Julian Dorey Podcast - #21 - Bill Facciolo

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Bill Facciolo is a Developer, Computer Scientist, and an amateur meteorologist. Key Links From Our Conversation: 1. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180402-the-fascinating-world-of-instagrams-virtual-celebrities  2. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/stretching-theory/201809/how-many-decisions-do-we-make-each-day%3famp  3. https://www.google.com/amp/s/gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-dont-be-evil-from-1826153393/amp (Full Links List is in the Shownotes on https://www.trendifier.com) ***TIME STAMPS*** 1:58 - 10:13 ~ Mentality in your 20s; Imposter Syndrome/Success; Millennials' worldview  10:13 - 16:18 ~ "You don't know what you don't know"; Internet 3.0, AI, and Virtual Influencers 16:18 - 27:18 ~ Fake news and the ripple effects it has on culture; Impressions, engagement, & subscription psychology; Psychological conditioning on social media  27:18 - 43:17 ~ "Thought Bubbles" & "Echo Chambers"; Negativity in culture and in humanity itself; Social media and happiness 43:17 - 1:06:27 ~ The Bin Laden Raid & Twitter; The Court of Public Opinion & the real courts; the 24 hour news cycle; Disruptors & Podcasting like Call Her Daddy (CHD); Greg Oden, Kevin Durant, & Risk vs. Reward; Alcoa CEO Paul O'Neill's marriage of data and humanity; the future of people vs. data 1:06:27 - 1:15:27 ~ Companies' "negative" consumer experiences driven by profits; Capitalism: a great system with flaws 1:15:27 - 1:21:29 ~ The point where data becomes the employee and not the human 1:21:29 - 1:29:51 ~ Julian tells a story of going to an Amazon AWS Loft in NYC 1:29:51 - 1:36:43 ~ The need for Federal Anti-Trust Suits (Amazon, Google); Google's algorithm & machine learning 1:36:43 - 1:52:57 ~ Julian brings up the movie Ex-Machina; Google; Why the Google Tagline "Don't be evil" is problematic; Government regulations due to "bad apples"; Jared Dillian's quote about Lehman Brothers 1:52:57 - 1:58:17 ~ Bill uses the three laws of entropy and thermodynamics to explain everything 1:58:17 - 2:06:12 ~ Julian talks about the early days of the US and how fewer choices" created fewer decision points and fewer laws; Columbine & Tec-9's 2:06:12 - 2:13:35... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Because it is new, it is change, and we fight change, and we fight the unknown more than just change. And so because there's the unknown and this is the devil we don't know, we ignore the devil we do know. And within Google's mission statement used to be the phrase, don't be evil. And where has it gone? I don't know really what his path forward is, and I don't think he does either. And honestly, I'm worried about him because it feels like he's spinning tires. Yeah. You know what?

I think a lot of us are in our 20s. I mean, you and I talked about it. It's like, you're, you're not old, but you, you think about not being young anymore. And you think about what the upside is for you. And then you're thinking about, well, what am I really good at? I always, I don't know if I told you about this, but I always heard this quote. I had read it somewhere. I'm sorry. And then I always, I don't know if I told you about this, but I always heard this quote. I had read it somewhere. I'm sorry. And then I always repeated it to myself. I think it was attributed to Jim Carrey. I don't know if he said it though. It's one of those social media like pictures. So you never know. But the quote was the older I get, the more and more I realized just how much people pretend. Yeah. And it's like, when we were were young we were growing up forget like parents and stuff just like people we would see working in a suit or like even teachers or whatever it was like

those guys have figured out like they know what's up like or they know everything about this thing and that thing and then they're also aware of this they're running exactly they're running around guessing just like the rest of us yep Yep. And what's interesting about that is what separates people who are successful in a lot of instances from those who aren't is how you deal with that imposter syndrome. to acknowledge their shortcomings, but also understand that they have an impact on those around them. And not everyone sees the holes in their knowledge. More people see where it exists. You know, you might not see the limitations. And so, for instance, there are certainly areas of life where, circling back for a second, like let's take a healthcare professional, for example. Let's say you have a doctor who specifically is an orthopedist. And they know everything that there is to know about the skeletal system.

You understand bone density, the diseases that go along with it, etc. And they are seen as an expert in that field, but they don't know everything that there is to know about the skeleton and the human body. You don't know every single disease. And when you're faced with a new challenge, when you're faced with something that's beyond your skillset, how you respond to that challenge is do you wilt in that moment of uncertainty or do you rise to the occasion, take what you know and take your best stab at it? And that circles back to exactly what you're saying is everybody's guessing. Even those among us who have the most specialized skill sets, even those among us who are widely regarded as experts, we don't know everything. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that we put on top of all

this that sometimes spoken of and other times isn't is like the concept of success. People, I feel like in their 20s are talking about this all the time, because they don't know what it is. Everyone's taught when they're growing up, you know, okay, get the grades in school, you do this, then you you do this then you do that then you do that and so on and so on it's like that whole plan and then what do they do when you get out of college they pick you up right on the plan exactly they put you right the fuck in into the corporate model and they say oh save this much in your benefit every year in your 401k and by the way you'll you'll get your health care too and then if you do a good job two years from now they'll bump you up x amount and people get on that hamster wheel and

look it's not i don't want to generalize and say whitewash it or whatever for for everyone and say that oh no it works for nobody look corporations got to run they gotta have people who get to the top and these are people that that play the system the right way and work hard and do their thing. But since most people aren't going to do that, a lot of people get into these bigger models or working for big companies or whatever it is, and they do get stuck on that wheel. And they're getting to the point maybe when they get into their mid-20s, especially when they've been out of college a few years, where they start to say, what else is there to it? What else can I do? Why am I doing what I'm doing right now? In some ways, I view that as a uniquely millennial struggle.

And I say that because we as a generation are faced with the erosion of certain social security blankets, name dropped unintentionally um you know we're gonna we're gonna face the issue of medicare not being available for us when we hit a retirement age as it's prescribed nowadays um poor financial planning up front yeah so basically my understanding of it because i've never looked really really deep into that but with like social security and medicaid and things like that we i guess set ourselves on an unintentional war footing all the way back like in the fdr years where we didn't plan for population growth and life expectancy is that pretty much it exponential relationships will damn you every single time yeah

yeah and that and it's also like a major i guess like prisoner's dilemma or something there because if you are a politician and you vote against funding social security or something like that this will be your last term whenever that is that you vote on it so all these politicians are gonna unless they all band together and say we are all voting against it in which case there will be some people back home that say, fuck it, I'm running for Congress. And they'll all get unseated. Like, it's that constant game of, like, self-preservation over long-term preservation for the good of society. Interesting.

I don't know. I think that, you know, circling back to some of the challenges that we face, being in the advent of the digital age, we were brought up with a different set of social Xers, had the concept of a nuclear unit in the family and then also a surrounding community in the neighborhood. And that was pretty universal with the exception of far rural communities. But we had towns, we had neighborhoods, we had blocks that would band together, and you had people that were looking out for each other among millennials i find a lot of us seem to be more geographically individualistic yeah you know um part of that is due to greater availability of cars like the number of cars owned in a median household has risen a lot in the last 20, 30 years. Some of that is availability with

platforms of digital communication. Like it's easier to stay in touch from longer distances, but we, we've developed different social constructs and they're manifesting politically. And we're going to have to find a way as a generation to adapt to the absence of some of those security blankets that were afforded to generations ahead of us. Oh, so when you say manifest politically, you're talking about like Social Security, Medicaid and some of the things that can't be funded. I'm trying to tie it all the way back. And so this actually feeds back into your original point in that we get stuck on this hamster wheel. And that hamster wheel worked out for our parents.

It did. You know, they're going to be pretty decently funded through retirement if they made some shrewd financial decisions. And I say that as a middle class child. Well, not anymore, but you get the idea. Grew up in a middle class household. And so we need to be a little more aggressive in the way that we plan for our own individual futures because we – and I think in some ways we're prepared for that because we're a little bit more individualistic in parts of our lifestyle. But at the same time, I don't know that the bulk of our generation is financially aware of that. You know what it is, though, with like our parents and, you know, generations before that, too, that they had in common that we don't, specifically referring to like millennials and Gen Z and anyone that's coming after. Our parents didn't know what they didn't know and they were cool with that because there was no way for them to know. And let me expand upon that before like you know

i send you down the wrong rabbit hole here what i mean is literally having the ability to explore an endless web of information whether it be for positive or negative or everything in between on the internet allowed the kid who grew up on a farm in in kansas to know a lot more than his dad did growing up on that farm even if when he learned about other things in other cultures let's just use an example even when he learned about what goes on at a marketing company in new york city or something even if he went there and then couldn't relate to it because he wasn't a part of it he at least had a predisposition to like, oh, that exists. You know, like our parents, as crazy as this sounds,

yes, they had the first forms of mass communication. They had TV on a massive scale. They obviously had radio on a massive scale. There was, you could disseminate information. They had phones on a massive scale, not portable like we did growing up. But their reality of what different cultures were really like wasn't crazily off like the first conquistadors that came to America and had to learn that there was a new culture here. As crazy as that sounds, it wasn't like that far because the exponential access to info that we have is just well beyond anything they ever did. For sure.

That's a good point though. And so that makes me wonder, what is that access to information going to look like beyond us? What's that going to look like for our kids? I mean, everyone talks about like, what is the internet 3.0? Because like, we're at the dawn of that right now, right? But I mean, it always comes back to AI. Like, there's going to be some sort of reality. If you're asking about like, what kids are going to know that we couldn't understand,

I actually think we might be seeing the first frontier of that. And I'm a little bit afraid of this this just because I don't like the implications. But there was an article on the BBC, I talked about it in another podcast, where they were talking about like fake influencers and how they birthed a movement of what's called virtual influencers online, which are what they sound like. They're people they are fake creations like little cgi's very real profiles exactly exactly so there was one in 2017 that came up out of nowhere a super model named shudu and no one knew who she was but models were literally following her because they're like oh my god her aesthetic is incredible her you know she was a full-blown model so the

the work that was coming on there was unbelievable and they're like what oh my god, her aesthetic is incredible. You know, she was a full-blown model. So the work that was coming on there was unbelievable. And they're like, what publication is this in? This is crazy. She got quickly over 100,000 followers and it turned out she was a CGI creation. And so her owner or whatever you call them, the person that created her, like the account owner, had to announce like, oh, she's not real. This is not a person. And it opened up this Pandora's box that eventually led to accounts like Lil Miquela. You ever seen that one?

I have, yes. Yeah. So she literally has singles on YouTube and shit. She has like charity causes. She's like friends with celebrities and stuff. So in this BBC article, this one kid from Michigan, he was an 18-year-old. And look, could he be an outlier maybe but he was quoted in this article and the way he spoke scared the shit out of me because he started talking about little michaela and making her human he was calling her she and

talking about what what mick stands for and what she's all about how she cares about her fans and all these things. And so I guess the people who were writing the article were asking him a bunch of questions. So the quotes came in context that way. And they were obviously trying to figure out whether he differentiates the two and like between what's real and what's not. And what he said, and I guess some of the virtual influencers are in a way to blame for this, but what he said is that the influencers we see who are human already come to us through a phone. Yeah. They already come to us through the internet.

The channel's the same. We don't know who they are or where they're from or what they're about. So what makes them different? This is basically, I'm paraphrasing, but this is what you're saying. What makes them different from is basically i'm paraphrasing but this is what you're saying what makes them different from little michaela and i look at that and so you ask me how do what do i think the next frontier of information is for our kids and i look at the development of of the way that we can make what seems what's not real seem completely real i don't know what like it's existential to think about it but i don't know what that looks like, it's existential to think about it. It is. I don't know what that looks like, but it's got to be something tied to that when I think about it.

Now, what I find interesting is that you use the word existential there as kind of a defense mechanism, as like a throw the hands up. I don't want to deal with it. Get this out of here. There's absolutely no reason that i want to be thinking about something that's out of heavy but that is exactly how you find yourself in this mess in the first place yeah it's exactly how you find yourself in this mess in the first place because if no one is willing to tackle what's real and what's fake now at the onset before that becomes so horrendously widespread that we can't render a distinction,

that's how you end up in a dystopia. That's how you end up in a surveillance state. That's how you end up in a situation where real is no longer dictated by our own perception. Real is dictated by forces beyond our control. Or what the mob says is real. No, it's – that opens up a whole can of worms. I love this. Let's go.

It sure does. Let's go. It sure does, buddy. So let me ask you about this then. How do you define – and you know what? We put the term fake news on it when we talk about it. I guess it came out like in the 2016 campaign with the two of them going at each other but i like to take it beyond that because news is like what's what's the term

it's it's very sensational you know it's the news like you turn on what's going on in the world whatever i don't think it puts it to a serious enough effect when we just say fake news, right? It's almost like a hashtag at this point. But I look at it like fake or false information. Yes. I look at the dissemination of that and I see the ripple effects because you can start one little subject matter where you get the wrong piece of fake information making it into the mainstream because somebody puts it there and then it spins out into the next things that are born off of that and the next things, and then it's out of control.

How do we, like, have you ever thought or tried to come up with a concept of how we handle that without breaking down some human rights barriers and some American citizen right barriers in order to stop that kind of spread? I can't say that I have. And honestly, I don't know that I'm necessarily equipped to tackle that question. I think that there are a lot of brilliant technological minds that are already trying to tackle that. But exactly what you brought up is the greatest challenge is, let's say you develop some sort of brilliant algorithm and it, you know, shuts down five nines worth like 99.999% of falsely originated facts, facts. Facts. What happens in that 0.001% where you're shutting down real information? Where do we as a society select our risk acceptance? At what threshold is our tolerance for accuracy going to be accepted because you know we we we discuss the sharing of false information today as though it's a new challenge and in some ways it is the proliferation of it particularly how fast how fast it can spread yes that's absolutely a more recent and modern challenge

but i think people have been lying since the dawn of time oh yeah everybody has an agenda that they want to push and what about like stories down the line like whisper down the lane with stuff absolutely story changes once it gets through like two people it's different than whatever the original story was and was it true even that's an experiment you play when you're what four or five years old preschool kindergartenchool, kindergarten status? Now put Twitter behind it. That is... You can reach anybody. Absolutely.

