Transcript
Andrew Mayne: Hello and welcome to the Weird Things Podcast. I'm Andrew Mayne, joined by Brian Brushwood. Hello, hello. And Mr. Justin Robert Young. Hello, friends. You know, one of the cool things that happened, which I don't think we, maybe it happened since we did this last episode, if not, we should talk about it anyways. You know, was Starship releasing orbit and releasing a bunch of starlings?
Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of crazy Starlink news. I mean, there's that, the deployment of it and Starship being the one to do it, which is obviously a gigantic step forward. And then also the big spectrum buy by Space XSI. We'll see. That's the one I know the least about. Well, I guess starting with the low-hanging fruit, I don't know if this is an unpopular take or not. But regardless of who's behind it or who said it first, I think a rebrand of SI isn't the worst thing in the world. Because I know this much, I am tired of talking about AI because I can't say those letters without people taking all their preconceived grievances about some other thing that isn't the thing I want to talk about. Well, look, as a Sports Illustrated subscriber, we can table this conversation for another day. Yeah, Starlink looking to kind of step up. And there's a reason why, despite whatever misgivings Andrew and I might have had with the IPO and why it was valued or where it was valued. We were long on the company…
Andrew Mayne: Hello and welcome to the Weird Things Podcast. I'm Andrew Mayne, joined by Brian Brushwood. Hello, hello. And Mr. Justin Robert Young. Hello, friends. You know, one of the cool things that happened, which I don't think we, maybe it happened since we did this last episode, if not, we should talk about it anyways. You know, was Starship releasing orbit and releasing a bunch of starlings?
Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of crazy Starlink news. I mean, there's that, the deployment of it and Starship being the one to do it, which is obviously a gigantic step forward. And then also the big spectrum buy by Space XSI. We'll see. That's the one I know the least about. Well, I guess starting with the low-hanging fruit, I don't know if this is an unpopular take or not. But regardless of who's behind it or who said it first, I think a rebrand of SI isn't the worst thing in the world. Because I know this much, I am tired of talking about AI because I can't say those letters without people taking all their preconceived grievances about some other thing that isn't the thing I want to talk about. Well, look, as a Sports Illustrated subscriber, we can table this conversation for another day. Yeah, Starlink looking to kind of step up. And there's a reason why, despite whatever misgivings Andrew and I might have had with the IPO and why it was valued or where it was valued. We were long on the company just because when you have nearly exclusive access at their level to space, you can do really interesting things. And with an IPO'd company, you can kind of really make some big splashy purchases and decisions. And that looks like what's happening with Starlink now looking to get into the realm of phone service, of mobile internet service, which, you know, look, there's a long way to go before here or there. But for my money, the things that Elon has been the most successful on historically have been kind of tricky to understand, tricky to figure out big physical engineering problems. It tends to be where he can recruit some of the best talent and he is unafraid to go all in on big solutions. So, I don't know. It's a really interesting place for that company, in my opinion.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I think that, you know, we, you know, it's weird because we are in this position of, like, telling people we think the space-based data centers is bullshit. And inference is another thing. If they want to put a bunch of, like, GPUs on satellites and have it serve low latency stuff, that's fine. I don't, there's a lot of economics where that doesn't make sense. But the idea of data centers and running training runs in space just doesn't make sense because of the space between satellites. But bullish overall on when you have cheap access to space, all the other stuff. But that's the harder thing. It's funny because, like, you have to sell it to Wall Street. Data centers are big. Data centers are space, free energy. Like, oh, yeah, we like that. Don't pay attention to physics. If you're trying to sell them, like, well, you know, when we have access to space, we could build all kinds of materials, do all kinds of stuff. And they're like, eh, I don't know, Ag Head. I don't know about that. You kind of have to sell them on the Bolts, the BS, to get to the actual thing, which we're going to start seeing a lot of that. And so, yeah, just to mention this, they bought a bunch of Spectrum, which is the current Spectrum for Starlink satellites is you need line of sight. They have to be able to see, you know, be directly, like, pointed at a dish. Doesn't work indoors. Well, they bought Spectrum, which can go through buildings and stuff. Don't know how well it'll go, like, deep into whatever, but it is going to be a way to provide – another form of, you know, maybe, you know, they're – I mean, we say cellular, but cellular inherent in the name is the cells, which means small stations, locally, whatever. But cell phone-type service, like, literally straight to your phone, you'd be sitting in your office and be able to get a call. How much of it we'll be using satellite for versus local? Because, again, a tower is a lot easier to install than a satellite, and I have to go through this a lot, like, but we'll see.
Justin Robert Young: Well, and it also just kind of opens up a lot of different lanes for them. Would it be shocking in a world where this exists for them to come out with hardware for a phone that would be, you know, GrokBot native? You know, you're doing X, Y, and Z? Like, that seems like something that would be a possibility, you know, but that's even terrestrial. I think the reason why I'm still long on SpaceX AI is just, like, you know, what can you do when you own the railroad to the undiscovered frontier? Even if that undiscovered frontier is a lot of, you know, kind of bare and expanse, there's still asteroids, there's a lot. There's a lot you can do. You can, you can, anything that you can do or anybody else can think of, you're going to get a tax on. So that's pretty, that's pretty valuable in my opinion. I think that you really hit upon something, Andrew, when you pointed out that it's like, man, look, there's, there's numbers and dollars and cents and maximizing. Like, we're at the part where they've already invented the railroad, where they've already invented railways, they've already connected the golden spike or whatever. And then it's like, well, what are you selling? It's like more of that, exponentially more for smaller and smaller gaps until finally all of America is covered. And it's like, eh, got anything else? It's like bar cars. They're like, all right, now we're talking luxury rides, smoother, faster, whatever. And so even if, like, for example, I guess as long as this parallel makes more sense when I think about it, you know, Amtrak very famously came out with much faster trains and the overall speeds improved. Not at all because fully 60% of all of the coverage of the rail networks had enough of a curve at it that all, that whatever engine was pulling the train, they were all going at the max speed on that. But selling faster trains is what loosens up those pocketbooks. And I can see that kind of happening with the data sensors in space versus the more important thing of total coverage for everybody who wants Internet anywhere on the planet.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, and I'll add to you, let me kind of say to you, like, I live in an area I don't have cell phone coverage, literally this tiny little valley, middle of the Bay Area, no cell phone. There are parts of San Francisco, parts of this area. I would say that I was remiss in how good conventional cellular coverage is because we've all been to places where you see buildings in civilization and your cell phone doesn't work. And that's a frustrating thing because economically, they're like, eh, we could add one more tower, but we won't. And so I'd say that's an advantage of, you know, of satellite-based phone is, you know, I would be able to make, I think there'll probably be a service that switches between cell and satellite. But, heck, you know, would I pay an extra $10 a month to know that I could always get my...
Justin Robert Young: Boy, the brief amount of lag that we just experienced. Like it was a commercial for the service itself. Like it was a commercial. That was amazing. Indeed. Yeah, Andrew, you froze right in the middle of you explaining the point for which you were making.
Andrew Mayne: Oh, well, let me switch to my Starlink then.
Justin Robert Young: Switch to Starlink. Well, while Andrew's doing that, I want to change the subject a little bit because here's something that we have not mentioned on this program. And that is the plague, my friends. What the hell is happening? Are we about to like... I saw some people that were getting excited because GTA 6 is coming out next month and they might get a pandemic so they can play through all of it in their house. Guys, I don't think... I mean, at least I'm in Texas this time. Like I would prefer to be in Texas for this than something else. But what are we doing? What's happening? Are we believing it? Are we not believing it? What is going on? I need to throw it around the panel. Because by the way, there were a few podcasts that were out here at the very beginning of COVID that was talking about this thing that was happening in China. And the fact that they were building hospitals in three days because they were dealing with so many people. And that was this podcast. We were very early on every step of that entire thing. So what do we think? Let's throw it around. First of all, I want to be on the record that when it comes to plagues, I avoid them. I avoid them like my mind fails. Don't say it because you know you're going to have to say it a million times if this happens. You know, save those. Save those because you're going to need them. All right. No, I actually am ill-informed. I know that somebody got the plague in Russia. This is normally, quite literally, Andrew Maine would be the first person I would call on this.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I mean, the reports were that, get this, a facility, a pathogen research facility experimenting with, you know, gain of function, was trying it with the plague virus. Apparently, some people got sick and they had to shut down some hospitals. Then there was kind of a bit of a news blackout. But that's never happened before, according to smartest people I know. We've never actually had a major outbreak. It was natural. We didn't bother to find out where it came from because it was natural. Why would you bother looking at this? Why would you even care to look for an extra origin when we told you it's natural, guys? Andrew Maine. Why do you hate science?
