Brain Soda Podcast - Episode 15 - Climixology

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

On this week's episode we'll be discussing the history and evolution of the comic book platform Comixology, and the science behind climate change!

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Brain Soda Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Kyle, joined by my co-hosts, Brad has gone, and Frog. Bloodthirsty. Today, we're going to be talking about climate change, but first, in 2007, gentlemen, David Steinberger, John Roberts, and Pete Jaffe come up with a website that ended up becoming a subsidiary of Amazon. It is known as Comixology. They started planning it in 2007 and won a business plan competition at NYU, which, for

whatever reason, I just envision it like Shark Tank. For some reason, I believe that NYU had a celebrity panel sitting there in cushy chairs, business suits, and just sitting there rattling shit off, but anyway. At first, it was actually just kind of like a website where you could sit there and look up what was coming out. It cataloged previous issues and titles and volumes of books, but you can make your poll list and then eventually go to retailers, local comic book stores, and have your poll list kind of translated there.

In 2009, it became a digital comic storefront. Not only could you get your poll list, you could start to buy and read those issues through Comixology. At first, it was not even an e-reader then. Right. And to be honest, it was just a good utility resource for people like me. You know what I mean? For your average monthly reader and things like that, that's really all that it was at

the beginning. But think about the time frame, 07-09, the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod itself. Okay. So this is early. This is very early on. Okay. Of course, there wouldn't be no e-readers or anything like that. You guys both had iPods?

Yes. Yeah. Very early in the smart technology. I had a little iPod Nano or whatever. I never had the cool one. I had the iPod Touch later on, probably in 2009 or 2010. Yeah. I think so.

Yeah. I love that. Yeah. That thing was great. In 07, it's founded at NYU. By 09, it's kind of become this larger-than-life comic book presence online. By 2011, late 2011 and in through 2012, this thing becomes one of the highest-grossing apps in the app store because now you're able to buy your issues through it.

And I feel that really is where Comixology went from being a resourceful tool to becoming a whole platform. And when you look at the digital comics space, the only people who really occupy it are the big publishers and Comixology. And Comixology would sell their books through them. And I believe they use that original Comixology reader for their services still to this day. Marvel Unlimited probably uses some version of Comixology's e-reader. Really?

Yeah. Yeah. Same with DC Universe Infinite or whatever it's called. So it's almost like the steam of comics then. A little bit. I would think so, yeah, to a certain extent. Is there like a specific file format that they use? I don't know.

What is the Amazon one? I think it's like Moby. I think it is. There's like EPUB. Well, we're going to get into that in a moment. So let's just go over the fact that so in 2011 and 2012, this thing goes from, again, a tool to a platform, right? This is where many people are reading their comic books outright or if you're like part

of the speculator market, you're getting your books here and then like you're only getting variant covers or you're keeping long boxes full of books or whatever it is. This thing continues to grow or at least stay stable in that position as being one of the highest growing apps at that time in of its field. Then in like 2013, the first like real big hit came to this thing. So during the South by Southwest Festival, Marvel decided it was going to take 700 issues and make them free for the public to obtain and access at Comixology as part of a promotion they had called Marvel number one, right?

This crashed Comixology just because of like all the traffic, right, the influx. So not only because the servers crashed. So not only could you not access all those 700 issues that Marvel was going to hand you for free, users couldn't even access their libraries. So is there a way to access all these right now? Like if is there an app that I can look at all of them at? Yes, there you can. You can use Comixology across multiple different platforms, absolutely.

And I believe the response to this is kind of what you're asking too. So later on, they redid it. They kind of went back and had a mulligan. And what they started to do from here is they offered you DRM free downloads of your books once you purchase them. That's no longer available as far as I know. But yeah, you could then start to download your Accessible Library. So OK, so explain DRM really quick for people that don't know.