Any platform. You know what I mean? You have startup accounts that, you know, you tweet five or six inflammatory things and get discussions going. 10K followers the next day. Yeah, that's a crazy concept to me. I mean, maybe because I'm just not... I don't think, like, let's tweet something inflammatory today. Like, that's a crazy concept to me i mean maybe because i'm just not i don't think like let's tweet let's tweet something inflammatory today like that's just

not what i do but yeah there's people who are able to to get in there and then people are like i like the way this guy thinks you know and who is it who like that's how you get when when you look at like foreign countries interfering in our discourse foreign countries interfering in our discourse, forget elections, interfering in our discourse, period. Because everything – politics is downstream from culture and culture is downstream from politics and vice versa. So it's all part of the same thing. So interfering in our cultural discourse and driving what we think and also how we think and us not knowing it. And so, I think about that when it's just a matter of them being able to get accounts on these platforms. And even if they get nine that people see right through, what about the 10th that they don't? That then gets that type of following. Not even

a following, but just is able to start the discourse somewhere and get someone to say, oh yeah, that was right what that guy said. I'm going to say that to all my people now. Well, in advertising and in marketing, they have, you know, you obviously have your metrics for subscriptions, for engagements. But the one that is potentially the most impactful in a social media sense is impressions. And how many times does this post appear on someone's feed can you define an impression for us an impression is exactly what i just said it's an appearance within someone's feed like does it show up on the screen my question is does that have to mean that they physically or not that i guess it is physically that they saw it or that it was put into their feed and maybe they didn't see it.

So maybe that maybe that is defined specifically by the tech platform that is hosting the advertisement. I really don't know that. I would assume that it is presented to the user and at some point it was displayed for maybe a minimum number of frames and then it was gone. Got it. And something registers as an impression. Like for YouTube, I would imagine an impression is something that shows up in that sidebar of like related videos, regardless of whether or not you actually saw it. That would be my best guess.

An engagement is where the user might take more time to look at it or you had some reason to believe that they actually read the text or they clicked on it or something of that nature. Click the picture, media media stuff like that you know you have site analytics that take you to the next the next stage you've got scripts that run in the background that say hey this user moved their mouse over this at this time uh they engaged with this particular portion of it like you could have even down to the pixel tracking of, you know, where exactly did this draw the most attention? The analytics behind it are, you know, the possibilities are endless. It's wild.

But bringing it back a couple of steps, we were talking about the whole how far does fake fake news proliferate and so you don't have to get the subscribers you have to get the impressions and so within social media there are multiple ways to do that you can have your following or you can have a post that goes viral of its own nature it takes on its own life those are far more dangerous in my opinion there is this quote it's a famous quote i don't know who the hell said it but it's taught you hear like motivational speakers say it when they're talking about attacking something to get great at and how you got to beat away at the same fundamentals and they'll say like if you shoot an oak tree a thousand times it's not going to come down but if you shoot it a thousand times in one place it it's gonna yes

right in a way and maybe i'm just reverse psychology in my head it's kind of the opposite here if you have bad intentions on social media your job is like let's twitter's just an easy example because you're limited to 280 characters unless you do a thread in which case you still kind of are to get someone's attention you're limited to the first one right and it's quick written word that people can pick up right away whereas on youtube they may need to watch a video for four minutes to really understand what it's about or you know what i mean so on on twitter you may not hit maybe the same subject matter in a different context a thousand tweets in a row you may just hit a thousand different subject matters that fall under a certain type of personality type or line of thinking or way to to reach people based on

things that are trending or ideas that other people may have that they want to find people who agree with them on it such that someone comes across it and maybe not the first 10 maybe not the next 10 but the 50th tweet or the 100th tweet it's different for everyone suddenly it clicks and they're like oh yeah that no that you know what i think that's what i think boom now they're on that train and now they're in that echo chamber of that confirmation bias of whoever this was don't even know who it was they just put the idea out there and i agree with it so fuck it i'm in and that must mean it's real and at a certain point, when you are, you know, once you've hit that subscribe button, it's, think of it this way. Subscriptions are easily turned off and turned on, right?

Like, you can click the button, it's turned on. You can click the button, it's turned off. But how often really, and this is a direct personal question to you, how often really do you find yourself unsubscribing from a media source rarely interesting to think about right you subscribe to more than you've removed and in a sense there are benefits to that absolutely you should always be widening your perspective you should be listening to conflicting voices conflicting ideas but what if you screw up what if you fall for? And in the event that you do, and you end up in a situation where you have subscribed to an AI, perhaps, you know, as we're discussing these dystopian possible futures of Internet 3.0, just based on personal experience, you're a lot less likely to unsubscribe from that unless it is directly refuted as false or sullied in the court of public opinion and so if you if you hit that subscription you continue to be exposed and then more and more of this information is late

or information is laid out before you and you get more and more of this stimulus and it's conditioning. It's basic human behavior that you start to take that on as part of your own set of beliefs. That was the word I was looking for yesterday with someone and I couldn't think of it, but that's exactly what it is. It's conditioning. And it all comes full circle too. Like you see all those people on Instagram using like InstaZood and all that stuff for follower growth. The whole concept of that is it automatically unfollows people for you after following them because it's betting that, you know, some of them will follow back and then they'll forget you're there. Exactly. And then they'll just keep it.

You're right. Like people don't – it's just like not a thing because it involves organization and effort. You got to go in and organize what you're going to be exposed to and you got to think. And people are like, nah, I don't want to do it. I'll do it tomorrow. You just said the organization word and I have like red blaring sirens in my head. Yeah. The whole corporate speak.

I mean, dude, and that's the other thing like when it comes to false information getting out there the bubbles that exist aren't necessarily one person or a group of people or like one type of place or one type of tribe even well i guess technically the last one and everything is some sort of tribe but like there's such a level of distrust in all media now like I'd say mainstream media in general just talking about their traditional outlets but even online where you have media that is more open internet culture and also going to tell you or at least strongly imply if they're left or right or whatever their bias is. But you see these different what I call thought bubbles form where it's a constant war to them. It's a war on ideas.

And so they can't – like I see good people go into it who are – who have the right intentions and are very, very smart. But then they get so married to the fact that we can't give up any ground like if we're wrong about something we can't say it that it gets to the point that they're like we can't even recognize it so then they just start saying things and getting into these patterns where they're spewing stuff that's not real. I mean, you saw it, you saw it 1000% over the summer when it got really out of control. And this was not just mainstream outlets. When people were showing videos of like, you know, a protest and saying this is a peaceful protest, and there's like buildings burning and shit behind them. That's when you know we've crossed the chasm of like being able to step out of what we're doing.

And it also defeats the purpose because then you let things like that overtake the right intentions. You know, you saw what happened. Like you and I were talking earlier about bad apples. There are bad apples in everything. Yes. So like protests started in june and that one was in direct response to like george floyd everyone saw that was upset and a lot of people who came out it's a combination of they had been inside for three months so they really

definitely felt like they wanted to get out that was one thing but the other thing was they were motivated to get out because they're like this is bullshit yeah like we we want to see improvement here and the cause is just in that respect right and then what happens you get some people who are like bad motherfuckers coming in there and they do some bad things and then what happens that the media gives them attention it's online media too again i want to stress that it's not this is not just this is online media too it's not just of course fox cnn and all these people but they give it the attention and they show other people who aren't in that bubble the use and the means of the world oh we got peaceful protests here with like the city's burning and it's like you look at that

and you're not in the bubble and you're like yeah yeah that's not that's not very peaceful that that that doesn't look peaceful to me. And then, you know, people are unique. We have disagreements with each other. But we spend so much time, so much time focusing on the bad. Focusing on the things that divide us. Bill, it's literally evolutionary. think about it what what were the fucking caveman doing they were waking up and they're like all right by sundown today i hope i don't get mauled by a fucking bear is that a positive thought coming out of bed no it's not

you know they didn't they didn't have wheels at one point they had to lug around shit and then one day some guy like sharpened a rock in a round way and said oh my god and one day they rubbed some sticks together and they found fire and that was the best positive they had the rest of their life was there's no entertainment there's survival how am i eating today how am i not getting eaten today so what do we expect from us when it comes to our relationship with positivity and negativity on the flip side of that i disagree with you okay and the reason i say that is because humans are naturally social creatures and we have always we have always framed our life as a as a conflict between challenges and joys all right so you know what what the original caveman viewed as the challenge of

how am i going to lug this bear carcass back to my den so that i can cook it with my newfound fire what was a moment of survival for them is to bring this full circle in the eyes of a black lives matter activist is a fight for survival against a system that's rigged against them you know it may be of a of a different time scale of pressure versus you know not eating for three weeks versus maybe eventually running into an unfortunate circumstance with a police officer five years down the road. But to them, it's still the strife that's top of mind. It's the number one challenge that they feel they face in any given day. And they don't think about the fact that I say they,

but that's not right. I mean, we, all of us together, we don't think about the joys that we have around us, the people that make us smile, the food that we have on our plate when we have it. You know,

our, our choice of career in America, where we get to decide how we want to make our livings. You know, we don't, we don't think about all the, all the good things that we take for granted. And even in the media, we don't think about the good things that people do and we don't celebrate our accomplishments. It doesn't sell.

It doesn't sell, but maybe we need to make it sell. I think everything you just said, because you started that by saying we are naturally social creatures which is a thousand percent correct and i think that it then takes the overall argument and actually contradicts itself i'll tell you why interesting okay because what what is what's facebook called what's instagram called what's what's Facebook called? What's Instagram called? What's Twitter called? All this.

What's it called? Social media. Exactly. They put the word in it. They did. Because the idea is you can connect with an unlimited number of people on this world who just happen to use that same communal platform. But when you're doing it, you're not doing it in person.

You're not doing this. You're not talking with someone. You're not feeling the actual vibe of their presence. You are them like that kid from the bbc article i mentioned a while ago where i was talking about he couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't you are seeing them through a reality that they create for you and in a non-direct interaction way so the reason i bring that up is because there's if we are naturally social beings to bring this through to the point of like negativity versus positivity we've created an environment where the place where we go to be most social and feel most social technically isn't with other human beings that's why you go to a dinner table in america and everyone's on

their fucking phone that's why you know when a dinner table in America and everyone's on their fucking phone. That's why, you know, when people watch this movie, The Social Dilemma, which now 40, 45 million people in this country have watched, listen, I'm very happy they made it. It was excellent. It was a very, very good movie.

Well done. I enjoyed it. Eye-opening. It is damning. That's the thing. Told me nothing I didn't already know. And then when I heard everyone else's reaction to it, I realized very few people have thought about this.

True. Very few people have actually decompressed and thought about what the decompression is from social media and things like that. And you see, you know, one of the most compelling scenes in there, which was an exaggeration to be fair. But it wasn't that far off, was where the mom, the mom – because it was a document. If people haven't seen it, it's a Netflix documentary that goes through basically how the social platforms were designed to keep us coming back to it over and over and get us addicted to it and feel things that we're not supposed to and create echo chambers and all that. So check it out. But within it, they would have little scenes with actors, like almost as a part of the story there. So as they're going through the documentary, they would have these little scenes. And there was a scene where there was a family where the mom said, we're going to start something new. And I've heard families do this before. We're not going to have any phones at the table for dinner. and she went around and collected the phones and put them in like a jar and out like everyone didn't know how to talk to each other because they weren't used to like not like they'd go

down to feel their their pocket for that phantom vibration and it wouldn't be there and then the 16 year old was flipping out a 15 or 16 year old girl was flipping out and so out of nowhere they're like wait where'd she go and she went over to the jar and it had a lock on it, the jar, and she smashed it and got her phone out and went upstairs. Like nothing happened. Now, is that an exaggeration? Yes. But that is how she like as a Gen Z or 16 year old right there, that is how she knew to be the first frontier of being social. So when I look at this positivity versus negativity, and you talk to me about like the news and how we don't, we need to make the positive stories sell. If they did, they would have already. And maybe we do have to find a way, but that involves like legislation and a slippery slope. The negativity sells and these kids were raised on it.

But come at me on this. I don't know that I agree with that. And the reason I say that is we find ourselves in a society where the best and most compelling writers and marketers have found a system that works where you can sell the bad. So if it ain't broke, don't break it. You know that's how businesses run. Yeah. Break it. You know that's how businesses run. captures but there needs to be a sense of social responsibility among those marketing and social media tycoons where you need to realize you're you're dealing with a conditionally renewable resource and the reason i say that is there's always going to be people and consumers for your media but will they stick with your platform will they associate you with a positive experience and so if you lean too far into the negative and people just get mad using your platform it will eventually fade and lose its

popularity but if you give them nuggets of positivity and a little feel-good story every it will eventually fade and lose its popularity. But if you give them nuggets of positivity and a little feel-good story every now and again, you re-invoke that process of positive feedback and positive reinforcement that the entire social dilemma is founded upon. Which these platforms do, by the way. Which they do. And they have that perfected. But what I think we need to realize is that it is perfected for them for now. What we're failing to acknowledge is the long-term and chronic effects on the morale of our society. Think about it today, 2020 versus 2010 which version of america is happier i i the argument needs to be 2010 you picked a bad year but yes well yes i did let's say let's

say like 2007 okay yeah 20 2012 even let's go with either of those you know the point stands compare present day to a point in relatively recent history where these social media platforms were let's let's pick 2012 facebook was firmly entrenched as you know king as the king my space is gone by the wayside rest in peace um where is my space what if what if all this is MySpace, Tom? What if he's like pulling the strings? What if he's like in a bunker somewhere and like all the social media companies report to MySpace, Tom? Ladies and gentlemen, this is what happens when you reject your top eight. Yeah.

If you know, you know. Go ahead. Go ahead. Oh, man. I haven't thought about that in a while but 2012 facebook is king twitter is on the rise um vine is just starting to make headway as its predecessor to tiktok snap is in its infancy and you know we're we're in this this period of unprecedented growth of social media and you know it's it's before it's really totally got its hooks in. Yeah.

Were we happier as a society in 2012 than we are today? Yes. How so? Can you put your finger on the pulse as to why? We were less consistently connected. Because let me even add a layer to it. 2012, mass adoption of iPhone was coming in at that point. Yes, it was.

It was, but we were at like iPhone 4. Sounds right. Right? It didn't have – it was not – the iOS along with the phone itself and capabilities did not go nearly as far it's it had already gone far let's be fair but it did not go nearly as far as it did even in 2016 2017 let alone today so there was statistically our attention spans were I I'm trying to remember the Microsoft data correctly it was probably still somewhere in the range of like 10, 11 seconds back then. Now it's like four or something like that.

But our attention spans were longer. Our phone usage was probably, and I don't know this for sure, so we can check this later, was probably statistically a little lower still. I would agree with that. Right? still i would agree with that right and to your point there was not there was not as much there was not as much wide-ranging high quality constant social media in your face where it was also the first point of discourse for everything that happened and what i mean by that is is the mainstream tv was already in trouble but the medium was still

much more powerful then than it is now the cord cutting was not at that level netflix did not netflix as an example was like not an enormous thing they were a smaller player they were they were they were big they were still mailing dvds i think maybe even even in 2012. But you saw a massive shift occur really like starting right before then and through like 2014, 2015. And after that, I mean, it was all mass adopted and these became the platforms. own like oh we've rung a bell here and it's not going to be unrung is when there was between the media the government and random fucking eyewitnesses on the ground when we were getting a tweet by tweet live report of osama bin laden's killing on may 1st 2011 that's when we should have known oh there's some inconsistency here not even just that 100 because no one recognized that at the time people are like oh no you know it's still media

sources like they'll they'll win out like they're obviously they have all the right intentions in mind like we were we still had that most people still had that thought there was the concept though that like oh this is where we're going to go. This is point one. You don't go to TV first to find out what's happening. You go to Twitter. Well, it's faster reporting. It's more instantaneous.