Justin Robert Young: Well, so, but this one is unambiguously from a gain of function research lab. So we at least get, I mean, it's sketchy. It's a Russian wet market.
Andrew Mayne: Literally, no, there's literally. With the Mahjong parlor. That's what people forget, by the way. I came from a wet market with a big Mahjong parlor. And it's one golf swing away from a certain lab. But, you know.
Justin Robert Young: No, there's, look, we don't know exactly what has happened. We do know a few things. There was a Facebook post of a woman who worked in a lab who died that the Facebook or whatever the social media post within Russia said that she died of the plague. And then that was edited to say she might have died of the plague. Then there was kind of a news blackout after there were a few hospitals that were shut down. Russia came out and said that people were being treated with an antibiotic regimen, but that things are under control. They have not admitted that it happened because this woman worked at a plague lab. Could have happened anywhere. There apparently have been isolated cases of this in that region of like Siberia and Mongolia and some of the more remote regions where people have eaten animals that were not properly cooked that have gotten something along these lines. But this obviously in a dense area next to the place where they're experimenting with the plague would be eye-raising and certainly memorable to many of us who went through this thing that happened in 2020 in case you need your head jogged.
Andrew Mayne: And again, I don't want to belabor the point too much, but if you've been paying attention, reading emails and everything else like this, new emails surfaced about Fauci and the Ebola, like an Ebola treatment that he said, oh, this is great, really good. And probably like, this is terrible. It's not good, but I just need to support the science, you know, like just this pattern. And the 1977 Russian flu, that was a big outbreak, you know, a big, big pandemic outbreak flu, that virus, the H1 virus that they trained it was like an exact copy of one from the 1950s, which the only way you can explain that was it was pulled out of a freezer. Yeah, mucked around with. Yeah, and that's been kind of attributed to like, yeah, that was a lab leak. Doesn't get, because you hear lab leak, people like, oh, your tinfoil hat, your COVID denier, whatever. It's like, let's put all that on the side. Let's put all of that aside. Let's just, you know, you know, 1941, you know, they're putting people in the gas chambers. You're a conspiracy theorist. They're not doing that. Nobody would do that. Well, I mean, the lab leak thing.
Justin Robert Young: And I swear, we're not going to play the reruns on this much longer, but like, they happen all the time. They happen all the time. I'm just, they have happened in the past. They will happen in the future. It's why we need to have not only maximum safety, but I would say also maximum transparency. That if you want to do research like this, then we need to be in a world where you are being as open and honest as possible. And unfortunately, both what happened in China and now what's happening now is we're dealing with countries that don't have an incentive to be maximum honest. They don't have a free press.
Andrew Mayne: Even here, Fauci and his colleagues literally said, let's not talk here because it's going to be freedom of information. We literally got the, literally, and it goes out there like, and it's frustrating. And people are like, you can defend it, but you can't say they're being open or transparent or telling us what they actually thought, which they weren't. And that's the problem here is nothing's changed. It's the same people. It's the same community, WHO, et cetera.
Justin Robert Young: So here's the good news about this plague. You want to hear the good news, Brian? Oh, heck yeah. Tell me, is it bespectacled? Does it know disco moves? It's deadlier. Which, which I, look, I've played plague LLC. And as a result, I know that that's a harder way to play the game because you, you, to play this game. And by the way, I think, is it plague Inc. or plague LLC? Plague. So it's deadlier, Brian. And the reason why that's good news is because it doesn't have as long of an incubation period. That was the big tricky thing with COVID was that it had this very long, very camouflaged incubation period. And so spreading it was very hard to contain because you didn't know that you had it at the time that you were spreading it. By the time that you were actually kind of acting sick, it was, you'd probably been spreading it for days at that point. This is like an incubation period of a day. So, you know, we're getting to this probably about a week and a half after the first report of it, maybe even a little longer. And there is an argument to say that if we have not heard about outbreaks and cases in some of the places where planes had left from that remote city, then we might be okay. Just because the incubation period on this goes so fast. And while it does kill faster and it will kill you dead if you don't get antibiotics into you, we might be okay. We might already be okay. Yeah, the game that I was trying to access, it is called Plague Inc. I recommend you guys play it because it gives you a sense of the kind of the laws of gravity when it comes to infectious diseases. You want something that's highly infectious, but also doesn't really show itself for a long time. And then when it does, it's real bad, real fast.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I'm not a fan. I think that we need to be vigilant. I think that we need to also not fall, again, I don't want to say don't fall for both. You don't know, like just not fall for every crazy idea, but not throw out every idea. You know, not just reject things because it's coming from one group or the other. Just because the government says it doesn't mean it's a lie. Just because the government says it's a lie doesn't mean it's a lie. You know, and I think also like all tone down our sort of response to things and be kind of cool headed. I was frustrated when COVID first started because I have a friend who's a science writer. One of the first things he said like, hey, I don't think this is going to be a big deal because we can isolate these things and figure this stuff out really quickly. What he didn't count on was, we will say, a lot of misinformation from the scientific community about what was being caused and a lot of information from being withheld, which documented, and things that we were told, it's fomite, it's on the surface, as they knew by the time they said that it wasn't. Remember when we told we don't need masks?
Justin Robert Young: Oh, yeah. As a matter of fact, you were a bad person if you were using masks because those belonged to a hallowed, baroved person.
Andrew Mayne: And then when you did use a mask, you were belittled for using a mask, although in certain small situations, mask is fine. If you're going to be in a room for six hours, like, yeah, no, masks are going to be useless. But, you know, for short periods of time, yeah, masks are fine. It's why they're used. But the idea that there's some magical, you know, thing that keeps it away. And we caught both sides of what I thought was sort of frustrating. Like, oh, the masks don't work. I'm like, I can show you the data that shows there's a certain amount of help for it. But you're right. It's not a magic perfume. It's frustrating. But anyhow, my favorite thing was there was a science writer, like Yahoo Science or something like that, is talking to a doctor. And they said, yeah, listen, there, it's not, I don't think it's going to be an issue. You know, there were only like 16 cases, you know, only like 16 cases this week. And there were four last week. It doesn't seem like that's many. And I'm like, um, that's terrible by this rate. You know, you know, like I said, if you're telling me that because this rate, if you look at the rate at which it's spreading and, and they're like, well, this is what they said, whatever kind of thing. And then like, of course, a month later, we're in a lockdown. And I'm like, yeah, like maybe, you know, let's keep our heads.
Justin Robert Young: So, yeah, I, I got a question for you guys. And, and this is, look, it's too early to panic, but if one were to sketch out.
Andrew Mayne: Never too early to panic, Brian. Never too early.
Justin Robert Young: Well, but it isn't too early to think ahead of, of, of possible things. Like that's a real conundrum. We're just coming out of a failed dress rehearsal for an infectious plague pandemic. And so we all have recency biases for who, for, you know, what we just saw, we're all going to assume. And given the fact that the problem was poor communication before, how do you, like, like, how can any institutions possibly get people on board when everybody can select their own version of reality? I, I don't know. And I'm asking from a practical standpoint. I think, I think honestly, the biggest difference is COVID was also very uniquely, it was, as if it were designed to sow discontent. Uh, it was deadly. It was mostly deadly with people that had either, they were old and, and kind of infirmed or had comorbidities. Right. So if you are just a human, and I'm not saying this is right or good or moral, right. But if you look around to everybody that you see, I think it is human instinct to say, okay, if I, if I am healthy and I get sick, will I die? Or if my child gets sick, will they die? Those are the two most primary things. And if you don't have a comorbidity and you're not old, then you don't think that that's going to be as big of a deal. And eventually that will shape the discourse, uh, especially if there are blanket mitigation efforts that are put on, put on everybody. I said in the beginning, if, if COVID killed children, there would be cops with guns making sure that nobody left their house for a month. Like it, I think it would be a very, very different public conversation, but we knew fairly early on that if you were young and healthy, it wasn't going to affect you in the same kind of way. And whether or not that wound up filtering its way as fast as it should have to authorities that were, uh, you know, figuring out mitigation efforts, that's another question. But like, we knew it, the humans knew it. And I think that caused a lot of the angst. If this does injure everybody on a level that is different than COVID, uh, 19 did. And so I think we, you know, we would, um, I think we would react differently. And also because the incubation period is so short, uh, there would actually be, I think, probably a better argument for a shorter, harder lockdown, but like, I don't know. I don't know how you sell it right now. I guess there, there is the tactical advantage of if this is a known critter with known rates of behavior, then that, that empowers folks to make better informed decisions.
