Dynamics Corner
About Dynamics Corner Podcast "Unraveling the World of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Beyond" Welcome to the Dynamics Corner Podcast, where we explore the fascinating world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and related technologies. Co-hosted by industry veterans Kris Ruyeras and Brad Prendergast, this engaging podcast keeps you updated on the latest trends, innovations, and best practices in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem. We dive deep into various topics in each episode, including Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Power Platform, Azure, and more. Our conversations aim to provide valuable insights, practical tips, and expert advice to help users of businesses of all sizes unlock their full potential through the power of technology. The podcast features in-depth discussions, interviews with thought leaders, real-world case studies, and helpful tips and tricks, providing a unique blend of perspectives and experiences. Join us on this exciting journey as we uncover the secrets to digital transformation, operational efficiency, and seamless system integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and beyond. Whether you're a business owner, IT professional, consultant, or just curious about the Microsoft Dynamics 365 world, the Dynamics Corner Podcast is the perfect platform to stay informed and inspired.
Dynamics Corner
Episode 427: Framed: A Villain's Perspective on Social Media - An Unplugged Conversation
Join this enlightening conversation with Tim O'Hearn, author of "Framed: A Villain's Perspective on Social Media," as he joins hosts Kris and Brad in a candid discussion. Recorded on June 5th, 2025, this episode of Dynamics Corner Unplugged explores the intricate web of social media's evolution, the ethical dilemmas of growth hacking, and the emotional rollercoaster of digital interactions. Tim shares his unique insights from his journey as a software engineer and his reflections on the internet's impact on social interactions. Join us for a thought-provoking exploration of technology's past and present, and predictions for the future.
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Welcome everyone to not another episode of Dynamics Corner. This is a new segment. Dynamics Corner Unplugged and we have an amazing topic today and I'm just baffled. I'm your co-host, chris.
Speaker 2:And this is Brad. This episode was recorded on June 5th 2025. Chris, chris, chris, I like that Dynamics Corner Unplugged. What is Dynamics Corner, dynamics corner unplugged? It's when we talk about a topic not related to the dynamics industry or the dynamics products week. With us today, we had a great episode about a book that we recently read, called Framed a villain's perspective on social media. With us today, we had the opportunity to speak with the author of that book, tim Orr. Hello, hey guys, hey good evening.
Speaker 1:How are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's evening over here, Chris. It's evening over there, on this side of the globe, how are you doing? Yeah, it's evening over here.
Speaker 3:Chris, it's evening over there On this side of the globe. How are you doing this evening? Yeah, not bad.
Speaker 2:We finally got a hot one in New York here, very nice. Interesting fact. I recently, by saying within the last half hour, sent a screenshot of the weather that it's warmer up north than it is here. Oh interesting, wow, so it was five degrees warmer.
Speaker 1:we have the humidity because rainy season started, but can you tell the difference, though, between five degrees and other degrees, like 20 degrees? Uh, it depends on humidity, I guess. Right, I think it's the humidity in the sun. I.
Speaker 2:I think when it gets cold, like we talked about negative 10, negative 20, it's all the same thing. So that's it's interesting. So you have a warm one. New York is the worst when the weather gets warm, by the way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no doubt about it, but no, it's supposed to hit like 89 today, so it's steamy, it is steamy, so it's steamy.
Speaker 2:It is steamy, it's interesting. So I've been doing a lot of thinking about some things, chris, and it's relevant and, tim, that I was looking back at what some people may say was sort of like the downfall of the Internet or a pivotal point to it, and that was the inventing of the infinite scroll. I read in a book many months ago with, I think was slow productivity, talked about how uh azaraskan I think it was back in 2006 invented the infinite school, whereas early on you used half to um next page yeah, next page.
Speaker 2:And now you just have that infinite scroll on your speed. So, uh, it's. It's interesting when, when I read that, I thought about that and it made me think about a lot of things. But do you also want to know what made me think about a lot of things? What's that? What is that? What is that? I recently read a book and I will tell you honestly, I have 12 pages of questions and I'm nervous that I won't be able to get to them all from the conversation. The book that I read was Framed A Villain's Perspective on Social Media. Awesome, and with that, sir, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 3:My name's Tim O'Hearn. I began my career as a software engineer many years ago. I spent most of my 20s actually working in quantitative finance as one application of my skills, but I think the most unique side quest here was that I worked on the underside of social media, so thinking about some of these unique paths of breaking terms of service and profiting from breaking the rules, which ultimately led to me writing a book called Framed A Villain's Perspective on Social Media, which talks about growing up with the internet, learning how to program and break the rules, profiting from breaking the rules and then coming to terms with this gigantic mess that is the internet today.
Speaker 2:It is a gigantic mess and I will say when I was reading this book, it is very informative, very well written. So many things went through my mind when I was reading this book and first it was a walk down memory lane. Even generationally, we're slightly different, but I do remember a lot of the points that you had talked about and I really had a lot of aha moments. It made me go back to which you mentioned later in the book. Early in the book you were talking about instagram and bots and stuff and I was thinking the first thought was, before I talked about some other thoughts, was instapy. And then I said, uh, instapy, I used instapy to get followers and to even to that point I actually did a pull request for instapy. Wow, to add the multi-user logging so you could have multiple users and have the logging to it. So I actually go back in history. I have a pull request for something that I did for instapy to go no way.
Speaker 1:Yes, sir, it's still in your github I still in my github.
Speaker 2:I looked it up I printed it out I have the issue and the pull request number and I did quite a bit with Instapy early on. I knew nothing about Python, but I was able to figure out what I needed to do to get it going.
Speaker 1:So you had me.
Speaker 2:Nostalgia. Nostalgia was everything. It brought me all the way back in the days when I started out before the Internet, when we had dial up and I ran a bulletin board with Fidonet and a couple other things. But before we get into it and, by the way, I do like your stories, like with Cutlet, with Shark Social and all the names that you have it was great. I really want to get into all of that. What made you write the book? I want to inspire you to write the book. I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, brad, I would say a lot of the motivation came from reading other contemporary works that were supposedly big tech exposes and always feeling like something was missing, to an extent also feeling like I could do better, and, as I workshopped more and more of this content, realizing that I didn't necessarily have a screenplay here, I didn't have this wonderful made-for-Hollywood narrative, but I had enough that hadn't been told before, and so I was motivated by the fact that if I didn't capture this, it was probably going to be lost, starting with MySpace and going through a lot of the nitty-gritty of what even happened on Instagram.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. Go ahead, Chris. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:I'm sorry. I'm curious why the title Framed?
Speaker 3:A lot of the titles of these books were using terms like framed, disrupted, irresistible. You have a lot of these common usage patterns for it, so I'm like let me show that my book fits in with these, but also that it stands out almost as a meta commentary of contemporary technology books. Framed specifically is interesting because, if you guys remember early web 2.0, when you had any type of content feed, there usually was a very thick border, also known as a frame, around each piece of content, and this was even apparent on early Instagram, where it's like now you don't see it as much like even in this, the recording studio. Here we have much, much thinner, kind of all the way stretched to the screen, border type frames. In the past, these frames were actually almost like an artistic element, so I thought it was a play on words as well as it was a meta commentary on these things, in addition to a framing being my perspective on something. I love it.
Speaker 2:No, it's great. And, to go back to it, it was a great framing and I think you'll walk through and talk through the technology and what was going on. If anybody, I recommend reading it because it will take you through memory lane and even, as I've mentioned, even generationally. You know someone with my generation working in the tech industry, paying attention and working with all of this. Your viewpoint was a little bit different, which was, I appreciate it, because it was a generational gap with how we look at technology or what is going on and what we do with it and how we adopt it. So it's wonderful. The other thing, and again I'll start off with you know, some levity type things before I get into a lot of the questions, but, chris, I want you to go to whendidmyparentsbangcom.
Speaker 1:Someone's going to do that right now.
