Julian Dorey Podcast - #17 - Alex Horowitz (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 29, 2020

Alex Horowitz is the Chief of Staff at Eight Sleep, a technology company in New York City that specializes in developing & manufacturing smart mattresses. Previously he was a debt underwriter at Goldman Sachs, where he worked with some of the world’s largest tech companies. 4:10 - 10:25 ~ What goes into being a modern-day Public Company CEO 10:25 - 17:10 ~ “Hope” in environments with fewer resources and opportunities (“The Wire” example); Capitalism vs. Socialism 17:10 - 25:10 ~ Presenting ideas in groupthink (“robot”) political duopoly culture 25:10 - 30:22 ~ Russian bot accounts and online hacking methods (Renee DiResta) 30:22 - 33:52 ~ The social media platform overlords; Facebook’s responsibility 33:52 - 39:52 ~ The responsibility we have to take for ourselves on social media 39:52 - 49:22 ~ How do we teach social media use in broader culture; the free speech danger of left-wing bias on social media platforms; misinformation on social media; James Damore & Google 49:22 - 53:52 ~ How social platforms predict culture change and then profit off of it; the dilemma of censoring far right figures 53:52 - 1:09:52 ~ The de-platforming of former Evergreen State College Professor Bret Weinstein; Censorship; The protected status of organizations to operate freely; precedent-setting & Hobby Lobby 1:09:52 - 1:13:52 ~ Net Neutrality and more discussion on Bret Weinstein 1:13:52 - 1:25:22 ~ “Ideas” as a protected class; the treacherous concept of offsetting misinformation with misinformation; discussing the KKK as an extremist group that could dangerously leverage internet to spread ideology 1:25:22 - 1:36:32 ~ Traditional liberalism vs. Leftism; Personal responsibility with social media content consumption 1:36:32 - 1:41:22 ~ Moore’s Law and the runaway train of social media on our culture; The moral dilemma of “ceding power” for the greater good 1:41:22 - 1:56:41 ~ Government control and how governments don’t give back power they take (the tradeoff of civil liberties); Trade-offs Americans have made over the past 20 years including topics like September 11th, The Patriot Act, & Stellar Wind (Snowden); our willingness to give up freedoms for certain things in return 1:56:41 - 2:08:11 ~ Civil Liberties & The Pandemic; Society’s mentality towards the Pandemic; Discussing the theory that “the cure is worse than the virus;” Masks  2:08:11 - 2:16:11 ~ The desperate people who are “over” the Pandemic because of economic hardship; Masks in a restaurant logic; Personal accountability with masks; The politicization of masks (Trump & Biden Supporters; Fauci) 2:16:11 - 2:28:41 ~ Unbiased Science as a source for mask policy; Anti-Vaxxers and the problem they may pose towards ending of the Pandemic 2:28:41 - 2:39:21 ~ The value o... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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has their own problems. Everyone has their own things that they have to prioritize. Someone's got, you know, just had the worst breakup of their life. Somebody just got divorced. Somebody just got married and is stressful about it somebody just moved to a new state and got a new job somebody's kid doesn't like them right now and they're in therapy about it all these things they already have to go through their day and put food on the table and do their job and worry about it and they only have 24 hours to do it and they gotta sleep in the middle and yet during all this they also have to have the wherewithal when they're escaping on social media which is their downtime and their time where they shouldn't have to feel like they're doing work.

They suddenly have to make this work and educate themselves and decide every time they scroll their finger. Oh, let me stop and consider who wrote this and why and why I'm reacting the way I do. And does it go back to the manual that you pointed out earlier? Does it match the manual of what I'm supposed to do here? Yeah. The expectation on even a majority of society to have to do that is ridiculous. Yeah. It's sad, but it is.

There's something that I think about a lot, actually, which is, you know, you don't know what you don't know. or create more innovation out of what's going on they really just care about boosting their their their multiple their public multiple um and their market cap yeah they want to be able to say to shareholders look at us we're doing something exactly or look at us we're you know share price will go up another 10 percent this year, and it's mostly because we purchased this company that had a 25 times multiple on it versus our company that has an 18 times multiple. So when you blend it together, we've got a 20 times multiple now. And this is the disconnect too between like main street and and not even wall street but but main street and and the major part of corporate

america here i don't think most of us appreciate the fact that these these big companies when they're public they have a quarterly nut to make and that's what everything is driven off of. And what I mean by that is four times a year, they have to report what their earnings are to investors who then choose to invest, buy, or sell, or hold their stock on the basis of that. And so when you think about it, 90-day runways to make major company decisions

where your ass is on the line, especially when you're a senior person, and all the way down, because people got to do their job, doing that constantly, that doesn't allow you to think long term. I mean, you look at it, there have been some proposals that never go anywhere. I don't know who's done it, but some people in Congress have talked about this over the years of making it where the reports would be required by annually instead of quarterly, which still might not be enough, but it's this balance of, Hey, you want to be transparent with the people investing in your company, but you're so concerned with being tied

to the price of that public share that then drives the value of what your company is and what you're able to invest in that you're like, all right, all right, do something, do something, do something constantly. It's this cycle and it never ends. Exactly. And for me, it's really hard to, you know, when I see a company that's doing, you know, sort of short-sighted gains, you know, it's a lot of the time it's hard for me to, you know, be this person, you know, standing on this pedestal saying, oh, look at this company, like they're just doing this thing because they're trying to make these short-term gains. Because I know how hard it is, right? Like I've seen, like, imagine you're a CEO of one of these companies. And not only do you have to beat earnings in 90 days, but you have thousands of public investors that you have to deal with on a daily basis and then at the same time you got to run your your company like and everyone

thinks that their investment is the most important exactly world exactly I mean imagine dealing with you know imagine dealing with 500 investors yeah like you know I mean thousands of investors right like it's being a public company CEO has to be one of the hardest jobs, if not the hardest job, besides President of the United States in the country. I mean, how much time do you actually have to focus on your own business? I mean, it's less than 50% of your day spent on the, you know, growing the business that you spent so much time, you know, putting the work into to actually make it public to begin with. Right? Like, I have a lot of sympathy for these guys. the expense of, say, innovation or at the expense of, say, you know, some jobs, you know, in the case of like, you know, we're going to cut costs and rationalize costs.

It's hard for me to feel that bad unless it's really malicious. Because I know how hard it is, especially having now started working with smaller scale at a startup. It's hard. Running a company is really hard. And if it's public, it's even harder. And the public, like the general public, pushes back on these things and says, oh, these CEOs don't care. It's very easy to rag on corporate America. And you know what?

The group think in corporate America and the lack of foresight and sometimes the lack of empathy it's a fair point but yeah when you're looking at the guys at the top it is a really difficult place because it's game theory like you're once you get to a certain level the only place you can go is down everyone gets the promotion to get the promotion to get the promotion eventually they get to the one where they get fired that's how or they retire like that's that's the way to end and be like all right i made it right and so now a lot of the country again ties right into the wealth gap too and and the lack of opportunity you see a lot of people saying well fuck this like they don't understand that nor like they have their life to worry about and they don't understand what the ceo goes through

that they're like you're lucky you get to wear a nice suit every day get a driver up to your up to your office and you make millions of dollars what the fuck what's so hard about your life but the pressure that comes on that from the public who constantly wants to know what have you not yesterday not what have you done for me yesterday what have you done for me one minute ago and what are you doing for me in the next exactly and it's all driven at you all the time and i i i empathize with it heavily just like you and i i understand it but it's also leading to ideas like socialism coming in where people are amenable to this because they're like well these corporations don't give a fuck about us so i guess we'll just create a system where they have to give a fuck about us by trickling down money. And it's a shame because while I empathize with that, a system that is as crazy as that historically has never worked and has never created a powerful country.

And the fact of the matter is it defeats that entire game theory where you don't get people like the CEO starting off when they're 20 years old and saying, I'm going to work my way up here and I'm going to work my balls off because there's less, there's significantly less to work for and the rewards aren't there. That's why people come from socialist countries and they come here. And to hear you say that is very notable to me because you sat on the other side of that raising billions of dollars of debt sometimes for these companies who are just trying to make a nut and are trying to invest so they can make the people that actually own their company happy yeah i mean it's it's really it's really tough you know it's it's a tough thing to be in that spot and it's also a tough thing to be on the outside looking in saying like what the fuck like i didn't even have a chance to start a company because i came from you know the absolute bottom of the bottom with you know zero resources zero

education so there's there's a disconnect yes there's a there's a there's a huge disc there's nothing in the middle that is that is able to bridge those two things in the current way that the system works. Because in order for you to benefit from the trickle down, right, you need to be, one, in proximity to these companies. Two, in a lot of cases, you need to be a shareholder of these companies meaning a lot of the wealth generation in this company happens through investing it doesn't happen through your salary nobody gets wealthy off of their salary um and it's something that actually a lot of people a lot of people wow okay i see where you're going it's something that a lot of people talk about within the the tech and the and the the vc twitter sphere where you have to have alternative sources of income that um are oriented around saving and wealth generation

right so don't throw your money in the bank yes the bank is great but don't throw your money in the bank put that money to work now you i want be clear here, just so I'm following and people listening are following. You're talking about the everyman. You're talking about the employees at places like this, or maybe not even at places like this. You're talking about how they can get themselves in the game if they lack some resources, but they have the ability to get a job. Right. Okay. But what I am saying is this.

A lot of people just don't have the access. They don't have the access to the education. They don't have the access to the education. They don't have the access to the platform to invest. They don't have the capital to do it. Like a lot of people that I know, for example, and I grew up on Long Island, pretty affluent place. But there are a lot of people that I grew up with on Long Island. I mean, there's basically two different types of person, right? You came from a wealthy family.

You had the resources. You were able to do it all. Or you had the other sort of family that your family, both families worked equally hard. But one of them, they just didn't start from the same place. And so they were working their tail off to be able to keep that family on Long Island, but they didn't have all this wealth behind them before, right? So they didn't, they don't necessarily have excess capital to invest and they'll probably be working until they're 85 years old. Whereas this family that had the capital behind them before, they're probably

retired at 60, 65. The kids are well off. They don't have to worry about anything. Trust fund. Yeah, trust fund, but not even trust fund. Just, you know, they had a little bit of backing before, right? There's nothing that, you know, and I agree with you. I don't think socialism is the answer to the problem.

But there's got to be something that takes the resources that this family has and at least presents itself to be available to not just this family, which they work their tail off every single day, but they just don't have the capital to create that wealth. But the next level down from that, which is, you know, absolutely just working, working, working, and just struggling to survive, you know, every single day, there's got to be some way to make investing available for those people. There's got to be a way for locating those people in the right places to get noticed for jobs that are talented to happen for those people. That's a struggle, too. And there's got to be ways for public

education to be strong enough for those people to get into those places where you get noticed for those jobs, which are good universities. And I mean, that's definitely a stream of consciousness about the issue. You just opened up like five Pandora's boxes right there. That was pretty awesome.

But I mean, look, I agree with you in the sense that you can't force people to like forcing people through a system like a socialist system in the way that it's currently envisioned and constructed is not the way to do it because it's not going to do those things in a way that benefits everybody. And it's not going to incentivize people to want to help, right? But there has to be something. And I don't know the answer. Yeah, you, me, and the rest of us. But you, just in a whole bunch of different ways, we could go off for six hours apiece on everything you just laid out there, which we're not going to do. But to go inside of it a little bit. You talk about the system and the highest end of what you're talking about, I don't think you said this phrase, but you were identifying it on the spot, is the concept that it takes money to make money. Exactly.

You got to get somewhere and start somewhere. Now, you talk to some people, and I have some people like this in my life who, they're older, and they came from nothing. Some of them are minorities as well, like they came from nothing, and they worked and they built something great. And they wear that on their sleeve, and they should, because they overcame odds, they overcame struggles, they didn't make excuses, they worked and they learned, they taught themselves stuff. Like, I have so much respect for that. Once you go through it, though, I notice a common pattern where people are like, because I did it, everyone can do it. Yeah.

Technically, I don't know that they're wrong about that. But somewhere along the way, whether it was their environment or their genes or whatever, they convinced themselves that there was hope and There are a lot of people in this country Who don't get that and by the time they're 18 they don't feel that yeah, and I remember Watching when I think I did right at the very beginning of college I watched one of the greatest shows of all time to this day It's frightening how dead ass on it is and relevant to today but there's a show called the wire on hbo for sure you ever want yeah okay so i view that as the second greatest show of all time behind the sopranos and if it had come first

it probably would be the best show of all time but for people that haven't watched it it's about i guess you would say like the war on drugs in baltimore yep and it's it's fictional it's it's a story it's five seasons and there's characters and there's actors but it is literally like a documentary that shows this whole cops versus drug dealers type vibe and how it goes down and for people that don't know much about baltimore baltimore is you kind of have your 6 to 12 blocks that are a great city in a burgeoning social area. And outside of that, it is a very, very rough neighborhood. And the show painted the picture of a lot of different cities and cultures within the cities across America and the problems we have, because you get these environments where there isn't hope.

You raised the point about education. The education in a lot of these places, which is public education, technically funded through our government, sucks. That's not the fault of a six-year-old that goes through it. I've had four cousins that have taught in Philly, and they teach in Philadelphia in some of the poorest neighborhoods. And to see how much hope they go into it with and then in some cases a couple did it for several years and then left and how little hope they leave it with is a very sad thing because you could be in that school system and then 25 minutes away be in suburbia in a public school system and it's pretty good yeah you get the kid experience you get you get teachers who care you

you you there's no bullshit and so you raise the point of people not having these resources and not having that place to start and you are making that argument whether you realize it or not at least in my opinion and correct me if i'm wrong you're making that argument between well here's the capitalism system and here's the socialism system that i brought up in this case and and here's where I understand where people are coming from and once again this happens all the time you're painting a picture of an answer being somewhere in the middle and I want to qualify that before people flip the fuck out right now and say oh he's an anti-capitalist these pro so dead no capitalism in my opinion I've said this on the show

before is the best system that the world has ever created what i will say is that just like america where we try to be the best and we don't always get it right and we want to always be improving same thing for capitalism and capitalism has some flaws we've talked about them on this sitting down here already in this conversation yeah that said that does not mean that the answer is to go to something that is proven not to work, that creates no competition and makes everybody lose like socialism. The answer can be something, though, that takes capitalism as we know it now and creates a system for smaller – not smaller, but underprivileged environments to be able to have some of those same opportunities and feel like they can chase the American dream. Exactly. And I think that's exactly what i'm saying so i think you nailed it um and the other thing that i think kind of sucks about the way that we frame these things

right in in in general you know general conversation in in just the the the discourse that is sort of the norm today when when especially when when we're in such like a polarizing you know political environment right is you have such a you said that like so softly like you know especially when we're in such a polarizing you look outside but you yeah but words, right, capitalism and socialism, like, all these isms, right, they're all given this political context that makes it really tough to, like, have, like, substantive conversations with people about them because you say one word or you say the other word and then somebody paints you as somebody that you might not be, right? Based on the rap sheet of what X or Y political party, you know, is all about, right? And I say all about because like even within those systems, you have people that think different things. But that's sort of besides the point. The point of the matter is, and it's something that, you know, if you follow, you know, amazing venture capitalist Vinod Khosla started Khosla Ventures, one of the biggest tier one venture firms in the in the u.s it's what something that he says all the time which is

if you really are affiliated with a political party you're kind of a robot um because you you're sort of embodying these things and you're not letting yourself think about what's truly best for everyone um and and i'm not sitting, oh, if you identify with a Republican party, you're a bad person. That's totally not what I'm saying. But what I am saying is, if you find that you do affiliate with a political party, my suggestion would be that when you hear somebody present an idea, or when you are talking with somebody and trying to get to a place where you both are coming up with what is the best result for the largest amount of people, just take a step back and think to yourself, is what I'm actually thinking right now an organic

thought, something that I truly believe? Or is it something that was manufactured by someone else that I believe, because I believe a subset of these other things that identify with this person or this group's politics? And I mean, I would encourage everybody to do that. Because I think it's, you know, it's the only healthy way to, you because i think it's you know it's the only healthy way to you know and it's actually something you talk about a lot it's it's it's the only healthy way to take that humanity back um and and realize that what you're saying is human um and not some construct because most things that people talk about and think about and and and identify and define are just constructs right all of america should be required to watch the last two three

minutes of what you just said that was that was said so perfectly everyone wants to label you pointed it out right there everyone wants to tell you and put you in a box of what you are based on two sentences you say that they then immediately like a robot like like you were talking about then say okay well that must mean that he also thinks this is this and that so he stands for this and then you do it to yourself too right and we live in these echo chambers that we don't understand and you know like everyone talks about that movie, The Social Network, or Social Dilemma, sorry, where, you know, that just came out. It was very well done. I liked it a lot. It didn't say anything I didn't already know. I don't know why people don't look into this, but that's what happens. People get stuck in their

echo chambers and they think that's the only reality and then suddenly it's it's like it's like hitting away a little bit more every time and it's by the way like when when people look at they talk about foreign governments messing in our elections that that's what the russians did when they were messing around on social media back in 2016 they didn't start accounts i mean in some cases they did but but these accounts weren't created in June 2016. They were created in fucking July 2009. And slowly over the years, without people realizing it, they just kept hitting them with little kernels, little kernels. It's like a carrot and a stick. And then suddenly, you start to renee di resta talk about it she's been on a million podcasts going through this you would have pages like maybe lovers of classic cars or something like that like some

stupid thing yeah and they would build this following on facebook this group that would amass and eventually be 50 100 000 people and then what they would do is they would they would give you the tribal calling every time they would would say, as lovers of classic cars, and then eventually, by 2015, 2016, they started saying, as lovers of classic cars, and there's a fucking Jeep Wrangler below there and looks all innocent, we would never stand for what Hillary Clinton believes on blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. So people read that, and then, again,

it's like they're trained like a robot. Like, oh, yeah, well, I love classic cars. I love this page. Oh, fuck that. I don't believe in that either. You're right. You're right. And this is like the most extreme example.

