Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Better Offline and we are live
from beautiful New York City, Nevada. I am edzit Tron,
I am your host, and I'm joined by Thomas Jermaine

(00:24):
of the BBC Today it's Better Off Life.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Welcome Thomas. Glad to be here. So it's been a
very funny few weeks.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
The Google is a monopoly, and of course you'll the
next episode will be about that monopoly money stuff. And
it feels like something is breaking in tech, not necessarily
in a bad way.

Speaker 3 (00:42):
In that we're finally moving.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
It looks like the government is saying it's time to
not have five companies that do everything in tech.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (00:51):
I mean, we're clearly at some kind of turning point, right.
I think you know, if we'd been talking about this
five years ago, I never would have predicted that we
would seen any meaningful antitrust action against any of these companies.
Now it's all of them, and it seems like we're
actually trending in the direction of doing something about it.

Speaker 3 (01:08):
And I'll even take that a step further.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Two weeks ago, I would have probably said I don't
think Google loses the anti trust case.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
I think that they're gonna win. I don't think the epic.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
The federal judge on the epic case, did you hm,
So with that one for the listeners, we'll have the
links in there about this. The federal judge, during the
remedy stage of Epic suing Google over their monopoly over
the Playstore, has been very clear that he does not
intend to let them let Google off easily, and has
said because Google has estimated six hundred million dollars of

(01:40):
costs to fix the play store, and it's kind of multifested.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
And the judge basically said, when Google said, this is.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
Going to be really difficult, not my problem, which is
one of the funniest ways of putting it.

Speaker 3 (01:51):
But okay, he didn't say it literally.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
He said, I'm paraphrasing, Hey, if you didn't want your
monopoly broken up, maybe you shouldn't have built it in
the first place. And it's it's awesome, and I know
I can delight in this. Perhaps you come like we
all know our oppositions here, but I think that there
is something kind of magical happening because this is a
good thing.

Speaker 3 (02:11):
Competition is good.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
I think even the tech companies would agree. Yeah, competition
is good.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
At least in their public statements, right, yeah, publicly, and
we're you know, there's been a lot of talk in
recent years about all the ways that progress in technology
has slowed down, not necessarily in the development of the
tech itself, but you know the way that the landscape
plays out, you know, innovation things just feeling like fun
and interesting and weird, and a lot of people are

(02:37):
arguing that that's because there's been so much power amassed
among a couple of very large companies.

Speaker 2 (02:43):
And it feels like at this point we're at the
end of whatever started in like twenty ten. We're getting
to the point where venture capital doesn't seem to be
being spent in the same way, where actually it's kind
of returning to how it wasn't twenty ten. Like I
think it was like two hundred and something million last year,
it's probably gonna hear about three hundred million this year.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
And the mask and slut.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
You're not really seeing the massive acquisitions anymore. You're just
kind of seeing the consolidation of industries. But I just
I don't know what's gonna happen with generative AI at
this point, because that in itself seems like monopoly of sorts.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
But also it's all gone very quiet. It feels like
we're all waiting. I'm hearing about it so much all
of a sudden, but also we're all waiting for something
to happen. Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Because we went from recording this, we're obviously in this
slight delay. We went from this period where everyone's like,
generative AI is over. It's over too, not necessarily saying
it isn't, but just everyone's sitting there waiting for someone
to blink.

Speaker 4 (03:39):
Right, and like we're The conversation is constantly about like, well,
when the technology gets better, X, Y and Z will happen,
We'll get all this innovation, the whole world will shift
around it. And it's not at all clear that that
getting better thing is going to be real.

Speaker 3 (03:53):
But also they've stopped even saying that. Now. I started
to see people say things like.

Speaker 2 (03:58):
Well, we've got to look at the smaller language model,
maybe the large ones aren't good, right. And what what
I do like though, is the Google's pixel event was
just pure AI.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
The week after everyone.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Was saying this is a terrible idea, like this kind
of looks bad. I don't like how this looks and
the it's like, nah, you gotta have AI and your earbuds.
Now you need the thing you use for listening. You
need to talk to it as well.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
And it's funny if you look at all the marketing
that the big tech companies are doing, like you know,
from Google to smaller companies, it's all about like we
swear that this is useful, and they have like people
you know, doing different things that you maybe you should
try using AI for this. I think because they've really
built a product that, for a lot of people is
not intuitive. It's not clear what it's good for. It's

(04:42):
clearly good for something.

Speaker 3 (04:44):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (04:45):
And I realized it's good for something? And I got
a very annoying email this morning. And I get very
annoying emails from someone's saying here is the use case.
I use it every day. Just to be clear to
that listener, I have no problem with you. Thank you
for actually emailing. I love to actually hear how people
using it bomb. I feel a lot of the biggest
difference with general if AI is everything else that I'm
being sold something. I'm being so oh Airport's what are good?

(05:08):
You put them in your ears that automatically connect the
music comes out, the noise can't slink these.

Speaker 3 (05:12):
I don't want the noise. I want the noise from
the music I'm listening too. And then general IFAI comes
along this AI stuff and it's like, well, you could
use it for this, I guess what do you think
of this? Do you want to try this?

Speaker 2 (05:22):
And you're like, no, I don't need to write a
letter to an Olympic athlete at all, And if I did,
I don't need it to be written like Grock.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:31):
I mean, I've been working really hard over the past
couple of months to try and find things I can
actually do with it, and I've come across a couple
of you know.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
You tell me like genuinely I would love to.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, I mean I like it for I. I'm a writer, right, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:45):
So when I'm stuck with like a sentence that I'm
having a hard time getting from my brain onto the page,
sometimes all you know, write out some like terrible.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Version of the sentence. Yeah, you know, stream of consciousness.

Speaker 4 (05:59):
Ask one of the AI's, you know, for an idea
of where I could go with it. I don't ever
take that and then use it. But it's like it's
I heard someone say it's kind of like talking to
a smart brick wall, right, You're not gonna get anything new,
but it can kind of help you sort through your
own ideas. But that's not what the tech companies are promoting.

Speaker 3 (06:19):
I'm never gonna pay for that.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
And I fully admit that's kind of how I've used it.
If it's especially some boring workshit Like I don't know,
if I'm trying to come up with four ideas to
talk about AI and healthcare, I will throw something at
it and then none of the ideas will be good.
I will be just really clear, it never really get
a good idea. But I'm like, oh, that kind of
makes me think about it. But again, is this worth

(06:40):
one hundred two hundred billion dollars?

Speaker 3 (06:42):
Is this is this really?

Speaker 2 (06:43):
Because if they had launched this and the entire thing,
this will be like a very twenty tens thing where
they're just like, yeah, it's an ideation machine. You throw
some shit in, it bounces it back. Because really, that's
what of them's are They just kind of repeat the
past back to you. If that was what they were saying,
and it was like, this is an ideation machine. Open
Ai had raised fifty million dollars and this is what
it did.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
I'd actually be.

Speaker 1 (07:04):
Kind of like, right, sick core product, Yeah, sick.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
This is just it's kind of a churning machine.

Speaker 2 (07:09):
This is this is something where oh like it's kind
of it's not really creative, but it's kind of lets
me bounce things off of it.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
What a great idea the brick wall, like you.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
Said, but it isn't it is And that's it's like
the opposite of how they're describing it, almost as if well,
what you see today it sucks, but what if it
didn't Yeah, one day in a non specific way that
I cannot describe as I am yet to work it out.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
It's just but actually back to the question, what have
you found any other useful things?

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Because I really, I genuinely actually feel like this is
a useful conversation.

Speaker 4 (07:45):
Yeah, I mean I I went and did a ton.
I read everything I could find from people that I
respect about what you can do with AI, how you
can use it, how you can figure out how to
use it, And what I landed on was really you
just have to try everything you can think of and
spend like four to eight hours in total, and eventually
you'll find a way that you can bounce back and

(08:07):
forth with it. I mean I had to write a
bio for something, yeah, and it was useful for because
it was just like what does that look like?

Speaker 1 (08:16):
Like what kinds of things should I include? It was
kind of useful for that. It probably saved me half
an hour.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
And maybe that's something it's useful for, where it's like
an aed own business copy. But also the very boring
structural stuff that no one enjoys writing like bios. Yeah,
I think it's actually very threatening, specifically for writing press releases,
express releases.

Speaker 3 (08:35):
Anything that's formulaic. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
And also maybe that's a good thing for it, but
again that is not worth plagiarism. That's not worth the
insane amount of money it costs.

Speaker 3 (08:46):
It is really.

Speaker 2 (08:47):
Crazy, though, how distant these things are, where you've got
like this kind of useful thing and just this out
outlay of money, this insane amount of money. I have
never seen a single thing in tech history anything close
to this ever, ever, ever, ever, Like, I.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
Don't know, is there anything.

Speaker 4 (09:06):
I mean, there's always a hype cycle thing, right, there's
the metaverse or when you know Facebook first blew up.
Everything had a social media component but I've never seen
write anything close to this level of investment where the
whole industry acts as though this really is the wave
of the future and it's happening now. That's it. I
think it's kind of unpressive.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Even the metaverse was the forty five billion that Mark
Zuckerberg put into it, which is so funny, still remains funny.
That turned out this great Yahoo Finance story about it.
Yahoo Finance still still doing stuff, all right. They had
a story about how it's mostly just mismanagement. It's just
like they keep firing and hiring people.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
It's just like I love that that. I love the GOV.

Speaker 2 (09:48):
There is no law about like running a company remotely sustainably.
But even then, outside of the metaverse with Meta, I
don't think the spend was there. And I'm sure that
some smart person who reads things no things very rude
do not email me that might say, yeah, the overall
outlay for just data centers, maybe that's it. When the

(10:08):
push of I don't know when they started moving towards
using GPUs for processing outside before llm's maybe then, But
even then, this feels like more, and it feels like
more for so much less, like we are a year
and a half in and we're still sitting there being like.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
So white is what do we do with this? Yeah, well,
my thing that I've wanted to do, and I don't
think I'm gonna be able to do it because I
think everyone will work out on my dickhead immediately. I
kind of want to just ask multiple leaders in tech
what is chet GPT and just see if they can
tell me because I cannot gun to my head describe,

(10:46):
like what is Google Search? It's a way of searching
for stuff online. It indexes everything. What is chet GPT?

Speaker 2 (10:54):
It's sometimes it answers questions?

Speaker 3 (10:57):
Correct, it's a question answerer.

