Speaker 1: I used to like soccer growing up, but then I've
Speaker 1: just grown out of it now and hearing a bunch
Speaker 1: of Americans be like, Hi man now Arsenal, that's my
Speaker 1: best American accent.
Speaker 2: Yay, you found him.
Speaker 1: I just I don't like it. I don't like hearing it.
Speaker 1: I don't need any Americans talking about west Ham.
Speaker 3: Oh Man forever blowing bubbles? Mate, you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: that's what we're saying. I remember catching them at the
Speaker 3: Bowl in ground playing. You know, did that other team?
Speaker 2: So yeah, there we go.
Speaker 4: Now that's someone who knows football. Yeah, unless they're like that,
Speaker 4: in which case they're an expert. Right, Hello the Internet,
Speaker 4: and welcome to season three thirty eight, Episode two of
Speaker 4: der Day's I Guys Say production of iHeartRadio. This is
Speaker 4: a podcast where we take a deep dive into a
Speaker 4: Erica's shared consciousness.
Speaker 2: And it is.
Speaker 4: Tuesday, May fourteenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 2: You're of our lord.
Speaker 3: I just realized on yesterday's Weekend Trending episode, I said
Speaker 3: I gave the days that are actually today, so you
Speaker 3: already heard what today is. It's National Decency Day and
Speaker 3: National Biscuit Day and National.
Speaker 2: Dance like a Chicken Day.
Speaker 4: Could we just be decent to each other and stop
Speaker 4: yelling on college campuses?
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Did you see that guy Richie Showjack on Netflix The Gentleman.
Speaker 4: I saw the first couple.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was just more a bunch of British people
Speaker 1: trying to wait.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, very believable, very believable.
Speaker 3: But the I just was thinking of the guy how
Speaker 3: he had to dance like a chicken for the Liverpool
Speaker 3: gangster guy. Yeah yeah, and just doing indeed more and
Speaker 3: more cocaine to be able to believe be a chicken.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You got one thing, right, and that's the chicken thing.
Speaker 1: But the decency. No, in fact, those two things are
Speaker 1: in no position to each.
Speaker 2: Other, right right right.
Speaker 4: I used to have to do so much cocaine before
Speaker 4: the chicken dance came on. At my middle school dances.
Speaker 2: I used to have to get.
Speaker 3: Fucking jack to the You start hearing that Poka band
Speaker 3: warm up?
Speaker 1: Oh man.
Speaker 5: I still fart whenever I hear Poka music. Man my
Speaker 5: Bonny Water Fountain. Ye, Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka.
Speaker 5: Here comes the story of Harry Kane.
Speaker 4: A soccer player with an amazing name and though I've
Speaker 4: never seen him run, jack Obe said he was the
Speaker 4: one who makes him scream and the Zeit game Baby's agreed.
Speaker 4: That is courtesy of hanahamic View on the discord about
Speaker 4: my favorite phrase in the English language, Harry Kane massive,
Speaker 4: I'm sure I guess esus Christ completely unoffended and uh yeah,
Speaker 4: just headed to the Harry Wow. Wait am I home? Anyways?
Speaker 4: I'm a thriller to me joined shout out to hanarhamic
Speaker 4: view though one of the greats uh throw to be
Speaker 4: joined as always by my co host mister Miles.
Speaker 3: Grasty aka Slithering and Fishing and big toothless smile heroin
Speaker 3: addict with Lebron James hair style.
Speaker 4: The video game was a horrible thing.
Speaker 3: Gollum's my new favorite Lord of the Ring singular reference
Speaker 3: to that apology letter from the people that made the
Speaker 3: Gollum video game.
Speaker 1: And couldn't apologizing.
Speaker 3: Yeah it was should have. Yeah it was terrible. It
Speaker 3: was absolutely terrible. And the first thing was like, we're
Speaker 3: so sorry about Gollum Lord of the Ring, and everyone's like,
Speaker 3: the fucking you don't even have.
Speaker 1: The name, you can't even get that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, not at all so on the discord that
Speaker 4: was from Blink.
Speaker 1: Yeah, shout out to you, thanks for that one.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, Wait is there fishing in that game?
Speaker 1: Is that what? Or did we just think that might be?
Speaker 3: I think because he just needs to From my understanding,
Speaker 3: he just lives off of just fit whatever from the stream.
Speaker 1: The chickens as well.
Speaker 3: I think he eats. I think McCallum is an omnivore.
Speaker 3: I think it's safe to say he would eat a
Speaker 3: tin can if pushed back.
Speaker 2: The chef like a goat.
Speaker 4: I've only seen the first of the Lords of the
Speaker 4: Ring and I was very high for so I don't
Speaker 4: remember much of it.
Speaker 1: So the first first time I saw the second one,
Speaker 1: Two Towers, I was in a Less the Square movie
Speaker 1: theater in London and was there with a few friends
Speaker 1: with quite a few drinks. And then it says Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings on the screen, and one of the
Speaker 1: guys on which goes, oh fuck.
Speaker 6: I thought, this is Harry Potter and a bunch of
Speaker 6: really like exactly the kind of people you thought would
Speaker 6: be there opening night for this movie, shushing him.
Speaker 1: Then we I think it said like Lord of the
Speaker 1: Rings and then took a bait and then said the
Speaker 1: two towers because immediately he goes, you're wiz it, Harry,
Speaker 1: and look the people punned around, very clearly wanting to
Speaker 1: say something, not realizing that this guy was huge. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was just a giant guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a total that.
Speaker 3: Well, that's good for happy Gilmo, my god.
Speaker 4: Gilmore Billy Madison reference.
Speaker 1: In two days, he would have punched them on fire asunder.
Speaker 4: Right right, I like it. Well, that voice you hear
Speaker 4: is not Harry Kane. We are thrilled to be joined
Speaker 4: by one of our favorites, the tech journalists and writer
Speaker 4: behind the newsletter Where's Your ed At? Where's Your ed
Speaker 4: dot At? This podcast with cool Zone Media Better Offline
Speaker 4: is a must listen one of my favorite podcasts that
Speaker 4: launched in the last year, so good go check it out.
Speaker 4: It's head Dry.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to podcast.
Speaker 1: The podcast voice the entire time, I don't even know
Speaker 1: what that is. You're in the pot, you're in the
Speaker 1: rock with the casters. Man didn't start on college radio,
Speaker 1: So what were you?
Speaker 4: Were you playing music or were you just doing like
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 1: I was playing music, but I was talking and I
Speaker 1: just bring random people in. Yeah, and my favorite thing
Speaker 1: to do was when I got crank calls from people
Speaker 1: is I'd find the number and call them back. I'd
Speaker 1: be like, we got cut off somehow. Right, most of
Speaker 1: the time, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, man, it's okay.
Speaker 2: You're on radio. Whoa, it's interesting to.
Speaker 3: See that kind of troll energy. Were like, I only
Speaker 3: meant it for to go in one direction. The second
Speaker 3: you acknowledge as a person, it all falls apart a conversation.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but I was born on the Internet. I was
Speaker 7: ready for this, like right exactly. Oh man, who was
Speaker 7: that one dude who did those crank calls in the UK?
Speaker 7: That comedian I remember, like they went viral over here
Speaker 7: in the internet era.
Speaker 4: Hmmm, it was like crah my, god he would do
Speaker 4: never mind, I'll find the thing.
Speaker 3: It was like boys you're thinking of, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Jerky boys, the Jersey Boys. I think that's a musical.
Speaker 4: Yea, look, my brain's not working all right.
Speaker 1: That makes three of us. That's right, two five well ed.
Speaker 4: We're thrilled to have you on. We're going to talk
Speaker 4: about some of the stuff you've been covering over on
Speaker 4: Better Offline. Why we got a little more detailed. I
Speaker 4: think the first time you were on We talked a
Speaker 4: little bit about Google Search being an example of the
Speaker 4: rot economy, but we have a better idea of kind
Speaker 4: of the specifics of how it got so bad, So
Speaker 4: we're going to dig into that and other companies that
Speaker 4: are being ruined by this, like management class.
Speaker 1: Of people, the McKenzie elite.
Speaker 4: McKenzie elite, You do your time at McKenzie and then
Speaker 4: go ruin the.
Speaker 1: Techste run any business you like into the ground. They'll
Speaker 1: pay you so well.