But to your point, it is a literal reflection of our talks now in public and especially on social media, on like Twitter and stuff like that, where if we are, we have to be on a team. And if we're not, then we're not part of the conversation and if we are then you better believe everything the whole team believes yeah and look i mean there are there are sort of tool to when you when you look at like what you were saying which is sort of the the manipulation side of things right the the the echo chambers that got basically started and developed by other countries trying to sort of infiltrate the thought of our constituency in the United States. Right. There are sort of two schools of thought on how to prevent this. The first is we need to have essentially firing squads at these companies, right? Like Facebook,

Facebook needs to have its own like get stoppo to go in and find these groups and just basically shut them down because the American public doesn't have the wherewithal to understand that what they're looking at is, is needs to be taken at least with a grain of salt. The assumption there, by the way, the key assumption is that everyone is dumb. Exactly. And no one has the ability to make a decision for themselves.

But it is still immoral, Delana. Go ahead. And then the other side is these things obviously will and will continue to exist, right? The internet is a beast. People just need to be taught to identify when they're in these situations. And the way that you do that is sort of what I said before, which is if you're an individual that takes part in political discourse

or really any sort of discourse that is based in opinion, really. I mean, that's what it boils down to. You need to take a step back and just be a little bit self-aware about what you're looking at. I mean, at the absolute sort of core of it, that's what you need to do. And so you have these two competing ideologies on the subject.

Which one do I subscribe to? I mean, I would say this, and I hate giving you these middling answers, but I mean, it's another one that I'm going to give. I love it. Which is, yes, there are a lot of people in the U.S. that will probably never be able to have the self-awareness to identify that something that they're viewing is really just a projection of something else that someone created to get them to think a certain because we can't be out there, like, on Facebook, for example, like, trying to say things that gets caught in the line of fire and then you know they feel like their First Amendment rights are getting sort of taken advantage of what do you mean by line of fire like caught in the line of fire yeah I mean there are people who actually have legitimate thoughts that that that they think that they want to get out there to create some sort of discourse.

But because they might be close to or at the fringe, and because they might rile some people up, they sort of get wrapped up. There's a potential for them to get wrapped up in sort of what these proposed sort of you know internet firing squads would ultimately do which is like take down this content right and so meaning the social media overlords exactly exactly and so what what that logically sort of informs for me is the social media overlord concept, the concept that things online need to be taken down if they are fringe things or things that might be identified as fake. We probably shouldn't rely on that. And so what that logically sort of gets you to in the next step is, okay, so then if we can't rely on these companies to accurately take things down for fear that it's going to infringe on people's rights, what do we have to

do? And it gets to the other side of's rights, what do we have to do? And it gets to the other side of my argument, which is we have to teach people somehow how to identify that they're in situations where they're being fed something that isn't an organic thought. And how do we teach people to have organic thoughts themselves once they see this content online rather than just take it and regurgitate it and play telephone with it, right? And so that brings me to the next thing, which is whose job is it to do that teaching, right?

Like, because someone has to do it. It has to be done or else we're going to be stuck in this loop where we're going to have Mark Zuckerberg at Capitol Hill every other quarter saying, oh, I'm sorry for this information that's being spread, but I can't really do anything about it because, I mean, I don't know where to find it. And, you know, blah, blah, blah. And half of them don't believe him. Yeah, exactly.

There's got to be some person or some group or some body that's going to be able to teach this. And the reason why is, like I just said, Facebook has no responsibility. They don't need to, because they're not liable to teach people this stuff. Facebook doesn't have to teach you how to use Facebook, because Facebook, the platform that you and I see, isn't really Facebook. Facebook is the advertising machine that lives underneath what you and I see. That's the business, right? So what you and I see on Facebook is just the way that that algorithm learns how to make more money for the people that are advertising on the platform. And because that's the business, Facebook doesn't have a responsibility to say, oh, you don't know how

to use the platform correctly and you're getting fed misinformation and you're spewing that information and creating more misinformation out of that. We should probably teach you how to not do that. They don't have a responsibility to do that because it's not their business. It's not their core business. So the question becomes who is going to do that right and is it the government well i think in some way it needs to be uh and when i say that i mean within public schools you got to teach kids how to use social media correctly when they're when they're growing up learning how to use it and i'm and i don't know that how do you depoliticize it though that's that i mean that's the first of a litany of questions i love that you're bringing this up this is this is this is

an extremely extremely relevant topic right now it's something that's coming up in every conversation i'm having because we are in that question of censorship era but we also are dealing with companies that it's easy to paint as the boogeyman again because they're the big company up on the hill have to make it have to make their quarterly and and they have all this power and they they control thought and everything but again you know these guys started these businesses in garage and garages and it's not their fault. They're like everyone. They have a point of view. It's a question, though, of how do you then put something – like if you're going to put it in the hands of the government, I mean, I don't think it's a stretch at all to question whether or not

that goes straight to a 1984 scenario like the book. Yeah. No, I mean, I see where you're coming from there i mean i don't think that i don't think that it needs to be in the hands of government in the way that you know i don't know like like for example i don't think that the fcc has to go out there and and sort of like create classes to like teach people how to do this, right? Like, I think, I think you do have to teach it though somehow. Like, I think, I think, for example, like nobody, nobody grows up right in today's day and age with a handbook on how to use Facebook or a handbook on how to, how to use Twitter. And, and you know usually when you get a product

for example and you open up the box there's a there's a manual right and the manual has disclaimers in it writes the manual the owner you know but the problem with the owner writing the manual in this case is the product that you're getting isn't the real product that the owner in this case is actually producing what do you mean and what i mean by that is facebook again they're not really in this business of new of spreading news like they're like they're they are in some way but it's really serving a broader purpose for them, which is they built this advertising algorithm, which is how they make all of their money, right? Like, you know, the Facebook now isn't what the Facebook was when Zuck and, you know, Moskovitz were sitting there. No, no.

Yeah, they could have never known. Like, it's now just an advertising behemoth, right? And so because that's the business that Facebook is, it would be hard for Zuckerberg to go out there and say, oh, here's the manual on how you, the user, needs to use this platform. Because anybody using the platform in the way, like the purpose of Facebook's algorithm is you use the platform the way that you want to use it

because that's the way that many people are going to use it. Which creates the echo chamber, by the way. Exactly, exactly. And it's actually good for our business. Because if we know that a lot of people are going to act this way, we can better serve them ads. And we can maximize ad dollars for companies, and we can make more money because the ads might not actually serve their business's core proposition, the value proposition, which is to deliver the best possible advertising algorithm in the world.

And so that, again, gets back to this analogy of if you're a manufacturer and you have a product and you put out a book and it has the disclaimers in it, you want people to read those disclaimers because if they, if they, you know, do one of those things that's warned against in the manual, they'll probably get hurt or, you know, something will happen and you might have a lawsuit on your hands, right? If Facebook writes the manual and they actually want you to do those things that the the manual says are are you know from the perspective of um you know spreading misinformation you know they they kind of want you to do those things in a way because it's it's human nature in a sense why do they want you to because it's good for their business

it's yeah exactly because because basically what you what what Facebook wants is the activity on their site to most mimic human nature the best way that it possibly can. Because that's the way that your algorithm gets stronger and learns more about people's behaviors, habits, interests, et cetera, so that you can serve them advertising. Right? And just pure content. Exactly. What content are they going to fuck with the most. Exactly. And I'm not saying that that Facebook is is is necessarily bad for this. Like I Facebook has a business that they're trying to run. They're trying to do what we said before. They're trying to maximize their gains. They're trying to deliver shareholders' value. It's really on us as Americans to start to learn how to use these platforms better for the benefit of what we're trying to do here, which is to stop the spread of misinformation. It's really on us as people.

It's not on Facebook. And that's what people have to realize. That Facebook has no responsibility to do this themselves. And it's really on us. And so how are we going to teach that? And I agree with you. It's hard to do it through the government, especially when every single four years, we're looking at a more polarized candidate, more polarized, more polarized, more polarized. Can we get more polarized than this right now? I mean, you'd be surprised. Yeah. So where does it happen?

And I mean, I think there is some hope. And the reason why I say that is there is a generation, you know, this one, the millennials, who we have grown up with these platforms. These platforms were birthed essentially along the same generational path as we have been. We've used them basically as we've grown. So we've used Facebook in its infancy when we were younger. And we've now grown up and we know what the platform is now. And we recognize that. Twitter, same thing.

There is hope that people in this generation can realize that we need to start actually teaching this stuff better to the next generations that come because, again, it's our responsibility to make sure that these things get used properly. And by properly, I mean, in a way that doesn't continue to spread misinformation. To push back on that, though, with the most blatantly simplistic lack of teaching there is right now, we've already covered, by the way, how lacking our educational system is publicly in general, especially in certain places. But we can't even teach our kids in school what taxes are and how they work. We can't teach them how bills work and how cash flow works and how rainy day funds work. We can't teach them, to put it really simplistically,

like overall, we can't teach them the value of a dollar in school right now. And now we're going to teach them the value of psychological warfare on what it is they think. When people go to vote and when they – not even vote. Let's not even go there yet. When they go to formulate their thoughts and opinions that they want to put out there, which human nature, we're negative first. We have to work to be positive. It's very often complaints positive it's very often complaints and it's very often things that we want to see better they're doing it based off of their

own experience and their own environment and their own point of view and the things that are most important to them one guy one time talked to me about how there's every human in this country not every single one but he was like, in general, people vote on the one, maybe two, and usually at most three issues they actually give a fuck about. Absolutely. Everything else after that,

you pointed this out earlier, they'll get robotically behind the team that just happens to support those things. And so when they do this, then they're spewing out, like if they're active on social media, they're spewing out all these viewpoints, they're spewing out all these different things that say like, oh no, I think this, then they're spewing out, like if they're active on social media, they're spewing out all these viewpoints, they're spewing out all these different things that say like, oh no, I think this, so you have to think this too, and then because I think this, I

also think this. Yeah. And what you're saying right now is that we need to create, and you're using the manual as a visual, and I understand exactly why you are, and so I'll go with that. But you're saying we need to have these companies or somebody create the manual to teach people how to use it. And I come right back and say, well, okay, let's say you put it in the educational system, for example. We already have political problems or very conservative educators at these schools. And I'm not knocking teachers. Teachers get caught in this crossfire because they have political beliefs. Maybe sometimes they don't even know they're doing it and they're putting it on their kids.

So it's like being stuck between a shit and a fart. It's a tough spot to be. But yeah, if you have, for example, especially when you look at the fact that these social media powerhouses are all left-leaning hard. It's just – it is what it is. Let's say that they want that then to go out to kids to be educated on it when they're young, and the way they're choosing to do that is through a lot of schools where they happen to have a lot of teachers who are left-leaning. You're now shutting down a train of thought on the other side, voluntarily or involuntarily. And you're bringing this all up, by the way, at a time where, and you keep using the Facebook example because they've been the most prominent one over the years overall, but right there

behind them flanking is Twitter. And right now, as we're speaking, we're coming up like a week from the election or whatever right now, but Twitter's embroiled in one where they basically and facebook ended up joining them on this but twitter was was keeping the biggest news story in the country from twitter with with the whole hunter biden thing because it didn't match their community standards or whatever but they let anything go on trump yeah and i'm not and what's amazing this is the most amazing thing to me, when we have conversations around censorship or even just regular political issues, the insanity that we're seeing with online culture trying to indoctrinate people to say this bad, that good, is now leading to so many of us having to defend Trump left and right. I feel like I'm defending the guy once a day and there's so many of his policies I don't like. I'm not voting for the guy. I'm not voting for Biden

either. And we're in this, just to be overall clear, we're in this scenario where I got to sit here and say, well, no, he does do that. Or no, he doesn't say that. Because the misinformation that we're allowing on him and the misinformation that we're allowing on the other side is entirely two separate standards right so now you have these platforms that admittedly have that bias and the people who run them are humans they're like anyone else they have their bias but the alternative here to get back to the manual is that we're going to talk about setting up something where it's taken out of their hands which then opens up the Pandora's box of is that the government is that some sort of Illuminati system of the elites

that's put in there that you know has different political beliefs like let's give Facebook some credit on one thing for example they have for something in their newsfeed I don't know what we'll we'll check it later but they have something where they have a board of different companies. And there's literally right-wing companies in there, like Tucker Carlson. I don't know what the company is, but Daily Wire maybe? No, it's something America in there, right? Maybe, something like that.

