The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss Robert Sapolsky’s book: Determined, Society Getting Scarier? George Clooney Strike Solution, This week’s AI watch, and lastly, in today’s day and age, is it too expensive to have fun?
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Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.
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Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/show_vs_business
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Follow Theo on YouTube:
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The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss Robert Sapolsky’s book: Determined, Society Getting Scarier? George Clooney Strike Solution, This week’s AI watch, and lastly, in today’s day and age, is it too expensive to have fun?
----------
Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.
----------
Follow us on Instagram - https://instagram.com/show_vs_business
Follow us on Twitter - https://twitter.com/showvsbusiness
Like us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/ShowVsBusiness
Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuwni8la5WRGj25uqjbRwdQ/featured
Follow Theo on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@therealtheoharvey
Follow Mr.Benja on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminJohnsonakaMrBenja
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Theo Harvey: This is show versus business. Your weekly take on pop culture from two very different perspectives. If your host, the real Theo Harvey and Mr. Benja come with all the relevant info about the week in pop culture. So Mr. Benja, what are we covering today?
Mr.Benja: As for this week in pop culture, it is popping off like it wasn't before because it's a new week.
So first of all, I'll let you know that we have no free will. So I don't even know why we're trying to do anything. I don't know why we're trying to be here every week with the hotness, because we have no free will. According to this scientist guy, Ainge from Stanford, so people are listening to him. We'll see what he's got to say.
There may be some truth to it, maybe something for you to think about, and definitely a little takeaway we've got. Also, speaking of not being in control. Are we a little too scared of things? Maybe that's why this book came about in the first place. If we're too scared of stuff. So that's another story we're going to look at.
We might just be too scared of things. Halloween's around the corner. It's been getting bigger and bigger. I'm sure you've already got your spirit Halloween up and it's raking in money with its weird Halloween smell. We'll talk about that too. And, but aside from being a scared society, no one is scared to tell George Clooney that just because he's rich doesn't mean he can solve the actor strike.
The actor strike is still going on, they're still trying to work things out, still trying to fix it up, and George Clooney tried to fix it, but he failed. We're gonna let you know what happened, what he did, what this means, we'll get into that. Also, we're going to, we're going to be talking about AI again, because we got to keep up on these AI guys, have a little AI watch for you.
This time, Bing is so concerned, Microsoft is so concerned that it's Bing GPT engine of AI, it needs to be reeled in a little bit. You need to make sure it doesn't go crazy. So they're offering a 15, 000 bounty if you can get Bing AI to go crazy. Act up. Say something nutty, fly off the rails. I know a couple of you, a little industrious prompters.
You might be able to do it. I think you can go for it. Finally, with all this stuff going on Theo and I were talking and we need to rant on this a little bit. It might be costing too much to have fun just in all areas of life. It's I want to have fun. And it's can't have fun without the mon.
That's a little mon, the dollars. Give me 2, make it holla. So it used to be 1, make it holla, but now it's 2, make it holla. Anyway, inflation on the on the limericks. All right. That is our, those are our five stories. We're going to get into Theo. How's that sound?
Theo Harvey: Oh, Mr. Benja, I love it. I love it. I love it.
Story time, Mr. Benja. Ah, man. I am, watching these shows. I only watch, I really watch horror films too much. Or horror TV shows. But recently Netflix dropped a new show. And it got me because it was very interesting conceit. Basically. They want to combine the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
With succession and they got a show called fall of the house of usher. Have you heard of this show, Mr. Benja at
Mr.Benja: all? Oh, no, it showed up on my, I showed up on my Netflix. I, I still have it. So I'm just checking in on it, showed up on my Netflix and said Hey, you should be watching this. I was like, all right, watch later.
Cause I had heard rumblings about it. So now I'm glad you're here to tell me.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not big horror guy, just don't like to get into all that devil foolishness, but and that caught my interest, man, because, anything to do with business, I'm like business TV show I'm there.
And then, Edgar Allen Poe, do you remember? Reading Edgar Allan Poe in high school or middle school, the raven pitting the pendulum, just, yeah, it was very weird because, all the poems we read when we were in high school or middle school were like, about love or Romeo and Juliet or just, really philosophical thoughts Thought provoking type poems.
You remember the entry way for me, at least for poems was what's at the the end of the sidewalk. What's his name? Shel Silverston. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Remember that big white book and how all these poems in there and they had these little simple little poems and that kind of was the entryway into that.
So then you got a little bit more mature and then they got to him. Words lost with Emily Dickinson, all these great poets in the, yeah. Early 1800s and all that, but then they got to this guy, Edgar Allen Poe, man, and that guy was just on some other stuff, man. And even reading it, you just got a little creepy feeling about this stuff.
Like that one story, I can't remember the name of it, but the one where the guy, they put him in the cellar and he walled him up while he was still alive. That was just like, and it was, and he wrote not just poems. He also wrote short stories, right? So yeah, I was more of a short story. I got to this.
Yeah. So anyway, I say all I have to say is that they took all his works and remixed it into this, cohesive story about this, this, the CEO, master of the universe type guy who owns a pharmaceutical company of all things. So they made it very modern and just like how he had eight kids and how they were just terrible kids.
And how they all his wealth and
Mr.Benja: how they felt. Is this the premise though? Is they putting it out there like that or is that just it happens to be part of the behind the scenes? No, this
Theo Harvey: is the premise. It's if you look at the Netflix, if you go to Netflix now and you look at the titles, each title is based on the story, the raven, the murder in the room org.
Okay. All these are, stories of Edgar Allan Poe, the titles themselves, and then they actually have names of characters from the poems and the stories representing, they actually recite the actual poems inside the storytelling. Because one of the ceo, he's a poet, so he's always bringing up, words from Edgar Allan Poe and speaking to everyone.
