Transcript: YouTube, Natl Parks, 30 Rock – DS548

Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name’s Doug Cunnington. And in this episode, it’s a little bit of a grab bag. I’m going to talk about some potentially relevant things, uh, some stories about myself and some irrelevant stuff that doesn’t, it doesn’t really matter to anyone, but it’s kind of funny and it kind of bridges the gap from a couple of the other topics.

I don’t know. There may be some other points in here too. We’ll see. Where it goes. Oh yeah. And I, I was actually doing some pre research or I guess it’s just research for a topic for my other podcast, mile high fi about happiness, which I tend to talk about pretty often on that show. But there’s a couple of cool studies, which I’ll reference kind of just the thesis, and if you have any comments on that, I’ll be certainly interested in it.

So I won’t bury the helpful. Stuff too deep in here. I’ll get to it maybe in a second. But one thing I actually do watch a lot of YouTube videos and like to the point where I’m thinking, Hey, should I cut down on my YouTube consumption? I think it’s probably all right. I usually watch it when I’m on the treadmill or the elliptical or whatever kind of cardio thing I’m doing and when I’m at the gym.

So usually I like pair it with working out. So that that’s usually pretty good, but I’ve been watching more. Travel vloggers and YouTubers a lot of times around like van life and or traveling often domestically, not always, but a lot of times, uh, in, you know, the Rocky mountains in the West where I am actually located and I’m interested in that stuff, sometimes some national park coverage.

And that’s one of the helpful things that I’m going to tell you about. So I have a couple of videos on my channel. Where I tried to vlog a little bit. I like national parks, so I tend to go to them. In fact, my wife and I, it’s our mission to, to go and visit national parks. And we’ve been to something like 25 or so.

I live very close to Rocky mountain national park. In fact, we were just in Estes park for a few days. And went into the park multiple times while I take pictures and, you know, maybe some short videos for the last couple of years, I haven’t videoed or thought about publishing that stuff on YouTube or any social media because a lot of people don’t realize was out there these, well, I’m going to, I’m going to cover the kid’s ears or whatever.

Usually I just cuss, but I’m going to. Get upset at the National Park Service slash. What is it the Department of Interior they kind of fucked up They fucked up pretty pretty significantly. I think so. There was a law enacted I can’t remember when I want to say within the last five years or so where We’re basically, if you’re recording something that could end up on social media, where it could be monetized sometime in the future, you had to get a fucking permit for videoing, even if you were doing it on your phone, like it’s, it’s not like you had to come in with a big crew, but you had to apply to an individual national park that had to go through the application.

And then approve or disapprove, and you maybe had to pay. So let’s say I’m a vlogger, which I am technically, and I wanted to record some shit on my phone video, me and my family publish it on YouTube. Maybe some ads would come up, or maybe I got an advertiser to sponsor the video or something. I would have to go through the exercise of getting a application done, getting it approved.

And I might have to pay. Money to do it. Same application. If it was like a fucking film crew with a bunch of people that were actually impacting the other people around them or something like that. So that’s the rant. And I was very annoyed. I didn’t record anything about it because I was kind of pissed off about it.

I mean, it’s kind of a dumb, dumb rule, especially like I hardly monetize my videos, but let’s say. A few years go by and I want to monetize the video and turn on ads for a specific video for some reason, then I could get fined. So if you go research this, you’ll find some coverage of it. The thing is, it wasn’t enforced that much.

So actually, like in the last I would say six months. I was getting a bit of an interest in doing some vlogging in national parks and or traveling to some, and I thought, well, I’m gonna have to, I don’t know what day I’m going to go in because you have to say like, I’m going to. I’m going to record this day.

Here’s the number of people I’m going to have. This is the equipment I’m going to use. Some of that easy to answer, but let’s say, I don’t know what day I’m going to record makes it more complicated. It was sort of set up for like Hollywood film crews or documentarians or something. But again, I’m just one person recording with my phone.

Right. So anyway, they have this stupid fucking rule set up. And in the last six months, I was still seeing like on, uh, social media in general, on YouTube, very small channels were like publishing videos from national parks. And I’m thinking, did they go through the exercise to like fill out the fucking applications and all that stuff?

