TrueLife - The Psychedelic Roundtable - Disrupting Corporate Structure, A hard right turn, & rounding up homeless people

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

Grab a flashlight, we’re going deep down the rabbit hole known as predicting the future. Can we disrupt the corporate structure? Is the antithesis of wokeness about to sweep over the nation? Will the increasing homelessness population create hatred among the working class?

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. Ladies and gentlemen, you know what day it is. Everybody knows what day it is. It's Sunday.

Time for the psychedelic round table. We are joined today with Mr. Wizard, Paul, Ben, why did you go ahead and do what we do every show and just let the people know who it is that you are? I'm Benjamin C. George of Benjamin C.George.com, aka Mr. Wizard, you can find the book and all the other things that I'm up to on the website. Looking forward to another Sunday chat. Nice. Paul, how are things with you, my friend? Anything you want to share with the audience before we get to.

started? Not really. Everything's going good, though. Fantastic. Fantastic. And as for me, I'm living the dream, as always, getting fired up for another week. And, you know, I was going to, I've been thinking about, you know, we talk a lot about different structures, parallel structures, economies, what's happening in the world. And I wanted to get you guys opinion on this particular idea of, I've been reading quite a bit about the, the, the idea of emotions and economy. Like how do emotions factor in to economic action? And the point, the argument I want to make today is that I have seen a trend of emotions

playing a bigger and bigger part in the economy than they have in the past. And I want to try to give an analogy in that I think it was Steve Jobs who said the reason companies fail is because the engineers get pushed to the wayside and the marketing team takes over. And when that happens, people no longer care about the product. They care only about that which moves the profit needle forward. And that's the marketing team. I think the same thing has happened in the world of economy. We have allowed the products and services throughout the economy, be it in our country or in Europe or in any of the biggest industrialized parts of the planet. we're now building an economy built on emotion, built on marketing,

and the products and the services are failing. What do you guys think about that? I think to some extent, that's probably always been the case. I mean, ever since really mass marketing kind of took over, you know, and we've moved, you know, away from industrialization into consumerism. but i would agree with you i think you know uh there definitely seems to be some sort of bent where you know the people who thumped their fist allowed us because you know you know however they feel that tends to be where a lot of marketing money is flowing these days yeah i i i think

yeah good i agree that it's you know it's always been the case you know people make emotional connections to products you know you have like chevi versus Ford, BMW versus Mercedes, Coke versus Pepsi. You know, always, you know, these brands have been able to develop, you know, really strong emotional bonds with consumers. And so even when they've introduced new product in the cases of, you know, like vehicles or clothing or whatever it may be, they could actually be inferior to their competitive product and still, you know, get a

a lot of attraction because people are just emotionally tied to the brands. And so when you explode that out, like on a global level, and you add in stuff like a pandemic, you add in the holiday season, you add in, you know, inflation and all the rest of these things, those things are also emotional issues for people. They become emotional issues for people. And that'll either drive the, you know, the economy up or down, you know, I mean, that's why they say there's an optimistic market and there's a pessimistic market, you know, because, you know, largely those things, to some extent, are based in emotion on how people are feeling and not what they're thinking. Yeah, that's a good point. Welcome in, Jason. Good to see you, buddy.

Hey, guys. How are you? Doing well, thanks. We were just talking about, like, so if we continue to pull in that thread a little bit, You know, it seems to me that as a whole, rationality is being replaced by emotionality. You know, it seems to me that starting at a certain level of production, rationality, which is the medium of disciplinary society hits a limit. Henceforth, it is experienced as a constraint and an inhibition. And this is what I want to talk about. It seems that we have, you know, there's limits to growth.

there are limits that things people can do. But in the business world, if you're a CEO, you don't want to hear anything about limits. You don't want to hear about limits to growth. You don't want to hear about limits to productivity. And that is the turning point. I think we've hit this turning point where we have reached this wall of rationality. And so what we're doing now is because this,

because rationality is a constraint that it has, it's suddenly it seems rigid and inflexible. So at this point, Emotionality has taken place. And we see all these triggers out there of, you know, just very emotional people seem to be taking over the airwaves, whether it's through anger or whether it's through, you know, all these kind of wedge issues.

They don't seem rational to me. They seem emotional. And it seems to me that the world we're moving in is moving in a very, it just seems that emotion is taking over rational. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, I agree. You know, and I think it has to do with like, like, you know, Jason's working on his dad balls project, right? Where he's trying to, you know, what he wants to, you know, mentor, coach, whatever you want to call it, you know, men on how to become better men and better fathers and, you know, enforce or reinforced their masculinity.

And in a lot of cases where it's like, you can see. it as a whole where that is that's being suppressed and right so people are no longer turning to what they knew or you know what their what their bodies are telling them what their you know their gender role is telling them and they're falling back on emotion on so many things right like it's there's no longer this you know if you said like rationale goes out the window and it's replaced by you know reactionary behavior. And at the same token, I just read that

$9 billion was spent on Black Friday, which was a record for the most money ever spent. Wow. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I saw something that said the deals were like

not good at all. Like most people were pretty underwhelmed by the deals that were taking place, which makes you think like who spent that nine billion right like i think sometimes they throw a number out that to think like oh the masses were spending the money i i would argue probably the majority of people if you're like just pure numbers probably didn't spend on black friday and a smaller section of the halves spent a lot more maybe than they normally would have i i would argue that number's

bullshit i would say that they're trying to get people to spend more money by saying look at this record profits that we got like i think i i don't I don't think we did spend that much. I think we're in economic decline. And if you look at the way in which the media puts out information, whether it's, hey, here's the vote totals of this or, you know, I don't trust the media at all. Why would I trust them to tell me the truth about the economic situation? Right.

And it's also the metrics of what they use to measure this, right? Right. You know, those are usually moving targets, you know, in all of these different scenarios. So, you know, what if, yeah, it could be nine billion spent, but, you know, what are they actually putting into that number? Is it, you know, is it, is it business to business type stuff as well as consumer type stuff? You know, you need more data and then you actually have to have access to the real data and not something that's, you know, skewed for the purpose of marketing.

Yeah. And this gets just, this gets us right back into emotion. Like what if you want to further the buying season, like, you want to call the Ben's a fisherman. You know about getting boils. You want to go out there and chum the water, man. You want these boils coming up. So what better way to do that?

And if you look at all these people, you know, if you listen to any sort of ad, it's like, come down and buy your new Toyota and hurry. Like there's all this influence on like, get down there now, you know? So there's so much emotion in it. What are you going to say, Jay? Well, I was going to say, I mean, that's just playing off the idea that scarcity and urgency sell, right? And that's always the motivating factor for people.

And then I agree. I think it is kind of, to me, I saw that pop up yesterday, that $9 billion number. I was like, how do they know that already? Like Friday just ended. Like what companies send their numbers into something that can then aggregate? Like clearly they can't really know that number. So it's assumptions, right? They're making some sort of assumptions and they're skewing those assumptions to their favor

to kind of further this. Because to this point that you're driving, George, we can. can't be rational about the data that we see. It's almost like, you know, because to me, rationalism is the removal of emotions, right? Like, you're not going to be emotional about it. Like, let's think rationally. But when we can't trust the numbers, the ration, then all of a sudden we then are driven more into the emotional piece because what is it to be rational?

Well, that's to have a baseline of understanding or a baseline of quote unquote truth. And that's been removed. So when you don't have that baseline to work off of to say, well, this is rational, all of a sudden we have our emotions, and that's far easier to control. And I think at the end of the day, that's where you start seeing this more like, we're being conditioned for obedience right now. That's really, like, whatever it is, like we're being conditioned to obey a certain strategy or a certain way.

And I think it's a lot easier to make emotional people obey than to make rational people. Yeah, that's well point. where do they get those numbers from are those are like reported from like visa mastercard american express and the number is that how they figure out the nine billion like what people are have charged and then um and then with the rising rate of inflation right then you would think that that number would be you know high right everything costs more so of course that number went from whatever it was last year to nine billion dollars but i guess the question is is is like what did people get in return for their $9 billion? Probably not as much as they got last year or the year before.

Probably not. I think, I don't think they're actually getting reporting numbers. I bet you they're doing some, you know, statistical woo-woo of stuff and saying last year there was X amount and, you know, there's the expectation of sales, projected sales like all of these companies do. And then they just took those projected sales, you know, increase. over last year and spit out a number. That would be my guess if I had to take one.

Yeah, I would agree with that too. It's interesting to me. I like what you said, Jason, about this idea of, you know, being, being kind of groomed to be a consumer. And I think that consumption and emotions go well. Like when you're consuming something, you know, if you're hungry, you're going to eat something, you know. But when you're in a consumer mindset, you're in an emotional mindset. You know, we hear these terms like irrational exuberance or a feeding frenzy.

You know, there's these terms that we use when we consume, but yet when we're where we are in a state of where we're logical or we're rational, then we're contemplating. And we get back to, we talked earlier about contemplation versus consumption. And I think the last thing that can, the people that are selling you stuff want you to do is to contemplate if it's a good deal. They want you to consume. So they're preparing the environment for you to do so, which takes us full scale back to the idea of, of the world we live in, really becoming this area of this consumer capitalism that's just feeding us meanings and emotions. They're selling so we consume meanings and emotions. You're getting away from products. You're getting away from services and just getting you into a certain state of mind.

And big businesses have been taking advantage of this over the past at least 15, 20 years. There used to be like these really quality products like a craftsman tool, right? Yeah. All of a sudden, lo and behold, that gets bought out by this multinational conglomerate or some huge bank industry thing from China. And all of a sudden the quality disappears, but they keep the name and they keep that emotional attachment in order to drive more profits.

Yeah, on the topic of driving, I just saw that Mercedes-Benz is now offering a subscription-based service for your engine to run better. So it's like they already have, and the same thing with BMW is going to offer you a subscription to use your seat warmers. like they're just they're just re like they're not going to make anything new they're just going to piecemeal everything back to you like you could buy the whole car last year but now oh you want the seat heater oh you want your air conditioner work that's extra oh i pay i pay four dollars and 95 cents a month to start my Subaru from my phone there you go like it's not on the remote controller like is as it should be it's you know four bucks so it's not like whatever and you know most people aren't going to really bad an eye at spending $4.95 for strategically priced.

