Better Offline - Algorithms and Oligopolies with Thomas Germain

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

In the fourth live-to-tape episode of Better Offlive, Ed Zitron sits down with the BBC's Thomas Germain to talk about breaking up big tech, and how we can find hope in the hopelessness of multiple monopolies and algorithms. LINKS: Thomas Germain: https://x.com/thomasgermain vkgoeswild: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbKM5fcSsaEFZRP-bjH8Y9w Dan Yang: https://www.instagram.com/realdanyang Cities By Diana: https://www.instagram.com/citiesbydianaSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Also Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline, and we are live from beautiful New York City, Nevada. I am Ed Zittron. I am your host, and I'm joined by Thomas Germain of the BBC today. It's Better Off Life. Welcome, Thomas.

Glad to be here. So, it's been a very funny few weeks. The Google is a monopoly, and of course 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, in that we're finally moving, it looks like the government is saying, it's time to not have five companies that do everything in tech. Yeah, 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 have 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. And I'll even take that a step further. two weeks ago, I would have probably said, I don't think Google loses the antitrust case. I think that they're going to win. I don't think the epic, the federal judge on the epic case, did you? 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 the monopoly over the play store has been very clear that he does not intend to let them get, like, let Google off easily and has said, because Google has estimated $600 million of cost to fix the Play Store. And it's kind of multifaceted. And the judge basically said when Google said, this is going to be really difficult, not my problem, which is one of the funniest ways of putting it.

But, okay, he didn't say it. 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 awesome. And I know I can delight in this.

Perhaps you can't. Like, we all know our position's here. But I think that there, is something kind of magical happening because this is a good thing. Competition is good. I think even the tech companies would agree. Yeah.

Competition is good, 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 arguing that that's because there's been so much power amassed among a couple of very large companies. And it feels like at this point, we're at the end of whatever started in like 2010.

We're getting to the point where venture capital doesn't seem to be being spent in the same way. Actually, it's kind of returning to how it was in 2010. Like, I think it was like 200 something million last year. It's probably going to hear about 300 million this year. And the mass consulate, 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 going to happen with generative AI at this point, because that in itself seems like a monopoly of sorts, but also it's all gone very quiet. It feels like we're all waiting.

Not hearing about it so much all of a sudden. But also, we're all waiting for something to happen. Because we went from recording this, we're obviously in a slight delay, we went from this period where everyone was like generative AI is over, it's over to not necessarily saying, it isn't, but just everyone's sitting there waiting for someone to blink. 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 realized. But also, they've stopped even saying that. Now I've started to see people say things like, well, we've got to look at the smaller language model. Maybe the large ones aren't good. Right. And what I do like, though, is that Google's pixel event was just pure AI. Yeah.

Like the week after everyone was saying, this is a terrible idea. Like, this kind of looks bad. I don't like how this looks. And it's like, nah, you've got to have AI on your earbuds now. The thing you use for listening, you need to talk to it as well. Right. 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 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 good for something. Is it? And I realize it's good for something. And I got a very annoying email this morning. And I get very annoying emails from someone saying, here is a 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 are using it. But I feel that the biggest difference with Generative AI is everything else is I'm being sold something. I'm being sold. Oh, Air pods, why are they good? You put them in your ears that automatically connect.

The music comes out. There's noise canceling these. I don't want the noise. I want the noise from the music I'm listening to. And then Generative AI comes along with 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?

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 grok. Yeah, I mean, I've been working really hard over the past couple months to try and find things I can actually do with it. And I've come across a couple of, you know. Can you tell me? Like, genuinely, I would love to know. Yeah, I mean, I like it for, like, I'm a writer, right?

Yeah. So when I'm stuck with like a sentence that I'm having a hard time getting from my brain onto the page, Sometimes I'll, you know, write out some like terrible version of the sentence, you know, stream of consciousness. Ask one of the AIs, you know, for an idea of where I could go with it. I'm not, 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 going to 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.

I'm never going to pay for that. And I fully admit, that's kind of how I. used it. If it's some, especially some boring work shit, 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. Never really get a good idea, but I'm like, oh, that kind of makes me think about it. But again, is this worth $100, 200 billion? Is this, really? Because if they had launched this and their entire thing, this would be like a very 2010s 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 LLMs 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 $50 million and this is what it did. I'd actually be kind of like, sick. A cool product. Yeah, sick. This is just, it's kind of a churning machine.

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. What a great idea, the brick wall, like you said. But it isn't. It is, and 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. It's just, but actually, back to the question, what, have you found any other useful things?