And my hunch is no, they didn’t. Cause it’s not a well known thing and it’s hard enough to start it. YouTube channel and record it and then edit it and how heartbreaking is it if you do that and Then you you get fined for having that video out there really sucks. So anyway, the news is the National Park Service took their fucking head out of their asses and Then they have a new there’s a new law You In place, which I think it was just signed in, in the last few days here, it’s like in 2025, the explore act, which like all laws is confusing and filled with legalese and such.

If you have under six people, then you don’t need a permit consult your lawyer. By the way, this is not a legal advice or advice. Of any kind, this is just me, uh, absorbing some of the information and you can do your own research. Other YouTubers have talked about this. So if you have six to eight people, which I would say would be pretty rare, unless you’re, I mean, you’re running like a company, then you may have to get an authorization for that because that’s a larger group, but under six, you should be okay.

And it should be okay for, uh, non commercial like personal use. Like if it’s just your home video or. If you do publish it on social media, including YouTube, and it is commercial, i. e. you earn money from it from ads, or there was some kind of sponsorship or something like that, but generally, you know, read the fine print and make sure you’re all right, as long as you’re not impeding or doing stuff.

You’re not supposed to like, you need to be able to record this in normal places where people go to, um, you. Can’t like exclude other people or close off an area for you to do recording It’s just like if you could record without bothering other folks, that should be fine And the thing is I took I took some photos like within a national park I also took some short videos and I just haven’t published any of that stuff because I’m a little paranoid and the motherfuckers out there could Potentially find you for each incident And it could be fairly expensive, especially if, if I’m like, I’m not actually monetizing this, at least.

I’m not running ads on it specifically. So do your due diligence. This probably does not impact very many people at all, but it does make me feel better about recording some of my adventures when I go into national parks. So it was a winter time when we were out in Estes Park and went into Rocky Mountain National Park.

And it was just like a lot of snow. We’re tromping around in the snow and ice and going hiking. And it was very quiet. It was just after new year. So not a lot of people were in town. A lot of people were back at work. And it was just very chill and quiet. And it was a cool thing. And now I could probably, you know, share some of that footage.

Although I didn’t record much because I, I didn’t know this law was coming around. So. One one of the other one of the other things when I was watching some of these YouTube videos of travelers I won’t mention who it is. Not that it matters, but it seems like a nice person and She was Basically talking about like living on the road, living in her van and traveling around, staying in, um, campgrounds and often going to truck stops and taking showers in truck stops, which pretty common.

I go to, um, like loves often, which is a. It’s a gas station, trucker stop chain. It’s pretty nice. That’s where that person went. And I’m going to tie a couple of things together. So stick with me here. I’m going to try to explain it so that it’s not too confusing. She was talking about how nice truckers are.

And she was saying like, yeah, sometimes, you know, it’s a little more expensive to buy the shower. So you could like pay some money. They’ll let you take a shower there and you get like, you know, Your own, your private bathroom, essentially. And you can take your time. And it’s supposed to be pretty nice, right?

So if you’re living in a van and even if you have a shower in your van, going to a truck stop might give you more room. You could use a little more water. You don’t have to worry about the gray water and blah, blah, blah. Right. So it could be inefficient, but she mentioned that. Truckers are so nice. They just give her a shower credit because they are full time truckers.

So they have like a reward points and you earn showers with reward points. And I was thinking to myself, yeah, not everyone gets that sort of treatment. This person, again, she’s a nice person. So I won’t mention her name. Very huge channel. So, uh, it’s kind of irrelevant, right? It doesn’t matter if I say anything, but she’s in a bubble.

All right. She’s in a bubble. She was also, um, like a fitness model. And I think she was a cheerleader for maybe the Raiders or something like that, and was on a TV reality show. She’s very pretty, lovely personality. Very pretty. The thing is, she has no idea she’s in a fucking pot and it made me think about this 30 rock episode and I’ll break one of these Cardinal rules, which is talking about a TV show that you like, but I’ll put a link in here.

