How You Can Stop Radicalization Before It Starts

0:00 we're all arguing over whether or not Charlie, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, or whether or not Jimmy Kimmel should have been pulled off the air. We're not arguing about the fact that there are 10 companies running everything and fucking over the rest of us. But the power and the control is what keeps the money coming in because if all of us actually banded together and rose up against the very few billionaires that are causing all of this or at least making it possible for us to live this way, it would be a quick turnaround, right? Like if we realized who the real bad guy is here, it would be a very different world rather than the one where we're sitting here arguing about whose idea about, know, Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel is right.

0:44 this is robots where the podcast that tries to help you use AI and technology to safely manage your mental health, your well being all the things that we're trying to manage on a daily day based on a day to day basis. And this is gonna be a tough conversation. This is gonna be hard because there's there's some lines that we want to walk here to make sure that we don't mischaracterize any any part of this, but obviously we're talking about what everybody's talking about the the death of Charlie Kirk and the blowback that has followed since then uh goes without saying I I almost didn't even want to say this but it goes without saying that this is a horrible tragedy that nobody should ever stand for this should not happen to anybody I don't care what kind of a piece of shit you are you shouldn't be gunned down for your ideas there we've done the disclaimer now we can have the conversation so this is tough because I completely disagree with pretty much everything I ever heard fall out of his mouth.

1:40 The only thing I respect about Charlie Kirk is the way that he took on his issues face to face and took his debate out in public and challenged people's ideas. I think we need more of that. You even made a statement on the show, Jason, recently about like, you know, maybe more and more people need to be afraid of being punched in the mouth for saying something stupid, right? Like, because we all hide behind our keyboards and we all get into these into these wars online. Yeah, we're super, exactly. And we're super brave and we're at a distance and people can't touch us. But when we're up close and personal, we tend to, we tend to back away from our opinions or we tend to be less vitriolic in what we say. And Yeah, I actually, do think that's the line.

2:21 Like being punched in the face, that's a level of violence that, you is not super acceptable, but... Right, like, yeah, the founding fathers did that, right? Like, they would get into fistfights, and they'd get into arguments, and they'd go back and forth, but they wouldn't fucking shoot each other. Like, when they would get to the point where we have irreconcilable differences, they wouldn't stand at a distance and assassinate each other, they'd get pistols and do a fucking duel. Like, and it was straight up. No, right, it wasn't a cowardly act from a distance.

3:01 mean, snipering somebody from 200 yards away, at an elevated position on a college campus, that's cowardice. You know, I mean, straight up. And like, that's not okay. And we have to look, yeah, so good. was saying the reaction to it as well, right? We're now in a few days in the wake of the Jimmy Kimmel being pulled off the air. He's one of a number of TV commentators who are now axed because they said something that made you know, Mr. grumpy pants unhappy and he wanted something done about it. So This just continues to spread in awful ways.

3:44 And so much of it comes back to things that you and I have been saying here for months, things I've been saying on this show for years. And there's a couple of instances I want to share. And one, actually, ironically, is from Facebook. And it is somebody who shared a conversation that someone else shared, and they just reshared it. it so brilliantly highlighted what I think is a huge root of this problem. And it basically describes two different points of view about who Charlie Kirk was based on people's algorithm. And so I'm just going to read a little bit this. Stop me when it gets boring. But it says, one thing that has become really clear since yesterday is that we live in at least two different realities. Talking to a friend who only knew Charlie as a Christian motivational speaker, because that's all that ever came across her feed, they showed me videos I'd never seen of him saying perfectly reasonable and empowering things.

4:32 I showed her videos. She'd never seen before of his racism, misogyny, homophobia, advocating for violence against specific groups of people. She was horrified by his remarks about Nancy Pelosi's husband's attacker being bailed out and celebrated for his violent act. She was horrified by the number of things he'd said, but she had never seen them or heard them before. The same as I had never heard or seen the generalized clips of him sounding like a personally nice, like a perfectly nice, loving man and father. Neither of us had the whole picture of this man. I mentioned he was a known white supremacist and she thought I was joking. She talked about him giving a speech about finding your purpose and doing good in the world and I thought she was joking.