Speaker 2:Go to whendidmyparentsbangcom because, tim, when did my parents bangcom come into play?
Speaker 3:A long time ago when I was in college, to play. A long time ago, when I was in college, you began to see this ease of use of like somebody learning how to program and then deploying a web app all by yourself. So, going from I'm taking these classes on theory, I'm taking calculus, let me just make a website that I can actually use. That might also fit in with, like, a social tie-in. So I created a website called when did my parents bangcom? I launched it in roughly 2014. And the idea was that it was a calculator site based on your birth date plus some other information which would estimate your date of conception, which was like, very interesting, because everybody has a date of conception and people like, when you think about it, you're like, oh, like you're a Valentine's Day baby, you're a Thanksgiving baby. I wanted to harness that while also practicing how to code a front-end web app, and also a very early integration with Facebook's API, so you could link your Facebook and pull your birth date from that and then share the content on Facebook as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah it was great, that's fantastic.
Speaker 2:The inspiration I think you had mentioned was from you know when am I going to die, or whatever that was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, death, clock Death clock, another one of those. Like I said, it's interesting, a lot of good information in here and, as I mentioned, going back a lot to I'd like the terminology, because, even going back to when you're talking about early days, in the onset of some of the stuff, like with the pimping MySpace, we talked where you created MySpace and the evolution of, as you talked about, we talked where you created MySpace and the evolution of, as you talked about, the MySpace counter, and then moving on to Facebook and having likes, and then the talk about the dislikes, and then even to the Twitter point of having Twitter bots for followers, and then obviously progressing up to a big portion of it you talk about is Instagram, which was great, and also, I really am interested, interested. I have to talk to you about those apis uh, even the one that you had to take down, uh, or uh that you mentioned in the book too.
Speaker 2:So, um, on the top friends, I think api for facebook is what it was that you had in there yeah, sure as well, so with this and I think we can jump into it, but someone that's reading it or you think about reading it what is the key takeaway that you think that you have for the book?
Speaker 3:We've missed a lot of this context on the history of the web, meaning why it is what it is today, and this push and pull between people like us as users, platforms like the publicly traded companies today, and then that sneaky, pesky layer of advertisers and platform adjacent services. Everybody wants something different and in many, many cases these wants and needs are naturally conflicting. There's only so much space on the screen, there's only so much money to go around, and we notice these very odd patterns of behavior and of information retrieval born out of this.
Speaker 2:That's great and I liked how you talked about that. Speaking of the space on the screen, your history again, the history of the internet. You were reading on the Scranton Times with the advertising.
Speaker 2:I liked as you went through it because I remember that time personally and I remember being so frustrated, even thinking of some of the popular sites. Now, as you scroll and the ads pop up, they take and you jump and then you read three sentences and go forward. So it really goes to something that you had mentioned in the book that resonated as well, which is just a quote from your book. My eyes are getting old at this point, but my corruption of screen grab no longer refers to impulsively saving what appears on a screen. My idea of screen grab refers to the impulse to physically grab the screen, the device, even when not beckoned by vibration, sound which we'll talk about some of these or visual notification. It is a cerebral clutching of electronics. And when we talk about screen grabbing, you explained screen grabbing originally a little bit differently. What is screen grabbing?
Speaker 3:I see screen grabbing as most fundamentally the practice of taking a screenshot of what appears on the screen.
Speaker 3:So this original, you know you're taking a screenshot, you're taking a grab, whatever we have all these different terms for it.
Speaker 3:But in the chapter which I named screen grabbing, we really begin talking about addictive types of behavior and antisocial behaviors, problematic behaviors born out of mobile device usage, and the hypothesis that I push there, which could probably be a standalone book, is that a lot of these design elements were actually borrowed from video games. So some of the things that I remember being so addictive of growing up with even a PlayStation, to then much more like World of Warcraft and other types of games that have a reputation for hardcore gameplay. We see a lot of this beckoning and a lot of this desire to play and play more and ascend high scores that then was transferred to social media apps. I see that and I will add guys, that chapter was originally probably three times as long and I just had to make a decision is this book mainly around the addictive nature or is it more around the history? And what I did there was so much more there that I just had to cut Is that like a gamification?
Speaker 1:Is that the term? Similar to that where, you like, you create an app that makes it like a game, so you get addicted to it because it's like it's a game and be able to?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I to reduce it down to a word, I think we are talking about gamification and a lot of contemporary like research. Nobody has really addressed it, but for me, the way I grew up and what I remember was for so long on these either early apps like twitter or like late, when everyone was still using them on their parents' desktop browser, you were still searching for new stuff to do, like the news feeds weren't that good, you were still like clicking through other tabs and it wasn't immersive, whereas at the same point in time, video games were incredibly immersive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It is, and you experimented with a lot too, because you went through a lot of the things that you talk about and also with with purchasing Twitter followers and and keeping score on that, and you talked about the scores with with likes and it just, like I said, it just resonates with what people look at right now. They look at, they care about the follows, they look care about the likes, they care about all of that information versus the depth of it. Right, it's not the depth of what you're doing or the depth of what you have, but I can have, as you had what 5,000 fake followers as a senior in high school, which was a key point, and then going through your career. Then you started targeting some of this more with advertising when you were over at Cutlet and it's not advertising, excuse me, but tracking uses. Can we talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 3:The term growth hacking comes up a lot, and it's funny because I was recently asked to interview for a position where it was essentially called a growth engineer.
Speaker 3:So now we've had software engineers, devops engineers, product engineers and now something actually called growth engineers and I said, hey, I don't think I'm a growth engineer. I'm kind of like a backend Python guy. Then I looked at the job description and I realized that the job description was describing all of the things that I did when I was the special projects lead at this app called Cutlet, and what that was comprised of was these persuasive technology systems and analyzing the behavior of my systems or the success of what I did, based on these same metrics. So a lot of it was reduced to oh hey, tim, they're spending 5% more time in the app compared to version one Good job. Or, hey, they're returning more often when you sent this push request, or, sorry, this push notification versus this push notification Good job. So in this practice of growth engineering, a lot of what I was doing, the only success metric was improving these user stickiness metrics, such as how often they're active and how engaged they are when they are using.
Speaker 1:Got it. So growth hacking? So I'm just trying to understand all of this. So growth hacking is essentially you trying to keep them on the screen or trying to keep them on the app as long as you can. Is that a fair statement?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it seems like when growth hacking has now been rebranded as growth engineering, because I guess hacking is also a dirty word.
Speaker 3:Sounds professional, yeah, and even I was like, wow, that's interesting, this only happened within the last week. Also, my book is already published, so I see this role and they're like, oh well, you could do this, maybe you could do that. And I'm like geez, like growth engineer and it's all of these things. So a lot of it. Yeah, it does come down to running experiments on users and your career essentially rising and falling based on the success of those experiments. The more mainstream approach to this we see at all social media companies, but they all just use generic titles for their employees because they have so many employees, right? So if you have tens of thousands of employees and some of them do work on growth or consumer facing products, they're probably just called software engineers. We're just seeing more, more of this like title. You know more divergence into specific titles at smaller startups.
Speaker 2:It is a nice name for someone who wants you to be addicted or draw to the app which you know. I was reading some of this stuff and I just think of the dopamine rush, right, which you talked about with becoming attached to your phone or becoming attached to the vibration, to almost where it's like it is the relationship when you're having a text from someone. I think, yeah, I will keep saying to everybody, like I said, I'm I'm jumping around a little bit because there was so much in this book and I'd really felt as part of your life the way you went through it, because you talked about so many parts of like, even your dating relationships with women and the texting and the feeling of just getting the buzz and the vibration, which was where you associated the buzzing, the text, with your female friend's affection. It was a good comment that you made.
