March 21, 2024 • 64 mins
Have you ever found yourself in the heat of a pizza topping debate, staunchly defending the honor of pineapple and jalapeños? Well, you're not alone. Our latest episode is a smorgasbord of culinary conundrums and philosophical ponderings, starting with my own guilty pleasure pizza and a taste test that could save your palate from an unfortunate citrus coffee soda mishap. We chew over the joys of local dining and how our personal tastes can elevate a meal from mundane munching to a full-flavored feast of conversation.
As we move from sizzling burgers at school games to the celebrity-induced frenzy of Logan Paul's hydration drink, we touch on the ripples created by food trends and influencers. We're not just tossing around opinions on charred Brussels sprouts here; we're diving into the shared experiences and cultural shifts that dining out brings. Plus, we discuss the unexpected delight of air-fried veggies with a side of salsa verde, and the communal joy of a pizookie at BJ's Restaurant.
But we don't stop at the dinner table. The episode takes a twist into the paradoxical nature of our world, from the analysis paralysis brought on by too many choices to the elusive nature of originality in an era of AI-assisted creation. We debate whether a Civil War author's work is a tapestry of influences or a beacon of original thought, and we examine the tightrope between inspiration and imitation. Join us for a feast of ideas that will leave you savoring the flavors of thought long after the plates are cleared.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to help yourself.
Food and philosophy with Brianand Nick.
I'm Nick.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I'm Brian.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Can I take your order ?
No, no.
So what do you, Brian, what doyou call it when two docs
evaluate each other for theirperformance?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Peer reviewed paradox .
See that works, whether we talkabout medical doctors or you're
talking about right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, all right what doyou mean?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I like I wouldn't have guessed the peer reviewed
part.
I had then my head.
I'm like it's something paradox.
I know that.
But what am I eating?
So I'm having a.
Actually there's a local pizzaplace called New York pie that
you're like, oh man, that soundsreally good and I like Pete.
(01:05):
Well, first of all, it's niceevery once in a while to go to a
place that actually makes theirown dough, like they actually
do the dough at the place, andyou know, it's not just like a.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I mean, I hope everyone makes their own dough,
like otherwise.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'm saying that some places have it shipped in from
other places.
You know what I mean.
Where?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I'm Tom, I was making the money pun, oh yeah.
Otherwise they used to be inbusiness.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, got it Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Back to you.
So so they make their own dough, so they make their own dough.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Sorry, and and their, their toppings are pretty good.
They have some sort of semiunusual ones, but I will always
I'll get a, a what's it called?
Oh, antipasto salad.
My wife and I like to get thatbecause it has, like you know,
(02:02):
it's cheese and meat and a bunchof other stuff.
They actually put artichokehearts on theirs, which I get.
I get all of them because mywife doesn't like them and and
they have a good, good ranchdressing that goes with that and
but they have different form.
Facts.
Some people will do theselittle pinwheels of like meat
and cheese that go in theirantipasto salad.
This place does little cubes ofdifferent kinds of meat
(02:26):
Pepperoni is in there, Cheese,some ham and stuff like that.
So it's a really good salad.
And then I last night I was ableto just get my own pizza.
I usually like a lot of othertoppings that nobody else in my
family likes, so I just get.
A lot of times I'll get a smallpizza just for myself that has
all the crazy toppings.
They call them the crazytoppings, but they're not crazy
(02:47):
to me.
So so I got pizza last nightwith well, the base pizza was
just I think they called it theNew York basic, which was olives
, mushrooms, green peppers,pepperoni sausage, and I think
(03:10):
that might be it.
And so they got that.
And then what's the other thing?
Oh, so then I added all right,this is going to create a huge
rift in our audience, but Iadded pineapples and Wow, just
(03:31):
your basic pineapple pizza.
So I added pineapples andjalapenos.
So you know, so reallyinteresting.
They put a lot of jalapenos onit, so it was really really
spicy.
Spicy it was and it was good.
I don't necessarily likepineapple all the time, but
(03:51):
every once in a while that sweetand spicy Like.
One of the things I like a lotis there's a Mexican restaurant
nearby our house that doespineapple, jalapeno margarita
and so sort of the same kind ofthing.
It's like super sweet but thenyou get like a burn that you're
getting and it's served with thejalapeno.
(04:13):
And so.
So I got that and it was reallygood it was.
You know, like I said, Iusually am just stuck with sort
of getting what the rest of thefamily wants, because I'm a nine
and so I'm just like, yeah, Iget whatever you want, I don't
care, Just get what you know,and so that you know, basically
(04:35):
I was able to get the full deal,which was really really good.
I will say that the places thatmake their own dough, they do
make their own dough becauseit's more expensive to buy pizza
there.
But sometimes everyone, like Isaid, every once in a while I
feel like it's worth it to, youknow, to get something that's a
(04:58):
little bit more than just thestandard.
I guess I don't know how wouldyou.
It's like you can't really sayfast food pizza, because it's
not really fast food pizza, butI guess chain, commercially
produced chain, chain chain,yeah, and that that place, new
York pie, has a few locations.
They've got, I think four orfive locations around where we
live, but they're not a megachain, they're like across the
(05:21):
whole country and so sort of alocal, locally owned chain.
Maybe that's the bestterminology.
So that's what I have and the.
So then Brian's beverage corner.
I've drank the I've drank.
I've had these before on thepodcast.
(05:43):
Drink is the proper drink, Idon't know.
I always you don't say drink.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
No regular verb.
You don't say drink.
You definitely don't say drunk.
It doesn't feel right though.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It just doesn't feel right I drank.
I don't know, I drank, I drankit, I drank it.
I don't know it.
Just it sounds like I shouldhave some kind of an accent when
I say it.
But so slingshot coffee companymakes these little coffee sodas
and yeah, I think you talkedabout them before.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I have had them before.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
This one's a little different.
This one is a citrus vanillacream soda.
It's a coffee flavored citrusvanilla creams cream soda, if
you're, if you are familiar inthe last episode, if you didn't
listen to it, go listen to ourfirst episode of this, because
this is part two that I talkedabout having coconut flavor with
(06:39):
coffee and thinking that thatwas not a good flavor, and then
in this case, I thought, hey,citrus vanilla cream soda that
doesn't sound like it's verygood good flavor in a coffee,
like coffee with citrus vanillaand cream soda.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right yeah sounds like a lot of acid added to very
little and base.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
And I was correct, it is not a good flavor.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Good stuff, good delivery.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, I mean, I like what they try it, what they're
trying to do.
You know they're trying to likebroaden, broaden the thing out
and everything.
I like the attempt.
It just there's a lot going onwith it.
I can't really taste.
It tastes very bitter coffee,like when you, when you drink it
.
It's, I mean, makes sense.
The number one ingredient isorganic cold brew concentrate.
(07:34):
So obviously that's the numberone ingredient in there and I
don't know, I don't know if it'slike worth it to to like to
have the flow.
Well, let me put it this way, Iwould much rather just have
like cold brew or something likethat from Starbucks.
That's just, you know, regularplate flavors, or just maybe
(07:57):
even just some sweet cream in it, than this.
I don't know that I would reachfor this, and it's nothing
against slingshot.
I've had some other stuff thatslingshot is done, that's good,
but this one seems to me likenot my cup of tea.
It's not my cup of tea, or, inthis case, not my cup of citrus,
vanilla cream soda, coffee,soda, coffee soda.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's not.
It's not your cup of coffeesoda.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Right, exactly, exactly.
So I'm going to, I'm going togive it a few more sips
throughout the podcast to see,but the first sip was it was
quite intense.
So I'm going to see, I'm goingto see if it actually changes
flavor a little bit or if I mytaste buds change.
Maybe it was just shocking thefirst sip that I had.
So do I have that as part ofBBC?
(08:43):
And then my water jug forhydration, and I know my BBCs
are getting lesser and lesser.
You know, I did say I did sendyou that picture the other day,
though I was at a conference andhad like multiple drinks.
Yeah, I guess.
But I did send you that picturethe other day when I was at the
conference where I was likethey had drinks, you know, they
(09:04):
had coffee, and I had my flaskwith me, not flask, my water
water bottle, and I had allthese drinks and I send you that
picture.
It was like hey look, bbc had alegal conference, you know.
So I.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
It's normal for me that I have you know multiple
drinks everywhere.
So better to have BBC therethan at an at an illegal
conference.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That is true.
That is true, yeah, so that iswhat I am eating and also what
I'm drinking.
And what are you eating?
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Well, I want to call back briefly to you talking
about the, or is it this?
The jalapeno margarita.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Pineapple jalapeno Pineapple yeah, pineapple
jalapeno margarita yeah, mysister handed me a beer at one
of our recent holiday familygatherings.
Yeah, she wanted me to try itand it was a spicy margarita,
(10:12):
like, like a can of beer, spicymargarita.
Oh, okay.
Beer, yeah, and it was bad likeshe was hitting it to me because
it was the last one left.
I think she had two left, lasttwo left, and she'd already kind
(10:33):
of pawned off on other peopleto try.
She thought might like it or beinterested in trying it.
But it it was just bad like Icouldn't even.
It tasted like Pickle juice butthen had the if the cumulative,
cumulative effect of heat inthe mouth like jalapeno right
(10:55):
ice often does you know?
like the first, first time yousomething's got jalapeno flavor,
jalapeno spice in it, you'relike, oh, this is so bad.
Yeah, then the second bite is alittle more warm.
And third, it was just.
It was just jalapeno picklejuice is what it tasted like,
and and I Couldn't finish it andshe convinced me that the next
(11:17):
holiday gathering to go aheadand give it another try, the
last can right wow to get it outof the fridge and like, okay,
I'll have a couple sips, but I'mprobably gonna pour it out and
so that's fine.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
She was a good that's always, that's always good.
Yeah, hey can you drink this,just so I can get it out of my
refrigerator.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, it's like if, and that to me is probably a
good indicator that I've got Atleast a little bit of nine in me
, right?
Because?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
yeah.
Yeah, sure.
I can help out.
Yeah, no problem, I was apeacemaker.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, just if I don't know if I would an achiever and
she dared me, then that mightbe more effective.
Right finish it anyway.
But what I'm actually eating issome air fried chicken cooked
in olive oil, and Dory was evensweet enough to cube it up for
me for easy eating nice.
She also.
(12:12):
Her secret ingredient was SomeMonterey chicken spice.
Oh yeah which it does.
It does give it a bit of Like afriendly Earth-tone flavor.
Yeah, we use the, we use the.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Monterey steak seasoning On our.
So when we cook hamburgers forthe football games at the high
school, that's the season ofchoice for the hamburger patties
, because it makes it has thesalt and the pepper and has a
little bit of like Garlic in itand a little bit of other stuff,
rather than just a plain oldsalt and pepper on a burger, you
(12:51):
know.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Mm-hmm but, it's good , and my side dish for Our
frozen veggies heated up abelief, the air fryer as well.
Yeah.
Russell sprouts, sweet potatoesand onions and I've got a bit
left.
It's kind of cool a little.
(13:14):
I might throw some salsa verdeon there, just to spice it up a
bit more.
Yeah and I can say that itpairs very, very well both the
side dish and the chicken with,like the classic round crackers,
good old, you know wheat flourwith, you know vegetable oil and
(13:35):
see, yeah, the vegetable oil issafflower oil, but it's, it's
all.
Vegetable oil is just bad foryou, I'd yeah as is wheat.
Now I'm like feeling bad forparent crap this healthy food.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The Brussels sprouts sound yeah yeah, there's just a
little.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Edges are nice and crispy.
That's good burnt, burnt tipsto him, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I Used to not like that.
I used to not like any kind ofyou know, charring or anything
on, even if it was like on meator if it was on something else.
Now I've got, I've actuallylike sort of developed a flavor
for that, where it's like, yeah,I want a little bit of,
especially with that, like whenthey do the Brussels sprouts
where they're Baked and the youknow, even some of the outside
(14:23):
parts will fall off and just besort of crispy like on the side,
so gives a little bit of extratexture when you're eating them,
you know.
Yeah, because I remembergrowing up.
