So excited to have you, Todd. Welcome to the show. So good to be here. Now, your latest book, The Art of Insubordination, How to Descent and Defy Effectively, is coming out. And we'd love to just start with your definition of the art of insubordination. What is it? Well, the key piece is the principled part of insubordination. So what we're talking about is principled rebels who realize there are norms, there are rules, there are authority figures that are dysfunctional, they're not working for people, they're not working for other people. And they basically decided is that to create a more constructive live for themselves or other people, they're going to rebel, they're going to dissent in some way. And they're doing it not because they don't care, because they care so much about the group. And with this, obviously, we've seen a lot of rebellion of modern media, institutions. And there's been a big backlash against even rebelling and getting people back in line. So in today's current state of affairs, how do you feel rebellion is viewed? You know, I've been thinking about writing an article, which is what social activists today could learn from social activists in the 70s. So I'm glad you brought this up. So I think about one of the greatest social movements has been the speed to which people in the LGBT community ended up with gay marriage.  And in a mere 12 years later, gay marriage is part of the regular institution of society. And one of the ways that they did this, which advocates today don't do is they use playfulness. They figured strategically who are the people who are socially attractive in society that we can bring in as allies and then have them amplify our voice. And they were willing to be patient and realize we're not going to change 2,000 years of human history in the course of one year, which is much less a tweet or one op-ed article in a newspaper. It's going to take some time and we're going to pick apart small little things that we want to address. And one of the first things that they really made great progress on was get out of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, the notion that homosexuality is a disease. And they spent time in that one thing, even though there's a lot of homophobia, that one thing was gaining them traction to reach the point 10 years later. Well, I think what's interesting about that journey is right now it feels like a lot of social activism is built around coercion and getting others around you to agree so that you just give in. And that doesn't seem the way that the LGBTQ community went about it. And understanding that if we just use sheer coercion or some of these other tactics that we can talk about, we're not actually going to win people over to our side. And that message is then not going to be shared by enough people to actually get it into law to make the change that they're looking for. Yeah, we can dissect a few of these. You know, later we can dissect Black Lives Matter. We can dissect Occupy Wall Street. And I think, AJ, you hit it perfectly. You're looking for conversion, not compliance. And one of the things is when you force people to say, these are the magical words you have to use or else you're not one of us. And you wouldn't have to go into the details. Everyone knows that we are told this regularly. You're getting people to publicly say those things because they don't want to be hurt and socially persecuted. And then as soon as you leave the scene, as soon as the big group is over, people retreat to their fire pits and their parties and they speak about what they really think. And so what happens is you've actually created the factors of people who are potential allies. And in the 70s, I just remember watching this video where it showed protesters outside of some congressional building in some state. And you had these gate protesters that their sign said, we just want to get divorced just like you, no better, no worse. And just the sense of humor and the sarcasm alone, they weren't even asking for a specific issue. They were just saying, recognize our humanity. You're imperfect. We know that you know that. So let's just talk and have a conversation. And that's the kind of emotionally intense, empathetic strategy that's missing in this course culture that you're talking about. Well, this puts us in this dilemma of where has our public space gone, right? If there is no public square, then there is no marketplace of ideas. And then everyone, there's going to be a certain group that is going to feel oppressed that, well, we can't, we can't even display our ideas for everyone to choose because we don't have access to that public space. And that public space has many different components to it. One of those components is comedians. And you brought it up in the book as well, where part of that public space is to be able to pick fun of whoever is at the top to punch up, so to speak. And everyone is dealing with cancel culture. I mean, we have Joe Rogan, who's probably one of the most world famous renowned comedians due to the size of his show and what he's doing. And he's getting slammed left and right. And he's trying from what it seems to me is to continue this old idea of the marketplace, bringing in people's voices who he feels are not being heard and then paying a price for that with, as AJ was saying, this, this coercion that is going on. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack in there, Johnny. So I want to bookmark the notion of the public square because there's an interesting element where we have social media, which led to the Arab Springs where you have people in Tunisia and Libya that are able to fight a totalitarian government and they just own a shoe store in a candy store. And so you have this democratization of you don't have to wait for someone to give you the podium. You don't need Atlantic records to say we're going to sign you. You don't need Penguin books to say you can now write a book. You could just pop online and anybody can speak. Now the problem is, is the filters. And the problem is, is the loudest, most aggressive, most morally outraged person who tends to be unhinged gets the most attention on this platform and that's problematic. Well, we can also look at Arab Spring as an example where it was more of a public square to Johnny's point. We did not have these large companies who own this virtual public square making decisions on who could speak about what, even when the governments in those countries were trying to censor this speech, this message of freedom, democracy, and all of the issues that totalitarianism bring to the forefront of its citizens. That platform of Twitter was available to everyone. If you had a VPN, if you were blocked in your country, you could still access it somewhere on the internet. And now what we're seeing along with this coercion, as Johnny was talking about is this cancellation of, well, these voices, these insubordinate voices are no longer within reason of the public square. We need to censor them. We need to move them out of the conversation. And I was just in Vegas with Johnny and, you know, we always sort of compare notes on where we're getting our information in news. And right now, as we're recording this, we're in the middle of a war with Ukraine and Russia and mass disinformation is going on. Both sides are using the public square to poison the well with propaganda. And I was just asking Johnny, like, what are some of the ways that you're tuning into the news? How are you getting the news?  Well, why are you on Odyssey? Oh, because a lot of the people that I was following are no longer on some of these other platforms. So what we've seen, you know, we've seen the power of social media to drive insubordination to regime change to new governments to revolutions. And now it seems like we're almost moving in the opposite direction where these companies are now saying, well, this is within the public square. This is an acceptable insubordinate voice. And oh, by the way, some of these scientists you're talking about, some of these views you have around coronavirus or around the war that's breaking out, well, that's not acceptable for our platform anymore. We don't view that as acceptable in subordination. Go elsewhere and burying those voices. But those voices, I would assume take your position that they're principled in their insubordination. They're standing for what they view as freedom and what they view as the right to free speech. So nobody who speaks against the mainstream popular sentiments thinks they're unprincipled. And so you have to get into the mechanics of what makes it principled. I mean, there are two core components you have to think of. One is, is it authentic?  