So it's, and then it's a horror film. It's a horror tv show. Go ahead. Sorry. So
Mr.Benja: you're checking this out already. Are you into it or? Yeah.
Theo Harvey: So I went through, I binged it. So yeah, I liked it. I thought it was very interesting concept. It just sparked my interest, from watching Thank you.
The trailer and everything. I said, I'm not really into this, but I think I'm into this. It's an interesting mix to be like, ah, not really a horror guy, but. This kind of sparks my interest. Yeah, it's scratch that itched. And and it's a lot of philosophical things about, is wealth evil or are the people evil, who become wealthy.
And that kind of debate, but to put it in a very lyrical sense, based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, that was very interesting. It's scary when that scare is more thrilling, they had some, if Mike Flanagan, he's he's like the new horror.
Yeah. Guy now and okay. Not like Jason Blum, who's a producer, does movies and TV shows. He's more that director, writer guy. And he did Dr. Sleep, which was the sequel to the Shining. I don't know if you remember that movie that came out, and he does, he used to do like once a year around October.
He did all these Netflix TV shows that horror TV shows based on classical works. And he this is what's his last one. And now he's moving on, I think, to Amazon and other folks. But go check it out. I highly, recommend it. See what you think if you like it. But yeah, he scratched that itch for me for being in that Halloween mode.
Mr.Benja: All right. All right. I'm I'll check that. I'll check that out. I got my notes down right here. Boom. And also I'll check out the director. What's his name again? Mike Flanagan. Flanagan. Okay. Nice. It's funny. You're talking about just trying something new and, getting into Hey, this is normally my thing, but I'm going to make it my thing.
So I'm online. I'm putting out reels and stuff. And I'm on threads and I'm having fun with it. And I'm like, man, one of the things that bothered me about Twitter was, it just seemed if anything could be pointless, it just seemed like Twitter, that whole text was, that could be pointless.
And that's where I had fun. But I'm sitting here thinking about. Threads as I'm using it. And I'm like, what if I made this my primary platform? What if I started everything here? All my ideas, my thoughts, my randoms I started really making that my primary. And I spent three or four days just really going into people's, let's have a discussion with this guy.
Okay. Let's say something that this guy doesn't like, like he says, Hey you save all your money and you'll live forever. And it's BS, man. Grant Cardone said this and, get into an argument with these guys, see what happens on threads. And the way these discussions were playing out were productive and interesting to me.
And I was like, hold up a second. This might be interesting. So basically. I've decided to go all in on threads, where threads is my primary platform. And what I mean by that is if I have an idea of, oh, and I wrote a blog, right? It took me about five or six days to write this blog post because I wrote it.
Then it was reformatted it. And then when I put it in the web browser, it didn't look right. So I was like, Oh my gosh, this thing doesn't look right. I hate when that happens, just doesn't look right. Physically look right. So I had to readjust everything and make some things bold and break it into headlines.
So I was like, okay, now it looks better. It feels better. Anyway, six days later, I look at it and I'm like, okay, that's fine. I'll publish that tomorrow. I go to threads and say I wonder what, how I should make a multi level thread. I've never done one of those before, like the, so I make one. And then I put a little error on the bottom continues.
It was about my first experience with grand theft auto. So I put, it had five sections to it and I made it, I said, post. And then I started getting some replies and I was like, there it goes. I'll start my blog writing here. So when it, when I do my thread and it goes in, make it like five, six, seven sections long, and then I'll take all those, compile them, make an actual blog post out of it, that's my content there.
Then if it's good, next time I have a recording session, I'll just record some reels, maybe a whole long blog, and I'll make a long form out of that. So instead of going from the long form to the short form, because I know a lot of speakers say, Hey, you're guests on a podcast or you're you're doing this speaking at a conference, then make your long form to a short form.
I'm about to make my short forms into long forms. So I'm starting incredibly short, like I'm just firing out thoughts and ideas and get a couple of likes on it. It's good point. Turn that into a longer post than a blog post. Dude, I was flowing and I got my, man. Threads is number one platform for me now.
I'm just gonna try it for the rest of the year. Amp is gone. Amp is gone. So I have yeah,
Theo Harvey: that, let me interject it. That's why, you let's rewind the tape. , you said something similar to AMP not too long ago so that's why I was just chuckling, but I get it,
Mr.Benja: A amp as of this recording amp only has.
seven, eight, nine days left in its lifetime. It's going to be, they're going to pull the plug on October 31st and yeah, too bad for them.
Theo Harvey: And to your recommendation, I started to get on threads more. I'm liking the interaction. I'm getting in as well. And just, and like you, I'm using it like you had mentioned before in this podcast or even Alex Hamozy had mentioned this, like the, you used to use Twitter, right?
Just. Putting your random thoughts out there and see what people kind of gravitate toward. If you're like me, I do a little morning kind of a meditation. I get some ideas, do a little Bible reading and stuff like that. I get a lot of these ideas. And so I'm writing down on my little notebook and all this stuff.
I was like can I consolidate this into something that could be appealing to my audience? And so I'm starting to leverage that and seeing what kind of grab people gravitate toward. So like you, I'm looking at, okay, what, is. My lane, what kind of audience I'm building.
And then from there I can see, okay, I could do more of this type of content, as I build it up. So I'm not there where you are yet, where I'm just like doing the short form and trying to expand upon it yet. I'm just still trying to test it out and trying to see how, what themes are resonate with folks based on, me as the mouthpiece. But I will say this, my team, I'm all going all in a long form because we found a lot of AI tools. My team, that's what we can figure out. I think one is, I can't, I don't want to shout them out too much. Cause we may want to give them as a sponsor, but they do something really cool where they're able to give you a variety store what's it called?
viral score, if you will. So they can edit, let's say you got our long podcasts or whatever. They'll find little snippets. They do this with our podcast too. They find that could, get a lot of views and sure enough is working so far. I you saw some of our latest shorts. So I think I want to do more long forms and then switch them down.
