Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to Call It Like I See it, presented by Disruption Now, I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call It Like I See it, we're going to take a look at the ibuyer trend and more generally, big tech's increasing involvement in the real estate game and consider whether this development should make us more or less worried that we could have or already be in a housing bubble.
And later on, we're going to discuss the concept of toxic positivity and how being around it can actually make dealing with struggles more difficult.
Joining me today is a man whose tongue is faster than a speeding bullet, whose mind is more powerful than a locomotive, and. And whose leaps of logic can clear tall buildings. Tunde. Ogonlana Tunde. I see you've already changed in the phone booth. So you ready to get busy?
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Always. Man, I like that intro.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: I take it when you don't say that you don't like them, huh?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Let's just say I like this one more than many others I've heard. This was very flattering.
[00:01:20] Speaker A: Now, we're recording this on November 9, 2021, and we saw last week that Zillow, the popular online real estate marketplace company, is getting out of what is called the iBuying game.
Now, iBuyers, or instant buyers, can generally be considered tech companies that use huge amounts of data to buy homes and to make decisions to buy homes and sell them very quickly. Well, I should say buy them very quickly, can skip an inspection, all that type of stuff, and then they ultimately turn around and sell them, oftentimes after they clean them up a bit.
And this is, as I said, this is backed by algorithms that they use that put together reams and reams of home sale data to try to predict what homes should be selling for and so forth, and then try to get ahead of the market basically and not try to make a killing on every house, but to do it at scale. So you make a little bit with a lot of different houses or a lot of houses, you're buying them by cash, so you offer buyers incentive with that and so forth.
So doing a lot of transactions very quickly. And again, this is without all the viewings and inspections and all the things that sellers normally have to go through in order to sell a house.
Now, Zillow's been at the forefront of this trend, but now we see they're getting out. So, Tunde, what do you think of the ibuying trend generally and also Zillow getting out of the game so early in its development?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: It's a Very interesting topic because it's another area where I think technology is disrupting kind of an old industry being real estate or has the, let's put it this way, maybe it's not disrupting it yet, but has the ability to. And this is maybe an early sign of that.
I don't know how far it gets after. And we'll talk about some of the stats here because I think home buying, unlike many other transactions, is very personal and is, you know, houses are illiquid, unlike stocks that you can just press buttons and trade instantly. So it'll be interesting to see where it goes. But I do think this whole Zillow thing is very interesting because it seems like a relatively new concept, this ibuying. And when I say relatively new, it's been around several years.
There's a handful of companies, I would say about six or seven that really have. Use this as their primary business model. Then there are a couple of key players, large, big investment banking types like Blackstone and blackrock who. This is a very small part of their overall business, but the fact that they're participating in it tells you that there's something there for the financial community. So it's just very interesting to me that, and you had mentioned this just recently, that kind of like the Ubers and Lyfts disrupted the taxi industry through the ability to use, you know, the, the technology at hand in today's day and age. This is now coming to real estate, I think. Zillow, though, what's interesting is Zillow appears to have made some bad bets and that's why they've gotten punished for, for the way they've handled themselves in the market. But there's others who look like they might be able to sustain this model. So it'll be interesting to see.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's very interesting because, yeah, you can take, you can look at Zillow being well known and saying they got in and now they're getting out and be like, oh, well, this thing is on the, you know, on the decline, so to speak. But I don't take it from. Take that at all. It looks like, like, yeah, Zillow's algorithm probably just wasn't as, as good. You know, they. Because if you're trying to live on the margins, if the business model is to be on the margins and say we got to make a little bit a whole bunch of times, then your algorithm has to be on point because it has to deliver that little bit each time if it gets, if you start getting underwater. So to Speak or buying houses for too much on scale, that can affect you very quickly. It's very substantially so. I look at more of Zillow's implementation was problematic, but the overall trend, as you pointed out, there seems to be something there because it is.
Yeah, and I look when I read this, what I thought of was Uber and Lyft and the taxi industry. And so they're trying to bring use technology and leverage the availability of this data and more particularly the ability to make decisions like to, to, to compile all this data and then make decisions based on it, to try to be predictive, so to speak. And with that, you therefore can come in, you can offer sellers such a more convenient process that you actually may be able to get them to sell for a couple of a little bit less than they otherwise would have. Hey, you can sell for me, sell to me now, cash for this, or you can take your chances and maybe get another five or $10,000. A lot of sellers might take the, the earlier offer and just say, hey, we'll do it. And so there is kind of the overall incentive structure in place where someone could come in with money and with technology and, and get a foothold. And we've seen that, you know, like even it's still very new, but you know, like, I think we've seen statistics where maybe 2% of all the home sales in California were this Ibuyer style. But this is very early, this is just starting. And so that's something that could grow over time. But again, the, the idea that someone would put together this combination of financial resources and this technological approach is something that, it's one of those things in hindsight, like, oh yeah, that makes sense why somebody would do that or why somebody would have done that. And so, yeah, I don't think this is the last we've heard of it, notwithstanding Zillow hitting eject, you know, in the early stages.
