Joe Rogan and Lewis from Unbox Therapy debate gun violence—Rogan calls it a "numbers problem," while Lewis argues media bias fuels perception, citing Chicago’s 100+ homicides in 2023. They critique Spotify’s murky revenue model (5M–30M paid users amid 100M free accounts) and artists’ exploitation, contrasting Jay-Z’s failed Tidal with Taylor Swift’s Spotify boycott. Prince’s alleged medical denialism and James Cameron’s obsessive filmmaking lead to discussions on fame’s psychological toll, from Bill Cosby’s unchecked power to pop stars’ shortened lifespans. Rogan dismisses viral "eagle eating cat" claims as natural predator behavior but questions veganism’s ethical blind spots, like pesticide-driven violence in agriculture. The episode pivots to tech—LG G5’s modular flaws, Apple’s headphone jack removal, and VR’s potential to replace physical experiences—while warning AI could erode human agency through convenience-driven interactions, like Tesla’s autonomy or dumb phones’ failed detox experiments. Ultimately, they expose how media, tech, and fame distort reality, prioritizing spectacle over substance. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, it's the kind of situation, I think, where any time as a human being you lose a little bit of control over a situation, whether it's the weather or something else, you kind of take yourself outside of that realm of how we like to compartmentalize things.
The epitome of self-centeredness is being in control of absolutely every experience you have and never letting go.
And one of them, I guess she just doesn't smoke pot, or she just, for whatever reason, she took a hit, and then you see her eyes roll behind her head, and her legs go down, and she almost fell.
No, no, it was definitely the weed, because she's from L.A., and we flew in to film Fear Factor there, and she just had a weird reaction to pot, for whatever reason.
Yeah, there certainly is a kind of reset button effect when some kind of disaster happens where people feel like they've lost control, even for a moment.
Dude, like, I'm out here on the highway, or anywhere for that matter, and you have those moments where you're sitting around looking at all these vehicles and wondering how the hell this shit is staying together.
What percentage of individuals is that to like screw it up for everyone else, whether you're flying a goddamn plane into a building or swerving the wrong way or looking at your text messages or whatever it is.
I think, you know, often we kind of take these disasters and we kind of hold them up, you know, CNN style, like replay it over and over again.
When in reality, there's an argument to be made that the amazing part is that it's held together as well as it is.
There's a lot of arguments when it comes to that, but one of them about gun violence.
Somebody showed me a chart the other day of how many people have guns, how many people actually get shot by guns, and who are the people that are getting shot by guns.
How many of the people that are getting shot by guns are involved in gang violence or criminal activity?
And then it boils down to how many people, I mean, your chances of getting shot, your actual chances of getting shot.
Like, do we really have a gun problem?
Or do we have a numbers problem?
And it really, if you look at the hard, raw facts, it's way more of a numbers problem.
It's a 300 million people problem.
That's what it is.
And if you look at the actual number of guns versus the number of gun incidents, it's shockingly low.
But it's just we're dealing with so many human beings.
And those numbers just seem...
I just don't think human beings are supposed to have access to 7 billion human beings on Earth's worth of drama and stories.
There was some kind of a blog I was reading which was like based on infographics and all this guy does, the entire blog is just following Chicago violence.
That's the whole thing.
And he had it all mapped out.
He had every single shooting, fatal shooting, where the person was hit.
It's like an amazing amount of detail that he went into on this particular blog.
72% soared 72% in 2016. Shootings up more than 80%.
88%.
Wow.
That is insane.
So murder up 72%, shootings up 88% the first three months of 2016 compared to the same period last year.
Fuck, man.
There was a video that this guy did.
He was live streaming his neighborhood, and he got shot on video.
Did you see that?
God, it's fucked up.
He's just hanging out there, you know, walking around, and I don't know what he was saying, but he was filming something, and all of a sudden, you see him drop, and then you see the shooter standing over him, shooting at somebody else.
And I think at this point, we've got enough evidence to realize that at some root level, we are still animals.
And when it comes to vengeance, revenge, everybody's susceptible.
If your brother or your neighbor gets killed or somebody you care about, you just want to go and do the same thing.
Whether it's in Chicago or it's in the Middle East or wherever it happens to be, people have been doing it.
You know, I was...
I don't remember who I was talking to about this, but it was regarding whether or not more humans were responsible for killing other humans in modern history or disease, like which one was the bigger figure.
Right.
And I was sitting there thinking about it.
I didn't know, but when I looked it up, it was like shocking figures in the direction of...
He's got this foundation called Fight for the Forgotten.
And they go and they build wells in the Congo for people.
And he's been over there many many times and this is the second time he got malaria and one of the things he was saying is there's different forms of malaria and some malaria will last six months some malaria lasts five years and some malaria lasts thirty years thirty year malaria That's kind of like that Lyme disease.
There's this amazing podcast right now, if anybody's interested in this.
My friend Steve Rinella has this show called Meat Eater.
And it's on the Sportsman's Channel.
And there's a new podcast, or not new, but he's been doing it for a while.
It's called The Meat Eater Podcast.
And he's got this guy on named Dan Flores.
And Dan Flores is a historian.
And he was one of Steve's former professors.
And he has this book coming out about coyotes.
And it is fucking fascinating.
The knowledge that this guy drops about coyotes will blow you away.
First of all, coyotes are wolves.
It's a kind of wolf.
They used to call them prairie wolves.
That's what they used to call them, but it's like a type of wolf.
And they breed with wolves, most wolves, except gray wolves, because gray wolves have a different genetic line.
They had left North America millions of years ago and then came back within X amount of thousands of years.
And so they kill coyotes when they find them.
But red wolves and some other North American wolves that still survived, those wolves bred with coyotes and they're creating this thing called a coy wolf, which is like a hybrid of coyotes and wolves.
This country, like I said, there used to be a small range of coyotes.
But due to persecution, they've expanded their range.
Part of it, the persecution is not by humans, but by the gray wolves.
Because the gray wolves are killing them.
So what coyotes do, this is so fascinating.
Coyotes, when they call out.
When you hear coyotes, and then other ones call out.
What they're doing is, they're doing a roll call.
They're making sure that everybody's there.
And when coyotes get killed, when coyotes are under pressure, when coyotes get killed, there's a reaction in the mother where the female coyotes have larger litters.
So the normal litter, if nothing's disturbed, is between three and four pups.
But if they get killed, if they notice that their numbers are dwindling, their numbers jack up to as many as 13 to 14 puppies.
So one of the things that they've been studying this is in Yellowstone Park.
Because Yellowstone Park, for more than 70 years, had no wolves.
Because they had eradicated wolves.
They had extirpated them from Yellowstone Park.
