Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline and we are live
Speaker 2: from beautiful New York City, Nevada. I am edzit Tron,
Speaker 2: I am your host, and I'm joined by Thomas Jermaine
Speaker 2: of the BBC Today it's Better Off Life.
Speaker 3: Welcome Thomas. Glad to be here. So it's been a
Speaker 3: very funny few weeks.
Speaker 2: The Google is a monopoly, and of course you'll the
Speaker 2: next episode will be about that monopoly money stuff. And
Speaker 2: it feels like something is breaking in tech, not necessarily
Speaker 2: in a bad way.
Speaker 3: In that we're finally moving.
Speaker 2: It looks like the government is saying it's time to
Speaker 2: not have five companies that do everything in tech.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, we're clearly at some kind of turning point, right.
Speaker 4: I think you know, if we'd been talking about this
Speaker 4: five years ago, I never would have predicted that we
Speaker 4: would seen any meaningful antitrust action against any of these companies.
Speaker 4: Now it's all of them, and it seems like we're
Speaker 4: actually trending in the direction of doing something about it.
Speaker 3: And I'll even take that a step further.
Speaker 2: Two weeks ago, I would have probably said I don't
Speaker 2: think Google loses the anti trust case.
Speaker 3: I think that they're gonna win. I don't think the epic.
Speaker 2: The federal judge on the epic case, did you hm,
Speaker 2: So with that one for the listeners, we'll have the
Speaker 2: links in there about this. The federal judge, during the
Speaker 2: remedy stage of Epic suing Google over their monopoly over
Speaker 2: the Playstore, has been very clear that he does not
Speaker 2: intend to let them let Google off easily, and has
Speaker 2: said because Google has estimated six hundred million dollars of
Speaker 2: costs to fix the play store, and it's kind of multifested.
Speaker 3: And the judge basically said, when Google said, this is.
Speaker 2: Going to be really difficult, not my problem, which is
Speaker 2: one of the funniest ways of putting it.
Speaker 3: But okay, he didn't say it literally.
Speaker 2: He said, I'm paraphrasing, Hey, if you didn't want your
Speaker 2: monopoly broken up, maybe you shouldn't have built it in
Speaker 2: the first place. And it's it's awesome, and I know
Speaker 2: I can delight in this. Perhaps you come like we
Speaker 2: all know our oppositions here, but I think that there
Speaker 2: is something kind of magical happening because this is a
Speaker 2: good thing.
Speaker 3: Competition is good.
Speaker 1: I think even the tech companies would agree. Yeah, competition
Speaker 1: is good.
Speaker 4: At least in their public statements, right, yeah, publicly, and
Speaker 4: we're you know, there's been a lot of talk in
Speaker 4: recent years about all the ways that progress in technology
Speaker 4: has slowed down, not necessarily in the development of the
Speaker 4: tech itself, but you know the way that the landscape
Speaker 4: plays out, you know, innovation things just feeling like fun
Speaker 4: and interesting and weird, and a lot of people are
Speaker 4: arguing that that's because there's been so much power amassed
Speaker 4: among a couple of very large companies.
Speaker 2: And it feels like at this point we're at the
Speaker 2: end of whatever started in like twenty ten. We're getting
Speaker 2: to the point where venture capital doesn't seem to be
Speaker 2: being spent in the same way, where actually it's kind
Speaker 2: of returning to how it wasn't twenty ten. Like I
Speaker 2: think it was like two hundred and something million last year,
Speaker 2: it's probably gonna hear about three hundred million this year.
Speaker 3: And the mask and slut.
Speaker 2: You're not really seeing the massive acquisitions anymore. You're just
Speaker 2: kind of seeing the consolidation of industries. But I just
Speaker 2: I don't know what's gonna happen with generative AI at
Speaker 2: this point, because that in itself seems like monopoly of sorts.
Speaker 3: But also it's all gone very quiet. It feels like
Speaker 3: we're all waiting. I'm hearing about it so much all
Speaker 3: of a sudden, but also we're all waiting for something
Speaker 3: to happen. Uh huh.
Speaker 2: Because we went from recording this, we're obviously in this
Speaker 2: slight delay. We went from this period where everyone's like,
Speaker 2: generative AI is over. It's over too, not necessarily saying
Speaker 2: it isn't, but just everyone's sitting there waiting for someone
Speaker 2: to blink.
Speaker 4: Right, and like we're The conversation is constantly about like, well,
Speaker 4: when the technology gets better, X, Y and Z will happen,
Speaker 4: We'll get all this innovation, the whole world will shift
Speaker 4: around it. And it's not at all clear that that
Speaker 4: getting better thing is going to be real.
Speaker 3: But also they've stopped even saying that. Now. I started
Speaker 3: to see people say things like.
Speaker 2: Well, we've got to look at the smaller language model,
Speaker 2: maybe the large ones aren't good, right. And what what
Speaker 2: I do like though, is the Google's pixel event was
Speaker 2: just pure AI.
Speaker 3: The week after everyone.
Speaker 2: Was saying this is a terrible idea, like this kind
Speaker 2: of looks bad. I don't like how this looks and
Speaker 2: the it's like, nah, you gotta have AI and your earbuds.
Speaker 2: Now you need the thing you use for listening. You
Speaker 2: need to talk to it as well.
Speaker 4: And it's funny if you look at all the marketing
Speaker 4: that the big tech companies are doing, like you know,
Speaker 4: from Google to smaller companies, it's all about like we
Speaker 4: swear that this is useful, and they have like people
Speaker 4: you know, doing different things that you maybe you should
Speaker 4: try using AI for this. I think because they've really
Speaker 4: built a product that, for a lot of people is
Speaker 4: not intuitive. It's not clear what it's good for. It's
Speaker 4: clearly good for something.
Speaker 3: Is it?
Speaker 2: And I realized it's good for something? And I got
Speaker 2: a very annoying email this morning. And I get very
Speaker 2: annoying emails from someone's saying here is the use case.
Speaker 2: I use it every day. Just to be clear to
Speaker 2: that listener, I have no problem with you. Thank you
Speaker 2: for actually emailing. I love to actually hear how people
Speaker 2: using it bomb. I feel a lot of the biggest
Speaker 2: difference with general if AI is everything else that I'm
Speaker 2: being sold something. I'm being so oh Airport's what are good?
Speaker 2: You put them in your ears that automatically connect the
Speaker 2: music comes out, the noise can't slink these.
Speaker 3: I don't want the noise. I want the noise from
Speaker 3: the music I'm listening too. And then general IFAI comes
Speaker 3: along this AI stuff and it's like, well, you could
Speaker 3: use it for this, I guess what do you think
Speaker 3: of this? Do you want to try this?
Speaker 2: And you're like, no, I don't need to write a
Speaker 2: letter to an Olympic athlete at all, And if I did,
Speaker 2: I don't need it to be written like Grock.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've been working really hard over the past
Speaker 4: couple of months to try and find things I can
Speaker 4: actually do with it, and I've come across a couple
Speaker 4: of you know.
Speaker 3: You tell me like genuinely I would love to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I like it for I. I'm a writer, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: So when I'm stuck with like a sentence that I'm
Speaker 4: having a hard time getting from my brain onto the page,
Speaker 4: sometimes all you know, write out some like terrible.
Speaker 1: Version of the sentence. Yeah, you know, stream of consciousness.
Speaker 4: Ask one of the AI's, you know, for an idea
Speaker 4: of where I could go with it. I don't ever
Speaker 4: take that and then use it. But it's like it's
Speaker 4: I heard someone say it's kind of like talking to
Speaker 4: a smart brick wall, right, You're not gonna get anything new,
Speaker 4: but it can kind of help you sort through your
Speaker 4: own ideas. But that's not what the tech companies are promoting.
Speaker 3: I'm never gonna pay for that.
Speaker 2: And I fully admit that's kind of how I've used it.
Speaker 2: If it's especially some boring workshit Like I don't know,
Speaker 2: if I'm trying to come up with four ideas to
Speaker 2: talk about AI and healthcare, I will throw something at
Speaker 2: it and then none of the ideas will be good.
Speaker 2: I will be just really clear, it never really get
Speaker 2: a good idea. But I'm like, oh, that kind of
Speaker 2: makes me think about it. But again, is this worth
Speaker 2: one hundred two hundred billion dollars?
Speaker 3: Is this is this really?
Speaker 2: Because if they had launched this and the entire thing,
Speaker 2: this will be like a very twenty tens thing where
Speaker 2: they're just like, yeah, it's an ideation machine. You throw
Speaker 2: some shit in, it bounces it back. Because really, that's
Speaker 2: what of them's are They just kind of repeat the
Speaker 2: past back to you. If that was what they were saying,
Speaker 2: and it was like, this is an ideation machine. Open
Speaker 2: Ai had raised fifty million dollars and this is what
Speaker 2: it did.
Speaker 3: I'd actually be.
Speaker 1: Kind of like, right, sick core product, Yeah, sick.
Speaker 3: This is just it's kind of a churning machine.
Speaker 2: This is this is something where oh like it's kind
Speaker 2: of it's not really creative, but it's kind of lets
Speaker 2: me bounce things off of it.
Speaker 3: What a great idea the brick wall, like you.
Speaker 2: Said, but it isn't it is And that's it's like
Speaker 2: the opposite of how they're describing it, almost as if well,
Speaker 2: what you see today it sucks, but what if it
Speaker 2: didn't Yeah, one day in a non specific way that
Speaker 2: I cannot describe as I am yet to work it out.
Speaker 3: It's just but actually back to the question, what have
Speaker 3: you found any other useful things?
Speaker 2: Because I really, I genuinely actually feel like this is
Speaker 2: a useful conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean I I went and did a ton.
Speaker 4: I read everything I could find from people that I
Speaker 4: respect about what you can do with AI, how you
Speaker 4: can use it, how you can figure out how to
Speaker 4: use it, And what I landed on was really you
Speaker 4: just have to try everything you can think of and
Speaker 4: spend like four to eight hours in total, and eventually
Speaker 4: you'll find a way that you can bounce back and
Speaker 4: forth with it. I mean I had to write a
Speaker 4: bio for something, yeah, and it was useful for because
Speaker 4: it was just like what does that look like?
Speaker 1: Like what kinds of things should I include? It was
Speaker 1: kind of useful for that. It probably saved me half
Speaker 1: an hour.
Speaker 2: And maybe that's something it's useful for, where it's like
Speaker 2: an aed own business copy. But also the very boring
Speaker 2: structural stuff that no one enjoys writing like bios. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I think it's actually very threatening, specifically for writing press releases,
Speaker 2: express releases.
Speaker 3: Anything that's formulaic. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also maybe that's a good thing for it, but
Speaker 2: again that is not worth plagiarism. That's not worth the
Speaker 2: insane amount of money it costs.
Speaker 3: It is really.
Speaker 2: Crazy, though, how distant these things are, where you've got
Speaker 2: like this kind of useful thing and just this out
Speaker 2: outlay of money, this insane amount of money. I have
Speaker 2: never seen a single thing in tech history anything close
Speaker 2: to this ever, ever, ever, ever, Like, I.
Speaker 3: Don't know, is there anything.
Speaker 4: I mean, there's always a hype cycle thing, right, there's
Speaker 4: the metaverse or when you know Facebook first blew up.
Speaker 4: Everything had a social media component but I've never seen
Speaker 4: write anything close to this level of investment where the
Speaker 4: whole industry acts as though this really is the wave
Speaker 4: of the future and it's happening now. That's it. I
Speaker 4: think it's kind of unpressive.
Speaker 2: Even the metaverse was the forty five billion that Mark
Speaker 2: Zuckerberg put into it, which is so funny, still remains funny.
Speaker 2: That turned out this great Yahoo Finance story about it.
Speaker 2: Yahoo Finance still still doing stuff, all right. They had
Speaker 2: a story about how it's mostly just mismanagement. It's just
Speaker 2: like they keep firing and hiring people.
Speaker 3: It's just like I love that that. I love the GOV.
Speaker 2: There is no law about like running a company remotely sustainably.
Speaker 2: But even then, outside of the metaverse with Meta, I
Speaker 2: don't think the spend was there. And I'm sure that
Speaker 2: some smart person who reads things no things very rude
Speaker 2: do not email me that might say, yeah, the overall
Speaker 2: outlay for just data centers, maybe that's it. When the
Speaker 2: push of I don't know when they started moving towards
Speaker 2: using GPUs for processing outside before llm's maybe then, But
Speaker 2: even then, this feels like more, and it feels like
Speaker 2: more for so much less, like we are a year
Speaker 2: and a half in and we're still sitting there being like.
Speaker 3: So white is what do we do with this? Yeah, well,
Speaker 3: my thing that I've wanted to do, and I don't
Speaker 3: think I'm gonna be able to do it because I
Speaker 3: think everyone will work out on my dickhead immediately. I
Speaker 3: kind of want to just ask multiple leaders in tech
Speaker 3: what is chet GPT and just see if they can
Speaker 3: tell me because I cannot gun to my head describe,
Speaker 3: like what is Google Search? It's a way of searching
Speaker 3: for stuff online. It indexes everything. What is chet GPT?
