In this episode of the podcast, the boys talk about their favorite things to do with your money. They talk about how to save money, how to make money, and how to spend your money in the best way possible. They also talk about a cool new invention that could change the way you spend your hard earned money. And they talk about the weirdest thing they've ever done with their money and how they're going to pay for it in the future. This episode is brought to you by Audible, Ting, and Stamps. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any music used in this episode. It was produced, written, produced, and edited by our patrons and produced by our own employees. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. or wherever else you get your music, and we'll be sure to make sure to include it in future episodes. Thank you for supporting the show. in the ad-free version of this episode! if you like it, please consider rating, reviewing, and/or reviewing it, rating, and reviewing it in your own review, and sharing it with your friends and family. if it helps us spread the word out there about it's value to the rest of the world. Thank you! we really do appreciate it! and we really appreciate it. - Joe, Joe, Jim, Sarah, and Sarah, etc., etc. etc. XOXO, etc. - Thank you, Joe and Sarah - Tom, Sarah & Sarah, JRE, etc, etc.. Thanks for listening, Joe & Sarah. -- Thank you so much, Sarah and Sarah! - P.A. & Joe, R.A., R.J. & R.B. & JRE. (A.J., J. (and the rest. ) , R.E. (a) & B. (AJ. ( ) , S. (JRE, B. & A. (S. & G) - EJ (J.A.)
00:00:35.000It's an excellent resource for audiobooks, perhaps the best on the net, and that's a strong statement, but I stand by it.
00:00:44.000More than 100,000 different titles, great books like our friend Chris Ryan's Sex at Dawn, that's available on Audible.
00:00:54.000You can get that for free if you go to audible.com forward slash Joe.
00:00:57.000If you don't use audiobooks, you're a silly bitch because they're awesome.
00:01:01.000It's great if you have to travel, if you get stuck in traffic, if you're sitting on a bus.
00:01:05.000It's an amazing thing that can take an otherwise wasted moment in time and actually make it enjoyable and make it educational and enrich yourself while you're on the bus, bitch.
00:03:07.000Stamps.com, which if you've ever seen those silly Death Squad kitty cat t-shirts that Brian Redband creates, and if you haven't seen them, go to DeathSquad.tv.
00:03:17.000They're pretty badass, and especially the hypnotic Lookin' one.
00:03:24.000But Brian sends all that stuff through stamps.com.
00:03:27.000If you are someone who runs your own business, going to the post office can be a real pain in the ass.
00:03:32.000It's a long wait in line to deal with some unenthusiastic person that doesn't really want to weigh your shit and tell you how much it costs.
00:06:35.000And one of them that really struck me There were several of them that struck me, but one of them was your story of being mugged, and you told people on an online room where you got mugged,
00:06:51.000and people were upset that you, in telling the world that you got mugged there, it was lowering their property values.
00:07:33.000Yeah, so I sent it out, and then the first two emails I got back from this loving list of parents was, how dare you say exactly where it happened?
00:07:50.000No, we're not selling, but it was a really weird time when people needed their property values to go up because they were trying to get bigger mortgages and pay down and do all that.
00:07:59.000And it was just like so panicky there about that, that some, you know, someone was afraid, oh, what if a newspaper covers it and it's bad?
00:08:08.000It's so weird when ones and zeros trump humanity, you know, and in that case, that's exactly what that is.
00:08:20.000Well, yeah, and two kinds of ones and zeros, you know, the ones and zeros of money, you know, and the ones and zeros of sort of digital technology, which I think Can create a kind of a distance that you wouldn't get.
00:08:33.000Because you're not feeling the impact of saying that to someone's face.
00:09:06.000But then the part that then worries me after that is, if you get used to doing it like that in an anonymous way online, Does that start to make the behavior a bit more normative when you're even with your identity?
00:10:48.000I'm just saying that you really can't have really shitty thoughts and get through.
00:10:53.000And I think that if you're really shitty online, you have those thoughts, even if it's only online, I really believe that negative energy is going to leak over.
00:11:07.000The meaner you are online, Without your face, the meaner you can be online with your face and the meaner you can get in real life, you know, until you just got...
00:11:18.000Like if someone says something weird on Twitter, do you go to their Twitter page and see just all their cunty shit that they write to everybody and go, oh, they're just crazy guys.
00:11:25.000Well, I will admit, I focus way more on the cunty tweets and emails and things than on the ones that are loving and positive.
00:11:35.000I'll get like 10 emails, oh, your book was great, oh, I loved it, you've changed my life, my children, you know, worship at your altar.
00:13:47.000I think there's a good thing that comes from criticism, though, because it's even really harsh criticism.
00:13:54.000It's because if they're ridiculous, and if you look at what they're saying, if it's ridiculous and mean, it really reveals far more about them than it really does about you.
00:14:02.000But look at what they're saying, and is there any merit to it at all?
00:14:05.000Does it make any sense, or is it just nonsense?
00:14:08.000Is it just a guy being an asshole, or if you weren't you, could you find merit in it?
00:14:12.000Like, I've found criticism from the biggest assholes, but it was like, there was like a hair of accuracy into it that made me, like, reconsider certain things.
00:14:21.000Yeah, I mean, and the most valuable thing about it for me, entertaining it to some extent, is just, it makes me more flexible, you know, as a thinker.
00:14:31.000If you can wrap your head around, oh, where am I wrong?
00:14:35.000It can make you a little indecisive because it's like, well, he's right and he's also right.
00:15:47.000And I don't even think it's our fault.
00:15:49.000I honestly think in these cases, it's because we're living on an operating system, an economic operating system that just needs to feed off the net when it should be our space, not the economy's space.
00:16:06.000Yeah, I feel like we're in a stage of progression, this interconnectivity progression, where we're starting off with just regular telephones, and that has moved to cellular phones, which everybody carries, which is going to move into some Google Glasses type thing,
00:16:23.000which is going to eventually, I mean, down the line, if you extrapolate 100 years or whatever it's going to take, there's going to be some really crazy interconnectivity that people share.
00:16:33.000And I think this stage that we're going through right now, the anonymous stage of being able to, like, make a Twitter account or some fake name and just start saying mean things to random people, like, that ability is going to go away.
00:16:46.000You're not going to have this anonymous portal.
00:16:49.000Like, I just think, if you look at the way things...
00:16:52.000I feel like the way I look at the future is, like, the thing that's going to be really scarce is secrets.
