How Culture Will Tame Artificial Intelligence Digital Anthropologist Giles Crouch

Ready for a clear-eyed look at AI that doesn’t lean on buzzwords or doom? We’re joined by digital anthropologist Giles Crouch to unpack how these systems really work, what they cost in the physical world, and why culture—not code—ultimately decides which technologies endure. We trace the supply chain from rare earths and chip bottlenecks to the low-frequency hums of data centres built near homes, and we talk about the policy vacuum that leaves Canadians exposed while the EU clamps down and the US lets courts test the boundaries.

Giles shares a personal account of a sophisticated hack that cut across social, email, and banking to show why cyber insurance and basic operational hygiene matter for everyone, from carpenters to consultants. We dig into parasocial relationships, AI “hallucinations,” and engagement-optimised design that mirrors our desires back at us. If you’ve ever wondered why LLMs feel insightful yet still make confident mistakes on complex tasks, this is your translation layer—stochastic parrots, not synthetic thinkers.

There’s good news, too. We explore cognitive scaffolding—how tools can jumpstart drafts, help ADHD brains beat task paralysis, and still preserve a human voice. We make the case for a return to the humanities alongside data literacy, arguing that print may be primed for a revival as a trusted, memorable record in a world of deepfakes. And we name the economic shift hiding in plain sight: technofeudalism, where subscriptions replace ownership and DRM can erase your purchased library with a policy change.

You’ll leave with practical takeaways on digital safety, a fresh lens on AI’s limits and uses, and a bigger story about how culture tames technology. If that resonates, follow Giles at gilescrouch.substack.com, share this with a friend who’s unsure about AI, and subscribe so you never miss a conversation that respects your intelligence. What part challenged your assumptions most?
Find Giles: gilescrouch.substack.com and gilescrouch.com

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Transcript

Welcome Back And Setting The Table

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Cheers. Cheers. Welcome to the afternoon fight. I'm Mike Dobin. I'm Matt Conrad. I'm Giles Crouch. Good to see you again, John. Good to see you.

SPEAKER_04 0:24

Yeah. Well, you can't say no to a pint, it's a good chat. So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I mean, uh, I'm really glad you're back right at Jungle Jim's. I'm doing the the the dry uh January still, and you're joining me on this one. That's so thank you for me. Matt Matt is just going all in all year. He's not gonna stop. Why not? He's a warrior. What can we say? That's right, exactly. Nothing wrong with that either. No, exactly. Yeah, so you were on our show a year and a half ago, or maybe a little bit longer than that, ain't it?

SPEAKER_04 0:51

Yeah, a year and a half, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Yeah, and June, I remember. Folks who didn't hear that show, uh Giles is a digital anthropologist, which is right, the coolest title we might have ever had on this show.

What AI Really Is And Isn’t

SPEAKER_01 1:01

I honestly think it's either digital anthropologist or astrophysicist. I mean, really those are both. They're both cool titles. That's neck and neck.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's neck and neck. And uh, we talked a ton about AI. And to think about, I mean, a year and a half ago to now, man, our conversation then was just like, what do you think's gonna happen? And now it's happened. It's happened happening. Yeah, and then like it was like all the things you predicted in that episode and said we're going to come to fruition, have came to fruition. Oh, yeah, and then it went beyond that, right? Your your predictions were pretty well bang on. So that's pretty fascinating in itself. So kudos to that. Well, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So honestly, like I know you were saying it's one of your favorite episodes. It was one of my favorite episodes to sit and chat with you, and I think it's one that we did need to kind of cover off a little bit more of because AI is used everywhere for the most part now, and I think probably more than ever, we're actually seeing uh you know, we see great divides in a lot of things in society today, and I think we're seeing it in AI. The people who are terrified don't want to use it, stay away from it, like kill it. And then there's I use it every day, and we I think we all use it every day.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

Well the funny funny thing is there's actually no such thing as artificial intelligence. AI isn't a thing. It was a term made up in the mid-50s by a college kid who was looking for a funding for a summer program. Oh. And he used the words artificial intelligence and really liked it, and then sort of it just seeped into computer science as a whole, and we've called it AI. So the way Yeah. So the way you think of AI is uh it's an umbrella term, it's a marketing term for a toolbox of technologies. It's a toolbox, really. And so inside there you've got natural language processing, machine learning, and what we all talk about today, generative AI. So when most people say AI, what they're talking about is large language models like Chat GPT and Cloed and Gemini and copilot, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, that's uh but we all call it AI, so I call it AI too.

Limits Of AI: Chips, Energy, And Water

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Well, the the big thing that I took away from our last uh session was actually you really dampened a lot of the fear that like I even would have remotely had for it, which was I remember you said something like that for the human for basically for AI to become as intelligent and have the capability of a human brain, it would have to essentially use up all the resources on Earth, like in a short amount of time. Like there's there's not enough resources on earth for it to actually overthrow us.

SPEAKER_04 3:26

Yeah, there and there isn't, and there still isn't. And in fact, it's gotten worse because it's even harder to extract the minerals now. You've got China that controls 90% of the rare earth materials that are or minerals that are needed. They can't build enough chips and enough chips to go in all the devices we have, all the data centers that they want to build. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

And just even the PlayStation was delayed. The production on the next PlayStation is delayed because of uh RAM. Yeah. They don't have enough RAM.

Environmental And Community Impacts Of Data Centres

SPEAKER_01 3:52

And I mean, and then and there's the actual cooling and the w wastewater. And I've I've done a lot more reading about like how the wastewater that happens and like the environmental impacts of AI and all that stuff, and how much that people may not realize it, but you know, looking on Google versus using Chat GBT to do basic Google searches is using so much more energy.

SPEAKER_04 4:09

Yeah. And it's not and it's not so much the water that's the the danger, it's it's the energy use, but it's also the low-level sounds. So a lot of these communities where they in in in the US, where they build these data centers very close to suburbs, what they found is that they create these low-generation hums. People are getting headaches, they can't sleep. There was um uh a CBS interview with a guy, he had to move his whole family into the basement of his house and basically build a Faraday cage. No way. That's where they have to sleep. Because you're like 300 feet from a data center.

Regulation: EU, US, And Canada’s Vacuum

SPEAKER_01 4:42

So, how do we stop? Like, how do we embrace AI while mitigating that?

SPEAKER_04 4:48

Yeah, it's a real challenge. Um, I I don't think they're gonna build out the data center infrastructure that they talk about, that they want. Um, but we're gonna see a lot more of them, and then there's the challenge of how do you regulate enough that it keeps innovation going, but at the same time protects people. You know, so it's it's environmental concerns, it's psychological concerns. You know, we have parasocial relationships, like they talk about AI psychosis. So we you've got to find that balance. Um, I the EU has gone a little bit too strong on it, too fast. The US is doing absolutely no regulations, really. It's leaving it up to the courts, and that's that's where that battle's going on.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Where do you feel it is in Canada?

SPEAKER_04 5:28

We have absolutely no AI policy, and our privacy policy and data policies are about 26 years old now.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 5:37

Um, so they're completely out of date, and there's absolutely no relevance whatsoever. So we have pretty much no protections in Canada from data privacy to how our data is used, all the rest of it.

Cyber Risk For Everyone, Not Just Techies

SPEAKER_01 5:48

I mean, I can tell you from an insurance standpoint, I mean, AI and deep fakes and all those things are on the rise. Like cyber insurance is really should be the number one thing that people are focusing on. And then I remember trying to teach some stuff to people like even if you're a carpenter, even if you're a builder, and some of these builders, these guys are like, I don't deal with anything computers, I literally just build stuff. So why do I as a carpenter do I need, or as a person who's a developer, why do I need it's like cyber insurance? It's like, well, do you electronically pay people? Because that can be hacked. Yeah, that like you can have all your accounts can be hacked, or someone can send you a really good-looking email from a subcontractor that you you know think you deal with, and you send them 50 grand thinking, like, yeah, there you go. I and all of a sudden it's like, oh, who did I just send that to? Right. And that's not covered through your regular liability policies. That's actually covered, you have to have cyber covers. So even the plumber, even the builder, yeah, needs to have that cycle.

Giles’ Hack: Identity, Banks, And Recovery

SPEAKER_00 6:44

We were talking about just before the show. If you don't want to share this, you don't have to, but you just personally first handly experienced a hack.

SPEAKER_04 6:50

Yeah, I had a I had a major hack back in uh I think it was late November, early December, and um I was targeted because I have enough of an online profile to be of an interest where people can validate that I'm a real human being.

SPEAKER_02 7:02

Right.

SPEAKER_04 7:02

So they put my image on dating sites, uh, they hacked into my Facebook, they got into my Gmail, they got my bank accounts, like everything. It was a disaster.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

And I I imagine you probably don't have simple passwords, I mean, you know, because you know this industry so intimately. Right.

