[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Reality 2.0, I'm Katherine Druckman doc Surles and I are here today to talk about a few things, but the most important is that it's doc's birthday. So happy 

[00:00:11] Doc Searls: birthday, doc. Thank you. And it's not any birthday. I, I am a big one. It's a big one. It's a long one. Um, I am actually, I'm appalled to say this I'm 75 years old, which is really weird because I, I Don.

I don't feel like, you know, of course I don't, what is it to feel to hold? I mean, we have two, we have a president who's substantially older than me and the other guy who run ran against them is also older than me. But, um, the big thing is that. Um, I'd have to tell you everybody time really does fly. And the older you get, the faster it goes, which is really weird, but every year is a smaller percentage of your whole life.

And that actually applies. It actually moves really fast. Um, yeah. And, and it's like, this pandemic thing started like last year, but it didn't, it started two years ago. Um, three years ago, nine 11 was 10 years ago, you know, nine 11 was actually 21 years ago. And, um, but it all was really fast. And I, you know, when you're young, you don't, you feel like, you know, there was this really wonderful cartoon I saw once.

Um, and it was called, it was, uh, You know, six looks at 40 and, you know, two, a kid 40 looked like it was like a gravestone, you know, and, and to 30, it was like some old guy. And to at 40 itself, it was like these two guys looking at each other, like, aren't we cool. And then at older and older ones, you know, by the time you get to like my age, they look like babies and there's something to that.

But then my point about it though, is that when you're young, it's very hard to imagine or even contemplate what it's gonna be like when you're older. And the weird thing is if you stay healthy, which fortunately I have, um, You don't end up, you don't feel that much different. You look different. That's the horrible thing.

You know, you don't sound different. My voice now isn't much different if at all, from when I was 25. But, um, but you do look like an old person , you know, that that does happen. There are a few exceptions. I've known a few, a few people who, you know, um, Look really great when they, when they age and they keep their hair, you know, this bastards, they keep their hair, you know, I mean, among guys, women do tend to keep their hair, but guys don't and, uh, and I don't, I didn't, I, I, weird thing is I was like, I got to about 65 and it was like, Hey, Family curse has not hit, you know, all my cousin, male cousins are baldest stone and you know, they, it is great.

I'm not going lose my hair. And then I did, then it's like in about two years, most of it fell out. So, but anyway, but I'm here, you know, better a milestone than a headstone and, or, or a, a milestone. So, so 

[00:03:03] Katherine Druckman: is that the title of the, of the episode I'm here? I think it might 

[00:03:06] Doc Searls: be, it's a pretty good one. Still standing, you know, there was that song I'm still standing better than I ever did.

Yeah. Um, you know, or, or the, what was the Tom petty one? Don't don't back down. It's kind of that same feel to it down, you know, don't back down. Yeah. All that, um, Yeah, it's all good. 

[00:03:25] Katherine Druckman: It's still standing. Oh, that's Elton John, isn't it? Yeah, it is Elton John. Yeah. I had it took me a second. Like who is that?

It's Elton John. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, well, before we go too, too much further, I wanted to make sure I haven't done in this in a while. Um, I wanted to make sure to give a shout out and a thank you to people who support us on Patreon and Ko-Fi and all the people who email us and all of those things and all.

Even just listening. Uh, we, you know, we appreciate that a lot and we love feedback. So I wanted to throw that out there. Also visit our website at reality2cast.com. We do occasionally send out a newsletter. Although the cadence of that later, 

[00:04:02] Doc Searls: we cadence. We're we've. 

[00:04:06] Katherine Druckman: Yeah, if you follow either of us, you probably see 

[00:04:08] Doc Searls: not conversation, something on there.

[00:04:10] Katherine Druckman: I feel bad that we struggle. We struggle with the idea of newsletters. I mean, you, you, I do posted about Substack, which is our platform, actually.

[00:04:18] Doc Searls: I will say this. I had a really great long talk with Dave Winer this morning. Dave is one of the real major geniuses of the computer world and he invented RSS for example, which we all still use to syndicate everything podcasting.

You know, you're those of you who subscribe are subscribing with RSS in most cases, I think even if you're on Spotify or one of the others RSS is in there. Um, but he invented outlining a zillion years ago. Um, modeled what we, you know, presentation software, um, but blogging and podcasting both would not be the same with that, Dave and I really want to use his software that he's working on now that starts without lining to do both. Um, you can tweet with it. You can, and I'm using it for that right now, by the way. And, but you can also put a blog, publish a blog out of it, and you can also produce a newsletter out of it. I really wanna do that. And because it's all one tool and it all works really well and he's still working on it.

