Speaker 1: As media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
Speaker 2: Zitron and this is the third I was about saying inaugural,
Speaker 2: but I'm not sure that's what that word means. Episode
Speaker 2: of Better Off Live, the live to tape radio show
Speaker 2: that I shove in there when I'm in cities. Today,
Speaker 2: I'm joined by two titans, Titans of the tech industry. Yes,
Speaker 2: I've got Cory doctor Row here of course, author Cory
Speaker 2: doctor Row and Brian Merchant, other author and journalist. And
Speaker 2: I am so excited because today we're talking about how
Speaker 2: we fix the entire tech industry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds like an easy order. I don't know what
Speaker 3: we're gonna do with the excess time after we're done
Speaker 3: with that.
Speaker 1: Looking forward to that's probably twenty minutes, Yeah something Max, Max, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll talk about our various holidays.
Speaker 2: Brian just got back from the French rivi era. It
Speaker 2: sounds like that's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did. We got stuck in Philadelphia, so my
Speaker 3: brain is still.
Speaker 2: The French revie Riviera of America, of America. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: welcome to scholar debate, gentlemen. So the thing that I
Speaker 2: keep thinking at the moment, the thing that really I
Speaker 2: had too. It was like pessimism versus optimism that brought
Speaker 2: you two together today with me and I keep coming
Speaker 2: back to this, which is everyone's kind of depressed in
Speaker 2: tech at the moment. It feels like everyone's very negative.
Speaker 2: And Brian, I know you've been a ton about lat
Speaker 2: it's obviously, and I'm wondering how we actually reverse this STrenD, Like,
Speaker 2: how do we actually get away from the fact that
Speaker 2: everyone feels miserable with their devices right now? Because I
Speaker 2: love tech. I adore my gizmos, my gadgets, my apps.
Speaker 2: I don't I care that they're messing with me, and
Speaker 2: I write a lot about it, but I want everyone
Speaker 2: else to enjoy it again, I just don't how do
Speaker 2: we even begin that well.
Speaker 3: I think that the story that the tech industry wants
Speaker 3: to tell us is the origin of this depression, because
Speaker 3: the tech industry wants us to think that you have
Speaker 3: to take the bad with the good. Right that you know,
Speaker 3: if you want to have a friend, Mark Zuckerberg has
Speaker 3: to be your friend too. If you want to search
Speaker 3: the internet, Sergei Brinn needs to know about it. If
Speaker 3: you want to have a phone that works, then Tim
Speaker 3: Apple gets to charge everyone who helps you use it
Speaker 3: thirty percent of whatever you pay them. And their argument
Speaker 3: is that like building a phone that works that doesn't
Speaker 3: have this thirty percent viig is like making water that's
Speaker 3: not wet, right, right, And that's just like patently untrue.
Speaker 3: And so I think that, you know, to the extent
Speaker 3: that we're like God, you know, I like being able
Speaker 3: to talk to my friends and being able to you know,
Speaker 3: download a movie without having to go to the video store,
Speaker 3: and I like all of these other things. I guess
Speaker 3: I just have to live in the apocalyptic wasteland or
Speaker 3: I have to go and you know, live in a
Speaker 3: shack in the woods and be the unibomber. And I'm
Speaker 3: here to argue that there's like, you know, we could
Speaker 3: seize the means of computation. We could decompose the prefeast
Speaker 3: menu into an a la carde little little French content
Speaker 3: for you then, Brian and we could have a new
Speaker 3: good Internet that consists of the stuff we like and
Speaker 3: throws away the stuff that's bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's why the you know, the luddite is
Speaker 1: such a handy epithet for them in its you know,
Speaker 1: incorrectly deployed sort of context. That's why they use it, right,
Speaker 1: It's not they say, oh, if you're against any one
Speaker 1: of those things that Corey just brought up, then you
Speaker 1: are against in fact the whole of technology. And then
Speaker 1: we can sort of deride you, we can write you off,
Speaker 1: we can cast you aside. And it has made for
Speaker 1: the last twenty years or so at least kind of
Speaker 1: you know, actual sort of substantive critiques and attempts to
Speaker 1: reconfigure some of those systems much more difficult. You have
Speaker 1: to clear that ball bar first, you have to say,
Speaker 1: you have to start every argument with, well, I'm not
Speaker 1: a lot I but I actually like technology. But I
Speaker 1: think that and we are only now kind of reaching
Speaker 1: a point where we have enough sort of a critical mass,
Speaker 1: enough momentum where we don't have to sort of, you know,
Speaker 1: dither around and sort of and make all of that,
Speaker 1: all of that.
Speaker 3: Sort of pretext. It's clear now, I think.
Speaker 1: Add to your point that the Internet is such a
Speaker 1: festering mass in so many ways that it's just self evident.
Speaker 1: You log onto this thing and Google barely works. Everything's
Speaker 1: tracking you, either, surveillance capitalism is at work in every
Speaker 1: nook and cranny and it's just and anybody who uses
Speaker 1: that besides just a few isolated apps can kind of
Speaker 1: feel it. It makes your skin crawl these days. So
Speaker 1: the task that we have now laid out before us
Speaker 1: to try to fix this stuff, I think is clear
Speaker 1: than it ever has been. And I do think, you know,
Speaker 1: I often get criticized for being a pessimist or a
Speaker 1: doom sayer, but I'm really not.
Speaker 3: I'm actually quite idealistic.
Speaker 1: I think that there's a lot that we can do
Speaker 1: that's fairly straightforward to start sort of fixing some of
Speaker 1: this stuff.
Speaker 3: And I know Corey and are.
Speaker 2: In agreement on all, but yeah, and I think that, oh,
Speaker 2: we'll get to where you disagree later. That's where scholar
Speaker 2: debate is. So because this is the woke Lex Friedmann show,
Speaker 2: of course. And but the thing I keep coming back
Speaker 2: to as well is these people who are like, I'm
Speaker 2: a techno optimist. Not just the people the capital t
Speaker 2: kept Low Andresen types and the fans of Nick Land,
Speaker 2: I guess, but even the people criticizing, say tech Crunch
Speaker 2: for being against I don't know a writer saying fuck
Speaker 2: people who who don't like who don't like the AI,
Speaker 2: which is bullshit. Sorry, Connie. The thing is, these people
Speaker 2: don't seem to like tech. They seem to like business.
Speaker 2: They don't seem to It's not like I see Bajali
Speaker 2: sitting around digging around on his fucking iPhone playing a game.
Speaker 2: I don't see Mark Andreson or hear Mark andries and
Speaker 2: talk about even using technology. None of these people seem
Speaker 2: to experience tech. They're just experiencing the ways in which
Speaker 2: McKinsey and their various outgrowths of Sandwich. They're weigh in
Speaker 2: between the layers of society and and it's so fucking
Speaker 2: frustrating because I too, get called a pessimist. I have
Speaker 2: people on the Reddit, the people who want I don't know,
Speaker 2: actively stealing the hub caps off of cars as they
Speaker 2: listen to the show. They're piste off, like, Oh, you
Speaker 2: just don't like it. You're just being negative, You're just
Speaker 2: a pessimist. No, I love this shit, and I'm tired
Speaker 2: of not loving I'm tired of it being bad. Facebook
Speaker 2: used to be great. I know that that company's deeply evil,
Speaker 2: even to the early days book.
Speaker 3: I mean, it was founded so that Mark Zarkerperg and
Speaker 3: his friends could non consensually rate the fuck ability with
Speaker 3: their fellow hearts. Undergraduate, it's like truly evil.
Speaker 2: But then even then there was a good side of it,
Speaker 2: where like I was in college in two thousand and
Speaker 2: five and Penn's day when it was going and like there.
Speaker 3: Was something magical. You suddenly these nights for.
Speaker 2: Better or for worse that you might have forgotten, or
Speaker 2: that you might have forgotten moments of these get these
Speaker 2: shitty digital camera pictures. You have people that you'd met
Speaker 2: in passing, that you'd never meet again except you could
Speaker 2: now and now what over fifteen years later, Facebook actively
Speaker 2: in vines if you try, if you're like, i'd let's
Speaker 2: find this person, like haha, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: So I can I draw a distinction. So I think
Speaker 3: that you're the frame of optimism. Pessimism is not very
Speaker 3: useful because optimism and pessimism, I think, are our beliefs
Speaker 3: that don't leave a lot of room for human agency. Right.
Speaker 3: Optimism is just this idea that the history is running
Speaker 3: on rails and it's running to a good place, right,
Speaker 3: And pessimism is the opposite belief. But neither of them
Speaker 3: really admit of a place where where we act. And
Speaker 3: I like hope, right, yeah, which is the idea that, like,
Speaker 3: if you don't like your situation and you don't know
Speaker 3: how to make it fully better, if you can find
Speaker 3: even just one thing you can do to materially improve
Speaker 3: that situation, you will ascend the gradient towards the future
Speaker 3: that you want. And that as you attain that new
Speaker 3: vantage point, you may find yourself able to see new
Speaker 3: ways to make things better that were occulted when you
Speaker 3: were further down the slope. And so you know, it's
Speaker 3: not the most efficient way to get from A to Z,
Speaker 3: but it's it's also much better than trying to treat
Speaker 3: your activism in your life like a novel. Right. I'm
Speaker 3: a novelist. I know how novels work. In novels, you
Speaker 3: have a very neat dramatic arc where you do a thing,
Speaker 3: and then you do the next thing, and you do
Speaker 3: the next thing. You build to a climax and either
Speaker 3: it's triumphant or it's tragic, and then that's the end.
Speaker 3: In real life, there's a lot of backtracking, and the
Speaker 3: fact that we can't see a novelistic way from A
Speaker 3: to Z just tells us that we're living in the
Speaker 3: real world and not a simulation.
Speaker 1: So where do we find hope then, Like, really, I
Speaker 1: think that that is it. Yeah, I mean I and
Speaker 1: I would just also the sort of comment on that.
Speaker 1: I do think that there is you know, there's utility
Speaker 1: in pessimism, right, and there's utility in optimism as well.
Speaker 1: I don't think it necessarily forecloses any futures necessarily. There's
Speaker 1: the of course, you know that you have the pessimism
Speaker 1: of the intellect and the you know, the optimism of
Speaker 1: the will. I think that's endured for a reason, and
Speaker 1: I think it's applicable here. And I think these two
Speaker 1: sort of like brief snapshots that you just offered a
Speaker 1: Facebook to use it as an example sort of can
Speaker 1: can be illustrative in a sense, right, Like you you know,
Speaker 1: it was founded for truly demonic purposes by a troll
Speaker 1: man who continues to like wield influence over what is
Speaker 1: now one of the most powerful platforms of all time.
Speaker 1: And yet in that sort of interim period before it
Speaker 1: became that from its evil origins, there was this period
Speaker 1: where users had more power right where they were connecting
Speaker 1: each other. I mean, some of that was somewhat illusory
Speaker 1: because they're still subject to all of the you know restrictions. Well,
Speaker 1: at the very least they Monk Zuckerbug was scared of
Speaker 1: his us as being upset. Yeah, and there was a
Speaker 1: you know, the users were dictating the growth. I mean,
Speaker 1: we had this kind of fertile period twenty years ago
Speaker 1: or so, especially with Web two point zero, where it
Speaker 1: was basically the users were taking the lead.
Speaker 3: Like Twitter was.
Speaker 1: Like nothing before. Users said, oh what about a hashtag?
Speaker 1: What about these features? What about you know what, how
Speaker 1: can we sort of build this into something that's useful
Speaker 1: for us? And you know, a couple of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: white dudes in their in their twenties and and and
Speaker 1: got pretty lucky because they owned some of that infrastructure
Speaker 1: at the time, but they at least had the the
Speaker 1: the foresight to sort of let users lead and to
Speaker 1: see what was you know, what was what was working,
Speaker 1: what wasn't, what was popular, what what helped. Obviously that's
Speaker 1: imperfect as a model of genuine of sort of generalized
Speaker 1: growth too, but it's something that is still powerful to me. Right,
Speaker 1: we have a more democratic model of developing technology that
Speaker 1: is not just limited to the company in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: certainly not just limited to one founder, and how do
Speaker 1: we sort of knock down some.
Speaker 3: Of those barriers.
Speaker 1: This is what Corey writes about a lot like especially
Speaker 1: sort of knocking down sort of the the monopolistic and
Speaker 1: the oligopolistic instincts and tendencies that these companies have acquired
Speaker 1: now that they've concentrated so much wealth and power. But
Speaker 1: we do see flashes of what can be. We still
Speaker 1: have models of what's still good. I found myself pointing
Speaker 1: more recently to like, Wikipedia, for all its flaws, still
Speaker 1: a really interesting organization that still operates and creates really accurate,
Speaker 1: good and enjoyable and useful information without you know, having
Speaker 1: succumbed to so many of these immense like pitfalls and
Speaker 1: become a disgusting cesspool like many of its other contemporaries.
Speaker 3: You know, I think that what we're getting at here
Speaker 3: when we talk about what's hopeful about the future and
Speaker 3: when we look back on the past, is that we
Speaker 3: see these people who were at very best imperfect I
Speaker 3: speak as an imperfect person myself, and sometimes actually just
Speaker 3: genuinely terrible people who nevertheless produce things that we like.
Speaker 3: And that's a very hopeful thing because it suggests that
Speaker 3: We don't need perfect people to make good things. We
Speaker 3: can imperfect vessels can still hold something of value. And
Speaker 3: so you have to ask yourself, why were they better
Speaker 3: then and why are they worse now? And Ed, I
Speaker 3: think you got at it right, right in the bullseye
Speaker 3: a few minutes ago, when you said Mark Zuckerberg was
Speaker 3: afraid of his users. Right. So I think that these
Speaker 3: firms used to be disciplined by external forces, and by
Speaker 3: some internal forces their workforce, and that they no longer
Speaker 3: feel that discipline. Right. There was a time when firms
Speaker 3: worried about competition. Hm, that's not so much a worry anymore.
Speaker 3: We relaxed anti trust laws, and the long run effect
Speaker 3: of forty years of relaxed anti trust laws is five
Speaker 3: giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.
Speaker 3: In the memorable phrase of Tom Eastman, and so there's
Speaker 3: nowhere to go, right. Lily Tomlin used to do this
Speaker 3: bit on Saturday Night Live, where she'd play an AT
Speaker 3: and T operator doing commercials for the Bell system. They'd
Speaker 3: end with her turning to the camera and saying, we
Speaker 3: don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company.
Speaker 3: When you have a ninety percent market share and search
Speaker 3: when you've got twenty five billion dollars a year to
Speaker 3: spend making sure that nobody ever sees a search engine
Speaker 3: other than yours, because you're the default everywhere there's a search.
Speaker 3: Why do you need to make the search good. You're
Speaker 3: just the only game in town. You don't care, you
Speaker 3: don't have to your Google. Right, So they didn't have
Speaker 3: to worry about competition. They used to have to worry
Speaker 3: about regulation, and we've seen some pretty big regulatory interventions.
Speaker 3: You know. The real big one was Microsoft and the
Speaker 3: DOJ for seven years over antitrust. And they don't have
Speaker 3: to worry about that either anymore because once the sector
Speaker 3: is really concentrated, it finds it really easy to figure
Speaker 3: out what their lobbying position is and to stay on message.
Speaker 3: If you remember the Napster Wars, right, there were like
Speaker 3: one hundred little tech companies that in aggregate were still
Speaker 3: much bigger, like orders of magnitude, bigger than seven entertainment companies.
Speaker 3: The seven entertainment companies kick their ass, yeah, because two
Speaker 3: hundred companies they're a raval, right, seven companies are a cartel,
Speaker 3: and so thank you. Yeah. No, the Calltaeil. Thing is
Speaker 3: my mite.
Speaker 2: Phil Broughton's safety officer and a nuclear safety ex But
Speaker 2: in general he's been telling me Calltel, Calltael, Calltel. And
Speaker 2: I I'm really coming round to this thing that it's
Speaker 2: not just it's not just about the monopoly. It's about
Speaker 2: the fact that they're all sitting there shaking each other's hands.
Speaker 2: Apple being paid at nineteen twenty billion in the year
Speaker 2: by by by Google to not do.