Because I really, I genuinely actually feel like this is a useful conversation. Yeah, I mean, 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 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 forth with it. I mean, I had to write a bio for something. Yeah. And it was useful because it was just like, what does that look like? Like what kinds of things should I include?

it was kind of useful for that. It probably saved me half an hour. And maybe that's something it's useful for where it's like anodyne business copy, but also the very boring structural stuff that no one enjoys writing, like bios. I think it's actually very threatening specifically for writing press releases,

because press releases are awful. Anything that's formulaic. Yeah. Yeah. 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. It is really crazy, though,

how distant these things are where you've got like this kind of useful thing and just this outlay of money this insane amount of money i i have never seen a single thing in tech history anything close to this ever ever ever ever like i don't know i caught is there anything 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, right, 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, I think it's kind of unprecedented. Even the metaverse was the 45 billion that Mark Zuckerberg put into it, which is so funny, still remains funny. That turned out this is great Yahoo finance

story about it. Yahoo finance still doing stuff. They're great. They had a story about how it's mostly just mismanagement. They keep firing and hiring people. It's just like, I love that that, I love that the government, 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 and knows things, very rude, do not

email me that, might say, yeah, the overall outlay for just data centers. Maybe that's it. When the push of, I don't know, when they started moving to. towards using GPUs for processing outside or before LLMs, 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, so why is this? What do we do with this? Yeah.

Well, my thing that I've wanted to do, and I don't think I'm going to 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 chat GPT? And just see if they can tell me. Because I cannot, gun to my head, describe, like, what is Google search? It's a way of searching for stuff online. It indexes everything. What is chat GPT?

Sometimes it answers questions correct. It's a question answerer. Well, I think, and this kind of brings us back to the antitrust conversation, right? 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, you know, in my own life, I'm trying to use AI as often as I can to understand it.

Sure. It is useful for, you know, the other day, 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 correct or not. You could see if it was brought. 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, right? Is this antitrust stuff? Because there's a very real, once unfathomable, unfathomable possibility that Google is going to get broken up. That they're going to separate the ads business from the search business. And, you know, all of the moves that Google has been making to change the way the search algorithm works, which you've talked a lot 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.

But what's crazy is a story came out from Bloomberg the other day where, so there's Robots.TXD, and I'm going to fumble this and someone's going to email incorrectly. It's very rude again. How does the internet actually work? How does it? What's a website? I don't really good computers. Is this a phone? But it says that if you try and cut Google off, specifically Google, off from 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 a means of distancing themselves and saying, we're no longer just Monopoly is a, we're not just indexing, we have created this knowledge ourselves, this is our own material, this is not just, we're not just passively keeping people out from this. It's actually worse now, because if that is the case, that is the antitrust problem with LLMs, with Gemini.

They have made it so that you cannot get away from Google. Google will fuck you over in the event that you try and stop, them stealing your stuff. It's just, it's so frustrating as well because there's no real, there's no need for them to do that. 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 internet, it's kind of how it used to be. It's like, we're scraping

this, but we provide a service. We send you traffic. You allow us to scrape your website. This is the kind of the deal. Now it's just, no, this is ours now. This is our world. 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 we need a fairer deal for the web. We need a fairer deal for everyone right now. 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 are running 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

behemates, right? And they touch every part of the world, every decision they make is about a strategy that's expanding to every corner of the Internet and the physical world. So 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. And I mean, my chat GPT thing, what is chat GPT? What does Google do? What does Google do now? Yeah. Google is a search company, an ads company, a phone company, a phone provider company. They 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. No, do they own Boston Dynamics now? Is Boston Dynamics? Nevertheless. They make robots, yeah. Yeah. Well, they're doing something in every, AR, VR, VR. Yeah. What the, like, well, 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. It's most of them.

Yeah. 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 were. It's great. I love tech. 15, 20 years ago, Google, I didn't mind. Like, they were doing a decent job.

Yeah, they were. Even the old Facebook in like 2005 is a pretty good product. Yeah. And then Mark Zuckerberg's kind of evil and horrible. 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 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 that changed 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. I don't know how many units of Google are profitable without Google search. Like how much of it is bankrupt? I think they're making 60% of the company's money is coming from search.

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. And breaking them up, I think is good. I think we need an example in the tech industry. Get going. Well, I mean, we're at a point where now we can officially say, like, Google is legally a monopoly at this point, right? Like, we don't have to hedge.

No opinion. Google is a monopoly, at least in the search business. There's a bunch of other antitrust cases. Maybe other parts of the company are going to get declared a 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 to people all the time. It used to be, I think back, you know, 15 years ago or maybe even longer, the early 2000s, Google was the best search engines.

Yeah. Right? Google came out. It was better than Alta Vista. It was better than Yahoo. And excite. That's why Excite. Ask Jeeves, right?

That's why Google won originally. Yeah. At this point, is Google actually better than Bing? I think most people couldn't tell you the answer to that question because they don't use Bing. They kind of seem the same. I try. You know, I switched my default search engine to Bing for a while. It was not as good because I'm not used to it, but in terms of the results, it seemed fine. Bing News is better, which is... You like Bing better.

What a horrible sentence. Bing is also really terrible to say. I don't like saying. I don't like saying it. Google's fun. Bing is, hmm. Maybe it's just because we're not used to it, you know. Nah, I tried saying, you don't want to be. Sitting at home going Bing, Bing, Bing.

It's kind of nice. But also, Bing is not great, but neither's Google, and what is a good search engine anymore. 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 will admit I've been kind of black and white over this. I say Google doesn't care. I know that there are tons of people inside of Google.