Then they reintroduced them in the 1990s.
So the population of coyotes during that time was exactly the same.
It was completely steady until they brought in wolves.
And when the wolves started killing the coyotes, because they're gray wolves that they brought in from Canada, the gray wolves started killing the coyotes, the coyotes expanded like crazy and multiplied like nuts.
And now, the initial thing that happened when they brought in wolves was that the wolves killed a giant percentage of the coyotes, and the coyote population dropped by 50%.
But then, once the coyotes started having much larger litters because they were being killed off by wolves, Their numbers went as high as they were before, and now even higher, and now they've expanded their range.
So thanks to the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park, we've got coyotes all over the continental North America now.
And I went past a place where I went to elementary school.
In a neighborhood.
Houses everywhere.
A wolf came straight in front of my vehicle, limping, looked right at me, and continued on into the back of that elementary school.
A legit wolf.
I was like, is this a coyote?
And I'm sizing it up as I'm staring at it.
So sure enough, I'm like, this can't be true.
I've never seen a wolf my whole life in this area.
And then so what I ended up doing is I went online and I typed the town name along with wolf and sure enough people have been spotting Wolves coming into that area.
You might not be into hunting, and I get that if you're not a hunter.
It's not a hunting podcast.
That one is not about hunting.
It's all about the Wild West and about the animals that used to exist on the plains.
And they're actually trying to set aside a gigantic chunk.
I think it's in Montana or something like that.
Where they're trying to establish a new Yellowstone type of situation where they bring in a lot of these animals and allow them to live in a natural way in some large sort of, you know, like a savanna type area, like that, like recreating sort of the African savannas.
The tap thing is controversial only because some people say that some of that natural gas that got into that water had already gotten into that water, and this is a common phenomenon that you could actually document back decades before fracking ever existed.
So it could be that the natural gas, which was already in the water, right?
They're already trying to...
That's what they're trying to get out when they're fracking, right?
That it was already leaking into some water in some places.
But that doesn't remove the possibility of fracking making more of that shit get into people's water supply.
So it's real tricky because these people that are anti-fracking...
They want to point out the dangers of fracking.
And the people that are pro-fracking, they want to pretend that there's no danger.
And then you put it back in to continue the lobby or whatever it might be to continue that conversation.
And it's like, when they talk specifically about how individuals, they only need a fragment of information in order to confirm their pre-existing bias.
You just have to present the alternative argument, make people think it's an argument in the first place, and then they'll pick the side that's more convenient to them.
I mean, there's this young Republican kid from my jiu-jitsu class who's, like, somebody brought up climate change.
It wasn't even a conversation I was involved in.
And he goes, it's a cycle.
There's always been a cycle of change.
I go, are you a fucking earth scientist, dude?
What do you do?
You just got out of the Marines, and I'm pretty sure you weren't studying earth science in Afghanistan.
Come on, man.
This is a super complicated issue that a lot of people, they have decades of science behind them, and they're researching the numbers, they're trying to figure this out.
You know, I think part of it is the fact that the way we've sort of been conditioned via media is to feel empowered.
You know?
It's like, you watch this clip and you think you're getting information, but in reality you're getting a headline.
You know what I mean?
Because that's the flow that'll keep you engaged.
Where you feel like you're getting smarter, but there's no way in hell you're putting in the time to be educated on certain subject matter.
You're getting just enough To, as I said before, confirm kind of what you thought already and then go out and pretend that, as you mentioned, you're some kind of authority on the situation when there's other people out there that have invested so much more in their perspective.
But instead of admitting like, hey, I don't know too much about it or it is a complicated issue or there's more to the conversation, there's something empowering about picking a side even if you don't necessarily know.
He's done a fantastic job of trying to make science interesting to people, and trying to educate people, and trying to make science something that's compelling, and make young people drawn to it.
So, Bill Nye, the science guy, was having a conversation with this guy, and the article, the topic of the article, or the headline said, Bill Nye favors prison terms for climate deniers.
So you're like, what the fuck?
So, like, has Bill Nye lost his fucking mind?
Has he gone crazy?
So I read this piece, and then I watch the actual interview with Bill Nye.
He never said such a thing, ever.
Someone suggested that climate deniers should go to jail because these...
Energy CEOs and these people that are spreading misinformation are directly harming the people that are going to be affected by that.
They know that they're saying something incorrect.
They do it to distribute propaganda, and there's other people that are going to be affected by it.
So Bill Nye says, that's interesting.
When you're talking about these energy CEOs and these people are making choices that are going to directly affect our quality of life, what do we do about it?
Yeah, and the thing is, the only way to really combat that is to bounce, is to get out of there as quickly as possible.
Because the way I understand it, not necessarily an expert in the field...
Kind of done a few things on YouTube, but as far as Google PageRank is concerned, if a site is getting a quick bounce rate, like if people are landing on it and leaving really quickly, then it could potentially be ranked lower in the future because of that.
Because I defended Bill Nye on Twitter, and I said that's not his words, it's not what he was saying.
But let's watch the video itself.
And if we watch the video itself, you can see how deceptive it is to say that he favors people who deny climate change to go to jail.
Because that's not what he's saying at all.
Essentially, he's saying that we should look at people that are ruining the earth, like these energy CEOs that wantonly pollute these areas in order to gain profit.
Do you think some of the rhetoric on your side, as I'm sure both sides, but some of the rhetoric on your side gets too carried away?
unidentified
I mean, what's your thought on jailing skeptics as war criminals?
We'll see what happens.
Was it appropriate to jail the guys from Enron?
Interesting.
Okay, right?
So we'll see what happens.
Was it appropriate to jail people from the cigarette industry who insisted that this addictive product was not addictive and so on?
And you think about, in these cases, for me as a taxpayer and voter, The introduction of this extreme doubt about climate change is affecting my quality of life as a public citizen.
So I can see where people are very concerned about this and are pursuing criminal investigations as well as As well as engaging in discussions like this.
Yeah, and even if you look at the very end there, he made sure to say, I can see why people might think something like that, instead of necessarily confirming that that's the outcome he wants to see.
Like that Merchants of Doubt movie, which is an amazing movie.
If you watch that movie, you realize that the same people that were working for the tobacco industry, that were denying the addictive effects of tobacco, are the same people that are denying climate change.
The same human beings.
Like, not the same kind of people, but the exact same people.
Yeah, so in that sense, I feel like, you know, there's a place for it, but I think people use the technique to essentially lie, and it gives the whole kind of system a bad rap.
Yeah, and that's like the entire agenda is to use other people's content as the vehicle for you to have a channel.
So like, today I'm going to shit on this video, and tomorrow I'm going to shit on that video.
