The Bill Simmons Podcast - The "Infocalypse," Conspiracies, and the Future of the Internet With BuzzFeed's Charlie Warzel (Ep. 334)

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

HBO and The Ringer's Bill Simmons is joined by BuzzFeed senior writer Charlie Warzel to discuss the information war on the internet (6:00), the power of conspiracies (17:00), the idea of internet vigilantes (22:00), translating computer crimes into movies (38:00), misusing the internet (52:00), and the power of Twitter (1:02:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Bill Simmons Podcast on the Ringer Podcast Network brought to you by ZipRecruiter. 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate through the site in just one day. Their powerful technology distributes your job to dozens and dozens of the web's leading job boards, then identifies the right people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job. My listeners can try it for free.

You know where. ZipCruiter.com slash BS. Meanwhile, Belvedere Vodka, the world's finest all-natural vodka produced in one of the world's longest-running distilleries, crafted by a collective of master distillers. Belvedere made with non-GMO Polish rye, pure water, no additives. Recognized for quality.

ISC World Vodka Producer of the Year, 15, 16, and 17 this decade. Enjoy a delicious cocktail with Belvedere vodka today. Remember to always drink responsibly. If you missed my column about Anthony Davis on TheRinger.com, it went up on Friday.

If you missed all of our awesome Oscars coverage and our post-game show, you can get that on Twitter. The Sunday post-game show with Fantasy Dobbins, Ryan Greenwald. Also available on The Watch Podcast. And don't forget about One Shining Podcast this week. The March Madness.

I call it The March Madness. It's coming up. And if you want to know who to pick go with the dudes we had on Friday's podcast Tate and Titus they told you Michigan was a sleeper Michigan won the boring Big Ten tournament congrats Tate

I'm proud you did it yeah we did it go blue hang your head high out to the victors we're not going to talk about fish sex movies today thank God

we are going to talk about some smart internet stuff but first in memoriam, Pearl Jam. It's a, uh, it's a boring time of the year right now. We're a week away from madness. We just had the Oscars basketball. We're about two weeks away from award discussion. Hockey, eh, next month. Baseball hasn't really kicked in yet. We're going to talk about internet culture.

Charlie Warzel from BuzzFeed. We've circled this podcast for a while. Yeah. How long have you been writing for BuzzFeed? Almost five years exactly. And your job has evolved over that time. And over the last 18 months, I think you have one of the most interesting jobs of any writer right now with the stuff you're covering. Not just some of the biggest companies we have, not in America, but in the world.

But also like the impact that it's having on day-to-day society is genuinely frightening. You wrote a piece, I think two weeks ago about the information apocalypse. Yeah. And by a guy who had warned us about the fake news phenomenon. And this guy is basically like, things are really bad. Nobody understands how bad they are right now and where this is going, but we are in a true danger point when when you publish something like that does it come and go do people read it for a day and then they move on to another thing like do people realize the impact of that piece so that one was actually i mean it's really an outlier

like really and truly surprising in terms of i usually feel writing for five years for like an internet-centric publication we you know i good sense, usually, of how something's going to travel and the impact it's going to have. And this was, you know, I thought it was really interesting. This guy scared the shit out of me when I talked to him. Give the 30-second synopsis of what he said. So this researcher, he's an MIT grad, incredibly smart guy named Aviv Ovidaya. He has worked for some of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. researcher. He's an MIT grad, incredibly smart guy named Aviv Ovidaya. He is a, you know,

has worked for some of the tech companies in Silicon Valley. He had a, he quit his job about four months before the election because he was just sort of noticing that like the incentives structure of the internet, it basically rewards sensationalism. There's no real checks and balances to these companies to make sure they're not, people like, say, I don't know, Russia to advertise on the platform and try to influence the outcome of an election. He sort of saw this stuff in a very vague way. And since he's in Silicon Valley, he's plugged in, he's talking to people. And he said, holy shit. And so he actually gave- So when he has the holy shit moment, he actually gave so what's when he has the

holy shit moment where does he go who does he talk to he started talking to some like research institutions he talked to columbia university uh he's doing some work at the university of michigan but mostly he was trying to talk to the people at the companies at facebook at yahoo right youtube google and he gave a couple of presentations in silicon valley one of them was in october before the election and he called it the infocalypse the information apocalypse great name yeah not as good as carmageddon which we had out here which i thought was a great title but the yeah that one's good decent portmanteau um and so he uh he gave this presentation and it was sort of like these guys were like,

yeah, it's interesting. There's no real hard science behind it. It's a gut feeling, like good name. Yeah, sorry. Would you like a free meal at our giant cafeteria? Right, exactly. See you later. He was pretty dismayed by that, and then obviously the election happened.

He basically said that three, four, five days after, he started to get people calling him up and saying, hey, this is going on. We believe you now. And so I met him probably, I don't know, a year after that or close to. And the first conversation we had, I always sort of ask people, what keeps you up at night? Because I just think that people are usually very guarded when they answer that and he just like out the gates just started saying all these things started talking about these terms that he was coining like you know uh one of them is called uh automated laser fishing which is basically like instead of getting those like crappy you know ph, phishing emails or Nigerian Prince email scams, it's like an AI generated scam. It's like an email that's

coming not just from someone who looks like it might be your mom or your brother or your sister, but it actually, it's coming with information from them that's pertinent to the conversations you've had. My mom and my wife have almost gotten nailed by this a couple times now. It's really getting more and more sinister. And imagine if, you know, so say it was with you. It took all the information from all the columns you've ever written, all of your tweets, all of those things, and basically put it into a learning algorithm.

Yeah. And then spit out information so it's talking like you. It's, you know, it's sending an email to's you know it's sending and you know an email to tate about something that was you know in your guys's tate would know tate's too smart you can't fool tate he's from carolina and so you know it's just basically like what he was saying is you think it's bad now this is you know we're in the first ending here right well i've noticed um people have been writing about what's happening in porn not Not to go blue, but there's this how to digitally put her face on somebody else, and it looks like her,

and this is the creepiest thing that's ever happened. Yeah. So there's sort of like a maxim on the internet, which is that all technology kind of starts, like all the great technological innovations of the internet start with porn, and then sort of bleed in everything else. And then move everywhere else. So that makes a lot of sense. the internet start with porn right and then sort of like bleed in everything else so uh so that

makes a lot of sense but yeah there's these it's uh it's a subreddit that reddit has gotten rid of now uh called deep fakes and it's basically oh thanks reddit thanks for getting rid of that but they have they have like a they have a non-porn one which is just called something else fakes i don't know what the name is, but like where people are taking, they're putting Nicolas Cage's face on every like old movie star. So like, you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Terminator clips with Nicolas Cage's face.

And it's fun and it's interesting, but like when you kind of zoom out back on that, you're like, oh, any dipshit with 80 bucks and you know, a decent processor and two hours of spare time to learn this can do that. I went on YouTube and I watched a tutorial. I mean, it's not point and click easy yet, but it's like anyone who wants to can start to do this.

And the whole nature of artificial intelligence and machine learning stuff is basically that it's going to get better faster and faster exponentially. Well, and the fear is, I mean, it's a fear now. But like, you know, you could put anybody's face on a porn and stuff like that. But eventually, we're going to get to a point where you can take the audio of somebody or, you know, you could even hack into their email with audio or hack into their Twitter or hacking anything. And you could do it with somebody who has real power and pretend that they're saying something that they never said, which, you know, with the worst case scenario of this would be,

we end up in a nuclear war because of something that was a deep fake. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and also like the thing that's really scary about this, um, for, you know, for Monday morning is the, is the combination of all of this different stuff. So you have the audio manipulation. So I can say, manipulate. It sounds like your wife is leaving you a voicemail that's very urgent and needs you to, I don't know, send money or Venmo me something.