Speaker 4: For and then you'll fail upwards. We'll talk about that,
Speaker 4: and there's some also some interesting stuff on Elon Musk,
Speaker 4: who you referred to as n Ron musk ra Musk.
Speaker 1: That was the best pun I've made.
Speaker 4: There is a direction, there is a path that this
Speaker 4: could go down that's like really really like obviously, like
Speaker 4: anyone who's been paying attention, it is like this guy's
Speaker 4: kind of full of shit, right, But some of the
Speaker 4: stuff with Tesla and the self driving car stuff, granted,
Speaker 4: this being the version of America we existed, it's probably
Speaker 4: gonna be fine, But there's a version in a sane
Speaker 4: world where this whole house of cards collapses.
Speaker 1: What's Tesla is just such a peculiar company like the
Speaker 1: cyber trunk alone. Right, it's just insane that that thing
Speaker 1: is going on about like nearly chopping people's fear, like
Speaker 1: some guy put his finger in the drunk thing as
Speaker 1: it closed. Yeah, and like broke.
Speaker 2: Harper truck trunk.
Speaker 1: Honestly, we've also on you yes on unite. Yeah, especially
Speaker 1: when you're going to stick your finger in that. But
Speaker 1: also these things keep breaking someone's broke because he put
Speaker 1: it in a car wash.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I saw that one too.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They seem to just perpetually get stuck in situations that
Speaker 1: a nineteen eighty six Camra would carefully navigate. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think though to some extent, that's also they used
Speaker 1: to just make things better but easy. We're getting into globalization.
Speaker 4: But the Mackenzie person hadn't come in and given them
Speaker 4: the analysis that yeah, exactly in a couple of years
Speaker 4: actually makes it helps with turn over.
Speaker 1: It could save us thirteen cents per car, but the
Speaker 1: cause will last five years less and the meaning they
Speaker 1: need to buy a new one.
Speaker 4: Boom.
Speaker 3: Just the prank call thing I was reverending earlier was
Speaker 3: phone jacker, phone jack tracker. Yeah, Cavon Novak, who's the
Speaker 3: guy who's on what we do in the shadows. He's
Speaker 3: like this English comedian. He'd had this whole prank call
Speaker 3: website that me and my friends. It was like a
Speaker 3: show that was on I forget what channel.
Speaker 4: I missed a branding opportunity in elementary school. Apparent I
Speaker 4: could have been the phone jacker, could have been the
Speaker 4: phone jack.
Speaker 1: Now I want a Yeah, I want a title with
Speaker 1: Jack in it.
Speaker 4: In elementary school.
Speaker 3: Yeah if Jack, cause you don't pick up just so
Speaker 3: you know, it's weird on the other side, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4: I tried to steer clear of that as much as possible.
Speaker 4: But before we get into all that stuff ed, we
Speaker 4: do like to ask our guests, what is something from
Speaker 4: your search history or what is something that you've recently
Speaker 4: screen grabbed that is revealing about who you are.
Speaker 1: I've been very much enjoying this weird side project called
Speaker 1: them Crooked Vultures Queen. It was the Queen's the Sage
Speaker 1: front man bassist from let Zeppelin and Dave Groll on
Speaker 1: drums also but also that and Peeping Tom, which is
Speaker 1: another great name to say. But also it was a
Speaker 1: Mike Patten, So Mike Patten in the face no more.
Speaker 1: It is him Razel Who was this guy who does
Speaker 1: beat boxing with his mouth. Yeah, from the roots weird
Speaker 1: weird bundled Trio, which was to upstep but done with
Speaker 1: the band, and then I forget what the woman was
Speaker 1: calling it, but the DJs were called the Executioners. It's insane.
Speaker 1: It was like a one off album. It's fantastic. I'll
Speaker 1: be listening to it sit outside. The weather's getting nice here,
Speaker 1: so I'm just sitting outside having a frosty diet coke
Speaker 1: listening to music. It's delightful.
Speaker 4: Wait. What was this group again that had the Executioners
Speaker 4: in it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Peeping Tom. Wow.
Speaker 3: I mean I used to watch their like scratch videos
Speaker 3: because they're.
Speaker 1: They like they was excellent, Like the whole band's excellent.
Speaker 1: You got to check them out.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay, Yeah rec in Peace Rock Radar.
Speaker 3: I remember he passed away in two thousand and something,
Speaker 3: but yeah, that's okay.
Speaker 2: I'm definitely gonna look into that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's such a weird band, but it's great, and.
Speaker 4: I think the first time you're wrong. Your search history
Speaker 4: was also something related to the Queens of the Stoney.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's because I'm a huge Queens of the Stone
Speaker 1: Age fan. I've now seen them sixteen times. But I
Speaker 1: realized that there's actually something not Queens of Snage I
Speaker 1: could bring up, which is Peeping Tom, which I don't
Speaker 1: think has any connection to the band, which is unusual
Speaker 1: for music to me.
Speaker 4: Wow, look at you spreading, spreading.
Speaker 1: Out, spreading out. Now I listened to two bands.
Speaker 4: Yeah, have you been to the ORB at all?
Speaker 1: To the ORB? Yeah, I have. So I don't know
Speaker 1: how much you know about this thing, but it's really weird.
Speaker 1: They tell you to come in at a time, but
Speaker 1: then there's like an hour in this very strange lobby
Speaker 1: with these ai ai quote unquote humanoids that will respond
Speaker 1: to things you say. So you're there for an hour
Speaker 1: and it's crowded than the food sucks and it's awful.
Speaker 1: But also these these robots will talk back to you.
Speaker 1: But I've heard rumors that there's not actually robots, that
Speaker 1: there's a bloke who's just talking.
Speaker 4: Oh.
Speaker 1: If I ever come across the truth behind this story,
Speaker 1: you're here on better offline for sure. But I went
Speaker 1: to see Aronofsky's Postcards from Earth. One of the things
Speaker 1: I was up the very high seats, which were the
Speaker 1: cheapest ones, making them one hundred and thirty bucks apiece,
Speaker 1: which ridiculous for a movie. Those seats. I have never
Speaker 1: felt such powerful vertigo. I have a fear of heights,
Speaker 1: and I thought I was going to die at the
Speaker 1: whole time. My kid was there. He was fine, totally fine.
Speaker 1: That was like ah. But the movie itself is so
Speaker 1: peculiar because the beginner it's set in space, and it's
Speaker 1: like these people being woken up in cryo sleep cry asleep,
Speaker 1: and they have this whole, very belabored thing, and the
Speaker 1: whole thrust of the movie is that they remind them
Speaker 1: who they are and where they're from and all this,
Speaker 1: and the suggestion is that Earth has been destroyed by
Speaker 1: global warming. All that stuff, except one big problem. The
Speaker 1: space stuff is not actually filmed in the aspect ratio
Speaker 1: of the sphere. So you've just got this huge screen
Speaker 1: with this tiny picture like you can see it. But
Speaker 1: it looks terrible, right, it looks like ass But the
Speaker 1: actual main thing is genuinely really cool as the most
Speaker 1: impressive spatial audio I've ever seen. The screen is a
Speaker 1: it has depth to him. Yeah, you can hear a
Speaker 1: guy shout from the front of the screen to the
Speaker 1: back of the screen. It's very cool. It looks amazing
Speaker 1: for the amount of money it costs. It's a bloody
Speaker 1: joke though, right right, yeah.
Speaker 4: The yeah, we've talked about there, just like being there
Speaker 4: from the outside with the like high death weird.
Speaker 1: Like the ads of Salesforce Einstein.
Speaker 4: Are they doing heads now? When we were there the
Speaker 4: NBA Summer League and there's just a big basketball and
Speaker 4: it was just the surreal there being like a high
Speaker 4: definition basketball on the like hazy skyline, but then it
Speaker 4: would turn into that eyeball. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm
Speaker 4: good on that. Yeah, but but now it's like ads.
Speaker 1: It's adds. Yeah, well, just like a miscellaneous image just
Speaker 1: purple for some reason, right, just anything, Right. I do
Speaker 1: think they should just have a big eye the whole time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And they should, and it should very aggressively focus on
Speaker 1: one point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel freaked out.
Speaker 1: So like one guy who's just coming off whatever he's
Speaker 1: on is.
