Ep. 275: "I Want an Adult"
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Good.
How are you?
Yeah, I'm very well.
That's good.
So early.
I just got a phone call from the local public radio station, and they wanted to know if I would come on a panel today to talk about whether or not Amazon.com's new bubbles that they built in Seattle are going to be an icon like the Space Needle.
Oh.
You might need to bring me up to speed here.
I am not totally up to date on the, what are you, the Emerald City?
What do you call it?
Jet City.
Nah, well, we were the Jet City.
That was a very cool name.
Yeah.
And I think an organic name, Jet City.
Jet City.
We'll let you go without a fight.
Yeah, we made the Jets here.
Yep, yep, yep.
And then once you're a Jet, you're always a Jet.
Is Emerald City, is that Oregon?
Yeah.
No, Emerald City is something.
It's a nickname that came about as the result of like one of those.
Let's take suggestions from the audience type of things where they're like, hey, what should we call our city?
And people think we're like, we already have a name, Jet City.
And they were, oh, let's call it Emerald City.
And it's like, who said that?
You know, hey, you in the back, stand up.
Why did you say that?
And they're like, I don't work for a publicity firm.
Don't mind me.
Let's call it Emerald City.
La, la, la, la.
Is that the name of the Oz place?
Yeah.
Oh, that's not good.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're going to repurpose.
Amazon giant Seattle biospheres.
Yeah.
Oh, God.
And are people going to live in them?
Or are they just greenhouses?
I say just greenhouses.
I'm new to this.
Oh, boy.
Yeah.
A few years ago, I was downtown.
I have a friend that works at an architecture firm.
And he invited us to come by and see what's going on.
And they're a big, big company that are making big, big things.
And one of the things that they had on their drawing board were these giant, very organic looking spheres.
And I was intrigued because they were pretty cool looking on the design table.
And he said, yeah, Amazon wants us to build these, but like in the center of downtown.
And I thought that'll never happen, first of all.
But
Wouldn't that be cool if you built like a big thing like that, like a public space?
It's ambitious.
Yeah.
So these look like, I mean, it looks like if you've seen the Pauly Shore movie Biosphere.
They're big, round, and they have a kind of a, who's the guy with the geodesic domes?
Oh, yeah, the guy with the dome.
You've probably done a show about him.
You know, that one guy with the initials of his name.
Yeah, it's H.R.
Geiger.
It's like the H.R.
Geiger domes.
It's H.R.
Puffin's domes.
H.R.
Snuffleupagus.
These appear to be three...
A tripartite of three big interconnected bubbles with what looks like green trees inside.
And they look pretty big.
Right.
They're super big.
And they are Buckminster Fuller.
Oh, that's it.
Bucky Buckyballs, yeah.
They're...
And they're built, unlike buckyballs, which are built with regular sort of triangular components, these are made with very organic, like the type of shapes that you'd see inside of an actual, like a soap bubble or something.
Swirling.
uh they kind of feel like they're sort of irregular patterns it isn't like you're just seeing a bunch of triangles right and i hate to keep referencing the movie avatar but it feels like something oh the movie avatar yes yes yeah uh so anyway i was and then they started building them and i was like i never expected that they would actually go through with this very ambitious um idea to build these orbs in the center of town and what a
What a bold move for a company that I think of as being pretty culturally conservative within themselves.
You know, Amazon is not very – has not typically been like, we love everybody.
They're much more like – they're a typical tech company that hides behind security keys and everything.
You know, it's like harder to get into –
Amazon.com or to Microsoft in downtown Seattle.
It's harder to get in than it is to get into the White House.
There's so many different levels of security.
And it's like security.
I mean, what do you guys got in there?
Like gold bars?
What are you so scared of?
But
But they started building them, and they built them for a long time, and they screwed up traffic in both directions downtown forever.
And they built two big office towers on either side, which are also interesting, architecturally interesting.
But then as they got closer to opening these bubbles, they were like,
Oh, we were never going to let anyone go in them.
Oh, no snorks allowed.
Right.
Oh, no, these are just for us.
Oh, boy, it seems like that's the kind of thing you want to mention.
Yeah.
Well, but even I mean, they didn't mention it because they never considered that it would be something the public would access.
It sounds like Amazon.
And so here you have this this like basically, yeah, space station Earth.
I'm seeing like a, you can tell me if I'm looking at the right thing here.
It looks like a side, what do you call that?
That's so early.
It looks like a, you know, where you slice the edge off and you show it from the side.
One, two, three.
Yeah, you know what I mean?
Like when you show the Fantastic Four building.
One, two, three, four, five stories.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then you got about 10 feet in a story, plus you got a little bit of overhead.
So these things are probably like at least like what, 80, 100 feet tall?
They're big.
They're big.
And they take up the space between.
It's like a bit of a block.
Well, and they've already, on either side, they have big office towers.
So the whole thing is, you know, it's a whole city block for this campus.
And they've done, you know, they put these buildings in.
They hired 10,000 people.
Um, and on the ground floor of their buildings, they have a fat belly sandwich shop and a Thai restaurant and a cool burger place that puts lavender on their burgers and, you know, all this stuff.
And if you have a key card, I'm sure you can go in and just charge your food.
Um,
But the campus did not, you know, it's not built.
There's so many different eras of like downtown architecture fashion.
And we've both lived in cities.
San Francisco is a real example of this where a building gets built and it has a very kind of open, unfriendly, sun-baked plaza with some cement walls.
There that you could suppose I guess maybe sit on yeah brutalism shake I mean, you know, it's it's just it doesn't want to go away It's really tough and and that was the idea that was an idea that was supposed to be That was supposed to engage people, you know these big plazas and it just they didn't think through how actual people want to be this campus
Really?
I mean, those bubbles really draw you.
You come to them and you look at them and you're like, I want to.
What is the first thought you have?
I want to go in because there's there's trees in there.
It looks like it's got probably it's playing like tubular bells.
Mm hmm.
Or music for airports.
Oh, yeah, right.
It's like the future.
I want to go in.
And then you get there.
They're kind of like giant Christmas ornaments.
They're very, I mean, I have to say they're, I don't mean this as too much of a compliment, but they're very attractive, as you say.
Like, if you saw these, you would go, what is that and how do I get inside?
Yeah, how do I get inside?
Yeah.
You know, the other public buildings that have a similar effect in Seattle are the downtown library, which was just looking at a picture of that right now.
Yeah.
That people are like, oh, boy, it's modern.
But it's a library.
It's like somebody got tired of folding a box.
It's really I keep since the day it was opened, I've described it as a spaceport on a minor planet.
It's just like, oh, that's it, huh?
I mean, there are bus stations that are important.
A planet that used to be pretty popular.
Yeah, it was like a mining planet like six millennia ago, and that's the spaceport.
And it's typical of contemporary architecture, like at some point, not that long after it opened, the escalator stopped working.
Then pretty soon there's somebody there with some scaffolding and a sign that says no access, trying to fix it, but they're not working that hard.
And then the other example is the EMP.
Which was, you know, which was, again, a folly of a rich person.
And when you saw it on the drawing board, you were like, wow, we're going to get a Frank Gehry right in the middle of town.
And Frank Gehry designed it.
But because Paul Allen owned it, Paul Allen got involved and was like, I know that you designed this to be all silver, but what if it was...
Red, white, and blue, and green, and yellow.
And Frank Gehry was like, well, no, I don't want that.
That's not what I am building.
And Paul Allen was like, yeah, but don't you think the colors would make people like it more?
Kind of psychedelic.
And Frank Gehry was like, no, I don't think that.
And then Paul Allen said, and we're going to need some meeting rooms in there, like square boxes with chairs, big, big, long chair rooms.
And Frank Gehry was like, that's not what, what I was building.
And then he said, and then, you know, on the outside, there should be some, some things where we can put posters that like advertise upcoming shows.
And so if you go to Frank Gehry's
I guess he's got a website.
But if you look at Frank Gehry's... It's probably very curvy, the website.
He does not acknowledge the EMP.
He washed his hands of it.
He was like, I... He didn't have any money from it, probably.
He's like, take my name off of the credit.
No, I'm sure he took the money.
But...
But what Paul Allen did was he got this thing built, but he needed it to be something that wasn't that.
But he was thinking in terms of the big...
Like key card buildings in the suburbs that he came up in.
On the face of it, it sounds like a fairly classic design problem or anti-pattern in design, which is, you know, it's probably easy to overstate this, but one problem for people who are outside of design and don't approach it from a certain point of view is to think that it's really, it's a coat of paint.
it's wrapping, it's maybe, you know, branding, but you haven't really thought about how the space is going to be used.