Speaker 4 (11:00):
Well, I think And this kind of brings us back
to the anti trust conversation right the a year and
a half ago. The big discussion was this is an
existential threat to Google, right, this is going to be
an alternative to search, and you know, whether or not
it's good for that, the hallucination problem is a real issue.
But I you know, in my own life, I'm trying
to use AI as often as I can to understand it.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
It is useful for you know, the other day.

Speaker 4 (11:23):
I can't remember what it was, but I needed to
look up an acronym, you know, where it's like low risk.
I can probably tell whether it's I it yeah, And
I'm not like putting that in a story. It's just
for my own understanding or something. But I've also heard
a lot of speculation that this is part of why
Google has put AI at the top of search results.

Speaker 3 (11:43):
Right.

Speaker 4 (11:43):
It's this anti trust stuff because there's a very real,
once unfathom unfathomable possibility that Google is going to get
broken up, that they're going to separate the ads business
from the search business.

Speaker 3 (11:54):
And you know, all of the moves that Google.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
Has been making to change the way the search algorithm works,
which you talked a lot yeah about, could be an
effort to shift over to where we don't really need
to scrape the open web because we're just giving you
the answer.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
But what's crazy is a story came out from Bloomberg
the other day where so there's robots dot txt that.

Speaker 3 (12:15):
And I'm going to fumble this and someone's gonna email
and correct me. It's very rude. Again, but how does
the internet actually work?

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Which computer?

Speaker 3 (12:24):
Is this a phone?

Speaker 2 (12:26):
But it says that if you try and cut Google off,
specifically Google off from your using your website for training data,
it will also stop Google indexing it, right, which is
what you were saying, is correct. If they were using
generative AI as means of distancing themselves and saying we're
no longer just not play is a We're not just indexing.
We have created this knowledge ourselves, this is our own material.

(12:49):
This is not just we're not just passively keeping people
out from this. It's actually worse now because if that,
if that is the case, that is the anti trust
problem with l LMS, with that with Gemini, they have
made it so that you cannot get.

Speaker 3 (13:04):
Away from Google.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Google will fuck you over in the event that you
try and stop them stealing your stuff.

Speaker 3 (13:10):
It's just it's so frustrating as well, because there's no
real there's no need for them to do that.

Speaker 2 (13:15):
They could have probably made a very small amount of
effort to not make that the case, and maybe they
will indeed, it's just like it's like these companies don't
even know how to operate normally anymore. They've kind of
they're too big, they're too messy. But also their natural
configuration isn't We're going to do a thing so that
we interact with the ends because it is kind of
how it used to be. It's like, we're scraping this,

(13:36):
but we provide a service, we send you traffic, you
allow us to scrape your website. This is kind of
the deal now. It's just no, this is ours now,
this is our world that you don't you don't get
to play here other than on our rules. And it's like,
I that's why I want the breakup to happen so badly,
not just because they will be better companies, but also

(13:56):
we need a fairer deal for the web.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
We need a fairer deal for everyone right now.

Speaker 4 (14:01):
I mean, I've talked to people who work at Google
who've told me that it really does seem like there's
been some kind of mission creep and the people who
run in the company aren't really clear what the company does.
And I think part of that, and it's not just Google,
is because all of these companies are such behemoths, right
and they touch every part of the world. Every decision
they make is about a strategy that's expanding to every

(14:24):
corner of the Internet and the physical world. So it
just there's so many competing incentives for every decision that
a company like Google or Amazon makes it's just hard
to operate. It's the same thing that happened with the telecoms, right, yeah,
they got so big and then you know, when a
company is big enough, it's kind of just like stomping
around and can't really do anything super effectively.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
I mean my chat GPT thing. What is chat GPT?
What does Google do? What does Google do?

Speaker 3 (14:51):
Now? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Google is a search company, an ADS company, a phone company,
a phone provide a company that have an MVNO with
Google Fi, which for listeners is a basically they are
on the T mobile network. They are a cloud storage company,
a data center company. They are also they have all
sorts of business lines. They make robots.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
No, do they own Boston Dynamics now? Is Boston Dynamics
to nevertheless demic robuts Yeah, yeah, Well they're doing something
in every ar VR yea what the like? Well?

Speaker 4 (15:22):
Google is the Internet, right, That's what's going on, not
just with Google, but with all these companies. It's this
platformization where the open Web is dying and everything exists
on a platform that some gigantic company is running. Not universally,
but that's the direction we're trending.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
It's most of them and it's but Google is I think,
and this is the thing. I don't hate technology. I
actually really would love Google to be where they work.

Speaker 3 (15:46):
It's great. I love tech a lot.

Speaker 2 (15:48):
Fifteen twenty years ago Google I didn't mind like they
were doing a decent job.

Speaker 3 (15:53):
Yeah they were.

Speaker 2 (15:53):
Even the old Facebook in like two thousand and five
is a pretty good product.

Speaker 3 (15:57):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (15:58):
And then mox Zucker Book's kind of evil and I've
done plenty of episodes on him. But Google is just
I think symbolic of the problem. They are symbolic of
the too big not too big to fail because they've
kind of proven that as well, that they seem incapable
of failing despite their failures. It's just maybe we shouldn't
have a company that does everything. Maybe they need to

(16:21):
be broken up, and there needs to be genuine legislation
that stops companies getting that big, because I don't think
as a product, Google Search needs to be bad, and
I think it could be insanely profitable without being a monopoly.
It's just that at some point I think this company
became a private equity firm. I think they became a
private equity firm that gets bankrolled by Google Search, and

(16:44):
that change those incentives. I mean, it makes sense if
you're as a company, don't believe you can lose customers
if you don't believe that if everything is kind of
because the other units of Google, and we'll never know
because even public they don't really break it down.

Speaker 3 (16:57):
I don't know how many units.

Speaker 2 (16:59):
Of Google are profit without Google Search, Like how much
of it is bankrolled.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
They're making sixty percent of the company's money. It's coming
from search.

Speaker 3 (17:05):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
And also it's a terrible way to run a company.
It's an awful way to run a company. And it
isn't how they used to do things. But in and
breaking them up I think is good. I think we
need an example in the tech industry we get going well.

Speaker 4 (17:20):
I mean, we're at a point where now we can,
you know, officially say like Google is legally a monopoly.

Speaker 1 (17:25):
Yeah at this point, right, like we.

Speaker 4 (17:26):
Don't have to we don't have to edge Google is
a monopoly at least in the search business. There's a
bunch of other anti drust cases. Maybe other parts of
the company are going to get declared to monopoly. But
that's how monopolies work, right, Like, once you achieve enough
market power, you don't need to make a good product, right,
Like I talk.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
To people all the time.

Speaker 4 (17:44):
It used to be I think back, you know, fifteen
years ago or maybe even long with the early two thousands,
Google was the best search engine.

Speaker 1 (17:52):
Yeah, right, Google came out. It was better than AltaVista,
it was better than Yahoo.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Excited.

Speaker 4 (17:56):
That's why excite, ask jeeves, right, that's why go one originally?

Speaker 3 (18:01):
Right?

Speaker 4 (18:02):
At this point, is Google actually better than Being? I
think most people couldn't tell you the answer that question
because they they don't use that.

Speaker 3 (18:10):
They kind of seem the same.

Speaker 4 (18:11):
I try, you know, I switched my default search engine
to being for a while. It was not as good
because I'm not used to it, But in terms of
the results, it seemed fine.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
Being news is better, which is you like being? What
a horrible sentence? Being is also really terrible to say.
I don't I don't like to say. I don't like
saying Google's fun. Being is.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
Maybe it's just because we're not used to it, you know,
but I tried saying, you don't want to be sitting at.

Speaker 3 (18:37):
Home going being being, but it's kind of nice. But
also being is not great, But neither's Google? And what
is a good search engine? Anymore.

Speaker 2 (18:45):
And I think again, it comes back to the incentives.
It's do they know what's a good search engine anymore?
Do they actually? I I will admit I've been kind
of black and white over this.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
I say Google doesn't care.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
I know that there are tons of people inside of
Google I've spoken to who are like, I fucking hate this.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
I hate how this is happening.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
I mean the Department of Justice, emails and Ben Gums
you could see the pain and Shashi Thakur and Ben
Gums as they fought against this. And I think that
what sucks is it never had to be this way.
Never did not once they could have kept fucking that
chicken and get so much money they forever, but it's like.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
No, we must grow forever.

Speaker 2 (19:23):
But also, on some level, it's horrible to say, why
would they bother? They had the monopoly they have, they
have the world by the bulls, Why would they? Why
why bother being good? I just don't get why they
let it be so bad? Like it's so bad, it's
so bad. It's so awful. When you go look at
something and it's just four Breddit posts and four forum posts,

(19:43):
four other things. You've got a technical support thing, and
all the forum posts are it's people saying I too
had this problem, anyone fix it? And then no, and
then maybe occasionally like a bot being like, I have
no idea what happened here? Cora is the best have
you seen Have you looked at Cora recently?

Speaker 3 (19:58):
Uh?

Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, it's pretty insane.

Speaker 4 (20:01):
And also, like now Reddit is having problems because Reddit
users and businesses have realized that's how you get to
the top of Google.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
So all of the SEO stuff that.

Speaker 4 (20:10):
Was happening on the web is now happening within conversations
on Reddit, so that's being polluted in the same way.

Speaker 3 (20:15):
Have you seen how coorra has had a DAI. I
don't know if I'll come across that now.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
Okay, so listeners, I want you to go and look
up something on korra right now, because right now on Cora,
if you look, most of the time, it will have
a chat GPT response at the top. This is why
for a while on Google you could look up can
I melt an egg? And it would come up and say, yes,
you can melt an egg, because I will keep trying
for your science. But now what it does is they

(20:41):
have chat GPT at the top, and it's just like,
so the entire point of Cora is that it's human beings, right,
who have questions and their answers and you go on
there because it's like wow, subject matter experts who are
rewarded with Cora cloud.

Speaker 3 (20:57):
I don't really know, like there's some sort of points system.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Like any good thing on the Internet, it's mostly just
degenerate posters who really love stuff.

Speaker 3 (21:05):
Except now it's that.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
After just the world's most awful generative thing and then
an obvious ad and then an answer to a different question.
Now you may think, why did this happen? Well, the
CEO of Cora, Adam di'angelo, is on the board of
open AI.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
That's why. It's just it's like the death of the
open web because these guys just went I got mine, bitch.
I don't need to find stuff anymore. I know everything.

Speaker 4 (21:34):
Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to look at the
way that Google has changed in the past year two
years and see well, I mean it's also hard to
say whether it's better or worse because like what is
good Google? First?

