Julian Dorey Podcast - #16 - Mitch Lacsamana

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Mitch Lacsamana is an NFT investor, trader, and advisor. Currently, he is a Moderator for the exclusive Discord NFT Investment Community, Metaverse HQ. Mitch also serves as an official advisor to various NFT Collections/Companies including Superlative Secret Society. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 3:07 - 22:22 ~ Quibi’s failure, how Quibi came to Mitch’s team right before their launch; and streaming industry trends 22:22 - 35:07 ~ What it’s like working with the biggest companies in the world on streaming and how they often know so little about it 35:07 - 1:03:24 ~ CENSORSHIP discussion (Twitter, Spotify, Reddit, Yik Yak, Political bias, etc.) 1:03:24 - 1:14:37 ~ Putting people in a political “box” and the assault on “critical thinking” 1:14:37 - 1:21:27 ~ Mitch’s early involvement in the NYC Social/Racial Justice Protests and why he stopped participating 1:21:27 - 1:46:04 ~ What’s happening in NYC (where Mitch has been for all of quarantine); the effects of Covid on the city’s future, what we love about New York City and its “energy;” and the James Altucher vs. Jerry Seinfeld debate 1:46:04 - 2:10:27 ~ Covid’s psychological and long-term effects on society; Mitch opens up about a terrifying psychological event of his own; the fight or flight long-term psychosis the Pandemic is causing; and the craziness of the Pandemic’s politicization 2:10:27 - 2:35:22 ~ The Artificial Intelligence Question; Google & Deep Mind; Technology in the era of Covid-19; Julian’s AI-inspired artwork in The Bunker; Human intimacy and connection in the machine age; how the virus has shown us that we, as humans, still value connection with one another more than anything else; and the difficulty of the Pandemic for those of us with the “Quality Time” Love Language 2:35:22 - 2:48:02 ~ How Julian & Mitch met at the good ol’ Landmark on Thanksgiving Eve 2017; The work they’ve done together over the past few years; Memories about their friendship; and what they admire and appreciate the most about each other 2:48:02 - END ~ Mitch discusses his start-up company, Aeronaut Skincare for Men--as well as his new Podcast (hosted with his Co-Founders) called “Project Aeronaut” ~ YouTube FULL EPISODES: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0A-v_DL-h76F75xik8h03Q  ~ Show Notes: https://www.trendifier.com/podcastnotes  TRENDIFIER Website: https://www.trendifier.com  Julian's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We have now gotten to a point where critical thinking is viewed as a radical idea. And so, God forbid you have that opinion. If I go on Twitter right now and I put that out, like, that's not getting in the blue check. Now, I don't have a blue check, but let's say I did. That's not getting in the blue check mafia trending on Twitter. That's getting shut down because it doesn't match exactly how it's supposed to be. So, we have taken away critical thinking and replaced it with, oh, this is the line of thought, stay to it.

That's it. It's 1984. I don't like to be put in a box if I want to have a conversation about it and you say, this shouldn't even be a matter of conversation. It's like, what? We can't talk about this? You're already going to put me in a box and say, if you're not this, then you're that instead.

It's like, when do we get so, when do things get so black and white? Understand who your audience is and how they consume the content, right? The biggest mistake of the streaming industry in 2020, and I can confidently say this is quibi and yeah now what happened there because it was such a they put what was it like 1.8 billion dollars in funding in their missing amount they had they had um katzenberg and who was what what's

the the ex lieutenant governor packard lewitt yeah what the hell's her name megan something yeah i forget her last name we'll pull that up but they had all these big names behind it and then they were getting like kevin hart to produce content for it they had like all these shows lined up they had some of the athletes on it too and it just you would think covid would have been the best spot for it but well here's where they fucked up they didn't create apps for roku fire tv apple os and uh desktop so where where what because i didn't i never used it at all you could only find them on android and ios the whole purpose was they created this really unique mobile playback experience where you can either view the content um horizontally

or vertically and it was. And it was shorter. And it was shorter, like under 10 minutes every single video, right? So not only were they boxing people in to view it on their mobile devices, they also limited the amount of time that the content was. And so the whole idea of Quibi was you'd be imagine you're on your way to work, you had to take the subway and in transit, you can consume high quality video content at discretion, vertically or horizontally, and have these really unique interactive experiences have all this premium content at your fingertips. It was,

it was supposed to be a gold mine i mean that's how everyone was playing up to be what happened was covet happened no one was visiting no one was traveling at all and they didn't have the apps ready on fire tv android roku i'm sorry not android but like yeah android tv chromecast all the sit down television experiences they missed out on and guess who won netflix did guess what like every other streaming platform that already had apps and audiences developed choice they didn't give people a choice they were like you're going to consume our content in the way that we want you to consume it because we're making such good content that you should view it the way we want you to view it and I think the biggest problem was sure Katzenberg he's been in the business for

a long time I read up very briefly on his history with Disney I get that right yeah he was this guy in cat this guy puts people together he understands the business and how the entertainment issue works very extremely well then you had the his partner I believe I'm just gonna assume her name's meg right meg something meg whitman that's it meg whitman yep the problem was they don't watch their own fucking content they're not getting high in their own supply they don't actually believe in the products that they're selling and serving and that's a really dangerous thing because if you if you don't even consume or believe in the content you just believe that

other people will like it, then I just feel like you won't fight hard enough for it. You won't really be an advocate for it. And I just, it felt like those two were so removed from the process and what came out was like, they weren't even listening to what people wanted. And then you had this massive disruption of the, which was COVID and they couldn't respond in time because they didn't really know how to how to couldn't they didn't understand their consumers because they don't consume the content themselves and with anything jules the content that i create especially nowadays i watch that shit over and over and over again to make sure that it's a banger

every single time that this is something that you're also in it remember though you're also in it sure i'm also in it but i believe more in the work that i'm doing with my clients if i fuck with their content if i really like their content and can appreciate the value in their content what they're looking to serve same thing with my content same thing with um that's the the biggest problem that i observed with quibi was that they just had a massive culture difference where the founders, the people that were making the decisions really didn't understand how young viewers, which was supposed to be their audience, really wanted to consume content and what kind of content they wanted to consume. Now, Whitman, look, they both had very good careers. There's no denying that. Whitman, I don't want to speak on as much. I know

she was the CEO of HP for a long time. And I believe, if I remember correctly, but we can fact check this, HP kind of went downhill after she left. So while she was there, she was very effective. Pure businesswoman though. Yep. Katzenberg, I know for a fact, pure business guy. You know, you look at when Pixar went to launch and Disney was trying to make some deals with Pixar. He was involved in that at the beginning and then he – I think he got fired from Disney or there was some kind of like not amicable parting and that's when Bob Iger to your point was a content guy yeah he understood everything going out he understood why the kids like this and didn't like that and he cared about it he would sit there and watch all the scenes he would literally do it with Steve Jobs and so Pixar obviously became a great investment and became a total machine in that case Katzenberg went out and it's not like he didn't have success but you know I think he was he was at the helm with

shrek but he was constantly chasing disney like he did ants to try to get on the train of what they did with toy story and stuff it didn't land as well and it was because yes he had an understanding of what people would go for he could read the data he could get it but he wasn't to your point ingrained in it he did not he did not really feel it yeah he it wasn't it wasn't his life it wasn't his world exactly it wasn't like what kept him up at night yeah and and i just look at it like not that they could have seen covet coming but when you put yourself out there put your company out there where you are already cutting yourself off on the exclusivity side by taking away choice to be this rarefied air yeah like they did by just putting their apps you said it was on ios and android

yeah only yeah i didn't even know that yeah that's that's a thing it's they did two new things at once i feel like you could only get away with doing one new thing right right because they had the whole 10 minute content short form consumable where everyone's used to netflix and chilling and 10 minutes is not netflix and chilling that's like i gotta fucking be somewhere great i can leave in 15 i'll watch this fucking 10 minute clip it's like you're really they did they tried to standardize two brand new components to streaming that I think viewers just took as, oh, these guys are ingenuine. I'll tell you what I think happened. Sure. I think that Katzenberg and Whitman and some of the other – there were other people involved too, like big names.

They got in a room and they read the the business report the business report says oh people's attention spans are down to seven seconds on average yep yep oh wow look the average netflix content length is blank whatever it is an hour and a half we're gonna make something really short and that's just a great trend so we will hop on the trend yeah and like people who are just trend chasers it works if you're buying stocks and you know what it can also put you in good spots and there are people who make money doing it but if you're looking to change an industry or change the game or come in and reset things you can't just be following data reports on trends please yes i love and i love that you

brought up stocks too right because my dad is a stock trader and he really believes in the companies that he invests in he's not investing based on trends and reports and i'm you might make the argument that he could be making more money looking at the data and following well it's a mix following a different path right so he has a he has a combination of both and i think if the i feel like the oversight of quibi was exactly that they just looked at the data and they didn't really understand mid-form clips and the effectiveness of of mid-form clips when you say mid-form clips i just want to keep this open so what kind of length are you talking so when i refer to mid-form clips i refer i'm referring to five to 10 minutes of content, whereas short form might be under a minute. There's a little gray area

between like a minute to five minutes. But if you are like a content creator on YouTube, I heard through various sources, because I work in the media and entertainment industry where mid form clips have been a focus. I hear it's been a focus because now algorithms are trying to optimize to serve mid form clips to keep viewers on longer than the short form clips would keep them

entertained, be able to serve ads on mid form clips, but not have to force viewers to sit down for like longer form, half hour to hour long content, right? So you have this fine in between where the data says people will actually sit through five to 10 minutes of content and actually be willing to sit through maybe two or three different ad breaks within that micro slice of content. And it's just long enough and just short enough that people will be like they'll see the next video up and they'll be like oh i can do one more and they'll keep saying it and they won't realize like six minutes plus eight minutes plus

nine minutes plus seven minutes and so on and so on adds up eventually you're there for three hours going down the rabbit hole whereas when you put on on an hour long video or something like that, you're already like investing. And then you're looking at the clock and you're thinking if you have somewhere to go or things to do, you're like, okay, I watched 20 minutes. That's enough. And you may go and not watch the next video. Exactly. A hundred percent. And it's also, if we look at it from the platforms that are serving us this content, let's take for instance, YouTube, YouTube saying what makes us the most money, right? What kind of content makes us the most money period? We're a fucking business. We're not Yes, we're free to consumers. But it's free at a caveat, right? It's free, because we want to make money off of your content and keep

viewers on our platform. So we can continue to serve serve ads because that's how we make money is by serving ads. I guess the data is showing that mid form clips, people have a tendency to understand that, that experience and, um, and actually engage with mid form clips in such a way where YouTube is able to serve more ads, hence make more money, which is why they're not optimizing for mid form clips. So if you're a content creator, that's why you should make mid form clips is because YouTube's algorithm and really, if you take YouTube's like quite the standard for video streaming, you know, for anyone, for any content creator to be able to stream out to many, YouTube quite the standard for that so if youtube is optimizing for that that's something you should really take and consider when you're creating um content and queeby's sin or pb like how do you even say it the name was also terrible terrible do you do you know how they came up with the name how oh my god it was um quick bites i think was the oh something awful

like that something like so stupid that was like they were like oh we'll just call it this and it made no like i read it in an article so and also maybe i'm remembering that wrong but it was just that dumb where i just i i couldn't believe that's how they came we be quick bites yeah quibi changed the whole phonetic idea of it too i we need to fact check myself on that but it was it might be something it sounds familiar now it might be something i mean maybe i'm just picking it out because i already was predisposed but that sounds like maybe i did read that somewhere and forgot about it. But here's what's crazy. They were actually a client of ours, right?

Really? Did you work with them directly? We have a content delivery network, which says if you want to send anything over the internet, you need to go through a highway, right? A virtual highway in the cloud. We own a piece of that highway and we actually sell it to businesses, right? What do you mean? So if you want to host a website, right? If you want to deliver content, whether it be a video, whether it be a photo, whether it be a single like blog, you need to

go through what's called a content delivery network. And we own, there's a couple of content delivery networks you can choose from, right? You might say, hey, I deliver content through Squarespace, right? I have a website through Squarespace. Squarespace actually works with a content delivery network like ourselves, right? So we offer a piece of that highway for a certain amount of exchange based on how much traffic, how much you want to send to different users around the world. And so Quibi came to us before the launch and said, When was this? This was sometime earlier, like late last year, early this year.

So not long before their launch. No, no, no. So right before their launch, they're like, Listen, we're expecting to have this much traffic, and we're already with the big guys. We're with all these other content delivery networks we want to also have you guys included uh for redundancy so they were very confident that they were really gonna max out on all the bandwidth um and streaming in people

streaming and um and this is some like i don't even know like if i should feel weird about talking about our clients at verizon media like this um but i really don't because i like if I should feel weird about talking about our clients at Verizon media like this. But I really don't because I think if I can be critical about the clients that really fuck up and drop the ball, that means that if I'm giving my actual like recommendations and accommodations for the clients that I do believe that are doing the right thing, then that should hold some weight, right? I'm not afraid to fucking be critical. I'm not here sipping the Kool-Aid saying every client is doing amazing.

I'm here saying some clients are doing better than others and here's why. And I think, again, what Quibi really, where they really dropped the ball was they tried to do too much innovation too quickly and then COVID hit and they weren't ready because again no one could find them you didn't even know no it was it was i remember there was a lot of hoopla around it like you would see stories on it all the time because whenever you get the names like

there's going to be stories on it and i remember thinking right away the name was stupid and just kind of like paying attention to it on the side and thinking Okay, mitch might be dealing with this because you know, I was always kind of making that connotation right there, but When they went to launch it worked out like I remember in february They're like, all right We're launching and it was like a week later or something like that and then covid lined up And I don't know maybe it was like two weeks into covid. I was I was thinking Oh that queeby thing launched. Like they must be doing great. And I go in and it's, I mean, it's a funeral.

Like you typed it, you typed it into Twitter and it was like RIP Queeby or like the failure of Queeby. I mean, the things it was on like the national trends too for like three, four straight days at one point. And I read some stories where they were talking to some of the investors in it and obviously like whitman and and um and katzenberg and and they were at a loss because again they just followed the data and they thought that was enough and so you talk about this mid form and you're 100 correct the data says hey people are willing to sit there and consume that because it's not too long but not too short and it's different than when they're just scrolling through their instagram feed and seeing the 30 second exactly exactly but it then they know that it's one dimensional it's like niching yourself out they were so focused on a niche and saying oh my god that's where the attention is we'll just go

there and that'll be our value prop yeah Yeah. But they left people without choice. And this is a little bit of a – you can run into paradoxes here. Can you say paradoxes? Like is that how you say it plural? Yeah, paradoxes. It's not like paradigm. Paradox. I don't think I've ever said like paradoxes. I always say paradox.

Either way. But you can run into this problem because there is also the aspect that choice is not good for the customer on some things sure like you look at some of these steve jobs couldn't have said it any better yeah you know he walked in there in in 97 when he came back to the company and there were 78 products and he took meetings for a week and then he said cancel all the meetings fuck it four products now and people are like oh my, the customer is not going to have choice. What are we going to do? We're going to fail.

The company is already failing. Now we're done. Everyone is looking for jobs. And he goes, no, no, no. The customer doesn't want a choice on this. They want to come to our website or walk into our store and know exactly what we offer and not be overwhelmed with all these different decisions. And it was brilliant. The difference here, I think, is that they were not only going into a niche of saying, hey, we're going to do video content only right away.

