Benn Jordan

Hello AI Bill here. Before we begin I'm excited to share that I just released two tracks with Gondra White Knight on their new album Sprouted and I'll be joining them for nine shows on their spring 2025 tour. Also head over to MrBillsTunes.com for early podcast episodes, Ableton Courses, Samplepacks, Project Files and more. Become a hardcore Ableton year today. Our guest is my longtime friend composer, YouTuber and technologist Ben Jordan. He began his career in the late 90s under the moniker, the flash bulb, releasing a broad range of electronic and experimental music. Over time he became a vocal advocate for independent artists, famously reclaiming his music rights, challenging early digital distribution models and even consulting for bandcamp before its 2007 launch. His advocacy led him to grow his nonprofit into a music education school and community center in Chicago. Ben now runs one of the most respected YouTube channels in pro audio and music technology, going beyond gear reviews to explore complex topics like the evolution of digital music and the ethical issues surrounding AI as a critic of how independent artists are treated by the tech world. He's actively involved in setting ethical standards for AI generated audio and holds patents aimed at preventing non-consensual AI training. In this episode, Ben Jordan returns for a deep dive into everything from technology and economics to the mysteries of the universe. Let's get started. Hey, you're listening to the Mr. Bill podcast. Bill podcast. Hey, you are listening to the Mr. Bill podcast. Bill podcast. Bill podcast. Bill podcast. Bill podcast. Now we're recording. I see the big white sick. All right. Well, welcome to the podcast. Feels a lot like your podcast today because we're at your house recording and using all of your gear. It's been a trend lately. It's podcasting from my house for other people's podcast. Yeah, it's a good place to do it. I mean, you could go to a good setup for it for sure. Yeah, it also me being lazy. Well, I did a thing more recently. I sort of decided that because you could ask to do a lot of podcasts here and there. I sort of decided maybe I'm just going to prioritize real life ones because it's either going to be somebody like you that I know that is already going to have good conversation. That way, it's just not somebody's not going to come all the way here and have a bunch of pre-loaded questions. So what do you like about music? Yeah, I had that philosophy at first when I started my podcast. I was like, I'm only going to do them in person. And then COVID happened. And I was like, well, I still kind of didn't do them for like the first three or four months of COVID or whatever. And then I was like, well, I still want to do them. So then I was like, okay, I'll try one online. So I did one online and I was like, that's fine. Yeah. Then I guess if you were like to have effects to win on or something, you'd probably just fly to England if you demanded it. Yeah, that or I mean, if the only option was to talk to him online, it's not like I'd be like, no, sorry, I only do them in person. Yeah, of course. There's some study, I can't remember what it's called, but like the study was basically looked at a bunch of people's the way that a bunch of people get to work. And they force them all to get to work a different way for a month. And then after the month, they like ask them, do you still, do you, did you go back to the old way that you go to work or do you keep going to work the new way? And most of them, I think, well, I could just keep going the new way because the new way is actually better. Yeah. And I wonder if it's actually more efficient or if it's they start a new routine. And sort of like if you, you know, I guess speaking of COVID, like a lot of things that we bought in the store sort of changed, like, oh, no, no more vanilla Coke zero or whatever. Now I'm going to try this and then I never went back to, you know, for somebody who would never go back to vanilla Coke zero just because that was their new routine, not necessarily because they liked it more. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the findings were at the end of it, but yeah, it's either that, some routine change and just once you've been forced into doing things in a new way, you just get used to it and want to keep doing it that way or that quite often when you find a new way to do something, you realize it's more efficient and better way to do it. And like maybe it's a, something to say about like just the stubbornness of humans of like getting stuck into their thing and like only doing it one way or whatever. Yeah, we're all on the spectrum in some degree. In that way, I guess now they think about it. You've been podcasting for five years. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was the second or third gardener was the second, right? And I was a third. You were in the first 10 at least for sure. Yeah. I think you did like Andrew Wong. Andrew was an I soul. Yeah. Yeah. But that was in person. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was the first time we met. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. I think I'm a, I think this is probably episode 160, something maybe 170. Yeah. It's been going for a long time. When was the first time we met? I think it was that time that we did that first podcast. It had to be earlier than that. Now it was in Denver. It might actually, it might have been like, I think you did show that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That show in Denver. I think that was it. Yeah. All right. I want to talk about this thing. So so just before the podcast, Ben was like, Hey, check this out. I mean, pulled out this, um, this little black box. Uh, it's maybe like twice the size of a smartphone and a lot thicker. And it has a five by five array or grid of tiny speakers on it. And when you turn it on, it just absolutely obliterates your microphone and you can't record into a microphone near it. It just turns the mic recording into just pure distortion and trash. And I optimized it. I optimized it for like mobile phones and lobs. But I've never tried it with the ones that we're wearing on our headsets right now. So should we try it just to like show people? I'll start low just so we don't get that bad doing that. Whatever sound is going to come out of our monitors. All right. Test test test test test test. Turn it up a little bit. All right. Turning it up test test. You can hear the distortion coming in test test test. It's starting to fuck with the microphones. Yeah. So this is, this is just a box. And you can't hear anything in real life. Right. If you take these off, you won't be able to hear this. And I think so it's at like a really low volume. But I think if I were to turn the microphone towards, like if it were like a mobile phone microphone or like a, you know, if it was a wider one because this one's just in front of my mouth. Turn it down. I'm also talking a bit. So yeah, if I move my microphone over to here, no. Because I guess like you also have to be talking to the mic. But basically, if you turn this thing up, like I just had it up a little bit. Yeah. Two percent or something. If you turn that up to like 50 percent or something, it just, you can't hear anything. It just turns the signal into distortion. Yeah. Here I'll, I kind of, I kind of want to like take the headphones off just to like show people what we're talking about here. Because it's, I'll record a video on my phone right now. And then I will turn it up right now as I'm recording the video on my phone. But that's also going to destroy our ears. But I'll show people, I'll just show people what the, what it sounds like for my phone. So here we go. Let's see, do you want my phone right now? And then I will turn it up right now. Yeah. So you can hear that it just absolutely fucked the phone recording up. Yeah. First of all, why did you want to make, is this like the first idea I go when you first showed me, this is like, oh, it's like a security mechanism. Like if you go into like a meeting with some important people, you want to make sure like a journalist isn't recording. You just walk in and just crank this thing up. And then they can't record you because all microphones can't stand a chance against this thing for some reason. I've been kind of fascinated with modulating audio up into ultrasonic frequencies. And then without without having a device that does it automatically, like the sonic weapons that, I don't know, if you've seen me use them on YouTube or whatever. Yeah. That L-Rods. Yeah. Those have the modulators in there. They have chips in there that automatically sort of use frequency or amplitude modulation to bring it up. And so I was like, okay, well, I kind of want to just make my own and I kind of want to find target frequencies of like specific devices and see what's possible. Like, you know, so this thing specifically targets finds. Yeah. But in this is sort of like rather than modulating something where you can like take somebody's speech and noise cancel it or something or defeat noise cancel the lesion headphones or a lot of different things like that. This would be just kind of the brute force version of that. Like, let's just pump it full of sonic pressure and just turn it in. So what you're hearing that like lawnmower sound, the digital lawnmower sound is kind of just the your phone's microphone being pulverized back and forth really fast and like oscillating. Yeah. It's just like overloading the microphone with pressure. I'm surprised it works because like you said, when you turn it on, you can't hear anything because it's pumping out like 25k. So anyway, well, something like extremely high outside of the range of human hearing. But why does that overload a phone speaker? It's usually like when you see someone like recording at a concert or whatever, the distortion is always on like the the subs. Yeah. Like you notice that is the thing that's like putting out the most pressure. I didn't realize that high frequencies put out that much pressure. I think. I assume that most phones are used to-- I just assume that they're not even designed to think about it. Like, you would just have a shelf up in that frequency. But also, yeah, it's inaudible. So it's sort of like the one gap within a phone's frequency range or a phone's microphone frequency range where it picks up audio, but you can't-- humans can't hear it when it's being transmitted. But yeah, it works on some devices. It works insanely. You'd have in another room, and it'll still better the speaker to where you can't hear a thing. On other ones, like these microphones, these seem to be pretty shielded against it. But I mean, you could still hear it. It would still ruin the podcast. You'd still be like, why is there a lawnmower outside? But at least, I don't know why. Maybe it's just