Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we react to some recent research that suggests that in some scenarios, there are some very real social and psychological costs with working from home. And discuss what people need to know about this to protect themselves.
And later on, we discuss what at least feels like a drastic uptick in spam calls offering loans of various sorts that have been coming through, and how people in that case, can protect themselves from what seems to be happening there.
Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining me today is a man whose takes are so wild, you may think he is not a human being. Tunde. Ogunlana Tunde. Are you ready to show us how you stay right above it, man.
[00:00:57] Speaker B: You're calling me reptilian? You're gonna get me in trouble. We're gonna.
My people stalking me now.
I'm a human, everyone. Don't. Don't start. Yeah, it's the Internet, James. It's the Internet. You're gonna get me in trouble, man.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: This is the Internet.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: You're right. I might have a guy come up with an AR15 shooting my door up and looking for the basement, bro.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[00:01:18] Speaker B: And we live in South Florida. There's no basements.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I went too far, man. I went too.
Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Like my own pizzerias up in here and stuff.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Subscribe like the show on YouTube or your podcast app. Doing so really helps the show out. Recording on June 23, 2026. And Tunde, we recently came across some pretty extensive research from Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel about remote work and how it's affecting many people, particularly from a social and psychological standpoint. One thing that was really notable to me in this is that they made clear that they weren't coming at this from the standpoint of they're trying to say working.
Working from home is bad or that shouldn't happen or anything like that. They weren't trying to poo poo on that necessarily, but.
Or as a result, it came off very differently as the attacks on remote work that you'll see from the capital class when, you know, it seems more like they just want to get people back in the office, you know, for control and domination sake, you know, so this seemed like a information that could be used to help people deal with, like, what are the challenges that people face and how can we deal with this, so to speak. So the information or the research raised some really interesting questions on the toll that many people have faced with working from home. And whether certain life situations or circumstances may make it more particularly risky and so forth. So to get us started, what do you make of these recent studies that we've seen about the remote work and how it may make people more lonely and sad?
[00:02:50] Speaker B: I think it's very interesting. I think it's very believable, understanding people, that working alone, if you really are remote and alone, that that can have an effect on your psyche and your emotional state and all that. So I think it's very interesting. I think you make a good point too, that the messengers and how they deliver messages with these kind of observations is important. And so you're right that there's been a tension between, I think, a lot of people on the working side versus a lot of the people on the employer side, you know, kind of employer versus employee. And for some employees, it can feel very authoritarian and all that when they're being asked to come back into the office, maybe full time, not just for two days a week, but for five days a week type of thing.
But to see it, particularly in places
[00:03:43] Speaker A: where the productivity doesn't seem to be impacted, you'll see that kind of like what's going on.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's probably a case by case per employer as well. There might be some employers that are just authoritarian and they want to have control and they think that if people are out at home, they're just farting around, no matter what the productivity numbers show them. Right. And there's probably others that are really more laid back about it. And as long as the work is getting done and the business is advancing, they're fine with people being wherever, whether they're in the office or not. So I'm sure there's a case by case from the employer side.
And it's nice to see a study like this that is nuanced and that I think brings about some of the. What I would say is two observations for me that come out of this. One is the structural changes in society. I was thinking a lot and share it in the conversation. My thoughts about kind of going back like 200 years when we were switching, kind of beginning the transition from agrarian to industrial age. And some of the things that probably people couldn't imagine that would happen 100 years later. And then also just kind of the complexity of humans started thinking about James, like the fact that solitary confinement is considered a form of torture. Right. And so that's that just. And not to say this is solitary confinement, but this idea that human beings are social creatures and so it's been identified that if you, if you put somebody in solitary confinement, that is a way of torturing them by taking them away from socializing.
[00:05:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Like the, not the confinement part, but the solitary part. Right, Exactly. It's both, you know, like, so you could be confined.