Speaker 2: It's sometimes it answers questions?
Speaker 3: Correct, it's a question answerer.
Speaker 4: Well, I think And this kind of brings us back
Speaker 4: to the anti trust conversation right the a year and
Speaker 4: a half ago. The big discussion was this is an
Speaker 4: existential threat to Google, right, this is going to be
Speaker 4: an alternative to search, and you know, whether or not
Speaker 4: it's good for that, the hallucination problem is a real issue.
Speaker 4: But I you know, in my own life, I'm trying
Speaker 4: to use AI as often as I can to understand it.
Speaker 1: It is useful for you know, the other day.
Speaker 4: I can't remember what it was, but I needed to
Speaker 4: look up an acronym, you know, where it's like low risk.
Speaker 4: I can probably tell whether it's I it yeah, And
Speaker 4: I'm not like putting that in a story. It's just
Speaker 4: for my own understanding or something. But I've also heard
Speaker 4: a lot of speculation that this is part of why
Speaker 4: Google has put AI at the top of search results.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: It's this anti trust stuff because there's a very real,
Speaker 4: once unfathom unfathomable possibility that Google is going to get
Speaker 4: broken up, that they're going to separate the ads business
Speaker 4: from the search business.
Speaker 3: And you know, all of the moves that Google.
Speaker 4: Has been making to change the way the search algorithm works,
Speaker 4: which you talked a lot yeah about, could be an
Speaker 4: effort to shift over to where we don't really need
Speaker 4: to scrape the open web because we're just giving you
Speaker 4: the answer.
Speaker 2: But what's crazy is a story came out from Bloomberg
Speaker 2: the other day where so there's robots dot txt that.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to fumble this and someone's gonna email
Speaker 3: and correct me. It's very rude. Again, but how does
Speaker 3: the internet actually work?
Speaker 1: Which computer?
Speaker 3: Is this a phone?
Speaker 2: But it says that if you try and cut Google off,
Speaker 2: specifically Google off from your using your website for training data,
Speaker 2: it will also stop Google indexing it, right, which is
Speaker 2: what you were saying, is correct. If they were using
Speaker 2: generative AI as means of distancing themselves and saying we're
Speaker 2: no longer just not play is a We're not just indexing.
Speaker 2: We have created this knowledge ourselves, this is our own material.
Speaker 2: This is not just we're not just passively keeping people
Speaker 2: out from this. It's actually worse now because if that,
Speaker 2: if that is the case, that is the anti trust
Speaker 2: problem with l LMS, with that with Gemini, they have
Speaker 2: made it so that you cannot get.
Speaker 3: Away from Google.
Speaker 2: Google will fuck you over in the event that you
Speaker 2: try and stop them stealing your stuff.
Speaker 3: It's just it's so frustrating as well, because there's no
Speaker 3: real there's no need for them to do that.
Speaker 2: They could have probably made a very small amount of
Speaker 2: effort to not make that the case, and maybe they
Speaker 2: will indeed, it's just like it's like these companies don't
Speaker 2: even know how to operate normally anymore. They've kind of
Speaker 2: they're too big, they're too messy. But also their natural
Speaker 2: configuration isn't We're going to do a thing so that
Speaker 2: we interact with the ends because it is kind of
Speaker 2: how it used to be. It's like, we're scraping this,
Speaker 2: but we provide a service, we send you traffic, you
Speaker 2: allow us to scrape your website. This is kind of
Speaker 2: the deal now. It's just no, this is ours now,
Speaker 2: this is our world that you don't you don't get
Speaker 2: to play here other than on our rules. And it's like,
Speaker 2: I that's why I want the breakup to happen so badly,
Speaker 2: not just because they will be better companies, but also
Speaker 2: we need a fairer deal for the web.
Speaker 3: We need a fairer deal for everyone right now.
Speaker 4: I mean, I've talked to people who work at Google
Speaker 4: who've told me that it really does seem like there's
Speaker 4: been some kind of mission creep and the people who
Speaker 4: run in the company aren't really clear what the company does.
Speaker 4: And I think part of that, and it's not just Google,
Speaker 4: is because all of these companies are such behemoths, right
Speaker 4: and they touch every part of the world. Every decision
Speaker 4: they make is about a strategy that's expanding to every
Speaker 4: corner of the Internet and the physical world. So it
Speaker 4: just there's so many competing incentives for every decision that
Speaker 4: a company like Google or Amazon makes it's just hard
Speaker 4: to operate. It's the same thing that happened with the telecoms, right, yeah,
Speaker 4: they got so big and then you know, when a
Speaker 4: company is big enough, it's kind of just like stomping
Speaker 4: around and can't really do anything super effectively.
Speaker 2: I mean my chat GPT thing. What is chat GPT?
Speaker 2: What does Google do? What does Google do?
Speaker 3: Now? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Google is a search company, an ADS company, a phone company,
Speaker 2: a phone provide a company that have an MVNO with
Speaker 2: Google Fi, which for listeners is a basically they are
Speaker 2: on the T mobile network. They are a cloud storage company,
Speaker 2: a data center company. They are also they have all
Speaker 2: sorts of business lines. They make robots.
Speaker 3: No, do they own Boston Dynamics now? Is Boston Dynamics
Speaker 3: to nevertheless demic robuts Yeah, yeah, Well they're doing something
Speaker 3: in every ar VR yea what the like? Well?
Speaker 4: Google is the Internet, right, That's what's going on, not
Speaker 4: just with Google, but with all these companies. It's this
Speaker 4: platformization where the open Web is dying and everything exists
Speaker 4: on a platform that some gigantic company is running. Not universally,
Speaker 4: but that's the direction we're trending.
Speaker 2: It's most of them and it's but Google is I think,
Speaker 2: and this is the thing. I don't hate technology. I
Speaker 2: actually really would love Google to be where they work.
Speaker 3: It's great. I love tech a lot.
Speaker 2: Fifteen twenty years ago Google I didn't mind like they
Speaker 2: were doing a decent job.
Speaker 3: Yeah they were.
Speaker 2: Even the old Facebook in like two thousand and five
Speaker 2: is a pretty good product.
Speaker 3: Ye.
Speaker 2: And then mox Zucker Book's kind of evil and I've
Speaker 2: done plenty of episodes on him. But Google is just
Speaker 2: I think symbolic of the problem. They are symbolic of
Speaker 2: the too big not too big to fail because they've
Speaker 2: kind of proven that as well, that they seem incapable
Speaker 2: of failing despite their failures. It's just maybe we shouldn't
Speaker 2: have a company that does everything. Maybe they need to
Speaker 2: be broken up, and there needs to be genuine legislation
Speaker 2: that stops companies getting that big, because I don't think
Speaker 2: as a product, Google Search needs to be bad, and
Speaker 2: I think it could be insanely profitable without being a monopoly.
Speaker 2: It's just that at some point I think this company
Speaker 2: became a private equity firm. I think they became a
Speaker 2: private equity firm that gets bankrolled by Google Search, and
Speaker 2: that change those incentives. I mean, it makes sense if
Speaker 2: you're as a company, don't believe you can lose customers
Speaker 2: if you don't believe that if everything is kind of
Speaker 2: because the other units of Google, and we'll never know
Speaker 2: because even public they don't really break it down.
Speaker 3: I don't know how many units.
Speaker 2: Of Google are profit without Google Search, Like how much
Speaker 2: of it is bankrolled.
Speaker 1: They're making sixty percent of the company's money. It's coming
Speaker 1: from search.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And also it's a terrible way to run a company.
Speaker 2: It's an awful way to run a company. And it
Speaker 2: isn't how they used to do things. But in and
Speaker 2: breaking them up I think is good. I think we
Speaker 2: need an example in the tech industry we get going well.
Speaker 4: I mean, we're at a point where now we can,
Speaker 4: you know, officially say like Google is legally a monopoly.
Speaker 1: Yeah at this point, right, like we.
Speaker 4: Don't have to we don't have to edge Google is
Speaker 4: a monopoly at least in the search business. There's a
Speaker 4: bunch of other anti drust cases. Maybe other parts of
Speaker 4: the company are going to get declared to monopoly. But
Speaker 4: that's how monopolies work, right, Like, once you achieve enough
Speaker 4: market power, you don't need to make a good product, right,
Speaker 4: Like I talk.
Speaker 1: To people all the time.
Speaker 4: It used to be I think back, you know, fifteen
Speaker 4: years ago or maybe even long with the early two thousands,
Speaker 4: Google was the best search engine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, Google came out. It was better than AltaVista,
Speaker 1: it was better than Yahoo.
Speaker 3: Excited.
Speaker 4: That's why excite, ask jeeves, right, that's why go one originally?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: At this point, is Google actually better than Being? I
Speaker 4: think most people couldn't tell you the answer that question
Speaker 4: because they they don't use that.
Speaker 3: They kind of seem the same.
Speaker 4: I try, you know, I switched my default search engine
Speaker 4: to being for a while. It was not as good
Speaker 4: because I'm not used to it, But in terms of
Speaker 4: the results, it seemed fine.
Speaker 3: Being news is better, which is you like being? What
Speaker 3: a horrible sentence? Being is also really terrible to say.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't like to say. I don't like
Speaker 3: saying Google's fun. Being is.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's just because we're not used to it, you know,
Speaker 4: but I tried saying, you don't want to be sitting at.
Speaker 3: Home going being being, but it's kind of nice. But
Speaker 3: also being is not great, But neither's Google? And what
Speaker 3: is a good search engine? Anymore.
Speaker 2: And I think again, it comes back to the incentives.
Speaker 2: It's do they know what's a good search engine anymore?
Speaker 2: Do they actually? I I will admit I've been kind
Speaker 2: of black and white over this.
Speaker 3: I say Google doesn't care.
Speaker 2: I know that there are tons of people inside of
Speaker 2: Google I've spoken to who are like, I fucking hate this.
Speaker 3: I hate how this is happening.
Speaker 2: I mean the Department of Justice, emails and Ben Gums
Speaker 2: you could see the pain and Shashi Thakur and Ben
Speaker 2: Gums as they fought against this. And I think that
Speaker 2: what sucks is it never had to be this way.
Speaker 2: Never did not once they could have kept fucking that
Speaker 2: chicken and get so much money they forever, but it's like.
Speaker 3: No, we must grow forever.
Speaker 2: But also, on some level, it's horrible to say, why
Speaker 2: would they bother? They had the monopoly they have, they
Speaker 2: have the world by the bulls, Why would they? Why
Speaker 2: why bother being good? I just don't get why they
Speaker 2: let it be so bad? Like it's so bad, it's
Speaker 2: so bad. It's so awful. When you go look at
Speaker 2: something and it's just four Breddit posts and four forum posts,
Speaker 2: four other things. You've got a technical support thing, and
Speaker 2: all the forum posts are it's people saying I too
Speaker 2: had this problem, anyone fix it? And then no, and
Speaker 2: then maybe occasionally like a bot being like, I have
Speaker 2: no idea what happened here? Cora is the best have
Speaker 2: you seen Have you looked at Cora recently?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty insane.
Speaker 4: And also, like now Reddit is having problems because Reddit
Speaker 4: users and businesses have realized that's how you get to
Speaker 4: the top of Google.
Speaker 1: So all of the SEO stuff that.
Speaker 4: Was happening on the web is now happening within conversations
Speaker 4: on Reddit, so that's being polluted in the same way.
Speaker 3: Have you seen how coorra has had a DAI. I
Speaker 3: don't know if I'll come across that now.
Speaker 2: Okay, so listeners, I want you to go and look
Speaker 2: up something on korra right now, because right now on Cora,
Speaker 2: if you look, most of the time, it will have
Speaker 2: a chat GPT response at the top. This is why
Speaker 2: for a while on Google you could look up can
Speaker 2: I melt an egg? And it would come up and say, yes,
Speaker 2: you can melt an egg, because I will keep trying
Speaker 2: for your science. But now what it does is they
Speaker 2: have chat GPT at the top, and it's just like,
Speaker 2: so the entire point of Cora is that it's human beings, right,
Speaker 2: who have questions and their answers and you go on
Speaker 2: there because it's like wow, subject matter experts who are
Speaker 2: rewarded with Cora cloud.
Speaker 3: I don't really know, like there's some sort of points system.
Speaker 2: Like any good thing on the Internet, it's mostly just
Speaker 2: degenerate posters who really love stuff.
Speaker 3: Except now it's that.
Speaker 2: After just the world's most awful generative thing and then
Speaker 2: an obvious ad and then an answer to a different question.
Speaker 2: Now you may think, why did this happen? Well, the
Speaker 2: CEO of Cora, Adam di'angelo, is on the board of
Speaker 2: open AI.
Speaker 3: That's why. It's just it's like the death of the
Speaker 3: open web because these guys just went I got mine, bitch.