Speaker 3 (21:47):
What is good?

Speaker 4 (21:48):
But then also just what is Google Search? Like it's
such a gigantic, diffuse product, like there's no way to
really examine it wholesale from the outside. But you know,
people were adding Reddit to the end and their search
queries because the things that were coming up on Google
weren't what they wanted. They wanted like some kind of
authentic human response. So Google shifts and now they're showing

(22:09):
Reddit at the top. Maybe, well, people were putting in it.
Maybe that's what they want. Can Reddit results?

Speaker 3 (22:14):
Yeah? How is that better?

Speaker 2 (22:16):
It's it's it's because I don't think Google. It may
just and I'm hypothesizing here, we don't actually know, but
if I had to guess, it might be because when
you build a monopoly that's this successful in any case,
you stop learning how to build products. You just you
don't have those muscles aren't in there to say, oh, right,

(22:37):
I need to serve a customer, and if I don't
serve the customer, they might go to a competitor. So
it went from being like what is the best search result?

Speaker 3 (22:44):
To fuck? What do people want? Now?

Speaker 2 (22:47):
Who are these people who keep bothering me with questions? Ah,
these little pigs?

Speaker 3 (22:51):
They want Reddit? I guess credits where things happen now?

Speaker 4 (22:54):
And there are ways that I sympathize, right, Like, because
of the system that Google set up, you know, because
of SEO search engine optimization, everyone who you know has
the time and the money has figured out how to
set up their web page to game Google search receipts.
So it's the system that they developed to sort through
what's good and bad and what should be at the

(23:15):
top kind of, you know, it's it's harder and harder
to make that work because the signals that they identified
everyone figured out. So the web has kind of changed,
and I think that's a big part of why the
results are and it's good. I think it's because there
simply aren't great results to be found.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
I agree fifty percent. Like I agree that there is
an adversarial nature with SEO and the people have been
trying to screw with Google forever. The other thing is,
this company makes like one hundred billion dollars a year.
My sympathy for the challenges here is so low. And
also SEO people get There are good SEO people, Lily

(23:53):
ray Rox's she's great.

Speaker 3 (23:55):
There are good people out there.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
But I would argue the majority of SEO is fucking
evil and it is adversarial to the web.

Speaker 3 (24:02):
And also Google should fight it. Google should make war
with them. Google should make it. They lie. Google lies.
I'm fucking saying that you don't have to. They lie
and say, oh yeah, we're making helpful content updates. Screw you. No,
you're not shut down.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Every shut down Dot Meredith, shut down every single company
that has re engineered their content to rip off others,
and screw SEO.

Speaker 3 (24:24):
He hello, not Hello fresh, that the house house fresh.
There you go, they're a great article about SEO. Thank
god you remember that.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
I was talking about how Dot Meredith basically outdid them
on SEO by working out the signals.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
What Google could do is, I don't know. I'm not
some genius guy, but here's an idea. If you mess
with Google, Google messes back, Google says you want to
mess with me, I will cut you in out of Google.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
Well that and that happened, it does it happened? Well,
not not on a large scale. But there was a
case recently that no one really talked about. But I
didn't even know this. Every gigantic news publisher, you know,
from CNN to tiny little companies, has like a vertical
on their site that has coupons on it. Yes, right,
and Google went in and decided and it's not original content.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
Right.

Speaker 4 (25:13):
They were like white labeling stuff that coupon companies were
giving them. Right, Google went in it said this is
not allowed anymore. You're abusing the authority of your domain
name and we're not gonna let you do this. And
you know, I think there's an argument that that's better
for consumers that if I search for a coupon, it's
now presumably I'm gonna get sent somewhere where a guy

(25:34):
who just makes coupon's posted it.

Speaker 3 (25:36):
But there are all these other.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
Cases that you're talking about where it seems like Google
either is okay with the way that they're being abused
or they don't have a solution in mind. But they
have so many like their resources are so enormous.

Speaker 2 (25:50):
And the thing you're talking about with the it was
there's a specific term. I'll probably be emailed as well,
but it was basically that they would have content like
coupons and other things on that they'd have high domain
authority posts from completely different shit. But the way I'd
push back on that, you're right by the way they
did do that, and that's a good thing. Is Google
a coupon right now? Google, look up a coupon, listeners,

(26:12):
go and do it. Look at the amount of sites
like retail me Not that just have broken coupons. They're
all broken, and they're full of shitty ads that cover
your screen and they make your iPhone go to one
thousand degrees and melt through your desk, and it's disgusting.
That is That's the kind of thing that I'm just like,
I don't think Google cares because that is an experience

(26:33):
of the average person. I want to buy something on
a website. Is there a coupon I can use?

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Oh? The majority of this content is outright fake.

Speaker 4 (26:42):
Right, And that's the counter argument, right, And I don't
think that the coupons on retail me Not they're the
same ones that you're seeing on CNN, dot coupons or
whatever it is. Yeah, not literally, but for the most
part they have the same problems. But maybe it's the
wrong question is this better or us? Because the other
one that we can ask is and it's the one
the government is asking. Should Google be the one who

(27:03):
gets to decide what is and isn't okay on the web?
They have unilateral decision. May be for twenty years it
was totally fine to do this on CNN and the
La Times and every other website, and then all of
a sudden, with very little warning, it's forbidden now, and
companies have set up entire business models like these coupon

(27:24):
verticals were making tons of money for news publishers that are,
you know, on the brink of shutting down, like the
La Times had one.

Speaker 1 (27:31):
The La Times is in big trouble.

Speaker 3 (27:33):
Right.

Speaker 4 (27:34):
This was bringing in I don't know the exact figure,
but lots of money every year, probably to the two
and of million millions of dollars. And Google says, you're
done with this. You don't get to do this anymore.
This is not a way that you are allowed to
make money on the Internet.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Right.

Speaker 4 (27:48):
That's a lot of power for one company to have
over something that is infrastructure.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
The Internet is infrastructure, I think.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
And that's a really interesting point because I believe that
any such engine is if their job is to get
you the best results, should have that power. Conversely, I
also believe that there should be a quality level, because
you can do that theoretically. I think that that's a
good thing that they carve if you maintain quality elsewhere.
If it's just arbitrary. I've decided that.

Speaker 2 (28:17):
This thing doesn't work for me and it's a black
box like everything with Google, then it needs to absolutely
needs to go. But I would actually be a little
bit okay with Google being more forceful with stuff if
Google actually did the thing it's meant to do.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
The original Google.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
The thing that made it good is it cut through
the noise that there was always a lot of noise online,
not just social just shitty websites, good websites, and Google
would get you good results. It was the thing that
helped you search the web. Can we even argue it
helps you search it anymore? It doesn't feel like it's
doing the job it's meant to do.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
It doesn't.

Speaker 2 (28:54):
It indexes everything, fine, who gives a fuck. I don't
need it indexed. I need the good stuff brought to
me so that I don't have to go and find it,
except now I have to, which is fine. But I'm
also a horrible online gremlin. I'm online. I know all
the websites. I've memorized all the URLs. Now, I don't
think most people have, and I think most people's because

(29:16):
that is really what this is about, not you or
me or people who are like online all the time.
It's about regular fucking people who depend on this, and
it's good they cut off the coupons because a bad
that's a bad thing for regular people to just.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
Get exposed to.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
But also, I don't know how about you actually protect
people from the malignant stuff in the ads. I was
on Google the like month ago and I actually emailed
Danny Sullivan the search of Liason.

Speaker 3 (29:44):
Hi Danny, now you love me?

Speaker 2 (29:48):
And I bought a GPD Win four pocket from what
I thought was the GPD Win four website. GPD website
GPD is a they make little gaming console PCs. They're fantastic.
I put down thousand dollars this thing. I then realized
when I looked in the PayPal that it was some
Chinese guys email at gmail dot com. And this was
because the first result was a sponsored ad for a

(30:11):
fake website. This happened to me and I'm pretty good
at this and it was just a well designed page,
and I'm I was so embarrassed, like this is my
internet cred gone right?

Speaker 3 (30:22):
All of my.

Speaker 2 (30:23):
Hates O, my hater has found out they were outside
my applauding. It was terrible for me, very bad very unfair,
But Jesus Christ, you can't keep the fake ads off
the page, Like.

Speaker 4 (30:34):
Come on, well, it's bad enough. I think that it
was last year or the year before. It might have
been twenty twenty two. It was bad enough that the FBI,
do you remember this, They issued a statement that said
consumers should use ad blockers because there's so much spam
and abuse in ads that in order to protect yourself,
you just shouldn't even be seeing the ads anymore.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
So just to cut to ads for a second.

Speaker 2 (30:56):
If you want to protect yourself, if you really want
to make your life better, I really recommend the first
thing you do immediately is to listen to this following ad,
which will directly and precisely aligned with every belief I
have had and will have in the future.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (31:21):
And I think the funny thing about all of this
as well, is these companies always say.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Well, the web is too Basil's too our jobs are
too hot. But it's like even just one guy in
Google who's just trying to search for the worst stuff,
not even the obvious words like horrible, like like, because
I think they're probably quite good at c SAM and
like outright illegal stuff but just I don't know a dickhead,

(31:47):
just the I'm the guy at Google, who's the dickhead.
I just search for the annoying stuff. We fix it.
I know they can do that.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
I refuse to believe that they can't pay a guy
to just find this stuff, to be a regular john
who just sits there and go googles things like coupons,
who searches for fake websites. For a while, on Google News,
there was a website called good Morning Kashmere I think
it was called, and it would just rip off everything.
And when I say everything, I mean pretty much every
major tech site and then get Google News syndication. When

(32:16):
I told Danny, sorry, Danny, I'm putting you on blast,
but you didn't say off the record.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
When I told him, he was like, well, you shouldn't be.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
Using Google news chronological view because it doesn't really work.
I'm like, what the what the what?

Speaker 3 (32:30):
What? Excuse me? What? That's the thing.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
And I think that this is the problem with a
lot of these big tech companies. They just see customers
as like, well, you.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
Are the problem. And I think that actually this is
an industry wide thing where consumers have been gas lit
and this is definitely me doing like a book pitch.
But it's true.

Speaker 2 (32:48):
I think that consumers have been made to feel like,
oh when tech fails you.

Speaker 3 (32:53):
This is a lack of awareness of how good tech is.
You didn't read the privacy parlast exactly. You didn't use
the manual.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
You didn't do this Apple, And I know my listeners
want me to bag on Apple as an app store
thing coming. It's gonna be mean, it's gonna be nasty,
very unfair to mister cook.

