Grubstakers - Episode 55: Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Part 3)

Episode Date: February 26, 2019

The conclusion of our 3 part look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin continues our discussion of surveillance capitalism and examines the extent to which they have captured the government and the political system. With Silicon Valley money so dominate in the Democratic party and Google so integral to the functioning of the federal government is there anything that can even be done to stop them? You can find the answers on bing.com

I honestly think some of like the but like when when the creepy line they're talking about Google's ability to influence elections right I honestly think like part of the bias that he uncovered was like Google didn't even intend for that at all to happen. But they just sort of stumbled upon it, like you said. And then now they completely embrace it. Part of it is just inoperable. You wouldn't be able to really shift it into a way that you could influence, say, a gubernatorial race in the same way that you could do so with so like quote-unquote low-tech methods of like just making just outright racism or something where you borrow people from being able to sign

up to vote or something and yeah so just the story steven's telling again from the documentary the creepy line a researcher named robert epstein no relation uh allegedly yeah so he did this experiment where they essentially took people to look at the australian election in 2010 which you know generally if they're using americans they won't have any idea about the australian election so it's like they test people and they ask you know what's your knowledge and preference and trust of these candidates right so they can get a control group then they have them look at this search engine where they're controlling the results.

They have one that will primarily show negative results for one candidate, one that will primarily show negative results for another, another that's as close to neutral as possible. And what they essentially found is they can get like a 10 to 20% shift in people's things by just having them use the search engine. And then what they found

that was really disturbing was 85 to 90 percent of people had no idea the search engine was biased you know they just assumed the search engine was neutral they assumed that it was just returning regular results even if it was and they even found that if they knew it was biased it wouldn't work right exactly and they even found that when they kind of like covered their tracks a little, like say four pro articles for every one negative article you put on the front page or, you know, whereas the other person is just all pro articles. When you just kind of rejigger this a little bit to make the bias not as explicit, you

know, that goes up to like 95% have no idea that the search engine is at all biased. But so he writes this article in the Washington Post, which is essentially like Google has the power to sway elections, and he summarizes his results from this study, and the very next day he is locked out of his Google account.

So it's just really explicit and pretty terrifying. Yeah, and... I'll wait and talk to the drop. All right, well, this is the Robert Epstein story. The day after that article appeared, that's when Google decided to shut off Dr. Robert Epstein. The next day, I could no longer access Google.com.

I mean, you're seeing something here that probably very few people in the world have ever seen. You are seeing a timeout on Google.com. So I started asking around. I seeing a timeout on Google.com. So I started, you know, asking around, I started doing some research on it. And I actually found how a company like Google could, in fact, cut you off from their services. I also found in their terms of service, very clear language saying they had every right to cut you off from their services whenever they pleased with or without cause. Yeah, and I mean, that is just like you think about in your day-to-day life, how much you rely on Gmail, Google Docs.

We do research for this podcast on Google Docs. Like, as soon as you are a threat, they could just lock you out and all of your data that you've uploaded to them is gone now, you know, and all of this stuff. And I mean, again, just the amount of power that they have without anyone really realizing or spending much time thinking about it is fucking horrifying. Well, on top of like tech power that they've built up, they've also developed, you know, just kind of classic political power. Essentially, they've made inroads into the think tank world. Like Eric Schmidt went on to uh basically create the new

america foundation or at least he he funded it um which shaped a lot of uh obama's economic policy one of the things uh that happened at the new america foundation a little while later was that after uh google had a loss in um eu courts and had to pay $4 billion. This guy, Barry Lynn, he praised the, who worked for the New America Foundation, he praised that EU ruling, and Schmidt basically pressured the head of the New American Foundation to fire him and 10 of his research employees.

One other drop from the creepy line, actually. But yeah, so they also talk about how Google has been funding research papers. So essentially, if you want to make this argument that they are corrosive, you need scholarly research papers. Right. So Google, and sometimes they'll pay a lot of people to do these research papers. And sometimes Google will actually review the paper before it's published. And some of the people who publish them won't even reveal or disclose that they're basically being funded by Google.

Here's the drop. So Google provides a ton of funding for academic institutions, individual academics all around the world. So we found something like 300 papers that were funded by Google in some way that supported Google's policy positions. They like to say, hey, we have the country's foremost academic experts behind us. And what they're not telling the public is the fact that they're actually funding these so-called independent experts, these so-called independent academics. Eric Schmoes, that's fine before I cut.