[00:05:18] Speaker B: Yeah. With 10 people and probably be okay for a while. But being confined alone is very stressful, Right.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: So.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Well, not to me. What was interesting to me about this is that I think that we may. Our perspective may be reversed on this.
The, the original state of human beings is probably working from home. You know, you talk about an agrarian society. You're not like, going to the farm down the, you know, down the other side of town and working for eight hours and then coming home. You know, like, you are working from home, you know, so it. A lot of things that, if, if you're, you know, raising animals, you're doing things. Things like that. Like, yes, there were, you know, as tradesmen and so forth that, that, you know, would. Would be, you know, operant stores or operating, you know, like a blacksmith or something like that, where they'd be in a place where there's people moving around and stuff like that. But it seems like working from home itself is not something that would create a ton of friction from people. But you got to, okay, well, what's different about this? And so to me, the key insight here really was the, the. If you live alone, peace. If you live alone, working from home can be very risky because what they saw is that people would be going days without seeing, like, interacting with people, like, and so forth. And like, that's where you get into this solitary thing where you're just working on a, on a spreadsheet or something like that for days and you're not interacting with people. And then worst case, the only interactions you're having is being mediated by some algorithm that's designed to trigger your emotions. And, and so, you know, like, you're really putting yourself into this stress, stress, stress. Like, you're stressful because you're not having normal human interaction. Then you're stressful because all the interactions you are having are being mediated by something trying to raise your blood pressure, so to speak. So I think that the way we're doing this stuff, and this is where I found this to be very helpful the way we're doing this stuff. There's certain things you probably should be aware of in terms of where the risk areas are, you know, because, yes, when people worked on a farm, they had big families. They weren't out there by themselves, like they were doing that, and extended families, generations of people maybe on the same. In the same general farm and so forth. So what replaced that is you'll go to a workplace and you're making friends, you're meeting new people and so forth like that, or getting to know people better, and you're interacting with people and, you know, the water coolers and all this other type of stuff. And so when you take away all that stuff, you do lose something again.
You're probably gaining productivity by not having the water cooler there, but you're losing something else. And those are the things. If we recognize that we're losing, then at minimum, you can take active steps to deal with that. And so that you can kind of manage the fact that, hey, I'm not getting enough socialization. And particularly, like I would say for you and I, I'll kick it back to you. For you and I, I say this would be a blind spot for both of us because on your hand at your home. At my. On my hand at my home, we. We have families here, you know, so we're. Even though we might work from home, we're dealing with the kids. You know, you got your kids, you're dealing with. I'm dealing with my kids, you know, you got your wife, you're dealing with. I'm dealing with my wife. There's never a dull moment.
So it's like, I'm not sitting here just locked in. I'm figuring out, okay, I got to finish this work so I can get out here, and I got to do this for the kid or something like that. So the.
[00:08:27] Speaker B: The.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: The blind spot that I had was like, oh, yeah, if you're alone, then this could be. This could be something that you need to watch out for.
Yeah.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: No, it's interesting because you mentioned a couple things that make me think. One is I've been an entrepreneur for 11 years, so I left corporate America back in 2015. And you're right about that water cooler talk. That was one of the first things I realized once I was just working on my own. Like, man, I'm so much more productive due to the lack of interruptions that I was having in an office.
