WEBVTT - Enzittification with Cory Doctorow & Brian Merchant 0:00:02.480 --> 0:00:03.560 As media. 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:08.000 Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed 0:00:08.119 --> 0:00:22.640 Zitron and this is the third I was about saying inaugural, 0:00:22.680 --> 0:00:25.079 but I'm not sure that's what that word means. Episode 0:00:25.120 --> 0:00:27.800 of Better Off Live, the live to tape radio show 0:00:27.880 --> 0:00:30.400 that I shove in there when I'm in cities. Today, 0:00:30.400 --> 0:00:34.560 I'm joined by two titans, Titans of the tech industry. Yes, 0:00:34.880 --> 0:00:37.880 I've got Cory doctor Row here of course, author Cory 0:00:37.960 --> 0:00:41.720 doctor Row and Brian Merchant, other author and journalist. And 0:00:41.800 --> 0:00:45.000 I am so excited because today we're talking about how 0:00:45.000 --> 0:00:46.599 we fix the entire tech industry. 0:00:46.840 --> 0:00:49.440 Yeah, sounds like an easy order. I don't know what 0:00:49.440 --> 0:00:51.519 we're gonna do with the excess time after we're done 0:00:51.560 --> 0:00:51.800 with that. 0:00:51.920 --> 0:00:55.880 Looking forward to that's probably twenty minutes, Yeah something Max, Max, Yeah, 0:00:56.400 --> 0:00:58.000 we'll talk about our various holidays. 0:00:58.000 --> 0:00:59.720 Brian just got back from the French rivi era. It 0:00:59.720 --> 0:01:00.760 sounds like that's true. 0:01:00.800 --> 0:01:03.600 Yeah, I did. We got stuck in Philadelphia, so my 0:01:03.680 --> 0:01:05.000 brain is still. 0:01:04.800 --> 0:01:08.240 The French revie Riviera of America, of America. Yeah, and 0:01:08.480 --> 0:01:11.760 welcome to scholar debate, gentlemen. So the thing that I 0:01:11.840 --> 0:01:13.720 keep thinking at the moment, the thing that really I 0:01:13.760 --> 0:01:16.959 had too. It was like pessimism versus optimism that brought 0:01:17.000 --> 0:01:20.160 you two together today with me and I keep coming 0:01:20.200 --> 0:01:23.960 back to this, which is everyone's kind of depressed in 0:01:24.000 --> 0:01:26.040 tech at the moment. It feels like everyone's very negative. 0:01:26.040 --> 0:01:27.680 And Brian, I know you've been a ton about lat 0:01:27.760 --> 0:01:32.360 it's obviously, and I'm wondering how we actually reverse this STrenD, Like, 0:01:32.400 --> 0:01:34.480 how do we actually get away from the fact that 0:01:34.760 --> 0:01:37.720 everyone feels miserable with their devices right now? Because I 0:01:37.800 --> 0:01:40.920 love tech. I adore my gizmos, my gadgets, my apps. 0:01:41.240 --> 0:01:43.280 I don't I care that they're messing with me, and 0:01:43.319 --> 0:01:46.240 I write a lot about it, but I want everyone 0:01:46.240 --> 0:01:48.280 else to enjoy it again, I just don't how do 0:01:48.320 --> 0:01:50.640 we even begin that well. 0:01:50.720 --> 0:01:54.800 I think that the story that the tech industry wants 0:01:54.840 --> 0:01:57.360 to tell us is the origin of this depression, because 0:01:57.400 --> 0:02:00.080 the tech industry wants us to think that you have 0:02:00.120 --> 0:02:02.800 to take the bad with the good. Right that you know, 0:02:02.920 --> 0:02:06.600 if you want to have a friend, Mark Zuckerberg has 0:02:06.640 --> 0:02:09.720 to be your friend too. If you want to search 0:02:09.760 --> 0:02:12.680 the internet, Sergei Brinn needs to know about it. If 0:02:12.680 --> 0:02:15.680 you want to have a phone that works, then Tim 0:02:15.720 --> 0:02:18.359 Apple gets to charge everyone who helps you use it 0:02:18.440 --> 0:02:21.560 thirty percent of whatever you pay them. And their argument 0:02:21.639 --> 0:02:24.480 is that like building a phone that works that doesn't 0:02:24.480 --> 0:02:27.360 have this thirty percent viig is like making water that's 0:02:27.400 --> 0:02:31.320 not wet, right, right, And that's just like patently untrue. 0:02:31.520 --> 0:02:34.079 And so I think that, you know, to the extent 0:02:34.120 --> 0:02:37.560 that we're like God, you know, I like being able 0:02:37.600 --> 0:02:41.200 to talk to my friends and being able to you know, 0:02:41.560 --> 0:02:45.160 download a movie without having to go to the video store, 0:02:45.200 --> 0:02:48.440 and I like all of these other things. I guess 0:02:48.480 --> 0:02:51.560 I just have to live in the apocalyptic wasteland or 0:02:51.840 --> 0:02:54.400 I have to go and you know, live in a 0:02:54.480 --> 0:02:57.359 shack in the woods and be the unibomber. And I'm 0:02:57.360 --> 0:03:00.520 here to argue that there's like, you know, we could 0:03:00.520 --> 0:03:04.200 seize the means of computation. We could decompose the prefeast 0:03:04.240 --> 0:03:07.200 menu into an a la carde little little French content 0:03:07.240 --> 0:03:11.200 for you then, Brian and we could have a new 0:03:11.280 --> 0:03:14.360 good Internet that consists of the stuff we like and 0:03:14.440 --> 0:03:15.760 throws away the stuff that's bad. 0:03:16.080 --> 0:03:19.480 Yeah, And that's why the you know, the luddite is 0:03:19.520 --> 0:03:22.160 such a handy epithet for them in its you know, 0:03:22.639 --> 0:03:26.400 incorrectly deployed sort of context. That's why they use it, right, 0:03:26.639 --> 0:03:29.240 It's not they say, oh, if you're against any one 0:03:29.280 --> 0:03:31.760 of those things that Corey just brought up, then you 0:03:31.840 --> 0:03:34.760 are against in fact the whole of technology. And then 0:03:34.800 --> 0:03:37.640 we can sort of deride you, we can write you off, 0:03:37.680 --> 0:03:40.320 we can cast you aside. And it has made for 0:03:40.360 --> 0:03:43.200 the last twenty years or so at least kind of 0:03:43.680 --> 0:03:51.000 you know, actual sort of substantive critiques and attempts to 0:03:51.480 --> 0:03:54.760 reconfigure some of those systems much more difficult. You have 0:03:54.800 --> 0:03:56.600 to clear that ball bar first, you have to say, 0:03:56.680 --> 0:03:58.960 you have to start every argument with, well, I'm not 0:03:59.000 --> 0:04:01.120 a lot I but I actually like technology. But I 0:04:01.160 --> 0:04:03.840 think that and we are only now kind of reaching 0:04:03.840 --> 0:04:06.240 a point where we have enough sort of a critical mass, 0:04:06.320 --> 0:04:09.400 enough momentum where we don't have to sort of, you know, 0:04:09.880 --> 0:04:12.760 dither around and sort of and make all of that, 0:04:13.040 --> 0:04:13.600 all of that. 0:04:13.680 --> 0:04:15.760 Sort of pretext. It's clear now, I think. 0:04:15.800 --> 0:04:18.520 Add to your point that the Internet is such a 0:04:18.560 --> 0:04:21.400 festering mass in so many ways that it's just self evident. 0:04:21.480 --> 0:04:25.279 You log onto this thing and Google barely works. Everything's 0:04:25.400 --> 0:04:29.360 tracking you, either, surveillance capitalism is at work in every 0:04:29.400 --> 0:04:31.760 nook and cranny and it's just and anybody who uses 0:04:31.760 --> 0:04:34.400 that besides just a few isolated apps can kind of 0:04:34.400 --> 0:04:36.479 feel it. It makes your skin crawl these days. So 0:04:37.120 --> 0:04:39.359 the task that we have now laid out before us 0:04:39.400 --> 0:04:41.919 to try to fix this stuff, I think is clear 0:04:42.560 --> 0:04:44.359 than it ever has been. And I do think, you know, 0:04:45.000 --> 0:04:48.159 I often get criticized for being a pessimist or a 0:04:48.160 --> 0:04:49.600 doom sayer, but I'm really not. 0:04:49.760 --> 0:04:51.120 I'm actually quite idealistic. 0:04:51.160 --> 0:04:52.640 I think that there's a lot that we can do 0:04:53.880 --> 0:04:58.200 that's fairly straightforward to start sort of fixing some of 0:04:58.200 --> 0:04:58.559 this stuff. 0:04:58.560 --> 0:05:01.279 And I know Corey and are. 0:05:01.120 --> 0:05:04.160 In agreement on all, but yeah, and I think that, oh, 0:05:04.240 --> 0:05:07.480 we'll get to where you disagree later. That's where scholar 0:05:07.520 --> 0:05:10.600 debate is. So because this is the woke Lex Friedmann show, 0:05:10.600 --> 0:05:13.400 of course. And but the thing I keep coming back 0:05:13.400 --> 0:05:15.320 to as well is these people who are like, I'm 0:05:15.320 --> 0:05:17.800 a techno optimist. Not just the people the capital t 0:05:18.000 --> 0:05:21.719 kept Low Andresen types and the fans of Nick Land, 0:05:21.800 --> 0:05:25.240 I guess, but even the people criticizing, say tech Crunch 0:05:25.279 --> 0:05:27.920 for being against I don't know a writer saying fuck 0:05:27.960 --> 0:05:31.040 people who who don't like who don't like the AI, 0:05:31.200 --> 0:05:34.960 which is bullshit. Sorry, Connie. The thing is, these people 0:05:34.960 --> 0:05:37.120 don't seem to like tech. They seem to like business. 0:05:37.400 --> 0:05:40.000 They don't seem to It's not like I see Bajali 0:05:40.360 --> 0:05:43.280 sitting around digging around on his fucking iPhone playing a game. 0:05:43.320 --> 0:05:45.760 I don't see Mark Andreson or hear Mark andries and 0:05:45.800 --> 0:05:49.320 talk about even using technology. None of these people seem 0:05:49.360 --> 0:05:53.239 to experience tech. They're just experiencing the ways in which 0:05:53.680 --> 0:05:57.960 McKinsey and their various outgrowths of Sandwich. They're weigh in 0:05:58.000 --> 0:06:01.560 between the layers of society and and it's so fucking 0:06:01.560 --> 0:06:04.480 frustrating because I too, get called a pessimist. I have 0:06:04.600 --> 0:06:06.720 people on the Reddit, the people who want I don't know, 0:06:07.120 --> 0:06:09.520 actively stealing the hub caps off of cars as they 0:06:09.560 --> 0:06:11.680 listen to the show. They're piste off, like, Oh, you 0:06:11.760 --> 0:06:13.920 just don't like it. You're just being negative, You're just 0:06:13.920 --> 0:06:16.760 a pessimist. No, I love this shit, and I'm tired 0:06:16.800 --> 0:06:19.680 of not loving I'm tired of it being bad. Facebook 0:06:19.960 --> 0:06:23.160 used to be great. I know that that company's deeply evil, 0:06:23.200 --> 0:06:24.320 even to the early days book. 0:06:25.040 --> 0:06:27.159 I mean, it was founded so that Mark Zarkerperg and 0:06:27.160 --> 0:06:29.360 his friends could non consensually rate the fuck ability with 0:06:29.400 --> 0:06:32.200 their fellow hearts. Undergraduate, it's like truly evil. 0:06:32.800 --> 0:06:35.760 But then even then there was a good side of it, 0:06:36.080 --> 0:06:38.240 where like I was in college in two thousand and 0:06:38.240 --> 0:06:41.080 five and Penn's day when it was going and like there. 0:06:40.920 --> 0:06:43.520 Was something magical. You suddenly these nights for. 0:06:43.520 --> 0:06:45.680 Better or for worse that you might have forgotten, or 0:06:45.680 --> 0:06:47.320 that you might have forgotten moments of these get these 0:06:47.320 --> 0:06:50.280 shitty digital camera pictures. You have people that you'd met 0:06:50.279 --> 0:06:52.599 in passing, that you'd never meet again except you could 0:06:52.680 --> 0:06:59.760 now and now what over fifteen years later, Facebook actively 0:06:59.839 --> 0:07:01.920 in vines if you try, if you're like, i'd let's 0:07:01.920 --> 0:07:04.440 find this person, like haha, no, no, no. 0:07:06.040 --> 0:07:09.000 So I can I draw a distinction. So I think 0:07:09.040 --> 0:07:12.360 that you're the frame of optimism. Pessimism is not very 0:07:13.040 --> 0:07:17.560 useful because optimism and pessimism, I think, are our beliefs 0:07:17.560 --> 0:07:20.880 that don't leave a lot of room for human agency. Right. 0:07:21.120 --> 0:07:24.120 Optimism is just this idea that the history is running 0:07:24.160 --> 0:07:26.880 on rails and it's running to a good place, right, 0:07:27.040 --> 0:07:29.680 And pessimism is the opposite belief. But neither of them 0:07:29.760 --> 0:07:32.760 really admit of a place where where we act. And 0:07:32.880 --> 0:07:36.160 I like hope, right, yeah, which is the idea that, like, 0:07:36.600 --> 0:07:38.840 if you don't like your situation and you don't know 0:07:38.880 --> 0:07:41.440 how to make it fully better, if you can find 0:07:41.480 --> 0:07:43.760 even just one thing you can do to materially improve 0:07:43.760 --> 0:07:47.640 that situation, you will ascend the gradient towards the future 0:07:48.040 --> 0:07:50.760 that you want. And that as you attain that new 0:07:50.840 --> 0:07:54.520 vantage point, you may find yourself able to see new 0:07:54.600 --> 0:07:58.120 ways to make things better that were occulted when you 0:07:58.200 --> 0:08:01.080 were further down the slope. And so you know, it's 0:08:01.080 --> 0:08:03.040 not the most efficient way to get from A to Z, 0:08:03.280 --> 0:08:08.200 but it's it's also much better than trying to treat 0:08:08.840 --> 0:08:11.560 your activism in your life like a novel. Right. I'm 0:08:11.600 --> 0:08:14.400 a novelist. I know how novels work. In novels, you 0:08:14.400 --> 0:08:17.920 have a very neat dramatic arc where you do a thing, 0:08:18.000 --> 0:08:19.440 and then you do the next thing, and you do 0:08:19.480 --> 0:08:21.680 the next thing. You build to a climax and either 0:08:21.720 --> 0:08:24.280 it's triumphant or it's tragic, and then that's the end. 0:08:24.520 --> 0:08:26.840 In real life, there's a lot of backtracking, and the 0:08:26.880 --> 0:08:29.840 fact that we can't see a novelistic way from A 0:08:29.920 --> 0:08:31.600 to Z just tells us that we're living in the 0:08:31.600 --> 0:08:33.079 real world and not a simulation. 0:08:33.280 --> 0:08:35.720 So where do we find hope then, Like, really, I 0:08:35.720 --> 0:08:38.080 think that that is it. Yeah, I mean I and 0:08:38.120 --> 0:08:41.080 I would just also the sort of comment on that. 0:08:41.120 --> 0:08:43.040 I do think that there is you know, there's utility 0:08:43.080 --> 0:08:46.400 in pessimism, right, and there's utility in optimism as well. 0:08:46.400 --> 0:08:49.720 I don't think it necessarily forecloses any futures necessarily. There's 0:08:49.800 --> 0:08:52.080 the of course, you know that you have the pessimism 0:08:52.200 --> 0:08:54.560 of the intellect and the you know, the optimism of 0:08:54.559 --> 0:08:56.920 the will. I think that's endured for a reason, and 0:08:56.960 --> 0:09:00.200 I think it's applicable here. And I think these two 0:09:00.240 --> 0:09:03.560 sort of like brief snapshots that you just offered a 0:09:03.600 --> 0:09:07.600 Facebook to use it as an example sort of can 0:09:07.440 --> 0:09:10.440 can be illustrative in a sense, right, Like you you know, 0:09:10.800 --> 0:09:14.960 it was founded for truly demonic purposes by a troll 0:09:15.080 --> 0:09:17.960 man who continues to like wield influence over what is 0:09:18.000 --> 0:09:21.000 now one of the most powerful platforms of all time. 0:09:21.920 --> 0:09:25.040 And yet in that sort of interim period before it 0:09:25.040 --> 0:09:29.319 became that from its evil origins, there was this period 0:09:29.320 --> 0:09:32.320 where users had more power right where they were connecting 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:35.000 each other. I mean, some of that was somewhat illusory 0:09:35.040 --> 0:09:39.600 because they're still subject to all of the you know restrictions. Well, 0:09:39.640 --> 0:09:41.720 at the very least they Monk Zuckerbug was scared of 0:09:41.720 --> 0:09:45.120 his us as being upset. Yeah, and there was a 0:09:45.320 --> 0:09:48.360 you know, the users were dictating the growth. I mean, 0:09:48.360 --> 0:09:51.559 we had this kind of fertile period twenty years ago 0:09:51.640 --> 0:09:53.360 or so, especially with Web two point zero, where it 0:09:53.400 --> 0:09:55.960 was basically the users were taking the lead. 0:09:56.040 --> 0:09:57.079 Like Twitter was. 0:09:57.040 --> 0:09:59.960 Like nothing before. Users said, oh what about a hashtag? 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:02.719 What about these features? What about you know what, how 0:10:02.760 --> 0:10:05.640 can we sort of build this into something that's useful 0:10:05.760 --> 0:10:09.640 for us? And you know, a couple of uh, you know, 0:10:10.080 --> 0:10:13.240 white dudes in their in their twenties and and and 0:10:13.679 --> 0:10:16.559 got pretty lucky because they owned some of that infrastructure 0:10:16.600 --> 0:10:20.800 at the time, but they at least had the the 0:10:20.800 --> 0:10:24.720 the foresight to sort of let users lead and to 0:10:24.760 --> 0:10:27.200 see what was you know, what was what was working, 0:10:27.240 --> 0:10:29.800 what wasn't, what was popular, what what helped. Obviously that's 0:10:29.800 --> 0:10:32.520 imperfect as a model of genuine of sort of generalized 0:10:32.520 --> 0:10:36.600 growth too, but it's something that is still powerful to me. Right, 0:10:36.640 --> 0:10:40.000 we have a more democratic model of developing technology that 0:10:40.080 --> 0:10:42.200 is not just limited to the company in Silicon Valley, 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:44.840 certainly not just limited to one founder, and how do 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:47.280 we sort of knock down some. 0:10:47.320 --> 0:10:48.199 Of those barriers. 0:10:48.200 --> 0:10:50.599 This is what Corey writes about a lot like especially 0:10:50.640 --> 0:10:54.400 sort of knocking down sort of the the monopolistic and 0:10:54.440 --> 0:10:58.439 the oligopolistic instincts and tendencies that these companies have acquired 0:10:58.440 --> 0:11:01.480 now that they've concentrated so much wealth and power. But 0:11:01.600 --> 0:11:04.240 we do see flashes of what can be. We still 0:11:04.240 --> 0:11:07.360 have models of what's still good. I found myself pointing 0:11:07.400 --> 0:11:10.640 more recently to like, Wikipedia, for all its flaws, still 0:11:10.679 --> 0:11:15.160 a really interesting organization that still operates and creates really accurate, 0:11:15.280 --> 0:11:20.280 good and enjoyable and useful information without you know, having 0:11:20.320 --> 0:11:23.839 succumbed to so many of these immense like pitfalls and 0:11:24.080 --> 0:11:27.040 become a disgusting cesspool like many of its other contemporaries. 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:30.080 You know, I think that what we're getting at here 0:11:30.640 --> 0:11:32.840 when we talk about what's hopeful about the future and 0:11:32.880 --> 0:11:34.360 when we look back on the past, is that we 0:11:34.360 --> 0:11:37.640 see these people who were at very best imperfect I 0:11:37.720 --> 0:11:40.880 speak as an imperfect person myself, and sometimes actually just 0:11:41.000 --> 0:11:45.080 genuinely terrible people who nevertheless produce things that we like. 0:11:45.360 --> 0:11:47.480 And that's a very hopeful thing because it suggests that 0:11:47.520 --> 0:11:50.000 We don't need perfect people to make good things. We 0:11:50.040 --> 0:11:54.640 can imperfect vessels can still hold something of value. And 0:11:54.720 --> 0:11:57.760 so you have to ask yourself, why were they better 0:11:57.800 --> 0:12:00.720 then and why are they worse now? And Ed, I 0:12:00.760 --> 0:12:03.840 think you got at it right, right in the bullseye 0:12:03.880 --> 0:12:06.319 a few minutes ago, when you said Mark Zuckerberg was 0:12:06.360 --> 0:12:09.440 afraid of his users. Right. So I think that these 0:12:09.480 --> 0:12:14.000 firms used to be disciplined by external forces, and by 0:12:14.040 --> 0:12:17.240 some internal forces their workforce, and that they no longer 0:12:17.280 --> 0:12:20.520 feel that discipline. Right. There was a time when firms 0:12:20.600 --> 0:12:24.800 worried about competition. Hm, that's not so much a worry anymore. 0:12:24.880 --> 0:12:27.920 We relaxed anti trust laws, and the long run effect 0:12:27.960 --> 0:12:31.120 of forty years of relaxed anti trust laws is five 0:12:31.160 --> 0:12:33.720 giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. 0:12:33.960 --> 0:12:37.920 In the memorable phrase of Tom Eastman, and so there's 0:12:37.920 --> 0:12:40.040 nowhere to go, right. Lily Tomlin used to do this 0:12:40.080 --> 0:12:42.480 bit on Saturday Night Live, where she'd play an AT 0:12:42.520 --> 0:12:45.000 and T operator doing commercials for the Bell system. They'd 0:12:45.040 --> 0:12:47.000 end with her turning to the camera and saying, we 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:49.880 don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company. 0:12:50.040 --> 0:12:52.000 When you have a ninety percent market share and search 0:12:52.480 --> 0:12:54.840 when you've got twenty five billion dollars a year to 0:12:54.880 --> 0:12:57.360 spend making sure that nobody ever sees a search engine 0:12:57.400 --> 0:12:59.880 other than yours, because you're the default everywhere there's a search. 0:13:00.800 --> 0:13:02.880 Why do you need to make the search good. You're 0:13:02.920 --> 0:13:04.440 just the only game in town. You don't care, you 0:13:04.440 --> 0:13:06.760 don't have to your Google. Right, So they didn't have 0:13:06.800 --> 0:13:09.360 to worry about competition. They used to have to worry 0:13:09.400 --> 0:13:15.120 about regulation, and we've seen some pretty big regulatory interventions. 0:13:15.600 --> 0:13:18.760 You know. The real big one was Microsoft and the 0:13:18.840 --> 0:13:23.839 DOJ for seven years over antitrust. And they don't have 0:13:23.920 --> 0:13:26.600 to worry about that either anymore because once the sector 0:13:26.679 --> 0:13:29.160 is really concentrated, it finds it really easy to figure 0:13:29.160 --> 0:13:31.800 out what their lobbying position is and to stay on message. 0:13:31.840 --> 0:13:34.120 If you remember the Napster Wars, right, there were like 0:13:34.520 --> 0:13:37.600 one hundred little tech companies that in aggregate were still 0:13:37.679 --> 0:13:41.360 much bigger, like orders of magnitude, bigger than seven entertainment companies. 0:13:41.400 --> 0:13:43.959 The seven entertainment companies kick their ass, yeah, because two 0:13:44.000 --> 0:13:46.840 hundred companies they're a raval, right, seven companies are a cartel, 0:13:47.360 --> 0:13:51.200 and so thank you. Yeah. No, the Calltaeil. Thing is 0:13:51.400 --> 0:13:51.719 my mite. 0:13:51.760 --> 0:13:55.400 Phil Broughton's safety officer and a nuclear safety ex But 0:13:55.480 --> 0:13:59.000 in general he's been telling me Calltel, Calltael, Calltel. And 0:13:59.080 --> 0:14:02.040 I I'm really coming round to this thing that it's 0:14:02.120 --> 0:14:05.880 not just it's not just about the monopoly. It's about 0:14:05.880 --> 0:14:08.400 the fact that they're all sitting there shaking each other's hands. 