Misaligned Incentives, Failures of Government, and Coca-Cola’s AI Misstep

Rob Collie (00:00): Justin, it has been a little while.

Justin (00:02): It has been, and I feel that the last time we recorded an episode together, we said the same thing.

Rob Collie (00:08): Yeah, we did. We did. And then, in the interim, you did an episode.

Justin (00:13): I did.

Rob Collie (00:14): Your first solo hosting gig, which went incredibly well, by the way. I told you this off camera, but I'm impressed. You ask really good questions. You showed signs of actually preparing. I loved that episode. That was great. And then, I did a solo episode, and now here we are. I would feel like I would be completely remiss if I didn't point out that in last week's episode, I semi-casually remarked about how the United States healthcare system is both semi-heartless and overly financialized. And then, yesterday, Reddit is calling this the murder with the most suspects in human history.

Justin (00:51): That's terrible. It's terrible.

Rob Collie (00:55): Obviously we don't want killing. There's just so much more capacity in our economy to care for people than what we're allocating. And I think of healthcare, I think of people as infrastructure. It's really no different from highways and things that we need to take care of. A productive person produces more than they consume and an unhealthy person does not.

Justin (01:20): That's right.

Rob Collie (01:21): The fact that we have turned healthcare into an extraction mechanism, extracting as much money in particular from the middle class, while also simultaneously denying any sort of proactive care to the lower class. The lower class can go into the ER when things get really, really acute and they can get care and then get put on a $10 a month payment plan. Where, in the meantime, the middle class is the one that's enriching the insurance companies, right? No one seems to be winning. None of the people seem to be winning. The healthcare providers like the physicians aren't winning, most specialties anyway, nurses aren't winning, the patients aren't winning, the citizens aren't winning.

Justin (02:02): Hospitals aren't winning.

Rob Collie (02:03): Depends upon who you mean, right? The people who own the hospitals are definitely winning. I lived in Cleveland for a while. It's hard to drive past the industrial scale of the Cleveland Clinic and how it's just constantly gobbling more real estate. It's just obscene. The guy that got killed, he's not responsible for all of this, but he was being paid $10 million a year to administer this grand injustice, which by the way, everyone agrees with.

(02:32): I don't care how polarized people are on most topics. We all know that we're being screwed in a very inhumane way. We know it. The only difference on the two different sides of the political aisle here really is just who's being scapegoated for it. It's the only difference really. We all agree this guy that did this as of the time we're recording, he hasn't been caught, but they're starting to piece together that he wants to be. Again, we're speculating. He probably wants to go to trial and keep this in the news and tell his story. I think of this as just one of the most visceral things that's happened in my lifetime is what happened this week.

Justin (03:10): There's no condoning killing people obviously, but this broke somebody.

Rob Collie (03:16): Yeah. And the victim has been part of an organization that has been killing people at scale. When a system is designed improperly, when the incentives are aligned improperly, it's going to spring leaks. And I can say that the whole thing is a tragedy, but we've been living this tragedy as a nation. Treating people's health as a profit center as opposed to as an infrastructural investment is immoral, inhumane, and also long-term net negative for everyone, except for a chosen few. And I hate it. I hate it with intensity. Just amazing timing that I mentioned this last week on the podcast and I'm like, "Okay, well, I wasn't in New York City. I don't have UnitedHealthcare. I'm not a suspect."

Justin (04:06): Okay, that's what that was about.

Rob Collie (04:08): I did tell you beforehand, we're all murder suspects now. And if you're listening to this in a country other than the US, this has got to be just absolutely mind-boggling to you. Either A, you're in a country that can't afford the level of healthcare that we can afford in the US, period. Or you live in a country where the government does take care of it and does treat it as an infrastructural investment in the country, and it just blows your mind that the Americans are so wacko. Anyway, so current events. Before we get into the inevitable conversations about AI, I have another banter topic, which again is about one of our favorite things, which is that you got to be careful about what you measure, the things you choose to measure. As they become goals, they can become perverse goals. They can become goals that actually misalign with your real intent.

(04:51): I've had one example of this, and it goes back to government regulation again. It's kind of interesting, right? It's not like I believe that all government regulation is good. I believe that we need it, but it needs to be thoughtfully, carefully designed and adapt to the current realities and all of that. You need to put thought into it. So, one of my favorite examples for years has been light cigarettes. The way that the FDA or whatever tests cigarettes for their tar levels was to put them in this straw, this metal straw that smokes the cigarette and captures the tar. Well, the cigarette manufacturers figured out that straw covers the first inch of the butt of the cigarette. So, what they did was they perforated the paper of the cigarette in front of where the straw covers.