because they're so encased inside. It seems like they're very directional. Yeah. I'm wondering if I turn around like this to where it's facing the mic mode. Is that-- No, that doesn't seem to fuck with it that much. Yeah, I'm not sure why. But yeah. I think it's just more-- the drivers probably-- because it's supposed to be closer to your face. The drivers are probably a lot more-- they need a lot more pressure to be driven. Yeah, and I guess another argument for doing it with high frequencies instead of low frequencies is that it can be a lot more compact like this. It's like something you could just have in your backpack or whatever of us is like if you're trying to do it with low frequencies. Oh, yeah, like an infrasonic speaker of some sort. Have you seen that video of that guy who made like a one-hurt sub oscillator out of his window on YouTube? No. He like cut out a hole in-- he basically took the window out of a window and then put this like essentially a giant fan in the window that vibrated his entire wall, I think, to turn it into just a giant sub. And it was like rattling the doors in his house and shit was insane. Yeah, I've seen it done with pipes. You could do it with-- if you have a driver that has a lot of pressure that pushes out really far and put it inside of a giant pipe, you can then make an infrasonic speaker out of that pipe. But just because the pipe acts as a big resonator? Man, basically. Yeah. Wait, so you have the speaker at the end of a pipe and it shoots like it has to be a big sphega too. And a big pipe. I've seen it done with speakers that are maybe eight inches, six or eight inches. They don't have to be absolutely massive. But I'm not trying to remember where I saw it done, but it was like-- for ages, I've been trying to build infrasonic microphones that are easily easy to be transported around to travel with, for the home and stuff like that. And yeah, and so I've seen those testing infrasonic microphones, which are just essentially vibration sensors. The one that I have now-- I have one that I was using when I was doing the home research initially was like a box with some sensors in it. And then it had these long cables that-- or they were long tubes that would sort of spread out over an entire room or an entire area outside. And then it had to be hooked up to a computer to a laptop. And it was essentially a seismograph that was extremely, I guess, sensitive. Like you could pick up earthquakes quite far away and stuff like that. But now I have a little vibration meter for industrial use that-- you can unscrew it and put an SD card in it to log data for 24 hours. And I put it on a metal cup that has a non-lubricated condom wrapped around it. And it just sort of sits and it maximizes whatever vibration. And it picks it up quite well. And then if you filter it-- if you just filter it in Python or something like take the data of the CSV data in filter in Python, you could get a usable graph for stuff. Yes, speaking of seismology, I was actually chat GPTing some shit about seismology last night. I watched some video on YouTube about how come we've never dug to the center of the Earth. And then I looked up how far we actually dug to the center of the Earth. It's like 12 kilometers is the furthest hole we've dug out of, I think it's like 6200 kilometers to the center of the Earth. And that one in Russia? And that's the one in Russia. Just for the sake of it. And it took them 24 years to dig 12 kilometers, which is 0.2% of the way into the core of the Earth, not even into the Earth. I guess it would be 0.1% of the entire Earth, which is just fucking insane. And then I was like, well, how do we even know what's down there? How do we know there's a mantle? And then I started looking up shit and got into reading about seismology and how they basically wait until an Earth quake happens. And then they measure those two types of waves that come out of an earthquake-- S waves and P waves. And they measure these two different types of waves at different polling points around the planet or whatever. I guess they just have stations everywhere with some senses on them to be able to check what these waves are doing. And by seeing how little or how much the wave has changed pressure or state or whatever, by the time it hits another one of these stations, they're able to go like, OK, well, we know in the lab if we use this type of material and try and send a wave through it, it has about that same amount of change. And so we guess the middle of the Earth is a bunch of rocks. Yeah. But I guess they use the actual rocks that they suspect are in there. So they're essentially like-- it's almost like cryptography like to coding. And then yeah, it's all absorption coefficients. Right. I mean, yeah, this blows my mind that people figure that shit out over time. I mean, honestly, astronomy is that on complete-- on meth, it's just like the amount that we know about our universe from just calculating an object behaving a little bit strangely. And then like a planet nine, for example, we've never even-- Is that the one that people think the Anunnaki wave on? No, that's planet X, I think, or whatever. So planet nine-- no, it exists. It's in the outer-- It's like the one off the Pluto. Yeah. And we know it exists because of how gravity behaves in that area. And it's like we've ended up just using subtractive reasoning as a way to figure out, yep, it must be there. And then every theory we throw at it with another space object that's near it ends up fitting the numbers perfectly. And so that's how we know it's there. But it's really crazy because there's so many things that you can't even see. It's just like-- but we know they're there because we've painstakingly figured out that that's really the only possible explanation for why things are the way there. Yeah, one of my favorite things to watch on YouTube lately has been a spaceship launch fails. They're pretty impressive. All the ones on YouTube, they will always just show ones, obviously, where people didn't pay. But it's just so interesting. I heard a funny joke the other day. Do you know what the difference is between a missile and a spaceship? What? We put people on top of missiles and shoot them into the sky. So essentially what they are, they're just missiles, right? And they just have a giant skyscraper full of fuel. And then they just put some little people in a capsule on the top and just shoot them into the inside. It's like pure raw-dogging science. Yeah, it's ridiculous. When you think about the initial moon landing, the amount of recklessness involved in that was just like-- Yeah. It's really a miracle that it worked out as well as it did. Right. Yeah, I've watched a bunch of videos recently on just spaceship construction and stuff. I watched some of Jeff Bezos' ones. And then just some random YouTube documentary shit. And yeah, it's essentially just like a skyscraper that they're just full of fuel. And like 99.9% of the thing is just fuel. And the Jeff Bezos one, like how-- is that any point in the development of that thing? Was he just like, it looks too much like a cock. I can't fucking get in that thing. I had my picture taken. Like it really-- it looks like a gigantic dildo for anybody listening who has not seen it. Please look up the Jeff Bezos rocket. Because I mean, it is like a-- it's like if a child drew a dick rocket. It's like-- it's like that can't be-- yeah, like there has to be a better way than that. But-- Speaking of Jeff Bezos, that's a good segue into capitalism. Yeah, he's good at it. You mentioned you're making a video on capitalism. And that this is freshening your mind. And we were talking about it a little bit at the end of the stream that we just did. Yeah. Curious. Yeah, what you have views on it. Like what have you found? We'll do in this video. And I guess like how did you feel about capitalism before it? How do you feel about it now? I think, well, I think classically, I thought like-- obviously there's pros and cons to it. Every single time that I ever heard somebody denounce in capitalism usually a tanky or something just wanting to talk about communism or socialism. And as like the primary principle-- Wait, a tanky's fall left or far right? Far left. Well, like commies. You know, people who are just like-- Yeah, I feel like socialism has kind of gotten a bit of a bad name from those kind of people lately. I mean, socialism's got like a son placker and stuff. Yeah. Socialism's just kind of-- it's hilarious the way that people in our country look at it in the first place because like we still call the police and we still pay taxes for our property. and we still, I mean, there's public schools all over the country, children, literally go to school for free. There's free education. - Right, and you want to educate. - There's all these things that are like very, very socialist, but I guess, segue into your question. One thing that I didn't realize, well, here's some fun facts that I knew a little bit of this, but I really learned more about it, that in right around World War II, so we had the New Deal after the Great Depression, and the New Deal, it was called. And FDR, Roosevelt, he essentially just kinda went hardcore and he set up social security for the first time. He set up the SEC on Securities and Exchange Commission to monitor stocks and capitalism and all these other things. That sort of set the precedent for the 40-hour work week. Child labor became illegal. Sub farms got subsidies because farmers were starving, and then he was scared that we weren't going to be able to once that drought ended, we wouldn't be able to have the resources to grow food again, and everybody was gonna starve. And the Great Depression started getting better because of that, obviously taxes for the upper class were extremely high. And then in World War II, things got turned up a notch. People had rations, they had food rations, they had to get sugar, like little sugar stamps, if they wanted to buy sugar, so they could only buy so much sugar every week or every month. If you wanted to buy gas, you had to propose why you needed gas, and then you would be given gas stamps and they could buy gas. And companies, on the other hand, were told what they were gonna be producing, how much they were going to be producing, how many people they would need to hire, and what the minimum and maximum they could be paid. So ironically, during World War II, our government was what the Soviet Union was striving to become, but we were just pulling it off accidentally. Like we were a communist government to have our role in the war and have it be successful, to the degree that it was. - And was this because they just needed to divert so many like funds to military shit, like we need to dump all the money in the floor. - Everybody needed to be working together. If you look at the signs, it was like, that you need to work