And so when you, that is revealed when somebody says stuff like, yeah, yeah.
So basically we want to, uh, we want a fancy building.
The cool people will like, but we want the inside to be pretty pedestrian and we want to put posters outside.
And, and we should, you know, and it's when you look in from outside, like, so that's what they did with these Amazon bubbles.
If you look in from outside, you see, Oh,
Inside these incredibly organic structures, there are white walls squared off with no windows and doors.
And inside, I'm sure there are like AV equipment and PowerPoint stuff.
And I'm sure there's a folding table out front where you get your lanyard.
And they just built a convention center that no one is allowed in.
Mm-hmm.
And so that, you know, the idea that you would build something like that and then not let people come is an example of the kind of like the kind of tech tone deafness.
that goes with this new idea in big companies that you're going to locate your campus in the center of downtown and that's going to be appealing to employees because they're not going to be out at some suburban campus.
They're going to be right in the heart of the action.
And Seattle is a cool city and you mountain bike there and get your coffee and people.
And, you know, I'm sure in their brochures,
When they're trying to attract prospective employees, there's like a picture of a girl with pink hair.
And there's somebody throwing the fish at the market.
And they're like, come to Seattle.
Don't move out to Mountain View, California.
Right.
But what the company isn't doing...
is repaying the city for all that cool culture that they're using to attract employees by adding anything back.
They're just like, yeah, come to Seattle and we'll just, we'll just, is it really, I mean, are you stating facts?
Are these really actually, this is actually true.
They actually are not going to have, like a lot of this is a place that somebody's, it was kind of pitched as a public project, but it's actually not going to be such a public project.
Is that true?
I do not believe it was ever pitched as a public project.
It says retail in here.
I mean, is that retail only for Amazon people?
Boy, I don't know about that.
My sense of it is they stop you at the door.
God.
If you want to...
So arrange a tour, a small number of people per year, I guess, like civic leaders.
I'm sure I'll get a tour, right?
I'm sure that at some point someone will say, hey, we're going to get an Amazon thing.
You want to come?
And it's going to be because civic leader.
But like your regular person who came here from St.
Louis to spend a week in Seattle because they've always wanted to.
Who are like, yeah, we should go look at the Amazon orbs.
And they walk down there and you look at them.
And then you walk over to the door and you're like, can we get in?
And no.
And then you pull your camera out, and then somebody with an earpiece is like, no pictures.
I mean, you know, I'm exaggerating that, but that's about it, right?
That's about the mentality.
It looks like part of it is deliberately open, but I'll tell you a good sign, this is a headline from a week ago today, is that there will be a visitor center.
And in my experience, places that have a visitor center are not open to everybody.
Right.
You can get tours.
You can get like a full 90 minute Amazon HQ tour.
You go to, oh, their visitor center is called the Understory.
The Spears Discovery Exhibit.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's going to have 300 endangered plant species in it.
But it says, you know, there's an article in GeekWire.
In a couple of years, Amazon employees will be able to walk on a suspension bridge over a forest and settle into a nest perched within a mature tree for a brainstorming session.
And it's just like three quarters of that sentence is really appealing.
But what it really is saying is Amazon employees are going to have brainstorming sessions in this place.
And Amazon employees, you know, like...
And the brainstorming session is probably going to happen, you know, within four... Like inside of an organic skiff.
No, I don't think so.
I think there are meeting rooms inside.
Oh, jeez.
Maybe you can go sit in a hammock, but, you know, my experience of... I went and toured the medium offices a couple of times, and they had...
They had a bunch of sleeping cubbies.
Have you been there?
No.
There were like little pods like built into the wall and they had curtains on them and you could pull the curtains back and inside there was like not just a mattress, it was like a Japanese hotel room.
How often did they clean them?
Well, so I didn't ask that.
My first question was, how often do people go in and take naps in here?
What is the highest level inside the organization of someone who uses this at least weekly?
And the answer was, no one has ever used these to take a nap.
Because if you went in and took a nap...
You would be looked at like someone who was trying to take a nap during the work day.
You could probably smoke weed in the office and get less kickback than if you went and slept, took a nap during work.
But there are the facilities there for six people to be sleeping simultaneously.
Mm-hmm.
And I said, do people ever like go in here and fuck in the at night?
It's like, no, no, no, no one ever goes in there.
Why would you go in there?
It's creepy.
Or it's like, you know, I don't know how and probably they're cleaned every day.
Probably they have a dedicated cleaning person to clean them.
But as far as I could tell, pulling the employees of medium, no one had ever gone in those pods.
And I was like, if I worked at Medium, I would be in that pod.
I would work from there.
Oh, absolutely.
I would just bring an iPad and recline all day.
Yeah, I'd be in there.
The reply was, well, you wouldn't work at Medium for long.
See?
Dummy.
Right.
I mean, you could go down to Amazon Orbs and sit around and have brainstorming sessions, but to really sit in a hammock and watch the endangered butterflies fly around, you have to be a vice president or hire.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, so it's like this – it's an incredible missed opportunity that is – that from inside their hive mind, I'm sure they're –
Because you can already feel it.
This radio show was about, like, Amazon wants this to be a tourist destination.
They were thinking that when they built it.
Like, we want people to come see this.
We want people to wear T-shirts and to be like, oh, Seattle.
You mean the orb city?
You know, they had that in mind.
But they couldn't – they didn't make the leap to think –
If we're going to build this, it's going to be an incredibly attractive nuisance to everyone.
Like, okay, so it's got these endangered species.
You can't just open it up to everybody to just come through like a mall.
But you've got to have a way to pay $15 at least to go in and sit around.
I mean, you know, the Space Needle is not free.
Right.
But you pay money and you go in it.
Something, you know, some way for the city to access it.
And whatever the retail is, I'm sure that it's like 50 square feet on an understory that's selling you T-shirts that have the orbs on them.
You know, there's no like...
There's not going to be a Fendi store in it.
Well, and thank God for that.
I'm looking at images here of the blight of my own city, which is this Salesforce tower.
I don't know if you've ever seen this.
You mean the largest tower in San Francisco?
It's visible from Japantown.
That's what they say.
I was at my hotel and I looked up and I was like, what the fuck is that?
Oh shit, it's the Salesforce.com tower.
It's like if Darth Vader made a water rocket.
Also, I do not like this style of architecture personally.
It looks good in London, but I don't know if I like it so much here.
You're talking about Forbes?
Well, no, I'm talking here about the tower, but I guess my question is, because this is all brand new to me, I've known about this for now for 20 minutes and 30 seconds.
Are you opposed to the bubbles differently than you would be for another kind?
of building that was mostly not meant to be public?
Do you have the same feeling about the towers that are astride the bubbles as you do about the bubbles themselves, or do you think you get sold a different bill of goods here?
Well, I do think that if Amazon wants to...
The libertarianism that is at the heart of the way that that company interacts with Seattle suggests that they don't owe us anything, right?
They built their company from the ground up.
They built it.
They brought good, clean jobs to town.
Yeah, they built it themselves.
And their only obligation to us is that they're bringing young people and they're paying them a lot of money and those people increased our tax base.
And whether or not
They created a traffic fuck up and whether or not this like the sewers and infrastructure in downtown is built were built to accommodate 50,000 new people who are all flush on their toilets at the same time.
Whether or not any of those things, any of those larger questions of how we interact with each other.
Like, they will do the minimum to be in compliance, but they don't think of themselves as integrated.
They're their thing.
They built it.
The money belongs to them.
Mm-hmm.
They bought that land and they can do what they want with it.
And if Bezos wanted to erect a glass penis 80 stories tall, he wouldn't be the first rich guy to build a glass penis in downtown Seattle.
There literally is a building that looks like a penis in downtown Seattle.
It's a green penis.
Which is a bad color for a penis.
That's what most farm fresh peas are full of.
Green penis.
I'm not a doctor.
But if your penis is green, it may be a side effect.
But so the combination of like ego and hubris that would...
Allow a company to say, we're doing this in the center of your city.
We have the right to do it because we get to do whatever we want because money.
We're not obligated to you in any way, shape or form to make it.
I mean, we have to make it accessible because that's the code.
We have to make it like you have to be able to walk through it, but we have no further obligation to make it, to have it interact with you at all.
If you don't have a lanyard, um,
You're barely welcome at the fat belly sandwich shop, which is ostensibly open to the public because they don't have a capacity to use.
Their cash registers don't accept money or whatever.
But at the same time, they want to be loved.
And that's the thing that – that's the cognitive disconnect.
