Hello, folks, and welcome back to the Talk of All Trades podcast, where we talk to various guests who work in the trades and or own small businesses. Today, our guest is William, founder of Goofy Los Angeles Group, based here in San Pedro, California. He's an experienced graphic designer, among other things, who will give us a little insight into that line of work, as well as his involvement with small and large business. So thanks for joining us, William.
I want to start by asking you, sort of, how did you get started in what you're doing now? Let's sort of backtrack. I honestly kind of just fell into it. I started off my entire career at a dry cleaners. So I've always had something to do with clothing. I don't know why. That's just been my life. Funny enough, I'm very basic. Jeans, shorts, T-shirts. That's my life. That's my closet. But I ended up working at Norman's in San Pedro, if you guys know. Norman's.
With their uniforms. Is that still around? Yep. Really? He actually just expanded. Really big uniform company went down. They had 2,000 schools nationwide, completely shut down. We're taking over like five or six of those. So we service like 40 schools. No kidding. With contracts for each single school, you have a base of about, I don't know, 15,000 kids that have to come to you for uniforms. It's lucrative. So the dry cleaning world, as interesting as I'm sure it is,
got you interested in fashion, per se? To some degree. I just learned it's not as complicated as people think it is. Clothing is clothing. It just has a few different forms.
Well what got me more more involved in fashion probably more the design aspect i like simplistic to the point designs and that's what got me into goofy los angeles which, kind of just happened naturally because i have access to a bunch of blanks at my job so all i have to do is cut a piece of vinyl and heat press it onto the clothing and that's it i have my own custom clothing or have them embroidered because we also have embroidery machines so i just been surrounded
by it for the last about four years just clothing interesting so you sort of started, during the covet era would you say if you've been doing it for four years i came back to longby i came back to long beach in the covet area i was in college for a little bit, then it got shut down this i was in okay let me back up because i just realized my timeline is pretty messy right now let's start from the beginning you were born beginning you started to walk no where did you go to college i went to
a small christian school called north valley no no golden state baptist college okay not my best decision how's that. I didn't get kicked out but they were like maybe don't come back oh it was over one belief you know i've kind of been there but i want to i want to hear, do you want to get into that you don't know totally i'm totally not i could talk about any topic for hours. Let's get into the details. They said, maybe don't come back.
Yeah, almost verbatim. It was like, oh, okay. Why did this happen? Okay, so I'm not, okay, genuinely my mindset going to Bible college was, okay, they're gonna tell me why the Bible is true. Cause like every belief Christians believe comes from the Bible. And then I realized they were giving just so much dumb, illogical arguments that a child, anyone.
In two seconds can see past or just like have reasonable doubts like okay like they would say oh the the kjv which is one type of the one version of the bible is the right one i'm like okay why they're like oh because god used it okay well that sounds like an argument any religion would make do we have anything better like no like every argument was just a circular argument and no one wanted to admit it was a circular argument well okay so they were shoving this down your throat let's
say and you became fed up yeah it just made no logical sense and no one like the thing the irony is all the students were on the same page we all knew it was ridiculous we all just kind of went along with it i just had a hard time staying quiet like i would talk to people i would have full-on hour-long conversations and apparently that got to the faculty and they're like where do you get these thoughts from what books are you reading
i'm like what do you mean So you were a religious revolutionary at Christian school. That's interesting. The modern Martin Luther. Yeah. Perhaps you're due for interesting things in life. Because, you know, I think especially people in California have this, there's a zeitgeist around where people tend to comply more than they need to, right?
That's sort of, and we saw that during COVID. Yeah. And I don't want to turn into Dr. Drew's podcast, but basically there's a general idea of people in California listening to the higher ups and saying, well, this is what we need to do and it's for the greater good.
But in your case going to this school taught you not only should i not comply with what i don't believe in but i need to spread the word about how i feel otherwise and i think that's an interesting point of view you just don't see people like that especially in this part of the country now after you supposedly were.
You you left or were you suspended what happened it was the end of the year basically so just shut everything down i was working security i was fed up with my security job so much corruption honestly really in the security business not corruption corruption but like definitely i didn't know there was like a political hierarchy in the security world but perhaps we could get into that maybe not corrupts may just illegal things that were blatantly illegal and No one did anything about it.
What kind of security were you working for? Amazon, actually. So for Amazon warehouses? No, it was an Amazon office building, a canvas of like five different buildings. I got to see behind the scenes of a lot of projects that I probably shouldn't talk about. I don't know if you signed any NDAs. I didn't, but... Listen, like I said before, you don't have to say what you don't want to say. It is all interesting to me and our listeners. I saw a lot of ring cameras taken apart.
A lot of what cameras? Ring cameras, a little robot. Oh, the ring cameras. Yeah, yeah. I thought you said rain cameras. That's interesting. That was back when they just acquired them. Okay. Back in the day. Amazon owns Ring? Yeah. I did not know that. All right. So you had a stint there. And once again, it's this story of you see something wrong with the environment you're in and you disagree with it. Yeah. And you had to move on to the next thing. There's actually a great story
about how I quit that job. Well, let's talk about it. I'm not going to curse a lot, but I'm a dumbass. And I just had to go out with a bang. I had to. I was so tired. I'm like, I'm on my way home. Screw this. I started typing, hey, this manager, because I was a manager, I was a supervisor. Okay. So I had to deal with other supervisors being complete morons. And I had to clean up their messes when they left. I was on it. I had a whole list to checklist.
Like, all right, this has got to be done. This has got to be done. This has got to be done before my next supervisor comes and takes over. I was on it. I got things done. None of those supervisors were like that. So I had to clean up after their messes. And some of them were just straight up disrespectful. It went to their head. You're a supervisor, bro. Like you don't have any actual authority. You're not a cop. There was one or two guys specifically that one guy, one manager.
Should never been hired as a manager i called him out i called them out by name like two or three people by name and i just sent an email to all the higher-ups and like three or four employees so they wouldn't lie about what i said i wanted there to be a record this is what i said is what i believe and i even took a picture of my laptop and my phone you had like a manifesto almost.
I'm not a cultist that makes me sound like that doesn't make you a cultist it you you know you left your work and uh i i won't interrupt anymore but this is a keep going i'm sorry i'll just i like to make that joke about the whole cult thing because it's california you're right people are it is the one state with probably the most cults you know i would think and i don't have hard evidence on that but if i had to put my money anywhere and i know it's the state with the most serial killers
or historically that is true mostly up north in the bay area not as much down here even though there are more people down here but i was gonna make the argument that maybe had something to do with the weather like we don't have to worry about survival in terms of like hot or cold we just worry about maybe food maybe i don't know that you can have anywhere anything definitive with that that's a funny thing i'm not going to worry about the weather but
making food that's going to be my big challenge of the day and it's not that hard we're we can grow anything we have taught you're saying in terms of agriculture yeah absolutely i mean not really out we where we are right now but it's a lot of farmland out there that's for sure we got we got so much farmland in the state and i'm just curious if that has anything to do with like why cults are so prevalent like we don't have to worry about basic survival needs so we just have free
time to do dumb stuff i know And I've said this before, not really on this podcast, but in general. Good weather for too long a time for anybody, and I think this is the case in Florida, too, it's not good for anybody. It's really not, unless you really grew up in it and it's what you're used to or whatever. Yeah. I think it's way better for somebody to live in a place that can become too hot, can become too cold, has seasons.
