Julian Dorey Podcast - #33 - Brady Burkett

Starting point is 00:00:00 Truck Month is on at Chevrolet! Get 0% financing for up to 72 months on a 2025 Silverado 1500 Custom Blackout or Custom Trail Boss. With Custom Trail Bosses available, Class Exclusive, Duramax 3.0L Diesel Engine, and Z71 Off-Road Package with a 2-inch Factory Suspension Lift, you get both on-road confidence and off-road capability. Dirt road ahead? Let's go! Truck Month is awesome! Ask yourvrolet dealer for details and i see the same thing at the capitol throw them all in jail don't suddenly give me like i'm getting from the left all these speeches like this is beyond the pale these people

Starting point is 00:00:41 are disgusting we don't don't give me that. You did it. You supported it all last summer. Call it both ways. Number one, I ask, why is society creating people with nothing to lose that they, they resort to this? We have these two sides and it's a classic tactic to make you think that the other side is violent and, and going to commit crimes against you, so you better go and be violent, commit crimes against them. We don't have people on both sides of the aisle condemning their own. What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by my friend Brady Brickett. Brady is a consultant for a company called Currency Cloud, which is a late stage fintech startup based, I believe, out of the UK. But he definitely says that in this podcast. He'll explain what Currency Cloud is, but they have three or four hundred employees.

Starting point is 00:01:42 And Brady is actually based out of their New York City office, or I guess former office because everyone's remote now. In addition to working there, Brady is also the host of the Payment Innovation podcast. I think there are a couple different hosts, but he is one of them for the company. And as you will see in the final hour of this podcast, he is extremely well-versed in in FinTech, which I might have said this, but stands for financial technology. That is a big space that is seeking to disrupt an archaic legacy financial system that has all different types of silos to it. So it can get very complicated. But Brady is someone who actually understands pretty much the full scope of the industry and all the different new moves that are being made.

Starting point is 00:02:25 So it's nice to get a feel for the different trends he's been seeing and what he expects. Now, the first two hours of this podcast, we talked about a whole bunch of societal issues. Brady is a guy who has the ability to hold two different thoughts at once, which makes him special in today's society. And I really just appreciate his take on a lot of hot button, high charged issues these days where he just manages to kind of stay right here. And if you're listening and not watching, I'm just kind of holding my hand straight across up the middle of the room. He's not somebody that gets caught up in all the noise. And so I look at him as a voice of reason on a lot of these issues, and he did not disappoint. He's actually fairly new on Twitter as far as actually tweeting, but he – his Twitter is phenomenal. There we go. And you would like to hear some more thoughts from Brady. You can follow him at Burkett Brady.

Starting point is 00:03:27 B-U-R-K-E-T-T-B-R-A-D-Y. I will post that link in the show notes as well. Anyway, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. We are on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. And if you're on YouTube right now, hit that subscribe button, hit that bell button, and if you can, like the video. Also, to all the people who have been leaving five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, thank you. I say it every week. More roll in. That's a huge help. You guys are doing amazing. The comments are incredible. So if you haven't,

Starting point is 00:04:02 and you can take a second to leave a five-star review with a comment on there, I would really, really appreciate it. That said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory and this is Trendify. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where is the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts

Starting point is 00:04:25 you feel me everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo start asking questions my mom got it happy for her she's 60

Starting point is 00:04:43 I think my dad should get it I think when you should get it. I think when you and I are 26, 27, I don't know if it makes sense to get it. Which one did they get? Pfizer or the mRNA? I don't know. I don't know. But the majority of my opinions on this topic probably don't come from the best sources.

Starting point is 00:05:06 I'm not reading the medical literature. I'm kind of following funny people on Twitter. Good for you for admitting that too. So my thought is I like my chances with coronavirus in general. So let the people who need the vaccine get the vaccine. I'm not going to push to get to the front of the line. If six months down the road it makes sense. Based on what's going on, it makes sense, but I don't need it. I don't feel like I need it. Yeah, I think that's probably the fairest opinion I've heard from somebody who's saying they're not going to get it like right now.

Starting point is 00:05:42 There seems to be a large amount of public lack of trust around it simply a because of the politics that were injected into this whole thing and b because people know that you can't cheat time and so when you're looking at a vaccine or any kind of medical test that you're doing over a period of time there's the six months there's the 12 months, there's the 18 months, there's the 24 months, etc. It's only been 11, 12 months since I started working on this. You can't just invent 18 months. So when you are evaluating people who have taken this as test subjects, we don't have the 18 month data. We don't have the 24 month data and so i understand why a lot of people are questioning that where i get some comfortability so to speak in it is a when i'm talking to guys like john schneider who i just had on on the last episode who was excellent and is in this world and

Starting point is 00:06:38 understands it very well and i hear guys like that be very confident in this that's certainly something that helps and then b when i see a lot of public figures, not even necessarily the politicians, because you never know what to believe, but a lot of public figures who are, you know, maybe in the intellectual space or the innovation space who are getting it, that certainly gives me a little less pause. So I, don't get me wrong, I'm a vaccine guy. I've been vaccinated for everything and believe in that. But the one thought I had is how many sci-fi movies start with every senator, everyone in the president's administration, everyone in every state government getting a vaccine that we don't really know anything about.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Yeah, I remember watching I Am Legend. Like they don't even let the about yeah i remember watching i am legend like they don't even let the president and vice president fly in the same plane but they'll shoot them up with the same vaccine and who knows yeah it's we all look at art as imitating life and life imitating art so it's going to be a question and people are going to do that but like we were just talking about you can't reinvent time and that And that's the one argument that I hear from people because where I say that has credence to it. And so I also think a really good way of looking at it is exactly what you laid out, which is let's go at people who are more at risk, who also, by the way way if we're even talking about a part of that community being older people let's say people above the age of 55 so not even you know like

Starting point is 00:08:10 old old people but just people who are older these are people who are not procreating at this point by and large you know that there's they have that more risk to it and if you're gonna do it do it on those populations not because it's like oh if it goes wrong you're gonna die more so what are some downstream effects that could just affect your physical abilities in life or whatever yeah you you wouldn't want to see a 25 year old lose that over a 55 year old potentially having some downsides that don't affect them as badly as it would a 25 year old yeah see what i'm saying yeah and i think generally speaking i trust the the companies behind the vaccine i don't trust the government rollout of it um or what they're doing but if you

Starting point is 00:08:56 look at the the math behind it and there was a guest on rogan probably in early december um chris docus no um someone who's who's a much more skeptical about the vaccine an ex-journalist he said well so if you're in son baronson yeah he said like if you're 80 and you get covid you have a 20 chance of dying if you get the vaccine we don't really know but odds of negative side effects will probably be less than that so go get the vaccine if you're 24 25 and you get covid what 0.1 percent chance of dying it's it's in there and again like always i put this data in the show notes from the cdc so people can look at it yeah it's i remember the number from the seven from the september 10th report of the 70 and above yeah and that and again that

Starting point is 00:09:42 includes people who are 100 right but that number was 94.5 chance to survive so you do have a 5.5 chance of dying yeah assuming you get it so that's that's serious right but then when you look at i won't even go the infants who generally are no problem when you get it as as crazy as it is because like an infant is incredibly vulnerable they do very well with their stuff. The under 18s. Right. But if you look at the under 18s.

Starting point is 00:10:09 So I think the age group the CDC had on, I might get this wrong, but I think the age group was like 4 to 17. They had the survival rates like 0.9998 or something. Yeah, yeah. And that's, again, of cases we know about. Yeah. And that's, again, of cases we know about, which is a whole other can of worms too because now you see, I guess, like the day after the inauguration, the WHO says that the rapid tests suddenly aren't very reliable. And I forget the logic behind it. I'll post what they posted. But we rejoined the WHO that day as well because Biden put us back back in that which i think is fine but definitely a little

Starting point is 00:10:45 sketchy that now suddenly they're saying that because i don't know about you but i've known so many people who have gotten covid over the last six months and maybe two of them were like a little banged up yeah you know and i do know of some people who i don't know personally who have been in the hospital i've talked to people who like they got really banged up so it's not like that doesn't happen it does but there's so many people who are like well fuck i have it but you know i had to test myself six times for six or eight days just to see if i did yeah and they only tested themselves because they went somewhere not because they were feeling right something right because they're yeah that's sketchy um i i read that the flu cases are

Starting point is 00:11:24 massively down this year so when you look at covid compared to the flu cases are massively down this year. So when you look at COVID compared to the flu, I think some of the prevention measures for COVID have impacted the flu. That's what people are saying. And you can draw a parallel between COVID and the flu with the vaccine too. I think it's yet to be determined if we need a new COVID vaccine every year. Some people are saying that it'll mutate and move around and it could become one of those diseases that just stays in our population.

Starting point is 00:11:52 And the point of a flu vaccine is not necessarily to keep you from dying. Because when a 27 year old goes to get the flu vaccine, they're not expecting to get the flu and die. They're trying to keep grandma safe when they go visit her. So I do get that argument for vaccination. So I can see both sides of it. I don't know. Time will tell. That's another scary thing though, dude.

Starting point is 00:12:15 You just touched on it there, but you can't find data on stuff. I usually, when I do research, I'm pretty good about screenshotting and saving links. For whatever reason, a lot of, maybe because I'm doing too much of it, but a lot of the stuff I was looking at in, say, over the summer and into the early fall on Corona and COVID, I didn't do that much. I didn't like leave the trail. Yeah. And fuck if I can't find a lot of them. Yeah. These days. And, you know, my life was on Google and being an expert with that and learning how to find things. And as far as like my circle, I'm probably the most experienced with Google and

Starting point is 00:12:58 being able to uncover the shit. Yeah. I can't do it on some of this and one of the things is the the flu numbers i can't even get those anymore yeah i can't get the breakdown of deaths and projected deaths per category for the year 2020 anymore i was looking at that data i saw it yeah in august and again it had basically two quarters first quarter complete second quarter with some projection i think and then third and fourth quarters projected because it hadn't happened right but there were there were trends where it's like oh well we are losing a lot of people to mental based issues whether that be the tragedy of suicide or overdoses which are the two most common ones or people just developing things because their immune systems could be compromised which that's more controversial to talk about because I don't know much about that. But there's been doctors who are like,

Starting point is 00:13:49 hey, long term, this isn't great for people when they're so separated from reality and being around constant walking germs of other people. Yeah. Early on, I was watching Scott Atlas, who was on Fox News. It's going to make everyone think that I'm a big Fox News guy. Big Fox News guy. I'm not. I'm not. But I caught Scott Atlas. He's written a lot for the Wall Street Journal.

Starting point is 00:14:13 I respect him. Was he the doctor in the White House, that Scott Atlas? He was on some commission who left voluntarily. And I used to work in a healthcare tech startup, so I've been following him for a while. And so you knew him? I didn't know him personally. I saw him speak at conferences. Right, right. But his approach to healthcare is always looking at kind of the knock-on effects of any policy. Rather than look head-on, should we develop a vaccine or not? He looks at, okay, what's the cost of going all after this vaccine when we could be spending our time researching something else?

Starting point is 00:14:50 He has an open mind about things like that. So his, one of his perspectives early on was when you close down elective procedures, elective cancer screenings, he went through the stats and I don't know them all, but he said, you know, we find 5,000 cases of throat cancer a week in the U.S. If people aren't getting screened, how many people are going to be sick six months, a year from now with cancer we didn't catch? And that's just one example, and I didn't get that number right. Think about all those preventative measures going to your primary care physician you were scared to probably until at least September, October. And some people probably still aren't going. So there's that whole aspect to the shutdown that I don't think gets covered. And here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:15:38 This is where the politicization, I can never say that word comes in and atlas was the guy for full background who ended up being hired officially to i think lead the coronavirus task force in the white house so he's hired by trump who is like he's got his people on his side and then if you're not on his side don't like him you fucking hate him so anything he does and he didn't help with his whole trust numbers on this thing in the early months especially. But anything he says related to this is going to get the full vitriol attack no matter what. Some of it's fair. Some of it ends up being not fair. You got to try to sift through it.

Starting point is 00:16:13 But this is one of the unfortunate examples because they crushed this guy Scott Atlas. And maybe, by the way, some of it was very fair. I'm not really sure. I did not follow him closely enough to be able to say. But they tried to paint him as this completely unempathetic herd immunity scumbag who – his ideas were all loony. a long list of expertise and was looking at this from a pure 30,000 foot in the air medical perspective as a longtime doctor. So I looked at that. I'm like, well, that doesn't mean he's not qualified to talk on this. And that's the thing. We have put the effect, the societal effect of this virus so deep into our souls that the idea of introducing an idea that could be counter to the ads we see on TV, literally ads that we see on TV that then come onto the internet, onto our social feeds,

Starting point is 00:17:10 anything counter to that is, it's forbidden. You can't talk about that. So I'm drawn to people who don't look at the world through either you're on my side or you're against my side. There are two viewpoints. Which side are you on? And I think Scott Atlas is one of them. And just to pick up on another thing that, another of his ideas that I absolutely love,

Starting point is 00:17:33 and I'm sure you didn't invite me in here today to do a podcast about Scott Atlas. No, this goes where it goes, dude. Let's go. But he takes a stance on the healthcare debate. You know, Obamacare, private insurance, socialized medicine. He says the problem with healthcare, yeah, access to insurance is important, but it's the cost. Why can't we lower the cost of every procedure, of every time you visit your doctor,

Starting point is 00:17:57 of every bottle of pills, and then it's not so important who provides the insurance because the stakes aren't high. How does that work though? That's always the question. I'll be honest about healthcare. And I've said this on the podcast before. I don't think there is, or at least I haven't seen it. I think it might be the hardest question we have. I've never seen a good answer because anytime someone like with Obamacare, I completely understood where they were coming from. Yeah. But there's a huge loss on then the talent pool side and the incentive to go into the space with obamacare yeah the contrary is don't help people if they walk in the emergency room and aren't covered

Starting point is 00:18:33 that sucks too that's that's fucking terrible no one wants to do that you know so it's like you have these two ideas where it's like well shit we're we're kind of fucked either way. So is there something in his plan that you thought was realistic around that? So at the end of the day, healthcare is a service industry. Yes. No matter how many MRI machines you have to buy to fill a hospital, it's about getting a service from a nurse, a physician's assistant, and a physician. Those are licensed professions. Mm-hmm. and a physician. Those are licensed professions. And the American Medical Association decides how many they're going to graduate and give jobs to each year. High barrier of entry. High barrier of entry, very competitive. And their salaries are protected because of how

Starting point is 00:19:17 competitive it is. So it's not the medical establishment doesn't like the idea that you open up the credentialing. But I think that's the path forward. If there are more doctors, what's the law of supply and demand? So you have the demand for it. You have more doctors. Well, actually, couldn't that water it down though? Because then you have a greater number to choose from, a greater supply. So essentially the overall value of the service you get goes down.

Starting point is 00:19:49 Is that what you were getting at? I thought you were getting at the opposite. The cost goes down. Well, the cost goes down, but then also the quality goes down. And that's what the American Medical Association would say. There's a great book by George Bush's brother who, who founded Athena Health. Forget his first name. I thought you were going to say Jeb for a second.

Starting point is 00:20:10 No, no, not Jeb. Um, Reply Hall was a terrific book. Called Where Does It Hurt? Um, and, and he was in the military as a medic and then he served on an EMT crew in New Orleans. Um, and he wrote about how the, the, the EMT crew was providing trauma surgery. He learned it in six weeks in the army. So I don't think, I'm not claiming that this is the solution to all of our healthcare problems. All I'm saying is there are other ways to look at a problem.

Starting point is 00:20:38 Think about the entire context. And if cost is the issue, let's take a look and see what can be done yeah and i don't know how much this part works like i i'm not i would definitely not call myself educated on the full insurance process i have an idea from my own experiences with it but i've never sat down and read a book on how the actual insurance companies work with this. I've read some articles. That's it. So I need to be very clear, like a farthest thing from an expert coming at this with the question, but how much is it due to the fact that you have kind of an oligopoly with insurance companies? And I don't know how it works with like the drawn on state lines part, but that's another thing where they essentially have the opportunity to then control price and then

Starting point is 00:21:30 how do you take that away without having government come in and basically take over an industry i guess so the the entire um health care industry is set up not with the patient in mind. It's between the insurance companies and the healthcare providers, and they're at war with each other. Yeah. The providers want to charge more. The insurance companies want to pay less. And that's why hospital systems are massive. You don't have neighborhood hospitals anymore. They're all owned by research universities or big health systems.

Starting point is 00:22:09 Like Northwell LIJ is a bigger employer in New York State than J.P. Morgan. And on the other side, the health insurance companies just keep buying the smaller insurance companies. Yeah. Because then you have more power in this war, setting prices. They fix prices with each other. They negotiate those prices. So that's the dynamic of the industry i don't other than you know i lean on technology to lower overall health care costs reduce credentialing uh requirements i don't know what other steps you can take but it's it's a power struggle it is it is and looking at it

Starting point is 00:22:48 through the lens of coronavirus you were talking about how so many people didn't go do normal things that they would do yeah and then i guess atlas had the whole argument around well if these people aren't getting screened for throat cancer we're going to lose x amount more people for throat cancer which by the way i haven't heard that argument i would listen to that argument in a second yeah that's the thing we are we are trained to say no that's bad yeah right no that's something you got to listen to like at the beginning i remember my doctor was telling me how many people were having heart attacks just because they wouldn't come in because they're like oh no it's yeah probably nothing yeah right and yeah he hadn't known any person who ended up dying, but there were some who were having

Starting point is 00:23:28 minor heart attacks that could have been fatal because they just waited so long to come in. And so there has to be these long-term effects of this stuff where especially if you, at the beginning, we were talking about this thing going two, three, four weeks, maybe six, right? Now you extrapolate it over basically like a 12-month period, 10-month period, I guess, what we're at end of January, beginning of February right now. It's now you suddenly have things that were born from the beginning that have now had the chance to grow. And I'm not just talking about cancer. I'm talking about anything, right? You have these health problems that did that and people, they're waiting longer and longer to get them addressed.