They then took that to a niche of we are going to length it out. And it's also not a physical or tangible product. It's something that you consume in bites, whether it be long form or short form you're consuming entertainment as like okay well this is my escape and so they came in and said all right we're we're gonna go in the niche of the niche of the niche and then people went okay well why should we adopt this when we can go to youtube and we can look up one minute videos and we can look up four hour videos yeah and i want to point And I want to say that we're – well, me specifically, I'm not hating on innovation. I love when a client comes in and says, we want to do this, and here's how we're going to be different.

And I say to myself, that's amazing. I can't wait to see if that will actually work, right? So with Quibi, that was like the whole conversation and topic around it for quite some time was is this thing really going to work right all the things that we're hearing um oh okay now they're not going to build on other apps they're only going to be a mobile experience oh they've created this really amazing player that's top of the line no other company like netflix hulu rogu can offer this sort of experience with virtual with um with uh the way that they were um allowing consumers to experience their content um but then you also ran into the problem of like you said what is stopping

us from just going to youtube what is stopping us from just going to ig tv or tiktok and um and and going to any one of their many competitors i mean this thing was just way too innovative and there's just too much other sources of content that were basically providing i would say a similar experience of mid-form content without having to be boxed and without having to subscribe um i think that's just where the viewers on those platforms just continued to view and consume on those platforms. They weren't incentivized to make the switch necessarily. Well, I actually have a question based on what you just got at right there on the front end of that answer.

You deal with enormous companies. We've covered that at Nauseam at this point. And you've been at Verizon for a while and you're high up and you're a big swinging dick over there. I'll say it for the guy. He's not going to say it. He's humble, but he is. And when you have these big guys come in and you're dealing with their CTO

and then a lot of times you deal literally with the CEO, which I think is crazy on some stuff, but it's really cool. How do you have that conversation where someone, a great big company you know a billion dollar market cap comes in and the idea sucks and you you could sit there and say customer's always right and say yeah yeah no like let's let's run with this let's see what's what i i like where your head's at or you could say hey this idea sucks how do you but you know that's that's risky how do you have that conversation jules if a client says they have a billion dollars whatever the fuck they say after This idea sucks. How do you, but you know, that's, that's risky. How do you have that conversation? Jules, if a client says they have a billion dollars, whatever the fuck they say after is either going to hear yes from me.

Of course, they're going to hear it immediately. I mean, all the sales guys in the room and women in the room are going to be like, oh my God, this motherfucker just said the magic number. If you ever talk about numbers, period, you're immediately, everyone's just going to be like, okay, now we're listening. Now we're engaged. Now we're intent. Now you have my attention i think um the the consultative aspect to what i do comes from

years of experience and having seen what has worked and what hasn't worked with other clients and customers that are either similar in the stature in terms of how much money they have to invest or similar in the nature in which they want to serve video and based on all that experience plus the experience of all the incredible people that i work with at verizon media i'm able to tell the customer okay this is historically either it worked failed this is how you should do it this is what you should think about here's what other people are thinking about and this is where um so you can say it with i i want to make sure I'm understanding, right? Sure. You can say it without saying it.

So this is where you point out like, okay, well, I'm talking about a former client right now, but I like to be able to show like, okay, this didn't work. Yeah, 100%. So you run into that a lot where people, the idea they come up with, you've seen before. Yes. And sometimes, you know, they are innovative ideas. So I'm very like transparent with that. But I'm, the way I'm incentivized is since I'm incentivized at a team capacity, if my

team wins, then I win. So I'm not necessarily looking to just say yes to everything that the client says. In fact, a lot of times I say no, just because it really can't be done or prove me wrong. Right. And the whole purpose of what I do is that this isn't a thing that you just set up shop right away, right? Quibi didn't happen overnight. And so these sort of build-outs

and developments of these strategies for video, even the biggest customers that you can think of today, think like tier one content providers, right? Maybe they're not in video yet. Maybe they've historically lived in radio space they're trying to convert into video they are fucking as clueless and as disengaged and sort of dismembered as a tier one as a startup with with new funding no difference yeah there is no difference and so i'm thinking to myself here it's's a culture thing. Yeah. How do I, how do I

instill what I've learned from being in this culture for this long for a client to be a value that's so unique and so non-salesy because at the end of the day, I just simply want your business to work no matter what, if you're not making money period, then it's like, we, we, we have no, uh, there's no discussion here i can't be of value unless i make you money that's kind of at the end of the day what it is and so if i can't if i honestly in my head can't think of a way to do that then i i say listen it's not the best it's not the best fit i wish someone i don't again when quibi came in and said we have a billion dollars to spend no one is fucking saying no at our company we would never turn down a paying client that's not and by the way that's not what i was

i was saying because i i didn't ask that right you're not saying no like yeah fuck you and your money get out of here i'm saying like when the idea comes in and it's like okay well we know that doesn't work well i tell them it's wrong yes and you've you've kind of answered that it could because it sounded if people were listening, it sounded like you were contradicting yourself for a minute. I understood though, because I asked the question badly. What you were saying is that, of course, you want to bring them on as a client. That's a duh.

But yes, like I'm going to point to iterations that were wrong and I'm going to point to things that have worked best practices. And usually these people, regardless of the size of the company, they're not, it sounds like you don't see a lot of ideas come across your desk from them where it's like i have never seen this before i'm so curious because this is an awesome conversation that we're having and we've never really talked about what i do like you and i have never really discussed in this much of a detail as to what i've been doing so i'm curious what is your perspective been about the streaming

industry and sort of um in the way that i wish i work it or not like what's an outsider's view of the streaming industry uh look like i'm curious to know i have always told people it's it it's a good question when people ask me what you do i say you understand the concept of netflix and youtube i'm like yeah online video and i'm like okay well to take that a step farther they replaced tv like you cut the cable because now you get your content on one of those two or whatever else is out there so mitch does that but it's not like he does it for youtube and netflix he creates individual platforms for the companies that come to him and they're very very big companies i use the one example all the time i forget her name now but that

international fashion lady gail garrison of global fashion channel yes and so that was such a niche space but you built the entire platform out so i'll say like yeah you know he built this woman's entire channel for a whole company and then there's a million other companies you worked with but it is complex in that when we're thinking of it at home like i said earlier when we were talking you immediately go to well why don't you just use youtube or put your content on Netflix? And to your point, it's because you don't own it and you can actually drive people to your sites and then have all the things behind that. So you may, for example,

let's say for a piece of content, 2 million people would watch it on YouTube and maybe you put it there and they do, but then only 60,000 people watch it on your platform to actually go there on the click-through from socials and wherever you put it out to them so that you say, hey, come check this out. The 60,000 there may be a lot more monetizable than the 2 million because, I mean, right now YouTube is cannibalizing monetization. I don't know if you've looked at the numbers, but you get a video with a million views, you're grossing six grand. That's not a big number for a million views. You know what I mean? I think the worst part is you don't have a say in that. Exactly. You don't have a say at any of that. So the strategy, the winning strategy should be,

how do we drive consumers from all these platforms that offer organic traffic and organic reach to millions of audience members like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever the case might be. And how do we drive these consumers into our own properties where they will then subscribe to us, where we have full control over how we curate that experience for our customers and monetize with our advertisers or monetize for our shareholders. That is where we should be thinking because that's the long-term play. all those audience members of followers on YouTube, followers on Spotify, on maybe like a mobile app or some sort of like application where people sign in and have downloaded and consume his content on a regular through his app,

as opposed to being on these platforms, because he would have full control over the experience that he's curating and how he's monetizing that experience. Now, why doesn't he do that? It could be one of many things, right?e rogan if you're listening um i'd love to help you out here the experience alone is tough because joe started with just making videos right he was just having his friends over at the very beginning they were doing like just youtube i think for the first

maybe it was like a year a couple years they weren't on the pod it was i think it was just like the itunes app at the time and they weren't on the audio only platform so yeah and these platforms again help grow the fan base but and that's important in the beginning what starts to happen though is that these platforms, as you gain leverage on this platform, the platform gains leverage over you. And your only way out is really to either switch to a platform that will now be able to leverage you in a different kind of way. foresight to sort of more the foresight if you had the foresight to establish the whole time with viewers that hey you can watch my content here but you can have a full experience on my mobile app or on my app on fire tv if you're home please download it then he would have full leverage to do whatever he wanted to do and he wouldn't be at the whim of youtube's and the spotify's and all

these other platforms that at any fucking whim they could just change the way that you make money on those platforms which that's important because it comes down to the final dollar but as far as engagement yeah there is no question that if if he went that route and said okay i'm only putting my content on that his engagement's going to go down because people we go to places where there's a community of options so people go to youtube or they go to apple podcasts and chances are the joe rogan experience is not the only thing they're consuming yeah and they're going to consume some random shit too and so if he puts it on his own platform well it's it's just him and you have to go to another app to do it you see what i'm saying yeah so it's there's a trade-off there still but to your point you can

monetize your following a lot more per follower and you also own the content there and they can't tell you what to do exactly i'd argue that if you had 3 000 app downloads as opposed to a million followers on youtube the 3 000 app downloads that the people that downloaded your app are more valuable than the million followers on youtube than the million views total sure 100 that's a big number because that's 3 000 people that bought in to downloading your application where you create the full experience and you have full power and control over how your content is being served whereas again with the youtubes and the like the spotify's and i'm not even bashing on these platforms because i think what no we'll talk about them the the place in

which they serve for the communities of of content consumers is really important. But with that leverage with the community comes the fact that they can really do whatever the fuck they want, whenever they want to do it with no remorse, no questions asked. Let me push back just – and I don't want to hold you to numbers. I mean I always throw out round numbers. But I mean 3,000 out of a million is like what, 0.3 or 0.0? Like the percentage is extremely small. I think like what, 0.3 or 0.0, like the percentage is extremely small. I think it's like 0.3. Sure.

You really think that 0.3% engagement can yield the same money, even if they, and I agree with you, that means if they went through the effort to do that, a lot of them are extremely engaged and they're more likely to click your affiliate links and buy what you buy and help you make money and actually get return on advertisements and stuff like that but still just from the law of averages and the law of shareability you know you get a million viewers but how does that equate to dollars right so i would argue if you have 3 000 active users of your doubt of your app then we can assume that they're paying right if you have a, let's just

assume a $5 or $10 subscription, right? 150K to 300K a month. Do you think you'd be making that much with a million followers on YouTube? Not under, probably not. It's close at least. I'd also argue that even if you do one month, it's not totally guaranteed that you'll do it the next month because you're not at the whim. You're at the whim of YouTube and not at the full creative and operational control that you have when you create those when you curate those experiences through apps that you build. Well, you also keep on saying like at the whim of these apps, and it's so relevant now because and you and i were talking about this the other day and i thought the point you raised was so fucking spot on but we have never had a world where major companies like this can control how we think and what we think and when and also curate

what that is not just by putting the things we're most likely to consume based on what we last consumed but also deciding what goes and what doesn't and recently i you brought up the joe rogan example let's stay with that there was a question when he went to spotify and it's still an open question it has not been addressed but you know this is a guy who's done I think it was like a total between the MMA show and the regular show was near 1,700 episodes over an 11-year period before moving to Spotify exclusively on September 1st. But when he moved over, 45 videos or episodes did not move with him. And don't get me wrong. Some of those people were a little nutty and crazy.

That's true sure but this is a guy who has built his brand to use our favorite little word right there on speaking to people from every walk of life and even when you go to the political aisle literally like here and here and everything in between and so yeah are people going to agree with everyone he brings on no i mean as far as like pure political people that he's brought on i'd be really hard pressed to find one that i'm like all right this guy or this chick really nailed it you know he brings on people who are all over the place but now you know they things move to spotify spotify is in the u.s it's based out in new york it's definitely a woke company in that way and so you see that some of even just regular conservatives not just the nutty ones were their episodes didn't make it yeah you know and even

like a really popular one with a total looney tune alex jones like yeah that's the first one that came to mind exactly like alex jones is fucking nuts we're not disagreeing with that but he's he's another one to bring up on this topic like they still got millions and millions of views and people it's also some comedy too people laugh their ass off when that guy talks funny dude and i think personally if you have a platform and especially if're going to have a guest on that platform, as long as you're not being extremely negative and putting negative thoughts and vibes out into the atmosphere that can totally incite followers and audience viewers to think negatively, react negatively, and do negative shit, or like propagate actually commit a terrible idea totally 100 that's fucked up yeah right and so i can see the argument that one can make where it's like okay um you know joe rogan had alex jones on a show and he didn't put his feet to the fire on a lot of the ideas that are really incendiary sure i can see that that could be the case where

you know you might say in that argument that you Rogan is actually helping him propagate those ideas, whatever the case might be. I didn't personally see the episode of Alex Jones. I saw a little bit of it. That's fucking nuts. Maybe I should go watch it. There's two. I mean it's – There's two of them. It's crazy, but look, because now you're bringing up two different frontiers here you're bringing up the frontier of okay are people putting out speech that can cause crimes yeah like

are they and are they purposely doing that like the old crime of inciting a riot have the intention of doing that and if they have a guest on are they allowing this guest to fuel and propagate their own ideas of hate and that kind of rhetoric that's extremely negative? Because you have an accountability as a moderator and as a host to make sure that those ideas and that individual is tested to the same degree um at least in my personal opinion i think if you make content and that that's that's where i would consider one realm of making content and producing content um in a in a sort of like righteous way i would say another piece of the whole content thing back to joe rogan is that you can't please everybody when you make

content you shouldn't try to please everyone because you're never gonna please everybody we had a clip that went viral on tiktok and it was literally tim it was um my roommate my cousin and my co-founder tim talking about how one of the worst investments to make right out of college is buying a brand new car you should buy a used car instead and i shit you not the comments there are 600 comments in this one tiktok video alone and people are going back and forth with each other saying that's bullshit actually buying a brand new car is like totally great investment if it's a wrangler everyone has different opinions around a topic that is seemingly pretty standard. Nothing controversial.