And, but he told me today, uh, in a, in an email, he said, just go ahead and use subst stack or something in the. So well, which is what we're doing. So, which is what we're doing so already. I didn't mention that to him, but I'm, we're already on subst stack. So I'm gonna get more, I'm gonna get practice in by working on this one, so that, that will be cool.

Um, but you know, I'll tell you, here's an interesting thing though. I, I tweeted this this morning. I said, I, I'm not going to. Respond to any more subs stack, any more newsletters that shake me down for money? You know, I don't like the here you're getting two thirds or half or almost none of a, of a, of a newsletter post and stops halfway through as only subscribers get the rest of this.

I don't like that. I don't like that comment. Well, and I don't like, we certainly don't do that. I don't like the five bucks a, you know, everybody pays five bucks a month. I'm over I'm way past peak subscription right now. Yeah. Way past it on a lot of stuff. And, and if I. You know, had a proper tool for it and not just the spreadsheet, a lot of it would go away and, and I feel bad about it cuz there's some people I'd like to subscribe to, but I'm not, uh, magazines, I'll cancel and stuff.

So I don't mean to sound old and cranky, but you know, what is your birthday? So it's my birthday. I can get crotchety, I guess. 

[00:06:36] Katherine Druckman: Do you, do you feel any differently when it's um, when it's. Presented as a subscription versus just like a patron model, like where you're just on supporting a creator on an, on, 

[00:06:49] Doc Searls: I, I prefer a Patriot model, but, but even I don't like Patreon that much.

I, in part, because a bunch of us came up with an idea called emanate. We'll put that in the newsletter. Um, look up emanate, em like emancipate only eman pay. And, uh, it's a project VRM which I still run. Out of the Beman client center at Harvard. And it's, it's this thing that it's really just on a server there, but it's an idea.

And the idea is it should be up to us as listeners. To just be able to easily easily hide. Yeah. Impulsively throw money at things. Yeah. And, and, um, coffee, coffee, coffee kind of works that way. And also yet also to monitor our actual consumption. Like I, I, we had a thing with, um, the public media player, which is a, a, a.

Which is done by PRX, which is one of the public radio suppliers. Um, PRX, I worked with them on this. They, they had a, a, um, an, uh, a, uh, a tuner, uh, that was an app on your phone. It worked on Android and iPhone that, uh, maybe it's still there. I don't know, but it only gave you public stations. Here are all the public stations in the country and you can, but we had a thing we put in there.

A hats off guy named Keith Hopper, who came up with this idea called listen log. And, and you could look at the end of it at all. The stations you'd listen to and how much time you gave to each of those. But you could put, put a EPA on top of that and say, you know what, I'm gonna pay 200 bucks a year to public radio and it'll be allocated by what I actually listened to.

And then it would go into escrow somewhere where at, at some service that, uh, um, maybe like sound exchange or one of those rights clearance services, that does nothing that does the same thing for, for music artists, where, you know, cuz when you hear music on streams, a record is kept of that. And the people playing those dreams have to pay royalties, but it's like royalties in the hands of the individuals.

So I would have my own royalty rate as it were where I'm, I've decided I, I do consume these things. I, I want to. Send money to all of the podcasts and all of the streams that I listen to on a pro rata basis. And emancipate will let you do that. If somebody would just write the code for it. so, so the, the basic aspirations of it and the design is there, but, um, but no, but nobody's ever built it in part because we never evangelized it.

We just one of many ideas that we had, but it's a good idea. It's a hell of an idea. Yeah. So that's what I'd like to see. So one of you, 

[00:09:27] Katherine Druckman: what kinda virtual tip jars, you know, I, I love the idea of being able to just, yeah. Automating the process of that is, is, uh, yeah, 

[00:09:35] Doc Searls: it would be great. The thing is it has to be in the hands of the individual, if there's yet another third party in the middle.

yeah, that's a sphincter or the waste of the hourglass that wants to be the toll road for you. Here's your toll road? No, I want my own way to disperse money to whoever I like to disperse it to on a pro rat of basis, based on my actual consumption, that'd be a fun thing to do. Um, there could be third parties involved in that, but the, in the same ways I have my own, you've gotta do the financial transaction.

Yeah. And I have my own phone. I have my own. Apps. Those are mine, hopefully. Uh, and not just I'm, I'm stuck in yet. Another silo that in this case is just a conduit. You know, we need a me a metaphor for that. Like, we just wanna be your culvert, you know, that's what companies are saying that wanna be in that kind of middle, middle, that pipe, that muddy pipe.

So, anyway, another thing too, I wanna briefly report is that, um, we may have talked about it last week. Um, One of my very best friends, uh, Craig Burton, who was, uh, a source of an enormous amount of quotes when I wrote for Lenox journal, um, uh, died a week ago, Wednesday, and, uh, not. Unexpectedly, he had had cancer for a while.

