FTP017: Mike Johnston and Matt Bolton - Sci Fi, Copyright and The Sharing Economy
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Mike: Alright guys, thanks for joining us on the show, it’s good to have you. This is Matt and Mike from…

Euvie: The Robot Overlordz podcast.

Matt: Thanks for having us.

Mike Johnston: Thanks.

Mike: Why don’t you start by telling us a bit about yourselves. Tell us your story.

Mike Johnston: Really, for us, I think it started with the idea, just Matt and I talking, but also [00:00:30] trying to explain to our friends some of the topics that we saw out in the world. I’m a big science fiction fan. Just the idea of the future has always fascinated me, how the world is changing. I dragged Matt into this.

Matt: I’m not as big a sci-fi fan, but I am very interested and have always been interested in how things are going to change and what the future’s going to look like. It’s odd not to be into sci-fi. I’m not not into sci-fi, [00:01:00] I’m just not into it at the level that Mike is. Since we started doing this it’s opened up a lot of interesting things for me.

Mike Johnston: We also started a little bit because politically we’re slightly different. Both of us have a Libertarian streak, it might be a slightly different flavour. I tended to be more on the occupy side of things and Matt tended to be a little bit more on the tea party side of things. When we first started recording episodes, [00:01:30] we actually recorded a little bit in 2011 and it was a way to, “Here are two sides, they both have some things that they get right about politics in the states. Maybe we should look at the things they agree on or things that they each bring to the table and talk those through, rather than this constant Your Side, My Side.” Unfortunately, we didn’t get too far with recording back then. We quit right away at the beginning of 2012.

We picked it up again last year, [00:02:00] in 2014, and we’ve done episodes every Tuesday and Thursday pretty much all year, except for the holidays. I think we drifted away from the political aspect relatively quickly, other than politics being messed up. The idea of the future for us was probably the biggest driver.

Euvie: What are you guys takes on the solutions? How do you envision the future being, the ideal future?

Mike Johnston: I don’t have any answers. That part of the fun [00:02:30] of actually doing the podcast, of playing around with ideas. I’m a big fan of Robert Heinlein’s term ‘grok’, trying to understand things. The older I get, the less I understand. It’s just a way to consider ideas. Personally, I’d like to see us get to some kind of Star Trek system where people are just out to better themselves. In terms of the roadmap there, [00:03:00] I think no one has really come up with a definitive roadmap. There’s all kinds of ideas out there.

Mike: You mentioned Star Trek. I like the idea of becoming one with the Borg.

Mike Johnston: Different variations of that. I’ve been a huge fan lately of Ramez Naam, his science fiction. He’s got two books out: Nexus and Crux. The third book actually comes out next month called Apex. In that, he posits a nanotechnology that actually links people’s brains together. [00:03:30] Rather than a top down Borg structure, he’s got several almost living organisms that come about from people voluntarily associating – likeminded people get together and they form this intelligence that just by connecting with each other that’s great of the sum of their parts in that technology.

Some people might find that idea pretty scary, but certainly the way it plays out in fiction… The problem I have somewhat with science fiction is that it’s a constructed story. [00:04:00] They can manipulate things that when it comes to the rubber meeting the road with reality, they don’t necessarily play out that way.

Euvie: What are some other recent good movies, books that you guys have read or watched lately that are future related?

Mike Johnston: Matt found us The Machine. If you guys haven’t seen The Machine, I think their website is themachinemovie. It’s relatively similar to the movie that’s coming out now, Ex Machina, but it’s also an independent film about AI. I thought it was [00:04:30] really well done. That story had the AI emerging from a military project.

Euvie: Interesting.

Mike: Speaking of AI movies, have you seen Chappy?

Mike Johnston: I have not seen Chappy yet. I’m not a big fan of… Is it Die Antwoord?

Euvie: Yeah.

Mike Johnston: To be honest, them being in it has been a turn off. I was excited about it at first until I saw that they were in it. I’ll probably rent it.