00:16:59.000I think we're going to be able to connect with each other in some way that we probably can't even imagine right now, whether it's some neurochip or something that you embed into your body, whether it's nanotechnology, whatever it is.
00:17:12.000There's going to come a day where we're completely interconnected with each other.
00:17:18.000Beauty of that, though, is if it really worked, it would bring us back to the now that we've been avoiding all this time.
00:17:24.000To the face-to-face live interaction where you can't fuck with each other because you're here.
00:17:31.000It's a strange way to look at it, yeah.
00:17:33.000I met this guy, this show guy, you know, a stage magician guy who could tell when people are lying.
00:17:38.000I don't know if you've ever seen this guy.
00:17:39.000He's, like, worked for the FBI and stuff.
00:17:41.000And he can, like, he does all these tricks.
00:17:43.000He lines up ten people and he says, okay, one of you think...
00:17:46.000And he can really tell, period, when people are lying.
00:17:48.000And I was thinking, if he can tell that people are lying, because he's got this talent, it means that on some level, we all know, we all have that ability.
00:17:57.000So we all on some level know when the other one's lying to us.
00:18:00.000So it's kind of been, if you're actually in the moment, It's all exposed anyway.
00:18:06.000Yeah, I think there's a weird feeling that you get when someone's being deceptive.
00:18:09.000There's a weird feeling you get where you're like, there's a sense of disturbance when you're communicating with them.
00:18:59.000So I concluded in the end that it's because they've put so much Botox in their faces that they can't actually execute facial expressions in an honest way anymore, in a way that the other person organically can react to.
00:20:01.000I understand the urge to stop time, but when you stop time, you lose the moment.
00:20:06.000That's kind of the whole point I'm making.
00:20:08.000The net, it can stop time in a certain way, but you're going to lose certain moments then.
00:20:15.000So I'm all for being on the net and having a net moment.
00:20:20.000But even here, I've heard you do those ads before for those sponsors, and you could just cut and paste You could cycle seven of them and maybe people wouldn't even know it's the same ones.
00:20:33.000You could cut and paste from another show and throw it in, but you decide, no, I'm actually going to sit here and read these three ads with my friends.
00:20:39.000Well, if I didn't do it like that, I'd be really bored.
00:20:43.000I would never want to just read an ad.
00:20:49.000That's the model of the industrial age, of course, is to print out more.
00:20:54.000Yeah, and the only way we could even do any of this stuff the way we're doing it is because we don't have anybody that we have to approve it.
00:21:02.000I don't have to go to NBC and say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing.
00:21:07.000I know you have these commercials, but we're just going to talk shit and occasionally we'll get to the point of the commercial.
00:21:11.000But ironically, on the long run, it ends up making more money.
00:21:16.000Certainly more money for the people who are actually doing it.
00:21:19.000Maybe by the other system you can make more total money, but it's going to go to God knows what, to some institution anyway.
00:21:26.000So the fact that it is live And it is a what?
00:22:03.000You have an option to immediately jump in and get a gigantic group of people that are going to start retweeting and tweeting and listening to your stuff.
00:22:12.000And you'll develop a giant following in no time.
00:22:15.000And as that's happening, all you're doing is selling ads for companies that you actually believe in.
00:24:07.000So the one aspect of radio that I feel like I would miss is that local terrestrial quality of it.
00:24:14.000Because, I mean, yeah, we could still have, you know, you could have a L.A. channel and I could have a, you know, this part of New York channel and, you know, We could do that technically with digital, you know, where you'd pick your so-called regional thing,
00:24:29.000it'll be local stuff, but the medium's not biased towards that.
00:24:33.000The medium is, it's all equivalent, you know, and I wonder, would we drift further away from local and kind of the things that matter to us in the here and now, or, you know, or would we choose that stuff?
00:24:50.000I think, you know, instead of like a local radio station, you're going to have a million people in LA making their own music, making their own, putting their own shit out there that you can choose from.
00:25:03.000You know, whether it's a music list, like a Pandora list or something like that someone puts together, or whether it's podcasting.
00:25:10.000I just think the idea of a local representative was always gross.
00:25:51.000You know, once you have six billion people doing podcasts, I mean, and you've got two billion left doing farming, it's like, where did all the businesses go?
00:25:57.000And you also lose those iconic figures like the Wolfman Jack or like Howard Stern.
00:26:03.000Well, I mean, I think you could still choose.
00:26:06.000You would just have major – every once in a while, something major would happen.
00:26:11.000Right, but it wouldn't be that one guy who's your town's guy.
00:27:06.000It does, it will, and it's going to replace everything terrestrial, I mean, in that sense.
00:27:11.000So if we're saying everything's going to be replaced, everything terrestrial is going to be replaced, first it's radio, then it's other stuff.
00:27:19.000All we have to make sure then is before we lose all those things, which we're going to inevitably lose, to say to ourselves, what is it we value about those things that we want to bring into These digital things before we're untethered in there, you know,
00:27:44.000And that's the question is, can you get both?
00:27:45.000You know, so can you have this, you know, very traditional narrative 20th century industrial age culture live right aside, you know, this sort of steady state economy and peer to peer currencies and local Can we have an iPhone and organic chard and no slavery in Africa to get either?
00:28:14.000It seems like that's what a great percentage of the world would like, but it's – we've made shockingly little progress in moving towards that potential utopia.
00:28:24.000But then – but, you know, as long as we got a hope or try to envision, I would say, okay, but this shift that we're undergoing now from an analog era To a digital one is a bigger shift than just that.
00:28:41.000There's a whole different digital media environment that we've gone into.
00:28:44.000So we've gone into this from this time is money, expansionist economy, live by the clock universe to one that's potentially asynchronous.
00:28:58.000I remember when the net first came up, it was people in Austin and slackers and cyberpunks.
00:29:05.000The idea was that the net was going to give us more slack.
00:29:08.000And it's ended up, for most people, kind of doing the opposite because they're always on and working and being monitored and all that and distracted.
00:29:15.000But, I mean, I think if we take command of the way we're programming these things, then we can use them to sort of create You know, the gorgeous culture of Slack to create, you know, what a few of us are kind of discovering we can do,
00:29:57.000I really don't feel like we can stop that.
00:30:00.000It seems like the things that we got so excited by as these higher functioning primates are these new things that we've created that input us or give us input in a way that our body's completely not designed to get.