They don't understand why people are mad at them.
They feel hurt and put upon when people complain.
Also, it seems like there's this kind of serial, this feeling of being, oh, we're so misunderstood.
Yeah, yeah.
You guys describe all of this evilness to us that is not only not factual, but is just unfair.
And we take such a beating from the public, especially given all the good that we're doing.
Yeah, look at all the stuff we've done.
Look at what we've done for you.
It is kind of an aggrieved dad thing.
It's an aggrieved dad.
And when you think about it, you've got 50,000 people now that you brought into town.
Nobody can move.
You didn't think of that, because that's not your problem.
Because as soon as they leave the door of your building, it's not your problem anymore.
But it is your problem, or it's our problem.
And definitely the idea that they sell
They sell working in Seattle as a big part of their compensation package because it's the old argument they used to make to us in rock and roll.
Like, oh, you know, you're so lucky you get to play rock and roll.
And it's like, oh, man, it's my job.
I'd like to also get money.
Oh, but part of the money has got to be just.
But also, I mean, it is in fairness, but like, you know, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, super schmooper costly, even if you're making pretty good dough.
New York City, you know, tough to get an apartment that's bigger than a closet.
You could have a quality of life in Seattle with a similar kind of job with a big growing company that's...
Your quality of life is going to be higher than it would be if you're living in some kind of a hovel in Mountain View.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, the argument that they're making is not wrong.
My argument is that is taking, like you're sucking from the city.
But you're sucking a thing from the city that nobody owns.
Like, you can't pay anybody for the cool artists that are loafing around.
You're certainly not going to pay them for their art.
But you're...
you don't feel a responsibility to, you're bringing your people in who don't have culture, right?
They're 24 and they have computer science degrees and they don't know and they live in an apartment with nothing on the wall.
But they like having access to like good pho and bike paths.
Yeah, they like a good, they look good, good restaurants.
They like to go to, you know, they're learning to go to shows.
That's wonderful.
I mean, Seattle will inculturate that.
the people that work here because they will, if they, if they allow themselves, I'm sure Amazon has programs where it's like, Hey, come to a show with us or, you know, like, like after work groups of people that go do things.
So you see, you see them, you see a group of people show up at a thing and you're like, Oh look, it's a bunch of young Amazon people all in a herd with one another.
Like, and that is the process of, of the culture, uh, how the culture of a city works.
But what they don't acknowledge is that that has a cost on the people that are already living in the city who are making the thing that they're selling, which is like an intact culture where there's a music scene and where there's room for artists that don't have a lot of money to live.
This is the thing about San Francisco that when I'm down there and talking to musicians, I did this show while I was there last week where we covered the music of
A couple of Wes Anderson films, Rushmore and Royal Tenenbaums.
And it was, you know, there were probably 30 to 40 musicians.
And most of them were either old San Francisco people, like the Flamin' Groovies were there.
Wow.
Who did these days?
What did you let me ask would you do I ended up doing Judy is a punk and I did song yeah, which was super fun and I did The Rolling Stones tune I am waiting mm-hmm, which is not one of their greatest tunes and
But the band behind me was really great, and Kelly Stoltz was there, who's a friend of mine.
Kelly Stoltz, I know that name.
Kelly Stoltz is a San Francisco indie rocker who was on Suffolk.
Kelly Stoltz was mobbed up with the kind of, like, the Oranger kind of groups.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay, yeah.
He's a great musician, and he hilariously covered...
The Echo and the Bunnymen, the Seminole, whichever one of their records people consider Seminole, he covered that record in its entirety early on this year.
They heard it and came to him and said, we need a rhythm guitar player.
Oh, shut up.
You already know all the songs.
Was it Ocean Rain?
He's in Echo and the Bunnymen.
Was it Ocean Rain?
The record?
I guess it must have been.
I'm not... I don't celebrate their entire catalog.
It's not that I'm against them.
My face among them, kissing the tortoise shell.
It's a good-ass record.
I bet it is.
Sounds like the killers, you're saying.
Oh, no.
Oh, I did that poorly.
But so Kelly is in Echo and the Bunnymen and he's out there.
You know, those guys are very old and crusty.
Even Liza Minnelli?
He looked good last time I saw him.
He's okay.
I didn't tell you the story.
I opened it for them.
I opened for them.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
And he came off the stage.
You know, I tried to interact with him a couple of times, and he very definitely was like, Oh, yeah.
Completely unintelligible.
And I think he knows that he is.
And he talks throughout the show into the microphone.
And the crowd is like.
That sounds kind of amusing.
It was very amusing.
I was loving it.
But he got off the stage.
And I'm standing by the backstage stairs.
He gets off the stage.
People are like, yeah.
Somebody throws a towel around his shoulders.
And then there's an EMT.
a medic standing there.
He comes down the stairs and the medic hands him an oxygen mask.
I wish somebody would do that for me.
And he takes like four big drafts of this, like just just big, big lungfuls of pure oxygen.
And then he's like, and off he lights a cigarette and walks off.
And I, and then the EMT is packing up his stuff and I'm like, Hey, um,
Is that a real thing?
And the guy's like, oh, no, that's not going to do anything for you.
But he wanted it.
And...
I was here and had oxygen and they paid whatever the extra $150 is.
And he said, like, I think it's just kind of a, like, boost.
I mean, like, maybe you get a little head rush, but I think it's more like you feel like I got off stage and got some pure oxygen.
I don't think so.
And then he's kind of like, meh, which I thought was cute and funny.
Echo and the Bunnymen was founded eight years after the Beatles broke up.
And the time from forming Echo and the Bunnymen until now is 40 years.
So that feels pretty good.
Did you read the thing that as of a couple of days ago, the Berlin Wall has been down longer than it was up?
I reject that.
That's very troubling to me.
Isn't that nice?
Oh, my goodness.
We've had an entire Cold War, and all we've been doing is yelling about sleeping pods in San Francisco.
It's a different kind of Cold War.
Look at that Salesforce Tower.
That's handsome.
So have you been in it?
Does the Salesforce Tower allow you to go even in the front door?
I avoid downtown these days.
But, yeah, I don't know.
You know, the other part of it that's weird, and again, I'm not reading anything much while we're talking.
I'm going by what you're saying.
But what you're describing also, let's say the obvious thing, it is...
What some of these companies do is weird and at the least tone deaf.
But also they're like kind of shocked surprise that people don't like what they're doing.
Once they're kind of clocked doing what they're doing, you know, like whether that's stuff with your data or, you know, stuff with your other data or building a bubble.
There's this whole sense of like, oh, well, what do you mean?
Like, we're just we're just making tech.
tech and makes like why why are you guys getting all mad at us like like the fact that like you know i didn't realize we had to like ask permission to make your city good boo on us oh look at us making your making your stupid fucking town into a destination for the most desirable men in america like wow how how dare you get mad that we put some ferns in a pot downtown oh man you're gonna we're putting jimmy john's in there oh
A rising tide lifts all techs.
There wasn't a Jimmy John's downtown before, and now there is one.
Yeah, it's like a Donovan song, right?
Yeah, so thank you.
I guess you could overstate this, but it's kind of like the meme of like, oh, should I not have done that?
It's like, oh, that thing where this app downloads your entire contact list and uploads it to the cloud.
It's like, oh, was I not supposed to do that?
Is that something that makes people frustrated that we now collate all that data against these permacookies from Facebook?
Is that weird that we did that?
Is that bad?
And you're like, yeah, man, that's bad.
Not only should you have asked about that, but you shouldn't have done it.
You shouldn't have done it and needed to ask, but doing it and not asking is mega gross.
I don't know if this has happened to you.
Oh, you don't have a Facebook account or whatever.
Go on there.
I have a deactivated Facebook account that I have to use sometimes to log into something, but I don't post there or read there.
Right.
And also, I try not to talk about it, but if you ask, I will tell you.
I am one of the OGs at knowing that place is a fucking garbage fire.
You're welcome.
In my case, I don't... It's for your work.
Yeah.
But what...
What happened the other day was I got a DM.
Last time I heard about you getting a DM, it was that you hadn't gotten somebody free tickets for a show fast enough.
That's the last one I remember.
Because that's, of course, where you go.
You go to Facebook, and you go pester somebody that they hadn't given you a free thing fast.
And I get DMs.
People give me DMs.
And I don't mind them.
I'll take your DM.
