Bad things happen when we let robots decide what’s good

What we're trying to unpack today, which is what we've been calling the crisis of taste. Tech companies kind of like flipped media on its head about 15 years ago, where instead of the commercial sort of being what everything was based around, that's now kind of incidental. So it's like, OK, what do we how do we make culture now? When you're outsourcing taste, that feels weird because that's the thrill of doing anything. The thrill of doing anything is these are my tastes. I like this. I hope someone else likes it, too. All right. So I did not say anything at the live show about why you were not able to attend. I just said, hey, he can't be here. I'm really sorry. I would love to hear what happened because you sent me an email that I don't think I've ever received before. I reached out to you because I had what I thought was poison ivy on my face. Well, we had a whole plan for today, but I think we should just sort of explore this medical mystery for the next hour. Yeah, let's WebMD this shit. You've always wanted to be house. I have always wanted to be house. I'm extremely unpleasant to be around just like him. So, yeah. I had a terrible time with Poison Ivy as a kid because I was convinced I couldn't get it. because I played in a patch of poison ivy without any problems. So for years I thought, I can't get it. I'm fine. And then I got it and I spread it all over my entire body, which was not fun. Were you like bragging? Were you like, were you like, look at me running this field? I was bragging. Yeah. Oh, no. I was bragging. Yeah. I was hoisted by my own petard. Absolutely. That now reminds me, though, that as so I ran into a friend and I said, yeah, I think I've got poison ivy on my face. And then he proceeded to tell me about a friend of his who has adult age children and that kid and a bunch of their friends. I think they were probably like college age. They had recently gone camping. And so while they were camping, they decided to have a bonfire. They just grabbed whatever wood and sticks and things. they light this giant bonfire not realizing that some of the stuff that they had lit on fire was poison ivy that's like so dangerous oh my god they all breathe it in no and so then they've got poison ivy on the inside and are all having to medicate and i don't know if you're just drinking calamine lotion at that point i literally heard that as a story like years ago and it's haunted me ever since that you could just like have poison ivy inside that's like a widow's bit that's like yeah that's that's brutal that's unreal um poison ivy is actually kind of a fantastic metaphor for what we are going to be talking about today but uh which is ai and and the the colonization of taste but first let me set up the show my name is ryan broderick with me as always is grant irving my producer and this is panic world to show about how the internet warps our minds our culture and eventually reality and joining us today is wyatt snack why thank you so much for doing this. When we reached out to you pre-health scare about being on our live show, we asked you a question that we've been asking all of our guests recently, which is, what do you do online? What do you enjoy about the internet? And one example is a podcaster, PJ Vogt. He was on a show of ours and he said he likes the Smoking Meats subreddit. And so we ended up doing like a 10 minute segment on stage where we just sort of had him talk through why he likes watching people smoke meat, uh, uh, like, like briskets on the internet. And you told us that you really enjoyed like super clips or compilations of 1970s and eighties and nineties advertisements. Is that right? Yes, that is, that is the thing that I, I either I found it or the algorithm found me, but that is the, that is the thing that if I'm on YouTube, I will, I will get pushed a lot of those videos and at the right time of the day, I'll say, yeah, sure. And next thing I know, I've watched an hour of commercials from 1986. My girlfriend is the same way. She got me hooked on this and it got actually so bad that during the snowstorm that happened in New York, you know, a couple of months ago, we were watching news coverage of an older snowstorm in the 90s, which was totally insane i now realize but i i wanted to ask you you know like why why do you kind of get drawn to that stuff is it is it purely nostalgia is it is it a fascination like what what is it for you that kind of brings you back because like when i watch those i get this like very weird almost like the same feeling i had watching the back rooms of like this like forgotten air like i don't know i'm infinitely fascinated by what i don't remember from that time period. Sure. I'll answer your question, but I've got a question for you first. Yeah. So when you were watching the old snowstorm footage, was there a certain comfort that you found in that coverage, whether it was them talking about it's a catastrophe and the fact that we obviously survived it, or just in the way that they were talking about it as it related to the way that people talked about this snowstorm? I think it was it was more peaceful. Like news coverage was more peaceful. And it was like it was like there's something about the SD video quality that I find very soothing on my brain. The the chyrons were sort of more chill and weird and wacky. I feel like TV was more fanciful. Yeah. I feel this way a lot when I have a rant that I do often about how like life was sort of more interesting when there were more child or friendly oriented public spaces like McDonald's was like weird and wacky and like you could sit down at Pizza Hut and it was like there's an arcade there like like life just felt a little sillier and TV sort of reflected that in a way. And so when I watch like old TV compilations, that's what I'm always struck by is like how silly things were allowed to be back then. