SvB: Sam Altman is back! Snoop Dogg is giving up smokin’? Is Social Media dead? Ep 143

The guys, @mrbenja and @the_real_theo_harvey, discuss Open AI: Sam Altman is back! Amazon isn’t playing with Black Friday, Is Snoop Dogg giving up smoking? Dave Filoni is the new CCO of Lucasfilm and Rant: Is Social Media Dead?

Story Number 1 - 19:40
Story Number 2 - 35:36
Story Number 3 - 44:52
Story Number 4 - 46:47
Story Number 5 - 53:46

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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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Transcript

Theo Harvey: This is show versus business, your weekly take on pop culture from two very different perspectives of your host, the real Theo Harvey and Mr. Benja come with all the relevant info about the week in pop culture. Mr. Benja, what are we covering 

today? 

Mr.Benja: Today, as always, we have five amazing ones for you.

And let me tell you what we're going to start with. Sam Altman and open AI drama. You've heard about it. It's going crazy. Somebody gets fired. We're not sure what happened. If you want the beginning of that story, check out last week's podcast. We got the continuation right here. It's still going on. Drama in the world's most powerful, important, earthshaking company around right now.

Open AI. So yes, we're very interested in this one. And we're going to check that one out. Open AI drama. We've also got Amazon. We got to take a look at these guys because. They're not playing around for Black Friday or your October Deal Days or your, Amazon Prime Days in July, whatever they got going on.

We just gotta stop to remind you that they're not playing around. They just did their Black Friday football game and there's, they've got stuff going on. So you just need to listen to this because if you're not keeping an eye on Amazon, you're getting caught up in some nonsense. And you need us to guide you through it because that's what we do.

Also, we're gonna talk about Snoop Dogg. Snoop Dogg did a little finesse move told us he gave up smoking and there's a little more to the story than that. Snoop Dogg is apparently a marketer now. So we're going to talk about Snoop Dogg and his, I'm not smoking marketing tactic and his little team up with T Pain and all that.

It's funny, cute. We'll get into that. Also, Dave Filoni, what you might call the number one star wars lieutenant over there underneath George Lucas, all through George Lucas's tenure. Now that George Lucas is gone, Dave Filoni stepping up into the big boy seat. Creative director. Dave Filoni.

So we'll see what that means for him. We'll see what that means for star Wars and for, Disney and storytelling in general, because this is actually a pretty major move. We'll see what happens with it and a clone Wars for the win, and also we're going to finally ended out with a little bit of a rant here.

Gary Vee made a prediction a while ago that this, we were seeing the beginning of the end of social media. That was four years ago. And now I'm thinking about it. He might be right. And we're gonna tell you why. So that's all I got. And that's the story that we're gonna come to you this week. Theo, what do you think of it?

Love it. Love 

Theo Harvey: it. Love it. Mr. Benjes. Here as we record this podcast we just finished Thanksgiving and I got some stories, Mr. Benjamin, I got some stories. Thanksgiving is a great holiday but it's also a holiday that makes me mad because it's like you get a couple days off, but then you gotta go right back to work.

And so it's not like Christmas and New Year's where you get a week off and you gotta chill and relax a little bit. Trying to figure that, all that out. For this year and had a chance to travel a little bit without the North Carolina really enjoyed that time. But yeah, man, just overall, just good times at Thanksgiving.

I would say the challenge I always have is going over people's houses eating food, really not enough time, not places to sit. So you're sitting on the couch, with a little coffee table, trying to change your mac and cheese and gravy, so it doesn't spill all of your food.

Mr.Benja: DOnald, get that old TV tray from behind the counter over there. 

Theo Harvey: And it's all dusty. And it's, you got to clean it off first because no one's used it since last Thanksgiving. And Yeah. Oh yeah. Just, it's lovely. Love that. If you're like me, I like my space, we have five bedroom house and four kids, four of us.

We love it. It just gives us space to do different things. I don't have to see my kids for 24 hours if I don't have, cause I don't want to write in this house. I like it. space, man. And then, you visit the in laws and then, you're staying in their house. And so sometimes the space is a little bit smaller.

So man, it was just one of those things where, you know, when they say three days, guests and fish, they start to stink. I don't know if you heard that time, but yeah. So it's like after three days, at anyone's house or us visiting other folks, it's time to move on. And 

Mr.Benja: Like fish.

Huh? How do you mean guests are like fish? After three days, they start to stink. 

Theo Harvey: Exactly. It's one of those days where it's time to move on, man. The crampness of the space and all that, it was good to be in a different environment. So I did enjoy that, but it's just good to be back into my environments and my routines.

And so yeah, but overall, very thankful that make the travel, the trip was very exciting. It was. Uninventful, right? But it was definitely a time of relaxation. So just thankful for that. What about you, 

Mr.Benja: Mr. Benjamin? Do you ever hold on, do you ever get any epiphanies? Any... Do you, does your thinking change up any during Thanksgiving?

Cause I used to have, I used to use Thanksgiving intentionally for stepping back and thinking. But I don't know if you ever had that. 

Theo Harvey: Yeah Thanksgiving is weird for me cause it's like literally almost a week before my birthday. And it's usually this was about two weeks, but usually about a week or so.

So it's like around the same time the whole month of December, November, I'm always thinking about it, but not really any, but it does nice to have things slow down for a day or two after just, getting so hard all the weekday and on the weekend, dealing with family stuff.

And so just having an extra day or two, just to have your own thoughts, definitely. It just leaves more room for more insight. So that's always good. 

Mr.Benja: I asked because at some point I got into the Black Friday madness. And before before it turned stupid, when it was when it was fun, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I got this TV and, call your auntie. See if she wants this heater or, to heat the food and say, all right, anyway, I would enjoy that time. Cause I was just going in stores and just like watching the people buzz around. And I like watching what people shop for and how they pick items out.

