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After interviewing a non-internet native, Mark the Plumber On Success, Work and Early Retirement, I decided to interview a few people I know who do not uses social media at all. All of the people in this series are Echo Boomers who've chosen to stay off social media and in some cases (like Jason), avoid using the internet at all. While the majority of Echo Boomers use social media (over 90% use at least 1 social media platform) and almost all Echo Boomers (over 95%) use the internet, there are a few I know who do not use one of the two or both. This interview series highlights these.
The Series
Background
I met Jason while taking a road trip to Miami with some friends over a decade ago. My friends and I made a few stops along the way, one city where we met Jason (kept private because he's relative well-known there for what he does). Because none of us were in a rush to Miami, we asked Jason for some recommendations the next day to see in his city and all became good friends. At the time, Jason stood out to us because he didn't have a Facebook account (rare in those days, though this has become more common). He also gave us his landline phone because he didn't have a cell phone. At the time, texting wasn't as big as it is now, but even then, more people had been getting cell phones.
Jason's story is fascinating because he defined success his own way and lived it. I also find it fascinating because it highlights how much time all of us internet natives have lost without thinking about the time we've lost.
We all continue to meet up at least annually as part of a private group.
Interview notes. Jason read this interview prior to each question and answer being posted, as the only edits may be the way questions are answered and some words and word choices. In addition, because Jason and I stay in touch, I've added some questions to this interview over time that I find fascinating and worth knowing from him given his life experience.
Had To Ask...
You've been a bartender for almost two decades in the same city. For Echo Boomers, that's extremely rare. What's your story here and what made you choose your city, as it's not a place that a lot of Echo Boomers live?
I wanted success with girls and I paid for a pick-up artist to teach me. One thing that he said when he taught our class is that you have to go where the girls are. I didn't know what that meant, but that weekend, we went out to bars and clubs and met girls. I noticed how many attractive girls were at bars and clubs.
I connected the dots in my mind - attractive girls come to bars and clubs to have fun. Bartenders make drinks for everyone and also talk with people. Pickup artists talk about social proof and to me, a bartender has social proof in a bar or club.
Of course, there's a professional side to all of this as well that I didn't think about early on. Things like how do you get a job in the first place? How do you get to be a bartender at the best spot in town? Things like that. But I didn't focus on that stuff at first and that helped me when I think about it because it's too easy to over analyze what you're doing and do nothing.
That's very common with Echo Boomers.
I'm the same. I've made that mistake before. So I stuck to learning bartending and getting my license. I worked at a few bars part time as a waiter before finally getting the opportunity. After I gained a few years of experience, I had a better idea of how to connect with people, so I was able to get to a bar near the beach.
As for how I chose the city, it was more of what I was trying to avoid at the beginning. I wanted to be a bartender at a beach town. But places like Miami attract a lot of tourists who are wealthy. These actually don't make great girls to meet, unless you have money or something that appeals to them. I hear guys say things like "high maintenance" or whatever, but what I noticed is that those girls weren't after some temporary fun or adventure. It's hard to describe, but there's definitely a class thing going on in attraction there.
I moved to a smaller town because it actually had better waiter opportunities, which I was going to use to become a bartender. This originally wasn't permanent, but what changed my mind was our town is more affordable to average people - including attractive girls who don't have a lot of money, but want to visit a beach on their vacation. What I noticed is that we get fewer tourists, but I didn't have the trouble with the tourists that I met in places like Miami.
I guess the way to put it is, you meet tens of thousands of tourists in Miami, but only get to have fun with ten or so because they're very high class. In my beach town, you may only get a few thousand tourists for the year, but I get to have fun with thirty or forty new girls a year because they're more down to Earth.
So you wanted to balance meeting new girls with a getting a favorable result.
Yes. I know you're aware of the red pill community and I've met quite a guys at the bar over the years who say that they're a part of it. They talk about this concept of women trading or marrying up, there's a term for it.
Hypergamy.
Yeah. There's some truth to that, but it's much more dependent on where than they like to admit. A girl who visits Miami is going to have very different standards than a girl who visits my city. The girls with money or the girls who want to meet someone with a lot of money are going to Miami. The girls who come to my city want to have fun. This applies to where people live too. Large cities attract a type of person while smaller cities also attract a type of person. It's a filter.
