TrueLife - Distraction, Consumption, & Contemplation

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry born from the blaze. The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Kodak Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. You want to go to. Oh, here we go. Ladies and gentlemen,

welcome back to True Life podcast. I hope everybody's living the dream out there. I am sitting here with the one and only Benjamin C. George, aka Mr. Wizard. We've been kind of going over some ideas about what's happened in the news and some of these weird cryptos and some of these things to do with Reddit. But let me toss it over to you, Ben. How are you doing today? Another day in paradise, George. It's finally got some warm weather in Colorado, so I'm not so grumpy anymore.

Nice, man. Nice. Yeah, it's interesting, Colorado. You guys seem to me to be the mecca for. the psychedelic experiment over there, right? Like you, where are you guys on legalization over there? So I'm pretty sure it's later on this year. I want to say it's June to September-ish,

where they're actually opening it up for you can open facilities, right? And have kind of like psychedelic treatment centers, things like that. I think that's opening up later this year. Technically speaking, I believe, that, you know, psilocybin right now is legal. So if you were to get, you know, pulled over, for instance, and you had a bag of mushroom sitting on your, as long as you weren't high as a kite,

sitting on your passenger seat, they would, you know, there's nothing that they could really charge you with right now. Ah. Yeah. Right. Now, that's probably not a good thing to do in general, but that's kind of the state of things anyway.

Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see what kind of rolls out because, you know, all, there's a lot of people who are opening centers all over the place. I think Boulder is probably going to be a little bit of a hot spot for it because, you know, it's Boulder. But, yeah, I think later this year we'll probably see at least a few dozen of these different types of centers, treatments. You know, people are approaching it from a variety of ways. You've got people approaching it from a church perspective. You got people approaching it from a pharmacological perspective.

You got the psychiatry industry who's very interested in treatments and, you know, PTSDs and things like that. So, yeah, I think it'll be, it'll be a slow start, but then it'll be one of those things as the snowball rolls down the mountain. It'll probably make waves once it splashes down. Yeah, and it'll leave some pockmark because it comes down that hill. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Here in Hawaii, we have a few dispensaries, but it's, It's not really as transparent as it is like in California or Oregon.

And I think in some ways we're going to get to see, you know, mushrooms or psilocybin go through with sort of birth pains that cannabis did. And there might be some regulations or maybe seeing some things different there. But I'm really excited to see what happens. And I'm hopeful that it's somewhat democratized and it's rolled out in a way that's fair for everybody to partake in it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised to see along the way some sort of McDonald's of magic mushroom where you can go through a little drive-through and get like a real happy meal or something.

I know it's kind of tragic, but, you know, you could see it happen when it comes to money, man. Well, yeah, I think when it comes to money, it's going to happen, right? Just like how cannabis rolled out. First, you know, it was the medical side of things where it also allowed you, just like the psilocybin stuff, you can grow it at home if you want to. But, you know, the vast majority of people at the time and effort for that, they just wanted to go to the store and pick it up. And then all of a sudden it went from just a couple, you know, maybe a dozen stores per town to well over hundreds in some of the bigger towns. I mean, when I drive around Colorado Springs here, I would say there's probably 70% of streets, main roads that you turn down.

you'll see at least a CBD outfit, if not a medical dispensary. And Colorado Springs doesn't even have recreationally legalized. When you go up to a place like Denver, they're a dime a dozen. You know, you don't have to walk more in a mile to find one in any direction. Yeah, I wonder, you know, I bet you if we could look this up and I should probably have my handy-dandy computer ready. But I'm willing to bet the amount of money the state makes on tax, taxing that kind of stuff. It's going to be considerable. Oh, yeah. It's in the hundreds of millions.

Wow. Yeah. I think it was 400 and some million last year, if I remember correctly. Wow. And that's just on cannabis alone. Like all that's different forms, whether it's a space cookie or a dab or a doodad or whatever, man. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what would be interesting to compare and contrast how much money the state's making on taxes versus what? what happens to wellness. Because I'm sure there's an effect with cannabis and wellness. Does that cut back on some of the, you know, mental illnesses or does it cut back on health care?