Andrew Mayne: I don't, I don't know. I mean, the problem we saw, you know, even as a short incubation, the problem, in the nineties, we worried a lot about this stuff because of air travel. And, and, you know, in 12 hours, I can be on an airplane and sitting in a stadium. And, and that's, that's the issue where it gets kind of scary. It's one thing when people are limited on foot and how far they move. So Siberia is, you know, at least it's Siberia is even by plane is 12 hours from anywhere, but, uh, that's the challenge. And also lockdowns were a joke from the beginning, you know, from, we watched all of our politicians not do them. You would see certain countries that were doing super, super strict lockdowns and still get breakouts because you'd find out the track, certain politicians and other people. And you'd find out like, yeah, not for you, you know, not, not for me, but for you, um, I, I, I don't know. I, I don't, I don't know. I don't know what you do. I don't know. I think you just, you just, you know, let, you know, and we had the last time too, like, you know, I know more elderly people that died after the shot than died from COVID. But I'm not making any statement to how I feel about the shot. I've, I've been, MDs tell me they refuse the shot and I'm like, well, shucks, I'm not an MD. What do I know? You know? And that was the hard part was a lot of people saying this and tell us different things. And so.
Justin Robert Young: Yeah, I, I, I, I think that we would be hurt the most not having done a full truth and reconciliation as to how we handled COVID if we were to face it again. Because part of the reason why COVID was what it was, was because we drew up a pandemic plan because George W. Bush read a book about the Spanish flu and was, you know, went to his, his team. This is late into his second term. And he went to his team and said, Hey, what happens if this happens tomorrow? And so they drew up a lot of stuff that was based on lessons that were learned during the Spanish flu. No, I'm not, not to question the infallibility of George W. Bush, who otherwise never made a mistake in his presidency. But like, I don't know whether or not all of those lessons were applicable to 2020. I don't know if they are the right lessons going forward. I would say that there's a lot that we could learn right, wrong, indifferent from, Hey, what worked? What didn't work? Now that we're a few years out, how fast did the economy come back? How fast did the economy not come back? What do we know we're sacrificing for sure if we do this and what changes based on what we just saw? We haven't done it. And I do think, and this is where I will do, you know, to use a, a medical metaphor, a pox on both of our houses in terms of the political will. There has not been much of a desire to do a real thorough independent, let's open up the, the, you know, all the cabinets and, and take a look at what we were talking about internally, what we said publicly and, and get some rules of the road going forward. We've done it in fits and starts and it's largely, largely happened by way of, you know, partisan desires, which I'm glad that the information's out there, but I don't think that it brings us to any kind of national understanding in the way that say the 9-11 report gave us at least a touchstone that we could work off of. And we are poorer for it and we're more, and we're poorer for it now when we look at like, wow, could we be facing another one of these this quick? Boy, it'd be nice if we had learned some lessons.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. The, and that's my, like, it's a great question because I, like, it's frustrating because like a lot of people, like the regular, I would say mainstream media hasn't covered the Rand Paul hearings like at all. And like, like I asked people, I have no awareness what all the document disclosures, all the stuff that just show how the system fell apart. Takeaways from, you know, the 9-11 hearings were one of the biggest ones was, you know, in the 90s, we put together, we put this wall between FBI and CIA, domestic and international for a reason that sort of made sense at the time is we didn't, we, we, because part of, part of the real reason was, is we gave, we gave, you know, you know, our foreign intelligence agencies, all these incredible powers of wiretapping, all the sorts of stuff that we didn't want being used domestically, right? So they said, okay, we'll put this wall in between there about what information gets there. But then you had people like, hey, we wiretapped, you know, some people from outside, inside the U.S. doing some very suspicious stuff, can report it at the FBI. If it's like, we don't want it, we can't handle it. And, and it created this very, very sticky situation. We now have, for better or for worse, a system of which that information theory can go backwards and forwards. So, you know, we probably lost a ton of our freedoms and all that when it comes to privacy and stuff, although we can still use encryption stuff, which is the other side of it. But that was one of the big things that came out from there is we had two different groups that were not talking to each other. There may be some better medium, definitely a better one than where we have now, but at least that stuff gets reported. You notice, you know, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of terrorism stuff kind of, kind of moved outside or it became lone wolf kind of stuff after that. But, um, bigger plots are a little bit harder, whatever reason. But anyhow, the idea now is, do we see that cooperation? I don't think we have that. We have some agencies that have come out internally and said, yeah, we think COVID was a lab leak. Other ones like Hammond Hall, whatever. There's not that kind of communication. There's not that kind of transparency. There's not this ability, you know, to sort of say, hey, I screwed up. Let's fix this. You're still incentivized to cover things up, which is really what scares me more than anything else.
Justin Robert Young: Yeah, well, and I guess that's, uh, it's, you know, oftentimes knowing there's a problem is the first step to fixing it. But I feel like we all know there's a problem and I, for one, have no idea how to fix it.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I mean, I think it's transparency and stuff. I think that it's like we, we had a number of people going out of their way on our end to hide stuff, to obfuscate. And I'm not, I'm not after like war crimes trials, but I want that exposed and offered and to tell like, hey, listen, if you do this sort of thing, if you go out of your, if you're a public official.
Justin Robert Young: If I'm hearing, if I'm hearing this, it's like, if we increase the social cost to deceive the American populace, and even if it's in retrospect by, by, uh, by airing all, if, if we establish that, look, man, tell a fib, you're going to get found out. If there's something you knew at this point, uh, your best strategy becomes to tell what you know while you know it. Right. I think, I think, I think part of it though, is you need the system to be willing to turn the sunshine in on itself. And, and what we saw over the COVID situation was you had a lot of very entrenched bureaucracies that believed, had diluted, in my opinion, had diluted themselves to the purity of their own mission to the point where they would engage not only in willful deception, but also an ongoing coverup. Because they would afraid, they were afraid it would erode the larger, uh, uh, mission going forward. And then it became grafted on political parties because that's a great way. If you need fighters, then align yourself politically one way or another and make it a wedge issue where people are going to fight about it. And now you're not going to get anything close to a consensus where the system says, hey, we're the CDC, we're the NIH, or sorry, not the NIH. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the NIH. Um, we're going to do a gigantic after action report. We're turning over everything that we possibly can. And we're going to, to, you know, look for things that would otherwise be going to intelligence agencies to make sure that we can declassify everything that's possible to declassify. So we can understand our own process and you can understand why we made the decisions that we made, why we made the recommendations that we made, how we communicated to all of your local officials that were making the other thing. Cause that was another big question is like, all right, well, Dr. Fauci goes out on television and says that there's a certain level of immunity that needs to happen. How does that affect what happens in my neighborhood? If I live in California or Texas or Connecticut or Florida, like there was a lot of opaque element where nobody wanted to take credit or blame for it. And I think that we do need to have that. And right now we don't have that system. We still have a system where you have bureaucracies that really want to protect themselves. And I don't think that it's an evil thing from a motivation standpoint. I think that they do genuinely believe that they are doing the most important work. And so they, that the things they need to do are only because other people are trying to do even meaner things, but boy, do I hate it. And that's the only way I think that it changes is if you incentivize the system to audit itself.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, we have, what became very clear is how much it went to protect. Like we didn't, it was like independent researchers that pointed out that Wuhan applied for gain of function research grants from the EcoHealth Alliance. So we provided grant support to them in the past that we had our own, we'd had our own misgivings about the quality of the lab, but we continue to fund them. That was not disclosed openly. That was things that people had to dig out and find that sort of stuff, which is scary. It's scary that if some concerned people didn't say, let's go find out what's going on there, we wouldn't know. You know, and it's, it's, I don't know. Well, you can go away. My last thing is like, I do, you've said this before, you know, years ago, Michael Shermer kind of warned about the, the idea of scientism and said, you know, like, ask me what I thought. And I'm like, well, I think anything pro science is great. Like, why is that a problem? Yay, science, whatever. And I did, I was young and naive and didn't quite understand really what that meant. And that meant that anything that clothes itself in science, whether it's a PhD or an institution or whatever, we often just take, well, these are scientists. And why would I be skeptical of that? We forget these are people with motivations like we do, and they have their own incentives. And I certainly am going to give more credibility to somebody with a PhD than without in an area of that person's PhD. But it's not complete and automatic. You know, it's not, it's not a thing that I say, oh, I can't question it. I would be hesitant to without good reason. And I think that's a thing that I think was very frustrating. I think that it's sort of been a political divide to some people. Like, why would you quite like, I believe science. It's like science is a tool. I believe the tool works.