00:30:14.000Like through your earphones, like listening to a podcast.
00:30:19.000A computer itself, the ability to watch a video, the ability to go to the movies, the stimuli that's coming at us is just – we're not designed for it.
00:30:28.000But it's reconfiguring itself to be as seductive as possible because that's what it's for.
00:30:35.000It seduces into itself so that the companies behind it can make money.
00:30:39.000And because we move constantly in a path of progression.
00:30:45.000And if you look at the technology, it's always going to move into a stronger – we're never satisfied with any particular result at any particular time.
00:31:10.000But then what's interesting to me about that is while all that's pushing ahead, what we get in a digital media environment is we end up retrieving like weird medieval Values.
00:31:22.000You know, you get Burning Man and Etsy and people doing peer-to-peer stuff, trying to have their local currencies, which they haven't had since medieval times.
00:31:31.000You know, you see the stuff that gets retrieved and paganism and, you know, mashing up roots to heal yourself of things, maker culture, all these things are what we've lost over the last thousand years.
00:31:44.000That's what the Renaissance and the Industrial Age was about, you know, stamping that out and putting everybody on the assembly line at Ford.
00:31:52.000So it's fun that as we move forward, we get these great old recurrences, which to me is reassuring.
00:31:57.000It means that we are bringing something with us into this next place.
00:32:02.000I think it's also that the current system is so flawed that people are willing to try anything and that they're actually actively thinking about what can we do differently?
00:32:18.000It's like the two places I've gotten emails from The last many years of people doing social currencies are either from a place like Ithaca, New York where they're doing it because they're just strange and trying to try something weird and good or like Lansing, Michigan where there's no GM plant.
00:32:34.000There's no bank that's going to give money to a factory to open up to hire people and they're desperate.
00:32:40.000I know how to fix a refrigerator and they have needs.
00:32:43.000So can't we just make an economy that way?
00:32:46.000You know, those are the places where people are actually asking where they're ready.
00:32:51.000I just don't like that readiness seems to involve being just so, not just fed up, but uncomfortable, you know, that you've got to do something.
00:33:04.000We're clearly going through a change as a culture that we weren't prepared for, and we're sort of making our way as we go along.
00:33:10.000And there's a lot of mistakes along the way, and the evidence that points to it.
00:33:16.000One of the best pieces is your story about people getting upset at you because you got mugged and called in the story and said the location.
00:33:24.000That's one of the best examples of people losing the script.
00:33:28.000Along the way, in this crazy thing that we're doing where we develop currency and then there's things called property values and there's mortgages and equity and all this crazy shit.
00:33:39.000Along the way, we're going to have to figure out how to stay human.
00:33:43.000And when you see instant failure, like, oh my god, I got mugged.
00:33:51.000I mean, every single one of my books, and I've written like 12 now, they're all finally about how do we bring humanity into this thing that seems to have lost it.
00:34:16.000And now this one, it's weird because it's like I'm kind of admitting that it's what – I guess I've realized it myself but I'm kind of saying, oh my gosh, I'm a humanist.
00:34:24.000I'm a humanist and a technology enthusiast and how do you be both?
00:34:29.000Because so many of the other folks who are sort of pro-technology, sort of my posse, they're all sort of talking about not human beings being enabled by technology but technology It might not be that simple.
00:34:55.000I've been thinking about it a lot lately and one of the things I think is why do we have this idea of competition and why would the computer enjoy that idea with us?
00:35:04.000Our idea is based entirely on our biological makeup, our need to reproduce, our need to prove ourselves to our mate, our need to protect against strangers, all these instincts that a computer is not going to have at all.
00:35:15.000So the idea of competition with humans for resources or even the idea that survival is imperative.
00:35:24.000And that you have an ego and you can't die.
00:35:27.000They're not going to have any of that.
00:35:28.000So why would they be in competition with us?
00:35:50.000It's more a matter of people in the here and now saying that human beings are really only important insofar as we can be the shepherds and organizers of information, right?
00:36:01.000Information is the thing that's evolving towards greater states of complexity.
00:36:05.000And once human beings are no longer the best at making complex information but computers are the best at it, then there's just no need for humans anymore.
00:36:17.000But just the whole idea that we should be developing technology with this in mind, I don't know, it negates what I think is an essential, for us anyway, centrality of humanity in the equation.
00:36:33.000Well, I think people don't recognize how much we need each other.
00:36:38.000We don't recognize how important positive interaction is with other people to your health and the way you feel about life.
00:36:45.000There's clearly a relationship that people have to each other that we're in denial about.
00:36:51.000We lock ourselves up in our apartments or in our homes and we shut our car doors and we roll down the window.
00:36:57.000And that's one of the reasons why people are willing to give people the finger when they're in the car.
00:37:21.000But eventually, I think we have to accept the fact that we're only happy when the people around us are happy, when we're in harmony with the people around us.
00:37:32.000We're not happy when we're in conflict.
00:37:34.000We're not happy when we fuck people over.
00:37:38.000I know people that have done bad things in business and bad things ethically, and they're not happy people.
00:37:44.000No, but then in the current culture, they can compensate for that with medicine.
00:38:30.000Just the idea that the wealth of a person can vary day by day because of confidence.
00:38:38.000You know, consumer confidence in a product and shift and change with recall.
00:38:44.000And then you're watching these numbers go up and down like, what the fuck are you even talking about?
00:38:49.000Most of the explanations you see, you know, I watch these business sites and the market will go down and they say, oh, market down because of such and such in London.
00:38:56.000And then it's like by the time that piece comes out, that market's actually back up and they're already constructing their, you know, let's tie market going back up to another random market.
00:39:03.000You know, it's like the explanations after the fact have so little to do, you know, with whatever some algorithm decided it was going to suddenly ultra-fast trade something and throw the stock up.
00:39:15.000You know, it's like at this point, it truly is – that's the best place to see humans combating machines is on the market where it's like there's human traders competing with these programmed algorithms and the algorithms are certainly winning the war.
00:39:28.000And if you look at their screens while they're doing it, it is almost like code.
00:39:33.000The average person who doesn't understand it doesn't know what the fuck the stock market's saying.
00:39:37.000The symbols and the SAO and this and that and the ones and the zeros.
00:39:41.000You look at all that, you have no idea what that is.