Yeah, whatever it is. Exactly. Just insert America here. Yeah, that's a conservative one. But they have groups like that in there, and then they have left-leaning groups like like the huffington post and outlets like that so these companies all kind of and i'm sure they just i would love to be a fly on the wall in those conversations i'm sure they disagree on a lot of things like now we should censor that we should censor that but at the end of the day they have to come to come to some sort of consensus and i

think that's probably the best thing that's been set up but clearly it hasn't solved all the problems here because you have things happening where when it doesn't match exactly what the masses want if the left users of the platform scream out and cry foul it gets met with with um with support from these platforms sure and i i think, I agree with you. I think the who is going to teach people how to identify what is misinformation. And I think it's a really tough question and a really tough nut to crack, because I agree with you. when left in the hands of ordinary people human nature will take over and if those people don't have the self-awareness to identify what is misinformation and what is not then bias will automatically be injected into it 100 agree with you there but i mean you bring up the you bring up the exact point about these companies right these companies are not incentivized whatsoever To be the people to teach people how to use their platforms

they have certain affiliations themselves which bleed into it and Again, I mean it stirring the pot helps them it shows them how humans are it's it's human reality What about when it happens within their own companies, though, too? How does the James Damore situation help them? I'm sorry to just throw that out there for people listening. James Damore, this was the guy in, I think it was like 2017. He works at Google. He wrote the internal memo about the problem with why there aren't as many women in in tech and in

silicon valley as there should be and he looked at it from a very pragmatic data point of view and he was immediately ostracized and fired by the company i think he later won lawsuits against them for being hateful and all he was doing was saying hey our problem is that women tend to have other interests and we haven't figured out a way to make them so interested in this and so you saw the company in that case google who controls a lot of thought with it's fucking google they just immediately went to the lower common denominator there and said oh he's saying something that the people who are most vulnerable will just automatically think is wrong so let's kick them out so they are like that caused bad press for them it didn't cause usership to go down because people rely on google they have

a monopoly on our attention but it's still over the long haul it hurt like now people not just for that reason a million other reasons there is a big segment of society that automatically assumes that companies like this have the wrong intentions so they're incentivized in that they draw more attention and they draw more use through the anger that people then have over these situations just like when the new york post got censored more people than ever were on twitter trying to post it to see if it would get through absolutely and more people are talking about twitter than ever but it then hurts their brand and hurts their trust down the line. Right. But here's the thing, right? Because again, all of these companies operate on a system where they have underlying technology that learns from

human behavior, right? That's the first principles bottom line about what these companies are doing, right? So not only is, okay, yes, usership is up from this, you know, people are talking about these issues online, right? And so that's, in a sense, good. You know, that's not the only benefit that they're getting out of it. The other benefit is something that you actually just identified, which is These companies get to see exactly how people react after these events happen. Right. And by doing that, they can almost predict how culturally things will shift based on sort of the the issues that are presented, the way people talk about them, and they can essentially almost predict these outcomes, right? So when a situation like the Google situation in 2017 happens, Google can sit back and say,

how does my system react to the shitstorm that comes about from this whole thing getting out, right? And they can sit back and they can look at it and say, wow, like, we've actually learned a couple of great insights about how, you know, culturally things have shifted since this. And we can then train our algorithm to mimic how human behavior will change as a result. So it's a lot deeper than like good press, bad press, whatever. It's all just about mapping out like and sort of identifying the changes in the human experience and being able to predict them before they happen. Because ultimately, if you can predict culture change before culture changes you can profit off of that in many ways many many ways and there and then lies

the question of where people can come in with another angle and another example of oh this is this is a problem with capitalism and all that you create that you are incentivized to be able to drive the most attention however that is you do it just like you know the jerry springer show doesn't exactly show the best in human beings and a lot of it's an act but guess what people watch and he knows it's because he's going to incentivize people to say oh my god that's crazy i want to get i need to get my two eyeballs on that and spend a half hour on this show. It's the reality. And right now, though, it also opens up the question. We talk about censorship with specific posts and trains of thought.

Fine. But people, communities, billions of people use these platforms. Obviously, like everyone in this country, most people use these platforms obviously like everyone in this country most people use these platforms including older people yep and so it's where people go for their news and for their information which also makes the whole echo chamber thing a bigger problem because people see their whatever reality the algorithm says is their favorite reality but you also have the problem of users in prominent positions then putting their opinions out there which is just speech and it's it could be labeled hate speech sometimes and you know what once in a while when it's directly meant to cause harm to other people yeah which is a very slippery slope of a phrase right there that people use to their

advantage when they want to deplatform people. But anyway, when they put this stuff out there, these companies have the power to deplatform them. Exactly. And so for a long time, because of the left-wing bias that these companies had, it was happening to right-wing figures. And to be fair, it was happening to far right-wing figures. You saw people like Milo Yiannopoulos get the platform milo you know he's a provocateur he he he's a bit of a psycho like he knew some of the things he was doing and there might have been some situations where you could say hey you were really trying

to incentivize people right there and like he got in trouble for the leslie jones thing on twitter where leslie jones from snl was beefing with him and he she's she's a tall black woman and I don't remember what he said but he made some sort of racial intonation and was telling his followers to go abuse her online which I think he was joking about it but it goes back to the the platform saw that it happened and they made the assumption that his followers are too stupid to see that he's joking which opens up the other side of the argument, but It's not just the conservative figures now

It's not just the most controversial figures the Milo's and the Alex Jones's we saw I mean this broke yesterday I guess Brett Weinstein it was the platform from Facebook. Did you see this? Yeah, so Brett Weinstein for a little bit of context, I may still have this tab up here because I was looking at it last night. Yes, I do. But Brett Weinstein is a prominent liberal professor. He was most known for being a professor at Evergreen State College and he is a true, like, when you look at it and say that conservatives and liberals have to exist and whoever's in between has to exist, you want people who are doing it for the right reasons. Meaning those back 10% on each side are usually the sociopaths that you only let in

because of free speech and it's important to keep them in the conversation. But the people who exist past that, who may be very strong on one side or the other, you want them there because they're there for the right reasons and they're there to be a check and balance to each other. Brett Weinstein is a very good, true, traditional liberal professor. And he worked at Evergreen State College, as I said, which is one of the more progressive schools in the entire country. It's been called an experiment in some ways. And he rose to fame, what was this, like three and a half years ago something like that when at evergreen state college i think the context was the students were saying like the the black community on campus that maybe it was under the tag of like black lives matter i don't think it

was it was like some sort of of diversity coalition on campus representing the black students on campus. They wanted to have a day of white absence or something like that, meaning that regardless of who you were, president of the university, professor, student, they wanted a day where only the black people, students and professors, were allowed on campus and brett weinstein jewish guy was thinking to himself hmm i don't like the sound of this because you know he understands his own heritage he knows what it's what it's like as well to be able to be singled out for your own racial background and he was like this is on the basis of color of skin telling people that they cannot go where they work and where they have a purpose and so he had the audacity to write an email to the overall community saying hey here's why i have an issue with this let's talk about it and i don't want to do that and so what did the

students do they rioted and i mean it was in fairness this was an extreme example got out of control i mean they were carrying weapons and shit. They were hunting for him on campus. It ended with him and he loved the university. It ended with him and his wife having to step down from their positions to get the fuck out of there. And he became a big advocate for free speech. Guy remains a good, true liberal to this day. But he has the audacity now to go out there in public and point out where like far leftism goes too far and he points out far rightism too you know equally but he says all these things and it doesn't quite match the line

of thinking that says hey automatically if you're a a left agenda or a left organization whatever you say is good because we'll play the intersectionality curve and the lower you are down it the more we're going to say, get on with it, sister. Awesome. And so because of that, he's become a little bit controversial, which is ridiculous. But yesterday, to land the plane here, he was evicted from Facebook. He tweeted out. He said, I have been evicted. It's right up here.

I've been evicted from Facebook. No explanation. No appeal. I have downloaded my information and see nothing that explains it and he points out in the tweet goes on to say we are governed now in private by entities that make their own rules and are answerable to no process disaster is inevitable we are living it now the message that facebook sent him said your account has been disabled you can't use facebook because your account or activity on it didn't follow our community standards there which they

are a private company they're allowed to define that but they say we have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed to learn more about the reasons we disable accounts visit our community standards so they don't give him the specific reasons as far as we know they gave him no warning about this we know he's tweeted out nothing racist or nothing anything like that the guy is is is a true liberal he just talks about free speech a lot and they decided that we have already reviewed this decision and it can't be reversed which is patently false because they control their online server and system and if they want to put his account back up they can do it but this

is the shit that happens now we're not talking about loonies on the right we're talking about they're even coming after people on the left who just have just don't quite want to say that well you know that or or they say well maybe not all of what we think is actually true and so i agree with our original point here that these companies didn't ask for this control, and they didn't know it when they were in a garage. But they have it now, and now they are clearly appealing to a side and causing anger on the right, which is a disaster, because that's what leads to division in this country. So, I mean, do you think they should be censoring accounts? Not should they be censoring accounts, but can they do this and how do we fix it? Like, is this a reality?

Yeah, well, to answer your question of can they do it, they absolutely can. about political affiliation um and what that is just in the U.S right it's it's not anything that's protected like like you're not you're not a protected person let's just say because like like your your right-leaning beliefs don't make you protected right your left-leaning beliefs don't make you protected it's. It's not anything that within our laws in the United States, we protect. And I mean, I think the reason for that is we've historically never had to. You know, we've always had a two-party system where, you know, we have a constitution that allows for free speech and allows for people to, you know, proliferate, proliferate their thoughts in in whatever the ways that they that

they see fit, right? We never really have had a reason to protect viewpoints. It's just never been a part of our country's DNA. So when you when you look at at Facebook, right, it's almost like if I were a restaurant owner, right, and you walked into my restaurant and I said to you, hey, you, you're not allowed to eat in my restaurant. And you weren't sort of a protected status, meaning you weren't part of, you know, what is defined as protected under the Civil Rights Act. I didn't discriminate against you. Right. I just told you you had to leave. I'm well within my right to make you leave my establishment. There's nothing when you talk about the private landscape, which in a way the Internet now sort of is in a lot of senses privatized. When you look at it and you look at what these companies are allowed to do, they can essentially operate like private organizations within the jurisdiction of their space on the internet. And so what that means is just like how you can walk into my restaurant and I can immediately deny you service really without anybody really questioning it.

Facebook can do the same thing, especially because they have guidelines that, like you said, they can draft, they can put anything in their guidelines they want. And if you violate them, they don't have to provide you service, right? There's nothing protected about political views within the context of the Constitution other than you're allowed to say things publicly that you want to say. But where you say it, meaning Facebook is, to go back to your point, it's a private entity. Exactly. So that is not, they are not automatically, at least as we have it right now, defined as the public square. Therefore, when they censor, they are not censoring free speech.

That's just how we look at it because it's where the most people go. Exactly. And to that point, I mean, that raises a good point, which goes back to what we were talking about before, which is, you know, social media and how it is currently used, you know, there really does need to be some level of education around, like, and some sort of catch up that people need to have around what it has become right now. You know, because, yes, like, you know, Zuckerberg does go to Capitol Hill, and people on Capitol Hill say, you know, Mark, did you realize that you just created, like,

the place where most people go for all their information? And he's like, apparently I did, because I'm here on Capitol Hill hill talking to you about it right like like the the world needs to catch up a little bit and by that i don't mean bring mark zuckerberg to capitol hill by that i mean people need to get smart about these platforms because if they don't we're just going to end up keeping on bringing Mark Zuckerberg to Capitol Hill and nothing's going to ever get done. People's minds aren't going to change.

So if you get smart, again, about these platforms and the way that they should be used, you're potentially able to save yourself the trouble of thinking that these places are the end-all be-all to say and do everything that you want to do. Because my restaurant, I will never in the history of this country ever have be forced

to have someone sit down in my restaurant if I don't want them in my restaurant, if they're not a protected status. Your restaurant is a physical place. Right. This is, I'm going to push back on this, and your example may hold water here. It may be true, but maybe this will change it, maybe it won't. Your restaurant is a physical place with a limited capacity. Even if it's the biggest restaurant in the world, there are a certain number of asses that can go in there and sit in seats. You are also providing a consumer service where they are literally consuming food that they're going to shit out and come back later and do again at some point, you hope.

The internet has the ability to connect to most of the humans on this planet. These social media networks, they don't have a capacity of how many people from this planet decide to access them. They can access at scale anywhere at any time anyone who has access to the internet. And so they also are not there serving food. Yes, and let's be fair to them. It's where businesses go to advertise. It's where people go to advertise themselves and their lives, which therefore then can drive them to make money through their business or through literally doing that. There are a lot of things that happen in the ecosystem. It's not like everyone goes there and says, I'm voting for so-and-so. That's not what this is. But it's a public place that supposedly anyone can get on. And because it has such a large percentage, like a herd immunity, so to speak, speak of i'm making a parallel here of people that access it from society it therefore has the most attention and effectively is the number one public square meaning if someone walks into union square in new york city and has a big rally with a thousand people yeah the people who pass it that day maybe you know 50,000 people

walk through there and like see it happening there's the thousand people that are there and the businesses around there their coffee shops and the companies see that it's happening out there maybe they catch wind of what they're saying but if that if the video of that doesn't play with the speeches on social media how much was it really in the public square yeah look i mean it's it's a great point and i and i think when you look at the context of how this stuff lives in our world you're absolutely right but the problem with that is it's not how it's read within our laws like that's the the, that's the bottom line is there are, there are,

there are laws that currently govern what Facebook is, which is a, a essentially a corporation that prevent the, the internet as it's sort of accessed through Facebook to be able to be governed as anything public. So like when you think about what needs to be done in order to sort of prevent these things from happening, right? In my mind, there has to be some level of change in the law

in order to sort of make it so that these places can be seen more as the public square, as you mentioned, and not as the restaurant or the establishment or the corporation, right? And so why does that become difficult? It becomes difficult, like you said, because of the political nature of how these laws end up being eventually. And so, you know, something that a lot of people agree with, both on the left and the right, is the protected status of corporations in their ability to really operate freely.

So you mean like without, just to be clear, so listeners understand, you mean without the government intervening? Exactly. And so, in my mind, it's going to be very hard for that to change. And another thing is there have been things done within government, meaning precedent setting things, that are also going to make it difficult for any sort of change in the opposite direction, meaning from private to public, to happen. One of them that comes to mind is the Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby. The Hobby Lobby decision, if you recall, was about certain companies essentially requiring people within the company to abide by certain sets of rules that had sort of religious undertones. I think what happened was Hobby Lobby,

they didn't want to provide contraceptive coverage, if I'm not mistaken. I believe that was it. And they won, right? What that sets in terms of precedent is the ability for companies to further have more private control over essentially the – and granted, look, that's employees, right? That's not people going to Hobby Lobby, right? Like I can walk into a Hobby Lobby, and I can walk out, and I can still buy condoms at the gas station, right?

Like, it's not, or, you know, my health insurance that is that when you look at sort of how our laws work and how the Constitution works and how the people that make decisions related to the Constitution operate, they operate more on the privatizing things side of the spectrum. And it's really – it's going to be really hard to dig ourselves out of that hole. Another thing I think that has impacted the ability for us to change the narrative in the more public direction is with net neutrality. Can you define that for people? Absolutely. That's a loaded term that a lot of people are not familiar with. Yeah. So net neutrality, in the most simplest sense, is – so internet service providers, right? So those are private companies that provide internet service.

So like Optimum, Comcast, Verizon. Yeah, net neutrality was essentially sort of a set of rules by which the private companies that provide internet service could not do a subset of things that would inhibit sort of the freedoms, so to speak, of the companies and the users of that internet service to do certain things, right? Or for those companies, essentially the ISPs, to monetize certain aspects of the providing of internet to people, right? net neutrality was repealed meaning internet service providers now have more opportunities to privatize aspects of the internet uh they can throttle service when was when was it repealed to be clear i think it was it was uh 2017 or 2018 keep going um and so what you what you saw happen Keep going. for people to access the internet or you know being malicious about about net neutrality i think or the repeal thereof but what it does is it does put the internet into more of a privatized context again sets a precedent on the on on the private side not the government exactly on the on the internet being a private place that is sort of carved out like real estate for certain companies to essentially have a privatized level of control. And so there are these things that have happened in sort of recent times that, you know, on a government-wide scale, in my mind, will make it difficult for a Facebook, in the eyes of the

law, to be seen as a public square. Because, you know, the long and the short of it is, it's a corporation. And corporations are allowed to do a lot of things with somewhat limited recourse. And so, to get back to your original point they were allowed to do it to Brett and it's hard to see you know unless Brett wants to go to court and and you know spend hundreds of thousands of dollars it's hard for me to see how you know that going to change from one person. We're a bunch of people talking about one person getting censored or this person getting censored. It's not going to – I find it hard to believe that it's going to happen through something as small as somebody getting censored on the internet.

Let's put it that way. When you gave the example of the restaurant and you said, you painted a perfect picture in that you said, when I kick someone out there, let's assume I'm doing it not on the basis of their identity or something about them that makes them a protected, you used it like literally under the Civil Rights Act, which is great because it gives you the picture that,

no, I'm literally just kicking someone out because I don't want them there and it has nothing to do with who they are. Could we see a world – now, we're looking at a world or a country right now that is roughly 50-50 divided overall, although there are a lot of people in the middle. But you have people who lean left and people who lean right, and then you have the people who people who take it really really far so call it half and half just as a generalization here for the sake of argument yep could we see a world where you could consider identity to be a train of thought or not a train of thought a hell it's a system of held beliefs whereby judging that online and these platforms tend to be run and appeal to left wing whereby the minority protected class here is actually anything that leans right wing this is a mind fuck which is kind of the opposite of what the identity curves

are because the identity curves the intersectionality curve i always go back to that because it's just the easiest example to use the lower the lower classes they're according to the rankings they give the farther down you get the more technically associated with the left wing belief they also happen to get again a generalization doesn't mean all of them, but could you see that narrative flip now where the protected class and the precedent set of, hey, you can't just not let people use your business on the basis of their identity. Could we see political beliefs,

maybe not even political beliefs, but worldviews and the idea of opinions become a protected class uh no and i and i'll tell you why i'll tell you why you were sitting there the whole time like no i knew i knew what you were getting at and the answer is no and there's i think the main reason comes to something that we've talked about already, which is a lot of people's worldview. And look, I can't sit here and give you a percentage of the population whose worldview is, is this way, but a lot of people's worldview is, is fed to them, right? It's, it's not something that they've organically believed.

