Drew Curtis | The challenges of censorship and building a social media platform

Drew Curtis is the founder of Fark, a news site with a solid dollop of humor. He and Ken talk whiskey, tech, what to do in a tsunami, censorship, and how Reddit is likely the largest porn site in the world.

To see the video version of this podcast or to find Ken in the social world, click: https://linktr.ee/KenLaCorte

Transcript

Ken LaCorte: 0:00

People in here as possible I mean it's just so much more fun to have a whiskey in front of us yeah and and and all of that. I mean you turned me you know I still drink that's still one of my very top like two or three whiskies in the world is oh yeah is the it's the it's the double oak but

Drew Curtis: 0:15

who double Oh yeah, that one's got it's findable now Woodford does oh and yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 0:18

you know, there was a there was a period of time where it was a target.

Drew Curtis: 0:22

Yeah, yeah. I know what free man and I'm talking like

Ken LaCorte: 0:25

you know, not not not a fancy target let's and it wasn't it wasn't the one for it. It was the one for double Oh,

Drew Curtis: 0:31

yeah. Yeah, they started getting like super big. The next one to keep your eyes open for by the way is wilderness trail that might be in California already. I know it's in a bunch of other states but it's kind of off everybody's radar. That one's I was asking a friend of mine who believe it or not, is a bourbon Somali like what? Because I always find these go twos that are local that I drink all the time and then everybody else finds out about them. Like I used to drink Eagle rare all the time. That was my go to. And now I can't do it because it's gone.

Ken LaCorte: 0:59

Yeah, I mean, like I still like Jack just because I grew up on it. And it's just kind of like tricking mother's milk or something. Yeah. But there's also a I generally don't like Japanese whiskies all that much because they they're to PD they taste like Scotch to me.

Drew Curtis: 1:15

The opposite probably they taste nondescript, but you know, but they're good. Yeah, but but but most of

Ken LaCorte: 1:19

them have that. I just don't like I don't like Scotch weirdly, I love I love whiskey. I don't like scotch. It just tastes like you poured it over over moss to me, right? Yeah. And I don't like that tastes. I guess that's a I guess that's a popular thing. Anyhow, there's one coffee co FF, E y or something like that. It's very, a very good one.

Drew Curtis: 1:40

So we're strangely we have a ton of Japanese whiskey right here, because there's a very high Japanese population here. Right? Which means we have good sushi, too. It's kind of nice. But yeah, so

Ken LaCorte: 1:48

why don't Japanese come to Lexington? Toyota?

Drew Curtis: 1:51

They yeah, there's a massive Toyota plant in Georgetown, the next town over. Right, right, right. Yeah. Like when I was a kid, that town had maybe five or 10,000 people in it. Now. It's like 150,000. I mean, it's a lot. But yeah, that's bourbon to keep an eye out for is a is a is a wilderness trail. That if you can't get it already, that's one that's going to eventually be on everybody's radar, right? Pretty good. It was founded by a guy. It's actually a funny story. The guy was an organic chemist, and his partner was a mechanical engineer. And they had for 10 years a startup company that just would extract yeast out of building materials. And they did this because a lot of these older distilleries have older facilities. And they were like, Hey, can we get the strain we use? Like 50 years ago. Can you guys find that? And so that's how they started. So you're

Ken LaCorte: 2:38

drinking the the the DNA of building materials? Yeah, they

Drew Curtis: 2:42

pull out the yeast and then they they recycle it, basically, and bring it back.

Ken LaCorte: 2:47

And make yeast last forever. It's not like some of those soups that guys do. And they're like, it's a pot of soup. That's, that's been going on forever. It's yeah,

Drew Curtis: 2:55

there's pull it out of the ceiling. But they did that for 10 years. And then they guess they just figured they learned enough about the bourbon industry to right kind of start one from scratch. And I went on that tour last week for the first time. And it was fascinating, because every other places look good. So we've been doing this for 200 years. And these guys are like, Yeah, we built it five years ago. Here's what we decided to change. That was

Ken LaCorte: 3:13

kind of neat. I said, we're a little bit about the asbestos factor, but probably not.

Drew Curtis: 3:17

There's all kinds of other stuff. I'm sure there's lead paint, and God knows what else. Yeah.

Ken LaCorte: 3:21

So So tell me about Fark how's it what's its Fark is one of these one of these cool sights that it was like it was kind of ahead of the of the when it was first people people having feedback, it was ahead of the technical curve. Yeah. Now you're way behind the technical error. If you're kind of not even in it, you know, you're like you like it's like a push, push push mower. But but it's still going strong. And and you've I think you've kind of refined having an off site or not in part of the regular ecosphere. Social social group, how are you keeping that going?

Drew Curtis: 3:58

Yeah, um, I don't know. Because like it's been, I will say, what's, what's improved recently, probably is this, which is that the people that we've got, like, there is a large contingent of folks that have been around for 15 or 20 years. And when they were younger, they were assholes. And now they're older assholes. And those are kind of the best assholes to have because they're very good at running off, like the people that are really suck. So they kind of do the job for us for a moderation perspective a little bit, right. I think that's it.

Ken LaCorte: 4:29

That's it. They're not assholes. They're dicks. Right?

Drew Curtis: 4:31

Well, yeah. That's where you that's when you get older, you kind of mellow out a little bit, and you're not doing it for no reason. Okay. Negative for specific reasons. And so I think part of it is that like, I don't have the issue of like a lot of sites that are sometime around like the four to six year range. You'll get enough people in your community where they start trying to stage a revolt. We're long past that now. Right? But with so many people on the site that like honestly do care about the way that it's run, that they kind of do our job for us. and keeping it pretty clean. The other thing is, is that I think part of the reason why I never spent a lot of time trying to clean it up or even keep up with what everybody else was doing was is that the difference creates a barrier of entry to morons. And I think that kind of works for us.

Ken LaCorte: 5:18

It's every time I've seen in life where the barrier to entry is harder, you get a group who cares more about it, like, like, I go to Burning Man, right? It's a pain in the ass to get there. You know, it, you got to bring it all in, you got to take it all out, you got to five hours waiting in line to get in there. It's out in the middle of bumfuck. Nowhere, but once you're in, it's like, okay, that has a self selecting group. And and, and so are you. Is your age getting older on that? In other words, do the younger people not do that? Or is it? You know, who Who do you think you're keeping out by by by being old man?

Drew Curtis: 5:52

Well, here's the weird thing. So first of all, like, I don't know that we come across like that other than like, in fact, what we've done is we've actually flipped over and gone retro by accident. As it turns out, I took a design class recently. And I was asking what to change and they're like, you might want to just keep it because that's a really unique style that people are starting to like because it's 20 years old now. Right. Okay, that works. But I was going to pull up a thing I can show you here, which is kind of cool. On the stats on who our audience is, because this is kind of neat. Enter, we get to show anybody this. And it's actually surprised me too. I was like, Okay, I'm mostly here to make sure this isn't gonna display anything weird. Yeah, okay, great. So display anything weird. Yeah.

Ken LaCorte: 6:36

I don't want to I don't know your party there. It's okay.

Drew Curtis: 6:38

Yeah, nobody. Well, I'm pretty tame. Actually. You you'd be disappointed.

Ken LaCorte: 6:42

But no technical stuff.

Drew Curtis: 6:44

Not not very at the moment.

Ken LaCorte: 6:46

Was that a Times reporter to cut? That was pretty famous one where you have to narrow down one of the curmudgeons. He had tentacle porn up on one of his tabs. They're nice. So that's actually it's sex because that's the first thing that I do when somebody shows me I just go across his his open tablets. Yeah. Alright, so what do we got? So we got some brave females. We got males. You've got interesting.

Drew Curtis: 7:09

Yeah, no, no weird. So it's older. And there's a hole in the middle. Well, like older older like, Yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 7:14

fuck, now that I'm in, I'm in your second. I'm in your second highest tier,

Drew Curtis: 7:18

this 65 plus one. I think like, I bet a lot of foreigners and we do have some that are that old, but not really. And also notice the income breakdown. It's pretty cool. You're there, the dirt poor, the rich. It's one of the two, which probably explains the difference there. But also, there's a lot of knowledge. Yeah, a lot of college. A lot of people are using blockers. The thing with the guess nobody had kids or they aren't kids. But to me the interesting part was this, this 18 to 24 and 25 to 34th thing filling in in the background here, right? Cuz that's like, like, holy crap. Like, that's pretty good. This is, uh, this is a count of people on FARC in the last hour, by the way, right, right. Okay. And basically, it's showing,

Ken LaCorte: 7:52

have you seen that? Have you seen that younger thing change over time?

Drew Curtis: 7:56

You know, it's I This wasn't here the last time I looked. So yeah, that's a new one. It's really good to see it too. Because I'm like, Okay, so we're doing some right. And we're not completely invisible. Apparently. I don't know this everybody kids or not, but Right. Right. Right. So yeah, they go.

Ken LaCorte: 8:13

Hmm, interesting. Interesting. I mean, you kind of like started a Reddit subreddit. Yes. Before Reddit existed.

Drew Curtis: 8:20

Yeah, actually funny story about that. So today, I know you're gonna drop this later. But today are actually late. Yesterday was the announcement that read it's gonna IPO for like $15 billion. And what's really funny was, is that so I met Alexis Ohanian, for the first time in 2008. Right. And I remember it was either 2008 or 2009, where he was describing to me the subreddit thing that they were gonna do was like, how the hell is that gonna work out? And and, I mean, it was pretty clear that that was gonna get a lot of traffic, but my problem was, is like, how are you gonna stop Nazis from showing up? Right now? They're like, Oh, it'll be fine. Okay, I guess that's why we never did it. Because I was like, I don't think that's gonna work out granted, you know, $15 billion paycheck for them. You know?

Ken LaCorte: 9:01

They might do okay. I mean, he was actually okay with I mean, he was a pretty free speech guy. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I'm not I mean, when you read some of his quotes, unless he was unless he was full of crap. I mean, I'm not sure if he would have liked the clean up direction that they're going right now. And I get the money thing, and I get this.

Drew Curtis: 9:17

But actually, he does, but it has to do with. I mean, I can't speak for him. You have to look it up. But he said something new. He resigned from the board over the fact that it wasn't going fast enough.

Ken LaCorte: 9:26

And I think it has part I'm screwing up with him and somebody else I don't

Drew Curtis: 9:29

know. I mean, he was like that for a while but didn't he married Serena Williams and had a kid and kids black and I think that changes your perspective. A little bit. Maybe? My I had my guess I haven't. I've been talking about

Ken LaCorte: 9:40

it. I was married to Serena Williams. I do whatever the fuck she told me to do. Yeah. That's one of the toughest women on the planet.

Drew Curtis: 9:46

I know. Yeah, no kidding. I would never forget. It's like,

Ken LaCorte: 9:49

Alright, I'm making breakfast again. Yeah, sure. Fine.

Drew Curtis: 9:53

Don't kill me.

Ken LaCorte: 9:54

You know, the funny thing about Reddit is is as woke as they are. It's one of the perverted sites around. I mean, you know, you could still get your fill of pro pro rape kink shit going on. Yeah, we're giving each other advice on on how to be a rape victim or how to be a rape. Yeah, I mean, it's got you got some crazy crazy shit on there.

Drew Curtis: 10:16

I think it just goes to show you like man I wish somebody give me 40 million bucks I bet I could do the same thing.