Not that long but long enough. Um, but he was just a huge influence on me and on a lot of things and had a lot of what amazing things to say about open source and sorry, we never got him on the show. He was a funny, crazy guy and he made Noel succeed. And, and for those who remember Noel, um, This is an important thing.

What happened that in the eighties, PCs came along and if you asked a company in 1982, a big company, are you gonna let PCs into your company? And they'd say no, because we can't control. We already have mainframes. We have 32 70 display terminals, and we have VT one hundreds of two hundreds out there.

You're not getting in, in PCs in here. And then people have brought their own PCs into C. And they got more done than they ever got done with the mainframes and mini computers. And so all of a sudden companies are full of PCs using spreadsheets and other software and word processing. And the rest of it and Wang was going out of business.

And digital was going out of deck, was going out of business and data general and all of these companies that, that we're in the mini computer business and what came in their place lands the land business. And the winner in the land business was Nobel. And the guy that made that happen was Craig bur. He was brilliant at, at Noel and, um, really made that company succeed.

And it was the best thing we had on the enterprise side prior to the internet. Um, and he, he was, you know, a troubled soul as well in some ways, which is why he's, he's kind of an unsung hero. Uh, in some ways, but the best thing he ever said, I just, I quoted this on Twitter earlier. He and I were co consulting a company.

It was pretty funny. And, and they had one of those marketing guys that was just so customer hostile and Craig who was six, five and weighed well over 500 pounds, um, and ridiculously strong. Um, I have stories about that too, but this is more important. He rises up and he's got this wonderful deep Baso voice.

And he says to. Jerk who's saying customer hospital hostile things at this company, he says, Put down the customer step away from the marketplace. You were a danger to others, it was, it was one of those perfect things I'd ever heard because that's exactly what needed to happen. Put down the customer step away from the 

[00:13:12] Katherine Druckman: marketplace.

I, I saw that tweet actually, and I was hoping if you didn't mention it, I was going to ask you to, to, to 

[00:13:19] Doc Searls: read that. Yeah. There's that? That's hilarious. So rest in peace, Craig, he was, he was a fun guy, so 

[00:13:26] Katherine Druckman: yeah, I would've loved to have seen that. 

[00:13:29] Doc Searls: yeah, no, that was, oh God, it was great. 

[00:13:31] Katherine Druckman: yeah. So speaking of, of customers, Amazon, there are a couple things happening in, in the privacy world, which is something actually we haven't 

[00:13:40] Doc Searls: specifically, it'd be great if private privacy was a world, but it's not, which is 

[00:13:44] Katherine Druckman: why. Yeah. Well, that's true. There is no private in the, the lack of privacy world.

Um, that, uh, so Amazon has bought, or is buying, a company called one medical. And that is well, it's weird. And we'll get into that. And then the other thing is the legislation, the American data privacy and protection act. So those are, those are a couple things that are topical and that we kind of wanted to touch on today. Yeah. 

[00:14:10] Doc Searls: Like if we had ads, we could tease that.

And just say like, after this break, I I'll talk about, yeah. Hey, we should totally do that, but we don't, we don't have oh, but we 

[00:14:18] Katherine Druckman: don't, which is fine. We don't need any ads. Um, so, so yeah, so let's talk about why, why Amazon buying a medical service provider. A healthcare provider is weird and concerning to a lot of people.

Um, I, so Amazon already knows everything there is to know about me. I think, I mean, 

[00:14:41] Doc Searls: actually doesn't to an extent, so, but, but there's enough to fear. I know this is a thing we, yeah, I, I'm always amazed a lot actually. You know, Amazon, you know, all these companies, Google too, you know, that they know everything about me.

They know where I've been. They know what I eat, they know all this other stuff. And yet their guesses about what you might want are terrible for the most part. And. And Amazon is no, no exception. It's like, and it's like, it's like when you check out at the grocery store and they give you the, you know, they give you the receipt that has discounts on the things you just bought, which can only like really piss you off because wait a minute, I, I could have had those Kleenex or the fish or whatever for half, if I, why don't you give it to me at the discount now?

Um, Amazon here's here's this is my take on this. I don't think anybody else has this take Amazon never needed to get into the advertising business at all in any way. They have a gigantic business in retail, um, and, and in advertising to people within their own system. The things that, you know, I mean, they could just do advertising within their own system and it would've been great and everybody would've trusted them, but instead they got the same creepy business that the rest of the ad tech world is, which is we're gonna do surveillance and we're gonna surveil you everywhere.