Or are you basically signaling that you are a member of a particular group or tribe and trying to win likes and make sure you gain status within that group? So we're seeing a lot of people engage in disingenuous behavior because they don't want to lose status and power in their group. The second part is, is it constructive? Are you trying to design some sort of movement that closes the gap between the present world we have now and some utopian vision of how the world is going to be? Or are you just trying to create friction and noise? And it's because very easy to knock over someone's Lego block kit. It's very difficult to take the farmer Lego block kit and the Moon Lego block kit and mix them together and innovate and create something. I mean, one of the things, you know, what I hear you guys talk about the public square that's challenging is that there's no concentrated consistent message in a lot of these social movements that are happening. And we know from research over the past 60 years is that the number one predictor, that a minority voice, and that could be demographic, that you're a marginalized group, that could be status, that could be you don't have the numbers, for minority influence to make an impact, you have to be consistent in your message. So when you mentioned about, you know, the COVID-19 and mask mandates, we all recognize the inconsistency in the message. So as soon as epidemiologists went out, and they said, you know what, the racial reckoning and focusing on hundreds of years of being marginalized is so important that it's okay that they didn't wear a mask when they were protesting. Most of society, while we didn't say it publicly, we said to ourselves, I don't think science works that way in terms of virus transmission changes differently. If you're protesting for a cause you approve of versus a cause you don't approve of. So that mixed messaging was the start, that inconsistency of that opened a hole for people to start asking questions about what are the scientists conflicts of interest, psychological and financial, and what ideas are being suppressed about this. And it's not that I'm a conspiracy theorist. This is what I believe is there can be dangerous ideas like Nazism, but there are no dangerous questions if you're coming from a place of curiosity. And this is where the Joe Rogan issue that you were mentioning and talking about, you know, what the science says about in terms of mask mandates is there's a lot of questions people are asking. They were being suppressed, told to conceal and hide them and ignore them. And when you do that, people actually, their defenses and threat, threat is raised and all you're doing is raising detractors towards a cause. And just to comment on that, I would say that mixed messaging at the beginning of COVID was the first time that regular mainstream people had saw a mismatch in certain messaging. I would say that people left a right of center had already been experiencing that online and have been discussing this and trying to bring attention to it. And because they were right of center, it was all those guys are always complaining. But when this was discussed, and now it is in plain view for everybody to see, which rattled a lot of people of we have a problem here. And I think you're right. And it's so a lot of social time scientists talk of the big sociological problem today is political polarization. They're just real intense concentration at the extremes. I don't think the science actually points to that. I think what the science points to is that the big sociological problem is the speed to which we reach intolerance and certainty in our beliefs. And this isn't about being polarized. It's that it only requires one person that you view as being socially attractive.  They show hatred for someone or something. You have no nuance about the person. No nuance about the issue is completely ambiguous. But they said, this is what I believe. And everybody jumps on it else this concentrated mass. What we've stopped is taking a deliberate pause to think about what's the evidence for the belief that I have, what's the best evidence against the belief I had, what evidence would change my mind? Why do I trust the evidence for my belief? And why do I not trust the evidence against my belief? And if we could stop and develop the sense of intellectual humility from the top down, starting with the media, just imagine opening up the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or whatever your favorite newspaper is. And they actually had a reversal. Here's their main topic. And they say, here's some evidence that's actually a little bit counter to what we're saying. It's a little bit ambiguous. So we're not leaning on that right now as opposed to this more clear, high quality evidence. That's not how articles are written. That's not how newscasters talk because they want it to be simplistic. And I think it's not too much to ask that we actually treat information just as complicated as it needs to be and just as simple as it needs to be. And reading your book, I wanted to get your opinion on this because I didn't see it represented.  The Asian kids over here, the black folks over here, the white kids over here, the nerdy kids are over here. It is a self-segregation due to the familiarity that they have with each other due to their interests. Now, online, where we always hang out and I would say, well, Todd seems cool. We had a few beers. I see him every week. That's about as much as I know you. That comfort is at a very surface level. But now with being online, people understand what your internal thought process is, what your beliefs are.  And people are not following that person or, you know what? I need to stay away from Todd. I didn't know he was a vegan. Are you kidding me? So, because of that, I was like, well, I don't want to hang out with any, I don't want to hang out with Todd. He's going to want to go to some shishy place. And my point in this is with social media and the way that people post, it becomes very obvious who's more like you and who isn't. And so it hastens that pace. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it. It's just preference of comfortability due to consistency in behaviors that we can count on and that we are comfortable with. Yeah. Oh my God.  So, on the positive end of this is you can have everybody who has Asperger's syndrome, who is a furry and who likes the cure and the smiths. And they can all find each other because there's only one for every three school districts. There's one kid. So that's an amazing thing that everyone with every paraphernalia can find each other. The masochists can find the sadists and they can kind of have enough people, a sheer number of people they can choose people they actually want to be with. But here's the dark side of this. So let me actually pull back history once. So I just saw this stat. I think this is going to be intrigued to you and the listeners. I want to give you an idea of how recent this groupiness is. So I was looking back at the hanging chat election between Bush and Gore in terms of all came down to Florida. So they had some polls right before they had that election. This is 2006. This is what the data showed. It was how warm and comfortable would you feel if the president that is the candidate not in your party becomes president? Approximately 40% of Democrats said, I feel perfectly warm if Bush was president and approximately 40% of Republicans said, I'd be perfectly fine. I'd have warm feelings towards Al Gore. This is not how we remember the storyline. But just imagine if that mentality pulled its way through from 2007 to 2022 right now, how different the world would be if we didn't go to our individual sides of this huge endless dodgeball game where we're going to fight each other with these balls. And instead, we said 40% of us said, you know what, not only do I not loathe the person on their side, but actually they're kind of a cool cat. They play pickleball. They have good taste in whiskey. I like their music. Like they're really good with their kids.  And that's not how we're operating right now. And we have to wonder what's the 30 year time span? What's that's going to do to us culturally in terms of bringing new perspectives, getting new perspectives and making friends with people in our activities as opposed to just these conversations we're having about politically charged issues? Oh, I completely agree with that concern. And to Johnny's point, you know, growing up in my neighborhood, there were diverse opinions there. Yes, it was blue collar. It was predominantly Democrat, but I had neighbors who were Republican while my family was Democrat. And they'd crack jokes and have their arguments after a few too many Miller lights. But at the end of the day, like they still came together, kids played together. There were no negative repercussions for being someone who has an outside view in that neighborhood. What we're now seeing is this segregation happening quickly, where I just unfollow Johnny or I go, you know what? I can't believe Todd posted another vegan meme unfriend. And we just keep pulling back into our comfort zone of just things that make us feel good online, things that don't question our ideas. And with that, we then start labeling the other person. And the labels have gotten more and more ferocious. So it used to just be like, oh, you know, that guy, he's right wing. Then it became all right. Then it became racist. Then it became anti science. Then it became, you know, anarchist.   I can't be friends with my neighbor any longer. He's clearly a racist. And where do these labels for someone who's trying to be insubordinate? It seems to me like a more rapidly spreading phenomenon that the person who doesn't agree with you, the person who's being insubordinate, now has to have a label slapped on them so you can just know to avoid them, unfollow them, move away from their opinion. At one point, I want to add to AJ's comment there and question, which is, am I growing up? As AJ mentioned, yes, we had neighbors with very diverse opinions as well. But there was an unspoken social rule that has been obliterated and social media put the nail in the coffin for it, which is you don't discuss politics and religion around strangers. So like, for instance, if I go into a bar and just start yelling my political affiliation and how I feel about the other, well, that's going to get me punched in the nose. And you don't do that because you understand that civil society makes room for people to have these diverse beliefs and opinions that work for them. If COVID didn't show us anything, it's that facts don't matter, that you can get whatever facts you need to beef up your end of your narrative. And I got an expert who's going to back that up. So because of that, there was this sheen on things where you just don't talk about those things and you treat people how they are dealing with you. And there was a mutual respect and social media has nuked that, that buffer has been removed and now we're at each other's throats. I just realized that hanging out with the two of you because you're, you're oversized lobes, there's so much information to process in one single comment. So let me play with this in a couple of ways. There's a great concept by David Lavari at Harvard University. He did seven studies and he calls this concept prevalence-induced concept change. So hear me out, very nerdy jargon. What it means is that as we discover and uncover more solutions to social problems, we don't actually feel better and more optimistic about our lives in society. We actually become more pessimistic about society because our threshold for what's a