Adam Curry Warns Against Phone Tracking | Joe Rogan

We're live right now so we'll just let everybody know we're talking about Cheech and Chong's album Big Bamboo that actually came with a real rolling paper. Yeah, huge. Just across the, I think it was across the double album. Dude, you have a flip phone. I do. I do. I do. I do. I stepped out. OTG, brother. Yeah, you figured it out. Create less data. Yeah. That's my motto. Is that what it is? Yeah. Well, two things. One, your phone is always fucking with you. It's notifying and I just didn't want to be a part of that anymore. I wanted to be a little more connected to life outside. You still call people. Well, so this is actually a new flip phone from T-Mobile, Alcatel, and it has KaiOS, so it's not really a trackable OS, although Google put an investment into it. Oh, you're serious about this? Oh, I'm very serious about it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So all the apps are all tracking you. They're all doing all kinds of shit. So initially, really, just to not be a slave to this thing. And the further I got into it, the more I liked it. And you don't really need it. Now, I have a device with me that's off. This works as a hotspot, so I can turn into a hotspot if I really, really, really needed to do something, but what do you need? Text, phone call. And if there's something that I really need to look up, you just turn around and say, hey, can someone Google this for me? And they do it. There's always someone around. Are you texting on that thing? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a T9. It's a little bit better. It's their version of predictive texting. Yeah. I really am serious about it. Well, you should be. Yeah. Everyone should be. Yeah. I mean, we have all this cool shit, all this great technology, but the business model fucked us all. I mean, six years ago, I had the first Amazon Echo. I'm like, this is groundbreaking. Dvorak, my co-host, he was laughing at me. He's like, why would you bring a spy device into your house? Look, I'm just testing this out. If it had an Apple logo on it, everyone would be losing their shit right now, but it didn't. And I loved it. Hooked it up to the lights and all that stuff going. And then as I started to understand what it was really doing and what it's really communicating, all these things right down to your Roku remote, you pick that up, it's communicating with Homebase. So all this stuff, I got rid of all of it. Just got rid of it. Well, I was listening to one of Sam Harris' podcast, and he was talking with someone that said, and they had a really great quote, that we didn't realize that our data was something valuable. Right. We didn't realize it was a commodity, and it was being sold, not just a commodity that's kind of value, but insanely valuable. Extremely, yeah. That's where Facebook makes all their money. That's where Google makes all their money. Everybody. Yeah. Everybody. They make it from your data, and you never really understood what you were doing when you signed off to give that data away. When you signed the terms of agreements, and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, and nobody breathes through that shit. You know what's even more egregious is there's a company called Plaid, P-L-A-I-D, and it's just sold to Visa for, I think, four or five billion dollars. And it's the financial back end, or kind of like a bridge between all these apps that can do stuff with your bank account and your bank account. So if you have an app like Venmo or ... Ah shit. Name any payment. Cash app. I didn't want to disparage anyone who might be advertising on your show, but yeah, cash app too. It doesn't matter. It's PayPal. Well- Does PayPal do it? PayPal has their own system, but what you do is you sign up and you literally give this app your username and login to your bank account. Instead of an API or some kind of programming interface, it just lets the app talk to your bank account and put money in, take it out. It can do anything. In fact, it is just like screen scraping. It's going ... It can go through anything that's connected to your bank account. It can look at, and they do. And Credit Karma, another great example of it. And they are just sucking out all of your information. When you pay your bills, who you pay first, why ... If you have what your pattern is of credit card payment, moving stuff around. So you think you're just using it as a utility, but they're tracking your fucking life. Dude, you're really concerned about this. Well, everybody will get the world they deserve, so I'm trying to protect myself and people I love. Also, the drone can't target me that easily with this, so protecting you, Joe. Thank you. It seems somewhat inevitable that this connection that we have to technology gets deeper and deeper into our lives. What disturbs me is that there are these giant corporations that are not just profiting off of our connection, but then they're using that money and that influence to affect a lot of things in our culture. Well, they're enslaving you. So Credit Karma is a great example, which also just sold for $7 billion. It was literally changing your behavior to get a higher credit score. And this credit score isn't really even an official credit score. It's the one that they kind of made up. So they'll say, pay your utilities on time. Time will raise your credit score. Your credit score is higher. Now we can lend you this money. You see? So they're training