alongside your, the soldiers, you need to chip in with every American, so we could get this done. - So we got a cutback on sugar production, so we can buy them all tanks or something. - Yeah, everything, yeah. If you have a car manufacturer, if you're Ford or something like that, no, you're making military things now because gasoline, no, we need the fuel to go to our boys and find the Nazis. So fast forward, war's over 1950s, that's like the era of American prosperity, that's capitalism's golden era, it's literally coined that. And oddly enough, in that time, so not only is that like a product of the government's very close guiding hand of capitalism, which is what socialism is, that's like classic, you know, post Marxist socialism. But during that period, I believe in the late '50s, early '60s, we were taxing the richest 91% income tax. Like, and it's like most of your money. - Yeah, you know, but at the same time, it was like not even that controversial because anybody making, you know, five million dollars a year, could never spend it. And so, you know, it was like, it wasn't that controversial because it is now, we're for some reason, we have our heart on our sleeve for, you know, fucking billionaires, where people could never spend the amount of money they have. There's no point in them having that much worth or value or power, but we're so obsessed with the idea that we might become that someday, that we need to stick up for them. - Oh, also just a lot of those people are the ones in power. - Exactly. - And so they keep it that way, and they settle the rules up in such a way that they will stay that way. - So 2008 happens. Not too dissimilar to what happened with the, with the Great Depression, where just things got too complicated with capitalism, sorry, my dog. - Dogger. - She's just coughing, she's just coughing. It was not too, it wasn't that dissimilar from what happened with the Great Depression, where basically what caused the Great Depression was that there was no oversight or transparency in what was happening with stocks. And so everybody had optimism that didn't really add up, and then eventually the bubble popped, the entire economy fell. That happened again in 2008 with mortgage-backed securities. - Sorry, why did it fall the first time with stocks? - There was no regulated transparency. The government tried to, grain was a big deal at the time, and the government actually set up an administration in the 20s that would require grain futures to be put on a ledger for every single future. - Every single future. - Futures are like a contract essentially. - Right, you can say I think this thing is gonna be worth X in this, so futures would be a good example. Futures would be like I have a farm here right, and let's say I was planting a bunch of wheat, and I said hey, I need some money to plant my wheat. This year I want to actually want to grow and plant 50% more. I will sell it to you at a bit of a discount, and we sign a contract saying that. - You pay me for it now. - Yeah, so you give me the money now for the wheat, and then in August I deliver this much for that, and so that's a future contract, right? - Go to. - And that would be counted as a stock. - No, no, a future is a future. But you could still buy futures, and you could invest in futures, and like future bonds. Okay, you're getting put down if you're just gonna cough near me. And so you could still buy future bonds and stuff like that, and it's considered a safe investment. In the 20s it was considered a safe investment because it was a contract. You can't lose on a contract, right? It's a great deal. So, but turns out that you totally can, because grain prices went from, I don't remember the exact number, but they dropped by, I think they were worth maybe 15% what they were in the course of like a year's falling. So, all the people who bought grain futures a year later will like fucks with nothing. - Right, yeah, they essentially shorted themselves, right? And so then mortgage-backed securities, sort of same situation with that, where there was like no real transparency, nobody knew what they were investing in. People were buying subprime mortgages, and not realizing it, 'cause they're bundled into these mortgage-backed securities that had high credit ratings B or B+ credit ratings. They didn't realize that they're buying loans where 20% of them weren't gonna be paid back. And so, the entire economy fell. - So, is that another kind of future buying loans like that? - A mortgage-backed security now that, mortgage-backed securities are really, I mean, I, it's somebody who pays a lot of attention to finance, I'm surprised that they're legal. I'm surprised that it's legal to take a bunch of things in general and then wrap them up into a soup, call them something else, and not be completely transparent about what's in them, and then resell them with your own sales pitch like that. - So, just to make sure I'm understanding this correctly, if you owe like half a million on your house, I owe half a million on my house, the likelihood that I'm gonna pay it back is very low, and the likelihood that you're gonna pay it back is like pretty good. A bank could just put those two loans together and sell it to somebody else, and be like, you can buy this loan for like less than a million. And they could do it with hundreds and thousands, and then they could sell shares in those securities. - And why would you do it just to try and like offload all the shitty ones to somebody else? - 'Cause people believe that it's a bit of a more safe bet 'cause that way you're not just taking on the loan from one family who may lose their job and not pay it off that way. It's, you're betting on the housing market, which of course, God ain't making no more land, it's gonna always go up, and so that's generally what people think when they bought these, and I mean, like everybody's 401(k) was invested in the stuff, it was the safe investment, you're betting on the American housing market. Unfortunately, it turned out that like, those securities had a bunch of subprime mortgages in them from people that should have never gotten the loans that they got, you know, they're just greedy brokers, sold them as well. - And what they used to package up things was a kind of like, 50% subprime, 50% good, or was it like way more shitty ones, and then go one. - It depends on the ones, I think that fidelities were really bad, but we still may not even have the answer to those questions because nobody bothered to actually look at the time. Yeah, and so when eventually like more of those houses started getting foreclosed, and the truth started coming out, and then everybody started dumping the securities as fast as they could, and the stock market crashed. And so what happened after that, I guess you weren't in America at the time, Obama was president, or sorry, George Bush Jr. was president, and Obama was coming in, and they both worked out a deal where they essentially, it was like a new deal, but it was kind of only socialism for like the richest. And so we ended up just spending hundreds of billions of dollars bailing out the banks that otherwise wouldn't have existed or the investment firms or whatever else, and they put all of their money into, they put all of this money into new investments for future things, which built up the government. Well, the government gave taxpayer money to these, you know, or I don't wanna say taxpayer money 'cause really it's borrowed money. - Like just minted money. - We also printed, a ton of we printed about twice as much money in, God, I wanna say like 2009, I believe. One of those years right around then we printed something like $370 billion, whereas we usually print around like $150 billion at the federal reserve. - For you? Yeah. - For what? - And so, well yeah, and a lot of it gets lost too. Like a lot of, you know, just it's an accounted for, but generally inflation is. - Quite a lot of it. - Quite a lot of stuff. (laughing) And so we printed a bunch of money, borrowed a bunch of money, and the idea was, well, if we restore these companies, or some of these companies, we bought that the government literally bought the companies and controlled the companies like General Motors. So we had this like socialist semi-communist government, that had only applied to the people who really didn't need it. The people who are actually being foreclosed in their homes, like it was a lot harder for them, and they ended up homelessness increased. Our economy, another big factor that like you wanna look at is the income gap between renters and homeowners. It increased dramatically, and it still is increasing dramatically. It's higher than it's ever been. And so all these companies, they invested in this like newer economy that put electric scooters all over every city, that turned everybody into gig workers instead of employers that have, that earn wages that are negotiated, or get benefits that are required by law, things like that. And that in 2020 had happened again. And our market crashed again, because of COVID, and we printed a bunch of money, and we borrowed a bunch of money, and we gave it, we gave the majority of it to investment banks, and venture capital firms, and private equity firms, and they doubled down again, and they put all that money right back into these investments that now are giving us this economy, where it doesn't look like capitalism anymore. Like it looks like capitalism for small businesses, but those small businesses are, like for example, we ordered pizza today, and like, so that was capitalism. But to my surprise, DoorDash was involved in that. And there is a gig worker who's not being guaranteed any wage, who can work a hundred hours a week without anybody caring, who doesn't have any job security, who won't get unemployment, if the app bans him from delivering. He didn't speak English, and I'm sure he seemed like, not that I have a personal problem with this, but he doesn't seem like he's legal to hire anyway. And so, how much did DoorDash get from that? How much did little Caesars pay for that privilege to have that third party come in, and what private equity has made more predominant than ever, is businesses that, like the first thing they do, is they wedges themselves as a third party for transaction. They're not producing new things, they're not manufacturing new things. There is no like intellectual property that's that useful for society. The only intellectual property or trademarks you have are we are the only ones who can get in between these two businesses. They're overfunded, so they subsidize their own use. So like Uber, for example, used cost like five dollars in Chicago. Now it costs more than CAHBS cost in many parts of Chicago, just because it's not being subsidized anymore. Same thing with Spotify with, you know, we've seen the effect, personally, we've both seen the effects