We wanted to know because that was such a pivotal moment in modern American history where we wanted to know the second it was going to happen yes we knew we were hunting we were literally in the throes of a manhunt of one of our greatest ideological rivals that we hadn't thought about in like five years either yeah as far as like the hunt and then the hunt was suddenly on and then people are like oh my god like is it bin laden and then they're looking at they're looking at the guy on the ground tweeting like lots of planes green lights men just went into building that's back there that everyone passes every day walking their their their cattle down the road and you see that guy and then you see like cbs news can confirm was just source inside the war room at the white house you know what i mean it's this mix of and it's like a microcosm of podcasting too you went from you there was a barrier there was a middleman to

you being able to get information out or be able to do your job or become a reporter or something like that to fuck it you you buy a mic you you know how to upload and everything and you figure out how to use your phone and know people and network and then try to get sources like that's what people did yes sir it's it's so bizarre but you know one of the things that i that you hit me with that i can't get out of my head because it just it oversimplifies it in in the best way is that it also changes how we judge things so we talk we use this buzzword all the time but the court of public opinion but you took it all the way where you were like we have the court of public opinion and then technically we have the courts to handle things but it doesn't matter by the time it hits the court it's already decided and then people don't change their mind. How does this happen where we get so locked?

Like we hear even just minimal facts, but we immediately associate 12, 15, a thousand different things and say, no, that's what happened and that's it. I don't care what anyone tells me. This goes back to my argument about social media and conditioning. So your, your subscription to a, to an outlet, which is what Twitter accounts are, their media outlets. Um, you, you subject yourself to their stimulus and you, you hit that button because it's a vote of confidence because you believe in what that account has to say. That's what a subscription really means.'s i am interested in and i subscribe to the words thoughts and ideologies put forth by this social media account you might not realize that that's what you're doing but in a way because of the plasticity of the human mind it is

and so we we get to the point where you know know, you've probably, if you've subscribed to one pundit, you've subscribed to four, you've subscribed to 10. And for the vast majority of us, a lot of them are probably like-minded and are going to interpret issues in the right way. And so we get conditioned. Or what they assume is the right way. Yes. And so we get this barrage of information all at once and we react to it emotionally instead of taking time to process it because that's what Twitter is. Twitter is about the fast paced emotional reaction. Can I get the first reply to get more likes and retweets and attention?

And it's fast paced and it's designed to be that way because that's their model. But we end up not media and goes to the course of many decades. From the onset of the 24-hour news cycle in what I believe it was the 80s is when we had the first one. Maybe the 90s. Maybe early 90s. CNN, I guess, was like the first one, right? And so ever since then, the pace has quickened and quickened and quickened and the amount has increased and we've given ourselves less time to process less time to think less time to rationalize and grapple with difficult issues and more time to be flooded

with more information than we can handle. And as that cycle continues, our collective ability to respond decreases because we get more and more emotional. And studies have shown, neurological studies have shown, I can pull up three or four of them right now, that when you are presented with an increased degree of acute and or chronic stress,

your ability to respond to emotional stimuli decreases substantially it is notable there is a positive correlation there the more we flood ourselves the dumber we become and unfortunately also the less happy because we constantly have something to think about and we and and it tends to fall in the same thought pattern it's not like you're there's not there are not enough people who are grappling with the possibility let alone the potential of things and like i look at it with podcasting anything that happens like podcasting disrupted a lot of media, particularly radio, obviously, but it disrupted other things and it became, it also disrupted the written word in many ways. It disrupted even like some of documentary culture and things like that. the power structures pay to catch up and they try to come in and own it this happens this has happened in every single thing in human history it's not just like podcast it's everything and so like the best example like another one like nbc has peacock now you know nbc does streaming

yeah well why did they do that because streaming came in and took over the world so they're like oh well i guess we got to get involved. Got to get a share of that a lot of the content that comes in and then gets flooded through marketing and dollars behind it is based on strictly data of what people want right and you lose sight of how people feel you are you are touching on a concept of corporate research that is very interesting to me go off because um every every decision that a corporate conglomerate will make and i will take for instance um let's let's use financial services since it's a background that is common to both of us um every decision that a company makes about whether or not to enter an emerging market or

whether or not to try to create a new product or invade a space is based on and backed by several multi-million dollar research efforts and they can afford to do it that's why you develop a balance sheet that supports flexibility in the future. But they're going in not understanding a humanistic aspect of is this a good thing to do? They're going in with the primary mode of is there money to be made? And what are the zeros and ones that back it? What are the binary decision points across all these different pieces of data that say, this is a great idea. And listen, I am not anti-data at all. Data is critical. If you are not integrating it into your decisions, you're blind. Like you're missing something.

You're a fool. Yes. There needs to be absolutely aspects of that however we it's like everything else we do one or the other we think we may do both but we ignore the way the people who we're trying to reach or why they want to feel a certain way and what's going to make them feel that way, like on an inherent human level. And we go for all the numbers or we just go for how they're going to feel and ignore all the numbers and then don't have a plan around it. So like you said, the corporates obviously err on the side of the numbers in this case but like i i looked at the podcasting realm and i see all these people like even shows that do well because they have a lot of money behind them they overthink it for sure they are trying to they they have essentially not and by the way

not all of them at all i'm i do not want to over generalize i'm saying some like you know within the subset of the top 150 shows and things like that they have essentially taken what was the production of radio and everything that came with it and simply transferred it to where you play it on demand why would they not they had a successful platform before why can't it succeed again because it got it and it can but you're right for a short time especially when you have the money and power behind it it can but then they wonder why certain shows and i say certain shows because what when when these companies come in and stuff what is the every man then who's coming and try to do they're like oh well npr is doing that i must

need to do it like that they follow the data. So then they're shocked when certain shows come in and follow none of those rules and fucking run past all of them on the charts. It's because they understand like, hey, there is a certain – maybe a certain category of issue or a certain type of show or a certain type of personality that people are going to enjoy and I can give them these things or I can't. But there's also like how people feel and what makes them loyal and what makes them feel like out of all the hours in their week and all the things they can be doing, they're going to be listening to you. And so what you find, I would imagine in that space is you think about the three different types of appeals within writing. You have your appeal to ethics writing you have your appeal to ethics you have your appeal to logic and your appeal to emotion pathos logos ethos i believe is what you were taught in school god you remember that good for you i tried buddy um we didn't we didn't spend all that money on education for nothing did we i guess not but um so data- driven decisions lend themselves towards an appeal to logic, even in the decision making process.

And they neglect the other two. And there's money to be made there. And I respect that decision. And I am not decrying business for the sake of business. That's not I work in a business. That's not, I work in a business, that's fine. But that only provides you with sustained, moderate, sometimes reasonably successful growth. It does not give you your new titan. And so if you can back reasonable growth and use that to maintain a position of dominance within an industry, then good on you.

You're doing the right thing for yourself by only appealing to logic, by only using data-driven metrics to drive your decision-making. But for an upstart, for the everyman, we're not afforded that same luxury. We don't have millions of dollars waiting in our coffers to throw at market research. We just don't have it. The means are not afforded to us. And so we're left with, and this is part of the beauty of the American economy and capitalism,

other avenues through which we can develop our success and become upstarts and those are typically your disruptive shows that appeal to passion that appeal to human interest to ethics you know that's how you gain new new audience new appeal yeah at least in at least from what I can see yeah like everyone was so shocked by like call her daddy come on yeah that I really don't believe would have ever been started as a show by a major corporate outlet and you say well you know picked up by barstool well yeah well barstool picked it up when it was done barstool would start it and barstool is like they are technically corporate now technically but they pretty much build their

entire world on reminding themselves that corporate sucks and like we're not going to do that so some cynics will say well there's still an aspect of it sure of course the personalities there and the fact that they're constantly publicly facing that helps against that but what i was going to say is like some people may say well howard stern's been the biggest show on sirius for a long time you remember when howard stern took over radio what that was like he was there they're like this will never go this will never and he took it by storm so much so that when sirius came to buy him he was they're they're like this will never go this will never and he took it by storm so much so that when sirius came to buy him he was already the biggest thing so of course they bought him

just like anyone if they could would buy call her daddy right now as a data-driven decision yeah yes one of maintenance not one of emergence yes exactly and so people see these these things rise and they it's hindsight is 2020 they're like oh i see why that works now oh yeah the data supports that you know all these all these females want to want to talk about you know men and how much they suck and and and also like their sex lives and stuff and then men are going to want to listen to it too so it'll have a 50 50 audience of course every corporate says that now looking to call her daddy but like well now you have data to reflect on that backs it up exactly exactly because now they're like oh we have the data point but they don't look at it that way they're like oh no we would have known this all along because the data would have told us no it wouldn't have if you had heard a cut of that show

before it ever got heard publicly you probably would have said no the data reflects that this is like too dirty or you know women don't want to hear other women talk this way whatever insert insert line here and then it became one of the biggest podcasts in the world because they did it bootstrap and they did it their way and so that brings up an interesting point of your you find yourself wondering how do you manage the conflicting priorities between being first to market and having an original idea and mitigating your risk of flop and the real answer is the most successful shows have a very high flop chance huge you don't hear about the flops. You, of course you don't. They flopped. But you find that throughout the industries. Who takes on the most risk in finance?

Venture capitalists. Who strikes it the biggest? Venture capitalists. You know, they're putting their own coffers in with no guarantee of return. And sometimes it's gone. Sometimes they strike it big. Same thing happens in athletics you know you got it you got a guy who's on course to make the uh nfl tears his meniscus in his mcl career is shot huge flop potentially you'll never hear the names greg odin versus kevin durant

you know there isn't especially where the nba was then as a pretend maybe today you would say differently just because of how the game progressed especially through the warriors and stuff like that and where it's at right now with the type of game but in the 07 draft if you did not take greg odin overall there was something wrong with your scout department right he had no history of knee problems he was a seven foot one or seven foot two player with a crazy vertical who could who could dribble who could he had some of the best post moves coming out of college of all time he was a passer he was the best defensive player on the floor immediately all these things and you had kevin durant who was also a freak an amazing

score from texas but you know you could get there's more likely even though he was an outlier in his in his height and stuff he was very thin and slight and there's a higher chance that you're going to have really good scores coming to a draft in the future yep the chances of you getting a greg odin were you know once every 15 20 years maybe yeah for a guy that size so of course portland took him but it's still a chance and so then when odin tears his meniscus right away as a rookie and then never gets his knee to recover and just repeatedly gets injured and kevin durant becomes one of the 15 greatest players to ever play the game hey too bad it was the risk that's the way it goes and it's it's it's inherent in anything.

And that's why a lot of great things don't happen because people don't want to take that risk. They don't want to do – people don't want to even take the shot of running the opposite way that everyone else is. Why do you think people lose their ass when the stock market goes down? Because they sell because they get scared when in reality they should be getting more aggressive. That's why you double down. Right. Maybe it's like my background and I'm like – what's the word? I'm like morbidly excited about that stuff.

When the stock market is going down, I'm like, let's fucking go, baby. Yeah, keep going. Your time is showing. Keep going down. Your time is showing. Because I'll just throw in money every day. Like, oh, it's down another 10% today. Boom, again.

Like, that's how I'm trained. Most people, like, and that's just because of where I work and stuff. Most people, they don't think like that, you know? And in corporations, it's actually when, like, we started this with the mix of data and humanity basically and and the perfect balance you ever read um malcolm gladwell uh it's it's escaping me the name of the book he wrote he wrote like the tipping point he wrote um talking to strangers is his most recent one he wrote outliers outliers that's the one i've read yes right i don't remember which one this was in maybe it was outliers but he talked about and i forget the guy's name but he talked about a guy

who took over the job ceo of i believe it was alcoa it was like a big steel company i think that was it maybe back in like the 90s okay and when he took over their sales were down their production was down their profit all the regular corporate shit was down. And he came in and he did something. I don't know if Malcolm even laid it out this way, but I'll lay it out this way. He followed data and humanity in a perfect focus in one place. He said, we're going to do one thing. He gets up to give his first speech

to all the shareholders at the annual share meeting. And everyone's like, all right, what's he going to say? How are we going to improve the company? How are we going to, how's our stock going to go up? And he gets up there and gives a speech about employee safety. That's all he talked about. He said, in order for us to be a great company and to make a lot of money and to be a place where people want to work our Only focus from this point forward is going to be employee safety and he listed off all the stats of employee accidents that had happened Not just at his company but at other companies too and how they were but I think they were behind the curve and He said if our employees are afraid to go to work because

some bad shit might happen to them, how are we going to get good people to work here? And how are we going to get them to do their best job when they're worried about what might happen to them? They're not focused on the task at hand. They're focused about survival. Right. So he was focusing on the humans that worked for him. And what he saw is that the data would then also support that if people felt safe working at the company and going into the plant every day and like they could do their job that they were already good at and do it and not have to worry about am i going to lose my fingers or my hand and feel like you know also this place this company cares about me he said what's going to happen to the output when we do

that what's going to happen to the quality of the product what's going to happen to our overall volume straight up now while he was saying all this he didn't say any of the number stuff right he just talked about the safety because he wanted to hit on the fact he didn't need to get up there and say hey i'm looking at the data too he wanted to who works for him data or humans humans work for him so he wanted to hit on the humans so they heard it and so that was the focus that they did and he created these stipulations where if managers didn't follow it they were fired and that i forget the numbers i don't have them but it went like this when when when he retired he was the greatest ceo in their

history and everyone got it but the day he gave that speech all the shareholders were running out of the room to call their brokers to sell the stock right but they didn't understand that this was a ceo who was marrying the two and he just wasn't telling them it's a beautiful thing now an interesting point that you touched on there is who was working for him the people or the data and maybe this is a this is a topic for another time. I don't know. We can, we can touch on this now if you want. Let's go. Um, dude,

you can take this wherever you want. That's going to change who works for you. The people are the data that's gonna change. That's scary. All right. But that's the whole point. You got to find that. That's the whole point of AI and deep learning is that there's going to come a point where our,

and this is, this is some singularity type stuff that I'm talking about right here. But, point of AI and deep learning is that there's going to come a point where our, and this is, this is some singularity type stuff that I'm talking about right here, but, um, there's, there's going to come a point where our ability to analyze through deep learning and our understanding of people is going to surpass the ability of the human brain.

You know, there's, there's going to come a point where we're going to be able to accomplish so much more with machine than we can with man that the data's going to work for you more than the people do.