Sure.
um you know don't do it all the time i don't want to i don't want to hear about things i don't want to hear about but if you've got something you want to tell me yeah or you want to ask me something or something maybe it is literally something private you know there you go i mean it isn't private that you're showing me your pictures your family because i don't know you yeah that's not a thing that needed to be private but but if you have a question or you want to talk to me yeah so anyway i got a dm
And I did what I often do, which is I went and clicked on the thing to see their profile because I want to know who I'm talking to.
Because a lot of times somebody will be like, what am I looking at here?
Yeah.
They're like, Roderick, man.
Yeah.
What's up, bro?
And I'm like, do I know you?
And then I go on their Facebook page and I'm like, I do know you.
Like you're the guy that I went on that long road trip with.
I wouldn't have remembered your name, but you and I are friends.
Yep.
As opposed to being, for example, a public relations person who acts like they know you.
Exactly.
Not that.
Because that's the thing.
This person comes on the thing and they're like, hey, what's up, man?
Or something.
And usually you know when it's a bot or when it's a troll.
But it's just plausible enough.
Did I tell you I started getting emails from Ben Shapiro?
Do you know who that is?
Yeah.
And these emails started coming into my inbox, and the problem is I know eight people whose names are some combination of Ben Shapiro.
Oh, sure, sure, sure, sure.
I know, like... Are they also the future of the conservative movement?
No, they're not, right?
I have a lot of friends that are named Ben.
I have a lot of friends that are named Shapiro.
I have a lot of friends whose names, you know, are in the larger family.
But not...
The larger family of Ben.
Just the smaller family.
I have 40 friends named Ben.
So I was getting these emails and I would open them because I'm like, oh, Ben Shapiro's got a question.
Or, oh, yeah, Ben Shapiro wants me to.
And then I would open and I'd be like, oh, you know, you get sticky on you.
Yuck.
And so anyway, this Facebook DM was from a person that seemed plausible.
And I went to click on their thing and I.
And I couldn't get to their profile.
It was like, you would click on it and it would say, you know, actions, thumbs up, delete, block.
And I'm like, I don't want to do any of those things.
I just want to see who this is that's trying to talk to me.
And I click on it again.
I click over here.
I click on the little wheel.
I click on the widget.
I click on the flag.
And it's like, would you like to add this person to your contacts?
Would you like to save this conversation?
That's a lot of options.
Would you like to give them a wave?
Would you like to give them a poke?
Would you like to give them a little pat on the fanny?
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.
I want to see who the fuck this is.
Couldn't do it.
And dedicated five minutes to five frustrating minutes to trying to figure out
Why I couldn't see who this was.
Well, a day or two later, I read a thing that says Facebook has decided to open up Messenger, their shitty DM platform.
to people that don't even have Facebook pages because they want their DM program to be the new SMS.
Oh, it's like a green bubble text.
Yeah.
Kind of, right?
I mean, somebody from outside the ecosystem.
Yeah, right.
But because China, I guess, won't allow Facebook, but they don't want to miss out on a billion customers, they've figured out a workaround, which is now you can just use Messenger.
Well, what they've done is they've introduced now into the system the possibility that some spammer comes out of nowhere.
And I don't even I can't verify there.
I thought one of Facebook's bug slash features was you had to prove that you were you equals equals you that your name is you.
I thought that, too.
But now.
There's this person.
And now subsequently they've come back a second time and been like, wave hi.
But it's a spam because they haven't said anything.
They're not asking me anything.
I don't want to just like be on there waving at you, whoever you are.
But like there's still the possibility that the third time they're going to write me, they're going to say,
Hey, don't you remember?
You know, because it's like, don't you remember me?
They might actually be somebody that I know.
Right.
You're explaining this just fine.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
You have to determine, is this an actual person?
If this is a person, can I judge what their intent is?
Because I'm so fucking sick of being punked out by PR people and robots that it has made me...
suspicious and a little cynical about that.
And it's sort of like the way that anybody who ever knew me mostly would not call me on the phone.
Like, you've called me on the phone.
I pick up.
It says it's John.
I pick it up.
But, like, it's a pretty good sign that it's not anybody I know or want to talk to if they call me on the phone.
And my various...
Yeah.
But like now we're at a point where when you reach a point where most of the inbound communication is harassment or junk, maybe that's a model that we need to flip around.
And until that model is flipped around, I go out and do I'll spend 15 minutes on due diligence for 30 spending 30 seconds saying thanks for the note.
Yeah, right because that's just how my fucking broken brain is is like I do not want to get in a conversation with a PR person and Feed them stuff that makes them think that they are cleft onto me and can count on me to go, you know promote their energy drink or whatever I'm just I'm just so tired of that.
It's just I'm sitting thinking about the internal logic at Facebook
where they have one of the largest media companies and tech companies in the world.
Although they say they're not a media company.
And they are worth billions and billions.
Everybody there is richer than Croesus.
Is that how you say it?
I don't think I know the reference.
Well, it's fine then.
You're bleeding over from your other goddamn show, I think.
I just learned about defenestration.
That was a very good episode.
Did you like it?
You know, do you want me to tell you the truth?
Yes.
I absolutely was not super into it for the two or three episodes I listened to, and I thought, I don't know if this is a miscalculation for John.
I don't like this show that much.
And then I listened to more of them, and I've come to really enjoy it.
And I think some episodes are way better than others in a way that will eventually balance out.
But your chemistry is actually really good.
And Ken is genuinely fucking funny.
Yeah, he is.
He's funny.
The bouncing checks joke is the stupidest smart joke I've ever heard.
And he had it ready.
He wrote it the night before.
Anyway, I give a thumbs up.
Go listen to Omnibus.
It's a good show.
The first couple were pretty stiff.
We were trying to figure out how to do it.
I think that Ken, he's so funny, and I've been meaning to... He's so funny and fast, and you know why I like him, because you start to like somebody when they make the joke that you would have made, and I'm like, oh, this guy's good.
He's so fast.
I think I just want to empower him to interrupt me more.
You know, he's very polite.
Right.
That's good advice for doing a podcast with you that a lot of people could take.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want him to say...
I want him to say his joke.
You know, he's got the joke and he's being he's like a little microphone shy.
Like he doesn't want to jump in.
Step on you.
Yeah.
But but we're sitting across from each other at a table so I can see him.
So if he's going to like jump in.
It'll be visible on his eyes.
And if you listen to that show, it's not really very edited.
We just don't talk over each other because we're looking at each other.
But yeah, I'm proud of it.
I think it's getting better all the time.
But good for you.
I'm glad you're doing it.
I don't think it's Croesus.
I think it's Croesus.
But it doesn't... I like those names that sound like it might be somebody from ancient Greece or Rome, or it could be somebody from West Virginia.
I like a name like that.
Hey, what's up, Croesus?
The great order of Cletus.
Well, Croesus was a very rich king.
Croesus?
And when you say richer than Croesus, you're saying that that's a way of describing someone as being rich.
I'll save that for Omnibus.
Okay, thank you.
But so thinking about internally in Facebook, the business culture that is saying, rather than saying, let's improve the user experience for the billion people who are using our platform.
Let's make it better for them.
Let's make it a better environment.
Let's make it a better product.
Their mentality is how do we get another billion people to use this?
And if getting another billion people to use this makes it worse for the billion customers we have, that's not our problem.
Like we need to just keep patching the holes in our program because people are, you know, they got nowhere else to go if they want to show pictures to their grandma.
But what we want is a billion more users.
That's our business model.
And that's so different from what the attitude of business was up until recent times.
You know, the attitude of business back when it was the customer's always right.
And what you want to do is get a customer for life and keep them happy.
And that person will tell their friends and come back and use your thing.
If they like buying tires this time, they'll be back in a few years.
Right.
And you contrast that with now, which is just like, well, you know, you have to use our product because we bought all the competitors.
And we're just, you know, you're not going to like it.
But you can't log into any of the other things you want to do on the web without using us now because...
Because basically we've made it so that either you one click into this new thing through Facebook or you spend 15 minutes filling out a form.
And it's like, okay, you're right.
My laziness is my culpability.
Yeah.
But it's just it's so I don't I don't know.
You and I both have many, many, many, many opportunities on our various shows to talk about how disappointed we are in the Internet.
But but this this situation where Amazon has built some orbs.
Now, I just got a letter just as we were sitting here from the radio station.
And they're saying they don't need me on the show.
They're going to have some architects come on instead.
And the woman, Amina, who I was speaking to, and I kind of ranted at her for a while about this.
She says, I guess Amazon does have a few ways to let the public see the spheres.
Limited, but they have a visitor exhibit section and they do cooperate tours.
That's nice.
But you have to schedule them and they are only on Wednesdays.
So I guess technically the public, if they plan in advance, can interact with them a bit.