Speaker 3:This is something where I really feel that I could have carved out this chapter screen grabbing and had a standalone book, because these are things that as soon as I thought back to like what was going on in my head I mean, to understand what's going on in a 14 or 15 year old's head is tough to begin with, but to think back to how I remember it going down, so much of it was was dating centric, you know, and this is dating well, well before what we think of modern, you know, like app assisted dating.
Speaker 3:This is really the beginning of it, the first frontier, and nobody else has written about it in the same way. And, of course, in some cases I look like a dork, but in other cases people have read it the same way and they're saying, wow, like, this makes a lot of sense and maybe that is the most the strongest association that most people have with their phones. Like, when you open your phone or you turn it over, you unlock it, what are you actually hoping to see? Like what's number one? A lot of people would say it's the equivalent of the risky text or the old flame who decides to rekindle things. I don't think we're that far detached from it. We just have all these different ways, and a lot of people are probably embarrassed to admit that.
Speaker 2:That is a great point as far as what you're going to get or what you're going to see or what you're going to feel, or that like again, that dopamine rush that you become addicted to and you almost become trained for those vibrations of those things. And then you're and you talked about, we all talk about is the attention span that you're starting to have now with all these constant notifications, uh, and the, the alerts of those notifications as well too. Um, and then you did also some pretty interesting things. Uh, you participated in the hackathon as well, early on at a young age. That was a very interesting story. It's quite impressive as well, too, to talk about that.
Speaker 2:So, how was that working? At the hackathon the internet, you get to see broadly what's out there.
Speaker 3:And I went to a good school, but not MIT. So you're looking and saying, okay, what are the top jobs, how much money can you make? Whatever, and back in you know 20, again, like 2013, 2014, 2015,. It was a really exciting time to be studying computer science, I would argue, much more exciting than today, where it's kind of like the opposite.
Speaker 3:I participated in hackathons because I saw the hackathon as this contest where you would be brought together with like-minded individuals and all of the cool companies that maybe only would visit the campus of UPenn of the top schools. They would maybe give people like me a shot, and going to Penn Apps at University of Pennsylvania was one of these really cool experiences for me, and I'm also happy to say that some of the specific projects that I mentioned as far as having inspired me, I've actually reached out to some of these people after publishing the book and they've enjoyed it too, and they've said, yeah, sure, I'll take a read and whatever, because they realize that people might not be talking about it with this vast appreciation 10 years later, but they probably should be, because there's a lot of things there that again have been completely lost. What a hackathon was 10 years ago is nothing like they are today.
Speaker 2:That's what I feel as well, too. Speaking of reaching out, one thing I found that was interesting you did in the book is you talked about how, years later, speaking of reflection, you reached out to someone that cyberbullying's a big topic today, and you admittedly had someone on the within the book that you talked about. We can talk a little bit more about them with the artist the music artist and how you reached out to him after you know, as you were writing this book, thinking back and talking about how he felt with the bullying. Can we talk?
Speaker 3:a little bit about that. Thank you for pointing this one out, because the title of this chapter is probably the weirdest in the book. I believe it's called Say Hello to my New Gangster Friend, and the spoiler here is that I was the new gangster friend and it's because I had become friends with someone on MySpace and I had entered into this juvenile cyberbullying relationship with him before we even knew what cyberbullying was Like. This was at a point where the only term we had to describe this was maybe trolling, and essentially what I did was we're talking 20, I don't know 2007. At this point I found this essentially EDM artist, so somebody producing electronic music on MySpace, and for some reason I decided right then and there that I didn't like his music and you know I get into it more in the book. But I, you know I was just saying hey, you're stupid, your music sucks, and these are just like. These aren't even cruel comments compared to what you see on the internet today.
Speaker 3:But it was something, and the point is that it was my negative, you know my attack, basically. And then his attack back where he's saying oh, you know, this guy doesn't, for example, use G's at the end of words that end in I and G. So he's a gangster, right. He's kind of adopting some of this more like Ebonics based speech or whatever, and I love rap music. So it was true, if you looked at my thing you would say here's this kid in you know, scranton, pennsylvania, who's like 14 years old maybe and has like rap lyrics and things of a culture that is clearly not his. Uh, meanwhile, this guy, eagle um, actually lives in the arctic circle in norway. So what a bizarre clash of cultures.
Speaker 3:And uh, for the book, I remembered, just remembered, just ragging on the guy and I remembered our exchange and I said you know, it would be really useful, not just for the book but also on a personal note, to reach out to him and be like, hey, man, I'm sorry for being a dick, and let's like see what we could do here. And he was super receptive to it. We sat down for an interview. I apologized he had nothing to apologize for, but he apologized anyway and I kind of built a chapter around it. I think that's a really unique one. It's kind of like this notion of you know, the comeback or the revisiting of it, the redemption, as we've seen. You know, it's kind of like my redemption story, but also talking about the extremely harmful and potentially far-reaching effects, because I remembered it from 15 years ago. He also remembered it from 15 years ago, so it wasn't like a passing blow. We really went at it there.
Speaker 2:That's the point that I also wanted to bring to. It is that story. It just shows that the importance of what you do because again, the cyber bullying where you can write, as you had mentioned, your music, sucks right. It's bad to this artist on there that you didn't have any other reason to interact with besides to comment, and again, with the internet, in this type of action you really don't see the person on the other side, right.
Speaker 2:So now with this, we can all sort of hide behind that keyboard you know, be a keyboard warrior, as I call them and say things to someone, but to see that 15 years later, when you did reach out to him, you spoke with him, he remembered it. It just shows that some of these things that you say or do do have a lasting impact on someone, and that's something that really resonated me do have a lasting impact on someone, and that's something that really resonated me and I admired that you actually did go back to apologize. I don't know what his life would have been different. Like you know, obviously, he's still doing music, but just to just to know that someone says, hey, I'm sorry, I did that to you must have been good for him as well too.
Speaker 3:Yeah and hey, I sent a free copy of the book to the Arctic Circle there in Norway and it was just very interesting A part of growing up, this type of redemption arc that you don't often get. I also visited Norway last year so when we were originally talking I was like hey, I was like I didn't even know you were based here. I was just in Oslo, you know, reporting on a track meet and you know I thought it would be worth reaching out. He remembered it and I guess the other ironic part, which I do admit in the chapter, is some of it is really just part of growing up and tastes changing, because now I listen back to his music. I actually think he was way ahead of his time and I listened to music just like his almost every day while I was writing the book. So that's the greatest irony. It's like the music didn't suck. It was actually great and it's still better than anything I could do.
Speaker 2:That's great and that is quite ironic. And again, I know we're talking about some of these points and some of the chapters out of order. Again, just to go through, because, again, a lot of it to me. To be honest with you, I told you I have 12 pages of notes because when I was reading this I was so I couldn't put it down because of the walk through memory lane. I keep reading that to everybody. Just go through it.
Speaker 2:And it brought back so many points of my life as these things were occurring and it's almost like music. It made me realize that music used to be. You know, when you think of memories, you always think of associations and a lot of times people have music and they think of when a song was published or released and that tells you what time you were in your life. Okay, I remember doing this, I remember this going on, but as you were going through the story it was. It took a different twist for me because I remember my space, even though I barely used it. I remember the page counter. It made me go back to thinking about, as I I said, running a BBS sitting in the computer lab on a VAX playing a MUDS.
Speaker 2:You started talking about some of these other games, the multiplayer games and Pocket God being a big thing. I did play Pocket God too, by the way, when it first came out. So it was a good walk down memory lane for me too. And it also took to me the evolution of technology and the level of participation, because there's this strange thing that goes on on YouTube now for me and I just don't understand it. And I grew up playing sports and then I remember pong. Right, I played pong, I bought the pong machine. And then I remember the Atari 2600, playing video games with my friends and doing things. And then you have the multi uh shooter games or the multi-participant games, as you talked about I think it was runescape you talked about in the book. You talked about a few of them and you start playing with your friends. But now we have this non-participative generation that sits and watches people play video games, they watch people ski, they watch things for entertainment. They never really play, they never really do, but they're participating by watching. That's wild to me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's almost something that I backed myself into as I wrote the book. But in conducting, you know, these basically basically conversations at bars, when you're meeting new people or even talking to your friends, like, hey, I'm writing this, what was your memory of this? That? And the other thing, the clearest, most distinct generation gap is definitely this change from playing games to watching other people play games. It's the most clear where so many people are like, yeah, you know, I have this little cousin and he just sits there and watches people play. And I come with the point that when I was a kid, if I went to my cousin's house and I was forced to watch him play games, that was torture. Yes, yes, that was a form of torture.