And so I want to play with that model first because long forms are just, they're harder to do, but then as you start doing this more, as I've the last couple of long forms at what, 10 minute long forms. I've done things where I didn't even use a script anymore. I'm just like, okay, I'm just off the dome now.
And so I'm enjoying that. So now the next level is and thanks to you, Mr. Benji, you did a podcast with us, trying to do more podcasts, cause I do like the interaction and seeing if I can do more of those. So anyway, so like I said, threads for me. I'm enjoying it. Thanks to your recommendation.
I'm not all in like you are, but I do feel like it is something that could be part of repertoire. And there's more, Beyonce's a lot of my other content, working with my team a lot more, they're doing a lot of stuff for me. This is directly for me. I'm just testing this out. Before I say, okay, team, jump in there and do it.
Mr.Benja: It's funny. I'm starting to see the hat. I'm starting to find the little hacks that work for it. So once I started getting to that level, this is just fun to me. I'm like, ah, let me see if this little trick works. And, for that whole day, I'll try this little thing.
It's I thought it would. They did this jumping in the comments, find out how people react. On the business side, you mentioned, I'm actually collecting all of the people who do my likes, the retweets and all, the rethreads and all that. So I'm like keeping track of it. At the end of the day, I just go back and say, okay, add this guy's name, add this guy's name, add this guy's name.
And then it's just, this is old school Twitter tactics, by the way, that are updated for now. Gary Vee had an old Twitter strategy. Grant Cardone had an old Twitter strategy. And this was back when, hashtags were just being a thing. And this took me back to, I told you about when I started talking to DJ Woo Kid, right?
Yeah. 50 cents a DJ. So there was a whole thing. I was talking to him on Twitter and I was like, that, that blew my mind. I was thinking, yo, I can just start talking to people and they might respond. I've gotten responses from Elena Cardone what's his name? John Hope Bryant Ron English, the artist, just random people, not Ron English.
Forgot the artist's name. Luke Chu, actually know him though. The sudden count, Bobby hundreds, a lot of people, right? But. It's funny because the engagement is high, but the numbers of people active are low, if that makes any sense. So you're not getting a bunch of spam and nonsense. The people who are interacting really want to engage, talk, answer, if they do, in fact, engage, talk and answer.
They're pretty, it's a pretty small, vibrant community is what I'm saying. So I'm in.
Theo Harvey: And just my 2 cents on it was like, I don't think that's a challenge for what threads is gonna be. The product VP is on there, right? He's given us updates on new features, like they have a voice feature now and some other things they're gonna launch.
I think they're looking at or do they already have a trending section yet, or what's trending in
Mr.Benja: They, they don't have a trending section, but from what I can tell, I believe that trending is already being tested underneath the. The sheets, if you will, underneath the thousand thread count sheet.
I
Theo Harvey: like that. That's a good one. You put that out there on threads. Yeah, man. So I think, that twitter, it's based on the algorithm and it's really push pushing like news, right? And trying to get more folks. And I think threads is actively preventing that. So that may be preventing it from getting to that next level.
I think that may be, the issue there was just more of a tight knit community because it can't get that variety of the viral component going because there's, breaking news. Because remember when Israel, the whole Israel situation. People trying to do Twitter, they were frustrated because Twitter is broken.
And so they tried doing threads and then threads is yeah, you can do some of this, but not
Mr.Benja: all that. Yeah. So to that point, like a real quick tip, don't go blasting links, especially links without context. If you just post a link and let it sit there, you're it's. It's not getting pushed anywhere, but if you post a link and then talk about it Hey, listen, I saw this, I was thinking about this and that, and you have a good amount of text to go along with the link.
It's okay, there's some contextual argument with it. Then if you just have a picture, screw actual link that gets them off threads. If you have just a picture and you're reading of it or your discussion, then you're pretty good. And if you have straight text, you're pretty good. What I'm saying is more of yourself, less of whatever.
Or news headline you you're trying to ride the tails of.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. Tail riding.
Mr.Benja: No tail riding on threads. Tail riding. Jokers. Speaking of tail riding let's start this. Let's start this long tail of a podcast here. Cause there's going to be a lot of people going back in the archives like you should on all the podcast platforms.
Make sure you check us out. Story number one. We have no free will. According to the Stanford scientist by the name of Robert M. Sapolsky, we have no free will. Or at least free will is extremely overrated. Because science actually, Theo, I'm going to let you go off on this one because you seem to be very interested in this one.
And I may have a different view than you had when you sent this to me. So let me know your thoughts on this.
Theo Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. I thought, which is fascinating. Reason you asked me before this podcast, behind the scenes, guys, before we got on the podcast, Mr. Bench is like, what's your angle here?
So look, we talk about. Everything around A. I. Social media a lot on this podcast. And one of the things that's always coming up is how they, hijack our attention, right? So first with social media, how using dopamine hits to keep us distracted and attention on something else. And A. I. Is just going to supercharge that, right?
They're going to get more intimate in that. And so that makes it the question, are we really watching what we want to watch or are we just being driven by the algorithms? So that's on the technology side, right? This professor, he is coming from more than biological neurological sense where he's thinking about hey, you know what, when you look at human biology, there's just a lot of things you're predisposed to Go along with right, you know how you're raised, what's your biology is telling you so you may think you want to eat that hamburger you made that choice, but no, it was in your biology did to be predisposed to like beef or that smell reminded you of, this, the time used to go to McDonald's with your mom brought back good memories.
It's like he's saying every choice we make, we think it's something on our own volition, but no, it's backed by science and, sociology, why you made that decision. So I'm like, wow, combine that with social media. Then, do we really have, quote unquote free will based on, these type of concepts.