SPEAKER_04 7:17

So you had very complex passwords. And I use two-factor authentication and I use authenticators. Wow.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

So you're not using the puppy puppy. No. No. Whatever. I don't know. Yeah, the big question. Matt 123, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, the mat one, yeah. The big question is though, did you get any good dates out of it?

SPEAKER_00 7:33

No, Jeremy. Because they they they redirected the email, so I don't know if any of the women liked me. Why do they put you on dating profiles just so they could use your likeness to attract people and then take money from the case? Well, it's the bread page that we talked about. Yeah, it's the brown page. So it's the brown page. It's the old catfish game.

SPEAKER_01 7:49

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. You start dating, you talk, whatever, you gain the crut trust of somebody, and next thing you know, it's like, hey, you know what? Like, I need 10 grand or something like that, right?

SPEAKER_03 7:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

And you start asking, like, they just have people asking and working, and then, you know, obviously people are dating and you're pulling at their heartstrings, right? Yeah. You rob people based on love.

Parasocial Bonds, AI Psychosis, And Safety

SPEAKER_04 8:08

And we have this is what comes down to parasocial relationships. This is part of the problem with AI. And a parasocial relationship, you can think, you know, probably one of the most modern terms is like Taylor Swift and the Swifties. So we have an artist and we get involved with them and we form this parasocial relationship that doesn't really exist, but we get all these ideas about them. And it actually goes back to ancient times and totemic worship. So when we were in our hunter-gatherer times and our foraging times, we'd make these totems and we would we would talk to them. And then in ancient Egypt, they had these giant oracles, and they were like massive statues, and the the mouth moved, and sometimes the arms and eyes and head moved, and inside that oracle was a priest. And so all the local adherents, the followers, they would go and ask the oracle questions, and the priest would be inside talking and the mouth would move, and they thought that was real.

SPEAKER_00 8:56

Like Woody the Christmas tree. Like Woody the Christmas tree.

SPEAKER_04 8:59

That's awesome. Egyptian version. Yeah. And so parasocial relationship is something we've we've had for a long time. And now that's why we see AI psychosis. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

You just feel you're so into it.

SPEAKER_04 9:12

And if you have enough ROM and you're talking to the thing, you can you can start to say, geez, well, well, there was one guy who thought the chat GPT told him he'd invented a whole new form of math. Right. And that he needed to go tell the FBI and the CIA and all the rest.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, I saw that article.

SPEAKER_01 9:27

Yeah. Okay, I missed that one. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I I do know that there's some like there's some other serious things. Like, I mean, I know there's some people um there there's some sort like a serious one that came out recently where a guy decided to end his life because basically ChatGPD told him to do it.

SPEAKER_04 9:40

Yeah, it showed him the methods on how to do it and convinced him and told him not even to tell his parents or anybody else. Yeah. And then there's the church of chat be chat. Well, how does that happen?

SPEAKER_00 9:50

How does it get that dark that quick with that individual? It's just try- is it trying to give you back what you want to hear? So it's telling you to it's basically a mirror, right?

SPEAKER_04 9:59

It is a mirror and they're actually designed to keep you engaged. That's the whole purpose. The more you use it, the more likely you become a paying customer. And once you become a paying customer, they want to keep you there.

SPEAKER_02 10:10

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_04 10:11

Even though it's like$15,$20 a month and they're losing money on everything, um, they still want you there. They want to show revenue, yeah. They need to show revenue because uh and the more users that they have, then the the easier it is to get investment.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

And government funding.

Hype Cycles: Prophets, Engineers, Skeptics

SPEAKER_04 10:24

Yeah, government funding. And and there's when a technology comes into the world, there's basically three roles that we see in culture. One is uh you have the profits, you have the engineers, and you have the skeptics. So the profits are the masks, the altmans of the world. And they their job is to hype the technology because they have a financial interest in it.

SPEAKER_03 10:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 10:43

Um the engineers are the ones that actually figure out how to do things. Yeah. They they take the technology to make it work. And then the skeptics are the people that question it.

SPEAKER_03 10:50

Right.

SPEAKER_04 10:51

And some some of them might hate the technology, but a lot of them they they just kind of question it. They don't know what it is, and so we're curious about it. And that's and then very healthy. Right.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

I mean, you you need the that's the whole devil's advocate of like, you know, why who did why not to choose a pope, right? Kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 11:08

Yeah, it's it's cultural tensions that are necessary. And culture is the ultimate arbiter of all technologies. Um no technology has ever survived culture. And we're very um the we don't adopt a technology, we actually domesticate it. And people talk about technology adoption, but that's yeah, we adopted into society, but we did domesticate it. So when you know agriculture came along, we domesticated cows, we domesticated plants. Um when any other technologies come along, we domestic. We did the same thing with newspapers and printing presses um as we figured that out. We go through this moral panic phase and everybody freaks out, which is where we are with AI today.

LLMs As Mirrors: No Reasoning, Just Statistics

SPEAKER_01 11:47

Yeah. That actually I'd like to get your thoughts on something because that kind of triggered something. What I've been seeing a lot lately online is basically it's like, here's the top 50 or 100 jobs are gonna be obsolete in the next 20 years because of AI. Right, they're everywhere now. They're everywhere. But then they but then it's like it's like it you it starts off like fear of AI, and then it it almost feels like it's kind of like um we want you to be afraid of it. Like it almost feels like it's an ad to like make you hate it. But then they flip it and say, and here's why you need to use it, because that's the only way you can stay relevant.

SPEAKER_04 12:19

Well, absolutely, right? Those those are the profits, if you will, yeah, um, that are putting it out there. Probably most of the jobs that they've got in there, they used AI to generate the jobs, right? And the the thing about uh large language models like ChatGPT is they they're only as good as the data they were trained on, and that data's old. So they're not current, and they're also stochastic parrots. So all they are is statistical machines. They cannot think, they cannot reason. They none of that exists, no matter how much you hear Hinton or others say they're thinking and they're reasoning. Then they're absolutely not.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Really? Okay.

SPEAKER_04 12:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Yeah. So when it says thinking, because you can you can drop your chat G V D down putting in thinking version or you or a regular version.

SPEAKER_04 13:00

I choose the thinking version. But would you choose a version that said statistical processing in place now? It doesn't sound as cool as thinking. No, it doesn't. It's actually kind of cooler in my opinion, but whatever. So they're only telling us what we already know. They're rear view mirrors. Yeah. And reflecting back on the knowledge that we have. They can't generate new knowledge. You you you think that they're generating new knowledge, but they're not. They're being able to um access a vast amount of data more than we can and more than we can process. So when things come back and look novel and new to us, we think that they are, but they're actually not.

ADHD, Cognitive Offloading, And Scaffolding

SPEAKER_01 13:36

We we talked about this before too, like before we were while we were setting up here. But for me, like the reason why I've used I mean the the the fear, you like our last episode, you pushed away a lot of that fear that I had going into it. So I kind of felt like, okay, I'm good, kind of just dive in. And then the other part of it was that uh, you know, being diagnosed with ADHD and and kind of researching that and realizing certain things. I've come to realize that using AI or chat or whatever you want to, whatever AI out there and ADHD together has become a little bit of a superpower for me. Yeah, it it gets me over that task paralysis.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

It gets like so much in 2025 I can't even count. And in going forward, so much organization where this year is already done.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Well, it gets that like 25 to like 50% of the start done in minutes or seconds or whatever. And then I'm kind of like, oh, well, now I feel like the project's already started, and now I can just edit and then I can just go in there and change it the way it's like.

SPEAKER_00 14:35

It's like a sculpture, right? Like, you know, the shittiest part of the sculptures getting all that clay in there and just standing it up on top of each other. Like think of making Michelangelo. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:43

When I'm writing articles and and doing my research, I use it as a research tool.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:47

But as I have enough education and background in anthropology, I'm able to see when it makes mistakes, when it hallucinates or something is wrong, um, and then I use it to write.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

Right.

SPEAKER_04 14:57

But I never get it to write my content because I have my voice. I like my voice, and then that's the way I like to write. But what you guys are doing, what we're all doing now, is a process of cognitive scaffolding. And this goes back to how we've used all cognitive technologies throughout history. Like when writing came along, Socrates said that's it, memory's done, we're not going to remember anything, we've got to keep memorizing, and we can't write things down. And I always say, well, it's a good thing Plato wrote that down. And here we are. So we did the same thing with the printing press. And we like to cognitively offload because our brains can only do so much and have so much energy. And every time we've had these new tech cognitive technologies come along, we scaffold them and we figure out so we've freaked out with AI and it's gonna take everything away from us. These large language models, they're only so good. Uh they're getting better and they're gonna do okay, but we're pretty interrogative as a species. Like we're aggressive. And when we get a technology in that we're not sure about, we're gonna find a way to pick at it and and find all the weaknesses and the strengths. And and we're we're punching AI in the face.