But I still think it's an interesting conversation.
Thanks for your time.
And I don't mean to mock her.
She's trying to do a radio show.
She's got a job to do.
Yeah, but you're bringing in architects.
I mean, you know, the generals run the war.
You know what I'm saying?
That's right.
They're going to be like, well, I think... There's not enough electrical outlets.
But so Amazon's covering their ass, and anybody that's listening to this show that works at Amazon that is a partisan is going to say, you can go on Wednesdays.
I mean, it's booked through March of 2024, but...
Get your name on a list.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess it's, you know, I don't know.
It's easy to, there's so many things to be outraged about these days for good reasons.
And there's so many things to... Outraged about that statement.
I'm sorry.
Follow bug.
There's so much stuff that just kind of roils inside of you.
And so for me, I just don't talk about Facebook anymore because I don't want to be that guy.
Who's like, yeah, well, you're just figuring that out.
I hate that guy on the internet.
Stop being that person on the internet.
Oh, you didn't notice that till now?
You know, it's like, God, just don't do that.
So I don't do that because I don't think there's anything that fruitful in me going, see, I told you Facebook was bad and dumb.
But there's also this, it's too much to call it a lobster trap, but not too, too much.
But there are these kinds of things where you're like, well...
I guess we got to where we are now, and how do we feel about that?
And it's like the now-discredited myth, but the still-useful analogy of the frog in boiling water, where it becomes a question of, well, if we need to get another billion users, and we need to get this adoption to move up.
I think that's a huge issue for Twitter, where they're not growing anywhere near where they need to for their valuation.
Yeah.
So then you get into this thing of saying like, well, you know, we can just keep moving these buttons around and now you can thread tweets and there's all this kind of stuff.
Even though, I mean, of course, the chorus, the response to that is, yeah, well, what about the abuse in Nazis?
Is that a thing you're going to make a button for?
Because that's really upsetting to a lot of people who've been here from the beginning.
But you have to, you end up doing this kind of funny calculation in your head of saying like, well, okay, if, as you're saying,
If they want to get another billion users or whatever it is on Facebook or on Twitter, then it becomes this weird, I guess it becomes a balancing act of how many people will tolerate those changes for how long before they just go somewhere else.
At the time when you and I, you know, during the full fruition of our relationship, I feel like the big thing was MySpace.
And there was a time when everybody thought there's no way anything will be bigger than MySpace.
It was such a juggernaut.
And then I think Facebook kind of took that over.
And MySpace still has its demographics and localities where it's very popular.
But I don't know.
I don't have a smart opinion about this.
But as somebody who is outside of the boiling pot, I'm a frog outside the pot.
I do think it's interesting that people using Facebook...
seem to bring to it the approximate joy of draining a wound.
Maybe a wound near their eye.
It's the same way I felt.
I never saw anybody look happy using a Blackberry.
And these days, I never see anybody happy.
There's nobody who's excited about Facebook anymore as a veteran user.
That's maybe not entirely true, but people who've been using it for five or more years, I think by and large, they will all tell you that they do it out of this grudging sense of obligation.
Now, maybe it's because of their family and they need to post photos there.
Maybe it's because of their work.
But, you know, I mean, who looks forward to using LinkedIn?
Like, who's excited about, you know what I mean?
And I don't know.
I mean, I don't know where the inflection point comes.
Maybe some of the improvements they make that attract another billion people are also good for the people who are already there.
But that's kind of the interesting balancing act is that.
The kinds of things that make the system more permissive are generally the kinds of things that make other people feel more exposed.
When you make it easier for randos and new accounts to get to me without any way for me to control that, that's not good for me.
That's not good for anybody.
And I'm a fucking 51-year-old white guy.
I have the easiest thing in the whole world.
But did you, for example, did you see the New York Times article yesterday, I believe it was, about buying followers?
Did you see that article?
No.
Can you still buy followers?
Huh?
They used some data visualizations, data analysis, that's extremely interesting.
Long story short, this particular company that sells followers, for one thing, they are basically taking, in some cases, acquiring the accounts of real people.
And like the zombie that eats out an ant's brain, it turns your account into one of their follower accounts now that they can deploy.
But it leaves a fingerprint where you can sometimes see that there are these changes or these new accounts that are all happening at roughly the same time.
And when somebody buys X number of followers, it's a thousand fingerprints are left behind of like this certain pattern that is very, I don't want to say easy to detect because a lot of hard work went into it.
But when you look at it, it's staggering how similar the pattern is.
So you see these nerds at the New York Times do this great work.
And then you think, like, man, first of all, Twitter is a very good API that let them do that analysis.
They have a very permissive API that's fairly powerful for doing data analysis.
That's super cool.
But Jesus fucking Christ, how hard would it be for them to do that?
How hard would it be for them to go in and look for patterns that are just blindingly obvious?
For a long time, it was the boobs and butts problem.
Every time you post something, a picture of a boob or a butt would favorite it.
And I think that's kind of gone down.
The part that astonished me about that, though, was there was such a similarity to every one of the accounts.
You don't even need to have deep learning to go like, oh, are there boobs in this picture?
Just the very way that there was always a pinned tweet that was about this kind of subject matter.
There were always these kinds of things in the bio.
There was always...
It's just the kind of shit where I barely know how to use fucking Excel and I could see the pattern.
If I had two months of Pearl, I'd be able to write something that would be able to identify plus or minus 20% probably thousands of these accounts.
Now I am fucking ranting, but that's the part that's frustrating.
This is their party.
Guys, this is their house.
This is your couch that you're letting everybody come in and shit on.
And we're expected to sit there and go, wow, that was really good shit.
Yeah, that was awesome.
Great.
Why don't they use some of that firepower they've got?
And a cynical person would say, well, I'll tell you why.
There's a reason they don't do anything to try and curtail the most extreme voices.
And it's the same reason that clickbait headlines get lots of comments.
Every comment is at least three page views.
Every time we're outraged and reload, we are engaging at a level that is exactly the kind of metric that they are selling right now.
So, you know, it's like that old thing.
What's his name says about never expecting anybody to understand something that jeopardizes their job.
That's the frustrating part.
And then they just play it off legit and go, yeah, we're trying real hard.
Here's our update.
Sorry for all the Nazis.
I mean, when I say...
that the old business model was customers always right.
I know that there are, there's a lot of eye rolling about my, uh, 1940s idea of what capitalism is, but, um, this isn't better and it isn't an evolution.
Um, it is, uh, a very
very narrow idea of what business is and it's you know the narrow idea of people that have only studied business and they have not I mean it's the in some ways the rise of the business school because it used to be that you went to university and you studied things and then you went and you started a business and if you go to business school and you study business you are studying
in a lot of ways, a very culty discipline where things are in fashion and out of fashion.
But you're also starting with these infrastructural things without regard to what it is that you are quote-unquote selling, which is very foreign to someone like you or me.
You didn't get into music by saying, hey, what kind of music should I be recording to sell the most records?
Right.
Right.
Or how can I sell T-shirts?
What's a good way to sell T-shirts?
I know I'll make some band music.
Right.
Like, you know, they're going to business school with no novel idea.
They're not going there because they built a better mousetrap and they want to sell it.
They're going there just like, I'm going to get into business.
And then they learn business and then are frantically casting about trying to find a way to... To have something to do a business about.
Yeah, to do a business.
And so some of them think like, oh, I'm going to go out and talk to inventors.
And a lot of them are just like, what can I get that will attract attention to me long enough that I can cash out?
And then there are these models like Twitter...
There was a proposal, and I forget exactly who made it.
And I responded to it kind of like, this is amazing.
Why don't we do this?
And I know that it is a flawed premise.
But also, it was suggestive of a way of thinking, which was, why don't we put together a multinational entity?
to buy Twitter at its current valuation and make it a nonprofit because it is in its older version was such a benefit to the world.
Honestly, I think it was, you know, it did fulfill the promise of like, what would happen if everybody could just talk?
And, you know, so many of my friends came from Twitter and,
Like people that I know in real life who changed my job.
If it hadn't been for Twitter, I would have not.
I mean, I'd done podcasts before, but I mean, real talk.
If I had not been on Twitter, I would not have met Scott and Adam.
I would not have done you look nice today.
And I would not have seen podcasts as a thing that I could do as something like my job.
If it weren't for Twitter in favor, that wouldn't have happened.
Me too.
Right.
I would never have.
I mean, I met Amy Mann after a show.
And she was like, you covered my song and you did it wrong.
And I was like, I know, but I didn't practice that much.
And she was like, yeah, well, pretty good, kid.
