631 - Consciousness vs Morality with Sam Harris

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is The James Altucher Show. Today on The James Altucher Show. Who actually rules the world? Congress? The president? China? My next guest, he wrote a book called Everybody Wants to Rule the World and it's basically about how Google, Amazon, Facebook, my areas, they rule the world. And Ray writes about this, we talk about it, and we talk about what the future could hold for us in a world where essentially it's like an oligarchy instead of a democracy. But is there opportunity in this? Can we find some opportunity? And the answer is yes. So fascinating discussion about who really rules the world. Here's Rae Won to talk about it. Ray, author of everybody wants to rule the world, surviving and thriving in a world of digital giants. Everybody could guess what that means. We're gonna talk about it. But, Ray, first off, have you ever been a radio announcer? I have not, but I'll do radio announcements now. You have, like, the best voice I've ever had on this podcast. Like, could you do the inner world? Inner world where inner world where spaceships have never flown before. Describe your book using an inner world like, let's say your book had a trailer. Describe it with the voice using, inner world where start off like that. In a world where digital giants roam free and companies are trying to figure out digital transformation but have failed. Have they failed? I don't know if they failed. Oh oh, yeah. A lot of companies failed except for the winners. But, okay, so, obviously, you wrote a book that's very relevant in today's world. Everybody's talking antitrust, dividing up the giants. There's this huge battle. It seems like there's a battle in the air above us mere mortals where and Scott Galloway has talked about this where Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, they're all battling for supremacy of the planet. And and and, really, I would say it's down to Amazon, Google, and maybe Apple, but, really, Amazon and Google are the ones I think about the most. But who's ruling the world right now? And then we're gonna get into your book. Yeah. You know, you're right. I mean, it's it's also Microsoft. It's also Apple. I definitely would put in that boat, and I also look at companies like Alibaba, in that mix as well. So it it's companies that have pretty much figured out how to build business models, monetization models that span across multiple industries in and what we call data value chains. This is really what the big shift is happening right now, and those digital giants seem unstoppable unless there's some level of regulation or unstoppable unless there's another force, which is how new digital giants get created. Well, let let me play the devil's advocate on the first one. Well, actually, first, you didn't answer the question. Who actually is ruling the world? Who's ruling the world? I think the governments are actually they've stepped in and said, hey. We're gonna whack your heads off if you get any bigger. So I think they've actually stepped in. But if I compare, like, let's just say Congress. Okay? The government of the United States, Congress combined with the president. When I look compare them to Jeff Bezos, it seems to me they are like gnats on the wall, and Jeff Bezos rules the world. I mean, he has the Washington Post. He's got his hand in one of the most powerful, media companies in the world, like, just old media. And because of the the pandemic accelerated the fact that every dollar we make now pretty much goes to Amazon. Like, I buy my clothes. I buy my computers. I buy, medicine. I buy food, and then, music. I watch TV. It's all Amazon, and I'm, like, addicted to Amazon. I'll go out there just to rather than web surf or social media surf, I'll, like, surf products on Amazon. So it even takes up my in a weird way, my social media time is now Amazon. So, and then and then but then you have Google, which every piece of knowledge I would ever wanna know is Google. Google is a metaphor even for, like, all human knowledge. Like, my wife says to her friends, James is my Google because she asks me a lot of questions, but then I ask Google. So she doesn't know that because she's not gonna listen to this podcast. But so so it seems like and then you have the fact that they have so much data about you. You know, there's that saying, if if if you don't know what the if you're getting something for free, then you're the product. Or if you don't know what the product is, then you're the product. And that's true. Like, for Google, we're the product. Like, our data, which makes up our virtual selves, is the product that Google and Amazon ultimately makes a ton of money on. So I feel like when they make decisions, that is what affects the world more than when Joe Biden makes decisions. I know. I you're completely right. Amazon and Google are are are winning in the digital giant war. It doesn't mean they're always gonna be there, but they have encompassed only almost every aspect of our lives, right, from where you eat or how you search for something or what kind of music you listen to or how you even buy things or what do you even think. Right? So they've completely permeated our lives, and a lot of these digital giants have done that. And sometimes it's free. Sometimes it's not free. Sometimes you are the product. Sometimes you're paying for the product, but they've gone through every round of digital monetization as well, ads, search, goods, services, memberships, subscriptions, and they've encompassed almost every aspect of our lives. Yeah. I remember, like, back in you know, you could say back in 2,000, 2001, Google was a search engine. Then Google we realized, oh, it's not really a search engine. It's an advertising agency because that's how they make their money. But then you realize, oh, it's a media company because to some extent, we get our entertainment through Google. And then you realize, oh, but it's also, has all our storage, and then it's a phone company. And then it's a they they buy they they sell you all the apps you need. It's got our voiceprints. It translates our language. It gives us our maps. Right? It tells us our navigation. It makes a suggestion. Right? It's helping us think. Right? It's doing AI. Yeah. They're gonna and they're gonna have autonomous cars. They're probably gonna have spaceships. Who knows? And they're they're gonna deliver our Internet. I know there's a there's a battle up in the sky literally of who's gonna start providing our Internet. And, you know, of course, this was an evolution. And and as you refer to in the book, it was in part because their their, you know, founders and leaders were really good at long term thinking much to their credit as opposed to American conglomerates or big companies in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and so on. But is this a bad thing? I kinda think this is a good thing, to be honest. I don't think it's a bad thing, but I think we have to do a cost benefit analysis to figure out when it becomes a bad thing. If you notice, like, we we talk about the, you know, the dawn of digital giants, the rise of digital giants, the decline of digital giants, and the dusk of digital giants. All throughout that, we have to do a cost benefit analysis. Are prices coming down? Are you getting more love more innovation? Are, you know, are people being able to have more access to goods and services that they never had before? Are we contributing to the world's knowledge? Are you getting more types of services and innovation that you've never seen before? Right? So long that's happening. It's a good force. Right? But once we stop, you know, like, making sure that competitors are being bought out so we can't have innovation, costs go up, you have less choices, people feel forced into situations where they don't have any freedom of choice, yeah, then that's when it's bad, and that's when we need that level of antitrust or that level of regulation. But right now, there's a lot of lot more good than bad. Well, what when have we actually lost choice because of an action by one of these, leading companies? And by the way, I don't mean to be an apologist for them. I would love to find out if, you know, if there's something I'm missing in all of this. But so everybody always complains about, you know, oh, these guys are too big, too rich, whatever. But I don't really know where I've been negatively affected, but maybe I'm just blind to it. I think you're negatively affected when you lack the choice to be able to, you know, buy something or purchase something. And it just goes away because, you know, it's inconvenient to one of these steel giants. I haven't I've encountered that yet. Right? The the closest thing I think we'll get to is, maybe the inability to pay in cash, the inability to have anonymous transactions. I think that's the part where I'm gonna feel injured. I personally believe that, you know, privacy should be one of those freedoms that you have, and the ability to be anonymous should be one of those things as well. So the right to actually make a purchase anonymously without, you know, being seen as a terrorist, I mean, that should be alright. But it's something along those lines. And and for you, when has, I mean, again, privacy is something that people talk about. Like, oh, I I famously spoke to the recently late John McAfee, and he was telling me, look at your phone. Why does your flashlight have access to turn on your camera without turning the light on? And they could be filming you right now, and you wouldn't know it. Okay. That might be true, but when are they actually filming? When when has my privacy actually been violated in a way that is inconvenient to a nonterrorist? I don't think it has yet, but I think we have to protect for that. And I think that's really part of, you know, the vigilance around privacy. It's for the edge exceptions and the edge cases. I mean, today, I mean, you could say that one of those edge cases is that your vaccination records are out being made public, or you're being asked to provide things like that that might not have been done before for travel. Right? You might have done it, you know you know, independently and willingly and voluntarily to say, hey. Look. You know, I've gotta take these vaccinations