Starting point is 00:24:06 Yeah. I think it just always comes back to refusing to participate in this two-way debate. Either you're for this and against that or you're for that and against this. And just have a free and open thought process about all these different impacts that whatever policy can have. Because I think even the fact that we think of politics as a spectrum from left to right, why don't we think of it as a circle or a sphere? Why can't you come at it from any angle? So I think that's the biggest thing we're losing is the fact – What do you mean by – I heard the part is the fact what do you mean by i i heard the part any angle what do you mean by circle more more persp if you have two viewpoints on a

Starting point is 00:24:53 spectrum right left right maybe you fall somewhere in the middle but it's always a balance between two viewpoints why don't you have a 360 degree um and you know i'm not a politician or a political scientist, but it shouldn't be a crime to agree with some parts of a philosophy and other parts of a different philosophy and let alone practical policy, set your philosophy aside. But I think people get caught up in their tribe and how they want to – how they want to fit in, and we lose a lot of nuance and context to any conversation. Yeah. Everything you just said is spot on, and what gives me a little bit of hope is I feel like there are more people who are recognizing this now. Yeah. recognizing this now yeah there aren't i mean we're in front of microphones right now that's excessive because it's a podcast but there aren't a lot of people who think that who are putting it out publicly yet or maybe they're putting it out backhanded right like hidden behind something else

Starting point is 00:25:55 and there need to be more people who are speaking openly about this because if there's one good thing that I hope comes of Trump having been in office for four years, it's that if all this catalyzation had to happen of people fucking hating the guy or then some people die hard loving if it hasn't been as big as it is right now, we've had this division problem for a long time and it affects the abilities to pass law. It's funny because we've been sitting here for a few minutes. I never get to listen to Rogan anymore. It's like a shame. I listened to Rogan like three years ago. I was – so I've been listening for a long time. I love him. I love the people he brings on but you've literally brought up the three that i've listened to in like maybe the last month or two

Starting point is 00:26:50 and that's the chrysakis one which i was wrong about you were talking about berenson which i also listened to and then he just had one i don't know like last week or week two weeks ago something like that with with tulsi gabbard okay and so tulsi is a very interesting politician because she had a whole lot of spectrum of views yeah and she was a democrat and she was it's actually great to have her speaking on this because she was literally vice chair of the democratic party yeah the dnc so she's been in like in the middle of the shit right that the most politicized you can get but one of the really disheartening things – and I have to go finish that podcast. I only listened to like an hour I think.

Starting point is 00:27:27 But one of the disheartening things she talked about that should be a surprise to absolutely none of us was telling a story about the first time where she was trying to decide on a vote. And she had people she had worked with in the past, Democratic leaders, approach her and not tell her about the merits of the bill, but tell her why she needed to vote against it because they needed to get a political win. And I think the example she was giving, like the bill, the big point was that they were going to take people who had been charged with ridiculous crimes of like drug conspiracy who hadn't done anything. They were just like in the room, like their boyfriend did it or their girlfriend was doing whatever. And they were sitting in jail for 10, 20 years. And this was going to grant clemency. And when you do that, you also play right into his hands because this is what he'll go out and tell people. And by the way, he's not wrong when he does it. You can think he's a maniac sociopath, but when he comes out and says, oh, the Democrats killed this because they wanted a political win, he's right. Because that's what they wanted to do. And so when you hear someone who just left Congress

Starting point is 00:28:46 because she was so sick of it, and someone who ran for president and was called by her own party immediately with no evidence a Russian asset. Yeah. She got a half a percent of the vote, and they're busy calling her a Russian asset. This is what these parties do

Starting point is 00:29:02 because exactly like you said, it's this left to right where there's only the two lines of view. Yeah. And the point that's scariest about that is think of all – I would literally say I'll bet it's in the millions of issues that we have at hand that might not matter to you and me on one thing but it matters to this girl on another thing and yet we have two parties who generally stand in the complete opposite viewpoint at this point on a lot of those things and not only that but when you have like your main issue that you care about you then have to get behind everything they do and eventually because you care about that one issue so much you do and you don't think about the repercussions of like well wait i don't agree with that other thing right there yeah you just blindly go vote for it it's so i saw on twitter yesterday and again at the risk of bringing up

Starting point is 00:29:56 a highly controversial topic that i've no uh knowledge about um it was you know biden hates women or something for supporting transgender rights. And it's people screaming at each other on Twitter, you're transphobic, you're not a feminist, you're a trans rights activist. We have no context about what he said, what he did. People lose the story. You decide in their 280 characters if they're with you or against you and you either attack them or you retweet them yeah and and there's no ability to just wait so what what happened what are you talking about try to find a different opinion it it's it's it's interesting our our system was designed obviously two parties in

Starting point is 00:30:47 the way we vote we learned in political science class will always exist it has a natural coalition government to it whatever will always exist not the same two parties but will tend to have a two party system um so i i don't get angry that there's only a Republican and a Democratic party, but what I can't get behind is individual people throwing their entire life behind one or the other without having their own thoughts. I mean, I would expect senators and representatives to also have their own independent thoughts and go for their own issues. But I don't blame them for playing a game because politics is a game. And that's why it's a whole nother conversation about how much they should actually be able to control in society. It's a game. Yeah, it is. I completely agree. They play with, in some cases, people's lives like a football.

Starting point is 00:31:47 And I'm not even referring to coronavirus there because how many times have we heard we're saving lives or we're talking about lives here. But how do you define saving lives even on that example? Some of the people who – and it's been split right to left or it was split right to left at first, and now it's a mess. Like it's a whole bunch of different ideologies. I don't know who stands where. I think it's just an issue-by-issue, case-by-case true basis. There is a group of individuals that think, oh, we need to just save lives and lock everything down and one life lost is too many, which is not how the law of large numbers works, unfortunately. And then there's a group of people saying we need to save lives because

Starting point is 00:32:29 we're destroying them in the process. To say nothing of the fact that people are dying for other reasons, but we're talking about people losing everything that they've worked for, for sometimes 40, 50 years or two, three generations, and all for something that is in no way their fault and the governments at every level federal and state have just botched this repeatedly like i thought it was pretty good like the first two weeks once it hit yeah i was like wow they're all kind of doing a good job it like seemed like cuomo and trump were like kind of on the same page and then you know so just dead the the best explanation um i heard about the lockdown was,

Starting point is 00:33:07 I think it was Dan Crenshaw, who, it sounds like you have an opinion of him. No, no, I don't. I'm just laughing at it. It's funny, but go ahead. And he said, at this time, everyone was in favor of a lockdown, except for a few crazy people in Sweden. And he said, the lockdown is a tactical retreat.

Starting point is 00:33:28 We don't know what this is. We need to, we know that being out in public, going to movies spreads it. We need to take a step back, learn about this and figure out a game plan. And that was in mid-March. Interesting. I didn't't know so we did that and no one made a plan we just hoped it would go away that is so so you can't have a retreat and not make a plan you don't like if if that's the way you think about it you're retreating and hoping the enemy gives up.

Starting point is 00:34:09 So it's a little mind-boggling there. I don't think the government is used to being competent. So when asked to do something, they flail around. But that's where we are. Do you think a part of it – I mean, you have to say it. Do you think a part of it was that it was an election year? And for all the issues that Trump had caused in his presidency publicly and all the division and all that shit, I personally was concerned about some of the long-term – lack of long-term view on his economic policies that I felt were not they they were not relevant to how the world was going to be they were more relevant to how the world was and i don't need to get into that right now but at least at the time being he was eight months away from an election and for right now then the economy was extremely good yeah it was good people vote with their wallets like that's what

Starting point is 00:35:05 breaks the tie in this 50 50 society he was gonna win that election yeah for sure and that's a disaster for the democrats because it makes them look good and he's has all these hateable characteristics that they were busy attacking and so you look at this and it's like well why is florida open right now florida's open because they got a red governor and he said fuck it it's like, well, why is Florida open right now? Florida's open because they got a red governor. And he said, fuck it. It's warm weather down here. We're going to lose some people. But the tradeoff, you know, the Scott Atlas argument, the tradeoff is not as good. And I want to give people personal responsibility.

Starting point is 00:35:35 Then you look at California. You look at New York. It seemed like at the beginning Cuomo had a plan. Newsom never seemed to have a plan. But whatever plans were, they haven't had, you're right, they haven't had any for months and months and months. It's just a total clusterfuck. Yeah, yeah. And any type of plan, I live in New York, so any type of plan someone like de Blasio was trying to create, it was a political game. It wasn't a plan to keep

Starting point is 00:36:02 people safe and get the world back to normal it was you know a entire summer negotiating with the teachers union um probably about you know considering his support as as for whatever whatever it is but there's just a lack of um in my opinion a lack of people in power caring about the people. Because they're sucked into this game. I get it. But that should tell us something about putting our entire well-being in the hands of these people who are playing a game with it.

Starting point is 00:36:36 Yeah. Now, you've been in New York this whole time, right? Yeah. Because you lived there and you never left, I don't think, right? I left for a few months, but I've been there since June. Oh, you did? Yeah. Where'd you go? I went home for a couple months and then i went out to to

Starting point is 00:36:48 colorado with my with my ex-girlfriend so nice how was colorado it was beautiful and what was it like out there like what was the what were the restrictions like like what was the vibe way more open than new york um i don't know there's there's more out there. You're not really itching to go to restaurants, so it didn't feel restrictive. We hung out at her parents' house. But I could go get a haircut. Things like that in May were a big deal. So it was nice.

Starting point is 00:37:18 I've had a lot of people from New York in here, and I ask every time just to – because they've been coming in over months, so I don't know what's changing and what's not. What is the vibe up there now now because we're a month into the new year obviously there there was a whole lot of hoopla yeah December and January about a second round of lock lockdowns yeah what's our business is open what's the official rules right now how's it going so I I live in the east village um midtown manhattan is completely dead yeah and i don't

Starting point is 00:37:48 think anyone is surprised it's been dead since april um dwayne reed cvs all the all the delis they're they're closed up they're boarded up um my neighborhood has did pretty well through the summer it's like people live there so're still going to go get a sandwich. What street are you on? Avenue C and 9th Street. But the thing that is making the neighborhood look scary is the second round of no dining-in orders, which I think happened at the end of October, early November.

Starting point is 00:38:24 There was a lot of places that were going gonna hang on that I don't think will because of that because now now even to serve a drink you have to get a thousand-dollar space heater build an entire shelter of two by fours because realistically people aren't gonna go stand stand there in 35 degrees. They made people build all this stuff, buy all this stuff, invest in all this, do the bullshit plexiglass, build these ridiculous atriums, whatever you want to call them, and then they take it away. And my biggest issue with it was, you know, again, Cuomo's calling card at the beginning was following the data because that's what he tweeted about every day so at least there's some kind of trail well second round

Starting point is 00:39:09 of lockdowns didn't follow the data because the data said that like 60 or 70 contact tracing was in home yeah versus it was a low number it was like one or three percent we'll get it i'll put it up there was contact trace from restaurants and so And so it's like, I'm sorry, but from the outside, it looks like they're saying, fuck you to these people. And it's like they want to do it. And I don't want to take that takeaway because I look at humans and I want to see the best. But I got to tell you, that's been my takeaway for a long time now, and it's not changing for now. And here's an analogy to think about the the lockdown with restaurants specifically i think you hear a lot on the conversation about legalizing drugs either you can legalize them regulate them tax them sell

Starting point is 00:40:00 marijuana in a safe way at a dispensary or cS or whatever the argument is, or there's going to be some dude on the street selling I don't know what. You could get poisoned. Family gatherings, if they happen in a restaurant, you can take their temperature. You can write down their name. You can follow the safety precautions, make sure only six people are seated at a table. But when people don't have that option they're gonna have 20 people over to their house it's it's a it's a parallel um and you don't know who's there you're not taking temperatures you're not you're not doing contact tracing so it's i don't know i then the average

Starting point is 00:40:38 human is gonna have fatigue to sticking to an extreme scenario on anything yeah so are there people who have legit quarantine and done a good job? Yeah. I've kind of done it not by choice, just because like I work all the time, right? Yeah. So I see the people who come in here who are always tested negative ahead of time and everything.

Starting point is 00:40:55 So I legit have had very little contact. I had a little bit over the summer and that's just how it is. How many people are like that though? How many people are like that busy all the time? Like I'm building something right now. Yeah. It's not a lot of people who are doing that by math.

Starting point is 00:41:09 Yeah. Right? They're trying to go about their life. They want to see like, they want to see their parents. They want to see their grandparents. They want to do all these things. And so eventually they're going to be like, ah, I can do it once. And then once turns into five times and I'm not blaming them.

Starting point is 00:41:23 Yeah. It's fine. I get it and and i'm on the side of that it's not like see you say things like this and people go oh he's a herd human herd immunity hoaxer whatever no and i don't know what the term is or whatever it's not like i'm full herd immunity like i wear a mask everywhere i go whatever like for the time being like that's what it is i have serious grave concerns about that long term at this point yeah we'll talk about that but you know like it's what it is but there has to be a level to which you make your

Starting point is 00:41:53 own decisions and i think gallagher who i hadn't here a couple episodes ago he had a line where he said if i go out i am consenting yeah to get covid that was the guy from florida yeah yeah and i i hadn't heard that yet maybe someone said that i'm sure someone on the internet said that at some point but i was like yes yeah that's it yeah you're making your decision and then you don't want to be the guy in the hospital who are people like you went out you dick how how fair is that how long are are we going to do that? How long are we going to shame people? And the big concern for me is that, like you even talk about it as someone who's looking at this long-term view, okay, you're not getting the vaccine yet, but the plan would

Starting point is 00:42:36 be, let's just see where it is so that I have a little more time because I'm at low risk. And then the connotation is that you get it. And most people are going to do that and i'm i'm definitely doing that too they're already trying to say oh by the way when you get vaccinated you still got to wear a mask and and do all this stuff and you know because there's only a 90 chance dude the flu vax is only whatever it is it's lower than that i forget the number but my doctor was walking me through it a couple doctors i asked about were walking me through it they're like yeah it's this is literally higher than that so it's another slippery slope question at what point do we say draw the line that's it versus oh let's just keep listening to people and let them move the goalposts so it i think this whole conversation comes back to a debate between personal responsibility and the government will take

Starting point is 00:43:27 care of you and it touches every aspect of our life now yeah for better or worse and to completely pivot you know i work for a fintech company and there's a huge conversation should the government take care of you and provide Social Security and take care of the banking system and take care of the money? Or will we be better in private hands? And we're at kind of a breaking point society right now, too. Yellen is coming in as the Fed or Treasury Secretary. She's a hack. She's a bigger hack than Mnuchin.

Starting point is 00:44:04 But the point is we're having these questions across every aspect of society it's not just health and safety and the ability to to control small businesses but it's should the government be involved in our money should should and i've always taken the approach that the only person looking out for you is you um which is easy for me to say it's a lot harder for other people um to have that opinion but it's it it's a much bigger question and that's no longer a party thing either which is the craziest part and it's almost like kind of funny because it's all a part of the same game the the democrats seem to be a little louder about being on the opposite end of that opinion, but I look at actions, and the Republicans have been a huge, huge hand in that for the last 20 years.

Starting point is 00:44:52 I mean George Bush was a bigger big government guy than – I can't think of a president – I mean he made Obama look conservative. Yeah. It's – there is – He certainly madeama look conservative yeah it's it's there is certainly made clinton look conservative oh yeah yeah yeah and there's this whole like and i'm not talking about the culture side of it i'm talking about like how he ran government that culture size what did he call it like conservatism with a conscience or something like that something like who the fuck knows compassionate conservatism he called it whatever dick cheney told him to call it but they're these these two parties no longer have an interest in that personal responsibility.

Starting point is 00:45:29 And even like the Republicans who have been arguing for open everything up because that got drawn along party lines at the beginning. They're still – they still make the same mistakes. They're still okaying stimuluses or stimuli, however you say it, that are printing money and fucking our currency over into perpetuity. They're still supporting government coming in and solving a bunch of issues that they've obviously been completely incompetent at doing. This vaccine rollout is just a great example. And yet there's no compromise on, well, maybe that wasn't right. Maybe we should think of this the other way. Maybe we should get to things that are less political and think about it on the individual level.

Starting point is 00:46:10 Like what do individuals in this country by and large want? Law of large numbers too. And again, you can also draw things on community lines. It's okay to do that. It is okay to say, hey, that community right there has a lot less resources or access to information to be able to get the right help. So we can spend a little more there. That community, not so much. They're good. Like, let them make decisions. You can do that. It is possible to hold two thoughts at the same time. We just seem to have eliminated that from public conscious and what we expect from a politician. Yeah. And I just listened to a conversation between Naval and Matt Ridley talking about innovation. And they had this paradigm they were thinking about of safety versus progress. And we live in a world now where we value safety more than we value risk-taking and progress. And we live in a world now where we value safety more than we value risk-taking and progress. And they think that's one of the reasons why we haven't had major breakthroughs

Starting point is 00:47:12 in physical technology. We have IT breakthroughs in information technology, processing data, because that's safe. But if you think about flying supersonic to London, we shut that down in like 2003. Going to Mars has taken Elon Musk a decade to make any progress in all these things that people in the in the 60s and 70s thought were given, we've decided that people, people should be safe. And every human life is sacred, which a lot of people agree with and I agree with that. But if you're willing to strap yourself to a rocket and see if you can get to Mars, why not? Yeah. It's that concept of one life is too many.

Starting point is 00:47:58 Yeah. And on certain things from an empathetic perspective, I understand. I agree with it. Actually, this came up this this podcast still gets referenced all the time because it was so fucking good i'm gonna have him in here in june again but when i had terrence jones in here he was very open yeah about that mindset as it relates to like racial issues in this country and i get it i do it is a difficult and almost callous thing to look at things from 30 000 feet yet that is often

Starting point is 00:48:27 where the best answers come from and i don't know how specifically you would answer that question i'm just using that one example but there has to be a way to look at the world and be able to define certain things where you make it a little bit black and white and there's a lot of gray yeah and i argue against the black and white on a lot of things now but i'm saying on very small micro doses of things sometimes you have to say okay let's for the sake of this is a minor decision to make let's make that decision yeah and that's where i think and sometimes he goes a little too far but i love neval yeah because neval is so so – he takes a stance on some things and he's not in your face about it. He's calm, collected, and lets the people then argue over the point. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:15 And try to find a little bit of that nuance. And we just don't have that anymore in much of our discourse and i wish guys like him would get more of a like like he's a guy who's who's i would call famous at this point yeah but he appeals especially among you know tech bros like you and me exactly yeah he appeals to a certain subset of people yeah no yeah there's a certain demographic that knows him and there's a certain demographic that would never take him seriously so and i think he's brilliant brilliant, but I understand that my mom has never heard of him, like whatever. Yeah, and you talk about it with the problem and he points out a lot of the problems with the way they think in tech. And you were talking about physical products just now versus software products.