And it gives me access to the app on my phone that then can lock my doors, gives me like all the control of my car remotely. So I can start, you know, kind of my car from anywhere, you know, walking from the airport, get my car started. Like, you know, it has some values more than just something like when I see my car for sure. But I got paid for it. Well, Tesla kind of kicked this whole thing off, right? Totally. You know, they created that subscription model where, you know, that never existed in vehicles. But then all of a sudden, if you want the software update so your car can go zero to 60.1 seconds faster, you know, it'll cost you $7,000.

Or if you want the semi-autonomous driving thing, I think it was like $15,000, $7,000 for that upgrade. And so all of a sudden these upgrade and subscription models have kind of infiltrated into vehicles. and I think everybody's just kind of fall in suit because they're like, oh, shit, Tesla's making a lot of money. Why don't we figure out how to do this? Well, it's a way to make a consumer out of us. I have to continue consuming. And I think that's where this idea of subscription into our homes and into our vehicles, these things that for maybe like once every while purchases, now they're finding ways to continue to make money off of us.

So you buy your home and now there's something. be all these elements of subscription to make your home that much better. And things with our, because they keep us on for, you know, our lifetime value goes up as customers to them versus making purchases every five, 10, 15 years, depending on who you are with these things. And these are also just pure profit incentives too, right? You know, that $4.99, they're not, they don't need to have that money to pay engineers to constantly be updating anything. That's a one and done. And so all of that $499 times the millions and millions of Subaru is out there, well, now you have just a steady stream of income that's pure profit.

That's interesting. Yeah, a little sinister if you think about it. It's just undermining the consumer to the point where there's nothing left to spend. Well, but then, you know, you attach some zeros onto the economy and there's some more to spend. Or you just give people money. And they give it right back to you. So just going, sorry, I had to do some math here because what you were saying, Vince, really interesting.

Let's just say there's a million, you think there's a million Subaru drivers that would subscribe to this? Is that a fair? Because I bet this is something in a car that's probably low. It's just say three to three years. So about a million. And they're one of the top cars, like I would say, at least here in Colorado. But like, definitely certain parts of the country.

So they have a million people paying $4.95. Annually, they're generating $59.4 million from just that subscription. From $4.95. That's $60 million of profit. That's insane. Oh, yeah. Well, there's a reason all these companies are putting up record profits. And that's part of it for sure.

Yeah. That's an interesting thought. Yeah, I think it goes along with engineered scarcity as well. Like you're seeing all these older cars being taken off. You know, you're seeing this artificial scarcity take place so that this new, you'll own nothing and be happy model can be brought in. You know, Kevin brought up an interesting point yesterday. And I'm not sure we all agreed with it,

but it was a different point of view on the topic of you'll own nothing and be happy. Do you think that the idea of only, things may be a point of contention that makes people unhappy. And what I mean by that is, you know, there's this level of animosity if your neighbor gets a new car and you don't have. You start looking at them a little different. I mean, probably not us, but you can see how this idea of coveting things or, you know, keeping up what the Jones is could be something that gets people in trouble. So if you were unable to own stuff, would it take that sort of animosity out of the human condition?

So you're saying that if there's no ownership, you could not covet because you don't own anything? Is that basically what you're saying, George? And nobody else would too, right. And nobody else would either. So what is there to covet? It may free you from these constraints of judging who you are by what you have. Not exactly. I didn't put it exactly.

But that's the gist I'm trying to make. But I don't think it's going away in that model. I think it just gets kind of replaced. because, you know, like, for instance, you know, there's this big push for like the Metaverse, which obviously is kind of crashed and burned, but it's still going to come back and push again. And so now all of a sudden these physical ownership things turn into virtual goods. And, you know, if you look at like gamers and all of those things, you know, what was that,

Farmville game? That was one of the first big apps at their height. They were making some crazy number like $30 million a month or something like that because people wanted, you know, some pigs on their farm in this little digital handheld game. Yeah. It makes, see, this is another point I wanted to bring up in the beginning is that along with the change from rationality to emotionality, so too are we changing from buying things to non-things. Like a subscription is a non-thing.

You know, taking Robux and buying a character in a game is a non-thing. You know, we have never seen this shift into buying widgets or buying fictional products that don't really have any value except for a sort of cultic value in a linear world, you know, or in a virtual world. Like, there's all this money going to these virtual spaces. And when you just pan back and think about that from a rational point of view, it's like, what the fuck is this money going? You're buying a virtual character for how many? You're buying a subscription? You're buying experience, right? You're buying a dopamine release.

You're buying that feeling that when you press that button, the desire that you had is now yours because that's what they're able to do. They're able to create desire and say, oh, you should desire picks on your farm because you're going to be able to do X, Y, and Z. And that's going to progress you forward. And so it's, again, very much playing off the emotion of desire. So what are you buying is you're buying your desires and you're buying a dopamine release. And it may be a non-thing, but it is a physical, emotional release that takes place.

That's how they're getting you addicted to these things in this experience. And I think on some levels, it could get so individualized that, yeah, we don't think we need real things because we can buy our emotions. We can buy our experiences. And we get disconnected about how the real world gives us. those same experiences but it's out of our control and that's far scarier well you don't even get the same experiences i mean you can't get that dopamine release in the real world by just clicking a couple buttons but you you load up these apps that are you know designed by psychologists you know you

know the flashing lights the the bright you know the fireworks going off the hey you've leveled up to level 35 on your farm and all of these things those are instantaneous dopamine releases it's you know kind of similar to the doom scrolling phenomenon that a lot of people get caught up there. But to go out in the real world and get something like that, it typically requires effort, right? A lot more than a couple of clicks of your finger. This is the move from, I think what we're seeing is the move from a consumer capitalism to emotional capitalism. And instead of buying things, now you are buying and consuming meanings. and emotions. How deep can we go into this emotional capitalism before the entire system breaks?

Like if you flood all the money from a rational, tangible system into a system that's based on emotions where you're buying dopamine hits, where you're buying a fictional experience so you can feel like you accomplish something versus really accomplishing something. Like how long can you suck these people out of this system before the original system fails? Well, I wonder though, kind of on some of us, how much does it require the rational system to drive the emotional one? Right? Like we assume that the, you maybe see these altruistic guys are in their garage and they like came up with this video game called Thornville and right.

Like, no. Like that's the narrative, right? That's the, that's kind of what marketing would like us to believe. But like these are freaking scientists that understand like it has been saying the psychology of a human being and they're designing a game around that. That's highly rational. On some levels, right? Like, it's understanding how to change people's behaviors.

And the rational mind, I think, can really only manipulate the emotional. The emotional can't manipulate the emotional. And again, that's where I don't know that rational, in the general public, but I think they can suck off this. Like, they can shift us fully into an emotional society. And we think the whole time that, you know, it's this reality. But behind the scenes is a highly rationalized system driving the whole. thing. And I don't think you see like the system kind of break. What I think you see and what I think we've seen is that you have a centralizing of the power. And, you know, it'll continue to, you know, centralize itself until you're just left with a few massive conglomerates. And there's already industries that are that way. Yeah. It's just a giant, hey, it's just a giant distraction so we can consolidate power.

yeah yeah you know micro micro dopamine releases for people who bite their nails right they're gonna yeah they're like they're like designing you know games and tools on your phone that they can charge you for that are like 10ies per click and then people just be hooked to their phones just clicking away on these little tiny dopamine you know until they're like cracked out and you know cracked out and you know

Cracked out is probably a pretty apt term. You know, if you take some of these people who spent their entire lives just sucking on these dopamine, you know, little sippers in their cage, all of a sudden you remove them from that system and they experience significant emotional distress. You know, they've fallen to hysterics. They become, you know, all sorts of depressed and experience massive anxiety attacks and all sorts of very deleterious and detrimental things to the human. human system. But we have pills for those people. And so if they just take a couple of them, they're going to feel fine. And that anxiety and depression will go right away because, yeah, that's your brain failing you, not your, like, let's, we can fix that. Yep.

What's the psychedale? Yeah. Go ahead. Well, and then I was going to say if you look at who's, who's benefiting and profiting off of those, where is that money all being invested from and where's it being invested into, you know, you find that there's a significant amount of overlap on, you know, like something like a Black Rock, for instance, on, you know, the types of investments that they make. And, you know, they're playing the pharmaceutical card. They're playing, you know, these, these dopamine release cards. And all of a sudden, you know, they're profiting, you know, seven ways to Sunday off of everybody. That's why you see this rise, you know, again, as you've watched the community, because this is the doom and gloom, right? I would say this is the majority of people,

but on the fringes, you start seeing these conversations being had around how, you know, resistance training, and you need to increase the dopamine, you have to have effort. And you'd see these guys like Huberman Labs popping up and that three-hour podcasts on this stuff. You see Wimha. You see all over the place people cold plunging and this is becoming a thing, like that you spend your time doing and doing cold exposure and hot exposure. So it's interesting, like, you see this, there's a shift there. But that stuff is fringe. And it's kind of interesting.

Like, the common person would be like, you sat in a cold bath for why? And why would you ever do that? You're weird. You're crazy. And it's kind of, yeah, it's on that fringe, which is fascinating to me. That's you, Ben? Yeah, that's me. Like yesterday a buddy came over and he's like dude you have a cold plunge in the backyard

and I was like yeah he's like you got a pair of shorts like can we go hang out because he's been doing it so like we spent time just hanging out in the backyard around the cold plunge and yeah it's interesting like it's happening and it's important to worry I think there is kind of a movement of people who are have been frustrated by the system for sure but I think you know back to our nine billion number, right? You know, if that has some sort of merit of truth, you know, how many, how many people are actually, you know, taking that experience? How many people are going down that path? Yeah, like the Heberbin Labs podcast does a great job with the neurochemistry of all of these stuff. And he goes into very great detail about how this all

works and more explicitly, you know, how to rewire kind of what you're doing in your system and various aspects of, you know, whatever you might want to do with your life. But at the same time, you know, it is fridge. But there is a movement happening. And it would be interesting to kind of maybe plot that out on a graph, kind of see, you know, what type of numbers these things are getting. How many cold plunges are being sold? How many sonnas are being sold?

