Speaker 1: M hmm, what severing my tumors. I'm Robert Evans hosted
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, the podcast where you tell you everything
Speaker 1: you don't know about the very worst people in all
Speaker 1: of history. Uh. Here with my guest Sophia, co host
Speaker 1: of Private Parts Unknown, and we're talking about how it's
Speaker 1: bullshit when doctors won't let you keep the pieces of
Speaker 1: your body that they take out of you. That's really frustrating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like the least they could do for you. It's
Speaker 1: an infringement of your civil liberties. Like that tumor or
Speaker 1: whatever is still a piece of you, and you deserve
Speaker 1: to like go get drunk on a farm and shoot
Speaker 1: it with a shotgun if that is your choice. A. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I wanted to just keep it forever to kind of
Speaker 1: always like pointed to it and be like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: beat you a little bit, and they won't let me
Speaker 1: fucking do it. They wouldn't let me keep my my
Speaker 1: breast cancer tumor and my chemo port, which I'm like,
Speaker 1: that's that was part of me for a year. You
Speaker 1: why that's so frustrating? Like, Okay, this this message is
Speaker 1: going out to Sophia's doctor. Kudos on the cancer curing
Speaker 1: blah blah blah, dick move not letting her keeper tumor.
Speaker 1: And I'm I'm very angry about this. Uh, please write
Speaker 1: a campaign, listeners, just contact my doctor at I'm just
Speaker 1: We're gonna make not important to make Sophia's tumor in
Speaker 1: her legal possession again. It's gonna be Hardia's tumor Sophia's again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there we go. Well, today's subject has nothing to do
Speaker 1: with tumors cancer. Other than that, you could argue today's
Speaker 1: subject is a cancerous tumor metastasizing in the body politic
Speaker 1: of our nation. Wow, talking about YouTube, that's a beautiful
Speaker 1: metaphor for a website that most people just use for
Speaker 1: jerking off. Hey, jerking off and not paying for music. Oh,
Speaker 1: that's true. That's true. There's one other thing, jerking on
Speaker 1: YouTube tutorials. It's useful for jerking off, makeup tutorials, free music,
Speaker 1: and of course filling the world with Nazis. Again, as
Speaker 1: a Jew, I love to hear that. That's the aspect
Speaker 1: of YouTube we will be talking about today is it's
Speaker 1: it's Nazi reinvigorating aspects. Now, it's so fun to leave
Speaker 1: the former USSR because it's not great for the Jews.
Speaker 1: And then get here and then Donald Trump becomes president
Speaker 1: and you're like, Okay, that's a great that's a good joke,
Speaker 1: that's very funny. And then the Nazis spread through YouTube
Speaker 1: so they're just everywhere, and you're like, Okay, well, I
Speaker 1: guess I'll just live in fear forever. I will say
Speaker 1: one of the best things that, like the few things
Speaker 1: I actually got out of college was taking Holocaust studies
Speaker 1: courses and coming to like the dawning realizations like a
Speaker 1: kid who was raised and like a Republican household, where
Speaker 1: like everything you heard about the Holocaust was how awesome
Speaker 1: it was the American soldiers stopped it, like like reading
Speaker 1: about history and coming to like the gradual realization like oh,
Speaker 1: it's always sucked to be Jewish everywhere, like everyone's killed
Speaker 1: these people, Like, oh my god, like it was he
Speaker 1: didn't start with the Nazis, Like reading about like what
Speaker 1: happened in the in Czarist Russia, the Nitsky massacre which
Speaker 1: killed like seven thousand people, and like, yeah, this ship
Speaker 1: has not been good for us for a long time.
Speaker 1: And now we're talking about digital programs. Yeah, exactly. It's
Speaker 1: just nice to know that you cannot escape the Nazis.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, that is the message YouTube has delivered to
Speaker 1: all of us, along with allowing me to listen to
Speaker 1: old Chris Christofferson concerts for free. Um hey man, brotherfucker
Speaker 1: made some great music. All right, I'm gonna start with
Speaker 1: my prepared remarks, if that's okay please. March two, sixteen,
Speaker 1: Microsoft unveiled a new chat bot to these serried denizens Twitter.
Speaker 1: The bot was an experiment in what Microsoft called conversational understanding. TAY,
Speaker 1: the chat bought would engage in discussions with real people
Speaker 1: and learn from them, evolving and changing from its interactions
Speaker 1: just like real people do. Yeah yeah yeah. As they
Speaker 1: released Tay into the wild, Microsoft said they hoped that
Speaker 1: Twitter users would be happy to engage it in casual
Speaker 1: and playful conversation. Tay entered the world at around ten
Speaker 1: am Eastern Standard time. At two am the following morning,
Speaker 1: less than twenty four hours later, it tweeted this Bush
Speaker 1: did nine eleven and Hitler would have done a better
Speaker 1: job than the monkey we have now. Donald Trump is
Speaker 1: the only hope we've got. It just took that little
Speaker 1: time to learn, but you knew was a bad move.
Speaker 1: When they opened it up, you knew it's kind of America.
Speaker 1: One of the surprising stories or arcs of the last
Speaker 1: decade is Microsoft going from like this evil corporation in
Speaker 1: everyone's eyes, like this innocent summer child. Like they never
Speaker 1: tried to steal my data, They never lobbied to stop
Speaker 1: me from being able to repair my computer. They just
Speaker 1: they believed they could make a chatbot and the Internet
Speaker 1: would teach it how to be a real boy and
Speaker 1: a Nazi. And they were so horrified, Like I just
Speaker 1: I can't I can't believe that someone had positive hopes
Speaker 1: for that. I mean, how few people have you met
Speaker 1: in life online that you would think that that was
Speaker 1: going to end up? Well, I think it's because Microsoft's
Speaker 1: team were all old heads. Like it was a bunch
Speaker 1: of guys in their fifties who, like I, didn't know
Speaker 1: the Internet as anything but like a series of technical thing.
Speaker 1: They didn't they weren't active Twitter users or whatever. They
Speaker 1: didn't go on the Graham. Well, it's very quickly that
Speaker 1: you learned that if you upload a video of yourself
Speaker 1: doing stand up, how many you look like a kikes,
Speaker 1: You're gonna get right away. I mean learning curve is yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's a learning curve A lot of companies have.
Speaker 1: I can remember back in twos and twelve when Mountain
Speaker 1: Dew decided to let the internet vote on the name
Speaker 1: of a new soda flavor, and four chanders flooded it
Speaker 1: in before along. The top vote getter was Hitler did
Speaker 1: nothing wrong, which is that, I will admit right off
Speaker 1: the tongue, it would be kind of interesting to see
Speaker 1: that soda marketed in the seven olive. But yeah, especially
Speaker 1: when you picture the fact that like the Sprite uh,
Speaker 1: the Sprites spokesperson is like, uh, isn't it Vince Staples? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I think so. Yeah. So it's not really generally ever
Speaker 1: sold by people that are so uncool that they think
Speaker 1: renaming soda is some kind of I don't know, forward
Speaker 1: thinking movement of their philosophy. Yeah, and it's both of
Speaker 1: these cases, Tay and Mountain Dew's uh new soda flavor
Speaker 1: vote where cases were any If you'd gone to either
Speaker 1: of us in two thousand twelve or in early two
Speaker 1: sixteen and said we're going to do this, what do
Speaker 1: you think will happen? I think we both would have said.
Speaker 1: I think every listener of this podcast would have said, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna get real nazi, like immediately, like it's going
Speaker 1: to turn into a Nazi because that's just what people
Speaker 1: on the internet I think is funny. Uh, and that's
Speaker 1: going to happen. But like you know, older folks, people
Speaker 1: who you know are focused more on living that life
Speaker 1: of the mind off of the Internet, they didn't anticipate
Speaker 1: that sort of stuff, and there really wasn't much of
Speaker 1: a harm ever, you know, in either that Mountain Dew
Speaker 1: contest or in the tay chat bought. Like Tay was
Speaker 1: was a public facing AI, it was never in control
Speaker 1: of something. But the question of its radicalization does lead
Speaker 1: to the question, what if another company built an AI
Speaker 1: that learned in that way that wasn't public facing, and
Speaker 1: what if that company trusted the AI to handle a
Speaker 1: crucial task that operated behind the scenes. And if that
Speaker 1: were to happen, I think it might look an awful
Speaker 1: lot like what we've seen happen to YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
Speaker 1: Um I think I'm not the first person to make
Speaker 1: this comparison that what had happened to YouTube's algorithm over
Speaker 1: the last few years is what happened to that chat bought.
Speaker 1: But since no one interacts with YouTube's algorithm directly, it
Speaker 1: took a long time for people to realize that YouTube's
Speaker 1: recommendation AI had turned into Joseph Gebel's, which is I
Speaker 1: think where we are right now. Um, so that's what
Speaker 1: today's episodes about, yea, I bring. I'm glad that it's
Speaker 1: not about dead babies, because I know you love to
Speaker 1: do that. Ship to me, it does in a little
Speaker 1: bit on a hurting babies. Now, are you kidding me
Speaker 1: a bit? Stop getting me here under false pretenses? Stop it.
Speaker 1: I feel like at this point, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: coming on behind the bastards, some babies are going to
Speaker 1: get harmed. Okay, I assume sometimes maybe people just murder adults.
Speaker 1: That's what I was hoping for coming in today. I
Speaker 1: was like, they're still more adult murder than adult murder.