Nothing totally controversial. And yet you have a massively engaged like conversation happening that is from so many different sides and so many different interpretations. So my point is when you make content, yes, think about the first thing where you're making content in a responsible way. But also think about the fact that not everyone is going to fuck with your content. And that's okay. If people are ready to hate it, that means people are ready to love it too. Right. And this is the second frontier. The first frontier is like are you actually trying to commit

a crime or have other people commit crimes that's a little bit of a different story but where you are putting out ideas that not everyone might agree with that's the danger because you see that and now recently we saw it with the new york post you know they do a story every single day on trump's family and trump and like shit he did the new york post you know they do a story every single day on trump's family and trump and like shit he did the new york times when they got his tax returns you know they put it out there and it was trending for like three weeks but they got it obviously not legally because it was not granted to them by him or someone who has control over it and that was never a problem but then the minute the new york post puts out a story that is seems and i'm still reviewing it because who the fuck knows these days

but there are aspects of it that certainly seem newsworthy and potentially legit about joe biden and his son hunter and some of their dealings overseas and quid pro quo pro quo kind of stuff it gets censored and you have twitter come in and say well it it violated our what happened was on twitter if you wanted to share that story it would block you from tweeting and they said well it violated our policies and they directed people these policies but they violated that with almost with all these things all these reports that happen on trump all the time and i look at it and i i say to myself because i i love studying the politics of things now and and i'm pretty disgusted with where we're at but i love trying to figure out like who's going to win and why and i i look at these at these trends and i'm going once again you have

these platforms taking power over something and clearly being biased in one direction. And you're risking – like Trump could win because so many people recognize that and go, oh, fuck, no. Like that's bullshit. I love that you brought that up. I mean it's for the same reason that now I don't go on the politics subreddit anymore because they they show the reddit and of itself has showed their hand that they are extremely left-leaning and they will try to shut down donald trump supporters at every fucking turn and it's really disgusting to see that places where i believe free speech is condoned and is propagated as one

of the biggest value propositions to use the platform is you have freedom of speech. These platforms actually control our freedom of speech, right? They actually dictate which speech is free and which speech is silenced. And I think that's a really scary place that we're in right now. I couldn't agree with you more. And it's not to say I'm either left leaning or right leaning. It is to say that I think that again, short of that first thing that we talked about, where if you're making content responsibly, right, short of making content responsibly, it's not you're not making it to create incendiary effects. You should be able to say whatever the fuck it is that you want to say. You should be able to engage with people however you want to engage with. That's a whole

value proposition of living in America, right? That's our fucking freedom of speech is one of the most quoted and probably one of the only rights that I know as a citizen that I truly understand. And I think it's a really scary place when we start to look at these companies and say, hey, they should be dictating our freedom of speech. They should be taking down this and that and the third. It's like, now we're really getting into some territory where we're relinquishing control to these big companies

and we actually want to relinquish control to these companies. You're getting into the point of intentionality these companies are deciding what intent is so they see something and they call it hate speech or they call it politically driven that violates our policies so you know in the new york post example so you can't share that who are you you to be the judge? Now, let me take their side for a minute. Actually, we keep on coming to it, but I guess like Joe Rogan is so relevant in this conversation for so many reasons, but there was a great example

about a year and a half ago, he had on Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter and also CEO of Square. And it was a great conversation if you listen to it he gets into how jack dorsey concepted twitter like what the thought was how he runs the company whatever there was an enormous backlash after that episode in online from a lot of joe rogan's listeners who were screaming at him because they said how could you not ask him about censorship and about their left-wing bias and yada yadaada, yada. And so one of the guys who called up Joe personally, a friend of his, this guy Tim Poole, who is a, bills himself as a centrist reporter three hours he's just like you need to ask this this is what Twitter does yada yada yada and then Joe says well why don't I reach out to Jack and see if he'll come on here and and have a debate about this yeah and to Jack's credit he reached

out and he said yes right away and Jack brought if you never saw this it's must see tv but Jack brought in I forget her name but it was like their global head of of legal or something like that and like some weird title but she handled like how twitter projects itself around the world and what goes and what doesn't and tim pool sitting across from them it was basically this very tense debate for over three hours and where i take their side and say i feel bad for them is that they didn't ask for this okay when when they started this company jack started the company with the idea that like hey let's just take the concept of a group text but you can send it out to the world and maybe if the world fucks with it they'll they'll look at it yeah they didn't know that they were literally going to have the ability to control

thought and patterns and how people latch on to an idea or set of ideas and then get caught in these echo chambers based on what the algorithms push them they didn't realize that but they're at the helm of it and it's been a while since you've had that realization that, oh, well, shit, we kind of control how things work here. I mean, look, Trump got into office because of how he tweets. It's a big part of what he did. And I know, obviously, they don't like him too much. So they're like, well, shit, he used our platform to do that. So I get it.

It's a very dense burden. But you get the far right to have these arguments to stand on because it's very clear that the ideology, and I say that word openly, the ideology that's driving Twitter's policies and what they're trying to do is skewed very left. And so maybe even people, when i say far right i mean like also very far right to like people who really far left far right in my opinion really shouldn't be in the conversation but you know it's free speech so you gotta let them do it but you give them a base to then get other people who may be here like if you're not listening to us or if you're not watching us i'm pointing like a little bit to the left of the far right who now suddenly get pushed to go all the way far right because they see this and they're sick of it it's driven by anger you drive people by fear and you drive them by anger and they will do really

really funny things yeah and so i look at these platforms and i'm picking on twitter right now but we use the spotify example with joe obviously facebook's been caught on both sides of it it's like they were like moscow facebook four years ago and now they're not they're not left enough or whatever and you name any one of the companies the companies where there's a huge user base and people go on there to exchange ideas and opinions there is this shutdown that's happening where it's skewed because the people that work there have an opinion and suddenly they want to project it on everyone else regardless of what they feel and so now you have a like i just mentioned that example of people just to the left of the far right or moving even farther right but you have a lot of people i'm noticing catching the vibes who are taking that quote-unquote red pill who may not

have any beliefs that actually mention or actually line up with the right side but suddenly boom that's their home strictly because it's so bad over here and and what people are doing is so blatantly shutting down speech that we have a problem yeah and you bring up the point of free speech being the most important thing in the constitution thank god you say that i hope a lot of people say that it is the most important thing but when these guys sat down and wrote this document in 17 fucking 85 or 89 whatever it was you know it took six months to go to france by boat and you might survive or you might not they to their credit it's the greatest document ever written and the things that are still completely relevant today are amazing but they also didn't foresee a world where people could exchange ideas like this like crazy instantaneously and no problem and basically have technology hack into the conversation.

But it makes that First Amendment where the free speech is all the more prescient because this covers that and says, hey, there's some dangers to it you're gonna have some people who incite hate you're gonna have some people with bad intentions but it is worse to then start picking and choose like with this slippery slope idea what goes and what doesn't because the minute you do it then you take another then you take another then you take another and it's this by the way it's the same argument people could have with the second Amendment. Like, I look at the Second Amendment, right? And I'm a Second Amendment supporter. But do I think anyone needs an AK-47? Absolutely fucking not.

It's ridiculous. What, are you going to fucking hunt with that? Like, that defeats the whole purpose of hunting. Like, the people that have AK-47s shoot it off the back of their yacht in the Caribbean. You know, it's not... Never had an AK. I wouldn't know. Right?

Besides the point. But you know what I mean. Like, it's basically to be able to say fuck yeah i can and and you don't need that however when they start coming for one or two where does it stop government doesn't give back they only take away you know so it's the same. Now, to bring it back to free speech, which is far more important, in my opinion. Sorry, Second Amendment people. It's just way more important. When you start taking away speech or saying this is OK or your intent there we think was wrong, whoever you are. And in this case, we're talking about the corporations and the gods up above us that they become.

Where do you stop? And what speech is right? And I don't mean that right or left. Which speech is correct? And how do you determine what's correct? Well, it's tough because they have something that we want, which is that experience of consuming content, that experience of engaging with other people

and lightning fast speeds and basically just they really are at the front of all this technological innovation that allows communication to happen at such rapid speeds across many in basically the entire world and so they have so much leverage because they have exactly what we want and at the same time people that are i guess you could say woke or are just watching and seeing what's happening on these platforms and who these platforms are how these platforms are dictating freedom of speech it can be really alarming and

appalling now i noticed this like four years ago when b Sanders was running against Hillary in the primaries. On Reddit, you had a lot of rhetoric that was so pro-Hillary, and it just seemed fake. It seemed like it was created by bots. And like there came out multitude of studies that showed that bot farms can literally um all you have to do is post something on reddit have a bot farm do like a couple of upvotes a couple hundred upvotes and boom you already have a trending post and that's going to continue to go up so like posts can be manipulated and um different messages can um different platforms can be hacked and that's social engineered in that sort of way and so i I think from a platform perspective, if we're going to have this conversation about where does the bill start and stop, I think it should start at the number one part, responsibility. spread hate speech hate rhetoric incite ideas that are hateful incite ideas that are very negative

and then it comes to a point of where does it stop who determines what is hateful who determines what should be allowed and disallowed from like a content standpoint and i don't i actually don't have the answer to this i don't know where the medium lies. My medium is I don't want people to be incited to do things like kill one another, hate one another, think badly about one another. Think critically is a different thing, but think totally negatively and badly about each other. I think that kind of content, I could live my whole life without that kind of content. And yeah, it just becomes where does the bill bill stop I don't have the answer to that and it's really interesting to hear that Twitter didn't have the foresight to that they would be in this position because when I talked with the founder of Yik Yak which I don't know if you ever downloaded the Yik Yak I remember Yik Yak well i used to fucking kill it on yik yak right so

ruckers yik yak i had it on lock um if anyone that's listening doesn't know what yik yak is it's a random you want a yik yak story on this yeah my yik yak sure if you have a yik yak story so senior year yik yak was like blowing up and we had i lived with like five guys and four of them were on the football team so they were in season so we had a little baby pitbull rottweiler like the thing was like lou i think was like 10 weeks old so he was little and basically for the first semester me and my one buddy kind of raised a dog while the others were working their 60 hour a week job as a college football player and so one friday like in september i was like right, let's see how he does because he wouldn't walk for that long.

So I take him outside and he starts pulling me. I'm like, okay, it's a really nice day. We'll walk up towards campus. So he's pulling me up towards campus. And people are coming up to me left and right. And they're like starting to smile like, oh, cute dog. Then they look up at me. They kind of double take and they would frown or make a weird face and then kind of walk away. I'm like, starting to smile. Like, oh, cute dog. Then they look up at me. They, like, kind of double take. And they would, like, frown or, like, make a weird face.

Then, like, kind of walk away. I'm like, what the fuck? Like, do I smell? Like, what's the deal here? And so I go all the way up campus. Keeps on happening. Come all the way down campus. And by the time I get home, I'm like, that was bizarre.

I mean, Lou just went 45 minutes. But everyone was, like, kind of weird. Like, they'd start petting him and then leave. I go upstairs. I hit the yik-yak. And and you're gonna give the context to yik yak but there's a yik yak going all right so is it just me or is there a guy in a michael vick jersey walking a baby pit bull on campus right now i was like i looked down i'm like what oh no that is fucking that was yik yak for you it had like 10 000 upvotes or whatever it was but give the full context to yik yak because i like that you brought this up so

that's kind of what i was alluding to right where you really have no power over what is being said and what people can gravitate towards and a lot of um scary speech a lot of scary messages would be written on TikTok. On Yik Yak. I'm sorry, on Yik Yak. A lot of these scary, hateful, and sort of like really concerning messages would appear on Yik Yak, and it was totally random. And users didn't have usernames. You just posted, and geographically, if you're in the area, you could see what they posted.

It came into dangerous territory. The founder said that he was unable to solve the challenge of having to be the mediator of all of this content. Because that's what it turned out, right? Like if a student said that they wanted to kill themselves. If someone said they wanted to do bodily harm to their partner if like anyone threatened made any threat at all on the platform it needs to be addressed it should be like you know reported to authorities or it needs to be addressed somehow some way they just didn't have the scale at the time to address all of the message boards all the threads all the posts so they ended up shutting down the company

because it was becoming a liability well there's a clear line and and that's a shame that that it went that way but yes people took advantage of that because of the anonymity and so yeah there was a lot of comedy but there was a lot of other shit and i wouldn't even go as graphic as that but i'm sure there was on on ours too yeah but the line between actually inciting things again and on the other side the things that are actually getting censored or being shut down or the ideas blocked from people even hearing there's there's a fine line there and what you're talking about is clear like yes you need to be able to scale that so that you understand who does that and report that. That's saying, like, if I want to harm my domestic partner, like, yeah, it's a crime.

So I am totally in agreement there. But when you bring up people, as an example, we saw with COVID, who have doctors on who may have a different idea about COVID or a different perspective and it doesn't seem to match you know the quote-unquote CDC guideline that comes out which they very conveniently listen to or don't listen to it seems like to me that's another conversation but when it doesn't do that they shut it down and they say no no one can see this it's like they're deciding like okay you are all too stupid to form an opinion for yourself that we're going to stop you from watching this or consuming this or viewing this. It's like, bro, there's 7.5 billion people in this world. 5 billion of them are online. The internet is a wide and open place.

Yes, these platforms have the most attention, but if people are going to consume stuff, they're going to do it. And in my opinion, they only drive – like on the radical opinions, they only drive people into the arms of those. I see it. Into the arms of those opinions more when they say, no, no, no. We're shutting that down. Like that New York Post story. And again, I don't even know all of it's the true. I read it.

Some of it seems legit. Who the fuck knows? It might all be fake news. It might. But we don't know that because it was reporting done and you got to kind of decide for yourself and let the facts come out but that story those two stories it was two of them back to back they got more attention and more press literally as a result of that story because what do you think happened every republican in dc was like this is an assault on the right side and they did their press conferences we're

subpoenaing you twitter's gonna come in here and answer they can't even half of them can't even go to twitter they don't even know what it is but they're gonna fucking subpoena them and they have a right to do it and they have a point and so now they get their message out there and people are like without even seeing the facts or what it was now if it was fake news no one's ever going to hear that they're going to be like they shut down this report on Hunter Biden. God damn it. And these platforms are doing it to themselves. So I get it.

The line of like, all right, well, are you trying to incite and hurt other individuals? Fine. Cool. But the line of like, is this hate speech? I don't know, man, because then you get your protected classes too. It's really tough because, again i i don't even know politically where i lean because i have tendencies that are more conservative i have tendencies that are more liberal especially understanding i'm 27 years old living in uh the wonderful city of new

york that being said you can't deny that these platforms whether they are suppressing speech that is left or right they are oppressing speech regardless and so the conversation that we need to have if we're going to really continue to rely on these platforms to be moderators of hateful and really terrible rhetoric is where do we draw the line where do like how do we put in place a standard that is, I don't want to say nonpartisan, but I do want to say that is focused on getting the bad shit that we determine is bad out of that, out of these platforms. Who determines it? That's what I'm saying. Like some sort of like governing, some sort of board, I feel like. Some sort of like entity or some sort of like guidelines that everyone can agree to and then oversight from a committee. I don't know what that would even look like. I think if I were to even scale it back,

I'm a content creator and I look at these platforms and all the fucked up shit that's doing at the end of the day, I create content and these platforms are really important for me. They bring me value in the sense that I want to build an audience or continue to engage with my audiences because maybe I don't have my own OTT apps yet built. Maybe I don't have my own platforms where I can drive users to and keep them engaged, where I can control that engagement. I still have to rely on these platforms. So I'm thinking to myself, how can I reliably and how can I sustain my growth on these platforms, creating content that I believe is true to my own values. And again, those are based on, on positive values and goals while also keeping in mind and not making up lies or not making up

and covering for the lies that these platforms are either selling or trying to block or just in general people that are defending these platforms i think even if let's put it this way even if i don't agree with reddit and how the reddit governing board of freedom of speech is controlling and behaving that doesn't necessarily mean that I will stop using Reddit. And that's kind of where I'm at with Reddit specifically, and kind of where I'm at with all of these general tech companies, big tech companies in general. It's like, I need them, or I find value out of them, so much value, in fact, that I'm willing to be on the platform, even though I know that they're censoring, and I don't agree with their censoring. But that doesn't mean that I agree with the censoring because I'm publishing to

these platforms. And as a content creator, I think there's a huge, and this is something we talked about with regard to TikTok. As a content creator, there should be an inherent understanding that the platforms that you're publishing to, if you do get big you know as much as you believe you own those followers they own you i heard mark cuban explaining to a kid the other day talking about like he was asking this kid bryce hall has like tens of millions of followers across the platforms he was a tiktok kid and is a tiktok kid and then has a bunch of youtube followers etc and mark cuban was even saying he's like all right well tell me about your email list and your newsletter setup and where you hit these people in a personal way that's away from the apps and

the kid you know to his credit he's just building this up so he he didn't have a huge answer for that and mark said to him he said well listen that's where you own them you don't own them on these platforms he's like you he's like you were just telling me tiktok is in danger of being shut down the u.s well you're shit out of luck when that happens like that's what you're worried about so this is how you own them and it's a good point because it is a moral quandary and i i know it and what i like about you is politically, I can vouch for it. I've never been able to put you in a box. I love that. You know, you are so all over the place. I don't even know if you vote, but like there, there is, there's this quandary of people who don't have a horse in the race and

don't have a set of opinions. And I've been open about that myself on this podcast. I'm not someone who supports either of these parties at this time or either of these candidates i've supported both parties in the past and i regret doing so and on both cases yeah but there are a lot of people like us who live in this weird middle ground where it's like well that ain't it you know okay well that side's doing that that ain't it and then you empower this side where you have to defend them i mean when i'm getting up here and i gotta defend ted cruz something's wrong something's wrong yeah like and i'm like yeah everything ted cruz just said retweet like and it's nothing personal against him he's a he's a texan conservative it's no problem but he one thing i'll say is that a lot of the a lot of the unchecked hatred I'm seeing is coming from the left side.