Speaker 3: I don't need to find stuff anymore. I know everything.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to look at the
Speaker 4: way that Google has changed in the past year two
Speaker 4: years and see well, I mean it's also hard to
Speaker 4: say whether it's better or worse because like what is
Speaker 4: good Google? First?
Speaker 3: What is good?
Speaker 4: But then also just what is Google Search? Like it's
Speaker 4: such a gigantic, diffuse product, like there's no way to
Speaker 4: really examine it wholesale from the outside. But you know,
Speaker 4: people were adding Reddit to the end and their search
Speaker 4: queries because the things that were coming up on Google
Speaker 4: weren't what they wanted. They wanted like some kind of
Speaker 4: authentic human response. So Google shifts and now they're showing
Speaker 4: Reddit at the top. Maybe, well, people were putting in it.
Speaker 4: Maybe that's what they want. Can Reddit results?
Speaker 3: Yeah? How is that better?
Speaker 2: It's it's it's because I don't think Google. It may
Speaker 2: just and I'm hypothesizing here, we don't actually know, but
Speaker 2: if I had to guess, it might be because when
Speaker 2: you build a monopoly that's this successful in any case,
Speaker 2: you stop learning how to build products. You just you
Speaker 2: don't have those muscles aren't in there to say, oh, right,
Speaker 2: I need to serve a customer, and if I don't
Speaker 2: serve the customer, they might go to a competitor. So
Speaker 2: it went from being like what is the best search result?
Speaker 3: To fuck? What do people want? Now?
Speaker 2: Who are these people who keep bothering me with questions? Ah,
Speaker 2: these little pigs?
Speaker 3: They want Reddit? I guess credits where things happen now?
Speaker 4: And there are ways that I sympathize, right, Like, because
Speaker 4: of the system that Google set up, you know, because
Speaker 4: of SEO search engine optimization, everyone who you know has
Speaker 4: the time and the money has figured out how to
Speaker 4: set up their web page to game Google search receipts.
Speaker 4: So it's the system that they developed to sort through
Speaker 4: what's good and bad and what should be at the
Speaker 4: top kind of, you know, it's it's harder and harder
Speaker 4: to make that work because the signals that they identified
Speaker 4: everyone figured out. So the web has kind of changed,
Speaker 4: and I think that's a big part of why the
Speaker 4: results are and it's good. I think it's because there
Speaker 4: simply aren't great results to be found.
Speaker 2: I agree fifty percent. Like I agree that there is
Speaker 2: an adversarial nature with SEO and the people have been
Speaker 2: trying to screw with Google forever. The other thing is,
Speaker 2: this company makes like one hundred billion dollars a year.
Speaker 2: My sympathy for the challenges here is so low. And
Speaker 2: also SEO people get There are good SEO people, Lily
Speaker 2: ray Rox's she's great.
Speaker 3: There are good people out there.
Speaker 2: But I would argue the majority of SEO is fucking
Speaker 2: evil and it is adversarial to the web.
Speaker 3: And also Google should fight it. Google should make war
Speaker 3: with them. Google should make it. They lie. Google lies.
Speaker 3: I'm fucking saying that you don't have to. They lie
Speaker 3: and say, oh yeah, we're making helpful content updates. Screw you. No,
Speaker 3: you're not shut down.
Speaker 2: Every shut down Dot Meredith, shut down every single company
Speaker 2: that has re engineered their content to rip off others,
Speaker 2: and screw SEO.
Speaker 3: He hello, not Hello fresh, that the house house fresh.
Speaker 3: There you go, they're a great article about SEO. Thank
Speaker 3: god you remember that.
Speaker 2: I was talking about how Dot Meredith basically outdid them
Speaker 2: on SEO by working out the signals.
Speaker 3: What Google could do is, I don't know. I'm not
Speaker 3: some genius guy, but here's an idea. If you mess
Speaker 3: with Google, Google messes back, Google says you want to
Speaker 3: mess with me, I will cut you in out of Google.
Speaker 4: Well that and that happened, it does it happened? Well,
Speaker 4: not not on a large scale. But there was a
Speaker 4: case recently that no one really talked about. But I
Speaker 4: didn't even know this. Every gigantic news publisher, you know,
Speaker 4: from CNN to tiny little companies, has like a vertical
Speaker 4: on their site that has coupons on it. Yes, right,
Speaker 4: and Google went in and decided and it's not original content.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: They were like white labeling stuff that coupon companies were
Speaker 4: giving them. Right, Google went in it said this is
Speaker 4: not allowed anymore. You're abusing the authority of your domain
Speaker 4: name and we're not gonna let you do this. And
Speaker 4: you know, I think there's an argument that that's better
Speaker 4: for consumers that if I search for a coupon, it's
Speaker 4: now presumably I'm gonna get sent somewhere where a guy
Speaker 4: who just makes coupon's posted it.
Speaker 3: But there are all these other.
Speaker 4: Cases that you're talking about where it seems like Google
Speaker 4: either is okay with the way that they're being abused
Speaker 4: or they don't have a solution in mind. But they
Speaker 4: have so many like their resources are so enormous.
Speaker 2: And the thing you're talking about with the it was
Speaker 2: there's a specific term. I'll probably be emailed as well,
Speaker 2: but it was basically that they would have content like
Speaker 2: coupons and other things on that they'd have high domain
Speaker 2: authority posts from completely different shit. But the way I'd
Speaker 2: push back on that, you're right by the way they
Speaker 2: did do that, and that's a good thing. Is Google
Speaker 2: a coupon right now? Google, look up a coupon, listeners,
Speaker 2: go and do it. Look at the amount of sites
Speaker 2: like retail me Not that just have broken coupons. They're
Speaker 2: all broken, and they're full of shitty ads that cover
Speaker 2: your screen and they make your iPhone go to one
Speaker 2: thousand degrees and melt through your desk, and it's disgusting.
Speaker 2: That is That's the kind of thing that I'm just like,
Speaker 2: I don't think Google cares because that is an experience
Speaker 2: of the average person. I want to buy something on
Speaker 2: a website. Is there a coupon I can use?
Speaker 3: Oh? The majority of this content is outright fake.
Speaker 4: Right, And that's the counter argument, right, And I don't
Speaker 4: think that the coupons on retail me Not they're the
Speaker 4: same ones that you're seeing on CNN, dot coupons or
Speaker 4: whatever it is. Yeah, not literally, but for the most
Speaker 4: part they have the same problems. But maybe it's the
Speaker 4: wrong question is this better or us? Because the other
Speaker 4: one that we can ask is and it's the one
Speaker 4: the government is asking. Should Google be the one who
Speaker 4: gets to decide what is and isn't okay on the web?
Speaker 4: They have unilateral decision. May be for twenty years it
Speaker 4: was totally fine to do this on CNN and the
Speaker 4: La Times and every other website, and then all of
Speaker 4: a sudden, with very little warning, it's forbidden now, and
Speaker 4: companies have set up entire business models like these coupon
Speaker 4: verticals were making tons of money for news publishers that are,
Speaker 4: you know, on the brink of shutting down, like the
Speaker 4: La Times had one.
Speaker 1: The La Times is in big trouble.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: This was bringing in I don't know the exact figure,
Speaker 4: but lots of money every year, probably to the two
Speaker 4: and of million millions of dollars. And Google says, you're
Speaker 4: done with this. You don't get to do this anymore.
Speaker 4: This is not a way that you are allowed to
Speaker 4: make money on the Internet.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: That's a lot of power for one company to have
Speaker 4: over something that is infrastructure.
Speaker 1: The Internet is infrastructure, I think.
Speaker 3: And that's a really interesting point because I believe that
Speaker 3: any such engine is if their job is to get
Speaker 3: you the best results, should have that power. Conversely, I
Speaker 3: also believe that there should be a quality level, because
Speaker 3: you can do that theoretically. I think that that's a
Speaker 3: good thing that they carve if you maintain quality elsewhere.
Speaker 3: If it's just arbitrary. I've decided that.
Speaker 2: This thing doesn't work for me and it's a black
Speaker 2: box like everything with Google, then it needs to absolutely
Speaker 2: needs to go. But I would actually be a little
Speaker 2: bit okay with Google being more forceful with stuff if
Speaker 2: Google actually did the thing it's meant to do.
Speaker 3: The original Google.
Speaker 2: The thing that made it good is it cut through
Speaker 2: the noise that there was always a lot of noise online,
Speaker 2: not just social just shitty websites, good websites, and Google
Speaker 2: would get you good results. It was the thing that
Speaker 2: helped you search the web. Can we even argue it
Speaker 2: helps you search it anymore? It doesn't feel like it's
Speaker 2: doing the job it's meant to do.
Speaker 3: It doesn't.
Speaker 2: It indexes everything, fine, who gives a fuck. I don't
Speaker 2: need it indexed. I need the good stuff brought to
Speaker 2: me so that I don't have to go and find it,
Speaker 2: except now I have to, which is fine. But I'm
Speaker 2: also a horrible online gremlin. I'm online. I know all
Speaker 2: the websites. I've memorized all the URLs. Now, I don't
Speaker 2: think most people have, and I think most people's because
Speaker 2: that is really what this is about, not you or
Speaker 2: me or people who are like online all the time.
Speaker 2: It's about regular fucking people who depend on this, and
Speaker 2: it's good they cut off the coupons because a bad
Speaker 2: that's a bad thing for regular people to just.
Speaker 3: Get exposed to.
Speaker 2: But also, I don't know how about you actually protect
Speaker 2: people from the malignant stuff in the ads. I was
Speaker 2: on Google the like month ago and I actually emailed
Speaker 2: Danny Sullivan the search of Liason.
Speaker 3: Hi Danny, now you love me?
Speaker 2: And I bought a GPD Win four pocket from what
Speaker 2: I thought was the GPD Win four website. GPD website
Speaker 2: GPD is a they make little gaming console PCs. They're fantastic.
Speaker 2: I put down thousand dollars this thing. I then realized
Speaker 2: when I looked in the PayPal that it was some
Speaker 2: Chinese guys email at gmail dot com. And this was
Speaker 2: because the first result was a sponsored ad for a
Speaker 2: fake website. This happened to me and I'm pretty good
Speaker 2: at this and it was just a well designed page,
Speaker 2: and I'm I was so embarrassed, like this is my
Speaker 2: internet cred gone right?
Speaker 3: All of my.
Speaker 2: Hates O, my hater has found out they were outside
Speaker 2: my applauding. It was terrible for me, very bad very unfair,
Speaker 2: But Jesus Christ, you can't keep the fake ads off
Speaker 2: the page, Like.
Speaker 4: Come on, well, it's bad enough. I think that it
Speaker 4: was last year or the year before. It might have
Speaker 4: been twenty twenty two. It was bad enough that the FBI,
Speaker 4: do you remember this, They issued a statement that said
Speaker 4: consumers should use ad blockers because there's so much spam
Speaker 4: and abuse in ads that in order to protect yourself,
Speaker 4: you just shouldn't even be seeing the ads anymore.
Speaker 3: So just to cut to ads for a second.
Speaker 2: If you want to protect yourself, if you really want
Speaker 2: to make your life better, I really recommend the first
Speaker 2: thing you do immediately is to listen to this following ad,
Speaker 2: which will directly and precisely aligned with every belief I
Speaker 2: have had and will have in the future.
Speaker 3: And we're back.
Speaker 2: And I think the funny thing about all of this
Speaker 2: as well, is these companies always say.
Speaker 3: Well, the web is too Basil's too our jobs are
Speaker 3: too hot. But it's like even just one guy in
Speaker 3: Google who's just trying to search for the worst stuff,
Speaker 3: not even the obvious words like horrible, like like, because
Speaker 3: I think they're probably quite good at c SAM and
Speaker 3: like outright illegal stuff but just I don't know a dickhead,
Speaker 3: just the I'm the guy at Google, who's the dickhead.
Speaker 3: I just search for the annoying stuff. We fix it.
Speaker 3: I know they can do that.
Speaker 2: I refuse to believe that they can't pay a guy
Speaker 2: to just find this stuff, to be a regular john
Speaker 2: who just sits there and go googles things like coupons,
Speaker 2: who searches for fake websites. For a while, on Google News,
Speaker 2: there was a website called good Morning Kashmere I think
Speaker 2: it was called, and it would just rip off everything.
Speaker 2: And when I say everything, I mean pretty much every
Speaker 2: major tech site and then get Google News syndication. When
Speaker 2: I told Danny, sorry, Danny, I'm putting you on blast,
Speaker 2: but you didn't say off the record.
Speaker 3: When I told him, he was like, well, you shouldn't be.
Speaker 2: Using Google news chronological view because it doesn't really work.
Speaker 2: I'm like, what the what the what?
Speaker 3: What? Excuse me? What? That's the thing.
Speaker 2: And I think that this is the problem with a
Speaker 2: lot of these big tech companies. They just see customers
Speaker 2: as like, well, you.
