Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode, we discuss the use of debunked claims about haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets by the Trump campaign for political gain and to deceive Americans or their constituencies or whatnot. And later on, we'll consider whether the growth of onlyfans into one of the most popular and profitable websites on the Internet should be considered a surprise or is something that is totally expected.
Hello. Welcome to the call like I see it podcast. I'm James Keys, and joining me today is a man who may not be the ice cream man, but he is known to bring some sweet tastes. Tunde, I'll go. And Lana Toonday, you ready to break him off something today?
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Yep. Let's go.
[00:00:56] Speaker A: All right. All right. Now, before we get started, if you enjoy the show, I ask that you subscribe hit, like on the show or on YouTube or your podcast platform. Doing so really helps the show out. Now, recording on September 17, 2024, and at a recent president presidential debate, we all saw former President Trump throw out the claim that haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's pets. And this claim, which originated and as far as we know, and then really started propagating in right wing media ecosystems, has never really been or never been supported with any evidence, and in fact, has been debunked repeatedly by city officials and law enforcement and so forth in the area that there's just no evidence of any of these claims or that these claims even haven't come to them. But despite that, the Trump campaign has continued to push it and at times even seem to be willing to admit that the story is not true and that it's just, you know, this is being used, you know, well, they're not that, you know, that the story's basically out there. They're using it, but may not be true. So, tunde, what stands out to you about the Trump's campaign ongoing use of debunked claims and or claims that there's no evidence to support about haitian immigrants at Springfield to try to score political points?
[00:02:11] Speaker B: Man, good question. A lot stands out, I would say, starting with the fact that it's interesting. I'm 46, the first time in my lifetime I've seen a US presidential candidate and his vice president really go in this direction of things. I only learned either happened in history before I was born or that I heard of from family members that are older in terms of the way that some leaders, their rhetoric is really about just dividing and conquering and not about actually political policy issues. And that's kind of what it got me feeling is that this is what you do and you got nothing else. You know, part of it to me is obviously people like JD Vance have a certain worldview and agenda. We've learned, you know, and this has become jokes about things like the cat ladies or the fact he proposed having a separate tax structure for people without children and people with children. And, you know, I think what we're realizing here is these guys, at least, Vance and Trump, I don't think they believe that if they were transparent about what they're really about on their policy, that they would win through the democratic process, that the majority of Americans would support their vision of what they think the country should be. And so this is a good way to distract an electorate, especially after you had a terrible, terrible debate a week ago, where we're recording this show a week after the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. And for a week now, we've been talking about haitian migrants eating pets and all these other things that kind of distract us. So to me, I look at it as a strategy and as disgusting. I mean, you know, it's terrible.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Let me throw something, let me push back on you a little bit, because I don't know that what you're saying is true in the sense that I don't know that this is what you would do necessarily because, or if you think you have nothing else, you may just decide that policy discussions or whatever kind of things you want to do is less engaging than throwing out claims that inflame people emotionally, make them angry, make them fearful and so forth like that. So it may not be that they have nothing else, so to speak. It may just be that they don't want to engage people intellectually. Now, it may be a mix of both, but just react. I want to get into this guy as well, but I just want to throw that at you and just so.
[00:04:44] Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: What do you think about that?
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Because now, that's a great point, because if I were to think, well, which one would be better? Is that a politician is actively trying to distract me and the rest of the population because they don't want us to really focus on what their main policy agendas are or something about them.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Correct the politician. Yeah.
[00:05:05] Speaker B: And that's why I'm asking her this rhetorical question. Would I prefer to have that in leadership or would I prefer to have someone that consciously is like, nah, I just, not trying to even go there about policy and govern. I just want to divide everybody because.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: Yeah, the people's attention span that says something about the electorate. You see what I'm saying? Like, if it's like, oh, hey, I don't have any agenda, so let me just try to distract the public that says something about the, you know, kind of like that politics.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Oh, you know, it's kind of sad. As you say.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: It says something, but it says something about the people. If it's like, hey, the people don't want all that stuff, or the people won't be that interested in that stuff, or they won't. They won't pay, they won't stick around. They'll be watching stuff on YouTube. If I don't fire them up, make them mad, make them fearful and all that, that's the only way that they'll pay attention to me, so to speak. That's. Yeah, I don't know what you would prefer.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: No, but I think it's a sad reality because I guess the way I was setting that up, that rhetorical question was, both are bad options. Right? Like, I wouldn't want to live under the leadership of either type of mindset because one is just gonna. Then, you know, obviously can't trust one, and the other has clearly got a strategy that is not gonna be fun to live under.