Speaker 3: So how is that Google and Facebook carving up the
Speaker 3: search the ad market with the political collusive Jedi blue
Speaker 3: arrangement that was revealed by the Texas AG's lawsuit against them.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean, these companies they pretend that they're
Speaker 3: you know, bitter enemies, but they're all chummy when it
Speaker 3: comes to the stuff that matters. And you know, once
Speaker 3: you have your regulators captured, then you also can mobilize
Speaker 3: law against your adversary. So it's not just about flouting
Speaker 3: the law, it's about using the law against your enemies.
Speaker 3: And what used to happen with tech And one of
Speaker 3: the things you asked what we love about tech? One
Speaker 3: of the things I love about tech is how flexible
Speaker 3: it is, right, how you can always change it so
Speaker 3: that it does what you want. And one of the
Speaker 3: things that we got out of the concentration in the
Speaker 3: tech sector is a capture of regulators that led to
Speaker 3: an expansion of IP law that has now made it
Speaker 3: illegal to reconfigure your own stuff.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So imagine that this the three of us. We're having
Speaker 3: a board meeting about our ad strategy for our website,
Speaker 3: and you're chairing it at and you say, well, guys,
Speaker 3: our KPI, here is AD revenue top line AD revenue.
Speaker 3: I figured out we make the ads twenty percent more obnoxious,
Speaker 3: we get two percent more top line revenue. Brian, who
Speaker 3: may not give a damn about users, can still stick
Speaker 3: his hand up and say, ad, has it occurred to
Speaker 3: you that when we make the ads twenty percent more obnoxious,
Speaker 3: forty percent of our users will type how do I
Speaker 3: block ads? Into a search box? And then our revenue
Speaker 3: from those users goes to zero forever because they're never
Speaker 3: going back to type how do I start seeing ads again?
Speaker 3: And so when you raise the price of ink, you
Speaker 3: have to worry about third party in cartridges. When you
Speaker 3: make MySpace terrible, you have to worry about bots that
Speaker 3: let people leave my space, but still have their messages
Speaker 3: imported into Facebook. You know, all these things that made
Speaker 3: it very easy to lower the switching costs and go
Speaker 3: where you wanted. Well, IP laws basically made that illegal.
Speaker 3: Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt a business model where
Speaker 3: break DRM or violating terms of services become a crime.
Speaker 3: And so companies just put DRM in terms of service
Speaker 3: around their stuff so that anything you do that displeases
Speaker 3: their shareholders as a felony. And then the last thing
Speaker 3: that used to discipline these companies, something near and Derda
Speaker 3: Bryan's in my heart, was their workforce. Yes, because tech
Speaker 3: workers were powerful, there weren't enough of them, and they
Speaker 3: could get a job somewhere else. And yeah, their bosses
Speaker 3: suckered them into working every hour that God sent by
Speaker 3: telling them they were on a holy mission, and so
Speaker 3: they missed their mother's funeral and their kids litteral league
Speaker 3: game to ship the product on time. But that did
Speaker 3: mean that they would feel profound moral injury when their
Speaker 3: boss said let's make this shitty, and because they could
Speaker 3: get a job somewhere else, they would tell their boss
Speaker 3: to go fuck themselves. But two hundred and sixty thousand
Speaker 3: tech layoffs last year one hundred thousand year to date
Speaker 3: this year, tech workers aren't telling their bosses to go
Speaker 3: fuck themselves. And so you have a boss who every
Speaker 3: day went to the wall where there's a giant lever
Speaker 3: labeled in shitification and yanked it as hard as it could.
Speaker 3: And they couldn't get that lever to budge very far. Competition, regulation,
Speaker 3: their own workforce, interoperable hacks, they all kept the lever
Speaker 3: from moving freely. Now the lever just goes all the
Speaker 3: way to one hundred, and from the boss's perspective, they're
Speaker 3: just doing what they did every day of their lives.
Speaker 3: They don't know why we're so angry at them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I think this also circles back to, you
Speaker 1: know that what we were talking about earlier about you know,
Speaker 1: the need and the imperative to sort of be critical
Speaker 1: and to sort of oppose certain aspects of how tech
Speaker 1: and tech companies especially are unfolding. Because the current state
Speaker 1: of play, all these things that Corey's describing that are
Speaker 1: absolutely true that you know, they didn't just you know,
Speaker 1: they didn't arrive prepackaged that way. I love that you
Speaker 1: just walked us through all all those three things that
Speaker 1: no longer happen, and it's in large part a result
Speaker 1: because there were a lot of missed opportunities to regulate
Speaker 1: a lot of missed opportunities to sort of constrict this
Speaker 1: growth before it became. My favorite example is, like, I
Speaker 1: think it was twenty thirteen when the Obama administration had
Speaker 1: a chance to sue Google for when it became quite
Speaker 1: clear that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior and it
Speaker 1: was becoming sort of a monopoly of search, and they
Speaker 1: basically just kind of let them off with the slightest
Speaker 1: slap on the wrist possible and said go for it.
Speaker 1: I mean, we all think about tech today and all
Speaker 1: these people who are you.
Speaker 3: Know what happened there?
Speaker 1: Exactly what happened there? It was so Obama. I mean,
Speaker 1: how far back do we want to go.
Speaker 2: That specifically twenty thirteen era, because there's the current antitrust
Speaker 2: lawsuit now, But what was the predecessor.
Speaker 1: Well, it was just there was an FTC probe and
Speaker 1: basically the Obama administration could have sort of green green
Speaker 1: lit a more aggressive investigation, a more aggressive suit into
Speaker 1: Google's monopoly practices. You know, this was ten years ago,
Speaker 1: so it was before it had become so sort of
Speaker 1: like obviously and so stultifyingly sort of the want what
Speaker 1: does it have ninety percent of the search market, So
Speaker 1: it's literally it's just like the textbook definition.
Speaker 3: Of an search. So it's twenty thirteen. So that's right.
Speaker 2: So Prabagod Ragavan at this point had joined Google. Going
Speaker 2: back to the man who killed Google Search my favorite story,
Speaker 2: real piece of.
Speaker 3: Shit, motherfucker there, Probagod, come on the shell. I'll take you.
Speaker 3: I'll take you out in the mic.
Speaker 2: But what's interesting is that does time really interestingly with that,
Speaker 2: so that that interrogation never happened, They never really went deep,
Speaker 2: and just then they hired Prabagarth from Yahoo after he's
Speaker 2: done his work destroying Yahoo's search, and that was when
Speaker 2: Google began to sour. And it feels like that could
Speaker 2: have been a complete that's a historic moment. That's a
Speaker 2: moment where everything could have changed.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was one moment of you know, a
Speaker 1: number that they could have but yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: Corey has documented what's happened.
Speaker 3: Since it's just old school.
Speaker 1: Payola practices, right like Google has just sort of really
Speaker 1: just kind of strangled the market, not through innovation, not
Speaker 1: through introducing great products or ensuring that the user has
Speaker 1: the best experience, but just by you know, sheer force of.
Speaker 3: Paying people out.
Speaker 1: The Apple deal is a great example, just literally just
Speaker 1: funneling billions to another tech company to make sure that
Speaker 1: its product shows up at the top of another tech
Speaker 1: products you know service.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, you know, I think that if we want
Speaker 3: to understand why Obama took the decision he did and
Speaker 3: what's changed, you have to understand that during the Carter administration, right,
Speaker 3: so we have to go way back, we started to
Speaker 3: see the rise of a crank theory of anti trust law,
Speaker 3: and that Crank theory was that anti trust law was
Speaker 3: being misapplied that if you saw monopoly in the wild,
Speaker 3: what you'd actually encountered was something that was very efficient. Right,
Speaker 3: if everyone goes and buys the same product at the
Speaker 3: same store, uses the same search engine, it's the best.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't it be perverse for the government to spend public
Speaker 3: money to take the best product and make it worse, Right,
Speaker 3: And so that was the theory that we got under Carter.
Speaker 3: Reagan really liked it because of very monopoly friendly, and
Speaker 3: every administration since has brought into it as did every
Speaker 3: economic school in the country and eventually in the world.
Speaker 3: This is a very thatchery kind of ideology, but it
Speaker 3: also heard in the EU, thank you, and you know
Speaker 3: that these ideas kind of raced around the world and
Speaker 3: became orthodoxy, and they were funded by very rich people.
Speaker 3: So there's a thing called the man seminar m a
Speaker 3: NN that is sorry. So the man seminars are these
Speaker 3: free junkets for federal judges where they teach them about
Speaker 3: anti trust law and they're run by rich guys and
Speaker 3: they fly them to luxury resorts and they explain how
Speaker 3: anti trust law should work. And there's been quantitative work
Speaker 3: on this where they took federal judges and they looked
Speaker 3: at their decisions before and after going to a man seminar,
Speaker 3: and they found that after going to a man seminar,
Speaker 3: they weighed more heavily in favor of monopoly. And so
Speaker 3: they built up this evidouce edifice rather of precedent and
Speaker 3: theory and orthodoxy. And Obama's FTC said, oh, We're going
Speaker 3: to let them walk. What they were doing was just
Speaker 3: continuing a grand tradition of Bush one, Bush two, Reagan, Carter, Clinton,
Speaker 3: right like this was the way that things were done.
Speaker 3: It was an absolutely wasted opportunity. But it's more or
Speaker 3: less what Trump did afterwards, and it's what we did
Speaker 3: all the way up to the Biden administration, which for
Speaker 3: reasons I think that have nothing to do with Biden's
Speaker 3: own ideology, but have everything to do with the way
Speaker 3: that he operates as a party powerbroker, where he wants
Speaker 3: to give everyone a little as something. We got a
Speaker 3: handful of appointees at the tops of some of the
Speaker 3: most important agencies that really oriented themselves towards smashing corporate power.
Speaker 3: Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, Jonathan Canter at
Speaker 3: the DOJ Anti Trust Division, Tim Woho's in the White
Speaker 3: House for several years, and so on, and these people
Speaker 3: have really transformed things. We've seen more policy transformation in
Speaker 3: the last four years than in the last forty. It's
Speaker 3: it's been head spinningly great. It's wonky, it's hard to
Speaker 3: get your head around. It's very structural, right, it's about
Speaker 3: changing the rules of the game, which takes a while
Speaker 3: to show up in the game. Right, But boy, oh boy,
Speaker 3: it's pretty substantial. Do you think it could go anywhere? Though?
Speaker 2: Do you actually we talk about hope. Should we have
Speaker 2: hope from this?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's it's very it's very tenuous. It
Speaker 1: has been great, you know Lina con in particular. I mean,
Speaker 1: I wish the administration would do kind of a better
Speaker 1: job of touting its wins because all this stuff is
Speaker 1: just so popular. What Lenakon has done in awakening sort
Speaker 1: of the FTC from its kind of kind of coma.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's coma, it's in decades long coma. And then
Speaker 1: attacking some I mean, who doesn't hate Ticketmaster? Like who
Speaker 1: doesn't you know, who who loves logging onto the Internet
Speaker 1: as it is today? Like these are these are entities
Speaker 1: that are popular to go.
Speaker 3: After junk fees, non competes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how Amazon which has recently turned so hostile to
Speaker 1: its own, you know, third party vendors and small businesses
Speaker 1: that that it relies on to operate that it's strangling.
Speaker 1: This is a perfect example of what the you know,
Speaker 1: the Democrats and Biden are supposed to be all about
Speaker 1: standing up for you know this, the little guy, the
Speaker 1: small business owners, you know. And I think the problem
Speaker 1: with all of these gains is that they're just tethered
Speaker 1: to an administration.
Speaker 3: Right, so if.
Speaker 1: If Trump, I mean some some of them, you know,
Speaker 1: some of them could could be more durable.
Speaker 3: They could be. But I mean Lina con is not
Speaker 3: going to be the head of the FDC if Trump wins.
Speaker 3: They're already coming for Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean Democratic donors are coming for her too,
Speaker 1: because tech companies don't like Lena Khan either.
Speaker 3: So you have guys like I think it was, is
Speaker 3: it Reid Hoffman? Yeah? Oh god, but that company that
Speaker 3: just turned down a thirty six billion dollar acquisition offer
Speaker 3: from Google did so because they didn't want to go
Speaker 3: through that wizy trust. Hell it is the security company. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And so you know, you have had, if nothing else,
Speaker 3: four years of companies not being acquired and instead trying
Speaker 3: to be product led and make a thing that people
Speaker 3: want that they can sell for more than a cost
Speaker 3: to make them, which is you.
Speaker 2: Know, that's an insane I don't.
Speaker 3: I was raised by socialists, it's right, and even I
Speaker 3: can recognize that this is what capitalism is supposed to look.
Speaker 2: Like my dad ran apart of the NHS, like I'm
Speaker 2: the same way. But also this is also something that
Speaker 2: really fucking bothers me about. Take you showed me your
Speaker 2: framework laptop beforehand, and for the listeners, the framework is
Speaker 2: a laptop that you can actually effectively rebuild, replace the
Speaker 2: motherboard and the screen and all these things. As a
Speaker 2: regular user. There is still cool shit happening. But also
Speaker 2: I assume that company makes more money than it spends
Speaker 2: on its stuff. Take can do this, and I feel
Speaker 2: like the Commons, there's this weird paradox at the moment,
Speaker 2: we've got Take saying well, it's actually these companies should
Speaker 2: be able to quote Ilia Suitskava formerly of open Ai,
Speaker 2: we should be able to scale in peace. I by
Speaker 2: the way, Ilia, if you some here this, you will
Speaker 2: never have a moment of piece. As long as I
Speaker 2: have a microphone. Now that you said that, I'm going
Speaker 2: to be watching you, I'm going to be popping out
Speaker 2: of the toilet like the skibberty meme that the children
Speaker 2: look at. But the thing that frustrates me is they
Speaker 2: want this world where they can burn as much money
Speaker 2: as possible, but also the biggest of them can print money,
Speaker 2: prints so much money, more money than any company should
Speaker 2: have while also providing their services. And it's just how
Speaker 2: is it? How do they not want to be the
Speaker 2: company that just makes more money than they spend that
Speaker 2: people like.
Speaker 3: And is it just that they don't give a shit?
Speaker 3: Is it? Is it sunned up a shy and his
Speaker 3: ilk just don't care. Well. I think that what you're
Speaker 3: looking for, the Fraser looking for here is what Lina
Speaker 3: Khan calls too big to care. Right if you think
Speaker 3: back to the moral philosophers of capitalism or you know,
Speaker 3: writing at the time of the Light Eyed uprisings, and
Speaker 3: they were saying, look that the thing that i'm a
Speaker 3: profit driven economy as opposed to a rent driven economy
Speaker 3: will get us is a world in which, instead of
Speaker 3: the lord knowing that the peasants will have to bring
Speaker 3: in the harvest every year because they're legally obliged to
Speaker 3: they can't leave the land, the lord, the capitalist will
Speaker 3: have to mobilize capital, bring free labor into contact with it,
Speaker 3: alienate them from the surplus of that labor, and watch
Speaker 3: over their shoulder all the time for someone who shows
Speaker 3: up with a better machine, a better process, a better
Speaker 3: pitch for their workers. You know, if you own the
Speaker 3: building that a coffee shop is in, and that coffee
Speaker 3: shop goes bankrupt because a better coffee shop is just
Speaker 3: open across the street. You're fine. Actually you're great, because
Speaker 3: now you have an empty storefront. You could rent on
Speaker 3: the same block as this new hot coffee shop. Right,
Speaker 3: if you own the coffee shop, if you're the capitalist
Speaker 3: as opposed to the rontier, you're fucked. And so every
Speaker 3: capitalist aspires to being a rontier. Right. They don't want
Speaker 3: to operate in an environment in which they're like the
Speaker 3: fastest gun in the West, who's always waiting for that
Speaker 3: kid to show up and say draw Brian.