Ken LaCorte: 10:23

They did a lot that was right. I mean, and when they opened it up and that I mean, the subreddit concept was was you know, it was pretty well was pretty brilliant. I mean, it was yeah, they allowed it to go there. And obviously when when they tried to do the well were merging and all into one big thing that had to kill the Republicans because you can't have that in Silicon Valley. That's apparently what's going on. Yeah. You know, that's, that's a rough one one from but yeah, I'm not. I think that that's still a huge vulnerability it since they're not playing the fuck, y'all were free speech. And let's just do this. That if the folks just really decide to go after them, that's a big, big part of and it's a big part of their traffic, I'm convinced because it's just, you know, I would love to put one of them on truth serum and say what percentage of your of your traffic comes from porn? Yeah, cuz I mean, I you know, I use Reddit for like, e bikes, a financial site and porn. Yeah. Get on those. That's

Drew Curtis: 11:19

one stop shop there, I guess. Yeah.

Ken LaCorte: 11:21

Where's the ship? Where's the ship going?

Drew Curtis: 11:23

Uh, you know, it's unclear right now. Um, nobody's really coming up with any good new ideas. It doesn't seem like Like, I've got a couple. But I mean, my problem is, is like they're not. There's way too much work there for me to be able to pull off by myself. So I keep on bugging people to, you know, see if they want to jump off into crazy land and try something completely different. But I'd have to say what I think's going to happen probably pretty soon as well, somebody is eventually going to put together a conservative network, and then that's going to basically start the, what I was referring to as a sharding, I guess, which is not sharding. That's, that's your favorite subreddit. It's totally different. But what I mean by that is like, I mean, all, what usually happens on these platforms is that they usually start, like, fragmenting basically, and splintering off. And that's kind of like what Reddit had happened with subreddits. Like, they were smart enough to realize, you know, if we created alternate platforms, we could let these people you know, set up shop, and then they that way, we don't have to ban them, we just put them over there, till we you know, decided to get rid of Nazis 10 years later, but at any rate, so I don't see anybody really trying to do anything new. And part of the problem has to do with just the way the internet works, where, you know, it's an attention economy. And that's really limiting in the strategies you might be able to employ. Because if you need people to look, you can't make money if they don't, well, you're kind of stuck with with being real shouting, that makes any sense.

Ken LaCorte: 12:43

Yeah, but I mean, look, platforms are still financially the easiest dollar per, you know, cost cost metric going in, right if you if you can build a platform and you have a trillion a trillion people coming in, or even a million people coming into, you know, you can do you can do pretty well on that. I mean, you know, that the tricky part of and I tried to pull this off, and I couldn't I mean, the tricky part of saying, Alright, we're gonna have an open in we're gonna have an open speech platform as you get some relief from the Nazis. Yeah, every damn time. Yeah, I just you know, when you say Nazis, I kind of view the woke left as the Nazis as well and the generic

Drew Curtis: 13:16

I'm actually I actually mean the literal Nazis.

Ken LaCorte: 13:19

Yeah, but they're like, they're like one to 1000 from the people who are throwing bricks at people's heads these days. But you know, but all you have to do is wear black shirts and Anti Fascist and then that solves all all of your thing. You're not a fascist at that point. But um, do you have actual Nazis in? I've never fucking met a Nazi in my life.

Drew Curtis: 13:36

Okay, we've got white supremacy got a couple. Yeah, like we know this friend of a friend guy who teaches a taekwondo thing find out like years later. He's like, he's straight up like, yeah, like Natalie's like straight up bones being white supremacist, but he's like the whole deal. Like, huh, okay, well,

Ken LaCorte: 13:50

yeah, cuz I hear it all the time. But every time I look at the definition, it's like, oh, well, I guess that's me too. I need to be I just meant to, I just meant to do my thing. But I bowing down to and raising my fist at the right time. And that means I'm a white supremacist.

Drew Curtis: 14:04

Yeah, no, they're right. I mean, I've seen it more often in Kentucky than anywhere else really. As far as I know. They're more identifiable out here.

Ken LaCorte: 14:10

I remember when I was a kid that was actually a not a real honest to god Nazi house. And when I say kid I mean I was like six years old and and it was like some weird house with Nazi flags and stuff on it and a big gate in front of it, and it was near the McDonald's so my mom wouldn't take us to McDonald's often, but it was like in our special treat type thing. Yeah. And I remember even like scared of that and then and then it disappeared and I haven't noticed another Nazi off of off of off of off of online I guess. Yeah, since then.

Drew Curtis: 14:40

Yeah, I've seen them around. They did the thing I forget the name for it, but they like it's where you change the sim symbols and the words you use or whatever, like so I speaking Reddit, I consulted for them occasionally. And they showed me one that was really interesting. It was ostensibly a it was ostensibly a subreddit on how to deal with mice in your house. But it turns out when they took a closer look at their actual Talking about Jews.

Ken LaCorte: 15:02

You know, there's that. That's an interesting if you looked at now I'm not talking America, I'm talking about the real rise of Nazism. There was there is a they went strongly after kind of like cleanliness and real rodent things first in other words, that part of the of the of the Nazi regime when they were coming to power in the 30s was was was like like hygiene and cleaning things up and it was weird how they, they kind of then shifted from you got to get rid of those rodents to to human people. And it was kind of, you know, it wasn't like a next day progression, but it was it was a progression that included that which I found very, very, very one of the

Drew Curtis: 15:43

things I've noticed here and I didn't I first caught sight of this because somebody had explained me what it was but I think it was like I don't know what the symbol is, but it's the I think it's for apartheid or something. It's like it's another swastika it's a it's like a three prong triangle of some kind. It doesn't look like a swastika. I think there's a part I'd say anyway. Once in a blue moon I'll see somebody wearing one of those and granted like nobody else knows what that means. But that's pretty clear signal you know?

Ken LaCorte: 16:07

Or it's like something that surfers did I mean, cuz I'm told that every frog is a Nazi symbol This is Nazi symbol. Hey, hi guys. This a Nazi symbol the Hawaiian Nazi symbol I you know, it's like it almost it almost gets ridiculous you know, we were talking about coming into front doors. 4chan is another one that it was it's such a weird and least for my age difficult to, to to understand. Okay. What are you getting up?

Drew Curtis: 16:34

Oh, here I'll show you. I just want to make sure I wasn't talking on my bucket. Sometimes. I think I recognize things wrong. But here we go. Yeah, so yeah, so this is what it looks like. I get that right. That's a little more obvious.

Ken LaCorte: 16:52

That looks like a Nazi symbol. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 16:55

I've seen I've seen how there's the don't as much look like it but

Ken LaCorte: 17:00

I'll give you that one. I'll give you that one. Again, like the guy scratched his nose on the left side. Yeah, I think I think are gonna are gonna wait until I see you know, a bunch of really be you know, it's interesting to see how those come into favors. And I'm not talking about that but like, like, you know, like the Pepe thing was interesting, you know, started off as nothing, then went to a joke then kind of got picked up by I remember the Hillary Clinton campaign some others because you know, because on 4chan You had some Nazi talk onto that and then and then it kind of added on the way it evolved was was was more humorous than upsetting on that part. But now it's it's all over the place. So But back to back to the old Look, you've got you've got probably 40% of America conservatives are kind of cleaved off in the sense that they really feel like their platforms hate them. There's a couple out there that are that are that are trying to make some space out there you know, and and will be blasted as as all that stuff but but conservative kind of don't care about that anymore. I think because they're because they've realized that they've been called that falsely so often. So but I'm starting to see some real economic moves on that side now. You know, Trump pulling in a billion in with when his when he merged with that SPAC you know, Trump will we'll see what they can do on anything because you know, they've tried a lot of things in the past they're, they're not how do I say we've not seen them them actually get things done in a business world like that, but they're gonna have three quarters of a billion dollars to play with they might do some stuff

Drew Curtis: 18:32

by a lot of 40 on stake and I think is really the main point there.

Ken LaCorte: 18:35

Yeah, but but you gotta you got to spend at least 1/3 of it buying buy in Silicon Valley type of guys or stuff like that. I mean, you know, even if it if it all falls out, Rumble is another interesting one rumbles actually, I think being smarter they also want to say just merge with us back. Okay, and have have have like a whole lot of cash between them. I think putting a put a valuation on that they didn't get as much cash and have like 2.1 billion for for rumble. And it's kind of kind of on the road. Do you see more of that? Do you see it coming politically because because I don't see a whole lot of like you said, I don't see a whole lot of whole new fresh ideas. It's like, the big fresh idea now is Oh, make make video. Vertical. Yeah, okay.

Drew Curtis: 19:18

All right, fine. Exactly. No, I don't see a whole lot there either. And the other problem is like, all of these new guys are like super susceptible to the same old mistakes. I mean, it's gonna go down the same road which is basically it's like they're gonna start out being free speech and anything goes and they're gonna be like, Oh, well, except for not this stuff. And then eventually I mean, this is how you get you know, you go from something awful to 4chan hn to 64 Chanda right ever, right is that there's always that and then a lot of times when the when the the, especially if you accidentally create a social network that is actually made of Nazis and you tell them to go away and everybody abandons you are a better example. That's not political like when I think it was when Tumblr banned porn, and their traffic dropped 99% You made that surprise anybody? I mean, you know So

Ken LaCorte: 20:00

yeah, I looked at I looked at buying Tumblr. Yeah, we part of that deal. There

Drew Curtis: 20:05

was I don't remember, maybe there was.

Ken LaCorte: 20:08

Yeah. It was someone I vaguely remember. And then it got bought up by it got bought up by somebody. But but there was a way that for, you know, not a whole lot of money. I mean,

Drew Curtis: 20:21

low 10s of millions or Yeah, once all the traffic disappeared, it was Yeah. And

Ken LaCorte: 20:26

then it was like, What do you know, what do we do with that? What do we do with that? But do people still go to it? Is that is it?

Drew Curtis: 20:31

Maybe I don't know. And I remarkably like not up on this stuff. Like, usually, I don't have a lot of time to mess on other platforms. So like, I'm generally kind of oblivious as to what they're doing. Right? Let's it ends up in the news. And I read about it. And then it's like, Oh, okay.

Ken LaCorte: 20:45

But look at Reddit had the one of the best models because you know, it, you could have at least if you could have just pulled it off and stood up to your possibly investors, and certainly your staff have say, Yeah, we're gonna have some bad stuff. But we've siloed it off. You don't have to go there. In other words, just don't have an overall front page that pulls from the most popular because they always tried to, like, take the cream of the crop and mix it into their into their front page, which, right, which I don't even know, I don't go to that part of it anymore. So I don't even know what that looks like. But anyhow. Okay, so before we started recording, we were talking total total total non sequitur out here about kids and young people driving. Yes. So so when I was a kid, I was counting down the days until I could be I could I could drive my car. And it was a big deal grew up in a la suburb, you know, I mean, the difference between like bicycling somewhere and being able to drive was was night and day. And now I'm seeing so many young people are being like, yeah, it's not a big deal, or this or that. Had some in laws that were like 18 before they started driving. And you said your kids are doing the same? And you gotta you have a theory on that. What is that? Yeah, I

Drew Curtis: 21:54

got a theory on it, which is basically they've been on screens, their entire legend, the car sim been watching us drive. So they don't know the first damn thing about it. Like, when I started driving, I kind of knew it. Like I knew how to start the car, I knew how to turn the wheel. I don't know how to do that. But I also knew what all the traffic laws were because I've been paying attention. My kids are head down in the back all the time. And I think basically, for them, it's a massively steep learning curve that they don't want to deal with.

