/475 Open Internet / AI Future with David McCall, Host of the QTS Experience Podcast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today we have part one of two of Joel's conversation with David McCall, host of the QTS Experience podcast and vice president of innovation at QTS Data Centers, and they discuss what it means to have a free and open Internet and how we can think about censorship, guardrails, and risk online. All of this, right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(David McCall at 00:00:47) Joel Beasley, welcome back to the QTS Experience. I'm really stoked about this conversation. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Dude, I am fantastic. Life is good. And when I got to hear that I was talking with you again, I was just super pumped up.

(David McCall at 00:01:02) What I love about our conversations—we've had one or two off camera and one on camera—is I feel energized. And this is gonna sound weird, but let me just, by way of start, and then our producers will probably edit all this out and save us the embarrassment. But when I came home from our last conversation, my wife generally asks me, how did the podcast go or what conversations were you having today? And I came home so geeked up from our conversation, partly about the guests and the things that you do on the show. I love it. I think it's really cool. Hopefully you'll share some of how that's evolved over the last year. I'd like to compare notes. But the other was just your personal story. And I love it when I see human beings really endeavoring to help themselves, their family, and their communities flourish. I mean, I just think that's really cool. And sometimes, you know, I get a little Pollyanna or naive, but I just like to see the practical ways that plays out. People do that, whether it's warning each other or helping each other or whatever. And so today I said, oh, I checked my schedule. Oh, I get to speak to Joel Beasley. And she remembered—I mean, this is as close as she can remember—said, oh, yeah, the young man in Florida. We're in our mid, you know, middle age. We're up about twenty years older than you, so everybody's the young man or young woman from somewhere nowadays. But yeah, the young man from Florida. That's right. Anyway, but I thought that was really cool that I was so enthusiastic from our last conversation that she remembered your name and that I was really jazzed about that. So, welcome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:33) Dude, I'm glad to be back. Yeah, my wife knows you too.

(David McCall at 00:02:38) Oh, boy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:38) She knows you as the one CTO who has had a fifth wheel. So I told her about all of that. And, you know, we did a big circle around the United States over the course of the summer. And every time we were stopping at a new spot, I was like, are we gonna pass Dave on the way back? And we didn't. But I was really hoping we would because I wanted to stop by and see your church because I'd watched it live stream a couple times and we had gotten to talk. But life happens with those two little kids, man.

(David McCall at 00:03:10) They do. And probably even more interesting than the church, although I love it—we got cool stuff going on—is we've got four wheelers, two wheelers. We've got a big giant backyard that's been overrun 7,000 times, so we don't care what gets hit and what happens. And we just, you know, we got the Mölkky set, which if you never played Mölkky, it's an amazing yard game. I'll explain what that is offline. The Finns invented it, so you know it's gonna be a blast. Simple, easy. You can do it one handed. I'm not saying I do it in an altered state of mind off of a good stout, but you can do it in a number of ways. A lot of fun, all that other stuff. But here's what I'm really interested to get started in. When we talked, you're the host of the Modern CTO, an outstanding, one of the leading technology podcasts out there. And I had been referred to you by a number of people in my industry, the data center industry, and then some other folks that I knew who aren't in telecom or data center, but they knew your podcast. They really enjoyed the kind of people that you got on there, the conversations. And you were—I don't remember if you were a year in, but certainly it was a lumpy year with the pandemic, and you guys were working through that. From then till now, I don't wanna miss the opportunity to hear how the show's evolved and whether it's the technical components of it or the guests that you're getting on or the things that you're talking about. Can you help catch us up?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:30) Yeah. I wanna make sure I pinpoint the right time. So right when the pandemic happened, I think that was March when things closed down.

(David McCall at 00:04:39) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) I think we talked around there.

(David McCall at 00:04:41) We did. We talked—I think we talked in October.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:44) Okay. So in the fall.

(David McCall at 00:04:45) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:46) Okay. Yeah. So things with the business side of things, because we have about 11 employees here at the podcast, but at the time we were transitioning business models because of the pandemic. So before we were licensing content for leadership training, licensing the interviews, and then we switched to people paying to come on the podcast and we make them deliverables. So we had that transition. And of course, you know, all the up and down of entrepreneurship. But the show's changed in a couple of ways. I hired this awesome person named Yvonne, and she books just special guest episodes, like people that build underwater robots or an individual who's working on nuclear powered submarines or cloning salmon, just random things. So that's about 20% of what the show is now. And then the other 80% is people looking to grow in their career. You know, how does the CTO of Verizon or NASA, how do they think about time management or leveling up in their career? And then we'll do some cool technical interviews too. Like, we had Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. So he came on and talked about how the web is changing and what the future looks like. So, yeah, but those are the typical categories. We call it educate, entertain, and elevate. So that's how we look at each episode.