Speaker 1:Give me a controller.
Speaker 3:It's unbelievable the amount of hours that people sink into this. You'd have to think that there's some relation between this new trend and maybe less of a critical thinking ability. To some extent there has to be a correlation.
Speaker 2:I still don't understand it. I know, chris you, you had some fun with youtube and recording games as well, and I still didn't get like how people sit and yeah, you know what, people watch on youtube.
Speaker 1:It's it's it is. It is pretty fascinating. I never quite understand, and I have young kids, you know, and and I know my younger, younger kid watches from time to time people play games and I was like, no, how about you play the game? How about you and I play a game? Right? But at some point I think it was like 10 years ago, brad, I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:So I had a YouTube channel and I just started playing games, literally had like 10,000 subscribers. At that point I'm like, okay, this is not what I want to do. I just wanted to play a game and just record it and put it out there. But yeah, I never quite understand that it's. Maybe I'll never understand, but I like that you had mentioned there's a correlation between no longer having any critical thinking and just watching someone play. So I don't know, maybe it sounds like that's a possibility, because then you're not being put into the actual game yourself and being able to think for yourself, right, because you get to learn hand-eye coordination and all that stuff and it's a huge benefit down the road.
Speaker 2:Could some of it potentially be, though, that by not playing and it's other things that people watch too I think you mentioned skiing or snowboarding, and you know people watch other events is it something driven to where you're not participating? Therefore, you're not failing, but you watch somebody else do it.
Speaker 2:you can take the enjoyment of it, and that's what I started thinking of as I was reading through what you were talking about in the book on this non-participative generation that we have on. Why are they not participating? What's the enjoyment in watching someone? I could see watching someone play a game if I was stuck. So I'm playing a game, I'm stuck at a difficult spot. Maybe I can see how did somebody else get through that challenging portion of the game. But as I was reading this, I'm like I think it all goes back to that Everyone gets a trophy type thing that we talk about Everyone. You know the participation trophy and and not learning how to deal with failure or your emotions with that too. So I wonder if that has something to do with it yeah, brad, I'm with you on that, that's.
Speaker 3:I couldn't take it much farther than that. But there has to be some relationship there where it's just so easy to watch but it's actually hard to log in, load, get in the lobby, get in a game and then get your ass kicked.
Speaker 2:I can understand why that's intimidating for some yeah, and you don't have to hear someone bully you and say you suck if you lose and have to deal with that.
Speaker 2:So again, a very big thing. Another geez I do want to talk a lot about APIs. That's on my list too. I don't know, We'll see how much time we have. I could talk with you all night, all week, all year, and I hope to talk to you more about some things afterwards as well. But one other portion of the book that interested me is when you talked about summing up everything with. I always pronounce names incorrectly. I should look it up, but even I read the phonetics. I'm poor at it, so you know, just put that into me being old. The Plutchik diagram, yeah, yeah. So could you explain a little bit? What is that? Into me being old? The Plutchik diagram, yeah, so could you explain a little bit what is that diagram and what's the relevance within the book?
Speaker 3:Originally, I found that I had to think of these terms or words to describe what our baseline motivations were for using the Internet for playing video games, for logging into Instagram, for playing video games, for logging into Instagram and beyond dopamine, which I think is maybe a cop-out at this point. Everyone kind of knows that I found this diagram which is called Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, and it's basically this wheel where you have these bipolar relationships between positive and negative emotions and also some other like derived emotions that are kind of in between one and another. And what I attempt to do in the book is stitch together my history, my usage patterns, and extrapolate that widely with not just dopamine but thinking about what are the emotions that I hope to feel when I'm online and why social media is so uniquely positioned to take us through the full spectrum of these emotions. So essentially saying, oh, if you're like, basically okay, you could be happy, but then sometimes, if you can be happy, then you could also be sad. Sometimes, if you could be like anticipatory, sometimes you could also be disappointed.
Speaker 3:You have these different emotions and of course we would prefer the positive emotions, but also we have these maybe desires for things like drama or for sadness or for anger and their intensities. So sometimes it's like there's anger, there's rage, right. There's just, you know, annoyance, right. These are all in the same and they kind of get more intense. So the more I read about it, I found that I was actually able to go through specific things that I've done on Instagram mainly, and draw them to some of these emotions that would be placed in distinct parts of Plutchik's diagram. And I think it's really unique because also, some researchers who have worked with Facebook or Meta have also come and admitted that these platforms are not bad because they're not introducing new emotions. It's just that they reflect real life where these emotions good and bad are present. So I found it pretty interesting, but it did take a long time to kind of form that chapter.
Speaker 2:Yes, and then you went into it. Though it's another interesting point that I hope to just maybe talk a little bit of theory about is you mentioned that with these emotions good or bad and you had a good exercise and you're good examples of take a look at your life, you have the emotions and then put down what you expect for these, like you had mentioned. So the book has a good example, but people desire an emotional roller coaster. So now that you have these feelings identified, now the emotional roller coaster that people desire, uh, one there in life what are your thoughts on that? I do have some comments on that.
Speaker 3:I was just thinking a little about this too many of us expect life and relationships to play out more in this dramatic, almost cinematic, uh, sense, where you have this rising action, right, you have the climax, you have the falling action when you think about like playwrights or how movies are constructed. We've been so overwhelmed with these examples of really good entertainment. I believe that we're going to great lengths for our own lives and our own you know just mundane aspects of life to actually kind of follow that same track, that roller coaster of more of the extremes of emotions. And you could say on one end it's probably because we've been desensitized with this onslaught of different vectors for entertainment, but also just having greater awareness of it, we've definitely had just more and more desire to go to the extremes, and we see that for sure.
Speaker 3:Where you used to have trolling and then you had cyberbullying, and now we have like attacks on the internet that get like really really personal and get taken too far, but the emotions being drawn from there are quite similar.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I make the case like look when it used originally with video games, you were either really happy or really sad because you either won the game or you lost the game and what ended up happening was when social media platforms first came out, they were muted compared to what you could feel in a video game, and this has been captured by videos like Boom Headshot, which is about Counter-Strike I'm sure both of you guys remember that where you have this crazed guy who is almost channeling the image of like a crack addict, like someone who is so obsessed with the game, so obsessed with getting headshots, and basically, when he loses in the game he becomes suicidal. The point is that it took a very long time for social networks, for their products, to catch up to this extreme level of emotion Along the way they provided all the other emotions under the sun, because they do mirror real life scenarios.
Speaker 2:I thought of two things when I thought of it. I thought of movies like what's a good movie? Because a good movie rides the emotional roller coaster through watching a movie and now you can see, as you said, you're bringing that same type of attachment to it. And do you think that that emotional roller coaster, the desire for that roller coaster, has anything to do with how mature someone is emotionally to be able to understand their emotions, their, their feelings and such?
Speaker 3:This is a touchy subject, but I would say, of course and we often see it expressed in more stronger ways for those who don't understand some of the social implications of the internet as well. So, for example, if you have older friends who just got on MySpace or just got on one of these apps like Facebook, you see behaviors that are very unfiltered or that are almost unlike who they are in the real world. So you'd say like, yeah, aspects of tech literacy actually also come into play here. But if I was to the touchy aspect, that's not touchy. Everyone's on the same page with that.
