Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we take a look at the explosion of sports gambling in our society and look at how it has changed both the business of and the culture around sports. And in part two of our discussion, we will discuss recent discoveries on how ultra processed foods affect how our brains work at a fundamental level.
Hello.
Welcome to the call it like I see it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and riding shotgun with me is a man who knows how to keep the pod rollin'like, it's a Cadillac. Tunde. Ogon Lana Tunde. Think it's time to put throw some D's on it.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Yeah, man, she messing me up. Cause I love mercedes, but I can't deny a good automaker from America. So now I don't know where to choose, right?
But I'll throw all of the above. Let's go. All right.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: All right. Get started. If you enjoy the show, I ask that you hit subscribe on YouTube or like, or on your podcast app. Doing so really helps us get the show out there more.
Now, we're recording this on April 9, 2024 and Tunday. It's been almost six years since the US Supreme Court struck down the federal law that barred sports gambling in every state except Nevada. And now we're up to 38 states plus the District of Columbia, where sports betting is legal. And we've seen the major sports leagues all partner up with the sports books. And we've seen the idea of a sports book change from, like, a room you go into in a casino or something like that and walk up to the window and place bets or, you know, a back alley bookie or whatever to, you know, an app on your phone. We've seen, you know, sportsbook advertisements just blanket everywhere, you know, in whether it be advertisements and sports or even beyond that. So you can't even watch or read about sports, really, without getting inundated with ads from sportsbooks. So what? So now that sports betting, you know, is spread out like it has tunde, what really stands out to you as far as how this has become so ubiquitous?
[00:02:13] Speaker B: That's a great question, especially after I'm tired from staying up watching the final four last night, which I did not bet on and didn't appear to be worth betting on. But, um, well, it depends on what.
[00:02:24] Speaker A: You would have been betting.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Yeah, but no, it's like, this is, to me, an interesting conversation. Gambling's not something that is really in my everyday wheelhouse of life. I got other vices. That's not one of them.
I am human, but that's not one of them.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: But this is one of the fundamental ones of humanity.
[00:02:47] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what I was going to say is in researching, that's why this is a fun topic for me, because it's not something I'm steeped in. But in reading and preparing for today's show, it was a good reminder to your point. I mean, I did my nerd rabbit hole, which was look at the history of it, and found, you know, records dating back to 4000 years ago in Egypt, they recorded, you know, gambling games and things like that. So to your point, I mean, there's, there's, there's history of the buddha discussing gambling, Jesus discussing, you know, playing dice, things like that. So clearly, the idea of gambling, I think, is rooted in the human mindset of things like competition, things like that. So I think gambling has probably been around since humans have been cognitive. So that's number one. Number two is what's different today. And in doing, you know, just again, preparing for today, I found, which is very interesting to me, that gambling, to your point, since this legalization in 2018, or I'd say the expanded legalization by.
[00:03:48] Speaker A: The Supreme Court, just for reference, what the Supreme Court did, there was a law from the dated to the nineties that barred sports gambling in every state with exceptions. And one of the exceptions was that Nevada could do it. So prior to this, you could go to a casino in Las Vegas or somewhere in Nevada, and they'd have sports books, and you could sit in there and walk up to the window, place bets, not unlike in some states, they had maybe horse racing or dog racing, and you could go up to the window and place a bet and so forth. And then the Supreme Court struck down that law. So each state basically could make their own gambling laws.
[00:04:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's very interesting, as you say it. Cause when I was younger, I used to wonder, without having been nuanced in all the laws and how things came about historically, like why Nevada, why Vegas and Reno were the only places besides the indian reservations that were allowed to gamble? And to your point about federalism and the ideology of states rights, I mean, to me, I can't argue that the Supreme Court allowed all states to behave in this way, because why give one state like Nevada a leg up and everyone else has to suffer a different rule? So I don't necessarily disagree with the.
[00:05:00] Speaker A: Ruling that actually, you know, like Chris Christie, governor at the time, governor of New Jersey, was the one who, you know, really led that charge with New Jersey, suing to make rule that law unconstitutional. And eventually he wasn't governor, by the time the case got decided by the Supreme Court. But, yeah, it was other states, like, yo. Yeah, what? Why can't we get any of this?
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah, and so, but. And I know this is basis of what. We'll talk a little bit further. What. What I found in researching was, it's just interesting that the way in which we are exposed as humanity or people in our country to the opportunity to gamble, let me put it that way, through our current technology seems to be more disruptive than the other. Like you said, then, when gambling was either you had to go somewhere physically, like, go to a casino or Vegas, or you at least had to go, like, deal with a bookie or, you know, things like that. The fact that it's available now in the palm of everyone's hand does. The numbers do seem to tell that it's having a different effect on society than it did up until this point.
[00:06:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's an interesting point in the sense that we can't look at. We can't look backwards because of the current technological environment. We can't look backwards and say, okay, yeah, this will play out in this way because we have this as an example, like, we're in uncharted territory, so to speak. When you have the combination and one of these is older, you know, just sports on all the time, or, you know, sports going, you know, there's. There's. And you can access. It's not like 1985 when there's one game on, you know, Monday Night Football is the only national tv game every week. And then. But everybody, you know, people can't watch. You can only maybe watch a local game, and that's it. But now you can watch every game that's happening every night. One, and then two. Now you can bet on any of these games, any or all of these games from the palm of your hand. So, yeah, we don't have much historical guidance on how this is gonna play out. And related to that, actually, was the thing that stood out to me, was how quickly all this happened. You know, like, this is we go from a situation where just take for sports media, for example, like the ESPNs of the world, they don't discuss gambling lines. They don't discuss, you know, the gambling angles, even though that stuff in Nevada, it was legal and it was happening all over. But they. It's like, taboo. They don't discuss it. The sports leagues want nothing to do with it. They wouldn't even put teams in Las Vegas. And, you know, to now where it's like full embrace, you know, and then ESPN has a betting, their own betting app, you know, like, and then in the sports leagues are putting teams in Vegas. They got sports books in arenas for some of the sports and the teams. And so it went like a complete 180 where in the leagues have changed their tunes. The leagues were saying this was up until the point Supreme Court ruled the leagues were on the side of gambling. Should not be, should not expand. It's terrible. It'll destroy our businesses to full embrace.