I didn't like them because itwas always boiled like they
always boiled the.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
You know, or, or like steamed the Brussels sprouts
and it was just sort of likethis a baby food texture.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, yeah yeah and now I've gotten into it.
I think it's sort of trendy,though, because I know, I know
of at least three or fourrestaurants I've been to where
they have Brussels sprouts onthe menu, either as a side dish
or as a as an appetizer, like astarter, where you can get
(15:07):
Brussels sprouts for the table,which is the James Brute house
is a National chain in the US.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, they have.
What is it?
The balsamic Brussels?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
yeah, do you have BJ's out and where you are?
Oh, we don't have one out here.
Yeah, they're lucky.
We used to eat the.
Bj's.
We see the BJ's all the timewhen we lived in Southern
California.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
So yeah, great place to go after work With some
friends.
You know, yeah, just shareappetizers.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Get a bazooki.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yes, that's the the cookie.
Yeah, and cookie in a pan.
Yeah, iron skillet.
Yeah.
Drinking.
So I've got adequate amounts ofwater, maybe yeah, but even
lots of water, as well as ahydration drink.
This is Prime hydration.
(16:05):
Oh nice not associated with yeah, not associated with Amazon at
all.
This is the lemonade flavor.
You would know that by lookingat it because it's this bright
highlighter yellow.
And one thing that seems thatinterests me about these drinks
is that every flavor that I'vetried so far has 10% coconut
(16:27):
water in and it really comes outin terms of just sweet and
there's a ton of flavor too Likethat was something that really
like.
It literally hit me.
Like I know it didn't literallyhit me, but it felt like it hit
me with flavor, like you tasteit right away.
Your first step, your fifth sip, as Pretty stimulating, but
(16:52):
there's no caffeine, no gluten.
Yeah it's Sweden with sucraloseand and only 25 calories,
because I think there's alsosome actual sugar in there too.
So, mark, yeah.
But yeah, since I startedexercising, getting my hands on
(17:16):
some hydration drinks seemedlike the thing to do to help
make me feel like a part of thecommunity.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Well, that's a.
That's a.
That one is a new drink.
That's Logan.
You know Logan Paul.
Have you heard of Logan Paul onYouTube?
He was a big YouTuber.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, If I had known that I might have.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, anyway, he said yeah that's pretty funny.
So he's yeah, so he had, youknow, he had a YouTube channel
and then he now he's like a boxlike he's.
He literally is like has made alot of money and I think is
went on to train and he's hadactual like professional boxing
matches or at least at leastgotten paid to go out and box
(18:00):
someone but him and this otherguy started he had a pretty like
he medium muscle build, butlarge or long lens, yeah yeah.
He's a pretty tall guy, but he'syeah, he started that.
I actually just pulled up anarticle, said that.
It's like an article in YahooFinance and it's like, yeah,
they, they were on track to hitover a billion dollars in sales
(18:24):
in 2023 after, like the previousyear, only being like 250
million.
So they've like sort of takenthe drink.
I know that a lot of the youngkids like it, like it's being a
parent of high schoolers, likethey have it on sale in the
vending machines at school andkids like it.
So, and they also have an energydrink.
(18:44):
I'm pretty sure that I think Imay have actually reviewed that,
not reviewed it, but that might.
That was definitely in a BBC atone point, I don't know if it
was the hydration one or theenergy one, but yeah, Okay, yeah
, man.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But yeah, maybe I'll probably stop getting those
drinks.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You're like this is the last time I buy that.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I know there's always kind of like a neutral, nearly
negative, I don't knowconnotation around that guy Like
yes, yeah.
I love to hate them, or Yep.
I don't know much about them.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I don't think I've ever posted on YouTube I think
there was a recent.
Well, we did an episode alittle while ago about cancel
culture.
I'm pretty sure that he goteither partially or completely
canceled at some point for doingsomething like he did,
something that was notacceptable, and I don't even
know what that is, and you knowbut I know that he got like sort
(19:47):
of people were like okay, youknow, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
You're done yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And then he opened a drink company and is making
hundreds of millions of dollarsin a drink company, so Sounds
like an enigma.
Right?
Well, this is part two, as Ialluded to, of our series on
paradoxes, the paradoxes ofmodern life, and last episode we
(20:19):
went over about five of themand we've got a few more that we
can go over today, that justhave conversation about them.
But before we get to that, I'mgoing to re, I'm going to review
the definition of paradox, justso that if you didn't listen to
the first episode, you'll knowwhat we're talking about.
But if you didn't listen to thefirst episode, go back and
(20:41):
listen to it, because it'spretty good stuff.
There's lots of good stuff inthere, if I do say so myself.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Anyway, I mean, I feel like it's the most recent
episode we've published.
You know right, You're notsaying something.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, exactly that is saying something.
So let me just go over thedefinition of paradox, in case
somebody hasn't listened to ourpast episode, just to make sure
that we're still all on the samepage.
So paradox is a seeminglyabsurd or self-contradictory
statement or proposition that,when in fact investigated or
(21:17):
explained, may prove to bewell-founded or true and, as we
talked about in the last episode, talked about sort of a bunch
of them.
Five is a bunch, that's mydefinition.
A handful, huh Five fingers,it's a handful Right.
(21:38):
So we talked about five of them.
I think that they are all.
I don't want to say thatthey're not like mind bending or
anything like that, but I willsay that you know, talking as we
said in our that other episodewe did about counterintuitive
truths, there's just so manythings that you, I think your
(21:59):
mind plays tricks on you and youthink that it should be a
certain way based on logic, butwhen you start actually looking
into things, that logicallydoesn't play out that way.
So that's sort of the coolthing about these is that if you
, you know, not that these aresuper profound or anything like
that, but at the same time Ithink most people think in a
(22:20):
certain way and sometimes thelogic doesn't play out.
So so the next one, or the onethat we were we left off on that
we were going to do, is calledthe paradox of abundance, and
that's talks mostly aboutinformation abundance, but I
(22:42):
think it could be really appliedto any kind of abundance.
So they talk about it saysinformation abundance, like all
markets of abundance.
Oh there, hey, look at that, itties it all in there.
Information abundance, like allmarkets of abundance, are bad
for the average person but greatfor small numbers of people.
(23:05):
So which I think is what we'resort of yeah, well, I think
we're also seeing that in thelast 20 to 30 years, the amount
of information that's availableto us at our fingertips 24 hours
a day, seven days a week,between AI and Google searches
(23:26):
and everything else, is amassive amount of information
right, and so, for most, product, product abundance, to write
their stuff, that, and 1700different versions of charging
cables and phone cases andsweaters and books that you can
(23:47):
get on Amazon.
Yes, you know, it's which whichtouches on the one we we talked
about last in our last episodethe paradox of decision making,
having that abundance of stuffwhere you're, you're like
paralysis by analysis and you'vegot man, it's better to have
three, three choices, like backwhen, back in the day, back in
the old days, you know, backback in the day when there was
(24:09):
only three network televisionchannels and you didn't have
cable and you didn't haveanything else, you had three
choices about what you're goingto watch on TV.
And sometimes I spend an hourscrolling through trying to
figure out what I want to watchbefore I start watching it now,
because there's so many thingsthat you couldn't watch.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So and I there's people I play games with that
you know identify with this toothat it's the same problem with
gamers.
There's such an a saturation ofgames and games on discount and
games that people bought ondiscount or bought just wanting
to play or figuring they wouldplay that they've never played.
Right.
(24:47):
And and they still aren'tgetting around to playing them.
And they have the choice andthey don't know what to play.
They don't know what they wantto play.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Right.
So, and I think also we areseeing this play out relatively
recently, just within the last10 years, and unfortunately I
don't not that I don't want thisto be a political podcast, but
I think in politics that's thathas really where it's gotten to,
the, you know, sort ofinformation overload.
(25:16):
And then, you know, for, forpeople who know and see the
internet for what it is, as atool to use in very specific
circumstances, I think it worksout great.
But the minute that you use itas I'm going to go out there and
, you know, basically fill mycart with all this information
(25:39):
about the subject that I'mtalking about, or, you know.
Going back to making anotherreference, when we talked about
the cognitive biases, you knowthat confirmation bias is really
really, really strong when youhave a source where you can
phrase a question in a certainway and you can get an answer
(25:59):
that you want because there'ssomeone else out there, there's
someone you know, there'ssomeone out there that thinks
the way same way that you haveand probably has put that on the
internet somewhere.
So when you do a search and say, oh, does this, this, this,
this happen, If this happens,then there's probably somebody
else out there that, and it hasno basis in science or any kind
of research or anything.
It's just some person that hada platform and said, yeah, I
(26:22):
believe this because it makessense logically.
Which is exactly what we'retalking about is paradoxes,
things that should make sense.
You know, logic doesn't alwaysplay out, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
So I think there's an old Bible proverb that's oh,
actually it's Ecclesiastes thatthere's nothing new under the
sun.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
You know.
But yeah, Just coming to thewhole, like you were saying,
somebody might have alreadythought of it.
Yeah.
Because tons of times where Ithink I come up with something
original.
Yes.
Now the curiosity.
I'll Google it and it's like,oh nope, there's already three
different versions of the samething I just thought of.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
There was a.
There was a professor in my lawschool that on.
I thankfully did not have himas a professor, but apparently
on the first day of class hecame in and said don't think
that you're going to have anoriginal thought in this class.
You're going to read, you knowyou're going to read findings
from the most brilliant legalminds throughout history.
So don't think that you'regoing to come in here and think
(27:22):
of something that's novel,because all of those things have
already been thought about.
You know so.
But again, getting back to thatabundance of information, I
think that it can be like I said.
I think I see it going two ways.
One is that confirmation biasis you come up with a conclusion
(27:45):
and then you go and seek outinformation to try to support
that conclusion and with theabundance of information on you
know that's readily available,you're going to find
confirmation for whatever youwant to find confirmation for,
and I think that.
But I also think that you knowfor, for a, for a very few, you
(28:05):
know, much smaller group ofpeople, the internet is a very
powerful tool that can be usedfor, you know, for really good
things and for, you know,productivity and creativity and
all kinds of things, but I thinkfor most people it's not that.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I think there's an abundance of content creation.
We talked about the previousepisode.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
And those who, those lucky few, who have just the
right talent and they, theycaught the attention of the
algorithm at just the right time.
Yep.
End up being the the few peoplefor whom this abundance is good
.
They went viral.
Yeah.
But it's difficult for theaverage person to become a
(28:48):
YouTube star or a tick talksensation or writer.
The phrase is um.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well, the paradox there is that it takes the.
It sort of goes back to thatwhat we talked about the paradox
of writing or creativity in thelast episode, which is that
there's still no secret formulafor becoming famous on YouTube
(29:25):
or TikTok or as a whole, as apodcast or anything else.
What it is is continuing tocreate content until somebody
says, oh, you know what, I likethat content.
And then you get feedback andyou get into a feedback loop and
then you create more of thatcontent and then you get a
bigger audience and then youknow it just keeps on going like
that and you're able to developa large audience, but it's, you
(29:46):
know, part of that is luck youknow.
Part of that is you get featuredon YouTube as one of the you
know.
Youtube itself says hey, thisis one of our featured content
creators.
Go check them out.
You know, and all of a suddenyou know there's a lot, of a lot
of people that go to yourchannel or whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
So I want to say that it sort of implies it with
talking about markets ofabundance, but I think money is
another thing, that we have noabundance today.
You know, more money, moreproblems.
Yeah, I think it's true ofindividuals who have a lot of
money, but I think it's true ofthe marketplace.
(30:28):
When you print more money andthe dollars are less scarce,
less rare yeah.
And everybody's got some, thenit literally means less.
That this is like how inflationhappens.
This is where people who areearning six figure salaries
today can feel poorer thanpeople who are earning, you know
(30:49):
, 20,000 before the GreatDepression.
You know it's like there's moreto go around, but it still
feels like we have less of it.
Right.
Right, well, and it's usuallythe who are already very rich
have the means to get even moremoney so that the effects of
(31:09):
inflation affect them less.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, I mean, and even that, like the way that
this particular person phrasedit is, you know, it's bad for
the average person, but greatfor a small number of people.