Print’s Comeback And Why Books Stick

SPEAKER_01 16:00

And to to that point, I actually feel that the print is gonna make a bit of a strong comeback and be even more important because of deep fakes and fake information and misinformation and fake news and all this other stuff. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

You know, in times of war and stuff, it definitely could.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

We're gonna need to have things written down on paper because we gonna we're gonna need to know what actually happened. Maybe the newspapers will come back. That'd be cool.

SPEAKER_04 16:24

That actually would be cool. Yeah. Yeah. There's something that's there's also another thing about printed books that's um print is is an experienced product. Um we we want to sit down, we want to have a good read, maybe a cup of tea, a coffee, or a drink, and and we want to read a book, uh, a really good one, or a newspaper, a magazine. And um, so AI isn't that. Digital devices aren't that. We don't remember as much with them, and they're a sort of a a cognitive technology that requires constant input, whereas books don't.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

You know, yeah, yeah. I I I agree with that because I think and reflecting on what you're saying there, I think that I can almost not always memorize something. I don't have to memorize something because I can just say, like, I'll just play it for you. Yeah. I have it, I'll just play it for you. Yeah. Whereas if you read something, right, you kind of have to remember what it was because I can't necessarily just pull it out and be like, you and we're having a conversation here, and I can just can't pull the book out and be like, here, I'm page one hundred and sixty-four.

SPEAKER_04 17:51

Yeah, because you can carry that around.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

But I can easily just go, like, let me just show it to you right now. Yeah, just play what I heard. Right.

Deep Versus Surface Cultural Change

SPEAKER_04 17:58

And it's nice with digital because we can cognitively offload, and books require us to think. And there's lots of research that proves that we retain print and written content better than we do digital.

SPEAKER_00 18:08

Okay. I saw something neat uh geez, not too long ago. You might know this uh about how long it took humans to just be able to read and how crazy of a thing that was for our brains just to do initially.

Robot Reality Check And Form Factors

SPEAKER_04 18:19

It's phenomenal. I mean, even even just the the simple concept of the first technology. Can you imagine you're sitting around the campfire, and this is like, I don't know, 40,000 years, 100,000 years ago, and all of a sudden the you know they've made pokey sticks or something to kill a mastodon and they move back to the to the fire. And someone sitting there and she's got, you know, this one of the cave women, she sat there and she smashed together a stone and she sees a sharp edge and she says, Oh, I can cut a T-bone steak out of this mastodon. And then someone else goes, Why don't we put it on the fire and that started barbecues? Right. Like, but the cultural impact at that time, all the other people in that clan would have looked at her and him and said, You can use nuts, we can't do that. The whole thing is we'd we rip the meat off, we eat it with our mouths. Right. Like that was enormous cognitive change in Homo sapiens, which we probably took from the Neanderthals or the Dennis Ovens anyway.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

As a like an anthropologist, take the digital part out. There always seems to be in society the like and not pol not like not to take the political names out of it, but there always seems to be like the conservative and the like the liberal or the progressive, whatever word you want to use for it. Yeah. Of the people that are like, Why change? And then there's the people like, why not? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

And ages of like, you know, I saw something there else the other day. I won't cite the source because I can't remember what it was, but they we might be in the age of empire right now, right? Which is a scary thought. Yes, it is, but it could be very true of where we are getting back into dominant players and in uh you know a hemisphere race for you know supremacy in a sense. And that's it's that's a crazy thing to think. We've rode the democracy train here for a while, it was pretty darn nice.

SPEAKER_03 20:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:03

Like it was really good for a lot of us, not for all of us, but man, we had a lot of wins. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:09

So it was the greatest period of uh global stability that we've ever had.

Digital Footprints And A Return To Humanities

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Right. And like, you know, so so these empires rise and then they collapse and then they get back into the the kind of rinse and repeat. I saw there were seven stages, zero to seven, and we're almost at the the bad one. Yeah. It feels like it. End of a cycle. It really feels like it was in um it was in a psychology. Like I read the weirdest thing the other week, and I don't know how I fell into it. I'll find it. If I find it, I'll send it to you. But anyway, I'm sorry I can't But it was different ages of of of like how humans go in cycles of different ages.

SPEAKER_04 20:45

And much of these much of these cycles are driven by information technologies. Whether that's writing or cuneiform and pottery and and cave painting or something.

SPEAKER_00 20:54

But it makes sense because there's so much pushback and there's so much uncertainty and fragility, and now all of a sudden's a really good time to cover manipulation. Or I wonder if they're also moved by disasters, so things such like as COVID, like you know, where people are forced out of their norms and then they're it doesn't help.

SPEAKER_04 21:11

I mean, even the first vaccines that came out, they were made in cows. And they created all these pamphlets of people that were against the vaccines, and the images were like cow heads growing out of people's arms and hoofs out of their heads and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Same thing with like with like I saw the stuff with like seatbelts. When seatbelts were first mandatory, everyone was like against it and they had all their reasoning for it, and eventually it just becomes kind of normal. Listen, I've only been on this earth for 40 years, um, but for I feel that in the last year, it's the first year that I feel that we've stepped back in progression, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_04 21:49

Yeah, that's I think a lot of us feel that way, and it's because of the flood of misinformation and disinformation. But you know, we actually have the lowest poverty rates in human history.

Work, UBI, And Augmenting Professionals

SPEAKER_01 21:58

No, in a lot of ways, you're right. A lot of things are it's still the best. Yeah, it's still the best, but it's awful at the same time. Yeah, and it may and I'm I'm willing to maybe like accept the fact that maybe it's like recency bias, where it's like everything's been so great that when anything not great happens, I'm kind of just kind of like, ugh.

SPEAKER_04 22:17

Well, yeah, yeah, and and now there's a lot of not great happening. You've got war in Ukraine, you've got you know Trump and in the States and what's happening down there, and Venezuela stuff and all the stuff, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:27

Like there's just so much stuff. It used to be the time you'd have time to digest one news story to the next, but now it's just impossible. Like we did our you know, to by the time I had we had Andy's episode come out last week, the mayor, and between what happened when we recorded that episode and now sitting here with you, I'm so much happier that there's a weak turnaround with between this episode coming out because yeah, three weeks from now, this episode could be entirely irrelevant. It could be like a new empire. It's just moving so fast, it's just like holy smokes.

SPEAKER_04 22:56

It's part of it is like when you said keeping up with a newspaper article, so all these information technologies, especially AI today and social media, and because we all have devices in our pockets, um, that's cultural transmission. So it enables we used to have a lot of space between cultures and societies. So we had time to process the changes and and evolve the changes.

SPEAKER_03 23:17

Right.

SPEAKER_04 23:17

But it's all surface level today. And that's surface cultural change, but deep-rooted cultural change, like our norms, values, behaviors, our rituals and traditions, all of those actually take decades, sometimes centuries, to actually change. They're much slower than what we think they are. And that's the thing with AI, is that the technology is advancing rapidly, but not as rapidly as we think it is. And it has constraints on it. We can't mine enough minerals to make all the chips and and and the data centers and even the humanoid robots. They talk about Yeah, you were talking about the the the elbows and like the screws and stuff. So the bottleneck for humanoid robots, aside from just that we can't mine enough minerals to make them, is these particular screws that have to go in all the joints.

SPEAKER_00 24:02

Okay.

Technofeudalism And The Subscription Trap

SPEAKER_04 24:02

And there's only two factories in the world that can make them and they can't keep up with the demand now. They're actually bogged down.

SPEAKER_01 24:08

So like my question to that would be why are there only two? And why can't we do something different?

SPEAKER_04 24:14

Well, there's only there's a component it used in in all computer chips, and there's only one company in the entire world that makes them, and they're in the Netherlands. And it's why can't other people make them? I know, right? And I'm thinking, like, okay, if there's only one and there's such demand, why isn't someone else built another factory? I I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 24:31

I'm gonna go completely way off on a like a little tangent here, but it's the same thing about how uh mad I get about why Quebec can only be the only ones that make proper cheese curds, and why we can't I ask this every time I go to Quebec and I come back, I'm like, why can't someone in Nova Scotia just make cheese curds? Or why can't someone from Quebec move to Nova Scotia and make proper cheese curds?

SPEAKER_00 24:52

That should be a business business idea for you this year. Figure it out, yeah. Yeah. And do it. Maybe there's nothing to be the guy.

SPEAKER_04 24:59

Maybe there's not enough market, it could be unique bacteria that's that plays a role in cheese making. I have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

But that can't be unique bacteria and the other ones that make in front of synthetic French.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

That's the secret. Yeah, French gowser. Yeah, they're English. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:13

But like, why can't another company find out like what they're doing and replicate? I mean, we have competition all the time for many different things.

SPEAKER_04 25:20

It's a challenge. I it's probably the capital investment that's required, uh, plus patents that protect the intellectual property of these, and so someone else has to find a different way of doing it, and that's extraordinarily expensive. And we also don't have the mining capacity to extract the resources from the earth, not only for chips and not only for robots, but for pretty much any devices. We want to uh have 10 million robots, as Musk says, in about four or five years, we're all gonna have to stop buying new iPhones and laptops and tablets. Like that's would be the end of it.