problem changes as things get solved. And so we start to pick little tiny slivers and say, no, no, no, it's still no different than 1960 to be an African American in society because now I've changed the goalposts and I'm focusing on this very small problem that still exists. So you have this perpetual sense of pessimism and this sense that there's no social progress in society. Now let me just play with this a little further because I don't want people to misunderstand this who are listening here. So if you look at the numbers, it is incontrovertible. And Johnny, as you said, people don't really care about facts other than a small spike that occurred during COVID, the number of murders, the number of robberies, the number of abductions, the number of trespassing, the number of home invasions, stealing of property, all of these things have gone down before this, you know, invasion of Ukraine. The number of people that have been harmed or killed from war has gone down so substantially over the past 150 years. We live in the best time ever to be any type of person whatsoever, heterosexual, gay, any race whatsoever. But one of the this is where the prevalence induced concept chains comes in. We have a hard time holding on to two views at the same time, grateful and recognizing the incredible progress we made and at the same time realizing perfection is impossible. But let's focus on the problems and continue to work towards these utopian ideals. But it's not the same as 1970 or 1980 or 1990. And there's actually some really cool data that it shows implicit biases. And this came up in the first Trump, Hillary Clinton debate of that came into the public nomenclature, which is that even if explicitly, you are willing to sell, you know, sell your goods to someone of a different race, be friends with someone of a different race. If your kid marries someone from a different race, you're fine with it. Implicitly, you have these biases that makes you more uncomfortable, less likely to reveal things to them, and more inclined to actually discriminate against them when you see their job application. If you look over the past 10 years of data, there is a 37% decline in racial implicit biases over time. And nobody's talking about these data. You're acting as if it's exactly the same or worse than it ever was. And the problem with that is many people in society who are not saying anything, people who are who don't have the temperament such as myself to write a book about, you know, the art of insubordination, they can see this and they know this. And so they, they see these hypocrisies of what people are saying. And it prevents people from being your allies for the issues that you're focusing on and improving, reducing racial inequities and reducing gender and sex inequities. With that, I think this book pre-pandemic, fascinating post-pandemic, seeing the cost of insubordination, seeing the way that people have been treated based on their preferences and their decisions, whether or not to trust the science, whether or not to trust the mask, whether or not to trust the vaccines. It's wired a lot of people to be even more fearful of being insubordinate, right? To just give in to the state, to give in to the mainstream, to give in to whatever the prevalent view is. So why is it so important that we continue to learn the art of insubordination when it feels like with the labels that are being passed around, the shunning of our friends and family, you know, some of the articles that were written during the pandemic were what to do with a family member who doesn't wear a mask. And it's like disona, like not, not a part of your, and it's the vitriol that was expressed towards people. And I, I'm vaccinated. I'm, science very focused on, on science in my experience with science. So I, I was first in line to get involved in a vaccine study. And I have family members who still aren't vaccinated and can't come to visit me because, well, here in LA, there's not much you could do when you're unvaccinated. And you read some of the media and it's like, well, disona, get, get uncle Phil out of the family. Like why, why are you still talking to uncle Phil? If he doesn't believe in science. And of course, someone who studies science, science is ever evolving. Follow the science, believe in science. Well, you're going to hold a lot of contradictory views. Yeah, at one point you're going to believe that cloth masks protect you. The next minute, you're going to realize you need N99 masks to protect you. And, and it has to evolve. But it feels like we've become more rigid in our views of those who are being insubordinate, those who aren't agreeing with us. Yeah, I don't know if we become more rigid because I just keep thinking that it took 369 years for the Catholic church to forgive and apologize, Galileo, that you know what? You were, you were right. We were wrong. So I'm not, so I'm not sure we're worse. I think there are two social movements that are happening simultaneously. One, AJ, exactly what you're saying. It's called preference falsification, is people publicly are expressing views that are completely counter to what they believe privately. And I am of a firm believer is if you want to deal with biases, police officers, teachers, government officials, the only way that you could reeducate someone is actually to understand what they believe in and what their perspective is. But the only way someone's going to reveal their perspective and their beliefs is that they know they're not going to be socially persecuted if they reveal those things. You know, I've been into, I was at a workshop several years ago at George Mason University. It was a, an LGBTQ before IA came on workshop. And one of the parts of the workshop was there were white, there was white paper and all over the room and it had bisexual here. It had queer here. It had gay here. And you were to write down chimney sweep, the first thing that came to mind as you see those words. And there were, the facilitators were very clear. I don't want you to hold it in, conceal or suppress anything. And there were some of us that wrote down what we actually thought and AJ, just as you're saying, we got crushed, crushed socially, not just during that workshop, but that came up three months later, three years later. Remember that thing that you wrote in the workshop? They didn't preface it by saying the facilitator wanted you to get it out so you can work through your teachings.  You learned certain terms, you believed in them. And now you're committing yourself to, to educating and changing and evolving as a person happens there. But if someone's going to keep a file drawer and hold it against you and anything you said with an older version of self becomes harm, what you're going to get is that social pressure is going to lead to a discordance between, you will never know what I actually think. And thus we will never have a genuine social interaction. Nobody wins that way. But on the other side socially, you have a rise and it's what you're describing in terms of people saying, there's a different way of living other than trying to be happy all the time. That's living a meaningful, rich life. And so here's one of the maxims of the science of minority influence or principled rebels, which is what is beneficial for the group is going to be painful for the individual. And so the social sacrifices or the sacrifices to your wellbeing that you're going to make by dissenting because you know there's a better way than the way a group is going right now, you will be personally hard. You will get strong social bonds of other people that hear your cause, but they might not publicly defend you. They might do it privately, but the group will be better even if they don't agree with you. When it dissenters in the mix, it puts a little bit of like a a tinge of thought into everyone of like, you know what, maybe there's not just one perspective. Maybe we've only been looking at one vantage point. Maybe we've seized and freeze on a solution way too quickly. And the dissenter often doesn't get the benefit of getting credit when they change their mind and agree with them a year later. Yeah, that has certainly been the case through my lens on this experience of COVID and the disinformation that's circulated. I mean, even you take an instance talking earlier about humor, right? So following online, scientists were split on whether or not this was from a lab or from zoonotic passing in a wet market. And it took many, many, many scientists being canceled online before John Stewart cracks a joke on mainstream TV for it to start to get some credence. And for some people to start to wonder, well, maybe there are some coincidences here that involve more investigation. And the debate is still raging now. But humor was that one breakthrough of light on, hey, what's going on here? I certainly don't know what to make of both cases. There's been papers published of late that show strong ties to the wet market. Then there's a lot of arguments around, well, what is the data set we're working with? Science, of course, is murky in that way. But I think about, in a lot of these ways, it's conditioned people I know, myself personally, to really guard what I say even on a platform like this with a friendly audience of people I think are listening because they enjoy my perspective. And I know Johnny's felt the same way because of some of this coercion, cancellation, and labeling that we've seen around those who are insubordinate to mainstream views.   So it took John Stewart jumping on board this lab leak theory for it to break through and become actually a part of the conversation in mainstream media. So how do we start to persuade once we've identified that we're principled in our insubordination? Just one second, AJ. And for Todd, if you could just explain to our audience this idea of principled rebel, it should be self-explanatory, but nail it in so that our audience can understand. Yeah. And I'm glad we're using, so we're not really talking about COVID. We're really using this as an example so that we don't repeat history again, and it becomes easier and better and more functional next time. And I think this is what we should always be doing for every social cause and every tragic event and every problem that society or any organization or any school system faces. So a principled rebel, it's you're constructive, you are authentic, and you are focused on trying to improve your well-being or the well-being of other people.  