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: But I'll say this. Yeah, I mean, I think we can say objectively that both are inconsistent with the ethos of the way the country was set up. Like the, like the founding fathers went through a lot of effort to try to take the emotion out of the politics and then also to put in checks and balances so that leadership. And to protect the free press. Free press. So that leadership couldn't use outright deception to control the people. So either way, like you say, both of them are bad. I'd say either way, both of them are un american, at least in the terms of the way the founding father set up the country. To me, what stands out is, I think this is like the most clear demonstration that this Trump thing is really just about the accumulation of power. And I say that because if you say, okay, well, if JD Vance is on CNN saying, oh, well, you know, whether this is true or not isn't really that important or, you know, paraphrasing him, but, you know, basically kind of insinuating that he doesn't care if it's true or if it's might not. He understands it's probably not true, you know, insinuating or going down that road, if you're saying this stuff not because it's true, like, you're not an artist, you know, like people, what's what's the quote from v for vendetta? You know, an artist use, uses, you know, lies to tell the truth, so to speak. Like, he's not an artist, he's a politician. So he's using lies to tell a lie, you know? And so then, so what's the overall point? You're using a lie to tell a lie. The overall point is to keep people in a state where they're easy to manipulate. How can you put someone in a state where they're easy to manipulate? Well, two emotions make you really easy to manipulate, fear and anger. So if you keep people afraid and angry. And another piece about this, by the way, is the way that there's almost a domestic abuse type of approach to the way that they treat their supporters and that they're constantly trying to isolate their supporters against other Americans and saying, those other people, they don't like you. You know, those other people are evil. Those. And so when you isolate, this is the reason I call it domestic violence with something you see in domestic violence is because what that is is the abuser a lot of times tries to isolate the abused so that the abuse doesn't feel like they can turn to anyone else. And so it's like you're stuck with me no matter what I say, no matter what I do and so forth. So I see all this and I'm just like, so what is the, what's the overall goal? Well, the goal is to accumulate power. And I think you can see this from a lot of different angles, you know, in terms of how the Trump campaign, and apparently just, there's a strain in the GOP right now that this is about accumulating power, being free from accountability. I mean, the Supreme Court going as far as saying that presidents are immune from, you know, the law and so forth. And so it, and so that, to me, is what I can't escape. Is that okay, well, if this isn't about telling, the reason I say it's, it's a lie to tell a lie is that reports about Springfield are that the, the immigrants have helped the community and that there have been growing pains, but these are growing pains of a community that is bouncing back, in fact, because of the immigrants. So if the narrative that they're hurting the community isn't true, then you're just trying to create fear and anger again so that you can create a group that will follow you, that is easy to manipulate and that will put up, basically with whatever you want to do.
[00:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think, you know, there's there's something to be said. I want to touch on the last part you said, and then go back to some of the things we've been discussing, is, you know, when you talk about the whole way that the immigrants were brought to Springfield specifically because the economy was in a ditch, the people of Springfield, Ohio, were not going out to apply for the jobs that were, you know, the job vacancies that the small.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, there's like. There's like a processing plant there that they were, I think, you know, whatever the company was, was unable to staff and so forth.
[00:09:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So, yeah, so that's why I don't want to stay on this. But I want to say. To say it, because we've seen this in american history, which is certain Americans, they're living in a very. You know, what we would. All the rest of us would consider maybe an impoverished community looks a bit downtrodden, and they're not doing anything about it themselves. Right.
You know, they're. They're just, you know, taking their government assistance, you know, living their lives, things like that, then these immigrants come in, and the immigrants have a certain work ethic because they're immigrants, and they just want to show up on work because they're coming from somewhere else. That's terrible. And they just appreciate the opportunity and.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah, by the way, which is something that the country, United States, has benefited from for decades. Like, that's been one of our secret advantages for a really long time.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: But that's why I don't even want to go there, because everyone knows that, even people that want to deny it. So let's just. Let's just not even try and convince anyone of that, because it's just historical fact. But just the idea that. And if there's 20,000 people of any group, it can 1%. Can 200 people maybe be bad apples? Yes. Okay, that's life. But. But at the end of the day, the small business community, like you said in Springfield, has been thankful. And basically, these people are working. And instead of having a community that will come and say, okay, not that they got to go kiss the Haitians behind and say, thanks so much for saving our community, but just accepting, like, okay, these people coming in, working, they're starting to revitalize the town. We're starting to get some tax revenue in here, so more businesses may come in to fill the needs and the demand that's now here because we have a bigger population, so on and so forth.
They are driven to saying it's those people's fault, that everything else that's been bad here is because of them. Well, these Haitians only been here for two, three years. I bet you Springfield's been dying for 2030 years for a lot of reasons that doesn't have to do with the Haitians. And so it just reminds me of other times in the american past where this is like what JD Vance and Donald Trump doing, the reason why it's so dangerous and inflammatory and why I don't think we should be sitting there. I think it's a mistake. Whenever I see on the news people trying to correct these guys, oh, but they're here legally and all that. These guys don't care about that. The people that are listening and supporting this type of rhetoric don't care that these people are here legally. This is back to a mix of dog whistle and foghorn. The foghorn is what already we've been seeing on tv. And what these guys have been saying, the dog whistle is that these are black immigrants. Let's go there. This is racism.
It's an easy group to pick on because Haitians are a weak community, meaning they're a very small community in America, so they're preying on the lowest kind of people on the totem pole. They're also. There's the stereotypes of voodoo, the whole thing. So it's like these people are savages that are going to come and invade our kind of lily white communities. I mean, this is classic. And what's happening, as we've seen already in Springfield. I just saw this morning the thing from the NAACP there. Black Americans now are getting harassed because the people that want to harass the Haitians can't really tell the difference because me and you could look haitian if we're just walking down the street. So, again, this is going to spill over into Americans attacking Americans. And we have a vice president and a presidential candidate who are causing this.