Mike: [00:05:00] It probably qualifies as a music video for them.

Euvie: It was kind of terrible, actually, I didn’t like it. What was the movie we watched it back to back with?

Mike: Interstellar.

Euvie: Interstellar, yeah. We watched it back to back with Interstellar. Interstellar was so amazing that Chappy was just so terrible in comparison.

Mike: I felt like I had brain damage from something after. I watched Interstellar and I was like, “God, what is this? Did I hurt myself?”

Mike Johnston: [00:05:30] You guys reminded me of something. I’m assuming you’ve seen Her?

Euvie: Yeah.

Mike: Yeah, we did a review of that one, it was really good.

Euvie: Did you guys like that one?

Mike Johnston: Yeah.

Matt: We loved it, loved it.

Mike Johnston: We also did a podcast review on that one, as well.

Matt: Two, actually. We folded Her and The Machine into one with [inaudible [0:05:47] from the Centre for Future Consciousness.

Mike Johnston: Yeah.

Mike: Cool. Yeah, I’ll have to check out The Machine. Have you seen… What was that one with Johnny Depp, Transcendence? God. Why is everyone being dystopian?

Mike Johnston: Yeah. [00:06:00] There was so much about that movie that could have been good and it just wasn’t.  I’ve watched it three times now, just because I guess I like punishing myself.

Euvie: Maybe you were really trying to see the good parts, find the good parts.

Mike Johnston: All the singularity stuff that’s in that is actually good, but the whole context of, “Technology, bad,” the story, the way the writers move their little action figure characters, it is so terrible. It’s [00:06:30] a missed opportunity for a good movie.

Mike: Yeah. Shoot the nanobots.

Euvie: Shoot the nanobots.

Mike Johnston: At least they didn’t load a virus up to the alien spaceship with a MacBook power book.

Matt: Part two’s coming out for that.

Mike Johnston: It’ll be a virus uploaded from an iPhone then.

Matt: Probably.

Euvie: Have you guys seen the documentary on Anonymous called [00:07:00] We are Legion.

Mike Johnston: I have to look for that one. I’ve been following Alex Winter’s Deep Web documentary about Silk Road and Bitcoin I think. Matt was a big fan of Going Clear, the scientology documentary. We do watch a lot of documentaries. We’re planning to talk about Going Clear as soon as I get around to watching it. I think Citizen Four is also on our list.

Matt: Yeah. The Internet’s Own Boy we actually did a review of that one, too, about Aaron Swartz [00:07:30] and him being sued by the government.

Euvie: Yeah, I just read about that story. They’re actually building some program on top of Ethereum that is named after him.

Mike: Really?

Mike Johnston: Mike actually turned me onto Downloaded, which is Alex Winter’s documentary about Napster. Both of us were huge fans of Napster back in the day. To see that documentary… There was a hilarious bit with I think it’s Katty Couric and Bryant Gumble talking about the internet [00:08:00] from, what is that, 1995.

Matt: Yeah.

Mike Johnston: “What is that? This internet thing.”

Matt: Napster’s been dead for so many years and I thought, “Wow.” I wasn’t sure what to expect because it’s been so long. A lot of what they talk about is still applicable today. It was a great documentary.

Mike Johnston: Matt’s been dragged into being interested in copyright because of the shit that I talk about all the time. I’ve been very interested in copyright ever since… I actually [00:08:30] bought the first MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, this would have been ’98. Oh my God, was it a cheap piece of crap. You could fit way more songs than a CD on it at the time, until the battery hatch broke. You could shake it and it wouldn’t skip, which everybody else had their discman and if you tried to shake one of those you’d really mess it up.

Mike: Yeah, you’d se the 30 second disk skip resistance or whatever that was called. We’d just shake it for 30 seconds, “[00:09:00] No, it’s not 30 seconds.”

