Ep 602 - Future Man (feat. Kevin Ashton)

Support the D. A. W. G. Z. @ patreon.com/MSsecretpod Check out Kevin's Book 'The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art' OUT NOW on all platforms Go See Matt Live @ mattmccusker.com/dates Go See Shane Live @ shanemgillis.com Go See Shawn Gardini Live if you want @ https://www.shawngardini.com/live Yo0o0o0. TGIF we have a bonus cast for you. Hope you all had a good week. Kevin Ashton is a future man, tech pioneer, and our bro. He and cusky blessed the podes for a lil bonus treat this week. Check out Kevin's new book!! Please enjoy. God Bless. Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://www.ziprecruiter.com/secret Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/DRENCHED and use code DRENCHED and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Matt McCusker?

  Hey, what's up? What's up? What's going on, everybody? I'm already fumbling over my fucking words, dude. I suck. I'm here with Kevin Ashton. How you doing, man?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I'm good. How are you?

• 0:09Matt McCusker?

  Pretty good. So how would you define yourself? Obviously, author, futurist.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Old guy.

• 0:15Matt McCusker?

  You think you're old now?

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Oh, gotcha.

• 0:17Matt McCusker?

  What?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Fifty-seven.

• 0:18Matt McCusker?

  Fifty-seven?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Fifty-seven.

• 0:20Matt McCusker?

  I'm not, I'm not too far behind. I'm forty.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's young.

• 0:24Matt McCusker?

  Forty? I think forty is kind of, I still feel like a boy. Like, there's never, the switch has never occurred to where I'm like, a little bit, I feel like a man.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  I go in the grocery store, they're playing the music I danced to when I was a kid.

• 0:35Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  That's, that makes you feel old.

• 0:37Matt McCusker?

  Oh, when it's in the grocery store?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the muzak now.

• 0:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  The Cure or whatever. That was alt when I was a kid.

• 0:43Matt McCusker?

  So what was your, what was your music back in the day? What was your go-to?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I was a jazz funk guy.

• 0:48Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:49Matt McCusker?

  Jazz funk?

• 0:51Speaker 01

  It's like the, it's a British name for like R and B, basically. So like, mid-eighties, it was like Luther Vandross.

• 0:58Matt McCusker?

  Ooh, you're smooth, brother.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. All the working-class kids in London, that's what we were.

• 1:03Matt McCusker?

  There you go. Nice.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  The posh kids liked, you know, the punky stuff, but we were...

• 1:08Matt McCusker?

  So I gotta ask you then, is it true? Because I, I have a friend who's from London and he loves soccer.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:14Matt McCusker?

  And I, I, you know, naturally, in America, soccer's looked at as a sport kind of for girls. You know what I mean?

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Not so much now, though.

• 1:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, not so much. But when I was trying to explain to him, when I grew up, it was like, we, everyone played football. That's what we, we call American football, football. And I was like, you know, I was just kind of getting under his skin. I was like, it's kind of for like weak guys and girls. And he was like, nah. And I was, because I played rugby. And he's like, rugby's for the posh boys.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:41Matt McCusker?

  And so it's true.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42Matt McCusker?

  Rugby's such a more brutal sport, it's such a more brutal sport. Why is it for the posh boys?

• 1:47Speaker 01

  It's just the way the school system, I mean, I was like, it was suggested that I go to like the posh school in town. And but they didn't play soccer. They played rugby and there was just, I was like 11. There was no way.

• 1:58Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 1:59Speaker 01

  I was going to school that didn't play soccer.

• 2:01Matt McCusker?

  So it's ki- okay. So it's almost like over there. It's like if someone played water polo over here, that would be very posh.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, or like lacrosse, maybe.

• 2:08Matt McCusker?

  Lacrosse is a very, it's not posh. Eh, it's, it's, yeah, I can see that.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  It is in New England, I feel like.

• 2:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you know, you're right. Lacrosse bros are, I would say borderline posh boys as well.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  So cricket and rugby are like the posh.

• 2:19Matt McCusker?

  Ah, I feel ashamed. I played the posh sport. I thought I was flexing on him. He was like, ah, it's posh.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you could play soccer on the street corner.

• 2:25Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  You know, you toss down your sweaters and you got a ball and you're away. You can't do that. You can't quite do that with rugby, you know?

• 2:31Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you'd have to play like touch. You'd be like sevens.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Landing on the street and it would, yeah.

• 2:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, well, shit, you're right. I was hoping I would, uh, he would get overturned, but that's completely true.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:40Matt McCusker?

  Dang. Well, thank you for coming to the podcast. So, okay, so futurist, how do you get the futurist title? Oh, so that's like a thing. Like you can't study at school, right? There's no like major in futurism.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I, it's not a word I use about myself so much, I guess, but yeah, I, I mean, I started a lab at MIT.

• 3:01Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  In the late nineties. That's why I came to the US and like I had this idea that I called the Internet of Things.

• 3:09Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  And everybody thought, what the hell is that? It's crazy. And they're all interested in like the dot com boom and everything, but you know, we got lucky and our research did well. And now the Internet of Things is everywhere. So you kind of, I guess, when you have a stupid idea and it comes true, you, you move from being like an idiot to a futurist.

• 3:28Matt McCusker?

  Futurist, that's awesome. Well, it's funny because I, I watched a video and, and the origin of the Internet of Things, you know, which we'll explain in a second because I, I always heard that term and I, I, there's something about it. I'm like, man, I love that term. I had no idea what you were talking about. I just like, I was just like, it's like the internet. I had this nebulous idea in my head. I'm like, it's like the internet and just fucking stuff and you know, I, I didn't know what it exactly was. You came up with the term, you're pitching a thing for Procter and Gamble, right?

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:55Matt McCusker?

  I saw that and you, it sounded like you kind of just like pulled it out of your ass. You're like, I wanted, I wanted to like, because you wanted to what? Like make them use the internet for their supply chain to make it faster.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  It was the mid nineties.

• 4:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  And like, honestly, it sounds crazy now, but the senior executives didn't even do email. Like you sent them an email and it came back in the internal mail. Most people want to know what the hell that is, but like a special reusable envelope. Their, their secretary had printed it out and they'd like write a reply to your email. Like that's how technical these guys were in the mid nineties. And then suddenly they like heard about the internet and it was kind of like the thing you had to, to know about.

• 4:34Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  So like, I already had this idea for like, like putting chips and things in, in the product. So we could know where they were, but they didn't want getting that. So I figured if I could put the word internet in there somehow, then you know, they'd be interested.

• 4:48Matt McCusker?

  And then just tacked on of things.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:50Matt McCusker?

  Kind of awesome.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, really like, what am I going to call this PowerPoint presentation? How about this?

• 4:56Matt McCusker?

  Internet of things.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And here we are now 30 years later.

• 4:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's cool. Cause then like that idea for the presentation became almost like a career launching point.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Oh, it did. Yeah.

• 5:04Matt McCusker?

  That's insane.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  And I have to pretend like it was like some real stuff. The, the best you ask about what the internet of things, have you heard of telly dildonics?

• 5:13Matt McCusker?

  Hmm.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Telly dildonics. Have you heard?

• 5:15Matt McCusker?

  Telly dildonics? No, I have no idea what the hell that is.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  This is my favorite. People say, what's the internet of things? I say telly dildonics. It's the internet of things of sex toys.

• 5:23Matt McCusker?

  Oh, okay.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Vibrators you can like turn on from like the internet, anywhere in the world.

• 5:29Matt McCusker?

  Oh, the vibrating butt plug.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:31Matt McCusker?

  The vibrating end.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  But like, you know, through, through wifi or your phone.

• 5:34Matt McCusker?

  That's how you define the internet of things. You're like.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  That is one of the first killer apps of the internet of things.

• 5:40Matt McCusker?

  They were, they're always the first adopters of everything. And just so, and just to explain it, cause again, I, I feel like if you're, it's, it's a simpler idea than you think. It's just using, attaching sensors to things that are connected to the internet and then can bring in information.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  You're plugging the world into the internet.

• 5:54Matt McCusker?

  So here, did you come up with that idea or were you just describing the practice to these guys and you coined the term?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  I was one of, like, there was a small room full of people who all came up with similar ideas about the same time.

• 6:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  But like the internet was new. It was dial up. It was kind of crappy.

• 6:10Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  You know, we didn't have graphics really or anything. So the idea of using the internet for like anything past like email was kind of on the wild side of things.

• 6:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  So yeah, but like plugging the real world into the internet. So you knew where stuff was. So like you could have these like self-driving cars that like know where they are and are communicating with your phone and stuff like. Yeah. And, and this was before wifi.

• 6:34Matt McCusker?

  Oh dude, that must've sounded insane in nineteen.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Oh, it did.

• 6:36Matt McCusker?

  I, uh, yeah, nineteen ninety-five.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. People thought it was, it was like maybe ninety-seven, but like, yeah.

• 6:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  People like, what the hell? This is why it called the internet of things.

• 6:45Matt McCusker?

  True.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Cause like, at least I could, they, they wanted to pretend they knew what the internet was.

• 6:49Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  So you just like write on that.

• 6:52Matt McCusker?