Do you think there's a correlation between this movement happening in psychedelics? Yes. I see it overlap. A lot of people saying the same stuff. Wim Hof, I don't think he talks some of it. about psychedelics, but his whole thing is like, you can have a psychedelic experience with your breath and giving people. Yeah, giving people that ability to do it from that angle.

But yeah, I think there's a massive overlap between the two. Right. And you have to figure probably one of the greatest purveyors of this is Joe Rogan for better or for worse, right? Yeah. Just because of the stretch, the breadth of his audience. And I would say, you know, all of the people who. who are kind of really at the forefront of talking about these things in a public space, have also talked very publicly about psychedelics and their experiences and how that's led them down these paths.

So yeah, I see a massive overlap too. I just looked up back to our 9 million number. Salesforce publishes its own figures. This is coming from TechCrudge based on 1.5 billion shoppers. And it noted that online sales reached 8 billion in the U.S. and 40 billion globally at 5 p.m. Eastern on Black Friday, with most of the discounted items in the U.S. appearing in home appliances, apparel, health and beauty, and luxury handbags.

That's fascinating. Luggery handbags made that list. And what's even more interesting is that Black Friday is an international phenomenon. Right. Like other people are buying. up the goods. Like that's that's I've never thought about Black Friday. I always figured it is a US thing. I wouldn't imagine like global shoppers getting discounts on Black Friday. I think that's probably more recent development because you know think about it if if all

of a sudden I can go on Amazon.com or I can go to overstock.com or whatever and I can pick up all of these things and I know they're going to be cheap on Black Friday. I'm probably delayed my purchases for a couple months if I need something or want something. How much? that 40 billion was Amazon to that point, right? A lot. And you still got Cyber Monday coming up, right? That happens this Monday, which is Amazon, like Amazon created its own holiday. Like that's how gigantic these people are.

But they're just liquidating their warehouses, right? Like that's what that's what Cyber Monday is like, hey, this crap's not selling. Let's get rid of it. Mm-hmm. So here's a, like, this is what I, it trips me out too. When we look at this idea of a changing world, and we look at this idea of like ESG scores and stuff, and you look at the idea of multinational corporations talking about a green agenda in ESG, it seems to me the biggest flaw that no one talks about is how is it that any multinational corporation? How can any of them be talking about building a better world when their entire business model is built on excess concess? consumption. You know what I mean? Like, that's so dumb to me. Like, your entire, all of it. The whole economy is built on excess consumption. And you're going to stand up here and tell me you're doing the best you can to bring down, like to have, what's the point of an ESG score if your business models excess consumption? Well, you know, now you're being rational or not emotional. Watch this video, right? Put the toothpicks in your eyes and watch the video.

You can look outside and it's clearly happening global warming, right? Come on. I'm beginning to think this guy's not vaccinated. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yeah, it's interesting. And I think that's another thing psychedelics does, as well as the cold plunge or any sort of resistance training, is it forces you to think critically. You know, and maybe that's another thing that this sort of emotional capitalism is doing to us is it's trying to alleviate the critical thinking.

You know, with consumption comes emotion. With the emotion comes the inability to contemplate or think critically. So it seems, and I know if I had a tinfoil hat, I'd put it on right now because I think it's by a design. I think that this is what, like what Jason was saying. I think that this is a new system coming in place to consume, consume, cradle to grave. Thanks for being here. Have a nice day.

Well, I would take off the little tinfoil hat just a little bit because, you know, at some level, while you could say it's by design, that doesn't imply necessarily that there's some group of people sitting in a room and having a conversation. But these people are all very readily aware of what's going to benefit them. And, you know, they've all, they're in, you know, they're all colleagues at some level. You know, a lot of them went to the same colleges, once of the same fraternities, you know, are part of similar networks. And so they don't have to directly have some cabal that's kind of orchestrating this. They're all going to be acting in their self-interested. interest. And through that action, you know, they're, they're going to take very similar steps

when it comes to these things. Right. And I think that this, you know, on the, for those listening, Ben has an amazing podcast on Saturdays called Saturday shenanigans. And I caught a little bit of that podcast. And I think some of the things that you guys were talking about there was this idea of disruption and how people say the four of us or people that may be like my, minded that think critically and are beginning to see clear, there is a path for disruption to this giant monolith. A lot of times when things get so huge, they get sloppy. They get so big, their overconfidence is their weakness.

And they leave room for these new niche markets. They leave room for these new strategies to get a foothold. In fact, these big companies, the only way they grow is by buying up and consuming the smaller ones. So maybe we can shift gears a little bit and cover a few of the things. the same things and maybe we'll have some new ideas, and just more of a, we have a different dynamic group here. Maybe we can talk

a little bit about disruption and throwing a wrench into the giant system using the Terra Libre project. Sure. Well, you know, I think a good way to kind of imagine that is you have this massive monolith and in order for change

to happen at these scales, it has to go through 17 middle managers, go up to a couple of EPs, and all, you know, there's such a cumbersome effort for any sort of pivot to happen. Whereas when you're, you know, you have a very smaller operation or, you know, it's individualized. Now you become very nimble. And your ability to adjust to the marketplace becomes, you know, your number one strength. And, you know, I think, and to what, to your point earlier, you also then see,

that these big companies, they come out and just buy up all these people who are much more nimble than them in hopes that they can just perpetuate this, this mega, you know, conglomeration of whatever they're doing these days. But therein, I think, lies the opportunity for to actually disrupt this and invoke a little bit of change in society. Yeah. So if we were to look at sort of the structure model, you know, when I think of a multinational corporation or even a smaller type of LLC or corporation, or corporation, you have this top-down structure where whether you have a board of directors and then your upper middle management and your middle management and then your employees. It seems to me the Terra Libre project or the model that is right to disrupt the big boys is from the bottom up. Is that correct?

Yeah, in essence, except, you know, the bottom is the top as well. Maybe you can't explain that. Instead of having this pyramid structure, you just have a network structure that is expansive. And each individual node on the network then becomes, you know, an effective mechanism and tool for people to gain wealth. So, and, you know, we see this. So you're decentralizing that power structure. And you're also decentralizing the incentive structure because those, the whole reason it's built that way is because people, you know, they're greedy in taking advantage of people at the end of the day.

Yeah. Do you see, you know, I think I could make a case for, you know, there was a book that came out a while back called Bullshit Jobs. And it was this book about people making like six figures or sometimes, you know, crooked numbers in front of those six figures. And they really weren't doing anything. Another idea that would be, look at all these people at Twitter that just lost their job. Like Twitter's running fine.

probably better than ever. But all these people making all this money, they really weren't doing anything. And so that seems to be the problem of the monolith. Like it gets so big and then all of a sudden it's just paying out all these people for really not doing anything. That seems where it's where it's a good spot to strike if you are this upstart. I think it's also connected to the expert, I'm going to make up a word of like expertization. I don't know if that's a word or not, but like you basically have to deal with an expert now. And if you're not an expert, you don't have anything to say. And so it's really interesting, like how the, it's like we've gone so insular.

You have like an expert on like just the left valve of the heart and may not even understand how the rest of the body works, but they're an expert on what that valve does and how it works and what it plays. But if that person had to do open heart surgery on the other chamber, they're fucked. They don't know that chamber. Where it used to be like you would actually understand the whole heart or the whole body, right? And so it's interesting, like, we have gotten to this place where we believe the experts to such a level that when someone comes along that's a non-expert, that's speaking rationally, they're seen as, again, wearing a tinfoil cap. And I don't know if you guys have been paying attention, but for one thing that I've been watching recently on Netflix is the ancient apocalypse with Graham Hancock. You guys haven't seen it.

It's fantastic. But talk about someone that's disrupting. He's trying to disrupt the narrative of humanity and looking at the fact that there was an ancient civilization that existed before the Ice Age came. And basically they were the ones that taught the next human civilization how to progress and how to move forward and how to build shit and how to do all this stuff. And again, but he's seen as this coop, right? But he's not. He's just a non-expert and no one's willing to listen to him because of that. What are you guys saying about that?

Well, you know, I love what Graham Hancock does. I've said it before, but, you know, I disagree with his conclusion of how it all went down in terms of the ice age and things like that. But he just goes over a few pieces of evidence in that whole narrative. And there's so much more out in the world. And it's found on every single continent. But, you know, one thing that I think he did wrong is he spent probably 15 minutes every episode, you know, basically poking the tiger in the butt. And saying that these people are, you know, they're all trying to shut me down. And he was very contentious about it, which I get that.

He's spent the past 30 years of his life being shit on by these people. So I understand where he's coming from. But I don't think that was probably the most applicable approach that he could. have chosen. But yeah, you know, it kind of gets into the thing like tenure. I heard you guys talking about tenure last night a little bit. But, you know, these people get in these positions of authority and they're the expert. And now, you know, they make all of their money. They make all of their fame off of being the expert. Or, you know, like these Egyptologists, you know, these guys who, you don't run the narrative of how Egypt was formed and how the pyramid was built and how

all of these things are done. And to go against that, all of a sudden, you just get slanted. Yeah. It reminds me of like the child who never works and just waits for their wealthy parent to die. Oh, I can't like Prince Charles. Like, I can't wait until my mom dies. And I'm going to be king. You know, the same way the expert waits in school for 40 years for the professor to die.

So he can finally say, well, my idea is good too, you know. But he has to wait because he's not willing to go out there and do the work. He's not willing to go out there and be called a conspiracy theories. He's not willing to leave the walls of the neighborhood because it's dangerous. And I like what you said too, Jay, about this idea of specialization, how there's a specialist for everything. Like, there's a special for the left ventricle of the heart. And I think you can see that I think you can see that exact same picture in supply chains. Like what happens if one little supply chain breaks nowadays?

