What If The Real Competitive Edge Is Being Human Again

We kick off 2025 with a “status of everything” format and take a hard look at tech and social media and how it’s reshaping daily life. We talk through the benefits of unlimited access to information, the hidden costs of short-form content, and why being great with people may be the most valuable skill now.

• the plan for a January “status of everything” series and what sectors we’re covering
• how TikTok and short-form video changed habits across age groups
• the upside of instant learning via Google and YouTube tutorials
• why watching content can feel like progress without real action
• how platforms optimize for retention and keep us scrolling
• the mental and emotional downsides including feeling unfulfilled, anxious, or disconnected
• how real estate and investing benefit from tech while losing human interaction
• why human-to-human skills become a bigger advantage than tech fluency
• signs of cultural pushback and growing hope for a better balance

Just strongly encourage everybody, try to make it a part of your plan this year. Set aside an hour every day or six hours every day, whatever you're comfortable with doing, maybe it's 20 minutes, to go outside of your house and do something active and physically do something with your hands or do a project, you know, with another human being in some capacity.

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Transcript

Welcome And 2025 Series Plan

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, guys, thank you so much and welcome. This is Stefan Piscano with the Stefan Piscano podcast and happy 2025, guys. Not only the shows and listening to me ramble about real estate, finance, and uh tech entrepreneurial stuff, but you can also get access to some of our training that we do on the real estate side, investing in general, and then actual hot deals. So today I want to do the what I'm calling the status of everything series, which is a ripoff of probably my favorite podcast I like to listen to these days, which is the Bill Simmons. He does that about twice a year. He'll bring on a guy and they kind of talk about the status of everything, and they'll pick a couple of topics, sports, tech, whatever it is. And since we're starting off 2025, I wanted to do the same thing, but do it in a series-style format. So for every week in January, uh starting today, since we're a little bit behind January 11th, when this will probably be posted, then we'll do the 18th, the 25th, and then the 31st. So we'll do four episodes, and we're gonna look at the status of different sectors. And the one I wanted to look at today is the tech sector and social media and just how that's impacting our lives as a society as I see it, and just how things have evolved over the last really six to ten years here, and where I think they've improved and could continue to improve over the next two years or so. So, this is something that I talk a lot about. If you know me personally, you've probably heard me rant about social media and uh the effects that it has on human beings and society quite a bit, and it's something I haven't really talked that much about publicly. But one of the reasons I wanted to do this topic, I started thinking about status of everything, where everything is at in society right now, and how things have shifted in the last 10 years, and then really just in the last 18 months, and about I'd say 2017, 2016 to 2023. And then I thought, well, what happened five or six years ago? And that was the time when TikTok really started to blow up in the United States. I don't know how long it was around in China or wherever before that, but that's at least when I heard of it, and I remember it was kind of a funny story. One of my good friends, he uh he called me up and we were just randomly talking, and he had his uh daughters in the back, which at the time I think they must have been maybe eight years old and eleven years old or so. And uh he said they had just made a big video on TikTok, and I said, What's TikTok? And then they all laugh. He said, Oh, Uncle Stefan doesn't know what tick tock is, and they all laughed at me. It was sweet. But then I went in and I told my wife, I said, you know, what's this TikTok thing? And all that now tick tock has become so ingrained in society to where society had gotten to be so dependent on tech. And in growing this podcast, honestly, as we've tried to put more links out over the last six months and try to really grow this on the tech side. And as somebody that does own a digital marketing company and has for the last 15 or so years, you know, I know how to drive traffic, I know some things are necessary, and I know the power from an SEO standpoint of Instagram, Facebook, all of these websites, but I just philosophically I don't want to be a part of it, and it's really transitioned to a point where smart people that are very deep thinkers are being pulled into this to where you you live your life on social media, and it's a very scary thing. I do think we've started to see some pushback on it just in the last 12 to 18 months here. But when I started to think about 2025 and where we're at, I uh you get really worried about the next generation. Growing up in the 80s and the 90s, I remember a time when there wasn't