That's an interesting observation about Miami. In the times I've been there, it has a feel of being very "live in the right place, know the right people." And that's common in cities like Miami, New York, Dallas, LA, etc. Shifting to your reason why - meeting girls. You're talking a lot about tourists. Your city is much smaller than the Miami metroplex, why wasn't that a concern for meeting girls in your city?
Meeting local girls can backfire. I've seen this a lot. It's not a problem if you want to date for a long term relationship like marriage. But if you want to have fun? No. You can get a reputation fast and then it starts to work against you. This is where I disagree with the red pill guys. The player vibe may be attractive to some girls when they're younger, but it backfires hard as you get older. Generations also change over time and I've seen this as I get older. You want to be extremely careful about your local reputation.
This may not matter in a big city, but it does matter in cities like mine. Also, the dumb guys giving dating advice often hop from city to city. They don't realize what I'm saying here because they're rarely in the same city for long. If you've lived in a city as long as I have [about two decades] then you see how behavior plays out over time. When I moved here, I could immediately tell this because people would talk about others based on their reputation. This matters a lot in a city like mine.
A girl on a vacation wants to have fun. This is what I learned in pickup. When girls travel, they are not looking to meet a boyfriend. Anything that happens is just for fun. It's also temporary. The girl is in the city for a week or two and then she's gone. A girl you hook up with in your city and who decides to start a family there remains there. How she acts toward you when she's single and having fun will be very different than how she acts toward you when she's married with a family and older.
You can't do what I've done in a city that I live in if I was seeing girls who were locals. I've seen guys make this mistake since I've lived here and it backfired in horrible ways.
So, when local girls come to the bar, you simply treat them as a local?
Yes, like I would with friends. And this approach helps in many ways too because local girls can be social proof for you when tourists show up. They know you and feel comfortable flirting, which is only going to be more attractive to female tourists. You're also not a threat to local guys because you're not trying to get with local girls. It's a double win because jealousy hurts popularity, but popularity is attractive. So I'm getting the best of both worlds - I'm popular in my city and successful with tourists.
Bartenders can be like local celebrities in smaller cities. They know the people the best too.
We can be, but it can also be very easy to be hated quickly. I knew this other bartender a decade ago from a competitors bar who did the opposite of me - he would try to get with locals. He burned some key bridges and earned a reputation for being [a jerk]. You don't recover from that and if you lose your job and people know why, no one wants to hire you.
Good bartenders have to be likeable people. You won't only get more tips that way, but you'll also be a reason why people come to the bar. The owner, who's owned this bar for decades, loves me because many people come here to see me. They know I can make their favorite drinks. They know I'll come up with a fun game that we can all play. And they know that I remember things about them that make them feel seen. All of this compounds over time, plus makes work a lot of fun. I joke with some of our customers that I have more fun playing the games than them, though they'll insist I'm just saying that.
Do you plan to marry and have kids eventually?
No. I didn't realize until much later how much what happened to my parents impacted my decisions. My parents both worked as manufacturers before the government destroyed those jobs. It sent those jobs to Asian countries and my parents both were casualties. The result was chaos. My parents ended up divorcing. Looking back, I see how that altered my childhood.
For a long time, I believed that I didn't want a serious relationship because of my parents. But as I've gotten older, I couldn't help but wonder why my parents divorced. As a young child, I remember them being happy. When they worked, they had their rough days, but it wasn't anything like when they both lost their jobs.
I've also seen really great men face divorce. You know Ben. He has always been the greatest guy, and yet his wife divorced him. Even more crazy is how much money she ended up getting, even though she's more educated than him and simply didn't work by choice. The system punished Ben and he's hardly the only one like him. You don't have this issue when you hook up in situations like mine. Yes, guys who do this in cities where they create a reputation will face blow back possibly, but not guys in my situation.
I don't have anything to offer a girl except an experience. Ben offered a lot - economic opportunity, resources, relationships, you name it. Look at what his ex-wife did to him. I've seen that multiple times and heard it from customers. Guys have a lot going for them and their wife manages to extract all those opportunities for herself. It's crazy too because you tell our group frequently that women in our generation are more educated than men, yet that doesn't seem to be how divorce lawyers see things.