30 rock is really a awesome show. And John Hamm was the love interest for a Liz Lemon. And this is why you’re not supposed to do, um, a retelling of, Your favorite TV show or whatever. But basically Jon Hamm, he’s a very handsome dude. Right. And he doesn’t realize that he’s treated differently. And there were so many fantastic examples.

Liz eventually points out to him again, I’ll put the clip in, but you’ll, you’ll be able to dig in. I just watched it. It’s about five minutes long. And yeah, he had no idea. That he was getting special treatment. He thought everyone just gets treated like that. So some examples without spoiling the clip here, I do encourage you to watch it.

So without spoiling it, he was able to walk up to a super busy restaurant where like, no one can get a table. You have to book a table three months in advance and that sort of thing. He walks in and he’s able to get a table like that. Oh, surely we’ll be able to do it. Another restaurant, a separate restaurant, like a greasy spoon kind of place.

He’s like, you know what, I don’t feel like any of this stuff on here. I’m just going to order like a shrimp po boy and, um, a raspberry soda. And, uh, it’s just bananas. All right. So again, I’m not going to spoil the whole thing. There’s a couple other things where he was like, I’m going to play tennis with Liz.

And he was like, well, I don’t want to scare you, but, um, I’m actually a tennis pro. Yeah. I started playing at the Y and all the kids moms, they wanted to take lessons from me. So I started teaching a tennis lessons. It turns out he’s horrible at tennis. And, uh, they were just like trying to get lessons from, uh, The point being, our friend.

My, uh, YouTube, uh, the vlogger person that I’m mentioning without saying her name, she has no idea she’s in a bubble. She gets special treatment and has no idea. It’s very interesting, very interesting. And the thing is, uh, there’s. If you’re in the bubble, that’s cool. You don’t even know it, but the rest of us were like, yeah, no one gets treated like that.

I’m sure, uh, perhaps in a friend group, you know, there must only be like 10 percent of the people that are like that. I have no idea, but anyway, pretty funny. All right, let’s move to the happiness topic here. And thanks for going with me on that ride. I’m certain the humor didn’t come through like I hoped.

So perhaps there’s a small percentage of you that have actually seen the episode of 30 rock that I’m talking about. So when you watch it, you’ll be, uh, you’ll be very amused. It’s fucking hilarious. Okay. So the happiness stuff, and I’m going to read a bit of a. Kind of a summary, and this is a culmination of essentially three fairly well known studies.

So this is around money and income and happiness. So, a Wharton and a Princeton research collaboration investigated the relationship between income and happiness in resolving the conflict between two studies. And this is a little study that. So there were two studies, one in like 2010, one in 2021 or so, then in 2023 or so, and I could be off on a year or a little bit, but, Not too far off the two researchers, they worked together on a collaborative study.

So it’s like, I think it’s called like adversarial collaboration. So their, their studies found sort of two different things. Then they worked together to come to hopefully better information, which I think, you know, when they analyzed why they came to different conclusions, I think they were able to tease out more information.

Their findings indicate a positive correlation between higher income and increased happiness for most people. However, a subgroup experiencing unhappiness showed happiness rising to about the income level of 100, 000 annually before plateauing. This research used data from a happiness tracking app and an adversarial collaboration methodology.

The study’s implications extend to policy decisions and individual life choices, emphasizing that while money contributes to happiness, it’s not the sole determinant. And you might remember hearing that Up to $75,000. Like your happiness doesn’t grow if you have more money. And that was the 2010 study.

So basically it said your happiness will grow to $75,000 and then basically it levels off. And that didn’t sound right to me. ’cause I thought, well, I got happier when I earned more than $75,000. And, you know, adjusted for inflation. It’s a little bit more, call it up, you know, whatever, a hundred, 110 people could figure it out, right?

Inflation changed that a little bit, but. 75, 000, then it kind of levels out. And I didn’t think that was right. I heard that sort of sediment from other people. Set to mint from other people. And I think that was, you know, interesting information, but it does mean, you know, at the bottom line, it was just like, Oh, money won’t make you happy except like if you really need it for like the, the core, um, you know, minimum living, you know, food and shelter and a little bit of comfort.