to go to a certain country, but we're getting close to the edge for some areas. Like like, close to the edge? Tell me how. We're close to the edge. Like, you have to declare vaccinations, or are you vaccinated or not when you go to attend an event. That that's like a government requirement. But sometimes, I think some organizations are asking that even if it's not a government requirement. Contact tracing on a public health basis makes a ton of sense. Look. I've got an epidemiological background. I went have a master's in public health. Totally understand that. There's a public good to it. But when that's a requirement, and forced requirement, to reveal, like, where your vaccinations are coming from or if you have those vaccinations in general work, I think I'd be a little bit more worried about that. You know, and I could it's easy for this is, like, great material for a conspiracy theorist. Like, when Sergey Brin's ex wife but then wife started 23 andMe, you could imagine that Google combined with the DNA of every human being on the planet could have a The government of China because the DNA is being sequenced in labs in Illumina Labs in China. Yeah. So so you could imagine some scenarios where that's a problem, when I where I could Google who's got different mutations. Like, that's a pretty interesting thing. I don't know what the use for that is yet, but in a world when we have superhuman mutants, that might be a problem. But so so for you, what's what what's your you wrote this book, Everybody Wants to Rule the World. A, the questions you start to answer is how they began to rule the world. But what are the what are the issues? What what drove you to this? And, again, you know, we we've talked about also I I made in the list, you know, Facebook, Netflix, Apple. You mentioned Apple. I feel like Apple, not as much anymore because the computers, particularly since Steve Jobs is no longer there, don't really seem as exciting to me. Google has kind of monopolized the imagination in terms of technology. Netflix has so many streaming service competitors. Facebook, even as a social network now, I don't wanna say it's on the decline, but when's the last time you added a Facebook friend? In 2007, I would add 50 Facebook friends a day. But when's the last time you actually added a Facebook friend? Probably less so, but more on Insta than Facebook today. Alright. Go on. Give you that. But let me let me push back a little bit. I I would say digital giants today, the ones that we know, those aren't the ones I'm worried about. I'm thinking about the new ones, and they all have, like, 5 characteristics. 1, they disintermediate customer account control. It means that they take customers away from their partners or build even more. 2, they build the biggest network, whether it's users or objects or machines or connection points. Then they actually go out and compete on a concept called data supremacy, where data is basically driving their big platforms. And then, of course, they go out and monetize. They do the digital monetization, and they have a long term mindset. And so these are the roadblocks. This is Starlink. This is Airbnb. These are new digital giants that are emerging. This is the Coupang's of Korea. It's the Swiggys, the Gojek's in Indonesia. They're building these new models to go out and dominate the world as well because almost every start up that's funded today, especially in the consumer world, they're designed to be a monopoly on day 1. Yeah. So, like, take take Uber as an example, and you you refer to, I think it was actually in a recent blog of yours. You refer to Uber buying Postmates. Do you think that is something that potentially removes choice from us, or or if they are they buying Postmates strategically because to combine with, like, Uber Eats and other logis I I always viewed Uber from the beginning as not a a a driving related company, but as a logistics company. So You're completely right. It's that last mile logistics. Deliver food, deliver medicine, deliver a package, deliver that. You know, if you want it within 30 minutes or less. Right? I mean, it's basically Domino's on the background. I mean and so this is what's very powerful as you get things like Uber plus Postmates. Right? Uber plus the courier service. Right? All those additions that you can actually deliver. Uber doing last minute groceries and taking it from Instacart. That would be you know, that's they're both all coming at the last mile delivery space, and that last mile logistics is where they're trying to dominate. But it's not just that. Think about what happens when a food delivery apps helps a restaurant with their delivery. They basically subsume the customer. They get the customer information, then they get the customer payment information, and then they get the customer preferences, and they take the account control away from the small business, and then they use that to build their network. I mean, look at Domino's versus Postmates or Uber Eats. I mean, you order pizza, what? Do you order pizza, like, once a month, once a week? I order sushi once once a day. But, Is that Uber is that through delivery service, or do you actually go pick it up? No. Uber Eats. Uber Eats. Right. So so you're ordering, like, you're ordering multiple times from a delivery app, and you're probably ordering pizza less. And that takes a company like Domino's and puts them really in the back burner. Right? I mean, they're not even top of mind. You're gonna order pizza. You're gonna go to the delivery app before you go to Domino's. And and Domino's for us is like the poster child of doing awesome digital transformation. And and or what do you mean by that? By the poster child of doing awesome digital innovation? You can I mean, they won on commerce? They won with some of the best mobile apps. You can order the pizza on Alexa. You place the order, it's in they tell you it's in the oven. It's 10 minutes away. It's 5 minutes away. And you take a picture of the pizza, you put it into their AI engine, and they'll tell you the quality of the franchise. I mean, they won the battle for digital transformation. But, hey, right now, do I care? I mean, they're gonna get crushed by these food delivery apps and ghost kitchens. So And so this is what I'm saying. Digital transformation is not enough. So so you're you're sort of referring to, the concept Chris Anderson's concept from almost a decade ago of the long tail, which is that it's the aggregators. No matter how good an individual retailer might be like Domino's, it's the aggregators, the ones with the short tail and the long tail that ultimately, I just wanna order pizza, send it. As opposed to, like, I I love Domino's, so I'm gonna order Domino's. Because there's lots of choices. It's just Domino's was the main delivery service when we were younger. Now everybody delivers through somebody. And and so I'm gonna go with with the somebody that gives me the fastest, best, and to service and the best choices and the most choices. And so that's in And I Oh, go ahead. Yeah. But I don't wanna say Domino's is completely out out for the count. Right? If I was Domino's, I'd flip it around and say, let's go save small businesses delivered by Domino's, a brand new joint venture start up. It's funded to actually help small businesses take advantage of Domino's logistics capability and their delivery, and they would use and invert it to go against the other food delivery apps, and they could get smacked back into the business. So But I don't know if they have, they can do that. I don't know if they can pull it off, but that's what I would do if I was them. But right. But, historically, nobody has ever done that. Like, why didn't Polaroid or Kodak become, you know, the iPhone? That's not true. Netflix Netflix went from, what, CD delivery, DVD delivery to streaming service? They pulled it off. It's not it's not impossible. There's some companies that have it. They get it. They can actually flip and actually make that pivot. You point out in your book, though, a classic case, and this has happened all over the industry. Toys R Us had this brilliant deal with Amazon. Hey. Nobody's gonna compete with us. We're Toys R Us. We're the toys brand. So Amazon, yeah, you could take care of this online thing for us. We'll outsource it to you. Toys R Us, gone. And where do you buy your toys? Amazon. Amazon. Same thing, by the way, with, like, I guess it was Borders. Right? Borders, outsourced to Amazon and Borders and Barnes and Noble. Yeah. But Barnes and Noble on Amazon. What a novel idea. Barnes and Noble. Nobody realizes it yet, but Barnes and Noble is the walking dead. Like, every time I go into a Barnes and Noble, there are fewer and fewer books, and I keep asking them, are you guys going out of business? I'm like, no. Of course not. And, like, why do you have fewer tables with books on it? It's like they're it's the same thing that happened to borders 20 years ago. It's it's going away. But, again, I kind of think this is in general a good thing. And, again, it's it it there's an evolutionary history to this. You know, you used to cook food or you used to grow your food in your garden. Then you went to the local mom and pop store. Then you went to Walmart, and Walmart was criticized. You're putting all the mom and pop stores out of business. Then now it's Amazon. Amazon, I don't know if it's quite putting Walmart out of business, but it already put Sears and Kmart and all those guys out of business. Maybe eventually you know, Walmart's been trying to catch up with jet.com and so on. But I don't know. Again, I think this is a is it a it's a fearsome thing, but is it a bad thing? And I know you said it's like that. It's it's not necessarily bad, but I think what we have to understand is what those shifts mean and and what people are competing for. It's it's kinda like this weird thing where people suddenly say, oh my god. They became a digital giant or became a monopoly, and and it was intentional, and and we didn't see it. I mean, yeah. And what was the what was the downside? And I agree with you. I mean, I I haven't seen the downside yet. It's not like people lost more jobs. Amazon just hired millions of people over during the pandemic. If you're driving anywhere during the pandemic, it was just streams of prime trucks. Like, I've never