people to do certain things, like the Progressive app for insurance. It's training you to drive in a quote unquote responsible manner because you get discounts if you don't break too hard, if you're not accelerating, if you're not breaking speed limits, et cetera. Is it hooked up to the GPS? Oh, yeah. So it knows your speeds and everything that's monitoring it? You're breaking velocity. All of that shit. Oh, yeah. So they take that into consideration every month when you... That's the whole point. The point is to train the user to be a good fiscally good person, whatever that means. And you'll do that just because you want to save some money. Well, of course everyone does that. And you're going to be forced into it. Like I just got health insurance, new health insurance. And they're, oh, download the app. And if you download the app, we'll give you a break. Why? Because they're going to tell me to do things. This app is saying, now it's small things, but it'll start telling you, stand up, move around. And if you follow it, then you'll get a discount. So we're really, really becoming enslaved that way. That is definitely a way to look at it. That's the business model. Yeah. And it gets more and more immersive. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that Progressive's app does that. All of them do, Joe. All of them do. The insurance company. Oh, yeah. And that would be the best way to figure out if you're actually a good driver or if you're just some dickhead who gets lucky. Well, yeah. I mean, that's kind of the marketing. It's like, if you're a good guy, don't worry about it. But they keep pushing. They keep pushing. They'll just keep telling you. And you don't have to have the app active for that to be tracked or monitored. That was one of the grossest arguments I heard after the whole Snowden thing. Like what do you care if you're not breaking the law? That's changing a little bit. I have a 29-year-old daughter and she definitely had that mindset. And her friends did. It's changing. Now it's like, okay, we totally get it. They're tracking all of our shit. So we're going to, might not use this or we'll leave the phone at home. There's a little bit of that creeping in. But in general, it's like crack. How can you do with it? It's not easy. I mean, this phone, it's sometimes like, ah, I could. But no. It's like, and I just have to stand back and go, do I really need to have this information right at this very moment? Do I really need to do this? No. And typically no. Typically no. Yeah. When I feel any sort of anxiety or boredom, I just grab the phone. It's just instantly my little soothing blanket or my little teething thing. Absolutely. It's my little binky. And I play a game with myself. You know, I'll give myself points as I'm driving around. Like person walking on the street holding the phone in their hand, one point. You don't need to actually hold the phone in your hand. Women, holy crap. They got two phones sometimes with little button plugs so it doesn't fall off. They got their bag. Maybe they got their kid or a stroller. And so, pom, pom, pom. They're doing all, and just, they're all over the place, all the time. So it's one point for just holding it. Two, if you're walking and doing something, I see a lot of that. How many points if you have a kid and you're walking and looking at your phone, that seems like that'd be a bonus point. If you're in the car, 10 points. If you're walking with your kid on the phone, it's five points. And you can hit 100 within five minutes. It's crazy. It's zombies. When you start to really pay attention to it. When you're above people have a truck, and I want to look down for my truck, you can see people texting. And it's stunning how many people are on the highway texting at the same time. I got rear-ended with my truck, say, maybe two months ago in Austin, right after a stoplight. I was in the left-hand lane. I was going to turn left. Damn, full speed. It was maybe 30, 35 miles an hour. The girls' air flags deployed. She's like... I was in the truck. I'm like, check if it went okay. I get out. And the whole front end is destroyed. She's dazed. I'm like, so I'm trying to pry the door open. And yep, there I see the phone on the floor, still open. And then her excuse was, well, my break didn't work. Okay. I got it. Well, my break didn't work. Does that ever happen? My breaks didn't work. I got rear-ended the same thing. There was a slowdown on the right lane and some guy plowed right into me. And I asked the cops. I said, oh, this is five times a day. Yeah, I'm sure. It's crazy. Yeah, it's weird that that sort of snuck up on us. There's this thing that's incredibly addictive. I was with my family this past weekend in Dallas and we were at this event as we're walking through this crowd. I'm like, look how many people are on their phones. This is crazy. Like, everyone. It was just you're going through the crowd of this store and everyone is just looking at their phone. Yeah. It's like a zombie movie. They don't know they're zombies either. Truly is a zombie apocalypse. Yeah. Truly. Yeah. In the weirdest way. I mean, it gives you a little bit of reward. Every now and then someone has a funny meme and they're like, ha ha ha. Well, that's what Silicon Valley figured out is that the Pavlovian response and all the brain impulses you get from a like or a retweet or whatever it is, or even just something blip. Oh, yeah. And we have different sounds. Bling, blong, all this stuff.