I've spoken to them. who were like, I fucking hate this. I hate how this is happening. I mean, the Department of Justice emails of Ben Gomes. You could see the pain in Shashit Thakir and Ben Gomes 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 forever. But it's like, no, we must grow forever. But also, on some level, it's horrible to say, why would they bother? They had the monopoly. they have the world by the balls? Why bother being good?

I just don't get why they let it be so bad. Like, it's so bad. It's so awful. When you go look at something and it's just four Reddit posts and four forum posts, four other things, you look up a technical support thing, and all the forum posts are, is people saying, I too had this problem.

Anyone fix it? And then maybe occasionally like a bot being like, I have no idea what happened here. Cora's the best. Have you looked at Quora recently? Yeah, Quora is pretty insane. 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. So all of the SEO stuff that was happening on the web is now happening within conversations on Reddit.

So that's being polluted in the same way. Have you seen how Quora has added AI? I don't know if I've come across that now. Okay. So, listeners, I want you to go and look up something on Quora right now. Because right now on Quora, if you look, most of the time, it will have a change. 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 to say, yes, you can melt an egg.

I never tried. I will keep trying for science. But now what it does is they have chat GPT at the top. And it's just like, so the entire point of Quora is that it's human beings who have questions and their answers. And you go on there because it's like, wow, subject matter experts who are rewarded with Quora clout. I don't really know. Like there's some sort of point system. Like any good thing on the internet,

it's mostly just degenerate posters who really love stuff. Except now it's that 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 DeAngelo, is on the board of OpenAI. 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. 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? Well, first, what is good? But then also just what is Google search? Like, it's such a gigantic, diffused product. Like, there's no way to really examine it wholesale from the outside. But, you know, people were adding Reddit to the end of 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 Reddit at the top because maybe people were putting in it. Maybe that's what they want. But 10 Reddit results?

Yeah. How is that better? 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. 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, 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 to? Fuck, what do people want now? Who are these people who keep

bothering me with questions? Are these little pigs? They want Reddit, I guess. Reddit's where things happen now? And there are ways that I sympathize, right? 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 webpage to game Google search results. So it's the system that they developed to sort through what's good and bad and what should be at the top. Kind of, you know, 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 aren't as good. I think it's because there simply aren't great results to be found. I agree 50%.

Like, I agree that there is an adversarial nature with SEO and that people have been trying to screw with Google forever. The other thing is, this company makes like $100 billion a year. My sympathy for the challenges here is so low. And also, SEO people get, there are good SEO. people. Lily Ray rocks. She's great. There are good people out there. But I would argue the majority of SEO is fucking evil. And it is adversarial to the web.

And also, Google should fight it. Google should make war with them. Google should make it. They lie. Google lies. I'm fucking saying it. 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 every, shut down dot Meredith. Shut down

every single company that has re-engineered their content to rip off others and screw SEO. What was it? Hello? Not Hello Fresh. House Fresh. House Fresh.

There you go. They're great article about SEO. Thank God you remember that. I was talking about how like Dot Meredith basically outdid them on SEO by working out the signals. 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. Well, that and that happened. It does have, well, 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 that, and it's not original content, right? They were like white labeling stuff that coupon companies were giving them. Right. Google went in and said, this is not allowed anymore. you're abusing the authority of your domain name, and we're not going to 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 going to get sent somewhere where a guy who just makes coupons posted it. But there are all these other cases like 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.

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 their domain. So they'd have high domain authority posts from completely different share. 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. 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, they make your iPhone go to 1,000 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 of the average person. I want to buy something on a website.

Is there a coupon I can use? Oh, the majority of this content is outright fake. 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 worse? Because the other one that we can ask is, and it's the one the government is asking, should Google be the one who gets to decide what is and isn't okay on the web? They have unilateral decision-making authority. Because of the monopoly. For 20 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 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. The LA Times is in big trouble right now. This was bringing in, I don't know the exact figure, but lots of money every year, probably to the tune of 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. That's a lot of power for one company to have over something that is infrastructure. The internet is infrastructure. I think, and that's a really interesting point because I believe that any search 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 cut off.

if you maintain quality elsewhere. If it's just arbitrary, I've decided that this thing doesn't work for me. And it's a black box like everything with Google, then it 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, the original Google, 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. 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 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 that's a bad thing for regular people to just get exposed to, but also, I don't know. How about you actually protect people

from the malignant stuff in the ads? I was on good. Googled the, like, month ago. And I actually emailed Danny Sullivan, the search liaison. Hi, Danny. No, you love me. Um, and I bought a GPD Win4 pocket from what I thought was the GPD Winfor website, a GPD website, GPDs are they make little gaming console PCs.

They're fantastic. I put down $1,000 in this thing. I then realized when I looked in the PayPal that it was some Chinese guys email at gmail.com. and this was because the first result was a sponsored ad for a fake website. This happened to me, and I'm pretty good at this, and it was just a well-designed page. And I was so embarrassed. Like, this is, my internet credit gone. Right.