  That's, that's pretty cool. So that, that was, the whole idea was you, you know, back in the day, you'd have these companies or advise them to attach basically just sensors to regular objects. So then those sensors could then gather data.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:06Matt McCusker?

  Which basically, so, and this was before the smartphone then.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:10Matt McCusker?

  This is way before the smartphone.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was like business systems, like we got a lot of money from the defense department because you know, you go to war.

• 7:17Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  You've got to have enough stuff.

• 7:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Where the hell are my bombs?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:20Matt McCusker?

  Where the hell did I put those bombs?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Bombs is one thing, but like, you know, soda cans and like body bags, bibles, you know, toothbrushes.

• 7:26Matt McCusker?

  All that stuff.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  You've got to know where it all is. And so, you know, that was one of the first like obvious applications was just like logistics.

• 7:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  That's where all the money came from to fund it. But yeah, then a few years later, you got the smartphone and it becomes easy to put it in everybody's pocket.

• 7:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. So how did that like, you know, were you kind of following the development of the smartphone? Did that just come out and you're like, hey?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it was funny. I was, um,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I guess I can say the name now, like I was, I was on the board, the research board of Motorola.

• 7:59Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  And we were trying to explain to them, this was like the flip phone.

• 8:03Matt McCusker?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  And one of the perks was they gave you their best phone every year. So I always had like the quote unquote best Motorola phone. It was terrible.

• 8:14Matt McCusker?

  Like, do you like the razor, the flip razor?

• 8:16Speaker 01

  It was awful. I mean, the funny thing is, like Motorola even had a partnership with Apple before the iPhone.

• 8:22Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was called the Rocker, right? It was like an iPod in a Motorola flip phone.

• 8:27Matt McCusker?

  Okay, whoa.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  They fucked it up so badly that Steve Jobs was like, yeah, no.

• 8:32Matt McCusker?

  Oh, I don't want anything to do with it.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Do our own thing. But we are trying to explain these, me and some other like futurists, we're trying to explain to them like, you know, touchscreens, graphic user interfaces, guys, sensors.

• 8:43Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Have the phone like know when you pick it up. Like this is not expensive. It's not hard to do. And then, I mean, the first, iPhone wasn't the first one, like LG came out with a thing in Korea.

• 8:54Matt McCusker?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  About six months before.

• 8:56Matt McCusker?

  That makes sense because I had a Droid way before I had an iPhone. My first phone was a Droid.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:00Matt McCusker?

  I think it was actually an LG.

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, and LG had this like, it was called the Prada. Don't ask me why.

• 9:06Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Like a clothing company.

• 9:07Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  But it was, it was, it was basically the same as an iPhone. And then the iPhone came out. And I remember, like, I went back to the Motorola guys who had another meeting and we were like, so you know that thing we were telling you about for years? It's happened, right? What do you think? And the head of, I swear to you, the head of research at Motorola said, yeah, but it doesn't have a very good microphone. Like, people were like lining up around the block to pay like a thousand dollars for this phone they'd never even touched, right? And this guy was like, well, it has a crappy microphone. And that was kind of true.

• 9:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, okay.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  But who gave a shit?

• 9:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, Motorola is kind of not in business anymore.

• 9:47Matt McCusker?

  No, they, and they, it's funny you say that because they were like cell phones. They were like number one.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  Nokia.

• 9:52Matt McCusker?

  Yep, Nokia.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Sony, all these guys. And probably in all those companies, there was somebody saying, hey, this is what the future is going to look like.

• 10:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And they were like, yeah, no. So, yeah.

• 10:03Matt McCusker?

  So, who is that? Yeah, who's above you?

• 10:06Speaker 01

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• 11:33Matt McCusker?

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• 12:14Speaker 01

  He was a guy like, you know, like a really good DJ who like is just ahead of the trends, who like plays a tune you wouldn't have thought about. But then you realize it's actually, he was that guy for like tech. Like he really had a good eye for what was coming. And yeah, and so what happened with the iPhone, like, and this is kind of what we all saw. It was, it wasn't really a phone. Phone was a thing, you know, if you think about your smartphone now, like, how often are you actually making a call?

• 12:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Right? It's just one of your apps. There's always others to use it, a camera, use it as a video game, use it as, you know, GPS mapping, whatever you use it for.

• 12:48Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  And, and that's what he saw, you know, so you got the iPod idea and the online video idea and the phone idea and the handheld video, oh, just all stick it into one thing.

• 13:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, and he really, I, I get him, because I had the Droid first and I, you know, I was like, and I, I will say, there was something about when I would like, tap it or touch it, that when it would buzz every time I did that, it, there were, I, I don't know why that like made me feel so happy. Every time it like respond back to me, I, I don't know, I still like, you know, I had to turn it off my phone because I just, I, I do like those little noises like.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And if you watch the first like presentation of iPhone, like way back when, like he swipes on the screen. I think it's a standing ovation.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  We take it all for granted now, but yeah, so it was, it was fairly clear in the late nineties, early two thousands that something a bit like that was, was gonna happen.

• 13:40Matt McCusker?

  Well, yeah, I, that was my whole thing. Apple, like when I had the Droid for a while, I'm like, this is cool. But Apple was like, it was like intuitive where I was like, oh, this is so easy. Like I don't have to spend time figuring it out. I was just kind of like, this makes, it's just so much easier to use.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I mean, Jobs wasn't really a technical guy, you know, so he, he was kind of like our representative in, in the room who's like, yeah, it's just too complicated.

• 14:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Make it easier, make it easier. And then you end up with, you know, what we have today, which is great.

• 14:04Matt McCusker?

  That's awesome.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, so the, uh, so here's, here's the thing. So, okay, Internet of Things, term you coined. And when you gave the meeting, were you like kind of aware that like, damn, I think I'm crushing it right now, or like, this is a thing, or you, do you have, you know what I mean? Like?

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Uh, this is, it's a long time ago. It's like, so, uh, the CEO wanted to see the talk, the Procter and Gamble. And I was in the UK. I don't think they realized that. Like I got an email saying, yeah, come and see the CEO like the day after tomorrow or something. Procter and Gamble is based in Cincinnati. I'd never even been to the US, right? Fortunately, I had a passport, so like, I got a ticket. First place I ever went to the United States was Cincinnati.

• 14:50Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty sick, actually.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  I was fairly disappointed.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Um.

• 14:56Matt McCusker?

  Right to Ohio.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  And I'm in this like walnut panel like boardroom kind of place. And they all come in like there's, you know, the CEO and all these other like really senior guys and I do my thing. And basically we go around the room and like all the other, like the entourage guys are like, yeah, it sucks. That never worked. I don't like it. I'm like, oh damn, you know?

• 15:18Matt McCusker?

  Damn.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  But then the CEO is like, well, I like it. I think it's a good idea. And funnily enough, like, it's like watching the dominoes go down. Like all these guys who I I swear had just been shitting on my idea.

• 15:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, you're right. That's a really, yeah, what a, what a good idea. So, yeah, if it hadn't been Dirk Yager, wherever you are, thank you. If it hadn't been for, for that guy who was CEO at Procter at the time, I don't know what would have happened. But, yeah, he got it. He said, yeah, we're gonna pay for you to go to MIT and make this real.

• 15:45Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So like, yeah, first time we're into the US was like Thanksgiving.

• 15:49Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  Was like Thanksgiving of ninety eight. And then by September, the first ninety nine, I was in the Smithsonian Institution announcing the Internet of Things to the world. And I lived in the US.

• 16:01Matt McCusker?

  Whoa.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  It all happened really fast.

• 16:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's insane.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was crazy.

• 16:05Matt McCusker?

  And they were like, well, just give you, we'll pay for you to go to MIT and just figure this out.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, they gave me money so I could fund the research. Then we got a bunch of other companies involved and it just snowballed.

• 16:14Matt McCusker?

  Well, and what did you do before that? Well, what was?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I was a brand manager. I was, uh, I ran like part of the oil of Olay business, the Procter and Gamble.

• 16:23Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  In Europe. Yeah.

• 16:25Matt McCusker?

  Damn, just like slang and lotion. Yeah, just slang and lotion.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I was like an expert on mascara.

• 16:29Matt McCusker?

  And you were like supply chain side of it?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  No, it just, the shit was never in the store and I got pissed off and I was like, why is my stuff never in the store? Why is, you know? Why is this particular color of lipstick that we know everybody likes? A literally true story. It's never in this. I go to get my groceries. It's never fucking there. And the first answer was, well, it's just in that one store. And I'm like, yeah, no, there's no way. It's just the store I go to is. So I did some research. It wasn't anywhere like we were paying all this money to advertise it. You couldn't actually buy it. I wanted to fix that problem.

• 17:00Matt McCusker?

  It just wasn't getting there, basically.

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was it was in the back or something, you know?

• 17:04Matt McCusker?

  Wait, so you have like computer training? Like, do you? Are you like a systems IT?

• 17:07Speaker 01

  No, but like, I was.

• 17:09Matt McCusker?

  There's an idea guy.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  I was at school in like the early mid nineties and like, I had a computer when I was 10. I had like a shitty home computer.

• 17:16Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  You know, like the age of like, if you've heard of like Commodore and all those kind of really early computers.

• 17:21Matt McCusker?