Speaker 3:The touchier aspect today is that, yes, I do have friends or friends of friends, and you can almost tell what podcasts they listen to or what influencers are most strongly impacting them. Even when I was in my late 20s and now I'm in my early 30s, it's actually that noticeable when you can see how people then reflect that and then also see, under pressure, how do these people really act. And there's no, not to say it's one gender, not to say it's like one type of person. The common denominator is people who spend way too much time on the Internet engaged in these like parasocial relationships almost with influencers. They're learning everything from them and they're representing their emotions in ways that are very, very immature, I think, compared to what we would expect in the past.
Speaker 1:That is funny. That is one thing that I do notice with a lot of my interactions. That I do notice with a lot of my interactions. You do realize like okay, is that really your opinion, or is it an opinion of the people that you listen to on a daily basis or on a weekly basis? You get to see that and it's wild. It's like I know where you got that from. I also heard that, right.
Speaker 2:Chris, right it is you become what you surround yourself with. As we say, it is the truth. Whereas if you surround yourself with an environment an environment could be people, could be content, could be a number of things you do ultimately become what that is. Whereas I always say, if you take someone who's unhealthy and put them with five healthy people, give it some time and that one unhealthy person will become healthy, it's a little bit extreme. I like to talk about the extreme and do the flip side. Take five unhealthy people, put one healthy person with them. They'll pick up the habits of the group that they're in.
Speaker 2:So, to both of your points, it's what you consume yourself with, which, to me, is a little concerning because I don't think sometimes people understand the implications of what they're subjecting their children to potentially, and the viewpoints. And also with social media, I talk with a lot of people. We talk about Instagram. You talk about Instagram being the biggest buzz and resolution of revolution, which we'll talk about where you just have a picture, a snapshot in time of somebody's glorious life, where I know people. They took a picture, they were smiling and happy in there, but if you were in the room with them beforehand, I can honestly tell you they're throwing beer bottles at each other, which brings me to Sorry.
Speaker 1:So that goes back to I love this topic because that goes back to the social media effect of everyone's daily lives. Because you know, when you are going through social media and you're going through watching these people, you get fed with the same similar things, and so it takes away from an opportunity. You know, especially if you don't have the emotional intelligence, it takes away an opportunity to look at other side of the story or other content, Because then you eventually gets fed. That's the only thing you know moving forward and it becomes your identity, unfortunately, and you see that all the time with all the people I've ever interacted with. So I had to finish that because it's like man. That makes sense to me.
Speaker 2:No, it is, it is, it's good. I'm sorry. Like I told you, I'm super excited about this and I'll probably miss half the stuff and I'll probably be out of the place. I'll keep apologizing, but that's just the way I am, because I'm nervous and I'm usually never. Chris knows me. I'm never nervous when I talk to anybody anywhere about anything, not just on the podcast, which does take to an interesting point, and you had a viewpoint in there and it made me really think a lot, because it's so much easier now for someone to say to their child here's a phone, go sit there, I'm going to cook dinner. And then they get stuck on this phone and you have a great perspective on it. And it's a tough topic, I think, because you hear a lot of people talk about it. I think you said you don't think anyone should have access to the internet until the age of 14 or in some notion of that. Let's jump into that a little bit more.
Speaker 3:I think one of my direct quotes was to give a child a cell phone redefines childhood. I'm very, very strongly maybe even more so than when I wrote that like in that camp where I think the restrictions should be like almost like government enforced, like it should almost be illegal at some point. So, yeah, I believe that problematic usage now starts when children are younger, and I have opinions on how I grew up and the environment. I come from where, even though the iPhone was out when we were in seventh or eighth grade, it was a couple more years before people had iPhones, and part of that for me was socioeconomic differences where I went to a public middle school and then I went to the private high school, and at the private high school I was then bullied for not having a modern phone, whereas when I was in the public middle school people were saying, oh, whoa is that your cell phone? And 80% of the class didn't have one. So now we're saying, as costs have come down and parents obviously both parents obviously have cell phones, there's this opportunity for kids to be exposed earlier and earlier as a replacement for child care or how to entertain or enrich your child's upbringing using technology.
Speaker 3:And why I say I feel more strongly now than when I wrote the book is because I live in New York City and I see so much on public transportation. I live in a really nice neighborhood by schools and I can kind of see these things playing out both on the socioeconomic. So much on public transportation. I live in a really nice neighborhood so I buy schools and I can kind of see these things playing out both on the sides of the socioeconomics spectrum. But then also what parents are actually doing, how they're dealing with unruly kids on the subway and unfortunately most people do seem to be defaulting to give them an iPad, give them a cell phone and queue some stuff up and let's go. If they're watching Sesame Street, that's not a problem. The issue is that they're not watching Sesame Street.
Speaker 1:It's the access to the internet. Man.
Speaker 2:It's the crazy things, it's the crazy access that they have and, to your point, you can play it out and you even talked about it. I just want to just go back to what we were talking about before, and I want to talk about that at the points is again a quote from your book. I believe social media has no place in a child's life until age 14. I strongly support banning social media access nationwide for anyone under 14, adding in enforcing ID restrictions will come at a cost of technology companies, but it must be done. Nobody should be using social media before they're in high school. The most addicting content personalized auto-playing videos on TikTok and video games with gambling elements and microtransactions should also be age-restricted. I can't agree with that anymore. The only thing I will say is I think you might leave it a little bit later than high school or to a point where you can teach them will say is I think you might leave it a little bit later than high school or to a point where you can teach them internet literacy. I think we really need to have a curriculum on internet literacy because I see individuals now and you also mentioned in your book those that you can visibly and again in New York City.
Speaker 2:I spent a lot of time in New York City in my career, in my life and I can tell you some of the strange things you see on the subway. I can only imagine what it is now. I think I vowed not to go back and I haven't been there in many years, not to mention during the summer. It stinks, it's hot. You want to get out of there. But they have to have literacy on the Internet because they're forming and shaping their values, their beliefs and what they know based on an influencer, so, in essence, they're becoming left behind.
Speaker 2:I've had the opportunity to have conversations with individuals that are in high school, within middle school and even in elementary school, and you can really tell those that their parents had them read books when they were growing up or spent story time reading time, versus those that just gave them a phone and said, okay, watch the internet and I? It's the generation that's being born today. It's amazing because I know firsthand that I could see a child of two years old using an iphone. They know to hang up the phone and then, if they're on the phone with the facetime and this is at two years old they turn the phone around so that somebody could see, not them, but what's in the room. And it's just it's natural, it's becoming an, it's just exactly, it's becoming natural, it's become an attachment to them. And these, I tell everybody again, to put it loosely like these are the people who change in my diapers when I'm in the future, which is you just need a robot to do that for you, brad, at that point no.
Speaker 2:I think we do. I think we do have to have the age restriction or content restriction. I mean, there is a point, because the amount of stuff that people see on the internet is it's scary. Yeah, I think it's actually scary.
Speaker 1:I think majority of that. Now, as a parent myself, one of the things that my concern is usually the access to the Internet, because, no matter how much you do, some filtering and things like that somehow would eventually make it to them anyway. So it's always. It's always different. It's an interesting balance as a parent myself. It's an interesting balance as a parent myself. And even then, as your kids go to school, there are schools out there that requires them to have a tablet or a laptop, which also gives them access to the Internet. Yes, they block a few things here and there, but essentially, if they have YouTube kids option to watch content, eventually things will still filter through. It is an interesting balance.
Speaker 1:It's hard for me to kind of like, okay, where do I fit in here as a parent? Now, the biggest thing for me is the education component, making sure you're educating your kids of like, okay, these things are bad and these ones are okay, and you kind of build that trust system, right, that hopefully your kids don't actually go anywhere else. But lucky for them, or lucky for me or unlucky for them is that I'm in the tech world, so I kind of know how to get through that. But not every parent has that opportunity through that, but not every parent has that opportunity, so it'll be. Yeah, it's a slippery slope, I guess, when it comes to technology it is.