(05:33): So, when it put it in the smoking machine, it would pull a bunch of extra air through those perforations and it would dilute the flow of tar. And so, they would get a lesser tar signal. But as soon as you gave the cigarette to a person, they figured out pretty quickly just subconsciously that they got a better drag on the cigarette when their fingers covered the holes that they didn't even know were there. These cigarettes were exactly the same as the regular cigarettes advertised as low tar. You got the full dose because the measuring device. So, I was reading yesterday on The Ringer about headlight brightness. We've all known that headlights had been getting obnoxiously bright.

Justin (06:10): Very much so.

Rob Collie (06:11): Right? Okay.

Justin (06:12): And this time of year, you notice because it's dark all the time.

Rob Collie (06:16): Dark all the time, and there's also like, for you, there's a fine layer of salt already on your windshield, I'm sure. That extra bright light coming in diffracting through that salt grid, right? It just really sucks. So, it turns out, I didn't know this, but it turns out that it's the same thing as the cigarettes. So, the standards for testing headlight brightness to determine whether headlights are too bright have not been adapted to LEDs. They were set in the world where all you had were incandescent bulbs with a parabolic mirror behind them. But LEDs, especially grids of LEDs can be aimed in all kinds of creative ways.

(06:56): And the headlight manufacturers know that the sensors that the whatever the regulatory agency deploys to detect headlight brightness, they're located in very precise places in the visual field relative to the headlights. So, they just engineered the headlights to be darker in those tiny little spots, little tiny spots where the sensors are while cranking the absolute brightness overall. And it's just like, oh my God, that is it. So, the headlights are still passing the test even as they become five, 10 times brighter. And then, in the same article, it also talks about how insurance companies actually love these bright headlights because the brighter headlights result in fewer single car accidents. You do see farther down the road with your bright headlights.

Justin (07:46): Of course.

Rob Collie (07:47): If it were the case that these bright headlights were blinding other drivers and causing more accidents for the other people, there's no way to measure it.

Justin (07:56): That's right. How convenient.

Rob Collie (07:59): Everyone seems to be kind of aligned on the same side here of just make the headlights ridiculously bright and they haven't updated the testing standards for LEDs. There's also, of course, a trend where people are just driving all the time with their brights on.

Justin (08:10): Oh, yeah. Right.

Rob Collie (08:11): And there's also a trend where cars, a lot of trucks in particular are now seven and a half feet off the ground at all times, so that's why you can't see at night.

Justin (08:19): Yeah. I found myself always recoiling whenever I flash my brights at somebody, I realized, "Oh, no, they're just a truck."

Rob Collie (08:28): Oh, yeah, that's true. You don't know. That's also very explicitly mentioned in the article, but we all know it. We don't know if you're using your brights.

Justin (08:35): Right. Are you being a jerk? I don't know.

Rob Collie (08:39): Yeah. That is another daily microcosm lesson in measurement.

Justin (08:48): We both have newer vehicles. I bet our headlights are bright as hell.

Rob Collie (08:52): Oh, yeah, mine definitely have LEDs. Yeah, man, can I see well?

Justin (08:58): Boy, am I safe?

Rob Collie (09:00): Is driver's education even a topic, like a class you can take in high school anymore? I don't think it is.

Justin (09:05): My kids are only halfway there. I don't know.

Rob Collie (09:07): But one of the things I learned in driver's ed, it's still valuable to me, is when bright headlights are coming at you, turn your eyes and look at the white line on the right edge of the lane. I don't know if this knowledge is being passed down. I told my kids at one time and they're like, "Dad, that really works." You also had some things to talk about.

Justin (09:27): We talk quite a bit about AI and wrestle with what's going on and how it's impacting our industry and the world and all these things. AI is always in my feed in some way. There's a new white paper or you see, oh, it's now capable of this and it wasn't before. That's always happening. But I've seen a few examples now, very real, very tangible of AI showing up in the real world. It sort of feeds in the conversation, is this what we want? Is this good? I think some of it isn't, and if some of it might be just an adaptation. I just want to hit the big one right out of the gate here, which is Coca-Cola caught a bit of backlash for their holiday spots this year.