See, you know it's bad because you can hear the dramatic music in the back. So the FTC was investigating a Google antitrust thing, and right in the middle of that, around... I'm sure they got to the bottom of it. Around May 2012, while they were investigating, there was this George Mason University, at the George Mason University Law and Economics Center,

there were all these talks. That's the one that's like Koch Brothers funded, right? I'm not sure. GMU, we talked about this in the Koch Brothers episode, but they have the Mercatus Institute, which is like a Koch Brothers auxiliary funding thing, which of course churns out some of the worst libertarian hot tanks,

which of course, hot takes, which of course the Koch brothers fund. Right, right. And Google kind of got in on this during the FTC thing by having a bunch of the speakers there be either Google employees or just people who were really sympathetic to Google,

but it would never be revealed before they spoke. And a lot of people in the audience were the regulators. So basically they're just making it seem like all these experts are big fans of Google. Google also, they back the EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're the ones who are most for like net neutrality. Electronic Frontier Foundation, yeah. Yeah, or just like internet rights uh but they're also supported by google so they can't really speak out against google i remember so

this bootlicking book i read the google guys they they've uh briefly mentioned with they mentioned that a former google employee went on to head the eff and then they like don't comment on why that might be a conflict of interest but oh before i, it did just occur to me that Google has a list of every single person who has ever Googled age of consent laws in different states. Really? Yeah, that makes sense. But yeah, and... Wait, is that true? Well, I would assume so.

It's on record somewhere. I mean, everything they got's in somewhere. If they're putting together a profile of you so they can show you ads they have to know if you're like really into like uh reading articles about the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia i mean i will say say what you want about the libertarians but okay they're done the people who are googling that stuff are also the people who are working through like three ghost servers redirecting and a tor account yeah the smart ones yeah but so one other thing from the google guys book this electronic frontier foundation that andy mentioned apparently in 2008

google claimed is what they said they only keep user data for nine months and then they anonymize it. That's what they said. Oh, really? We have no way of verifying that, but that's what they told people. Yeah, they're probably lying. Yeah. And so the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the European Union, they wanted to reduce that to six months.

But Google said, we can't do that without compromising our products and making it not as good for people. And then this got tied up in the EU court for a while, but I don't believe it's ever really been resolved. And again, these are companies that we don't have access to. We just have to trust them, and that's, of course, the problem with corporate power. We have no real input into it.

Yeah, and there was one attempt to really rein them in, which came out of a controversy with google street view uh which was essentially that google um you know when they were creating street view they have those iconic cars that you'd see see in like arrested development with a camera on top of them and they say google and uh they found in hamburg i believe, that the Street View cars, along with taking pictures of everyone everywhere on the road, and I'm sure processing that for God knows what, the cars were also outfitted with Wi-Fi systems, or systems that would just go into unsecured Wi-Fi networks and pull as much data as they could from people. And just blatantly pulling data out of unsecured Wi-Fi networks.

And so that came out and was, I guess, a big scandal for a second. And it's why you don't see Google Street View in Germany. But part of that then is the FTC was like, okay, well, we're going to investigate that. Or not FTC, the FCC, Federal Communications Commission. They're like, oh, we should look into that. And so essentially what Google did to deflect this is first they said, oh, it was a rogue engineer who put a line of code in on his own. We didn't know about it, even though apparently some internal records showed that, like, you know, this code was passed up the chain and, like, you know, seen by the person superior. It wasn't us. It was some guy we were paying to do shit for us. Yeah, yeah.

And then. Serga didn't see it. He was in the massage room at the time. So, Google. If you check his calendar, it's very clear what he was in the massage room at the time so google if you check his calendar it's very clear what he was doing in the google then just straight up dragged their feet uh on releasing this information and eventually like they released as little as they possibly could to the FCC and you know because American enforcement agencies just don't have much power Google was able to pretty easily just

circumvent any kind of checks on their power by dragging their feet and eventually it it just kind of the FCC couldn't do anything and it's they finally, or the author finally found out who the rogue engineer is and he wasn't like fired or anything, he was like promoted and like he moved around a little bit but like there was no

Yeah, for this incident in Hamburg they were fined $190,000 but when it comes to Google that's chump change. But in the time since then, they've been fined like around $9 billion, something around that amount for various different things. Essentially, they pay more in fines to the EU than they do in taxes. With that $190,000, they could almost create Amanda Rosenberg's web series.