So there's this kind of conversation about whether or not that—like, is that still fair use in that environment?
Because the understanding—I mean, it's not definitive, but the understanding I have of fair use is that, like, if you're compelling people to go look at the original, like you just did with the information about coyotes— You took a moment and you said, okay, this is this guy's research or whatever, so go check him out.
You actually did him a service there instead of the alternative of you could have just talked about it and so on.
Well, in the case of these types of videos, people are using actual clips from these channels that they're shitting on.
They don't compel you to go look at the original because essentially they're hating.
Why would you go as a viewer and go source out this thing that this person that you like is telling you is a piece of shit anyways?
You're not going to go watch the original, right?
You're happier to listen to this guy shit on stuff.
So anyway, the problem is that...
Algorithmically, it feels like drama sells, right?
Just like in the regular world.
And so some of these channels are rapidly growing.
Rapidly growing on the backs of essentially making fun of people.
So there's some sort of feeling in the community that YouTube has changed or you get a lot of these people that are like, make YouTube great again, stuff like that.
But I mean, I don't necessarily agree with that.
But I think that there is maybe a conversation to be had about how much freedom we're willing to give individuals to essentially build their product on the back of other people's.
The core aspect of the model is that there's this thing you're reacting to, whether it's a viral video, a trend, whatever it might be.
Well, recently they tried to trademark the term React so that anybody who uploaded a video with the term React in it, that they could claim it and earn the ad revenue.
If you make a reaction video, you want to watch Two Girls, One Cup, or a guy getting run over by a buffalo, If they want money from you watching that video, that's stealing.
What they've done is they've used lawyers to circumvent the system.
They've jacked the system and they're gonna try to steal.
If that's what they want to do, you really want to reach out to everyone using the word react in a video and you want money from them.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
You're everything that's wrong with distributing content over the internet.
That's everything that's wrong with it.
You've taken one of the sneakiest, most diabolical fucking tricks in all of the legal system, and you've applied it to this open, free world of the internet.
It's scary both ways, because at the same time, you're like, well, do you really want YouTube to come in as this massive governing body to stop stuff like this from happening?
I mean, just because we're on the topic, how do you feel in general about digital rights and whatnot?
Are you...
Are you really fancy about it?
Let's say you had some content.
I know sometimes you have musicians on here, right?
And they kind of seem to me to be a little bit out of touch with the internet space.
And I'm just wondering, if a person is purchasing or streaming or buying something that somebody's trying to sell digitally, How do you feel about that?
Well, see, it completely depends upon whether or not...
What your business is so I my feeling is that one of the things about music and You could use the same argument for stand-up comedy is that pirating in a lot of ways empowers people like like when someone puts up my stand-up on their YouTube channel I'm not into taking that down because I think that even when I was selling it, I'm not into taking that down.
And the reason being is because I think the more people see it, the more people will come to see your live shows, the more people will come to support your stand-up, whether it's on Netflix or Comedy Central or whatever.
They'll pay more attention to it.
So in a way, it's kind of free advertising in that way.
Music companies don't tend to think about it that way.
And we had a recent problem that was pretty fucking disgusting.
Well, we had an act on, and the musical act played a small section of one of their songs.
And then the music company that owned that section of the song wanted all the ad rights for our show, for that episode.
And so, you know, we contacted the artist, and the artist said, well, I'll get that taken care of.
The music company's decision was, no, just tell them to not dispute the claim, and we'll take the ad revenue, and then it'll be fine.
We won't take down the video.
I go, you won't take down...
It's a fucking three-hour video.
We paid 15 seconds of a song, and you want all the ad revenue.
Fuck you.
And I told them, I'm like, look, dude, you get this taken care of, or I'm gonna delete the episode.
You go, fuck yourself.
Like, this is ridiculous.
That's some greedy, sneaky bullshit that record companies are still trying to do.
Because record companies have to justify the fact they've got X amount of employees in a giant building on Sunset.
You don't need that anymore.
Okay?
Your business is dead.
Okay?
Sorry.
But this is what you got.
You got iTunes Music, Google Play, and that's it!
That's it!
That's your business now.
The real business is artists getting their shit out on YouTube and on social media and then doing concerts.
And that's where they make the bulk of their money.
They used to be the opposite.
It used to be artists made the bulk of their money from the record sales and then they made some of the money from concerts.
So what happens was...
The record companies would rip them off for record sales and they would come up with all these elaborate accounting methods to fix the profit so they made it look like all their expenses had to be paid first before they counted the profit.
They didn't take into consideration the artists learning how to play, going on the road, Doing all these gigs, creating this song, all the time spent writing.
They don't take that into consideration, but they do calculate all their employees, all their expenses, all their advertising revenue, how much it costs to rent their building, how much it costs for insurance, how much it costs for errors and omissions insurance.
All those different things they do take into account before you get paid.
So the artists were fucked.
Like, there's a lot of artists that got unbelievably bad record deals.
Like, the reason why Prince had changed his name to a symbol, because they fucking owned his name.
So that crafty bastard just decided to make his name some sort of a weird symbol and become the artist formerly known as Prince, and they couldn't do shit about it.
It was a really clever workaround for Prince.
But it was...
Essentially in response to these devious practices by these fucking record companies, right?
So in that sense I think like if someone if you have an album and everybody loves it and then people start pirating it and then it gets all over the place like Some musicians I had Paul Stanley on from kiss I heard that one.
Well, there's no way because it's so easy to access now.
That's one thing.
And the other thing is, the sheer numbers of songs that get put out every day, they all exist now.
You could go back and listen to some Roy Orbison from the 1950s, or you can listen to some shit that some new band you haven't heard of just put out last week.
He's like this weird, androgynous guy in his 50s who's got a kid who makes his own music.
And he got famous for these songs on YouTube.
This is him.
He makes these videos where he just puts up a curtain behind him, and he makes these YouTube videos, and he sings these songs, and some of them are fucking good.
I remember reading something recently, don't quote me, I don't know the figures, but that artists, a lot of artists are actually making more off the vinyl than they are off the digital.
Even though the volume is so much lower, just because the actual per unit cost is so high.
So like, big bands are doing special edition releases on vinyl and such to kind of get back some of that lost revenue that's existed because of digital.
So that's an interesting angle to take, but I think people are like you, where you're kind of almost doing it not because you really need to have it on vinyl, but because you want to support something that you like.
I guess what I'm saying is, in the absence of Spotify, do those millions and millions of users, do they turn to iTunes and give you the 99 cents, or do they give you nothing?
Because if they're giving you nothing, And stealing it, right, then isn't Spotify better than that alternative?