And so how quickly that happened. And now 38 states plus the District of Columbia that you have this gambling, it's just, it's amazing to me like that that's the power of capitalism and money, so to speak, that, you know, where a, an opportunity to, to get return on investment exists, it takes no time for the money to get there and to back it and to start trying to put, to extract that value out of society. There's a lot of moral concerns, there's a lot of social, excuse me, societal concerns that we'll have to deal with and wade into. But the speed in which we go from something that doesn't exist like that from a mainstream standpoint to something that you cannot avoid is just jarring to me.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, I mean, and it's no surprise when you look at the explosion of the speed at which the technology can make it go from zero to 100 miles an hour and then something interesting.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Just to piggyback on that real quick, like, it does make a difference that you don't have to. Like when they did this, they didn't have to go and start doing large scale scale construction of sports books, like of physical sports books everywhere. They could just somebody have some people in a lab design an app, and then it's there, you know, so not having to do this, physical infrastructure, I'm sure plays a role in that. That's a good point.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Well, the other thing which I think we should prepare for kind of more of this in our society, because if you really think about it, you make a good point about kind of the proliferation of this. And then it made me think of what I read about the revenue that states are making in general. And I know we'll talk about that a little bit later in more detail, but just for the purpose I'm making now. And kind of this discussion here in this part is because with kind of the world moving more really to the information age, again, number one, we don't need as many people in terms of labor doing things to make society productive. You know, it used to be, you know, you know, the old pictures of 100 people making one Ford Model T, now it's all robots, you know, and all those stories we know. So I think, number one, we got more people with more time on their hands. Number two is, like you said, we have more access to more stimulation.
To your point about how many games you can watch in one day and, you know, like the NFL ticket where you can have on your tv all these different boxes of games, like when you and I were kids in the eighties, that didn't exist. You just had your tv into one channel and you could watch the game one game at a time and you.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Weren'T watching games from all over, you know, and you couldn't get which game. You're.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Why you. Whatever game they showed whatever it was in the market. Yeah. And, and then the other thing I'm thinking is, I mean, that's why I just bring up the revenue that the, literally the hundreds of billions of dollars that Americans spend on gambling generally, and then what that means in the tens of billions of dollars of tax revenue and other, that and other things like that. And that's what I mean. Like, I almost feel like this is going to be the new way that revenue is generated by governments is basically taxing our vices because, you know, the idea of manufacturing and labor has diminished in a way that you can't tax that as much. So there's going to be this push and pull on society, I think, where you're going to have the need for revenue and the need for and especially revenue that is not, doesn't seem that painful because no one likes or at.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Minimum is considered voluntary, you know, like at least a large number of people. And that's an interesting point because it really goes into, like, we're familiar with this already with the lottery. You know, lotteries are put in place and by a lot of states, that's gambling, you know, and that's not necessarily, that's not sports gambling. That's more pure chance, you know, so to speak. And then a lot of times that's used to fund education systems or whatever. And it's an interesting point, you know, like that's been called, you know, some people call it like a tax on the stupid, you know, stuff like that, which I'm not going to throw that around and stuff. But, you know, just noted, just you're taxing people that are willing to, quote unquote, throw their money away because just fundamentally the reason why casinos are being built and sportsbooks that are being developed, apps are being developed, as others, because ultimately they, the house always wins. They always end up making more money. They know how to do the numbers so that they always win more than they lose, so to speak. And the same thing with the lottery, they wouldn't do that stuff if it was giving away money. But the idea that, to me, is very interesting from the standpoint of you're correct, you do need to figure out ways to fund society. Productivity has gone up. Per capita productivity has gone up. What do you do? And so you can look at these type of voluntary actions to take advantage of. Okay, well, we gotta get the money. We can try to kind of pull it like tooth and nail from people, or we can just set up these systems, but these things all cost society money as well. So there's a certain symmetry to instead of spending money to try to eradicate it, and you get no return from that, you open it up, you make it legal, you regulate it. Ideally, I mean, we'll get into whether or not that part has happened yet, but you regulate it, and then you take the proceeds that you're making from a governmental standpoint, you take those proceeds to then a deal with the fallout that's going to happen that you'd have to deal with anyway. But at least you're using money that's being generated from that activity. And ideally, you generate more money than activity, then just needs to clean up the mess, so to speak, because we're cleaning up the mess anyway. It's just where that money is coming from. So it, it kind of, it's different way to allocate, you know, resources and to generate, you know, kind of the, the, from a state standpoint, what you're going to do to deal with the issues that are come out, that come out of this.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's a good, that's what I mean by I could see this happening more often because as you're talking, it reminds me a bit of the marijuana legalization. I mean, you know, you and I live in Florida, which now has both the sports betting and marijuana legal in certain capacity. Marijuana medically legal, not, not recreational, but that appears to be a well regulated thing. You know, the medical marijuana in Florida, there's, you know, there's a certain way you can get a license, I mean, a card. There's, you have to go renewals periodically.
They only allow you to have a certain amount of grams per period of time, like every 60 days. You can't have more than an ounce or 2oz, whatever the doctors prescribed. And that keeps people from buying, let's say a pound and going to sell it themselves and things like that. So to me that's like, okay, that's the proper way to regulate something that society once has considered a vice. And like you're saying that it's shown that so many people were using this anyway, that it was kind of like the system was just getting gummed up because you're arresting people and law enforcement's gotta waste time for nonviolent people just being arrested for having a bag of marijuana on them.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: So conceivably you could use a lot of the money, that's, let's say half of the money being generated from the taxes of that to actually deal with. If there's people with problems that come from this. Yeah, yeah. So, like you can divert. So instead of that, money is coming out of general budget. If otherwise, you know. Cause you're still gonna have to deal with that kind of stuff. So. And you know, it creates a different kind of mindset of an approach, a deal with some of these things that appear to be human behaviors that are going to happen. And, you know, like, so how are we going to, you know, account for that? You know, like there there's the criminal, criminalizing everything aspect, but then there's also the treatment aspect and all that. And there's very.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: That's why I want to keep going. And now segue to the gambling, because it appears that this legalization of gambling at the state level has not been met with the same type of effort. To, let me see how to say it, like a forward thinking way of how to regulate it. So that's where I think we run the risk. Where, I mean, from what I'm reading is the amount of addiction, especially among young people in their twenties and thirties, and again, without a remedy to help the society deal with that. That's where it can go off the rails a bit, I think, or guardrails.