Speaker 3 (33:07):
But we'll get to that. Apple does a generally better
job of not treating the consumer well, maybe treating them
like an idiot, but sometimes you have to. If you're
selling things, sometimes you're an idiot.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
Well and I am regularly, But if there are hundreds
of millions of people, you should assume that the base
level understanding is as low as it can be, and
that the manual is a backup plan. But it's the opposite. Now,
Chat GPT, well, you don't know how to use it
well enough. And I'm not saying you said that like
you were saying this in this manner, but you need
to put hours into it. That just shows such a

(33:39):
U's a loathing in my opinion for customers like, oh,
you're not smart enough to use the future.

Speaker 3 (33:44):
Fuck you, this is meant to be artificial intelligence. I'm
not meant to be smart. It's meant to be smart.

Speaker 4 (33:51):
Yeah, and especially when it comes to the content moneration issue. Yeah,
the search results are on Google or getting worse, or
they're being abused, or the ads. You know, there's just
a report the other day about ads for illicit drugs
on Facebook, and you know, I hear the argument that
there's so much content that it's just not possible that

(34:13):
human beings could go through all of this. You know,
that's only an argument that's acceptable if you start with
the presumption that these companies should exist. But on the
other hand, I'm not even sure if it's true. I
was talking to one of the guys who works at
the private equity firm that owns porn Hub.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
It's called Alo now used to be called mind.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Geek in fascinating.

Speaker 4 (34:37):
They told me that every single video on porn hub
gets reviewed by human being, every video on Pornhub, which
I can't imagine a worse job than that, because I mean,
like the things that people must be uploading on there
that don't make it onto the site.

Speaker 3 (34:53):
But it is possible. That's a terrible job.

Speaker 4 (34:56):
Like then you have to you know, pay for therapy
for the people who are doing it to say that
it's just not possible.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Maybe you should be running fewer ads.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
But that's the porn hub. That's an interesting one. Me.
I've never used porno, but I imagine now, but with
something like porn hub, it proves it's possible, because, yeah,
you'll get fucked up as a porn hub if you
don't do this right, if you don't review everything and
make sure that there's no copyright, that there's no underage,
that there's no outright illegal stuff, and because there are

(35:26):
very clear, very stark penalties for that, there aren't for ads.
And I think one of my favorite.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Ideas that i've I've read is Darren Asamoglu previously on
the show Becoming on in the Future Mit Economist, he made.

Speaker 3 (35:41):
A suggestion put the CEOs in jail.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
Now I realized that's a little much, but drilling down
the idea, if there was personal liability for Mark Zuckerberg,
I bet all those problems go away immediately. I think
Mark Zuckerberg make it his mission to have the cleanest
ad experience in the world because the reason that they
do it is they can get away with it. I refuse, Like,
to your point, maybe there should be less ads. Maybe

(36:05):
if I walk around and I have a crowbar in
my hand, I think I've used this example before, and
I'm swinging.

Speaker 3 (36:10):
It will in nearly and I hit a few windows
on the smash.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
I love my crowbar. It's so much fun. But if
I do that, do you think I have to pay
for the windows I smash? Do you think I'm gonna
get arrested? Of course I am. Well, my job, I'm
paid to swing the crowbar. The crowbar must be swung.
That I make four million dollars a year swinging the crowbar.
This is my job. The cops aren't going to be like, well,
this is just commerce. We're not going to mess with
the economy. And sometimes a few windows get broken. No,

(36:35):
they'd be like, stop doing it, and that's because property
damage is illegal. How About they make it illegal to
fucking show these ads and there are actual penalties. How
About there is an actual quality level for all of
this stuff. I think that you can't do like swinging
legislation where it's like search results must be this good,
but there should be company and CEO level liability for

(36:56):
if I get scammed due to a Google ad that
is on Google, Like that is a not only are
they liable for whatever I lost, but my legal costs
blah blah blah blah blah.

Speaker 3 (37:05):
There should be actual things. And I think that that
is the problem.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
It all happened relatively fast, like a couple of decades,
which seems like a while, but for legislation isn't. Yeah,
But to your point, like, do these companies have to exist?

Speaker 3 (37:19):
Probably not.

Speaker 2 (37:20):
It's good they do, but if they can exist, they
should be held to some account. There should be Now
that you've said that, I'm really thinking about, like do
they need to exist? But why can't they deal with
this stuff? What they never seem to be asked? Why
they never? Oh, there's too many of them. No, there's not,
Like there's.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
Just no we can say that there shouldn't be scams
and Google ads. I don't think that they have a
legal obligation to make sure that there's not.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
I'm aware they don't, so you know, you like they
could put.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
Soon Arpachina jail, or you could you know, just you know,
write a law and have there be some penalty that
affects the company's sack price, that they'll address the problem.

Speaker 1 (38:06):
Oh, yes, we don't. There are no rules about the Internet.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
And there are definitely false advertising. There's definitely lying it
like it's FDC. I believe it's FCCC. Always get those
wrong cases.

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Probably listening going to.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Get mad, But that's the thing, like those they need
to be enforced. But on top of that, when I
say put them in jail, IM mostly joking, right. I
think personal liability, however, would do really well. If they
will like I will lose Pshai makes like two hundred
million a year, mostly in stock. How about he loses percentage,
not dollar amounts, percentages zero point five percent, not for everything.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
But perhaps that's an aggregate thing.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
If they are like, oh my wealth will be directly attacked,
I think some UPSHI would immediately. There would be this
insane quality improvement. Same with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg right now is unfireable.
But if we set these things for the chief executives
who are paid three hundred times their employees' salaries, if
they were paid this insane amount of money but it

(39:07):
was a job with inherent risk, Hell yeah, I think
that would start changing shit really quickly for the better.
In the same way that competition creates better companies, I
think risk would create better executives. I think that they
would start getting real, real worried about this stuff. And yeah,
they could still get paid in the insane amount of money,
which I still think is too much, but it would

(39:30):
be kind of like being an NFL player. You risk
your body, you risk your money, you risk your nasty
little houses. I don't know, There's just it feels like
what's exciting right now with all this anti trust stuff
is we're finally seeing consequences, though, real nasty, mean consequences,
and the people getting upset are really funny, like all

(39:50):
the people I've seen them have matter like tech analysts, like,
now you can't hit the Googles.

Speaker 3 (39:56):
So good. I love it.

Speaker 4 (39:58):
Well, what I'm really excited to watch is presumably there's
going to be some kind of consequence here. Right the
government says Google is a monopoly, We're going to see
what they do. Maybe they break them up, maybe they
give them some enormous fine. And then there's another antidos
case for Google in the United States. There's yet another
one in the EU. Then there's all the cases that

(40:18):
all the other companies are facing. I wonder whether or
not it's too late to turn the web around, Like
it'll change, it'll become something else. Can we go back
to the open web the way things were five or
ten years ago. If you break Google up and suddenly
there's competition, Suddenly there's incentive to send people to different

(40:38):
parts of the Internet instead of to a different part
of Google, would it get better or has it just
collapsed to the point where we need to build something else.

Speaker 2 (40:47):
I don't think it's collapsed. But I will also say
something a little controversial. The Internet wasn't great fifteen years ago.
I think we all need to.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
Like, it's not like it's worse now, but oh waw
live journal? Did we love live Journal?

Speaker 2 (41:02):
I had friends on there like it was cool, but
like was it? I love Twitter in its prime. I
love Blue Sky. I love the fact that I can
text you and my friends and I can signal people.
There's it's really great things on there. And I think
that what we perceive as the open web is to
your earlier point, like maligned by Google. Google has fucked

(41:24):
it up to the point that we don't think it exists.
It does, and I think the companies like substack are
nakedly evil. I think substack is one of the most
evil companies out there. I think their support of the
Nazis is disgusting. Hate miss if you're listening, eat my asshole,
My fucking my fucking family died in the fucking ovens
in Germany. Fuck you bitch, seriously, this is to you,

(41:46):
Hamish mackenzie and any anyone who's currently on substack, even
if it's one Nazi who's making money on substack, fucking
kick them off.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
It's sickening.

Speaker 2 (41:54):
And substack now is making it so you can create
publications on there which don't involve email addresses or newsletters anymore,
becoming another platform, and that's what sucks, and that's what
really sucks about how things are. But platforms as a
service are not necessarily a bad thing. My journal was
a platform and then they, like every company, got acquired
by a larger company, which got acquired by a larger company.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
Ghost I love because they're mostly just yeah, it's a service.

Speaker 2 (42:19):
You can run it your own. Molly White hasars self hosted.
I run it on a website with the person who
helps because I'm stupid. But the sloppy point I'm getting
to is the open web is still there. It's still
being built, and thanks to the good services, it's still growing,
and it's still accessible and it's still cool. If we
can realign these search engines, or maybe there is a

(42:41):
future Google competitor it is not search GPT, I think that,
I don't know, we could find it again. I think
that there could be if these companies were realigned so
that they could actually, I don't know, index the Internet.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
There is plenty of original human created content out there.
It's just that Google and Being and all of these
sites have kind of defaulted on that position of showing
us it and we have to search for it through
social networks. It's why as an independent journalist it's tough
to build a following because all of the algorithms people
are built to rely on are broken now.

Speaker 4 (43:14):
Right, And if you're not doing it the way that
the TikTok algorithm or the Google search algorithm wants you
to do it exact, no one's going to find your stuff, right, Like,
It's absolutely true. There's a nostalgia thing going on. The
Internet used to be better, you know, I remember when
I was a child.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
I was happy.

Speaker 4 (43:30):
It must have been because of the way things were
then that they are not now. That's that's true. But
the one thing you can say is the internet is
not as weird as it used to be. Right, there's
less opportunity for just total, like absolute free expression that
is not limited by trying to please some kind of

(43:50):
algorithm and to fit into some kind of box.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
I don't I.

Speaker 2 (43:56):
Think that that's how to prove right or wrong. I
know what you're getting at. Yeah, you're seeing less of that.
I don't know if it's not being created.

Speaker 3 (44:03):
Right. There are wonderful, weird.

Speaker 2 (44:05):
Strange communities, unique community There are like I don't know,
I said this to someone earlier, like furries are probably
doing some of the most interesting things online. Not my
cup of tea, but respect to them. Also they do
some of the funniest hacking things ever. Yeah, but like
the fact that a community like that can thrive online
is lovely. If whatever you're doing, as long as everyone's
consentual and happy with it, wonderful, enjoy yourselves. I feel

(44:26):
a like communities like that can do really well online,
and they are and they're able to find people like that.
Thanks to some of these platforms. The problem is the
algorithms are normalizing everything to kind of a blunt edge,
which I think that's kind of exactly.