Justin Robert Young: I think public health is very unfortunately dictated by the public, which means you need to understand the public's perspective. And, you know, Brian and I were at an event not too long ago where there were people getting an award, and I refused to stand up. I was very interested. It was, it was, I was, man, I was proud of Justin because he resisted a magnetic pull to do like the rest of the group did. It's, I think that, that try, the tribalistic instinct is so magnetically powerful. And of course, and that one, I legit don't know how to fix because, I mean, that, that's as old as mankind group is. Well, the thing, the thing that really I would ever critique with the people that were getting the award, and I don't even want to name them because I don't want to be a thing here. But like, I think that they meaningfully eroded public trust in how our government communicates these things. And I think that that's incredibly dangerous. And to demonize and to talk down to people when there's something this important on the line is reckless. Is it, I mean, when, if and when this were to happen again, I'm going to the Rizzler, and I'm asking the Rizzler what his followers are saying. I need to understand. I don't want to give celebrities a, a script to read from, and then shame them if they don't, and exile them if they don't. Like, this is something that needs to exist in a real world where everybody needs to hear a thing that matters to them, and they need to be heard. And that's the biggest problem that we had was that the, the science, the communicators were, in my opinion, extraordinarily flawed. And, and, and, uh, I think it, the, the, the tail wagged the dog. I think our, our response was also flawed. Like, and then it became about digging in, in a very political way, in the way that, like, if your candidate's missing for 14 days, you stand there and say he has the flu. If your candidate cheated on his wife and then got divorced on biblical grounds, you say he's a good public servant and he's a good father. Like, these are just how, random examples, just told from the ether, not. I'm a very creative man who comes up with, these are right from the dome. That makes sense. You, but like, you do that politically because you're in actual information warfare. And I understand that it can be messy and I understand that it can be uncomfortable to tell the truth when you're trying to deal with a very large population on something very serious. But the cost of not doing it is them just tuning you out. And that's what I would worry about the most if, let's say, something deadlier were to come from Russia with love, is that now there's a segment of the population that just doesn't believe the government at all, whatsoever. And you want to know what? They got reason to.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I remember when you guys, that event came up and I was pinging you guys. It's like, it was just, it was very much a, let's circle the wagons around these guys that we agree with because they're like us.
Justin Robert Young: And circle would be the way that I started a phrase that I would describe.
Andrew Mayne: Anyhow, on the bright news.
Speaker 02: On the bright side.
Andrew Mayne: Oh, I mean, I'll tell you, okay, what's cool. I'll tell you, no, I'll give you the bright side, okay? We have entered an era of incredible acceleration with the capabilities of AI. Had we had Codex, ChatGPT, Claude six years ago, I think it would have, I've seen us personally, like the acceleration and scientific development and research. I think we're, one, it could find some dangerous stuff for us maybe before we want it, but I think it'd help us a lot too. There's, this has been a very big week for science. On one hand, you know, Zuckerberg, Mark and Priscilla Zuckerberg, you know, donated like a billion plus dollars to an initiative for open public health, open health data, open science data for like biology. Part of their biohub initiative, like cure all disease. And that's been a big thing. Other companies can, I think, Anthropic contributed. Other ones have done that, which is great. And opening, I dropped a bunch of math proofs, like 300 plus math proofs in some really significant ones. And, man, the mathematics community handled it totally well. Totally a great example of how science should embrace new science.
Justin Robert Young: Give us a window into this, because not everybody is either a following, like I'm following it in the AI adjacent version of it, where it's largely a bunch of AI people that are very excited that this tech is capable. And many of them are engineers and very math focused. But, but you are more dialed in on this. Explain what is happening in the larger conflict.
Andrew Mayne: So they went in and they looked at a lot of open problems or questions in math. And they worked with a group of mathematicians to say, okay, we, we, we've used AI to come up with really interesting, sometimes solutions or observations of these problems. Mostly things, very, very complicated stuff. I watched the, I watched the explainer video and then I need an explainer video for the explainer video, you know, about some of these things. But some of the stuff is, you know, some of the stuff we see in the simplest stuff like packing, you know, how, what's the maximum way you can fit squares into something? Like how, like, are there more efficient ways to factor certain things? There have been some very, very interesting things they found that actually may have some applications to it. And some mathematicians, a lot of them like, this is great. Some other people, there's a group that just popped up, which is like the association of like human mathematicians. They start off like, we did not ask for this. I'm like, I was in there. They're literally in their life. We did not ask. Mathematicians did not ask for this. I'm like, what a great way to say. We did not want this knowledge. And there's, there's a criticism from mathematicians because they're like, well, these are a bunch of proofs that are kind of messy and whatever. And the job of a mathematician is to try to make these proofs more explainable and do all this sort of stuff. And I'm like, guess what? That job's still there. You know, I saw something that made its way around. Imagine if there was a, you know, a dig, you know, paleontology dig where they dug up, you know, 100 meters of ground and just shook it out. All the bones fell out. You know, like, that's what happened here. I'm like, no, that's destructive. Math is still there. You can go back and check the math. Nothing got destroyed. All we did was get some x-rays and some other stuff of what's in the ground here. Maybe it's kind of fuzzy for you. Maybe it's not quite as clear. Guess what? You can still go put in there, but you know where to dig now.
Justin Robert Young: And it also, more importantly, it informs the path going forward. You now have an option where you can avoid accidentally sawing right through important stuff because you have a hint. You know where to dig. And as we've seen with YouTube, you know, somebody will do something amazing where they'll balance seven chairs instead of six on their nose. And the moment that it's proven that somebody could do it with seven, then 10 minutes later, somebody else does it because it's known for a fact that it's possible. And the number of things that people now, because look, we're all gamblers with our time, energy, and effort. We don't want to pursue dead ends. And the number of well-informed lanes forward just massively continues to explode, which is deeply encouraging.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. I, you know, it's funny. I've heard something like, oh, well, you know, everybody's ridiculing the mathematicians, but wait until it comes for your vocation. I'm like, us three? Like, it's happened multiple times. Oh, yeah.
Justin Robert Young: And I think a lot – we've discussed this on the program, but to anybody who's new, we may come across as callous or unmoved by things. And that is not out of a lack of understanding. It's not out of a caring about the impacts of stuff. But just more from the three of us, if we were to list all of our jobs that we've ever had, all the roles that we've ever had, they would be in the hundreds, and 99% of them, that role no longer exists. In fact, the roles that we play right now on the 1,001st episode of this program are very different roles than we played in the very beginning because all the roles have changed.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I've gone through, like, watching, you know, the changes in the entertainment industry to – I was a guy that did – we, you know, Justin and I made money making magic DVDs. Magic DVDs were great. Really good business. You come up with a thing. You can print it. It costs a buck to produce it. You can come spend time on it. Then file sharing came out, and file sharing destroyed that industry. Like, effectively, everything had to have a gimmick because otherwise nobody would buy it.
Justin Robert Young: A physical gimmick that couldn't be – and then even then, you started being able to 3D print those gimmicks, which changed the calculus.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, and I don't think that kind of survived, but like that, and, you know, it was my attitude. I'm like, this sucks, but the world's better off for having this other thing, and I wasn't like – I didn't go look at anything I said. I never said, stop peer-to-peer. Stop peer-to-peer. Never. Never, even though I think that it hurt a lot of artists and stuff, too. It's funny. There's a thing that shows, like, people are like, why have concert tickets gotten so expensive? Oh, I don't know. Remember, you'll make it up on touring? This is called making it up on touring, folks. You know, like, literally, you can trace the trajectory of revenue. Like, we'll figure it somewhere, and that's the thing. And it's like – I was like, yeah, okay, sucks, but I would never have lobbied or said or pushed to change that, you know, because that's not right. That's restrictive. I don't want to, you know, people – other people benefit from these kinds of technologies, whether it's, you know, making free phone calls, whatever. You know, the internet. The internet was very damaging in some respects to, like, my magic business, but, you know, okay, I'll take the benefit.