(David McCall at 00:06:10) Where have you found in the last six months, as you've worked through that, whether it's a special episode or a current episode, where when you were done, you just said, what just happened? Like, I went in with a big idea of something, the tech, the person, a philosophy. Maybe sometimes I don't wanna use the word confrontational, but there are times I have guests on that I know a little bit about them, and I don't necessarily agree with their perspective, but I wanna hear it. And it's not a contentious conversation, but, you know, we don't always agree. What of those conversations have you come back saying, that was a surprise, hopefully, in a pleasant way?

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:51) It happens a lot. We definitely have—like, a week or so ago, we talked to somebody, and you said in the team meeting that it was one of your favorite episodes ever.

(David McCall at 00:07:00) I have a suggestion for you of one of mine that's a pretty recent one that just left. John Lennox. John Lennox.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:09) I think that was the one.

(David McCall at 00:07:11) I don't know if you can see this, but in my notes, Martin Ford, futurist, robotics and UBI. Yeah, both of those guys.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:21) Dude, I got so many—people reach out and stuff after certain podcasts. Right. And, you know, they can listen to the library at any point in time. So I get feedback across the board, but I have never gotten as much outreach and personal LinkedIn messages and personal direct emails as I've gotten with John Lennox's episode. He wins the most outreach after an episode award.

(David McCall at 00:07:43) Yeah. I've listened to John many times. Never even occurred to me to invite him on the show because one of the things that I talk to people about all the time—it doesn't always, not every episode we record makes it to the show for one reason or the other—but the ethics of AI. And that's one of the things that I love. John, as a classically trained mathematician, philosopher, he happens to be a Christian apologetic person, which, well, that's my personal faith. It is his. The way that he walks through with reason, and he's very engaging, I thought, in that he's not—he's no more against AI than he is against a hammer. Like, it's not for or against, and he makes that point very elegantly over and over and over. He just helped to challenge me to think about and really resonate with a lot of other thinkers that I've been talking to, how when we apply a tool in a very specific focused way, this is where it probably could change the world, will change the world mostly in beneficial ways. When something has the power of the gods but no moral ethic and you have no agreed standard of world acceptance—for example, if you're a small country and you don't like how trade deals are going, you can go to the WTO. If it's health issues, you can go to the WHO. If it's a diplomacy thing, you can go to the UN. There are places and agreed upon things, and there are barriers and boundaries, but some of this tech doesn't have that. And John didn't tease all of that out, but he really got me to think about a number of things of critical thinking, whether we agree or disagree with him. It was a brilliant conversation. Really captured my imagination. I thought he was a genius. He is a genius.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) One of the things you asked me earlier about different episodes, I've been struggling with figuring out how to have the conversation around big tech censorship for a couple reasons. The first one is most of our sponsors are big tech. Right? So you wanna be careful about how much you beat up on a topic. But it's also in our everyday lives to the point where every single person in, at least the United States, is super comfortable with the fact that Facebook's always listening, and they're changing your ads based off of your conversations. And, you know, that's happening. That's the—it's not invasion of privacy because they often make you agree to it. But then there's, you know, the censorship. And the reason why the censorship part is hard is because, you know, there's different political ideologies and teams out there, and one is getting censored more than the other. And so I was trying to have that conversation in a really roundabout way, but I did a couple interviews, and we didn't air the episode mostly because, you know, they had very strong opinions and they kept coming back—every argument or discussion point on big tech censorship led back to something that was political. And I'm trying to not make the show divisive. Right. You know? I'm just more like, hey, censorship is happening. It's definitely the wild west out there because, you know, we make laws in arrears to massive issues. So I just am curious, you know, what the current thoughts are about censorship. It's a hard thing. You know, even Facebook, they're like, oh, we wanna be better, but what do we do? Do we set up a panel? Is it a third party company? So talking about censorship is something that's been really hard, and we haven't figured it out yet on the show.