I mean, that's why we have 1%.
You know, the 1% like, yeah,99% of it's not great, the
abundance of the abundance inthe United States that we have,
(31:35):
and 1% of people, it's awesomefor you know.
So now, granted the other 99%,don't have it so bad, you know,
until you start getting to thereally, really bottom.
And so and we mentioned that inour last episode as well I think
just, you know, until you getto the very, very bottom of that
(31:56):
spectrum, even the people thatare in the middle don't have it
so bad.
But again, it's great for asmall amount of people and, eh,
for other people.
Sure.
But you would think abundancewould be a good thing, right?
You would think, oh, we shouldhave an abundance of all these
things, I mean.
(32:17):
But it doesn't play out thatway.
I think the information one isparticularly dangerous just
because it is so abundance ofinformation.
I've actually thought aboutthis quite a bit.
But abundance of informationisn't the problem in my opinion
(32:40):
per se, Like what I think is theproblem is that you have to
have the ability to processinformation.
So you, particularly like youas an individual, have to have
the ability to process whateverinformation you're given.
Right, and we all processthings in different ways.
And I think that's the biggestthing that education gives you
(33:03):
like formal education, or whatwe know as formal education in
America is it helps you toprocess information.
It doesn't help you tobasically All right, it helps
you to evaluate and process.
So it's not necessarily if youget a degree in history that
you're going to be a greathistorian, but you're going to
(33:24):
be able to evaluate differentsources of historical data and
sort of weigh them for theirveracity or anything else.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So one.
To me I'd say processing is thesame as decision making.
Yes, Okay, what do I do withthis information?
Or what is it I want to achieveof all the information that's
out there?
What information is going tohelp me achieve it?
And then, basically, filteringProcessing is a mix of filtering
(33:58):
and decision making, butfiltering itself is a decision.
You have to decide what'srelevant, what you're going to
use, what you don't need, what'sirrelevant.
So just kind of a quickcallback to our previous episode
and such.
But I could do all kinds ofresearch on healthcare and
healthcare organizations anddoctors and fraud and there's
(34:21):
tons of information out there.
But how do I process it, as yousay, such that I know which
companies to invest in or how doI process it to know which
doctors to go to or how much tosave in my HSA?
It's information overload.
It can make it hard to make adecision if you don't know how
(34:47):
to quote, process it.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, that's why we have the term rabbit hole.
You know, like you're literallygoing down a rabbit hole about
something that's like and youmentioned this actually, I think
I mean we're referring a lot toour last episode but you know,
having a like, you know, thelarger sort of, the larger the
(35:08):
purchase, Like you said, ifyou're purchasing a business,
you might take six months tomake that decision.
If you're purchasing a car, youmight take a little bit.
Or if you're purchasing a candybar, you know it really
shouldn't take you any longerthan a few minutes to make that
decision, right, and you know.
But then if you decide, hey, Iwant to purchase this type of
(35:30):
vehicle, if you just go onYouTube and search for that,
you're going to have thousandsof videos about that car from
everything, from somebody justshowing pictures of their I mean
showing videos of theirpersonal car and then all the
way up to reviews and people whoproduce content for YouTube,
right.
And if you do all that, that'sjust prolonging your decision
(35:51):
making process, right?
So yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So what's the next?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
paradox.
So this one, if you listen tothe last episode, is the one
that I teased.
I know it's, we're getting to it.
It's called the paradox oforiginality and it says many of
history's greatest artists havefound their voice by copying
(36:19):
others.
We discover who we are byimitating others and watching
our uniqueness emerge over time.
So it has the example of liketrue creativity or true
originality.
Is it really original?
There's a big debate going on.
We mentioned AI.
There's a big debate going onright now about this exact thing
(36:40):
, which is AI takes all of thethings that it has access to on
the internet.
Like, if you say, write a storyabout XYZ, it's going to look
up every single story that ithas access to all over the place
that are stories that aresimilar to that.
It's going to use those andit's going to put that into the
story that it's writing for you.
So is it actually an originalstory or is it just an
(37:01):
amalgamation of?
all of those things.
Well, a person could do thattoo.
To me the debate is a littlebit like, because a person could
read 50 books.
Here's an example I have afriend who has written multiple
books about the Civil War andhe's probably read two or 300
(37:23):
books about the Civil War, soprobably the most well-read
person I know about that subject, but it's his job.
So then, when he wrote his bookgoing back to the paradox of
reading that we talked about inthe last one, where you might
not remember all the materialthat you wrote, but it changed
(37:46):
you profoundly, right?
So in that case, is his bookactually original?
Or is it not?
Because what people are sayingabout AI is well, that's not an
original piece of work, becauseit's taking little pieces of
everyone else's work and it'sputting them together and
spitting out something else, andI'm like well, isn't that what
a person does?
So are you just debating aboutthe speed at which it can do
(38:07):
that?
And these are all genuinequestions to my head.
You're just mad because it cando it in two seconds, whereas a
human being is gonna takepotentially years in order to
read every single story, or manyof the stories that are about
that, and spit out their ownwork that is influenced by other
(38:31):
pieces of work.
I don't know, I don't know theanswer to that.
I get it, but it's interestingbecause, in essence, if you go
down that path and what we justtalked about, what is actually
original, like what's, doesoriginality cease to exist?
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Like it comes back to that there's nothing new under
the sun, right, or so much oforiginality is taking like two
seemingly different things andcombining them into new and
meaningful, interesting ways.
And I you mentioned like Ithink you Mixed-in art was just
hey, let's take charcoal andpaint and make something you
know.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Well, and you mentioned I believe you
mentioned Aristotle in our lastepisode.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
As I do yeah, as you do, and in every episode there's
an Aristotle reference.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
But I will and I'm gonna butcher this, but I know
that Aristotle and some other ofthe major philosophers were
like somebody was someone'steacher, so they were mentored
by another philosopher and thenthey came up with their own and
they're still widely regarded assomebody who came up with, you
know, fresh philosophical ideasor their own philosophical ideas
(39:48):
, and but they were taught byanother.
So that was influenced by theother person and nobody seems to
have a problem with that.
So so is there a problem ifyou're influenced by someone
else?
I understand copyright law.
Let's just take that out of theequation right away.
Like I understand, there arecertain rules and a court can
(40:09):
look into something and say, no,that's too close of a copy, so
you're not allowed to do that.
Right, but how do you?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
you know how do you parse that out, I think one.
There's transparency about ittoo, right?
There was no secret that Platowas a student of Aristotle, if I
got that right.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
So on.
You know, someone is a studentof Socrates and such Like.
They made that very clear intheir writings and people at the
time obviously knew that theywere hanging around each other.
But, like with AI, it's well.
There's no citation ofreferences and sources.
Right.
(40:50):
You know, there's no creditwhere credits do, whether that's
social credit by givingrecognition, or financial credit
in terms of compensation foruse of copyright or whatever.
Right.
So it's like I think that'swhere a lot of people are going.
Oh, wait, a second.
I am reminded of you know, itwouldn't be, it wouldn't be our
(41:11):
podcast if we didn't mentionToastmasters.
And you know, in speechcontests there's a statement
about originality, right?
Like you can't just get upthere, quote the Gettysburg
address and expect to win aspeech contest.
Right.
You might not even meet the timequalifications.
You might exceed the timequalifications, but aside from
that, it's not original andevery contestant takes a
(41:33):
statement or makes a statementof originality and the rule
books gives some objectivity,some quantifying attempts at
this qualifying sort ofqualitative sort of idea.
Right.
It says that 25% or less of thespeech may be devoted to
(41:53):
quoting, paraphrasing orreferencing another person's
content.
Yeah, so we?
I don't think our podcastqualifies as original by that,
but maybe not.
Maybe, so I don't know.
Right, exactly.
But then even then, like anyquoted, that's an interesting
distinction.
I wonder if, anyway, any quotedparaphrase or reference content
must be so identified duringthe speech or within the speech.
(42:16):
So not only so 75% has to beoriginal, and anything that's
not original you gotta cite yoursources.
Wow, and I too honestly like IToastmasters contest, yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I can recall some speeches I've, given that I
don't know that I've cited whothe quote was from.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, good thing you didn't have a litigious judges
turning in context, but yeah, soI think some of that talks to
the ideas of it.
Of course, this is one standardfor a one organization.
There's a copyright law and allthat stuff but, you know.
Even so, by Toastmastersstandards, if a quarter of what
(42:56):
you say is quoted, it's stillconsidered original.
Right.
The 100% of what you say isconsidered or qualifies as
original by contest standards,and I think that's an
interesting rubric.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, and I think I will say that I don't.
I feel like going back to likethe other paradox of creativity,
right, I feel like, well, it'snot, it doesn't really fit there
, but just in terms of thecreative process, you know, I
feel like artists look at otherartists' work.
You know, if you're a painter,you're gonna go look at other
(43:33):
painter's work works and you'regonna, you know, you're gonna
take that in, you're gonnaabsorb that somehow, and then
you're going to go create yourthing.
And was it?
There's no debate that you wereinfluenced by that other
artists or the person in yourfield, in your craft.
There's no debate that you wereinfluenced.
(43:54):
You have to have beeninfluenced by that.
So then you know, and Iunderstand, like it'd be, but I
will say that you know,sometimes you do.
You know that imitation kind ofthing.
Imitation is very flattering,you know, to the person.
But I think that I think that'show it starts out.
(44:16):
I think you start out ascopying.
And then I saw an interestinggraphic one time that was
talking about original thoughtand it was talking about.
It wasn't talking about it, itwas showing it graphically and
it had a circle and it said okay, here's the circle of knowledge
that you get when you graduatehigh school or elementary school
(44:37):
, high school and then collegeand then getting a master's
degree and you know, and then ithad a line all the way at the
edge.
That was the limit of humanknowledge.
So it was just like here's ourcollective body of knowledge and
it's this big circle, and thenit has a little tiny like bump,
that is like a little tiny notchthat comes out in one little
(44:57):
spot and it zoomed in on thatyou know spot and it said
yeah, and it basically yeah,exactly yeah, like a little tiny
thing, and it said this is whatit's like when someone does a
PhD thesis, because a PhD thesisis something that is required
to be original thought.
It's something that is, youknow, but it's also been
(45:17):
influenced by all of your yearsin school.
But it also has to be some kindof thing that, hey, nobody's
ever written a paper about thisbefore, nobody's ever looked at
it this way before, nobody'sever.
You know it has to be some kindof original thought, and so if
you're you know, if you cansuccessfully defend your thesis
and get your PhD, what they are,their proposition, is that
(45:39):
that's how the total amount ofhuman knowledge is expanded Just
slowly, slowly, slowly, by eachperson doing a little tiny, you
know movement of that, and Ithink that this is sort of where
that plays out is they have tohave been influenced by all of
the things.
And when you're doing like, forinstance, when you are going
(46:00):
through your lower levels ofeducation you know college and
grad school and all these thingsthat's almost expected of you
is, hey, you know, like, ifyou're an art, if you're an art
school, they're gonna say, hey,we want you to paint an
impressionist painting and it'sgonna be sort of like these
other artists that have beenimpressionists in the past.
So try to do something likethis.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
You have to learn the rules before you break the
rules.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Right, exactly, and so you know.
I mean, like I said, I don'tknow how to feel about it
because it's you know, you wannathink that you have original
thought, but then you know, aswith most things and this is
another cognitive bias too thatI can't remember the name of,
but it's ultimately, the moreyou know, the more you realize,
(46:47):
the less you know.
Or is that Dunning-Kruger, oris that the other part of the
Dunning-Kruger effects?
Speaker 1 (46:53):
basically, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
The further study.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
I would say that's a good connection to make.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
yeah, yeah and so like you begin to understand by
going through all those things.
Oh, like I thought I knew aboutthis, but now I don't.
So now I'm gonna study a littlebit more and then yeah, kinda
wanna learn.
Right, but that's where theoriginality comes up.
I think I think that you keepdoing it and you go, you keep
(47:19):
getting to those levels whereyou think that you know, and
then something else comes up inyour study or something that's
influencing you or that you'reexposed to, that you realize.
Oh, I thought I knew again.