Like it's so specialized like, uh-oh, this plant, China. is shut down. No more iPhones. This plant in Vietnam set down. Okay, no more Cadillac converters. You know, like it's, it's, it's, we've gotten so specialized that now no one can do the whole. Right. Nobody can nobody sees the whole thing. And if you do if you do work at it from a perspective of, of the whole, you're fringe, right? You're, you're kind of put out as a like, like, like, why would you ever trust that person? Like I see this in help all the time. Working like in the naturopathic or natural medicine world that looks at things a lot more holistically, that scene is like kooky or, you know, someone that's that they're not a specialist. And we to be a generalist, right, to be a renaissance man is no longer seen as being valuable.

You're wasting your time. You can't come up. You know, you can't stick on one thing. Like you should study one thing for the rest of your life. Like that's insane. That's what a lot of people are doing with their careers. Well, that's because the incentive structures are aligned that thing. Yeah.

And, you know, we see it in farming, too, right? We have monocroping, you know. We know what that leads to eventually. We had a dustball. We figured out why we had a dustball, you know, and yet we're repeating that same process. But yet this time, we have some genetically modified seeds that are going to, you know, solve the entire problem for us. this time it's different.

This time it's different. Anytime you hear that, like, you just have to start laughing, right? Like, how can anybody say utter that sentence and be, and with a straight face? It's the same people who say, you know, we've always done it this way, so we're going to continue to do it this way. Okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a fascinating time to be alive.

And I, you know, I think there's a few ways to look at it. And I think you're seeing this play out across the nation. You're seeing one group of people live in fear. Oh, no, we're all going to die. This is common. And then you see another group of people that are like, dude, this is the perfect time to disrupt this beast. You know, what can we do?

And it's happening all around us. I mean, I see it happening in the group that we're in. I see these nodes being built. And though I can't thoroughly explain what the future holds, I feel as if we are in uncharted territory in some areas. I would agree, especially when you factor in our ability to have this type of communication across these distances. You know, that's for the first time in pretty much recorded history, we have the ability to interact at the individual level in mass without some sort of gatekeeping mechanism. or, you know, conglomeration or people or red tape to get into the newspaper or what have you. And I think that's where this kind of movement is really being driven from, ultimately.

Yeah, it's never been easier to find like-minded people that want to do something or that align with you. And that can be positive and negative. I guess you could find echo chambers that way. But it also allows you to find some areas of friction that can ignite the job. dream that you want to put on to the world. I was going to say, have you been on Reddit? I want to talk about like an echo chamber. It's on some levels. I feel like you,

if you're a contrarian or you bring up something that's opposing in the comment thread, the community comes around and downvotes it. And like, it's very hard to be an independent thinker, I find, especially in some of the subreddits, right? And more silly ones, like, but it's fascinating how you can drive people into thinking all one way and then it's everyone's we're good right that's the social credit score piece that I think is so interesting of how we can all be like-minded and to not be like-minded is you know you're an outcast so it's then it's like where the outcast communities right and that's that's uh I think a place that we can

be paying attention to the fringes of like who's saying that who's why are they being canceled right now that's a question that I'm often asking like instead of assuming the worst like why Why is this person going through this right now? What's this speaking to and how is it against the larger narrative? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, these echo chambers are very detrimental. And I think this gets into, you know, why does this happen? And, you know, I feel this happens because partly education, right?

But from a philosophical standpoint, the ideologies that people are ascribed to, the tribes that they participate in. They're not built upon foundations that are, you know, that drive creativity, that drive, you know, different ideas that, you know, thrive upon debate. You know, there used to be a great, there used to be great debates, right? When's the last time we've really seen a great debate, you know, in relative context to before? And so when all of a sudden we remove, you know, the intellectual ability for us to sit and, you know, hash out ideas, things become an echo chamber. And then back to where we started, you know, you throw in some consumerism and then you make it emotional.

And then that echo chamber just, you know, echoes back even harder. Yeah. It just, it just helps me reaffirm that, you know, there's certain ingredients you need to build a fire. and if you take away one of those ingredients you're not going to get a fire. If you take out the oxygen, you're not going to get the fire. If you don't have the fuel, you're not going to get the fire. And it seems that on some level, you know, there's a

conscious effort to take away at least one of those elements wherever people are turning to. I don't know if it's necessarily, again, I don't think a little less tinfoil had. I don't think it's necessary like some concerted centralized effort. But I think, you know, when you align, if you just look at like a game theory perspective, you align the incentives, and then you align, you know, the kind of loose structures that exist

that are kind of upholding these incentives, all of a sudden, you don't really have to have a group like that. You don't have to have some conglomerate that's trying to pull all these streams because the people and the players that are in the game are going to act in their own self-interest. And that self-interest is the continued, you know, basically extrademarking. of value from the common individual. Yeah, we were talking last night. Like, you know, there's, I think, I think Paul said it. Like, there's the, there's not the will, but there's the possibility.

Like, if we could just change citizens united and maybe change, if you could change citizens united and say the corporations are not people and you could add into the charter of every corporation that not, it's not the profit of the shareholder, but all. also the well-being of the people. I think it fundamentally change the way business works in this country. What do you think? Sure, but how are you going to sell that? Right.

There's no will to do it. And even if there was some will to do it, I think you end up in a position where all the people who are profiting off of this structure are going to align against you. And that's a lot of power and that's a lot of money. And that's a lot of, you know, ticker tape and red tape and court dates and lawyers and all sorts of other things that bogged. down the ability to invoke that change.

Yeah. You know, this, this, this conversation seems to me to be one that has had by probably greater minds than, than me for sure. But I remember Peter Thiel talking about one way to get through some of all this minutia and stuff would be to start like, you know, your own little, your own, um, uh, special economic zone. You know, if you had like a sort of island type or a floating island or something like that, you could theoretically create your own, you know, NGO or your SEZ and then you could get away from some of this stuff. Like there are these special economic zones throughout the world.

There are these non-government organizations that pop up in different countries around the world where, you know, you are a giant corporation and you abide by these five countries laws. But you've got to have tons of money to be able to do that. That game is for the mega wealthy. If you're not, if you are not generational money, you don't really have a chance. Right. And so that's where I think, you know, we institute a different model. And you create that, we create that known system like Terrible Libre Project, where the individual now is directly benefiting at the highest level possible from their effort into the system.

Now if all of the individuals are, you know, now you're now back to the game theory perspective, now what sort of incentive structures are there? Well, do I want to go work for an Apple where, yeah, I'll make six figures, but I'm beholden to all of these things? Or do I want to work for myself where I can still make six figures or potentially even more? And then when I do, you know, all of my ingenuity, all of my creativity is mine. I own. And, you know, I think if you create that proper model, that's when you can really compete in that marketplace. You don't need to have the big generation of money. You don't need to be a big NGO. You could just be a loose conglomeration of like-minded individuals that, you know, have a same charter, for instance, and how, you know, just like we were talking before where, you know, those,

you don't need a big group who kind of dictates everything. They're going to, they're going to self-align based upon their interest. The same thing would happen at the individual level. And that's what we don't trust. I think at the end of the day is we're, I feel like we're so conditioned to really not trust the individual. And that, because we're kind of told to not trust ourselves. And I think this is one of the biggest things what religion does is takes that away, right? The ability to truly trust oneself, especially within like Christianity is like you're evil, right? You're a sinner. You can't trust yourself. So you remove the trust of the self and then it becomes you have to then you you trust the group or you trust group

think not the individual and then the group will then align itself to to itself but if we again get to this like where we see the reality like if individuals we would align as a community of people because we our self-interest is your self-interest like that's what it needs to believe in the good of humanity that we would find a way to align all of our interests as individuals instead of it being happening to us at these corporate levels. Right. And, you know, it's very important on, you know, how that's worded and how those, in how you basically onboard these people and in the structure that exists.

You know, because most people are really afraid of something like that because they feel that at some level they're going to lose their autonomy. Somebody wants to take a piece of the pie. You know, all of these different factors that, you know, are fear tactics, essentially. But to be able to overcome that with the proper model, now all of a sudden, you, you know, imagine to our example, all of the Subaru owners paying $4.99 a month and how many millions of them are and how much money that was per year. Now all of a sudden, if you get some sort of similar conglomeration except as the individuals and all of that money now can flow into bettering the system and growing that network and creating more opportunity for those individuals, you can compete against these things. Yeah, you have $495 for a group of 20,000 people,

and that money is going into a pot to make everybody better. You know, it's not being siphoned off by a bonus here or a salesholder there. Shareholders, yeah, yeah, you're not responsible to any of those dummies. Yeah, and then all of a sudden, you know, from that pool, now we can afford more infrastructure. We can build better systems. We can provide services within that structure to, you know, allow people to cross over red tapes, to grow their businesses, to, you know, provide, you know,

the ability for people to talk and have communications and debate ideas and, you know, all of these things. And when if we can align those, I think we end up in a very strong position as, you know, a group of people where now you can look at like, you know, an Apple and be like, okay, well, we don't need to do it that way. We can take all of that money that is being siphoned off and we can build a stronger network of people. We can provide them with all sorts of different services to grow their individual stake in these things. And now all of a sudden we're in the game. We have pieces on the board.

It kind of sounds like a Republican in some ways. I mean, so when I've been thinking about this over the years, the idea is, you know, take the things that work from, you know, different aspects of what we've tried and experimented with as, you know, throughout history. And, you know, take the ones that are going to benefit the individuals, grow individual wealth, have the ability to create a system that, you know, is not just a republic. It's not just a meritocracy. It's not just socialistic. But yet merge all of these things into a novel idea, a novel model that, you know, it doesn't detract from, you know, somebody coming in and being a part of it, doesn't try to benefit off the backs of other people. And yet can still manage to compete in the marketplace.

Yeah. You know, another thing that we haven't talked about that it seems like it does is it seems like it, it doesn't reward fraudulent behavior, which is something that the current system, it puts a premium on. Right. And you really can combat that when you start to have things like a one person,

one vote type idea. And because then, you know, and especially if you attach some transparency to all of that stuff, now, you know, there's, you don't really, there's not a lot of shadows to hide in. You know, those passive corruption that exist in all the bureaucracies that we have today vanish very quickly. Yeah.