00:39:43.000I mean, how is that really different than a computer code that you're reading?
00:40:04.000And I think it's gotten certainly further and further from whatever.
00:40:08.000What is going on in that company or the earnings or the things, you know, it's absolutely abstracted to the point now where people don't even invest in companies.
00:40:17.000You invest in something like when Facebook went public, people bought it at like 9 in the morning and like 9, 10, they're all pissed off that it hasn't gone up.
00:40:25.000It's like, wait a minute, I was supposed to...
00:42:11.000So our economy needs to expand by hook or by crook somehow.
00:42:15.000It has to grow in order for it to survive.
00:42:17.000That's just the way central currency works.
00:42:21.000They need to find more surface area for the money, more ways for people to buy stuff.
00:42:25.000So instead of just having – there's not enough of a company to buy, so now we can bet on – How that company is going to do in some future.
00:42:32.000Now we can bet on that or we can bet on that.
00:42:35.000But what we're really doing is trying to kind of compress all of this time right onto the head of a pin so we can bet on that.
00:42:42.000So I don't have to sit and wait 3,000 years for Facebook to be worth something.
00:45:40.000Well, the thing is, and again, I don't want digital technology to get blamed for this, right?
00:45:45.000Because the real operating system they're promoting is not...
00:45:48.000The digital operating system, it's the economic operating system underneath it.
00:45:52.000It's this 13th century central currency, interest-bearing, debt-based economy.
00:45:57.000And none of the guys who I thought would get us out – Ev Williams with Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, the kids from Google, right?
00:46:05.000Each of them had a real shot, even Bill Gates, at breaking – The central economy and flipping things the other way.
00:46:15.000Not going public, not doing it with venture capital, saying if Google can hack web search, if Facebook can hack social, if Twitter can hack everybody, Why can't they – if they're so busy disintermediating all these different things,
00:46:32.000why doesn't any one of them yet want to disintermediate central banking and say, no, Mr. Chase, we don't actually need you.
00:46:39.000We're going to do our whole thing through Kickstarter, say.
00:46:41.000Like one of your – didn't one of your things – Yeah.
00:47:15.000You've got to be, you know, registered as a bank or you're going to have to be connected to one of us.
00:47:19.000And that's when, you know, PayPal kind of becomes part of eBay rather than whatever these crazy guys might have done.
00:47:25.000And I suppose there's this point, you know, where, you know, innocently these companies that get bigger and bigger and bigger hoping to do the right things and then it's like...
00:47:35.000We're not going to let you do this if you don't play by our rules.
00:47:39.000But I also feel like there's companies that if you're willing to go smaller, if you're willing to let it grow a little bit slower, that you can scale up.
00:47:50.000You can become A big ethical corporation?
00:48:12.000Their shareholders are people who just want to see a number go up by the next quarter.
00:48:17.000And if you have to make a number go up by the next quarter, Then you're going to have to be thinking about something other than doing good in the world.
00:48:29.000But if you've got shareholders, then you're going to throw you in jail if you don't do that.
00:48:33.000I mean that's your fiduciary responsibility.
00:48:35.000And it's a fascinating thing that a corporation can do something that an individual would be a total piece of shit to do.
00:48:41.000If it was one person that was involved and this one guy, what he did was he gave the loans to the Third World Company, the countries that they couldn't pay back.
00:48:51.000He went over there, monopolized their natural resources himself, dug the oil line himself, polluted the river himself, raped and killed the villagers himself.
00:49:00.000He'd be like, Jesus Christ, lock that fucking guy in jail.
00:49:03.000He's making people work for $5 a week.
00:49:09.000You know, but because it's a corporation, you're like, well, they're making money for their...
00:49:13.000Exactly, and how many people who on the one hand, you know, will read You know, good magazine or something or listen to us and NPR and be all sad about that stuff still has a 401k plan with stocks in the very companies that are doing those things.
00:49:28.000They're the ones who actually own the company.
00:49:30.000They're the shareholder who wants the thing to go up so they can send their kid to college.
00:49:33.000You know, I mean, it's interesting how circular it gets.
00:49:36.000So, I mean, for how unvirtuous that circle is, though, I think unwinding it is just It's just as easy.
00:49:43.000So it's like, okay, instead of doing these sort of long-distance, long-term, disconnected investments in mining companies, I'm going to invest my money where I see it and people I actually know in the place where I am who are trying to do something, you know, and bring it, if not local,
00:50:00.000at least into your present, at least into your visible reality.
00:50:33.000Which is why then the question becomes, I mean in the nightmare scenario then, is you Invest that into technology so that your robots, no, they're not in competition with us, but they are playing the corporate program.
00:50:47.000They have no desire other than to extract value and meaning from us.
00:50:53.000And those computers, running algorithms, recognized trends in the marketplace before a human could ever see it coming and then counter.
00:51:00.000And meanwhile, as we're making ourselves dumber about technology, I'm wearing this Codecademy t-shirt, right?
00:51:31.000How about the weirdness that comes when you Google something or you look for certain things online and then say you go to a YouTube and there's ads for things that you've recently looked at.
00:53:23.000Yeah, but again, with all that artificialness, it's not necessarily, although it maybe is, it's not necessarily the technology that's the problem in this equation.
00:53:32.000It's the company that owns the technology.
00:53:50.000And with every overtake, with every new gigantic invention and bundles of money that go along with it and all the people that got fucked over, at the end of the day, the technology keeps moving forward.
00:54:02.000It keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger.
00:54:04.000It does, but it's not just stronger, though.
00:54:08.000I mean, that's the thing that McLuhan was trying to bring up.
00:54:11.000Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist, he was looking at the different environments that different media, different kinds of technology create.
00:54:18.000Fire had a change – had a media environment, had a technological environment.
00:54:22.000With fire now, people could then go live further north in colder places and little apes who were smart enough to have fire could get away from big dumb apes who couldn't travel north to chase them.
00:54:35.000All sorts of things happened because of something like fire or the invention of text.
00:54:39.000The invention of text changed – well, for me, it changed the way we look at time because now – I can write something now that I'm going to be accountable for later, so we can have contracts.
00:55:22.000And now we get the digital media environment, which is just as different as the industrial-age media environment than the clock was from the printing press, from written text, from even fire.
00:55:36.000And in the digital media environment, there's this...