(David McCall at 00:11:30) I agree. We—it's very, very, very rare. Hopefully we can leave all of this in. We'll listen to it each when we're done. I made a little note of the time stamp. So if this makes it to an audience, just smile. But it is—I have zero interest in making anybody look bad or, you know, we live in the world. My name's not on my podcast. I work for an organization. And we—not just our sponsors, but our friends, our customers, our whatever—are, you know, the entire world of data. Right? The data is the commodity of the whole world these days. And that takes a million forms from very, very the largest companies on Earth to minute niche players. And so couple things for us. One, or at least for me, I have zero interest in taking the conversation to what team's winning, pick a color, pick a nation state, pick a whatever, number one. Number two, I have yet to come across—I'm sure it happens, human beings being human beings, but everybody that is in my layer one, layer two, I don't know about layer three circles, I think are people of integrity and they're hardworking and almost all of this—even with some of the documentaries that have come out in the last couple years, a lot of those folks are like, look, most of this is unintentional. The algorithm is doing what they're doing. Kinda like when we first made airplanes, the focus on the regulation about, you know, parts and maintenance and routes and air traffic control was loose, and there were things that didn't work well. And sometimes the technology failed or people manipulated things. Even early days of media, there have been things, what gets into the newspaper, what got onto the front page, what was in the television news. And so we sort through it over time, generally speaking. To me, to kinda take that discussion and go further, there is the big idea, I think, that as people we need to think about, and that is, here in the West anyway—my only personal experience—we all have an agreement with any of the technologies that we use that are free. They and our governments. Our governments, you know, they are listening to phone calls. They are, hopefully they'll listen to this show and drive my viewership up. But they're listening to—they probably already done it and said we don't need to waste our time anymore. Let's save resources and move on to someone else. They read our text. They do all those other things that we know. That's not particularly concerning to me. Once upon a time in my life, I was really worried about it. Now there's so many things that are going on that that's not as interesting. What is interesting to me, though, is that there are parts of the world where that data, those systems—not so much in the West, the EU or United States or Canada, but in other places where they're centralizing that data, and then they're taking it and they're saying, okay, now I'm gonna give you a credit score. Now I'm gonna give you a social acceptance score based upon your behavior or this data. You and I could travel to where we wanna travel. We can say pretty much anything that's not treasonous. It may cost us a job or whatever, but we have a lot of freedom even within this oversight and these things that they're monetizing and they're using or whatever. But there's no threat to us, really. Not if there is, it's a long term existential that people are pontificating about. And I don't know. I once looked at the history of the last two hundred years, and we could probably go back to the original days of forming bricks to build pyramids, and they were saying the same thing. But in terms of practical everyday impact, for us, we're not really experiencing an influence of that. Well, we are, but there are parts of the world where that data is—I don't wanna say weaponized, but it's almost like that—but that it's being used to impact what people can do, where they can go, what they can buy, how they can consume things. And then scarier version than that, in some places, if Dave McCall is labeled as less credible, less—you're down in the yellow score by whatever that centralized government or data says, the people connected to me are then impacted. Their score is reduced. If you sell to me on the books, if you do business in any way with me, if you're affiliated with me in my social media or whatever—I know you recently had a retired FBI or ex-FBI person on your show, probably many of them in that world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:18) Oh, Mark. Yeah. So—or no, Mark, he got raided by the FBI.

(David McCall at 00:16:21) Well, I didn't get to listen to that podcast. I just saw that he was on there. But I have a—we have a—I've got friends that have retired from the FBI. I know a number of them. And we talk—we've talked on the show, although we haven't released the podcast yet.

(David McCall at 00:16:32) It's going through post-production with Charlie Mariota, who's talking about, look, there's things that are going on in the world where, you know, we don't chase down bank robbers very often anymore. And even the domestic things like ID theft and things like that, they're important. But as we look on the horizon, we're looking at how data is being manipulated, not just physical threat, but nation states are using these things or other people.

(David McCall at 00:17:01) And so it's a really compelling, interesting conversation. And this power lives in—it hasn't had a lot of government oversight. And as a libertarian for me, you know, I want an inspector to inspect my home. Nobody wants no regulation. That's not going to work because then we have unsafe places to live.

(David McCall at 00:17:21) But what's that right balance of oversight and entrepreneurship? And so I just think that's fair to ask the marketplace. But I'm watching these things happen around the world, or at least I'm starting to hear them and learn of them. What is it that happens with this stuff when it goes beyond just the how do I customize your experience when you go to the store or you go to a show or whatever, so that I'm feeding you things I think that are of interest to you? Because at the end of the day, that's what they want. They want to make money and move things and whatever. And it becomes—I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:54) I have an idea.

(David McCall at 00:17:55) More—I want to limit you. What's your idea?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:58) Okay. So let's say we are starting from scratch, right, with the whole internet and everything. If right now, let's just use Facebook.

(David McCall at 00:18:08) Okay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:08) Because everyone knows it. Right now Facebook—they are both the data store and the filter. So they store the raw information and then they filter what's accessible based off of their community guidelines. And so they have community guidelines. You go over to Spotify. They are the data store and the filter, and they have community guidelines.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:23) The internet was built to be open and free. At the same time, we all agree that there are things that need to be filtered. However, what should be filtered to what degree varies greatly based off of local culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:44) And so one of the things I thought of is if you could make all of the popular sites raw data stores where you can post anything, and then a new layer of technology emerged that were filters. And you could sort of subscribe to these filters and they would have similar values across all of your data interactions. That could be really interesting because then I could make one—you know, I could have a whole profile for like a church filter. So, you know, when I'm in that filter, it's all things that would be acceptable to them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:21) In that community, I can have a technology leader filter, and they're filtering out the worst management ideas and bumping up the best management ideas, and there's transparency there. I think that that could be an interesting world to live in. I think everything's just really new and so we're watching the pains of, like, they are trying to decide what's great for everyone. Right. Whereas the way you win is decentralize it and empower individuals and communities to decide what's right for them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:52) And I think that's a potential solution. I call it, like, a new level, like a filter economy, a new level of products that are just filters.