Yeah, except that one is owned by artists, not record labels, and they have similar issues in trying to pay actual artists, because at the end of the day, if they raise the price of their service, if Spotify goes from $10 to $20, people aren't going to have it.
And that's why I also curbed it by saying it's arguably more important emotionally and all the rest of it.
But I'm just specifically talking about that.
I think...
I think artists need to recognize that and then whatever system comes forth for how to deliver the future of how we listen to music, at least they're involved in that process instead of just participating in the current one.
It's like you need to be on Spotify for a number of different reasons as an emerging artist because that's the way people are discovering music.
So there's a lot of pressure there to participate even though you're not getting rewarded for it.
As an emerging artist, but as an artist that already is doing well and established making money and you realize that Spotify needs people like you in order to legitimize its company, then it becomes an issue, right?
Well, our subscriber growth in the last six months of 2015, what does that mean?
Okay, just 10 million paid subscribers.
Apple Music, 10 million.
According to Stats Now, Spotify just crossed 100 million total users.
A paying number could be more than 30 million.
Why don't they tell you that?
But what does that mean, though?
That's not a real number.
They're saying could be more.
Whenever something says could be more, it could be three people.
It could be more than 30 million, but it could be like five dudes.
Spotify announces 20 millionth paying subscriber.
Okay, back in June of 2015. Spotify announces 20 millionth paying subscriber with an ad-based free user base of 55 million.
Okay.
That's a pretty decent...
75 million total and 20 million paying subscribers.
Huh.
See, the problem is, too, if you have a podcast on it, they can get rid of your ads.
I've been having a lot recently because I've seen some things happen.
If all of the music you like, let's say, pick your ten favorite albums of all time, you don't have them a physical copy of, but you have them saved on your Apple, your iMusic, whatever service you pick.
If it's all in the cloud, they can technically go change that music whenever they choose to.
Yeah, Kanye West has been doing something really recently right now, where he put out an album on Tidal last month, and for about a month they were kind of tweaking it.
They were changing the mastering on it, they were changing the featured artists on it even on one song.
He's gone back on another album that's already been out for a long time now and changed some of the mastering on two of those songs, and some people think he might be doing more.
No one knows.
But it's a thought that I've been having that.
One of my favorite albums, I went to go back and find, the track order is out of order now.
Some of the songs are missing.
It's because that artist has decided not to have the version of that album up on Spotify the way it originally was.
So if you wanted to have that album, you need to own it the way he put it out in 2011. Or you never have that actual album.
You have whatever they have existing in the cloud, and that's what you get to have for the future.
Well, she's been protected by royalty for so long because he existed...
as a celebrity in a strange time when an artist can get away with almost anything I mean you were in a bubble you were different and I think that being in a bubble and also I think for a guy like you or I to try to even understand what it's like to be as famous as Bill Cosby it's impossible I think it's probably an unmanageable level of fame at a certain point in his life you know especially when he had Bill Cosby himself and the Cosby show on NBC he was fucking royalty man And during that
time, he was inviting these girls to come over and read scripts and suck his dick and fucking drugging them and they'd wake up with their panties down by their ankles and cum in their hair.
They didn't know what the fuck was going on and he just got away with it over and over and over again.
And because he got away with it and because of the way people treated him, it sort of fostered this really crazy sociopathic behavior that he had.
The judge already ruled that she had signed some shit saying that she couldn't testify against him, that she wouldn't bring charges, and that she wouldn't reveal the details of the case.
But then she did reveal the details of the case.
So you know what he did?
He sued her.
So he's suing her for going back on her deal because he paid her off.
I think he paid her like several million dollars to keep her mouth shut.
And because she is now talking about it, now he's suing her for that money back.
And the argument was that because they had made this deal, he shouldn't be able to be prosecuted.
But unfortunately for him, the deal that he had made was a verbal deal only.
There was nothing written down.
This is one of the things the judge had said, like, you gotta get this shit written down, dude.
We're going to trial.
So he's going to be charged.
And they recently announced it over the last couple of days that they're charging him.
I've told this story before, but I'll tell you it again just for you.
There was a show that I did in Seattle, the Seattle area, this casino, and one of the people that was working there said that Cosby used to have these people sit down before the show.
He had all the employees, like the ushers, the door people, they'd sit down and watch him eat dinner.
He would sit there and eat curry, and they had to watch him.
They'd stand in the room and watch him eat before the show.
First of all, Prince was like androgynous and he was all about free love and he wore high heels, but he didn't like gay people.
Do you know one of the things that Prince...
I mean, Prince is like a known homophobe.
And one of the things that he said in a recent interview, and I hate to disparage him in his death because he was a brilliant artist and all that good stuff, but...
He was talking about how one of the problems with the world today is that God set all these rules and then, you know, people just decide they want to stick their dick in this hole or that hole and just do anything they want to do and you can't do that.
And they were asking him about gay marriage.
And, you know, he was saying that this is not what God wanted.
This is not what God asked for.
See if you can find the exact quote because it was pretty disturbing coming from a guy that you expect because of his sort of androgynous nature and how weird he was.
Honestly, I think with Prince, based on what I've seen of his interviews, I think he was insanely sheltered because he was so famous and that he could basically say anything and nobody would disagree with him.
And he cultivated some really fucking wacky opinions.
First of all, he believed that the government was spraying things in the sky that made people fight in the ghetto.
He goes, you got the Republicans, basically they want to live according to the Bible, but there's a problem with interpretation, and you've got some churches, some people basically doing things and saying it comes from here, but it doesn't.
Then you've got the opposite of the spectrum, you got blue, you got the Democrats, and they're like, you can do whatever you want, gay marriage, whatever, but neither of them is right.
Asked about his perspective on social issues, gay marriage, abortion.
Prince tapped his Bible and said, God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out.
He was like, enough.
Okay.
That's hilarious because a lot of people fucked each other in the ass listening to Let's Go Crazy.
How many people sucked a cock because it was like, we're going to party like it's 1999, and they just said, fuck it, I'll just do ecstasy in my asshole.
I think he's sheltered, or he was sheltered, and I think he's a brilliant...
The outlier of outliers when it comes to brilliant artists.
But that's why I say, even in the case of Bill Cosby, are we looking at a condition of the circumstance?
Because if we have this data that says, hey...
Pop stars are dying 30 years before the regular public, on average.
These people obviously have an unusual enough circumstance that it's affecting all of them the same, unless the type of people drawn to that career in the first place are already substantially different than the rest of the public.
I'm 48, he was 55, so he's not that much older than me when he died.
And I was living in Boston when that song came out, and it was a jaw-dropper.
I was like, who is this guy?
With no shirt on, on the cover, trying to figure out what the hell...