Or come to this place. Come here in 10 minutes and you go there and five guys are waiting for you and they rob you. And it's just sort of how all these things piggyback off themselves. And that's the true sort of scary thing is all this happening in tandem. And then what it does and what this guy Aviv was telling me is it creates this thing that he's calling, again, he's very good at coining terms, reality apathy. is really high-level, good spam, you can't differentiate between an email from someone on your staff to whatever, then you're just eventually going to stop checking your inbox

because it's just too hard. Or we end up almost like the email version of Google Docs where only people who have been approved to email you and have some sort of encrypted encrypted email account those are the only emails you get which is weird too because that means you'd never be able to hear from anybody outside your little bubble and we would our bubbles would become even you know more intense yeah yeah exactly and i mean and there are ways right now that people are thinking of you know to encrypt things or like digitally

watermark something really good like that's sort of what a lot of people who are into like the bitcoin crypto like space think they can use that technology to to do that to authenticate but it's also what's striking is you talk to some of these people out there who seem like they should be the experts and they're like oh i don't know man i don't know what we're gonna do it's like yeah holy shit you know like we're just we really are with a lot of this technology just making it up on the fly and that's great for like for innovation but it's like we're seeing what this is doing well there's no criminal there's no criminal ramifications really at this point right yeah there's no law being written it's not like the administration we have right now not to get too political but it's not like trump's gonna be like i got this guys right you know

like i was looking today so we're taping this monday morning and there was a story that brian windhorse wrote on espn.com about the nba and about how Adam Silver is proactively trying to figure out how to help high school basketball. Like this is now a crisis. I see it. The AAU culture is messed up. College basketball, that culture is messed up. Nobody likes the one and done.

It's rampant cheating. And we're doing a disservice to guys who are eventually going to come into our league and might have 15 year careers and are going to be assets for us. We have to get involved now. We have to get involved at the high school level. I mean, he's laying out the blueprint for complete change with how we know basketball. I don't see anybody in our government even having the wherewithal or the foresight to do. I'm not just talking about Trump.'m talking about anybody democrats like who is the debt people always complain about the

republicans and trump all that stuff but it's not like the democrats have emerged like these great voices have emerged on that side either who is going to be the voices that fight for this stuff i mean it's it's really it's really hard i so that story that we initially talked about, I went to Washington as like the first stop in that story. Didn't end up using anything because the meetings that I had with people were just sort of like, oh yeah, you know, we're thinking about it.

You know, there's no real, I think like the state department just announced there's like gonna be a cybersecurity initiative thing, but it's very vague. It's very weird. It would seem like a cyber department would be the single most important department this country could have at this point other than homeland security it's it's i mean it's really wild when you talk to people not only is not only is there just like the bureaucracy element of washington but there's just like

this idea that it's not it's not even on their radars. And I think we kind of saw a little of that. A lot of the senators, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter came in front of Congress in October and had to testify about all the Russia stuff. And I mean, they were awful. But you had a lot of senators you could just see were working through like the very basics of this and like really hung up on like russia advertising on facebook and it's like okay you know they spent i don't know 180 grand or something yeah complete drop in the bucket the real problem is all the stuff that's you know not coming from a state government it's all of the other like

morass of information and crap and so what i i mean what i saw there was sort of like you have a lot of people who are trying to come to terms with this but we have we're sort of in this in between sort of generation of a lot of lawmakers right now that sort of like maybe didn't grow up with the internet necessarily. And they're like trying to understand this, but we really need people who are like, Trump doesn't use the internet, you know? Like, and I was thinking about this sort of, you know, the other day. That should be sort of, not trying to be political about this at all,

just as a statement of fact, the leader of the free world should know how to use the internet. Probably. That just seems like a qualification that makes sense to me. It seems like for anything to get fixed, changed, solved, anything, we're going to need the power brokers in this country to get together.

Like, I think a very small example of what we're talking about here is after when the Me Too stuff broke, and eventually we're talking about how do we treat people in the workplace? And Bob Iger, Zuckerberg, all these different people, they formed that, I forget what the committee was called, but there was like 20 of them, and it was 20 of the most powerful people we have in America. And they were like, we're going to start a dialogue about this. Let's try to fix this. What's crazy to me is those same people haven't decided to get together

and mobilize behind this infopocalypse. Infocalypse? Infocalypse. It almost sounds a little dirty. Because this is, I think we're going to remember this decade. It's 2018. We got two years left, then we go in the 2020s. I think we're going to remember this decade for social media and

fake news and and uh and those would be the two things that stand out when we're like oh what was that decade about and it was like that was the decade when social media became out of control and when we lost our minds and when it became possible to make up something about anybody like i look at you've been writing about a little little bit about one of the Parkland high school kids, David Hogg. Yeah. Is it Hogg or Fogg? Hogg. Yeah, yeah.

David Hogg. And anytime this happens, I go to the Reddit conspiracy page. I don't take it seriously. I'm always kind of interested to see what people are flipping out about. I have some JFK assassination conspiracy theories. So I always go on there to see what people are flipping out about. I have some JFK assassination conspiracy theories. So I always go on there to see if they're talking about that.

And they're adamant that this was some paid child actor pretending to be a Parkland high school student and now Reddit has to keep taking it down. They had to put something at the top of the conspiracy page. There's YouTube clips left and right about this kid. It's like some poor 17 year old kid who just watched 17 of his classmates get gunned down and this is how we're spending our time um i don't know it's i just think we're in a dark place it is it's super dark i mean it there's i think too that you know this sort of conspiracy stuff that that you find yourself interested in jfk like that stuff has taken such a dark turn with the internet and it's sort of i i wrote about this after the boston

marathon bombing and all that stuff that was happening on the reddit you know find boston bombers conspiracy page and it which which by the way they they claimed to find the guy and it wasn't the person yeah and it's just this huge and it wasn't the person. Yeah. And it's just this huge, like it was on the front page of a New York tabloid, their botched investigation. And I really thought a lot then about this, the rise of internet vigilante detectives. And it's just sort of, it's become this thing that I guess people feel like they have some, they've been trained on so much access to information for the last I don't know decade and there's sort of this expectation now and it keeps getting more and more intense of I need to have all the information right now it's like with the um the Devin Nunes congressional memo thing that happened for a while it's like

this idea that like no no, even classified information, I deserve to have access to that. And that combined with sort of the communities that you can build around anything on the internet and sort of the unmoderated nature of it, it just creates this like really dark, weird situation where people are just like, if it doesn't make sense to me, then there's something wrong with it

and I can find 20 people and we're just going to go nuts on it. Well, I always feel like there's an art form to it to some degree. I hate to use the word art, but where you take something that there's a seed of doubt and you just blow it out. And I always felt like 9-11

was the sea change moment for that. When people were like, you you know you've hundreds of witnesses and it's broadcast live on tv a plane going in a building and then you have people like now the plane didn't go in the building yeah it's like what the plane went in the building there's people underneath it who watched the plane go to the building there's videos from all different places um but i think it's got it's gotten weirder and weirder and weirder and yet at the same time you mentioned how people feel entitled to have this information i felt that way when trump didn't release all the jfk stuff there was that last group of of files

that it was like all right these are the good ones these are going to be the ones that prove i've always thought the cia was in killing them. I think there's a shitload of evidence that says that they were. And it was like, here we go. And then Trump, for one of the rare times at his presidency, actually kind of backed down and didn't do it. But I get it. I get the feeling

of being entitled to get information. But it seems like this loud minority slash I'm involved with all these other people who see something that I see and let's all get together and we'll go get this person or we'll go get the truth. It's getting scarier. I like the internet vigilante thing. It's good. Yeah.

You should coin that one. I wrote something in like I think 2013 or – but it's gotten so much worse. And you see it in this like really. Web vigilantes. Yeah. You see it in these weird ways to like, that are, that are productive. Like, I don't know if you saw the Netflix documentary, The Keepers, which is like came out over the summer.