  No, no, no. I only remember the Windows and like that early Apple thing that was like purple on top of it.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  So, yeah, but my generation was like, we were the first kids to have computers at home. You had like, you either had your Atari video game system or your Commodore sixty four home. Didn't do very much, but like.

• 17:37Matt McCusker?

  What was the Commodore? I remember Atari. What was the Commodore?

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Commodore sixty four is like a keyboard that you plugged into the TV and it had like basic computer ability. And you could like buy video games on cassette tapes and like play them into the computer.

• 17:48Matt McCusker?

  Damn.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  It would sound like a fax machine and it would like load it in. You could play some little game.

• 17:53Matt McCusker?

  That's awesome.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, no. So, yeah, I just grew up with computers. So like, I was like, well, there's got to be a, this is an information problem, right?

• 18:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Solution. And like, there was.

• 18:02Matt McCusker?

  Dang.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:03Matt McCusker?

  That's pretty cool.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it worked out.

• 18:05Matt McCusker?

  So you walked home that day like I, I think I crushed it. Like, did you have an idea? Like you were just.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  I, I went from there to a meeting at MIT. And I was having breakfast in the Cambridge Marriott Hotel, which is, at that time was like the only hotel near MIT.

• 18:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And a senior guy from Procter and Campbell came busting in to find me at breakfast. And was like, they've just approved for you to like transfer to MIT. How quickly can you move to the United States? And I was like.

• 18:37Matt McCusker?

  Shit.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Uh, how about two weeks? And they're like, yeah, sure.

• 18:41Matt McCusker?

  That's awesome.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  And I like went back to my office and like the human resources team went there. Yeah, we, we pay for your apartment. We pay for your plane. We pay for all this stuff. I'm like, oh my God. So, yeah, it was like, it was life change.

• 18:53Matt McCusker?

  That's insane. That's, honestly, that's like a fantasy of mine. I always wanted to go in a boardroom and hit him with the, you know, million dollar idea. God, that's awesome. I would love that.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it landed, but like, I'm not kidding you, like the first five minutes of feedback were brutal.

• 19:08Matt McCusker?

  It is funny like nah, I don't like it.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:10Matt McCusker?

  What was there? Do you remember their pushback specifically or they're just like, this will never work?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  It was just like they had some bullshit like, I mean, the thing you always heard back in that day was all the laws of physics. You know, if you want to put a radio microchip into like a bottle of moisturizer, it's going to cost $10 and it won't work. And like, this was before wifi. It was before Bluetooth. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that you really couldn't send data over radio.

• 19:35Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Or barely.

• 19:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  And that's crazy now. Like we think about like, you know, you can download like a high def movie on your phone over like the cell network.

• 19:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  But in the nineties, it's like, yeah, that won't work. It's going to cost too much. We already know where all our stuff is anywhere. I'm like, no, you don't.

• 19:52Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  You know, there were guys whose job it was like to know. They weren't going to be like, yeah, you know, he's right. We actually have no fucking idea.

• 19:59Matt McCusker?

  True.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  So like, this is not a problem. That was one of the, you know?

• 20:02Matt McCusker?

  So what were they? How did they like, who, the guy who knew where all the stuff was back in the early night? They would just call a warehouse and be like, yo, did you guys get that stuff?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Well, they'd know like, they'd know like down to the nearest like million or something.

• 20:13Matt McCusker?

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  But was, because I used to get this, like even after we got to MIT, we'd have like CEO type guys come through and we'd pitch them. And they'd be like, yeah, we already know where all our stuff is. And I'd be like, okay, you sell this product and you've got a store down the street in Boston. How long would it take you to find out how many of this one product are on the shelf in that store? And they'd be like, uh, yeah, well, you know. And that was what they couldn't do.

• 20:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, of course. I used to work in a beer distributor in the, when was this? The early 2000s. And they, the guy would still walk around, count every single case of beer. He had a piece of paper. So I remember I stole a 12 pack from him one time.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:52Matt McCusker?

  And he could, he was like, did you, uh, I was missing a 12 pack of MGD. And I was like, god damn, you really had this thing.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  That's good. Yeah.

• 21:00Matt McCusker?

  He was the only guy.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  That guy owned that store, I reckon.

• 21:03Matt McCusker?

  He was, he worked very closely with the owner. It was like a, he was trying to get a citizenship and he like lived in the, he lived in the warehouse itself. So he was, it was like his ticket to America.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  He's invested. But like in the big box store like.

• 21:14Matt McCusker?

  No, there's no way. No, especially if you go to like a Target, still to this day, you go to a Target sometimes and it's like just crap everywhere. Like I, it's, it's pretty bad.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. It's a mess.

• 21:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Matt McCusker?

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• 21:30Matt McCusker?

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• 21:30Matt McCusker?

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• 22:15Matt McCusker?

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• 22:25Matt McCusker?

  Well, cool. So you came up, came up with that idea and that kind of, I don't know, did you ever feel like kind of, um, since you weren't, you know, technically like a, you know, you were savvy with computers, I guess. I guess if you used a computer regularly in the nineties, you were a tech guy. You know what I mean?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I was kind of too stupid now, stupid I was really, but my experience had been like, the first computer I got had one K of memory. And I saved up, we used to deliver newspapers, I saved up for months and bought a sixteen K, like K, not megabytes, gigabytes, kilobytes, memory expansion for that thing, cost like a hundred bucks or whatever. And I felt like I had more memory than I would ever need, right? This is in the eighties and by the nineties, you know, it's like, we're talking about like maybe megabytes.

• 23:12Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And the stuff you you can do was like a million times better than the stuff you could do in the eighties. So like in my dumb brain, it was like, well, things just get cheaper.

• 23:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Things just get smaller. And that turned out to be true. I mean, I didn't know how it was true or why it was true, but like.

• 23:27Matt McCusker?

  You just figured it out.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd seen that happen for like fifteen years at that point.

• 23:31Matt McCusker?

  Yes, I saw a video. So there's a video from you eleven years ago and you were doing predict, you had like three predictions. And the one was fifteen years from now, and this is eleven years ago, fifteen years from now, most cars won't have steering wheels, which I took as like automatic cars, basically.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:46Matt McCusker?

  So kind of, it kind of nailed that because I don't know if you see, I mean, obviously you see all the Waymos here.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I got here in a Waymo, finally.

• 23:51Matt McCusker?

  I love the, I actually love the Waymos. So you were, so you were kind of spot on with that fifteen years ago or eleven years ago, you were like, yeah, the self, self-driving cars, I don't think people really, eleven years ago, they're like, no way.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Oh, they were no, and the thing is, like, what's happened is a lot of cars, like new cars are more self-driving than people realize. It's called like enhanced driver aids.

• 24:10Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  So it tells you if you're like going out of your lane, it can tell you if you need to brake suddenly, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff they're like building in gradually. So like what used to just be like the automatic gearbox or like cruise control or something.

• 24:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  It's like now getting more and more sophisticated. So you're getting closer and closer to like that self.

• 24:29Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, the lane assist and I, I, I like it. I took a Waymo and I actually kind of really enjoy it. And I, you know, I thought I'd be like, I don't know. It's, it's pretty reliable. It drives like a regular speed. It's, you know.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  First few minutes is kind of weird and then it just gets old.

• 24:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I, I find, and I, I like, I'm, I enjoy talking to people in Uber, so I don't mind the human interaction. But there is something really peaceful about just like being there by yourself.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:52Matt McCusker?

  Putting on a song and just kind of just chilling. I, I like really, really, I don't know. I feel, I find it really relaxing.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  I still catch myself about to say something to the driver. Oh, yeah.

• 25:03Matt McCusker?

  Well, I'll say thank you getting out of like.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it says hello and it says your name, right? And I always want to say, you know, hello back. It's like, there's no one, no one here, dude.

• 25:11Matt McCusker?

  So the other one was, and I'm curious to see what, what, where you're coming up with this, five years from now, computers won't have batteries. What were they run on?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I was cheating at that point, right? Because they were, I mean, so there's a thing called an RFID tag, which is like the sort of one of the main technologies in the Internet of Things. It's just like a little chip with an antenna and like, you buy something from Walmart or something, they use it for inventory tracking.

• 25:32Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  You know, you buy something from Walmart, it might have a sticker on that says EPC. That's the thing we met at MIT, that's the electronic product code, right?

• 25:40Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  That's a computer. An RFID tag is a computer. But it's very small, it's very simple. It doesn't have a battery. It gets power from the radio waves that are communicating with it. There are more, even when I made that prediction, there are more RFID tags in the world then than any other kind of computer added together. Smartphone, I mean, these things cost a few cents. They're in like your speed pass and the products you buy and they're used for tracking and Amazon warehouses and whatnot. So there's billions of them and they don't have batteries, right? So that's the cheat in that story.

• 26:13Matt McCusker?

  Got you.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  But, you know, what's happening in computing is two things. One, the amount of power it uses.

• 26:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Goes down by about half every two years.

• 26:24Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  So computers just keep getting more power efficient, right? So they need less power, but also then we're getting better at like sending power over the air, harvesting power from like vibrations, sound vibrations, stuff like that. So yeah, we're definitely moving. I mean, it might be your smartphone always has a battery, but you probably noticed you get a lot more life out of a charge now than you used to.