Yeah, he was 20 or 21. 20 or 21. And that is a fucking beautiful song.
To this day, I'll play that song out of nowhere.
And it's just, he was an amazing artist.
So if he was that good at 20, 21, I mean, he was involved in music from the time he was a small boy.
So he developed in a very bizarre and strange way and was under the microphone at an incredibly young age.
To be that huge at 20 years old and also to be such a revolutionary guy when it came to style and fashion.
Dude, I had an overcoat when I was like 21. A long overcoat because I saw Prince with one.
I used to listen to Prince music.
I loved Prince when I was a kid.
He was so good.
He was so different and interesting.
There were so many good songs like Controversy.
You know, he had some and then also like some guys sort of like came along with him like Morris Day in the time because they were in Purple Rain They sort of came along with him and they got famous for a brief period of time, too He was amazing man.
It was amazing But I think I've always said this that I think you can't there's there's a balance in this world that you can't achieve when you achieve greatness when you achieve that kind of greatness I think it's at this at that is at the sacrifice of balance, right?
Whether it's balance in your social life or balance in your ability to have a healthy and objective perspective.
I think that's what we're seeing with Kanye West, too.
In order to really go after something and just be obsessed with it to the point of just carving out this magnificent diamond of art, you gotta be a fucking nut, man.
You gotta be Richard Pryor.
You gotta be nuts.
You gotta be out of your fucking mind to make something perfect.
And what he made was perfect.
I mean, Purple Rain is goddamn perfect.
He was perfect.
This shit that he did that you just to this day just go, God damn, he was so good that all the other stuff is probably a symptom of a lack of balance and development in his overall life that led to this incredible brilliance in his art form.
But he just, he nailed this insane version of that genre.
It's like saying a rock and roll song.
Like, there's some classic rock and roll themes that you would, you'd see, if you heard of this song, yeah, well, there's like themes in songs that you just kind of accept because it's cool to hear them in songs.
And that's essentially what he's done on a grand scale in Avatar.
I mean, granted, whatever, James Cameron's brilliant and the shit they do in Hollywood is fucking amazing and all the rest of it, but I'm in this weird situation where, like, I'm the guy.
Well, as a person who watches you, sorry to interrupt you, but that authenticity comes through and that's one of the reasons why your videos are so compelling.
Because when you open up a video and you're checking out a new phone and you're going over the edges and you're experiencing it for the first time with the person that's watching the video.
I want to be, you know, you, the proxy version of you.
Like, how would you engage with this thing?
And in many cases, the de facto standard for these types of videos was like a person who had, was more sort of journalistic.
They're expected to make a report on the thing.
And it's like, that's cool.
I respect that.
That's part of it too.
But at the same time, it's like it doesn't, that part of it doesn't necessarily capture the excitement associated with the thing, the oohs and the ahs, and all that kind of natural reaction, which is impossible to fake.
All the rest of it you can.
All the rest of it when it comes to like, let's do that line again because, I don't know, you didn't say the spec right, or whatever.
Like, that would be the equivalent of the situation I was in yesterday.
But it's like, I'm willing to sacrifice some of that to get the intangible stuff, which is the oohs and ahs that will never happen again, not in the same way.
Before, I mean, when I was, you know, I've been here for a couple days, and I'm telling people, okay, no, you know, Saturday, I can't hang out, whatever, I'm going to be on the podcast.
And they're like, what do you guys do to prepare for that?
And on your podcast, I'm like, no, nothing.
Like, you actually just sit down, and you just start talking.
Well, in that sense, I think that there's kind of like a service being...
Like, it's surprising to me how many...
Like, when I'm saying, okay, I'm going to be on here and I put it on my Twitter or whatever, like, how many people, like, pumped about it?
Pumped.
Like, oh, thank God.
Amazing, right?
Like, they love the idea of it.
And for me...
communicate with them right for you it's the it's the standard so i think you're like really aware of it it gets it gets personal in a different way when you're using this medium where there aren't these definitive parameters that exist in your your typical youtube video your typical tweet or vine or whatever it is like those ones are all so it's almost like every social media is it has its kind of structure that it like landed on for the standard the status quo
but you you've been doing this for a while now and you've been on many different platforms and you just kept in here the same essentially like as far as the the format is concerned but i think there is something to be said for I think what ends up happening in giving people that access is that it means more to them.
Like, you simply can't get to know somebody in a three-minute segment that you can in three hours.
It's impossible.
So what they actually end up getting here is something that matters substantially more to them.
I think that's exactly, I think, how it's looked at.
In a world where we realize that there is this increasingly short attention span, you wonder how much of this kind of stuff here actually replaces the real-world version of it.
If people can't be in a movie theater without being on their phones, if they can't drive without being on their phones, if we are literally building new pathways in our heads for how we look at spare time, then is this thing an alternative to that?
Like Meat Eater, Radio Lab, TED Radio Hour, all my friends like Joey Diaz's podcast and Ari's and Duncan's.
I listen to all my friends' podcasts and different people's podcasts.
I just think it's an amazing thing.
I love the fact that at a red light, you could just go to your thing, press play, find it.
Oh, there's a new episode of this out.
Boom.
Press play and it goes.
So it stimulates you when you're in your car.
It gives you interesting conversations when you're on a plane or when you're at the gym.
And it replaces a lot of traditional standard media in that way.
Also, because there's no ads, there's ads in the beginning, and if you want, you fast-forward through those fuckers, but the three hours of the podcast is totally uninterrupted.
It's like, if you're going to have that environment, if you're going to have this situation where there's like 50 or 100 people to get this piece of content, everybody in there needs to carve out that groove for themselves, a place to fit.
In fact, you could make the argument that if our goal is to connect with people on the other end, form these relationships, it's better to look to just in every way to be as close as you can to the real you.
Amongst some of the tight-knit groups on there, some of the bigger photo pages that emerged, it was kind of like, hey, I built this business on the back of a stupid cell phone camera, and then some person comes in.
With all this heavy duty equipment and kind of interrupts it.
And I don't know how much of it was just them being competitive and how much of it was them believing in the ethic of it being instant.
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I guess he has these prints for sale, but let me pull it up so people can see it here.
People think that that sounds crazy, like going out to kill an animal is psychedelic.
But what's psychedelic about it is...
It's boundary dissolving in that you enter into a truly wild world, and there is these large animals that live in this wild world, and you feel their world.
There's no cell phone service out there.
You're in the woods with the trees and the animals, and you're a part of this natural environment for a very brief time.
And people are like, well, why would you want to go there and kill those animals and this?
There's all these weird arguments that you could have back and forth about this, these conversations that you could have about whether or not it's okay to kill these animals.