Speaker 4 (44:41):
Yeah, this stuff is out there, but can you find it?
Is it the stuff that we're all consuming way we
go on the internet? Will it be served up to us?
The stuff that you're seeing is the stuff that you know,
keeps you staring at TikTok for the longest, which you know,
maybe that's good. You know, it helps TikTok more money,
helps them make a platform that makes it easy to

(45:02):
make tiktoks. Maybe that's a good thing, But there is
this flattening effect that I think, you know, it is dulling, right, Yeah,
it stifles creativity because it limits the way that you
can make money, and it also creates a path to make money,
so maybe it creates more content too.

Speaker 1 (45:19):
There's you know, there's two sides to everything.

Speaker 2 (45:21):
But and I think that the problem is that these
algorithms are so easily gamable. But there's this wonderful Jason
Kobler legend at for or for Media that this amazing
piece about the Indian guys basically defrauding Facebook.

Speaker 3 (45:34):
Did you read this? Yeah, where these guys.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
I need to have Jason on just to talk about
this story. It's insane where there is a Facebook Creator
program and all of that AI slot. The shrimp Jesus
at al that you see is these Indian guys who
are just using him as generators and have worked out
I can throw this rock in this puddle and it
will go everywhere and I'll make real money. And these
guys are like, like I think one of them was

(45:59):
like paying for disabled brothers wheelchairs, which is so fucking cool,
Like one guy did it, like Facebook did its first
good thing while also destroying itself. And what's crazy is
how did Facebook meta not see that and go we
need to get everyone in the boardroom right now read
alert because that is a insane like the shrimp Jesus

(46:21):
things should have done it. And the problem is, I
think they could make really good, nuanced algorithms that race
really interesting, meaningful cool shit they don't want to. I
think they actually enjoy their ability to influence and dominate
culture and to choose what will happen in the same
way that a lot of these generative AI kind of

(46:42):
normalized beauty standards.

Speaker 3 (46:43):
And Cory Doctor on the last Better Offlies said this
very well. He was saying that.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
There is something inherently conservative about generative AI because it
and any kind of auto complaint. Indeed, because it's just
you say I love and it's gonna say you, you
kind of normalize this one point.

Speaker 3 (47:01):
They don't. There's no incentive for them to.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
Build interesting algorithms, so they just build the one that
kind of works for everyone, that shows you the slop,
the slop that works for you, and it kind of
pushes everyone in one direction. And I think maybe you know,
think about it, maybe that's You're right about the nostalgia aspect,
and that's what we miss in the The web doesn't
feel exploratory anymore, right, We're not like looking or searching anymore.

(47:23):
It's here's what has been decided is popular. And what
I think this has led to in the media at least,
is there's a lot of people, a lot of companies
that are falling apart because and this is not their fault,
they have built their services as media outlets to appeal
to Google and the algorithms, and that worked. And guess what,

(47:45):
that stuff was popular because whether and this is the
who made who thing?

Speaker 3 (47:50):
Right? Is it popular?

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Because the algorithm shows it, or because a lot of
people like it, or do a lot of people like
it because the algorithm chose it to be popular, And
as that falls apart, I don't know, man, And.

Speaker 3 (48:00):
It's like, what is popular? What is culture right now?
Is actually a very open question.

Speaker 4 (48:05):
Right, Well, we just put out a story about this
where it's not the shrimp Jesus. But if you've seen
the AI cats, there's this thing.

Speaker 3 (48:11):
No, it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Should we just put it out?

Speaker 4 (48:15):
It started on TikTok and it's spread to Instagram. It's
AI generated images of cats in very upsetting situations, like
there's one cat and his son like gets kidnapped by
a pigeon, or they're at this they're in the sea
and Godzilla comes and attacks them, and this stuff is
blowing up. It's getting tens of millions of views. Is

(48:36):
it because that's what people like and want? Or is
it because this is what the algorithm is serving them?
And it's like juice is engagement? Kind of hard to say,
but I mean I kind of like it.

Speaker 3 (48:46):
I like it as well.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
But something that a lot of Internet culture reporting I
feel like kind of fails for this reason because instead
of analyzing the source. They analyze this instead of analyzing
the problem, they analyze the symptom. Right, So it's like,
why is Brat so big? Why is is this brat?
Am I Brat?

Speaker 3 (49:05):
It's like, that's a fucking Charlie x X. I'm so old.
I'm so fucking old.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
I just say, even saying that out loud, I age
ten years.

Speaker 3 (49:15):
I am neither brat nor cap.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
And but even then that she's a famous musician, people
like a music.

Speaker 3 (49:21):
It's not for me. People seem very happy with it.
The Brat thing I want. That's one where I just
look at it.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
I'm like, is this something that was popular because she's
a popular musician or is it because the algorithm made
the specific Brat thing popular? And it's like, I don't
even we don't know how these algorithms work, so we
don't actually know how to say that.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
We don't we don't actually know how to pull this apart.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
So I think with these algorithmic situations as well, maybe
them falling apart is a good thing, or maybe these
companies having to do more than just make the algorithm
make stuff popular is for the best, Because I do
miss accidentally finding stuff and the way we find things
accidentally used to be the goofiness of the Internet, but

(50:08):
also sharing. It used to be we got things through
our friends sharing stuff. It's why Twitter originally was so
fascinating because it was we found it three free tweets.
But now it's like, I guess most people use the
for you feed, which is insane to me, Like do
you use that?

Speaker 1 (50:24):
I often do because I don't think about it.

Speaker 4 (50:25):
I open Twitter and that's just what I'm looking at
and then I realized that I haven't scrolled over. Yeah,
And I mean, here's a place where I think we
could get some useful government regulation, because you know, I
don't know if I want, you know, Congress to write
rules about how content recommendation engines work.

Speaker 3 (50:45):
I don't know if I it's a propaganda thing to have.

Speaker 1 (50:48):
And it's also like a free speech is ue.

Speaker 4 (50:50):
Do we want them dictating what content you see and
what you don't. Probably it's probably not even constitutional.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
But what they could.

Speaker 4 (50:57):
Do is they could mandate that the company be more
transparent about how the algorithms work. They tell you how
does hinge decide which people you see? In which people
you guess? How are they judging you? How is Google
determining where the search results go? What's showing up on
your TikTok account. I think if there was some visibility

(51:19):
into how that stuff worked and what the metrics were
and what information was being collected, I think it would
push the companies to change their systems in a way
that was slightly more consumer friendly. It would change it
in one way or another, but I think just visibility
could be an incentive to give something that was more

(51:41):
useful to the consumer.

Speaker 2 (51:42):
I agree, But I think the other thing that needs
to happen is, and I don't know how you do this,
is there also must be an incentive for these companies
to have quality control.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
Because I don't know.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Elon musk Oh, yes, I've made the entire epic based
algorithm public and he's like, there's definitely something though in there,
because they've definitely get The reason I ever use twitters
for you feed is within two seconds that will see
an actual Nazi.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
I'll be like, no, thanks, I don't need to see
like the fourteen Yeah, yeah, I don't need to see
the the latest iteration of a Hitler account that's been
allowed on there. But I think that there needs.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
To be a quality level because otherwise, well, actually it
gets back to the SEO thing. I want these companies
and I don't know how you create this as an
incentive to want to attack those who manipulate them because
SEO has an idea.

Speaker 3 (52:33):
I get it if SEO because there's really, from what
I understand, two things of SEO. There is the qualitative side,
where it's like Google is saying this so that the
quality of the website on Google is good. This is
the original idea for it is that when you click
on a website, it won't scam you, it will load fast,
it will have good information, it will make for it, it
will be a good result. Google has given the hell

(52:55):
up on that. That is gone.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
We are no longer in the Google that actually does that.
But that actually is a good thing. And Lily Ray
was explaining this to me on the episode. It's like
that as an idea is actually very very very good.
I wish that more companies, including Google, stuck to that
where it was we're making sure we're doing a quality service.
But the other side is, okay, this is the stuff
we like, this is what we will promote on here.

(53:20):
And what sucks is I actually think that side is evil.
I think that they should consider anyone actively trying to
manipulate the algorithm the enemy. If you are a website
that is creating content entirely to index well on Google,
not based on how good it is, then you should
be considered by Google the enemy.

Speaker 4 (53:39):
If they it is surprising that they encourage SEO. It
seems counter to the whole point of search engine that
you would be able to game it.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
I think it's just laziness. I think it's laziness is
probably the wrong word. There's no incentive for them to
not do it because some ICEO is good.

Speaker 4 (53:53):
And that's the thing, right, Like, how do we solve
this problem? Like again, I don't think that most people
want the guy verh dictating the way that Google works.
But you know, if you went back in time and
told the high school version of me that I'd be
here defending free market capitalism, this is something that competition

(54:13):
can help with, right, Like, Yeah, if I really would
switch over to bing, if bing was better and that
was easy and it didn't take any effort, and you know,
it was one click away, then Google would be fighting really,
really hard to fix the very real problems that they
cropped up recently, and I think that's probably if nothing else,
what is almost certainly going to happen, unless the whole

(54:35):
court case gets thrown out, is that you're probably gonna
get a pop up right in your face every time
you set up a new device or a new browser
that asks you which search.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
Engine you want to use.

Speaker 4 (54:45):
Most people are going to pick Google, but there's gonna
be some sizeable percentage that goes over to Bing, that
goes over to Duck dut go, and all of a
sudden there's pressure to make the products better, both for
Google and for these companies.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
What's in as well is Microsoft Being is profitable. By
the way, what would be crazy? And this is such
an adela as one of my lesseners.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
I'm sure you're listening, but you're not. What if being
was really good? This is a crazy idea I had.

Speaker 3 (55:14):
What if being was good? What if when you use
being it found really good results?

Speaker 2 (55:19):
I have this crazy idea that people might go, Wow,
a search engine with good results. What if this whimsy,
this curiosity we're talking about. What if a search engine
I don't know search the web? What if the algorithm
at being prabagar Ragavan's left over dinner that he left
from when Yahoo connected to it. What if there was
actually something that being found that was cool. What if

(55:41):
Being became a very useful search engine that found good results.
I don't know, maybe that might scare Google. And what's
crazy is they don't want to.