And this is why I really think and I really hope that society spends more time deconstructing what happened during COVID and Black Lives Matter so that it can gain more traction and more social progress in the future. So here's a couple strategies that are pretty important that were mistakes. The first, when you face, when you have a potential audience that's going to listen to your non-conventional idea, now this could be innovation, it could be defending somebody, it could be pointing out there's a lifestyle that is deviant from the mainstream thinking, right? So one of the things that happen is, van life became a big thing and polyamory became very popular for some reason during COVID happened there. Just any style or just people to say that, you know what, I have a great life, I have great friends, I have great nieces and nephews, I don't want to have kids, and a lot of people get a lot of flack for that. That's part of being a principled rebel. You're challenging a norm of why should I feel obligation to just because you want that. So the number one thing, test you have in front of the audience is, are you one of us? Are you part of the in group? And so I'm going to use a concrete example to stick with the COVID one because it's a nice thread to kind of explore this. Brett Weinstein, he was one of the first people talking about that the lab leak might actually be legitimate that happens here. Now if he was canceled from Twitter and other forms of social media because of this, he was raising questions, he was providing information that raised our thoughts about this were ambiguous, that it was more complicated than thought. Now one of the things that he could have done better was point out that I'm not just this biologist with this alphabet soup after my name.  He was so hyper focused and pointing out that the experts were wrong that he forgot to ask what to pass the test of. I'm here for constructive reasons. Here's what I'm focused on. Here's why I'm asking these questions and talking about it. And also here's what I'm sacrificing because I'm one of you and I care so much about the group and make that crystal clear before he was actually the sacrificial lamb. Well what's interesting about that example is your exact framing of asking questions. Asking questions is different than making declarations. And where Brett got into a lot of trouble was he started with, hey, there's some smoke over here. Let's all go and investigate. To then shouting from the rooftops, it's a five alarm fire when no one else was seeing the fire and making that declaration that you're wrong for not seeing this. And his shift in the way he was framing it at the beginning of, hey guys, you know, this is something to talk about to all of a sudden, hey, this is getting me more clicks and views. I got to come out with bolder, stronger declarative statements that I'm right until he stepped a little beyond the science and started making some recommendations around things that weren't as affirmative in their results and didn't have the science to back it up. And that ultimately led to a lot of platforms saying, well, you can't be making these bold statements without the science to back it up, your D platform. AJ, I just add right there as well as somebody who was watching Brett through all of that to go along with what Todd mentioned. I believe he did do that at the beginning, but then as you mentioned, AJ, he wasn't able to get as far out there as he wanted to doing it in the manner that Todd did. So the proclamations and everything that he said had to get stronger, had to get more outrageous in order to get the message out there. And now we're discussing how, again, these platforms are dragging these ideas out of us and forcing us due to the attention that we all crave as human beings to say these things in such a manner and a marketing manner that gets ooms and ahs and eyes over to your part of the argument. Well, we've worked with a lot of digital marketers over the years. And one of the strategies that's very common with digital marketing is to create a villain because it gets clicks, it gets views. What happened in this situation was we went from asking questions, hey, is this what the science shows to the villain is the pharmaceutical company and the crazy CEO who wants to poison us. And that of course is going to get you more views. That of course is going to draw more of an audience. And of course with the audience comes dollars, etc. But it's not the principled rebel that we're talking about here who's turning this into a narrative and making this into someone is the villain. That's not as effective of a persuasion tactic. Right. So one of the things that the social media, you work with digital marketers, with social media, you get stuck with the perverse incentives, which is the eyeballs every single hour of the day. And if you're talking about trying to create a social movement and make change on a problem, actually creative, effective decision making, you can't go on a time span of looking hour by hour in terms of how much traction you're getting. Because often the change you get from the majority, the mainstream, is that you get transient changes and they're often indirect. So they're not going to agree with you right away that what you're saying is a singular entity with a few people that are on your side is this is equal to the counterpoint by the Center for Disease Control, which we're getting as people start thinking to themselves, huh, let me read some a few more new sources. Let me actually think about this. Let me get off of my channel, which is we're relaying the same message over and over. Now, the breaths of the world are not seeing these small, almost imperceptible changes that are happening. And also not being patient enough is that this is going to take time over days, weeks, maybe months, and you're looking for immediate incentives and rewards that happen doesn't work that way. Black Lives Matter had the same problem in terms of not getting traction and got to tractors where the message began very simple and consistent, which is that we still have inequities in terms of who has access to the best school districts, health care, high quality food in their supermarkets. And then it sort of transmuted into a very different message, which was, you know, we have syllabi in colleges that are colonized, and we have to make sure that every class and every topic, whether it's engineering or computer science that, you know, racial issues has to be integrated into those threads. And all of a sudden people were, again, privately saying to themselves, if I'm trying to create a bridge that's going to cross from, you know, from Detroit to Canada, and I want to make sure that it doesn't fall, explain to me why race has to be born to the equation, because I only have a certain amount of time to learn how to do this. And I want to make sure that physics are right. And if the wind gets over 60 miles per hour that nobody dies on the bridge, it was an argument that had no evidence behind it. And it was, and because of that, you started to lose some of the cause. You were showing that you moved away from, I'm like you try to want to improve society. So we stopped looking at skin color as a parable proxy of intelligence, of virtues, of strengths, and of your ability to work in an organization to everywhere you go, race is relevant, irrespective of what you think about this. So it's similar to Brett in terms of losing traction. And it did, you can watch the poll numbers over the course of time. The second test that people ask over being a group member is, is the message going to be a threat to the group's existence? And this is where, again, all three examples, COVID, Black Lives Matters, hate to be picking on Brett Weinstein and Brett Weinstein, all three of them did not provide a sufficient message, which is that the longevity and the health of the group will improve if you give attention to this message and consider it is that this will improve society over the course of time. All of them focused on the incentives in terms of how much attention are we getting? How much money are we getting? Are we getting traction and not about for the everyday individual, if you commit and sacrifice towards this cause or this mission or this innovation, will your life be easier or harder a few months or a few years from now? And when you can make that selling point, that there's ease, ease is going to happen after a short period of friction. That's how you make a better message is a minority influence. I definitely think patience is the missing virtue in a lot of this persuasion that we're talking about, especially with causes as large and as ingrained in society that we are talking about, you know, whether it be systemic racism, whether it be the pharmaceutical industry, whether it be just public health, and those incentives for public health, those incentives for pharmaceutical companies, yes, it may be easy to vilify them, but they're far more nuanced than a bumper sticker than a simple statement that everyone can agree with of Black Lives Matter. Of course, who doesn't want to agree with that? But they're often adopting positions that, yes, on the whole, I agree with them, but once you get into the nuance and their proposed solutions, they don't actually meet the needs or what you were saying, the principles that we're looking for in the change that impacts all of us for the better. Just to go along with that, that idea of your group coming to its end due to these other ideas, it's this push and pull, which leads us to this problem that you put in the book about the newly powerless and the rebels who won, which is we avoided extinction, not only did we avoid it, it is our ideas that are now prevalent. Now that we're the ones in control, we need to make sure that we are never in that position again, which is we now need to take out the other guy, which