And so the focus, and I think you're already seeing it in certain areas, the focus will shift to less of, you know, how can I get a better product by caring for my people? And more to how can I better get a better product? Words are hard. How can I make a better product by massaging my data? All right. Now you're bringing us back full circle though. Okay. I don't know. maybe this was like a half hour ago or something

you were talking about and we hit on it for a minute about the need to create positive news as the outlet and creating that impetus and you even mentioned that like when it's repeatedly negative over time it will die but again even if that's true and so far at least with the social platforms it's mostly not because the last one to really die was myspace because facebook even like we say it's dead but yeah your fucking grandma's on there and and aunt theresa it's not it's still got heavy usership despite that it's a cesspool so let's let's argue that maybe 10 years from now that one is gone and that may not be the case but let's just for the sake of argument say so that could be one that goes by the wayside

but they generally don't and i think we hit this too because they hit you with enough positive like you get all the videos saying the q anon is real and stuff and then you know the 10th post is like you know a soldier coming home and his dog jumps into his arms. And people are like, oh, and they share it a million times. So there's enough of that positive reinforcement that it keeps you coming back even if the negativity is pulling you down. But this is the problem because you're talking about now a data approach overtaking a human approach as it relates to like AI. And we can go deep on this. And like I haven't really gone deep on like the idea of

singularity with people but having a developer encoder in here like you I kind of want to but we'll get there but when you talk about that as an impetus to be a decision driver in the future where it's going to and the idea is it's going to take away the emphasis on the humans who work there and the humans you so-called serve we already kind of have that with what we're doing because the social media platforms are giving us these echo chambers, like we said in the social dilemma that they pointed out, that they're all public companies they are driven by the next quarterly report and they are driven by what did you do for me yesterday that's why when facebook stock goes down you know 40 50 dollars in july 2018 because of earnings after you know the whole cambridge analytica scandal had come out and they had to adjust all their ad revenue and things you know they had to fire people they had to change businesses all because of one report and it's not down there now it clearly recovered very well they came back but

that's that's the short-term view of a company so when a company gets into this like this crossing point i talked about this with someone else too, but everything starts as an idea and it starts with one person or maybe two people or three people. Everything at some point, whether it's the 50th employee or the 100th employee or the 1000th employee, at some point they cross the line and they cross over into the dark territory of where they lose what built them and they become what they think people want of them i will say that that is a crisis that affects the vast majority of companies but not a hundred percent of individuals and we had discussed this earlier before we started recording steve jobs yeah is a notable exception to that in that you know he was let go by apple but never really lost his vision for what he wanted his company to be he was let go because he stayed himself exactly and so there was a a takeover in the organization to stray from its original mission. But he was the reason that they were successful. And the more he stayed true to himself, the further towards the top Apple climbed.

And they reestablished their dominance because of him. He's also the GOAT. Yeah jordan's the goat you're gonna have goats and do they get a lot of attention and do they do things that change the game yeah they're still outliers so steve jobs created the iphone do i think steve, just based on everything we know about him and everything that's been reported and all his biographies and his story and all the legend and all that, do I think Steve Jobs wanted a world where people were actually addicted to their phones and it made them miserable? No, I don't. I hope to God he didn't. And I really believe he didn't. I don't think he did either. Yeah, he wanted to change humanity. Yet, once it got out of his hands, you know, and then he literally left this earth, you know, it got developed and developed and developed. Not just by his company, but think about it.

The app culture, everything that went into it, like anything else. It's just like we talked about this podcast a little bit ago. Like whenever something disrupts, everything, all the other action comes in and it bastardizes. And this is another subject matter that comes up a lot, but it's something we need to grapple with because I always talk about how capitalism is the best system and I believe in that. And I have – to use the word, I have the data, I believe, to 100% back that. And the problem is people get so tribalism or so tribalistic on that idea like I am a capitalist and I'm all about capitalism that they fail to acknowledge where the flaws are. And then the issue with the flaws is that if you do acknowledge it and you seek to fix it, it's like everything else comes back to the slippery slope of where does it end and when does it become something that's a different ism? People always say socialism, but there's other isms too or other things out there. When does it become something where it's not capitalism?

Obviously, the answer, like anything else, is a little bit of nuance and a little bit of middle ground and a little bit of, hey, that makes sense. Let's do it you know but when you look at what we've incentivized with companies that can reach everyone internet companies in this era specifically communities that people can go to which are the social platforms we have incentivized a place where the data takes precedent over the human because they are making humans miserable, and they know it by the data, but it sells. It does sell. But, and this is maybe a foolish optimist in me, believing this,

I think that companies that are continuing to sell on that platform of negative, negative, negative, negative, negative. One crumb of serotonin, please, coming right up. And I briefly hinted at this earlier. I think that they are failing to acknowledge the tax that society is paying on their morale. And that while that strategy is working today... What do you mean tax that society is paying on their morale and that while that strategy is working today what do you mean tax that society's paying on their morale going back to my suggestion that society is less happy

today in 2020 than it was in 2012 i think that we are seeing an uptick in mental health issues today that we've never seen before in the past uh suicide rates partly due to isolation from covid but even predating the pandemic you could see that they were very much on the rise feelings of isolation and loneliness among people in adolescence were on the rise and diagnoses of depression of anxiety of adhd all on the rise yes some of that is due to improved ability and diagnostics and understanding of mental health disorders themselves and so there is an argument to be made that it was already pre-existing but i don't think that's a hundred percent encompassing oh it's not i think that there is a genuine negative influence on society that is brought about by social media and i am not damning it as a concept i am damning the implementation of it today

through the process of mostly negative news or negative information or not even negative, but conflicting and stressing information being presented to you with that crumb of serotonin. Yes, it sells. It is captivating. It brings out the best and the worst of us, but it encourages us to live on this extreme constantly. We're redlining as a society and we're starting to pay for it and that's why i think that although the model works in the short term it will eventually eat its own tail and i don't know when that will be i have no forecast on it well you know what i also i also a little bit and this is my bad bastardized what you said because you i took it and focused on went right back to the tech platforms but you

were talking about in general when you said when does data then just completely become ahead of humanity because it's the data they serve meaning data is the employee versus humans being the employee which am i am i correct to assume that you were implying for any industry or any type of company i am right okay so let's let's actually go back to that because i the point you just made is up for debate but there's not an answer to it we don't know for sure or not so no one can say you're right or or he's wrong or whatever but i think that is a possibility that i what was the phrase did the head bites off the tail yeah the snake will eat its own tail yes so to go back to the original point of

just companies in general and the economy in general. Yes, when there are new technological innovations, you can't fight the fact that they're going to exist and people who are motivated by winning competition are going to use them to their advantage. Therefore, people who are in decision making positions within companies are going to do that. We see that every day. It's happened forever, but it's just happening at a rapid pace right now. Sure. What it may do, though, is create new opportunities for people to work. So the question becomes – now we're getting really, really deep here,

so I want to be able to say this right. The question becomes when you are talking about serving the data versus serving the people, could there be a scenario where you serve the people as in your employees to keep people with jobs because you're creating new types of jobs? Still do that. but you're serving the data in how you reach whoever your end consumer is where you don't treat them as a person you treat them as a data point which in fairness we are already seeing on social media that's been happening for a long time so does that then go down to just throwing one out there the hardware store you know i guess yes i mean because look at amazon that's what they do they somehow know your recommendations based on data points.

And so that's just it, is that that's an avenue of business that is available in the digital marketplace that is absent from business as we've known it for the last couple of centuries. Yes, let's take a hardware store, for example. If you're a hardware store with enough of a scale and budget like a Lowe's or a Home Depot that you could afford reasonably to make a serious inroad into a digital marketplace for hardware. I understand it's a difficult industry to buy things without seeing them firsthand. Yeah. Just from the example. Yeah. Um, you know, you may have a team that is dedicated to what percentage of our clientele is engaging with our light fixtures online. And how can we drive that metric up from 6% to 8%,

you know? And can you do that by the second quarter? And how are you going to do that by the second quarter? You know, what adjustments can you make to your placement, your presentation of the product, your targeting of your audience. And that is serving the data. That's not serving the people. You don't care about the person buying the light fixture and saying, oh, that would look great on your end table. It's how can I shove this in front of you? There is a large extent to which that already is completely adopted and is happening,

which is the craziest point because you're using it as the example to point out the clearest thing that we can concept right now without trying to think of the future and imagine how it would be of course which is why i like that you just did that but that's kind yeah that that is what we're doing already there is at least still the recognition that there is a human being on the other end right now for the most part but even like you will see good mom and pop hardware stores who lead with that because they have customer relationship management systems that run the data for them and tell them that they sold x amount of this and therefore they should put it in this position and therefore these types of people who they may have data on their demographics depending on what they're actually able to collect

are going to buy it and then if they bought this they're most likely to buy this so these stores do like even some of the regular small businesses have that so but what you don't see in the small business that you would see on the scale of a Lowe's or a Home Depot or a larger hardware supplier is the availability of budget to create a position solely dedicated to driving that metric. isn't going to go out there and hire a business analyst that's going to look at this metric and say, I want 8% of my clientele to focus on light fixtures and then, you know, design a solutions team to make that happen in two quarters. They're not going to do that. So I still hesitate to equate the two and say that small businesses would be serving data instead of their customers, especially since at the very beginning of what you said there, you're talking about they have an established customer relationship. They continue to interact with their customers face-to-face like you and I are doing on a daily basis.

In a fully digital marketplace marketplace you lose that connection a couple years ago this is literally actually weirdly almost down to the day didn't mean to do that so november 2018 i had a guy that i was connecting with another guy who they were in a similar space it was a little complicated so it's very interesting because they didn't know each other at all they were from different parts of the country but i thought if they would come together they could actually really make something happen there so anyway i was trying to make that happen and get the one guy to see if there was upside to him and forming the relationship not to get like too deep on it but it was kind of on the verge of like is it going to happen or isn't it and my one guy who i had brought to the table was really hesitant and i and i was like

i really think this is a good idea for you you should do it and he's like i don't know i don't know and i said i'm coming to you i'm gonna come see you so he's like all right well i'm i'm working today i'm downtown like you can come i'm like cool right so i said all right give me the address he gives me the address pull up to this building in new york city it's down in it's down by grand mercy park like in that area of the city. Maybe like 15th Street, 20th Street, something like that. And pull up and it's this grand old school city block building with the early 20th century architecture. And I walk in and there's this enormous space that's almost like a greeting area and then a giant conference hall that's also open space next to me with a stage and everything and there's steps going up somewhere now in the conference hall there was clear it was like it had a sign and it had been like rented out and there was an

event going on in there so like obviously if we're going to this building i'm not going in there because that's not where he is and i'm like i i text him like when i get to it and i go where did you send me and he goes oh we're at an i think it's called an amazon workspace and i said okay so then i walk up and there's a couple people sitting at a front desk there and i see their tags and it says amazon on it and they're very nice and you know human connection like hey welcome how are you what are you here for whatever and I'm like uh almost like a concierge yeah I was like I'm really confused right now like at that point I didn't even know what WeWork was or anything like I wasn't really that familiar with that so I'm like okay I guess like this is

he doesn't work in Amazon all right cool so I'm just asking the guy I'm like, okay, I guess like this is, he doesn't work in Amazon. All right, cool. So I'm just asking the guy, I'm like, I'm supposed to meet someone here? Like, do you know where they would be or how I get there? And he goes, oh, they're definitely upstairs. And unless you were coming to the event. I said, no, I'm definitely not going to an event. And he goes, all right, well, they'd be upstairs. I'm like, okay, do I just go up there?

He goes, yeah, we'll fill out your thing right now. And then you go right up there. So he asked me, gives me an iPad and says, just fill this out. All I had to fill out was my name, my industry, which they then put my name with my company name on a printed beautiful name tag and gave it to me immediately when I gave it to the guy. I had to put that on there. And my phone number, my email. It was optional to put my address. I think I to the guy. I had to put that on there and my phone number, my email, it was optional to put my address.

I think I just put it. I wasn't thinking twice about it. Several other things. My age, my income level. Yeah, yeah. That's a prying question. All this stuff. If I remember correctly,

it was like my approximate income level or something, but it was optional and I don't know if I filled that out. But there's definitely people who do. That's a prying question. I know. I know.

And I think that was on there. I don't want to say for sure. I think it was on there, though. Okay. And so I fill out all this stuff. There were other data points. And again, I'm just like, I'm trying to get upstairs to meet this guy. So what am I doing?

I'm just filling it out. I give it back to him. I get the name tag. I go upstairs. There's this enormous space with couches, bars, little desks, whatever. Everyone's in their little pods like working alone or with people. And I look across and there's this beautiful kitchen with food everywhere. Now, mind you, I didn't pay a dollar to come in here.

Right. They just sent me upstairs with a fucking name tag and i'm in a suit because i worked in a suit industry no one in here is in a suit i'm walking in there like what the fuck is this guy doing here khakis and a polo kind of stuff i'm not even that i'm talking like hoodies like like my kind of swag in there all right i was never a suit guy let's be honest so i So I'm like, all right, I guess I'll find a seat. And then I'm looking over at this kitchen and it's a full buffet spread. And I'm looking for the cash register. Because I'm like, all right, well, clearly this is like a mini caf.

And then I see people walking up and they're just taking the food. I'm like, huh. And then I ask a guy,'m like is that is that food free he goes oh yeah man you know they bring in food around lunchtime sometimes a little later too like oh okay well i haven't eaten yet so i'll uh go get some of that and i go get the food it's like great it's from like a nice restaurant sit down perhaps i don't know i forget but i i'm sitting down i'm waiting for my guy he comes in and he goes oh um you want to go outside where it's quiet it was november but it was still like okay outside so it wasn't like freezing freezing cold i'm like oh there's an

outside he goes oh yeah we walk out the back now this is this is Manhattan, New York, okay? It's got a full roof deck, open spaces. There's no one out there. We had it to ourselves. And, like, it wasn't, like, a crazy view. But I'm looking at this, and I'm like, I'm doing the calculation in my head of the square footage, where this building is, what's going on. And the prices I'm running in my head of what the rent is here for everyone to walk in here free is absurd. And so we have our meeting and whatever, and then after a while, he leaves.

And I stayed for a few minutes, and I started thinking about this. And then it hit me. To get people like me, you, or anyone to walk in to get all their data and then let them in for free, give them food, make them want to come back, bring other people with them, meet people there of all different walks of life. And because they had the size and scale to invest and they've been a company that perennially is not afraid to not have a profit, if need be, though they haven't had a profit for a while now. They are not afraid to reinvest back into it it also get a low tax bill out of it they can do it and then use all this information to learn about every neighborhood in every single place and come in and sink people and sink businesses and it's how they stay on top that's a data-driven approach and to your point you referred to the economy of scale and whether or not even like the great small business who has access to resources has the resources that are quite as good as the resources

that the best companies might have that may not know the market as well but just have the ability to come in and fucking outspend you and outlast you yeah and then you look at the top of the food chain and i realized oh my god i just walked right into it they might date it forever now well they have that snapshot of your data yes that's true and to to imply that they have your data forever is kind of a smack in the face to the concept that people can change and some people believe that people can't change but you know even never mind uh yeah people can change that's that's the point i'll leave that at yeah they can shark infested waters on the other side of that sentence um but yes i i do agree i think that there also comes and i i know this is a topic that you feel relatively passionate about as well, there comes a point where that snuffs out competition and takes away some of the benefits of what makes a capitalist environment great.