Speaker 3: Like, no, God abound me, and.
Speaker 2: Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it.
Speaker 1: And it's just there's a TikTok where someone did that
Speaker 1: where it's just his face going searching for perverts or
Speaker 1: something like that. I do think that they should do
Speaker 1: that as well. They should have a pervert.
Speaker 4: Watch what's what's do you think is underrated?
Speaker 1: So let's see yoga. I know this is a weird one.
Speaker 1: I'm changing. I know I'm changing a bit, but yoga
Speaker 1: yoga recently, and I'll tell you I've been doing it
Speaker 1: a few months. You want to know. I started off
Speaker 1: really bad, and I think I'm worse, but it's very good,
Speaker 1: Like I feel good after it, not during it. I
Speaker 1: feel very bad, but also I'm intimately aware that my
Speaker 1: body is fragile and terrible, but there's something quite fun
Speaker 1: about it. And I do it on my own. Don't
Speaker 1: want to done a few classes with people height it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to be around people. I look and
Speaker 1: sound awful. I make these terrible noises I smell. And
Speaker 1: that's even before I do yoga. Not just kidding, but
Speaker 1: it's I I love it. And also the amount of
Speaker 1: big strong men I know who have just been like, yeah,
Speaker 1: Yoga's it's like, you know, it's baby stuff. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: this is incredibly hard. Yeah, it's more of a challenge
Speaker 1: than anything else I'm doing.
Speaker 2: For sure.
Speaker 4: Mobility is such an underrated aspect of being healthy I
Speaker 4: think people don't understand is like just the ability to
Speaker 4: like turn your back in the shower without stressing your muscles.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, being really put in my back out trying
Speaker 3: to like wash my ass crack the other morning, and
Speaker 3: I was like, I gotta fuck it.
Speaker 2: I have to really stretching.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it gonna save me from washing my ass crack
Speaker 3: in the shower.
Speaker 1: Is the twenty first century, I shouldn't have to do
Speaker 1: it anymore.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And what my explaining to me as rigid as pass.
Speaker 1: This isn't the future. I should be able to be good.
Speaker 1: I should be in a perfect L shape at all
Speaker 1: times and still able to wipe my arms. Exactly where
Speaker 1: is it, sam Ortman? Why can't I do that?
Speaker 2: Come on answers?
Speaker 1: Just like the idea of yelling at sam Ortman about
Speaker 1: a bid day. Sorry, Yeah, what's something you think is overrated? Croissants?
Speaker 4: M hmm.
Speaker 1: I've got a croissant this morning. I was looking forward
Speaker 1: to our beer and it's everywhere, it's all over me
Speaker 1: and wearing a black shirts covering croissant barely got any
Speaker 1: matter to actually eat. It's very pissed off about this.
Speaker 1: I originally told you that getting up early was my
Speaker 1: overrated thing, and I still stand by the but croissants
Speaker 1: today I'm taking them down. No, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tolerate this crap anymore. They're messy, there's not enough food
Speaker 1: in them.
Speaker 4: There's only a bunch of hard They're just dissolve into
Speaker 4: a bunch of crumbs.
Speaker 1: They're like those are costs, like those Costco peanut bars
Speaker 1: that you just bite them and they combust. You get
Speaker 1: like two bites before the whole thing is just right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, isn't that like what?
Speaker 3: Because I feel like the jank Costco Kirkland signature croissant
Speaker 3: is the opposite, like it has no crumbs because it's
Speaker 3: just so like just poised, yeah, versus like I guess
Speaker 3: a good one is supposed to be that flaky version.
Speaker 2: I'm like, man, give me the mushy, give me the cramp.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I need, I need the cramp. Put the crap
Speaker 1: in my hull.
Speaker 4: Put the crap in my whole new album new album
Speaker 4: from the Tongues and the Jack Peeping to Phone Jacker
Speaker 4: featuring Phone Jacker and Top in My Home.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It is one of the hardest foods to eat on
Speaker 4: the go without just covering yourself, making yourself look like
Speaker 4: a backyard in autumn. You know, you're just like covered.
Speaker 1: Looking back out, and I'm not quite love that.
Speaker 4: Just nothing but crumbs all the way down. I'm already
Speaker 4: like I'm not the not the neatest person.
Speaker 2: In the world.
Speaker 1: So it's that makes two croissans.
Speaker 3: French people eat it with their hands. It's not a
Speaker 3: forking knife job, right, a chroissant, are we like completely.
Speaker 1: Depict I think you meant to like slice it and
Speaker 1: like put barter on it versus how I do it,
Speaker 1: which is just like just kind of like put it
Speaker 1: in my mouth bite and then it explodes everywhere.
Speaker 4: Right, that's why you gotta take it down with one bite.
Speaker 4: I sold your problem, duck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they say customarily you eat it with a napkin,
Speaker 3: but you eat it with your hands rather than utensils.
Speaker 1: Okay, I try that, Yeah, try maybe like.
Speaker 4: Tear off a little pieces and they dip it maybe
Speaker 4: into coffee.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like all right, Yeah, I don't know. All
Speaker 1: I felt was disappointment, though.
Speaker 4: Yeah, crumb cake is less crummy than fucking croissants.
Speaker 1: If I can eat the crumbs grape, it's all the flights.
Speaker 1: They're horrible.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, all right, great, overrated, underrated. Let's take a
Speaker 4: quick break and we'll come back and talk about the
Speaker 4: tech industry and why tech is underrated. And we're back.
Speaker 4: We're back, and sort of recap. Google search used to be.
Speaker 2: Good.
Speaker 4: It was good, and I remember a time that that
Speaker 4: was like the tech breakthrough that everyone was.
Speaker 2: Like, fucking believe this shit, It's like magic.
Speaker 1: They feel like it was a slow bun. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then it just was so ubiquitous at some point that
Speaker 1: it was just like people just assumed it would always work.
Speaker 4: Yeah right, Yeah, there was like a time in the
Speaker 4: late nineties early it's where people were like it's it
Speaker 4: was cool. People are like here, let me google that, right,
Speaker 4: or it was like you were like a verb or
Speaker 4: like you knew how to use it too. It's like
Speaker 4: you got to use quotation marks or got to use
Speaker 4: signs between Google.
Speaker 2: That's why I use Alta Vista.
Speaker 1: Actually that's what someone say Google foo and sometime that's
Speaker 1: a certain kind of guy.
Speaker 3: But I mean, like, yeah, Ed, we've when the last
Speaker 3: time you were talking, we were talking about the rotten economy,
Speaker 3: and I know we've made mention of just how Google's
Speaker 3: become just worse and worse, and then your recent episode
Speaker 3: about how Google just became an absolute, just unusable basically
Speaker 3: ad service just because as some of the words I understood,
Speaker 3: and I was I was right there with you other
Speaker 3: times conceptually I knew where you were going, but I
Speaker 3: couldn't quite put it all together intellectually.
Speaker 2: So could you?
Speaker 3: Would you mind explaining just sort of this shift from
Speaker 3: this like code yellow change that occurred, or this code
Speaker 3: yellow moment into this basically glorified ad server we have now,
Speaker 3: But please explain it as if I am an ignorant
Speaker 3: person that was distracted by a toddler while.
Speaker 1: They were listening. No problem. So the episode I wrote
Speaker 1: and the news accompanying newsletter was about in two thousand
Speaker 1: and I'm now going to put it up slide eighteen
Speaker 1: or eighteen correct, because the dates are important. Yes, So
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen there was a low called Ben Gomes
Speaker 1: who is the head of Google Search. Ben Gomes had
Speaker 1: been at Google since nineteen ninety nine, so basically the
Speaker 1: beginning he worked directly with Soga and Larry. He is
Speaker 1: and there are tons of articles about him where everything
Speaker 1: he talks about he's talking like a Renaissance painter. He's like,
Speaker 1: I believe the connectivity between dating, like he's so romantic
Speaker 1: about it. So on February fifth, twenty nineteen, he gets
Speaker 1: through a connection of events something called a code yellow,
Speaker 1: which is an internal Google thing that says there is
Speaker 1: a problem that's significant. There are higher codes, but they're
Speaker 1: extremely rare. Code yellow itself is actually pretty rare. So
Speaker 1: what happened was this code yellow was the revenue and
Speaker 1: ad side of Google saying Google Search, you are not
Speaker 1: making us enough money. You need to make us more money.