And we're gonna use it. We know about you here to advertise to you elsewhere. And, um, you know, and, and of course their, their reassurances about this, especially when they know so many intimate. Potentially with ring and with Alexa, um, they're just a creep show at this point. And, and so why should you trust them?

And they go and buy a medical. Right. And so the, yeah, the story, you know, of, regardless of anything else. Yeah. There's a CNBC, when you, you, you shared on our back channel and, um, and there are all these quotes from people who say I'm dropping out I'm I'm I'm I like one medical, which by the way, I never heard of before this, but I'm just sure, sure.

It's a good company or was, you know, that I I'm dropping out because I just don't trust Amazon and Amazon has done a lot to not earn our trust and which. Kind of sad, but you know, there it is, you know, that this, and I mean, we, we really need much better ways on our side to valve. What others know about us and extract from others, auditable, um, promises that they will not share that information.

And there's no way to audit. Privacy breaches on anybody else's side. There's no way to get agreements from them that they will not follow you or share that information. All we have are promises in their really, really, really shitty. Insincere fatuous um, uh, privacy notices and it's the craziest thing. I mean, I, I tweeted this this morning that, that I was, somebody told me something about, um, a, a, a, a scientific report.

Um, and it was the American academy of pediatrics or something like this. It's a medical outfit. You look at their privacy policy and it's all about, it's got that line in it. You know, we have third parties, those third parties gonna follow you everywhere for advertising purposes. And we're involved in that.

They don't need to be involved in that, but they are because it's proforma. That's what everybody does, you know? Yeah. In a similar way we could share this too is in, in the newsletter. Um, Tom Fishburn, the marketist who's a great cartoonist, um, He has a cartoon that has, you know, let us Snoop a little conference at some company.

Let us Snoop on people in a privacy first opt-in consent based way. And, uh, you know, in notes there that there was a study that said 97% of people just automatically click on unaccept, you know, and, uh, You know, because they know they're screwed and you know, why bother digging down into there to, you know, control your privacy.

I'm using air quotes here, your privacy choices. It's not yours, it's theirs and you have no record of it. So it doesn't matter. Uh, And, but they they're all involved in this horrible business and, and all the European laws and the CCPA in California have no effect, no effect whatsoever. And they just made things less convenient for us.

They've caused those, those awful things to appear on our websites and, uh, and, and don't do any good . So, uh, you know, and, and you punish these companies and they can all take it doesn't matter, you know, it's. But we need our own controls. This is simple as that. And, and I, and there's nothing in, there's nothing Amazon can say that that can contradict anything and it's in that CNBC story.

Uh, so, you know, I sure anybody. 

[00:19:43] Katherine Druckman: I, I hesitate to ask the question, but why would Amazon buy them to make money 

on 

[00:19:48] Doc Searls: this? That's another question. So they already, 

[00:19:50] Katherine Druckman: yeah. I mean that they already own pill pack, right? Amazon is PillPack, right? I believe so. PillPack is a great service if you don't know about it, it's um, no, I don't.

It delivers, I know I don't use it myself, but I know people do and it delivers prescriptions in sort of dosed packets. So you can take your, you know, your collection of AM pills and your collection of PM pills. Oh, really feature individually wrapped in a, in a, uh, in a little packet and it comes in a roll.

And so it's just suddenly you grab your, you know, your morning pills. And so for people who are aren't tick a lot of medication, it's very, uh, useful. I believe that that was an acquisition. I don't think they started it or anything, but, um, huh. But yeah, no, so that, I mean, it kind of makes sense. 

[00:20:28] Doc Searls: They bought whole foods it's by, by Amazon pharmacy, Amazon pharmacy is a thing.

Yeah, I that's interesting. So I, you know, being, as I said, 75 that I take fewer pills than most people to are this my age, but I still have morning and evening pills. That's that's it. And I have on my watch, I've got a little re you know, thing that re reminds me to take them and, um, But none of the, none of the pill cases are good.

And the pill cases themselves have a little timer on 'em. That's what I was just thinking. Is it something like that, but I mean, talk about. How bad this thing is. I mean, I, I depend utterly at this point on CVS and I hate to say that I love CVS, but here's what I love about CVS. It's everywhere. It's the, McDonald's, it is everywhere of, of pharmacies.

And, and I can go, I can move my, my prescription from one to the utter, to the other and pick it up here and there, it still mostly involves getting on the phone, their, their app. Isn't worth a dam, frankly. The one thing that matters in the app that I want in the app is the ability to move prescriptions from one store to another.

Cuz I travel so much. Um, and they don't have that. they, they didn't the last time I looked anyway. Um, but still I like that. So I switched to Humana hu. Humana is my, um, Medicare supplemental, uh, insurer, I think, or it's the least part of it. And, but that's, but I that's that they have a pharmacy and it might come in 10 days.