seen so many trucks that were just labeled prime in my life. It just kept going and going. Those miles, hundreds of miles of prime trucks. So You know? And and, you know, it's it's interesting because during the pandemic, people who needed jobs, and many people did need jobs, Amazon warehouses were popping up all over the place like you said. So there was always opportunities for people to who lost their waiter jobs or line cook jobs or whatever to become Amazon warehouse workers. And now restaurants are actually in a terrible situation. They can't hire line cooks or waiters because people are pretty happy at Amazon working in an Amazon warehouse. I kinda wanna work at Amazon warehouse. Sounds like fun. I mean, it it Actually, if you've if you've ever done any line cooking, actually, working at an Amazon warehouse might actually be a lot easier. Yeah. And you make more money. At least air conditioned. It's air conditioned. It's the same type of manual work, but it's definitely at the same pace. So Yeah. So so and, you know, I was looking at some some data, which might be interesting to you, which is, jobs you know, wages adjusted for inflation since 1992. So 1992, of course, is, you know, a year after the World Wide Web was created by Tim Berners Lee. But since 1992, wages adjusted for inflation among, I think it was the 25 to 45 year olds, has actually gone down. And Yeah. This is a deflationary force, and it's probably due to the Internet, you know, creating you know, lessening the need for many jobs, but def a deflationary force that combats inflation, yes, people suffer because wages should go up ideally, but, it does prevent inflation, particularly right now when so many 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars have been printed in society. Well, you know, actually, this is really the crux of the issue. Right? We printed so much money, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars. Now in the past, in the eighties, we put that into empty space. We called that real estate. Right? In the nineties, we put them into start ups. In the 20 2000, we actually, you know, recreated real estate with derivative products of real estate. And in 20 tens, we did the same thing with how we, you know, built SPACs and new types of start ups and new types of funding mechanisms and direct listings and, you know, secondary markets. And and so we're back, you know, I mean, other than crypto, I mean but we're back to another phase, which is really what's next. Right? What are the next winners? And if you're a company and you're competing and you're not getting 15 to 30% returns, the institution investors are mad at you, and they're saying, fine. Give us your money back. I want share buybacks. I want dividends. Why don't you merge with another company, get some efficiencies? Because you're not doing your job, and you're not growing fast enough. And so the same set of investors are basically stripping the companies they've invested in to go fund startups to beat the crap out of those startups. And and so they're hedging their bets, which is really what's causing, these winner takes all markets. Yeah. What is causing like, why is it that only one search engine essentially survives, like, you know, Google? Why is it that there's only one real, you know, monopolistic ecommerce outlet, which is Amazon? I mean, yes, there's Etsy. There's plenty of other places, but Amazon is so dominating. You know, what why has it become a winner take all environment, and there really isn't competition, you know, in the in the those particular niches? Because certain sets of investors understand that long tail. They understand the need to make that long term bet. Let me give you an example. If I wanted to take and dominate the TV electronics and home appliance market, I could potentially kill LG, Samsung, and a whole bunch of electronics manufacturers in less than 5 years. And let me show you how. So I'm gonna give you a deal. $15 for a smart TV 4 k 75 inch product for the next 5 years. That's $900. I'm gonna give you that for $15 a month for the next 5 years. If it ever breaks, I'll make sure that you get it fixed. We'll make sure we'll send you a brand new one less than 48 hours if it dies. Would you take that deal? Sure. And it would you take this deal if I gave you a free upgrade during that 5 year period, for $25 a month instead of the $15 a month Yes. What would happen to LG and Samsung overnight? I locked them out of the market for the next 5 years. And in order to do that, I need a $100,000,000,000 from MASA or Norwegian or Temasek or, you know, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. Right? I buy break fix data from Best Buy safety data from Underwriters Labs. I would then pick up Asurion, a company that does break fix, you know, the warranties for your cell phones. I'd have better underwriting data than the reinsurance companies. I turf my insurance and reinsurance to General Re and Swiss Re and actually do better. Alright? And suddenly, I know which products work. I know which components work. I know which features were being used. I might even have the world's largest ad network if I need to put that up to speed. Right? I suddenly have more information than everyone else has, but I'm not done. Right? I wanna do your kitchen. For a $100 a month for the next 10 years, I'm gonna do your entire kitchen, washer, dryer, range, oven, you know, dishwasher, refrigerator. Would you take that too? I'll do GE and Whirlpool for a $100. You know, maybe you're an LG Samsung guy. I'll do it for $250. Maybe you're even higher in Gag now, Mele, Viking, Wolf. I'll do it for $400 a month for the next 10 years. What would happen? I now own the entire home. So why I'm not done. I'm gonna do your HVAC too for a $100 a month for every for one ton, $300 a month for the next 10 years. And you know what? I have so much data now that I actually know when things break, and I know how to build things better because I just bankrupted a whole bunch of factories, and I can actually pick up factories for cheap and actually build to my demand and my specs. And so I'm gonna give you the ability for 10 years and portability. If you move, we'll give you the same plan. And you're asking me why hasn't anybody ever done this yet? Yeah. I just pitched it. There are $3,000,000,000,000 companies in the book and ten $100,000,000,000 unicorn ideas in the book. Yeah. If you read it carefully, you'll see. I mean, these things just need to be funded. And you're saying, what? Why is it winner takes all? Because it takes about a $100,000,000,000 investment to pull it off, but anybody who's got the guts and balls to do it, you're there. I mean, you can pull this thing off. It is not hard. I mean, I'll give you another one. It's actually fun if you're ready. But Yeah. Give me alright. We're gonna sneak peek into the book. We're gonna sneak peeks in the book. So about 4 to 5 years ago, I wanted to buy Air Canada's mileage program. It's $400,000,000. I was too late, but it was literally $40 a user. They have 10,000,000 flyers. What's an airline mileage program at the end of day? It is tax free, cross border, value exchange, funded at a penny per mile. But it's not Air Canada's mileage program. I love Canadians, but that wasn't the point. I have access to 762,000,000 Star Alliance flyers. I want a cryptocurrency that puppy on day 1. It's a fully funded cryptocurrency. Think about it. You redeem miles for a penny a mile. Right? You, you know, I mean, you redeem miles for for 1.6¢ a mile. Sorry. That's like, you know, if you have 25,000 miles, that's $400 for a ticket. Right? If you buy magazines, that's 2¢ a ticket, 2¢ a mile. And if you buy electronics, you know, jewelry or sports equipment, that's 3¢ a mile. But suddenly, what would I do if I turn that into a cryptocurrency? I have the collapsing of travel, media, entertainment, retail, and financial services, and the world's largest cryptocurrency on day 1 because all those arrangements have already been negotiated. The value exchanges have been negotiated. I also have the world's biggest ad network on day 2. The cookie apocalypse? I have first party data now. And on day 3, anyone unbanked, so long they have a connection point to the Internet, you can now go peer to peer. That's a $1,000,000,000,000 idea right there. So And if anybody's listening, come in on a percent, I'll help advise. But, you know, you get the idea. Right? Describe the last part again. So how's it peer to peer? Pretty soon, I can actually trade currencies. I basically have a network that allows you to exchange any one of my points and my crip you know, my points for a retail service, or you can pay each other in points and redeem somewhere else. Yeah. Or you can make it fungible with other, mile mile programs, free mile programs. It's funded. And here's the beauty. It's funded. A penny a mile. This isn't a Ponzi scheme. This isn't like, oh, here's this NFT. It's gotta work this. No. We've got money assigned to the back end of this. And people are gonna buy in to pay to be part of it. It's like green stamps or, like, Canadian Tire Points from way, way back in the fifties. You know? In the past 20 years, we've seen the rise of these giants. 