I've made these conversations with myself, believe me.
Before I started hunting for the first time, my thought was, I'm either going to go hunting, and I'm going to never eat meat again, I'm going to become a vegan, or I'm going to be a hunter.
And I decided to be a hunter.
And one of the reasons why I decided to be a hunter is, I realized I don't like factory farming, I think it's fucked up, I think the way we get our food...
I think we've made a huge mistake.
It's a great decision, but a huge mistake at the same time, in that we've all...
We've decided to live in these gigantic urban areas.
And these urban areas, that becomes our natural world.
And in that natural world, we don't see tigers.
We don't see wolves.
We don't see bears.
We don't see these animals.
So our association with these animals is very unnatural.
Our world consists of streets and cars and buildings and elevators.
And that's our natural world.
That's the natural world that we live in.
When you go out into the woods and you see the actual natural world, the tooth, fang, and claw natural world, and you find mountain lion shit that has hair in it, and you look around and you see an elk at the top of a ridge, and he's trying to fuck all these other cow elk and trying to fight all these bulls that are coming in.
Last time I was elk hunting, they had found a dead elk that had been killed by another elk.
This thousand pound animal that died because this other animal with fucking a tree grown out of its head speared it in the side and killed it.
I mean it's really wild to see like these things kill each other so they can fuck.
And you're out in that world, and when you do, it makes everything seem...
The whole predator-prey experience seems very intensified.
Like, your connection to your food is very intense.
The whole thing is like...
And also, from a wildlife management standpoint, what we're talking about with Lyme disease, the reason why they have Lyme disease is because they have too many deer.
They have too many deer.
They have these ticks.
These ticks get on these deer.
They develop this disease, and these ticks get onto people.
And it's because of an overabundance of deer, the overpopulation.
They could nip that shit in the bud if they could figure out how to dwindle down the population of deer.
When you have too many animals, too many game animals, too many wild animals, and the balance gets overrun, whether it's too many wolves or too many bear or too many deer, wildlife biologists understand what the correct numbers are in order to keep that harmony.
And you have two options.
Option number one, hunters.
They pay money.
They go out there.
And the money from those tags is responsible for the protection of these wildlife areas, protection of habitat, or option number two, they hire snipers.
They hire people to go out there and kill these animals, and that's what they're doing in Zimbabwe with lions.
They're killing 200 lions, rather, this year because they have so many lions now because of what happened with the dentist.
Where the dentist went over and shot Cecil the lion and became this big thing.
Yeah, well, it's one thing to have an opinion on that matter, and it's a different thing to actually have exposure and then maintain that opinion.
You know what I mean?
It's one thing to be on Twitter, sitting on your couch, Watching TV saying a couple words about how you think about the planet, the wilderness, and so on.
But to maintain that perspective when you're actually in it, I would have to believe and speculate that that's a difficult thing to do.
Well, there's a deep respect that comes and a deep love for an animal that is going to sustain you and feed you.
The thing about it is these animals, they're not going to live forever if you don't do that.
Their life is incredibly brutal and incredibly short.
And what you're doing as a hunter is you're going into that world and you're dipping your toes into it for a brief amount of time, a week or whatever it takes to find an animal.
And then that animal's gonna feed you for months.
And to me, it's so much more ethical than buying it from a store.
You know, I mean, unless you're buying absolute organic where there's no pesticides used, you're for sure going to be responsible for the death of millions of bugs.
And on top of that, there's some very real and compelling evidence that plants have a level of intelligence.
We don't want to think of them as sentient because they can't communicate with us.
They don't say anything to us like, ow, don't chop me down, it hurts.
But they communicate with each other.
There's something that plants do.
Now this is a crazy thing that they found with giraffes, that the plants that giraffes eat, if they're downwind, so like if the giraffes are eating this plant and the wind from the plant they're eating goes downwind and catches these other plants, the plants will change the chemical composition of their leaves and become more bitter, making them less attractive to predation.
I don't remember what planet was that does that, but they have proven that plants do calculations, that plants are doing some kind of strange mathematics, that they're communicating with each other.
They know when other plants are being chopped down.
There's some shit going on with life, and we don't have the capability to understand dolphins, okay?
We don't know what they're saying.
When dolphins communicate with each other, they have a complex language, they have dialects, they sound differently in different parts of the world, they recognize each other, they have a very bizarre way of communicating that we have not been able to decipher.
But we recognize that it's going on because it's close enough to our own kind of communication that we say, oh, these things are smart and they're talking to each other.
Well, there's something going on with plants, too.
And this is a recent thing where the science behind it is starting to catch up, where it's emerging, where they're doing these tests and they're running these numbers and they go, look...
They're not wooden in the sense that it's not...
You're not talking about a rock.
A living plant has some sort of awareness.
There's something going on.
And different ones have more awareness.
And there's some sort of communication through the actual...
Actually, ecology of the ground.
I mean, the ground itself is a living thing.
Dirt itself is some sort of an organism.
Like a person is.
Like a person is an ecosystem.
We are responsible for the lives of Untold trillions of bacteria that live inside of us, right?
Well, it's the same thing can be said of the dirt itself.
The dirt itself is some sort of a strange balanced ecosystem, right?
Where worms and bacteria and all of these different funguses and all these different life forms all exist together and then the plant feeds off of those life forms and the plant in some respects It relies on the death of biological things like mammals and rats and bugs.
It relies on them for the very nutrients that it needs to make a plant in the first place.
It's all very, very complex and deep.
It's all connected.
And to deny that you're eating life, some strange life form, when you're having a salad is the height of convenience.
There's nothing wrong with eating a salad, but I don't think there's anything wrong with eating an elk steak either.
Life is consuming life, and it's just more obvious when you shoot an animal and you're there when it dies.
Yeah, I remember reading something about They had the meat ready to go, but they couldn't actually consume it because the governing body or whatever for food and beverage or whoever the hell it is said that it would be illegal to consume it.
For some reason, again, probably some food lobby or something.
But theoretically, right, we could find a way to manufacture all this shit.
Whatever the reasoning is, the biological part pulls you in, but then there's a psychological aftermath of you now being a different person because of the moves you made in the first place.
So part of me worries, though, that, like, in the absence of those interactions, what happens to the psyche of...
Males and females now just kind of allowed to bathe in their own perspective over and over and over again and never have to make those adjustments and never have to make those compromises.
Because historically, that hasn't really been a good sign.
You send a bunch of guys into jail without any females or you send them off to war without any females, they become fucking savages pretty goddamn quickly.
So is that what's going to happen?
Is the digital onslaught going to create some kind of hyper-aggressive male?
I want to sue this person over here and do this over there.