Speaker 3: Are the problem. And I think that actually this is
Speaker 3: an industry wide thing where consumers have been gas lit
Speaker 3: and this is definitely me doing like a book pitch.
Speaker 3: But it's true.
Speaker 2: I think that consumers have been made to feel like,
Speaker 2: oh when tech fails you.
Speaker 3: This is a lack of awareness of how good tech is.
Speaker 3: You didn't read the privacy parlast exactly. You didn't use
Speaker 3: the manual.
Speaker 2: You didn't do this Apple, And I know my listeners
Speaker 2: want me to bag on Apple as an app store
Speaker 2: thing coming. It's gonna be mean, it's gonna be nasty,
Speaker 2: very unfair to mister cook.
Speaker 3: But we'll get to that. Apple does a generally better
Speaker 3: job of not treating the consumer well, maybe treating them
Speaker 3: like an idiot, but sometimes you have to. If you're
Speaker 3: selling things, sometimes you're an idiot.
Speaker 2: Well and I am regularly, But if there are hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions of people, you should assume that the base
Speaker 2: level understanding is as low as it can be, and
Speaker 2: that the manual is a backup plan. But it's the opposite. Now,
Speaker 2: Chat GPT, well, you don't know how to use it
Speaker 2: well enough. And I'm not saying you said that like
Speaker 2: you were saying this in this manner, but you need
Speaker 2: to put hours into it. That just shows such a
Speaker 2: U's a loathing in my opinion for customers like, oh,
Speaker 2: you're not smart enough to use the future.
Speaker 3: Fuck you, this is meant to be artificial intelligence. I'm
Speaker 3: not meant to be smart. It's meant to be smart.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and especially when it comes to the content moneration issue. Yeah,
Speaker 4: the search results are on Google or getting worse, or
Speaker 4: they're being abused, or the ads. You know, there's just
Speaker 4: a report the other day about ads for illicit drugs
Speaker 4: on Facebook, and you know, I hear the argument that
Speaker 4: there's so much content that it's just not possible that
Speaker 4: human beings could go through all of this. You know,
Speaker 4: that's only an argument that's acceptable if you start with
Speaker 4: the presumption that these companies should exist. But on the
Speaker 4: other hand, I'm not even sure if it's true. I
Speaker 4: was talking to one of the guys who works at
Speaker 4: the private equity firm that owns porn Hub.
Speaker 1: It's called Alo now used to be called mind.
Speaker 3: Geek in fascinating.
Speaker 4: They told me that every single video on porn hub
Speaker 4: gets reviewed by human being, every video on Pornhub, which
Speaker 4: I can't imagine a worse job than that, because I mean,
Speaker 4: like the things that people must be uploading on there
Speaker 4: that don't make it onto the site.
Speaker 3: But it is possible. That's a terrible job.
Speaker 4: Like then you have to you know, pay for therapy
Speaker 4: for the people who are doing it to say that
Speaker 4: it's just not possible.
Speaker 1: Maybe you should be running fewer ads.
Speaker 3: But that's the porn hub. That's an interesting one. Me.
Speaker 3: I've never used porno, but I imagine now, but with
Speaker 3: something like porn hub, it proves it's possible, because, yeah,
Speaker 3: you'll get fucked up as a porn hub if you
Speaker 3: don't do this right, if you don't review everything and
Speaker 3: make sure that there's no copyright, that there's no underage,
Speaker 3: that there's no outright illegal stuff, and because there are
Speaker 3: very clear, very stark penalties for that, there aren't for ads.
Speaker 3: And I think one of my favorite.
Speaker 2: Ideas that i've I've read is Darren Asamoglu previously on
Speaker 2: the show Becoming on in the Future Mit Economist, he made.
Speaker 3: A suggestion put the CEOs in jail.
Speaker 2: Now I realized that's a little much, but drilling down
Speaker 2: the idea, if there was personal liability for Mark Zuckerberg,
Speaker 2: I bet all those problems go away immediately. I think
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg make it his mission to have the cleanest
Speaker 2: ad experience in the world because the reason that they
Speaker 2: do it is they can get away with it. I refuse, Like,
Speaker 2: to your point, maybe there should be less ads. Maybe
Speaker 2: if I walk around and I have a crowbar in
Speaker 2: my hand, I think I've used this example before, and
Speaker 2: I'm swinging.
Speaker 3: It will in nearly and I hit a few windows
Speaker 3: on the smash.
Speaker 2: I love my crowbar. It's so much fun. But if
Speaker 2: I do that, do you think I have to pay
Speaker 2: for the windows I smash? Do you think I'm gonna
Speaker 2: get arrested? Of course I am. Well, my job, I'm
Speaker 2: paid to swing the crowbar. The crowbar must be swung.
Speaker 2: That I make four million dollars a year swinging the crowbar.
Speaker 2: This is my job. The cops aren't going to be like, well,
Speaker 2: this is just commerce. We're not going to mess with
Speaker 2: the economy. And sometimes a few windows get broken. No,
Speaker 2: they'd be like, stop doing it, and that's because property
Speaker 2: damage is illegal. How About they make it illegal to
Speaker 2: fucking show these ads and there are actual penalties. How
Speaker 2: About there is an actual quality level for all of
Speaker 2: this stuff. I think that you can't do like swinging
Speaker 2: legislation where it's like search results must be this good,
Speaker 2: but there should be company and CEO level liability for
Speaker 2: if I get scammed due to a Google ad that
Speaker 2: is on Google, Like that is a not only are
Speaker 2: they liable for whatever I lost, but my legal costs
Speaker 2: blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: There should be actual things. And I think that that
Speaker 3: is the problem.
Speaker 2: It all happened relatively fast, like a couple of decades,
Speaker 2: which seems like a while, but for legislation isn't. Yeah,
Speaker 2: But to your point, like, do these companies have to exist?
Speaker 3: Probably not.
Speaker 2: It's good they do, but if they can exist, they
Speaker 2: should be held to some account. There should be Now
Speaker 2: that you've said that, I'm really thinking about, like do
Speaker 2: they need to exist? But why can't they deal with
Speaker 2: this stuff? What they never seem to be asked? Why
Speaker 2: they never? Oh, there's too many of them. No, there's not,
Speaker 2: Like there's.
Speaker 4: Just no we can say that there shouldn't be scams
Speaker 4: and Google ads. I don't think that they have a
Speaker 4: legal obligation to make sure that there's not.
Speaker 1: I'm aware they don't, so you know, you like they
Speaker 1: could put.
Speaker 4: Soon Arpachina jail, or you could you know, just you know,
Speaker 4: write a law and have there be some penalty that
Speaker 4: affects the company's sack price, that they'll address the problem.
Speaker 1: Oh, yes, we don't. There are no rules about the Internet.
Speaker 2: And there are definitely false advertising. There's definitely lying it
Speaker 2: like it's FDC. I believe it's FCCC. Always get those
Speaker 2: wrong cases.
Speaker 3: Probably listening going to.
Speaker 2: Get mad, But that's the thing, like those they need
Speaker 2: to be enforced. But on top of that, when I
Speaker 2: say put them in jail, IM mostly joking, right. I
Speaker 2: think personal liability, however, would do really well. If they
Speaker 2: will like I will lose Pshai makes like two hundred
Speaker 2: million a year, mostly in stock. How about he loses percentage,
Speaker 2: not dollar amounts, percentages zero point five percent, not for everything.
Speaker 3: But perhaps that's an aggregate thing.
Speaker 2: If they are like, oh my wealth will be directly attacked,
Speaker 2: I think some UPSHI would immediately. There would be this
Speaker 2: insane quality improvement. Same with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg right now is unfireable.
Speaker 2: But if we set these things for the chief executives
Speaker 2: who are paid three hundred times their employees' salaries, if
Speaker 2: they were paid this insane amount of money but it
Speaker 2: was a job with inherent risk, Hell yeah, I think
Speaker 2: that would start changing shit really quickly for the better.
Speaker 2: In the same way that competition creates better companies, I
Speaker 2: think risk would create better executives. I think that they
Speaker 2: would start getting real, real worried about this stuff. And yeah,
Speaker 2: they could still get paid in the insane amount of money,
Speaker 2: which I still think is too much, but it would
Speaker 2: be kind of like being an NFL player. You risk
Speaker 2: your body, you risk your money, you risk your nasty
Speaker 2: little houses. I don't know, There's just it feels like
Speaker 2: what's exciting right now with all this anti trust stuff
Speaker 2: is we're finally seeing consequences, though, real nasty, mean consequences,
Speaker 2: and the people getting upset are really funny, like all
Speaker 2: the people I've seen them have matter like tech analysts, like,
Speaker 2: now you can't hit the Googles.
Speaker 3: So good. I love it.
Speaker 4: Well, what I'm really excited to watch is presumably there's
Speaker 4: going to be some kind of consequence here. Right the
Speaker 4: government says Google is a monopoly, We're going to see
Speaker 4: what they do. Maybe they break them up, maybe they
Speaker 4: give them some enormous fine. And then there's another antidos
Speaker 4: case for Google in the United States. There's yet another
Speaker 4: one in the EU. Then there's all the cases that
Speaker 4: all the other companies are facing. I wonder whether or
Speaker 4: not it's too late to turn the web around, Like
Speaker 4: it'll change, it'll become something else. Can we go back
Speaker 4: to the open web the way things were five or
Speaker 4: ten years ago. If you break Google up and suddenly
Speaker 4: there's competition, Suddenly there's incentive to send people to different
Speaker 4: parts of the Internet instead of to a different part
Speaker 4: of Google, would it get better or has it just
Speaker 4: collapsed to the point where we need to build something else.
Speaker 2: I don't think it's collapsed. But I will also say
Speaker 2: something a little controversial. The Internet wasn't great fifteen years ago.
Speaker 2: I think we all need to.
Speaker 3: Like, it's not like it's worse now, but oh waw
Speaker 3: live journal? Did we love live Journal?
Speaker 2: I had friends on there like it was cool, but
Speaker 2: like was it? I love Twitter in its prime. I
Speaker 2: love Blue Sky. I love the fact that I can
Speaker 2: text you and my friends and I can signal people.
Speaker 2: There's it's really great things on there. And I think
Speaker 2: that what we perceive as the open web is to
Speaker 2: your earlier point, like maligned by Google. Google has fucked
Speaker 2: it up to the point that we don't think it exists.
Speaker 2: It does, and I think the companies like substack are
Speaker 2: nakedly evil. I think substack is one of the most
Speaker 2: evil companies out there. I think their support of the
Speaker 2: Nazis is disgusting. Hate miss if you're listening, eat my asshole,
Speaker 2: My fucking my fucking family died in the fucking ovens
Speaker 2: in Germany. Fuck you bitch, seriously, this is to you,
Speaker 2: Hamish mackenzie and any anyone who's currently on substack, even
Speaker 2: if it's one Nazi who's making money on substack, fucking
Speaker 2: kick them off.
Speaker 3: It's sickening.
Speaker 2: And substack now is making it so you can create
Speaker 2: publications on there which don't involve email addresses or newsletters anymore,
Speaker 2: becoming another platform, and that's what sucks, and that's what
Speaker 2: really sucks about how things are. But platforms as a
Speaker 2: service are not necessarily a bad thing. My journal was
Speaker 2: a platform and then they, like every company, got acquired
Speaker 2: by a larger company, which got acquired by a larger company.
Speaker 3: Ghost I love because they're mostly just yeah, it's a service.
Speaker 2: You can run it your own. Molly White hasars self hosted.
Speaker 2: I run it on a website with the person who
Speaker 2: helps because I'm stupid. But the sloppy point I'm getting
Speaker 2: to is the open web is still there. It's still
Speaker 2: being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing,
Speaker 2: and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we
Speaker 2: can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a
Speaker 2: future Google competitor it is not search GPT, I think that,
Speaker 2: I don't know, we could find it again. I think
Speaker 2: that there could be if these companies were realigned so
Speaker 2: that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet.
Speaker 3: There is plenty of original human created content out there.
Speaker 3: It's just that Google and Being and all of these
Speaker 3: sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing
Speaker 3: us it and we have to search for it through
Speaker 3: social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough
Speaker 3: to build a following because all of the algorithms people
Speaker 3: are built to rely on are broken now.
Speaker 4: Right, And if you're not doing it the way that
Speaker 4: the TikTok algorithm or the Google search algorithm wants you
Speaker 4: to do it exact, no one's going to find your stuff, right, Like,
Speaker 4: It's absolutely true. There's a nostalgia thing going on. The
Speaker 4: Internet used to be better, you know, I remember when
Speaker 4: I was a child.
Speaker 1: I was happy.
Speaker 4: It must have been because of the way things were
Speaker 4: then that they are not now. That's that's true. But
Speaker 4: the one thing you can say is the internet is
Speaker 4: not as weird as it used to be. Right, there's
Speaker 4: less opportunity for just total, like absolute free expression that
Speaker 4: is not limited by trying to please some kind of
Speaker 4: algorithm and to fit into some kind of box.
