Who Watches The Watchers?

Dan Sullivan: Hi, this is Podcast Payoffs and with my partner, Gord Vickman, and we're exploring some recent news and it's mostly a function of Donald Trump. being elected again, not re-elected, but being elected again as president. And all of a sudden, a massive movement from the high-tech world, which had been totally democratic, is now, they've discovered that they're actually MAGA. They've gone MAGA. And one of the recent examples of this is Mark Zuckerberg, who is definitely not a MAGA person. He's discovering more and more that he actually had it in himself to be more MAGA-ish. And he was being interviewed by Joe Rogan, who himself was not a MAGA person, but has now discovered the truth, the eternal truth of MAGAism. So what did you think of all that, Gord, when you started? I mean, Joe Rogan is kind of cool because he's open to interviewing all sorts of people, and he treats them with respect. And where he's ignorant about something, he really admits that he's ignorant. And he never was into censoring anything.
 
Gord Vickman: No.
 
Dan Sullivan: Just the opposite, actually. He's interviewing all sorts of people now who were really trying to keep things from being spoken, you know, in the digital world, in the digital universe, they couldn't say certain things. And he was going along with political authorities who were telling him, you know, you're going to only allow this to be said. And that would be Mark Zuckerberg. I'm talking about Mark Zuckerberg here. I found his performance impressive from the standpoint that he was portraying himself as being a totally oppressed person. You know, he and his company were oppressed person, you know, one of the biggest corporations in the world. I just found it interesting to watch him as a phenomenon of someone who was one way and is now pretending to be another way. So that's basically how I saw it.
 
Gord Vickman: Mm-hmm. Snake in the grass or change of heart? Who knows? Only Zuckerberg knows. Below his mop of sandy blonde ginger hair, he's the only one. That was good.
 
Dan Sullivan: I mean, he had almost reverted back to teenage Mark, you know.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. Oh, I have so many thoughts about this. You know, I watched the video. This will be older news, but we haven't had a chance to get together and to talk about it. And now we're talking about it today. So most people will be familiar when Zuckerberg released that video, like the very polished one. And he went on Rogan as well. And so the point of it is that Facebook had fact checkers. These are the groups, the organizations who were making it impossible for people to say what they wanted to say on Facebook because of the fact checking people. So Zuckerberg announced he's going to move away from the fact checkers. A few details about that. Get rid of the fact-checkers. Get rid of the fact-checkers. So I had no idea what the fact-checking groups were. And then I looked into it and I asked some questions. And apparently there were up to 90 different organizations that Facebook had partnered with or hired who were working to check the facts, so to speak. And Zuckerberg, in his own words, said it got way too political. This is, in fact, true. So Zuckerberg was there, and, you know, you're talking about his appearance. I think it's hilarious because he started hanging out with MMA people. There's pictures of Zuckerberg online. He's training with Alex Volkanovsky, former champion, and he's training with a bunch of MMA guys, and he's going into jiu-jitsu tournaments and probably losing more than he wins, but good for him for, in fact, doing that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Just a new capability.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. So he starts hanging out with these tough guys, okay? He grows out his hair, so he's got this mop of hair now. He starts wearing a gold chain on the outside of his shirt, like Kanye West, and he starts wearing tight t-shirts. And now he looks like a human being, like Zuckerberg went from sort of like android weirdo to he looks like a middle school bully. And it's an incredible transformation in the way that he's talking and the way that he's looking now.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and he's dropping lines to what the world needs now is more masculine energy. He dropped that line. My sense was he comes from a background of being, you know, sort of a weirdo, nerdy kind of guy, probably when he was grade school, high school, went to college and everything else, and probably had some bad experience of getting beaten up.
 
Gord Vickman: Oh yeah, wedgie, turbo wedgie. He got wedgied into oblivion. You just know he did.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and everything like that. And I have nothing against people deciding they're not going to be the 98-pound weakling anymore, and that they're going to toughen up mentally, and they're going to toughen up physically. And actually, my sense is, I saw some videos of him sort of surfing on one of those electric surfboards. Saw that?
 