I believe this is where we are in this social media world now, as it's been an experiment for all of us, and we're what, 10, 15 years in on social media in a mainstream attitude. So here we are with those roles reversing. Some of those ideas would be, I would say like the cake being baked for the gay couple, right? And somebody like, listen, you could buy a cake, but personally it goes against my religious beliefs to bake this cake. Well, why are you beating on this guy? Because he's accommodating in every way, but for his own personal moral dilemma, can't do what you were asking. Why are we beating this guy up? Why are we forcing him to do this? Really great points. I'm glad you're moving to this idea of if you win and you succeed, how are you going to treat the previous majority as they no longer have the power and status they did because they're not going anywhere. So let me give a less contentious example than what the ones we've been playing with here. Whitney Wolfe, who is the founder of and still the CEO of Bumble, right? So she basically took a social norm that's existed for over 100 years for as long as people have dated, which is heterosexual relationships, men are the hunters and they are searching for the woman that they want when they go to bars, grab the cantaloupe at the same time in the supermarket, whatever it is, is the guys going to the one approaching and then attempt to say something witty and try to get a date. And then she basically said, listen, this doesn't make any sense why this should be the only pathway to having romance or sex or whatever it is you want. So she created Bumble where if you choose and swipe and find a woman that you're attracted to, you cannot have any communication. Not only that, you can't even look at a picture of that person until the woman within the next 24 hours says, you've passed my threshold. I'm willing to talk to you. You get to say a couple words and now we can actually have a back and forth exchange. She disrupted up 100 years of social norms in terms of how dating operates. Now here's what she didn't do, which gets through these tests. Are you one of us is the group survival at risk threatened as a result of this innovation? You will not find anywhere in any interview or any book or any mention of Whitney Wolfe talking about that men are a problem in society and that men are too aggressive and that men are obnoxious and that as if as a whole species 50% of the world, you're all a problem and you're the patriarchy. You won't see her saying that because she's basically saying is that listen, I'm interested in creating really good unions of real people that love each other, like each other, want to be with each other to just consenting with each other. And I'm not judging and evaluating people that I don't know. And because of that, I believe it's one of the reasons that people have no problem whatsoever. It's a big innovative shift in terms of it. It was very effortlessly entered into the dating world. And I think there's something to learn about how she did this when we think about other norms that we have a problem with. So with that, obviously, there's a layer of persuasion because you're introducing now women have to do the work on this platform. Women have to be the ones who are witty. And when this platform launched, we had a major influx of women reaching out to us and saying, Hey, teach us the banter lines that you've been teaching the guys. Hey, we need to get our acting gear because we now have to be the ones initiating communication. So what were the other persuasion steps involved in that example that allowed her to convince women to even participate in this new way? I mean, one of the things that Whitney did extremely well was describe some small details of her dating history, which was, you know, I mean, I'm from New York City.  They've got nothing to do all day. That happens there. And she would describe it being a nuisance and annoying, but also simultaneously, what woman doesn't want attention from people. That's why you wear high heels. And it's why you kind of put makeup on and dress up. So she was able to deal with the ambiguity where she wasn't doing absolute. She was describing like, you know, we still, you know, people still want to date men no matter how much people say that it's a patriarchal society and men should disappear and women leaders are better than men leaders without talking about individual leaders. She didn't do that. She dealt with the fact of you've got good people, you've got bad people, you've got a whole continuum. It's no different than women in terms of what you have here and that we're going to work with them. So these kind of strategies about not othering people and not castigating people and Asia, as you said earlier, the idea of in public parlance right now, if I say that the two of you are conservative leaning because of the things that you mentioned about COVID over these past 45 minutes, that's considered an insult now as opposed to like, oh, okay. So there's this one dimension in this 400 dimensions that describe your personality ends up like you're, that's where you fall in this continuum that happens there. Now it's considered you like a middle finger to somebody. That's a problem moving forward because a large chunk of society you're going to interact with at work and family dinners and in organizations are not going to match you ideologically and there is no evidence that only spending time with people that are ideologically similar to you leads to better creative decision making stimulates better thinking and makes you consider more options before you make a decision. And there are ample examples in politics where one party gets complete control and implements what they view as the perfect solution to all of the problems. And guess what? It's not the perfect solution. You actually need the middle more than we need the polarization. And it's interesting because what we love about the show is bringing on guests with a variety of views and showcasing a bit in our interviews are variety of views. And there are certainly things that I'm liberal on. There are certainly things that I'm conservative on. It's crazy that it's now at a point where expressing a view around this podcast and dissent will get you labeled. And I'm sure there are some listeners who are going to say, oh, well, they're conservative now. So I got to find a new podcast that's going to fit my leanings. And Johnny and I have joked about this behind the scenes because we're not political in this podcast at all. But sometimes the discussion will center around these front and center politics that are in everything now. I mean, companies have started to virtual signal and have made it clear where they stand. And we're obviously seeing the impact that people are leaving companies because they don't feel comfortable with the virtue signaling that's going on. They don't want to be surrounded by people just like them. I don't want to be surrounded by people that just have my views. And I think it's important that we start to take steps to guard our sensibility and our sense making skills so that we can think critically, that we don't fall into these traps of castigating the others, painting with a broad brush, and then avoiding those opinions that we don't necessarily agree with. And I've sought through the pandemic as I've watched this unfold to find the Bretts, to find the people who are talking about other views because the world isn't quite making sense to me. I haven't fully bought everything that Bretts sold in the pandemic. I haven't fully bought everything that some of the lab leak people have sold, but it's raised questions enough for me to go, huh, maybe the mainstream narrative is not what I need more of in my life. Maybe I need to start to look at things a little more critically. And I feel like it's sped up even further now with what's happening in the conflict in Ukraine, where one minute you're hearing about this crazy, amazing, celebrated hero of a fighter pilot, and then within 24 hours you're finding out that it's video game footage from three years ago. But all of my friends are hitting me with the ghost of Kiev. It's moving at lightning speed, and it's not giving us enough time to digest the nuance and think for ourselves, is this reality, is this real? Well, and just to add to that discrepancy in the mainstream narrative and reality as we know it is giving everybody reason to be full of anxiety and worry because we can't go to our trusted news sources. And we have to be, all have to be dissenters.  So let me offer a few more tools because I know you guys have amazing workshops that you actually help people, not just in terms of dissenting, but really it's about socializing more effectively. So one of the strategies that's going to be more effective, especially as we talked about if people gain traction and they become the quote unquote winners of whatever the culture war is, what do you do to the leftovers? One of the things is to really focus on the outcomes as opposed to the ideas. So what you want to hear people say is what is the end game in terms of the exact things that you're trying to acquire? So when you people say, I'm trying to have it so that skin color doesn't matter, that's an outcome variable. That means something very differently than having quotas in terms of an end game. So then that raises an additional question, which is, at what point would you potentially remove affirmative action as a strategy to get to that point? Now, that's not a conversation most people are having. It's more like the Supreme Court pornography question, which is response, which is you'll know it when you see it. Well, no, that's not an effective way to work towards a social cause. What percentage at a university at a job would be effective where you'd say, okay, at this point, we're going to allow the best pilots, the best physicians, the best heart surgeons to actually get jobs irrespective of proxy variables that are irrelevant, such as height, physical attractiveness, eye color or skin color that happens there. The other strategy that's important in terms of being persuasive is you want to be able to say that you have reached out and understood the perspective of people that aren't like you. So as much as you want to fight for a cause, you have to ask yourself to think of this thought experiment, college classroom today. So I'm teaching at the number one most diverse school considered in the South, racially diverse school, George Mason University. Imagine if I brought someone into my classroom and I told my students, I want you to listen to what they say and ask them questions from a place of curiosity, not judgment. I want to warn you ahead of time, trigger warning, they're not going to have the same views as you.  