And it's something that they've been given from misinformation and so if you protect people's worldview or you protect people's identity you're you're potentially protecting misinformation and so there's no way that that would that would fly uh let's just say in in in i think any sort of world where social media has had the head start that it has had. What about the fact though that by default in this scenario, by default, the people who are the business, the restaurant owner in this case, social media, they are inherently biased. Drew, no fault of their own. They have their own worldview worldview people that run it they are inherently biased towards their side of view which means that they are likely and actually do protect misinformation on their side therefore we make the other side protected as well to have misinformation at least offset or try to offset misinformation which i agree is a terrible system

i am not saying like oh yeah it's great the world can go on and every action has an opposite reaction we're good but in that scenario it makes that protected and balances the scales a little bit is that does that change what you're saying at all i mean look i think i think we want to protect organic free speech i think that's the bottom line. We can agree on that. And I think most people who agree that, you know, censorship in its current form isn't working, they probably agree with that as well, right? I think the problem with when you get into protecting this group and protecting that group, and you continue to sort of do that is you get into a slippery slope sort of debacle right where everyone just becomes protected and then you're in a position where you were before where now you know if if you're this

group you can't get banned if you're this group you can can't get banned. If you're this group, you can't get banned. Who's to say who is not in those groups? And I think then the misinformation just continues to proliferate, right? Because you can literally just claim to be protected no matter what. And there's also, and we have to point this out, we need to play devil's advocate on every side of this thing and point out where we're cherry picking. Let's look at like the extreme example of, say, the KKK, which was very powerful, especially 50, 60 years ago. At the time, yes, they wielded a lot of power because they could intimidate their communities and therefore the kids in the communities to have a certain attitude and upbringing. And they could build it out to the next generations, which they for a long time this has been around i think they were around for 150 160 years like something like that and they still exist today although they are smaller

the difference is there even back then there was a limit meaning if i were if i were the kkk and they were in all 50 states as far as i know like they had at least a chapter in all 50 states, which is pretty gross, but there was a limit to the number of voices that they could reach. Whereas with the internet, if they had had that, they press a button, suddenly they can reach all these voices. Like you saw that with Dylan Roof, the killer in South Carolina who had the racially motivated killer. He was influenced online by far racist

right wing whatever's and now you look at the idea of the kkk which is obviously they've been declared a terrorist organization their their speech is i don't i don't know this for a fact but they're not on twitter or anything. They're banned from all these platforms. So there's a limit to their reach. And what happens? Most of these people, while they were already from the common stereotype here was poor, angry southern communities that were blue-collar towns that worked in jobs that had a ceiling on them. Well, they're still there now. They're still in bumblefuck.

They're still away from everyone. They're not spreading their ideas. There's a limit to what they do. If they had access to these platforms, though, they could. The question is, why do organizations on the other side who are, for way different reasons and way different motivations, seemingly similar, or some people would say, as bad,'t know i won't go there but why are organizations like antifa at least still protected in that they can have these platforms and they can get people pissed off and they can brainwash people to want to be a part of that and think it's out of love yeah i mean you bring up a lot in that and i think part of it is the i mean part of it – and I don't know if KKK honestly is the best example because the KKK were going out and they were lynching people and they were killing people and they were actually causing – they were targeting specific groups, right? Which had a significant impact on their ability to participate in society, right?

So I see your point, but I don't think obviously the KKK is a great example. I think when you look at groups like Antifa, right, I think the things about Antifa is they're not necessarily targeting a marginalized group of people that is already in a disadvantaged position. And people don't want to hear that, by the way, but that is technically correct. I mean, if you want to see who they're going after the most, they start with going after the most obvious ones, like the far right and stuff like that. They just take it farther than that. But even when they do, they're not, at least how they message it, they're not going after minorities or they're not going after poor communities. Now, some of their actions may lead to that happening, but that is supposedly not the intention. That's important. Right, right. So I think, and I think for the most part, it

isn't. But I would say, because they're not putting a marginalized group in a position where they are even more marginalized, and they are actually unable to walk the streets for example it's not seen as bad as you know the kkk for instance which by all accounts i mean if the kkk had a large presence in a particular city and you were a black person you probably were doing everything you could to get out of that area uh because you were so marginalized and so disadvantaged by their presence sure that it was impossible for you to function there yeah there's no opportunity. they're already in a privileged position. I see it as more a level of annoyance, where they're not necessarily prevented from doing their day to day with with Antifa being present. Yes, the the activities that they're engaging with, what about when they burn down your business that you've been

running for 30 years, and your insurance may cover some of it, but not as much as it was worth. And now you've lost three years, if you're even going to be able to rebuild it and you lose the time and value of having your customer base that you've worked to build who may not come back whenever the fuck you get back around yeah i mean i think in those situations for sure um you know absolutely uh but i think those situations are uh more more few and far between when you compare them to situations where um you know when you use the example of the kkk you know lives were lost generations were held back yeah etc uh from from just them being around um and to be clear i mean it's almost like you have to pick a side when when you're saying things like that, and it shouldn't be that way.

But yeah, I think anyone with half a brain should at least say that the KKK is one of the most extreme examples there is, and historically has been around for a long time as we covered, and is the worst of the worst. I mean, there's just no... They hit on anyone who is not even a lowest common denominator, anyone that doesn't match.

They're basically like along the lines of what Hitler thought with eugenics and bullshit and false scientific theories and then taking that to a level of taking lives. So I want to be very clear because I don't want people... We're having a dignified discussion here

and exchanging some controversial type ideas and going through it. I don't want anyone – we're having a dignified discussion here and exchanging some controversial type ideas and going through it. I don't want anyone losing context to this. I am using the examples from each wing of the parties or polarization here to at least create a foil. But I don't want people thinking like, oh, you know, the KKK, not too bad. No, no. Let's be very very very clear here yeah so i mean i think when you when you boil it down to so i think what you're saying which is why are some ideas on the right seen as worse than uh you know the radical ideas that we see on the left, I think what it comes down to is

there are groups that either disagree or are affected by the most right-wing beliefs that are already in a position of marginalization. And so it's not appropriate, or it's actually detrimental to the advancement of society for those beliefs to be continuously proliferated, especially, as we mentioned, in the ever-growing hive of social media when you look at beliefs on the left I would say probably less of those beliefs if any you know if I'm being completely honest mm-hmm negatively affect in a very blatant way the most marginalized groups within our society. In theory. In theory.

In theory. So I think that's where the disconnect comes from. Now, the question that it presents is, is it then right for these companies to do all this heavy censoring on the right? Well, they're doing it on the left, though, too. And we got to point that out. They're doing it on the left when people have the wherewithal to say, you know, we need to talk about this one thing,

because maybe the left is supposed to be the... I shouldn't even... Let me make a clear distinction between leftism and liberalism. I'm going to make that distinction right right now because there is a huge difference. For sure. When I've done my own political autopsy, I am your traditional liberal, not a quote-unquote bleeding heart liberal, but politically that is where I fall, just like a little left of the curve. Leftism is more of the shutdown idea and the extreme of progressivism where it actually paints the opposite of progress, in my opinion, in a lot of ways. And so some of these true liberals who truly actually believe the traditional ideology that that is supposed to represent, which at the highest level is everyone should have an equal opportunity at the American dream in the context of this country. We are seeing their ideas and their platforms shut down because they are just saying like, hey, this out of control train we have over here, that ain't it. That's a distinction that's got to be made.

So it's not just – we're not just coming after right side beliefs that want to say if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Or no, I liked it better when America was like this. Literally like – I mean Trump's slogan is make America great again. Okay, when? For who? What is – and even if he didn't mean it this way, what is the intonation for some people that are like, well, the 1980s were really maybe great for you but not as great for me? Yeah, I think it all comes down to i mean like you said also like you know there's there's leadership that that believes

certain things there's corporate leadership that believes certain things those are not always going to match the The policies that are created within each of those different regimes are not always going to match. It creates friction. It creates... To say the least. Yeah. It creates problems that trickle down to, you know,

the everyman, me and you, debating on Twitter about them. And at the end of the day, right, that's how it's going to be. The only saving grace, like I mentioned before, is do people have the self-awareness and the care about each other and the advancement of society, essentially, to step back and think for themselves and say, is what I'm looking at, is what I'm thinking, is it an organic thought? Is it something that I truly believe and that I need to get on the soapbox and speak about

because it's something that I deeply, deeply care about? Or when I examine this a bit further, is it something that I actually don't even really remember where i got this from there that is that is a heavy admission for a lot of people that they've never had yeah because you get you get whipsawed you get whipsawed through beliefs and and something gets you worked up and then the next thing that could be somewhat parallel to it but a little different gets you worked up and then so on down the chain. But I was sitting with a guy last night who – I was loving it because older, like probably about 60, really, really successful guy who's taken a couple different companies public over the years. He's working on his third company right now and every time we would talk about something he would whip out like in the middle of this italian restaurant

he would whip out the ipad and be like all right let's check that and he always wanted the numbers like even when he was wrong he's like oh no i was wrong about that one but out of nowhere he's where i forget the context of it but i think we were talking about like voting rights and stuff like that and and the moral dilemmas with it. And he's like, I don't even know what to say with some of this stuff because you can't take away the right from people to vote. It's the most important thing they have. But he goes, we also have to grapple with our failures as a country. He goes, what do you think the illiteracy rate in this country is?

330 million people, America. And I said, you know, I think it's higher than I think. I'm going to say about 13%. He goes, all right, let's check it. NCES data, National Center for Education Statistics, 21%. There are 21% of people in this country who, and I got to go back and check the full definition of it, but by the standards of being able to legibly write and communicate and being able to read and comprehend what they are reading, only 79, I say only, only 79% of Americans can do that. Now, this opens up yet another Pandora's box, because one of the things I hate about the left

versus right wing ideology is that on the right wing you have, it's always the answer, I'll pull yourself up by the bootstraps, my granddaddy did it, so you can do it too. And just ignore the problems and don't do anything to try to fix it. And unfortunately, they have to deal with the fact that that has been a consistency of their beliefs. They just believe in freedom of choice and ability regardless of environment or other factors or things that they may have accidentally or intentionally contributed to to create bad problems for people on the left side

in my opinion the ideology becomes no one's capable of doing anything no no no you are never going to get out of your community we feel bad for you so we have to help you at all times because you are marginalized and you're guess what so they So are – they don't say this, but so are your kids and so are your grandkids and so are your great-grandkids. And so when you look at it and now you bring it back to educating yourself as a society, you keep on raising this point and so I'm going at it. Like being able to say we need to be able to step back and decide and understand and take responsibility for ourselves. 21% of the country can't read and write just by the law of averages maybe the next 20 isn't exactly like the most well thought about it and and i hate that i'm doing that because then it's it's me seeing the

worst in people but then let me take it to another level and say it has nothing to do with iq or smarts or abilities or whatever you were able to figure out and let's say that it nothing to do with IQ or smarts or abilities or whatever you were able to figure out. And let's say that it has to do with the fact that there are people, not there are people, everyone has their own life. Everyone has their own problems. Everyone has their own things that they have to prioritize. Someone's got, you know, just had the worst breakup of their life. Somebody just got divorced. Somebody just got married and is stressful about it. Somebody just moved to a new state and got a new job. Somebody's kid doesn't like them right now and they're in therapy about it all these things they already have to go through their day and put food on the table and do their job and worry about it and they only have 24 hours to do it and they gotta fucking sleep in

the middle and yet during all this they also have to have the wherewithal when they're escaping on social media which is their downtime and their time where they shouldn't have to like feel like they're doing work they suddenly have to make this work and educate themselves and decide every time they scroll their fucking finger oh let me stop and consider who wrote this and why and why i'm reacting the way i do and does it to go back to the manual that you pointed out earlier does it match the manual of what i'm supposed to do here yeah the expectation on even a majority of society to have to do that is ridiculous yeah it's sad but it is no i and i i hear you um but i also i mean what i'm also hearing and and what i think is probably true of your opinion is that that censorship isn't the way to go either oh 100 it's not no so so so like the so again logically i think there's there's a conclusion that there needs to be a responsibility

on somebody right like the like yes there's there's a sub-segment like the the sub-segment of the population that that can't read or write I have zero expectation that they will be able to deduce from, you know, right from wrong on social media. Sure. You know, maybe. And they're the ones that actually may not be interacting on social media much because they only, and well, they can do the visual and hearing aspect of it. So they could. So look, maybe, well they can do the visual and and hearing aspect of it so they could so look maybe maybe they can but but i would say probably most of them sure probably most of them can't deduce the right and wrong on social media as as well as somebody you know sitting in my position right

and so that that you know sort of gets to another you know thing in terms of the you know who should be the people teaching this thing you know teaching us how to use it setting an example and and sort of dictating things right i mean like you can't expect that that 21 of the population is going to be able to do that at all. No. So... You have to assume they can't, actually. Yeah. Unfortunately. And so, it's funny because this gets back to the conversation we were having about the isms. Yeah.

You know, the socialism and capitalism and, you know, yeah, there's a lot of things that socialism tries to force-feed people, right? But if we're saying that there needs to be responsibility on some people to provide some breadth of knowledge about some subject to everybody, then there's never going to be true one-to-one individualism in that sort of agreement. There needs to be some sort of social contract for some things that can be potentially harmful. And I think we both agree that the misinformation spread on social media and through our news is pretty harmful at this stage. It's not great. But there needs to be some sort of social contract where there is a group of people that does know what they're doing how do we define that how do we get how do we get the general public to agree on that

i mean it's tough i i don't i don't know that we can solve it um i i really don't and it's it's very it's very possible that social media has already had a head start on this. Just given Moore's law, you know, the growth in technology, I mean, human, the growth in human evolution will never outpace the growth in technology. It's impossible. You know, technology scales faster than, than anything in the world. You know, it's possible that we've already reached a point where we as humans are foregone in our ability to sort of curtail and really wrap our heads around how to deliver this message to people. Because it's just going to continue to grow and scale way beyond our ability to do that and that's where you start to get into you're really deep that's where you start to get into the idea of singularity with machines and the whole potential outcome of that and yep and forget the assault on thought or the change on thought patterns and that we're already seeing

but you know it's about survival potentially potentially in that scenario yeah so i mean look it it comes down to what type of ism is going to work in a bunch of different areas of life despite the fact that two things are are blat present, which is one, our political system, there are groups on either side that say that one ism is the best ism for all, and that's it. Right. And number two, which is we have a system of laws in place that only offers so much room for new isms so you get to a spot where you really need to think we love what what needs to change for people to really understand you know or or

what what sort of power are people willing to seedede for the benefit of the greater good in this scenario? And how do people actually identify what things are so out of their control, or may in the future be so out of their control, that they actually do need to cede some power to a greater good? Because they won't have the ability to control those things. I think when you ask most people to think about those concepts, I mean, first of all, they already live under a system where they're polarized by political thought, so they won't be able to think about these things. Rationally.

Yeah, exactly. But the ones that will, they probably won't be able to, most of them won't be able to identify what those things are. I sitting in front of you probably can't. And we, and we know right now that the whole social media spreading of misinformation, we're already behind.