I, you know, I mean, it, it, the prices, I don't even know if it's actually cheaper, but I, I quit it almost immediately after I started, because the, you know, having 'em sent to me is a real issue, cuz I may not be where they send it to. So it's. You know, anyway, but I, the idea that Amazon has a pharmacy, I suppose, with HIPAA and all the other, all of the other laws surrounding personal information with medical, you're relatively safe.

But, but the fact that what are you, 

[00:22:36] Katherine Druckman: because do, do do any of those laws really take, take into account the real nature of supposed anonymity of data, because I, I suspect that if you read any legislation there, you know, the language would suggest that anonymizing data. I mean, I, you know, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong, but that anonymizing data.

Would be sufficient in some cases or, you know, in the way that data is stored. Mm-hmm , but we all know the, the real answer is that , you know, once if the data exists and is stored for too long, it's potentially toxic. Right. Um, so, you know, I don't know. So I think people are right to be concerned. And I think ultimately perception is, is really what matters anyway.

And when you're Amazon and you own things like ring who have flying cameras that chase you around your house, or, uh, or, you know, you're involved you're, you're. Pitching law enforcement to, to, to sell your cameras and, you know, and human rights organizations are rightfully concerned about that. So once you've already established this sort of place in the world where privacy advocates and, and just, you know, any normal human who's concerned about their privacy starts to get nervous.

Then, you know, health data, I think is one of those areas that really makes people a little bit more wary about privacy. So you've already 

[00:23:59] Doc Searls: financial, the tipping ones. Yeah. Financial people and politics. I think those are things people don't wanna know. They want other people to know. And, um, I mean, I did.

It's interesting. I mean, I think, okay. Would I even wanna say now what pills I take and for what? Probably not. Oh God, no, I probably, I probably could, but why would I, you know, and 

[00:24:20] Katherine Druckman: well, at least at least you're male. Like if you're, if you're a woman, right, exactly. God forbid you, uh, you say that you're taking a pill that might have a miscarriage as a side effect, right.

Or, or that's a whole other conversation, 

[00:24:32] Doc Searls: right? Yeah. Or that I was, I mean, it's, it's interesting, cuz this is a funny story. Uh, years ago when my son just tell, I mean he's 25 now, but when he was like nine or something like that, we were watching a sports and there was, there was an ad on TV for erectile dysfunction, but they just call it ed, you say, well, if you of ed do this and that, if you do, you know, you know, you can enjoy your life.

If you, of ed and. um, and he asked me what's ed and I said, oh, okay, well, that's, that's when you're, I guess we'll be X-rated here. What the hell. You know, it's when your penis doesn't get hard. And, and he said, Oh, what's so bad about that. 

[00:25:20] Katherine Druckman: so wait, how 

[00:25:21] Doc Searls: old was he? he was, he, he was in a, he was pretty young. He was in an age when it, you know, it didn't, it, it didn't matter yet.

[00:25:30] Katherine Druckman: Uh, I don't get it. Where's the problem really hard to pee. I'm. 

[00:25:35] Doc Searls: Yeah, the euphemisms there, but you know, there's, I mean, there, there are lots of things we don't want other people to know. Um, and I think that what's happened is that the horribleness, I mean, horrible is the wrong word. Both the accuracy of advertising when it's personal and the degree to which for the most part they're really inaccurate and wrong or off base or ire really irrelevant are both spoke screens.

I mean, they, they both, you know, they, they both misdirect attention away from the fact that. These companies are acquiring massive amounts of information about us. That's none of their damn business. Yeah. And we don't want them to have, and could potentially be harmful to us. I think there's not enough obvious harms in most cases, there's lots of concern.

But not, you know, we don't have many cases where somebody got chased around because somebody found their advertising information. Yeah. You know, and the 

[00:26:38] Katherine Druckman: other concern, you know, when you talk about companies like Amazon, Amazon is a massive company. Massive. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, and, and. When you get all of these little divisions that collect, uh, various types of data and, you know, and of course they have, you know, I assume, uh, use best practices with data retention and handling information, but.

The larger the company, the more points of failure, right. it, it just seems, it seems like people are, are right. Very, very right to be concerned because I don't know, getting, getting plugged into to that larger organization, but you know, also who knows because Amazon does on, you know, I, I would, I like the idea of at least providing.

Both sides of the argument, maybe if possible, but Amazon does have a great record, uh, with customer service and, you know, innovation. And, um, so who knows, although this is not whole foods, one medical and whole, this is not the same thing. 

[00:27:41] Doc Searls: Would anybody say that whole foods is better now that Amazon owns them? 