SPEAKER_01 26:15

What you're telling me is I'm not gonna have a robot made in the next 10 years. Unfortunately, no.

SPEAKER_00 26:19

Maybe if it's made out of jello, maybe if you didn't.

SPEAKER_04 26:22

And the other thing is humanoid robot factors are really lousy. Okay. They're not a good form factor. And I've talked to I have a a good friend, he he's he's a hu human form factor designer down in the States, uh, Charles Morrow. And he said, like, robot humanoid robots don't make any sense. Like we're actually really bad at doing things. Like when we're walking downstairs, we're literally falling downstairs.

SPEAKER_01 26:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 26:46

And we're falling upstairs when we're walking upstairs. So the dexterity that's required and the brain processing energy that we use as human beings is incredibly low. We only use like, you know, 300 hertz or something, whereas a robot needs to use 500 and some hertz per second. So they have massive amounts of energy requirements. They can't get the dexterity to them, and they don't really make a lot of sense. Like it would make more sense to have a thing in your kitchen that's on tracks that has eight arms and can do five thousand things at one time.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:16

That's a better form factor. Spider trains.

DRM, VPNs, And Data Exploitation

SPEAKER_02 27:19

Spider trains jell-bots, no wells, no wells required in your kitchen.

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Spiders have two thousand. Exactly, yeah. No, that that's and so when it kind of I guess switching over, I mean, not just the you know, this whole conversation doesn't be the AI, but actual like digital anthropology. Like, what do you think? Like, if you were to put kind of fast forward or like in 50 years, what do you think people uh when you when we look back on our digital footprint that we're doing? Like, what do you think people are gonna study uh and and and conclude from like our digital footprint?

SPEAKER_04 27:56

Yeah, so I've thought about this a fair bit. I think we're gonna do more of the arts. I think we're gonna have a return to the humanities. Love that. You know, anthropology, sociology, psychology, it kind of got shoved to the back end of the campus. You go in the moldy old holes in the back, and we're gonna build these temples to business and technology as the computer science and business schools. A lot of this AI is gonna start to augment us. And there's even some research that's been done that shows that AI gets better when humans get better with AI. And we got better with writing, we got better with printing and books, and I think we're gonna do the same thing. We're going to cooperate with AI and we're going to scaffold in a way that makes us all better. And we'll come back to the humanities. Are we going to have universal high income, whatever that is, and Musk calls it, and in universal basic income? Um, we may have to in some societies, but I think it'll be a temporary thing. Our capitalist model is changing. We're in late-stage capitalism. We're going to go through a bit of a crapshoot uh over the next 10 to 15 years. It's going to be very messy. Um, and no one can predict exactly what's going to happen. My only prediction is going to be very messy as we figure out these technologies and how to use them. Um all these prognostications of Musk and Hinton and all the rest. AI is not going to take us over. We're probably not going to reach artificial general intelligence like and and superintelligence, and they keep coming up with new terms. Um because they have to move the needle to get the investment. Right. Um, so we're not gonna that's so far away, it's not even funny. Like I'm not at all worried about that.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

You think it's hard times are ahead for the working class, though?

SPEAKER_04 29:32

You know, and uh the working class, if you're in a blue blue collar and trades, you're acting. Oh yeah, yeah.

Geopolitics, Culture, And Immigration

SPEAKER_00 29:37

I guess more so uh you know, yeah, the jobs, uh marketing jobs, uh uh accounting jobs, uh jobs that can actually be done. Even legal jobs could be at risk, because I mean, you know, all the things a lawyer can do, not maybe not represent somebody in court, but many of the online wills and estates and like documents, contracts, real estate stuff, simpler template stuff.

SPEAKER_04 29:58

Um simpler things, yeah. I don't think we're gonna get rid of doctors or lawyers. Um the large language models that they're using for doctors and legal work, the more you train on, the more data you give them and the more complex you make the questions, the more they hallucinate. Ah, okay. So they make mistakes right now. Can you explain hallucinating just so people? So it's kind of a bad term. Um when they say hallucinate, it means that it makes a mistake. Yeah. Because it it cannot process, it doesn't know statistically what comes next. So it just makes something up. It just throws something in and they call that a hallucination. And what they've called a liar. A liar. Yeah, that's even better. Liar, liar, pants on fire.

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Couldn't you just say I don't know? I've been doing that my whole life.

SPEAKER_04 30:40

You can if you tell them to say I don't know, but even then they have a challenge.

SPEAKER_00 30:45

Right.

SPEAKER_04 30:45

So we're not losing lawyers or doctors anytime soon.

SPEAKER_03 30:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 30:48

But we're gonna augment them. Um the doctors and and nurses and lawyers are gonna have access to this vast trove of data and they're going to be able to process things very quickly, but they will be trained. The way humans think is very different because machines don't think at all. But we think and we put together abstractions in very innovative and novel ways, especially when we work together, and that's why we're social creatures. So we're still gonna do that, but it's going to change entry-level job positions.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 31:16

Um, they're all we're already seeing that impact in the workforce. Um, so we're gonna have to figure out how what education do we give to people, and that's why I think the humanities will come back in.

SPEAKER_01 31:27

That's the other thing, is like when I think of doctors, for example, like AI is going to help the family doctor, help diagnose you, right? It'll it it'll have its own database, and like, you know, they'll obviously put in the the symptoms of things and help it be more accurate as opposed to like you know googling your symptoms kind of thing. Yeah. But where it's never where AI is never gonna help, is it's not gonna help the heart surgeon or the brain surgeon, right? Like it's it you need those specialists who are gonna go in because like it's just not gonna fix your whatever, right?

SPEAKER_04 31:59

Yeah, we well, we already see like in in in medical surgery, in surgery now, they're using robots.

SPEAKER_02 32:04

Yeah. But someone's controlling that robot.

Ten Quickfire Questions

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Exactly. It's a human. They have the precision because robots aren't shaky like we are, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 32:11

But someone's still controlling the robot. And now they can make more precise cuts and they can make thinner cuts and do all kinds of amazing stuff. We're gonna see huge leaps in human health care. I agree with you.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

I'm actually I talk about this with my wife all the time. I actually think in the like I'm also Neil deGrasse Tyson fan, so I kind of listen to him too.

SPEAKER_02 32:30

That's great, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:31

But I actually think in the next 30 to 40 years, I actually think we could borderline on like achieving immortality.

SPEAKER_04 32:40

Yeah, I think we're getting awfully close to it. And then we have to ask the question do we want to be immortal? Yes. Like you have 100% the yeah, I'd kind of like to live a long time. I got a lot of things I want to do.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Um I have a lot of things I want to do, but also like I wanna I want to know what happens. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, like FOMO, yeah. Some people miss out on like the some people's FOMO is like, oh man, I miss out on that awesome party. I miss out on like when are we gonna discover life on another in another solar system? Like, what's gonna happen in space? I'm a big space guy, right? Yeah, like if we could live for you know a hundred thousand years, send me out on a spaceship, and I will like you know, me and my family will go out and discover the solar system.

SPEAKER_04 33:24

You've got the transhumanists and the effective accelerationists that say we're gonna download our brain to a computer. Just that too, right? Which I I don't think I think that's gonna be really hard to do because silicon isn't the way to do it. But we may, they're already working with with brain neurons. And if we can figure out how to use brain cells and actually grow organically biological biocomputing, I think that's the future where we might upload our brains to uh to a but then you have to ask yourselves like, is that just become has has that just become AI to a degree or like the memory of what once existed and it's no longer you?

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Well, that's that's a philosophical question.

SPEAKER_00 34:02

It was also an aliens uh yeah there's a great the new alien system.

SPEAKER_04 34:05

Great book by an anthropologist in Chicago, uh I'm trying to remember her name now, call about Jenny Huberman, and it's about about the transhumanist movement. Yeah and and and what happens if we because every culture has its its ways of uh ancestor worship, right? Dealing with funerals and death, and we're really lousy at it in in a Western European sense, and and other cultures have really good ones, and and like you look at indigenous cultures in the Mi'kmaq here, they have beautiful ways of celebrating their ancestors and ancestor worship. But what happens if you upload your brain and then your great-great-great-grandkids can go and talk to you? Like sick though. But is it you? Because what if you're in there and up here you're uploaded as Mike, and now Mike wants to be an astrophysicist, so he makes a copy of Mike and then goes and does astrophysics, and the other one wants to be a carpenter or whatever else, right? Now, are those copies you?

SPEAKER_00 35:01

No, exactly. That's the philosophical moment they leave the station, they become their own person because they've gone another path. It's a clone, right? It's like if you chose to talk to that person and make friends with them or whatever you've done in your life, but they just want to live to I just want to live forever.