It's part of the digital rights media act or something like that. And essentially what it is is like ear markings and things like that to make your stuff copyright free, right? So you can if I were to access this and have an earmarked with that, it would it would have that kind of thumbprint always on it, right? And versus not. OK, that's how I understood it too. But like I feel like in another way, this is different from them trying to make it exclusive

to their platform, right? Like because right, because you could then take it wherever. Yeah, is that is that different, though? Because I don't know, you know, like, does that limit it? If you have that DRM, like, can you take it wherever or? Well, I to be honest, I believe DRM mostly is just so that way you can't try to then pirate it. You can't try to then like resell it or anything like that. But that's fine then. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Yeah. OK, so it's not necessarily because like, I mean, what the whole thing about the format thing was what I was saying is that like, I know, like, you know, I just got an e-reader, but I can't and I can like download free books, you know, but I can't download a Moby version on my on my e-reader because it's Amazon only, you know, that's the Amazon format. Oh, right. Interesting. Yeah. Right. That's actually a great point to make, Brad.

So in 2013, Amazon went from being in like 94, started by Jeff Bezos in his garage in Bellevue, Washington as an online book retailer, had become a large conglomerate, probably one of the largest out of all the early internet startups. They had launched a comics imprint through their publication line. And it was called Jet City Comics. And it failed to gain as much market share as Bezos and company hoped for. Thus, they bought Comixology in late 2014. Yeah. So here we go. Now, I will say this.

I, I kind of feel like there is a difference in mindset from what Bezos is a businessman would like no to go in with versus what it would have actually taken to capture market share in that marketplace. The only frame of reference he would have had to do that really is image, image comics. And if you look at the felons, a book guy. Well, but, but comic books is a bit different. See, image was successful off the back of four or five creators who left Marvel to found image, had their own imprint.

And a lot of it was about creators rights. That being said, image as a company was as successful as it was because of those creators, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Todd MacFarlane, upmost out of all of them. Eric Larson as well, I would say to a certain extent. So they were the only benchmark, realistically, to say this is what a new upstart comic books publisher can do to grab market share. And they did it by grabbing top of top tier creators. Okay.

And giving them the opportunity and the avenue, right? Their books were on better quality paper. Their artistic endeavors were not cinched in by editorial. There were elements of the business that were changed between that company and image, you know, from going from one to the other. That whole sale is what made it more not accessible, but definitely more appealing to a consumer. Okay.

So instead of doing that, I feel like Vezos went to Georgia or Martin knows a little bit about comics. He can do like a Game of Thrones spinoff in a comic. Let's do that because that's exactly what happened. If you were to go on that website right now and look up their books, Hedge Knight and The Sacred Sword. But here's here's another Bezosism. So it became later on that you couldn't buy comic books through Apple

or Google anymore because they want a percentage of that sale. So then you have to go to Comixology as a web store and buy it through that, like on your computer and then send those to your other devices to cut around Apple and Google. Yep. See, that's exactly this is this. You love your Bezos. Amazon as a whole, they have they have revolutionized the way we shop, obviously.

However, there's a lot of problems with the company. Obviously, the way they treat their employees and second biggest private employer in America. Yes, yeah, yep. That is insane. If you think about that, it's sad to. Well, I mean, you know what that means. Yeah, so you work for a job, right?

That's a private employer because they are such a big company. The amount of how much they are contributing to climate change is probably enormous, you know, I don't have exact stats, but you know, think about all the shipping, but we'll we'll get into that a little bit, but continue Kyle. So this is where it really starts to be a death by a thousand cuts because Amazon purchases Comixology and is in large part, it seems kind of hands off. Then things like their relationship with local comic book stores ceases to be their availability to purchase your books through an easy, convenient way like an

Apple or a Google Store like the Android market ceases to be. You have to go through Comixology and then ship your Comixology purchases across other platforms or two other devices. So OK, I remember you saying, you know, at the beginning, the whole like the start of it was that you could set up lists and stuff to have your local comic bookstore come so they they they didn't there was there was actually there was actually an incentive for local comic book stores to not because a local comic book store is a small private business that has a finite number of

customers and new traffic coming in through its doors. So customer retention is high and this, that and the other thing. So to sit there and say, well, we're going to offer digital copy. Right. It is a dangerous thing. But they had an incentive. They had a marketplace incentive so that way their competitors would still have a benefit or still be able to exist and thrive within that market while they coexisted with them that was done away with underneath Bezos rule.