It sounds familiar. And it's these women from like Baltimore or outside of Maryland who there's like a Catholic catholic high school priest oh yeah yeah and like these 45 year old women basically like start a facebook group that's like we want you know justice for this thing we want to and finding found all these different survivors and basically like you know these this documentary crew followed them but it's the same sort of like the great thing about the internet is it's this like value neutral thing like people are always now on like oh the internet's bad or

the internet's good and it's just like no i mean you can track down you know old cold cases of you know rampant child molestation in a school or or, you know, you can call the Parkland teens crisis actors. It's, it's, you know, it's all depending on how you use it, but we're the one constant is that we're getting more sophisticated at constructing these narratives and making them more appealing to more people. I don't want to embarrass him, but Tate's in a group, this group that believes that Coach K fakes his injuries when the team isn't that good. No, I started the group. You started the group.

I didn't want to out you as starting it, but he started it. Coach K deep fakes? It's in the deep, deep, deep, deep web for Reddit. We have all types of videos. All types of videos of like him claiming to have a back injury, but he's playing golf that same week. Del audio it's amazing oh man this is a loose change the uh the the parkland thing which you wrote about recently yeah um that was why every time there's a school shooting and then conspiracies start after i always think about like what if my

kid was at that school and my kid got gunned down or shot and I'm searching for information three days later and I'm completely traumatized. And then I find this place where people are telling me either, A, it didn't happen or B, one of my daughter's friends was a crisis actor. And I can't even imagine the pain that would be. And we're just not, we don't seem to be governing that and we don't seem to really care. Yeah. And I don't know how you govern it.

I don't know how you govern it either, but I mean, I think one, so what I wrote about with the Parkland teens and I think this is like sort of the hopeful element of all of this is that, so I write a lot about like what i'm loosely called the pro-trump media which is like you know it includes a lot of the conspiracy actors but it's people who are just like unabashedly pushing the trump agenda everything yeah is good and and trying to

basically turn everything on the internet into a culture war and not all of them but some of the publications and personalities behind it really push this crisis actor thing and including like alex jones from info wars and um and when this happens you know people just rightly so get outraged about yeah and usually the people who are like being accused get really indignant about it again totally understandable and these teens were just like, yeah, screw you. And just like the term that people use is just dunking on them on Twitter and just sort of like quote retweeting their stuff and just like adding some like sick teen burn, you know, just sort of like.

I like when they do the words, like when they talk about the kids and the kids like they write like kids yeah like like being condescending back at the people gee thanks with like yeah yeah yeah with like you know crying emoji like laughing crying emoji like and it's just this sort of like dismissal that it's really it was really something different in terms of like how people treat these trolls because the trolls are looking for a reaction people often because we're so charged up right now and so you know so many people are just always upset that they they play into that yeah quote unquote feed the trolls and these kids were just sort of like they stripped it of all of its power they were just like like oh i like there's one girl who, when they were saying,

there's 10 crisis actors or whatever, and she's like, thanks for pointing out all my doppelgangers. I've always wanted to go to a party with 10 people that look like me. And just like, LOL. And these conspiracy theorist guys, these shock jocks, whatever, they don't know how to handle that. It's a combination of trolling and sarcasm. I liked what you made.

That was a really good angle. I'm the king of angles. I respect the great angles. But what you wrote in that piece, you're basically like, these kids were trained to do this. This generation that they're in, they've been watching trolling, and they have all these internet weapons that they've been learning in the last six, seven years to just mock this stuff.

So it's almost like information gorillas. Yeah, well, it's like the Bane thing. It's like, you know, I didn't adopt the darkness. I was born into it. It's like I was born into the internet. Yeah, it's like getting a glass of water from them to mock this stuff. It's a reflex.

And so I think that there's two ways to look at that, right? One of them is like, it's really heartening. The kids are all right. The other is sort of like the kids are are like born with information warfare into their dna like god help us yeah like it's like some of those people are gonna use their powers yeah and not the parkland people but other kids who grew up the same way 10 years from now who knows yeah and i so i mean i think like we just we just don't we don't know how any of this is going to play out but like that right there that whole you know what happened

at parkland and in the week after like it's sort of a preview of how the internet has really i know this is just what i think about all day is just like what is this what how is this weird social experiment that we've been on for 20 years like how is this affecting us and every you know look what happened with the nra though like all these advertisers that pulled out including a couple that have sponsored this podcast and it happened because of the pressure that was started by the parkland kids. And I think when all of this was going on, we were hoping that at some point somebody was going to use a real tragedy like this as a platform to try to change some things

about the country that aren't good. Like not to get too far into guns here, but I think it's crazy to be able to buy an AR-15 that anybody can go get one and be able to get off 200 rounds in one minute or whatever it is. I don't even understand the counterargument for that. I get the whole point of arming yourself and guns. That's a whole different debate.

I just don't understand why somebody needs 200 rounds of anything. That's not like fighting a war for us. But the way they were able to really, really push and fight back was inspiring. And I think we'd kind of been waiting for somebody to do this. And now we have this march on March 24th. And my fear is that this eventually dies down

and then it goes to something else. On the other hand, Emma Gonzalez has like 1.2 million Twitter followers now. And she probably had what, 40? Like a month and a half ago? So something's happening. Well, this speaks to what we were just talking about with the teens.

Like, you know, if you, I'm not trying to bring Logan or Jake Paul into this really, but like- Oh, I want to do that later. So yeah, I'm ready to have that talk. But in terms of, you know, understanding how to make things go viral like understanding that culture living in it growing up having that be like the main thing

that you consume for entertainment those like the problem has always been post these shootings these these things is like you said it just dies out after a couple of days we just have to move on because that's the way that news and whatever our psyches whatever how it happens but the like that's what going viral like what these kids they know how to keep something going how to keep it alive how to just keep it in front of our faces and that's you know that's the real testament that's the thing that it's harder for people of who grew up with a different type of media and news cycle it's hard for them to keep up with that it's hard for them to know how to make it fresh and new every day it's but like these these kids and i'm sure you know like i i know that we like buzzfeed reported a lot of organizations have like kind of glommed onto them

you know sort of been like how can how can how can we help you guys out? But they're leading the charge because they know how to make this relevant and just never like let it die out of that spotlight. I mean, and maybe after the march, it'll just have to. But they're doing this great job and they know it's just it's really just like manipulation of, you know, of a news cycle, and they're using it for a really positive thing. I don't know if it dies down because it's too easy now to... It's the era of the loud minority. It's too easy now to really mobilize for good or for bad,

and in this case, for good in a lot of ways. You can keep that going. You can keep pushing and you can keep applying pressure. My question is, who's actually going to listen to the pressure? I think the pressure is going to be there. Does it actually change for the better? Are there any, not to get too weird but are there any conspiracies out there that you actually find yourself going ah i can i can see a little bit of that one because like for me um i see what's going on with the coverage of the vegas shooting these last few months and it's like it is kind of weird there's no there's no videos yet they haven't released a lot of information yet and i don't i don't feel like there's been a lot of transparency with what

happened i still don't totally understand what happened when they actually shot the guy what um why haven't they released some of the stuff yet or maybe they shouldn't maybe it's too gory or whatever but it doesn't seem like there are a lot of answers. This is hard for me only because I follow a lot of these professionally, these people who are these conspiracy theorists. These maniacs, yeah. A lot of them are dark people. Yeah. And so my Twitter timeline is half mainstream and just like way out there, which is tough.

But it's hard for me because I see the same people who put forward those questions, who have a lot of those questions say about Vegas. And then, you know, the next moment they're, you know, berating somebody, you know, on social media about something strange or, you know, calling someone a cuck or something weird like that. And so it's just hard to like square those two things with, hey, there's something that may, you know, maybe doesn't add up with these people. But I think, I mean, I think what, I spent some time last spring profiling Alex Jones. Yeah. Who's like, you know, America's conspiracy theorist in chief.

And I listened to hours and hours and hours of his broadcast. Oh, God. And, I mean, we're talking like 100 hours of his broadcast. And would drive around listening to him on the radio. And he's, I mean, he's really, I don't want to use the word genius, but he is, like the way that his mind. You can use the word effective. Yeah. He's so effective at piecing together these things, at taking something that like is completely understandable.