Or I wonder how that cannabis is tied to health care in a way. That's interesting to think about, right? If you had to guess on that, what would you think? Well, I could have swore I've read a couple of papers about it. But they're hard stats to really come up with. Because what you're doing is you're taking like, hey, you know, in 2020, we had X amount of patients for this. And then in, you know, in 2021, we had a few less. But the correlation doesn't necessarily equal to causation.

You know, I've read a few papers where driving accidents have decreased in states that have legalized candidates. Yeah. I think that would be very hard data to get a really good grasp on because there's so much vested interest. Yeah. You know, I don't think there's a lot of people who would really like to see the true numbers behind that, at least people who are, you know, in positions of power or running companies or things like that.

Because, you know, you're robbing Peter to pay Paul at some level in that equation. You know, I'm just, I just had this thought in my mind. Like, as I'm thinking about legal cannabis, I'm thinking about buds. And as I think about buds, I think about this debacle with Bud Light. And wouldn't a great commercial be for someone like, okay, listen up, to all the community out there, wouldn't this be a great commercial and a great way for Bud Light to turn around their whole freaking image? This one's free Bud Light. You guys should pay me for this.

But this is what it comes down to. A couple of guys sitting on their couch. The guy rolls up a fat joint and they start smoking it. He's like, I'll be right back, bro. He goes, what kind of weed was this? He's like, I don't know. He goes and he comes back and he's dressed like a woman. And he's like, dude, are we smoking that, are we smoking that Dennis Mulvaney?

What the fuck that guy's name is? Like, this weed is so good. It'll make you dress like a woman. Boom, bud, like, you know what I mean? Like, if they just change their package around, like, I think it could really work. I think they could work that into their whole media sort of conundrum. What do you think, but is that crazy or is that silly or is it dumb or what? I think that's pretty damn crazy, George.

I think I haven't spoken to you as much. blood light. Yeah. No, I, I, from a marketing perspective, that might just piss off even more people. I think it would take the heat off of them, man. Like, I don't, it's got to be a giant distraction. This whole Mulvaney, bud light beer or pissing off people. That's got to be, hey, look at this, look at this thing over here. Don't look at the economy failing. Look at this over here. Don't look at these leaked documents. That's got to be what that is, right? I think in part, I think it plays into that, right? You know, because you have to figure the people who don't want you to look over here are people who are heavily invested in media companies, heavily invested in what sort of information gets disseminated. And the dissemination of that information can quickly be overtaken by a radical commercial. You know, now, at a different time, would have this had the same effect? That's the interesting question.

And I think probably not. I think what happens is that because, you know, they're trying to, the magician's trying to hide what he's doing with his right hand. The left hand comes out and then it just gets propagated through all these media channels touching that many more people. And then that creates just kind of that viral storm where all of a sudden now people are just, that's the only thing you're talking about. Screw the bank's collapsing. I mean, that was like a week ago. We don't, we don't even talk about that anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I wonder how much of this is, is even organic. Like, you know, I'll flip through the YouTube channels or the TikTok channels. And, you know, of course, this issue is getting tons of views, but how many of those views are organic? Like, that's the same thing as if I, if I, my favorite songs on the radio, I'm going to turn it up as loud as possible. But it doesn't mean people are listening to it. It just means that sound is blaring. Most people probably don't even like that song.

And that's kind of what I see when I see this whole. sort of distraction playing out, you know, and it's, it's, I think it's to keep people from seeing that the fabric of our society is being ripped apart at the scenes. Well, I think it's just another level to bread and circus, which we've talked about quite a bit, you know, and it's instead of it being like the planned every Sunday football game, it turns into the, hey, this is an opportunity, let's take advantage of it. But the underlying, you know, the underlying mechanisms of why they want to take advantage of that are the same. You know, you get all these people just all of a sudden shouting at each other and, you know, you get country rock stars out there blowing up cans with shotguns and you get all this other stuff.

And it becomes, it becomes this own little hype wagon where now, and because we're such social creatures, because we're, you know, very tribalistic in nature still, you know, people attach to these things. You can't go out and have a conversation and not talk about this thing. Yeah. Because everybody's talking about this thing. So now it becomes part of the social zeitgeist that just, you know, it has to be acknowledged. It's like the pink elephant in the room. You know what would have been awesome? If Dylan Mulvaney was the leaker of the Pentagon paper, then you know what I mean?