All of my hate, my haters found out, they were outside my house applauding. It was terrible for me. Very bad, very unfair. But Jesus Christ, you can't keep the fake ads off the page? Like, come on. Well, it's bad enough. I think that it was last year or the year before, it might have been 2022. It was bad enough that the FBI, do you remember this?

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And we're back. And I think the funny thing about all of this as well is these companies always say, well, the web is too big. also our jobs are too hard, 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, because I think they're probably quite good at CSAM and like outright illegal stuff. But just, I don't know, a dickhead. 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.

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 Google's things like coupons who searches for fake websites. For a while on Google News, there was a website called Good Morning Cashmere, 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 I told Danny, sorry Danny, I'm putting you on Blast, but you didn't say off the record. When I told him, he was like, well, you shouldn't be using Google News chronological view because it doesn't really work. I'm like, what the, what the f what?

What? Excuse me? What? That's the thing. And I think that this is the problem with a lot of these big tech companies. They just see customers as like, well, you are the problem. And I think that actually this is an industry-wide thing where consumers have been gaslit. And this is definitely me doing like a book pitch, but it's true.

I think that consumers have been made to feel like, oh, when tech fails you, this is a lack of awareness of how good tech is. You didn't read the privacy policy. Exactly. You didn't use the manual. You didn't do this. Apple, and I know my listeners want me to bag on Apple, there's an app store thing coming. It's going to be mean. It's going to be nasty.

Very unfair to Mr. Cook. 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. Well, 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 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 an utter loathing, in my opinion, for customers. Like, oh, you're not smart enough to use the future.

Fuck you, this is meant to be artificial intelligence. I'm not meant to be smart. It's meant to be smart. Yeah, and especially when it comes to the content moderation issue, The search results on Google are getting worse or they're being abused or the ads. You know, there was 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 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 then 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. It's called ALO now. Used to be called Mind Geek. Fascist. They told me that every single video on Porn Hub gets reviewed by a 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. But it is possible.

That's a terrible job. Like then you have to, you know, pay for therapy for the people who are doing it. But to say that it's just not possible, maybe you should be running fewer ads. But that's the, it's, 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 underwriting.

that there's no outright illegal stuff. And because there are very clear, very stark penalties for that. There aren't for ads. And I think one of my favorite ideas that I've read is Darren Asimoglu, previously on the show, becoming on in the future, MIT Economist, he made a suggestion, put the CEOs in jail. Now, I realize 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 if I walk around and I have a crowbar in my hand, I think I've used this example before, and I'm swinging it, willy-nilly, and I hit a few windows and I smash it. You love your crowbar. I love my crowbar. 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 smashed? Do you think I'm going to get arrested? Of course I am. Well, my job, I'm paid to swing the crowbar.

bar. The crowbar must be swung. I make $4 million 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, 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 hard. There should be company and CEO level liability for 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. There should be actual things. And I think that that is the problem. It all happened relatively fast, like a couple decades, which seems like a while, but for legislation, isn't. Yeah. But to your point, like, do these companies have to exist? Probably not.

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? They never seem to be asked why. They never, oh, there's too many of them. No, there's not. Also, there's 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. They don't. They don't. So, you know, you could, like, you could put Sundar Pichai in jail, or you could, you know, just, you know, write a law and have there be some penalty that affects the company's stock price. They'll address the problem. Oh, yeah.

We don't. There are no rules about the Internet in the United States. And there are definitely false advertising. There's definitely, like, like, it's FTC, I believe it's FCC. I think FCC is, yeah. Always get those wrong. Casey's probably listening. and going to 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, I'm mostly joking. Right. I think personal liability, however, would do really well. If they were like, I will lose, Peshai makes like $200 million a year, mostly in stock. How about he loses percentage,

not dollar amounts percentages. 0.5%, not for everything, but perhaps there's an aggregate thing. If they are like, oh, my wealth will be directly attacked, I think Sonddaar Pish, I would immediately, there would be this insane quality improvement. Same with Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg right now is unfirable.

But if we set these things for chief executives who are paid up 300 times their employees' salaries, if they were paid this insane amount of money, but it 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 an insane amount of money, which I still think is too much. But it would 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 antitrust stuff is we're finally seeing consequences, though. Real nasty, mean consequences. And the people getting upset are really funny. Like all the people I've seen who have mad at, like tech analysts, like, no, you can't hurt my Googles.

So good. I love it. 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 anti-dress case for Google in the United States.

There's yet another one in the EU. Then there's all the cases that 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 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? I don't think it's collapsed, but I will also say something a little controversial. The internet wasn't great 15 years ago. I think we all need to, like, it's not like it was, it's worse now, but, oh what? Live journal? Did we love Live Journal?

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 all that I can signal people. There's some 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. Like, Google has fucked it up to the point that we don't think it exists. It does.

It's there. 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. Hamish, if you're listening, eat my asshole. My fucking pet, my fucking family died in the fucking ovens in Germany. Fuck you, bitch. Seriously, this is to you, Hamish McKenzie.