Most of it goes to rent but uh but anyway that's what you need for a one bedroom in san francisco andy you did leave out the happy ending of that story where everyone at the ftc got sweet new google jobs that's crazy though the thing you mentioned a while ago about the fucking eight years that the united states government and google just swapped employees oh yeah i mean like just blatant fucking you work for me i'll work for you like i remember when the legit pie fcc stuff was coming out the amount of vitriol over him working for verizon previously over the new trolley stuff but with this google shit you barely heard any of it. With this figure that I just pulled, about the 190,000,

I tried for eight different searches, Hamburg, Google, Street View, car, fine, and Google just couldn't find it for some reason, and then I looked it up in Bing, and it's the first result. And it's like, you fucking, you idiots. But it is just interesting, another aspect of that revolving door is you see this with press accounts, at least with the revolving door with Wall street or in the case of like the the heroin

epidemic the revolving door between um uh the dea or the fda big pharma all these people who are creating the heroin epidemic this revolving door is like it is reported on that with the press in like a very deeply condemning kind of terms. But this revolving door with big tech, like I remember even reading articles in the Obama admin, it was like, it was always portrayed as like, of course they're hiring. They're hiring the smartest people in the country.

They need these, these master race, learn to code people are going to bring our fucking government up to a web 2.0. And they're going to modernize all the infrastructure. So it's like, why wouldn't there be a revolving door? These are the smartest people. Of course. It turns out it's leisure suit, the infrastructure. So it's like, why wouldn't there be a revolving door? These are the smartest people. Of course we want them. It turns out it's leisure suit Larry.

It's out there in the open with the big tech world because they really look up to those people. Yeah, of course. They're just fundamentally better than us. Of course. Yeah, I mean, that's baked into the ideology of, again, learn to code. And it used to be the same way with Wall Street. People getting hired into the economic planning sector of the White House.

Right, that is true. Definitely before 2008. Because Obama was like, I want the smartest people at hand for this financial crisis. So, of course, he goes to Goldman Sachs. Right, right. And the Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and all of them. And the sad reality is because these corporations and infrastructures make money, they're technically all, like, okay, if they're not making money, they're dumb. But because they make money, they're so intelligent.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, they're not, it's not the prowess of their merit that's actually bringing them to, like, oh, wow, they're really innovating in ways that's great. It's just, well, they're making money, so they've got to be smart. And it's not, well, they're corrupt.ating in ways that's great. It's just, well, they're making money, so they've got to be smart. And it's not, well, they're corrupt. That's why they're making money. So a couple of things I wanted to get to.

Steve, you read this. There's an Intercept article about China. Basically, I know, like, Google was in China. Wait, before we go into this, I want to talk about some of their other, just quickly about some of their other exploits into basically tracking behavior. Like Google, Yogi, you were talking about how they have these Wi-Fi networks that they would set up to basically, they would provide Wi-Fi to different cities. And clearly, was it like a free Wi-fi public service that was the idea essentially

in 2006 google was going to set up wi-fi in mountain view a la the same way you get wi-fi like starbucks and stuff so it was the first citywide wi-fi program and essentially very quickly it uh materialized into hey this wi-fi sucks um But they used lamp posts to put Wi-Fi receivers, I guess, and that's how they got Wi-Fi all around the city. But in 2013, this article of the MV Voice talks about how City Hall is going to switch off the Google Wi-Fi and it's going to cost them $130,000 over the next five years to replace the system because it's that bad. And people in the comments, one of them was like, well, it was set up in 06,

so maybe the bandwidth was not good enough. But another comment was like, no, no, this thing's been terrible since day one. But essentially, Google gets free PR and good press to be like, wow, look, they're doing something so great by setting up their... Well, I was just going to say one counterpoint to that is essentially like google's incentive to set up free wi-fi is because google is so synonymous with the internet 90 of searches are done through google more people online is more money for them well it's not it's not just that it's it's uh the same reason that street view was sucking up information it's just more behavioral data right yes and and the last thing i want to mention about the wi-fi is is that the other reason that they decided to set up the Wi-Fi Mountain View was essentially they didn't want their employees paying for Wi-Fi via a different service that they wouldn't be able to track, like Andy's mentioning.

So instead of all of their employees paying Comcast or Affinity, whoever else, they're going through themselves. But the reality is is their Wi-Fi sucked. So they got good PR being like, hey, we set up this Wi-Fi in this town, and there was another city

that I have to look up that they set this up, and the same situation happened where their Wi-Fi sucks because all they really wanted was the good, buying good PR by providing a shitty service

is a very Google move. I remember when we were all excited that google fiber was gonna save us from the fucking terrible internet we all suffer with oh yeah and really it's just like it went nowhere it's gonna it went nowhere and it's also just another um another tool for sucking up again like 89 of their profits are from ads and part of their uh ad pitch is that we can predict human behavior better than anyone else and so if they control more and more aspects of your behavior it's like of course google and facebook are the mainly profitable uh internet companies because nobody else has

access to the data that they do yeah and they're always expanding that because of the arms race of capitalism and one one other way that they tried to do it, of course, that got Mr. Brin into some trouble was the rollout of Google Glass, which eventually was so transparently just a tool to invade everyone's personal space. But it was even more than the Android, because the Android, at least you you can say someone buys an Android, they're entering into the agreement to have their space violated. Um, but if someone's wearing Google glass, that means just some asshole on the street is videotaping you, uh, without your knowledge. You go, yeah. Without your knowledge for Google's information systems.