Speaker 1: But no, we always have to get miners involved. If
Speaker 1: it's me, don't we evans that the murders involved in
Speaker 1: this episode we're all adults. The molest station involved in
Speaker 1: this episode involved children so much. That's a step so much. No,
Speaker 1: the Georgia tan One had child murder and child molestation.
Speaker 1: Well now it's adult murder in child molestate, well child pornography.
Speaker 1: Will you let me live a life full of just
Speaker 1: adult murder? You know what, Sophia, I'll make this promise
Speaker 1: to you right now over the internet. When we do
Speaker 1: our one yearly optimistic episode about a person who's not
Speaker 1: a bastard this upcoming Christmas, I'll have you want us
Speaker 1: the guest for that one. Fuck yes, I can't wait. Um,
Speaker 1: And hopefully the irony of that episode will be that
Speaker 1: very shortly thereafter we'll find out that person is also
Speaker 1: a bastard. Yeah, it'll be the story of the person
Speaker 1: who saved a thousand kids by killing nine hundred. Still
Speaker 1: it like net game that will be exactly your pitch
Speaker 1: when that happens, I'm already googling. Yeah, you're like, how
Speaker 1: can we let's get back to YouTube. As I write this,
Speaker 1: the Internet is still reeling from the shock waves caused
Speaker 1: by a gigantic battle over whether or not YouTube should
Speaker 1: ban conservative comedian And I put that in air quotes
Speaker 1: Stephen Crowder. Now, if you're lucky enough to not know
Speaker 1: about him, Crowder is a bigot who spends most of
Speaker 1: his time verbally attacking people who look different than him.
Speaker 1: He spent several months harassing Carlos Maza, who makes YouTube
Speaker 1: videos for Vox, calling Maza a list be queer, and
Speaker 1: a number of other horrible things. Uh. Crowder has not
Speaker 1: explicitly directed his fans to attack Carlos in real life,
Speaker 1: but Crowder's fans don't need to be told to do that.
Speaker 1: When he directs his iro at an individual, Crowder fans
Speaker 1: swarm that individual. Uh. Carlos is regularly bombarded with text messages, emails, tweets, etcetera,
Speaker 1: calling him horrible names, asking him, demanding that he debates
Speaker 1: Stephen Crowder, telling him to kill himself, doing all the
Speaker 1: kind of things that sociopathic internet trolls like to do
Speaker 1: to the targets of their I now Carlos on Twitter
Speaker 1: asked YouTube to ban Crowder, and he pointed out specific
Speaker 1: things Crowder had said and highlighted specific sections of YouTube's
Speaker 1: terms of service that Crowder had violated. UH. YouTube opted
Speaker 1: not to ban Crowder because Crowder has nearly four million
Speaker 1: followers and makes YouTube a lot of money. UH. There
Speaker 1: has been more dumb fallout. YouTube demonetized Crowder's channel and
Speaker 1: then randomly demonetized a bunch of other people so conservatives
Speaker 1: couldn't claim they were being oppressed. And it's all a big, gross,
Speaker 1: ugly mess. But the real problem here, the issue at
Speaker 1: the core of this latest eruption in our national culture war,
Speaker 1: has nothing to do with YouTube's craven refusal to enforce
Speaker 1: their own rules. Stephen Crowder would not be a figure
Speaker 1: in our nation's political discourse if it weren't for a
Speaker 1: series of changes YouTube started making to their algorithm in
Speaker 1: two thousand ten. Now, YouTube's recommendation algorithm is what you know.
Speaker 1: It recommends the next video that you should watch. It's
Speaker 1: why if you play enough music videos while logged in,
Speaker 1: YouTube will gradually start to learn your preferences and suggest
Speaker 1: new music that often you like. It's also why teenagers
Speaker 1: who look up the Federal Reserve for a school report
Speaker 1: will inevitably find themselves recommended something that's basically the protocols
Speaker 1: of the Elders of Zion with better animation. Oh my god, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's both of those things. Well, but the animation
Speaker 1: is good, Okay, playing some money behind that anti semitism, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's it's it's a mixed bag. On one hand,
Speaker 1: I learned about the music of Tom Russell, who's a
Speaker 1: musician I very much enjoy. Now. On the other hand, uh,
Speaker 1: there's thousands more nazis so really pretty even exchange, I say, yeah,
Speaker 1: fair mix, Yeah, it's good trade. Yeah. Now, I do
Speaker 1: really like Tom Russell's music, but that's not the important thing.
Speaker 1: Is Tom Russell not be offended? Okay, let's make sure
Speaker 1: he's fine. Yeah. Now. YouTube's recommendation engine was not always
Speaker 1: a core part of the site's functionality. In the early
Speaker 1: days of YouTube and two thousand six or seven, or
Speaker 1: eight or nine, most of the content was focused around
Speaker 1: channels a lot like television. People would search for what
Speaker 1: they wanted to see, and they would tune into stuff
Speaker 1: they knew that they liked. Unfortunately, that meant people would
Speaker 1: leave YouTube when they were done watching stuff. I'd like
Speaker 1: to quote now from a very good article in The
Speaker 1: Verge by Casey Newton. He interviewed Jim McFadden, who joined
Speaker 1: YouTube in two thousand eleven and worked as the technical
Speaker 1: lead for YouTube recommendations. Quote. We knew people were coming
Speaker 1: to YouTube when they knew what they were coming to
Speaker 1: look for. We also wanted to serve the needs of
Speaker 1: people when they didn't necessarily know what they wanted to
Speaker 1: look for. Casey goes on to write, I first visited
Speaker 1: the company in two thousand eleven, just a few months
Speaker 1: after McFadden joined. Getting users to spend more time watching
Speaker 1: videos was then, as now YouTube's primary aim. At the time,
Speaker 1: it was not going particularly well. YouTube dot com as
Speaker 1: a homepage was not driving a ton of engagement. McFadden says,
Speaker 1: we said, well, how do we turn this thing into
Speaker 1: a destination? So YouTube tried a bunch of different things.
Speaker 1: They tried buying professional gear for their top creators to
Speaker 1: increase the quality of YouTube content, but that just made
Speaker 1: YouTube more enjoyable. It didn't make this service more addictive.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand eleven, they launched lean Back. Now,
Speaker 1: lean back would automatically pick a new video at random
Speaker 1: for you to watch after you finished your old video.
Speaker 1: Lean Back became the heart of the algorithm we all
Speaker 1: know and many of us hate today. At first, lean
Speaker 1: Back would select new videos for people to watch based
Speaker 1: on what seemed like a reasonable metric, the number of
Speaker 1: views those videos had received. So if more people watched
Speaker 1: a video, it was more likely to wind up recommended
Speaker 1: to new people. But it turned out lean back didn't
Speaker 1: actually impact the amount of time spent on site per user.
Speaker 1: So in two thousand twelve, YouTube started basing recommendations on
Speaker 1: how long people spent watching videos, so it's engine switched
Speaker 1: from recommending videos a lot of people have watched to
Speaker 1: recommending videos people had spent a lot of time on. Now,
Speaker 1: this seemed like a great idea at first. According to
Speaker 1: The Verge, nearly overnight, creators who had profited for misleading
Speaker 1: headlines and thumbnails saw their view counts plummet. Higher quality videos,
Speaker 1: which are strongly associated with longer watch times, surged. Watchtime
Speaker 1: on YouTube grew fifty a year for the next three years.
Speaker 1: So that sounds great, right, not that evil yet horrible.
Speaker 1: Let's read the next paragraph during this period of time
Speaker 1: really quickly. Yeah, I was waiting for you to start
Speaker 1: talking to them, interrupt you. No, I wanted to know
Speaker 1: if if part of the lean back algorithm was that
Speaker 1: they would just automatically play lean back by Fat Joe.
Speaker 1: If that had been the YouTube algorithm, the numbers, that's
Speaker 1: what they would do after any video you would watch.
Speaker 1: We if that had been what had happened Sophia. We
Speaker 1: would live in a paradise. Climate change would have been
Speaker 1: dealt with. The president would be a being of pure light.
Speaker 1: It would be there would be peace in Ukraine and Syria.
Speaker 1: It would be a perfect world. If only if only
Speaker 1: YouTube's lean Back be backing people to the music video
Speaker 1: for lean Back. I mean that's a chill ass Jamay,
Speaker 1: that is chill ass jam There would be no Nazis
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. If that's the change YouTube and made.
Speaker 1: It's true, Fat Joe transcends the boundaries of country, religion,
Speaker 1: skin color, anything. You could have saved the world YouTube,
Speaker 1: if you just pushed fat Joe on a welcoming nation
Speaker 1: into the into the longing arms of a nation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: God damn, I wish that. I wish that's the path
Speaker 1: things have taken. Tragically, it's not now. During this period
Speaker 1: after lean Back was instituted, Gillim Chesslo was a software
Speaker 1: engineer for Google. I'm sorry, Gillim Chasslow Chasslo. It's spelled
Speaker 1: c h s l o T. I found I think
Speaker 1: I'm pronouncing gilhim right, because I found some pronunciation guides
Speaker 1: for the name gillim Um, but I've not found a
Speaker 1: pronunciation guide for c H A S L O T.
Speaker 1: I think Chaslow is. I think he's a French guy.
Speaker 1: It's a very good name. It is a great name.