• 26:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  So the power budgets go down, ways of putting power in go beyond batteries. That's been happening for a while. That will keep happening.

• 26:52Matt McCusker?

  Damn. So there's little, okay, so those are, what's the difference between a computer and a computer chip?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 26:58Matt McCusker?

  Really? Okay.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I mean, because you think a computer and it's like shorthand for like personal computer. But that's like a chip with like a keyboard, like a memory or, you know, a fan or something, right? But the thing that's doing the computing is the microprocessor.

• 27:11Matt McCusker?

  Got you.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  And that's one chip, one integrated circuit.

• 27:14Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy. They just pull the, I guess, the energy out of the Wi-Fi and they keep, that's why, yeah, that's why my EZ Pass keeps rocking. I've never charged that.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  There you go. Yeah.

• 27:21Matt McCusker?

  Dang, nailed that too. And what do you think?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  I'm nervous.

• 27:26Matt McCusker?

  No, the third one, I think you're spot on. Kids and grandkids will live to a hundred on average.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:31Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's coming, I think.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Worldwide, we're definitely getting there.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, the pandemic like screwed up like life expectancy. Cause the thing about life expectancy that nobody knows, right? Is it's what age are people dying today? So if you're twenty years old and you're like you go on the internet or say your life expectancy is eighty. But that means that the people who die today are average age of eighty.

• 27:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  That's not actually counting for the fact that it will probably get better as you get older.

• 28:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so most people are gonna gonna hit a hundred unless they have a bad accident or something.

• 28:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  That's definitely on the way.

• 28:07Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, hopefully they can do that, uh, you know, little like tiny, small robots that can go around your body and be like cancer cell. And then you just get like a thing on your rod.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Oh, really? I mean, that's, that's kind of sort of happening.

• 28:18Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Like at least customized drug delivery. Like it's kind of a bit more modified for your, you know, your DNA, your body type, stuff like that. We're learning a lot and the, I mean, the thing about healthcare is you solve one problem. Like when I was a kid, like all the men were dying in their forties of heart attacks.

• 28:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  They were smoking too much, they were drinking too much, they were eating British food too much, you know?

• 28:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  And, and we figured out heart attacks, right? Doesn't really happen anymore. So then people start dying of something else when they're fifty.

• 28:47Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  And then we figured that out and then, you know, you get, and now it's so now it's like dementia type problems.

• 28:52Matt McCusker?

  It's the big one right now.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  You know, there's, there's a lot of interesting work happening. There's a lot of money being thrown at that. I guess someone will figure it out. And then the other side of that, there's, there's something else that people are a hundred dialed.

• 29:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  You just don't know at what point do you like, does it stop working that you can't fix the thing that people are dying?

• 29:08Matt McCusker?

  I wonder what the new thing will be.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  I'll probably be the one who finds out. Call me in thirty years.

• 29:17Matt McCusker?

  Dang, man. So, okay, so we've, we've figured out how you become a futurist. It's, uh, do you have any futurist like pals that you talk to that you kind of like?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, there's like, there's a little bunch of us and we shoot the shit and we, we like. You know, like we post rationalize, like you give me those predictions. A lot of guys are completely wrong. I won't name names, but but you but you know, when you said that, yeah, but what I meant was.

• 29:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, futurists.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  There's this thing over here that I found on Google that actually proves. So, yeah, you know, I I'm I think I'm an honest futurist. Like, if you if you'd have said you predicted this, it didn't happen. I've been, yeah, you're right. Oh, yeah.

• 29:53Matt McCusker?

  That's hard, yeah.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, there there are a lot of guys. Yeah, who who won't ever admit that like they got it wrong.

• 30:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  I feel you get a lot of stuff wrong, like things are surprising.

• 30:03Matt McCusker?

  If one of your futurist bros were to go like too far into the future, would you pull him back and be like, bro, you can't go that? Like, if they were like 700 years from now, or would you be like?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's like, I mean, because you've got to think about, there's two things, right? If you think about 700 years ago.

• 30:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  There was no way anybody could have described this, right?

• 30:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  But and and as the population gets bigger, you get more ideas. And people have more leisure time as technology gets better to think about new things. So technology improvement accelerates like massively, right? Which is why we've gone from like, I mean, the first like main TVs were like in the 50s, I think. Was like the big US television revolution.

• 30:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Like some shitty TV about, you know, this big.

• 30:47Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  And now you've got like 4K on your phone.

• 30:51Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So like, the idea of like looking more than like 50 to 100 years ahead in any meaningful way.

• 30:57Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, because like one thing leads to another and at some point, you know, it's just gone in a direction you didn't see coming.

• 31:03Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's what I like. Um, I do like in terms, you have you have a pretty optimistic outlook on terms of the future and technology.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:10Matt McCusker?

  A lot of people.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:11Matt McCusker?

  You know, especially with the sensors and this and that, feel like they're they're close, they're slowly getting closed in by like a giant, you know, uh, surveillance apparatus that's going to like lock them out of the room.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  People use tech, good technology for bad things.

• 31:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  I mean, generally governments, not always, and that that happens and, you know, you try and control it, but you, if you if you don't invent something because someone might do something bad with it, you know, you're never going to invent anything, right?

• 31:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Um, but the other thing is like, it's it's safe to be an optimist because like, I'm going to tell you right now, like, the world is not going to end in our lifetime.

• 31:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  And if I'm wrong.

• 31:46Matt McCusker?

  Hey.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Who's gonna? Who's gonna know?

• 31:50Matt McCusker?

  True.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  You know, you can't really lose betting on that.

• 31:53Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, well, no, I feel like it's a lot of you get a lot of, uh, I personally think it's really in vogue to be very negative and very kind of doom and gloom with the history, especially with AI. Everyone I know is like freaking out about it. And I honestly don't, I don't know. Again, it's like, yeah, it races a bunch of jobs, you know, seemingly overnight, that's it's gonna be a problem, but I, I really feel like they'll figure it out. I don't know. I don't like,

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:17Matt McCusker?

  Cause it's like, especially if you like, go back to like the fall of the Roman Empire. Dude, if you would ask any of those guys back then that had been like, it's done, we're done, everything's over. They would have never been able to conceive of the fact that it's like, not only not over, but it's gonna be a million times different and better.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I mean, and, and bad things happen, good things happen. AI is like a big complicated topic, but like, it's very close to the Internet of Things. So I've been like dealing with AI one way or another since the nineties.

• 32:43Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  So like, I'm not like all doom and gloom or all like hype about it. I'm kind of like in the middle, you know? And the thing is, I think, um, and I'm not, I'm not trying to raise a billion dollars right now. So, you know, it's easy for me, but like it's, it's just a more complicated toaster. Right?

• 32:59Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  You know, you, you like a toaster turns bread into toast. It doesn't know what toast is, right? Doesn't understand meaning. AI is the same. AI is just like brain toast. Right? You know, it's, it's, it doesn't know what it's doing. It's just a machine. And, you know, like there, there are things that only humans can do, right? And the thing that only humans can do, one of them is meaning. So if we like tell stories, we can only tell good stories. Computers can't, they can tell bad stories because they don't know what anything means.

• 33:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like, I give you like in comedy, like the best comedy is the truest comedy.

• 33:36Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  People laugh most, they get the most emotional reaction from something that feels most true. And that's true in all storytelling. If it makes you scared or if it makes you excited or sad or whatever. The more it makes you feel something, you know, in comedy, it's laughter, the truer it is generally. The more it means something. Machine can't do that. AI can't do that.

• 33:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's, that's kind of a, that's my feeling on it. And I've, I've like, it's useful for like editing. You can have it edit, you can have it flag errors, but like, I don't know. I I feel the same way because it's like, I mean, I guess in terms of like producing a good story, maybe they could like draw from, you know, a hundred of the best authors of all time, copy some sort of like, you know, pattern to that. But I don't feel like I've tested Grok before. By being like, you know, um, here's a joke I'm thinking of. And it was complete nonsense on purpose.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:26Matt McCusker?

  And it was like hilarious. You're killing it. And I was like, that's literally.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like the guys who run it. They're like, they're like sycophants, you know, they're like, people suck up and they think you like that too. But like, I mean, I can't imagine you like asking AI to write you a bit.

• 34:42Matt McCusker?

  They can't.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  And then you go on stage and being like, yeah, I can confidently deliver this.

• 34:47Matt McCusker?

  No, I can't do it. Cause I was, I remember hearing like, oh, it's gonna, you know, it was that first or whatever, not the first, but the last writer's strike. There was a big thing like AI is coming, it's gonna take. And I was like, how close is it actually for comedy writing? It's so, so bad. It's horrible.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And crap, crap. AI storytelling is like crap. Human storytelling, right? You know, like what's, what's, why is a bad comedian bad? It's because they're saying something that doesn't really mean anything. That doesn't really ring true.

• 35:13Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Right? And like, like you see a crappy, like straight to video kind of movie and it's, it's kind of like a mashup of a bunch of cliches you've seen a million times before.

• 35:23Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Doesn't really have any kind of thematic thing. So if I say, you know, comedy is, is truth telling, right? So I grew up, and again, I'm old. I grew up on like Bill Hicks.