Starting point is 00:50:03 Can you expand upon that real quick because I want to make sure I understood exactly what you were saying. So Naval thinks about this. I think Peter Thiel also thinks a lot about this and I've listened to what he's had to say. When we think about innovation in material science or physical, you know, real world applications, they argue there hasn't been much. And I'm not an expert to say they're right or they're wrong, but I think they're smart people. They say, you know, we kind of built the nuclear bomb in the 40s

Starting point is 00:50:38 and made progress building, exactly, going to the moon in the 60s, but things have kind of stagnated and all the breakthroughs in the last 30 or 40 years have been based on the computer and information technology, which is- In the ether. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, which is great. I think it's improved people's lives. But when you ask about where could we be if we sort of let people tinker and take risks, because that's where danger happens, right? Not too many people get hurt coding. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:15 I haven't heard that one. I like that. That's pretty good. But people on the other end can, and they get hurt by the downstream effects of of what the coding decides goes and this is this is a whole can of worms that's obviously relevant right now but i i was uh from number 30 did you hear that one with anthony fenu yeah yeah yeah so unbelievable guy and um i i got connected with him and and hadn't known him before and then we did the podcast and was blown away it was it was nice going into it very blind i talked to him on the phone for

Starting point is 00:51:52 maybe like a half hour a couple weeks before and knew the lay of the land what he was working on but he's very very humble and very in his world just going about the work and building cool shit and trying to use all the vc buzzwords just for whatever trying to do things that makes the world a better place and is actually someone who when he says that in practice is that way and i've been i've been able to talk with him a bunch since then and and meet his co-founders as well who are unbelievable guys, Riley and Baker. And I was over their house a couple nights ago and I asked them straight up because what they build is – for people that haven't listened to that episode, their company does a few different things.

Starting point is 00:52:39 But they exited their first company. I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say beyond that. So I had a very good first company when they were 20 so they fell into this early and got legit early and they've been building this next company called soar for the last four years yeah and they do virtual experiences in the vr and ar space and specifically they build holograms so they build holograms that are going to put you like you're right there right now they have the technology to do that and they build holograms so they build holograms that are going to put you like you're right there right now they have the technology to do that and they build it that'll put you on my phone in a 3d hologram if i hold it up to something or go into an app that has you as an experience on there

Starting point is 00:53:14 and on the back download that up oh yeah yeah when it's when it's live on the back end the way that they're able to do all this and no one else is in the world right now is because they they have a significant i don't understand the details but they have a significant algorithm and compression so they can take a huge file size like that that's required to have a moving non-freezing hologram experience and they can transmit that across the world in a very very sustainable and low data point type right so they can actually pull it off but i i asked them straight up when i was over there because the three of them were sitting at the table and they're very laid back kind of guys they're not they are not what you would expect to find in technorati like the silicon

Starting point is 00:54:05 valley but i asked them straight up i said do you guys ever think about this technology and the harm it could do opening up pandora's box and they all looked at each other dead ass and turned to me and said every day all day yeah and then we ended up talking about it and they they really hit on the examples that they've seen before them because they look at a tool like facebook they look at a tool like google they they look at a tool like amazon yeah and they're like these are amazing innovations that in so many ways have made the world a more convenient better place with more people to access but a lot of these companies maybe there's the point they get to where they get too big or whatever which is something they told me they

Starting point is 00:54:50 think about all the time or just over time they lost sight of what they were there to do they didn't consider what innovation was going to do they just innovated and they innovated very often not 100 but they innovated in the ether they innovated on the software side yeah and in this whole culture is the point that you came with which is the same guys who do this and open up these pandora's boxes of potential downside issues we can get with technology that we've seen especially on social media with like the social dilemma yeah all that these are the same people who then through that thought that they then control in the world, preach safety on everything. Preach, in this case, just over

Starting point is 00:55:32 COVID, the lockdowns and how important saving one life is and whatever. And they're not the people who are out there and trying to go to Mars, trying to build the physical spaceships. And that's not totally fair. It's like Google does self-driving cars stuff like that but by and large that's not what they do so it's like their mentality got so different yeah and so i was interested on the example with venue and those guys because they are building heavily in the software space it's pretty much what they're doing so i wanted to know are they thinking about going down that wrong path with that and not wanting to then see creative things that take risks, that put lives at risk sometimes but voluntarily? And right now as a company, they're a sizable company, but it's not like they've IPO'd yet.

Starting point is 00:56:17 So they're still small enough that they're quiet and doing their thing. Right now, it seems like they're very in tune with that focus. And my only fear is that so many other people in Silicon Valley are not. They're the exception and not the rule. That's scary. I think it just comes back to when you're starting a company, I can build an app where you fly a bird around on a screen and make $10,000 a month, if it does reasonably well, if I want to build a company that builds rockets, how many permits do you have to get? Right? So, so it's, it's, I don't, I don't think there's a conspiracy. I don't think there's

Starting point is 00:56:57 anything bigger going on, but we don't make, we don't make certain things easy in this country. You know, and obviously all those, I think, came from a good point of view and a good place to make sure people are doing things the right way. But self-driving cars, you make the argument those are safer than human drivers, but there's still red tape. So we're just resistant to that type of change. How much of it do you think is the role of media in how we think of this? Yes. So the old media only covers the bad news and the new things, right? So they're going to – everyone is going to hear about the time a self-driving car hits a pedestrian versus the 25,000 times a day a human driver kills a pedestrian. Yeah. Did you hear that argument?

Starting point is 00:57:43 Yeah. That was a while ago yeah um it's an interesting point i think people are always scared of new things um which yeah part of human nature for a little context there i think that was with that was bill fasciolo so that was that was a few months ago two months ago something four months ago something like that i don't know it all it all blends into each other but this is when i was first really starting to get concerned like awake to wow they're not stopping the lockdown yeah okay and i was walking them through the parallel between self-driving cars and the covid mentality and the covid mentality is we have to save all lives one life

Starting point is 00:58:26 is too many whatever and we have fucking death counters on tv and shit which is just so bad and it's what the media sells you and it's what then people then suddenly get ingrained to believe and yet most of our society doesn't understand that we have had self-driving cars in this country that we know of from behind the scenes exposés and sharing the information too. They've talked about it since at least 2006. Google had the first successful one back then. Yet we have no self-driving cars on the road. And without looking at the data, I could tell you reasonably seeing as now Google and Tesla are neck and neck with it and other companies are working on it like crazy. If you put 50% of cars on the road today for all mileage and time driven that are self-driving

Starting point is 00:59:10 versus keeping 50% humans, it's reasonable to say that the ratio of deaths caused by self-driving cars to humans, humans are going to be way, way worse. And yet we don't have self-driving cars on the road and elon until computers figure out how to get drunk then then we'll see yeah that's that's a scary thought but like elon's talked about it the government needs like trillions of miles of data just to get the conversation started and it's because we fear change and it's because we fear that media cycle of if we have a if we put 50 on the road let's use that example and on a given on the first night one person is killed by a self-driving car

Starting point is 00:59:53 it will not matter that a hundred people let's say yeah just random numbers were killed by human cars the media story that's not a story that happens every day we're used to it yeah it's normal the media story will be the the self-driving part that did it yeah and so this is what stirs up people and then we shun new things because we don't want to lose one life and then we don't consider the life that we lose by not wanting to lose one life it's the same argument with covid and yeah with lockdown similar argument with covid um the the company that jumps into my mind is Uber. And not as much about safety, but about regulations and protected interests. Uber's strategy was never to go to a mayor of a city and beg and plead him to disrupt the taxi union and put all the taxis out of business they just unleashed their cars on the street they said if we can get you know a hundred thousand two hundred thousand new yorkers relying on uber by the time the government figures out what's going on and tries to take action

Starting point is 01:00:54 now we have 200 000 signatures on a petition to make uber legal so that was their strategy it doesn't work as well when there there's a line but but i think it cuts across a lot of different things it's not just a safety issue people have protected interests and um different different people have different strategies to get out there yeah do you do you follow russo coon on on twitter i do yeah yeah he's awesome yeah and russo coon for a little background he uh he's still a very good lineman in the NFL. He's been in the NFL for like 12, 13 years, 11 years, something like that. Was an All-Pro a couple times, won a Super Bowl.

Starting point is 01:01:32 He's such an interesting guy, man. His Twitter, if you follow him, I don't know that he's ever even tweeted about anything that happens on the football field whatsoever. He is a total just brilliant dude who's a thinker, and he's a big Bitcoiner. But he is a philosopher is what I would call him. I mean, do you agree with that? Yeah. Yeah. So he talks about these concepts a lot and what – especially over the last year, it's gotten very relevant with what you're allowed to do on your own versus – decide to do on your own versus what the government can tell you to do and things like that and he also i'm just thinking of this on the spot you talked about having a circle of beliefs

Starting point is 01:02:10 this is a guy who's got a circle beliefs i mean to give you perspective he was one of the founders of the players coalition yeah in the nfl which is a complete social justice and racial equality right which a lot of people and it's all positive a lot of people just equate that with like, oh, far left-wing or whatever. He must have voted for Bernie, right? I don't even know that Russ votes. I really don't. And that's the point. He's kind of like an outlier. He thinks for himself on things and strongly seems to disagree with pretty much everyone in Washington, which I think a lot of people quietly can get behind. But he has talked about heavily what the media does. And he put out this meme the other night, a video. Did you see this thing? Yeah, because you reposted it.

Starting point is 01:02:56 I may have. Yeah, I saw that. I retweeted it. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. So should we just play that so we have it? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:03:03 Yeah. Hold on. Let me pull it up. Here it is. Yeah. So this was, he used one of those stick figure memes. Right. To which you see usually as pictures, but they made it into like a funny little bullshit cartoon describing what the media does to people. And this is not, this is geared at the media as a whole. This is left wing, right wing and whatever's in between. i'm not sure what that even is anymore but let's turn this on person people person realizes people need hey people what do you what do you want um some news yeah some news we want you some news please person gives people news the world is round going to rain tomorrow because technology is improving we have pleased to catch the bad guys so it's okay. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. The next day.

Starting point is 01:04:06 Um, the news is still pretty much the same as yesterday. Oh, okay. A few days later. Uh, yeah, the news is still the same. This is getting boring now. Yeah, this is getting boring.

Starting point is 01:04:21 A few more days later. Anything interesting happen or... No. I don't like the news anymore. Doesn't sell. A wild news competitor appears. Everybody, I have more news.

Starting point is 01:04:37 Yay! Hurrah! A man died yesterday. Oh, that's so sad. Hey, you're stealing my audience by only telling them worst case scenario stories which take advantage of a human cognitive bias. That means we naturally pay more attention to negative events. Screw you, pal.

Starting point is 01:04:59 The competition for attention begins. Hey, some random celebrities that you don't care about are getting divorced. Oh no. Hey everyone, the sun gives you cancer. Why is this so entertaining? Bacon gives you cancer.

Starting point is 01:05:22 Terrorists, they're coming to get you. There's a virus spreading around the world nobody can do anything to stop it and you're all going to die it's it is funny to watch and laugh at also because it's a meme and you got these two news organizations i like the accents, the accents are hilarious. And for people that are listening and not watching, it's literally stick figures. And you got, you end up having these two news organizations standing on an actual soapbox and then people in the middle. And they're just, once the second one comes in, they start going back and forth to one up each other. And it is that we have such a negative bias and negativity bias that news is so reliant on what's going wrong so we can talk about it.

Starting point is 01:06:08 Because as humans, even people who are the most negative, we want to at least talk about the problems to then think we're talking about solving problems. Most people aren't as a result. They just end up repeating the cycle of what the negative is. But this is – it's such a relevant thing. I can't even remember the cyclone that got us here but you can look at this with corona sure that's one thing but look at it with everything and then how we end up having these issues because i mean everyone always uses the example you have on one hand like cnn and on another hand fox yeah and they're yelling to the two bases what the base wants to

Starting point is 01:06:44 hear yeah and much of it is not hey look at all the great we're doing it's hey look at everything that's wrong and it's their fault that they're that it's all wrong yeah when you look back at media and the technology they used like there was the printing press radio tv and now we're online. But each version of the latest technology had a different impact. Right? With radio, that led to the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe. Wait, how so? Radio came about in the 10s and 20s. And 10 years later, there's fascism taking over a couple countries in Europe. And I'm not saying it caused that, but then TV kind of took over and we had a period where everyone's doing okay and

Starting point is 01:07:33 coming towards the middle and now social media comes and there's more chaos again. So I think there might be something to that. I don't know how much these media sources reflect kind of the general attitude that's going on in the country. But, you know, some people make the argument that the nuance of that particular media source plays a role in how people think. Well, you also have standards change over time, too. So, that's actually really important, because I don't know that I've talked about that with anyone on this show. The medium – your point is that the medium itself opens up the Pandora's box, which just everyone think about that from the lens of social media. Best example? Well, there you go.

Starting point is 01:08:18 People didn't have the ability to tweet out whatever they want and go viral 15 years ago. And it could be one explanation. I don't know if I fully buy into this, but one explanation is how expensive is it to broadcast your channel? Radio, relatively inexpensive. People can set up a radio channel, at least they could, and spread their ideas. TV, incredibly expensive to produce the content, to distribute. For that reason, there was only three or four channels for a lot of TV's history. And now with social media,

Starting point is 01:08:52 every person has their own channel. So it's kind of the most extreme of those three examples. I don't know how much I believe social media contributes to us being more separated. I think it's kind of a cycle or a feedback loop where we're divided and social media makes it worse. Definitely. Yeah. Because just think 20 years ago, people – well, let's even just be safe and go back 30 years ago.

Starting point is 01:09:23 People got their news news turn on the tv six o'clock news yeah ten o'clock news and then they also to talk on the phone you know at that point they probably had some wireless home phones but it's a phone on a line yeah and no cell phone to text people instantaneously and they see they have far fewer touch points right in the number of people that they interact with on a daily basis as a result of the fact that technology wasn't there yet so that and the number of people to get all these views exchanged with to see where people stand and then therefore the law of large numbers the vitriol that can come of that yeah was just mathematically much smaller so so but like everything there's

Starting point is 01:10:05 two sides to this too okay so with the internet the the positive view of the internet as it was coming up in the early 2000s was if you play magic the card game you're gonna find a web forum for that and you're gonna make all these friends and explore your hobby yes if you have mental health challenges there will be a forum for that and you can find a support group like a really positive benefit of all these people coming online and being connected but on the other side if you're a radical member of the kkk now you have your own website too so there's a there's a positive and a negative of of everything i think right now we're really focused on the negatives. We take the positives

Starting point is 01:10:45 for granted. So there's a balance. I don't know exactly how I fall, but there's a balance to it. Yeah. My issue now, though, is the barriers of control. I don't know if that's a term, but to qualify that, the big question that's been coming up, it's been – ended up just being a theme on this podcast because it's something I'm passionate about and I think everyone is this open source product that technically you and I can go to the farthest ends of the internet if we want to. But what are people going to do? They're going to go to the places where the most number of people who they know or are interested in are going to be. whether it be for social media, looking at like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, or looking on the product side, Amazon, and the fact that Amazon Web our thoughts, good, bad, dark, great, everything, indifferent. These places are the hub spots, which I'm not referring to the company HubSpot. I'm saying they are literally the hubs that we go to at the start of our – the average person goes to at the start of their internet journey. So they're – even if the internet is this

Starting point is 01:12:25 great equalizer, and I agree, it gives you so many opportunities. We are now at a point where these so-called chat rooms with Magic the Gathering that would have happened in 2000, yes, they're still around. The number of people who use them versus the number of people who use that same communication on a Twitter or on a Facebook or on an Instagram or whatever, oh my God. Yeah. It's totally flipped the paradigm. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:12:48 That's a fair point. I mean, for sure, all those things can still exist on Facebook in particular, you know, support groups and I'm a new mom in this area. What should I, how should I address my kids for school or whatever moms ask about? So I still, they're in a tough position because they have to balance both ends of the spectrum. I don't know. Maybe it's just human nature that we kind of devolve into this, especially when you don't see the other person.

Starting point is 01:13:16 And yes, you're arguing with someone who could be a Russian bot, could be someone who lives in Kansas Kansas and you're never going to understand their lifestyle. It doesn't make sense for that to be the main discourse, right? Like, a debate should happen between two people who know the context of each other's lives and if not friends, at least you bump into and you work together. So, there's a whole lot going on but and it's just natural to make this this stretch right and it's not a stretch to to to draw this parallel right now that we're seeing in society actually at the highest level with the power that that gives these platforms and it is the entire definition in the modern era of free speech and at the end of trump's presidency before

Starting point is 01:14:08 he left office we obviously saw him after the capital riots which were gross and there was a lot of questions around that and what his role in that was he was the sitting president of the united states and we watched him get banned from Twitter. We watched him also get, not permanently, but suspended with no end date and site on Facebook and therefore Instagram. And it has opened up this argument because like you talk about, oh, you can still do all those groups and find things that are helpful in your area and connect with people on those. You're right. But these artificial intelligence mechanisms that these platforms now have to be able to find and spot anything that falls under a lens

Starting point is 01:14:51 that doesn't match with their purview is directly affecting our free speech. And maybe at the beginning, we even joked about it when things would happen where you'd get the COVID tag on a post or something. If God forbid you introduced a new idea. Put out a meme, a joke about COVID. You shouldn't you shouldn't be laughing anymore right because we're reporting this meme

Starting point is 01:15:09 that they have taken this to such a level that it's ridiculous now when they went to ban trump they also banned a lot of q anon accounts yeah i don't know about you but q anon drives me nuts because it's it's funny in a way because the things these people believe are fucking hysterical yeah but they are ever signed into the site no oh my god tell me about no i've never no i haven't i was just curious i i haven't but i've seen like i've seen people get overtaken by it and like smart people too and i'm like holy shit like it does brainwash people so twitter went in to try to find all accounts that were openly associated with q anon and ban

Starting point is 01:15:51 them on the one hand your reaction minus the context we already had might be okay i would understand that if people were like okay because if you just said to me right now do i think we are better off without qAnon getting more followers? Abso-fucking-lutely. Like, I would like to see it go away completely. The problem is they do that ban, and they don't ban Antifa. They've done, like, one-off bans where someone's literally like, I'm going to rip your fucking head off and feed it to your children. Like, then they're like, oh, yeah, yeah but they don't they don't attack both extremes

Starting point is 01:16:29 of the ideology they attack one extreme and what i'm concerned about is it it is causing i see it all the time it is causing a lot of people who were previously centrist or minor conservatives who might even vote the other way sometimes to completely get i'm not even going to call it red pill to go off the deep end the other way i will i want to come back to that point and i also want to ask you what all the different color pills means because i don't i don't understand that but this what you said about banning q anon um it It vaguely reminds me of the movie Black Klansman by Spike Lee. I never watched that. I love Spike Lee. So nothing to do with the plot, but you realize in the 70s, to infiltrate the KKK,

Starting point is 01:17:15 you have to become, the cops have to go undercover and get trusted. And there are these creepy underground basements where people are there and they're completely radical. And the question is, would you rather have that happen in someone's basement where they're planning violence and you don't know who's there and you don't know what they're saying? Or would you rather have a platform like QAnon? And yeah, it could be Big Brother, the FBI is looking, but also anyone else could log on and see these accounts and see what they're saying and see what they actually believe. It's a – I don't know – again, I don't know the answer, but that's the question we need to ask because if you push them offline, they're going to figure out a way to meet up, right? Like people don't stop thinking the way they think because they don't have access to QAnon. So there are these repercussions of everything.