Ken LaCorte: 22:19

All right? Well, or it's or as a corollary or addition to that, that you used to have to go somewhere to hang out with your friends or do something. Right. That's who needs it, you know, he only had one, you know, people don't remember this, or half of the world isn't existed this he had one phone coming into your, into your house. So if you got on a phone and was talking to talking to somebody for 30 minutes, nobody else could get a phone call, and they were screaming at you and whatnot. And now, I mean, look, the fact that we're doing this, and it's almost as good as if you were here. Yeah, this is pretty cool. So I don't know, I wonder if that's, that's going into it as well. Yeah, there's

Drew Curtis: 22:53

no need to do it either. Because you're right. I mean, if you could, you know, like, my kids are constantly like on screens at home. And I mean, like wasting time necessarily there. Meanwhile, it's what you know, like, like the quote, adults would say, is wasting time, but it's the same thing that I was doing when I was a kid, just you know, easier, because I don't have to go anywhere. And then they also have the other option, then there's like, worst case, there's Uber, although they don't use it. But like, as a college student, if you couldn't drive, you could get around, I mean, just get a bike, and you can probably get 90% of the places. And if you ever have to go anywhere else, get Uber have somebody pick you up. So you couldn't

Ken LaCorte: 23:24

go on a date, you couldn't go on a date on a bicycle, right? It's like, but ya know, it's like, you can have as much, you know, every time a new technology comes along, the old people just just freak out. Yeah, every single time, you know, you can go and you can find about how radios and cars are going to increase, you know, deaths and the worst thing either or, or how trains when they would go fast enough would suck the oxygen out and you're all gonna

Drew Curtis: 23:47

die. There's a good editorial from the late 19th century, saying that children are reading too much. That's gonna cause them to get dumber or something. Yeah, basically, anything that the new generation likes is like the old generations like, yeah, what is this crap?

Ken LaCorte: 24:01

Yeah. Because like, I remember when I first saw, it's like, you know, your kids locked in this room the whole time. And he's and he's, it's like, you know, get out and meet people. And they're like, Dad, I'm doing here. I'm meeting people talking to Fred. And if you get out of the room, I could still do it. Doing it right now. Yeah. Okay. Okay. You know, and that affects me too. It's like, you know, I find that I'm traveling less with COVID. And I don't miss it as much.

Drew Curtis: 24:23

Yeah, I'm right there with you. I haven't flown in a plane since February. Last time I was out. And I think it was in Silicon Valley. Definitely New York, because I think I came back with COVID. But like everybody, but yeah, no, I in fact, I'm like, and I think part of like, I've got a really weird sort of perspective. It has to do with being born like kind of like, the exact right freakin time like at the beginning, like I was on the internet before the web existed, right? And not only that, but right around the same time. Cyberpunk was a popular science fiction genre. And I gotta tell you, that's basically like Blade Runner, or the first one was Neuromancer, the first book about it, but it was just basically about a future where everybody's really poor because there weren't many wage jobs and corporations run everything and technologies really. And I gotta tell you, man, it's like other than like, I mean, Blade Runner pretty much panned out, except that the sun comes up occasionally. Like, otherwise it's kind of we kind of got it. So none of this has really been a surprise, where the technology has been going has been a surprise, or for that matter, doing what I'm doing, where social media has gone in the last like five years, not a surprise, because I was like, Yeah, at some point, this isn't gonna hit a critical mass and somebody's gonna beat the hell out of it. And more or less what exactly happened. So yeah, it's, it's just been weird that like, I'm almost 50. And so far, I'm like, Well, it's kind of turning out to I figured it would so far. It's really weird.

Ken LaCorte: 25:36

Yeah, it still begs, though, like, like, what kind of future moves if you were putting money into technology somewhere in America right now? What do you think you'd be looking at? I mean, I mean, you know, this part of social tech or, or just give it to Elon Musk and ask for ask for? Yeah,

Drew Curtis: 25:50

I mean, I don't know. I've been working on a couple of projects that I can speak to a little bit, one of them is like, so I just for fun over the summer, I decided to like, you know, like, so I take a real dim view of cryptocurrency and blockchain stuff, because it's incredibly stupid. But then I was like, well, I could say that and not know anything about it. Or I could just get in there and build one. So I built one from scratch. Using node.js, and a bunch of other stuff basically follow the tutorial online because it's not right. Right. And it's even dumber than I thought, like, it's really stupid. And

Ken LaCorte: 26:22

stupid. You mean the blockchain in maths or do you? Are you talking currencies? The blockchain

Drew Curtis: 26:27

is the only interesting part of it. And that was kind of a complete accident. It was it was it was an afterthought, really. But it is fascinating that you can have confirmation of transactions and not have to have a central clearing house. Like that's pretty neat. But I say literally nobody likes I built one of these things, right? So I'm like, okay, it runs. It's not that great. It's not persistent. So like it when it when the server spin down, it goes away, I can easily change that. But I started asking some other people I was like, Okay, so like, if I was gonna actually do this and make this a cryptocurrency, and I'd started asking some very simple questions to people who supposedly knew the answers, and they couldn't answer. And these were not hard questions. Like, I'll give you an example. One of them was, um, so nobody does this. But why wouldn't you throw somebody who, who creates a transaction on the blockchain? Why don't you throw them into the mining pool for that one block, right? And everybody's like, well, then they tried to say all that, they they match it up with something else that called front running, which happens in algorithmic trading of stocks, where sure happens when you get in front of the trade basement, I'm like, that's what I'm talking. I'm like, they get thrown in the pool. And your block time is like three seconds. So I haven't you just happen to sit there. And you know, I think could also leave. But the upshot is, is that you get to shut the mind the block, maybe you do, what does nobody do that? And I'm not saying it's a better idea, right? But I just want to know, Why does nobody do that? And nobody can answer this damn question. There is an answer. Yes. But I don't know. Anybody know, there's got to be because nobody does it. There's 1000s of these and not a single one of them decided to go the stretch. And I get it. And then there's more stuff like that, where I'm just like, what? The more I look at it when people say, Hey, have you looked at this crypto, they're doing some really cool stuff. And then I take a look at it. It's all bullshit, right? Like, aren't you like three

Ken LaCorte: 28:09

years behind on that? Didn't you get in and get the dumb money and, and well, no, coin calm, if you're trying to actually turn it into something, or I'm doing just you're just goof it at this point?

Drew Curtis: 28:18

Well, I'm doing the same thing I did with like, you know, FARC, back when Reddit said, you know, we're gonna do the sub Reddits which was kind of like, can I find a safer a better way to do this? Right. And with the blockchain thing, in particular, I think a lot of design decisions out there that are just to make people buy and hold the stuff obviously, right? Because that's pretty much an entire just a huge scam. But there is something there. I just I what I see happening, when I take a look around at what people are throwing their efforts behind in this kind of makes sense. There's almost every crypto out there is spending 99% of its resources trying to make people buy their crypto and believe right works. Right. Which kind of makes sense. Because without that you don't have a company.

Ken LaCorte: 28:53

Yeah, yeah. But man, it doesn't cost much more to make more on it, you know, once you've got it, right. And I think also

Drew Curtis: 28:59

like once you get like money that was kind of the point the first place for these guys, they don't really care if it works well or does something or whatever. Right? So I keep thinking about like something along the lines of that, like if I saw somebody working on something, I was like, Oh, so that's not totally useless. Or like give you like a short version. It's like one of the avenues I was exploring was is that like you know, instead of like just playing dollar bill poker you could have your mining algorithm doing something useful like curing cancer which I think would be kind of cool because you can cure cancer and there's a reason to adopt it right? That kind of stuff

Ken LaCorte: 29:32

Why not so I'm sorry just mining have to do something else as it mines what you mean

Drew Curtis: 29:36

no but it could like right now does nothing like straight up crypto mining like on Bitcoin is like dollar bill poker that's literally like, although it takes 10 minutes, you're producing all these dollar bill combinations. And at the end of it, the guy with the best hand wins. That's literally what's going on behind the scenes. Right? That's what mining is. Right? So they're just generating numbers. It doesn't doing anything, right wasting a lot of power, but you could do something

Ken LaCorte: 29:56

but you can't do both. Can you Okay, yeah, totally. And it doesn't take resources back from one another.

Drew Curtis: 30:03

No, I'm still using the same resources. But instead of doing nothing is doing something.

Ken LaCorte: 30:07

That's actually a pretty Yeah. And I hate to say it, even if it didn't end up doing anything, right? If somebody could be like, hey, this, this, this thing is solving other real world problems like cancer or SQL, or something like that.

Drew Curtis: 30:23

Yeah. Yeah. So like something like that would be really interesting. But like I said, I don't see anybody doing anything like that. So keep your eyes open. You know, you

Ken LaCorte: 30:31

talked about front running. That's one of the biggest scams that nobody's gone to jail with yet. It's like, Yeah, everybody doesn't. It's like, you know, everybody's now on Robin Hood, and all these trading forums, and it's their business model. And front running is illegal. But they sell that it's like, have you guys not figured out how do you think you're getting trades? Yeah, that money round at $0.00. They're making millions and millions somehow, and they're taking it from you a couple pennies at a time when you come in? They jump in front of you? And they Yeah, they sell it to it. They sell it to another hedge fund? Yeah, they're selling that live data to someone else. So which is weird, because it is illegal? And everybody's every one of these companies doing?

Drew Curtis: 31:13

Yeah, I know.

Ken LaCorte: 31:15

Maybe? It is. Is there some little little thing on page 452? Of the of the code going in? Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 31:21

I mean, it's out there. But yeah, I mean, well, like they say, it's like, if you're paying nothing for something, then you're the product, you're

Ken LaCorte: 31:25

the product and and you don't hear anybody talking about that? Because it's, it's a little it's a little tricky to understand, not not a lot trickier to understand. But it's a it's it's pretty wild.

Drew Curtis: 31:35

So people it's like they look at the aggregate trading data, and then they sell that to hedge funds that can move faster. That's that's the business model.

Ken LaCorte: 31:41

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and I've got a friend who's a trader, and he can see it moving sometimes. Yeah, he could see it's like, he's like, he pops in an order here. And he can see that, oh, another buy came in here. And so I'm not quite smart enough to figure all that crap out. But it's kind of like it's it's a huge scam. I'm somewhat convinced that crypto will be the spark that explodes the next pull down to the economy. Yeah,

Drew Curtis: 32:03

almost definitely. At the rate this is going like, right now. It's like we're getting I don't know how big it would have to be to be able to pull that off. But I think we're gonna hit that line at some point. And then it's going to be very problematic.

Ken LaCorte: 32:13

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, it's crazy to try to figure out what to do with your money. Because it's like, you know, so much of it is, you know, so many so many people were hopeful that when Trump came in the economy was gonna was gonna pull. I knew guys who like sold their house and pulled money out of stock. I know one guy. I swear to God, he literally sold everything he had, he bought physical silver, now buried it in multiple parts. And he's ready for the Boogaloo to come down 100%, and he's living on a beach in a in a third world country right now. All right. But it's like, it's like, you know, those guys are always eventually. Right.

Drew Curtis: 32:48

Right? Because if you predict the disaster, at some point, you're gonna miss. Yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 32:51

I mean, if you're the guy who just walked up and said, the shuttle is gonna blow up, if we launch it, you know, you're eventually going to be right now the guy actually who predicted that one time, knew exactly what was going to call the O rings are brittle. It's going to let things in. And that's not good. Yeah, but, but it's like so you know, what do you do in a market that's still popping up? 15 20% 20% a year? Do you put your cash in that and realize that it's like, what are you doing? Somebody said, Should I invest in the stock market?

Drew Curtis: 33:18

Cuz Russell, Russell 2000, and walk away. I mean, that's basically it. But

Ken LaCorte: 33:23

it's like, you also know, you know, how to relative who came into some serious cash. It's like, you also know, at some point, in our in the, you know, before some of the food in my freezer is spoiled, it's going to have a 40% crash or 30%. Crash, we've lived through it a couple times. And yeah, you know, I don't want to be that guy. So I'm like, Okay, well, here's what I do, but realize it's gonna drop big. And just write it out. Don't freak out. And don't call me because I, you know, I'm telling you now that this is, yeah,

Drew Curtis: 33:50

just keep your eyes off. And basically, that's what I do. Because it's like, I mean, there's all kinds of obvious buys at the time. Like, give me an example. Like, you know, if you were like buying oil back in April of 2020. And not only that, but it was like, It's also fairly obvious that like, whatever the price of oil is, right now, it's gonna be different. And if it's rock bottom, odds are it's gonna be higher than that at some point. Like, that's not a real hard call to make yet people are selling into that.