So
Mr.Benja: that's my angle. No, that's a, that makes a lot of sense. And it, it made more sense when you said it. And yeah, I don't know if you remember you brought this up in college. You were talking about, you were angry and pissed off at something because they were playing a song on the radio and you didn't want to hear it.
You're like, man, I want to be brainwashed by the radio. And I was like, yo, calm down. At
Theo Harvey: 20, at 19 years old. I do
Mr.Benja: not going to force me to this song. I do not like this song. No matter how much they play it, no matter how will I
Theo Harvey: like it? That's Sam I am.
Mr.Benja: I don't know if you started bobbing your head to it and were like, no, I will not. But but I thought that was really funny. I was like, man, J.
R. will not be brainwashed by this song.
The real Theo Harvey keeps it real. But yeah you've been doing that since then. So no, that makes total sense to me, your angle here. It's really interesting. This is something I've thought about for a while. It's yeah, if you take a certain person, drop them in a certain environment with these inputs and incentives and disincentives, it's Oh yeah.
How much of that person is actually running things or, that's, that was a question I had, but. And of course, being computer science, that's what I was studying, I really started to see that wow, there's a whole lot of information you can boil down into just numbers and inputs and outputs and, calculations.
And we were studying AI on a theoretical level. Now we're seeing AI in an actual level. So what I want to know is. What's out there that data scientists know that we don't know that they're holding on to. I'm talking about like the leaders of the field that they just can't let certain stuff out.
And they're talking to behind closed doors and, in these dark, dirty academic back rooms. And they're like, Yeah, man. I think we've pretty much solved this, and this, we could, in fact, program this out of society and completely. It's I'm wondering about these discussions.
Theo Harvey: I agree, man. I think there's tons of people, discussions.
I'm thinking about like Facebook, man. They have three. 3 billion monthly active users on their platform. And I think I talked about this one time I went to theirs I went to LinkedIn and saw how many data scientists, it was like at least eight pages deep man of data scientists that work at Facebook.
So I guarantee they know. Within small degrees of how to influence anybody in the world to do anything. And that is one thing that are probably holding on to. From an individual level and from a nationwide level. We saw that for elections, right? You know how that worked. So I think that they have a lot more data that can influence us and really make, determine our choices.
And it's because I'm reading a book. I think I told you about this never split the difference, right? It's about, The how you negotiate with folks and they really talk that the author is really saying, Hey, Oh, yeah, you have to come up, grad school and they talked about this, a bad and the best alternative to a negotiated sell agreement.
Right? And all this stuff, psychological, you put these, plus and minuses on all these things and be very logical about it. He said, F all that. It's all about that lizard brain, bruh. And what you're trying to do is try to search circuit that lizard brain with simple things like keep your voice upbeat.
Hey, Mr. Benja. How are you doing? Even it gets spicy talk, keeping
Mr.Benja: your voice. Nice
Theo Harvey: voice. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. How that, but then if there's a red line that you don't want to cross, you go into that deep DJ voice. I do not negotiate on prices. And that's it. And then people, okay. So it's like you do these little psychological hooks.
And I say, all I have to say is that, we're driven more by the emotional, the id inside of human beings. And I think the data scientists and all that know that. And so that does drive a lot of our decision making process. More than we care to admit. We're more emotional, more driven by that, that's, that brainstem, that, that's really controlling our instant reactions as opposed to the prefrontal cortex, which we think we are. So I say all to say is I could see people having an argument that we just don't have any free will now because of so many hooks into us, biological, neurological and societal.
And now with technology. So it's did I make a decision to do a podcast with you, Mr. Bench? Or was it predetermined that we're going to start a podcast eventually? Yeah.
Mr.Benja: It's, when people hear this, I don't want people to think predetermined as in, the time variance authority from Marvel's Loki, somebody who's got a big script and they're like, ah, but.
If you have enough data points, if you have enough information, like we were talking, you mentioned the election, Facebook was a very good example of that. They can literally turn knobs on, okay, this has a lot of Foul language in it. Let's turn the knob down on that, so we don't show it as much.
And then this guy has flowery language. Oh, we like flowery language. Let's turn the volume up on that. We want to see more of that in the feed. We want to see more likes. We want to share more to your friends, if
Theo Harvey: you like, before you go into that, TikTok literally has a button that says, Oh yeah, this content will go viral.
Yeah. So there you
Mr.Benja: go. So yeah. As I was saying, as you've got knobs that can move stuff up and down, but what if the guy who was talking and he used foul language, what if he was actually correct? And the person with the flowery language was actually a big, filthy liar. And then all of a sudden you're like, Oh Facebook just turned the election one way and when they could have turned it the proper way And, this is stuff happening that's happening in real time.
Companies are thinking about this. Marketers are thinking about this. Programmers are thinking about this. The military is definitely thinking about this. What are the chances of a riot breaking out? You've got your city on the line. It's okay, we need to start. Adjusting these knobs to make sure that we don't put this on the media knows this as well.
Any large scale media professional will tell you that. Yeah, they'll come in and limit what you can say, how you can say it, how much you can say it. That's happening. But I think my beef with this guy is he comes out with a very strong statement that says we have no free will at all. Holding people morally responsible for the actions is wrong.
Yeah. To that, I say G T F O H.
Theo Harvey: You gotta say the word. The last sentence says he envisions a world about blame or prisons where criminals quarantine only as long as they're deemed dangerous. No,
Mr.Benja: that whole deemed dangerous. It's come on, dog. It's like I've been deemed dangerous too many times to.
I was like, I got caught up with the police one time, man. You know how they have the what is it? Not the newsstands right next to the entrance. So I have, a bottle of liquor under my arm. And some snacks. I was like, Hey man, it's the weekend. I'm gonna grab a little bottle of something, this and that.