of subsidizing all music to the point where our intellectual property is devalued. What do you mean when you say stuff is being subsidized? Like how would you explain music being subsidized? So like when Spotify started, they had billions of dollars in investment capital, and they didn't turn their first year turning a profit was 2024. And so all that other time, they were just burning money. And they just to try and like to negotiate with label, they're throwing money at labels. To get a mortgage. Yeah, basically. Yeah, they gave, they gave Sony, a recognition or whatever. Yeah, they gave Sony Warner universal actual stock in the company that they ended up dumping as soon as they went public. And as a result, like everybody paid, I think started at like seven dollars, then went to 10 for the majority of the time. And now it's going up again, but everybody paid 10 dollars for unlimited music. That's not how much music costs, or it's not how much it costs in the beginning of that. Like you would have to buy a 10 dollar album before that. And now you have, you know, so of course, it's great that everybody has access to more music, but they did with piracy, you know, and they still bought albums. Yeah, that's true. I mean, like back in the day, if I wanted one of your albums, I'd have to go buy it. And I'd give $10 for the album. And I was like, I don't know, at least five of it would probably go to you. Yeah. Maybe the other five goes like JB Hi-Fi, or whoever's selling it, or HV, or whatever. But yeah, these days it's like you pay 15 bucks a month to Spotify, but I can listen to that album 100 times, if I want. Yeah. And you might get like less than 10 cents. Yeah, the bigger problem with that is like, I've pulled, I've ran this poll two times from people who watch my channel and stuff like that, with hundreds of musicians chiming in. One time was over a thousand, one time was 550. And the vast majority of them pay more to have their music put on Spotify than they get paid from Spotify, which indicates that, like you can't that well, you could. But I don't have every single number than every single person's paying and making, but I would bet that right now, if you're an independent musician, your intellectual property has a negative value, which is actually-- Like you're making Spotify more money from making music for living, then they are-- Like you're technically giving money, you're giving money to Spotify, or you're giving money to that economy to make money from your content. And that's what you mean by music is being subsidized now. Spotify is being subsidized by the musicians themselves. No, no, it's being subsidized by venture capital and private equity. One more venture capital in Spotify's case. But I mean, investors are the one subsidizing. The same ones who subsidized Uber, who again with the scooters, MoviePass is a great example of venture capital throwing money to improve somebody's lifestyle through subsidies, just to grow that market share and make it the new norm, to become that middleman between customer and business, and MoviePass failed miserably, hilariously. It's like one of my favorite venture capital stories because they were so arrogant that they-- Well, we're going to let people come to the theater. Do you remember MoviePass at all? I vaguely remember it. It's like you buy a MoviePass, and then you can just go to the theaters and watch movies as long as you have that, monthly-- $10 or $15 bucks a month, unlimited movies. And AMC was like, no, this ain't going to work. Like it's just not-- and they're like, no, no, no, no. We got it. We'll pay the ticket price. And AMC was just like, no, we're not going to accept your stupid coupons for this. We're not doing it. So they ended up sending-- MoviePass ended up sending every single user a fucking debit card that said MoviePass on it that they could only use at AMC that like worked through a separate bank. That's how arrogant they were that they would actually make this work and become the new norm. And the Hollywood would just fall as a result of this. Hollywood would just have to start making $100,000 movies to be able to make a profit. Like-- but the sad thing is that the way venture capital works is that they throw a bunch of things at the wall and if one of them sticks a piece for all those other losses. And that's generally, you know, MoviePass is one of those losses, Spotify's one of those wins. So you said you think what we're in now doesn't look like capitalism. But for example, you mentioned public schools. You mentioned the police. You mentioned like ordering a pizza. Yeah. Like don't you think in the case of public schools, the teachers incentive to teach there is because they get paid and like the police is incentive to come and help you because you're having trouble is because they're getting paid. And they're incentive for the little seizes to make you a pizza. And then the incentive for that guy to go pick it up and drive it here is all because they're getting paid to do it. Is that not capitalism? I mean, the teacher and policemen is-- I mean, I guess they're government employees. So anything that's a government employee, I guess you can't really call capitals on it. We call it a socialism. But in the case of the pizza-- Wait, but even still, they decided to become a government employee and get that job. Like they wouldn't do it if they weren't getting paid to do it, right? A teacher probably wouldn't wake up every day and go to school and teach if they were getting paid $0. I don't think they would do it if they were paid $0. But I think a lot of them would still do it. Being a teacher is actually-- most people don't become a teacher for profit. Right. They're fulfilling time. Yeah. It's a abstract-- well, Karl Marx would have called it abstract labor. It gives you a purpose or makes you that where you improve society as that. And then regular manual labor would be the janitor at the school or something. Somebody who's paid less and just kind of clocks in and clocks out and provides the physical labor needed. I mean, it could also be in some ways for some people maybe a selfish thing. Like they just enjoy teaching. Sure. And therefore, they're like, you know, it's the reason I make music for a little bit, right? It's just I enjoy doing that. It's not like I'm doing it to do it as a service to other people. people, whatever. Yeah, it's abstract labor. Right. I mean, everybody, I mean, people who are lucky end up with jobs that are like that, where they're doing something with their passion, rather than making a pizza at Little Seasers. A job that I actually had when I was 15. Little Seasers? Yeah. Right. But yes, so how is, for instance, the pizza example, not capitalism? The fractured part in there would be the door to ash driver, where I ended up paying more Little Seasers ended up getting less. The employee, therefore, can't get the raise that he normally would have had because this other business that didn't need to exist now exists because every pizza place had a delivery driver as little as five to ten years ago. And now it's almost impossible to see a restaurant, have a delivery driver, not because they can't find a delivery driver, not because fuel prices are higher because it's not fashionable anymore. Because the amount of venture capital that goes into a company like DoorDash or UberEats ends up dominating the market so much and providing so much incentive through subsidies, through subsidizing people's experiences that nobody won't order Little Seasers anymore because they're not on DoorDash or because they're not on UberEats. Right. It's like a convenience tax. Yeah. And speaking of Jeff Bezos, that's his thing. Right, Amazon. Right. He took a bunch of money, took a bunch of venture capital. Well, I don't even know if you would call it venture capital. First, he met with something like 60 different, he had 60 different investor meetings in the beginning and was asking for something like 50,000 hours each. Like some amount that is not much by today's standards. I know his parents were like huge investors. They owned like 5% Amazon at the beginning. And he just immediately, and he was upfront with everybody that they weren't going to make a profit. There was not going to be a profit for any time soon. It was going to take five or 10 years before that would ever be realized. And he put everything into growth and market saturation. And before he knew it, Walmart was playing catch up with online shopping and overall, you know, customer retention and things like that. When Amazon Prime came out, it just became this thing where if you paid, the idea of the principle was if you paid money for membership to this website, where you get free shipping, then you won't shop anywhere else. And it turned out that very, very few, I want to say less than 10%, probably less than 5%, I don't have the stat in front of me, very, very few of Amazon Prime subscribers, which is like over half of the country, by the way. Don't even compare us to shop. Like if they see something on Amazon, they don't even bother to see how much it is anywhere else. Yeah, that's kind of pretty much how I operate for the most part. Unless there's something like a synth or something more bespoke, like some like an army audio card or some weird shit like that. I found myself doing it all the time. Yeah, 90% of the time I'll just go straight to Amazon for sure. And then it turns out that in a lot of cases, if you, if people sign out of Prime or if they like open up a browser and incognito mode or something like that, they'll find that something's actually priced the less for somebody who's not an Amazon Prime subscriber. Right. So that when you add shipping to them, maybe not. No, no, I mean, it's free if you spend over 30 bucks or 35 dollars or whatever it is. On Amazon, you mean? Yeah. Right. And so in a lot of cases, you know, it's sort of an enter only economy. Now think about what you're buying. Like when you're buying something from Amazon, let's say you just buy like a task scam recorder from Amazon or something like that, you're, you're buying it from the cheapest and closest, like the person who can ship it the fastest and provide it to the cheapest out of a bunch of different independent businesses that sell that taskam recorder. And or the one who pays Amazon for listing priority. And if you search for that taskam, you search taskam port of capture, there is a good chance that a Zoom recorder or something else will be, will come up as the first result because that was also paid for. And so everything that you're being shown, even when you look for a specific product is, is, is algorithmically programmed to have you shopping in a certain way. And it's being algorithmically programmed through information that you not really realizing what you were doing, we're giving all of this information to Amazon to use to have put