And so obviously like Google glass, that's what you get for thinking you're too good for Steve Jobs. Buying an Android, you deserve to have your data dumped. So there was, you know, all kinds of places would ban Google Glass, you know, stores. People got attacked. Yeah, people got attacked. Good. Yeah. How much was it? Do you guys know how much Google Glass was? I don't know. I mean, it was probably much cheaper than you would expect. Cheaper than Oakley's? It was one ten thousandth of a web series.

So they claimed that they were going to redesign it to be more stylish, and they're going to work with whoever. Ray-Ban. Ray-Ban or some shit um but then another part of their strategy was oh this is great i'm sorry to cut you off but uh in being if you just look up google glass cost uh they say it costs 79.98 to make each hair but it would to buy it was a thousand five hundred dollars damn that's fucking what a markup and mind you in on google couldn't find anything about this being number one result listen obviously microsoft might have vendetta against google let me rephrase that they do got a vendetta against google but the stark reality is if you want dirt on microsoft check google but if you want dirt on google check bing well here's

the thing that i mentioned in the notch episode episode. I can't wait until people have to Bing this episode. The thing I mentioned in the Notch episode is Microsoft is getting in on this now. That's the new direction of Microsoft. HoloLens. Yeah, HoloLens. And so what happened with the Google Glass is that in addition to, you know, quote, redesigning it, which, you know, that's not. That's not going to work, buddy. That's not that's not gonna work but that's

not gonna work but what that's kind of a smokescreen for what they're actually doing is they um said okay well it has utility in work environments right right so we're gonna introduce it in these uh warehouses or whatever and what they're really doing is they're basically introducing it in a place where employees don't have a choice. They have to wear Google Glass to do their job. And in that process, they will then be habituated to wearing Google Glass, which will ease the transition into bringing it out in larger society. Yeah, I don't think we realize how fortunate we are that failed because Google going into the corporate market outside of consumer consumption would have i mean obviously they're in corporate markets i'm not saying they're not but something like this a physical product being a corporatized product you know a company like boeing or walmart would have bought millions of these things well i feel like that's kind of i

would hate if my if my manager right right like these are google glasses they'll help you do your job and i mean like you could do shit where you'd be like all right so like you know i'm a palette mover in a warehouse that's they're no longer labeled you have to use google glass to get that shit that's what they're doing with the amazon amazon warehouses like very explicitly that's the direction they're moving where it's like if you're wearing these shits then of course they can much more effectively uh metadata all of how you're spending your time while you're working. And I think there is a point at which, you know, as much as class consciousness and labor has been like broken in America, I do think there is a point where people revolt and push back.

But it is just something where it's like, like we've said, you saw this push back to the Google Glass initially, but it is just like, OK, they're going back to the drawing board. How do we get people to wear this without, you know, right yeah they're very relentless in it like if a if a product like this fails once they just immediately go back and try to retool it it's interesting how palmer mentioned how microsoft is innovating with the hololens now because it kind of reminds me of how microsoft tried to introduce you know essentially ipads the thinkPad in like the late to mid 90s. And it was a complete failure in that like it just the technology wasn't there to make a usable, convenient iPad, essentially. And then Apple looked at that tech and not looked at it physically, but like when, OK, let's let's make this better.

And then created a huge market of iPads. But Microsoft kind of did the flip with Google Glass. They watched Google Glass kind of fail and went, OK, I think we could probably do that, but not shitty. And, I mean, HoloLens is an example of them trying to do that. And I do think that Microsoft has primarily been a corporate model-based corporation. And so, for them to utilize HoloLens in the way that Google would have gone eventually, it was very scary. So, I wanted to talk about China as well,

as briefly like kind of employee perks and these kinds of things. But from what I understand, there was an article in 2018 in The Intercept which had some internal Google docs about essentially them coming back into China because that's another interesting thing about, you know, again, being an IPO

is that because you have to deliver these returns, you have to start doing kind of dubiously ethical things. So in 2006, initially Google is just running, before 2006, they're just running an offshore search engine in China. So the Great Firewall of China is blocking Google. But if you can get a proxy, you can get around, you can get onto Google. But what happens is, again, this is from the Google guy's book, book um uh badu baidu however you pronounce that the chinese search engine baidu um so what happened sean say it the way yogi just did baidu baidu i i uh you're canceled yogi you're canceled okay now someone say the N-word. Special guest, PewDiePie.