Like, then you would have been on that camp. People would be like, yeah. You know what I mean? Like, I think that like there's, like, if we can control the narrative. And if you're listening to this, like, we can control the narrative. Like, who cares who's on that can? Let's make that guy on that can awesome. Like, what if that guy was the leaker?

Like, you put that out into the narrative, you know? Or who cares what is gender is? Who cares what that is? What if we could find a way to steal the narrative from the people that are trying to piss everybody off? Like, I think that there's, that's worthy of thinking about. Like, we could, there could be enough of us creators that made a video that went viral, right? that on some level change the channel it's like it's like the ultimate troll it's like the apes with AMC taking over the stock market it's us taking control of the narrative back well i think you

know in in part that's happened like you have like the cat turd account or whatever on twitter they basically just take the exact same videos that are published by people saying just absolutely insane insane things and they just highlight the insane instead of glossing over it and they just focus on the insanity and completely hijacked the narrative. So, I mean, there's definitely a path for that. And I think, you know, it's kind of interesting because it kind of harkens back to the court gesture, right? The court jester was the only person who's allowed to make fun of the king. But the reason you had the court gesture was to kind of allow the populace to identify and humanize the king. But and then so you kind of contain that.

itself and i think you know we we just have through the internet and through social media you know we're basically have the ability for court gestures to kind of use humor and you know humor born from truth to really shine lights on these dark places yeah that's really well said i i agree wholeheartedly and it it brings to it brings to the forefront this idea i've had about you know we're hearing a lot about like uh the creator economy bent and whether you're a Dylan Mulvaney or you're a Joe Rogan or you're a George Monty or a Mr. Wizard or, you know, it seems to me, and this is, I'm just throwing this out here. I don't know if this is true or you're a TikTok star.

You're beginning to see like these individual creators almost be treated like athletes used to be treated when I was growing up. And what I mean by that is all of a sudden these big corporations are throwing big money at these individuals, you know, and they're becoming their own brand in a way. You know, it's, is there a pattern there? Am I making that up? Is that something I'm imagining or is there a pattern there, in your opinion? Oh, it's definitely happening.

I mean, you know, just look at Joe Rogan got paid over $100 million for his podcast, right? You know, and basically this is kind of like it's kind of like what advertising has brought to the game of capitalism. Because, you know, the whole idea was the sports star before or the pop star, you know, was they got so much attention, they got so much focus, they had so many eyes on them that somebody said, wow, I want a piece of those eyes. Let me pay you for it. And, you know, now you have these, you have these YouTubers, TikTok stars and other creators who are, you know, they're getting 50 million, 100 million views on some of their creations. Well, guess what? Those are the, that's a lot more eyes than you get on, you know, like even like things that used to get tons,

like an MTV, for instance, right? You know, back when we were back in the 90s, you know, 80s, 90s, everybody watched MTV. They touched every single household in the country pretty much for the age demographic. And now, you know, what touches every single household in the country for those age demographics is the creators. Yeah. Even more so probably than sports stars. Yeah, I would argue. I would argue.

If not now, then that. Yeah, without a doubt, without a doubt. They are the new celebrities, you know, and they've got much more freedom to do stuff. But you've worked in this area for a while. You've known your way around it. Is it when a creator hits a certain level, are they making money through like an affiliate links? Or are people just actually paying them to save things? Like on some level, it's got to be affiliate.

And then at the next level is it, okay, I just want a piece of your life. eyes or do you know how that structure works yeah so they call it sponsorships really so uh you know affiliates kind of like the bottom to the bottom rung of it where hey if you can push traffic to us great we're going to give you a kickback and then and then you'll get bigger brands who have these you know multi-million dollar marketing budgets and they're like how do we get our product in front of people well guess what you know 10 million people watch joe rogan and they you know he talks about x y and z I think we can fit in here. Let's go to Joe Rogan.