0:14:08.440 --> 0:14:11.920 Apple being paid at nineteen twenty billion in the year 0:14:11.960 --> 0:14:15.120 by by by Google to not do. 0:14:15.040 --> 0:14:17.400 So how is that Google and Facebook carving up the 0:14:17.440 --> 0:14:22.400 search the ad market with the political collusive Jedi blue 0:14:22.480 --> 0:14:26.400 arrangement that was revealed by the Texas AG's lawsuit against them. 0:14:26.600 --> 0:14:29.160 So yeah, I mean, these companies they pretend that they're 0:14:29.240 --> 0:14:32.400 you know, bitter enemies, but they're all chummy when it 0:14:32.400 --> 0:14:35.840 comes to the stuff that matters. And you know, once 0:14:35.840 --> 0:14:40.360 you have your regulators captured, then you also can mobilize 0:14:40.440 --> 0:14:43.200 law against your adversary. So it's not just about flouting 0:14:43.200 --> 0:14:45.960 the law, it's about using the law against your enemies. 0:14:46.360 --> 0:14:48.280 And what used to happen with tech And one of 0:14:48.280 --> 0:14:49.760 the things you asked what we love about tech? One 0:14:49.800 --> 0:14:51.520 of the things I love about tech is how flexible 0:14:51.520 --> 0:14:53.960 it is, right, how you can always change it so 0:14:54.000 --> 0:14:56.560 that it does what you want. And one of the 0:14:56.600 --> 0:14:59.160 things that we got out of the concentration in the 0:14:59.200 --> 0:15:02.080 tech sector is a capture of regulators that led to 0:15:02.120 --> 0:15:04.640 an expansion of IP law that has now made it 0:15:04.680 --> 0:15:07.200 illegal to reconfigure your own stuff. 0:15:07.760 --> 0:15:07.880 Right. 0:15:08.080 --> 0:15:10.080 So imagine that this the three of us. We're having 0:15:10.280 --> 0:15:13.760 a board meeting about our ad strategy for our website, 0:15:14.240 --> 0:15:16.960 and you're chairing it at and you say, well, guys, 0:15:17.000 --> 0:15:19.880 our KPI, here is AD revenue top line AD revenue. 0:15:19.880 --> 0:15:22.000 I figured out we make the ads twenty percent more obnoxious, 0:15:22.040 --> 0:15:24.520 we get two percent more top line revenue. Brian, who 0:15:24.520 --> 0:15:26.880 may not give a damn about users, can still stick 0:15:26.880 --> 0:15:29.440 his hand up and say, ad, has it occurred to 0:15:29.440 --> 0:15:31.720 you that when we make the ads twenty percent more obnoxious, 0:15:31.760 --> 0:15:33.640 forty percent of our users will type how do I 0:15:33.680 --> 0:15:36.080 block ads? Into a search box? And then our revenue 0:15:36.120 --> 0:15:38.400 from those users goes to zero forever because they're never 0:15:38.440 --> 0:15:40.440 going back to type how do I start seeing ads again? 0:15:40.880 --> 0:15:42.520 And so when you raise the price of ink, you 0:15:42.520 --> 0:15:44.400 have to worry about third party in cartridges. When you 0:15:44.800 --> 0:15:47.200 make MySpace terrible, you have to worry about bots that 0:15:47.320 --> 0:15:49.800 let people leave my space, but still have their messages 0:15:49.840 --> 0:15:52.240 imported into Facebook. You know, all these things that made 0:15:52.280 --> 0:15:54.400 it very easy to lower the switching costs and go 0:15:54.440 --> 0:15:57.120 where you wanted. Well, IP laws basically made that illegal. 0:15:57.200 --> 0:15:59.720 Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt a business model where 0:15:59.720 --> 0:16:03.120 break DRM or violating terms of services become a crime. 0:16:03.520 --> 0:16:06.000 And so companies just put DRM in terms of service 0:16:06.040 --> 0:16:08.040 around their stuff so that anything you do that displeases 0:16:08.080 --> 0:16:10.640 their shareholders as a felony. And then the last thing 0:16:10.640 --> 0:16:12.960 that used to discipline these companies, something near and Derda 0:16:13.000 --> 0:16:15.640 Bryan's in my heart, was their workforce. Yes, because tech 0:16:15.640 --> 0:16:18.320 workers were powerful, there weren't enough of them, and they 0:16:18.320 --> 0:16:21.200 could get a job somewhere else. And yeah, their bosses 0:16:21.320 --> 0:16:23.600 suckered them into working every hour that God sent by 0:16:23.600 --> 0:16:25.280 telling them they were on a holy mission, and so 0:16:25.320 --> 0:16:27.760 they missed their mother's funeral and their kids litteral league 0:16:27.800 --> 0:16:29.600 game to ship the product on time. But that did 0:16:29.640 --> 0:16:32.200 mean that they would feel profound moral injury when their 0:16:32.200 --> 0:16:34.920 boss said let's make this shitty, and because they could 0:16:34.920 --> 0:16:37.040 get a job somewhere else, they would tell their boss 0:16:37.080 --> 0:16:39.480 to go fuck themselves. But two hundred and sixty thousand 0:16:39.480 --> 0:16:41.640 tech layoffs last year one hundred thousand year to date 0:16:41.680 --> 0:16:44.400 this year, tech workers aren't telling their bosses to go 0:16:44.440 --> 0:16:47.040 fuck themselves. And so you have a boss who every 0:16:47.120 --> 0:16:49.240 day went to the wall where there's a giant lever 0:16:49.360 --> 0:16:52.040 labeled in shitification and yanked it as hard as it could. 0:16:53.320 --> 0:16:57.119 And they couldn't get that lever to budge very far. Competition, regulation, 0:16:57.200 --> 0:17:01.240 their own workforce, interoperable hacks, they all kept the lever 0:17:01.320 --> 0:17:03.880 from moving freely. Now the lever just goes all the 0:17:03.880 --> 0:17:06.800 way to one hundred, and from the boss's perspective, they're 0:17:06.840 --> 0:17:08.920 just doing what they did every day of their lives. 0:17:09.080 --> 0:17:10.720 They don't know why we're so angry at them. 0:17:10.920 --> 0:17:14.119 Yeah, And I think this also circles back to, you 0:17:14.160 --> 0:17:17.440 know that what we were talking about earlier about you know, 0:17:17.760 --> 0:17:21.080 the need and the imperative to sort of be critical 0:17:21.480 --> 0:17:27.000 and to sort of oppose certain aspects of how tech 0:17:27.040 --> 0:17:30.960 and tech companies especially are unfolding. Because the current state 0:17:31.000 --> 0:17:33.520 of play, all these things that Corey's describing that are 0:17:33.560 --> 0:17:36.239 absolutely true that you know, they didn't just you know, 0:17:36.880 --> 0:17:39.800 they didn't arrive prepackaged that way. I love that you 0:17:39.840 --> 0:17:41.920 just walked us through all all those three things that 0:17:42.680 --> 0:17:46.560 no longer happen, and it's in large part a result 0:17:46.640 --> 0:17:50.200 because there were a lot of missed opportunities to regulate 0:17:50.240 --> 0:17:53.239 a lot of missed opportunities to sort of constrict this 0:17:53.400 --> 0:17:56.080 growth before it became. My favorite example is, like, I 0:17:56.080 --> 0:17:59.200 think it was twenty thirteen when the Obama administration had 0:17:59.200 --> 0:18:03.240 a chance to sue Google for when it became quite 0:18:03.280 --> 0:18:05.720 clear that it was engaging in monopolistic behavior and it 0:18:05.760 --> 0:18:08.360 was becoming sort of a monopoly of search, and they 0:18:08.400 --> 0:18:11.879 basically just kind of let them off with the slightest 0:18:11.920 --> 0:18:14.840 slap on the wrist possible and said go for it. 0:18:14.880 --> 0:18:17.040 I mean, we all think about tech today and all 0:18:17.080 --> 0:18:18.080 these people who are you. 0:18:18.040 --> 0:18:18.760 Know what happened there? 0:18:18.800 --> 0:18:23.000 Exactly what happened there? It was so Obama. I mean, 0:18:23.280 --> 0:18:24.960 how far back do we want to go. 0:18:25.080 --> 0:18:27.760 That specifically twenty thirteen era, because there's the current antitrust 0:18:27.800 --> 0:18:30.320 lawsuit now, But what was the predecessor. 0:18:30.000 --> 0:18:32.919 Well, it was just there was an FTC probe and 0:18:33.160 --> 0:18:38.600 basically the Obama administration could have sort of green green 0:18:38.680 --> 0:18:44.399 lit a more aggressive investigation, a more aggressive suit into 0:18:45.320 --> 0:18:48.840 Google's monopoly practices. You know, this was ten years ago, 0:18:49.200 --> 0:18:51.760 so it was before it had become so sort of 0:18:51.800 --> 0:18:56.160 like obviously and so stultifyingly sort of the want what 0:18:56.160 --> 0:18:58.320 does it have ninety percent of the search market, So 0:18:58.520 --> 0:19:02.040 it's literally it's just like the textbook definition. 0:19:01.720 --> 0:19:04.760 Of an search. So it's twenty thirteen. So that's right. 0:19:05.240 --> 0:19:08.120 So Prabagod Ragavan at this point had joined Google. Going 0:19:08.160 --> 0:19:10.479 back to the man who killed Google Search my favorite story, 0:19:11.200 --> 0:19:11.880 real piece of. 0:19:11.800 --> 0:19:14.359 Shit, motherfucker there, Probagod, come on the shell. I'll take you. 0:19:14.600 --> 0:19:15.600 I'll take you out in the mic. 0:19:16.200 --> 0:19:20.159 But what's interesting is that does time really interestingly with that, 0:19:20.280 --> 0:19:23.760 so that that interrogation never happened, They never really went deep, 0:19:24.000 --> 0:19:27.359 and just then they hired Prabagarth from Yahoo after he's 0:19:27.400 --> 0:19:30.600 done his work destroying Yahoo's search, and that was when 0:19:30.640 --> 0:19:33.680 Google began to sour. And it feels like that could 0:19:33.720 --> 0:19:36.520 have been a complete that's a historic moment. That's a 0:19:36.520 --> 0:19:38.040 moment where everything could have changed. 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:41.720 I mean, it was one moment of you know, a 0:19:42.359 --> 0:19:44.240 number that they could have but yeah, and you know, 0:19:44.320 --> 0:19:46.080 Corey has documented what's happened. 0:19:46.080 --> 0:19:48.080 Since it's just old school. 0:19:47.760 --> 0:19:51.280 Payola practices, right like Google has just sort of really 0:19:51.320 --> 0:19:53.639 just kind of strangled the market, not through innovation, not 0:19:53.680 --> 0:19:56.520 through introducing great products or ensuring that the user has 0:19:56.560 --> 0:20:00.720 the best experience, but just by you know, sheer force of. 0:20:00.920 --> 0:20:01.800 Paying people out. 0:20:01.840 --> 0:20:05.840 The Apple deal is a great example, just literally just 0:20:05.840 --> 0:20:08.399 funneling billions to another tech company to make sure that 0:20:08.440 --> 0:20:11.760 its product shows up at the top of another tech 0:20:11.800 --> 0:20:13.720 products you know service. 0:20:13.960 --> 0:20:16.920 So, yeah, you know, I think that if we want 0:20:16.960 --> 0:20:19.200 to understand why Obama took the decision he did and 0:20:19.520 --> 0:20:24.320 what's changed, you have to understand that during the Carter administration, right, 0:20:24.359 --> 0:20:27.280 so we have to go way back, we started to 0:20:27.280 --> 0:20:30.560 see the rise of a crank theory of anti trust law, 0:20:30.640 --> 0:20:33.720 and that Crank theory was that anti trust law was 0:20:33.760 --> 0:20:36.800 being misapplied that if you saw monopoly in the wild, 0:20:36.840 --> 0:20:40.120 what you'd actually encountered was something that was very efficient. Right, 0:20:40.119 --> 0:20:42.159 if everyone goes and buys the same product at the 0:20:42.200 --> 0:20:44.560 same store, uses the same search engine, it's the best. 0:20:44.880 --> 0:20:47.520 Wouldn't it be perverse for the government to spend public 0:20:47.600 --> 0:20:50.440 money to take the best product and make it worse, Right, 0:20:50.640 --> 0:20:52.680 And so that was the theory that we got under Carter. 0:20:53.800 --> 0:20:56.879 Reagan really liked it because of very monopoly friendly, and 0:20:57.000 --> 0:21:00.840 every administration since has brought into it as did every 0:21:01.040 --> 0:21:05.240 economic school in the country and eventually in the world. 0:21:05.359 --> 0:21:08.359 This is a very thatchery kind of ideology, but it 0:21:08.359 --> 0:21:13.679 also heard in the EU, thank you, and you know 0:21:13.760 --> 0:21:16.679 that these ideas kind of raced around the world and 0:21:16.720 --> 0:21:20.720 became orthodoxy, and they were funded by very rich people. 0:21:20.880 --> 0:21:23.159 So there's a thing called the man seminar m a 0:21:23.320 --> 0:21:31.520 NN that is sorry. So the man seminars are these 0:21:31.600 --> 0:21:34.359 free junkets for federal judges where they teach them about 0:21:34.359 --> 0:21:37.199 anti trust law and they're run by rich guys and 0:21:37.240 --> 0:21:40.720 they fly them to luxury resorts and they explain how 0:21:40.760 --> 0:21:42.960 anti trust law should work. And there's been quantitative work 0:21:42.960 --> 0:21:45.160 on this where they took federal judges and they looked 0:21:45.160 --> 0:21:47.879 at their decisions before and after going to a man seminar, 0:21:47.880 --> 0:21:49.760 and they found that after going to a man seminar, 0:21:50.160 --> 0:21:52.919 they weighed more heavily in favor of monopoly. And so 0:21:52.960 --> 0:21:57.280 they built up this evidouce edifice rather of precedent and 0:21:57.400 --> 0:22:01.719 theory and orthodoxy. And Obama's FTC said, oh, We're going 0:22:01.760 --> 0:22:03.840 to let them walk. What they were doing was just 0:22:03.920 --> 0:22:10.640 continuing a grand tradition of Bush one, Bush two, Reagan, Carter, Clinton, 0:22:10.920 --> 0:22:13.800 right like this was the way that things were done. 0:22:13.880 --> 0:22:17.280 It was an absolutely wasted opportunity. But it's more or 0:22:17.359 --> 0:22:20.560 less what Trump did afterwards, and it's what we did 0:22:20.600 --> 0:22:24.560 all the way up to the Biden administration, which for 0:22:24.680 --> 0:22:26.960 reasons I think that have nothing to do with Biden's 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:29.400 own ideology, but have everything to do with the way 0:22:29.440 --> 0:22:33.160 that he operates as a party powerbroker, where he wants 0:22:33.200 --> 0:22:36.560 to give everyone a little as something. We got a 0:22:36.600 --> 0:22:39.280 handful of appointees at the tops of some of the 0:22:39.359 --> 0:22:45.359 most important agencies that really oriented themselves towards smashing corporate power. 0:22:46.040 --> 0:22:48.320 Lena Kahn at the Federal Trade Commission, Jonathan Canter at 0:22:48.320 --> 0:22:50.840 the DOJ Anti Trust Division, Tim Woho's in the White 0:22:50.880 --> 0:22:54.560 House for several years, and so on, and these people 0:22:55.359 --> 0:23:00.080 have really transformed things. We've seen more policy transformation in 0:23:00.080 --> 0:23:02.120 the last four years than in the last forty. It's 0:23:02.200 --> 0:23:05.879 it's been head spinningly great. It's wonky, it's hard to 0:23:05.920 --> 0:23:09.280 get your head around. It's very structural, right, it's about 0:23:09.320 --> 0:23:11.680 changing the rules of the game, which takes a while 0:23:11.720 --> 0:23:14.879 to show up in the game. Right, But boy, oh boy, 0:23:15.040 --> 0:23:18.600 it's pretty substantial. Do you think it could go anywhere? Though? 0:23:18.680 --> 0:23:21.280 Do you actually we talk about hope. Should we have 0:23:21.359 --> 0:23:21.879 hope from this? 0:23:22.640 --> 0:23:25.960 I mean, it's it's it's very it's very tenuous. It 0:23:25.960 --> 0:23:29.000 has been great, you know Lina con in particular. I mean, 0:23:29.000 --> 0:23:31.840 I wish the administration would do kind of a better 0:23:31.960 --> 0:23:34.399 job of touting its wins because all this stuff is 0:23:34.480 --> 0:23:38.440 just so popular. What Lenakon has done in awakening sort 0:23:38.480 --> 0:23:42.160 of the FTC from its kind of kind of coma. 0:23:42.359 --> 0:23:45.440 Yeah it's coma, it's in decades long coma. And then 0:23:45.520 --> 0:23:49.359 attacking some I mean, who doesn't hate Ticketmaster? Like who 0:23:49.400 --> 0:23:52.159 doesn't you know, who who loves logging onto the Internet 0:23:52.200 --> 0:23:55.560 as it is today? Like these are these are entities 0:23:55.760 --> 0:23:57.400 that are popular to go. 0:23:57.240 --> 0:23:59.200 After junk fees, non competes. 0:23:59.440 --> 0:24:03.000 Yeah, how Amazon which has recently turned so hostile to 0:24:03.119 --> 0:24:06.120 its own, you know, third party vendors and small businesses 0:24:06.160 --> 0:24:09.000 that that it relies on to operate that it's strangling. 0:24:10.000 --> 0:24:11.920 This is a perfect example of what the you know, 0:24:12.200 --> 0:24:14.520 the Democrats and Biden are supposed to be all about 0:24:14.520 --> 0:24:17.080 standing up for you know this, the little guy, the 0:24:17.080 --> 0:24:21.120 small business owners, you know. And I think the problem 0:24:21.119 --> 0:24:23.800 with all of these gains is that they're just tethered 0:24:23.840 --> 0:24:24.800 to an administration. 0:24:25.000 --> 0:24:26.160 Right, so if. 0:24:26.640 --> 0:24:28.679 If Trump, I mean some some of them, you know, 0:24:29.640 --> 0:24:32.520 some of them could could be more durable. 0:24:32.800 --> 0:24:34.359 They could be. But I mean Lina con is not 0:24:34.359 --> 0:24:36.280 going to be the head of the FDC if Trump wins. 0:24:36.320 --> 0:24:38.240 They're already coming for Yeah. 0:24:39.119 --> 0:24:41.880 Well, I mean Democratic donors are coming for her too, 0:24:42.000 --> 0:24:44.639 because tech companies don't like Lena Khan either. 0:24:44.720 --> 0:24:45.920 So you have guys like I think it was, is 0:24:45.960 --> 0:24:49.359 it Reid Hoffman? Yeah? Oh god, but that company that 0:24:49.440 --> 0:24:51.920 just turned down a thirty six billion dollar acquisition offer 0:24:51.920 --> 0:24:53.760 from Google did so because they didn't want to go 0:24:53.800 --> 0:24:57.040 through that wizy trust. Hell it is the security company. Yeah, 0:24:57.080 --> 0:24:59.920 And so you know, you have had, if nothing else, 0:25:00.080 --> 0:25:03.800 four years of companies not being acquired and instead trying 0:25:03.800 --> 0:25:06.359 to be product led and make a thing that people 0:25:06.400 --> 0:25:08.359 want that they can sell for more than a cost 0:25:08.359 --> 0:25:09.680 to make them, which is you. 0:25:09.640 --> 0:25:12.879 Know, that's an insane I don't. 0:25:13.520 --> 0:25:16.959 I was raised by socialists, it's right, and even I 0:25:17.000 --> 0:25:19.840 can recognize that this is what capitalism is supposed to look. 0:25:19.880 --> 0:25:22.720 Like my dad ran apart of the NHS, like I'm 0:25:22.800 --> 0:25:25.119 the same way. But also this is also something that 0:25:25.119 --> 0:25:27.399 really fucking bothers me about. Take you showed me your 0:25:27.400 --> 0:25:30.520 framework laptop beforehand, and for the listeners, the framework is 0:25:30.760 --> 0:25:33.080 a laptop that you can actually effectively rebuild, replace the 0:25:33.160 --> 0:25:35.359 motherboard and the screen and all these things. As a 0:25:35.400 --> 0:25:38.040 regular user. There is still cool shit happening. But also 0:25:38.160 --> 0:25:40.240 I assume that company makes more money than it spends 0:25:40.240 --> 0:25:43.600 on its stuff. Take can do this, and I feel 0:25:43.640 --> 0:25:48.080 like the Commons, there's this weird paradox at the moment, 0:25:48.160 --> 0:25:52.040 we've got Take saying well, it's actually these companies should 0:25:52.040 --> 0:25:54.800 be able to quote Ilia Suitskava formerly of open Ai, 0:25:55.200 --> 0:25:58.360 we should be able to scale in peace. I by 0:25:58.400 --> 0:26:01.120 the way, Ilia, if you some here this, you will 0:26:01.119 --> 0:26:02.720 never have a moment of piece. As long as I 0:26:02.760 --> 0:26:04.520 have a microphone. Now that you said that, I'm going 0:26:04.560 --> 0:26:06.600 to be watching you, I'm going to be popping out 0:26:06.640 --> 0:26:09.240 of the toilet like the skibberty meme that the children 0:26:09.280 --> 0:26:12.199 look at. But the thing that frustrates me is they 0:26:12.200 --> 0:26:13.920 want this world where they can burn as much money 0:26:13.920 --> 0:26:17.399 as possible, but also the biggest of them can print money, 0:26:17.760 --> 0:26:21.520 prints so much money, more money than any company should 0:26:21.560 --> 0:26:25.880 have while also providing their services. And it's just how 0:26:26.000 --> 0:26:28.960 is it? How do they not want to be the 0:26:29.000 --> 0:26:31.240 company that just makes more money than they spend that 0:26:31.280 --> 0:26:31.879 people like. 0:26:32.920 --> 0:26:34.560 And is it just that they don't give a shit? 0:26:34.680 --> 0:26:36.040 Is it? Is it sunned up a shy and his 0:26:36.119 --> 0:26:39.240 ilk just don't care. Well. I think that what you're 0:26:39.280 --> 0:26:42.480 looking for, the Fraser looking for here is what Lina 0:26:42.520 --> 0:26:46.200 Khan calls too big to care. Right if you think 0:26:46.240 --> 0:26:48.760 back to the moral philosophers of capitalism or you know, 0:26:48.960 --> 0:26:52.080 writing at the time of the Light Eyed uprisings, and 0:26:52.119 --> 0:26:54.280 they were saying, look that the thing that i'm a 0:26:54.400 --> 0:26:57.600 profit driven economy as opposed to a rent driven economy 0:26:57.680 --> 0:27:02.199 will get us is a world in which, instead of 0:27:02.240 --> 0:27:04.520 the lord knowing that the peasants will have to bring 0:27:04.520 --> 0:27:06.879 in the harvest every year because they're legally obliged to 0:27:06.960 --> 0:27:10.320 they can't leave the land, the lord, the capitalist will 0:27:10.320 --> 0:27:14.080 have to mobilize capital, bring free labor into contact with it, 0:27:14.119 --> 0:27:17.960 alienate them from the surplus of that labor, and watch 0:27:18.000 --> 0:27:20.359 over their shoulder all the time for someone who shows 0:27:20.440 --> 0:27:23.400 up with a better machine, a better process, a better 0:27:23.440 --> 0:27:25.840 pitch for their workers. You know, if you own the 0:27:25.840 --> 0:27:28.679 building that a coffee shop is in, and that coffee 0:27:28.680 --> 0:27:30.919 shop goes bankrupt because a better coffee shop is just 0:27:30.960 --> 0:27:34.679 open across the street. You're fine. Actually you're great, because 0:27:34.680 --> 0:27:36.480 now you have an empty storefront. You could rent on 0:27:36.520 --> 0:27:38.840 the same block as this new hot coffee shop. Right, 0:27:38.960 --> 0:27:41.160 if you own the coffee shop, if you're the capitalist 0:27:41.200 --> 0:27:44.080 as opposed to the rontier, you're fucked. And so every 0:27:44.080 --> 0:27:47.840 capitalist aspires to being a rontier. Right. They don't want 0:27:47.880 --> 0:27:50.720 to operate in an environment in which they're like the 0:27:50.840 --> 0:27:53.119 fastest gun in the West, who's always waiting for that 0:27:53.240 --> 0:27:56.280 kid to show up and say draw Brian. 