But beyond that, it kind of levels out. Well, it turns out that that study and I’m going to probably do a couple or series of episodes on this topic for my other show. But like the bottom line is the 2010 study kind of focused on the low end. So it focused on sort of the negative of not having enough money.

But the 2021 study, it focused on. The higher incomes and sort of the, the positive outcomes that could happen. So 2010 study focused on the sort of the lower end and negative, and then the new study focused on the positive. So when you put the two together, they found that I want to say around like 15 percent of people are unhappy generally.

And once they hit about a hundred thousand, then it kind of levels off. However, there’s a group that’s at the top, say it’s the top 15 or 20 percent that are pretty happy people. Well, they, they get happier when they earn a certain amount and then over, I can’t remember exactly, but call it 180, 000 to 200, 000.

Once they hit that point, they actually started building up. Getting happier faster with even higher income up to about 500, 000 per year for their income. The interesting part is that that group that was already, I mean, they were, they were content, right? So happiness, contentment, there’s some vocabulary that you have to work out when you’re asking these questions.

You have to ask other sort of different questions to, to get that. Get the right information that you’re looking for. But basically the people that were happy got happier when they earned more money, which kind of makes sense. You know, if you think about anecdotally, uh, people in your environment, sometimes like they get promotions, they earn more money and they’re still kind of grouchy, you know, some people will have other.

Other things, right? Maybe they have, um, some external circumstances that are negative, say within their family, and that’s not necessarily their fault or anything, but there’s some, there’s some other issues that they have to deal with, and that’s Makes it harder for them to be content and happy and all that thing, all those kinds of things, even if they do have more money.

So it kind of makes sense in some ways. It’s not like, uh, someone’s just always negative. Sometimes there’s those external factors, addiction, other stuff that may impact things, maybe not even them personally, but just within their immediate family or even extended family, if it impacts them. So I found these topics super interesting and the fact that the 75, 000 thing, like never quite.

I didn’t quite buy it completely. I like the idea of it that money can’t buy happiness, but money can, like, solve some problems and money can be a really good tool to buy back time for certain people in certain ways and it, you know, it’s not universal. Like some people are. Comforted and calm and it’s kind of meditation to like clean the house and like do Yard work and they actually want to do that stuff Perhaps they spend time outdoors or if they’re uh, you know cleaning their house It’s just somehow meditative for whatever reason other people hate that stuff and they want to hire someone and they will pay And that actually makes them happy to not do that kind of stuff.

So it could be sort of the opposite, but you can use money as a tool to help you do things that you want to do more of and do them with people that you want to do them with. So anyway, kind of a short episode today, kind of random. The middle was a total mess and I appreciate you going along for the ride one quick thing, you know talking about finances one you know partner that I’m starting to work with because I use this company mint mobile is Just save some money on your mobile phone plans And I was nervous to switch over to mint For honestly, a couple of years, I thought it was going to be hard to switch.

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So highly recommend checking out Mint Mobile. I save roughly a thousand dollars per year for my plan and my wife. And I tested it out for, I think like three or four days. Everything was fine. Frankly, most of the time. We’re in a normal metro area where there’s plenty of service all around. And I’m able to, you know, get service wherever I need it.

Definitely worth checking out. Almost certain that you’ll be able to save a lot of money pretty much immediately if you switch over to Mint Mobile, but you could follow the link and check out the deals, the deal that I purchased. Get I pay annually I pay 15 per month annually So it ends up being a couple, you know 100 that I need to pay and then that’s good for the whole year and you kind of lock in that rate when you pay For it annually like that.

I get five gigs of data and It, if I go over, sometimes if I’m traveling and I have to use more data on the road for some reason or another, very simple to add on a little bit more and it’s not a huge price and it’s very transparent about when you’re getting close to the limit and that sort of thing.

So anyway, Mint Mobile is great. Check it out if you want to. And thanks a lot. We’ll catch you on the next episode.