internet. And I also being you know young enough, I know how to use pretty much all of the tech that's out there right now. So I think my generation's in a unique spot to have kind of a bridge between both. But I think the big difference was it used to be if you wanted to learn how to do something, you really had a few ways you could learn how to do it. You could ask someone, you could ask your mentor or your father or your mother or your friend, and they could explain it to you. You could go to the library, you can read about it, or you could go and do it. Now, anything you want to know, you can Google it, and then you can watch a YouTube video on how to do it. You want to learn how to do put a spark plug in your car, you can watch it on YouTube. You want to learn how to uh buy a seller finance property, you can watch my YouTube channel. I'll explain to you how to do it, and that's great. That's a gift to be able to have access to all this type of information, but it also can be a detriment too, because what happens is if everything's accessible without ever having to even stand up and without ever having to leave your home, then you don't have that experience of actually learning how to do it. And so you have an entire generation of people that have learned this way, but they're not getting the life experience. It's honestly it's scary to me, guys. And and the TikTok, I think almost every human being I know of all ages has one, um, whether they're in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, um, and it's utilized in so many different ways uh to where it's some great, and honestly, there's some good things on there too. I mean, uh I said I don't have one, but we were just in Florida with family there, and if you know my brother-in-law will show me some funny stuff on there, you know, or there'll be a cooking recipe, and I go that's that's neat, you know, or my wife will show me um, you know, motivational stuff, and it's great. I can see how I personally would get sucked into it because it's fun, it is. The the problem is, and I experienced this without even having a TikTok, just with using YouTube. Like I had this experience to where I said a motivational clip on YouTube pop up from Denzel Washington, and I watched it. The first time you watch it, you go, Oh man, I that made me feel really good. That makes me want to go out and do something. This is great. But then it leaves you it's so short that it leaves you wanting more. And you say, Okay, well, let me see if I can find another one. Then we watch the second one. Oh man, that felt good too. Before you know it, and then the things you have to watch to get to the thing you're trying to watch, the next thing you know, by the fifth or the sixth or the eighth or the twelfth time you've watched a motivational clip, you realize you've been sitting there for an hour and a half and you haven't done anything, and now you're mentally tired and you feel like you've done something. That's the problem. And I without getting too far off on it with TikTok specifically, I don't think that's an accident. I think these short base clips, our brains are not meant to process information in 60 seconds or less. I do think there's genuine learning value if you want to learn about a specific topic in watching a 40-minute YouTube tutorial on how to do that. I think there's value in watching an uh um a video on how to calculate a cash on cash return. Of course, I'm biased there. I think there's a value in a long-form interview with somebody that you respect or inspired by. But our brains, you can get a little hit in 40 to 60 seconds, but you're not going to actually be fed with knowledge in that amount of time. So what happens is it leaves you wanting, which is not an accident. I mean, anybody will tell you who's ever been in the tech industry, and I guess I technically am in the tech industry because I've owned multiple websites and I still do own the digital marketing company. Um, lots of money, lots of brilliant minds and resources and time are spent trying to figure out how to keep you on that platform. So they don't want you to watch one video and then go out and do something. They want you to watch one video, then feel satisfied enough to watch another video and another video and another video and another video. And the next thing you know, you spent 11 hours on Facebook or YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever the platform is, and you didn't actually do anything. And it leaves you feeling unfulfilled. I believe it causes depression, um, anxiety, and it it doesn't allow you the ability to be connected with reality and real life. It's a blessing that we have access that we can learn in a way we've never been able to learn before. It it makes it makes sporting events and uh and music trivia and movie trivia a lot less fun because you used to have some great arguments with your buddies back in the day saying this person has the touchdown record, no, this person does, this person doesn't, so on and so forth. You just go back and forth for hours and never really have a winner to the argument. Now one of you just Google it, and then the other person feels silly and sad, and that's you know that. It is funny too for me, direct story with this. When I created my website, listedby.com, which is