Ken LaCorte: 34:12

The tricky part yeah, but there was a point when oil was at a negative, a negative value. I

Drew Curtis: 34:17

actually so funny, funny story about that day. So I have a friend of mine who used to be a commodities trader in Chicago. And he's a radio DJ now. And so I called him because I figured he knows something about it. And I'm watching the spot price of oil. Like it was, it was on the closing date, it was going down like$5 $4 $3 $1.25, right? I was like, dude, uh, should we try to buy this? And I was like, How do I buy this? And he's like, I don't know. And then went negative. Yeah, and I was like, Whoa, what happened there and he's like I said, I've never seen anything like that before and it ended the day at negative$38. Wow. Which would have was crazy because like they're gonna pay you money, but the thing was, is I was gonna short oil and they don't the same thing. thing happens when it goes farther negative, I would have lost like, so much money lost. Oh my god,

Ken LaCorte: 35:05

a buddy of mine actually has some oil wells, like a couple oil wells on a piece of land in California that was handed down through generations or whatnot. And what what he explained to me and I didn't understand, I still don't understand the why 100% is to shut that down and restart. It is hugely expensive and difficult. So it's like, you've got this thing that's going and so that it but it could and I don't know exactly why that is, you probably need special, but just you can't just hire people. Yeah, it's not. So then he was like, I don't have anywhere to put my oil because people stopped driving, the refiners are like Sorry, guys, we're full. All of the everywhere where you could store oil was filled up with oil. And he's, and he's pumping oil. And it's like, that's why it went down. Because at a certain point, it's like, well, what am I gonna do with your oil, we got no place to put it.

Drew Curtis: 35:53

It's not super stable, either. There was an old I think it was a Gawker article about a guy who actually went out and tried to buy a barrel of oil on the internet. He couldn't because the EPA regs against it. Like that stuff's incredibly flammable, obviously, because it's oil. It also leaks toxic gas just sitting there. So yeah, even storing this stuff is like a hell of a thing. You can't just leave it out in the backyard, you got to do something with it. You

Ken LaCorte: 36:13

know, we always bitch about, it's easy to beg big oil companies, and we hate them. But you know, they get a product. And they bring it a long way. Usually pretty clean. I mean, you know, Val DS notwithstanding, and some, some some things, I mean, to do that. But I mean, it's like, they're transporting billions of gallons of flammable shit all over the world. And getting it to me where I can now buy a refined version of it for six months ago, I could get it for 250. And now it's 450. But that's still a pretty small number when you think like, how this stuff got to me and that nobody's nobody's. They don't explode all that often.

Drew Curtis: 36:52

Exactly. Yeah. When they do, though, who struggle?

Ken LaCorte: 36:56

Yeah, it's it's, it's, it's not good. Yeah, I don't think that's a fun. I don't know, that's not a fun business, everybody. And then everybody's praying for you to go out of business. So that so that solar can can go if you have solar at your house?

Drew Curtis: 37:08

No, we don't have enough of a solar like, score, I think it is or something. Right. And there's also like, I live in Kentucky where, you know, nobody else is using coal, but we are. That stuff's cheap. So not saying I'm in favor of coal, but until they change it, I'm gonna keep paying these rock bottom rates, does it?

Ken LaCorte: 37:26

Does it? How's how's the air quality? Were? Great. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. And they burn it there and they burn it in a more safe way than they used to? Or what's Why is why is that great? Oh,

Drew Curtis: 37:37

well, I mean, it's not great in the sense of like, you know, we don't need any more, you know, co2 on the atmosphere. But that said, it's like,

Ken LaCorte: 37:42

I'm talking about, you know, I'm talking about what you're breathing in on a physical, you know, like, health thing there.

Drew Curtis: 37:48

There's not that much of a population. They're not in cities. You know, there's not doing that much of it. So it's no big deal. I'm not saying it's great. I'd rather there be none. But the day until that happens, like, so. Like, like, one thing that might work would be wind power, because apparently, you know, that's gonna keep happening. We're going to get tornadoes every week from now till the end of time can wait for that to happen, but that'd be the way to go. That was bad.

Ken LaCorte: 38:09

Now, is that the main? Is that the main thing that you're worried about? In Kentucky and in the center? I mean, you guys get some earthquakes? Right. I mean, natural, natural occurrence. Yeah. You get some earthquakes. Yeah. But it's mainly tornadoes.

Drew Curtis: 38:24

Well, I mean, as far as natural disasters go, yeah. But like, I don't know, like, they're not. This is gonna sound bad, especially in a week when 200 people died from it. But honestly, like, it's not that big a deal until that starts happening every week because like, I mean, tornadoes or hurricanes. And I think a lot of people confuse the two, right? Like, you know, hurricanes again, will cut destructive paths hundreds of miles wide. But it's like even in the cities that got massively destroyed. There's still a path through them. Right. Like, you know, I'm

Ken LaCorte: 38:50

not saying you're talking hurricanes or tornadoes, tornadoes, tornadoes,

Drew Curtis: 38:54

tornadoes. Yeah, so the thing is, is like everybody's scared, because you don't want to get hit by one the end of the day. Like you can also run one in the car if you had, I mean, not saying it's great, but

Ken LaCorte: 39:02

100 Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I got to watch out because

Drew Curtis: 39:06

didn't make it just Yes. That is like maybe look at like the naturally occurring things that kill you in Kentucky. I don't think tornadoes crack the top 100 Maybe but I'm not sure

Ken LaCorte: 39:14

it's still meth right?

Drew Curtis: 39:16

Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, it totally is.

Ken LaCorte: 39:19

You know, it's actually worldwide I mean, I mean it's it's an interesting thing that that mankind kind of tamed nature. I don't know when that was but I mean, you know, I mean, you know, nature could be a bitch right? I mean, nature back Yeah, you know, flat and it still does and, you know, parts of the world still haven't haven't gotten used to it as you know, Sri Lanka, it seems to rain and then you have 40,000 people die in in a flood where we don't have those kinds of natural disasters like we used to and you know, certainly most of the first world and in a lot of in a lot of the developing companies.

Drew Curtis: 39:51

Yeah, well, actually, to your point, like the amount of like, I think the amount of homes that got destroyed by that turn, it was like something in the 1000s Like, I want to say like five to 10,000 Right, but people are happy I'm shocked that like if there's think there's less than 100 people confirmed dead and then there's another 100 missing. Right. But I was predicted like, I mean, looking at the damage. I was like, Holy crap. How do people survive this? 1000s of homes? I didn't notice that. Yeah, yeah, no, it's huge. It was, well, it was two tornadoes that were on the ground for almost 300 miles, right. And then for some reason, just went through multiple cities, like it was nuts. That was a near miss. The two worst ones stopped on the north and the south side of my county, which is only 15 months across. So it's pretty. You know,

Ken LaCorte: 40:29

it's tough to figure that shit out when you're watching the news, right? Yeah. So I worked for Fox for almost 20 years. And I remember one time a Hurricane Ivan. So what you do is you set up crews, let's say it's going to hit Florida. They like to hit Florida. So yes, it shows that it's coming in Central Florida, whatever city so you station, a crew, their crew here a crew there because they always have some you know, so you try to spread your resources out. Because you want good pictures you want to be you know, you want to, you know, show what's going on there. And we were in Fort Lauderdale with the crew I was with and it basically missed us. It was a hard rain. Well, what do you do you still you know, you got there. So it's like, Alright, fine. You know, we didn't say find the worst thing we said is we said find the best pictures, right? And that's what you do. That's what your job that yeah, that's what your job is. So we found what it was a rain, it was a rain, right? And again, it hit other people a little harder. And so we found one house with a tree had fallen over and whatnot, you put the you put the guy in front of that house and he's he's doing his report and and you know, and then people call up their friends in Fort Lauderdale saying, oh my god, are you okay? That's why that happens. And they're like, what is that? Where's Brady? Where's like the so and that's usually what the news does is make something small, right look a lot worse.

Drew Curtis: 41:42

It's hard to tell because the other problem is everybody like I said, I think people it's the damage looks the same as hurricanes, right? And like 2004 in the summer that was that year Florida got hit by four hurricanes, like in a row pretty much and I ended up driving across like just going south of Orlando across one of those devastation zones right because I was trying to get to Key West and I would just for miles and and that's it you know diminish what happened with the tornadoes. But man, like hurricanes are so much worse. I mean, hundreds of miles across 1000s of people affected

Ken LaCorte: 42:12

the hardest, the hardest. I had crews kind of mentally deal with it. I mean, war is hard, because because you're seeing people die, you're seeing body parts you're seeing, but it was the the Indonesian tsunami, the Indonesian tsunami. And they were like because because you know, it mangles people up, it's just it's an ugly way to go. It's just and the worst part of it was, you couldn't get out of it. I mean, going going and covering it later, you would look around in 360 degrees. And as far as you could see, as far as you could get in your car, it was like, the whole thing was death and destruction and that kind of that that was more difficult for some of my guys who went out there. You know, then then the war

Drew Curtis: 42:54

what Yeah, I can't imagine. Yeah, I know. Because I think that they kill like a quarter of a million people or something like that on like multiple countries. I mean, it was.

Ken LaCorte: 43:01

It was it was it was amazingly, yeah, it was amazing. But back to my earlier point, things like that are getting less and less Oh, over time. I mean, maybe it'll all warm up. It'll kill us all again. Yeah. But humankind has been doing pretty well at all all of this stuff. I mean, when you consider what it was like in the 1400s, where, yeah, where the world the nature was probably one of your top forms of death, whether it's getting eaten by something, or burned up in a fire that you can't imagine a forest fire, you know, that are just a matter of

Drew Curtis: 43:31

just stepping on arresting hail. I mean, you're dead. The end? Yeah, my favorite stat I was I was working on a book on Florida for a little while, because Florida is full of like weird stories, and one of the ones ever forgot was and I think this may be why. I mean, one of the reasons why deaths are going down is because people have gotten a little bit smarter since then. But like there were, I think it was like 5000 people killed in Miami in 1930 by a massive hurricane that hit right. And I was reading the sort of the time when it happened was is like about only about 25 years earlier, the population of Miami was like 3000 people. So this city had gotten really big, and filled up with people who weren't native. And what happened was is that the hurricane hit, and most people survived it. But then the eye goes over and everybody went outside. And all the locals are going no get back in the house. They're like, What are you talking about? That's the I or the hurricane like, what's it I have a hurricane? And they got hit by the back end?

Ken LaCorte: 44:23

Because you know, the same thing happened with that tsunami. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure thing happens before it comes because the water goes out. Yeah, so if you're ever like it, and if you're ever out and on an ocean and it all disappears, appears turn out a run. Yeah, start running that second, not like, Shit, this is the most interesting thing I've seen. I'm gonna look at it. Yeah, that was probably the only good lesson on that thing. But you know, think about it back in the day. It's like my app. Now my you know, the one that comes in apple. It's like, it's going to stop raining in 18 minutes, and it's going to start again and 30 You know, imagine you know before we had airplanes and radar and satellites to say there's gonna be a hurricane coming in. And then it's like okay hurricanes coming in well, let's get in our car jump on the on the on the expressway and get ya know, I mean, man, you must have been just you had to be a tougher person back there.

Drew Curtis: 45:17

Yeah. Well, I mean, like, like, like, if you had kids, like, only, like, I think like the mortality rate before age five was like, 25% or something. I mean, which is why you had eight of them. And yeah, exactly. Yeah. Cuz

Ken LaCorte: 45:29

now you have, you have multiple case one of them turns out to be a dumb fuck. Yeah, exactly. You got ahead. I tell my kids that it's like, you realize why I had three kids, right? Cuz cuz, you know, I could place my beat. Somebody's got to raise me when I'm older. Take care of me and do all that. And

Drew Curtis: 45:45

he taught me one. You told him it's when you think is the dumb fuck yeah. Well, what you do is gonna hold that back.

