Taliy: 0:00

Life is good. Life is good, doesn't matter what.

Alexey : 0:03

Actually, there is one thing that always makes your life worse is the expectation gap. So it's not about lowering your expectations. But it is about setting realistic expectations. Because the expectation gap is something that we are all living very badly.

Taliy: 0:21

Yeah, I think that's why one of the most popular memes on the internet is that expectation versus reality of it, it pretty much shows the disappointment between how something gets advertised and how something is presented in actual life. And very first example I remember is very old movie, 1993, I believe, with Michael Douglas, where he went off rails, and he went into some kind of McDonald's, and he ordered a burger that looks so bad in real life. And he says, look at that picture and look at this. This looks nothing alike. We shouldn't lower the expectations. But actually, we should pull up the reality. What do you think is better to do?

Alexey : 1:04

I think it's not about lowering the expectations, because why would we? And we've talked about not progressing in the previous episode. By lowering expectations, we will be regressing even more. I think we have everything to do better in today's world. And you know, the funny thing about the burgers, my kids were watching some YouTube videos, and they have seen how these ads were made. It's not even a real burger, it's some kind of a mock-up that looks like a burger. This is what they are filming with. What we should stop doing is deceiving other people, as a society in general. This is actually a good topic for today's talk. We've been fooled and deceived many times over, we don't even trust anything we hear or see. And this goes even beyond, it goes with everything with the news or the information in general. I mean, looking back at the health crisis we had in the previous years, none of us knew and even didn't have the possibility to have the truthful information about what was happening. We never knew how this thing was transmitted, did it stay on paper, on tissue or on fabric, or on plastic? To this day, no one knows. I guess that by having too many contradicting opinions, contradicting information, we have this protection mechanism that is being activated that we perceive everything as noise, but it shouldn't be like this.

Taliy: 2:32

Yeah, totally. Human brain at some point decides to detach from the reality, which is too much like and now this reality is too much. There are real-world problems that need to be solved, like food shortages, lack of water around the world, there is a refugee crisis almost in every region of the world. But at the same time, we're being advertised by the media outlets around the world some very emotional topics, which are being pushed on us as very pressing issues of today. Which, if you zoom in, they look like oh, my gosh, this is a real problem. But if you zoom out a little bit, this is something that looks very emotional, and very involving, engaging, and we all feel like we investing a lot of attention, a lot of our emotions in there. But in fact, while we focus on this one thing that's being advertised to us by official media outlets, the real problems of the world they just keep on growing, and nobody's even trying to solve them. And there is no public demand, because everyone's too involved in this political drama we witnessing over here. And it's been so aggressively pushed upon us. That mechanism of perceiving the reality is, it just switches off. It's just some valve in your brain that says, oh, my gosh, I cannot take this anymore. I don't want to watch it, I would just want to you know, like, get some burgers, go in the backyard, make barbecue and just have my own life that has nothing to do with this reality that is too much. I think that's one of the reasons why people stopped trusting the media, because whatever is being pushed on us is this narrative of us versus them. And it's always you have to pick the team, you have to stick with your team. And your team sometimes is having certain set of values that like you know, you take one of the beliefs and it's a package deal - you have to accept the whole package. And I like since when, since when it's normal? And this creates a huge social tension in our society, we start trusting each other less, it creates social division. And I feel like the whole system, the whole system today is working on that. I understand why so much popularity, you know, bloggers gaining whose job is to mainly entertain people and not to provide truthful information about stuff, because people accept funny things better. But what's even funnier, the original media outlets when being sued for lying to the public, their defense line was that we are entertainers. We're not supposed to say 100% truth. And this is crazy! You like, these are, these are the people that should be really taking better care of the stuff they're pushing in their TV shows. Trading places, right? In the media and entertainment.

Alexey : 5:27

Oh, yeah, definitely! It's like this video that you sent me with Russell Brand who was discussing these issues between CNBC and Fox News. It's not even that they defended themselves being entertainers. But the judges told that the viewers understood that these guys were performing. So basically, we have like a late night show or something like that, instead of news. If we have truthful representation of the information on the news, being replaced with performance and pushing some political or personal opinions. I mean, it doesn't surprise me that the trust to these media outlets is going down, and down, and down every year. Why do we accept that there is no more truthful representation of the information? Where did the transparency and openness of information go? How can we make any decisions, if we don't have the facts? We just have some kind of representation of the facts that serve some people. And as you said, that funny things work better. And we've seen it also with the short clips that we are doing from the podcast, only they funny the jokes, the funniest jokes work well. We get 1000s of views of those. People swipe when it's something serious. And it would be great if everything was great in the society. But since we have so many issues, I don't think that only laughing at something is the only solution, we should be also discussing things that are important and relevant. There was this funny

meme as well: 7:02

Will you be trusting the government until your pronouns will be "was" and"were"? This one is funny. We can link to all these videos and stuff in the show notes. I mean, it would be very, very funny if it wasn't also at the same time concerning. Not sad, but concerning, that people, they prefer to just forget everything, detach from reality, and go grill their burger in the backyard. We still need transparency and openness of information. Without that, well, I guess we will have what we have today, just opinions of someone. And sometimes you don't even know whose opinion it is.