We'll pay him, you know, 30, 40, 50,000, probably more for Joe Rogan these days per read of an ad. And so that's why you get like, you know, you'll get the ads that stop and you hear the content creators, the more popular ones. They're reading the ad, right? They're reading the ad for ZipRecruiter or what have you. And every time they do that, every time they get paid per per ad read, essentially. Wow. Wow. Yeah, that's next level. And you do hear people saying that. I think I read somewhere, and this was a while back, and it was the magic number for podcasting was 30,000 downloads per episode is equivalent to $500 a re. Now, that's just kind of a rough estimate like that, but, you know, I think it at least paints a picture for people that are out there starting a podcast or doing a podcast or beginning to go down the road of creation.

something of like, hey, this is kind of a benchmark that you could be reaching for. And I don't know if that's true, but I read that somewhere. So, you know, it's out there. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's something to be said about those type of statistics. But there's other streams of revenue for these things, too, from a creator perspective. You know, if you have your own website and you have a paywall and you have, you know, you have 200 dedicated people who are willing to pay you $10 a month, there's your $500.

you know, a week type idea. But that's only coming from 200 people because you've, you know, you've made fans. You've impacted these people's lives at such a level that they're like, fuck, I'll give George 10 bucks a month. No problem. And so, you know, that's just one of the many different types of revenue streams that you can derive from, you know, not just during the podcasting, but kind of like centralizing your brand. Like you were saying before, everybody's, you know, creators are a brand unto themselves. And more importantly probably, and why they're winning in the larger scale of, you know, where attention is going is because of the freedom that they have in being their own brand. We can sit here and we can talk about whatever we want, whatever pops up.

We don't have a script of things that we can't talk about or names we can't say or ways to express ourselves or topics we're not allowed to really touch. And so that freedom breeds just a layer of authenticity to all of this. And that authenticity is why all of the attention is going in the direction of creators. Yeah, it makes sense. It is the, in some ways, it's the same thing chat sheet BT is doing is just getting rid of these middle men that have their hand out on both sides, right? For sure. Yeah. Yeah.

It makes me look forward to the future and it makes me think that the future while uncertain is something that is being created. I guess that kind of makes sense. Like you as an individual or you as someone who's looking forward to building yourself up in the future, even though it seemed daunting is something that has never been easier to do. Well, at least in the Western world, right? Right. I mean, yeah, there's obviously locations on the planet. that probably a little bit harder than others for sure but at the same time you know there's you know like central and south america i still have a lot of connections down there because i spent so much

time down there and when you're a creator down there you know 500 a week that's like almost life-changing money in some of these countries you know there's where your average income is 1,200 bucks a month if all of a sudden you're making 2 000 a month for just you know of your bare internet time, you just changed the, you know, the lifestyle and the manner of what your family can exist. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. So I think we're, you know, I think, so that's just more fuel to this fire, right?

And, and, you know, it's making all of these really crusty, archaic megalists of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of disseminating information, uh, disappear. And I think we're, I think we've already seen the death mail form. I think when you had people like a Joe Rogan get $100 million from Spotify, that was kind of probably the hearkening of these things to come, where these big megachannels, these corporations, you know, things like a CNN or the Fox or anything like that, they're on the way out. You know, the more money they have, the longer they think they can claw their way

and hold on to the wall of the system. eventually, I think it moves past them. Yeah, that's a great point. Do you think that was the Joe Rogan $200 million or $100 million deal? Was that the crest? Are we now kind of coming down the other side? Or is that just like the first pit stop on the climb up this mountain to the individual being the king of his own world? I think it's the first step.

And I think, you know, AI is just another one of those steps. I think if we were to grab this out, you know, there's this thing in marketing. called S-curve economics, where it takes X amount of time for something to hit about 10% market penetration. And then in about half that time, it rises up to about 90% market penetration. And if we were to take this whole thing and extract it as kind of, you know, in that equation, I think like the Joe Rogan was probably just 10% of that market penetration at a global scale. And I think as and as this all ramps up, you know, I think it's going to completely change the landscape. of how all of this is handled and played out.

I even think like these monoliths like YouTube's and stuff like that, I think that will all change too. I think their time in the spotlight of having all of that data and having all of that attention and access to it is waning. You know, to kind of highlight that the CEO of Reddit today came out and said that they are going to be suing these large language model AI. companies because they scraped the data and didn't compensate the company. So, you know, that's, I think that's, that fits in perfectly with that equation. And I think,

you know, eventually it's going to be where, you know, people are utilizing things like blockchain technology to own their identity, to own their personal brand, not just getting paid from some big outfit who hosts their content, but they're at, they actually own every single bit of the data that they produce. And they get acknowledged for that monetarily in any exchange. I think that's where this goes. Yeah. Okay. So that I want, I'm going to read something that sounds abstract, but I'm going to tie it back to the whole Reddit and scraping stuff.

