THROWBACK THURSDAY - The Social Network on I AM Liberty (2017)

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You've just joined the Prepper Broadcasting Network, where we promote self reliance and independence. The views and opinions expressed are strictly those of the host or their guests. Visit us in the interactive chat room at Prepper Broadcasting dot com. If you're down, Greensman, we want to just eliminate potentia. Oh absolutely, media, the. Ability of almost every working Americans to access more credit than they should have been able to mask the underlying fact that lower and middle class incomes were not rising. That's not a tenable, Joe, isn't all the time to eliminate. It would have been a time long time. Anyone a side terrors there, Let's talk only about our own homegrown. Animals that are patrolling America right down. So it goes down to the simplest thing. Be prepared, dear boy, Soon enough you will know all there is to know, at least all I'm able to teach you. Anyway, give pause to the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. You're twelve now, but not for long, and thirteen is just around the bend. As we walk the dogs, you absorb the path. As we follow the deer at dusk, you absorb their routine. As we see the Big Dipper, the North Star, or the moss and the trees you absorb a sense of direction. You may never need these things, but if you do, I want you to know them by heart. I want you to know your terrain and the life among it. I want you to know your path and heading. But that's not all. Last summer you helped me plan in the garden, and a few weeks ago we harvested what grew. Last year you learned to cook, and this month we shared a meal from backyard to table. And while you may not know at the time, just why when I explain a sunflower seed's power as it dropped into the soil, there is in that moment a truth that will soon make sense. Trust me. That is from an Open Letter to My twelve year old son, which is a guest post by Ryan buford Up on the IEM Liberty Show website Iamlibertyshow dot com. And it's again it's titled an open Letter to My twelve year old son. And what can I say? It's an amazing little piece of writing that when I first got it through email, I read it and it just gripped me. I was in the middle of a work day doing some writing myself, you know, and sometimes you read things that you scan through and then sometimes you read things that just grip you. And this thing really gripped me. I'd like to read the rest of it for you at some point tonight, but I wanted to give you that little intro from Ryan Beauford, an open letter to my twelve year old son. It's it's powerful, powerful little thing from father to son. And you know, you have to applaud a man who's doing the things that Ryan's doing. All listen to the I'm Liberty Show and freelance writer in his own right. We're gonna be hearing more from Ryan Beaufort in the future, so don't forget the name, because he's going to be around. I think, how is everyone? How are we doing? Chat? Room's looking a little slow going. That's all right. I'm sure you guys will file in as things go. I made it. I'm doing good. I wasn't even sure if we were going to do this tonight. I was a little nervous about it, to be honest with you. It's a monster week in the world of the Eyem Liberty Show, in the world of James Walton, huge week, and it's just just getting ready to explode any minute. Now you know, big trip, coming trip to Utah. Very excited. Along with the little nook and cranny that Ryan Buford sent over to me, he also told me that while I'm in Salt Lake City, I should check out the university because as one of the best dinosaur one of the best collections of dinosaur bones around period. So I'll definitely jump in there and see that. But even more excited than I am for Prepper Kahn. I have to be honest and tell you that my six year old first grader, he's gonna be performing tomorrow night in the Big Bad Musical, and he's stressing up Hiskio And there's a lot of fun things you can do with your time. But I'm telling you, when you see this little guy who I was playing Monopoly with the other day, which also blew my I'm sorry, not the other day, just about three hours ago, you're sitting there watching the six year old roll the dice, count his money, sell properties. You realize he's going to be performing the next night, and it's just like, WHOA, what is happening here? I mean, it's just amazing to me, right, amazing to me how these things happen. They happened fast, and before you know what they're reading, then they're talking, and then they're spitting at you and yelling at you and leaving the house. So what are we doing here tonight? We got a lot. We're not going to touch on everything that I have for you because I have a lot, and to be honest, I probably need to sleep, So I don't think we're gonna go the distance to eleven thirty. We might do a ten thirty show tonight in the preservation of my own health and sanity. So I hope you can. I hope you can forgive me. But unless I really get going, I think we're gonna cut it at ten thirty. I'm gonna try to get a little extra sleep because I had a nice early flight coming. But what I wanted to do here is really set the tone. We've got steven menking with us, which I mean that's we could go to eleven to be honest with you, that's an easy two hours. But I wanted to kind of hone in. We're gonna talk, and we're gonna talk the way we talk, and I'm not gonna guide the conversation too much. But I did want to talk about this crazy landscape of social media tonight. Because social media is everywhere, it's digging into everything, it's expanding. I don't know if you know, but Facebook is putting out its own dating. I'm sure that's going to explode. I mean, these these corporate it's what they are, their corporations or businesses. They're trying to figure out how to make money and how to how to do it in a way where they can still provide free content. And that's a big part of this whole thing, right, that's a big part of this whole social media question. We get up up in arms, we get upset, we get angry when we find out that they're selling data, or that they're demonetizing videos, or that they're banning certain conservative you know, groups, or whatever it is. But you always have to stop and consider the power of these programs or these apps, right, the power of these apps and the fact that you're allowed to sign up absolutely free. I mean there are very few places that have well, actually, if I want to be honest