And anyone who's currently on Substack, even if it's, one Nazi who's making money on Substack, fucking kick them off. It's sickening. And Substack now is making it so you can create publications on there which don't involve email addresses or newsletters anymore. They're just 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. Live Journal was a platform. And then every company got acquired by a large company which got acquired by a larger company. Ghost, I love, because they're mostly just yeah, it's a service. You can run at your own.

Molly White has self-hosted. I run it on a website with a person that 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 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. There is plenty of original human created content out there.

It's just that Google and Bing and all of these sites have kind of defaulted on their 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. Right. And if you're not doing it the way that the TikTok algorithm or the Google search algorithm wants you to do it, 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, I was happy. It must have been because the way things were then that they are not now. 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 algorithm and to fit into some kind of box. I don't, I think that that's hard to prove right or wrong.

I know what you're getting at. You're seeing less of that. I don't know if it's not being created. Right. There are wonderful, weird, strange communities. Absolutely. There are, like, I don't know. I said this to someone else.

earlier. Like, ferries 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 you, whatever you're doing, as long as everyone's consensual and happy with it, wonderful, enjoy yourselves. I feel 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 a kind of a blunt edge, which I think that's kind of...

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. This stuff is out there, but can you find it? Is it the stuff that we're all consuming when 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 make more money.

It helps them make a platform that makes it easy to 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. It also creates a path to make money, so maybe it creates more content, too. There's, you know, there's two sides to everything.

And I think that the problem is that these algorithms are so easily gamable. Like, there's this wonderful Jason Kobler, the legend at 404 Media, did this amazing piece about the Indian guys basically defrauding Facebook. Did you read this? Yeah. Where these guys, 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 et 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 like paying for his disabled brothers wheelchairs, which is so fucking cool. Like one guy did, 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 red alert? Because that is a insane, like the shrimp Jesus thing should have done it. And the problem is, I think they could make really good nuanced algorithms that raise 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 normalized beauty standards, and Corey Doctor, on the last better off lies, said this very well. He was saying that there is something inherently conservative about generative AI and any kind of autocomplete indeed, because it's just, you say, I love and it's going to say you, you kind of normalize this one point. There's no incentive for them to 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 thinking about it maybe that's you're right about the nostalgia aspect and that's what we miss in that the web doesn't feel exploratory anymore we're not like looking or searching anymore 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? That stuff was popular because, and this is the Who Made Who thing.

Is it popular because the algorithm chose 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. It's like, what is popular? What is culture right now is actually a very open question? Right. Well, we just put out a story about this where it's not the shrimp Jesus, but have you seen the AI cats? No? It's incredible.

We just put it out. It started on TikTok and it spread to Instagram. It's AI generated images of cats in very upsetting situations. Like there's one cat and his son gets kidnapped by a pigeon or 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 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 juices engagement. Kind of hard to say. But I mean, I kind of like it. I like it as well. 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 the, 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? It's like that's a fucking Charlie X-E-X. I'm so old. I'm so fucking old. I just say, even saying that out loud,

I age 10 years. Yeah, I saw. I am neither brat nor cap. And, but even then, that, she's a famous musician. People like her music,

not for me, but people seem very happy with it. The brat thing, I want, that's one where I just look at it. I'm like, is this something that was popular because she's a 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. We don't, we don't actually know how to pull this apart. 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 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 retweets. But now it's like, I guess most people use the 4U feed, which is insane to me. Like, do you use that? I often do because I don't think about it.

I open Twitter and that's just what I'm looking at. And then I realize 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. Same. I don't know if I trust them to have. And it's also like a free speech issue.

Yeah, yeah. Do we want them dictating what content you see and what you don't? Probably, it's probably not even constitutional. But what they could do is they could mandate that the companies. be more transparent about how the algorithms work. They tell you how does Hinge decide which people you see and which people you don't? 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 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 get something that was more useful to the consumer. 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 because, I don't know, Elon Musk clearly is like, oh, yes, I've made the entire epic-based algorithm public. And he's like, there's definitely something not in there. because they've definitely, the reason I never used Twitters for You Feed is within two seconds,

I will see an actual Nazi. And I'll be like, no, thanks. I don't need to see like the 14 words. There's a reason I'm not following them. 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 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 as an idea, 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 up on that. That is gone. We are no longer in the Google that actually does that. But that actually is a good thing. Lily Ray was explaining this to me on the episode. It's like that as an idea is actually very, 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. 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.

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. 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 SEO is good. And that's the thing, right? Like, how do we solve this problem? Like, again, I don't think that most people want the government not 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 can help with, right? 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 of the cropped up recently. And I think that's probably, if nothing else, what is almost certainly going to happen unless the whole court case gets thrown out is that you're probably going to 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 engine do you want to use. Most people are going to pick Google, but there's going to be some sizable percentage that goes over to Bing, that goes over to Duck. Go. And all of a sudden, there's pressure to make the products better, both for Google and for these companies.