It's a fascinating concept to think about. I think it's right. You know, I think that this is one of many parallel structures that we're going to see beginning to pop up around not only where we are, but, you know, there's parallel constructions that have been happening. probably in Sri Lanka, probably all over the world wherever there's strife, right? Like you're seeing, they used to call it the black market, but it's just a parallel economy. Yeah, and I think we're going to see a lot of them pop up. And I've seen a lot of ideas that kind of have some similarities and some parallels to this pop up. But, you know, a lot of these things are still founded in the ideal of, hey, I'm going to start this great idea.

And, you know, the four of us, we're going to kick ass and make millions of dollars because we're, going to be the first movers in this. You know, we're going to have a larger stake. And, you know, they so again, back to our consumerism and, you know, the stage that's been that we've been indoctrinated into, you know, that is such an incentive in this world today that a lot of, you know, the novel ideas are just a rehashing of the old idea, but you know, with a new paint job. So, so I'm curious. Like, What's your guys' perspective? Like, thinking through some of these ideas and what we're doing, like, what Elon's doing on Twitter?

Like, from your worldview, where you're at, do you feel like, is he helping Twitter right now? Like, what's the narrative? Like, what do you think? Well, I mean, helping Twitter is a pretty big statement. You know, I'm pretty sure he's helping himself pretty well. And the people who put up the money to privatize Twitter, I think what's going to happen is they are going to all of a sudden bring it out as a public company after, you know, gets more traction and all this stuff and kind of exactly what he did with Tesla. This is from his playbook. You know, he

privatized it and then re-released it on the market and look at Tesla shares today. You know, there are a thousand times what they were when it was originally privatized. And so I think that's kind of the playbook that we're going to see in Twitter. In terms of betterment of Twitter, I think the product will get better because there's the incentive to kind of, you know, control that marketplace, that social media square, town square. And he's said as much, he wants to make it like a we chat, you know, where you can do all sorts of transactions on it where, you know, everything's basically included in that single, singular app.

Yeah. And I think, too, just by privatizing it, like he's going to put a lot of pressure on all the other social media companies. You know, when they were all public, they probably had. I don't know this for sure, but I'm sure that there was at least some influence from, you know, I don't know if they had interlocking boards of directors, but I bet you there is some pretty big influence between this board and this board and this board. Like, hey, they're doing that. You know, they're getting, it's almost like price fixing.

Like, hey, we're all going to sell at this price. Hey, we're all going to have this policy. Hey, we're all going to do this to keep 230. But when he goes private, all of a sudden, he's the, he's the upstart at the mafia family table. Like, look, I don't need to do. do that anymore. I don't serve that guy anymore. I'm doing my own thing. I'm going my own way. It's like that movie Goodfellas when Joe Pechie goes

to Vegas and all of a sudden those other gangsters like, hey, well, what are you doing over here? He's like, we're over here now. Hey, we're over here now. You know what I mean? That's a fairly decent impression. Elon Musk is like, hey, we're over here now. Yeah, we're over here. You know, and that allows him some freedom

to go and cut stuff. It allows him to break the woke. It allows him to give the finger to some of these fat, ugly lobbyists that were just coasting on money, coasting on fumes and we're sitting in their positions. And so I think that he does have, you know, at least a window to do some disruption and force these other companies to lean out a little bit, you know, like force them to start playing at a level that they should have been playing at 10 years ago. So I think that would

help Twitter if that answers the question. So George, you see a little bit more of, I altruistically, like, you know, Elon's like trying to do something with this, whereas Ben, I hear you're a little bit more of like, he's just going to be making a bunch more money. I think both. I think that by, you know, I think that by, he sees that people want change. And I don't think that he's altruistic or that he has these grand motives to make the world better. But I see there's a market share there that no one's tap. that not only people were not tapping into,

but they were just flat out denying, like these people are dumb. We don't want any of their money. So there's this giant, there's a giant mass of people lined up to give someone money and no one will sell to him. He's like, I'll sell to you. I'll sell to you at a premium.

Come on over here. Those guys are all dumb. Come over here. You know, and he has the niche. He has the new Apple. Tesla is the new Apple. Apple is dying. Apple's dying on the vine.

You know, their Foxcon is an apple with a worm in it. And you have Tesla over here that is this new thing. And they're like, we'll build a new phone. What do you want us to do? We'll do anything. Like they, they are what Apple was 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago. You know, they're the new, they're the flower. They're the apple blossom flower beginning to fruit. And so I, I don't know that he's altruistic, but I think he has positioned himself in a spot to be ripe. I wouldn't call him altruistic. I I think, you know, it's it's the idea of altruism to benefit, you know, if, if all of a sudden, you know, I can cater to that vast market that George is talking about and it'll appear as altruism, but at the end of the day, you know, the structure is still the same thing. The profit and centers are still the same way. Where that money is going to flow is going to be similar to where it would flow from an Apple perspective. So, you know, I don't think that there's, you know, some greater good at the core of this.

Now, even though some greater good might be accomplished by a lot of these steps that he's trying to take, I don't find that there's some sort of, you know, core altruism behind it. Could be right. I don't know the guy, but, you know. What I think it's interesting because he's, I mean, again, when we think about some of the stuff we talk about, you know, especially like psychedelics. He's one of the probably, you know, the most famous people that's talked about it. I don't know.

Like, I haven't heard Tim Cook talk about doing psychedelics. Like, you know, going on, you know, smoking weed on Rogan and Stockshares Tumble. Like, he's someone that's kind of been this disruptor of sorts and similar things that that we maybe would want to see disruption around as well. So I don't ever know to trust the guy and be like, okay, I'm into what you're doing, man. like i don't know it's kind of weird but like i'm into it or is it like you know is he evil is he you know the richest man in the world in the world and he's not iron man he's you know he's the villain i don't know i don't know i don't think it's evil just as much as i don't think it's altruism

you know i think this is again back to the incentive structures of the world i think this is just that incentive structure playing out at just a larger scale You know, there's no evil necessarily behind it. There's, you know, there's not, you know, he's not trying to pull the rug out off of underage. He's just trying to make more money. And if you look at kind of the stuff that he's talked about over the years, he has some ideas about, you know, humanity and, you know, industrialization, you know, manufacturing, getting off this planet, things like that that are probably more aligned with his core motivations. in those pursuits, I think you do get altruism and a greater good that comes from a lot of these things. But I don't think that him at a personal level is trying to be that some sort of savior or some sort of devil.

You know, I want to throw this out at you guys. Like, do you remember, like, staying with my dead apple and new apple, as above, so below, death and rebirth. Do you guys remember, like in 1980, the first Apple computer commercial was during the Super Bowl, and it was a play on 1984. And it was the new Mac was coming. Everybody remember that? And like they're running. And like all of a sudden, like all these IBM guys are like running off a cliff. And then like at the end, this girl jumps out and she takes a sledgehammer and she smashes the telescreen, which is like the 1984.

And then I think the tagline was something like Apple computers. Let me tell you why 1984 won't be 1984. Like that's gone full circle. Like Tim Cook is now the Goldstein. You know what I mean? Like look at like they went from being, we're not 1984, to having this mass group of uniform robots in China making things like an assembly line.

And so like what I see happening full circle. Like Steve Jobs, psychedelic guy, right? That guy did all kinds of LSD, talks about it, books. So he comes out and he was kind of the beginning of the left movement. He was the beginning of coming in and getting rid of the old blue, I think they called it, IBM, you know, big blue or whatever, something like that. And this was this rigid Republican suit and ties. We have computers. And here comes this upstart Apple. And Apple fundamentally changed the game. And they took and look how far left we are now. I think you could, I think you can make the argument that Steve Jobs was the

catalyst for the radical left and the Democrats to come in and sweep into power. He may have been the blue wave that brought big tech to the crest where they are now. And if we can just think about that for a minute, might it be that Elon is the beginning surge of a red wave? Elon is this new technology that's coming in. And I think what you're going to see is just like Apple became this hardcore left-leaning, you know, epitome of wokeness, then so too might Tesla become this epitome of the right. And you can kind of see it happening. Like all these people on the left are so afraid of him.

Oh, he's a terrorist. Oh, my God, I can't believe he's doing these things. He's going to kill people. Like, you know, but if it follows the same cycle, I think there's a real case you're going to see a hardcore right turn. And I've seen this on the fringes. Like I was telling Paul and these guys last night, you know, when you see, when you see, like I listen to Tim Cook, not Tim Cook, but Tim, boy, it seems like those guys are taking a pretty hardcore right turn. It seems like the youth today are taking a pretty big right turn.

I think Nick Fuentes is taking a big right turn. I think Kanye is taking a pretty big right turn. And I think that there's people in this place. I made the argument last night that I think by 2030, you're going to start to see homeless people just being wrapped up and taken away. Like there's so much crime. getting sick and tired of it. And not only will, it's probably unfair that it'll happen, but I think that these large centers of homeless people, like in, you know, Portland and stuff like this, you know, we saw it with the riots. I think that you're going to see these younger

people that get upset about it and get pissed off. And I think you're going to see people calling for people to be rounded up and taken away. And this is this right turn, this sort of, I hate to use this term, but a cleansing right waves that moves out the wokeness. You know, they've been trying to get rid of it for a while, and it seems to be intensifying. And I think that the same way we saw the blue Democrats being born through Apple, we're now seeing this red wave be born through Tesla. What do you guys think? Well, that's a lot to unpack in a rant. You know, one thing I would say from the tech perspective was that when Apple came around, And, you know, their proprietary system, they always have been.

And it was one of those things where, you know, the open source communities and everything like that, they were kind of the antithesis of that. And it kind of propelled, you know, a lot of the computer manufacturers end up going open source and stop these proprietary contracts and all of these things. So I don't know that it was the beginning of kind of the blue wave type idea. Yeah. Because, you know, Steve Jobs, he was an innovator, kind of. I mean, you know, he stood on the shoulders of giants for sure.

And I don't, and I think that was just an emerging marketplace. And so there was this, you know, competing ideals in this emerging marketplace. I think the technology was then kind of back, it kind of backbone this movement. Because as much as we were talking about echo chambers before, I think, you know, this kind of created the modern echo chambers that kind of led to this woke kind of movement. But I don't know, I don't know if you could call that a catalyst. And that's just the first part of the rim. Yeah, I could see that there's, you know, there's definitely a movement on Twitter for, you know, obviously people who've been banned are coming back, all of these things.