• 35:32Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Eddie Izzard. You can still, you got that, you know, that Bill Hicks. Yeah. So you can go, you can go back and look at Bill Hicks like from like the eighties or nineties. He's still funny.

• 35:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  You know, maybe the president he's taken the piss out of has changed the name or something, but basically it's, it's still true, right? And so, you know, that's, that's, that's all storytelling, whether it's comedy or anything else. It's got to be real. It's got to be true. It's got to have meaning. AI, I don't think he's ever going to be at that point.

• 36:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  Where like you could say, okay, I'm going to have it tell me, write me a joke and I'm just going to go say it and people are going to laugh.

• 36:08Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. I, yeah, I don't think you could do anything meaningful. At least, you know, I don't think so. I, I think you could crank out like children's cartoons. Like Paw Patrol, if you were to do like, you know, like a, a children's animated show. I've noticed as I've, I've watched a good amount with my kids, almost all those cartoons follow the exact same storyline where it's like, you know, an animal's lost and needs its mom. And it's like, you could, I think you could like crank out slop like that, but yeah, I, I just think it's good for like organizing, it's like a super spell check where it's like it can go flag errors, you know, but yeah, I, I'm not worried about it. I know so many people like it's going to become sentient and like realize it doesn't like us and kill us. And it's like, I think people have stopped saying that since I started using it. I feel like, like actually, this is kinda crap.

• 36:54Matt McCusker?

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• 37:37Matt McCusker?

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• 38:22Matt McCusker?

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• 38:35Matt McCusker?

  Hey, uh, real quick while I have you guys, I have some shows coming up and, um, well, we have some good news and bad news. Good, well, depends on, for me, the good news is I'll be in Cleveland and Pittsburgh this weekend, March 6th. Cleveland, March 7th, Pittsburgh, and I'm not fronting, I think both shows are gonna sell out. So if you wanna come, here's your CTA, your call to action. If you wanna come to those shows in Clitz, or, uh, you wanna come to those shows, I almost called it Clitzburg, that's crazy. Uh, Cleveland, Ohio, or Pittsburgh. Forty and slip. Um, yeah, just come, you can get my tickets. I think there's a link in this video to get them. Pretty sick. And, um, also after that, I'll be in St. Louis, Missouri, Indianapolis, St. Paul,

• 39:20Matt McCusker?

  Missouri, I guess that's M.O., Missouri, Des Moines, Iowa, Phoenix, here's the big one, guys. All of them are selling pretty well. God damn that Phoenix Celebrity Theater is, it's not till

• 39:32Matt McCusker?

  April 17th, so we have some time, but that show's in the round and I actually enjoy performing in the round. So if you wanna see my butt for like good 10 second stretches while I, I do my thing and, you know, I'll turn around, I'll show you my bulge at the Celebrity Theater as well, and it'll be butt and bulge all night at the Celebrity Theater. Just an angry little micro bulge, I'll wear some joggers that night so everyone gets their money's worth, they can all go, ha, ha, ha, look at that. It's barely sticking out. Guys, I'll be in Tucson, Arizona, Toronto's a big one, two shows, again, not bragging, Nature of the Beast. Two shows, both have sold out in Toronto, I'm thinking about adding a third, so. Canadians, I know I've said a lot of bad things about your country, I was just fucking kidding around, I love you guys.

• 40:17Matt McCusker?

  You guys love me more than all these bastards in fucking Phoenix, Arizona, apparently. So, come on out to the shows, and then Chicago, of course, I'll be at the Riviera Theater. Uh, probably gonna add a second show there, hopefully, cause that, that thing, Don, sold out. May 26th, so whatever. Hopefully that makes sense to you guys. Go to mattmccusker.com. And yeah, come to a show, man. We're having a good time. Also, I'll be doing Alga-Nuts in Austin, Texas. That's, once a month, I do that where me and Tim Butterly take people's cell phones, project their algorithm through Instagram, usually on the screen, and you know, try to get a picture of like, who is this person? What are they, what is the algorithm being sent to them? Or what is being sent to them through the algorithm? What does that say about them? What doesn't it say about them? Because you can't just judge someone on their algorithm, or maybe you can, I don't know.

• 41:00Matt McCusker?

  Come out to that. That's at the Creek and Cave. So if you go to Creek and Cave ATX, you can get that. And last, and I don't remember the saying, last and

• 41:13Matt McCusker?

  cool enough, guys, I'm tired. Last and most importantly, um, noble bomb. I'll be in Philadelphia, March 16th. I'm gonna, I'm just visiting family, figured I'd strut my stuff. On the old flagship stage that is Helium Philadelphia, I'm gonna get some of my friends, and we're all gonna try newish materials, stuff we're working on. It'll be fun. Come out. It'll be St. Patty's Day weekend. You can get drunk if that's what you feel you must do. And if you're trying really hard not to be drunk, well, try to hold out. Come to the show, be sober. You know, be fun. Learn how to be fun while sober, or get fucking hammered on St. Patty's Day.

• 41:55Matt McCusker?

  It's really up to you. All these, I'm weighing out choices. That's all I'm doing. I'm, I'm not trying to coerce you. I'm not trying to manipulate you. I'm just giving you choices. Do whatever you want. Love you guys. Back to the show.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Pardon the interruption, pardon the interruption. This is Sean Gardini. I just wanted to let you guys know that I'll be in Salt Lake City, Utah at Wise Guys Comedy Club, March 27th and 28th with Nate Marshall. So please come see that show if you'd like. And I'll be at The Comet in Cincinnati. Not Comet Ping Pong, just The Comet in Cincinnati on May 22nd and 23rd. So please come to those, that was a little joke there, but I'd like, I'd really like to see you guys at the show. So please come if you can. Tickets are at sean gardini.com. And we also have Optimum Noctis at the Creek in the Cave in Austin, Texas.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Me, Nate Marshall, and LaMara Lee, every first and third Tuesday of the month. So, thank you very much for your time, pardon the interruption, enjoy the rest of the show.

• 42:59Matt McCusker?

  But, but yeah, the other, and the other thing too is like, I, I saw you talking about, um, God, who, what was it Mozart? That fake letter?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 43:07Matt McCusker?

  Where like all of his songs would come to him like in this, he'd be in a great mood and they would just start to finish, they would come and all he had to do was kind of write them out.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:16Matt McCusker?

  And how that was, everyone believed that, I was like, oh, for sure, but it's, it's literally fake.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Guy worked his ass off, probably like you do, like, you know, I mean, maybe once in a while you're stuck at a red light and you like get the seed of an idea that's quite a good idea.

• 43:27Matt McCusker?

  Sure.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  I don't know you, but I'm guessing like most of the comedy you write, you're like sitting there like thinking about it and like making a little bit better and a little bit better again.

• 43:36Matt McCusker?

  And yeah.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Getting pissed off with it and throwing it away and you know, that, that's, that's how great creators create.

• 43:42Matt McCusker?

  Hmm.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  They just work.

• 43:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  There's talent and all that stuff. It's not like anybody could be Mozart.

• 43:48Matt McCusker?

  Sure.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  But even Mozart had to be like writing things down, crossing them out. He has to play something, listen to it. They are, that's good, that's not good. That's how everybody does it.

• 43:57Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, there, that's, that's kind of a, you know, what you come to discover. It's like, it really is like, you know, if you want to do something cool in any capacity, usually it's just like, you have to trade your time. Like you have to trade tons of time and just deal with stuff that like sucks.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:12Matt McCusker?

  So bad and just keep plotting through.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:15Matt McCusker?

  Whereas I, I do think there's, yeah, there's a thought where it's like, I can just link into the AI, feed it prompts and it's like, I don't, I don't think it's going to produce.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  That's why it sucks to be like on a deadline or in a hurry.

• 44:24Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  Cause you kind of need the luxury to be like, yeah, I spent a week on this, but it sucks. And I don't want to, but I'm going to have to start over.

• 44:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  You know, and so if you, if you don't have that luxury, you've got to go with the thing that sucks, right?

• 44:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, true that. So, so about the book, you got the story of stories?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 44:45Matt McCusker?

  Where'd you, when, when'd you kind of like, you know, cause you were talking about things. What, what made you, what prompted you to switch to thinking about stories?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Oh, well, it's like, I was, so we talk about smartphones and like this year, about 90% of the people in the world, in the world, own a smartphone.

• 45:03Matt McCusker?

  Okay.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And that's like 15% of those people are like us in advanced economies. We maybe had computers before that, TVs and telephones and all that stuff. But the other like 75% of people, they never had any of that stuff. So you've gone from like not owning a telephone, you know, watching a TV that 10 other families watch on the corner of the street. To having a smartphone in your pocket.

• 45:27Matt McCusker?

  Yes.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  So the beginning of the story of stories was like, well, what does that mean? Like, how does that change things? And, you know, the way it changes things is this is the first time in human history when anybody can tell stories to anybody, right? If you have a good story, like you can put it on the internet, on Facebook or whatever. And if people start sharing it like very quickly, like it can kind of go all the way around the world. That's never been true. Like, you know, storytelling started about a million years ago because we invented fire.