0:27:56.480 --> 0:27:59.880 Actually, Bridgingenolf of that is well, I think it's time 0:27:59.920 --> 0:28:01.639 to much the oscy just very bas what did the 0:28:01.720 --> 0:28:04.159 Ludites actually ask for? Because I've heard people who do 0:28:04.160 --> 0:28:06.399 not like this. They're in people who do. But explain 0:28:06.440 --> 0:28:09.480 for the listeners because you hear this phrase Ludism mentioned 0:28:09.720 --> 0:28:10.320 quite long. 0:28:10.680 --> 0:28:13.520 Yeah, well, you know, so there's no there's there's no 0:28:14.800 --> 0:28:17.560 you know, enduring lud eighte manifesto that where all the 0:28:17.600 --> 0:28:18.960 lud Eites and the people who were out on the 0:28:18.960 --> 0:28:21.200 streets who are part of the campaign, you know, of 0:28:21.240 --> 0:28:29.320 the of the eighteen tens who were organizing basically against 0:28:29.840 --> 0:28:31.920 this new sort of you know, this new this new 0:28:31.960 --> 0:28:35.760 class of entrepreneur that was rising up to to basically 0:28:35.800 --> 0:28:39.840 exploit their labor, to use machinery, to uh, to divide labor, 0:28:39.920 --> 0:28:43.400 to to use children to run it, and to sort 0:28:43.400 --> 0:28:46.400 of may force them to compete and to sort of 0:28:46.600 --> 0:28:49.280 and to drive down their wages. So they are against 0:28:49.400 --> 0:28:51.760 The Ludites are basically against all that they were. 0:28:51.760 --> 0:28:54.680 Truly a They were. 0:28:54.520 --> 0:28:57.600 In many ways, you know, a reactionary force. They had 0:28:57.600 --> 0:29:00.600 their back against the wall. They weren't a pro active 0:29:00.680 --> 0:29:03.440 political party or anything like that. So you can't necessarily 0:29:03.520 --> 0:29:06.520 say every Ledite believe this or this is what they wanted. 0:29:06.720 --> 0:29:08.240 But there are a number of things that. 0:29:08.200 --> 0:29:11.040 Are clear about what they were that what they were seeking, 0:29:12.240 --> 0:29:15.360 and you can really boil it down to basically a 0:29:15.400 --> 0:29:16.240 seat at the table. 0:29:17.440 --> 0:29:19.320 This was a profoundly. 0:29:18.840 --> 0:29:22.120 Anti democratic way to develop and deploy technology that they 0:29:22.120 --> 0:29:25.800 were experiencing, and they went to great lengths even before 0:29:25.800 --> 0:29:28.240 they became Luddites to point this out. They went to 0:29:28.280 --> 0:29:31.880 Parliament and said, these new machines are being bought up 0:29:31.920 --> 0:29:35.360 by this new rising class of capitalists. They are being 0:29:35.400 --> 0:29:40.960 staffed by either migrant workers or children, or precarious. 0:29:40.360 --> 0:29:44.720 Workers Napoleonic war orphans, right exactly, they literally would pipe 0:29:44.720 --> 0:29:48.520 in orphans from London into these factories to staff them, 0:29:48.720 --> 0:29:53.000 and they wouldn't pay them until they turned eighteen. They 0:29:53.720 --> 0:29:56.600 and so the Luddites or the people who became Luedites 0:29:56.680 --> 0:29:58.440 would point this out and they would ask for some 0:29:58.600 --> 0:30:02.520 very basic, very common sense reforms, asking for minimum wages, 0:30:02.680 --> 0:30:06.800 protections from fraud. And that went on for ten years, 0:30:06.840 --> 0:30:09.200 and they got laughed out of Parliament time and time 0:30:09.240 --> 0:30:12.200 again until those any regulations that did govern the trade 0:30:12.240 --> 0:30:16.440 were thrown up altogether. And so when the Luddites become Lutdites, 0:30:16.880 --> 0:30:20.600 they're basically protesting all of the above, the fact that 0:30:20.640 --> 0:30:23.800 this was a profoundly undemocratic process that they are being 0:30:23.880 --> 0:30:28.360 forced to uh to either succumb, to either go work 0:30:28.400 --> 0:30:32.400 in the factories or to give find it, give up, 0:30:32.440 --> 0:30:34.440 which wasn't an option. By the way, This isn't a 0:30:34.440 --> 0:30:38.440 diverse economy of you know that we recognize today right 0:30:38.520 --> 0:30:39.240 exactly learned it. 0:30:39.280 --> 0:30:41.360 You can't even learn to code. You grew up in 0:30:41.360 --> 0:30:45.320 a weaving town. Guess what you're John's pretty limited to weaving. 0:30:45.400 --> 0:30:48.320 So these are people who are remarkably at the at 0:30:48.600 --> 0:30:50.479 sort of the whims of the market. And when the 0:30:50.480 --> 0:30:53.480 market was as poor as it was, and these capitalists 0:30:53.520 --> 0:30:56.160 were in control of it to the extent that they were. 0:30:57.000 --> 0:30:59.480 You know, they tried, they tried to reason with a 0:30:59.480 --> 0:31:03.320 lot of these uh, these factory owners. They tried before 0:31:03.520 --> 0:31:06.320 it came to it came to what it came to 0:31:06.360 --> 0:31:09.000 when they sort of organized this gorilla rebellion that was 0:31:09.360 --> 0:31:11.719 incredibly popular that they you know, this was the new 0:31:11.800 --> 0:31:15.880 Robin Hood movement basically, and what they wanted was, yeah, 0:31:15.920 --> 0:31:18.680 a seat at the table. They opposed the machinery hurtful 0:31:18.720 --> 0:31:20.800 to commonality that was align well must it. 0:31:20.800 --> 0:31:24.000 Seems like it wasn't, because the common misunderstanding if lotism 0:31:24.080 --> 0:31:26.680 is that they just wanted to destroy the machines because 0:31:26.680 --> 0:31:29.080 they didn't like them. And it sounds like, I don't know, 0:31:29.360 --> 0:31:31.720 if the market forces would have given a seat the 0:31:31.720 --> 0:31:34.080 table for the workers, they might not fucking resent. 0:31:33.880 --> 0:31:35.920 Under Yeah, I heard Cory, you make this make this 0:31:36.160 --> 0:31:38.880 observation too again. If like someone had come to town 0:31:38.920 --> 0:31:41.240 with the machine and said, all right, let's figure this out. 0:31:41.320 --> 0:31:43.800 Let's get together, like, how can we all benefit from 0:31:43.800 --> 0:31:44.400 this machine? 0:31:44.440 --> 0:31:45.240 I saw it over there. 0:31:45.280 --> 0:31:47.800 I bet the whole town could really benefit from having 0:31:47.880 --> 0:31:50.080 access to this machine that makes our working lives a 0:31:50.120 --> 0:31:50.440 little bit. 0:31:50.480 --> 0:31:52.560 Maybe to make the machine better. If we talk to 0:31:52.560 --> 0:31:53.520 the people who'd use it. 0:31:53.560 --> 0:31:55.400 Yeah, maybe we can all make a little bit more 0:31:55.400 --> 0:31:58.200 money together. You still have your if you're if you're 0:31:58.320 --> 0:32:02.080 the you know, the merchant capitalist who was you know before, 0:32:02.200 --> 0:32:04.200 was kind of the middleman in charge of distribution. 0:32:04.560 --> 0:32:07.239 Maybe this will make you more money too. But it 0:32:07.240 --> 0:32:08.120 didn't work like that. 0:32:08.520 --> 0:32:13.040 It always developed where either somebody would come in from 0:32:13.040 --> 0:32:15.720 out of town with a lot of money and be 0:32:15.960 --> 0:32:19.520 set up something truly enormous, or a factory or owner 0:32:19.560 --> 0:32:25.360 would recognize, or a prospective factory owner would recognize the capacity, 0:32:25.400 --> 0:32:28.320 the productive capacity of these new machines and then try 0:32:28.320 --> 0:32:31.920 to build them for personal gain. And this whole process 0:32:32.560 --> 0:32:36.640 really was deeply conflicting to the vast majority of factory 0:32:36.680 --> 0:32:39.800 owners too, because they saw a handful of people using 0:32:39.840 --> 0:32:42.160 the machines this way in a way that then at 0:32:42.160 --> 0:32:46.120 the time was very clearly corrosive to the social contract. Right, 0:32:46.120 --> 0:32:48.520 if you have one person saying I'm gonna use this machine, 0:32:48.560 --> 0:32:50.320 I'm gonna hire kids to run it, I'm gonna sort 0:32:50.320 --> 0:32:52.520 of profit as much as I can drive prices as 0:32:52.560 --> 0:32:54.840 low as I can to get these guys. You're fucking 0:32:54.920 --> 0:32:58.200 up the entire town economy, You're fucking over your neighbors. 0:32:58.400 --> 0:33:00.760 It's a disgusting thing to do. And you were hated 0:33:00.760 --> 0:33:02.840 for it. So the people who did it were willing 0:33:02.880 --> 0:33:05.600 to be hated. They were willing, they were they were 0:33:05.600 --> 0:33:08.240 the ones who were willing to take that ire. And 0:33:08.480 --> 0:33:10.680 few were. And a lot of some people walked away 0:33:10.680 --> 0:33:14.120 from the trade rather than you know, automate their machines, 0:33:14.200 --> 0:33:16.760 and and some you know, sided with the Ludites and 0:33:16.800 --> 0:33:18.840 were quietly kind of like cheering, like, yeah, go smash 0:33:18.840 --> 0:33:22.920 those guys factories. But by and large, you know who 0:33:22.960 --> 0:33:24.960 did the state. Once the state threw its lot in 0:33:25.240 --> 0:33:27.680 with with with with the factory and back them up 0:33:27.720 --> 0:33:30.520 with arms and with with punitive policies, it was, you know, 0:33:30.560 --> 0:33:31.040 pretty clear. 0:33:31.040 --> 0:33:32.400 I was going. I want to point out two things 0:33:32.440 --> 0:33:35.120 that I think are really important that that Brian omitted here. 0:33:35.160 --> 0:33:37.280 The first one is that Brian wrote the definitive book 0:33:37.280 --> 0:33:39.760 about Yes, it's called Blood in the Machine. You should 0:33:39.800 --> 0:33:41.920 read it. It's very good. And the second one, which 0:33:41.960 --> 0:33:44.280 I think you just you skipped over maybe too quickly, 0:33:44.880 --> 0:33:47.600 is that they already had the legal right to a 0:33:47.640 --> 0:33:50.080 seat at the table. They did. There were laws in 0:33:50.160 --> 0:33:53.720 Parliament that gave them that right. The firms involved were 0:33:53.760 --> 0:33:57.160 moving fast and breaking things, and the Luodites went to 0:33:57.240 --> 0:34:01.320 Parliament and said, we would like the law obey right. 0:34:01.400 --> 0:34:03.400 And this is this is an early example of of 0:34:03.440 --> 0:34:07.120 Wellhet's law. You know that that capitalism consists of exactly 0:34:07.320 --> 0:34:11.000 or or conservatism consists of exactly one proposition that there 0:34:11.000 --> 0:34:13.920 should be powerful people whom the law protects but does 0:34:13.960 --> 0:34:16.400 not bind, and everyone else whom the law binds but 0:34:16.440 --> 0:34:18.800 does not protect right. And this is what the Luddites 0:34:18.840 --> 0:34:21.120 were actually. You know, the thing that drove them into 0:34:21.120 --> 0:34:25.800 the streets was they they watched these people effectively stealing 0:34:25.840 --> 0:34:28.440 from them and Parliament going along with it, and they 0:34:28.440 --> 0:34:30.880 were like, well, I guess we just got to do 0:34:30.920 --> 0:34:31.799 some self defense here. 0:34:31.880 --> 0:34:35.240 And I think you can draw a direct fucking line 0:34:35.239 --> 0:34:40.480 from this from Luddites to people who would call someone 0:34:40.680 --> 0:34:44.120 like me or someone better like Molly White, a cynic. 0:34:44.800 --> 0:34:47.560 And I think it's this thing where what people like 0:34:47.640 --> 0:34:50.839 everyone at this table, Molly White, David Garrett. When talking 0:34:50.880 --> 0:34:54.279 about cryptocurrency these Gary Mark has been talking about AI, 0:34:55.080 --> 0:34:58.080 Roger mcnamy, You've been talking about everything these people are 0:34:58.120 --> 0:35:01.040 not cynics or critics. I guess they are critics if 0:35:01.040 --> 0:35:04.399 you just frame any criticism as big critic. What they're 0:35:04.400 --> 0:35:07.240 doing is saying, hey, can we apply very basic fucking 0:35:07.280 --> 0:35:10.799 societal structure to this stuff that is thieving, that is 0:35:11.120 --> 0:35:11.840 burning things? 0:35:11.880 --> 0:35:14.680 Hey, do we want this thing that seems. 0:35:14.400 --> 0:35:17.320 To enrich in the case of cryptocurrency a very small 0:35:17.320 --> 0:35:20.160 and shadowy group. And the ones who want shadowy are 0:35:20.280 --> 0:35:25.080 very annoying. And these people like the Winklevosses who lost 0:35:25.080 --> 0:35:28.400 a billion dollars of their customers money. That's fine, But 0:35:28.480 --> 0:35:31.560 when you talk about this stuff, well, you just don't 0:35:31.640 --> 0:35:35.520 like technology. You just don't want progress. Motherfucker. None of 0:35:35.520 --> 0:35:36.560 this is progress. 0:35:37.000 --> 0:35:39.600 From the very beginning, this was the goal. 0:35:39.719 --> 0:35:42.800 It was clear to anybody in eighteen twelve when the 0:35:42.840 --> 0:35:45.520 Luddite movement was at its apex, that this was a 0:35:45.560 --> 0:35:48.760 popular movement. That people were coming out in the streets 0:35:49.040 --> 0:35:52.400 to cheer the Luddites, not the factory owners, because they 0:35:52.400 --> 0:35:55.000 felt solidarity with them. Yeah, because they saw the shape 0:35:55.000 --> 0:35:57.440 that industrial capitalism was taking. They knew who the winners 0:35:57.480 --> 0:35:59.120 were going to be, they knew who the losers were 0:35:59.120 --> 0:36:01.319 going to be, and they cheered the lued Heites on. 0:36:01.760 --> 0:36:04.600 And so when the state comes out and it has 0:36:04.640 --> 0:36:06.600 to sort of make its case against the Ludite, it 0:36:06.800 --> 0:36:10.040 has to demonize the Luedites, it has to try to win, 0:36:10.280 --> 0:36:13.120 and it does so again by making frame breaking a 0:36:13.160 --> 0:36:16.479 capital offense. You break a machine, you can get killed, 0:36:16.520 --> 0:36:17.040 you can get hung. 0:36:17.120 --> 0:36:20.759 Both taking too right, oath, taking too saying that you 0:36:20.880 --> 0:36:23.080 were a Luttite became a hang up all offense. You 0:36:23.120 --> 0:36:23.640 could get hung. 0:36:23.719 --> 0:36:26.759 That's why there's no real records left of sort of 0:36:26.800 --> 0:36:29.960 their their meeting minutes or there anything or any letters 0:36:29.960 --> 0:36:31.720 between the very few and far between. 0:36:32.920 --> 0:36:33.120 Yeah. 0:36:33.200 --> 0:36:36.960 Classic, and then they mobilize troops. There's more troops in 0:36:37.040 --> 0:36:39.280 England fighting the lut Heites than they were fighting Napoleons. 0:36:39.280 --> 0:36:41.359 They brought them back from the front, right, they brought 0:36:41.400 --> 0:36:43.200 them back from France to fight the Lutedtite. 0:36:43.440 --> 0:36:45.560 The tens of thousands at one point, so you could 0:36:45.800 --> 0:36:49.799 literally see you'd see the lines drawn sort of as 0:36:50.080 --> 0:36:54.719 industrialization was very literally almost a civil war, and the 0:36:54.719 --> 0:36:59.239 states making the case against the Lutedites, and it's the propaganda, 0:36:59.400 --> 0:37:01.360 you can call it. It's propaganda at the time, and 0:37:01.400 --> 0:37:05.279 its proclamations and its declarations it's it's it's casting the 0:37:05.320 --> 0:37:10.080 Ludites as backwards looking, as deluded, as malcontent under the 0:37:10.360 --> 0:37:12.920 you know they must be you know, they're they're smashing 0:37:12.960 --> 0:37:15.920 the thing that that that that you know that that's. 0:37:15.560 --> 0:37:16.239 Part of their job. 0:37:16.360 --> 0:37:20.680 Yeah, they're smashing, they're smashing. Probably this form of criticism 0:37:20.800 --> 0:37:24.080 is already there. So when the Ludites do lose, when 0:37:24.080 --> 0:37:27.880 they are hung en mass uh, that language is used 0:37:28.000 --> 0:37:31.360 in the trial against them, and we can see why 0:37:31.440 --> 0:37:34.799 because the state needs to have this enemy. They have 0:37:34.880 --> 0:37:37.280 to be able to paint this portrait as anybody who's 0:37:37.640 --> 0:37:42.400 against the shape that technological development is taking, anyone who's 0:37:42.600 --> 0:37:45.319 criticizing any element of that, Like, wait, is are there 0:37:45.320 --> 0:37:49.200 too many losers or winners? No, shut up, you're a luttite. 0:37:49.520 --> 0:37:52.120 Get out, you stand down, or we will hang you. 0:37:52.800 --> 0:37:54.480 And I think that this is a really I'm so 0:37:54.600 --> 0:37:57.760 glad you went into this specific thing because it really 0:37:57.800 --> 0:37:59.719 feels like now I don't know if the state is 0:38:00.080 --> 0:38:02.640 I think the state's laziness is more or like a 0:38:02.760 --> 0:38:05.239 lack of focus is the problem. It's not that the 0:38:05.600 --> 0:38:08.720 administrations are being like people who don't like AI are stupid, 0:38:08.760 --> 0:38:10.799 or people who don't like crypto. They're just like, I 0:38:10.840 --> 0:38:13.600 don't really get this, and these people got so much money. 0:38:13.640 --> 0:38:16.560 And I love money. I love getting paid, I love 0:38:16.600 --> 0:38:19.200 being lobbied. This is great. So I'm gonna go with 0:38:19.239 --> 0:38:22.120 the guys with the money versus the fact that I 0:38:22.200 --> 0:38:26.320 think that actually the optimists I don't just mean Andresan 0:38:26.400 --> 0:38:29.839 or Bajali, I mean the AI fantasists, all these people 0:38:29.880 --> 0:38:32.239 who claim that if you're against AI, well you don't 0:38:32.280 --> 0:38:34.640 care about progress. I actually have a counterpoint, which is 0:38:35.320 --> 0:38:38.680 they are against progress. They don't want anything new to happen. 0:38:38.719 --> 0:38:41.719 They want whatever money they want the next Google. And 0:38:41.760 --> 0:38:44.080 when I say the next Google, I don't mean Google Search. 0:38:44.440 --> 0:38:47.560 I mean the giant monopolistic entity that just spits like 0:38:47.640 --> 0:38:50.839 eats people and shits out money. And I'm just gonna 0:38:50.840 --> 0:38:54.600 put it bluntly. They they are the cynics. They are 0:38:54.600 --> 0:38:58.680 the pessimists that like the SCALEAI guy, like all of 0:38:58.719 --> 0:39:00.880 these people who go around, well if you if you 0:39:00.920 --> 0:39:02.640 don't believe, we need to do this, we need to 0:39:02.680 --> 0:39:04.920 train as much as possible. That's what the future likes. Like, 0:39:05.000 --> 0:39:07.160 Fuck no, these people don't care about tag. 0:39:07.600 --> 0:39:09.600 Can I can I I'll give you a little gloss 0:39:09.600 --> 0:39:13.200 on this from Mal Sauter, who's very smart about this 0:39:13.320 --> 0:39:15.040 and who was the first person to point this out 0:39:15.560 --> 0:39:19.200 that that I encountered, which is that AI and indeed, 0:39:19.239 --> 0:39:25.440 all statistical methods of prediction are intrinsically conservative because because 0:39:25.480 --> 0:39:29.080 if what you're doing is predicting what should happen next 0:39:29.080 --> 0:39:31.160 based on what already happened, what you're doing is you're 0:39:31.239 --> 0:39:33.520 driving a future that looked like the past. So think 0:39:33.520 --> 0:39:35.120 of it this way, Right, you pick up your distraction 0:39:35.200 --> 0:39:38.440 rectangle and you type hay, and then it finishes it 0:39:38.480 --> 0:39:41.279 with darling, because that's what you type every time. That's 0:39:41.280 --> 0:39:43.160 what a cool mclenns you might be. You might want 0:39:43.160 --> 0:39:46.960 to type hay, asshole, but it wants you to type hey, darling. Right, 0:39:47.000 --> 0:39:49.120 and now, if you type something you've never type before, 0:39:49.800 --> 0:39:52.560 it's going to pick the thing that most people say. Right, 0:39:52.640 --> 0:39:54.840 that's that's the So you're going to get either the 0:39:54.880 --> 0:39:57.759 statistically average version of who you used to be or 0:39:57.800 --> 0:40:00.919 the statistically average version of who every one is. There 0:40:00.960 --> 0:40:06.719 is something intrinsically and inseparably conservative about the project of 0:40:06.800 --> 0:40:10.359 making the future look like the past. Now I want 0:40:10.400 --> 0:40:13.279 to mention something that again I learned from Brian's very 0:40:13.280 --> 0:40:17.839 excellent book Blood in the Machine, which is that Frankenstein 0:40:17.920 --> 0:40:20.120 was a ludite novel and was widely understood as a 0:40:20.160 --> 0:40:22.600 ludite novel. It's a cautionary tale about what happens when 0:40:22.600 --> 0:40:25.719 an entrepreneur gets to build a machine without talking to 0:40:25.760 --> 0:40:28.160 his neighbors about what it should do, and it was 0:40:28.239 --> 0:40:30.840 really widely understood as this. And the irony here, and 0:40:30.880 --> 0:40:32.640 I say this as a fully paid up member of the 0:40:32.640 --> 0:40:36.200 Science Fiction Writers of America and science fiction novelist. The 0:40:36.239 --> 0:40:40.160 irony here is how many of these torment nexus building 0:40:40.200 --> 0:40:44.760 weirdos read cyberpunk as a suggestion instead of a warning, 0:40:45.239 --> 0:40:49.880 and defend what they're doing as carrying on the visionary 0:40:49.920 --> 0:40:53.200 tradition of science fiction. The first science fiction novel ever 0:40:54.040 --> 0:40:57.480 was Frankenstein, and it was a novel about why you 0:40:57.480 --> 0:41:00.120 shouldn't just build whatever goddamn machine you feel like? Bill? 0:41:00.400 --> 0:41:02.799 What I like about The Ready Player one one? First 0:41:02.840 --> 0:41:04.919 of all, one of the worst books ever written. 0:41:04.960 --> 0:41:07.759 In mind, it would be nice to Ernie. I think 0:41:07.800 --> 0:41:11.040 that book. It's very fun. 0:41:11.440 --> 0:41:14.480 I believe it is that we are not going to 0:41:14.520 --> 0:41:16.360 turn this into a debate on that book in so 0:41:16.440 --> 0:41:16.960 much trouble. 0:41:17.239 --> 0:41:20.400 But my problem. I like your book, Ernie, come on 0:41:20.440 --> 0:41:21.480 the show, You'll kill me. 0:41:22.920 --> 0:41:24.799 But the thing is with that is that book is 0:41:24.840 --> 0:41:28.799 not a positive book. No, nothing about that story feels good. 0:41:28.800 --> 0:41:32.040 But also the central plot is this shanty town this 0:41:32.160 --> 0:41:36.880 child escapes from every day and then using his distractions 0:41:36.920 --> 0:41:40.600 from his terrible life, he is able to decode the 0:41:40.640 --> 0:41:46.440 thoughts of a deeply troubled, mentally unwell man as he 0:41:46.560 --> 0:41:49.720 is chased by greedy people who don't really care about 0:41:49.719 --> 0:41:52.120 any of it, and all of them are obsessed with 0:41:52.640 --> 0:41:56.319 not the interest in the stuff, but the existence of 0:41:56.360 --> 0:42:00.320 the stuff. And Mark Zucker books that's actually the single 0:42:00.400 --> 0:42:01.560 best I'm going to build. 0:42:02.239 --> 0:42:04.319 That's this is just what Corey was just talking about, 0:42:04.400 --> 0:42:07.239 right is. It speaks to the conservatism of the a 0:42:07.280 --> 0:42:10.160 lot of these the detection once they've built a company 0:42:10.200 --> 0:42:13.200 that's big enough to where you know, you're casting around 0:42:13.200 --> 0:42:15.440 for your next thing because you don't actually want to 0:42:15.480 --> 0:42:17.400 do any you know, real innovating yourself. 0:42:17.440 --> 0:42:20.000 You you you outsource it to a sci fi novel. 0:42:20.120 --> 0:42:25.240 That's why we've seen this this sort of generation of 0:42:25.239 --> 0:42:29.320 of sort of wish lists from cyberpunk from the metaverse. 0:42:29.360 --> 0:42:33.200 I mean that was just Mark Zuckerberg saying, hey, uh yeah, 0:42:33.320 --> 0:42:35.960 let's let's let my next My next thing is the metaverse. 