The Ben Mulroney Show - Was the Montreal shooter an incel? His manifesto suggests it could be.

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

GUEST:  Jillian Sunderland, PHD Candidate dept of Sociology, UofT GUEST:  Carmi  Levy/Tech Journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast is brought to you by the National Payroll Institute, the leader for the payroll profession in Canada, setting the standard of professional excellence, delivering critical expertise, and providing resources that over 45,000 payroll professionals rely on. Welcome to the show, and thank you so much for joining us. I hope everybody had a good day and a good evening at home. We are continuing our coverage on a number of stories.

I am locked. out of my computer. Hold on a sec. Intrepid, how are you, sir? I, too, am locked out of my computer. There must be something going on. This is fantastic. This is a great little day. That sort of thing happens, though, right? It does. It does. Gremlin's in the machine.

Yeah. Well, anyway, we were talking yesterday about, obviously, the biggest story in the country was this horrible situation in Montreal with the shooter. Yes, indeed. And we've learned so much more about it. A lot of the details are troubling. A lot of details still to fill in. Yeah. Well, the one thing that we were looking for yesterday was the motivation of the shooter. Yes. But the first thing first is yesterday when we were on air, this was still happening.

It was still unfolding. And we were speaking with Paula Samuel, a former colleague of mine, a former journalist, but now with B'nai Brith, who was across the street in complete lockdown. and she was with us. We were with her the moment the city took them out of lockdown. Yeah, it's, what's it saying? It's saying the alert regarding an armed and dangerous suspect at the Kootenesh neighborhood of Montreal has ended. There we go.

It's just ended. Yeah. Oh, thank goodness. The immediate threat to the public is no longer present. That was the end of the threat, but certainly not the end of the story, because we knew not about what motivated this person. We don't know who the targets were. We don't know. We didn't know much yesterday at all. And today we know the name of the shooter. We know that he was from Alberta. We know that he had published a 104 or 105 page manifesto. And look, for example,

in the globe, authorities are warning police services about a possible anti-police manifesto, encouraging violence against him. In 105 rambling and sometimes, contradictory pages. This guy has a lot of grievances. And so there are elements that certain people, depending on how they want to read it, are going to highlight. It's almost like a Rorschach test of what do you see when you see that?

Yesterday, I put out there that this was a Jewish neighborhood. People wrongly assumed that I was describing motivation. I was pointing it out. And if you can't appreciate nuance, go back to school, buddy. But I pointed that out, if only for the empathy in me, for those who live, who've lived under constant threat and to hear 29 shots ring out in your neighborhood. One thing that it appears we can agree on, despite all of these grievances about the financial situation and the financial system and who is to blame, is that it appears this person was an in-sell, an involuntary situation. celibate. And we are going to dig into what that actually means moving forward in a little bit. But again, to give you the details, at about 1135, there was a 911 call reporting a gun sticking out of a window at the Hilton Hotel.

In 58 seconds, about 29 shots rang out. And the videos that we have all seen that were shared on social media, again, in real time, made this an experience. through my phone, and I'm sure your phones, that felt one of a kind, or hopefully the first and only of its kind. We see two officers at the start. Gunfire erupts. One officer collapses. Lies almost completely still.

Someone near the camera shouts, he's hit. He's hit. Second officer retreats. Shooter moves into the spot that the officer just left, firing in their direction. He ends up standing right beside the downed officer as shots continue.

Then the gunman, crouches, appearing to adjust and manipulate his weapon. At that point, he lowers himself to the ground for sitting and then lying down. We are in mourning. The country should be mourning. The passing of the Montreal police officer who was felled by this killer. Mohammed Lamin bin Redouan. He had been on the force since 2021.

The civilian killed was a Michael Mosheh, described as kind and generous, and someone who always had a smile and a kind word. The Bureau of Des Enquette Independent, the BEI, which is the police watchdog, took over the investigation because a civilian died during the intervention. Now, back to the motivation, the Quebec Public Security Minister stated the attack was not terrorism-related. And we'll dig into what that definition actually means. Droulet and I were going back and forth about maybe the definition is, too narrow because it's not just about inspiring terror.