you in that position to maximize as many sales as possible from both ends. So on the other side of that, so the company decides to ship it, they have to pay Amazon anywhere between 30 and 50% for just just for that. Wait, is this how Amazon works? Yeah, yeah, Amazon's the middle man between small businesses or businesses. My thought process of how this worked was that Amazon just buys a ton of shit and just have a warehouse full of shit and then you buy it and they go order someone like an Amazon working in the factory, goes and gets the thing, puts in a package, sends it. Yeah, no, you buy something off Amazon, something like that. A lot of times it'll be like, gear tree with just sweet water. And then sweet water will have to eat the 50 to 30% production. And is it, is it sweet water sending it direct because it comes in an Amazon package, right? They'll either send, they'll either send it through a fulfillment center near sweet water. Like an Amazon fulfillment center. Some things do send direct, I just got like that right there. There's something I ordered from Amazon. It's a, that was sent direct. Grand pause feed is. Yeah. It's a, what is fortunately, I couldn't find it anywhere else. But Amazon, it's automatic chicken feeder where they step on it and it opens up. But like, and then other times it comes in the, if it's in a fulfillment center where they have to pay a monthly fee for the storage for, you have to pay per half or quarter palette from the last I checked. They have to pay for that and then they have to pay the fulfillment fees on top of the 30 to 50% that they have to pay. So sweet water pays Amazon to keep their stuff in the Amazon fulfillment center. If it's not sent from sweet water directly. I got you. In fact, it's just not a middle man capturing the sale. That makes a lot of sense actually. So it then, if you search something that's on sweet, if you search task ham or something like that, on Google, one of the first results you'll get is Amazon. Before you get task ham, before you get sweet water or any other, even if task ham selling it directly from their website, you'll get, and sweet water does this too. I mean, it's like the, it's just the SEO game where they, you know, try and capture the first sale. Okay. So back to Amazon, when they deliver that, they're, they do hire people, but more and more, they're hiring independent contractors who are essentially gig workers who are just taking, who aren't being paid, who don't receive the same protections that an employee gets. And so, you know, they're, they're, I mean, people in Amazon trucks generally piss in bottles because if they take enough time to actually stop and go to the bathroom, they end up getting demoted at work. And so, like, generally, Amazon, all the Amazon trucks you see have bottles of piss in them. Like, and so it's like, and then at the end of all of this, like, does it really look like capitalism at that point? Like, is it because capitalism is, is defined generally by like labor versus profit. Those are like the two, that that's the, the balancing board is like, you either have labor that's treated well and paid well and your profit goes down or vice versa. And this is a very strange perversion that seems, of capitalism that seems more and more, like money has stopped being the goal and power has, has become like, my people are kind of aiming enough for money but for like monopolism, monopoly, absolutely. When, when slavery ended, monopolization, that's, yeah, when, when, when, there's another word for reverse monopolization, uh, what, for when something monopolizes, so for example, when Amazon acts as a, when, or sweetwater is actually a better example for like this demographic, if you have a new product, if you're a small company, if you're polyander, something like that, uh, you need to have your stuff on sweetwater because so many people shop there because they capture so many sales and so they, they become a monopoly as a store for a business rather than a commercial. I mean, it's like the equivalent of Spotify really, like you have to have your music up there. Yeah. Um, I, I can't remember what the word is called but it's actually that that is an economic principle in the self. Um, but what I've been noticing more and more is that especially with inflation and like everything seems like it's a gigantic inflation hedge with a lot of these companies. Farmland is being sold to private equity more than ever before. I mean, it's been skyrocketing. What is private equity? Private equity is just a one company that generally or a firm, a group of investors or partners that will buy a bunch of companies and then classically sell them within three to five years at a profit. Uh, native instruments, for example, one thing that private equity does when we're talking about mortgage back securities. Um, uh, one thing private equity does is they blend up businesses into, uh, securities essentially that people can then buy and they'll buy a package of businesses, usually represented by the most popular one. And so, for example, So in our universe, private equity bought native instruments, isotope, God, one of those was a plug-in retailer that still exists. I forgot what it's called, but plug-in boutique or something like that. It's one of those middlemen. And then some other company that's now defunct. This recently happened on Mug too, right? No. You like that? I go call it by someone. That was by in sound, maybe, in sound music. Yeah, the people who own a chi, and that's owned by-- I want to say Rhode Island Capital, but I know that's not it. It's some northeastern name, but yeah, it is a capital firm that owns that as well. I mean, I don't think that they're going to sell Mug within three to five years, but increasingly, it's been more concerning. I mean, what initially triggered my alarm, who was private equity firms trying to buy my music, was just people like scouts reaching out saying, "Hey, we're going to figure out a bunch of music catalogs worth and then give you this price for it." Yeah, I've had that email before too, especially during COVID. People like, yeah, artists need money. I had a Minnesota on the podcast during COVID, and he sold a lot of his catalog to a company here for some amount of money, like 150 grand, or might have even been 50 grand or so. And yeah, definitely seemed the initial vibe I got from it is it's like kind of predatory, like going to artists during COVID when they need money and being like, "Hey, give us X amount of money and we'll buy all of your music." A bigger-- what I immediately thought of when he said that it was during COVID was that they just got a fuckload of money that was printed or borrowed from the government, that the Federal Reserve gave investment groups that money and they need to offload it and hedge it because inflation-- because what happens when you print a bunch of money, inflation rises, and so they need to hedge that inflation. So they can sell it as a profit just because what they're selling at four US dollars will be worth less when they sell it. But that's what initially triggered my alarm bells, because I'm like, "Why would anybody want to buy-- why would anybody want to buy my music library, my discography at a premium?" You're like offering more-- How much did they offer you for it, can you say? It depends on the company that-- But you've had multiple emails? Yeah, it was-- I mean, I had just for research essentially just to find out what they were going to do. I've had them add things up and I mean, it's close to half a million dollars. It's like-- It's a significant amount of money. Well, like 10 or 20 albums or something? Or all of it, and in perpetuity, and they would have to renegotiate something in 15 years or something like that if they held onto it that long. Right. But do you think this is a good or a bad deal for you? Do you think you would make-- what was-- you said it was half a million? Yeah. Which is-- Would you make half a million from music and 15 years these days? Just from Tune Coralone, I think I've made somewhere around like 600,000 at this point. Since when? It's the beginning of Spotify, essentially, since like 2009. Yeah. Okay. So-- and they would just keep it for 15 years and then you would get it back. Yeah. That seems like a reasonable deal. Yeah. Sammy Ducin. Right. Maybe. It's like an up front payment. Yeah. Unless all of you just like goes insane, like, you know, in the next few years for some reason. Which am I, like, if you're doing, you know, getting bigger on YouTube and stuff? Yeah. And I haven't really seen any music since early 2022, just because of the way that the economy looks with music really-- like it-- You don't think like something like Bank Camp is a solution or like your own-- Yeah. --say make your own platform and just sell it there? I've put stuff on Patreon. And sometimes I've shared like the project files. For a while I had project files on GitHub. Right. People could literally just download them and, you know, do whatever they want with it. And what do you-- how do you feel about Patreon? Because they're kind of like a middleman too in a way, right? I'm not happy with it. But-- It seems to be like the one you've gravitated towards the most. It's, again, it's one of those things where like the thing that's stopping me from literally starting a square space site and, you know, putting a paywall on a certain portion of it or WordPress or whatever. The thing that's stopping me from doing that is that a lot of my Patreon members-- and I've asked them, you know, I've like, feel that this stuff-- a lot of my Patreon members are other people's Patreon's and they're like that convenience. Yeah, they're like-- They're like-- They're like to be all in the same place. Yeah. You understand that. I did Patreon for the podcast when I first started it, but then I shut it down like six months around. Right. And, you know, I reckon having your own website is the way to go, but I do understand like that as an end user too, I also understand liking that convenience, like being able to go to one spot. Like I use Patreon and I have subscribe to a bunch of Patreon's. Yeah, it's nice to go to one spot and get everything. Sure. I mean, that's why a lot of musicians still use Spotify too, you know? It's like-- Yeah, it's a sacrifice. Yeah, I miss Spotify user and I do enjoy it, I think it's a nice, convenient way to get music. Actually, I thought of something on the way here. I was listening to Spotify and on my release rate, I applaud the Boosey track anyone and I was like, "What the fuck, he's still putting out music?" What's the deal with that? Like, why? How is that still happening? I just don't understand like with classical people, every now and then like a rack man and off track will come up in my release rate or a Claude de Boosey track or something. And I'm just like, "How does this work? Like, who owns the rights to this shit and how are they uploading it to the actual Claude de Boosey Spotify profile?" Well with de Boosey, I think I could just take a midi file of like one of his tracks and put it through like a contact piano library. Like if it's, you know, let's just say it was like one of his pianos and auditors and something like that. And then, yeah, I could just like tweak it a little bit, tweak the BPM. Like, I don't even have to learn how to play it. But you could get it uploaded to his Spotify profile. Oh, that's a good question. Yeah, I think it would probably lump in. I bet that he has a massive amount of just random, like how many. And then you just put yourself as a collaborator on it or something and see if you can get royalties. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if you have to do that. Like, because you would, you would essentially be profiting from both the master and master synch sides because it's so old, right? So it's kind of open. But that makes me wonder if. Yeah, that makes me wonder if there is some sort of qualifier. Also makes me wonder how many Claude de Loons there are on Spotify or something like that. Like, it's his most popular. So I've had this thing happen to me on Spotify a bunch times. And I've seen it happen to other people too, where like just some random other Mr. Bill will upload their music. And it'll show up as my last release track. Like it'll like knock my latest release off and be like, this is the latest track I put out. And you have to reach out to your distributor or Spotify directly, mostly usually the distributor. Be like, "Yo, what the fuck is this?" And you get this removed. And it's just possible to do that to most people. It's not possible to do it in my experience to virtual Riot, but to everybody else, it seems like you can just put anyone's name in there and just have it come up on their profile. For some reason, when I had a virtual Riot remix, he remixed one of my songs like last year, when to put that up and have it show up on his profile, we had to email someone. Could be as distributors or something. But yeah, no, I mean, that's the release, the release hijacking is what that's referred to. Yeah, I mean, it's happened to me and I kind of ignored it in a way, but I was, I don't know, I also just wonder if anybody even looks at my profile on Spotify, like if anybody actually, I mean, I've listened to your albums in the car on Spotify. I mean, so you've like typed in the flash bulb and then like listen the whole album? For sure. So I imagine that that's so rare now that somebody actually listens to a full album. Just do do do do. Is there really, let's see, what do you play is that on Spotify? Yeah, what's the thing? I honestly haven't looked at it in probably like six months. The flash bulb, you're at 206 K monthly list. Oh, no. So that's a lot of people listening down. Oh, I'm going down. That was higher. I mean, this is about what mine is at. And I consider that to be like a decent amount of people. Yeah, I mean, it's still amazing, but um, using that's just all algorithm recommended and playlists and stuff. You don't think it's people going to albums and listening now, eh? Oh, yeah, yeah. It's almost entirely that. It, it actually showed you those metrics. I mean, yeah, I should check. Actually, what's going on there? Which also like lends to my point to where, you know, that doesn't really look like capitals them anymore when, when you're like a member of a system, when you're renting, you're renting a membership to a system, you don't get to own anything. You don't get to buy anything. And then it recommends you, you know, primarily what you're listening to is what it recommends you to listen to. You don't really have that choice that you used to have or you've been like demotivated to have it and that's how it operates. And now that's monetized on the other end with their discovery mode where people get less royalties to have their music prioritized in the algorithm. And so it's just extracting from both ends rather than, rather than even acting as like a middle man that's selling something. Right. So what is the, the you think where and now if not capitalism? Um, like, stagic capitalism? Well, I would, one thing that like when I was writing in the beginning of writing my video, uh, was this video made on YouTube? Yeah, yeah. Can't wait to watch it. Thanks. When in the beginning of writing this video, uh, I was going over the history of capitalism and. that starts with feudalism, which is where you have a king who kings decided that they could just own land. And then if somebody wanted to continue living on the land, they would have to give so many of their, if it was an orange plantation, they would have to give so many oranges to the kingdom in order to stay there. And then capitalism came to the rescue and people bought their own land. However, then slavery came to the United States. And feudalism more or less ended in like the 15th or 16th century. Post slavery, well, my grandpa was telling me a story 'cause my family, not the family who raised me, but the other side of my family, my dad's side. They had slaves on not when I was alive, of course, but in the time of slavery, that was a plantation that had slaves. And at the end of it, they said, well, we know you've grown up on this plantation and you have nowhere to go, so why don't you just stick around and we'll let you keep some of the crops and you just pay us some crops for the land. And I later looked into what that was and that's sharecropping. And that was essentially what happened in a lot of cases when slavery ended because if you were born a slave and all of a sudden the Civil War ends and it's no longer legal to own a slave, where are you gonna go? Just like you can't just walk into the road and be like, all right. And so for, I mean, centuries, I guess, they stayed sharecroppers remained and that sharecropping remained up until like World War II, like that's when it kind of went out of style. But it made me realize that obviously I would never want to compare myself or anything that I've, anything that like, you or I have gone through economically as successful musicians to slavery because that's not what I'm doing. But it does look like the economy is set up like digital sharecropping. Like you have to, you can release something on Spotify if you give the at least half, most likely the majority to the land that you're renting to host your music. And you cannot decide how much it costs anymore. I mean, I've even had Spotify yell at me for album artwork before where I had text in my album artwork about a version number and they yell at me and told me to literally, if you look at my last Spotify release, it has a bunch of red scratched out text on the front of it just because I literally just opened Photoshop and was like, all right, fuck you, here's the album. - Charlie and Types. - Yeah, oh yeah. That's hilarious. So it's like, so I can't sell the exact thing that I want to say. - Wait, why was it that they had an issue with that? - It was a version 1.0 because I was going to. - Oh, you're gonna update a kind of software. - Yeah. - That was cool. - And you're gonna keep updating the masters on Spotify with the new artwork. - Yeah. - And you just decided against pursuing that idea 'cause there's no good platform to do it on? - Yeah, mostly. - Or do you still plan to update it? - Like if GitHub had large file support, a little bit better, like if it did the way that it deals with most things, I'd probably just do that. I'd probably just have, but at the same time, it's gonna be an interesting way to release an album like "Vosion History" it. - Yeah, right. Like why it's the only reason that our albums are like these tombstones, these like, these encased things that we can never reopen is because of physical media. Like which nobody's using anymore. So why not? And if you liked the first version of "Curly and Tapes" or something like that, you could always go back and bookmark, you could just go find that. It's not like, there's not enough storage on the internet to put it. - Yeah. - Yeah, but okay, so Spotify said no. No, that's not allowed. - Why don't you just do it like on your own platform? - I still may, you know. - It's a good idea. - You know, Kanye gave me that idea. 'Cause "Life of Pablo" he ended up like changing a few things. There was like a 1.1 to "Life of Pablo". It wasn't named that, but like something had changed. And I remember being like, wait a minute, there's a new like vocal line in there or something like that. And then I was like, oh my god, albums are evolving. They're like software now. You don't have to keep it the way it always was. - You really should change log with every year. - Right, yeah. Like that's pretty good. And then also like when you add in like the other things that you could put with an album like "Session Files" or stuff like that, especially you. Like I mean, for how many people listen to music who are also able to nears, who also subscribe to your education platform. Like that's. - Yeah, honestly, like this is giving me an idea. It might be like do something like this way. I can just release like all of the project files with all of the versions of like the iterations I went through with the songs for each version. - And then not only that, but like if you are updating an album, like if I decided to make a "Curly in Selection" 1.1 or something like that, all of a sudden out of nowhere. And if I were to, or if I were to just release one album that I consistently, that was like, you know, this living organism that consistently got updated. Like before I had a YouTube channel, like people would only Google me like every year, once a year, every two years. And it would usually, and if I looked on like social media, it would be like, "Oh, he's still making albums, that's cool, as if I got into like age back or something else." And that would be a way to keep people connected. Like you wouldn't have to be thinking of stupid shit to put on Instagram constantly because you'd be able to work on me so it can keep updating your album. And I, and God, I mean, when I think of like artists that I listen to, that I actually follow and pay close attention to, like I would be like checking their website every week, you know, like, "Oh, is there a new Corey Henry thing?" Or, "Oh, is there a new, you know?" But, yeah, so back to the point, Spotify said, "No to the artwork, no to the concept." I can't add anything else if I wanna have any of those extra files, you can't put that. It can only be music, it can only be encoded the way that they wanna encoded with the codec that they encoded with. And at the end of the day, it doesn't look like capitalism anymore. 