And that is the availability of free market competition every free market capitalist wants competition until the competition can't be won and that is a frontier the free market capitalists have to they have to realize they're staring into that abyss now with the ability of technology to reach everyone around this earth and understand that they have to make their deal with the devil on it but there is there is vast widespread denial in that space right now that we are fighting a losing battle for small business right now. And so, in my own personal opinion, I think we're at a crossroads right now where we need to consider heavily, we need to consider the serious pursuit

of antitrust action against companies like Amazon, potentially against companies like Google, which you're already seeing, even possibly against social media giants. Potentially against companies like Google, which you're already seeing. Even possibly against social media giants. But I understand the reservations for wanting to take those on, particularly within the by that monopoly, the structure with which that company was created is of absolutely brilliant design. design because they have an ironclad argument to say, we're not snuffing out competition. Our main mode of operation is actually encouraging small business by becoming an available, scalable distribution network for third-party products and vendors and that is just positively brilliant and has probably saved their bacon to allow them to grow to the scale to which they already have that's a

wolf's and sheep's clothing oh it absolutely is a wolf and sheep's clothing i am not praising it well in some ways i am praising it because it's bloody brilliant. But yeah. But it is unintentionally snuffing out business. And the reason for that is Amazon has proven time and time and time again that not only are they able to enter a market and distribute to a market, but they have increasingly so within the last 18 to 24 months started pushing their own brands. Amazon Basics is starting to gobble up market share in various areas of commerce. And so as that's going on, I think, and I would really love to see data on this because I haven't yet. And part of this is just my own hunch. I think Amazon basics is going to start, if it hasn't already, driving businesses away. Oh, I mean, it's not a question or it's not an if. It's not a when. It's already happening.

I mean... And that's just it. I wish i had the data to back it up amazon basic amazon basic i'm pointing to things around my studio that are amazon basics i don't think that is but there yeah like a lot of this isn't but there's some things that are and they're some of the inherent like easy things that you must have like the xlr cables and things like that that work fucking great i forget the price but it's low right because they can they're willing to invest in losing money because they can to then make themselves the driver of what controls the marketplace where they can set prices eventually that's why you see some things where you may have bought it two months ago and it was $60 and now it's $130. It's the Walmart model. It is the Walmart model. And the difference – I mean Walmart's scaling their e-com too.

That's going to be very interesting. But Walmart was able to do that through their era of growth through the brick and mortar. And they've had to adjust. But there comes – to go back to it there comes that point where you you have to decide like okay am i true am i for free markets overall or am i for what makes sense and look it's it's not just what businesses stay in business or you know about how much a company is able to use their overly large scale to drive out other companies from competition. It's about more than that.

And everyone was wondering what the big first company was going to be for the antitrust suit from the Justice Department. And a lot of bets were on Amazon because obviously it seems like, you know, Trump was in office and Bezos and Trump certainly butted heads a lot. And it was a personal kind of thing. And Bezos is also the wealthiest guy in the world. So I was thinking like, all right, Amazon is going to be the first. Amazon is not far behind if at all. Maybe they're even ahead of Google. I don't know.

But Google's algorithm that is through the Google.com, literally that page and going to that search bar, that is the source of the ultimate machine learning intelligence to build artificial intelligence through data amalgamation. I don't know if I used the last word there right, but data collection. Let's make it simpler. Yeah. And they built that algorithm, I think, in like 97, 98, and then brought it live right away. And the more adopters it got around the world, which it got a lot right away, and obviously now like anyone with the internet uses Google, that is the go-to. The more human thoughts from the more diverse number of perspectives you get on a constant basis. And then when it becomes your source of intelligence, you can also then, as they do with the Google algorithm, decide what they see first.

And therefore affect how they think about things. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. And then you start paying for those placements. And so you're starting to find that, you know, yes, certainly some of them will say ad next to it. But I wonder how many of those placements that don't say ad are funded anyway just through means that aren't necessarily technically qualified as an ad. You know, what are – Can we know that? there's no way for us to know that right given that google has a proprietary algorithm on it i seriously doubt that um i certainly haven't figured it out and i would encourage anyone who has to please tell me i have have you ever seen the movie ex machina i have not all right it came out maybe like 2015

okay the concept is this picture like you know google was founded by larry page and sergey brin they basically for the movie created a company that's like google and it's founded by one guy right and so at the company they have some competition whoever wins talks with him or whatever so this kid wins and he gets contacted by the starter of the company and says, come visit me on my remote island. He goes to his remote island, and I'm not going to spoil the movie and tell you what happens. But the concept is he goes to this remote island out in the jungle, and the founder shares with him the fact that he has developed an artificial intelligence life form, so to speak. Right. Like in a body and

everything and some of it you know some of the artificial intelligence community and tech communities like oh well some of the this isn't realistic that's not realistic and they're right like some of the technology and ideas they put into it because it's a futuristic movie like that's not how it would go but of course the concept is coming face to face with things like the singularity and when we get to that point like we've touched on with other themes in this conversation when we get to that point of what's real and what's not and thinking about it that it's not lost on me that the company they created was a search engine company company

like Google because we are born as life forms not just humans either like life forms that can't do what we do, like other mammals or other animals. Every organism is born evolutionarily, whatever, with certain things that are just ingrained in their being, like the most obvious one, the need to survive. People don't walk outside naturally unless they have something wrong with them when they're born to just like fall off a cliff by accident. We are not lemmings. That's not what we do.

Exactly. It's not what we do. And so, when you are talking about potentially getting to a point where a machine can function in a way that a human being can, think about all the things that – because again, it's a human developing the ability for this machine to function. Think about all the things that have to be decision points that you build into this that are evolutionary built into us. It's in the quadrillions or whatever. And they're all these sources of like decision trees and yes or no's. And so, part of it, a way to make that exponentially be able to teach itself and continue to build that

is by reading what human beings think and then making patterns with it and reading what all those things put together then create. So when you think of Google now and you go to type something in, if you want to know how does a camcorder work, work right like maybe you start there i'm just looking at a camcorder so i'm using that example and then these other five questions are most likely to be asked the machine can learn the not just what people are asking and wondering it can then start over time through data points to decide what they're going to wonder next right and not just what they're going to wonder next but how they're going just what they're going to wonder next, but how they're going to ask it, what words they use. That's why when you type in what or how or any first word, it will come up with some

lingo phrases that aren't even grammatically correct because other human beings think that way. Correct. This is how it happens. And so, what's interesting and dangerous at the same time about Google is that they are undeniably the homepage of the internet. Undeniably. I would say a vast majority of internet traffic, when you open a browser on whatever platform

it is, whether it's a phone, whether it is a tablet or a computer, your homepage is set to Google. And if it's not, you're probably going to go to Google to go to wherever you want to go, unless you have a direct URL in mind. What's dangerous about that is that you have this centralization of power because you not only control the access to the information, but you start steering people in exactly that way. And the question becomes, are the ethics behind that algorithm being held to adequate standards? Are they being surveilled by people? Are we consistently reevaluating whether or not that system has inherent bias within it?

Does it contribute to the concept of an echo chamber? And within Google's mission statement used to be the phrase, don't be evil. And where has it gone? Oh, that was creepy creepy i knew you were going there well i telegraphed it yeah you saw that coming why is why is that why was that the phrase why was don't be evil the phrase why do you think they came up with that i think it i purely conjecture here i think at one point they had this discussion years ago about we know what product we have in our hands. We know its capability.

And we know we have an opportunity to make a decision around are we going to make ourselves the richest people in the world? Or are we going to further humanity? Or are we going to make ourselves the richest people in the world? Or are we going to further humanity? Or are we going to have a blend of both? And I think for a time, they consciously made an effort to avoid being steered down the path of greed. And they verbalized it. And they felt it necessary to do so but i think they also adhered

to it because i would not say through its inception through its early phases even its mid phases i would not say that google is an evil company i think i don't know if we can even that's the thing i don't think we can say that today we don't know it's the possibility of are they we don't know but it was it possibility of are they. We don't know. But it was comforting from a public perspective to know that it was top of mind for them, that it was embedded into their very fiber as a company, as they provided us with service after service. availability of document storage of spreadsheets presentations a mailing system that has completely taken over the electronic mailing market gmail is far and away the superior system for mailing save potentially microsoft outlook for business applications. They also, and all these companies do, this is not unique to them at all. But since their inception, they have invested in serious talent.

Absolutely. Coming in there. And that's not, again, like that's the most obvious statement of all time. I know I'm Captain Obvious saying that, but, you know, they get a guy like Ray Kurzweil to come and work there. But you are Captain Obvious in a a way but you're also not because there are a lot of companies that will that will invest in people by compensating the employees that they have well and recognizing high talent but won't go after the you know the diamond in the rough,

that one web developer that can truly turn your company around and be innovative. And Google had the cojones to really go for that. Because those companies are afraid to bring in people who are going to tell them what to do. They want to tell the people what to do. One of the hardest things to do as a leader is to listen.

Yeah. And when you respect the ideas of those around you and you understand that your job as a leader, your job as a manager is not to order. But it is to assemble a team of people who are the best at what they do and trust them and know that you can step in to steer when necessary to stay mission focused but you gotta let your employees do their jobs and google has done an incredible job of that absolutely incredible possibly unparalleled if i asked you as a manager to name what your broad job description is, and let's say your answer of what that description is of to assemble, and that description was what it was. If I asked you that question and said, tell me what your job is without giving me a foil to it, which in English what I mean is don't tell me what your job isn't tell me what your job is your answer would have been my job is to assemble and then the rest of what you said is that fair to say my answer would be it is to make a reality the vision of a strategic organization.

So it's to manifest. My job is to understand what a business strategy team has decided they want to come up with. Take it to a team of technical experts and say, this is what we need to do. Now you tell me the best way that we can do it and I'll help us get there. Okay. I'm pointing this out because you just gave me a affirmative and also what I do answer. And the second part I liked better because it was more in English, whereas the first part was like, I'm taking the strategic data and blah, blah, blah.

Jargon. Right, exactly. It's jargon. The phrase, don't be evil. Remember we talked about negative versus positive connotation as humans? It is a completely negative phrase. Do not be evil. Starts with a not, a negative. It ends with one of the most negative words in any language, evil. Starts with a not, a negative. It ends with one of the most negative words in any language, evil. Absolutely. So there is a constant reminder. I mean, this used to be, this was everywhere. I don't know if they like had it on their homepage or anything, but it was,

this phrase was everywhere. It's known in popular culture. I don't know if it's like still there, but it will always be associated with them. And the employees that they built up this company over the years, yes, to your point, they obviously had that discussion early and at least recognized that it could go that way. And so I appreciate that. But the way they decided to implement it among their workforce was a culture of fear of what could be instead of a culture of hope of what it should be and so it's like anything else when you project something you often become you often become the thing you project even if you're saying not to do it you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain no really and and that's that's what I think about because our first reaction is to assume all these people are evil.

We don't know that. And that's the point. You can't say for sure Google is evil. It's part of being a skeptic. Yes, and like it's easy to say when it comes to like discourse and someone disagrees with the discourse that they may favor or something like that. They say, oh, they must be evil because they're shutting down the other discourse. That's not necessarily true. But when things are left unchecked bad things can happen and it's obviously we pounded away at the argument of regulation versus free market capitalism that's

one thing we don't need to hit that again but it also then comes down to where is the greater good served here? It's so hard. It's so, so hard to fix them the one recourse we have to be able to fix them is the one thing that can come above them in the pecking order in the chain of command which is a government and what's the one thing that can get out of control if the people are taken out of the process and are forced to do what the government tells them to do down to the individual all the way up from the corporation the government and so you are stuck between the shit and the fart here because on the one hand, you can leave these companies. That's one of my favorite phrases I say all the time. On the one hand, you can leave these companies unchecked and say,

hey, it's better to leave the free market capitalism and let competition figure it out and, you know what, assume that over time most humans are going to do good on the other hand you come in and you be the big bad government and and i say that like in air quotes right of course and you tell them no free market capitalism which means where else does it go and then once you take that power you just in that case you took power over the ultimate tech companies what else can you take power of and bill like i know in the past you and i have talked about this with with banks actually and we don't realize it one of my favorite quotes from the financial crisis of 08 is there was a great trader at lehman brothers who ended up lehman brothers was the company back in September 2008, one of the main investment banks that failed and almost ended the world.

And then the government had to step in and bail out the other banks. Otherwise, our financial system, without going into the details, would have ended as a whole. And so this guy, Jared Dillion, who was a great trader there, wrote some books about Lehman Brothers. And the thing about that whole crisis was, it was a very limited number of people who were relied upon in the chain of command of a corporation where everyone has to do their job to do their job, and they didn't. And so his quote was, and I'm going to amend it afterwards with my own commentary, but his quote was, there were approximately 20,000, and I may be slightly paraphrasing here, but there were approximately 20,000 employees at Lehman Brothers. 19,995 of them were really good people who were really good at their jobs. I'll amend that and say it's

probably more like 19,970 of them. Either way, the point is correct. And yet what had to happen there? Because a few people when left to their own devices, did not do their jobs and did not think of the consequences and slippery slope proportions of their actions and effect on everyone else. What happened is the government had to come in with our money and bail their asses out. And when the government comes in with our money to say none say nothing of the government coming in and taking control in a situation, what else has to happen? They have to create a deterrence. And they have to create a system whereby there is a level of control that the government previously didn't have, such that something like this never happens again. And why is that? It's because the

government is run by people who are elected to office who have a job to do and want to self sustain their own career. Because otherwise, if they they don't and people are pissed off and people want heads on a pike they get voted out of office and so what happens as a as a result what happens as a result is now where there were three lawyers at a bank in a certain room now there's 30 lawyers and where there's now 30 lawyers there's 300 new bylaws or new guidelines that banks have to follow. And now that there's 300 new bylaws and guidelines that banks have to follow, there's 3,000 more things that falls back to the customer that's now inconvenient in their life. And when there's 3,000 things that fall back to the customer, whatever they may be, company, individual, whatever, that's inconvenient to their life, now there is all these downstream effects that makes people have less utility than they did before the crisis happened all because of a few bad apples yeah full circle it's just it's and it's i try to have hope on things and we all try to see the end outcome and it's impossible

you know you can simulate this stuff but is, no matter what you do, there is a potential downside or a straight up downside. Well, I'm going to, forgive me for this, but I'm going to go full physics nerd here. All right. Blasto, by the way, for people listening, just to be be clear i may end up saying this in the intro when i give you the intro so they may have heard this but bill will get to some of his like full backstory maybe today or maybe another time he's on but as you can probably tell at this point bill is a a genius one of the smarter guys i've ever met in my life he's like very diverse too he's not a stereotype at all but you know by trade

he's a developer of sorts and and yet another huge tech guy i try to surround myself with people like this because they can make a baboon like me actually sound like i halfway know what i'm talking about by injecting real intelligence into the conversation so anyway come on go ahead bill regardless um the point i want to make is and this is a bit of a stretch for an analogy, but bear with me. I'm going to take this to the laws of thermodynamics. There are three major laws you need to know. The zeroth law, the first law, and the second law. The zeroth law says that everything in the universe is constructed of matter and energy. The first law is that matter and energy cannot be created,

nor can they be destroyed. And the second law is that in any exchange of matter and energy between two areas, between the two themselves, etc., some will be lost to entropy which is a state of english yeah it's a state of disorganization it's a state of or really it's a it's a a variance of states of where you can distribute energy can you i don't know chaos for for for layman's terms it's chaos i don't know if this is possible but but can you inject a visual example onto these laws? No, but I am about to go and actually explain it and make it make sense.