And it's interesting because, you know, I'm a. I'm a people guy. I'm a nice guy in the office. I say hi to everybody. So what happens is I was the guy like that. You know, if there was a new young person in the office, you know, the manager would bring them by my, you know, can you Spend a few minutes with this guy and just give him a. You know, and then a few minutes is 45 minutes. Right. And then it takes you time to get your head back into what you're then someone else. So that's the kind of then, you know, people want to talk to you about the game last night and all this stuff. So I found that I was getting my kind of regular day done by two or three in the afternoon early. As an entrepreneur, I didn't know what to do with myself to rest this day. It was weird, you figure it out after the first year, but it was just an interesting experience. It made me think of. But the other that in preparing for this discussion made me think of actually is the contrast with what you just said about how we operate. And I think about my son, who's 27 and who moved to Brooklyn last year from down here in South Florida. So he moved from our home. Right. He was living for a couple years here after college in the suburbs. Right. To New York City where he's in the traditional New York high rise apartment that he walks downstairs and there's a million people on the street. And so it's interesting that he's as cybersecurity. He falls into what I saw here in one of the studies where 25% of the survey respondents say they spent the entire day alone. He falls into that category. And he's had some of those issues of, you know, loneliness and maybe claustrophobia, not kind of just being in the same spot. But the good thing about him is he's very conscious about this. And so he does spend a lot of time outside of his apartment. And it's New York so he can socialize and easily.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: You walk out the door, there's a
[00:10:48] Speaker A: million things to do.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Correct?
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: The people I think of that I'd be concerned about is someone his peer, like a kid his age, who might be doing something similar, but does live in an environment like my son used to back home, sitting in his parents house or maybe by himself, but in the suburbs where he can't just walk outside and just socialize with people.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: And that to me is where we are seeing a structural change in how. And that's what. Just to finish this quick, Doc, because I wouldn't mind your thoughts on this. As I was thinking and preparing for today about the agrarian to the industrial age, I was thinking about like man, imagine being alive in the founding of this country, like in the late 1700s. Everybody's got farms, the biggest buildings are like the churches and a big plantation house. Right. But it's not. Think about 100 years later. By the late 1800s, you had skyscrapers in places like New York because of the technology of steel and the ability to make it a lot stronger because of technological changes and metallurgy and being able to forge, put these molecules together and all that. And that created high rises, which created a different environment for working. Then we had factories, like in the early 20s. So what I'm saying is it's probably impossible for somebody in the year 1800 to imagine what working would look like in the year 1900. And I just feel like we're probably at the cusp of that now because of this transition to the information age, where we may lack the imagination to see what working might look like 50, 80 years from now. And we're beginning that shift. And this is where all these arguments are going to start happening about what can we do, how can we work, what is productivity, blah, blah, blah.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Yeah, so, no, it's a good point. The other piece, and you brought it up with your son, is I think that youth as a part of this is something that we have to keep an eye on as well. Like, there's the alone part that can affect people at any age.
But when you're young, you know, like, the office offers a lot, you know, because when you and I, you know, like, again, because of our age, you know, you're a little older than me, but when you're coming up, you've told me about how, like, you guys, like, you're, you're working at the office, then after, you know, oh, yeah, we'll go to happy hour or whatever. Like, people are together. I know for me, it was the same kind of thing, you know, like Fridays, hey, you know, happy hour. Hey, everybody goes from the office and goes there. There's those types of things were just a normal part of the kind of the inertia that was going on. So you join a. A job, an office, and you start just, you know, filtering in with that kind of stuff. And so the social piece on being, having people there at work is one part. And then another part is when you're young, you're in an age where you're not going to have a family at that point. You know, you're going to be trying to meet people, you're going to be trying to learn about yourself. And what kind of things do you like to do? You know, after work, you want to go to a movie or you're going to go to dinner, you're going to go to the bar, you know, all these different types of things. And if you're working from home, all of that requires, particularly like you said, for your son, if he's in New York City, that's, that's easier. The hurdle to actually doing all that is much less. But if you live in the suburbs or just in smaller towns where it's like, okay, I could go out, but you know, where am I going to go? And I don't have a group of people I'm going with necessarily. And so it just creates a lot of additional hurdles for a lot of the traditional socialization that has been apparently been protective for people. You know, like if we're, if we're seeing harm coming from the lack of it, then we can assume that, that the supply of it was helping people and so forth. So I think that essentially if you have to be more intentional and actually have to go over additional hurdles in order to keep yourself social, you just like, hopefully people can do that individually, but then also hopefully it can be something that people can work on from a collective standpoint as well, like making sure that there's action being taken. I know some businesses do this, there's organizations that do this because as you pointed out before, people are social creatures. And so it's very important to not build in all your habits that don't involve, if they don't, you know, not involving socialization, you want to have some habits that involve that as well, you know. And I know that you had mentioned, and I know we want to get out of here, but just one other thing I wanted your thought on was the productivity piece. Just from the standpoint of with young people as well, learning a new, you know, like when you get in somewhere, like you said, people bring, people would come when they came to you in the office and they're like, oh yeah, here's the new guy, yada yada yada. And then people learn a lot, you know, in that setting as far as how to operate, how to do that business and so forth. And remote work makes it makes entry level jobs conceivably much, much harder as well, which you know, has its own knockoff effect. So. Any thoughts you wanted to share on that before we get out of there?