She is chased in terms of her romantic life. She is against all forms of abortion and this is informed by her talking to people and actually gaining social experience over the course of time. Now she's not going to have views that are typical of most students at George Mason. And all I asked them to is, can you listen to her? You are not obligated to agree with her? You're not obligated to take her perspective, but can you get her perspective and try to understand where she's coming from? My guess is most students would have an incredibly hard time doing that. You've seen that, you know, there's a sociological change that's very interesting. At no point in the history of humanity has religiosity having been religious, but it's at the point that it is now the lowest number of people that are religious, the lowest number of people that are spiritual, the lowest number of people that believe that there is a higher power that is not explained by humans and potentially by science that has consequences. Everything has trade-offs. So when you don't have those social institutions and you don't allow space for someone to hold those quote unquote antiquated views in quotes, that happens there. What do you do with people that hold these views? And I would argue is that to create a more utopian world, which is that we can understand and talk to people that are different than us, you could listen to this student even if you disagree with them vehemently on every single topic possible, as long as there is good faith by that person, not to proselytize their beliefs. But just to explain, this is my life, I don't care what you believe in. And if we can't do that, we have a real big impasse in trying to truly get at diversity and actually unlocking its benefits. It's fascinating because when many people think of persuasion, they think of what are those magic words I need to be saying, Todd, to get people went over to my side. And what I have enjoyed the most about hosting this podcast, being introverted and going through and living through this COVID experience is just listening, just absolutely listening to where these ideas are coming from, where these beliefs are made and listening to other opinions than my own to allow my mind to expand beyond what I hold as the truth or I hold as a belief. And my religiosity over the years has waxed and waned. Johnny's talked a bit on previous podcasts about that as well, evolving and changing its humans, those beliefs are going to be shifting. And I can't remember what the study was, but it was around getting voters to your side. And of course, we have bumper stickers, we have signs, we have hats, you name it. And they found that the single most impactful strategy to win over voters was door knocking, going inside of their own home with completely different political view and just asking them questions, not sharing the bumper stickers, not saying this is what we're going to do. This is how we're going to change. And this is the right solution based on all these facts and figures, no presentation, a clipboard with some questions that allowed the other side to start to explain themselves, talk through some logical fallacies, talk through how some beliefs came to be and maybe some negative experiences that they were holding on to that color the world in that view, only to share it with someone who's not like them who doesn't have that view to realize, huh, there might be a third path here, there might be a new way of thinking for me. And I know that that is how I've developed my beliefs. I gravitate towards podcasts for that reason, consume a lot of long form content as a listener, trying to expand my mind and understanding that listening power and persuasion and being a principled rebel, a dissenter who wants to win people over, it's just such a powerful attribute and skill that not enough of us are leveraging in these conversations with our neighbors, our friends, our family and now our enemies. There is so much, AJ, what you said that I love. I want to add one more strategy that's from that science by Bruckman about canvassing door to door. And this is a lesson for social advocates for today and for tomorrow, which is, so this was about the bathroom laws in North Carolina. That was what that study was in terms of should we have bathrooms where they basically asexual, anyone of any sex can go into any bathroom. So when transgender individuals went door to door, they didn't try to beat them over the head in terms of, are you using pronouns in your email signature? Are you listening to Fox News? They did exactly what you said, AJ, and one more thing is that they asked them, this goes back to your listening. So listening plus curiosity, they asked them, Hey, has there been a time in your life that you might be willing to kind of share where you felt you were excluded or you were ostracized or you're rejected? And I'm just wondering like what that was like for you now being as an adult thinking about those times when you were younger and everybody's got a story when they were lonely, rejected and ostracized. And they met them there. They met them as that two human beings that have experienced rejection. And they weren't meeting where they were different in terms of their demographics.  And we're adding extra by having all of this, you know, loathing and moral outrage that's experienced regularly life's hard enough as it is.  Oh, like your pain is similar to my pain, your brain probably worked the same way. Your emotions are probably the same as mine. And that pushed it over the edge for them to be supportive of them because they saw their humanity. And what we're doing regularly is we're skipping the humanity part, we're skipping the charity part, we're skipping the reconciliation part, we're skipping the assumption of benevolent intent until proven otherwise, we're skipping those parts. And because of that, with that lack of humanity is we're just getting into our corners. And but that's not even the big problem. The problem is you're losing all these potential friends, you're losing all these potential social networks. And I know that, you know, AJ and Johnny, this is what you do for a living is the one thing that you can do, the one thing you can do until you are in the grave is you can keep making friends, you're not going to keep making romantic partners because people are going to stop looking at you after the age of 50, male or female, you just don't look the same anymore.  And if we have this attitude of low humility, infrequent perspective taking, being curious, these are all barriers to making friendships. And that is the number one predictor that you're going to live a happy life. There's one barrier that I want to discuss as we wrap that is also important, regardless of whether or not you want to be a principled rebel. And that's the internal struggle. So we've talked a lot about winning people over to your side. We've talked a lot about persuasion tactics and what it really means to be a principled rebel. But there's also an internal battle. And Johnny and I have struggled at times just what to talk about on this podcast, not only worried about how the audience is going to perceive it, but worried about our own internal state and the self-doubt of, should I express this side of myself? Should I share this opinion that, you know, half of the audience listening right now might not agree with? How do we manage our own negative emotions, self-doubt, as we work towards becoming that principled rebel? Because that internal battle is often even more challenging than the external battle we'll face. Yeah, I'm glad you're ending with this. And Johnny, this reminds me, I watched a YouTube video of you talking about how to cope with social anxiety. And there's a lot of overlap between these two, because that's really what it is. There's, you know, the belief that there are these perceived flaws in myself because I'm not agreeing with the tribe and the herd and where they're going. So one of the, you know, there's a lot of strategies in the books. I'll just give one of them for the audience, which is the idea of expanding the timeline.  And you think of what would future Johnny be proud of, of what I would do now? Would it be, I'm going to self silence myself and not speak about something where I see a flaw or problem. I'm not going to step up when I see that a woman is being harassed on a subway because I want to protect my wellbeing. Or you're going to say something and say, Hey, listen, I don't want to get into a fight. I don't know how to fight anybody. I haven't done it since I was in third grade, but you got to stay away from the lady.  