Okay. All right. So to simplify it, the zeroth law says there is a game. The first law says you cannot win the game you can't make energy you can't make matter the first law is you cannot win the game the second law is you will always lose the game you will always lose energy into the inaccessible what was the zero law again the zero law is there is a game it's just the definition game you cannot win the game is law one and the second law is you will always lose the game so as we direct our energy so you wait wait okay i want to make sure i got it there is a game yes because one and two sound like the same you cannot win the game and then you will always lose the game yes

so meaning they're basically saying there's no tie. There's only loss. There's only defeat. You can get close to tie, but you can never fully tie. And so this relates back in the way that, you know, you've brought up a situation where banks were operating in an relatively, comparatively unregulated fashion prior to the financial crisis and due to the actions of 35 traders there were legal implications you know we had to go in derivatives guys and stuff like or ceos yeah we had to go in and spend energy to, you know, look at these processes and make changes to support, you know, not only the security of global financial health, but also the security of

our representatives in Congress and our lawmakers and, you know, positions of authority. And when you say we, I just, I'm going to keep being clear here to make sure we're on track. When you say we, you're saying I'm going to keep being clear here to make sure we're on, we're on track. When you say we, you're saying we, the people through the representation of government. That is exactly what I'm saying. Yes. Thank you for clarifying. Um, but as we've done, so we've lost a little bit of our freedom that we won't get back. There's an increase in regulation at the expense of convenience to the customer. There is an increase in regulation at the expense of convenience to the customer. There is an increase in legal representation at the expense of funds put toward new products. There is an increase in red tape to access our financial services, to receive financial advice, to potentially propel ourselves toward independence and success.

We've added litigious components to this process that absolutely come at the expense of our financial freedoms, of our personal freedoms, of our ability to direct our careers. We've erected more laws and by doing so created more chaos. Second level to this, because I actually, I follow completely and I hope people out there do follow because I think you just explained that beautifully.

I always say on this show and I'll say it forever in English, like give it to me in English with stuff. And you just put that at least for me in very good english so i hope everyone else felt that way i tried and i apologize if you didn't i think about i always like to think of like extreme examples to see if it applies so like when when was the Constitution written? Like 1789, something like that? Let's just make it easy. Okay. 1800. America's a country.

Yep. Chilling. You know, you got your log cabin. You got your apple trees outside. Maybe you have some horses and shit. And you're a farmer. The next house is a mile over maybe you can live in like boston or new york and you know the next house is right next to you and it's not a log cabin it's like a little brick and mortar kind of whatever it was back then and you know it's still

you got the horse and carriage outside and you know you go about your day and there's limited things you can do there's there's limited things you can do. There's limited entertainment. There was no electricity, so there's limited opportunity for activity in dark or in darkness late. There are less decision points, much fewer decision points, I should say, in a day. There are all these things you don't have there's less life expectancy there's less possibility like there's less you can do with a lot of money there's less of everything fast forward to today where in the palm of your hand you actually have more power in that iphone significantly than george w bush had on 9 11 with the full resources of the government going into defcon 5 mode which was not that long ago obviously yeah

there is more there are many more decision points in a day there are more decision points in your social media feed than there was in all of a day and in in five minutes of your social media feed there are more decision points than there was in all of a day perhaps in 1800 and maybe i'm wrong people might call me out and say well you're technically a little wrong on that you get my point i'm generalizing there since then though you could argue that there's far less freedom because what's happened since 1800 as this country's grown things happen things go wrong whether it be economic cycles crime um the insert blank here and every time there's a problem people look to the government and like we're going to complain when there's a problem it's natural as we should

because we want to fix it right and then the government has to come in and say okay we'll fix it and when they fix it it's not like they just say like here's what it is they set a law and of course this works very well sometimes obviously is a very good thing that we set a law that african-americans are not first of all they are african-americans they're not slaves and secondly they're not three-fifths of a person. They're a full person. Like, yes, there's, like, we get caught in this rabbit hole, like, this all has to be negative. No, there's a lot of great things. It's called progress. It's what it's supposed to be. That's just the most blatant, obvious example. But there's also red tape that's put up as you get layers to this over and over and over again. So even though the world becomes more free with your access to things and resources and possibilities of what you can do or where you can go even how

fast you can go there i'm getting deep here there is still less that you can do from a freedom perspective in the same way that like you know i guess and i don't know about this one but maybe it's like illegal to own a rocket launcher i gotta think that's illegal right that's not a weapon like that's i'm sorry it is a weapon but it's not a um that's not like a gun that's like a fucking rocket it's not a pocket firearm exactly exactly but hypothetically let's say they existed in 1800 you could fucking own one they're not going to stop you back then there and and let's look at it logically too there weren't people walking into movie theaters or into schools shooting people up at least statistically speaking i think someone will

probably point out that that happened at some point in like 1800 but how much of that was the access and availability to the advancement of a fully automated firearm. Yeah, wasn't Columbine, though, like I'm just pointing out an example cherry-picking here. Wasn't Columbine like all handguns? I don't know. I do not recall. And honestly, I should. I want to check that in real time.

People, what we don't want to do here is give the wrong information on stuff while we're making arguments and occasionally when we're in conversation obviously like you start going all over the place and trying to figure it out um some real-time fact checking can while i'm looking this up bill can you just remind people what columbine was uh wow that's a that's a heavy task it's a heavy task but columbine was for those of you guys who aren't fully aware probably one of the largest and first national media attention grabbing massacre within our american education system for lack of a better way to put it um there was an armed gunman who went through the school and god it's disgusting that i have to say that this is a trope you've heard hundreds of times at this point but a lot with no regard for human life went through and struck many people down yeah and i'm glad i looked it up

because i was wrong uh they use tech nines right. Like I don't even have to look at the rest of the guns. A Tech Nine is an automatic caliber carbine, I think the official term is. But I don't know how many rounds a second it is, but it's much more powerful than a pistol. So to be clear, to go back to your original point on that, yeah, it's not like you had that in 1800. So it's also like those possibilities – it works that way. The more possibilities you get the more red tape you get against the new possibilities versus what used to exist like when they said the right to bear arms you know they didn't have ak-47s they had muskets yeah but some of that

makes sense some of that is logical because we found the need for laws in 1800 because people were presented with choice people had free will we respected the idea of freedom and some people chose to abuse that freedom fast forward to 2008 we have 20 000 traders in new york working in a company 19 970 of them choose to respect the dignity of their profession. And they weren't, by the way, they weren't all traitors. They were all different types of things, but yes. I'm generalizing.

Yes. Thank you for the clarity. Yeah, sorry. And those 30 choose to fly in the face of what's right. Maybe for a little bit of personal gain, maybe for other reasons. We don't know what their motivations are. That's not the point. But that was a new avenue, a new opening that, quite frankly, probably couldn't have happened in the 1940s, in the 1930s,

when the New York Stock Exchange was still comparatively a fledgling organization. And so as that opportunity for choice was presented with itself, we found that the vast majority of people chose to follow the right path and stick to the generally unspoken guidelines at that point and trade fairly. And those who didn't ended up creating a whole sack of shit for the rest of us you can even like 2008 obviously not that long ago and relatable to today as far as like what type of world it was obviously it's a different world in 2020 but you know it wasn't that long ago to to the original point 1929 though was it's a way different world back then shit alcohol was illegal in 1929 at the

time which nice job their government that didn't start any big organized crime systems that still actually exist today but you know that's neither here nor there what could possibly go wrong there anyway um when you look at the effect that had on everyone because there also weren't systems in place to back end the banks who then literally had to take the reserves of the people who just may have lost money through no fault of their own, lost everything they had. What had to happen after that? What had to happen after that was the government had to act. The nude heel yes and so fdr comes in and because hoover was obviously voted out of office because that happened under his watch duh but fdr comes in and in his defense he inherits the most empty deck any president has ever inherited in the history of this country and people were starving dying and

there was no money anywhere and so he had to set up systems that stimulated the economy now also in the hindsight of of what we know for from a human rights perspective it's notable that he did set up systems that didn't exactly help minority communities. They tended to help white communities. So that was one bad thing to come out of it. But even beyond that, this is where things like – and I don't even remember if we talked about this on the podcast or if it was when we were talking earlier, but either way, this is where systems like social security came in and didn't account for the fact that you were going to have a certain level of exponential population growth, at least over a period of time, and you were also going to have a certain level of potentially exponential life expectation, or life expectancy. And so, you created a system that regardless of how long it was, was eventually a ticking time bomb. And I'm just cherry picking one thing there, but there were other things in that that were set up and what were they they were a response to what happened they were a response to a new thing that was there in this

case a relatively new thing as far as the level to which it affected society was the stock market and the widespreadness or whatever the word, to all different people across the economy, from businessmen to even some regular people buying stock, was affecting how banks were open or closed. So this was a new frontier. Something bad happened. Government comes in and fixes it. And we see it come full circle once again with like the global financial crisis in 08-09. But you can relate it to our point on this to anything and it's what comes up in the conversations around covid and the government

responding to something that frankly they've never seen before the last one was a spanish flu in 1918 1919 and people died but guess what there was less of an expectancy on human life back then for one thing for another thing there was a thing called world war one that had just been happening and coming to a close then so it wasn't the same and there wasn't a media disseminating all all the information left and right for everyone to constantly know what's going on so it wasn't yes the deaths were terrible in it and it was a horrible pandemic but it technically wasn't really relatable to this one. And so with this one, the government had to deal with hand-on the fact that everyone had mass communication and was going to be fearful about this, righteously so. And they had to deal with how they were going to try to get rid of it in the shortest amount of time and get popular buy-in from the population to do it and part of getting popular buy-in from the population to do it was setting regulations to make sure that there was some

forced buy-in and then also some stipulations that were open-ended with like well if you guys do this we might have to come in and do this by leading like hey there could be more if you don't like follow our guidelines not our even our regulations. And it changed. It has completely changed the way people act. And so we've gone full circle here like six times today, which is awesome. But we started this rabbit hole with the fact that you're damned if you do, damned if you don't, you don't in a way coming in to regulate companies like Google and Amazon. But it's really everything because no matter what we do, whether it's an individual company that you're like, oh, do we go anti-capitalist and come in and trust bust? Or whether it's a situation of a crime that a human commits that's a new type of crime, there's always going to be a level to which we learn something new that's possible,

that's bad, that happens, and some ruling body, in this case, any time it's a government, comes in and says, okay, here's how that's going to be avoided in the future. Here's the rule we're setting. Trying to decide which direction I want to go on this because you've brought up two different points that I want to make. One, and I think this is a one- thing and I'm out of it. I do not equate trust busting with anti-capitalism. That's important. Yeah. I do, I do not equate those two. Um, but the second thing is, and this is back to my concept of leadership that i discussed earlier

the job of leadership is to surround yourself with subject matter experts listen to them and know that you've assembled the best and the brightest minds and steer them and so in this instance, with the coronavirus pandemic, I believe there was an initial attempt to surround ourselves with the best and brightest minds. And perhaps you can say what you like about whether or not you agree with his recommendations or not, but Dr. Anthony Fauci is one of the brightest epidemiology minds

of his generation and perhaps of ours. The man has dedicated his entire professional career to infectious disease. And we heard his damning prophecies at the beginning of this whole pandemic. Back in, you know, there are some reports that say that government officials were hearing about this even in January before most of the American populace knew what COVID-19 was. But we disregarded a lot of the recommendations of the, we, we ignored the calls to action, I'll say. We didn't, as a public, do a good job of spreading information about what the true danger of infectious disease is. We missed an opportunity as a country to take a moment for public education and to really, really throw ourselves and the full force of the American public

at a threat to our economy, to our national security, to our public health, to our way of life. We failed. This is going to be something that is judged maybe for the rest of our lifetime. It's going to be something we look back on just like people still – and it's only 12 years later. But people look back on the financial crisis and it's still analyzed. It's still like who was at fault, why. We trace it back to them. And the bottom line is whenever you inject politics into a situation, it immediately takes away at least a part of objectivity

towards it. And it puts a level of subjectivity that can't ever be taken out. That's just what it is. I agree. I think that what you just said, though, has a lot of truth in it. And I also think there is a lot of truth to the fact that at the beginning at least by public appearances and what the general bipartisan opinion was regardless of how people were judging trump handled it what the bipartisan opinion was of the people who were in the room on the situation was that there was serious expertise we could agree on that like fauci Birx, all them. Absolutely. Okay. At some point, that started to shift. And one of the reasons I think it started to shift, especially as it relates to Fauci, is people made the argument that Trump would misquote things sometimes or misstate things,

which they're right about. I mean, there were some things he was just wrong about. And I thought Fauci did a very good job diplomatically, quietly correcting it without making Trump look bad. I thought he was really like, as someone who is a public servant in that case, who wants the same outcome that Trump does, which is to end this pandemic and, you know, have people be able to return to their lives. I thought he did an excellent job of that, especially the first couple months. Eventually, when Trump got to things that were less related to him misstating facts out loud, and I'm not saying that he stopped doing that. Of course. I want to be clear. He still, and we could go month by month, day by day. He misstated things consistently. It's just what it was.

Outside of that, though, when he would try to do or look at some of the positive outcomes to try to return people to their lives and stop people from losing their businesses, losing their homes, and falling into mental problems like depression and suicide due to isolation or failure or whatever. There was a level to which Dr. Fauci would then, I don't know what month this was when it really started, but he would then separately from Trump, like not on a stage with him talking, he would separately come out and say, he would paint the bleak picture over and over again. Negative. We're going to lose. We're only just starting. The second wave's coming. There will be a third wave too.