Gord Vickman: Yup.
 
Dan Sullivan: Actually, he looks like he's got good coordination. He looks like he's balanced and everything else. So, I mean, he's probably on some sort of personal journey, you know, to toughen up. I know he's got security details to the nth degree of people who, you know, might take a swing at him or injure him or anything. Actually, there was an online contest, who's the most punchable face in the world and he won I think about six years running, the most punchable face, so I mean, you have to approach it first of all just on a personal level that you know he's what, is he 40-ish now? Something like 40, I don't know how …
 
Gord Vickman: Somewhere around there, yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah childhood lasts longer, you know, these days than it did in the old days. And so he's doing this. But the big thing is the political shift. And it's not just a political party shift that's going on. I think there's a fundamental political culture shift.that has gone on in the recent Trump election, there was a real shift. He was getting significant votes from groups that used to be 100% Democratic. But the other thing shifts, and you'd have a lot to say about this, Gord, is the shift in where people are getting their information and where they're getting information from is not from ABC, NBC, CBS, National Public Radio, New York Times, Washington Post. They're getting their information from a technological driven universe that actually isn't open to the fact checking minded type of people. You can't go into the podcast world and be a fact checker.
 
Gord Vickman: No. I mean, you could do those reaction videos on YouTube or whatever if you want, but I think that's kind of stupid.
 
Dan Sullivan: Nobody watches them.
 
Gord Vickman: Nobody watches them. They're stupid. Maybe if Mr. Beast did one, he might get some action. But, you know, backing up a little bit, what does this mean, this community notes thing? What did Zuckerberg actually announce? Well, what they do on X, I still have a hard time calling it X. I want to call it Twitter. I just like brain default. So on Twitter X, you can apply to be a Community Notes contributor. And if you have an account, I mean, I don't work there, but here's what I've been able to learn is, if you have an account in good standing, you've never been banned for saying something ridiculous. I think you have to be six months or a year into it. You can't be brand new. You can apply to be in this Community Notes community. It was very Austin Powers there. Allow myself to introduce myself. You can be in the community notes community.
 
So you start out and all you do is you just say whether other people's community notes are helpful or not. That's it. And then once you've built up enough clout, you can start posting your own. And then what happens is, so when a politician or a journalist says something ridiculous or untrue, someone will community note it and they'll put a note at the bottom and they'll be like, this is not true. This is a lie. This is exactly what happened. And then the community has to decide, is this worthwhile? Is this valuable? Now, it's not simply a numbers game because that would lend itself pretty easily to, you know, these political pile-ons where you have someone saying something which is true. Someone says, no, it's not, and then all their buddies go on and agree with them. There has to be a consensus across the whole Community Notes community that, yeah, this is not in fact true.
 
And from what I've learned, only about 10% of Community Notes below other people's tweets actually make it to publication. But you've seen them before when there's politicians. If you're on X, the politicians say something stupid or journalists say something which is just completely fabricated. And then below it, it'll say, not true. And someone will put the actual fact that, you know, this is what actually happened. This is what he actually said. This is the full context. And then it gets approved by the community. So that's what Zuckerberg in a roundabout way is going to be doing with Facebook. So these 90 organizations, heavily politicized organizations that were fact-checking, and on one side, in Zuckerberg's own words, very one-sided, way too political. He's going to be moving away from these organizations.
 
Side note to that, all these organizations are whining now because they believe that they're probably going to go out of business. Because most of them, their entire business model was based on getting contracts with Facebook. So Facebook is not going to be paying them anymore, and now who are they going to fact check for? Nobody, because nobody wants them. So they're all going to have to go find something else to do, and all these companies are going to shut down, which is probably not a bad thing. So Facebook is borrowing from Elon and X, and they're going to do community notes, and they're probably going to, you know, model it. The code will be similar, if not identical, where you can just go and say, okay, this is not correct. And, you know, if enough people agree with you across the spectrum, it has to be on all sides. You can't just pile on with all of your left-wing friends or your conservative friends or whatever. That's how the whole thing works. I would say it's earth-shattering, not only because the fact-checkers were not really checking facts, but just injecting their own opinions for a very long time. They've been working with him since 2006. We're going on a decade now.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, 18 years. Is it 18? Yeah, yeah.
 