It has to be motivated by a particular set of perceived grievances. The shooter has been identified as Seth Hadfield, 25 years old from Lethbridge, Alberta. There was a long gun used, no make or model yet, although some sleuths online are trying to use GROC and AI to identify it. And that's a big deal as well. Because obviously the gun lobby in this. country is it's a huge deal and we'll be very curious to see if this was a legal gun or not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's very, it'll be very important to the conversation moving forward because there is a almost a paint by numbers approach in this country following gun violence about what we

can do to make sure it doesn't happen again. Sadly, it keeps happening, which makes me wonder, have we been doing the right things? I think you know where I land on that, but today is not the day to talk about that. Let's talk about the police officer who died because if you feel like you're hearing a lot more of that recently, you're not mistaken. There were no on-duty police deaths across this country in 2024 or 2025. Now, that's an anomaly in 64 years of data. In 2023, eight officers died on duty, six of them as the result of intentional violence. Now, speaking just from the stories we've talked about, there have been three that have passed away

and have died in the past week and in a week and half? Yeah. Week and a half. It's been, especially here in Toronto, it has been a really tough go for place. Yeah. So there is a lot to dig into, you know, this manifesto is an odd thing. I will say this.

And this, my observations about what I witnessed on social media yesterday. Like I said, I told you what I put out there, I got insanely unhinged. pushback. And the videos were graphic to graphic to... And I was apparently to blame for reposting the graphic videos. By the way, you can't access

it unless you agreed to access it. There is an unhinged mentality on social media where anybody who does anything, anybody who tries to push the story forward in whatever way they think is right, If you're not doing it exactly the way the person who's receiving the information wants, then you are somehow at fault and you are somehow a net negative in the story.

However, if we pushed out any video that showed some of the horror horrific blood trails in this, we apologize because that is not something that we would share. Well, I did personally, but again, you can't access it. It's on a, it's blocked. You can't access it unless you press. they'd say you want to see it. And it wasn't my video. I was reposting something.

I'll do that. It was information that was out there. And it was, it happened in our cities. It's happening too often. I'm not going to link it all together. But this was something that happened here. And I'm told constantly, this doesn't happen in Canada. Michael Moore came up here and did documentary about how we don't lock our doors.

We lock our doors after this. And, you know, I've told far too many stories about far too many. stories about far too many people who have been the subject of violent crimes in this country that I don't want this to be normalized. And I also, in some weird attempt to normalize it, we want to fetishize it and keep it behind a gated garden. This stuff happens here. And it happened yesterday. And three people are dead, all due to the violence of one man. And that is Seth Hadfield. He bears the responsibility of it and all of it,

the death of the police officer, as well as the death of the civilian. At least that's how I see it. So when we come back, we are going to drill down into what I believe, as I said, is the one thing that everybody seems to agree on that this guy was an in-cell. So what does that mean?

Where did the term come from? And what are the impacts on society? And how do we, How do we find these people and de-radicalize them so we don't have another Seth Hadfield? That's coming up next on the Ben Mulroney show. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if?

Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what-if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. Welcome back.

And as we continue to pour over this tragedy that befell a community in Montreal, we are learning more and more about the hateful vile killer and shooter, who is what we all seem to be able to agree on is that based on his rambling 105-page manifesto, he is and would be considered part of the involuntary celibate community, the in-cell community. It's an expression we hear a lot. and I'm sure most of us don't know enough about it and we should know more given the fact that we were just facing the violence of one of them yesterday.

So please welcome to the conversation. Jillian Sunderland, she's a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. And Jillian, your expertise is hate, in-cell ideology and ideology-motivated gender violence. So very happy to have you on today. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, thank you for having me in. Unfortunately, it's kind of sad circumstances that bring me here.

Absolutely. But the more we understand, hopefully the more we can protect ourselves against this sort of thing in the future. So, yeah, I think a lot of us know the word, but not necessarily the meaning behind the word. So how would you, how would you educate us on that front? So it's really an ideological space or movement, primarily online communities, where a lot of young men transform personal disappointment. into kind of political grievance against women, feminism, and social change. And a lot of these communities where they find are encouraging of violence against people and broader members of the community. There are people out there on all sorts of platforms calling this guy either a right-wing

in-cell or a left-wing in-cell. But does in-cell violence or a violent in-cell perspective, it's not inherently political, is it? That tie into political, but it's not necessarily a political movement where you say, oh, they're voting for this party. It's primarily like online communities that become radicalized. So it's ideological in a sense, but doesn't necessarily map on to traditional political divides that we see.