The vaccine, we said it's going to take 12 months. There's no way. That's too soon. It's going to take longer. You have to go inside. And then it goes to the ultimate fear tactic, fear of loss. We're trying to save lives here. That's more important

than opening up the economy. And people talked about at the beginning, the virus being worse than the cure. Now inject into all this the fact that it was a campaign in an election year. And we're recording this post-election when all this bullshit's going on. And we're not, you and I talk, we don't want to talk about that. I recorded one last night with somebody. We don't want to fucking talk about it. We're not going there. Right. Let's just focus on what we're not you and i taught we don't want to talk about that i recorded one last night with somebody we don't want to fucking talk about it i we're not going there right let's just focus on what we're talking you cool state of the task okay anyway when you inject that into it to bring it back to the original point of politics there you can't unring that bell and what's what's true becomes false what's false becomes true what up what's true becomes false what's false becomes true what up what's up becomes down what's down becomes up and then you create tribes around even the expertise

well who's the expertise here now i look at this with some nuance are there some things that dr fauci did that pissed me off yes are there some things that trump did that pissed me off yes so as far as i'm concerned just for the sake argument, I'm not saying this is the case, but let's say they're on equal footing of some good and some bad in my mind, just for the sake of argument, right? Sure. I think that because they both got some things right and they both got some things wrong, I think that overall that makes them both, both right and both wrong. Now let me, I just twisted your head there. So let me explain. Hit it.

When you are focused on your outcome, you, there is, just as human beings, we are going to have confirmation bias on things. Of course. Confirmation bias does not, sometimes it does, but it doesn't mean we're wrong. you there is just as human beings we are going to have confirmation bias on things of course confirmation bias does not sometimes it does but it doesn't mean we're wrong always it can mean that we're half right or three quarters of the way right or a quarter of the way right and the and the rest of the way wrong and so prime example someone used this the other day it was fucking brilliant they said when you were doing math problems in like high school calc and you did all the work on like a full page of a

problem and it got a little off and you knew what the final answer was because you had deduced it and you realized that the final answer you came up with after all this work and mind you you're timed in this test you knew that the final answer you had was like a decimal place off right meaning the right numbers but it like a decimal place off right meaning the right numbers but it was a decimal place off you're gonna put the right answer you're gonna move the decimal point and then just hope the teacher because what is what's the thing the teacher is going to give you the most amount of credit because the first thing they look at oh is oh he got the answer right and then they're going to go back and look at the work and realize some

of the work's wrong whereas when they see the answer's wrong right away, they're more likely to just take away from it. So here's what I mean by this. What was Fauci's outcome that he wanted? He wanted the pandemic to end. He wanted to save lives. And he wanted to make sure that the actual epidemiology, did I say that word right? Close enough. Yeah, sorry. Again again not as smart here but oh can't i'll be like get out of here but he wanted that to be the central focus and he wanted that to win the day and win all reason and win all logic because he's a 78 or 79 year old man and this is what he had done his entire career this This is what he lived, breathed shit, and fucked every day.

All right? That's it. Trump wanted the outcome to be to end the pandemic, but in a way that also allows people to return to their life normal as soon as possible so that they could live, make money, be out of isolation, not have to work. Like, he's looking at it also from more than Fauci might be. And I'm not speaking for Fauci, but possibly for the sake of argument,

more than Fauci might be. He's looking at all the mental health problems that other experts are telling him about. Like all these people are in isolation. They're not meant to be like that. This is not normal. Yada, yada, yada. And he's going, that can't happen on my watch. And he's got an election to try to win in November. Yeah. So you add in that there's one perspective there and another perspective from two very different areas of expertise. Very different areas.

That is bound to crash up against each other. Of course. And then the public, based on their political interests, will pick a side of who they more agree with. And frankly, I use the decimal example because perhaps Dr. Fauci, in the confirmation of this being, you know, and I don't mean to at all equate it to something positive at all. So let's just be clear. I'm using this as an example. This is his Super Bowl. It will never get bigger than this, hopefully.

The hope to God it never gets bigger than this for him. In all of his life. So he is more likely to, just by confirmation bias, play up the worst case scenarios and play up the worst that can happen and play up the priorities that he knows as an epidemiologist however the fuck you say it to be able to make sure that this doesn't spread as much and doesn't kill one life too many whereas trump is looking at it not as an epidemiologist how many times am i gonna say this but as someone who's also looking at other things that may lead to unhappiness and even ultimately like potentially like mental health like, mental health-related suicide death. Of course. So he moves his own decimal points on his end as well to, like,

maybe he makes the virus not as bad as it really is with his decimal points, whereas Fauci makes it worse than it really is. And once again, what do we get? An answer in the middle. But what do we get? A public split far away from the middle i need to take a lap so i admittedly um and this is this is my stupid science gerbil brain you know running on the hamster wheel i am inclined to agree more so with the recommendations of the scientists of the epidemiologists and i acknowledge that i have a degree of personal bias in that space i will be wholly cognizant of that tell people your major

in college both of them so. So, I started college as a chemical engineering major, made it through my first two years of that, and decided it was just not the right path for me to pursue. Where did you go? I was at the University of Delaware. And their chemical engineering program is top 10 in the country, right? Correct. What was your ranking in the class? At the end of my first year when they gave me our official rankings i was at the top but um so bill when it comes to eat sleeping and shitting science he has room to talk thank you continue i appreciate the introduction on that and give your second major too what'd you end up in and so i switched into an environmental science degree with minors in chemistry and geography and a concentration in atmospheric science in

the hopes of studying and getting my doctorate in meteorology those plans are on hold we will get back to that soon um bill found weed after freshman year that's essentially what you could take away from that i'm kidding sheesh i'm kidding I'm kidding. Go ahead. All right. But the point I'm trying to get to here is that I am inclined to trust the scientists here because this is exactly what they do. They understand the transmission of viruses, how they go from one person to another. And the fact of the matter is, you know, we're in a situation today where, what, 220,000 Americans have died due to COVID-19, something like that. And you can make the argument that no matter what we did, that would have been unavoidable. You can make that

argument. There are some people who believe with certain varying degrees of accuracy that perhaps a herd immunity approach would have been better. I personally disagree with that, but it certainly would have gotten us out of the way of the first wave faster. And I'm not going to make you like, yeah, I don't want to make you right now go through the scientific points. But but just for the record, i talked about that with bill earlier and um basically he uh he had like data points to back that up which doesn't mean they're inherently true all the way like you can't really know some of it's obviously completely simulated but like he's not just saying that offhand to just disagree with it so we find ourselves today in a situation where we had an opportunity to really try to get out ahead of this not just as a country but as a globe you know we we look at and this is maybe the only occasion in my entire life where i will praise the leadership of China. And granted, I also think that China doctored their

own story, but that is a, that is an issue for another day. We look at the, we look at the leadership of certain countries that really handled this quickly and well in the first wave, like South Korea, like New Zealand. Yeah. Please use that example. Don't make me, don't make me rip you a new asshole on China. Use the South Korea example. That's fair. Like I said, I will, I absolutely believe that there was some propaganda going on there. And by some, I mean all.

All of it. But regardless. South Korea is a fair point. Yes, absolutely. South Korea, New Zealand, which had gotten the total number of new cases per day down to zero for a time. Also a fair point. There were ways where we could have at least temporarily as a country gotten out ahead of this and resumed a lifestyle resembling normalcy. Unfortunately, we failed that litmus test, I would say, in May as a country.

And we got it under control a little bit in the summer. We had a somewhat closer to normal summer experience. And once we started going back indoors, once we started congregating and breathing the same air as everybody else and sending children to schools and returning to work we jeopardized our public health once again and um the website that i'm going to name drop here i have no affiliation to this whatsoever rt.live does an incredible job with data visualizations of the ratio of transmission for how many cases one current case is expected to create within the next two weeks and it's it's a very interesting site i would encourage you to take a look at it if you

haven't already um isn't that like russian tv or something uh no it's not it's a different one it's you know i'm talking about the like rt yes i thought you were like dropping that i'm like oh here we go oh no not a chance not a chance. Not a chance. All right. Yeah, I was like getting ready to say propaganda alert. No, no, I have no interest in that. Yeah. This was an independent third-party site that was only created after the coronavirus pandemic began.

Send me that link after because I'm going to put it in the show notes. Certainly will. I'll look at it. But you'll notice, and it's particularly damning of the last few weeks, once we opened schools, cases are on the rise again. We are in the middle of the second wave and we are at a turning point in this moment where we need to suck it up and do the horribly inconvenient thing and possibly damaging thing to our mental health and our well-beings of isolating and trying to really put this thing to bed? Or do we adopt the defeatist strategy and say it's going to run its course and we've already lost the fight? And I don't have the answer for that, ladies and gentlemen. I do not have the answer.

Do you know when we had the first self-driving car in this country, allegedly? What year? 07? 06, 07. Somewhere there. I believe, technically of what we know of, Google was the one that had it.

Mm-hmm. Would you agree that there's been a lot of data points and a lot of innovation since then i'd be a fool not to and a lot of time for companies like google because they're not the only one tesla was right behind them and tesla's like right with them on it and other companies as well to get a lot of data points of cars that drive themselves with you know a human for legality just sitting there monitoring for them to be able to go prove that cars can autonomously drive themselves much better at a much lower death rate per trip than a human being handling the car could. Do you think that could be reasonable to say? I'm not expecting you to say like, is that the case? I'm saying, could it be reasonable that

they've had enough mileage of data since then to be able to say hey per miles driven here's the number of deaths that can happen or would have happened in our simulations versus here's the number of deaths that happen per mile driven of a human being driving the car for the sake of the argument i'll say yes okay all right yeah and and again you can check that afterwards and i'll i'll i'll throw it in the intro if you want to if if you want to come back and um and say something against that to hedge or whatever no worries but this is where the argument in a totally different way of data versus humanity comes in because i'll tell you this let's say and i don't have the numbers in front of me let's say on the average day

i don't know there's 10 fatal car accidents in the States. I don't know if it's 10 or 100 or whatever, but it's some number. Let's say it's 10. If we start, if the government starts allowing self-driving cars, and for the sake of argument, we get to a day where there are an equal number at the same time, a 50-50 percentage of human cars and self-driving cars on the road on day one just for the sake of this illogical experiment that you and I are setting right now. Right. If on day one, 10 people are killed in fatalities by human cars and one person is killed by an automated car, what's the news story? Automated car kills person. And I think I see where you're going with this. Yeah. And so there will, of course, on a human level,

let's even say I knew the person that died. You don't think I'm going to be devastated? Of course, I'm going to be devastated. Yeah, of course, I'm going to be emotional. And actually, if I was close with the person I should, for the sake of this argument I'm making, I should be someone totally removed from the conversation here because the conversation here turns to the news story and to be very very unempathetic about it if we're just going to label it the sob story of the one person who died versus the 10 people who died and and with human driven cars and then let's say for the sake of argument we continue this experiment for 300 straight days or 400 straight days, and it continues at an average clip of 10 to 1.

Right. We will continue to say the automated cars are bad despite the fact that they have a 90% reduction in death or fatality ability on the road. Because it is new, it is change, and we fight fight change and we fight the unknown more than just change and so because there's the unknown and this is the devil we don't know we ignore the devil we do know and so when i look at covid and i look at the data that the cdc puts out in september about fatality ratios this is a september 10th report that's been in multiple show notes i'll put it in there again every time of course that shows that if you are 70 or above, yeah, there's a 5.5% chance that you die when contracting.

Whereby, everything younger than that is within, I believe, it's within like 1% and all the way down to like the youngest people, it's like 0.02%. Far more dangerous than the regular flu, I might add. Of course. By a large factor. It's not even close. Oh, yeah. But there is a level to which you have to say, well, comparatively speaking, what is the trade-off in the long-term health and viability and freedom of the people in a country

if we perpetually continue to, at the drop of a hat when anything goes wrong, completely take away our norms and take away our or voluntarily give up our civil liberties to try to get a lid on something that may never leave the air because by the way and i have not checked this in the last few weeks but new zealand that got down to zero cases had a couple more cases come in correct i don't know what they've done since then i have no idea people so maybe they haven't locked down at all i don't know but i'm just saying it still came back it did and you know for all my for all my blustering i do want to hedge that even if america did everything perfectly even if we pulled a new zealand we got it down to zero we'd still have to worry about other nations doing their part

um and i'm not saying that they would or they wouldn't have these are hypotheticals that i can't possibly dream of exploring yeah but there's always the possibility that it could have re-entered and we could have to do this again and to your credit that is an extremely valid point of where do we draw that line between giving up our civil liberties and accepting an additional risk. Life is always throwing additional risks at us. We've been dealing with new challenges since the dawn of time. And most recently, the, you know, the one that I think of the most that truly altered our way of life in a understandable knee-jerk reaction, and don't ring me for this because there's a possibility i get canceled for this one um 9-11 shaking keep going keep going 9-11 was an incident where we as a country had never experienced well i't say never, but not since 1812,

had we experienced an act of war on our turf. Well, Pearl Harbor. Okay, yes, I apologize. I'm sorry, but still, long time ago. No, you're 100% right, though. Long time ago. Can't believe I just missed that point. No, but either way, your point stands.

I just want to make sure we're historically correct. Yes, of course. Sorry about that. But here we are, you know, it's 2001 and it's been 60 some years since we have had an act of aggression on our turf. And what did we do? We knee jerked. The TSA exploded tenfold. We were checking everything. We were paranoid. We had this Islamophobia that ran rampant through our country. And we started several international conflicts as a direct result. The second one being the big deal, which was unrelated and then forced to be made related based on a false narrative of nukes which

was iraq the first one being a deal that i think people everyone got behind and i to this day will pound my table getting behind which was we went and found them yeah i'm cool with that one it's the second one that was unrelated there was a problem but to your point you're correct but what else did we do the tsa and the tsa like yes technically you're right those were civil liberties because security took 20 times as long you had to take your shoes off and shit and people had to feel you up in ways they didn't in the past but that was the kind of thing where people were like all right with it as long as they knew the stipulations of what they couldn't get caught with like don't

bring a gun don't bring a knife there were known concrete guidelines. Yes, yes, yes. And today, because of the nature of an invisible enemy, one that can't be seen with the naked eye, one that can't even be, at least with our current capabilities within medical technology, can't be tested for at the drop of a head outside of the extremely wealthy. You know, we find ourselves... Less true find ourselves less true now less true now but yes yes we're moving in that direction but it's not quite there yet not quite there we do find ourselves restricted in our lifestyles and we as a populace are particularly resilient but also resistive to change as As you pointed out yourself, we fight like hell against change. You're also missing one.

You're missing a big one though. Hit it. Like that's just going to add to your argument here. Hit it. And I'm not going to go deep into it because now this will be like three podcasts in a row where we go down the rabbit hole with it. But what did we do in response besides the TSA and declaring war on Al-Qaeda and going to Afghanistan?