0:42:36.040 --> 0:42:38.920 Then that comes from your your future is being a legless, sexless, 0:42:38.920 --> 0:42:41.680 low polygon heavily surveyed cartoon character in a virtual world. 0:42:41.680 --> 0:42:44.440 I stole from a twenty five year old ystopian cyberpunk novel. 0:42:44.560 --> 0:42:47.600 Exactly Elon Musk, the cyber truck that's from Blade Runner. 0:42:47.680 --> 0:42:49.520 For some reason, it's from a blade Runner which is 0:42:49.520 --> 0:42:53.600 Epegen based or oh now open Ai, which says, oh, 0:42:53.680 --> 0:42:55.879 you know, it's gonna be like Her, the movie Her. 0:42:56.120 --> 0:42:59.240 They're just saying like that, like right, like that. That's 0:42:59.480 --> 0:43:03.560 that's sort of the extent of the imagination at work here. 0:43:03.800 --> 0:43:05.799 And I do think that that is like an inherently 0:43:05.960 --> 0:43:09.839 sort of conservative and restrictive way to operate, and it's, 0:43:10.080 --> 0:43:11.840 you know, we were seeing the limits of it now. 0:43:11.880 --> 0:43:13.160 I don't even know if they actually want to build 0:43:13.160 --> 0:43:14.880 these products or if they just want to win a 0:43:14.960 --> 0:43:17.840 hype cycle and sort of get it's a way that 0:43:17.880 --> 0:43:19.279 they can get people to talk about it. 0:43:20.160 --> 0:43:22.879 I just want to call out that ads Elon Mosk 0:43:23.040 --> 0:43:24.760 is early similar to FW to Clark. 0:43:26.400 --> 0:43:30.160 Well, if you're a legless fullness creature. You feel your 0:43:30.160 --> 0:43:32.640 life's restricted, perhaps you could check out one of the 0:43:32.680 --> 0:43:36.439 following products, and I guarantee you the following products will 0:43:36.480 --> 0:43:39.440 not in any way embarrass me have some kind of 0:43:39.480 --> 0:43:43.359 almost ironic connotation with what they run. So please enjoy 0:43:43.400 --> 0:43:55.799 the following ad and we're back. So I think it's 0:43:55.840 --> 0:43:58.399 funny you brought that up, Brian, where it's like, it's 0:43:58.400 --> 0:44:01.960 not even obvious that they can about what they're building. 0:44:02.080 --> 0:44:05.000 It's not even about the stuff anymore. And when I 0:44:05.040 --> 0:44:08.400 look at a company like Google or Microsoft, what do 0:44:08.480 --> 0:44:11.560 they do? Like if you really sit down and say 0:44:11.560 --> 0:44:15.279 what does Google do? What does Microsoft? Or you can 0:44:15.320 --> 0:44:17.560 look at Apple and say they make consumer electronics. 0:44:17.560 --> 0:44:18.640 That's fairly that. 0:44:18.800 --> 0:44:20.760 I think that that's a fair thing. They make laptops 0:44:20.760 --> 0:44:23.959 to make phones, you use them, and sometimes they force 0:44:24.000 --> 0:44:26.400 you into an abusive system called the app Store, But 0:44:26.440 --> 0:44:28.799 nevertheless you can tell what they do. Google and Microsoft 0:44:29.400 --> 0:44:33.279 are like holding companies. They're they're private equity firms that 0:44:33.560 --> 0:44:33.880 have no. 0:44:34.880 --> 0:44:36.600 Like formal shape. 0:44:36.600 --> 0:44:38.919 Because this whole week I've been sitting down and reading 0:44:38.960 --> 0:44:41.560 about something we will get to in a minute, which 0:44:41.560 --> 0:44:44.560 is how open a I can can compete with Google Search, 0:44:44.560 --> 0:44:48.080 and by the way, they cannot. It's impossible. It's actually impossible. 0:44:49.239 --> 0:44:51.560 It just feels that it's not that they don't have focus, 0:44:51.719 --> 0:44:54.680 is that they can't have focus. That there's simply nothing. 0:44:54.719 --> 0:44:58.040 They can't make anything anymore. They can make more similar stuff, 0:44:58.040 --> 0:45:00.720 But when was the last time Google up with something 0:45:01.280 --> 0:45:02.200 truly innovative. 0:45:03.320 --> 0:45:07.080 Yeah, I mean it's it's you can kind of tunnel 0:45:07.120 --> 0:45:10.120 by the rush and it's desperation to sort of like 0:45:10.200 --> 0:45:13.080 build some sort of an AI product that can work 0:45:13.200 --> 0:45:15.600 or that can at least capture some attention, because it's 0:45:15.600 --> 0:45:17.920 not I mean, it's not this this overview AI thing 0:45:17.960 --> 0:45:20.480 that they rushed out the door and were just ruthlessly 0:45:20.520 --> 0:45:23.759 and widely and deservedly mocked for making it. You know, 0:45:23.800 --> 0:45:27.640 it's not even clear I think to anybody how that 0:45:27.960 --> 0:45:31.520 serves Google's bottom line. If anything its them, it loses 0:45:31.560 --> 0:45:38.280 the money because they have ostensibly this remarkably potent revenue 0:45:38.280 --> 0:45:40.560 generator in terms of Google Search. I mean, that's the 0:45:40.680 --> 0:45:42.759 only real answer to your question. I think that is 0:45:42.920 --> 0:45:44.719 what does Google do? It runs a search engine that 0:45:44.760 --> 0:45:47.640 it has gotten tired of running, and it's or it's 0:45:47.760 --> 0:45:50.880 backers and partners have gotten tired of running, or people 0:45:51.000 --> 0:45:53.239 are convinced that it's no longer the future and that 0:45:53.320 --> 0:45:56.319 it's not going to be useful to anybody. But I mean, 0:45:56.400 --> 0:45:59.839 to me, the search engine is still far superior to 0:46:00.040 --> 0:46:03.399 and to using a chat, GPT or any generative AI 0:46:03.560 --> 0:46:06.920 product that I've come across yet. And it's you know, 0:46:07.080 --> 0:46:10.920 it's the talent as I understand it, from Google, has 0:46:11.320 --> 0:46:14.480 has been shifted away from running the search operation, the 0:46:14.520 --> 0:46:18.320 search department. Now it's all on on Ai, which is 0:46:18.360 --> 0:46:21.080 the again, this nebulous form that I don't even think 0:46:21.320 --> 0:46:23.560 it's not like Google. I mean, Google sounded that famously, 0:46:23.600 --> 0:46:25.960 this red alert that said all hands like we got 0:46:25.960 --> 0:46:28.359 to catch up to open aid, we gotta we gotta 0:46:28.360 --> 0:46:30.440 figure out a way to make this happen. And we 0:46:30.640 --> 0:46:35.240 just see this sputtering, all these little false starts and 0:46:35.239 --> 0:46:38.520 and turds rolled off into the Internet that are that 0:46:38.560 --> 0:46:40.759 are more mocked than us and certainly not profitable. 0:46:41.120 --> 0:46:42.759 I want to I want to try and make the 0:46:42.800 --> 0:46:45.680 heroic case for Google, okay, which is a tough case 0:46:45.719 --> 0:46:48.319 to make, but I'm gonna make it so Google, I 0:46:48.320 --> 0:46:50.160 think you said, what was the last time Google made 0:46:50.160 --> 0:46:52.799 something truly innovative. I think it was twenty five years ago. 0:46:52.840 --> 0:46:55.759 Google has not made a successful products in search. They've 0:46:55.760 --> 0:46:58.439 brought a lot of successful products, right. They bought their 0:46:58.440 --> 0:47:00.680 mobile stack, they bought their ad text, they bought video. 0:47:00.719 --> 0:47:04.400 You could like go for example, it wasn't go fairly 0:47:04.440 --> 0:47:06.480 recent that the coding language. 0:47:06.239 --> 0:47:10.200 Their programming lange. Yeah, sure, I'm getting I'm getting to that. Yes, 0:47:10.400 --> 0:47:12.640 they bought YouTube, right, yeah, they bought They bought YouTube. 0:47:12.640 --> 0:47:15.480 They bought YouTube after Google Videos failed, so they made 0:47:15.520 --> 0:47:17.920 a video platform that didn't work and they bought one 0:47:17.920 --> 0:47:20.800 that did great. Right. They they bought their ad tex Stact. 0:47:20.800 --> 0:47:23.360 They bought their customer service. They bought dogs, they bought collaboration, 0:47:23.440 --> 0:47:27.640 they bought maps, they bought all of it, transition. Where 0:47:27.640 --> 0:47:29.920 did they buy dogs from? Who's Who's they forget it 0:47:29.920 --> 0:47:30.440 was that company? 0:47:30.920 --> 0:47:34.319 That's that's something like I feel like I'm fairly well versed. 0:47:34.320 --> 0:47:36.080 Intent was the start I thought they built. 0:47:36.280 --> 0:47:39.880 No, No, they didn't build they so like first depending 0:47:39.880 --> 0:47:42.000 on how on how you want to purse it, right, 0:47:42.000 --> 0:47:45.360 because you have things like their hotmail clone, which was 0:47:45.480 --> 0:47:49.439 very successful. Uh you know Gmail, Yeah, right, but it's 0:47:49.480 --> 0:47:51.759 it's a they made that in house. They didn't buy 0:47:51.760 --> 0:47:55.160 that from someone however, it's a clone of hotmail, right, sure. 0:47:55.640 --> 0:47:58.480 And so they have these these products. But what they 0:47:58.480 --> 0:48:01.359 did for these products, and and this is the heroic part, 0:48:01.400 --> 0:48:03.200 the part where I'm going to be bend over backwards 0:48:03.200 --> 0:48:05.680 to be fair to there, is they know they scaled 0:48:05.680 --> 0:48:10.440 them and they made them reliable. Right, that's crazy. And look, 0:48:10.719 --> 0:48:14.040 one of the things that we critique capitalism for is 0:48:14.040 --> 0:48:18.360 that it is underinvest in maintenance, It underinvests in infrastructure, 0:48:18.640 --> 0:48:21.120 it underinvests in what we could broadly call care work. 0:48:21.640 --> 0:48:24.480 And at its best, what Google did was, in a 0:48:24.560 --> 0:48:29.080 kind of patrician way, became a serial acquirer of nascent 0:48:29.120 --> 0:48:32.960 competitors that didn't necessarily extinguish those competitors, although they did 0:48:32.960 --> 0:48:35.680 in some cases. But what primarily they did was they 0:48:35.680 --> 0:48:37.920 scaled them up to utility scale, and then they maintained 0:48:37.920 --> 0:48:40.799 them to a very high degree of reliability. Now, I 0:48:40.840 --> 0:48:44.160 think that if you want to understand Google's internal culture, 0:48:44.640 --> 0:48:46.279 and I think you did a good job talking about 0:48:46.320 --> 0:48:48.240 it when we wrote that the man who killed Google 0:48:49.640 --> 0:48:53.040 is that it's a distinction between people who want to 0:48:53.080 --> 0:48:58.000 do care work and people who want to do rent seeking, right, 0:48:58.800 --> 0:49:02.000 And so you know, there's a version of even keyword 0:49:02.040 --> 0:49:04.879 advertising that I think we can tell a heroic story about. Right, 0:49:05.160 --> 0:49:08.799 if you are a novelist and you've written a science 0:49:08.840 --> 0:49:12.480 fiction novel and it's like a novel by someone else, right, 0:49:12.520 --> 0:49:14.799 it's a comparable to it, then you could buy the 0:49:14.840 --> 0:49:17.319 adword and you could say, when someone searches for Neil 0:49:17.320 --> 0:49:21.600 Stevenson launched this guy's career by saying at the top, 0:49:22.120 --> 0:49:24.799 having one little ad slot that's like, have you read so? 0:49:24.840 --> 0:49:28.200 And so it's the foundation of the like the good 0:49:28.239 --> 0:49:30.080 bits of capitalism, if you can call it, like the 0:49:30.600 --> 0:49:33.960 honest marketing, like we like this, you might you like this, 0:49:34.000 --> 0:49:34.680 you might like this. 0:49:34.840 --> 0:49:37.200 Yeah, yeah, it's it's and so there's a lot you know, 0:49:37.239 --> 0:49:39.359 being able to reach into these niches. This is also 0:49:39.400 --> 0:49:42.359 a thing that Facebook has done quite well. And and 0:49:42.440 --> 0:49:45.040 you know when Facebook has defenders, they are often small 0:49:45.080 --> 0:49:48.959 business people who could not address a market without fine 0:49:49.000 --> 0:49:52.520 grained targeting. Me right now, that fine grained targeting needn't 0:49:52.520 --> 0:49:55.040 be behavioral. It could be it could be content based. Right, 0:49:55.080 --> 0:49:59.640 you could target if you want to target plus sized cheerleaders, 0:49:59.680 --> 0:50:02.000 you could find the Facebook group for plus sized cheerleaders 0:50:02.000 --> 0:50:03.719 and sell your uniforms to them. And I'm sure that 0:50:03.719 --> 0:50:05.480 there are a bunch of people who are plus sized 0:50:05.560 --> 0:50:08.120 cheerleaders who are really pissed that the uniforms for plus 0:50:08.600 --> 0:50:11.440 cheerleaders suck, and who'd be really great to see those ads. Right. 0:50:11.480 --> 0:50:12.640 You don't have to spy on them, you don't have 0:50:12.640 --> 0:50:14.040 to follow them into the back. I don't need to 0:50:14.040 --> 0:50:17.000 know who they are. Yeah, but that's what they've done 0:50:17.000 --> 0:50:20.440 at their best, right, And the rent seekers just want 0:50:20.520 --> 0:50:24.520 to make money by providing as little to everyone else 0:50:24.680 --> 0:50:28.759 as they can and taking as much in as they can. 0:50:28.800 --> 0:50:32.319 They want to own a factor of production and they 0:50:32.320 --> 0:50:34.879 want to be insulated from the risk because other people 0:50:34.960 --> 0:50:37.840 who produce useful things will have to license or buy 0:50:37.880 --> 0:50:40.480 that factor of production from them in order to do 0:50:40.520 --> 0:50:43.000 the useful thing. But whether or not they do the 0:50:43.080 --> 0:50:44.920 useful thing or not, Like think of Nvidia right in 0:50:45.040 --> 0:50:48.400 videos selling video cards to people who are going to 0:50:48.400 --> 0:50:50.600 go out of business. That doesn't matter to Invidio and 0:50:50.640 --> 0:50:52.919 they already sold them gets a stake in Think about 0:50:53.040 --> 0:50:55.880 Unity right, who said, oh, we're going to take not 0:50:56.040 --> 0:50:57.760 We're not just going to sell you the dev tools 0:50:57.800 --> 0:51:00.640 to make your video game. If your video games succeeds. 0:51:00.880 --> 0:51:04.560 We're going to get a royalty for every game you share, right, 0:51:04.680 --> 0:51:07.080 And they called it shared success. Now, note that this 0:51:08.200 --> 0:51:11.520 rhetoric of like shared success is not the rhetoric of 0:51:11.560 --> 0:51:12.160 shared risk. 0:51:12.360 --> 0:51:14.960 Kind of like a parasite shares your success. 0:51:15.440 --> 0:51:18.520 Yeah, you know, shared risk, right, shared risk, shared reward 0:51:18.640 --> 0:51:20.960 makes a certain degree of sense. If they're saying, okay, well, 0:51:20.960 --> 0:51:24.080 i'll tell you what. We've got a deal where we 0:51:24.200 --> 0:51:27.960 will give you discounted or free tools and development money 0:51:28.080 --> 0:51:31.799 and whatever. We'll invest in your company, right, and as 0:51:31.840 --> 0:51:34.239 a form of shared success, and we will also take 0:51:34.239 --> 0:51:37.480 a shared risk in your failure. That's a very different matter. 0:51:37.600 --> 0:51:41.160 Yeah, because shared risk is inherent to actual shared success. 0:51:41.200 --> 0:51:42.359 We are taking a risk. 0:51:42.760 --> 0:51:46.040 But it's almost I think this keeps coming back to 0:51:47.080 --> 0:51:51.120 basic evolution Darwinism, probably two different things. Now, I said 0:51:51.160 --> 0:51:52.759 I did not do well in size. But nevertheless, I'll 0:51:52.760 --> 0:51:55.440 get round to this. There are no predators for these 0:51:55.440 --> 0:51:56.560 people anymore. 0:51:56.400 --> 0:51:59.239 There's nothing they're afraid of, no discipline, Like there's the 0:51:59.320 --> 0:52:01.880 cattail thing is they don't want they want everyone to 0:52:01.920 --> 0:52:03.879 stay the same, so they know who they're looking at 0:52:03.920 --> 0:52:04.520 every day. 0:52:04.760 --> 0:52:07.560 We can bark, bark anyone out of the area. If 0:52:07.560 --> 0:52:10.440 we don't like them, we can make growing difficult. We 0:52:10.480 --> 0:52:14.160 know the venture capitalists, we know the commercial real estate owners, 0:52:14.160 --> 0:52:18.000 we know the people in government office. We can make 0:52:18.040 --> 0:52:20.640 this really difficult and really easy for us. But also 0:52:21.160 --> 0:52:23.759 it feels like we need predators in the tech industry 0:52:23.920 --> 0:52:26.600 and not the kind who worked at Google like Andy Rubin, 0:52:27.000 --> 0:52:28.680 and I think the. 0:52:29.280 --> 0:52:33.480 Well, and as long as you have a company I mean, 0:52:33.200 --> 0:52:35.800 I mean that has any you know, degree of success 0:52:35.880 --> 0:52:38.439 or that becomes as big as Google does, I think 0:52:38.560 --> 0:52:41.799 just like the base logics of capitalism are going to 0:52:41.840 --> 0:52:44.400 mean that you do you grow the number of people 0:52:44.400 --> 0:52:47.440 who are the rent seekers and who are interested in 0:52:47.560 --> 0:52:52.160 protecting those revenue streams at any cost. And you know 0:52:52.239 --> 0:52:55.320 that the halo of a company like Google may dim, 0:52:55.480 --> 0:52:57.320 it's still kind of extent. 0:52:57.400 --> 0:52:57.560 You know. 0:52:57.600 --> 0:53:02.000 I just wrote this this art about a former Google 0:53:02.080 --> 0:53:06.480 privacy engineer named Tim Leibert, who was a big security 0:53:06.719 --> 0:53:11.759 and privacy guy in the academic field. He went to 0:53:11.840 --> 0:53:14.000 pen he did a time at Oxford, and he was 0:53:14.000 --> 0:53:18.480 a professor at Carnegie and he really, you know, was 0:53:18.640 --> 0:53:21.000 really a big critic of Google. And then Google hired 0:53:21.040 --> 0:53:25.040 him and he agreed to go because he thought this, well, 0:53:25.360 --> 0:53:27.719 all the things that I'm talking about, all the things 0:53:27.760 --> 0:53:30.560 that I want to fix, Google is the largest purveyor 0:53:30.600 --> 0:53:32.640 of these issues of privacy. He looks at cookies and 0:53:32.640 --> 0:53:35.960 the way that Google tracks your data. So he figured, 0:53:36.040 --> 0:53:37.600 you know, if I'm going to have a shot at 0:53:37.640 --> 0:53:40.080 fixing this, I'm just going to go into the mothership. 0:53:40.400 --> 0:53:43.000 And sure enough, the way that he describes it to 0:53:43.040 --> 0:53:48.040 me is his job was split between two basic tasks. One, 0:53:48.120 --> 0:53:50.960 he's talking to other younger hires who still kind of 0:53:50.960 --> 0:53:53.920 believe in the idea of a technology and a service 0:53:53.960 --> 0:53:57.040 that can really help and serve people, and who want 0:53:57.080 --> 0:53:59.800 to try to make sure that Google, you know, meets 0:53:59.800 --> 0:54:02.040 its privacy commitments and is in line with the law. 0:54:02.440 --> 0:54:04.680 And then he would go into the meetings with the 0:54:04.760 --> 0:54:09.640 executives and management and they would spend the most of 0:54:09.680 --> 0:54:12.560 the time telling him why they couldn't do all the 0:54:12.600 --> 0:54:14.440 things that he and all of the people who are 0:54:14.440 --> 0:54:16.799 actually working in the trenches at Google wanted to do. 0:54:17.160 --> 0:54:20.880 And it just became this two year long clash of well, 0:54:20.960 --> 0:54:23.440 there's this privacy law. Don't we we have the tools 0:54:23.440 --> 0:54:25.440 and the capabilities to fix it. Don't we want to 0:54:25.440 --> 0:54:27.920 do it and then butting up against management. 0:54:27.920 --> 0:54:29.439 Why would we do why would we do that? That would 0:54:29.440 --> 0:54:30.600 it's would we could? 0:54:30.640 --> 0:54:32.800 It would be easier just to like pay the fines 0:54:32.800 --> 0:54:35.799 as they come than to actually finds a price, and. 0:54:35.760 --> 0:54:36.200 They need to. 0:54:36.320 --> 0:54:39.520 I feel like they really need to change the finds 0:54:39.560 --> 0:54:43.360 so they scale sure or here's my other there and 0:54:43.520 --> 0:54:45.920 they're on a Smoglu said this as well, I'm then 0:54:45.960 --> 0:54:50.680 take it step well laterally put them in jail. And 0:54:50.760 --> 0:54:53.880 I'm only kind of kidding. I mean, if, for example, 0:54:53.920 --> 0:54:56.680 the CrowdStrike situation. I brought this up on the Lost 0:54:56.719 --> 0:54:59.520 Battle Off Live as well, such an Adella should be 0:54:59.520 --> 0:55:02.560 looking at potential jail time or the cuts see of 0:55:02.640 --> 0:55:07.160 CrowdStrike should be jail time or personal liability. If you 0:55:07.239 --> 0:55:10.000 work for a public company with excess revenue blah blah, 0:55:10.040 --> 0:55:11.440 and you make it so that they can't just do 0:55:11.480 --> 0:55:13.399 stock splits or some weird shit so they get away 0:55:13.440 --> 0:55:18.080 with him including stock revenue, you should potentially forfeit like 0:55:18.400 --> 0:55:19.280 tens percent. 0:55:19.880 --> 0:55:21.320 You know, it's funny that you say this because the 0:55:21.560 --> 0:55:23.640 other part of the story is, so is Tim built 0:55:23.680 --> 0:55:26.759 this this this system called web x ray that can 0:55:26.840 --> 0:55:30.200 search for every privacy violation that a company is committing 0:55:30.520 --> 0:55:32.560 on the web and the ideas to make it into 0:55:32.680 --> 0:55:34.879 like a sort of an assembly line for class action 0:55:34.960 --> 0:55:38.000 lawsuits and for lawsuits. So you can say, okay, you know, 0:55:38.840 --> 0:55:41.839 maybe Google, maybe people emailing Google and saying, hey, you're 0:55:41.880 --> 0:55:44.200 in violation of the Germany's new privacy law. May can 0:55:44.239 --> 0:55:49.080 you please address this isn't really but if you can say, okay, boom, 0:55:49.080 --> 0:55:51.719 here's here's a search engine can show you exactly how 0:55:51.760 --> 0:55:55.520 many times a minute or an hour it's violating these 0:55:55.600 --> 0:55:56.840 laws regularly. 