And they're buying games, they're buying music, they're buying clothes and that vibe just got me. And it was interestingly enough, a way to relax. So during the holidays, I started doing that and my aunt would say Hey, can you go out? Can anybody go out and to the stores and, oh, I don't want to sit in traffic.

Oh, I don't want to. And I'm like, cool. It's great. I'll stand in line for two hours. It's like meditation just with more people around. It was like weird, but it really cemented when. After driving around all day, I ended up at a family member's house and I'm sitting down like, ah, okay. They're in there watching the game.

I'll be chilling over here. The kids are over there. I had a book in the car. I'll take out that book and here comes a family member. And they're like, oh, you didn't get a piece of cake. And I really didn't want a piece of cake at the time. I was like, oh no, thank you. She's no, it's a piece of cake.

We just cut it. They made it. And they're, they're expecting everybody to eat the cake. And it was like, there was cake drama. Eat 

Theo Harvey: the cake, anime. Eat the cake, anime. It 

Mr.Benja: was legitimate cake drama. Like somebody's cake showed up in the house and they're like, oh no, we're going to finish our cake first because it's the more delicious cake.

And if you don't eat our cake, then that means their cake tastes better. And I was like, look, I don't need to be a part of this, man. And it was like large. And I'm looking at the cake. I'm like, I don't want this. And then I look at the person who was handing it to me. I look over at her husband and her husband's like the size of a house.

And I'm I don't want to say I don't want to look like him because she's obviously been plugging this guy with cake and I'm like, man, is this what it's about? Is this what family's about? I don't want to do this. And I'm talking about New Orleans, it's like they got a lot of people's biggest houses.

It's a whole thing. Exactly. So I got in an argument and was like, I don't want the cake, it ended with a very loud, just eat the cake, true story. So I was like, all I took the cake, took a bite out of it. It's Hey, it's not bad. It went about my business. Soon as she turned her head, I took a large chunk out of the cake and put it in,

so every time I would just keep taking chunks out of the cake with my fork, balling it up in a napkin,

Theo Harvey: you're going to eat it later. Or you just eat it throughout the night. 

Mr.Benja: iT looked like I was taking bites out of it because I was cutting it with the fork, but then I slide it off the. the fork into a napkin and not eat it. Oh, yeah. I wasn't about, I wasn't about to eat this cake, man. The thing was huge, greasy.

It was delicious. Cause I ate the one piece to get her off me. But yeah, man, that little piece, that, that cake just slowly disappeared into a bunch of napkins. And I was like, I don't need this drama. So you asked me what I did this year for a couple of years, man. I've just been chilling for Thanksgiving and my family understands it now.

They're like, hey, he's just chilling. He's cool. He's cool. He was doing this already because I'd tried to take out a book and get bothered by people saying, Hey, can we play your video games? I'm like, ah, don't scratch him up. I got a dream cast. Don't scratch my games up anyway. So yeah, mine was chill, man.

Good 

Theo Harvey: good. Any insights or any epiphanies that you achieved, like mints, anything that happened? 

Mr.Benja: So here's one 

Theo Harvey: my notebook 

Mr.Benja: out. So when I'm talking to people I've been trying to do this and it's funny, I have to go into myself now to understand how to talk to people. I, it's, but instead of asking instead of.

Whenever you have a projection, turn that into a reflection. So like, when You're looking at somebody or talking with somebody and you're projecting your feelings, like they're this type of person, they're that type of person, or how come we don't get along, how come they don't do things this way, or, why is this toy on the ground, who put this here, there's a whole bunch of projecting our thoughts about the way things are, instead, immediately turning that into more of a reflection, where it's you see something there and it's why did I notice that in the first place? Why does it bother me? It's dangerous and and you need to keep a clean house or whatever. Okay, cool. I like things clean it doesn't matter if they like things clean or not It's just you just start noticing and reflecting instead of getting so much into Trying to project how you feel how you think the world should be in terms of everything And just getting to understand yourself a little better And so that's, 

Theo Harvey: so the way, so to your point, when you get defensive about something or you react emotionally towards something, a lot of times you want to say something to other folks, you project it out.

But to your point, flip it on his head and be like, okay, why do I feel the need to project this to someone else? Because, for instance I'm just giving you examples so I can see if I understand the lesson. My, my wife called me or text me literally today and she got upset with me or she just said, Hey, did you use my towel?

Wash your face. I was my towel and all this stuff. And then the first thing I wanted to do project, which I did, I just said why does this matter? And then I said, okay, let me stop. And I said, I'm sorry. And she gave me a little thumbs up in the text message. So first thing you do, just apologize.

And then I reflected on myself. It's okay. Why did I act visually? Because to me, it's what's the big deal? We got like a hundred towels here. So just get another one. Now, maybe I just don't feel the need to, if I made a mistake, legitimate, I know my intention. But then maybe she didn't understand that.

So I started to really, to your point, reflect more on how, why I did that. So is that kind of the hint, is that kind of what you're saying? Just Hey, really understand why you want to project this out there or why do you feel a certain kind of way about it and to get more insight into yourself.

Mr.Benja: Yeah, exactly. The more insight into yourself where you're not on this autopilot and then, feeling that you need to necessarily, I don't want to say react, but play this role. You can step outside of yourself and just look at what's going on. And it's oh, okay. Even if it did, even if it did make you mad or you thought it was unfair or whatever you felt about it, that's all fine and valid.