Taliy: 7:41

Yeah! I also find that funny how it used to be like you know, when you study in the university, and you take certain topic and you work on it, and you have to actually learn the topic, study it, present the facts, whatever you learn to the group, to your colleagues, teammates. And this is how you, you know, you study - you, you make your brain work by studying stuff. And then what I found over the period of last couple of years that this narrative started being pushed up on the society - the laughing at learning facts, so people not supposed to learn facts by themselves. And there was this even meme that started going around about "I did my own investigation." Oh, you conspiracy theorist. You don't believe the official narrative. That's why you do your own investigation. You're not supposed to do your own investigation, you're not supposed to do your own conclusion, if they're different from the conclusion being pushed upon you. You should trust the stuff that's being pushed upon you until your brain switches off from all this craziness, and you go flip burgers in the backyard. What are we talking about here? Let's make America think again, let's make the world think again!

Alexey : 8:46

You know, I think it's also something that we are taught from our youngest age that we should trust the expert opinion, we should trust scientists, the government or anything that's shown on TV. Well, the problem is that TV now is in everyone's pocket. And there are so many opinions that are not even true. They serve mostly commercial goals. Blind trust in experts is a double edged sword. And we have a crisis of trust, especially too much trust. Because look where it led us, we now really have to do our own research all the time. If you want to find out even if what's written at the back of your canned food, or anything else at the grocery, you have to do your own research, what's good, what's not. And it takes time and effort to educate yourself, to do this research and be able to make your own opinion, which for most of us, we simply don't have time to do, or we don't see the point, as you said, because people say: Well, look, I can't change anything, so why bother? The thing also that, this may be for another episode, that those who have discovered the truth, they say nothing. We understand that saying the truth is difficult. Sometimes it is difficult, sometimes it is dangerous. But if we say nothing, then I mean we, in general, as people, how will we agree on something? If everyone is watching a different TV channel? How can we do it? The example, the one that we talked about in the episode "The accidental voting mechanism," when people in Spain, they got together, they switched off the electricity, and the government noticed this. Well, what the government did was not, I guess, we can say that, yes, they did achieve some of their goals. But the government took their money, and just gave them back so that they will pay back the money to the government for the electricity, but still. They united. And this shows that, yes, we can agree on things that are important to us, to everyone. And if we think about it, living a good life, a good and happy life, isn't that important for everyone on this planet? Well, I think it is. So we have a lot of common ground, if we can say so. We don't have to even believe if this is true or not. Because we know that everyone wants to live a happy, healthy life without any problems. Why not get together on this? I think is a great unifying point.

Taliy: 11:21

Yeah! Separated as we are right now, there is no way we can withstand the challenges that are coming, and it's a huge economical crisis. And if you look at the history, how every crisis has been solved - always been a huge conflict with a lot of casualties. One of the things that I love about Russell Brand that almost in each of his episodes, he's talking about like, how do we actually get connected on planetary level, on local level, on each level, and start demanding, building a society that is based on different set of values. Not talking about coming to any"-isms" of the past, but building something different in which this tremendous amount of wealth that robotisation, AI, automation can bring to our lives actually using it for the benefits of all of the people.

Alexey : 12:07

People start thinking that when we unite, we will have to I don't know, live all together in one big house and share everything. Well, it's not actually about that. We will share the resources of the planet, obviously. The main idea is to unite to build a society where everyone has everything he needs. And this is not so complicated, because we can see that what you pick as a goal for anything, this is how you will be progressing. Right now, the main goal of our society is profit. There's plenty of profits generated all the time. But who can say that they have a great life? Maybe there are several 1000s of people who really enjoy it here. And even though if you really talk with them, once they have these big fortunes, they start telling well, that now they're worried that they need to preserve it, they don't want to lose it. And we're not talking about all the"-isms" of the past, what we are talking about is if the goal is to ensure that each and every one of us has a life that's worth living, really, then we can say, Okay, guys, how do we achieve this? And if we look from this perspective, that we have everything, we already do everything, this is even laughable that we are still trying to solve problems that we ourselves created. You know, just start thinking differently.