Speaker 3: I don't I.
Speaker 2: Think that that's how to prove right or wrong. I
Speaker 2: know what you're getting at. Yeah, you're seeing less of that.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's not being created.
Speaker 3: Right. There are wonderful, weird.
Speaker 2: Strange communities, unique community There are like I don't know,
Speaker 2: I said this to someone earlier, like furries are probably
Speaker 2: doing some of the most interesting things online. Not my
Speaker 2: cup of tea, but respect to them. Also they do
Speaker 2: some of the funniest hacking things ever. Yeah, but like
Speaker 2: the fact that a community like that can thrive online
Speaker 2: is lovely. If whatever you're doing, as long as everyone's
Speaker 2: consentual and happy with it, wonderful, enjoy yourselves. I feel
Speaker 2: a like communities like that can do really well online,
Speaker 2: and they are and they're able to find people like that.
Speaker 2: Thanks to some of these platforms. The problem is the
Speaker 2: algorithms are normalizing everything to kind of a blunt edge,
Speaker 2: which I think that's kind of exactly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this stuff is out there, but can you find it?
Speaker 4: Is it the stuff that we're all consuming way we
Speaker 4: go on the internet? Will it be served up to us?
Speaker 4: The stuff that you're seeing is the stuff that you know,
Speaker 4: keeps you staring at TikTok for the longest, which you know,
Speaker 4: maybe that's good. You know, it helps TikTok more money,
Speaker 4: helps them make a platform that makes it easy to
Speaker 4: make tiktoks. Maybe that's a good thing, But there is
Speaker 4: this flattening effect that I think, you know, it is dulling, right, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it stifles creativity because it limits the way that you
Speaker 4: can make money, and it also creates a path to make money,
Speaker 4: so maybe it creates more content too.
Speaker 1: There's you know, there's two sides to everything.
Speaker 2: But and I think that the problem is that these
Speaker 2: algorithms are so easily gamable. But there's this wonderful Jason
Speaker 2: Kobler legend at for or for Media that this amazing
Speaker 2: piece about the Indian guys basically defrauding Facebook.
Speaker 3: Did you read this? Yeah, where these guys.
Speaker 2: I need to have Jason on just to talk about
Speaker 2: this story. It's insane where there is a Facebook Creator
Speaker 2: program and all of that AI slot. The shrimp Jesus
Speaker 2: at al that you see is these Indian guys who
Speaker 2: are just using him as generators and have worked out
Speaker 2: I can throw this rock in this puddle and it
Speaker 2: will go everywhere and I'll make real money. And these
Speaker 2: guys are like, like I think one of them was
Speaker 2: like paying for disabled brothers wheelchairs, which is so fucking cool,
Speaker 2: Like one guy did it, like Facebook did its first
Speaker 2: good thing while also destroying itself. And what's crazy is
Speaker 2: how did Facebook meta not see that and go we
Speaker 2: need to get everyone in the boardroom right now read
Speaker 2: alert because that is a insane like the shrimp Jesus
Speaker 2: things should have done it. And the problem is, I
Speaker 2: think they could make really good, nuanced algorithms that race
Speaker 2: really interesting, meaningful cool shit they don't want to. I
Speaker 2: think they actually enjoy their ability to influence and dominate
Speaker 2: culture and to choose what will happen in the same
Speaker 2: way that a lot of these generative AI kind of
Speaker 2: normalized beauty standards.
Speaker 3: And Cory Doctor on the last Better Offlies said this
Speaker 3: very well. He was saying that.
Speaker 2: There is something inherently conservative about generative AI because it
Speaker 2: and any kind of auto complaint. Indeed, because it's just
Speaker 2: you say I love and it's gonna say you, you
Speaker 2: kind of normalize this one point.
Speaker 3: They don't. There's no incentive for them to.
Speaker 2: Build interesting algorithms, so they just build the one that
Speaker 2: kind of works for everyone, that shows you the slop,
Speaker 2: the slop that works for you, and it kind of
Speaker 2: pushes everyone in one direction. And I think maybe you know,
Speaker 2: think about it, maybe that's You're right about the nostalgia aspect,
Speaker 2: and that's what we miss in the The web doesn't
Speaker 2: feel exploratory anymore, right, We're not like looking or searching anymore.
Speaker 2: It's here's what has been decided is popular. And what
Speaker 2: I think this has led to in the media at least,
Speaker 2: is there's a lot of people, a lot of companies
Speaker 2: that are falling apart because and this is not their fault,
Speaker 2: they have built their services as media outlets to appeal
Speaker 2: to Google and the algorithms, and that worked. And guess what,
Speaker 2: that stuff was popular because whether and this is the
Speaker 2: who made who thing?
Speaker 3: Right? Is it popular?
Speaker 2: Because the algorithm shows it, or because a lot of
Speaker 2: people like it, or do a lot of people like
Speaker 2: it because the algorithm chose it to be popular, And
Speaker 2: as that falls apart, I don't know, man, And.
Speaker 3: It's like, what is popular? What is culture right now?
Speaker 3: Is actually a very open question.
Speaker 4: Right, Well, we just put out a story about this
Speaker 4: where it's not the shrimp Jesus. But if you've seen
Speaker 4: the AI cats, there's this thing.
Speaker 3: No, it's incredible.
Speaker 1: Should we just put it out?
Speaker 4: It started on TikTok and it's spread to Instagram. It's
Speaker 4: AI generated images of cats in very upsetting situations, like
Speaker 4: there's one cat and his son like gets kidnapped by
Speaker 4: a pigeon, or they're at this they're in the sea
Speaker 4: and Godzilla comes and attacks them, and this stuff is
Speaker 4: blowing up. It's getting tens of millions of views. Is
Speaker 4: it because that's what people like and want? Or is
Speaker 4: it because this is what the algorithm is serving them?
Speaker 4: And it's like juice is engagement? Kind of hard to say,
Speaker 4: but I mean I kind of like it.
Speaker 3: I like it as well.
Speaker 2: But something that a lot of Internet culture reporting I
Speaker 2: feel like kind of fails for this reason because instead
Speaker 2: of analyzing the source. They analyze this instead of analyzing
Speaker 2: the problem, they analyze the symptom. Right, So it's like,
Speaker 2: why is Brat so big? Why is is this brat?
Speaker 2: Am I Brat?
Speaker 3: It's like, that's a fucking Charlie x X. I'm so old.
Speaker 3: I'm so fucking old.
Speaker 2: I just say, even saying that out loud, I age
Speaker 2: ten years.
Speaker 3: I am neither brat nor cap.
Speaker 2: And but even then that she's a famous musician, people
Speaker 2: like a music.
Speaker 3: It's not for me. People seem very happy with it.
Speaker 3: The Brat thing I want. That's one where I just
Speaker 3: look at it.
Speaker 2: I'm like, is this something that was popular because she's
Speaker 2: a popular musician or is it because the algorithm made
Speaker 2: the specific Brat thing popular? And it's like, I don't
Speaker 2: even we don't know how these algorithms work, so we
Speaker 2: don't actually know how to say that.
Speaker 3: We don't we don't actually know how to pull this apart.
Speaker 2: So I think with these algorithmic situations as well, maybe
Speaker 2: them falling apart is a good thing, or maybe these
Speaker 2: companies having to do more than just make the algorithm
Speaker 2: make stuff popular is for the best, Because I do
Speaker 2: miss accidentally finding stuff and the way we find things
Speaker 2: accidentally used to be the goofiness of the Internet, but
Speaker 2: also sharing. It used to be we got things through
Speaker 2: our friends sharing stuff. It's why Twitter originally was so
Speaker 2: fascinating because it was we found it three free tweets.
Speaker 2: But now it's like, I guess most people use the
Speaker 2: for you feed, which is insane to me, Like do
Speaker 2: you use that?
Speaker 1: I often do because I don't think about it.
Speaker 4: I open Twitter and that's just what I'm looking at
Speaker 4: and then I realized that I haven't scrolled over. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And I mean, here's a place where I think we
Speaker 4: could get some useful government regulation, because you know, I
Speaker 4: don't know if I want, you know, Congress to write
Speaker 4: rules about how content recommendation engines work.
Speaker 3: I don't know if I it's a propaganda thing to have.
Speaker 1: And it's also like a free speech is ue.
Speaker 4: Do we want them dictating what content you see and
Speaker 4: what you don't. Probably it's probably not even constitutional.
Speaker 1: But what they could.
Speaker 4: Do is they could mandate that the company be more
Speaker 4: transparent about how the algorithms work. They tell you how
Speaker 4: does hinge decide which people you see? In which people
Speaker 4: you guess? How are they judging you? How is Google
Speaker 4: determining where the search results go? What's showing up on
Speaker 4: your TikTok account. I think if there was some visibility
Speaker 4: into how that stuff worked and what the metrics were
Speaker 4: and what information was being collected, I think it would
Speaker 4: push the companies to change their systems in a way
Speaker 4: that was slightly more consumer friendly. It would change it
Speaker 4: in one way or another, but I think just visibility
Speaker 4: could be an incentive to give something that was more
Speaker 4: useful to the consumer.
Speaker 2: I agree, But I think the other thing that needs
Speaker 2: to happen is, and I don't know how you do this,
Speaker 2: is there also must be an incentive for these companies
Speaker 2: to have quality control.
Speaker 3: Because I don't know.
Speaker 2: Elon musk Oh, yes, I've made the entire epic based
Speaker 2: algorithm public and he's like, there's definitely something though in there,
Speaker 2: because they've definitely get The reason I ever use twitters
Speaker 2: for you feed is within two seconds that will see
Speaker 2: an actual Nazi.
Speaker 3: I'll be like, no, thanks, I don't need to see
Speaker 3: like the fourteen Yeah, yeah, I don't need to see
Speaker 3: the the latest iteration of a Hitler account that's been
Speaker 3: allowed on there. But I think that there needs.
Speaker 2: To be a quality level because otherwise, well, actually it
Speaker 2: gets back to the SEO thing. I want these companies
Speaker 2: and I don't know how you create this as an
Speaker 2: incentive to want to attack those who manipulate them because
Speaker 2: SEO has an idea.
Speaker 3: I get it if SEO because there's really, from what
Speaker 3: I understand, two things of SEO. There is the qualitative side,
Speaker 3: where it's like Google is saying this so that the
Speaker 3: quality of the website on Google is good. This is
Speaker 3: the original idea for it is that when you click
Speaker 3: on a website, it won't scam you, it will load fast,
Speaker 3: it will have good information, it will make for it, it
Speaker 3: will be a good result. Google has given the hell
Speaker 3: up on that. That is gone.
Speaker 2: We are no longer in the Google that actually does that.
Speaker 2: But that actually is a good thing. And Lily Ray
Speaker 2: was explaining this to me on the episode. It's like
Speaker 2: that as an idea is actually very very very good.
Speaker 2: I wish that more companies, including Google, stuck to that
Speaker 2: where it was we're making sure we're doing a quality service.
Speaker 2: But the other side is, okay, this is the stuff
Speaker 2: we like, this is what we will promote on here.
Speaker 2: And what sucks is I actually think that side is evil.
Speaker 2: I think that they should consider anyone actively trying to
Speaker 2: manipulate the algorithm the enemy. If you are a website
Speaker 2: that is creating content entirely to index well on Google,
Speaker 2: not based on how good it is, then you should
Speaker 2: be considered by Google the enemy.
Speaker 4: If they it is surprising that they encourage SEO. It
Speaker 4: seems counter to the whole point of search engine that
Speaker 4: you would be able to game it.
Speaker 2: I think it's just laziness. I think it's laziness is
Speaker 2: probably the wrong word. There's no incentive for them to
Speaker 2: not do it because some ICEO is good.
Speaker 4: And that's the thing, right, Like, how do we solve
Speaker 4: this problem? Like again, I don't think that most people
Speaker 4: want the guy verh dictating the way that Google works.
Speaker 4: But you know, if you went back in time and
Speaker 4: told the high school version of me that I'd be
Speaker 4: here defending free market capitalism, this is something that competition
Speaker 4: can help with, right, Like, Yeah, if I really would
Speaker 4: switch over to bing, if bing was better and that
Speaker 4: was easy and it didn't take any effort, and you know,
Speaker 4: it was one click away, then Google would be fighting really,
Speaker 4: really hard to fix the very real problems that they
Speaker 4: cropped up recently, and I think that's probably if nothing else,
Speaker 4: what is almost certainly going to happen, unless the whole
Speaker 4: court case gets thrown out, is that you're probably gonna
Speaker 4: get a pop up right in your face every time
Speaker 4: you set up a new device or a new browser
Speaker 4: that asks you which search.
Speaker 1: Engine you want to use.
Speaker 4: Most people are going to pick Google, but there's gonna
Speaker 4: be some sizeable percentage that goes over to Bing, that
Speaker 4: goes over to Duck dut go, and all of a
Speaker 4: sudden there's pressure to make the products better, both for
Speaker 4: Google and for these companies.