And, but I don't know that it's going to end up in this, in this massive shift in national identity. I think I would, and I would, you know, bet 10, sense on this, I think it ends up in more of a national divorce type situation. I mean, I think it is interesting to us thinking about jobs and Musk. And one area that they're similar is, to your point, then, you know, jobs being, you know, kind of an inventor, I think the same thing would be said of Musk. Like, he's kind of this person.

Like, he didn't start Tesla. He didn't start, you know, Twitter. He didn't start any of this stuff. He came in and sure, he's done stuff and he's maximized and he's had influence, but it's not like he was the inventor. So he, too, is standing on the shoulders of giants to have this influence that is happening. And, you know, George, I can see where on some levels the celebrityism that came around jobs. Like for the first time, a CEO of a company is now a celebrity,

someone that pop culture respects and honors. And in that way, it ushered in more of this maybe blue thinking, this more liberal thinking, because now you're starting to see celebrity outside of sports and television and entertainment, and you're now seeing it in business. And that good business was aligning to the more liberal agenda, right? Like traditionally it was always bad business.

If you're at least in those camps of celebrity, and sport and whatnot to, you know, be more conservative in those spaces is always seen as a negative. So sure, he ushered in some sort of, of quote unquote, democratic blueness, if you want to call it that, into that space. And Elon, you know, is maybe now saying, okay, cool, we can go this other direction now. And, you know, you can be this powerful person and buck the agenda. Because that's kind of what Jobs is doing, right? The agenda of the red, the Reaganism and all of that, like he was kind of bucking that system. So in the same way, we see in a trench system and someone's coming in and bucking it,

whether it's red or blue. Kind of all the same at the end of the day on my, from my perspective, like they're not really letting people have that much power on some levels. Like it's still just kind of these puppets of what's really happening. But I think what's interesting is this correlation, this is something that I was watching, someone that I respect this video they're talking through,

this idea that, you know, if we were to go back to the 1850s, right before the Civil War, you had this really interesting movement taking place between the Democrats and the Whigs. And the Republicans weren't on the scene yet. And at that time, there was a lot of conversation around, you know, ending slavery, but there are these extreme abolitionists. Like, and think about that statement alone. Like today, if you're like, oh, he was an extreme abolitionist. like what, he wanted, you know, freedom for people?

Like, what's extreme about abolition? But there were these groups. And they were not getting any movement politically so much so that Lincoln didn't want to be associated with them. And they were the Republicans. And so the first time he ran for Senate, he didn't align with them and he lost. And I'm not, I may be getting some of my history a little bit off. But it's interesting because he then decides to align with the Republicans and he

gains the presidency and joining in on trying to bring in some moderate conversation. Like he didn't run on the extreme abolitionist kind of agenda. He ran on a moderate abolitionist agenda to get elected. And today, do we see the same thing happening with free speech? And by no means am I trying to say that I can't say something equating it to slavery. I know these are very vastly different things. Yet, there is definitely control being had. And there's those that are the extreme free speechers, right?

The Alex Jones, the Elon Musk's and whatever. And like this next movement that's going to take place, is it going to come from a third party? Is it going to come out of something that doesn't really we see? And will it follow the agenda of the extreme free speech or are we going to find some moderate free speech coming about? I don't know. What do you guys resonate from that? I don't know. Something about this isn't sitting right with me attaching it to red and blue.

partly because I agree with you, Jason, in the sense that it's more of a uniparty system when you back up and look at, you know, policies and how that's changed over the years. And, you know, the alignment of the money situation, I think, is perhaps why I'm not so sold on either direction of this. And I think the same. And I think the is much more driven by the profit incentive than it is from a political type of agenda. I don't know. Still thinking about it. How much of the free speech?

I'm just curious. How much of the free speech thing do you think is going to become more of an agenda item, whether it's the red or some other, but more of something we see in politics that we should have the right to free speech? Because that's in question on some levels, I think. we're seeing this really kind of come up right now, like, what can you and can you not say? And I think Elon taking over Twitter was this idea of like the free speech movement, right? He's going to open up the forums.

He wasn't going to cancel people anymore. So are we seeing a free speech movement begin? And should there be a free speech movement? Is our speech even in question right now? That's interesting to think about. You know, is it a wedge issue? Is it, is it immigration? Is it abortion?

Is it, hey, free speech, you guys fight about this? I think that there's something to be said about, you know, what speech can do. Like, what happens to the groups out there if Twitter is a lot, if people are allowed to say whatever they want? I mean, was there really, like, how much of the censorship was having an effect on the reality of people's lives on Twitter? You know, was it really affecting that people? Was it just affecting a few people online? Or was it truly affecting the way people think? I don't know.

Yeah, those are hard measurements to make. I'm sure hindsight will probably be 2020 to further we move down this timeline. I think if depending on who you pulled, you would get, you know, both sides of that answer. You know, there would be people who say, by the elimination of all of these Alex Jones and Donald Trump and of these things, now you remove those people from the conversation, now it, you know, back to the echo chamber, now it just becomes an echo chamber. To what degree was that of reality that was actually impacting people's lives? It was a very interesting question. And I guess, you know, you can measure that in quite a few different ways, you know, the policies that have been enacted,

you know, what sort of, you know, this whole new speech type idea that we've been talking about for the past few weeks. And I would say, you know, just as an intuition, I would say it definitely affected the narrative. I mean, if you look at, you know, backward where this conversation started, the emotional aspect of the consumerism that we've moved into. You know, you had all of these large conglomerate companies, you know, your Disney, knees, you had all of these places where now they were very much promoting this agenda. So what sort of, you know, how much does that impact the individual on a day-to-day basis? That would be a hard thing to quantify, I think, but we're thinking about for sure. Yeah, you know, I think it goes back.

I think we can show at least correlate that social media has been. been used to fomit uprisings. If we look at the, right, so if the Arab Spring, I'm sure there's some things that like Indonesia, I think I read some things. So if we know it can work, if we know people pay billions of dollars to be on the board to influence what's said in other countries, if we know that some of these social media companies are defense contractors, it kind of correlates that it works. So if we can use that as a foundation, then I think we can say, yeah.

Twitter does have a more than minimal effect on how people view their country, how people view authority. So, so yeah, I think that in that, looking back on those aspects of it, that if Elon Musk were to allow free speech, it would change the way we see discourse in this nation. Like I tweeted, why couldn't there be, you know, I tweeted this to Elon, not that he'll ever read it, but, you know, why could, you know how they have the $8 checkmark? Like, what if they had once a month debates where there could be a poll that goes out? Who do you want to see debate this month? How about Medi Hassan versus Nick Fuentes? You know, how about Jordan Peterson versus Eric Dyson? Like, if you could set this up and people would love it.

And you could now begin to teach discourse on a fundamental national level. in a way that's respectful, meaningful, and can actually solve problems. Good points for sure. And I think, you know, the ability to have those sort of public debates, like we were talking about earlier, you know, we've been removed from that. You know, the idea that these, you know, intellectual behemists would get together and hash out ideas. It's just something that's pretty foreign to the vast majority of our consumer-based society. I think Luxe needs to be the moderator of that, by the way, George. I'm sorry?

Let's get Lex Friedman as the moderator of the debate. Like, it'd be an incredible debate moderator, just like going right at people, like, you know. But, yeah, it's interesting. I don't think we're that far away from seeing some of those conversations starting to be half. Well, I think they're happening, but it's the, it's not necessarily them actually happening. It's them being broadcast in mass, right? And I you know to George's point and you know Twitter does stand out a unique opportunity to facilitate something like that. That would be a very I would be full forward that idea.

That would be awesome. I would subscribe to that. I would subscribe to that too. You hear that, Elon? On the same token, you know, I do. Do, does he have the ability to do something like that is a different? question. I mean, you could argue and say, yeah, he owns the company so he could do it. But I mean, in terms of making it a huge thing. Yeah. I guess, you know, if you look at,

did you guys see his, uh, his poll for Donald Trump should be reinstated? 70% right. It got right. It was actually very much closer than that, but it got it garnered, you know, uh, what was it 100 or no, it was 10 million votes. Whoa. Yeah, so 10 million people weighed in on this. So, you know, there's something to be said there for sure. If all of a sudden 10 million people were aware of something like this and watching it go down, I mean, does that elicit some change? I think potentially, yeah.

But we're also talking, you know, 10 million in verse 350 million in this country is kind of a drop in the bucket too. How many people are really getting, you know, their, you know, their daily dose of propaganda or information or conversation from a Twitter. You know, I think those would be interesting numbers to be had. But, hmm.

Yeah. That's a great idea. I would subscribe for it. Yeah, I mean, it's, even if he couldn't do it himself, just him, you know,

suggesting it or, you know, like, you know how many advertisers? Like, hey, Elon, you want your advertisers, back have debates.

They would flock to that. You know what I mean? Well, maybe because, you know, those debates are going to touch on the topics that are highly sensitive. Could you imagine a debate about vaccines brought to you by Pfizer? Oh, boy. Yeah. I know exactly what that sounds like.

Yeah. So, you know, back to him having the ability to do it, where does that get kind of shut down? You know, all of a sudden, And if you're pissing off, you know, those types of people, the amount of alignment, you know, Section 230 all of a sudden gets a little bit of an update. Yeah. That's a good point. It's a good point. But yeah, it's, I think that there's, there is, and maybe that maybe this is exactly what people are worried about. Maybe this is, you know, maybe this is what people are afraid of is that the, I think you've said, before, Ben, that technology is not good or bad. It's a tool, and it can be used for either.