I've consistently noted throughout my research that we live in an anti-male society, similar to the Soviet Union before it dissolved. You're seeing that in those examples. Shifting a bit to your choice not to use the internet, was it simply that you didn't need the internet for your job or was there another reason you decided against using it?
No, I wasted a lot of time on the internet in my early twenties. In fact, I did have a Facebook account for a very brief period. I know, I feel embarrassed.
I think about where I feel like I'm losing time and I've done this since I was a teen-ager. I don't always act on what I find. I've wasted time and kept wasting time. But eventually, I take action.
I never felt good about spending time on the internet. I noticed how it would shift my thinking - and it wasn't good. I also didn't like how people would share information that often didn't relate to me. At least when I spent time on it over a decade ago, I also saw how anything that angered people got more attention. We also saw that during [he-who-cannot-be-named], even if you weren't on the internet. People would bring stuff they read or saw on the internet and yell at others in real life. This happened multiple times at the bar. People would be arguing over something that happened in another part of the world. This is so weird.
It didn't take long for me to realize that the internet added nothing to my life. It did subtract a lot from my life. When you consider that we pay for the internet, that sounds absurd. I'm paying $50 a month to feel bad, plus losing 100 hours per month? That makes no sense.
I treated it like an addiction. I break addictions by making it hard to do them, so I cancelled my internet. I would sometimes take my laptop to the library or a coffee shop, so I got rid of my laptop. I lucked out on the cell phone because if you recall, the cell phones and plans were expensive early on. I couldn't afford those and didn't need one, so I skipped it.
Now, I see that I would have wasted even more time if I had had a cell phone. Plus, I find it odd how people can be having a great day, then look at something on their phone, and now their day is "ruined" to quote them. This has happened multiple times with people at the bar. "My day was going so well, then I saw" and they talk about something on their phone. I'm like, "Why don't you stop using technology that's ruining your days? How many ruined days before you see that the cost of that thing isn't worth what you get out of it?"
It's not always negative either. We have some customers who will start talking to their phones at the bar. To me, this just looks weird because they'll be saying things about how their life is so interesting, yet they're really just this person sitting alone at a bar talking to their phone. When I talk with them, they'll mention that they have thousands or millions of viewers. I get that they're showing off to their viewers, but it just looks weird to an outside viewer. But some of these people make good money doing it and their viewers get the benefit of living vicariously through others rather than living their own life, so there's benefit to them having a phone that allows that.
That's interesting because it's hard to imagine not having a cell phone - and I am guilty of this. Like I start to think about, "What would I do if I had a flat tire?" or something. But then, I used to live in a world where I didn't have a cell phone and I just had to adapt to the situation.
I think that's why I lucked with the pricing being high. I can see how having a cell phone over time would have made it feel impossible to not have one. But for me, when I see how many people get upset over something they see, I can't imagine having a constant source of negativity around me. It even feels weird that more people don't notice that about their phones.
But my job also doesn't require that I have one. I know a lot of people, especially executives, who must have a cell phone. The same with the internet. They have to constantly have access.
A little unrelated to phones and the internet, how have you been able to do the same thing for the past few decades without worrying about things like inflation, healthcare, or other costs? I know from talking with you over the years that you're one of the few Echo Boomer who doesn't have a "side-hustle" and you don't value materialism or money like others.
Bartending doesn't pay a lot, though the tips can be really good. But for me, it's also not stressful. From what I can tell, stress costs.
Another thing, I don't need to have fun after work because I'm having fun. When I was younger, I'd try to see two or three new girls a week. That was a lot of fun, but it also didn't come with big costs. Now, I'm okay if it's one every other week because this is less important than it was.
I didn't understand it at the time when my mom used to tell me that while the dollar benefits the government, destroyed communities end up with their own currency as they rebuild. I know you've travelled through the US and you've seen the abandoned places like I have. Some of those places have their own currency now. They'll never return to a centralized system because of the costs. My mom was kind of an example of that when she was alive. She worked manufacturing and the government destroyed her job by sending it to Asia. I see the same pattern with some of my IT friends who are watching their jobs get outsourced to cheap Asian countries.