Speaker 1: And also, and this is very important, the amount of
Speaker 1: queries going into Google is not growing enough. Now, little
Speaker 1: side note for you. Queries in this case is referring
Speaker 1: to the amount of times that people search. Now, if
Speaker 1: you think about it for just a second, is that
Speaker 1: necessarily connected to how good Google is? Not necessarily. In fact,
Speaker 1: if there are less queries, maybe Google's better anywound what
Speaker 1: they were looking for, right, yes, which does not work
Speaker 1: for Google. So Google is then in this little futz
Speaker 1: of the code yellow, and between Ben Gomes and some
Speaker 1: other guys, there's a conversation where he says, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: I feel like Google is getting too close to the money.
Speaker 1: Google seems to only care about growth. And after about
Speaker 1: a month they resolve the code yellow, and there's a
Speaker 1: big email thread and there's a ton of emails that
Speaker 1: I'm just leaving out, but I'm sum racing as quick
Speaker 1: as possible. There's also on the sidelines this guy called
Speaker 1: Jerry Dishler, who was one of these noxious VP types,
Speaker 1: who was kind of like, yeah, guys, we need to
Speaker 1: make more queries and we need to make more money,
Speaker 1: so could you just do that? So the code yellow
Speaker 1: comes to an end, and it turns out that the
Speaker 1: guy behind it is a guy called Prabagar Ragavan, who
Speaker 1: was then the head of Advertising it head of ads
Speaker 1: on Google, and Ben Gom sends out a thing to
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who are all congratulating each other,
Speaker 1: saying we got through this great job everyone. Prabaga responds saying, yeah, actually,
Speaker 1: engineering did that. You didn't do it. He didn't do anything.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So so these emails came out through a Department of
Speaker 1: Justice is antitrust hearing, and I realized this is a
Speaker 1: lot of history. In twenty twenty, Brabaga becomes head of
Speaker 1: Google Search and then goes he takes over Google Search
Speaker 1: from this ideal from the idealist who worked on Google
Speaker 1: Search from the beginning, right, so he came in, he
Speaker 1: was basically meshed him out. And also, to be clear,
Speaker 1: this queries metric is insane. Having more queries means nothing.
Speaker 1: And in fact, these emails kind of detail that he
Speaker 1: takes over in twenty twenty. Now, if you really think
Speaker 1: about it, Google started to get really bad in like
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, and has got significantly worse constantly
Speaker 1: since twenty twenty. End of twenty nine, well, mid twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen they added this to mobile, but they put it
Speaker 1: fully on to desktop as well. In twenty twenty, they
Speaker 1: maybe changed to make it harder to tell when something
Speaker 1: is an AD on bribble now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I definitely noticed that change.
Speaker 1: They made a bunch of changes to make Google worse.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he used to be pretty easy. There was like
Speaker 4: a background. It seemed like pretty clear that they had
Speaker 4: a internal discussion and we're like, well, we don't want
Speaker 4: the product, we don't want to be actively tricking people into.
Speaker 1: Well they they it was funnier than that. They were
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, we need to see the numbers go up.
Speaker 1: Please make number go higher. Now, line go up now, yep.
Speaker 4: But yeah, like during the two thousands, like it was
Speaker 4: like there was a balance of like, we need this
Speaker 4: to be a product, a product that people want to use,
Speaker 4: and we need to make money off of ads. But
Speaker 4: they've hit a point where they don't really give a
Speaker 4: shit if it's a product that people want to use.
Speaker 4: It seems like it's that.
Speaker 1: And also within these emails, and again this is from
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice, is suit against Google for monopoly.
Speaker 1: So right, hey, what monopoly could they have?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: And what's really stark about it is what mister Rugavan's
Speaker 1: previous job was. So can you think of a what
Speaker 1: would the worst job that could be previously held by
Speaker 1: someone running Google Search? Just think about it for a second.
Speaker 1: You might not get it, but just think what is
Speaker 1: the worst company he could have worked for that isn't
Speaker 1: like I don't know deffinctively. Yeah, different companies, Like one of.
Speaker 4: The worst would be Google, as they're like, wait, driving revenue.
Speaker 1: Company within this period be not good at their job.
Speaker 1: I'll skip to it. Mister Ragavan ran search at Yahoo
Speaker 1: Watch two thousand and five to twenty twelve. In that period,
Speaker 1: they went from I think like a thirty three percent
Speaker 1: market share versus Google's thirty six percent to literally doing
Speaker 1: a deal where bing would power Yahoo. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yea, let me just say in fact check you real quick,
Speaker 4: let me go Yahoo that Nope, never said.
Speaker 1: And she says he's great and has a huge dick. Crazy. No,
Speaker 1: but it's crazy because you read this thing, and you
Speaker 1: read this story, and you read the emails, and I
Speaker 1: was writing it and I was like, is this someone
Speaker 1: messing with? This is ridiculous, right, because the emails are
Speaker 1: so grim. There's one with this guy is enginey called
Speaker 1: Shashi Saka, who's like, can we tell Sundhar Pushai about
Speaker 1: this and stop this? Two that's the CEO of Google
Speaker 1: and his former job was Mackenzie.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4: They're on the right side of a lot of things.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, bread prices, Oxycrton Yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's wild because you read this story and you're
Speaker 1: like it couldn't be this obvious, could it? And the
Speaker 1: timeline is just perfect, and I will I will actually
Speaker 1: say something. I'm previewing, something I'm working on. The Only
Speaker 1: time I've ever seen worse than this story is in
Speaker 1: my next newsletter. About Facebook. Yeah, well you don't have
Speaker 1: emails in this chain where someone is like, yeah, actually
Speaker 1: it's good. The product sucks, right, I actually like this,
Speaker 1: this is good. I've got documents where there's someone writing, yeah,
Speaker 1: here are the changes we've made at Facebook to increase
Speaker 1: engagement that made Facebook worse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, worse for the.
Speaker 1: User and it And guess who guess what COO of
Speaker 1: Facebook Sheryl Samberg until twenty twenty two McKinsey.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The people that run Facebook right now, or product managers
Speaker 1: or growth people. This is the this is tying it
Speaker 1: back to Google. The people in charge are management concerns,
Speaker 1: ads people, revenue people. They're not the people who build anything.
Speaker 1: They are parasites.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's sort of like what yeah, private equity does
Speaker 3: to like any other business, Like, we don't know this
Speaker 3: business innately at all. We just know how to make
Speaker 3: the line go up. And if that means everything falls apart,
Speaker 3: like then great, well.
Speaker 1: They're going to do.
Speaker 3: We have the monopoly right right. What was the way
Speaker 3: that search human was making ads before or making like
Speaker 3: generating revenue before the ads or they're just saying we
Speaker 3: need to.
Speaker 1: Blas them so Search But to be clear, at this
Speaker 1: point in like twenty nineteen, Search was making them tens
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars. Sure, it wasn't like it was
Speaker 1: a fledgling business and they were like, oh, we got
Speaker 1: to grow up everyone. This was a business printing money.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It was a beloved product that everybody used that everyone
Speaker 1: was like, Man, I'm glad that Google exists. I'm glad
Speaker 1: that Google isn't bad, right, And it was almost kind
Speaker 1: of magical. You just find everything now because the people
Speaker 1: in charge are thinking, how do we keep people on
Speaker 1: Google more? How do we make people use Google more?
Speaker 1: Versus how do we make Google good? Yeah, it sucks,
Speaker 1: and it's across almost every tech platform you look at.
Speaker 1: This is because I spoke about the rock economy last time,
Speaker 1: but since then I've done a lot of work actually
Speaker 1: covering the actual rot. Because you can speak big picture
Speaker 1: and you can say, okay, yeah things are bad, thing,
Speaker 1: bad people bad, look at bad person. But when you
Speaker 1: see in start writing how these people act and the grimness,
Speaker 1: the craven nature of the way these people work, it's
Speaker 1: it's stomach churning, turning. I forget which one it is,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's disgraceful. But also, these people have names.