Something that we just don't know, that we're not allowed to see. And he's able to spin it. It's so great how he how he constructs these narratives and what he also tends to do too is he knows now and all these people do on the internet these internet vigilantes they know how these cycles work so they can preempt things and gain credibility so they can be like you know oh i think you know in in the next two months there's going to be a huge school shooting because we need another false flag or something. But they just know because there's probably – because we have a problem in America.

Odds are. There's going to be – and they use this to gain these little bits of credibility. And so I was going back through the research and there's this like seven months or six months or something before 9-11. Alex Jones went on the radio and predicted something at the World Trade Center was going to happen. And so that is like held up by people who believe him as like he knew. But he knew. But he probably predicted 300 things, right? Yeah.

You just, you know, you take a lot of shots. Yeah. And nobody remembers the misses. That's kind of what Skip Bayless does. There you go. Yeah, I mean, this has been adopted. There's definitely like conspiracy theory like bleed into the mainstream

in not harmful ways necessarily all the time. It's just like, it's like part of the hot take, you know, culture of everything. Hey, we gotta take a break to talk about March Madness. Speaking of madness, March is here, which means one thing, it's bracket time. Yahoo Sports, turn your pick-em. The best place to fill out your bracket

all through the Yahoo Fantasy app. Joining a public group is easy, or create a group and play with your friends, or join Draymond Green's group for a shot at 25,000. Don't know your college hoops? Choose one of the autofill brackets. Pick coaches with the highest winning percentage or party schools or totally rebel

and pick least popular picks. There's no wrong way to fill out a bracket in Yahoo Sports Tourney. Pick them. Tate. Yeah. You doing a one shining pod bracket? We are.

We made one. You made one? Yeah. Can people enter it? They have to wait a week, right? No, you can enter it now. Sign up. One shining podcast? I think it's something like that i don't know i didn't make it personally but a group has been made check out uh at one shining pod which is our twitter handle for that and you can go head to head against tate and titus i don't

recommend it but you can do it don't miss out on march badness get your bracket in before the games tip off march 15th also speaking of Yahoo, fantasy baseball in full swing. You play fantasy baseball, Charlie? No. A lot of fantasy baseball in Montana? There's a lot of minor league baseball in Montana. It's time to start thinking about your fantasy baseball drafts. This is the greatest fantasy baseball year of all time

because the Angels have somebody who's a pitcher and an outfielder, Otani. And nobody knows what to do in their league. Does he count as one person? Do we split them up? Flex your skills as a real GM. Crush your league with the Yahoo Fantasy app. The number one mobile app in fantasy baseball. Draft trade.

Manage your team right from your phone. The new weekly scoring format makes it even easier to run your team all season. Use the set active players feature to set your lineup for the week in one tap. Sign up now at yahoo.com slash fantasy baseball. Create your own league. Join a public league. Do whatever you want. Don't miss out on this baseball season.

Yahoo Fantasy Baseball, the official fantasy game of major league baseball. Would you say that we're in peak conspiracy culture right now, Charlie? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I imagine it's only going to get worse. I'd love to know when this started. It does feel like JFK was the seminal, the first time everybody kind of looked at each other and said,

wait a second. Because then you see like the movies in the 70s, which had to do with i think the jfk assassination and and some of the other great people that were murdered that decade and then on top of it watergate nixon and then you look at this era that of movies that people were pumping out basically from like 73 through 79 and three from three days in the condor all the president's men all these kind of somebody's marathon man. I know something.

The bad guys are coming to kill me. And it's been going ever since. And now we are in conspiracy culture. What's weird is we don't have movies yet that have really effectively – I remember Mel Gibson made a movie that was actually called Conspiracy Theory, and it wasn't very good. But I wonder if Hollywood is now going to move into this whole world i mean they should this is always like the not always but this is one problem i think with the internet is how it's tough to

translate it to tv you know like a bunch of online vigilante detectives computers are tough yeah computers are tough as we found out in black hat yeah and so yeah but i mean it's it's totally right for it i mean i think it's fascinating you know if you look at there's just been so much interest in like in watergate with that like there was a the slate podcast about it i was jealous of that that one. Then you have a lot of people re-watching and talking about and writing about all the president's men. By the way, Cinemax is definitely trolling everyone. They show that all the time.

I feel like they bought a lease of all the president's men. They're just constantly putting it on. And it's actually getting better somehow, 43 years later. It's very relevant. And even The Post sort of has a little bit of a deal in that. somehow 43 years later it's very it's very relevant um and and you know like even the post sort of has like a little bit of a deal in that um it kind of half-assed it but yeah and and i wish they had gone further and so i think that i i do think that you know with the success of something like spotlight like i i think there's going to be like a lot of journalism stuff to maybe come out of this or some sort of enterprising.

I think political thrillers, we're going to see some more of those, even if they're fictional. I don't mean to get dramatic, but the people you're writing about are incredibly powerful and wealthy. And in some cases, you could make the argument that they're making their you're making their business look bad like do you worry about your safety at all no no no um i think no i mean no can i what can i worry about your safety if you want i mean these i think if we're talking about if we're talking about like the, the pro Trump media types, like the Alex Jones types of the world, I mean, this is the difficulty of writing reporting on them in any way is they're looking for attention too.

So you have to find the right way to do this. Like to, you know, like I've had to write about, you know, like neo-Nazis a couple of times. Like, um. We had those people in sports too. I don't want to name any names, but the any attention is good attention. Yeah. Philosophy is pretty dangerous.

And so what you have to do is you have to figure out like how to bring this to an audience, contextualizing it in the right way, not giving them what they desire. When, you know, like. Have some sort of balance and fairness at the same time you're crushing them. Yeah, I mean, like, the... I talk to a lot of people who don't talk to a lot of other mainstream journalists. And the one way that I've sort of gotten, like, in with that crowd to some degree is that I just simply, like, I ask them i asked them so like how do you want to be identified are you alt-right are you this are you that are you you know like and then i just i say

how they want to be identified and i qualify i don't immediately call them a nazi because you know they voted for trump or something like that and that's a good philosophy i like that and it's just you know so they get to be called what they want to be called but then i also wrap it around all this context of like so this guy says he's you know part of the quote-unquote new right and he went to charlottesville and he did that you know it's like so to some extent there's it it's not actually that hard to to do it but there's a reflex right now in a lot of reporting to you know to be to have like a real perspective on some of this stuff and sometimes really all that you need to do is to shine a light on it and just let people you know um make up their minds and that's sort of the way

to get them to talk um who do you think, let's go YouTube versus Facebook versus Google, who should be the most ashamed of their performance over the last two years? Google owns YouTube. Well, I'm talking about like the mechanism of Google. Yeah, the three services. Because I would argue Facebook because it seems like they knew the whole time. Not to sound like Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight, but they knew! They definitely knew what was going on.

And they just kind of all looked around and shrugged their shoulders. At the same time, YouTube is really a dark place. And some of the child pornography stuff that was going on that you wrote about that, right? But that was that was going on. Now, this is where the Reddit conspiracy page does some good. They were on that. They were on that. Child porn stuff early.

I had no idea. It's terrifying. It was like, honestly, the amount of content that was just on there that they did jack shit about. They should be ashamed of themselves. I feel a lot like the Mark Ruffalo character these days. A lot. But yeah, I mean, you have sort of two different things. Like Facebook has sort of created to me a culture of,

Facebook has sort of changed the internet, it to sort of subsume the internet to some degree you know it's just like it's so many people's actual experience and i don't think that they've done enough thinking about the ramifications of that especially with younger kids like i look at that stuff my kids watch and you know i wait till they fall asleep and then they go i go in their youtube history and stuff like that and it's it relatively tame, but there's also stuff in there. I'm like, shit. Yeah. How did they find that?