almost 15 years ago now, it all started. I was uh with one of my partners, mentors. We were down in Las Vegas, we were looking at properties, and we spent the whole day, and it was nearly 120 degrees July in Las Vegas, driving around looking at properties. And I mean, we were doing it for 11, 12 hours from about sunrise to after sunset, and just sweating the whole time. And that whole day we looked at about six properties, actually went in and looked at them, and I looked at him, we were so beat at the end of the day, and I said, There's got to be a better way to do this. There has to be a uh way we could simplify this process, speed it up. And it was that conversation, and then the several years of work and innovation after that that led to us going live with the website listed by in 2012, the goal being at that time to try to take the home buying and investment research process entirely online and have a real estate marketplace and social network and all that. And we did that, it didn't quite go how I thought it would go, but I mean we still did it. And so it's interesting to me, even just going back 15 years ago, there was a real need for technology to speed things up, and now we've got all that. All that stuff that I just said that we wanted 15, 20, 30 years ago, we've got it from a tech standpoint. That's great. I'm grateful for it. Helps me when I'm buying properties. A lot of the times, the properties that we buy, uh, I negotiate the whole thing without ever having to step foot even in the city that the property's in, uh, which is great. And it saves a lot of time and allows us to have the volume that we have, and other people do the exact same thing or even much bigger scales than we do. But it's funny to me, as the person who 15 years ago was thinking, gosh, we need all this stuff, it's gotten so tech heavy now that you miss out on the human being person-to-person interaction. And this is a blessing too, because one of the other things when I think about the status of 2025, I think about how young everybody is, you know, like my my grandmother, she passed at 63 years old. And at that time, I you know, I mean, obviously I was a kid, but I remember thinking, you know, that was so old. Now, 63, 60 years old, you're just, you know, it used to be the joke, you know, 40 is the new 30, but now I mean 40 is like 20, 60 is like, you know, 45, 50. And I have a ton of friends and partners in their 70s that are still going stronger than ever and doing innovative things and long-term minded things. One of my good friends that sells hotels, buys hotels, and builds hotels, you know, just started a five-year hotel project. He's 77 and he's got just as much energy as ever. And so it's a fortunate thing that as people are living longer, not only living longer, but the quality of life is better. The knowledge that people, let's say 35 and up, 40 and up, you know, that actually know how to interact with people. Whereas 20 years ago or even 10 years ago, uh, it was a huge advantage if you knew tech in real estate or finance or in any sector. And you, you know, some of us uh could feel like dinosaurs if you didn't. Now it's a huge advantage if you know how to interact with people as a human being, because I worry about the younger generation just not having access to doing it. It's not their fault. That's the way society's set up. Society's set up to where if you want groceries, you hit a button. If you want uh McDonald's, you hit a button. If you want to buy your t-shirt, you hit a button. Oh, you need a uh, you know, uh cable for your laptop, hit a button. You don't have to leave to even go to the store, you don't have to leave to do anything. And uh and these interactions all take place from behind a computer screen. And it's just interesting to me. I'm not really even gonna say, well, I mean, obviously you can tell I'm not a huge fan of it, but it's interesting to me how that back and forth has taken place. And if you are among those of us, which I know several people that are of all age groups, from 20 all the way up to 80, if you are one of those people that have the combination of real life experience, real life human interaction, and technology, then that's golden. That ticket is ready to go. And I think that's just a good, you know, as we start 2025 here, it's a good thing for all of us to take inventory and stock in ourselves and where we're at and say, okay, well, am I heavier in the tech side? Have I uh, you know, how much human-being interaction did I actually have in 2024? And if you're good there, great. You know, uh one of my good friends and mentors now, you know, who's also in his 70s and has more energy than I've ever had or will have, he's flying around the country all the time and meeting with people. He knows the tech and he is a master of dealing with people. So somebody like that, you're set and you're primed to be optimized in everything you do in this era right here, right now. If you're a younger person and you know things about tech that I could never dream to know, that's awesome. That's a gift that you have that skill. Continue to optimize that, but just make a point to go outside of your comfort zone a little bit. Maybe go to the mall, if malls even still exist where you're at. Maybe uh instead of ordering something on Amazon, drive