Offline with Jon Favreau - Big Tech vs. Hollywood; AI vs. Journalism; Socialists vs. Bananas

Episode Date: July 23, 2023

Madeline Ashby, futurist and WIRED contributor joins Offline to talk about her recent piece “Hollywood’s Future Belongs to People — Not Machines." She and Jon discuss how the entertainment indus...try is “unbundling,” the role of art in creating social cohesion, and the hubris of TV execs who think AI will deliver content that is fast, good AND cheap. Then, Jon and Max discuss the decline of streaming and subscription models, how AI could be used by reporters, and the problem with community leaders being replaced by sh*tposters. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, in case you missed it, you can now listen to Pod Save America ad-free by joining Crooked's subscription, Friends of the Pod. And with fewer ads in your day, you'll have more time to enjoy other exclusive-to-subscription perks like bonus content feed featuring our chaotic and funny new show, Terminally Online, opportunities to chat directly with John Tommy and myself on Discord, which is like just a fun Slack channel. It's like a nicer Twitter. And we have a news feed with the latest headlines informing all of our shows, plus real-time commentary from us and other Crooked staffers.
Starting point is 00:00:32 Signing up to the Best Friends tier is also the easiest way to stay involved in Vote Save America's on-the-ground organizing, with $10 of your subscription going directly towards supporting and expanding those efforts. So you can ditch ads, save democracy. It's a win-win. Head to crooked.com slash friends and sign up today. Okay, you can create these things. Will you be able to find an audience? And if not, then, you know, where is this going? And in so doing, are you maybe cutting a lot of people out of jobs and out of a national or an international conversation that usually takes place in, about the future, about romance, about sex, anything. Right.
Starting point is 00:01:31 And so we lose out on that. You know, when you aren't sharing those things with other people, you might be the AI version of Emily Dickinson. You might be that person who has like a ton of great material just hiding somewhere on your hard drive, but it will be very lonely. I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Wired contributor, science fiction author and futurist Madeline Ashby. For these next two episodes, we'll be talking about the unprecedented dual strike that has brought Hollywood to a standstill. Next week, straight off the picket line,
Starting point is 00:02:11 I'll be joined in studio by comedian and WGA negotiator Adam Conover to give us a behind-the-scenes look into the negotiations. But before we get into the details of the strike, I wanted to step back and spend some time talking about the broader technological trends that led the entertainment industry to what certainly feels like an inflection point. Trends that began when Netflix launched the bingeable House of Cards in 2013 and continue today with labor negotiations over artificial intelligence. Madeline just wrote a phenomenal piece in Wired that covers this era and what might come next. It's called Hollywood's Future Belongs to People, Not Machines,
Starting point is 00:02:51 and it's the result of months of reporting and interviews with dozens of writers, producers, and executives about the future of entertainment. It's a comprehensive, insightful look into the technology, finances, and greed that have completely changed the way Hollywood does business. The two of us talk about how we arrived at this moment, Thank you. for consumers and creators when more art is created by machines and algorithms. I really enjoyed the conversation and hope it gives you a deeper look at what's at stake in these negotiations. As always, if you have comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offlandercricket.com and stick around after my interview with Madeline. Max joins me to offer his thoughts on the parallels between the transformation of entertainment and journalism,
Starting point is 00:03:44 how AI is coming for the latter, and this week's bizarre and extremely online debate, the Pitt Socialists against bananas. Here's Madeline Ashby. Madeline Ashby, welcome to Offline. Thank you for having me. So ever since the writers went on strike, I've been wanting to have a larger conversation about all the ways technology is transforming entertainment. And then I came across your fantastic piece in Wired, which I keep sending to people because I loved it so much. I know you did a lot of the reporting earlier this spring, and you end up concluding this,
Starting point is 00:04:26 quote, the unbundling of the American storytelling machine has become the unbundling of the American story. What was once a roaring engine of commerce and a siren of soft power is now as fractured as the audience consuming its products. Can you walk us through the unbundling of the American storytelling machine?
Starting point is 00:04:44 When did it start? What caused it? And how did we get here? That is a big question. I feel as though you've asked me to summarize somebody's doctoral dissertation. I'm almost certain that someone has gotten a PhD in this. And if you have and you are listening or watching us right now, I really apologize because I'm sure that you have done more research. So first, the idea of unbundling or bundling and unbundling comes from former Netscape CEO, Jim Barksdale. And Barksdale said that there are two ways in this, in America to make money. There are two ways in this world to make money. One is bundling and one is unbundling. And by bundling,
Starting point is 00:05:21 he meant like creating value from services that are tied together, like product offerings and services that are tied together. You know, the cruise line doesn't make any money if they don't sell food. You know, you have to bundle these things together. And so, for example, newspapers used to be bundled with personal ads and classified ads. And that was how they got revenue while also providing service and value for money in terms of providing news and and so on then came craigslist and then came online dating and that sort of unbundled those things so those relationships unraveled uh i would say that with the advent of a lot of digital technologies and with the sort of broadening of digital and technical literacy amongst viewers and consumers and and everybody um some of the
Starting point is 00:06:14 the way that cultural production especially at the film and television level um happens has been similarly unbundled so when when Netflix came along and when other streamers came along, they did things in a very different way and they untied some of the relationships that were fundamental to how film and TV got made in America, including taking away, for example, ads. Now you might think that that's great. And in fact, for a lot of people, it really was like, everybody likes watching things without ads. That was one of the virtues of, you know, allegedly some types of cable television. But when you don't do that, that one of the things that was brought up to me is that you aren't one, you don't have a stable revenue stream two you aren't writing to dramatic beats in the same way and three the a lot of the audience or knowledge about the audience or writing to the audience
Starting point is 00:07:13 kind of goes away and so a lot of how television got written whether it's big writers rooms now becoming mini rooms or whether it's uh one executive who isn't sharing a lot of the information about audience metrics and so on, like at Netflix, that's sort of very different from the way that things used to be done. And there hasn't really been training to compensate for that. On the flip side, in that fracturing of the American story, what we've seen is sort of a fracturing of audiences. So once upon a time, it used to be a big deal that the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan. Suddenly that was a landmark moment. People have an idea of, for example, like watching the moon landings or watching something as a shared experience or everybody saw this thing. That doesn't exist anymore.