(10:10): So, Coca-Cola, I think we could all recognize their ads around the holiday season. Very popular, very known, polar bears and the trucks and all this. So, Coca-Cola put out, I think, at least two, maybe more spots, video spots, that generative AI was used in a significant way in producing them. And the general vibe of the backlash was essentially, "You're Coca-Cola. How dare you? You're the gold standard in advertising and bringing the world together around the sugary, carbonated water." When you watch these things, if you pay close enough attention, you can spot the AI-ness of them. He's like, "Oh, is that polar bear? Am I tripping on drugs? 'Cause he's sort of not all together when he is moving around."

(10:56): The trucks driving down the road, it's like, "No, Coca-Cola has real trucks that they shoot video of, driving down the street." And one of the spots, there's a person that's smiling and the teeth look good, the person looks good, but almost looks like the teeth and the mouth are rotated one tooth to the left, so there's a middle tooth and not two big teeth. When you watch it, at first you don't really realize what was off, but you can have the, "Oh, something's not quite right here." Is the backlash warranted? Is it good that Coke is doing this? The backlash is the interesting part.

Rob Collie (11:29): I think I'm pleased that there's pushback. I do understand where it's coming from. Coca-Cola it's just sugar water, right? There's almost no product or company whose branding is more important to its total value than Coke. Coke is the apex predator of branding and marketing. And so, for them to kind of like "break ranks," it's very analogous to being the company that hires replacement workers to try to break a union.

Justin (12:01): Sure.

Rob Collie (12:02): That kind of dynamic, that union versus union busting thing is now I think on its way to the white collar world. I'm not sure how it's going to play out.

Justin (12:11): That's an interesting parallel. Yeah.

Rob Collie (12:13): The thing I discussed in last week's podcast was like if doctors become three times as productive in their labor, what's going to happen is two thirds of doctors get laid off, and the remaining third get paid less because there's plenty of people clamoring for their job.

Justin (12:27): The supply goes through the roof.

Rob Collie (12:28): Right? So, if Coke does this, it's going to legitimize it for every other company, and an entire industry is now going to be facing... Here goes the fear, right? The entire industry is going to be facing this dynamic. Now, it's not that Coke produced more ads this year. Is it, that they produce the same volume of ads that they normally do? These are the questions we'd want to know. Did they expand their surface area or did they produce the same amount for lower costs? These are the things we'd want to know. When things become more efficient, if the market expands as a result, that's far less destructive to the value of labor. And we all should start thinking of ourselves as labor, whether we're white collar or blue collar. You're listening to this, you're labor, whether you're writing formulas, building dashboards, you're a business leader, organizing things, you're labor.

(13:23): We're all labor. There are very few of us who aren't. So, Coke is "selling out." I think it's also true that Coke has transcended just being ads. The Coke polar bear commercials and the Polar Express style commercials and things have become part of the holiday fabric. It's like part of the atmosphere of the holidays. Really shows you how successful they have been. They have gotten to that level. I don't even drink Coke anymore, and I find those ads to be somehow reassuring and warming. I'm not immune. So, not only can Coke be viewed as poisoning an industry now, the marketing and creative industry, they're poisoning something culturally significant. They've become an institution, and now they're doing this. Now, what I was going to ask you was as a former audio engineer, has this feel to you in comparison to autotune, because autotune from a consumer standpoint, autotune it's bizarre, but after a while, it became something that became part of the fabric and people were using autotune even when they didn't need it because people were expecting hip hop or whatever to sound like that.

Justin (14:38): This is a really good question because just for background, I have a college degree in audio engineering and I became a data person. Go listen to episode 100. I remember when we had a lecture one day about autotune, and this is almost 20 years ago, so the technology has changed. But the point of the lecture was people think that because autotune exists, Britney Spears can't sing. No. False. Britney Spears can sing, autotune just helps it get to that level of perfection that's expected in pop music production. But to your point, so autotune is used on almost every recording production in all genres.

Rob Collie (15:24): I'm imagining James Hetfield of Metallica autotuned. Anyway, continue.