Starting point is 01:18:09 And I don't know if that means we shouldn't be in QAnon. We should, whatever. It's just we have to ask that question. What are they going to do? A hundred percent. When you are, it just reminds me of this. When you're 16 and your parents come over to you and say, don't drink. And give you this whole speech, show you the dead people who like died because they drank or some shit like that. You're naturally rebellious as we are as humans, but especially at that age.

Starting point is 01:18:39 And what's your reaction? I'm going to go fucking drink. Yeah. Right? Yeah. reaction i'm gonna go fucking drink yeah right yeah on the contrary you look at european countries who many of them either are totally lax or just don't have a drinking age they they don't care about it as much yeah it's not a big deal to them i mean i grew up my best friend for my entire life is is a dual citizen of greece and the united states his whole family is from greece they

Starting point is 01:19:04 immigrated here they would live there in the summers. When he was there in the summers, if there was wine on the table when they're nine, it's like, yeah, they have it. So he never gave a shit about the drinking or whatever. He laughed at everyone. If you knew a kid who wasn't allowed to have soda, when they go to their friend's house,

Starting point is 01:19:18 they chug four Sprites. Exactly. Same thing. You're telling these people they can't look at it. Now they want to go look at it. Yeah. Now they want to go look at it. Yeah. I mean, shit.

Starting point is 01:19:27 I already have. I mean, I've had an opinion on them for a long time. They're fucking Looney Tunes. But now that they're getting banned, I am curious about, as someone who at least isn't going to change my opinion, I am curious about going to find wherever the fuck they're talking now to see what the hell they're talking about. Because I'm concerned. And I'm telling you, whatever people post online, it's a lot scarier if they get together in person and talk about it in someone's basement so it is and you make the point about them doing it out of

Starting point is 01:19:57 view yeah so what when you it feels like when these platforms are doing this, they're doing it for political virtue signal points. And that is probably dumbing it down too much. I'm sure that they have more higher priorities in their mind or higher opinions of themselves of doing – making the world a better place. But they're not considering what the equal but opposite reaction to what they're doing is and when it comes to free speech because this is the conversation that needs to be had immediately now you have all these people claiming they're a private company they can do what they want to do which is entirely true as things are set up right now by the way when the people claim that whether they're doing it in a gleeful happy because i shut down your opinion and my guy's opinion didn't get shut down white or not. They're right about that. Yeah. Where they're not thinking of the bigger picture is that when the

Starting point is 01:20:50 founders of this country defined free speech, which was the most important amendment they had, in my opinion, and I think once speech goes, everything goes. Yeah. That's where tyranny happens no matter what. You can make the same argument up the ladder of amendments. Yeah. But that's the one that it's like, the that goes we're fucked when they did this they defined free speech as the public square i am not going to sit here and tell you that tom from my space and fucking mark zuckerberg and the winklevoss twins give them the credit they deserve in their dorm rooms in harvard thought about the fact that these platforms are going to be the new public square. And that's the only place where speech is going to matter. And by the way, you're going to carry around these

Starting point is 01:21:33 little devices and take a video anywhere you want in a decade. I don't expect them to know that. I don't expect, I believe Jack Dorsey, when he said that when they found Twitter, they just wanted it to be like a public group chat. And then suddenly it suddenly it became one of the movies. You want to come right? Yeah. Where people suddenly affected thought they didn't know that they were young. Right. So I don't have that expectation. That's bullshit to have that. But that happened. Right. It grew into that. And now you're there. And everyone talks about this Section 230 thing. Everyone's like, oh, Section 230. Can you explain that?

Starting point is 01:22:09 I was going to ask you how familiar it was. Section 230 to really dumb it down. And I want to bring in a lawyer who's like very versed on this to really go into details. But the highest level of Section 230, which you've heard some politicians use to invoke about these social media companies it without giving it a definition that i'm going to get wrong and fuck up terminology it essentially means that social platforms are not legally liable part of it at least means they're not legally liable for the things that are said on there because it has something to do with like publisher versus not publisher which which I don't understand. So I'm not going to comment on that.

Starting point is 01:22:48 I don't know the terminology of 230, but I saw a good analogy where basically these platforms want to be considered a newsstand, not the magazine. I believe that's spot on. So they don't endorse the

Starting point is 01:23:04 content of the magazine, but they're able to sell like they're a newsstand right yeah and so then you say well why do people want to repeal this because that essentially means all speech goes again though they're a private company so even though they have that protection they can decide just horo gave the best example of this and he's spot on and we'll attack this yeah to go through it but some of the stuff he said aged so well man i mean my god number 17 alex horowitz like 45 minutes in got hot but he talked about it from a restaurant he's like if you walk into my restaurant and not based on something that has to do with the civil rights act or your identity i say get

Starting point is 01:23:43 the fuck out of my restaurant you gotta get out yeah i can force it's my property i can force you to remove so even though they're protected by 230 these social media companies can do that so you say well why on earth would people argue to repeal this and what would the repeal mean let's start with the second part the repeal would mean that now they are liable for the things that are said in there so it's not a newsstand anymore it's the magazine to use your example yeah and so what does that mean that now they are liable for the things that are said in there so it's not a newsstand anymore it's the magazine to use your example yeah and so what does that mean that means that anyone from any political spectrum can sue them for words that damage them or do harm to them in some way on their site which think about how many frivolous oh but costly lawsuits that would happen out these companies would be i don't want to say they'd be dead, but they would be fucked.

Starting point is 01:24:27 And now they would essentially become like banks with compliance. So pretty much anything on social media that even has a slight opinion. 24 hours, submit it. We'll review it. Done. Yeah. It's out. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:24:40 They wouldn't have anything anymore. So that's not necessarily the answer because it would take away the entire utility and yeah even though we get so caught up in this negativity it would take out the discourse that the good important stuff that comes out of that too yeah so it's not a great answer but because they are the private company they get to use that and then it appears based on political lines say like anything that appears more conservative that's extreme we're taken out but things that are more left i won't say liberal things that are left and constrained i shouldn't even say conservative there things that are far right wing yeah right yeah that we find controversial we'll take out and then they've

Starting point is 01:25:20 dragged it on to some regular old conservatives too and then left no we'll leave that yeah so it essentially fucks one side and to bring it back to the public square point and this is where i argued on the restaurant this is what what i want your opinion on i said the horo and it didn't change the fact that he was 100 right right based on how it's defined right now i said here's the thing when the founders defined a public square they defined that as a world where people had they didn't even have phones right that like they they a newspaper news from a state over took three days to get there right so where was the discourse the discourse was they had to leave their home and go to the central community place where other people physically went and yelled through you know a tube to make it as loud as they could they didn't have a microphone and talk about opinions right beautiful thing

Starting point is 01:26:09 if on social media today we called that the public square here's what supports that argument let's take new york for example and new york pre-covid so not when there's no one on the streets right let's talk about union square so there's all the buildings around it, the Starbucks, it's pretty close to NYU, I think. So let's just say, I'm sorry. I swear to God, I don't have COVID. Anyway, let's just say that in Union Square, someone holds a rally and a thousand people attend. And let's say that the rally lasts for three hours. And during that time, between people working in the office buildings or walking through the streets or going to Starbucks or wherever the restaurants there, let's say a hundred thousand people witness it to the point where a hundred thousand people throughout those three hours, at least,

Starting point is 01:26:58 and that's a big number, but we'll use a bigger number, be conservative. A hundred thousand people witness it and maybe stop for long enough to know what the rally is about and what the opinion is. So they at least have a thought process of, oh, there are people in the world who think this. Right? Public square. If social media decides, hey, we think that's damaging and bans any video that happened, whether it's from a bystander or someone involved, and bans any posts about it that happened. Interesting. Okay. The people that watched it that day are going to be reliant on giving

Starting point is 01:27:31 purely word of mouth only, if they decide to even do that, to people who weren't there to tell them about it. Versus a rally that occurs the next day where they say, oh, all videos go. Now millions of people around the world see it because it has unfettered access. These platforms, I'm not saying they were asking for it. I am saying they are the modern-day public square, and that's what the great conundrum is. So I think we're blending kind of technology and old world examples. You're saying if a protest happens in modern time in the physical world and people are taking videos, social media could take that down. Or a virtual protest.

Starting point is 01:28:14 They could just take that down altogether. So that's what I thought you were getting at because at least if you are committed enough to be one of the 3,000 people who go to Union Square and you do it with your face open, you're not masked like the Antifa guys are, and you say, hey, I'm Brady Burkett and I believe in this. I think that's one thing. I think when you get to make up a username called like Joe Biden's ghost or like Janet Yellen's farts or whatever it is on Twitter

Starting point is 01:28:40 and you start shit posting, then that's a different conversation. But I think things that happen in real life, that's news. If you have a crazy opinion online and no one knows who you are, that's a different conversation. Totally different. And it's still the conversation because where do you draw the line? But you are affecting what people can see at a high level. Like think about how many decision points we have in a day how many pieces of content the average person passes on average they're spending two seconds on the ones that well maybe like four seconds on the ones they actually interact with

Starting point is 01:29:17 yeah but that four seconds gives them at least a fair amount of information this is not great because you wish they would spend more than four seconds to form an opinion but at least to know like oh hit point that's what that thing thinks okay maybe i think that then they see it 10 days in a row and now they it's ingrained right but when you block this from going into the ether whether it be a virtual protest that you shut down like when facebook shuts down groups that they don't agree with yeah or whether it be something in the physical world that relies on technology to spread the message and get awareness to other people when you do this you are effectively shutting down that public square yeah and when juro gave the restaurant example i said to him i said look you may have the biggest most beautiful best restaurant in

Starting point is 01:30:00 the world that's open seven days a week 365 days a year and it may be in a stadium that can sit 50 000 people but there are 7 billion people in this world and there are like whatever 4 billion on the internet if you i don't know the math but if that restaurant was open every day for 100 years you're not even getting to point zero zero zero zero zero one percent of the world it's not the same as then arguing what's the public square. So when you kick people off these platforms, sure, they can go to their chat rooms and do it in the dark like you were concerned about and you should be. Great. But for the people that get kicked off that maybe shouldn't, that are just sharing ideas that you don't agree with, like a Professor Brett Weinstein,

Starting point is 01:30:39 who was kicked off of Twitter for creating a third-party page. God forbid somebody creates an idea like, hey, let's talk about a political third party. I mean, some of these examples I think are obvious that they shouldn't have been banned. When you ask the question, should the platform have the power to ban, I think that's a lot more difficult to answer. Now, here's another question for you because someone posed this to me the other day. I said, okay, you want to stop this from happening right i said yeah and in my opinion i'm extreme with free speech i err on that side i'm like an acluer with free speech i think first of all you can tell when it is openly inciting so prime example when steve bannon who was an ex-strategist literally in the white house yeah says that i'm not going to repeat what he said but said the things about certain people working in washington dc that were directly directly inciting violence against them to go get

Starting point is 01:31:38 killed when he got banned agree with it ban him yeah because that's not free speech right but they're drawing they're blurring the lines and they're banning people like even when they ban trump if you actually read why they ban trump it was scary the the reasons they gave for doing it were nothing he said at the rally or whatever and it was tweets that they twitter was admitting in there that they can read his mind they and they just straight up ignored. So he at one point said, they were breaking down the tweet where he said, 75 million great patriots believe X, Y, and Z. They then said the word patriot they believe was referring to the, I don't know, 2,000 people who stormed the capitol he very clearly used whatever it is a direct object or adjective to say 75 million people who voted for him who were great patriots because he said 75 million

Starting point is 01:32:29 people who voted for me great patriots and yet they decided no no the patriots is referring to the 2 000 assholes that fucking broke in and were causing havoc that's scary that they do that so how many times have you seen multiple posts about the same story? It uses a hashtag and you click on the hashtag and you just want to know what the fuck is going on. Sure. Yeah. You click on a hashtag, you just see hundreds of tweets of people yelling at each other with no context. And we don't have that anymore. I want to be able to click on a hashtag and understand what's going on before I get wrapped up in forming an opinion. That's where we are, is people forming opinions just based on your 240 characters. And you have no idea what they're thinking, what they're talking about, because you can't click a link. It's not hyperlinked to an essay.

Starting point is 01:33:27 Even when it is, people don't click it. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I think we had – there's the meme that goes around. It's a screenshot, so it's not really a meme of the World Economic Forum article saying the year is 2030 and you have no data and no privacy. The number of people who actually read that, including the people who I would agree with are saying this is an issue is is low i read it and it actually that example the article really does back up the title you don't really have to read it to have the full context but how many things are headlines where you gotta read it to know that

Starting point is 01:34:03 oh that's a bullshit headline they just trying to get clicks yeah and yet people make their opinion off that headline right um yeah no i wait yeah people are stripping away context through all these things and things like long form conversations like this there are the people who really fuck with it and listen to it but they're the people like you who are already thinking already think about things already are trained to look through the noise and that's something i do too you look at rogan who's the biggest guy in the space and the biggest i think by math media personality in the country he still reaches consistently and i would call consistently someone who at least casually listens to maybe one episode a week or something like that. I call that consistent.

Starting point is 01:34:49 He still reaches only 15, 20 million people in this country. Yeah. It's 339 million people. So the number of people outside of that group who would adhere to long-form really looking and sifting and being curious about stuff, yes, there's a big group of people who've just never heard of them or aren't a fan of them or whatever who are like that yeah but it still leaves the majority of the population who's not like that who wants their information in that quick tweet or that quick announcement or that quick little clip yeah we lose the context there people get their identity from not even their ideas because they're not their ideas. People get their identity by what team they're on.

Starting point is 01:35:30 Yeah. And it's that age-old advice people give you in management training, how to conduct a meeting. Don't criticize the person. Criticize the idea. How many times have you heard that? But if someone's identity is the idea then where do you start because in the workplace i can make a pitch for for doing x with the business and i'm not i'm not identifying with that idea that just came to my mind but if you've spent your whole adult life crusading for something, fighting for something maybe you don't even understand because a person you looked up to did it.

Starting point is 01:36:10 And someone criticizes that idea, you would immediately take them as an enemy and you fight back. Yeah, what was the one – I've talked about this before. This has been around for a while, but you'll see when it gets near election day, people who are firmly vote the left you you are trying to kill all these people yeah whatever which is ridiculous because think about okay some of that let's say even some of it's like a little bit true let's say for if you voted for a republican who strongly against transgender rights and you know that ends up hurting those people yeah that's a reality but the people who are voting for that person may not know anyone who's transgender and maybe they're voting for it because that candidate let's just use a covet example wants to open up businesses yeah and allow people to live versus the other candidate wants them all to die yeah so you're it's you're

Starting point is 01:37:23 you're shit or a fart you're fucked either way yeah it's one of those so um we learned in in college the old legal principle like you ever see the symbol of the the lady who represents justice represents justice with the scale and wears a blindfold no so if you look up like a imagery from a courthouse, she'll be blindfolded. And the idea is that the law or justice should be blind to anything but the case. Right? So we have that same idea, I think, a little bit. I have it up here. I'll put it in the corner of the screen on the podcast too.

Starting point is 01:38:06 When we talk about social justice and things like that, we should be blind to all the extraneous factors. But there's a thought that you can't be blind, right? Everyone has a bias, including the people in power. So rather than try to be blind, which we can't be, we should try to incorporate as many different viewpoints as possible. And when we do that, though, you just said this perfectly a minute or two ago. What was it? Attack. People attack ideas. Or people aren't attacking ideas. They're attacking the person. Attack the idea, not the person.

Starting point is 01:38:47 Yeah. Yeah. That's in a nutshell the problem because when you attack the idea, it's not personal. You're attacking a thought process. Right. And I don't even like the word attack, but let's just say have a diplomatic good dispute that tries to come to some form of agreement or problem solving on the other end where there's a give and a take. Let's just use the long words and call it that. People don't do that because they associate with the people who happen to symbolize the idea.

Starting point is 01:39:21 So when they tell you, oh, if you you are voting i mean you just saw such an example of it with trump you saw 75 million people vote for trump i tell people all the time like do you know how many people voted for him and went jesus fucking christ i'm really voting for this guy and just did it because they're like well he stands for this one idea and that really affects me and the alternative I think personally is a disaster. But yet we judge them for voting for him. But that's the idea behind this because if you admit to yourself that you're not going to have this blind system of justice, you need to incorporate every view possible. So when you incorporate every view possible, there's a million different reasons someone could support Trump or Mitch McConnell or whoever.

Starting point is 01:40:11 But we jump to conclusions. Maybe not like the person. Maybe not support the person, but support like a couple things that they are going to happen to vote for in representative in government like if you watch the election results come in i don't i don't know i actually don't think i know um more than two or three people who live in new york city and voted for trump but the election like millions of people voted for trump guess what cops live somewhere and when the the left says they're going to defund police cops aren't racist they just don't want to lose their job. Yeah. So the idea that if you voted red, you're a racist, and if you voted blue, you want to shut down and kill small businesses. People vote for a variety of reasons. I think one side gets a lot more leeway on why

Starting point is 01:41:00 they're allowed to support that party than the other. Anyone who voted red is a white supremacist or a Nazi, which is a bit ridiculous. But we need to be able to accept that there are as many different viewpoints as there are people, and by people acting on their own viewpoint and their own interest, we can come to the middle. It doesn't mean that you support 100% the republican platform of the democrat and i saw people attack others for voting for biden because biden is old right and has some cognitive issues it appears

Starting point is 01:41:36 but they weren't voting for biden because like oh joe biden they were voting for him because they liked one or two things that his platform supported and then some people i totally get this they're like we can't have another four more years of trump because of the divide in the country and so my friends who did that i get it and then it was also a problem because i didn't vote for either of these guys and i got shit from every side yeah and they were all like you know this side's saying oh you stand for lockdowns and all that and this side's saying like oh you stand for hatred and division i'm like i don't stand for any of that yeah i just felt like all right we have one guy who's who's really divided us more than ever before over the last four years and we

Starting point is 01:42:18 have a and that's the person right and that affects things because even though we want to attack ideas people don't do that by and large. And I accept that reality for now. And then on the other side, I saw a guy who couldn't finish a sentence in some ways. And so in my head – and let's not even get to some of the platforms, which I could pick apart all day. In my head right there, it was like, well, fuck. What is the choice that I want to endorse there? How do I think my life is going to be more positive in one way or the other? And I could make a list of pros and cons of both of them, and it's long, man. that I want to endorse there. How do I think my life is going to be more positive in one way or the other? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:45 And I could make a list of pros and cons of both of them and it's long, man. Yeah. And so I just felt like especially the last two elections and, you know, I don't think the choices

Starting point is 01:42:58 in hindsight now, I did it, I liked Obama in 2012, but I don't think the choices of Mitt Romney or Obama were too strong either, but, or McCain and Obama, but in 2012, but I don't think the choices of Mitt Romney or Obama were too strong either, or McCain and Obama. But in hindsight, 2016 and 2020, it was a shot glass or an acid trip. There's too much where it's like, how can I even stand for this?