Speaker 2: Actually, Bridgingenolf of that is well, I think it's time
Speaker 2: to much the oscy just very bas what did the
Speaker 2: Ludites actually ask for? Because I've heard people who do
Speaker 2: not like this. They're in people who do. But explain
Speaker 2: for the listeners because you hear this phrase Ludism mentioned
Speaker 2: quite long.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, so there's no there's there's no
Speaker 1: you know, enduring lud eighte manifesto that where all the
Speaker 1: lud Eites and the people who were out on the
Speaker 1: streets who are part of the campaign, you know, of
Speaker 1: the of the eighteen tens who were organizing basically against
Speaker 1: this new sort of you know, this new this new
Speaker 1: class of entrepreneur that was rising up to to basically
Speaker 1: exploit their labor, to use machinery, to uh, to divide labor,
Speaker 1: to to use children to run it, and to sort
Speaker 1: of may force them to compete and to sort of
Speaker 1: and to drive down their wages. So they are against
Speaker 1: The Ludites are basically against all that they were.
Speaker 3: Truly a They were.
Speaker 1: In many ways, you know, a reactionary force. They had
Speaker 1: their back against the wall. They weren't a pro active
Speaker 1: political party or anything like that. So you can't necessarily
Speaker 1: say every Ledite believe this or this is what they wanted.
Speaker 3: But there are a number of things that.
Speaker 1: Are clear about what they were that what they were seeking,
Speaker 1: and you can really boil it down to basically a
Speaker 1: seat at the table.
Speaker 3: This was a profoundly.
Speaker 1: Anti democratic way to develop and deploy technology that they
Speaker 1: were experiencing, and they went to great lengths even before
Speaker 1: they became Luddites to point this out. They went to
Speaker 1: Parliament and said, these new machines are being bought up
Speaker 1: by this new rising class of capitalists. They are being
Speaker 1: staffed by either migrant workers or children, or precarious.
Speaker 4: Workers Napoleonic war orphans, right exactly, they literally would pipe
Speaker 4: in orphans from London into these factories to staff them,
Speaker 4: and they wouldn't pay them until they turned eighteen. They
Speaker 4: and so the Luddites or the people who became Luedites
Speaker 4: would point this out and they would ask for some
Speaker 4: very basic, very common sense reforms, asking for minimum wages,
Speaker 4: protections from fraud. And that went on for ten years,
Speaker 4: and they got laughed out of Parliament time and time
Speaker 4: again until those any regulations that did govern the trade
Speaker 4: were thrown up altogether. And so when the Luddites become Lutdites,
Speaker 4: they're basically protesting all of the above, the fact that
Speaker 4: this was a profoundly undemocratic process that they are being
Speaker 4: forced to uh to either succumb, to either go work
Speaker 4: in the factories or to give find it, give up,
Speaker 4: which wasn't an option. By the way, This isn't a
Speaker 4: diverse economy of you know that we recognize today right
Speaker 4: exactly learned it.
Speaker 1: You can't even learn to code. You grew up in
Speaker 1: a weaving town. Guess what you're John's pretty limited to weaving.
Speaker 1: So these are people who are remarkably at the at
Speaker 1: sort of the whims of the market. And when the
Speaker 1: market was as poor as it was, and these capitalists
Speaker 1: were in control of it to the extent that they were.
Speaker 1: You know, they tried, they tried to reason with a
Speaker 1: lot of these uh, these factory owners. They tried before
Speaker 1: it came to it came to what it came to
Speaker 1: when they sort of organized this gorilla rebellion that was
Speaker 1: incredibly popular that they you know, this was the new
Speaker 1: Robin Hood movement basically, and what they wanted was, yeah,
Speaker 1: a seat at the table. They opposed the machinery hurtful
Speaker 1: to commonality that was align well must it.
Speaker 2: Seems like it wasn't, because the common misunderstanding if lotism
Speaker 2: is that they just wanted to destroy the machines because
Speaker 2: they didn't like them. And it sounds like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: if the market forces would have given a seat the
Speaker 2: table for the workers, they might not fucking resent.
Speaker 1: Under Yeah, I heard Cory, you make this make this
Speaker 1: observation too again. If like someone had come to town
Speaker 1: with the machine and said, all right, let's figure this out.
Speaker 1: Let's get together, like, how can we all benefit from
Speaker 1: this machine?
Speaker 3: I saw it over there.
Speaker 1: I bet the whole town could really benefit from having
Speaker 1: access to this machine that makes our working lives a
Speaker 1: little bit.
Speaker 2: Maybe to make the machine better. If we talk to
Speaker 2: the people who'd use it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe we can all make a little bit more
Speaker 1: money together. You still have your if you're if you're
Speaker 1: the you know, the merchant capitalist who was you know before,
Speaker 1: was kind of the middleman in charge of distribution.
Speaker 3: Maybe this will make you more money too. But it
Speaker 3: didn't work like that.
Speaker 1: It always developed where either somebody would come in from
Speaker 1: out of town with a lot of money and be
Speaker 1: set up something truly enormous, or a factory or owner
Speaker 1: would recognize, or a prospective factory owner would recognize the capacity,
Speaker 1: the productive capacity of these new machines and then try
Speaker 1: to build them for personal gain. And this whole process
Speaker 1: really was deeply conflicting to the vast majority of factory
Speaker 1: owners too, because they saw a handful of people using
Speaker 1: the machines this way in a way that then at
Speaker 1: the time was very clearly corrosive to the social contract. Right,
Speaker 1: if you have one person saying I'm gonna use this machine,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hire kids to run it, I'm gonna sort
Speaker 1: of profit as much as I can drive prices as
Speaker 1: low as I can to get these guys. You're fucking
Speaker 1: up the entire town economy, You're fucking over your neighbors.
Speaker 1: It's a disgusting thing to do. And you were hated
Speaker 1: for it. So the people who did it were willing
Speaker 1: to be hated. They were willing, they were they were
Speaker 1: the ones who were willing to take that ire. And
Speaker 1: few were. And a lot of some people walked away
Speaker 1: from the trade rather than you know, automate their machines,
Speaker 1: and and some you know, sided with the Ludites and
Speaker 1: were quietly kind of like cheering, like, yeah, go smash
Speaker 1: those guys factories. But by and large, you know who
Speaker 1: did the state. Once the state threw its lot in
Speaker 1: with with with with the factory and back them up
Speaker 1: with arms and with with punitive policies, it was, you know,
Speaker 1: pretty clear.
Speaker 3: I was going. I want to point out two things
Speaker 3: that I think are really important that that Brian omitted here.
Speaker 3: The first one is that Brian wrote the definitive book
Speaker 3: about Yes, it's called Blood in the Machine. You should
Speaker 3: read it. It's very good. And the second one, which
Speaker 3: I think you just you skipped over maybe too quickly,
Speaker 3: is that they already had the legal right to a
Speaker 3: seat at the table. They did. There were laws in
Speaker 3: Parliament that gave them that right. The firms involved were
Speaker 3: moving fast and breaking things, and the Luodites went to
Speaker 3: Parliament and said, we would like the law obey right.
Speaker 3: And this is this is an early example of of
Speaker 3: Wellhet's law. You know that that capitalism consists of exactly
Speaker 3: or or conservatism consists of exactly one proposition that there
Speaker 3: should be powerful people whom the law protects but does
Speaker 3: not bind, and everyone else whom the law binds but
Speaker 3: does not protect right. And this is what the Luddites
Speaker 3: were actually. You know, the thing that drove them into
Speaker 3: the streets was they they watched these people effectively stealing
Speaker 3: from them and Parliament going along with it, and they
Speaker 3: were like, well, I guess we just got to do
Speaker 3: some self defense here.
Speaker 2: And I think you can draw a direct fucking line
Speaker 2: from this from Luddites to people who would call someone
Speaker 2: like me or someone better like Molly White, a cynic.
Speaker 2: And I think it's this thing where what people like
Speaker 2: everyone at this table, Molly White, David Garrett. When talking
Speaker 2: about cryptocurrency these Gary Mark has been talking about AI,
Speaker 2: Roger mcnamy, You've been talking about everything these people are
Speaker 2: not cynics or critics. I guess they are critics if
Speaker 2: you just frame any criticism as big critic. What they're
Speaker 2: doing is saying, hey, can we apply very basic fucking
Speaker 2: societal structure to this stuff that is thieving, that is
Speaker 2: burning things?
Speaker 3: Hey, do we want this thing that seems.
Speaker 2: To enrich in the case of cryptocurrency a very small
Speaker 2: and shadowy group. And the ones who want shadowy are
Speaker 2: very annoying. And these people like the Winklevosses who lost
Speaker 2: a billion dollars of their customers money. That's fine, But
Speaker 2: when you talk about this stuff, well, you just don't
Speaker 2: like technology. You just don't want progress. Motherfucker. None of
Speaker 2: this is progress.
Speaker 3: From the very beginning, this was the goal.
Speaker 1: It was clear to anybody in eighteen twelve when the
Speaker 1: Luddite movement was at its apex, that this was a
Speaker 1: popular movement. That people were coming out in the streets
Speaker 1: to cheer the Luddites, not the factory owners, because they
Speaker 1: felt solidarity with them. Yeah, because they saw the shape
Speaker 1: that industrial capitalism was taking. They knew who the winners
Speaker 1: were going to be, they knew who the losers were
Speaker 1: going to be, and they cheered the lued Heites on.
Speaker 1: And so when the state comes out and it has
Speaker 1: to sort of make its case against the Ludite, it
Speaker 1: has to demonize the Luedites, it has to try to win,
Speaker 1: and it does so again by making frame breaking a
Speaker 1: capital offense. You break a machine, you can get killed,
Speaker 1: you can get hung.
Speaker 3: Both taking too right, oath, taking too saying that you
Speaker 3: were a Luttite became a hang up all offense. You
Speaker 3: could get hung.
Speaker 1: That's why there's no real records left of sort of
Speaker 1: their their meeting minutes or there anything or any letters
Speaker 1: between the very few and far between.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Classic, and then they mobilize troops. There's more troops in
Speaker 1: England fighting the lut Heites than they were fighting Napoleons.
Speaker 3: They brought them back from the front, right, they brought
Speaker 3: them back from France to fight the Lutedtite.
Speaker 1: The tens of thousands at one point, so you could
Speaker 1: literally see you'd see the lines drawn sort of as
Speaker 1: industrialization was very literally almost a civil war, and the
Speaker 1: states making the case against the Lutedites, and it's the propaganda,
Speaker 1: you can call it. It's propaganda at the time, and
Speaker 1: its proclamations and its declarations it's it's it's casting the
Speaker 1: Ludites as backwards looking, as deluded, as malcontent under the
Speaker 1: you know they must be you know, they're they're smashing
Speaker 1: the thing that that that that you know that that's.
Speaker 3: Part of their job.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're smashing, they're smashing. Probably this form of criticism
Speaker 1: is already there. So when the Ludites do lose, when
Speaker 1: they are hung en mass uh, that language is used
Speaker 1: in the trial against them, and we can see why
Speaker 1: because the state needs to have this enemy. They have
Speaker 1: to be able to paint this portrait as anybody who's
Speaker 1: against the shape that technological development is taking, anyone who's
Speaker 1: criticizing any element of that, Like, wait, is are there
Speaker 1: too many losers or winners? No, shut up, you're a luttite.
Speaker 1: Get out, you stand down, or we will hang you.
Speaker 2: And I think that this is a really I'm so
Speaker 2: glad you went into this specific thing because it really
Speaker 2: feels like now I don't know if the state is
Speaker 2: I think the state's laziness is more or like a
Speaker 2: lack of focus is the problem. It's not that the
Speaker 2: administrations are being like people who don't like AI are stupid,
Speaker 2: or people who don't like crypto. They're just like, I
Speaker 2: don't really get this, and these people got so much money.
Speaker 2: And I love money. I love getting paid, I love
Speaker 2: being lobbied. This is great. So I'm gonna go with
Speaker 2: the guys with the money versus the fact that I
Speaker 2: think that actually the optimists I don't just mean Andresan
Speaker 2: or Bajali, I mean the AI fantasists, all these people
Speaker 2: who claim that if you're against AI, well you don't
Speaker 2: care about progress. I actually have a counterpoint, which is
Speaker 2: they are against progress. They don't want anything new to happen.
Speaker 2: They want whatever money they want the next Google. And
Speaker 2: when I say the next Google, I don't mean Google Search.
Speaker 2: I mean the giant monopolistic entity that just spits like
Speaker 2: eats people and shits out money. And I'm just gonna
Speaker 2: put it bluntly. They they are the cynics. They are
Speaker 2: the pessimists that like the SCALEAI guy, like all of
Speaker 2: these people who go around, well if you if you
Speaker 2: don't believe, we need to do this, we need to
Speaker 2: train as much as possible. That's what the future likes. Like,
Speaker 2: Fuck no, these people don't care about tag.
Speaker 3: Can I can I I'll give you a little gloss
Speaker 3: on this from Mal Sauter, who's very smart about this
Speaker 3: and who was the first person to point this out
Speaker 3: that that I encountered, which is that AI and indeed,
Speaker 3: all statistical methods of prediction are intrinsically conservative because because
Speaker 3: if what you're doing is predicting what should happen next
Speaker 3: based on what already happened, what you're doing is you're
Speaker 3: driving a future that looked like the past. So think
Speaker 3: of it this way, Right, you pick up your distraction
Speaker 3: rectangle and you type hay, and then it finishes it
Speaker 3: with darling, because that's what you type every time. That's
Speaker 3: what a cool mclenns you might be. You might want
Speaker 3: to type hay, asshole, but it wants you to type hey, darling. Right,
Speaker 3: and now, if you type something you've never type before,
Speaker 3: it's going to pick the thing that most people say. Right,
Speaker 3: that's that's the So you're going to get either the
Speaker 3: statistically average version of who you used to be or
Speaker 3: the statistically average version of who every one is. There
Speaker 3: is something intrinsically and inseparably conservative about the project of
Speaker 3: making the future look like the past. Now I want
Speaker 3: to mention something that again I learned from Brian's very
Speaker 3: excellent book Blood in the Machine, which is that Frankenstein
Speaker 3: was a ludite novel and was widely understood as a
Speaker 3: ludite novel. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when
Speaker 3: an entrepreneur gets to build a machine without talking to
Speaker 3: his neighbors about what it should do, and it was
Speaker 3: really widely understood as this. And the irony here, and
Speaker 3: I say this as a fully paid up member of the
Speaker 3: Science Fiction Writers of America and science fiction novelist. The
Speaker 3: irony here is how many of these torment nexus building
Speaker 3: weirdos read cyberpunk as a suggestion instead of a warning,
Speaker 3: and defend what they're doing as carrying on the visionary
Speaker 3: tradition of science fiction. The first science fiction novel ever
Speaker 3: was Frankenstein, and it was a novel about why you
Speaker 3: shouldn't just build whatever goddamn machine you feel like? Bill?
Speaker 2: What I like about The Ready Player one one? First
Speaker 2: of all, one of the worst books ever written.
Speaker 3: In mind, it would be nice to Ernie. I think
Speaker 3: that book. It's very fun.
Speaker 2: I believe it is that we are not going to
Speaker 2: turn this into a debate on that book in so
Speaker 2: much trouble.
Speaker 3: But my problem. I like your book, Ernie, come on
Speaker 3: the show, You'll kill me.
Speaker 2: But the thing is with that is that book is
Speaker 2: not a positive book. No, nothing about that story feels good.
Speaker 2: But also the central plot is this shanty town this
Speaker 2: child escapes from every day and then using his distractions
Speaker 2: from his terrible life, he is able to decode the
Speaker 2: thoughts of a deeply troubled, mentally unwell man as he
Speaker 2: is chased by greedy people who don't really care about
Speaker 2: any of it, and all of them are obsessed with
Speaker 2: not the interest in the stuff, but the existence of
Speaker 2: the stuff. And Mark Zucker books that's actually the single
Speaker 2: best I'm going to build.
Speaker 1: That's this is just what Corey was just talking about,
Speaker 1: right is. It speaks to the conservatism of the a
Speaker 1: lot of these the detection once they've built a company
Speaker 1: that's big enough to where you know, you're casting around
Speaker 1: for your next thing because you don't actually want to
Speaker 1: do any you know, real innovating yourself.
Speaker 3: You you you outsource it to a sci fi novel.
Speaker 1: That's why we've seen this this sort of generation of
Speaker 1: of sort of wish lists from cyberpunk from the metaverse.