Euvie: Hacker mentality. Try to break things.

Mike: I had my mom call me the other day really worried about all the pirated music that my dad’s been downloading. She’s like, “Are they going to come take the laptop away?” Has no idea about it. “No, it’s okay mom. You might want to stop doing that.”

Matt: Yeah, I can remember when Napster first came out. I have a pretty extensive CD collection and when Napster first hit I was [00:09:30] basically like a kid in the candy store. It wasn’t the stuff that I already had, it was stuff that had been out of print for so long that on eBay was going for a lot of money or whatever. You could get all this stuff for free that you couldn’t touch. Not for wanting to but just because it had been out of print so long. When Napster first came out, I was burning up my computer as fast as I could get stuff downloaded.

Mike Johnston: It was also great for discovering new music. I went from I think at the time [00:10:00] was buying one CD a month and then Napster hit. All of a sudden, I was buying four and five a month. I burned through way more than I should have spent on CDs, then they basically sued them out of existence and I immediately went to buying zero. I didn’t even go back to buying music at all, really. I just turned music off. It was kind of sad actually, I felt really bad at that point that I’d been cut off from music.

Mike: That reminds me of when I was a kid. [00:10:30] I was one of the first kids in my school to buy a CD burner. I turned it into a little business. Since my parents owned a CD store, I took all the CDs and burned them and then copied them and gave them to my friends. Then another kid came along and he bought his and he started doing business.

Euvie: Competing against you.

Mike: Little shit.

Matt: They sued Napster out of existence. To me, [00:11:00] it’s always like they create bigger monsters by doing stuff like that because now everything’s decentralized and it’s so much easier. To me, it’s even easier now to get and there’s so much more variety than there was before, had they just left Napster alone.

Mike: Exactly. That’s an excellent point. There would be no reason for us to have all of these decentralized systems and be creating things that the government couldn’t spy on if they hadn’t been abusing it so much for the last few years. [00:11:30] We would just still be operating under that system. Because there’s such a big thing with us all being spied on or people being sued for stealing music, it’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to develop our own systems now.”

Euvie: Or the corporations that have gotten two big and they’re trying to eat up everything around them. They’re speeding up this whole process of their own demise I think.

Mike Johnston: They’re run by people that grew up with the industry a certain way. They seem to be still thinking like it’s a scarcity [00:12:00] economy where they can actually dictate to you. Matt and I talk about this in regards to Game of Thrones a lot, because we’re both huge fans of that show. HBO doesn’t make that show available legally until a year after it’s on. Nobody’s going to wait a year. I buy a lot of TV shows online and they’re generally available next day. When all your family and friends have seen the show and you want to join in that conversation, nobody’s going to wait a year. HBO could eliminate [00:12:30] that piracy just by selling it. I would have bought that show from them site on seen.

They don’t. All those executives are still competing. They’re starting to get a little smarter now but they all seem to have that attitude that they’re the ones in control. All the decentralized systems probably that you guys talk about or are that are out there that everyone is interested in is because it removes that control from those executives to say when you can and can’t watch something. If I want [00:13:00] a show on HBO now and HBO won’t make it available, I’ll just take it then and I won’t pay them. Instead of them getting offended at that, of, “Well, you should pay up.” Maybe you should have competed with that and actually offered it.

For all those systems, you run into people who have fake files or viruses and things like that. It would just be, for most people, they would just go and buy it if it were cheap enough. They always overprice it, too.

Mike: [00:13:30] The price and the release time, it’s just so inconsistent. It would suck to be in Australia because they get everything last, but in Asia, too. Everything gets pirated. You can see the search results and you can see which movies are popular. It’s all the same as the states. Yeah, of course nothing’s being purchased here because it never gets released and it’s way too expensive for most people out here, too. If they just had a dollar per movie or whatever, couple bucks, then released at the same time, I think they would have a huge market over here.