Justin (15:28): Especially on the more later stuff, I bet money that it's happening, it became like a style. There was a whole lot of, "Oh, we can do something creative with autotune that's new and fun and different and it's not cheap and imitating something we can't do. It's a different category." So, what's interesting about that idea like, no, autotune isn't replacing a bad singer or it can be used for a new creative purpose. Okay, now with this thing with Coke, when I watched the ad, I don't think they did either of those things. It's like the AI didn't help them cover up a production gap. They just couldn't quite get there, and they didn't necessarily deliver a new creative thing. They tried to do the old thing with the AI. Again, when you watch it, you're like, "Wait a minute, that dude's teeth are messed up."

Rob Collie (16:18): I don't think that we are as a culture going to, as consumers of ads or consumers of creative content, I don't think that we're going to accept that level of quality. It's like what Forrest Brazeal said on the episode we did with him like, "Why should I bother to read something that you didn't bother to write?" And when it's obvious that you didn't bother to write it. When it's obvious that you didn't bother to put the creative effort in to make me feel something. I mean, if you're going to make me feel something so that I go out and buy your semi-poisonous sugar water product, come on, in the transaction, at least, make the feeling authentic.

Justin (16:57): That's just it. And I don't know that the technology's quite there, but if we could use AI to make aesthetic changes to the way people look, that's the equivalent of Britney Spears. Let's just get it perfect on pitch. Or let's create a universe that's totally fantastical and new and different and create a whole nother environment with the AI stuff. That would've been the extremes, but they tried to do the thing they already have done so well and it diminished it.

Rob Collie (17:24): It absolutely did. In that sense, I'm glad that Coca-Cola is getting the signal that collectively we're not going to care for this. Our eyes and our emotions and all that kind stuff are the kind of the hardest thing to fool. We're talking a long time ago about the hallucination problem in AI, why some of the "most successful, most mind blowing" things that it can do are image generation and video generation. But we're only seeing, most of the time anyway, we're only seeing the versions that came out that weren't hallucinated, where the people don't have seven fingers.

(17:57): It's just that no one quality controlled the odd number of teeth. And there's also just like they call it the uncanny valley, right? You can just sort of tell. We've had full digital movies forever. The Incredibles. So, much of what happens in those movies is still motion capture. The actor playing Gollum is out there on set with the suit that's got dots all over it. Obviously there is no Gollum in the world. It looks like there is. I find Gollum in Lord of the Rings, I forget that it's CGI. So, there's an example of doing something with tech that you couldn't do otherwise, but the AI-generated Gollum is going to be awful.

Justin (18:43): Today.

Rob Collie (18:44): Today it is.

Justin (18:45): If the speculation is true, right on the rate, models are going to keep getting better, I think maybe at some point soon. I don't want AI to diminish the quality of my life experience. I want it to make it better. When this sort of cheapens the vibe from Coke, I'm like, "No, not that."

Rob Collie (19:06): Yeah, good news, bad news, no one's going to care about the quality of data and dashboards and things like that being similarly cheapened, 'cause the numbers are either right or they aren't. It's a much more digital exercise, like binary, right or wrong. Of course, there's always nuances in data, but the data itself better not be the same level of nuance. So, we're not going to experience similar protections in our industry, but at the same time, we're also not going to experience similar limitations. Depends on how you look at it. And I do think, as I've pointed out in the last episode, that unlike advertisements, 'cause there's only so many ad spots you can run each year, especially when you need to run the same ones over and over again so that they get the right absorption and uptake. There's only so many ads you can run. And screens on which they run aren't changing. We're all looking at two-dimensional displays that are now so saturated with pixels.

(20:00): Is a higher resolution going to make a difference if our eyeballs can't tell? Probably not. In that industry. What are you going to do to expand into unmet territory? They're kind of running up against the boundaries already. In data, we are not. We are still incredibly fortunate that we are only addressing a tiny percentage of total demand. So, we have room to expand, again, as labor becomes more efficient. I don't know that Coca-Cola's advertising does. In the end, I think this will be judged as an incredibly, incredibly silly one-time misstep by Coke because they have all the resources in the world, however much they saved on the production of those spots, given their leverage, given their reach. I mean, it is just dumb. Other people, smaller budgets producing the same stuff, okay, different set of trade-offs, but I think Coca-Cola is right to be raked over the coals for this one. It's just not even smart for them.

Justin (21:01): So, the other thing, there is a noticeable increase in the prevalence of AI people on LinkedIn.

Rob Collie (21:13): Okay.