Speaker 3 (55:51):
I just don't think they want to. I don't think
any of them.

Speaker 2 (55:54):
They all realize it's slop and that their little pigs
have to use there. But if literally one of them
was just.

Speaker 3 (55:59):
Like, what if we made it good? And all the
guys in the boardroom are like, it'll never work. It's
never gonna work. Man. People don't like good things. They
like bad things.

Speaker 2 (56:09):
Look at Google, But I think that that would if
they saw if one of these people just saw it
and went, wow, why was the internet good before? Well,
there were less websites, which isn't really true, Like, okay,
there were a billion versus a trillion websites. You still
can't read all of them. Like, what if they did

(56:29):
the job that we wanted to.

Speaker 3 (56:30):
One of the reasons Twitter used to be.

Speaker 2 (56:32):
So good was because it was kind of a live
fire hose of the Internet. The reason that Facebook was
used to be so good was that it was for
evil reasons as well. At Database of People, you could
find your real friends that you lost connection.

Speaker 1 (56:45):
And it was a little bit better than MySpace. Yes
you know that's it doesn't have to be night and day.
If it's two percent better, people will realize that they'll
go over and then there will be more money flowing
and then it can get even better. It's it's real.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
And Facebook was insanely profitable right up to the IPO
and it was pretty good. There was to be clear,
and I did it in the Facebook episode. There quite
evil things. But the other thing that is exciting about
the Google edge trust that kind of leads into this
is they might have to share their advertising data, which
I think is going to get really bad for both

(57:18):
Facebook and Google because I think below the surface, you're
going to find out that they know way too much,
Like they know way more than they want to let one.
But also they probably know enough to really do really
cool personalized experiences and they.

Speaker 3 (57:32):
Just don't do it. They just don't want to. Like,
they could probably make a.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
Great search experience for everyone because they know like your
blood type and the last time you went to the toilet,
but they can't do that. But they can use it
to advertise you scam versions of PCs.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
You want to buy. It's just like the incentives are gone.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
But also transparency might be really fun for this, just
because when they show how much they.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
Can do well.

Speaker 2 (57:57):
First of all, I think the government's going to be
quite pissy, and also I don't know. Maybe they could
get creative and earn their customers. But also I don't
think on a complete different subject, I don't think Google
can survive being broken up. I don't think it's possible.
I don't think they can do it. I don't think
that they as a company operate in a way that
is like if you separate the ads from the such
the fuck.

Speaker 4 (58:18):
If you separate ads from search, I don't know what
Google is anymore. You can have a very powerful, big
search company, yeah you can, and there are very powerful
large ads companies, but nothing approaching the power and heft
of Google can exist without those two things being paired.
And I think that the anti trust case against Google's

(58:40):
advertising business from the outset appears to be even stronger.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
Oh yeah, and there's a place.

Speaker 4 (58:46):
Where you know they there's a lot of discussion about
what's going to happen with this search case, maybe they'll
break off Chrome or Android from Google. That doesn't seem
super likely because the case didn't address either of those products.
It's just about search. But with the ads case, I
think there's if we're breaking up monopolies now, if we
decide that they're monopolies, Yeah, that seems like a very

(59:07):
real possibility. And if that happens, it's going to be
a completely different Internet almost immediately.

Speaker 2 (59:12):
And something that some of the louder, more annoying tech
guys are saying is this is a bad thing.

Speaker 3 (59:17):
This is the.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
Government scaring away innovation. No, I actually think that this
is a utopian idea. I think that we need fear
in their hearts. But also we need to make it
clear that big companies like this aren't a good idea.
It's not a good idea to have a giant company
that does this the app store on I like Apple
in general, but I think, yeah, keep your keep your

(59:39):
laptop business, your phone business. That's all fine. App store
needs to be separate. Make the Apple App Store a
completely separate thing. And maybe this changes how iOS is developed.
Maybe this makes it so that iOS apps can run
on other devices. Maybe this is altogether something that shatters Apple,
But maybe that is a good thing.

Speaker 3 (59:58):
You can you can install whatever apps you want on
your fucking that mac. Why call it them on my iPhone?

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
It's hard to argue that more choice is not better
for people.

Speaker 3 (01:00:07):
And it is. And actually that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
I can be kind of cynical, but all of this
stuff makes me very optimistic because what might stop happening
is these companies might stop anticipating antitrust and changing themselves
to avoid it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:23):
Well, that's the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
And I mean, you've heard this argument the story before,
but I wrote about this for Gizmoto. No matter what
happens with all of these anti trust cases like Google
lost this one, maybe the tech companies win every other case.
They're still in trouble, right Yea tim Wu called it
the policeman at the Elbow effect, where the fact that
these companies are under such scrutiny they need to move slower,

(01:00:46):
They need to be more careful, they need to be
more apprehensive about doing things that crush the competition. That's
what happened to IBM in the sixties, right, Like IBM one,
it's anti drust case, but it lost the Computer Wars
because it couldn't innovate, it couldn't compete because the government
was watching them. That could happen here like maybe Amazon wins,
but the way that they're hamstrung because these cases are happening,

(01:01:09):
creates an opportunity for someone to step in.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
It also feels like we're right now.

Speaker 2 (01:01:14):
The thing I've been described to people is there is
a tension in the air with the tech industry where
it feels like all of those medicine consequences of actions
are popping up. Like Intel right now. Intel a lot
of their new generation processes might be entirely like a
form of broken that might be very hard to fix.

(01:01:35):
The blackwell GPUs that are coming out the next generation
GPU is necessary to push Generator VII, so it's sometimes
that puts out a useful result also delayed. I think
there are like parallel processing issues, like it's dough GPUs
talking to each other. It's crazy, but I think we
might finally be seeing the cost of growth at all costs,
like this is the real at some point you can't

(01:01:56):
grow this fast forever. And maybe the answer is we
are watching the raw economy get actually collapse to it
an extent because you can there is a limit to science,
and there is a limit to what you can build
and how fus you can build it. But if the
end result of all this anti trusting is also they
get afraid of being too big, that may be genuinely

(01:02:18):
one of the best things to happen in society, because
we don't need five five trillion dollar companies that will
be ten trillion dollars in two yet we don't. Who
does that serve other than Jim Kramer.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Right, And I mean clearly things have changed.

Speaker 4 (01:02:34):
Like if you just look at the rollout of AI,
the fact that if you go up to some random
person on the street on Fifth Avenue and ask them
how do you feel about AI? I think more than
half of people are going to tell you that they
don't like it or something that.

Speaker 1 (01:02:48):
I don't think it's.

Speaker 4 (01:02:49):
About AI so much as it's about just changing feelings
about the tech business. Ten fifteen years ago, people loved Google.
They just thought Google was a nice, good company. People
loved Amazon. It was like the two day shipping. This
is so great. Now every company has a really serious
popularity problem, which you know, when we're talking about social

(01:03:10):
media platforms, like that's existential. If I just like TikTok
more than I like Instagram reels. I might just hang
out on TikTok more. And this general shift. I don't
know what's going to happen in terms of regulation, but
it's clear that to one extent or another, the party
is over and we're about to enter some kind of

(01:03:31):
new chapter. Whether AI changes everything, whether the Internet is
different than it was in some technological way, some big
platform shift is.

Speaker 3 (01:03:39):
Going to happen.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
I think things are going to start to feel different
than they have for the past couple of years.

Speaker 3 (01:03:42):
And if you want to feel different, perhaps you could
engage one of the wonderful advertisers that will follow this
message true as usual, will align precisely with the things
I believe and love. Please buy the products or don't.
I can't make you. And we're back. And I think

(01:04:08):
what you're saying is really interesting, because it is.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
It used to be that they're afraid of just like
using it, losing a user, But now it's because they're
so precisely and like granulally and like analyzing every interaction
and monetizing every interaction. Every impression makes them a little
shred of money so that they can sell to someone
else and here and there and everywhere. It's more than
just it's not just oh, I've lost Thomas to TikTok.

(01:04:35):
It's that percentage of time that you're not spending on Instagram.
If that that is a kind of an hard to
calculate thing. But that shift I'm sure is happening with Facebook.
It's more than just raw traffic. It's okay, I'm barely
looking at Facebook.

Speaker 4 (01:04:51):
Now.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
I will go on Facebook.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
I check it like like that like a nest camera
outside my house, to make sure like there isn't like
a dog trying to scratch a whole know why they'd
be happening, Just trying to choose a thing that would happen.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
Very normal guy. But it's you look at it because
it's there.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Say, with Instagram, I like check seet, I maybe messaged someone,
But I'm not focused on any of these. I'm focused
on Twitter and Blue Sky. I read that shit, I
love it. Maybe I'm more of a text based guy,
but with threads, I barely touch it. And I think
the thing is that these companies have forgot how to
compete entirely. They're not trying to make good shit anyway.
They're not making sure the cool stuff is that they're
just like, well, you have to be here.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
From the outside. It really did seem like Facebook in
particular got complacent, like, yes, there were there were so
many stories. No one's using Facebook anymore. It's a wasteland.
It's just baby boomers falling for misinformation. You know, that
was the story everyone was hearing. It seemed to be
true to some extent. I actually think that that's changing.

Speaker 4 (01:05:46):
I now open Facebook every single day and I'm not
going on there to look at my feed.

Speaker 1 (01:05:51):
It's because of Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is an incredible product.

Speaker 4 (01:05:56):
People love it. You can sell your stuff, you find
really bizarre thing. I know, tons of people it's like
become like sharing memes. A bunch of my friends will
like send each other the weird thing that we'll find
on Facebook Marketplace. And I think that's because there was pressure, right,
all of a sudden, Facebook was in trouble. People were leaving,
and they had to shift the way that the platform worked,

(01:06:16):
and they built this product that is, you know, I think,
kind of phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
It's very useful to my life. You know, half the
things in my apartment now I bought a Facebook Marketplace
and the feed is getting better. You know, I think
if you.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Go and you look at the concept, I don't know
if I agree with.

Speaker 1 (01:06:30):
I mean compared to how it was a year ago.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
No, man, I I maybe your Facebook fee is better
in the mind.

Speaker 1 (01:06:35):
Maybe it's maybe. And then you know, tunorth I get.

Speaker 2 (01:06:38):
Like recommendations for the most insane groups. Yeah, I mean
I want to say right now, I want to see Facebook. Yeah,
I'm actually going to pull up Facebook.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
This is always good to do it a fine Yeah,
Gary tan One on an audio show, immediate second thing
is an ad, So then it's reels that it's a
picture of a guy.