Speaker 3: What's in as well is Microsoft Being is profitable. By
Speaker 3: the way, what would be crazy? And this is such
Speaker 3: an adela as one of my lesseners.
Speaker 2: I'm sure you're listening, but you're not. What if being
Speaker 2: was really good? This is a crazy idea I had.
Speaker 3: What if being was good? What if when you use
Speaker 3: being it found really good results?
Speaker 2: I have this crazy idea that people might go, Wow,
Speaker 2: a search engine with good results. What if this whimsy,
Speaker 2: this curiosity we're talking about. What if a search engine
Speaker 2: I don't know search the web? What if the algorithm
Speaker 2: at being prabagar Ragavan's left over dinner that he left
Speaker 2: from when Yahoo connected to it. What if there was
Speaker 2: actually something that being found that was cool. What if
Speaker 2: Being became a very useful search engine that found good results.
Speaker 2: I don't know, maybe that might scare Google. And what's
Speaker 2: crazy is they don't want to.
Speaker 3: I just don't think they want to. I don't think
Speaker 3: any of them.
Speaker 2: They all realize it's slop and that their little pigs
Speaker 2: have to use there. But if literally one of them
Speaker 2: was just.
Speaker 3: Like, what if we made it good? And all the
Speaker 3: guys in the boardroom are like, it'll never work. It's
Speaker 3: never gonna work. Man. People don't like good things. They
Speaker 3: like bad things.
Speaker 2: Look at Google, But I think that that would if
Speaker 2: they saw if one of these people just saw it
Speaker 2: and went, wow, why was the internet good before? Well,
Speaker 2: there were less websites, which isn't really true, Like, okay,
Speaker 2: there were a billion versus a trillion websites. You still
Speaker 2: can't read all of them. Like, what if they did
Speaker 2: the job that we wanted to.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons Twitter used to be.
Speaker 2: So good was because it was kind of a live
Speaker 2: fire hose of the Internet. The reason that Facebook was
Speaker 2: used to be so good was that it was for
Speaker 2: evil reasons as well. At Database of People, you could
Speaker 2: find your real friends that you lost connection.
Speaker 1: And it was a little bit better than MySpace. Yes
Speaker 1: you know that's it doesn't have to be night and day.
Speaker 1: If it's two percent better, people will realize that they'll
Speaker 1: go over and then there will be more money flowing
Speaker 1: and then it can get even better. It's it's real.
Speaker 2: And Facebook was insanely profitable right up to the IPO
Speaker 2: and it was pretty good. There was to be clear,
Speaker 2: and I did it in the Facebook episode. There quite
Speaker 2: evil things. But the other thing that is exciting about
Speaker 2: the Google edge trust that kind of leads into this
Speaker 2: is they might have to share their advertising data, which
Speaker 2: I think is going to get really bad for both
Speaker 2: Facebook and Google because I think below the surface, you're
Speaker 2: going to find out that they know way too much,
Speaker 2: Like they know way more than they want to let one.
Speaker 2: But also they probably know enough to really do really
Speaker 2: cool personalized experiences and they.
Speaker 3: Just don't do it. They just don't want to. Like,
Speaker 3: they could probably make a.
Speaker 2: Great search experience for everyone because they know like your
Speaker 2: blood type and the last time you went to the toilet,
Speaker 2: but they can't do that. But they can use it
Speaker 2: to advertise you scam versions of PCs.
Speaker 3: You want to buy. It's just like the incentives are gone.
Speaker 2: But also transparency might be really fun for this, just
Speaker 2: because when they show how much they.
Speaker 3: Can do well.
Speaker 2: First of all, I think the government's going to be
Speaker 2: quite pissy, and also I don't know. Maybe they could
Speaker 2: get creative and earn their customers. But also I don't
Speaker 2: think on a complete different subject, I don't think Google
Speaker 2: can survive being broken up. I don't think it's possible.
Speaker 2: I don't think they can do it. I don't think
Speaker 2: that they as a company operate in a way that
Speaker 2: is like if you separate the ads from the such
Speaker 2: the fuck.
Speaker 4: If you separate ads from search, I don't know what
Speaker 4: Google is anymore. You can have a very powerful, big
Speaker 4: search company, yeah you can, and there are very powerful
Speaker 4: large ads companies, but nothing approaching the power and heft
Speaker 4: of Google can exist without those two things being paired.
Speaker 4: And I think that the anti trust case against Google's
Speaker 4: advertising business from the outset appears to be even stronger.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and there's a place.
Speaker 4: Where you know they there's a lot of discussion about
Speaker 4: what's going to happen with this search case, maybe they'll
Speaker 4: break off Chrome or Android from Google. That doesn't seem
Speaker 4: super likely because the case didn't address either of those products.
Speaker 4: It's just about search. But with the ads case, I
Speaker 4: think there's if we're breaking up monopolies now, if we
Speaker 4: decide that they're monopolies, Yeah, that seems like a very
Speaker 4: real possibility. And if that happens, it's going to be
Speaker 4: a completely different Internet almost immediately.
Speaker 2: And something that some of the louder, more annoying tech
Speaker 2: guys are saying is this is a bad thing.
Speaker 3: This is the.
Speaker 2: Government scaring away innovation. No, I actually think that this
Speaker 2: is a utopian idea. I think that we need fear
Speaker 2: in their hearts. But also we need to make it
Speaker 2: clear that big companies like this aren't a good idea.
Speaker 2: It's not a good idea to have a giant company
Speaker 2: that does this the app store on I like Apple
Speaker 2: in general, but I think, yeah, keep your keep your
Speaker 2: laptop business, your phone business. That's all fine. App store
Speaker 2: needs to be separate. Make the Apple App Store a
Speaker 2: completely separate thing. And maybe this changes how iOS is developed.
Speaker 2: Maybe this makes it so that iOS apps can run
Speaker 2: on other devices. Maybe this is altogether something that shatters Apple,
Speaker 2: But maybe that is a good thing.
Speaker 3: You can you can install whatever apps you want on
Speaker 3: your fucking that mac. Why call it them on my iPhone?
Speaker 1: It's hard to argue that more choice is not better
Speaker 1: for people.
Speaker 3: And it is. And actually that's the thing.
Speaker 2: I can be kind of cynical, but all of this
Speaker 2: stuff makes me very optimistic because what might stop happening
Speaker 2: is these companies might stop anticipating antitrust and changing themselves
Speaker 2: to avoid it.
Speaker 1: Well, that's the thing.
Speaker 4: And I mean, you've heard this argument the story before,
Speaker 4: but I wrote about this for Gizmoto. No matter what
Speaker 4: happens with all of these anti trust cases like Google
Speaker 4: lost this one, maybe the tech companies win every other case.
Speaker 4: They're still in trouble, right Yea tim Wu called it
Speaker 4: the policeman at the Elbow effect, where the fact that
Speaker 4: these companies are under such scrutiny they need to move slower,
Speaker 4: They need to be more careful, they need to be
Speaker 4: more apprehensive about doing things that crush the competition. That's
Speaker 4: what happened to IBM in the sixties, right, Like IBM one,
Speaker 4: it's anti drust case, but it lost the Computer Wars
Speaker 4: because it couldn't innovate, it couldn't compete because the government
Speaker 4: was watching them. That could happen here like maybe Amazon wins,
Speaker 4: but the way that they're hamstrung because these cases are happening,
Speaker 4: creates an opportunity for someone to step in.
Speaker 3: It also feels like we're right now.
Speaker 2: The thing I've been described to people is there is
Speaker 2: a tension in the air with the tech industry where
Speaker 2: it feels like all of those medicine consequences of actions
Speaker 2: are popping up. Like Intel right now. Intel a lot
Speaker 2: of their new generation processes might be entirely like a
Speaker 2: form of broken that might be very hard to fix.
Speaker 2: The blackwell GPUs that are coming out the next generation
Speaker 2: GPU is necessary to push Generator VII, so it's sometimes
Speaker 2: that puts out a useful result also delayed. I think
Speaker 2: there are like parallel processing issues, like it's dough GPUs
Speaker 2: talking to each other. It's crazy, but I think we
Speaker 2: might finally be seeing the cost of growth at all costs,
Speaker 2: like this is the real at some point you can't
Speaker 2: grow this fast forever. And maybe the answer is we
Speaker 2: are watching the raw economy get actually collapse to it
Speaker 2: an extent because you can there is a limit to science,
Speaker 2: and there is a limit to what you can build
Speaker 2: and how fus you can build it. But if the
Speaker 2: end result of all this anti trusting is also they
Speaker 2: get afraid of being too big, that may be genuinely
Speaker 2: one of the best things to happen in society, because
Speaker 2: we don't need five five trillion dollar companies that will
Speaker 2: be ten trillion dollars in two yet we don't. Who
Speaker 2: does that serve other than Jim Kramer.
Speaker 1: Right, And I mean clearly things have changed.
Speaker 4: Like if you just look at the rollout of AI,
Speaker 4: the fact that if you go up to some random
Speaker 4: person on the street on Fifth Avenue and ask them
Speaker 4: how do you feel about AI? I think more than
Speaker 4: half of people are going to tell you that they
Speaker 4: don't like it or something that.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's.
Speaker 4: About AI so much as it's about just changing feelings
Speaker 4: about the tech business. Ten fifteen years ago, people loved Google.
Speaker 4: They just thought Google was a nice, good company. People
Speaker 4: loved Amazon. It was like the two day shipping. This
Speaker 4: is so great. Now every company has a really serious
Speaker 4: popularity problem, which you know, when we're talking about social
Speaker 4: media platforms, like that's existential. If I just like TikTok
Speaker 4: more than I like Instagram reels. I might just hang
Speaker 4: out on TikTok more. And this general shift. I don't
Speaker 4: know what's going to happen in terms of regulation, but
Speaker 4: it's clear that to one extent or another, the party
Speaker 4: is over and we're about to enter some kind of
Speaker 4: new chapter. Whether AI changes everything, whether the Internet is
Speaker 4: different than it was in some technological way, some big
Speaker 4: platform shift is.
Speaker 3: Going to happen.
Speaker 1: I think things are going to start to feel different
Speaker 1: than they have for the past couple of years.
Speaker 3: And if you want to feel different, perhaps you could
Speaker 3: engage one of the wonderful advertisers that will follow this
Speaker 3: message true as usual, will align precisely with the things
Speaker 3: I believe and love. Please buy the products or don't.
Speaker 3: I can't make you. And we're back. And I think
Speaker 3: what you're saying is really interesting, because it is.
Speaker 2: It used to be that they're afraid of just like
Speaker 2: using it, losing a user, But now it's because they're
Speaker 2: so precisely and like granulally and like analyzing every interaction
Speaker 2: and monetizing every interaction. Every impression makes them a little
Speaker 2: shred of money so that they can sell to someone
Speaker 2: else and here and there and everywhere. It's more than
Speaker 2: just it's not just oh, I've lost Thomas to TikTok.
Speaker 2: It's that percentage of time that you're not spending on Instagram.
Speaker 2: If that that is a kind of an hard to
Speaker 2: calculate thing. But that shift I'm sure is happening with Facebook.
Speaker 2: It's more than just raw traffic. It's okay, I'm barely
Speaker 2: looking at Facebook.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I will go on Facebook.
Speaker 2: I check it like like that like a nest camera
Speaker 2: outside my house, to make sure like there isn't like
Speaker 2: a dog trying to scratch a whole know why they'd
Speaker 2: be happening, Just trying to choose a thing that would happen.
Speaker 3: Very normal guy. But it's you look at it because
Speaker 3: it's there.
Speaker 2: Say, with Instagram, I like check seet, I maybe messaged someone,
Speaker 2: But I'm not focused on any of these. I'm focused
Speaker 2: on Twitter and Blue Sky. I read that shit, I
Speaker 2: love it. Maybe I'm more of a text based guy,
Speaker 2: but with threads, I barely touch it. And I think
Speaker 2: the thing is that these companies have forgot how to
Speaker 2: compete entirely. They're not trying to make good shit anyway.
Speaker 2: They're not making sure the cool stuff is that they're
Speaker 2: just like, well, you have to be here.
Speaker 1: From the outside. It really did seem like Facebook in
Speaker 1: particular got complacent, like, yes, there were there were so
Speaker 1: many stories. No one's using Facebook anymore. It's a wasteland.
Speaker 1: It's just baby boomers falling for misinformation. You know, that
Speaker 1: was the story everyone was hearing. It seemed to be
Speaker 1: true to some extent. I actually think that that's changing.
Speaker 4: I now open Facebook every single day and I'm not
Speaker 4: going on there to look at my feed.
Speaker 1: It's because of Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is an incredible product.