And I said, Oh, let me pick up a newspaper while I'm at it. I was doing newspaper collages. And I saw some interesting headlines. And I picked up a newspaper and put it under my arm. It looked like I was covering up the liquor. The security guard comes over and he said, I see what you're trying to do.
And I'm like, Oh, no, it's right here. I'm just, I'm about to go. I'm still shopping. And he's no, you weren't. You were about to walk out with it. Who's buying a newspaper? I was like, Oh God. That is right. Who is buying a newspaper, right? Are you kidding me? Why would a young black dude be buying a newspaper?
Theo Harvey: So many levels. Yeah.
Mr.Benja: Yeah, I got caught up and then manager came out and they said the police were on their way, but I ended up leaving before the police came because a bunch of people at the store knew me. So they were like, eh, what are you talking about? He's here all the time. Don't worry about that guy.
But anyway, it could have been a thing, right? Yeah. And that's what I'm talking about. So I don't know about these systems that are like, Hey we think this guy is going to do wrong. Or we think what behavior has taught us is that there's always a large series of anomalies. And these anomalies are what move, we think things are going to go in a straight line or roll down the hill a certain way.
But these anomalies, these imperfections, these outer agents, they cause these changes. That caused butterfly effects. And then you're like, Oh I didn't expect it to do that. That's right. No one expects us to do that. And I don't like this idea of even if we are in a deterministic state, I don't like the idea of trying to go a world without blame or prisons.
And quarantine. So
Theo Harvey: And it's, this is obviously more on the liberal side, which is more open and, saying, hey, we shouldn't prosecute criminals. But then if you look on a more extreme we should absolutely quantify everybody facial recognition software to determine that they're terrorists and they need to be out here and there's issues with that.
Where you're. Have a I biases, right? And to determine who these people are, if they're a criminal or not, because the data that was input into it had a larger folks who looked like me and you were deemed criminals. And so now we walk into our airport or something. Did he did the red flag?
So I would say, I agree. That's not the society I want to live in. I still want to feel society as a free will, but I do feel that there is an illusion sometimes of free will, because if it was over people rebel, so they have to keep it covert so that, we're content watching our Netflix, right?
It's playing our video games. But if it's too overt, then, the scales start falling from the eyes. It's a revolution!
Mr.Benja: Think about the crisis of mind if they started calling you out for what they really know and can guess. Magicians I've known two magician types in my life.
Who are really like sleight of hand kind of people, and It's it's a weird dark art that I don't think is very healthy. I'm just like, you know what? A lot of that, just leave it alone, bro. Just leave it. Yeah. That
Theo Harvey: misdirection. Yeah.
Mr.Benja: When you start getting into playing with people's literally playing in people's emotions, and then you get somebody who recognize you're playing with their emotions, but then they recognize that you see that they recognize you're playing with their emotions.
It starts to get real stupid. And it's just say, bro, just, just calm down. Just go drink your Jägermeister or whatever and vote independent if you have to do what you want. Just don't get caught up in the matrix.
Theo Harvey: No, man. So look, maybe we need to do a deep dive on this discussion another time.
But yeah, but it leads into some of our discussions later. So hopefully we'll bring it back up. I'm sure again and again. Oh,
Mr.Benja: yeah. Because that leads us right into story number two. Are we becoming a scared society? Or are we already a scared society? This has been coming up quite a few times in little bits where it's always Oh, the pandemic and everybody runs scared, goes by his toilet paper, Oh, this is happening.
We're all going to lose our money and, Oh, you can't allow this. And you take it back to the seatbelt days. It's they want to change us in the car seats. And it's now we just seem scared of everything, but the data says we're actually a lot safer, just at least physically safer in terms of crime and things like that.
This came up because , because of Winnie the Pooh of all things . So I'm pretty sure everybody's familiar with Winnie the Pooh, the lovable orange. Be bear with a red shirt. A little while ago, and we talked about this the copyright. Went out copyright lapsed for the character, meaning it fell into the open domain, meaning anybody could start making Properties, not not properties.
Anybody could start making content or their own proprietary Creations based off of this character. So it wasn't on lock, under lock and key anymore. Now you had a little bit of playroom where you could start making your own Creations based on this idea of a character, Winnie the Pooh. In short, they made this horribly twisted version of Winnie the Pooh called Winnie the Pooh Blood and Honey, which just sounds disgusting anyway.
Apparently, Theo, he got after some kids. Is that what I'm hearing?
Theo Harvey: Yeah, look, fourth graders in Miami, man, saw this with a substitute teacher accidentally put this, I don't know if accidentally is the word, but put this into the VHS recorder, DVD player, whatever they do. And showed it to the kids and they were basically traumatized.
You just can't go by title anymore before you show it to kids. As a parent myself, I'm very weary. All this stuff I see, cause there's some subtle stuff, even the things that can see the most innocent. And yeah, man, this was one of those things that, you know. It's an interesting story and it's funny this we talked about this story I feel like we talked about this movie a year ago or heard this coming out It blew up the internet.
I think people forgot about the movie came out people forgot about the movie But here it is two years later. We're still talking about this. This is crazy So I can see more people trying to pull this type of stunt other if other projects become, unregulated or what's it called unprotected, right.
With that's the domain, the common domain.
Mr.Benja: Who would you want to see in a F ed up, twisted, crazy, out there kind of way, I don't know if you have one in mind, but I have, I already have
Theo Harvey: one. And he almost went, they wouldn't let this happen, but he was almost in the public domain, but Disney would not let this happen.
Michael D Mouse, Mickey Mouse, man. If he was out in these streets, boy, we could do some fun stuff with Mickey. He's already out, behind the scenes, wilding out. He was out here, man. I see Michael D. Miles running a corporation, slapping women, driving his Cadillac. People want to do so much to Mickey, man.
It's not even funny, man. So they just but Disney would not let that happen ever.
Mr.Benja: But yeah, the mouse of wall street.