Starting point is 00:08:09 And so that collective viewing experience isn't there any longer. And so we don't share in the same common experiences as we used to. And it's why you'll see this sudden fascination with trends or hashtags on Twitter or things that suddenly everybody knows when in fact everybody is just the people whose you know customer profile matches yours and you feel like it's everybody and it's not so there's I asked a big question and there's you offered a lot there and I want to almost break them out into a couple different areas and start with sort of the business model
Starting point is 00:08:45 of all this. So it's interesting that you mentioned this is similar to what happened in journalism and media, because part of what happened is when you bought a newspaper, there were the ads in there and that helps finance the whole operation. But also there was, you know, you got sports, you got local news, you got weather, you got all kinds of stuff. And so you might have an interest in one topic, but you got a whole bunch of other topics. And similarly, in the cable era, you bought a cable package, and you got a whole bunch of channels, and some of the channels you wanted, and some of the channels you might not have wanted, but they were all there in the cable package. And then in the streaming era, now you can sort of pick and choose. And you also
Starting point is 00:09:30 mentioned how the transition from the cable era to the streaming era brings something of a Silicon Valley startup ethos to Hollywood. What has that done to the business model of entertainment? So previously during the broadcast and cable eras or when broadcast and cable were more how people accessed entertainment and information, they moved at a different pace. They moved weekly. Episodes dropped weekly. There were ad breaks. So even down to how stories are told, they were written to sort of get to ad breaks. That's one of the things that Javier Grillo-Marxwatch talked to me about in our interview was that once upon a time, we knew how to pace stories because they were written to ad breaks. And those were cliffhangers. And that's how that worked. taken from Saturday morning serials in the 1930s, the same ones that inspired Indiana Jones, was that at the end, there was a cliffhanger. That's why you came back the next week. And the same with how television episodes and films were written. So one, it changes story structure. Two, there were 22-episode seasons that dropped weekly. And over time, that gave every creative team involved with the series
Starting point is 00:10:48 a lot more time to hone their craft and to develop a create like a shorthand with their fellow creatives that isn't there any longer, because now the streaming production model is to essentially abandon a litter of episodes on a hillside and see if they make it and if they don't within 48 hours 72 hours a week it's gone you know and that's why netflix in particular is like very uh has developed a reputation for canceling things within two seasons they really want everything to be, or they seem to want everything to be watched right away, right to the end. They want you, they actually want you to binge the content. Like that for them is the highest metric of success. And they want you
Starting point is 00:11:37 to watch nothing else. What is in common between the two sort of traditional broadcast model and traditional Hollywood studio model and the streaming models that they want your attention and they want you to pay attention to very little else. And they each have different ways of achieving that and financing it. And so what we've noticed though, in terms of creative production with streamers is that they adopt this kind of principle of least interest or sort of bare bones lean startup what have you ethos to creating things so as cheap as possible as fast as possible and as any good creative would tell you you can have it fast good or cheap too and and that's um that's how uh that's how things have have worked um except now we're getting you know fast and cheap right and i and also like what does that do
Starting point is 00:12:36 to the actual creator the writer the someone who's trying to succeed in this new context where they know that there is an algorithm somewhere that's telling people that's telling the studios or the streamers this is what's popular instantaneously and we're not going to give this show a chance like you know you remember i think you wrote about this too the days where tv show you know maybe it wasn't doing well in the first couple months and then it sort of picks up and then it gets a fan base. And then, so they finally renew it because it,
Starting point is 00:13:09 you know, it got, it got better over time and that just doesn't happen anymore. True. And so what does this do to, from the creator standpoint? Well, for one,
Starting point is 00:13:17 one of the things that the writers guild is striking about is the presence of these sort of mini rooms where very tiny writers rooms sketch out in an entire series or an entire limited series so like six or eight episodes and it might never make it to air so all the work that they put in never sees the light of day so the things that they would have built their reputation on or the ways that they would have made for their connections and crucially the ways that they would have made further connections and crucially the ways that they would have watched something being filmed
Starting point is 00:13:46 so that they could improve their craft and get feedback, that's gone. And increasingly the mechanisms within creative production in this style means that writers aren't improving their craft, they're not developing relationships and they aren't becoming showrunners. Javier Grillo-Marx was talking to me about this in terms of it being an R&D problem, that artists are developed in the same way that technology is developed or that
Starting point is 00:14:14 or the developers develop, that they hone their craft over time. And the journey from, you know, an assistant to a showrunner is a proven track of success that was vince gilligan that was um that was a bunch of other uh writers who came up sort of through the system or came up and developed their skills slowly but steadily and were able to learn from their teammates in the same way that anybody in any kind of workshop would learn from their teammates and now that isn't happening well now it seems like it's a much lonelier endeavor yes and that you have to be right if you're vince gilligan who's uh known for breaking bad and many other uh wonderful shows but if you're a vince gilligan or someone like that or shonda rhimes
Starting point is 00:15:03 right you have to just you have to hit it the first time hit it on your own and if you're Vince Gilligan or someone like that, or Shonda Rhimes, right, you have to just, you have to hit it the first time, hit it on your own. And if you don't, then it's unlikely you're going to get many other chances. Yeah, it's a real zero sum game, I guess, is the way that I would describe it. It's a real harsh, it's a much harsher environment where the capacity to learn from failure is not there any longer. So you point out that a lot of these disruptions have led artists and creators to seek out platforms like Patreon and Twitch and TikTok, where they have more freedom to create and earn money and build an audience. But depending on those platforms to make art and a living also has its own limitations, right? Can you talk about some of those?
Starting point is 00:15:43 Well, I think that similarly, they are similarly lonely, if not more so. At least in a writer's room, you are in theory sort of on a team with other people, even though you may never see them again. When it's just you and your audience, there's you and your audience and there's nothing else. And there isn't crucially mentorship in the same way.
Starting point is 00:16:08 When we see a lot of scandals at that level, sort of whether it's Twitch streamers or whether it's on Instagram threads, whatever, whatever the platform du jour is, there's always this moment where you sort of wonder like, did no one tell you that this might happen? Did you not understand what the stakes were? Did no one explain this to you? And in fact, no one did. Because there isn't that level of mentorship. There isn't that level
Starting point is 00:16:32 of coaching and development and instruction and camaraderie. There's camaraderie at different levels. I'm not trying to say that it's the most lonely thing ever, but we are increasingly seeing sort of an entertainment model of like isolated creators for isolated audiences. And that's feeding what I would call like a broader societal pervasive sense of isolation, loneliness, and alienation. Yes. And just also from a financial perspective of these creators who are trying to make money,
Starting point is 00:17:07 they're also at the mercy of a lot of these platforms who can change an algorithm or censor at will or do whatever they'd like at a moment's notice and then suddenly you have no platform anymore and no way to make a living and you're sort of starting from scratch.
Starting point is 00:17:22 You are. And you also, unlike someone like Ian, thega or sag after uh you have no collective bargaining agreement you don't have uh any previous relationship with that you can't you know bargain with other people you don't have allies in the same way so the other big consequence of all this unbundling and fragmentation, and you touched on this a bit, is how personalized and individualized entertainment has become. And from the audience perspective, right, got infinite choices. We all have our own screens. Algorithms feed us recommendations based on our consumption habits. And it seems like artificial intelligence
Starting point is 00:18:05 is set to supercharge this trend. What is a future filled with AI-generated entertainment look like to you? Wow. So one of the things about me is that I'm a science fiction writer and a consulting futurist. So I write science fiction novels about robots who eat each other and and in fact, company towns and some other things that are coming out later. But
Starting point is 00:18:31 I also do foresight consulting. And one of the things that I do is I end up writing sort of short stories set in certain worlds that are framed out by the research. So I did a little bit of that in this piece where I talked about what would it be like if you were the one creating something from, you know, this, you know, a likeness stable online, what would it be like if you were dictating all these terms, and then it sort of got generated and spawned for you? Where would that go? Do you get to be famous that way? Do you get paid that way? Do girls like it when you do that? Stuff like that. What is it that draws people to do this? Does it create an audience? Are you creating a relationship? Are you communicating something that is true or real
Starting point is 00:19:21 or experienced? I think in the future, wherein all of that is possible, we can design a lot of different things. But if everybody is doing it, the likelihood that what you create will penetrate and gather an audience in an even more saturated and even more fractured environment is very low. You might have done it, but you may effectively just be hanging a drawing on your fridge. It might be an incredibly sophisticated drawing. It might be genius. It might be, you might have somehow spawned the birth of a new digital species in creating it, which would be great until the moment you prune it. And then effectively, you know, this little octopus got their arms cut off because dad didn't like the picture on the fridge.