Yeah. Yeah. And so that, so YouTube to me right now is sort of my, my front runner. Um, because I really feel like the, as you were saying, how did they find that shit? The recommendation algorithm in youtube is especially for conspiracy stuff it's just it's like an automated rabbit hole you could put like fake strangling kid i i put go find that and then it leads to like really a fake strangling of of a seven-year-old kid who's screaming and seems unhappy yeah but it's even it can be even more insidious than that right like i

after the um after the vegas shooting i okay, how do we, how can I get in? How quickly can I get into a conspiracy theory with something just like reasonably, you know, tame. So I just typed in Hillary Clinton and like the first video that comes up is, you know, her on MSNBC or something. Fine. Two later, I'm in like, you know conspiracy sort of like hillary was being injected

by her bodyguard you know because she had i don't know parkinson's or something like that during the campaign and then you just keep going and then it's just like you know hillary's israel and palestine conspiracy like it just goes it doesn't even have anything to do with that anymore and that is one thing on a you know on conspiracy topics but it works for any like you know any video that you well the benevolent version is when you're searching nba games or clips and it's like michael jordan oh here's 1997 game five it's like hey i want to okay i'll watch that and that's what we like that's the fun part that's the joy of the internet yeah that is and that's sort of like that's what they've been selling and i don't mean that in like a you know a shitty way like that's what these social networks

are selling that's the product this like this great experience like things that you know going down a wikipedia rabbit hole and learning about all this different you know random stuff like that's wonderful the cop-out is put in your information if you're over 18. Oh, yeah. Which, by the way, my son is 10 and just says he's 18 and then he can watch it. But there's some dark shit on YouTube. Like, there's a politician, I think, like 40 years ago. Now I'm going to tell this story and people are going to search for it.

But this guy who on a live news conference just shot himself and killed himself. And blood is like, it's disgusting. And it's on YouTube. And it's still on there to and blood is like it's disgusting and it's on youtube and it's still on there to this day and it's very easy to find i do not recommend finding it it's really horrible um but there's a lot of stuff like that now when you get into the realm of like the reagan assassination attempt should that be on youtube like yeah actually maybe it should it's it was a really relevant news event. It was one of the transformative moments of my childhood.

I think it would be weird not to have it on YouTube. But there seems some sort of line, and I don't trust YouTube to delineate what's the line. It's so hard. And I think we just don't understand yet, or we have no sort of ground rules on the particulars of moderating stuff on the Internet. Because as you said, you get to a point where there's many clear cut things, right? Like an ISIS training video.

No place on YouTube for that, right? Right. Right. But then you get into sort of like, here's a guy talking about, you know, the like differences, parsing differences in Islam in a sort of like a political way. And it's like, well, is that, you know, is that kind of speech? Is that OK? Is that? And again, I'm speaking sort of out of my ass there on that. But in on every subject, as you know, even even with videos geared towards kids, there's always some sort of gray area sort of line. There's tons of people whose jobs it is to tow that line producing content, you know, like how titillating and exciting and weird can we make a video for kids? That's kind of messed up, but it's also okay. But, you know, but they're going to want to watch it and be freaked out by it. Like there are people who have turned that into a cottage industry

that makes thousands and thousands of dollars a day. So what do you do? And the fundamental problem right now, and I think what scares me the most about YouTube, is that 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute. What do you do? But somehow they have at least put pressure points in for porn and stuff like that. Yeah.

They have some sort of technology that it's like if you download a porn scene on YouTube, it goes down pretty much immediately. So why don't they have that same technology for other stuff that is damaging? I think it's because they're so because of these weird gray areas and they're so i mean all these companies i talk to people inside them i talk to ex-employees about all this like i i started covering all this stuff because of harassment on twitter i started writing about that after yeah Leslie Jones incident. That was horrible. And everyone is just like, when you work at these companies, you're so afraid. They're so afraid of censoring someone wrongly, of being seen as saying, well, because they believe X, Y, or Z, we have to kick them off.

There's a freedom of speech part. The founding of these companies, too, is based off of this utopian vision of the internet, of this very flat system where you can upload something from the ringer and it can get as many views as dude uploading a video from his basement because he's got a really great point of view or something like that. Or a six-year-old kid opening toys. Yeah. Which is one of my friend Chris Williams, his company Pocket Watch, their breakout star has been this six-year-old kid.

I think it's called Ryan's Toys. Wow. He just opens toys. Yeah. And people love it. And it makes a crazy amount of money and the views are insane. Yeah. And I guess that's the benevolent version.

The dark version is like, you know, a variation of that. But it's like some crazy uncle pretending to kill the kid each time. Sure. And that's on YouTube. You could probably find that. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, you can find anything um and and again it's

sort of it speaks when you go down these sort of these roads on this you can get like your mind just gets scrambled because say the unboxing video right it's a kid doing this really harmless thing meant for other kids all good and then all of a sudden you start seeing like creepy comments from you know dudes with sketchy mustaches yeah like hey on the next video can you do this this this yeah it's like or you know wear this kind of shirt a shirt and it's like so okay what do you do there obviously you delete the comment but so now you know that like these videos are you know fulfilling some kind of weird thing for somebody else and it's like well so does that make the video bad no but we clearly have a problem and it's like i mean the it all speaks to the scale

of these platforms and what's been built and the idea that like we've never had to deal with any of these problems in this type of way at this volume, at this speed, and with such serious consequences. So I truly sympathize with these companies and the people there who I know are good people trying to figure out how to deal with this. But at the same time, my unpopular opinion right now, when I get into some of these like reporting quandaries and see some of these things and hear people talk despairingly about it, I'm

almost just like, pull the plug. It's just like, I don't know how else to solve this. And obviously we're probably not better off doing that, but it's also. There's one way to solve it. This is crazy. And it was, it's a way that's been sitting there for 20 plus years. Are you going to solve the internet? No, I think the ship might have sailed at this point.

But in the late 90s, it certainly seemed like something that should have existed. And then it definitely seemed like in the 2000s. And now it's probably too late. But think about it this way. You need a driver's license to use a car. You need to pass basic competency tests to get on the road. We do not do that with the Internet because the appeal of the Internet is what you just said about it's a utopian paradise. And everything is based off this idea that, oh, this is great.

It's the information highway. highway, but the way that it's been misused and ruined over the last 20 years makes me wonder, what if we did have a driver's license for the internet? What if everybody who was on the internet, it was traceable, all your stuff, you had everything you posted on, you had your name and your ID and you were easy to find. And would that make the world a better place again now this is a utopian idea because it'll never happen but there was a point in time where it feels like that could have happened maybe and now that time's gone yeah it's definitely gone i i think i mean the closest thing to something like that and it's obviously not quite like that is what some people are doing with like the you always hear it like in the tech world like

the blockchain and this stuff like it's basically like creating a decentralized system of authentication and that that again can you explain that for 20 seconds because some people might not understand yeah it's gonna be tough um basically like the the blockchain is and i'm gonna get this wrong to some extent is a cryptographic system that basically like any anything that you do creates a transaction and it has to be verified and it's unique and so it's kind of like a lot of people, it works right now for like for money, for things like that. You know, like I can see that transaction that you made. I can never alter it. I can never change it.

I can trace it back to your unique ID. Yeah. And it's like applying that principle to everything. So, you know, maybe to the way that we browse the Internet. And so, I mean, do you have that a little bit with, you know, some of the technology behind the Internet where like your IP address, where you're coming from? You can spoof that. The blockchain's idea is that nobody owns it. It's decentralized. Nobody can change it or alter it.

And anyone can see it. And so if you apply that just very broad principle further out into the internet, there are a lot of people who talk about that technology as like internet 3.0. So we had like the Wild West sort of internet of the message boards and just like, you know, all the AOL and the portals and all the fun stuff of the 90s and early aughts. Some of us are still on AOL. Be careful. Hey, it's okay. It's okay. Don't wait down on Friday. Our editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed has a theory that you can always tell

who powerful people are by their email address. If you have an AOL or a hotmail email address, one of those things from the 90s, it's like you got popular enough, you meant enough that you couldn't change your email address. You were too important. That's what I try to tell people, even though I'm just lazy. So there you go.

By the way, AOL has never been hacked. All these DC power players have AOL emails. Yeah, I bet Obama's on AOL. I mean, maybe. Maybe. Who knows? You'd know better than I would. So that was 1.0.