Technology doesn't care what it's used for. You know, and it can be used to liberate or it can be used to constrain. It can be used to tie something up or it can be used to free them. And it comes down to, it comes down to us as people. It comes down to us as people that are willing to start parallel economies, those of us that are willing to be called conspiracy theories, those of us that willing to go way out on the branch and try to stand there. You know, it's these ideas. You know, Paul and I last night were talking about important people, and we brought up the idea, we brought up Tours video

and how he was able to stand in front of all of us via video and talk about, hey, here's these things that I did. Here's the situation I put myself in. And we were talking about how, you know, I think Paul said something like, that's staring the demon in the face. and not blinking, you know. In a video that I saw him when I was speaking to him,

and he told me about how he went away to prison and how he had faced the courtroom. After he got out of prison, he went back and apologized to his ex-girlfriend's father for putting him in that position, you know, and it's like, dude, that is, I think, hey, Paul, are you there? Yeah, I disappeared for a minute, but I'm back now.

What were you saying was the highest form of empathy? Can you reiterate that? that topic a little bit last night, like the highest form of empathy? Well, I mean, you know, it's the ability or, you know, to, um, to truly put yourself in another one's, you know, position. And so when we're talking about Tor, and he, in his video, he didn't like get into what he did that sent him to prison, but, um, you hadn't interviewed him before. And so you were sharing a little bit of that and, and how he was able to,

you know, really look at everybody that was in that courtroom while, you know, when he was being sentenced and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, based on what you were telling me, right? So, and be able to see everybody as, as being a victim of his, whether it was, you know, like, whether it's, like, whether it's the people on the other side of the aisle who were supporting, you know, the real victims in, in, in the things that he did, or even, like, you know, you know, his own families. his own family and friends that because of his actions, you know, he's in a way victimized them too. And so to be able to kind of see that and to understand, you know, what all these people are going through because of your actions and then own up to those things, you know, own them 100%. You know, it's a very, very powerful tool. You know, it shows that, you know, it's a person that has, you know, a depth that, you know, a depth that. very few have. Yeah, we were talking about this idea of empathy, Paul,

and this idea of radical change, and this idea of speech. And one of the ideas we had come up with, we were talking about Twitter and Elon, wouldn't it be amazing if something, if Twitter rolled out like a monthly debate series where two serious people

were going to go head to head and talk about some of the biggest ideas of our time? Like, you know, maybe you have Jordan Peterson versus Eric Dyson talking about the idea of, you know, racism or you have like just these people that thoroughly understand the concept of language and genuinely care about solving problems. Wouldn't that be something that Twitter or one of these huge multinational social media companies could do and really create positive change? I mean, I think it sounds like it would be interesting to watch or to listen to. But, you know,

When I look at social media companies and I look at like, you know, news networks, I kind of think that, you know, in some ways, you know, by their algorithms that they're trying to control the narrative. And so when you have people that are like arguing, you know, against, you know, racism or corporate dominance or whatever it may be or the rights of workers, you know, then I think that's going to be a turnoff to a lot of people who pay the bills that. you know at Twitter and you know or Instagram you know I think those you know corporations are generally on the wrong side of public opinion and so when you you'd have to really like you know the topics would have to be like pretty narrow right you couldn't get into like what was really you know plaguing the world yeah that's that's a was kind of where I was, that were my thought process went to, too, is, you know, what sort of things are going to be allowed to, into what extent? That's, I think it could work because

he did privatize it, but I don't know where that money came from to privatize it. I think that would be an important factor in that equation, you know, who's really foot in the bill? Because Elon didn't put up his own money to do it. You know, he was, you know, it came out that, what, Larry Ellison gave him a couple billion dollars, a couple other people chipped in some billions of dollars. You know, who are all those people, what are their interests and what's their end goals with this idea?

Well, I mean, like that money gets paid back to the advertising, right? Theoretically, I mean, that's a lot of money. Right. Well, I mean, part of the program. And Twitter historically ran at a, oh, sorry, you broke up, Paul, what were you saying? No, I'm good, go ahead, keep on. I was going to say, historically, Twitter was running out a deficit, you know, for the longest and longest of times. I don't even know if they ever were posting profits.

It was always the promise of profits. For the longest time when it first came out, they struggled to even figure out how to monetize the thing. I mean, it wasn't, it was like seven, eight years after Twitter came out where they actually had monetization of ads and things like that that they were able to get into the platform. So how much money does Twitter actually make would probably be an important factor in that equation. Yeah, I don't, I don't go on Twitter. I don't know a lot about it. I was there from pretty much the beginning on Twitter. I think my account was registered in 2000, or that was my second account.

is 2008. Oh, wow. Yeah. Is it enjoyable, Ben? Oh, I've never actually used it for what people use Twitter for. Yeah. There's some interesting ideas like dead internet theory. Like, you know, there's only like a very small percentage of people that even are on the internet that are even on active and the majority are all bots.

Right. Yeah. And I think, you know, we see Twitter. social media and news and all this stuff, how many people are actually really participating is a very interesting question. Because, you know, if the loudest one percent's on there and just making a ruckus, all of a sudden they sound like, you know, they're the majority of people because they're out there making a ruckus where in reality it's a fraction of the population. It's like that it's like that news crew that like just films like eight people, but it looks

like it's a riot, but then you pan back and there's only eight people. I mean, on some levels, I think that's the rise of social influencers. Like, the only way they kept this thing going to say, oh, certain people are going to be able to make money and they're going to be the ones you want to follow because the average person isn't going to create enough content to keep me entertained, right? Like, let's be honest, you can only see other kids' pictures of their children so long as it's like, I fucking love Facebook, right? it's an entertainment thing and at some point you have to pay your entertainers and I think that's where you see the rise of social influencers is again it became this cool thing and it was like you could do it all on your own but like freaking China figured that out with TikTok and how quickly they could get you know people to adopt a brand new social platform with built in entertainers and again the ability to pay them so everyone flocked to that and and it's really interesting

interesting how without, without social influencers, people would stop getting on Instagram. Because they don't really care about their shit. They care about the influencership. That's who they follow. That's who they're engaging with. I would say that's the bulk majority of content that goes viral is through these, you know, influencers. And without that content, what's the point? I would challenge what like viral. I'm not sure anything really goes viral by itself hardly anymore. The people that are influenced, they're no longer, it used to be, it seems to me, I don't know for sure, but it seems to me there was an organic process. Back in the day when you had full access to your 500,000 followers or your 1,000 followers, back in the day when you could post a video and all your followers would see your stuff, you had an opportunity to organically become an influencer. Now you have to buy that spot, the same way you have to be an anchor, the same way you have to be part of this click.

it like it's it's it's it's almost like it's been captured well and that's you know that's why tic-tok actually rose so fast is because their algorithm um was heavily weighted for you know new people to the platform to be put in front of multiple eyes and have that opportunity to go viral that was their algorithm was to you know basically boost up all of these new upstarts and so as somebody who wanted to be a social influencer now became very easy to become go viral on TikTok but it was all artificial. So they took kind of the different path instead of having people pay for the spot, they decided that we'll just make everybody have a piece of that spot. And then, you know, their whole business model was data harvesting. It wasn't actually, you know,

generating money from ad revenue or something like that. Yeah, it's interesting to think about how if how, how, how controlled the algorithm is. Like it, you know, maybe it's just wishful thinking to, to wish that, hey, let, let it be meritocracy. Let's see what people want to see. And then the argument is that is, well, everyone just wants to see flat earth and conspiracy theory.

So we have to show them CBS News and CNN, you know. And, you know, it is kind of an entirely manufactured thing these days. And those algorithms, I mean, what's this? Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan, right? And he very explicitly said, oh, yeah, we fine-tune these things in X, Y, and Z different ways in order to, you know, create that narrative and create what sort of content people are actually exposed to. So.

So our experiences, right? So then we were like, well, okay, yeah, I want my experience enhanced. So, you know, that's the consumeristic mentality. of I'm just going to sit here and consume and make it better for me and I'll keep giving you whatever you know you can harvest my data because I don't really think about it so there you go keep making it better for me I'm okay with it and at some level people have completely sold out to that right you know I think the vast majority of people probably at some level have just accepted that reality is the reality that we live in yeah all the while it's interesting China is using TikTok they

Like their children, all they show children is like educational materials. Right. And they actually limit the amount of time that can use. Yeah, 45 minute time limit on children versus what they're doing. Like, so again, TikTok's an interesting one. Again, looking at its level of influence and like what's really going on kind of behind the scenes there. Yeah. It blows my mind to think like, here's a stat from my, from my channel.

In the last year, I have over 96,000 hours of watch time. Like that's years. Like that's, I mean, if the one person watched for years, I get no dollars. But like you have 96,000, like someone has watched 96,000 hours of your content, you get nothing. That seems a little sinister to me. You know what I mean? Like that's working for free. But, you know, it's, and I'm, I'm a micro channel.

There's people that have, you know, probably millions of hours of watch time. And it just, it blows my mind to think about the, the, the, how much content is out there. It is kind of amazing to think that people could sift through these billions of hours of content and find some things. You know what I mean? I guess you have to have, if you're one of these companies, I guess you don't have to. Like, I don't know. It's interesting, just a sheer magnitude.

You have to have an algorithm at some level. Right. Yes, yes, yes. Now, what that algorithm entails is an entirely different animal altogether. You know To your watched hours point You know like the Tim Poolecast or whatever I think I've seen them have some 40,000 people watching that live

And that goes on for a couple hours So there you go that's 800,000 hours in one episode of content that's being consumed Wow Wow So you know these are big numbers and I think we as humans are really terrible with big numbers to begin with And so I think that's where, you know, there's kind of, it's, it's a little scammy to your point. You know, it is you're, you're getting free labor and free content essentially. And, you know, yeah, you're giving these people maybe a percentage of two of the actual potential

revenue that could be had. And this goes back to, you know, the idea of, you know, having different parallel structures and setting up different marketing models and business models that would be able to out-compete these because now if you can if you can take that and give it back to the individuals now all of a sudden you know all of that becomes really big revenue for people and and it's not filtered off in shipped off to shareholders so so think about this here's an interesting way to look at this that came on my radar recently Ari Ari Sharfar I think is how you say his last name He's a cheer.

And he had a special on Netflix that came out about a year ago. And he just released one and he went to YouTube to release it. So instead of getting like Netflix to like put out his special, he went straight to YouTube and just released the entire special for free on YouTube. His Netflix special got somewhere around a million views. So did okay, but like a million people, that's not great for something, you know, a special on Netflix. On YouTube, in the last three weeks, he's gotten 4.2 million views of his content. So instead of going through like the gated, like, oh, I got a Netflix special, how cool, right?