Justin Robert Young: You know, it took a while. I think that we've always been extremely populist when it comes to information. You know, even the first segment of this very program we talked about, like, give people the actual truth to play with. And, you know, when I get in the most trouble, take Scam School or what have you, it's because some people would very much like to have fewer competitors. And meanwhile, that's great for a magician but not good for magic. And so the got you that people loved to hit me with during the Scam School, peak Scam School days was, would you like it if I taught how your tricks were done? And I said, there is literally not one thing in my entire stage show that I've not already taught on this program. And now, not directly. I didn't show the routine and then say, it's just this. But there is not one – I left nothing on the table. And it's because I knew that I had to have the courage of my own convictions on that. And I feel like everybody else on this panel has done the same. Yeah, I think the problem with this specific issue with the mass stuff is kind of endemic to what I would see from the LLM revolution at its very beginning. And really, the reason why there are kind of two frontier labs that are running ahead of anybody else is because the LLM revolution has had a contentious relationship with academia from the very beginning, largely because there were a lot of very, very, very smart, extraordinarily educated people who were in positions of academic tenure that did not believe this was the way forward for this technology. And quite frankly, they were wrong. Like, it turns out scaling up LLMs is a huge part of where we are going as a society. And that's what it is. Now, why does that matter? It matters because there are some companies that hired some of those really great minds that had a longer time getting out of the gate because they wouldn't redouble their efforts to go where the puck was going. And that's why OpenAI benefited. That's why then anthropics splitting out of OpenAI had benefited. They knew where the North Star was and they were running to it. They didn't have to have an internal battle over their priors. They had their own internal battles, but at least they were on the path going forward. And so now you have a field, not the last, by the way, but right now it's math, that they are dropping crazy proofs, like just insane things that would be people's entire careers that they would spend working on these kinds of things. And what they see is a loss of that time. In the same way that, to use the archaeologist metaphor, there would be X amount of time spent on applying for a grant and Y amount of time scouting an area and Z amount of time getting the staff up. And then you would see whether or not the bones were where you thought they were. And instead, somebody just found the Minecraft god map and said, oh, here are where all the bones are all over the world. Now, to Andrew's point, yeah, you still got to dig them up. There's still a lot of work to be done. There still is a huge field. You still have time. But it's not what they thought. And I think we're, buckle up, we're going to see more of this in certain fields that are there for, to kind of, you know, think about these things in capital letters.
Andrew Mayne: Two things, too, that are interesting. One is that when they did the previous Navier Stokes, they talked about using, you know, thousands of agents and stuff and huge compute cost. And a question that got asked was, they just did that. Did you need as much, did you need all of that to go do it? For these, they said they used the equivalent of just asking, like, a GPT, whatever the current internal model pro version was and gave it one prompt. And it did that. So the cost of doing this were way, way less. In the results, you know, another mathematician looked at this and came up in an evaluation. It was very interesting, very useful. If you were going to try to solve a lot of math problems, there's a certain category of math problem that was very underrepresented there.
Speaker 02: Brian, you want to guess?
Justin Robert Young: I have no idea.
Andrew Mayne: Cryptographic. Oh, dear. As in, like, attentionally, let's not try to go break or do that. And also, you know, the cryptographic stuff is one of the things that the government will say, you can't release this. You can't publish this. And that's the thing is the realization that, you know, we've already realized that certain protocols may actually be solvable, you know, with, you know, human level amount or, you know, meaning, you know, not impossible levels of compute. And that's a very interesting thing is that that's the thing that the labs are now going to have to say, okay, do we want to publish that we figured out a way to crack this key or there's some sort of way that it could be done faster, et cetera, which gets into another tricky sort of area.
Justin Robert Young: Because if there's a way to crack a certain key or what have you, then there's it's we get into kind of philosophical notions of a platonic truth. There is a platonic truth out there that this code can be broken. But there's an artificial barrier where it's like anybody who figures it out, let's say some men in black say you're going to not release that. That doesn't change the fact that now anybody can press a button and say over there, is there a platonic truth that isn't being discussed about? And they could they could keep on finding it.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I mean, the idea is that that's real. And the idea is to say that, hey, you should probably change your codes now is the kind of the thing like because that that's sort of what the purpose it can serve is that because if I say, hey, there is one string of numbers that will train Brian Brushwood's bank accounts into your own untraceably completely in a matter of seconds. I'm going to tell Brian and say, Brian, we're going to we're going to try to hold off on this for a while, but people are going to figure it out after a certain point.
Justin Robert Young: And what's interesting, it's like as as we hear the chatter surrounding Q day, the day that quantum compute makes it possible to break a whole bunch of things. I would think that just the confidence that that day was coming would completely undermine all cryptocurrency markets and so on. But I I can understand that we already know what's on the other side of it. It's just another you know, maybe it's as simple as one time pads that are locked in a physical safe somewhere. We just go back to a case where, yes, a robot could break it, but it would have to send other armed robots in to rob the bank to get the piece of paper that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I. I know where a crypto guy lives and he has a guy who heads a crypto firm and he has 24 hour security in his driveway. I believe it. It's so it's like not anywhere. I know a guy. I've seen it. And yeah, because that that becomes the other vector. So, yeah, I am excited because I think that we are now I've been using for the last week or so. I've been using Astra for 3D printing and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. There is incredibly capable of doing that. And I think we're going to be entering in this era of of building things. And I'm excited about physical. I know a lot of people in the air are now buying 3D printers. I think that we're going to be exciting the times ahead of us.
Justin Robert Young: I think that so here's here's a take that I only now am having the courage to say out loud. But when we were very, very young, you know, one of my favorite episodes of the Modern Rogue was when we pulled out the old Radio Shack 201 kit. And what I loved about that and what the it is, the single most commented upon piece of media in the history of this channel. And every comment looks the same. I had one of these as a kid led me to become an electrical engineer, led me to become a quantum physicist, whatever. But what is gorgeous about that thing is that it's it's something you could put in your hand and understand. Wire goes in here. Variable comes out. You can twist the knob. You can change the amount of light, et cetera, et cetera. That deeply experienced understanding opened up a world of otherwise extremely dense electronics and electrical engineering in the lives of an entire generation. For a while, when when our generation was in college, when we were shortly out of school, everything was integrated circuits, everything. You could open a thing and stare at the components, but only an extreme rare group of people versant in various scripting languages could dare to repurpose anything like essentially once something broke, it broke and you threw it away and bought another one. And what we're seeing now just over the last two years with the again, that Promethean moment, that democratization, that populist movement of power and truth into the hands of anybody where I'm reading about this old dot matrix printer hasn't worked since my Apple 2E died. Something something, something, something, something, something, something vibe code, and now it's making stuff again. We I mean, not to toot our own horns, but we called the amount of latent infrastructure out there that's just waiting to have new life breathed into it. Like we're all sitting on pioneer probes in our own backyards, and now we have the ability to tell the wizarding box what to do with it to make it alive again. And I, I, I, I, as excited as I am to see what can change in the world, uh, by solving, you know, your fancy math problems or world, whatever, I'm even more excited to see the second order changes of what happens when my kids generation grow up empowered to do things without intermediaries.
Andrew Mayne: I've got a couple old Macintoshes that like, I never bothered to get rid of that like, eh, like there was, there was an amazing stories episode with Mark Hamill years ago where he kept all the crap from his youth. And then it was all like, you know, rare comic books and stuff. And I had them and then, uh, I got myself a laser cutter, right? Cause why not? It's like $300 to buy a laser cutter. It literally cuts stuff with lasers. Like that's the future. You owe it to my childhood. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, oh, what do I, well, you can take the little SD card. I'm like, that sucks. And I'm like, I really just want to have it on a network and I'm like, oh, I can take my old Mac as long as it runs codecs or just probably just put it in there and connect it to it and let it connect it and run it and just have another codec session run it. And now I've got this, it's a mini network PC, you know, like that just to me, it was like, oh my God, like, wait, wait, wait, wait, walk me through that.