It's just, it goes with sort of the changes that go throughout the year of, you know, of someone's life.
A year in a life. and yeah i the problem with california is because you don't care the weather is the same every day you you can blink your eyes and it's you know you're five years down the line you don't even realize that time just flies down here it can't it depends on what you do and and everything else but no i think the weather plays a big factor in it well we know like well there's there is hard data lake and more gloomy states there are way more suicides like we
know that yeah like japan and it's not a state but yeah yeah japan japan's like like if the bay if oregon was a country basically but you know with more technology oregon is beautiful but i'm sure there's i think it's just kind of rainy and cold all the time yeah that's not good for a person's psyche either can't but anyway this is a weird rabbit hole so you you quit this job oh yeah i went out in a blazing uh fire blaze of glory that's what blaze of fire.
No no i was just like sick and tired of it because i had to deal with it i was a supervisor i felt bad from the people under me it's like why are you dealing with my Because my supervisor was an asshole. I'm sorry. He just, the power genuinely went to his head. And in my head, I'm just like, they're just people. They're your employees. They're not your subjects. Right. Like, and I was always nice to my people. Like, oh my God.
I just, it blew my mind. I, someone could act that way with such little authority. Yeah. I, no, I, and the only time I really felt the same way as you in terms of that hierarchy is when I worked and they're very similar. You were, you're talking about Amazon. I worked at, at a UBS warehouse stocking trucks, I think around this time of year. And it was about a decade ago. And I mean, same, same difference, man. They will just, they, they, they yell at you like they're whipping you.
Like that's sort of the, the image in one's head because it's not. They really don't care. They don't treat you like humans. It's just, we have a quota. We need to get this done. And you got legs on you, arms on you, enough muscle to fill this truck in the amount of time we need done. And we're still going to pay you like shit. I think they're weeding out. I think it's a weeding out mechanism.
Sure. And I agree with some of that to an extent. But I think there's something wrong with the system in general.
I don't think it should work. it should be that cut and dry where you go into a job and you expect to get paid one thing and that happens right but there's shit there's absolutely no incentive for working harder than anyone else other than a shitty pizza party or you know i mean yeah that's about it i can't even i'm like let me think of something else there's nothing you're not going to get paid any more than anybody else for so you know what's the point that there's there's just i i don't
get it that's a we're not that's a problem but if you want to take like a and it's labor i get that that's the thing though there's so many jobs but you know i can work at mcdonald's and not you know break a sweat the way i do in a warehouse and get paid more so what the hell do i care working for you stupid the thing is like there's always well i was gonna say there's always gonna be menial labor but who the heck knows with all this ai stuff which genuinely scares
me because i follow it now that's an interesting conversation we could have we could have ai is definitely going to be more prevalent in the next four years than it was of the last four in my opinion and it's going to be exponential that's what people do not pay attention to and i want to scream it at them this is growing at an exponential rate because that's how intelligence works the more interconnected human beings.
Are the more interconnected our devices are the faster growth happens no i I agree with that in some semblance. But I want to know your specific worries about AI. Have you seen it? I've studied it. This is my pet project. I've written code with it. It is the main difference between AI and us. The way it views the world is actually very similar. The only problem is it doesn't have an understanding of the physical realm. It understands language very well.
And the main difference is it doesn't self-iterate. Our brains don't turn off. AI, the only time it runs is when you ask a question, it has something to go off of. Our brains typically go off of the stimulus we get from the world. So once they throw an AI that can perceive the world and interpret it into a humanoid body and throw it out into real world scenarios, then we'll see a semblance of something like genuine artificial intelligence.
Because right now it's just predictive software. And it's still amazing because it can get rid of so many jobs like writing code. yeah it's such a labor intensive job to write code yeah it totally is. I got to wonder about sort of the first jobs that are going to be lost, right? Writers. Do you think writers? Yeah. How do you think it's going to affect Hollywood? You mentioned you had worked in some video production. That was more of a hobby.
I did photography for some rappers in L.A., and that led to me convincing them to, hey, can I shoot a music video for you guys? Hey, bro, I see you got a nice camera. Can I borrow it for $150?
Bucks he said yeah like hell yeah okay we're doing this and it's a nice video I didn't get a lot of views but I'm happy with the quality and really anybody we know let me see I'm probably not I'm trying to just local guys yeah yeah they're local guys they're actually hustling they do have like their own studio and everything no and I and I've worked with rappers before in a another another time in my life nobody famous I used to have a good friend he was sort of trying to be a rapper,
but he had friends who were bigger local rappers, not here in LA. Well, that's not a worry. So if you're trying to make a name for yourself, you gotta collaborate. But what I was trying to say was, more than almost anybody in today's culture, the hustle that these guys have is you cannot compare. Those guys will get what they want and they will work hard to do that.
And I mean You can tell You can say all you want About rappers That sit around And smoke weed all day Or whatever They still They got their stacks Somehow You know They earn what they want And I appreciate That aspect of them Some of them don't But a lot of the guys I've run into They certainly do, I'll be honest I hung around the guys Trying to make it And I Those guys are the worst.
Yeah Like It's heartbreaking It's like I see your heart and you're not a bad lyricist, but you don't have the drive. No. And like, I don't want to break your heart. I don't want to be the one to be, to tell you that, but I can tell, we all feel it. It's always a gamble. I mean, some people, they just walk into a room and it's like, I know he's going to be big. Yeah. And some people you're just not sure about. And some people it's like, you know, it's like Simon Cowell from American Islands.
It's going to be a no for me or whatever. but so there's there's three archetypes of the rapper i don't even know what we're talking about but uh if you ask me but and in la it might i don't know if that changes very much but no i they're definitely they're an interesting person to run into there's plenty of them out here that is for sure the thing is the thing i like about it is it it's just like incorporating art and I'm trying to put it in a more eloquent way.
Well, I was going to say on top of it, though, I feel like rap, I mean, music in general, but rap itself, it has evolved, obviously. It's evolved almost too much to where I don't even know what I like about it anymore. It's gone through sort of every iteration that maybe it was supposed to. And this sort of happened. It's one of the longest genres of music that's really stayed going. I feel like everything just turns to pop way long enough. It does.
I mean, punk music turned into pop somehow, even though it's the complete opposite. Everything always does. But, you know, rap itself is still a very unique genre. Having said that, no, you're right. I think it's been pop since 2005. I mean, you know, since.
The thing is like it is okay well i've i've seen the wide variety of it i've seen the rap that um where people try to like bad mouth each other's uh rivalry like that kind of rap i've seen rap where it's a social like tom mcdonald or dax where they talk about life and philosophical stuff or they're talking about race and they go into all this stuff and that that's also new people were not talking about political things and rap go back 10 years and it also became a thing where people eventually
the guys that were most listened to or most popular started just talking about like investments and money like jay-z's the biggest example i don't know where he's going to end up the next few years if anybody's been paying attention to the news but he had like a whole album where he basically talked about just investing and like, or just rapping about investing and owning property and stuff like that.