• 46:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  So we invented fire and at about the, you know, similar time, alcohol, drugs and cooking. So you're sitting around a fire. What else is there to do after you've eaten some food, gotten drunk, gotten high? Right? You start shooting the shit. So that's how language happened, right? Language didn't give us stories, stories gave us language. So you know, you're a million years ago, like your long way human ancestors and you only know how to like, you know, say, oh, there's a pioneer over there or let's have sex, right? You've got a few kind of barkies now, but gradually, you've got to use sound because you can't see because it's firelight. So gradually over a long period of time, you know, you evolved to get good at talking.

• 46:44Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  About tomorrow or something you remember or like where the stars maybe came from or whatever. Right? So storytelling is what made us human, right? And.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  At that time, like it was like you could talk to like five guys, you know, your buddies around the fire, right? But then you get like maybe drawing, like you can draw on the wall of a cave or something. People can see it like even after you die. Then you get stuff like singing. So it makes it really easy to remember a story. And then of course, you know, writing, printing all the way through to like smartphones and AI. It's it's it's stories all the way down, right? So the minute I was like, what the fuck does it mean that everyone's got a smartphone? You know, I kind of went backwards, I guess, down the rabbit hole and ended up with, well, it's it's all stories. You know, the way to tell the story of what's happening now, everyone's arguing about whether this is true or that is true, or this conspiracy theory or whatever. That's really being enabled by smartphones, right?

• 47:41Speaker 01

  It's all storytelling. Storytelling is deep in our brains because it evolved with us.

• 47:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  So that's where the story of stories came from. I mean, this is like, I'm kind of a slow thinker. I like have to read fucking everything and it takes ages for it to like, you know, settle in and like make sense. And I chase squirrels. I go to rabbit holes. I wake up in the morning like, how did I get here? But the the point was like, what does it mean about the smartphones, basically?

• 48:06Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  And then one thing leads to another. You end up with the story of stories because that's the only way I figured out how to answer the question.

• 48:12Matt McCusker?

  So what did what did you uh, what in terms of like a prescriptive, I guess, or if you have one? What do you think the answer to that question is in terms of like where it'll go or like, how do you handle yourself in a world where like you have a million people telling you a million stories? And especially with like the deep fake stuff and you know, it's coming down the pipe.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  I mean, I I think there's a couple, I I I can't really do prescriptions like I but but what I what I think is,

• 48:39Speaker 01

  we've got to understand that stories are really integral to how we think about the world. Like some people think of stories, they're like, oh, I've read a book. I saw a movie.

• 48:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  But yeah, stand up comedy is storytelling, right? This conversation is storytelling, right? Most of what we do is storytelling one way or another.

• 48:52Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, the thing I'm sorry to get the thing from the book that really, you know, I think is cool is the uh, kind of the idea of like, you know, how you're. Majority, oh, I guess maybe the whole entire thing of your identity is literally just you telling stories or continuing stories, like the person you are. And to be, and it's like, you know, you're, you were saying too, like how your, all your cells basically die.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:12Matt McCusker?

  Except for your eyeballs and like the

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Just a little bit of the back.

• 49:15Matt McCusker?

  Part of your brain.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a couple of little bits.

• 49:17Matt McCusker?

  That's crazy. That's the only thing over your whole lifetime that lives the entire, the cells don't die. Just you have your, your original eyeballs and your little like lizard stem of your brain. Everything else dies, comes back, dies, comes back.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  It's all made of food.

• 49:28Matt McCusker?

  So, and I, I do get that because there's like, okay, that's fair. So like your physical form is actually kind of coming and going. And you're, you're, the thing that's actually sustained is the story you're telling yourself. The only caveat is that there is a form, like a shape to your physical cells and stuff. That's the one thing that does, well, actually no, it doesn't. Cause then you grow and you

• 49:48Speaker 01

  I mean, you went boom, looking like this, man.

• 49:50Matt McCusker?

  Actually, I came out, exactly. Came out 192 pounds, like, no, that's fair. That's, yeah, okay. Yeah. So, and then you can also alter your form. So, nope, I'm wrong. So, that is kind of cool to think of like, I was like reading it last night, kind of bug, first of all, bugging out about people telling stories a million years ago over fire, which is just like, like, uh, just like groaning noises to each other. And how that becomes basically, you know, that's, that's evolved into where, like, literally, that's how you experience yourself as who you are through stories. And the thing that I really liked too, is like stories being vehicles of like shame and glory delivery systems, where it's like, you tell, it, it happens all the time. The news is like the number one thing where it's like, it's a giant shame, mostly a shame apparatus,

• 50:35Matt McCusker?

  where it's just like, this person, piece of shit, they suck. And it's, you know, and you're listening, you're like, yeah, I hate that guy.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  There's no gray, right? It's like, you're a hero or you're a villain. And that's, that's your story shaped brain, right? So you've got to understand, like, that's, that's not how the world actually is. Everybody's kind of like a bit good and a bit bad. And some people are really quite bad and some people are really quite good. But we, we think in terms of heroes and villains, just because of all that stuff around the fireside, right? You know, because we're shooting the shit around the fireside, getting high. Well, we're the heroes. Those guys over there. They're the villains. You know, that's just how the brain works. So like, understanding that is one thing. Like, your, your understanding of the world is like ninety nine point nine percent based on stories that you have heard.

• 51:18Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And most of those stories were based on stories that the person who told you the story had heard and so on. Very little what we know, we know through our eyes and ears and so on, right?

• 51:27Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  We told it. That's unique about humans. So you've got to be really, I think, just like you might think about the food that you eat, right? You kind of got to be a little bit picky about what stories you expose yourself to.

• 51:39Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  But also then, like, don't just take him at face value, you know, especially if it's something you want to believe.

• 51:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Like, if someone tells you your hero is a hero, you might, that might be the best time to be like, well, I'm going to think about that a little bit harder because there may be another angle here, you know? And, and this is a challenge, like, because the story of stories kind of, the first wave of it is this, one person can tell stories to five people, to now, everybody can tell stories to everybody, right? That's kind of, we're at the end of that first wave. But what we're seeing now is like, is this story real? Right? Is this, because, because throughout human history, like, you know, you look at this painting, like, we know that's a painting. We know that's not actually a naked woman sitting right there, right? But as we move into this world of like ever increasing screen revolution, so it looks more and more three dimensional, ever better AI, deep fake technology, we're going to

• 52:31Speaker 01

  reach a point sometime soon, when you actually can't tell.

• 52:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Are you looking out of a window, kind of thing? Or are you being told a story? Like, how real is it? How fake is it? And that critical thinking, we already need to be like, is someone bullshitting me right now?

• 52:47Matt McCusker?

  Sure.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  It's got to get a lot sharper.

• 52:49Matt McCusker?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. Dude, real quick, got to tell you guys about this.

• 52:54Speaker 04

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• 52:54Matt McCusker?

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• 53:37Matt McCusker?

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• 53:49Speaker 04

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• 53:51Matt McCusker?

  Nice.

• 53:52Speaker 04

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• 53:53Matt McCusker?

  I love Quince. I'll be, I'll be honest. They sent me the stuff and I, their boxers, they use like cotton, like regular materials, not a lot of polyesters, natural fibers. I'm a, I'm a big fan.

• 54:04Speaker 04

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• 54:29Matt McCusker?

  It's pretty crazy.

• 54:30Speaker 04

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• 54:31Matt McCusker?

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• 54:55Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's gonna be, I was like thinking about that, um, a lot, especially with the Epstein files, because I think that is going to follow whatever the next election, like the, you know, presidential election. I think it's going to be weaponized to try to like take the either, you know, people trying to take their opponents down with that, which is like, okay, fair enough. But then it's like, we'll be in a place now where you're gonna be accused of horrible stuff as a politician. There could be a video and you'd be like, that's a deep fake.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  You see that already, right?

• 55:21Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, that was not that long ago. Like I think Syria was accused of gassing its population or something. And like, there was a video. It's like, oh yeah, that's all AI, you know?

• 55:30Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Speaker 01

  That's, that's bullshit, but it's, it's common. And, you know, I mean, obviously people in Epstein, I mean, you know, raping kids is bad. Those people suck. They should all go to jail. I'm totally for that. But yeah, I mean, now just on the story of story side of it, the Epstein files exist because of email.

• 55:46Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  And there's so much like, like, you know, this like priest, police brutality stuff that we hear about now. Like, that's not new, but you get to see video of it. Like, right now, there's like ten smartphones pointing at it and they're all on the internet like immediately.

• 56:00Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  So there's good and bad with this new technology. We're getting this paper trail. Like, are the Epstein emails fake? We kind of know they're not, right? Cause they just, they look real, right? And there's so many of them. So, but at some point, yeah, you're going to be shown a cellphone video. Well, this happens now, like, look what this, you know, this person did. It's gonna be BS.

• 56:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, I saw, I saw a video of a bombing recently where like, literally the cars just like flew up in the air. And I was like, damn, that was in like the Middle East. And it's like ten people like, this is AI, not real. And it's like, fuck, that's kind of weird.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  You could genuinely find some expert online now, though, like who can explain to you like,

• 56:35Matt McCusker?

  That can get it.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  This is or isn't real.

• 56:37Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, well, I think, I know, um, yeah, I think Netflix has a thing where they, they actually screen. If you give them something, they'll run it through a filter to determine how much AI is in it. And if there's too much AI, they're like, we can't use this.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  I was watching a video yesterday, it was like some guy who was like cheating at like speed running. You know, like when you,

• 56:55Matt McCusker?