So what is a pattern? Despite what they say, people do not seek help from a therapist or counselor because they have a problem. People seek help because they realize that without intervention, the repetitive nature of certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, I mean, underscore behaviors will continue over and over. And so you had mentioned this idea about Reddit suing the AI companies for scraping their information without paying them. Well, that's a very similar pattern to Reddit scraping the user's information without paying them. And so there was this intervention. Now there's this potential interruption of the pattern.

Like, you know, it's like we mentioned earlier. It's not terrorism when we do it, but it is terrorism. It is scraping information. So what, I mean, what is there anything that Reddit or Facebook or Google? Is there anything these guys can do to really stop the AI from scraping that information? And if so, wouldn't the individual just be able to apply that same sort of strategy? There's nothing really you can do. Once this information's out on the internet, once it's out there, like, you know, for instance, let's take a Twitter, for example.

You know, Elon decided that, hey, we're going to screw all of the developers and charge them a monthly fee in order to access Twitter data, which is, you know, it's just priority. It's his company. But at the end of the day, it actually really doesn't stop anybody truly accessing Twitter data. I can still write a program that goes out there because just like you can pull up your phone or on your computer and look at Twitter, so can my robot in my scraping system and pull that data. Now, there are ways to make it a little harder to do so and you store it in databases and there's calls to databases and all this other stuff. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of that would be too burdensome for many companies to implement, especially from just an infrastructure perspective. but also just from the nature of, you know, how attention, people are so if they don't get it right now, they're moving on to the next site. They're going to the, you know, they're going somewhere else to get that data.

They're not going to wait for loading times. They're not going to wait for all this stuff. And so as the, and as that data gets out there, there's, it's like the genie out of the bottle. You really can't put it back. Yeah. Okay, well, this brings up the idea of Max Tegmark on, um, over on, who's the guy who's the tuxedo? Lex, on Lex's show.

You know, Techmark came out and said that him, along with Elon and a handful of other people who, I guess, are considered to be thought leaders, have decided that they should call for a pause on the whole idea of AI. And, you know, I listened to some of his ideas why they should pause. And it was, you know, it kind of came down to responsibility. just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do something. We're moving so fast.

And here's what bothered me always say. He goes, we're moving so fast, even some regular guy in his living room could come up with a hack to really shake things up. And like, I don't, for me, like that sounds like a slap in the face. I'm going to fuck you, Max Tegmark.

You're not that important, dude. You know, so is there some truth? Obviously, there's truth to what they're saying. But what's your take on AI, accelerating or staying lower, what's your take on this letter being proposed? Well, I mean, you know, again, genie's out of the bottom. Right. You know, the question of just because we can, does, you know, should we,

you already move, you already barreled past that question. Yeah. When you started building these things and building them to the degree that you did, you already moved past that question. And hilariously, you know, Elon came out and said he's going to build his own AI now called truth GPT, right? So, you know, what's the signature on that on that document really mean? It doesn't mean anything. I think the only thing that a document like that presents is just more of, hey, we're going to keep this and use it and grow it, but you guys can't have access to it.

Yes, that's really well said. That's exactly. I didn't think about that, but that, that's the letter. Hey, there's too many dummies. There's too many people using this. We need it for us, not for them. It's not fair. You know, we might lose our competitive edge. That's what that is. Right. Because now if all of a sudden, me as an individual creator can use these AI systems to amplify my creativity, my imagination, my words, my images, my podcasts, my videos,

now all of a sudden I can compete with somebody who has a couple million dollar marketing budget and a team of artists and a team of all of the. and the team of this and the team of this and the better idea wins and so that they lose all of their competitive edge when the individual gets access to these tools and i think that's probably one of the more underlying aspects of why these a lot of those people signed on to that wow ben that's that's that's well put i never thought about it from that aspect for the now that i that you said that i I can't stop thinking about that. That's a very well-put point.

You can imagine. Imagine you're on the other side of that argument where you have gone to school and you've built infrastructures to train people and you've built something up over 20 years. And now you have that. Now you're the top dog. The last thing you want is somebody at the bottom competing with you, especially if it's a thousand people at the bottom. Like, whoa, what is God here?