Speaker 1: I genuinely think that just by saying Propagar, Ragavan, sun
Speaker 1: uppershy all them, Sheryl Sandberg, last Batch, like all of
Speaker 1: these people have names. I'm not saying do anything. I'm
Speaker 1: just saying that I genuinely think that they will stop
Speaker 1: doing quite as many bad things if we keep saying it,
Speaker 1: right because Probaca for a man who runs an one
Speaker 1: hundred billion dollars a quarter, I think revenue property just
Speaker 1: Google Search. He is very very quiet. No one had
Speaker 1: really heard of it. He'd be mentioned as a Wired
Speaker 1: art call. There was a ZDNA art call that called
Speaker 1: him Yahoo's search master, which is one of the funniest
Speaker 1: things considering how bad Yahoo got afterwards. But these people,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying anything should happen. I'm just saying talk
Speaker 1: about them. Saying their names will shame them, and perhaps
Speaker 1: they won't feel much shame. But the more that these
Speaker 1: people are called out for these specific actions, I think
Speaker 1: change can actually happen. And also Google's in a real
Speaker 1: pickle right now, like they they have buggered search up
Speaker 1: quite horribly. If I'm honest, Yeah, Like I've never seen
Speaker 1: a product get destroyed this badly other than Facebook.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I think like if ads are the
Speaker 3: guiding principle, I guess it, does that mean it's bad
Speaker 3: for people looking for information? If if if part of
Speaker 3: it means they're getting the best deal on the one
Speaker 3: of those indoor silent basketballs.
Speaker 2: You know, just being serviced to them.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find the good and the bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's the thing. So advertising itself is not evil,
Speaker 1: and for a while it wasn't perfect. I mean, anyway, it's.
Speaker 3: An ad in a second, but.
Speaker 1: I mean I definitely can't with ads on ads on
Speaker 1: better offline. Sorry, everyone, there's a lot of them. I
Speaker 1: don't control it. But advertising has always been a problem
Speaker 1: for search. In the original Google paper written by Sergey
Speaker 1: Brin and Larry Page, they literally say that advertising can
Speaker 1: create the wrong incentive for Google.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's the main Yeah, it's the main conflict at
Speaker 4: the center of the entire business. Like, this is not
Speaker 4: coming out of nowhere. This is like a long held
Speaker 4: battle where they had people in positions of power who
Speaker 4: were just who knew this was the battle. They were like,
Speaker 4: there's going to be add people money, people who are
Speaker 4: going to be constantly pushing us to decrease the quality
Speaker 4: of the service we provide customers so that we can,
Speaker 4: you know, make our ads more effective at getting them
Speaker 4: to click right. Like that's basically what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: I think what it is is that, Yeah, there was
Speaker 1: always going to be some profit incentive. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's possible to avoid, but it was a fairer trade.
Speaker 1: It felt like it wasn't so oddly craven. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: that's the thing. It's when you look at how they've acted,
Speaker 1: especially in these emails, and it's where's your head? Look
Speaker 1: for the man who killed Google Search? To listen to
Speaker 1: the podcast these emails, the people fighting against this are
Speaker 1: saying things out of a disaster movie. They're like, I'm
Speaker 1: afraid that all we care about is growth. Money. Is
Speaker 1: the money is getting too close to search? Ads are
Speaker 1: getting too close to search? Is there any way we
Speaker 1: can stop this? I'm not signing up to this kind
Speaker 1: of thing. This will create bad incentives. All of the
Speaker 1: warnings of that, and then some guys like noh, kram it,
Speaker 1: you're gonna works. And now Ben Gomes is SVP of Education,
Speaker 1: you know Google's education, Like that, sure, we all have
Speaker 1: interfaced with Google's education problem. I'm on the island from
Speaker 1: the prisoner. He's gone. This man has been put in
Speaker 1: a box, probably because they can't fire him, and he's
Speaker 1: much more valuable in the corner than he is out
Speaker 1: there talking to people like me. Yeah, right right, because
Speaker 1: I would absolutely I would be on a plane to
Speaker 1: go and talk to her. But like, hey, Ben goes.
Speaker 4: But it's the same thing. We've talked about this with
Speaker 4: Dei and you know other you know, with environmental policies.
Speaker 4: When companies are asked to pay attention to the environmental impact,
Speaker 4: it will be popular and it will be entertained by
Speaker 4: them for a while, you know, like for Google it
Speaker 4: lasted almost an entire decade, But like that was the
Speaker 4: main battle that's happening within Search is like, Okay, we're
Speaker 4: trying to make this product better. The money people are
Speaker 4: trying to you know, take it over, and eventually it
Speaker 4: just they wear you down because Wall Street is ultimately
Speaker 4: the thing that the people at the very top end
Speaker 4: up getting kind of inundated with to the point that
Speaker 4: it's like what you know, it's their entire incentive structure.
Speaker 4: So just feel like, yeah, the whole thing is just
Speaker 4: management people and above conjugating the desires of Wall Street
Speaker 4: down through the people who are actually building products that
Speaker 4: customers use. And you know, basically that is the conflict
Speaker 4: that we're seeing happen over and over again. And the
Speaker 4: people who care about the quality of the product, or
Speaker 4: care about the initiative to make their company more diverse,
Speaker 4: or the people who care about the environmental impact of
Speaker 4: their company like that eventually always seems like it gets
Speaker 4: drummed out by Wall Street and gets treated as unrealistic
Speaker 4: and idealistic and childish by Wall Street, who ends up
Speaker 4: only caring about, you know, profitability.
Speaker 1: And what's crazy is Wall Street loves plenty of very
Speaker 1: bad companies. Tesla is a garbage company, but it's a
Speaker 1: meme stock now. It does no connection to reality, right,
Speaker 1: Meta as a company has burned like fifteen billion dollars
Speaker 1: I think, or something like that on the metaverse, which
Speaker 1: is never happening. But also they have made Facebook and
Speaker 1: Instagram borderline unusable, and Wall Street loves them because they
Speaker 1: print money. What's insane is all these companies had to
Speaker 1: do was provide a decent service and just make them better,
Speaker 1: and they could just print money run them like a casino,
Speaker 1: like just we don't want to mess with the winning formula.
Speaker 1: That's why casinos look the way they do for so long,
Speaker 1: because they have a supply and demand thing and they
Speaker 1: work it very nicely, but they know touching that little
Speaker 1: balance canno the whole thing off. And it's crazy. It
Speaker 1: makes me feel a little bit crazy like it does
Speaker 1: because as I mentioned earlier, when I wrote The Row Economy,
Speaker 1: I had a few public things and I looked at
Speaker 1: and I was like, yeah, this makes sense. This is
Speaker 1: this is a strong theory. It's backed up by things
Speaker 1: I've read. Seeing it in action, really and I'm already
Speaker 1: kind of pissy. I'm kind of a pissy missy by
Speaker 1: defare but reading what they're doing, and like some of
Speaker 1: these Facebook things I've got coming as well. That company.
Speaker 1: I used to think that Google was the worst one,
Speaker 1: but Facebook is Mark Zuckerbok's genuinely evil, as are all
Speaker 1: the people and gLite and Schultz and all these other people.
Speaker 1: There are so many people at Facebook who are just
Speaker 1: do not care. They don't care about the user. I
Speaker 1: kind of admire that there are people at Google who
Speaker 1: do right, and I think that only makes what Probaga
Speaker 1: Ragavan did more evil because he's just like, no, Na,
Speaker 1: don't listen to the bloke who built this crap. No,
Speaker 1: make more money, now, make money, now, make money, now,
Speaker 1: make money for the machines. So I could make the
Speaker 1: search engine worse and get more money now what. And
Speaker 1: all they had to do was just kind of leave
Speaker 1: it alone. But guess what, that doesn't create eternal growth
Speaker 1: in the street. Also, the real change was twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: when Sundar came men McKenzie boy and the mckinziye people.
Speaker 1: The moment they touch it, they got the the brown
Speaker 1: midas touch Yeah, turns everything to poopy.
Speaker 2: It sucks.
Speaker 1: It sucks so bad. Because they didn't have to do this,
Speaker 1: they could have. Still Google would probably if they left
Speaker 1: it in a good condition and didn't really touch it
Speaker 1: for seven years, probably still print like sixty seventy eight
Speaker 1: billion dollars a quarter. Because it's so ubiquitous. They pay
Speaker 1: Apple like ten billion dollars. Yeah, I think right to
Speaker 1: make it exclusive on I as well. It's just insane.