[00:27:46] Katherine Druckman: Um, I mean, I can get them. I can get whole foods delivered really 

[00:27:50] Doc Searls: quickly, so that's nice. Yeah. But is it a, if you go into it, is it a better store?

I don't know. I don't shop there. No, it's about the same. I very rarely do anything more. It's about 

[00:28:00] Katherine Druckman: the same it, huh? It's about the same. They've they've made it no worse and there are some, there have been advantages in my opinion, but I, you know, again, I'm not a diehard whole foods goer, but even though it's funny, I mean, I grew up with whole foods back when it was a tiny little health food, grocery store, you know, originating in Texas, right.

[00:28:17] Doc Searls: It did. It came from Texas. 

[00:28:18] Katherine Druckman: Yep. Our, our whole foods was, you know, just, just down the street and, and, um, yeah, I mean, it was very, obviously very different than, than what it, how we know it today. But. But, um, I've never, so, so the changes in whole foods to me, I don't tend to compare, you know, pre, Amazon and post Amazon.

I tend to compare the last 10 years versus, you know, 30 years ago. yeah. So it's a very different, it's a very different thing into, to my mind. 

[00:28:49] Doc Searls: But it's, it's interesting. I mean, I, I, um, I'm looking here at all of the divisions is, I mean, whole foods, Twitch shock ring lab, 1 26. I never heard of before, but apparently exists.

Um, ESOR Julee good reads hero. I have, I'm talking to you over in ni right now, actually on maritime that exists. Anna PERMA, Perna labs, Israel based micro electronics company. My gosh. I mean, there's a lot of stuff. I remember a nine, a, a nine was gonna be their search engine and it didn't, that never happened.

I don't know what it's, what it, that ended up happening with that. But that's what the original idea was that they thought they could, you know, kick butt with that. That was in the odds. Yeah. So, um, Some things, some things are successful. Some are not, I mean, the thing that sort of surprises me the most, I like, let me, let me actually look at Amazon now I'll just go to there and what their, I mean, I think they're junked it up horribly, you know, keep shopping for like I already got, I, I didn't get any of that, you know, by again, you know, shop both speakers with Alexa built in.

I don't want that. Um, As I'd look down the page, a video recommended for me, Lizzo, you know, uh, we actually have a family connection with Lizzo, but that might be part of it. I don't know. But, um, uh, you know, more things to Amazon basics books. I may like, none of them are interesting to me. it's like none of this it's like garbage up.

Totally. I mean, and it, none of it's interesting for the most part. And you just have. It's like this endless catalog as you go down now, I'm sure they have lots of research that shows, well, this is all better and is working better all the time. But the, you know, by again, I'm not gonna buy most of the stuff that that's, that they have there for me to buy again, you know?

Yeah. Chief handkerchiefs, uh, maybe the interdental brushes. I like those. Those are very cool, but you know what? The ones for CVS are better and they're cheaper. So I'm gonna get 'em from CVS, you know? 

[00:31:02] Katherine Druckman: Yep. One thing I wanted to make sure I mentioned and I'll drop the link in is that there was a, a data privacy study, uh, a survey from the AMA and it, you know, it just kind of goes back to the fact that health data is something that people are increasingly worried about.

And I think that's that's yeah, and very interesting and very relevant right now, because I mean, again, we've got the Roe V Wade issue. We've got, um, There are a lot of other things to say about health data privacy, but, but yeah, it's just interesting timing. So I'll drop that in there. 

I'd be curious to know if, if any of our, of our listeners have any experience with one medical or have any opinions about this, but, uh, But yeah. Let, let us know if you do. Certainly. Um, yeah. So, yeah. So on, on the subject of privacy, maybe, maybe it's a good time to segue to the, uh, privacy legislation we were talking about.

I 

[00:31:55] Doc Searls: have to bring the other tab up. yeah, this is, um, Uh, oh, what's the name of it? Oh, the American data, privacy and protection act, HR 81 52, um, which is apparently going to pass. Um, and I, you know, to me, I'm kind of a Silicon valley libertarian on this one. I think that most new laws protect yesterday from last Thursday, and then we have to suffer with them for the next 50 years.

Um, And after seeing how the GDPR and the CCPA in some ways made things worse, at least at the experience level, at our side, like all of a sudden, you know, they have to not only show us the GDPR mandated or at least how they think they, you know, the company's selling GDPR compliance insisted as mandated.

Consent to consent notices on the fronts of website. Now there's this new thing of your, if your detective is coming from California, says, says, you know, do not sell my data. And, uh, there's a bunch of stuff on there about not selling your data that people ignore. So what they wanna do with this is they have.

You know, they're, they're granting a whole bunch of new rights, the rights to awareness, transparency, individual data ownership, and control, right to consent and object, data protections for children and minors. Third party collecting entities goes, it goes on unified, opt out mechanisms is number 10 and that's when I have a problem with, and.