00:56:08.000Just to be put yourself in that interruptive state is very digital because you want to have the choice because that person wants to reach you, but how that interrupts what used to be a more continuous way of just moving through life.
00:56:27.000Yeah, it certainly gives us more options than we're naturally designed to handle, and the more people have on their Facebook page, the more likely they really have zero connection to those people.
00:56:42.000We're designed for Dunbar's number, 150 people, and you get 5,000 people on your Facebook page.
00:57:31.000They know who's going to be pregnant, who's going to be gay, who's going to be this, who's going to be that.
00:57:35.000So it's like, OK. So it was like my past is all in here and now my future is all in here and everything is just sort of crushed in on me there.
00:57:41.000I don't feel – I don't feel autonomous anymore.
00:58:52.000I can't solicit the likes of other people, of readers, of people who I'm supposedly advising about this stuff, especially about sort of media ethics and integrity.
00:59:04.000I can't invite them to like my page when that very act of liking is making them vulnerable to marketing that's going to be passing through me beyond my control.
00:59:15.000Yes, and no, because they're also providing you with this excellent connection with all these people that's available through Facebook, which is not as limited as Twitter with 140 characters.
00:59:25.000No, and I'm willing to pay for the privilege to reach those people, but I'm not willing to have them and their likenesses used to represent things.
00:59:36.000I don't think that they understand what liking makes someone vulnerable to.
00:59:42.000I don't feel – so I mean in some sense, this is patronizing I guess.
00:59:45.000What I'm saying is I think I know stuff about this technology that they don't – if they all knew really how this worked, if they all knew the implications of what they were doing, then I would say let's go for it.
00:59:56.000But ultimately the worst consequences is what?
01:00:46.000And just to be there, it just didn't seem like – And it also, because I so don't trust who they are and what they're about, I don't trust them as a company.
01:00:55.000The way I want to trust the kinds of companies, I like it bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper into my lives and eventually put probes in my brain.
01:01:01.000Do you not trust them because Justin Timberlake played him in a movie?
01:01:11.000What's the MySpace story and how much of it is about coke and whores?
01:01:15.000Is that what happened with those guys?
01:01:17.000They just take that money and go crazy?
01:01:20.000If you're going to take Facebook, if you're going to say, I don't trust Facebook, you can't trust Twitter, you can't trust Google, you can't trust any of the stuff you use nowadays.
01:01:29.000But I'm aware, right now, I'm aware of the ways that Twitter...
01:02:00.000So now you're saying that, which is okay, you're saying that you want your, if you're going to do tweets, you want, in addition for your free tweeting, you want them to maintain...
01:02:13.000An archive of you and everyone else forever.
01:02:15.000Well, I personally don't have a problem with it, but what I'm saying is that's kind of more ridiculous to me than Facebook.
01:02:22.000The fact that I can't even access stuff that I've...
01:02:25.000No, I mean, you can if you save it or whatever.
01:02:28.000The thing I'm concerned about, I mean, this is what, in the book, I call it digifrenia.
01:02:31.000You know, I feel like the problem with digital for most people is not this idea of information overload, that there's too much stuff coming at them, but they can't maintain more than one online persona Simultaneously.
01:02:44.000There's too many sort of individual instances of us.
01:02:47.000And if you're going to have different instances of yourself, you know, even your email inbox is an instance of a sort.
01:02:52.000If you're going to have all these different things out there filling up or interacting, you want to be damn well sure that you're in charge of each one of them.
01:03:00.000And I felt like Facebook was now doing things on my behalf.
01:03:08.000Well, you make a very good point in that having more than one version of yourself becomes very problematic, especially if you're involved in any, like, real...
01:03:16.000I mean, I'm sure you probably interact with quite a few people every day, and to do that on Twitter is semi-manageable.
01:03:23.000Do it when you can, but to do that on Twitter, and then have to hop over to Facebook, too, it's like, you should have one portal.
01:03:32.000It was always said, you know, because I don't really...
01:03:35.000I didn't go to Facebook much, and I go there, and there'd be, like, some...
01:03:38.000Relative, you know, who's like, oh, I just heard of your mom's passing.
01:03:41.000It's like six months have gone by before I found that message and, you know, want to console them or whatever.
01:03:48.000It's just such a – for me, it was such an awful interface anyway that I was just losing stuff there.
01:03:54.000But, yeah, it's – I don't think it just has to do with, oh, well, I get more correspondence from other people, so I've got to limit it more than others.
01:04:03.000I think it really has to do with – Well, if anything, it's at least I'm a canary in the cage for what's coming for everybody else.
01:04:11.000I mean, you know, people only used to get one or two emails and now it's just streaming in for everybody.
01:04:17.000Yeah, if you send me something on Facebook, I don't read it.
01:04:19.000It's just to let everybody know because they pile up.
01:05:08.000So again, I feel like it's a useful tool, but it's just part of the untrustworthiness of a good portion of the net.
01:05:20.000Yeah, well, I could see that with someone else being in control of the interaction and someone else being in control, ultimately, of, like, when you sign a user agreement and you have all this information that you just sort of put up online, you're entrusting it to them, and in turn, they're marketing it to you.
01:05:36.000I mean, it's a really clean relationship as long as they don't fuck you.
01:06:50.000One of the things that I do with it is whenever someone sends me something fascinating in a link, I retweet it.
01:06:57.000And because of that, you become like a portal for cool shit.
01:07:00.000And people know that if they send me cool shit, I'll retweet it.
01:07:03.000And so you get all this cool shit just starts coming to you when you sort of have that idea.
01:07:08.000And then you send it, they send it to you, and then it becomes this really exponentially expanding thing where, you know, you have this like a radio channel or like an information dump.
01:07:21.000What percent of the tweets that you get do you think you pass on?
01:07:25.000It's not that high a percentage because it's not always...
01:08:38.000The demographic, the younger, like the younger than the 16 is like – It's falling totally off and they're doing things like Snapchat because they don't want to be putting everything they're doing on their permanent record.
01:08:48.000I mean they're finally kind of hepped to this.
01:08:49.000So this picture, like they can show someone their pussy and it only lasts for three minutes.
01:08:53.000And then you screenshot it though and then you save it and re-upload it.
01:09:26.000What happens in the 7-Eleven stays at 7-Eleven.
01:09:30.000Now it's like it's every single silly thing they did.
01:09:33.000If they didn't post about it, their friend posted about it.