Taliy: 13:31

What we all feel that we should build something different. But again, like taking responsibility, you know, one of the things that makes successful people successful is taking the responsibility. And most people trying to run away from any sort of responsibilities. And that's why we either allow ourselves to watch the news that we don't trust or just to switch them off and do flipping burger thing. Because doing your own investigation also takes responsibility for the results, for the outcome.

Alexey : 14:00

We need to start taking responsibility and we need to start taking responsibility for our own life. Let's start small. Let's start by building from the ground up. Let's take responsibility for our own life. As you do in your home, you know that no one will come and I don't know clean it or cook for you. So you just do it. So if you do the same for your life in general, at the very broad level. Imagine that if everyone does the same, will we have the same problems that oh, you know, they will do something again, I'm a small person, nothing really depends on me. So I will just do my stuff and let them do their stuff. But the problem is that what the politicians are doing, it damages our lives. Paying two times more for a tank of gas, it is happening for the same reasons that people are not taking responsibilities, because they say nothing. Taking responsibility and talking around everyone saying okay, look, guys, things are not going really as we expected. So why don't we just get together and discuss how we want things to be and express this demand. And this is taking responsibility. It's not about marching in the streets and saying that we will not go to work or something like that, no, but it is doing things in a peaceful manner, just by talking. And talking is actually the simplest, but also at the same time, the hardest thing to do. While talking, you will understand that everyone wants the same. And once everyone wants the same, there will be politicians who will support these ideas, because, well, they execute whatever the public wants. So it is about taking responsibility, but by taking responsibility for your own life, you will be taking responsibility also for the lives of other people as well.

Taliy: 15:44

Well, you say there, there is no need to protest anymore in the streets. And that's interesting. But that got me thinking about different things that with AI robotization and replacement of workers, there will be no point in boycotting, because you can only boycott when you have a job that you can boycott. But if you if you're replaced by machinery in your working space, there's no point you can boycott or you can just do whatever you want, you you don't have a job anymore. Right now, while we still have this mechanism of demanding something in a peaceful way within the law of each country, you don't have to even boycott, you, you have a much better mechanism just to connect with people on online platforms and create a political request to change things. But then for that you need a vision, you really have to know what you want. Because if you don't have a vision of your future, what you want to do with your life, you will not achieve anything. But the same works with the society on the social level as people we, we will gotta have some kind of vision. And it has to be something positive, aspiring that we really want to achieve. And today, we keep watching this political drama that only drains us on our energy, attention and emotions. But it's not changing anything. We're talking about bills that were passed 50, 70 years ago, we're still talking about the very same issues. And I feel like they're not the issues we should be discussing. Although they are very entertaining, they're very involving, we all love to invest our attention in what this politician said versus that. If we would be responsible. And we would say, hey, wait, we elected these officials to actually improve our lives, but they don't do that, they just performing as actors. And we would, for example, sue them like those TV anchors, their line of defense would be well, you know, we didn't come to this political seats to actually improve your life. We're performance artists, we are entertainers. And you should know that. And this is the society we created, in which people who deliver the information don't have responsibility for delivering the information because they are delivering performance and entertainment. The same thing politicians do, they are not there to improve our lives, they are there to create a perfect storm of drama, which we enjoy so much. And their line of defense would be you know exactly what we're doing. You know exactly because that's what you elected. That's what that's what you originally choose. So why don't we just grow up and start thinking straight and creating a demand for them to execute because they're not stupid people and you know, they do stuff that's popular that gains them popularity gains them high ratings and gets them reelected. So the only way for us to actually change the system is to let everyone know that we're going to vote only for those people who are going to fulfill a very specific demand of building a certain type of society. I don't care where you're going to find money to provide everyone with housing, free education and free medicine, I just know this is what we want as a society and this should be done. If you're not ready to do that - you lose your seat. If you get into the parliament or the presidential seat and you are not executing it within like six months, we don't see you taking concrete actions on improving the situation here and there - you lose your seat, you're being replaced. That's the way it's gonna work. When you hire a CEO to your company if you're invested into any sort of stock and stock market, you have a CEO who's not doing a good job and your money is disappearing, you're not gonna have that CEO sitting there for four years just because he got elected once. So the same thing should work on the social level. So it's really time for us to grow up. I just don't know how to say it more straight than that.

Alexey : 19:32

I wonder what would happen if people would get together and, I mean not get together physically, but arrange a BigTVOff, not BigPowerOff, but a BigTVOff, and no one would watch TV for I don't know several days.

Taliy: 19:47

I tell you what'll happen! The mental health would improve drastically!

Alexey : 19:52

Happiness going through the roof!

Taliy: 19:56

Yeah, instantly!