Gord Vickman: Thank you for fact-checking me.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, I was just putting in a community note on your comment.
 
Gord Vickman: See, I know my story, I just don't know the math.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but let's take seriously what I just did, okay? Your community noted me. In a fact-check world, you just would have been cancelled out. Nobody would have even heard what you said. And what I'd hear, I would say, I did the math and it's 18 years. And then you check back and you say, well, you know, Facebook didn't really exist. Maybe it did. I don't know. I don't know. The years were 2006.
 
Gord Vickman: It did. But I think it was still reserved for college students. You had to have a school email address to access it because Facebook was started as a way for Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts to rate the attractiveness of female classmates. That's where Facebook at Harvard. That's what it was. It was a way to objectify the women in their classes. And now we have a virtual reality company that is, you know, responsible for the thoughts and opinions of probably half of middle America. Who knew? Anywho, it was 2016 that the fact checkers came to be. So we're on a full decade now and now they won't be around anymore going to Community Notes.
 
Dan Sullivan: Now, to be honest with you, I have never been on Facebook. I've never been on any other social media. When I say I'm not on it, I'm on it every day sending out messages, and that's through our social media team at Strategic Coach. So apparently, I'm posting enormous number of things every day. But I have no idea what it is, and none of it's coming back to me. You know, I was born in the broadcast world, and I said, this looks like an interesting way to do broadcasting, so I'm not interactive. I personally would not know how to get on social media to either read messages or send messages. I have a team that stands between me and the world, and they pick things that I say. I say a lot of things that are on video and they're on audio and they send it out and I trust them to do a good job and make me look acceptable, you know, in the world. But my sense is that If you're doing social media, you're probably not developing a new capability.
 
So if I go back to a previous podcast that you and I did on the 4 C's, essential progress process that we have in Strategic Coach, that unless you're going through a 4 C's process, you're probably not making any progress. And that is you're committing to something, you're going through a period of courage before you have the capability, but you're moving forward, even though you don't have the capability, then the capability comes into existence and you get a big shot of confidence as a reward, and then you go into your next even more powerful 4 C's process. If you're doing that, I don't think you're paying any attention to all this other stuff that's going on in the world.
 
Gord Vickman: True.
 
Dan Sullivan: If you have the sense that you're improving by not knowing anything about what's going on in the world, and you are making real progress, and you're getting more capable without knowing what's going on in the world, and as a result of your improving capabilities, you're being more creative, you're being more productive, you're being more profitable, then you really don't have to pay attention to what other people are saying on social media.
 
Gord Vickman: Your attention your property.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Where have I heard that before? [laughs]
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah but it is your property and you know veering down another fork in the road here it's like, you don't have to pay attention to any of the things that you don't want to pay attention to, Community Notes or no Community Notes. And you said you're not on social media, Dan. You're not missing all that much, to be honest.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, there's some funny stuff in there. I'm in my seventh year of not watching television, and it's been a great bonus for me because I estimated that I was probably spending 800 hours a year watching television. I got that 800 hours back. I'm reading a lot more, I'm reading a lot more interesting things. It allows me to get everything done on time, it allows me to show up on time, you know, and everything else. It's been a great benefit of not taking 800 hours of my attention and giving it to an activity that I really didn't get anything back from him.
 