What's insane as well is Microsoft, Bing is profitable, by the way. What would be crazy? And this is Sachin Adela, as one of my listeners, I'm sure you're listening, but you're not. What if Bing was really good? This is a crazy idea I had. What if Bing was good? What if when you use Bing, it found really good results? 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 Bing, Prabagal Ragavans' leftover dinner that he left from when Yahoo connected to it? What if there was actually something that Bing found that was cool? What if Bing 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.

I just don't think they want to. I don't think any of them, they all realize it's slop and that their little pigs have to use it. But if literally one of them was just like, what if we made it good? And all the guys in the boardroom are like, it'll never work. It's never going to work, man. People don't like good things. They like bad things. 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. okay, there were a billion versus a trillion websites. You still can't read all of them. Like, what if they did the job that we wanted to? One of the reasons Twitter used to be 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, a database of people. You could find your real friends that you'd lost connection with. And it was a little bit better than Myspace. Yes. It doesn't have to be night and day. If it's 2% better, people will realize, that they'll go over and then there will be more money flowing and that it can get even better.

It's real. 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 were quite evil things. But I, the other thing that is exciting about the Google Antitrust 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 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 on But also

They probably know enough to really do really cool Personalized experiences And they just don't do it They just don't want to Like they could probably make a 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 you want to buy It's just like the incentives are gone But also Transparency might be really really fun for this just because when they show how much they can do, well, first of all, I think the government's going to be quite pissy, but also, I don't know, maybe they could get creative and earn their customers.

But also, I don't think, on a completely 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 search, they fuck. 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 antitrust case against Google's advertising business from the outset appears to be even stronger. Oh, yeah. And there's a place where, you know, 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, that seems like a very real possibility. And if that happens, it's going to be a completely different internet almost immediately. And something that some of the louder, more annoying tech guys are saying is this is a bad thing.

This is the 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 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. You can install whatever apps you want on your fucking app. Mac, why can't I do it on my iPhone? It's hard to argue that more choice is not better for people. And it is. And actually, that's the thing. I can be kind of cynical, but all of this stuff makes me very optimistic because

what might start happening is these companies might start anticipating. antitrust and changing themselves to avoid it. Well, that's the thing. And I mean, you've heard this argument in the story before, but I wrote about this for Gizmodo. No matter what happens with all of these antitrust cases, like Google lost this one. Maybe the tech companies win every other case. Yeah. They're still in trouble, right?

Yeah. 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. They need to be more careful. They need to be more apprehensive about. doing things that crushed the competition. That's what happened to IBM in the 60s, right? Like, IBM won its antitrust 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, creates an opportunity for someone to step in. It also feels like we're, right now 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 meddlesome 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 the Blackwell GPUs that are coming out the next generation GPU is necessary to push generative AI so it's sometimes that puts out a useful result also delayed I think there are like parallel processing issues like it's do GPUs talking to each other it's crazy

but I think we might finally be seeing the cost of growth at all cost. Like this is the real, at some point you can't grow this fast forever. And maybe the answer is we are watching the raw economy get actually collapsed to an extent. Because you can, there is a limit to science and there is a limit to what you can build and how fast you can build it. But if the end result of all this antitrust thing is also they get afraid of being too big, that may be genuinely one of the best things to happen in. society because we don't need five, five trillion dollar companies that will be $10 trillion in two

years. We don't, that what, who does that serve other than Jim Kramer? Right. And I mean, clearly things have changed. 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. Yeah.

That, I don't think it's about AI. so much as it's about just changing feelings about the tech business. 10, 15 years ago, people loved Google. They just thought Google was a nice, good company. People loved Amazon, right? It was like, oh, the two-day shipping is just so great. Now, every company has a really serious popularity problem, which, you know, when we're talking about social 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 new chapter, whether AI changes everything, whether the internet is different than it was in some technological way, some big platform shift is going to happen. I think things are going to start to feel different than they have for the past couple of years. And if you want to feel different, perhaps you could engage in one of the wonderful advertisers that will follow this message who, as you use, will align precisely with the things I believe and love. Please buy their products or don't. I can't make here. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guide,

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This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from Hypocrite as part of the Mike Cultura podcast network available on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. And I think what you're saying is really interesting because it is, it used to be that they were afraid of just like losing a user. But now it's because they're so precisely and like granularly. like analyzing every interaction and monetizing every interaction and 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. It's that percentage of time that you're not spending on Instagram. If 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. Now, I will go on Facebook. I check it like, like, a nest camera outside my house to make sure, like, there isn't like a dog trying to scratch a hole. I don't know why that'd be happening. He's trying to choose a thing that would happen. Very normal guy.

But it's, you look at it because it's there. Same with Instagram. I like check, see, I may be message 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 share. 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 there. They're just like, well, you have to be here. From the outside, it really did seem like Facebook in particular got complacent. Yes.