We're talking about it. Right. And from a societal person, perspective, you know, if we're all being honest and goodwill actors in this game, you want the best idea to rise to the top, which means you want to enable every individual, especially individuals who have a passion for creativity, for exploration, for the application of knowledge. You want those people to be able to come up with the next iterations of society, the next great inventions that move humanity forward. You know, you think it's going to come from these crustaceans who have just grown to the ship of, of society and have just been wading through the waters not on their own power and just, you know, kind of leaching off of the whole thing. No, it's not going to. I mean, you know, and I don't, you know, we look historically and it's really easy to see that in older times when the access to these types of things was even harder to have, right? The access to tools,

the access to resources to do these things. And yet there's still the Nikola Tesla, the poor guy, right who has this great idea and eventually realizes a good chunk of those ideas of electromagnetism and it influenced every single aspect of the world that we inhabit today a hundred years later now imagine you get a thousand nicola teslas because they have access to the tools and they have access to information that you know at their fingertips and are able to see perspectives that you know couldn't be seen with a hundred people working on some something a hundred years ago. And fast forward 100 years, what does human society look like? I mean, it's it could be remarkable. But if all of a sudden we restrict it and say, hey,

you guys can't use it, but we can, I don't think it ends up remarkable. I think it ends up pretty pretty poorly. Yeah, it ends up media, it ends up on a, on a, in a town called mediocrity at best. At best. At best. Yeah. And that's probably a destroyed town. God, man, it's probably where we're living now. It's probably why we're living where we're living is that. Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of myths. And when I hear you talk, I started thinking about Prometheus,

how we stole the fire from the gods and gave it to those, to the mortalism. In some ways, you could say that that is what chat GPT is. It's this tool. It's this fire that people can use in a way they've never had access to before. And the people up top are like, what are you doing? man, this is for us, not for them. Yeah, this could be a true Promethean moment for, you know, modern society. Oh, man, it's so, I'm so excited.

And it's these kind of ideas that are really exciting. And I, if I were to be, you know, if I try to put myself in the position of someone who is maybe sitting on the fence and saying, well, it could be bad. I guess the ideas I would come up with is this is why this is me trying to steal man the argument that they should shut it down. I think what could happen is that the biggest potential problem about chat GPT in the future is the fact that it shows all the models in which we built society are wrong. And when that happens, there does tend to be a revolt. There does tend to be a breakdown in society. But, you know, what would it mean if all the models that we've built society on,

not all of them, but a big part or the foundation on which we've built in society is wrong. Well, that would mean some people would have to pay the penalties for that. Like, there would have to be some sort of new justice system put in place. It would have to be some sort of new currency system put in place. There have to be a new set of values put in place. And maybe that's what the people who are saying AI should be put on hold or thinking about. Are there anything else? Do you agree with those things that could happen?

Or are there some other things that you're thinking about? Well, I mean, I agree those things happen. But you have to think about it from the perspective of, well, if it's broken, why don't we fix it in the first place? if we if we understand that you know the we have these broken models of society and these systems that are unfair and that they they take advantage of different groups of people at different times at different levels of socioeconomic you know disparity in society then why aren't we fixing them and then is it that that's what they would say i mean i didn't mean to cut you off there but that that's exactly that's what i hear from people who are who don't want to change

legacy system. Why don't you want to do it? It's too hard. Too much work for us. Oh, okay. And, you know, I mean, fine by them. And I think this, this goes back to what we've talked about many times. And I think we're going to see new models of society, parallel economies. All this stuff start to emerge, in part because a lot of what we've been talking about today, you know, the individual being empowered, you know, these tools that we now have access to, the information, the wide breadth of information that we now have at our fingertips and disposal, and not even at our fingertips, but also an interpretation of that and in a sounding board. You know, you know, we were talking a little bit earlier about how, you know,

sometimes we talk to ourselves out loud before the podcast. And this is this is that. You get to, you get a sounding board. You get to talk to yourself out loud. And from a creative process, I don't think you can really, you can really put a value on that. I mean, just look at, you know, what a great producer can do to a good song. Yeah. Or, you know, an editor for a writer. And, you know, we're familiar with the need for these relationships. And now all of a sudden, we have that relationship at our fingertips in our phone, at our disposal, 24 hours a day.

and it's not attached to some monetary unit. That's a game-changing thing. And that in and of itself, I think, then breathes the changes that should happen in society, the fixes for these broken models. And if somebody, well, and if the people don't want to change it at the top, you know, the people at the bottom don't change it. Because like I said, instead of the one Tesla,

now you have a thousand Teslas. And those thousand Teslas are going to hear about each other. And they're just going to start their own thing. It'll be more efficient. It'll be more authentic. It will get more attention. It will have more freedom. It will inspire more liberty.