5:13 I saw why this friend was mourning the loss of a person she thought was a good person. My friend bless her saw why I feel the way I do about him. We understood each other better in spite of a billion dollar internet machine specifically focused on keeping us apart because we talked to each other. with the desire to listen and learn rather than the desire to change someone else's mind or be right. I mean, that's it. That's it in a nutshell, right? The very salient point in that is that Charlie Kirk was a people. And people as individuals, persons, are not entirely good and are not entirely bad. You can find fault in Mother Teresa. You can find fault all over the place.

5:55 Like, we're not perfect. And thinking that we are is foolish. But we're also not entirely evil. Like, and unworthy of sympathy and empathy. There is so much uh to unpack in that statement because the way that most of us consume information these days is via a few media sources. Those media sources are being consolidated. ah Most of them are being consolidated towards the right right now, and they've gone through their own path to be consolidated by the left. And really what they're being consolidated to is people with money.

6:36 And we have to stop thinking about media in terms of political left and political right. They just start thinking about media by the people that are motivated to make money off of it, which is what they're doing. Like they're not doing it for the public good. And the FCC coming out and saying that we're going to revoke ABC's licenses if they don't do something about Jimmy Kimmel is government censorship. This is not cancel culture. This is government censorship. This is against the Constitution. It should be against the law. than internet outrage about somebody who said something stupid. This is somebody who made a joke that that made, what do they call him tangerine Palpatine made him very upset. And so they had to do something about it.

7:16 Right, and it's... Look. The fact that the right is getting upset about this uh at a level where they're like cancel everybody, cancel everybody, fuck this. you don't, if you say anything negative against people that we like and love, we're going to cancel you. This is exactly what they were complaining that the left was doing to people. So this blade cuts both ways and. there are definitely people on the right that are standing up and saying, no, no, no, this is not okay. Like Fox News, people on Fox News are saying this. Like cancel culture should not be a thing because the next party that comes into power could cancel us.

7:59 Whether or not we have another election is still up for debate. um But this feels very, very much so like uh stories I've heard of authoritarians and dictators coming in and forcing propaganda and messages to be scripted a certain way, which is exactly what the right was accusing the left of. um But I've never seen the left make the threat that we're going to cancel Fox's licenses from the FCC. chorus of the left saying cancel their license, like what they're doing is not good, what they're doing is harmful. Like they are pressured by the population to do that.

8:41 And they're like, no, no, because we understand that when the shoe is on the other foot, we would be screwed. We know better. But that's kind of, yeah, I mean, and I don't, I don't mean for this to get political and that's what I was afraid of. but it is the, the actions of someone who's who is behaving as though they aren't going anywhere. Like they, are intending to make rules as though they don't ever have to worry about blowback from those decisions. So that's uh at the risk of getting political. I want to step back a little bit more and talk a little bit more about the perpetrators of this violence and the information that tends to lead to the actions of, know, assassinating somebody you disagree with.

9:23 There's a guy that I'm a fan of. His name is Scott Galloway. He was on CNN just within a couple of days of the shooting. And really in this few minutes articulated something that again that we have been saying here for a long time and I wanted to just share this quick conversation that he had with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

15:11 First comment, in the US corporations are people. Because they're people, they're given the inalienable rights of people. Also, the top 10 companies are Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, is Google, Amazon, Meta slash Facebook, Broadcom, Satiramco, Tesla, and TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor. The top 10 companies of those, the only ones that aren't making money directly off of computational metrics is Saudi Aramco.

15:55 Everyone else is making money off of these processing functions. And for those of you saying, Tesla, no, that's not what's happening. You bet your ass it is. You bet your ass that those cars are giant walking, traveling computers that are collecting huge amounts of metadata, watching people's tracking flow. And if you Tesla is only involved in this, remember that Tesla funds the rest of Musk's projects. These people aren't your friends. They don't have your best interest at heart. You are the product for them. You make them money and they make their money by bifurcating you and putting you into classifications that are easy to market to. And the best way to do that is to control your information feed and only give you bits of information.

16:38 that make it plausible for you to believe and amplify whatever preconceived biases and notions they think you have. And if you don't have those biases already, because you're keep watching that shit for another 10 weeks and you will, because they will figure it out. I was going to share a little perspective I had on that. I haven't gone down the path of political radicalization thanks to the internet, but I did have an experience a few years ago when attempting to grow this podcast in its previous form. Some advice I was given was to, in order to grow the podcast, go into these social media groups, go into these places where your potential listener is hanging out, help them, offer them advice.