Starting point is 01:43:21 And I didn't vote for either candidate in in the past two elections either um again i'll contradict my point um that the people are voting for a lot of different ideas um i think at the end of the day the person matters a lot yes that's what i'm saying i accept that the person matters more than the ideas that that they pretend to hold um what we're talking about is how we wish the world would be. Right. But we both have an acceptance of that's not how the general population views it. And so we live in that world.

Starting point is 01:43:53 Right, exactly. And it's a shame that we have to live in this world. And I love this symbol right here. I'll put it up again, the Lady Justice, because you want to talk about having a circle of life on this and applying to so many different things from every angle, it does. Do you read Malcolm Gladwell? No. I love him. I think his books are just fire. I don't even remember what book it was, but one of them, maybe it was Outliers or something. There was some kind of study,

Starting point is 01:44:22 I'm going to remember some of this wrong, where they used software and i think even like a touch of artificial intelligence to judge how judges i think in the southern district of new york yeah treated non-convert this story yeah so people who were appearing in court for the first time and they found that there was a very noticeable racial bias, and it had to do with bail and levels of bail and whether or not they granted it or how much they granted it for. There was a clear racial bias. So they would look at similar crimes in the legal code, and they would see white guys versus black or Latino, and the judge was more likely and it's not even like maybe some of the judges are racist but it's not even like they are but there's these inherent things that maybe they don't even consider that are built into them to be like oh this is a this is a this is a black guy he might be more dangerous right and and to take that and blow it up, that's why rather than have a judge decide every case who's trying to have a view from nowhere, we go to a jury of 13 people that can at least get closer to a view from everywhere.

Starting point is 01:45:36 That's an interesting one. So you think – because a lot of the system relies on jury trials, jury of your peers. Right. Just talked about this a couple weeks ago with Kevin when he was on here because he's a lawyer. Yeah. He really walked through this. I didn't realize how, I don't want to say common, but how more often than I realized people request a bench trial. Right.

Starting point is 01:46:03 Where it's the judge who decides and no jury and it's on a criminal trial. Yeah. And that's the opposite. Yeah. But the argument there is that there are certain, especially when it gets more complicated in law, a judge has more likely or at least is calculated to have more likely of a true legal nuanced opinion on maybe things like self-defense and stuff like that, that it is in your interest to do it. So it does kind of work both ways. But my other issue with it, and we didn't talk about this, this is what I'd want to ask you about is, yes, mathematically, you're more likely to get your field of view with 12 or 13 people. Does it ever go to 13? Or is it just always 12? Oh, 12 angry men. Yeah, you're right. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:45 I don't know. I don't know. Who knows? But let's just call it 12. Still, though, what's the process to get it there? The process is really fucked up to get it there. Especially on high-profile cases, there are attorneys who are brought in to, and they're experts at it, and they're worth their weight in gold to game the system and psychologically show about that is there yeah bull maybe i don't know he's a yeah okay he selects

Starting point is 01:47:12 juries that's his profession okay well there you go yeah that's the point and some of these guys are paid millions of dollars to do it and they figure out oh psychologically that one right there she's more likely to see our case this way. So they can still, and don't get me wrong, then one is fighting the other. The prosecutor fights some versus the defendant, you know, fights some, but they can stack a jury and they can get it to where it's not just these unbiased 12. To say nothing of how many people get a jury duty and never show up. Most of us. Literally most of us i've i found a jury duty like three months later from old mail that i never opened up and i call up the courthouse

Starting point is 01:47:50 and they're like oh no problem everyone misses it i'm like well how many who's showing up for this exactly yeah we and and again i'm not sure where i fall on this debate but people talk all the time about recognize your bias and don't try to eliminate it from your actions which i think is very important a lot of us have inherent biases we should try to eliminate that but there's also a complex society we live in and if someone is biased one way and another person is biased another way whether it's on racial issues or anything in between the the idea of society is we we meet in the middle by canceling out all these biases right so so so i think that's an idea that gets overlooked i'm not saying you know if you were raised by a racist dad then then go continue being a racist. Sure.

Starting point is 01:48:45 But the point is you don't have to be a perfect person because the idea of society is be polite, interact with people, understand where they're coming from, and we'll all meet in the middle at some point. And that's the argument for the two fields of view you mentioned earlier where you were saying in Poli Sci they teach you that there is always going to be two political parties that's just the accepted system which it's another conversation but let's just assume that's the definition and they're right about that yeah the idea is that if you have these two polar opposite systems they do offset and there's a level to which that still does effectively happen it's just very ugly getting there because the transparency of the bickering that gets us there is so bad that it leaves scars yeah not just on the people working in congress which they experienced for years but now the public because we see it play out on fucking twitter yeah you

Starting point is 01:49:35 know so i don't know when that gets to a point where the anger boils up so much that that doesn't even work because i am a firm proponent the just look at life man the answer lies in the middle yeah on most things yeah yeah 100 i i wouldn't want to live in a society where everyone thought like me that's the danger right now right that's why i bring this up that's why I'm talking about these platforms because these platforms are taking away viewpoints that do not think like them. And I'm not even saying like, I think QAnon's terrible. I've said that, right? Yeah. But that's just an extreme example. They also banned a podcast called Red Scare. I think it's called the Red Scare or something like that, which is two immigrant women who, I'm going to get some of this wrong, but I will put their podcast in the show notes so people can look through it.

Starting point is 01:50:28 But my understanding – I hadn't really listened. They talk to people from all spectrums of the aisle. They are on the left. They are feminists, but they're not – maybe they call them like TERFs or something. They're the feminists that don't think transgender women should be a part of the women's movement, which I've never looked at that enough, but okay. They're a woman. They can hold that opinion. And they just try to find a little bit of nuance in the discourse.

Starting point is 01:50:53 And so when Twitter was doing all these bannings of Trump and QAnon and stuff, they tried to do these one-offs where they banned them too. I don't know if they restored that, but they then were able to say oh we we ban one on the left well you did but you ban one that didn't go with your full opinion of what the left is yeah so you still run the risk of like all right you're removing certain things but you're doing it in a way that's not balanced at all yeah and doing it under the the lens of what's balanced and so you're talking about what people are what then

Starting point is 01:51:26 people get to hear and well what do these mainstream media outlets do they cut it up and put it on social media so what are they saying like do you do you watch cnn you were you mentioned earlier like you've at least watched a little bit of this stuff but are you just seeing it on socials yeah i try not to watch any of the mainstream stuff yeah yeah i i don't either i can't tell you the last time i turned it on the tv like i've been in a room where especially during an election like it would be on a tv downstairs or something like i see it i glance but i watched the tim dillon election show oh god with uh with joe rogan and i couldn't i i just can't do the the cable news Wolf Blitzer only need eight more votes in West Virginia like I don't care about any of that I I will say I do I every election

Starting point is 01:52:13 I always have CNN on because like John King I think is always people argue about him with opinions like outside of this but I he's the guy that runs like the election room and that communicates with their room he's always to me been not going with the flow and going with whatever the fuck their data says which who knows what to believe anymore but i've always actually that's one night a year i do watch okay and completely other than that i don't watch any cable news yeah i used to be able to watch to laugh at it i used to love to like flip between i guess like mad owl and and hannity yeah just to see like how crazy it was but now it's not really funny anymore right it hasn't been for a while right because i see

Starting point is 01:52:56 this and i'm like these people are looney tunes they're you know they're well it's it the old thing we learned in uh middle school history class one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. That's literally happening with people talking about the Capitol being stormed. Yes. People on the right, Fox News is saying they're patriots who are going in to fix a fake election. Are they really? They're saying that? Well, more or less, right?

Starting point is 01:53:24 Jesus Christ. I don't know if, I don't know, Hannity or they're saying it, but enough people on the right believe that they're doing the right thing. And enough people on the left are saying this is an attempted coup. Sure as shit would it look like. Right. So, I don't know how we reconcile that. Well, that's the other problem. Yeah. See, I looked at that i don't know how we reconcile that well that that's the other problem yeah see i looked at that and said and don't get me wrong there were the fact that there

Starting point is 01:53:52 were so few cops there that day i mean he's a fucking idiot for holding that rally something was gonna go oh sure do that somewhere else if you're gonna fucking do it do it he was as far as i'm concerned he walked right the fuck into i have zero sympathy for him and i don't know if by the letter of the law he incited violence but you want to talk about being careless with what you say on stage in front of fucking rabid however many people there were who think the election was stolen they're stupid um so go ahead there's again to to call back to something i know, which is I'm not an expert on politics, but I work in a corporate setting. If you want to get people bought into a process, you take their feedback and you make them think it was their idea for the end product, right? Define that. I love that.

Starting point is 01:54:38 So the reason I bring this up is I think the idea of the election was stolen. That idea I don't think has any merit. But if you want to show people that the election wasn't stolen, say, I understand your concern. This is the process of how we count ballots. This is how we're going to go about verifying the election instead of banning them from Twitter, calling them racist, calling them morons. It's a tactic of how to manage people and i think we've lost that censoring their speech from day one right right do you push people into believing it more when you do that exactly and that's so spot on so you're you're looking at it from what we talked about maybe like 20 minutes ago which is

Starting point is 01:55:22 people are going to be more likely to want to do something when they're told they can't. Right. So if I told you I think there's coffee in that cup and you said, no, it's water. I better show you it's water. Why don't you just show me it's water? Couldn't agree more.

Starting point is 01:55:41 Instead of saying, no, you can't see it. You can't see it. And that's where the fault lies lies and then once something like that happens and you have an insurrection or whatever they're calling it well see i'm consistent myself yeah when i saw bad actors take over good actors from the protests last summer for a while like it you know it made perfect sense and people in new york were especially were protesting beautifully yeah wow then you get your anarchists to come in and then eventually like the normal people go oh we don't support that and they just go home and so you get the right saying they're all like that which is insane but what did you get the left doing from day one

Starting point is 01:56:18 they're taking fucking videos and putting it on tv and cutting it up and putting it on socials they know what they're doing yeah you know like and i'm talking about like cnn that so that show headlines mostly peaceful protests with the person saying very peaceful out here and there's fucking buildings burning down behind them yeah so i'm consistent when when jerk offs go into the capitol building with spears and shit i don't even care if there were a few like antifas in there there were that was that was mostly fucking trump people in there going in. And they're overtaking the house the people built. And there's people fucking dying in there too.

Starting point is 01:56:51 There's cops who you're supposed to support on the right side in danger. I'm going to call that out. You know what else I'm going to call out? I'm going to call out people fucking burning down businesses and killing people like David Dorn in St. Louis. I think it was in St. Louis. Yeah. During these fucking so-called peaceful protests i do i i don't see as things go on in those situations enough people like terrence jones staying out there i see people like fucking banded anarchists who have no political affiliation other

Starting point is 01:57:17 than burning down the fucking system yeah no pun intended to do it and i see the same thing at the capitol throw them all in jail don't suddenly give me like i'm getting from the left all these speeches like this is beyond the pale these people are disgusting we don't don't give me that yeah you did it you supported it all last summer call it both ways i i so i i have two immediate comments to that. Number one, when you see people breaking laws on both sides, breaking into buildings, setting them on fire, looting, trying to steal Nancy Pelosi's podium, all garbage, they should go to prison. On camera too. Number one, I ask, why is society creating people with nothing to lose that they they resort to this but but then the other question i have is um why are we letting so so we have

Starting point is 01:58:14 these two sides and it's a classic tactic to make you think that the other side is violent and and gonna commit crimes against you so you better go and be violent commit crimes against you, so you better go and be violent, commit crimes against them. We don't have people on both sides of the aisle condemning their own. Not at all. It's all about radicalizing your own and making the other side seem scarier.

Starting point is 01:58:39 That's the problem. And I will say, I appreciated the fact that some republicans came up to the plate and said that ain't it immediately yeah others didn't i don't appreciate that fact yeah because they're the same fucking and and it's not just even the people in washington dc some of these right-wing commenter commentators and stuff who were calling out all the violence as they should in portland and stuff last summer were coming in and saying what you were saying earlier i didn't know they were even saying that on fox news but you know oh these people are just pissed off because they've been silenced it's not an

Starting point is 01:59:13 excuse it's not you don't it's not what this what this country's built on don't become what you hate but that's what this system creates yeah and what i worry about is that they are the same people who were telling us peaceful protests and shit all last year when they weren't are the same people using this do you do you follow glenn greenwald at all no i i know who he is i haven't followed him on twitter i love him as a reporter because he's just he's about let's talk about all the unpopular opinions i don't give a fuck which way they go. And he's been warning for a long time that they were going to use some kind of event to tamp down or get down on domestic terrorism again. And that's what they've done with this. They've taken it, and they've taken those 2,000 assholes, or let's even

Starting point is 02:00:04 call it a bigger number. Let's say 10,000 of them and define the whole batch that way. And now they keep on using – referring to the insurrection again, again, conveniently ignoring the problems from the other side of the spectrum of extreme. And they're now trying to define this as a cancer. And to bring it back to the free speech thing, you are now seeing these platforms which in the mainstream they support more of the left. It's just how it is. And it puts you in the funny position of feeling like you're defending the right. I'm not. I'm defending free speech on things.

Starting point is 02:00:37 You see people on the left going on TV openly talking about shutting down speech and and using words like cleansing society right right so i um have you read uh anything by hayek hayek the the economist um so i know of him i definitely have not read him one of his books from the 40s says that the great tactics of the communists and the fascists, which I wouldn't say we're there yet, but we have a very divided left and right wing. He said the great tactic is they make their constituents believe there are no more people in the middle. There are no more people in the middle there are no more classical liberals everyone is either a communist or a fascist pick a side because we're because we're going to battle each other right so that's how they get people to their side and that's also how they make them hate each other because there are all those internal battles before any country goes either

Starting point is 02:01:40 way um you know during during those periods of tumult so i i think there's something going on now where the people on the right make it seem like if you're not if you're not firmly in the camp of the right you support the anarchists and the people on the left say if you're not firmly in the camp of the left you support the capital storming yeah i completely agree that they they they generalize yeah completely and i've spoken it gives me some hope i've spoken with people all across the political aisles over the last 10 months yeah and there are a lot of people who i can firmly put in one of the two boxes who talk about this and they talk about generalization and maybe even sometimes they fall in the trap

Starting point is 02:02:32 with a tweet or a post on instagram one-off stuff we probably fall in that trap too i always try to say like hey this is a generalization on the show and sometimes i probably forget to do that so it's human nature you'll fall into that but we do it on the highest level consistently on this stuff and we say this is what you are and there was there was a tweet a couple weeks ago from some guy who's like big on twitter i don't know a hell of a lot about him but this this guy hotep jesus who said something along the lines of, how do you divide an entire country? You take the lower classes and you pin them against each other on certain things that make them look different or something like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:03:17 And claim that they're each other's enemy. And at the top, you just keep, and he said it way better than this, but you just keep playing puppeteer exactly you make the people who have more in common down there with why they ended up down there and why things like the middle class right are shrinking away you make them think that they're each other's enemy rather than the people who have caused that rather than the people who have allowed things like the wealth gap yeah like dr pinker always says to data backed continue to just go and separate like this yeah over and if you're listening not watching i'm separating my hands big time separate like crazy

Starting point is 02:03:52 since the 1980s with no end in sight and oh by the way coronavirus is now the biggest red button of them all because the biggest elites the amazons of the world and stuff the googles whatever they were allowed to continue while all the people who were still hanging on to that middle class like the small businesses are fucked yeah you ignore it i i think there's a lot going on um to crush the middle class i think that that's a huge topic of conversation too um but yeah mean, we're fighting about ideas that don't materially impact your day-to-day life. Yeah. Right? So I get the dignity question. I get that some people say, I want to be able to use the women's bathroom if I call myself a woman. And that's a day-to-day issue fine but when we talk about

Starting point is 02:04:45 some fringe cases about you know and and i'm i'm racking my head for an example but i think a lot of what we argue about don't really materially impact us on a day-to-day basis yeah it matters a lot more you know where you work who your is, who your friends and family are than it does who's president. But you would think that's not the case, that people's day-to-day hinges on whether Trump or Biden's in the office. Yeah, I don't remember who said that, but someone who was on this podcast said something along the lines of, if you wake up every day and think that your life is completely fucked because of who sits in the Oval Office, you're looking at things the wrong way. He's not saying it's positive, but you know.

Starting point is 02:05:35 There's a Bill Burr joke. Oh, really? Yeah. When Trump got in, I think he was on his podcast, he said, did Obama make you coffee in the morning? Did Obama tuck you in at night? 99.9% of your life is between you, your friends, your family, your coworkers, your boss, maybe some things going on with your local city.

Starting point is 02:05:58 Yeah. But it's certainly not whoever the president is. How many people, including you and me, by the way, I'm going to first raise my hand and say I couldn't even tell you a name. How many people go into the booth and even know who's running for assemblyman and what they've done? No, I have no idea. That's one example, but all these things. Yeah. Running for sheriff even. How many people know who the fuck the people are?

Starting point is 02:06:19 Yeah, no. Nobody. Because we have lives. We have things. We don't have time. I was talking with someone a few weeks ago who was talking about, oh, we're really good at handing out voter pamphlets. And in a way, I was like, oh, wow, that's great. Now, the voter pamphlets that they were handing out were biased.