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a part of it where I see a certain comfort when I look at those commercials, because there is the nostalgia part of it. But then it's weird because watching like, whatever, an hour of commercials from the 1980s or something like that. when you watch them, I do find myself thinking, this just is kind of what TikTok has become. Oh, sure. And I don't go on TikTok. I don't look at that as a feed. But I found myself as I'm watching these compilations, I'm realizing this is kind of old, like prototype TikTok. Like this is kind of the original TikTok in a way like commercials, because you have these highly produced ones that there's a lot of money in. And then you get some local car dealer or insurance company and the production value is terrible. And it doesn't feel that different than the person who has a video that goes viral and it's their kids saying something dumb. It just feels like, oh, these things feel really similar. What feels a little more pure is that these commercials are all very much out in the open trying to sell me something. They are not hiding the fact that this is a commercial enterprise where TikTok is trying to present itself as we're connecting people all over the world in ways that you never thought. And the reality is we're scraping your data and selling it to advertisers to push things to you. And this isn't really... It's less insidious. Yeah, this isn't really about you connecting with that person across an ocean. This is about us making connections between you, that person across the ocean, this other person this other person and then packaging that and selling it to someone who can then push a product down your throat i i know exactly what you mean there's also i'm curious if you've noticed this too so uh i have been watching entourage for the first time uh i have congratulations it's you know i love cracking open a cold one with the boys after a long day it's great um oh yeah oh yeah Yeah, it's so I mean, honestly, everyone by today's standards is like a sexual predator. But other than that, it's great. Oh, and like a huge racist. But other than that, it's like a pretty well made show. But two small caveats, two small caveats. Look, if you're going to watch TV from the 2000s, those are just the caveats you have to go into it with is like everyone here would be in jail. But other than that, like I am struck by how well made the show is. And like, you know, I was watching an episode where like the needle drops in this one episode were both MIA and Santa Gold. And it's like when I watch even old TV commercials that at the time were sort of chintzy and bad, there was this sense of like craft that I don't think has moved over to the digital video age. And now we're sort of entering this new age where, you know, AI, I think, is allowing a lot of people to outsource even just like their slop. Right. So every time I watch old TV, I think, man, like a lot of people took a lot of time to make this. And like, I miss that feeling. I miss encountering culture that people spent a lot of time on. Yeah, no, there's one of my favorite commercials is this one from the 80s and the production value on it. I would be very curious to talk to like a line producer today and say, if you were going to make that commercial today, how much would it cost? And it's a commercial for Huffy Bikes. and the commercial is a guy it's a it's like the perfect 80s guy in like short shorts and a button up like plaid button up shirt some aviator sunglasses a sweet mustache blonde hair flowing as he just rides along like this sort of mountainside that overlooks the ocean and it's all just that sort of you know that amber glow is on everything and it's i want to say a christopher cross song is playing yeah dude but it's just this guy just fucking hauling ass beautiful like sunset there's a bird whatever and i watched this thing and i'm struck by the fact that today that would probably who knows what that would cost to make to license that song to lock up the street to do any of those things and also to think this is for huffy bicycles i don't know the last time i saw a tv commercial for a bicycle and that kind of breaks my heart yeah i i was i i am not a sports guy but i have become a sports guy you know over the last few basically since the super bowl i've I've been sort of watching sports on linear TV for the first time in a long time. And I am struck by how you can see sort of this decline in commercials where it's like it's either Oscar award winning actors like advertising T-Mobile or it's like pharmaceutical companies like that's sort of or AI companies. Can I just pose to you a conspiracy theory around that? Yeah. Yes, please. So I have a good friend who is a commercial actor and has done well for himself as a commercial actor, and he's talked about how things have dried up and often talks about the fact that you have all of these A-list celebrities who are now doing ads and just what it's doing to the middle class commercial actor, where the opportunities are fewer and further between for people like him who used to work really well and really consistently. and commercial acting is a skill unto itself. The idea that you can create a character and make me believe something in 30 seconds to a minute, like there's a real skill there that, you know, whether it is you are a dad talking to their kid about driving for the first time or something, you pull out a lot of emotion in a very little bit of time. And now it's been replaced with all these Hollywood celebrities. And my conspiracy theory around this is, because we're now in an age of being able to just zip through the commercials as you zip through you will get little you know screen parts of it yeah yeah and i think in this moment where we've got that going on and also everything is being fucking rebooted if you're zipping through and you're like i don't want to see these commercials but then you see steve Carell and John Krasinski and just have a screen cap of it that you're like, wait a minute, are they making an office reboot? And then you go back and rewind to see, no, they're just selling coffee. But even that like five seconds of capture is enough that the you know, that