17:22 do it and become basically become online friends with them. They discover your podcast, your podcast grows because they had this personal connection with you. So as a show focused on men's mental health, I found myself spending a lot of time in a lot of groups where a lot of really miserable, sad fucking men just wanted to vent. They didn't want help. And, you know, day after day, these 1015 minute sessions that I would spend really started to erode my own mental health because I was just going like these guys, like I'm trying to help these guys and they're all just these sad fucking sacks that didn't want help. They just wanted to be heard. And it it fucked with me like in bad ways. Like my mental health was probably at the lowest it's ever been because I was spending so much time with people whose mental health was so emotionally fucked up that that's where they that's the only place they felt they had to go to get help.

18:08 So pivot that to I don't have community. I don't have connection. I don't belong anywhere. You find yourself in a political debate with somebody, somebody else suddenly makes a little bit of sense. They share a group with you that you take part in, you join that group. And that just opens up the pathway to deeper and deeper rabbit holes that ultimately lead to these radicalized behaviors where you're suddenly feeling like it makes completely rational sense to go murder somebody because they said something you don't like. That's how it works. Yep. Now, the thing I want to ask you about, I know you have a lot of experience uh in dealing with bots, because that's the other part about this that people don't talk enough about is that all those people you're fighting with or agreeing with or having conversations with online, they ain't people.

18:57 And if you saw the latest Superman movie, interpretation of it as monkeys in space was fucking fantastic. But you've done a lot of work to try to prevent bots from doing what bots do. Tell me more about. Yeah. So uh more than half the traffic in the internet is bots. uh I used to work, I've worked at several companies building web application firewalls. And uh RSA, one of the big security conferences out there, probably the biggest security one, um which happens every year in the Bay Area. uh Their topic the last two, three years for their main stages have revolved a lot around preventing bots.

19:39 And there's different kinds of bots. There's good bots, things that are out there trying to do good things, trying to index information for easier searching. Their intent is not to harm. There's bad bots whose intent is to harm and to take things down or to grab information or to do things they're not supposed to do. And then you have this other category of uh just poorly configured, costly bots. So you might have good bots, but they cost website owners a lot of money or they cost companies a lot of money because they're too aggressive and they do something, you know, they're misconfigured, do something bad. And then you also have bad bots that aren't expensive to let run and do their thing.

20:22 um the BroBots? What do do about the BroBots? good question. um I would say the robots are in the upper left hand quadrant of the good and inexpensive because if any of you are paying extra money for this podcast, we're fucking up because we're not getting any money from that. right. But if you but if you look at that, the companies that actually um are responsible for the most bots are these top 10. I mean, it's it's Microsoft. um It's Apple. It's Alphabet. It's Amazon. It's definitely Facebook. I when you look at the people that are actually generating traffic to go through and feed their AIM models, it's these folks on top of that.

21:03 em Companies actually make money like you have more than a few state actors going out there doing things that are relatively free for them, where they create their own version of chat bots that scrape and look at content that's going across the Internet and find ways to provide outrage messages to those pieces. because they're trying to amplify outrage and anger. It's good economically to do this because it gets people fired up and keeps them more engaged. There's no doubt about that. And we talk about these things like, you hear a lot about the mainstream media being a problem and your mainstream media are basically your three commonly found broadcast channels.

21:44 It's ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. in the Seattle area. It's channel four, channel five, channel seven, channel 13. And there's other ones like the CW and other things, but they don't do anything for media. PBS used to kind of be called mainstream media, but it's not. It was public broadcasting. You have to get down to company number. Let me see here. Oh, I'm still going. I'm still going. I'm in the 50s. I'm in the 60s. the media money is not really there. I'm in the 70s, okay! I get down to the Walt Disney Corporation at spot number 79 at $204 billion dollars a In contrast, the real media companies, the ones actually doing real money things.

22:38 They have market caps of, let's see, Microsoft 3.85 trillion. Google 3 trillion. Amazon 2.5 trillion. Facebook almost 2 trillion. It's not even close. Like these are orders of magnitude. more than the mainstream media. They make way more money, they do way more things, and their broadcast media coming over the airwaves is not a fucking thing anymore. If you look at it, yes, you can still get broadcast media sent to your house. You can put up a high definition antenna and you might be able to pick up some channels, but almost all of them don't spend any money on critical range addressing and they force you to go through a cable operator and look at these things online.