Theo Harvey: Oh, it just writes itself, doesn't it? Just having that, that, the high pitch voice, Hey bitch, where's my money? Just, it's just funny.
Mr.Benja: Hey, so I was thinking Felix, the cat.
I want to see some like old gangster type Felix, the cat. Coming out, scratching fools in the face. Yeah, you like that? You like that? Let me do a dance while we're at it. Bleed fool, bleed.
Theo Harvey: Let's pivot real quick. I know, I wanted to talk a little bit about the true crime shows.
So yes, that's, stuff becomes scary. This is stuff that's out there, right? That's actually happened, but I addiction to these shows, man, start with the podcast, to cereal back in the day, Mr. Bidget, but that just took over everybody, right? I listened to the first season of it. But then became the, from the podcast to the docu series, right?
Where Netflix has ton of murder suicide. Matter of fact, it becomes such a thing that Saturday Night Live has a parody. I go look at look for is a song parody about how many of these movies are out there is hilarious. Maybe we'll put the link in there. But my wife is one of those that watches these shows, man, and she's trying to get me so bad to watch this one called disappear about these people just disappear and no one knew what happened to him.
And I tell my wife, why do I want to watch a show that there's no solution to?
Mr.Benja: That's such a man response.
Theo Harvey: It is, but it's I have the same murder suicide. This is a murder. You know what happened? Okay. There's a murder suicide, right? It happened. And we know who did it, right? But then if it's just like opening them, like my brain is like now I'm trying to solve a, for a problem that's not really my problem.
And my brain power is used for that. And it's I could use that brain power for something else. So anyway, so that's just my take on these two crimes. I'm not a big fan. I watch them every now and then, but I'm not a big fan. There
Mr.Benja: was an unsolved mystery episode. And it said it happened in like the, some forest in Georgia and everything like, all right, I drew through Georgia one time and that came up.
It was like, Hey. It's such and such, forest is down the way, or, I saw it on one of the highway signs, like you go that way and you pass through it. And I was like, huh,
and it wasn't real to me until I drove past that, that highway sign, and it stuck with me ever since then. I was like.
Theo Harvey: You wanted to pull over so bad and pull out your bag and get your Sherlock Holmes on, boy. If you had saw that crime, Mr. Benja.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. Something went down in Forsyth County. That was at Forsyth County, not Forest, but Forsyth County, a bad area in Georgia for black people.
Oh, yeah. But anyway, so yeah, these shows scared society. And here's the, here's an interesting twist I want to add to this. What if we're scaring ourselves as a protective measure because things are going too far out of control? Technology's moving at crazy speeds The population is really high. What if this is a societal protective measure to hey if we're scared about stuff we'll pull back a little bit and Start to hold on to what we have a little more we won't be so adventurous and try to I don't know we won't lead ourselves into a place that's crazy because I don't want, I don't like using the term healthy fear too much, maybe we have a healthy fear, healthy skepticism about some things.
And it's Hey, we're starting to tap into things we don't understand spiritually, technologically. Socially with all these crazy things happening, we've never had connections like this and that we've had with the Internet and auto translate and stuff. It's crazy, right?
Theo Harvey: Yeah, I do feel like people have to distinguish right between actual fear.
And anxious anxiety, right? And so I think we are very anxious society, right? So yes. And that, manifests as fear sometimes because real fear is like, look that, ancestors that bears chasing us, right? Or that, we will be killed if we don't leave. And that's genuine fear.
Fear, right? That's something that, that's that survival instinct, right? That's biological breaded into us. But what's been happening is because this fear has the biological fear is lessened and lessened. The anxiety, fear has increased more. And so I think we just had to distinguish that, a lot of this stuff is perceived fear.
Yeah. Just perceived brand, right? This is a perce perception. And so how do you combat that? And I think, people are doing that with therapy and other ways of interacting, because a lot of. The anxiety we feel is basically feel the fear of the other and, 999 percent of all human beings are the same.
So it's you're fearing something that 001 percent and really, I think that's what's really driving all this. Yes. And I think there's some technology fears in there, too. But ultimately, I do feel like, that we have to distinguish between the two. And I think we're just making ourself more and more anxious.
I even see it in my kids. I'm like, wow, my daughter is very, just anxious about stuff. And I get it. Just we're overwhelmed with so much information and stuff that we didn't have to deal with because. Information was as freely available. So yeah, we may, we'll talk about this more deeply.
It is Halloween time, so not to scare you too much, you don't have to be scared about ghosts, goblins, demons. You have, real anxious opportunities here in society
Mr.Benja: right now. Yeah. Sending inadvertently sending money to North Korea, for their weapons programs.
Which is actually a thing that's happening right now. Yeah, you can look into that, but. There's companies acting like they're doing one thing and they're actually just taking money and sending it over to North Korea for their weapons. So there are legitimate things to be afraid of. Should you live in like South Korea or something like that?
Don't be scared. Don't be scared. You scared Theo? I ain't never scared. That's right.
Theo Harvey: Doom. Anyway, go check
Mr.Benja: it out guys.
Theo Harvey: I ain't never scared.
Mr.Benja: Speaking of never being scared, George Clooney, rich actor, has a solution for the SAG actor strike. It didn't go over well when he told it to him.
Theo, this is your wheelhouse. You've been keeping up on the strike. What did Clooney do this time?
Theo Harvey: Yeah, I'm out here on the picket line with these actors, man. So talking to them, getting the latest scoop. Yeah. So if you guys don't know we have all these strikes that just lined up. We had the director strike.
We just got over the writer's strike. The last hurdle is the actor strike. And the reason why this is becoming. To head because number one, we thought it was gonna be over after the W. G. A. The writer's track was over. We thought, Oh, the actors which I can at the same time, but ready to go. But that's not the case.