01:09:35.000So it's still up there and it's like may as well be patched into the side of the Parthenon.
01:09:41.000Not only that, but the ideas behind what you can and can't do are enforced by these archaic laws that were written when none of this digital technology was available.
01:09:51.000So because of that, you get a lot of weird shit happens.
01:09:54.000Like there's one girl who got charged with child pornography because she was sending photos of her naked body to boys in her class.
01:10:02.000And so the cops arrested her and charged this young girl, she was 15 years old, with child pornography.
01:10:55.000If Google camera is finding like tens of thousands of people who are just smoking joints in the street of every American city, at some point they have to go, okay, let's just let people smoke pot, let gays get married.
01:11:07.000I would say yes, except the smoke pot thing.
01:11:12.000Is there more money in enforcing it than there would be in selling it?
01:11:15.000No, but it would be to different people and you have to pry it from the hands of the people that are making money by keeping it illegal, whether it's the private prison industry, whether it's the prison guards unions.
01:11:28.000Whether it's different pharmaceutical companies that would stand to lose profits.
01:11:33.000There's going to be a bunch of people that are trying to stop anything, any change.
01:11:38.000Especially changes in legality because there's a big business in locking people up for shit.
01:11:45.000So they're going to have to maintain An illegal population, right?
01:11:50.000In order to stay alive, they're going to have to arrest more and more.
01:11:52.000If they're going to have corporate growth, a greater percentage of America has to be in prison every single year until it's an asymptotic curve and there's like one guy left.
01:12:00.000That becomes a really interesting scenario if marijuana does become legal and you can trade on the future of marijuana.
01:12:16.000Well, they're the companies that I guess have already laid out a marijuana strategy or they're ready for it.
01:12:23.000Look at that percentage of the U.S. prison population that are non-violent drug offenders in the 1980 and then in 2012. 10% and in 2012 it's 25%.
01:12:50.000It's just the fact that in this day and age, you still can't make a logical argument as to why certain things are legal and illegal.
01:12:59.000Certain things that are legal, which are devastating to your health.
01:13:03.000And then when you find out that information's been withheld and that companies may have known about certain risks, no one seems to go to jail.
01:13:12.000If anything happens, people get fined a little bit.
01:13:14.000But if that was an individual, a person that did that, Oh my god, there would be a horrible human being, a personal person, one person who's responsible for all the deaths that came from aspirin alone.
01:13:43.000When you're feeling good about yourself, though, what it does is you put in everything that you own, if you have a car or not, where you live, and this and that, and it calculates how many slaves are working for you right now.
01:14:21.000Something to do with electronic connectivity and the use of your cell phones.
01:14:26.000I found it to be so bizarre and one of the more bizarre things in life that the most complex stuff that we use like cell phones, like computers, that the very base of it, the origins – there's a mine.
01:14:41.000There's a mine but there's also human suffering which is why I don't like the idea that my – computer which could really do everything I need it to do is rendered obsolete by changes in operating systems that really are unnecessary except to sell another computer.
01:14:56.000You know, the difference does not But aren't they necessary because they're trying to continue to improve the product and they're continuing to add more functionality?
01:15:05.000I stopped believing that, at least at the rate at which they do.
01:15:08.000I sometimes feel like there's a – it used to be sort of Windows and Intel.
01:15:13.000Windows would make a complex operating system so that you'd have to get the next Intel chip and then Intel would create a tweak on that that makes you need the next Windows operating system.
01:15:23.000They sort of would leapfrog each other.
01:15:25.000And it feels like that with, yeah, your iPhone does better things now than three iPhones ago, but what about all these iPhones in the garbage and all these people who lost all this stuff?
01:15:38.000The amount of time compressed into one of these devices is really intense.
01:15:42.000At least one of our goals when we're developing new technologies and new technology pathways should be, Well, what's the one that's going to actually require the sales of the fewest amount of computers?
01:17:20.000You see a modern street in this day and age and you see these beautiful...
01:17:25.000You can tell they're proud people because these are shiny cars.
01:17:29.000They're painted nice and they're done well and they're restored well or at least maintained well.
01:17:35.000I mean, I don't know how many miles some of these cars have on them, but they do look, it does look amazing.
01:17:41.000I know, and there is that, you know, I feel like there's a hunger for stuff, not just 50s, but also sort of 60s Mad Men period, that the nostalgia for that is sort of, that's right before this digital age started.
01:17:55.000That's like the height of the TV age and, you know, putting satellites in space.
01:18:42.000Like, those were sort of, like, human-created works of art, as opposed to, you know, you look at, like, a new Mazda or something like that, a real modern car.
01:18:50.000And it looks like something that just came out of a machine.
01:18:53.000They screwed it together and it came out of a machine.
01:18:56.000You look at a 69 Chevy, that's something somebody fucking screwed together.
01:19:26.000But it's like they didn't – it's like so they get rid of all these guys screwing in the screws and it's like so they just then let them stay in their houses?
01:20:51.000What if we figured out that, okay, we only need, rather than having everybody work 40-hour weeks, which is based on a clock of the industrial age, how much can we have people work and have weekends, what if people don't really have to work that much for us to have everything we want?
01:22:22.000Too many people find sort of a pre-existing way to interact and they don't create their own way to interact.
01:22:30.000And in doing so, you oftentimes miss on one of the best things, which is accomplishing things.
01:22:37.000Whether it's accomplishing starting your own restaurant and keeping it open, or having a car shop that only fixes a certain type of automobile that you really love to work on.
01:23:06.000In this kind of economy, you can't have it.
01:23:08.000When you have this kind of education system, you can't have it.
01:23:11.000What about just real naturally dull people that need to be pushed in a certain direction?
01:23:15.000Well, yeah, but you know, so not everyone has to be the one that figures out how to do a new method of biodynamic Rudolf Steiner.
01:23:30.000It's also the issue of how human beings are raised in the first place, which is so huge and not really addressed.
01:23:37.000The reason why some of these people fall into these mindless jobs is because never along the line have they been stimulated.
01:23:44.000Never along the line by their family, by the school systems, by their environment, by their atmosphere, by their fellow knuckleheads in their community.
01:23:53.000They're all just surrounded by people who are either like-minded or less or supported and you're kind of fucked.
01:24:01.000And then when something comes along that eliminates that job for that guy, that robot job when he was 45 years old or 50 years old, he has to start again and sort of reignite some sort of passion and curiosity or die off like a dinosaur.