23:27 So these companies really are not broadcast mainstream media. If you look at the newspapers, the companies that own newspapers are in this. Most of these are billionaires that own those newspapers. Like I remember back in the day, everyone was worried that Knight Ritter was going to consolidate all these media sources and try to have one homogenous voice back in the 90s. was one of the thesis for my senior project when I was in college. That shit doesn't matter anymore. Nobody gives a fuck. Like people don't read newspapers. My wife loves to read newspapers. We get the Seattle Times every Sunday. Do you know the last time they got out of that plastic rain bag and actually got opened up and it wouldn't just get tossed in the garbage on like Tuesday or Thursday was been a long fucking time.

24:12 Not because we don't enjoy opening up the paper and holding it in our hands, but the convenience of having these things fed to you and pushed to you. It's just too high. Why am I going to spend more cycles and time going deep on these kinds of stories when I can just dummy box this thing right on my screen right in front of me? and who's who's going to read the three page article in the paper when there is a nice four paragraph summary from somebody's perspective that is just fed to you while you sit there drinking your coffee on your couch with the you know, the phone staring you in face. Yes, now imagine you're 20-something. Like, you've probably never picked up a fucking newspaper in your life. Or if you have, it's been for, like, nostalgic reasons, because your parents told you to go get it.

24:57 Right. Yeah, exactly. And more than likely, These exist? Why? That's ridiculous. And more than likely, you printed it off on your computer and didn't actually get a newspaper or actually go to the library and look at microfilm reels. Like it's just not practical. We've changed the way that we consume media. And people want to come back and say, you know, Fox News is the problem. CNN is the problem. MSNBC is the problem. Bullshit. Like in any given point in time, collectively, they don't have more than five percent of the viewing audience. If you look at the ratings on them, like they're just not there. Well, also, as someone who spent 20 years in the media, the fallacy that there is some, you know, somebody sitting in an office somewhere dictating all of the content that must be fed through all of these channels is just not real.

25:44 It's just not a thing. I've worked in enough newsrooms to know that's not a thing. I will say when I did work for one company, Sinclair Broadcast Group, by the way, that is the only company I ever worked with that mandated content to be fed across all of their affiliates. conservative, hard right propaganda that we are required to play and people lost their jobs because they resisted. I never heard that shit coming from the left. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but I spent enough time there to know if it did, I would have heard it. If somebody listening to this or watching this knows of something, please, please educate me because I would love to see it. But that shit is unacceptable. and I will say that there have been lawsuits at uh Washington Post, at New York Times, at multiple different print outlets by conservative editors or conservative writers, where they've come back and they said, my way of presenting this or my way of structuring this editorial content was taken down or removed or I was fired because I was making opinions.

26:46 So I think it does happen on both sides. I do. sure it does, but right, think there's a difference between I am an individual contributor and my voice is being silenced versus we are the company mandating that everyone share this content. There's a very distinct difference there. Well, OK. If the effect is the same, though, is that. I mean, if the effect is the same, then it's editorializing content for a particular brand, whether it be more conservative or progressive. I think I think those things still happen, and I I definitely think that Hollywood and the people that produce content for entertainment purposes tend to skew more left than right, but not entirely right, like.

27:32 There definitely does tend to be a narrative that gets put in from Hollywood by the people that produce content to try to make things look and feel a certain way. We've seen the scope of military dramas change, police dramas change. They're definitely more progressive in the way that they talk about things. They definitely present things from that perspective, but they try to be holistic and they try to be more inclusive. compared to what they were 20 years ago. Like we just watch uh Starship Troopers. My kids were watching it downstairs. My daughter's boyfriend had not seen it before. And they're like, we're to watch Starship Troopers. It is. And it's a total war propaganda film, right?

28:13 Like, and it's this thing where it's human fascists against bugs because we've decided to take fascism out to the universe and not just keep within the local country. But the nice part is that humans were all unified and there were men and women and minorities all fighting with, fighting against the bad enemy, you know. In other words, we are highly, highly susceptible to having our minds changed by signal inundation. And the more signals you have coming towards you, the more you're going to be affected by this. At the same time, You can program automation in such a way to amplify negative signals or positive signals however you want.