Justin Robert Young: Like, so you had codecs write something that is running on the Mac and now it can control the Mac?
Andrew Mayne: So what I, okay. All I, all I needed was there's a USB input on the, on the, the laser cutter, but I have it in my garage. Okay. Um, and with the, with the laser cutter in my garage, my main computers here, how do I control it? There's no wifi in the laser cutter. Well, I just plug it into an older Mac that has wifi and this Mac talks to that Mac and says, go do this, go do that. And I can just, I can even have codecs running on that other Mac because the intelligence is in the codecs. Got it.
Justin Robert Young: Well, and what's funny is I was thinking all the way back to like a 1984 level Mac and I, and I was trying to picture how that could work. But then just now even speaking it aloud, it's like, we live in an age where you plop down a video camera and you, you attach the literal robot arm over the mouse and keyboard and it can do it. I mean, that's those interfaces are, are suddenly legitimate.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, it's, it's interesting to see like how like we can make use of stuff using, you know, codecs to create apps and stuff. It's amazing. Now, if it's the limits of our imagination, robotics is going to come fast.
Justin Robert Young: Yeah. How do we feel about that? Are you, are you, are you smiling or frowning when you see your first dog patrolling the neighborhood?
Andrew Mayne: I'm, I'm excited. I, I, I look around, like we just, we just had our, our flooring put in, like we just had new stairs and wood floors put in, in our house. Right. And the problem is that we had great guys coming and do it. I've got neighbors that got a backyard construction project. They want to put in a mini, mini putt putt golf course in their backyard. Right. And guys, this thing's been going on for five months. Five month construction project for a very simple project. There are two problems. One is, uh, material, sometimes waiting for materials. Two is the way contractors work is contractors will say, yes, I'll do a thing. And then they'll send as few laborers as they can to get the thing done and keep the project moving along. Cause they don't want to say, no, I can't do it in the three month period that you need it done in. So they'll just say yes to you. And then you find out that these projects just take, they, they will, their fear, they don't want to lose the project. So they'll tell you, and they know that you're not going to bring another product to them for a couple of years anyway. So they don't mind lying to you about how long it takes. That's a common, common thing. And I see this, I have another neighbor that's had for well over a year, you know, like building an ADU in his backyard, incredibly long period of time. Now in a world of robotics, I'm going to call the same dude to do this for me. I'm going to pay him a lot less, but I'm going to call them a lot more often do stuff. There's a lot of stuff I like to do in my house, but I'm not excited about having the contractors for another two weeks, hammering nails and stuff and doing stuff and keeping me awake, whatever. You know, if I could have a robot work crew that only worked when I was out of the house, that would be amazing. And I don't care. I'll pay somebody to do this, to do this. And that guy will make as much or more money as before. I think that people don't understand there are way more things that we want fixed in the world than are being fixed right now. If we made a list, if everybody made a list of all the things you want to have done around your house from a construction point alone, that list is never going to end. And by the time you get everything done, you're going to do that. I think we have to look what real abundance means. Real abundance doesn't mean we reach perfection, we're done. Real abundance means I change it all the time and keep going from there. So I'm excited. I think robotics will create even more opportunity than before because there's stuff I just don't do now because it'll take forever. It'll take too long or it's, it's, I would pay 2000 for this, but not 20,000.
Justin Robert Young: I just look at what happens, what opens up when you unlock a thing that had been locked by constraints before. How much of our reality is constructed by just a bottleneck that doesn't, you know, really say anything about us as a society or as humans. It's just some law of economics that certain things can't get here at a certain speed. And what happens when you change that? What happens when you have things that are available for cheaper? What happens when you have things that are available faster? What happens, you know, like, I know this is what I think has been, the reason why you see so many true believers about AI and LLMs is because people have felt a change in their day-to-day life based on how this technology is being used and their capability because of it. What happens when that's open to physical things too, when it's not just knowledge work, like that's, what is Brian's, Brian has a property that he can either maintain once or twice a year if he's got the money and he knows that he has company coming, or if he knows that he's not throwing events on the property, then it's going to get a little shaggy. And then when something happens, you can bring somebody in to, to mow it. What happens when there's three robots that can actually clear brush every single day? How much does it look like Disneyland? Now does it make Brian say, oh, actually, you want to know what? This place looks amazing. I've always gotten emails from people that love scam school that they want to have, you know, a birthday party or something like that. I can now open this up and now I don't have to think of like, oh, I got to call on Elisa and I got to talk to this person. And I don't want someone to trip and I wonder if it's a legal thing if we have kids running around the back acre. No, you could literally do all of the same safety automation that Disney has in a cheap way that you would have never thought of before because the cost would have been so prohibitive. There's just a lot that kind of gets unlocked and it just reminds me of eras of great expansion in our past. Like, what was the world before the interconnected highway system? None of us know. None of us really have any idea what that was like before it was very cheap and easy to go do it.
Andrew Mayne: Killed a small town, though. That was the motor lodge and all these other things. Like, it's interesting. You'll start to, we forget that there was an entire economy of like really cheap motor lodges or things like this outside towns because we need travel. Because when it took you, you know, four days to go from L.A. to Fresno by car, even, you had to sleep somewhere and that. But those places also became, you know, places of ill repute and whatnot. Like, literally, there was an entire economy that we forgot about. Like, small towns that exist that don't exist anymore. Pardon me. I'm excited there. That's the change that happened, you know.
Justin Robert Young: But even that, you know, when I'm in Ohio, my wife's family lives just outside of Mansfield, right? And Mansfield is, you know, the town square looks like Back to the Future. Like, it is very much that kind of model of like this idyllic 1950s Americana, you know, small, sometimes ethnic town in Ohio, Pennsylvania. Like, that area. And it's fallen on harm times because it used to be powered by factories that don't exist anymore, right? But like, what happens when you've got robots that can maintain all these buildings? What happens when now what used to be, there's this old high school, I think it's a high school. It looks like a high school. But like, it's, it is right out of central casting. Like, a big, you know, circle, like, but it looks like an old high school from a movie or something like that. Like, what happens when that could be a hotel? What, and the retrofitting of it isn't going to take three years. It's going to take six months because you're able to do it. Like, I don't know. It just opens up so many different possibilities. Because Mansfield is only like an hour outside of Cleveland. You can very much commute. You can commute to Cleveland or to Columbus from there. But like, what if you were able to live in a balling ass house? And it was just that much easier. And it was that much cooler. There's more stuff to do locally. I don't know. I just think it just opens up so many things that we haven't even thought of.
Andrew Mayne: There are a lot of businesses and things that we like, you know, comic book shops or record stores or stuff like that, that are very hard to operate because of the cost of rent and labor and these other things. But when you can use robotics and stuff like that to lower the cost of that stuff, you make these things more viable. But a lot of businesses today, like four guys, you know, three guys talking on a podcast, you know, as a business, sounded crazy as in 15 years ago.
Speaker 02: Yeah.
Andrew Mayne: You know, somebody says, we're going to have the kids grow up and never know what the world was like before AI. Kids don't know what the world was like before the cell phone. I don't know what the world was like before YouTube.
Justin Robert Young: I was fascinated to find out that my dad had memories without television. I couldn't even conceive of it. Yeah.
UNKNOWN: Yeah.
Justin Robert Young: I mean, my daughter, my daughter's not going to know a world before AI. Like the way we motivate her to brush her teeth is that we make a picture of her and a cow from a Spanish children's song that she likes every morning. Every morning. I'm like a little IP theft as motivation. No, original IP. Original IP.
Andrew Mayne: Okay.
Justin Robert Young: We have created our own very distinct IP. It's a, it's a, it's a common song. We've invented our own thing around it. Get out of here, cop. Wearing a wire. Uh, uh, no, like every morning I'll be like, Hey, do you want to brush your teeth? No. Do you want to make a picture of you and LaVacalola? Well, can we do it while I brush my teeth? Let's go. Like, it's the way we motivate her. It's the way that she does it. And she, and she is obsessed with it in the way that she's obsessed with anything else that she sees on the internet. And it's like, that is something that is unique to her. We have made that for her and she's never going to know a world where that's not the norm.