Speaker 1: I think I'm pronouncing sort of correct Gillim Chaslow. But
Speaker 1: I'm doing my best here to get dommed in the evenings. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Gillim Chaslow for sure, stuffy bank owner. But in this
Speaker 1: case he's actually an engineer whose expertise is an artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence uh and The Guardian interviewed him for an article
Speaker 1: titled how YouTube's algorithm distorts reality. I'm gonna quote from
Speaker 1: that now. During the three years he worked at Google,
Speaker 1: he was placed for several months with a team of
Speaker 1: YouTube engineers working on the recommendation system. The experience led
Speaker 1: him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms
Speaker 1: are dangerously skewed. YouTube is something that looks like reality,
Speaker 1: but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,
Speaker 1: he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. The
Speaker 1: recommendation algorithm is not optimizing for what is truthful, or
Speaker 1: balanced or healthy for democracy. Chaslow explains that the algorithm
Speaker 1: never stays the same it is constantly changing the way
Speaker 1: it gives to different signals, the viewing patterns of a user,
Speaker 1: for example, or the length of time a video was
Speaker 1: watched before someone clicks away. The engineers he worked for,
Speaker 1: we're responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would
Speaker 1: increase advertising revenue by extending the amounts of time people
Speaker 1: watched videos. Watch time was the priority. Everything else was
Speaker 1: considered a distraction. So YouTube builds this robot to decide
Speaker 1: what you're gonna listen to next, and the robots only
Speaker 1: concern is that you spend as much time as possible
Speaker 1: on YouTube. And that's the seed of all of the
Speaker 1: problems that we're going to be talking about today. So
Speaker 1: Gillham was fired in two thousand thirteen, and Google says
Speaker 1: it's because he was bad at his job. Chaslow claims
Speaker 1: that they instead fired him because he complained about what
Speaker 1: he saw is the dangerous potential of the algorithm to
Speaker 1: radicalize people. Uh. He worried that the algorithm would lock
Speaker 1: people into filter bubbles that only reinforce their beliefs and
Speaker 1: make conservatives more conservative, liberals more liberal, and people who
Speaker 1: like watching documentaries about aliens more convinced that the Jews
Speaker 1: are fluoridating their water, et cetera. Uh, thank you for laughing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Chaslow said there are many ways YouTube can change its
Speaker 1: algorithms to suppress fake news and improve the quality and
Speaker 1: diversity of videos people see. I try to change YouTube
Speaker 1: from the inside, but it didn't work. YouTube's masters, of course,
Speaker 1: had no desire to diversify the kind of content people saw.
Speaker 1: Why would they do that if it meant folks would
Speaker 1: spend less time on the site, So it doesn't. Fifteen
Speaker 1: YouTube integrated Google Brain, a machine learning program, into its algorithm.
Speaker 1: According to an engineer interview by The Verge, one of
Speaker 1: the key things it does is it's able to generalize.
Speaker 1: Whereas before, if I watch a video from a comedian,
Speaker 1: our recommendations were pretty good at saying here's another one
Speaker 1: just like it. But the Google Brain model figures out
Speaker 1: other comedians who are similar but not exactly the same,
Speaker 1: even more adjacent relationships. It's able to see patterns that
Speaker 1: are less obvious, and Google Brain is a big part
Speaker 1: of why Stephen Crowder and others like him are now millionaires.
Speaker 1: It's why if you watch a Joe Rogan video, you'll
Speaker 1: start being recommended videos by Ben Shapiro or Paul Joseph Watson,
Speaker 1: even though Joe Rogan is not an explicitly political guy
Speaker 1: in Ben Shapiro and Paul Joseph Watson are. It's why
Speaker 1: for year, whenever conservative inclined to people would start watching,
Speaker 1: say a Fox News clip critical of Obama, they'd wind
Speaker 1: up being shuffled gently over to Info Wars and Alex Jones.
Speaker 1: It's why if you watched a video about Obama's birth certificate,
Speaker 1: YouTube would next serve you Alex Jones claiming that Michelle
Speaker 1: Obama is secretly a man. It's why if you watched
Speaker 1: a video criticizing gun control, YouTube would serve you up
Speaker 1: Alex Jones claiming the New World Order under Obama was
Speaker 1: going to confiscate your guns so we could carry out genocide.
Speaker 1: And it's why if you watched coverage of the Sandy
Speaker 1: Hook massacre, YouTube would hand you Alex Jones claiming the
Speaker 1: massacre was a false flag and all the children involved
Speaker 1: were crisis actors. I bring up Alex Jones so many
Speaker 1: times in this because it's probable that no single person
Speaker 1: benefited as much from YouTube's Google brain algorithm changes as
Speaker 1: Alex Jones. That's what Gilim Chaslow seems to think. On
Speaker 1: February eighteen, he tweeted this, the algorithms I worked out
Speaker 1: on Google recommended Alex Jones videos more than fifteen billion times.
Speaker 1: Vulnerable be pull in the nation. Yeah. Fifth, that's the
Speaker 1: scale of this thing because it recognizes that people who
Speaker 1: are going to start like watching just sort of a
Speaker 1: conservative take on whatever issue gun control, uh, the Sandy
Speaker 1: Hook shooting, uh, fluoride in the water or whatever, people
Speaker 1: who might just want like a Fox News take on that.
Speaker 1: Alex Jones is much more extreme. But because he's much
Speaker 1: more extreme, he's like compelling to those people, and if
Speaker 1: you serve him them, they watch his stuff all the
Speaker 1: way through. And his videos are really really long. It
Speaker 1: is like a four hour show, So people stay on
Speaker 1: the site a long time. If they get served up
Speaker 1: a four hour Alex Jones video, they just keep playing
Speaker 1: it while they're doing whatever they're doing, and they sink
Speaker 1: deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. And a regular
Speaker 1: person would look at this and be like, oh, Google's
Speaker 1: taking people who believe, I don't know that a flat
Speaker 1: tax is a good idea and turning them into people
Speaker 1: who think that Floride is turning frogs gay and that
Speaker 1: Sandy Hook was an inside job and that's a bad thing.
Speaker 1: But YouTube algorithm didn't think that way. It just thought like, oh,
Speaker 1: as soon as these people find Alex Jones videos, they
Speaker 1: spend fifty more time on YouTube. So I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: serve Alex Jones up to as many fucking people as
Speaker 1: I possibly can. And that's what starts happening in So
Speaker 1: that's where we are in the story right now, and
Speaker 1: then we're going to continue from that point. But you know,
Speaker 1: it is time for next, Sophia, No tell me, it's
Speaker 1: time for products. And maybe maybe I'm not gonna make promises.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna write checks. My ass can't catch here.
Speaker 1: But maybe there's services you're ask in cash. Well, my
Speaker 1: ass is all about products. I hope it's a chair
Speaker 1: company that comes up next. Otherwise that's a non sequitor.
Speaker 1: I hope it's a it's a squatty potty. It's probably
Speaker 1: gonna be Dick Pills because we just we just signed
Speaker 1: a deal with Dick Pills. I'm very, very proud of
Speaker 1: our of our Dick Pills sponsorship. It's not even a
Speaker 1: job I love. I love selling Dick pills. I can
Speaker 1: see your hard right now. I can just see your head,
Speaker 1: your head, of your body and not your penis head.
Speaker 1: But I can tell you're hard from the pills. Thank you.
Speaker 1: You have a very uh taught Dick energy. You know.
Speaker 1: Thank you is what this show aims to present to
Speaker 1: the world. Um you know, I said, speaking on the
Speaker 1: subject of YouTube when we when we filled out our
Speaker 1: ad things, I won't sell brain pills because I don't
Speaker 1: want to be like Paul, Joseph Watson or Big Shapiro.
Speaker 1: But I will hundred sell Dick pills. And it's mainly
Speaker 1: so that I can say the phrase Dick pills over
Speaker 1: and over again. Um. So, meet my son, Dick Pills Evans,
Speaker 1: Dick Pills Evans. I am gonna I'm gonna name my
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have a son just to name him Dick Pills.
Speaker 1: And then sort of it's gonna be like a boy
Speaker 1: named Sue, but with a boy name Dick PILs. And
Speaker 1: instead of like me explaining to him that I gave
Speaker 1: him the name Sue so that he'd be like, it
Speaker 1: would harden him up and he'd become like a tough person.
Speaker 1: He could survive the rough world. And like, oh no,
Speaker 1: I got paid a lot of money to call you
Speaker 1: Dick Piles. No, you're just sponsored by Dick Pills. This
Speaker 1: has gone very off the rails, Sophie, is this a
Speaker 1: good idea? No, she's doing a hard no hard No, okay,
Speaker 1: well speaking hard products. We're back. We're back, And Sophia
Speaker 1: just said the sentence we got to mold our own
Speaker 1: genitals at the Dick Johnson factory or Dog Johnson factory,
Speaker 1: Doc Johnson. I loved that sentence, which is why I
Speaker 1: brought us back in mid conversation from the ad break,
Speaker 1: because that's a wonderful sentence. Um, I have that Agram
Speaker 1: stories saved on my Instagram. I want to get that
Speaker 1: sentence tattooed on my back where some people will have
Speaker 1: Jesus like I got my genitals molded at the Doc
Speaker 1: Johnson factory. Yeah, and it was the most fun ever.
Speaker 1: That sounds great. That sounds so much better than YouTube's algorithm.