and if I really want to admit it, there was nowhere that has a rolodex, a bibliography, a biography, an autobiography, a photo gallery, a video gallery, of my life the way the Facebook does just from using it, right, just from using it for the for the however many years I've been on it, my whole life is just you could you could follow the steps right from probably marriage on. I think actually I was on my status ond eight. And I'm sure I'm not the only one right who has just an incredible amounts of data surrender to these people. Why convenience? Right? So are there are reasons, there are reasons why these things make sense and why we use them. But we gotta be careful, right, We've gotta be very careful about what's going on, and we also have to be strong willed enough to say when enough is enough. Right, when we say enough is truly enough, I'm finished, you guys are no longer. There's gotta be a line, right, There's gotta be a line where we could say that's enough. We are not going to be doing this any longer. With whatever it is, you know, whether it's the banning of certain people, whether it's the demonetizing of content, it's just there's a lot, you know, there's a lot, there's a lot of issues that are cropping up, and they're cropping up more and more often, and it really makes you wonder, you know, how far can this thing go? And one of the things I want to talk about, and I'm pretty sure we'll probably get some information from Steven as well on this is what are the alternatives? What are the alternatives out there? To Facebook, to Google Plus, to Twitter, to what else you might use, Pinterest, Instagram, whatever, YouTube, There's a lot of opportunity out there. Highlander puts UH. I don't know how to pronounce it, but I've checked it out before. It's me we I think I really like it. I like it because it does it does personally what I want what I started my social network time with NUMBI four rather, I moved to Virginia. I moved far away from everyone, and I started Facebook because it was the best way that I could send video and send pictures and keep up with all my friends from Philadelphia. That a going to make fifty phone calls every day, you know, and of course friendships grow apart and that type of thing. You find out that I don't really need to keep up with these people anyway. But one of the biggest things that rocked me lately was the YouTube demonetization of UH. Really just tactical gear distributors and tactical gear and gun related reviews. You know that these people are seeing they're seeing their they're literally their income affected because YouTube has decided to take some silly stand that really isn't going to make a difference. It's really punishing, you know, the way that most laws do. It's just punishing the average guy. It's ugly. It's a very ugly thing. One of my favorite YouTubers is affected by this. And before before this person was affected, I used to watch a YouTube channel called an American Homestead, which is phenomenal. I think they still have videos up, but an American Homestead it's just a phenomenal YouTube channel. Check them guys out. And they left YouTube. Same thing. Videos demonetized political views being questioned and you know, guns and videos and all this stuff amazing to me. And then you see the music videos that are up there, and then you see the videos that aren't banned, and it's laughable, right, It's laughable when you see the kind of the just degenerated behavior that goes up on YouTube and everyone's fine with it. You know, Heaven forbid your little daughter go in and see a CZ scorpion and some guy shooting it at a target, right, and talking about it. Much better for her to go run into a Nicki Minaj video, all right, what do you think is gonna damage her more? What do you think is gonna what do you think is gonna set the tone for the rest of her life? Right? It's a wild thing, and it's just one aspect of it. That's not even talking about the Slate article that I have here, the Slate article where they're talking about, you know, conservative media, social media bias is the new liberal media bias. And we'll get into that. But listen, I don't want to waste any more time because I know our guest has some things to do tonight. I don't want to hold them up, So why don't we I think we're going to save commercials for the top of the hour. Let's do that. We'll save commercials for the top of the hour ten o'clock. And what we'll do is we'll bring Steven on now and we'll see how things are over on the Objective World. Steven men King, how are you tonight, sir? I'm doing just fine. Thanks for having me here, James. It's always a pleasure to be on the I am Liberty Show, speaking with your fantastic audience, jumping in the chat as well, and answering some questions, hopefully giving some perspective about the these important events. I actually was going on Twitter on the objective as our account. We'll see it's like partially shadow them, but that's not that's neither here nor there. It's a little bit difficult to evaluate based on the way that that comes down. But if you if you follow that account, you should still be able to see the tweets. Fortunately, at least for the time being. I'll keep on broadcasts and the name and Jesus across that platform, and so that may not get me on the verified or most favorite kind of list, but that's all right. That's that's the way. That's the way we're going, and that's the way that this technological landscape is playing out. So one of the things that I was mentioning is that it seems to me that people have a divided and differential view of even the basic definitions of technology. And you know, and forget the demographic issue for a minute, in terms of people not you know, not being in touch with technology at all, I think that there is a profound tendency to either follow the herd when you're not sure what's going on, or to jump to generalize conclusions that are going to miss out on the nuance. The one thing that everyone should agree upon, the starting principle that any analysis would have to hinge on, is that the pace of change, the rate of adoption and the development of new technologies has escalated, and in fact it's exponential, and we call it Moore's law, the idea that processing power on a per dollar basis doubles roughly every eighteen months. And so we are in we're in a position and we're in a perspective to say, okay, well, how is this going to play out moving forward? Which is difficult because we are rinnier thinkers trying to deal with an