And it's sort of like the foolmyself once you know, fool
myself twice.
That kinda Don't go over.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Let's just I think.
One thing I'll put out, though,is when it talks about copy and
copy and eventually somethingoriginal or new comes along.
It does remind me of thenatural evolution of language
and of species, right?
Yeah?
Supposedly our genetic copyingprocess is a perfect copy, but
(48:01):
there's always slightdifferences with each iteration.
Yeah, and the same thing withrepeating what we hear.
All language is just reusingwords that other people created.
Yeah, but what do kids do whenthey're trying to branch out and
form their own words?
They just co-opt existing wordsand make them mean something
else.
Right.
(48:22):
Like bad, like oh, that's bad,like bad to the bone, or it's
really a good thing or cool,like I'm referencing various
generations, you know there's-.
That's sick, Sick yeah.
Yeah, that's sick, bro.
Wait, I'm not your brother and.
I'm not ill, so-.
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
And actually Like what are you doing.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Stop messing with my language, make your own.
No, that's-.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Well, I think that's and the other thing is I'll
touch on before we go to thenext one is that this goes back
to also the paradox of skill.
Where it's the, you know,basically there's a certain
amount of luck that's involvedin whether or not you're the so,
like famous, famous, famousauthors, famous painters, famous
philosophers, they were thelucky ones.
(49:10):
There were a lot of otherphilosophers that were around
the time of Plato and Aristotle,and all right, but they aren't
the household names, they aren'tthe one that if you walk in,
ask someone, they aren't theones that are gonna get named
and potentially they have justas much skill.
But they just didn't, theyweren't the lucky one you know.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
They were the ones that people ended up copying
Right.
Right, they latched on to, theycopied their ideas and decided
to mess with those, and thenthose ideas happened to be
better and they were copied, andyou know.
So I think the current paradoxapplies, but your point stands
too.
That's also about what?
Was it?
The paradox of skill?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Well, I'm just saying that now you've got people who
go back and are you know theyare reading about you know?
Hey, let's talk about the greatphilosophers.
Well, there's going to be acertain list that that comes up
and there might be greatphilosophers that you've never
heard of, and that was justbecause the lucky ones were the
ones that hey, that you know,this was published in some way
(50:15):
and then expanded and expandedand talked about.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
And they had better branding.
They knew someone.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Right, right, exactly .
Better branding, that's veryfunny.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
William Shakespeare was actually in the third best
playwright of the Thomasgeneration.
The others didn't know how totalk to the ladies, so right.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
I think you're also touching on the next paradox of
the paradox of strategy.
I won't let you read the thing,but at the bottom it talks
about the things that lead tosuccess are the same things that
can also lead to failure.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yes, yeah, so paradox of strategy the same things
that help you achieve outliersuccess also increase your
chances of outlandish failure.
For example, investing withleverage increases your chances
of risk and reward, and yeah,and that's that's a, that's an
(51:08):
interesting sort of aninteresting paradox it's.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
I mean, it touches on a bias for me, like the
survivorship bias.
Yeah.
That's like assuming thatwhoever, whoever wins, whoever
doesn't die in the war, musthave this one weird trick that
helped him or her survive.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Soldiers, soldiers hate this one weird trick.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
But you know, when you interview the hero, like,
what did you do to survive?
I was like, well, I've, I'verelatted my men, I buckled down
the trenches, I waited for thewhites of their eyes, or
whatever it was.
Well, if you could interviewthe dead, like, hey, excuse me,
I did that too.
Yeah.
But, but I got hit with onemore bullet than this guy did,
yeah, you know.
(51:58):
So, yeah, I guess there's thatcomes to mind.
You can do all the right thingsand still lose, yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
And that's the thing that can go.
I think awry for me is is the.
I can't think about that.
You know what I mean?
I think I think anybody who'ssuccessful and I mean there's
that old, the old story thatthey always tell about, like
Abraham Lincoln, if you've everseen that's like, yeah, he ran
for this office and he failedthe bar and he did like all
(52:28):
these failures and failures andfailures, and then obviously
he's one of the greatestpresidents, if not the greatest
president that we've ever had inthis country.
Right and 16th time to thecharm.
Well, the thing is you just haveto keep like in terms of self
help, and where this leaves youis you can't think about like,
(52:49):
hey, the things I'm doing, likethis is where that positive
attitude not like the rosyglasses, but the positive
attitude comes in is like youhave to know that you can fail,
but you also have to.
You also have to just be likeyeah, but I'm doing everything
in my power.
Oh, this is a good reference togoing back to how to win
friends and influence people isactually take it back.
(53:13):
It's how to stop worrying andstart living.
That's same author, differentbook, Because in that book,
basically, it's like okay,except that the worst case
scenario is going to happen,that you're going to fail
miserably and then do everythingin your power in order to
prevent that.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
So I think you know like I said, that's a good
strategy.
Speaker 2 (53:39):
Yeah, yeah and because.
But I mean you have to be awarethat you can fail, but I think
you have to not think about that.
I think you have to just say,like I know I can fail, but you
know what Part of the growthprocess is going out and making
the effort to try to get whatyou want, you know, out of life
or out of whatever you're tryingto chase after.
You know.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
So, I guess the other .
Yeah, I get that for sure.
Like you can't, if you can'talways think about how many
times you can fail or worryabout the failure, you just got
to do the thing right.
Yeah, do the work I'll just.
I guess the thing I'm lookingat here is also the flip side of
what I'm saying.
You can do everything right andstill lose, but there's also
(54:25):
that there are people who dothings wrong and still win.
Yeah.
You got to be careful takingadvice from successful people
who behave, who do things.
Broke people do so to speakright.
Right.
It's like just because they wonthe lottery doesn't mean they
can give good financial advice.
They got rich despite theirpoor choices in terms of
(54:51):
aggregation, right In terms ofprobabilities, or the hero that
runs headlong into war andsomehow comes out unscathed
doesn't mean you should do whathe did to win the next battle
right.
Right.
Like he might have got lucky.
Just because they won doesn'tmean they won.
(55:12):
What they did before is thereason they won.
You got to have to be carefulabout your strategy.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
It's the forest gump mentality of just sort of going
through life and like it's likewhen he's like, yeah, I just I
don't know.
My friend wrote me a letter andsaid we want me to invest in
this fruit company and it wasApple.
So I invested in the fruitcompany and that may be a lot of
money and like it's like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
Well, there was how could I had had something that
it's all good.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
So the last one, that this one's a little bit.
This one's a little bit crazyto me and I don't know, I don't
know the actually, if I canjudge whether or not it's true
what it says in here or not,because I don't know Jewish law,
but it says so.
It's the paradox of consensusand it says under Jewish law, if
(56:15):
a suspect was found guilty byevery judge they were deemed
innocent To or too muchagreement implied a systemic
error in the judicial process.
Beware unanimous agreementoften leads to bad decisions.
So, the way I look at this moreand I don't know, like I said, I
(56:35):
don't know Jewish law, so Idon't know if that's a true
statement or not.
But what I do know is sort ofhive mind mentality, where
everyone just sort of jumps intoa boat and is like yeah, yeah,
we should go, yeah, we should gokill that guy or whatever.
I don't know why I went so darkimmediately.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
All the mob mentality yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
Like mob mentality where everybody is like sort of
like yeah, get them, let's go.
You know, salem, salem whichtrials?
Speaker 1 (57:02):
there's the eugenics sterilization craze.
Yes.
Some people would say the.
January 6th yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
So when people storm the Capitol, oh, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Some people would say that Iwas yep.
Speaker 1 (57:19):
And then I would say, another one that is probably
left still to history would beour response to COVID and rapid
approval of vaccinations andcompulsory, you know,
administering of that to theclinical workers and such yeah,
and I think that I think that'sthe.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
I mean, everyone always uses the.
Everyone always uses the oldexample of Nazi Germany, you
know, and a lot of people in youknow, in that arena were like
sort of along for the ride.
They were like, well, this is,you know, and I'd have to look.
I mean, maybe this is a badstatement because I don't, I'm
not a historian, but myunderstanding is that you know,
(58:05):
there were many people that weresort of on that, you know, on
that bandwagon, because everyoneelse was on that bandwagon.
And also, if, if, obviously inan authoritarian sort of
situation, if you speak outagainst it, then it's bad news
for you, right, sure?
So you kind of like choose tobelieve.
Right, you sort of go alongwith it With the survival
(58:29):
mechanism.
Yeah.
And I think that I mean as anoverall thing, like with this.
I feel like this is where wesort of run into some issues
with people that are we'll goback to content creators again
but people who are on theinternet and who are espousing
(58:50):
certain views and certain things, and whether or not you're for
or against those views.
Sometimes, when you seesomebody and they, hey well,
this person has 10 millionfollowers on YouTube, they must
like know something right, 10million people are following
this person and yeah, so?
So I think that's sort of the.
(59:10):
I think in the modern day,that's what we're.
I mean, these are paradoxes ofmodern life, right?
So I think in modern day,that's that's where that can go.
Really bad is that all of asudden, you've got somebody who
has a platform and is able toput information out there and
other people are looking at that, and one of the ways of
determining whether or not it'sgood or bad is whether other you
(59:33):
know whether there's peoplelistening to that person.
It's like, well, if they've got10 million people listening,
they must be saying somethingright.
Speaker 1 (59:39):
And and and then probably not like, like the
thing that we should.
The paradox, the listener fromthe paradoxes, which I think
you're kind of leading to thispoint, was that it's you might
be a little skeptical becausethey're probably just keeping it
at the base level and appealingto the lowest common
denominator feeling, to themasses of of content and
(01:00:00):
interests and topics.
Right.
I would just rely onconventional wisdom.
But I would be remiss if Ididn't bring up Frederick
Nietzsche's quote.
It's very Mark Twain-ish like.
It seems kind of playful, butit's.
In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties,
(01:00:24):
nations and epochs it is therule.
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Yeah, and that makes sense.
I mean that plays right intothis is like hey, beware of a
consensus, you know, beware ofeveryone is like you know, like
you said, mob mentality or hivemind kind of.
And I think that's.
The bad part is that we allsometimes can well, I don't want
to say we all sometimes it'svery easy for anybody who even
(01:00:52):
is of really good intelligenceto fall for something like that.
I mean that's why cults happen,that's why all kinds of I mean
that's that isn't that cultmentality is, you know the cult
gets bigger and bigger and morepeople are like, well, all these
people are involved and, like,this person brought me in and
they're sort of my friend andthey seem normal.
So I don't see how being partof this group is not normal and
(01:01:14):
it's like, yeah, it's a cult,you know.
Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
Yeah, yeah, it is rough.
It does remind me like I feellike there's a paradox here of
if the paradox of originalitytells you you need to copy
others to become original, andnow we're it's saying be careful
about consensus, right, you'recopying others' thoughts.
(01:01:40):
Yeah.
I guess it's maybe the thingthat the bridge there is copy
others, but don't forget to findyour own flavor right Put in
your own flavor Right Right.
Don't just follow the cookbookexactly.
Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Learn enough about cooking that you can start
mixing flavors, mixing uhcuisines or chalmers fusion and
such, just don't mix do not mixcoffee with citrus vanilla cream
soda.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
But hey, we wouldn't have.
You don't know for sure, unlessyou try it right.
Both from the company doing thetaste testing and you doing the
taste testing.
Now, you both know it was a badidea, right yeah, but you, you
both took the chance and kudosto both of you.
Right.
I'm glad you learned it so thatI don't have to.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
And you're working on the shoulders of Brian and his
experience with the coffee drinkcitrus flavor.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Well, I think that's it.
I think that's what we.
We have killed this top topicand we'll yeah, we'll put this,
we'll put the JPEG up or the uh,the picture up of the
infographic that we used, andthe paradoxes will continue.
I'm sure you know, the paradoxis, whether you're not, you
(01:03:06):
listen to the next episode ofhelp yourself or not.
That's a big paradox, becauseyou would think that it would.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
I don't know, I don't even know, what I'm.
Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
I don't even know what I'm, what I'm trying to get
at here.
All right.
Well, that's it, bye.
Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
It was a pleasure talking with you.
Welcome to help yourself.