[00:15:46] Speaker A: To try to limit how much that would happen, because those guardrails aren't gonna come from industry. Industry wants, is encouraged and is incentivized to get people doing this compulsively, you know, and so, and that's. I actually wanted to get into that because there's several potential downsides that we've observed. And now when we talk about this, the question of when we point out downsides, it's not to say that you should make it illegal. You know, it's just anytime you have, there's actions, there's reactions, you need to evaluate what's going on, to say, okay, well, what can we do. How can we tweak this in order to make it something that's more safe in society, that's more manageable in society because, but still maybe not go all the way to a complete prohibition, which generally speaking, doesn't work that well anyway. And so are there things that you've seen that have gone too far, like you point out that you can get into? The addiction issues that we've seen are things that might need to be reeled back in from the standpoint of now that we've opened this up, and I think we can agree that there hasn't been that second step of, okay, let's regulate this now and figure out ways to make it safer for, you know, from a state standpoint, make it safer for the population. That part hasn't happened yet, unfortunately. A lot of times we've talked about this in other shows, that doesn't happen until you have a bunch of tragedy. You know, like, it's like, oh, but a bunch of bad things happen. And then people come and say, okay, let's regulate. And it's like, well, a lot of this stuff is, some of it at least is foreseeable, you know, in terms of the way businesses are going to operate. In terms of the way, like the incentive structure, let's at least figure out ways to regulate, tamp down on some of the excesses of the incentive structure. Meaning the incentive structure, meaning companies are trying to make as much money as possible, so they're going to try to make their products more addictive. They're going to try to market them in a way that, you know, that may be deceptive or, you know, something like that. So, but what stands out to you as far as things that may be going over the bounds of something that would make this sustainable or making it so that it would be unsustainable and because it's exceeding these, these reasonable bounds.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: I would say everything you just said.
And the reason is, it's interesting because we did the show last week on more of the tech side of this discussion of algorithms. But that's what I'm saying is in preparing for today, I couldn't ignore the fact that this change in how people are responding to the opportunity to gamble, let me put it that way, and having it in their ecosystem, the changes seem to be directly correlated to the technology available to us now. So it's the smartphone specifically. This isn't people going to a desktop. This isn't somebody going to a kiosk at a gas station. These changes have happened specifically because like you're saying apps, algorithms in the phones and all that. So as you're talking, it made me realize, yeah, I was about to answer you about gambling specifically, but let me start then. A 30,000ft is. It's another example where the inability for our country, our leaders, however you want to call it, to figure out how to regulate big tech. And by regulate, I'm not trying to say choke off business opportunity and growth, I'm just saying the idea of these algorithms, we haven't figured that out yet. So that's where I realize is, because I'm looking here at one of the stats from the article, 1% of us household, sorry, approximately 1% of us adults meet the diagnosis of gambling, being addicted to gambling. But then it goes on to say that a 2021 survey from the National Council on Problem Gambling. So I think they know a little bit of something on this topic, found that one quarter of young adults, those people in their mid thirties and under, have basically shown symptoms of some sort of addictive behavior to gambling, like withdrawal, if it's taken away from them, anger, things like this. So what it tells me is that under normal circumstances, maybe, or circumstances before this technology, maybe only 1% of all of us as adults become addicted to something like this. But with this type of exposure, it seems that the younger generation, who are kind of like the petri dish here, this is like an ongoing experiment.
They seem to be a quarter is a lot of people, right? A quarter of the young adult population. So this, to me reminds me, it's like politics, right? Not that many people paid attention to politics prior to 1015 years ago. All of a sudden, when everything is being fed to you in your phone, you're paying, more people are engaged. Now, that could be good or bad. And we could say that with many other topics in our society, that it's the phones, the technology, specifically in the smartphone, that has caused a certain change, more so than, than other types of technologies. That's why I make the example of the desktop and the kiosk at the gas station, because those have been available for a long time for gambling, but that addicted attracted just that 1% of people that had a true addiction. Now what's happening is the smartphones are opening up the opportunity for more people to kind of get sucked into the orbit of potential addiction. And that's just a reality.
[00:20:50] Speaker A: The engagement in politics is a good example, actually a good analogy, because you said, I think it's a good thing that more people are engaged, but we gotta look at the way that they're engaged. You know, they're engaged in a way that they're almost being. It's a kind of trigger response engagement. It's not like, oh, let me learn more about this. It's like they're engaged in a way that they're being manipulated in a sense. Like, okay, we know how to trigger someone. Let's trigger them with this. And then they will do, they'll be Pavlov's dog. They'll do what we know that they'll do once triggered, you know, they'll yell at this person or they'll, you know, do this or do that. So I think here what we, what we have to be able to observe. And there's a, it's a subtle distinction. Making the activity legal, I don't think, is actually what's led to the problems that we had. We've had, it's the marketing and the convenient way that it's been deployed that has led to the issues that we have. So just having it to your point, if, if we had gambling, sports gambling, legal, but you had to go to the gas station and go to, you know, or go to a kiosk at some building or whatever in order to place your bets. It's not buzzing you on your phone every five minutes like, hey, look at this. This line just moved. You know, all these different things, then it might be received differently. You might not put a quarter of the young people population at risk, because they're not these techniques that have been tried and true in order to foster addiction from a social media standpoint and other standpoints, those techniques won't be used in the gambling context. So, you know, it's not unlike to me, up until the nineties, like, this is something that, you know, we've lost touch with. But up until the, the late nineties, the FDA prevented big pharma for. They didn't prevent them from marketing on television. But the disclosure requirements for any direct to consumer marketing for drugs were so onerous that they only could really do it in print. And so, you know, you get, like, it wasn't something that they could just mass distribute because they had to say all the, all the downsides and all the risks. They had to list them all. And typically, there are a lot of downsides and risks to these. The big pharma stuff. Late nineties, big pharma, or the FDA changed the regulation. They only had to label, like, the major things so they could start going on tv. And what happened? People started taking more, you know, of these prescription drugs. They kept going to directors, hey, I think I have this. I think I have that because of the way it was being marketed to them changed. It wasn't the prevalence of these things and changed. But we know the way marketing 101 is that you can make people want stuff if your marketing is good. So that gambling is legal might not necessarily be the issue. It may be that the way that it's being marketed to people and the convenient deployment with these techniques that are known to foster addictive behaviors might be what is creating the risk factor that we really have to look at. And that's where you can look at regulation without looking at prohibition. So it's not necessary. And one thing I'll add to this just real quick. I'll let you get your comment on it. But the issue of true addiction is one that we have to deal with. But that's where I think we have to look at more larger interventions, more extreme interventions for those people. I don't think you make the general rules for society based on how it's gonna be received by the most vulnerable population. But you might have general rules to say, hey, let's not take. You can't take advantage of people. We know that you can trigger the human brain in this way, but you can't do that in this context. We just won't let you do it. That kind of regulation, I'm saying, but not necessarily the regulation to say, we got to regulate this so that even someone who's prone to an addiction won't get addicted, because then you end up. You almost end up at prohibition. That's kind of the logic for prohibition a lot of times is that, oh, well, if some people even get a taste of this, they're going to be addicted. And it's like, well, you can't have freedom in a lot of those contexts if we're looking at only the people that are most susceptible to the worst outcomes.