And it is what it is.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: I mean, the thought that you say as far as, like, this is a better way to illustrate how this is all about power, because you often say leadership is important. And so leadership, in a situation like that, there is going to be some discomfort when you have new people coming into a community. That's just the way it's gonna be. But if the new people coming into the community are helping to revitalize the community, then good leadership, and we've seen this actually, on a local level, actually tries to help people become more comfortable with this, try to ease that discomfort, not try to inflame it. The reason you try to inflame it is because you want power. You want to, then you're not helping the community by inflaming the discomfort that may naturally exist.
You are basically consolidating your power. And so we see this manifested in which I'm going to talk about in a second, is like these bomb threats and having to close schools, having to close city hall and all this other type of stuff, that stuff is not making the community better. That's not making things work better, that's not making the community better for anyone, not the previous residents, not the new residents, anything like that. And so, but I want to say just real quick, like this, this did remind me of the Stuart Stevens book. It was all a lie that we just discussed a couple weeks ago. And really what it is is that the Trump campaign, and Donald Trump was the first republican politician really to really push the issue online, to just see how much dishonesty, the right wing media ecosystem that Stevens explicitly called machinery for deception, he called the right wing media ecosystem machinery for deception, tracked it back for decades, how it evolved and everything like that. And this is a former republican operative doing this. And it really, like, I think what we're seeing is Donald Trump is trying to push, to see the potential of this thing and say, how far can this go? If I say something that's not, that I have no truth, no evidence to it or anything like that, and this ecosystem will repeat it over and over and over and over again to the point that we can get people to believe it. How far, can I take that? Okay, can I say that a president is not, wasn't born here without any evidence? Check that works. I can do that. And so what we're seeing is continually escalating. Can I say I won an election that I lost?
He's continually escalating the lies and dishonesty, really to just push the, it push the limit. How far can the machinery for deception, also known as the right wing media ecosystem, how far can I go? How far, how much dishonesty can I do before that starts to bust at the seams? And so it's been so effective that GOP politicians at this point, they're willing to openly embrace a lie, openly embrace a lie that they'll acknowledge in parts are dishonest or not true. And they're comfortable because the reason they're willing to acknowledge that, because they're comfortable that their constituents either can be convinced that the lies are true and so no harm, no foul, apparently, or they have been convinced already that their fellow americans are so bad that even if their politicians are lying to them to their face and manipulating them to their face, that it's still better than whatever the other side has to offer either. And that's where you get into that isolation that I mentioned earlier. So to me, it's, this really is a distillation of what has happened to part of our electorate and part of the leadership apparatus, one of our two political parties, that we need two political parties for our system to work. Right. So it's really the loser here is the american system and the system that our founding fathers set up. And so it is offensive. But I want to ask you about the backlash because we're going to get out of this topic here shortly. Do you think there'll be a backlash to, like, bomb threats and hospital closings and all the school closings and stuff? Like, this is the kind of stuff that this is. Like, these are the people that blew up churches, you know, with little girls inside, you know, 50 years ago in this country. Like, do you think there'll be a backlash to this, you know, or do you think that this is, again, we haven't seen the limits of how far, you know, how much people will put up with, you know, if they're in a, you know, like a distinct reality that's been crafted for them.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: That's a great question and time will tell. I would say that this election in November, which is less than two months from right now, I think is going to be that barometer. You know, do the majority of Americans want to keep going this direction and find this kind of, you know, this kind of, not only the rhetoric but this term I've learned recently called stochastic terrorism, which we'll get into after, you know, we finish this, this, this answer. But do they want that or do they want the type of, you know, whether it's Ronald Reagan or, or Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, that kind of uplifting, hopeful, you know, America looking forward into the future type of attitude? I mean, this is, this is really, in my lifetime, the, the real first time I've been alive to see an american election that doesn't seem to be as much about policy and details like that as it is about just this two different types of directions. Do we want to go the kind of the american optimism way or do we want to go the american carnage way?
[00:18:01] Speaker A: And, you know, I think you're right. And I would say that it's not the first time that those issues haven't been like the primary issues because, you know, there's always an emotional component but it is the first time where it's kind of like, that's really what it's about. Like, it's not people. There's not even a lot of window dressing on, hey, here's our policies. We have frameworks of policies.
[00:18:25] Speaker B: You got concepts, concepts of an idea.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Concepts of an idea.
[00:18:28] Speaker B: But it's like something you've been talking about for a decade.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: To the extent that. I mean, even to the extent that in the debate, Donald Trump offered his character witness, the dictator in Hungary, the.
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Guy, the guy who's like, but let me, let me.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: Amazing to me, but go ahead.
[00:18:44] Speaker B: Let me answer the question, because I think.