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Yeah, man, I think that's all. That's why I said this is kind of, we're gonna, this is probably gonna take a generation to figure out because you're right, there's so many.
And who knows, right? I mean, someone could have argued with me if I Took a time machine 200 years ago about all the benefits young people got from working on a farm. Right.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: I'm sure.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: I'm sure they would. Right. So my point is, I'm thinking, like you said, like, all the benefits I got as a young person coming out of college, let's say, at 22, 23 years old and going into an office and like you said, whether it's happy hours, whether it's sitting in the conference room watching the two older people talk to a client, and me learning just through osmosis, the little social cues and how to deal with people, whether it's seeing the cute girl, you know, before I met my wife at the office and learning to deal with those dynamics about all that stuff. Right. So it's like, to me, part of.
Again, we're getting back to what social. Right. A social setting about being around other people. How do you. How do you behave? How do you. How do you. The etiquettes, boundaries, all that kind of stuff is kind of discovered as a young adult. Once you, I guess, you know, in our society, right. It's kind of generally leaving the house after high school, and for many people, there's a college buffer. But a lot of it is, you know, whether you're going to college or you start working at a job after 18, or go to the military or whatever, right. It's about you leaving your home and going to deal with other people in the world. And I think that if we develop a world where young people leave the home and just go straight into a box and don't see other people for the first 10 years of their professional development, I just feel like there'll be something lost in society and I think it'll have other knockoff effects. Like, we did a show on things like incels and like, the way that loneliness begins to manifest itself in the human experience.
Societal, you know, and people lashing out in other ways because they're lonely, people committing more acts of violence, things like that.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: So.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: And not knowing, especially men not being comfortable dealing with the other sex, you know, with women and stuff. And that has. Then men feel insecure and that has all these other societal effects. So, yeah, so it's all real stuff.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: I mean, I think that the big takeaway is that the, you know, of all the things, you know, all the things that were part of our lives, the workplace was something that had importance beyond just a place to get a paycheck or a place to develop a craft. They had other important.
So if that's going to be taken away or if that's going to be de. Emphasized. There are. We're going to have to be more intentional. It's not the end of the world, you know, it's. We're going to have to be more intentional about making sure that the things that are beneficial about that we don't lose touch with altogether because as you said, that'll just have other knockoff effects that probably aren't best for society or aren't, you know, something that we want to lean into.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: So it was interesting, man, until now. I just finished with this. Until you said that, it never made me, made me realize we've known that there's a fall off in religious attendance, you know, like church attendance. You and I did a documentary, a show on a documentary called Join or Die about the loss of participation in civic organizations. And now you're, you know, you're kind of sobering me with this, the way we're kind of, you know, the lack of social interaction now with work. And you're right, we should find a way to be more intentional about how to get people together because
[00:18:56] Speaker A: we don't have things. Like when you have things that force you to do certain things, then it's taken care of for you. But once those things are removed, which generally speaking, people consider progress because you have more options, but you just have to be more intentional about what you actually do. I mean, it's not much different than a diet. Like, if you live on a farm and all you grow, you have what you grow or whatever, then you don't have a lot of options. You eat what you eat, you know, but if there's endless options to eat, then you just got to be a little bit more intentional about eating things.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: That's a good example.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Terrible for you, you know, all the time, because that's one of the options is you can just do something that's bad for you all the time if you have endless choices. So. But I think we can wrap from there. We're going to have a second part of today's discussion. I'll go ahead.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: I say, yep, we're having a second
[00:19:38] Speaker A: part of today's discussion here shortly. So please stick around for that and we'll talk to you.