'Cause I'm not able to have the freedom to price things the way I want them. - Well, you can, just not on Spotify. - Right, but it's created, you know, what percentage of music listening is on Spotify now? I'm sure it's changed since the last time I looked. - Like, I was over 50 years old. - Right, yeah, so it's-- - So it's-- - It's done what Amazon Prime did to, you know, shipping commerce. And so it begs to question like, it's further from capitalism, like, or traditional capitalism, then it is traditional capitalism. Like, you could still say, "Yes, there's somebody "still making money." But again, this company that's been like, both citing it, getting money from both sides, from both customers and from people, you know, essentially giving them royalties for free knocking paid under a thousand streams. And it wasn't until 2024 that they even made a profit. So they've just been burning money while taking money from both those ends. And so, yeah, that's not capitalism anymore. That's something else that's sharecropping. Digital sharecropping. - Yeah, I feel like the internet used to be a lot more interesting. It used to be like when I first started, there was all these shitty geoscience websites. And everyone was like, no one really knew what to do with the internet. - Yeah, right. - So like, everyone was just kind of trying shit and doing their own thing. And I feel like these days when I go online, it's just like the same six websites. - Yeah, yeah. - And yeah, it's got a little depressing to be honest. I do miss the like early 2000s crazy internet where people just do it and say, like, like what you're saying, like, have a website where you like update an album. Like that's some, I feel like shit you would see in the early 2000s on like geoscience or like my space. - Yeah, and when people would be like, I'm gonna make an album and then I'm gonna make a website. - Right. - It's like this crazy idea. And now it's like, are you fucking crazy? Nobody's gonna go to a website. Like, well, that's, we were talking about this earlier. I joined Blue Sky when I quit Twitter. I mean, I'd been a Blue Sky member for like a year but I updated it like once. And when I deleted everything on my Twitter account and like left, you know, whatever it was, like 25,000, 30,000,000, Fowers, just sort of nuked it and went, - Wait, did you delete your Twitter? - Yeah, I deleted, I guess you can, can you delete it? I think you can only deactivate or? - You can delete it, but then they could resell your username, which they do, they auction them. Instead, I wrote a script to delete every single tweet that I'd ever made, which was like tens of thousands. It was-- - I've done that before. I deleted everything before the 2017 or 2016 at one point. 'Cause it's like racist, like, skinhead stuff. - Yeah, I mean, I probably said some shit I was. - Oh, okay, no, I was joking, but no. - Oh, I mean, I probably didn't-- - I'm sure it wasn't racist, skinhead stuff, but yeah, I know I seriously. - Yeah, not racist skinhead stuff, but you know, I grew up in Australia. - Right, yeah. - We talk, you know, all sorts of shit down there. And I never expected to get to where I was gonna, where I am today, right? I was always just like, "Yeah, whatever fucking everyone's a cunt." - Yeah, yeah. - She's like, you know, it's just a, I don't know, it's a different, it was at least a, when I was growing up in Australia, a different culture, and people would say also it's a shit, and I grew up around that, so I would say it also it's a shit. And anyway, yeah, around, I think I did this in like 2019, and I was like, the political climate strange, a lot of this kind of deleted all of my shit from-- - Way back then. - Right. - Yeah, no, yeah, I mean, I did mind basically 'cause I just didn't want it to be able to be engaged with anymore idea, I just didn't want. I didn't want Elon Musk to get my money in any way, shape or form. Other than my tax dollars, which is stupid. - All right, like the engagement would then basically be adding good to his platform. - Yeah, right. - Makes sense. And so, to Blue Sky, I went and I, Blue Sky, if they do have an algorithm, it's like very light. Like it's very, it's just, oh, this person is into, pictures of puppies. So maybe we'll suggest some puppy picture accounts or something like that. That's about as extensive as the algorithm seems to be. And the amount of like, so my number one, I was telling you this earlier, my number one post on threads is something about Elon Musk that's like me insulting him in some way. My, and like if you look at all my top posts, it's all like very spicy content or content that like, some people got really angry. - Yeah, like a rage baton. - Right, yeah. And then on Blue Sky, my number one post by far is astrophotography or links to videos I made or me talking about making a video or like-- - The actual shit you would hope would get a lot of updates. - Yeah, like the reason I'm on there in the first place. - Yeah, it's always annoying like you go on social media and you just say like some snarky thing or make like some weedy comment about like, you know, win-amp or like some dumb shit like that. And it will get like a ton of updates and then you're like, hey, I just put like 400 hours into this album and it gets like four likes. - Oh, right, yeah. But I mean that's by design, right? Because on X or on threads, they very much don't want you leaving the site. They want you to stay on it. So anything, so they literally deprioritize content that has an off link off the site, whether it's a video or anything else. - More stuff that they just don't see people engaging with. - Right. - Yeah, I feel like every time I make like a, you know, for instance, I don't want to mention exactly what I was, but I did something the other day and I just got a lot of hate on Twitter. - Yeah. - And I noticed if I went and looked at anyone at the-- - Was that the picture of Muhammad's spread eagle masturbating? - Yeah, I don't get it true and put it out. (laughing) - It's not good. But I just noticed like everyone on that thread that was hating on me for it. If I clicked on all of their profiles and looked at other tweets that they'd made to other people, it was just, they were hating on fucking everyone and I was like, okay, I get it. What's happening here is Twitter has found this thing that I've drawn and been like, "I had no-- - She clarified that you didn't actually draw that. That's my imagination. (laughing) - But Twitter was like, all right, I know exactly who to show this to. These same 30 people who like to hate on people in the EDM industry and yeah, it seems like it's definitely designed that way. - So what is the takeaway from that? Like ultimately, like the takeaway from that for me was blue sky is what society kind of looks like and threads and X are just making money off of rage. But not only does that affect my outlook on society and affect my day, just thinking that this is what people are like, which would affect my output. My videos might change because I think that people are so hostile and crazy or I might be more careful when not take as many risks or whatever it is. But now imagine being like a 14 year old girl and this is your environment and it's actually terrifying. It's like all of a sudden I became like so ethically disturbed by social media because of that realization where it's like this is actually creating a simulac rougher for somebody to think the world is a lot worse than it actually is. When actually it's full of people who are more likely to be supportive and kind, but it just doesn't make as much money as somebody like telling you that you're ugly and then somebody arguing with them about what they look like and whatever else thing that would happen to the average person posting a photo or whatever it is. So you don't see a company being like, okay, we see what makes money here. People hating other things because that makes them comment that makes them stay on the site fighting, et cetera, as capitalism. I think that it initially was, but I mean, it would be very, very hard. It would be very difficult to consider Elon Musk a beacon of capitalism. You would say that some people could say that he's like, he's one- Exactly what he is. But I don't think that being worth half a trillion dollars is something that should exist in capitalism. That's kind of a perversion of capitalism in itself. Like half a trillion dollars, I think now he's worth like $480 billion or something less. I looked like that is, that's, I mean, he's worth far more than the entire annual gross domestic product of South Africa. Like if you could shop for countries, he could buy a huge chunk of developed countries. And like a person that's not the point of capital is like, a person should not have that amount of power. But more so, I mean, he gave what a quarter of a billion dollars straight up not only paid for almost all of the rights marketing for the election, for Trump's election, but he literally paid voters to sign pledges and things like that in swing states. Literally just gave them money. Like that's not capitalism anymore. That's a lot closer to fascism. Right. And now, as a result of doing that, he's been awarded a high government position that's never existed before, where while I say this, he's going through our social security files and going and firing literally him and his people that he's employed for this are firing the people that tax him. They're at the IRS fire. And it's like that's not a product of capitalism. That's a product of something that is entangled in corruption with the government, which is a lot closer to fascism. But again, everything that Elon's involved with is not everything, but I would say that everything he's involved with is either a subscription platform type of thing, where if you, you know, you could subscribe to full self-driving in your car. If you want to use the media services in your car, if you want to listen to something like Spotify, you have to pay a monthly, I think we have to pay a monthly - Tesla. - Tesla? - You have to subscribe with Tesla? - Yes. - Let's fucked up by the car and you still have to pay a monthly. - Almost every car now is like that. - Yeah, I mean, I guess I pay a monthly fee to like, essentially I guess I'm renting my car. But I mean, you know, the idea is like you pay it off and then you own it. - Oh no, I mean, like I bought my Ford F-150, like I have to pay extra after I think the first year to use the blue cruise, like highway driving assist, BMWs. - And what is it? What's the monthly fee? - It's like 40 bucks. BMWs, you have to pay monthly fee, some BMWs, you have to pay monthly fee to use the seat warmers. - Yeah. - Like it's fucking, and so I bet that's like, - Yeah, that is the same. - It's a rent-based economy. It's like, - Yeah, really is. So you think we're going closer to fascism, we're not necessarily in capitalism anymore. Where would you ideally like to see society go? Like if you could just like snap your fingers and it could