Starting point is 02:06:37 And I'm not going to say which direction, but they were biased in one way or the other. So I'm like, okay, they're sending out, i guess it was like email newsletters or whatever i'm sending i'm saying they're sending out these email newsletters and it could be from prager you or pod save america right you could either example applies because places like that are doing stuff like this and they're educating people based on what they want to educate them with and then people still can't even name who the people are or what they really have said in the past because they get this rose-colored view in one direction of who they are. I think this is a really interesting conversation that I don't think enough people are talking about because our political parties in this country have a national brand that are dictated on national issues. But we use the same parties to determine local elections and i don't know why

Starting point is 02:07:27 that exists how it evolved to become that but we all know a republican in tennessee does not have the same views as a republican in staten island so so we're using these national brands i think that's why we see a lot of one-party states, a lot of one-party cities, because the national media who these people are running Democrat, Republican, for whatever reason, we decided to use the same names. That doesn't get into people. So I don't know the full impact of that. But we see California completely blue, New York completely blue. There are some states that are completely red. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:08:27 They're less populous, so I don't know who they are. Even New York, though. I want to ask you about this. Yeah. And I could say this about California, but New York is a way better example. Where's the majority of New York's population? In the city. Right.

Starting point is 02:08:42 Yeah. There's a big state out there. Yeah. Do you know how red a lot of new york is oh sure yet you go two hours northwest of new york city it's a different country yeah different so i'm just giving your example even more it's even intrastate yeah yet we just say oh blue state yeah yeah we say we say oh red state for florida which now appears to be like a red state there's some big blue pockets there yeah you think people in in tampa people in orlando people in miami agree with the people in

Starting point is 02:09:15 central florida no they fucking don't the people in western new york don't agree with the people in central florida but we still call them all republican yes and i get it on the national stage you need to form a coalition to win these votes to pass a law but i don't get because it all comes down to the branding wouldn't matter if you knew who you were voting for but people don't take the time people don't have the time so you trust the brand and the national brand gets more distribution than the local brand. And you know what both brands push? They both push Democrat, Republican, and anything else.

Starting point is 02:09:52 But let's just use those two because they're the ones that matter. They both push politicians being saviors. They push politicians answering the higher calling and doing good for society. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:10:06 And bringing American values and freedom and justice and liberty. They don't push politicians as being, I'm trying to think of a good word, but being, maybe this isn't the right word, but conduits, connectors. Right. People who help and the best politician in america right now by and a lot of people still have no idea who the fuck he is but the best politician in america over the last december and january so the last two months has been the mayor of miami florida yeah who i recently found out as a republican you would never fucking know it yeah and you know why? Well, because he's trying to make his city a better place. Yes! And rather

Starting point is 02:10:47 than pretending like he has all the answers, he's asking people how he can help them. That is literally what his first tweet was. Who was the, it was like the Founders Fund guy? Keith. Keith. No, Keith Ramos was the guy who went there first, and he was like

Starting point is 02:11:03 kind of quieter about it. Yeah. But the guy uh Deleon or I don't know him very well like Deleon or something like that the whole thing started with a tweet on December 3rd where he said hey hear me out guys let's make Miami the new Silicon Valley or something and Suarez on Twitter, the mayor of Miami, retweets it with a quote that says, how can I help? And walk people through what this guy has done over the last two months, because it's nuts. So I'm no expert on Miami city politics, but this mayor Suarez has basically taken to Twitter and other online communities to try to create a better environment in Miami for innovation by recruiting individual founders, operators, and VC firms to come down to Miami. I don't know if he's doing the same with banking, but we see a lot of people in finance moving down

Starting point is 02:12:01 to Florida too. So he's just trying to create a community where people are coming. The zero state income tax certainly helps in Florida, but- And it's open. And the lockdowns are relatively less than New York and California. So he's just creating an environment where people are coming. And it seems like if people aren't moving there full time, people are taking a few months and going down there. And the reactions I've seen are pretty positive. I've never seen anything like it in my life, how fast it's happened. But yeah, the Ramos guy went down there first. He was a San Francisco transplant. He's a big name. And then some minor names went down there, fewer people would know. But after DeLeon or however you say it put that out there and considered it, Suarez I guess then met with him immediately, got him to move there, and then started knocking down the bowling pins.

Starting point is 02:12:54 And that first tweet, any politician could put out a good one-liner. He has backed it up though because when he brings these people in he does it on camera too he has his cafecito talks or something it's i guess it's like a cuban coffee that they have in miami where he brings him into his office and that's what he does he says what can i do for you how can i help not i'm republican francis suarez and i approve this message no no he's like what what can we do here i want to make i don't and he's meeting with people from the left and the right too he doesn't look at it like where do you stand he's like hey you're really smart i would love to have you build your community in miami here build your company out in miami with even with your future remote work bring your employees here so everyone's close to each other

Starting point is 02:13:37 how can we make that happen yes so so i'm sure on the face of it i'm positive that not everyone who lives in miami right now is a fan of that. Sure, sure. The same controversy that San Francisco had about people coming in and driving up rent prices, you can make that same argument. But what you have to respect is the fact that this guy puts his ego aside. He meets with people, and he says, how can I make Miami a city of the future? I mean you see it all the time. Republicans have,

Starting point is 02:14:06 well, if we lower the taxes here, we'll get more businesses to come. If we recruit the right people from other countries, they'll start their companies here. But not that many people go out and call the corporation and says, how can I get you to move here? And this guy's doing it.'s not afraid to to have that conversation and he's getting in conversations with elon musk on twitter at 358 in the morning where you familiar with the boring company the whole tunnels thing yeah so one of elon's many projects to get an approval in la which he or i guess that one was in la but his offices are in silicon valley which he moved from and

Starting point is 02:14:45 is now in austin he relocated because it's freer there well no you you saw why he did that too oh yeah i'll tell that story i forget what elon tweeted but the the congresswoman assembly woman from san francisco replied to his tweet fuck you and he said message received and he moved to austin the next day yeah out it's these people they think they're saviors that it's so and she was like an assembly woman or something like on some state legislator no one knows who the fuck she is she's trying to make a big name for herself as as well she's a woman i can't say big swinging dick but you you get the point she got what she wanted she got what she wanted. And she wanted him to leave. Did she want that?

Starting point is 02:15:27 Yes. Do you think so? Well, you can't say that that's what you want and not want it, right? I think she just wanted points. You think they just wanted a struggle? Oh, yeah, because she gets to say, you're Elon Musk. You're really important. Well, I'm more powerful than you are. So this is a really interesting um conversation that we're getting

Starting point is 02:15:45 into because the topic of zero sum versus positive some games right and i think for define that for so for so a zero sum game um the the perfect thing that comes into my mind is is michael douglas in the movie wall street he said when you're making a trade, it's a zero-sum game. Either you're right or the guy on the other side of the trade is right when you're trading a stock, right? It's a fixed pie and you're trying to decide how to divide it. A positive-sum game is an example where the pie grows. So a positive-sum game is business, the private enterprise. Because as you innovate and create new products, new customers are served,

Starting point is 02:16:30 you create new value, you unlock, you build a bigger pie. And it's not as important how it's divided. For whatever reason, I think politics has become much more, if not a perfect zero-sum game, much more of a zero-sum game. And business, especially in Silicon Valley with network effects,

Starting point is 02:16:52 capital has become a positive-sum game. If a startup with 10 founders, PayPal Mafia is a perfect example, right? The startup, they build it successfully provide value to all their customers and they ipo and now each of them are worth a billion dollars well now there's 10 billion more dollars sitting in silicon valley that can be invested in future companies so i think the the butting heads of politicians in business, we're seeing that clash between people who think it's zero-sum. When a Democrat yells at a Republican, the Republican has to reply in kind because they're fighting for votes. When a politician yells at a business person, he can go somewhere else and do what he needs to do.

Starting point is 02:17:48 Perfectly said, man. a business person he can go somewhere else and do what he needs to do yeah perfectly said man it's i haven't heard someone put it that way maybe i'm not listening to the right people but that's that's what this guy has figured out right he didn't figure out oh the the republicans are right on this issue and the democrats aren't he just figured out like like, oh, wait, they're all just yelling at each other. I'm just going to go right at these people and tweet at them and say, hey, tell me what to do, man. And so the old way of thinking of it, if you were playing a zero-sum game, you'd say if I invite Elon Musk to my city, he's going to have more power than me because of the people he employs. So I can't sacrifice my power but what this guy suarez is saying and and maybe some other people out there saying if i invite elon musk to my city he'll have more power than me but i'll have more power and more resources to make my city a better

Starting point is 02:18:37 place so you can see the positive my city will have right exactly yeah and then people will just respect more people some you said some people will be negative for certain reasons there's always going to be that you're never going to have everyone happy yeah but more people by percentage are going to be like whoa i love that guy look what he did for us it it brings to mind um a couple years ago when amazon did hq2 i don't think that was well received by the public it was kind of tricky the way they did it but they announced they're building a second headquarters, going to employ 100,000 people. What can you give us, city?

Starting point is 02:19:11 And they ultimately picked New York for part of it. And almost immediately, the politicians in Queens in particular, but New York City and New York State in general, turned on Amazon and said, we don't want your headquarters here because you underpay your people. Whatever the classic argument is against big business, they made, and Amazon pulled the proposal to build an HQ2 there. Peggy Noonan, who's a writer for the Wall Street Journal, wrote a column, definitely on the conservative side. But she said, hey, I get the liberal point of view, but what New York liberals would have done in the 50s and 60s is gotten Amazon to move there and then had a conversation with them about how they could

Starting point is 02:20:00 improve their business to benefit the people. Once you kick someone out of your city, you have no say in what they do. The politicians in Queens now cannot call Jeff Bezos and understand why he's doing what he's doing and try to convince him another way. That's still left for people in Seattle because he doesn't have an office in New York. But if you can bring them in, you get a seat at the table, you can convince them otherwise. And I think that's it's lost when you just attack people it's it works both ways and i didn't even know

Starting point is 02:20:37 i never thought of it this way but you just gave a perfect dichotomy for the current situation and i'll point to let's say the dynamic between jeff bezos amazon with new york versus the dynamic of now elon musk with suarez which we have to see this play out but early on you know we can do some takeaways from their public conversation on twitter bezos and amazon you just said it they went in there and said here are our demands right we're fucking amazon you know we get to do what we want to do so immediately like i'll defend the politicians here. That puts them in the back seat. Yeah. Because they go, oh, you're going to come in and demand what to do with our state.

Starting point is 02:21:09 You piss them off. You get the equal but opposite reaction, and it causes the same friction and problem. With Suarez and Musk, Musk was talking about, I forget how it came up, but he was talking on Twitter about building the tunnels. And so he's gotten some permits to build a tunnel in L.A. before. It took him, I don't't know a week to get it like like elon musk should have to really ask not for a tunnel to dig one hole yeah like these self-important city politicians were like you know elon we're going to need a full plan on that and you know we'll be able to judge the efficacy of this like they fucking even passed physics in high school right now i'm not saying you should

Starting point is 02:21:45 just let anyone do exactly what they want to do no questions asked so they're again middle ground but they're so self-important in the last five years he's dug one hole yeah so he's putting out there something about it on twitter and suarez who is the mayor of miami which is a city that's like concerned with the climate and going underwater. Underneath the city is literal ocean. He goes, hey, I would love to be the first city on this. Like, can you just come in and tell me what you need? And so Musk immediately responds at 3.58 in the morning. They're going back and forth, like going over how this would work.

Starting point is 02:22:18 And instead of saying, yes, I will come in and give you my demands and exactly what needs to happen and take it or leave it. He went through, hey, here's what I think. I think traffic is a huge problem. I know it's probably a problem in your city. My goal is to, and I'm paraphrasing here, would be to eliminate traffic and be able to utilize ways that build a couple levels so that people can save time and stuff. So if Miami is down to talk about this, I know I talked with your governor about this briefly before would love to come in and see how we can make it work he didn't say here's my dick on the table take it or leave it

Starting point is 02:22:49 he said hey here's why i think it's going to be good for you and it's this beautiful back and forth where there's a give and a take we don't get that you didn't get that with amazon not the businesses have to take responsibility for this too they can't just come in and be like we're gonna do whatever the fuck we want to do yeah it's not fair right i i get that view um but again we're talking about elon musk and mayor suarez these are big time people but you can always think about much closer to home examples. If you work for a boss, and every time you had an idea to make the company better, and all he said was no, how long would you want to work with that boss anymore? If you had a boss and you said, I want to dig a tunnel under the city of Miami, and he says, that's a good idea. I had that idea myself five years ago. Here's why it didn't work. Do you have any new information that I missed? Right? So, so you can determine like, okay, that's a good boss.

Starting point is 02:23:50 That's a bad boss. But it's, it's a little bit more rare when it comes to these business politics conversations, when people at such a high level kind of have an ego about them and just want to have their way. Yeah. There's the. There's the boss that says every reason why it can't be done. And there's the one who says, how can it happen? Yeah. And you're right. It's the same dynamic. And you know what? To be personal about it, that was when I look at banks, and my joke on today's mug is a little not to what you do, RIP banks. I've never hated a groupthink ideology more in my life outside of politics than what I experienced in a bank. Politics is a whole other issue. But it's not like there were a lot of bad people working there, or it's not like everyone was not talented.

Starting point is 02:24:45 There were plenty of very talented people there, but these banks are so big. I worked within Bank of America. I think statistically, commercial-wise, it's the biggest one, I think. It's one of them, right? So it's not the lack of having some of the right people there it's the idea that it gets so big by a numerical scale of people that work there and the government gets so involved which some of that very fair because banks even if it was a small number of people fucked people over right in 2008 2009 so i get it when you combine those two things though the idea of the chain of command and having new ideas and asking questions of saying how can we do this doesn't exist yeah it is i used to joke the bank

Starting point is 02:25:33 of america would would ask us every reason why we shouldn't do business with someone rather than why we should do business with them yeah and so that affects how you then think about things. And you suddenly – I found myself without realizing it for a short time asking myself all the wrong questions going into business situations because that's what I was trained to do. And I had to come out of my – I had to recognize – I didn't recognize that right away. I was hypnotized by that for a long time. And then I had to come out of my cocoon and be like wait a second this doesn't work but i i couldn't go to someone at the bank and talk about that i could go to like one person but it's gonna die on the vine right there they're not gonna take it to the next guy and he's not gonna take it to the next girl it's

Starting point is 02:26:18 not how it works and so we see this now infect every level of society and there's an example for it everywhere i i think you talk about it being a bank issue or a big organization issue i think specifically in finance it has a lot to do with any type of regulation um but absolutely the i mean you this is something you talk about a lot the bigger the organization the harder it is to get a yes to have new ideas to innovate and i think uh you were talking about this on on a previous episode with anthony fenu about smaller companies being able to innovate that's what we were talking about on this one earlier about him too yeah yeah that's right the same and and i let me not just single out banks i might have said this earlier but it applies to the tech companies too it applies to google it applies

Starting point is 02:27:09 to facebook yeah there's a point where suddenly facebook wasn't in a garage and now i was in an office with a nice bureau and maybe it was still great then and then and it's not like they're all bad right they do a lot of good things still but some point, it crossed over from how can we make things possible and how can we do something to quote-unquote change the world to, okay, how can we iterate on top of this to be able to report for our quarter three earnings and be able to get a good result and have investors be confident in the efficacy of this business moving forward over the next rolling two quarters. Right. It's an interesting way, almost visually, to think about businesses and how they try to become more profitable or more efficient, whatever term you want to use. But you look at small companies being started and they bleed money because all they're interested in is creating a new market, creating new products, innovating, and that's really exciting. But then over time, it's almost like you're blowing up a doorway, but then you have to build a sidewalk that goes through it

Starting point is 02:28:18 or else it's too costly, right? So mature companies are at the stage where if you can innovate at the margin and create that little bit of efficiency, that's what they want. But smaller companies have the liberty to say, I actually have a new idea. Let's go see if this works. And that's how they create their value. And don't hate on the buzz speak you just used because it's important. It's spot on. That's where people always say efficiency and effectiveness and drop all this stuff up

Starting point is 02:28:47 you're dead fucking on with that though yeah there is this happy medium of okay we want to move fast and break shit and and invent cool new shit to to change the world and all that right but you do have to recognize that money is the lifeblood of your company. You can't just invent it – well, our Federal Reserve would say differently. But for the most part, you can't personally invent your own money out of thin air. Yeah. So you could have the best idea in the world. How many companies do you think die because they put Descartes before the horse and they're like, oh, let's do this thing right now because we have that idea. And then they never get there because they have no fucking money and no product.

Starting point is 02:29:33 Yeah. have that idea and then they never get there because they have no fucking money and no product yeah well i mean i'm sure that you take banks and fintech for example yeah let's get to this do it so so i have no doubt that excuse me i'm gonna blow my nose for a second here tested negative multiple times no covid i have just have to say that i have no doubt that the ideas that spawned robin hood the ideas that spawned um chime as a bank the ideas that spawned all these fintech companies that are taking the world by storm some banker had them in in the 90s and 2000s right um i mean robin hood was literally literally like E-Trade before it was on the mobile phone. But these ideas are not new. What's new is the ability to execute. So it just – when a technologist builds a stock trading app, it's different from a stock trader building a stock trading app.

Starting point is 02:30:26 Wait. Exp expand that. I think I see where you're going with that, but I want to make sure I understood that. So if you're in the industry and you're a stockbroker, you say, I want to build an app to get all my clients online and then I don't have to take their call every day. Rather, I can go get new clients to come on. You're enabling self-service, which is basically – You're scratching an itch. You're reducing the barrier to entry and you're making yourself more efficient. Because you're aware of it.

Starting point is 02:30:57 Because you're aware of it. Because you're a stockbroker and you say, if my clients were trading online and still paying me commission, I could go recruit new customers rather than taking their phone calls. To draw it out, you are identifying a problem from the inside because you're on the inside and you are saying problem because I'm on the inside and understand this problem and understand what caused it. I have a very high probability of being able to figure out the solution to the problem because it was unfamiliar with all the context. Right. So I think you take a look at a stockbroker from that perspective, and he brings an idea to his manager that we should build a mobile app for his clients to trade stock versus a technologist, a software engineer who has to call his broker and says, why do I have to do that when I can send an email and everything's online anyway?

Starting point is 02:31:53 And he builds an app from the outside. Are you going to get a better result from a committee of people in the industry or by one person on the outside building what he thinks the customers want. The ending to that went in a different direction than I thought. I like that though. You're arguing over a larger group of people who understand all the context and nuance to it, including the regulation around stuff, versus the upstart outsider who hatches an idea in at his desk because he understands disruption versus understands the full context within there

Starting point is 02:32:32 and it's just going to figure out some of the context later that's interesting i could see that going both ways so so um i'll point out two examples for the big company trying to do something new number one is the app Fin by Chase. You've never heard of it. No, I've never heard of it. No one's ever heard of it. What's it called? Fin, F-I-N-N.