exponential world. So when I'm thinking about this and when I'm on twit that are talking about it, I want to make sure that people have fundamental definitions correct, because if we're not thinking about algorithms and artificial intelligence and machine learning and all of these things, it's going to be challenging because we don't necessarily have agreement on the basic definitions. And from my vantage point, it certainly doesn't seem like we have that. So a quick wrap up of some bona fidees that I have in here. I graduated from William's College with degrees in math and economics. In twenty ten, I started working for Morgan Stanley, a Wall Street bank doing investment banking and the technology group. So I covered software companies and directed mergers and acquisitions and IPO transactions there, and then I traded equities with a focus on the tech sector for a couple of years before getting saved, giving my life to christ and becoming a private tutor where I work now for myself in business for myself for three and a half years. It's been a fantastic journey where it allows me to do podcasting. You mentioned on the Objective that's the podcast network that I manage and run. The website there is on the Objective dot org. And I also have the opportunity to manage portfolio assets for a company, a hedge fund that's focused on blockchain and cryptocurrency strategies. So I do my best to stay up to date with technology, but I'm not really like a gadget guy or anything like that. I don't always need to have the news phones or other stuff like that. But my point here is that because I'm thirty years old, I grew up alongside the consumer Internet, which allows me to say that I do remember a time when the Internet wasn't ubiquitous, it wasn't everywhere. However, the generation that is currently growing up does not have that experience. They are living in a permanently technological existence and you could call it their permatexts in that there is technology that they have access to twenty four to seven and they've always lived like that, and so it's becoming more and more integrated into the way that they manage their lives. And so for people who don't understand life outside of technology, then we're going to be We have to understand that they are more naturally inclined to view their digital identities on social media and other words, as the natural extensions of themselves. And so when we think about this and we're like, wow, the statistics about social media and bullying and even suicide tragically are really devastating, in particularly the attitude that the platforms take towards these sorts of things. And in that scenario, we have to understand, well, how could people care about it that much? Well, they've never lived with out it. They never have. And so whether we're talking about Instagram or snapchat, Facebook isn't really even popular among let's say, the students that I work with who are in high school or even college. That stuff, it develops, it ages, and it grows old. Facebook will probably have more staying power unless it is directly replaced because of the networking effects that has among older generations. That's where that's where people in Gen X and the Baby boomers, that's where their social media is and that's how they that's how they stay connected. But that makes it uncool by definition, and so people move on to other sources and other kinds of other kinds of platforms. But from from my vantage point here, James, when I'm thinking about social media, there's a tremendous landscape, but it has to start with the basic awareness of technology and of the aspects that go into it. So, with that being said, with that introduction under our belts, is there particular direction that you want to take us, a particular aspect of this landscape that you'd that you'd want to identify it. Where where do you think we should far focus and target? Well, I think you bring up a couple of good spots. I think to pinpoint one would probably be nearly impossible for a flake like me, Steve, and I'll be honest with you. But. I definitely want to talk about at some point, I'd like to talk about other opportunities outside of the traditional social media networks that we're you know, we're all accustomed to, outside of the Twitter's, outside of the facebooks, because there are some options out there, and I think that people should know about them. I'd love to get your take on that. I'd also really like to talk about kind of maybe just reflect on what it is we think is coming because as you mentioned about Facebook, I mean it was the first big like, yes, it was the biggest, right, it wasn't the first, because my space is pretty big too, but it was one of the biggest to come on and it's taken over in a big way. And I believe we're gonna see it die at some point because and it's probably not gonna be really far away, but I have to imagine that something's gonna arise in that space, and it's gonna be something that connects us in a way where we maybe we can't disconnect. I'm not sure. But I'd like to kind of talk about that also, But maybe we should start with maybe we should start with this idea of and this is what I really want your take on, is the censorship. I mean, what are you what is your take in general on deciding whether or not certain groups of people get to talk or don't get to talk, or get the post or don't get to post, or get to express their views or not. And I mean this in a way not just to say, you know, it's so mean and nasty of Facebook to be banning conservative voices. Obviously that's a problem, but I'd like to get your take on it, Stephen from an even higher level. And you know, from the idea that even isis can get on Facebook and post terrible videos is there's already terrible things up on Facebook and YouTube all the time. And I wonder what your thoughts are. Obviously, Facebook is a corporation, so they have the ability to, you know, block whatever they want to block. That's their deal. But what are your thoughts, you know, because government regulation I'm sure is going to come into play eventually, and what are your thoughts on this idea that anyone should have the ability to regulate any any speech, any media whatsoever. Well, there are several profound questions at play here, not only as it relates to the Bill of Rights and to the rights that are endowed to aspire our creator to speak and to and to speak our minds regardless of our opinions. But when we think about this from the highest level, what we want to emphasize is