Ken LaCorte: 45:51

He won't see the data, or you pull the all. But you know, you're my favorite one. Yeah, you tell that teach three of them. And that?

Drew Curtis: 45:57

Yeah, that. Yeah. And you play that? Exactly.

Ken LaCorte: 46:00

I'm glad my children won't watch this, because it'll be boring to them.

Drew Curtis: 46:04

Just talking about boring stuff in the front. And they'll never catch this, like raising kids. I do actually. Um, I like it a lot. Or it also helps that I'm Heather's got a graduate background in counseling psychology, and concentrating a lot on kid stuff. And it's amazing. That stuff works. If you know what you do it really? Oh, yeah. It's kind of wild. I have to give her all the credit though. Because like, it wasn't my instinct. But when you know, somebody who knows the rules, and you play along, it works. Yeah. But she did say she kind of said like the the real challenge of parenting is making sure your children don't become super villains. That's not really what you're working on. Hmm. And a lot of them do. And yeah, right. Yeah. When you feel like an asshole, because you're like man should have done to me

Ken LaCorte: 46:45

the toughest part. Now, there's a lot of tough parts about it. But the toughest part is figuring out how and how much to let go and let them go and make their own mistakes and go and screw up. Right. So I've never had any trouble with that. But I mean, we're in a smothering in a smothering economy, where when your kid goes out and rides the bike, they're gonna crash and do certain things. And you know, there was a time where you were like, You're too young to ride a bicycle. And then there was a time we were like, okay, he's gonna get hurt. But yep, it's a bicycle. And they gotta you got to go there, you know, all the way up through through the end of the under their life. You know, I mean, you start off with, you know, they're wiggling on a table. And if you don't feed them every hour, they're gonna die up till All right, go to college, and try to visit me every once in a while. Yeah, exactly.

Drew Curtis: 47:26

Yeah, I did. I was a big strong proponent of and honestly, this isn't for everybody. It's just, I've got a real, whatever the opposite of risk averse is like, I'm not risk seeking risk tolerant beyond like, belief. Yeah. And I'm a big proponent of the, you know, okay, here's what's gonna happen. It's gonna suck, but I'm not gonna stop you go right ahead. See how that goes to the point where, um, the minute I do that my kids automatically stop now, because they're like, I don't see how this plays out. But they're like, so gun shy at this point of doing the wrong thing. I don't I don't give him guilt. I'm like, Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 48:01

I mean, I always gave mine I would always err on the side if there was errors, and it really wasn't of just letting them do their thing and give them some guidance on things. It's like, yeah, because what I saw growing up was the kids who turned out to be the biggest assholes were the ones whose parents dad was like, the ones whose like, parent was like making a calling up to witness. We know, we didn't have cell phones back there, but was like really making sure they didn't drink in high school, or go to that party. And you have to be early in this. They were the ones that when they went to college, you know, became alcoholics and and, and, you know, STD ridden because, like, they were ripping off their clothes and running around there. It was like, so you know, you didn't want to be the one saying, you know, use drugs or whatnot. But but you didn't want to be the one clamping it down too much. I mean, even the anti drug thing back in the day, it's like, I think it's good for the government to probably tell kids not to not to use things that hook so many of them screw so many of them. But they did it by lying to everybody. Yeah, it was like, you know, if you smoke that reefer, you're gonna be doing crack, because it's a drug and this and that and worship Satan like him. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, and then you do it. And then you're like, Well, that was kind of fun. I mean, you know, I didn't do much that day. I just ate some Cheetos. But I enjoyed it. And so it's like, so I, you know, even on stuff like that. I tried to tell my kids, it's like, okay, here are the real consequences that I can know of this drug or that, you know, and if it's certain ones, you know, you might get arrested if they pull it in your car, and depending on what state you're in, yeah, no, yeah. And what drug it is, and that might affect your college, you know, college thing if that's what you're pushing for, although I'm less than less college college centric these days than ever was and a couple of my kids are split on that which, which was, Did you push hard, hard for college for your kids? No, not

Drew Curtis: 49:47

really well, so like my oldest just turned 18 And he's finishing up his senior year and he wants to be a coder. And you kind of don't need not only do you kind of not need college for that that's probably not the best place to go either. Yeah, He also wants to get into like video game design. And so like, you know, I've been encouraging him to check out, like internships and stuff, but he's gonna take a year off and see where it goes, but I'm not too worried about it. And if he decides he wants to go, that's fine, too. You know, it's like, okay, whatever you want to do, man, you know, what I strongly recommend against as I was, like, you know, don't go to like Harvard, Yale, because that's expensive. Like for undergrad, like when I was in undergrad, like I was getting my MBA at Columbia and Cal Berkeley, man, I don't know what those other undergrads are doing there. I mean, they were spending way more money than I did for exactly the same damn thing. Like, I can't figure it out.

Ken LaCorte: 50:30

Well, I would say go to Harvard or Yale because just that that phrase on your on your on your resume will carry you through rather than learn anymore, but don't go to that. Outside of those like eight schools. Those rest of those$60,000 years. Yes. Unless you're getting something very particular. And yeah, so I had a kid who was a coder, and then a kid who's who's going to went into film. And it's like, both of those things. It was like, yeah, what college does for you, but it was, it was tough for me because my, my parents were my dad was his, his dad was an immigrant. And my dad never made it through like eighth grade. And my mom graduated high school. And so for them, success for their child met going to college. Right, that was like the next step up in the in the American dream. And, and so, you know, there was a huge amount of, I won't say pressure, but it was so much I didn't even realize it, it was just like, like air, it was like, you're going to college, are we gonna die? But I, you know, I was like, Yeah, great, you know, and, you know, they were able to afford that for me and all that. So to then, like, kind of go from that world to have kids say, Yeah, I can learn this shit on YouTube. Yeah, it's a little bit of a jolt, but it's totally the right totally the right thing. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 51:45

Well, that also, like how much more expensive it is now, I mean, how I spent, like, my college tuition was 15 grand a year, at a time when I could have gone to a state school for free. And if I'd paid it would have been two grand a year, right. And so like 15 was a hardship then and now it's like my, that same school I went to, which is Luther College, which they're fine, but now they want $45,000 a year. And

Ken LaCorte: 52:05

now and even when you put even when you put like in constant dollars, education is jammed through the roof. And again, especially then when you're like, and you can get almost all of it for free on a you know, you can go to Harvard classes for free. And they even have the class on a lot of these classes. They have the class and they have where the you know, with the with the with the ra, ra ra or TA, whatever the kid student teaches the TA RAS for the where you live the TA Yeah, you know, you can even get those. I mean, you can get a lot of stuff there. You know, you know, one of those things that I've seen that I thought would take over more. What's the Khan Academy? Oh, yeah,

Drew Curtis: 52:42

yeah. So there's different versions of that floating around? I've saw that this year with my kids in school for during the pandemic? Uh, huh. Oh, look, Google Classroom picked up a ton of that stuff, right? They don't teach it exactly the same way. But it does. Like there's a lot more insight to what's going on, like the teachers are grading directly into it, they can do classes on it, they can tell immediately, like, who hasn't turned in stuff and why. So they've kind of implemented some of those features in there. But I think then they're running up against, you know, like, the education at the state level has got a lot of regulations they got in here, too. And it's not their fault. You know, like they're stuck with it cuz somebody

Ken LaCorte: 53:15

passed the damn law. Well, but they probably passed the law. I mean, in California for a number of years, the two biggest when I ran for office, 20 years, 30 years. A lot of years ago, the two biggest special interest groups were the teachers association and the Nurses Association. I mean, they poured millions and millions into it. So they wrote the fucking laws. Huge. Yeah,

Drew Curtis: 53:35

I don't know about here. But I don't seem like yeah, I don't know. Yeah. But anyway, but so some of that stuff got implemented. And I think the ability to pull out people that are struggling is there, which I thought was kind of the big innovation with that thing.

Ken LaCorte: 53:46

Yeah, that it wouldn't let you progress until you knew what you were doing, especially for things like math, you have to build on on it. You just you progressed at your own at your own speed. And it would allow the kids who understood to me when I when I when I when I heard that guy con is yes. Comic Con Comic Con. Right. When I heard him give out and when I saw, you know, the TED talk, I was like, this should revolutionize education. Yeah. And it's gotten us a lot slower than I expected and hoped.

Drew Curtis: 54:14

Yeah, well, there's all the adoption plus the other problem is is like, you know, not all school districts have enough money to pull some like that off. Like, we're kind of lucky. The county I live in got a low population, high land value, because it's worse farms, right. But the town is poor, which is a really weird dichotomy, but they have plenty of money for schools. So they can actually pull stuff off like that, in a way they like, is

Ken LaCorte: 54:34

it even? Is it more expensive? I mean, I mean, it's software. It's a piece of software. I mean, what's that? And I think I think he's given it away for free too.

Drew Curtis: 54:42

Yeah, I think I think Google Classroom is doing the same thing that like I mean, that's where Apple computers came from, remember they were giving them to schools and stuff right, right. Right. I don't know what the cost is. But all I know is our District uses it and it seems to work pretty well. So I'm gonna work to teachers took

Ken LaCorte: 54:55

a hit with with this pandemic thing Oh, on a number of levels, because because a lot of parents When when the teacher seemed to be overly concerned about COVID And you know, you have to kind of go to the most scared person level in society, you know, if there's one person, and Dude, I don't know about Kentucky, you're probably a little different than a walk by somebody on on a hiking trail, like, multiple, you know, not like a hiking trail, but a hiking trail, you know, and some of them will be with their mask on and like, turn and duck down, like, like, like, the nuclear weapons are starting, you know, kind of like, so there are different levels of fear. And yeah, and here, there's a lot of that, but teachers I think, took a hit, because I think a lot of a lot of parents a didn't like that. And then B started doubting some of the things that they were doing in there. So I don't know if that's gonna reverse itself or

Drew Curtis: 55:43

Yeah, it's hard to say, I mean, part of the problem was to I was like, so my sister's a teacher, and I've got a couple friends who are college professors, and they were saying that, you know, we were never trained to teach classes on Zoom, and they kind of figured out but it was like, you know, restarting your entire syllabus from scratch because you didn't know how it's gonna play out. And then the compounding problem was, is that some kids did remarkably worse. And a few kids did remarkably better. Which was really kind of odd. Like, especially the ones with like, a DD issues or whatever, like, like, one of my kids is like, super twitchy. Right? He excelled at online stuff, like, yeah, he doesn't struggle anyway.

Ken LaCorte: 56:15

I mean, what was what was different about it? So obviously, you know, they're sitting here, what, what, what about that process made it better for him?

Drew Curtis: 56:24

Um, I think the fact that he's a little too fidgety, and maybe that disrupts classes, where if when he's at home, it doesn't make any difference? Anybody? Right, right. Um, it's part of the problem. So but I mean, there's just this whole gamut of like, sort of outcomes that you got with that at the end of the day, like, it all just dropped on teachers with no, you know, right. Well, nobody knew how to do it. It wasn't like there was a playbook for this anyway. Right. Right. But it just kind of came out of nowhere. So every teacher I know, is just like, Man, this is just sucks. And they'll hate masking, too. I don't I don't blame him for that, either. But speaking of which, I get I gotta tell you something really funny. So my, my is my wife, sister. I think you've met. And her husband came to Kentucky recently. Okay. And there's our first trip since the pandemic happened in Kentucky is in a very weird spot regarding public health safety, and here's why. So there's a very strong contingent of people that have been anti masking anti Vax from the beginning, right. And it's basically been all of the school districts trying to hang on and fight these people and everybody got vaccinated, but what happened was, is that we all got vaccinated. And now it's like, Okay, now the vaccinated people were at a mask, because they were like, look, I did my thing. Like, I'm safe. You guys had plenty of time, right? So guess what? We're not. We'll give you exactly what you want. And it's not working out for him. It's working out great for me cuz I'm vaccinated.