How widespread is the in-cell movement? I have to assume it's an, is it exclusively an online movement until one is it? of these guys get so radicalized, he's got to, he's got to do something publicly and before the cameras, because when I first heard in-cell, if you were a self-described in-cell, this before I knew anything about the violence that could be perpetrated, but if I were to consider myself an in-cell, that's not something I would want to telegraph. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so it's primarily, it emerged in kind of online community. and online spaces, the word was actually coined by a young woman who actually wasn't associated with any type of violence, but it got taken up by a lot of young men who form these communities. And since we're seeing, when I first started researching this, this was a very niche online phenomenon. You would have to go in and search for things. But now we see these kind of in-cell terms or discourses have really proliferated into

mainstream social media platforms. So people no longer have to go out searching for it. Some of these memes and some of these kind of jokes and things that kind of get people interested in the worldview start off very innocuously in like, you know, TikTok and Instagram. So it's become very diffuse. It feels to me like this is the perfect sort of breeding ground that could lead to radicalization is in sort of an online echo chamber because if you put a lot of disgruntled men

together or a group of disgruntled people together, at some point somebody is going to come up with a unifying theory to explain why it's not that group's fault. Yeah, and these spaces function as a form of community. So people get validated. They go with their pain, maybe dating, maybe economic anxiety and they can't get dates. And they come with their pain and then they get validated by all these other men experiencing similar things. And it comes a very easy worldview. It's not your fault.

It's other people to blame. And we see in the manifesto, this person wasn't even just lamenting his anger towards women, but plastic surgeons, the porn industry, various businesses. So the violence got externalized into other community aspects. I'm speaking with Jillian Sunderland. She is a PhD candidate in sociology, and she is a specialist in hate, Incel and ideology, motivated gender violence. I wonder, is it too early, because we don't know enough about this guy,

but what I have heard is Incel is one step removed from the Manosphere. Is it too early to make those leaps? And if you could, maybe give our audience a definition of the Manosphere. Okay. Yeah. I think it's a little early to say exactly how this person got radicalized, but Incel is also a part of the broader mannosphere community, which is kind of this collection of kind of online social networks, podcasts, videos, you know, on Twitch that kind of coach men on how to be a man and kind of instill ideas about masculinity in terms of dating, economic success. So there are various kind of umbrellas in the broader manosphere.

And some are fairly innocuous, like how to, you know, get shredded abs or, you know, improve your looks. But others can transition into very harmful, this real gender essentialist attitudes that say men are like this and women are like this. Talk to me about how this tragedy that we witnessed yesterday and that we will be dealing with for a very long time to come fits into any possible broader pattern of in-cell-related violence in this country? Well, it fits into a lot of them.

So, of course, it wasn't labeled in cell at the start, but kind of a widespread gender violence was in 1989, a Cole Polytechnist who was celebrating violence against women and women were incurring on his space in. Yeah. Yeah. We also have the 2018 Toronto Van Attack perpetrated by Alec Menazian that came. killed numerous people, the attack on the Crown Spa in 2020. And that was our first case where the court adjudicated it as a crime of terrorism.

So that was the first time in Canadian court history that it got labeled terrorist in response to in-cell labeled violence. Gillian, we only have a few minutes left. And I'd love for us to end on a positive note. How can we de-radicalize at-risk individuals before they act? And is it, I don't know, unless we find them, sort of finding them before they do anything, is there any way to, if anyone sees this behavior in someone they know or sees sort of in-cell, or, you know, I don't know, a red flag goes up, let's leave it that.