(David McCall at 00:19:59) I like that idea. One, because I don't want to interfere with the free market and entrepreneurship. The most innovative technology, or certainly some of the most, comes from The United States because of a combination of, you know, protections from our government and opportunity without much interference to thrive and survive. And we're not saying this—I'm not interested in—it doesn't seem to me like—like I'm not interested in the conversation of let's demonize some group or whatever.

(David McCall at 00:20:30) So I want them to have that ability to do it. At the same time, I do like that idea of, can I apply a filter, which then allows me to modify my experience to—what do I want to stream in? What do I want to stream out? That already sort of happens a little bit, though. Like, you know, if you go—I love Meta or Facebook.

(David McCall at 00:20:51) I use it, though I don't post a lot. I use it to keep up with my disc golf groups. What tournaments are happening around me? What's going on in the world of dirt bike racing? What's going on with this group of friends of mine or family or whatever? Things like that. And I don't encourage—in fact, I may even discourage or remove material or things that come into—whether it's a person I know that's constantly injecting it into this experience that I want to have.

(David McCall at 00:20:59) But anyway, the ability to have a smart filter, almost an AI-driven filter that can learn me and tune to me over time, almost like a Pandora. This is—I've given you the, you know, Blake Shelton radio or whatever.

(David McCall at 00:21:34) And over time, as I'm thumbs-upping and thumbs-downing musical experiences, it can roll it in and help me to do, one, still discover new music because it trends like these other people I've given a thumbs-up to. I've given away some of my sovereignty and data so they know things that I'm liking, and that's okay. I want them to feed me more stuff. But I still want Pandora or whoever, Spotify, to make the best program possible so that I can enjoy the development of technology. I don't know that we've figured it out yet.

(David McCall at 00:22:05) Lennox said, you know, one of the things—and he's not the only one. I've heard this, many some version of this many times—that technology moves so fast in these particular areas and it's just constantly accelerating that it's—you know, we're gasping to catch up and just keep up with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) I have a whole team of people that just try to keep up with it to figure out what we should have on the show.

(David McCall at 00:22:28) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:28) It's hard.

(David McCall at 00:22:28) How do you determine that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:29) You were right. Well, I want to talk about something. I think you were right. You see this filter concept emerging. So like, we go back to caveman times of the internet. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:42) You had a like button.

(David McCall at 00:22:44) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:44) Right? And it tried to do everything from that like button. And then we started following people. And then people were acting as our filters. Oh, I like the way Jocko thinks. Or I like the way David Goggins thinks. Right. Or Joe Rogan. So I'm going to follow them and then their content's going to populate my feed. I might like 60% of the way they think or whatnot.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:00) So we're kind of already organizing the internet like this. We're trying to do this. I just haven't seen specifically a set of tools that came—that could come out—that you could subscribe to a certain culture or set of values and it would transcend the platform so that, you know, you see on Facebook now, which is great, and Instagram, which is fantastic, they started doing this thing where—well, first of all, I had suggested it in year one of the show and people told me I was stupid and then they started doing it in year four.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:36) But they started asking you, like, what do you want to know more about? Like, click a tag. Or, you know, if you're scrolling through Facebook, it'll randomly be like, hey, do you want to see more of this? And it'll show different tags that you can tap on. It'll ask, do you want to see less of this? And you can do different tags. So they're getting there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:48) I think we're on that progression of the individual companies allowing you to sort of craft the algorithm the way more intentionally. Right? Well, I think that that path we're already well down. I just think it would be cool to not have to train every single platform about you know, because it takes a while for that Pandora to figure out the thumbs-up, thumbs-down deal. So if it extracted into a third-party service, that would be cool.

(David McCall at 00:24:19) Do you think the government should have more role than they do now in, say—when we say tech companies, we mean specifically the types of organizations that we're interacting with to, you know, whether it's a news feed or some sort of a social construct where I'm forming opinions, so they probably wouldn't impact our music. I don't want them telling me I can listen to the Blues Brothers, but not Depeche Mode or, you know, The Clash, but not Zeppelin or whatever. How do you imagine that? Is there a role for them to play there or not so much?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:02) So how I feel about that in general is, like, I'll give some background. I look at every single issue and I analyze it for its merits. And I will typically form a strong opinion, and it'll be loosely held based off the introduction of new information. Right. I have no problem changing my mind on a dime because I've learned something new.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:18) I have no problem changing my mind on a dime because I've learned something new. So I'm pretty open and transparent about that. But the government in general, I'm a fan of smaller government. I'm a fan of smaller government. If you want bigger local government, that could be cool. I'm definitely a fan of smaller federal government.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:32) Just because that's our tax dollars that are funding it. And if you didn't make the government as big, you could probably do some more interesting things. That's a whole different—right.