We're already behind the curve on that. If, if, if 10 years ago, someone said, Oh, there's going to be this whole thing that happens where, you know,

you know, Facebook, that platform where that, that Mark Zuckerberg was using. Your grandmother's going to be this whole thing that happens where you know you know facebook that platform where that that mark zuckerberg was using your grandmother's gonna be on it yeah your grandma's gonna be on it and she's gonna be reading about how russian spies are are uh are are driving you know driving taxis around new york to like hear you know shit from you know people at the un you know like grandma's gonna be holding up her hand with the how do they do it like this with the q in the middle yeah exactly and saying that there's a

pedophile ring run in washington dc and it's not a russian conspiracy i mean it's just dude so you're killing me right now but it's so true so it's it's tough but when do you say as an individual uh especially as an individual, uh, especially as an American individual, right? Where we're given, we can do whatever the fuck we want for the most part. Um,

in our, in our day to day, like when do you, as an American individual realize that there are some things that, that actually require you to cede some power for the greater good to who and and that's the thing like i me personally sitting here i don't know if i if i could legitimately tell you right now that that i'm 100 comfortable ceding power to any identifiable body do you well let me ask you this you're you're coming up on the brink and i don't know if you

intend to do this but it's just where the conversation goes you're coming up on the brink of where do we decide you keep on talking about bodies where do we decide to cede control to a form of government whether it be the government we think of as government in washington dc or a government that's set up by a bunch of silicon valley technorati or whatever or both yeah and the thing about governments well two things number one when you give them power they don't give it back it's how it works and that's how you see the conservative movement be able to make that small government argument over and over again even when it doesn't make sense because people inherently know, ooh, power. Don't want other people to have it. And what we're talking about right now, even though it may be the right way to go, I don't know.

We got to get there and figure that out. That's not – that's the opposite so it gives those people the the platform to be not the platform the the credibility to be able to say see i told you small government's good but when we get down this rabbit hole we start to then give up our civil liberties and really interesting that we're talking about this right now but you look at the last 20 years i mean when that tech bubble burst in 2000 when the internet was first coming in little did we know that everything was going to converge all at once in society and form this atomic bomb no pun intended

of change and adjustment to our mental state that was driven by the technology. And weirdly enough, you had cultural and geopolitical and tragic events, even like September 11th, line up and create the whole war on terror and all that. And so I look at that period, because September 11th happened during the tech bubble burst. I look at that period as a key turning point because it got everyone angry because they hit us home they hit us here they took down our buildings in manhattan we watch people fall to their death no one's ever going to forget that and brought it brought the country together for the time being sure just very crazy to think about now because it wasn't that long ago and here we are but the

government like anyone else people point the finger and they say, who's at fault? Who didn't stop this? No one says, hey, CIA or FBI, who did you stop and foil? What kind of plot did you foil yesterday to save us all? Oh, cool. Great job. We'll give you congratulations on that. The only time these people get attention is when they did something wrong. And so like any human being with their back against the wall, they respond and they respond with aggression and they respond by trying to right the wrong by eye for an eye, whatever it is. And so for that, the beginning was going to Afghanistan and taking down the Taliban and taking down war in Iraq, which remains one of the most controversial wars in the history of this country to this day. And it expanded to, well, what really are our intentions here? What does our government really want to do? And when you look at it at home, little did we know it was expanding to us too with technology.

Because after this, and likeward snowden talks about this a lot yeah he talks about the idea of like the save the puppies act whenever everything's marketing in life whenever a government comes out with a new piece of legislation in washington dc if they name it something that sounds like no one can be against that you should you should put up your eyebrows and any organization because that means they're probably hiding a lot of things in there. So our government responded to September 11th by creating things right away like the Patriot Act and stuff like that, which basically was us signing away some of our civil liberties to allow the government to spy on a lot of people to be able to determine where's a little terror cell that we don't know of right now that we can stop. Saves lives, but at what cost yeah and it created this whole concept of the government then expanding on those programs where they were clearly invading on constitutional rights that people had and instead of abiding by

the law in this case not just the set of laws but literally the constitution they found ways to change the law to match what they wanted to do yeah and that's where the stuff like stellar wind came in where they basically told all the phone and communication companies you have to give us all the data otherwise you don't have business and that means we're going to spy on every american if we want to and that's what snowden let out yeah but it's amazing that snowden let that out seven years ago now and a lot of people don't even know what he let out they just know this guy like maybe was a traitor or maybe wasn't and let out this information and we haven't done much about it it hasn't really changed yeah and so now

to bring it back to our social media point we're talking about watching this play out in front of us and the infringements on literally in some cases the Constitution whereby social media is defined as the public square in this case because or set up in concert with the government, such that whatever they come up with is going to be the best for everyone when we have such a record of these things not being the best for everyone and them just taking this power and then taking more control from it. Yeah. So completely, completely, completely hear you there. And I think I mean, when you think about when you think about the Patriot Act, right, and you think about what the goal of it was, the I think was accomplished we in the cut in this country I don't think we've had you know and you know certainly we've had on on on some some levels of scale terrorist attacks but I mean like you said we don't hear about all the terrorist attacks that are stopped, right? And I think, you know, through the Patriot Act, you know, we got what we were looking for as a country, which is we are – like, the Patriot Act clearly outlines what it's doing, and it's doing just that. Can I outline what it was for the listeners just to give some context?

So we have it up here i just want to make sure i was pulling this up while alex was talking right there just so that we don't go down a rabbit hole here and people are like wait what the fuck was this again so the patriot act and i'm literally lifting this from wikipedia which is not the best source in the world but i'm taking the highest broadest facts about it that are just in general correct i i can i think we can vouch for that but the patriot act was written following the september 11th attacks in an effort to dramatically tighten u.s national security particularly as it related to foreign terrorism in general the act included three main provisions number one expanded abilities of law enforcement to surveil including by taping domestic and

international phones meaning they could be taping us right now. Eased interagency communication to allow federal agencies to more effectively use all available resources in counterterrorism efforts, which is fine. That just means the NSA, CIA, FBI all working in concert. That one's cool. crimes and an expanded list of activities which would qualify someone to be charged with terrorism, which the second part of that potentially opens up Pandora's box related to point number one, which was the increased surveillance. So, to be clear, the Patriot Act, if we were going to really generalize and dumb it down, gave incredible surveillance powers to the U.S. government, and it was a response to one of the worst things that ever happened to us. But go ahead, Alex. So, when you look at that, and it touches on something that I'll bring up that I think is to your point about do we cede certain liberties in exchange for outcomes that we ultimately desire, that we see in sort of the current environment

as not working. And by environment, I mean, like everyone's day to day life, like society, right? I think there's something that I think about a lot actually that that that happens which is um which is you know you don't know what you don't know and i think about this concept probably all the time because as somebody who thinks about uh like how you solve these problems right like there Like, there's a whole, like, us as individuals are only capable of thinking about the things that we can actually think about. And there are potentially infinite combinations

of things that could happen that we just literally can't conceptualize because we are limited in our capacity as individuals to do so. And it's actually something that keeps me up at night. This concept of not knowing what I don't know, because I mean, everyone likes to be in control. Everyone likes to control their own destiny. Everyone wants to know what's going to happen to them. Everyone wants to be able to see B in the horizon while they're standing at a and say

i know for certain that in x amount of time i will be at b right but not knowing what you don't know will always be present in society it happens you can't control certain you can't control certain things you can't control outcomes And even the brightest minds in the world, when thinking about the outcomes of a particular situation, could be wrong about how those outcomes end up being. It's just, it's just, it's a, it's a natural limitation of the human species. And so when I think about scenarios like the Patriot Act, right? Sure, there were consequences to the Patriot Act being out there. We're now surveilled more than ever before. You know, like you said, cell phone companies need to provide all of that information to the government. Those things, some people may have predicted that things some people may have predicted that some people may have not it was a consequence that we took in return for the the proliferation of the sort of safety and the national security system that's in place today when we think about putting in place today. When we think about putting in place laws that, like you said, exchange some of our civil liberties for results that we expect, right? Because I think, like I

said before, I think with the Patriot Act, the results that we expected were a decrease in the ability for these terrorist attacks to happen, which I think we were successful. Yes. Yes. I would say that there's always going to be a situation where you, you're not going to be aware of the potential knockdown consequences of those, of those provisions. You, you, you never will be. And, and with the Patriot Act, yes, some of them may have been really clear, but we're obviously living in a hindsight world right now. There's hindsight bias in that. If you were to sit and tell me, oh, you know, all of my information, my cell phone, you know, whatever, would have been sold to a, you know, a cell company after the release of the Patriot Act, two things. One, might not have believed you. And two,

I might not have cared. That's, now you're hitting it. Yeah. Because, like I said, Snowden released this stuff seven years ago. Like I also said,

people to this day, some guys forget who Edward Snowden was. Yeah. They have no fucking idea what he did. And he was basically saying hey all 330 million americans you're all being spied on by the government illegally i might add they changed the law not really but they're still literally breaking the law and your data that not just your data your most innermost personal thoughts are out there

oh and by the way not even edward snowden coming back and saying like everyone was giving facebook shit for the 2016 election. How were they able to sell that data to these companies to be able to advertise and change your train of thought? They were able to do it by making you click some I agree to a thousand page thing written by six fucking lawyers or 600 fucking lawyers in a room somewhere that gets them not liable for everything apparently, and then allows them to go in and harvest your thoughts through the things that you choose to interact with and like, and then be able to say, this is your profile, and here's how we are going to psychologically pinpoint you and then tell brands that might make sense to be able to sell to you

and then drive your decisions to buy. So it's not just the government. It's whoever has control of the technology and therefore the train of thought that now comes in. And it's like, well, yeah, do we care? Because people still fucking do it every day. Yeah. You and I do.

And so, yeah. And so when you look at these problems, right, it's like I think the decision needs to – to take a bit of a step back from the, oh, like, our liberties are being taken away, like, that's, like, the worst thing that could happen in the universe. And we actually, I think, need to think of it in a bit of a different frame, which is, if I exchange this liberty for this thing, what's probably the worst thing that can happen as a result?

And can I live with that? Do I actually care if I'm getting the desired outcome from that thing that I received in exchange for that liberty that I gave away? I think people need to think about it in that way. Convenience, time-saving, safety-saving. I don't know if that's a term, but I think you see what I mean. Or convenience, yeah. What's the trade-off?

Exactly. It's a trade-off thing. It's an opportunity cost, thing um and it's it's also it's also just like a way that you're able to solve an issue that might that you might not be able to solve on an individual level um across society that there is a requirement that there is a greater good out there that, and again, that needs to be defined. We've discussed it. I can't tell you exactly what that is right now, but can that greater good do something for us in exchange for something

that we actually are okay giving away? Yeah. It's just so many things man i mean when you look at it you could go so many different directions with all the things going on in our society right now with what you're saying and we focused a lot on social media and we've gone in other places too and we've we've talked about the level of control and giving it to certain groups and not giving it to certain groups and stuff like that yeah but if we're going to talk about civil liberties and the concept of the trade-offs that you just raised it's impossible not to talk about what's going on with this pandemic right now for sure i mean look and there's a whole litany of issues here but you

effectively with no precedent saw a panic set in whereby the federal government and the state governments it's really it's both in this case told everyone hey there's this crazy happening it's very dangerous people are going to, and you need to go inside, and the economy needs to shut down, and you need to social distance, you need to wear masks, all these different things. And when it comes to saving lives and responding to something that you've never seen before,

yeah, you have to take actions that are insane. But when this started, I remember those conversations, and they were all like, hey know let let's let's get our let's get a handle on this inside of like two to four weeks yep or something four weeks was the most common one like a month yeah i think it was easter was the first the first the first line that was set was all right we're gonna get our shit sorted by easter i remember and before trump even said that yeah there were people saying like i remember talking with people on the phone it like, yeah, you know, we'll kind of have the line in the sand by Easter, that's about a month, whatever. And obviously, it hasn't worked out that way. We also

had to learn about this disease. And you always have to put a qualification on this. Yes, the coronavirus is real. It sucks. I'm sure you know people who had it i knew people who had it right at the beginning i was right up with you in the in the eye of the storm up there yeah and there's some bad shit you know i i said on another podcast i'll say this always cite this as an example i know a guy who was around regularly very well in shape middle age not old at all in his 40s and you know he got it and was on a respirator in a coma for 55 days and actually lived man but it's real yeah yeah that said there is a level to which it it doesn't affect some people there is a level to which it affects some people and they get over it and it might be a normal flu i

mean the president got it and if you think he got it because some people question that but supposedly he got it and and he kicked it in three days it's or whatever it was two days three days meaning it's like anything else in the world you go to take a risk on something there's potential consequences yeah and we now gave up all these civil liberties and allowed it to continue to happen where the government was telling us almost like cheerleading us and saying, you're doing great, guys. Stay inside. Keep social distancing, whatever.

And now we've infringed on this territory where we've been listening to it for seven, eight months, whatever it is. And what else does this allow them to do? Now whenever there's some little spike, they can say again, oh, we've decided to shut down these zip codes or whatever, and people have to go inside and businesses have to shutter. The level of personal responsibility and the ability for people to say, hey, I understand the risk, I understand the data, I understand what I'm doing, but I am empowered as an American citizen with a freedom in this

country under the Constitution to go out and take my risk knowingly and then not cry if it goes wrong for me yeah that is being slowly taken away and when you look at the data behind it look man if you're above 70 yeah it's a lot more dangerous there's still according to the cdc data and we will fact check this i will have the link in the show notes but according to the cdc data that came out in mid september you are 94.5 likely i think to live 70 or older and then as you go younger it's higher and higher by the time you're in the kids it's like 99.998 or something like that so i always put it to people this way and this is an extreme example but if you walked into the doctor's office after getting a test and he walked in there and, and he was walking in there with the kind of solemn face, but the, okay, I'm going to give you some news, and we're going to talk about this, and we're game on.

If that doctor looked at you and said, you know, you have cancer, whatever cancer it is, but we caught it really early, stage one or whatever, and you probably don't even have to do chemo we're going to be able to go in there real quick and cut this fucker out yeah yeah if he said that to you and then you said to him doc what are my chances to survive and he said it is a 95 confidence interval on this you're like fuck it let's get on the table man i feel great about you you just went from oh my god i have cancer to oh my god i won't beat the shit out of this thing it's all the mentality.

Now it's still serious. You got to pay a lot of money. It takes some time. It's not overnight, but you're like, I'm feeling good. Now you come to people and, and, and by the way,

you continue working that scenario. You continue living your life. You continue going around people or whatever, maybe with some precautions. But now we're in a scenario where it's like, well, no, you have to shut down your business and stay inside.

Cause we just had a Kate, a spike of another thousand cases, regardless of whether or not there's only like two fucking deaths in there. Yeah. And we're giving up the civil liberties to do it. And it is yet another in this conversation, Pandora's box of, okay, well, what's right and what's wrong? Yeah. So I have two sort of perspectives on this. um for a lot of people that it's almost um it's almost worse than what the the virus can do to some people right i'll just give you an example um my girlfriend is a chef that's how she makes her living she was out of a job for four months because of this thing. Living in New York.

Living in New York City. If she wasn't shacking up with me during that time frame, it would have been really hard because what happened was public assistance was good for a while in the sense of being able to allow somebody who has a New York apartment afford their rent. But then when things came crashing down to earth and things returned to normal levels, it is almost inconceivable for anyone to think that on $300 a week, you can afford to both live and pay rent in New York City.

It is literally impossible. And that's not even a polarizing statement. It is impossible. And that's going off the $1,200 number. Exactly. So there is an aspect of this thing where to me, it goes back to our point about civil liberties what is the one thing that you can give up so that the greatest number of people

can continue to survive and thrive in society without giving up so much that you actually are seeing negative effects. And what that brings me to is sort of my second view here, which is masks. Masks are necessary. You have my attention. And I'll tell you why that is. If everyone wore a mask, and look, there's data out there that says a number of different things on these issues. I don't think that there is resounding data on these issues one way or the other because it's so new. There is data that suggests that masks will save lives. There's some data that suggests

that it will save significantly less lives than people think it will. But if the narrative exists that masks help, and if masks do help, I am willing as a citizen to give one civil liberty away, which is the right to not to have to wear a mask. In exchange for the hospitality industry, for example, to operate and make money. Right. To me, that seems like a tradeoff that is acceptable. And when I think about and we touched on this as well, what's the most negative thing that can happen from me giving away my ability to wear a mask or to not wear a mask rather. Right. And when I think about that, and yes, there could be some things that I don't know that I don't know. Right. But when I think about what the biggest negative thing could be, right, whether it saves lives or it doesn't save lives, whether, you know, whether, whatever.