all go some different place. Like what do you think would work best and what would you be happiest in? - You know what I was really, really excited about. And this is like one of those things where if somebody fucking clips this without putting the context in it, I'm gonna go to their house and bash their head and that take that as a warning. One thing I was really really excited about at first was crypto, which did not work out well and it's not good for society at this point. - Yeah, because I think it's just because of people's greed that it didn't work. - Yeah, and it essentially emulated what caused the great depression in the first place. Just lack of transparency when the whole thing was designed for transparency. Like a blockchain, the whole point is a ledger that you can see transactions on and you could follow transactions on. But in order for blockchain to actually work in the decentralized way that it should have, you would have to be using it for all your transactions and nobody's using it for transactions. So at least not directly in the way it was initially made to be. And there should only be one. You know, like the whole point is that it was a decentralized currency that everybody used not a bunch of meme coins that become their own market. And so with that being said, the idea of decentralized commerce was very exciting. Because then you could also have things like, running a business in a decentralized manner. I could hire people to, I could hire a camera person and a lighting person and somebody to help me do research. And they could all just automatically, you know, with what we were initially promised with like NFTs and smart contracts. If there wasn't somebody profiting on the other end of that pyramid scheme, that would actually create a really exciting way to do things where you don't need any of those middlemen. Like you don't even need Visa or MasterCard or a bank account or any of that sort. - That's like an automated middleman basically. - Yeah, no, I do agree. I think that was a really good idea and the start, But I think people's greed and just need for power got in the way of it. The idea of Bitcoin was that it was decentralized. Nobody, there was no centralized power. But there is just decentralized power now. It's whoever has most of the Bitcoin. I would be really, well, who invested early on it? Who found out the first? And in a meme coin, it was like who had the most US dollars or whatever, who just had the most VR currency and was able to buy up the most. And now they essentially control it because they can control how much it's worth. Yeah. Or regionally, who can pay the least energy price to mine it. And so you end up with areas of China that are just filled with Bitcoin mines. And where it's like nobody else can get that same level of efficiency. Yeah, I mean, I think at the very least what I would really like to see and what I would be really excited by, like I'm excited by things like Blue Sky and Macedon and stuff like that. Like that's actually because it's somewhat decentralized. Like if you know like the way that, you know, the, the Macedon system works. Or like you have your own servers that you connect to this headquarters server with. And it's a little bit more democratized that way. But at the very least, it's like a no brainer that there should be a decentralized social network that operates that way where, you know, in, maybe you do have to buy in initially or something like that, but nobody can own more than one coin. Like, like there should be some sort of limit on ownership for those things that aren't just finance based. And that would make a little bit more sense. And that would be a good way to vote on things and how you want the site to turn out. You could have referendums every single time that there's, you know, a major decision or a minor decision. Yeah. And you could set up employees and pay them with those same levels of currency and stuff like that or a cash out at that point. Yeah, I do think that would be pretty ideal if everyone was on board with that. But that's the other thing with these kind of things is they don't work if, if nobody gets on board. Right. Which I guess that kind of stuff has to come from the government really. They have to just make a law and be like, you're forced to like go into this new system that is like, you know, democratized. Yeah. I mean, that's what China is doing with their currency. Right. They're digital currency. They make a coin. Yeah. Yeah. They have a digital currency there now. And it's like, I mean, it's like all through we shadow something, right? Yeah. And I mean, that's like terrifying to us with our current economy and how we're, you know, doing things. One thing that dawned on me just recently that like blew my mind. So back in 2023, I was like, I was maybe as 2022 initially. I was consulting for a few different music gear companies. And I was considering buying a small portion of one just to like hedge money or whatever, you know, fight inflation. And I was trying to research if sales run an uptrend or downtrend in overseas markets like China. And China isn't very transparent with their financial data like they are in the US. And so I had to do a little bit of digging and one thing that I was like, it's like stuff like what we're sitting in front of now like the solar 42 synthesizer and stuff like that. These are all luxury items. Like if I at any point got anywhere close to being hungry, I would not be buying this. So in the average person would not. So you can usually assume that music here would follow luxury item trends. So luxury items were way down in China. Or sorry, luxury items were way up in China. But then when I looked at like each individual thing like gems and like fashion and, you know, pan bags, they're all down. And it was like, well, what the fuck why is luxury as an item up so high? And then I realized it was all gold. And I was like, yeah, but this is jewelry. It's not like bars of gold. Turns out that all over China citizens were buying gold jewelry to hold on as hedges because they didn't believe in the dollar. Which is like, what? Wow, that's crazy. I had no idea that their economy was going through such a rough time. And just recently I realized this happened right after Putin invaded Ukraine. And one of the first things that Biden did when Putin invaded Ukraine with the US dollar being like the safest currency in history, he is confiscated Russia's assets with the sanctions. And it's like global investors realize which assets did he confiscate? Like basically like any assets that Alagarks had in American banks or that the government had in American banks that were just confiscated. And nobody thought that this would ever happen. Like this was like unheard of stuff because like again, like why would you ever jeopardize the US dollars legitimacy and bedrock of the entire world economy? And it seems like some global investors were like, oh China is not going to get paid back. Like we're just going to invent a crisis with them or a cold war or whatever and then confiscate the, you know, or call off our own debts or something like that and say, well, why don't you do something about it? And who knows if that's actually going to be the case. But it's definitely something you could imagine they'd be considering. It's a strong enough possibility to where people started pulling out of the economy and droops, which is like, yeah, which is like pretty crazy that that was all like related. I mean, I assume was all related. I've like looked it up and I couldn't find any like news stories about those two things being, you know, the correlation between those two things. But it was like the timing was was like one after the other. So you have like correlation and causation. I just watched your video the other day on your NAMM. You did a, you interviewed like 500 people at NAMM or something. I was just one thing that I was thinking when I was watching that video was like, how the fuck did you logistically pull that off? Like did you just have sort of a form that people filled out as a? Oh, no. It was online. So that was a, yeah, that was a Google forums thing that a lot of people filled out and sent to their friends and so it was a bunch of unique questions. Okay. So I thought based on watching the video that you interview, like you asked 500 people, those questions as well. Well, that's a little work. And it was funny because like I was here and I was like in a big rush to go on that trip and I was like, you know what? In the days proceeding it, I'll just do the data crunching in a hotel room and you know, like I'll just do it like for one day. I'll just sit in a hotel room and do it. Thinking that like, I don't know. Like I set up some really complex like variables and qualifiers and so I didn't really realize how complex they were. So I thought that I was, I figured this would just be something that I would be able to do in like a Python library or something. But like I did most of it in Excel, like literally just crunching the numbers like on pieces of paper overnight in hotel rooms up until NAMM when, you know, I got people to read the results. So what was the sickest shit that you saw in NAMM? You think? I saw barely anything. I didn't get to go on the trade for. It's just, it's too chaotic now. I think just having your face on like every person who watches YouTube in the music gear world inevitably will see my mugs somewhere. And so, um, try I'm a cost you a bombard you. Yeah, well, I had a security guard this year, which, which was a trip. That was, he was, he was funny, but he was funny and unique. I'll have to tell you about that after the, I don't want to talk about him on. I don't want to like tell any stories about somebody's like personal situation, not that I don't want to tell a story about something that happened in private off of on a public podcast. But yeah, he was, he was crazy. And it, I mean, in a good way, but it was a, it was a trip. Nice. Well, yeah, we should probably wrap it up anyway, because to 11 PM and I have to drive home in this. Yeah. And it's like 10 degrees outside. It's very cold. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. I moved down here for what? Oh, yeah. It's always good to chat with you, man. Yeah. Um, I appreciate you. Yeah. I'm sorry for being so preachy about economics. Oh, no. I'm not going to align with the release of the videos. Yeah. You're, you're a place. Super interesting. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Well, take care. Yeah. All right. I'm going to press stop. All right. Bye. Thanks for listening to the Mr. Bill podcast credit to Robert Fumo for the production and edit. Join MrBill's tunes.com for early access to the video podcast tutorials, sample packs and more. And please consider rating and reviewing us on all podding ease because it really helps the podcast. Thank you.