28:59 And understanding the intent of those pieces is not particularly difficult. And creating fake Facebook accounts is super easy. And Facebook does not at all want to stop this from happening. It's how they make their money. They are not incentivized one bit to make this change. Neither is TikTok. Neither is Google slash YouTube. None of these big podcasts are set up that way. Apple makes their money reselling multiple different layers of these pieces and creating their own content. mean, Amazon's in so many as their finger in so many cookie jars that, you know, there's there's no way that they're not making money. They have their own ad tech platform. They have their own LLNs and machine learning systems like these are all there.

29:43 And then your chip manufacturers, your Nvidia, your Broadcom. your TSMC, like all these places make money off of trying to crunch data at large volumes inside their data centers. And Oracle is hugely on the rise right now. Larry Ellison's son now owns CBS. uh Larry Ellison is not known for being super progressive. But honestly, he's not known for being super political either. He tries to figure out a way to make money. because it's not about politics, it's about deregulation, and it's about getting access to turn people's dollars out.

30:24 But that but I think that that's something that is interesting, because it's not just money, like the political impact is also very, very strong. Because if you talk about the fact that we're all arguing over whether or not Charlie, Charlie Kirk was a good guy, or whether or not Jimmy Kimmel should have been pulled off the air. We're not arguing about the fact that there are 10 companies running everything and fucking over the rest of us. And that's like, okay, the money's great. But the power and the control is what keeps the money coming in because if all of us actually banded together and rose up against the very few billionaires that are causing all of this or at least making it possible for us to live this way, it would be a quick turnaround, right?

31:07 Like if we realized who the real bad guy is here, it would be a very different world rather than the one where we're sitting here arguing about whose idea about, know, Charlie Kirk or Jimmy Kimmel is right. I mean, as of 2024, there are 813 billionaires in the US. 813 people. And if you just collect them all and turn them into a monolith and keep them as one group and say these 813 people are the ones doing these things, we need to get rid of these 813 people. That's not the answer. Because there are a few million millionaires.

31:49 I mean, how many US I'm just Googling this live. There are almost 22 million millionaires in the US. I guarantee you that those people are more than willing to step up and take over the jobs of those billionaires because we want a money. The way that you solve this problem is you get money out of the public good and stop deciding that you're going to have. Capitalism be the driving force. Not just capitalism. It's not capitalism. mean, we're not a free market capitalist society in the US or in the West at all. We're at best a representational uh socialist, uh democratic socialist country in some regard.

32:36 We socialize losses, we privatize profits. We have socialized medicine in some regards. We have socialized roads, socialized school systems. But we change who gets what and who has to pay for what depending on their economic prowess and upon whether or you can get lobbyists to go in and Look, we started this conversation off about radicalism in these pieces, and we're talking about the motivation of folks of why it is that these companies are not going to make these changes. Really, I think what we should be talking about is the Simpsons episode where the ad tech piece is in there and are not the ad tech that the ad company was in there and they're singing the song.

33:19 Just don't look, just don't look and you'll kill the marketing items. I mean. You have Lardlad there with the giant donut holding this thing up, walking through places like, yeah, you have to just not look like if you do things that aren't going to make the money, then you're no longer a profit target for them and they have a hard time sending stuff to you. I don't want to set myself out as the golden example of this, but my Facebook feed is 90 percent cat videos and and like surfing clips these days. And every now and again, I'll get a pop up for like some probiotic or testosterone health or hair loss health, because they know how old I am. And these are like common things, right? Every now and again, like I get, I guess, bro culture stuff thrown at me where it's like, you should be shooting guns and you should be hunting and you should be doing this and this.

34:07 And I'm like, yeah, okay. Like I've done that shit. I get it. But like, no, I don't need that. And I skip over that ad. I give it no air time. And they've tuned the algorithm. to figure out a way to make me profitable because I don't really cleanly fit into any of these categories. That being said, I'm sure that when they have my profile in place and they're saying, hey, do you want to market to this person and push those things across? Companies are probably getting more discerning as to which demographic bucket I fall into because I do have a discerning way of tuning. Now, if I go on to blue sky or X. Like it just goes white male 50 and like barfs all of it on me.