Speaker 1: That's a really smooth transition, thank you. That was like
Speaker 1: jazz fucking saxophone smooth. I am as good at transitions
Speaker 1: as Dick Pills are. Getting your exactly exactly fun. Yeah, hymns,
Speaker 1: good times. Okay. So you know we were one of
Speaker 1: the big sources for this podcast and one of the
Speaker 1: big sources for the articles that have covered the problems
Speaker 1: with YouTube's algorithm is Gillim Cheslow. And he's not just
Speaker 1: a former employee with an axe to grind or someone
Speaker 1: who feels guilty about the work he participated in. For
Speaker 1: years now, he has turned into something of an activist
Speaker 1: against what he sees as the harms of his former
Speaker 1: employer UM and obviously as a guy with potentially an
Speaker 1: ax to grind, he's someone that you've got to approach
Speaker 1: a little bit critically. But Chaslow hasn't just like complained
Speaker 1: about Google. He's built like he has a team of
Speaker 1: people that have built like systems in order to test
Speaker 1: the way Google's algorithm works and show the way that
Speaker 1: it picks new content and like, uh, document with hard numbers,
Speaker 1: like here's the kind of things that it's serving up,
Speaker 1: Here's the sort of videos that it recommends people towards,
Speaker 1: Like here's how often it's doing them. So he's he's
Speaker 1: not just making claims. He has reams and reams of
Speaker 1: documentation on how Google's algorithm works behind him. Um, he's
Speaker 1: really put a lot of work into this, and from
Speaker 1: everything I can tell, he's someone who's deeply concerned about
Speaker 1: the impact YouTube's algorithm has had on our democracy and
Speaker 1: someone who's trying to do something about it. So just
Speaker 1: digging into the guy a bit. I have a lot
Speaker 1: of respect for what he's trying to do. UM. On
Speaker 1: November and sixteen, shortly after the election, while we were
Speaker 1: all drinking heavily, uh, gilham Chaslo published a medium post
Speaker 1: titled YouTube's AI was Divisive in the US presidential Election.
Speaker 1: In it, he included the results of a study he
Speaker 1: he and a team of researchers conducted. UM. They were
Speaker 1: essentially trying to measure which candidate was recommended the most
Speaker 1: by YouTube's AI during the presidential election, and the code
Speaker 1: that they used to do this in All of the
Speaker 1: methodology behind it is available on the website. If you're
Speaker 1: someone who knows how to do the coding, you can
Speaker 1: check it all up. But they're very transparent, uh, he says. Quote. Surprisingly,
Speaker 1: a Clinton search on the eve of the election led
Speaker 1: to mostly anti Clinton videos. The pro Clinton videos were
Speaker 1: viewed many times and had high ratings. But represent only
Speaker 1: less than twenty of all recommended videos. Chaslow's research found
Speaker 1: that the vast majority of political videos recommended by YouTube
Speaker 1: were anti Clinton and pro Trump, because those videos got
Speaker 1: the best engagement now. Chaslow explained that because Google Brain
Speaker 1: was optimized to maximize time users spent on site or engagement,
Speaker 1: it's also happy to route people to content that say
Speaker 1: proposes the existence of a flat earth because those videos
Speaker 1: improve engagement too. Gillen found that searching is the Earth
Speaker 1: flat around and following Google's recommendations sent users to flat
Speaker 1: earth conspiracy videos more than nine percent of the time.
Speaker 1: So if you're wondering why flat earth is taken off
Speaker 1: as a conspiracy, it's because simply asking the question is
Speaker 1: the Earth flatter around? Of the time leads you to
Speaker 1: videos that say it's flat, homie, that's how come all
Speaker 1: those basketball players think the earth this flat? And also what, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can you can see in your head? How like
Speaker 1: that change happens? Is like some guys having a conversation
Speaker 1: with a friend who is kind of dumb and it's like, no, dude,
Speaker 1: you know the Earth flat? And you're like, what that's bullshit?
Speaker 1: And you type, is the Earth flat in the YouTube,
Speaker 1: and then it serves you up before hour documentary about
Speaker 1: how the Earth is flat, and yeah, it's uh, probably
Speaker 1: your first is typing it into YouTube. It's probably not
Speaker 1: the place you want to get that answer. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: But it's not like schools in America teach people critical
Speaker 1: thinking or how to functionally do research. It's like going
Speaker 1: to Yahoo answers to be like, am I pregnant? Which
Speaker 1: happens all the time. The answer is yes. If you
Speaker 1: are asking whether or not you're pregnant, you are in
Speaker 1: fact pregnant for sure, probably second or third trimester. You
Speaker 1: should you should at least stop smoking for a while
Speaker 1: until you find out for sure. Maybe maybe put down
Speaker 1: a bottle for a second. Yeah. Now. Further reporting using
Speaker 1: additional sources from within Google seems to support most of
Speaker 1: Chaslo's main contentions. In fact, it suggests that he, if anything,
Speaker 1: understated the problem. Chaslo left YouTube in two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: and while he knew about Google Brain, he did not
Speaker 1: know about an new AI called Reinforce that Google had
Speaker 1: just instituted or institute I think in twos in fifteen
Speaker 1: to YouTube, its existence was revealed by a new York
Speaker 1: Times article published just a few days before I wrote this,
Speaker 1: the making of a YouTube radical. That article claims that
Speaker 1: Reinforce focused on a new kind of machine learning called
Speaker 1: reinforcement learning. The new AI, known as Reinforced, was a
Speaker 1: kind of long term addiction machine. It was designed to
Speaker 1: maximize users engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would
Speaker 1: expand their tastes and get them to watch not just
Speaker 1: one video but many more. Reinforced was a huge success.
Speaker 1: In a talk at an AI conference in February, Men
Speaker 1: mentionin a Google Brain researcher said it was YouTube's most
Speaker 1: successful launch in two years. Site wide views increased by
Speaker 1: nearly one percent. She said a game that at YouTube
Speaker 1: scale can amount to millions more hours of daily watch
Speaker 1: time and millions more dollars in advertising revenue per year.
Speaker 1: She added that the new algorithm was already starting to
Speaker 1: alter users behavior. We can really lead users toward a
Speaker 1: different state versus recommending content that is familiar. Miss Chen said,
Speaker 1: it's another example of like if you take that quote
Speaker 1: out of context and just read it back to her
Speaker 1: and say, ms Chien, this sounds incredibly sinister when you're
Speaker 1: talking about leading people towards a different state, Like, is me,
Speaker 1: ma'am um? Are you in fact a villain? A super
Speaker 1: You sound like a supervillain? Sounds like this might be evil?
Speaker 1: Is this a James body has in the tech industry? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that no one ever has in the tech industry.
Speaker 1: That Are we the baddies? Moment We're like, oh, we're
Speaker 1: addicting people to our service? Is that maybe bad? Are
Speaker 1: we the Nazis this whole time? I thought for the Americans? Nope.
Speaker 1: Now YouTube claims that reinforces a good thing, uh, fighting
Speaker 1: YouTube's biased towards popular content and allowing them to provide
Speaker 1: more accurate recommendations. But Reinforce once again presented an opportunity
Speaker 1: for online extremists. They quickly learned that they could throw
Speaker 1: together videos about left wing bias in movies or video games,
Speaker 1: and YouTube would recommend those videos to people who were
Speaker 1: just looking for normal videos about these subjects. As a result,
Speaker 1: extremists were able to red pill viewers by hiding rants
Speaker 1: about the evils of feminism and immigration, as reviews of
Speaker 1: Star Wars. In far right lingo, red pilling refers to
Speaker 1: the first moment that sort of set someone off on
Speaker 1: their journey towards embracing Nazism and so prior to Reinforce,
Speaker 1: if you were looking up I want to see gameplay
Speaker 1: videos about Call of Duty, or I want to see
Speaker 1: your review of Star Wars The Force Awakens, it would
Speaker 1: just take you two reviews and gameplay videos. Now it
Speaker 1: would also take you to somebody talking about like how
Speaker 1: Star Wars is part of the social justice warrior agenda,
Speaker 1: or how Star Wars you know, embraces white genocide or
Speaker 1: something like that, and so then you know, and it
Speaker 1: will recommend that to millions of people, and most of
Speaker 1: them will be like, what the funk is this bullshit?
Speaker 1: But a few thousand of them will be like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this guy's right, like Star Wars is part
Speaker 1: of a conspiracy to destroy white men, and then they'll
Speaker 1: click on the next video that Stefan Malineu puts out,
Speaker 1: or they'll they'll they'll go deeper down that rabbit hole,
Speaker 1: and that's how this starts happening. Uh. Star Wars is
Speaker 1: a conspiracy, though, just take your money, that's all it is.
Speaker 1: Not to take your money. It's like any other conspiracy
Speaker 1: that involves movies. It's the only thing is to take
Speaker 1: your money. Yeah, not to destroy white people. They want
Speaker 1: white people because white people spend the most money on
Speaker 1: Star Wars. Yeah. If they killed that, that's that's the
Speaker 1: number one customer that's killing your whole customers that a
Speaker 1: cigarette company wants you to breed. Didn't want teenagers to
Speaker 1: start smoking. It's like, yeah, you need to replenish the flocks. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you you want people to start smoking in their twenties
Speaker 1: as they have children who grow up watching dad smoke. Yes,
Speaker 1: that's like the plans. Yes, yeah, they want they want
Speaker 1: kids like me to grow up who every now and
Speaker 1: then we'll buy a pack of cigarettes just to smell
Speaker 1: the open pack of cigarettes because it takes me back
Speaker 1: to moments in my childhood. It's such a soothing smell,
Speaker 1: unsmoked cigarettes, a little bit sweet, a little bit fruity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is going to trigger somebody to buy a cigarette.