Our second part of our discussion today, you and I had talked about over the past few months how we've both, you know, separately, obviously been getting on our phones, tons and tons of calls, offering us money. Hey, here's some money. Here's some money. Specifically loans. There's loans. Like, you know, I think you first Mentioned to me like, man, I get all these emails and calls about business loans all the time. You're a business owner. I'm a business owner too. I get these same calls. I'm like, what in the what? And then now I'm getting all these offers and I know you have them too, about personal loans. Like they call, you call your personal line and say, hey, you know, we, we, we know you've been looking at a loan and, and yada, yada, yada. And so we got these great numbers. I mean, you might not have been that interested before, but you're going to love this. And it's like, well, I haven't been looking for a loan, so like, what's going on here? So I know that you had some interesting thoughts on this and so I wanted to give your thoughts. I wanted you to put it, you know, put it on the record, so to speak. You know. So what, what, what do you think is going on with all of these apparent, you know, like these spam calls and messages that we're getting? And we got some stuff in the show notes. Apparently this is not just us that are getting all this about offering all these loans and things like that. What's going on here?
[00:20:56] Speaker B: My first word will be predation to its true definition. Right.
[00:21:01] Speaker A: Big words, man.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: The act of actually being a predator.
Yeah, we've got a lot of actors out there that are preying on the public in different parts of the public, unfortunately, a lot of elderly. You and I may be getting those actors that prey on the business community because we have, you know, registered corporations and we're professionals that, that, you know, there's enough metadata being sold behind our backs that probably tell the right folks, you know, what our demographic as, as kind of business guys. So we're getting those kind of solicitations. And like you said, there's also the personal, I'm sure there's all the metadata and the dark web about, you know, the mortgages I own and you know, the different loans I have out there and all that. So I'm sure I'm a target for, because of that kind of information being out there. But, but yeah, it's, it's, I think it's predation and, and, and it's just again, going back to this, these societal structural changes we have with the means of communication.
So before, let's say 20 years ago, 25 years ago, maybe 20 years ago, I could have gotten an email. So let's say 25 to 30 years ago, before really email was prevalent, really the only way for someone to get at anybody would have been through a solicitation, the mail, or a phone call.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:22:18] Speaker B: And that means I gotta be by my home phone at the time because we didn't have cell phones.
So if I'm on the road, no one can bother me. And I'd have to go look at my mailbox. Right. So it was.
Didn't feel as harassing.
Now I've got the cell phone in my pocket at all times, and that gives me text messages, phone calls and emails. So anytime I check my phone, there's a risk that I've been harassed. And it's like the conversation we've been having. It's literally like a dozen times a day I'm getting some sort of hit by. By somebody soliciting me to try and give me money and I'll finish with this, James, and hand it back.
The bad joke in my head became, I thought we saw what happened 20 years ago when we tried this, because, remember in 06, it was throwing money at everybody for a mortgage.
And that didn't end too well.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: But that was banks, at least. We don't even know who these people are.