Let me put it this way. I don't think. I think there's always going to be a part of the american society that doesn't want to accept whatever the mainstream kind of narrative is, right? We saw that during COVID Any society.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: There'S always going to be a portion.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: Well, I think just America, we have a culture more paranoia than others, more so than a lot of, at least other western countries do. I mean, we have the type of paranoia streak you see in, you know, Iran or Afghanistan as relates to certain. I mean, this is. Look what's going on now. And I guess, let me not get all over the place. To answer your question, I'm not that confident that a large chunk of Americans, I'm not saying a majority, but at least 30, 40%, if not more, that they may not have enough of this. I started thinking about Sandy Hook, remember? I thought that would get enough Americans attention to want to maybe get creative about how to deal with some of this mass shooting stuff that didn't.
Charlottesville, we saw Nazis with Tiki torches talking about Jews will not replace us and saying blood and soil. Half the country acted like there was nothing to see. January 6, half the country gets convinced there's nothing to see. And that.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Is it really half the country, or is it just a maybe 40% or 35% that they are very involved and very loud? I always wonder. You don't have to answer that.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: I mean, that. But that 35 to 40 still get another ten to 15 to be silent, right? So, I mean, like, half the country is kind of accepting of this, effectively.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: Half of the country.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: So when you ask the question about how long will the american people put up with this, my concern is that instead of, like, the answer that I would love to say, which is, yeah, this is it, November is gonna be it, blah, blah, blah, I'm more resigned to say these guys keep whittling away at the american kind of psyche. And we seem to be putting up with more and more of this type of attitude because it's not even just the violence, it's the B's. I mean, this stuff is, to me, lazy is like, again, why are we, why is Taylor Swift involved in american politics right now? Is not her fault is because the former president, United States keeps poking at her and bringing her up. So this is like, this is like we've turned politics and serious things into a reality show.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I think that the reason I say logical, it was not reached a conclusion is your point. And we're still, we're still going. And I think actually the reason I think that, you know, like, you're, you were in this situation and that it's difficult to say at any point that there'll be like a, a backlash to, hey, hey, you know, we got to stop telling lies or we got to stop at least amongst the people that are currently accepting of that stuff. We got to stop trying to intimidate or terrorize people. The reason I say is if you look back throughout history, those, those moments didn't really come a lot of times, a lot of times that it, you know, would continue on until something from the outside intervened.
Now, there were times where society's current kind of changed the direction. You know, even in United States, you look at, you know, post sixties, there was a de escalation from, from what things were, from social unrest standpoint, from a discontent standpoint, so forth. So it's possible. But reason I think it's unlikely here is because it's not a, it's a multi part issue. It's not just at what point are we going to have people sit there and say, okay, I just can't, I don't want somebody that's going to lie to me anymore. At the same time, you have the tools and the machinery for supporting liars continue to evolve and improve and get better. So it's like if that stayed static, then I think at a certain point people would get tired of it. But as, as people with the threshold for where they might get tired, the machinery of deception continues to improve and continues to get better at deceiving. So it's like this is going to continue to escalate until at some point we're going to be sitting there and it's going, it's going to be, people openly embrace and AI generated stuff that they know isn't true and they're just say, hey, but this is just what I like. So this is going to be my reality, regardless of the fact. That's not true.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Yeah, and you're right.
[00:22:58] Speaker A: It's.
[00:22:58] Speaker B: It's. It's a soma coma. Right? It's. It's people running into pleasure.
And again, that's what I mean by it's kind of lazy. And that's what I mean by the term lazy, is.
Takes work and self reflection and, you know, to have. Grow, you know, to grow as a human being and all that, you gotta have some adversity. And you're right. Our media ecosystems are just becoming places where we just can lounge around and hear whatever we want to hear and take it as fact and not be challenged so that we can grow intellectually and emotionally as people in a great. In a great kind of greater society in terms of population.
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Without any struggle, there's no growth. So, you know, like, media ecosystems take away all the struggle.
[00:23:43] Speaker B: But one of the things I wanted to say, and actually, it's just interesting with timing. So I was watching. I decided it was on prime it, watching the movie Scarface, the early eighties movie with Al Pacino that everyone knows. It's an interesting thing because, a reminder me, we live in South Florida. James, in 1980 was the Mariel boatlift. And this is why I say the movie, because they show real scenes from it. So everybody, you know, who's got Amazon prime or can get online and watch Scarface, I recommend you watch the first ten minutes of the movie, because that's when Fidel Castro opened up the cuban prisons and all that stuff and let them out to the United States. And I think it was something like 125,000 Cubans came to South Florida. And that wasn't easy. There was a lot of, you know, the South Florida history. There was some tensions, just like we're talking about tensions in Springfield, where, you know, the native Miamians, if you want to call them that, weren't that happy. And there was a term in the eighties and nineties called white Flight out of Miami. But if you look at Miami now, built on the back of those cuban immigrants, Miami is one of the most thriving cities in the world. And so, and so what, what, the other thing that I realized when I'm watching that is these waves of immigrants and migrants have happened before in this country. Yeah, but the way that.