And another set of feelings and thoughts to deal with, but just the act of stepping, stepping away from yourself and reflecting on what you're doing, where your energy is going and, properly addressing it or properly looking, properly observing yourself, a. k. a reflecting and I was able to move much more quickly into a space that I wanted to when I started when I started thinking like that and it's something that's been bubbling up for a while, but I noticed myself starting to get into an argument on threads and I was like, hold on, let me step back a second.

And, it did the doctor strange astral plane stepped out and just, I just looked at myself doing this and I'm like, here I am, I'm trying to do X, Y, and Z and now I'm furiously typing at this person. I don't know on threads. Okay. Step back from yourself. Just a second. Reflect on the situation.

Okay. Now let's jump back in, backspace over the comment. Okay. Tell me more. 

Theo Harvey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I thought threads is not supposed to be emotional, man, but that's supposed to be the friendly place. It sounds like getting some heat so 

Mr.Benja: he can start. Hey, man. The pendulum swings, brother.

X is on one end, threads are starting to get bubbly on this other side. 

Theo Harvey: Spicy. Hey, one little injection here where we get into the main stories here, but yeah, man. Yeah, I'm really getting a lot of strength from Dr. Benjamin Hardy's little course. I'm doing this last couple of weeks and just, he talks about this, just like how you frame.

Everything is the key to life and success, man. You can really learn to reframe your past. And a lot of times people want to think about regret or missed opportunities, which is the same thing, or, things they could have done or whatever, but... It's just reframing that and looking at positive things, really focused on those things that you did do that was right.

And that grew you and that gives you the energy to catapult you into the future and then also give yourself grace. And so when you give yourself more grace, then you start giving other people more grace for their mistakes. Because a lot of times people who are the hardest on you or other folks that they're probably 10 times harder on themselves.

So I had that conversation with my wife and my business partner about that recently. And, they both admit it. Yeah. Yeah, they're probably 10 times more harder on themselves. And I said sometimes you need to give yourself grace. You did all you could in that moment. And I think a lot of people can get power from that, they understand that, look, I did the best I could at that moment, give myself grace. Take that lesson I learned from it and grow from it. And sometimes you can even stories you tell yourself is really your identity and you can read, change those stories. So it was really blown my mind, like how you can reframe everything basically, and he's saying, look, you're not you're not your your talents or your skills, those can be created.

Based on what your goals and your vision is, right? Your vision and your goals. So whatever your visions and goals are and whatever's impossible, then you back, then you start developing those skills and abilities. And that just changes your mindset. You're like dang, if I did that, what could I do?

As opposed to I'm good at, marketing. I'm good at sales. I guess I could just do this. No. Scrap all that. And so it's like reframing your future to be, based on this goal and that's changing your past. Changing your present and then reframing your present to change, how you feel.

So it gives you energy so you can go toward that possible future. So it's you really, it's really starting here to my, in my mindset where. Anything is almost possible because you're not shaped by any of it. It's it's weird. And but yeah I'm getting some, a lot of insight into this still, it's still, I still have issues a little bit with trying to, cause you really want to get connected to that future self, get to see it, you believe in it, you become it, you feel it.

But sometimes when that future self seems so almost transmutable and you don't really see it too well, it's hard to get connected to it. So I'm trying to figure out how to get to that next level, but I definitely feel like I have a good understanding of how to reframe the path a lot better. And so that's helping 

Mr.Benja: me now.

And I didn't think about this when I was having the projection epiphany, but yeah. That may be actually a good way of looking at your future self just by taking a moment and really practice stepping outside of yourself. lIke I've got it. With no judgment, just hold up, step back.

Okay. That's not me getting upset. That's Somebody who's gotten upset over these things, but that's not truly me. I don't exist in this one moment in time. I exist, all across my timeline when I was young. That was me in the future. That's me. All of this is me. So from that point of view, stepping back and looking at one single instance, 

Theo Harvey: There's a book that talked about that.

Man, it's the impartial observer. That one, that's another one, but it was called, it's the impartial observer. And it was like the same guy who wrote Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, he wrote a little known book. And it was about something similar where it's talking about how to live a well, a better life.

And he talked about the power of how you think about yourself. It's have this impartial. Observer. And, to your point, that could be like your future self or whatever, which just stands outside of time and has no judgment on your actions. And it's just it is what it is, so what, what are the facts here?

And so that way you can get beyond the emotional aspect of it and get to the real root of the issues. And so it's hard to do, emotions are there for a reason. You just, I don't know. I'm just reacting, But I think the power of reframing, I think there's two things, right?

Obviously you want that distance between reaction and action. Meditation helps, that's why I've seen or other stuff to just pause you from reacting that's in the present, but in the past, you can start building those skills now by just Thinking about all the positive stuff.

And that's what, Dr. Benjamin Hart is having us do all the time. What are the 10 things that would, what did the, 10 years ago, how have you grown and empowered in the last year alone? Have you grown in power in just this last seven days? What have you done that empowered you?

And so it's you're filling yourself, all these different ideas and visions. And so it becomes almost wow, I've done a lot. And you didn't realize it. And it's not just, actions, but it's also emotional changes that, that, that's evolved you. And so yeah, it's very powerful stuff and definitely highly recommend everyone go through some of these trainings from Dr.

Benjamin Hardy. But it's definitely opened my eyes to what's possible. And yeah, man, it's almost like. Anything's possible. Anything is 

Mr.Benja: possible. Anything is possible. Even drama in the world of open AI. And that leads us into story number one. The open AI drama continues with Sam Altman, ending up back at open AI.

We thought he was ousted. We thought he was leaving. We thought he was with Microsoft, but suddenly he's back. Theo, what's going on here? 

Theo Harvey: Mr. Benjamin, we talked about this last. Last podcast. And so do you know that how open AI started? Have you heard that story before? Again, I think we talked a little bit about it.