01:24:14.000And it's hard, too, because he was liking the thing he did.
01:24:17.000You know, if he's a toll collector, you know, and you get better and better at it.
01:24:21.000And then you start, you know, then test to see how many people you can make eye contact with when you're getting the tolls and how many lives can you change with that eye.
01:24:28.000I mean, gosh, you could live the bodhisattva life as a toll collector.
01:24:32.000You know, they take that away from him.
01:24:34.000And it's not just that he can't be retrained, he doesn't have motivation, you know what I mean?
01:24:38.000It's not his fault that they broke his heart, you know?
01:24:41.000They should have a show where a guy's a toll collector.
01:24:44.000And just see how he interacts with people.
01:25:28.000And you have to do, like, break it up.
01:25:31.000It's like, we'll sit down in our little chairs and then have a discussion about the last couple of ones that we've seen and what it really means.
01:25:37.000People love that fast track thing now, though.
01:25:41.000They want to put that little thing up there, and they just go through.
01:25:44.000Like, New York is one of the weirdest scenarios ever, because somewhere along the line, they just decided to make people pay to get to the city.
01:25:51.000It used to be that they were paying to get the bridge built, but they paid that fucking thing off a long time ago.
01:25:59.000Every bridge got paid off a long time ago.
01:26:02.000But the revenue is so intoxicating, they just kept with it.
01:26:06.000We can't understand that in California, because we don't really have a place we could get anywhere.
01:26:11.000Those bridges were built, but now they gotta all be rebuilt.
01:26:51.000Either you could justify the construction of the bridge, the maintaining of the bridge, but they should pay for it through their taxes and that's it.
01:26:58.000There shouldn't be a spot where you have to stop because that's fucking dumb.
01:27:02.000The only reason why you would want to do that is you want to check cars for bombs or nutty people.
01:27:09.000Well, I guess- Maybe it's environmentalists trying to discourage, get people onto LIRR and do rapid transit the way God intended.
01:27:15.000And discourage people from coming into the city because the easier it is to get into the city, the more the traffic sucks and it sucks already.
01:28:01.000Though you'll be in a neighborhood where you're seeing these mansions with these giant lawns, and then you'll go half a mile, and you're in the projects.
01:28:29.000I mean, if you're inside Bloomberg's bubble, if you made it in there somehow, when an apartment was a million, now you've got $10 million of real estate or something.
01:28:38.000But anywhere else, it's not quite that bad.
01:29:04.000Most things about it are more consonant with our era and our digital economy and all that.
01:29:12.000A better carbon footprint to stack people up like that, that they have everybody having lawns and fertilizer and whatever else they get in the suburbs.
01:29:19.000So, I mean, it's good on most of those levels.
01:29:23.000It's just New York itself is so crazy expensive through God knows what sort of real estate shenanigans are done.
01:29:30.000That's what sort of then, for me, colors The experience of urban joy there.
01:29:37.000No one who's an artist or a writer of regular means could live there.
01:29:43.000Yeah, that's where it gets really crazy, where you see a small apartment that's like $3,000 a month, and you're like, okay, that's just nuts.
01:29:51.000That means a guy who makes $50,000 a year has to give up three-quarters of his income to pay his fucking rent.
01:30:27.000And yeah, there's certain some part that waxes nostalgic, but that's not a good old days that you really want to return to either.
01:30:33.000It's just like, how can you have a New York that works and is still artistic and alive and vibrant and fertile and not have people, you know, getting stabbed in the subway?
01:30:42.000Yeah, and how can you have so many rich people living together?
01:30:46.000Because you have to be rich to live there.
01:30:48.000I mean, it's really difficult to pull off living in Manhattan if you don't have at least, you know, upper middle class income.
01:30:58.000So, you know, it's a strange, strange place, unlike any place in this country.
01:31:02.000You know, there's no place in the country that's so overvalued.
01:31:05.000You can get a decent apartment in San Francisco for half of what you'd spend on an apartment in Manhattan.
01:31:10.000I think, although San Francisco now has gotten the worst something.
01:31:40.000But it's like everybody in that neighborhood, they're all tech people.
01:31:44.000They all made insane amounts of money.
01:31:46.000In the various tech bubbles and booms over the years, and all that Google money's up there, and all that Apple money's up there, and there's just a lot of fucking people that have incredible amounts of cash up there.
01:31:58.000So real estate, they need houses, this is where they live.
01:32:00.000So real estate's through the fucking roof.
01:32:57.000But, you know, like you're saying though, if that lower 98% or 99%, whatever it is, It gets fed up enough, it'll network with itself rather than trying to get something down from the top.
01:33:53.000Well, try to occupy the world in which we live.
01:33:57.000I liken the Occupy movement to white blood cells.
01:34:01.000Like, they recognize there's an issue, and they gather around it, and it's like it calls attention to the issue, but they're gathering around a sick spot.
01:34:12.000I mean, they know there's something wrong here.
01:34:14.000And so everybody's like, look, this is the spot.
01:34:19.000They do teach-ins and learn about stuff.
01:34:22.000A lot of people know more about these issues now than did And they see it as a super long-term project.
01:34:29.000I mean this year they did Occupy Debt and the Debt Jubilee.
01:34:32.000So what they're doing is buying pennies on the dollar, the debt of people like who've got health bills they can't pay and all that because it's just owned by credit companies.
01:34:39.000So they buy the debt and just relieve it.
01:34:47.000That's a great idea, and I think that's a great community idea.
01:34:51.000There's a lot of people out there that have a spare $5 or a spare $10 that you wouldn't even think about, but if you get enough of those people, you can enact some real change and really help people.
01:35:01.000What is the best way, besides podcasting, besides books, and besides Having actual conversations with people where you explore these ideas.
01:35:12.000What is the best way to get people to understand that true happiness really does come from a sense of community?
01:35:22.000One of the interviews that I saw with you, you were talking about your youth and you were talking about living in a place where you all shared a It's a large backyard and it became sort of a community thing where everybody would get together and have like a barbecue.
01:36:36.000Yeah, but what if you want to just get up in the morning and you don't want to talk to Mr. Johnson and see if you can use the snowblower first because you've got to be at work at 730. You don't want to talk to Mr. Johnson is the thing.
01:38:20.000Maybe we need to just understand and explore the ethics of when to and not to use cell phones, when to and not to connect, and encourage more connection.