[00:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's interesting because you're right. I mean, I think that one thing that has shown, you know, human innovation, whenever there's a technology available, human beings will try and leverage it in kind of various aspects. So that's why I do like the analogy of the Lyfts and Ubers to something like this, because it's just kind of a natural progression that algorithms and other parts of kind of the modern technology ecosystem would eventually find their ways to kind of an old school business model like real estate. I mean, you know, real estate is, I'd say stocks, bonds and real estate have been around real estate's been around forever, but in terms of their modern forms, at least for 5, 600 years in our generally large economies around the world.
So they have been tried and tested and just like technologies come to other parts of finance, like money and like I just mentioned, the ability to buy and sell stocks on your phone and just, you know, the stuff that we all know and don't seem that intimidating to us right now. The housing market obviously is going to continue to go down the road of being influenced by technology.
The Zillow story again, is interesting because what I like about that story is it kind of shows when done properly or allowed to behave or kind of left alone in its natural state, the capital markets reward and punish those decisions that leaders make in these various companies. So if you look at a company like Zillow now, I think they went public somewhere around 2015, somewhere around the 20 to $30 range.
And then with all the buzz that was happening around these projects they're doing, they hit around $200 a share in February.
So if you look at just hypothetically, someone with a million shares, your net worth just ballooned over a couple of years.
And between February, 10 times, literally between February and today, which is, we're recording this on November 9th, Zillow's gone from $200 a share down to $67 a share. So they've lost 66% of their of their market value. So that same person who was sitting fat at $200 million in net worth has had a tough time. I mean, they're still worth 67 million if they owned 100 shares. But, you know, that's gotta be. That's why people jump out of windows sometimes. You know, that feels pretty.
[00:09:27] Speaker A: It's all a matter of perspective. They thought, thought they had 200 million.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Let's hope they didn't put the down payment on that $100 million, 250 foot yacht. Yeah, but no, but on a serious note, that's, to me, the beauty of the capital markets. And I think we've kind of talked about this offline a little bit, that until another system is created that's better than this one, this seems to reflect kind of humanity, you know, the ability for risk takers to have booms, but also for risk takers to suffer if the risk they took didn't work out. And, and shareholders are able to sell shares and leave and exit. And as we see, like a result, like I said, the share price is down 66% in 10 months or so, and who knows, maybe in three, four years. It's back up because they figured out how to turn this around.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it pivoted. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good point because what we often see in our capital markets is kind of a bastardized version of this where companies aren't just rising and falling based on performance, but they're trying to keep their thumb on the scales in other ways through policy, through government, you know, handouts or whatever to support them when they bet on their bets lose, and then they keep all the money when their bets win. And so you're right. When actually when the markets can be responsive to actual performance, then they can reward the winners and punish the sellers. And, and in this case, that's what's happening here. Where it goes awry and where people are rightfully gripe is when it goes awry. And then the people who were the losers in that are able to then get tax dollars or then able to get policy written in their favor to then bail them out, so to speak, which we see happening oftentimes. And I know you mentioned part of that offline discussion that we should bring online was that that's a big reason why antitrust really is important and it's really been left to the wayside in modern times. But it's really important because the concept of too big to fail, like if Zillow just conceivably, if Zillow had had a certain level of success and been able to start selling 50% of all houses in California and then their business model fails, then California would have a problem.
Like, they would have gotten so big, they would have been essentially too big to fail. They could have gone to California and say, or the federal government said, look, you know, we do 50% of the houses here, and if we, if we get out of this business, you guys are going to be out of luck. You guys aren't going to have the infrastructure to even sell houses anymore, like on a large scale, because all the people who used to be doing that aren't doing that anymore. And so if they would have gotten too big to fail, then they would have basically been able to hold, hold the governments for a ransom in terms of, hey, if you don't want us to get out, give us all this money or give us all this, this benefit or whatever. Whereas when you have a, when you have a bunch of smaller players in competition, you have winners and losers.