Speaker 1: I mean that was just Mark Zuckerberg saying, hey, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's let my next My next thing is the metaverse.
Speaker 3: Then that comes from your your future is being a legless, sexless,
Speaker 3: low polygon heavily surveyed cartoon character in a virtual world.
Speaker 3: I stole from a twenty five year old ystopian cyberpunk novel.
Speaker 1: Exactly Elon Musk, the cyber truck that's from Blade Runner.
Speaker 1: For some reason, it's from a blade Runner which is
Speaker 1: Epegen based or oh now open Ai, which says, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's gonna be like Her, the movie Her.
Speaker 1: They're just saying like that, like right, like that. That's
Speaker 1: that's sort of the extent of the imagination at work here.
Speaker 1: And I do think that that is like an inherently
Speaker 1: sort of conservative and restrictive way to operate, and it's,
Speaker 1: you know, we were seeing the limits of it now.
Speaker 1: I don't even know if they actually want to build
Speaker 1: these products or if they just want to win a
Speaker 1: hype cycle and sort of get it's a way that
Speaker 1: they can get people to talk about it.
Speaker 3: I just want to call out that ads Elon Mosk
Speaker 3: is early similar to FW to Clark.
Speaker 2: Well, if you're a legless fullness creature. You feel your
Speaker 2: life's restricted, perhaps you could check out one of the
Speaker 2: following products, and I guarantee you the following products will
Speaker 2: not in any way embarrass me have some kind of
Speaker 2: almost ironic connotation with what they run. So please enjoy
Speaker 2: the following ad and we're back. So I think it's
Speaker 2: funny you brought that up, Brian, where it's like, it's
Speaker 2: not even obvious that they can about what they're building.
Speaker 2: It's not even about the stuff anymore. And when I
Speaker 2: look at a company like Google or Microsoft, what do
Speaker 2: they do? Like if you really sit down and say
Speaker 2: what does Google do? What does Microsoft? Or you can
Speaker 2: look at Apple and say they make consumer electronics.
Speaker 3: That's fairly that.
Speaker 2: I think that that's a fair thing. They make laptops
Speaker 2: to make phones, you use them, and sometimes they force
Speaker 2: you into an abusive system called the app Store, But
Speaker 2: nevertheless you can tell what they do. Google and Microsoft
Speaker 2: are like holding companies. They're they're private equity firms that
Speaker 2: have no.
Speaker 3: Like formal shape.
Speaker 2: Because this whole week I've been sitting down and reading
Speaker 2: about something we will get to in a minute, which
Speaker 2: is how open a I can can compete with Google Search,
Speaker 2: and by the way, they cannot. It's impossible. It's actually impossible.
Speaker 2: It just feels that it's not that they don't have focus,
Speaker 2: is that they can't have focus. That there's simply nothing.
Speaker 2: They can't make anything anymore. They can make more similar stuff,
Speaker 2: But when was the last time Google up with something
Speaker 2: truly innovative.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it's it's you can kind of tunnel
Speaker 1: by the rush and it's desperation to sort of like
Speaker 1: build some sort of an AI product that can work
Speaker 1: or that can at least capture some attention, because it's
Speaker 1: not I mean, it's not this this overview AI thing
Speaker 1: that they rushed out the door and were just ruthlessly
Speaker 1: and widely and deservedly mocked for making it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not even clear I think to anybody how that
Speaker 1: serves Google's bottom line. If anything its them, it loses
Speaker 1: the money because they have ostensibly this remarkably potent revenue
Speaker 1: generator in terms of Google Search. I mean, that's the
Speaker 1: only real answer to your question. I think that is
Speaker 1: what does Google do? It runs a search engine that
Speaker 1: it has gotten tired of running, and it's or it's
Speaker 1: backers and partners have gotten tired of running, or people
Speaker 1: are convinced that it's no longer the future and that
Speaker 1: it's not going to be useful to anybody. But I mean,
Speaker 1: to me, the search engine is still far superior to
Speaker 1: and to using a chat, GPT or any generative AI
Speaker 1: product that I've come across yet. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's the talent as I understand it, from Google, has
Speaker 1: has been shifted away from running the search operation, the
Speaker 1: search department. Now it's all on on Ai, which is
Speaker 1: the again, this nebulous form that I don't even think
Speaker 1: it's not like Google. I mean, Google sounded that famously,
Speaker 1: this red alert that said all hands like we got
Speaker 1: to catch up to open aid, we gotta we gotta
Speaker 1: figure out a way to make this happen. And we
Speaker 1: just see this sputtering, all these little false starts and
Speaker 1: and turds rolled off into the Internet that are that
Speaker 1: are more mocked than us and certainly not profitable.
Speaker 3: I want to I want to try and make the
Speaker 3: heroic case for Google, okay, which is a tough case
Speaker 3: to make, but I'm gonna make it so Google, I
Speaker 3: think you said, what was the last time Google made
Speaker 3: something truly innovative. I think it was twenty five years ago.
Speaker 3: Google has not made a successful products in search. They've
Speaker 3: brought a lot of successful products, right. They bought their
Speaker 3: mobile stack, they bought their ad text, they bought video.
Speaker 2: You could like go for example, it wasn't go fairly
Speaker 2: recent that the coding language.
Speaker 3: Their programming lange. Yeah, sure, I'm getting I'm getting to that. Yes,
Speaker 3: they bought YouTube, right, yeah, they bought They bought YouTube.
Speaker 3: They bought YouTube after Google Videos failed, so they made
Speaker 3: a video platform that didn't work and they bought one
Speaker 3: that did great. Right. They they bought their ad tex Stact.
Speaker 3: They bought their customer service. They bought dogs, they bought collaboration,
Speaker 3: they bought maps, they bought all of it, transition. Where
Speaker 3: did they buy dogs from? Who's Who's they forget it
Speaker 3: was that company?
Speaker 2: That's that's something like I feel like I'm fairly well versed.
Speaker 2: Intent was the start I thought they built.
Speaker 3: No, No, they didn't build they so like first depending
Speaker 3: on how on how you want to purse it, right,
Speaker 3: because you have things like their hotmail clone, which was
Speaker 3: very successful. Uh you know Gmail, Yeah, right, but it's
Speaker 3: it's a they made that in house. They didn't buy
Speaker 3: that from someone however, it's a clone of hotmail, right, sure.
Speaker 3: And so they have these these products. But what they
Speaker 3: did for these products, and and this is the heroic part,
Speaker 3: the part where I'm going to be bend over backwards
Speaker 3: to be fair to there, is they know they scaled
Speaker 3: them and they made them reliable. Right, that's crazy. And look,
Speaker 3: one of the things that we critique capitalism for is
Speaker 3: that it is underinvest in maintenance, It underinvests in infrastructure,
Speaker 3: it underinvests in what we could broadly call care work.
Speaker 3: And at its best, what Google did was, in a
Speaker 3: kind of patrician way, became a serial acquirer of nascent
Speaker 3: competitors that didn't necessarily extinguish those competitors, although they did
Speaker 3: in some cases. But what primarily they did was they
Speaker 3: scaled them up to utility scale, and then they maintained
Speaker 3: them to a very high degree of reliability. Now, I
Speaker 3: think that if you want to understand Google's internal culture,
Speaker 3: and I think you did a good job talking about
Speaker 3: it when we wrote that the man who killed Google
Speaker 3: is that it's a distinction between people who want to
Speaker 3: do care work and people who want to do rent seeking, right,
Speaker 3: And so you know, there's a version of even keyword
Speaker 3: advertising that I think we can tell a heroic story about. Right,
Speaker 3: if you are a novelist and you've written a science
Speaker 3: fiction novel and it's like a novel by someone else, right,
Speaker 3: it's a comparable to it, then you could buy the
Speaker 3: adword and you could say, when someone searches for Neil
Speaker 3: Stevenson launched this guy's career by saying at the top,
Speaker 3: having one little ad slot that's like, have you read so?
Speaker 2: And so it's the foundation of the like the good
Speaker 2: bits of capitalism, if you can call it, like the
Speaker 2: honest marketing, like we like this, you might you like this,
Speaker 2: you might like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it's it's and so there's a lot you know,
Speaker 3: being able to reach into these niches. This is also
Speaker 3: a thing that Facebook has done quite well. And and
Speaker 3: you know when Facebook has defenders, they are often small
Speaker 3: business people who could not address a market without fine
Speaker 3: grained targeting. Me right now, that fine grained targeting needn't
Speaker 3: be behavioral. It could be it could be content based. Right,
Speaker 3: you could target if you want to target plus sized cheerleaders,
Speaker 3: you could find the Facebook group for plus sized cheerleaders
Speaker 3: and sell your uniforms to them. And I'm sure that
Speaker 3: there are a bunch of people who are plus sized
Speaker 3: cheerleaders who are really pissed that the uniforms for plus
Speaker 3: cheerleaders suck, and who'd be really great to see those ads. Right.
Speaker 3: You don't have to spy on them, you don't have
Speaker 3: to follow them into the back. I don't need to
Speaker 3: know who they are. Yeah, but that's what they've done
Speaker 3: at their best, right, And the rent seekers just want
Speaker 3: to make money by providing as little to everyone else
Speaker 3: as they can and taking as much in as they can.
Speaker 3: They want to own a factor of production and they
Speaker 3: want to be insulated from the risk because other people
Speaker 3: who produce useful things will have to license or buy
Speaker 3: that factor of production from them in order to do
Speaker 3: the useful thing. But whether or not they do the
Speaker 3: useful thing or not, Like think of Nvidia right in
Speaker 3: videos selling video cards to people who are going to
Speaker 3: go out of business. That doesn't matter to Invidio and
Speaker 3: they already sold them gets a stake in Think about
Speaker 3: Unity right, who said, oh, we're going to take not
Speaker 3: We're not just going to sell you the dev tools
Speaker 3: to make your video game. If your video games succeeds.
Speaker 3: We're going to get a royalty for every game you share, right,
Speaker 3: And they called it shared success. Now, note that this
Speaker 3: rhetoric of like shared success is not the rhetoric of
Speaker 3: shared risk.
Speaker 2: Kind of like a parasite shares your success.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, shared risk, right, shared risk, shared reward
Speaker 3: makes a certain degree of sense. If they're saying, okay, well,
Speaker 3: i'll tell you what. We've got a deal where we
Speaker 3: will give you discounted or free tools and development money
Speaker 3: and whatever. We'll invest in your company, right, and as
Speaker 3: a form of shared success, and we will also take
Speaker 3: a shared risk in your failure. That's a very different matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because shared risk is inherent to actual shared success.
Speaker 3: We are taking a risk.
Speaker 2: But it's almost I think this keeps coming back to
Speaker 2: basic evolution Darwinism, probably two different things. Now, I said
Speaker 2: I did not do well in size. But nevertheless, I'll
Speaker 2: get round to this. There are no predators for these
Speaker 2: people anymore.
Speaker 3: There's nothing they're afraid of, no discipline, Like there's the
Speaker 3: cattail thing is they don't want they want everyone to
Speaker 3: stay the same, so they know who they're looking at
Speaker 3: every day.
Speaker 2: We can bark, bark anyone out of the area. If
Speaker 2: we don't like them, we can make growing difficult. We
Speaker 2: know the venture capitalists, we know the commercial real estate owners,
Speaker 2: we know the people in government office. We can make
Speaker 2: this really difficult and really easy for us. But also
Speaker 2: it feels like we need predators in the tech industry
Speaker 2: and not the kind who worked at Google like Andy Rubin,
Speaker 2: and I think the.
Speaker 1: Well, and as long as you have a company I mean,
Speaker 1: I mean that has any you know, degree of success
Speaker 1: or that becomes as big as Google does, I think
Speaker 1: just like the base logics of capitalism are going to
Speaker 1: mean that you do you grow the number of people
Speaker 1: who are the rent seekers and who are interested in
Speaker 1: protecting those revenue streams at any cost. And you know
Speaker 1: that the halo of a company like Google may dim,
Speaker 1: it's still kind of extent.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: I just wrote this this art about a former Google
Speaker 1: privacy engineer named Tim Leibert, who was a big security
Speaker 1: and privacy guy in the academic field. He went to
Speaker 1: pen he did a time at Oxford, and he was
Speaker 1: a professor at Carnegie and he really, you know, was
Speaker 1: really a big critic of Google. And then Google hired
Speaker 1: him and he agreed to go because he thought this, well,
Speaker 1: all the things that I'm talking about, all the things
Speaker 1: that I want to fix, Google is the largest purveyor
Speaker 1: of these issues of privacy. He looks at cookies and
Speaker 1: the way that Google tracks your data. So he figured,
Speaker 1: you know, if I'm going to have a shot at
Speaker 1: fixing this, I'm just going to go into the mothership.
Speaker 1: And sure enough, the way that he describes it to
Speaker 1: me is his job was split between two basic tasks. One,
Speaker 1: he's talking to other younger hires who still kind of
Speaker 1: believe in the idea of a technology and a service
Speaker 1: that can really help and serve people, and who want
Speaker 1: to try to make sure that Google, you know, meets
Speaker 1: its privacy commitments and is in line with the law.
Speaker 1: And then he would go into the meetings with the
Speaker 1: executives and management and they would spend the most of
Speaker 1: the time telling him why they couldn't do all the
Speaker 1: things that he and all of the people who are
Speaker 1: actually working in the trenches at Google wanted to do.
Speaker 1: And it just became this two year long clash of well,
Speaker 1: there's this privacy law. Don't we we have the tools
Speaker 1: and the capabilities to fix it. Don't we want to
Speaker 1: do it and then butting up against management.
Speaker 3: Why would we do why would we do that? That would
Speaker 3: it's would we could?
Speaker 1: It would be easier just to like pay the fines
Speaker 1: as they come than to actually finds a price, and.
Speaker 3: They need to.
Speaker 2: I feel like they really need to change the finds
Speaker 2: so they scale sure or here's my other there and
Speaker 2: they're on a Smoglu said this as well, I'm then
Speaker 2: take it step well laterally put them in jail. And
Speaker 2: I'm only kind of kidding. I mean, if, for example,
Speaker 2: the CrowdStrike situation. I brought this up on the Lost
Speaker 2: Battle Off Live as well, such an Adella should be
Speaker 2: looking at potential jail time or the cuts see of
Speaker 2: CrowdStrike should be jail time or personal liability. If you
Speaker 2: work for a public company with excess revenue blah blah,
Speaker 2: and you make it so that they can't just do
Speaker 2: stock splits or some weird shit so they get away
Speaker 2: with him including stock revenue, you should potentially forfeit like
Speaker 2: tens percent.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny that you say this because the
Speaker 1: other part of the story is, so is Tim built
Speaker 1: this this this system called web x ray that can
Speaker 1: search for every privacy violation that a company is committing
Speaker 1: on the web and the ideas to make it into
Speaker 1: like a sort of an assembly line for class action
Speaker 1: lawsuits and for lawsuits. So you can say, okay, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe Google, maybe people emailing Google and saying, hey, you're
Speaker 1: in violation of the Germany's new privacy law. May can
Speaker 1: you please address this isn't really but if you can say, okay, boom,
Speaker 1: here's here's a search engine can show you exactly how
Speaker 1: many times a minute or an hour it's violating these
Speaker 1: laws regularly.
Speaker 3: Kind of logne that have costs you know, attached to them.
Speaker 1: Then and maybe you can sort of so there are
Speaker 1: people sort of like fighting against this.
Speaker 3: This is maybe a good time to talk about the
Speaker 3: structure of regulation or what regulations work and which ones
Speaker 3: don't and why and so on. So one of the
Speaker 3: key things to understand about regulation is that a regulation
Speaker 3: that's hard to administer will be administered less. Right, So
Speaker 3: if you make a rule, for example, that says, if
Speaker 3: you're a platform that competes with the platform users, so
Speaker 3: your Amazon, you sell your own goods, but you also
Speaker 3: sell goods by your competitors. As a fairness requirement, you
Speaker 3: must put the best match for the user's search at
Speaker 3: the top and not just your own products. So this
Speaker 3: is what's called a ban on self preferencing. The problem
Speaker 3: is to administer that, you have to be able to
Speaker 3: kind of peer into the mind of the Amazon executive
Speaker 3: who decided to put the Amazon product at the top
Speaker 3: of the search, because if they believe that they made
Speaker 3: the best product, then they haven't violated the rule.