And it's like, okay, well, this isn't rap anymore. This is just, you're rapping about things that have nothing to do with most rappers that make it were actually like well-educated. They, they, they understood the game. I think at this point. In the 90s and I think 2000s even, it was different. But it's turned into this thing where you almost have to go to school to become a rapper. It's quite interesting. Yeah, it's wild.
Like the stories they tell aren't real. We all know it. We all know it's a show. But if you have enough skill, people don't care. Like, not a bad mouth, is it Drake? Yeah, Drake. Is it Drake? No, it's because I've had this conversation with a friend. I've never heard of him, but go ahead.
Yeah, Drake. No one's ever heard of that guy. i don't know who you're talking about you go for it no because like i talked to my friend like is drake hard like if he was on the street would he make it would he be okay now would would he get beat up by dodger food dodger foos yeah for instance he wouldn't make it he's he he lived a privileged life he is a great rapper but it's not like you grew up in the streets but you're fronting that
you did and that i find that personally a little offensive it's like i've seen the ghetto people i've seen the people who actually hustled there's like pusha t who's an example exactly coming from complete dirt and then now he he owns a record company but like at least be honest about it like kanye's sort of the rare example i will give you because kanye he didn't grow up wealthy really but he grew up middle to upper middle class and yeah but he's
just very creative with his rap you know his music's very creative so it's a little different than maybe what you're talking about and i'm here sometimes well he's you know i'm talking about historically his track record a little little shaky but no historically you know no yeah he has amazing songs don't get it he's.
Got some good stuff down there but as as interesting as this conversation is and i could talk about music all day you you you touched a you struck some gold with me anybody starts talking about music with me it's it can go on for hours unfortunately we are not a music podcast i do want to go back a little bit yeah so we went off on a big tangent that's what i like about you though i i can just keep talking with you a lot of people it's like
i really gotta i hate when no no i understand that like people don't have the flexibility to talk about i just don't think people know how to have a conversation they know how to like.
Say a couple sentences and then it's like they don't know how to improvise there's no yes and with anybody it's it's a lot of like i'll answer your question but i will not give you any ammo to figure out where to go next in the conversation nothing to riff off of it's like okay now what yeah yeah but anyway we were talking about amazon you quit amazon great story there that was fun i'll be honest i i like telling that story so day one you're done with that job What did we do next?
Came back to Long Beach, work security for a little bit. Oh my gosh, that was so ghetto. Where at? LA, like Hawthorne, like the bad parts of LA. So you work security? Oh, night shift too. Hawthorne's not terrible. Not Hawthorne. That's where the Friday house is. Oh, yeah. Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong section. Actually, that's Gardena. I was over by it the other day. The Friday house. No, it's just bad. There's just parts of LA you don't want to be in. It was that part of LA.
At night, by myself, driving a little car, I dealt with enough crackers. I'm like, okay. I'm not going to go do anything else. I was just burnt out. I hit on my boss at Norman's because I worked for him before college. So, like, I knew how to do everything at the shop. He's like, hey, do you have any openings? Yeah, it's summer. Get your butt over here. Okay, get to work. I'm like, okay, cool. And then I've been there for the last two, three years.
Okay. Just working in clothing again. So, you're still working there? Yeah, I'm currently working there. Okay. Now, in terms of trajectory, where you want to see yourself, let's say five years down the line, what do you envision for yourself? What do you want? What are your dreams? What are your goals?
I'll be completely blunt I love the intersection I'll be blunt and a little pretentious I love the intersection of art and like science and tech and like having creativity but also being like organized about it that's just it's very architectural in a sense yeah like there's got to be beauty and enjoyment in the path forward it has to be ordered too yeah like I can't my room is spotless I can't think if my room is dirty not that I'm completely spotless but like Like,
there's a, I think it's an ADHD or ADD trait where your brain, if you're given too much stimulus, your brain literally won't function. It's like, okay, we're not doing nothing. We're just going to worry about everything that we're looking at. We're not going to finish a project right in front of us. Yeah. Yeah. I've always had this interesting sort of relationship with people that have ADHD.
I myself do not really have it. And in fact, I think I have something sort of the opposite realm, which is more of a hyper focus. I get way too focused on things and I go deeper, deeper into that. And that might be ADHD. No, I think that's ADD. It might be ADD. It's an outdated term. I actually did some study on it. I was like, I feel like I have ADHD traits, but I don't have the hyperactivity. ADD is an older term. Now they like all lumped it all into ADHD.
I don't like that. They don't even have Asperger's anymore. I know. Now it's just autism. And Asperger was such a great name. No, it is. Great South Park episode. No, but I knew a kid growing up, and I feel like a lot of us did, that had Asperger's. And then you knew a kid that had autism. And it's like, there's a difference
there. Yeah. Clearly a difference. We should not be lumping that i don't know who's i don't know who's doing that shame on you but no like for real it's odd i don't get it no i'm sorry you brought it up it is my pet peeve like if everybody has it then nobody has it it is normal human behavior if we all have adhd then it is just normal human behavior well more and more of us do it seems but i think that's, it could be I don't want to get into conspiracy theories but I mean,
I'm sure it has something to do with big pharma vaccines, yeah well there's no vaccines for ADD or whatever just for autism, Is there an autism? No, that's the whole conspiracy theory that vaccines give you autism. Oh, no, I have heard that before. That's, I don't think that's true. Yeah, me neither. Okay. But. For another rabbit hole, where were we? I don't know. We keep doing this. I'm not mad. I like it. I don't know. So you work in your, the current.
Yeah, I'm working in clothing and that kind of, oh, well, I can go into this story. My bad. My friend, yeah, Rolando, I'll say his first name. My friend Rolando works with me, and he would say Goofy. Goofy, like just like loud as heck, just to kind of make a scene. And he would just do it at random times. He's just going around yelling Goofy? Yeah, like we're working, and like, that's Goofy. I'm like, okay, like just to make a scene. I'm like, one day I just sat down like, you know what?
That would work as a brand name. I just sat down, typed Goofy, looked online, different fonts, found what I liked, and I just kind of messed around with it threw things around. I was like, that's a cool logo. I wonder what other people think. I printed it out in like a vinyl sheet, put it on my shirt, appear like, oh, that's cool. And I got a lot of good feedback. I'm like, all right, we're going with this. And do you have a website? Yeah, GoofyLosAngeles.com. And we'll plug that at
the end. But you've been doing that for four years, about saying?
Probably around two, three years. Two, three years. Just because I wanted to, because it started off as a brand, but then I was like, I love the idea of helping younger people, especially in a world that's getting even more complicated and like to be honest i grew up as a kid wanting guidance wanting to understand things and nobody would take the time to tell me things like sit down and be like yeah this is how that works this is how that works yeah no they
don't do that in school that's for sure but you know know how how to do long division i'll be i'll be good there when that comes i multiply up i still do it it's a horrible trait i don't do my i just you anyway but we were sort of talking about where you saw yourself in the next few years now what what do you predict with the way california is currently the climate and its economy do you and i don't know how in touch you are with it but do you predict for yourself your business others,
things will get better worse. I think it would've got better probably because the pendulum's gonna swing back the other way. I think it couldn't get much worse, could it? Newsom's trying to charge us another dollar per gallon. Oh, he will. Yeah. I can't afford that. No. None of us can. I go to Costco for the gas and let me tell you, I can't even Costco is still like 380 or whatever. I can't do any more than that.