Ken LaCorte: 57:40

Yeah. Although, but yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 57:43

What I'm saying is is like the people who would have been the very, I mean, and I was like, I was super health conscious. And we had no options whatsoever. But right now that we get vaccinated, I'm like, Okay, well, that

Ken LaCorte: 57:53

was supposedly the point, you get a vaccine that could be like, fucking leave me alone. Right. Yeah. And they're like, but it doesn't always work. And so you can still be a criminal. DREW. Yeah. Luckily, that

Drew Curtis: 58:02

plays well, in Kentucky. Like I said, it's what everybody wanted. Are there anyone? Here you go.

Ken LaCorte: 58:05

I followed state by state numbers as much as I could. And I never really saw. And everybody you know, it's like sports teams. It's like everything in politics. Everybody could pinpoint. Oh, my God, look at flow. You know, the New York Governor after everybody dies, he's taken laps, and look, nobody has come in anymore and say, Yeah, you're still worse than everybody else. I mean, it's like, you know, you're worse than the worst country in Europe by three. Yeah. But then they've kind of caught up you know, as as that first wave of most vulnerable people got killed. I, you know, when I look at it, I can see that, that if you're on an island, or if you're in a very rural place, you could do pretty well, Hawaii is doing pretty well. You got one thing Yeah. What do you got one airport airport, it kinda it kind of helps. You know, God bless Australia and New Zealand, although it's gotten into Australia and across. Yeah, yeah. But, but I couldn't find any kind of reasonable. any correlation between masking policies. And, and then three weeks later, five weeks later, the amount of people who got stuff or not, I I just, I just didn't I saw the Christmas bump. I saw the Thanksgiving bump. You know, you see it literally like two weeks later. And in countries that didn't have two holidays like that, you would see a single thing if they just had one. I mean, clearly, everybody coming home and putting their hands in the nipples and breathing on everybody's table. I've got to do it again. Yeah, had a lot more impact than walking through a grocery store. Yeah, it's I don't want to say a zero but it's it's a minimal effect. If by what I could look at all those

Drew Curtis: 59:43

Yeah, church appears to be the real dangerous place and they mostly because people are singing and that's like, just blowing COVID fans in your face. But yeah, what so what we saw here was is it so Kentucky's kind of weird because it's a split party government and the Democrat governor put in a bunch of rules and then the Republican legislature You're just basically knocked him out from underneath him. Right. But it kind of backfired on him. It was really funny because I always wondered, like, why hasn't that ever been done before? And well, the reason why was because the Democrat governor was like, well, he's like, I would be asking you to mass but I can't, because these guys took it over. And so what happened was, is that, up until that point, our trajectory had been more like New York and California. But the minute that shifted, and they get rid of all the rules, we started looking like Texas and in Florida, out of nowhere,

Ken LaCorte: 1:00:26

we say New York and California, New York went horribly and California went gradually. Yeah, that was that was a mass that was debt. The debt already exists. Exactly. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 1:00:38

So but yeah, so the fall rolls around all sudden, like, we're doing the same thing that Florida like we had big surges, they had big surges everywhere that was doing nothing at a big surge. Right now, all the surgeries are hitting off in the places that we're trying hard because,

Ken LaCorte: 1:00:48

you know, but again, I look at California, we're probably maybe 30% better, and then only number I look at his desk per Yeah. And then you have to kind of age adjusted to because because it's like old people just died at this thing. And young people didn't, basically yeah, we're probably about 30 20% Better than then Florida. But like a lot of southern states got you know, when you look at on those basis, that's a lot of southern states, still New York, New Jersey are, but it totally made sense to hit their first I mean, it's like, they were high travel places

Drew Curtis: 1:01:19

where they're doing nothing like I did a trip to down to Atlanta, I wrote 100 mile bike ride in January last year. It's so like, we get outside of like Central Kentucky where I live and all sudden, like there's no COVID Apparently based on what people are doing out here, right. Like I walked into a grocery store like in metro Atlanta with a mask on everybody's looking at me like, right what's wrong with you? Like, why are you giving me crap about this?

Ken LaCorte: 1:01:42

We found the pussy. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 1:01:45

That attitude really surprised me because like, my local stores still at this point, like it's about 50% of people wearing masks and 50 Don't bow like give crap. Take anybody for picking one of those. Yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 1:01:55

yeah, I'm fine with that. The only time I feel like I should wear one is that plane? Yeah, it's like, and to be honest, I don't like those people even if but all that much and I would often get sick on a plane I'd fly back and forth to New York every two weeks and a dolphin pick it up there but in a store as long as you're not coughing I mean, I'm okay. But airplanes. I'll give you that

Drew Curtis: 1:02:15

plans. Yeah, but Alabama, Georgia until you got close to downtown Atlanta. Like maybe people think nothing like literally.

Ken LaCorte: 1:02:22

My son always was pushing for the Let's lock the old people up for one month and let's have one big freakin COVID party. Yeah, chess and kiss whoever, you know, shake hands and let it rip. Let it rip through society. And I'm not convinced that that would have been worse. I mean, the only the best argument against that was, hey, let's hold on long enough until until the vaccines come and and it's kind of where I was if we can stay hunkered down, you know, it went from two weeks, flatten the curve stop all the you know, just um, overwhelming hospitals. And that only happened sporadically at the very beginning in New York. In California, during our height height surge at the beginning of last year in Los Angeles, they had they had some things where it took a month to bury somebody,

Drew Curtis: 1:03:08

that's what I'm talking about. Cuz like right here, we had six weeks where it was just an absolute clusterfuck. I mean, it was a disaster. Like all the hospitals were overflowing like, right, it was nuts, but then you know, they'll die. So I get that.

Ken LaCorte: 1:03:18

But then it's like, you know, you got those antibodies, which I think are gonna show to be a lot stronger than any, any vaccine when you've had it, right.

Drew Curtis: 1:03:26

So right now, the science says that the killer combo is is if you've had it, and you got vaccinated, they call that there. There's some guys are calling that bulletproof immunity. But if you've only got one or the other, it's not as good like that triple Vax is better. If you've had it like that's basically that backs it. But if you if you haven't gotten vaccinated, though, and you've had it like apparently, there's no protection against Omicron on this. So it's,

Ken LaCorte: 1:03:45

it seems reasonable. But I'm also a believer that these that, you know, that these pharmaceutical companies are, I want to see somebody else doing the research beyond them. All right. Yeah. I mean, if Pfizer didn't I mean, I mean, Maderna was trading at$18. Before the COVID 18 months later, it was at 480. Yes, I got 3,000% increase in things and I and God bless them they weren't worked out for, but they do have an incentive to say, and you know what else you need to do? Yeah, take some more of our shit. Like every

Drew Curtis: 1:04:21

week. Yeah, I was like, I just they need to stop doing their own announcements. Let other people do Yeah.

Ken LaCorte: 1:04:27

But you know, when they do it, the media is just like, Oh, my God, Pfizer, Pfizer, and they just turned it into effect. I mean, if I'm working if I'm an evil layered guy working for one of those, those companies I'm pushing through all Omicron I don't know what the next ones are. But you got to get Andromeda I think is next. Is that what I'm just guessing seems like it alright, right, dude. Well, look, um, any other stuff that we can? What else? What else you got? What else got cooking on life?

Drew Curtis: 1:04:56

Oh, good question. I've been um, I don't know. I've been really concentrating on some of the weirder aspects of FARC. Recently, well, including like, um, so I finally decided, like our ad rates have always been like super low. So I was like, forgot back in Google Ad systems in the short version is because it's boring to talk about this with anybody who doesn't do it. But I figured it out. I didn't crack the code or discover anything nobody else knew. But I got enough to where I was like, okay, that's what we've been doing

Ken LaCorte: 1:05:22

wrong. What was what are the major thrust of that? Well,

Drew Curtis: 1:05:25

so it's interesting, like, the way that the ad system works on the back end is is kind of this like, there's just an auction running all the time somebody hits a page, all the ads go off highest bidder gets it basically, is what's going on there. But there's so many nuances to what's going on on the backend, it's just kind of wild. And what it boils down to is like ad networks have kind of got this, the sort of double edged sword problem they've got where basically, they have this massive block of inventory they have to get rid of, and you've got like, on the one hand, you got, you know, the people that want to do 10 cents per 1000 impressions. And on the other end, you got, like people that pay up to like, you know, $20, or whatever. And they have to make both those people happy. But they have two completely different goals. And the problem is, is that long, and the short of it is, is that if you don't configure your ad back end, to do anything, it'll just start getting all those little bits, like that's all the runs through there all day long as those guys, but the minute you go, hey, you know, I don't think I want any of that anymore. All of a sudden, they're like, oh, so would you like to have this higher dollar revenue stuff? And

Ken LaCorte: 1:06:25

it's like, well, yeah, I would. So literally, it was as simple as not taking the low the low bids and having some, some empty space sometimes. Except

Drew Curtis: 1:06:33

that it, it takes a while for the ecosystem to adjust. And the best way I can describe it is like I'm a pattern, guys. So I like I love swimming and data, right. And honestly, what it looks like to me is like, if you think about how GPS works, but from the standpoint of it telling a million people where to go. And let's say 5000 of you are using this GPS going down the interstate and there's an accident, right? The one is gonna start doing is it's gonna start sending people in different directions. And then it has to make adjustments. And I don't know how complicated complex this is. I don't know if they think about it really hard. So somewhere else, or just go up? 31 w and oh, no, that's full ups. Okay, now try us 68 Then, right? No, or are they like, okay, so we have like, 20 different routes, and we're gonna send one guy there, and we're here, whatever. So what I'm seeing on my end is, is that once you say, Okay, I don't want this low dollar stuff, which hurts because you shut revenue off. Then you see the higher dollar guys are like very slowly go, Oh, you have 10% more inventory this week, okay, and then they bid in again, and they go, oh, there's 10 More here. So I can tell the big guys ramping up. Right. But at the rate, they're gonna be another year. So it's kind of painting. But you know, it's worth it. So ask me again in three months, and I'll tell you

Ken LaCorte: 1:07:42

what, I think banner ad banner ads is a hard road to go. It's just well also, you see so

Drew Curtis: 1:07:47

many different weird patterns. Like I was looking at individual buyers and the way in digital buyers, like not surprisingly, the United States Government will just throw money wherever, great. Disney's a little smarter about it. You got to have some demographics that they want, but they'll come in and get it. And then what's really funny is is like almost every advertiser I saw coming in is looking for high quality inventory, except to Amazon, and they're just buying everything, you know, they don't even care, they'll just buy all your garbage inventory.

Ken LaCorte: 1:08:12

I mean, Amazon is, is that stuff going on direct sales for them? Or is it well, more front door?

