STEVE

Is that work or, I’m on social media–

MARLO

Right. 

STEVE

I use LinkedIn a lot for my day job. 

MARLO

Yeah, I do too. 

STEVE

Is that considered social media or is that a quote-unquote “productivity” and everything? But that’s everything. It’s all encompassing. The lawsuits, the mental health, the lost productivity, all of that goes into that. But it brings up a great point. the gray area. For me, I use LinkedIn a lot for my day job. And do you consider LinkedIn social media?

MARLO 

Of course. 

STEVE 

Okay. So it’s also a tool that’s replaced email in a lot of space. 

MARLO

But you could make the same argument for—

STEVE

So, is email social media?

MARLO

I don’t think it’s in the same realm, so I’d say no. Because that’s more of a direct messaging type of scenario—

STEVE

But there’s an evolution—

MARLO

There is. 

STEVE

—that has taken place. 

MARLO

Yeah. Because like you—

STEVE

But for me to go to work in the morning and sit there, and I never viewed that as productive. Sitting there, going over emails for an hour. And so you talk about the productivity side for me, that wasn’t productive. 

MARLO

It drives me nuts, too. In fact, I have a person that’s almost full time handling my personal email. Isn’t that insane? 

STEVE

That’s okay in the business place. But, okay, if I’m on a social media platform and we’ll say LinkedIn, which is a business one that I use a lot. I’ve skipped over emails because my good lord, I can’t read all this . 

MARLO
I think a lot of people have. You have email right? But if they really wanna get a hold of you-– 

STEVE

If you wanna get a hold of me. I tell everybody—

STEVE & MARLO

Text me. 

MARLO

Or, but a lot of people, I mean our younger people aren’t using text like they used to either. So they use their social media platform. What I’ve noticed—

STEVE

Messenger, Snapchat. 

MARLO

All of it. Instagram, TikTok. TikTok now has—

STEVE

It’s Russian. I try not to go there.

MARLO

It’s like you and I have to have, we have to be gurus of all the things. Because I have people that talk to me strictly through Facebook. I have somebody that I’ve been corresponding with about sponsoring a curling team. But it’s interesting. He’s contacting me through, Twitter my old cohort on the Tech Ranch. he’s a Facebook guy too but we always talk through Facebook, so we were messaging each other back and forth and I have some people that text me or message me through Twitter and now it seems like TikTok, I’m getting more and more messages through TikTok. It drives me crazy.

LinkedIn is by far the most popular for business stuff though. I always have a half a dozen or a dozen messages waiting for me on LinkedIn. And I like that. I always tell people, if you really want to get a hold of me, either you Slack (and that’s my internal stuff that we use) or if you message me on LinkedIn, I’ll probably get back to you because I’ll notice it. I won’t notice email because email, I get thousands of them a day. It’s just lost. 

STEVE

You can make a phone call on it. 

MARLO

Do you know how often your phone is used to actually make a phone call? 

STEVE

Not very. 

MARLO

It’s 8%.

STEVE

Is that it? 

MARLO

Isn’t that something? Texting is almost 20. 

STEVE

Yeah. 

MARLO

So texting has replaced the actual using the phone as a phone. There’ll be a day that maybe we don’t even call it a phone. Maybe it will just be the smart device that you carry along. 

STEVE

At that point just carry a tablet, right? 

MARLO

Yeah. 

STEVE

Because that was the other thing I’ve wondered is like, why don’t tablets make phone calls? Oh, there’s an app for that. . 

MARLO

Remember the day when we would just pick up the phone and call people?

STEVE

And that’s the thing with smart devices, they’re, we talk about AI occasionally, but your smart device is an AI device.

STEVE

One of the things we were talking about – Elon Musk. Some breaking news on Elon so which time is this, that he’s buying Twitter again? On again, off again. On and off again. On again. Off again, on again. Lawsuit. So is he buying it because of the potential lawsuit, or does he really want it or—? 

MARLO

I would have to think that, I don’t know. I just don’t think that the lawsuit had a lot to do with his decision, but people are saying that it is. How do you force somebody to buy your business? Just because they said you’re gonna buy it when you’re the one that said you have this many followers and you don’t, it’s come out that Twitter has a significant amount of bots running. 

Some people estimate 40% of all the accounts are fraudulent accounts. Meaning that there are bots, people and this is rampant. It’s rampant on Facebook right now too. The cloning of accounts is out of control. It’s really rampant right now so you have to be careful with that. But anyway, getting back to Twitter. This is what Elon was saying is that your company isn’t worth this much because you don’t really have that many followers. Maybe Elon just decided that it was worthwhile even at the 44 billion to get it. I don’t know. Did you see the footage though of the SpaceX? The Falcon Nine in front of the full Moon the other day? Oh my goodness. 