Speaker 2: And I was going to say, it feels like the
Speaker 2: word best is the problem then.
Speaker 3: Right, So it's a very difficult thing to discover. Moreover,
Speaker 3: if you have a sincere but incorrect belief about what's best,
Speaker 3: because we're really good at talking ourselves into thinking that,
Speaker 3: you know, with the stuff we make is good.
Speaker 2: And being empathetic, maybe you truly have seen more of
Speaker 2: this thing being built, like yeah, loss is what they'd say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So you might have a good reason to do it,
Speaker 3: and you still might be wrong. So as an administrative matter,
Speaker 3: figuring out whether or not someone is self preferencing is
Speaker 3: really hard. Now, this isn't the first time this has
Speaker 3: come up. When the Sherman Act was passed in eighteen ninety,
Speaker 3: the first anti trust law in the United States, self
Speaker 3: preferencing was a huge problem because you had railroads that
Speaker 3: owned freight companies and they competed with the freight that
Speaker 3: they shipped. Right. You had banks that hadn't been split
Speaker 3: where you had retail and investment, so you had banks
Speaker 3: that loaned money to local businesses and owned local businesses
Speaker 3: that competed with their debtors. Right. And so we didn't
Speaker 3: create a rule that says, Okay, you must treat everyone fairly,
Speaker 3: because determining the fairness was too hard. What we said
Speaker 3: is you have to be structurally separated. You either are
Speaker 3: a bank or you're an investor, but you can't be
Speaker 3: in a bank that invests. You are either a railroad
Speaker 3: or you're a freight company, but you can't be a
Speaker 3: railroad that owns a freight company. This is called structural separation.
Speaker 3: And the thing is you do lose some efficiencies. Maybe
Speaker 3: there's some cool things you can do with vertical integration,
Speaker 3: but what you get is administratable rule. Because I can
Speaker 3: tell really easily whether a railroad owns a free company.
Speaker 3: I can't tell whether they're dealing with it fairly. But
Speaker 3: it's really you can from orbit. You can figure out
Speaker 3: whether a Railroad owns a freight company.
Speaker 2: So just imagine you're a dumbos look at mey you
Speaker 2: It's pretty easy. Yeah, just why has this not been
Speaker 2: done with I don't know, Microsoft and open Ai for example.
Speaker 3: This is very interesting. So think about the ad tech
Speaker 3: platforms ad tech. It's it's into three pieces. You have
Speaker 3: a demand side platform, a sell side platform in a marketplace.
Speaker 3: So the demand side platform represents advertisers, the cell side
Speaker 3: platform represents publishers who have places where the advertisers can place,
Speaker 3: and out in the marketplaces where the agents for them
Speaker 3: gather together to bid. And so you land on a
Speaker 3: web page that lag before it loads. That surveillance lag
Speaker 3: is all of these little auctions taking place where someone says,
Speaker 3: you know, I have an eighteen to thirty four year
Speaker 3: old manchild from Queens who has been recently searching for
Speaker 3: gonorrhea and owns an Xbox, who will pay to advertise
Speaker 3: to them? And how much will you pay? Right? Love them?
Speaker 3: And so there's this little thing going on in the background, right, Okay,
Speaker 3: So Google and Facebook each own a demand side platform,
Speaker 3: a sell side platform, and a marketplace. And moreover, they
Speaker 3: have rigged the game so that if you use one
Speaker 3: part of it, you pretty much have to use the
Speaker 3: other parts. And they're both publishers and they're both advertisers. Now,
Speaker 3: so fifty one percent of every advertising dollar goes into
Speaker 3: Google and Facebook SIG. The historic share for all intermediaries
Speaker 3: and advertising supported media was fifteen percent, so they've tripled
Speaker 3: the share for intermediaries in this. So this is like
Speaker 3: if you and your partner were getting divorced and you
Speaker 3: showed up and you realized you both had the same
Speaker 3: lawyer who was also the judge, who was also trying
Speaker 3: to match with both of you on Tinder, and then
Speaker 3: after the divorce was settled, you discovered that you didn't
Speaker 3: get the house. Your partner didn't get the house. The
Speaker 3: lawyer got the house. Right, This is the thing. So
Speaker 3: last year we had a bill introduced in Congress called
Speaker 3: the America Act. And one of the great tragedies of
Speaker 3: American politics is our brightest political science graduates go to
Speaker 3: work in the Senate where all they do is come
Speaker 3: up with acronyms for acts. So you know, the America
Speaker 3: accents for some of the ess A is for America, the
Speaker 3: country that I love. M is for motherhood, the value
Speaker 3: I admire. So the America Act says to the ad
Speaker 3: tech platforms, you have to split, you have to be
Speaker 3: structurally separated. You can represent sellers, you can represent buyers,
Speaker 3: you can be a marketplace, but you can't be all three.
Speaker 3: And the two main co sponsors of the America Act
Speaker 3: were Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. Right, wow, that is
Speaker 3: a pretty bipartisan pill because even someone as terrible as
Speaker 3: Ted Cruz can look at an arrangement in which someone
Speaker 3: represents the buyer the seller and is the marketplace and
Speaker 3: is capturing three hundred percent of the traditional share for
Speaker 3: representatives who perform this function and say, this market cannot
Speaker 3: be fixed with a code of conduct. This market can
Speaker 3: only be fixed structurally.
Speaker 1: Or at least recognizes the politics of taking on big tech,
Speaker 1: right as something that is applicable to his constituents, Right,
Speaker 1: because I think, you know, I don't know that most
Speaker 1: of his most Texans might necessarily care about all that,
Speaker 1: but they do care about fairness. They do care about
Speaker 1: the fact that big tech has gotten so powerful.
Speaker 3: It is really interesting we've come to the place where
Speaker 3: it has been become a truly bipartisan code. Ben It's look,
Speaker 3: nothing moved out of the Senate last year.
Speaker 2: So the abyss do we move this shit forward, like
Speaker 2: to the to the real meat of it?
Speaker 3: What do we do? How do like?
Speaker 2: Maybe it's not us and my editor Matt Hughes, he
Speaker 2: suggested an idea. I can't do this because it make
Speaker 2: me morally corrupt. But I'm just saying American software pants, right,
Speaker 2: they're extremely and Matt, this is Matt's idea. You can
Speaker 2: there are a lot of patents you can file pants
Speaker 2: for anything.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying you do this.
Speaker 2: In fact, I know a lot of my listeners right
Speaker 2: now you're holding up a drug store, you're working on
Speaker 2: a new kind of tasteless poison, and you're or just
Speaker 2: regular stealing. It's a Friday, It's an easy day for you.
Speaker 2: Here's an idea. Surely someone could just anticipate the things
Speaker 2: the Open Eye was going to do in the future
Speaker 2: and just start filing patterns and then use those pans
Speaker 2: to mire them in endless lawsuits bullshit lawsuits. Not saying
Speaker 2: they should do that. But if you're not doing that,
Speaker 2: how do we actually break these people up? Is there
Speaker 2: a way for regular people to contribute towards this actual change?
Speaker 2: Because it feels like relying on the governments is the problem.
Speaker 3: Well, let me tell yes, sorry, let me tell you
Speaker 3: a story.
Speaker 2: I don't mean that in like the by the way,
Speaker 2: the anal kick like we can't rely on the government
Speaker 2: just it doesn't seem like the weapons of government.
Speaker 3: Let me tell a story about as yeah, yeah, about
Speaker 3: a man who was in the wilderness, a man who
Speaker 3: had ideas that everybody thought were crazy, a man called
Speaker 3: Milton Friedman, right, oh, Christ. In the nineteen sixties, Milton
Speaker 3: Friedman had this idea that all of the gains of
Speaker 3: the Great Society and the New Deal should be rolled back.
Speaker 3: So there are problems with the New Deal in the
Speaker 3: Great Society. They excluded black people, they excluded gay people,
Speaker 3: they excluded women to a large extent, and so on.
Speaker 3: That wasn't Milton Friedman's problem with it. Problem with it
Speaker 3: was who had included, not who had excluded. And he
Speaker 3: was like, we need more forelock tugging plubs, right, like,
Speaker 3: you shouldn't expect to have a dignified retirement. You shouldn't
Speaker 3: expect that your children will go to school for free,
Speaker 3: and so on. And people would say, Milton, people like that, shit,
Speaker 3: how are you going to make that shit happen. And
Speaker 3: he would say that in times of crisis, ideas can
Speaker 3: move from the periphery to the center. So our job
Speaker 3: is to keep ideas lying around so that when the
Speaker 3: crisis arises, we can move them into the center. And
Speaker 3: that crisis was the oil crisis of the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: So I like to quote Milton Friedman because I like
Speaker 3: to imagine that he looks up from that spit that's
Speaker 3: protruding from his mouth and gargles a curse as he
Speaker 3: hears his words. Him and Jack Welch, and you know,
Speaker 3: the demons laugh and they throw more molten shit on
Speaker 3: his naked body. But you know, if there's one thing
Speaker 3: that Milton Friedman has bequeathed us besides this theory change,
Speaker 3: it's an abundance of crises. Right. We have so many
Speaker 3: foreseeable crises on our horizon, crises of technology, climate crises,
Speaker 3: economic crises, legitimacy crises for the Supreme Court, and so on,
Speaker 3: and having these ideas lying around like being part of
Speaker 3: a group of people who say, look, right now, this
Speaker 3: is impossible, but this is like just because it's just
Speaker 3: because it's hard, it doesn't mean that we should do
Speaker 3: something easier. If it won't work, you don't look for
Speaker 3: your keys under the lamp post. I get it. If
Speaker 3: you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.
Speaker 3: But this is the thing we have to do. And
Speaker 3: if we keep talking about the thing we have to do,
Speaker 3: then when the crisis comes and someone says, Jesus Christ,
Speaker 3: we've got to do something here, we can say, here's
Speaker 3: the thing we have to do.
Speaker 1: So it starts with breaking them up, then, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think that that's well, you know, I think both
Speaker 1: Corey and I would probably agree that that's pretty high
Speaker 1: on the priority list. It makes a lot of things easier,
Speaker 1: and it would make a lot of things better. And
Speaker 1: it's something that's also within sort of the realm of
Speaker 1: possibility for a lot of reasons. Again, that's sort of
Speaker 1: that you know, it might be a flimsy bipartisanship right now,
Speaker 1: but it is a bipartisanship nominally, and so it's it's
Speaker 1: it's something that's actually sort of more imaginable than a
Speaker 1: lot of other happen It's happened before Bell systems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, I think there's a lot that you
Speaker 1: can do. I think there's you know, as we've seen
Speaker 1: the tech industry sort of you know, it is wealth
Speaker 1: concentrate and it's sort of calcify, and each of those
Speaker 1: things that that Corey mentioned earlier on gets sealed off
Speaker 1: to most people. Well, you see more anger, and you
Speaker 1: see an industry that doesn't historically have a lot of
Speaker 1: interesting in organizing or in sort of activism becoming much
Speaker 1: more so. So I think that is another area that's
Speaker 1: ripe for action. You probably have a lot of listeners
Speaker 1: who are in the tech industry or related to the
Speaker 1: tech industry, and startingly underneath cause outside Google, that's the mechanics,
Speaker 1: might all might might be the mechanics, right, Yeah, they
Speaker 1: might already be unionized, but they should.
Speaker 3: But organizing, I think is a.
Speaker 1: Really really ripe area where you can really start to
Speaker 1: move the needle and how.
Speaker 2: Software developers actually unionize, Yeah they can.
Speaker 1: So when I one of my organizing efforts, I was
Speaker 1: at Medium and I and and Medium was at the time.
Speaker 3: They've since jettisoned all of their editorial employees.
Speaker 1: Like me, So there's no none, none of those like
Speaker 1: three times as well, yeah, I was I think the last.
Speaker 3: Time the third wave Choral bleaching. Yeah, they just launch
Speaker 3: them out of a cannon everything once in a while.
Speaker 1: But it was it was half editorial and half tech,
Speaker 1: and there was genuine and uh you know, really sort
Speaker 1: of animated interest in organizing, and we got so close,
Speaker 1: we got within one one vote, and it wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: for them, it wasn't about you know, I'm sure they
Speaker 1: wanted their their salaries to be a little bit higher
Speaker 1: or whatever, but that wasn't the driving, uh, motivating factor.
Speaker 1: It was they didn't like a lot of the direction
Speaker 1: that medium was going. They didn't like a lot of
Speaker 1: the policies that medium had, they didn't like a lot
Speaker 1: of uh, you know what the founder the power of
Speaker 1: the that the founder had to wield over the entire platform,
Speaker 1: and organizing is one way to sort of claw back
Speaker 1: some of that power. I mean, in some cases, it's
Speaker 1: almost like when you have a weird situation like Meta
Speaker 1: with Zuckerberg at top, as like the boy king who
Speaker 1: is just going to rule that forever barring.
Speaker 3: Some fireable right exactly.
Speaker 1: But well, most tech companies are not like that, and
Speaker 1: you can begin to you know, sort of wield more
Speaker 1: influence internally if you join some of those efforts. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of great unions and organizers working in that
Speaker 1: space right now. So that's just one thing that you
Speaker 1: can that you can start to get involved in.
Speaker 3: You yeah, let me say, you know, you said can
Speaker 3: we do this? And you said we have to break
Speaker 3: them up. Well, like the thing that stops us from
Speaker 3: unionizing is also the thing that stops us from breaking
Speaker 3: them up, which is that they're powerful. Right, And so
Speaker 3: the reason that we practiced anti trust law the way
Speaker 3: we did until the Carter administration was not just because
Speaker 3: we wanted to preserve choice or competition. It was because
Speaker 3: when companies get too big to fail, they become too
Speaker 3: big to jail. Right. Once a company's more powerful than
Speaker 3: the government. IBM, you know, was suit for anti trust
Speaker 3: violations from nineteen seventy to nineteen eighty two, and every
Speaker 3: year for twelve consecutive years, they spent more on lawyers
Speaker 3: to fight the DOJ Anti Trust Division than all of
Speaker 3: the lawyers at the DOJ Anti Trust Division costs combined
Speaker 3: for all anti trust cases in America for twelve consecutive years.
Speaker 2: There's no way to limit their ability to fight back
Speaker 2: as well, because that'd be undemocrats.
Speaker 3: So once they're once they're a monopoly, right then you know,
Speaker 3: like the best time to stall monopoly forming is is
Speaker 3: But look, before there is a law, there must be
Speaker 3: a crime, you know. Lenny Bruce points out that if
Speaker 3: we have a law against fucking chicken, someone must have
Speaker 3: fucked a chicken at some point. Right. So before we
Speaker 3: had antis, before we had anti trust law, we had
Speaker 3: monopolists right right, that's where we got the anti trust
Speaker 3: law from. And specifically we had monopolists like John D. Rockefeller,
Speaker 3: who is still the richest man that ever lived, the
Speaker 3: most powerful, the most ruthless, terrible piece of shit, and
Speaker 3: we brought him low. And like the way that we
Speaker 3: did it, it happened in living memories, like nineteen twelve.
Speaker 3: So there's people alive today who were mentored by the
Speaker 3: people who did it right, and then there's people alive
Speaker 3: today who are those people's mentors, who are still working
Speaker 3: and still on the job. Right, it's not like embalming pharaohs.
Speaker 3: It's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The
Speaker 3: thing we know how to do.
Speaker 2: And yeah, like breaking up for me, bring him low though.
Speaker 3: It's a great story. So woman called Ida Tarbell was
Speaker 3: the first woman in America get an undergraduate science degree.
Speaker 3: She was trained as a biologist sick. She was the
Speaker 3: daughter of a Pennsylvania oil man who was destroyed by
Speaker 3: the Standard Oil Trust Wow, and she went to work
Speaker 3: for Colliers, which was the biggest magazine in America at
Speaker 3: the time. Were one of the biggest, and she serialized
Speaker 3: a two volume muckraking history that pitilessly laid out exactly
Speaker 3: how the John D. Rockefeller scam worked. It had a
Speaker 3: very good title, she called it the History of the
Speaker 3: Standard Oil Company, Volumes one and two. It was super viral,
Speaker 3: and at the end of it, the Incoe political will
Speaker 3: that we'd had that said, like something is really wrong
Speaker 3: turned into a very sharp political will that said, we
Speaker 3: know how the scam works, and we demand that something
Speaker 3: to be done about it. And the Sherman Act, which
Speaker 3: had been hanging around for twenty years, finally was taken
Speaker 3: off the shelf and mobilized against John D. Rockefeller, and
Speaker 3: we brought him low.