We also passed things like the Patriot Act, which got born into stellar wind and violated. We, for the first time, behind the scenes, government, if you want to call it deep state government, whatever, changed the laws to fit their narrative instead of fitting their narrative to the laws that's a good point that's the ultimate civil liberty because it affected the Constitution and no one gave a fuck that's good now when people viscerally or physically feel it because they have to physically put on a mask because they're told to or they have to physically stay inside or whatever and you know like the mass we're not gonna dig into that like it's physically put on a mask because they're told to or they have to physically stay inside or whatever and you know like the mass we're not gonna dig into that like it's just it's a temporary thing

that everyone should just do so that we get it the fuck over with but you understand the symbolism of course like they have to do things they can't go to the office they can't do normal things tangible yes time yes it's much more tangible it's much it's and you know what was tangible last time watching the fucking buildings come down yes it's and you know what was tangible last time watching the fucking buildings come down yes it was very tangible so what did that tangible result result in it resulted in one thing that was two things that were very tangible right away and we're probably missing things but tsa on our home turf and also seeing us go to war with these people and then seeing it on the news and what was happening the third thing was the intangible thing which was

they said oh here's the patriot act what are you not gonna approve something called the patriot act i mean like what are you unpatriotic but what's in the patriot act what does it mean what's the slippery slope it creates well that's what we did yeah yeah and actually it makes me think of have you ever read jonathan hate at all or height can't say that i have. He's a psychologist at NYU. Okay. And he wrote a book, it just ties into this, like it's kind of seamless. It talks about our mentality and culture.

He wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind, like three years ago, something like that. And he wrote it with a guy named Greg Lukanoff, who's another psychologist from NYU. You have my attention and so he charted out how we have invented a culture of an inability to have conversations especially among our younger generations because people fear things that are potential or don't exist or they fear the possibility that other groups who aren't like them or don't think like them are going to run with ideas that therefore can then hurt them so this is why we see like on college campuses over the past especially and he literally year by year it's

creepy how correct he gets it he shows you the years it started and at what rate and it's like backed by data but especially over like the last five six seven years you know 2013 and on there has been an increase in college campus freak out like cancel cancel culture, total safe space, and here's the key word, safety. It hits on fear. Everything is about safety. When you click any of these community guidelines on social media, who by the way,

they're smart, they always appeal to the youngest generations. When Facebook stopped doing that, all the old people went on there and all the young people left for their other company that they owned, Instagram. So they appeal to the youngest generations and what do their guidelines say safety all over it we care about the safety and security of our users we want you

to feel safe in here we want you to feel like you are open they're there or whatever they say any servicing department from any company will say that if they're worth their time corporate speak is taking it too and so now everyone is like they're trying to be all about the human right they're trying to get away from the data on it which i should appreciate and in a way i appreciate the effort there but what they're doing is they're constantly reminding people of danger through the word safety that they're inventing dangers where dangers don't exist it's virtue signaling at its finest yeah and you could tie that in and like there's so

many things this could have been like 12 hours long but like i have to keep on saying like book market we'll talk about that another time but of course it's that is the culture we've created and yeah i mean culturally maybe it's tied back to september 11th and all the downstream offshoot effects that came from it. But like, when it comes to COVID, that's why the mentality is so built on fear. And that's why there's a lot of people who are fighting back against it. Because guess what? There are a lot of people fighting back against the college campus culture now that doesn't allow any conversation that they don't agree with. Right? So, that also tends to get drawn along political lines, though that I see now changing, which gives me hope. It used to be left versus right, and if you were conservative,

you fought against it because you felt like you were getting shut down. Now, I am seeing, thank God, a lot of people who are moderate liberals or in that middle area or, you know, don't vote right and now maybe don't vote left going no no no all right wait we got to look at this and so with covid it was the ultimate manifestation of it from a marketing perspective because people like these politicians everyone like even right wing they sold safety and saving lives and shit and they reminded us over and over again, fear, fear, fear. It's the same negative mentality that gives me the problem with like, don't be evil from Google. It's the same thing. Now, that's an interesting tie-in.

So, let's turn this on its head. to you know as opposed to creating a culture of fear but still addressing the concerns of those who feel persecuted how do you create a culture of positivity around that checkmate there's no answer and that goes back to what I said about the social media algorithm feeding you negativity. We're so trained to diagnose problems. That's what I just did. We diagnose problems, but there will always be space for the problem solver, for the one who runs in the opposite direction of the herd. But I didn't do that. I know you didn't.

Yeah. direction of the herd but i didn't do that i know you didn't yeah but i'm saying if there's ever been a time where socially maybe we need someone who can do that maybe it's now i'm all ears and like i i try to think about it and when i did dumb as it sounds i mean i'm getting this thing off the ground and i'm bringing in a lot of smart people like you and just going with it and having conversations and building out a show that i enjoy i get a lot out of and then hopefully other people do and and really feel it but you know like along these lines on election night like i i did a show then just kind of talking about the things that were going on and not just like live reporting what was happening anyone can do that but like having the conversations around how we react to it and what what i was thinking from a political perspective or like from a social perspective as we were seeing the results

and the polling kind of come in and i did you know the first 45 minutes i wanted to do like just a conversation about the status the status of things without saying the words Trump or Biden for the most part, like not addressing that, just addressing the thought and the patterns that we're seeing in society. And, you know, here I am a fucking nobody, just trying to provide entertainment to the people who have early adopted me here and are trying to get value from me more than anything, more than just the entertainment or whatever. And I was like, dumb as it sounds where I don't even have the solution to offer with you right now. Why don't I have the conversation about

third party politics or removing a duopoly or why I didn't vote for either of these candidates? Why don't I at least introduce it? It's like something that people don't want to talk about, but at some point people have to stand up and do it. My thing and the thing that you just pointed out that I think about and that I need to, I don't know, prepare and get better at or, and it's, and frankly, it's not just me. It's, it's all of us is that we identify the problems and we don't know the solution and i'm not saying you need to know the solution right away that's these are complicated things you and maybe you never know the full solution but we don't even have an idea of it so when you said what would you do and

i said checkmate it's because i my my king's down man of course like i just maybe and maybe i did a terrible job but for the sake of argument maybe i just did a great job laying that out but fuck if i know how to fix that right now and so gerbil brains going back to science yeah no really you have a scientific method you have a problem statement and what it takes is um we as a society proposed a hypothesis of how to fix it and we're in the experiment phase you know and that's how we've ended up in the throes of a social movement now we analyze the results of that see whether it was good or bad for us overall take the good keep it chuck the bad make a new problem statement reevaluate iterate continually think about what's better for all of us. What builds a more perfect union? And sometimes that's

going to be changing our way of life for the betterment of public health. Sometimes that's going to be accepting that we have a challenge to public health that we don't have the means or technology to attack right now, but there are bigger things at stake. I am not in a position of power to make that decision can you define those bigger things like how you think of them and it could be really broad i know i'm putting you on the spot no it's fine um you know you brought up a very interesting point about death rates and how they drop off exponentially particularly relating back to coronavirus but it's by age though that's that's what i was getting at by age and it's you know there are also relationships to comorbidities things of that

nature and i think you find that with a lot of illnesses that mortality rates decrease as you decrease in age decrease in complications to your health but some of the other things outside of just your physical health would be exposure to screen time, availability of the outside, social interaction, being able to see your family, being able to hold a newborn nephew for the first time in your entire life. life having that opportunity you're there there are life experiences that you can't put a monetary value on that we do miss out on because of some of these restrictions and who am i to say what's worth what quite frankly i don't have the answer for you i don't and you know i'm falling into my own trap here because i'm asking for answers and not providing them. But it's certainly food for thought. I think it also bursts a time where people, through the desperation of the things they lose that they can't put a value on, start to think about the potential of things that they haven't considered before. And in English, they start to look at normal things in their life,

be it their health, their occupation, the way they spend money, even down to what type of money they use or how they spend. What is it they spend? Is it tangible or is it just cash like usual? And they start to look for, they have time to consider other alternative better solutions. I don't think that it's a coincidence that we've seen something like Bitcoin come back to Earth in a good way during the coronavirus pandemic.

We've seen its price now start to approach where it was for like two seconds during the massive bubble at the end of 2017 into the very beginning of 2018 yes and we've seen money pile into the assets so much so that i saw a statistic a couple weeks ago that somewhere in this 60 percentile like maybe 65 66 something like that i'll look that up after of bitcoin has been held for at least a year or more meaning people have not only been buying it but they're holding it as if it's an asset that they believe in and perhaps one of the reasons for this besides just people being at home and having the time to watch the price slowly go up and start to think about it and start to think about a lot of things like their civil liberties or government control or what how far their money's going to go because they don't know if they're

going to have a job on the other side of this or what the future of the economy is going to look like. They start thinking about the most basic things like, well, how do I put food on the table and how do I put enough money in my pocket? And they start looking at new asset classes or old asset classes like gold or like, you know, collection items or things like that and get them real creative. They even start looking at stocks. That's why we saw a lot of people gamified and going into Robinhood this whole time. But Bitcoin obviously has gotten adoption over this period because, generally speaking, its price has gone straight up like this throughout the pandemic since like right after the very beginning.

Right. And part of the reason for that could be twofold or for two different reasons meaning someone might lean to one way for adoption someone may lean to another way as their reason for adoption one being that it is an asset that is not inflatable meaning it is defined as there will be 21 million total bitcoins by the year 2041 or 2041 of those two years or 2141 there's 18 and a half million right now but meaning inflation will stop right in 2141 i think it is and the second idea being it is money that is immutable in that or i shouldn't call it money it is a storage of value that is

protected on a secure online location that cuts out all the excess waste and control hypothetically of something like a government because it wasn't created by the government correct it's it's independent now do you think that these something like this is more just a reactionary trend right now while people have time on their hands at home and are thinking about their freedom and about their future and maybe panicking in some ways in their head or getting really overly creative in their head? Or do you think that is representative of a long-term trend? Because now, by the way, through the coronavirus pandemic, one of the many things we've seen happens every time there's some sort of economic crisis. What do central banks do, including the Fed, ours?

They print money. They inflate our currency. They devalue a dollar. And no one fucking understands it. Or very few people, I i should say ever think about the fact that the dollar they pull out of their pocket is worth a lot less the day after the government does that correct so i would lean on the side of you need context um what you need to understand and i am forgive me i'm not totally up to date on the cryptocurrency markets right now

sure so while that may be true for bitcoin does that hold true for the others in that same asset classes no not necessarily it doesn't hold true for ethereum or litecoin or things of that nature right now for example yeah a lot of them are increasing in price so in theory it could hold true but you don't want to equate all of them like they're the same they're different and that's what i wanted to ask you is do you have the same restrictions on ethereum i'm using that as an example um are they also going to have a hard cap of the number of ethereum coins or dollars or whatever their unit is actually i know a lot less about ethereum is there another one that you do so xrp okay which is created by the company ripple but it is separate ripple is a company they created this digital currency it is not related to them but i forget the exact amount there is but it is my understanding

is it is a capped amount or to an extent a capped amount we'll have to check that after okay but the company currently still owns an enormous percentage of it themselves so they can they can control they can dole it yes understood whereas bitcoin is just created out in the public it is not owned in the ether yes yes um and so without a suitable comparison to tie it into the performance of a pre-existing market, really difficult for me to say whether or not it's a trend. And the reason I say that is because we're seeing it rise, but we're seeing it rise in parallel with the remainder of the cryptocurrency market that does exist. But there is that important restriction that exists on Bitcoin

that doesn't exist on the value of others and that they can make more Litecoin or Ethereum or whatever it is whenever they so decide. But as you've said, there's going to be a hard cap on the number of Bitcoins. So my inclination is to say that yes this will persist beyond the covet 19 pandemic and lifestyle changes that come about because of that the reason i say that is this is the crisis of now this is the crisis of tomorrow this is the crisis of tomorrow. This is the crisis of three months from now, a year from now. All short term in the context of time. God forbid two years from now. Please don't say that. Don't put that out on the internet.

God forbid. So it is the crisis of the short term. It will be replaced. Of course. there will be another crisis and so there's support for the idea that crisis is driving the value up because we are treating it as an asset class like you said it is becoming a commodity it is an independently owned and controlled self-regulating price point i would say that half of that's right for xrp and half of that's right for bitcoin bitcoin technically may have straddled the two yeah yeah you strut no no that's cool i just want to be clear okay for listeners i would say for bitcoin because it does not have a company over it and it is just publicly mined in the open we don't need to go into details but basically there is roughly 18 and a half million bitcoins out there right now there will be only 21 million when it's done that is

benito that you can't change that and so the way it's then created publicly over that set time period it's not owned by anyone and it's not going to be released at a different clip than it's already defined whereas xrp i think and i think the company and i don't know this we'll have to look it up after i think the company has defined or made like some sort of promise as to how much they're going to release at a given time or whatever but they still own a ton of it and not to go down that path and go too deep into it but xrp is also different because it's willing to work it's actually openly trying to work with large institutions like major banks and major corporations and I guess governments too that in some ways a lot of people in the crypto space and I see – I have some agreement with this argument from what I've heard they believe defeats the purpose of what cryptocurrency was supposed to be which is remove all the control and the middlemen and give the power to the people in a

protected manner right i just want to give context to that and so as a result i do think there will be continued buy-in i don't i don't think that this is a fad because as long as we face strife and it casts doubt on our ability to trust in our own form of currency and our own economic construct, which is a socially driven construct, we decide what a dollar is worth. As a people, we decide what a dollar is worth. It's paper. It's not backed by gold. Yeah. Story for another day. Yeah.

I think there will continue to be a space for crypto. How large that space will be, I don't know. And what its utility is, whether it is a storage of value only or it actually then has one rise up or one that exists right now that then performs as a digital currency that is then adopted into mass circulation and i do want to say i saw a headline and nothing more that i'm gonna i'm gonna press the button here uh there is a certain country whose name i have been forbidden from mentioning that is testing the internal only circulation of a digital currency right now and admittedly that stirred some fears within me but i will leave that to another time it's china but yes yeah they're they're a problem man they're big and let me let me be very clear on that statement the chinese government is a problem not their people their government is a big big problem

but yeah if if we were going to start that right, that in and of itself is a six-day conversation at a minimum. So, Bill, my head hurts. This was great. My head hurts too. You've made me think a lot, man. Thank you for coming out. And thanks for your measured thoughts as well. And what I liked about this is there are some things i have to go

back and review from this conversation i'm actually really going to listen to this one close because there are some things that we generated some agreement out of disagreements as well which is really cool that's powerful it's powerful because that's that's what you can do especially when you're doing long form like this you sit down you have conversations and all these different streams of consciousness can tie together and then form these patterns, and then suddenly you realize, like, oh, ideologically, we may have started differently on this one rabbit hole, but then we ended up on this thing, and boom, like, it all makes sense. There is more that unites us than divides us. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's why I preach against the duopoly, and we'll continue to do so.

I'm with you on that one. Well, listen, brother, good to see you. Good to see you too. Thanks for coming in. We will have to do this again down the line. My pleasure. I'm looking forward to it. Absolutely.

All right, everyone else, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dorey. This is Bill Faciolo. And this is Trendafire. Now give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.