I mean, the biggest negative thing is a minor inconvenience, right? Like, all right, so what? I got to go out and when I'm out in public in a place that is confined, I got to wear this mask. And, you know, I wear glasses. You know, the mask goes around my ears too. It's not that comfortable. Because I already have to wear my glasses all the time every day, which already puts a little bit of strain on the skin above my ear. Yeah, it's uncomfortable.

But I'd give that away in a heartbeat to save entire sectors of this economy that have just been completely routed by this virus. And not just by the virus, but the handling of, was wear a mask to change the narrative and to open up this sector because I want things to open and I want people to wear masks. I'm not saying that we need to have everything open and people can just go about willy-nilly without wearing masks. And I'm not over here saying that we need to keep things closed until everything's under control. I think if we can prove that something works reasonably well, that prevents us from needing to shut down the economy, prevents us from needing to shut down what I consider to be essential businesses. The hospitality industry is essential. Let's get that right. Then why wouldn't we wear masks?

I mean, that's just my take on the situation. I'd love to hear where you're coming from, though. I'm stretching out here. I'm getting ready. I'm getting ready to go. First of all, because we've got to qualify everything, I've said this on another podcast, I'll say it again. I feel like a commercial salesman every time I do this. But i wear a mask everywhere i go unless i'm alone in my car

i don't have a problem with doing it right now it is to me obviously and i've said this too there are varying opinions on how effective it really is i am cool living on the safe side of that if i mean look you always paint the worst case scenario with this stuff and that's what makes it emotional over pragmatic and that is like if if i didn't wear it and i gave it to some old person in all likelihood just according to the data and they died yeah i i'd feel terrible about that and it's like the worst thing that could happen so i don't want that to happen and i wear it it's it's what it is and there are some people who are like man fuck the mask and they take it off and it's been seven eight months in a way i empathize with it

and you also have to understand some of those people are coming from a place where this thing has ruined their lives already and they're like fuck it and they're ready for it to be over but dude so many so many things come back first of all the cure being worse than the virus it's it's a line people gave trump shit for in march or april but it's not wrong given the time that has passed since and you have i mean the stats are there and i don't have them up right now but you have seen more suicides you have seen things that you can't see like depression you've seen people's lives ruined i mean this is going to have effects for years from now on and so yeah you can't make that worse very quickly before i even go into this an argument with the mass in the restaurant like i

was in a restaurant last night right i pull up everyone who's outside is sitting at a table without a mask and it was still light out and there is reasonable nothing is for sure we don't know anything for sure but there is reasonable data to say that in sunlight outside this is not terribly transmittable that may not be true don't take it from fucking me go do your research on it but i see all these people sitting out there fine i walk inside i look at every table yep all the tables and this is new jersey you know one of the eyes of the storm here all the tables are right by each other there's the smallest table i saw was four people many of the tables were were 10 to 12 people they're all sitting at

the table not wearing masks yeah and then i look and whenever anyone gets up from the table they throw on a mask and then they go wherever they go i see people at the bar they're sitting down the bar they're not wearing a mask so the argument and someone put this to me the other day one of the more pragmatic individuals i've ever met in my life like a you know somebody who is just completely above the fray here not a political person at all he was just asking with data or however you want to say it he was like as it pertains to the mass regardless of whether or not they they save lives or not let's say they do if your policy is to wear a mask everywhere and let's use the restaurant example as he did.

Yep. If you're wearing a mask into the restaurant, then you sit down with other people in close proximity eating and breathing and talking to each other at all times and facing each other, and the mask comes off because the mask has to come off to eat. Yep. Why wear the mask at all? Yeah. And, I mean, that's where, you know, a level of personal accountability needs to be injected into the conversation. And it's actually similar to what we were talking about on the social media front, because you can't trust that every person will exercise good judgment, just as you can't trust that every person will exercise good judgment on the internet with the information they spread. People are going to do what they want to do.

Um, and it's especially true, um, when people have been, as we've alluded to, you know, locked up in their homes for the past three, four months, right? You know, know plus more than that um yeah it's like seven yeah eight whatever yeah man time time has been in a bit of a stand still with all this um but um but like i don't know who or what needs to be held accountable but there needs to be a system of accountability and whether or not that's developed by our society as individuals which i think we've

come to a consensus that it's probably very difficult for every individual to be held accountable themselves because most people are not capable of that. But whatever that body is that's going to hold people accountable, it needs to be done in a way where people agree that if one thing is helpful, they'll give away something in exchange for that thing, which gets them their desired result, right? So, like, maybe what should happen is we should actually do the work to figure out if masks are as effective as we say they are. Who do we believe on it? Yeah. That's another question.

Even Fauci, he was on record, I think on 60 Minutes, saying no one needs to go get masks. Maybe this was like February, early March, something like that. To his credit, he later said that the reason he said that was because they were so unprepared and worried about a shortage for first-line responders that they didn't want the first-line responders not to have it, which we still ended up having a shortage on, so he was vindicated by that. The problem is this is the preeminent NAIA or however you say it guy at the government, and he had to admit publicly to people, a society that's already on edge and upset, that he did lie to them early on. And so now I understand it. I try to look at it reasonably, but I understand it when people say, well, how the hell can we trust this little bastard? Mm-hmm. Yep.

There's so many, and it's, like, the point is, how do you decide who does the research, what their ideology is? I mean, look, you look at the town hall we saw the other, not the town hall, the debate we saw the other night with the candidates. I love going channel to channel after that you go to msnbc you go to fox you go to cnn you just it's it's a shit show but there were panels and then i think i saw the panels on twitter yeah i think that was on twitter after but either way there were panels and there were like political strategists whatever and you see these people who are biden voters and trump voters sitting in the room and usually there's a couple undecideds and the trump voters are all not wearing a mask the biden voters are all wearing a mask yeah and the trump voters are talking about you

know not personal responsibility and not knowing who to trust and the biden voters are talking about caution but also talking about i don't really know who the fuck to trust on this. So either way, even though one could be wrong, one could be right in that scenario. And it seems like the people who are wearing the mask are at least on the safe side here. We've created this line where how are you going to get that consensus of people who already think that the other person's crazy for voting for the other candidate? How are you going to get them in consensus on something so personal as what they put on their face to go out every day yeah but i i mean i think i think that what what that argument i mean i i think the issue there is is that that assumes that there's no unbiased party that does scientific research which i think is is false i mean i think i agree

it's false i think there i think there are um I agree it's false. I think there are. How do you prove it, though? That's the problem. Yeah. I mean, how do you prove it? I mean, how do you prove a lot of things, right? It's by seeing them play out in real life. So I think, like, if, and it's a little bit chicken and egg i will say right because you have to get everybody to agree to do the mask thing in order to see the mask thing work and you're not going to be able to convince everybody to do the mask thing because they don't know if it's going to work right so there's chicken and egg happening but i mean if there was some chicken and some egg and also a little bit of science, you know, maybe it would be a little bit easier for people to get on board. So it was a little less, you know, circular.

I mean, that's sort of the, yeah, so like people may not like 100% trust this thing, but I mean, let's say that there was some sort of consensus built behind it where this study, this study, this study, and this study, and this study all said that transmission decreases by X percent when you're wearing these masks. I think then, and only then, can you at least try to convince people that getting on board with a larger social experiment

with regards to these things makes sense. Because, yeah, maybe they won't trust it, but if five studies come out and say the same thing, like from five different relatively unbiased sources, I think then you've got a little bit of bite behind it, and you'll motivate a lot of people to do it. At least people that want to see things open. I think if you want to see things open, you almost want to see, you know, want to see things open. Like, I think if you want to see things open,

you almost want to believe it. Sure. Sure. And so if you want to believe it, and you see these studies that have essentially corroborated your belief, I mean, you're going to want to try it, I think. I mean, that's, but that's, I mean, that's just me. I mean, there could be skeptics out there that say say there's no way in hell i'm trying this even if even if it opens up the economy if if everyone were to get on board with this not everyone is going to there's too much skepticism i'm not going to do this you know yeah they'll still be people like that out there for sure but i mean can we can we move a larger number of people more towards the side of the spectrum that is okay with giving up some, you know, what I see as inconsequential civil liberty of needing to wear this mask in order to, you know, potentially with solid probability, obtaining the result that we want. I mean, in my view, it probably would.

So, I mean, that's where I come from on this. I mean, I think, like, look, I hear, I totally hear the argument for not wearing one in the sense of like oh yeah if people aren't going to be personally accountable like like why like and that's it's not gonna it's not gonna move the needle that's the problem but if we could convince more people to be more accountable accountable through science maybe i think we have a chance maybe through my experience and my reality i know for a fact i'm not worse off than a lot of people who are really fucked by this and so again your environment and your reality drives your opinions and the veracity of those opinions maybe that's why i am so

diplomatic about it and like i don't care like i'll wear it like it's no problem and i do everywhere and maybe other people don't have the ability to do that and that's sad but you know i there's a level to which i empathize with where they're coming from not the outcome but where they're coming from yeah the the issue that i run into here is that i just agreed with what the entire thing you just pointed out there and i have an issue with it and to be clear what i mean i agree with is that i do think you can have a panel of unbiased experts who can determine and will in my opinion based on the data i've seen would most most likely determine that, yes, mass help. And so let's do it.

I also have to pragmatically look at society. We've talked about it already today a little bit. But I have to look at society and say that you effectively have a big percentage of people who are either in the belief system that, like, QAnon is is a real thing and we have pedophiles in Washington and then you also have people in a belief system who think that racism right now is worse than it was during slavery, both of which I find to be crazy. They may both be on the track of pointing out faults in our society, but the solutions or general identification of the problem that each of those sides and those two opposite scenarios are pointing out in my opinion don't reflect the reality as it is even when things are fucked up and stuff which i'll agree with sure so when you have this unbiased panel come out you're gonna have a big percentage of

society for whatever the final decision is that says, I don't trust any of that. And they won't listen to facts. So I have a question for you because I think it, I think it, I think it jives well with this argument. Do you think those people will get the vaccine? Oh my God. I love that you asked that. A lot of them know, and I think that is terrifying. The anti-vaxxer movement in this country right now is a frightening thing. Yep. So leads me back to the point that I mentioned before, which is how do you convince these people to do anything, right? Like, like it's like, if, if they check me, if there, if there

are people that, if there are people out there that literally have no faith in any source of truth, there is no such thing to them as a source of truth. You will never convince them to wear a mask and you will absolutely not convince them to get a vaccine. They are too afraid of not knowing what they don't know. And what they do is they take assumed outcomes and they replace that fear with those assumed outcomes, which are almost always negative. And the reason why they're almost always negative is because they want to legitimize that fear. That fear of not knowing what the outcome is, potentially. The fear of not knowing what they don't know. The way I like to approach these problems is different, is what if the only negative potential outcome is that you get a little rash on top of your ears because the mask is uncomfortable if that's the case i'll take it ten times out of ten you're so but there are people but there are

people that are not going to do that because again again, they fear the unknown. They fear what they don't know. And they don't, I feel like a lot of these people, they don't know that that's what they're afraid of. They don't know that they actually are afraid of what they don't know. It's just a defense mechanism to swap that out, that fear, with an outcome that is so negative that, you know, it essentially blinds

their reasoning, and they default to, oh, well, you know, if this happens, you know, why would I believe anyone? Like, it's very possible that this negative thing could happen as a result of this you know so I think you can potentially get less people to think in that way if you if you build up evidence behind the positive outcome that is so potentially insurmountable that you can get the that basically you look stupid if You don't at least try it. I think that's the only way that you can affect You know those people because what those people don't like is Looking stupid

So so I think I think the only chance you have is Again, I mean it's something that we've touched on in this interview is there's gotta be people that step back and they say, look, let's think about this thing a little bit. Like let's, let's, let's do, let's do what we think needs to be done in order to reach the outcome that we desire. And that thing that we're doing, that in and of itself doesn't have any negative consequences. But then we measure the positive and the negative from the outcome that we're that from from what we're actually measuring. And we determine whether

or not the positive outweighs the negative. That's the only way. And, yeah, you might get people to believe you or not. But, I mean, I think if you do it in a way that's overwhelming enough and to go, I think it's the only way that you'll get people to realize that that's the way to go. Like, I mean, I think, and look, I mean, maybe we're at a point where it's now so over-politicized that there are people that are so far gone that we won't be able to get them back. Um, but again, I mean, I think, I think, you know,

what it comes down to is people, if you're, if you're... if you're part of the process enough, where you have made a determination that you will not wear a mask because X person said that it's not helpful, you should at least have some shred within you, possibility of changing that opinion. Because you've already formulated an opinion

based on things that you've seen, right? So if there are other things that come out that overwhelmingly change that opinion, you should be able to change that opinion. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, you know, I think the only people that are incapable of that are the people that are incapable of forming their own opinions. And I mean, we talked about that too. And there are a lot of those people out there, but I think the people that are the ones that have created the opinions they're the ones that can get the people that have essentially taken those opinions and and and have uh internalized them as their own to potentially change their opinions too right so i mean it it all comes down to i mean and and know, maybe I'm a little bit too apolitical for my own good, to be honest.

But, you know, maybe I'm preaching to a choir that's singing in Japanese. But at least I'm trying. And at least from a rational perspective, I think that that's what we need to do. First of all, you should not be apologizing for being too apolitical for your own good. I love it. It's so refreshing. And I also admittedly, biasly love it because I brand myself. God damn it.

There's that word again. But I portray myself in the same light. And we talk about things where in one moment someone's going, God damn it, that's a right winger. Or in the next moment they're going, God damn it, that's a lefty. And I like that because it keeps people guessing. And it's true because you talked about this maybe before the podcast when we were talking but you talked about this whole robotic opinion making that people do and it then can put you into boxes and

that's i live my life doing everything i can not to be that robot and to reconsider things yeah you know be like you know i really thought this but now i think i'm wrong about that no this this person made a good argument let's talk about that so you number one you should not have to apologize for that number two your measuredness is that a word i don't even know whatever works we make up words here sometimes but anyway the level to which you are being so diplomatic about this and also reasoned and and putting logic behind it has a whole other lens on it because you are from New York. You live in New York City. You live in Brooklyn now, and you've lived in Manhattan a bunch, and you stayed there. You've been there this whole time. You've been working

every single day. And New York was ground zero for COVID in America. And we were both up there and that whole region was hit extremely hard and we saw the worst of what this virus does have to offer. So we come at it with that experience. Whereas, you know, some of the people in Oklahoma, they don't know that. They don't, they never saw that. And by the time maybe they did see some cases, it was like they were already jaded by the whole thing. Yeah. But to what level do you think – like let me ask you this. When do you remember masks becoming a big thing where it was just fully accepted for you in New York? And to what level have you watched all the things that have happened in society since with the controversy around this and then even with all the social uprisings that happen right under your nose in new york and in other cities to what level did that all have a storm around it where you continue to formulate this opinion and come to the conclusion that hey we're deep into this thing but we this this does seem to be

empirically backed which i would agree with there is much more data to say masks are completely good. Let's be very clear on that. And despite everything we're seeing and all the other anger in other places that have nothing to do with the actual virus itself, this needs to be something that people just come together and say, hey, we're giving facts here. We're trying to get rid of this just like the rest of us. And we don't want to have another situation like New York City in March and April. Yeah, absolutely. us and we don't want to have another situation like new york city in march and april yeah absolutely i think so i think um you know obviously being there this whole time i've been able to see a lot of the behavior of people and how that sort of resulted in the outcome of where we are now, which is I think we're either the 47th or 46th in terms of rate of transmission of the virus.