[00:25:00] Speaker A: And we survived, that's what I'm saying.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: The way that it is talked about today, as if this is the be all and end all for the United States. I mean, this is why, to me, it's so offensive. The way Donald Trump and JD Vance talk. Because this whole thing, like, the country's gonna be over. We're a third world nation. We're fair. These guys hate America and they're causing so much disruption for Americans. This isn't just affecting the haitian people. And you said this to me when they, when someone does a bomb threat to Springfield and it shuts down an entire school, the city hall, a hospital, that's white Americans in Springfield. Also getting affected when people are harassing black Americans in Springfield, mistaking them from Haitians, that's affecting Americans. So. And one of the people perpetrating these lies is a senator from Ohio. So he's on purposely hurting his own constituents. And I want to read a quote from his interview on Sunday on CNN. It says, I, if I have to create stories so that american media actually has to pay attention to the suffering of american people, then that's what I'm going to do. That's from a us senator named JD Vance, who's running for vice president.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: But the irony is, like, you're saying his lies are causing the suffering of american people.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: And it's real quick. I'll let you finish real quick. But because this is like, the craziest thing. Like, I'm reading about this and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. When the immigrants come, then, then crime will follow. And it's like, well, yeah, but that's because you guys are committing the crimes. You guys are the ones throwing, calling in bomb threats. The immigrants aren't doing that. The immigrants come. And then, you know, like, the people that advance is talking to apparently start creating, start. Start committing crimes. It's like the crimes wouldn't follow if we had leadership that would help people process the change as opposed to trying to exploit the change to accumulate power on their own.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: Correct. And so I want to read one more quote, and then I'm going to get off my high horse, because to me, this is very important. To share this. So Donald Trump was quoted on Sunday. I saw him at a speech. And so I know he said this, and he says, and I'm paraphrasing a bit because it was a long diatribe, but an illegal haitian migrants came in, taking over. Such a beautiful place, talking about Springfield. You have this beautiful place called Springfield. All of a sudden you have 20,000 illegals in your community and no one knows where they came from, which is interesting. They came from Haiti. I'm angry about young american girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens. That was a former american president who's asking for the job again.
And that to me is that's now we're at the level of pogroms in eastern Europe in the late 18 hundreds, early 19 hundreds, with the blood libels when they said that jews were kidnapping young kids and using their blood to put on the door for Passover. And they will go burn a whole jewish town because of those lies. Or lynch mobs in the late 18 hundreds, early 20th century in America, when some publication will say negro rapes, white woman, and a mob would go into the black section of town, take ten black guys out of their house and hang them from a tree after beating the hell out of like, this is serious stuff. We have a leader in this country that just said that, that he's angry about young american girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage criminal aliens with no evidence of that. Think about this. We have ring cameras and cell phone cameras in the United States.
This thing's been going around for a couple weeks. I haven't seen one video of a haitian person with a pet. I mean, this is really. And this is what I'm saying, James.
I want to ask the people that consume this willingly and really, like, ask them to pause and ask them, why are they so willing to want to follow this and consume it? Because, like you and I just said, go look at the Marielle boatlift. We've been through this before. 20,000 Haitians, not gonna hurt 300 million Americans.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: But that's so sad of, like, the people. You can't ask them because they're in a contained media ecosystem where they get whatever they get that's gonna keep them on this strength so that, so that they can.
[00:29:14] Speaker B: So it's just sad.
[00:29:15] Speaker A: Like, and so that's the concern, really, is that unless you can break them out of this ecosystem and actually show them things that are really going on, and there have been studies about this. I remember the study. We talked about it, you know, in passing at one point where they took a fox, they took a certain number of Fox News viewers, just had them watch CNN for four weeks instead of Fox. And they didn't change from their political leanings, but the things that they believe, the reality that they believed was real changed. And they stopped believing things like the big lie, and they stopped believing all these, all these false things that are propagated and that people are immersed in, if they're in these alternate realities. And so, I mean, I think that is, as long as that exists, and I'm not, I don't know I don't know how you necessarily fix that. I have some ideas, but this isn't the show for that. But as long as that exists, it seems like this is the direction it's going to go. And I really want to. We'll close it up, but I do want to, like, echo your point that I don't understand why these folks think America, the country and also the american system is so weak and fragile. Like, in their mind, any change will destroy America. And it's like America's been here for a while. The only people that are trying to destroy the America that the founding fathers put together are the people that are trying to disenfranchise voters or trying to turn off immigration or send the military around in the country to start rounding up people. Like, that's the stuff that's going to destroy America, not people coming in. People have been immigrating into America for the whole time. The world didn't end when Reagan gave amnesty to 4 million or whatever it was, illegal immigrants and so, or any, like you said, after the stuff in Miami, like, there have been these stuff going on the whole time. You know, we had boats and boats of people coming for, for decades. Again, that stuff typically has strengthened America, not made it weak, not ended it, so that they have such a negative view of America and of America's own strength and power, in my view, makes them unfit to lead a nation. If you think a nation is weak and can't stand on its own 2ft, you're not the person that should be leading it. If you have a football coach that think the team is garbage, he's not going to be a good coach for the football team. You need somebody that sees the possibilities of what the team can accomplish, has the vision and can put that in place. You have people that, then they think nothing's going to work. Then guess what? Nothing's going to work. So, I mean, say what?