Starting point is 00:20:13 And so that's what I think is one of the consequences. And there's other consequences, too. I mean, like, we know that AI sort of reifies bias. We know that it can reproduce, you know, it follows the garbage in, garbage out model of traditional software development. It can reify and repeat and layer over and amplify existing, you know, biases, existing oppression, existing problems. And so if you say, like, I have leased the or rented the likeness of Pam Greer to make, you know, a 70s style blaxploitation film, and I want to talk about this, this and this, the likelihood that she might come out not as she is and not be what we would consider a great representation is much higher so much of the focus so far in ai partly because because so much of this is new and around the writer's strike and actor's strike is, OK, AI is generating scripts, premises for entertainment.
Starting point is 00:21:35 And we're worried about sort of actors having digital replicas that either they don't sign off on or they are not well compensated for. But even beyond that, it does go to this point you make about this hyper-individualized entertainment, right? Where so, like if you're your own George Lucas now, right? And you can take your favorite movie and change it so that the actors do different stuff and maybe you're in it. So you can have a good time all by yourself trying to make this art, but suddenly the idea of art and entertainment as a shared experience or something that can sort of elevate a conversation sort of goes out the window.
Starting point is 00:22:16 Yes, like so many other things, it's better with somebody else. And I think that that's sort of where we're going with this is that, okay, you can create these things. Will you be able to find an audience? And if not, then, you know, where is this going? And in so doing, are you maybe cutting a lot of people out of jobs and out of a national or an international conversation about that usually takes place in art uh whether you know where we determine what good and evil are where we determine what right and
Starting point is 00:22:52 wrong is you know when those are isolated we aren't actually having a collective conversation about values about history about the future about, about romance, about sex, anything. Right. And so we lose out on that. You know, when you aren't sharing those things with other people, you might be the AI version of Emily Dickinson. You might be that person who has like a ton of, you know, great material just hiding somewhere on your hard drive, but it will be very lonely
Starting point is 00:23:27 one thing i've been thinking a lot about is the role that we play in all of this audiences and consumers right because one argument you hear from the studios and the streamers and the platforms is basically hey you know we are just giving people the the content that they want they are voting with their clicks and their streams and their downloads. What do you think about that? I mean, yeah, I think that we do vote with our clicks and streams and downloads, but also we are on platforms that optimize that behavior. And they could optimize different behaviors.
Starting point is 00:24:01 That would be easy for them to do it's sort of like blaming people for for taking the roads that have been paved for them like you know well it reminds me of this it reminds me of social media all over again yeah no it it is that it it operates on the same logic it it uses the same sort of metrics of success and it it sort of optimizes the same logic. It uses the same sort of metrics of success and it sort of optimizes the same emotional reactions in people, right? It wants to make you angry, it wants to make you sad, it wants to make you aroused, it wants to make you engage. And those things, you know, that sort of addictive model can be applied elsewhere. And it'll get applied to AI as well. Once we know what face shape, eye color, whatever it is, story beats, sound things, you know, this is happening at the level of like Spotify.
Starting point is 00:24:58 AI generated music and sort of the music that is generated by looking at metrics of what succeeds, that is already happening. And so it'll be like that. And that's why you'll occasionally see things on streaming networks that really feel as though they were not pitched so much as like plucked out of a hat, where it's just a bunch of tropes and we threw some actors in because they're successful and we thought that that would work and in fact it might have worked if the person writing it had been given another pass yeah and it becomes for audiences it's all
Starting point is 00:25:39 about the dopamine hit because the dopamine hit is can be profitable for these platforms and it's not profitable for the creators i mean you just mentioned about music too right like we're starting to see the ai generated songs that are sampling you know real artists go viral and it's like funny because it's like oh it's a viral tiktok now but down the road if that's happening all the time and artists are already getting like a couple pennies on the dollar for their streams on spotify you mentioned you mentioned in your piece taylor swift right she's making like a couple billion dollars from the tour but she's still making a couple pennies per song on streams for spotify not that i know the terms of her agreement let's uh i don't know what the specific terms of her i tried i reached out to some people. To be fair, I did not reach out to her. So I can't
Starting point is 00:26:27 speak to her agreement specifically, but those are the stakes. It's when everyone is making those fractions of a penny per anything, and that's even within the legal realm of stuff, and that's with residuals. That's with residual agreements. You know, one of the things that's happening during the SAG strike and during the WGA strike is that we're seeing royalty statements from people being posted online and they're, you know, I can finally afford that cup of coffee I've always wanted. Great, you know, for hugely successful titles. So one of the things that really has been worrying me especially since the strikes have started like so we've already seen a glut of uh reboots and sequels right that
Starting point is 00:27:12 we're already headed that way old shows like you know the office are streamed more than most new series which is about to be a ton of new reality TV and game shows because of the strike, which we know audiences like, right? The audiences for television and movies that win Emmys and Oscars keep getting smaller. And all of it makes me wonder and worry if it's going to be easier and more profitable to just feed people cheap, low quality crap. Yeah. Yeah. I think one, that's always been true. It has always been, you know, the even, you know, studio heads from the 30s would tell you that too.
Starting point is 00:27:55 Irving Thalberg would have told you that. The man for whom the Thalberg Award is named for producers would tell you that. You know, that's also the secret behind a lot of the success of like horror films. Horror films are always traditionally profitable and very successful because they cost less to make, they engage audiences in a great way and they, uh, and they can make back their budget and above. Uh, and that's consistently been the story with that, with those genres of films, the same with like certain romances, the same with like a lot of different genres. They can, they can make it all back. Spending a lot of money on your on your production isn't necessarily always the path to success. Spending 300 million dollars on, you know, for example, Indiana Jones
Starting point is 00:28:37 and the Dial of Destiny is not necessarily the way to make it all back. However, the way that we learn to consume art, the thing that troubles me about this, like I'm very troubled by a lot of people losing their jobs. I'm troubled about the idea of the bottom falling out. I'm worried about unemployed people. I'm worried about the loss of collective power. What I'm also really worried about is one, if all of this gets automated, then it's much easier to be vulnerable to an influence campaign that way once it's all automated. And two, when we lose out on that collective storytelling, we lose out on a collective conversation in the way that art positions it. One thing that I know from my other work is that it is much harder to get people to read information in a report and much easier to engage them at the level of fiction. I can tell you what the new projected rainfalls of the city of New York are going to be in a few
Starting point is 00:29:38 decades, or I could show you in fiction what it's going to look like when some of these things are underwater. One of them is more powerful than the other. And when we lose out on the capacity to share in that storytelling and share in that in art together, we lose out on our ability to have those conversations and talk about our shared values or lack thereof and what right and wrong is, what good and evil is, the stuff of fiction, sometimes the stuff of melodrama. But the way in which we have those conversations is often started in fiction. And crucially, it often represents people or gives them a vision of themselves that they might not have had growing up at home. It might offer them a way out or a way to identify or a way to think of themselves that they may never have been offered before.