[00:23:13] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's a good point. I'm just saying the idea of if someone's throwing a lot of money at people is coming from somewhere, and if they're not being underwritten properly and all that, what happens when that house of cards collapses? That's kind of the point. I was thinking, like, we've seen this before, unregulated, throwing money at people.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: Well, I think. I mean, I look at it from the other angle, and I know we talked about it offline a little bit. I think this is about the ease in which your information. You did touch on this a little bit. Your information can be obtained, but more particularly the ease in which these contacts can go out. There's a lot of friction that's required. You got to pay somebody hourly. They got to be able to deal with rejection. If they're going to just make a bunch of calls all the time now. I mean, and then there's been, you know, they did the automated calls and things like robo dials, all that kind of stuff, but it's a recording now, the ability for AI to be able to. And then they can use voices and stuff like that where it can respond to voice and try to walk you down a path or whatever. Because a lot of them, I don't answer the calls, but they follow the same script when I see the voicemails. And so Forth. And I listened to a couple of them before I did the show today. Because I'm like, is this AI or is this a person? And it's AI. I mean, this is not a person calling. And so if you can do that, I mean, I think you were. When we talked about this before, you were like, yeah, if you can have like, you used to do cold calls. But again, those were legitimate businesses. And I. The hard sell piece I thought was very interesting when you talked about this side. I would let your thought on that when you get back in. But the. That if you can not have to pay someone hourly to do this. If you can just have an agent, an AI agent going nonstop trying to just do this. And if you get a.0001% hit, then you hit the jackpot. You know, like the percentage of success that you need, the easier it is to blanket a group or a selection of people, the lower percentage you need to actually go through to make it worth your while. So as it becomes easier and easier and easier to contact greater and greater numbers of people, the lower the threshold is that they need any success. So I can ignore every call from here to eternity and I'll just get more and more calls because it's becoming easier and easier and easier to call people. And so it's like, you know, this is. I don't know where this is going to go. Like, I'm sitting here wondering because, you know, I got a few lines, I got my business line, I got my personal line, all this other stuff. And I'm like, at a certain point, like, I don't answer my phone a lot of times now, you know, because it's like, well, it's just going to be one of these again. And if I answer it, then I'm going to go in. They're going to put me in this other, you know, category of people that potentially answer. So that means they're going to call more. And so I'm like, my phone has become a voicemail service. You know, send me a text, I'll respond, I'll hit you back type of thing, or leave me a message and I'll hit you back. Because it's like if I don't recognize the number, my phone is of. Of is more of a distraction than it used to me.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: You know, it's funny.
So this is similar topic, but different solicitation.
I would joke with my wife on my phone and my WhatsApp I. I would get constantly for like this ended for some reason, but for a while, like a Year ago, I was constantly getting hit up by, I guess, the people trying to get lonely men that, you know.
You know, it's like a cute Asian chick that looks like she's 20 years old or something, you know, really, hi. You know, just comes in with a picture that says hi.
And it's like, oh, my God. You know what I mean? So I would show it to my wife and say, hey, should I answer? Just be like, no, Just like you said. That's what reminded me. It was because she would say, no, because then they're going to consider you as somebody interested.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you're a target. You're a dupe at that point. Like, oh, no.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: But the funny thing is. So I would say, yeah, watch this. So I would. I would suck them in and I'd be like, yeah, hey, what's up? And they should be like, hey.
You know, they try and like say some sort of wording to make it look like they know you. And I'd be like, yeah, I don't. I don't remember when we met. How do we meet? Blah, blah, blah. And so they started. So I would take them down for like five, six minutes, you know, just.
And then they'd be like, yeah, please send me a picture and all that. And I'd send them a picture of the president, right? And I'd send them a picture of or some movie star, just something random. And then sometimes they get pissed off and other times they just wouldn't say anything. So it's funny, but I stopped doing that and I started doing the spam delete. You know, that it's report spam. But it's funny you say that because it reminded me that I used to have fun with them in an attempt to just have fun. But in reading this, in preparing for today and reading up a bit, I realized that you're right. That was back when it was like a year ago, texting and stuff.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: As.
[00:27:50] Speaker B: I mean, how quickly the. This has grown since.
This has grown because now what I was reading, and I'm glad that I read this because I haven't picked up the phone calls to your point, and I won't. And I want to say this for the audience as well, because I was ignorant to this until last night. Reading this is the AI agents. Now, some of them are programmed to. When you pick up and just say hello and maybe say a few words to pick up your voice.