that information is absolutely critical. Information is essentially behind everything, and we can look at things in terms of the physical structure of the universe, our spiritual understanding, we're even the way that societies function. Information is extraordinarily primary. And what we have in social media, what we have in these digital platforms, these digital marketplaces of ideas are the primary information highways, this dissemination of information from news to personal activity and opinion everything else like that. And so this data that is being collected, and again I would caution people that if you are not paying something to sign up for a platform, and you know there isn't something else going on, then you are the product. The information that you are feeding in is the product. Because if you're a company and you want to make your advertising more effective, then you need to know certain things about your target audience. Now in the classical advertising days in television, back in mad Men, you would have some basic definitions, some basic demographic guidelines that you could then target. But now the idea is to micro target, and you're if advertising is micro targeted, the idea is to boost the effectiveness to you know, ultimately it gets down to a dollars and cents at least, that is the That's the cursory level explanation. There are obviously other things that we don't necessarily don't necessarily have time to get into. But the point here is that information and the points of information flow are absolutely pivotal. So there's a couple different questions to ask. The first is, well, because of the standing and the almost on the presence of these platforms, does that mean that they should be classified as a public utility for digital information? And the answer is well, it depends on what that means, and it depends on how you manage everything, because I would recommend exercising a great deal of caution in saying, all right, the government needs to come in and in order to deal with the censorship, they need to present regulation. And my primary reason for caution in that end is that I'm familiar with the way that the banking industry does things, and that is to engage in a process called regulatory capture. All that means is that the people who have the deepest pockets and the people who are most connected are the ones that can hire lobbyists and influence lawmakers. They're the ones that get to write the rules. Dodd Frank and the banking regulation that passed in response to the financial crisis that was written by the large banks, and the end effect of a lot of those rules was to prevent competition in the banking sector. And the same thing will come to pass if we allow extensive government regulation of the technological side of things as well. And you can imagine a place like Facebook or a place like Twitter even welcoming something like that because it would allow them to outspend and out influence other lesser money competitors and get the influence to write those rules. So from a dollars and cents perspective, just note that the more regulations there are, the more it costs to comply with those regulations. You have to have people who have the information about what the content of the regulation is. You have to understand to have people at your disposal who understand how to comply with those regulations, and all those are attacks on businesses, and it's easier and possible for the large companies to deal with that, but it's not possible for the small companies to hire an extra five to ten people who are full time in terms of interpreting and complying with governmental regulation. So let's not be misled here. The tech companies, the social media giants, all these different platforms, they would love regulation because essentially they could write it. And if they're writing the rules for their own industries, then they are going to protect themselves at the expense of other people. So when we think about it in terms of a platform for open information, there is one argument to say, all right, it should be totally open source. Totally open source, there's no there should be no prohibitions on anything. But obviously that runs into a difficult kind of structure when you have criminals and people who are looking to exploit children and commit crimes on a particular platform. And what point does the platform then have a role or responsibility to deal with these things. And I'm actually forgetting the exact the exact rule of the exact term, but as it currently stands, platforms like Facebook are not responsible for the legal ramifications of someone doing something on their platform. However, that is that is a bit up in the air, and could It's one of those things that could be regulated. And the question would be how would that kind of regulation, and how would the response from social media take place, and how would that develop over time, because you can imagine under a different administration where laws are passed that declare the Bible hate speech or any or anything like that, and so you end up in a situation where there would justified censorship or even it would be illegal for them to even let certain people have certain messages on their platform. So we end up in this dilemma. Do we want a do we want a safe space, or do we want the wild, wild West? And my inclination is that we would rather go towards the freedom aspect, because freedom and the ability to innovate allows for new solutions to these types of problems. It's certainly no mystery. It's no secret where the folks from. You know, the people who are predators, who have illegal accounts, or who are members of ISIS, or at least purport to be. It's no secret where those accounts are you can find them, and you don't necessarily have to spend your time going out there and doing it. But the social media companies have an ability to do this and the ability to report these things to law enforms. It's fairly trivial, but it does seem that the way that things currently stand, there is an ideological There is an ideological bent to the people who are running these companies and controlling the content that is on their platforms and even once it gets posted, what people can see. Because that's a totally different question. But the interesting thought is where are we where are we going? Where are we really going? And I'm not exactly sure because we do have alternate solutions that are out there. There's gab, there's steam it, there's dtube, there's bit shoot, there's all