to the store and buy it just so you can have those interactions. So maybe force yourself to do some things just to get to just to get to feel some of the joys and the blessings of being a human being. That would be my only two cents on that. And it sounds obvious, but if you really do an honest inventory with yourself, I think we'll find a lot of us probably aren't uh getting out as much as we should in the last couple of years here. But like I said, I do feel like because it's been joked about so much in a lot of different platforms, I think people are starting to realize it now. And I do think over the next five to ten years here, you're gonna see it get back to a nice medium between the two, and that pinch one will continue to swing back and forth a bit. So that has been my take on it, is my take on it. And if you would have asked me the status of everything in 2023 or even the beginning of 2024, I would have told you I was very concerned. Here's the good news, in my humble opinion, this is all just my opinion, that there's been a little pushback to even the younger generation, people half my age, saying, Well, this is just silly. You know, let's go, let's go do something. And I think there's a longing for the past eras more than there ever has been before in my lifetime for sure. And I think that's why you're seeing a lot of the old movies and a lot of the old celebrities come back. You know, if you think about the last five years, some of the biggest movies that have been made are remakes of movies from 20 to 40 years ago, Top Gun, you know, Bad Boys 4 or whatever they're up to. Even Beverly Hills Cop, one of my favorite ones, that they just did the remake last year, which was actually pretty good, by the way. But you know, you're you're bringing back all of these movies partially because the biggest celebrities that exist today with this crop of um of young adults that are coming up are YouTubers. And that's a it's kind of cool in a way. I mean, it's it's great that you can be some kid in anywhere in the country or the world, and you can be in Omaha, Nebraska, be 18 years old, and then all of a sudden you can be a celebrity. But it I mean, it's a little bit scary in the sense that there's something to be said for a Mel Gibson or a uh Eddie Murphy, pick a person, Tom Cruise. You know, I know a lot of people for some reason don't like Tom Cruise, but I'll throw him in there too. That had to work, had to go, they went to Juilliard, or they were a stand-up comedian in the bars for 10, 20 years or whatever it was, and they worked their way up. They got a sitcom, they got a movie, they got a big movie, bigger movie, so on and so forth, and they built their way to start. And there's some longing for that process. And I think you're gonna see a little bit of pushback, especially if TikTok gets bans. But I don't want to be overly negative. I I actually intended to be a little more thoughtful with this discussion, because I really do feel great about where society is as a whole. I really just in the last six months, even I feel like to where people are are just tired of nonsense. People are ready to to get to work, people are ready to be active, people are ready to learn. And I especially think, even though I was picking on younger generations, I feel like the youngest generation, you know, the people that are kids right now, teenagers and even younger than that, I feel extremely hopeful for them because it feels like the pendulum swung so far for five to ten years there in one direction, and now it's swinging back in another to where common sense is coming back into play. I feel hopeful for the future of this country and grateful to be a part of it. So um on future episodes, just so you know the other topics we're gonna cover that I promise will be much more uh light than this, and we're gonna talk about the status of sports next week. We're gonna talk about the status of uh the financial markets, precious metals, stock market, crypto. I'm actually gonna have an expert on from the precious metals industry on one of those. I'm excited about that. And then, of course, uh we'll wrap it up with the status of the real estate market with the final episode of the month, and then I'll do my predictions for the market for 2025 as a whole, and then we'll have another month's worth of data at that point. So I hope I didn't bum you guys out with my rants on social media. I think you can learn a lot from it. It's a blessing that we have access to all the knowledge and resources we do that we've never had before, and that can be utilized in beautiful ways. Just strongly encourage everybody, try to make it a part of your plan this year. Set aside an hour every day or six hours every day, whatever you're comfortable with doing, maybe it's 20 minutes, to go outside of your house and do something active and physically do something with your hands or do a project, you know, with another human being in some capacity. Do something that makes you feel good, get that sense of accomplishment. It's such a wonderful, beautiful thing to engage in a goal and then be fortunate to achieve that goal. And I hope that we all continue to be blessed to do that uh in 2025 and beyond. And I thank you for being a part of my network, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.