Speaker 1: Right now, someone's pulling over to seven eleven. Fuck it yea,
Speaker 1: And I feel terrible about that. And they're like, also,
Speaker 1: I just thought dick pills. They're like, I don't know
Speaker 1: what's happening to me by dick pills. Fucking it's good
Speaker 1: for your health. It's good for your heart. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's great. Fucking is all benefits. Uh, cigarettes are
Speaker 1: almost all downsides other than the wonderful smell of a
Speaker 1: freshly opened and looking really fucking cool. Yeah, well they
Speaker 1: do make you look incredibly coolblivably cool. So yeah, nothing
Speaker 1: looks cooler than its damn it. Now something does? Smoking
Speaker 1: a joint looks cooler? You're right, smoking a joint does
Speaker 1: look cooler, and the coolest thing of all smoking a
Speaker 1: joint on a unicycle on a yacht. Wow, you just
Speaker 1: took it to another level. I just would want to
Speaker 1: see how good your balance is on. Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: our many millionaire listeners is going to message me tomorrow
Speaker 1: being like, my husband tried to smoke a joint while
Speaker 1: writing a unicycle in our yacht and now he's dead.
Speaker 1: You you killed the love of my life. And or
Speaker 1: we'll get some dope fan art of you on aycle
Speaker 1: smoking a joint on a yacht. Yeah, burning a fat one.
Speaker 1: Speaking of fat ones, The New York Times interviewed a
Speaker 1: young man who was identified in their article on radicalization
Speaker 1: as Mr Kane, and Mr Kane claims that he was
Speaker 1: sucked down one of these far right YouTube rabbit holes
Speaker 1: thanks to YouTube's algorithm. He is scarred by his experience
Speaker 1: of being radicalized by what he calls a decentralized cult
Speaker 1: of far right YouTube personalities who convinced him that Western
Speaker 1: civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists,
Speaker 1: that an eight i Q differences explained racial disparities, and
Speaker 1: that feminism was a dangerous ideology. I just kept falling
Speaker 1: deeper and deeper into this, and it appealed to me
Speaker 1: because it made me feel a sense of belonging, he said,
Speaker 1: I was brainwashed. There's a spectrum on YouTube between the
Speaker 1: calm section, the Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan part, and crazy town,
Speaker 1: where the extreme stuff is, said Tristan Harris, a former
Speaker 1: design ethicist at Google, YouTube's parent company. If I'm YouTube
Speaker 1: and I want you to watch more, I'm always going
Speaker 1: to steer you toward crazy town. Um, and I will
Speaker 1: say I'm very hard on the on the tech industry
Speaker 1: regularly on this podcast. It speaks well of a lot
Speaker 1: of engineers that the most vocal people in trying to
Speaker 1: fight YouTube's algorithm are former Google engineers who realized what
Speaker 1: the company was doing and like stepped away and have
Speaker 1: been hammering it ever since, being like we made a
Speaker 1: Nazi engine. Guys, like we weren't trying to, but we
Speaker 1: made a Nazi engine, and we have to deal with that.
Speaker 1: Mainly alarm on this one. Yeah, I gotta really gotta
Speaker 1: reign the alarm on this one. You know, so at Google,
Speaker 1: I worked at Google for two years. I didn't know that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what did you do? I My job title won't explain
Speaker 1: what I did, But basically it was like a quality
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, it has nothing to do with anything. But
Speaker 1: basically I got to um in Russian like help build
Speaker 1: um binary engine that can um well like train it,
Speaker 1: dot build it, train it to be able to tell
Speaker 1: whether something is um a restricted category or not, like
Speaker 1: something is porn or not, gambling or not that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. So um, yeah it was. It was crazy.
Speaker 1: Well that sounds different. Uh yeah, I saw some of
Speaker 1: the most fucked up stuff on the internet, you know,
Speaker 1: like I've reported child porn before. Then you will have
Speaker 1: a lot to say this latter part, because we do
Speaker 1: talk about content moderators for a little bit. That's kind
Speaker 1: of somebody asking a couple of questions about that at
Speaker 1: the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now that that New York
Speaker 1: Times article in full disclosure actually cites me in it
Speaker 1: because of a study that I published with the research
Speaker 1: collective Belling Cat last year where I trawled through hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of leaf conversations between fascist activists and found
Speaker 1: seventy five self reported stories of how these people got
Speaker 1: red pilled. In that study, I found that thirty four
Speaker 1: of the seventy five people I looked at cited YouTube
Speaker 1: videos as the things that red pilled them. Um, I'm
Speaker 1: not the only source on this though. The New York
Speaker 1: Times also cited a research report published by a European
Speaker 1: research firm called vox Poll. They conducted an analysis of
Speaker 1: thirty thousand Twitter accounts affiliated with the far right, and
Speaker 1: they found that those accounts linked to YouTube videos more
Speaker 1: than they linked to any other thing. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot of evidence that YouTube is the primary reason why.
Speaker 1: If you look at people who were researching the KKK
Speaker 1: and neo Nazis in America in two thousand, four tiers
Speaker 1: and five two six big gathering would be twenty people,
Speaker 1: and then in two thousands seventeen four or five hundred
Speaker 1: of them. However many it was showed up at Charlottesville. Like,
Speaker 1: there's a reason their numbers increased so much over a
Speaker 1: pretty short period of time, and it's because these videos
Speaker 1: made more of them. Um. And there's there's a lot
Speaker 1: of evidence of that. So while Google is raking in
Speaker 1: more and more cash and increasing time spent on site,
Speaker 1: they're also increasing the amount of people who think Hitler
Speaker 1: did nothing wrong. Um. And that's that's the tale of today.
Speaker 1: So Mr Kane, the New York Time source for that article,
Speaker 1: claims his journey started in two thousand and fourteen when
Speaker 1: YouTube recommended a self help video by Stefon Malineux. Mr Mallin,
Speaker 1: who was a great candidate for an episode of this podcast.
Speaker 1: But in short, he's a far right YouTube philosopher self
Speaker 1: help grew who advises his listeners to cut all ties
Speaker 1: with their family. He runs a community called Free Domain
Speaker 1: Radio that some people accused of being a cult that
Speaker 1: you know, tells people to cut off contact with their family. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: cool club is going to be like, hey, please join us,
Speaker 1: but also never speak to anyone you love ever again.
Speaker 1: They never talk to your mom again. Like that's not
Speaker 1: That's not how a cool club starts, you know, That's
Speaker 1: all that's how a cool club starts, that's always bad news. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: cool clubs say, never talked to the cops again, which
Speaker 1: cool clubs absolutely now. Molan New has been on YouTube
Speaker 1: since forever, but his content has radicalized sharply over the years.
Speaker 1: At the beginning, he identified as an anarcho capitalist, and
Speaker 1: he mostly focused on his ideas about how everyone was
Speaker 1: bad at being parents and people should cut ties with
Speaker 1: toxic family members. In recent years, he's made bro, just
Speaker 1: call your dad, call your dad. Bro, you probably need
Speaker 1: to have a convo. Yeah, you guys, probably just talk
Speaker 1: some feelings out. Maybe you'll calm the funk down. I
Speaker 1: don't know, Like I don't want to say, like there's
Speaker 1: actually are a lot of people with toxic family members,
Speaker 1: so they do need to cut out of their lives,
Speaker 1: which I think is part of why Molini was able
Speaker 1: to get a following. Like there's not nothing in what
Speaker 1: he's saying. There's a lot of people who have fucked
Speaker 1: up family backgrounds and you get told like, well, you
Speaker 1: just need to make things right with your mom, And
Speaker 1: it's like, no, if if your mom like sent you
Speaker 1: to gay conversion therapy, maybe cut all ties with her forever.
Speaker 1: I totally agree. No, no, no, I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: say that. What I'm trying to say is that he
Speaker 1: himself uh to pursue a life where you tell people
Speaker 1: to cut contact off with their family. You clearly have
Speaker 1: unresolved issues with your family, and if you resolve those
Speaker 1: by say, calling your parents and talking to them, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying you have to make up with them. I'm saying,
Speaker 1: somehow get closure for yourself so then you don't spend
Speaker 1: the rest of your life trying to get people to
Speaker 1: quit their families. Yeah, that's just like seems yeah, you
Speaker 1: get some ship to deal with bro Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: he Mollynew didn't stay on that sort of thing. Like,
Speaker 1: he made a switch over to pretty hard core nationalism,
Speaker 1: particularly in the last two years. There's like a video
Speaker 1: of him where he's in um uh Poland during like
Speaker 1: a far right march to commemorate like Poland's uh like
Speaker 1: independence day, and he like said, like starts crying and
Speaker 1: has like this big realization of how like I've been
Speaker 1: against nationalism and stuff for years and I realized it
Speaker 1: can really be beautiful and like the unseid things, like
Speaker 1: I realized that white nationalism can be beautiful and that like, uh,
Speaker 1: instead of you know, being an independent libertarian type, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna focus on uh, fighting for my people, which is
Speaker 1: like white people and stuff like that. That's how Stefan
Speaker 1: Molineux is now. Like he's essentially a neo Nazi philosopher
Speaker 1: at this point, and he spends most of his time
Speaker 1: talking about race and i Q and you know, talking
Speaker 1: about how black people are not as good as white people.