Where To Find Giles And Final Advice

SPEAKER_04 35:15

And then what's a person, right? Because we have this thing called habitus. So we all have habitus, and our habitus is who we are as individuals. And it's a result of you know, we start and our habitus changes, it's our personal operating system, if you will. And it that evolves throughout our lives. And it's we're obviously not the same as we were as a baby, but as we learn language and we are embedded in a culture, the foods we eat, the celebrations that we have, the rituals that we learn, the norms, behaviors, that forms our habitus. Right. As we move and progress through life, we're constantly upgrading that software and changing it. And then culture is the operating system for humanity because biological evolution was way too slow for us. So we figured out culture. And culture is it's uh most people think of pop culture, music, and the arts. Well, that's the aesthetics of culture, but it includes our economic systems, social governance, military, political systems, all the rest of it.

SPEAKER_01 36:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 36:06

Yeah. And culture is a very complex word.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

And don't get me wrong, I do recognize the fact that if we don't die, we need to figure something out because we can't just be like a trillion people on this planet. But that's where, you know, moving to the moon, Mars, and all that stuff actually needs to start taking place, where we actually start colonizing be, you know, greater than. And you know what? You know, four months to Mars is not such a big deal if you get to live forever, right?

SPEAKER_04 36:33

Well, it'd be nice if we could live on Mars. It's all the science says we can't live very long. You've got a toxic environment. Martian sand is very different, gets into everything. Um, the air is toxic, plus, it's so low gravity that you know what happens. So, say we figure out how to go live on Mars, right? And we're there, and then three or four generations are born on Mars. Are they still human? Are they still Homo sapiens? Are they Homo Martianus?

SPEAKER_01 36:59

That's a good question. Never thought of it that way.

SPEAKER_04 37:00

Because you we we know we're uh homo, but there's Homo Africanus, there's Homo Denesinovian, there's Neanderthals. Yeah. There's all these spin-offs of the tree where we came from. You there's that picture of the uh the uh the ape turning into the man that we've all seen. That's complete crap, right? That's not how we evolved. No, right, exactly. No, it's very kind of winding and twisting. Um so where at what point would we say okay, they're not home, they're humans anymore? That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 37:32

The first one's not born on their home planet. They're they're not a human. But are they they are they? They maybe. Maybe maybe maybe it takes time for them to evolve. That's a great question. I mean, because it could take time for them to adapt to those, like you said, those pressures, and then before someone could actually jump again. Right, so they'd like it's low gravity, so you know.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

How they adjust and how they live, and they they yeah, the gravity would be different. I mean, they'd have to obviously, if they're gonna create these cities on Mars and everything. Now, Musk seems to think that he's gonna be able to like activate something that's changing it.

SPEAKER_04 38:06

You know, oh Musk.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

I know, I know.

SPEAKER_04 38:08

That's a whole other thing, right? Aside from his political views, but yeah, he's come up with a lot of ideas, and none of them have really come true. We're supposed to have robo taxis by now, autonomous driving, we still don't have it. They haven't figured out autonomous cars in the Canadian climate.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Yeah, I actually I honestly truly like I I like I think Tesla's are cool, and I think a lot of the stuff that he does is pretty cool, the whole going to Mars, stuff like that thing's pretty cool. That being said, at the same time, I actually think he's one of the like history's greatest charlatans. Yeah, and absolutely the reason why I say that is because uh one, I hate the fact that he can say and do anything and manipulate entire markets, whether it be cryptocurrency or the regular currency, like the stock market. That's incredibly frustrating and highly irresponsible that he in a single tweet he can lose someone's life savings and things like that. So he's ear highly irresponsible in that regard. He's highly emotional. I don't think he's as intelligent as people or he likes to claim him to be because he he reacts like when he and he and Trump were best friends, and then all of a sudden it was like not Trump was on Epstein Island, and like and he's tweeting all these things and he's attacking him. He's a highly emotional person. Yeah, he's very volatile, yeah. Yeah, so and and on top of that, and a lot of these other things that he's as you keep thinking, he's the the profits, the the selling of the things, and just it seems that he's always constantly.

SPEAKER_04 39:32

He's sort of filling a role like uh him and and these others that talk about this um age of abundance, and nobody knows what that is, and it's complete bunk. Um, but there we've always had these kind of profits in societies, and it goes back a long time. Like one of the first um technology hype cycles was the hot air balloon back in the 18th century.

SPEAKER_01 39:53

Look at that right there. No way, it's literally on the TV right there. Oh my god, that's brilliant. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 40:00

That is fun. There's still a thing, hot air balloons.

SPEAKER_04 40:02

There's still a thing, must have been kidding the psycho message.

SPEAKER_00 40:04

Seriously, it's been brought to you by balloons.

SPEAKER_04 40:07

The guy that the guy that uh launched the hot air balloon, it was these two brothers in the late eight, late 1700s in Paris, and everybody was amazed. So much so that even architecture and furniture incorporated balloon motifs and themes in them and and clothing and all the rest of it. And um he made millions of dollars and said we were going to the moon. On the balloon. On a balloon. I mean light turned on. Hey, who knew?

SPEAKER_03 40:31

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:32

And he made millions, and he was, you know, these hypers when the railroads came out, it was the same thing that happened. So Musk is kind of necessary in a way in society.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Yeah, I mean, I got a at home. I have like a book of it was just a book of Leonardo da Vinci's inventions and drawings, and I loved looking through it. It was more like, you know, page for page, and it's just it's a bunch of friggin' nonsense. Like that book is not. 95% nonsense. And then a couple like, whoa shit, that's a good idea. And then there's a couple things where he was ahead of his time and like, you know, he was trying to think out an airplane and he was trying to think out many things that, you know, ended up happening. Yeah. But yeah, he was just, you know, just a maniac, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:17

Like we've always something that goes back for for thousands of years is is that we've always had utopias and ideas of utopia. Yeah. And they're and and as well as dystopia. I mean, North Korea is a dystopia. Um and we've had them, you know, that the Nazi regime was a dystopia, and you know, Venezuela, the dictators. Um, but we've never quite reached a utopia.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Right.

SPEAKER_04 41:39

And but we love the idea of it, and it's something that gives us hope. It serves a very important function within society, within culture, to have these utopian ideas. And that's what Musk is selling and Altman is selling and all the rest of it when they talk about universal high income and basic income and all the rest.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

The only thing I would call out from like with him when he's trying to sell that stuff is like to me when I think if we could achieve an actual like utopia, like and you you can tell me if you would agree with this or not, but like Star Trek looks to me like that would be the most uh probable form of utopia. Yeah, it's kind of agreed.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a cool idea, like in the future that everyone just kind of contributes and everyone does all right.

SPEAKER_01 42:25

I mean, they still have their problems. I mean, like there's still racism within like Earth and Klingons and Romulans and things like that. They still cover the topics that we deal with today, but Earth is one government for the betterment of people. Yeah, there's a federation for the betterment of the universe.

SPEAKER_00 42:43

We'll just say right now, Matt is pro-globalism, is what he's saying. I probably would be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:47

No, it's just I mean, realistically. I mean, like, I understand we have to have like certain restrictions in terms of like, you know, there's there's certain people, there's certain leaders of the world that I would not want to be the leader of the world.

SPEAKER_03 42:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:58

And then there's certain leaders that I would probably be okay with them being the leaders of the world.

SPEAKER_04 43:03

And we we've we have always, throughout history, we've preferred egalitarian societies. That's been our pre preferred operating system. So democracies are very different and they change and they have different ideals. I mean, even the the initial idea of American democracy was borrowed more from the Greeks. And Greek democracy is for the elites, it's not for the population. Like it's not, you know, women shouldn't vote, and and if you're poor, you shouldn't vote at all. Right. Whether you're male or female. So it's um the original idea of the states wasn't the kind of democracy that evolved to be into today. Right. And or many democracies, and there's even even some argument that Western democracy is not really as democratic as we think it is. Um but we prefer these egalitarian societies. That's how we like to organize. We like it when people are more on a level. You know, and everybody says, oh, the Nordic countries are socialists, and it's like they're actually more capitalists than states. Like, wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:54

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:55

They pay high taxes, um, but they encourage millionaires and billionaires, and but they tax them appropriately and they get back into society.

SPEAKER_01 44:03

I think that's a whole like that's a whole shift because uh a mentality shift of of what it is. It's like I because I would agree with that mentality. It's like, let's try to make as many millionaires as we possibly can, but make sure that they pay their share and they're not evading taxes and not contributing to society like they should be, kind of thing. And then that you have universal health care and then you have to have all those things, right? We want universal health care, we want proper education, like those are all things like healthy people and educational people are good for society. Why are we fighting against that?

SPEAKER_04 44:35

I know, right? And but they are down in the States, because it's libertarianism and it's the ultimate libertarianism, and it's this this twisted view of Christian, if you will, uh nationalism and self-identity and all the rest of it, and and they're rewriting they talk about history being rewritten, but they're actually rewriting it. Um and they they went through this back in the 1950s with the Ku Klux Klan, which actually had a huge number of people in Congress.