20 years from now, what does it look like? I think 20 years from now, some of the giants get fat, happy, lazy. They get sloppy. They, you know, they fall apart. They don't always stay as digital giants that survive. I think some of the technologies get split up. I think, you know, investors who, you know, like founder owners retire and, like, the same level of energy might not be there, kind of like what you were talking about with some companies where founders have actually departed. Like, what's Amazon like without Bezos? I don't know. It's gonna be interesting to watch. Right? What's Google been like, you know, since, you know, Sergei and Larry have left? Right? It's Have they have they truly left, or do they sort sort of say stay behind the scenes so nobody bothers them? So they don't have to test the process. Scenes like a Bill Gates, you know, like the like the Bill Gates option without the without the scandal revealed. Right. Yeah. Yet. But but but, you know, all of that assumes, some sort of evolution of the current companies. What about you know, you're talking about new potential $100,000,000,000 unicorns, multitrillion dollar companies. Do those start get being created? They do. I mean, look at Reliance Industries in India. Mukesh Ambani has assembled probably one of the most, well, probably the largest, collection of digital services and goods that are gonna be delivered inside India to a base of 400,000,000 handset holders. I mean, it's brilliant. Right? I mean, it took the handset holders. They gave them data. They connected that back to the retail operations. You saw all the 100 of 1,000,000,000 that was being invested by outside interests that want to get into the Indian market. That's one of the big digital giants. You know, and, also, you talk about how the the role of AI to to basically further cement the domination of these big companies like a Google or Facebook or even an Uber. We have all the data, and we have all the AI. Now we're just figuring out how to use it. That's this kind of transition stage we're in right now. As opposed to just being a recommendation engine or something that picks your ads, there's a next step. What are some of those next steps? Yeah. You're completely right. That's the view of what we call competing on data supremacy. These digital giants all have these platforms, which we call data driven digital networks. And what they run on is lots of data, big networks, and the intersection of all those networks and, you know, what what happens, what are the actions. And those form what we call a business graph. You know, like we have social media and a social graph, the business graph says, hey. Who is interacting with what information, on what basis, in this context, what location, time, weather, how it's a sentiment, what journey were they in? And when they put all that together, right, they can start figuring out prediction and figuring out what's happening in the future, and they can also figure out prevention. Right? But the thing that these digital giants have that others don't have is this ability to compete on a concept we call decision velocity. You and I can make a decision per second, but, you know, if we work in large companies, how long does it take to get out of management committee? Is it a week? Is it 3 weeks? Is it a quarter? It could take forever. Machines make a 100 decisions per second. That is the asymmetry. And the companies actually can make faster decisions over time, faster predictions, prevent issues from happening, and risk and mitigate that. Those are the ones that are gonna win. And the digital giants are building that capability of bringing analytics, automation, and AI together. And by doing that, they have, like, flywheel effects in terms of getting signal intelligence, in terms of getting better information, extracting the signal from the noise. And in a digital world, every action we take is demand signal because we have attribution. What's a non basic example? So, like, I I would say the first level examples are recommendation engines. The second level of examples might be a media company testing a headline to see what headline generates the most traffic. So they release Mhmm. A an article with a a a thousand times with a 1,000 different headlines, and within seconds, figure out the ones people are clicking on, and then that's the headline. So that's you know, 3rd generation might be, you know, pulling up your Google search result. This is similar to the recommendation. So what for you is a nontrivial example where companies actually start running differently because of AI and analytics? I think it's happening at the mass personalization at scale that we're starting to see. It's more than just recommendation engines. It's anticipating your next move. I'll give you an example, and this was being tested with, once one client we were working with with smart buildings. You know, I walk into the lobby of a 50 story building. You know, it's 2 PM. The camera sense that I'm in the room. The 27 point facial analysis says, hey. That looks like the guy on the 13th floor. Right? My gait analysis kicks in and says, oh, yeah. That is the guy on 13th floor. You know, we should send an elevator down. I think he's going up. I swipe my badge. It says, oh, hey. You're on the 13th floor. Choice 1 shows up. Hey. Would you like to go to the 13th floor? Oh, makes sense. Yeah. 90% shot. I'm going to 13th floor. Choice 2 pops up. It scans my scheduling, and it says, hey. You got a 30 minute window opening. You've made, like, 10 requests to meet with your boss. She's on the 50th floor. Would you like to go to the 50th floor? You know? So there's an 82% chance I might say yes. But then the AB testing comes in and says, hey. Wait. There's free birthday cake on the 5th floor. Right? It's testing me. Right? Do I take the cake? Do I go to see my boss? Do I skip my floor? It wants to know. And then it takes that information and figures it out and tries to learn from that again to say, hey. What happens when this person pops in? Right? This is already happening. People are testing things like this in smart buildings and smart offices to do demand management or to optimize personalization. And it could be, like, a digital ad follows you around throughout the building. You're like, that's annoying. I mean, these minority report things are real. They're starting to happen. Right. And, like, you know, the digital ad following you around in a smart building, maybe there's a subs it becomes a subscription service where you pay to not have the ad popping around. And yeah. And that's that's that's suddenly, you know, that's suddenly how real estate companies make revenues so that they could charge less rent, you know, off of the Black Mirror. It's like the back Black Mirror episode where the guy can't turn anything off. He's gotta pay it That might happen. But but even this, though, I I feel like every situation you just described, that technology is capable right now. Like, it's just a matter of implementing it and testing it. Like, there's always you know, it's sort of like there's more ideas that are doable right now than people to do them. But what's the next generation ahead of that where, like, did you you refer to decisions, like, actually decisions running a company. Like, what could what could help Google run better if it uses AI so that maybe it even even the demands of the CEO are lessened because of AI? Well, you know, you could take you could take the issue of around, you know, anything from fraud or risk mitigation. Right? We have the algos for that. We just don't have enough data. But when you pull the data from all the different companies in one spot, you suddenly have very interesting surveillance and counter surveillance and anti fraud capabilities that you wouldn't have before. Right? And and this is back to the earlier case of where we're talking about digital giants. Right? You have to get to a certain level of scale before you can get to that level of precision. Right? 99% precision might not be enough to be able to make those decisions fast enough. We're talking about 99 and maybe, like, 8 other nines on the back end, and that's where that aggregation comes into play. And this is why scale is so important. So so that's where Google might pop in a plan and say, hey. Look. You know, you got a fraud alert, and we've solved it in, like, 15 milliseconds as opposed to we got a fraud alert, and we figured it out an hour later. I mean, that difference could be 100 of 1,000,000,000. And and with again, because of you said you have to reach a mass scale, mass data to be able to aggregate enough to make all these decisions and and affect the lives of so many. There's a a a couple of different things to unpack from that. 1st, could anybody compete with a Google? The government of China. The I believe that. Large company with the same level of networks. Right? Facebook could compete with Google. I mean, they are. Right? I mean, this is the other piece about the book. Right? We talk about how business models and monetization models are divergent at the moment. Right? Google has a $130,000,000,000 in digital ads. Facebook has $70,000,000,000 of digital ads as of 2020. Right? They're different business models. 1 search, 1 social networks. Right? And the 3rd competitor in the space, like, 5 years ago, was Microsoft. Right? Today, the 3rd competitor is Amazon, which is, you know, dominant, one could say, a monopoly in commerce in the US. And so 3 different business models all competing for digital advertising. I think the word competition is changing its meaning. Meaning that they're not competing on their services. They're competing on their monetization methods. Correct. A monopoly in one model business model is competing for the same digital monetization model. So, you know, one issue with the rise of these companies, take Amazon as an example, during this pandemic. It had a real ancillary effect that was negative on cities. Because let's say you know, I don't know if you live in a city or not, but let's say you live in New York City or San Francisco or whatever. San Francisco. Yep. San Francisco. So so there's this concept of the velocity of money. So if you're paid a dollar, that dollar circulates in San Francisco to, you know, you buy a coffee from Starbucks. The coffee guy buys a newspaper. The newspaper guy buys flowers for his wife. His wife buys another newspaper, whatever. So it stays you know, it floats around the city for 10, 20 occurrences. The dollar doesn't leave the city. But now when people are paid a dollar, it goes immediately to Seattle. And so that's part of the problem that's gonna we're gonna see over the next few years in in heavily urban cities is that you know? And we also saw lots of mom and pop stores go out of business, not because of digitalization, but because of the, pandemic combined with the velocity of money quickly going to 0 in major cities. There's a potential negative effect where Amazon essentially powers all the services of your city, and and the money goes there. It does, but I think the flaw in that buy local argument, I do agree on the velocity of money, it does work that way, is that we have remote workers now. Right? And folks are actually spreading that money around. And while we had the concentration of everybody in large urban centers, yes, that created a that created that velocity of money effect. But if you actually see what's going on with