Starting point is 02:32:52 So are you aware of Chime and Vero? I've heard of Chime, never heard of Vero, never been on either of them. These are online banks. They are brand new software platforms found about 2014 and on. And there's every year we get more and more of them vying for the customers that aren't represented either physically, there are no retail branches of Bank of America in your town, or the checking fees of these old legacy institutions would be too high. So there's a real business need for digital banks.

Starting point is 02:33:28 The cost of operating those accounts and maintaining those accounts is lower, so you can lower the fees and obviously bank the unbanked. Chase said, we see you guys. We're going to put millions upon millions of dollars into a new app and launch it. And they called it Finn. Trying to do the same thing. And it was closed within six months. So did they do this recently?

Starting point is 02:33:55 Probably two years ago. Okay. They shut it down. In a different industry, how much money did they put behind Quibi? It's these industry insiders who don't understand the problem they're solving yeah quibi's quibi's the ultimate example of them all because I know that's more of that's more up your alley is the maybe but it doesn't even matter what alley it's

Starting point is 02:34:20 up it's you had powerful people you'd katzenberg and whitman and then all kinds of they have 1.8 billion dollars behind that or something and they just looked at the data and then decided to hit a hot spot in there and didn't consider the context behind how they had to hit the hot spot they thought that they thought that the zeros and ones that they looked at on the screen that was fed to them was enough to understand the psyche of the human mind that was going to have an emotional attachment to this app and adopt it. I guess the point I'm trying to drive at is, it sounds cheesy, but the platforms that are built more genuinely, I think, stand a better chance than the projects by committee that have billions of dollars that are funded, that are trying to take focus group opinions to release to market.

Starting point is 02:35:14 And we'll get 10 million downloads tomorrow because we're JPMorgan Chase. And this goes back to – I think it's Peter Thiel's idea. I was like sitting over here biting zero to one, zero to one, zero to one. Go. Right. Yeah. So it's better to build concentric circles around your first market and expand out than it is to pick a large market. Wait.

Starting point is 02:35:42 Define concentric circle. So a small circle and then completely enclosed around it is to pick a large market wait to find concentric circles isn't it so a small circle and then completely enclosed around it as a slightly bigger circle so with with I think the example he uses is PayPal they found success because eBay had a payments problem so they went to eBay and they said eBay you have problems with people buying and selling whatever, Beanie Babies and baseball cards online will be that payment partner. And then around eBay, they got to more e-commerce sites. And then on top of that, they eventually grew to be a remittance tool where you could send money to your family overseas. So they started small. They did not sit in a corporate boardroom and say, we have the internet now and payments is a huge industry.

Starting point is 02:36:30 Let's come up with this huge idea that's going to disrupt the world. They started tactically and could build on that success. There's another thing they did there too. I don't want to leave that point because that's actually really important. They didn't try to save the world in a day. Yeah, that's actually really important. They didn't try to save the world in a day. Yeah, they yeah, that's that's perfect the other thing they did is one of teal's other main points of zero to one which is

Starting point is 02:36:53 um There's points to be argued on this But I love him opening up this conversation because it's important where he says competition is inherently bad. Yeah And fen you pointed this out in his episode but the example he gives is you don't want to be the eighth korean restaurant in la in the same district because you're just competing it's a it turns into a price war and you're just trying to beat what the other guy already did i love so so the i watched a talk he gave i think is at stanford and he said not only do you want to be free of competition and where you have competition, your business will fail.

Starting point is 02:37:30 But he said, watch the language the businesses use to talk about themselves. He said the monopolies will argue they're not monopolies. And the businesses in fierce competition will argue they're not in competition so the example he gave in that lecture was the argue he gave was a restaurant founder will go to a bank and ask for a loan and say i have no competition i'm the only uh persian restaurant in southwest palo alto and yeah that might be true but your competition is not persian restaurants in southwest palo alto it's the world of like cooking at home take out any other restaurant in the entire bay area let alone palo alto so they they kind of narrow their market to make it seem like they're not a monopoly and then on the other side you you get someone like Google, who clearly has market dominance in search. And they say, rather than respond to the criticism that they are the monopoly on internet search, they say, hold on, wait a minute. We have Google Cloud Storage that competes with AWS. We have Waymo that competes with other self-driving car units. We youtube that competes with vimeo so they start

Starting point is 02:38:45 piecing together to defend themselves so i i love that that way of thinking about how businesses talk about themselves and it's almost like teal is obviously an investor and he's like among other things and it's like if you want to invest in a monopoly, like you want to listen for that, those clues that they're saying they're not a monopoly versus the opposite. People take on the role they think they're supposed to play to gain the support of some sort of barrier to what they want to do. So if you are the restaurant that's saying I'm not in competition, you are trying to sell a bank on giving you a loan that you are going to rely on to hopefully not be in competition because you need that money to be able to remove the competition.

Starting point is 02:39:34 Yeah. So you're lying about it. If you are Google trying to say, we have all these competitors and picking it apart, you are doing that so you can continue to be the monopoly that doesn't have real competitors that can pick you apart and control the market and not have the government come in and stop you from doing so you are it's similar to the psychology of when people say most criticism is some sort of self-reflection that you hate in yourself it's it's in the same family yeah you know what i'm saying yeah crazy crazy but he i just think that book so important, and you're a big fan of Teal, just from our conversations.

Starting point is 02:40:10 I am too. I think it's so important because even if you don't agree with everything he said, and I don't even know where I stand on some of the stuff he said, so brilliantly and succinctly and easy to understand way lays out all these one-liner points that are then backed by his boom, boom, boom, boom, boom data that it opens up all these conversations and makes you ask questions, which I mean, that's the tagline on the intro to this podcast, start asking questions. And Zero to One, anyone can read in like two or three hours it's a very short book but this is another one that comes full circle because you have on the one end the upstart that needs to be able to get there to try to be a power and on the other end you have the power that needs to try to stay there to try to stay a power but there's all these others in between too and then how do you how do you decide which is right which one do

Starting point is 02:41:07 you prefer do you like a certain type of competition or do you think that there's more utility to the masses through not just products that all of us can use with especially with internet type companies but so not restaurants but also with the economy that creates through jobs and downstream economics and whatever, are you okay with trading off things being a monopoly or something like that? And I want to talk about fintech because you've been in this space. You hinted at it a few times or maybe even said it a few times earlier. You've been in this space for a long time, and from the outside, it's been really cool seeing you just have a totally – and I mean this in a good way – a more and more warped view of how things stand with systems that we've just come to accept. So banking being the ultimate established monopoly system where these small number of big banks and then their little redheaded brothers and stepsisters and stuff who are the smaller regional banks who get the scraps these this little group has controlled how everyone

Starting point is 02:42:12 controls their money very similarly by the way to how we talked about health care insurance companies yeah a small group of them controls how we get health if there are two things besides oxygen and i guess electricity minus our friends in in the amish community amish however you say it who if there are two things that tie us all together it is our health and our money and those are also arguably the two things that the average american including very smart people have including myself on healthcare especially have very little understanding of and when you look at it right now i i'll speak towards money because i want to go to what you're doing

Starting point is 02:42:51 and i know less on health care as i said right now i think we are seeing the biggest threat ever i think that's just a mainstream opinion at this point to the establishment man's threat is another man's opportunity right sure yeah so what first of all let's let's start bare bones here tell people where you work sure and what you guys do and then we'll relate that out into the whole ecosystem of the things you're seeing so i i work on the new business team at a company called currency cloud currency cloud is is a later stage startup. We have about 300 employees. And what our company does is provide a cross-border payment platform

Starting point is 02:43:33 completely built on APIs. Okay, English. So any type of cross-border, cross-currency transaction that you need to make. What's an example? You need to send money to your relatives in India. Okay. An individual in Finland wants to invest in Tesla in the US.

Starting point is 02:43:58 Like the stock? The stock, right. Or I think more realistically, it's a lot of business to business payments, paying supply chain, paying a developer overseas in the Ukraine, whatever that is. So if I'm Toyota and I have a plan in Mexico City and I'm located in Japan, I guess, if I want to send my pesos from Mexico City to Japan, you play a role in this process. And, and what our company does is we don't go direct to market. So you're never going to log into currency cloud and make a transaction. What we do is we sit in that next layer. Um, uh, we're, we're really an infrastructure provider. So, uh, we're, we're kind of the backend. So, so what we do is we enable small companies

Starting point is 02:44:47 to get to market quickly because we've built the entire global payments infrastructure. You can spend four weeks integrating to us by API or you can go out and spend three years building this. Okay, outside of the API thing, there's a lot of people hear that and they may know what an API is, but it's still like a little confusing how that goes.

Starting point is 02:45:03 Let's say I'm Robinhood and I'm Mason. So not Robinhood now, it's taken control, but I'm Robinhood and I'm trying to come to market. So whatever that was three years ago, four years ago. When I hire currency cloud, am I doing that so that someone in, because you just kind of use this example, I just want to make sure I got it right. Someone in Italy who wants to invest in tesla can do that immediately meaning at 6 p.m italy time italian time 12 p.m here when our markets open they can buy a stock on robin hood with it with a flip of their finger and now the money is started in that two-day settlement process that immediately gives them custody of the Tesla to say you bought it at 12 p.m. U.S. Standard, Eastern Standard Time.

Starting point is 02:45:51 Yeah, more or less. I mean, we obviously can't control when the markets are open. Sure, sure. But, yes, we fit in that stack. So the exact use case we probably couldn't do today, but more or less companies can use us to build that use case in. So, so we're doing that, um, for, there's a company called free trade, uh, in the UK, Winvesta, they are companies in the UK focus on getting their customers access to us equities. We have partners in the U S we have partners in the UK, obviously have many banking partners.

Starting point is 02:46:22 So we facilitate that entire transaction. Um, If you log into your app and you say, you can see the price of Tesla in euros because our APIs give the real-time FX rate. So it's a lot better than you calling a broker in New York and either wiring him funds from your bank account or mailing a check. You're also like an instantaneous translator, Ben. That's a big part of your value prop, because you show people in real time what things look like in their context. So you show someone in Europe what it looks like in the Euro context and immediately allow for the standard transfer. Yeah. Yeah. So it's all real time. Do you work with crypto? We don't. We had some crypto clients so this

Starting point is 02:47:07 is a hot button thing within the company um i'm glad you brought it up because i i love talking about crypto and yeah my friends know a lot about it my my friends uh definitely hear me talk a little too much about that um so we had some clients that were doing crypto um you know a good example is etoro um you might have heard of etoro they're a current client of currency cloud they do stuff with crypto we just don't touch it um but banks have become very nervous about touching crypto in the last few years and so we are so reliant on our banking partners right we're not um we don't provide our own foreign exchange liquidity. We have to trade through a tier zero bank. Oh, so you would have to. So you have to disclose to

Starting point is 02:47:50 them your clients because you're trading on their behalf. So it's a whole process. So we have a little bit of restriction there. So you would have to disclose to banks that, oh, by the way, what you're churning out in US dollars right now, let's use that example, is going to fund someone buying crypto. And now the banks say, oh, we to that that could make us liable and i know that language the banks need a source of funds and if the source of funds is proceeds of a crypto sale this is this is why banks are in deep because don't even wrong there's a lot of in in the crypto world we know that like yeah we know there's a lot of but the the crypto space and we'll talk about this but they are innovating to solve for problems that have i mean the best

Starting point is 02:48:33 example would be what happened in 2008 where it was banks at fault that did that and the thing about banks is they're so compliant tight especially in light of 2008 that they can't look at innovation like this right when i was at bank of america we weren't allowed to talk to our clients about crypto we couldn't say the word i never broke that rule just leave that there anyway um but we couldn't even say the word and so now i'm looking at you guys as a company going and trying to like sell a bank on hey by the way when you trade that out uh you're going to be trading out Tether, which is a bad example right now. But you'll be trading out whatever coin for US dollars. And I could just see every lawyer in a room in Manhattan and on Park Avenue going, yo, no, we're not doing that.

Starting point is 02:49:18 That's how's developing. Explain that. So for all these companies that are getting to market, whether it's a small business banking platform, a consumer finance app, consumer banking on your mobile phone, the only way to get to market in the US is to partner with a bank and ride on their FDIC charter. They're not handing out new FDIC charters. There's one, Vero Money got it. Maybe SoFi will get it. Who hands that out at government? The OCC, I think. Maybe there's probably a number of- Some committee. Right. So really what we're seeing in the fintech space is the smaller banks who need to take more risk to stay alive are letting these fintechs build on top of their compliance regime to take customers away from the bigger banks and they're taking a risk doing that. Yeah, a big risk. Now, if you're one of the big banks that does this is Evolve Bank.

Starting point is 02:50:50 They're in the Midwest. Have you ever heard of them? Nope. They're a commercial bank in the Midwest. They probably have more flexibility to do something like that because they don't have the billions of deposits on file. They don't have the hundreds of millions of customers that the Bank of America has. So they can kind of rip out their tech stack and put something new in place. So they have that lean advantage to take on these fintech clients in a more efficient way.

Starting point is 02:51:17 But crypto is still very much outside of that world. Yeah. And this is, this is kind of a can of worms because I'm trying to think what direction to even take this. Cause there's a whole lot of ways we can go, but just to keep things higher level and make sure everyone's on the same page here. We, I do it. Obviously you do it because you

Starting point is 02:51:46 work in it but we throw around this term fintech all the time and obviously stands for financial technology but that there are so many angles to finance in the legacy financial system before we even touch crypto right there are so many whether it be investments or cash transfers or exchanges or credit or systems of record keeping or back office operations or clear – I mean I could go on and on and on because I worked in that world and I actually know some of it at least. But people throw the fintech buzzword on it to almost like Silicon Valley segment of the tech industry to be able to say we're coming in to disrupt and fuck up the whole system, which I'm all for. But they're coming at it from so many different angles and everything is regulated. But you want to talk about regulatory or whatever loopholes that you got to try to jump through and the red tape everywhere there have got to be so many fintech startups that never had a prayer or are trying to operate right now that don't have a prayer because maybe they have a great idea and something that on paper looks

Starting point is 02:52:56 awesome but it's never going to get through government and we'll get to crypto but i'm saying like in general so we say at our company all of our taglines are in regard to payments and cross-border payments and FX. What we really are are regulation specialists that can talk to a customer that's been in business for about three months, educate them on how to get to market, and then we get them to market. It's so much more about knowing the regulation to win new business than it is about what services you provide, which I mean, that's, that's how we win. So we go down that road, that road. I don't think that's good for society. I don't think you want, um, companies thinking about regulation first. I think that you want them thinking about their customers first, but that's how that industry works. it really i mean i remember going to an

Starting point is 02:53:48 interview i won't say the bank but going to an interview at the bank at a bank when i was still in college in new york city to talk about a job post-college and they were taking me through the floors and you know it's a huge skyscraper on in manhattan and we get up to a floor and this is almost like out of a movie we're walking past i'm getting a little tour from a couple of the guys who work there and these big doors are open and i watch people like almost butlers but they're not simultaneously as they're pointing and in that room right there these two guys go to like close the door and as the door is closing i look in there they said that's the dodd frank room yeah dodd frank's the big legislative action the biggest one that came post financial only one room to deal with dodd frank oh first of all they

Starting point is 02:54:37 said there's three floors devoted to this in this building alone and secondly when i tell you they were closing this room i called it a conference room i think i hope i said that bro it was an auditorium where it just had i don't know the largest table i've ever seen in my life in the middle there must have been there must have been 250 people in that conference room and i was like wait oh they're all on dodd frank and they're like yeah and i'm like so so that everyone in there that's their job like that's what they focus on i said yeah that's the dodd frank compliance team and i was like holy shit because even then and i didn't appreciate this enough and i should have focused on this more to really ask myself questions i i missed i i recognized something and didn't realize wow that's a very good question to ask i was like so in that room alone to say nothing of the other two floors in this building and all the other

Starting point is 02:55:32 buildings that this huge bank owns that are meeting in groups about this all these people in pods big pods small pods are getting together to think of every possible threat and way that they could be fucked with the dodd-frank act with something that the bank does in business their sole job is to sit around and brainstorm based on things that they're doing in business what these ways are imagine the whiteboard or i should say terabyte hard drive produced every day of potential things that could possibly, through some little loophole in the law, go wrong for them and fuck them in court. And imagine how that affects what they let their employees be able to do. So I don't want to detract from where

Starting point is 02:56:16 we're going with this, but sometimes I like to take a step back. And the scenario you described, you're interviewing at one of the most profitable companies in America and can afford to have all those compliance officers who are not adding to revenue and then you compare that to another industry. It just tells you how much financial companies are able to make.

Starting point is 02:56:43 It's scary how much they're able to earn if you look at a restaurant who can't hire one more person or it cuts into their profit. So that's a side comment. Well, everyone relies on money. We said that a few minutes ago. It's the entire country.

Starting point is 02:56:56 Say nothing of the world. The whole country is on it, and they do business around the world. And there's a small number of them who hold the most power. So they touch every financial transaction. And even with FinTech rising up, that's still something that occurs. Even if they're not touching every single one anymore, still touching a lot of them. And so they may take, you know, $5 fee here and there, or a little 0.01% fee right there.

Starting point is 02:57:20 Every single time. It's the law of large numbers. That is a big fucking rake yeah and and they don't even care they don't even care how big the fee is because enough people will pay it they'll lose customers in the meantime but here's our price take it or leave it walk out the door yeah i don't care so i want to get specific though on fintech beyond just currency cloud and what you're doing because and i'm way over generalizing here but you guys are as you said the back end and you're you're kind of a conduit you're you are you are matching what

Starting point is 02:57:51 can be done with regulation and advising on how to in a to use the buzzword efficient way to utilize speed of technology to satisfy that regulation and also provide value to the customers okay that was enough corporate speak right there but outside of what you do because i know you look heavily at this space and i again i want to get to crypto but before then even what else are you seeing that are maybe like the one or two biggest trends in fintech right now and and what are those companies trying to solve for specifically outside of just companies that are trying to help be efficient around regulation so i don't know if this is the biggest trend but something i get

Starting point is 02:58:35 really excited about when i get to talk to companies doing something like this are alternative types of lenders that are popping up in the market. And I think it's so fascinating because it says as much about the new economy we live in as it does about banks' inability to change, ability to create innovative new business models that don't deal with regulated services. So they call themselves merchant cash advance companies or cash advance companies. And really why they exist is because Amazon sellers,

Starting point is 02:59:12 Shopify sellers, eBay, BigCommerce, anyone out there, even YouTube creators and podcasters have a stream of revenue coming in in the digital economy, but they don't have a brick and mortar storefront. They don't have employees. They don't have a cash register. And they can't go to a bank and say, I need a loan because the bank will say, okay, where's your business located? And they'll say, in my basement. They'll say, what do you do? I sell on Amazon. And they'll say, where's your income statement? And they go, well, here's my sales report from Amazon. I don't have an income statement. And the bank says, I'm sorry.