I'm a very big disbeliever, whatever the word is, in leftism right now because they're having their moment, and this is where it gets really ugly. And unfortunately, these platforms are in a position where they tend to at least lean in that direction. Even if they don't agree with everything, they play to that base. Yeah, go ahead. Good point. I, again, back to the whole thing where we shouldn't be covering for lies of companies. We shouldn't be covering for lies of that we see in general, right? Like, I'll never forget 2016 i was the first time i was ever impassioned about politics to begin with and bernie

sanders pulled me into really giving a fuck about what happens um in america how what what did he say it was not so much okay it was not so much his beliefs as much as it was his passion and his rap sheet of experience where i was like, this guy is really genuine. He's a really genuine guy. And I might not believe everything that he's saying. I might not want or even know how to even pay for everything that he's saying. But I like, I really like that he, it seems like he truly has the best interest of the people at heart. And so I, I, I actually, I found that in the candidate that's what i was looking for um other people are looking for different things and like you know other people

care about different things and i think that after what happened to him in 2016 i could never forget those lies i could never forget all the fucked up shit that the you know the democratic national convention um did to screw him over and i'm not like here saying bernie should have won in fact i am saying like whatever the process is the process is however now we have to look at the process because the process is where it's fucked up and i'm not here to cover up for bullshit that happened 2016 to say that we're gonna fix it in 2020 um or like after we win in 2020 it's like don't put me in this fucking we category what like are we all not awake are we all not in tune are we all not

paying attention because if we are we'll we would notice that there's a lot of fucked up shit that we need to account for now and i i don't know why we're pushing it off for later and that's kind of where i sit on the boat of like right or left. It's like I can understand why people feel the way that they feel both on the right and the left. And some things I can support and some things that I can't. By the end of the day, I really, really, really cannot support the fact that people are covering up for lies and just moving forward business as usual because I'm not about that life. And if we're going to say that we're here to make the future better, I think we need to really take a look at our past and all the decisions that we've already made and say, well, how the fuck can we fix that? Because I think that's the problem.

Retweet, number one. And number two, how telling is it because i also know like having conversations with you as far as like some of the political stances now bernie's a socialist and you're not really about that but it's it's true and and there were a lot of people like you who were really pulled in by that how interesting it is that the thing you led with and i fully understand this was that he was a genuine guy and you could kind of you knew where he stood on things and you felt like he identified the problems really well which listen when people look back on 20 on the 2015-2016 election run there are two people in that

election regardless of whether or not their solutions work or not who spoke to the people in this country who had problems and that was bernie and trump it's not even a question and their solutions again radically opposite but they there was something about them that if you didn't like them you probably hated them especially with trump it was way worse with trump than sanders i think a lot of people like at least respected sanders still yeah i think people just thought sanders was crazy like right exactly like crazy bernie yep that's what trump calls him i think right what it's like crazy bernie yeah something like that yeah so you know he wasn't as controversial but there were people who were

like oh yeah fuck that the socialist or the communist which he's not a communist but you know what i mean and people like you were at least like okay this guy speaks to the problems and i don't know about the solutions i'll figure that that out later, but he's genuine. And he comes at this from a lens where I feel like I know where he stands on stuff. And I feel like I know that he's going to handle these situations where he comes in and goes like, all right, well, let's, let's judge this on a case by case basis, or let's listen to what everyone has to say on this. And maybe that's right. Maybe that's wrong. Who knows? I'm cynical about all politicians, you know, regardless of whether they're inside or outside. That's not even a thing anymore. Anything that doesn't perfectly match that is now put in a box of being on the right side. And you use the phrase, and I won't say it as beautifully as you did, but you led it with a few things and then you closed it with, I believe in critical thinking or something.

We have now gotten to a point where critical thinking is viewed as a radical idea. It is viewed as a far right wing or alt right idea yeah i mean you go on reddit you see subgroups like subreddits like the intellectual dark web right now some of the stuff that goes on there actually is a little crazy to be honest but there's a lot of things where people go to post on there and it's like this isn't dark at all it's like a good idea or whatever i i was like afraid to follow and i'm like well let's see what goes on in here and i'm telling you man like i don't have a percentage for you but i'll see stuff come across i'm like oh that's really interesting let's look at that and now it's put in a box of oh no you can't say that because that that that doesn't go with with the platform here yeah just like people

like i had this conversation with terrence in that podcast, and I loved that podcast because Terrence is a guy who is clearly on the left side but is such an open person to conversation and doesn't like shutting down anything and actually goes back and forth on things. And I was talking with him, and one of the things I didn't agree with him on was the Black Lives Matter thing because I'm like the hashtag is great. It means what it means. When people say all lives matter coming back at you, you would never be saying that. Like, I get that. I'm with it. The problem is it drives to an organization.

It gives them attention and then gets them dollars because they play that card and they say, oh, we're Black Lives Matter. Donate to us. We're helping with racial issues, which they are. But they're doing a lot of other things too. And so, God forbid you have that opinion if i go on twitter right now and i put that out like that's not getting in the blue check and i

don't have a blue check but let's say i did that's not getting in the blue check mafia trending on twitter that's getting shut down because it doesn't match exactly how it's supposed to be so we have taken away critical thinking and replaced it with oh this is the line of thought stay to it that's it it's 1984 in real life that's why i really like what um people like jordan pearson's great example right dr jordan peterson one of his advice that i think is really important and mind you he's more conservative um i believe he's on the conservative side of the spectrum yes yeah he says that his advice is come into every conversation ready to change your mind ready to have new thoughts form in your brain about something that you previously thought was one way it could potentially be another because that's where you learn the most and my

not my fear but sort of my i guess you could say observation of what's been going down is whether you're right whether you're left whether you sit in the middle we're all now really weary and pc about how we're going about having the conversations. And I feel like we're not really being open-minded as to changing our opinions. And so now we're not even open-minded to having the conversation to begin with. It's like, I don't like to be put in a box

if I want to have a conversation about it and you say, this shouldn't even be a matter of conversation. It like what we we can't talk about this you're already going to put me in a box and say like if you're not this then you're that instead it's like when do we get so when things get so black and white black and white man yeah it's it is such a the the box culture zero to a hundred culture is insane and it's it's, I know it's hard for a lot of people who are just afraid to say anything and sometimes say the right thing publicly based on whatever their social group is, whichever way it leans, where they don't really think that.

But there are a lot of people in this country and around the world who, who go, this is madness. I mean, they look at this and you can't not watch it you can't not watch it it is it is must see tv it's very sensational yes it is it is look when the protests are going on and shit was getting out of control at night like yeah i'm why i'm tuned in i'm watching that and i was a part of those protests yeah like actually talk about that what was your so going into that yeah let's let's let's really attack this here's what happened you're in new york i'll tell you what happened yeah go we watch a video of this fucking asshole just kneeling on this on this guy for so fucking long

until the guy died turns out his name's george floyd and here we go hence a new era of living in williamsburg of now every single day we're having vigilant silent protests at the park three blocks down the street from me and we're going out every night literally chanting you know black lives matter and all this stuff and i think where it got for me where it started to take away – where I started to step away from it a little bit was when the chants and the rhetoric was getting a little bit misleading and misguiding. So they would yell, defund the police. And in fact, that's not – you're not really – that's not, in my opinion, a good solution. I think you need more context to identify the real problem, the real issue. And the real issue is bigger than just the police force. The real issue

involves legislation. The real issues revolve around the privatized prison systems. I mean, it's an entire ecosystem that fuels itself. And so when you just say this one thing, defund the police, I mean, I didn't think that's a really good solution, but everyone here is saying that everyone here is saying like, um, all cops are bass are bastards and like the rhetoric just became so evil and negative and hateful and unconstructive and i was like we the solution was we never want to see something like this happen again to a man that didn't deserve to have that happen to him period how do we solve that and then it just morphed into this whole like um i i felt very negative from it so i had to step away from it and because it really evolved my passion feeling was i can't believe this guy fucking died the way that he did that's so sad the day before that amy cooper i was

still pissed about fucking some chick calling up um calling the police on an african-american for being african fucking american is that the park amy cooper amy fucking cooper aka biggest karen of 2020 but that's the central park that was the central park lady so that had just happened the day before and i'm still pissed i was really pissed about that i was like i can't fucking believe this shit and then george floyd happened the next day and then you know feelings and emotions got carried away and before long like that whole week i didn't give a what i was doing i was just like i feel really impassioned to to really defend the lives of these people and that again it then formed into something so crazy and ridiculous that uh and negative that i was like i don't think this is the solution i think there i i think the solution is is much more complex um or requires much more um complex insight critical thinking critical

thinking more discussion but you know it was tough to have these discussions anymore once that really ramped up so i just stopped saying anything and here's where i focus down on now, because I'm more involved in having human discussions, reminding people that we are human fucking beings at the end of the day. Whatever side you lean towards, we all live, we all die, we all don't know who our creator is. And so if we can just establish that connection and get back to basics here, then that's what I'm here to remind you. And I feel like with all the content that I create, and this is why you don't know if I'm right or left leaning, because I really don't talk about it. That's not what I'm here to discuss. I'm here to actually have critical moments between human beings and remind us that we are human beings. We are the same species at the end of the fucking day day and that to me has been really positive because that uh being a part of negative rhetoric and

hateful speech a lot and you could you make the argument that it's due in part to other hateful speech and you're just spewing it back I don't want to be part of that tennis match at all i like how you explained how that happened with central park karen and then floyd happening the next day and yeah you especially when we see things on video especially when it's like sickeningly clear cut like that and now there's a report by the way that they were chauvin was sitting on him for longer than eight minutes that's been pr i mean it's it is insane when you see that but you raise the point that those two things in context and having a similar empathetic character on the other end it was obviously clearly innocent it got you angry and so the natural thing to do is like all right well i want to support that issue and you're living right in williamsburg it's during covid there's nothing

fucking to do i'm being woken up to protests yes they come up and down that my fucking block every single morning i mean you couldn't escape the feeling and you couldn't help but feel a part of this entire massive community that was saying this is wrong right or left everyone can agree that what happened was wrong yes and but you felt like at the time because you couldn't i mean i don't think anyone knew like if you were really outside of it you might be able to say oh this might go bad or this might go a certain direction yeah you're so caught up in it especially when it's an emotional thing like you pointed out for yourself with the experience, that you feel that tribal calling. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everyone was just like a human shouldn't do that to another human being at the end of the day, right? So it's very,

very core, very just, you know, like, this is wrong across the board. And again, that's where I reshifted my focus to be a lot more positive and i know we're coming in the election year i just want to be positive i want to remain focused and say whoever wins we just need to remind ourselves that we all we've all lived together since the inception of america and we've all had our trials and our tribulations and we can continue to do it no matter what happens we should just remind ourselves that you know we are not as radical or we are not as different from each other as we think we're actually quite in the same we live in the same fucking country and we support each other at the end of the day we all need to support each other and that's the that's my rhetoric i don't want to

fucking sit on the on either side because my i feel like my rhetoric is a lot more positive and a lot more just honed into being human because at the end of the day, no matter who wins, nothing will really fundamentally, drastically change for you and I. It might change for others, but I don't know, man. It's a really interesting time to be alive right now. Well, you also are bringing this up in a time where we're, what, eight months in, seven months, whatever it is, to basically quarantining. And you were in the eye of the storm. of people did come in on the protest because what the protest began as, it was a clear-cut point. And it's like, of course I want to support that, especially when you're coming in and you're upset about other things that are happening. But it raises the idea that people – it's not natural for us to be inside. It's not natural for us to be uncut or away from

reality and away from relationships and human contact. And so, people are craving that. But living in New York, you're literally boxed in. You know, you live in an apartment, you don't have a yard, you can't walk in the neighborhood and whatever. Yeah. You know, so, did that, I mean mean take me into covid when did obviously we went inside in march but when did you realize hey this shit's gonna last way longer than i thought and and what's that been like like what has the vibe been like in new york and it's obviously a lot has happened but just take me through it a little bit i think that the scene in new york and really

the general vibe of new york has evolved in so many different ways over covid but i would say if i had to bring you to a particular moment and um that that would exemplify the status of new york as compared to how people see new york this is a great moment so i was in west village recently celebrating a birthday and we are When I say recently I mean a month ago and we're celebrating a birthday we're having dinner dropping sake bombs a band Materializes out of thin air. It's 11 p.m. The entire street is completely blocked off We're all dancing and having an amazing experience right left Asian white black doesn't matter right all races all like

belief systems doesn't fucking matter we're all drunk as hell and dancing and vibing to amazing music and life couldn't be happier that's the experience that i had that night that following morning i received a text message from my parents. It's a video of another side of New York where there's a massive riot and the riot, actually, they invaded this restaurant. They told all the restaurant goers

to get the fuck out. And it's the same outdoor experience that we were having at the restaurants in West Village. Same situation, except different vibe obviously so which one does the media latch onto they latch on to the one that's more sensationalist the one that will create more clicks more views uh and gain them more money and revenue and so they attach to that side no one will ever see the videos of us having one of the most incredible human experiences I've ever had

in my life. Not this year, Jules, in my fucking life, I've never had an experience like that. It was so incredible. And six with me to this day and everyone that I was there with that day. Also, we all, we all say the same thing. So it's like, you would know what New York is like if you lived in there. I would say if you're looking out, if you're outside of New York and you're looking at it with a lens through the media, I assure you there is a lot of good happening. There's a lot of real human intimacy and bonds and relationships forming that are so positive, so overwhelmingly not left or right, but just human that the media will never report on you won't

see but i assure you it's there it's happening it's happening as we speak i had a really really close friend of mine like a brother text me a couple weeks ago and he was like afraid to say it but and this is somebody who head down lives his life doesn't give a shit about anything that's happening that's not like his family or like his work everything else doesn't matter and he texted me saying you know man he was talking about the podcast with me and what episodes he liked and then maybe an hour later he's like i feel like everything I hear is just horrible news all the time. And it's a hard time right now, but like, I'm just looking for the good experiences. I feel like I get him at my restaurant where he owns a restaurant and then I'm just brought down right away by all this shit that's apparently happening out there yeah and i realized if this guy is saying to

himself oh like i need some good news in my life imagine what everyone else is really thinking or saying and it's such a good point because you remember the show the newsroom you ever watched that on hbo yeah aaron sorkin there was i think it was two separate episodes part one and part two i could be remembering this wrong but it was called like tragedy porn you remember that what you explained to me because i love that show i just don't recall what like what happened in that episode i don't even remember what the plots were in those but it had to do with the you know the shows about a newsroom sensationalism it had to do with sensationalism and reporting on negativity whatever the plot line was. I don't remember.