Food and philosophy with Brianand Nick.
I'm Nick.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
And I'm Brian.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Can I take your order ?
No, no.
So what do you, Brian, what doyou call it when two docs
evaluate each other for theirperformance?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
Peer reviewed paradox .
See that works, whether we talkabout medical doctors or you're
talking about right, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, all right what doyou mean?
Speaker 2 (00:41):
I like I wouldn't have guessed the peer reviewed
part.
I had then my head.
I'm like it's something paradox.
I know that.
But what am I eating?
So I'm having a.
Actually there's a local pizzaplace called New York pie that
you're like, oh man, that soundsreally good and I like Pete.
(01:05):
Well, first of all, it's niceevery once in a while to go to a
place that actually makes theirown dough, like they actually
do the dough at the place, andyou know, it's not just like a.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
I mean, I hope everyone makes their own dough,
like otherwise.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
I'm saying that some places have it shipped in from
other places.
You know what I mean.
Where?
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I know, I know.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:25):
I'm Tom, I was making the money pun, oh yeah.
Otherwise they used to be inbusiness.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, got it Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
Back to you.
So so they make their own dough, so they make their own dough.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Sorry, and and their, their toppings are pretty good.
They have some sort of semiunusual ones, but I will always
I'll get a, a what's it called?
Oh, antipasto salad.
My wife and I like to get thatbecause it has, like you know,
(02:02):
it's cheese and meat and a bunchof other stuff.
They actually put artichokehearts on theirs, which I get.
I get all of them because mywife doesn't like them and and
they have a good, good ranchdressing that goes with that and
but they have different form.
Facts.
Some people will do theselittle pinwheels of like meat
and cheese that go in theirantipasto salad.
This place does little cubes ofdifferent kinds of meat
(02:26):
Pepperoni is in there, Cheese,some ham and stuff like that.
So it's a really good salad.
And then I last night I was ableto just get my own pizza.
I usually like a lot of othertoppings that nobody else in my
family likes, so I just get.
A lot of times I'll get a smallpizza just for myself that has
all the crazy toppings.
They call them the crazytoppings, but they're not crazy
(02:47):
to me.
So so I got pizza last nightwith well, the base pizza was
just I think they called it theNew York basic, which was olives
, mushrooms, green peppers,pepperoni sausage, and I think
(03:10):
that might be it.
And so they got that.
And then what's the other thing?
Oh, so then I added all right,this is going to create a huge
rift in our audience, but Iadded pineapples and Wow, just
(03:31):
your basic pineapple pizza.
So I added pineapples andjalapenos.
So you know, so reallyinteresting.
They put a lot of jalapenos onit, so it was really really
spicy.
Spicy it was and it was good.
I don't necessarily likepineapple all the time, but
(03:51):
every once in a while that sweetand spicy Like.
One of the things I like a lotis there's a Mexican restaurant
nearby our house that doespineapple, jalapeno margarita
and so sort of the same kind ofthing.
It's like super sweet but thenyou get like a burn that you're
getting and it's served with thejalapeno.
(04:13):
And so.
So I got that and it was reallygood it was.
You know, like I said, Iusually am just stuck with sort
of getting what the rest of thefamily wants, because I'm a nine
and so I'm just like, yeah, Iget whatever you want, I don't
care, Just get what you know,and so that you know, basically
(04:35):
I was able to get the full deal,which was really really good.
I will say that the places thatmake their own dough, they do
make their own dough becauseit's more expensive to buy pizza
there.
But sometimes everyone, like Isaid, every once in a while I
feel like it's worth it to, youknow, to get something that's a
(04:58):
little bit more than just thestandard.
I guess I don't know how wouldyou.
It's like you can't really sayfast food pizza, because it's
not really fast food pizza, butI guess chain, commercially
produced chain, chain chain,yeah, and that that place, new
York pie, has a few locations.
They've got, I think four orfive locations around where we
live, but they're not a megachain, they're like across the
(05:21):
whole country and so sort of alocal, locally owned chain.
Maybe that's the bestterminology.
So that's what I have and the.
So then Brian's beverage corner.
I've drank the I've drank.
I've had these before on thepodcast.
(05:43):
Drink is the proper drink, Idon't know.
I always you don't say drink.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
No regular verb.
You don't say drink.
You definitely don't say drunk.
It doesn't feel right though.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
It just doesn't feel right I drank.
I don't know, I drank, I drankit, I drank it.
I don't know it.
Just it sounds like I shouldhave some kind of an accent when
I say it.
But so slingshot coffee companymakes these little coffee sodas
and yeah, I think you talkedabout them before.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
I have had them before.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
This one's a little different.
This one is a citrus vanillacream soda.
It's a coffee flavored citrusvanilla creams cream soda, if
you're, if you are familiar inthe last episode, if you didn't
listen to it, go listen to ourfirst episode of this, because
this is part two that I talkedabout having coconut flavor with
(06:39):
coffee and thinking that thatwas not a good flavor, and then
in this case, I thought, hey,citrus vanilla cream soda that
doesn't sound like it's verygood good flavor in a coffee,
like coffee with citrus vanillaand cream soda.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
Right yeah sounds like a lot of acid added to very
little and base.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
And I was correct, it is not a good flavor.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
Good stuff, good delivery.
Speaker 2 (07:11):
Yeah, I mean, I like what they try it, what they're
trying to do.
You know they're trying to likebroaden, broaden the thing out
and everything.
I like the attempt.
It just there's a lot going onwith it.
I can't really taste.
It tastes very bitter coffee,like when you, when you drink it
.
It's, I mean, makes sense.
The number one ingredient isorganic cold brew concentrate.
(07:34):
So obviously that's the numberone ingredient in there and I
don't know, I don't know if it'slike worth it to to like to
have the flow.
Well, let me put it this way, Iwould much rather just have
like cold brew or something likethat from Starbucks.
That's just, you know, regularplate flavors, or just maybe
(07:57):
even just some sweet cream in it, than this.
I don't know that I would reachfor this, and it's nothing
against slingshot.
I've had some other stuff thatslingshot is done, that's good,
but this one seems to me likenot my cup of tea.
It's not my cup of tea, or, inthis case, not my cup of citrus,
vanilla cream soda, coffee,soda, coffee soda.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It's not.
It's not your cup of coffeesoda.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Right, exactly, exactly.
So I'm going to, I'm going togive it a few more sips
throughout the podcast to see,but the first sip was it was
quite intense.
So I'm going to see, I'm goingto see if it actually changes
flavor a little bit or if I mytaste buds change.
Maybe it was just shocking thefirst sip that I had.
So do I have that as part ofBBC?
(08:43):
And then my water jug forhydration, and I know my BBCs
are getting lesser and lesser.
You know, I did say I did sendyou that picture the other day,
though I was at a conference andhad like multiple drinks.
Yeah, I guess.
But I did send you that picturethe other day when I was at the
conference where I was likethey had drinks, you know, they
(09:04):
had coffee, and I had my flaskwith me, not flask, my water
water bottle, and I had allthese drinks and I send you that
picture.
It was like hey look, bbc had alegal conference, you know.
So I.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
It's normal for me that I have you know multiple
drinks everywhere.
So better to have BBC therethan at an at an illegal
conference.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
That is true.
That is true, yeah, so that iswhat I am eating and also what
I'm drinking.
And what are you eating?
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Well, I want to call back briefly to you talking
about the, or is it this?
The jalapeno margarita.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Pineapple jalapeno Pineapple yeah, pineapple
jalapeno margarita yeah, mysister handed me a beer at one
of our recent holiday familygatherings.
Yeah, she wanted me to try itand it was a spicy margarita,
(10:12):
like, like a can of beer, spicymargarita.
Oh, okay.
Beer, yeah, and it was bad likeshe was hitting it to me because
it was the last one left.
I think she had two left, lasttwo left, and she'd already kind
(10:33):
of pawned off on other peopleto try.
She thought might like it or beinterested in trying it.
But it it was just bad like Icouldn't even.
It tasted like Pickle juice butthen had the if the cumulative,
cumulative effect of heat inthe mouth like jalapeno right
(10:55):
ice often does you know?
like the first, first time yousomething's got jalapeno flavor,
jalapeno spice in it, you'relike, oh, this is so bad.
Yeah, then the second bite is alittle more warm.
And third, it was just.
It was just jalapeno picklejuice is what it tasted like,
and and I Couldn't finish it andshe convinced me that the next
(11:17):
holiday gathering to go aheadand give it another try, the
last can right wow to get it outof the fridge and like, okay,
I'll have a couple sips, but I'mprobably gonna pour it out and
so that's fine.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
She was a good that's always, that's always good.
Yeah, hey can you drink this,just so I can get it out of my
refrigerator.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, it's like if, and that to me is probably a
good indicator that I've got Atleast a little bit of nine in me
, right?
Because?
Speaker 2 (11:44):
yeah.
Yeah, sure.
I can help out.
Yeah, no problem, I was apeacemaker.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, just if I don't know if I would an achiever and
she dared me, then that mightbe more effective.
Right finish it anyway.
But what I'm actually eating issome air fried chicken cooked
in olive oil, and Dory was evensweet enough to cube it up for
me for easy eating nice.
She also.
(12:12):
Her secret ingredient was SomeMonterey chicken spice.
Oh yeah which it does.
It does give it a bit of Like afriendly Earth-tone flavor.
Yeah, we use the, we use the.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Monterey steak seasoning On our.
So when we cook hamburgers forthe football games at the high
school, that's the season ofchoice for the hamburger patties
, because it makes it has thesalt and the pepper and has a
little bit of like Garlic in itand a little bit of other stuff,
rather than just a plain oldsalt and pepper on a burger, you
(12:51):
know.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Mm-hmm but, it's good , and my side dish for Our
frozen veggies heated up abelief, the air fryer as well.
Yeah.
Russell sprouts, sweet potatoesand onions and I've got a bit
left.
It's kind of cool a little.
(13:14):
I might throw some salsa verdeon there, just to spice it up a
bit more.
Yeah and I can say that itpairs very, very well both the
side dish and the chicken with,like the classic round crackers,
good old, you know wheat flourwith, you know vegetable oil and
(13:35):
see, yeah, the vegetable oil issafflower oil, but it's, it's
all.
Vegetable oil is just bad foryou, I'd yeah as is wheat.
Now I'm like feeling bad forparent crap this healthy food.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
The Brussels sprouts sound yeah yeah, there's just a
little.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Edges are nice and crispy.
That's good burnt, burnt tipsto him, yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
I Used to not like that.
I used to not like any kind ofyou know, charring or anything
on, even if it was like on meator if it was on something else.
Now I've got, I've actuallylike sort of developed a flavor
for that, where it's like, yeah,I want a little bit of,
especially with that, like whenthey do the Brussels sprouts
where they're Baked and the youknow, even some of the outside
(14:23):
parts will fall off and just besort of crispy like on the side,
so gives a little bit of extratexture when you're eating them,
you know.
Yeah, because I remembergrowing up.
I didn't like them because itwas always boiled like they
always boiled the.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
You know, or, or like steamed the Brussels sprouts
and it was just sort of likethis a baby food texture.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yeah, yeah yeah and now I've gotten into it.
I think it's sort of trendy,though, because I know, I know
of at least three or fourrestaurants I've been to where
they have Brussels sprouts onthe menu, either as a side dish
or as a as an appetizer, like astarter, where you can get
(15:07):
Brussels sprouts for the table,which is the James Brute house
is a National chain in the US.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, they have.
What is it?
The balsamic Brussels?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
yeah, do you have BJ's out and where you are?
Oh, we don't have one out here.
Yeah, they're lucky.
We used to eat the.
Bj's.
We see the BJ's all the timewhen we lived in Southern
California.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
So yeah, great place to go after work With some
friends.
You know, yeah, just shareappetizers.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Get a bazooki.
Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yes, that's the the cookie.
Yeah, and cookie in a pan.
Yeah, iron skillet.
Yeah.
Drinking.
So I've got adequate amounts ofwater, maybe yeah, but even
lots of water, as well as ahydration drink.
This is Prime hydration.
(16:05):
Oh nice not associated with yeah, not associated with Amazon at
all.