But at some point, we're just gonna say we're done with it. Kind of like what happened with Trump. People were like, we're done with it. And that's a whole mess. Yeah. And in fact, I'm not terribly political, but I'm sort of seeing that in Canada right now. So their prime minister election is in 2026?
No, 2025. Actually, it's next year. The conservative candidate who's running against Justin Trudeau is up by, well, I don't know how many points or how to really say it, but he's up 60% and Trudeau's like 35. Oh, dang. So it's not even that close. They hate that guy. Yeah. So like Trump with America, Canada is going through a similar transition. For better or for worse. It's just human behavior. Like, if you push someone too far in one direction, we're contrarians.
Humans are by nature to some degree contrarian. You can't push someone too far one way or the other. They're going to at some point say, enough's enough. Well, no, it's not. I don't think, I wouldn't say liberals are the main issue. Liberals are a big issue with this state because that's all we vote for. And with that said, they know they'll win. And that's been going on too long. There's no, they don't, and there's no accountability.
That's my issue with California or Massachusetts, which is even a way more liberal state than this one, believe it or not. And New York too. New York will be the first to figure themselves out. We're kind of up next. I guess. And I don't know what that answer is. Well, we did have a recall. So, like, that's a bit of a... It didn't work. It didn't work. But the fact that it happened says something. It's something, yeah, I guess.
I hope that he just doesn't run for president, but that'll make him so mad. Oh, he will. He's just... I know he probably will. It's not going to happen. Yeah. I mean, who is going to back that? Well, plenty of people will back him. Nobody's going to vote for that guy. They backed Kamala. Come on. She didn't win, but they backed him. She had a terrible track record, too. Shoot, never good. They both have bad track records. They both... She came way closer than I actually thought she would.
You know? Yeah, that's fair. She didn't win. I mean, in terms of the electoral college, no, she didn't come close enough. No, no. Nobody wanted her. I mean, I think the difference was like 7 million votes. It's not a lot when you look at the... I think it's the social aspect. People voted for the social aspect, not the financial, not the organization
aspect. It was definitely an election where she could not solve any problems and she didn't have enough time to prove that she could and On top of that she didn't she never really answered a vice question. She never really was a candidate Nobody voted for her in there and better than Biden Yeah, Kamala Harris better than Biden you think? No, no, that was a mentality. It's like well He's old and decrepit. No one's gonna vote for him.
I almost would have voted for Biden again over her to be honest with you Well, honestly, I think he would have done better. I think he would have done better than her. Cause no one, there was no fervor for her. No one felt excited to vote for her. They tried to do the whole spin like, oh, she's a woman, she's a woman of color. That didn't work. Well, I think identity politics is over. Cause we realized. And I've thought this way the entire time. It doesn't really mean anything.
So, you know, you might be Asian, you might be Hispanic or whatever. The dollar's still a dollar. Well, it's that. And if I'm hiring anybody, I just want them to be the best. It might, I don't, I just think it's patently almost racist or sexist to be like, well, I need to have a certain amount of women in my company or black people or Hispanics or whatever. Don't look at it that way. Just treat everybody the same. It's just illogical. Like, you can't control the variables.
Like, okay, well, first and foremost, it doesn't make anything more fair, right? Because then you might be placing somebody who's unqualified to be put in that position. Let's say they're not great. They get fired. And yeah, go forward like one or two months.
And then what's their trajectory after that? You know, it's like, well, I've been fired four times because I was placed in the positions I wasn't qualified for because i was the right pick because i'm a female who's black or hispanic or whatever.
And you know that that's your track record at that point i understand the sentiment the logic is flawed though the sentiment like the sentiment's great yeah the logic's flawed that that's how i feel now i wonder if there is any way to properly implement that dei i take it back i take it back there's a great way to implement it encourage more people of color which i i personally hate that term just like people of color i don't like it either just it just sounds like
you're saying colored people of the opposite way people of different ethnicities just saying people of different races not really what's the other one ethnicities yeah ethnicities people different by the way they've been saying ethnicities for 70 years now didn't have a problem with it until i don't know a decade ago yeah it's wild so but no but i'm gonna say like encourage them to go into school more like well my first thing when the whole like racism cops like i don't know
Well, just don't put them on a pedestal when it doesn't make sense for them to be there. And I'm not saying you should do the opposite, but just treat them as if they were anybody. No, but my thing was like the whole— Give them the right guidance. I agree with you. No, the cops, though, the only answer that makes any sense is encourage people of color to get into those jobs. If you want to see that get better, that's the only way that gets better.
Well, I would almost argue that, and I've worked with the Long Beach Fire Department and Police Department, in terms of Latinos, they're— We dominate. Well, yeah, they're mainly Latinos. I don't think I've ever met any LAPD or Long Beach PD officer that's white, maybe two of them. Yeah, it's California. It's California and you're in L.A., like L.A. County. There's a lot. I mean, Hispanics are the majority anyway. I'm quite aware of that.
All my co-workers are Hispanic. But going back to your idea here, you want to say, encourage more people of different ethnicities to be a part of police departments? If they truly meant what they said, like, we want there to be less racism in the police department, there is no other way to fix that problem. How do you think it would help, though? Well, I'm just saying, like, if their argument is, oh, there's a bunch of white racist cops, okay, then the answer is not less policing.
It's let's get more police but let them be of color to people like i never understood their logic behind but i think they've done that has it worked i don't know no well that's the thing that i see hispanic women black cops all the time yeah like it's not a rare occurrence so, they're that maybe that was the flaw in the first place maybe they just assumed the majority of the police force was white and i think that's the problem too
that we assume that like california's representative of the whole and i'm sure in other states the majority is probably white yeah we're a very rare exception except for new mexico where i mean they're technically red i don't want to call them white but they're it's mainly native american but virtually every other state yeah i would say is mainly white i would think so yeah so there's some merit but like i still don't agree with the logic like oh let's
just reduce the police force like that's not the right step. That was no good, the whole to defund the police. I wanted to scream. It was like, I grew up in a place where the cops didn't want to come around, or if they came around, they came and chop her. It was like, no, we do not need less cops. What is wrong with you? What they are, are they're griffs, right? And the trans movement is one of them too, if you ask me. Black Lives Matter.
Even abortion, really. They're all griffs. they're they're all let's get people let's that's and it's not hard to find them we'll find a couple sheep a couple a couple of people who really you know believe what this message is and then we'll exploit them make some money off of them and move on to the next grift that's what they did if you ask me and don't get me wrong i i think that the only one that i think that makes the most sense is black lives matter because it.
It does, I mean, there was clearly an issue and it didn't really solve it. The protests and the movement itself, but it made it apparent at least. And maybe it's bad leadership. There's good evidence for that, actually. A lot of that money did not go to helping any black causes. Not at all. And they're trying to do it with the Daniel Penny thing right now.
They're trying to, I don't know if you were looking at that story too much, But Black Lives Matter, which I didn't even know was still around, really. And I'm not saying I thought they were dissolved or anything. I didn't realize that they had this much press on them. But they were sort of going about the whole thing with the Penny trial. And after he was acquitted, sort of pinning him as a racist.
And because he, on the subway, he strangled and accidentally killed a homeless guy that was threatening other people on the subway. Homeless guy was black. Daniel Penny was white.