Why is that not on the keyboard? Yeah. I didn't have time. You know, I was done with it after one episode. But so the point was, essentially Google is just doing this offshore thing, but Baidu is... My wife.

My wife. Baidu complies with chinese censorship laws listen he's probably one of the smartest human beings on the planet pewdiepie uh so baidu complies with these chinese censorship laws you know again like cutting out anything about tiananmen square protests about you know democratic movements these sorts of things um and so what happened in the lead up to 2006, Google's market share starts dropping compared to Baidu's. I believe in 2005, there was a report that said Google had 38% of the market share, while Baidu went up to 44%. And then in 2006, this is kind of what leads Google to say, okay, we have to get in the market because we're losing market share to Baidu. So from 2006 to 2010, Google is like running a censored search engine, but they actually do leave in 2010 because Chinese government affiliated hackers do actually hack Google.

And we're talking about, we've mentioned this in these episodes, but this collection of data that they have is terrifying, especially like with any sort of even loosely totalitarian state so China has you know these these dissidents that they want to suppress so of course where do they find information on them they just hacked Google because Google has this information so 2010 they hacked Google they get some information on dissidents you know we don't know what happened to those people I I assume they were imprisoned. But 2010, Google does leave China. They learned to love socialism. They also left because a congressional high-tech committee got wind of all this.

It really grilled Sundar Pichai. I shouldn't say the only, but some of the only really bad press that Google has gotten is for what they've been doing in China. So like Sundar Pichai, the CEO at the time of Google, or current CEO actually, and also then got grilled by the high-tech committee, like the House committee. And it was like part of why that happened was because of the Chinese hackers basically. And he said, well, like the rhetoric that they had at the

time was like well we're pulling out of china because like ultimately this doesn't this doesn't pass muster with what passes as our um principles for dealing with a totalitarian regime all that like do we really want to be involved in this so like that that was sort of like papered over as the reason why they're they're pulling out one other fun thing and again like from this book the google guys which is just so bootlicking uh they talk about this shareholder meeting before 2010 where uh amnesty international had presented two proposals which was basically requiring the company to set up an independent human rights committee to examine practices in China with the aim of like limiting censorship and information collection and this kind of stuff there. So management felt that this was already being done and rejected the proposal. But in a show of solidarity with those who have concerns about the issue, Sergey decided to abstain from voting his shares against it, neither agreeing nor

disagreeing. True, it was a... So brave. True, it was a largely empty gesture since the board and management had plenty of votes to reject it. But he wanted to demonstrate an acknowledgement of the difficulty of the issue. How does he find the courage? Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt

voted against the proposal to set up an independent board to monitor human rights activities in China. Another fun fact, the name Sundar in Hindi means beautiful. So he's a beautiful man. Well, I don't know about that. We'll abstain from

making decisions on that. It describes the taste of pork which people in Uyghur camps now get to enjoy. his name we'll abstain from making decisions on that regard abstain from that vote yeah it describes the taste of pork which people in Uyghur camps now get to enjoy well one one thing also if uh in terms of utilizing this kind of technology in terms especially when it comes to behavior modification is in China um they have a kind of credit score, but it's a social credit score where essentially the idea is to use a lot of these behavioral analytics. I'm just imagining somebody finding like a lost chapter of Karl Marx's Capital where he's talking about how this is what pure socialism is.

Everybody has a score that the government determines. There's a few blank pages at the end of Kevin volume three. He's like still reading. Yes. All right. So this is what we really care about. So what we really need for socialism is for anyone who wants to buy a train ticket and go anywhere, they have to have a minimum social credit score. You know, something that's funny is that David Harvey said he's been teaching.

I'm going to his, he's doing lectures on reading Marx's Capital. You can watch them online, too. One of the things he said this week. After you finish this episode. Yeah. We'll link it in the Tumblr. One of the things he said is, like, after 40 years of teaching Capital to various audiences, like, he's taught it in China, and they're especially hard to teach Capital to,

because you have to break through just all the slogans about Karl Marx to actually teach the content of Karl Marx. So there's communist youth in China who are actually political dissidents because they read capital and they don't really adhere to the party lines about what Marxism is and stuff like that.