And, uh, and it unpacks those, you know, for several dozen pages, which I have read and can't remember much of, because it's in, in legislative ease, but basically what it wants to do is regulate the existing surveillance economy. And my worry about that is it freezes that economy in place rather than allows us to replace it with something better.

That isn't based on surveillance and actually creates a market that, that begins with what we want rather than what somebody else wants to sell us. And, you know, and for example, as number 10 unified opt-out mechanisms, no, we need a, we need a unified opt-in mechanism. We need to be able to say, yeah, we're interested in, in, in having personalized advertising, not no we're going to opt out of all of your.

Personalized advertising systems separately and individually with no record of them whatsoever. Even if there's a record of them, it's a pain in the ass there's way too many. Um, because what happens is that everybody's selling GDPR compliance or compliance that anybody privacy laws all have one big cloud with one big service that every single company implements in a different way and keeps records differently.

And those records are generally with third parties and there's no way to get at them. It's horrible. It's a real mess. And it's a billion, uh, probably multi-billion dollar business that that's entirely created by the legislation. So this will create more, more compliance businesses with more loopholes, and we're just gonna be in the same opt out universe that we already have and it's icky and it'll take something icky and solidify it.

Um, so that's my worry about it. Uh, I don't think we need to regulate this existing surveillance economy we need to build. Tools on our side that allow us to create our own forms of privacy and. And get other parties to agree to our terms and our conditions. And if that's not thinkable to you, you don't understand the internet.

The internet is a peer to peer system. We can all operate on it. We haven't invented the parts that we need that give us privacy and give us choice and give us ways of asserting what we want in the world. You know, we didn't bother with that at first, you know, it's been 25 years that start bothering with it.

Yeah. So that's my take on it. 

[00:35:52] Katherine Druckman: well, I think that's, you know, that's very interesting. I, you, I'm not as familiar with it as you are. So I, I hesitate to, to comment at all, um, because I'd have to really go through this entire 132 page PDF. yeah, 

[00:36:05] Doc Searls: it's 

[00:36:05] Katherine Druckman: a long one, but, uh, but yeah, there, you know, there are some elements in there here that, eh, yeah.

I mean, who know they concern me because. Again, the nature of legalese and legislative-ese as you put it and the nature of technology, you know, can't always account for each other. 

[00:36:26] Doc Searls: And so, so, so here's an exercise that, that they can, nobody has to read anything. All I have to do is do a search for GDPR compliance.

The 200 million results they'll get, excuse me, uh, give or take either way. Hundreds of millions you'll get, um, are almost all from companies selling ways to obey the letter of the GDPR while completely screwing its spirit. Exactly. That's the whole thing. Thank you. That is a multi billion dollar business.

That's all about. That's that's all about screwing the spirit. It just, how do you stay in this surveillance business without meaning? Here's how we can continue in this surveillance business. I was talking to a family member who works for a big retailing company who said. She spends hours daily or something talking about nothing, but which one of these third parties they're going to use to spy on their customers or Pressy on their potential customers.

Like it's so proforma it's and you can't regulate it away. You have to just build tools on. It'll allow us to get around it, but here's what's gonna happen. So the, the data privacy protection act, what that's gonna be called, you know, this is gonna be the, a ad PPA. So there will now be, you know, look it up several years from now, you know, ad PPA compliance, and that's gonna give you 200 million results.

And guess what? You wouldn't have any more privacy and we'll have the same surveillance economy we have now. And you're gonna have to opt out with all these different parties and they'll think they succeeded because now you have some of the records on your side, maybe, but probably not. You know, it's gonna make the same thing just as maybe worse.

So that's, you know, Yeah, that's 

[00:38:14] Katherine Druckman: there. I, I, I just, you know, I wanna just show me in there where it says that data brokers cannot sell lists of rape victims or, you know, or any of the other really gross categories of consumer that you can buy lists on. You know, I show me in there and then I'll feel better.

Maybe like, it's, I dunno. I'm just, I feel kind of cynical at this point. 

[00:38:38] Doc Searls: I think that's. Yeah. And I I'm I'm I'm so incentive. You need to it, I mean, it, it's gonna just take a long time. I, I do have some faith that in the long run, you know, when I'm maybe 124, uh, or something, um, uh, that this will get worked out.

I mean, I think it's very early in the digital age that we're in now. I think that we're, you know, we have a lot of opportunity here. I just don't wanna see laws in place that, that. Solidify the creepy systems that we have. It's kind of like, you know, here, here's how we're going to regulate roads. When all we have are horses and buggies, right?