And it had nothing to do with race but that's sort of that's what makes me think oh this is just a grift i can actually give you a similar story to what happened on that subway, mine was different you were there yeah i was one of the witnesses no i'm kidding, literally like a month or two ago the wildest thing happened to me i was parked in like i think it was carson i was parking carson carson's a weird place these days let me
tell you but go ahead yeah yeah i'm sorry i'm laughing because yes it freaking is i'm parked in my car i see some dude across the street like across the street walking his bike looks rugged no like my height he's homeless yeah kind of backed out you can tell he's homeless you can tell he's rough, walks past just stares at me and part of me is like obviously you don't stare back but part of me is like all right well if he comes at me i want to be ready
so i kind of follow his eye sign for a second he crosses the street he comes at me the back of my car says goofy like hey are you goofy, i'm like yeah yeah that's my brand just saying random stuff trying to follow his like all right cool like what do you want. He like makes, we make conversation for like a minute. Then he walks away. He grabs his beer that he's holding. And I could tell later that it was alcoholic.
Throws it the back of my car, just sprays across it, runs across the car to me where I'm in the parking seat, in the driver's seat and just start swinging on me. Like punch me in the face. I'm like, oh, okay. I guess we're fighting now because my door was open. So like we get on the ground, we're fighting in the middle of the street. We end up on the sidewalk and I'm like, screw it.
I have a pepper spray screw you bro i start pepper spraying him sadly i pepper sprayed myself so that hurt like oh jeez i'm sorry so we're both in pain we're still fighting and i just like screw it i like i know how to i got him in chokehold i got him in chokehold i could have slammed his head into the ground part of me is mad i didn't because like i would have ended it there like knocked out like bro i'm sorry you started it i didn't start jack but ultimately i was
like screw it, threw him off. He's still fighting me. At one point I was just done. All right. Walking middle street. Hey, can someone freaking help me? Cause I was like, help, help. And nobody was doing anything because it was a pre-isolated area. Middle of the street. Finally, people come over. He runs to my car, tries to get, he gets my water. I had a gallon of water, starts throwing it on his face. I'm like in pain because this freaking pepper spray was in my ass.
I'm like, hey, can someone call the cops? I can't see a thing. I'm in the middle of the street talking to some dude, They were like, hey, please call the cops. Please don't ditch me. I don't got a fight left in me. Call the cops so we can straighten this out. Cops come over and they're like, yeah, we can't do nothing. Like either you both go to jail or no one goes to jail. Yeah. Apparently. Interesting. Cause like he said, she said, it was like, okay. He said, he said. What was the evidence?
He's a crazy homeless person. Yeah. I wanted to scream that at them. Like y'all didn't even check him. Your man with a car. But part of me was like, yeah. And then I was like, I was really broke at the time. I was like, I can't miss work. And if I'm in jail, I'm going to miss work. I'm going to lose a lot of stuff that I can't afford to lose. I was like, oh, fuck. My bad. And if that's in Carson. Yeah, it was completely unprovoked. I'm like, yeah.
I was going to say, see, I don't know if Carson has a courthouse. I think you'd have to go to Compton. Probably, yeah. That's a hell, that's not a fun courthouse. I had to go to that courthouse to pay like a parking ticket or something. For some reason, I couldn't do it online. They made me go to the courthouse. And it was the same day. Do you remember when like Microsoft went down for the day over the summer? Vaguely, vaguely. It was like one day. It was that day.
And I went to, you know, you go, you go into the courtroom at the time, bunch of people and me, it's just traffic court. And, and the judge comes in, we all stand, we all sit down, whatever, the whole nine. and the judge was like, well, my computer's down, so we're going to go through each person and reschedule. And it's like, I took the morning off to get this done. And so I had to go back and not a fun courthouse.
But it is kind of cool because you're like, you're going to that courthouse and you're like, Ice Cube's probably been in here. That's the only cool thing about it. That's the one that's remodeled, right, with the big old Compton letters. Going down the train track? Not a company about something else. Not their courthouse. That courthouse has been there since like 1960. It is old. Why does Long Beach spend so much money on architecture? They spend a lot on infrastructure when it comes to the...
Like political buildings, like their town hall and their libraries and stuff. I forgot they destroyed the town hall like a few years ago, no? Did they? Yeah, they completely destroyed it. But it's a new one. And rebuilt the whole thing. Yep. I forgot about that because I used to hang out there. For what reason did they do that? It was pretty old. Probably just the age. Okay.
Yeah. Now, Long Beach, which is good in some ways and sort of overdone in others, they spend a lot of money on infrastructure other than like the roads.
All the buildings everything and the park they don't care about the parks really either, no that signal hell is like no signal hell experience that's signal hell that's different yeah well it's i count it but i'm so mad about signal hell they literally are mad about signal they're a city within a city you morons you really made a city within a city just because you're so i know but yeah but it's kind of cool like like especially if you live around here and you and you go up to people like if
you live in long beach and and you live in signal hill it's like yeah i live up on it it is kind of cool it's like have you have you watched parks and reg i well a long time ago there's like there's whole rivalry between the poor city and the rich city that's literally what i think of every time it's like yeah because they are the rich city we all know that what uh signal hill absolutely well in terms of long beach's like total area i. Signal hill is actually more upper middle class same
with bigsby knolls right fair enough yeah but really the real money is in certain parts of like lakewood to be honest maybe not lakewood but i don't know where i was see i'm a when i do when i do home services like i don't know where it was but it's in long beach and it's north and i think it's it's not wrigley no no it's more that's hipster yeah that's like silver lake long beach but it's more like it's it's east but it's it's east of signal hill still north of
it i don't know what that area is but it's it always blows my mind how big long beach is it's it's very big and i lived in the east village so you know i would always be going back down basically when i worked around that area i i still i still work long beach but what was i gonna say no i there's some wealthy parts but it like you're.
Saying it's so big that it's sort of hard to pinpoint exactly which areas those are i want to say the beach but no it's pretty ghetto around the beach bixby's pretty bixby has some nice spots yeah you can tell they're an affluent yeah i've that yeah that might be actually one of the richest areas but also is like when you're close to seal beach when like kind of by cal state long beach but south of it there's a little area a lot of enclosed like gated housing areas right now a
lot of nice houses down there and it's yeah it's it's right next to seal beach. But kind of in between what what separates them is that there's like a reserve nature reserve but But I don't know. Getting into local history, but you're from Long Beach, yeah? Born and raised at the foot of the Signal Hill. At the foot. Yeah. At the foot. I went to Alvarado, which is in Signal Hill, I think. What's it called? Alvarado. It's an elementary school. Oh, okay. Literally, I grew up on Cherry and PCH.
This little streetcar gardenia, which was so ghetto growing up. There would literally be helicopters flying over every other night. It's like, okay. That's what someone told me that lived in Long Beach. You don't want to live on a street that's named after a fruit or what else? Or a tree. Or MLK. MLK gets kind of crazy, too. Yeah. Well, Anaheim sucks. PCH sucks.