[00:24:22] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's interesting. Cause my wife has a prohibition on me going to strip clubs. Maybe that's her. Maybe that's her reasoning.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: She don't live in a free household, man. Yeah. That's not freedom. You don't live in a free house. That's an authoritarian household. And you are.
[00:24:38] Speaker B: No, she only has a prohibition if I don't tell her. If I tell her, I'm going, ah, okay, okay.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: So it's a disclosure requirement.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a disclosure. Yeah. Like you're saying about big pharma on the commercial. I just got to disclose it, and I got it. Sometimes I got to have a long disclosure, depending on what my plans are. But, yeah, it's. It's in writing. You're right. I got to send her an email.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: Has to be in writing.
[00:25:01] Speaker B: Yeah. I've got to get the lawyer to sign off, and sometimes I got to have her sign an NDA. But, you know, that's a whole different discussion.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: That's the whole other thing.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: But that's a different show for the audience.
But she'll have a fun when she sees this.
But just to joke around and just say that I do agree with you that the idea of prohibition. And you're right, this is where I think it's just an interesting conversation about societies. Right. Because we've tried a lot of this prohibition stuff in general. We know the famous one with alcohol in the twenties in the United States. But we've had. I mean, basically, there's a prohibition on gambling outside of Nevada.
And I guess it's when he said Chris Christie, it reminded me of Atlantic City when we were kids, that somehow you were able to gamble there. I never understood that.
[00:25:47] Speaker A: But not sports gambling, and that's why they wanted to be able to have sports books in Atlantic City, you know, like, in those casinos. That was.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: Is that why those casinos went bankrupt? I don't think that there are different reasons.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: There's a reason why some of those.
[00:26:00] Speaker B: That's another show, too. So. Okay.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Very few people have proven to be able to lose money on casinos. Very few people.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: That's a special quality to be to actually bankrupt the casino. You got to be really good at what you're doing. That's one way to. You have to be purposeful.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: Yeah, we got to get back on the rails, man. I wanted to ask you, did anything. Has anything, as far as things have unfolded surprise you, as far as, you know, like, oh, has there been anything really unexpected or anything that you've looked at and just been like, oh, wow. That we would have never thought that, you know, so to speak.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah. So your word. Use the word trigger, which actually was very apropos. So that's what surprised me, honestly, in researching this. Kind of surprised and not surprised. I mean, it was a surprise, and then I was like, yeah, well, I should have expected that, which is that the. Again, we beaten this horse already on this discussion, but it's worth it. It's the apps, the technology, the algorithms. I got just the way that, like, in other parts of our life, like we're discussing that they draw certain people into this, and then they get stuck and they get addicted. Kind of, like, some stock trading apps, you know, in this whole. Remember the meme stock stuff? I mean, a lot of that was playing on the same addictive behavior and the impulses created with winning and losing money. And so, and again, like we talked about prior to this technology, people couldn't trade stocks in their hand. Literally at any given point of the day. They had to either show up at a desktop or, you know, call a stockbroker back, you know, before a computer. So it's, it's. That's what I'm saying is it's interesting that this is just another way that the tech industry has been able to have things that kind of permeate our attention in our lives.
[00:27:44] Speaker A: Yo, you got it. Actually, you were telling me offline as far as, like, the use of colors in terms of, in there, like, the training apps, and I'm sure that's in the gambling apps.
[00:27:53] Speaker B: Just real quick, I'll share that, which is. And it's funny because it's just talking to someone last night about that, I've started, you know, for a while now. I've had my phone, my iPhone. I put it on grayscale so that it's black and white. And it sucks because I was listening to a neuroscientist who actually spent time working at Microsoft's neuroscience lab, and she was saying she was giving a speech. I wasn't talking to her one on one, but she was telling us that Microsoft has one of the largest neuroscience research labs in the world. And it kind of hit me, and I was like, wow, I would have never thought that a software company like that would make that kind of investment.
But everything we're talking about make it makes sense because they want to learn how to, you know, understand the human brain for profit at the end of the day, right? Just like food companies and every, and a lot of other types of companies, our psychology is profitable. That's what we've learned with this, with this era. And so, you know, she had said in that speech that just by putting your phone in black and white, the grayscale, on average, they find that a human being uses their phone 60 minutes less per day. And what she said was, which hit me, was, imagine going to a casino with no lights, or imagine looking at a Christmas tree with no lights. It's just a pine tree. And so that was the point. She said, we scientists know exactly what colors, you know, all this kind of stuff, how to, how to get your mind engaged. And even sometimes when I go to, like, my stock app, right, if it's in color, and it's. The market was down today. It's all red. I'll immediately have a certain feeling. You'll feel it's all green. I have an immediate, certain feeling both are opposite feelings, but it'll be an immediate trigger. And it's interesting, when I look at it in black and white on my phone versus my iPad, which I keep in color, actually have to stop and kind of scrutinize a bit to see the minus or the plus because I can't see the color and which that little bit of. Yeah. And just to finish, just that 1 second of delay. Allow. Does I notice the difference? It doesn't allow my emotional state to immediately get triggered, like that word you're saying. I'm able to slowly get into the realization of, was it up or down today?