If one of them says, hey, we're out, then that's fine, because that's just, that's what the competition is supposed to do. And other people can get in, or the existing people can then leverage that, that space. And so the antitrust comes in not just at the front end when you have a lot of competition, but even after someone wins and wins and wins, you have to protect that. Then that's what the Justice Department is for. That's what our antitrust legislation is for. So that when someone starts getting too big, they start chopping them back down to size. And so it, that's a little bit of a tangent, but it does show how the, in the, in a properly functioning market with competition, even big players can come and go. And it's not like, okay, this whole system's going to fail now because this one person left.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's true. It's, it's interesting because as you say that I'm, I'm reading one of the articles and it's a CEO of Zillow's name is Rich Barton, and it says that he cited price forecasting volatility as one of the main reasons Zillow has been overpaying for houses. And I found that to be very interesting because what it talks about is the fact that they try to use these algorithms in a way that obviously hasn't worked out for them. As opposed to OfferPad, for example, which is a company that seems to have, still has some success in this. More so because what they've realized, I think more so than Zillow, is as much as they're relying on algorithms for kind of the entryway into the door of, hey, you know, is this a good market or not? Should we be selling these homes at these prices or not? They then make sure to, to like have a boots on the ground team in these various markets. So they have realtors who live in these cities that know the cities like the back of their hands and they, they consult with them. So it seems that there's a little bit of a, more of a human component. Once the algorithms tell them, hey, this might be a good place, they still go to the kind of boots on the ground folks there for the reality.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: Of what's going on, which is a More Robust System 1 and 2 probably costs a little more to do, but it gives you some more redundancy. And so that's where again, the markets should reward. If it's all a race to the bottom, the person Zillow may have been the most streamlined, but been the most volatile. And but if they would have been able to out compete everybody on a short term and then take over the marketplace, then when their System failed. They could have said, hey, you just gotta, you gotta prop us up cause we're so big. But go ahead.
[00:14:44] Speaker B: I think that's my point and that's the interesting thing. I mean, again, that's why I love this story about a functioning capital market with the company like this, because it's true. I mean, if I'm a shareholder of Zillow and I find out they're overpaying for houses regularly, I'm not going to be happy. Right. That's not a good use of my, my money that I put in there as an investor and a shareholder. And that's why, you know, I've seen things about larger firms like the BlackRock, some Blackstones that are, you know, paying 20 to 50% above market and you know, for homes. And you know, when I see that stuff, that's where I get suspicious of those kind of claims. Not because I can't believe it, but it's more so because I understand the markets and shareholders are not going to be happy if any company is paying, you know, 50, 20, even 5% over market value for any asset. Like, it doesn't have to be homes. It could be widgets, it could be cars, whatever it is. And so, you know, and the other thing which sticks out a little bit is the average, you know, according to the most recent census, the average American homeowner holds their home for over 10 years.
So I, that's another thing that is just interesting about this idea and this model. And let's see if it works long term. Because, you know, the average stock is held for about six months.
And there's some people that hold their stocks forever. There's some people that day trade, but on average it's around six months. But when you're looking at homes, I mean, that's what makes I think this whole project a little bit harder because I mean, look at you and I are good examples. I know you're a more recent home buyer than me. I've been in my home 13 years.
You may end up being in your home over a decade. So it's not like we're guys that are rushing out looking to buy the next home as opposed to we might be sitting here buying a new stock in our 401k or whatever, you know, sometime in the next 12 months.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's just a lot point though. Like it's also the, it's not easy to. Or it's hard for an external factor to convince us to sell the house. Like.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: To induce us, hey, sell your House like it's like. Well, most people aren't just in constantly on alert to sell their home, you know, just because there's some market inducement out there, like that's their house, you know, like that's where they live. Whereas you can induce people to sell stocks and so forth. So that's, that's an excellent point as well.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: Yeah. And the other thing, just a few, I found some interesting stats, you know, just to share. And this is also to give because I know that there's sometimes there's angst kind of in the community when people think that there's kind of these dark forces and large, you know, with large bags of money behind the scene going to bid up prices.
And it's amazing how just when you look at the real data and the numbers, just how large our economy and our society is. So the US has roughly 140 million housing units. That includes everything, apartment units, townhouses, you know, individual homes.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: So basically an American citizen owning, or I shouldn't say, because I know foreigners can own two. But, but a person owning a home, let's say a single home unit. Of those 140 million units though, about 80 million are standalone single family homes. So that, so now we know it's about 80 million of the, out of that that are really single family homes like you and I have then out of this 80 million single family homes, 15 million are actual rental, rental properties.