There were so many stories. No one's using Facebook anymore. It's a wasteland. It's just baby boomers falling for misinformation. That was the story everyone was hearing. It seemed to be true to some extent. I actually think that that's changing. I now open Facebook. every single day. And I'm not going on there to look at my feed. It's because of Facebook Marketplace. Facebook Marketplace is an incredible product. People love it. You can sell your stuff. You find really bizarre things. 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 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 and they built this product that is, you know, I think kind of phenomenal. It's very useful to my life. You know, half the things in my apartment now, I bought on Facebook Marketplace. And the feed is getting better. You know, I think if you go and you look at the content.

I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, compared to how it was a year ago. No, man. Maybe your Facebook fees better than mine. Maybe it's, maybe I just, you know, that tuned the algorithm better. I get like recommendations for the most insane groups. Yeah.

I mean, I want to. with this right now. I want to see what... Yeah, I'm actually going to pull up Facebook. This is always good to do on a... We can look at mine, yeah. Gary Tan from a... On an audio show.

Immediate second thing is an ad. Then it's reels. Then it's a picture of a guy. Is Facebook serving me content that I want? I'm not sure. But I do find myself enjoying it in a way that I didn't one year ago, maybe even six months ago. I'm actually seeing... A little bit less ads.

Yeah, I think the experience has gotten better, certainly for me. And that's the kind of stuff that happens when there's competition. I don't confirm my biases. It's tough. Yeah. But I think marketplace is an interesting one as well because it is useful. I bought shit off of that. It's a great product.

But it's being poisoned already. You have started to see direct-to-consumer shit on there. Absolutely, yeah. But also, I think it makes them enough money that they keep it alive, but not so much that they want to just, you can't really make it more evil. I doubt that it's making the money. Like, there are ads in it.

Maybe it is directly making a profit. They're certain, if you buy something through Facebook marketplace or taking a cut, I think it's just getting people to use Facebook. With a useful product, Mark Zuckerberg is woken. Now he hasn't.

It's so weird, though, because the more I think about it, I just don't think that there's much way to juice 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. Well, I mean, you see ads on there.

But it's not like a meme or a viral thing. No, no, it's definitely not. You can't really do engagement bait on app on Marketplace. There's only a handful of people who have whatever particular blend of OCD at ADHD that I have, that they're going to look at Facebook Marketplace for an hour straight. To be clear, I live in Las Vegas, Nevada, the shit. The shit on there is immate. It'll be like, yeah, I stole a bunch.

I stole a bunch of shit, classic better offline listener, from the Bellascio. I am on the lamb. Please meet me in this pocket lot. I will be in a different one in an hour. The law is behind me. The shit that people are right, the cars that people sell on there as well. Incredible. Like, I've seen motor parkas with not all of the wheels.

Well, my favorite thing is Vice shut down its office in Williamsburg. Right. And some guy stole the sign. like the big vice sign. And he hasn't been able to sell it, but every couple of months he'll put it back up and he wants like $20,000 for it. Damn, I was going to say if it's cheap. I mean, you could crowd fund, right?

There's a lot of people listening right now. I'm not giving a criminal $20,000. They just listen to this show. Maybe he is one of them. But that's the thing. What we're describing is the magic of the internet because the best things of the internet are watching people be like, yeah, everyone does broccoli milk, right? 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, and they're not normal at all. And sometimes it's quite distressing, but most, like there's this horrible meme of like a guy 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 dog ate the roast duck. It's horrible. It's creating a horrible discourse right now. That's horrible. Yeah. 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. I want that. There are so many weird, like cities by Diana on Instagram. Shout Diana. She is one of the early Dongwa Xin Long meme people. Did you see the Dongwajun Long? There's an episode about it.

And a lot of her stuff is just this kind of concussive actual brain rock, which is, in my opinion, what brain 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 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.

They're like, they just automatic like a signal, bam. And now this is popular. It's why Shrimp Jesus is popular on Facebook, because they don't really care about the algorithm. They don't really care that it serves good stuff. This is popular, so it's popular. It's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy. And my real, you know, concern with it is that it only allows for a certain kind of content, right?

Right. There's Mr. Beast. He's got a gigantic empire. The next person down the rung of like the content creator is like thousands of miles away. Yeah. And he's kind of got a media business that he started. It's only 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's something that with the previous model of the open web with the way that advertising works, you could start a company and do the kind of work you can only do with multiple people working on the same project. I love all of this stuff. The brain rot. There's people doing the latest thing that I've seen is people making AI videos where the point is they're kind of playing with how. how it hallucinates, it's great. 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.

Or when the platforms promote stuff like Mr. 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. Medioka doesn't mean bad. It just means middle. And he's really good at it. But also, is he good at it? 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. Are you paying attention? Yeah, you don't need to pay attention. I'll be here. I'm in our content, content, content. And people are like, oh, well, kids love it. It's like, it's what's top of the algorithm.

And you can't stop watching it. But also, you can watch other shit. Like, how much of this is a self-fulfilling prophecy? And I am 380 years old. Right. And thus, maybe some of this just bounces off me. 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' parts? Or maybe this is just the 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 by 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 journalism is really fucking good. I need to show more people it. 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. Well, there's also the business side.

There's like what the algorithm is showing you. But then there's also like you've got a really great one-man journalism operation going here. 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 can't. 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. Oh, I have an edit. 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.