Matt: You also have the release windows for movies and things [00:14:00] which is always such a stupid, “We’re going release it in the movie theatre in April and then six months later you can get it on Blu-ray or DVD, then digital download or whatever.” The United States gets it one date and then Australia gets it another and China gets it another. We have the ability at the point because everything is done digitally. Just release the movies across the world and let me decide if I want it on Blu-ray [00:14:30] or if I want to go to the theatre or if I just want to watch it at home or whatever. Release everything at the same time as opposed to this staggered release window seems dumb.

Euvie: Yeah, I think it’s the licensing laws in all the different countries are just so archaic and varied. It just doesn’t make sense. They should have global licensing laws. Why do we even need middle men, anyway? Why can’t artists just release their own stuff and get paid directly?

Mike: That reminds me of Patreon, have you guys heard of Patreon?

Mike Johnston: [00:15:00] Yeah. Scott Santens who we had on, he’s one of the sub-reddit moderators for the basic income sub-reddit, he’s got a Patreon. He talked about it in our episode. I know he’s trying to build a basic income system actually using Patreon.

Mike: It seems pretty cool. The owner of Patreon, his name’s Jack Conte. He’s a musician himself and he started that to help out musicians like himself and now he runs his own Patreon campaign for himself, it’s pretty cool. Have you seen many [00:15:30] successes with that?

Mike Johnston: I haven’t really. I think it seems still like it’s fairly new. I’ve started to see more of the authors and artists and musicians that I follow starting to use it a little bit. I don’t know if you guys have seen this, maybe you see it more as digital nomads. Within the circles that I’ve been part of socially, a lot of people still pay attention to the mainstream entertainment and they’re looking up at that and not really paying attention to what their friends are doing for [00:16:00] side projects or things like that. I personally think people should be paying more attention to what the people that they’re connected to socially are doing in those spaces.

When you think about the future of work, if we’re all going to be freelancers, if everybody’s only paying attention to what the mega-mega-superstar professionals are doing, there’s not going to be a lot of money then in the rest of the economy. That whole superstar mentality, I mean there’s a lot of garbage in that. We’ve been big fans of some independent movies, independent documentaries and, obviously, [00:16:30] just in the podcasting space there’s a lot of creativity and things like that. I try to pay attention to it I guess.

Mike: I really like the idea of being able to prepay for content on almost a subscription model. There’s a lot of bands back home that I know that are struggling and if they could just get half of their audiences to send them a dollar per song, that’d be really easy to do I think. How cool would that be if you could fund your favourite artists to make a career out of it?

Matt: I know there have been a few bands [00:17:00] who have released albums free and then asked you to pay based on what you feel it’s worth or whatever. They averaged about $5 per download which, to me, seems fair, especially when you’re going directly to your fans and you’re cutting out the music industry who take the majority chunk anyhow.

Mike: Actually, yeah, if you think about it I will be more likely to pirate music if I think I’m taking money away from the big company, but if it’s just [00:17:30] an independent release, I’ll definitely pay them. I wonder if this middle man thing actually has a negative effect on the potential revenue coming in through these bands. Probably huge.

Mike Johnston: I would think it does. I know when – go back to Napster for a minute – when Napster was huge, both Matt and I had big CD collections and downloading from that, I just figured, “I’ve given all this money to the recording industry and a lot of these albums only have one or two good songs, I’m just taking back some of that by downloading these things.” Particularly when [00:18:00] they don’t release them anyway. I think the problem is, for most people, they’re so overwhelmed with things they have to pay attention to that it gets to that, “I don’t want to invest the time or energy.”

Euvie: People pay attention so much to this kind of top down media model, where they just know about the top artists and they watch TV and hear the top politicians. Maybe in the future it will be a lot more distributed… How would you say it, like a sharing economy. People will have more incentive to share their [00:18:30] friend’s project because their friends will also reciprocate and share their projects.