If a red flag goes up in one of our listeners' minds, how can they act before something bad happens? I think sometimes people's ideas is to kind of, you know, kind of scapegoat these people. and try to, you know, put up, like, I'm not going to talk to this person anymore. But a lot of times meaningful social connections and a sense of kind of identity and belonging outside these online communities because people are going there because they feel rejected. So in Olive Branch into kind of, you know, bringing these people back into kind of broader social connections, maybe pairing them up with resources or places to go. because I think social isolation is one of the biggest contributors of radicalization, because then people find a community that just validates a distorted worldview.

So really try to bring them back into everyday life where, you know, people are mostly decent and having positive social interactions, pairing them, you know, with a community center as well would also help. Yeah. Jillian Sunderland, thank you very much. A really great primer for us to sort of a foundation, if you will, for us to sort of, a foundation, if you will, for us to sort of, to build our knowledge as we learn more about this terrible tragedy and the person responsible for it. I really appreciate your time today. Okay, thank you so much. You know, we just talked about how these online communities can lead people to some pretty

dark places. And when we come back, we're going to be speaking with Carmi Levy because a brand from our childhood. When I say, I'm talking about like my age group, is trying to come back and reinvent a tool in the best possible way so that we don't get caught in all sorts of traps online. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulrini show. Staples Preferred Business Membership, built for busy business owners,

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Welcome back. And before we jump into the top tech stories of the day with Carmi Levy, who joins us now, Carmie, welcome. Good to be with you, Ben. You had a great idea, and so I want to jump on it. The question is, what could the big social media companies do

to do their part? in ensuring that the content that is usually associated with the festering of in-cell frustration that could turn into in-cell violence gets mitigated. Yeah. I mean, how many of us wish that we could go back in time and perhaps have looked at this guy's digital footprint and say, hey, could we have identified something? Could there have been a trigger, a flag that this guy should have been investigated? And I think, you know, we're leaving enough digital tracks now.

And we know that the platforms are scanning for all sorts of things. The algorithm tracks all of our activities to serve up ads. Why can't it be used to identify potentially violent cops? Yeah. Why can't it be used as a flag to a human monitoring team? And, you know, certainly this echoes the story that we heard following Tumblr Ridge. Yeah. That AI did, in fact, trigger on this guy's commentary, his conversations with the bot.

So, I mean, I think that's the thing. The technology exists if we want to use it. It opens up a Pandora's box around privacy. A lot of people get creeped out. They're concerned is meta or is X or is law enforcement. Are they standing over my shoulder? Does it violate my personal rights? Does this mean we're in a mass surveillance state?

But, again, finding that balance, right? We have to ask ourselves, where are the possibilities? How does the technology work? and how can we perhaps go further than we have in terms of surveillance without crossing that line where we become George Orwell's 1984? Well, let's also remember, Karmie, that to a large extent, a great many people have volunteered over their privacy in the name of convenience. There's, if you use, if you use a mapping app, if you use Uber, if you, if you let people

know where you're checking in and on, on, on platforms that are. free. Good luck explaining that you had an expectation of privacy. You are you're putting your pictures out there of every meal you've ever eaten. And so a big chunk of it's already, we've already conceded that. But I agree with you. Look, one way or another, this will come to a head if in fact there is, there's evidence that this guy was consuming some toxic behavior, some toxic manosphere behavior. I don't know. But it Because if that information exists and it comes out, then the reckoning will happen. So it's either the social media companies get ahead of it or they behave in reaction to it.

Yeah. And you're right. We are buying interest every single time we install an app. We grant explicit permission for this kind of surveillance to occur. And up until now, it's been used largely for marketing purposes, right? Well, you and I talked last week about Pokemon Go and how for years this company was, who was mapping the world. People were allowing their digital,

their phones to map the world. And I guarantee you, you could overlay that individual's movement throughout using that game. They were being tracked everywhere they went. And then that information got in turn sold to another company that now makes drones.

So we're all part of the machine. Exactly. And I think it's reasonable to ask if we can change the use case of that data. In other words, we're already collecting that information. Why not use it for good? Instead of using it to create a drone robot army for the use of the military, why can't we put these tools in a controlled manner in the hands of law enforcement so that they can identify these individuals before they decide to pick up a gun and start running through a neighborhood?