sorts of other platforms. But it seems to me that the solution has to be decentralization in some form, because if there's centralization, then there's a gatekeeper to the information who gets to write the rules. And so what we see is either an archipelago of different of different sites of different things, and it's difficult to get a network effect. But what we do see is that if we end up with these the current crop of social media companies and the Silicon Valley giants getting to write all sorts of regulation about themselves. Then it's going to it's going to stifle competition, and it's going to crowd people into these Internet ghettos so to speak. Even just in terms of in terms of search, like using Google is not an appropriate way to get information because people can be banned or removed from from all of that. So the answer to this is that we are actually going to get a new kind of Internet. It's a you know, not even necessarily a Web two point zero. I don't I don't like to use those kind of sloganeerings and those kind of jargons, but ultimately we will find ourselves in a situation where there isn't a centralized internet with servers that everyone has to route through. It will be developed in a decentralized way. And that's what extremely intelligent and effective developers are working on right now. If you want more information on that, you have to look up a couple different projects. Check into what Kim dot com is doing. But we are in a situation where we are going to have a choice. The choice will be centralized government regulated internet where access is controlled and restricted, and the alternative will be a decentralized, unregulated system that is either built on the transparency that's enabled by blockchain or some future technology that will allow us to deal with all of this. So we're going to get an alternate version because people are sick and tired of these platforms, these solutions that are not really solutions anymore, and the larger companies, the existing giants, they can't keep up with the development and the pace of the pace of change for these new solutions. So it's always going to be a competition between the network the network effect that the large companies have and the flexibility that the that the smaller initiatives had, whether it's companies or just a couple of individuals who are making who are making the right kind of code and have the vision to set the people free from the social media gulag, so to speak. But again, remember if you're volunteering, your information and information is what is what drives the show here, because information is valuable. It's it's your your identity, who you are, and it's not just in an in an identity theft kind of perspective, it's it's who you are so that you can be marketed to, so that your your time, your attention can be bought and sold. And so it depends on who you want in control of that information. There are technological systems that are set up to hopefully make it so that you are in control, but if not, it's going to be the major social media companies and the government itself in terms of regulation and the way in which everything is rolling out. So it's kind of a rock and a hard place, James, if you ask me like, I don't think we can sort of thread the needle with the right kind of censorship, regulation and everything else like that, because there's going to we're going to run a foul of everything everywhere. My best bet is that the proper solution is to decentralize everything, get everything out of the hands of these gatekeepers, and then and then push it into a form where we do have that transparency where you can you can achieve like the pseudonymous kind of approach to these sorts of things, but toe to keep it simple here forever everyone. There are alternatives, they exist, they are developing, and you can participate in them. Right now, it's difficult to get a critical mass of people to switch over, but that time will come as crackdowns continue and as the censorship becomes even more parent. And I'm more than happy to get into how that censorship works and what algorithms and machine learning and artificial intelligence are, but I wanted to pass it back to you to get your thoughts on this in terms of the direction that I think things are headed in. I think it's we have a choice, and we have to be informed so that we make the right choice and speak up for the appropriate solution. We can either go with centralized government and corporate regulation in an effort to attempt to have a safe space that will end up backfiring inevitably, or we can go to a decentralized version where the people are in control individually, that has its own as its own set of risks, not in least part because it's something that's new, it's something that people aren't people aren't necessarily aware of or used to using just yet. But this is the it's going in one of those two directions, and I am definitively against the direction of more centralization and regulation and government involvement, and more towards the power of the people to innovate and to develop their own solutions that provide the kind of the kind of connections and capabilities that are necessary to maintain the prose of the networking and the connections that we've seen while getting rid of the more pernicious aspects of these things. Well, you know, we're kind of seeing shades of it already. But what unfortunately, Stephen, what I think, especially you have to listening to the things that you laid out, what really comes to mind is, in the short term, anyway, and maybe for a while, we're probably gonna exist in a plane that features both scenarios that you pose, right, So we're probably gonna live in a world where we still have these big guys, because these big guys are gonna fight. I mean, they're gonna fight with everything they got, and they got a lot. And I think those big guys are gonna become safe spaces. I just I can't see a way that you'd steer the ship away from that. When it comes to these large social media networks that make so much money from places like Hollywood and things like entertainment, I mean, it's it's hard. And linked in with that, of course, is this this whole social justice idea. So I don't see that going away. But I think, and it's really sad because it's only gonna further divide the nation. But it is gonna divide the nation. We're gonna have these safe space social media networks, and then we're gonna have these gorillas social networks where you know, the division is just