Speaker 2: So this is I'm so glad you brought up the
Speaker 2: story which I just learned. First of all, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: look at cool people who did cool stuff. If Maggie's
Speaker 2: not done that, she needs to hear this, that is.
Speaker 3: And she then became a leading suffragist and was one
Speaker 3: of the greatest orators of American history.
Speaker 2: Just first of all, go eu to Tarbell original poster. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like the like, genuinely like amazing. But also I think
Speaker 2: this speaks to something. I'm speaking to anyone who is
Speaker 2: a reporter, who's listening to this right now, there is
Speaker 2: this common sense that why are we doing this, Why
Speaker 2: are we cataloging this? They're still gonna do these things?
Speaker 2: Why bother? And the answer is that fucking story Hindenberg Research.
Speaker 2: I don't know if I agree with all their methods,
Speaker 2: but the fact is we need more people out there.
Speaker 3: And I do this too. Well.
Speaker 2: You don't necessarily write these fuckers are bad, they are right?
Speaker 2: Why and write in detail because it sounds like historically
Speaker 2: that actually eventually works.
Speaker 3: You know, there is a there's a phrase out of
Speaker 3: the finance sector called migo. It stands from my eyes
Speaker 3: glaze over, And it's the idea that if you make
Speaker 3: the prospectus thick enough, people will just assume that it's
Speaker 3: good because they can't possibly read it like the pile
Speaker 3: pony under it right, un unraveling migo, whether that's you know, Marco,
Speaker 3: Robbie and a Bathtub explaining synthetic collateralized at obligations, or
Speaker 3: you know, my last couple of novels, the Bazil and
Speaker 3: Red Team Blues are about explaining how real world private
Speaker 3: equity scams, cryptocurrency hustles and so on, how they work.
Speaker 3: Is I think the first step on the path to
Speaker 3: making people feel like they can see where the weak
Speaker 3: points are in this in this very large but very
Speaker 3: brittle edifice, and they can start go kicking at the
Speaker 3: week point.
Speaker 2: Because I think that something Google is very powerful. They
Speaker 2: have tens of billions of dollars in like sixteen billion
Speaker 2: dollars a profit every quarter. They are unbreakable by traditional means. However,
Speaker 2: they are also culturally weak. They are a patchwork of
Speaker 2: people who've been there two minutes and twenty years. They
Speaker 2: don't fire some Ben Gomes, the gouy around Google search
Speaker 2: Board provate God took over. They put them in the
Speaker 2: corner in SVP of education because they know if Ben left,
Speaker 2: he could very easily at least raise money to completely
Speaker 2: a real Google competitor. But the thing is, the asshole
Speaker 2: doesn't talk to the mouth or the elbow. Nothing, there
Speaker 2: is no form. But as they get bigger, they are
Speaker 2: weaker on some levels. And I think it's just something
Speaker 2: I'm doing with the show. And actually both of you
Speaker 2: had done amazingly with your work is breaking down these
Speaker 2: weak points, these pain points. Brian, you did the great
Speaker 2: thing about the mechanical turk for example, how it's very
Speaker 2: similar to how generative AI works. And it's just I
Speaker 2: think it's strange. I've heard and I won't name names,
Speaker 2: but I've heard people kind of make the suggestion that well,
Speaker 2: why why should we bother?
Speaker 3: Why, Well, they're so.
Speaker 2: Powerful, And the answer is they're actually terrified of this.
Speaker 2: They do not want this. This is scary. Do it
Speaker 2: every day?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Look at I mean again, we mentioned this earlier, but
Speaker 1: look look how Google reacted when a single credible.
Speaker 3: Competitor entered the field.
Speaker 1: Oh but they ran around like chickens with their heads
Speaker 1: cut off and they scrambled to find a product.
Speaker 3: It was internal turmoil.
Speaker 1: It is. If anything, it wasn't the reaction of a
Speaker 1: company that is convinced of the power and security of
Speaker 1: its products and its placement in the marketplace.
Speaker 3: This was.
Speaker 1: This was a company that is like, as you were saying,
Speaker 1: pretty profoundly insecure and reliant on all these deals in
Speaker 1: order to maintain its position where it's paying out a
Speaker 1: great deal of money.
Speaker 3: I mean this, it's it seems to me more.
Speaker 1: Like a house of cards that that could collapse if
Speaker 1: the right one is pulled out. And to to add
Speaker 1: on too, what Corey was saying, Uh, you know another
Speaker 1: work that that I that that I read while I
Speaker 1: was researching the Luddite Book, which was one of the
Speaker 1: first efforts to sort of quote rescue the Lutdites from
Speaker 1: from from condescension, was E. P. Thompson's The Making of
Speaker 1: the English Working Class, and it tries to tell the
Speaker 1: story of like, how did the how did we get
Speaker 1: to the point where workers came together and said, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, we have enough power to actually I have
Speaker 1: some change.
Speaker 3: How did that?
Speaker 1: How did it because it didn't exist before? How did
Speaker 1: workers start to see themselves as part of a class
Speaker 1: or have solidarity? And it's just filled with all these examples,
Speaker 1: you know, of little fights that you know have otherwise
Speaker 1: been completely lost to history, where people stood up for
Speaker 1: something and you know, were crushed and then everybody forgot
Speaker 1: about it.
Speaker 3: By and large.
Speaker 1: But the neighbors didn't forget, the local newspaper men didn't forget,
Speaker 1: the families didn't forget. They're recorded in oral histories. They
Speaker 1: formed this tapestry. So I feel like it's it's always
Speaker 1: a bad idea to feel like nothing that we're doing
Speaker 1: matters or registers, because it is, and it can reverberate,
Speaker 1: and it can echo, and it can coalesce, and it
Speaker 1: can snowball really quickly.
Speaker 2: And if things aren't really working out for you right now,
Speaker 2: if the crowball won't get the ATM open, if even
Speaker 2: driving a car doesn't get into it, but you still
Speaker 2: have some left open money, perhaps you could check out
Speaker 2: one of the following products. I think that this will
Speaker 2: solve probably every problem you've ever had.
Speaker 3: I hope it's SCRIPTO. So I want to bring up
Speaker 3: one way in which Google is unexpectedly weak, in which
Speaker 3: its strength strength is a weakness. And this is a
Speaker 3: characteristic of all the big tech companies, which is that
Speaker 3: they do the same shitty thing everywhere, which means that
Speaker 3: if there's a case built against a tech company by
Speaker 3: a regulator, and are a big, powerful country like the
Speaker 3: United States, all of those facts will be almost identical
Speaker 3: in much smaller countries like South Korea. We've actually seen
Speaker 3: this where cases against Apple for antitrust have been effectively
Speaker 3: recycled in South Korea Japan and successfully so. Right, so,
Speaker 3: all of the world's governments are facing the same adversary.
Speaker 3: So even if these companies are bigger than most countries,
Speaker 3: they're not bigger than all many countries.
Speaker 2: When you say a shitty thing, what do you mean, Oh,
Speaker 2: you know, like specific Apple.
Speaker 3: Apple has this Danegeld system where they take thirty cents
Speaker 3: out of every dollar you spend on an app, and
Speaker 3: it's super anti competitive, and they have all these ways
Speaker 3: that they block people from trying to circumvent it, and
Speaker 3: it lets them control certain markets, and it's just it's
Speaker 3: it's illegal under most countries systems of law. Here's here's
Speaker 3: a fun fact for you. After World War Two, the
Speaker 3: American technocrats who went around and rebuilt the legal systems
Speaker 3: of Europe and Japan just basically copypasted American anti trust laws.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so, and here's another funny thing. They were
Speaker 3: keenly aware of how important monopolies were to the rise
Speaker 3: of fascism and the access powers, and so one of
Speaker 3: the things they did when they got to Germany and
Speaker 3: Japan and Italy was smashed their monopolies because they said
Speaker 3: monopolies lead to fascism.
Speaker 2: But the thing is as well is monopolies are bad
Speaker 2: for everyone.
Speaker 3: It is a bipartisan issue.
Speaker 2: Roger mcnammey, who I mentioned Elie Facebook and bested though, Yeah,
Speaker 2: really good friend mine.
Speaker 3: He's wonderful.
Speaker 2: He really was, Like I was talking to about something
Speaker 2: I was writing, and I within shitification. I did the
Speaker 2: raw economy, which is very similar, but I know my
Speaker 2: central failing in it. And it was these monopolies. And
Speaker 2: it's just this sense where you get these Sam Wulton
Speaker 2: types who want the monopolies. You get these and recent
Speaker 2: types want to invest in monopolies for the money, but
Speaker 2: they're shitty businesses. Monopolies are like Google is probably is
Speaker 2: an incredible business, but inevitably must die, like it's going
Speaker 2: to die eventually, and fast or slow it must because
Speaker 2: eventually you run out of humans.
Speaker 3: Well, this is the problem Amazon is facing, right. They
Speaker 3: keep looking at the rate at which they're burning out
Speaker 3: warehouse workers and saying, well, all available semi skilled workers
Speaker 3: will have worked at an Amazon warehouse and no longer
Speaker 3: want to do so or have been permanently maimed by whatever.
Speaker 3: Originally it was twenty twenty four was their initial projection.
Speaker 3: That was their clarion call that made them start investing
Speaker 3: more heavily in automation. Not in treating work I bake,
Speaker 3: not in making it better to work there. Yeah no, no, no,
Speaker 3: not not in the slightest no, just in in adding
Speaker 3: more of that. Now. I have a lot of lefty
Speaker 3: comrades who are skeptical of this anti monopoly stuff, and
Speaker 3: they say, look, I don't want a million choices. I
Speaker 3: don't want to go to Amazon looking for a light
Speaker 3: bulb and find ten million light bulbs. You already do right, well,
Speaker 3: you do right, exactly right. I want to go and like,
Speaker 3: I want to live in an orderly regulated world where
Speaker 3: I don't have to use the magic of the market
Speaker 3: to make sure that like my water isn't poison or
Speaker 3: that things aren't bad and so on. And there's something
Speaker 3: to that. I don't know. Everything has to be. We
Speaker 3: can have regulated monopolies, we can have state we can
Speaker 3: have state.
Speaker 2: Things like healthcare. Ye competition, but the.
Speaker 3: Thing that that competition gets you is not merely choice.
Speaker 3: It's a weak corporate sector. People really fail to understand
Speaker 3: this at their peril because although these companies appear to
Speaker 3: be at one another's throats, when you look more closely
Speaker 3: at it, they're really quite chummy. We've surface around us
Speaker 3: several times. Yeah, so you know, Apple says, oh, we're
Speaker 3: the non surveilling company, and Google and Facebook are the
Speaker 3: bad ones. They surveil and we're so different from them.
Speaker 3: But Apple like puts a surveillance tap in the pocket
Speaker 3: of every iPhone owner by defaulting to Google. I mean,
Speaker 3: Apple wants to block surveillance unless they're getting paid for it,
Speaker 3: so they block Faceto and.
Speaker 2: They don't do unless it's their and they.
Speaker 3: Do their own surveillance. Right. Google and Facebook allegedly are
Speaker 3: our great adversaries in the ad tech sector, except they
Speaker 3: have this illegal collusive arrangement where they divided up ad
Speaker 3: tech like the pope dividing up the new world called
Speaker 3: Jedi Blue. Right, you have Cheryl Sandberg moving from one
Speaker 3: firm to the other. Right, she was a Googler before
Speaker 3: she was at Facebook, and.
Speaker 2: Before that Mackenzine before that Larry Summ's Department's treasury.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Facebook is stuffed with ex Apple people, and
Speaker 3: Apple is stuff with x Facebook people. That the way
Speaker 3: that you ascend through the ranks of a highly concentrated
Speaker 3: sector is through lateral moves because we within the firms,
Speaker 3: there are no boxes on the org chart for you
Speaker 3: to rise up to. Either someone has to die or
Speaker 3: become disgraced, right, and so it's only when a firm
Speaker 3: seeks someone from outside that you can actually jump up
Speaker 3: the rank, which is why you see, for example, people
Speaker 3: from Disney jumping to Universal and people from Universal jumping
Speaker 3: from Disney to ascend the right.
Speaker 2: Just to push back a little bit, isn't some of
Speaker 2: this just domain expertise though.
Speaker 3: In the sense that that's why they're doing it. Sure,
Speaker 3: But and you know, this is another problem with regulation,
Speaker 3: is that when a sector becomes highly concentrated, the domain
Speaker 3: expertise is siloed within the firms that you're hoping to regulate.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's a there's a not wrong point
Speaker 3: that people make about the revolving door, which is that
Speaker 3: if a sector consists of five companies, then everyone who
Speaker 3: understands those companies works for one of them. So where
Speaker 3: else are you going to get a regulator? Right? Of course,
Speaker 3: they hire ex Googlers.
Speaker 2: And at this point you have people where you only
Speaker 2: really hire if they've worked at a big tech firm. Sure,
Speaker 2: that's the only way you will know how to work
Speaker 2: very similar machines.
Speaker 3: Although I'm speaking of regulators, so sorry. The reason the
Speaker 3: f SEE is hiring x Comcast people, supposedly is that, like,
Speaker 3: who understands how the cable networks work except for people
Speaker 3: who work for one of the two or three big
Speaker 3: cable operators. Right, So there's a grain of truth to this.
Speaker 3: It's not entirely true, but there's a grain of truth
Speaker 3: to it. And the fix for it is not to
Speaker 3: let cable companies mark their own homework by parachuting their
Speaker 3: own people into the regulators. The fix is to make
Speaker 3: them small enough to be comprehensible, right, to make them
Speaker 3: small enough that outside parties can see what they're doing.
Speaker 2: But also a marketplace with tons of choices. It makes
Speaker 2: for a weaker corporate sector, but stronger companies, I would argue,
Speaker 2: because if you make a good fucking product, you can
Speaker 2: win a market. And I realize that this is not
Speaker 2: a perfect system at all, and that doesn't always happen,
Speaker 2: but at least to some extent, Apple has dominated because
Speaker 2: they aren't imperfect. And I know, listeners, I know you
Speaker 2: always am not hard enough about Apple. I'm doing an
Speaker 2: app Store episode. It's so hard to write, you want
Speaker 2: to write five thousand words. Jesus fucking But the things
Speaker 2: of Apple, they've done pretty well because they make good phone, phone,
Speaker 2: good laptop great, Like the laptops are great. These are
Speaker 2: good pieces of tech that do the job well. And
Speaker 2: yes they use monopolistic forces to keep where they are,
Speaker 2: but it also feels like a Google's phone division. They're like,
Speaker 2: why does this never work? And it's because it kind
Speaker 2: of like Android phones are good, but they've really why
Speaker 2: doesn't Google try and pay for my message? Well they shouldn't.
Speaker 2: They should actually really push our cs much harder. But
Speaker 2: they don't push it that hard. They could put a
Speaker 2: lot of more money behind our ces, or try and
Speaker 2: find a way to work without I know it's coming in,
Speaker 2: but it's like, like, doesn't really give a shit about
Speaker 2: Android doing super well.
Speaker 3: They just don't want.
Speaker 2: Apple to have everything. I guess it's so strange.
Speaker 3: It's hard to play criminology here, but I want to
Speaker 3: say that while competition is obviously imperfect, yes that in
Speaker 3: tech we do have a kind of secret power. And
Speaker 3: you ask. You started this conversation by asking what excites
Speaker 3: us about tech. One of the things that excites me
Speaker 3: about tech is a kind of nerdy principle, which is
Speaker 3: that all computers are We're in complete universal of onon
Speaker 3: noion machines. They can all run every program, which means
Speaker 3: that any program running on a computer that you have,
Speaker 3: whether it's your pocket Destruction rectangle, your laptop, or your
Speaker 3: game console, another program can run that modifies how it
Speaker 3: works so that it works for you and not someone else.