And I know we did a show recently where we, we, we, this reminded me of some of these stats that we talked about on, on a recent show.
But out of those 15 million single family rentals, only about 300,000 are owned by institutional investors. Yeah, that's a very small number out of 15 million.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: And it's kind of like thankful to say and it is a beauty of our system that the rest of them are all owned by individual investors or some sort of conglomerate of like people like me and you, let's say me and you pull together our resources and started an LLC and bought, you know, three or four single family homes. We wouldn't be considered institutional. We're still two guys with jobs that are just buying real estate.
[00:18:56] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:57] Speaker B: So, you know, if you look at that, the largest is Blackrock. They own 80,000 out of the 300,000 homes. I believe that Zillow owns 8,000 homes around the country. One of their largest markets is Orlando, Florida. They own about a thousand homes, like 962 homes.
One of the things, this is where it becomes interesting where again when the markets are allowed to function.
The kind of sinister nature behind these things kind of begins to evaporate. One of the speculations was that in a market like Orlando, if Zillow starts, if they really have problems and they start dumping these houses on the market, I mean you've got a thousand homes going to market. If Zillow needs cash now, they're going to sell them probably under market value, which could kind of cause an artificial depression short term or potentially leading to long term in the Orlando, Florida single family home market.
So it's interesting how these things can have, you know, they can cause prices to go up when they're buying them, but if something goes wrong like this and they have to flood the market with all this inventory, it could actually cause prices to go down.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: So. Well, that's where that's the given interest, so to speak. Yeah, that's the so to speak because one of the concerns now is that the ibuyers will are inflating the market that they're. Because it's an additional buyer, a backstop buyer so to, so to speak, that everyone can have or access, then that's going to inflate the prices of the market. And that actually leads me to the next point I wanted to get to, which is how big of a concern is this?
Now we had mentioned already Uber, Lyft and so forth. When we get big tech in and they bring their algorithms in, things can become more user friendly or more efficient for sure. But they also can go very, very poorly. If you look at like our information ecosystem, our ability to get information has been destroyed bas by the Facebooks and whatever of the world in terms of how their algorithms are also in tune to our human nature and are able to manipulate us based on our human nature in ways that make it very difficult for people to get solid information, real information, as opposed to just information that tickles their human nature a certain way, that makes them feel a certain way. And so when, if we're talking real estate now where it's people are trying to introduce and bring forward the concept that now algorithms are going to price forecasting algorithms. Zillow's apparently wasn't very good, but other companies have their, their forecasting algorithm along with maybe some boots on the ground or even just a better algorithm.
Is this something or what, what about unintended consequences here? What about things? What's going to happen where this could go really poorly? Or do you think this is something where it's, it's, it may have economic shocks akin to say a Uber or Lyft economic shops, meaning shocks, meaning, you know, you're at the deal with the labor, you're going to figure out ways that people can earn a living. But it's not destroying people's ability to get from point A to point B.
Whereas the information ecosystem, it has destroyed people's ability to get reliable information. If you're looking online, so which side do you think we're looking at there? How big of a concern are we looking at? This could become a situation where buying a home, for example, is impossible because these institutional investors, their algorithm says I only sell it for this or whatever, I have to sell it for this. And they own such a large block of them or whatever, like it could really throw sand in the gear, so to speak.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think from when you started, the way I was looking at it was kind of the, the algorithms doing a negative and doing harm through things like Facebook and, and, and, and YouTube and all that stuff.
I think this is different because this isn't people having social media and getting manipulated that way.
I do think that at some point, depending how big something like this were to get, like we mentioned, there's 300,000 homes owned by these kind of Ibuyer types, these institutional types, and out of 15 million rental properties, so we're not there yet, but if, let's say the number got up to 3,4 million that was owned by these Ibuyers, you know, a larger percentage, then I do think there's a risk of something in the future like a Zillow happening. Meaning let's say one of these Ibuyers owned, you know, 3 or 4 million units themselves and then just went bankrupt or something like that. And it just, you know, they flooded the market. That, that could cause an artificial economic shock.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: Well, one thing they could also do for, like, it's unforse, it's not unforeseeable, but it's not, it's not necessarily what would come to mind initially. What if one of them owns three or four units and just says, you know what, we're just not going to sell any of these ever, you know, or something like that. Like because of whatever the algorithm saying, oh, if we hold it for next five years, then we can make the price jump. Like again, this is a computer decision. This three or four million units would never collectively decide to not sell. You know, like we want to hold out. So there are a lot of ways, basically, some of which I'm saying now and some of which I can't even think about or can't even imagine where this could go poorly. And so that's more, it's any of those more.