Starting point is 00:30:41 And that's where a community gets built. And so when we lose out on that when it's mostly just sort of like the entertainment equivalent of like pink slime or whatever when that's what is out there you are going to get you know we had a game show president and you're going to get more of them if that's all that's on TV. You're going to get more of it. And you're going to get people who live by game show rules, right? It's going to be the Hunger Games all the time. It's going to be a zero-sum game, even more so than it already is. When man get hurt very funny is it,
Starting point is 00:31:24 then it's going to be really funny to hurt people yeah and then and then of course when you combine that with the other trend that we've talked about which is just we're already having an issue with loneliness and isolation and social isolation that has been exacerbated by the internet, social media, then the pandemic. And it has clearly influenced our politics. It is one of the reasons we are divided and angry all the time. And when everyone is watching their own AI-tailored entertainment and not talking and debating about some shared cultural experience, then it doesn't seem like the future is too bright. And it doesn't seem like democracy is all that possible since democracy depends on this level of empathy that we have with one another.
Starting point is 00:32:20 And that empathy often comes from art. Yeah the the story that i that there were i tried to write this piece a bunch of different ways before i finally settled down on it um and one of the ways that it originally began that i had to scrap because it was extremely esoteric but which i can share with you now um yes Is that it is not an accident that Heracles made the theaters free in Athens. That's not an accident. Like part of his job as a strategist was to make them ready for war. One of the ways he thought was best to do that was to increase sort of the social bonding within the population. So he signed into, you know, development,
Starting point is 00:33:08 a bunch of different theaters, a bunch of different music halls, a bunch of different venues, entertainment venues. He essentially built what we now understand to be some of the first Odeons. That's where the word Odeon comes from. And when we say Cineplex Odeon, we're actually using an ancient Greek term for an entertainment hall. And he built a lot of these to create a sense of social cohesion within the Athenian population because he believed them to be under threat.
Starting point is 00:33:43 And one of the ways that he made sure that people were engaging culturally was to lower the bar for entry to entering the theater so that everybody War. If that was the understood thing, if that was the wisdom at the time, what does it mean that we might all be watching wildly different things that are only tailored to us? Isn't that a way of losing the experience of friction? One of the things that came up in the pandemic, and I don't want to say came up in the pandemic because that implies a past tense. We're in an inter-pandemic period, if anything. One of the things that came up during lockdown, I would say, is that suddenly we discovered that a lot of our friends and neighbors had not really experienced this kind of friction. They hadn't had to listen to somebody else's story and then suddenly hearing somebody else's
Starting point is 00:34:46 story about why masks were important was just too much they'd never heard somebody else's story about why you might be working in a meat packing plant or why you might be immunocompromised or what the experience of illness might be like or why uh why it's not safe to work retail in certain environments and that lack of friction that frictionlessness that seamlessness that you know that sudden ease the experience of ease without consideration is what is offered by that particular future and it means that the experiences of what in fiction we would call try, fail, try, succeed, the literal character builders in fiction aren't there. And so our own development process gets sort of shortchanged. about humans being in the driver's seat here. How do you think we can avoid some of these,
Starting point is 00:35:53 the worst outcomes or this kind of dystopian future that you and I have been talking about? Well, for one, I mean, I think that there's a few different things. Like one, you can support strikes as they are. There's a lot of ways to support those striking writers. Two, you can stop denigrating the humanities all the time. It's right there in the title. They call it the humanities because that's what it does. It improves you as a human being. It's where you talk about what it means to be a human being. So you can stop not funding the humanities within educational systems. And you can stop sort of bagging on people who have those
Starting point is 00:36:25 degrees. If people want to talk about what it means to be a human being, then great, good for them. You can fund arts. You can demand that even your local city councilors start giving out arts grants. You can make sure that the NEA or whatever your local or whatever your national granting body for artists is, has the money to do it. And you can vote for people who support the arts. When they do that, they are, I live in Canada. And one of the things that really surprised me when I moved here years ago was one, how Canada tried very hard to support its artists. And two, the reasoning behind
Starting point is 00:37:07 it was to create a national media and a national literature and to not necessarily create a national voice, but to create sort of pride within it. I was really suspicious of that when I first moved here. But I also understood that one of the things that they were allegedly trying to do was create a thing that people could be proud of that would create a national conversation so whether that's a news network or whether that's films that are made for our networks or whether that's showing things in languages that are never going to be seen anywhere else, right? Whether that's, you know, that's granting funds for Inuk films, which is a language that people here speak. You know, when that happens,
Starting point is 00:37:54 you're creating a conversation about who you are and what you believe. And for all its faults, and there were many and are many, the way that the Hollywood studio system used to work did that. There's a reason that the USO went everywhere. There's a reason that people were attracted by the vision of America that they had on film and TV. Sometimes those visions were false. Sometimes that was a bait and switch right but it also worked in the national interest and you know it's it's telling to me that like for example the pentagon recently announced that they would no longer be offering technical consultation support to filmmakers who
Starting point is 00:38:37 censored their films in china or in the chinese market they just straight up said nope we're not going to do that anymore and you don't get to you know you will not get our assistance with these projects if you do that and those fights are coming more to the fore i would say and it is about who gets to tell their story who gets to be heard and who gets to be a human being yeah well it's fascinating i mean we have talked so much on this show about the way our extremely online era has done similar things to politics to the media to our own brains and it's fascinating to take a look at what it's doing to entertainment and how important that is in this larger role of um trying to sort of uh rebuild a sense of community and social cohesion that we seem to have uh be losing every day as everything splinters and fragments um
Starting point is 00:39:41 because of some of these technological advances so um your piece did that in such a smart and compelling way. So thank you for writing it. And thank you so much for joining Offline. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:40:08 All right. we're back. Max, what's going on? Hey, pal. So I wanted to start with what I think is an example of what Madeline referenced in her piece as the enshitification of entertainment. I know that wasn't her phrase. It was borrowed from someone else, but she thought about it
Starting point is 00:40:26 because it was in the piece. So we learned this week that Netflix is dropping its most basic ad-free plan that was $9.99 for new or rejoining members. If you already have that basic plan and you like your plan,
Starting point is 00:40:40 you can keep it. You can keep it. I've heard that one before. I think the promise is worth about the same thing this time. Ted Cerundo is just taking a page. You do sign up for Netflix via healthcare.gov now. More problems. So this is after Netflix cracked down on password sharing
Starting point is 00:40:58 and all as they tried to cut $300 million this year. Wow. The first ad-free tier is now $15 a month. $15? Yeah. Man. So if you want that, and then the premium one,
Starting point is 00:41:12 I think is a couple of dollars more than that. And the $15 per month is for one member. And then if you want to add other members, I think it's another $8 for each additional member. Despite all this, or maybe because of it, the company just reported adding 6 million subscribers last
Starting point is 00:41:26 quarter so it was robust subscriber growth okay um i wonder what they're joining for and that came after the first ever decline in subscribers that they had the quarter before that so here's the question are the stream you heard the and then i just had this whole conversation with madeline are the streamers on a slow decline or do you think it's possible for them to figure out a way to hang on or restructure? And can you imagine a scenario where that results in a better product for consumers? So, I mean, this is obviously the like big economic change that we have talked about so much on the show where the venture capital that has subsidized these services for so long is disappearing because of rising interest rates. So now they have to like make money on the merits. And that is definitely going to lead to a different service.