Speaker 1: It's really insane. And I think the especially given what
Speaker 1: I've seen of the Facebook stuff, much of it already
Speaker 1: out there, is I reckon behind the curtain. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of companies like this. I wouldn't be surprised if
Speaker 1: the Boeing stuff is going to reveal a lot more
Speaker 1: like this as well. But within the tech industry, this
Speaker 1: is what is happening, and this is what happens when
Speaker 1: you don't have the people who build stuff running software
Speaker 1: or hardware, you just get McKinsey scam artists who crap
Speaker 1: up everything forever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like the same thing that happened that's happened
Speaker 3: with the film industry, where people in the marketing accounting
Speaker 3: departments displaced the actual creatives who are developing films, and.
Speaker 4: They're like, no, no, no, no, no, these are the movies
Speaker 4: that make the line go up. Do we know anything
Speaker 4: about movies or storytelling?
Speaker 2: You no.
Speaker 1: Let me give you a good example. Microsoft, they just
Speaker 1: shut down a number of studios, including the one I
Speaker 1: forget what the name, Tokyo based studio called that made
Speaker 1: a game called Hi Fi Rush, incredibly successful first party
Speaker 1: title eclusive to Xbox NPC. Of course, great game. They
Speaker 1: shut down the studio and a bunch of other ones.
Speaker 1: Then immediately the next day, and I think the Verge
Speaker 1: had this one as well. It was like Microsoft says
Speaker 1: they need to make more games like the one that
Speaker 1: the studio they shut down. Mate, Like they were like,
Speaker 1: we need smaller indie games that people love, right, And
Speaker 1: it's like you just killed the company that did you
Speaker 1: And it's so obvious, and it's so obvious. And also
Speaker 1: I'm not even sure it's good business, right, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure they're actually making or saving more money.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Well, Google, yeah, they're definitely making money handover. This same
Speaker 1: thing with Facebook, but these things with game studios in particular,
Speaker 1: and the same with entertainment. It's like, you're not actually
Speaker 1: making money off of this. You're just like, I gotta
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get find fifty million dollars somewhere. Can we
Speaker 1: just kill that movie we filmed exactly? We just not
Speaker 1: release it. Can we take that off tax return? The
Speaker 1: other rush should close that loophole, by the way, that's
Speaker 1: if I can't deduct a boat, they shouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to deduct Wiley Coyote and His Courtroom Drama.
Speaker 2: Not the other movies.
Speaker 1: But also the other thing is I think all these
Speaker 1: tech companies don't realize at some point people are not
Speaker 1: going to care anymore. They're going to stop using these
Speaker 1: products and they're not going to come back, right, But
Speaker 1: the actual user churn is going to happen.
Speaker 4: So that would require them to no longer be a monopoly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: It feels like that's the thing that like the actual
Speaker 4: anti trust lawsuits need to like come through and actually
Speaker 4: make it so that they don't have these enormous.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's never going to happen, right. However, the
Speaker 1: thing that will I think is not what people are expecting, is, oh,
Speaker 1: they'll stop. They won't stop using Google because they need
Speaker 1: a search engine unless they don't, right, unless people just
Speaker 1: change their habits to move away from search engines. Now,
Speaker 1: search engines are bad if they don't use Facebook anymore.
Speaker 1: Like you've used Facebook recently, I'm sure it's terrible. You
Speaker 1: can't even see the people you want to see. Same
Speaker 1: with Instagram. I mean you run an account for the
Speaker 1: daily Zeitgeist. I'm sure you know you put it out
Speaker 1: and you're like, of the thousands of people that follow you,
Speaker 1: like twelve see it. Because of the algorithm. At some
Speaker 1: point people just go go, I don't care, I just
Speaker 1: won't use that. Facebook has already had churn they've had
Speaker 1: over the last ten years, a decent amount of churn.
Speaker 1: They've picked up new users, but it can go the
Speaker 1: other way. And the problem that these companies have is
Speaker 1: none of the people who built any of it, with
Speaker 1: Facebook being the exception, they're just a completely different animal.
Speaker 1: For the most part, the people who built these companies
Speaker 1: aren't there anymore, or they've been shoved in the corner
Speaker 1: and going out to the public and saying, hi, guys.
Speaker 1: So Google Search blue. It was so bad, but it's
Speaker 1: good now people are gonna be like, yeah, sure, mate.
Speaker 4: Domino's Pizza. We understand our product has been bad. That's
Speaker 4: because we're trying to save money, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's just very depressing. The whole thing makes me
Speaker 1: very angry. But hey, it's it's broadcast, baby.
Speaker 4: Yeah, all right, let's say, let's take a quick break
Speaker 4: because I do want to talk about and Ron Musk
Speaker 4: and what's going on over there.
Speaker 2: We will be right back.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 2: We're back.
Speaker 4: And so this is something that's kind of intersected with
Speaker 4: our show in you know, the sense that we all
Speaker 4: know that Elon Musk is lying shithead and doesn't really
Speaker 4: know what he's doing. When he starts takes over a
Speaker 4: massive company. And then we also covered the video they
Speaker 4: made early that showed a self driving car like driving
Speaker 4: from the Tesla headquarters to somebody's house or whatever.
Speaker 1: It was, the fraudulent one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then the we we covered it when it
Speaker 4: was revealed last year that it was just bullshit, like
Speaker 4: they they had used three D mapping on a predetermined
Speaker 4: route from a house in Memo Park to Tesla's then headquarters.
Speaker 4: Drivers intervened to take control and test runs. When trying
Speaker 4: to show the Model X could park itself with no driver,
Speaker 4: a test car crashed into a fence in Tesla's parking lot. Yeah,
Speaker 4: in the in their own part, So that that was
Speaker 4: like an impressive lie. But then there's also these stories
Speaker 4: that keep coming out about the autopilot, like leading to
Speaker 4: people's deaths and you know, horrifying fatal car accidents. And
Speaker 4: so you recently had an episode where you kind of
Speaker 4: went through what's been going on behind the scenes, and
Speaker 4: it started with this investigation from the NTSB and that
Speaker 4: and now it's gone over to NITZA because so NTSB
Speaker 4: are the they're the National Transportation Safety Board, I think,
Speaker 4: and they they're the one. They're like the hard asses
Speaker 4: from the plane crash movies.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I think like I think the I think
Speaker 1: knits is the one that can take action that stuff is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so NTSB was like, hey, you should look into
Speaker 4: this Tesla thing like years ago around the time of
Speaker 4: that video, and then National Highway Traffic Safety Administration KNITSA
Speaker 4: started an investigation at that time, and they started collecting
Speaker 4: data from Tesla but also across the industry with like
Speaker 4: other cars that had some sort of autopilot function, and
Speaker 4: eventually we're like, okay, so we found that this Tesla
Speaker 4: autopilot feature is causing fatal car accidents, and the problem
Speaker 4: is unique to Tesla, Like it's actually a problem that
Speaker 4: the rest of these other companies are not having because
Speaker 4: they're being more careful with it.
Speaker 1: Yes and yeah, So the big thing was that this
Speaker 1: Knitzer rapport that basically found that Tesla was It's actually
Speaker 1: kind of a gift for personal injury lawyers. The autopilot
Speaker 1: gives people a full sense of security, but also it
Speaker 1: doesn't Sometimes when people try and disengage the autopilot to
Speaker 1: make a move on the road, it doesn't disengage, which
Speaker 1: causes another accident. There are multiple times where the existence
Speaker 1: of autopilot made an accident worse. The Tesla has also
Speaker 1: really horribly marketed this as autopilot, autonomous, all these other things,
Speaker 1: when it really is just and I'm going to eat
Speaker 1: ed Nita Meyer, who is also on that episode, that
Speaker 1: it's kind of like watching a teenager drive but not
Speaker 1: being able to control it quite as well. Right, And
Speaker 1: what's remarkable about this report is it just details how
Speaker 1: unsafe this tech was. And there's two different things. There's
Speaker 1: full self driving, which is the one where you allegedly
Speaker 1: give it a location, it drives and puts itself there,
Speaker 1: and then this autopilot, which is the auto lane keeping thing.