[00:24:12] Speaker B: So what I'm at there's been, we've already seen a little bit of this. That's a good example about if they were decided to hold because we saw this after the great financial crisis in 08 through 2010 with what they called bank owned real estate or REO departments and banks. And what happened is there was a bit of a fear back then that all these foreclosures, the banks were taking back these homes and they were just going to be, you know, they were going to own all the homes. Right, the big banks. And at the end of the day, you know, banks didn't want to own homes. That's not the business they're in. And because owning a home has a lot, remember first of all, you got property taxes, I can't speak for every state, but we're in Florida where we have what's called a homestead exemption, where the taxes are not allowed to increase over 3% a year. If it is a single family residence, that is the primary residence owner occupied of an individual human being, not a company.
So you know, you look at our millage rate, which is the rate of tax on property in the state is approximately 2%. I say approximately because it can vary between municipalities. So let's just say for a million dollar home in Florida, you're paying about 20,000 a year in property tax. For a $500,000 home, which is probably the average price in south Florida these days, you're paying 10,000 a year. So if an ibuyer owns a half million dollar home in Florida, they, they might end up at 30, 40,000 in a few years if they're holding this. So at some point it's not there's, you know, it's may not be there might not be the economic incentive to hold this kind of house.
[00:25:51] Speaker A: Code is built in to prevent that wide level of accumulation of housing.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's interesting because let's say that did happen. I mean those municipalities will be flush with cash too. So there could be some other offshoot that might be positive from some of this stuff. If it were to happen, the other thing would be things like repairs. You know, if you're sitting on a house for four or five years. Let's go back to where we live, South Florida. You got the hurricanes, you got the hot muggy humidity. In the weather, if it's on the water, you got saltwater erosion and all that. So it's just the idea that, you.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Know, again, it's not that easy.
[00:26:24] Speaker B: Going back to sitting on a stock is a lot easier for a few years than sitting on a house. And so. And that's the other thing too. One of the things that was pointed out in one of the articles I found interesting, which speaks a little to this, is that the ibuyers tend to buy homes that are in dire straits, more so than individuals. Because like, like I look at someone like myself and I know it's anecdotal, but I'm not really a handy guy.
I mean I can change a light bulb but you know, I'm not going to be putting up drywall and things like that, nor do I want to. I work hard, I have a lot going on in my life, so I don't want to have to take the time to do all these things.
And so what happens is a lot of times in these markets, these ibuyers are the only ones really with the cash that will go into certain areas or neighborhoods and really kind of fix up these houses very quickly. Like I believe offerpad, the guy said it's 100 days is his goal, but buying, fixing, turning and selling. So that's just over three months.
And you know, if you left someone like me to do that, it would be three years and I might not have the product I want in the end.
So in reality, depending on how this.
[00:27:38] Speaker A: Let me say something real quick. Cause that's a good service. I always thought like the housing flip, house flipping gets. Some ways it's romanticized and other times it's getting a bad rap. But ultimately the idea of taking assets that, that are, that need to be re. Rehabilitated, rehabilitating them and then getting them back on the market if it's done right, that's a good thing for our economy, that's a good thing for you know, the, the infrastructure, so to speak. So the concept that that could do that or that could be that, that ibuyers or whatever could be a part of, that could be something that's very helpful for the, the economy and just our neighborhoods, our communities.
[00:28:13] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what the, the, the gentleman, the CEO of OfferPad was saying that and like you said, he's got a different model than Zillow, which you're right, I think his will be a little bit more costly, but probably it seems to be working out for them.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: Because what he's doing, more costly but more sustainable. And so what you can't do is as A municipality government or a federal government, whatever, always look to bail out the people that are cutting all the corners, but making a lot of money and in that way making the market incentive to not do things the right way, because if you make a mistake, the government will put the money back in for you. But whereas this guy, like the offer pad who's doing it, it takes a little longer, it costs a little bit more, but it's a more sustainable model. If left. If both types of approaches were left over five years, the offer pad model would in most cases survive over the more streamlined model. But a lot of times we don't let the capital markets and the market themselves work themselves out like that because people get in the lobbying and all this other type stuff. Actually. And just to jump on this point, for me, the answer is simple and it's actually the same answer that it would be looking at a Facebook or looking at Uber and Lyft or whatever. And it's. I foreshadowed this earlier. It's antitrust. If, as long, if you, if you allow one entity to take over 60% of the market here, then we will go into trouble. Like there will be problems. And if you. But if you maintain healthy competition in the market through antitrust law, then we probably will be okay. Then a lot of the things that we're talking about, these, these other benefits will probably be more likely or, excuse me, will be more likely to come to fruition. Because the whole point, this is overlooked so much in our economic system. It has to be market based and markets require competition. You can. Market is, does not exist without competition. And so if we do not protect competition as an utmost value, then our market system devolves and it's no longer a market system, it's no longer competition. And so as long as we protect competition in this industry and prevent it, sometimes people are uncomfortable with it because you almost punish the winner, so to speak. But that's what's required to maintain competition. We know what happens if you let the winner keep building and building and building. You end up with Standard Oil or you end up with Facebook and then they become unresponsive to anything else that that's happening. And they just basically can dictate their own economic environment that is disconnected wholly from the market.