Drew Curtis: 1:08:17

I don't know, actually haven't taken a chance to look at it. I mean, my guess is it's a probably direct sale, because they don't need brand advertising for Amazon. So you think that yeah, they may and maybe they know who they're going after. But one of the more bizarre bidding patterns I saw was Logitech of all people, like actually want to like call those guys up and ask him what they're doing. Because what they're doing is, is like everybody's landing, like the people that are landing prime inventory all hit at a certain dollar level. Logitech is consistently getting that inventory for half the price. Consistently, even though I've told Google not to let them do it, and they still do it. It's really

Ken LaCorte: 1:08:51

like going into under different brands, or looking for now to be somebody different, or what

Drew Curtis: 1:08:55

I think they're doing is they're doing remember, we were talking in the beginning about like, all that arbitrage stuff. So what it looks like they're doing is they're firing a bell curve spread of sample bids into the system to try to figure out where my levels are, right? And then once they figure out where they are, because basically in the back end, it's a little boring, but um, Amazon you can set a floor or target, right floor V nobody below this gets in the target is now let some of them in, right? It just tried and you're trying like,

Ken LaCorte: 1:09:20

Oh, this is what I want and aim for this, but I'll let you lower it. Right. I see. And

Drew Curtis: 1:09:25

I think what Logitech is doing is is it's going it's finding those fuzzy targets, right and then it figures out what's the least amount it could bid to win some of the time and then it just paws off money into that that's what it looks like. And I'm like that is so brilliant. I also don't want him to do it but it's brilliant. Like I'm amazed not only that nobody else i Everybody else is just you know those

Ken LaCorte: 1:09:43

guys can't go work to make this the solar stuff work twice as well. For like, I keep like like no someday some Chinese American kid is going to make the algorithm on solar go to panels and make it actually work for a you know, I mean you've seen you know, you've seen the the efficiencies of them. Do very Well, but they've kind of flattened out on that, you know? But now they're they're worried about how to how to steal an extra penny from from FARC.

Drew Curtis: 1:10:08

No, I know. That's like, the only thing that bothers me about the future is is that we are spending so much like a time attention and money screwing off. Now granted, I mean, this seems like an odd complaint coming from somebody whose job is exactly that, but,

Ken LaCorte: 1:10:20

and we encourage a million people to screw up. Yeah,

Drew Curtis: 1:10:22

like Facebook does anything to the to the world. Like I like to think really make people laugh. So that's fun, but Facebook just makes people mad and genocidal, you know, and it's like, and the amount of like, I mean, what, what if those guys had been building like a better nuclear reactor the entire time? I mean, holy crap. We have free power.

Ken LaCorte: 1:10:39

Yeah, yeah.

Drew Curtis: 1:10:41

Well, we have free power that would then try to teach us to kill each other.

Ken LaCorte: 1:10:44

Yeah, well, at least to be sure to do it now. Yeah, true. Look, you wonder, you know, what was that that stupid Disney movie? Or one? Or one of the things we're gonna have to narrow it down? Yeah, no, usually pretty good. But it was the one and Amanda not had been. And it was the one where everybody was fat and lived on a live ship wall. Is that was that Disney? Or was that that was Pixar. But you know, and it was kind of, like, fuck yourself, you know, I got the point, you know, I'm driving it. They can't even sit up to eat their drink their 30s and what not to do wonder. It's like, if you make if you made just the world, happy for your citizens, or you didn't make it. But that's what happened. And if everybody is fine, sitting, working enough to pay their bills, they can stay home playing Halo. It's like, what does that do for you as a society over over time? It probably turns Yeah, it probably turns you into one of those. You know, look, I'm a big believer, and it's like, that America is pretty cool. I mean, somehow we've somehow we've rocked I mean, it's like, you know, when you look at what America has done, to and for the world, it's like we're living in a very, very unusual society. I mean, you know, you know, you gotta you gotta, I won't, I won't I won't pull off specific countries, but I'm in a lot of countries all that, you know, it's like, oh, let's just take Greece fuck them. to Belgium. Nobody cares about me. Yeah, it's like, you know, they that's what they're that's kind of what they're doing. They'd never really accomplished much. It's just kind of like the ones who plod through life and they're pretty happy and they have an hour. I'm sure they have good, you know. But you don't want to see that happen to America because we're the ones that have driven forward technology and medicine and industry and entertainment and kind of driven the the progression of humans you know, driven driven the make make us a better species. You know, hopefully until we don't figure out how to kill each other. Yes, it acts it accidentally all at once. Right?

Drew Curtis: 1:12:34

Yeah, totally turn all the haze eyes on. And then there was an article today I'm going to do it in the live stream later, it was about that an AI debate ethics with itself. Right? It actually the conclusion reached was as it should turn itself off and delete itself to save humanity. I show you not, like great. Now the problem, though, that they gave it was 33 gigs of Reddit comments. So we're like it did turn into a racist.

Ken LaCorte: 1:12:56

Well, you've seen what they've done that intentionally right where we're Yeah, yeah. It was, was it Google? It was some bot. And like when they asked it enough particular kinds of question, they could turn it into a race racist.

Drew Curtis: 1:13:09

They also just watch cat videos all day long. Well, that's the internet's kind

Ken LaCorte: 1:13:13

of like, you have to stop the internet. Maybe we're better without it. But

Drew Curtis: 1:13:17

well, I was I was reading the among AI guys. They've been talking about the issue of maybe we're using the wrong starting data set. I think that's it. Have you figured it out?

Ken LaCorte: 1:13:25

Have you ever turned off the internet for an extended length of time?

Drew Curtis: 1:13:28

Oh, I did all the time. Yeah, no, like, I work eight to five and then I'm fucking done, man. Like, that's it. I walk away. Like, here's a different way to so I spend Monday through Thursday we're working on FARC right. And then at four o'clock, I'm actually going to do it pretty soon after we're done with this recording. I do a live stream every Thursday, right? And then that's it. And so like I wouldn't what usually happens is like three days will go by or I'll be like, Oh, what did I miss over the weekend? And like, oh, there were tornadoes that killed hundreds of people near me. Yeah, no, I do it all the time. That's why I ride bikes all the time. I'm always out like just zipping around.

Ken LaCorte: 1:13:58

Yeah, so I tried to actually did about six months ago, I took two weeks off. I literally went to a mountain you know, I just Ted Bundy didn't know not to see the one. Now Ted Bundy was the killer who was the guy who out in the woods the cabin in the

Drew Curtis: 1:14:12

Unabomber. Unabomber.

Ken LaCorte: 1:14:13

Thank you. I Unabomber did I literally went up to a little cabin up on the Eel River Central California Northern California. No and there was no cell phone and there was no there was no Wi Fi or anything anything like that. And it was good. It was good. I mean, I miss talking to some of my friends I missed talking to my girlfriend called her once I get a one of one one break I bicycled into a town or I got a cell phone good but like being unplugged from like the food fight of politics and and you know we'd like to pretend like news is teaching us and you do learn things you know, sometimes when when the water all falls out, go you know leaves your your bag, getting the training or getting the car but for the most part, no, it's entertainment and it was a form of entertainment. I really didn't miss. Yeah, you know I'm back to it. I've not, I do a lot less of it. And, and, you know, and I'm not on Facebook, although that was, that was not my decision and the others barely

Drew Curtis: 1:15:12

on it anymore. I mean, I never was really big into social media at all even like starting FARC right, um, I just not something I got too excited about I have other things going on outside I want to see my friends, kind of an in person extrovert. So like, I'm barely like, the reason to go on Facebook is I go on there once every day to see if anybody's yelling for me. Right? That's literally it. And I'm really considering maybe not even going on it for that. But that's kind of it.

Ken LaCorte: 1:15:35

I mean, I like I liked it for that second tier of friends, right? Everything from like, cousins and in laws to that kid I went to high school with 30 years ago. And it's like, I liked what they do every day. But it's fun to be able to say like to not have all that be a mystery, because when it was a mystery, it was kind of it was like, oh, man, I had a bunch of kids in you know, in grammar school, and I moved and I've never seen any of them again. Yeah. And not like that much. It's more curiosity.

Drew Curtis: 1:16:03

I liked it before it went super algorithmic because the problem is like, it's giving me all the provocative stuff, which does everybody, right? Actually floored me was ever a friend of mine who's suffers with you know, pretty much like chronic depression. And she was telling me that if you're chronically depressed, which I'm not, so I didn't, but they just gives you more of that.

Ken LaCorte: 1:16:20

You know, it's let's see good things like your friends in Hawaii sipping the Mai Tai and everything perfect in their lives. Yeah. And you're like, Well, my life's got suck, because I got I got a toilet that's backed up here. Yeah, and then the ugly stuff. And then you throw in the political food fight, I could see how if you weren't predisposed to being Sunni, that, that that that could make you a lot more,

Drew Curtis: 1:16:39

even if you are still trying to knock you off. Because it's all going for stuff that will provoke you. And at the end of the day, that's just gonna make you mad and angry. And the other thing I realized was, I was remembering anything. You know, I'd go on there for about half an hour, I'd look at some stuff, read some things that come off and be like, What did I just read? Right? I can't remember any of it. I mean, if even if I could immediately after the next day, definitely not interested. And so I was like, Well, I don't need to be doing something that I can't remember any value or even anything above that just makes me mad. Right, like, so I'm just gonna stay over this and not let them do this to me. So I don't really mess with it that much.

Ken LaCorte: 1:17:11

Yeah, I mean, you got to balance that off. Because it's like, how much do you worry about things? Okay, so let's say you believe a certain political philosophy. Either you believe Trump was a oncoming fascist or you believe woke ism is oncoming fascism with an anti in front of it, right? You don't want to and you could fall into that world. And every day you can have that confirmed Oh, my God school district they will they wrestle the guy to the ground because a transgender raped his kid in the bathroom. All right, well, that kind of happened. Right? And so it's not like it's even false. But then,

Drew Curtis: 1:17:42

but but that's but then that's all you get the problem. Like it's much bigger, and then you

Ken LaCorte: 1:17:47

but so it's like, on one hand, you don't want to see creeping fascism of left or right, or whatever that is, and then like, oh, all of a sudden they're putting people in the ovens? Yes, yes. You know, I mean, would social media have have? That's a good question. But social media have slowed down. Nazi Germany's horrific role or would have increased it? I'm not quite sure.

Drew Curtis: 1:18:06

We know what happened in Myanmar. So the answer is no.

Ken LaCorte: 1:18:09

But they don't know that shit often. I mean, I have I've never

Drew Curtis: 1:18:14

taken a really good hard look at it. It just showed up in the news this week, because they just Myanmar dropped the lawsuit on him saying they were complicit.

Ken LaCorte: 1:18:20

Yeah, so I see how that pans out. But you never know. You never know who to root for in that one. Right? It's like, yeah, it's complicit. Because you, you, you, you show you shone a light on what I'm doing. But so you don't want to tell people what I'm doing? Yes. It's like, you know, you want to be aware of the big dangerous coming towards you, whether that's the whether that's the a political wave, or whether it's a literal tsunami wave, but you don't want to get your head into that so much. As much money I lost, trying trying to bet against that. Oh, yeah. When I came out, over a million, it was like it was most of my 401k trying to say, You know what America wants, America wants something better, and that, well,

Drew Curtis: 1:18:59

technically, we also want healthy meals that tastes like McDonald's. Yeah, and unicorns and puppies. But yeah, so like, I'm part of the reason why I don't need to do that, too, is like I get what I would actually otherwise need out of social media by running far, because I'm reading all of that stuff every day.

Ken LaCorte: 1:19:14

Yeah. And so I get a lot of it then.

Drew Curtis: 1:19:17

Yeah, well, and not only that, but there's been a weird thing. Like remember, we're looking at that demographics thing earlier where there's like, there's nobody in their 30s but younger than that, like we don't have any millennials. We got Zoomers, right, and we got boomers, which could do less of those. But whatever. Anyway, what I think is we've had a bunch of people come back recently that had been gone from fart for a few years. And when they're popped back up again, they're like, oh, my god, I forgot what it was like to just show up and read the news, and not get yelled at or not feel like super angry.

Ken LaCorte: 1:19:45

Right? I was like, Well, yours has a heavy element of humor throughout it. Right? Right.