Right. But yeah, but things continue to kind of degrade through that. And we're going to fast forward to the extent of early last year. So February 2022, Comixology, as a platform for digital reading of your comic books, was going to merge in with Kindle. So they did so they did away with the guided view, which is honestly like the all star feature of Comixology. If you're reading on a phone, if you're reading on tablet,

guided view is where it's at, baby, because it goes panel to panel. Right. And then like, so as an example, if I'm reading Flash from the new 52, which is two artists really collaborating as writers and artists in making that book pop and shine. There's as an example, there's a two page spread that has all these different lightning bolts dividing up these diagonal or like pie cut panels and images. And like you could go through that as it would occur for your eyes. So you would actually probably start like lower left and look over and around.

But I don't know, I haven't read it through a digital reader. But what I'm saying is that like you get these cool emphasized actual fit to screen images and then it will show you the page overall at the end for the context and for you to just see the artwork as it is as a whole. OK, that's really cool. It is, except they did away with it. And now and now you would have to like zoom in and like file sizes have become larger under this change, but quality has gone down.

Yeah, they probably have like it's like a picture now. It's essentially you're looking at a picture. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But but again, even even if that were the case, OK, that's that's really unfair to a lot of your user base. But like to tell me then that that change is going to happen. And also my quality will go down. But my storage size will go up.

Yeah, is astronomically a no go. Like it is just right. Exactly. Like it is just I don't even you're cutting the feed out from under yourself. Another thing is that just the wholesale broken shape that this once thriving company and really well performing platform has now been reduced to in almost all my research based off of this initial merging last year. There is little to absolutely no positive remarks about Amazon's changeover with Comixology.

And then the top that they just laid off like most of its employees. So kind of like the whole endeavor thing. Well, like it did it. Well, no, I would say there you have a competitive market where these are two parallel positions between two companies, which one of you guys is better? You don't like you have a competitive marketplace. I think they probably cherry picked a number of people laid off the rest. That's that's realistically what I think happened.

If that they might have just wholesale. But like, nope, bye. That's terrible. Yeah, absolutely. So absolutely. And that's and from that, you have a beautiful ecosystem that has existed for a long, long time and it is left into shambles and ruins a lot like what might happen at the end of climate change, right, Brad? Yeah, and that's exactly like what I was saying earlier, is that like, I mean,

I mean, unfortunately, Amazon is probably a large contributor to climate change. And I just kind of want to say before we start this, I'm not going to try to get political because, you know, unfortunately, climate change is a political subject. It shouldn't be a political subject. This is a scientific subject. And this is something that is happening. It's there's there's tons of evidence that proves that it is true.

And we need to combat it. I'm not going to go like get on a soapbox this whole episode. But I did. I did just want to say that. So. Well, and I'm not trying to be political, but to go off of that, one of the most important conservative minds is Teddy Roosevelt, right? And he was a conservationist. Yes.

He he is who established national parks and things like that. So the environment in the eyes of one of the most important conservative icons there is short of maybe Abraham Lincoln. You know what I mean? Like conservationism and the planet and its wildlife all important. Extremely. Yeah. Yes. To them. You know, I'm saying to that person in particular.