Justin (21:14): There are profiles with pictures of humans, with titles at companies, at jobs that are not people, AI agents with LinkedIn profiles. People are using these AI profiles to engage and comment, and it got me thinking, "Okay, sure. LinkedIn people have been famously banned for doing the wrong things, but they're not using bots or any of that kind of stuff." So, now with some of the technology that's coming out where AI can control your keyboard and mouse on a computer, when this is happening or people are getting cold calls, like sales cold calls, and the voice on the other end of the phone is not a human. Your engineer in this world where it's like, "Is that a real person?" That's something that's got to be disclosed. This is not a real human.

Rob Collie (21:59): One of your favorite people and one of my slowly emerging heroes is Scott Galloway, in a recent TED Talk where he basically explained why all the young people are off. He points out, "Look, we have the technology to truly validate that online people are real. We could tie you back to who you are, but no one's doing it because it's bad for business." I just moved from Indiana to Washington. And the state of Indiana, my driver's license counts as what they call a real ID.

(22:34): Not that not real ID, but the one that you can use at the airport around the country, and it counts as identifying you in some states don't perform sufficient validation of who you are to meet the federal standard of security. It's like whatever state, you can do whatever you want within your own borders, but as soon as you go to an airport, you're on essentially federally regulated property. The feds are responsible for the TSA and your security in the air. So, if your state is issuing you a substandard license that doesn't necessarily validate your identity, we're not going to accept it at the airport. So, now I've moved to Washington and Washington issues real IDs, but the fact that I had one in Indiana doesn't help me.

Justin (23:15): Oh, you still got to go through all the red tape.

Rob Collie (23:17): My wife, Jocelyn, she is having to go and get certificates that document all of her name changes, 'cause she's been married twice. So, she needs to tie those back to her birth certificate, like a chain of custody, like a lineage. We both had to go get new birth certificates issued because we didn't have certified birth certificates anymore, and our passports have expired. We do this so that when I get on an airplane, they can believe that I am who I am. I get online and there's nothing. Of course, it's coming for LinkedIn. It came for Twitter a long time ago.

(23:49): How many studies have been done that show that some large percentage of Twitter is bots? The thing is on Twitter, unfortunately, the place where most of the incentive exists to produce bots on Twitter is to promote ideas. Mostly the strongest incentive for botting on Twitter is for countries other than the United States. But for the United States, it's other countries governments that are pushing us in different directions. And where I differ from a lot of people is that I actually, I see it pushing both left and right. But on LinkedIn, there's money at stake.

Justin (24:23): Right.

Rob Collie (24:24): Yeah. I just don't know how social media is going to maintain anything resembling its level of trust until we have the equivalent of real ID for online.

Justin (24:36): It's something I think about with some frequency because a lot of the conversation I'm interested with AI is how it helps us be more efficient, more productive, like you're saying, meet unmet demand change how we do what we do, but then I remember you can create an artificial representation of a person.

Rob Collie (24:56): Even before AI, someone that you and I both know doesn't work at P3 and never has created an additional false online LinkedIn persona to contact me, had been trying to contact me through his real persona, his real profile on LinkedIn. This was nearly 10 years ago. I wasn't paying attention. And then, this other person from the same company reaches out and starts talking about this and that. I'll engage with that, and it turns out it was the same guy. And we got to laugh about it years later. He confessed. He's like, "Yeah, you ignored me, but you didn't ignore this other guy."

Justin (25:31): Obviously, these are the areas where, okay, at some point technology can do it. So, where's the regulations and what's going to come in? When I don't know the person that called me about my insurance claim or follow up on my doctor's visit or wants to talk to me about whatever, because I asked for some information, is not a real human. Am I okay with that? I don't know. I was like, "Does it matter?"

Rob Collie (25:54): I used to have a principle when we were designing software at Microsoft, which was a policy about surprises. Surprises for the user. The rule was, a surprise can be okay. If something happens that they didn't expect, it can be okay if it is overwhelmingly positive surprise. It can't be positive half the time and negative half the time. Even if it nets out slightly positive mathematically, in the user's perception, the human being, you're insulting them, you're degrading them, you're depriving them of their will, and you're breaking the trust of the relationship. Amongst people, we wouldn't accept this, right? Oh, you're abusive 49% of the time, but you're good to me 51% of the time. Look, I'm not going to do that math and say, "It's worth to hang out with you." If the thing that calls you isn't a real person, well, if it's better 99% of the time, okay.