Starting point is 00:42:12 The whole thing really reminds me actually being in journalism in the late 2000s, early 2010s when everybody started instituting paywalls, again, because of economic changes, like need a new business model and did a lot of experimenting with like, what do we put behind the paywall? Like, is it opinion pieces?
Starting point is 00:42:28 Is it news? Do you hit it immediately? Is it after three or four articles? And it took a lot of experimentation to find what worked. And that even though no one said, let's change the journalism to fit the paywall, inevitably those incentives change the kind of work that you do.
Starting point is 00:42:43 And I don't think we know what changes it's going to lead to yet in entertainment, although I have some guesses. But I do think that the shift to higher prices for subscriptions and more restrictions on it is necessarily going to lead to different kinds of content from the entertainment industry, much as it did from journalism. What are some of your guesses? I think the result is actually going to be similar to what we had in journalism, which is the word that everybody uses now, like in the Times and every place else, is essential, is that you have to get people to hit the paywall on three or four stories that are capital E essential. They absolutely have to read because it's getting a lot of discussion, because it's like a major investigation that you can't read the aggregated version of. You have to read the real real thing and i think the entertainment version of essential is going to be hot button
Starting point is 00:43:29 social issues like squid games where it's like what does this mean for capitalism everybody is talking about squid games i have to watch it or like um tiger king which is also big netflix like you remember the like reality show that came out in the pandemic about like weird. Yeah, it was in our faces a lot. And I think that that is going to. Barbie. Barbie. Absolutely. Barbie is essential.
Starting point is 00:43:53 I will be seeing it in theaters because I support cinemas. But I think that the like the which you already feel you already feel the streamers trying to like create cultural moments, create things that are like water cooler shows that everybody is talking about. And how do you do that by hitting on sensitive social issues or by having outrageous characters? And there's a like Tiger King reality show version of that where we're just like more garbage, more like who are the worst people in the world? And we can see them at their worst moments and laugh at them, which is like I don't feel great about. Or the good version of it is like squid games where you're empowering creators and i know you and madeline talked about this creators who have like things to say about our world that feel like i have to see what this creator is saying about capitalism and this weird korean show so yes i agree with that and i think that the the creating content that's essential is going to be a key part of this on the other end of this i'm a little concerned and i spoke to madeline about this but a little
Starting point is 00:44:45 concerned that we're also going to get a lot of empty calorie content absolutely much like a lot of the content that's propping up journalism and has for the last 10 years right like you know uh i think pfeiffer said this uh a couple months ago that the new York Times is like, like, really fantastic journalism that is paid for by crossword puzzles. And, you know, cookie like recipes and all that. I actually love that, though. I know I have some friends in journalism who are discouraged by that. And it's like, if that becomes our value proposition games, that's going to be unhealthy. But you know, it's not so dissimilar from the like old bundle back in the days where you like get subscriptions by giving people their garfield yeah that's and i think i also think
Starting point is 00:45:29 the other two challenges that streamers are facing and have faced in addition to rising interest rates is they're caught between these two models or the entire entertainment industry is caught between these two models which is the pay for cable tv which has been on the decline for a while and then sort of building streaming services for the new era right like disney had abc and disney tv and then they did disney plus right and i think the pay for model is dying faster than anyone expected right and it's costing so much more money to build successful streaming services because now you have to keep the subscribers there's a lot of churn it's true and so people will sign up and then they drop it and so to keep subscribers it's
Starting point is 00:46:18 costing more right and one of the ways to keep subscribers i think is having essential shows like you're talking about, right? I think I saw somewhere that the people who sign up for HBO or Max now because of succession, those people are likely to stick around more because they really want to see those television shows. And Netflix, I think, is just – Netflix had a first mover advantage in this space because they bought up a whole bunch of libraries. And so, like, what was the biggest streaming thing on Netflix for a very long time? Just reruns of The Office. Yeah. And I do wonder if, especially with the strike now, and a lot of the plans now are to, like, flood the market with reality television and game shows because can't produce
Starting point is 00:47:05 anything else with everyone on strike right and those are cheaper to film and unfortunately i think a lot of people like that shit in america yeah and i just wonder if we're like headed into this sort of two-tier system where we have some essential shows that people are paying for that get a lot of awards that get a lot of buzz and discussion in our circles, the liberal elite. Right. And then there's just. Well, those people pay. And those people will pay.
Starting point is 00:47:32 Yeah. And then there's just a ton of other garbage to wade through that is getting just a much bigger audience than anyone would expect or hope. Right. And part of the lesson from journalism is that there's a gradual consolidation where people won't, even if people value 30 different outlets, they won't subscribe to 30 different outlets. And like, I, like a lot of people have been really paring down my TV subscriptions. And if people naturally end up converging on two or three subscriptions, if it's, you know, you have to have Max and Netflix, or you have to have Max and Prime, but that's all you're going to have, then that's good for those services, much as it was good for the times that everybody was like, well, if I'm going to have one new subscription,
Starting point is 00:48:12 that will be the one. But it's not good for the industry overall to have effectively a monopoly. And even people in the times, I think, know that and are aware that like, this is actually not great for the future of our industry that we're capturing like all of the new subscribers who have one subscription i also think that uh infinite choice has become absolutely a real problem right and just just a glut of choices and content out there and i think that was has been a challenge for journalism as well partly because you know social media you're scrolling through and there's like a million stories and you've got 50 tabs open right and it's hard to figure that out and that's that's tough business-wise as well and i think content-wise like i know that when before hbo went full max
Starting point is 00:48:56 like i'd much rather go to the hbo app and say okay there's only a couple choices of new shows and i want to watch when you go to Netflix and it's like, what the fuck? There's just so much shit. And you might have even heard about something great on Netflix and you can't even find it. I don't think the algorithm is that great. I have to use a third-party website to find good things to watch on the streaming apps
Starting point is 00:49:20 because it is so hard to. I use Letterboxd, but they actually subscribe to, I won't try to pull it up, a different service that will. But if you access. That's what I'm looking for. I go to Rotten Tomatoes sometimes. Okay, okay. I'm just like, what's new this week?
Starting point is 00:49:33 What's fresh? If you go to Letterboxd and sort streaming services on there, it will sort them from the most popular on Letterboxd to the least popular. And that's a good shorthand for like, what are the best movies on any given service, which is not what the services themselves will show you. Although I do think Max is pretty good at this.
Starting point is 00:49:53 And they give you the feeling of like a curated experience, which again is something that the Times I think landed on is that like, we are going to give you this feeling that like we've curated it for you. Here's the best thing. Here's what you should look at. Whereas Netflix really feels like it's like, do you want to watch Skyfall?