going to be palpable. People who want to say what they want to say in a safe space are not going to go to these other outlets because they know it's going to be dangerous. They're not gonna be able to to what is it that they really do. They're not gonna be able to live in that world where you know, facts don't matter. And that's not really the way to put it, because there's something going on in that social justice world right now. I mean, it's kind of like a game. It's kind of like a movie. Like they're playing in a movie and they really like being in the movie, and then every once in a while they're confronted by someone who goes off script and they just have no idea how to handle it. So I think those those folks are gonna stay in their padded rooms, in their facebooks and in their Instagrams and Twitters and they're gonna play there. But I think we're people like us, even in the people listening to the Eye on Liberty Show. We're gonna shed that stuff. We're gonna We've had that stuff for different outlets where we can go, we can go be ourselves, we can talk amongst people, we can discuss controversial ideas without people coming back with a lawyer. You know, if we say the wrong thing. It seems like that's kind of the situation. You know, We're going to exist for a while in a world, in a world where we're seeing the government overregulate. I just can't. I mean, that's what the government does. It's really hard for me to imagine them stepping back and saying, Okay, mister Zuckerberg, you go ahead and do things the way you want to do them, you know. And mostly because and we've seen this with you know, like with guns as of late. You brought up a great point about suicides and statistics therein when it comes to bullying on social media, that's not going to go. Americans have developed this sort of run to the parents attitude when a problem becomes too hard for them to deal with. You know, I don't know where that came from or how that started, but they have really become these these little children almost who say, well, I can't handle my kids, so we need to point to a corporation and we need the government to come down hard on them to parent for me, you know, and they I mean, that's what I look at when I see what's happening with gun control. That's what I look at when I see what's happening with with other types of censorship. And I have to imagine that eventually there's gonna be enough people for a march. There's gonna be enough people for an uproar, right, and they're gonna be able to say, you know what, this is all because of Twitter, and we need Twitter to do X, Y and Z. And then they're gonna get called, you know, the people who run it are gonna get called to task, and they're gonna get called before Congress and they're gonna have to play some sort of a game where we're gonna do X, Y and Z. Yeah, sure, no problem. And the regulations are going to come and those small guys are going to suffer until they figure out how to how to get around it, you know, it's a weird thing, man, It's a really weird thing. It just what makes me most upset Steven, to be honest, is that it seems to just it all seems to be pointing toward division. I mean, there's so little in our nation that you can look at and say, this is where we're going to come together. I mean, where do you see the American people coming together on an issue? It's a It's an excellent question because there's not too much that comes to mind in the political or ideological spectrum unless we wanted to be a little bit snide and say that everybody seems to be a little bit snow flaky these days. But to add some to add some context to that one of the explanations and one of the lines of reasoning that I think is helpful for people to understand, like why does everyone need a safe space? And you know, what's the deal with these participation trophies and everything else like that. It's difficult for people to understand, particularly people from a previous generation who did things totally differently. And so there's there's a couple of aspects here to pay attention to. And the demographics are really important since the since the nineteen sixties and the Cultural Revolution and everything else like that, people in America tended to have fewer children and tended to have them later. And so what this means is that your eggs are in one basket, so to speak. I mean, if you ask, if you ask people in my grandparents generation, were there were there any only children, and the answer would be, well, if very few families would only have one child. But now, based on birth ratestistics and everything else, more, you know, a sizable proportion of people don't have any siblings. And people are typically trying to manage careers both both members of a household if they're even there at all, and then that leads to the putting off of having kids. And so we end up in a situation where if you have if you have one child and you are in your mid to mid thirties or even into your forties when that's happening, you are going to protect that child at all costs, and even to the point of protecting them from the things that would make them tougher, the things that would make them able to deal with life. And so you end up in a situation where you're telling them that they're perfect and that everything is good all the time, and you never let them explore and take some and take some not. And the metaphor is that you know, the worst thing you can do for a baby a baby chick is to help it break out of its shell. It has to do that on its own to develop strength. And so we are looking at a at a scenario where this this is what results not only from the background ideology of cultural Marxism and identity politics and everything else like that, but also from the standpoint of demographics. I mean people, people treat children differently if they have one when they're forty versus if they have if they have six by the time they're thirty. If you're in a ladder kind of household, then you know the kids are raising themselves to a large extent, and so there's a discrepancy there between between these parenting styles. That is purely the results of demographics. But I do agree James, that we see the potential for the is so called quote unquote safe space is to develop. But we do see this bifurcation. And my hope and well my faith of course is in Jesus and in what God wants to do in this generation. To bring people together. But the agenda that's being perpetrated is certainly towards towards division and towards dividing and