Speaker 3: Your printer can always take someone else's inc your car
Speaker 3: can always have its surveillance technology disabled, and so on.
Speaker 3: And what that does is it means that with tech
Speaker 3: you have this separate competitive capacity, which is the ability
Speaker 3: to compete by modifying existing technology. Right Like Lexmark used
Speaker 3: to be IBM's printer division, right, and they made laser printers.
Speaker 3: And there was a company out of not Malaysia, Taiwan
Speaker 3: that made refill kits for their toner cartridges, and the
Speaker 3: toner cartridge had a little crude microchip in it. This
Speaker 3: is in the early two thousands, is when embedded systems
Speaker 3: were expensive and very primitive. It had a sixty four
Speaker 3: byte program and when you used up all the toner
Speaker 3: and the cartridge, the sixty four by program would toggle
Speaker 3: a switch that said, I'm now an empty cartridge, and
Speaker 3: if you put more carbon powder in the cartridge, it
Speaker 3: wouldn't work because the cartridge told the printer it was empty.
Speaker 3: So Static reverse engineered this sixty four by program not
Speaker 3: very challenging. They made another chip and it reset it
Speaker 3: to one. Right, I am a full cartridge. And when
Speaker 3: that happened, Lexmark sued them, and they sued them, arguing
Speaker 3: that they had violated their copyright, that they bypassed an
Speaker 3: access control for a copyrighted work, which is prohibited under
Speaker 3: the Digital Mining of Copyright Act. And the judge at
Speaker 3: the time said, like, where is the copyrighted work. It's
Speaker 3: not the carbon in the printer cartridge. They said, no,
Speaker 3: it's the sixty four by program. They said, well, you know,
Speaker 3: like sixty four by programs software is like copyrightable, but
Speaker 3: a sixty four by program isn't. It's not even a
Speaker 3: high coup right, Like, it doesn't rise to the level
Speaker 3: of complexity that attracts a new copyright. And so they
Speaker 3: threw the case out punchline. Today, Lexmark is a division
Speaker 3: of static controls, right, because they went for I'm refilling
Speaker 3: the cartridges to buying the business. Ah. Right. So today,
Speaker 3: if you were to try and make that argument about HP,
Speaker 3: which has this disgusting habit of pushing at fake security
Speaker 3: updates that break your printer's ability to use their party Inc.
Speaker 3: It breaks on its own. Sorry that too. But if
Speaker 3: you were to do this and you were to go
Speaker 3: back to court and say the program in the chip
Speaker 3: in the chip in the cartridge that stops you from
Speaker 3: using third party Inc. Doesn't rise to love a copyright ability.
Speaker 3: That's like a twenty six cent system on a chip
Speaker 3: that's running a full Linux stack with like busy box
Speaker 3: and a network stack. You could probably attach a monitor
Speaker 3: to it if you want it to write, and like,
Speaker 3: there's just no argument that that's not copyrightable. Now, with tech,
Speaker 3: if we could clear some of these rules that have
Speaker 3: been mobilized by big tech to block new market entry,
Speaker 3: to block reverse engineering, to block all this other stuff,
Speaker 3: we could do lots of things to compete, Like the
Speaker 3: iPhone is a great platform for someone else to make
Speaker 3: an app store, right.
Speaker 2: Vidia I was one of the like I was really
Speaker 2: into the homebrew community and iPhone. Yeah, and you know what,
Speaker 2: some of it was broken as shit, but you could
Speaker 2: do so many There were weird little things that connected
Speaker 2: the systems, probably in ways that were extremely leaky, but
Speaker 2: they were drowned in the water. Now geohot makes weird
Speaker 2: autonomous car things that kind of work.
Speaker 3: It's just yeah. But you know, if you remember in
Speaker 3: the early two thousands, Apple was dying because Microsoft wouldn't
Speaker 3: make a functional version of Microsoft Office right. And the
Speaker 3: way Steve Jobs resolved that was not by begging Bill
Speaker 3: Gates to fix Office. He just had technologists at Apple
Speaker 3: reverse engineer Microsoft Office and make iWork pages, numbers, and
Speaker 3: keynote that perfectly run word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now. It
Speaker 3: was janki at first, because Microsoft kept cycling the file formats, yes,
Speaker 3: in order to break compatibility. But that hurt Microsoft more
Speaker 3: than it hurt Apple because Apple had their own internal
Speaker 3: file formats. Microsoft just had these file formats, and they
Speaker 3: kept making them more obfuscated and complex, and then they
Speaker 3: had to support them all. So eventually Microsoft sued for
Speaker 3: peace and they standardized those file formats. That's where we
Speaker 3: get doc x PPT x xls X. Those are the
Speaker 3: XML versions. And the reason you can copy and past
Speaker 3: style text into a browser and then into libre office,
Speaker 3: and then into iWork and then back into office is
Speaker 3: because they're all using this standard. If Apple could not
Speaker 3: use the courts to shut down something like Sidia, uh
Speaker 3: and if they were required to just have hand to
Speaker 3: hand guerrilla warfare with Jay Freeman and his engineers, they
Speaker 3: would eventually sueer piece because they they are fighting an
Speaker 3: asymmetric battle where they have to make no mistakes in
Speaker 3: the iPhone, and Jay and Johatt just have to find
Speaker 3: one mistake they've made, and every time they do that,
Speaker 3: they have to go back to the drum. Alright.
Speaker 2: Talking to Margaret Thatcha, you need we only need to
Speaker 2: be lucky ones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And and you should be pointed out that I
Speaker 1: think that Apple's in house design were watching what they
Speaker 1: were doing in the in those jail broken sists, and
Speaker 1: they were, and they a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: were really popular. They poured it into the into iOS
Speaker 1: and future design. You know, obviously not the interoperability or
Speaker 1: the things that would be more radical, but just like
Speaker 1: design flourishes and features, like they were watching that community
Speaker 1: and taking notes from it.
Speaker 3: Every good designer starts by paving the desire path.
Speaker 2: And I mean one of my favorite examples of this
Speaker 2: where yeah, the courts would I don't know how the
Speaker 2: courts would have gone in because this is video games,
Speaker 2: but the originals of the World of Warcraft were from
Speaker 2: numerous forums, from numerous guilds. In EverQuest, there's a big
Speaker 2: thing with the plane of time, with the shadows lukelan expansion.
Speaker 2: Anyone who knows this story, by the way, email me.
Speaker 2: I love you, easy Better off line dot com. But
Speaker 2: long story short, there was a massive bug with the
Speaker 2: final rate, and a bunch of people, for all being
Speaker 2: one of them said I'm fucking done with this game.
Speaker 2: This company doesn't give a shit. They can't even finish
Speaker 2: their goddamn work. It's disgusting. And Blizzard, who are now
Speaker 2: kind of horrible thanks to Activision, Kotic and all them,
Speaker 2: said huh, well, if we just got all these high
Speaker 2: level players and ask them, how would you like EverQuest
Speaker 2: to be better? What would a better MMO look like?
Speaker 2: World of Warcraft was an amazing m I genuinely love
Speaker 2: Wow at the beginning, and to this day, I'm sure
Speaker 2: ever picked up. And it does that because this crazy
Speaker 2: idea of we could really compete with pretty much the
Speaker 2: only successful Western MMO with some exceptions, by taking the
Speaker 2: things they like and doing better at them, by iterating
Speaker 2: on their work and doing great things. If we could
Speaker 2: do that in tech. Even the small examples we have
Speaker 2: in tech of that working are so good. I mean
Speaker 2: Anchor being my favorite one, Like they have gallium nitrie.
Speaker 2: They've managed to make shit really powerful and really small,
Speaker 2: and yeah, it's made every other battery manufacturer have to
Speaker 2: fucking compete. I'm sure they didn't do it first, but
Speaker 2: Anchor has made a successful business out of seeing other
Speaker 2: people shit and going, what if this was good?
Speaker 3: Let me make one more point about why user adaptability
Speaker 3: is good. It's not merely because it lets firms discover
Speaker 3: a new way so pleasing us, or because it lets
Speaker 3: us make our lives easier. It's because when our technology
Speaker 3: doesn't work for us, it is often because the circumstances
Speaker 3: that we're in have changed for the worse. Okay, right,
Speaker 3: your printer, you need to get one more page out
Speaker 3: of your printer, and it's really desperate and it won't
Speaker 3: print because it doesn't have any magenta in it, even
Speaker 3: though you're printing a black and white document, and the
Speaker 3: black and white document you're printing is the thing that
Speaker 3: you need to bring to the bail bondsmen because your
Speaker 3: kid's just been arrested. Right The people who are finness
Speaker 3: this again, the people who make the technology can never
Speaker 3: anticipate all the ways that the people who use the
Speaker 3: technology are going to need to use it, not just
Speaker 3: in the immediate future, but in the decades that will
Speaker 3: come afterwards, because this technology lives in our stack forever
Speaker 3: and ever. If you want to read an amazing document
Speaker 3: about how technology ac creates, the British Librari's postmortem on
Speaker 3: their ransomware attack, where they talk about how they were
Speaker 3: early adopters and then they because they could never shut
Speaker 3: down the system, they just put more and more layers
Speaker 3: on top of it. Each layer was a seam that
Speaker 3: could be exploited by ransomware creeps. It's one of the
Speaker 3: most important tech documents I've ever read. So you know
Speaker 3: when things are broken, when people in the future are
Speaker 3: trying to maintain or adapt the things that you've made.
Speaker 3: When the climate emergency hits and the power goes out,
Speaker 3: or the internet is not available or not available continuously,
Speaker 3: or a website that's supposed to be checked every time
Speaker 3: you launch for a license key goes down because there's
Speaker 3: been a big cyber attack or because CrowdStrike has gone down.
Speaker 3: That is the moment where being able to change how
Speaker 3: your technology works is going to be the difference between
Speaker 3: success and failure, a good life and a bad life,
Speaker 3: sometimes life and death by it. And the hubris of
Speaker 3: thinking that you can anticipate all the ways that people
Speaker 3: are going to use it, all the bodies they'll be in,
Speaker 3: all the circumstances they'll live through, is so monumentally arrogant
Speaker 3: and reckless, and ultimately, although you may not always make
Speaker 3: the best decision about how the technology around you should work,
Speaker 3: that decision should still always vest with you.
Speaker 2: So as we wrap up here, I want to finish
Speaker 2: around the generative a Brian, do you see any value?
Speaker 2: This is such an aweshole question to end on. I
Speaker 2: realized we've got like tim but like, do you see
Speaker 2: any value in this? I think this is a good
Speaker 2: thing to wrap.
Speaker 1: I think like a lot of the technologies that have
Speaker 1: kind of surfaced or have become fixations of Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: over the last five years, as it's sort of cycled
Speaker 1: through the latest next big thing, as it's investors are
Speaker 1: desperate to find said big thing because it hasn't really had.
Speaker 3: One in a while.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, Jennert of AI has found a
Speaker 1: few more use cases.
Speaker 3: Than whatever the metaverse or web.
Speaker 1: Three or crypto, So therefore it's been a little bit stickier.
Speaker 1: And you know, as a technology it's itself, is there
Speaker 1: is there something interesting there?
Speaker 3: You know? Yeah, like I think that there's there.
Speaker 1: We should be having researchers and developers looking into into
Speaker 1: large language models and how to make them better and
Speaker 1: how to make them more interesting. Scene they can and
Speaker 1: can't do by kicking the tires? Do we need every
Speaker 1: major tech company running massive data farms doing basically the
Speaker 1: same thing as the cost of energy and compute skyrockets
Speaker 1: and a game that and a company that made video
Speaker 1: game chips as of two or three years ago is
Speaker 1: now suddenly more valuable than Apple and the entire GDP
Speaker 1: of or like the London Stock Exchange, I think I saw.
Speaker 3: Something like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, then you have then you have an issue. And
Speaker 1: this is the problem with our current mode of technological development.
Speaker 3: It's not just is technology? Is this technology and question good?
Speaker 1: Is Is this in any way a sensible way to
Speaker 1: go about seeing how it's.
Speaker 3: Useful or who it could be useful for, or what
Speaker 3: use cases it might have? And I think absolutely not.
Speaker 3: I think it's so hard.
Speaker 1: To distinguish that question right now because it's gone from
Speaker 1: zero to one hundred and twenty and it's spinning out
Speaker 1: in all directions, and it's so many bad decisions have
Speaker 1: been made in its rollout. It's it's been deeply non
Speaker 1: consensual to a lot of the parties whose work has
Speaker 1: been harvested into this thing. So you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who are furious at the way that the
Speaker 1: models were trained in the first place.
Speaker 3: It's being set against creative markets where people.
Speaker 1: Are now worried about their jobs, so you have them angry.
Speaker 1: On the other side, you have ordinary people who are
Speaker 1: just worried about is this going to automate my job?
Speaker 1: How's it going to affect me? And so you have
Speaker 1: this immense climate of not just fear but also of anger,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to pull out. You know, like, well,
Speaker 1: is generative AI like a good technology in terms of
Speaker 1: the use cases to which it is being put right now,
Speaker 1: I would say absolutely not.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It feels almost like the most egregious example of everything
Speaker 2: we've been talking about. When these companies have no natural predators,
Speaker 2: when they have no one to go shit, you can't
Speaker 2: do that. Customers will be mad because otherwise they'd say, so,
Speaker 2: what is chet GPT exact? Why are we doing this
Speaker 2: that just not more most stuff?
Speaker 1: Well, again, I would say I would push back on
Speaker 1: that a little bit because it did rack up organically,
Speaker 1: you know, one hundred million users or whatever. So there
Speaker 1: were some people who are like, this is a fun
Speaker 1: toy to play with, okay, but actually okay, well, but
Speaker 1: but then we transition to like, well, that's not really
Speaker 1: gonna make us any money, so how do we get
Speaker 1: it to make any money? And then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden it's like, oh, maybe we can just like automate
Speaker 1: some stuff. And it becomes an enterprise software that it's
Speaker 1: selling that it's being sold you know, to to consultancies,
Speaker 1: to uh fintech firms, to anyone who any any anyone,
Speaker 1: anyone who will who will listen to a to an
Speaker 1: open AI salesman's pitch, and that's how we wind up
Speaker 1: where we are today. Where you have hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of these enterprise seats sold to a dubiously useful technology.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: People are are rightfully concerned that it's that it's you know,
Speaker 1: that it's threatening their uh, their their, their livelihoods. Even
Speaker 1: though it doesn't do a good job.
Speaker 3: It sucks.
Speaker 1: This is a point that Coreya makes a lot, is
Speaker 1: that it doesn't actually often create a superior product. It
Speaker 1: almost never does. Yeah, it's just it's good enough for
Speaker 1: a manager to say, all right, we'll take it.
Speaker 3: It's cheaper. But I wanted to.
Speaker 2: Push back on one thing. And I don't necessarily know
Speaker 2: if you've disagree, But yeah, I don't know if chat
Speaker 2: GPT grew organically. The reason I say that is this
Speaker 2: when you have no hypergrowth markets, when you have no
Speaker 2: big new thing, and you have what I would argue
Speaker 2: is members of the media willfully engaging in a marketing campaign. Yeah,
Speaker 2: run by and I would. By the way, like all
Speaker 2: evil systems, I don't know how much of this was conscious.
Speaker 2: I don't think people sat around and now we shall
Speaker 2: all agree to write about chat GEPT.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 2: I think that just a desperation in the media for
Speaker 2: something new to write about, connected with the desperation in
Speaker 2: venture capital, which connected with the desperation in the market.
Speaker 3: Boom yeah.
Speaker 1: And then into the vacuum comes this new apparently viable
Speaker 1: product about which any number of narratives can.
Speaker 2: Unfold exactly, and you can probabilis telling me to leave
Speaker 2: my wife. Wow, you know, like Kevin Rose, the goat
Speaker 2: of freaking out about the computer.
Speaker 3: But you really, you really, you know whether or not.
Speaker 1: The one thing that I would say in its corner
Speaker 1: that that maybe some of that was is that is
Speaker 1: that it hasn't claimed that user growth has increased much
Speaker 1: since then We're like a year later, they're still saying.