Starting point is 00:50:08 Do you want to watch Missed Impossible 1? Like what are the movies that we can like shove in front of your face that will get you to watch? And I do think curation and a curated experience is something that people will pay for. I agree. Yeah. Speaking of journalism,
Starting point is 00:50:21 artificial intelligence coming for that too. Great. Should go too. Great. Should go great. Yeah. OpenAI, the company that runs ChatGPT, just cut a two-year, $5 million deal with the American Journalism Project to help fund efforts by local outlets to experiment with artificial intelligence technology. This is from Axios. The head of the AJP, the American Journalism Project, gave examples of what this might look like. Newsrooms being able to sort through complex FOIA data faster, freedom of information requests.
Starting point is 00:50:53 And this one, product teams personalizing products for consumers. So selling ads better? Is that, I guess? I mean, the White Whale forever has been a personalized home page on your favorite news service that will show you the stories that you want to see which i never actually understood the obsession with this in newsrooms because they don't produce that many stories that it's that hard to find what you want to look at but there's been a belief for a long time that if we could just get the personalized home page that will be amazing for some reason. I think that sucks.
Starting point is 00:51:31 Part of the problem with politics today, I think, is that we are all getting fed only what we want to see. Right, by the machines. Yeah, and obviously we're not going to go back to the print newspaper days, but the nice thing about reading a newspaper is you read what you wanted to read, but you also perused other headlines that opened up a world to something that you may not be interested in, but then you may be interested in after you read it or something that you're
Starting point is 00:51:56 not interested in, but is essential for you to know. And if everything is personalized and we're only getting what we want, I don't know if that's so great. And it's not necessarily what we want that is best for us, but rather what's the thing that is going to be like most glue our eyeballs. Because we have learned here on this podcast. It is another example of the like death of gatekeepers and the death of institutions as mediators, which it feels dystopian to describe like, oh, there's people deciding what news you should read. But I think that there is value and we have seen that value in what we have felt when it has gone away and having people who are thinking about
Starting point is 00:52:32 like what's healthy for us to consume. But there are a few different ways that the AI is like, it's been a big week for like AI in the news industry. Well, speaking of gatekeepers, New York Times reports that Google is testing and pitching to the New York Times, among others, a product with the codename Genesis. Guys. I know.
Starting point is 00:52:53 It's just on the nose. Have you ever seen Star Trek 3, The Search for Spock? Genesis, this is relevant, I promise. Genesis is the name of the machine they develop that is going to terraform hostile worlds to turn them into paradises. But immediately it gets captured by Khan, Ricardo Montalban, from The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek II, who realizes that it's actually a doomsday weapon. So it feels a little on the nose that they are calling their AI. I was thinking like first book of the Bible, Genesis. There's also that. Star Trek is my Bible, personally.
Starting point is 00:53:28 So Genesis uses AI to produce news stories themselves. Its capabilities are described as being able to, quote, take in information and generate news content. With Google claiming it can serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others. Peace also notes that some executives at these media outlets who saw Google's pitch described it as unsettling. Yeah, no, I'd say.
Starting point is 00:53:56 I'd say I could see that it's unsettling. I mean, so I don't want to get into the habit of always starting from the premise that all AI is bad, because I do think that's easy to go down that path. And I could see some areas and instances where it has a positive impact. But this does seem eerily familiar to what we saw with the rise of social media and what it did to journalism. But what do you think, since you have written the book on this? I agree. It does feel that we are going going to replace journalism and like we're going to be so great at it. The thing that has been really striking to me about this is that I actually agree that AI could be useful for journalism.
Starting point is 00:54:33 And you've talked about this like AI's role in politics too, that like there are actually some good uses for it. But the uses that the companies are pitching is the most dystopian, terrifying possible use for it, which is like, just have the AI write the article and like do the reporting, which is a profound and also deeply insulting misunderstanding of how journalism works, which is not surprising that Silicon Valley's view of journalism is that we're just like monkeys who are typing up things that anybody could type up. And that's like, really skips the value of journalism which is narrative and framing and what facts are important and how should you think about this and like what do you what is all the information that we've gathered mean and that is the human role in it but i think there are
Starting point is 00:55:15 potential uses for it and you hear this a little bit from the like local newsroom deal i think it could be really useful in gathering information there There have been times and I've been like reporting a story where you're trying to get like old documents about something a company was doing or digging through old four year reports and having something like an AI that could go through all of that and process it for you and pull out useful bits that you could then as the journalist figure out what you want to do with that information. That's potentially really useful. But what the companies are pitching that like what if you replace journalists with bots i think is is not a good idea i do not think that's a good idea for a host of reasons but yeah i was trying to rack my brain for like useful uh purposes for this kind of ai and like like we're we're both writers you currently me once upon a time. And the scariest thing when you're a writer
Starting point is 00:56:08 is the blank page. It's true. Or the blank screen. Yeah. And I think the first draft capability, we're just like, hey, give me a first draft AI. I'm gonna, here's all the stuff that I'm thinking about. Here's all my reporting.
Starting point is 00:56:22 Here are all my notes. Right. Here are the stories that I'm covering about. Here's all my reporting. Here are all my notes. Here are the stories that I'm covering today. And give me a first draft. And then you sit down and you're like, edit, edit, edit, rewrite, do all that kind of stuff. And it makes sure that it is still human-generated content that is assisted by AI. I couldn't see that being useful. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:56:40 And you made this point about politics, too, that ultimately you want a human overseeing it. I do think that there is a way to incorporate this and especially a way to incorporate it that I don't think it would actually replace that many jobs. I mean, the examples you constantly hear people say for what AI should do is it could do like financial reports and it could do sports scores, but those are really the only two things you could do with it. And the Associated Press is actually already using bots to construct stories like that. But as a scraper tool for gathering data, I think it's useful. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:11 And I think we made this point the first time we talked about AI. But again, in terms of jobs and skill sets that are going to be valuable in the future, creativity is going to be at the top of the list. And judgment. And judgment. Because AI, at least nothing we've seen yet,
Starting point is 00:57:33 it can't replace either of those things. And so if people who are creative, people who have judgment, people who have experience, expertise, all of that is going to be very valuable in the future. But it is concerning how the companies designing the AI seem to not understand that and seem to really be leaning into the idea that we are going to replace the judgment parts of it and the creativity parts of it with the bots, which I think is simultaneously like overestimating the power of AI and also underestimating it. Well, and on that note, we just learned today, we're recording this
Starting point is 00:58:06 on Friday, that the Biden administration had been meeting with some of the big tech companies and some of the AI startups to try to get a series of voluntary guidelines in place. They have reached an agreement. And so basically all of these companies have agreed to some kind of third party oversight to make sure that the AI they put out is safe. It can be trusted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I think the devil's in the details. We don't know what the third party would be. I don't think it's necessarily a government entity. There's still no legislation.