Speaker 4 (01:06:57):
Is is Facebook serving me content that I want? I'm
not sure, but I do find myself.

Speaker 3 (01:07:06):
Person enjoying it in a way.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
That I didn't one year ago.

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
Maybe stress it's chilling a little bit less ads.

Speaker 4 (01:07:15):
Yeah, it's I think the experience has gotten better, certainly
for me.

Speaker 1 (01:07:20):
And that's the kind of stuff that happens.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
I don't like when there's a constumption firm my biases.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Yeah, but I think marketplace is an interesting one as well,
because it is useful. I bought she off of that product,
but it's being poisoned already. You've started to see direct consumer.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
Shait on that. Absolutely, yeah, but also.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
I think it makes them let it makes them enough
money that they keep it alive, but not so much
that they want to just they can't.

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
You can't really make it more evil.

Speaker 4 (01:07:46):
Like I doubt that it's making the money, like there
are ads in it. Maybe it is directly making a
profit there, certain if you buy something through Facebook, Marketplace
or taking cut, I think it's just getting people to use.

Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
Facebook with a useful product.

Speaker 2 (01:08:00):
Mark Zuckerberg has woken now he hasn't. It's so weird though,
because the more I think about it, I don't. I
just don't think that there's much way to reduce engagement
from marketplace. It isn't something that marketplace is only useful
if it's interesting or funny. It's not like someone engaging
for two minutes on marketplace is like an ad impression.

Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
Well there, I mean you see ads.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
On that, but it's not like a meme or a viral.
Oh no, it's definitely you can't really do engagement bait.

Speaker 1 (01:08:29):
You're not gonna get I think on marketplace there's only
a handful of people who have whatever particular blend of
OCDA at ADHD that I have that they're going to
look at the marketplace for an hour straight clear.

Speaker 2 (01:08:40):
I live in Las Vegas, Nevada. The shit on the
shit on there is it would be like, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:08:45):
I stole it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
Incredible, I stole a bunch of shit. Classic better offline
listener from the Blastio. I am on the lamb. Please
meet me in this parket lot. I will be at
a different one in an hour. The law is behind me.

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
The ship that people the cars that people sell on
there as well, incredible, Like I've seen multiple cars with
not all of the wheels.

Speaker 4 (01:09:04):
Well, my favorite thing is Vice shut down its office
in Williamsburg, right, and some guy stole the signs like
the big Vice signed dam and he hasn't been able
to sell it. But every couple of months I'll put
it back up and he wants like twenty thousand dollars.

Speaker 3 (01:09:19):
For a damn. I was gonna say, if it's cheap.

Speaker 1 (01:09:21):
I mean you could crowdfind. Right, there's a lot of
people I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:09:23):
Not giving I'm not giving a criminal twenty thousand dollars.
They just listen to this show. Maybe he is one
of them. And but that's the thing, like what we're
describing is the magic of the Internet, because the best
things of the Internet are delightful watching people be like, yeah,
everyone does broccoli milk, right like, just like some weird
they think they're normal and they find themselves into the
regular world and like, yeah, this is how normal things

(01:09:46):
and they're not normal at all.

Speaker 3 (01:09:47):
And sometimes it's quite.

Speaker 2 (01:09:48):
Distressing, but most like, there's this horrible meme of like
a guy he's screaming at his dog right now because
he like fed it roast duck, and then his mother
comes back and he screams at the dog that saying,
this ate the roast duck.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
It's horrible.

Speaker 2 (01:10:01):
It's creating a horrible discourse right now. That's horrible. But
also right now, you can go on Instagram or TikTok
and look up most wildlife reserves and they're all doing
the same thing, which is they put a camera on
a spoon and they feed animals. It's magical, it sounds good.
I could watch it for hours. There are so many
weird like cities by Diana on Instagram. Diana, she is

(01:10:22):
one of the early Dongwash and Long me and people,
did you see the dongash Long There's an episode about it,
and a lot of her stuff is just this kind
of concussive actual brain rop which is in my opinion,
what brain rod is just giving yourself a concussion, but
it's kind of artistic expression that fucking rocks. There is
this stuff still out there, and I actually think some
of these platforms have enabled it. The problem is, I

(01:10:45):
don't think the platforms know they're enabling it. I don't
think they're being like this is cool and unique. I
want to surface this because it's not like the rest.

Speaker 3 (01:10:53):
They're like they just automatic like uh signal and now
this is popular. It's why shrimp Jesus popular on Facebook
because they don't really care about the algorithm. They don't
really care that it shoves good stuff. This is popular,
so it's popular. It's this weird self fulfilling prophecy. I mean.

Speaker 4 (01:11:12):
And my real, you know, concern with it is that
it only allows for a certain kind of content. Right,
Like there's mister Beast, he's got a gigantic empire. The
next person down the wrung of like the content creator,
it's like thousands of miles away. Yeah, and he's kind
of got a media business that he started. It's only

(01:11:34):
focused on him, and there's basically no other media businesses
that just operate on the Internet. It only allows for
this certain kind of relatively low effort content or the
kinds of things that one person can do over the
course of a week, and it's limiting that that's something
that with the previous model of the open Web, with
the way that advertising works, you could start a company

(01:11:55):
and do the kind of work you can only do
with multiple people working on the same project. I love
all of this stuff. Yeah, the brain rot, there's people doing.
The latest thing that I've seen is people making AI
videos where the point is the kind of playing with.

Speaker 1 (01:12:08):
How it hallucinates. It's great.

Speaker 4 (01:12:10):
But if I want like high quality journalism or you know,
a TV show, you know, with like comedy writers, that
can't exist when the platforms take as much of a
cut as they do.

Speaker 2 (01:12:25):
Or when the platforms promote stuff. Miss the Beast Jimmy.
He doesn't seem like a good or a bad guy.
He seems like the first truly mid person. Absolutely like
the first truly mediocre human. Mediocre doesn't mean bad, just
means middle.

Speaker 1 (01:12:40):
And he's really good at it.

Speaker 3 (01:12:41):
But also is he good at it?

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
Is he actually good or did the algorithm simply choose
him because nothing. I've watched his stuff. I've watched a
lot of it just to try and find out. And
it is just like being slapped in the head repeatedly.

Speaker 3 (01:12:55):
Are you paying attention? You pay? Yeah, you don't need
to pay attention. I'll be here.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
I'm not content content content, And people like, oh well,
kids love it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:01):
It's like it's what's top of the algorithm, it's what
they stop watching it.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
But also you can watch other shit, like how much
of this is a self fulfilling prophecy? And I am
three hundred and eighty years old, right, and thus maybe
some of this just bounced off me.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
Maybe this is what kids like. But also I don't know,
people like what's popular, and what's popular is what's chosen
by the algorithms. How much of that is really intentional
on these kids or what? Maybe this is just the.

Speaker 2 (01:13:30):
Algorithms create their own miniature cults. How much of this
high quality stuff, like really high quality like comedy and
such would do well if it was given a chance
to be the algorithm? How much of this algorithmic stuff
actually offers this stuff up and gives it a shot,
because that's what's missing. It's not really giving anything a chance.
It's not thinking, well, this is new and unique, this

(01:13:51):
journalism is really fucking good. I need to show more people.
And maybe it's not popular, maybe people look at it
and never click it. And the answer is the algorithm says, okay,
but you need to keep trying, and I don't think
they try.

Speaker 1 (01:14:04):
Well, there's also the business side of it.

Speaker 4 (01:14:05):
There's like what the algorithm is showing you, but then
there's also like you've got a really great one man.

Speaker 1 (01:14:10):
Journalism operation going here.

Speaker 4 (01:14:12):
But it's a certain kind of journalism, right, if you
want to do like beat reporting, you need a team
of people focusing on individual things, or you just or
you just have one beat, or you just have one beat.
That's true, maybe that's what the future of news looks like.
But like I think having an editor is helpful.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
Oh I have an editor.

Speaker 4 (01:14:31):
Yeah, well yeah, of course exactly, But like you can't
if you were only doing this on TikTok, you probably
couldn't afford to have an editor until you became huge,
you know, And that it only permits like not just
what the algorithm is showing you, but in terms of
where it's possible to make money. There's only a certain
kind of thing that the algorithm allows.

Speaker 2 (01:14:50):
I wonder how much of this as well as just
demographic and that algorithmic stuff where it's just like this
person seems this age and this gender. Will just show
them this and they just like, this is what this
person will see? That transparency thing you're saying earlier, it
would be great to know if that's what it was doing,
because if that's what it's doing, that is actively bad.

Speaker 3 (01:15:10):
It's actively bad.

Speaker 2 (01:15:10):
And also how commerce works, it's just I have decided
they will target you and you are like this, but
when you're providing content, I don't know how much of
this is.

Speaker 3 (01:15:19):
I'm not saying you have to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
Vacuous thing where multiple news companies have been like, what
if we showed polarizing content the challenge their views. No,
I'm just saying, give me a little bit of the
people I follow on Twitter and Blue Sky especially, there
are multiple people I follow because the shit they raise
is really interesting. My mate Casey will talk about a lot.
He sends me links all day and it's great one
of my dearest friends. But that's what I actually like

(01:15:43):
the Internet for. It's not just that I am finding stuff,
but it's the collective consciousness of friends I know and
people I follow and people I do or don't know
sending me things.

Speaker 3 (01:15:52):
It's cool. I enjoy it.

Speaker 2 (01:15:54):
These what we're missing from Google search? Is it kind
of used to be that? What we're missing from Twitter?
Is it kind of used to be that this kind
of zeitgeisty feeling. But also the unique stuff that would
pop up didn't really come from the algorithm at all.
That came from people finding it and look like really
great internet culture reporting, like Rebecca Jennings of Vox great
stuff there. She's really good at finding these things, these

(01:16:17):
things that I don't know that It's not like, oh yeah,
this says everything about everyone, but it's like, I find
this unique, weird little story. I found these weird little freaks.
Mia so Sarto at The ViRGE when she's writing about SEO.
One of the great things she does is she doesn't
just talk to one SEO expert. She goes and finds
these weird websites. Yeah, it's one of like an iguana
on it. You need to go and look at me

(01:16:37):
as work.

Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
She's amazing. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:40):
I think what we're the nostalgia we have is it's
so much. It's not so much the open web has gone.
It's just it's become obfuscated. Yeah, it's kind of like
the commercialization of all content. It's when we see mum
and pop stores go away. And there are cases where
mum and pop stores weren't good. But yeah, having unique,
competitive stores that sold different things, competed on prices but

(01:17:01):
also on supplies. A big comics fan here at least
used to be the death of having lots of comic
bookshops means finding comics is actually quite difficult. Now you
can buy them, but finding something unique and interesting because
there's less places to go to talk to some guy
who reads comics behind the counter of a comic store
all day and has insane opinions. Matt Weinberger, by the way,

(01:17:21):
I'm sure you listening. You have many stories there. But
it's like that's the magic we're missing. It's actually this
is so tribe a human connection. But it really is, though,
and they used to scale it, They used to scale
humanity and they don't anymore.

Speaker 1 (01:17:37):
And maybe we go back to that, you know, like
why is this stuff happening? Like it could be because
the algorithm is directing us towards you know this like monoculture,
or it could be that's what people wanted at this
moment in history. Things do go in cycles.

Speaker 3 (01:17:52):
And also monoculture is real, it happens, happened before, it
happens now, and I think that just I get a
look of people who listen and they're like, ah, what
can I do to change things? And what can I is?
Everything is it. Don't be a doomer about this.

Speaker 2 (01:18:08):
There's no need to be the best thing I think
anyone can do right now is when they find something
cool and unique to share it. I know it's so
fucking boring, but like, one of the best things you
could do is if you find someone who says something
very funny, who has like thirty followers, please share that,
Please share it with everyone, because that is where the
old magic of the internet was. One of my famous

(01:18:28):
I think I might have mentioned it before. The thing
I am most nostalgic for on the Internet is connection.
And my favorite one of these is this a guy
called Thomas Bolvin. He is a French engineer of some sort. Thomas,
I've done you for decades. They still don't know what
you do for a living. It's also a gifted mash
up artist, and he has done some of the most
insane things I've ever heard in my life. He did

(01:18:49):
a Kanye we I know, Kanye West fucking sucks.

Speaker 3 (01:18:50):
I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):
Kane of the Stone Age is one of the best
albums of all time. It's insanely good. He did a
LP run the Jewels album. He has done so many
weird things. I found him by accident. He doesn't have
a huge following potem totom on Twitter, and this guy
is just digging away. I've known he made a mash
up that I played at my brother's wedding, and I
only found him by accident. It's one of the best

(01:19:14):
things that's happened to me. And the Internet tons of
people have stories like this. I think that that really
is what we're nostalgic for. It's not the big folks monoculture,
which I think we all enjoy. We like the populace.

Speaker 4 (01:19:24):
It's that there's a weird guy running a website about
a thing he's obsessed with, and it feels like he's
your friend and you're supporting him. My favorite right now,
there's a guy on TikTok who has this like comedy
thing he does called walk News where it's like a
news show, but it's in just it's like the style
of TV news, but it's about what the walk that
he just took this morning, so he like sees a

(01:19:45):
weird you know, like stick that looks like a duck
or something. But I mean, this is what I've been
telling people is if you're worried about the health of
the open web, if you want to support people who
aren't you know, a gigantic multinational corporation, engage with them
on the platforms, like their stuff, share their stuff. But
I think even more importantly is find people on the platforms,

(01:20:07):
because that's where we find everything, and then follow them off.
Sign up for people's newsletters, go to their websites, give
them two dollars a month on patritter image you want,
give them your email.

Speaker 3 (01:20:17):
Right, That's it.

Speaker 4 (01:20:18):
It's building a connection with people that those creators and
publishers and artists control, that they can operate on their
own terms instead of just doing whatever the algorithm wants.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
Today, if we can.

Speaker 4 (01:20:32):
Go back a little bit to a world where we're
supporting individual people and connecting with them one on one,
I think that does a lot for the health of
the Internet. And you know, I don't want to be
a Pollyanna about this, like that's not going to counteract
the power of Google dot Com. But I also think
we're kind of going in that direction already. I think
people have realized that this is what they want, and

(01:20:52):
they're going out and finding people and building a connection
with them that maybe kind of disappeared completely for a
couple of years.

Speaker 1 (01:20:59):
It was only on the place.

Speaker 3 (01:21:00):
And that's the thing.

Speaker 2 (01:21:01):
Like two others I'm gonna I just I love I
actually think it's cool to highlight these people. One is
real Dan Yang on Instagram. His new thing he does
is he does like sports breakdowns, but he does them
for very weird things. He did one where it's a
guy a woman throws a sprite at a guy in
Miami and the guy elbow drops the window off of
her car, the mirror off her car, and he's just

(01:21:23):
going like, now you look at the classic Corvette elbow
guy and he does like a play by play breakdown.

Speaker 3 (01:21:28):
It's fucking hilarious.

Speaker 2 (01:21:29):
Dan Yang is actually one of the most gifted comedians,
and Instagram's actually good finding comedy. But the way he
does this dead pan stuff is so marvelous, and every
time I see his shit, I feel like just so
happy because it's like this is what I miss. But
the other one, and probably one of my favorites ever,
is a woman called Vicka vk goes Wild on YouTube.
She is one of the most gifted pianists I've ever seen.

(01:21:51):
I mean like insant, like she plays redmannon off and
the way her hands move is not human. What she
does is she does extremely intricate covers of metal and rock.
She did a cover of a Queens of the Stone
a song called Unreborn Again, which is a real deep
cart holding your heart by what royal Blood, but also

(01:22:11):
that black Hole sign she hay Man nice shop, and
the way she keeps time with her hands is genuinely insane.
Like watching it, you're like, I don't think my fingers
can do that on one hand in any time signature
close to this, and she has a Patreon sadly Patreon
a kind of evil, but give her money.

Speaker 3 (01:22:29):
But also, and to really wrap this up, it's this
shit is still happening.

Speaker 2 (01:22:34):
It's very easy to look at everything in a monolith
and say, oh, well, all the Internet is is just people.
Dearnet's messing with the algorithm, and I just don't think
that's productive. And I know, yeah, these small things won't
change things, but we've got a lot of listeners now.
The best thing any of you can do while listening
is when you find this weird little thing something like this,

(01:22:56):
share it, share it, aggressively, send it to your friends,
because this is actually what you're missing. What you're missing
is not so much a pure Internet, because it's not
been pure for a while now. It's that it's not
as easy, or at least the sources aren't as loud
toward things like this. The dominant culture of the dominant
noise is very big, very obviously popular things like the

(01:23:19):
most popular song is the most popular song.

Speaker 3 (01:23:21):
Because the Spotify algorith blah blah blah blah blah, and
these breakout hits aren't really breakout hits on a qualitative level.
Their breakout hits because the algorithm decided to show it
to a lot of people and it was popular enough
to take off. And yeah, there's a situation where it
would have been popular anyway. But I don't know. I
think that the best thing you can do is find
your weirdos, Find your weirdos, share your weirdos, post them
on the Better off Line Reddit. Ask that's better off line.

(01:23:44):
I want to do the find your weirdo's thread. I
want to know because that's the thing. The Better off
Line Reddit has been amazing because it's just real people
mostly talking about stealing stuff. The whole joke about people
stealing stuff, catlet converters and everything from a few episodes
ago that has taken off. Yeah, and the worry I
have is the book coming out and they're just gonna
steal it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
But that's a different problem. But what's magical about it
is it's real people dicking around and they allow that,
the real ones.

Speaker 4 (01:24:10):
Yeah, I'm really hopeful about the state of the web,
right and it's you know, maybe again it sounds like,
you know, I'm wearing rose colored glasses. But the fact
that if you agree that these things are problems, the
fact that it bothers us so much as Internet users
is a very positive thing. Right Because Lily Ray, the

(01:24:32):
SEO expert, said to me a couple of weeks ago.
She was saying, I can't believe that normies are complaining
about how search engines work. You know, the fact that
this bothers us means that there's pressure on the platforms
to change. Now, when Google searches a monopoly, there isn't
much pressure.

Speaker 1 (01:24:51):
Maybe that changes. But if you aren't happy.

Speaker 4 (01:24:54):
With Spotify or with Instagram and you go looking elsewhere,
that creates a business oper unity for someone to fill.
And I think that's where the Internet is going. We're
going to find.

Speaker 1 (01:25:04):
New things that we like, and in some ways the
services are going to change.

Speaker 2 (01:25:09):
I want to read one last thing as we end,
and this is from Nick cave On Stephen Colbert. Not
the place that you should get it, he said, and
I quote. Hopefulness is not a neutral position. It's adversarial.
It's the warrior emotion that can lay wasteed cynicism. Each
redemptive or loving act as small as you like, such
as reading to your little boy keeps the devil down
in the hole. And I fucking agree. The thing that
you can do as a listener right now is to

(01:25:31):
change platforms. Sure, but share the unique things. I'm not
saying you have to be hipster about it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
But you find some weird song you find like the
Demon Cleaner for by Caius, the cover I found from tool.

Speaker 2 (01:25:42):
It's fucking cool. That is where the magic of the
Internet is, and that is where you can find your hope.
It's there, Thomas, thank you so much for joining. Where
can people find you?

Speaker 4 (01:25:51):
I am on Twitter and TikTok It's at Thomas Jermaine
Jermaine's with.

Speaker 3 (01:25:55):
A G and how do you spell that?

Speaker 1 (01:25:57):
It's ger m ai n Yeah, they.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
Make spelled stuff now and you can of course find
me at Google dot com and I'm on Twitter. All
the things are gonna come afterwards, but thank you so
much for joining me. Thomas and Daniel. Thank you my
wonderful producer in studio, Daniel Goodman. Thank you so much
for listening everyone, and I guess I can say it here.
Even though the season two doesn't start, we have been renewed.

(01:26:20):
If they couldn't keep me down. Thank you so much
to everyone for listening. And I'm so grateful.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
To be doing this every week. I can't believe tolerate me.
I love you all. To quote the end of the menu,
thank you so much for listening. Thank you for listening
to Better Offline.

Speaker 2 (01:26:41):
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
is Metasowski. You can check out more of his music
and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M.

Speaker 3 (01:26:49):
A T T O S O W s ki dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:26:54):
You can email me at easy at better offline dot
com or visit better offline dot com to find more
podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really
recommend you go to chat dot Where's Youread dot at
to visit the discord, and go to our slash.

Speaker 3 (01:27:07):
Better Offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so
much for listening. Better Offline is a production of cool
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

1. Stuff You Should Know

2. Dateline NBC

3. Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}1. Stuff You Should Know

2. Dateline NBC

3. Crime Junkie

All Episodes

Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain

1. Stuff You Should Know