Justin (26:52): There's probably use cases where it is.

Rob Collie (26:54): But it needs to hit that standard.

Justin (26:56): Yeah.

Rob Collie (26:57): We talked this a long time ago, but when I ordered from the wrong online from the app, I ordered from the wrong Chipotle restaurant and I needed to change the place, damn thing routed me to a chat bot in the app to handle this problem, and I'm like, "Oh, no, here it comes. I'm going to be very dissatisfied with what happens next." And it turned out it was amazing. It did exactly what I wanted and it did it faster than any human being ever would have. It understood it better and everything. And I'm like, "Hot damn, that was a positive surprise." Give me that. That's okay. But you've got to hold that standard.

Justin (27:33): A service that I really like is text with Delta Airlines, so if I ever have a problem with a flight or I need to make a change, it's all on text, so it's just text back and forth. I couldn't care less if the other person responding to me was real or not 'cause it's so convenient.

Rob Collie (27:49): I'm 0 for 1 with that service.

Justin (27:52): Oh, I'm like batting a thousand.

Rob Collie (27:54): Okay, so let me tell you what happened with me is, I was on a flight that was delayed and I had a connecting flight in Atlanta. Delta went ahead and rebooked me on a later connecting flight. They just did it. But now my plane was landing at a gate that was relatively close and I was seated at the exit door. I was at first class, but I was in the middle. And I'm like, "I can totally make this." And so, I'm in the air texting with Delta. I mean, I guess it's not 0 for 1. I did end up getting on my original flight, the one that I wanted to be on and not had to sit around the airport for additional hour. The system didn't understand me sufficiently. It was frustrating. And guess what? I ended up in a worse seat than I paid for.

Justin (28:41): Oh, 'cause they took you off and...

Rob Collie (28:43): Right. And I get to the next gate and they're telling me that I'm in boarding group seven when I was originally in boarding group three. This isn't an indictment of the AI texting interface. I think I did get ahold of a human, but even the human, there's all these exceptional cases where what you really want is a human being with sufficient authority to make it right.

Justin (29:04): Yeah. I think about when AI starts coming into the world, being advocates for showing up in the right ways, I actually loathe the Apple Intelligence commercials, where the vibe is like, "Ooh, look at me getting away with using AI." I'm like, "No. No, no, no, no, no."

Rob Collie (29:20): "Look at me deceiving people."

Justin (29:22): Yeah. No. No.

Rob Collie (29:25): I want to think that famous asshole Steve Jobs, where if he was still alive would go, "No. No."

Justin (29:33): Yeah. Absolutely not.

Rob Collie (29:34): "No, not with my company. You're not going to do that." Sure, Steve Jobs can go and be an asshole in private, but we are not going to let that show out in the world. We're not going to advocate essentially like tech-assisted dishonesty. 'Cause that girl is lying, just lying and getting away with it like, "That's what we want? Oh, I had never even thought about that." I found those commercials repulsive from a bandwagoning, "Well, of course you've got to have AI, right?" So, they've got to say something. They've got to play the game. The music's playing. They've got to dance, right? That's what I've seen. It's like, "This is the best you could do?" Deep down, I was also really irritated by the thing you're pointing out, and I didn't realize it.

Justin (30:18): Well, and there's the one where the dude's drafting an email on his phone and it's very unprofessional and casual. Then he AI and then his manager's so surprised that he wrote this. And I'm like, "You are going to get replaced by the agent." Like, "You want to look at me being crafty, getting away with my AI tool?" No. No. No.

Rob Collie (30:44): I don't know about that one. I haven't seen that one.

Justin (30:47): And to be honest, I do like saying what you really want to say to a colleague or a vendor or something when you're just really ticked off and then saying like, "No, please make this polite and professional."

Rob Collie (30:57): I don't mind the idea of translation. Take my thought, my idea. Think about it. We wouldn't complain if I put my idea down in English and the AI translated it into Spanish so that someone on the other end would find it acceptable. We didn't mind when I would make a slide deck and give it to a graphic designer, and they would make it look better, so that it would be better received by an audience. I haven't seen that ad, so I'm not going to say that. I completely disagree, but boy, the ones where someone is deceiving someone else, it's not like the tech in that situation is really plugging the hole because the person who's getting away with it is still really not committed to doing the right thing. They're not really engaged. They haven't absorbed any of the nuance. They've been given a 10-word summary, a compression of everything that was... No, this is toxic.