Yeah, the Chinese government is, ironically enough, cracking down on Maoists who are... Yeah, there's people that are like, this is the true brand of Maoism that was lost after the Cultural Revolution. So those people are getting cracked down on now.'s nuts real communism is tech innovation um but yeah so there's this intercept article from 2018 which is basically so they leave china around 2010 but of course you know there's just so much money on the table that they're trying to go back in and there's uh the

intercept got uh these kind of internal confidential google documents about they're trying to go back in, and The Intercept got these kind of internal confidential Google documents about they're going to go back in and set up another horrifying censored totalitarian search engine. They call it Project Dragonfly. It's just kind of lame, I think. Yeah. And it actually came about in 2017. Sundar Pichai took a trip to China and met with a really high ranking member of the Communist Party.

Who's sort of like, he's known as the Kissinger of China, basically. Let me get his name for you. Hold on. What's funny is that for all the human rights abuses that are attributed to china uh if china has a kissinger he clearly doesn't have as many bodies to his name as the actual kissinger so his name is wang huning and he was like sort of the political advisor to president xiao jinbing i'm just imagining him him being really modest about being called the kissinger of china and being like please please i've only overthrown two governments but is in reality his body count is far lower but like he aspires to this sort of mantle what a

bitch i've only had my finger in like one genocide this guy is like i mean he's not i mean he's not the kissinger level but every day he's grinding for sure. Please, please. The Uyghur camps are nice, but it's no Bangladesh. So they... You know, I'm trying to get my way back to me, Lai. These secret documents that were obtained by The Intercept are basically like, yeah, we're going to go and do a censored version of Google again. You know, try know try try try

again eventually you'll get it and um this time it's going to be a mobile app and it's going to be more extensive desktop version that has more of the censorship features that china wants for its right for any for any google platform that's going to operate in the country you have to be able to effectively censor and uh yeah so they hadn't they had another yet another opportunity to say no we're not going to step on infringe on like universal right to free speech in terms of they chose not to do that in terms of censoring they've definitely uh gotten a lot of practice with that when it comes to negative articles about google yeah unfortunately all of the architecture that when it comes to negative articles about Google.

Yeah. Unfortunately, all of the architecture that they would need is basically there. And like, so they had a, they, for a while they had a team of 100 engineers working on project dragonfly. Oh really? Uh,

prior to when this story got out and, um, yeah, they were, they are basically trying to reboot the entire program. Oh, one last thing, and then I think we could probably wrap up. There was an app that was made for Android called Disconnect because pretty much every app on the Android can track you

in all kinds of different ways. And so someone made an app that would basically shut down all the different ways of different ways. And so someone made an app that would basically shut down all the different ways of disabling, or it would disable all the different- Location services. Location services, microphone, because they would use all kinds of crazy, apps would use all kinds of crazy things.

Like they would play a tone that was outside of human hearing. And then if another person walked by with that same app and it the microphone detected that tone coming from their right phone then it would be able to note that these two users are within proximity of each other just crazy crazy shit like that and it'd be like it's an audible tone that you can't hear like a dog whistle yeah that kind of thing yeah what yeah so there was this uh app i believe for android i

think it was uh an app uh called disconnect yeah my dog's been getting really agitated on walks recently for some reason whenever i take him out he starts covering his ears and desperately barking yeah all the dogs on the google campus are deaf people people say uh you know that our you know our slogans don't be evil but it it it's there's a clearly a difference between not being evil and not torturing dogs um but so this disconnect app was meant to kind of shut down all of these different types of things and it's one of the few uh apps along these lines that's just been banned from the google apps yeah don't be evil yeah you can find it on the bing website pretty easily though so uh in conclusion use duck duck go um

which basically it's uh or bing but duck duck go uses the google search engine but anonymizes you so it doesn't collect data uh and firefox even though it's shittier at least you're not sitting i don't know i i like as soon as i finished like this book i was i switched over to firefox even though it's shittier at least you're not sitting i don't know i i like as soon as i finished like this book i was i switched over to firefox i did watching the creepy line documentary i was like i should install firefox immediately yeah which i didn't but i will do tonight yeah but um we should probably cut that unless firefox is willing to give us money but the last thing that annie mentioned uh about how google has don't be evil as their slogan uh they removed that clause recently so if you want to know what google's all about

they used to say don't be evil then they went you know what let's not say that anymore let's not pretend like we're not doing what we're doing uh just a couple if there's one thing they don't want to be it's hypoc. A couple more things before we wrap up here. One thing, again, like we've mentioned this in the case of like Amazon and Bloomberg and a lot of these other companies, but it's like how they abuse their employees. Again, like in the case of like people who are actually on the Google campus. Oh, yeah, we didn't even get to the strikes. Right. Well, I mean, these people are very highly paid.