I mean, he's a known art. He's a known comedian. So obviously he already hasn't. His channel has a 191,000 subscribers. The thing about that, he doesn't even, he's got almost. 2,000 subscribers. That's not sorry 200,000 subscribers. So that's nothing in the YouTube land. And he puts out a special for free and he gets four million views. So what do you? Well, how much and then how much revenue does he does he get off of that? Right. And I'm sure he's

making some off of it, you know, his channel and commercials and whatever. So he's making some, but probably not, you know, so what do you do? Do you have Netflix right to check and you put out something and you know only a million people are going to see it or do you put the bill and put it out on youtube know you have a far better chance of reaching millions of people right and i think we're seeing that movement there was another uh comic andrew shultz who did something very similar um and but instead of just releasing it for free first he set it up behind a paywall on his own website and he raked in bank lots and lots and lots of them and because you know everybody who was buying I think it was something I want to say it was under 20 bucks might have been 15 bucks or

something like that but you know that was all his money and then after that he released it on to YouTube to the tunes of I think it's over 10 million some views so that's yeah disruptor piece right kind of coming back to like using these platforms using this content using the fact that we know people like how do you begin to play the game where you're able to start getting you know engagement and exposure without having to play by, you know, play by the traditional rules. I seen, you know who else I saw? I like this guy, that kid Luke Radowski, does We R change? And he has, you know, I think over 100,000 subs. He's not monetized on his YouTube channel, but he went, you know, I've been watching him for, he's going for a long

time, and he's always been raising money and stuff. And I would say last year, he did something similar to what you said, Ben, he keeps his YouTube channel and he makes a video every day, but he also put up his own website with a subscription like five bucks a month. And so he'll make one video for YouTube. And then it's half of that video is like a commercial for his site. Like look, you know what I'm talking about today? Here's what I'm going to talk about on my website where you can come and see all this stuff. And he's found a way to use YouTube as his own commercial for his site.

And then he funnels the people back over to that site where he does his better, more caretaking videos and stuff like that. So I think what you're saying, Jason, is that that can be the system. You can use these giant platforms, get the views, and then get a percentage of those people to come to your website,

which would be on Ben's server, and then we can have that. Yeah, yeah. And we could have them come behind the paywall over there. You could even do something like Rockfin, where if people pay five bucks and they get all our content for free, something like that.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Or we can start a psychedelic roundtable only fans. Oh, I don't know that we're going to get that many subscribers. I don't know. Jason's kind of pretty, but the rest of us,

I don't know. Oh, man. No, I, so, you know, that's the model that I see really working right now for, you know, just kind of how do you get a part of this and how do you retain ownership of this? And that is, you know, you have all roads lead to El Dorado, which El Dorado is your own website with your own paywall where you can then manage and have direct contact and access to every

single one of, you know, your followers, your fans. So is that the path to back to free speech? Is that how we figure this out? Like, do we say, you can say whatever you want? on your own site and people will have to go there to listen to you, but you should be able to espouse thoughts and ideas on the traditional platforms, but to like hear the real thing, you got to go behind the paywall. Like how do, I guess I'm curious.

Like this free speech thing, I've been curious thinking a lot about like, what do we do with it? How much of a concern is it? Well, I think that's definitely, you know, that's a path to enable free speech at localized levels. You know, and I think that's pretty, probably the most straightforward path that we have available to us. If, you know, because once you start getting into this, you know,

conglomerations of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you know, they've already, you know, Section 230 kind of, you know, was the beginning of this. But I, you know, there's been a lot of talk trying to convert these things into like a public utility type idea. So I think, you know, the decentralizing of the, you know, of these, you know, of these massive of all the content and then putting it behind your own paywall and then you know it be it it kind of returns things to a meritocracy much more much more of a meritocracy than the algorithm's going to afford you because now people really enjoy your content where you have to say yeah they'll

sign up you know they'll pay that five bucks a month to get all of the content you know that that we all post um because people find value in what we talk about and how we talk about it uh and it's definitely a model to, you know, not give away all of your content and work for free for, you know, like to George's point, having that 96,000 hours. Imagine even if 10% of it ended up, you know, behind the paywall for you, George. And that's the same thing with subscribe to our Patreon. It's the same method. Only that's someone else's site as well.

Right. And they can shut you down. Yeah. Absolutely. And have, you know, so they've created a bad precedent. And so then, you know, what's the solution for that? Well, you have your own, you have your own server, you have your own website, you have your own paywall. You know, there's still the problem of a payment processor.

You know, they're like, for instance, Visa and MasterCard shut down WikiLeaks, right? Right. So there's still issues like that, but there are alternatives to that. You know, cryptocurrency is one of them. And you can convert cryptocurrency on the fly from whatever currency comes in and offload it to US dollars, just, you know, euros to whatever you want. So there's solutions for that. And I think that type of model is basically the most effective model

if you want to be kind of like a small mom and pop shop podcast. So, um, so Jason, like, how do you define freak speech? It's a really good question. I don't know. I don't know if I have a definition for it yet. I've been, um, in your mind, are there limitations to speech? Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, harming another human being is a boundary, right? So words that would harm another person or incite violence to another person feels like an edge of free speech. But, yeah, I don't know. What do you, I mean, I'm curious what your thoughts are, Paul. Well, I mean, I don't think, I don't think, I don't. free speech is, you know, I mean, basically like what you just said, like it's, it's not limitless, right? You can't say anything you want to say, right? And, and, you know, we've had, there's case law that, you know, that says that you can't just go out there and espouse,

you know, speech that promotes violence or destruction. But then, you know, you know, Where do you, beyond that stuff, the line gets pretty blurry, you know, beyond there for me, as to what is an acceptable free speech. And I think it goes back to what is responsible speech. You know, there's definitely a lot of irresponsible speech out there that has caused people to get, you know, ban from social media platforms. but I don't know if the First Amendment, you know, would not protect them and their speech. So it kind of goes back to responsible speech, I think, is where the battleground is now. So my kind of articulation of it that I've kind of thought through for the years is, you know, my freedom or my freedom of speech, you know, extends until it negatively impacts somebody else's freedom or freedom of speech.

But that's not the whole statement. And then the next part of that statement is that's where the conversation needs to begin and happen. And I think if we have the place for that conversation to happen, I think that's where, you know, that fuzzy line that you're talking about. I think that's where, you know, it can kind of be hashed out to certain extent. you know like inciting riot right that's a suppression of right you're removing people's freedom and ability to have free speech and so you know that shouldn't be allowed uh you know but when you get it i've gone to jail for say what something i've gone to jail for you incited of a riot

inciting the riot yeah yeah yeah yeah what was the riot yeah yeah yeah yeah what was the riot yeah You know, but it's like, and when I reflect on the things that I was saying, you know, I didn't think that it was as bad as they were making it up. Which, again, it's like, you know, the lines are blurred. Right. It's like it's mostly rooted in interpretation. Right. And who becomes the arbiter of that? Right.

Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, you know, but, you know, what I was saying was irresponsible. Yeah, for sure a little bit. But was I inciting the riot? I don't know. It's still one of you know, this is 20 something you almost 30 years ago, 30 years ago. And you know, I still think about that when I hear people talk about speaking like what's what isn't free. What's protected and what isn't protected. Right? Because it's subjective. Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean in terms of inciting the riot, you know, you know, You know, was it just like a couple of people who, you know, were kind of being hooligans? Or did you actually start a full-fledged ride? No, it was a full-fledged deal. Oh, okay.

Respectable. Yeah, all right, I don't. Check that one off the bucket list. Yeah, it was in a handful of people, you know, it was a lot of people. There was definitely involved. But. Paul, where were you on January 6th? I was attending

Donald Trump Washington, D.C. No, no, it was for, I was in San Diego, it was the, it was the International Monetary Fund. Nice.

It was happening a, like a melting of the mines. And a bunch of people showed up. I was one of them. and things got a little crazy. Well, I think, you know, you also decided to pick the one target that probably is going to be the most oppressive towards that, right?

Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it goes back to speech, right? Because I was the guy in the cop car swearing at the police going, I can say whatever the fuck I want. Well, no, you can't. Yeah. Yeah. Gentlemen, I'm coming up on a hard break right here. But, you know, maybe before we, before we end it or land the plane,

maybe we can go around and say what you got coming up and where people can find you. You want to start us off, Ben? Sure. Benjamin C.George.com to find out what I'm up to you. Some interesting podcasts coming up. Paul and I are going to be talking about some dark skies here soon. George, we got a panel coming up here. I've had some interest from some other people from the business world who want to have some chats about, you know,

kind of similar topics to what we talked about tonight. And, of course, I will be hopefully by my birthday here releasing some more hard stuff about the Terry Libre project and building the conversation around that. So that's exciting. Yeah, it is exciting. What, Jay, what you got coming up, my friend? Oh, man. Yeah, check stuff out at

Experience Integration.com on Instagram, Experience Integration. And right now, I just got my first episode of Dad Balls podcast recorded, so I'm going to be getting that dropped here soon. Got to talk to an incredible dude with some Dad Balls. It was in the military and really went through

some pretty crazy stuff in his life. So excited to be getting to have that drop here in the near future. That is exciting. I'm looking forward to checking it out. Paul, what do you got some irons in the fire? What do you got coming up? Yeah, I mean, not really too much.

I'm doing this thing on Sunday. And working on the Hawaii Dark Sky Project, which we're going to have some stuff coming out here in the next couple weeks. And when we do, I'll let you guys all know. Well, I thought I remember here in a while back, there may be some psychedelics that you wanted us to be guinea pigs for. How's that operation looking? Yeah, it's coming along.

Yeah, it's looking really good. All right. Well, fantastic. Gentlemen, I'm super thankful for all your times. I really enjoy the conversation. And I think that we have a good time here. And I hope that we're able to at least make it entertaining for a few people and maybe even inspire. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for hanging out today.

We'll be back next Sunday in the psychedelic roundtable. Until then, check everybody out on their links and on their podcast. We'll see you on Sunday. Aloha.