Refreshes. Yeah. Basically Sam Altman, Elon Musk, couple of luminaries in the tech space. They said, Hey, AI is so powerful. It's going to be so powerful. Revolutionary. We can't let this technology fall into wrong hands. We can't let, Apple or Facebook get, create artificial general intelligence, which is the golden grail, for basically intelligent artificial intelligence. That's almost like human level. And that's can. Excel beyond our intelligence, right? Pretty rapidly. And so we have to create some kind of entity that can protect us from falling in the wrong hands. It's it's like the super friends, right?

You don't want that technology fall into the hands of the legion of doom, right? We should make that Picture just, I'm messing with the Superman cape on Sam Altman. They didn't want to fall in the wrong hands. And so they create this nonprofit entity, open AI to help protect humanity from the ills of, we're going to think about AI, so it doesn't harm us and all this stuff to think about the issues of alignment and all that kind of stuff. Fast forward to last year. Yes, all this time it was building, but really last year was when it all blew up. Cat GPT got launched and just rip basically 100 million users in less than a month and just really shown people to power what AI could do and then now we have this AI go rush and Santa Altman who came, let's be honest.

Now, yes, he's got, I'm a saint. I want to build a better humanity and build AI is better for humanity, but he is a capitalist. Let's not get it twisted. He was actually, before he joined OpenAI, he was a part of one of the biggest accelerators around shoot, why am I drawing a blank right now?

But that's the biggest accelerator he was part of. Yep, Y Combinator. Thank you, Mr. Bidja. So he was running that. So he's all these, so he is a before that he ran a company, so he's a capitalist. Saw the moment, saw the opportunity to commercialize Chad TPT. Got big money, including Microsoft.

Billions of dollars, ten billions of dollars. And that was moving forward. And then something must have flipped the loose, but he forgot that this was really a nonprofit entity that has a, that was in control of a for profit arm. So from a corporate governance standpoint, the nonprofit board members had all had control of how this is going to be operated.

And so that's where all this schism started. So you had the board members who really had I think a lot of them didn't have any financial interest. In open AI, which was purposely right. They wouldn't, so they wouldn't be at cross purposes. Fired Sam Altman. We saw that the fiasco that went there again, he's a capitalist and the employee employees are capitalists.

And so they see their shares and, we see Microsoft trying to get in where they fit in. And so everybody, who's got billions of dollars in state are trying to protect their interests and they think Sam Altman can get them there. But then he's hamstrung by this board. And over the course of the last couple of a couple of days right before Thanksgiving Sam Altman was there.

He was left. He came back. He was at Microsoft, so he's officially back, but He's no longer on the board anymore, and they did replace some of the existing board members, but they left one board member there who was from the original crew that fired him, and they replaced it with two other folks, but that nonprofit.

Board structure still exists, right? So that has the control of the entity. So Mr. Benja, I say all I have to say is Oh, and one last wrinkle in all this was that right before he was fired, did you hear about this? There was rumors that there was a new technology that was launched by open AI called Q star.

That was supposed to be the next advanced leap in AI technology. And all of a sudden, Sam Altman's fired because he wasn't consistently candid in their con his conversations. That's exactly what they said, consistently candid in his conversations with the board. Mr. Benja I say all this say, so now we're back open your eyes still here, people are trying to get back to normal here.

With all that being said, Mr. Benjen, do you think OpenAI's entity can still exist going forward with all this turmoil? And is it the right entity to protect us from AI that could harm humanity? 

Mr.Benja: It's to me, it always felt like the nuclear kind of argument. And it's whoa, whoa, nuclear weapons, dangerous.

We better be the only ones who have them to make sure nobody else runs amok with them. But we'll have them, we'll keep them safe. It's you always see this in any survival drama. It's whoa, there's a gun there and nobody else has a gun on the island. I should hold the gun to keep it safe.

So all y'all can stay in line because I got the gun. That's what it feels like with a lot of this AI. It's like, all right if AI is going to be controlled, it's going to be controlled by us. Cuz. We got the money, Microsoft's over there, they got our back, we're going to be the ones holding all this power.

Can it survive? I think at the very least, it'll survive by name. So you just have this concept of OpenAI that they can always push out front, no matter who's running the strings behind the behind the curtain. Like you were talking about Microsoft and the not Microsoft, but the for profit angle, right?

It's like they're making all these little... They just released their own Hey, you can make your own GPT and everybody's got all these plugins that they can buy and stuff. It's like, how do you set this up? How do you charge for it? It's okay, they might not be making money directly, but you can set up this whole licensing profiting scheme from the whole thing.

As I said, the open AI thing just seems more like a. Not a front to me, but like a nice face. I don't know. Is that 

Theo Harvey: what you said? It's got that scam malicious. I commend them. They're trying to do something different, but when you got billions of dollars at stake of venture capitalist money and you see the revolt, even with the employees, they revolted, right?

Because they have stock. Involved in this now, the capitalist motive is so stronger than, who, who cares about humanity, this nebulous term when I care about my human self making money. So it's there's no alignment. Oh, I had this epiphany today, man. The same issues with open AI is the same issues that struggling with AI, which is alignment.

There is no alignment from the capitalist motive to saving humanity, and that's why it will never work. And so to me, I don't know if they can get alignment with AI, if they can't even solve AI with the human beings to get them aligned. Can they get the, for those that are no alignment problem is basically what they're trying to figure out.

As the AI becomes more and more sophisticated more, more intelligent than us, how do we ensure that their values are aligned with our values? Basically make sure that our values are that we want to stay alive. The AI doesn't kill us, right? And so they, they're trying to solve for that.

That's the big issue. Whereas, I don't think they're they've even solved alignment issues when it comes to capitalism saving humanity. 