This is the lemonade flavor.
You would know that by lookingat it because it's this bright
highlighter yellow.
And one thing that seems thatinterests me about these drinks
is that every flavor that I'vetried so far has 10% coconut
(16:27):
water in and it really comes outin terms of just sweet and
there's a ton of flavor too Likethat was something that really
like.
It literally hit me.
Like I know it didn't literallyhit me, but it felt like it hit
me with flavor, like you tasteit right away.
Your first step, your fifth sip, as Pretty stimulating, but
(16:52):
there's no caffeine, no gluten.
Yeah it's Sweden with sucraloseand and only 25 calories,
because I think there's alsosome actual sugar in there too.
So, mark, yeah.
But yeah, since I startedexercising, getting my hands on
(17:16):
some hydration drinks seemedlike the thing to do to help
make me feel like a part of thecommunity.
Speaker 2 (17:24):
Well, that's a.
That's a.
That one is a new drink.
That's Logan.
You know Logan Paul.
Have you heard of Logan Paul onYouTube?
He was a big YouTuber.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, If I had known that I might have.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
Yeah, anyway, he said yeah that's pretty funny.
So he's yeah, so he had, youknow, he had a YouTube channel
and then he now he's like a boxlike he's.
He literally is like has made alot of money and I think is
went on to train and he's hadactual like professional boxing
matches or at least at leastgotten paid to go out and box
(18:00):
someone but him and this otherguy started he had a pretty like
he medium muscle build, butlarge or long lens, yeah yeah.
He's a pretty tall guy, but he'syeah, he started that.
I actually just pulled up anarticle, said that.
It's like an article in YahooFinance and it's like, yeah,
they, they were on track to hitover a billion dollars in sales
(18:24):
in 2023 after, like the previousyear, only being like 250
million.
So they've like sort of takenthe drink.
I know that a lot of the youngkids like it, like it's being a
parent of high schoolers, likethey have it on sale in the
vending machines at school andkids like it.
So, and they also have an energydrink.
(18:44):
I'm pretty sure that I think Imay have actually reviewed that,
not reviewed it, but that might.
That was definitely in a BBC atone point, I don't know if it
was the hydration one or theenergy one, but yeah, Okay, yeah
, man.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
But yeah, maybe I'll probably stop getting those
drinks.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
You're like this is the last time I buy that.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
I know there's always kind of like a neutral, nearly
negative, I don't knowconnotation around that guy Like
yes, yeah.
I love to hate them, or Yep.
I don't know much about them.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I don't think I've ever posted on YouTube I think
there was a recent.
Well, we did an episode alittle while ago about cancel
culture.
I'm pretty sure that he goteither partially or completely
canceled at some point for doingsomething like he did,
something that was notacceptable, and I don't even
know what that is, and you knowbut I know that he got like sort
(19:47):
of people were like okay, youknow, that's not cool.
Speaker 1 (19:50):
You're done yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And then he opened a drink company and is making
hundreds of millions of dollarsin a drink company, so Sounds
like an enigma.
Right?
Well, this is part two, as Ialluded to, of our series on
paradoxes, the paradoxes ofmodern life, and last episode we
(20:19):
went over about five of themand we've got a few more that we
can go over today, that justhave conversation about them.
But before we get to that, I'mgoing to re, I'm going to review
the definition of paradox, justso that if you didn't listen to
the first episode, you'll knowwhat we're talking about.
But if you didn't listen to thefirst episode, go back and
(20:41):
listen to it, because it'spretty good stuff.
There's lots of good stuff inthere, if I do say so myself.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Anyway, I mean, I feel like it's the most recent
episode we've published.
You know right, You're notsaying something.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
Yeah, exactly that is saying something.
So let me just go over thedefinition of paradox, in case
somebody hasn't listened to ourpast episode, just to make sure
that we're still all on the samepage.
So paradox is a seeminglyabsurd or self-contradictory
statement or proposition that,when in fact investigated or
(21:17):
explained, may prove to bewell-founded or true and, as we
talked about in the last episode, talked about sort of a bunch
of them.
Five is a bunch, that's mydefinition.
A handful, huh Five fingers,it's a handful Right.
(21:38):
So we talked about five of them.
I think that they are all.
I don't want to say thatthey're not like mind bending or
anything like that, but I willsay that you know, talking as we
said in our that other episodewe did about counterintuitive
truths, there's just so manythings that you, I think your
(21:59):
mind plays tricks on you and youthink that it should be a
certain way based on logic, butwhen you start actually looking
into things, that logicallydoesn't play out that way.
So that's sort of the coolthing about these is that if you
, you know, not that these aresuper profound or anything like
that, but at the same time Ithink most people think in a
(22:20):
certain way and sometimes thelogic doesn't play out.
So so the next one, or the onethat we were we left off on that
we were going to do, is calledthe paradox of abundance, and
that's talks mostly aboutinformation abundance, but I
(22:42):
think it could be really appliedto any kind of abundance.
So they talk about it saysinformation abundance, like all
markets of abundance.
Oh there, hey, look at that, itties it all in there.
Information abundance, like allmarkets of abundance, are bad
for the average person but greatfor small numbers of people.
(23:05):
So which I think is what we'resort of yeah, well, I think
we're also seeing that in thelast 20 to 30 years, the amount
of information that's availableto us at our fingertips 24 hours
a day, seven days a week,between AI and Google searches
(23:26):
and everything else, is amassive amount of information
right, and so, for most, product, product abundance, to write
their stuff, that, and 1700different versions of charging
cables and phone cases andsweaters and books that you can
(23:47):
get on Amazon.
Yes, you know, it's which whichtouches on the one we we talked
about last in our last episodethe paradox of decision making,
having that abundance of stuffwhere you're, you're like
paralysis by analysis and you'vegot man, it's better to have
three, three choices, like backwhen, back in the day, back in
the old days, you know, backback in the day when there was
(24:09):
only three network televisionchannels and you didn't have
cable and you didn't haveanything else, you had three
choices about what you're goingto watch on TV.
And sometimes I spend an hourscrolling through trying to
figure out what I want to watchbefore I start watching it now,
because there's so many thingsthat you couldn't watch.
Speaker 1 (24:27):
So and I there's people I play games with that
you know identify with this toothat it's the same problem with
gamers.
There's such an a saturation ofgames and games on discount and
games that people bought ondiscount or bought just wanting
to play or figuring they wouldplay that they've never played.
Right.
(24:47):
And and they still aren'tgetting around to playing them.
And they have the choice andthey don't know what to play.
They don't know what they wantto play.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Right.
So, and I think also we areseeing this play out relatively
recently, just within the last10 years, and unfortunately I
don't not that I don't want thisto be a political podcast, but
I think in politics that's thathas really where it's gotten to,
the, you know, sort ofinformation overload.
(25:16):
And then, you know, for, forpeople who know and see the
internet for what it is, as atool to use in very specific
circumstances, I think it worksout great.
But the minute that you use itas I'm going to go out there and
, you know, basically fill mycart with all this information
(25:39):
about the subject that I'mtalking about, or, you know.
Going back to making anotherreference, when we talked about
the cognitive biases, you knowthat confirmation bias is really
really, really strong when youhave a source where you can
phrase a question in a certainway and you can get an answer
(25:59):
that you want because there'ssomeone else out there, there's
someone you know, there'ssomeone out there that thinks
the way same way that you haveand probably has put that on the
internet somewhere.
So when you do a search and say, oh, does this, this, this,
this happen, If this happens,then there's probably somebody
else out there that, and it hasno basis in science or any kind
of research or anything.
It's just some person that hada platform and said, yeah, I
(26:22):
believe this because it makessense logically.
Which is exactly what we'retalking about is paradoxes,
things that should make sense.
You know, logic doesn't alwaysplay out, you know.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
So I think there's an old Bible proverb that's oh,
actually it's Ecclesiastes thatthere's nothing new under the
sun.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
You know.
But yeah, Just coming to thewhole, like you were saying,
somebody might have alreadythought of it.
Yeah.
Because tons of times where Ithink I come up with something
original.
Yes.
Now the curiosity.
I'll Google it and it's like,oh nope, there's already three
different versions of the samething I just thought of.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
There was a.
There was a professor in my lawschool that on.
I thankfully did not have himas a professor, but apparently
on the first day of class hecame in and said don't think
that you're going to have anoriginal thought in this class.
You're going to read, you knowyou're going to read findings
from the most brilliant legalminds throughout history.
So don't think that you'regoing to come in here and think
(27:22):
of something that's novel,because all of those things have
already been thought about.
You know so.
But again, getting back to thatabundance of information, I
think that it can be like I said.
I think I see it going two ways.
One is that confirmation biasis you come up with a conclusion
(27:45):
and then you go and seek outinformation to try to support
that conclusion and with theabundance of information on you
know that's readily available,you're going to find
confirmation for whatever youwant to find confirmation for,
and I think that.
But I also think that you knowfor, for a, for a very few, you
(28:05):
know, much smaller group ofpeople, the internet is a very
powerful tool that can be usedfor, you know, for really good
things and for, you know,productivity and creativity and
all kinds of things, but I thinkfor most people it's not that.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
I think there's an abundance of content creation.
We talked about the previousepisode.
Speaker 2 (28:25):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (28:27):
And those who, those lucky few, who have just the
right talent and they, theycaught the attention of the
algorithm at just the right time.
Yep.
End up being the the few peoplefor whom this abundance is good
.
They went viral.
Yeah.
But it's difficult for theaverage person to become a
(28:48):
YouTube star or a tick talksensation or writer.
The phrase is um.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
Well, the paradox there is that it takes the.
It sort of goes back to thatwhat we talked about the paradox
of writing or creativity in thelast episode, which is that
there's still no secret formulafor becoming famous on YouTube
(29:25):
or TikTok or as a whole, as apodcast or anything else.
What it is is continuing tocreate content until somebody
says, oh, you know what, I likethat content.
And then you get feedback andyou get into a feedback loop and
then you create more of thatcontent and then you get a
bigger audience and then youknow it just keeps on going like
that and you're able to developa large audience, but it's, you
(29:46):
know, part of that is luck youknow.
Part of that is you get featuredon YouTube as one of the you
know.
Youtube itself says hey, thisis one of our featured content
creators.
Go check them out.
You know, and all of a suddenyou know there's a lot, of a lot
of people that go to yourchannel or whatever.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
So I want to say that it sort of implies it with
talking about markets ofabundance, but I think money is
another thing, that we have noabundance today.
You know, more money, moreproblems.
Yeah, I think it's true ofindividuals who have a lot of
money, but I think it's true ofthe marketplace.
(30:28):
When you print more money andthe dollars are less scarce,
less rare yeah.
And everybody's got some, thenit literally means less.
That this is like how inflationhappens.
This is where people who areearning six figure salaries
today can feel poorer thanpeople who are earning, you know
(30:49):
, 20,000 before the GreatDepression.
You know it's like there's moreto go around, but it still
feels like we have less of it.
Right.
Right, well, and it's usuallythe who are already very rich
have the means to get even moremoney so that the effects of
(31:09):
inflation affect them less.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, I mean, and even that, like the way that
this particular person phrasedit is, you know, it's bad for
the average person, but greatfor a small number of people.
I mean, that's why we have 1%.
You know, the 1% like, yeah,99% of it's not great, the
abundance of the abundance inthe United States that we have,
(31:35):
and 1% of people, it's awesomefor you know.
So now, granted the other 99%,don't have it so bad, you know,
until you start getting to thereally, really bottom.
And so and we mentioned that inour last episode as well I think
just, you know, until you getto the very, very bottom of that
(31:56):
spectrum, even the people thatare in the middle don't have it
so bad.
But again, it's great for asmall amount of people and, eh,
for other people.
Sure.
But you would think abundancewould be a good thing, right?
You would think, oh, we shouldhave an abundance of all these
things, I mean.
(32:17):
But it doesn't play out thatway.
I think the information one isparticularly dangerous just
because it is so abundance ofinformation.
I've actually thought aboutthis quite a bit.
But abundance of informationisn't the problem in my opinion
(32:40):
per se, Like what I think is theproblem is that you have to
have the ability to processinformation.