But the takeaway, and I'll never forget it. This was years ago when I watched this. But the takeaway was you sell what people click. To your point, you sell what people are going to watch. And people like to get worked up on stuff. That's why when listening to these politicians talk, I was going back and forth between Biden and Trump last last night and by the way i want whatever drugs they were giving biden i yeah he was he was fucking focused dude he was phenomenal he was on his game last night bro i i feel bad for him like i you know i've stood next to him before i used to caddy for his brother-in-law all the time like that guy i'm

talking like five six years ago when i never caddy for him i don't know him at all but you know i stood from here to to there from him he was yoked and like with it and like whatever and now you see him and he's it's confusing but last night like he was on but either way when you listen to these guys talk and last night i think trump was a bigger example of this than biden i thought biden was struck a little bit more of a cordial relaxed moderate tone but they're not saying as much like here's our policy and here's why we're so excited about it why everyone's gonna win and you know trump will say it when he's saying like i want everyone to win i

want everyone to do well. Like, we had the greatest economy ever or whatever. When they're going for the votes, though, and this is all the way down to the congressmen, down to the mayors, whatever. It's like the world's ending. You're going to wake up tomorrow and the sun's not going to be there. We're fucked. Like, it's fear. You're not, my favorite line, you're not going to have a country if so-and-so wins.

My favorite line is, this is the most important presidential election we've ever had in our time. And they'll say it four years from now, and they'll say it four years after that, and they'll say it four years after that. And it's a constant move on fear and trading on things that people – what you don't know is going to happen is going to be bad. And so we feed into it when we put up the news stories that, and look, they sell, but you put up these news stories that paint this picture. And it's, it's like heartening for me to hear you say that about your experience in New York. And I want to talk about this more, like, let's actually dig into this. But yes, there's no doubt New York has a lot of problems right now. Yeah. It breaks my heart to see it you know i'm i'm from south jersey we're both from south jersey grew up around philly in philly all the time philly will forever be my home city right but you know philly's a town new york is america man like

living up there my entire career post-college yeah i love that place i get i love the rush on my skin when i get in there i love the people i love i love when people when i walk down the street and someone doesn't say fuck you or give you a look like i don't feel at home like i love that i love i love that energy and hustle and i keep this right there on the on the headphone amplifier that that little mini not snow the snow globe without the globe of new york just to remember it because obviously right now it's not like we're going up there but i i hate seeing people leave i hate seeing it fall apart right now and i i hate the the bad news i see from there so it is refreshing to hear that

there is some good side but if we're going to talk about it yeah there are some other realities going on there right now. You've had a lot of downstream effects, not just from COVID, but from the societal uproar around George Floyd and the other things that have happened. And frankly, the lack of empowerment with the police force who everywhere right now, it's tough being a cop. I get it. And some of it's it is what it is. But how how do we rebuild this? How do we make, assuming we get a vaccine early next year, how do we get it such that people like you and me go back up there? I mean, you're still staying there right now, but, and we're like, hey,

this is going to be New York again, baby. That's my dream. I want to do that. Yeah. You want it to be back to New York again. We talk about this a lot, especially if you're currently living in New York, right right if you're living in one of the boroughs of brooklyn manhattan queens right long island maybe uh the people that have stayed we the way that we see it or maybe even i could speak for myself the way that i see it is right now in New York, even though it's known as the Mecca of the world and really Western culture is civilization, it's really the best kept secret because people that left,

whether I want to say that they abandoned New York or not, they did abandon New York. They abandoned their life in New York because maybe their life is different now. And I get that. And so my life really didn't change that much. And I get to still live in New York, which is nice, right? I can live anywhere I want. I choose to live in New York because I think it's the best kept secret. I think that you might see of every single terrible thing that you might see in the media or like on social

media, there are like a hundred things that aren't reported that are beautiful, that are just immaculate, that are happening, that are exciting, that are thrilling, that is happening with the community of New York. Obviously there's a lot of challenges that people that are still in New York face. A lot of people couldn't leave New York. They don't have the luxury to go back to their home in middle America. So or like, you know, on the West Coast. So I think that's a different narrative in and of itself.

If I were to just, again, paint the perspective of how it is in New York, as opposed to how it's being painted if you're outside, it still very much is a beautiful place to be in, mostly because of all the people that still live there. And I think the best thing that you could do to help propagate New York is to live in New York right now, to support your local businesses. Right now.

Yeah, right fucking now. Like the rent has never been cheaper. Go live in New York. Go experience what it's like to dine outdoors where the entire road is completely filled, back-to- back restaurants up and down with beautiful custom sidewalk seating where you can gallivant and just go around and obviously be safe and wear masks but support local business be a part of the community and be here while we continue to build and and kind of rebirth like a phoenix from the ashes what about the fact that and i don't have the exact numbers i do not want to pull them out

of my ass but it's like it's just for the sake of argument here it's like roughly half of the restaurants in new york which new york is a big part of the definition is the food and the social life experience yeah they're closed and they're not coming back yep they're not coming and and that's talent gone too you know there's talent that runs those places and so yeah you still have a lot open because it's new york but it's not the it's not the same it's not the same but i would argue it's still new york it's still it still has those amazing beautiful pockets of people of culture of um of uh experience when it comes to like food culinary experiences i mean there are restaurants that are still bangers right like out of all my favorite restaurants

90 of them are still open and continue, have continued operations during COVID. And it was people like us, people like me that kept these restaurants afloat by continuing to order takeout every single fucking, every other night by just like allowing my paychecks to flow into the city of New York, whether it was rent money, whether it was like, you know, um, food and drink money. And it's like, I really do believe in the city. And this is coming from someone that lived in New Jersey, right? It's every New Jersey's dream to kind of like leave Jersey for some fucking reason, I believe.

And because we have all this exciting shit happening around us that isn't Jersey, like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, fucking DC. I love Jersey. I love Jersey too. And I can honestly confidently say that moving to new york i chose to be in new york during covid as opposed to living back at home in jersey because if it wasn't for us i don't know if new york would survive it if everyone left new york yes yes we wouldn't have a new york so it's like who's what is new york right now it's us it's

people that are there right now currently so come through you know bring a good vibe bring a good energy if you can and come help support new york it's a really best kept secret but i'm telling you right now it's not it's no longer secret it really is a lot of fun and there's a lot of good happening did you see the back and forth between james al tucher and jerry seinfeld two or three months ago i did what were your thoughts on that i think i don't know enough about either of them and their work to have any thoughts other than that article that was posted on linkedin it was new york is dead al tucher's article yeah it was like new york city is is dead and it's never coming back which we'll unpack that in a second but go

ahead i mean i listened to a bunch of other people unpack it and i'm curious what your thoughts are because you know you did used to live and work and breathe the same air as new yorkers and you know now you don't and now you're seeing this article that says basically new york is dead and never coming back to life well what was your thoughts on that it it's it makes you giving me the experience that you talked about and about feeling alive and about how great this is it it gives me hope because these are the things you see this is what gets clicks this is what sells now i i also don't want to put james altucher in that box because he's a really measured guy i'd actually seen interviews with him before like i

was a very aware of who he was and very interesting dude he's lived in new york his whole life very apolitical guy too like truly and the thing about his article is the evidence was stunning and it doesn't mean all of it was 100 correct but you know this is a guy that he lived there and then moved out he wrote it like two weeks after he moved out he moved out in late july on a whim but went went to Florida for the first time in his life. And for people who haven't read it, it ended up with his permission being reposted in the New York Post. You can Google it, give it a read. It's like 2,000 or 3,000 words. And he breaks down New York segment by segment as to what's going wrong.

And I didn't agree with all of it. But he's painting this picture that's scary and it comes back to what you said to where you were talking about people like us people who stayed or people who didn't have the luxury of leaving well the people who are in their even 30s but 40s and 50s who have families and and own their real estate there or pay a fuck ton to be there they're in a different part of their life than you and me. You and me are in our mid-20s, having a good time, like getting after it, whatever, coming up. Those other people, they're thinking about their kids. They're thinking about retirement. They're thinking about their priorities and the safety of their environment. They're thinking about how the air smells to them. It's a different part of your life, and I respect that, and I can't

fully understand it because I haven't been there. But they're going to have a different decision point as to whether or not they're going to get out. And I don't blame those people for doing it. What I do blame is that Jerry Seinfeld, who I love, I've got to criticize him because he

comes back with a 300 word response to this with no evidence and just says fuck you to james al tucher i don't even know if you read the article and you know jerry seinfeld was living on long island this whole time in his mansion yeah yeah you know and and that's no disrespect like i'm cool with that like he deserves to do that and he should but don't if you're gonna come back at it combat it with facts and you just gave one-off personal't – if you're going to come back at it, combat it with facts. And you just gave one-off personal experience. But if you sat there, you'd go through it and give some facts like, well, actually, this is going okay. That's going okay.

This can be rebuilt here, whatever. Like one of the things I really believe is that New York is based on the energy. And it seems like you 100 – is it fair to say you 100% believe that too? I don't want to speak for you. No, you're right. I think that, first of all, this is such a testament to how much New York means to so many people. People from different backgrounds and different experiences can feel like they are vouching for New York because it's their home. And first of all, I think that's really commendable. And I think that speaks a lot of value for the fucking power and tenacity and energy that exists in New York. It always has. That's been consistent throughout the history as far

as I understand it. When it comes to the place in which you are in your life, as it relates to your home, maybe that's really where the conversation should be looked at further right where jerry seinfeld lives in a fucking mansion and he wasn't even living in any of like the main boroughs where you saw all the foot traffic and really all that problems right he like his place is there lived in long island well to be fair he lives in new york city i i want to say it's on the upper east side like he's got a really big mansion but you know it's new york city it's an apartment the whole bit sure he just has other homes and what i'm saying is that when covid hit i don't know exactly when but very quickly

after covid he went to one of his other homes he left the city he wasn't there when the protests were going on and stuff even if he stayed i think my point is that he has a different perspective and new york means something different to him than it means to me and that could be said about literally everyone that lived in new york and still lives in new york today and everyone has their reason for leaving everyone has their reason for staying and um and again that's what i can appreciate about new york so much and that's why i that's what compelled me to stay is because this place is so important to so many people whether they they left or not, and whether they have lived here

yet or not. I know people that still want to live in New York and all they want to do is move to New York and live in New York. And they didn't even get that opportunity to do that yet. And so for me, I really do appreciate being in New York and especially like living in a time where again, Phoenix were born from the ashes. I truly believe that we are on the rise. If we're not, if we still have yet to fall, we'll be on the rise. I'm pretty optimistic about that. Maybe I'm just an optimist at heart as well.

So when it comes to sensationalist articles and responses and all that stuff, I really pay no mind because that doesn't affect what I do. That energy, I firmly believe this, and give me your thoughts. It's built on the younger generations. It's built on the people, especially in their 20s and early 30s, who drive the social scene, who drive the, I'm in fucking New York, baby, let's go, right? And then even the people who didn't grow up there, who just come there and they're chasing the American dream in the epitome of what the American dream is. That's what then attracts everyone else because the younger generations, that's where you're in the most beautiful time of your life. You're the best looking you're ever going to be.

And you're out there. You're being the most social you're ever going to be. And it's not just the business. It's not just the American dream. It's the energy and all the things you do around that and so i think that the key like guys like you who and i remember that decision where you were like fuck it we're we're staying like i thought i was gonna have to bring you down here like are we going and you're like it was it was like the titanic almost it was like i imagine like people are like are you gonna go on the boat or not they're like we're staying we're saying we're

going you were like you were like jules we're on call just we're we on the boat or not? They're like, we're staying. We're staying. We're going down the ship. You were like, Jules, we're on call. We're deciding whether or not to go with you or not. And then I called you up and I'm like, what's the choice? And you're like, we're staying. And I give you so much credit for that, but it's going to take more than that. They're the people who did that by choice in your situation where a lot of people who didn't do it by choice but on the other side of this it's gonna take people in their 20s and in their early 30s to come in and even if they're working remote say yo over our dead fucking body is new york not gonna be fucking new york yeah and it's gonna take that energy and that energy will attract everyone else it's the same way that like you know you don't see promoters walk into a club with like nine dudes they walk in there with eight girls in

cocktail dresses that are like far too short but they look great you know it's a vanity thing like you draw people in and for new york it's the energy of the people in the younger generations who are coming gonna say it's new york again 100 and if you're not down then you're not down stay where you are it's fine you know we only want people that are interested in collaborating and and um being open-minded to rebuilding the city because don't get me wrong there's a lot of shit that's fucked up i mean there's i used to live a block away from a movie theater now i live a block away from an empty vessel right i haven't seen any activity in that place and it's like there are so many things i could say about that in new york all these experiences that were shut down

and might be shut down permanently for good so i'm not saying like it's a fucking um like it's like six flags but like it's open but no one's there i'm saying you know a lot of the rides are closed but that's not to say that we can't still have a good time and, and create an experience with each other. That's what I'm saying about New York. And I think that can be said about a lot of things where outside looking in, it might not be actually how it is when you're, when you're inside it. See what I'm saying? So perception is key and making, maybe doing full circle back to social media, right? Some things aren't as they seem. And so if you're going to take things at face value, I would, I would recommend don't do

that. You know, there's a lot more beauty and maybe a lot more feeling and emotion behind, um, behind that one thing that you're taking at face value for the case of New York. I don't believe new york is dead i think we're fucking we if this is us dead then i'd be amazed to see what it'd be like if we had an even ounce of life in us because right now again i had one of the most beautiful human connections experiences whatever the fuck you want to call it and you're saying it's not just a one-off you're making that point clear to me. I want to make sure people understand that. Yeah, exactly. It was an incredible experience that I had in New York City on the same night that the thing that was televised was just rampage and carnage. And so that was a really big juxtaposition to me. And only the people in New York will know exactly what I'm talking about, I feel like. I think that's incredibly well put. And I hope you're right, brother.

I mean, I have faith that it is going to rebuild. And it's going to rebuild because of leadership from people like you and hopefully people like me too getting back up there. But, you know, on the point of the movie theater, I mean, this is bigger than New York. You just reminded me with that. Things like that, like are movie theaters even going to be a thing anymore? You could ask simple questions like that, but it's also like this is changing everything. The world is not going to be the same. You see it in your business just because of the rush to that space that is great for you guys.

You're in the right place at the right time but we are seeing so many social shifts and it's not even just things like movie theaters going away or you know certain restaurants that are never going to open again and people are going to go to things like cloud kitchen like what travis kalanick's doing and all that but it's also literal motion of people you know these people who are leaving new york and leaving la and going to florida or texas or middle of nowhere pennsylvania you are seeing cultural shifts happen and there it's gone on so long now that it's like well some people are gone they move their family like like they're they're gone and some businesses some industries are gone they move their family like like they're they're gone and some businesses some industries are gone how do we come out of this and have any sense like let's say we get the vaccine

early next year and i don't want to fucking hear anything from anyone but get the fucking vaccine but i'm sorry like some of the i i get it but like some of the anti-vaxxer stuff is just like, give me, I can't deal with this. Like, let's go. Yeah. But you know, once, once we get out there, it's like, okay, well now people feel safer and there's normalcy, but what is normalcy? What does that look like?

Obviously there are jobs that they're, they're remote now. It's going to be that way forever. But how does our world, what does our world look like, Mitch? Like what is – what are – what's going – when you go outside, like what types of businesses are there and what needs to be there? And how does this still feel like when things are normal, so to speak? How does it still feel like it did before or is it not gonna i think as far as like what kind of businesses and and what kind of role businesses and technology will play for the future i think digital first i think redundancy i think um people are we're going to lean more towards technology to enhance and facilitate

our business operations right because some things you need to be on the ground to do manufacturing is a great example of that. Some things we've proven you can do without having to be on the ground without having to be in the office. And so I think we're going to see, if I'm making a projection here, we're going to see a lot of offices that no longer exist, right? What are we going to do with that space now that it's not an office space anymore um this is going to happen um potentially around the world i've i'm hearing from our i mean the messaging from verizon ceo is hey guys get used to get used to not being in the office you know we're doing so well right now right um so from a business standpoint i could see that being a thing as far as like will movie theaters open again? I mean, I work in the streaming industry.