Keep it up.
And I was like, lol, you're Amy Mann.
High five.
But then the next day she followed me on Twitter.
And I was like, wow, no shit.
And so I followed her back and I was like, hey, what's up?
And she was like, lol.
And I said, lol.
And you can't have conversations like that in real life.
And then within four months, she said, will you fly back to having never seen her since?
She said, will you fly back to New York City and do a show in Central Park with me where we cover Simon and Garfunkel and Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel are going to be there?
And I said, hmm.
Lol.
And that only happened.
I don't know.
It's pretty far away.
I know.
Well, are you paying for the flight?
Do I get a per deal?
Yeah, exactly.
Where are we staying?
Yeah.
Am I staying with you?
No.
That only happened because in that four months, she and I talked on Twitter with a bunch of other people who were also fun and funny all day.
By the time she made that phone call, we knew each other.
And when would that have ever happened before?
So anyway, this proposal was like, why don't we just buy it and declare it a UNESCO site?
And we'll govern it.
And we won't let Nazis, and we won't let boobs and butts, and we will restore it to what it was, which was like a true human accomplishment.
And everybody was like, ha, ha, ha.
It's kind of like a cross between a national park and a Superfund site.
Yeah, right.
Well, it starts as a Superfund site, but we'd like to eventually turn it into a national park.
We have to do a little bit of cleanup.
Roll up our sleeves a little bit.
And it seemed...
It seemed briefly plausible, like, wow, right, the people at Twitter don't care anymore.
All they want is money.
They just want to get out, I think, probably, most of them.
And give them their money.
You know, they made their money.
They can keep their accounts.
Yeah, you guys, that's great, Jack.
Like, here's some money.
Would that make you happy, money?
You can beam back to your home planet.
Yeah, you can go now.
Go with your money.
He's crazy.
Human emotions are strange.
I mean, emotions.
Yeah.
And leave it to us, like give it back to us.
Right.
But that idea that every single thing needs to be monetized to within an inch of its life, that Facebook doesn't have enough money.
And that they need a billion more customers because they need what?
To control everything?
Right.
What's your end game?
What's the end game?
You'll know this will have been super successful when what happens.
When what happens?
Yeah.
Precisely.
And is the stuff you're doing now, is this the direction that you consider moving toward utter success?
And are we... We are nothing, right?
We are just...
100,000 people come and go every second.
We're Matrix batteries.
We're pod boys.
You know what I'm saying?
We're Keanu Reeves with a garden hose in our neck.
I want to reach out to people and say, do you have a good idea?
The guy that had the idea of URLs gave it to the world for free.
I mean, he just said...
here you go.
Right.
I'm not going to copyright.com.
This is a thing that needed to happen.
Right.
And here it is.
Like I built it.
It didn't take that much.
It was like a brainstorm I had and it took a couple of little bits to, to build, but it didn't, you know, the idea that Twitter or Facebook represent that some intellectual property that,
we all know was the result of like a one-night brainstorm and a few weeks of coding.
Like it isn't the same as building the infrastructure to bring water to New York City.
It just isn't.
It was some guys in a dorm who were like, ha ha ha, what if we made a website where you could judge people's faces?
And thumbs up, thumbs down.
I mean, it was it was like sick at its core from the from the very dawn.
But but Twitter, I mean, you know, you know how Twitter got made.
You were there like it was.
It was like, oh, I know here.
Why don't we do this?
It'll be like an SMS for friends.
And we can say like, oh, I'm going to the taco place.
And then everybody, you won't have to text everybody individually.
Had a good run.
Like that's not a fucking idea that's worth a billion dollars.
It's just a fucking idea that you could have had and given as much as you could.
It reminds me a little bit of what happens in pharmaceuticals where you come up with like a Nexium or something.
Let's say you come up with what was the big allergy one, like Claritin.
You come up with some new formulation and you get a patent on it for however many years, like five years or whatever it is.
And then you have to re-up your patent.
So you've got to figure out what most of them I think end up doing is slightly changing the delivery mechanism and getting a patent on that.
Wow.
We were able to string this out longer and longer, but you're like, man, how soon do we start giving the clarity in a way at prices that are normal for everybody?
It's like, well, that's not really how this model works.
Right.
Like, oh, you know, we moved a button.
Yay for us.
Sorry about the Nazis.
Yeah, you see that a lot where I feel like I've seen that several startups that I have sort of tangential knowledge of where they had 15 employees and they felt like they needed 50 in order to build the business.
So they hired 50, but then they've got 50 employees and they need to...
earn money to pay the 50 employees.
So they need a hundred employees to make enough money to pay the 50 employees.
And it's just this like this mentality of the voracious growth that no one wants to run a 15 person company anymore.
That's really good and sleek and makes an income for everybody and is stable and it's not growing by leaps and bounds and you're not going to sell it for $15 million when you're 28 years old.
It's just a job that you gave yourself that's like pleasing and you go home at night and you feel satisfied by your work.
Like my mom was talking about her brother the other day and she said, well, he retired from, you know, Sohio at 50.
And I said, he retired at 50?
She said, yeah, that's what used to happen.
You'd start at a job when you were 20 and then 50, you'd work there 30 years and you retired with a full retirement.
And I was like, am I just hearing about this for the first time?
Is this what people talk about when they say that things have changed?
What do you mean?
What did he do then?
Oh, you know, he got a sailboat and he did some stuff.
And I'm like, 50?
50?
I'm 50.
Yeah.
I'm 50.
I don't, I don't have, what are you talking about?
And then she's like, think about the people that join the army when they're 20.
They retire.
My high school girlfriend retired at 40.
Retired because she was rich or been retired because she had done 20 years at a company and got, she used Excel in the air force for 20 years.
20 years since she retired.
From the Air Force.
Yeah.
Thank you for your service.
They love that.
And the way that she does the rows and the columns.
Oh, the mom's in the apple pie and freedom.
You know, Mike Squires did a pretty good stint in the Marine Corps.
Really?
Yeah.
Shit dog?
Mike grew up in a very rural Washington town, and the...
And kind of the writing was on the wall about how life was going to go, and he decided that he was not going to go that way and join the Marines.
The family meth business?
Yeah.
He said, you know, I'm not going to take over from the weakest uncle as the younger enforcer for the family business.
It's like the world's saddest eye, Claudius.
And he joined the Marines, and it got him out.
The weakest uncle.
Yeah, right.
Like, Uncle Tony, sorry, pal.
You're going to have to come take a walk with us in the desert.
Who among you still has the original teeth?
Who has the keys to the pickup truck?
You shall wear the crown.
He joined the Marines and he got out.
He got out of his little town.
He got out of the cycle of rural shittiness.
Took the midnight train going anywhere.
He did.
The streetlight people.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
And then when he got out of the Marines, very crucially, he did not go back to his little shitty town with his duffel bag and hug his high school sweetheart.
He went to Seattle and he bought a bass guitar and was like, fuck it.
Mm-hmm.
But what he did in the Marines was sat at a typewriter.
Yeah.
That's a lot of people.
He's got big biceps and he's got tattoos that say like USMC.
I'm not in any way impugning Mike or Marines in general, but that's part of what makes me laugh in a way I'll never laugh publicly is like when everybody's always just jizzing themselves so hard over the troops and the first responders.
And it's like...
Yeah, but they also got their education and their pension and everything paid for in a way that my kid's teacher does not.
The support staff, Merlin, is just as important as those frontline troops.
No, the rest are as important as the notes.
I am mocking Mike just because it gives me tremendous satisfaction.
And the thing is, Mike could absolutely kick my ass.
Sure.
Even right now, even as fat as he is.
He probably knows that Chava Grava, whatever it's called.
He knows that it's really Kung Fu.
He knows Chupacapra.
He knows Chupacapra.
Seven different ways.
And one of those ways is he'd hit me with his typewriter.
Freedom!
Well, you know, that's one of those things when I'm sitting around not thinking about burying shipping containers in the desert to put Donald Rumsfeld.
Yeah.
You know, a big idea that isn't really even that big is the idea of national service that encompasses things other than the army.
And, you know, the Israeli model of 18 to 20, everybody serves.
But you can choose to work for the National Park Service.
Maybe you could cut trail.
You cut trail.
You work for the Department of the Interior.
You work for the National Endowment for the Arts.
You do two years of public service in one of a million different ways, but it be considered equivalent to military service.