34:50 uh Instagram is not much different. Like there are certain people that follow on Instagram, but I get ads on Instagram, which is fucking owned by Facebook. You would think they'd share the same algorithm. And I don't look at it at all because I don't have enough track record in history to look at my wife's and my kid's stuff. I don't tend to scroll through. So its algorithm does not have as much information on me. So it's still trying to figure out kind of who I am. But in the figuring out who I am phase, it's test marketing and throwing shit at me that it thinks I might like. And almost all of it is a variation of bro culture or right wing propaganda. And... They're not doing it to help me. They're not doing it to bring me better content that I will like.

35:32 They're doing it to sell me ads and capture my eyes. That's what they're doing. And I'm 50, so radicalizing me is going to be hard because I'm old, fat, and lazy. uh A teenager or a 20-something, they've got energy, they've got time, and they feel depressed because it feels like there's no future. The economy's busted. There's very little economic opportunity for them. AI is coming in and taking over things. If you don't fall into the cisgender white like kind of bucket of things as as a man, And most of the media sources have decided that they want to go after you in this way.

36:16 And I mean, they're they're definitely there's a more there's a bigger prevalence, right? Like getting kids to be outraged by telling them that they're not part of the community or what they're doing is wrong. And then amplifying that signal with negative messages coming from other people to create more outrage. And then these bots that go through and amplify that message even more and put even more like hysterically outrageous. Shitty things that they say to try to get people more more riled up. This is a recipe for disaster because we are telling people that are part of groups and tribes that are not fully mentally developed that don't have all. All the mental regulation that's actually required to work in this space that.

37:01 You know, don't get upset about this. These things don't get radicalized, don't get pushed in this direction when it's their main information source is unrealistic. And yeah. they're they're young people that are that are lost. They feel alone. They feel ashamed because of it. They don't know where their people are. So they go more and more inward. They become more and more isolated, which then they still crave connection. So then they reach out through social media and then they become immediate targets that that this very propaganda that you're talking about is targeted for. It's trying to reach that lost young man and push him in a certain direction. Well, I think it's more nefarious. So I actually think when these people go through in the street looking for things that are part of counterculture, Facebook provides it.

37:46 The social media sources provided. It's like, well, look at this group. Follow these things. Push these things in this direction. And then what you get is you get other companies out there and state actors going through and saying, well, let's destabilize things a bit more and let's actually join these groups and pretend like we're part of this or just fuck with people to try to make these things more difficult and painful because it amplifies the outrage. It amplifies the distrust and the hatred and the otherification of people out there. And we're all people, we're all persons, we're all flawed in all kinds of different ways. And one group saying these people shouldn't exist is no worse than any other group saying these people shouldn't exist.

38:33 Saying it is one thing. Mm-hmm. taking action and doing things to make those things people not exist. That's that next step. And when you look at the body politic and the removal of voices and the removal of opinions and literally the physical removal of people in the US at the moment, there is plenty of reason to think that at any given point in time, you could be targeted and the fear is not unfounded. So you've got this convergence of these different pieces occurring right now and it's scaring folks and the media outrage machine is leaning into that.

39:19 And keep in mind, it's not the mainstream media that's the problem. It's fucking social media. I look, I still got a meta account. I still use Facebook. I still use Instagram. I've got an ex account, which I fucking hate. I refuse to have a TikTok account. I've got a blue sky account. Like I've got 40 other pieces. I I started a fucking social media company like eight, nine years ago to try to get it moving. This is the, this is the things that we deal with and the things that, that we have to be looking at. What I do think needs to occur is I think these social media companies um there needs to be a way for people to have Other folks validated that what they're saying that these are real people, not just bots.

40:06 Facebook could do all of that, but they're not doing it because it's expensive. It's difficult. It eats into the profit margins. Exactly. It doesn't allow people to be as outraged so they don't get as much money. Yeah. is, as we heard earlier, there is no appetite in DC for regulation on any of this stuff. no. mean, the fact that we've just deregulated AI for the next 10 years with no with no strict controls. How are we going to deal with all this? And the real thing is we have to stop being assholes. And it's real hard to stop being an asshole when all you're seeing is messages coming from assholes like to put it in really clear vernacular.

40:51 when your entire mental space is occupied by the farts of shitty assholes. Laughter you might start, your breath might start to stink when you speak. It's like we said, with no threat of getting punched in the mouth or having to smell a shitty asshole, you're gonna keep being an asshole. don't assume that you're not an asshole. Like, you fucking are. And that's okay. It's okay to be that. You don't deserve to be shot for that. You don't deserve to be killed for that. That's just fucking wrong. Punching in the face is a different story, but. and I just because this is setting off an alarm bell in my head, I want to make sure we're clear about this.