And there's something in the human condition that attaches to those things at a visceral level. That's really well said. I agree. I think that there is. And that's beginning to, I think that that's the one thing that that unites everybody. is this idea of being connected through, you know, it's hard to really put terms on, but if I just bring it back to the idea of the broken models haven't been fixed for so long, whether it's through, you know, whether it's through the ideas of apathy or ignorance.

It doesn't really matter why they didn't fix them. The fact is they didn't fix them and now they don't work at all. We're past the point of why you didn't fix them. Hey, they don't work. It doesn't matter why. They don't work and they're not going to be fixed. So here we are. And yeah, I can see that pattern running through.

I'll give you an example of a trucking company like where I used to work at UPS. And they had this model where they were sold this bill of goods about technology. Hey, you put this sort of technology in the trucks. It'll line up the route for all the drivers. You know, the only problem with that is the map's not the territory. So they spend billions of dollars updating all this software for their trucks and they have this idea. We're all going to make right turns.

But it turns out it doesn't really work that well. And not only does it not work well because the roads aren't the maps on the territory, but it's really not the same when you put something on paper versus doing it in the real world. Turns out the human can make a lot better decisions on the fly. can reroute stuff, can understand where someone works versus a computer system that was told, hey, we're going to save you billions of dollars. And they may have up front, but in the long haul, it's actually costing you more money. And that's the same kind of problems I see working in our society where, hey, we fixed this thing. No, you didn't fix it.

You actually made it worse. Okay, well, we've been, now that you have the fallacy of sunk cost involved in it. Well, we're not going to do anymore because we've already spent billions. We've told our shareholders about it. And we've gotten rid of the people that know how to fix it. So it's there to stay. Yeah, but it's worse. It doesn't matter.

It's there to stay. Right. And so, you know, that seems to me to be a pattern of things that are happening. And maybe it's necessary, then maybe things have to get so bad that, you know, it's not going to change to inspiration. So the only way it changes is to desperation. That's where we're at. Maybe. What do you think?

Well, I think desperation followed by a lot of perspiration. I love it. It's true. It's true. Yeah. And I think that's what we're approaching at a global level. I think, you know, we started this conversation with the advent of the internet. Yeah.

And then all of this thing are just little pieces along this equation that are pushing us to the point where it's like, hey, we're getting to the point of desperation. We have banks failing. These economic models that we've had in place forever no longer work are way to manage society. digital systems are, you know, our relationships with foreign entities and all of these other things are all broken. And I think we have reached that point of desperation at a human level. Because now it's, you know, it's, it used to be where people are like, oh, yeah, I believe in the government, you know, I have my vote. I have my say in all these things. But if you were to pull the average person on the street these days, do you trust the government to do the

right thing. I think you would get a resounding no, especially, you know, different demographics in different places. You're probably going to get different answers at different times, but I think if you were to take that data at a large scale and look at it, you would get a resounding no. And it's, and that's just an artifact of us at a kind of a primal level, realizing that this is all broken. And it's kind of our desperation pouring out into, you know, being verbalized. talking to ourselves, right? Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt, I, you know,

it's such an inversion of, of the reality that I knew as a kid. And in some ways, that should be a sign of, an unhealthy society. You know, it used to be, when I was a kid, you know, the good guy won. You're rooted for the good guy. But then somewhere along the line,

it became like, hey, man, this guy was wrongfully in prison. And now it's like, Joker's like, I'm going to burn it all down. You know what I mean? So you can almost see this evolution or the inversion of what was good is now bad. And what was bad is now good. You know, it's, it's a fascinating concept. Yeah, that is a fascinating concept. But I don't know if it's necessarily tied to like a good and bad. I think good and bad for our relative for sure. But at the same time, you know, it's it's also our access to information. You know,

before you had, you had Walter Cronkite telling you this is good. good. And now, and now, you know, you have a hundred different voices all telling you some form of how it's bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's, you know, it's, it's too simplistic to use the word good and bad. It's like a five year old. I should really try to fix that. You know, there's, for everything that I think is favorable, there's probably a reason why it's unfavorable to somebody else. And the trick is trying to balance those things and figure out what is it that people can agree on. And you're not going to agree. And that takes us into the greater good argument.