Speaker 1: In both of these cases, they're both unsafe, and they're
Speaker 1: unsafe in a way that Tesla has made worse by
Speaker 1: the fact that I don't think they even save or
Speaker 1: the telemetry data. But there was a data collection issue,
Speaker 1: which I realize sounds weird. But if you don't collect
Speaker 1: good data on each crash, how do you avert another crash,
Speaker 1: especially when your car is doing things autonomously and AI
Speaker 1: requires training data. I don't know, and neither does Elon,
Speaker 1: And it's so bizarre because any other company in the
Speaker 1: world this report would have killed them, but because Tesla
Speaker 1: is this otherworldly shit pile where just Elon Musk has
Speaker 1: so much money to prop it up, it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: what is it going to take here? But also any
Speaker 1: personal injury attorney will just be able to go after them.
Speaker 1: It's a terrible report for Tesla then, because it's both
Speaker 1: as epic as it is based. He fired most of
Speaker 1: the team behind the supercharger network, which is Tesla's network
Speaker 1: lets you charge fast, and they've also opened it up
Speaker 1: to other cars, and it's a big thing. They fired
Speaker 1: almost everybody. Elon Musk has now claimed, oh yeah, actually
Speaker 1: we're putting half a billion dollars into this, like that's
Speaker 1: actually it's actually fine. But for the most part, there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of coverage up for around the time when
Speaker 1: they announced it a couple week or so ago, where
Speaker 1: there were people saying, I can't find someone at Tesla.
Speaker 1: There was someone on a YouTube or watch where a
Speaker 1: guy was talking about how a power utility could not
Speaker 1: find someone at Tesla to work with to install a
Speaker 1: new supercharger. All their people were gone, and it's so weird.
Speaker 1: It's just very weird because on one hand, this company
Speaker 1: could keep chugging along for a while. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: he could also fall apart in the next few years.
Speaker 1: It's not really obvious. They no longer have any real
Speaker 1: growth trajectory. Autopilot is incredibly incredibly unreliable, right, just it's
Speaker 1: not safe.
Speaker 4: They may, in a way, if they may, fundamentally fuck
Speaker 4: up their entire business model exactly.
Speaker 1: And Edniamier mentioned as well that autopilot is actually a
Speaker 1: fairly amazing business for Tesla. Most cars are very low
Speaker 1: margin businesses, but autopilots entirely margin. It's a Tesla thing.
Speaker 1: They effectively have monthly and annual recurring revenue from cars.
Speaker 1: It's genuinely great. It's a good business unless it gets
Speaker 1: made legal. Then it's not right. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: the cyber truck sucks. It's a bad truck. It's a
Speaker 1: bad car, it slices people's hands, it gets stuck in
Speaker 1: like a one inch bed of sand. It's not a
Speaker 1: good truck. So that's gone. That's not saving this company.
Speaker 1: And then he did this thing where he said, oh,
Speaker 1: we're going to do robotaxis. Now that's kind of in
Speaker 1: the crapper because of the autopilot thing. So his only
Speaker 1: other thing is, oh, yeah, we're going to make the
Speaker 1: Model two and it will be twenty five thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: Oh good, Yeah, a cheaper, a cheaply made Tesla.
Speaker 1: Tesla at this point is kind of insane, like if
Speaker 1: he could pull it off, it would be huge. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, the Model three, which is the
Speaker 1: cheapest car right now, actually nearly bankrupted the business. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and on top of all of this, there was a
Speaker 1: class action suit against against the Tesla board about how
Speaker 1: the board had greenlit this fifty six billion dollar pay
Speaker 1: package for Elon Musk that got thrown out in Delaware courts.
Speaker 1: So they have to now reincorporate the board and add
Speaker 1: some people who are independent of mister Musk. Now, mister
Speaker 1: Musk is trying to get around this. However, if he can't,
Speaker 1: he's in real doodo because an independent Tesla board will
Speaker 1: probably try and fire him because he's a terrible CEO.
Speaker 1: He goes on his website he bought, he posts a
Speaker 1: bunch of was I racist and actually racist stuff, and
Speaker 1: then he promises a bunch of stuff which pisss off
Speaker 1: everybody because he doesn't deliver it. And also he's a
Speaker 1: very annoying asshole. He's not fun. No one enjoys. He's
Speaker 1: not fun to work. He thinks he is Tony Stark.
Speaker 1: He's actually the Riddler, and it's just very he's a
Speaker 1: very divorced riddler. I think that that's the best riddle
Speaker 1: this Batman. Yeah, where are my kids? About the count?
Speaker 3: That shareholder call though, that you know where the profits
Speaker 3: were down fifty five percent, like even worse than analysts
Speaker 3: had thought. Yeah, And I always thought it was strange
Speaker 3: when he did the things like nah ah or not
Speaker 3: even an automotive company, if you thought that you're so dumb,
Speaker 3: or actually like a rope AI or what is it
Speaker 3: automation botics company?
Speaker 2: Is what he said, Tesla.
Speaker 1: I love that shit, Like no one's actually gonna get
Speaker 1: Like if that was actually your business and you stop
Speaker 1: selling costs, your company would shut down immediately.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: And that's just part of what his shell game essentially
Speaker 3: to try and be like, okay, man, we've definitely hit
Speaker 3: the wall there with the cyber truck. We're hitting the
Speaker 3: wall here with autopilot. I just need to say something
Speaker 3: that gives people a certain amount of like opium copium
Speaker 3: to pretend that this thing isn't completely just shitting the bed,
Speaker 3: which it seems like that's what is happening.
Speaker 1: And now the fifty four minutes ago, Tesla's head of
Speaker 1: cyber truck manufacturing is out.
Speaker 2: I'll fix it.
Speaker 1: God damn it. That's the best guy they had. Oh
Speaker 1: is it really not?
Speaker 4: Is there a world where the AI self drive?
Speaker 8: It?
Speaker 4: Like just this whole bubble burst, Like it seems obvious
Speaker 4: that all these massive companies that when you talk to
Speaker 4: people who pay attention to the market, the US economy,
Speaker 4: which is you know, what they describe the stock market as,
Speaker 4: but like they talk about how it's being propped up
Speaker 4: by all these massive tech companies, and it feels like
Speaker 4: that it's a lot of like smoke and mirrors. You know,
Speaker 4: there was a time when people were over investing in
Speaker 4: technology that wasn't ready yet, like the original dot com
Speaker 4: boom and bust like before like you know, decade before
Speaker 4: the internet was capable of doing the things that it
Speaker 4: wanted to be and that people were investing in. Like
Speaker 4: I'm wondering if that happens with AI or what do
Speaker 4: you think the future looks like? Because it also feels
Speaker 4: like maybe people are just too like there seems to
Speaker 4: be an overall thing where Wall Street has recognized like
Speaker 4: they can just insulate themselves from the from reality a
Speaker 4: little bit by just pretending and investing.
Speaker 1: So you mean AI writ large right outside of Tesla
Speaker 1: as well. Yes, So right now we're in maybe month
Speaker 1: three of like a six month to nine month horizon.
Speaker 1: I'm saying where AI has to start making money, right,
Speaker 1: It has to start making money, and it needs to
Speaker 1: start making profit because Google put and Amazon both put
Speaker 1: several billion dollars into Anthropic compared to Open Ai. Microsoft
Speaker 1: get thirteen billion dollars to Open AI, primarily in cloud
Speaker 1: credits to make the thing work. But also, who gives
Speaker 1: a shit? What has AI actually done? And that is
Speaker 1: the overwhelming feeling I'm having. And also, all of these
Speaker 1: magical promises have been made of AI and then you
Speaker 1: look at what they've actually done, it's kind of wank. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not very good at all. So right now we're
Speaker 1: in kind of the exciting hype cycle where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can say AI and stock go up, but give
Speaker 1: them another quarter or two and things are going to
Speaker 1: start falling apart. So Adobe actually got hit very bad,
Speaker 1: Like They're stock kind of tumbled when they said they
Speaker 1: weren't sure when a revenue was coming out of AI.
Speaker 1: But the big ones to look at, like Microsoft and Google,
Speaker 1: who have both put billions of billions into AI, if
Speaker 1: they can't start, if they can't show real growth there
Speaker 1: and at even revenue, not just profit. Revenue would be fine.