  Video game, yeah, yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  So like they video themselves, but like they'd analyzed like the mouse movement and they realized that the mouse hand was like kind of superimposed and it wasn't really there.

• 57:03Matt McCusker?

  Really?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, that stuff's already happening.

• 57:05Matt McCusker?

  This is a scandal, why doesn't nobody hearing about this?

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, I mean, YouTube, man, tells you everything you need to know. But there's, there's, again, good and bad, right? You can use this technology for like cheating.

• 57:15Matt McCusker?

  Hmm.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  But there's another guy who can use the technology to tell that you're cheating.

• 57:19Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah, it's true. And that's what I wonder too, cause again, with, with the, you know, if we go into a realm of just like political deep fakes, you don't know what's real, what's not. It's like literally genuinely impossible to tell. I wonder if, you know, cause there is like a desire for like the truth, like especially with the Epstein stuff or whatever's going on. Like, I want to know exactly what happened.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:39Matt McCusker?

  But then it's like, I wonder if people want that kind of access to the truth. If there's going to be some trade off where it's like, all right, we're all going to like divulge everything about each other. Like, you know, live, we're all on camera 24/7. That way we have like, we have the truth if we need it. I think everyone would be like, I'm all right on that.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Instagram filters are there for a reason, right? You know, Facetune and all that, nobody wants, they want, they want to make you think that's what's real. But yeah, there's, I mean, there's never any proof of anything, right? There's only evidence.

• 58:07Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  And we have to be, you know, we already are because our brains are built this way, but we have to be smart and awake about is this evidence real? Does this evidence add up to the story someone's trying to tell me? Why are they trying to tell me this story? Because the other thing like if anybody's ever telling you a story, even like in conversation, like they, whether they realize they've got an agenda. It's not like neutral or objective. They're like, they want to get a second date or they want to make you laugh or they want to impress you or they don't want you to find out what you did, what they did or something, right?

• 58:38Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Always. But it's not a bad thing. It's just the way of the world. So you've got to be kind of on to like, is this bullshit?

• 58:45Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's, no, for sure. And it's, it's hard, you know, it's, that's kind of a hard thing to do because I feel like a huge part of that is like taking yourself out of the equation as much as possible. It's usually like, what, what version of this makes me look the best? And it's like,

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Well said.

• 58:57Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's, I think that's what happened at, you know, it's, it's hard to like be aware enough to not do that. But even with like the, again, with the Epstein stuff, it's like, like you said, obviously child rapists are horrible. Horrible, horrible thing should be punished, you know, beyond even whatever they get. But then the thing I've saw is like, it becomes very almost, I don't know if trendy is the word to be like, to ramp it up to the point where it's like, we're now controlled and people are like, I'm sure of this by pedophiles entirely who are like eating kids. And it's like, and again, if there's proof of that, it's like, obviously punish that person.

• 59:35Matt McCusker?

  But the thing I worry about is like, you do get a charge, like whenever you talk about something like somebody being bad makes you feel good in some way. Where you're like, that guy's a piece of shit. And you know, it's like, how much of it is like, you know, like if they're a fucking pedo, cannibalistic pedophiles, obviously fucking punish them. But it's like, A, what if that's not as true as you think? And like, what is that weird ego charge you're getting being like, these fucking pieces, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And like, they're in control of the entire world. It's like, maybe.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Heroes and villains again, right?

• 1:00:05Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, yeah, that's the one kind of thing that I get a little, but it's, it sucks. It's like, what are you sticking up? It's like, no, not at all. Like again, if you catch somebody doing that, like do whatever you have to do. But it's like, when you, there's like a, there's a, Thing where you ruminate on it endlessly where you're like, what are you, what are you getting out of that? Where it's like, it's kind of sick on both ends.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  I think it's storytelling again, like, cause like, you know, you've got the pizza gate thing, like it's blood sucking Hillary Clinton or whatever that was about. Like, that's a story. That's like a movie. Like, good conspiracy theories are kind of like good movies, right? Or the other way around, right? Real life, even with these heinous crimes, the other thing about the Epstein files is kind of how tacky it is. You know, these people are like cheesy. They're kind of cringey. It's not like a, an action movie or, you know, it's like, you know, it's what they're doing is fucking horrible. And, and, but, but also like, they're, they're, they're just like having these tacky kind of email exchanges about like.

• 1:01:01Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, that's the one thing too, how dorky it all was.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm addicted to J E. I like, you know, I miss my jet.

• 1:01:07Matt McCusker?

  That guy stood right there.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Really? Seriously? Oh shit. Sorry. Sorry, that guy. But like, what the fuck?

• 1:01:13Matt McCusker?

  I, I've been making fun of J E withdrawals. As soon as I heard it, I was like, ah, man.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Have you looked in the Epstein files for yourself?

• 1:01:19Matt McCusker?

  I have not, no.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  Oh, I have. I'm not in there. Like, I never knew the guy or anything, but like, he was hanging around MIT when I was, so like, you know, there's, there's plenty of people who are like, they'd ever met him, but like.

• 1:01:28Matt McCusker?

  He loved, he loved science.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, there's a list of like, you know, names or people present, presenting at something, but yeah, I was very pleased.

• 1:01:35Matt McCusker?

  I don't think I was on his radar. Thank God. That was the other thing for the guys. Again, there's.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  Comedians came out very well.

• 1:01:41Matt McCusker?

  They did. Thank God. Thank God. But yeah, that's, that's the, uh, yeah, that's the one thing where it's like, you're totally right. We're, you know, it's like, we have to, recognizing how deeply stories kind of alter your reality. You know, it's like one thing to be like, let me sit back, let me take a breath, especially I know myself, as I have my own biases, like, if I read a thing and I'm, I'm starting to get pissed, I have to like, train myself to be like, relax. Or I'll feel myself, I'll be reading an article and I'm like, this better not be fucking true. And I'll start like trying to right away, pick it apart automatically.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  That's emotion, right? That's emotion and truth. That's that thing. It's like, oh, I'm feeling something here.

• 1:02:21Matt McCusker?

  Yep.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  That's really good to notice.

• 1:02:22Matt McCusker?

  But it's hard not to be like, fuck, yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  That's possibly what, that, that, yeah, I'm gonna fucking share this. I'm gonna comment. I'm not actually gonna like read the article because I just saw the headline. Yeah.

• 1:02:31Matt McCusker?

  Well, that's, and that's my thing too, though, with on the flip side of the conspiracy stuff, it's like. You have some people to be like, if something even sounds outlandish, they go, this is a crazy. It's like, it could be true too. I don't know. But it's like, I, you know, I don't know either way. Could totally. That whole thing about the island of pedophiles was out 10 years ago and everyone was like, you're out of your fucking mind. And it was true.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51Matt McCusker?

  So it's like, you know, that, that's the one thing where I try to just like, stay as neutral as possible, where I'm not like, you know, hoping it's true or hoping it's not, or it's like, maybe it is, maybe like, and you mentioned COVID in the book. That was, that was a great example of like, you know, cause again, like I, my family was just kinda like, whatever, we'll just live life as we see fit and it seemed fine. And then I, you would hear people like their, half their family would die. And it was like, it was crazy. You know, it's kind of nuts.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's, that's the thing about stories that like, is really serious. It's like, it changes how we behave. Like, you know, if you believe the Loch Ness monster is real, like, it doesn't really matter. You know, it's not, there's not a dinosaur in a Scottish lake, but like, you're not hurting anybody believing it. You're not hurting yourself by believing it. But the minute you're like, you know, I don't know, Jewish people are like pedophiles sucking blood. I'm gonna like, you know, go, go yell at a mosque. Or like, I'm not gonna take a COVID vaccine.

• 1:03:45Matt McCusker?

  Josh's Instagram.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 1:03:50Matt McCusker?

  It was just that like word set. Yeah, I know. And that's, that's the, uh.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  If you hurt yourself or somebody else, that's a bad story.

• 1:03:56Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. And especially, yeah, exactly. And especially again, it's like, just the awareness of being like, what are the odds that like, you know, I am the one who's like the good one. I'm the good guy and everyone else is the bad guy.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Matt McCusker?

  You know, and it's like, again, it's such a case by case basis where it's like, I could confidently look at Jeffrey Epstein and you go, yeah, I'm good compared to that guy, you know, but it's like, when you start like grouping in thousands and hundreds of thousands of people and being like, I know what they're all about. Uh, you know, it gets kind of dumb.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  This is, this is the identity being the story you tell yourself, right? Like the fact that Jeff, yeah, Jeffrey Epstein is this heinous pedophile.

• 1:04:33Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  And God knows what else, like, you know, bribing, blackmailing, whatever the hell he was doing. That doesn't change who you are like one inch.

• 1:04:40Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  You're not a better person because he was an asshole, right? Just like, you know, you're not, you're more of an asshole because like there's some other dude who's like, you know.

• 1:04:49Matt McCusker?