Future Johnny is going to be much happier having that story as heroic moment where you're courageous, even if you get your butt kicked in that moment that happens there. But present Johnny is like, you know what? Why am I always the one that has to stand up and do something? Like, why can't someone else in the subway do this? Like, listen, I got a great career. I look good. My voice sounds good. I don't need my trachea to be ripped apart in the middle of a subway. It's not going to help my life. And so when we think about there's a future version of us that we could either pay dividends to like one of those bar mitzvah bonds, or that we can take out, we could be eating tons of donuts sitting on the couch right now and actually, you know, paying negatives forward, nothing but lipids forward to our future selves. When we think about that, that there is a future version of us that is going to get rewards or punishment from today, this is a strategy to say that allows you to absorb the pain and friction of now knowing that you're going to have the meaning and richness later. We love that strategy. It truly puts a lot of what we do around socialization, building relationships into perspective, that those moments of fight or flight are fleeting. And once we get down to our core values and moving forward in the direction of our core values with that timeline of understanding future Johnny, it's so powerful for these negative thoughts and emotions that are bound to happen, whether it's social anxiety or in those moments of dissent and opposition. I think one of the important things to know about is that we can absorb much more pain than we think we actually can. And we know this because just think about all the times that you have faced adversity and stress and trauma, and you're still here right now, even if you've got a couple wounds internally or externally as a result of that. Absolutely. When I think about the stress and trauma from my graduate school career, in that moment, it was torturous, mentally, it was beating my head against a wall. But now with this time horizon here at 40, looking at those stresses in my 20s and the fear and anxiety around what my career would look like, put in that perspective, wow, I have a lot more to give and a lot higher pain tolerance than I realize. Wait, this is a horrible way to end this conversation, but I didn't know you got a graduate degree. What's your graduate degree in A.J.? So I dropped out of a biology PhD program at Michigan. I was doing cancer biology as a PhD about three years in when the podcast took off, first dealing with my own social anxiety. So what I encountered in graduate school was far different than what my undergrad and high school years were. So I rushed into graduate school based on a mentor's suggestion. It really wasn't the best fit for me, although I enjoyed the research. I did not enjoy the school work as much. And in throwing myself into that environment, I dealt with a ton of imposter syndrome and my confidence hit the floor. So I went from getting good grades, loafing through school, having a great time to, holy cow, everyone in graduate school is smarter than me. They're published authors. I'm not. And all the self-doubt that goes along with that as a young adult and started the podcast and the podcast caught fire. And a lot of people were struggling with social anxiety and the lack of confidence in their dating life, which is where the podcast started. And since then, yeah, dropped out, started the art of charm. And I'd still read some published papers from my peers who are working alongside of me in graduate school and follow along with their career, but happy with the decision that I made to leave grad school at that time. I am so glad I asked this question. Can I just deconstruct that for people? So I don't know if there's going to be a visual for this conversation, but AJ, I mean, because your posture, your hair, your articulateness, your confidence, this is such an important thing for your audience to hear about you mentioning social anxiety, which often has particularly a stigma for men to say that they are uncomfortable in their skin in social situations, because here's what we do. And this goes back to a strategy for dealing with your small acts or large acts of defiance, which is we compare our insides to other people's outsides.  I've sort of was like shocked that you were going to tell me that you've experienced high levels of social anxiety before because you have so much equanimity and so much ability to kind of communicate clearly and eloquently and extemporaneously as we're talking with some deep stuff on the fly about radioactive topics. What we don't know when we compare ourselves to other people is we see, we only see, you know, the veneer of what other people, but if we had access to what thoughts were going through their brain and what emotions were cycling through and the regrets and the ruminations and the emotional difficulties and how much they white-knuckled themselves so they can make it through this social gathering, we wouldn't feel so bad about ourselves and we wouldn't feel as if we're not coping effectively with life. I think it's good. And one of the ways that you make allies, just like that study we talked about canvassing study, is you ask about people's insides and you reveal your insides and you supercharge the speed of social bonds. Absolutely agree. And the visualization I use is the duck swimming in water. Growing up in the Midwest, watching a lot of ducks glide across that water only to realize that they're furiously paddling below but looking smooth up top. We love asking every guest what their X factor is, what that unique skill attribute mindset is that's allowed you to unlock success in your life. Well, for me it's I can enter into flow states incredibly simply for really extensive periods of time up to 10 hours at a shot, whether it's playing pickleball or writing or reading and then all of a sudden I remember I have to eat for two and a half consecutive meals and it's been a long time since I went to the bathroom. So that allows me to go for have much longer deep states than the average human being. Well, apparently you can have flow states in your bathroom because it was a joy sharing this podcast with you. Thank you for the great conversation. We really appreciate you coming back through and this book is a must read talking not only about persuasion, even if you're not interested in being a dissenter, it is so important when it comes to developing critical thinking skills to have these tools in your tool belt because you never know when you might be in that position that you have to dissent. Pleasure to be here. Where can our audience find out more about you and the book? Well, it's it's available everywhere. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and go to ToddCashin.com. It tells you 10 things you could learn from reading the book and you can find me on every social media possible. I got the domain name of my name everywhere. So it's ToddCashin everywhere. Wonderful. Thank you, Todd.


Hey everyone, welcome to the channel. My name is Philly Beats you and in this video, I'm going to be showing you how to catch the legendary Pokemon Chris Sellia in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl. If you enjoy this kind of content, make sure to hit the like button and if you're new to the channel, hit subscribe. Let's go. So the first thing that you want to do is go ahead and open your map and you're going to fly all the way over to Kenna Leaves City. Go ahead and do that. Once you arrive in Kenna Leaves City, go ahead and cross this bridge. Come down by the Pokemon Gym. And then you will see a sailor over here. Go into the house by the sailor. Once entering this house, you're going to see a kid in a bed. Go ahead and talk to the kid. Little boy is dashing about in his sleep. He appears to be in torment. He is muttering something. Dark, dark is watching me. That's it. After that, I'm going to go ahead, exit outside of here. Go talk to the sailor. Says I've lost my love of sailing since my son fell into that horrid nightmare. I need that lunar feather from Full Moon Island to awaken him. Would you go to Full Moon Island for me? If not for me, then for my son. And just say yes. Only you can awaken my son from his awful nightmare. We're both counting on you. Then you hop into the boat and the ship starts sailing. By the way, you need to probably be in postgame for this and have the national decks done because Criselia is not in the regional decks. Then you will arrive at Full Moon Island. We're going to go ahead. Garatina is definitely in my way right now. Come on, buddy. We need it. Come on. All right. Go through this area. And we're going to enter into this spot. Then just like that, there is Criselia. Gonna go ahead and click on it.  There is something sparkling where the Pokemon once was. Go ahead, pick up this Pokeball. And just like that, you found the lunar feather. It wasn't too bad at all to actually get it. I'm going to go ahead and head back to the sailor and sail back. That Pokemon you met was the lunar Pokemon. I've heard tales of it flying from place to place throughout Sinnoh. Oh, that sparkle. That must be the lunar feather. Thank you. That will wake my son from the nightmare. And then, boom, we're sailing back to the mainland. Just like that. Go ahead, inside the house. Talk to the boy. Then it says, your lunar feather began to glow. The boy's living face became unshumbled and serene.   Sailor man walks in. Oh my gosh, you're awake. Oh my son. I don't know what to say. Thank you. I will never forget you. Seeing you back to normal makes me feel great. I've regained my spirit as a sailor. Come sail with me later. And I kind of feel like I'm doing a Lutz play right now. After you complete this entire quest, I'm going to go ahead and open up my map and fly over all the way to Floroma town. This is going to be one of the best locations where you're going to be hunting roaming Pokemon. This includes Mispirit and Criselia. You basically want to position yourself in this area. Open up your Poke app where you see the roaming Pokemon and position yourself between Route 205 and the Valley Windworks. And what you're going to want to do is just keep going back and forth until that legendary Pokemon happens to spawn in the area that you are in. I'm just going to keep doing this nonstop. Hopefully this is going to happen anytime soon. Is it going to happen? Nope, not yet. So it's going to change. Every single time you change a new location, it will literally just jump to another spot. So I'm going to open up my Pokemon app that tracks this legendary Pokemon Criselia. And as you can see, it's literally on the same location as me right now. This is so cool. So I'm going to head over to it. I'm going to save right before I walk into the grass because you don't want to deal with it. There's basically one strategy that is the safest thing to do. One, save your game before walking into the patch of grass. Two, use Quick Balls every single time on the first turn. Three, if you happen to fail, just reset the game and rinse and repeat until you get it. You do not want this thing to reset and you travel all over the map.  Let's walk into the grass. And here it comes. That wasn't supposed to happen. Let's try that one more time. And there it is. There it is, Criselia, up and about. Here we go, throw out my Garatina from the last video, which you should totally check out if you don't have one yet. And we're just going to throw a Quick Ball at this thing, see what happens. Please one time, one catch, be done. Come on, come on. One, oh my God. Yes. First try, baby. First try, 50 times. Okay, we got it. Wow, first time. We're done. Criselia's data will be added to the Pokedex. That's it. We really just got it the first turn with a Quick Ball. This is the power of the Quick Ball, ladies and gentlemen. And here is the walking animation for this Pokemon. Even though it's not walking, it's really floating. And look how cool this looks. Just to roam around the world with this thing. Oh my God. That's pretty much the video, guys. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to hit that like button. And if you're new to the channel, make sure to subscribe. This has been great, first turn, Criselia. So leave a like for that. That's pretty awesome. And I will see you guys in the next video. This is Philly beats you and I'm out.