41:31 And we're talking about the the class war, big air quotes between the billionaires and the rest of us. No one here is calling for the death of billionaires. I'm just I'm just suggesting that maybe some of their money could be better spent in other ways and perhaps shared a little bit more evenly. But that's that's not for me to decide. Or we have better regulations that actually have the people in mind and not the profits of corporations. And I think that's the biggest thing is that our body politic and the way that we make laws and make decisions are not happening in the people's best interest. They're happening in corporations best interest. And don't don't buy into the concept that one side does this and the other side doesn't because they both do like they both take money from lobbyists.

42:14 They both take money from special interests. Certainly one side that's in power right now seems to be doing it a lot more than anyone's ever done in modern history from the time that we've been taking data. Like the last time that we were in this kind of economic issue with the ruling elite having such different barriers was just before we went into the Great Depression. Coincidence? I don't know. We're going to find out. The last point I'll make on this is just that, you know, you talked about don't look right. Just don't don't give them the attention. I've had this now multiple times in real life where I have been surrounded by people that I do not politically agree with that.

42:57 If we were on Facebook, the conversation would be one I would not engage in because it's not beneficial. But I was in shared space with a lot of people that see the world very differently than I do. And we never once talked about it. What we talked about was how we're doing, how our health is, how our family is, how our kids are doing, how they're doing in school, how works going, fun things they're working on. And it was fucking lovely to be able to share space with people that see the world differently than me. But at the end of the day, we all want the same things. We want a safe place to raise our kids. We want to make a decent wage. We want to be able to buy a house and have some financial security. I that's that's all we really want.

43:38 We used to just argue about the best way to get there. But now we argue about stupid shit that doesn't even matter. I just I bring this up just to again point out, just put the fucking thing down and go talk to people in real life. It's just such a different reality than the one you're experiencing online. Yeah. up. We could end the show. We have turned minor grievances into existential problems of good versus evil. And my wife was a kindergarten paraeducator for a while. And one of the things they teach kindergartners is how to react to problems.

44:20 Is your reaction comparable to the size of the problem? We have to remember that Facebook is the kindergarten playground. This is not where we're going out there and being our best selves and our best adult-like people. We're dealing with a bunch of emotional limbic system pieces that are going out and we're treating everything like an existential crisis. And there are several books about this and the world religions didn't have this problem until about 2000 years ago. with the rise of Christianity and creating this idea that there are cosmic goods and cosmic evils that are at war with each other, amplifies these pieces and stops letting us look at each other as being human beings that are both good and bad.

45:14 And if we don't start thinking about each other as holistic, real people that maybe have bad ideas, that maybe done some bad things, but actually are still good at some level and worthy of respect, This is going to get worse. It's going to get a lot fucking worse. And I don't want that to happen. I look, I break the country up. OK, great. I get that. You want to have a civil war. It sounds miserable and awful. I don't want to do that. No one's going to come out as a winner on this. And the reality is, is like you said, there are many people and many friends that I have that are on a different side of the political spectrum who I have lovely conversations about sports.

45:54 about food, go out to dinner with them, have beers with them, and when politics comes up, we actually sit there and listen to each other and try to understand. And we'll say shit, but like, you're full of shit, here's why. And we'll give each other grief because we have the social dynamic and the context built around that where we can act like adults with each other and not in the fucking kindergarten playground that is the internet. Yep. There you go. Real life. That's where to work this out. Yeah, exactly. All right, man. Good talk. That was good stuff. don't know if that helped anybody. It certainly helped me. I had a lot of that just rolling in my head for days. So I'm glad we got that out. well, we were in charge.

46:35 We work for ourselves so nobody can nobody can cancel us. Well, yeah, we do have. We do have other employers, though. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, if you have found this beneficial in any way, please feel free to share it with somebody. You can do that with the links that are available at our website, BroBots.me. That's where you can also sign up for a newsletter where we sort of recap some of this and give you some action action steps to sort of take forward with your life. All that's available available at BroBots.me. And that's where the next episode of our little show here will be available in about a week. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Thanks, guys.