everyone moving out to, like, tier 2 cities, to suburbs, even to tier 3 regions. Right? They're basically spreading the money and the expertise around. So they're capturing the salary and the revenue and spending it, you know, also in their local areas, but also creating new services that are built off of those Amazon services. And as Amazon gets actually more local, you're gonna see more and more of that. And, of course, with Google trying to compete with Amazon at the local level, there's a lot of investment, in terms of getting that velocity of money in play. Do you see a future where we have a ownerless society? So for instance, I don't need to own a car because anytime I want, I can get an Uber. I potentially don't need to know own a house because I could always Airbnb. In fact, I did Airbnb for about 3 years, without owning or renting. I just Airbnb'd. Now there's an argument, well, someone's gotta build the initial house for a reason, so there's some tension business tension there. But do you put in your model you described before about the kitchen and the Samsung TVs and so on, I don't need to own any of my appliances. I just need to subscribe to my appliances. So are we gonna turn into a place where subscription is ownership? I think the short answer is yes. But that's part of the reason it scared the crap out of me when I wrote the book. I mean, I started by saying, where were these digital giants coming? What's gonna happen? And how do you compete with the digital giant? And then I took a step back, and I said, holy crap. If nobody owns anything or only the rich can actually own something, then everyone is subservient. Everyone's subservient to someone else, and you truly don't have freedom. And that scared the crap out of me. Do you have freedom now? I don't know what level of freedom, probably more than someone sitting in China. I don't know. I mean but I have the freedom because I know I own a place. I know it's always mine. I know I can leverage the crap out of that for on a mortgage. I know it's going to appreciate. And so I have this concept that I believe I have some level of freedom. But if I have to always subscribe or pay rent to someone else for that, is that freedom? Maybe it is because I don't have to pay condo fees, and maybe I don't have to actually mow the gra*s. You have to repair anything. I mean, I I I but but to me, I feel secure actually owning something, instead of subscribing to it. Right. But even when owning a house, you don't own it until the bank doesn't own it anymore. Initially, the bank owns 80% of it, and the government owns a piece of it depending on your property taxes. So is it different if now Amazon owns your house that as opposed to the bank owning your house? It's different because I never get to participate in the creation of wealth. And it's different because I don't have an appreciation access. And and this is why it's so important for, you know, for different communities to be able to have homeownership so that they have an appreciating asset they can pass on through Jeff different generations and create generational wealth. And when you take that ability away by creating and this is what's happening. Wall Street's going around creating these suburbs to attract folks to pay rent for the rest of their lives at 5 to $6,000 a month. These folks will never be free. Wait. What what do you mean Wall Street what do you mean Wall Street is creating these suburbs? Large investors are developing, land and for the sole purpose of rent and creating rental control over individuals. And that's happening right now. So it's like, let's go create this big super this big, like, mixed retail, mixed use complex, and we'll charge 5, $6,000 a month for this rent. It's slightly higher than what someone could actually, you know, it's slightly higher than someone could actually, you know, afford to, you know, pay for a home, but slightly less than someone could actually pay for a mortgage. Right? And it's it's set up that way. It's intentionally designed that way so that people are gonna rent forever. If Google advertise or if Google told you, hey, Ray. Do you wanna live in, the Google city of the future where we're gonna use AI to make your life so much easier, and we're gonna provide products on your doorstep before you even need them, and we're gonna just take care of everything for you. And, by the way, you'll you'll work a 3 day work week now because we've made efficient so many of the things that you do for a living. Would you do it? I'm probably gonna say no. And that's gonna sound really weird even though I'm a tech futurist and I love technology. I I value my freedom, and I value whatever I believe is my sense of freedom. So and I value my privacy, and I wouldn't wanna give that up to to a large tech company that way. Even though it it might be happening indirectly, and and this is very overt. Right. Right. It's very overt as opposed to what's happening now, which is, like, it's probably already happening. We do live in the cities of the future already, and all our data is being monitored. You know, you you search Google a 100 times a day. You buy things on Amazon. They have so much data about you already, and and a lot of your decision making you don't realize or as you point out in the book is already being made for you. So it's kind of, like, not overwork. I'm on Tor and DuckDuckGo and, like, I'm, like, on the other extreme. Right? Like, this is the first time I've opened up a Google Chrome browser only because I have to get on to this to be able to do a podcast. So I'm on the other extreme. Like, I'm paying cash to restaurant workers so that they have the freedom figuring what they wanna do with it. So I'm I'm totally on the opposite. It's it's funny how this it's funny how this pandemic may accelerated everybody shying away from cash. People don't wanna touch Yep. Cash. Yep. But I'm worried. Right? I'm I I really think that if you don't take away those anonymous capabilities, you really do lose freedom. Like, if we take away, like, the right to have a paper document or the right to pay in cash or the right to have, you know, your your data as a property right where people actually have to seek consent for your usage of that data, we're really gonna lose a lot of the freedoms that we cherish maybe in in America as opposed to some other countries. And what's the solution? I think a couple things. I saw something interesting from these bills that are being proposed in the house. I really like Access, which is the, data portability act that's out there. And what it's really like is, like, number portability. Remember, like, we used to get those cell phones and you couldn't change your number, like, if you moved to another carrier and they finally fixed that? That's what it's like. Like, hey. I wanna take all my I don't know how this is gonna be done. I actually think it's next to impossible, but maybe someone will figure it out. But I want all my social media profile information, like, taken with me, and I'm gonna go to another new social network. Right? I'm not sure how I'm gonna do that, but, you know, but the concept of it makes a lot of sense. Right? Data portability. But the other one is really having your personal data, your genomics, your digital exhaust. I want that as a property right. I mean, we have land. We got titles. That's my property right. I got ideas. I got IP and trademarks. That's a property right. We gotta make sure that a class of property is this digital exhaust and genomics and DNA because the property laws are are already written around the world. You don't have to create new legislation. You just need to do one thing, which is make this information a property right. So so there's 2 different issues, really. There's the fact that Google and Amazon and some of these other companies have become become larger than life larger than governments, and they make these decisions that affect our daily lives perhaps more than congress or the president does. And then there's and and to your point also, they become so big and such an expression of extreme capitalism that it might lead to socialism in a weird way where Google is the have, but then everybody who is happily living in Google City, you know Is a have. Is is is a have not. And because their all their data and stuff is being freely given up. And people happily do it. I I know in general, people always want to fight for their rights, but the average person is happily gives away their rights if they think it's it's it's morally justified if they're convinced by a higher power, which Google has and Amazon have become. So there's that issue. But, also, there's the issue that the the leaders, the founders of these companies, like, take take a Jeff Bezos. He and this is not a criticism, by the way. I'm I'm always interested in what these guys are up to, and they're always doing innovative things because, you know, they do the unexpected, and they do the most creative. But, like, when Jeff Bezos starts sending spaceships to Mars or Elon Musk does or whoever, and and they also start putting up thousands of satellites to provide all the Internet, it it's going to spread the distance between them and everyone else. And I hate talking about income inequality because I think it's not as big a problem as people think. It's just these handful of individuals. But are we in trouble then when it's the Jeff Bezos' and not the Amazons that are actually the the issue? Those are very, tough questions to unpack, so let me take them 1 by 1. I actually think that digital giants, like all companies and all trends, will have their rise and fall. And and but the individuals who can control and wield that much power, that is true. Right? With technology, one person can actually control a lot of different, forces. And and I think that is interesting to see how that works and how that how that is being used or abused. I'm not sure how you can contain that power right now. But I'm gonna take a different tone here is is really, your notion of, like, who can access, you know, telco services or payment networks or geopositional sub satellites. That's actually happening right now with this ideological war between the US and China. China's going to I mean, if you're a dictator authoritarian regime in anywhere in the world, and you need, like, hey. I need GPS services. Oh, we've got these BeiDou satellites. We'll help you out with. Oh, we need this payment model and a digital currency. Oh, we've got this digital yuan for there. Hey. We need to suppress, you know, this weird political nonsense that's going on in my country. Can you have something I can do to actually create some, you know, fake media for me? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We got that for you too. China is, like, the world's largest supplier for authoritarian regimes for all digital tools and technologies, know, to control their people. Right? It's just like almost god funny. Hey. By the way, you know, by the way, you got a port. You went, well, we can build you a port, but if you can't pay for it, we'll just put some ships there. You'll be okay. Right? So so so they're basically the arms dealer for to authoritarian regimes on how to control, you know, their population with digital technologies. The tools that we use to create freedoms and expressions and creative are being used against us. Right? So it comes back to, you know, the point that it really comes down to the individual and the person behind it as opposed to the technology that's the problem. And so so I think it's it's it's gonna be one of those things where we have this long term battle in the long run between individuals for good, forces for good, and forces for evil, depending what camp you believe you're good or evil. That's gonna continue. There's an interesting video by the French philosopher, Alain de Botton, which is basically it's called I think the title of the video is called Machiavellian Ethics for for Nice Guys. And his point is is that nice guys also needs to need to use Machiavellian ethics because let's say it's the US versus China. And let's just, for simplicity's sake, the US is nice. China is not nice. China is going to win if we don't use some of their methods because let's just take genomics. If they have a 1,000,000,000 people which they could study the, genomic data of, and they're willing to clone people and to make mistakes doing that and to go through, you know, scientific evolution, of of, you know, cloning and and manipulating genes so we could have superhumans and so on. They're going to eventually succeed and win. So all their people are gonna be 9 feet tall and have IQs of 300 and be extremely charismatic as well. And we're still gonna be and all diseases are gonna be cured, And we're still gonna be us because we only have 10 legal stem cell lines, and we we're we don't do cloning and and so on. And so I guess Alain de Poon's point is you're gonna lose if you if you could still be a nice guy, but you might occasionally have to use Machiavellian ethics to win. Is that are we heading or are we just heading to a world where China, like you say, is going to dominate because they the people are dispensable, and they're just gonna do everything it takes long term to to dominate. Well, the first thing I would do is I'm gonna separate the Chinese people from the CCP government. Yes. I I agree. CCP government is the is the challenge here. It is Machiavellian on their end. And I would say that, you know, it's like the book The Prince. Right? Why do why do nice guys finish last or become unstuck? Right? That was that was the central thesis, and then how do you actually solve that? We're at a point right now in the like, we were in the seventies where we looked at, you know, the Soviet Union, like, oh my god. These guys are better. They're doing everything nicer than us, and we're falling behind. And, but but but eventually, right, I mean, eventually, humanity wins. Right? Humanity's natural course is to be free. It's to be independent. It's to, you know, it's to be able to share ideas in in an open market. I mean, it's just that you have a few bad actors in the space that can actually wreak havoc if we don't take steps. And and I agree with you. There's there's gotta be a need to actually take those, you know, you know, take, you know, take mac and availing, like, approach, right, to be to actually unsmart or outsmart the folks that are actually being a little wicked. So so how do you fix that? So yeah. I mean but I think it's really about decentralization. Right? We see that movement on our end, which is really about decentralization and how can decentralization beat centralization. And I'll use example. I'll take the pandemic, and this might be controversial because we're doing it today. But 3 years from now, it might not look as controversial. You had different states and governments and around the world that took different approaches. We could have all taken the same approach. Right? But without other folks taking a different approach, we wouldn't have learned what works or what doesn't work. Right? If we lived in that world of dogma that we all have to do x, right, wherever it was, right, We would never know if y would have worked or z would have worked or something else would have worked. And in the scientific method, right, it's about experimentation and going back and looking at the data and saying, no. That's not true. And going back and then trying to figure out and test the hypothesis. One thing you'll learn from this pandemic, and maybe it's just me, is that, you know, dogma does not beat data. Everybody had their dogma. I don't care what political side you were in. But at the end of the day, you come back and you look, and you're like, this is really bizarre. The data's showing something else. Is this true? Is it not true? Should we challenge that? But we had a media around the world that was designed to censure new ideas or other points of view, and that, right, that's a great example of, like, what, at the end of the day, you know, decentralization wins. I agree. But let's say, you know, you you brought up China, so I'm taking it to an extreme. You know, China could basically require every one of their 1,000,000,000 citizens to submit their you know, get their DNA sequenced, use this enormous amount of data Against the citizen. Yep. Right. And and also just to figure let let's say to to move the envelope scientifically, they could start to figure out which multiple genes cause certain, features, in in humans. Right now, we don't have the the capability or the data to do that, but they can do that, and then they can make use of it by editing the genes accordingly. You know you know, right now, we're really good at editing single genes. And they have. No. And they have. If you talk to I have some sources in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There are some Chinese generals who look like they were in the eighties, who disappeared for a couple years that now look like they're in the sixties. So their advancements in CRISPR technologies and gene editing and gene sequencing and the combinatorial capabilities are there. It's already there. And that's why a lot of US scientists are, you know, making these missions to China or being paid to come visit and provide consultative services, to help the Chinese continue to further that because they can't do that kind of cutting edge research in the US. And so we are seeing that already. So that is a fact. That's not a guess. So that strikes me as a problem. Like, maybe in the long run, decentralization wins. And so China, quote, unquote, takes over the world, but then becomes decentralized over the next 2, 300 years, and humanity as a whole benefits. But in the short term, there could be there's a struggle. There's a struggle in that. Suck. The short term's gonna suck unless we do something about it. So so I agree. I mean, right, I think I think very, very short term, it's great in that yeah. Okay. I can get my favorite meals delivered to my doorstep before I'm even hungry, or I can get, you know, books or, you know, or Wait. I won't send you that meal because we've got you on a cholesterol plan. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Like, oops. Sorry about that. You can't eat that. But then the medium short term, we're gonna be, you know, 5 foot 8, and the Chinese are gonna reverse age and be 9 feet tall. And, you know, that's gonna happen until they take over, and then they become free. Well, you're seeing some of that already in Africa, right, if we take geopolitics into this. Right? Whenever I get in a taxicab in France, it's hilarious. I will get the Chinese guy, which I'll speak some broken Chinese with since my Chinese isn't that great, or I'll get, like, the Afrikaner. And the African guy comes up to me and says, sir, where are you from? And I'm like, oh, I'm from San Francisco. He's like, no. Where are you really from? Where are your parents from? And I'll say, oh, they're from Taiwan. And they're like, oh, okay. Good. You get to live today. Like, what do you mean? He's like, yeah. Well, I mean, in Africa, they're the the populace is sick and tired of the CCP government coming in there and taking all their resources, not paying their people, not, you know, putting the riches are being pocketed by the few, and they see that, you know, millions of, you know, Chinese have actually migrated to Africa. Right? And and, basically, they've they've colonized Africa. And they built the roads, though, across Africa. Like, they they had the satellite systems and the networks and the payments and the farming, but they didn't use local resources. They brought their own people to build it. But still, Africa must be, have mixed feelings about it, like, in the sense that they're doing some good for Africa, whereas we're not building the roads in Africa. And we're doing nothing. We're doing nothing. Yeah. No. There there's that there's that double that's there's that perspective. It's kinda like when we we we criticize slave labor or child labor, and we take it away in some countries, but that was really like, there are opportunity to actually get started in manufacturing. Like, you know, it's different perspectives. Someone could say, hey. Look. The, you know, the $3 wage that we paid per hour for someone in a low you know, like a developing country, that actually got people, you know, their first job they built the middle class with, we're gonna take away because we we consider it unethical from Western perspectives. It's gonna be interesting. So But then meanwhile, we have child labor making our iPhones in China. And solar