Oh, yeah. strikes right well i mean these uh these people are very highly paid oh yeah ironically enough but would you believe based on uh sergey and eric schmidt's behavior that there was a sexual harassment walkout among google employees um but uh i did just want to quote from that book uh the google guys um an anonymous employee describes the work environment at google as a quote velvet prison where the perks and friendly atmosphere are offset by the pressure to work insane hours. Quote, 12 hours a day, six days a week was typical. It was optional, but there was pressure to do it. They fed you all the time, so there was no reason to leave for food.

Google was a 24-7 lifestyle, and they were all such nice people. And that's like the other thing of like, you know, these kinds of on campus parks, you know, people see like the foosball tables or whatever and they think, Oh, that's sweet.

Uh, or, but the entire point is like, if you have coffee and if you have food on campus, then your employees are not going to leave to get coffee and food so they can spend more time working. I used to work on the Microsoft campus and they've got like a bike store and they've got,

they've got a music store where you can buy like trombones and shit. What? Really? On the Microsoft campus, yeah. Oh, I would never leave. Like, oh. Sousaphones? Fundamentally how a lot, I mean, almost all of the tech giants operate is, you know, overwork your employees and compensate them outside of more money uh in ways that are you know more fun i mean it's kind of like you know how lyft and uber are flexible but outside of that they're

fucking over their employees oh yeah i mean it's you know the whole put on a nice face and then do terrible things while smiling yeah we're all friends here uh well i've got my fucking hand in your wallet yeah you know and we don't like to think of ourselves so much as a company as a family. And just two other things. Yogi, there was one more drop I wanted to get. Did you spend the weekend with your family? There was one more drop from that, yeah. Oh, and then the other thing is, whatever you think about the guy, Jordan Peterson was featured in the creepy line-up.

Not just featured, he's starring in that film. But, so he was actually, again, whatever you think about the guy, he was locked out of his Gmail account, so he claims. And again, this is just kind of terrifying, where it's like you have all- That was Peterson who was locked out? That's what he, well, Robert Epstein was as well,

but Jordan Peterson has said that, you know, like, I don't really give a shit if a private company wants to demonetize YouTube videos, but it's like if they want to lock you out of your email, that's pretty fucked up because you a result of foucault and deridia and the post-modernists who tell people that you don't have access to your email at all times i see boys with tears in their eyes saying that these post-modernist feminists are trying to make their email not a publicly accessible dictate. I got to dance for the people. All right. Be all right.

1.11. Yeah, 1.11, 16 seconds. If you look at the traditional notion of fascism as demonstrated by Mussolini in Italy, it was a policy of corporatism. It was a fusing of powerful private corporations with the government and joining them together. And what we are experiencing increasingly in the tech world is a fusing of these large tech firms like Google and Facebook with our federal government. It's not just trying to get the sort of regulatory freedom that they want. It's about involvement in areas related to military technology, related to artificial intelligence, to steering the tech ship of the future of the American people.

And the problem is that the conversation is being held by our political leaders with Google and Facebook, but it's a conversation that never includes us at the table uh he then went on to say now if you uh or peterson went on to say if you study the little mermaid uh it's it's a lesson about how you should stay in the ocean and uh the the the data of of the land above the ocean. Well, and so there is just like kind of like, and again, that's kind of a horrifying dystopian picture of a potential, again, many people would argue we're already in kind of inverted totalitarianism where this kind of corporate power of these big tech companies is so fused with the government that they are unchallengeable. And that is something I was just kind of thinking about before we recorded this episode, because, you know, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are controlled by Silicon Valley, Google and Facebook. And, you know, say Bernie Sanders or whoever you want to save it, you know, they can take on Wall Street, they can take on health care. But the question is, can anybody actually within the

electoral system take on all of these powerful interests can you actually go after google and facebook while going after wall street healthcare all of these things i will say if anyone's impervious to getting their google searches shut down it's bernie sanders because google can't shut down his almanac you know bernie uses duck duck go but uh too much of a good jewish boy and like one last statistic from the creepy line documentary fewer than five percent of people click beyond page one of a google search result so we talked about the study about how manipulating these search results conditions people so much that it's like if say bernie sanders or uh ocasio