It's like, no, let's, let's look forward here a little bit. And, uh, you know, what's a better way to do this. Um, And, and not on the policy side, you know, it's too easy to think of policy as the only answer to everything. And, and it's too easy to think on the other side. Um, no, the market will take care of this.

No, the market's not gonna take care of this. Geeks are gonna take care of this. Geeks are gonna invent stuff that gives us privacy, that we, and, and puts it out there and standards people. You know that we're working on this with I E 7 0 1 2, which is machine readable, personal privacy terms. You know, I want you to agree in my personal privacy terms sign here, and now we both have a copy, which a company should be glad to do if they're not spying on you, simple, you know, let's do it.

Um, yeah. So, um, I, I, I want the tech geek solution to this. Not yet another policy solution, not yet another market solution. That's just more big businesses coming up with better ways to not spy on you, but say spying on you anyway. Yeah. To say they're doing one thing while they're doing another. 

[00:40:32] Katherine Druckman: Hm. Well, cool.

I, um, I know, I think, I think we've covered. I think we've covered what we came here to talk about. Yeah, maybe. So I wonder if there's aside from. Happy birthday again. 

[00:40:43] Doc Searls: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Happy birthday. It's uh, yeah, I know. I, I tweeted at midnight last night, I was watching my, the sweep second end of my clock.

I was up at midnight, you know, and at the, at the moment, you know, it happened. I tweeted out, Hey, I just completed 75 loops laps of the sun. Um, But in fact, I was born at like, you know, 11 in the morning or something. So I had to live 11 hours. So when I woke up at, you know, seven o'clock, I thought, well, I'm not really 75 yet.

It's actually, no, not yet, but I am now, you know, for real it's real now. Yeah. But that's only because we think time is real. Maybe it's not. 

[00:41:18] Katherine Druckman: It's all it's relative. Yeah. I'm it is. I'm, I'm definitely old enough to feel the speeding up of time. It's very, it's surreal how it is. And, and then, you know, like you said, the COVID COVID timeline is, uh, it's just totally whacked everyone's brain.

Everything feels anything 2019 was last year and it, it will be for a while. It feels like, and yet, you know, my. My eyes 

[00:41:41] Doc Searls: are. I know, I, I think of 20, 20 19 is last year and it's two years ago, you know, three years. I, I, I did a road trip with my sister in 2019. It's three years ago. Yeah. There you go. Is an example of it.

See, we have, you know, so three years ago, 

[00:41:56] Katherine Druckman: well, maybe it was 10 years ago. Wait, was it 20 years ago? I have no idea. yeah, no concept. 

[00:42:02] Doc Searls: Yeah, it's crazy. And I, and I, I think too, like I think about, you know, the Vietnam war, which is a huge thing in my life, cuz I didn't go fighting it. I fought against it. And the civil rights era in the sixties, I was very involved in that, um, in my college years, uh, in the late sixties and that's far back than world war, I was when I was growing.

You know, it's it's 

[00:42:28] Katherine Druckman: yeah, 50, 60 years ago. I can't even play that game. I can't, Ugh. The, this was closer to me than this freaks me out. I, oh, I think that so much. 

[00:42:38] Doc Searls: Talk about, you know, televisions, you know, movies and TV that you, and so I watch TV from maybe 1953 to 1962. Maybe 63 and maybe a little bit on weekends, but I, I, I was sent away to high school and a place that didn't have TVs in it, uh, in 1962. And then I went to college, didn't have TVs in college either, you know, didn't have it, you know, so, you know, so I guess TVs sort of came back into my, my life when I was outta college in the early seventies, but, um, But it was busy too, you know, and I tended to write and work in the evening.

So I, you know, didn't take it in that much TV. So there's, I'm missing a lot of stuff, you know, there, there are a few exceptions, but not many. 

[00:43:33] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. 

[00:43:36] Doc Searls: You know, and then, you know, 20 years ago, remember TikTok, that was a thing. Remember that thing, you know, 

[00:43:43] Katherine Druckman: oh yeah. 

[00:43:44] Doc Searls: Maybe. And it'll also be remember Facebook and Twitter and all those things.

And they're gonna remember podcasting remember podcasting. I think podcasting's here to stay though. I really do. Might 

[00:43:54] Katherine Druckman: be. It seems to, I do. I dunno. We'll see. We'll see. Or maybe we'll call it something. At some point yeah. Talk radio 

[00:44:03] Doc Searls: yeah. Well it's it's yeah. Yeah. 

[00:44:06] Katherine Druckman: Well, cool. On that note, thank you everyone for listening to our talk radio today and for, for joining us and celebrating doc's birthday.

Um, but yeah, reach out, let us know your thoughts on, on all the things and until next. Yeah, see you.