SPEAKER_03 44:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:59

It was a really scary time, and they were trying it, and then um in the night or maybe it was the twenties and then the thirties came along the technocracy and the technocrats, and they their whole idea of society, which you see in effective accelerationism today, is that um we'll all be governed by engineers. Right. And they'll make all the decisions and everything can be done systematically and properly, and we'll just all hail the engineer.

SPEAKER_01 45:23

See, I actually think that Canada to a lesser degree, but like with uh yeah, uh the uh United States was founded on uh and I know this is gonna be a triggering word or triggering sentence for some people who's listening, but the United States was essentially founded on a like one world order type of thing, yeah. Because they said let's take everybody, yeah because like you anyone can be an American, yeah, but not everyone can be an African, not everyone can be a German, not everyone can like you know, it's one but everyone can be a good American and everyone can be a Canadian. Like we were we founded uh Canada and America and then the United States based on immigration. The country was found colonization, obviously.

SPEAKER_03 46:06

Colonization, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:07

But then as it developed, it became immigration, right? Yeah, and we we were basically like take we'll take everybody. We have athletes who were born in South America, but because they were born in South America and moved here since and when they were two, you know, and raised in Toronto, we have athletes now that play for Team Canada, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are an uh we are a country, Canada and US are two countries that have understood that we want everyone's feedback because so many different people and countries and nations and all that stuff are good. This is why DEI and all that stuff are good things because we get different people's perspectives, yeah, and that helps us gain knowledge and move and be progressive and all that other stuff that to help achieve. Yeah, so like, and I feel Canada's still hanging on, but I mean I think we have that American creep a little bit, but I feel like the United States has lost who they are, and what that is is that they are a nation of immigrants, originally colonizers, but a nation of immigrants, where it was like, hey, we are all we we are we are Italian, we are French, we are German, we are Asian, we are African, and we are indigenous.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

Right.

SPEAKER_01 47:21

And we can all have our perspectives and come up with ideas and get and make the great this great country, right? And Canada was kind of the same to a different but with slightly different mentalities. The thing is, is that that concept is one world order. Yeah, it really is. Let's take everybody, it's actually work together.

SPEAKER_04 47:40

It's actual republicanism.

SPEAKER_01 47:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 47:42

Yeah, at and at its extreme, where it's like the elites will rule and that's gonna be it. And and that's where we see the tech oligarchs coming into play here because that plays into Andreessen and Musk and the rest of them. They all have this idea that no, that the engineers, the technologists will run it. That's part of the the challenge with the economic model that we see starting to come into the States and Canada, well, around the world, is technofeudalism. So I I don't know if you've heard that term.

SPEAKER_01 48:06

No, I've never heard that, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 48:08

So technofeudalism was coined by Yannis Veroufakis, who is the former um Greek uh economic finance minister who managed Greece's economy through the 2008 financial crisis. Quite a brilliant man. And he's written a book on it called technofeudalism, but it's the idea of rentierism. So think about all the software that you have today. Do you buy software like we used to go and buy a software CP? Subscription-based society, all right. AOL. AOL, right? Even BMW came out. If you wanted heated seats in your BMW, you had to pay a subscription fee to take off. Oh no way. Oh my god. And the backlash was so massive. Even if you drive a Tesla today, you have to pay subscription fees to keep your software updated. Otherwise, you get an old style car that can't do as much. So what they're doing is figuring out how to charge us for everything. It's a rentier economy, much like feudalism was, tying it up and we pay rent and we're no longer paying, we're no longer buying things we're renting things.

SPEAKER_00 49:05

Yeah. I mean, you notice that with digital licenses now, when you're buying movies and you have it in your maybe you do your collection on your Apple store or whatever, right? It's like you just can't really take that film over to a friend's house the same way. Or you know, it's a much more challenging environment. What happens? This year, Microsoft dropped their movies and TVs app, right? Yeah. So they were on the Xbox, they dropped it. Oh, now I don't think I had a couple things on there, nothing that I was really too concerned about. Yeah, yeah. You know, if a cheap movie was on once or twice, I might have bought one. But those movies now can only be watched on an Xbox that's in one room of the house, um, and there's no outside way to watch that, so it's almost useless. That Xbox is gonna be old in a few years and probably never die out or watching. You know, and sure I could get a Microsoft laptop maybe, but I don't use Microsoft laptops. So it's like pretty much when that that Xbox fades away, so does those movies that I purchased. That's the rentier. There's no ownership.

SPEAKER_04 50:06

Yeah, you don't you think oh you buy uh a movie on Apple or something and you think, well now I own the movie, but you don't. No. And what if Apple goes out of business? Yeah, exactly. Shut down. What if the company that you upload your brain to goes out of business? What's your human right?

SPEAKER_01 50:19

Okay, so did you see the um do you watch Black Mirror? Yeah, I did. Okay, I love Black Mirror. It's one of my favorite. Yeah, and it freaks me out sometimes. It does, but I mean I imagine this would be like right up your alley kind of thing, though. The more one of the the more recent seasons where they had a subscription base for the lady who had that brain problem, and it was basically I don't know if you saw it, but it it had basically a subscription, it was almost like a Netflix subscription. She had something wrong with her, and they could fix her. You just had to upload, like we'll put a chip in her and then we'll fix it. Yeah, and it was like it was like oh it was a hundred bucks a month to do this, right? Great. But then what happens is is that you know subscriptions go up like they do with Netflix and those other streams and all that stuff, and all of a sudden it's like, oh well now, you know, if you want to you can have the hundred dollar a month, but you know, she's gonna have commercials, so literally she's in there having a conversation and out of nowhere, she'll just be like tampax is the best, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah, right? And it's like what the hell is going on? Or you so you go in and say, like, hey, I don't want my wife to just start talking about tampax in the middle of a conversation of like we're you know, whatever dinner, right? And they're like, Oh, no problem, you know what, you just upgrade to the the ad-free version for a thousand dollars a month, and basically like it got to the point where it was unaffordable to keep his wife alive, and he had to choose basically between like unplugging his wife and like basically working six jobs.

SPEAKER_04 51:44

Yeah, wow, yeah. That's that's techno feudalism. That's it's a rentier economy.

SPEAKER_00 51:49

Sounds lovely.

SPEAKER_04 51:50

Yeah, it does, and that's that's one of the things we're having to figure out is what are the economic models that work in the digital world.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

So we're all have our devices and we all need to connect to these things to yeah, and you see these companies they get bigger and bigger and bigger, nobody stumps them. Oh wait, that Netflix buys HBO, right? No, not HBO, Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers, sorry. Yeah, it has HBO, so yeah, and that's a whole bunch of stuff. Consolidation, you know, and you see it even with the CTV now has CTV. If you actually look with the Crave app, there's like nine different channels, like you know, within the Crave app plus all this other stuff, and it's like, oh my gosh, right?

SPEAKER_04 52:23

Consolidation is and some of them that you you pay more. It drives me bonkers with Amazon. Is that you know I have the subscription? Well, if I want to get a TV show that's run by City TV, you've got to pay extra for that.

SPEAKER_00 52:34

Yeah, or you had to pay more for ad-free now. It was like an ad online year, right? Like just like just like Black Mirror, like it's just it's City Free.

SPEAKER_04 52:41

It is getting to a point where it's ridiculous. You have to pay a subscription to City TV, plus they still give you ads. You can't there's no ad-free version of City TV. And that that's probably where we'll see a lot of things go.

SPEAKER_01 52:51

See, this this thing that's frustrating, and I understand like Netflix does original content, Disney does original content, Crave does original content. Like Crave's is great because Crave, I mean, props to Crave, done a lot of bit of like research about them about how I mean they're owned by Bell, but they they uh really heavily contribute to because they're Canadian streaming services, yeah. So they have to because of CRTC and the cable guidelines, yeah. They do, but even still though, they really do a great job. Like, I will give them credit to that. Yeah, yeah. Like we got it, and my wife loves it because I mean she's from Quebec, and they have a ton of Quebec shows that she's like gets to watch now because of it. Yeah, they invest in in Canadian film and television heavily because they need to create that content.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

And we need a lot of that, yeah. We need a lot more of that.

SPEAKER_01 53:38

So I actually I actually really give props to them, right? Um, but that being said, you have the tubies of the world, which is free to download, but you're gonna suffer through some commercials. Yeah, and I mean, like more of that, please, though. Like honestly, yeah, sure.

SPEAKER_04 53:53

It's everybody's pirating, everybody's stealing, it's copywriting, it's you know, it's it's a challenging environment. It's so much that you can put on for DMs, but we have to figure out how to regulate what we haven't done is figured out the norms and regulations and stuff that we do in the real world and translated them to the digital world. And that's part of the challenge. We've put in, but also digital rights management DRM that came out. That's also stopping a lot of content from being produced because then it puts restrictions on regions and what you can and cannot access. Yeah. If the DRM changes on the movie that you bought two years ago and now it's moved over to another company and they don't have to honor your license, movie.