Speaker 2:It is, and it's important to remember the reason why, as Tim had mentioned, where people are looking to draw your attention, to give you that emotional roller coaster for you to stay, and it does have an impact. Another thing that, another quote from your book that I thought about, and to tell a little story about it as well, as you said, this made me realize that LinkedIn is probably the most trusted network. Everything that supports everything that happens on LinkedIn gets taken more seriously than anywhere else. Users are on their best behavior. Is this still the case? This made me think of something recently, and I'm going to tell you the answer is no, all right, because I stopped using Facebook, probably eight years ago, because it got too too, too much for me. Right? I got tired of the cliffhanger posts like, oh, I can't believe this happened to me, waiting for 15 000 other people to say, oh, what happened?
Speaker 1:is that one of the reasons why you stopped using facebook is because there's too many cliffhangers. Like I stopped using facebook because it was too distracting. You're building a career and then, and at the same time I had family members were upset that I'm no longer in facebook for them to follow what I do in life.
Speaker 2:So they say Facebook's the old person thing anyway.
Speaker 1:It is. My parents are on it more than me. That's not why I got rid of it.
Speaker 2:I got rid of it because it became a meme infested. You know, originally it was a good idea. You could see, keep up with family. That was a way they could show pictures of kids that were growing, such like that. But your question there, or your point, is I don't think that's the case anymore and it really hit me.
Speaker 2:I was quite active and have been quite active on LinkedIn. I'm not saying it's bad. It's probably the only social media tool that I use now because I did find a lot of value of it. Get out of it because there was a lot of content. I've been tracking what I see in my feed and, again, I know the feeds are curated. You have the option to put the feed in timeline order or based on what the aggregator wants. I still argue that the timeline feed still has some aggregation.
Speaker 2:But what hit me some weeks ago and it actually was great because it coincided when I was reading this book I saw a happy birthday message on LinkedIn and I said to myself we have now moved from Facebook to LinkedIn and LinkedIn has become Facebook to me and I'm now paying attention to what content am I seeing on LinkedIn? Many people are sharing good how-to articles, business tips and all those types of things, but I'm also seeing a lot of look at me, I'm here and such like that. So what are your thoughts on LinkedIn now? Yeah, Even in the time that you wrote this book because you wrote this book last year, I just wanted to frame it up you spent last year and I think you noted when we spoke before and when you also noted the book you took time off from work to write this book, so you focused on this book for one year. Honestly, I'll tell you you can tell, because it's really well written and the points resonate well and I love the timeline. But even since writing this book, what are your thoughts on LinkedIn today?
Speaker 3:Brad, I think it's an important point to bring up, because what you say is true as far as the enshitification of LinkedIn or just a degradation in quality in what you see in your LinkedIn feed, do I still highlight this app as the most trustworthy compared to other social media apps? Yes, but do I think it's a bastion of high quality content? Absolutely not. So, between writing this book and this chapter was definitely written, I would say, late 2024. Um, it's changed, and I will also say that for me now, having to go into promotional author mode, where I'm connecting with different podcast hosts, different journalists and even some academics, you can imagine the composition of my feed has changed quite a bit and with these changes, I've noticed the same thing in that there's different types of content creeping in. I've noticed the same thing in that there's different types of content creeping in because it is one of these spaces where the loudest people are defining a lot of the content that I see there Because, frankly, like I give the example of my mom's, linkedin was hacked.
Speaker 3:A lot of people do use LinkedIn quite regularly, or they check messages or they have like push notifications at least. Well, I know, I know they do because they talk about my posts there, but the point is that most people will never ever ever create a LinkedIn post. So we look at who's actually creating these posts and it's basically this iteration on what we were seeing on Twitter or Facebook. So you're you're right on there and my feelings have changed significantly Still trustworthy, but the content itself a lot of it is throwaway content. Or, if I do see content that I would love to, if I would love to have a confrontation there, I hold back because it is a professional representation of me and I don't necessarily want, uh, people to know that I will say there were examples, um, at my last job where people were like, hey, man, you should probably cool it with like these, like diatribes on on linkedin.
Speaker 3:So I see all of it but your point is, your point is, like, really true here are you saying all the influencers?
Speaker 1:and there's more influencers on linkedin, then, because they're the one who puts out the content the most. Now there's short videos in there and all that stuff.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can't believe they did that with short videos. That's like, because even if you say I don't want to see this, you only block it for like a week. There are some ways you could have like custom CSS to like continuously hide it from your feed. But yeah, the influencers there, the issue is that there's pressure to have something out every week. And for my book, let's say, you know, at this point I've done 30 podcast appearances.
Speaker 3:I've had a couple announcements that I think are worthy of a LinkedIn post, but if I was to say, how can I even come up with a once a week post that is relevant to all of my whatever 2000 connections, it would be really hard. So you see people reaching for content that isn't original and then, in some cases, just blatantly ripped off other people's posts where we're avoiding the engagement and this confrontation that I think would make it much more exciting, like the things to actually say like hey, you're wrong, and here's why I see that with some of the smartest people I follow there, but for the masses we see that it's still this like tiptoeing around, really getting into like interesting discussion and stuff. And I, as an aside, I do think it's a shame we don't have anywhere on the internet where we can have fiery debates that don't result in doxing or threats.
Speaker 2:It is unfortunate. I think you should be able to have a healthy discussion. I call it. You can have healthy discussion without making it personal.
Speaker 2:And some people. Some people fail to realize that you and I can have a disagreement, but it goes back with most people argue to be right Instead of most people argue to be right instead of most people argue to be understood. But they make it to be argued with their right, where sometimes it's just OK. Tim, I understand your point of view. This is my point of view. We don't agree, but we can have a healthy discussion about it while we feel it.
Speaker 2:But, it's not personal, where you're like, OK, well, you think that then you're stupid, or you know all these other personal things You're like, okay, well, you think that then you're stupid, or all these other personal things. I think, unfortunately, I think LinkedIn will go that way because, as you had mentioned, I noticed, most of the content that I see now is very superficial and, as you called it, is throwaway, and I think what has really had a detriment on what we see and hear on the internet is AI. I think now a lot of people generate content with AI and the AI is generating content on the internet is ai. I think now a lot of people generate content with ai and the ai is generating content on the ai. I'm just afraid of where we're going to be no, so ai for content?
Speaker 1:right, like you just ask ai or whatever and then just spit whatever it comes out and then you just repost it. My concern on linkedin right now and I'm not I don't know if, if this is happening, when now is the bots? Are there any bots that you guys are aware of that may be on LinkedIn, or maybe that's the last place right now that doesn't have it.
Speaker 3:I have been seeing it more and it's been mentioned to me a few times. People have said, oh, you did this Instagram automation thing. Have you heard of these agents on LinkedIn that do XYZ? And somebody actually showed me a demo a few months ago. So I know they're out there and I can see the business value in all types of Instagram sorry of LinkedIn engagement bots that are borrowing basically features from what we remember from Instagram. I've seen it on some podcasts that I've been on, where the host will post their thing, their most loyal followers will like it and a few will comment for visibility. But I've noticed that some of the comments for visibility, chris, are absolutely generated by AI and almost certainly left in a automated manner. So they were also left by a trigger, not by a human clicking or typing.
Speaker 1:So that's the crazy part I have to share a little bit of, so I played a little bit on this. There's a product in Microsoft called Parautomate. Parautomate is very simple to use and you can actually connect to. There's a connector for LinkedIn, so you can actually get some set, some triggers where, if this person responds or something posts, you can then add a prompt within your Parautomate where you can generate a AI driven response and then post it back. So there is a possibility. Now it requires someone to still do that, but not like it's a. It's not like a fully automated agent. It stands alone, as far as I am aware. But you can do that because I've used it to just extract information. So I'm sure, uh, there's an option for you to kind of respond back as well I'm sure you could do something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, talk with tim. He talked about his days of scraping his screens with python and uh and doing those types of things.