Gord Vickman: When you think about information sharing, you know, where it came from and now notifications in your pocket, there was a time a long, long time ago where we had town criers. And I thought about this while I was planning this episode because I lived in London, Ontario for just about a decade when I was doing morning radio. And there was this guy and his name was Bill. I don't know if he was retired. I don't know his story. I don't know where he came from, but he used to dress up like a town crier and he'd show up at all the events. I don't even know if they paid him. He might have just shown up there because he didn't have anything else to do. He was a nice guy. So if you don't know what a town crier is, town criers started in, I think it was the 12th century, right up until like late 1800s. So you had everybody, or at least most people who weren't nobility, they were illiterate. They couldn't read anything, the printing press, you know, it didn't even matter if it was there or not because they weren't reading newspapers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not in the 1200s, there was no printing press.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. So, the town crier was a guy, I'm sure he wore a big smelly velour suit and he had a brass bell and he would walk around and he would just shout the news into the community. So, for example, like, the barn is on fire, get a bucket everybody, the barn is on fire. Or it's like bake sale at Betty's house on Monday. So everything that you heard in that time was hyper-localized, and it mattered to you. Like, the barn is on fire, holy smokes, get the bucket, Billy, we're going down to the Johnsons. Or like, oh, you know, Sally's got fresh baked bread. And whatever else the town crier would decide to scream about into your window, whether you wanted to hear it or not, you couldn't read it anyway.
 
So now, let's move forward a few hundred years. The Town Crier guy is, I don't even know if he's still doing it in London. I hope he's still alive, but I don't know. Name was Bill. Hi, Bill. So everything was hyper-localized when the Town Crier was screeching at you from below your window, but now it's like a spider farts in Indonesia and you hear about it on your phone because you have all your notifications set up. Everything, every calamity, every disaster, every good news and bad news, element, nugget across the entire planet can now land in your hand and tell you to pay attention to it. And I just don't think the human brain has evolved or is designed for knowing this much about everything. We just don't have enough buckets in our brain to put all this stuff.
 
And I believe that this is where so much like talking about like young people are just full of anxiety now and depression. It's like stop paying attention to everything because it doesn't matter what just happened. in South Africa or in Northern Norway. It's like, is the barn on fire? If the answer is no, you're okay today. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. There's no fire in the barn. Just stop paying attention to 100,000 things, Community Notes or not. Dan, you've made a conscious effort. My point for all of this, this loose brain ramble was, that you've made a conscious effort, not only in writing the book, Your Attention: Your Property, but not watching TV, staying off social media because you recognized that early. And, you know, paying attention to that which is important to you, very much like the people who are listening to the town crier, you decided that, you know, this is not what I'm going to consume because I have other things to do.
 
Dan Sullivan: You can tell that there's young people, teenagers and people in their twenties who were properly trained to focus on what was important. And they've developed real muscle, they've developed focusing muscles and they're not distractible by a lot of this stuff. And I would say that generally they're happier individuals, they're more productive. So it's a function of proper education But, you know, I think it's hard for a young person to make their way progressively in their lives if they don't get proper training. And that, you know, for most of it comes from their parents. So if their parents are on social media, their parents are always watching television, and their parents aren't really advancing very much in their life. That's not a proper teacher for a young person.
 