For what? I work in the streaming industry. So if you're asking me, do you think movies will come back? I think everyone that's already shifted into digital before COVID won. I think everyone that's shifting into digital now is going to win. And I think that people will still crave that movie theater experience. It just won't be as heavily lucrative as it used to be. And that's the problem.

The business, the movie theater business already operates on fairly tight margins. They need a certain number. They need to get asses in seats to make their nut. I mean, it's scary to me, but yes, especially millennials, and it seems like Gen Z to a slightly lesser extent because their reality is different, but it's still somewhat of a trend there. We value experiences.

We go out there and we lived in, we grew up in this world where you share them as well, and you're trying to compete on experiences. And that's why people do things like go skydiving or go to the escape room and shit like that that 20 years ago would have seemed almost dumb right but with a movie theater i'm just thinking about it because it's such a traditional business that you would think great experience want to go but how many people are just going to be like all right i don't want to do it tonight i'll do it another time like that's work i gotta i gotta leave my house i gotta get ready i gotta look presentable in public and i can just turn it on right here anyway and oh

you know my girlfriend or boyfriend's living over right now like let's just relax netflix and chill yeah i mean it's there's a reality like people don't like being at home because they don't like being told they have to be there they don't like going outside and and having to wear a mask because we're in the middle of a pandemic but once that choice is given and it's like well i can do that or not it doesn't mean that they're gonna jump full form into the other side of it yeah i see i See, I think my reflection on movie theaters, I've had a massive 27 years of very successful movie-going experiences. Successful meaning highly enjoyable, positive, incredible memories. And when I talk about movie theaters, I'm a little bit – I can't help but feel a little bit more precise in particular because i had an experience happen to me and my brother mike um at a theater during a time of

political climate that just uh made it really uncomfortable for me to ever go to move theaters ever again yeah tell that story very quickly um very quickly this happened in williamsburg brooklyn this was a year ago or so this was precisely a year ago and i don't mean to be sensationalist this is i'm really just recanting an experience and how it's helped um and not how it's helped but really how it all enabled me or pushed me to form the opinions that I have about movie theaters. We were watching the Joker. Really weird, distinct vibe. I remember it. The theater was packed. My brother and I were sitting in the front row. It was that packed. And opening weekend, opening weekend. And mind you, I don't watch the traditional media, CNN, Fox.

I don't watch any of that. I mean, I cut cable. So apparently there was a lot of reporting on like, oh, is this movie going to be positive? Is the main character propagating this idea of anarchy? Like all this kind of questions that came into play around the Joker. We experienced none of that. So my brother brother and i would go and watch this movie like we've done our entire lives we just go sit it's like a total like um amazing experience that we always have

and we're watching this movie somewhere in the middle of the movie, it gets really awkward and quiet. All we heard was a shuffling of seats. You could hear a commotion in the background, but no one was really yelling or anything. We turn around, and you just see people ripping at each other to escape the theater. It was a mad rampage. It almost looked like World War Z. It almost looked like I war z it almost looked like i am legend type shit people just crawling on top of each other like just forming on top of each other trying to get to the exits and you know my first thought was holy fuck this is

my first thought was get the fuck down so everyone the moment we all saw it really yelling though they were just no one was really yelling it was all silent commotion which was even scarier because it was so silent you're waiting for fucking bullets to rip through the fucking theater that's how scary it was it was actually more terrifying that it was fucking quiet what was causing no idea no idea what's i don't know the catalyst all i know is from our position we turn around people are fucking for their lives trying to escape the theater we get down the entire for the row that we're in gets down and i remember i even forgot this fucked up i even forgot my brother was next to me for a split second i was like this is how i'm gonna die this is crazy and you think you

kind of have a i feel what people mean when they when they say like oh your your whole life lasts before your eyes it's almost like it felt like there's like this drug that like got released in my body where i actually had more time than i thought and i just thought about how the shit that you hear about that happened in aurora during the the batman rises premiere um it's like you hear about these things and you always wonder what it would be like to be in them you hear about these experiences that these people had at the time but you never really know for sure what it's like until you're fucking in that experience in that and i was like okay this is what it's like fuck this is fucked up shit and i'm like okay you

remember you i started to remember okay okay, like the important things. I'm here with my brother. We need to get the fuck out of here, right? Objectives. Got it. He's right next to me. God, I can feel him. You start to remember the small details.

What the fuck color is his hair? You know, details you never thought about. What color was the sweatshirt that he was wearing? Is he wearing a hoodie? What kind of pants was he wearing? You know, what does he smell like? What cologne does he wear? Like, I need to, now all these details are suddenly like fucking possible mind you i'm in a theater where

predominantly my whole 26 years of living it's been totally positive never had anything like this happen to me yeah now it warps your whole vision of it now i'm fucking underneath my fucking seat clinging towards everyone around me and there was a move to just go right like there was a commotion to leave the fucking row and if you didn't leave you were going to get trampled so we're like fuck it we saw an opening we saw the we saw the light at the end of the tunnel the end of the tunnel being the doors that left the theater and we fucking just booked it everyone was fucking booking it by the time we got out of the theater i'm leaping i sprained my fucking ankle my brother has all this shit ripped his clothing ripped he lost his wallet i dropped my phone we're all like just fucking i'm i'm breaking down and hysterically crying i don't

even know what the fuck is happening and going on like it can't be this is happening um again because the whole time i was just like when i remember my brothers with me i was like okay my goal is to like make sure my brother's safe um and also like we're gonna get the fuck out of here and so after having that experience and mind you nothing happened we went back to the theater everyone's like crying hugging each other apparently it was a false alarm someone says something fucked up which triggered the entire catalyst but it should it what it was was it told me wow everyone if everyone leaned on the notion that we were all going to die as opposed to oh it's just a prankster in the theater what the fuck does that say about our reality right now that we live in

and so ever since then i've been a i i try to watch movies to just desensitize myself and like not be scared and go to the theater. But to be honest, I'm kind of relieved that the theaters are closed because now I don't have to pretend like I like going to theaters anymore because I just can't do it. This is what I love about these conversations in podcasting and sitting down with, you know, your voice straight in my ear and hearing that and kind of reliving it myself because we just went, we ended up totally off topic there, what we were going at.

But now I like this point 20 times better that you just raised because I don't even know if you did it or if you realize you just did this, but you painted a symbol. You took this very visceral event that wasn't that long ago that destroyed your notion of a sanctity of a space and that space being a movie theater a happy place where there's only good memories and now have you been to a movie theater since then because that was before covid did you go again or yeah so i i try was that terrifying yeah terrible awful and my brother

will tell you the same thing my my first movie back when i fucked up i watched zombie land part two because i was like i need to watch anything like when yeah zombie land part two that's a good one to start on and here here's my thought processes all right when i was younger my father saved my cousin from drowning and that same day he forced my cousin to go back into the water and swim so he wasn't afraid of water for his entire life like fucking 13 years old all right and he almost drowned in the ocean right so that was my idea thought process here i was like i might be afraid to go to theaters forever if i don't force myself to go back to the theater the same theater that i fucked that this experience happened to me you went to the same one i went to the same i mean it's in walking distance right

yeah so the first movie i went back to zombie land 2 terrible there's a lot of gunshots and violence and i was like this is the worst experience of all time i'm literally sitting in the middle of the movie theater all i could think about was the exits how fast i could run to them that's all you think about yeah right what sound was that so many times during the theater i shouldn't be laughing but no it was just thinking about now like i can't believe i chose that movie of all movies and so i was like all right maybe that was a terrible experience only because of the movie let me go watch something else i watched shia labeouf's honey boy first of all that movie is boring as fuck and a movie that's boring all you think about in your head is ever say that the shia labeouf movie's boring i loved even steven

okay ian stevens the best is best work uh arguably this stuff not so much and so whole time pack theater i was thinking to myself wow we're all gonna die because all i could think about was not this movie because i'm not engaged it's not good so i'm just thinking about really scary thoughts and i had to actually walk away from the theater because i was just like wow i can't believe this is happening to me i've always loved this experience why why am i now all of a sudden so scared even though you know it it's most likely not going to happen again and then i finally watched a good movie and it was the lighthouse with robert pattinson i don't know if you've seen that movie fire amazing right so i was engaged the whole time but it was sad to hear that my brother he went to go

watch the new star wars and even like the like the choo choo choo like all the fucking sound effects and shit were freaking the fuck out of him and these are like i mean these are this is disney this is a disney movie and he felt uncomfortable being in a theater it's it's really sick that i'm about to say this but it's true i remember this just reality we live in with crazy people and crazy shit and some things that didn't happen in the old days or it happened a lot less or maybe you didn't hear about it but you know i used to walk into like our high school auditorium or in college I'd walk into like a big hall for a class and I would think to myself, man, if someone really just wanted to come in here right now, we're done.

Yeah. There's nowhere to go. Yeah. Like they just plow away. And it's scary to think that, but you brought up this point in that, that I'm not sure you know you did, but you were talking about the desperation you feel and when that kicks in and how everyone suddenly, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, you said it way better than I'm going to remember it, but everyone suddenly just fears for their life and wants to live, right? Along those lines. And so, without even knowing the impetus, which in this case that, I don't know if this was made clear at the end of your story, but there was nothing, right? It was some kind of misunderstanding.

Misunderstanding. Misunderstanding. So it's not like anyone was in there actually shooting or anyone even had a bad intention. It was just a misunderstanding. So people were on edge and one thing, like a domino effect. Not a single violent act happened. Right. So still though, there was the idea that there might be something happening and it goes into flight mode in that case because you're in a vulnerable place. You don't have a defense on you. You can't defend yourself against a gun in an open forum like that. And you just, you're scared. That's what you were getting at you're scared and fear drives you to the door to run without

without critically thinking not that you would i'm just i'm raising a point here i'm landing this plane like without saying like well is there anything or or actually analyzing what's happening because by the way if there was you're dead if you do that you're dead but it's such a good symbol for what we are doing in society right now and i would argue that you know at this point if you live up in new jersey new york you know people have had covid you know people have had covid bad i mean i being up in the eye of it where we were the first like literally the first week like the first couple days of quarantine i had four friends who had it severely one guy who i know extremely well had it where he was in a coma on a respirator for 55 days and he lived well he was a miracle he had like a 10-page story in

in the star ledger up up out of newark in north jersey and you know it's it's a real thing so the people out there like you saw people putting out like the plandemic and and saying it's all fake and it doesn't suck it's not that bad like that's all you get no like when you get it it sucks it really does but we have generated seven months of total fear now where people are shaming other people for wearing masks and stuff. And let me be very clear. When I go outside, unless I'm driving my car alone, yeah, I wear a mask. It's not a hard thing to do. Hopefully it's a short-term kind of thing.

Like it's out of respect. I don't know how much it helps because i've heard so many goddamn different opinions i'd rather wear it and and be sure that i'm doing the right thing rather than be like oh fuck this man like there again you have like two sides butting heads over something that shouldn't be this ostracized or politicized whatever but all of our society has just thrown everything to the wind and gone inside and not questioned anything that's happening, not questioned the fact that, you know, when governments start to tell you what to do on everything, they don't really give that power back. You're giving away your civil liberties. The same thing

like we were talking about with the Patriot Act and Stellar Wind and what happened there. Like they just will start doing this stuff. And so, you know, and I'm not one of these guys, like, I guess it's the conservative belief that small government over everything. That doesn't work in a country of 330 million people in a world of 7.5 billion. But the concept that there is government that gets too big and too powerful yeah yeah that that's a real thing and so i look at it like people are ignoring this or putting the blinders on and being fearful for their lives of a disease that's bad but you know you look at the numbers from the cdc the most vulnerable age group is 70 and above and their their survival rate as of

it was like mid-september this report checking on the cdc i'll put this link up the survival rate is 94.5 percent the survival rate among i think it was like age 4 to 17 or something like that is like 99.98 or something you know what i mean so it's it is crazy to me that we have shut down everything and lived in such fear over something that frankly you know there's a it's the law of averages on stuff you know and and it is worse like you look at it versus the regular flu it's not even close i did it like the factor power based on the numbers from the cdc is it can be a factor of up to 300 to 1 in some of the age groups. It might even be higher on some. So let's check that.

So it's way worse. But you have people shutting down their lives. You have people who have shut down their business. It's never going to open again. You have people who now live in fear of going outside and wonder if they're ever going to go outside without wearing a mask again. You have people who have changed their reality who are hysterical over it because it has been ingrained in them. I've seen it with my own mom. It's hard because she's taking care of her parents a lot right now, and she's terrified of giving it to them.

I get it. But seeing her mindset now as opposed to the beginning of March or even the beginning of May after it was already in, it's crazy and it is changing our mental on things. And so, we have this natural fight or flight response as humans and you live through a scenario where that happened viscerally and it happened in something that was in the context of things relatively quick. But we have now taken that attitude and we have expanded it upon the long term and along all of us like the entire society everyone's affected no matter where you live or what's going on or what your reality is this we all have to do the same thing or we're

fucked yeah it's crazy it's it's you put it there best again, that's why there's so much uncertainty. Always. There's always uncertainty. But now there's like volatility and uncertainty and like more polarization, in my opinion, and feel than ever before. of positive impact is to focus on things that are, um, to focus on doing things that will have positive impact, not only for me, but for the people around me and for people that like, um, have access to what I'm doing. That's really the only way I could, I could see fit. And that's why I had to step away from all those protests before they got really too misguided in my personal own belief of what a solution would be.

That's why I had to move away from engaging or watching the media or being sensationalist and joining conversations of this and that because it just felt really negative. And it's not to say that you can't derive positives from negative outcomes. It is to say that you can't derive positives from negative outcomes. It is to say that why don't we just focus on bringing solutions to the table? I think that's like first and foremost.

That's what I'm focused on. When the vaccine comes, I'm fucking taking that shit. And I hope everyone does. And I want to be in a world where I can travel and do what I wanted to do always and forever. And continue to build on what I'm building on now. I'm not seeing my future predicated on the outcome of this election or predicated on the outcome of coronavirus.

I'm just living it as I would. I'm just living it as if those things don't really fucking matter. They're just simply happening, but they're not they're not ingredients in the recipe of my success you learn to separate the two obviously you live in society so yeah so there's there are certain things that you can't ignore and have to be a part of your life obviously there's a pandemic going on you adjust to that but you yeah you learn to create

that barrier there is what you're saying yeah 100 i had to learn to remove myself from that barrier and in fact just i continue to do what i've always been doing identifying opportunities and throwing my weight and throwing my efforts on things that i i think are positive um and it will allow me and others to be successful and i i don't know i think if i'm not saying more people should feel this way, I'm simply saying like, this is this is how I feel. And I can also appreciate if you feel really passionate about what you believe in, whether it doesn't matter what you believe, I could understand and appreciate how passionate you feel. Because maybe you don't have the luxury of, of being able to take my route. right? I have the luxury of not having been fired, right?

And I actually have the luxury of having grown with the company and established myself and had much better footing than I did before this whole thing started, right? Like I took the opportunities that I've had in front of me and I really made, I feel like I made the most of those opportunities. And at the bottom line, I'm just doing what I think is right for me. And I like to think that it's also right for other people because I do keep other people in mind.