Hey, last question on this. It came to my attention. You lived in Code Denez for a few years. Yeah, so, yeah. Go ahead. So that was our neighborhood. we got married. My wife and I had an apartment there within walking distance of that corner. It's a neighborhood that's familiar to us. Of course, we're members of the Jewish community. All the Jewish institutions are all within walking distance of there. We stayed at that very Hilton Odell a number of times when we go back home to visit. So this hits incredibly close to home.

And quite frankly, the connection to him, sort of reading through snippets of that manifesto really does make you wonder just about how vulnerable this and other communities are to this kind of thing. And listen, I want to be. as open-minded as possible. He had a lot of hate to go around. He had a lot of hate to go around. He didn't limit it to any one group. And I think that's what's jarring about this.

Is reading through it, that should have been just a massive red flag. And that should have triggered something. And in the ideal world, and again, I'm that, I'm that optimist who believes technology can be used for good. I'd like to think that that, you know, could perhaps at some point in future prevent an event like this from happening by identity. ifying it to those who can do something about it. Well, let's stay on that. This guy was, you know, a lot of an involuntary celibate. And which I don't know, I don't know what led him to the, you know, I don't know what leads

people to find those communities. But there is a sense of loneliness and longing that not just he, but everyone feels. And this next story, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to create a segue, but it's all part of this struggle for connection. Singles are wary that artificial intelligence in dating says 47% of it view it negatively. Now, I read a story a few weeks ago, Karmie, that Whitney Wolf, the founder of Bumble,

said the future of dating online will be, if I have a profile, my profile will have an AI avatar, and it will be me living in the app, and my AI avatar will go out on a date in the app with somebody else's AI avatar. And if they have a connection, these avatar to avatar connection, I will then get an alert to say, hey, you should go out with the real version of that person.

That's crazy. Oh, that's a world I don't want to live in, Dan. And I think the data that, you know, so match, of course, they own Tinder, Hinge, and OKCupid, and they surveyed their own users to kind of understand what are their opinions on the use of AI. And I think that that kind of matches with what you and I are thinking is that I think we expect that AI will be part of the experience. So, for example, if you download the app and you're using it, maybe it'll help you punch up your profile. Maybe it'll help you come up with some more flowing, interactive conversational tips, basically make you better at the dating game. And I think as a tool to enhance the humanity of the process, I think that's fine.

I think as a replacement for it, and the data shows that most of their followers have a problem with using AI as a companion. In other words, I don't want to ever see relationships where AI bots replace them. humans and that's what this data suggests but it's okay for it to be used in a way that doesn't replace the humanity so it's a very fine line and it's not just that a i is black or white it's just a i is very gray and we have to pick very carefully how we choose to use it without losing ourselves in the process well what about renters you know if if if i i is presenting potential daters as as uh as a mirage and not exactly what they were sold as and so too the same thing is happening with that with people of who looking for that dream apartment

Yeah, so this news comes out of New York. The Verge did a bit of a deep dive on it. There's a process called virtual staging. So you're looking for a place to live, you know, looking for an apartment or whatever, and you go online, and you see the images. And it looks like a really great place. And then you show up at it, and it is nothing like what those photos appeared to be. So it's a lot smaller. It looks a lot radier.

It was clearly staged. And virtual staging has been around for a while. But, you know, if you wanted to doctor the images, you had to be good at Photoshop. You kind of had to pay someone a lot of money to do that. Whereas now, thanks to AI, you can essentially create something that doesn't exist. And that is apparently rampant, not just in New York, but in other cities. It's coming here to Canada as well. Realtors are reporting that it's happening here.

And there are even apps, for example, Stucco and Box Brownie that allow realtors to essentially do it on their own on the cheap. Yeah. So, you know, create your own. your own listing that has nothing to do with reality, trick people into thinking that it's worth coming out to see. All right. Well, when we come back, there's always this drive to get the newest, best phone with the most features. But could a brand from the past be sitting on an incredible idea?

And that idea is more could lead to less. More apps could lead to a better life. We'll talk about that next with Carmi Levy. Don't go anywhere. This is the Ben Mulroney Show. from coast to coast to coast on the chorus. Radio Network. Welcome back and thank you very much to Carmi Levy for sticking around.