Andrew Mayne: Um, yeah, I, I think that we, we know, you know, post-scarcity is not a real thing. And like for us, it's being the barrier and people talk about it and then you bring up things like, so we all get front row seats at the World Cup. Like, well, you could do VR. We're like, no, then you're saying we don't. So, you know, we all get a vacation on the coolest beach in Hawaii. Well, no, but you go, okay. So that's not real. So we all get one of the limited edition thousand designer handbags. Well, we could make more. No, that's not this. We all get to live in San Francisco. Nope. Can't do that. And you start to realize there's all kinds, we've invented all kinds of scary. Like, I think we're kind of pseudo post-scarcity too. If you, if you plan your, your, at the first, you know, 10 years from 15 to 25, go right for you or 10, 20 to 30, then you're in that phase. You just can't want a lot of things. You know, like, like post-scarcity, do we all get front row at Taylor Swift? Well, no, you can't. You literally can't. You can't do that. You can't replicate an experience that's designed to be one-on. But anyhow, that being said, I, I, I get into this where we're like, oh, what are we to do in science? What's left for humans? It's like, where's my hoverboard? You know, have we, I've, you know, talking to one of the, one of my former colleagues from OpenAI and we're like, should we think about funding stuff? Like, you know, like there, there are a couple of questions that could be answered that might tell you how fast and light travel is possible. You know, um, you know, you need to establish that there's some sort of cosmic reference frame. Otherwise you have casualty violations and stuff, but you know, like.
Justin Robert Young: Well, and, and if, if I'm putting on my futurist hat, knowing that where we're headed to. What is, wait, describe your futurist hat to us. Yes. Oh my God. Is it Wi-Fi enabled? It's, it's, it's actually a Robin Hood cap, but it's made of diamonds, literal print on demand diamonds. Diamond age. Yeah, exactly. But, but I think what we do is we craft mini realities. We're already doing that virtually in the form of, you know, you can feel like the second lieutenant of your favorite subcultures discord group. Or, you know, just the fidelity of all that is going to get bigger and bigger. If you want to live in the Federation and, and wake up on the USS Enterprise. I hear you. I hear you.
Andrew Mayne: A lot of us aren't gamers and we don't want that. We want reality.
Justin Robert Young: Yeah. Well, that's good for you. There's another reality for you. I'm saying that, that, that there is as many different postmodernist skins that, that are going to be fleshed out.
Andrew Mayne: Well, I'm talking about like the real, I get, I hear, I believe, yes, I think there's going to be the escapist version that people are going to want or whatever. And there might be, we might build some version of reality better than this reality. All for that. But I'm also like, no, like, like legit, let's, let's solve warp drive. Let's, let's see if that's solvable. Let's like for real do that. Not, you know, put on meta of five thousands and pretend we did, but let's, because that's exciting to me is like, can we really do it?
Justin Robert Young: I also wonder whether or not we are at an age where, you know, every generation rejects the lessons of the last generation to a certain extent. And in the same way that my generation in many ways, now that I look back, was defined by the idea of rejecting physical barriers and embracing the internet. So you can connect and grow and enrich yourself in ways that was denied you or was more difficult or had gatekeepers physically. And then you have a generation after that, that really takes that to the next level. Like, I kind of wonder whether or not Bella's generation is going to be more about physical, embracing physical community. Yet, yes, because it's, because it's lame and boring and what the old kids do who are complaining about how their life sucks. Historied physical property and made by authentic humans are two things that have not been affected at all by the recent changes. Not at all. If a 300 year old colonial chair was 300 year old colonial chair made by an excellent craftsman, it still is. And guess what? It's only more valuable for all of its rarity. So, but now, now, you know, that's all fine and good for the, for the goober on the internet to say where, you know, how do I get paid for it? Welcome to our podcast, Goobers on the Internet. Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's, that's what we're all figuring out. And yeah, it's extremely chaotic during this time. And yeah, it sucks, but it's awesome.
Andrew Mayne: I loved, I mentioned like last week, Star Trek, The Undiscovered Country. One of the things I loved was like when they talked to like the, the space president, uh, you know, I think was the dad from, uh, that 70s show, but with like, you know, red Klingon face tan, whatever. Oh my God, really? Red Foreman? I think so. And he's in this, his office is this like Elizabethan or whatever style, you know, 18th century furniture. And I'm like, that was the most realistic thing I think I've seen in a lot of science fiction movies was, yeah, no, they're going to want that. They're going to, he's probably going to want it to be original furniture because that's what makes it special. And I think that we, we, you're to your point, like, yeah, both of you, right. Like record stores, like we're talking about this, album sales are up. Um, I attempted to put together a Blu-ray wall of just a bunch of Blu-ray videos because one, it'd be kind of cool. And now it's, now it's kind of retro and not like, oh my God, you still have those too, because sometimes media disappears. And I think that, you know, we, you see how, yeah, like a very popular thing with younger kids is using, like, there's a, my wife bought this camera, this like Fuji camera that takes photos that look like they're 1990s flash photography photos. Cause I like, I do like crappy photos to me, but all the kids like this. And I realize, oh, our generation was one of the last ones to have physical lasting media. Yeah. You know? And, and these kids don't, they didn't have CDs. Everything they have is frigging a download or a game expansion package or something like this. And you're like, why are people excited about effing popcorn buckets? Because we killed the toy industry. I'm very excited about the Guile Street Fighter popcorn bucket. And that's, that's become this insane multi, you know, a hundred billion, like a hundred million, something billion dollar industry for popcorn buckets. Because, yeah, people, people want physical things.
Justin Robert Young: Yeah. They want collectibles. They want to be able to, to have a, a lasting trigger in their brain whenever they look at it or they hold it that brings them back to that moment.
Andrew Mayne: I would even, I would even venture, not, not forcefully, but suggestively, provocatively, seductively, if you will. Wow.
Justin Robert Young: Hold on. Roll for charisma. Go ahead. I was going to say, I think, I, I, I think I read these text messages on TMZ last night.
Andrew Mayne: He was ready. I read it a roll. Um, I think that part of it is the idea that maybe, maybe it is the, the fetish is the idea that I'm going to have this forever and go revisit it. I think there is something to the idea too of, I, at least I want to have this experience for a moment. I won't care about it in a while, but it will be fun. Like, I don't know where my action figures are. I don't cry for Han Solo. I don't, I don't decide, don't feel like I need to play my Han Solo figure anymore, but man, when I had, it was really cool. And it gave me this experience, this sort of thing to do that. And I think that some things, even physical things can be ephemeral and that's fine. You know, we, we, we, we dealt with this, all of us dealt with magic, where when you create a magic trick, you're trying to think, is this for the professional? But the people that really cracked it is like, no, this is for the amateur and the experience of playing with the props and learning it is actually more important to them than actually performing it for other people.
Justin Robert Young: Right. Well, and, and that's one of the things about magic in general is that it exists as so many experiences at once. It exists as a, a reality breaking surprise performance for people in the wild or a theatrical experience, but it also exists as the training montage to go from not being able to do a wizard thing to doing a wizard thing. And it also exists as, uh, now, now everybody's got their own levels of skill, how much they want to invest in terms of knuckle busting, whatever, or memorized, whatever's. And then other people are like, well, I just want the, the thrill of, of, of, you know, paying my 50 bucks. And then look at that. I've, I know that I'm awesome and not for nothing that matters. One of the things I'm most pleased with on the rogues ring is that it is not that it has an escape shim in it. Cause truthfully, you're never going to be put in cuffs and need to use it to escape. It's the fact that, that we put hieroglyphs all around the outside that are crib notes to remind you so that when you go into a party, you're like, oh, do I know any tricks? Yes. There are 23 of them on your finger right now. And, and your crib notes are there for you. So I think that, uh, uh, magic experiences by stock in magic, man, because the ability to continue to surprise people. In an age of wonders is going to be valuable. Oh, wait, hold on. So you're telling me that magic growing, booming industry, and we want physical media again, Andrew, we're going back to the warehouse. I'm packing up the family. We're going back to Margate. We're the, the bands back together. I'll call the DVD replicators and let's tune this MF up.
Andrew Mayne: Do they still exist? I don't know. Probably.
Justin Robert Young: I don't, I hope so. Who knows?