And in an environment where we take that a step further, and now we never compromise for other people, when we do emerge from Our headset world, what is our personality?
It's a guy, he's a scientist, and he does these videos that sort of, I don't know, attacks sort of everyday things that might seem obvious, but then breaks them down a little bit.
Anyway, he did a video about a bicycle.
And what happened was, this was a bicycle that had a gear in the steering.
So that left was now right, and right was now left.
And what he did was, he took this bicycle around to various talks that he was giving at different universities and stuff.
And he made a bet to people in the audience, I bet you $100 that nobody in here can ride this bike.
And of course, every time he got somebody coming up going, I can do it easily, whatever.
They get on the bike, they couldn't pedal it once.
Even though they're completely aware of what change has been made to it.
And so he spent six months before he could actually get down the street on this bike that was reversed.
And what he talks about in the video is about how he has...
The pathways that he had created in his mind for how to ride a bike...
We're very difficult to rewrite.
Once they're in there, they're in there.
And so he did an experiment where he took his eight-year-old, I want to say, who had just recently learned how to ride a bike the right way, gave him the same bike, and in a couple of weeks he had it down.
The kid could ride either bike.
He could ride the reverse bike or the regular bike.
And so he was building this kind of...
Perspective that like but potentially when it comes to language when it comes to learning when it comes to everything that the absence of those Pathways for young people actually makes them more Flexible yeah a greater ability to change their way of thinking right on a more frequent basis Because he was looking big picture at it and the funny thing is when he went back To go back to the regular bike.
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He couldn't ride the regular bike Hmm Wow That doesn't make any sense.
Well, it makes complete sense because pathways that you've developed are incredibly difficult to break.
And one of the things that when I was teaching martial arts, I found was it's way easier to teach a person who has no martial arts experience whatsoever than a person who studied a different style where they might be using bad mechanics.
So if they develop bad mechanics and then they came to a really good school, it was incredibly difficult to break them of their bad habits. it was incredibly difficult to break them of their bad Whereas like if I could get two people and one person was like, say one person maybe even had a black belt in one style and one person was a white belt.
I feel like if the black belt had bad technique and bad form and bad Bad mechanics if I could watch the two of them progress over a few years Eventually the white belt would surpass the black belt and move forward and be able to reach their full potential where the black belt with bad mechanics even though they might know how to fight good or Because they might know what they can do and even though what they're doing is not optimized with the most effective technique They know what how it works and how it fits
in the language of the community Like I think fighting is kind of like a language and even with like your shitty words and your bad grammar You could still form a sentence and still talk and communicate with people that's similar to the articulation of a real polished Technical martial artist versus a person with like a very limited vocabulary with street knowledge The person with the polished vocabulary will be able to express themselves more clearly.
And expressing yourself is what you're actually doing when you're fighting.
So the person who starts out with nothing is better off than the person who starts out with shit technique.
Unless the person who starts out with shit technique is super open-minded And has no ego and is willing or has very good control of the ego and is willing to try to completely learn everything from scratch and not go into it saying, hey, I'm already black belt.
I think it applies across the board, to be quite honest.
You know, I started working with a couple people for my channel.
I have an editor now.
He's a guy who I've known for a long time, but he doesn't have a background in editing at all.
He didn't have any kind of preconceived notions of what these videos should look like, but I liked that when he came in because I was like, you know, I can kind of...
Finesse this idea of how I want things to look and how I want them to be and he can kind of learn Starting with this These parameters the ones that you know as opposed to somebody coming in who would have been like a professional in the space And I think that particular perspective is something that a lot of startups are are doing as well when it comes to hiring new people is it's like are you hiring?
Are you hiring a person and their skill set?
Or are you hiring a personality?
Are you hiring potential?
And what is the difference in each of those decisions?
Sure, if you hire a professional, probably you're going to be able to snap your fingers and be achieving things immediately.
But in the end, is that person as capable of flexing and floating along with the needs of that business over time?
And also, do they come into that business with a preconceived notion of what their future is going to be based on, like, I'm going to move from here to there, and then I'll get a corner office, and then blah, blah, blah.
And they have this idea already mapped out in front of them.
And then when things aren't that way, they maybe be disappointed or don't know how to react.
But I don't know what it is exactly that holds it back.
Also, I think it's a fine line because on the other side of it, if a person's bouncing around from day to day on how they feel about something, it could be a fucking nightmare as well.
And that's why a lot of things, when you look at them and you go, ooh, well, okay, there's a lot of ways to look at this.
And when someone wants to come at it from a real hard black or white perspective, that usually is either someone with a deep agenda or someone who doesn't have a considered nuanced perspective of the subject at hand.
It's one of the most frustrating things about living a substantial part of my life on the internet is that, and I don't know if we talked about this previously or not, but it's this idea of everybody having kind of a microphone.
Everybody being able to blast out their kind of perspective.
I don't like the comment section on YouTube.
And my comments are not that bad, okay?
But I don't like the way it works.
The idea that you could create this video, put all this effort into it, formulate a perspective, and then everybody's gonna scroll to the top comment, and this dude put in what?
10 seconds?
A knee-jerk reaction, and he gets to occupy that real estate?
And trust me, whenever I engage in anything slightly more artistic or subjective online, I'm thinking, man, it'd be cool to turn off the comments and let it just breathe a little bit.
But at the same time, I'm like, this is the format that has been what everyone's accepted and expects now.
And so I feel like probably the healthier approach is this idea of tweaking it.
Now there's a whole thread underneath that guy's single comment, which then pushes it to the top because it's creating conversation.
And this is stuff that like on the highest level, the biggest businesses in the space, if you're Google, if you're Facebook, they're having boardroom meetings about this stuff.
They have a hundred people that are working for her that actively go out and correct people that are saying negative things about this fucking career criminal that might be the President of the United States someday.
Anyway, that obviously never happened, but LG kind of Took the approach of trying to make what the consumer version of that would look like.
So there's modules.
So the battery compartment, you can pull out the battery and then reinsert a camera module, which is going to give you a better grip, different attributes to the camera.
So anyway, I don't know if they show any of the other modules here, but they're opening it up to third parties as a port.
So essentially, if you're an audio maker and you want to have your own amp, or if you're God knows what accessory you might want to have utilized that, maybe a bigger battery.
What an uphill battle it is, though, for these cell phone companies to come up with something that you can get other people to jump in on and make accessories for.
Because people look at it and go, man, I don't know if this is going to catch on.
Do we use our resources and our engineers to develop something for this LG platform?
We can just make some shit for the iPhone and it's going to sell for sure.
Okay, so I don't know how fair it is, but really the way I evaluate a phone is how it kind of interacts with all the other devices that I expect it to interact with.