Starting point is 02:59:45 I don't know what to do with this. This is hitting home. Keep going. This is hitting home so hard. The banks say, I don't know what to do with this. So fine. A new breed of companies are popping up. And you can look them up, merchant cash advance companies.

Starting point is 02:59:59 And what they do is they take- Can you give an example? Clear Bank. Clear Bank with a C at the end, is in Canada. Payability is a big one in the US. There's a company called Sellers Funding, as in Amazon Sellers Funding. What can they do differently than a bank that doesn't apply? Because I'm going to give you an example that I experienced with this in a couple minutes.

Starting point is 03:00:18 But what do these places do differently than a bank that allows them to not only give these loans, but give it at what would be a similar or the same or maybe even better interest rate how way better yeah and and so why would anyone even do business with a bank that's another question but what are they allowed to do that a bank's not where I guess like certain regulations the banks are scared of why they don't give those loans in the first place don't apply to these companies so the reason they're called merchant cash advanced companies is because they don't technically lend the money what they do is they'll connect their algorithm that determines a company's value or credit worthiness to the data feeds from all these

Starting point is 03:01:01 different marketplaces at once simultaneously get all the sales reports from all these different marketplaces at once simultaneously, get all the sales reports from Amazon, their Shopify store. A lot of these merchants have three or four different storefronts that they sell their goods on. They can immediately determine their credit worthiness so you don't have to mail in a form and go meet with someone in an office. You apply online and you know within minutes if you're approved or rejected. And what they'll do is they will quote unquote, buy a percentage of your future credit card sales. So you're not subject to lending laws

Starting point is 03:01:31 because you're not issuing a loan with a duration and an interest rate. So they'll say you do 100,000 bucks a month. I'll give you $300,000 for 15% of your future credit card sales until you pay me back $310,000. And they know, based on their algorithm, when they're going to get paid back by. All right, two things. One, I have one, and there's plenty of examples for this. I have one that will hit home for me till the day I die because it ended up being the greatest failure of my career as a banker at least that's how i took it because i fought so hard for it but it wasn't from a lack of effort at all i did everything i

Starting point is 03:02:11 could do but prime example of what you're talking about i got wired into a couple clients who run a kick-ass company and it is all in the ether they run to really oversimplify what they do they run a digital ad sales company and they have i guess some proprietary ways of looking for spreads so again oversimplifying here but they look in real time in nanoseconds. They scan for ads that they can buy for a penny that they know on the back-end landing pages of content that they have. They can sell for two. Those are the new Flash Boys, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so these guys are geniuses, and they're really tactical about what they do.

Starting point is 03:03:00 But they worked in the industry each for about five, six years working at other places and bided their time, figured out what they wanted to attack. And then they opened up a company and bang, they were making seven figures right away. Low overhead. They leased office space, which now they never need again, right? And they had a few employees. That was it. That was their overhead and their business without going into specific numbers to you know take away confidences here their business went from

Starting point is 03:03:34 here to if you're listening and not watching let's just say double to triple inside of three years now they came to me because they wanted a loan and the way that they were paying for their business was they had an enormous credit card i think it was like american express or something and so i won't say what the number was but it was a nice fat number that they could pay because they did settle most their money settled mostly inside of 90 days so there's a 30 60 90 day in in the financial industry and so the way that banks would look at credit lines and i had previously done some credit lines very easily with some clients i'm like oh this is great let's fucking go i'm gonna help these guys out is that they'll look 10 of

Starting point is 03:04:23 revenue so if you do 100 million dollars in revenue, they'll say, okay, we'll give you a rolling credit line of $10 million, which means every time you tap into it, whatever the amount left is, that's the amount of credit you have left. And then once you pay it off, it's back up to $10 million. And then over time, as you prove that you pay, they'll increase it, right? So these guys, I looked at their revenues and I said, holy shit, we're going to get number X right here. Long story short, it ignited a battle. I'm not going to get into all the details, but it was a two-year process where the number that the bank would – the baseline that we would be allowed to ask the bank for started here. The bank came to me and said, we want to do business with these guys.

Starting point is 03:05:08 Go get them. let's do it and they already had a bank account open at the bank too but that they had a lot of money in i'm like oh great let's go started there and by the end of two years later not only were we not allowed to ask for one percent of revenues the bank said we won't do business and they wouldn't do business because it wasn't 19 fucking 95 and there wasn't a warehouse with a plow and a horse in there and a bunch of people sitting at a wooden desk that they could value the deaths on and instead this was a company that was up in the cloud and the bank couldn't even understand how guess what you they were doing profit margins of say it was a ridiculous number say 150 year one and it went down to like 85 by year three the banks didn't understand the

Starting point is 03:05:47 fact that when you're doing more volume and making significantly more money profit margins tend to come depending on the industry tend to come down on some things so here's here's what i love a bank's loan requires on profit margin and cash flow to be paid back. These merchant advance, cash advance companies are taking from the top line credit card sales. So they don't need to know your margin. All they need to know is your credit card sale number. And you're allowed to do that because you say, okay, to accept this loan,

Starting point is 03:06:20 you have to make us the beneficiary of Stripe or whoever's processing your sales, and then we'll forward on the rest. When we're done with this loan, you have to make us the beneficiary of Stripe or whoever's processing your sales, and then we'll forward on the rest. When we're done with this podcast, by the way, I'm getting them on the phone immediately. These are my guys. Love these guys. I'm getting them on the phone immediately, and we're connecting them with these companies. And I mean, so that shows you some of the flexibility that people have in fintech. Goes kind of against what I said earlier about everything being compliance but but that's not a regulated service that's what and that was it's a new it's a new development i'm sure in three years chuck schumer will have a

Starting point is 03:06:54 in in the southern district of new york or whoever makes these policies will have a new rule about it but um you know those finance guys yeah for now they can get around it yeah but you're talking about basically like nuovo credit lines here yeah and that lends the question moving towards crypto because everyone is at least not everyone but most people are aware of the name bitcoin at this point there's still a lot of people who don't understand it or even a lot of people who think they understand it but don't i try to say i know what i know and don't know what I don't, but I love it and I study it. And that's one, and it's one that's entity-less. It is on the internet and the ether was created by this pseudonymous Satoshi for everyone to share in. It's not a company you can go after.

Starting point is 03:07:42 We talked about there being a lot of shit coins out there and shit blockchain projects they're just trying to go off the trend and aren't thinking about what the market would actually adopt but there also has to be some sort of legitimate i think and some people would yell at me for this fuck them like let's just have the conversation there has to be some legitimate ecosystem below bitcoin that i think i could be wrong about this, becomes based off Bitcoin. And again, there's all kinds of nuanced opinions on this. I view Bitcoin as gold, right? And I heard a guy say this beautifully the other day as well.

Starting point is 03:08:18 He said, Bitcoin's like the sun. It's there and it provides you the energy you need. So what are we going to build on earth around it? That was beautiful. Jabari, shout earth around it? That was beautiful. Jabari, shout out, dude. That was awesome. So now I'm looking at some projects that I think are legitimate to do that. And the one, frankly, I'm not a believer in most of this shit out there.

Starting point is 03:08:39 And that's what I call it. I have to be proven otherwise. The one that I believe in heavily and have been studying like crazy over the last year, year and a half of my life is the Ethereum network, which people talk about DeFi, decentralized finance within that. And Ethereum, well, can you this, remind me the name of the guest was about three episodes ago. You had someone in. Oh, Cole. itself being the first cryptocurrency it's basically a ledger um and a decentralized ledger that can track money movement what ethereum is fundamentally is a decentralized computer that has a token that moves value so so think about the the the programming opportunities you have with a complete decentralized computer system. Because it's open source. You can build on it.

Starting point is 03:09:50 That's what you mean. So is Bitcoin, but Bitcoin's protocol just doesn't include the complete logic that a computer requires. Yeah, and it's one thing. It's one thing. Yeah. So you can program on Bitcoin. There's a company called Blockstacks that's like the Pied Piper project in Silicon Valley want to bet on the decentralized internet ticker stx um but but ethereum from what i hear just has uh more technical capabilities yeah and another i want to make sure i understood everything there too so that people get it but when you build these they call them decentralized apps and daps on

Starting point is 03:10:48 there they have all different uses it's not like just money and other stuff and there's some questions around are some of the use cases long-term important are they better whatever but we're talking about these lenders that's why i bring this up where they're going outside in fintech they're going outside the banking system and they're finding new ways to lend money to new era type businesses, which is a beautiful thing. Part of a enormous part, it's like built on it of Ethereum's blockchain system, ecosystem, excuse me, is that people stake and by stake it means that they are willing to let me peel it back for a second bank accounts right they used to actually earn an interest rate they still do but they earn nothing right so maybe 20 years ago you could put money in your savings account and on an annual basis if you put a hundred dollars in there maybe you made 3-4%, right? It's $103, $104. Now you make 0.0003% or whatever. You make no money. On Ethereum, you can make more by staking your Ethereum on there,

Starting point is 03:11:55 which let's call it money. I'm going to oversimplify it and call it money, right? You put that on there so that other people can come in and access that capital and they pay in a set interest rate depending on the DAP that then siphons through to you. And you essentially get paid on your money that's publicly visible. You have proof of the transaction. No bank can say it didn't happen. It is decentralized on the blockchain. That's what it means. So you are allowed to access this.

Starting point is 03:12:24 And what we are seeing, Cole talked about the number that it grew to i didn't even realize how big it got but it went maybe in like a year we'll go check the numbers but it went from like 1.5 billion dollars worth of ethereum eth staked on the ethereum blockchain to like 20 billion so you're building this ecosystem that now and my guy jabari was talking about this too he said anyone anywhere in the world with an internet connection who wants to go access it can go get credit on there like that they couldn't apply for and get at a bank yeah and it's open to them so my question that's the promise that well that's a promise so let's just say for sake of argument that promise is true might and there's arguments around it my question is is that gonna put companies that are just iterating on top of the legacy financial system like on u.s dollars who

Starting point is 03:13:10 are doing this out of business because now it's done in the open source ecosystem in a way that other people are now moving to a new currency because let's say the dollar goes away down the line um that's a loaded question short answer answer to a complicated question. Yes. Okay. A longer answer is I don't think we're within 50 years of that happening. You're talking about displacing the entire banking system. Some people are more bullish. I think I'm not saying it's not going to grow.

Starting point is 03:13:42 It's not going to continue to grow, but there needs to be a lot more in place. I mean, if you're a business importing goods from any country in the world, what's the odds that that other business is plugged into DeFi? You still need to make a payment. You still need to go to your bank. Oh, yeah. Yes. No, I understand what you're saying now. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:14:03 So you just view that adoption as taking a very long time. Yeah. So – Potential adoption. Do you read Matt Levine's newsletter? No. Writer for Bloomberg? I don't know who he is.

Starting point is 03:14:18 So he writes a daily newsletter called Money Stuff. And one of his, he has recurring themes. And one of his themes is cryptocurrency is rediscovering the legacy financial system one step at a time. So his ideas, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever project you're looking at, they are recreating step-by-step how we got our current financial system today. And he makes fun of a lot of people who are confused by that because, you know, you should have seen it coming, but basically, um,

Starting point is 03:14:51 is he saying is the implication that they're not improving? They're just building the same thing behind a different fail. I think, I think the implication is it can be improving because I think decentralization is better than centralization, but they're defy lending is more or less getting a loan from a bank prior to FDIC insurance and the Fed. So there are these projects that seem risky. But if you think about how you got a loan before kind of our modern system anyway, you're going to a bank that was

Starting point is 03:15:21 not connected to a Federal Reserve System. They did not have FDIC insurance. They had to pay you an interest rate commensurate to the risk you were taking that they were not going to a bank that was not connected to a federal reserve system. They did not have FDIC insurance. They had to pay you an interest rate commensurate to the risk you were taking that they were not going to fold. It was easier to get access to capital back in the day. That's part of it. Potentially. Yes. Okay. Maybe I wouldn't go that far,

Starting point is 03:15:39 but let, so let me go that far and I'll continue your example. So don't, I'll take credit for that and say let's just assume that. It might not be true, but keep going. Sure. And over time, people get burned by that system. People give money to unscrupulous bankers.

Starting point is 03:15:56 They gamble away the money. They do fractional reserve banking, lend out too much, runs on banks. So we built this system of protection over time, but that also compressed yields. So you can't earn interest on your money anymore. Up to regulation as bad things happened. Yes. And it's all about protecting consumers, all great things. But now with DeFi, we're rediscovering the fact that there's an actual value to your money. And if you lend it to someone who wants to borrow it without all this regulation, but with all the risks included that you could lose it entirely, you get paid a reasonable interest rate. So if you're looking to earn anywhere from 6% to 25% on your money, you can just go to DeFi and stake your money.

Starting point is 03:16:39 You just have to understand that there are those risks. So, hmm. One key change that the system, and we're talking hypothetically. I'm not saying there aren't flaws in the system. Of course, there definitely are, and I'm not going to analyze all of them right now. if you're doing that and staking on ethereum another key difference in the rebuild of the legacy system is that the legacy system was built on backdoor the bank knows the data you don't have access to that yes so so this is different 100 it's decentralized there's no banker who can take your money and and run away and it's public record skip town it's public record and all the products to date all the lending protocols are built on a collateralized model

Starting point is 03:17:33 where if you fall below 100 collateral on your loan you get liquidated and the investors get their money back so there's safety built in there I think that is restricting access to capital. But for better or for worse, it's an experiment. Sure. And who knows what will come up down the road. Yeah, there's a lot of open questions. I love that whole thing, and that's an enormous, enormous can of worms we could open up right now and go into. One thing I'll say, say because we got to get out of here in a few minutes we got to get back up to new york but one thing i do want to throw out

Starting point is 03:18:12 there for some last thoughts on this is we mentioned this at some point earlier but how health care and and money are two things that are so important everyone but few of us actually understand it regardless of whether or not this is building a new and better system that's designed in a parallel universe in a parallel way to the legacy financial system, one thing that I'm trying to pound the table with, and I'm a small voice, but a lot of smarter people than me who have a big platform are trying to pound the table with right now and they're doing god's work doing it is this concept of what the value of your money is like we're talking about collateral and all this stuff and access to capital and that's all a big problem i agree with you but the inherent problem is people aren't paying attention or don't understand that printing four trillion dollars out

Starting point is 03:19:00 of thin air to solve the coronavirus crisis has a lot of long-term complicated issues and it creates this supply of money and it's kind of like full circle because we were talking about the media and platforms and controlling and policing thought and affecting how we hear what we hear and form opinions for ourselves versus that whole like react to opinions and then think that things are truths that aren't bankers central bankers around the world not just in this country are doing that too and they're getting away with it because unlike you and i and many people at least having the conversation about what these platforms have been doing publicly these bankers do this stuff that we don't understand and we don't ask questions and in a lot of ways they and whether it be janet yellen coming in and saying she's going to try to legislate bitcoin yet fuck

Starting point is 03:19:49 you good luck with that you know or whatever you know the the regulators seek that they can't understand that they think is going to take away their power that's one thing but they continue with the ecosystem that does exist which let's just point to this country u.s dollars in this case it's it's not going away tomorrow like it's it exists right it's the center of what we go out to buy anything they are essentially manning a ship and driving a lot of people into the iceberg who don't know they're doing it so regardless of whether ethereum works or not or this fintech startup is going to disrupt this thing or not how do we educate to – without me just yelling to the rooftops, look at your money. It's not worth something.

Starting point is 03:20:31 How do we educate people to get them to think about this stuff to adopt so that we can have a better system, whether it be Ethereum, Bitcoin, or whatever it is? I've read a lot on this topic because you're right. We're facing massive inflation. But at the end of the day, the central bankers are doing what they have to do. We hold too much debt as a country. We have to inflate it away. There's no way we're ever going to repay the debt. They're put between a rock and a hard place.

Starting point is 03:20:59 So they're going to have to inflate massively. We saw it before in the 30s and in the 70s. FDR did it and Nixon did it when we went off the gold standard. And it's the only way to get out of this crazy debt that we're in that we put ourselves in. So the bigger problem is how do we not get into debt in the first place. And I think we are creating a system on Bitcoin specifically, that puts the power in the people's hands that we haven't seen since the 18 early 1900s when people owned gold. And the government's only way to create money was to tax and and i mean the like a lot a lot of implications come from the government being able to print money um but it's inevitable that they're gonna create debts that they can't

Starting point is 03:21:54 pay for and then have to inflate them away so i would say that the the the most important thing people need to do right now is understand that your money in your bank today will be worth less tomorrow. So either buy real estate, stocks, gold or Bitcoin or, I don't know, invest in Magic the Gathering trading cards. But do something with it. But that money is not going to be worth as much. That's just a fact of the system we live in. And so you get on one side of the aisle, Republicans are saying, stop spending money. We need to repay the debt. And then on the other side of the aisle, Democrats are saying, we can spend forever. The dollar is supreme.

Starting point is 03:22:42 They're both wrong. We're going to inflate the dollar to worthlessness to repay the debt. We're not going to stop spending. Every major crisis in the last, I mean, I could go way back 2000 years, whatever, but let's really just focus on like the last 100 years or so. A little more than that 150 years every major crisis around the world had some sort of catalyst that involved governments trying to save their ass to fix economic problems in the short term by fucking over the long term and then rendering people lost

Starting point is 03:23:22 where their money either became worth nothing or they lost it due to control issues and governments literally taking money to to try to solve debts and then causing wars out of it and people go look it up we're not trying to go into it right now but adolf fucking hitler came out of that the the the biggest real world impact that bitcoin can have if it becomes money which is the next standard money is i don't think we can have wars like we've seen in the 20th and 21st century with a government that needs taxation to fund them because because currently they're able to borrow indefinitely and print their money indefinitely and we have these long expansive wars that get us nowhere that the people don't like like when's the last time we fought a popular war

Starting point is 03:24:16 right like like the government gets away with it because they don't have to raise our taxes to pay for it they have other means of financing the war borrowing printing um so there's a lot of reasons libertarians like bitcoin um but i think that's that might be the biggest one return to a sound money standard brady briquette to be continued brother. This was a killer conversation. We were just getting to the fun stuff. Yeah, exactly. We could do a part two, but we got to get up to the city, as I said. So I got to cut it there.

Starting point is 03:24:55 I don't want to. Damn. Wow. Unbelievable. Thanks for having me on, man. Thank you for coming in. And we're going to do this again, obviously. Yeah. Awesome, awesome obviously yeah awesome awesome stuff no doubt everyone else we gotta get out of here so you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace

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