But I learned from an early age just to pay attention to the things that moved me forward. And here I am 80 years later, and I'm still doing it. So far, so good. And people get upset by what they have. And I says, well, why are you watching something that upsets you? Well, I need to know. I need to know. No, you don't. You actually don't. Ignorance is pleasant sometimes. You don't need to know, you want to know, and there is a difference. There are certain things I do need to know, but I also want to know about those things. So, you know, it's an interesting world that we live in, but probably just the same percentage of people today as 100 years ago are going to be successful, and other people are just going to be sort of on a treadmill of aging, going through their life, but not really getting any more capable or getting any more confident in their lives. And that's the way it'll be. And humanity moves forward with a relatively small number of people creating new things and making new kinds of progress. And that's good enough for everybody else.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah. And the show is called Podcast Payoffs. We explore the links, the relationship between technology and teamwork. And what better place to chat about how podcasting fits into this? You brought this up briefly a little while ago, Dan, but podcasts, as far as I have read in terms of what people trust, podcasts are trusted more than any other media source right now. People just trust podcasts. Your thoughts on that? Do you think they're on the money? Because I do.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, they trust the podcasts that they like. It's an endless bandwidth. Before, with radio and with television, there was only so much room on the band. It was very pricey, and the big dollars ruled. But with podcasts, it's endless, and it's useful. And the people watching you have chosen to watch you because there's a trust factor that you're talking about. If you come from the side of the political spectrum that believe there have to be language bullies, you're going to stay away from this medium. You won't be comfortable on this medium. If you live in a world where you have to watch out for every word that comes out of your mouth, you're certainly not going to go on a medium that's freeform and goes on for 15 minutes, half hour, Joe Rogan, three hours and everything like that. You would be 15 minutes in and you just had your entire career and future canceled because you said a wrong word. So it's actually very interesting. It's the first time I've seen a political situation where one side just has total ownership of this medium and the other side can't even get in just because of the way their brains work.
 
Gord Vickman: We're too loosey-goosey over here in the podcast space.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah.
 
Gord Vickman: I guess one side cares much less about saying things that might bother others, whereas one side cares a lot. And when you're just talking and having conversations and seeing where it goes, if you're doing … And it can't be scripted. I mean, if you're podcasting properly, you're not scripted..
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, you show that you're scripted. You're off. You're out. Oh, it's an audio book.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah.
 
Dan Sullivan: They just switch over. You're not canceled. They just don't watch. I haven't seen this before. I haven't seen this phenomenon before. I think it's a new phenomenon. We should have a full podcast and go a little bit deeper on how one side, because of their philosophical beliefs, because of their training, because of their socialization, are effectively disabled from using the most powerful communication medium on the planet. It's an interesting topic.
 
Gord Vickman: Yeah, there you go. You just planned our very next episode of Podcast Payoff. Thanks, Dan.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. What did you learn, Gordon? Did you get anything else out of this?
 
Gord Vickman: I learned that Mark Zuckerberg went from a lizard man to a junior high bully and I found it super interesting that, I'm still kind of bouncing this around in my mind, but what is it about hanging out with tough guys that seems to have turned him just a little bit conservative, more human? There's a little bit of red kind of oozing into the blue, the deep blue that Zuckerberg … And I think it's going to be an exciting and it's going to be a very interesting time now that social media and the ability for those who rely on social media for all of their news and all of their information. I think it's going to be a cold bucket of water for a lot of individuals who have not really been exposed to ideas because, you know, we have, let's say, like one semi-generation of people who have never really been exposed to anything that they don't already agree with.
 
And if the big old Facebook and, I mean, X has already achieved that with when Musk bought it—but if Facebook now starts going into the realm of everyone has a voice, and as long as you're not saying abhorrent, ridiculous, awful things, they're going to allow you to say your opinion, you can state your opinion, I think it's going to be jarring for a lot of people who've never had to really, because there are a lot of people who truly believe that they have every right and every privilege to just live their entire lives without ever having to read, hear, or see anything that does not conform to the way they already feel about the world. So you're going to have a lot of people having many freakouts, but I think that's a good thing. You know, I think we're going back to a time when people were allowed to say what they wanted to say. As long as you're not like actively threatening anyone or making terroristic threats, that's a totally different thing. Like kill all the fill in the blank. That's dangerous because there's a lot of mentally ill people out there who go, I should go kill all those fill in the blanks.
 
But just, you know, expressing your opinion and having those people, you know, and if you don't like it, there's a mute button on all of these social media platforms. If you don't want to listen to someone, you just turn them off. And that's probably the way it should have been done all along. But here we are. You know, the circle closes and we're back where we started. And 2025 is going to be a wild, wooly, and very interesting time on the World Wide Web.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yep. Thank you.
 
Gord Vickman: Thanks, Dan.