panels. Exactly. And lithium batteries. So where's the opportunity? Like, I'm listening to this, and I'm and everybody who's listening to this is getting a little scared. There's it was such amazing abundance of knowledge, data, opportunity, creativity, money, there must be opportunity also in here for those willing to to seek it out. Where where do you see the opportunity for for the person listening to this? Person who's a a middle manager at Procter and Gamble who wants to to break free from the grind. What how can you start thinking about things differently? So if you're a middle manager at P&G, you should be thinking about how you're building the next direct to consumer network, what you actually would need to do to actually take your products, go to consumers, get it to subscription models, or get them to direct to consumer cross sell kind of approaches. You should also be personally investing in these new digital giant stocks that are forming, the ones that have those five characteristics, taking customer account control, building big networks, using digital monetization, building these data driven digital networks to win on data supremacy and with a long term focus. And you could also even create the next startup to participate in these ecosystems because these digital giants can't do everything. And while it's gonna be really, really big and really, really small, there's a lot of money to be made in building out the really, really small businesses and the niche capabilities that these digital giants will never get to. Well, what's an example, maybe one that you've seen recently? Yeah. So, you know, if you looked at, you know, the services really around, you know, how ghost kitchens are being created, I think there's some small business owners that are pulling together investments to build ghost kitchens. Right? They're using their restaurant knowledge, and they're saying, hey. Wait. We can create our own ghost kitchen. Kinda like the way we saw food trucks kind of evolve and merge. We're seeing that convergence of food trucks and ghost kitchens actually create new markets and then plugging into some of these networks. And in some cases, you know, I I think in some markets, you're getting to see that the food trucks and ghost kitchens may actually outsmart the food delivery apps. So, like, what what's the advantage of a ghost kitchen? Well, let's say let's say you own a chain of something, I don't know, like a nightclub, and it's a a chain, and it's all over the country. And you have space and licensing for a kitchen that you could potentially, turn into a ghost kitchen, meaning multiple virtual restaurants can have their kitchen in there and then and then deliver from there. What's what's the benefit of that as far as, like, taking over the world? Like, how what's how is that the first step in in world domination? It might not get you to world domination, but you'll make some good money along the way. But what actually would happen is by opening up those kitchens, you get massive volume discounts on purchasing of food. That's why chains always do better than individual restaurants, right, how they can actually keep their prices down. So it's the procurement and the procurement power. The second piece is that you actually start getting really micro focused data on people's habits. You know, Thai food does better in a ZIP code versus Italian food. Okay. Why is that? You know, preferences, you're on the holidays are different. Here's more catering done than others' spots. Right? People celebrate their birthdays differently in this neighborhood versus another. Like, I scooped ice cream in Brooklyn for a summer, right, for my godfather. And, like, holy crap. People spend 100 dollars, 100 of dollars on, like, ice cream cakes for, like, 16th birthdays, and they pay in cash. And I'm like, that's crazy. Right? Where I grew up, like, people were, like, you know, scraping away before they'd even buy an ice cream cake. So I was like, wow, this is kinda interesting. Right? So so you see different types of patterns emerge, and and I think that allows you to fine tune your operations even better. And and I think that's really what people are using is they're looking for that, you know, that nugget or that signal to say, you know, here's a new product or offering that we could try. Here's something that, you know, our market is testing, and it's really driving down, you know, customer acquisition costs and any kind of cross sell. If you're listening to this, you're saying one opportunity might be within the company itself because they have the financial resources. Hey. Let's think about turning Crest toothpaste into a subscription model or whatever. And then as an individual, what sort of, like what what what sort of startup opportunities would you be looking at right now or even, like, lifestyle entrepreneur opportunities? Yeah. I'd be looking at joint venture startups, places where I can bring together different value chains. Let's take the P and G person. Imagine if we actually did Charmin as a service. Right? We figured out that, you know, it's like vendor managed inventory at a personal level for toilet paper. You use, like, 4 rolls a week. Right? You know, we'll make sure that we ship you, like, 4 rolls a week until you tell us to stop. Right? That's a simple thing that people get involved. But how are they gonna deliver that? There's lots of opportunities in that value chain for a startup to say, hey. We'll we'll take care of that for you, Charmin. Maybe it'll be Uber, right, that does the delivery on the last bottom mile. Right? Maybe Domino's Pizza, you know, your Charmin delivered by Domino's bill. Weird, but it's possible. But those are the type of opportunities. You're trying to figure out where you can actually provide gaps in the value chain where, you know, the big digital giants can't get to yet or not for a while and create companies which might be acquired by them over time. And that's where that that hyper personalization, that micro, you know, markets, you know I mean, local markets are really gonna play a role. You know, I I it reminds me. I have one friend who, he has there's a lot of data that's public. So he has all this public data about when people buy their cars, where people buy their cars, what model people buy. And so he's able to predict in a kind of a minority report sort of fashion. Oh Refresh. Ray Ray Wang, every 2 years, buys a new, you know, Honda from this dealership. So he sells that data to surrounding the other dealerships who then call you 2 months before your next Honda upgrade that you do and say, listen. That's awesome. I can give you a Honda frustration. 20% off, and just come to my dealership within the next 2 days. I've got a couple extra Hondas just for you, and it's got extra features as well that you haven't normally seen. And he sells that data and and, you know, makes about 20,000,000 a year in revenues, and he's just starting out. Yeah. That's awesome. I mean, just on refresh cycles and lease expiration dates, and he could actually take that and create a two sided market by going to sales reps who are missing their quota and charging them a $100 to actually get the get the lead. That's pretty awesome. That's I think that's basically what he does. That that is that is what he does is he sells it to well, he basically sells it to dealerships, which is a collection of of sales agents. But, Yeah. This has been this has been fascinating, Ray. I don't know if I'm I'm missing anything. We could talk forever about, you know, kind of you know, I'll I'll or okay. One area where I think is very interesting is to look at models like Google and Amazon, and they're not just the long tail, but they're sort of the there there's the long horizontal tail, but nobody really talks about the long vertical tail. So so Amazon started off with books, but then they say, hey. If we have the infrastructure for books, we could do clothes, electronics, food, and so on. So they went up vertically. Then they went up vertically again. Hey. If we have the infrastructure to do ecommerce, we can let other people sell their own products. So they went up vertically again. And then they're like, if we have the infrastructure to handle all of this storage and data and databases and transactions, we can sell our cloud services and AWS, which is where they make most of their profit now. So so, you know, there's there's interesting things using the the long vertical tail as well as just the long horizontal tail, and I think that's a key feature to, you know, like, you you mentioned Netflix. Netflix was this, to you know, they they sent a new DVD to you in the mail every month, and then suddenly, they became their own kind of streaming network. But what and I've actually had this discussion with Airbnb. I think what Netflix did was not really an expansion of their DVD model, but any website that has a large amount of traffic could automatically be a TV network. They've got the traffic. And I I've actually had this discussion with Airbnb where I pitch I said, you should have TV shows at airbnb.com. Why not? You have billions of, you know, unique visitors a month. If you had a show about, I don't know, every city I pitched them at one show idea, which is I'm gonna stay in every city, I'm gonna stay in the most expensive Airbnb and the cheapest, most rundown Airbnb and bring my friends who are comedians to each place. And every week, there's a new episode. You just have that show on your front page, and you're you're a TV network now. So any site with a large amount of traffic could be a media company. Largest network wins. You can do media. You can do ads. You can do goods. You can do services. That's the basic rule. You wanna build the largest network. But let me take a step back. This is a really important piece you have here, which is really about the vertical long tail. Here's the interesting thing. With all this antitrust activity, guess what's gonna happen? Google and Amazon won't be allowed to get into other industries. There's gonna be a big push. I mean, this is really what the antitrust is going on. The k Street lobbyists are trying to push back on big tech, so your pharma, your health care, your financial services. Right? They're trying to push hard to keep Amazon out of their business. But remember, these folks haven't