0:55:56.960 --> 0:55:59.759 Kind of logne that have costs you know, attached to them. 0:55:59.800 --> 0:56:01.520 Then and maybe you can sort of so there are 0:56:01.520 --> 0:56:03.359 people sort of like fighting against this. 0:56:03.600 --> 0:56:06.360 This is maybe a good time to talk about the 0:56:06.360 --> 0:56:10.399 structure of regulation or what regulations work and which ones 0:56:10.400 --> 0:56:13.080 don't and why and so on. So one of the 0:56:13.320 --> 0:56:17.800 key things to understand about regulation is that a regulation 0:56:17.880 --> 0:56:21.200 that's hard to administer will be administered less. Right, So 0:56:21.280 --> 0:56:24.680 if you make a rule, for example, that says, if 0:56:24.719 --> 0:56:27.480 you're a platform that competes with the platform users, so 0:56:27.520 --> 0:56:30.239 your Amazon, you sell your own goods, but you also 0:56:30.280 --> 0:56:35.400 sell goods by your competitors. As a fairness requirement, you 0:56:35.480 --> 0:56:38.000 must put the best match for the user's search at 0:56:38.040 --> 0:56:40.200 the top and not just your own products. So this 0:56:40.239 --> 0:56:43.080 is what's called a ban on self preferencing. The problem 0:56:43.200 --> 0:56:46.040 is to administer that, you have to be able to 0:56:46.120 --> 0:56:49.560 kind of peer into the mind of the Amazon executive 0:56:49.960 --> 0:56:54.200 who decided to put the Amazon product at the top 0:56:54.239 --> 0:56:57.120 of the search, because if they believe that they made 0:56:57.120 --> 0:56:59.919 the best product, then they haven't violated the rule. 0:57:00.000 --> 0:57:01.719 And I was going to say, it feels like the 0:57:01.760 --> 0:57:03.520 word best is the problem then. 0:57:03.480 --> 0:57:08.280 Right, So it's a very difficult thing to discover. Moreover, 0:57:08.400 --> 0:57:11.640 if you have a sincere but incorrect belief about what's best, 0:57:11.719 --> 0:57:14.319 because we're really good at talking ourselves into thinking that, 0:57:14.920 --> 0:57:16.840 you know, with the stuff we make is good. 0:57:16.600 --> 0:57:19.120 And being empathetic, maybe you truly have seen more of 0:57:19.160 --> 0:57:22.560 this thing being built, like yeah, loss is what they'd say. 0:57:22.680 --> 0:57:24.840 Yeah, So you might have a good reason to do it, 0:57:24.840 --> 0:57:27.640 and you still might be wrong. So as an administrative matter, 0:57:28.520 --> 0:57:31.080 figuring out whether or not someone is self preferencing is 0:57:31.080 --> 0:57:32.880 really hard. Now, this isn't the first time this has 0:57:32.880 --> 0:57:35.680 come up. When the Sherman Act was passed in eighteen ninety, 0:57:35.680 --> 0:57:37.840 the first anti trust law in the United States, self 0:57:37.840 --> 0:57:39.960 preferencing was a huge problem because you had railroads that 0:57:40.000 --> 0:57:43.680 owned freight companies and they competed with the freight that 0:57:43.720 --> 0:57:47.960 they shipped. Right. You had banks that hadn't been split 0:57:48.000 --> 0:57:50.800 where you had retail and investment, so you had banks 0:57:50.840 --> 0:57:53.720 that loaned money to local businesses and owned local businesses 0:57:53.720 --> 0:57:57.480 that competed with their debtors. Right. And so we didn't 0:57:57.680 --> 0:58:03.640 create a rule that says, Okay, you must treat everyone fairly, 0:58:03.760 --> 0:58:06.760 because determining the fairness was too hard. What we said 0:58:06.840 --> 0:58:11.000 is you have to be structurally separated. You either are 0:58:11.040 --> 0:58:14.080 a bank or you're an investor, but you can't be 0:58:14.120 --> 0:58:17.040 in a bank that invests. You are either a railroad 0:58:17.200 --> 0:58:18.760 or you're a freight company, but you can't be a 0:58:18.840 --> 0:58:22.360 railroad that owns a freight company. This is called structural separation. 0:58:22.840 --> 0:58:24.840 And the thing is you do lose some efficiencies. Maybe 0:58:24.880 --> 0:58:27.080 there's some cool things you can do with vertical integration, 0:58:27.440 --> 0:58:31.360 but what you get is administratable rule. Because I can 0:58:31.440 --> 0:58:35.320 tell really easily whether a railroad owns a free company. 0:58:35.560 --> 0:58:37.720 I can't tell whether they're dealing with it fairly. But 0:58:37.800 --> 0:58:40.640 it's really you can from orbit. You can figure out 0:58:40.680 --> 0:58:42.440 whether a Railroad owns a freight company. 0:58:42.640 --> 0:58:46.000 So just imagine you're a dumbos look at mey you 0:58:46.120 --> 0:58:49.919 It's pretty easy. Yeah, just why has this not been 0:58:50.760 --> 0:58:54.360 done with I don't know, Microsoft and open Ai for example. 0:58:54.840 --> 0:58:57.120 This is very interesting. So think about the ad tech 0:58:57.160 --> 0:59:01.160 platforms ad tech. It's it's into three pieces. You have 0:59:01.160 --> 0:59:03.720 a demand side platform, a sell side platform in a marketplace. 0:59:03.840 --> 0:59:06.840 So the demand side platform represents advertisers, the cell side 0:59:06.880 --> 0:59:10.440 platform represents publishers who have places where the advertisers can place, 0:59:10.480 --> 0:59:12.800 and out in the marketplaces where the agents for them 0:59:12.880 --> 0:59:15.080 gather together to bid. And so you land on a 0:59:15.080 --> 0:59:17.720 web page that lag before it loads. That surveillance lag 0:59:18.120 --> 0:59:20.600 is all of these little auctions taking place where someone says, 0:59:20.640 --> 0:59:22.000 you know, I have an eighteen to thirty four year 0:59:22.040 --> 0:59:26.240 old manchild from Queens who has been recently searching for 0:59:26.280 --> 0:59:29.360 gonorrhea and owns an Xbox, who will pay to advertise 0:59:29.400 --> 0:59:31.600 to them? And how much will you pay? Right? Love them? 0:59:33.240 --> 0:59:37.040 And so there's this little thing going on in the background, right, Okay, 0:59:37.120 --> 0:59:40.080 So Google and Facebook each own a demand side platform, 0:59:40.120 --> 0:59:43.200 a sell side platform, and a marketplace. And moreover, they 0:59:43.240 --> 0:59:44.960 have rigged the game so that if you use one 0:59:45.000 --> 0:59:46.400 part of it, you pretty much have to use the 0:59:46.440 --> 0:59:50.680 other parts. And they're both publishers and they're both advertisers. Now, 0:59:51.440 --> 0:59:56.240 so fifty one percent of every advertising dollar goes into 0:59:56.520 --> 1:00:01.080 Google and Facebook SIG. The historic share for all intermediaries 1:00:01.080 --> 1:00:04.960 and advertising supported media was fifteen percent, so they've tripled 1:00:04.960 --> 1:00:07.680 the share for intermediaries in this. So this is like 1:00:07.720 --> 1:00:10.960 if you and your partner were getting divorced and you 1:00:11.000 --> 1:00:12.600 showed up and you realized you both had the same 1:00:12.680 --> 1:00:15.280 lawyer who was also the judge, who was also trying 1:00:15.280 --> 1:00:17.280 to match with both of you on Tinder, and then 1:00:17.360 --> 1:00:20.000 after the divorce was settled, you discovered that you didn't 1:00:20.000 --> 1:00:21.600 get the house. Your partner didn't get the house. The 1:00:21.680 --> 1:00:24.560 lawyer got the house. Right, This is the thing. So 1:00:25.040 --> 1:00:27.120 last year we had a bill introduced in Congress called 1:00:27.120 --> 1:00:29.840 the America Act. And one of the great tragedies of 1:00:29.880 --> 1:00:33.440 American politics is our brightest political science graduates go to 1:00:33.480 --> 1:00:35.280 work in the Senate where all they do is come 1:00:35.360 --> 1:00:38.960 up with acronyms for acts. So you know, the America 1:00:38.960 --> 1:00:42.760 accents for some of the ess A is for America, the 1:00:42.840 --> 1:00:45.920 country that I love. M is for motherhood, the value 1:00:46.040 --> 1:00:49.160 I admire. So the America Act says to the ad 1:00:49.160 --> 1:00:51.200 tech platforms, you have to split, you have to be 1:00:51.200 --> 1:00:54.720 structurally separated. You can represent sellers, you can represent buyers, 1:00:54.800 --> 1:00:56.600 you can be a marketplace, but you can't be all three. 1:00:57.400 --> 1:00:59.919 And the two main co sponsors of the America Act 1:01:00.080 --> 1:01:04.200 were Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. Right, wow, that is 1:01:04.240 --> 1:01:08.720 a pretty bipartisan pill because even someone as terrible as 1:01:08.720 --> 1:01:12.800 Ted Cruz can look at an arrangement in which someone 1:01:12.880 --> 1:01:15.400 represents the buyer the seller and is the marketplace and 1:01:15.560 --> 1:01:18.200 is capturing three hundred percent of the traditional share for 1:01:18.400 --> 1:01:22.920 representatives who perform this function and say, this market cannot 1:01:22.960 --> 1:01:25.880 be fixed with a code of conduct. This market can 1:01:25.920 --> 1:01:28.480 only be fixed structurally. 1:01:28.080 --> 1:01:31.280 Or at least recognizes the politics of taking on big tech, 1:01:31.400 --> 1:01:34.960 right as something that is applicable to his constituents, Right, 1:01:35.200 --> 1:01:37.400 because I think, you know, I don't know that most 1:01:37.400 --> 1:01:40.520 of his most Texans might necessarily care about all that, 1:01:40.560 --> 1:01:45.320 but they do care about fairness. They do care about 1:01:45.560 --> 1:01:47.440 the fact that big tech has gotten so powerful. 1:01:47.480 --> 1:01:49.280 It is really interesting we've come to the place where 1:01:49.320 --> 1:01:54.720 it has been become a truly bipartisan code. Ben It's look, 1:01:54.760 --> 1:01:56.520 nothing moved out of the Senate last year. 1:01:56.680 --> 1:02:01.520 So the abyss do we move this shit forward, like 1:02:01.920 --> 1:02:03.720 to the to the real meat of it? 1:02:04.160 --> 1:02:05.880 What do we do? How do like? 1:02:06.040 --> 1:02:10.080 Maybe it's not us and my editor Matt Hughes, he 1:02:10.480 --> 1:02:12.840 suggested an idea. I can't do this because it make 1:02:12.880 --> 1:02:16.480 me morally corrupt. But I'm just saying American software pants, right, 1:02:16.560 --> 1:02:20.960 they're extremely and Matt, this is Matt's idea. You can 1:02:21.080 --> 1:02:23.240 there are a lot of patents you can file pants 1:02:23.240 --> 1:02:23.760 for anything. 1:02:24.040 --> 1:02:25.280 I'm not saying you do this. 1:02:25.480 --> 1:02:27.400 In fact, I know a lot of my listeners right 1:02:27.440 --> 1:02:29.920 now you're holding up a drug store, you're working on 1:02:29.960 --> 1:02:33.920 a new kind of tasteless poison, and you're or just 1:02:34.040 --> 1:02:37.240 regular stealing. It's a Friday, It's an easy day for you. 1:02:37.800 --> 1:02:41.240 Here's an idea. Surely someone could just anticipate the things 1:02:41.280 --> 1:02:42.880 the Open Eye was going to do in the future 1:02:42.920 --> 1:02:46.000 and just start filing patterns and then use those pans 1:02:46.280 --> 1:02:51.200 to mire them in endless lawsuits bullshit lawsuits. Not saying 1:02:51.200 --> 1:02:53.960 they should do that. But if you're not doing that, 1:02:54.440 --> 1:02:57.640 how do we actually break these people up? Is there 1:02:57.680 --> 1:03:02.680 a way for regular people to contribute towards this actual change? 1:03:02.720 --> 1:03:05.360 Because it feels like relying on the governments is the problem. 1:03:05.400 --> 1:03:07.520 Well, let me tell yes, sorry, let me tell you 1:03:07.560 --> 1:03:07.880 a story. 1:03:07.920 --> 1:03:09.520 I don't mean that in like the by the way, 1:03:09.520 --> 1:03:11.680 the anal kick like we can't rely on the government 1:03:11.720 --> 1:03:13.440 just it doesn't seem like the weapons of government. 1:03:13.760 --> 1:03:16.720 Let me tell a story about as yeah, yeah, about 1:03:16.720 --> 1:03:18.800 a man who was in the wilderness, a man who 1:03:18.840 --> 1:03:21.680 had ideas that everybody thought were crazy, a man called 1:03:21.720 --> 1:03:25.640 Milton Friedman, right, oh, Christ. In the nineteen sixties, Milton 1:03:25.640 --> 1:03:28.160 Friedman had this idea that all of the gains of 1:03:28.200 --> 1:03:30.680 the Great Society and the New Deal should be rolled back. 1:03:30.720 --> 1:03:32.400 So there are problems with the New Deal in the 1:03:32.400 --> 1:03:34.720 Great Society. They excluded black people, they excluded gay people, 1:03:34.720 --> 1:03:36.560 they excluded women to a large extent, and so on. 1:03:36.840 --> 1:03:40.040 That wasn't Milton Friedman's problem with it. Problem with it 1:03:40.080 --> 1:03:42.560 was who had included, not who had excluded. And he 1:03:42.680 --> 1:03:45.720 was like, we need more forelock tugging plubs, right, like, 1:03:45.880 --> 1:03:48.840 you shouldn't expect to have a dignified retirement. You shouldn't 1:03:48.840 --> 1:03:50.840 expect that your children will go to school for free, 1:03:50.880 --> 1:03:54.080 and so on. And people would say, Milton, people like that, shit, 1:03:54.760 --> 1:03:56.400 how are you going to make that shit happen. And 1:03:56.440 --> 1:04:00.240 he would say that in times of crisis, ideas can 1:04:00.240 --> 1:04:02.840 move from the periphery to the center. So our job 1:04:03.240 --> 1:04:05.920 is to keep ideas lying around so that when the 1:04:05.960 --> 1:04:08.920 crisis arises, we can move them into the center. And 1:04:08.920 --> 1:04:11.360 that crisis was the oil crisis of the nineteen seventies. 1:04:11.760 --> 1:04:13.920 So I like to quote Milton Friedman because I like 1:04:13.920 --> 1:04:16.640 to imagine that he looks up from that spit that's 1:04:16.640 --> 1:04:20.200 protruding from his mouth and gargles a curse as he 1:04:20.200 --> 1:04:23.320 hears his words. Him and Jack Welch, and you know, 1:04:23.360 --> 1:04:25.760 the demons laugh and they throw more molten shit on 1:04:25.800 --> 1:04:29.880 his naked body. But you know, if there's one thing 1:04:29.880 --> 1:04:32.720 that Milton Friedman has bequeathed us besides this theory change, 1:04:32.720 --> 1:04:37.360 it's an abundance of crises. Right. We have so many 1:04:37.480 --> 1:04:41.720 foreseeable crises on our horizon, crises of technology, climate crises, 1:04:41.760 --> 1:04:45.720 economic crises, legitimacy crises for the Supreme Court, and so on, 1:04:46.440 --> 1:04:50.800 and having these ideas lying around like being part of 1:04:51.680 --> 1:04:54.280 a group of people who say, look, right now, this 1:04:54.400 --> 1:04:57.040 is impossible, but this is like just because it's just 1:04:57.080 --> 1:04:59.240 because it's hard, it doesn't mean that we should do 1:04:59.280 --> 1:05:01.200 something easier. If it won't work, you don't look for 1:05:01.240 --> 1:05:03.480 your keys under the lamp post. I get it. If 1:05:03.480 --> 1:05:05.400 you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. 1:05:05.800 --> 1:05:07.400 But this is the thing we have to do. And 1:05:07.400 --> 1:05:09.760 if we keep talking about the thing we have to do, 1:05:10.200 --> 1:05:12.439 then when the crisis comes and someone says, Jesus Christ, 1:05:12.480 --> 1:05:15.120 we've got to do something here, we can say, here's 1:05:15.160 --> 1:05:15.920 the thing we have to do. 1:05:16.000 --> 1:05:18.520 So it starts with breaking them up, then, I mean, 1:05:18.520 --> 1:05:20.919 I think that that's well, you know, I think both 1:05:21.000 --> 1:05:23.000 Corey and I would probably agree that that's pretty high 1:05:23.000 --> 1:05:25.680 on the priority list. It makes a lot of things easier, 1:05:25.680 --> 1:05:27.480 and it would make a lot of things better. And 1:05:27.560 --> 1:05:29.920 it's something that's also within sort of the realm of 1:05:30.360 --> 1:05:32.600 possibility for a lot of reasons. Again, that's sort of 1:05:33.000 --> 1:05:35.680 that you know, it might be a flimsy bipartisanship right now, 1:05:35.680 --> 1:05:39.600 but it is a bipartisanship nominally, and so it's it's 1:05:39.640 --> 1:05:42.520 it's something that's actually sort of more imaginable than a 1:05:42.520 --> 1:05:47.080 lot of other happen It's happened before Bell systems. Yeah, 1:05:47.160 --> 1:05:48.480 and you know, I think there's a lot that you 1:05:48.480 --> 1:05:52.200 can do. I think there's you know, as we've seen 1:05:52.240 --> 1:05:54.840 the tech industry sort of you know, it is wealth 1:05:54.920 --> 1:05:57.919 concentrate and it's sort of calcify, and each of those 1:05:57.920 --> 1:06:02.240 things that that Corey mentioned earlier on gets sealed off 1:06:02.320 --> 1:06:05.080 to most people. Well, you see more anger, and you 1:06:05.120 --> 1:06:07.520 see an industry that doesn't historically have a lot of 1:06:07.520 --> 1:06:11.880 interesting in organizing or in sort of activism becoming much 1:06:11.920 --> 1:06:16.080 more so. So I think that is another area that's 1:06:16.200 --> 1:06:18.520 ripe for action. You probably have a lot of listeners 1:06:18.560 --> 1:06:20.640 who are in the tech industry or related to the 1:06:20.680 --> 1:06:26.680 tech industry, and startingly underneath cause outside Google, that's the mechanics, 1:06:26.720 --> 1:06:30.080 might all might might be the mechanics, right, Yeah, they 1:06:30.120 --> 1:06:31.640 might already be unionized, but they should. 1:06:31.720 --> 1:06:33.360 But organizing, I think is a. 1:06:33.280 --> 1:06:38.120 Really really ripe area where you can really start to 1:06:38.160 --> 1:06:39.240 move the needle and how. 1:06:39.320 --> 1:06:43.160 Software developers actually unionize, Yeah they can. 1:06:43.320 --> 1:06:45.560 So when I one of my organizing efforts, I was 1:06:45.600 --> 1:06:49.479 at Medium and I and and Medium was at the time. 1:06:49.640 --> 1:06:52.880 They've since jettisoned all of their editorial employees. 1:06:52.560 --> 1:06:54.720 Like me, So there's no none, none of those like 1:06:54.760 --> 1:06:57.560 three times as well, yeah, I was I think the last. 1:06:57.360 --> 1:07:01.919 Time the third wave Choral bleaching. Yeah, they just launch 1:07:02.000 --> 1:07:03.720 them out of a cannon everything once in a while. 1:07:04.400 --> 1:07:06.880 But it was it was half editorial and half tech, 1:07:06.920 --> 1:07:11.240 and there was genuine and uh you know, really sort 1:07:11.240 --> 1:07:15.400 of animated interest in organizing, and we got so close, 1:07:15.440 --> 1:07:18.640 we got within one one vote, and it wasn't you know, 1:07:18.760 --> 1:07:22.560 for them, it wasn't about you know, I'm sure they 1:07:22.560 --> 1:07:25.280 wanted their their salaries to be a little bit higher 1:07:25.360 --> 1:07:29.400 or whatever, but that wasn't the driving, uh, motivating factor. 1:07:29.960 --> 1:07:32.680 It was they didn't like a lot of the direction 1:07:33.000 --> 1:07:34.840 that medium was going. They didn't like a lot of 1:07:34.840 --> 1:07:37.320 the policies that medium had, they didn't like a lot 1:07:37.360 --> 1:07:39.960 of uh, you know what the founder the power of 1:07:40.000 --> 1:07:42.560 the that the founder had to wield over the entire platform, 1:07:43.360 --> 1:07:46.640 and organizing is one way to sort of claw back 1:07:46.720 --> 1:07:49.240 some of that power. I mean, in some cases, it's 1:07:49.280 --> 1:07:52.080 almost like when you have a weird situation like Meta 1:07:52.160 --> 1:07:55.000 with Zuckerberg at top, as like the boy king who 1:07:55.240 --> 1:07:57.720 is just going to rule that forever barring. 1:07:57.400 --> 1:07:59.160 Some fireable right exactly. 1:07:59.680 --> 1:08:01.640 But well, most tech companies are not like that, and 1:08:01.880 --> 1:08:04.560 you can begin to you know, sort of wield more 1:08:04.640 --> 1:08:07.240 influence internally if you join some of those efforts. There's 1:08:07.240 --> 1:08:10.760 a lot of great unions and organizers working in that 1:08:10.800 --> 1:08:12.800 space right now. So that's just one thing that you 1:08:12.840 --> 1:08:15.760 can that you can start to get involved in. 1:08:15.800 --> 1:08:17.880 You yeah, let me say, you know, you said can 1:08:17.920 --> 1:08:19.320 we do this? And you said we have to break 1:08:19.320 --> 1:08:20.960 them up. Well, like the thing that stops us from 1:08:21.040 --> 1:08:22.760 unionizing is also the thing that stops us from breaking 1:08:22.760 --> 1:08:24.840 them up, which is that they're powerful. Right, And so 1:08:24.880 --> 1:08:27.599 the reason that we practiced anti trust law the way 1:08:27.600 --> 1:08:30.400 we did until the Carter administration was not just because 1:08:30.400 --> 1:08:32.920 we wanted to preserve choice or competition. It was because 1:08:32.920 --> 1:08:35.479 when companies get too big to fail, they become too 1:08:35.479 --> 1:08:37.479 big to jail. Right. Once a company's more powerful than 1:08:37.520 --> 1:08:40.840 the government. IBM, you know, was suit for anti trust 1:08:40.920 --> 1:08:43.519 violations from nineteen seventy to nineteen eighty two, and every 1:08:43.560 --> 1:08:46.080 year for twelve consecutive years, they spent more on lawyers 1:08:46.120 --> 1:08:48.240 to fight the DOJ Anti Trust Division than all of 1:08:48.280 --> 1:08:51.600 the lawyers at the DOJ Anti Trust Division costs combined 1:08:51.920 --> 1:08:55.439 for all anti trust cases in America for twelve consecutive years. 1:08:55.439 --> 1:08:57.840 There's no way to limit their ability to fight back 1:08:57.880 --> 1:08:59.200 as well, because that'd be undemocrats. 1:08:59.240 --> 1:09:01.880 So once they're once they're a monopoly, right then you know, 1:09:01.920 --> 1:09:04.760 like the best time to stall monopoly forming is is 1:09:05.040 --> 1:09:08.360 But look, before there is a law, there must be 1:09:08.439 --> 1:09:11.000 a crime, you know. Lenny Bruce points out that if 1:09:11.040 --> 1:09:13.000 we have a law against fucking chicken, someone must have 1:09:13.040 --> 1:09:15.680 fucked a chicken at some point. Right. So before we 1:09:15.760 --> 1:09:21.040 had antis, before we had anti trust law, we had 1:09:21.080 --> 1:09:24.000 monopolists right right, that's where we got the anti trust 1:09:24.040 --> 1:09:27.880 law from. And specifically we had monopolists like John D. Rockefeller, 1:09:27.920 --> 1:09:30.000 who is still the richest man that ever lived, the 1:09:30.040 --> 1:09:33.960 most powerful, the most ruthless, terrible piece of shit, and 1:09:34.360 --> 1:09:36.640 we brought him low. And like the way that we 1:09:36.720 --> 1:09:39.160 did it, it happened in living memories, like nineteen twelve. 1:09:39.200 --> 1:09:41.519 So there's people alive today who were mentored by the 1:09:41.560 --> 1:09:43.960 people who did it right, and then there's people alive 1:09:43.960 --> 1:09:46.280 today who are those people's mentors, who are still working 1:09:46.680 --> 1:09:49.959 and still on the job. Right, it's not like embalming pharaohs. 1:09:49.960 --> 1:09:52.559 It's not a lost art from a fallen civilization. The 1:09:52.600 --> 1:09:53.519 thing we know how to do. 1:09:53.680 --> 1:09:56.959 And yeah, like breaking up for me, bring him low though. 1:09:57.120 --> 1:10:00.120 It's a great story. So woman called Ida Tarbell was 1:10:00.160 --> 1:10:02.599 the first woman in America get an undergraduate science degree. 1:10:02.640 --> 1:10:04.720 She was trained as a biologist sick. She was the 1:10:04.840 --> 1:10:07.439 daughter of a Pennsylvania oil man who was destroyed by 1:10:07.479 --> 1:10:10.519 the Standard Oil Trust Wow, and she went to work 1:10:10.560 --> 1:10:14.160 for Colliers, which was the biggest magazine in America at 1:10:14.160 --> 1:10:16.800 the time. Were one of the biggest, and she serialized 1:10:16.840 --> 1:10:22.000 a two volume muckraking history that pitilessly laid out exactly 1:10:22.400 --> 1:10:25.080 how the John D. Rockefeller scam worked. It had a 1:10:25.160 --> 1:10:27.040 very good title, she called it the History of the 1:10:27.040 --> 1:10:30.639 Standard Oil Company, Volumes one and two. It was super viral, 1:10:30.960 --> 1:10:33.679 and at the end of it, the Incoe political will 1:10:33.720 --> 1:10:36.040 that we'd had that said, like something is really wrong 1:10:36.560 --> 1:10:39.400 turned into a very sharp political will that said, we 1:10:39.479 --> 1:10:41.639 know how the scam works, and we demand that something 1:10:41.640 --> 1:10:43.280 to be done about it. And the Sherman Act, which 1:10:43.280 --> 1:10:46.000 had been hanging around for twenty years, finally was taken 1:10:46.040 --> 1:10:48.920 off the shelf and mobilized against John D. Rockefeller, and 1:10:48.960 --> 1:10:49.639 we brought him low. 1:10:49.920 --> 1:10:51.600 So this is I'm so glad you brought up the 1:10:51.600 --> 1:10:54.920 story which I just learned. First of all, I'm gonna 1:10:54.920 --> 1:10:57.360 look at cool people who did cool stuff. If Maggie's 1:10:57.360 --> 1:10:59.080 not done that, she needs to hear this, that is. 1:10:59.120 --> 1:11:02.160 And she then became a leading suffragist and was one 1:11:02.160 --> 1:11:04.000 of the greatest orators of American history. 