STEVE

Was that cool? 

MARLO

It was so cool. And it wasn’t just a photo. There’s actually video and you can see the flame. In the video, you can see the flames coming out of the back of the rocket as it’s going in front of the full moon. This is – you gotta be kidding.  So I highly recommend just go YouTube it or Google it or whatever.

STEVE

We had a question about whether or not you can trust internet searches. Because you got me thinking, okay, in this day and age, plagiarism aside for college kids and high school kids doing their homework, and nowadays we’ve gotten to the point where Google it. But now I’m thinking of sites like Wikipedia that are open for interpretation, people can add to them. Do you trust some of those sources? So how do you do a search or research and know that you’re getting reputable information in today’s day and age? 

MARLO

Yeah. I think, first thing is that – just don’t blindly trust the first website that you go take a look at. I think you need to verify that information by at least one more. And I would say even three sources – the first one is amazon.com, then you have Wikipedia, then you have Merriam Webster. Okay, so this one’s actually not so bad, right? 

STEVE

I’d go to Merriam Webster. Cause I wanna know where it came from. I know that Amazon is a sales site. Wikipedia I don’t always trust, right? And it might be an ancillary resource, right? But okay I’m gonna go to the Merriiam Webster because that’s where the definition is. So rule of thumb are you, should you look for things that don’t have a connection to sales? 

MARLO

Yes. If you’re doing research, I would certainly do that. Now, if you’re doing research to buy something, and then of course, same thing holds true here. Go and check out two, three sources if you know exactly what you’re looking for, if I’m gonna buy this particular type of pen that I’m holding in my hand, for example, I would certainly research this pen. Go to find two or three sources that sell it.

STEVE

But the point is, you have to do diligence whether it’s having to click on a friend request on social media, or you’re doing some research or I don’t think enough is made about high school, middle school kids that are doing homework and some of the things that they may be exposed to as they’re doing some of this research. Parents really need to be diligent. 

MARLO

Yeah, they should. And depending on how old the kids are, like your routers, you can put parental filters on now, which I think is important. You and I could probably come up with a bunch of things that could be researched. Other types of industries like the adult industry might have zeroed in on as well. And those are keywords to take people to pornography or what have you  and it could be all kinds of other stuff. It could be racial intentions. There’s all kinds of stuff that can come up that your kids will inadvertently find so—

STEVE

Is it the fact that the kids are inadvertently finding them or that they’re finding the kids? Because with a lot of these and I come back to political agendas, agendas in general that get politicized. You wind up having so critical race theory and gender issues and things that some of those sites are actively going out and seeking your children.

MARLO

No doubt about that. 

STEVE

Yes. Because they want that influence on your kids. As a parent, Are there programs, are there filters? What do you do as a parent other than just sit there and look over your kid’s shoulder as they’re on the internet the whole time? 

MARLO

And you can even go deeper to this, right? What’s Google’s agenda? What’s Microsoft’s agenda? So the search engine results that you’re getting, what’s the algorithm doing? You have other search engines to choose from as well. You have Bing from Microsoft, you have DuckDuckGo. There you go. I haven’t used it a lot recently.

STEVE

So that brings up the question then, as a parent, how do you pick a good search engine? Because you’re helping your child, which nowadays you need to have a computer for success in education.

MARLO

Yep. 

STEVE

So you’re helping a child. So, you set up that laptop or that desktop at home for your child to use. How as a parent do you make an informed decision to go “okay, we’re gonna use Bing or we’re gonna use this” because that little step makes a big difference.

MARLO 

Makes a big difference. 

STEVE

So, how do you walk through that process as a parent?

MARLO

I would just research them as well. Just like you would research, Google it or Bing it or whatever. We say Google it because Google is dominant. It’s like the Phillip Screwdriver. It’s the same thing, right? 

STEVE

You go back to the marketing strategies from the fifties and sixties and stuff, and people call things like down south, it’s I’ll have a Coke but clear or colored. 

MARLO

Yeah. That’s just it wasn’t that long ago with Yahoo. In recent history, Yahoo was the dominant search engine for a few years. AOL was huge right away, Google just has been around a little longer now and not that the other ones have disappeared. They just – Google’s been dominant, but yeah.

STEVE

You could think Google’s acquired them, is what happens. A lot of cases they’ll gobble up smaller entities. 

MARLO

Yep. So yeah, I would just research and see that it falls into what you want your kids to be exposed to. There’s all kinds of ways to do that, but just be aware. That’s the simple thing to follow, I think.