Willow kind willow sucks actually except long beach fox one shout out to you guys once it's class like spring it comes down yeah i think after spring it's like okay we're going north at this point yeah we're good we're good all the ghettos left behind uh it's just a nightmare until you get to like belmont like all that area like and i lived in it for a while but it's just there's really no good part of it other than downtown long beach because you can live kind of on a high rise i
guess the thing is like it's good and bad like it got better because i grew up when it was horrible, you got better and now there's a bunch of homeless people and i was getting worse again yeah damn it it's not gangs no more though i wasn't there when you said it so you said it got better what was that time zone maybe not better better but it was better than having gangs and having people just Well there were the Snoop Dogg days in the 90s those weren't good Yeah I think that kind of
trickled into like the 2000s and then it got kind of quelled the only problem is now there's homeless people everywhere people on drugs everywhere That's sort of just an LA thing though I feel like and maybe that's a product of COVID in a sense but no definitely I would love I can't wait till the studies come out I because there's no science to homelessness nobody's going around and counting them all by head every day.
I mean, obviously there's shelters and you can kind of do a census based on that. But what am I trying to say? I don't really know sort of what creates more homelessness or where— Mental health issues, probably. I think that could— I think we can say that definitively. So with more homeless people, would you concur that mental health issues have gone up? Drug issues have—drug use have gone up? Mental health issues and drug issues are pretty well intertwined.
Yeah. And once you kind of start down that path, it's—what's it called? Like, it really— Well, it snowballs. It snowballs, exactly. It certainly does. But I don't know. It's so easy to get drugs now. Like it used to be more like, oh, you do drugs? You're doing the hush hush. Now it's like I talk to people and they're so open about it. I'm like, oh, okay. Like strong stuff. I'm like, okay. Like what? Or am I just growing up? Is this part of growing up?
Yeah. And I feel like a lot of people, a lot of people I talk to that aren't using drugs don't do it for the same reasons I do. I don't. I don't lose drugs. Which is basically, I'm too scared to get a bad batch anyway. Yeah. Why bother? Alcohol does white enough for me. Haven't smoked weed in a long time. But, you know. Yeah, the fentanyl is scary stuff. I'm not scared of weed. I haven't, like I said, I haven't done it in a while.
But that's not the one I'm scared. Actually, you know what? I am kind of scared of it because it's becoming too regulated. But, yeah. Yeah, no, I don't understand, like you're saying, the people doing the hard stuff. Like, you really trust in a bag of Coke these days, even if you can test it, which I know is possible. Why bother? It just seems like a whole trip. I feel like the psyche of the American, or at least in California, the psyche just, people stopped caring.
I think they don't care if it's a bad batch. Part of them was like, well, I'm kind of, no, no, no. Like, obviously, they want to have a good time. I know what you're saying, but yeah. The psyche got much darker as a whole. Or maybe, like, I'm projecting, but I don't think so. So I think if I, you've lived here long enough, I think you're allowed to have that observation.
And I think it's valid. We'd like to talk to people just to confirm, but like, I think the, yeah, just as our psyche, our psyche as a whole, just like, eh, if it happens, it happens. Like, if we die. Yeah. Which is kind of like, what the, what? Like, we have. I don't know who you're talking to. Hopes and dreams. I got a lot of things to do in this life. No, me too. I got it.
But. So that's, that's my question. Am I projecting or is it my certain, my, is it a. Well i don't know who i'm polling no that's a good question i i i agree with you in some sense however it does depend on who you talk to like i said i don't know who you're talking to who has this it seems very nihilist to be like well i feel like it's become socially acceptable to be that kind of nihilist when it wasn't like 10 years
ago i don't know about that and maybe i'm just not talking to these people really i think i'm going off of vibes of social media but then i gotta remember the runoff of algorithms. Like, I could be just in a feedback loop. And a lot of people in social media really crave attention. That's what it has become at this point. Yeah. It's not really for connecting one another. It's for arguing or look at me, look at me, look at me, give me a like, give me a whatever.
That's all it is now. So I wouldn't be surprised if you're seeing a lot of outrageous statements made by people online just because they want to be seen and or heard. Having said that. At the same time, I don't understand how someone would be genuinely that open on the internet about using illicit substances. If that's what we're talking about still, we could be sort of on a vaguer scale or a broader scale. Well, on personal levels, I've had full-on conversations with people like, yeah.
Like, they do hard drugs on the regular, and they're like, some of them are still well, like, regulated. Like, they still live. They still do their thing.
Others like kind of teetering i'm like but why are you so like nonchalant about it i still can't wrap my head around that i don't either i and i i don't think either of us really have an answer to this but no california is a you know what it is these days it's like a golden retriever that used to be owned by like a wealthy family and then got like pushed out of the of the home for like barking too much and now it's like on the street and it has heartworms and like like cancer and
stuff and you know the dog pound picked him up and it's living in a cage and it doesn't really care i think that's i that's sort of like going to your point there where there's there's i guess a zeitgeist of people that there's a darkness that has overcome this state well there's nothing to Join us. What social institutions can we all agree on? Like what social institutions? Yeah. Like we don't even like, oh, maybe that's not the right term, but like. I don't know what that means.
So it's a social. I'm trying to like, I'm trying to define that term and that's the word came to my head. Like a library or a university? Like beliefs or standards or customs. Like there's nothing that really ties us as a whole. Well, it's a question of morality, I guess. And pathos, ethos, all that. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm not from this state. I didn't really mention that to you. I'm from the Midwest. I have lived here for, I mean, long enough, I feel like.
But no, I grew up in Southern Ohio. It's very different there. People are friendly. And I think on one of my podcasts, I sort of talk badly about Ohio because the only reason that I'm not living there now is because I found it never changes. It sort of stays the same. It's like Groundhog Day, like that movie. You wake up and everything's sort of the same. Your whole day's the same. And that's just bothered me. I want to be somewhere where there's more change in the air.
When you live in California and you go out into that world every day, that is the city of Los Angeles, you never know what you're going to run into. And, you know, I'm realizing, well, that was fun for a while. And now I'm, like, used to it. And I almost can't imagine growing up here because kids... I think more here than even New York City, like, see things that they shouldn't. It becomes normalized to us. They're institutionalized almost by their environment.
And and there's nothing like the parents can really do about that but no i don't think it's really fair for them would i raise my children in la it depends on you know what la is at that point, like i said it is always changing but sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse it just it doesn't really know how to sit still and like i well that's why there's a lot of innovation so It's a double-edged sword. Well, I like that. Yes, there's a lot of good aspects to it.
Like any big city, you realize that there's a lot of things that you came here for that you realize, well, I came here for because there's a lot of reasons that are great reasons to live here. But there's also a lot of reasons that make you realize that this isn't a good city.
There's more there's the same reasons but there's more reasons on both sides and you go to a smaller city or town you know there's a couple good reasons why you might want to live there and there's a couple bad reasons why you might not it's just every time you go to somewhere bigger yes the extremes, are magnified so I don't know well I'm curious if LA's even going to be as relevant in the future like our main thing was Hollywood we got the Olympics coming up
and I think that might be true That might be it, pal. I don't know. That would be very interesting. Because with Hollywood kind of dying out and... Because people are filming whatever they want all over the United States. Not only that, but AI is going to basically be our entertainment. I don't think so. You really think that? Yeah, definitely. I've followed along with what they're doing. Could you watch an AI movie?