Right? And the other thing is, these delays are really jeopardizing movies and TV shows. So we may not have a summer. Blockbuster season. So you hear things like Deadpool, right? Deadpool three, people are super excited about that might be gone. Mr. Benjamin next year. So I think a lot of these actors.
So I read this article, they said these big time actors, is making millions of dollars like the Ryan Reynolds, like the Hugh Jackman. So the world, then it's not affecting their first, it's already affected the first movie, right? That's got pushed back. Now it's affecting their second movie or like their TV show.
Now they like, we gotta do something. This is getting my pocket now. So basically, George Clooney was a face, but it wasn't just George Clooney, it was a bunch of other actors. I think they put a list here, basically actors you've heard about like Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, Ben Affleck.
I don't know. How this guy got in here, but Tyler Perry,
is there a TV crew around Tyler Perry? Yeah, I'm over here. But anyway, Tyler Perry was in this mix and they basically proposed that, look, there's a delay, the SAG after they're saying, Hey, we need some more money, for other things. And they got a lot of demands. The, these rich actors are saying, Hey, Right now, when we pay our dues, there's a cap of a million dollars a year.
So we can't pay, even though we make 50 million a picture or whatever, or 20 million a picture, we can only pay, 1 million for our dues. If we just increase that cap, then we'll pay more. And then if there's more. In the dues fee structure, and then we can be able to pay out for health care and other things for, our lesser paid actors.
Nice gesture, but it didn't underline the biggest issue, which is yeah, that's fine. You can solve the problem for now. But long term, you still have AI that's taking jobs away, right? Or they're gonna still have a not getting more revenue, right? For future streaming successes. So how do you prevent that?
And they it was a non starter for the union leadership, led by a friend dresser, the nanny. So make a long story short. I think what's happening that the actors are feeling pressure to hire and actors are feeling pressure to do something. But they're being hamstrung by the vast majority of members.
I think it was like, thousands, hundreds of thousands, almost tens of thousands of actors that have made that you never know the names of right. That's that guy. They're like saying, no, we want more. And so this is what's holding things up. So we may not, Mr. Benja, this is really holding up Hollywood and we may not see any good movies, TV shows for a while.
So that's going to be interesting.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. Sucks to be a lower paid actor. It's just a bad not bad, but it's a hard life. And I went to a party in LA and it was nothing but actors. I love you, but I couldn't stay on the party. I got to tell you. Cause they've so many of them are just hungry and in your face and like doing the actor thing.
And I'm a, I was a game developer programmer at the time. And I'm like, no, just stop. Just. Get away from me. And I could feel their earnesty. I could feel their eagerness to act and do stuff and be about it. So being stuck, not working, and you've got people who are making all this money and can just go to some.
Villa estate and chill out. And you have to do something that works for you and for them. It's a hard, it's a hard situation. And for those of you who are thinking, LA is all cushy and everything. Not for everybody. Which is what I'm getting at. So I don't know how much we want to say on that for now.
We will definitely keep coming back to the strike as it develops. But you ain't got anything else in that deal? Nah, man. Actors are
Theo Harvey: fun. Very, just, I'll just put it like this. I've met a few of my dad grew up in LA. My uncle's actor, and just, very earnest people to your point.
Also very emotionally available. Because they have to have access to their emotions. And a lot of range, you think one person's this way, but then they're like, serious and funny. You ever met a person like that? It's just wow, that doesn't, why are you both?
So I think that's just that. Usually it's so much just this way. Actors are like, you're funny and you serious, right? You mean, but you generous.
Mr.Benja: Yeah. So anyway love them. I feel like that sometimes. Yeah. Same here. All right. So yeah, we'll check up on those guys. Speaking of keeping a watch on people, we've got our story number four, the AI watch this time, Microsoft is going to pay you 15, 000.
15 G's, 15 large, just to have you find a bug in their being GPT system, or wait, is it being or any of their AI applications. We got to find out the details cause I might need to need a little money. Yeah. Okay. So specifically for their AI powered being being is their front end, basically their most accessible search engine and AI technology.
And they've been really integrating this chat AI into all parts of the Bing search engine. It's fascinating how they're doing it. It's pretty slick, actually. But if you've known Microsoft and their And AI it's gone off the rails a couple of times, and I think it's getting serious enough for that.
All right. We got to really try to run this thing off the rails and we'll pay you up to 15, 000 for your trouble. You're looking to make a little extra scratch deal.
Theo Harvey: No man, I get it. They're trying to what was this? Some, we, there was something, I think didn't Netflix have a prize for like their recommendation algorithm and they wanted people to come up with new approaches and, try to improve it over time.
So this is reminds me of that a little bit, there's just on the search to keep these. AI system from hallucinating, because what's happening is become, they've become more embedded, embedded in our software. We're gonna start trusting more. Number one, we won't even know that they're there, so it'd be hidden.
And then the second thing is we're just gonna trust that it's accurate and it could be falsely off. And so I think, as you see these different, it behemoths, like Facebook has their own ai, Google, Microsoft or open ai, and then you see other folks, I think Apple is trying to create their own A.
I. I think that's gonna be the key differentiator, right? Whose A. I. Is the most accurate, right? And they're gonna do tests. They will figure this out. And so I think, microsoft to their credit is trying to or yeah, Bing is trying to figure out how they can make the most accurate one and get rid of a lot of these hallucinations before it's fully embedded inside your Excel, inside your PowerPoint, inside everything you do.
And so this is going to be interesting. The scary part is, we talked about something scary in a previous segment. I think I talked about this on the last podcast, the intentionality here is not to make, is it to make these things safer or just to make them more efficient at their job, which is scary because the just like with social media was the intention to just, get people to connect or is it just to keep you on the platform longer because that's going to drive what's happening.
And we see all this investment. For instance, I found out this last quarter There was over about $17.9 billion in AI funding, which made up nearly 30% of all venture capital funding in one quarter alone. So you triple that. That's what, 2, 4, 6, 8, that's almost $80 billion in rev in capital going to ai.