That's the big thing I've shared with our group. "You gotta shut up." A lot of people have made their life more difficult by oversharing with the world. I've met tourists who worked in government come to this bar and tell me how they helped craft regulation from reading stuff on social media. When I asked them about this, I learned that a lot of these people don't really understand how life works in small towns. So they create arbitrary rules for these jurisdictions. But where do they get the ideas? People who go around bragging about their success. There's thousands of ways to beat inflation, but if inflation is a secret tax as I keep hearing, do you think policy makers want you to beat it? So a person does well with something, brags on social media, then a policy maker creates a new law.
This is exactly what several of them have told me that they do. Of course, they could be lying about what they do, but it does seem like there's new laws every year and you sometimes wonder where these ideas came from.
I had a shocking experience similar where a person shared that this blog [Echo Boom Bomb] was actually featured in a policy maker discussion. I don't know what was the result of that discussion, but the person showed me the slides and they were right. It did make me wonder and reminded me why not writing about some things is more important than the inverse. Back to money, I take it you don't have retirement accounts then?
No, but it's funny you ask. The other night, this guy came in to the bar who said he had millions saved in retirement, but was venting about it. I was a little stunned because I was like, "That's awesome - you're a millionaire and you can't be taxed on any of it." He went on a rant about how the government would probably end up finding a way to tax his accounts. He said the government was always trying to find new arbitrary laws to use on people, like we just discussed.
I don't understand all the details of how retirement accounts work outside of the tax free stuff, but I kept thinking, "This guy seems worried even though he has millions." I've never met a person with a retirement account who I envied or thought was living a great life. I'm living a life that I want. People like him sound miserable, yet they have millions. I guess I don't get it, but I feel like people get money and then worry all the time about their money. There's also this feeling of delay when I talk to them too. Like they're putting aside money for something, but that something is unclear. Like what is retirement? I love asking that question at the bar and it's clear that a lot of people have put thought and money into an account, but not what they mean by retirement.
I don't fear losing something I don't have a lot of. Plus, I watched my parents get destroyed by the government when I was a kid and my mom often shared stories about what they did. In my mom's words, "the system stole." The system can't steal from someone who has nothing. I'll never trust the government or anything they propose. I think a lot of people forget that a system willing to steal from other people will eventually be fine with stealing from you, if my mom is correct about theft.
Some of what you said highlights a mistake that I made when studying Echo Boomers in the past. I felt disturbed that Echo Boomers had little saved for retirement, but like your story, I wasn't thinking about whether the Echo Boomers were enjoying their present life and the value of that. For instance, my mom retired and died less than two years from retirement. She finally got to "live her dream life" and she died quickly after doing so. She also died over two decades earlier than her life expectancy. That won't happen to you. You are living the life that you want to live. You'll probably live to 100 too!
Oh man, I hope not. I don't think I could be a bartender after 60, though I have an uncle who still welds for some professional projects at 80, so maybe so. I've thought more this past year about what I can do when I'm older, but I want to be doing something and I'm going to have to because there isn't anything I have to fall back on. I'll have to adapt to the situation. But that beats spending all my time worrying about what happens to my money.
The whole retirement accounts and plans sound weird. "I now have enough money to do whatever I want." Great! So what do they do? Something they could have made money doing in the first place. Maybe I'm not thinking about it right, but that sounds backwards.
To take the opposite side of what you're saying, societies are built on sacrifice. A civilization has no future if everyone chases their passion. That's been the most contrarian thing to say since I started in demographics, but it's true. However, you provide an example of the common warnings that incentives drive behavior and you can't win against someone with nothing to lose. You saw your parents lose, like I saw my parents lose, even though they were playing by the rules. That's perverse incentives. You, like many Echo Boomers, don't trust the system so you don't invest in the system.
That happened during [he-who-cannot-be-named]. Leaders destroyed people who had spent decades of their life starting and managing their own business. I am so lucky because our town survives from tourism and we knew that if we complied with all of the nonsense, we'd sink our city. That didn't happen and many of the businesses here survived because we stayed open. But more importantly, our community realized what the system was willing to do. We also learned that people would follow the system even when they would privately disagree. That moment was a wake-up call for our city. We saw what happened to other communities. Some cities have been decimated since that time, almost like poverty over night.
If my mom and dad had been alive when [he-who-cannot-be-named] happened, I think they would say that the system was much worse than even they believed. And they believed it was bad.
Let's shift gears a bit and talk about what you've seen or heard with AI and how it affects bartenders? I struggle a bit with AI personally because I honestly don't think there's any there there, to use a phrase from Gertrude Stein. But you meet people frequently, so what's your experience with it?