innovated in years. That's the challenge. Right? But because there's gonna be antitrust scrutiny on m and a activities or any of these folks swimming outside of their current swim lanes, what they're gonna do is require joint venture partnerships. So these basically, Amazon might not be able to own something, but they're gonna fund the next set of joint ventures and allow new companies to actually invade some of these markets or pick winners inside some of these markets to go against their competitors. And that's the next piece that's going to happen, and you're gonna see that already. I mean, you saw food Ford partners with Google. Microsoft partnered with GM. I mean, there's more to that in those partnerships in the long run. It's not like they're gonna go build cars like maybe Apple might, but what they're really trying to do is get into that the the whole transport business in the long run and get into the video and entertainment inside the cars and and the vehicles. And so that's the game. What about where where's the role of crypto in all this? Where do you see crypto, specifically Bitcoin, but DeFi, ether? Where where where do you see these things? I know that's a a a multi $1,000,000,000,000 industry. I mean, just what do you think of that? Like but, yeah, if you what what is the the simple view on that right now? Well, the crypto is right. Bitcoin works because it's a scarce resource. And if it's going to be a stored value, we're gonna see a lot of smart contracts, transactions, enabled in those crypto environments. The role crypto plays is really in facilitating the anonymous transactions that may have to occur. I don't know if you've been on the dark web lately, but I have. And, you know, that's always, like, the trendsetter for commerce. That's always the trendsetter for what's the next big thing, right, in terms of how interactions occur. And you can see the efficiency that's already happening, you know, with crypto transactions and smart contracts. What what's that what's about to happen is that coming to the mainstream market for smart contracts and, you know, all these signals just like the way we do, like, you know, automated trading. That's gonna be the same thing that we do for automated contracts. And, you know, you hit this price reserve, you hit this quantity, fine. Trade goes through, and things are paid, and things are settled right away. No intermediaries. And so this decentralization trend is real. What's also interesting is the fact that a company with 1 microservices or one API that's operating at a 1,000,000,000 or even a 100,000,000,000 transactions can make a ton of money on fractional on fractional, transactions. Right? So for point 001¢, call this API, and suddenly you've got a company that's just built on that. And, basically, what the DeFi and the decentralized, finance markets are doing is, basically, they're chipping out all the value around the banks to the point. You're gonna ask, why do I have a bank? And who the is it if it's only for insurance reasons that I have a bank and they only insure up to $100,000, who cares? Maybe I don't ever need these banks again. They're just a waste of the middle. So that's interesting. On the dark web, what are people using Bitcoin? Are they using Bitcoin to buy things, or what are they use and what are they using Bitcoin to buy? They're using a whole bunch of different cryptos to buy things. Right? Anything from, hey. I I need a spare part to I need some illicit drug or, you know, I'm I'm transacting for a contract hit. I mean, it's everything. Right? I mean, the the worst of the world's happening there and the best of the world's happening is like, hey. I need 20,000, like, you know, what are those hats where you push the button and the ears flap? Like, I need 20,000 of those. Right? So it's it's all over the map, but you just see commerce being facilitated in super efficient means. So some people say Bitcoin's too volatile to be used as a currency. So do you see Bitcoin transactions happening, or are they more stable coins? Or where where do you see the transactions actually what currency are they using? We see ether. We see Ripple. We see folks using Bitcoin. Problem is these things are too slow. So if we're gonna do massive transactions at rapid space, you're probably not gonna put it on the blockchain. There's gotta be something else that's gonna be much faster. Transactions per second are way too slow, and blockchain's still even though people are like, oh, we can do a 100 transactions per second now. Like, you're gonna be, like, 10,000 transactions per second to even count. What what are there any currencies coming close or any any innovations happening there? And what about, like, Chia, which is, not, you know, proof of work or proof of stake? Yeah. That helps too. I just think that we haven't hit that point where there's enough volume for people to say, okay. We've got a problem yet, and we haven't hit the point of mass adoption where people are actually truly transacting here. They're mostly most of the use cases that we see are really people using it as reserve assets or, you know, small transactions or, you know, small transaction volumes, but nothing that has a time element. And yet DeFi tokens are doing 1,000,000,000 of dollars worth, a day, arbitraging between these different currencies. Is there any DeFi tokens that you particularly like? I'm staying out of the token market mostly because it still looks like a Ponzi scheme to me. Right? Whereas for me, Chia makes a lot of sense because it's just hard disk storage. But on the token side, I'm not sure I'm there yet. It has to have something of value, and I also need to have the assurance that the physical asset is definitely on the other end. There's gonna be too many scams where people thought they bought, like, you know, I got a slice of Mona Lisa. And you're like, oh, really? Okay. You know, who is offering it and what the heck? But, hey. You know, the code for Tim Berners Lee's, you know, worldwide web was just pushed out for 4,500,000. I think that's just Really? Oh, I didn't know that. That's cool. What would be a catalyst for either a Chia or a Bitcoin to really take it to the next level? I think it's gonna be that model that I talked to you about, but the airline mileage points, mass adoption right away. Right? I mean, if you got 700,000,000 users on day 1, it's pretty wild. I mean, here's another one. Like, I can't figure out. Like, LinkedIn, I I like them. I use them as kind of a resume. It'd be nice if they would just, you know, do something as simple as say, hey. This person worked here, worked with all the employers, worked with all the universities. Hey. This person got this degree. Here are all the skills and courses I took. They could make a ton of money to do that. And and that would be the next network, right, where you basically you know, a network like Chiyo would just handle the transactions and handle the fact that, hey. This person has these skills, and they wanna reveal them to people or not. Right? And so these the intersection with the smart contracts, the payments, and the fact that, you know, you can actually pay for that information to be provided or not provided. You mean LinkedIn's got, so much relevant data for the career space that, people could own their data and, cryptocurrency could could buy that data. So if I'm a recruiter, I could say I need all the photographers out there, in New Jersey. I'm gonna pay use, you know, Chia to buy it. And why would I need a crypto, though? Why can't I just use cash? Oh, because you're already you're you can always use cash. I mean, the question with Bitcoin and blockchain is always, can you do it without? Right? That's the first question we tell people when they're on a project. Can you do this without that? And the answer is yes. Okay. Why aren't you doing it without that? Oh, I can't get funding. Oh, okay. Fine. Okay. Let's go back to Bitcoin and Blockchain. Let's get out of this market. It's working. So so that Fort Lee, New Jersey wedding photographer. Yeah. I know. You can just use cash. Yeah. But you're right. LinkedIn sort of never really it's a it's a huge social network, but it never really became, like, the Facebook. You know, it'd be it's it's still LinkedIn. It's still LinkedIn. You should be you should be well, how come you don't become the CEO of one of these companies? Like, you run your research service. I'm sure people are after you to be CEO of one of these things. You know, what we do is, like, we basically advise folks, like, any one of those ideas in this book. Like, I would just tell people, Give us a give us a percentage cut of the company, and we'll go advise you, help build it out. So, you know, you actually, you know, that's a good point. I mean, this is the challenge. Right? When I wrote the book, like, I had several close friends say, why don't you just create a fun thesis and raise the money for these companies? Then the short answer was, you know, I I love the ideas. I love thinking through the ideas. I'm not the guy to build them right now. There's a lot more there's a lot of smart people that can put this together, but I can help people see where that future is. And so I I kinda know where my role is right now. What about investing in MMO? You have an an like like your friends say, you have an investment thesis. Again, not as a manager, but as an investor. Why don't you do that? I do. I do. A lot of the companies that have those 5 elements are the ones that I bet on. That's why you'll see me on CNBC or Fox Business or Yahoo Finance and Cheddar talking about digital giants, because those are the ones that have been the winners in the marketplace. Well, Ray Wang, author of Everybody Wants to Rule the World. I wish I knew everything you knew, but 20 years ago, I would probably would've made a lot more money and knock on broke several times. I'm looking forward to the next book. Where are you gonna write another one? This is like a a a guide book to the future. I want the next book. Yeah. I'm working on it. That's what they say. Write the next book after the first book's published. I didn't do that last time. That's why it took 5 years. So Excellent. Well, I look forward to it. You're always welcome back on the show, and thanks for appearing this time. Hey. Thanks so much for having me.