What was 2.0? 2.0 is this, you know, like the social, quote unquote, social web. It's all these platforms. It's sort of like- Look at me. The reason why people don't go to, you know, like don't have a homepage, essentially. You're getting everything through your social feeds and it's chaos. Right.

And so like, you know, the next idea is sort of like this authenticated type of web. And right now it's kind of it's not a joke, but we're in this like phase where like in the tech world like people are changing their their startup names to like something something and then just adding the word blockchain to it and getting you know like 10 million dollars thrown at them by investors because nobody knows yet what it is and it's really got this like bubble mentality behind it but there is this sort of like underlying hope that like maybe we can find a way to sort of take away you know the chaos a little bit keep it free keep it open but make make people more accountable good luck yeah jesus how did you get it how did you get involved just quickly what's your backstory getting involved with all

this is this always what you want to do is write about the internet or did you run right about something else i i mean i just kind of wanted i was just watching people like starting up blogs and stuff like that and i kind of missed blogs a little bit like yeah like i had my own but it uh you know nobody read it i was like in college um and i kind of just wanted to be involved some way and so i didn't really want to be in the mix yeah i wanted to be in the mix um and no i mean but did you know you wanted to report or do you know i'm i'm not i mean it's very it's very vague like i just i too sort of think of what i do is like it's definitely reporting i'm talking to people all the time, but like angles and like framing things and big picture ideas are like,

that's sort of always what I've gravitated towards and what I really love. And I think, you know, I kind of like fell into the tech thing, but I've always just been interested in media and culture. And like technology has always just been a cheat for me. Like I don't really care about the new iPhone. I don't care about the gadget side of things like that.

But that's what tech writing became for a while. At The Ringer, we didn't want to do that. We wanted to write more big picture and angles, stuff like that, because we felt like that was a real inefficiency, and it's something that you've exploited better than anybody. This is what drew me to buzzfeed to write about tech because i wasn't really writing about that at the time i was writing a lot about politics and stuff um what drew me was this idea of like we're going to treat technology as culture

yeah because it's shaping culture so much so you know finding that lens I think led us to do a lot of weird stuff in like 2013, 2014. Like my colleague, Joe Bernstein, this guy, he was writing about video games and then the Gamergate thing happened. Yeah. And I was, um, I was editing our tech section at that time. And there was just this general, like, yeah, like just follow that, you know, like he knew it. I knew it. I knew it. Do you think that was the seminal moment for all the stuff we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast? It seems like there's before Gamergate and then after. And then everything after makes sense in the context of Gamergate.

Because it rose up into the popular consciousness. It was one of those fever swamp things that broke through. I was super late on it. I never even did a podcast on it. I thought it was one of those weird internet things that broke through. I was super late on it. I never even did a podcast on it. I thought it was one of those weird internet things that had momentum and I never really fully understood the ramifications until late. Yeah. I mean, I don't think a lot of people did, but... I'm not sure people there might be people like my mom. I don't even think she knows what it is.

That's a good case for a really good internet style documentary or something. Because there's been a lot of online writing about it, but good writing and reporting. But something that's sort of more palatable to people who are a little bit offline, I think that that's a story that we're going to see, or hopefully we do but but that like when we were writing about that early on it was looked at as like sort of weird sort of like you know like why are you devoting your time why do you care about this and now it's sort of like everything every culture war on the internet is gamer gate just you know dna game yeah yeah and yeah and so i think you know I felt like I was sort of toiling on the fringes for a while. And then everything kind of shifted to the fringe like that.

And so I just feel like. The fringe became mainstream. Yeah. And so I feel like, I feel like this is kind of, there's like a real urgency I feel every day. Not to sound like, know an ass but just that everything about all this feels really urgent it's never stopping um and and i think that that well it's definitely not stopping because it might start a war yeah and i think it's just because you know this like technology is culture and it's proven now, and it's –

I mean, I'm a technology writer. I write about politics. I write about media. I write about all – like tons of different things. But they all intersect. Yeah, everything. Well, I think about it a lot. One, because it's my job, but two, because I have a daughter that's gonna be 13 in two months and i

have a son who's 10 and i watch how they use the internet i go on their accounts after they fall asleep like i want to make sure nothing weird's going on and uh to say that this generation is different than mine i mean there's you can't even compare them. It's like I might as well have grown up in the 1820s. But then even their generation versus a generation like Tate's generation, even that's completely different. And you could argue their generation versus a 19-year-old is completely different. And kids really use social media to interact, though,

in ways that it's almost more important than actual interaction in some ways, which if you're a good parent, you're working on your kids so that you their phones their devices and computers and then the social part of it they're going to be going on dates and just kind of what are they gonna you're out of date you're just texting each other sitting across from each other like we might be headed that way i i'm concerned yeah we i mean the the crazy part is that we don't know right and what i what I think is really interesting, what you were just saying, is that there are also these, like, within the generations, there are these super micro generations. Yeah.

It changes, like, every three, four years. Snapchat doesn't really, I don't really go on it. Like, it's bad as a tech writer that I'm not really, like, plugged in necessarily. But it's just, like, it wasn't a thing when I, like, that any of me or really my close immediate friends

adopted but i have friends that are 18 months younger than me like you know a year in college two years in college difference and it's like for a while it was like the most important thing in their world and it's crazy how old are you i'm 30 tate you care about snapchat 24 no you have friends yeah never really trickle to the south yeah everyone's on everyone's on it How old are you? I'm 30. Tate, you care about Snapchat? 24? No. You have friends? Yeah. You never really trickle to the South. Yeah, everyone's on it.

Everyone's on it. Everyone's on it, but we just don't use it. South is like, yeah, they look down on Snapchat. Yeah, we're okay. South's old school. Oh, man. Yeah, I don't. It already seems like Instagram over the last.

I'm just judging this from everyone in my kid's school. And I live in California. Obviously, that's not the same experience as somebody who lives in Oklahoma or Montreal Instagram over the last, I'm just judging this from everyone in my kid's school. And I live in California. Obviously that's not the same experience as somebody who lives in Oklahoma or Montreal or Boston or whatever. But it seems like Instagram, once they shifted to stories, Instagram is now the dominant institution now for like 14 and under. Interesting.

With the pictures. And then now there's this whole culture with how they all deal with each other with like you put a picture and it's six of the friends but the seventh one wasn't there their feelings are hurt it's just it's all these games that it's like chess yeah we were playing checkers when i was in high school you know it's like oh caller well the stakes are just the stakes are just higher, you know? Yeah. Because it's so public. It's so visible. But I wonder, like, does Instagram realize the power they have over kids, though?

I think that all these companies in the back of their mind do. But I also think that they can't. Again, I probably shouldn't be speaking for them, but I think it's very hard to, you get paralyzed when you start thinking in that way, probably, as the leader of a company, as the guy making the product, and at some point, and this is where we get into these problems,

it's like, well, we just gotta put this thing out there, right? Gotta see how people are gonna use it. We'll try to back it down, back it off. Well, I think people make the mistake of assuming people people in high positions are competent and the reality is they're usually not you might have a couple competent people but you have a ton of people that were either promoted three spots too high or weren't competent to begin with i was telling you before we started the podcast, I came from ESPN where from like 2000 to 2013

was arguably the most successful media company in the world. And inside the company, there were a lot of incompetent people. And it was always shocking to me. I was like, wow, I can't believe we're this successful with this person there and this person there and this person there. And everybody's five years behind whatever is actually going on. And you see this with sponsors, you even see this with podcast sponsors. Like now all the right brands are like, wow, we got to get in a podcast. We got it. We got it. That's a great audience for us. And it's like, it was a great audience in 2012 you guys didn't see it yet yeah um and i and

i worry like with instagram with twitter facebook youtube it's people that five years from now hey we got problem well so we're seeing that first of all yes we're all everyone's just acting on this is like the on the fly more than more than ever before again i don't have that much perspective i guess but it really feels like i I guess, the stakes are higher, as we were saying. But people are totally acting on the fly with all this technology. But I think right now what we're in is we're in sort of a bit of this reckoning. Maybe not fully as America, but certainly in the industry, there's a a big tech, quote unquote, reckoning. And it's the thing that I like Facebook is saying, you know, trying to change some of the metrics of how they want to.