conquering and separating, separating all of these people and groups from one another, to prevent there from being a dialogue. And that's why information is critically important. And so we have to get into a position where we're willing to break the rules, where we're willing to endure scorn, where we're willing to endure mockery and even rejection from those we love, in order to speak the truth and to do it from a loving perspective, because if you don't, there's so many different pitfalls along the way. If you don't get someone with with cowardice and peer pressure to conform, you can get them with bitterness if they if they speak, if they speak up and get and get smacked down. For you can get people with all sorts of different temptations, all sorts of different problems that they have to deal with. I mean, do you risk do you risk your job, do you risk your relationships? Do you risk anything? And for what? So part of the issue is people don't have the courage of their convictions anymore. And that's because, and this is something I talk about on the Amateur Society, people don't even know what they believe, let alone what their world view says about how they should approach the world and how they should live their lives. So you know, if we're if we're living in that kind of world, if we're living in that kind of society, we're either having the rules dictated to us from a top down perspective, or we are making them up in individually, and neither is neither is good. Both of those are tyrannical. So we have to have the source of our life, and of our moral structure, and of our ethical foundation. If it isn't, if this isn't resting in God and in for me, the Bible and Jesus Christ, then we are in serious trouble. And you can see that we are already in serious trouble. But I mean to be fair with you, James. I when I look at these companies, when I trace the money, when I see the seed investments in Google and Facebook and all these other things, I see the connections to military intelligence and to the intelligence community, I have to wonder if all of this wasn't just the development of an open source intelligence gathering operation under the guise of a public company. Because I mean you saw, if for anyone who saw Mark Zuckerberg's testimony up on the Hill, this guy doesn't look like the leader a you know, of a Fortune five hundred company. He doesn't look like he's, you know, some massively driven shark, technologically savvy businessman. He looks he looks like a cutout. His answers weren't the kind of answers that Steve Jobs would say, you know, let's let's at least be honest with ourselves there. Now we don't have to we don't have to go into other things of that nature. But the demographics are important, the overall attitudes are important. But please, I would encourage our audience to understand that those who are my age and our age, James and younger, these are people who are permitexts. They've they've never been outside of technology. So it is more their lives than you can understand unless you've lived through an existence like that. So where we where we end up? What's it? Where it ends that obviously remains to be seen, but it's a critical question and it is absolutely pivotal that we get educated about these things because it tends to be the case that we will overestimate the rate of technological change over a two year time frame. It's like, oh, you know, we're going to get self driving cars totally operational in two years, and you know people said that in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, et cetera. But we will typically underestimate the pace of technology over over a ten year timeframe. And that's because we think linearly and technology is exponential. So when we see these dynamics and when we're not sure where they lead, it's incumbent upon us to become as educated as we can be in these fields, and even with terms because let's say, let's say this, James. If you went around not to your audience, because they're obviously intelligent, they're listening to you, that's a good decision off the bat, so how to spend a Wednesday night. But if you went around to people in general and you ask them to explain to you what an algorithm was, what machine learning is, or what artificial intelligence is, chances are the vast majority would have heard of those heard of those things. But I would I would bet that almost no one could explain in basic terms or in simple pictures, what those what those words actually reference, and how they're being applied. I think people will just pull items from from popular culture and say like, oh, well, all that it's just it's the terminator and that's that's where it is, or it's you know, for someone who is a technofile, someone who loves technology or a technocrat, and say, okay, no, this is the this is the way to this is the way to utopia. So people I don't think are even properly equipped from an educational perspective self educating in this case, because that's the that's the best way to do it, to even try to describe what these really core core things that are going on in computing and in technology are, let alone things like the Internet of things, blockchain, quantum computing, or all of these, all these other ideas. The principle is like if you could, I mean, people can't describe what an algorithm is, can they? Am? I am? I like, way off base here, James, What do you think? No? I think you're hundred percent right. I think we're seeing the early stages of us reaching our limits, you know what I mean, We're in the early stages like you said, if we're linear thinkers and machines or exponential thinkers, then we're playing a game that we're destined to lose. Right, There's no way that the chimps can keep up with the X financial machines. It's impossible. It's an impossible thing unless you you know, if you want to get real sci fi, you talk about integration. That's the only way we will be able to keep up. And I'm sure that's coming some way down the line. But I don't know if you got one more in your holster or not, Steven, But I want to ask you to do something that I think you do, probably better than most people I know. And it's one of the reasons that I like you so much, because there's not a lot of people who can spend the amount of time you just spend breaking things down in the technological world, in the world of finance, in the world of business, as thoroughly, in as effectively as you've just done it, and then be able to answer the question I'm going to give you now we do