1:11:04.680 --> 1:11:08.840 Just first of all, go eu to Tarbell original poster. Yeah, 1:11:08.960 --> 1:11:13.360 like the like, genuinely like amazing. But also I think 1:11:13.439 --> 1:11:16.559 this speaks to something. I'm speaking to anyone who is 1:11:16.640 --> 1:11:19.439 a reporter, who's listening to this right now, there is 1:11:19.479 --> 1:11:22.280 this common sense that why are we doing this, Why 1:11:22.320 --> 1:11:24.439 are we cataloging this? They're still gonna do these things? 1:11:24.520 --> 1:11:29.040 Why bother? And the answer is that fucking story Hindenberg Research. 1:11:29.479 --> 1:11:32.040 I don't know if I agree with all their methods, 1:11:32.320 --> 1:11:34.680 but the fact is we need more people out there. 1:11:34.720 --> 1:11:35.880 And I do this too. Well. 1:11:35.880 --> 1:11:39.240 You don't necessarily write these fuckers are bad, they are right? 1:11:39.360 --> 1:11:43.440 Why and write in detail because it sounds like historically 1:11:43.479 --> 1:11:45.200 that actually eventually works. 1:11:45.280 --> 1:11:46.920 You know, there is a there's a phrase out of 1:11:46.920 --> 1:11:49.280 the finance sector called migo. It stands from my eyes 1:11:49.360 --> 1:11:51.280 glaze over, And it's the idea that if you make 1:11:51.320 --> 1:11:53.559 the prospectus thick enough, people will just assume that it's 1:11:53.600 --> 1:11:55.840 good because they can't possibly read it like the pile 1:11:57.000 --> 1:12:03.160 pony under it right, un unraveling migo, whether that's you know, Marco, 1:12:03.240 --> 1:12:06.639 Robbie and a Bathtub explaining synthetic collateralized at obligations, or 1:12:07.080 --> 1:12:09.439 you know, my last couple of novels, the Bazil and 1:12:09.479 --> 1:12:12.799 Red Team Blues are about explaining how real world private 1:12:12.800 --> 1:12:15.599 equity scams, cryptocurrency hustles and so on, how they work. 1:12:17.360 --> 1:12:20.040 Is I think the first step on the path to 1:12:20.080 --> 1:12:23.080 making people feel like they can see where the weak 1:12:23.120 --> 1:12:26.479 points are in this in this very large but very 1:12:26.520 --> 1:12:29.080 brittle edifice, and they can start go kicking at the 1:12:29.080 --> 1:12:29.519 week point. 1:12:29.560 --> 1:12:32.880 Because I think that something Google is very powerful. They 1:12:32.920 --> 1:12:35.479 have tens of billions of dollars in like sixteen billion 1:12:35.520 --> 1:12:39.519 dollars a profit every quarter. They are unbreakable by traditional means. However, 1:12:40.200 --> 1:12:43.760 they are also culturally weak. They are a patchwork of 1:12:43.760 --> 1:12:46.639 people who've been there two minutes and twenty years. They 1:12:46.840 --> 1:12:49.599 don't fire some Ben Gomes, the gouy around Google search 1:12:49.600 --> 1:12:51.400 Board provate God took over. They put them in the 1:12:51.439 --> 1:12:55.080 corner in SVP of education because they know if Ben left, 1:12:55.920 --> 1:12:59.440 he could very easily at least raise money to completely 1:12:59.680 --> 1:13:04.360 a real Google competitor. But the thing is, the asshole 1:13:04.400 --> 1:13:07.400 doesn't talk to the mouth or the elbow. Nothing, there 1:13:07.439 --> 1:13:10.080 is no form. But as they get bigger, they are 1:13:10.160 --> 1:13:12.760 weaker on some levels. And I think it's just something 1:13:12.800 --> 1:13:14.479 I'm doing with the show. And actually both of you 1:13:14.520 --> 1:13:17.920 had done amazingly with your work is breaking down these 1:13:17.920 --> 1:13:20.120 weak points, these pain points. Brian, you did the great 1:13:20.120 --> 1:13:23.080 thing about the mechanical turk for example, how it's very 1:13:23.120 --> 1:13:26.920 similar to how generative AI works. And it's just I 1:13:26.960 --> 1:13:29.439 think it's strange. I've heard and I won't name names, 1:13:29.439 --> 1:13:31.800 but I've heard people kind of make the suggestion that well, 1:13:32.120 --> 1:13:33.960 why why should we bother? 1:13:34.040 --> 1:13:35.200 Why, Well, they're so. 1:13:35.240 --> 1:13:38.880 Powerful, And the answer is they're actually terrified of this. 1:13:38.960 --> 1:13:41.880 They do not want this. This is scary. Do it 1:13:42.040 --> 1:13:42.719 every day? 1:13:43.200 --> 1:13:43.439 Yeah? 1:13:43.520 --> 1:13:45.519 Look at I mean again, we mentioned this earlier, but 1:13:45.520 --> 1:13:50.800 look look how Google reacted when a single credible. 1:13:50.640 --> 1:13:51.880 Competitor entered the field. 1:13:51.960 --> 1:13:55.160 Oh but they ran around like chickens with their heads 1:13:55.200 --> 1:13:58.160 cut off and they scrambled to find a product. 1:13:58.200 --> 1:13:59.600 It was internal turmoil. 1:13:59.680 --> 1:14:04.040 It is. If anything, it wasn't the reaction of a 1:14:04.080 --> 1:14:09.360 company that is convinced of the power and security of 1:14:09.400 --> 1:14:12.400 its products and its placement in the marketplace. 1:14:12.960 --> 1:14:13.439 This was. 1:14:13.640 --> 1:14:16.280 This was a company that is like, as you were saying, 1:14:16.280 --> 1:14:21.040 pretty profoundly insecure and reliant on all these deals in 1:14:21.120 --> 1:14:24.479 order to maintain its position where it's paying out a 1:14:24.520 --> 1:14:25.280 great deal of money. 1:14:25.280 --> 1:14:28.200 I mean this, it's it seems to me more. 1:14:28.120 --> 1:14:30.120 Like a house of cards that that could collapse if 1:14:30.160 --> 1:14:33.639 the right one is pulled out. And to to add 1:14:33.720 --> 1:14:37.759 on too, what Corey was saying, Uh, you know another 1:14:38.080 --> 1:14:40.160 work that that I that that I read while I 1:14:40.160 --> 1:14:42.000 was researching the Luddite Book, which was one of the 1:14:42.040 --> 1:14:45.639 first efforts to sort of quote rescue the Lutdites from 1:14:45.840 --> 1:14:49.040 from from condescension, was E. P. Thompson's The Making of 1:14:49.080 --> 1:14:51.519 the English Working Class, and it tries to tell the 1:14:51.600 --> 1:14:53.720 story of like, how did the how did we get 1:14:53.720 --> 1:14:57.360 to the point where workers came together and said, wait 1:14:57.400 --> 1:15:00.280 a minute, we have enough power to actually I have 1:15:00.320 --> 1:15:01.000 some change. 1:15:01.400 --> 1:15:02.000 How did that? 1:15:02.120 --> 1:15:04.400 How did it because it didn't exist before? How did 1:15:04.439 --> 1:15:07.320 workers start to see themselves as part of a class 1:15:07.439 --> 1:15:11.440 or have solidarity? And it's just filled with all these examples, 1:15:12.280 --> 1:15:15.559 you know, of little fights that you know have otherwise 1:15:15.560 --> 1:15:18.479 been completely lost to history, where people stood up for 1:15:18.560 --> 1:15:22.759 something and you know, were crushed and then everybody forgot 1:15:22.760 --> 1:15:23.120 about it. 1:15:23.160 --> 1:15:23.960 By and large. 1:15:24.400 --> 1:15:28.000 But the neighbors didn't forget, the local newspaper men didn't forget, 1:15:28.680 --> 1:15:32.000 the families didn't forget. They're recorded in oral histories. They 1:15:32.040 --> 1:15:35.559 formed this tapestry. So I feel like it's it's always 1:15:35.560 --> 1:15:37.920 a bad idea to feel like nothing that we're doing 1:15:38.360 --> 1:15:42.080 matters or registers, because it is, and it can reverberate, 1:15:42.120 --> 1:15:43.920 and it can echo, and it can coalesce, and it 1:15:43.920 --> 1:15:45.200 can snowball really quickly. 1:15:46.240 --> 1:15:48.880 And if things aren't really working out for you right now, 1:15:48.920 --> 1:15:52.320 if the crowball won't get the ATM open, if even 1:15:52.439 --> 1:15:54.320 driving a car doesn't get into it, but you still 1:15:54.360 --> 1:15:56.519 have some left open money, perhaps you could check out 1:15:56.520 --> 1:15:58.880 one of the following products. I think that this will 1:15:58.960 --> 1:16:01.360 solve probably every problem you've ever had. 1:16:01.680 --> 1:16:17.160 I hope it's SCRIPTO. So I want to bring up 1:16:17.200 --> 1:16:19.719 one way in which Google is unexpectedly weak, in which 1:16:19.720 --> 1:16:22.920 its strength strength is a weakness. And this is a 1:16:23.120 --> 1:16:25.040 characteristic of all the big tech companies, which is that 1:16:25.080 --> 1:16:28.280 they do the same shitty thing everywhere, which means that 1:16:28.360 --> 1:16:30.720 if there's a case built against a tech company by 1:16:30.720 --> 1:16:33.240 a regulator, and are a big, powerful country like the 1:16:33.320 --> 1:16:36.960 United States, all of those facts will be almost identical 1:16:37.400 --> 1:16:40.160 in much smaller countries like South Korea. We've actually seen 1:16:40.200 --> 1:16:44.320 this where cases against Apple for antitrust have been effectively 1:16:45.080 --> 1:16:50.280 recycled in South Korea Japan and successfully so. Right, so, 1:16:50.920 --> 1:16:54.920 all of the world's governments are facing the same adversary. 1:16:55.000 --> 1:16:57.439 So even if these companies are bigger than most countries, 1:16:57.439 --> 1:16:58.639 they're not bigger than all many countries. 1:16:58.640 --> 1:17:00.800 When you say a shitty thing, what do you mean, Oh, 1:17:01.040 --> 1:17:02.280 you know, like specific Apple. 1:17:02.320 --> 1:17:05.559 Apple has this Danegeld system where they take thirty cents 1:17:05.560 --> 1:17:07.400 out of every dollar you spend on an app, and 1:17:07.400 --> 1:17:09.439 it's super anti competitive, and they have all these ways 1:17:09.439 --> 1:17:12.479 that they block people from trying to circumvent it, and 1:17:12.520 --> 1:17:16.320 it lets them control certain markets, and it's just it's 1:17:17.280 --> 1:17:20.719 it's illegal under most countries systems of law. Here's here's 1:17:20.720 --> 1:17:22.479 a fun fact for you. After World War Two, the 1:17:22.520 --> 1:17:25.200 American technocrats who went around and rebuilt the legal systems 1:17:25.200 --> 1:17:29.960 of Europe and Japan just basically copypasted American anti trust laws. 1:17:29.960 --> 1:17:33.559 Oh yeah, so, and here's another funny thing. They were 1:17:33.640 --> 1:17:36.880 keenly aware of how important monopolies were to the rise 1:17:36.880 --> 1:17:39.479 of fascism and the access powers, and so one of 1:17:39.479 --> 1:17:41.280 the things they did when they got to Germany and 1:17:41.360 --> 1:17:45.960 Japan and Italy was smashed their monopolies because they said 1:17:46.120 --> 1:17:48.280 monopolies lead to fascism. 1:17:48.720 --> 1:17:52.080 But the thing is as well is monopolies are bad 1:17:52.120 --> 1:17:52.759 for everyone. 1:17:52.840 --> 1:17:54.519 It is a bipartisan issue. 1:17:54.600 --> 1:17:57.240 Roger mcnammey, who I mentioned Elie Facebook and bested though, Yeah, 1:17:57.320 --> 1:17:58.040 really good friend mine. 1:17:58.080 --> 1:17:58.719 He's wonderful. 1:17:59.120 --> 1:18:01.120 He really was, Like I was talking to about something 1:18:01.120 --> 1:18:04.960 I was writing, and I within shitification. I did the 1:18:05.040 --> 1:18:07.439 raw economy, which is very similar, but I know my 1:18:07.479 --> 1:18:09.840 central failing in it. And it was these monopolies. And 1:18:10.560 --> 1:18:13.000 it's just this sense where you get these Sam Wulton 1:18:13.040 --> 1:18:15.120 types who want the monopolies. You get these and recent 1:18:15.160 --> 1:18:17.880 types want to invest in monopolies for the money, but 1:18:18.600 --> 1:18:22.640 they're shitty businesses. Monopolies are like Google is probably is 1:18:22.640 --> 1:18:27.160 an incredible business, but inevitably must die, like it's going 1:18:27.200 --> 1:18:31.360 to die eventually, and fast or slow it must because 1:18:32.280 --> 1:18:33.719 eventually you run out of humans. 1:18:34.520 --> 1:18:37.160 Well, this is the problem Amazon is facing, right. They 1:18:37.240 --> 1:18:39.360 keep looking at the rate at which they're burning out 1:18:40.000 --> 1:18:43.759 warehouse workers and saying, well, all available semi skilled workers 1:18:43.800 --> 1:18:46.040 will have worked at an Amazon warehouse and no longer 1:18:46.080 --> 1:18:49.599 want to do so or have been permanently maimed by whatever. 1:18:49.680 --> 1:18:52.000 Originally it was twenty twenty four was their initial projection. 1:18:52.160 --> 1:18:55.040 That was their clarion call that made them start investing 1:18:55.040 --> 1:18:57.400 more heavily in automation. Not in treating work I bake, 1:18:57.600 --> 1:19:00.000 not in making it better to work there. Yeah no, no, no, 1:19:00.120 --> 1:19:03.000 not not in the slightest no, just in in adding 1:19:03.040 --> 1:19:05.200 more of that. Now. I have a lot of lefty 1:19:06.000 --> 1:19:10.439 comrades who are skeptical of this anti monopoly stuff, and 1:19:10.479 --> 1:19:13.040 they say, look, I don't want a million choices. I 1:19:13.080 --> 1:19:14.920 don't want to go to Amazon looking for a light 1:19:14.920 --> 1:19:18.439 bulb and find ten million light bulbs. You already do right, well, 1:19:18.479 --> 1:19:21.519 you do right, exactly right. I want to go and like, 1:19:21.560 --> 1:19:23.920 I want to live in an orderly regulated world where 1:19:23.960 --> 1:19:25.920 I don't have to use the magic of the market 1:19:26.000 --> 1:19:28.160 to make sure that like my water isn't poison or 1:19:28.160 --> 1:19:30.120 that things aren't bad and so on. And there's something 1:19:30.160 --> 1:19:33.160 to that. I don't know. Everything has to be. We 1:19:33.160 --> 1:19:36.000 can have regulated monopolies, we can have state we can 1:19:36.040 --> 1:19:36.519 have state. 1:19:36.560 --> 1:19:40.840 Things like healthcare. Ye competition, but the. 1:19:40.880 --> 1:19:45.240 Thing that that competition gets you is not merely choice. 1:19:45.760 --> 1:19:50.240 It's a weak corporate sector. People really fail to understand 1:19:50.240 --> 1:19:54.800 this at their peril because although these companies appear to 1:19:54.840 --> 1:19:57.759 be at one another's throats, when you look more closely 1:19:57.800 --> 1:20:00.760 at it, they're really quite chummy. We've surface around us 1:20:00.800 --> 1:20:04.000 several times. Yeah, so you know, Apple says, oh, we're 1:20:04.040 --> 1:20:07.400 the non surveilling company, and Google and Facebook are the 1:20:07.439 --> 1:20:10.040 bad ones. They surveil and we're so different from them. 1:20:10.400 --> 1:20:13.679 But Apple like puts a surveillance tap in the pocket 1:20:13.680 --> 1:20:16.679 of every iPhone owner by defaulting to Google. I mean, 1:20:16.960 --> 1:20:20.120 Apple wants to block surveillance unless they're getting paid for it, 1:20:20.120 --> 1:20:21.040 so they block Faceto and. 1:20:21.040 --> 1:20:24.320 They don't do unless it's their and they. 1:20:24.040 --> 1:20:28.040 Do their own surveillance. Right. Google and Facebook allegedly are 1:20:28.120 --> 1:20:30.559 our great adversaries in the ad tech sector, except they 1:20:30.600 --> 1:20:33.160 have this illegal collusive arrangement where they divided up ad 1:20:33.200 --> 1:20:35.360 tech like the pope dividing up the new world called 1:20:35.439 --> 1:20:40.679 Jedi Blue. Right, you have Cheryl Sandberg moving from one 1:20:41.439 --> 1:20:43.240 firm to the other. Right, she was a Googler before 1:20:43.280 --> 1:20:44.360 she was at Facebook, and. 1:20:44.320 --> 1:20:47.120 Before that Mackenzine before that Larry Summ's Department's treasury. 1:20:47.280 --> 1:20:50.160 Yeah, and Facebook is stuffed with ex Apple people, and 1:20:50.160 --> 1:20:52.720 Apple is stuff with x Facebook people. That the way 1:20:52.760 --> 1:20:56.640 that you ascend through the ranks of a highly concentrated 1:20:56.680 --> 1:21:00.879 sector is through lateral moves because we within the firms, 1:21:01.040 --> 1:21:03.160 there are no boxes on the org chart for you 1:21:03.280 --> 1:21:04.960 to rise up to. Either someone has to die or 1:21:05.000 --> 1:21:08.679 become disgraced, right, and so it's only when a firm 1:21:08.920 --> 1:21:12.360 seeks someone from outside that you can actually jump up 1:21:12.360 --> 1:21:14.439 the rank, which is why you see, for example, people 1:21:14.439 --> 1:21:17.719 from Disney jumping to Universal and people from Universal jumping 1:21:17.720 --> 1:21:18.880 from Disney to ascend the right. 1:21:18.960 --> 1:21:20.840 Just to push back a little bit, isn't some of 1:21:20.880 --> 1:21:22.519 this just domain expertise though. 1:21:23.320 --> 1:21:25.639 In the sense that that's why they're doing it. Sure, 1:21:26.000 --> 1:21:28.200 But and you know, this is another problem with regulation, 1:21:28.439 --> 1:21:31.160 is that when a sector becomes highly concentrated, the domain 1:21:31.200 --> 1:21:34.599 expertise is siloed within the firms that you're hoping to regulate. 1:21:34.880 --> 1:21:38.280 And you know, there's a there's a not wrong point 1:21:38.320 --> 1:21:40.840 that people make about the revolving door, which is that 1:21:41.240 --> 1:21:43.439 if a sector consists of five companies, then everyone who 1:21:43.520 --> 1:21:45.880 understands those companies works for one of them. So where 1:21:45.880 --> 1:21:47.920 else are you going to get a regulator? Right? Of course, 1:21:47.960 --> 1:21:49.600 they hire ex Googlers. 1:21:49.200 --> 1:21:51.719 And at this point you have people where you only 1:21:51.760 --> 1:21:54.200 really hire if they've worked at a big tech firm. Sure, 1:21:54.320 --> 1:21:56.240 that's the only way you will know how to work 1:21:56.439 --> 1:21:57.280 very similar machines. 1:21:57.280 --> 1:21:59.720 Although I'm speaking of regulators, so sorry. The reason the 1:21:59.840 --> 1:22:03.000 f SEE is hiring x Comcast people, supposedly is that, like, 1:22:03.120 --> 1:22:05.880 who understands how the cable networks work except for people 1:22:05.880 --> 1:22:07.120 who work for one of the two or three big 1:22:07.160 --> 1:22:10.920 cable operators. Right, So there's a grain of truth to this. 1:22:11.040 --> 1:22:13.080 It's not entirely true, but there's a grain of truth 1:22:13.120 --> 1:22:16.880 to it. And the fix for it is not to 1:22:17.000 --> 1:22:19.880 let cable companies mark their own homework by parachuting their 1:22:19.880 --> 1:22:22.639 own people into the regulators. The fix is to make 1:22:22.640 --> 1:22:27.120 them small enough to be comprehensible, right, to make them 1:22:27.280 --> 1:22:30.880 small enough that outside parties can see what they're doing. 1:22:30.640 --> 1:22:33.599 But also a marketplace with tons of choices. It makes 1:22:33.640 --> 1:22:37.000 for a weaker corporate sector, but stronger companies, I would argue, 1:22:37.040 --> 1:22:39.800 because if you make a good fucking product, you can 1:22:39.840 --> 1:22:42.320 win a market. And I realize that this is not 1:22:42.400 --> 1:22:44.960 a perfect system at all, and that doesn't always happen, 1:22:45.360 --> 1:22:49.040 but at least to some extent, Apple has dominated because 1:22:49.080 --> 1:22:52.400 they aren't imperfect. And I know, listeners, I know you 1:22:52.479 --> 1:22:54.880 always am not hard enough about Apple. I'm doing an 1:22:54.880 --> 1:22:56.760 app Store episode. It's so hard to write, you want 1:22:56.760 --> 1:22:59.559 to write five thousand words. Jesus fucking But the things 1:22:59.600 --> 1:23:03.559 of Apple, they've done pretty well because they make good phone, phone, 1:23:03.600 --> 1:23:06.880 good laptop great, Like the laptops are great. These are 1:23:06.920 --> 1:23:09.200 good pieces of tech that do the job well. And 1:23:09.320 --> 1:23:11.639 yes they use monopolistic forces to keep where they are, 1:23:12.960 --> 1:23:15.240 but it also feels like a Google's phone division. They're like, 1:23:15.280 --> 1:23:17.120 why does this never work? And it's because it kind 1:23:17.160 --> 1:23:20.840 of like Android phones are good, but they've really why 1:23:20.840 --> 1:23:23.360 doesn't Google try and pay for my message? Well they shouldn't. 1:23:23.400 --> 1:23:25.960 They should actually really push our cs much harder. But 1:23:25.960 --> 1:23:28.519 they don't push it that hard. They could put a 1:23:28.560 --> 1:23:31.200 lot of more money behind our ces, or try and 1:23:31.240 --> 1:23:33.120 find a way to work without I know it's coming in, 1:23:33.479 --> 1:23:35.960 but it's like, like, doesn't really give a shit about 1:23:36.000 --> 1:23:37.040 Android doing super well. 1:23:37.080 --> 1:23:37.880 They just don't want. 1:23:37.760 --> 1:23:40.559 Apple to have everything. I guess it's so strange. 1:23:40.560 --> 1:23:43.799 It's hard to play criminology here, but I want to 1:23:43.840 --> 1:23:47.559 say that while competition is obviously imperfect, yes that in 1:23:47.600 --> 1:23:50.320 tech we do have a kind of secret power. And 1:23:50.360 --> 1:23:52.719 you ask. You started this conversation by asking what excites 1:23:52.800 --> 1:23:54.880 us about tech. One of the things that excites me 1:23:54.920 --> 1:23:58.080 about tech is a kind of nerdy principle, which is 1:23:58.120 --> 1:24:01.360 that all computers are We're in complete universal of onon 1:24:01.439 --> 1:24:04.719 noion machines. They can all run every program, which means 1:24:04.720 --> 1:24:06.920 that any program running on a computer that you have, 1:24:07.000 --> 1:24:09.720 whether it's your pocket Destruction rectangle, your laptop, or your 1:24:09.760 --> 1:24:12.880 game console, another program can run that modifies how it 1:24:12.920 --> 1:24:14.800 works so that it works for you and not someone else. 1:24:15.200 --> 1:24:18.040 Your printer can always take someone else's inc your car 1:24:18.080 --> 1:24:21.760 can always have its surveillance technology disabled, and so on. 1:24:22.160 --> 1:24:24.240 And what that does is it means that with tech 1:24:24.800 --> 1:24:29.280 you have this separate competitive capacity, which is the ability 1:24:29.320 --> 1:24:34.439 to compete by modifying existing technology. Right Like Lexmark used 1:24:34.479 --> 1:24:38.240 to be IBM's printer division, right, and they made laser printers. 