And maybe that's what we learned in COVID a little bit was, hey, we can still agree on the greater good, right? Nope. Can't agree on that either. Well, part of that is good and bad or relative. Greater good for who? Yeah. You know, in my neck of the woods, what you say is the greater good is causing me significant harm. You know, and there's a lot of people who are in that situation, right?

I just look how many people lost their jobs because they were, you know, concerned about putting something that was rolled out so fast in terms of a vaccine into their body. I mean, you know, there's, and the waves of that are still being felt throughout various industries who mandated this. You know, so good for who, right? And another thing that all this access to information is given us is that now we can see the consequences of what we declare good and what we declare bad. We can see the rollout. We can see, oh, yeah, we removed this dictator. Fast forward 20 years. Turns out that all we did is put in another dictator and, you know, the quality of life has dropped for the entire populace minus this.

you know, 5% of people. And we can objectively see these things. And so then, you know, it brings us back to that voicing this thing out loud. You know, do we really trust this? Is this good? Is this bad? Is this, you know, is there a greater good in this situation even? And having these discussions and having these discussions out loud, I think is kind of an earmark in the turning point of society. Yeah, I would agree. That's, that's well said. I do think that at the very least, people are beginning to get a different view of themselves, the past, and what's possible in the future. And I, I'm thankful that we have the internet. I'm thankful that we have open communication where people like you and I can reach across to the United States and talk. You can open up the conversation to everybody else. And, you know, sometimes that which is messy on one side looks really clean and organized on the other stuff.

Like if you think about embroidery, on one side, it's this beautiful canvas. And you flip it over, like strings and everything's all crazy and mangled on one side. So maybe we're working our way through this thing and we're building a beautiful mosaic, but it just seems so chaotic. Well, right. I mean, you can't have order without chaos and vice versa, right? And I think what we're doing at a more kind of maybe primal level is we're moving towards balance in a way. Because in order for us to see the order, we've, you know, now we're seeing the chaos. And, you know, there's something to be said about both sides of that, right?

You know, there are things of beauty born from chaos and complexity. And then there's, then there's things, you know, that really makes sense born from order. but too much order and all of a sudden you turn into an authoritarian, right? And it becomes a dictation of how somebody should live. And so I think, you know, I think we're approaching this at a human level from, you know, finding the middle road and finding that path of balance. Yeah. I think that's a beautiful spot to leave it for today.

I mean, the idea of balance is something that all of us can work on in our lives. and if we're honest with ourselves, we can see that both sides, well, we might not agree with either one, we could probably be more balanced in our judgments of what's really happening there. Well, Ben, as we're landing the plane, man, I'll give you the last word.

And after you get the last word, I would love for you to explain to people where they can find you and what you got coming up before I let you go. Well, my path of balance took me to this book called No Absolutes, which is over my shoulder here. And it's a philosophy in order to view the world in a certain way where what you just said.

You know, we see the pitfalls over here. We see the pitfalls over here. And instead of attaching ourselves to, you know, that tribalistic nature that we're kind of have inside, it allows us to view the world and look for balance. And I think that's something that is happening and I think will happen more. And anybody listening, I highly recommend trying to. find some more balance in your life. And for me, you can find me at

Benjamin C.George.com. I got a lot of stuff coming, but nothing happened in any time tomorrow. Well, fantastic. I'll be in touch with you, if not later this week, then next week for sure. So maybe we'll be able to squeeze in another show this week and if not definitely next week. So ladies and gentlemen, I'm so thankful

that you took a moment to spend time with myself and Mr. Wizard, aka. Benjamin C. George, check out his website. We'll put the links in the show notes. Check out his book for sure. No absolutes. It will help you find the balance you need to find your way in this world. That's all we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, we love you. Aloha.