Mr.Benja: Yeah. And does it and that also brings up one of the, one of the things they were saying about the possible schism and that candid line they had, is it because.

Sam Altman and a lot of his followers wanted to really push the system to go fast and quote unquote, break things, to make a Facebook term, didn't want to just blaze on forward. And it's Hey casualties be damned. I'm blazing forward with this technology. Or, you had some people on the board, hold on now. Let's be safe. And it's like safe, man. My wallet needs to be safe. Shut up. Get out of here with all that safe stuff. I think, that was a, that was some of the discussion. I don't know how much is verifiable or what you've heard, but I don't know. How did that play into it?

Theo Harvey: Definitely. There was this whole rumor that what's it called? Altruistic, what's it man, what's the term? The EA altruistic movement. The Sam Sam Beekman Freedom Movement, right? That everybody was saying. The goal for this movement was to Was to basically make as much money as possible.

So they can solve all the benefits of humanity. And this is one of the things that everyone's trying to push this big, almost religious movement within Silicon Valley to figure out how to solve these problems. But the way to solve these problems is you got to make as much money as possible.

And, it's that is one of the things is so are they pushing AI so they can profit from it? But at the same time is, is it's benefit in the humanity that they do push it, so it's it's hard to get that good balance, 

Mr.Benja: did you hear Kevin O'Leary talk about this?

Like that. No, what did he say? Kevin O'Leary, one of the sharks from Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful, right? He said, somebody asked him an interview. They're like, we've got this whole wealth disparity and, it's causing a schism in society where you got people that are super poor and then you've got like the, Bezos, Zuckerberg oil oligarchs or whatever, you've got these unknown people in the federal reserve that, there's so much money versus so little money and she was bringing it up as a problem.

And Kevin O'Leary was like, Whoa, that. That should, that divide, that chasm should grow even larger. He was saying that we need people with way more money, way, way more money, and people with way less money. And he said, inevitably, That person with way more money will drag everybody forward, and it doesn't matter how how bad they feel, they're going to be better off.

And it was an interesting thing, because I'm like, okay, now, that might technically be true, where if you didn't have fresh drinking water, and you didn't have toilet, or whatever, but now you do, but then... This other guy is taking trips around Mars, and laughing it up and beaming it down to everybody on Earth.

It's look at me, I'm on Mars, yeah, it's does that make you feel better even though you've got clean water and you didn't before? You know what I mean? So it was an interesting argument, but he was like, it doesn't matter how they feel.

Theo Harvey: Yeah. And the term is effective altruism. So I want to get it right. And yeah, EA and it's a social movement using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible and taking action on that basis. So basically, in other words, sam Beekman Freed, who just got, probably gonna be in jail for the rest of his life.

He was the EA advocate. And so the advocate is doing what he can to make as much money as possible. The challenge I have with that argument is these guys are almost trying to be everyone's mommies and daddies, right? Dictating. We know what's best, right? Because we're we're smart.

And it's almost because we made so much money. Ergo, we know what's best for humanity, right? Which we all know wealth does not equate that you have the answers to solve, society's ills, some cases you just got lucky. And so now, now we're relying on you to guide dictate what, how humanity is going to be saved.

And so this EA movement within Silicon Valley is really starting to show its head, it reared its head under the crypto movement and now it's reared its head under AI. And so I don't know, and so it's what are their ultimate goals for humanity? And it doesn't look good, man.

It looks like a lot of those what those dystopian future books and movies that we always 

Mr.Benja: read about. Yeah. It's really weird. I was in. I was in the valley, in the early 2000 and seeing all this and I didn't get the hate for the tech bros, but now that I'm removed from a little older and I can step back and see like I do, then it's wow, the, some of the tech bro mentality I'm.

I see it a lot more clearly now, but 

Theo Harvey: I know we want to move on, but I think to your point though I think we were all more Pollyannish, we were almost optimistic about technology in the early 2000s. Oh, look at this, the browser, I remember literally being your room when we learned about Netscape, blowing up, and we just, Oh, what's this? And we got super excited, man. It was like. Look, I don't want people to think that it was always shit. There was moments where generally joy and excitement. Oh, no. Yeah. The future possibilities. But to your point, that's been corrupted over and over again, where we're almost cynical, right?

About this and this new generation. I think that growing up I think they born cynical because they understand, probably more intuitive because it's all they know. But they know that just like anything, you just can't trust a lot of that stuff. And I don't know, it's going to be interesting to see what happens.

One last thing and we'll move on, but Q star, Mr. Benja, did you hear about that? Before this, or what would you think about that 

Mr.Benja: story? That was interesting. Actually, I didn't know anything about Q star. I thought you were referring to GPT 5, which got announced, but no, QSTAR is something different.

Theo Harvey: Yeah. So it sounds like it could be a breakthrough in that direction, of course, open AI is not being very open, which is exactly what this technology can do. So yeah, it's, and then I saw this other article, one last thing, I saw this other article about quantum computing. NASA has shut down the quantum computing research and it's interesting.

This coincides with AI, but those are no quantum computing is supposed to be next level for computing that relies on quantum mechanics. And the thing about that is traditional computing typically stood for what ones and zeros, right? So you can have one. Two states mostly. And so everything's based on this two state kind of architecture.

Quantum computing, you can almost infinite states. And so you basically can pack so much information and in some of the states of what they can exist in the same state, the same time position. So it's like you can pack so much more information in just one piece of corp or whatever.

And, they got scared too. So it's, this is very interesting time and it's a technology that maybe 10 people in the whole world truly understand between quantum computing, AI, and they're going to shape the next 30, 40 years. Shoot, 100 years of humanity. It's 

Mr.Benja: crazy. yeAh, it was either in the dynamics of software development or or code complete.