This is unheard of, man. And so these tools that we still don't know still hallucinates. They're rushing to make more of it. And that is the scary part. They still don't have, there's no safety brakes on this anymore. And they're just like, Oh it's the car's down the hill. Let's make some brakes now, right?
Let's see who can figure out if this is hallucinating. We're gonna pay you 15, 000 to see if it hallucinates. But if you don't figure it out, that's okay, because the car's gone. So it's getting to that point.
Mr.Benja: So let me throw Elon's name in the musk, in the mix here. I was about to say in the musk.
So let me throw Elon's name in the mix here. Elon's been working and he's got his own version of AI, which is an image processing system for their cars, for the Tesla vehicles. And basically, you have your self driving car, it's supposed to be able to spot people and you need to be make sure it doesn't kill anybody and doesn't cause any accidents and behaves like it should, et cetera, et cetera.
Now, because he's Elon, he said things in a very straightforward programmer way with no fear. Speaking to determinism and all that. This is the kind of robot person of a mind that would say something like this. But he was like he's yeah, it's going to kill a couple of people. That's good in so many words.
He's like a self driving car somebody out there ain't going to live. That's basically what he was saying. And everybody got all pissed off. The scientists, people were like, man, he shouldn't have said that, but he's right. Cause it just comes down to a number of calculations.
It's like statistics and that somebody, something's going to happen. There's going to be an edge case where it doesn't understand some crazy guy's going to have his. His dog walking on two hind legs and it's gonna cause the system to freak out or something like that it's just gonna be this these cases they can't account for And yeah, the you have to how do you get a system like that to go crazy?
And how do you plan for this kind of stuff? It's like you can't You just have to wait and to see what happens, and this is why it's good that Microsoft's paying out this money, because what it's going to do is it's going to start getting those, I don't want to say obvious mess ups, obvious in the real world mistakes are going to start happening, like some guy is out there in, let's say Finland or something, and he's dealing with a bunch of Commodore VIC 20 computers, and he's got this super rig of computers set up, and he's oh, I know exactly how to, Construct an algorithm to screw with, Microsoft's computers and Microsoft's what, I didn't even know you could string those kinds of computers together like that.
What are you talking about? Okay. We found another case. Boom. So that all makes sense, but the fact that they're doing this is. It's just interesting. This whole scene is interesting. It's we can't stop it. We're going to start paying out money as like insurance almost to mitigate our losses or your losses.
You run across
Theo Harvey: 15, 000 is way. Yeah. 15, 000 way too low though. I think they need to increase that bounty up. So that's what I'm saying. What people spend is the function of their priorities. And it shows you that they don't care. They would spend way more. On that prize that they really cared.
So that's my take on it.
Mr.Benja: That's a good take. And if anybody gets 15 K, let us know. But for now we have story number five. We got a little rant to go on here. I've been dropping streaming services like nothing. And it's because not because I don't want to pay for these services, but it feels like it's becoming too expensive to have fun.
I just don't want to keep paying all this money to have fun. I used to be a stick and a ball while I'm not that old, it used to be simple ways to have fun. Theo, I know you go to Disney a lot. What's going on, man? Why is it so expensive?
Theo Harvey: The rent is just too damn high, man. Yeah, man.
If you didn't hear Disney made some big announcements, they're going to reinvest in the parks, 60 billion over the next 10 years. So obviously they're going to pass that back to the consumer. And so people are feeling it, not just in the entry price, but they create a whole new system where you pay extra to get ahead of the line.
So that's just more money out of your pocket. And that doesn't count the countless number of times you pay extra for yeah, alcohol or for food at Disney. So the inflation piece of is really increasing things. So that's just an amusement parks. But they said even in concert experiences, you and I had the chance to go to Coachella last year, but even that is increasing, right?
We knew, right? Everybody's gonna go want to go to see concerts. They had two big concerts this year. Taylor Swift and Beyonce. They said typically, average ticket price for 120. This summer, which is a 7. 74 increase, a 7. 4 percent increase over last year and up about 30 percent from 2019.
So 120 average cost for a concert ticket and it doesn't get into, the streaming services, they're all going up on their price point. So much so as I, I'm the one that has a subscription to all of them. I'm like a Mr. Benjamin. I need to start canceling some of this stuff.
So yeah, man, inflation is real man. And not only that, but the cost of having fun is not, you really think through what's your fun now. I'm enjoying hanging with the kids and go and playing basketball on the courts or he'll find going to the park, yeah, Mr.
Benja, family, I'm the married guy with kids. You start to fill in your
Mr.Benja: pocketbook. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get too hooked on anything because I don't see anything but the prices continually going up.
Theo Harvey: For the foreseeable future. The feds did say they may put a pause on, raising inflation interest rates, which is causing some of the prices to continue to go up.
But even then, I think this is a cover for a lot of companies to just raise their prices anyway, to get more margin. So think about it. Yeah. Oh yeah. I got to raise prices. I got to cut people. Nah, I just got a big check as a CEO for 20 billion. So there you go. This business one on one guys.
That's why I'm the business guy. This is what they think about.
Oh man. Mr. Benja. This has been great. Anything else?
Mr.Benja: I think we're done. I'm going to go. I'm going to go cancel the subscription right now, man.
Theo Harvey: Same here, brother. Same here. So hey everyone. Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Please subscribe and comment at show versus business on Twitter or X YouTube and Instagram.
Listen to us at Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Go check out our website at show versus Business. Go keep liking our reels on YouTube, but definitely in short, excuse me, on YouTube and reels on Instagram. But definitely give us a shout out in the comment section if you like this content and what you want to hear.
Alright, Mr. Benja. Have a good one.
Mr.Benja: Did you know I was planning on saying peace after this? Peace!