I'm the wrong person to ask. I hooked up with this tourst a few months ago who started a conversation at the bar initially because of AI. She complained to me that a lot of guys on her phone were actually using AI. I didn't understand what she meant because that sounds confusing. She showed me a phone exchange where she and a guy were texting. I should add here that she had never met the guy in person. Anyway, she told me the guy's response to her text was fake and I asked how she knew. She showed me this technique that she would use where she would interrupt their conversations with nonsense and the guy would respond normal. But she said it's not the guy responding, but actually an AI. This still confuses me a bit. An AI can type on a phone? She spent a while explaining how the whole things works and it sounds crazy. Ultimately, she knows how to identify if a guy she's chatting with is an AI. Obviously any bartender would be thinking, "The other more practical way would be to actually meet people" but there's something about this generation that doesn't want to hear that.
For me, I was like, "You're using your phone to meet a guy, who's actually using AI to interact with you, and you're upset?" This guy wouldn't have been able to use an AI in person. In other words, she made a choice to use a tool that wasted her time. After she and I hooked up, the next morning she shared that a lot of guys she would meet on her phone weren't very interesting and often lacked basic social skills. That made me wonder why the guys were using phones to meet girls. From her experience, these guys weren't learning any basic social skills by using their phones to meet girls. But then I wondered why she bothered as well. If you know that you're going to meet people who don't live up to your standard, then stop.
In life, it's extremely easy to set a goal and fail. However, these people have managed to add wasting time to this process. They set a goal, then create as much unnecessary complexity as they can so that when they fail they not only fail, but lose as much time failing in the entire process.
There's a lot of truth to what you're saying. Ultimately dating is about dealing with another person's habits. That may sound unromantic, but it's true. Outside of hook-ups and flings, a person will always regress to their habits in dating. Introverts would actually be happier meeting people on apps because apps are really built for people who can't handle normal social interaction. But take a guy who really values health. He would be better meeting girls at a gym or health food store than any app. Apps want to interfere with this entire process because Silicon Valley more than Wall Street fundamentally wants to monetize every interaction. I've had executives who have told me this. They don't want you to socialize, date or marry unless you've paid them their bounty. And if you don't want to continue paying them their bounty, they want to wreck your relationships. This is what some of them believe, but it doesn't mean that people aren't responsible for their choices. People can recognize this and live life on their terms. Will it add some costs? Yes because on the opposite side of the bounty you pay Silicon Valley is convenience - that's their selling point.
Back to AI, do you fear that AI will replace bartending?
I'm in my position because I'm likeable. Local people come to our bar to hang out and to interact with me and others. Tourists come to our bar through our restaurant since people love it. I frequently hear, "So-and-so said we had to come by and ask for."
AI won't replace any of this because the people who come to bars are social people. Social people like people. Social people do not like AI. I've not only heard this, I've seen this. A social person won't get an answer from their phone, they'll ask a friend who knows. Keep in mind that technology tools to answer questions have existed long before this AI technology, yet these social people didn't consult with these tools. You would not believe the number of conversations I've been in where a person shared how inaccurate online information is. I think that part of this is that inaccurate information gets more attention. At least that's what I noticed in my 20s.
Plus, I think that most of us start socializing for the take in an interaction. Over time, we learn to enjoy and appreciate the give. Getting a big tip is nice and I enjoy it. But hearing that I'm the guy someone can open up to and not feel judged at all is even better. Interactions are never the same. This means that we never know what to expect and that makes them enjoyable. The red pill guys get one thing right and that's consistent rewards are boring. That's what makes socializing so much fun.
So it sounds like you think that some of the excitement over AI really reflects poor social skills?
When I hear people talk about the positive of AI, it almost always sounds like a take mindset. For example, we had a CEO come into the bar the other day talking about he could fire all his employees and replace them with AI. That's a take mindset. He's paying for his employees. He would like to take their money and replace them with AI. What he doesn't understand is that part of what gives him joy is employing people. That joy gives him meaning, even if he's not mature enough to realize it. He's the kind of CEO that will have 0 people at his funeral because he created a product that no one will eventually be able to afford. He will have made no impact. But he'll have an AI that does everything for him! Maybe his AI will attend his funeral.