Starting point is 00:58:40 We have seen the downsides of voluntary agreements before, but I don't know. It seems like a decent step forward. It feels like everybody is approaching this. Everybody in government, I mean, is approaching this as the attitude of if we were going to rerun the social media era, knowing what we know now, what would we do differently? Right. And I think that. Yeah, you get that sense. Right. We really wish that when Facebook and Twitter and YouTube had come about, we had gotten some, even if it's just a verbal on-your-honor agreement about vague principles, getting something from the companies before the technology is entrenched, before it is built into our lives and is lucrative so the companies won't want to change things, some sort of dedication to like vague principles and the ones here are very vague it's like risks of to
Starting point is 00:59:25 biosecurity and cyber security um and watermarks to distinguish between real and ai generated images sure yeah but it feels like it's just getting something down just to establish the premise that we should all be publicly agreeing to the kind of basic guardrails for humanity's well-being. That said, we did also learn from the social media era that you can get agreements, you can have legislation, you can have laws on the books, and the companies will still violate them willingly and at a huge scale if they think that there's money in it, which I'm sure people in the Biden administration know. I'm sure they're aware of that. So it's something, but I don't think it's going to fix anything.
Starting point is 01:00:09 Yeah. They're pulling the levers they can at this stage. Exactly. Right. All right. Finally, we have chosen to talk about an online lefty discourse so divisive and acrimonious that it led to a New York Magazine piece by Eric Levitz. A very long New York Magazine piece. 2,400 words. york magazine piece by eric levitz a very long new york magazine piece 2400 words with the headline will there be bananas under socialism uh max i hold you responsible for bringing this to my attention so i'm so sorry okay so let me i'll give you the like basic explanation and then i'll say like what the actual debate is then we can talk about like what this means about online discourse, which is nothing good because it is- Spoiler.
Starting point is 01:00:48 Fully, right, fully ridiculous. So a left-wing writer named Malcolm Harris tweeted, I assume under the influence, which I support. I say that with no judgment whatsoever, kind of- No, I would rather know that that be the case, that he would tweet under this influence. He tweeted that, like, obviously when we implement the full socialist revolution, the economic models, which is coming. That's right. Right around the corner. That's right. Brought to you by Twitter posters. If they post hard enough, full communism, full global communism is coming.
Starting point is 01:01:23 As the number of red roses go up, chances of the socialist revolution do too. Just if you get enough likes, that comes about. That in global communism, obviously bananas would not exist in the United States. Now, why would bananas not exist in the United States? It's not really clear because in the nature of Twitter, rather than explaining it, it was like, obviously, you fucking morons, you monsters. How could you think there would be bananas under communism? And this set off a still ongoing. I think it's because most of the bananas are produced by the global south.
Starting point is 01:01:54 And in global communism, there would be this sort of realigning where the global north would have to give up a lot and the global south would rise. So the that it's very it's very generous of you too. There were like, people got like days into the debates before people started reverse engineering. That was what I had to do. What we were actually arguing about and tellingly people arrived at wildly different explanations where it's like, it's North South equity. It's like climate change.
Starting point is 01:02:24 It's about labor rights. And so it's like furious argument between people who are saying like, obviously there could not be bananas in the world when we institute full communism. And then other people on the left saying, we have to have bananas in order to bring about the communist revolution.
Starting point is 01:02:42 And I think the actual, the like lines of the debate here, I think, tell you a lot, which is there's this long-running argument on the online left between, it's called de-growthers and pro-growthers. And the de-growthers are people who argue that primarily to combat climate change, but also because of other economic issues, we have to forcibly restructure the global economy no longer towards economic growth, which it is structured towards, and to
Starting point is 01:03:11 instead institute a controlled, deliberate, reverse of economic growth, basically like global economic depression in order to save the climate and save the global economy. And then the pro-growthers are the ones who say, actually, we need to promise people material wealth and material well-being if they are going to support the communist revolution. And I think what is one of many ironies about this is that the importing of bananas from Latin America and Southeast Asia, United States, actually has nothing to do with any of these issues. As a few economists like tried to point out to people, importing bananas is actually not that much of a climate
Starting point is 01:03:50 impact because they are brought by boat and shipping food by boat is actually like pretty low carbon impact relative to other things. And also the entire debate seemed to assume that bananas are only produced in the global south to give like little snacks to people in America. But actually, it turns out, and nobody online was aware of this, people in the global south eat bananas too. In fact, they eat most of the bananas because they are also food. And it turns out that people in the global south also eat food, which no one in this debate seemed to accept as a premise.
Starting point is 01:04:22 Not only do people in the global south... I can't believe I'm doing this. Not only do people in the global i can't believe i'm doing this not only do people in the global south eat bananas yeah they make money right by exporting bananas and selling them right that's how you buy things i mean it's so but so so eric wrote this this this very dense piece but i found it very useful so i appreciate him doing so a couple good parts from it. He said, it's difficult to have a coherent debate over this claim since we're essentially discussing an underspecified sci-fi scenario. Because Harris is seemingly making assertions about how commodity fruit production would work in a global socialist state, wherein the world economy is democratically planned, and presumably a global transfer system has radically reduced global inequalities of income intellectual property and technology and i do think that the point that he
Starting point is 01:05:11 was making this whole thing is like this none of this matters because socialism in this kind of global economy only works if you have a globalist social revolution we're not even talking about an american social revolution we're talking about talking about an american social revolution we're talking about getting all the countries around the world to have their own socialist revolution and then you can figure out how to divvy up all the bananas that are left and in that case americans were just gobbling up all the bananas because we're so we're selfish capitalists we're just eating too many bananas we would have fewer bananas and everyone else would have more bananas because certainly people aren't going to grow more bananas uh in that scenario because you're not going to get as
Starting point is 01:05:48 much money from the bananas because capitalism is gone so i have more thoughts on the economic merits of this plan but i'm going to spare both you and the listeners because we've done too much right because the the actual bananas issue is totally divorced from so i think there are like a couple of things going on here that are related to like the internet and how it's distorting our brains. I think one is that there has been a lot of online socialism desperately need to touch grass more than almost anyone else. I know that's number one for me.
Starting point is 01:06:14 In fairness, not exclusive to online search. Everybody online needs to is a universal. Although I will. This is my fault, too. When I started Crooked in 2016 2016 2017 i would frequently uh have fights with online leftists and it was the stupidest thing i've ever done and now i've muted them all in my life and who needs to touch grass more than frankly you and me these two guys right here at this table yeah i'm not throwing any stones here so there is this i think there's like a
Starting point is 01:06:39 couple of things here one is that there is this like long tendencies among elements of the super online left to try to out cosplay global communist revolutionary at each other online. And like, who is going to cosplay like Leninism harder at each other is how you're going to like win being online. And I think it is like, it's both ridiculous because it leads to all of this, like, I am more of Leninist than now, but like these completely made up hypothetical scenarios. But also if you talk to people who work at organizations like DSA, it like really derails their actual like in real life meetings because you get these people who like learn from Twitter what the left is and learn from Twitter what online organizing is. And they think that it means having these ridiculous hypothetical debates about who can do global communism the hardest on bananas. This is my, I mean, this is my biggest pet peeve about politics and being online. Right.