So you, particularly like youas an individual, have to have
the ability to process whateverinformation you're given.
Right, and we all processthings in different ways.
And I think that's the biggestthing that education gives you
(33:03):
like formal education, or whatwe know as formal education in
America is it helps you toprocess information.
It doesn't help you tobasically All right, it helps
you to evaluate and process.
So it's not necessarily if youget a degree in history that
you're going to be a greathistorian, but you're going to
(33:24):
be able to evaluate differentsources of historical data and
sort of weigh them for theirveracity or anything else.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
So one.
To me I'd say processing is thesame as decision making.
Yes, Okay, what do I do withthis information?
Or what is it I want to achieveof all the information that's
out there?
What information is going tohelp me achieve it?
And then, basically, filteringProcessing is a mix of filtering
(33:58):
and decision making, butfiltering itself is a decision.
You have to decide what'srelevant, what you're going to
use, what you don't need, what'sirrelevant.
So just kind of a quickcallback to our previous episode
and such.
But I could do all kinds ofresearch on healthcare and
healthcare organizations anddoctors and fraud and there's
(34:21):
tons of information out there.
But how do I process it, as yousay, such that I know which
companies to invest in or how doI process it to know which
doctors to go to or how much tosave in my HSA?
It's information overload.
It can make it hard to make adecision if you don't know how
(34:47):
to quote, process it.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
Yeah, that's why we have the term rabbit hole.
You know, like you're literallygoing down a rabbit hole about
something that's like and youmentioned this actually, I think
I mean we're referring a lot toour last episode but you know,
having a like, you know, thelarger sort of, the larger the
(35:08):
purchase, Like you said, ifyou're purchasing a business,
you might take six months tomake that decision.
If you're purchasing a car, youmight take a little bit.
Or if you're purchasing a candybar, you know it really
shouldn't take you any longerthan a few minutes to make that
decision, right, and you know.
But then if you decide, hey, Iwant to purchase this type of
(35:30):
vehicle, if you just go onYouTube and search for that,
you're going to have thousandsof videos about that car from
everything, from somebody justshowing pictures of their I mean
showing videos of theirpersonal car and then all the
way up to reviews and people whoproduce content for YouTube,
right.
And if you do all that, that'sjust prolonging your decision
(35:51):
making process, right?
So yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
So what's the next?
Speaker 2 (35:59):
paradox.
So this one, if you listen tothe last episode, is the one
that I teased.
I know it's, we're getting to it.
It's called the paradox oforiginality and it says many of
history's greatest artists havefound their voice by copying
(36:19):
others.
We discover who we are byimitating others and watching
our uniqueness emerge over time.
So it has the example of liketrue creativity or true
originality.
Is it really original?
There's a big debate going on.
We mentioned AI.
There's a big debate going onright now about this exact thing
(36:40):
, which is AI takes all of thethings that it has access to on
the internet.
Like, if you say, write a storyabout XYZ, it's going to look
up every single story that ithas access to all over the place
that are stories that aresimilar to that.
It's going to use those andit's going to put that into the
story that it's writing for you.
So is it actually an originalstory or is it just an
(37:01):
amalgamation of?
all of those things.
Well, a person could do thattoo.
To me the debate is a littlebit like, because a person could
read 50 books.
Here's an example I have afriend who has written multiple
books about the Civil War andhe's probably read two or 300
(37:23):
books about the Civil War, soprobably the most well-read
person I know about that subject, but it's his job.
So then, when he wrote his bookgoing back to the paradox of
reading that we talked about inthe last one, where you might
not remember all the materialthat you wrote, but it changed
(37:46):
you profoundly, right?
So in that case, is his bookactually original?
Or is it not?
Because what people are sayingabout AI is well, that's not an
original piece of work, becauseit's taking little pieces of
everyone else's work and it'sputting them together and
spitting out something else, andI'm like well, isn't that what
a person does?
So are you just debating aboutthe speed at which it can do
(38:07):
that?
And these are all genuinequestions to my head.
You're just mad because it cando it in two seconds, whereas a
human being is gonna takepotentially years in order to
read every single story, or manyof the stories that are about
that, and spit out their ownwork that is influenced by other
(38:31):
pieces of work.
I don't know, I don't know theanswer to that.
I get it, but it's interestingbecause, in essence, if you go
down that path and what we justtalked about, what is actually
original, like what's, doesoriginality cease to exist?
Speaker 1 (38:53):
Like it comes back to that there's nothing new under
the sun, right, or so much oforiginality is taking like two
seemingly different things andcombining them into new and
meaningful, interesting ways.
And I you mentioned like Ithink you Mixed-in art was just
hey, let's take charcoal andpaint and make something you
know.
Speaker 2 (39:14):
Well, and you mentioned I believe you
mentioned Aristotle in our lastepisode.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
As I do yeah, as you do, and in every episode there's
an Aristotle reference.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
But I will and I'm gonna butcher this, but I know
that Aristotle and some other ofthe major philosophers were
like somebody was someone'steacher, so they were mentored
by another philosopher and thenthey came up with their own and
they're still widely regarded assomebody who came up with, you
know, fresh philosophical ideasor their own philosophical ideas
(39:48):
, and but they were taught byanother.
So that was influenced by theother person and nobody seems to
have a problem with that.
So so is there a problem ifyou're influenced by someone
else?
I understand copyright law.
Let's just take that out of theequation right away.
Like I understand, there arecertain rules and a court can
(40:09):
look into something and say, no,that's too close of a copy, so
you're not allowed to do that.
Right, but how do you?
Speaker 1 (40:17):
you know how do you parse that out, I think one.
There's transparency about ittoo, right?
There was no secret that Platowas a student of Aristotle, if I
got that right.
Speaker 2 (40:28):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
So on.
You know, someone is a studentof Socrates and such Like.
They made that very clear intheir writings and people at the
time obviously knew that theywere hanging around each other.
But, like with AI, it's well.
There's no citation ofreferences and sources.
Right.
(40:50):
You know, there's no creditwhere credits do, whether that's
social credit by givingrecognition, or financial credit
in terms of compensation foruse of copyright or whatever.
Right.
So it's like I think that'swhere a lot of people are going.
Oh, wait, a second.
I am reminded of you know, itwouldn't be, it wouldn't be our
(41:11):
podcast if we didn't mentionToastmasters.
And you know, in speechcontests there's a statement
about originality, right?
Like you can't just get upthere, quote the Gettysburg
address and expect to win aspeech contest.
Right.
You might not even meet the timequalifications.
You might exceed the timequalifications, but aside from
that, it's not original andevery contestant takes a
(41:33):
statement or makes a statementof originality and the rule
books gives some objectivity,some quantifying attempts at
this qualifying sort ofqualitative sort of idea.
Right.
It says that 25% or less of thespeech may be devoted to
(41:53):
quoting, paraphrasing orreferencing another person's
content.
Yeah, so we?
I don't think our podcastqualifies as original by that,
but maybe not.
Maybe, so I don't know.
Right, exactly.
But then even then, like anyquoted, that's an interesting
distinction.
I wonder if, anyway, any quotedparaphrase or reference content
must be so identified duringthe speech or within the speech.
(42:16):
So not only so 75% has to beoriginal, and anything that's
not original you gotta cite yoursources.
Wow, and I too honestly like IToastmasters contest, yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
I can recall some speeches I've, given that I
don't know that I've cited whothe quote was from.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, good thing you didn't have a litigious judges
turning in context, but yeah, soI think some of that talks to
the ideas of it.
Of course, this is one standardfor a one organization.
There's a copyright law and allthat stuff but, you know.
Even so, by Toastmastersstandards, if a quarter of what
(42:56):
you say is quoted, it's stillconsidered original.
Right.
The 100% of what you say isconsidered or qualifies as
original by contest standards,and I think that's an
interesting rubric.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Yeah, and I think I will say that I don't.
I feel like going back to likethe other paradox of creativity,
right, I feel like, well, it'snot, it doesn't really fit there
, but just in terms of thecreative process, you know, I
feel like artists look at otherartists' work.
You know, if you're a painter,you're gonna go look at other
(43:33):
painter's work works and you'regonna, you know, you're gonna
take that in, you're gonnaabsorb that somehow, and then
you're going to go create yourthing.
And was it?
There's no debate that you wereinfluenced by that other
artists or the person in yourfield, in your craft.
There's no debate that you wereinfluenced.
(43:54):
You have to have beeninfluenced by that.
So then you know, and Iunderstand, like it'd be, but I
will say that you know,sometimes you do.
You know that imitation kind ofthing.
Imitation is very flattering,you know, to the person.
But I think that I think that'show it starts out.
(44:16):
I think you start out ascopying.
And then I saw an interestinggraphic one time that was
talking about original thoughtand it was talking about.
It wasn't talking about it, itwas showing it graphically and
it had a circle and it said okay, here's the circle of knowledge
that you get when you graduatehigh school or elementary school
(44:37):
, high school and then collegeand then getting a master's
degree and you know, and then ithad a line all the way at the
edge.
That was the limit of humanknowledge.
So it was just like here's ourcollective body of knowledge and
it's this big circle, and thenit has a little tiny like bump,
that is like a little tiny notchthat comes out in one little
(44:57):
spot and it zoomed in on thatyou know spot and it said
yeah, and it basically yeah,exactly yeah, like a little tiny
thing, and it said this is whatit's like when someone does a
PhD thesis, because a PhD thesisis something that is required
to be original thought.
It's something that is, youknow, but it's also been
(45:17):
influenced by all of your yearsin school.
But it also has to be some kindof thing that, hey, nobody's
ever written a paper about thisbefore, nobody's ever looked at
it this way before, nobody'sever.
You know it has to be some kindof original thought, and so if
you're you know, if you cansuccessfully defend your thesis
and get your PhD, what they are,their proposition, is that
(45:39):
that's how the total amount ofhuman knowledge is expanded Just
slowly, slowly, slowly, by eachperson doing a little tiny, you
know movement of that, and Ithink that this is sort of where
that plays out is they have tohave been influenced by all of
the things.
And when you're doing like, forinstance, when you are going
(46:00):
through your lower levels ofeducation you know college and
grad school and all these thingsthat's almost expected of you
is, hey, you know, like, ifyou're an art, if you're an art
school, they're gonna say, hey,we want you to paint an
impressionist painting and it'sgonna be sort of like these
other artists that have beenimpressionists in the past.
So try to do something likethis.
Speaker 1 (46:21):
You have to learn the rules before you break the
rules.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Right, exactly, and so you know.
I mean, like I said, I don'tknow how to feel about it
because it's you know, you wannathink that you have original
thought, but then you know, aswith most things and this is
another cognitive bias too thatI can't remember the name of,
but it's ultimately, the moreyou know, the more you realize,
(46:47):
the less you know.
Or is that Dunning-Kruger, oris that the other part of the
Dunning-Kruger effects?
Speaker 1 (46:53):
basically, yeah, yes.
Speaker 2 (46:55):
The further study.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
I would say that's a good connection to make.
Speaker 2 (46:57):
yeah, yeah and so like you begin to understand by
going through all those things.
Oh, like I thought I knew aboutthis, but now I don't.
So now I'm gonna study a littlebit more and then yeah, kinda
wanna learn.
Right, but that's where theoriginality comes up.
I think I think that you keepdoing it and you go, you keep
(47:19):
getting to those levels whereyou think that you know, and
then something else comes up inyour study or something that's
influencing you or that you'reexposed to, that you realize.
Oh, I thought I knew again.
And it's sort of like the foolmyself once you know, fool
myself twice.
That kinda Don't go over.
Speaker 1 (47:40):
Let's just I think.
One thing I'll put out, though,is when it talks about copy and
copy and eventually somethingoriginal or new comes along.
It does remind me of thenatural evolution of language
and of species, right?
Yeah?
Supposedly our genetic copyingprocess is a perfect copy, but
(48:01):
there's always slightdifferences with each iteration.
Yeah, and the same thing withrepeating what we hear.
All language is just reusingwords that other people created.
Yeah, but what do kids do whenthey're trying to branch out and
form their own words?
They just co-opt existing wordsand make them mean something
else.