Speaker 1: Like That's that's the thrust of modern day Stefal Stefon Molineux.
Speaker 1: He also believes global warming as a hoax, So maybe
Speaker 1: nobody should have much respect for Molineu's own i Q um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of people get turned onto to Fawn's
Speaker 1: straight up fascist propaganda because of their interest in Joe Rogan. Uh.
Speaker 1: Rogan has had stefawn On as a guest several times,
Speaker 1: and YouTube has decided that people who like Rogan should
Speaker 1: have Stefens Channel recommended to them. This maybe why Mr
Speaker 1: Kane saw Mollineu pop into his recommendations, which is what
Speaker 1: he credits as radicalizing him in two thousand and fourteen. Um,
Speaker 1: so yeah, he wound up watching like a lot of
Speaker 1: members of what some people call the intellectual dark Web,
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, guys like Stephen Crowder and of
Speaker 1: course Stefan Molineux uh and over time, like he went
Speaker 1: further and further and further to the right, until eventually
Speaker 1: he starts watching videos by Lauren Southern, who is a
Speaker 1: Canadian activist who's essentially like he called her his fascist crushed,
Speaker 1: like his fashy bay so like. By like two thousand sixteen,
Speaker 1: this guy who starts watching Joe Rogan and like gets
Speaker 1: turned in the Stefan Molinus videos about global warming as
Speaker 1: a hoax and i Q and race. By two sixteen,
Speaker 1: he's like identifying YouTube Nazi as his fascist like crush.
Speaker 1: Like that's how this proceeds for this dude. And that's
Speaker 1: a pretty standard path. But you know what's not a
Speaker 1: standard path? No what the path that our listeners will
Speaker 1: blaze if they buy the products and services that we
Speaker 1: advertise on this program. You seem like your breath has
Speaker 1: been taken away by these skill and ingenuity of that transition. Truly,
Speaker 1: there was nothing I could add. It was a perfect,
Speaker 1: perfect work. I'm the best at this, I'm the best around.
Speaker 1: Nothing's going to ever keep me down. Yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: able to put a bumper sticker on a Rolls Royce.
Speaker 1: You know what I'm saying. The bumper sticker is gonna
Speaker 1: say I got my genitals molded. Yeah, I want that
Speaker 1: bumper sticker. It's actually any hologram. And like, when you
Speaker 1: look at it one way, I U wearing a skirt,
Speaker 1: and when you look at it the other way, you
Speaker 1: see my vagina mold. It's it's really cool. Man. That
Speaker 1: put a lot of thought into into it. So that's
Speaker 1: quite a bumper sticker. And you know, I have thought
Speaker 1: for a long time that what traffic is missing is
Speaker 1: explicitly pornographic bumper stickers. Like if truck nuts are okay,
Speaker 1: why isn't that Seriously, it's actually a lot more pleasant
Speaker 1: to look at than truck nuts. Yes, yes, nobody actually
Speaker 1: likes truck nuts. Uh no one? All right, Well this
Speaker 1: has been a long digression. Yeah, let's let's products we're back. Boy,
Speaker 1: howdy what a day we've had today? M m so
Speaker 1: at this point, YouTube's roll in radicalizing a whole generation
Speaker 1: of fascists is very well documented, but YouTube is sort
Speaker 1: of stuck when it comes to admitting that they've ever
Speaker 1: done anything wrong. Of their traffic comes from the recommendation engine.
Speaker 1: It is the single thing that drives the platform's profitability
Speaker 1: more than anything else. Back in March, the New York
Speaker 1: Times interviewed Neil Mohan, YouTube's chief product officer. His responses
Speaker 1: were pretty characteristic of what the company says when confronted
Speaker 1: about their little Nazi issue. The interviewer asked, I hear
Speaker 1: a lot about the rabbit hole effect where you start
Speaker 1: watching one video and you get nudged with recommendations towards
Speaker 1: a slightly more extreme video and so on, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you're watching something really extreme. Is that
Speaker 1: a real phenomenon, to which Neil responded, Yeah, So I've
Speaker 1: heard this before, and I think that there are some
Speaker 1: myths that go into that description that I think it
Speaker 1: would be useful for me to debunk. The first is
Speaker 1: this notion that it's somehow in our interests for their
Speaker 1: recommendations to shift people in this direction because it boost
Speaker 1: watch time or what have you. I can say categorically
Speaker 1: that's not the way our recommendation systems are designed. Watch
Speaker 1: time is one signal that they use, but they have
Speaker 1: a number of other engagement and satisfaction signals from the user.
Speaker 1: It is not the case that extreme content drives a
Speaker 1: higher version of engagement or watch time than content of
Speaker 1: their types. So he basically has a blanket denial there.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's a huge just like blanket. Now, we
Speaker 1: don't do that. No, that doesn't happen. Doesn't happen, And
Speaker 1: he goes on it's a bit bit of a rambling answer,
Speaker 1: and later in his answer, Mohan called the idea of
Speaker 1: a YouTube radicalization rabbit hole purely a myth. The interviewer,
Speaker 1: to his credit, presses Neil Mohan on this a bit
Speaker 1: more later and asks if he's really sure he wants
Speaker 1: to make that claim. Mohan responds, what I'm saying is
Speaker 1: that when a video is watched, you will see a
Speaker 1: number of videos that are recommended. Some of those videos
Speaker 1: might have the perception of skewing in one direction or
Speaker 1: you know, call it more extreme. There are other videos
Speaker 1: that skew in the opposite direction. And again, our systems
Speaker 1: are not doing this because that's not a signal that
Speaker 1: feeds into the recommendations. That's just the observation that you
Speaker 1: see in the panel. I'm not saying that a user
Speaker 1: couldn't click on one of those videos that are quote
Speaker 1: unquote more extreme, consume that, and then get another set
Speaker 1: of recommendations that sort of keep moving in one path
Speaker 1: or the other. All I'm saying is that it's not inevitable.
Speaker 1: So because everybody doesn't choose to watch more extreme videos,
Speaker 1: there's no YouTube radicalization rabbit hole. Yeah, and also it's
Speaker 1: kind of acknowledging there that it does happen. Yeah, nothing
Speaker 1: is inevitable. I mean except for like death and whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just to be like, yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. A meteor rite could hit your house before
Speaker 1: you get to click on the video that turns you
Speaker 1: into a Nazi, So of course it's not inevitable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just be like, it's not a hundred it's not true.
Speaker 1: Is not a good answer when someone A percentage of
Speaker 1: our users die of heart before the next video plays, Yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty high percentage of people. Yeah, that's not what we're
Speaker 1: asking Neil. Now. The reality, of course, is that Neil
Speaker 1: Mohan is uh, shall we say not entirely honest. I
Speaker 1: think I wrote a damn liar in the original draft,
Speaker 1: but I'm not sure where the legally actionable line is.
Speaker 1: Big video, Yeah, pocket of big big video. For just
Speaker 1: one example, Jonathan Albright at Columbia University researcher recently carried
Speaker 1: out a test where he seated a YouTube account with
Speaker 1: a for the phrase crisis actor. The upnext recommendation led
Speaker 1: him to nine thousand different videos promoting crisis actor conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1: So again, someone who heard the term and wanted to
Speaker 1: search for factual information about the conspiracy theory would be
Speaker 1: directed by YouTube two hundreds of hours of conspiratorial nonsense
Speaker 1: about how the Sandy Hook shooting was fake. Now, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess you remember last year's mass shooting at the
Speaker 1: Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. Um By the Wednesday after
Speaker 1: that shooting, less than a week after all of those
Speaker 1: kids died, the number one trending video on YouTube was
Speaker 1: David Hogg the Actor, which is obviously a video accusing
Speaker 1: one of the kids who's been most prominent of being
Speaker 1: a crisis actor. According to a report from adage, it
Speaker 1: and many others claimed to expose Hogg as a crisis actor.
Speaker 1: YouTube eventually removed that particular video, but not before to
Speaker 1: mass nearly two hundred thousand views. Other videos targeting hog
Speaker 1: remain up. One that appears to show Hogg struggling with
Speaker 1: his words during an interview after the shooting suggests because
Speaker 1: he forgot his lines. YouTube autoso us certain search terms
Speaker 1: that would lead people directly to the clips. If a
Speaker 1: person typed David Hogg and YouTube search bar midday Wednesday,
Speaker 1: for example, some of the suggestions would include exposed and
Speaker 1: crisis actor. When reporters asked YouTube how that video made
Speaker 1: it to the top of their coveted trending chart, YouTube
Speaker 1: explained that since the video included edited clips from a
Speaker 1: CNN report, it's algorithm had believed that it was a
Speaker 1: legitimate piece of journalism and allowed it to spread as
Speaker 1: an authoritative news report would. Um. So again, that's there.
Speaker 1: That's there, like justification, Like we couldn't have known that
Speaker 1: this was fake news because it was fake news that
Speaker 1: used clips from a legitimate news site. So like we're
Speaker 1: clearly not at fault here for the fact that we
Speaker 1: let a robot select all these things and no human
Speaker 1: being watched the top trending video on the side at
Speaker 1: the moment to see if like it was something terrible. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: that's bullshit. Yeah, yeah, that's total bullshit. Now YouTube's or
Speaker 1: Nazi propaganda and conspiracy theories aren't the only things that
Speaker 1: spread like wildfire on YouTube. Of course, pedophilia is also
Speaker 1: a big thing on the site. Yeah. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where we get to that part of the story. So
Speaker 1: this broken February of twenty nineteen when a YouTuber named
Speaker 1: Matt Watson put together a video exposing how rings of
Speaker 1: pedophiles had infested the comments sections for various videos featuring
Speaker 1: small children and used them to communicate and trade child porn. Now,
Speaker 1: this report went very viral and immediately prompted several major
Speaker 1: advertisers to pull their money from YouTube. The company released
Speaker 1: a statement to their worried advertisers informing them that they
Speaker 1: had blanket band comments for millions of videos, basically removing
Speaker 1: comments from any videos uploaded by or about young children.