Okay, do you remember the voice? Like when we heard an AI voice on the Instagram, around me like you just skipped it because the voice was grading like it was just annoying but I might listen to an AI voice now I see videos of AI voice and I'm like okay it's passable it's not great but it's passable once AI reaches that I think in terms of video then it'll be like okay oh I'll watch it I think that's what there's no emotion in it I and I know that there can be but.
How quickly do you think that that technology can four or five years okay let's see five years from now I'm watching a movie completely AI made keep in mind is there mass appeal to it? I mean they don't have to do mass appeal as long as there's enough compute they can make it for an individual or a family based on their preferences because that's the entire magic of it oh interesting so it's you're talking about entertainment, that is directed at you Personified in a sense. Yeah.
Personalized. Yeah. It's going to be yours. Personalized. For you, for your family. You're all going to enjoy it because you're going to have something for everybody. So you're telling me. That's interesting humans are much more formulaic than we want to admit because we want to believe we're all special we have our own little quirks and to some degree we are but we are also.
Stereotypes and you can appeal to those stereotypes if you have enough data i know but i want to paint a picture of this so you're telling me i go on netflix one day if it still exists maybe it's called ai flicks whatever it is and i basically tell into the siri or whatever is there hey i I want to watch three episodes of a TV show about funny policemen or whatever that takes place in Arizona. It'll start probably off as, like, cartoons. That would probably be the easiest thing to achieve.
Real-life stuff would probably be maybe a decade or two. But, like, anything that's cartoonish in that style, you could probably knock that out in the next five years. Are you looking forward to that? No, it is terrifying.
I'm not either no but not it sounds awful to me be honest okay well okay if we're gonna go down this rabbit hole let me give you this example which i like to think of when i think of society as a whole i imagine as a human being just on a giant scale because they still do the same things but just on a much grander scale you got to move things you got to eat you got to sleep you got to organize so imagine if a human being had all their memories jumbled
in with fake memories because that's essentially what ai is you can give us fake memories fake records of the past damn because we don't have any ways to verify at the end that's what the scariest part how do you verify how do you verify that's who wrote that text so this is just like blade runner at this point. It's like we're giving society well not asperger's we're giving society asperger's That sounds like a Donald Trump quote for something.
We're giving society Asperger's. You got a good Trump voice. I don't do it on the pod often, but I'm not bad at the old Don. The old orange man. Can you do any voices? Oh, absolutely not. No? None, I wish. None of Asperger's. Schizophrenia. Like, well, you don't know what's true. Your history is kind of jumbled. That's not good. It's not, but that's my prediction based on how we're using technology.
And like we can have all the little signs that say this is fake someone's gonna believe it a large portion of the masses may believe it because you're gonna see that both ways people are gonna verify things that are fake people are gonna verify things that are true and that's when everything goes to hell at the end of the day it's just gonna be the government saying this is true because we said it's true and that is terrifying. Okay, so what's after that then? Let's say. The apocalypse.
The matrix? I got no idea. Maybe it's the matrix. I want to be hopeful. I want to be hopeful, but I haven't had this conversation with anyone and ended at a hopeful place. The only thing, alternative is a... Well, because you're not painting, like there is a hopeful. There can be. There absolutely can be. Solution to any of this. And there probably isn't. But I think the only hopeful is to get away from it. You're talking about a decade from now or so, right?
I don't know who knows what i'll be doing then but i don't want to live in that world i don't know either i think what's going to happen is going to be two sets of people's sex sex there's a t there i hear you s-e-c-t-s exactly but no i want no you got it i'm sorry no so two sets of people one who are totally into ai and they're gonna like totally go into that world other than like y'all are crazy um yeah the pendulum has sworn too far we're gonna go live on farms.
And just have a normal life a human life not this ai gibberish because that that's the only logical solution to a extreme push for ai there's gonna be a complete division and that's that'll be interesting for the country but also like imagine children born and raised with ai can you even imagine that well it sort of happened with the whole screen use but that's more just now i mean yeah what it wasn't interactive it wasn't.
A two-way thing what does that involve children being raised by artificial intelligence what what do you what do you even mean by that a lot more asperger's how you won't know how to interact with people you're using but asperger's doesn't exist what are you talking about william my bad autism autism now everything's autism it's coming back let's bring back so you're saying there's a higher probability you think and you don't we're we're no doctors here that there will be more neuro divergent
divergent yes but it's not even a i don't think you have to be a doctor there's studies that talk about how viewing people's faces seeing how they interact because that's how people how we learn to interact with people so if you don't get that enough you don't get enough of that interaction in real life to get the nuances of human behavior and like kind of incorporate that into your psyche you will have asperg-like
symptoms like just just it's i don't think that should be a controversial statement. It seems no i don't think either i just all of this is very predictive and what's kind of happened on a small scale i'm just waiting for the ai to kick it into hyper drive which is i I think what's going to happen once it reaches a certain breaking point, it's going to go like fire. Cause that's typically how breakthroughs go.
I just don't know how to respond to any of this because it's so, I think it's very interesting information and prediction on your part, but. I'm kind of pessimistic, so take it with a grain of salt. Well, I am too. I feel the same way you do because, like you were saying earlier, there's not a lot of hope coming out at the end of this conversation. So let me ask you this let's say and you mentioned two different sects of people.
Let's say there's not that let's say there's a majority of people who are against it what will happen then okay genuinely let's keep going pessimistic sadly because there will be countries who will take the opposite route the technology still exists let's say america doesn't is so we'll have to find a way to coexist with other countries. So let's say the majority is anti-AI and we create a bunch of laws to restrict it. We coexist with China currently.
China is world's decades technologically advanced than us right now. Maybe not decades. I think on the surface, but not- They're a couple of years ahead of us, though. I would give them that. Japan is probably about the same as us right now. China, they're moving and grooving. Not as much as we are. We've sort of taken a break on technological advancement and it's, that's not, we're kind of screwing ourselves with this open source stuff.
Yeah. But what am I trying to say? So why couldn't two countries, because they sort of do now. And what you're talking about is, is way too much of an impact on society for it not to be more, you know. I don't even know. I don't talk about these things. But no, why couldn't we live in a world where one country has its own thing going and they're doing their own thing and we still do business with them and all that? You can still visit.
But we're doing our own thing where it's not as deep in the water as the other. I guess I'm taking a pessimistic worldview just because when I look at human history, humans want to expand. It's our, in our blood, in ours. I don't. I've had enough with the expanded. No, but as a human race, as a race. No, I know what you're talking about. We want to take over the entire territory. We're prideful.
All you need is a leader to focus that energy. And then it's like, I don't agree with what you're doing over there. Let me go over there and make you do what I want you to do. It's like, why? Like, there's no logical reason, but we're still animals. Like, we're still having that instinct. It's, you know, it's progression and it happens.
So that's why. nobody wants to sit still for too long and i don't really either but yeah i don't know well that's why i foresee conflict between a very ai uh a technology focused group of people and a very anti all that and i'm very scared for the people who are anti because you're gonna be outwitted and outmatched and will there be a civil war. Yeah i think definitely you think so because a lot of people said Yeah. That there was going to be, and they even made a movie about,
I never watched. Oh, I heard about that. About sort of Democrats and Republicans having a civil war. What do those terms even mean? I don't think that's going to, what terms? Republican and Democrat? That's my pet peeve. It feels like those, nothing means anything anymore. They're labels. I, you know, liberal and conservative are two different labels as well. I don't know where you see yourself on the political spectrum. I'm fairly moderate.