One of those. Microsoft press books. I got them shelf. It was like, nobody really understands what's going on in the code at any sufficient level of complexity. And when I say sufficient level of complexity, if you make like the smallest video game. At some point, you're very easily yeah, I don't know what's going on in there.

It just happens to do its thing. 

Theo Harvey: So this is before AI, right? 

Mr.Benja: thIs was written before I got out of college, dog. So we're talking to like late nineties. They were like, yeah, nobody understands what's going on in computers. They just work. Oh man. All 

Theo Harvey: right. That's 

Mr.Benja: a scary one, but yes. But be scared.

Be scared of Meta, man. They're all in my business now. I don't know what to do about this. So anyway, story number two. Amazon is not playing with your Black Friday. Amazon is here. They did the Black Friday thing. People were going nuts over how much was spent on their, big Black Friday football game.

Basically they've got their own football game now. And everybody can say, Hey, what are you doing this Friday? I'm gonna watch the football game on Amazon black Friday game. I don't know. I haven't been into sports really big lately, but the idea that Amazon's got all your watch information and watch data and can feed you very specific content based on how you watch.

This is something that the Superbowl hasn't had. This is something that Monday night football doesn't have in this way. Only Amazon has it because. They're watching your stream. They've got your account. They know what your habits are. So this is a whole new level of let's pump money into this and Amazon is doing other things.

But Theo, let's start off with the Black Friday one, because this is what we started discussing it with before the show started. Yeah, 

Theo Harvey: man. So high low Black Friday this year. Let's see, it was spending popped around 7. 5%. Above what it was a year earlier. So it reached almost 10 billion in us, which is a record.

A lot of people spend a lot of money on black Friday, Mr. Benja. So there you go. It was one of those things that just in general is it pent up demand? I guess inflation is not hurt. It is hurting people, but I'm feeling it. I don't know about you, Mr. Benja. We'll talk later about the streaming services.

I've started to cut off to that point. bUt anyway, I digress. Yeah, so Black Friday was, growing, but let's 2022, I guess in the 2022 people felt some inflation, but made it feel like they can spend a little bit more. So maybe that was it. But Black Friday in general, Mr. Benja, I actually I was on a plane at the time when it was on.

I was trying to watch it on Amazon, but yeah, they had the QR codes popping. They had, they had everything going, everything's in black. You just had to watch it. It was playing too. They should've had the Raiders, man. Who was playing? It was the Jets. Look at that, it was the Jets.

Yeah, Dolphins. They should have the Raiders, man. They should have the team that was, that dresses black, so that would have been really cool from a marketing standpoint. But yeah yeah, I thought it was a success. Sure, it wasn't a good game, it did what it's supposed to do, and guys watched it, and that's what's about attention, and so now you know, you had the commercials that were showing, you had the QR codes, you had little side things pop up, from what little I did see, so yeah, man very interesting.

I remember you. So what Gary Vee talked about on CNBC and other places, what was he talking about? And what was his vision of what this is going to do this year? 

Mr.Benja: hE's basically saying that, with the Super Bowl and other big sports events, you don't know who's watching and you don't know where they're watching from.

It's just this thing that happens suddenly with Amazon. You can really tie into. Okay. We're talking about a huge sports event. That's streaming. What is streaming do differently? They've got your information on your internet service provider. They've got your account. What else you'd like to watch?

They've got your purchasing habits. They've got what else do I do with Amazon? They've got your live if you're on Twitch, how many people were on live streaming. We're on Twitch that watch this game or, is there a correlation between communities or is there not a correlation between communities?

And this is a big thing about, having all your data and being able to figure out who you are and what you can do and how we can sell to you. And. Not just how we can sell you. If we're talking about the big brother thing a while ago, how we can influence and control you and coerce you to do things.

So this is just an interesting step in terms of taking a lot of the mainstream and pulling it back down into the streaming world because sports is one of those last things that was existing completely in the Analog linear TV world, whatever you want to call it. So that was his basic idea.

That's Hey, listen, now we can sell you things. We know that we might be able to tell that you switched your browser to something else during halftime or whenever this happened. Or, when you saw the QR code, we saw that this many people hit the QR code.

It's okay, why did this many people, follow that QR code? And we posted it as opposed to this one. Data analytics gone crazy. And yeah, this is an interesting tie into commerce also, where it's not just a family event. It's now like a family financial event of sorts. 

Theo Harvey: Yeah, I just say Amazon, all these folks is evil.

I'm realizing that more and more, man, because Look, it was great when there was money was flowing. I'm not saying, money was cheap. Let's just put it that way. Inflation causes money to borrow money more expensive. I'm noticing now where it's credit card companies, they're just being more stippler about a lot of different things now.

And they're trying to make sure things are paid on time. They reach out to you more frequently on, on Texas text messages. So it's just a lot of things are just getting tighter, when it was easy to buy stuff. When the inflation periods were a little bit easier with, we had zero inflation, money was easy to buy.

It was, and they were making it convenient to buy things. Fine. That's perfect. But it's too convenient to buy things now in a period where people need to watch their money a little bit more, in my opinion. And I think people are realizing as all these automatic subscription services that we have I forgot I had a ring service.

It popped up like a hundred bucks. I'm like, where'd this come from? I like, crap. I forgot I had that, a year ago. And so it's I think at least I am, and I'm hoping, I think a lot of folks, you were early to the game on this, but a lot of people are realizing, things that are making it easier to buy is not necessary.

necessarily something I really want to go to path of a lot of times. And Amazon just makes it way too easy, right? They got this one click button now. They're trying to get you on while you're watching TV, popping up stuff in the middle of the show. So it's almost what they're trying to do to become, what's happening with it.