Speaker 3: Like, well, we still got one hundred million years.
Speaker 1: So you'd think that if they were inflating that figure,
Speaker 1: they would at least they would find some you know,
Speaker 1: metric to put together active paine. Now we've got two
Speaker 1: hundred yeah, exactly, some muskie and you know, minutes viewed
Speaker 1: per syllable generally.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I think that, you know, maybe a useful
Speaker 3: analogy here, although not a perfect one, is gamification. Right. So,
Speaker 3: if you've read Jane mcgonagle's old work on this stuff,
Speaker 3: you know, Jane was doing this incredible stuff where she
Speaker 3: On the one hand, she she'd suffered a neurological industry
Speaker 3: injury rather and she needed to do a lot of
Speaker 3: very repetitive and difficult and generally low compliance rehabilitation for it.
Speaker 3: People don't recover from those injuries because it's so hard
Speaker 3: to do. And she made a game out of it, right,
Speaker 3: and it really worked, and she started she's a game developer.
Speaker 3: She started figuring out how to bring these out. So
Speaker 3: there are some marketing crossings. I don't remember where she was,
Speaker 3: but she you know, she she worked on I Love Bees,
Speaker 3: which was the AI movie, and she worked on a
Speaker 3: bunch of other like really Texas Hold Them, Texas, Tombstone
Speaker 3: Hold Them or whatever it was called Tombstone Hold Them.
Speaker 3: People got married playing these games like they were really fun, right,
Speaker 3: And then a bunch of people said, oh, well, we
Speaker 3: could use these to get Amazon warehouse workers to uh
Speaker 3: gamify how long they can go without urinating so that
Speaker 3: they can meet quota. Right. And we look at that
Speaker 3: and we go, oh, this is horrific, But playing games
Speaker 3: is not horrific, right, right, And I've been following people
Speaker 3: doing weird, playful things with stuff we would now call
Speaker 3: generative AI. For a really long time. This guy called
Speaker 3: Shardcore is like a digital artist who's making weird videos
Speaker 3: and stills forever, really cool fun stuff. You know, literally
Speaker 3: a decade of this, which lends it self generative. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you know, today I look around and I see
Speaker 3: people who like play a D and D game, and
Speaker 3: then at the end, the LM has generated a transcript
Speaker 3: of the game. It generates a precie of the transcript,
Speaker 3: It illustrates it with fun epic moments from it. It
Speaker 3: doesn't matter if the ORC has six fingers, right, And
Speaker 3: everybody looks at that and they go, hahaha, that's great,
Speaker 3: and then they fire the customer service reps for your insulin.
Speaker 2: For the company that runs the thing that generates the
Speaker 2: ORC pictures.
Speaker 3: You know, No that for the people who supply you
Speaker 3: with dialysis you sell, or who determine whether or not
Speaker 3: you can legally get insulin on your insurance. And you
Speaker 3: find yourself arguing with a chatbot about whether you're going
Speaker 3: to get dialysis? Who live? And then you die? Right,
Speaker 3: And that's not a problem with the existence of tools
Speaker 3: that do weird shit, right, that is a problem. And
Speaker 3: now the thing is that total addressable market of epic
Speaker 3: illustrations from last night's D and D game is very small. Yes,
Speaker 3: and it may be that some of the productive residue
Speaker 3: of this bubble will be standalone models that run on
Speaker 3: commodity hard Yeah. And in the same way that, like
Speaker 3: the productive residue of the world Coom bubble was a
Speaker 3: lot of dark fiber in the ground that's being lit
Speaker 3: up now. The productive residue the dot com bubble was
Speaker 3: a couple hundred million humanities undergrads who are coerced into
Speaker 3: dropping out learning Python, Pearl and HTML and went on
Speaker 3: to create a bunch of really playful things that turned
Speaker 3: into Web two point zero. That might be a productive resue,
Speaker 3: doesn't make the bubble good. Bubbles are always bad. They
Speaker 3: steal from retail investors mom pops and leave them eating
Speaker 3: dog food into their retirement or sleeping a cardboard box.
Speaker 3: They're very bad, right. But en Ron was a bubble
Speaker 3: that left nothing behind, right, NFTs left nothing behind, But
Speaker 3: like shitty JPEGs and worse Austrian ex customs, the tank
Speaker 3: was bad. Yeah, but this case, in this case, maybe
Speaker 3: something good comes of it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It doesn't make the thing good, but maybe something good
Speaker 3: comes up it maybe there's a productive residue, maybe not.
Speaker 3: I think it's so yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean you've probably been watching the Olympics or at
Speaker 1: least read about like the I think one of the
Speaker 1: really telling you. One of the telling things here is
Speaker 1: you can look at how these companies are like trying
Speaker 1: to advertise generative AI service. So when the first like Google,
Speaker 1: you know, Gemini or I forget what it was called it,
Speaker 1: then maybe it was already overview, but it was like,
Speaker 1: you know, embrace this techno and then you can you
Speaker 1: can use it to scan all your photos and I'll
Speaker 1: tell you our new AI will tell you what your license.
Speaker 3: Plate number is. Is this a problem anybody has? You
Speaker 3: can't just go outside and.
Speaker 2: Look at the So that one is the useful one.
Speaker 2: But also I don't know if it's generally if AI,
Speaker 2: because it's just that's not they've now started wrapping these
Speaker 2: things in to try and sell the dog shit.
Speaker 3: Or look at this one.
Speaker 1: Did you see the did you see the ad for
Speaker 1: for Meta's AI where it's like they're like walking through
Speaker 1: a little Italy and going and and she's like she's like, Grandpa,
Speaker 1: weren't you here when it was you know the beginning
Speaker 1: of little Italy and she's like, meta, tell me what
Speaker 1: you know, tell me what little Italy looks like. Now
Speaker 1: we can see it, and it like produces like a
Speaker 1: slop picture of like a pretend little little when it's
Speaker 1: just like there are photos of little Italy.
Speaker 3: Could you could like, yeah, you could? That are in
Speaker 3: a public aren't they also look up woods.
Speaker 1: Or the Google one where they were like, oh you
Speaker 1: can have your Does your daughter want to write a
Speaker 1: letter to an Olympic athlete?
Speaker 3: Did you see this one? Yes?
Speaker 1: And it was like, have Google Gemini generate and use
Speaker 1: generative AI to write the letter. And it's like, obviously
Speaker 1: this has been roasted because it's the whole point of
Speaker 1: an activity like that is you get to you, you
Speaker 1: introduce your child to this, you know, to this this
Speaker 1: art of writing something down and engaging with this dream
Speaker 1: of of you know, and you actually participating in an
Speaker 1: activity not just like a fuck it hit a button.
Speaker 3: And you can imagine what it would be like to
Speaker 3: be the athlete. After that video rounds, that's twenty million
Speaker 3: AI slot letter. Where do I begin? So I have
Speaker 3: a friend who's a professor who tells me that now
Speaker 3: it used to be that if someone asked you to
Speaker 3: write a letter of recommendation for a grand student, you'd
Speaker 3: be very selective because you wouldn't want to just say
Speaker 3: yes to everybody because it's a lot of work. And
Speaker 3: then the people who got those letters really valued them
Speaker 3: because they knew that you were very selective. But now
Speaker 3: you take three bullet points about anyone who asks, and
Speaker 3: it expands it into an AI slot recommendation letter, which
Speaker 3: means that they're now getting so many recommendation letters that
Speaker 3: they ask AI to summarize them back into three different
Speaker 3: bullet points, three extremely losty bullet points, and the entire
Speaker 3: system is broken down.
Speaker 2: Hosting the ass hose in the mouth, it's it's my favorite.
Speaker 2: One of these commercials, by the way, was the co
Speaker 2: pilot ad for Microsoft on the Super Bowl where one
Speaker 2: of the things eagle in listeners will hear this and say,
Speaker 2: I just smashed the window, but I know this bit.
Speaker 2: It said, there's a bit what you type and say
Speaker 2: write the code for my three D game.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't do it. I did it.
Speaker 2: It creates a document telling you how to make a
Speaker 2: three D game. And I think that the point I'm
Speaker 2: coming towards him glad you'd brought this up both you
Speaker 2: is GPT really isn't the problem. Transformer based architecture cannot
Speaker 2: do the things the saying it, But it isn't the problem.
Speaker 2: The problem is the people building generative AI are actually
Speaker 2: deeply uncreative because gory up, you're the person you cited
Speaker 2: who makes the cool art. That's someone who's effectively like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, this is a very messy way of
Speaker 2: describing it, but getting a robot with sixty arms and
Speaker 2: throwing pain to the wall to make something random, sure
Speaker 2: that is art because you are operating the machine. But
Speaker 2: generat ive AI, the way it's being pedled is depriving
Speaker 2: people of actual operational expertise or any kind of domain
Speaker 2: ex police. It's you're not writing a letter that you
Speaker 2: care about because you're not writing the letter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Mean that's I just I wrote a whole newsletter about
Speaker 1: this because it was bothering me so much. How many
Speaker 1: times they've heard it said, mostly by vcs and you
Speaker 1: know AI advocates saying well, it democratizes creativity. I mean
Speaker 1: in in what in what what is art? What is
Speaker 1: more democratic than just producing art? Already? This is not
Speaker 1: something that needs to be further democratized.
Speaker 2: Actually democratizes creativity, access to the ants. It's time and
Speaker 2: space to access the arts and contributing. The best way
Speaker 2: I got better at writing was writing but also reading,
Speaker 2: which was my privilege of my parents being able to
Speaker 2: afford the internet, afford books. These are the actual ways.
Speaker 2: But none of these people are creative to how the
Speaker 2: fuck would that this is?
Speaker 1: And this is my whole point is, if anything, it's
Speaker 1: doing the exact opposite. It's it's it's creating an automated
Speaker 1: process by which you can pump out as much shit
Speaker 1: as possible, thereby pitting people who create art for a
Speaker 1: living and hope to make a living off of it
Speaker 1: against a machine that can generate as much slop as
Speaker 1: as as as the client can handle. And it's just
Speaker 1: pushing down wages. It's making it harder for art to
Speaker 1: make a living. It's it's it's doing anything but but democratizing.
Speaker 1: And it's making extant relationships between like a publisher and
Speaker 1: an art and an artist, or a writer and a
Speaker 1: and and somebody who's commissioning work much more important, thereby
Speaker 1: depriving people who are new to.
Speaker 3: The field of opportunities. Uh, you know.
Speaker 1: Ted Chang makes makes this point in his Great New
Speaker 1: Yorker essays about AI that it's just it's it's depriving.
Speaker 3: It's it's kicking down that ladder.
Speaker 1: Basically, it's like people who practice a craft by doing
Speaker 1: stuff that's less than you know, authoring a novel that
Speaker 1: you know you're going to get a full, full rate for,
Speaker 1: or it's you might still just be learning to apply
Speaker 1: the trade by writing a you know, marketing copy. Well,
Speaker 1: the generative AI is going to vacuum up all of
Speaker 1: those jobs and those opportunities. It's it's it's the anti
Speaker 1: democratizing force.
Speaker 3: Really, I was just trying to look up a book,
Speaker 3: but I failed. There's a wonderful artist, cartoonist, and novelist
Speaker 3: named Linda Barry, and I co taught a workshop writing
Speaker 3: workshop that she was also teaching at. And Barry is
Speaker 3: a great believer in the idea that you can anyone
Speaker 3: can draw, and that drawing is itself a gateway to
Speaker 3: a kind of creative understanding of yourself in the world
Speaker 3: that is uniquely powerful. And as someone who doesn't draw,
Speaker 3: I was skeptical of this claim. She's written a couple
Speaker 3: of very good books about this, and she's also won
Speaker 3: a MacArthur Prize. And I came in and I looked
Speaker 3: at what my writing students had done after spending a
Speaker 3: week drawing with Linda Barry. They were not there to
Speaker 3: learn to draw. They were there to learn to write,
Speaker 3: and they were remarkably like they had a free and
Speaker 3: loose arm and in a way that you know a
Speaker 3: lot of writers. This is a very intensive writing workshop
Speaker 3: called the Clarion Workshop. It's for science fiction writers at
Speaker 3: UCSD and I'm a graduate of it and a board
Speaker 3: member of it and in instructor. And it's often characterized
Speaker 3: as a kind of boot camp, and usually you get
Speaker 3: an it's a six week workshop, and I think I
Speaker 3: was teaching week four and by week four of these
Speaker 3: kids are zombies. These kids were not zombies, right, They
Speaker 3: were really open and free and really thinking expansively. So,
Speaker 3: you know, I think that like giving everyone a week
Speaker 3: with Linda Berry democratize his art. And I think there's
Speaker 3: you know, look, I think like typing prompts into an
Speaker 3: LM is in its own way like being Jackson Pollock
Speaker 3: and throwing pain at the wall. If that's why and
Speaker 3: how you're doing it right, Like if you're fooling around, right,
Speaker 3: if you're fooling around, you can you can get to
Speaker 3: somewhere that you can't get to if you're trying to
Speaker 3: get their own purpose. And I just don't think that
Speaker 3: we're being invited to fool around. Yeah, I think that
Speaker 3: that's the whole thing.
Speaker 1: I think artists would not give a shit about jenerative
Speaker 1: AI if it wasn't being put in opposition to their livelihoods,
Speaker 1: as if it wasn't threatening.
Speaker 3: Their economics security.
Speaker 1: The people that are many people as they want can
Speaker 1: go play around at home and and do and make
Speaker 1: different variations and for their own personal enjoyment. I don't
Speaker 1: think anybody would would would begrudge them that if that
Speaker 1: wasn't simultaneously being used as a justification as a promotional
Speaker 1: material essentially by these companies who are then going to
Speaker 1: go sell other firms.
Speaker 3: And I know you're gagging to go to an abit.
Speaker 3: I want to say one last thing. We've got to
Speaker 3: rouse this bad bloup. So I want to say one
Speaker 3: last thing here, which is that if you pouparize every
Speaker 3: single commercial illustrator in the world without open AI, you
Speaker 3: will pay the kombucha bill for fifteen minutes for their
Speaker 3: senior engineers. That the only reason they're doing this, This
Speaker 3: is a great tragedy. The reason they're doing this is
Speaker 3: not because there is a huge market opportunity in popularizing
Speaker 3: commercial illustrators. It's that it is an exemplary opportunity. It's
Speaker 3: not that there's a it's not that the market will
Speaker 3: then return their investment. It's that it will be a
Speaker 3: very visible example of what you can do with open AI.
Speaker 3: It's a convincer.
Speaker 1: They are effected one of the few that actually works, Yes,
Speaker 1: that can be dependably relied on to produce results that
Speaker 1: you can point to and say, hey, look.
Speaker 3: That kind of works. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So guys, it's been so wonderful having you. I
Speaker 2: could go another three hours, but that's just me Corey.
Speaker 2: Where can people find you?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 3: I'm at pluralistic dot net and as I've mentioned a
Speaker 3: few times, I write science fiction novels and other kinds
Speaker 3: of books, mostly published by tor Books at McMillan. You
Speaker 3: can get them wherever you get books.
Speaker 1: Brian, Yeah, I write a newsletter called Blood in the Machine.
Speaker 1: It's also the name of the book of the similar theme.
Speaker 1: You can check either out.
Speaker 3: Yeah blood inthemachine dot com.
Speaker 2: Yeahs so you and also hopefully I'll put all of
Speaker 2: the links to this stuff in there.
Speaker 3: But it's always good to hear out loud. Guys.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining me and listeners, thank
Speaker 2: you so much for listening. When you get out of
Speaker 2: the clink, you can email me at easy at Better
Speaker 2: Offline dot com and net for my Canadian and UK
Speaker 2: just that out Canadians say z as well.
Speaker 3: Ez off line, You're like serial killers where everyone we
Speaker 3: look just like everyone else and we say Z.
Speaker 2: That's right, bellow Canadian, I've I just learned, I've met
Speaker 2: a Canadians.
Speaker 3: Wonderful.
Speaker 2: All right, thank you so much for listening, and Corey Brian,
Speaker 2: thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 3: Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 2: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 2: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 2: and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 2: T O. S O W s KI dot com. You
Speaker 2: can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com
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