Because if you do two years of voluntary work at the National Endowment for the Arts, making it easier, or you work for the Department of Transportation...
like that is that is an equivalent service to your country and your people and the idea that there you know that there are there are people risking their lives on battlefields but yeah no question you know if if the person who is driving the truck that's bringing the bottled water to the people that are uh
are doing that work on the battlefield, is as integral to that machine as the fighter, then the people who are making the roads back home work better, and the people that are making America stronger by having a more devoted national commitment to the arts are also engaged in the same battle.
My kid's principal works about 12 hours a day and can't afford to live in San Francisco.
Yeah.
She lives in the East Bay.
Yeah.
And that's insane.
And that is a terrible misallocation of resources, but also it speaks to a core decline in our values that I cannot yell enough about.
And I think people may feel like this is all some kind of crusty attitude and that
That once we turn the next corner and we're all wearing heads up displays and walking around with Madame Butterflies strapped in our underpants.
Does that report back to the cloud, John?
I think it does.
The cloud is like we are producing seven milliliters of effluvient per hour.
It does a moisture check.
It does a moisture check.
It was Nixon that took us into China, right?
Yeah, took Nixon, yeah.
And as much as that's a Mussolini made the trains run on time argument, I also feel that it may one day be a liberal Democrat or a liberal politician that reintroduces the idea of a compulsory national service.
a peacetime draft, but that draft includes a, and to work at the department of transportation is considered equivalent to having been in the army because, because it is ultimately.
And that if we, you know, we, we spend, I spent a lot of time in the last year talking to people in the military and officers in the military.
And for the most part,
They say the same thing, which is that they consider themselves apolitical, but that they support the military.
And so they support politicians that support the military.
And those politicians tend to be more Republican than Democrats.
So that's how they fall.
But really, they support the military and that is their church.
Right.
And when you say to them, well, all right, but what about this weapons platform that is a hundred times over budget has been proved over and over again to not work.
It was designed at a time when the mission was different than it is now.
So there's no mission for it anymore.
It's a total boondoggle and they keep crashing.
How do you feel about that?
And they're like, well,
The billions of dollars that we pour into that go to the people that work for the military and the companies that support the military.
So even though it is a shit storm, I believe that in the end, it benefits the country because it benefits the military.
And that's the point at which you realize like, oh, right, they are...
I understand that they're nonpartisan, but also they should not be in charge of that decision.
Because they have a... They can't be blamed for... Self-interest makes it sound more nefarious than it is, but they can't be faulted for doing the thing that they think is right and that happens to support...
I mean, they do.
Yeah, I can fault them.
But but I but I but I do feel like we have listeners.
We have listeners who serve.
We should thank them for their service.
They love that.
Thank you all for your service.
I know we do.
And I know and I'm in I'm engaged in this debate with with several of them offline.
But they DM me.
And they say, that thing you said is wrong.
And I say, you're wrong.
And then we have a lively discussion because everybody loves to start that way.
But no, that is why we have civilian oversight of the military.
But the problem is that if you put into office people that get into office by saying, I will reflexively support the military without ever questioning them, you get into this situation where, you know, like in Rome...
I hate to, oh my God, I'm so, oh, it's a cliche.
No, you're already doing it.
Go ahead.
Want to talk about Moldovia?
Mulvania?
In Rome, the rule was, as soon as you stepped into Rome as a general or as a Roman soldier, you no longer were in the army.
In the city of Rome, you were a civilian.
You could not enter Rome as a member of the army.
So the armies were always outside of Rome.
And the reason was that they were worried, obviously, that it was a way of dealing with the fact that a general could come back from a triumphant battle and march into the city and get himself elected king.
the Caesar in the, in the, in the frenzy of, um, outpouring of, of, uh, joy at the returning conquering army.
So the army would return.
And as soon as they walked in to town, they were civilians and, um, it kept them, you know, it kept them in check.
And it's not that Roman generals didn't sometimes ascend and a couple of notable times marched in anyway.
Um,
But that was their mentality, their way of church-instating.
And we've kind of lost that.
We've lost a crucial element of civilian oversight because our civilian branch of government has abdicated its oversight responsibility.
It's gotten too enthrall.
You know, there are too many congressmen that are in thrall of the military and there's too much money floating around that they don't want to miss out on.
They all went to business school, so they're just looking for business.
They're not, they got no, there's no morality to it anymore.
I jumped into an online conversation and you might help me with this.
Yeah, sure.
I hope anyway I can.
I started following a bunch of OPSEC people about a year ago because I wanted out of the thing where people were yelling at each other.
Oh, God.
I made a real mistake.
Oh, my God.
It's like 4chan with a CS degree.
No, you are pwned with your intent.
Black hat.
But at one point, somebody in the academic CS community was sending out
Tweets to the people in their community saying we're having we're starting a group like an online think group where we're discussing ethics in CS.
and we're trying to get computer science computer science okay we're trying to get academics people that are working in the field people that are you know theoretical about it we're trying to get everybody together to talk about uh to you know to build a framework of talking about ethics in in computer science and so you know
And this was an open invitation on the part of an organizer to kind of, you know, come in, present your CV, explain who you are.
And on the basis of that, we'll, you know, we'll include you in this conversation.
And it was kind of, you know, it's like a typical sort of like, who are you?
How do you rank?
And we're going to include you in this conversation with priority if you teach at Stanford versus if you're a 24-year-old coder, right?
Right.
Which made sense.
But I wrote him and said, hi, I am not in computer science, but I really want to be engaged in the conversation around ethics in computer science.
And I humbly submit that
You could have some civilian lay people in this conversation because it feels like you guys might get into a little bit of a think bubble with one another.
Because some of the presumptions that you're all operating from maybe are the wellspring of some of these ethical beliefs.
Questions that you're struggling with, like maybe it's up, maybe it's up above some of your first presumptions, or maybe it's just a thing that you never looked at this this way because you all think a certain way.
But it seems like some lay.
thinkers might have a place here.
I mean, putting it, I would be putting it strongly to say you'd be the court jester, but you could be there to be a smart person asking a question that doesn't come up very often.
Right.
Which sometimes might be a silly, obvious question, and other times might be thought-provoking and help them to clarify their thinking on something by having to explain it to a numbnuts like you.
That's right.
And if your explanation to a numbnuts is, well, everybody knows what this is, and the numbnuts says, that's not true,
Yeah, you do maybe come at things from a different way.
You can't talk about ethics in computer science without recognizing that you're talking about ethics and not computer science.
Because if you're talking about ethics in computer science and you think you're talking about computer science, then you're going to come to the same conclusions you came to before.
If you're talking about ethics, you're talking about a different discipline.
And computer scientists aren't experts at it.
There's nothing to suggest that being good at computers means that you're also good at the ethics of what computers can and are doing.
That is a separate discipline.
Anyway, he wrote back and said, I agree.
How?
Like, how?
How?
We're not meeting in a convention center and giving speeches.
We're creating an online community of people that are doing this work.
And we're using, you know, in these short burst conversations, we're using all the nomenclature of our field.
And we're just bippity boppity booping back and forth with C++ talky talk.
Yeah.
I thought your site was a cobalt.
How are you going to engage in that conversation with us?
And I said, I cannot.
I cannot engage that way with you.
And if the ethical, if what you're doing is creating like an online community where people are bouncing ideas off of each other, there isn't a place for me to hop in.
Because nobody wants to sit and explain to a layperson something that everybody else in the room gets in 140 characters.
Right.
But I guess I'm just – if you are someone who's organizing this community, if you're impelled to do it, let me just plant that seed in your head that at a certain point other people need to be –
people that are not in computer science or people who are not biologists need to be part of the bioethics conversation or the computer science ethics conversation and you guys you know people in computer science need to acknowledge that and not have it be a thing where
you present your paper and then a bunch of people are butthurt about it and you're like, but we did everything we try.
You know, why are you so mad at us?
You're like, cause this is what we're in and I'm going to get angry letters, but this is where we are with drone warfare.
Um, because the people that were doing the ethics talk were also the people that were procuring and flying those drones.
And there wasn't anybody in the chain that was like, okay, let's, let's come up with a,
Let's come up with a order of engagement here or let's come up with a way that this is going to integrate into our civilian laws and our civilian morals.
The people that were doing that work were in the military or were in the Congress authorizing the military to do what it wanted.
And I know there are people in the military that I argue with about this.
But it was never put forth.
There's no Monroe Doctrine about it.
In a way, it violates the Monroe Doctrine.
So I don't know how to do that other than in places like this, right?
I mean, you and I sit and talk and we, do we traipse over into computer science ethics and we, we bumble around and I knock a vase off a shelf and you say some things that I don't understand.