Mike Johnston: I think you’ve already seen that a lot. The problem is for a lot of people they feel so overwhelmed by the future and they’re bombarded by all this stuff that they don’t know where to look next. I took a [inaudible [0:18:46] on behavioural economics and one of the big lessons that came out of there is that most people actually pay more attention to loss – they’re concerned with losing what they have rather than finding something new. They’re fans of the bands that they’re [00:19:00] already fans of. They don’t want to miss the new thing from that band versus go out and maybe find something new.

Getting people to pay attention to new is really difficult sometimes. I’m just surprised that more people don’t share the projects by people they know. Everybody is chasing after these viral things and sharing cat photos or this or that meme. Those things get plenty of sharing already. What about your friend who put out an [00:19:30] album himself, just recorded MP3s or something like that? A lot of people don’t share their friend’s stuff it seems like, at least within my social circles. I don’t know if you’re experience is any different.

Matt: Yeah, no, it’s the exact same way. Almost like pulling teeth. I think a lot of people look at it as, “It’s not the traditional way of getting a business started or doing something like that.” It’s becoming that way and maybe it’s because Mike and I are a little bit older, we’re in that middle ground in between [00:20:00] the old people and the young people now who are just starting to do this more and we’re decentralizing.

Euvie: I wonder if as younger people get older, as the gen Ys are starting to get into their 30s, they’re starting to get their shit together a little bit in terms of organizing these kinds of decentralized systems and maybe they’ll start taking off more. Within those systems, obviously, there’s an ecosystem and a culture that [00:20:30] develops. There will be more incentive for people to have this reciprocity rather than just a top down feeding.

Mike: You mentioned resistance a couple times. Resistance to trying something new and there’s an element of this when it comes to marketing that’s really interesting, where you can have models of behaviour because people are resistant, so they act predictably. I took a course recently on Facebook about Facebook ads. This guy implemented this element of social proof into his ads, where he would target people [00:21:00] in cheaper countries, like Malaysia or Pakistan, and he’s rack up the likes and shares of the posts before he started to advertise to people in the US, because the click through rates and the conversion rates were so much higher on posts and ads that had more social engagement already present.

It’s interesting how that behaviour can become predictable and marketers and businesses can easily develop manipulating tactics to swing behaviour in one direction [00:21:30] or another. I think that generation versus I guess you would say generation Y, right, or even younger, where people are born into this technology and born advertised to constantly and their bullshit detection is through the roof, I think you can definitely see a difference in the generation and how they are successfully advertised to. How successfully you can advertise to them and get them to do something, one thing or another. For a younger generation, you introduce them to a Kickstarter campaign or music or [00:22:00] something and they maybe would be more willing to adopt that than some of the older generations who just like their bands and like their movies and don’t want to change.

Matt: I think watching people who are younger and, to some extent, everybody, but especially people who are younger who have been advertised and, like you said, have that bullshit detection, they seem to find things only through their friends and through recommendations. They really don’t find things, at least watching them, they don’t seem to ever really find things through [00:22:30] being advertised to. It’s more of a…

Euvie: Organic.

Matt: Yeah, even if you’re going to a restaurant, everybody checks Yelp, how is the restaurant or whatever, let’s see if it’s worth going to. If they have poor Yelp reviews, you just go somewhere else or whatever. Recommendations seem to carry way, way more weight than anything else.

Mike: From your perspective, where do you see the downsides or positive sides of this kind of behaviour that you see with the younger generation?

Mike Johnston: I think some of it easy to game. [00:23:00] You take Yelp reviews or things like that, there are people that sell those. Actually, in my [inaudible [0:23:06] behavioural economics course they did a study where the two restaurants across the street from each other, if they put actors even or just paid people to sit at tables out in front of it, that was the restaurant that ended up being popular even though they basically serve the same food at them. You guys did an episode about the way we’re wired through evolution. I’m forgetting the title of it now but I literally [00:23:30] just listened to it last night.