It's like called time well spent Twitter on last. Facebook seems like they change their mind every two months. Hey, here's our new plan. All these companies love to do that because they're really good at PR and at press. They're great at crafting. Come here. This is going to work. Twitter last Thursday announced that they want to start figuring out a way to monitor the health of public conversations and do more to make conversation in public on Twitter healthy. Oh, really?

Thanks, Twitter. It's 2018. That would have been nice eight years ago. Well, it's like how they ran an ad last night at the Oscars that was like, women, we want to hear your voice. Meanwhile, any woman who's speaking on Twitter

is being berated by neo-Nazis at the moment. It would have been nice if they ran that after the Leslie Jones disaster, which was what, two years ago? Yeah, almost two years ago. Whoa, whoa. The thing with Twitter, the verified accounts, which in the old days was, I remember when my account got verified,

I was like, great, this is like a badge of honor. I have a real account. Now it's like you're seeing, you wrote about these verified accounts that are stealing bitcoin money it's like completely it's almost like they need a second check for like a this account's really verified it's gonna be like a like a general in the army with just a whole bunch of yeah i want like a five checkcheck account. Yeah. I'm an OG. Give me five checks. I mean, there's a real problem. And these companies right now are, I think, trying to figure out and trying to figure out how to message this idea of we're working on it.

We realize that something's wrong online. We are probably somewhat the cause. We're working on it as a start at least yeah but at the same time and i i wrote about this the other day these platforms like the problem the reason why twitter is toxic and you know awful and abusive and chaotic but also a really good vector for news and you know part part of these serendipitous moments and conversations and things like that. And shared experience.

And shared experiences. It's because it's designed that way. That's what the system's supposed to do. It prioritizes scale, sensationalism. The whole metric of it is I'm going to say a thing and there's going to be no friction in you amplifying that message. That's the whole point. It's an unbelievable promotional tool too.

Self-promotion. Yeah. I owe my career to her. Shared experience. Guaranteed. Yeah. I saw it in 2009 with my book. And I had only gotten on Twitter the end of April in 2009

and did not have a ton of followers early. But I was like, wow, this is really going to help me because I noticed that Amazon would have those things when it's like you crack the top hundred and your book suddenly 50% off. And I would tweet about that. I was like, my book's 50% off. I didn't care if people got my book for half off. I just wanted people to read it. I think my book company probably cared, but I was like, go to, go to Amazon right now. My book's 50% off. And like, i think my book company probably cared but i was like go to go to amazon right now my book's 50 off and like hey my book tour is coming up and i'm going to be here on september 28th and whatever the dates were and the power of that platform i could i was just like wow this is this

changed the destiny of my book and all these things i wanted to do with it and now we're almost 10 years later the self-promotion part is still there but all these other dark um pieces of it have emerged and the self like that the good part of that is is by design and the bad part is by design so when you know that's with facebook that's with youtube that's all these things so like when they say we're trying to do, like we're trying to have some sort of overhaul fix, it feels like the only possible way to do that is to like strip the guts out of the system, to like take away like what makes Twitter, Twitter. Like I don't really know how you square, you know,

healthy, productive, good conversations with, you know, the idea that anyone can post all this stuff. And like, and again, this idea of like the flat internet where anything can be amplified. Like that. There's one way to do it. It's driver's license? No.

You're all about verification today. No, no, no. You make people pay for it and you get 10 tweets free a month. And after that, it's $4.99 a month. That's how you fix Twitter. If you really want to fix Twitter, make people pay to use it. And they could still get there. You could do 10 tweets a week.

You could do five tweets a week. You could do 10 tweets a month. Whatever limit you wanted to have. And then everything else, it's like, if you really want to go all in and tweet, pay us. Yeah. You don't like that idea? Well, I mean, they'll just never. I know they'll never do it, but I think it would work.

I think the best idea that I've heard, and again, the verification system's kind of wonky right now, is that if you can prove who you are, like, you know, send a driver's license. But we just talked about deep faking. Yeah. Yeah. license but we just talked about deep faking yeah yeah no i mean this is this is again everything is like a terrible gordian knot of complications but if you can do the you know it's not just journalists or celebrities or whoever athletes who have the verified accounts but just anyone who can prove who they are and authenticate that. And then you just have that as like the tier.

And then the rest of the stuff is like, it's not really getting promoted very much. It's in the minor leagues. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You have a minor league sort of thing. And that to me,

I mean, there's problems with that, right? But it's also, it's a good way to make it so that you don't have all the trolls screaming at you all the time. Got to talk about credible student loans can completely wipe you out. If you don't get a hand on them at you all the time. Got to talk about Credible. Student loans can completely wipe you out if you don't get a hand on them.

How do you do that? Credible.com. It's an online marketplace for student loan refinancing and using their simple platform. I have a great idea for a Twitter merger in a second. Not to sound like Mike Greenberg. Coming up, I'm going to tell you the merger that will save everything. Credible. It takes you less than two minutes to find out if you're overpaying on your student loans and you can save thousands by refinancing. All you have to do is visit Credible.com slash BS,

answer a few quick questions right now. Right away, you'll get real rates, not ranges of rates from multiple lenders, completely free to use. Checking your rates will not affect your credit score. So you really have nothing to lose. The average user who refinances through Credible.com saves almost $19,000 over the life of their loan. Think about what you can do with $19,000 for a limited time. Our listeners will get a $200 welcome bonus when refinancing through Credible.com slash BS. Pay off your student loans faster, lower your monthly payment. Whatever works for go to credible.com slash bs here's have you ever thought about the craziest mergers that actually make sense i just came up with this idea and i think it's like one of my five best ideas in 2019 so far twitter merges with tsa tsa tsa has all has all these verification companies. Two wonderfully run companies. Two wonderfully run companies. But TSA has all the information.

Twitter can throw them a little money to make TSA better. And they join forces. And now it's like, to join Twitter, I have to have a TSA card. Now, this is going to work. And they merge and they become Twitter TSA. Twitter TSA. Yeah, there we go. So then the government owns them, right?

The government owns Twitter. Oh, that's not a good idea. All right, scratch that idea. Kate, I was fired up about that idea for like two and a half minutes. I liked it. Twitter TSA? Yeah, it was good at first, but then the government. Do you have TSA?

Yeah. TSA pre-check, baby. And now I have Clear. You can get... I have TSA and I have Clear. Twitter TSA Clear. Well, Clear is a private company, right? Yeah.

Maybe that's who they should Twitter clear. All right. Twitter clear. Twitter clear. I mean, it sounds better than Twitter clear. Yeah.

Yeah. Get another check by your name. We did not hit Bitcoin, which I want to talk about really quickly. Sure. Bitcoin, which I was always

a little suspicious of. I just see anytime something's so anytime, anytime something's too good to be true i don't know if it's the half italian in me but i just kind of kind of take a take a sideways stare at it and now it seems like bitcoin's going to a dark place where people are just getting kidnapped

and and people are stealing their stuff and it's not going in a good direction i'm gonna argue oh you're going the other way okay like big a lot of bitcoin's baggage right now is it's like dark web origins you know like the the silk road like dark web marketplace where like people were buying drugs and you know it's taking out hits on people so you're buying you're buying mainstream bitcoin you're buying stock in that yeah i mean okay i mean you should buy bitcoin probably uh i that's true i guess that would be that would be actual bitcoin but i mean i think i think it's a really we talked about like the tech that blockchain technology thing behind it i think like that's interesting right i think that that means that it's not because there's so much promise behind like the technology that underwrites it i think there's i think there's going to be staying power like that's not gonna that's just not just gonna go away like maybe the price

will plummet or something but like it means that there's something there and it's not like we're gonna wake up tomorrow morning and there's just like ah remember that experiment bitcoin it's over like i've i don't i just find it really really really weird and interesting and i just like i because we created a new currency from scratch yeah and the culture that's that's gone up around it it's also i mean just from like a all the all the gamblers i know in my life are like, it's fun. You know, it's like it's prospecting. It's a real culture has grown up around it. I'm probably the only gambler who's not into Bitcoin. Maybe I'm just getting old.