Yes, yes. Which I think, just to put it in context for people, is around 500 cases a day in New York. Yeah, I think it's around 500. But basically what I saw is at the beginning, especially when it was picking city that were not exercising caution that made it even more scary. And when I say communities, I say, I mean, I live in Brooklyn, right? So I live in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. It's central Brooklyn. And right above central brooklyn is williamsburg um in

williamsburg there is a very large hasidic community yeah and uh you know obviously i'm i'm a jewish american so you know all all the love for the culture. But the Hasidic Jewish population, they were not using masks. And they weren't from the start. And they didn't care at all about mask use. And what we saw is their infection rates going way up in their communities to the point point where um and i mean there are other things that play into that they're also a very tight-knit group they meet together in very large groups very regularly they do not they do not trust outside of their exactly not i don't want to overgeneralize but that's another good point they're very much insulated in their environment. And so, for example, it's not like all of us

out in the real world, um, you know, was meeting in 70 hundred person groups all the time. So, the empirical observation here is definitely skewed by the behavior. Um, but we were seeing those groups in particular start to really get hit hard, and it was very scary, especially as someone who obviously sympathizes with how badly this virus affects people, but also as someone who's living in a community that was literally right underneath this one to the point where they they literally overlap in in certain blocks and turn in certain parts so it was scary and then also you saw in Manhattan the complete shutdown right especially in the beginning when de Blasio and

Cuomo essentially said look everything is everything is closed. Like, go home and stay there for, you know, until we tell you to come out, basically. That's really, I mean, they gave a timeline, but it was really more, like, it felt like, go home and don't come out until we say so. That's really what it felt like. And so it was scary and i think i think a lot of new yorkers took that and really really took it personally in the sense of like i do not want to be this scared living in the city for the rest of my life like it is it is a a legitimate impossibility for me to feel like this anymore. Like, this is supposed to be the best place on Earth. Mm-hmm.

And so, I think, I think collectively people, when masks really became, um, and I remember it because at the beginning masks were not prevalent enough. Like, you couldn't get a mask. You couldn't, no. Like, there were nowhere. And only a couple of people had them, only essential workers. So you couldn't go anywhere, Right. But when they started like reopening, like you know, and this is just pure empirical observation.

So like, you know, I think definitely my opinion has been somewhat constructed from what I've seen personally with this thing in New York. But I think when more people started using masks, the issue became less scary. And it actually started to help psychologically for people. And I think when it started to help psychologically for people, I think people were able to finally take that, that caution that they were feeling and take the scary part of that and suppress it slightly and instead actually be able to function in a way that was more new york style you know a little bit defensive you know a little bit you know i'm i'm walking here you know what i mean and so i think it helped things a lot the masks not that i think think that they themselves did a lot of the work, but I think that at least giving them to people made people able to be, you know, on a different mental level to handle this thing and be more cautious. Now, I think when masks, when I started really observing masks as being helpful and again I

don't have any data behind this so for for everyone listening to this I would every and yeah just as a as an overall wash over here everything that we say especially when we're having a conversation like this you see it's just kind of live these cameras have to be on and you guys are hearing it we are putting an asterisk on it like i'm pulling up data when i can as an example you said new york was the 46th or 47th state as far as transmission per day i pulled up a source from eight hours ago from npr.org so we're going to fact check something while we're going here and it has red orange and yellow as far as and then green, as far as state of the outbreak across states here. And I just want to be clear that red and orange being the worst, New York is not a red and orange state as of today.

Okay, there is only one green state, which is Alaska, which is the most out there state, by the way. And then there are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 nine ten it appears yellow states so at the very worst if new york is the worst of those yellow states they're like 39th or 40th yeah right and so it probably lines up the bottom line is they were by far the worst yeah and now they're towards the bottom and so juro giving your thoughts here as far as what type of effect they had you raise a great point with the psych with the psychological aspect where it made people less afraid to go outside as well. And by the way, there was the same problem.

There's a heavy Hasidic community in Lakewood, New Jersey. That was where you started the whole explanation there. And we had the same problem. I mean, these guys were getting arrested having weddings in the end of March. And it's just like a little bit of common sense, people. I'm sorry, but it's just like you can't be having 80 people in a small yard in Lakewood end of March. And it's just like a little bit of common sense people. I'm sorry, but it's just like you can't be having 80 people in a small yard in Lakewood, New Jersey

in the house, excuse me, who's inside. And not expect that there's going to be an issue here. But there's New York has had so many trials with this and I can't help but then pivot to ask you what's the like what was the vibe

across the city because we just saw what we saw on the news yeah yeah during like the protests and stuff because I will say more than any other city I saw according to the videos and images I saw and you saw hundreds of thousands of people yep the mask wearing in new york seemed to be the heaviest and that is just my eyes seeing that i don't have data on that people so don't hold me to it but it seemed to be the best yeah and there were still though a lot of people not wearing masks and i understand it was a it was a big movement because we have some issues in this country as it relates to race relations no doubt about it so i understand it but then you also had like mayors and de blasio was the first one saying that for contact tracing you couldn't you weren't

allowed to ask people if they were at the protests or not yeah so it like if we're gonna listen and it goes to this point i think we should listen to good unbiased science on things like wearing masks to prevent transmission and this whole fucking pandemic yeah but if we're gonna listen to that why are the same people telling us to listen to it selectively deciding what to listen to when it suits their political needs? That is a legitimate question. Yeah, and that's a good point again, and it goes back to why I have to approach these things apolitically. Because when you approach them politically, you get into these mind-numbing, psychological and philosophical traps

that sort of derail you from the ability to look at something in an optimistic way, frankly. And so, getting back to another moment where I saw, specifically in my experience masks as a potential viable way to curtail the spread of the disease i went to a protest and i went to one because not only do we're in manhattan i went to a it was a march a a black lives matter march uh not affiliated really with the organization but you know more the term which is which we have to make a distinction is a very important distinction we have to make the distinction right but it was a it was a community organized march in support of black lives and it it started in uh prospect park brooklyn which is

essentially the central park of of western brooklyn um and probably all of brooklyn i would say meaning closest to manhattan for people that aren't familiar. Meaning it's a huge park. A lot of people go to it. It's packed. And it's one of the cultural epicenters of the region, this area of Brooklyn. But I went to this protest because, first of all, I supported the cause. Second of all, I needed to see for myself and be present at one to understand what was going on. I felt a need to understand what was happening. And I felt a need to see and react to it all. You know, be a part of what's happening in society. Because

again, if you're not a part of that, you have no context to make your own conscious decisions about these things. And I also want to point out for context here for you. Some people, cynics, will come back and say, oh, well, you were just locked up and had nothing to do and wanted to do something. To be very clear, Horo is – he's had a hell of a career. We haven't even talked about much of it today. The kid is – you're killing it. But he's the chief of staff at 8Sleep, which is far more than a startup. I mean it's a well-funded, high-profiting organization, and you guys are in the artificial intelligence mattress business, which is a whole other thing.

But you work like crazy. COVID did not slow you down at all. So this is you on your own time, like even while you're busy coming out and being like, okay, I want to understand what's going on here. Oh yeah. No,

this is, look, I mean, out of the, I don't know how many, I can't do the math right now. My mind's on, on vacation right now,

but, is it? Yeah. It doesn't sound like it. Of the, of the, you know, I mean, this, this was in addition to the 80, 85 hours that I work in a week. Which you're not lying about either.

It was purely something that I felt a moral obligation to do, I wanted to do, and frankly, was useful to me in framing the future for myself as a member of society, which I mean, I think, you know, I think we all should do, but that's besides separate issue. So I went there. And every single person at this march, I'm not kidding. I saw zero people that were not doing this, wearing a mask. Every single one. And I was a little bit, to be honest, when I got there, I was very scared for myself. Because I was, it was the first time in a long time that I had been around that many people in close proximity. And let me tell you. And at nighttime too. I mean, you were there. This was during the day. This one was during the day. Yeah.

This was, I mean, it was like 1 p.m. this March. Because these were in Prospect Park. Like I saw, I just assumed you were at some of the ones I saw. Like there were a lot at night too. And they were, I agree. They were all messed up. I mean, I really couldn't find many people that weren't. Yeah.

This was like, this was probably the most benign protest that you could have like this one would never be televised boring literally we just walked down the street had some signs chanted some stuff you know i didn't even really chant i just really walked and we just walked in support you know taking it in you know it's a's a lot, a lot of stimuli when you've come from being locked in your apartment and not really be able to do anything but go out and get groceries. It's a lot of stimuli.

So I was very overwhelmed, first of all, by that. And second of all, by the fact that I was walking in the streets with a mob, essentially, of people. And we were all wearing masks. And, I mean, I, you know, I wanted to see my parents a couple weeks later just to check up on them. And I got tested and I was negative. And really, I was, I mean, I was not, I was really not expecting to have tested negative, just given I was around all these people. But I mean, either there's one of two things there that are true. In my mind, maybe I'm wrong, but either number one shedding. Or two, because everyone was wearing masks, the possibility of transmission was severely reduced.

Because also, New York, by the way, there were a lot of cities in these protests. Again, got to go to the data on this, double check, but my understanding is that as a percentage of the population, New York had the best control on transmission during the June height of these protests of any city. That needs to be said. Yeah. And so, I mean, logically, I had to, my brain immediately went to the second, the latter, which is, I mean, statistically almost impossible that nobody was shedding at this thing.

There was hundreds of people, hundreds and there was hundreds of people hundreds and hundreds hundreds and hundreds of people thousands yeah so yeah exactly i mean at this particular protest potentially thousands and it's impossible that not one person there in my mind at least maybe i'm wrong but in my mind it's impossible I'm, I'm standing there thinking about it. Impossible that nobody has this thing. Like, actually impossible. It's possible that I was wrong. But I mean, you know, to me, it logically, my mind went to, okay, these masks kind of work, right? And I'll say one more thing about new york because i think it's important say what you want about andrew cuomo's politics right because everything outside of covet 19 a lot

of differing opinions depending on your political beliefs depending on what profession you are teachers have a lot to say about him people in hospitality have a lot to say about him etc like there there are a lot of differing beliefs about this guy people who read the New York Times article about him with the the corruption group that he set up and then immediately got rid of they have a lot of to say about him right there's there's a lot to say about him, right? There's, there's a lot to say about this guy. But what I will say is this, his approach to the COVID issue for New York was one that was very much grounded in data, which is something that I really appreciated. The way that he approached it, and it's different from from New York than a lot of states,

was he had a set of criteria, and he created almost an index out of it. He tweeted these out. And he would tweet them almost every other day because he would have town halls on it every other day. And he said, if we can hit three out of seven of these criteria, four out of seven of these criteria, we start to give people back the ability to do stuff.

You know? And look, I mean, yes, it treats people a little bit like lab rats, but at the same time, people in New York followed these rules. And guess what? Now you can go out to eat in a restaurant. And guess what? The transmission rate is still only 500 people a day. It hasn't gone up. Maybe a little bit here and there, but it really has stayed the way it is now. just to get people to stop panicking, to get things under control. And I think that the data approach allowed people to think about this in terms that were really simple.

Like, all I got to do is prevent these things from happening, and then I can go out and eat. I can go out and do this or that, or I can go to the gym. You know, I think it made things really simple for people. And I'm not saying that everything needs to be that way. But I think when you have a portion of the population that is panicking about something that is scared, right? And then you present them with almost a way out, which is you wear this mask, you follow this set of criteria,

we get these numbers under a certain amount, and then it's off to the races. I mean, personally, as a New Yorker, and as somebody who is as free-thinking as I think I come off on the show, I felt it was really liberating to be under those criteria and to contribute to getting things open as

part of New York I Mean and that's and that's also why I was a little bit pissed off when I read the article about oh everyone's leaving the city because I'll tutor yeah, because I Think somebody who was was truly like as somebody who has lived in New York and has grown up in New York my entire life, I felt like I actually contributed to the reopening of New York through my actions. Is it reopen, though? And hold on. I want to actually address that because, once again, you threw out, I i don't know 10 different nuanced issues there and i think everyone's mind especially if they're of the opposite political belief

or political savage meaning they hate them all which i'm close to i would not say that quite but you know i have to check myself on that because it's very easy for me to just say, fuck them all. But if you look at it diplomatically with what Cuomo's response was, A, this was a new thing. B, it was a new thing, as in, like, not just the virus is a new thing, but this has never happened before in this kind of size of a population in this type of world with this much mobility and people with the ability to transmit such a thing and c you can't lie about them getting the transmission in check now i go to the other side not even of the argument the other side of the devil's advocate

here which is and i i probably will forget how to repeat this line exactly how you said it so correct me if i'm wrong here but you were like he was saying if you guys do this then i will give you this stuff back yeah no that that's how i phrased it okay and the argument there gets into we talked about this earlier somewhere in one of our million rabbit holes in this conversation but the argument there then becomes well what else can they take and what else can the government take in the future if they can take people's ability to earn or make a decision for themselves or decide to use their own liberty to take risks in society. Like, do you stop the people from going to skydive who want to go skydive?

I have no interest in skydiving, right? But I also, you know, I'm also, if I'm being self-aware, I'm someone who doesn't... It's very hard to get leverage over me. I don't really care. I'm not... I have a very interesting concept of death like i'm really weird at heights so so skydiving like is out because i just think it's the weirdest feeling like i won't do it but if i walked out my attitude is if i got walked if i walked out

and got hit by a car okay you know that sucks but we'll see what happens next if there is anything next which is weird so maybe weird, but a lot of people don't think like that, they fear it. Yeah, yeah. And I try to level with that and then say, okay, well, to what degree are we letting governments determine our free will? Yeah. And to what degree are they looking out for a lot of the people who don't think

like I think? And so, the government, their job is to protect the people, right? That's in the job description. So, under that, if I believe, and I'm pretty sure I'm right about this, most people don't think like I think in that scenario when it comes to death, then by the percentages, he is probably doing the right thing. You just get that civil liberties argument again to come in because the cynics, especially people who are on the right wing, are going to come at it and say, this guy is a, you know, he's holding the President of Ante on a string here, and we're all puppets, and we're all under his control, and, you know, they'll call him,

you know, Andrew Stalin. And it's so, it's like, what do I even i even do like what side do i look at here so for you and let's let's also get some of the political footballs out there too i mean you hear like trump talk about this all the time and i don't know any of the facts around it i know nothing about what i'm about to say but you'll hear him say cuomo sent all the all the people to the nursing homes i don't know what was happening i don't know how fast decisions have to be made. In the same way that I don't fault Trump as much as other people do for the response, because it's like crazy what happened here. You know, I also, like, what are we going to do?

Then hold Cuomo to a higher standard when he took him from first rated transmission to at least 39th or better? Yeah, yeah. You know, it's, you see what I'm saying? I'm just confused. I mean, look, just confused I mean look firstly I think with regards to nursing homes man I think all nursing homes were doomed like if you go down to Florida if you go to up to New York if you go

anywhere and you look at what happened in nursing homes there was no nothing that you could have done unless you were god himself yeah to stop from from nursing homes being completely decimated so i i think so and we're not like we're not laughing out of the nursing home it's just like it's like what do you it's like exasperation what do you even do yeah you know yeah exactly so i i think i think in that sense, I mean, yeah, I mean, politics is always going to get in the way of these things. But I think the, you know, going back to what you said about civil liberties, right? Because I think that's where the argument, you know, currently lies, right? I think when you look at, for example, right, when you look at skydiving versus going to a restaurant without a mask on, if we're going to just talk two comparison activities, right, I think, COVID not, you know, COVID restrictions, not part of the equation.

You have the liberty to go or do whatever you want, right? And make those choices. They're both choices. However, if I go skydiving and I die, right? Or if I just go skydiving at all and I don't die, the only real person that's affected by that choice is myself. Minus the grief you give people who love you. Exactly. Minus that grief.

Agree. If I walk into an establishment and I have COVID, I'm putting other people at risk. And I'm not putting, you know, it transcends grief. I literally can give you the virus. And another thing that I've seen, and again, this needs to be backed by data. But another thing that I've seen with regards to the virus is it's had a lot of lasting effects on some of the people that I associate with. And so, for example, I have a friend who had it. He had it about four months ago, call it. You know, I think it was like, I think it was around the July timeframe when he had it.

Even today, he gets winded from doing a couple of push-ups. And this is a guy that is, you know, 6'2", 150. Fit guy, probably even, you know, for his size, you know, super slim, like no body fat whatsoever. And this guy is getting winded from doing a couple push-ups or a couple of pull-ups. And you got to think when you see those types of things, like it's not like this guy's faking this. Like he wants to go to the gym and he wants to, you know, this was a guy that was a relatively fit guy.