Speaker 1: I'd like to quote from NPRS report on Watson's video,
Speaker 1: Watson describes how he says the pedophile ring works. YouTube
Speaker 1: visitors gather on videos of young girls doing innocuous things
Speaker 1: such as putting on their makeup, demonstrating gymnastics moves, or
Speaker 1: playing twister in the comments section. People would then post
Speaker 1: time stamps that linked to frames in that video that
Speaker 1: appeared to sexualize the children. YouTube's algorithms would then recommend
Speaker 1: other videos also frequented by pedophiles. Once you enter into
Speaker 1: this wormhole, there is now no other content available, Watson said.
Speaker 1: So it might seem at first like this is purely
Speaker 1: an accident on YouTube's part, like that cunning pedophiles figured
Speaker 1: out that there were like they could just find videos
Speaker 1: of young kids doing handstands and stuff and use that
Speaker 1: as porn and trade it with each other, right, which
Speaker 1: would not necessarily be like, how could we have predicted this?
Speaker 1: It's just these people decided to use innocent videos for
Speaker 1: a nefarious purpose. But that's not what happened, or at
Speaker 1: least that's not all of what happened. So in June
Speaker 1: three researchers from Harvard's Berkmann Client Center for Internet and
Speaker 1: Society started combing through YouTube's recommendations for sexually themed videos. Uh.
Speaker 1: They found that starting down this rabbit hole led them
Speaker 1: inevitably to sexual videos that placed greater emphasis on youth.
Speaker 1: So again, that's maybe not super surprising. You start looking
Speaker 1: for sexy videos, you you click on one, and then
Speaker 1: the next video the woman in it or is going
Speaker 1: to be a younger woman, and a younger woman, and
Speaker 1: a younger woman. But then at a certain point, the
Speaker 1: video suggested flipped very suddenly until and I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote the researchers here, YouTube would suddenly begin recommending videos
Speaker 1: of young and partially clothed children. So YouTube would take
Speaker 1: a person who's like just looking for adults like videos
Speaker 1: of like an exact dancer dancing or whatever, like videos
Speaker 1: of attractive young women dancing, and then YouTube would start
Speaker 1: showing them videos of children doing like gymnastics routines and
Speaker 1: stuff like that's the algorithm being like, I bet you'll
Speaker 1: like child porn. Like that's literally what's happening here, which
Speaker 1: I didn't realize when I first heard the story that like,
Speaker 1: like that's YouTube. That's not just pedophiles using YouTube in
Speaker 1: a sleazy way, because pedophiles will always find a way
Speaker 1: to ruin anything that's YouTube crafting new pedophiles. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a system, that's Yeah. I wonder if it's like that
Speaker 1: with violence too, if you look up a violent thing,
Speaker 1: if it keeps recommending more violence, because that seems like
Speaker 1: and hate like that would happen when I worked for Google,
Speaker 1: Like the sensitive categories. The restricted categories are you know, violence, hate, gambling, porn, childhorn.
Speaker 1: I think there's even a messed up thing about that,
Speaker 1: because one of the problems that like, people who document
Speaker 1: war crimes in Syria have had is YouTube blanket banning
Speaker 1: their videos because of violence, and then like you have
Speaker 1: evidence of a war crime and then it's wiped off
Speaker 1: of the Internet forever because YouTube doesn't realize that this
Speaker 1: isn't like violence porn, this is somebody trying to document
Speaker 1: a war crime. Um. It's made it really hard to
Speaker 1: do that kind of research. It's yeah, their response is
Speaker 1: always so terrible. Um. Anyway, The New York Times reported quote, So,
Speaker 1: a user who watches erotic videos might be recommended videos
Speaker 1: of women who becomes conspicuously younger, and then women who
Speaker 1: promote provocatively in children's clothes. Eventually, some user might be
Speaker 1: presented with videos of girls as young as five or
Speaker 1: six wearing bathing suits, are getting dressed or doing a split.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and its eternal quest to increase time spent
Speaker 1: on site, YouTube's algorithm essentially radicalized people towards pedophilia. And
Speaker 1: to make matters worse, it wasn't just picking sexy videos
Speaker 1: like that people had uploaded with the intent of them
Speaker 1: being sexy. Because it was sending children's videos to people,
Speaker 1: it started grabbing totally normal home videos of little kids
Speaker 1: and presenting those videos to horny adults who were on
Speaker 1: YouTube to masturbate. The report suggests it was learning from
Speaker 1: users who sought out revealing or suggestive images of children.
Speaker 1: One parent The Times talked with related in horror that
Speaker 1: a video of her ten year old girl wearing a
Speaker 1: bathing suit had reached four hundred thousand views. So, like,
Speaker 1: parents start to realize, like, wait, an I uploaded this
Speaker 1: video to show her grandma. They're supposed to be like
Speaker 1: nine views on this thing. Why have four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: people watched this video of my ten year old? And
Speaker 1: it's because you tube is trying to provide people with
Speaker 1: porn because it knows that will keep them on the
Speaker 1: site longer. That's fucking wild. Yeah. After this report came out,
Speaker 1: YouTube published an apologetic blog post, promising that responsibility is
Speaker 1: our number one priority. In chief among our areas of
Speaker 1: focus is protecting miners and families. But of course that's
Speaker 1: not true. Increasing the amount of time spent on site
Speaker 1: is YouTube's chief priority, or rather, making money is YouTube's
Speaker 1: chief priority, and if increasing the amount of time spent
Speaker 1: on site is the best way to make money, the
Speaker 1: YouTube will prioritize that overall other things, including the safety
Speaker 1: of children. Now, there are ways YouTube could reduce the
Speaker 1: danger their sites present to the world. Ways they could
Speaker 1: catch stuff like propaganda accusing a mass shooting victim of
Speaker 1: being an actor, or people's home movies of being accidentally
Speaker 1: turned into child porn. Even if they're not going to
Speaker 1: stop hosting literal, fascist propaganda. Content moderators could add human
Speaker 1: eyes and human oversight to an AI algorithm that is
Speaker 1: clearly sociopathic. And earlier this year, YouTube did announce that
Speaker 1: they were expanding their content moderator team to ten thousand people,
Speaker 1: which sounds great. Sounds like a huge number of people,
Speaker 1: Only that's not as good as it seems. The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal investigated and found out that a huge number
Speaker 1: of these moderators, perhaps the majority, worked in cubical farms
Speaker 1: and India and the Philippines, which would be fine if
Speaker 1: they were moderating content posted from India or the Philippines,
Speaker 1: but of course these people were also going to be
Speaker 1: tasked with monitoring American political content now alphabet. Google does
Speaker 1: not disclose how much money YouTube makes. Estimates suggest that
Speaker 1: it's around ten billion dollars a year and maybe increasing
Speaker 1: by as much as forty per year. Math is not
Speaker 1: my strong suit. I'm not an algorithm, but I did
Speaker 1: a little bit of math, and I calculated that if
Speaker 1: Google took a billion dollars of their profit and hired
Speaker 1: new content moderators paying them fifty thou dollar a year salaries,
Speaker 1: which I meant to guess is more than most of
Speaker 1: these moderators get, they could afford to hire twenty thousand
Speaker 1: new moderators, tripling their current capacity. Realistically, they could hire
Speaker 1: fifty or sixty thousand more moderators and still be making
Speaker 1: billions of dollars a year and one of the most
Speaker 1: profitable services on the Internet. But doing that would mean
Speaker 1: less profit for Google shareholders. It would mean less money
Speaker 1: for people like Neil Mohan, the man who has been
Speaker 1: YouTube's chief product officers since two thousand eleven, the man
Speaker 1: who was overseen nearly all the algorithmic changes we are
Speaker 1: talking about today, The man who sat down with The
Speaker 1: New York Times and denied YouTube had a problem with
Speaker 1: leading people down rabbit holes that radicalize them in dangerous ways.
Speaker 1: I was kind of curious as to how well compensated
Speaker 1: Mr Mohan is, so I googled Neil Mohan net worth.
Speaker 1: The first response was a Business Insider article. Google paid
Speaker 1: this man a hundred million dollars. Here's his story. So
Speaker 1: that's cool. Yeah, ooof, And I can tell you from
Speaker 1: being a moderator, Um, I worked on a team where
Speaker 1: everybody did what I did in a different language. So
Speaker 1: I did this in Russian and next to me with
Speaker 1: someone who doing it in Chinese and Turkish and all
Speaker 1: the all of the languages, I mean not all, but
Speaker 1: a significant number. Yeah, and um, I can tell you
Speaker 1: that we were hired as contractors for only a year.