I appreciate it, Carmi. Good to be with you. The more radio with Ben, the better. There has been this push by certain entrepreneurs. You know, great entrepreneurs say they see a situation and they see a problem and they create a product that is designed to fix that problem. That's those to me, most of the successful entrepreneurs out there. There is a problem with addiction to social media and the knock on negative effects of them. And there's an addiction to our smartphones.

And so people have been trying to square that circle and solve that problem for a very long time. There was the light phone. I purchased the very first one, which was like it was tethered to your real phone and you could take it out and had like 10 phone numbers in it and that was it. And now they've got a third iteration of it that does a bunch of other stuff as well. There was something called the punked. and then there was the unplug tag where you could block your whatever you, whatever apps you want on your phone. And the only way to turn it to unblock them was to have this tag handy, like this NFC tag. So everyone's trying to do it.

And I don't know that anyone solve that problem yet. But enter the, enter Commodore, as in the Commodore 64, the VIC-20. And they think they have a solution to the problem. think they get pretty close to the target on this one. Yeah, I think they do, because I think they address. So the device is called the Commodore Callback 8020, and it looks like a flip phone of yours. So you open it up. It's got a regular sort of T9 kind of keyboard, and it's got a screen on it, color screen,

that sort of does the internet, but at an operating system level, it does not allow web browsing or the use of social media. It has its own app store, known as the Como store. and you can also side load any Android app from the Google Play Store that you wish. So, like, 99% of that app store is accessible to this device as well. So it addresses one of the reasons why more people don't get those feature phones like the light phone or the minimal phone or even Nokia has a bunch of phones as well that you can buy that kind of remind you of the old Nokia's that we all used to own.

And the reason being is we still want to be connected in some way. It has to bridge the gap a little bit better than a phone that has no apps at all. And so this one kind of does. It gives you that experience, but no doom scrolling, no, you know, limitless notifications, no unfettered access to the web. It's a controlled experience. So if you still need to be connected, but really don't want the mental health impacts of constantly being nagged by your smartphone, this could be that sort of happy medium,

perfectly balanced alternative that, you know, kind of scratches that itch, in ways that other solutions have not. I'm really jazzed by this, not just because it has a Commodore logo, but because it seems to be the best compromise I've seen so far. And let's remind people that the Commodore, a Commodore, for those of you who, you know, are younger than me, the Commodore was one of the early computer companies and gaming companies. And I guess they must have gone under because a YouTuber acquired the trademarks.

And this guy, Christian Simpson, is in charge of this resurgence of the brand. Yeah, it's a company with what I like to call Nine Lives, so it's certainly not the Commodore of Yore, but it's been bought and sold. Lord knows how many times, but he's really committed to it. And these are working products.

They have released other products as well. They've developed their own operating system. It's known as Sailfish OS. They are working with the development community. So this seems to be, this isn't vaporware. This seems to be an actual going concern. And for anyone who kind of remembers, again, I'm dating myself too because I've used Commodores back in the day.

You know, this is, you know, I think of all the devices, this is the one that I think, you know, I think we're all going to be looking at it, waiting for it to ship. It's supposed to be shipping later this year. Yep. And I'll certainly keep my eye open for it because, you know, it's almost like closing a loop. Commodore started the computing revolution. Now it might very well solve the problem of the smartphone revolution. Yeah, yeah, because like I said, I had the light phone, but the problem with that was you could call people.

But how often do you actually, like you use your phone, your smartphone, I communicate with people in ways that, I mean, texting is by far the more effective way to talk with me. I mean, the phone just rang while we were on the air. I don't know who's calling me, who knows me. If you know me, you know I'm on the air. And so, yeah, so this thing allows for texting. It allows for it allows for WhatsApp. I'm sure there are other messaging apps it allows for. And then it also allows, there's a, the video,

the launch video allows for some sort of video chatting as well. So that's, that's part of it. And even though it looks like a smartphone, I don't know, you said the specs are, compared to an old flip phone. I'm sure the specs are through the roof. Oh yeah. This is, you know, this is not a 25 year old Nokia, right?