He still is. But, you know know there are some lasting effects to this thing like you don't if you are and and it goes back to what we were talking about because i think if if you are the leader of a municipality like a de blasio or like a cuomo and i'm going to particularly talk about cuomo here because i don't i don't i don't want to touch de blasio with a 10-foot pole during this discussion. But I think if the choice that someone is making is actually going to affect other people without them willingly knowing about it, within an area that's your jurisdiction. Without them willingly know about it. You are injecting your own beliefs or personal preferences on them.

Yeah, I think you have to. I mean, at that point, I think it's almost justified to do what's necessary to to stop that from happening. And so and so that's why as a free thinking individual, I was actually somewhat relieved by Cuomo's actions and by the point system. Because while it looks on the outside to be a very restrictive thing... Keep going. I'm going to pull something. that this guy is realizing that my health and safety is more important than someone's stupid decision to go into an establishment or to breathe on somebody else while they themselves may or may not know that they have the virus and then they may or may not know that they're giving that virus to somebody else. So for me, I actually felt reassured. That's sort of my stance.

Once again, you say a bunch of things that I have a very hard time disagreeing with i i i think if there's one thing i'm very thankful i was not during this period is a politician on any level and in position around decision making or god forbid to have to make a decision one thousand because you are gonna i mean the hatred you are gonna get no matter what you do is insane so i empathize with all these guys i don't care what fucking party they insane so i empathize with all these guys i don't care what party they're in i empathize with all of them um and by the way they're all also at fault for it as well because they fight against and yell at the other person along party lines over a a health crisis issue which is like insanity but okay it comes back once again though to looking at these more extreme examples like in New York and seeing where it goes. And what I would argue is that, you know, we brought up, I don't know, maybe 10 ago with Mitchell Aximana, but James Altucher is a really interesting guy. He's like a, he owns a comedy club in New York,

but he's like a venture capital guy too, like very, very smart. And he wrote this piece, I think on his LinkedIn, in the beginning of August that was called New York City is Dead and it's never coming back. I'll put, we'll hopefully remember to put the link to that in the show notes for this. But the article was this maybe 3,000-word piece with all kinds of empirical data as to what the fuck is going on in New York and why it's such a disaster. And this is from a lifelong New Yorker. He was born and raised in New York City and never left.

In late July, he – or in July, I think, especially after the protests and everything, he got out and he went to Florida for the first time and he and his wife were deciding, like, I think we're going to stay here. And he said, I have a lot of friends who are too. I know of a lot of companies that just left and they're never going back to these offices.

Talking to my commercial real estate guys in New York, I mean, that's a fact. The numbers support that. Yeah, for sure. And that's a whole other can of worms. I'm, that's a fact that the numbers support that. And, you know, that's a whole nother can of worms. I'm not going to go there right now. But it ended up creating this public thing because the New York Post went to, they've been in the middle of a lot of shit the last few months, but he went to Al Tucher, this LinkedIn guy, and said, can we post your story

in the New York Post? He said, yeah. So he posted it. And then there was a whole outcry between people going amen yeah unfortunately he's right in new york city's got a problem and then people go and fuck that and so the leaders of the fuck that movement were backed by jerry seinfeld the famous comedian loved jerry seinfeld and seinfeld came back in the new york times even picked another newspaper and wrote this like 300 word piece that basically like with no evidence was just like fuck you jim yeah like your little linkedin i think he said some putts on linkedin and no disrespect to seinfeld but seinfeld was on long island this whole time he was not in new york city he was outside of the whole thing and it doesn't even mean he's wrong but he presented no evidence

to go back against it yeah now i don't agree without Tucher's assessment that it's dead. I think it's going to need to be rebuilt, and it's going to take a lot of us to do it, and I want to be a part of that solution. I fucking love that city. I leave it right here on the headphone amp to look at it every day because I miss it like crazy. I love the energy.

I love everything about it. We've got to rebuild the best city in the world. For sure. But he raises the point of people who have decided to leave and people who have decided that civil liberties have been taken too far. And the crazy thing is that there is actually a far worse example, it appears, based on the data and the sentiment and the lack of defending the politicians in this scenario on the West Coast out in California. In San Francisco. San Francisco is another one, and i know a little less about that so you can expand upon that i'll even focus on la as a microcosm of the whole thing

yeah la mayor garcetti has been incredibly strict he i mean they had the thing where they were there were some tiktok kids who were fucking partying in their mansion and they decided to turn off their electricity and shit just like the government decided to do that and gavin newsom the governor has been caught in the middle of all this in defense of gavin it feels to me and i could be totally wrong about this it's my little conspiratorial aspect of this it feels to me like he's not calling the shots on this it feels to me he feels so forced on it yeah and and he's he's demonized there now i mean his political career is over and it just like he's always struck me as like kind of a diplomatic guy and the level to which not just la but california as a whole has taken this out of control is what's leading people to have this conversation say fuck this shit no matter the data yeah there was some guidance

and that's what i said i was i was like keep talking i'm gonna pull something up there was some guidance released by the state of california this is the state of california health and human services agency california department of public health this is on october 9th 2020 and it is addressed to all californians with a subject of guidance for private gatherings i want to bring you through this and break this down because this is the definition of the slippery slope and how far can they go. So this was updated. They gave guidance in March and then again in September, at least that's what they list here. And this is now the most recent one. And so with holiday season coming up, this is what they chose to say. It says, the subject line is mandatory requirements for all gatherings. And they say, all persons planning to host or participate in a private gathering as defined above must comply with the following requirements. Must comply.

Listen to the language here. Meaning they'll stick the cops on you here. Local health jurisdictions may be more restrictive than this guidance. So they also give the right for other places to put out even more rules, but they say refer to your local guidance for what is allowed in your area beyond justice. That is me adding the words beyond justice. Number one, attendance. Gatherings that include more than three persons are prohibited. More than three households, excuse me, are prohibited. Three households are prohibited is bolded in this case. Link will be

in the show notes once again. I mean, is that even defined within this document? I haven't read this. Oh, I'm going to keep going. Let this go. This includes everyone present, including hosts and guests. Remember, the smaller the number of people, the safer. So they even get preachy there.

Keep the households that you interact with stable over time. By spending time with the same people, risk of transmission is reduced. Participating in multiple gatherings with different households or groups is strongly discouraged. So let's review so far. They are telling you you can never have more than three households in a gathering, so guess what? If you want to get together for Christmas and you're one of four kids and you want to go to your parents' house, two of you are shit out of luck. So the favorite children syndrome is going to come out and we're going to find out who those were the second thing they're staying there is keeping it saying is keep it stable so guess what in that same example the

two families that got left out they shouldn't be fucking going around yeah you know and and it's more guidance the second one rather than pure compliance there but still how how but i mean this just strikes me as so like how how do you define a household because in that scenario that you mentioned right where you got four kids they've got all different families they're not living under the same living under the same roof exactly yes in my mind that's my household yeah these are my kids yeah they have their own families they're not in my space but i mean these are my kids great question you know and and this let's go let's go through it let's get through and then we'll break it down next the host should collect all names of all attendees and contact

information in case contact tracing is needed later number two gather outdoors gatherings that occur outdoors are significantly safer than indoor gatherings. All gatherings must be held outside. So you can't, guess what, even if it's cold up in Northern California and you're doing Christmas, too fucking bad, go out in the snow. Which, you know, can't catch a cold out there, right? Attendees may go inside to use restrooms as long as the restrooms are frequently sanitized, whatever that means. Gatherings may occur in outdoor spaces that are covered by umbrellas, canopies, awnings, roofs, and other shade structures, provided that at least three sides of the space, or 75%, are open to the outdoors.

So we're going, like, what if two sides are longer than another side and the fourth side's the smallest? Is that 75%? I don't know. What the fuck does that mean? Or other outdoor space. We're finishing this whole thing. People need to hear this. If multiple such gatherings are occurring, mixing between group gatherings is not allowed. Additionally, multiple gatherings of three households cannot be jointly organized or coordinated to occur in the same public park or other outdoor space at the same time. This would constitute a gathering exceeding the permitted size. The last, the permitted size, the last

two sections here. I'm not going to go through all these. Don't attend gatherings if you feel sick. I'm not going to read that segment. That sounds exactly like it is. I think that's common sense. Everyone can agree with that one. Practice physical distancing and hand hygiene at gatherings. That's another segment I'm not going to read. It's all pretty clear. Wear a face covering to keep COVID-19 from spreading. Again, not going to read that one pretty clear. Number six, keep it short. Gatherings should be two hours or less. The longer the duration, the risk of transmission increases. They're telling you how long you can get together.

Number seven, though, is by far my favorite. Number seven is just one of the most beautiful things I've ever read in my life. Number seven is rules for singing, chanting, and fucking shouting at outside gatherings. The fucking was added in there by me. The state of California did not say that, so don't give them credit for that one. Anyway, singing, chanting, shouting,

and physical exertion significantly increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Don't work out, people, because these activities increase the release of respiratory droplets and fine area soys We just said 21 this country can't read. I don't know what the fucking area soys is but anyway Let's go. Oh, it's Eric. Sorry. My eyes are really bad right now The guy with the glasses is correcting me either way

I don't even know what an aerosol is into Into the air. Because of this, singing, chanting, and shouting are strongly discouraged, but... Here we go. But if they occur, the following rules and recommendations apply. Gavin, what are you doing? All people who are singing or chanting should wear a face covering at all times while singing or chanting, including anyone who is leading a song or chant. Because these... I love... What is a chant?

Anyway. It's like they're making sure they appeal to every culture, which, okay, fine. It's like, you know, let's go Yankees. Okay, fine. All right, yeah, that's every culture right there. Because these activities pose a very high risk of COVID-19 transmissions, face coverings are essential to reduce the spread

of respiratory droplets and fine aerosols. There it is. People who are singing, shouting, chanting, or exercising are strongly encouraged to maintain physical distancing between six feet to further reduce the risk. I wonder if you could get arrested if you don't do that. People who are singing or chanting are strongly encouraged to do so quietly at the at or below the volume of a normal speaking voice so hold on let me let me just do is this edda james or

whoever it's not edda james but somebody. I forget her fucking name. But so if I'm going to sing I Will Survive, it's not, I will survive. It's like, I will survive. I will survive. Let's put the mask on. I will survive. Yeah, I mean, look. So do you understand what I'm saying? Let me land this plane right now.

This is the slippery slope right here. And I'll relate this to other stuff. I've talked about this one. There's themes that can just get hit all day on this. If you're a Second Amendment person and you want a case study for what happens when they come for a gun, like an AK 47 or something like that, which I don't think anyone should have, but the idea that the slippery slope means they'll come for the next one.

Here's your fucking case study, pal. Yeah. But I mean, my, my question for you is when you see this, how can you not appreciate what Cuomo has done? I mean, the when you see this, how can you not appreciate what Cuomo has done? I mean, none of this is grounded in any sort of data.

It's all just absolute bullshit. Like, there's no goal to any of this. It's not like Newsom said all this stuff in this document and said, hey, guys, if we do all of this, this is how our lives will improve. X amount of cases down. X amount of hospitalizations down. X amount of deaths down. Right? This outlines none of that.

At the very least, what Cuomo did was say, okay, if we just abide by these much looser i should say than this set up so let me defend andrew cuomo much looser than set of set of rules we should hopefully see these trends happen which is this number of hospitalizations down this number of cases down this number of deaths down, and by county, right? He did this, he went as small as to say, we need to do this on a county basis, and we can actually only do the opening on a county basis once each individual county makes sure

that they get these things under control. And then he basically said, if we do this and these things go down, we just did a social experiment that says that that that what we're doing is working and so guess what everyone as long as we continue to be careful we can go out and we can we can chant in public we can sing songs we can exercise in the park. You know?

I'm sorry. You're making a great point. I just can't. I, you know, because, I mean, I think when, and it goes back to a question you asked me before we got into this, which was, you know, is New York really open? And I think in a lot of respects, when you look at things relatively,

it is when I'm on busy streets in New York and by busy streets I mean streets with restaurants that are sort of lining the street which I mean a lot of streets are like this but you know how New York is you have streets that have mostly business

and streets that have mostly residential and when I walk have streets that have mostly business and streets that have mostly residential. And when I walk the streets that are mostly business, and yes, it depends on the neighborhood, but I mean, you would think that nothing is, if people were not wearing masks, you'd think nothing was going on. Restaurants are all open, vibrant, people sitting, eating. They're actually open indoors, most of them now. Plexiglass around the tables? No plexiglass. And what I would say is, and this also speaks to the conscient, the con, I can't even say it. I'll just say a simpler word.

The respect and the self-awareness that people have in New York. Not everyone, but a lot of people. But you can do indoor dining now, but I've actually not seen a lot of restaurants start to do it. Even though doing so is, I mean, at this point, probably essential to their livelihoods as a business. But it's because they're looking way longer term down the line. They want to get to a point where they can open up the indoors and know for certain that we're not going to go back to a state where things are going to start to get shut again. You know, they're waiting for that time. And that time is coming. Things are getting a lot better. And like I said, things, when you look at certain streets with the businesses, with the restaurants, yeah, capacity is down, right?

You can't, like, you can't physically go into a store at 100% capacity anymore. They let 50% of people in. But people are going. And you go into Brooklyn, you go on the weekend to williamsburg and i mean the you know bushwick uh or sorry uh bedford ave right up in williamsburg you know where where the apple store is and where all the restaurants are you walk around it's like any other day in the fall you know you go to you at night time on a friday night you go to bushwick, you go on DeKalb, right? It's like nothing has happened, right? So, I mean, I think in a sense it is opening up when you look at things relatively.

And in this world that we're in right now, you have to look at things relatively because, I mean, there's no going, who knows when we're going to go back to what open used to be. I mean, there's no going, who knows when we're going to go back to what open used to be. I mean, I don't know. I honestly don't. And should we? Let me ask a really simple question. Yeah. Once we have a vaccine, let's say we give it like a one month grace period for people to go get it.

Do we stop all this shit? Is that free will at that point? At that point, can you even put on the restrictions anymore because if people don't get it because they think bill gates is injecting windows 95 in there to fuck them into an iranian whatever regime like i you know what i mean yeah like you know what people say on the internet if if they if people have the free will to get it and they choose not to fuck them yeah well look i mean i think that's where i have to agree because at that point what we're saying is we've created a solution and yes that that's where the argument about the fear of not knowing what

you don't know comes into play if you're're afraid of that, then you need to really reevaluate what your priorities are. Because if there's something that's presented to you that's going to stop all of this bullshit from happening, and you don't take it because you're afraid of something that you don't know, I mean, you really need to reevaluate the priorities that you have in your life. I'll be super blunt about that. I'm 100% going to get it. I think anybody, I mean, I think... Stick it in my veins, baby.

Exactly. I mean, I think, look, there are industries out there that need this vaccine. They desperately need this vaccine. Airlines desperately need this vaccine. They desperately need this vaccine. Airlines desperately need this vaccine. Restaurants desperately need this vaccine. Hotels desperately need this vaccine. We need to take it to revive these businesses. It's the only way, if it works so with that said what's the worst possible thing

that can happen and don't tell me a fucking zombie apocalypse because i'm not gonna believe you you'd be surprised what the internet says man oh my god you have to think about it in in in in in that framework. What's the worst possible thing that can happen? I am legend. Realistic. I mean, there's no evidence to suggest, besides, you know, Woody Harrelson in Zombieland, that there's any negative consequence to it.

And so I'm going to take my fear of not knowing what I don't know, and I'm going to replace it with optimism. And I'm going to say, stick that baby in my veins let's revive what's happening here and let's make let's let's make these industries alive again let's give people back their jobs that's really what it boils down to all right everybody i got horo over here i i turned his camera off for the minute we're actually gonna cut this podcast right there because we're just getting warmed up on some stuff. There's a lot of things like we were talking about in the one break we took in the middle of this one

where we want to get to them. This is wild. This kid's insane. So there's going to be a second podcast. We'll see where that one goes. I know where we're going to start. We're going to start on some of the state of the polarization and obviously the big old election coming up and then we'll see where it goes from there but um yeah so stay tuned for part two that's gonna be dropping

probably the same week that i'm dropping this one or whatever but thanks for listening to this one and uh give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.