01:39:31.000It's just having the conversation, letting people That's the whole thing.
01:39:37.000If they become more aware, then they stand a chance.
01:39:41.000I certainly think a lot of these things have sort of snuck up on us and we could all do with a lesson or at least an idea of how to manage them more humanly.
01:39:53.000And the trick is for people not to see, and this has been my whole thing, Not to see the messenger of this as the one who's saying, oh, this stuff's so bad.
01:40:01.000Oh, whoa, the children are turning more violent.
01:40:03.000You know, that whole kind of PBS-ish hand-wringing thing that so many writers are out there.
01:40:09.000It's like, are you for technology or against it?
01:40:12.000You know, and if you're not just going, yay, yay, yay, go business, they think you're against it.
01:40:16.000And it's like, no, no, I'm for technology.
01:40:17.000I'm just against the way we happen to be using it right now.
01:40:20.000I don't think it's a coincidence that people are, I think, fundamentally less happy now, I think, than they have been in a long time.
01:40:31.000If you look at the amount of people that are on medication for happiness, that's really what it is.
01:40:36.000If you're on an antidepressant, essentially you're on a medication for happiness.
01:40:40.000And whether or not that's because of a chemical imbalance that you suffer from or because of the fact that your job sucks and your life sucks and you're just filled with suck every day and you're responding to that.
01:40:51.000Well, for whatever it is, if you look at those numbers, one or two things that's happening, probably both.
01:40:56.000One, we're getting fucked over by these pharmaceutical companies and they get unethical doctors to prescribe that shit with impunity.
01:41:11.000And if you're in great pain, it's better to only be in moderate pain or mild pain if you can take a pill.
01:41:16.000I mean, what's hard to do is to get people to go, oh, well...
01:41:20.000Actually, that pain is kind of a good sign because it means that we all need to kind of work here to change the way the world is and take some action.
01:41:28.000The pain is trying to get you to change.
01:41:30.000The pain is trying to get you to avoid the pain and you should use your logic to say, well, what's causing this pain?
01:41:41.000Unless you're up against the wall and there's nothing you can do to change your circumstances, in which case you're going to take the pill.
01:41:50.000But I do think the more people can start to get in touch, you know, for me, it's these rhythms, you know, the rhythms of life, you know, the 28-day lunar cycle and the fact that each week of a lunar cycle, your neurotransmitters change, right?
01:42:02.000So you have an acetylcholine week followed by a serotonin week followed by a dopamine week followed by a norepinephrine week.
01:42:07.000It's like every month there's one ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom.
01:42:09.000If you know that, then you're like, oh, this is the dopamine week.
01:42:22.000Originally, it was an Olympic trainer, Irving Dardick, who figured this stuff out.
01:42:27.000He was exercising people at different times of the day and different parts of the month.
01:42:31.000They've been looking at biological clocks for many years.
01:42:36.000Ever since the Major League Baseball pretty much discovered jet lag, that people get more jet lag when they travel west to east than east to west, they realize, oh, these clocks are not folklore.
01:42:45.000There's actually something going on here.
01:42:47.000So there's circadian rhythms for the day and the night, but there's also all these other rhythms controlled by different weather and astronomical features.
01:42:56.000And traveling like that really does fuck with those rhythms, right?
01:43:00.000Yeah, but as people get in touch with them, I think it could help us get out of some of these drug relationships that we're having, where we're taking drugs in order to compensate.
01:43:13.000For those shifting neurotransmitters because we're trying to be on all the time.
01:43:18.000I'm in sales, so I got to be in sales when I'm in dopamine week or in serotonin week.
01:43:59.000They don't let you have those, though.
01:44:00.000They don't let you genuinely have those drugs.
01:44:01.000Because if you're as high as you are in ecstasy or as high as you are in pot, then you start figuring things out.
01:44:06.000Then you start unwinding that relationship and becoming less dependent on...
01:44:10.000Yeah, I mean, even just a shift in the levels of things and the approach to things gives you, oh, this is a new consciousness space that I'm occupying here, whether it's a brief moment or a long, drawn-out, crazy trip.
01:46:04.000Yeah, it's the ultimate industrial-age drug, I guess, because it makes you more productive, more efficient at this time.
01:46:08.000I've had quite a few friends who've had an issue with it, several.
01:46:12.000A good friend, very smart guy who just went.
01:46:15.000It just got off of it and he went crazy with it for like several months and he was starting up a business and working at a tech company and it was a lot of hours and he just took a little Adderall to help him along the way and next thing you know he needed an Adderall every day.
01:46:32.000Yeah, they do say there's this sort of I think speed, long-term speed use is the Closest they can model schizophrenia with drugs.
01:46:39.000You know, if you've been on Speed Freak for a really long time, you get way closer than with any, you know, psychedelic or something.
01:46:45.000Yeah, well, it just seems like it just red lines your system.
01:46:49.000Lindsay Lohan's plea deal, one string attached, I want Was that TMZ? Yeah, she's supposed to be in that prison or that rehab for the next, whatever, 60, 90 days.
01:47:01.000She's trying to get a plea deal so she can get Adderall on that.
01:47:04.000Wait a minute, they're putting her in jail again?
01:47:16.000Boy, there's another weird aspect of our new society that children become famous.
01:47:22.000Back in the Shirley Temple days when they invented that, who would have ever thought that you would get a person like a Lindsay Lohan where you raise them from the time they were a child and they never know anonymity.
01:47:35.000They just long to escape every day, longing to get fucked up and just drift away in a drunken stupor and not have to think about it.
01:47:45.000Yeah, and they can't leave it, is the thing, because they're also addicted to it.
01:47:50.000Yeah, and if you do leave it, it's almost worse to have been a has-been than to be a never-was.
01:48:03.000I'll tell you, it reminds me, there was this moment that I still don't know exactly how I feel about it, when they did the Brady Bunch reunion.
01:48:10.000It's like 10 years after the show, whatever, 20 years.
01:48:45.000I know, but that media's good for projecting.
01:48:48.000But there's something very sad about people that live completely in the past, like if you were on a show in the 1970s, and you're still going to those autograph signing things.
01:51:50.000And if you click on the link on stamps.com and use the code JRE, you get a special offer, no risk trial, plus a $110 bonus offer, including a digital scale that you should not use for illegal purposes.