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: Then what happens is they're going to
[00:28:17] Speaker A: use your voice when they call. Other.
[00:28:19] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:20] Speaker B: And. And, but think about the amount that they can scrape through your Bluetooth and all your contacts and all that. I mean, there's. These things are so intrusive. So the AI agent could get all your contacts, get your voice, and now begin to target your contacts so that when some scam artist wants to scam people, they can say, okay, go to all of James's contacts and make it like it's his voice calling them for something. And it could be a fundraiser for your.
[00:28:44] Speaker A: Remember, it's worse because they can also mimic your number when they call your contacts. They can correct. Yeah, I've had the issue with my publicly my published number, you know, for my business, where people. I'll call people, and they'd be like, it's coming up as spam. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I rarely call people from this number. And what I found out was that other people, like people have. Because my number is published on the Internet, people are mimicking, or there's businesses that are not businesses. I call them spam people or scammers that will mimic a business number, a legitimate business number to then call other people. You know, so it's like, yeah, don't give them your voice. Yeah, don't pick up the calls. Don't give them your voice to the end. Like I said, at what point then does our phone become more of a hindrance than a help? You know, if. If we're in this situation already now, and how this is exploded. So. So is there anything else you would like? Any. Now, as a friendly and decent person, not as a financial person or an attorney, you know, for myself. You know what. What. Do you have any other advice as far as how people should or can handle these? Or are we just, you know, screwed it? Is this like, hey, call your congressman type of thing?
[00:29:50] Speaker B: Hold on, man. Wait a second. Hold on, wait.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: You just gave us both professionally some negative stigmas.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: No, I'm saying no liability.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: As attorneys.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: I'm saying no liability. I'm not giving legal advice. You're not giving financial advice.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: And then you're telling the audience that in order to save them from people like us, they got to call their congressmen. Come on, man, you got this all backwards.
We're supposed to be bashing the congress people and putting ourselves up. What are you doing here?
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I guess the answer probably would be to hire a lawyer.
[00:30:21] Speaker B: Unless I would say. I would say that. Yeah, hire a lawyer now. Because, remember, if you call your congressman, they're going to say, man, they destroyed the government last year with doge, there's no more Consumer Protection Bureau, so we
[00:30:32] Speaker A: got political donations from these companies that are doing.
[00:30:35] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. So, so. So we got nothing for you. So then let.
[00:30:40] Speaker A: So just call a lawyer.
[00:30:41] Speaker B: So that's probably.
Don't call for the audience. Don't call me. Call him.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, don't call me. I don't do that kind of law. But there's plenty. There's surely a lawyer in your area that can give you options. But again, this isn't legal advice. This isn't financial.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, but it's just. I think. I think just to finish off is just from My point is just, look, we're gonna have to be prepared, I think, for more of this as a society, as we just, like I said, the structural changes really, as we enter and remain in the information age. Right. That this is kind of the way that computers, AI and all that will continue to affect our lives. This is just going to be one of those examples that's not going away.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: No, I mean, I think the biggest takeaway is that if you're not expecting a call from someone, then you got to be weary of answering it.
If you can't see who it is, be weary of answering it. Because unsolicited calls, 9, 9, 9, tens out of ten, those unsolicited and unknown calls, random numbers, those are spam calls that I get. At least for me. It's not unsimilar to.