[00:31:38] Speaker B: They have a concept of a vision, apparently.
[00:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, but that's all negative. So. But not, we close up this topic from here. Check out.
[00:31:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I just want to end with this. That, yeah, this is, this is, we're living through this, James. This is like George Wallace. This is Strom Thurmond. It's saying segregation now, segregation forever in 1948, 1st time in our life we're living through this. Yeah.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: Yeah. So, all right. But no, we appreciate everybody for joining us on this, on this part. Please join us on the other part for this show for this week, and we'll talk to you then.
[00:32:12] Speaker B: All right.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: For our second topic today we saw recently saw a couple of articles talking about Onlyfans releasing. You know, it's kind of this financial data and how, how popular, how much money it makes and how profitable it is really stood out. And now OnlyFans is kind of like a creator driven. Yeah, like individual creator driven portal where people can subscribe to creators essentially, is how I would describe it. And what it has been used for a lot and what people basically say it's used a lot for porn, you know, and where, you know, like a porn star or someone, anyone can put up there and then put risque or you know, porn content on and people can subscribe to them and then get, receive this stuff or be able to send a messages to them and stuff like that. So it, I guess there's been an expression of surprise. Maybe not that it's successful altogether, but how successful it is because at this point it's, it's much more successful than the, the websites, at least from a money, money drive driving standpoint. Websites that do porn completely. You know, so it's, it's really been to men. To some it's been surprising how well it's done. So you tell me, you know, Tunde, do you think it's surprising that only fans has not just been able to work but to be such a heavily or just a hugely successful business venture and also in such a short period of time?
[00:33:31] Speaker B: I'd say yes and no. I mean, you're allusing to sex selling and porn and all that makes me is a no part. I'm not surprised that a site like this will have done so well. But yeah, the surprising thing is why?
I guess the surprising thing is that the business model they employ has been so successful. And I'm not saying I'm surprised because I didn't think it could be just this is something novel and new. And I never thought, you know, about this kind of model before. And so it's a model though.
[00:34:03] Speaker A: That's a tried and true model for the Internet, though, as far as YouTube. I mean, users upload content for other people to be able to consume and then subscription models and stuff. So it's, it's, it's a context and you know, with a feature set that's kind of that. They were the ones that pioneered altogether.
[00:34:19] Speaker B: I mean, it's just to use it because I guess the, you know, the traditional porn industry is, I guess more like the movie studio industry where, yeah, actors, they go do a scene, you're paying, you know, someone's producing it, they got the cameras, all that. And then, and then you're paying that studio or that production house for their content. You put it on your site and you're either giving it away for free to, and selling ads, or you're given subscriptions and blah, blah, blah. This one is really where the, the content creators are empowered because they're basically.
[00:34:50] Speaker A: The entrepreneurs, basically is the content creator and, yeah, there's the entrepreneurs and they're the, the film crew, you know?
[00:34:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Have people there, but they're the, the whole, they create in the content. It's not a studio. It's not, you know, a director necessarily, or it doesn't have to be at least like it's, yeah, it's really a more direct, yeah.
[00:35:07] Speaker B: Like the way you say it is, it's no different than the way that the independent media space has began to thrive in recent years on platforms like YouTube, where you have these.
[00:35:19] Speaker A: I got an even better example for you.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah, go ahead.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: If substack, if, I mean, to me, it's one of those things that it, like, I'm, I don't pay attention to this world that much. So it's a surprise to me only because I'm not following it as closely. But I, if substack can be successful with content creators writing stuff for people to read, and then you pay a subscription for that person, and then you get there, their article is emailed to you, and that is instead of like a traditional newspaper, for example, you know, where the newspaper pays the writer and then puts the stuff on their website, and then you can have a subscription. That'd be kind of the subscript of the studio analogy for like, you know, your traditional kind of setup. But if substat can do it for words, than I imagine it's obvious that only fans can do it for video, and particularly video or images that, you know, are risque, so to speak. So to me, it's one of those things that in hindsight seems very obvious, but I also think it taps into something else, and that the direct, or the feeling of a direct connection in a world and a society that we're in right now, where people feel less connected than ever, and then people are lonelier than ever. And so what stood out to me in this also was that people can pay money to be like, I guess, at a subscription level or maybe ala carte, I don't know, 100%. But you can pay money to be able to send direct messages to somebody as well, like the content creator. So they're uploading pictures and videos and you're getting all that. And then if you're a certain tier or whatever, you can send a direct message and they'll respond to you and so forth. So there's even a more kind of personal connection that is involved in that. And what it reminds me of in that kind of sense is that like for podcasts or, you know, things like that, a lot of times people, if you listen to podcast a podcaster, a lot people feel like they have kind of a personal connection with that person, even though that's really a one way thing. So this is kind of like that, where you can get a personal connection with someone who you may be sexually attracted to and so forth, and not just consuming a video, you know, by yourself in the room or something like that. So it really taps into, I think, a lot of different things, which to me explains why you can, you can see why it would be more profitable and successful than even the porn business itself, because it adds more facets to it and it really leverages the way a lot of business is done these days.