And again, the whole idea of positive energy and putting positive things out there in the world, especially in a time like now. Beautifully said, man. And you've also been filling your time too like it's been established at this point that you're pretty you're legit in the world of tech you've been ahead of the game in that for a long time and and it's you become a power player in the space but tech is a very wide-ranging thing and you've been spending a lot of your time looking into like some of the futuristic things that we're dealing with that may actually not even may but already are invading

spaces like yours with artificial intelligence so what what are i'm curious to know just because i didn't have a chance to talk with you about this but what are some of the things you've been looking at and studying and and studying and what's your thought on the space? Because everyone hears the words AI and artificial intelligence, it's become a buzzword, but a lot of people don't even understand it or think they do, which is way worse. So what have you been looking at and what are you seeing on the horizon here with AI, not just here, but around the world so i gotta admit my understanding of the ai space is quite limited i've seen different use cases and and i've studied different

use cases right more specifically deep minds alpha go um and can you give context on that just so people listening i could so alpha go and they deep mind is a deep mind produced this program called alpha go that back when they were developing it and building it they had implemented ai in such a way where ai can actually learn to be better than the best players um of this game called Go, which is one of the most historically old and challenging and provocative and intuitive board games of all time. It's harder than chess by some ridiculous power. Some ridiculous power, exactly.

And it's just simply like... And DeepMind is owned by Google. DeepMind is owned by Google. That's important here because what they were able to do with alpha go their program is beat literally the best player in the world they beat uh i believe this guy was like out of all the levels that you could be like if we're going to talk about chess being like a grand master right like the highest um level player at chess the

highest level player at alpha go there's like nine like specific levels and this guy the software was able to destroy him did you watch that and this was a global phenomenon i did i watched it i watched the documentary twice like back to back like night and day because i needed time to consume what the documentary told me the first time, and then I watched it the second time. I was like, okay, good. Now I truly understand what this is implicating. What I think is interesting about AI is that we have this whole COVID situation happen, which is like there's a lot of month to month. We didn't know what the fuck was going to happen, right? Especially week to week, month to month.

It's been a rollercoaster ride ever since. This is all technically relatively short term. In the meantime, technology has not taken a beat off the path. In fact, it's actually grown exponentially, especially when you look at how much people are now depending and leaning on technology to communicate with each other since we've decreased the communication in person. So technology has replaced a lot of the human interaction that we had grown accustomed to. Greatest example is you don't go in the office anymore. You don't go to the coffee shop and meet people anymore. We're now using dating apps.

We're now using Slack and Airtable to collaborate with each other. So technology didn't take a beat off. And when it comes to AI, some of the biggest innovators in the world were already terrified of what AI can do, that AI can be worse. Like Elon Musk, for instance. A lot of them are. Elon Musk is more afraid about AI than he is about a nuclear-like war. And in fact, I think that if you look at technology as a whole, take away AI, if technology hasn't taken a beat off the path, what do you think AI is? What do you think the development of AI is and how long-term effects of what artificial intelligence will be able to do will affect we, the human people?

I think COVID made people, made all of us, rightfully so, and still makes us think very short term when the long-term problems still exist and have actually, this has been a breeding ground. COVID has been a breeding ground for this long-term problems to actually expedite themselves into our lives. And I think that is the unsung, that AI is one of those unsung aspects of like, this is a problem that's been expedited. Or this is like, not so much a problem because, right, it's being proposed as the solution to a lot of problems. This is an area in which we have decreased our attention and focus and in doing so have expedited its negative impact on society, which will be coming soon. Andrew Yang spoke about it a lot, and I'm glad that he did.

Yeah, he did. It's a loaded topic, and for people who haven't looked into it, I know it seems like a loaded idea, and if you're not crazy interested in tech, it's like an eye roll i understand that but i would take the time to look into it because you live around it and you talk about covid being a breeding ground it wasn't just a breeding ground because you know the tech world was able to continue and just go on like nothing happened it was also breeding ground because with everyone home and out of their normal and connected to each other by technology they're producing more data points and ai runs on machine learn i mean it's not all of ai but there is a large aspect of ai that depends on machine learning which in the english language would mean that it is it needs data data is its food. It then learns from if this, then that, if this, then that, right, wrong, yes, no, whatever. And over time, it learns to figure things out. And as it does, that computer becomes more and more powerful because AI is a computer.

And so all these people who are now relying on technology more than ever, whether it be on social media or just using the internet or combing platforms like google who own companies like deep mind which is the most important artificial intelligence house in the world that's known you know they're getting more information from this their machines are learning more and and it's it's a wild thing to think about because you do face like an existential crisis potentially and i i try to look at it from the positive lens too because there's good to come of it but we've already seen the early iterations of this with things like i mean i can name any platform but let's use youtube as an example that youtube algorithm is a machine learning artificial intelligence technology so it

curates its feed with one goal in mind it wants to keep you watching consuming content so it learns about your preferences and then what happens is over time as it says like okay if he if julian likes watching this then he'll like watching that the more deeper down that rabbit hole you go the more likely you are to be changed by the beliefs of the content that come your way so even indirectly yeah that artificial intelligence is moving you and like i i've i've taken it seriously for a long time and it's it's awesome to me and and you're being humble because i talking with you before this you've done a lot of work on it and trying to learn about it but

people need to do that it's look i I put this piece in here for a reason. I curated this art right here for a reason because in a studio, I want to feel the vibe. I want to feel some things that I stand behind or things I think about, right? And this wall right here, if you're not watching the wall I'm pointing to, I have two images.

I have an image of a nuclear bomb test in 1946 out in the Pacific that our government did after World War II, where we were just making sure we had our hydrogen and atom bombs all in order. And then below it, I have the famous, I think it was Michelangelo who painted it, but the picture of the hand of God and Adam's hand, if you know what one I'm talking about, but the hand of God is replaced by a robot hand. And I put this, I love that you brought that up about Elon Musk making the point that it's a worse threat than, you know, a nuclear disaster. I put this up there because even with artificial intelligence, I want to bet on humanity. I want to bet on humanity because when the nuclear bombs became a thing and it moved to the hydrogen bomb and the A-bomb, which are the steroid version of it and could mean the end of humanity if certain countries start hitting the buttonyear-old, they had the nuclear bomb drills or whatever, like in school.

It was like, oh, is the world going to end today? Are we all going to die of radiation poison or in the blast? And there was this fear that it was inevitable and that it was going to happen no matter what. And that was the crisis. And look, it still technically is a crisis every day but it should tell you a lot that these countries these leaders like the president here or putin in in russia they walk around with a guy who holds a nuclear football and they could hit the button anytime but they don't it's like we've learned and and hopefully it does never happen but we got through that crisis and now the crisis we face potentially and i say crisis lightly here but not lightly if you know what i mean it's it's

unknown if it is but it's gonna be like well what do what power do we give to machines what does that mean for our reality do we create machines that suddenly surpass humanity it's a very scary thing to look at and covid artificial intelligence more than anything it has streamlined it and moved it moved it up in its progress more than anything and so i yeah i i just people people need to pay attention to this because it's it's it's very real we're moving into some isaac asimov last question shit right what is the last question um that humanity asks it's actually a question yeah produced by a robot and i i i mean this short story the last question i don't know if you ever have you ever read this nope it basically poses the idea that um our god as we know it was created it was as actually a robot that we created in a

previous life right like when the let there be light was said by the robot that we built before everything perished and entropy um became nil is this simulation theory no this isn't simulation theory um this is this is a really interesting i don't want to ruin it for you right but it's a short story it basically proposes the idea that um no matter how much information, whether with machines or just human processing, we can gather, we still won't be able to reverse entropy or understand how to reverse entropy, how to live longer,

how to rewind life. And the way that, I don't want to ruin the ending for you, but it basically poses that question. I think that's a question that AI inherently is going to not solve for us, but sort of, what is that final question? We can have AI solve all these incredible problems

that we as humans solve. What else are we going to ask it to solve? What else are we dying to know or need help what else are we dying to to know or need help and yearning and understanding and it's our own humanity that's basically the idea there well that's i'd send that to me when we're done because i i haven't it's gonna fuck your shit up but yeah it's it's like this weird circle of life you know, because you lose humanity as you add technology because you bring in the machine age, and that's been happening for a long time. But you also become more aware of humanity than ever. It's a very weird thing.

It's like people – that's why today you see a lot of – in the search for purpose, which is something i've talked about on a bunch of podcasts and we'll talk about it a lot because it's a very real thing people are trying to figure out like where they make sense as a human in the world like how do they add value in a world that can do so much for them already in the palm of their hand like how do you beat that and artificial intelligence is just the final i shouldn't say nothing's ever final but it's the ultimate frontier we've ever faced because you go into it wondering like well what does the world look like if we have machines walking among us like humans which is not happening tomorrow that's that's that is still far far off but it's like well 70 years from now that could be a thing well i think an even weirder question is what does it look like if human intimacy can be replaced by an operating system right the movie her

joaquin phoenix killed it and i feel like that movie was totally went under the radar but it proposed a really interesting question it's like at the end of the day we're all humans we crave human intimacy all of us inherently what happens when we're able to almost completely replicate the human intimacy experience through surrogates, through operating systems, through self-learning machines and completely replicate the human intimacy and feel from a touch, smell, sound, taste, and fucking, like every perspective and sense we understand to know consciously. What does it mean when we can actually replace it enough to trick our brains into saying I'm fulfilling this human intimacy sense? And that's when I start to really get sad because I really am hopeful that human intimacy can't be replaced by machines though i could see it already happening now where

old people predominantly old people are talking to their alexas and their series as if they're actually human uh things as if they're anamorphizing these creations um these technological creations and replacing human intimacy with these creations and it's it's for the same reason that people on dating apps feel like even though they're connecting with more and more individuals connecting on the app they feel more disconnected with human beings in general spot on that's why i won't spot one hinge spot on it's and you raising the point of older people doing doing it you know the people who know the oldest school reality and they crave that connection they you know you get older maybe your spouse is dead or

and there's there's fear you're looking at at death and there's some fear involved with that and some uncertainty and you want comfort and you turn to machines to give it to you. I mean if it can happen there, you're goddamn right. It can happen young. I mean I don't know the one – I think it was like – I think it was number 13, the third part of the influencer series I did. I was talking about – I found this article. Maybe it was in the BBC. It's in the show notes for it. But they were talking about virtual influencers, and they interviewed this kid.

It was 18 years old, and he talked about a virtual – meaning like someone who doesn't exist. It's an AI, not an AI. It's a CGI creation run by, I think it was run by an AI company. But he's talking about this influencer, Lil Miquela, and making her human. He's saying things like Mick cares about this or she doesn't let this such and such affect how she puts out her message he's he's giving her not just a name and not just a pronoun he's giving her life yeah and it's scary to me and there's some influencers who are blamed for that because they put these bullshit fake lives up there and then lose kids like this or like well that's already not real so i'll just go to this

but that's something the the and i know it's just one example i don't like cherry picking things but i want to look into this more because that if there's one like him there are other kids who got to be thinking the same thing and so you see these 16 17 18 19 year olds who grew up in this world where they always had the iphone in their hand they've only known this virtual connectivity world and they're they don't see the cross between what's human and what's not and that's a scary scary thing and then when you take it to the other end of the spectrum like you did and realize that oh some of the old people are even given into this craving too it's crazy because they already they already have that connection with

their phone you know we're all addicted to it and it's a machine it gives us that quick dose of oxytocin like oh we checked our notification oh we checked our text like we are just fighting to be able to communicate with people yeah and it's building layers like these are layers um that are really getting i think in the way of what we're trying to get the core at, which is just to be human together. I think technology is just layer upon layer upon layer upon layer. Though it could be helpful to communicate and be quick and efficient, it does come with caveats. And just to circle it even back further,

as someone that's creating content and putting it out there into the ethos or to the web know uh to the web it's like how do i make sure i'm not contributing to that you know what i'm saying like that's a really big thing i think about a lot you know aside from thinking man this is fucking ridiculous i can't believe i said this i'm about to publish this it's more so how do i contribute in a way where i'm not part of the problem and i really don't have an answer for you on that one i don't have an answer for myself i just again to me it's like if i can focus on being goal-oriented maybe i'll i'll that will be like my commandments right the commandments in which i create content responsibly and sustainably. Whereas, again, I don't want to

be part of this problem where we're building layers upon layers. I would like if someone were to see any of my content or like, let's just say, for instance, running my Instagram, I would like for that person to want to actually meet me in person and actually get to know me better and again i think like all these social media platforms and these ways in which we can interact and engage and meet each other it's like there's there's a ton of layers in between all that and um at the end of the day and this is what covid19 has really taught me is people still want to be with each other. We want to experience things together.

And that's the most beautiful thing about all this chaos that's come with this virus is that I still am seeing that and feeling that people want to be together and celebrate life together and mourn together and just be with each other. Not just the West Village experience. I've had other experiences during COVID that have been incredibly saddening, incredibly maddening, incredibly delightful and shocking and surprising. And the consistency throughout all those experiences and events was that it was experienced with other people. It never happened in a vacuum with just myself. It was always me and other people experiencing things together. And that's what I treasure and will always remember about these things.

It's so true. People learned real fast just how much they cannot get validation and vibes out of being on an island with technology and it's one of the reasons like i get it with people who just want the pandemic to end and so they're trying to be the virtue signalers online yelling at people for not socially distancing or you know not going out and seeing other people or just going out at all like i understand in some cases in other cases i think it might be a little political but either way let's say none of it is and i understand all of it and they're all doing it from the right place you can't stop people from wanting to interact

with people and that's not something that even in a pandemic that has some risk to it it's not something you should be discouraging because it's not healthy yeah you need that connection and it actually in a weird way it gives what you just pointed out gives me hope it gives me hope that like maybe the machines can't always just replace something because people have had that easy choice now maybe they've let some of it do it, but eventually they come back around and go, fuck, man, I really miss being around so-and-so. I really miss just going out to dinner with so-and-so. And that quality time, that ability to understand and disagree and have that human-to-human connection,

whether you're happy or sad or angry or whatever whatever it is you just want to feel something yeah and you know for for me like one of my things is like i'm a quality time guy it's big love language over there yeah well yeah that's that's that's one of mine and we'll talk about that another time but that's exactly what it's people aren't familiar with with the five love languages like that's exactly what it sounds like it means that i value and feel affection from being around other people being around my friends being around my family being around having that that intimate connection. And inherently, with a quarantine, you lose a big portion of that. Yeah. And it affects your vibe. And like, when I got really sick this summer, I mean,

I probably had COVID at the beginning. That's what the doctors seem to think. And, you know, weird shit happened to my body. But, you know, when I was going through that, I felt like it was exacerbated and all my symptoms were made worse by the fact that i didn't have enough connection and then god forbid i go somewhere i mean the worst part is like when i did go to see like three people i literally it hasn't been much but when i did go to see people it was like do we shake hands do we hug it's the most awkward thing and i hate that I'm I mean that's how I live my life I'm a connector I I go I talk to people I shake hands I hug like

I'm I'm one of those guys yeah and now it's like you know but I crave it I know I mean especially knowing you you're like a you know it was always amazing to watch you network and and be in that environment because i could see that you it would activate something in you to be with around all those people and that excitement and that energy i had the same energy as well and like it we would just feed off of each other this is why i think we were so successful together when we did the Maxwell Awards, when we hosted and shot content at NextGen Summit. It was that vibe and that energy to say, we're here to make connections and have real, true human experiences and moments. And you do this very, I think you do this really well. You're a fucking madman.