So yeah, I agree. Definitely. So like I guess to start out, climate change to define it, right? Climate change, a.k.a. global warming, I don't really think we should call global warming for the exact reason climate change, right? It is the long term shift of global weather patterns and temperatures. OK, this is not your daily weather. This is not like, oh, it snowed in May or June, you know, or, you know,

something like that. This is this is long term patterns. OK, this is the climate. The climate refers to, you know, long term weather patterns, not immediate. Like things you see within even within a year. If you're looking for immediate results, look at what the highest yield for rain or lack thereof of rain or the highest temperatures or storms that have happened in your local communities. That's the immediate effects if you want to see them as a

empirical evidence, because across the world, you're getting record setting summers, rainfalls, droughts and natural storms and disasters. Yeah, yeah. And we'll go into that later. Like it's insane what is what the changes that's happening to this earth. You know, like we've only been keeping records for about 200 years, right? But that doesn't mean the scientific records, right? That doesn't mean that we can't go back in time through, you know, different scientific methods, but also just being able to hear like people

writing about things that not necessarily deal with not writing things down scientifically, but just saying, you know, it was a bad witch or something like that. You know, like the big crux of the issue, honestly, is that whether or not it's human caused and it's definitively human caused if you look at the evidence. So from from the industrial revolution on the temperature has raised nearly two degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn't sound like much. Two degrees Fahrenheit is like 1.1 degrees Celsius.

I want to give both measurements here. It doesn't seem like a lot, right? That average is actually pretty extreme. If you look at it over hundreds of years, this isn't, you know, the global temperature and the average temperature really only fluctuated within like a half a degree, if that over millennia, over, you know, like thousands of years until we get to the the industrial revolution where it just like started going crazy, right?

Like you can see it just like, you know, 20 years after the industrial revolution, it just started taking up, up, up, up, you know, we've seen in such a short period of time due from scientific evidence that we've seen mainly through things like ice core samples and stuff. So the way this is happening, right? I'm sure a lot of most people know what how, you know, they've heard of greenhouse gases and stuff, OK? But what greenhouse gases do is they they trap the heat in the earth.

So if you think of a greenhouse, OK, you think of like the glass panes and everything, OK, that lets light in, but it doesn't let the heat out. So light, you know, light can come in and it creates energy and that creates heat, right? The glass panes keep that in, right? So that traps the heat created by by the light's energy coming in. Right. The same thing happens when we have these gases such as carbon, carbon dioxide or methane or even nitrous oxide.

These things trap the heat that's coming from the sun's rays in the earth. Atmosphere, right? And from that, that, you know, that's obviously heating the earth. A good example of like a runaway effect would be Venus. You know, Venus, I mean, I don't think that earth would get to that extreme. But Venus, like the greenhouse effect, like it has a very thick atmosphere of like sulfur and, you know, like a carbon dioxide and everything. Like, right, it's extremely hot.

There's the hottest. How can they tell that? Venus, the hottest planet? Well, how can they tell the temperature? So there's, well, they've actually actually landed a probe while Russia had landed a probe on Venus, but we can tell how it is from different light rays. So like we can look at look at it through different like infrared and stuff like that. Like you ever seen those infrared cameras like what they do with a grill?

You know, I mean, yeah, exactly. Yep. Yep. We can do the same thing with Venus. Yep. And like it's actually crazy. Actually, I would love to talk about Venus in a future episode. I'm going to, but we're talking about earth. I hope we don't ever turn that into Venus, but it could happen if it went insane. I don't think humans could actually do that. I don't think so.

Like I said, the global temperature is expected to reach like one and a half degrees Celsius or about three degrees Fahrenheit over the next few decades. So like from like the average norm, right? Like it's in the morning creases, the more extreme things happen. It's not just like warming. It's it's an extremities of like storms and droughts and, you know, floods and things like that, the sea level rise. There's so much that happens with this warming.