[00:37:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's. I want to tap on the loneliness thing, but just to piggyback on where you just ended, which was on the financial part, I found it interesting. One of the articles says last year the company posted a 50% 50 operating margin. Meta.
I know Meta had 35% operating margin and Google 27%. So.
[00:37:56] Speaker A: Which I realized for reference. Hold on, hold on. The meta and the Google numbers are nuts as well, like those, but those are great numbers as far as how much profit you're pulling in versus your revenue. But yet our onlyfans lapse that.
[00:38:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's why I find it interesting, because, I mean, meta and, and Google, even though they have less brick and mortar costs than, let's say, a Coca Cola or McDonald's, they still plow money back into research and development because they're trying to save the world with generative AI. They have their products, they have their services, all that. Onlyfans is a great example.
They can invest in making themselves look better with updating the website and some marketing stuff, but there's no research and development. They're not creating something new like a new product or technology. So that's why they're able to have such a huge margin as well, which I just find interesting is that they're just providing a platform for people to be, be humans on. Right. Like to the sex and all that.
[00:38:57] Speaker A: And that's where it seems like the content moderation piece is going to. It would be their biggest kind of that's their biggest risk. And what I mean by that is the, like, making sure everybody's of age, making sure everybody who's doing this stuff is not being compelled to do it. Like, it seems like that kind of stuff would end up being their biggest vulnerability and their biggest cost. Yeah, well, you know, like, to me.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: It'S probably not, as they make more revenue, those costs are probably relatively fixed. I mean, you know, just having maybe.
[00:39:23] Speaker A: I don't know, like that, that's, I mean, I don't know, but that's, it seems like that's going to be their biggest concern, you know, whereas in Facebook has those kind of concerns too, from a standpoint of, you know, what kind of moderation they're doing or if they're not going to do it at all anymore or whatever. But they have so those kind of costs though, and those kind of costs I think, actually aren't fixed. You know, like the fixed costs can be more of the technical stuff, but, you know, like the, the servers and so forth. Like you don't even have to own servers. You can use Amazon servers and, you know, like do a lot of this stuff. But no matter what, even if they want to do their own stuff, that kind of stuff is more fixed. But the, the ability to manage the content because content providers have some level of obligation, as we've seen, the way the law has evolved. But, and in this case, you're dealing with it's not just the content moderation requirements from a free speech standpoint, but from actually are people committing crimes here involving exploitation of miners or exploitation of people, you know, and so forth. So I think they do have concerns in that standpoint and they are going to have to, like if they're doing 50% profit margin and they're not looking at that stuff, then they're going to have some problems pretty soon. Like they hopefully that money. Well, no, I mean, that's not going to profit. A lot of it's going into that kind of stuff.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah. The articles I read, you know, they seem to be aware that that's an important thing to, for them to monitor and all that. But what I want to get back to this thing you mentioned about loneliness, because one of the things I mentioned just now was that the platform is a place that allows humans to be humans. And what I meant by that in my head, jokingly, was the idea that sex sells. But when you use the term loneliness, it actually made me realize there's a deeper point to that thing about humans being humans, because loneliness is something serious. And it's just we have a loneliness epidemic. I mean, and there's a reason why, you know, the national, you know, whatever, about things like torture and all that, say that solitary confinement is a form of torture. I mean, humans are social creatures.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: To your point, though, just real quick. You say, let humans be humans. Will humans desire and strive for connection? You know, so the fact that you can exchange messages with somebody who you admire or whatever and, you know, so forth, it would be something that would, I'm not even saying prey on loneliness, but it can be an answer in.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: A society where, I mean, yeah, I mean, look, there are people that do prey on it, but the reality is that it's a need for humans to not be lonely. And in a world that's driven business, someone's going to find a business opportunity to fill that need. And so the, the interesting thing is, though, that I never thought about until this conversation, that Onlyfans could actually be a bridge over the long arc of human kind of, you know, stuff.
If we, if we were to fast forward a hundred years from now and people having, like, relationships with AI, like, for real, like the movie her, like, we've referenced in other shows where a human being actually gets attracted to and falls in love with a computer program, I could see this being a bridge, because here's what I could see happening.
[00:42:14] Speaker A: Excuse me.
[00:42:15] Speaker B: A human. A human being, right? Let's say one of these act, you know, the content creator on onlyfans, they're only one person. They got 24 hours in the day like the rest of us. What if they have 50,000 followers who are saying, I want to dm you direct message and have this kind of relationship? That could be profitable right now, one person can't handle that, you know, 50,000 interactions at any given time. But think about it. When bots and AI, degenerative AI really becomes really, which you could see probably in the next decade, you could have one person with all these little bots under them that are answering all these messages, and the AI, is that good?
[00:42:55] Speaker A: I've read about this already. There are people who are trying to do this right now.
[00:42:59] Speaker B: No, that's what I'm saying. Like, they're going to be successful, that technology.