I don't open for my personal mail at my home. I don't open it that often because 9 out of 10 pieces of mail are some type of solicitation, you know, to, to the resident or even if they get my name and then they have the address there, it's like, okay, this is a offer for. For a credit or this is a, you know, a magazine for, you know, hey, all these services I can get. And we've come to accept that, you know, as a society, that we're going to get all these mails for all these. These kind of, you know, solicitations, this and that, advertisements in some cases, you know, fine. But, yeah, I very rarely do I get a letter that I was not expecting that is like, oh, man, I better check this out and look at it. Most of the time, if it's something I'm expecting, I get it through email and I'm kind of looking for it and so forth. Same thing with the phone. So, I mean it. We are. I think we are going to a place where if you don't expect to call if somebody calls up. But I always tell myself, and then, you know, my kids, everything's like, look, if somebody's calling you and it's legit, they have something for you, they'll leave a message. You know, it's like, okay, hey, I was calling, you know, this is what was up. And you know, give me a call back. If you get that, call them back, you're good to go. But the, the just answering calls, like, I can't even. I'm going back to when I grew up before we had caller id. You answer the phone all the time and have no idea who it is now. No, no way. Like, I'm not answering the phone if I don't know who it is. So that may be, that may be the nuclear option, but we may be there at this point because it's, it's overwhelming. And again, at what point do phones become a hindrance where it's like, oh man, I don't know if I should have a phone because all I'm going to do is get all these scam calls. And so I don't know.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Well, you make a really good analogy with the mailbox because clearly that's the way people did communicate personally for a long time and for a hundred years in our society, in a sense. I mean, normally, I know males been around a lot longer, but the kind of USPS regular mail type of thing has been very efficient for a lot of people. And then now it's a great point that now it's not the way that we communicate normally. And I think just to finish off
[00:33:43] Speaker A: something else, male is not, it's not a personal correspondence or even financial correspondence. It's. That's not its primary thing anymore.
[00:33:51] Speaker B: Well, that's why like you're saying, so maybe the telephone is going that direct email clearly has gone that direction where it's, it's a lot of spam and stuff. But just to finish out, you bring up a good point because I would say we both have teenage kids in the house and I think to finish off, like, we also have to be a lot more conscious, right? Like us parents need, we are probably, you know, we need to be prepared. Our kids are going to have learning curves and they might actually accidentally get scammed and all that while they're teenagers or young adults. And then I think the other one, unfortunately. And just to finish and bookend my beginning with the word predation.
And we did the show on Facebook and how 10% of their revenue Comes from scam ads, but it's mostly targeted towards the elderly because that's the other people with cognitive declines, onsets of dementia. And I think for those of us that are younger, you know, to protect our elderly people and our friends and our elderly friends, elderly clients, elderly family members.
And that's what I mean by the predation. Like, you would think that that's the role of the government to stop companies being predators on elderly people in our society, but that's not happening. So it's just, I think on us more to be more conscious as individuals for those of us we care about.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: It's an excellent, excellent point. And I'll just say this. It's not just cognitive decline because one of the primary tactics is always to create a sense of urgency and fear and so forth. And so a lot of times elderly people are more responsive to that. That, you know, so they, they. The, oh, you know, like, hey, my, you know, I'm your son and I'm, you know, trapped here or whatever. And so a lot of times the, like the plausibility meter is able to be suppressed because the fear that kicks in or the, the. The urgency that kicks in because that urgency piece is a big part of how these scams and these, this spam is trying to leverage you. And like we talked about in the last thought, like we talked about with this, but offline, it was like, imagine, you know, I feel bad for the person who gets these scam calls when they're in a tight spot monetarily. And it's like, oh, man, I just. I need something to float me. You know, there's payday loan spots all over, you know, because of that, like, sometimes people are in a tight spot monetarily and it's like, man, these types of things, like, we don't know who these people are. Somebody might shove and break your legs for all we know. You start dealing with.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Let's not get into it. We could have a separate show.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: That.
[00:35:58] Speaker B: That could be by design. I had to design a society that has a certain percentage of the population that can be preyed on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: We can have that is desperate another time, right?
[00:36:08] Speaker B: That is desperate. Yeah.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: So, yeah, yeah, we'll just say there is a worldview that does account for that and does seek the leverage.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: Creates scarcity. So, yeah.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: But I think we can wrap it up. 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 a friend till next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: I'm two, day one. One lineup.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: All right. We'll talk soon.