Right.
(48:22):
Like bad, like oh, that's bad,like bad to the bone, or it's
really a good thing or cool,like I'm referencing various
generations, you know there's-.
That's sick, Sick yeah.
Yeah, that's sick, bro.
Wait, I'm not your brother and.
I'm not ill, so-.
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (48:39):
And actually Like what are you doing.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
Stop messing with my language, make your own.
No, that's-.
Speaker 2 (48:47):
Well, I think that's and the other thing is I'll
touch on before we go to thenext one is that this goes back
to also the paradox of skill.
Where it's the, you know,basically there's a certain
amount of luck that's involvedin whether or not you're the so,
like famous, famous, famousauthors, famous painters, famous
philosophers, they were thelucky ones.
(49:10):
There were a lot of otherphilosophers that were around
the time of Plato and Aristotle,and all right, but they aren't
the household names, they aren'tthe one that if you walk in,
ask someone, they aren't theones that are gonna get named
and potentially they have justas much skill.
But they just didn't, theyweren't the lucky one you know.
Speaker 1 (49:32):
They were the ones that people ended up copying
Right.
Right, they latched on to, theycopied their ideas and decided
to mess with those, and thenthose ideas happened to be
better and they were copied, andyou know.
So I think the current paradoxapplies, but your point stands
too.
That's also about what?
Was it?
The paradox of skill?
Speaker 2 (49:53):
Well, I'm just saying that now you've got people who
go back and are you know theyare reading about you know?
Hey, let's talk about the greatphilosophers.
Well, there's going to be acertain list that that comes up
and there might be greatphilosophers that you've never
heard of, and that was justbecause the lucky ones were the
ones that hey, that you know,this was published in some way
(50:15):
and then expanded and expandedand talked about.
Speaker 1 (50:19):
And they had better branding.
They knew someone.
Speaker 2 (50:21):
Right, right, exactly .
Better branding, that's veryfunny.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
William Shakespeare was actually in the third best
playwright of the Thomasgeneration.
The others didn't know how totalk to the ladies, so right.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (50:35):
I think you're also touching on the next paradox of
the paradox of strategy.
I won't let you read the thing,but at the bottom it talks
about the things that lead tosuccess are the same things that
can also lead to failure.
Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yes, yeah, so paradox of strategy the same things
that help you achieve outliersuccess also increase your
chances of outlandish failure.
For example, investing withleverage increases your chances
of risk and reward, and yeah,and that's that's a, that's an
(51:08):
interesting sort of aninteresting paradox it's.
Speaker 1 (51:13):
I mean, it touches on a bias for me, like the
survivorship bias.
Yeah.
That's like assuming thatwhoever, whoever wins, whoever
doesn't die in the war, musthave this one weird trick that
helped him or her survive.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
Soldiers, soldiers hate this one weird trick.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
But you know, when you interview the hero, like,
what did you do to survive?
I was like, well, I've, I'verelatted my men, I buckled down
the trenches, I waited for thewhites of their eyes, or
whatever it was.
Well, if you could interviewthe dead, like, hey, excuse me,
I did that too.
Yeah.
But, but I got hit with onemore bullet than this guy did,
yeah, you know.
(51:58):
So, yeah, I guess there's thatcomes to mind.
You can do all the right thingsand still lose, yeah.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
And that's the thing that can go.
I think awry for me is is the.
I can't think about that.
You know what I mean?
I think I think anybody who'ssuccessful and I mean there's
that old, the old story thatthey always tell about, like
Abraham Lincoln, if you've everseen that's like, yeah, he ran
for this office and he failedthe bar and he did like all
(52:28):
these failures and failures andfailures, and then obviously
he's one of the greatestpresidents, if not the greatest
president that we've ever had inthis country.
Right and 16th time to thecharm.
Well, the thing is you just haveto keep like in terms of self
help, and where this leaves youis you can't think about like,
(52:49):
hey, the things I'm doing, likethis is where that positive
attitude not like the rosyglasses, but the positive
attitude comes in is like youhave to know that you can fail,
but you also have to.
You also have to just be likeyeah, but I'm doing everything
in my power.
Oh, this is a good reference togoing back to how to win
friends and influence people isactually take it back.
(53:13):
It's how to stop worrying andstart living.
That's same author, differentbook, Because in that book,
basically, it's like okay,except that the worst case
scenario is going to happen,that you're going to fail
miserably and then do everythingin your power in order to
prevent that.
Speaker 3 (53:33):
So I think you know like I said, that's a good
strategy.
Speaker 2 (53:39):
Yeah, yeah and because.
But I mean you have to be awarethat you can fail, but I think
you have to not think about that.
I think you have to just say,like I know I can fail, but you
know what Part of the growthprocess is going out and making
the effort to try to get whatyou want, you know, out of life
or out of whatever you're tryingto chase after.
You know.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (54:01):
So, I guess the other .
Yeah, I get that for sure.
Like you can't, if you can'talways think about how many
times you can fail or worryabout the failure, you just got
to do the thing right.
Yeah, do the work I'll just.
I guess the thing I'm lookingat here is also the flip side of
what I'm saying.
You can do everything right andstill lose, but there's also
(54:25):
that there are people who dothings wrong and still win.
Yeah.
You got to be careful takingadvice from successful people
who behave, who do things.
Broke people do so to speakright.
Right.
It's like just because they wonthe lottery doesn't mean they
can give good financial advice.
They got rich despite theirpoor choices in terms of
(54:51):
aggregation, right In terms ofprobabilities, or the hero that
runs headlong into war andsomehow comes out unscathed
doesn't mean you should do whathe did to win the next battle
right.
Right.
Like he might have got lucky.
Just because they won doesn'tmean they won.
(55:12):
What they did before is thereason they won.
You got to have to be carefulabout your strategy.
Speaker 2 (55:22):
It's the forest gump mentality of just sort of going
through life and like it's likewhen he's like, yeah, I just I
don't know.
My friend wrote me a letter andsaid we want me to invest in
this fruit company and it wasApple.
So I invested in the fruitcompany and that may be a lot of
money and like it's like, yeah.
Speaker 1 (55:47):
Well, there was how could I had had something that
it's all good.
Speaker 2 (55:53):
So the last one, that this one's a little bit.
This one's a little bit crazyto me and I don't know, I don't
know the actually, if I canjudge whether or not it's true
what it says in here or not,because I don't know Jewish law,
but it says so.
It's the paradox of consensusand it says under Jewish law, if
(56:15):
a suspect was found guilty byevery judge they were deemed
innocent To or too muchagreement implied a systemic
error in the judicial process.
Beware unanimous agreementoften leads to bad decisions.
So, the way I look at this moreand I don't know, like I said, I
(56:35):
don't know Jewish law, so Idon't know if that's a true
statement or not.
But what I do know is sort ofhive mind mentality, where
everyone just sort of jumps intoa boat and is like yeah, yeah,
we should go, yeah, we should gokill that guy or whatever.
I don't know why I went so darkimmediately.
Speaker 1 (56:53):
All the mob mentality yeah.
Speaker 2 (56:54):
Like mob mentality where everybody is like sort of
like yeah, get them, let's go.
You know, salem, salem whichtrials?
Speaker 1 (57:02):
there's the eugenics sterilization craze.
Yes.
Some people would say the.
January 6th yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:14):
So when people storm the Capitol, oh, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
Some people would say that Iwas yep.
Speaker 1 (57:19):
And then I would say, another one that is probably
left still to history would beour response to COVID and rapid
approval of vaccinations andcompulsory, you know,
administering of that to theclinical workers and such yeah,
and I think that I think that'sthe.
Speaker 2 (57:42):
I mean, everyone always uses the.
Everyone always uses the oldexample of Nazi Germany, you
know, and a lot of people in youknow, in that arena were like
sort of along for the ride.
They were like, well, this is,you know, and I'd have to look.
I mean, maybe this is a badstatement because I don't, I'm
not a historian, but myunderstanding is that you know,
(58:05):
there were many people that weresort of on that, you know, on
that bandwagon, because everyoneelse was on that bandwagon.
And also, if, if, obviously inan authoritarian sort of
situation, if you speak outagainst it, then it's bad news
for you, right, sure?
So you kind of like choose tobelieve.
Right, you sort of go alongwith it With the survival
(58:29):
mechanism.
Yeah.
And I think that I mean as anoverall thing, like with this.
I feel like this is where wesort of run into some issues
with people that are we'll goback to content creators again
but people who are on theinternet and who are espousing
(58:50):
certain views and certain things, and whether or not you're for
or against those views.
Sometimes, when you seesomebody and they, hey well,
this person has 10 millionfollowers on YouTube, they must
like know something right, 10million people are following
this person and yeah, so?
So I think that's sort of the.
(59:10):
I think in the modern day,that's what we're.
I mean, these are paradoxes ofmodern life, right?
So I think in modern day,that's that's where that can go.
Really bad is that all of asudden, you've got somebody who
has a platform and is able toput information out there and
other people are looking at that, and one of the ways of
determining whether or not it'sgood or bad is whether other you
(59:33):
know whether there's peoplelistening to that person.
It's like, well, if they've got10 million people listening,
they must be saying somethingright.
Speaker 1 (59:39):
And and and then probably not like, like the
thing that we should.
The paradox, the listener fromthe paradoxes, which I think
you're kind of leading to thispoint, was that it's you might
be a little skeptical becausethey're probably just keeping it
at the base level and appealingto the lowest common
denominator feeling, to themasses of of content and
(01:00:00):
interests and topics.
Right.
I would just rely onconventional wisdom.
But I would be remiss if Ididn't bring up Frederick
Nietzsche's quote.
It's very Mark Twain-ish like.
It seems kind of playful, butit's.
In individuals insanity is rare, but in groups, parties,
(01:00:24):
nations and epochs it is therule.
Speaker 2 (01:00:28):
Yeah, and that makes sense.
I mean that plays right intothis is like hey, beware of a
consensus, you know, beware ofeveryone is like you know, like
you said, mob mentality or hivemind kind of.
And I think that's.
The bad part is that we allsometimes can well, I don't want
to say we all sometimes it'svery easy for anybody who even
(01:00:52):
is of really good intelligenceto fall for something like that.
I mean that's why cults happen,that's why all kinds of I mean
that's that isn't that cultmentality is, you know the cult
gets bigger and bigger and morepeople are like, well, all these
people are involved and, like,this person brought me in and
they're sort of my friend andthey seem normal.
So I don't see how being partof this group is not normal and
(01:01:14):
it's like, yeah, it's a cult,you know.
Speaker 1 (01:01:17):
Yeah, yeah, it is rough.
It does remind me like I feellike there's a paradox here of
if the paradox of originalitytells you you need to copy
others to become original, andnow we're it's saying be careful
about consensus, right, you'recopying others' thoughts.
(01:01:40):
Yeah.
I guess it's maybe the thingthat the bridge there is copy
others, but don't forget to findyour own flavor right Put in
your own flavor Right Right.
Don't just follow the cookbookexactly.
Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
Learn enough about cooking that you can start
mixing flavors, mixing uhcuisines or chalmers fusion and
such, just don't mix do not mixcoffee with citrus vanilla cream
soda.
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
But hey, we wouldn't have.
You don't know for sure, unlessyou try it right.
Both from the company doing thetaste testing and you doing the
taste testing.
Now, you both know it was a badidea, right yeah, but you, you
both took the chance and kudosto both of you.
Right.
I'm glad you learned it so thatI don't have to.
Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
And you're working on the shoulders of Brian and his
experience with the coffee drinkcitrus flavor.
Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Well, I think that's it.
I think that's what we.
We have killed this top topicand we'll yeah, we'll put this,
we'll put the JPEG up or the uh,the picture up of the
infographic that we used, andthe paradoxes will continue.
I'm sure you know, the paradoxis, whether you're not, you
(01:03:06):
listen to the next episode ofhelp yourself or not.
That's a big paradox, becauseyou would think that it would.
Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
I don't know, I don't even know, what I'm.
Speaker 2 (01:03:19):
I don't even know what I'm, what I'm trying to get
at here.
All right.
Well, that's it, bye.
Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
It was a pleasure talking with you.
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