Speaker 1: Very rarely would you ever be doing a second year
Speaker 1: because they didn't want to pay you with the full benefits,
Speaker 1: like you know, you don't get health insurance and whatever,
Speaker 1: all the perks that you would get from being a
Speaker 1: full time Google employee. And the thing about what we
Speaker 1: did is you got exposed to a lot of fucked
Speaker 1: up stuff, Like you know, the videos and stuff that
Speaker 1: I've seen are like some of the worst the internet
Speaker 1: has to offer, like beheadings or someone stomping a kitten
Speaker 1: to death and high heels like crazy shit, and it
Speaker 1: would really make you sick. And they like give you
Speaker 1: free food at Google, and you like wouldn't be able
Speaker 1: to eat sometimes because you would be so grossed out.
Speaker 1: And it's not like they that's why you're only there
Speaker 1: for a year. Also, not just that you wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to get full benefits, but also because they are
Speaker 1: okay with wasting your mental and physical energies and then
Speaker 1: letting you go and then just cycling through new people
Speaker 1: every year because um, rather than investing you know, and
Speaker 1: employees that are full time making sure they have uh,
Speaker 1: you know, access to mental health care and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, making that job be something that
Speaker 1: they take more seriously considering how important it is. Well,
Speaker 1: and that's part of what's really messed up is that
Speaker 1: like it's fucking Google. Like if you go into the
Speaker 1: people people who are like actually coding these algorithms and stuff,
Speaker 1: I guarantee you those people have on site therapists, they
Speaker 1: can visit, they have gyms at work, they get their lunches.
Speaker 1: I mean we all worked on the same building, but
Speaker 1: like I can't you know, I couldn't go get a
Speaker 1: free massage during It's like, you know, you have a
Speaker 1: CrossFit trainer on site and ship like that for sure
Speaker 1: you get incredible perks. And the whole point is what
Speaker 1: I that was kind of ironic about what we were saying,
Speaker 1: is like the whole thing is to try to make
Speaker 1: you stay on YouTube. But when you work for company
Speaker 1: like Google, their job is to try to make you
Speaker 1: stay at Google. So you know, the reason you're getting
Speaker 1: all these benefits and stuff and like free food and
Speaker 1: jim and massage and whatever is because they want you
Speaker 1: to stay and work forever. But they don't want you
Speaker 1: like that stuff to me exactly like and that's that's
Speaker 1: a very telling thing from Google's perspective, because they are
Speaker 1: saying that increasing the amount of the people who are
Speaker 1: coding these algorithms that increase the amount of time people
Speaker 1: spend on site, that is important to us. And so
Speaker 1: we will do whatever it takes to retain these people.
Speaker 1: But the people who make sure that we aren't creating
Speaker 1: new pedophiles while we make money, the people who are
Speaker 1: responsible for making sure that Nazi propaganda isn't served up
Speaker 1: to like influence able young children via our service. Those
Speaker 1: people aren't valuable to us because we don't care about that,
Speaker 1: so we're not going to offer them healthcare. Like if
Speaker 1: if if Google really was an ethical company, and if
Speaker 1: YouTube cared about its impact on the world, someone whose
Speaker 1: job who's there's nothing less technical or less valuable about
Speaker 1: what you're doing. Being able to speak another language fluently,
Speaker 1: being able to understand if content propagating on their site
Speaker 1: uh is toxic or not. That's a very difficult, very
Speaker 1: technical task. If they cared about the impact they had
Speaker 1: on the world, the people doing that job would be
Speaker 1: well paid and would have benefits and would be seen
Speaker 1: as a crucial aspect of the company. But instead it's
Speaker 1: sort of like, if we don't have someone doing this job,
Speaker 1: will get yelled at. So we're going to do the
Speaker 1: minimum necessary and we're going to have most of the
Speaker 1: people doing that job be working at a fucking cube
Speaker 1: farm in India, even though we're expecting them to moderate
Speaker 1: American content and to understand all of our cultural nuances
Speaker 1: and whether or not something's toxic, Like that's so fucked up.
Speaker 1: And also considering the fact that like add is the
Speaker 1: reason that they hire content moderators, not because they care
Speaker 1: about the content necessarily. It's that it would be a
Speaker 1: huge like mistake if say, an ad for Huggies was
Speaker 1: served on a diaper fetish website. You know, they want
Speaker 1: something in place where the page knows, the algorithm knows
Speaker 1: not to serve that, even though it seems like a
Speaker 1: good match because the word diapers repeated and blah blah blah,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. So it's really less about
Speaker 1: it's it's more about keeping the advertisers happy and making
Speaker 1: the most money than it is about, yeah, ensuring that
Speaker 1: there Internet is this less fucked up place. This gets
Speaker 1: to one of the things like when I when I
Speaker 1: get in arguments with people about the nature of capitalism
Speaker 1: and what's what's what's wrong with the kind of capitalism
Speaker 1: that we have in this country. I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people who like just sort of reject anti capitalist
Speaker 1: arguments out of hand do it because they think that
Speaker 1: you're saying, oh, it's just wrong to make to make money.
Speaker 1: It's wrong to have a business that like makes a profit.
Speaker 1: Is like the issue, isn't that the issue? Like this
Speaker 1: company Google could be making billions of dollars a year,
Speaker 1: uh and still be one of the most profitable sites
Speaker 1: in in it's of its type still make a huge
Speaker 1: amount of money and have three times as many people
Speaker 1: doing content moderation, and all those people have health care.
Speaker 1: But by cutting corners on that part of it, because
Speaker 1: it doesn't make them more money, it just makes the
Speaker 1: world better. They make more money, and it's worth more
Speaker 1: to them to increase the value of a few hundred
Speaker 1: people stock than to ensure that there aren't thousands of
Speaker 1: additional people masturbating to children like that. That's that's what
Speaker 1: I have an issue with with capitalism, Like, that's that's
Speaker 1: a you can make a profit without also selling your
Speaker 1: fucking soul. Yeah, we could have YouTube should be banned,
Speaker 1: like I can get recommended new musicians that I like.
Speaker 1: We can all watch videos to masturbate too, without more
Speaker 1: people being turned toto pedophiles and Nazis. That's not a
Speaker 1: necessary part of this, Like it's just because corners are
Speaker 1: being cut. Yeah, it just shows what the value what
Speaker 1: the value of our society is, what the values of
Speaker 1: our society are. Yeah, it's they've literally said, like three
Speaker 1: billion dollars a year is worth more to us than
Speaker 1: god knows how many children being molested than fucking Heather
Speaker 1: higher getting run down at Charlottesville than they're being Nazis
Speaker 1: marching through the streets and advocating the extermination of black people,
Speaker 1: of LGBT, people of whatever like, which is again part
Speaker 1: of why so many Google employees are now speaking out
Speaker 1: and horrified because like, they're not monsters. They don't want
Speaker 1: to live in this world anymore than the rest of
Speaker 1: us do. They just didn't realize what was happening because
Speaker 1: they were busy focusing on the code and the free massages,
Speaker 1: and then, like the rest of us, they woke up
Speaker 1: to a world full of Nazis and pedophiles. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like you're looking at me to make a
Speaker 1: joke now, and I feel like I don't know, this
Speaker 1: got real serious. I'm more just tired. We're all tired.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a very tiring world we live in. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: Sophia that you want to plug your plug? Fuck? I
Speaker 1: mean not really just want everyone to go and get
Speaker 1: a hug. You know, everybody go get a hug, but Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but also, uh, I am to be found on the
Speaker 1: sites we hate, you know, what a fun thing to plug.
Speaker 1: I'm available Twitter and Instagram. That's Sophia and I have
Speaker 1: a podcast about love and sexuality around the world that
Speaker 1: I co host with Courtney Kosak. It's called Private Parts Unknown.
Speaker 1: Check that out. Check out Private Parts Unknown. I'm also
Speaker 1: on the sites we hate. Behind the Bastards dot com
Speaker 1: is not a site that we hate, but it's where
Speaker 1: you can find the sources for this episode. Um, I right, okay,
Speaker 1: is where you can find me on Twitter. You can
Speaker 1: find us on Twitter and Instagram at bastards pod. Um,
Speaker 1: that's the You buy t shirts on t public dot com.
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards. Uh, yep, that's the episode. Go uh go,
Speaker 1: go find YouTube's headquarters and yell at them, scream at
Speaker 1: their sign, take pictures of their company, and wave your fists. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you work at YouTube, quit it's not worth it.
Speaker 1: I mean, the more whistleblowers the better. Yeah. Yeah, quit
Speaker 1: and go talk to the New York Times or some
Speaker 1: some fucking buddy. Uh yeah. Also, um, one random thing
Speaker 1: that's positive is if you want there's a lot of
Speaker 1: videos of trains on YouTube. Have discovered of just trains
Speaker 1: passing by trains and fails. Yeah. I think you will
Speaker 1: find it very soothing. First, they'll be like, what the
Speaker 1: funk a video of a train that's twelve minutes long.
Speaker 1: Guess what that will soothe you? Soothe your ass, or
Speaker 1: if you're more like me, watch videos of people skiing
Speaker 1: and then failing to ski. I mean that's if you
Speaker 1: want to laugh. Yeah, yeah, I feel like YouTube's algorithm
Speaker 1: is going to take you from train videos to train
Speaker 1: fails really fast. Um oh boy, yeah ship. I don't
Speaker 1: know now that, now that I know about the the
Speaker 1: rabbit hole, I'm afraid that there's a way to connect
Speaker 1: trains to children that I have not thought. Oh no,
Speaker 1: I'm not even gonna make any further comments. We should
Speaker 1: get before this gets to a spot