Andrew Mayne: I, I had a, we had a, the guy that, that are stairs said, yeah, just give me a check. And I'm like, uh, a check, a physical check. I know. And I panicked. I finally found a checkbook, but I'm like, I'm like, bro, like I had, I had, I had a form that needed a wet signature. And they're like, just print it out. I'm like, that's so funny.
Justin Robert Young: I, I, um, there's a, uh, there's a restaurant around me without doxing that, but it's like walking distance from our house. And, uh, it's very South Austin, very old, old world Austin. Uh, so much so that it still has a faded sign in the front that says no checks. Thank you. And it's like the world answered. You got it, boss. We'll do the work from here. We'll eliminate them from all daily society. So you, this darling little restaurant in my neighborhood will never have to deal with it again. Uh, Veldarg in the chat says that what we're talking about might be the appeal of a cyber deck. Have you guys seen all of these cyber deck builds where it's like, look, we can buy very nice laptops, but we all love building these rugged, you know, ready to move desktop PC proxies.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I, I mean, I have a lot of builder stuff on YouTube and I see a lot of that stuff. I don't see any, but they look like they're more fun to build than to use. Oh yeah.
Justin Robert Young: I think that's the real secret is.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Yeah. I got, you know, that dev day, which is the mod retro, which has wifi and Bluetooth built in. So in theory I could, you know, to gain, while holding that, the mod retro game boy thing, uh, which I, in theory could like, you know, connect to the internet and read my RSS feeds on this thing.
Justin Robert Young: But well, and it's, it's so interesting because you control your codex from your game boy. You could, you could do that. That's awesome. Yeah, there's a group of, just a game that just says, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, go. Yes. That's fine. Do that. Authorized. Authorized. Bro. No, for real. Just do it. I believe in you. Make no mistakes.
Andrew Mayne: Meanwhile, uh, I, the very beginning, you know, they added this new UI capability to, uh, chat GPT where it can create like inline UIs and stuff. And also like, I just had, it made me flappy bird. Amazing.
Justin Robert Young: All right. We got any picks. Uh, yeah, I started a, a, a, a show that I ain't never seen a single episode of, but I'm told it gets pretty good. So I'm starting at the beginning. I sort of sat on the, the sidelines because I heard mid things at first, but I heard it in so good that I started Ronald D. Moore's For All Mankind. Watched the first episode of that, uh, just two nights ago.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah, I, I, I did Ronald D. Moore's great. He's like, he worked on Star Trek, was one of the better writers there. He did the Battlestar Galactica revival. He's a guy that get called into everything. He's really well known. When Lucas was trying to do a Star Wars TV show, he brought him in. Um, I, I enjoyed it. There is one storyline that comes up in like season three or it's just this stupid soap opera storyline that I literally haven't gone back to watch it. Cause I'm like, I don't need, this is a dumb thing. That's not dealing with the space thing, whatever kind of stuff. And so it's like, when you get there, we'll talk about it. I'm like, I don't want to have to watch scenes with this, but.
Justin Robert Young: You know, that is, that is something where our modern world of television is like, things either start really dumb and then end, but like there, there was this thing, even with like prestige television shows that we really, really, really liked where there were just plot lines in a seven season arc. That everybody, including the creators were just like, yep, bad, sorry. Let's retcon it immediately out of the story. And let's just pretend that this never happened. And like almost all the greats kind of have it, but now it feels like either the cake is sort of fully baked with these shows. Like, like they're, they're flawed and then they start at whatever height they're going to get. And then they just sort of taper off. There's, there's not really like, no, there's like a really kind of a great rise. And then somewhere in season three, they accidentally have one of the most beloved characters kill somebody on purpose. And then they're just like, no, bad. We should never do that. Let's never have Jesse Plemons character reference the fact that he killed a man.
Speaker 02: Yeah.
Andrew Mayne: More was great though, because when he worked on Battlestar Galactica, he brought in his thinking. Cause like the thing that frustrated him about like, like Voyager or whatever was, how many shuttlecraft do we have? You know, they're like, shut up, run. He's like, well, I mean, you know, he liked the idea of the, he liked the idea of the finite resources being a thing that you had to play with from episode to episode. But Star Trek writing as it got progressively weirder and so Bob Reddick kind of didn't care. And that became, you know, thing he said, no, what if we, what, what if the things that we avoid as a writer become the things that we have to deal with?
Speaker 02: Yeah.
Andrew Mayne: I mean, that'll start great.
Speaker 02: Yeah. Yeah. What about you guys?
Justin Robert Young: You go ahead, Andrew. I got it. I don't know what mine is. So you go.
Andrew Mayne: I, I, uh, it's two movies. It's a part one and part two. And if you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Um, I'm going to ask you this question first. Do you guys like Rambo? Sure. Yes. Do you guys like Sicario? Yes. I haven't seen it, but I bet it's great. You would love it. Do you like Godfather?
Speaker 02: Uh, yes.
Justin Robert Young: Next question. You don't like Godfather? Uh, yeah. You know what? I saw it too late. I saw it having been raised on all the parodies of it. And as a result, it, by the time I saw it, it just played as every cliche. And I'm like, I am certain this was revolutionary. You deserve, you, you, you, you, you, you deserve another spin on it. And with Godfather 2, you should, you should watch that Godfather 1 and 2, if not back to back, then like in the same headspace.
Andrew Mayne: Uh, use whatever part of your brain you use not to be a magician when you have to watch a trick. Okay. Same thing. All right. Yeah.
Justin Robert Young: Well, it's just like, uh, what, now that you understand, it's like, oh, all of that, even things that you didn't know were from the Godfather that people were doing a referencing. And then you're like, you're just kind of catching all these things. You're not really focusing on the plot of the performances. Uh, Godfather 2 is amazing. And there's a lot of that, that, you know, like people make references to like some of the lines, but they're not like, it's not nearly as, you know, saturated in, in, in all of pop culture and, and once you get into it and it's like, oh, okay, this is why this plus Goodfellas is the Sopranos and it's just, it's iconic. It's awesome.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. So if you like, uh, a little bit of The Departed, you like all these things, right? We like all, maybe The Wire, we like all these things. What if we set it in Indian Pakistan and we call it Durandar? What is this? Sure. Durandar is the highest grossing like Hindi language action movie of all time or movie in, India. Uh, it is two, like almost three hour, hour films. It is, the plot line is in retaliation against all of the state sponsored terrorism acts from Pakistan into India. India sends in a guy, a death row inmate to there to take over the criminal underworld of Pakistan and provide, cause there's a connection between the criminal underworld, their counterfeiting weapons and all that to terrorism to basically dismantle the Pakistani terrorism.
Speaker 02: That sounds like a blast.
Andrew Mayne: It's over the top. It is, it is a blast. It's crazy. It's really, really over the top. Um, that guy there is the head of Pakistani intelligence services. He's, he's kind of the main baddie. Uh, when you see what's on the end of The Wires, there you go. Jesus. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah.
Justin Robert Young: Pull that away for terms of service.
Andrew Mayne: Yeah. Durandar, uh, they have one and two. They were shot two up, two back to back. They're long films. They're on Netflix. Uh, highly recommend it.
Justin Robert Young: Um, yeah. Uh, well, I'll tell you just cause I heard them, this is a physical pick. We, um, you know, my wife and I raising her daughter both work and, uh, you know, sometimes things get a little messy. Consider if you are in our situation and you have little extra scratch, hiring professional organizers. We have now done this not once, not twice, but three times. Once for our closets and storage areas, once for our pantry, and it's happening right now for our, um, for our garage. But it's not as much as you would think and it, it's like, oh, well, I could do that by myself. You're not doing it now. You're probably not going to do it later. And, uh, uh, what if you could knock it out? And if you have the money, think about it. I'll tell you what, it has been kind of a game changer. And I would dare suspect as we move into more of a world where the human touch kind of matters that you wouldn't see more of stuff like this, uh, kind of atomized elements of what used to be very luxurious kind of services. Um, professional chef, like, uh, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a logistics manager or something like that that would normally do a lot of this stuff as a full-time job. If this isn't kind of just made more into something that, that becomes more of a middle class, um, indulgence every once in a while. Uh, but yeah, we've, we've had a really good time and it's, I don't know, I'm, I'm excited to go downstairs and see what happened to my garage.
Speaker 02: Awesome. Gentlemen, it's been weird.