[00:30:45] Speaker B: Yep.
That's the thing, is that Hestav's gonna joke and say, well, whoever's making the largest campaign contributions might get the bailout.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: That's exactly. That's not a joke today. That's not a joke. That's Reading the future.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: No, I know, but it's funny. But that's why I think this just an interesting concept, this whole ibuying thing. Cause it's true. It's bringing this technology again to. It's part of the economy that generally doesn't move at lightning speed.
And that's what I mean.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: And it's bringing a lightning speed movement to it.
[00:31:24] Speaker B: Yeah. Like this guy saying that his goal is to turn the house in 100 days. I mean, that is lightning speed for turning a house, you know what I mean?
[00:31:32] Speaker A: And even for buying them a lot of these things, again, no inspection. No. They'll from time to somebody puts it on the market or talk starts talking to these ibuyers, you can have cash and be closed in 15 days, which is. That's wild.
[00:31:44] Speaker B: And I think, and I think that's the key. I mean, I think it all comes. Cause I thought about when I was reading these articles preparing for the show, I was like, okay, man, I've bought multiple homes over my life, bought and sold, and I can't complain about my experience.
So I guess if they can figure out how to make this experience better for the consumer, that'll work. If they don't, it won't.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: And that's the Uber Lyft mindset.
[00:32:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Because like. And like it's. That's why I like that analogy, the Uber Lyft, because before all that, I was fine taking a taxi, right? Yeah. You know, I just. But when you put it in my phone and I could just press a button and it shows up to my house, you know, that's even better. And it's cheaper and it's, and it's a flat rate and it's not the meter going when I'm sitting there. I remember, remember back 80s and 90s, I'll be sitting in the back of a cab and it was supposed to be charging you per mile or something.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: You'd be sitting in traffic and the thing keeps going up like, dude, come on. You just.
[00:32:40] Speaker A: More recently, you know, you get into the cab and then like nobody's credit card machine works because they don't want to pay the, the, the, the processing fee. So they're like, no, no, no, my car machine doesn't work. And it's like, yo, man, you know, it works.
[00:32:52] Speaker B: And that's the thing, right?
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Conveniences.
[00:32:54] Speaker B: Yeah. And, and, and then of course the Ubers and Lyfts come and, and, and at.
It's much, I'd say much better for us as consumers. But then you hear the complaints that the employees might not be getting the best go around, which are legitimate.
[00:33:07] Speaker A: But that's why we need competition there. Because if you keep competition healthy, somebody will come along and make a company that does that stuff that's better for the employees. And so that's what you gotta have people taking different approaches and so forth. And the competition is what promotes that.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Yeah, well.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think we can move on from there. I was looking forward to getting into this second topic with you, Toxic positivity, which the concept just being that there is like, ultimately there's a difference between optimism and this toxic positivity, where you're always emphasizing the positive or always, always trying to overlook things that could be negative sometimes in ways that could be condescending to people. Like, oh, you know, like, look at the bright side of this. Look at the bright side of that. Which, again, in the abstract isn't necessarily a negative. But it almost. It really struck me when I was reading about this as a matter of kind of human interaction, that you have to learn how to. You have to know how to. How to deal with people. And if you basically are on level 10, positive, positive, positive all the time, you actually, the people you're interacting with, you can do negative things or have. They can have negative feelings from that, or the way they feel about the way you're approaching them can be negative, which is counterintuitive, you know, like. But what was your take on the toxic positivity piece that we looked at.
[00:34:32] Speaker B: That was just, like you said, very interesting because I think it's something that all of us can relate to just from our life experience where you've been in a situation and you're not having a great time and then someone's coming at you with like, you're saying it's not optimism or certain things, it's just this almost fake cheer and fake happiness, like, oh, just don't worry. It's, you know, just always stay positive.