(David McCall at 00:25:49) Well, that's kind of the libertarian view. That's similar to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:52) Yeah. It's very similar. So as far as the government telling, you know—I think guidelines are great. I think guidelines are fantastic because there's a spectrum of people. There's multiple seven-plus billion of us on this earth, and there's people that are in mental institutions, and there are people that are winning Nobel prizes. And, you know, if you're—

(David McCall at 00:26:10) Sometimes they're the same.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:11) Yes. Sometimes they're the same. Right? But you have that entire spectrum. So guidelines would be good. Right? So I'm for guidelines. I'm definitely for, you know, the—like, you have to have regulation and things like that. But in general, I'm—smaller—I like smaller government. And would I want the government to have a say in the content I consume?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:33) No. When it comes to the internet, my philosophy is everything should be open and free, not in a monetary sense, in the accessibility sense. So like everything should be accessible and then you should filter accordingly because that's how the world actually works. Like, you know, there's alcohol, drugs, there's all sorts of things out there you can get yourself into trouble with, and you sort of have to curate that even though you have access to it. So you have to figure out what's right for you and what's right for your life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) And so, provided you're not hurting other humans physically—and I make a distinction with that physically because, you know, I tend to be a stronger person. So like, I think if you make the world padded mentally, then you're robbing them the ability to develop strength mentally. So like I had to develop a lot of strength through my entrepreneurial journey and through things that happened to me in my early life, and I would not want those experiences to go away in exchange of some easier life because I wouldn't have developed these skills.

(David McCall at 00:27:43) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:43) So I know that's a lot of different things I just touched on, but I want the internet to be open and accessible. I want to let different communities determine what their values are, and that will then filter the internet. But I just would like the internet to be like a giant server, a giant storage, giant hard drive.

(David McCall at 00:28:02) Well, we—so I think we're aligned in a lot of that. My philosophy is as well—I just had this, a professor on last week. We haven't released it yet. It should be out in the next few weeks. His name is Patrick Allitt, and he is, I think he's the most senior tenured professor of history at Emory.

(David McCall at 00:28:21) And he had a really interesting TED Talk about can history predict the future. And he walks this really compelling discussion about how we get it wrong so many times. And without going through all the examples, he really helped me to think. He said, look. For history, we—I try to approach it like a forensic scientist.

(David McCall at 00:28:44) How do I keep my personal feeling about who the current president is or isn't or this particular topic? I try to just think about what does the evidence tell us? And many times, you get to a—you don't get to 100% certainty. You get 70%, but you can get a projection. You can get to an idea.

(David McCall at 00:29:06) And for most investigators, that's enough. You know, you get a pretty good idea. And but you call it that. I have a pretty good idea, not this is a fact. This is a hypothesis or is enough evidence to be a theory or this is now a rule. It's a law. And I love that.

(David McCall at 00:29:23) And so he approaches so many things. This is a guy—I believe he's Cambridge educated just like Lennox. Got his master's at Berkeley and then PhD in others here at Emory. So, you know, kind of an academic slouch as those things go. But really smart, and he holds things. Look. I've got a reasonably firm grip, but it's not a fist. And as compelling evidence comes and overwhelms it, then I change my mind. You and I have talked about this in the past about how data has changed our mind or certain things.

(David McCall at 00:29:57) But for me, it relates to the government. I do like the internet to be open and free. I do like some of the things that they're—you know, there are some elements of GDPR that I like. Look here. Be aware of this stuff. Here's what you need to be aware of, the difference between security and privacy and how it plays out.

(David McCall at 00:30:12) There are some things, though, I feel like, at least here in The States, my personal opinion is I want the state involved in. I know for a fact that there's images that you can watch as a gentleman in your thirties with a certain amount of distance between your teenage years and your hormone development, your testosterone and development, and your brain development, and the neurons and whatever firing. And the overwhelming data is if you expose an 11 or 12 or 13-year-old to pornography that looks like this or to these things like this, here's how it rewires their brain. Here's the evidence that suggests that on a global level or whatever. Or recreational marijuana. If you want to indulge in that as an adult, this is the chemical response within your body as opposed to doing it as a kid.

(David McCall at 00:30:58) So there are some things that—and like all things, it's complicated. But my general rule is, we govern at the federal level or at the highest level lightly and much more, you know, much more detail the closer you get to actual people. And so I think we're still trying to figure that out. When it was academic sharing and the other things of the eighties and early nineties in the internet, I don't think we needed to be as cautious. And now where we see it can be exploited to impact people around us, the most vulnerable around us if we're not careful.