And the debt load for the U S is growing. I think the credit card level is higher than it's ever been. This last year and I get those numbers in a second but anyway, yeah, so those are some of the things I'm I see what they're doing. I just don't like it. 

Mr.Benja: And definitely, and as we said, it's not just, it's not just football.

We said they aren't playing around for black Friday. They've already got two other holidays, the prime days and the big deal days. And now they're they've announced their home internet service coming. So I don't know if many of but Amazon's been behind the scenes with their Amazon web services.

Allowing for these big companies to run their server operations and their computing operations behind the scenes with Amazon technology. So that's been happening for many years. They're going to flip that technology into a way to give people home internet. So low cost home internet from Amazon saying AT& T is messing with you.

Verizon's messing with you. Fios. I don't know who else you got Cox cable whoever else is out there with home internet, Amazon's about to be like. Hey dog, we already got you on the ring. We already got you on Amazon prime. We know you like this. Why don't you Hey, we'll send you some whole food groceries.

If you go ahead and get home in and how about that? So they 

Theo Harvey: Have to, to have to, they start and see some pressure. Have you heard team? 

Mr.Benja: Timu, 

Theo Harvey: obviously from China, has a lot of deals, a lot of discount deals and, going for the Amazon market. So Amazon has to, expand what services they can offer, right?

To your point, that, food services, car services. They just, they talked about healthcare, right? They're going to offer, 9 healthcare, right? For people who need access to telehealth. Yeah, man. Amazon has to expand, beyond just selling goods and services, right?

And they did try to just sell their only brand, right? But now they're trying to get into other things because they're starting to see pressure. They're saying two things, probably. It's saying less revenue because people don't have enough buying power, right? So that's decreasing. And they're going to see the cost being, squeezed from the bottom because they're gonna have more competitors, right?

Like T Move and stuff. So it's going to be interesting to see where it goes. But yeah, last year they said credit card debt in America has increased by 40 to 45 billion from Q1 of 2023. That represents a 4. 6 percent increase in one quarter. So yeah, credit card debt is increasing. The natural average credit card debt is around 5, 000, 5, 700.

Yeah, man, people are, I'm just, I just tell you what I know, brother, that's a family of four, homeowner, living the American dream. 

Mr.Benja: It is hard. Oh, and really quickly on the sneak, Amazon is pushing AI hard on the sneak. So if you go to a lot of your product reviews, they'll have AI reviews there.

It's sneaking in there, man. I'm telling you, they're going to have a little virtual salesman pop up. Hi, my name is Bob, the virtual salesman. I know you want this and you're like don't get me 

Theo Harvey: started, man. They got these video influencers that pop up talking about the ad product, that now, so anyway, we digress to Amazon, the devil.

Mr.Benja: Story number three. Absolutely no transition there, but story number three. Snoop Dogg is giving up smoking. Did you hear about this, Theo? 

Theo Harvey: I did. And, just like everyone else, I thought, when you think Snoop Dogg, you think of one thing. You think of endo. You think of smoke. You think of sticky icky.

All the humanisms you can think of. Yeah. Yeah. So I was like, Oh, good for him. But 

Mr.Benja: yeah, exactly. So Snoop gave up smoking or so he says, but then it immediately got turned around and you saw him creating a song with T Pain. You're like, Oh now he's giving up smoking. He's getting back in the studio.

Suddenly he's Hey, y'all. Psych! I didn't really give up smoking. I gave up smoke. What do you mean? Now I've got this new smokeless vape cartridge that you can vape with and there's no smoke. And I'm like, come on, dawg. Come on, dawg. D O D G. Why are you doing this? So reportedly somebody asked why he said he gave up smoking.

And it's a rumor that he said, I don't know. I was high. And if that's true, this is the best flip of a miss, of a high misspeak I've ever seen. It's Hey dog, you said you were gonna, you said you were gonna give up smoking. I was high. What you gonna do about it? Hey, man, I can release a smokeless vape.

That'd be great. I don't know. Nothing much to say on that, but that just is what it is. Yeah, 

Theo Harvey: I don't really have too much to add to that Mr. Bench on that note. 

Mr.Benja: That's comedy. You gonna go smokeless? 

Theo Harvey: Not really. I'm not a big smoker. Just, yeah, I'm not a big smoker. I sip a little wine every now and then, but nah, I'm not a big smoker.

There's cigars here and there, but that's about it. Love 

Mr.Benja: you, Uncle Snoop, but, not buying it. No. Alright. Story number four, Dave Filoni is now the Star Wars Chief Creative Officer. Hey, after all this time being in the background, pumping out Clone Wars plumping out pumping out Rebels, , he was doing that , putting out the bad batch, putting out all these shows.

Just tearing them out, finally. They said, you know what? You're the creative, you're the creative guy now. A lot more power, a lot more control, and the Filoni verse is a real thing. I'm not sure this makes me happy though. 

Theo Harvey: Yeah, Mr. Benja I would, I concur, man. Yeah I, let me just say this. I respect what he's doing, right?

He's trying to broaden out Star Wars story beyond the Skywalkers, right? And the Clone Wars was a, Key testament to that creating mythologies around Mandalore and the force and what it can mean and the great force and this and that. And then he's expanded in all these different iterations from a cartoon animation standpoint, and now it's extended to live action.

So we're definitely going to get. Star Wars movie, with his ideas infused with it. So that's there. That's, it's done. That's a wrap. But to your point it makes Star Wars almost like homework, man. It's just it's more of the same. And I guess, I don't know, man. I like, I don't know.

What is it? Is it me? Am I changing? Or is it this? I just don't like storytelling with too much homework. I just want core good storytelling and I don't know if he has that capability in it, because there's a lot of stuff in there, which is interesting and different. Yeah. But is there anybody you care about from the, that he created?