And then we bumble, you know, we waltz over into the next room and we, we, uh, yell about business for a while and you, uh, you talk into your shoe, but where else are those conversations happening?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, I can only kind of argue this by analogy, I guess, where, like, I feel like, because I don't know anything about any of this stuff, but I do at least have a reckon, like everybody I've got a reckon.
You know, it just seems like there are situations where, well, first of all, let's take it as red, that we're looking, when you're talking about any rapidly evolving and important topic issues,
in public discourse, it is very useful to have a lot of, as they say in England, a lot of boffins.
You want a lot of real smart people who understand the history of the problem.
how we've tried to address it in the past, how much of the way we've addressed it in the past is useful in the future, and all the kind of stuff that you would expect.
I mean, if you're going to have a stuff, if you're going to have something about medicine across the United States, it's probably good to invite some doctors.
I would never argue against that in a million years, but there is that dumb liberal arts part of me that thinks that, well, it would be nice to have some people who are...
doctor slash somethings as well and maybe even some people who are not doctors but are others kind of slash people in because you know i think i i do feel like i uh group think too strong a word but like i do feel like there's this thing of like well we're all smart people in this room who understand this problem so let's get to solving it when like some of the most useful stuff that you can have for input in any kind of a group project is people who have differing views on how we frame the problem
How we ask the right questions.
And I think that there is a fetishism for getting the right answer that sometimes can skate right past whether we ever ask the correct question about this.
Absolutely.
And that's where I think there's a role for people who are lay people or nearly lay people.
is to be able to be the dummy in the room, maybe in some cases, but look no further than what we've been describing for a lot of this episode, which is, oh, should I not have done that?
Why was there no one there to say, look, you know,
I may not be much smarter than the average bear, but if you had asked me about this and you had described it accurately, what the scope of this change to your system would do just as a garden variety user, a dummy like me could have told you that's a stupid, shitty idea that's going to be costly to your reputation.
It's going to potentially expose you to risks that were utterly unnecessary for what you're trying to do.
And here I'm talking about stuff like these apps that do stuff like pull down all your contacts for no great reason.
Like there's all kinds of risks to that, that somebody like me could have gone, did you kind of like just, did you kind of just, you know, sniff test that with anybody normal?
Because anybody normal would have gone, ooh, that does not make me feel good.
Help me understand why that's a thing you need to do without telling me about it.
You know?
So I don't know.
I don't know if that goes for medicine.
I don't know if that goes for CS all the time.
But like...
having somebody in there to ask a perhaps illogical question, not just for the purpose of being the smart guy with the pipe who's disruptive, but to be able to bring an outside voice and an outside opinion to making sure that you have provided a good answer to a question that needed to be asked.
I think it goes for everything.
And the thing is that if you run a North Face store,
And a guy with a really long beard full of sticks and twigs comes in and rants for 40 minutes about your product.
You don't forget it.
And you probably send a memo to somebody.
But if enough people do it, you redesign your product.
And that's how a business interacts with its customers.
But online, Facebook has too many customers.
They get a million angry emails a day.
from people saying this was a shitty idea.
And the way you do that is by managing the responses in a way to seem polite and to seem like you're listening.
When actually somebody that's closer in some ways to... I mean, I've mentioned this in other places before, but the gig economy ride-sharing service that I use has not only never gotten the location of my office correct, but consistently gets it wrong in exactly the same way.
And I haven't even tried to address it because I got a feeling I know what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is what I'm trying to say is I want to essentially file a civilian bug to say there's something with your system that gets the location of my office wrong by a right turn and over half a block every time.
It's something repeatable.
It's a repeatable bug.
But if I do that, it's just going to sound like I'm bitching.
And I'm not bitching.
I'm trying to say, I don't know if this is indicative of anything bigger, but maybe exploring that dumb experience I've had four times now could tell you something about your system.
But now I'm already editing myself on that because I don't want to be just some dingling where they say, thank you very much for your input.
We're always improving the service.
Here's your weekly update.
Yeah, exactly.
You are literally saying, let me help you make your product better.
And there is no way to do it.
I mean, I told you, I think, that I tried to call Snapchat about eight months ago.
Tell me more.
I want to hear this.
I said, listen, I just, you know, I'm saying this to myself.
I'm saying it to the air.
I have a simple question.
I just need to talk to a certain person.
I've looked online.
There doesn't appear to be a way to reach that person.
And I just need to ask an operator to put me through to the person I need to talk to.
Quick question.
I have a simple question for them.
Yeah.
And I called a phone number.
It was Snapchat phone number.
And it said, hi, thanks for calling Snapchat.
If you'd like to talk to us, just tweet us at Snapchat.
Beep.
Click.
And I was like, huh.
All right.
What if that involved the kind of information that I maybe wouldn't want to say publicly?
Right.
What if you've discovered a vulnerability?
This happened to my friends who work on a password management app.
We're trying to get encryption in place to send a critical zero-day exploit bug report to a company.
And they're like, hey, thanks for your interest.
Go sign up for our bug bounty over here.
And they're like, no, you don't understand.
Right.
Like, somebody needs to cut the fucking red wire now.
Like, we need to go get in, like, a skiff and talk about this thing that has been a problem for weeks or months and you didn't know about it.
And you're like, oh, that's cool.
Thanks.
Glad you're a fan.
Here's a pin, you know?
Yeah, right.
Tweet us at.
Tweet us at.
Okay.
We'll just expose your terrible cryptography error on Twitter.
And that'll be a good thing for you.
And my thing wasn't, like, clip the red wire now, but it was time-sensitive.
and it was real, and it was solvable by a person somewhere.
Well, I spent a couple of weeks
And not just trying everything.
And I tried, I mean, I did all these like go online and backward look up phone numbers.
And, and it was called like, it was like get human.
There's one where you can go and find the secret number for most places.
Yeah, I did.
I tried that.
I tried, I called the California business, greater, better business bureau, all these different things and everything, every phone number I got,
funneled me back to that couch at the fraternity house in animal house and i could not and so i i tweeted and said hi i'd like to talk to someone can you contact me
And then they wrote back two days later and were like, yeah, follow us and we'll DM.
And I followed them and they said, hey.
And I said, hey, I have a question about this.
And they were like, oh.
And I swear to you, they said, call this number.
And the number was like, just tweet us at.
Like it was an ultimate.
There was no way through.
And it was intentional.
It was from there.
I mean, like that is a word I reserve for special occasions.
It's somewhat Kafkaesque where it's difficult to understand why this is happening.
And there's some level of recursion and repetition where like you're in the castle.
What's crazy about science fiction is that it gets so many things right, but it often gets things really wrong.
And that was what was so amazing about Star Wars or Blade Runner, where they were the first science fiction films that made things look dirty, right?
And we were like, wow, that looks so real.
What Kafka missed, he was so right, but what he missed was that there would be a giant yellow smiley face on everything.
But it's also not clean, right?
You want to think like all those science fiction movies where there are giant smiley faces on everything, it's at least clean.
Yeah.
But this is both dirty and smiley facey.
And every interaction I had with Snapchat was just like, hi.
Oh, my God.
Thank you.
Hey, tweet us.
And it's like, look, I'm not 14.
I don't have a question about like my boyfriend took a booby picture of me.
And if I did, I wouldn't want to tweet you.
Right.
But I have like a grown up question.
I want to speak to one grown up.
Anyway, eventually, and I don't even remember how I did it.
I got a phone call from a live person there.
Wow.
And I don't remember what I said.
I think it was through their Twitter account.
I said, look, I want somebody to talk to me about, I want an adult.
And it came out of the blue.
I was not expecting it.
I got a phone call.
And it was a kid.
who said, hey, hi, this is Jeremy at Snapchat.
You got a question?
And I was like, yeah, Jeremy.
Have a snapper-rific day.
Here's my question.
And he was like, oh, yeah, well, hang on.
Let me call you back.
And then he called me back two minutes later and said, sure, here's the
Here it is.
Here's the number.
Should be arriving in the mail.
It's coming to you now.
Anything else?
And I was like, wow.
Yeah, just one other thing.
It took me a month to get to the point where I could have this two-minute conversation where you totally solved my problem.
Wow.
Why did it take a month?
Because to me, it feels like this conversation took a month, but it didn't.
It just took two minutes.
And I knew it was a two-minute conversation.
And I'm grateful for your help.
You've done more than I imagined.
Can you fucking make that a little bit easier for people?
He's like, oh, well, I'm just on the solution team.
Yeah, I know you are.
Thanks, Jeremy.
I know you are.
Have a good fish taco today.
Poor Jeremy.
Poor Jeremy.
Hey, hey, hey.
Hey!