[00:30:04] Speaker A: No, it's because. And we actually did. This point came up yet last week, but. But when it's in color, you go straight from perception to reaction with nothing in between. And so it goes straight to your emotional state. You perceive, you react. When it's not in color, you have to actually go perception, cognition, and then reaction. And so there's that intervening step where you got to think about it. And by thinking about it, it blunts the emotional part of the reaction because you. You're thinking about it, you're like, okay, well, that means I probably got it. You're already thinking about what you need to do with it versus just this, you know, type of thing. And so, like, I'm sure, you know, those are techniques that get played out, you know, in this type of context, too, which, again, has nothing to do with gambling per se. You know, that just how the gambling is presented to you. For me, just real quick, what surprised me, actually, is, I mean, I guess it surprised me only because we're kind of in uncharted territories a little bit. And that is the player reaction or the participant reaction has been one, you know, that's been kind of resentful in some ways, you know, a lot, at least not. Not across the board. But I know we've seen issues, and there have been scandals. We're not going to really get into the scandals. There's been gambling scandals. Before, you know, it was legal. There's been gambling, gambling scandals. Now, that's going to be a part of it. Like, we're just going to have to understand that's part of it. Sometimes having it legal can make it easier to catch stuff which has happened, but, you know, it's still there. But a lot of times I've heard players, you know, say, hey, I'm just a prop. Because, you know, with the prop betting NCAA, you know, with college athletes, they're trying to actually take away the ability to make individual player bets. In some states, they've been successful with this on college players because that's, that creates, you know, this friction where, you know, you're betting on a player to score certain they're not winning the game or anything like that. And so the players, you know, although, you know, this is something that, at least in the professional ranks, is going to increase their salaries because this is more money coming into the pot. On the other hand, like this does make them even more of a commodity, not less of a competitor and more of a commodity. And so a lot of them haven't taken too close to then some of the coaches, same thing where they're getting yelled at because of, oh, why didn't you play this guy 20 minutes? I had a bet that this guy was gonna play 20 minutes, and it's like, you know, we're really, we're getting further removed. So I'm not saying that's like the worst thing in the world. You know, like there's actions, reactions. But it's just interesting to me to see this. You know, fans always complain. All the coaches, you know, he should have done this. He's stupid, you know, from a win loss standpoint. But now we got this whole other layer of coaches and players being aware of catching flak for and all this other stuff of all these individual performance metrics, which just, it's, it's not necessarily a great direction to go. I'm not saying it's the end of the world, but it's, it's something you would necessarily, you wouldn't necessarily want to have that be front and center in terms of, from a sports standpoint, because that may not play out in a way that is long term sustainable for the legitimacy of the sports leagues if, if that's something that people are focused too much on.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think just to kind of wrap it up with this is if we don't regulate this somehow, the ability for these computers to keep manipulating us, I really think that we are doing ourselves a disservice and our children and the future generations if we don't really revamp how we teach kids at school, because I think starting in middle school, what you just said about when I was talking about the colors and understanding that the trigger and response, the shorter that time period, the more emotional a human being will become. So how to create an environment like the example of just going on Grayscale, where you are allowing a bit more distance between your trigger and response online. These are all putting you more in.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Control, you know, like a lot.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: The ways to. Because right now we're just being led around, you know, by. At the mercy of the programming of our. Of our devices. And so if there are techniques to kind of subvert now that's on an individual level, and then it also has to be looked at from a regulatory level, you know, and so what needs to be done to protect people from the big tech taking, you know, utilizing techniques that to maximize exploitation, you know, and that's. So those are all things we have to look at. I mean, we definitely are building the plane while we're flying it. And so, you know, like, that's ideally, though, we have leadership that is kind of. They can handle these kind of questions and can, you know, come up with kind of a good faith way to approach, you know, versus leadership that just yells and screams? Well, that's my concern.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: But we have leadership, like, in our state that's worrying about, you know, teaching third graders about being gay. If that, like, that's a real threat. I think this stuff is a bigger threat. Like, we need to be. How do we teach children to deal with the Internet as they get older? So, I mean, but, yeah, but I.
[00:34:31] Speaker A: Think we can wrap from there. We appreciate for joining us on part one of this discussion. Please join us for part two as well, which will be coming up next.
All right, our second topic this week, we're going to take a look at ultra processed foods. And specifically, I mean, people, you know, there's been a lot written about ultra processed foods, but something very interesting has been really starting to pop out a little bit more in the information that we're getting and how is how ultra processed foods actually change the way the brain operates, particularly the reward centers of the brain. And when we're talking ultra processed food, you're talking more and more removed from a whole food, you know, so a processed food might be, you know, something that is, you take a popcorn and you pop it, you know, or you take, you know, some corn meal and you. You bake it or whatever, fry it into a. A chip. That'd be like process. Ultra process is changed even more than that, you know, like a pringle type of thing where it's. It's something that is very far removed from a potato, you know, so it's no firm definition on where. How far you go where you become from processed, ultra processed. But basically, the further removed it, something is from whatever it came from originally or some things that are just concocted in a lab altogether, you know, that's an easy thing to say, is ultra processed. But your thoughts, you know, like I wanted to get from you, you know, just to start, you know, your reaction to seeing some of this research that's coming out in terms of how ultra processed foods are actually affecting the way the wiring of the brain and the way that it works.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. Again, this is another topic to me. It's very interesting.
The old me, you know, would have said, oh, that's hokey. And that sounds, you know, crazy. How does. How does food affect my mood? And, you know, in terms of this stuff and. But, you know, once you study and you learn about things like the microbiome and all this stuff, I mean, it makes sense that, you know, we are what we eat, that old saying. So, you know, our bodies are designed to process food in a certain way and certain types of food. And like you said, once you put.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: In millions of years, basically.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So once you process food and change kind of the molecular structure at certain levels of food, it's not a surprise that our bodies are going to have a tough time dealing with it. And I think with processing, we can add things like preservatives and all that in there as well. And so what you have is. And this hit me hard after my first trip to Italy, where I ate actual fresh pasta for the first time in my life. And then we learned how to make fresh pasta at home when we got back, and I accidentally left in a ziploc bag some pasta behind something in my kitchen counter for like, two days, like 48 hours. When I found it, it was full of blue mold.