SPEAKER_00 54:35

Again, it's it's a pain in the butt for them to do all that stuff too, on their end. Like, imagine how painstaking that would be if we had to equip like incorporate all these other users and all these other profiles and all this stuff and incorporate their needs, and it just it just makes it more challenging.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

I'm actually like surprised at how uh like a lot, there's a lot of VPN companies popping up, and I'm surprised they're like borderline legal. They should not be legal, like terrible, crazy. Yeah, yeah like you can just bounce around uh anywhere, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:01

And it they're tracking you and they're selling your data to advertisers, yeah. And they're selling it to third party um uh companies that are are aggregating all that data and then selling it off again.

SPEAKER_00 55:12

But are there good VPN companies? Uh like are there ones that don't do that?

SPEAKER_04 55:16

There are a couple the only one I know that doesn't do it for sure uh is NordVPN. Okay. Um but they're a bit risky. Um the better ones are they risky?

SPEAKER_00 55:25

Like in what way?

SPEAKER_04 55:26

I don't guess it's a little unclear on their terms of service and how they're using your data. Oh so they can still collect your data. They they know who you are.

SPEAKER_03 55:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 55:35

Any VPN company knows who you are, yeah. And that can be tracked and sold.

SPEAKER_03 55:39

Right.

SPEAKER_04 55:39

Um, but they're a little bit better. Some of them, like the the big names that that sell the VPNs, they're they're usually good from the West. But like these Chinese ones and stuff, they're they're putting spyware onto your machine. Like that's data that's going back to the Chinese government. They're used by espionage units, the North Koreans, the the Russians, the Chinese.

SPEAKER_01 55:57

See, like we we we so we have like I I always wonder if it's a VPN or if it's like someone legit. We have one hit on almost every episode of our podcast from Russia. And I'm like just be one guy that likes the show. It could be one guy from Russia who likes a show, or if you're selling us on a VPN.

SPEAKER_00 56:13

Please send us an email. Tell us you like tell us where you're emailing. Uh we'll send you a yeah, we'll send you an afternoon plain hat and sweater.

SPEAKER_01 56:20

Can we send stuff to Russia? I don't know, but I'll I will say this message. If we can't the way the rest of the world doesn't like your president, yeah. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_04 56:29

I got invited to speak at a conference in Moscow. Oh, cool. Um last year in early December.

SPEAKER_02 56:34

No way.

SPEAKER_04 56:35

And um they they offered to pay for me to go and and all the rest of it. And you know, they cover my flights and hotel room, all the rest of it. And it's like, oh man.

SPEAKER_00 56:45

What was your hesitation?

SPEAKER_04 56:46

Just it's Russia. I mean, I mean, I hate what they're doing to Ukraine. Yeah, and it's it's a dictator, and so my ethics kind of my morale morals came in, and I was like, and yeah, I just I can't do that.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

And it's it's uh yeah, I mean there's a lot of Canadians now, same with America, right?

SPEAKER_04 57:02

We've yeah, we're not going this year. Well, I was supposed to go speak in in uh Boston, yeah, and um so um That's the safe state.

SPEAKER_00 57:12

That's a safe state state right now.

SPEAKER_04 57:14

And um they they uh they I talked with their lawyer and my lawyer, and given the nature of some of the content that I write, which is geopolitical, yeah, and they kind of assessed my social media feed and they said don't.

SPEAKER_01 57:26

Yeah. Wow.

SPEAKER_04 57:27

They said we advise you not to go.

SPEAKER_01 57:28

Yeah, well, I mean, and that like I said, that's the only state that is one hundred percent blue. Is it really? Yeah, yeah. So so okay, so this is something I read recently. This is Massachusetts, is the only state that have 100% voted blue, and they are first or second in every major category with healthcare, education, and like all that stuff.

SPEAKER_02 57:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 57:52

And the only state that voted all red is Oklahoma, and they are basically second or last in every one of those categories. Yeah. Take it how you wish. Take it how you wish. Well, interesting. That is a fact that came out that they produced it out, and it's like it, and these are like independent rankings and something that they put through. So the one state that voted all red is second, last, or last in every like the top five categories of education and and healthcare and all the other things that you like quality of life and whatever, right?

SPEAKER_02 58:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:25

And the only state that voted all blue is second or like second or first.

SPEAKER_00 58:30

So were they already that way and did they flip red? Do you know? Like were they suffering when they were a blue state?

SPEAKER_01 58:36

Or were they always a red state?

SPEAKER_00 58:37

They're pretty consistently that.

SPEAKER_01 58:38

Yeah, okay. Yeah, they are.

SPEAKER_04 58:39

Those two states. Massachusetts has always been a bit more, oddly enough, socialist, but most of their ideas come out of Europe. Right. And yeah, that New England, that's why New England is so much the way it is, is because it's more moderate people that it was the libertarians that moved out west, and everybody said, I don't like you, and you know, held with the English and all the rest of it.

SPEAKER_00 59:02

They also have the Red Sox and the Patriots. What time did you have your you had another speaking event, I I believe. Did you say it was at 6 15?

SPEAKER_04 59:09

No, no, no. It's uh I have to leave by 6 15.

SPEAKER_00 59:11

You have to leave by 6 15? Okay, so Matt, I think we should still if you we could do maybe one more topic, but we've got to get in your Johnston's questions. We gotta get the 10 questions in for sure. Because this is uh this is the fun bit of our show. So uh let's just see here really quick. We got yeah, we'll just go into the 10 questions. We covered a lot.

SPEAKER_01 59:30

Yeah, let's do the 10 questions because you know what? There's a lot in there in the 10 questions that we can talk about.

SPEAKER_00 59:34

So awesome. Cool. So want to start with number one questions. Let's go. Matt, you did a great job writing these. Yeah, Matt and I take turns writing the 10 questions, and I I just had a glance at them. So these were these were great ones. So I'll I'll read number one. What's something you believed for way too long that turned out to be completely wrong? Oh boy.

SPEAKER_04 59:55

In it uh from an anthropology perspective, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 59:58

From any perspective, you don't know. Anything. No, this no, it doesn't matter. Anything you can throw at anything about the window, just talk about how you know what you're thinking.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:04

I I always thought human human rights came out of the age of enlightenment in France, and I learned that the uh most of it comes out of the Mi'kmaq community here in Nova Scotia. No way. That's the origin of human rights, yeah, here in the Algonquian tribes. No freaking way. Yeah, yeah, that just blew my mind. I'm still processing this like two years ago.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Okay, you just blew my mind.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:22

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

I mean, I never thought it was the French, because you know it's the French.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:26

No, they stole it from the Mi'kmaq and and the Algonquians.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:30

Go, Nova Scotia! Let's go, yes. Yeah, all right. All right, question number two What the hell that you're willing to die on but over something totally unimportant.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:44

Oh boy, I like Star Wars better than Star Trek.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:55

I totally agree. Oh yeah, I think it's uh it's just more fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:00

I'm always enjoying my I think the the idea of Star Trek is better. Absolutely. But I I would love to live that lifestyle.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:08

It's good thinking stuff, right? Great. It's it is great.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:11

It just for some reason just seems like meh.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:14

It's just not as fun. It's not. Star Wars is fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

Darth Vader is probably the greatest villain in history.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:23

Number three, over to you. Okay. What's the weirdest compliment you've ever received?

SPEAKER_03 1:01:29

Boy, I These are weird questions.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31

They're fun by design.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:33

I don't know. It's kind of people people tell me I have a good voice for radio and for stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

I totally think you do. Yeah. You do have a good voice.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:40

At least I didn't say a face for radio. Oh, don't have a face for radio. I do have a face for radio. Absolutely. Question number four. So if you could swap lives with someone for 24 hours, who would it be? Yuval Harari. Okay, why?