(David McCall at 00:31:33) But what's that slippery slope? Is it an age thing? Is it an IQ thing? Is it—you know, you could—you could put certain amount of data that you persuade people. I know people that have been persuaded to think the Earth is flat and rectangular, and they're former rocket scientists. And I—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:49) Come on. Former rocket scientist.

(David McCall at 00:31:51) Exaggerating, or certainly in that industry. And I'm like, do you know the level of conspiracy that would have to take place by our enemies?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:00) Have you ever flown across the country?

(David McCall at 00:32:03) Sometimes in a plane. Yes. Yeah. No. I look—

(David McCall at 00:32:10) Without wasting a lot of time on what I think is, you know, for me, it's like we know conspiracies exist. We know that not everything, I got it. Look, I am certain that I won the math table talent show in fifth grade, but there's a conspiracy against me, and I'm not even kidding. Like, I know that happened.

(David McCall at 00:32:30) But there are some things that if you're from a national, you know, your competitors instead of enemy, your competitors. If you're a competitor and you're Apple, for example, just to choose somebody randomly, and Google sees it the way you do and Microsoft sees it the way you do and Amazon sees it the way you do and Netflix sees it, like all of these people. And Alibaba and Tencent and ByteDance, like they all are sort of begrudgingly, yeah, that, you know, we agree that that's true.

(David McCall at 00:32:59) What would you have to do to conspire to get your competitors or your, you know, your honorable opponents to, you know, that normally would disagree with you in almost anything to agree? That's what I mean by it. At some point, it doesn't go from a conspiracy to not plausible at all. So anyway, what I'm saying is, should there be, you know, what, if anything, do we just let people just continue to believe these things? And then what's the recourse of that if you can use those tools to deep fake and manipulate people in such a way that you get responses out of them? Because technology can be weaponized in all kinds of ways. So anyway, I don't know. I don't know that I have an answer for that, but it's definitely something that's bouncing around that we're thinking about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:46) Let's take the Tide Pod thing. Yeah. Right? I go back and forth on that based off of my mood.

(David McCall at 00:33:51) Really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:52) I mean, I have found myself feeling strongly both ways. Yes, we should stop people from doing stupid things, so let's remove those video challenges. That's some days I feel like that. Other days I feel like Darwin. Like, let it happen. Like, if they're actually gonna eat that Tide Pod, like, right. And it's as public as it is that it's not a good thing to do, right, like do we need them more?

(David McCall at 00:34:12) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:12) It sounds really bad to say. But, you know, like I said, I go back and forth and, yeah, I think some conspira— I guess what we're learning as a society, I like to look at it like this. If we step back from all of these conversations on technology, we are a society, a group of humans that are going through digital puberty. We got this tool. It's new within the past 20 years as far as like the modern use of it and the application with the common person. And we're just figuring it out. And we're experiencing all the pain.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:39) So what I've been thinking more about lately, talking with our producers like Adam and, you know, different things, is that my general default stance at this point in time is that the best way I can impact society is by having conversations to figure out what we agree on because we've lost our, as a country, we've, we're very divided. And we've lost our homogeneity. That's a word. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) So I'm less interested in arguing or discussing, like, more specific points than I am figuring out, like, what do we agree on? Like, what do we agree on? And those are tough conversations because people openly disagree about certain things. Like, I mean, if you look at some of the quotes from, I think his name is Anad, the CEO of Twitter, I mean, he's openly saying that we need to censor this stuff and control the conversation for the good of whatever. And it's like, well, yeah, but, I mean, it's your values you're imposing on the world. And forget just within America, look at the world at large. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:49) And I've been trying to think of different ways, like, that some of these problems can be solved. One of them is, like, all the tech companies emerged from, like, one, like, a very specific location, and that location had specific values. And then now the whole entire world uses those things. So I think, I don't think that's a conspiracy. I think that's just what happened. But I think that most people, like I said earlier about the filters, have done a better job of, like, putting the power into the hands of the local people, which I'm really grateful for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:10) And also, to your point earlier, I know a lot of these people. And I would say 95, not even 80/20, 95 plus percent of the time, they are the most compassionate, loving, intelligent people that are trying to push mankind forward. And this is sort of like the heat dissipation of a system operating that we're dealing with. It's like, you know, Einstein did, you know, his nine math problems and the 10th one was wrong and everyone focused on the 10th one, and he said, yeah, you completely ignored the nine things I did right, the nine problems I solved correctly, and you all focused on the one thing I didn't do. And we just do that as humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:06) So sometimes I just have to remind myself that we're living in the best time ever. We have the most amazing modern conveniences. We have the best health, the least disease. Like, things are really, really awesome, and we just tend to focus on what's not there yet, which is fine.