And I remember looking at my wife and saying, you know, this makes me realize the stuff we got in the cupboard for the last six months from the grocery store here is not the same thing. Is not the same. Yeah, that stuff doesn't have mold on it. This is gross. It's got all this mold on it. And when I say that, I mean, like, it looked gross, but I realized how much better this food must really be because bacteria is attracted to it and a bacteria is not being attracted to the one in my pantry.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Yeah, mold. Doesn't even want the mold. Mold.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: That's what I was saying. That's what I was joking with my wife. I was like, hold on. When bacteria and insects don't want to eat this, that's not good. And so that's what I kind of, it made me realize, like, yeah, when we as Americans ingest this highly processed food with all these preservatives going back to what we've learned in society now through the scientific research of the microbiome, it stands to reason that things like inflammation and all that are so prevalent in our society, which all lead to other negative outcomes health wise, if long term consumed. Because once you inject something, or, sorry, consume something like that and inject it into your body, is what I meant. Your body is actually spending half its time trying to figure out what it is and actually fighting it. Because the way the food was processed, it was, it had preservatives added to it so that it can sit on a shelf for a long time, right? So it won't rot, so we can buy it. So, you know, that's why it's a battle. It goes back to like just what we said in part one about some of the fights that we have against big tech, which we don't realize because they figured out how to manipulate our brains in a way that we're kind of just lemmings going towards some of this stuff online. I think it's the same thing now with food that as I'm reading here, it's the same thing that the colors of the packaging, where they put it on the shelf in the grocery store, all that matters. And I saw even one that said that people that become addicted to processed food, when they study how they just see a package, there's certain parts in their brains that light up more. And so it just seems that again, industries figured out how to hook a certain part of the population to its product. And in this case, it happens to be easy, cheap food.
[00:39:26] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, and actually you left out the most important part. When we're talking about ultra process, it's not just the packaging or, you know, the marketing or whatever. It's actually the formulation of the food. And that to me is really what it stands out in the, in the research is that this isn't like an accident, you know, this is the incentive structure for big food, you know, in like kind of our capitalist environment. And that's not to knock the capitalist environment. I think, you know, the capitalist environment is viable, but it has to be regulated. This is an area where the regulation might be. You know, I would say this is more of a failure of regulation than a failure of capitalism. We know what capitalism will do, and it has pros and cons, so. But nonetheless, the incentive structure in the capitalist environment is not for you to be eat healthy meal or to eat well balanced healthy meals or to eat a moderate amount of food and then move on. They don't, that doesn't maximize profits for them. If you're just, you know, healthy, eat moderate amounts and stuff like that to maximize profits. They want you to eat compulsively. You know, like, that's the whole point. You know, if you eat compulsively, you buy more than you need or that you should eat. You eat it, you know, you want more of it. That's more money for them. So the incentive structure of the food industry and large parts of the food industry is to do this. Salty snacks and stuff like that. Like, yes, that's, that's what they want. And so we shouldn't look up and be like, oh, man, I wonder why when I eat this chip, it changes my brain in a way to make me eat more chips. Somebody figured out how to do that. That was the goal. And so to me, that we have the research to back it up is more so ammunition to us to get onto the regulators and be like, hey, there has to be some either. Whether it's a disclosure direction, again, I'm not one for prohibition, but whether it's a disclosure requirement, whether it's certain guardrails on how much you can alter food before it becomes classified as something else. We get regulation on this kind of stuff all the time. You know, like, in certain. What kind of packaging, like, when you're talking about, you know, like, the over the counter meds and, like, things we buy are regulated all the time. It seems like once you get a certain distance from food or from the actual food that grows or, you know, stuff like that, there may need to be some other category, because the ultra processed stuff, it was a success. You know, if you're judging it from the standpoint of the people who are selling it, who are designing it, it has been an unequivocal success because they are able to design foodstuffs that someone can eat. It will rewire their brain in a way not much different than nicotine or cocaine does and make them compulsively want to have it all in the service of profit maximization. And so that's what I'm seeing here is just like, yes, okay, you guys, you succeeded in what you were trying to do. Now, society needs. Now that we. Now that we have some empirical stuff, like, because I'm sure they knew this stuff years ago. Like, this was, again, they were testing this stuff to make sure it did that. So now, but now publicly, society has the information to kind of say, okay, here. Oh, we get it. We see what you guys are doing now. Now it's on us to react because, yeah, it's not a fair fight. And we, you've said that in other shows, like, it's not a fair fight when they are, you know, building this stuff in labs with test subjects and all this, and they're seeing exactly how it tickles your brain and. Oh, yeah, then if we do it, and, you know, I got more on this, but I want to kick it back to you because, yeah, it's not a fair fight. The only place where there can, we can get help in a situation like this. Yes, there's education that can help the individual, but by and large, this is where you need a state to step in. You know, state meeting, a government type of thing. Step in and say, okay, here's what's still within bounds and what's, what's out of bounds based on how good you've gotten it. Making this stuff hack into people's brains.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I mean, look, you, you make the point. I was thinking the same thing about just educating at an individual level is very important. Just like we discussed with the technology in part one, in the face of the fact that our political leaders won't regulate the food industry, just like they won't regulate the tech industry in a way that allows us to maintain a long term, healthy trajectory. And to your point, the food stuff, and as a topic is, is much better understood and has been around a lot longer than the tech stuff because this has been about 40 years, 50 years of, you know, kind of this real proliferation of processed food and fast food and deep fried food and trans fats and all that stuff. So I do think it's another example of, you know, look, this is a cultural decision that we've made as Americans. Unlike other areas in the world, like the EU or like China, that regulates its social media, for example. Right. And I've seen the studies where kids in China, they just fed different stuff, more educational things and all that on TikTok than what we're, what our kids are fed in America. And those are all decisions that are made by our, the people we elect we as Americans, you know, and so that's. Oh, you know, that's a long term different discussion.
[00:44:22] Speaker A: Well, if you think about. But there's an asymmetry there, though, because there is no, there is huge, huge lobbying involved where there's huge profits, you know, so for the tech industry that the tech companies have a huge lobbying wing, there's no counterbalance to that. Where there's this, there's no huge lobbying wing saying, hey, let's make sure we protect people. That's only going to come from a politician's own, like, moral code, you know, like, or food, the same thing. Like, there's, there's not going to be huge lobbying dollars if you become the politician about making sure that people get, remember, Michelle Obama was like, hey, let's try to reduce sugar. She's vilified, you know, and that is not because some grassroots citizens came up. It was like, no, it was big food was like, oh, yeah, let's front some groups to make it seem like this is coming from the public, but we don't want people to eat less sugar. So, you know, like, it's not a, again, it's asymmetrical. There's huge money from, for campaign donations. If you look the other way for big food or big tech, there's not huge money. It has to come from your own moral code. And that kind of says a lot.
[00:45:23] Speaker B: About the country, but that's what I'm saying. Like, but think about it. Unlike other large nations, first world nations, you could say that about every important sector of our economy that deals with something important for humanity. So, like healthcare, we, every American knows that we got a kind of messed up healthcare system that's a big black box. None of us really understand how insurers get, you know, reimbursed and come doctors don't even know how to get.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: But we know it's very inefficient. For example, we know that health insurance.