Speaker 2:It goes back to the same thing with the insta pie. You talked about the messages, with even putting in emojis or putting in variable words. I do think. I think everything goes that way because individuals are going to be drawn to where the masses are and the masses that don't want the noise are going to move and those will follow them. But then you still have that gamification that we talked about is how many followers do you have on LinkedIn? How many followers do you have on Instagram? We talked about Twitter. It just goes evolutionary through. It's not evolutionary, it progresses through each of the applications where most of the people are how many likes do you have? How many comments do you have? How do you get the algorithm to show your content more to others to see? It's a wild game.
Speaker 1:This talks about LinkedIn algorithm, and that's true. This talks about LinkedIn algorithm. I mean, one of the things that I have found out in the way you get engagement is that your first connection also be shared to the other. You know similar things, but you'll never reach to someone. Like, if I post something, you know dynamics, right. You'll never reach to any of the Oracle because it's not a Microsoft thing, right? So it can only be seen by people that are also interested in Microsoft, which kind of takes away that welcoming of like hey, let's have a conversation, why this product is better than that product, and so forth. So it's fascinating that they're still gatekeeping, in a sense.
Speaker 2:Tim, does this make you want to bring back shock shows, shock social?
Speaker 3:It's funny because we see the same opportunities to profit now, many years later, and it's the exact same where anybody doing this on LinkedIn is doing what I did on shark social, either on the scraping side or in the programmatic growth side. It's really the same thing. As Chris says, like we have these desires and we know that the money is there as you scale, whether it's one account or whether you scale it to thousands of customers. So I do think about it a lot and I do think about maybe there is a little bit of envy for those people who are doing it currently. However, I will state that anyone doing it currently, including on LinkedIn, is violating LinkedIn's terms of service, so they're vulnerable to legal action or shutdown pretty much at any time. The scraping stuff would take longer to adjudicate or whatever, just because it's much harder to prove, but any of the automation stuff is just like a slam dunk.
Speaker 2:I'm happy that you said that, because you do cover terms of service, of a lot of these services in your book when you talk about it, which is good, so that people understand I know a lot of people don't read the terms of service, understand the terms of service but you made a good point in your book to talk about. Again, your book was primarily a big talk about the social media, I think because it is so big. It was so big was instagram in their terms of service, and and then even how the terms of service have changed, sure, and then, um, oh, there was another term that you talked about. If you look at the wikipedia page how the definition of it changed over time, it will come back to me, I think, as we get to it, which is good, so it's still mind-blowing.
Speaker 2:About the book, I definitely, again, I did tell many people about it as well and to just get some other viewpoints on it and to just take away from not to take away from the content of the book great content of the book. But I also went and looked at your blog as a result of this and one thing that I found was interesting is the article that you talked about why to Hire a Copy Editor. I forget the title, but it was the concept of it that I want to talk to you about. A little bit too Sure as far as, as you're going through this book process, you know what's involved in the book process. And to go back to your blog, why would you hire a copy editor? I can self-publish using Amazon. I can self-publish with Word and using Grammarly and such oh the other tools to come up with the content of a book.
Speaker 3:To write a book and self-publish it takes almost this delusional level of self-belief where you have to wake up every day and nobody's there to pat you on the back or to encourage you. You have to have that internal belief that you are doing something worthwhile and that you are good enough to share this with an audience. So, naturally, if you take it all the way through to having a book that's ready to publish or a manuscript that's worth pitching to someone, you then have to admit at some point that maybe you wrote something that isn't so good or that needs some work. And this was the really unique part for me where, towards the end of last year, I started to think you know what I got to get this book out Like it's now or never. So that led to you know, of course, like planning to leave my job and everything like that, and eventually exploring these different opportunities, both for developmental editing, which is like much more broad and much more, you know, expensive, and then copy editing, which is to give somebody my 145,000 word manuscript, pay by the word, and say what can we do here? And the thing that I think it's a very traditional space in that with AI or with Grammarly or some of these tools, you get instant feedback, but when you're working with a copy editor, they're not going to give you feedback within five seconds, five minutes, five hours, in some cases even five days, and for the initial article, sometimes it was as long as two weeks just to get the initial feedback. So, brad, I'm glad you brought it up, because this journey also involved learning what it meant to be an indie author with very little support and also what it means to promote an indie book while not falling into the same traps that I highlight in my book right when it would be like a paradoxical for me to say, oh, and I use this, that and the other thing to sell my book.
Speaker 3:So does it suck to see that some of my competitors purchased fake Amazon reviews? Yes, like that keeps me up at night to see that I played by the rules and I know I wrote the best book. I know that my book is the best as far as my indie category in the couple of months that I published it. I'm so, so sure of that To see some of my competitors who I've reached out to just because I'm a friendly guy and I'm curious and I did purchase their books and to say, hey, how did you manage to get exactly 50 five-star reviews on the day that your book was published and have them and, and you know, have them come up with all these reasons? I'm like, hey, like, maybe before you answer you should read my book and understand like you are talking to a villain, not in an intimidating way, but in a way that if you have something to hide, I will expose it. And that's the ironic part, right? Is that? Like I'm being friendly? But when somebody lies to my face, then in the indie author community I can say, yeah, well, why are you now at 42 reviews? I thought you were at 50. It's because slowly and slowly, they're getting found out.
Speaker 3:So, to take it back to copy editing, it's a lonely pursuit and it's also one where you have to balance your own knowledge of what's out there with trusting a professional and paying a professional to take it to the next level. Ultimately, I found a copy editor who was wonderful and, I think, who charged me a very fair rate, gave me great turnaround and gave me great feedback beyond copy editing, sometimes just saying hey, tim, this doesn't make any sense and being willing to say okay, I wrote something that doesn't make sense, let's work with this. Reviewing her comments so she would provide this is finished, edited, and this is with every single comment and potential justifications For each one of those chapters. It could have taken me up to two hours to review and understand every one of those changes, so it was also like I was paying for lessons in English as well. It was really cool.
Speaker 2:That's good. I'm envious. I always talked about wanting to write a book or something. I never come up with a topic or something, but I'm envious for those that do it and to read about your story and to hear about your story, how you wrote it, and also that you um, uh, all that you put into it is also admirable as well, and I'm happy to hear that you're playing by the rules, even as a villain, because with all of your history of what you had done, going through, um, all the different companies that you work with and some of the history that you talked about, uh, with those is is uh interesting. Did you hear from anybody after you wrote the book by some of those companies? I know you have the company and you didn't name the name. You changed the name, obviously, but has anybody reached out to you to talk to you about some of the stories that you told in the book, about some of your experiences? You reached out to somebody, but did anybody reach out to you?
Speaker 3:There has been some organic outreach. So those kinds of emails where your first reaction is how did you even find me? Or what motivated you to do so? There have been some really interesting conversations, brad. The most interesting one is definitely from people like you who said, hey, this was suggested to me by the Amazon algorithm, and then I noticed that I did the same thing with Instapy Instagress. I was active in this space, running a marketing agency or doing something there. I've had several people who were previously unknown to me come out and say, yeah, I was active in that era and it is crazy that you're the only person to write about this. That's been the most interesting for me.