1:24:38.600 --> 1:24:43.320 And there was a company out of not Malaysia, Taiwan 1:24:43.600 --> 1:24:47.360 that made refill kits for their toner cartridges, and the 1:24:47.360 --> 1:24:49.840 toner cartridge had a little crude microchip in it. This 1:24:49.880 --> 1:24:52.000 is in the early two thousands, is when embedded systems 1:24:52.000 --> 1:24:55.000 were expensive and very primitive. It had a sixty four 1:24:55.040 --> 1:24:57.519 byte program and when you used up all the toner 1:24:57.520 --> 1:25:00.559 and the cartridge, the sixty four by program would toggle 1:25:00.560 --> 1:25:02.640 a switch that said, I'm now an empty cartridge, and 1:25:02.680 --> 1:25:05.519 if you put more carbon powder in the cartridge, it 1:25:05.520 --> 1:25:08.000 wouldn't work because the cartridge told the printer it was empty. 1:25:08.360 --> 1:25:11.160 So Static reverse engineered this sixty four by program not 1:25:11.320 --> 1:25:15.280 very challenging. They made another chip and it reset it 1:25:15.320 --> 1:25:19.960 to one. Right, I am a full cartridge. And when 1:25:20.000 --> 1:25:25.759 that happened, Lexmark sued them, and they sued them, arguing 1:25:25.960 --> 1:25:29.000 that they had violated their copyright, that they bypassed an 1:25:29.040 --> 1:25:31.679 access control for a copyrighted work, which is prohibited under 1:25:31.680 --> 1:25:34.080 the Digital Mining of Copyright Act. And the judge at 1:25:34.120 --> 1:25:37.160 the time said, like, where is the copyrighted work. It's 1:25:37.200 --> 1:25:39.800 not the carbon in the printer cartridge. They said, no, 1:25:39.840 --> 1:25:42.400 it's the sixty four by program. They said, well, you know, 1:25:42.680 --> 1:25:46.080 like sixty four by programs software is like copyrightable, but 1:25:46.080 --> 1:25:48.519 a sixty four by program isn't. It's not even a 1:25:48.560 --> 1:25:51.040 high coup right, Like, it doesn't rise to the level 1:25:51.080 --> 1:25:53.559 of complexity that attracts a new copyright. And so they 1:25:53.560 --> 1:25:57.000 threw the case out punchline. Today, Lexmark is a division 1:25:57.000 --> 1:26:00.679 of static controls, right, because they went for I'm refilling 1:26:00.680 --> 1:26:05.960 the cartridges to buying the business. Ah. Right. So today, 1:26:06.080 --> 1:26:07.960 if you were to try and make that argument about HP, 1:26:08.080 --> 1:26:11.360 which has this disgusting habit of pushing at fake security 1:26:11.400 --> 1:26:14.639 updates that break your printer's ability to use their party Inc. 1:26:14.720 --> 1:26:18.160 It breaks on its own. Sorry that too. But if 1:26:18.200 --> 1:26:19.439 you were to do this and you were to go 1:26:19.479 --> 1:26:22.160 back to court and say the program in the chip 1:26:22.360 --> 1:26:24.559 in the chip in the cartridge that stops you from 1:26:24.640 --> 1:26:27.080 using third party Inc. Doesn't rise to love a copyright ability. 1:26:27.280 --> 1:26:29.040 That's like a twenty six cent system on a chip 1:26:29.040 --> 1:26:31.800 that's running a full Linux stack with like busy box 1:26:31.840 --> 1:26:33.839 and a network stack. You could probably attach a monitor 1:26:33.880 --> 1:26:36.040 to it if you want it to write, and like, 1:26:36.080 --> 1:26:40.679 there's just no argument that that's not copyrightable. Now, with tech, 1:26:40.760 --> 1:26:43.200 if we could clear some of these rules that have 1:26:43.280 --> 1:26:46.200 been mobilized by big tech to block new market entry, 1:26:46.520 --> 1:26:49.200 to block reverse engineering, to block all this other stuff, 1:26:49.439 --> 1:26:51.439 we could do lots of things to compete, Like the 1:26:51.479 --> 1:26:54.040 iPhone is a great platform for someone else to make 1:26:54.080 --> 1:26:55.599 an app store, right. 1:26:55.600 --> 1:26:58.120 Vidia I was one of the like I was really 1:26:58.160 --> 1:27:00.800 into the homebrew community and iPhone. Yeah, and you know what, 1:27:00.920 --> 1:27:03.000 some of it was broken as shit, but you could 1:27:03.000 --> 1:27:06.839 do so many There were weird little things that connected 1:27:06.920 --> 1:27:10.680 the systems, probably in ways that were extremely leaky, but 1:27:10.720 --> 1:27:14.600 they were drowned in the water. Now geohot makes weird 1:27:15.000 --> 1:27:16.760 autonomous car things that kind of work. 1:27:17.240 --> 1:27:19.560 It's just yeah. But you know, if you remember in 1:27:19.600 --> 1:27:23.439 the early two thousands, Apple was dying because Microsoft wouldn't 1:27:23.439 --> 1:27:25.800 make a functional version of Microsoft Office right. And the 1:27:25.800 --> 1:27:29.080 way Steve Jobs resolved that was not by begging Bill 1:27:29.080 --> 1:27:32.639 Gates to fix Office. He just had technologists at Apple 1:27:32.720 --> 1:27:35.400 reverse engineer Microsoft Office and make iWork pages, numbers, and 1:27:35.479 --> 1:27:39.320 keynote that perfectly run word, Excel and PowerPoint. Now. It 1:27:39.360 --> 1:27:42.799 was janki at first, because Microsoft kept cycling the file formats, yes, 1:27:42.920 --> 1:27:45.720 in order to break compatibility. But that hurt Microsoft more 1:27:45.800 --> 1:27:48.320 than it hurt Apple because Apple had their own internal 1:27:48.360 --> 1:27:50.439 file formats. Microsoft just had these file formats, and they 1:27:50.520 --> 1:27:53.000 kept making them more obfuscated and complex, and then they 1:27:53.080 --> 1:27:55.360 had to support them all. So eventually Microsoft sued for 1:27:55.400 --> 1:27:58.040 peace and they standardized those file formats. That's where we 1:27:58.080 --> 1:28:01.200 get doc x PPT x xls X. Those are the 1:28:01.280 --> 1:28:03.720 XML versions. And the reason you can copy and past 1:28:03.760 --> 1:28:06.479 style text into a browser and then into libre office, 1:28:06.520 --> 1:28:08.560 and then into iWork and then back into office is 1:28:08.600 --> 1:28:12.960 because they're all using this standard. If Apple could not 1:28:13.200 --> 1:28:16.400 use the courts to shut down something like Sidia, uh 1:28:16.439 --> 1:28:19.000 and if they were required to just have hand to 1:28:19.040 --> 1:28:24.559 hand guerrilla warfare with Jay Freeman and his engineers, they 1:28:24.560 --> 1:28:29.160 would eventually sueer piece because they they are fighting an 1:28:29.200 --> 1:28:33.280 asymmetric battle where they have to make no mistakes in 1:28:33.320 --> 1:28:36.800 the iPhone, and Jay and Johatt just have to find 1:28:36.800 --> 1:28:39.400 one mistake they've made, and every time they do that, 1:28:39.400 --> 1:28:40.840 they have to go back to the drum. Alright. 1:28:40.960 --> 1:28:43.720 Talking to Margaret Thatcha, you need we only need to 1:28:43.760 --> 1:28:44.439 be lucky ones. 1:28:44.680 --> 1:28:47.360 Yeah, And and you should be pointed out that I 1:28:47.360 --> 1:28:50.519 think that Apple's in house design were watching what they 1:28:50.520 --> 1:28:53.120 were doing in the in those jail broken sists, and 1:28:53.200 --> 1:28:55.559 they were, and they a lot of the things that 1:28:55.680 --> 1:28:59.240 were really popular. They poured it into the into iOS 1:28:59.240 --> 1:29:03.320 and future design. You know, obviously not the interoperability or 1:29:03.360 --> 1:29:05.840 the things that would be more radical, but just like 1:29:05.880 --> 1:29:09.000 design flourishes and features, like they were watching that community 1:29:09.040 --> 1:29:09.920 and taking notes from it. 1:29:09.960 --> 1:29:12.679 Every good designer starts by paving the desire path. 1:29:12.640 --> 1:29:14.360 And I mean one of my favorite examples of this 1:29:14.439 --> 1:29:16.080 where yeah, the courts would I don't know how the 1:29:16.120 --> 1:29:17.759 courts would have gone in because this is video games, 1:29:17.800 --> 1:29:21.400 but the originals of the World of Warcraft were from 1:29:22.000 --> 1:29:24.559 numerous forums, from numerous guilds. In EverQuest, there's a big 1:29:24.560 --> 1:29:27.200 thing with the plane of time, with the shadows lukelan expansion. 1:29:27.400 --> 1:29:29.720 Anyone who knows this story, by the way, email me. 1:29:29.880 --> 1:29:32.200 I love you, easy Better off line dot com. But 1:29:32.320 --> 1:29:34.880 long story short, there was a massive bug with the 1:29:34.880 --> 1:29:37.120 final rate, and a bunch of people, for all being 1:29:37.120 --> 1:29:39.040 one of them said I'm fucking done with this game. 1:29:39.080 --> 1:29:40.920 This company doesn't give a shit. They can't even finish 1:29:41.000 --> 1:29:45.160 their goddamn work. It's disgusting. And Blizzard, who are now 1:29:45.280 --> 1:29:47.800 kind of horrible thanks to Activision, Kotic and all them, 1:29:48.280 --> 1:29:51.360 said huh, well, if we just got all these high 1:29:51.439 --> 1:29:55.679 level players and ask them, how would you like EverQuest 1:29:55.680 --> 1:29:57.800 to be better? What would a better MMO look like? 1:29:57.920 --> 1:30:01.680 World of Warcraft was an amazing m I genuinely love 1:30:01.760 --> 1:30:03.680 Wow at the beginning, and to this day, I'm sure 1:30:03.720 --> 1:30:06.400 ever picked up. And it does that because this crazy 1:30:06.439 --> 1:30:08.960 idea of we could really compete with pretty much the 1:30:08.960 --> 1:30:13.760 only successful Western MMO with some exceptions, by taking the 1:30:13.760 --> 1:30:16.480 things they like and doing better at them, by iterating 1:30:16.520 --> 1:30:19.200 on their work and doing great things. If we could 1:30:19.200 --> 1:30:22.200 do that in tech. Even the small examples we have 1:30:22.240 --> 1:30:25.240 in tech of that working are so good. I mean 1:30:26.280 --> 1:30:29.479 Anchor being my favorite one, Like they have gallium nitrie. 1:30:29.479 --> 1:30:31.679 They've managed to make shit really powerful and really small, 1:30:32.040 --> 1:30:34.800 and yeah, it's made every other battery manufacturer have to 1:30:34.800 --> 1:30:37.320 fucking compete. I'm sure they didn't do it first, but 1:30:37.400 --> 1:30:40.040 Anchor has made a successful business out of seeing other 1:30:40.080 --> 1:30:43.600 people shit and going, what if this was good? 1:30:44.360 --> 1:30:48.280 Let me make one more point about why user adaptability 1:30:48.360 --> 1:30:51.400 is good. It's not merely because it lets firms discover 1:30:51.520 --> 1:30:55.519 a new way so pleasing us, or because it lets 1:30:55.600 --> 1:30:59.920 us make our lives easier. It's because when our technology 1:31:00.000 --> 1:31:02.520 doesn't work for us, it is often because the circumstances 1:31:02.520 --> 1:31:04.680 that we're in have changed for the worse. Okay, right, 1:31:04.760 --> 1:31:06.880 your printer, you need to get one more page out 1:31:06.880 --> 1:31:08.719 of your printer, and it's really desperate and it won't 1:31:08.720 --> 1:31:11.160 print because it doesn't have any magenta in it, even 1:31:11.200 --> 1:31:12.720 though you're printing a black and white document, and the 1:31:12.760 --> 1:31:14.559 black and white document you're printing is the thing that 1:31:14.600 --> 1:31:16.840 you need to bring to the bail bondsmen because your 1:31:16.880 --> 1:31:20.519 kid's just been arrested. Right The people who are finness 1:31:20.560 --> 1:31:24.160 this again, the people who make the technology can never 1:31:24.240 --> 1:31:26.600 anticipate all the ways that the people who use the 1:31:26.600 --> 1:31:28.720 technology are going to need to use it, not just 1:31:28.800 --> 1:31:31.519 in the immediate future, but in the decades that will 1:31:31.600 --> 1:31:34.960 come afterwards, because this technology lives in our stack forever 1:31:35.040 --> 1:31:37.599 and ever. If you want to read an amazing document 1:31:37.640 --> 1:31:40.720 about how technology ac creates, the British Librari's postmortem on 1:31:40.840 --> 1:31:43.240 their ransomware attack, where they talk about how they were 1:31:43.280 --> 1:31:45.599 early adopters and then they because they could never shut 1:31:45.680 --> 1:31:47.880 down the system, they just put more and more layers 1:31:47.920 --> 1:31:49.559 on top of it. Each layer was a seam that 1:31:49.560 --> 1:31:51.439 could be exploited by ransomware creeps. It's one of the 1:31:51.479 --> 1:31:55.240 most important tech documents I've ever read. So you know 1:31:55.280 --> 1:31:58.720 when things are broken, when people in the future are 1:31:58.720 --> 1:32:01.479 trying to maintain or adapt the things that you've made. 1:32:02.160 --> 1:32:04.720 When the climate emergency hits and the power goes out, 1:32:04.800 --> 1:32:07.760 or the internet is not available or not available continuously, 1:32:07.840 --> 1:32:09.720 or a website that's supposed to be checked every time 1:32:09.720 --> 1:32:12.439 you launch for a license key goes down because there's 1:32:12.520 --> 1:32:15.639 been a big cyber attack or because CrowdStrike has gone down. 1:32:16.240 --> 1:32:18.920 That is the moment where being able to change how 1:32:18.960 --> 1:32:22.479 your technology works is going to be the difference between 1:32:23.040 --> 1:32:25.320 success and failure, a good life and a bad life, 1:32:25.320 --> 1:32:29.600 sometimes life and death by it. And the hubris of 1:32:29.640 --> 1:32:32.400 thinking that you can anticipate all the ways that people 1:32:32.400 --> 1:32:34.280 are going to use it, all the bodies they'll be in, 1:32:34.560 --> 1:32:40.160 all the circumstances they'll live through, is so monumentally arrogant 1:32:40.240 --> 1:32:45.120 and reckless, and ultimately, although you may not always make 1:32:45.120 --> 1:32:47.880 the best decision about how the technology around you should work, 1:32:48.479 --> 1:32:50.800 that decision should still always vest with you. 1:32:51.760 --> 1:32:54.360 So as we wrap up here, I want to finish 1:32:54.400 --> 1:32:59.439 around the generative a Brian, do you see any value? 1:32:59.680 --> 1:33:02.160 This is such an aweshole question to end on. I 1:33:02.240 --> 1:33:04.960 realized we've got like tim but like, do you see 1:33:04.960 --> 1:33:06.479 any value in this? I think this is a good 1:33:06.479 --> 1:33:07.480 thing to wrap. 1:33:08.760 --> 1:33:10.479 I think like a lot of the technologies that have 1:33:10.560 --> 1:33:13.679 kind of surfaced or have become fixations of Silicon Valley 1:33:13.680 --> 1:33:16.559 over the last five years, as it's sort of cycled 1:33:16.760 --> 1:33:21.280 through the latest next big thing, as it's investors are 1:33:21.320 --> 1:33:26.320 desperate to find said big thing because it hasn't really had. 1:33:26.200 --> 1:33:26.960 One in a while. 1:33:28.040 --> 1:33:31.439 I think, you know, Jennert of AI has found a 1:33:31.439 --> 1:33:33.080 few more use cases. 1:33:32.960 --> 1:33:35.720 Than whatever the metaverse or web. 1:33:35.479 --> 1:33:40.719 Three or crypto, So therefore it's been a little bit stickier. 1:33:41.280 --> 1:33:45.160 And you know, as a technology it's itself, is there 1:33:45.240 --> 1:33:46.439 is there something interesting there? 1:33:47.400 --> 1:33:50.600 You know? Yeah, like I think that there's there. 1:33:50.360 --> 1:33:56.120 We should be having researchers and developers looking into into 1:33:56.200 --> 1:33:58.640 large language models and how to make them better and 1:33:58.680 --> 1:34:00.559 how to make them more interesting. Scene they can and 1:34:00.640 --> 1:34:04.360 can't do by kicking the tires? Do we need every 1:34:04.720 --> 1:34:09.200 major tech company running massive data farms doing basically the 1:34:09.240 --> 1:34:13.000 same thing as the cost of energy and compute skyrockets 1:34:13.040 --> 1:34:15.280 and a game that and a company that made video 1:34:15.320 --> 1:34:17.920 game chips as of two or three years ago is 1:34:17.960 --> 1:34:22.400 now suddenly more valuable than Apple and the entire GDP 1:34:22.680 --> 1:34:25.880 of or like the London Stock Exchange, I think I saw. 1:34:26.080 --> 1:34:26.840 Something like that. 1:34:26.920 --> 1:34:30.120 Yeah, then you have then you have an issue. And 1:34:30.200 --> 1:34:33.160 this is the problem with our current mode of technological development. 1:34:33.240 --> 1:34:36.920 It's not just is technology? Is this technology and question good? 1:34:37.600 --> 1:34:41.280 Is Is this in any way a sensible way to 1:34:41.360 --> 1:34:43.040 go about seeing how it's. 1:34:42.920 --> 1:34:45.160 Useful or who it could be useful for, or what 1:34:45.320 --> 1:34:48.640 use cases it might have? And I think absolutely not. 1:34:48.800 --> 1:34:50.520 I think it's so hard. 1:34:50.560 --> 1:34:55.000 To distinguish that question right now because it's gone from 1:34:55.479 --> 1:34:58.320 zero to one hundred and twenty and it's spinning out 1:34:58.320 --> 1:35:02.160 in all directions, and it's so many bad decisions have 1:35:02.200 --> 1:35:06.800 been made in its rollout. It's it's been deeply non 1:35:06.840 --> 1:35:10.080 consensual to a lot of the parties whose work has 1:35:10.120 --> 1:35:12.559 been harvested into this thing. So you have a bunch 1:35:12.600 --> 1:35:14.920 of people who are furious at the way that the 1:35:14.920 --> 1:35:16.599 models were trained in the first place. 1:35:17.000 --> 1:35:21.080 It's being set against creative markets where people. 1:35:20.800 --> 1:35:23.880 Are now worried about their jobs, so you have them angry. 1:35:23.920 --> 1:35:26.200 On the other side, you have ordinary people who are 1:35:26.200 --> 1:35:28.519 just worried about is this going to automate my job? 1:35:28.520 --> 1:35:30.760 How's it going to affect me? And so you have 1:35:30.800 --> 1:35:36.120 this immense climate of not just fear but also of anger, 1:35:36.560 --> 1:35:38.960 and it's really hard to pull out. You know, like, well, 1:35:39.080 --> 1:35:42.880 is generative AI like a good technology in terms of 1:35:42.960 --> 1:35:45.800 the use cases to which it is being put right now, 1:35:45.840 --> 1:35:47.600 I would say absolutely not. 1:35:48.280 --> 1:35:48.479 Yeah. 1:35:48.560 --> 1:35:52.400 It feels almost like the most egregious example of everything 1:35:52.400 --> 1:35:55.520 we've been talking about. When these companies have no natural predators, 1:35:55.640 --> 1:35:58.000 when they have no one to go shit, you can't 1:35:58.040 --> 1:36:02.720 do that. Customers will be mad because otherwise they'd say, so, 1:36:02.800 --> 1:36:05.600 what is chet GPT exact? Why are we doing this 1:36:05.760 --> 1:36:07.280 that just not more most stuff? 1:36:07.560 --> 1:36:09.439 Well, again, I would say I would push back on 1:36:09.479 --> 1:36:12.640 that a little bit because it did rack up organically, 1:36:12.960 --> 1:36:14.960 you know, one hundred million users or whatever. So there 1:36:14.960 --> 1:36:16.760 were some people who are like, this is a fun 1:36:16.800 --> 1:36:19.840 toy to play with, okay, but actually okay, well, but 1:36:19.960 --> 1:36:22.639 but then we transition to like, well, that's not really 1:36:22.680 --> 1:36:25.160 gonna make us any money, so how do we get 1:36:25.200 --> 1:36:26.720 it to make any money? And then all of a 1:36:26.720 --> 1:36:28.919 sudden it's like, oh, maybe we can just like automate 1:36:29.000 --> 1:36:31.880 some stuff. And it becomes an enterprise software that it's 1:36:31.920 --> 1:36:35.640 selling that it's being sold you know, to to consultancies, 1:36:35.760 --> 1:36:39.719 to uh fintech firms, to anyone who any any anyone, 1:36:39.880 --> 1:36:42.360 anyone who will who will listen to a to an 1:36:42.360 --> 1:36:45.120 open AI salesman's pitch, and that's how we wind up 1:36:45.120 --> 1:36:48.280 where we are today. Where you have hundreds of thousands 1:36:48.320 --> 1:36:52.480 of these enterprise seats sold to a dubiously useful technology. 1:36:52.960 --> 1:36:53.200 Uh. 1:36:53.240 --> 1:36:57.240 People are are rightfully concerned that it's that it's you know, 1:36:57.280 --> 1:37:01.599 that it's threatening their uh, their their, their livelihoods. Even 1:37:01.640 --> 1:37:02.840 though it doesn't do a good job. 1:37:02.880 --> 1:37:03.360 It sucks. 1:37:03.360 --> 1:37:05.200 This is a point that Coreya makes a lot, is 1:37:05.200 --> 1:37:09.400 that it doesn't actually often create a superior product. It 1:37:09.439 --> 1:37:12.680 almost never does. Yeah, it's just it's good enough for 1:37:12.720 --> 1:37:14.320 a manager to say, all right, we'll take it. 1:37:14.320 --> 1:37:15.599 It's cheaper. But I wanted to. 1:37:15.560 --> 1:37:17.360 Push back on one thing. And I don't necessarily know 1:37:17.400 --> 1:37:20.360 if you've disagree, But yeah, I don't know if chat 1:37:20.439 --> 1:37:23.360 GPT grew organically. The reason I say that is this 1:37:24.000 --> 1:37:26.000 when you have no hypergrowth markets, when you have no 1:37:26.120 --> 1:37:29.160 big new thing, and you have what I would argue 1:37:29.200 --> 1:37:34.200 is members of the media willfully engaging in a marketing campaign. Yeah, 1:37:34.280 --> 1:37:36.720 run by and I would. By the way, like all 1:37:36.720 --> 1:37:39.360 evil systems, I don't know how much of this was conscious. 1:37:39.800 --> 1:37:42.280 I don't think people sat around and now we shall 1:37:42.280 --> 1:37:44.240 all agree to write about chat GEPT. 1:37:44.520 --> 1:37:44.600 No. 1:37:44.760 --> 1:37:48.479 I think that just a desperation in the media for 1:37:48.520 --> 1:37:51.120 something new to write about, connected with the desperation in 1:37:51.200 --> 1:37:53.719 venture capital, which connected with the desperation in the market. 1:37:53.960 --> 1:37:54.479 Boom yeah. 1:37:54.520 --> 1:37:57.519 And then into the vacuum comes this new apparently viable 1:37:57.600 --> 1:38:01.000 product about which any number of narratives can. 1:38:00.960 --> 1:38:04.280 Unfold exactly, and you can probabilis telling me to leave 1:38:04.320 --> 1:38:07.120 my wife. Wow, you know, like Kevin Rose, the goat 1:38:07.120 --> 1:38:08.400 of freaking out about the computer. 1:38:08.720 --> 1:38:12.680 But you really, you really, you know whether or not. 1:38:12.800 --> 1:38:14.880 The one thing that I would say in its corner 1:38:15.000 --> 1:38:18.479 that that maybe some of that was is that is 1:38:18.520 --> 1:38:22.559 that it hasn't claimed that user growth has increased much 1:38:22.600 --> 1:38:25.240 since then We're like a year later, they're still saying. 1:38:25.040 --> 1:38:26.880 Like, well, we still got one hundred million years. 1:38:27.439 --> 1:38:29.759 So you'd think that if they were inflating that figure, 1:38:29.760 --> 1:38:32.120 they would at least they would find some you know, 1:38:32.240 --> 1:38:34.880 metric to put together active paine. Now we've got two 1:38:34.960 --> 1:38:38.639 hundred yeah, exactly, some muskie and you know, minutes viewed 1:38:38.760 --> 1:38:40.799 per syllable generally. 