[00:45:53] Speaker B: But there's a lot of profit being made in between. That's what I mean, that's what I'm saying.
[00:45:56] Speaker A: It's very, it's profit. The inefficiency is the profit. Healthcare companies run at a 20% margin, whereas Medicaid, or excuse me, Medicare, runs at a 2% margin. So 80% of your dollars going into healthcare goes to actual going into a healthcare company, and health, they goes towards health, actual paying for healthcare versus 98% of the dollars that go into Medicare go into actually paying for health care. So that 20% that the healthcare companies, that's not going to health care, where do you think that's going?
[00:46:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well, no, and that's, you know, I've thought about this and it made me realize this is, you know, partly why the US GDP and the economy is just leaps and bounds. So much more robust than other nations is. And I hate to say it, like, we basically have allowed our country to become, like, this self enclosed ecosystem of selling crap to each other. And the lobbying efforts.
[00:46:49] Speaker A: Well, let me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. You shouldn't apologize for that, though, because people will tell you that's the point. Like, it's growth above all other values.
[00:46:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
And it's at the expense of our mental health. When we talk about part one and other stuff, we talk about social media here. We're talking about the expense of our physical health with processed foods and all that. We can talk about the continued expense of our physical health through the healthcare system. And again, because I've lived overseas as well, if you've never been outside the United States, it's hard to compare. And I want to be very clear here, too. This isn't a bash America conversation. This is just a mature conversation about things we can improve in our country. So let's just be very clear there.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: Well, hold on. You're saying America is not perfect right now. Isn't that bashing America? Is. It does, like, you have to say America's perfect or else, you know, like, then you're sorry. You're not. You're anti american if you say America.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: Hold on. I thought we were having the honest show today.
[00:47:44] Speaker A: You're right, you're right, you're right. What am I doing? I must have slipped into traditional media mind.
Let's continue with our honest conversation.
[00:47:51] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Sorry. You know, I'm not sure where we're going here, but. No, but something I learned that's new to joke around. Then I got a joke, and then we could wrap up is there's something new that's come out of this called the scientists have a new thing called the ultra processed food use disorder. And that's what I started saying. Okay, this is where the population's gonna get lost. Another clinical term for something.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Cause I was gonna say that, on one hand, that's kind of beneficial in the sense that they're recognizing that there's actual, like, they're identifying a certain set of symptoms with if you're eating too much processed food. But on the other hand, that's really not the right way to go here, because we know what our country will do with that. We're gonna create a pill for that.
[00:48:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And we're gonna market to it and.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: All that ultra processed food disorder. The answer won't be to eat less processed food. The answer will be to take this pill and continue to eat more processed food.
[00:48:40] Speaker B: What a great idea you just gave me. No, I'm going to invent that drug. That's awesome.
[00:48:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, and I'm with you on the point that the point of this actually is not at all to bash the system. You know, you and I both have said that capital is like. It's kind of like the whole thing of, you know, democracy is the worst form of government except all the other systems that have been tried. Well, capitalism, you know, not necessarily. Doesn't. Doesn't qualify that, exactly, but it's close. You know, like when we try these other forms of economics, you know, capitalism just needs to be regulated. It needs to be regulated, and that gets lost sometimes. Capitalism is a strong engine, but if you don't put the engine in the right kind of framework, then it ends up exploding. And so that's kind of what you have in that situation. The context of the point of this conversation, I should say, is that we need to have. We talk about this with politics. You need to have two sides. And this is something the legal profession understands very well. There's a reason why even if you don't have, if you're a criminal defendant, even if you can't afford a lawyer, they'll give you a lawyer. The legal system has determined that having two people honestly arguing both sides of an issue from good faith standpoint, that doesn't mean you make up stuff, but from a good faith standpoint, helps you get to the best answer. Having somebody take this position, that process that we should not regulate the food industry at all and let them do whatever they want, which that's the position the food industry takes. Having somebody take that position is fine, but we just need to have someone else take the position that, hey, maybe we should look at it from a individual and societal good in terms of what we're allowing you to do and what you not have. Those people argue and debate and, you know, again, in good faith, and then have a decision maker say, okay, a decision maker, like a legislator say, okay, I get it. You know, ultimately, that's kind of what lobbying is supposed to be. Lobbying. We equate it with dollars, but actually lobbying is persuasion, so to speak. You're supposed to listen to somebody who says that, yeah, yeah, give people all the processed foods they want, the more processing, the better. And then you're supposed to listen to somebody who explains to you why that's risky, and you need to put in guardrails, you know, if you're going to go down that path, because again, it's not about prohibition as much as it's about, okay, well, can we create a framework that this thing can occur in that won't give us the worst possible outcomes for people individually and in society? So that's what I think is missing from this discussion. And I hope that as more of these revelations come out, we can get that. And we've seen some evidence that that's possible just from the context of, like, trans fats. Like, trans fats were ubiquitous. Trans fats were great for not going bad. It was found, you know, it was found that they directly, and, you know, kind of too quickly for the food industry's liking lead to death and negative outcomes. You know, and a lot of the issues that we have now with the ultra processed food is that whenever there's a big long time period in between your consumption and the negative outcome, they're like, oh, we had nothing to do with it. And with trans fats, they got outlawed because they weren't able to hold that up anymore. That was something that was truly. Don't.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: It was too fast.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: Yeah, it was too fast.
[00:51:35] Speaker B: Can't kill the customer too fast.
[00:51:37] Speaker A: Are there any signs for hope that you have or, you know, like, something like that or, you know, you think that, you know, our environment is going to walk us down this path no matter what our environment we're in.
[00:51:49] Speaker B: So I think your point about capitalism is good because I think that's where part of the hope comes in. Meaning I can appreciate today because of innovation, is people having good ideas to fill a void in the marketplace. So to your point, if we look at this food thing going on for now two or three generations, in terms of really the processed foods, fast foods, all that, it was probably by the 1990s, I think, that a large part of society started waking up that this stuff is not that great for you. So then probably in the early two thousands, a decade later, is when we started to see what, I would say, healthier options for fast food. So I think of companies like Chipotle where I can go. If I'm just in a rush and I just need to get some food in me, I can at least now choose to go somewhere where I can get rice, beans and some meat that's not deep fried and all that. And generally it's healthier than me going to get a supersize at Wendy's or Burger King. So at least I do think the.