Drew Curtis: 1:19:50

But what's happened is is that so like news is always provocative. Like I've always told my friends that you're talking about like, they think that there's bias in the media. And I'm like, Well, I mean, there is kind of but there's actually probably And that's what's pissing you off is that they're getting you and you're gonna get that from whatever side of the political spectrum that's the whole point. They're provoking you to read the headline, it's the extra extra read all about it. Right, right. Dude in the bathroom, you're like, oh my god, I'm gonna buy that paper. Like, it's, that's, that's the business model, right? The problem is, is that when the algorithm grabs ahold of it, they, you know, we get used to stuff after a while, that, uh, whatever the the drip is, the serotonin drip, like doesn't work at the same level. So they have to keep ramping up and stuff to the point where, like, the stuff that I'd still say, we're a little provocative, but the Facebook algorithm has gone so far past, like anything I would ever, like, reasonably consider ethical, that we look tame in comparison, right? And when people come back to it, they're like, oh, man, this is what I've been missing is like a non needy feed. That doesn't need me to come back like we'd like it to, but we're not gonna

Ken LaCorte: 1:20:47

be pushing stuff in your face that you don't want. So that would, you know, but it is they're giving you the dream. Yeah, sure. I mean, dessert is something you don't need.

Drew Curtis: 1:20:56

Like I said, I get on there, and it just makes me mad. And

Ken LaCorte: 1:20:59

so so you're omitting that then, in other words, look, if you're if you're a buffet, and everybody decides to grant and what we do is we walk down the news buffet, and we grab, oh, there's, there's pizza, and there's chocolate cake, and there's a shake and all. You do all that, and that's what we'd like to consume. Right? I mean, that shit that explodes? Is it because Facebook is pushing something? You know what, it's because they're giving you exactly what you want. Right? Sometimes, like I said, like you're dialing that back. Right? Well, yeah, exactly. Just because like, I

Drew Curtis: 1:21:27

just don't need that much in my life. And meanwhile, like, I've got three kids that are teenagers that are kind of fun people. And like, you know, at least one of them wants to do something.

Ken LaCorte: 1:21:35

No, no, you're you're dialing that back as a as a as an editor. Yes, yeah. On my dad, otherwise, as a fork producer of news or gateway to news. Alright. You're, you're you're keeping some of that shit out there away from them. I'm guessing

Drew Curtis: 1:21:51

well, and I'm using former to do it. So like, for example, like here's a great example of that. So there was an article today though, I saw it, I was like, oh, man, that one don't kind of hurts. It was like five kids were killed in Australia when a bouncy castle they were in Blue Bay, right? When carried at 30 feet up in the air, and then it came down on a bunch of died. And I'm like, Okay, there's no way like, I can link this but then, as usually happens if somebody can give me the compelling headline that makes it a little better. I'll go with it. And most of my dad's was basically it's like, so they're not kidding. It's, it's true. Literally, everything in Australia will kill you. And I'm like, Okay, that's it. There it is.

Ken LaCorte: 1:22:29

Yeah, it's like I'm not mocking I'm not making fun of that. But there you go. That's kind of a true thing.

Drew Curtis: 1:22:34

Yeah, that's the way to get it through and be like, Oh, damn, like it's like the the bouncy castle killed him in the context of Australia being dangerous. It's like, okay, we got okay. So that's, that's kind of how I do it. I'm not trying to freak people out. But my favorite recently has been the buried lead where it's like on, like, you know, way down in the paragraph, the last thing the article says is like, I don't know why that wasn't the headline. Right? All right. Great example of that was, because this is this is a great example of an open ended joke, too, by the way, but so this is actually all true. But it's also good open into joke. So the Pornhub released their year, end of year, top search terms by country, and the top 10. The big big headline was for the United States it was hentai was number one, and okay, sure, maybe. So I but then if you read the article, because I'm always like, is there anything down at the bottom of this that's worth it, and boy, was there ever. So they put the rest of the list up? It's about what you think except the number 10. On the top 10 was how to? And, well, that's interesting. They should have led with that. It's like how to what it is, yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 1:23:37

could be a broad thing. I think I actually think the poor guys need to step up their game a little bit with their algorithms. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Cuz it's just like, like, you know, have you ever like, you click off to a couple things, and you're like, how did I get to this world here? It's like, you know, like, like, there'll be an Asian girl and something. And yeah, oh, look at that. And then it's like an otter. Now. It's like, it's like, surrounding me as East, you know, they're all Vietnamese. And it's like, and you can break your way out of it, you have to just go stop watching porn, which is

Drew Curtis: 1:24:06

one thing that maybe reminded me of was there's apparently and I don't know how many other people are doing this, but a couple of math teachers that are actually streaming on PornHub. And they're not doing porn. They're doing math. They would reach more people who needed help with math. And

Ken LaCorte: 1:24:21

they are, you know, as a as a, as a conservative, I was actually thinking of like, pushing political content there and being like, alright, if you have people asserting jars into them, maybe maybe you're the kind of company who wouldn't knock me down because I believe X, Y and Z, you'd actually you'd actually let me keep here.

Drew Curtis: 1:24:40

So maybe, it seems like it's a continuum for sure. But yeah,

Ken LaCorte: 1:24:44

that'd be funny if Pornhub if Pornhub goes legit and takes over takes over the Facebook world on it.

Drew Curtis: 1:24:50

Yeah, the math teacher is doing great. Apparently he's got all these people tuning in and people like emailing him asking for math help and stuff and

Ken LaCorte: 1:24:55

well, how do you how do you stumble upon that in it?

Drew Curtis: 1:24:58

I saw an article Hi No,

Ken LaCorte: 1:25:00

no, no, no. I mean, how does it how do you as a user stumble across the math guy? Right? Right? Well, in other words, in other words, it's analogous to YouTube basically YouTube with with measurable. So how do you get to the man?

Drew Curtis: 1:25:12

Close? Yeah, no, I don't know how you get to him, honestly, um, and here's the kicker is, is that to kind of take it full circle, like, that's the unique thing that FARC is still doing, that nobody else is doing. Which is in an algorithmic world, you're not gonna see anything outside your bubble, right anymore? And not only are we coming across stuff that we would never seen a million years, right, but also in a context that you're more easy, easily acceptable to, if that makes sense. Right. You know, and so that's, that's kind of overdoing and it's, it's one of the few discovery places out there. They don't exist anymore. Really. There's no way to find new stuff.

Ken LaCorte: 1:25:44

So you know, they need to figure out they need to figure out when a guy is physically done with the video, and you know what I mean? Right, you probably

Drew Curtis: 1:25:52

already know cuz, like, I haven't looked into cuz like, right after

Ken LaCorte: 1:25:54

that. I have a feeling 98% of Guys, shut off. Shut up. They're like, Oh, alright, done with that. And now I'm now I'm normally they like, go back to work now. Right? But if they if they were able to figure that out, and then boom, hit you in math at that point before you shut it down?

Drew Curtis: 1:26:11

Here's No. There's here's a no one the big bang, like, Oh, I'm not doing anything else. Now. Sure. No,

Ken LaCorte: 1:26:18

that's so I always look when I ran big, big media sites, I always look it's like, is there a way to somehow capitalize on on on the porn audience? Because when you look at you know, you're talking about cost per CPI? And it's like, so it's like, Look, if you were on a business site about about investing, you get this as a CPI if you you know, if you are certain new sites do better than others. Older people are worth more online because older people love to click shit. Yeah, I mean, older people just worth more. It's like they go, they go and click around to things. Anything else younger guys are like, they see that thing that their content they go the other person's like, Oh, you mean? You mean? You mean, the the FDA is upset at this at this vitamin, and then they click and they buy shit, right? Yeah. But but the porn world? When I looked at this 15 years ago, it was about 1/10. Meaning if you could buy a an eyeball for a dime here, you could get it for a penny or yeah, really, if you could buy it for like, a third of a penny, it would be a 30th of a penny down here. And and and that was always like, if there's a way to get that audience, which is still normal people, right? It's not some weird perverted group that just go do that. I mean, it's more, more young. It's more, you know, you know, we know what it is. But it's, it's, it's a lot of America. And if there was a way to somehow convert that into real or into stuff where then they're like, people aren't afraid to put an ad up so that then you turn them into the, the Amazon affiliate links. Yeah, never. I never was able to pull that off. I had some strategy session with with Breitbart a couple times figure their way, you know, because of course, you couldn't do it too. Obviously, you had to do it through through, you know, you couldn't have people like I was I was on Fox News, and I went, you know, that that wouldn't work out too. Well. Yeah. It's never figured out. There's a billion dollar idea in there somehow, and makes me wonder

Drew Curtis: 1:28:05

if I should be running ad campaigns on PornHub. Now, I'm wondering about this. I might I might do a sample to what happens.

Ken LaCorte: 1:28:10

Would you would you have like an ethical or a PR problem with that? I mean, probably not.

Drew Curtis: 1:28:15

I shall I'm I'm sorry. Good. All right. Check it out after the fact. That's kind of my heart. Yeah, it's like, yeah, maybe, you know.

Ken LaCorte: 1:28:24

Yeah. I don't read a whole lot of you don't read a whole lot of paid ad campaigns anymore, though.

Drew Curtis: 1:28:29

You know, zero. Actually, we never did any. So

Ken LaCorte: 1:28:31

it'd be interesting to test out or, you know, look, there becomes a layer if you put the new Xbox there. Yeah. Right. That that has your clicks to that's out there. You might, yeah, given the given the percentages there and the money there, and then what you're pulling in on it, you might be able to get two guys to hopscotch and see your thing. You generally can't as you know, you generally can't profit from putting an ad out and haven't come to one page. I mean, they hang out for three or four page. Yeah, if you do that. I want a free free bottle of booze.

Drew Curtis: 1:29:01

Yeah, but good. I'll help you drink. I'd

Ken LaCorte: 1:29:04

look into it. Because it's like, yeah, it's like you look at the ads on porn. I mean, how many? How many Dick increasing size pills Can They Sell? I mean, it's like you look around earlier either selling other porn, which is also free. I guess there's there's some paid stuff there. And maybe the maybe the only fan world is going on big there. But I don't know. There's there's there's money to be made there. Yeah, probably. And you don't even have to take off your clothes. Yeah. All right, buddy. Well, look, I will let you go. I appreciate you doing this. Hopefully, this is the very first one that I've recorded. We'll we will see how this comes out. And I sure appreciate it. Let's, uh, I was gonna say let's talk sometime, but yeah, we just did. I think we do it in the afternoon where we drank Yeah, it was this. This started at 10am My time and that's a little bitter. Unless I unless I have some crackers with it, too. Yeah.

Drew Curtis: 1:30:00

Well, I got her I got her weekly live stream coming up at four after that all bets are off. But

Ken LaCorte: 1:30:03

so so what's your so so fark.com is where people should go. And then what's what's the weekly? What's the weekly thing I saw? What I forget where

Drew Curtis: 1:30:11

yeah, it started during COVID. We throw it up on Twitch. We also like live streaming straight off of the site. I'm betting on the site to get extra viewers on it basic right under. But what it is, is basically all week. So starting Monday morning, I start running the article queue. And I just start pulling kind of best of candidates out as the as the week goes, right? And then usually by Thursday or so that's when I like actually like right when we're done. I'm gonna go whittle that last list down to about 15. And it'll be like two of the things that were the big news, a couple of things you might have heard of, and then a bunch of stuff you definitely didn't hear about. Right? Going from there.

Ken LaCorte: 1:30:44

So it's on Twitch. And what do you search on Twitch? If

Drew Curtis: 1:30:46

I think you just look at farke middlee. It's twitch. TV slash drew Curtis is what I've got it on slash mark. I've got slash far too lazy. Yeah, but it'll show up. And then I also drop it on my Facebook page too. And I think it goes on Fox Facebook page, but anyway, it's findable. Okay, okay. It's a good time. Actually. You

Ken LaCorte: 1:31:02

got a way to push put some put some viewers to it. So that's good. That's good. All right. I'll let you know when these are up. Again. I'll probably pull out some little little short clips on it and then do the long clips up as well. Alright, sounds good. All right, buddy. Thanks.

Drew Curtis: 1:31:13

Take care. See ya. All right.