Speaker 4: People love it. You can sell your stuff, you find
Speaker 4: really bizarre thing. I know, tons of people it's like
Speaker 4: become like sharing memes. A bunch of my friends will
Speaker 4: like send each other the weird thing that we'll find
Speaker 4: on Facebook Marketplace. And I think that's because there was pressure, right,
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, Facebook was in trouble. People were leaving,
Speaker 4: and they had to shift the way that the platform worked,
Speaker 4: and they built this product that is, you know, I think,
Speaker 4: kind of phenomenal.
Speaker 1: It's very useful to my life. You know, half the
Speaker 1: things in my apartment now I bought a Facebook Marketplace
Speaker 1: and the feed is getting better. You know, I think
Speaker 1: if you.
Speaker 3: Go and you look at the concept, I don't know
Speaker 3: if I agree with.
Speaker 1: I mean compared to how it was a year ago.
Speaker 3: No, man, I I maybe your Facebook fee is better
Speaker 3: in the mind.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's maybe. And then you know, tunorth I get.
Speaker 2: Like recommendations for the most insane groups. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: I want to say right now, I want to see Facebook. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm actually going to pull up Facebook.
Speaker 3: This is always good to do it a fine Yeah,
Speaker 3: Gary tan One on an audio show, immediate second thing
Speaker 3: is an ad, So then it's reels that it's a
Speaker 3: picture of a guy.
Speaker 4: Is is Facebook serving me content that I want? I'm
Speaker 4: not sure, but I do find myself.
Speaker 3: Person enjoying it in a way.
Speaker 1: That I didn't one year ago.
Speaker 3: Maybe stress it's chilling a little bit less ads.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I think the experience has gotten better, certainly
Speaker 4: for me.
Speaker 1: And that's the kind of stuff that happens.
Speaker 3: I don't like when there's a constumption firm my biases.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think marketplace is an interesting one as well,
Speaker 2: because it is useful. I bought she off of that product,
Speaker 2: but it's being poisoned already. You've started to see direct consumer.
Speaker 3: Shait on that. Absolutely, yeah, but also.
Speaker 2: I think it makes them let it makes them enough
Speaker 2: money that they keep it alive, but not so much
Speaker 2: that they want to just they can't.
Speaker 3: You can't really make it more evil.
Speaker 4: Like I doubt that it's making the money, like there
Speaker 4: are ads in it. Maybe it is directly making a
Speaker 4: profit there, certain if you buy something through Facebook, Marketplace
Speaker 4: or taking cut, I think it's just getting people to use.
Speaker 3: Facebook with a useful product.
Speaker 2: Mark Zuckerberg has woken now he hasn't. It's so weird though,
Speaker 2: because the more I think about it, I don't. I
Speaker 2: just don't think that there's much way to reduce engagement
Speaker 2: from marketplace. It isn't something that marketplace is only useful
Speaker 2: if it's interesting or funny. It's not like someone engaging
Speaker 2: for two minutes on marketplace is like an ad impression.
Speaker 3: Well there, I mean you see ads.
Speaker 2: On that, but it's not like a meme or a viral.
Speaker 2: Oh no, it's definitely you can't really do engagement bait.
Speaker 1: You're not gonna get I think on marketplace there's only
Speaker 1: a handful of people who have whatever particular blend of
Speaker 1: OCDA at ADHD that I have that they're going to
Speaker 1: look at the marketplace for an hour straight clear.
Speaker 2: I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. The shit on the
Speaker 2: shit on there is it would be like, yeah.
Speaker 3: I stole it.
Speaker 2: Incredible, I stole a bunch of shit. Classic better offline
Speaker 2: listener from the Blastio. I am on the lamb. Please
Speaker 2: meet me in this parket lot. I will be at
Speaker 2: a different one in an hour. The law is behind me.
Speaker 3: The ship that people the cars that people sell on
Speaker 3: there as well, incredible, Like I've seen multiple cars with
Speaker 3: not all of the wheels.
Speaker 4: Well, my favorite thing is Vice shut down its office
Speaker 4: in Williamsburg, right, and some guy stole the signs like
Speaker 4: the big Vice signed dam and he hasn't been able
Speaker 4: to sell it. But every couple of months I'll put
Speaker 4: it back up and he wants like twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 3: For a damn. I was gonna say, if it's cheap.
Speaker 1: I mean you could crowdfind. Right, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: people I'm.
Speaker 2: Not giving I'm not giving a criminal twenty thousand dollars.
Speaker 2: They just listen to this show. Maybe he is one
Speaker 2: of them. And but that's the thing, like what we're
Speaker 2: describing is the magic of the Internet, because the best
Speaker 2: things of the Internet are delightful watching people be like, yeah,
Speaker 2: everyone does broccoli milk, right like, just like some weird
Speaker 2: they think they're normal and they find themselves into the
Speaker 2: regular world and like, yeah, this is how normal things
Speaker 2: and they're not normal at all.
Speaker 3: And sometimes it's quite.
Speaker 2: Distressing, but most like, there's this horrible meme of like
Speaker 2: a guy he's screaming at his dog right now because
Speaker 2: he like fed it roast duck, and then his mother
Speaker 2: comes back and he screams at the dog that saying,
Speaker 2: this ate the roast duck.
Speaker 3: It's horrible.
Speaker 2: It's creating a horrible discourse right now. That's horrible. But
Speaker 2: also right now, you can go on Instagram or TikTok
Speaker 2: and look up most wildlife reserves and they're all doing
Speaker 2: the same thing, which is they put a camera on
Speaker 2: a spoon and they feed animals. It's magical, it sounds good.
Speaker 2: I could watch it for hours. There are so many
Speaker 2: weird like cities by Diana on Instagram. Diana, she is
Speaker 2: one of the early Dongwash and Long me and people,
Speaker 2: did you see the dongash Long There's an episode about it,
Speaker 2: and a lot of her stuff is just this kind
Speaker 2: of concussive actual brain rop which is in my opinion,
Speaker 2: what brain rod is just giving yourself a concussion, but
Speaker 2: it's kind of artistic expression that fucking rocks. There is
Speaker 2: this stuff still out there, and I actually think some
Speaker 2: of these platforms have enabled it. The problem is, I
Speaker 2: don't think the platforms know they're enabling it. I don't
Speaker 2: think they're being like this is cool and unique. I
Speaker 2: want to surface this because it's not like the rest.
Speaker 3: They're like they just automatic like uh signal and now
Speaker 3: this is popular. It's why shrimp Jesus popular on Facebook
Speaker 3: because they don't really care about the algorithm. They don't
Speaker 3: really care that it shoves good stuff. This is popular,
Speaker 3: so it's popular. It's this weird self fulfilling prophecy. I mean.
Speaker 4: And my real, you know, concern with it is that
Speaker 4: it only allows for a certain kind of content. Right,
Speaker 4: Like there's mister Beast, he's got a gigantic empire. The
Speaker 4: next person down the wrung of like the content creator,
Speaker 4: it's like thousands of miles away. Yeah, and he's kind
Speaker 4: of got a media business that he started. It's only
Speaker 4: focused on him, and there's basically no other media businesses
Speaker 4: that just operate on the Internet. It only allows for
Speaker 4: this certain kind of relatively low effort content or the
Speaker 4: kinds of things that one person can do over the
Speaker 4: course of a week, and it's limiting that that's something
Speaker 4: that with the previous model of the open Web, with
Speaker 4: the way that advertising works, you could start a company
Speaker 4: and do the kind of work you can only do
Speaker 4: with multiple people working on the same project. I love
Speaker 4: all of this stuff. Yeah, the brain rot, there's people doing.
Speaker 4: The latest thing that I've seen is people making AI
Speaker 4: videos where the point is the kind of playing with.
Speaker 1: How it hallucinates. It's great.
Speaker 4: But if I want like high quality journalism or you know,
Speaker 4: a TV show, you know, with like comedy writers, that
Speaker 4: can't exist when the platforms take as much of a
Speaker 4: cut as they do.
Speaker 2: Or when the platforms promote stuff. Miss the Beast Jimmy.
Speaker 2: He doesn't seem like a good or a bad guy.
Speaker 2: He seems like the first truly mid person. Absolutely like
Speaker 2: the first truly mediocre human. Mediocre doesn't mean bad, just
Speaker 2: means middle.
Speaker 1: And he's really good at it.
Speaker 3: But also is he good at it?
Speaker 2: Is he actually good or did the algorithm simply choose
Speaker 2: him because nothing. I've watched his stuff. I've watched a
Speaker 2: lot of it just to try and find out. And
Speaker 2: it is just like being slapped in the head repeatedly.
Speaker 3: Are you paying attention? You pay? Yeah, you don't need
Speaker 3: to pay attention. I'll be here.
Speaker 2: I'm not content content content, And people like, oh well,
Speaker 2: kids love it.
Speaker 3: It's like it's what's top of the algorithm, it's what
Speaker 3: they stop watching it.
Speaker 2: But also you can watch other shit, like how much
Speaker 2: of this is a self fulfilling prophecy? And I am
Speaker 2: three hundred and eighty years old, right, and thus maybe
Speaker 2: some of this just bounced off me.
Speaker 3: Maybe this is what kids like. But also I don't know,
Speaker 3: people like what's popular, and what's popular is what's chosen
Speaker 3: by the algorithms. How much of that is really intentional
Speaker 3: on these kids or what? Maybe this is just the.
Speaker 2: Algorithms create their own miniature cults. How much of this
Speaker 2: high quality stuff, like really high quality like comedy and
Speaker 2: such would do well if it was given a chance
Speaker 2: to be the algorithm? How much of this algorithmic stuff
Speaker 2: actually offers this stuff up and gives it a shot,
Speaker 2: because that's what's missing. It's not really giving anything a chance.
Speaker 2: It's not thinking, well, this is new and unique, this
Speaker 2: journalism is really fucking good. I need to show more people.
Speaker 2: And maybe it's not popular, maybe people look at it
Speaker 2: and never click it. And the answer is the algorithm says, okay,
Speaker 2: but you need to keep trying, and I don't think
Speaker 2: they try.
Speaker 1: Well, there's also the business side of it.
Speaker 4: There's like what the algorithm is showing you, but then
Speaker 4: there's also like you've got a really great one man.
Speaker 1: Journalism operation going here.
Speaker 4: But it's a certain kind of journalism, right, if you
Speaker 4: want to do like beat reporting, you need a team
Speaker 4: of people focusing on individual things, or you just or
Speaker 4: you just have one beat, or you just have one beat.
Speaker 4: That's true, maybe that's what the future of news looks like.
Speaker 4: But like I think having an editor is helpful.
Speaker 3: Oh I have an editor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well yeah, of course exactly, But like you can't
Speaker 4: if you were only doing this on TikTok, you probably
Speaker 4: couldn't afford to have an editor until you became huge,
Speaker 4: you know, And that it only permits like not just
Speaker 4: what the algorithm is showing you, but in terms of
Speaker 4: where it's possible to make money. There's only a certain
Speaker 4: kind of thing that the algorithm allows.
Speaker 2: I wonder how much of this as well as just
Speaker 2: demographic and that algorithmic stuff where it's just like this
Speaker 2: person seems this age and this gender. Will just show
Speaker 2: them this and they just like, this is what this
Speaker 2: person will see? That transparency thing you're saying earlier, it
Speaker 2: would be great to know if that's what it was doing,
Speaker 2: because if that's what it's doing, that is actively bad.
Speaker 3: It's actively bad.
Speaker 2: And also how commerce works, it's just I have decided
Speaker 2: they will target you and you are like this, but
Speaker 2: when you're providing content, I don't know how much of
Speaker 2: this is.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying you have to do that.
Speaker 2: Vacuous thing where multiple news companies have been like, what
Speaker 2: if we showed polarizing content the challenge their views. No,
Speaker 2: I'm just saying, give me a little bit of the
Speaker 2: people I follow on Twitter and Blue Sky especially, there
Speaker 2: are multiple people I follow because the shit they raise
Speaker 2: is really interesting. My mate Casey will talk about a lot.
Speaker 2: He sends me links all day and it's great one
Speaker 2: of my dearest friends. But that's what I actually like
Speaker 2: the Internet for. It's not just that I am finding stuff,
Speaker 2: but it's the collective consciousness of friends I know and
Speaker 2: people I follow and people I do or don't know
Speaker 2: sending me things.
Speaker 3: It's cool. I enjoy it.
Speaker 2: These what we're missing from Google search? Is it kind
Speaker 2: of used to be that? What we're missing from Twitter?
Speaker 2: Is it kind of used to be that this kind
Speaker 2: of zeitgeisty feeling. But also the unique stuff that would
Speaker 2: pop up didn't really come from the algorithm at all.
Speaker 2: That came from people finding it and look like really
Speaker 2: great internet culture reporting, like Rebecca Jennings of Vox great
Speaker 2: stuff there. She's really good at finding these things, these
Speaker 2: things that I don't know that It's not like, oh yeah,
Speaker 2: this says everything about everyone, but it's like, I find
Speaker 2: this unique, weird little story. I found these weird little freaks.
Speaker 2: Mia so Sarto at The ViRGE when she's writing about SEO.