And honestly, it's not that like the earth is in trouble. The earth's going to be fine. Like, yeah. No, the George Carlin that the earth is going to be fine. We're exactly exactly like really like the earth has had this type of atmosphere plenty of times in its past, you know, the dinosaur era and stuff like, you know, like back in the Jurassic and stuff, like this type of CO2 in the air, which I did two in a second, the mount has was seen back when the dinosaurs roped,

you know, but during that time period, it wasn't like such a sharp spike. So like, yes, there might be a climate change along with other factors is causing a massive extinction. And we're not going to go into that today because, man, I really. Climate change is a pretty dark subject, but the mass extinction that we're causing is even darker. And I think it's it's important that we are. I know. And we stay tuned to bring

sort of podcasts for even more devastating. Yes. But, you know, I feel like, I don't know, like people need to know about this thing. But the one thing and I don't want to again, I don't want to go in this part either. But it's not so much like we couldn't make change, but it's more the companies that, you know, the shipping and the the way we do things in the world is what really causes the vast majority and the use of fossil fuels and stuff.

We have to have a whole shift in our global culture to change this. It's not just us as individuals, like, you know, us not using straws and stuff isn't going to do any it's going to do much. Obviously, there's different things we, you know, as a whole we could do. But we need to change the way the world works. You know, it was just like insane to think about, but that's really what needs to happen. Yeah. No, I mean, but it but it definitely does go to show when I remember when we were in high school still and there was maybe there was one like

big landmark big time study that had kind of correlated with this. Maybe it was just the growing consciousness of the issue overall. But at one point, I remember there became a national discussion over things like this and large conglomerates and corporations involvement and such. And one of the solutions that some of these green, Eric, well, campaigns and companies was saying was, well, you can ride a bike to work. And while that is true,

you can get you can get yourself a little pedal bike and that's great. It's nothing compared to a company that doesn't want to pay to put washers on smokestacks. Yep. It's nothing compared to companies that don't want to invest in green technologies or electronic cars since they're already automating them to not have to hire drivers for exactly. And that's the thing. Like and I agree, like this is that's a perfect example because like this is a

societal change is that it's mandated, the government has mandated that all cars, I think it passed 2030, if I'm not mistaken, have to be electrical. And that's a step in the right direction. You know, because, yes, you ride your bike, you know, isn't going to change much. But if everyone uses, uses electrical vehicle that would have a comparable carbon footprint, right? Exactly. Although there is problems, obviously, with batteries and the way it's sourced and the things that, you know, the rare earth metals,

you know, there's there's so much to this subject. Like I don't want to like it's hard because there's always it is. Yeah. Because like, you know, you could say like, yeah, well, batteries are bad too. But I don't I really don't know what else to do. You know, like obviously combustion engines are worse, I think, in my eyes. We could we could sustainably harvest rare earth metals. Obviously, it's not happening much right now. I just like I don't want to, you know, I don't I keep straying away from the

subject because it's such a huge subject, you know, because like climate change delves into all these different aspects of just the way humans are destroying the earth, unfortunately. But like, OK, let's take sea level, right? The sea level has risen about eight inches since reliable record heaving. So it says about the 1880s. It's religion. Yeah, it's present eight inches.

OK, like that's an insane amount when you think about like what's at sea level metric tons. No, but metric tons of water gallons. But yeah, yeah, I encourage everyone. Please, please go on to YouTube and look up time lapses of glaciers. Oh, my God. Yeah, I could only imagine what has happened to the the the polar ice caps. It's melting. You know, we're losing it.

We're going to have like. Have you ever seen the polar bear? Mm hmm. Yeah, the polar bear trying to find a piece of a chunk of ice that like won't fall through by his weight again. That video to me is a perfect analogy. Yeah, I know I couldn't either. But like it's it's a 30 second snap.