  That's a depressingly low bar. I'll tell you what I don't do. I don't, you know, roast kids and eat them and, you know, yeah, that's, that is kind of a sad thing to get a charge on. We're like, what a piece of shit.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Any story where like you're the hero, someone else is the villain. I mean, it always makes me laugh. Like, you know, you're, you're an Eagles fan, right? Like every time you go to a football game, like the ref makes a call. And if it's for your team, the ref is awesome. Like the first time I watched a football game, like I'd only just come to the US. I didn't understand football very well. But I was like in a, in a bar, it was a snowball game. Like it was Patriots versus Oakland. And like Brady had like, what looked like a fumble. And they said, oh no, his hand was, it was a tuck rule game. And then the Patriots went on to win the Super Bowl for the first time ever. And like, Boston, like, yeah, that's, that was great refereeing right there. That was exactly, the rest

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  of the world, like, fuck that. But you know damn well, if that'd been the Eagles quarterback, if that'd been Donovan McNabb, that would have been a great call.

• 1:05:51Matt McCusker?

  Exactly. I know, it's totally true. You'd be like, no, actually, yeah, that's totally fair.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  It's heroes and villains every time.

• 1:05:58Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Especially the big thing too is like, you know, the, in a marriage, it's like, I can easily spin a yarn in my head where my wife is completely out to ruin my entire life, hates me, is genuinely evil. And then literally 10 minutes go by and I was like, I was being kind of a dick. I should apologize.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  I needed a sandwich. Yeah. It's also like post breakup, right? Like your friends are like, oh, she was, yeah, you know, and her friends like, he was an ass. And it's like, you know, anytime, anytime you're the hero, everyone else is the villain and you're really sure about that, that's probably when the, the alarm bells need to ring.

• 1:06:35Matt McCusker?

  Yes, that'll be an interesting, you know, I'll be curious to see how people, you know, what they do internally to kind of navigate the landscape. Cause I, I do feel like people are starting to catch on and like relax and not get ass triggers. Even like 10 years ago, people, you know, we were like hitting each other with trash can lids in the streets and like it was, people were pretty inflamed about like political storytelling and you know, who's the good guys and bad guys on that side. I I like to think a lot of the younger people I talk to, uh, like, you know, early twenties almost take like an ironic kind of stance towards a lot of the political, like getting heated.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Matt McCusker?

  In general, I don't know if you've ever, there's a, there's a, uh, there's a, like a Instagram video genre called Rage Bait, where just like young twenty year olds will walk up to a, you know, about like fifty, six year old guy and like, what's up pussy? And it's like, and they're filming it with Meta glasses and this guy is like,

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Matt McCusker?

  I have to fight you now. And they're almost just making fun of this whole idea that like, anyone can be triggered by words to like,

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  That's, that's, that's especially a thing in the South. There's like science on this. Like, I forget what they call it, but like, southern guys are raised, like, if anybody like looks at you funny, you know?

• 1:07:42Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  That's like, that's fighting talk, right? Whereas in like other parts of the US, it's like, I don't give a shit quite so much. So, some of that again is the stories you get told about who you're supposed to be.

• 1:07:52Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Yeah. Even on like the East Coast, I remember like, you know, people, I remember I was in Tulsa recently and, um, you know, I'm at, I'm at the bar and we're hanging out after the show and there was this kid who had come to the show and he's, you know, he's just hammered. He's talking to me, ah, ah, ah, ah. And then there was just like this black dude sitting at the bar and he reached over, grabbed the dude's head and went ah, and shook his head. And I was just like, this guy's gonna fucking punch you in the face. Cause it's like, you know, if I were to do that to just like a random black dude in Philly, they would, I, I, a one hundred percent, I think, ninety nine point nine, they would fight me. Like, it's literally like, you just can't do that. And this, and I was like, huh. And I like, it started almost like interceding on his behalf, like he's, and the guy was like, oh, he's just having fun, man. And I was like,

• 1:08:36Matt McCusker?

  and, and you know, it's not even if it was a, a white guy, it's a, it's similar thing, but it's kind of like, how are you not fighting? Right? I couldn't understand it. I was like, I would assume you'd be fighting.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  But there, I mean, there are chill people in Philly too.

• 1:08:47Matt McCusker?

  There are, but it's not that many, you know what I mean? That, if that had been a bar, that someone grabbed someone's head and shook it violently like that, in Philadelphia, and again, just regardless of race, it would have been, I would have said eighty percent chance of some sort of at least verbal, it would've been a hundred percent chance of verbal altercation where it's like, what the fuck are you doing?

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, my money.

• 1:09:06Matt McCusker?

  That age group too. I'm talking like fifty, sixty, maybe twenty.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  That guy was probably a fighter. Like, he probably could have like, killed the guy.

• 1:09:14Matt McCusker?

  He just was like, he's having a good time, man.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  I tell you, if, if you're in a situation where it gets confrontational and there's one guy who's like really chill.

• 1:09:20Matt McCusker?

  Yeah. Yeah, true.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  He's like the MMA guy.

• 1:09:26Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you know, I'm not trying to be racist, obviously, and black people will fight you if you touch her. Well, actually, no, that's kind of true, though. If you touch their heads, they spaz, so stand by the statement.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Hey, you touched my head.

• 1:09:35Matt McCusker?

  Doesn't sound good.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  I do that, too.

• 1:09:37Matt McCusker?

  I don't, because people touch my face. I don't like that at all.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  I'm from London, like, yeah, fuck off.

• 1:09:41Matt McCusker?

  Yeah, you can't, yeah, you can't touch my head, but that was, that is, yeah, I don't know. That was just something that I remember that made me laugh, because I remember I, like, interceded on a level where the guy was like,

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:09:50Matt McCusker?

  Relax, man, like, you don't need to do all this. And I was like, all right, well.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  Maybe your set had made that guy so chill.

• 1:09:57Matt McCusker?

  May, I don't think, that guy wasn't at the show. I don't think he was, he was just a chill, he might have been the chillest guy, but I think it is just like, and I was asking people from there, and they were like, yeah, man, like, you know, we just, we fuck around. It's not, no one's that wound up around here in Tulsa, like, to that extent. And I was like, well, that's a lot different. I'm not used to that. So. But yeah, man, so what else? You just, you got the book, when's the book coming out?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Tuesday.

• 1:10:19Matt McCusker?

  Tuesday.

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  March the 3rd, yeah.

• 1:10:20Matt McCusker?

  Ooh.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Big day.

• 1:10:22Matt McCusker?

  Okay, so we'll hold this, we'll hold this, this, we'll have this come out, maybe day of, dude, we'll see.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  Appreciate it.

• 1:10:26Matt McCusker?

  That'll be nice. And, uh, what do you guys, so what's on the horizon now, man? So, you know, you, you kind of, what, what are you looking to do? Because I, you know, I, I had you pegged as like a complete technologic, you know, technologist, kind of, in terms of like, not, not some, I, I thought you were like a diehard computer guy. And you're more of just like a curious, kind of, where will things go guy?

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Matt McCusker?

  So where do you think yourself, could you predict where yourself, where you're gonna go?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  I hope not.

• 1:10:52Matt McCusker?

  What's your, what's your plan?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  Every few years, like, I'm amazed at, like, what's going on, and I kind of like that, but like, I'm working on a new book.

• 1:10:59Matt McCusker?

  Nice.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Um, you know, I'm promoting this book. I've gone into calisthenics.

• 1:11:05Matt McCusker?

  There we go.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  You know, doing my planch and all that stuff. Bloody hard. So, yeah, it's me, I'm, you know, trying to get my kids to pay me attention now that they're in their twenties.

• 1:11:15Matt McCusker?

  What's that like? I have a three and a five year old, I can't even imagine them not wanting to.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  They can't either. Like I said to my daughter when she was 12, you know, when you turn 13, you don't want to hang out with me anymore? She said, no, daddy, I'll never be like that. And I'm like, yeah, you, you get a text once in a while. Which is great. It means they're independent. They're doing their own thing.

• 1:11:31Matt McCusker?

  True, true.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  I mean, they're very impressed that like I'm coming on here.

• 1:11:35Matt McCusker?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Like two of my three kids, two of my three, I said, I've been invited on this thing. I don't know what it is. I'm like, oh my God. Two of my three kids have met Shane.

• 1:11:43Matt McCusker?

  Nice.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  One of them has a picture, the one from Philly. She sent me a picture.

• 1:11:47Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 01

  So I'm like, oh, okay. You know, so my kids will be in touch with me about this. So thank you.

• 1:11:52Matt McCusker?

  Nice. That's awesome.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  For once they're impressed.

• 1:11:54Matt McCusker?

  Oh, they're gonna call.

• 1:11:57Speaker 01

  The book coming out, it doesn't matter, but oh, you know.

• 1:11:59Matt McCusker?

  Oh, yeah, they're on that.

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  You met Matt? Oh, my God. That's so cool.

• 1:12:02Matt McCusker?

  That's awesome.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:12:03Matt McCusker?

  Well, dude, thank you for coming. The book's called The Story of Stories. Kevin Ashton, appreciate you.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:12:09Matt McCusker?

  All right. I'm about to piss my pants.

• 1:12:15Matt McCusker?

  Watch new episodes of Matt and Shane's secret podcast on Spotify. Do it.

• 1:12:21Speaker 05

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• 1:12:51Speaker 06

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