I think, I mean, I think that it was really hard back in the day. Like, so one of the things about being a technology writer is almost every person that you know has some sort of Bitcoin experience. Good or bad? When it got really exciting and weird and strange in 2013 and people were first starting to hear about it, it was like 28 bucks. Yeah. There's like, I don't know, I probably know two or three people who were like, yeah, I'll buy seven. And put it in a wallet and then just walked away for four years and then came back in December and were like,

oh, it's $80,000 just out of thin air. There's all those kinds of stories. And that's really, really fun. But I'm really interested to see where it goes. And I think that, I think mostly for the technology aspect of it, but I also think just, we don't get,

we've gone through such an era of like shit apps and sort of like, you know, like the, like Twitter, Facebook, all these big internet companies kind of came about. And then there was like the whole, listen to my elevator pitch about this, you know, crummy dieting app or what all this stuff and it was just like we've had a long run sort of kind of boring innovation so to speak and this is something that's like hey like imagine a different form of money like you

know imagine just this decentralized sort of like almost like anarchic vision of the future. And like that to me is just at least from a cultural standpoint, pretty fascinating. You just made the case for Snapchat stock when you're talking about the lack of innovation. So think about it. We've only innovated how many platforms over the last 20 years facebook twitter youtube snapchat none of them were created in the last five years there is no like if you're doing a draft pick like if if i'm in basketball and i'm like who's going to replace lebronron James as the best player

in the league? I'd be like, well, Giannis could do it, Anthony Davis. You might see Ben Simmons if he learns how to shoot. I don't have all these candidates. There's no candidate for the next great platform, I don't think. Do you see one out there? No, because- It seems like now it's almost like their own little mini monopolies and there's not room

for anyone else. But that's crazy to me. There should be another platform that that challenges them i think this happens though right with with i mean we don't have that much history to draw on but i think this happens with the internet in in that it's it takes things get really big you know like I think it would have been hard to envision in, I don't know, 1998 or 9 that AOL was going to be sort of meaningless in a decade. I'm right here.

Yeah. You probably don't access AOL by going to AOL.com. No. Yeah. But I think these things, you have these titans. I mean, that's the whole idea of, like, disruption, right? And then just, like, immediately is undercut and, you know, something else pops up and is ascendant. And to me, it doesn't feel that same way.

Like, you have the people laying in wait and training and waiting for their moment and they're going to take it. It's just usually, like, to, like, kind of tie it back to like those those parkland teens it's just like somebody who comes up and they're just like i reject the status quo here's my thing here's how it's going to happen and just like throw it out into the universe and i think that that's really hard to predict well the trick for disruptors is occasionally they don't become disruptive anymore because they're too big and too mainstream. And the key is to then buy another disruptor and add that disruptor to your mix. That's Facebook. If Facebook did not buy Instagram, what is Facebook five years from now?

It's really an interesting question. I don't know what the fuck happens to that place um but that was like the AOL thing right AOL instead of becoming the disruptor who then buys more disruptors to grow itself internally says this is great let's merge with Time Warner and that leads to one of the biggest disasters we've had Disney's a really good example of this. Disney makes the deal with Star Wars. Disney makes the deal with Marvel. Disney's moving and trying to do things.

Even Disney with Merrimacks in the 1990s. Disney creatively has been able to bring disruptors into its circle and kind of keep the momentum going. And that's something like Facebook did it with Instagram, but that if they don't keep doing that, I think they're in a lot of trouble 10 years from now. Well, the weird thing with those companies too, given how they're basically,

they've created a, you know, an advert, change the advertising industry and made billions and billions more than they can probably, you know, hold for now. But because of that, it's not like they even have to acquire anything anymore. Now it's like, you know, like Instagram stories is just Snapchat. And they just like took it.

And like that's sort of like a thing. That's really smart and Neville but it was smart it's the thing that Facebook gets kind of like you know like shat on sometimes for but it's also just it's good business by the way

Jay Leno did that to David Letterman David Letterman was kicking Jay Leno's ass and Jay Leno stole like the best four or five things about Letterman's show and just made it his show people were mad about it

for a month and then they forgot right and then it's like yeah i'm just gonna do the same show you're doing but i'm on a better network that's totally how it works and so that's what's gonna be really interesting about facebook's future is that and like and google and all these like they right for now they have a lot of this money they have the ability to attract all this good talent like it's gonna be even if this upstart you know really interesting new idea comes forward like it can be cloned we've seen it work so by the way i think it's a bad sign for the company i'm about to mention that we keep mentioning these platforms over and over and over again and we have not mentioned them yet who do you think it is

i don't know. There's one big kahuna out there that should have been in this discussion and was not. Apple. Well, you know. At least from a content standpoint. But Apple had a chance to basically own audio completely to get into the content game in a big way.

And I know they're going to try. This is now they're belatedly trying to get involved with content. But with the iPad, with iPhones, with going back to the iPod in the mid-2000s, Apple TV, they have all the makings to just dominate. And yet Netflix has taken a lot of their corner, at least visually. And then Spotify took some of their stuff music-wise., what's Apple going to be? I don't know. I mean, to some extent you could say, right. If you look at the, the way that people are getting savage right now, these companies, and I do think that that will have an impact. Like right now, public approval on a lot of these, you know, platforms are pretty, pretty high. Like people

still feel good about Facebook as a brand. Because they use them in their everyday lives. As long as that happens, those companies win. But I do think that that's going to change to some degree if things don't change. But Apple's left out of that discussion. It's left out of the two of us, you know, talking and saying a lot of, you know, rough things. And that decision right now at this kind of moment of upheaval to just sort of be like, hey, you know, we're a hardware company.

We make these things like you enjoy the phones. You enjoy these things. We make these products well. We're obsessive about engineering. This is what we do best. We've always done best. Well, then why buy Beats? It seems like Apple can't decide what it is. about engineering. This is what we do best. We've always done best. Well, then why buy Beats?

Yeah. It seems like Apple can't decide what it is. I don't think any of these companies can really decide what they are. Twitter's the only one who's really said, this is what we are. We are there for immediacy. We are there for self-promotion. Live.

We want everyone to have the ability to open a Twitter account. We have the chance to change elections. We're overseas. People are overthrowing governments. And this is who we are, but we don't know what we're doing. I think what's really interesting about that point is I'm not sure that any of them can really control that. They don't know what they want to be. It's like they kind of don't have a say in it almost to some degree.

Not to take all the agency away from multi-billion dollar corporations, but like it's tough. You put this tool out there and then as we have been talking about, it's used and abused in a million unforeseeable ways and then you're basically left playing catch upup all right we gotta go uh thanks to zip recruiter my listeners can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash bs if you want to read more charlie go to buzzfeed.com or just search for charlie warzel column archive and all his stuff will come up. A lot of the stuff that we talked about in detail and a lot of stuff about the information apocalypse, which is the most important thing going on right now.

And you could also see some deep fakes of Charlie having Charlie important scenes, but it's not really him. So if you find those. Now, that hasn't happened yet. You'll know you're famous when that happens. But this was great. I'm glad we did this. I wanted to save a little bit, some meat on the bone

for next time. Cool. Yeah, cool. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we're back tomorrow. Stay tuned because what's becoming

an annual thing, the Jimmy Kimmel Post Oscars podcast, we're taping it tomorrow morning in his office and then we're going to put it up right after it's done.

Me and Tate are going there. Tate's going to take his annual picture with Jimmy. I hope Jimmy keeps posting, hosting the Oscars. Yeah. Cause we, last year's podcast was really fun. Me,

Jimmy and Sal. So get ready for that tomorrow. Until then. See them on the wayside Never run, say I don't have Feelings with them On the wayside On the wayside Never run, say I don't have