But still like it is an analogy that fits oh so well into like the the oncoming issue of like that, you know what I mean? Like exactly more and more places are going to become more and more inhabitable or unhospitable and and like you've said, a real dynamic cultural shift should happen to at least offset if not change that, you know? It really, yeah, I really don't see any other way for it to stop, you know? And like I know like to me, I I I feel like a lot of the stuff I see is disingenuous, you know, and that sucks because like these companies are like,

you know, like the carbon offset footprint stuff is just insane to me. That like, I mean, it's a good way, I guess. But the companies essentially like pay for for polluting would just give you money towards green energy and then, you know, that's OK. We can pollute all we want. But OK, the global sea level, though, like going back to that by 2100, it's expected to rise like by another foot or like another third of a meter, you know, like point three meters, right?

But possibly up to eight feet, like depending on how we do stuff. Well, we just keep going like we are. It could go like by bipolar ice caps as they're gone, right? The people like people are saying that is stuff hasn't changed. Like if you look at the extremity, like the extreme weather we've been having just in America, not even let alone the rest of the world, but like the amount of hurricanes we've had has increased like insanely. It's like that the it's not only increased, but the strength of them have increased.

You know, there used to be like, you know, a couple like severe hurricanes a year now, it's like multiple, you know, like we've getting we're going through the alphabet now. Do you remember when El Nino was like a two year piece of comedy? And now like there is another storm that probably does more damage to that every couple of months somewhere in America? Yeah, no, it's insane. You know, for years now, we're actually I think we're going into an El Nino,

if I'm not mistaken, this year. Really? Yeah. Isn't that how? You like how Pineapple Express is created? Is it? So I think El Nino and the Pineapple Express are both the same type of weather patterns. They just occur differently in different parts of the globe. So like it's a warm front that causes El Nino coming from South America and it's

a cold front, it's the Pineapple Express from Canada into America. You're saying that from there's a thing called the Pineapple Express that is not referring to the cannabis stream or the film based on that. No, it is a real. I've never heard of that before. It is a real weather pattern thing. And that's why it's so is that is that something different from the El Nino? I've never because I took geography and everything.

I've never heard of this pineapple express. Right. I think it's the same kind of thing. But the thing is, is that I was talking about the movie. I didn't know he was going to go all science. No, but but that is where if I if I remember right, because I was like, what is Pineapple Express? And then like the weed strain or the movie, the weed strain.

And then that came up, which again, that is another telling fact that like the movie based on the weed strain, based on the the weather pattern. Now I understand. Yes. OK, it makes it makes all the sense. So Pineapple Express is some weather pattern that originates like towards Hawaii and right. Oh, does it? Yeah, right up the Pacific up towards, you know, the western side of the US. So yes, that makes sense.

You know, oh, it doesn't go into Canada like the Yukon. Yeah, no, no, we'll go up into the western side of Canada and all that. Like that's, you know, yeah, that's the Yukon. I'm not too sure. I think so. Like that type of stuff. Yeah, like weather patterns are affected like crazy. All these things are affected by climate change.

You know, the Pineapple Express, I guess, and El Mino. But I just remember James Franco saying that. That's insane. I did not know that. That's really funny. Yeah. I didn't I didn't realize it was it originated like it would start in Hawaii and run up towards the western edge of Canada. I didn't realize that's the way it works. I'm still my mom.

It's a weather name. Like I'm me too. That's what my mind too. Not only are hurricanes getting worse, but droughts are too. You know, droughts in the southwest, even in the north, like, I don't know if you guys like have noticed, but like we get droughts almost every year now, like in the summer, you know, I mean, we're in Michigan. And we're dry spells.

Yeah, we get dry spells almost every summer now. And like that is terrible, obviously. Speaking of that, we didn't have mosquitoes in our yard as much last year because of drought. We didn't have a swamp. Right. Yeah. Normally our swamps full. Yeah. When our swamps not full, we don't have the mosquitoes. Well, and that's the thing. Like, I mean, honestly, climate change probably won't be terrible for us here

in Michigan. It might actually be somewhat good, but it's going to change a lot of the speeches. It's going to mess up the ecosystems. But eventually we're going to be the new Miami. That's the thing. Exactly. Like that's like, but it's not like it's not a good thing. No, not at all. I'm just saying like it'll be cool because we'll have less mosquitoes at first. Then we're going to be the most southern point of America. Yeah.