cortez or whoever becomes an actual threat to Google, how hard is it for them to just say, we're going to rejigger the algorithm. Now whenever you try to find out what they're doing, you're seeing these negative stories. Whenever you try to find out what their opponent's doing, you're seeing nothing but positive stories on the first page. And so that was like part of my justification in my head would be that in order to achieve any kind of change, Bernie Sanders is going to have to ally with Google and accidentally create a Deus Ex ending

where he becomes part of some supercomputer that controls all of the world for its own best interest. But yeah, I mean, it's just kind of a horrifying thing to chew on where it's like these people have not been challenged from the political system and I don't even know if the political system has the power to challenge them anymore well i would like to say that it has been nice being on the front page of a google search for grub stakers and uh you know what it's going to be sad when that front page goes back to uh whatever fucking metal company

the steakhouse in chicago one bad review and that's right you know there's another grub stakers it's a brewery in colorado and and also the person that owns that doesn't even make sense the person that owns grubstakers.com has like a huge Manifesto On Go to Grubstakers.com And then don't tell us Yogi just sent you to a child porn site That's not true But yes

So and then like we'll see what happens With Larry Page, Sergey Brin Again they're worth about $50 billion each. According to New York Post, Larry Page is hiding out in his island. The Post claims that for a while he didn't talk to Sergey Brin after the affair, but I'm sure they've made up by now. And oddly enough, Sergey Brin is working on building the world's largest airship, which again, like you really just can't be that much more of a Final Fantasy VII boss battle than if you've got a giant fucking airship which again like you really just can't be that much more of a final fantasy 7 boss battle than if you've got a giant fucking airship video game every boss is a billionaire well it is kind of shinra so and you know it's people people say billionaires are bad but clearly they're the best

and brightest they're the most efficient allocation of resources their boots are strapped all the way yeah yeah you can tell because uh uh larry page and sergey brin have nothing to do with the operation of google whatsoever uh but they control more than half of what's going on there so they are really essential to the uh the capitalism and the innovation that is happening but um anything we didn't get to from uh your um uh surveillance capitalism book andy any any any positive notes we could close out on um let's see if chomsky uh maybe this will close out if not we'll just cut it we spend like 10 minutes trying to google the chomsky quote like i can't find it for some reason oh no i got i've got it in a Google-proof format. Similarly, we can perceive the power of Skinner's behavioral

technology by considering the useful observations and advice he offers. Punishable behavior can be minimized by creating circumstances in which it is not likely to occur. If a person is strongly reinforced when he sees other people enjoying themselves, he will design an environment in which

children are happy. If population, nuclear war, pollution, and an environment in which children are happy. Unquote. If population, nuclear war, pollution, and depletion of resources are a problem, quote, we may then change practices to induce people to have fewer children, spend less on nuclear weapons, stop polluting the environment, and consume resources at a lower rate, respectively. The reader may search for more profound thoughts than these. He may seek, but he will not find. Noam Chomsky. So that's a technocrat mindset.

Yeah, that wasn't useful. We'll cut that. I can't wait to go to Chomsky's website and see an AdSense thing. But, you know, I guess this has been our long overview of sergey page or sergey brin larry page and google you know we'll cut this up into three parts um a little bit into eric schmidt yeah and but you know like it's a huge topic obviously it's three parts we've never done a three-parter before but you know we didn't get to everything, but we will come back to Eric Schmidt. But his wife will not. Right on that.

Yeah, we'll come back for Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg. So, you know, give us your thoughts on Twitter, at GrubstakersPod, at GrubstakersPodcast on Gmail. But not for long. It's soon to be hotmail. But give us your thoughts and, you know, feedback and anything we didn't get to, we'll circle back in the future. But, hey, best of luck out there, and guard your privacy because you are being spied on, and people know things about you that would terrify you.

But also, there's nothing you can do about it. Yes. You also have to participate in society. So good luck with that, everybody. And with that, I'm Yogi Poliwag. I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffers. And I'm Sean P. McCarthy.

Thanks for listening. Viewers are familiar with you from YouTube, so it's a big deal. You're popular there. Your account was suspended. Do you have any idea why? No, I've heard conflicting reports from people who've emailed me within Google, ranging from thoughts that it each day the color of the leaves. Thoughts that it had something to do with the political content to an administrative error.

When I think it might be nicer. It's not clear at all why it occurred or why it was turned back on. Although it did happen after I released a number of tweets documenting what had happened. So I don't think that was just fluke. But I have no idea. That's actually part of the frightening part, is that I could be shut off. I have no idea why.

They took me back on. I have no idea why. It's not a trivial matter when those sorts of things happen. And people tend to pass you over.