[00:52:49] Speaker A: Type of food, that's a good point. Like, it's not, like it's not ultra processed. It's like you know, it might be a calorie bomb, but, you know, it's not.
[00:52:57] Speaker B: I mean, it's better. Yeah, it's a good point. And that's my point is.
[00:53:02] Speaker A: So, and we get glass half full till day to day.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: Let's say quarter full, maybe. You know, I don't go as far as half, but, but no. So the thing is, is that, yeah, I'm not going to name every healthier option, but I mean, I think my example, people will get it that between when I was a kid in the eighties, there was nothing like that. I remember Roy Rogers, you had McDonald's and you just had fast food or you had to cook a whole meal at home. Now we've got some in between options and even things like juice bars and buying smoothies and all that. I mean, at least they're healthier options that someone can get on the go if they choose to do so. So I think that's a positive. The other thing that I think, and as we're talking, it kind of does leave me now, this is the 75% glass half empty, so I couldn't disappoint you.
[00:53:50] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:53:51] Speaker B: Okay. No, because as we're talking here, I mean, the stats really do bear out that people that I would say, heavily consumed processed foods, the research shows 20% to 50% increase in depressive style behavior. Like they're, you know, more prone to depression. And I just feel like, so it's what we're putting in our bodies and then you couple that with what you have in the palm in your hand and the smartphone and most people, hundreds of millions of Americans being on social media every day, which has also been proven to be caused mental health concerns, depression, things like that. And it's just like, this is where I feel a little bit more to the, to the downside is like, I don't know what it looks like in a couple generations. If we just have most of our society constantly being inundated, both by ingesting food and ingesting stuff in their mind and their emotional state, that leads to more depressive states of mind, that just seems like it's probably not the greatest direction to go into. So that is my concern.
[00:54:56] Speaker A: And no, it's an excellent point. And the thing, here's the thing that really, really makes it a concern is that it's because of the business model. The reason, I would say the reason why you see these things linked to depression is because the point, the goal of whether it be an app that wants you to use it compulsively or food that wants you to eat it compulsively. Well, how do they make it so you want to do it compulsively? Well, it's trying to change your brain in a way that makes it so you're not happy unless you're on the app or eating that food. And so, yes, if it's rewiring your brain to tie your happiness, to tie your reward center to engaging in whatever that is, then, yeah, that is going to increase depression. Because if you're not doing it all the time, when you're not, you're going to be sitting there like, you know, it's going to change you in a way that's not necessarily healthy. So the manipulation of the brain that is happening, that has become big business, the way of business in many respects. One, it's not a given. Like you say, point out in other countries, there's limits on how much you can do that kind of stuff or which you can put in your food in ways that might be detrimental. And so we can. It's possible to get there. We just, you know, we'll need a class of leadership that is willing to not necessarily be, not go wherever the dollars are in lobbying. The last thing I'll say, though, I'm less optimistic about this.
[00:56:13] Speaker B: Maybe instead of insider trading, they should just stop all the politicians from buying stocks in general, because I'm sure they all own all the food companies.
[00:56:20] Speaker A: The only problem with that is the people that would have to do that are the politicians. I'm just joking, but I'm less optimistic than you are on this in the same way I look, I think back to sapiens and how in the book we did, you know, sapiens a while back, and he talked about how the once agriculture hit and society changed to become one of agriculture. The population growth, the way people operated, it was something we couldn't go back. We couldn't go back in the same way that we look at this with fertilizers, synthetic fertilizers and stuff, in terms of how we're growing foods and people's like, I'm one that would prefer natural fertilizers and stuff like that. But our population in the world has grown so much that we need a lot of cheap and cheap calories, cheap calories that store very well. And all of that leads to more processed food and to growing food with synthetic processors because we need so much of it. We are on the fly in the same way it happened when societies adopted agriculture, we're adapting our society to need the efficiencies that this thing provides or that these things provide. But if it creates for more adverse outcomes, then that's what's going to happen. Like people, you know, life expectancy declined upon the advent of agriculture, you know, in human societies, at least in terms of how our records show. So, you know, there may be a place where we can actually get to a threshold to where we can keep the efficiency and not have it be as harmful to us, but we're not there yet. So until we get there, you know, I'm less optimistic than you. It seems like this is kind of a path like, or this is. This is a. Something to get through it. We gotta go through it.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you'll be glass half empty today. I'll only be a quarter empty.
[00:58:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. So we reversed our roles today.
[00:58:10] Speaker B: I got one quick 32nd. Funny one for you is my twelve year old yesterday complained of a stomachache. And this is on topic for this. It was cute because he's like, oh, he's like, my wife and I were in the kitchen. He's like, my stomach hurts this and that. And I'm like, what happened? What'd you eat? And he goes, I think I ate some cheetos that were old because of the date was like, you know, used by March something. Here we are in early April. And he goes, I think the cheese was bad on the Cheetos.
My wife was like, she's like, honey, that's not real cheese.
And then I'm like, yeah. And that date on the package is really the date that they should sell it by. I think that thing's processing away. It's probably gonna be good in a year. And it made me realize I was back to the education. Cause it was us, like, really teaching him. Like, yeah. Like, we take it for granted that we know that Cheetos doesn't have cheese on it, but to a twelve year old kid, it's called Cheetos and it's orange. Right. So if no one ever teaches him, he's gonna actually think that has cheese on it. Yeah.
[00:59:14] Speaker A: You know, education. Yeah. The education is important part, you know, for sure, because it. That at least allows for decision making on an individual level. So. Right. There's labels on food. Remember, food companies fought to have to list. They fought against having to list their ingredients on food, but at least they lost that fight. You know, regulators required that, but which, again, that's regulation. It wouldn't happen if it wasn't for.
[00:59:33] Speaker B: Government or even the calories on fast food. Yeah, yeah.
[00:59:37] Speaker A: Without that, you know, we, even people who do care to make informed decisions wouldn't be able to make informed decisions. And remember, an informed consumer is a vital part of a free and fair market. So if you're a market person, you should be in favor of a informed consumer, so.
[00:59:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm a monopolist, so you can go shovel with that. But anyway, I know we gotta go.
[00:59:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of call like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, review it, tell us what you think. Send it to us, friend. So next time, I'm James Keys.
[01:00:05] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Ogumana.
[01:00:07] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