One thing that the droughts cause is is fires, you know, too. Like we don't get too many of Michigan, but we do get some. But like definitely wildfires are insane. Like it's projected to increase by two to six times by 2050. So like it's already burning like crazy. You guys see other news, you know, like there's terrible parts of 2015. 2050, 20, 50. Oh, we got to we got to work on it.

There's certain things we could do. You know, like the main thing is to get off of fossil fuels, because that's like the biggest thing that's causing a lot of this global warming is the burning of fossil fuels that create carbon dioxide in the air. Yes, methane is a big one, though, too. And that's, you know, eating cows, unfortunately, like they create a ton of methane through their farts and their poop. They're like 500 pound minimum bovines.

Yeah, exactly. Like people people really laugh and scoff it off. And again, I think going back to the point you made earlier and kind of what I touched on with the point I made is people find it disingenuous or comical because we're talking about cow farts because some multinational cooperation will get together and put out a propaganda front and say like, it's it's not what we're doing. You have to play your part, too.

Don't use plastic bags and don't write a bike to work. And a couple other things that will offset by the millions one percent of what we put out daily, that is why so many people, I believe, are skeptical. And because we live in the disinformation age where anybody can publish anything. And as long as it fits a narrative that someone wants to hear, it gained traction, foothold and followings that you have something like empirical evidence that gets disputed, despite the fact that you could walk outside on any given day and feel the heat that 20 years ago didn't exist in the summer

to have sufferings from storms that 20 years ago would not have existed, let alone done the damage that it does. What do you guys think about the self serve gas stations, McDonald's that are completely operated by robot? So I I'll answer it really fast because I am a huge labor advocate. And I will also defer to Brad on the science level. Number one is as an energy expenditure, I feel it's it's kind of problematic, too,

because a lot of natural gas and stuff like that is still used in those environments. You know, energy does have to come from somewhere because we haven't laid an infrastructure for green technologies to offset or replace natural gas, gasoline, fossil fuels. Yeah, but I think he's talking more about like robots. Well, that's that's what I'm trying to get into. All those things need power to run, though, right? Yes. Well, I just was curious.

I just popped into my head. That's why. Well, so this is what I was going to say is that now you're you're already not giving a about your labor base because you pay them like and give them no benefit and you won't even keep them full time, but you're willing to further damage the planet by having to feed energy to the robots. You know what I'm saying? Like the energy production in this country and in all other.

Well, you could, but they don't true, because it's not McDonald's is ready to revolutionize its business so that it doesn't have to deal with people, not so that it's not polluting the earth as well. That's my point is not only are you over your people, you're picking up the planet. I'm fine with robots. I'm fine with robotic fast food and robotic gas stations or robotic supermarkets and everything as long as people still have jobs.

And that's OK, because you got to think about like cars, right? Think about like people that used to tend to horses and then cars came. Well, what happened to them? They found different jobs. Like, I mean, that's going to happen. I feel like in this economy, something like there will be different opportunities for people. I don't feel like menial labor jobs like that.

If they can be handled by a robot, let it be handled by a robot. I don't feel like humans need to be demeaned down to that to do a menial task, like flipping a burger all the time when a robot could do it, you know? And there's other jobs to be had where it does take a human skill to do it. It does. That's how I think you're I think you're right about that. It does push the labor force into other work and creates trade and creativity. That's how I feel. I like that, actually.

But yeah, I get what you're saying, too, as well, Kyle. I mean, see, yeah, I really don't know. Exactly what to do about this. Obviously, there's some alternatives, green energy and all that thing. But like I was saying earlier, we need to actually, like, come together as a world culture and change this. But to end on a kind of sad note. Sorry, Kyle, you want to lead us out.

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