Speaker 3:For Cutlet, I would say that there's really no surprises there, like the way things went at that company. The people who I was close with, they've read the book and they're like this. Generally speaking, they liked it. I haven't heard from, like you know, the management and you know, for other things, of course, there's this deep desire not to engage in some type of, you know, confrontation with meta or with big tech, but for people involved in the platform integrity side of things, maybe to read this book and to reach out and say whatever. Unfortunately, my book was, I guess you would say, sandwiched or bookended by traditionally published social media books which are having much larger impacts. So, like Careless People, that gets published and that's like this insider's take on why meta is bad, right. So it's a relief to me because it means there's no shot. I'm getting sued now because all the focus is on that and I had to take out insurance and stuff like I'm like, just in case let's do this, that and the other thing, um, careless people comes out. I'm not getting sued anymore. But also I think the shame is that there are probably thousands of readers for Careless People who actually should place Careless People aside and read my book and they would get way more enjoyment out of it. And that's the irony of marketing, right, that's why things happen On the other side, the other part of the sandwich, if you will, the other slice of bread, was Super Bloom, and Super Bloom, I think it's by Nicholas Carr, who wrote the Shallows, which is one of the original kind of, you would say, whistleblowing things about what the internet is doing to our brains.
Speaker 3:So the point is that I'm in a crowded space and I believe that if I had the same resources as these books. I would be right there and people would be having the same conversations and my rating right now would not be 12, 5 out of 5 star reviews. As you said, brad, sometimes we would disagree on certain topics and part of me does long for that. Part of me longs for a larger audience to see my book and say this guy is wrong or I don't agree with it. Here's why, you know, these are things that I definitely long for and some of the outreach has. I'll say this all of the outreach at this point has been totally positive. I'm thankful for that, but I do desire maybe a little bit more diversity there.
Speaker 2:I don't have any. My outreach is not going to be negative, it's going to be on the positive side because, as I had mentioned, and there's just so many, so many nuggets in this book that you talked about the mom being hack story I thought was a good story as well.
Speaker 2:It was just, it is. That's another I don't want to say sense of irony, but it is some irony, because here you are talking about how you're a villain in higher, like taking followers and scraping screens and, uh, attention grabbing and such Uh. Another story that goes back to is when you talked about the Trump riots, on how you were searching for the Trump riot. Um, if you would jump into that for a moment.
Speaker 3:This is true. Many years ago, when Donald Trump was elected the first time, I lived in downtown Chicago and at that point in time, on Facebook, if there was a very popular Facebook live video, there was something of a heat map so you could kind of see where the crowd was forming or at least where this creator was. It was very clear that on that November day that there was something of a protest or a riot in the shadow of Trump Tower, which is right on the Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago. So I showed up and I was like, hey, you know what, I'll go on Facebook Live and I made a video which is like I don't know an hour, an hour and a half long, where I kind of did this like street style interview, but also I was just taking in the sights and sounds. Right, this was pretty new and I was literally 21, 22 years old, so quite, quite young and none. I didn't have many strong opinions, I'll put it that way. Um, when it came to, uh, find this video and talk about it for the book, what I was really meant to address was influencer culture and this concept of like. Okay, I was there, I was kind of making a mockery of the protest. But then how does that relate to other types of influencers who just, you know, it's just a face on a screen and we just abide by what they do?
Speaker 3:What I noticed when I searched for the video, which was titled Trump riot, was that if I typed Trump and riot in my search box, the video didn't appear. Even late last year, algorithmic interference based on certain keywords. Where on Facebook I wasn't able to search for a video that was mine. It wasn't even exposure to other people's content. I couldn't search through my own content because it included the word Trump, and the case that I made Brad was like riot is a bad word. If there's any word I shouldn't search for, it's probably riot, but instead it was the word Trump. That I couldn't search for was like this shadowy interference in searching for my own content. That actually happened and it's hard to provide the exact proof in the book, but you could see. There are two of the few screenshots in the book. You could see. It's there, you could see in one. The video doesn't appear in the next the video's there.
Speaker 2:It leads to making you think how much of the information we see is controlled, and I don't. I don't want to take away from when you talk about your story with the book. I think it's an excellent book and I think if someone is looking for a book to read, this is definitely worth whatever the price of it is. I have it on the Kindle so I can take it with me everywhere. I have a lot of books, I do read a lot of books and this is a very well-written, very well-informative book, and if you grew up in the arts, as you called it right, or even earlier than as myself, you'll take a walk down memory lane and you'll have this aha moment as well too.
Speaker 2:But to go back to what I was saying, is it made me think? That specific point of your book made me start to think of. Now we're talking about this passive society that's having content serve to us. We may be thinking that we're looking for something, but now how much control is there on the content we see? Then go back, chris, to the point that you were making earlier. What are your viewpoints based upon the information that you see? And now you can say I can identify that person. We can almost shift a culture or a generation just by limiting the exposure to the content that they have. I could make myself clear I don't know but that's kind of.
Speaker 3:Again, this is what I'm saying.
Speaker 2:This is what I got from your book. I don't know if you can tell the passion of things, but everything I read in your book I was able to expand upon and really take a deeper look than the words that you had put on the paper, which is that's why I say I liked the way that it was written, because that's what I got out of it. I got more than just reading the pages. I got a life emotion right To go, with the emotion of rollercoaster saying wow. That really demonstrates how our content is being curated so that we see what someone wants us to see or think we want to see, and not seeing something else, therefore maybe limiting the way we shape our opinions or forcing us to shape our opinions a certain way.
Speaker 3:I appreciate your take, I can ramble, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I appreciate your take on this and that's one part of the book that's hard to explain. When people say who is your audience, it's essentially every person who's ever been on the internet. If we're being honest, and when we think about the more impactful things, the more consequential aspects of software design what you bring up here with algorithmic interference and how this affects information retrieval algorithms, it's probably the most important part of the book because it lends itself to conspiracy theories. But when an author who didn't set out to write anything that was political at all when I can find something just by happenstance it suggests that there probably is something bigger going on here and if there is enough care put into how they construct the feed or how they manipulate the feed they being either motivated advertisers or the platforms themselves it can have a major effect on. It's essentially this state level propaganda machine and that's like that's really really scary, really really important, and it's unlikely we get any writer coming with a better perspective than this just because it's so hard to understand what's being done.
Speaker 2:It is, it is. It is a great book. I could talk to you all night long. I know you may have some things to do, but we do appreciate you taking the time to speak with us this evening. I enjoyed the book. I appreciate the book. Again, it's framed Villain's Perspective on social media. It's available. I know you have it on Amazon. Where else can someone order the book? I?
Speaker 3:know it's available on Amazon. Do's approved for wide distribution through Ingram, so it should be able to be ordered through places like Barnes Noble as well. Excellent, excellent so.
Speaker 2:I encourage everyone to read it. It's a very good and interesting book, and I'd love to hear feedback as well. Tim, I know you'd like everyone to reach out to you as well. If someone would like to learn a little bit more about you or get in contact with you to talk about the book, what's the best way to get in contact with you?
Speaker 3:I prefer emails. I'm old school in that respect. You can find my email address even within the book if you scan the QR code, or through my mailing list, which is timohernbeehivecom. My blog, which has longer form posts going back almost 10 years, is tHearncom and my primary social media site is LinkedIn, so anyone looking to connect with me there just included a connection note. Happy to discuss the book, you know. Happy to hear what you've got going on.
Speaker 2:Thank you again for taking the time to speak with us. I appreciate it. Thank you for writing such a great book, and I do hope that you get up there past those that you sandwiched in between that you had mentioned about, because it is, uh, it is definitely an interesting read. I hope to see you do another book in the future, too. Maybe you can do a continuation of even what has changed, uh, since you had published the first book. I think it would be a good follow-up yeah uh, thank you again for your time.
Speaker 2:Look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 3:Thanks Brad, thanks Chris, thanks guys Take care.
Speaker 2:Ciao, ciao, bye. Thank you, chris, for your time for another episode of In the Dynamics Corner Chair, and thank you to our guests for participating.
Speaker 1:Thank you, brad, for your time. It is a wonderful episode of Dynamics Corner Chair. I would also like to thank our guests for joining us. Thank you for all of our listeners tuning in as well. You can find Brad at developerlifecom. That is D-V-L-P-A-L-I-N-O, dot I-O, and my Twitter handle is matalino16. And you can see those links down below in the show notes. Again, thank you everyone. Thank you and take care.