Justin (31:53): The positioning is what pisses me off. You can imagine the setting of a meeting and you'd be like, "Oh, remember we talked about," it's like, "Oh, sorry, I missed that meeting. Hey, AI, can you quickly summarize that and catch me up?" Right? It's like a more honest use of, "Oh, yeah, I remember reading the minutes from that meeting." The framing on that just irks me to no end.

Rob Collie (32:13): There's a theme running through everything we've talked about today. You can think of it as touchy feely, but it's also, I think, good business. It's both, is what are we doing? We cannot lose our humanity in the process of any of this. The low tar cigarettes, the high beams, the cars that are being manufactured with the headlights five feet off the ground. It's a theme in the article about the headlights. It's everywhere. It's like Jocelyn and I, my wife and I have been reading all these articles about everyone does this when they're older. They read about the problems of the next generation and how difficult romantic relationships are proving to be for Gen Z and even a little bit for millennials. And also the healthcare thing, right? It's just like these transactional relationships with other people. It's all transactional. It's all driven by what do I get? In philosophy we call it solipsism.

(33:09): I'm the only thing that exists, and everything else is just an illusion. The self-focus and our society. That knob. There is a right place to put the knob in terms of self-focus. You do have to take care of yourself, more your responsibility than anyone else's, but you just feel that knob being cranked higher and higher and higher every day, and shit's going to break under those circumstances. This circles back to a lot of our business philosophy as well. Well, it's really one rule. Don't exploit anyone. Don't exploit customers. Don't exploit employees. Under those constraints, now what? Go follow that. That shouldn't be innovative.

Justin (33:48): That shouldn't be counter-culture.

Rob Collie (33:51): And it is. We've been talking about our positioning, our branding and all of that, and the fact that this is an exceptional behavior, an exceptional ethos, "Okay, I guess it's good for us that we can stand out that way." It's also like, "Do we really want to be in the society where that makes you a rebel?" 60 years ago, that would be old fashioned, but it would be current old fashioned 'cause everyone was old fashioned at the time. Can't change, as individuals or even as a company, we can't change the broader zeitgeist, whatever, but we're going to swim upstream.

Justin (34:29): Yeah. This is going to keep happening, right? There'll be interesting things that are happening with AI that are going to cause like, "Is it really what we want this to be doing?" I'm for calling it out when it's not there.

Rob Collie (34:43): And then, you got to balance that with the flip side of, no one owes and the universe doesn't owe simple, convenient, warm, and fuzzy answers to problems to anyone. And this cuts both ways, whereas I believe that there are certain classes of problems where truly it needs a referee. The market itself cannot be left to regulate certain things. I don't think the market should be left to regulate anything that's infrastructure. I believe healthcare to be infrastructure. And it's not even necessarily a moral stance. There's a little bit of that, right? But I think it just actually, it just doesn't work.

(35:19): But there's also things, there's also a lot of things that you have to let the market regulate because the market is the only thing that's going to be effective at regulating them, that's going to be effective at maintaining productivity, et cetera. When AI comes along and just straight up replaces a job and it does a good job of replacing that job, there's nothing that's going to stop it. We don't have to like that, but it's coming and I don't even think the government could stop that. What rules could be made that would make that work out?

Justin (35:49): The banishment of the technology?

Rob Collie (35:51): Yeah. Nope.

Justin (35:55): No. No.

Rob Collie (35:56): Nope. Not going to happen. So, I just want to be clear that I do think that, if I start talking to people who are libertarians and they say the market is good at everything, I'm like, "No, it's not." And they're right about the government can't fix everything. The world doesn't owe you a nice answer to everything. I agree. I totally agree. At the same time, do we really think that Meta is a better regulator of what's best for the world and what's best for human beings than a government? Why is Meta special? Maybe 15 years ago, I flirted with libertarianism. Some of the things about it made sense to me, but then yeah, it kind of came out the other side going right. It's just another authority. Honestly. Are we going to get real ID? We need real ID for the internet.

Justin (36:39): I think that's the main call to action here is real idea for the internet.

Rob Collie (36:43): "Oh, no, the government being able to track me," and blah, blah, blah. Yeah, right. But you know what? First of all, they already got you. Secondly, everything is going to come apart until we get this. You got to be real.

Justin (36:58): It's got to be real.