This is still a full on. It's got the same guts as a smartphone inside. It's a processor going to handle. multi-media applications, high bandwidth, it's 5G capable. So it'll run on modern networks. It'll do everything that a modern phone does. It just looks like a retro phone. So best of both worlds, which I think is kind of cool.

I think it's really, really smart. If I had to guess, it would be a, like you would be able to do all your text with voice to text, which is, yeah. Because you're not T-9ing that thing. Oh, no. I have nightmares about T-9. So no, you would dictate. You would dictate them as you would.

And most people dictate their text to their phones these days anyway. I first see them walking down the street, holding the phone in front of them talking to it. No one's using their thumbs or at least not to the degree that they used to, all thanks to AI. But you know, I was looking at that unplug tag as I was doing some research for this. I was like, who else has been trying to solve this problem? And, you know, the idea that you'd have your smartphone and you'd have a series of apps, you would click on the ones that would get locked. So if you're going out for the night, you would make. make sure that you locked everything but Uber and your wallet and your texting apps and,

you know, all the things that you need, the camera, turn everything else off so that, and then you only turn it back on when you get home and you use that NFC tag to turn off. That's not a bad idea either. Yeah, my son actually has it and he deliberately leaves it at home for example that reason. So he limits himself significantly, he goes, I'm not going to go home in the middle of the day. There's no way. And he's finding it significantly helping his ability to not to sort of be in the moment and not be constantly interrupted by his phone. He says it was a worthwhile investment.

He would do it again if you had to. No, absolutely. And I love this idea that because we have to, there's, I don't believe that we are going to be able to do this on our own. It's a digital detox. It's, we know the advantages of it. We know the advantages of human connection. I have those conversations every week with Pipponbache from Genwell. and without the tools like these,

whether this is the one or not, then there are going to be people in government who say, well, we're going to be the ones to help you. And that's just making matters worse. Yeah, no, exactly. I think the government's track record on technology speaks for itself. I mean, we all remember Phoenix Pay and, you know, COVID alerts and arrive can. These were all apps and platforms that clearly failed in their initial mission.

and to this day they're kind of examples of why the government shouldn't be involved in tech at all so no please government stay out of that we will figure it out ourselves what was the last one of all the phones you've ever owned what's a favorite for your favorite phone mine was the StarTack mine I think mine was my first

was a blackberry bold it was the first blackberry that I really used to like that I could actually leave the house leave every other piece of technology behind and still stay connected still get work done and I used to write articles on that thing in the middle of nowhere. And it was so, like, didn't matter. I could drop it down a stairwell. And it would be waiting for me at the bottom. I would pick it up and just continue to work. It was.

Was that the one with the scroll wheel on the side? No, this one had, this one had, it was like a, almost like a touch pad in the front. It was one of the later boulds, but it was, I was really sad when I kind of had to move on from Blackberries like everyone else. But I still pine for that. And I still wish that smartphones were kind of like that. Small, robust, just did the job. And when you drop them, you didn't have to hold your breath and worry that you were going to lose a weak salary. Yeah, but you know, when we say it just did the job, you could argue that it didn't just do the job. It did everything that it was, that technology was capable of at the time.

Yeah. Which means it was the, it was the smartphone of its day. It really was. And in fact, I think, you know, Apple, Google, they all really, owe a debt of gratitude to Blackberry for taking smartphones, which up until then really hadn't figured out what they were going to be when they grew up.

Smartphones have existed since the early 90s. Since the very earliest time of cell phones, companies were trying to create smartphone designs, but they just didn't stick. And BlackBerry was the first one that truly succeeded globally and sort of created a template for everyone else to follow. And yeah, I mean, I remember at the time

thinking this stuff is magical. The first time I think anyone saw a Blackberry working was this is really cool. The world has changed. I can't really say that about smartphones today. We haven't had one of those world changing moments in a while. And I kind of missed that. I wish we did. Well, listen, one of these days, I want to have a

personal history through your life and my life comparing cell phones. Did you have the handspring trail? Because I did. I think of the drawer. Yeah, I have a drawer in my office. Oh my God, the handsping trio was amazing. It's outdoor season and my patio set up, that'll be ready to play.

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