theCUBE presents On the Ground. We're welcome to this special exclusive On the Ground CUBE coverage here at Oracle's headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. I'm here with my guest, Brad Tuxbury, who's the Senior Director of Business Development for the big data team at Oracle. Welcome to the On the Ground. Thank you, John. Did it be here?  You've seen the waves come and go. Certainly at Oracle, you've been here for many, many years. Oracle's transforming as a company. And you've been watching it play out. What is the big thing that's most notable to you that you could illustrate that kind of highlights the Oracle transformation in terms of where it's come from? Obviously the database is the crown jewel, but this big data stuff that you're involved in is really transformative and getting tons of traction. Get the cloud machine kind of tying in. Is this kind of a similar moment for Oracle? Share some thoughts there. Yeah, I think there's many, if you look at the data management path from going back to client server to where we are today. Data's always played a pivotal role, but I would say now, every customer is going through this decision-making process where they're saying, aha, data, I'm being disrupted by all different companies. Before it was, okay, I got my data in a database and I do some reporting on it and I can run my business, but it wasn't like I was going to be disrupted by some digital company tomorrow. Because the apps and the databases were kind of tied together almost. They were tied together. Things just didn't move as fast as they do today. Now it's in these digital-only companies, they realize that data is their business. I think one of the pivotal things that we've been doing some studies with MIT is that 84% of the S&P value of some of these companies comes from companies that have no assets, just data. So Uber doesn't own any taxis. Airbnb doesn't own any hotels yet. They've got massive valuation. So companies are starting to freak out a little bit and they're starting to say, oh my God, I got to leverage my data. So the seminal moment here is saying, how do I monetize my data? Before it wasn't this urgency. Now there's this sense of like, I got to do something with this data, but the predicament they're in is, especially these legacy companies, they've got silos of stuff that's not talking to each other. It's all on different versions and different vendors. Oracle's always been in the database business, so you made money by creating software to store data. Now it sounds like there's a business model for moving the data around. Is that kind of what I'm getting at here? So it's not just storing the data, software to store the data, it's software to make the data. Yeah, it's like three things. I think it's three things. It's ingesting the data from new sources that we, outside of the company, so sensors and social media, right? That's one thing. Secondly, it's then managing the data, which we've always done. And then third thing is analyzing it. So it's that whole continuation. And then what's happened here is the management platform's expanded. It's gone from just a relational base to this whole SQL world and this Hadoop world, which we completely support. And by no means is this relational a zero sum game, right? Where it's relational or nothing at all. We've expanded the whole data management platform to meet the criteria of whatever the application is. And so these are the three data management platforms today. Who knows what's gonna come tomorrow? We'll support that as well. But the idea is choose the right platform for the application. And what it's really becoming about is applications, right? And this data management stuff is obviously table stakes, but how do I make my applications dynamic and real-time based on what I have here? Four years ago, a new CUBE audience will remember we did the CUBE in Hadoop world, but it's called back then before we came to Strata Hadoop and O'Reilly and Cloudera show. Mike Olson and Ping Lee at XL Parties said, oh, we have a big data fund. So they thought there was going to be a tsunami of apps and it never really happened. Certainly, Hadoop didn't become as big as people had thought, but yet analytics rose up. I mean, analytics became the killer app. But now we're beyond analytics, the use of data for insights. Where are the apps coming from now? You had Rokana here, we had Landisco providing some solutions. What do you guys see the apps coming from? Obviously Oracle has their own set of apps, but outside of Oracle, where are the apps? So yeah, it's an interesting phenomena, right? It's everyone thought Hadoop's the next great wave and the reality is if you go talk to customers, they're like, yeah, I've heard of Hadoop, but what do I do with it? So it's like absolutely what's going to drive this whole stack forward. And to that end, the number one thing that people are looking for is 360 view of customer. They all want to know more about customer. I was talking with the customer who represents the equivalent of the tax bureau of their country and they, instead of putting the customer, it's the taxpayer or the customers at the center and all the different places that you pay taxes. So they want to have one view of you as the taxpayer. So whether you're a public entity, private, the number one thing that the apps that people are looking for is show me more about customer. If I'm a bank, a retailer, they want to cross sell and they want to do, that's the number one app. In telcos, they want to know about networking. How do I get this network? I want to understand what's going on here so I can better support my support center. But secondary to that, we're in this kind of a holding pattern now. What are the next set of apps? And so there's a bunch of startups here in Silicon Valley that are thinking they have the answer for that and we're partnering with them and we're opening up a cloud marketplace to bring them in and we'll let customers decide who's going to win this. Talk about Rokana and their value proposition there here talking to us today. What's the deal with Rokana? So Rokana is an interesting play. What they have found is that customers, one of the ways they talk about themselves is they offer a data warehouse to IT. So if I'm the IT guy, I want to go in and have basically a pool of all kinds of log analysis. How are my apps running? Do I need to tune the apps? How's the network running? They want like a one bucket of how can I better how can my operation perform better? So what we've seen from customers is they come to us and said, okay, what do you got in this new space of Hadoop that can do that? Look at log analysis and all kinds of app performance from a Hadoop perspective. They were one of the people that first person to answer that. So they're having great success, finding out where security breaches are, finding out where the network latencies are, just better, like I said, looking at logs and how things could run better. So that's what they're answering for customers, basically improving IT functions, right? Because what's happening is a lot of business people are in charge, right? And they're saying, I no longer want to have to go to IT for everything. I want to be able to do, go to basically a data model and do my own analysis of this. I don't have to call IT for everything. So these guys are in some ways trying to help that mantra. Talk about when Disco, what are they're talking about here and how is their relationship with Oracle? They were speaking with us today as well. Yeah, so there's in this big data world, what we're seeing a lot of is customers do a lot of what we call lab experiment. So they got all this data and they want to do lab experiments. Okay, great. So then they find this nugget of, okay, here's the great data model we want to do some analysis on this. So let's turn it into a production app. Okay, then what do you do? How do you take a production? These are the guys that you would call. So they take it into an HA high availability environment for you and they give you zero data laws, zero downtime to do that. They, one of the things that Oracle's, we're touting as a differentiator in our cloud versus hybrid approach, where you have, you know, you can start out doing test dev in the cloud, bring it back on-prem, vice versa. They allow you to do that sync, that link between the cloud and on-prem. That's, they also, you know, we work today with Cloud Air, we OEM them in our big data appliance. If the customer has Hortonworks, but they also want to work with our stuff, they go between with that as well. So it's basically, they're giving you that, that production ready environment that you need when in an HA world. Brad, thanks for spending some time with us here on the ground, really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, we're here exclusively on the ground at Oracle headquarters. Thanks for watching.