[00:35:02] Speaker A: Stop focusing on the negative things that again, in the abstract, you wouldn't take as being something that could be received as toxic.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, it reminded me a lot reading this was.
I think it was two weeks ago, our show about the power of now, that book and some of this stuff like the pain body and the ability to just accept what is and not try and spin it in your mind or to other people. That is somehow something different. And what really I thought of when I was reading this was that quote about the Buddha. And the Buddha saying that enlightenment is the end of suffering.
And again, how kind of personal that is for each of us, because each of us can define suffering in a different way. Whatever my suffering is might be different than yours. And so this toxic positivity.
I felt the same way because the article that we reference here started with a father who was talking to his daughter, who she was having a tough time with stuff. And he's sitting there being like, well, don't worry, just cheer up this and that. And it made me realize, like, well, his daughter was suffering from whatever, but in his mind, he wasn't suffering. So he was just telling her to get over it.
[00:36:23] Speaker A: But he thought he was being supportive. Yeah, he was.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Definitely.
[00:36:27] Speaker A: The way he was going about it. Yeah, the way he was going about it was condescending to her and just dismissive of her when. Cause again, this is about the interaction between people. And so his take on, hey, I want to try to give a positive mode basically ignores her saying, hey, I'm struggling with this, or having a problem with this. It's just like, forget all that. Just look, think about something else. And it's like, well, man, can I, you know, allow me to process what's going on? And I think one of the things just to add. I'll let you jump back in, is the. The idea where you can't or you shouldn't stifle your emotions, particularly difficult emotions. Like, you have to have a way to. To kind of deal with them and process them that doesn't involve just pretending they don't exist.
Yeah.
[00:37:13] Speaker B: And. Well, it's interesting because I think we've all seen those examples throughout life, whether it be our personal lives or, you know, watching, you know, people on TV and all that, where it's, It's. It's sometimes, you know, not sometimes, but it's the thing. Most of the time, it's better to just accept reality and if it's difficult, just deal with it in the moment so that you can move past it versus, you know, trying to avoid it or pretend it's not happening or not there and inevitably it will rear its ugly head again, whatever the issue is. So I think that, you know, and that's right, the article does make a good distinction between toxic positivity and things like optimism. Yeah, you know, I think that. And it's interesting, as I thought about my own life and okay, I'm generally an optimistic person, unless we're talking about the future of humanity, but generally I'm optimistic, but I try and have a realistic optimism. Right. It's not like we did a show.
[00:38:18] Speaker A: About that a few weeks back or maybe months at this point. But just talking about realism, injecting realism into it, balances it out a little bit more. Like it can't just be all one sided. But go ahead.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that, and that's part of it too is because there's a part of us from a societal side that, you know, we try and suppress or deny certain emotions. And this might be, I think, I mean, I'm sure many cultures have had this over the eons of humanity and human history. But I would say for us specifically the United States and Western culture, I think it's a, still an offshoot we have of the Victorian age that, you know, that we got from the British, you know, and the kind of late 1700s through the, through the, through the late 1900s where remember, things like sexuality were oppressed, women weren't allowed to express themselves in any sexual way.
And just a lot of our natural emotions were kind of repressed by society and both men and women. And this idea like men weren't expected to be for most of our country's history, let's put it that way, men weren't expected to be involved with child rearing. Right?
[00:39:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:39:37] Speaker B: And so what does that do to a man that you're not, you know, involved with your children as much? What does that do to the children versus other societies? If you look at even going back to certain hunter gatherer societies, you know, men were, even though they hunted and all that, they were, they were a large part of the child's life and child rearing generally. So I think that part of this is a little bit of that cultural.
I don't know the word I'm looking for, but just deep rooted that we have.
[00:40:07] Speaker A: Let's jump in real quick, man, because this is actually exactly what I was going to say. I think that actually we learn this as a society.
Like think of sports, think of how we engage in sports. Now. You were a high level athlete. Higher level than myself. I cut off in high school. You played NCAA basketball.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: Be careful how high you say I was.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: It's relative.
[00:40:29] Speaker B: Right.
[00:40:30] Speaker A: So it's high to me. And so you, you look at the way we do sports, you know, it's, it's, that is, that's like a study in toxic positivity. It's always like you're down 50 the game, you know, fourth quarter, hey, you know, keep it going. We can do like all that. And so the way we kind of deal with these things in society, a lot of times is to not think about the negative at all and just focus on the positive. Which again, has, can, can work for you. That there is the. This is not. I didn't read this and I don't think it should be read as one of those all one way type of things. It's more of a cautionary tale in the way you deal with people you care about.