1:38:41.400 --> 1:38:44.960 Yeah. So I think that, you know, maybe a useful 1:38:44.960 --> 1:38:48.760 analogy here, although not a perfect one, is gamification. Right. So, 1:38:49.160 --> 1:38:51.639 if you've read Jane mcgonagle's old work on this stuff, 1:38:51.680 --> 1:38:53.800 you know, Jane was doing this incredible stuff where she 1:38:54.240 --> 1:38:56.719 On the one hand, she she'd suffered a neurological industry 1:38:57.000 --> 1:39:00.080 injury rather and she needed to do a lot of 1:39:00.400 --> 1:39:05.000 very repetitive and difficult and generally low compliance rehabilitation for it. 1:39:05.040 --> 1:39:07.200 People don't recover from those injuries because it's so hard 1:39:07.240 --> 1:39:09.200 to do. And she made a game out of it, right, 1:39:09.240 --> 1:39:11.439 and it really worked, and she started she's a game developer. 1:39:11.479 --> 1:39:13.479 She started figuring out how to bring these out. So 1:39:13.560 --> 1:39:17.200 there are some marketing crossings. I don't remember where she was, 1:39:17.240 --> 1:39:19.360 but she you know, she she worked on I Love Bees, 1:39:19.400 --> 1:39:22.800 which was the AI movie, and she worked on a 1:39:22.800 --> 1:39:26.160 bunch of other like really Texas Hold Them, Texas, Tombstone 1:39:26.160 --> 1:39:28.200 Hold Them or whatever it was called Tombstone Hold Them. 1:39:28.320 --> 1:39:31.720 People got married playing these games like they were really fun, right, 1:39:32.160 --> 1:39:34.280 And then a bunch of people said, oh, well, we 1:39:34.280 --> 1:39:38.439 could use these to get Amazon warehouse workers to uh 1:39:39.200 --> 1:39:41.920 gamify how long they can go without urinating so that 1:39:41.960 --> 1:39:45.080 they can meet quota. Right. And we look at that 1:39:45.120 --> 1:39:47.400 and we go, oh, this is horrific, But playing games 1:39:47.479 --> 1:39:51.120 is not horrific, right, right, And I've been following people 1:39:51.160 --> 1:39:53.439 doing weird, playful things with stuff we would now call 1:39:53.479 --> 1:39:55.479 generative AI. For a really long time. This guy called 1:39:55.520 --> 1:39:58.679 Shardcore is like a digital artist who's making weird videos 1:39:58.680 --> 1:40:02.400 and stills forever, really cool fun stuff. You know, literally 1:40:02.400 --> 1:40:05.799 a decade of this, which lends it self generative. Yeah, 1:40:05.840 --> 1:40:07.720 and you know, today I look around and I see 1:40:07.760 --> 1:40:10.080 people who like play a D and D game, and 1:40:10.120 --> 1:40:13.960 then at the end, the LM has generated a transcript 1:40:14.000 --> 1:40:18.120 of the game. It generates a precie of the transcript, 1:40:18.200 --> 1:40:21.080 It illustrates it with fun epic moments from it. It 1:40:21.080 --> 1:40:23.920 doesn't matter if the ORC has six fingers, right, And 1:40:23.960 --> 1:40:26.040 everybody looks at that and they go, hahaha, that's great, 1:40:26.360 --> 1:40:31.920 and then they fire the customer service reps for your insulin. 1:40:32.320 --> 1:40:34.720 For the company that runs the thing that generates the 1:40:34.800 --> 1:40:35.400 ORC pictures. 1:40:35.800 --> 1:40:38.160 You know, No that for the people who supply you 1:40:38.360 --> 1:40:42.400 with dialysis you sell, or who determine whether or not 1:40:42.439 --> 1:40:45.120 you can legally get insulin on your insurance. And you 1:40:45.160 --> 1:40:47.960 find yourself arguing with a chatbot about whether you're going 1:40:48.040 --> 1:40:50.679 to get dialysis? Who live? And then you die? Right, 1:40:50.760 --> 1:40:55.040 And that's not a problem with the existence of tools 1:40:55.040 --> 1:40:58.720 that do weird shit, right, that is a problem. And 1:40:58.800 --> 1:41:03.160 now the thing is that total addressable market of epic 1:41:03.439 --> 1:41:08.479 illustrations from last night's D and D game is very small. Yes, 1:41:09.320 --> 1:41:12.800 and it may be that some of the productive residue 1:41:12.800 --> 1:41:16.400 of this bubble will be standalone models that run on 1:41:16.560 --> 1:41:20.680 commodity hard Yeah. And in the same way that, like 1:41:20.720 --> 1:41:23.479 the productive residue of the world Coom bubble was a 1:41:23.520 --> 1:41:25.040 lot of dark fiber in the ground that's being lit 1:41:25.120 --> 1:41:27.640 up now. The productive residue the dot com bubble was 1:41:27.760 --> 1:41:30.559 a couple hundred million humanities undergrads who are coerced into 1:41:30.640 --> 1:41:33.720 dropping out learning Python, Pearl and HTML and went on 1:41:33.760 --> 1:41:35.639 to create a bunch of really playful things that turned 1:41:35.640 --> 1:41:37.960 into Web two point zero. That might be a productive resue, 1:41:37.960 --> 1:41:39.720 doesn't make the bubble good. Bubbles are always bad. They 1:41:39.800 --> 1:41:43.200 steal from retail investors mom pops and leave them eating 1:41:43.200 --> 1:41:45.679 dog food into their retirement or sleeping a cardboard box. 1:41:45.680 --> 1:41:48.719 They're very bad, right. But en Ron was a bubble 1:41:48.720 --> 1:41:52.439 that left nothing behind, right, NFTs left nothing behind, But 1:41:52.560 --> 1:41:55.479 like shitty JPEGs and worse Austrian ex customs, the tank 1:41:55.640 --> 1:41:57.920 was bad. Yeah, but this case, in this case, maybe 1:41:57.920 --> 1:41:58.880 something good comes of it. 1:41:58.960 --> 1:41:59.080 Right. 1:41:59.120 --> 1:42:01.439 It doesn't make the thing good, but maybe something good 1:42:01.479 --> 1:42:04.280 comes up it maybe there's a productive residue, maybe not. 1:42:04.520 --> 1:42:06.000 I think it's so yeah. 1:42:06.000 --> 1:42:08.559 I mean you've probably been watching the Olympics or at 1:42:08.600 --> 1:42:10.320 least read about like the I think one of the 1:42:10.360 --> 1:42:13.280 really telling you. One of the telling things here is 1:42:13.320 --> 1:42:15.799 you can look at how these companies are like trying 1:42:15.840 --> 1:42:21.200 to advertise generative AI service. So when the first like Google, 1:42:21.520 --> 1:42:23.760 you know, Gemini or I forget what it was called it, 1:42:23.800 --> 1:42:25.320 then maybe it was already overview, but it was like, 1:42:25.600 --> 1:42:27.559 you know, embrace this techno and then you can you 1:42:27.600 --> 1:42:30.200 can use it to scan all your photos and I'll 1:42:30.200 --> 1:42:33.640 tell you our new AI will tell you what your license. 1:42:33.280 --> 1:42:36.240 Plate number is. Is this a problem anybody has? You 1:42:36.240 --> 1:42:37.479 can't just go outside and. 1:42:37.439 --> 1:42:40.760 Look at the So that one is the useful one. 1:42:40.800 --> 1:42:42.559 But also I don't know if it's generally if AI, 1:42:42.880 --> 1:42:46.200 because it's just that's not they've now started wrapping these 1:42:46.240 --> 1:42:48.040 things in to try and sell the dog shit. 1:42:48.000 --> 1:42:48.680 Or look at this one. 1:42:48.880 --> 1:42:50.879 Did you see the did you see the ad for 1:42:50.880 --> 1:42:53.639 for Meta's AI where it's like they're like walking through 1:42:53.840 --> 1:42:58.880 a little Italy and going and and she's like she's like, Grandpa, 1:42:59.040 --> 1:43:01.599 weren't you here when it was you know the beginning 1:43:01.640 --> 1:43:05.120 of little Italy and she's like, meta, tell me what 1:43:05.360 --> 1:43:07.479 you know, tell me what little Italy looks like. Now 1:43:07.479 --> 1:43:09.519 we can see it, and it like produces like a 1:43:09.560 --> 1:43:13.160 slop picture of like a pretend little little when it's 1:43:13.200 --> 1:43:15.880 just like there are photos of little Italy. 1:43:16.040 --> 1:43:18.000 Could you could like, yeah, you could? That are in 1:43:18.080 --> 1:43:20.360 a public aren't they also look up woods. 1:43:20.360 --> 1:43:23.000 Or the Google one where they were like, oh you 1:43:23.040 --> 1:43:25.160 can have your Does your daughter want to write a 1:43:25.240 --> 1:43:26.960 letter to an Olympic athlete? 1:43:26.960 --> 1:43:28.120 Did you see this one? Yes? 1:43:28.240 --> 1:43:33.599 And it was like, have Google Gemini generate and use 1:43:33.720 --> 1:43:37.600 generative AI to write the letter. And it's like, obviously 1:43:37.640 --> 1:43:41.200 this has been roasted because it's the whole point of 1:43:41.240 --> 1:43:43.880 an activity like that is you get to you, you 1:43:43.920 --> 1:43:46.880 introduce your child to this, you know, to this this 1:43:47.080 --> 1:43:50.880 art of writing something down and engaging with this dream 1:43:51.120 --> 1:43:54.040 of of you know, and you actually participating in an 1:43:54.080 --> 1:43:56.520 activity not just like a fuck it hit a button. 1:43:56.280 --> 1:43:57.640 And you can imagine what it would be like to 1:43:57.640 --> 1:44:00.800 be the athlete. After that video rounds, that's twenty million 1:44:00.840 --> 1:44:04.600 AI slot letter. Where do I begin? So I have 1:44:04.640 --> 1:44:08.960 a friend who's a professor who tells me that now 1:44:09.200 --> 1:44:10.439 it used to be that if someone asked you to 1:44:10.439 --> 1:44:13.360 write a letter of recommendation for a grand student, you'd 1:44:13.400 --> 1:44:16.320 be very selective because you wouldn't want to just say 1:44:16.400 --> 1:44:18.240 yes to everybody because it's a lot of work. And 1:44:18.240 --> 1:44:20.160 then the people who got those letters really valued them 1:44:20.200 --> 1:44:22.320 because they knew that you were very selective. But now 1:44:23.040 --> 1:44:26.040 you take three bullet points about anyone who asks, and 1:44:26.080 --> 1:44:29.120 it expands it into an AI slot recommendation letter, which 1:44:29.200 --> 1:44:31.600 means that they're now getting so many recommendation letters that 1:44:31.640 --> 1:44:34.960 they ask AI to summarize them back into three different 1:44:34.960 --> 1:44:38.120 bullet points, three extremely losty bullet points, and the entire 1:44:38.160 --> 1:44:39.160 system is broken down. 1:44:39.280 --> 1:44:43.360 Hosting the ass hose in the mouth, it's it's my favorite. 1:44:43.360 --> 1:44:45.479 One of these commercials, by the way, was the co 1:44:45.640 --> 1:44:49.040 pilot ad for Microsoft on the Super Bowl where one 1:44:49.040 --> 1:44:52.439 of the things eagle in listeners will hear this and say, 1:44:52.920 --> 1:44:55.120 I just smashed the window, but I know this bit. 1:44:56.479 --> 1:44:58.519 It said, there's a bit what you type and say 1:44:58.720 --> 1:45:00.360 write the code for my three D game. 1:45:00.880 --> 1:45:03.120 Yeah, it doesn't do it. I did it. 1:45:03.120 --> 1:45:05.040 It creates a document telling you how to make a 1:45:05.040 --> 1:45:07.680 three D game. And I think that the point I'm 1:45:07.680 --> 1:45:10.000 coming towards him glad you'd brought this up both you 1:45:10.160 --> 1:45:14.679 is GPT really isn't the problem. Transformer based architecture cannot 1:45:14.680 --> 1:45:16.280 do the things the saying it, But it isn't the problem. 1:45:16.320 --> 1:45:20.559 The problem is the people building generative AI are actually 1:45:20.600 --> 1:45:24.200 deeply uncreative because gory up, you're the person you cited 1:45:24.240 --> 1:45:26.760 who makes the cool art. That's someone who's effectively like, 1:45:26.800 --> 1:45:28.400 I don't know, this is a very messy way of 1:45:28.439 --> 1:45:30.800 describing it, but getting a robot with sixty arms and 1:45:30.840 --> 1:45:33.160 throwing pain to the wall to make something random, sure 1:45:33.200 --> 1:45:36.479 that is art because you are operating the machine. But 1:45:36.560 --> 1:45:40.040 generat ive AI, the way it's being pedled is depriving 1:45:40.040 --> 1:45:43.920 people of actual operational expertise or any kind of domain 1:45:43.960 --> 1:45:45.960 ex police. It's you're not writing a letter that you 1:45:46.000 --> 1:45:47.719 care about because you're not writing the letter. 1:45:47.960 --> 1:45:49.320 Yeah, yeah, I. 1:45:49.280 --> 1:45:52.519 Mean that's I just I wrote a whole newsletter about 1:45:52.560 --> 1:45:54.719 this because it was bothering me so much. How many 1:45:54.720 --> 1:46:00.200 times they've heard it said, mostly by vcs and you 1:46:00.200 --> 1:46:06.120 know AI advocates saying well, it democratizes creativity. I mean 1:46:06.200 --> 1:46:08.800 in in what in what what is art? What is 1:46:08.840 --> 1:46:13.240 more democratic than just producing art? Already? This is not 1:46:13.360 --> 1:46:16.320 something that needs to be further democratized. 1:46:16.760 --> 1:46:21.599 Actually democratizes creativity, access to the ants. It's time and 1:46:21.680 --> 1:46:25.080 space to access the arts and contributing. The best way 1:46:25.120 --> 1:46:28.080 I got better at writing was writing but also reading, 1:46:28.280 --> 1:46:30.840 which was my privilege of my parents being able to 1:46:30.880 --> 1:46:34.320 afford the internet, afford books. These are the actual ways. 1:46:34.320 --> 1:46:36.080 But none of these people are creative to how the 1:46:36.080 --> 1:46:36.800 fuck would that this is? 1:46:36.880 --> 1:46:38.720 And this is my whole point is, if anything, it's 1:46:38.760 --> 1:46:42.440 doing the exact opposite. It's it's it's creating an automated 1:46:42.439 --> 1:46:44.679 process by which you can pump out as much shit 1:46:44.760 --> 1:46:48.920 as possible, thereby pitting people who create art for a 1:46:48.960 --> 1:46:50.680 living and hope to make a living off of it 1:46:51.120 --> 1:46:54.320 against a machine that can generate as much slop as 1:46:54.400 --> 1:46:57.040 as as as the client can handle. And it's just 1:46:57.080 --> 1:47:00.559 pushing down wages. It's making it harder for art to 1:47:00.640 --> 1:47:04.520 make a living. It's it's it's doing anything but but democratizing. 1:47:04.600 --> 1:47:09.000 And it's making extant relationships between like a publisher and 1:47:09.040 --> 1:47:12.120 an art and an artist, or a writer and a 1:47:12.200 --> 1:47:16.679 and and somebody who's commissioning work much more important, thereby 1:47:16.720 --> 1:47:18.120 depriving people who are new to. 1:47:18.080 --> 1:47:20.880 The field of opportunities. Uh, you know. 1:47:20.920 --> 1:47:24.200 Ted Chang makes makes this point in his Great New 1:47:24.280 --> 1:47:27.960 Yorker essays about AI that it's just it's it's depriving. 1:47:28.040 --> 1:47:29.639 It's it's kicking down that ladder. 1:47:29.800 --> 1:47:33.000 Basically, it's like people who practice a craft by doing 1:47:33.040 --> 1:47:36.920 stuff that's less than you know, authoring a novel that 1:47:36.960 --> 1:47:39.000 you know you're going to get a full, full rate for, 1:47:39.439 --> 1:47:42.360 or it's you might still just be learning to apply 1:47:42.439 --> 1:47:45.719 the trade by writing a you know, marketing copy. Well, 1:47:45.760 --> 1:47:47.680 the generative AI is going to vacuum up all of 1:47:47.720 --> 1:47:51.080 those jobs and those opportunities. It's it's it's the anti 1:47:51.640 --> 1:47:52.800 democratizing force. 1:47:52.880 --> 1:47:54.479 Really, I was just trying to look up a book, 1:47:54.520 --> 1:48:00.639 but I failed. There's a wonderful artist, cartoonist, and novelist 1:48:00.680 --> 1:48:05.040 named Linda Barry, and I co taught a workshop writing 1:48:05.040 --> 1:48:08.080 workshop that she was also teaching at. And Barry is 1:48:08.120 --> 1:48:11.080 a great believer in the idea that you can anyone 1:48:11.120 --> 1:48:14.760 can draw, and that drawing is itself a gateway to 1:48:14.800 --> 1:48:18.320 a kind of creative understanding of yourself in the world 1:48:18.760 --> 1:48:23.040 that is uniquely powerful. And as someone who doesn't draw, 1:48:23.560 --> 1:48:25.760 I was skeptical of this claim. She's written a couple 1:48:25.760 --> 1:48:27.920 of very good books about this, and she's also won 1:48:27.920 --> 1:48:30.960 a MacArthur Prize. And I came in and I looked 1:48:30.960 --> 1:48:33.160 at what my writing students had done after spending a 1:48:33.160 --> 1:48:36.479 week drawing with Linda Barry. They were not there to 1:48:36.560 --> 1:48:38.120 learn to draw. They were there to learn to write, 1:48:38.720 --> 1:48:42.120 and they were remarkably like they had a free and 1:48:42.200 --> 1:48:45.360 loose arm and in a way that you know a 1:48:45.360 --> 1:48:47.599 lot of writers. This is a very intensive writing workshop 1:48:47.600 --> 1:48:50.000 called the Clarion Workshop. It's for science fiction writers at 1:48:50.160 --> 1:48:52.760 UCSD and I'm a graduate of it and a board 1:48:52.760 --> 1:48:57.759 member of it and in instructor. And it's often characterized 1:48:57.760 --> 1:48:59.840 as a kind of boot camp, and usually you get 1:48:59.840 --> 1:49:01.479 an it's a six week workshop, and I think I 1:49:01.479 --> 1:49:03.000 was teaching week four and by week four of these 1:49:03.080 --> 1:49:05.760 kids are zombies. These kids were not zombies, right, They 1:49:05.760 --> 1:49:11.559 were really open and free and really thinking expansively. So, 1:49:12.160 --> 1:49:15.280 you know, I think that like giving everyone a week 1:49:15.280 --> 1:49:18.200 with Linda Berry democratize his art. And I think there's 1:49:18.320 --> 1:49:22.800 you know, look, I think like typing prompts into an 1:49:22.920 --> 1:49:28.599 LM is in its own way like being Jackson Pollock 1:49:28.640 --> 1:49:30.960 and throwing pain at the wall. If that's why and 1:49:31.000 --> 1:49:34.200 how you're doing it right, Like if you're fooling around, right, 1:49:34.280 --> 1:49:38.120 if you're fooling around, you can you can get to 1:49:38.200 --> 1:49:40.000 somewhere that you can't get to if you're trying to 1:49:40.000 --> 1:49:43.519 get their own purpose. And I just don't think that 1:49:43.560 --> 1:49:46.040 we're being invited to fool around. Yeah, I think that 1:49:46.040 --> 1:49:46.720 that's the whole thing. 1:49:46.760 --> 1:49:50.160 I think artists would not give a shit about jenerative 1:49:50.160 --> 1:49:53.680 AI if it wasn't being put in opposition to their livelihoods, 1:49:53.680 --> 1:49:55.120 as if it wasn't threatening. 1:49:54.760 --> 1:49:56.440 Their economics security. 1:49:56.280 --> 1:49:58.880 The people that are many people as they want can 1:49:58.920 --> 1:50:01.519 go play around at home and and do and make 1:50:01.600 --> 1:50:04.599 different variations and for their own personal enjoyment. I don't 1:50:04.600 --> 1:50:08.400 think anybody would would would begrudge them that if that 1:50:08.640 --> 1:50:12.560 wasn't simultaneously being used as a justification as a promotional 1:50:12.600 --> 1:50:16.680 material essentially by these companies who are then going to 1:50:16.760 --> 1:50:18.240 go sell other firms. 1:50:18.240 --> 1:50:19.800 And I know you're gagging to go to an abit. 1:50:19.800 --> 1:50:21.960 I want to say one last thing. We've got to 1:50:22.040 --> 1:50:23.720 rouse this bad bloup. So I want to say one 1:50:23.760 --> 1:50:26.080 last thing here, which is that if you pouparize every 1:50:26.080 --> 1:50:31.000 single commercial illustrator in the world without open AI, you 1:50:31.080 --> 1:50:33.960 will pay the kombucha bill for fifteen minutes for their 1:50:34.040 --> 1:50:37.200 senior engineers. That the only reason they're doing this, This 1:50:37.280 --> 1:50:39.400 is a great tragedy. The reason they're doing this is 1:50:39.439 --> 1:50:42.520 not because there is a huge market opportunity in popularizing 1:50:42.520 --> 1:50:47.360 commercial illustrators. It's that it is an exemplary opportunity. It's 1:50:47.360 --> 1:50:49.280 not that there's a it's not that the market will 1:50:49.320 --> 1:50:51.840 then return their investment. It's that it will be a 1:50:51.960 --> 1:50:55.280 very visible example of what you can do with open AI. 1:50:55.479 --> 1:50:56.360 It's a convincer. 1:50:56.640 --> 1:50:59.439 They are effected one of the few that actually works, Yes, 1:51:00.160 --> 1:51:03.240 that can be dependably relied on to produce results that 1:51:03.280 --> 1:51:04.639 you can point to and say, hey, look. 1:51:04.640 --> 1:51:05.840 That kind of works. Yeah. 1:51:05.960 --> 1:51:09.280 Yeah, So guys, it's been so wonderful having you. I 1:51:09.280 --> 1:51:12.200 could go another three hours, but that's just me Corey. 1:51:12.240 --> 1:51:13.200 Where can people find you? 1:51:13.400 --> 1:51:13.479 So? 1:51:13.720 --> 1:51:17.080 I'm at pluralistic dot net and as I've mentioned a 1:51:17.080 --> 1:51:19.599 few times, I write science fiction novels and other kinds 1:51:19.600 --> 1:51:23.080 of books, mostly published by tor Books at McMillan. You 1:51:23.080 --> 1:51:24.920 can get them wherever you get books. 1:51:26.520 --> 1:51:30.920 Brian, Yeah, I write a newsletter called Blood in the Machine. 1:51:31.280 --> 1:51:34.679 It's also the name of the book of the similar theme. 1:51:34.960 --> 1:51:36.320 You can check either out. 1:51:36.479 --> 1:51:39.000 Yeah blood inthemachine dot com. 1:51:39.400 --> 1:51:42.840 Yeahs so you and also hopefully I'll put all of 1:51:42.880 --> 1:51:44.120 the links to this stuff in there. 1:51:44.120 --> 1:51:45.960 But it's always good to hear out loud. Guys. 1:51:46.000 --> 1:51:48.200 Thank you so much for joining me and listeners, thank 1:51:48.240 --> 1:51:51.280 you so much for listening. When you get out of 1:51:51.840 --> 1:51:54.160 the clink, you can email me at easy at Better 1:51:54.200 --> 1:51:56.840 Offline dot com and net for my Canadian and UK 1:51:57.080 --> 1:51:59.080 just that out Canadians say z as well. 1:51:59.080 --> 1:52:01.880 Ez off line, You're like serial killers where everyone we 1:52:01.920 --> 1:52:03.600 look just like everyone else and we say Z. 1:52:04.120 --> 1:52:07.120 That's right, bellow Canadian, I've I just learned, I've met 1:52:07.120 --> 1:52:07.800 a Canadians. 1:52:07.840 --> 1:52:08.280 Wonderful. 1:52:08.320 --> 1:52:10.360 All right, thank you so much for listening, and Corey Brian, 1:52:10.479 --> 1:52:11.600 thank you so much for joining me. 1:52:11.760 --> 1:52:22.200 Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening to Better Offline. 1:52:22.320 --> 1:52:24.760 The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song 1:52:24.840 --> 1:52:27.479 is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music 1:52:27.479 --> 1:52:31.160 and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com, M A T 1:52:31.160 --> 1:52:35.600 T O. S O W s KI dot com. You 1:52:35.640 --> 1:52:38.160 can email me at easy at Better Offline dot com 1:52:38.240 --> 1:52:40.519 or visit Better Offline dot com to find more podcast 1:52:40.600 --> 1:52:43.920 links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend 1:52:43.960 --> 1:52:45.840 you go to chat dot Where's your ed dot at 1:52:45.840 --> 1:52:48.280 to visit the discord, and go to our slash Better 1:52:48.320 --> 1:52:49.880 Offline to check out our reddit. 1:52:50.680 --> 1:52:53.920 Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a 1:52:53.960 --> 1:52:57.040 production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, 1:52:57.160 --> 1:53:00.479 visit our website cool zonemedia dot com. 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