I'd probably say libertarian. Oh, you're libertarian. I've never met a libertarian in California. Not that far deep into the whole thing, but like. But you like small government and. Leave me alone. Yeah, lower taxes. Yeah, heck yeah. Yeah. No, I'm with you on that. See, libertarian, because I've met libertarians who, they can be a little too heartless for me. And you're not saying you're like full libertarian. No, yeah, that's where it gets me too.
Yeah, when it's too, like when you're a full on libertarian, it's like, geez, you just, you have like no empathy. No, exactly. Or anything. Like, that's where it breaks from. Like, what if there's a kid being abused in the house next door? No, they don't care. That's my point. No, I can't live with that. I can't really trust you unless you're, you have to be socially liberal in some sense. You don't have to fully be liberal because I, you know, I don't care. They cross the line a lot of times.
Well, it's not even that. I just think you believe in a lot of nonsense happening. Because this past election, with abortion, abortion used to be a thing that I think should be allowed, and I think it should be used in very specific cases. They turned it into a sacrament. And that's, I don't know why. It's wild. And that's, I just don't really agree with that. We shouldn't just be giving them out like, you know. It shouldn't be birth control.
Abortion should not be birth control. And that's such a simple statement. They forgot about the... I wish I had gone to, like, a Kamala Harris rally and been like, what about Plan B, you know, shouting out? Because what is she going to say when that comes up, you know? Like, it's just simple. You can get it. All 50 states. Nobody's banning Plan B. If you can't get Plan B in three days after you've had sex, then you are in the wrong.
Any conservative— I'm sorry. Any liberal—we're not—I just wish we'd try to get to a middle ground. But we don't even— There's no attempt anymore. They can. But yeah, I'm totally on board. Here's the other thing, though. I think what's bizarre is conservatives have gotten more liberal. They're more centrist now, which I'm fine with. And then liberals keep going left, I think. Well, that, okay. At least the one's trying to run for president.
Well, have you heard of him? No, you know Jordan Peterson, right? JP, he has a podcast. I don't listen to it, but no, I know him. He makes one statement that is interesting. The right, people like the right and that ideology has always had like a break. The moment you reach like totalitarianism and that kind of stuff, you went too far. Cut it up. Yeah. The left doesn't really have that same mechanism socially. It's like, okay, when did he go too far? When were you too nice?
Well, even Bill Maher, and I only watch like clips of him on TikTok or something, but even Bill Maher, who was a staunch, you know, left, Democrat or liberal or whatever for the past 20 30 years is is being like i think they're going too far i don't know if i can i can stand and he says that because he knows he has a back end because the average american's like well he's cutting off a lot of his audience you know that's i don't think so i think a
lot i'm saying by if he were to stand with being more and more progressive oh yeah i'm saying exactly finding with him sort of staying more in the middle i i think everybody trusts him a little more because that's only human, Anybody, and I think Colbert has this problem, where he just says what he's told, and I don't know why anybody watches him anymore, because he's such a pawn. And it's the same with everybody that works on MSNBC and all that crap.
Nobody wants, even Fox News, they're the other direction, but they're too right, and then every other news outlet is too left. There's nobody in the middle anymore, and I don't know. We've got to fix that. I like the i've i don't know why this quote went in my head like don't trust a song that's perfect if someone's perfect there's something wrong there like if you don't have a if. Yeah, they're just puns. And they don't think for themselves, and you can tell right away.
Well, it's falling apart, though. There's no thinking involved. It's just, let me speak. Now, I imagine because you don't seem like an idiot, but. Thank you. So, the LA Times, been around for a long time, used to be the most popular newspaper in California, actually. And San Francisco has the Examiner, maybe. I don't know what it is. LA Times is the California newspaper used to sell in circulation in terms of subscriptions, millions and millions a year.
They're down to, I think, less than 100,000. They're not selling papers. Oh, man, that's nothing. LA Times not doing well at all. So the owner decided, okay, here's what I'm going to do. And I don't know how this will work. It's a news story that's actually not being talked about, but it's interesting because it's local to us.
What they're doing is inserting a it's going back to ai there he's inserting ai into published articles basically and and it's basically he's telling ai okay you need to make this article completely like unbiased it's like a bias meter thing it's a robot that goes through an article and says There's irony in that whoever wrote the code is biased. Whatever information he gave, it's a feed off of. Right. Is bias.
So, no, there is no bias. Like I said, I don't know how that works because of your logic. It probably does a better job than a human would. Right. It probably definitely does a better job than a human would. But. So, yeah, I don't know how LA Times is going to really insert that bias meter, but we'll see how it plays out. It's not a newspaper I read, but I don't know.
How do you get your news you seem well informed enough i've been staying away from it recently just because it got ridiculous and i got tired of following politics that does drain you it does this past election i am exhausted from oh my gosh because i was listening i i i love podcasting as much as i listen i love listening to podcasts and a lot of podcasts that weren't political became political started talking about nothing but politics and it's like i guess
i'll keep listening to you because i like hearing you talk but i don't know it's yeah and then i had to find new podcasts but and it's just hard to like i okay genuinely i want to find like a more left leaning podcast to combat my own biases just to get that point i agree however and i've tried Believe me, if you want to ask anybody about podcasts, you're looking at them, but the left-leaning podcasts,
they're tough because they're, they're as far, there's not, there's really not a moderate podcast. A lot of, um, a lot of the podcasts that are popular are actually right wing. But the left-leaning ones aren't popular because they're too left-wing. I don't think left politics is meant to be, like, in the podcasting world. I just don't think it meshes or something. No, no, no. Well, that's funny. The whole stereotype is, like, podcast.
It's a guy thing. Oh, is it? No, yeah. In my head, it's always been that stereotype. There's a lot of guys that do it, I guess. Well, think about, like, how many... Oh, have you heard a girl podcast? Well, there's that Call Her Daddy or whatever.
I've never listened to it. i just know that kamala harris went on there and it's like a sex podcast i heard about that and it's like okay i guess yeah i should listen to that one because i bet you it's funny but i have a theory about the whole why men gravitate towards podcasts well honestly i think it's like there's megan kelly though she's she's a podcast but she's well i'm still making my point there's not that many no i i do have to think now it's like huh i guess you're right
but no sorry go ahead well i think it's just like well podcasts tend to simulate a conversation i think it engages the same neural pathways fancy way of saying that you feel like you're part of the conversation you're very like.
Computational in the way you think i these are conversations i've had in my head that i like to run through other people to get feedback and be like okay did i miss anything i literally talked to ai like can you help me understand the world i know that sounds like crackhead energy but it's Can you help me understand the world? It's like a Disney song. I feel like I'm on the autism spectrum, but I can actually talk to people and understand their social cues. I don't think you're autistic.
You're like the Diet Coke of autism. You got like one calorie, not enough. I feel like I could vibe with them so easily and not like skip a beat. I want to test it, but I don't have a chance. All right. Well, I think that's all interesting. It's something that we should talk about next time we have you on. but that is about all we have for today. If you want, I want to give you this time to go ahead and plug whatever you'd like to.
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