[00:43:02] Speaker A: Well, eventually, yeah, eventually we'll get there. Like, right now, I've seen, I've read about this maybe a few months ago where there are performers, I think. I think onlyfans, people that are trying to train AI bots to be able to do that, for them to be able to expand how many people they can connect with and lower the cost, because if a bot is doing it and so forth and so what. But when you said it, I laughed initially because, you know how, like, Uber, you know, was created, and, you know, they're using driver, human drivers and so forth, and it's like, oh, yeah. But their grand plan actually would be to have this all, have set up this framework and then be able to plug in automated drivers, automated cars to go around and do all that. You said that, hey, you know, like, in the future, like, basically, you're saying Onlyfans is gonna try to pull an Uber eventually and have AI sexual attract people attracted to AI bots, either images or whatever, and then they don't even need creators anymore. The creators are gonna get pushed out of it.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: Think about what, the same way drivers.
[00:44:01] Speaker A: Are eventually pushed out of Uber, which.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: No, but that just, you talked about earlier. It's like, we did a show probably two years ago about Levi's was the first company to remember to do AI models.
[00:44:11] Speaker A: Models.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: And there was a huge uproar in the modeling community about it. But one of the things was this took out their liability of things like HR issues. Right. And me, too. Moments in the. In. At the workplace, and it allowed them.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: To show more body types, more skin complexions, more, like, they were able to. They could show anything to anyone, you know, like, so it. It actually, there was some utility to it, you know, like, there was.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: But that's going back to what you brought up earlier about the risks of us, of a company, like, like, the legal and serious risks of them, you know, not realizing that maybe there's human trafficking on their platform or underage stuff going on. Well, if once you get a perfected. Yeah, once you get pair a perfected, that's out the door because they don't have humans as the. As the content creator. And there's. So I can see, and that's what I'm saying is that it's. I never thought of this before, this conversation, but Onlyfans, actually, this conversation got here.
[00:45:06] Speaker A: Like, I still can't believe that we got to the point where we're talking about Onlyfans eventually trying to transition out the human content creators.
[00:45:12] Speaker B: No, that's what I'm saying. It's fascinating that, um. Yeah. That we're not just joking about porn and sex. That's.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: That's.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: I'm surprised that we're that mature, actually. That's. That's impressive. Now I got to show this one to my wife and say, see, I can talk about something without bringing up sex all the time.
[00:45:25] Speaker A: I can talk about porn without bringing up sex.
[00:45:28] Speaker B: Without bringing up sex. That's interesting. How do we do that?
But no, but it's one of those. Here's the thing. You blew my mind in a conversation we had some time ago this year about something. Thank you so much. We're talking about the first. Yeah, no, you're welcome. We were talking about the first amendment because what you said was very true, and I never thought of it this way. That we have to thank, seriously, all these people that are constitutional, you know, like, they're so hard at beating down the door about how they love the constitution, they should be thanking NWA and two live crew from the late eighties to early nineties for, you know, all the pressure they had from the system. And their court cases, actually are why we enjoy, like, a lot of their freedoms. Freedom of speech on Twitter and the Internet now is because of a lot of the court cases from two life crew in early night.
[00:46:19] Speaker A: They stood up to the government, basically, and said, you know, like, all the way put those report. Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:25] Speaker B: And a lot of people don't put those two and two together. And I think that's what I'm saying. Like, maybe in 50 years, the whole thing of the way humans relate to AI and all that. I'm not trying to make a nasty joke about it, I'm just being serious. That degenerative AI might be that good that we become friends with. With our robots, just like we're friends with our dogs. Like, I have a chocolate lab. That's my buddy, and imagine if there was a computer program that could even talk to me more than my dog. You know, my dog obviously can't talk. So my point is that it's fascinating that, yeah, maybe this company that we all look at as just some kind of advanced porn site where people, you know, it's like a brokerage services for adults, actually will change humanity. That could be interesting. So.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Well, I mean, many people have said, honestly, like, I've heard this in reference, that porn is what really saved the Internet and really built it up at a time before. Like, before it was everywhere. Like, that's one of the first things that people did there, you know, and so forth. And so it wouldn't be the craziest thing to say that something like this would bring in, usher in changes in terms of the way that humans satisfy the needs for loneliness. I'm not saying this would be a good thing, though. Like, this is, you know, frightening to me. Like, the way this conversation went, you know, just from the standpoint, but, I.
[00:47:41] Speaker B: Mean, I'm glad it was frightening.
I didn't have to involve s and m in the conversations. That's, you know, that makes me feel good, so.
[00:47:49] Speaker A: But, yeah, I mean, it's definitely not something that's inconceivable that the direction that a company like this goes with, you know, utilizing modern technology and further leveraging modern technology could, you know, have major implications and effects on how we all interact with each other in the future. So, I mean, yeah, it's an interesting. It wasn't where I thought we would go with the conversation, but I definitely think it's a lot of insight there. So.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Good, though. It was a good place to land.
[00:48:13] Speaker A: No, for sure. For sure.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: So I think I can tell my wife something new.
[00:48:19] Speaker A: But I'm gonna wrap this show up from here. We appreciate the opportunity 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.
[00:48:29] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Guan. Lana.
[00:48:31] Speaker A: All right, we'll talk to you next time.
Oh, my.