I wonder how much of this as well is just demographic and algorithmic stuff where it's just like, this person seems this age and this gender will just show them this. and they're just like, this is what this person will see, that transparency thing you were 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. It's actively bad and also how commerce works. It's just, I have decided I will target you and you will like this. But when you're providing content, I don't know how much of this is.

I'm not saying you have to do that 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 X. 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. It's one of my dearest friends, but that's what I actually like 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, no sending me things. It's cool.

I enjoy it. These, what we're missing from Google searches, 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. It came from people finding it and really great internet culture reporting. Like Rebecca Jennings of Vox, great stuff there.

She's really good at finding these things, these things that, I don't know, 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 Sato at the verge 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. It's almost like an iguana on it.

You need to go and look up Mia's work. She's amazing. I don't know. I think what the nostalgia we have is 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 mom and pop stores go away.

And there are cases where mom and pop stores weren't good. but yeah, having unique competitive stores that sold different things competed on prices but 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, I'm sure you're listening. You have many stories there. But it's like, that's the magic we're missing. It's actually, this is so triber, human connection. But it really is, though. Wouldn't that be nice? And they used to scale it.

They used to scale humanity. And they don't anymore. 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. And also, monoculture is real.

It happens before, happens now. And I think that just, I get a lot 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 domer about this. 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 30 followers, please share that. Yeah. We share it with everyone because that is where the old magic of the internet was. One of my famous, 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 a guy called Thomas Bolvin. He is a French engineer of some sort. Thomas have known you for decades and still don't know what you do for a living. He's also a gifted mashup artist.

And he has done some of the most insane things I've ever heard in my life. He did a Kanye where, I know Kanye West fucking sucks. I'm sorry. Kanye 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. Totum, TOTOM on Twitter. And this guy's just digging away. 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 things that's happened to me. And the internet, and tons of people have stories like this. I think that that really is what we're nostalgic for.

It's not the big box monoculture, which I think we all enjoy. We like the populace. 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 the walk that he just took this morning. Okay.

So he, like, sees a 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 because that's where we find everything, and then follow them off. Sign up for people's newsletters, go to their websites, give them $2 a month on Patreon. That's what you want. Give them your email, right? That that's, 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 today. If we can 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 I don't want to be a pollyana about this. Like, that's not going to counteract the power of Google.com. But I also think we're kind of going in that direction already. I think people have realized that this. This is what they want and they're going out and finding people and building a connection with them that maybe kind of disappeared completely for a couple of years. It was only on the platforms.

And that's the thing. Like two others I'm going to, 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 of. of her car, the mirror off of her car. And he's just going like,

now you're looking at the classic Corvette elbow guy. And he does like a play-by-play breakdown. It's fucking hilarious. Dan Yang is actually one of the most gifted comedians. Instagram's actually good finding comedy. But the way he does this deadpan 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 Vika. VK goes wild on YouTube. She is one of the most gifted pianist I've ever seen. I mean, like, insane. Like, she plays Rachmaninoff. 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 Age song called Unreborn Again, which is a real deep cut.

A hole in your heart by, what, royal blood, but also like black hole son. She did Heyman, nice shot. 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, but also and to really wrap this up, it's this shit is still happening. It's very easy to look at everything and a monolith and say, oh, well, all the internet is is just people 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, 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 being pure for a while. No.

It's that it's not as easy, or at least the sources aren't as loud toward things like this. The dominant culture, the dominant noise is very big, very obviously popular things. every like the most popular song is the most popular song because the Spotify algorithm blah blah blah blah blah blah and these breakout hits aren't really breakout hits in a qualitative level they're 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 offline Reddit R slash better offline I want to do the

find your weirdos thread I want to know because because that's the thing The better offline Reddit has been amazing because it's just real people, mostly talking about stealing stuff. The whole joke about people stealing stuff, Catholic converters and everything from a few episodes ago, that has taken off. And the worry I have is the book coming out and they're just going to steal it. But that's a different problem. But what's magical about it is it's real people dicking around. And they're still out there, the real ones. 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 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. Maybe that changes. But if you aren't happy with Spotify or with Instagram and you go looking elsewhere, that creates a business opportunity for someone to fill.

And I think that's where the internet is going. We're going to find new things that we like. And in some ways, the services are going to change. 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 waste of 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 change platform sure but share the unique things. I'm not saying you have to be hipster about it, but you find some weird song. find the demon cleaner by Caius, the cover I found from Tool. 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? I am on Twitter and TikTok. It's at Thomas Germain. Germain's with a G. And how'd you spell that? It's G-E-R-M-A-I-N. Yeah, they make me spell stuff

now. And you can of course find me at Google.com. I'm on Twitter. All the things are going to come afterwards. They're out there. 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.

They couldn't keep me down. Thank you so much to everyone for listening. And I'm so grateful to be doing this every week. I can't believe you 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. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Rosowski.

You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Matersowski.com. M-A-T-T-T-O-S-O-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at E-Z at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's Your Ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to R-S-Better-O-Line to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

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