I guess Ashoka is one of the characters that people care about, but is there anybody, any characters you care about 

Mr.Benja: that he created? That's the thing. It's like, when you, when, to me, when you're watching one of these stories or you're getting invested, you're like, who are you, what do you want? What do you need?

What do you desire? Why should we care? And what are you gonna do about it? Oh, and who's the bad guy in your way? There are a few of these basic questions that we have questions about. With Filoni, you're getting into this broader kind of random, Oh, this is this character. Why do we care? Hold on now.

They're connected to this because they're related to such and such. Oh, okay. Why do we care about them? Hold on now. You got to understand that these two people are, they come from the same planet and they have the same power set, but they don't know each other. Oh, okay. So yeah, we're going to have a whole series explaining the two planets that they came from.

All right. So back to our original character. Why did, why are they fighting? Hold on now. The reason that they ended up on this planet because there was a civil war, all these years ago on this nearby galaxy that Thrawn comes from. Oh, wait, who's Thrawn again? Thrawn's the blue guy. Okay. And it's just so much connecting and story. That's not plot driven. And. I call it, I don't want to besmirch the guy, I call it Easter egg television, where it's like you're watching and you're finding all these connections and all these things, and you're just doing a world building exercise as opposed to a, here's a character.

They got to do some stuff. They did some stuff, 

Theo Harvey: It's, he reminds me of you read comic books and these comic book writers come in, make my marks. I'm gonna create the elastic man. I'm going to create, this new spider character. And she's, you never heard of him before, but I'm going to create this.

And the hope is it could just catch fire. And I think that's what he was. He's a fan guy. That had the opportunity to write a couple of Star Wars stories. And they got a little action. And so now to your point, he just went wild with it. And so because Captain Kennedy doesn't have any clue of who she needs to bring on board.

And just say, sure, why not? Did you 

Mr.Benja: call her Captain Kennedy or Kathleen Kennedy? I 

Theo Harvey: was trying to say Kathleen. If I say Captain Kennedy, that's a good one. We should keep that one. Captain Kennedy. Yeah, I don't know how much longer she's got. But, I don't know. But, I see what she did from a corporate standpoint.

The most passionate Star Wars ever had, or, has right now is coming from Filoni, people, right? They're very passionate. And so let's. Let him do it. Let him cook, and wherever he cooks, whether it's let that boy cook, man. If you're gonna have whales, in space, let them cook.

Darth Maul looking like a spider. Let that boy 

Mr.Benja: cook. That's the thing. And this is a definite departure from where, how we've told stories before and hot take. I just got to say it. Ahsoka is extra. Her entire vibe is extra. It's like all the Jedi are one way. And she's you know what?

We need Jedi. Who's an alien. Okay. We need her to have two swords instead of one. Okay. No, hold on. We need the blades to be white. Totally unique from any other color. Okay. You know what? She can't hold them the regular style. She's got to hold them underhanded style. Okay. All right. And it just kept on going with all this extra about her.

And guess what? I still don't know about her. Like you talk about Kenobi. It's Oh yeah. Fought in the clone wars and had a chick on Mandalore. And yeah, that's right. Hey, what about you Ahsoka? It's my, my master was a jerk. It's yeah. What else that I don't know her parents.

I don't know that it's just it's a little flimsy to me. So that's all I got on 

Theo Harvey: that. Yeah. And let me just put this out there, man. I take, yeah I, over the break, I did do some watching TV and movies went back and watch civil war infinity. And Avengers Endgame, I'd say those are pretty good.

Mr.Benja: They're solid. 

Theo Harvey: And, so when I say that, Marvel's in the dumps right now. They do know how to build because when you watch every character on, when they built it up to that point, every character, everyone's motivations, what they want, what they're about, who they want. And so it's and they don't have to say much because they built it so well.

Previously with the other 18 movies, especially for Infinity and Endgame, I was like, man, this is good, man. Can Marvel ever get that point again? And it's and to me, I was like, man, that, that was amazing how they were still able to make that work, man. And so I'm hoping that they can be in Star Wars too, man.

Can you build something that's just so powerful that you understand everyone's motivations? Even if they're sitting in the corner somewhere, you know what they're about and creating this massive thing. And I don't know if they can, I don't know. Is that a one time thing? I don't know. It's hard to do.

It seems like it's hard to do. Because Star Wars hasn't done it yet. And five, what, three movies and all these TV shows. And MCU seems to have lost the mojo. I don't know, Mr. Benjamin. It's tough. It's tough to build these things. 

Mr.Benja: Yeah, something we're going to have to think about later, because right now we're going to do our shortest story ever with story number five.

It's social media did long time ago, Gary V released this thing about you need to be making 50 to 100 pieces of content. And in there, he said, you need to be making that because you're setting up your story. And basically, this is the end of social media as we know it, and it's starting to die down. And I think he's right.

Go. Keep 

Theo Harvey: going. 

Mr.Benja: That's it. We think he's right. It's done. People are making content now and not so much making connections with people. And that's where the big crux comes in at. TikTok, Threads X now. It's all about making these random pieces of content as opposed to connections. So now people are going to be breaking away from social media and going into more community based forms, whether that's Discord, School.

Circle or whatever else. And we don't know what form that's going to take yet, but we're seeing the beginning of the end of social media. Love it. That's 

Theo Harvey: our rant guys. I love it.

Let's do it. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Yeah, look, if you like this stuff, please subscribe and like comment at show versus business on X slash Twitter, YouTube. Instagram. We got a lot of good stuff there on Instagram and YouTube. Go listen to us at Spotify for the whole podcast, iTunes, or wherever else you listen to the podcast.

And we also have a website. Go check that out too to see the latest and greatest there. Mr. Benja, have a good one. Peace.