Speaker 1: The street would be happy. But at some point they're
Speaker 1: going to say the hell is going on?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Like what like is this do anything? Yeah, You've got
Speaker 1: the Rabbit R one, which is this two hundred dollars
Speaker 1: box that claimed it would control your apps with AI,
Speaker 1: and it turned out it just connects to like very
Speaker 1: weird scripts that barely work. All of these promises are
Speaker 1: coming to a head. All these people have said they're
Speaker 1: going to do all these things. It's going to be magical,
Speaker 1: it's going to change our lives. I think that there's
Speaker 1: going to be a market term. But I think there's
Speaker 1: a sietal one as well. Yeah, because Apple's talking about
Speaker 1: putting open AI in Syria and that's fine whatever, but
Speaker 1: do you think people are going to use that and
Speaker 1: be like, Wow, I love chat GPT Now Well, they're
Speaker 1: just gonna be like, oh, Siri works, Yeah, okay, Siri works.
Speaker 1: By what all these billions have gone into AI, I
Speaker 1: can't name a single goddamn thing that this AI boom
Speaker 1: is done for me other than give me a lot
Speaker 1: of things to cover, which is very useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah right, yeah.
Speaker 3: I mean the most is I've had fun with some
Speaker 3: of the music making AI things, and even then it's
Speaker 3: just fun. It's it's like a party trick. It's a
Speaker 3: video game at best, where it's like, hey, man, just
Speaker 3: try and make it to do a reggae song about
Speaker 3: RFK Junior's brain worms, it's like it kind of did
Speaker 3: a shitty job, and that's where it kind of ends.
Speaker 1: That's AI. Hey we've got a really expensive machine to
Speaker 1: do a shitty job. I'll do that for way cheaper.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You watch someone half fast something. Ah, I'm the Michael
Speaker 1: Jordan of half passing right exactly.
Speaker 3: And it's like, now I see like Sam Altman is
Speaker 3: talking about like raising like trillions of dollars from like
Speaker 3: the Middle East, Like what the fuck is going on?
Speaker 3: Is that him trying to say like, well, no, there's
Speaker 3: there's something coming, there's something coming.
Speaker 4: I'm getting the Petro States to fucking buy into this thing.
Speaker 1: Now. Yeah, he's going through a country associated with chopping
Speaker 1: up a man and American resident. I believe that was great.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, evil shit.
Speaker 1: So on top of that, what he's asking there for
Speaker 1: is he wants to create a more efficient chip so
Speaker 1: that AI will do something, because no one seems to
Speaker 1: really be filling in that part in the media doing
Speaker 1: a really bad job about this. He's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: need seven trillion, and he's kind of walked it back
Speaker 1: a bit. He's like, I didn't mean exactly seven trillion,
Speaker 1: but I need a lot of money to do this.
Speaker 2: That's five. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He's like, AI is inevitable, will be like a smart
Speaker 1: person that knows everything and does everything. Please let me
Speaker 1: build new chips so that I can prove it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you'll notice he did an announcement today for some
Speaker 1: new GPT four thing and it's funny. There was a
Speaker 1: big run up to it and everyone there was a
Speaker 1: physical event and it's like, okay, we've got a new
Speaker 1: chat is chat GPT four. Oh. The O stands for omni,
Speaker 1: which offers greater responsiveness to voice prompts as well as
Speaker 1: better vision capabilities. Yeah, okay, Just to be clear, computer
Speaker 1: vision the ability of computer being able to see something
Speaker 1: and say that is a strawberry or whatever you find
Speaker 1: it in like farming gear for example, been around for
Speaker 1: a decade happening before there's been AI that can understand
Speaker 1: voice and generative AI is slightly it's a bit faster
Speaker 1: on things like translation and voice stuff. But even then, okay,
Speaker 1: right now, what now? Do something?
Speaker 2: Do something with it?
Speaker 3: Do something, do something one thing right. The most I
Speaker 3: feel like that they can do is be like, we're
Speaker 3: terrible for the climate. You guys like that if the
Speaker 3: centers are everywhere and we're like, yeah, I don't see worse.
Speaker 2: Is this good fit you?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 3: This must be profitable then, and like to your point too,
Speaker 3: no one wants to pay for it, Like I would
Speaker 3: never pay for some like stupid goofy songwriting AI. Like
Speaker 3: it's free, So I'm like, yeah, whatever, this is fine
Speaker 3: for five minutes. But to the point where you're like,
Speaker 3: all right, now do you want to get a subscription?
Speaker 3: Like hell no, I don't need a fucking subscription of
Speaker 3: this shit.
Speaker 1: Also, the other thing with the AI boom that no
Speaker 1: one seems to want to talk about is not only
Speaker 1: is it making no money, it's also costing a lot. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and everyone's putting it into stuff for some reason. Opening
Speaker 1: Eye makes a billion or more in revenue, and everyone
Speaker 1: kind of reported that being.
Speaker 8: Like yeah, look, huh, and then no one seems to
Speaker 8: have asked the question of any profit, because if they
Speaker 8: make a billion dollars in revenue and they don't make
Speaker 8: a profit, that is a problem, not a solution, right.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, and it's yeah, I feel crazy. I
Speaker 1: feel crazy, man.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a it's a crazy world. Well, thank you
Speaker 4: for taking us into it. Of course, where can people
Speaker 4: find you? Follow you all that good stuff?
Speaker 1: Fuy me on Twitter, ed zitron edz it r awa
Speaker 1: and you can find me on blue Sky zytron best guy,
Speaker 1: don social, I want to say, And then you can
Speaker 1: find newsletter and podcast betrofline dot com. Shoot me an
Speaker 1: email easy at betrofline dot com.
Speaker 4: Amazing And is there a work of media that you've
Speaker 4: been enjoying.
Speaker 1: I just rewatched Seven Psychopaths as a classic green movie
Speaker 1: is by the guy who did him, Bruce. He's got
Speaker 1: Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Tom Waits, Christopher Walken, all the greats,
Speaker 1: fantastic movies. It's also a beautiful hour and fifty minute
Speaker 1: long hot damn.
Speaker 2: How about that?
Speaker 4: Miles? Where can people find you? Is there a working
Speaker 4: media you've been enjoying?
Speaker 3: Find me on Twitter and Instagram and the like at
Speaker 3: Miles of Gray.
Speaker 4: If you like basketball, check Jack.
Speaker 3: And I out on Miles and Jack Got Mad Boosties.
Speaker 3: And also find me talking about ninety day fiance on
Speaker 3: four to twenty day fiance. A tweet I like is
Speaker 3: from at lord rat Squirt. I like big butts and
Speaker 3: I cannot lie. My friend here likes big butts and
Speaker 3: cannot tell the truth. You may ask us three questions.
Speaker 2: Amazing, that's very good.
Speaker 4: Robert Jones at Stanton Underscore Jones make up your mind
Speaker 4: tweeted one of the great things about being a dad
Speaker 4: is how easy it is to launder my own desire
Speaker 4: for ice cream through my children, and that is that.
Speaker 4: You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore. O'Brien,
Speaker 4: you can find us on Twitter at daily Zeitgeist. We're
Speaker 4: at the Daily Zeikeeist. On Instagram, we have a Facebook
Speaker 4: fanpage and a website Daily zeikeist dot com. Or post
Speaker 4: our episodes and our footnotes, we link off to the
Speaker 4: information that we talked about in today's episode, as well
Speaker 4: as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles,
Speaker 4: what song do you think people might enjoy?
Speaker 3: This is a new band I stumbled upon called Karmachine
Speaker 3: and they are from London and it's, as they describe it,
Speaker 3: a mashup of Hindustani classical, fuzzy sixties rock a la
Speaker 3: Jimmy Hendrix and soon the inspired lyricism. And yeah, it's
Speaker 3: it feels like this. It's exactly that. I gotta say,
Speaker 3: that's a very good description of their music. And it's
Speaker 3: very it feels like old school but very new at
Speaker 3: the same time, and I just think it's yeah, really dope.
Speaker 3: So this track is called Without You and it's by
Speaker 3: Karma Sheen s h e N.
Speaker 4: All right, we will loick off to that in the footnotes.
Speaker 4: The Daily z Eeitgeist the production of iHeartRadio. For more
Speaker 4: podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or
Speaker 4: wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That's going to
Speaker 4: do it for us this morning, back this afternoon to
Speaker 4: tell you what is trending, and we will talk to
Speaker 4: you all then, Bye bye.