Speaker 2: One of the great things she does is she doesn't
Speaker 2: just talk to one SEO expert. She goes and finds
Speaker 2: these weird websites. Yeah, it's one of like an iguana
Speaker 2: on it. You need to go and look at me
Speaker 2: as work.
Speaker 3: She's amazing. I don't know.
Speaker 2: I think what we're the nostalgia we have is it's
Speaker 2: so much. It's not so much the open web has gone.
Speaker 2: It's just it's become obfuscated. Yeah, it's kind of like
Speaker 2: the commercialization of all content. It's when we see mum
Speaker 2: and pop stores go away. And there are cases where
Speaker 2: mum and pop stores weren't good. But yeah, having unique,
Speaker 2: competitive stores that sold different things, competed on prices but
Speaker 2: also on supplies. A big comics fan here at least
Speaker 2: used to be the death of having lots of comic
Speaker 2: bookshops means finding comics is actually quite difficult. Now you
Speaker 2: can buy them, but finding something unique and interesting because
Speaker 2: there's less places to go to talk to some guy
Speaker 2: who reads comics behind the counter of a comic store
Speaker 2: all day and has insane opinions. Matt Weinberger, by the way,
Speaker 2: I'm sure you listening. You have many stories there. But
Speaker 2: it's like that's the magic we're missing. It's actually this
Speaker 2: is so tribe a human connection. But it really is, though,
Speaker 2: and they used to scale it, They used to scale
Speaker 2: humanity and they don't anymore.
Speaker 1: And maybe we go back to that, you know, like
Speaker 1: why is this stuff happening? Like it could be because
Speaker 1: the algorithm is directing us towards you know this like monoculture,
Speaker 1: or it could be that's what people wanted at this
Speaker 1: moment in history. Things do go in cycles.
Speaker 3: And also monoculture is real, it happens, happened before, it
Speaker 3: happens now, and I think that just I get a
Speaker 3: look of people who listen and they're like, ah, what
Speaker 3: can I do to change things? And what can I is?
Speaker 3: Everything is it. Don't be a doomer about this.
Speaker 2: There's no need to be the best thing I think
Speaker 2: anyone can do right now is when they find something
Speaker 2: cool and unique to share it. I know it's so
Speaker 2: fucking boring, but like, one of the best things you
Speaker 2: could do is if you find someone who says something
Speaker 2: very funny, who has like thirty followers, please share that,
Speaker 2: Please share it with everyone, because that is where the
Speaker 2: old magic of the internet was. One of my famous
Speaker 2: I think I might have mentioned it before. The thing
Speaker 2: I am most nostalgic for on the Internet is connection.
Speaker 2: And my favorite one of these is this a guy
Speaker 2: called Thomas Bolvin. He is a French engineer of some sort. Thomas,
Speaker 2: I've done you for decades. They still don't know what
Speaker 2: you do for a living. It's also a gifted mash
Speaker 2: up artist, and he has done some of the most
Speaker 2: insane things I've ever heard in my life. He did
Speaker 2: a Kanye we I know, Kanye West fucking sucks.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: Kane of the Stone Age is one of the best
Speaker 2: albums of all time. It's insanely good. He did a
Speaker 2: LP run the Jewels album. He has done so many
Speaker 2: weird things. I found him by accident. He doesn't have
Speaker 2: a huge following potem totom on Twitter, and this guy
Speaker 2: is just digging away. I've known he made a mash
Speaker 2: up that I played at my brother's wedding, and I
Speaker 2: only found him by accident. It's one of the best
Speaker 2: things that's happened to me. And the Internet tons of
Speaker 2: people have stories like this. I think that that really
Speaker 2: is what we're nostalgic for. It's not the big folks monoculture,
Speaker 2: which I think we all enjoy. We like the populace.
Speaker 4: It's that there's a weird guy running a website about
Speaker 4: a thing he's obsessed with, and it feels like he's
Speaker 4: your friend and you're supporting him. My favorite right now,
Speaker 4: there's a guy on TikTok who has this like comedy
Speaker 4: thing he does called walk News where it's like a
Speaker 4: news show, but it's in just it's like the style
Speaker 4: of TV news, but it's about what the walk that
Speaker 4: he just took this morning, so he like sees a
Speaker 4: weird you know, like stick that looks like a duck
Speaker 4: or something. But I mean, this is what I've been
Speaker 4: telling people is if you're worried about the health of
Speaker 4: the open web, if you want to support people who
Speaker 4: aren't you know, a gigantic multinational corporation, engage with them
Speaker 4: on the platforms, like their stuff, share their stuff. But
Speaker 4: I think even more importantly is find people on the platforms,
Speaker 4: because that's where we find everything, and then follow them off.
Speaker 4: Sign up for people's newsletters, go to their websites, give
Speaker 4: them two dollars a month on patritter image you want,
Speaker 4: give them your email.
Speaker 3: Right, That's it.
Speaker 4: It's building a connection with people that those creators and
Speaker 4: publishers and artists control, that they can operate on their
Speaker 4: own terms instead of just doing whatever the algorithm wants.
Speaker 1: Today, if we can.
Speaker 4: Go back a little bit to a world where we're
Speaker 4: supporting individual people and connecting with them one on one,
Speaker 4: I think that does a lot for the health of
Speaker 4: the Internet. And you know, I don't want to be
Speaker 4: a Pollyanna about this, like that's not going to counteract
Speaker 4: the power of Google dot Com. But I also think
Speaker 4: we're kind of going in that direction already. I think
Speaker 4: people have realized that this is what they want, and
Speaker 4: they're going out and finding people and building a connection
Speaker 4: with them that maybe kind of disappeared completely for a
Speaker 4: couple of years.
Speaker 1: It was only on the place.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: Like two others I'm gonna I just I love I
Speaker 2: actually think it's cool to highlight these people. One is
Speaker 2: real Dan Yang on Instagram. His new thing he does
Speaker 2: is he does like sports breakdowns, but he does them
Speaker 2: for very weird things. He did one where it's a
Speaker 2: guy a woman throws a sprite at a guy in
Speaker 2: Miami and the guy elbow drops the window off of
Speaker 2: her car, the mirror off her car, and he's just
Speaker 2: going like, now you look at the classic Corvette elbow
Speaker 2: guy and he does like a play by play breakdown.
Speaker 3: It's fucking hilarious.
Speaker 2: Dan Yang is actually one of the most gifted comedians,
Speaker 2: and Instagram's actually good finding comedy. But the way he
Speaker 2: does this dead pan stuff is so marvelous, and every
Speaker 2: time I see his shit, I feel like just so
Speaker 2: happy because it's like this is what I miss. But
Speaker 2: the other one, and probably one of my favorites ever,
Speaker 2: is a woman called Vicka vk goes Wild on YouTube.
Speaker 2: She is one of the most gifted pianists I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: I mean like insant, like she plays redmannon off and
Speaker 2: the way her hands move is not human. What she
Speaker 2: does is she does extremely intricate covers of metal and rock.
Speaker 2: She did a cover of a Queens of the Stone
Speaker 2: a song called Unreborn Again, which is a real deep
Speaker 2: cart holding your heart by what royal Blood, but also
Speaker 2: that black Hole sign she hay Man nice shop, and
Speaker 2: the way she keeps time with her hands is genuinely insane.
Speaker 2: Like watching it, you're like, I don't think my fingers
Speaker 2: can do that on one hand in any time signature
Speaker 2: close to this, and she has a Patreon sadly Patreon
Speaker 2: a kind of evil, but give her money.
Speaker 3: But also, and to really wrap this up, it's this
Speaker 3: shit is still happening.
Speaker 2: It's very easy to look at everything in a monolith
Speaker 2: and say, oh, well, all the Internet is is just people.
Speaker 2: Dearnet's messing with the algorithm, and I just don't think
Speaker 2: that's productive. And I know, yeah, these small things won't
Speaker 2: change things, but we've got a lot of listeners now.
Speaker 2: The best thing any of you can do while listening
Speaker 2: is when you find this weird little thing something like this,
Speaker 2: share it, share it, aggressively, send it to your friends,
Speaker 2: because this is actually what you're missing. What you're missing
Speaker 2: is not so much a pure Internet, because it's not
Speaker 2: been pure for a while now. It's that it's not
Speaker 2: as easy, or at least the sources aren't as loud
Speaker 2: toward things like this. The dominant culture of the dominant
Speaker 2: noise is very big, very obviously popular things like the
Speaker 2: most popular song is the most popular song.
Speaker 3: Because the Spotify algorith blah blah blah blah blah, and
Speaker 3: these breakout hits aren't really breakout hits on a qualitative level.
Speaker 3: Their breakout hits because the algorithm decided to show it
Speaker 3: to a lot of people and it was popular enough
Speaker 3: to take off. And yeah, there's a situation where it
Speaker 3: would have been popular anyway. But I don't know. I
Speaker 3: think that the best thing you can do is find
Speaker 3: your weirdos, Find your weirdos, share your weirdos, post them
Speaker 3: on the Better off Line Reddit. Ask that's better off line.
Speaker 3: I want to do the find your weirdo's thread. I
Speaker 3: want to know because that's the thing. The Better off
Speaker 3: Line Reddit has been amazing because it's just real people
Speaker 3: mostly talking about stealing stuff. The whole joke about people
Speaker 3: stealing stuff, catlet converters and everything from a few episodes
Speaker 3: ago that has taken off. Yeah, and the worry I
Speaker 3: have is the book coming out and they're just gonna
Speaker 3: steal it.
Speaker 2: But that's a different problem. But what's magical about it
Speaker 2: is it's real people dicking around and they allow that,
Speaker 2: the real ones.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really hopeful about the state of the web,
Speaker 4: right and it's you know, maybe again it sounds like,
Speaker 4: you know, I'm wearing rose colored glasses. But the fact
Speaker 4: that if you agree that these things are problems, the
Speaker 4: fact that it bothers us so much as Internet users
Speaker 4: is a very positive thing. Right Because Lily Ray, the
Speaker 4: SEO expert, said to me a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 4: She was saying, I can't believe that normies are complaining
Speaker 4: about how search engines work. You know, the fact that
Speaker 4: this bothers us means that there's pressure on the platforms
Speaker 4: to change. Now, when Google searches a monopoly, there isn't
Speaker 4: much pressure.
Speaker 1: Maybe that changes. But if you aren't happy.
Speaker 4: With Spotify or with Instagram and you go looking elsewhere,
Speaker 4: that creates a business oper unity for someone to fill.
Speaker 4: And I think that's where the Internet is going. We're
Speaker 4: going to find.
Speaker 1: New things that we like, and in some ways the
Speaker 1: services are going to change.
Speaker 2: I want to read one last thing as we end,
Speaker 2: and this is from Nick cave On Stephen Colbert. Not
Speaker 2: the place that you should get it, he said, and
Speaker 2: I quote. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It's adversarial.
Speaker 2: It's the warrior emotion that can lay wasteed cynicism. Each
Speaker 2: redemptive or loving act as small as you like, such
Speaker 2: as reading to your little boy keeps the devil down
Speaker 2: in the hole. And I fucking agree. The thing that
Speaker 2: you can do as a listener right now is to
Speaker 2: change platforms. Sure, but share the unique things. I'm not
Speaker 2: saying you have to be hipster about it.
Speaker 3: But you find some weird song you find like the
Speaker 3: Demon Cleaner for by Caius, the cover I found from tool.
Speaker 2: It's fucking cool. That is where the magic of the
Speaker 2: Internet is, and that is where you can find your hope.
Speaker 2: It's there, Thomas, thank you so much for joining. Where
Speaker 2: can people find you?
Speaker 4: I am on Twitter and TikTok It's at Thomas Jermaine
Speaker 4: Jermaine's with.
Speaker 3: A G and how do you spell that?
Speaker 1: It's ger m ai n Yeah, they.
Speaker 2: Make spelled stuff now and you can of course find
Speaker 2: me at Google dot com and I'm on Twitter. All
Speaker 2: the things are gonna come afterwards, but thank you so
Speaker 2: much for joining me. Thomas and Daniel. Thank you my
Speaker 2: wonderful producer in studio, Daniel Goodman. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for listening everyone, and I guess I can say it here.
Speaker 2: Even though the season two doesn't start, we have been renewed.
Speaker 2: If they couldn't keep me down. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: to everyone for listening. And I'm so grateful.
Speaker 3: To be doing this every week. I can't believe tolerate me.
Speaker 3: I love you all. To quote the end of the menu,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening
Speaker 3: to Better Offline.
Speaker 2: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 2: is Metasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 2: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M.
Speaker 3: A T T O S O W s ki dot com.
Speaker 2: You can email me at easy at better offline dot
Speaker 2: com or visit better offline dot com to find more
Speaker 2: podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really
Speaker 2: recommend you go to chat dot Where's Youread dot at
Speaker 2: to visit the discord, and go to our slash.
Speaker 3: Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
Speaker 3: much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool
Speaker 3: Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
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Speaker 3: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.