Starting point is 01:07:37 Is that when, and I probably said this a million times in a whole bunch of different pods, so forgive me. But like like if you meet actual real life organizers whether they are on whether they are dsa sure left center left center right crazy right all of them are more practical than any of the people in those categories who spend most of their time online who have never knocked on a fucking door, picked up a phone to try to persuade someone because they don't think – because online, you don't – there is no need to persuade anyone. All there is is a need to show how right you are and get all your friends to retweet how right you are. And everything is like my – it's all about identity in this way, which is like my identity is this opinion that I have. And that is more important than persuading anyone else that I am correct and that I'm going to move them to a
Starting point is 01:08:31 different place. And so I think a lot of the online lefty people who are mostly online really hurt the cause of the many DSA organizers that are out there in real life, trying to knock on doors and win campaigns. And that's also why I think there's a gap between politicians on the left, like an AOC or Bernie Sanders, who I think are quite successful and also quite pragmatic by comparison to the people online that now think
Starting point is 01:09:00 that they're all sellouts. Right. I think there's something else happening here too, which is this like, there's so many like, to your point, like whatever different movement or cause you were involved in, there's always a sense online when you're posted
Starting point is 01:09:14 that like, if you post hard enough about it, you will bring about the revolution. And if you just, if people who are not posting hard enough about it are counter-revolutionaries because they're not posting hard enough. And I think that does come out of this specific thing that the Arab Spring era and the Green Movement in Iran era, which is really the formative moment
Starting point is 01:09:32 for how we interact with Twitter specifically, but social media generally. And we all saw so many actual revolutions and actual mass protests that were playing out partially online because they were being live-streamed. They were being live- live posted from the protests. And I think we all got that sense because when you were online the same time something like a mass protest like Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring is happening, it feels like you're participating in it. And I think that people made the mistake that because it felt like posting was participating because there was a posting component to these actual on the ground revolutions that posting is revolution and that i really think that people
Starting point is 01:10:09 it's not just that that people think posting is revolution not posting is either you do not care right or uh it's counter to it right because then there's a lot of people now who are like oh there's this big news event happened or this big injustice happened. And this person who was prominent and not even like that prominent anymore, somewhat prominent on up, has not said anything about it. And that person is a coward. And there's just like,
Starting point is 01:10:37 we've talked about this a lot too, like politics has become a hobby. Yes, hobbyism is very intertwined with this. Right, and it's like the online takes very intertwined right and it's like the like online takes posting and i realize as a podcaster like i'm really like a little complicit in this and i acknowledge that i get it that like mashing the dopamine delivery system online starts to feel like revolution starts to feel like you're doing politics but it's not but like even if you were just a passive consumer of it it starts to look like that is what political activity is but it is
Starting point is 01:11:09 just a complete just vacuum that sucks it up and absorbs all of this energy and activity and then it goes nowhere so the entire reason we did vote save america when we started crooked because i was like we cannot just be a progressive media company of posters yeah that's just not it's not going to do much right it's going to have some effect right you can persuade people that's what we're trying to do but unless we like actually go do this in real life right it's going to be a problem which people definitely are forgetting more and more speaking of um touching grass hold on I have to pull this up here just can't believe we're doing this i used to be an investigative reporter john austin our feelers producer really wanted us to talk about cat turd
Starting point is 01:11:55 unfortunately he's probably right cat turd uh who we all know of course i'm saying cat turd too thank you very much full title put some respect i Give us full title. Put some respect on him. I don't even know how to describe him. He's like an Elon fanboy. He's become a super poster. He's become a super poster. He's a conservative. Right.
Starting point is 01:12:13 Kind of a leader of the like pro-Elon right-wing Twitter. Yeah, like I think he sort of doesn't like Trump. He was like a DeSantis fan, but now he's sort of souring on DeSantis. I think he's a Trump guy. Is he a Trump guy now again? I think he's a Trump guy, yeah. Okay.
Starting point is 01:12:25 I don't know if it was DeSantis or Trump. He he's sort of souring on DeSantis. I think he's a Trump guy. Is he a Trump guy now again? I think he's a Trump guy, yeah. Okay. I don't know if it was DeSantis or Trump. He had strong feelings about one of them. I scrolled through his feed, and it was the post that we're going to talk about, about how he's going to vote Trump no matter who it pisses off. And also a lot of retweeting the fake AOC account, which of course has a blue checkmark on it. And he has 1.8 million followers on Twitter. That's encouraging.
Starting point is 01:12:45 Again, his name is Cat Turd. And he wrote this long post with way too many characters. He used up all the characters that his blue check mark allow him. Is there still a limit if you have a blue check? John, tell us about blue check.
Starting point is 01:12:57 Well, I haven't gone past the limit because no one needs to read that many words on Twitter. But his was very long about how he's exhausted mentally and physically this cat turd thing has been a five-year roller coaster ride for all of us for all of us i don't even know how i got here i often ask why me i don't know how i've gained such a large following sometimes i think it's mostly luck and then he goes into his life and he's had this difficult life and he's a lot of things he's dealt with and stuff like that and there was i think there was some ptsd and he was in this military and blah blah anyway and uh and then at the end he's basically like hey guys i just i just
Starting point is 01:13:35 want to thank you all for making this work and stuff like that and i don't know what else to say about it all these people started replying to him mike flynn general crazy mike flynn queuing on mike flynn right he's like cat turd we got your back senator mike lee republican senator from utah is like cat turd you make every day better thank you for this i don't fuck it so i think that this is actually a reminder of something that we have known for a while, but have like struggled to confront head on because it's so weird and so crazy. But online super posters are increasingly cultural elites in the way that seriously, in the way that like a major religious figure might have been in years past or like a major entertainment figure might have been. And like politicians need to court those cultural leads. But that is disturbing because now they are people not picked because they have a lot of influence in an actual community, but because they were
Starting point is 01:14:33 selected by an algorithm or knew how to play into an algorithm that incentivizes outrage and posting. And that means that that's what our culture is selecting for. And that's what our politics are selecting for. And by the way, these people are frequently, it started with them being quoted in actual news stories, like Twitter user X says this, as if it like, yeah, matters in some kind of big way. Sure. And it's gone from that to what like, Cat Turd had a fucking profile of him. Did he really? Yeah, there was a profile. It was a big profile of Cat Turd. That's where we are right now. The glossy magazine covers for,
Starting point is 01:15:06 he's the cover boy for Vanity Fair. I can't, I can't do anymore. I can't do anymore Cat Turd. That's all the time we have for today. I want to thank
Starting point is 01:15:14 Madeline Ashby and I want to especially thank Cat Turd for just doing what he's doing. I want to thank the Banana Discourse.
Starting point is 01:15:21 All the banana posters out there, thank you for your service in the revolution. Guess what I had this morning did you have a banana I did yeah you fucking neoliberal
Starting point is 01:15:28 shell well that's very own brand for me enjoyed every last bite all right bye everyone offline is a crookedoked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher.
Starting point is 01:15:51 Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Rachel Gajewski, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. All right, we got a new offline product, everyone.
Starting point is 01:16:23 We have revealed our incredibly troubling screen time stats on the show, but we know we're not the only ones addicted to giving Tim Cook money, so we made something just for you. The new offline phone case says, Help, I'm scrolling and I can't look up. And it's available now in the Crooked store. You can pick one up for yourself, or you can give it to a friend who you want to shame.
Starting point is 01:16:43 We have learned how powerful shame is here on Offline. So get off your phone, but not before you go to Cricut.com to check these out. I'd say they're about 100 times cooler than the phone case with the clown on it that we used during the challenge. So pick one up. It should be fun. Cricut.com.

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