(David McCall at 00:37:22) You know, let's err on the side of less regulation and imposition and work our way towards a thing that, you know, that works. I'm a big fan of the innovation that's coming out of, you know, the world of technology. Lennox talks about, his example was about the lungs. I've heard it in the world of radiology that, you know, if you put this data out there, you know, the AI and the machines can run through it and look at all of these markers and help give you a diagnosis, not just to what's going on, but with the best possible documented path for you to flourish based upon your genetic makeup and your environment that you live in and all these other things. And some of that is, many things are communicated to your point of, you know, they get 90, they get this overwhelming majority of things right, and then there are some things that are a burr.

(David McCall at 00:38:20) And I'm not trying to minimize. Some of the burrs are pretty big burrs, but they have these massive platforms. I don't want to stop platforms because we're figuring out this other stuff. But I do think there's, not so much about a platform, but I don't want my, you know, when I was a kid, my parents would drop me off at the library. It's a different time and era, but I could go to the library, and we're there with, you know, some of our classmates. And they didn't have to worry that if I got on the word processor that I could access something on the Internet that wouldn't be allowed at their home. Or, and I don't mean reading the Lord of the Flies as opposed to, you know, whatever. There are things that sort of the community agreed upon. This is what happens in our library.

(David McCall at 00:38:45) But it was, quote unquote, a safe space for whatever that is as opposed to, you know, the Internet can be a whole bunch of stuff. So I do think that there are some, and I don't know if it's, you know, the role of government exclusively, but whatever that combination of things, a filter, whatever, that helps us to check and make sure that or ensure to the best of our degree that we as a group of people agree on certain things. We agree on an age for drinking. We agree on an age for driving a vehicle, on age accountability, if you cause physical harm to somebody else, you know, and you go into the court system. So there are agreements that we come to.

(David McCall at 00:39:13) I love the biggest idea of the Internet is free and open, but there are some parts of it I think that we allow those vulnerable among us to be impacted in a way that I prefer not to. I don't know the answer to that is, but it's...

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:01) Yeah. Most of these things don't have great answers. Like, you know, one of the, The United States of America was founded on this concept of freedom, free speech. And we all understand the conversation of, like, okay, well, they're a private company and whatnot. My counterargument to that that I haven't heard from anywhere else publicly is when they want to enter other countries, they adhere to their culture. Yet, they don't adhere to the culture in which the country they were born and operated is. And I get it. They wanted, you know, you want to change culture or it's gonna, culture evolves anyways. It's not static.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:23) So they're just hard conversations to have, and we're just at a point in life where, you know, we're at a hard moment. And so I'm definitely not the person to scream and yell. Like, let's just say for conversation, David, that, like, I have a very rigid specific set of views and all of my views got classified as conspiracy and they all got shut down by a young...

(David McCall at 00:41:01) I've already written that down right over here. Joel's views are...Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:04) Imperative. You gotta train your ML later. So let's say that happened, I would be like, you know, I'd be like, that sucks. But then I would just say, what's the path out of here? What's the, like, what would need to change? Why did this happen? Why are, why am I thinking this way? Why are all my thoughts that I'm thinking this way so unaccepted by these other entities?

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:25) And I would just get, like, really introspective on it and try to figure out, like, what we can do. Like, what the next move would be. Do I need to change some of my thoughts? Do I need to change some of my mind? Or am I right and somehow I've just become the minority? In which case, the minority never goes away. Right? It's always this constant struggle from the 20 becoming the 80 and the 80 going back to the 20. So we're just in one of those transitions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:55) And so that's why, you know, there's some famous quote of a president, but they said something along the lines like, with your values, like, stand on a rock with everything else, like, wade with the social fabric or whatever. They're really big giant conversations that are super, super hard to have, but I stand on the side of, as far as The United States and being born and raised here and benefiting from the system and the economic entrepreneurial sense. There was a time where my family had, like, government assistance. Right? And I definitely was not born rich.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:36) And so, you know, a lot of figuring things out, a lot of hard work, and then you get, I like that system. I like that that system exists and it's not a system like, you know, some other systems. And so I'm a fan of it and I'm a fan of, when you have ideas, the only way to battle those is better ideas. And if it was up to me, I wouldn't silence any ideas. Like, I would say, alright. Here are the ideas, and then you're just gonna, it'll figure out. Either way, it's gonna settle out. Right? I'd rather it just settle out with the core, with the bedrock of it being free and open rather than trying to settle it out and try to control it and manipulate it on the way down with, but, hey. We're here.

(David McCall at 00:43:19) I think we're saying the same thing. One of the things that I think you and I both gravitate towards is I love people that are able to critically think, they're elegant at expressing it or eloquent at expressing it, and they don't necessarily agree with me. Like, they're not unreasonable people. They just don't agree with me, and I'm drawn to frequently areas of technology from really smart people who say, look. Here's how I believe this particular tech is really gonna help us. And other people who are equally committed that are equally reasonable and researched and peer reviewed and credentialed say, well, have you considered these things?