SPEAKER_04 1:01:57

Because I think he's absolutely brilliant. He's an interesting way of looking at the world. And he's just his perspectives are really interesting. Yeah. All right. Him or Rory Thompson. Or Rory Sutherland, I mean.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:09

Rory, okay. That's an interesting picks, man. I'd like to go be a rock star for a day or something, you know? Hip hip hip-hop hip hop idol. I don't know. They'd just be stoned all the time. I don't know. Yeah. Couldn't remember it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

I think I think I'd pick something, like I'd pick someone who's like extremely important so I could get like all the intel. Okay. Right? Like if I could, if I if I could switch with like and this is gonna sound terrible, but if I could switch lives with like Donald Trump for like 24 hours, that'd be awesome. Because then all of a sudden I could just go to like area 51, like go leak all the cool secrets. I'd just let the Epstein files flow. Only thing is he has dementia and he doesn't know what he's thinking about.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:51

So he would not remember anything. All right, so maybe it's JD Vance. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:58

I would basically create a dumpster fire in a day. In a day.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:04

Number five, over to you. Five. Okay. How is Oh anonity change social norms and accountability? Anonymous. On social. Yeah. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:17

Anonymity change social norms and accountability. So yeah, we everyone's posting as anonymous these days on.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:25

Yeah, they are. So when we don't have identity, we don't feel that we have to behave in a in a in a way that we do in the real world.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:32

So in the real world, we have to face each other, look at each other, we have to talk to each other. And so we have to be said about a punch in the face, eh? There is, right? And and 98% of our communication is is non-verbal, right? With emotions and movements and stuff. So anonymity means that you can do whatever you want, say whatever you want, and that's led to this crisis of misinformation and disinformation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:53

I like that. Trice. You know who trust when no number six.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:58

So what digital behavior today will future and anthropologists find the most troubling?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:05

I think he just said it. Misinformation?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:06

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's something.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:08

I think it's more behavioral. I think it's yeah, misinformation, absolutely. They'll find it fascinating. I think what they'll try to figure out is why we didn't translate our cultural norms and values in the real world into the digital world fast enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:22

Why do we just just let everything go rampant on the on the internet?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:25

I think energy will be one too. They'll be like, you idiots, you had a son. Yeah, yeah. But since the beginning of your existence. The tides. Tides. Windows flowing. And you're digging holes in the ground. I know. You don't need to do that. You've proved ways around this. Yeah. Number seven over to you. Okay. Are we losing anything fundamentally human as our lives move more online? I think that's a yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:53

Yeah. Yeah. We well, we're losing, but we're also gaining because of cultural transf trans transmission, we're able to learn about each other better. So I think it's not that we're losing. I think it's more that we're changing. We're evolving in different ways. You know, we say that AI makes is gonna make us stupid. It's not, it's just gonna make us different.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:14

So we're going to be different. And I don't know. Will we look back and lament that we've lost something sometimes? Because we always do. That's why we have nostalgia. But at the same time, I think we're just going to evolve differently.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:25

Okay. Okay. All right. My turn? No, it's mine. Okay. What's your opinion on AI music? Don't like it.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:35

Don't like it? Did you hear like the soul singings of 50 Cent singing Manny Man? I did.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:41

And then I found another song that I thought was really cool because I like alternative rock and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And um, I and sort of 80s new wave. And um I there was one that sounded so like it, and I'm like, there's just something wrong here.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:54

It just there it just doesn't hit the same way as it does. Yeah, it's the imperfections that make music perfect. Really, and uh it's hard to nail an imperfection. I call it the uncanny cognitive valley. Yeah, I mean music's just the space in between notes, so like the more that's just a little bit off and I actually have not listened to AI music at all.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:14

Yeah, like I I know there's some out there and there's some things, and I know it was like kind of a big thing because it actually hit like at one point, like hit like top of the charts.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:20

Yeah, it was something country music. Yeah, country song, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:23

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I haven't taken the time to actually sit and like listen to it yet. So I really don't have an opinion on it. That being said, I mean, I don't know. I think I'm divided because on one hand, I kind of feel like I I like real like musicians and artists and people who like sing and people who play the music. I don't I don't know if people will hate this or not, but I don't give the same credit or respect or whatever your word you want to use for it to digital music. Yeah, okay. Whether it be I'm a DJ, like these DJs that travel the world, and they're like, God, you're going on everybody today. Just no, you're going on everybody.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:04

You're done.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:04

You're not talking about that bad today. That Beatles documentary. And they had that moment where Paul McCartney starts to do the riff of get back. Right. I did watch that. And it's like that's a moment in history. Yeah. And you're watching a mind interacting with a machine.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:20

Figuring something out for the first time. It's really cool watching my kid learn how to play guitar, and then they come back and they're like way better at it. Because, you know, she doesn't openly come and play for me. I'm basically gonna say, hey man, what are you working on? Like, you know, right? And uh but she's getting awesome. And it's right, yeah. And it's so cool to see one year from when she could barely hit that chord to like, you know, now making these complex, much more complex sounds versus I hid in my basement on a computer. But also synthetic music's fun as hell. I'm not saying it's not fun. I'm not saying it's not fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:49

I'm just my only thing is like, I mean, like, I'm not talking like a DJ at a wedding. Like we need those. I'm just saying, like, he hates DJs? He hates Donald Trump. No, I don't. Well, I do need him. He hates Elon Musk. But my thing is, is like people go to like concerts and they pay like$200 as if they were gonna go see like you know Bon Jovi play a concert with ACDC or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:13

I'm just saying, Matt, the foundation of this show is bringing people together. We gotta stop talking bad about people, even if we don't agree with anything that they do. Right? Even if we don't agree with a single decision that they make, we gotta say, okay, that's that's that's that's a them problem, right? Yeah, DJs are so fun. Oh, I think I'm not saying they're not fun. Just mess with humanity. Just to spin records and I think it's the it's the non-alcohol beers, man. I'm getting, you know, a little foolish. It's getting to me. The non-alcoholm, there's something else. It just had something in it. Yeah, but uh anyways, sorry, I'll stop. Uh we'll get back to the questions. What one are we at?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

Number nine, it's over to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:51

Okay. Uh uh, how does digital well how do digital spaces change power dynamics? Who gets a voice and who doesn't?

SPEAKER_04 1:09:00

Oh, yeah, that's such a good question. It's something I research a lot. So uh unfortunately I had to do work into the Manosphere and the Red Pill movement last year.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:09

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:10

And um that was an interesting look at power dynamics because most of the that red pill movement, it starts out very innocent, you know, athletic clubs and all coming, you're gonna get fit and you're gonna be a better, stronger man. Um, but they slowly suck you into this sort of fascist far-right ideology and misogyny and it's crazy. It was really hard to do the research on. So that changes the power dynamic. Now you've got someone else that's you know having power over these kids that normally a culture has, a society like parents have and the community has. Well, now that's being given over to somebody that they don't even know and and they're getting sucked into that. Conversely, there's some other interesting power dynamics that's that's not as bad. And one of them is around fintech and financial technology.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:58

And what usually happens in a culture is that the older generation tells the new the younger generation what to do and what's going on and pull them up. But now you've got the younger generation training the older generation how to use these fintech products.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:11

Huh. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:12

That's a very different dynamic, power dynamic and twist. So yeah, that's just just two examples.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:19

Whoops. I'm sorry, I was wrong. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:24

Okay, question number 10. There we go. So if future anthropologists, archaeologists studied TikTok the way they studied cave paintings, what would they conclude about us?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:38

Well, there'd be a rich mine of of cultural stuff, but I think they conclude that we're absolutely bonkers and we were all nutters, and what the hell were we doing with our time? Fair. But they they'd also get some really interesting insights into how how society was shifting and accepting technologies and adopting technologies and doing the stuff that they do. So I think they'd actually get some really useful insights and and probably a shift in how we relate to animals and other humans and stuff. Like, you know. Fascination with the corgis. Yeah. Yeah. Cool dogs. I used to be. I don't use TikTok, won't use it um because of its data collection. But yeah, yeah, it'd be a fascinating insight. But that's all they'd also recognize that that's only the surface of culture. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:22

That's a great answer. Uh we do our ender questions. So it's we call this last call. So cheers to you. This was great. Please come back. We want you back for a round three. Oh, love. Uh, before we do the last call, I should ask, what are you, you know, where can people find your work? I mean, uh, a lot of people are listening to this, hopefully, and and probably getting a ton of tremendous insights. Where can they find you on Substack?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:43

Yeah, I'm on Substack, Gilescrouch.substack.com. Uh, just Google my name and you'll find my website, Gilescrouch.com.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:50

Do you do speeches? You do or sorry, keynotes presentations?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:52

I do keynotes. Uh last year I did over 90 media interviews. Wow. And I did a bunch of speaking engagements and stuff. So that's crazy. Yeah, it is crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:00

It's a career career in professional speaking. You're very good at it though.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:04

Yeah, I'd like to do more professional speaking actually. Um the pandemic kind of put a a bit of a kibosh on it. And yeah, and then trying to do other stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:12

I think there's a need for that now more than ever, right? Yeah. In front of people and talking and sharing ideas and communicating when a lot of people aren't sure about all this crazy stuff that's happening in the world every year. In real life stuff. That's what we want. So so sorry, last call is basically uh we just ask every guest, what's one piece of advice you were given in your lifetime that you'd like to pass along to us and our listeners today?

SPEAKER_04 1:12:35

Well, I was thinking about this the other day because I was thinking about the AI tech hype cycles and all the rest of it and and why it's there. And it's a saying that's stuck with me for decades now. If at first you can't find a solution to the problem, look for the financial interest.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

Oh. There you go.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:52

That's a unique one. We've been asking this question for like a year-ish. Okay. And that's a that's a new one. I like it.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:00

Cheers to you, Giles. This has been fantastic. Cheers, lads.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:02

Thank you very much.