I think that there’s always these social pressures or social ways of… We’re all following our tribe so to speak. It’s just a matter of finding a tribe out there. I really personally have thought, ever since getting on the internet, that people should be more participating in the process of getting news or creating content. Even calling it creating content is such a BS way of speaking about it. [00:24:00] I think that everybody has a story and they should be sharing it. That’s one of the ways that, as a culture, we would develop a lot more empathy. I think Clay Shirky has a book called Here Comes Everybody. It’s on my reading list, I haven’t gotten to it yet. I read some stuff he wrote about the book, that idea that everybody has a story to share. The problem I’ve found, any time you get on the internet there’s a gazillion people doing whatever you could think of.

There’s already somebody doing [00:24:30] some variation of really any idea you could think of. I found this on Twitter. I end up retweeting a lot of things that say what I want to say better than I would say it myself. I don’t actually write a lot of tweets, I just mostly retweet. To some people, my account looks like a bot, because I retweet a lot. I’ve had a few friends unfollow me because they’re just like, “Enough already, quit it.” It’s like a fire hose. [00:25:00] I think both Matt and I approach that media as… I like the fire hose, I like getting that but I spend a lot of time doing it and I guess it seems like a lot of people just aren’t interested in putting their time in that way.

Euvie: Yeah, I think it’s interesting that you bring up the concept of content versus stories. We work in a marketing space, so we get approached a lot and hired a lot to do content marketing. Of course, that’s just a shitty way to say that you want to tell [00:25:30] impactful stories that your customers might like. Just educating our clients on that sometimes can get difficult. They’re like, “But where does the sale pitch come in?” Well, it doesn’t. That’s not the point.

Mike Johnston: The easiest way to get sales is to make something that doesn’t suck, but that can be extraordinarily difficult. In the end, sucking is a subjective term. I know a lot of people that love Dancing with the Stars and that makes me want to stab my eyes out with a [00:26:00] sandpaper knife. It’s just the things that people like, there’s no accounting for taste. What is it they say? 80 percent of everything is crap, it’s just that the 80 percent varies person to person. When you take that and you apply it to the world’s population, it means everything is not crap. One of the things that we’ve, I think, been interested in doing a podcast is just actually having something to say. It’s a lot easier to just have a conversation like we’re all having now than it is to come up with really [00:26:30] stellar pros, for example.

Mike: Yeah, talking and riffing on a subject, not even really picking what you’re going to talk about. I know what you mean with that. It sometimes seems so contrived when you’re trying to make something with the purpose of getting the most views on it as possible. Some compacted micro-piece of content. As marketers, we get that pressure from clients sometimes where it’s like, “If it doesn’t go viral, it hasn’t done its job.”

Mike Johnston: Well, the things that go viral [00:27:00] the best are the things that don’t suck. In ’97, I had a website go viral and it actually landed me on MTV news. At the time, I had just been doing it because I liked doing it. I had a day job, I worked in IT but I did this on the side. Suddenly it went viral and I was getting 10,000 visitors a day all of a sudden. They all had expectations. At the time, there weren’t the kind of tools that [00:27:30] you see now with websites. Very quickly I got burnt out on trying to update this site manually and I just gave up on it. It’s a lot easier now but you’re also competing with a lot more noise. For most people, they just get overwhelmed by the noise I think.

Euvie: That’s the point of creating something awesome is that you just really love doing it and that’s why you’re doing it, you’re not trying to engineer anything.

Mike Johnston: For us, I’m sure for you guys too, for podcasting, that’s really been where it’s at. [00:28:00] I love having the conversations that Matt and I had when it was just us and the guests we’ve had.

Euvie: Yeah, that’s just the point, talking shop and throwing around ideas. Sometimes you agree and sometimes you disagree, that’s the beauty of it.

Mike: What do you think have been some of the most interesting episodes that you guys have done? You’ve got quite a few under your belt now.