So, for example, if I get in my truck and I want this shit to seamlessly connect via Bluetooth, start playing my podcast, and so on, this phone, for whatever reason, it had no problem linking up The multimedia portion to play the music, the podcasts, but the headset portion, for whatever reason, it wouldn't connect for answering phone calls via my Bluetooth.
Again, this is anecdotal.
This is my personal experience.
It's tough to even put that out there because who knows?
It's just the way that's talking to my truck.
But that issue doesn't exist with any of the other flagships, so that's something that I'm going to consider.
Another thing is build.
So a lot of people were upset because of the way that that modular portion fits in.
It's not completely flush.
It's a little bit rough around the edges.
And so, again, it's so competitive in this marketplace that any little inch you're going to give up is going to have a drastic impact.
And lastly, I don't like their software, their skin that they put on Android, but we talked about this before.
I'm like a purist when it comes to that, and I usually modify that anyways.
But there was some weirdness from the get-go about not just the skin they have on there, but But how hard it is to really switch it around too much.
The Samsung theme store is a little bit more elaborate if you want to change the appearance of the way your TouchWiz.
TouchWiz has gotten a lot better, but I still have a Nexus in my pocket right now.
And the tough part about that is there's so few people who have ever even experienced it because you can't pick it up in a Verizon store or an AT&T store.
I'm not 100% sure how that works, but Wi-Fi calling and whatnot is cool, because generally speaking, even in your own places, like the places you frequent, like your office and your house and such...
So if you're a person who takes public transit on the subway and they got a coffee in one hand, then you can make the argument that any of these giant phones, it's difficult to interact with them one-handed.
Well, not only that, a Porsche is smaller than an SUV. Like if you invented an SUV and you're like, I don't I don't want to drive an SUV. I want a little car that zips around.
But anyway, the point being is it's not universal.
So you couldn't just be over at your friends and grab any pair of headphones.
All the stuff you may be already invested in.
A lot of people have invested a lot into audio.
And everything fits with this 3.5mm universal jack.
And it's been that way for God forever.
50 years?
More.
More than 50 years.
It used to be a quarter-inch jack like this stuff here, which could be adapted, but essentially it's been that analog connection for as long as there's been audio equipment.
So this is a big move.
If the leader in the marketplace gives up on that and goes with a strictly digital connection, you can expect all the other people to follow suit because Apple just has that kind of pull.
It doesn't have to be an adapter, but they could put out, just like they put out earbuds with every iPhone, they could just give you new ones that plug into there.
So me and my friend Lou Morton, who was a hardcore gamer, who was one of the writers for NewsRadio, and a bunch of friends that were in my Quake clan at the time, we got together with the Razor guy.
And we had a LAN party.
And we brought in a bunch of different shaped mice.
And we all showed which mouse we used and why we used it.
And I believe at the time I was using a Microsoft mouse.
And I really liked laser mice because back then they were...
Yeah, it was kind of crude and primitive, but people really loved it because you would set these buttons for different things.
Some of them would set one of the buttons for a jump.
Some of them would set one of the buttons.
The way I would have it, I would have the index finger would be my trigger.
That's how it would shoot.
The middle button would be a rail gun, and the far left button would be a rocket launcher.
So if I wanted a rocket launcher, I'd hit that far button, it would come to me instantly and I could shoot it, and then the railgun would be the one that I would count on for like a long-range sniper shot.
And so you have all your keys, your keys would be in front of you, WA, S, and D for movement, and then various weapon keys were just really close, like lightning gun was up here, a C, you would hit that for this and that for that, and you would configure it based on what you would like.
Mostly VR experiences, but this headset here is actually an AR headset, and you may have heard of it.
It's called the Microsoft HoloLens.
Essentially, you've got a lens in front of you in a fairly narrow field of view, but what ends up happening is you have this digital representation that's overlaid on your own physical space.
There's this place in Lynn that had these black lights, and it was a warehouse, and you would run around, there was boxes and all these barriers and shit.
Yeah, you can imagine if when that thing grabs hold of you, and your vest is gripping you tighter, and you're feeling the physical surroundings, that's going to hijack our sensory system big time.
I think that the proven brand of Tesla has gotten people so excited about what this guy's capable of with a smaller, less expensive car that the price of entry for the Model S or whatever it is, the expensive one, was a little too much.
When you come around with a $35,000 version of it, and it looks pretty dope, and it has that big laptop screen just like the other ones do, people just jumped in.
Obviously, there's going to be some friction between where we're going and where we're at and how much control we're willing to give to these systems.
But getting back to the pizza thing, that's a huge one.
If we're willing to give up control of our vehicles, I think we're also probably willing to give up control of a lot of other things.
I'm not sure if we talked about this before, but there was this really interesting...
I don't know if I read it or if it was on a podcast.
It was relating to Facebook in the early days and how one of the biggest issues they had was people getting tagged in photographs that didn't want to be tagged.
And so they did this kind of test where they were like, well, how the hell do we allow people to get taken off the photograph without having to go to their friend and saying, I don't want to be tagged in that photograph?
And so what they did is they put in these stock answers that you can send off to your friend.
Like, select A, B, C. Like, I don't want to be in that photo or I look stupid or whatever.
And the second that they made it a multiple choice, way more people began to use it because they didn't have to come up with their own reason.
They felt like it was more accessible.
So humans are low friction.
We're lazy as fuck.
And many times we get overwhelmed at the prospect of having to come up with our own, I don't know, our own method for dealing with the awkwardness of life.
So if you can imagine in the future, if these things, our phones and the systems we interact with...
Get really smart at figuring out the correct responses for certain inquiries.
Let's say a girl texts you and she's like, hey man, meet me at 8pm or call me later.
What if your phone knows better than you are, than you do, at what the correct response is if you want to sleep with her later?
Like, here's the 50% likelihood if you say this...
This might be the outcome.
But if you say that, you understand where I'm going with this?
Maybe we have to figure out how to use them better.
But one thing I noticed immediately on the Apple Watch when I was experimenting with it was the auto-responses.
For questions, for texts, for anything.
It would have five or six options for how to get back to that person.
And maybe none of them are perfect, but just the easiness of it is why you want to interact with it.
You're like, ah, fuck, maybe I'm not late because I'm at the grocery store, but it's easier than pulling out my phone and telling the person where I actually am.
So fascinating that no one saw any of this coming either like 10 years ago No one thought that that was gonna be a real issue that you're gonna have a bunch of Predetermined answers to a phone call coming in how do you respond with a text?
I don't know why they took that particular approach.
I just think they're interesting because they're making that statement as opposed to like the flip phone marketplace, which is just like old leftover phones.