To not be insensitive or dismissive when they tell you their struggles with you. You might think by giving them a positive message, positive feedback that you're helping them. But actually like I said, it's kind of condescending, it's kind of dismissive of what they say they're struggling with. Like maybe help them process what they're struggling with without just saying, oh, that's nothing. Oh, oh, just cheer up, you know, like just, you're saying just something like that's inherently dismissive. And so we do. It's a balance basically, as you know, again, most things in life, it's a balance. It seems like that we're trying to strike and this stood out to me for that reason. It's just that, okay, I need a little bit more emotional intelligence myself, you know, because the default to me, I'm an optimistic person, you know, and, and, but the default to me when, when I see challenges and so forth is just, hey, think about what you focus on, what you can change, what you can control. Just keep pushing, you know, don't worry, don't, don't focus your energy on how things could go wrong. Focus your energy on things, how things can, you know, what you can do about it. And that's overall good messaging, but particularly in how I deliver it, I'm gonna have to be aware that if I'm, if I approach this a certain way, I could be giving people positivity in a way that actually turns them off and it makes it harder for them as opposed to what I think I'm supporting them.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's true. And I think a lot of this comes down to, and we've talked about this in various ways on various shows is also how we, how we were raised, how we dealt with our internal family, you know, growing up, meaning our moms, dads, brothers, sisters, things like that. And again, going back to, to the fact that we're hardwired at an age before 10 years old, most of us, when we're still blank slates and we don't really understand what's going on. So many people are raised to not allow expression of their feelings.
They're told to suck it up when they're little and they just.
[00:43:05] Speaker A: And then they teach that and. No, I thought that was a great point you made about the Victorian age in that sense, because they're. That. I would say that that's definitely has its root or this has its roots in that.
[00:43:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And I want to take a quote from the article. It says, ask yourself what you can learn from your feelings. And I think that's just a good sentence because most of us don't. We're not trained to reflect and internalize how we feel really and really dwell on those emotions.
We're triggered and we react.
So we often don't take that time between trigger and reaction to actually figure out what are we really feeling here.
And then it says emotions.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: That's because we're dominated by the thinking mind, sir.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Yep, there you go.
Emotions are data, says Dr. David. They are not good or bad. They are signposts to things we care about. I thought that was great because it is true.
Emotions, in a sense, if you look at it that way, of course, emotions are emotions. But in a sense, just like data, it can help us kind of read the landscape, understand what's going on. Just like we talked in the part one about the algorithms and data for real estate and home purchasing. Right. That gives, you know, a company like Zillow didn't have good data. So they failed.
[00:44:24] Speaker A: Well, no, they didn't have a good way of processing and understanding the data. That was what it was. The data was the data, but they didn't read it well.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: And so. Yeah, and so I think that's a.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Really good analogy, by the way. The data like, the emotions like data.
It's Dr. Susan David, and we'll have the article in the show Notes as well, but go ahead.
[00:44:44] Speaker B: And so. And the idea that there's signposts of things we care about.
And so, I mean, look, if you're upset about something, it's good to recognize that because it's probably something you care about.
And if something makes you feel good, you know, same thing. So it's just, it's just so you.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: Have to fine tune your algorithm of your mind to be able to read your emotional data, you know, and if your algorithm in your mind is all messed up as far as how to read your own emotions, or if you just ignore those emotions and you just basically cover your eyes to that data in terms of what's going on inside you, then you are. Or encouraging someone else to do that or courageous to do that, then you're missing a good chunk of the picture, you know, and your ability to deal with things and so forth. So, yeah, man, I thought it was an interesting perspective, you know, and like I said, we'll have that in the show notes so people can check it out. It's. Well, a lot of these things, though I like to discuss them when there aren't. It's not all one way or all the other way. It's like, okay, this is something, and there's some texture, there's some nuance to it in terms of how you can implement this or incorporate this type of thought process in your life to make your life better. But if you come in just wanting to, I either want to go left or right, I either want to go east or west, then this is the kind of thing you just won't be able to deal or do, do anything with because it's not, it's not like everything you're doing, stop it, do something else. Like, it's not that. So. But yeah, man, I definitely appreciate it, getting your thoughts on that.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: I.
[00:46:15] Speaker A: The Victorian age was. That was, that was worth, worth the price of admission right there, man, that con.
So. But we appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call It Like I See It. Until next time. I'm James Keys.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: I'm Tunde Iglana.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: All right, subscribe to the podcast, rate us, review us, tell us what you think, and we'll talk to you next time.