Matt: It wasn’t even a future one. One of my favourites anyhow was the lady we were talking about before, Lenore Skenazy. She wrote a book called Free Range Kids [00:28:30] and neither Mike or I have kids, so it was weird that it set it off for both of us I think was she talks about letting kids basically be kids and be by themselves as opposed to… I don’t know how it is where you guys are but in the United States now, kids are monitored from the minute they wake up until the minute they go to bed. All activities are organized. They don’t have that free time that Mike and I had when we were kids, [00:29:00] where it was just, “Alright, it’s summer time. The sun’s out, go outside and don’t come back until it’s dinner time.”

Mike: Yeah, go find a stick.

Matt: Exactly. We would entertain ourselves for the entire day. We talked with her about how different it is now, where kids just aren’t allowed to do that. She wrote the book because she got in a lot of trouble for letting her nine-year-old outside without supervision.

Euvie: That’s so crazy.

Mike Johnston: We actually did a whole episode on [00:29:30] the guests that we’ve done and what we liked about doing it. It’s out 158th episode, we called it sort of Behind the Curtain Two, because a long time ago we had done one called Behind the Curtain about our process. That entire episode was just about some of the guests we liked having. Everyone from a couple of the security experts we’ve talked to, Josh Corman in Space Rogue down to authors like [inaudible [0:29:54], like Martin Ford. We really enjoyed talking to Zoltan, I know you guys [00:30:00] have talked to him, too. He seems to make the rounds. We loved [inaudible [0:30:04], for example. I think you guys are going to have her on soon, right?

Euvie: Yup.

Mike Johnston: Yeah, she’s phenomenal to talk to, I think you guys will really like her. There’s starting to be, it seems like, a little bit of a podcasting future community. I don’t know if you guys have talked to the Review the Future guys yet. If you haven’t, I would recommend talking to them, too. We did an episode with them, they were a lot of fun.

Matt: Who was the lady we just had on recently that was from LA that was really, really good too?

Mike Johnston: Heather Schlegel.

Matt: [00:30:30] She was fantastic.

Mike Johnston: She’s an official futurist, as in, she’s got an MBA in forecasting and foresight. She does media production videos on the future. She had a couple I think that we linked to in our show notes with her. She talks a lot about finance, things like Bitcoin, she probably would be interested in Ethereum. Also, the future of intimacy and relationships. We talked to her about maybe coming back to talk sex robots, which has been one of our [00:31:00] most popular episodes dipped into that well a couple times. Our first episode on that topic was with Kate.

Mike: The sex robot thing, we haven’t even touched on that. That would be an interesting one to do. It’s so funny, the idea that you would become Gods and you still need to…

Euvie: Jerk off.

Mike: I doubt God is that horny.

Mike Johnston: You never know.

Mike: Why don’t we end it on that awkward note? Perfect.

Matt: Awesome.

Mike Johnston: Alright guys, nice to have you on.

Mike: [00:31:30] Yeah, this has been a lot of fun, thanks guys.

In this episode, we are joined by fellow podcasters Mike Johnston and Matt Bolton from the Robot Overlordz podcast. We get into a discussion about copyright, licensing laws, crowdfunding, and the present and future of the sharing economy.

We also talk about how and why they started their show, what topics they have discussed in previous episodes, and what some of their favourite guests have been. We then discuss sci fi movies and documentaries that we have recently watched, and what books Mike and Matt have been reading. Lots of resources in this episode, check them out below.

In this episode of The Future Thinkers Podcast:

  • Sci Fi movies and documentaries to watch
  • Napster and p2p sharing
  • Copyright and licensing laws
  • Patreon and crowdfunding platforms
  • Decentralized systems and the sharing economy
  • Behavior, loss aversion, resistance to change
  • How Gen Y is different from other generations
  • “Content” vs. Stories

Mentions & Resources:

Recommended & Mentioned Books:

More From Future Thinkers:

 

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