(David McCall at 00:43:47) And I'm allowed to hear the contending against my predisposition to believe so I can chew on it. And it sometimes, it pries an idea out of my hand or it changes the shape of it or whatever. Other times, it confirms what I already had come to resolve for me. I get more, less concerned about the opportunity here contending ideas than I do people that just aren't interested in an idea being challenged. And I don't mean beyond like, I don't need to read a communist manifesto again to know that, you know, I really am pro ethical capitalism because of all of these reasons and all of the sins and successes of it. I've resolved that. Until there's something new that's not in one of the manifestos or whatever, I had this, I'm not changing my mind.

(David McCall at 00:44:27) We were just in Miami about six weeks ago, and I met so many people from Cuba that were the most vocal people I ever heard or recently heard pro USA, pro capitalism, pro, they're like, look, we get to tell you what it's like to live in a regime that's much different than this. A woman from Haiti that was my Uber driver was having a conversation. I don't even know how we got on the topic, but she was so excited to be in The United States because we had a justice system. All I hear from some parts is how horrible our justice system is.

(David McCall at 00:45:06) She said, are you kidding me? Where I'm from, you don't get a jury of your peers. And she went through two or three examples of gross injustice against women and gross injustice against certain indigenous groups because of their social status and their indigence compared to, and they were all the same color people. This wasn't that, but it was ethnical. We're gonna invent words while we're here. Yeah. I love that. Today's word is ethnical, right after we watch Fraggle Rock.

(David McCall at 00:45:46) But anyway, so it's, you know, it's this stuff, and it just reminds me we are the greatest, we have, and I don't mean to rest on it, but we have so much opportunity and so much great things here. And it was built on a foundation of private property, free speech, free enterprise, entrepreneurship opportunity. And so we also have a, you know, a requirement to safeguard those things as we go. But I think that the challenge, at least as it comes to tech, is sometimes it can race so far ahead, so fast, ahead of us that we're, it's not just that we're trying to play catch up like in a newspaper era or in a telegraph era or the age of steam. Okay. Let's change how we're doing this stuff.

(David McCall at 00:46:33) You know, famously, rivers catching on fire from kerosene, just being dumped out and destroying. And, you know, and so the world had to respond and legislate and fix that. But it wasn't the, the consequences weren't so dire that they couldn't be rolled back pretty quickly. In some cases, it feels like, wow, we could really get ahead of ourselves with some of this technology that, you know, how do we keep up with it? And if you're a government institution or even a local civil group, how do we keep up with all of the potential interruptions? Interesting times. Why are we in the tech business? Because we love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) I love tech. I love it. I love it. You get to solve problems. I find most of the people in tech are extraordinarily reasonable, and, like, I have no problem taking the, like, I can have a very strong view about something and you can say, hey, we want to debate this? And I'm like, okay. And they're like, well, we want you to debate against that idea and we're going to stand for it.

(David McCall at 00:47:34) And I...

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:35) Was like, all right, I'll go debate the other side of it because people have good intentions often, and there's usually great ideas on both sides. And there's usually some logic behind both. And so I don't write people off that don't think exactly like me because every time I've ever dug deep into the other person's argument, they have some part of something I agree with or truth or a good point.

(David McCall at 00:48:08) Patrick Gallot, this professor I was telling you about, blew my mind the other day when he said, at what point in the American Civil War was the last point that the South thought they were right? And I started thinking about, like, what do you mean? And he said, as a historian, we all today, hopefully, would look at the abhorrence or the condition of slavery in horror. It's a horrific thing. At some point, human being, and it's so easy for us then to project upon classes of people, you know, a particular motive or whatever.

(David McCall at 00:48:47) And he said, one of the things, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but as I was thinking about it, he said, if you think about it, pick any, he just chose that one because that's part of our recent tragic history. But he said, if you think about that, when the people went to war, some of them thought they were in the right. They, people don't go die for something they don't think they're right about. Like, this is right.

(David McCall at 00:49:19) This is right for me. It's right for my neighbor. It's right for these other things. And this happens, this isn't white America. This is the whole world has done this over all of history and time.

(David McCall at 00:49:31) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:31) Time.

(David McCall at 00:49:32) Yeah. And so it's that thing that at some point, whatever the turning point was, was it because they lost a war? Was it because of whatever? We get through this. At what point did, when I think of the great battles of the Lord of the Rings or on and on and on, these great tales, when did one group believe that they were in the right and the other believe, come to understand they were in the wrong?

(David McCall at 00:50:01) Is that just because we get to write history, or how does that work? And I just think that one of the things that Lennox said that I also thought was really interesting as it relates to AI was, man, I want to encourage people that have an integrity and an ethic or whatever to be in this world, to be in the world of any of these technologies so they can bring a perspective where we're working for the common good and human flourishing and how do we resolve that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:34) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.