you have time for one more? Oh? Bring it on. Particularly with that setup. I can't I can't resist the urge to take a crack at a curveball. Maybe I'll maybe I'll whip fently, but that's well, no, you're not. You're definitely not gonna whiff it this one, because this is this is your kind of pitch to me, there seems to be and listen, I'll be honest. I have always struggled with organized religion and things like that in my life. But people are finding their way back to it. People are solving incredible problems with it, and it's something that still holds great meaning to us despite the attacks on it. So you, being as intertwined as you are and as knowledgeable about the topic, how can we go about making how can we go about making God the safe space again? Instead of us seeking you know, that's what I see out of everyone is we're seeking something that's already there. It's written down, the text is available. There's a giant community just waiting for you to join. How do we make God the safe space again? It's a great question, and there are a couple different aspects that come to mind immediately, But I'm going to go right to the point here. If we as Christians, as people who claim to represent God in this generation, in this moment of time, if we are going to make that attractive. We have to be the people who are living meaningful lives, who are unfazed by adversity, who are growing, who are loving, who are the people who are the strongest among us in the right kind of ways, in all of the right kind of ways. Not the might makes right sense, but in a I am willing to sacrifice for the sake of other sense. Because when people look at the church, when people think about the church generally speaking, it's oh, you know, sex scandals with the Catholic priests, it's an archaic set of rules that nobody needs to follow. It's oh this, you know, fire and brimstone kind of stuff, even though you know that's not exactly where people are going for. It's prosperity. Prosperity gospel, and you know, do what you were doing, you know, carry on, but maybe maybe join the club. So when we are going to be the people that God has called us out to be in this generation, our light will shine like a beacon that has never been lit before. And the only way that that can happen is if we press into God and if we are truly set on fire, Because people aren't going to just pick up and read the Bible. I mean that's a long one. It really is. People don't have the attention span of more than three seconds. But they can see it in someone's face, they can see it in their eyes, they can feel it in the way that you speak, in the way that you carry yourself, that there's something different about you and what we have in America, in particular in American Christianity, are groups of people and individuals who have a form of Godliness but deny the power thereof If we are going to make ourselves into the body of Christ, made up of the representatives that God deserves in this generation. The ones who are called out, the ones who don't care what other people's opinions of them are apart from what God has to say about them. The ones who press into God to seek the truth, to get the deeper things, the one who men bridges and bring healing as opposed to dividing and tearing asunder. The ones who speak truth, who speak healing, who help people, who reach out, who who do right by our fellow creations in God's image, who have a burden for the lost, who understand what's going on in our generation at all levels, Frankly, James, people in my generation and younger, they are searching. They are searching desperately for meaning, for purpose, because they've been told that it's just do whatever you want. But some of them already know instinctively that that is not going to be enough. Some of them still have plans and dreams of their own that when they fail to be fulfilled, they are going to be lost. This is why you see people having quarter life crises now as opposed to midlife crises. You just get to the failure faster and fine. That's a better place to be. You'd rather fail soon and fail hard, realize your own insufficiencies and acknowledge that the way that you were directing your own life, well, it's foolish. If we're the guides of our own lives, if we are ordering our own steps. Would you want your own steps to be ordered by a twelve year old? Well you were doing that at twelve, weren't you. What about a sixteen year old? Did you have it all set then? How about twenty how about twenty five, thirty, forty fifty. We have to admit in a crystal clear way that whatever our credentials, whatever our degrees, whatever our knowledge, whatever our connections, whatever our field, that when we are in charge of our lives, it's going to go wrong. We do have a choice, We do have a choice to make in this generation. And the question is who are we going to follow? Who are we going to serve? Are we going to serve God? Or are we going to serve ourselves. I know that I am not the best task master, in fact a horrible one, just like you, me and everyone else. And so if we are serving God, if we are lit up by His Holy Spirit, then we will walk around knowing, knowing, knowing, knowing that we are living a meaningful, a purposeful life, and that God is working through us and using us. Ultimately, we need to be the living representation of the power of God on this earth because if we don't do that. If we don't do that, then where are people going to find it? Like the pastor of Times Square Church where I attended work says, often you will likely be the only Bible that many people ever read. Pam. That's powerful. That's uncanny. To be honest with you, Steven, and I thank you for coming on. If you have anything left, feel free, But I know you you've got other things to do. I really do appreciate it though tonight it's been great. Well let's end it there, James. I think that's a a good note to sign off. You know. I'm sure we'll be in touch soon. It's a pleasure having spent this time with you, guys. It's been it's been fantastic. I think there may be some audio problems people are, people are pointing out some stuff in the chat. But at any rate, God bless you to pray that your family would be well, and that God would God would keep you and would give you the direction that you need to shine forth the past. So thank you for your faithfulness, thank you for thank you for inviting me, and I'm all ready to go, but I appreciate it, and God bless you. Same to you, Steven, Thanks so much. We'll talk soon, all right. God bless