Think about what this person believes about people. They exist for him to get something. When you stop and consider that, it's powerful. In his mind, people only exist for him to get something. If a person has nothing to give him, they have no value in his mind. In other words, if this guy could get everything he needed without people, he would be done with all of humanity.
Compare that to another CEO I know who's come to our bar over many years. He owns an oil company. In his many years there, his company has lost a few lives due to explosions. Oil is a dangerous job. However, with some advancements in robotics, a robot can do the dangerous tasks without human life being at risk. This CEO is using AI to prevent hard working people from dying. He understands that an employee giving their life for the company is not good. A robot's end means nothing because a robot is not person. That's a very different CEO. He doesn't look at people as costs. He looks at people as valuable. In fact, I have yet to talk to that guy without him going on about one of his favorite employees, which so far as I can tell, is all of them.
Think about the trajectory of those CEOs. Who would you want to work for? Who would you want to do business with? In my view, my parents frustration at the system was because the policy makers shared the same philosophy of the first CEO. That won't end well for anyone and I doubt it will end well for him.
In the broader sense, you're actually highlighting how the application of a tool is actually what's important. For instance, in high school, I thought the internet would be a great way for people to share information. You could live in any part of the world and access information from people anywhere. I never thought people would use the internet to replace social relationships. Reading information on the internet is not the same thing as creating memories with your children, family or close friends. But as I've gotten older, I realize that how someone uses a tool communicates who they are as a person. Like that CEO who's trying to save lives by having a robot do the dangerous jobs, his use of technology shows that he values people.
Yeah and this is why I don't worry as much about AI as much as other people do. My boss is great and would be the same way, if the restaurant or bar business was dangerous. It's not. And he knows as well as I know that a big part of why our customers come here is the people who work here along with what we offer. We help people create great memories and that's why we're all here.
Are there restaurant owners who will try to replace their employees with AI? Yes. And will that work? In some situations, it might. But our customers would not enjoy that experience.
In general, do you think technology has actually improved our standard of living? For instance, our generation is technology native, but our generation as I predicted will not (and is not) outlive our parents. This was my most contrarian take when I predicted this and boy did I get pushback, yet here we are. For me, I don't see how anyone can think Silicon Valley has succeeded. It's been a failure across the board.
Well, since I don't have the internet or a cell phone, I'm probably biased a bit. What I see at the bar and restaurant too is people wasting a lot of life energy. Like I mentioned earlier, people can let something on their phone change their entire attitude, even if what's happening in their life is amazing. I do get a sense that people always think "eventually" things will be better. I don't know if you've felt that, but it seems to be the expression I've heard since I became a bartender, like "times are bad right now, but this is only temporary." How many years is it going to be temporarily bad?
[He-who-cannot-be-named] was really revealing. That's when a few of our friends got rid of their phones because they were shocked by what tech companies were doing. But my take is that if you're an in person person and you stay that way, you'll do good. I know you say our life expectancy has dropped, but from I hear, the Amish's life expectancy is actually rising and they're not fans of technology.
If someone asked you for what the key is to giving up technology, what's your answer?
You have to value your time and be scared to death of a bad habit over powering you. Otherwise, you won't do it. I hate wasting time, even if I've done some of it in my life. I always felt horrible. You do not get time back ever. You cannot extend your time and you cannot price your time. Your time is limited.
It is so easy to avoid a bad habit if you can make yourself deathly afraid of a bad habit's power over you. People always think that because I'm a bartender that I must drink. No. I've never had a drink in my life. Why? Because I've seen how many drunk people lose control and do things or say things they regret. Most people don't do this and most people are social drinkers, plus one new trend is people who don't drink coming to bars just to socialize. But I avoided alcohol because I was always afraid that I would get addicted and wouldn't be able to stop the addiction. This fear is terrifying to me. It's the opposite of our society's encouragement of "overcome your fear." My value is make fear your best friend and exploit it to avoid all the bad things you don't want to do. Make them very, very scary in your mind. Make those bad habits keep you up at night. The more you fear those bad habits, the easier it becomes to stay away from them.
I think fear is great, but it's all about how you use it. I find it odd that people don't fear losing time or they don't fear bad habits over powering them. But they'll go to horror movie or something like that to be told what they should be afraid of? That doesn't make sense.