And so to hear that now it's much different, especially since the times are different, you know, it's not to say that it's saddening, but it is to say, I know for a fact, I still remember that you crave these experiences. And you're not fooling me when you say you're like content down here, because I know where you really, I know where your heart really is. You know what i'm saying like that's that's me just knowing you and me kind of giving understanding how humans work and really like truly naturally want to interact with each other but that being said i mean think about how many people are like that though too you know like it's not just you and me like there's a lot of people who crave that yeah it's really everyone honestly and if you're uh oh man it's been really interesting to i mean everything has changed with kovid like the way that we meet people um or lack of it the

way that we date people the way that we make friends the way that we form um professional relationships all of that has changed and i think again back to that same one constant that we keep coming back to we crave human interaction as humans that can't be replaced um by machines it can't be stopped by a virus it will always i feel like it will always continue to happen and this is my genuine optimism about humanity and back to a time where we could have easily blown each other up we did it and guess what we're still not doing it today beautiful i hope that dude i i i and i hope and i have hope for it too and and i hope you're right and to make this a circle jerk for a minute that's coming right back at you i'll jerk me off i remember my first time meeting you because like for so mitch and i have been friends now for

almost exactly three years and i had always heard about you and then you told me you'd always heard about me because we had mutual friends my cousin adam obviously was extremely close with mike i've been low-key friends with mike for years and years and i was boys with adam right right building malika beach together selling bracelets right so it's always like mitch would be told about julian and and i was always told about mitch and then thanksgiving eve weird shit happens on thanksgiving yeah but thanksgiving eve 2017 we go to landmark in town everyone's home for for thanksgiving and i walk in there and i had never met mitch before actually had never seen him we weren't friends on any social platforms.

And I walk in and like I'm wearing like a flannel with like a beater under it, like already like six seats to the wind after the famous Herman pregames of Thanksgiving Eve. If you know, you know. And I walk in there and I see, you know, there's like 800 people from town in there. Everyone's wearing a borderline t-shirt, like just getting fucked up, having a good time. And then there's this dude in a tan, like suede suit. Yep, it was. and shit you might have been wearing sunglasses which was a violation but still like it worked and i'm like that's fucking mitch because you had i don't know 15 people around you and you were like you were like the mayor in there and i'm like that's the guy and and that's right away like as a friend i was attracted to that because i already knew you were your mo and your reputation and you're moving and shaking and how brilliant you were but coming in there and seeing like oh this

guy gets it he's all about the people he's all about bringing people together making sure everyone has a good time and and having friends here and friends there and just constantly being around and buzzing and vibing off of people and i was like oh did we just become best friends we just became best friends that's wild and it's so true i remember it the exact same way as you do and and you didn't even have instagram at the time right so when we became boys was um really the start of us and really me understanding the power of networking understanding we were now both in proximity of new york i lived in jersey city and you lived in in uh, uh, correct me from Morristown. Yeah. North Jersey, Morristown. Working and constantly networking and being in the same

sphere. We got to know each other and then we formed Sporantics together, which by the way was, um, a really, if I take away anything from Sporantics, I really do believe we brought people value in the services we provided. I believe we also just, there are some parts of the business where it's just like a money grab. And the true parts of working together that I really appreciated was working with you on projects that revolved around things that we were both passionate about, which is creating content. And the fact of the matter is we didn't get paid for the maxwell awards we get paid for next gen summit but we ran in total what over 40

different interviews um on our own time on our own nickel on our own dime to do it just to do it i mean we were making money doing other things selling like social media services and whatnot. But this thing was like we were using that to propagate our entrance into creating and producing content. And I'll never forget just your tenaciousness and our collective vibe and energy and all this willpower where it didn't feel like work. It never felt like work it just felt like fun and that even when i'll never forget even when it all went even when it went to complete shit i don't remember that part i remember no no no no no hold on you know what i'm i'm talking about a certain grand theft whatever on the streets of jersey city you were there when i went wrong it was tough it was tough to for those listening that don't know what happened because you will mitch i'm just gonna say this for the listeners right

now we're not gonna go deep in this right now because we've just had a wild conversation we're coming up near the end here. I want to touch a couple things before we go. But you'll come back in here at some point a few months from now. We will do an episode. I'll make this promise called An Oral History of the Great Jersey City Robbery of 2019. It was the most viral marketing campaign we ever put together to this date. And that in and of itself, along with the work that I've done with Jules on so many different occasions and just getting to know him as a friend and a fellow brother from another mother, I am not surprised that he did Trend of Fire. In fact, I am so happy that you're doing this and I want you to continue to do it because this is a really important thing and um the ideas that you have that you're presenting are really they shouldn't

even be provoking but they are in this political climate no no matter what it is because no one wants to have these conversations every conversation you have now is is important and um and also you know i enjoy hearing you get passionate and yell in my bedroom in Williamsburg when you're miles away from me. So I'm not surprised at all. In fact, I think this was your calling because there were times where I was like, we would, for instance, be making content. I'm just like, this motherfucker lives for this shit. This motherfucker, you could see it in in your eyes in your vibe in your energy and the way that you talked about what you were doing it was always from love and from passion

and that's why every day worked with you on whatever it is we were doing and never felt like work to me you made me and this is where i owe you the biggest thank you i will say this to people it doesn't matter how much i love you or how frustrated I get when I'm doing shit wrong or you're doing shit wrong. But when it comes down to it, none of this would ever happen without encouragement from you. And it started with simple things. This is going to sound crazy now, but if you listen to some other episodes, I might talk about this a little bit. But I'm a private guy like the idea i was one of those guys that wanted my career to be like the back room dude which that that world doesn't really exist anymore and i

didn't realize that i was naive on that coming out of college but you know i had social media right when it started and and all that, but I didn't get an Instagram. I stopped sharing on Facebook over the years. Snapchat was always my baby because it was like everything went there and it was not really – like it's a separate thing. But I didn't do this stuff, and the first night I met you, you questioned me on that and you were like, hey, have you ever thought about putting yourself out there a little bit? I was like, what the hell? Why do people need to see my Instagram? Why do people need to see what I do?

And I still ask that question. But then my point is that ended up over a year, year and a half period translating towards like, hey, if we're working on a business or doing this, how do you want to get the message out? Are you cool going on camera? And I'm like, nah, who the fuck wants to see me on camera i still say that but point being it was like one thing after another like one domino you would pluck one domino down and the rest wouldn't fall but the next one would and it would shake until the next domino was gonna fall and eventually i was like man, I was born to do this. I live for this shit.

I come in here. This is my arena. I don't care if zero people are listening or 10 fucking billion people are listening. There aren't even 10 billion people. It's like I come in here. I bring in cool people. That's what I really want to do. And we have conversations around things that everyone else is thinking about.

Or once we talk about it, they're like, oh, now thinking about it you know and and it's the world we live in it's the ultimate microcosm of the world we live in and i owe the encouragement to even get there or get to this point or do it to you and and and mike as as well i did definitely your brother mike that the two of you were were always about we'll try this or try that. It doesn't mean I always agreed with everything you ended up telling me. I don't. But like the impetus is to do the simple things. Like you were saying, why are you marketing on Instagram for other people? You don't even have an Instagram. And I'm like, because they're interesting. And you're like, well, you're supposed to be too, you know? And like hearing that it's not a good character trait, but I'm always like, I'm not fucking interesting.

But just having like a friend who encourages that and is like, hey, you might be able to do something too. That confidence that you gave me is – it's not really something I can repay you for, and thank you. I really appreciate that I had that impact on you because you had a, you really did have a similar impact on me. And I know Mike can speak the same and, and really everything that we did before our work together with Sprantics and really just from when we got to know each other's friends up to now, a lot of what we were doing was brand new. I mean, like, let's take getting into linkedin for instance linkedin was a brand new platform it was exciting r.i.p linkedin r.i.p by the way but

like every investment we were making was towards this like future that we were dictating and we felt like we had true power over and so there weren't a lot of people that were on that wavelength of trying new shit and really being able to put yourselves out there like that and your energy and vibe you were hungry for it and i was like i love this guy's hunger we need to keep him around because it's it's gonna make us hungry and keep us hungry and tenacious can you tell that to all my best friends you wanted to keep me around they're like oh, oh, we've had enough of them. He's trouble, but he's a good kind of trouble, I promise.

You were just always that dependable person, and you still are to this day, where if I had an opportunity, you would just say, say less. You'd be like, say no more. You know what I'm saying? I could immediately count on you for anything if it involved meeting with people, which is really everything in life. If it was about having a true experience, you would say, yes, you're always down. And especially when it came to the more really scary and putting yourself out there stuff, you might've not been a hundred percent down at first, but that's the whole point. We should be checks and balances with

each other. That's why we keep people in our circle. And I don't think we've talked enough about how important it is to keep people in your circle that are going to check you, that are going to keep you in check, but also motivate you. They're going to criticize you, but not be afraid to criticize themselves. And I think that's truly the component that you brought to the table. You checked all those boxes and then some. And you came into our life at a time where that was the movement. That was just the motion. And it all felt like perfect timing.

2018 was a hell of a year. 2018, 2019. 2019 was too. and everything 18 was a hell of a year 2018 2019 like no matter what happened to us you're alluding to the crazy you know shit that that brought all of our worlds down sideways even for a moment even then so everything that we did i i can't help but appreciate and now i bring that into what i do today bro like for instance the workflow and the processes and how to interview people and how to um be magnanimous and how to make good content all that stuff we really learned together and we learned through each video that we produced each fucking short form clip that we captioned ourselves and put out into the world like all this stuff was very uh it was an accumulation

until now until what we're doing today and so when you talk about like me getting back on for a future episode i'm so excited to see where we will be during that time things are happening man because we're ramping up and accumulating at such an amazing pace you've also gotten really i i like that you misspoke there you misspoke on one thing you've also gotten really i i like that you misspoke there you misspoke on one thing you've also gotten really good like when i first met you you were doing the damn thing like you were doing all this shit already i had never even been right it was like i hadn't even dipped my toes and i need to see how how you did but you've moved and i want to talk about what you're doing with project aeronaut and everything now but you have moved

you don't really interview anymore. I love that. I'm always beating away at this on this podcast. I will beat away at it until I'm blue in the face. As you can tell people, the cameras are up. We don't do interviews. We don't have fucking questions. We come in here, we say what we say, the conversation goes where it goes, and it's exciting because it's unpredictable. But you've gotten really good at that where you kind of go in, and I've seen it with your early podcast here where you're also focused on a niche specifically and you have to have some content planning it's very conversational it's very free-flowing and it's so much better and and i think like i've seen that growth among us and it

it's it's a beautiful thing to watch but project project there or not. So you guys have the company. Tell us about the company first. Sure. So, and I appreciate that you, it's funny that you said that because I was making interview style content. And now for me, it seems that if you're centered around a mission,

even if you have a guest, the mission stays the same. And the conversation is guided by that mission. So case in point here is Project Aeronaut is a podcast that we started. And by we, I mean my co-founders, Tim Makalino and Mike Loxamato, my brother, who I also live with in Brooklyn. Both of them.

Both of them. We came together to say, let's form a men's skincare company, right? And what are the issues that we want to solve? What product do we want to release? We really came at it from a business perspective. It took us a year and a half to understand our why. Why were we doing this? Where was this rooted from? And so, hence our podcast, right? So we have this podcast, Project Aeronaut.

And we're still evolving this podcast. We're only three episodes in. And mind you, yes, we've found success and really interesting pockets of the internet already, which is like really, really motivating. But still we have, I wouldn't, I don't even want to talk about, like, I don't even want to reflect on it really until after 50 episodes, you know?

So I'm on episode four. I just finished it. So catch me at 50. Ask me how I feel about it then. But right now our mission and our goal is to talk about topics that men find really uncomfortable, right? Like the deodorant I use for my balls, for instance. Or like you asked me when I walked in here, how do I get my hair so nice? Well, I'm glad that you asked that. I've never been asked

that before. By like another man, you know what I'm saying? These are conversations that like, we want to have, but we but we just aren't. And so, you know, we have these conversations all the time at our crib, having like working on building this this this company called aeronaut skincare that now we've just kind of curtailed it uh curtailed a podcast to be more about men's self-help but what's interesting is that that could expand a ton of topics not just personal skincare but now and not just personal hygiene but now finance but now relationships all that kind of stuff so now that's key we have freeway to work with whatever the fuck we want to talk about which now is beautiful way better too i might add way chill way chill way chill we're

not gonna and i'm i'm glad that i saw that you guys do that in episode three i think it was because i could tell it'll go there now because when it was just going to be about like hygiene and the uncomfortable stuff around that i'm like ah this is gonna be great for a miniseries you know you're gonna run out of bullets like this podcast is over at like 10 episodes yep whereas what you're talking about now yeah then you can peel away the onion and there's a lot there so that's great yeah. Yeah. So that's, and I'm glad you noticed that. And the feedback has been important. Like you gave us feedback on episode one that we implemented for episode two

and then the feedback from episode two to episode three. So obviously like we're listening to our audience and seeing what works and what doesn't. And when I tell you that, like some of the clips that do bump and are bangers, like don't do that well on Tik TOK, but some of the ones that are surprising to me that do well on Tik TOK, I would never think would actually be like generally received well or

critically. It blows my mind to think that young people care more about finance than they care about fucking anything else. Yeah. At all. All of our finance clips bangers we could have a clip talking about fucking something that we think is so important but when it comes to finance people really give a shit about that because these kids are already starting to so

the younger kids like on tiktok and some of the the youngest ones you're talking about that might be on that platform like they're already thinking about how the fuck are they going to earn in this world they've seen that and then you look at the kids our age and slightly younger slightly older than us they know what happened in 2008 2009 and how that changed and how their parents didn't come back from that in many cases so yeah it's it the data backs up everything you just said to a tee. People are really, really concerned about it. And you see it by what what clips really go for you. So I'm glad to see you go into that. Obviously, like even leaving behind the industry, I did. You know, I left behind the industry because it was it was an industry problem. Right. But the concepts and the things I learned there are incredible and they're prescient, man. And so I always get off on hearing people really give that attention and get into the nitty-gritty and ask the what-if questions or bring up the how points. And it's nice to see you guys doing that.

Thank you. I mean it's a scary question to ask yourself right you you touched on it in your episode about um the the mishaps of higher education from like a financial funding standpoint and you know a really scary question to ask yourself is you're paying for all this you're paying for all the school what job are you gonna get to be able to pay this back and that's a foresight that no one i don't expect anyone to have when they're 17 or 18 when they have to make that really ridiculous decision and that's what's really scary and we're getting a lot of questions about that but again we're only three episodes in fourth one on the way we're totally in our infancy we already had someone reach out to us to want to be our intern he works at uh berkeley this is

the funniest fucking shit i've ever seen in my life so we are popping off but i assure you we are so confident that you know what we're doing is important and and hopefully positive in the same way that what you do here, you really get the sense that you're really just trying to inform people, whether whatever you believe in, here are the facts, here's the truth. Here is the way that I see it. I appreciate that in the same way that I, I'd hope our audience would appreciate, you know, our honest take on how to apply ball deodorant, um, effectively. Yeah. I was less interested in those ones, not going to lie, but still. You'll feel amazing if you try it though.

That's all I'm saying. No, but listen, man, this has been awesome. I'm going to have to, you know, I don't cut within a sit down here. I almost said interview there. You hear that? That was scary. But I don't cut down within, but this went so long, I may need to like take off the front end and just pick it up somewhere.

And this was awesome. I'm not surprised at all when we talk. It's always great. But listen, man, we'll have you on again sometime down the line here. And love you, brother. Thanks for coming on. I love you too, bro. And honestly, follow Trendafire.

Follow Jules. He's amazing. Trendafire is dope. The brand he's amazing trying to fire is dope the brands the brand whatever you want to call it the the show the podcast it's it's a great platform and medium for my friend julian dory to share his thoughts and ideas and his perceptions of the world which are really valuable and important if you want to think critically about your life and the lives of others and um and honestly bro you tuning into your show is is really great and you're in your infancy as well i understand that um but i'm

excited to see this grow and to see you grow because of this thanks brother and and you can get project aeronaut on you guys are mainly on spotify spotify uh tiktok instagram youtube is gonna is is huge for us um gonna be huge but yes um anywhere where content is consumed mostly all right beautiful well to everyone else give it a thought get back to me and mitch you're gonna get back to me real fast oh give it a thought