it's like, OK, you now know what this coffee machine is that they've sold, that they were trying to sell you. But also you've just justified to the ad agency, to the tech company that, hey, this works, getting big celebrities to do these because someone's going to stop and be like, wait a minute, that's Thor. What's Thor doing? And then they rewind and they're like, oh, wait, he's just selling Amazon Echoes. He's Thor. That is so clever. I think that is actually – that makes so much sense to me. This is what we're trying to unpack today, which is what we've been calling the crisis of taste, which is that basically tech companies kind of like flipped media on its head about 15 years ago where instead of the commercials sort of being what everything was based around, that's now kind of incidental. So it's like, OK, what do we – how do we make culture now? And so there's just less – there's also less money going towards it because people want to keep it in their pockets. Right. Something also that has been very apparent to me watching Entourage is like wow people used to spend money and make money That crazy that that doesn happen anymore And so AI of course has made this worse And now we're actually seeing people in Silicon Valley talking about how they're trying to figure out how to unlock taste. This term that we've seen a bunch is – have you heard this? Taste is the moat. Do you know this? No. Okay, so the moat, I had to look this up, is an economic term for like what protects your business from being absorbed by another business. And so there's all these like AI evangelists now in Silicon Valley trying to sell services to other AI evangelists, teaching them how to develop taste, which is very funny. Yeah. And there's a recent example I want to mention before we go to our first break. Do you know about the South Korean Starbucks incident from this month? I don't. Oh, okay. You're going to like this. So South Korea went all in on Starbucks. This is true. It's their third largest market. They have like over 2,000 locations. And they wanted to promote a new Tumblr, like a new kind of like Stanley Cup style reusable cup. And so they decided that they were going to use AI to help them come up with the campaign. And they are calling the Tumblr the tank because it's like a big Tumblr. And then they were like, oh, we should do like tank day. And so they decided to pick May 18th as tank day. The problem is that May 18th is the anniversary of a 1980 massacre in Guangzhou province where over 10 days paratroopers crushed pro-democracy. It was basically their Tiananmen square. Yeah. And then they pushed this campaign because an AI was sort of helping them come up with it, didn't really sort of understand the context there. And now they're having to close like all these locations and do sensitivity training across the entire country. and things did not go great for them. Yeah. And I think the idea that when you're outsourcing taste, like that to me feels like there's such a problem with that because even as the person who is selling the idea that you don't need to have taste anymore, you don't, like that in itself is dangerous, that feels weird because that's the thrill of doing anything the thrill of doing anything is these are my tastes i like this i hope someone else likes it too that feels like that is at the end of the day whether you are making art or making food or making a product it is more often than not you are looking at it from a place of i think this would be a great thing out in the world maybe others will too so the notion that no that like that's too dangerous that's too scary for you to think what you might like that others might like that or might dislike it it feels very strange to say yeah yeah no you can just stay safe and and no one will ever know anything about your tastes We'll just have a machine have taste and whether you're cool with it or not, like just wait for your tank day. And that's when that's when you can actually voice your act. Your real opinion is when your tank day happens. But prior to that, you don't need to even let anybody know. It's weird that you say that, you know, taste is, you know, the good part, because for me, the good part is building B2B SaaS technology that I can sell. and I find that taste gets in the way of sort of creating dashboards for other businesses. Sure, yeah. No, that's – yeah. And I see that and I totally accept that. Thank you. At this point, it's probably best for me to go. Well, like let me just – I don't know what your business needs look like right now, what your HR software looks like, but let me talk you through what we've been building. But more on that after a word from our sponsors. Just works. I would love if there was a boy band or like a K-pop band named B2B. B2B would be really, that'd be really good. I mean, just like if there was a K-pop band, like, could you imagine just how that would fuck up? Like any like SEO, like, like all of a sudden, like all of your search engine shit is just totally like K-pop bands. and like yeah like small business like marketing tools just converging in this just nightmare so that that just actually got me curious because i was like i wonder like you know is bts an acronym i i think i remember it standing for something and it's a korean acronym for i think a much better band name which is bulletproof boy scouts whoa yeah that goes hard as shit you can't be named bulletproof boy scouts in america though we have way too many problems that's true and yeah yeah americans could tell you that there aren't any yeah that's true um so uh do you do you follow sort of the the the creeping rise of ai at all like have you encountered it like professionally ever like i because there are you know conversations about like it being used in script writing or whatever like have you have you encountered it professionally at all? I've not encountered it directly. I have a friend who is a screenwriter who evangelizes about Claude and how helpful Claude is. And he tried to explain it to me. And it eventually got to a point where he said, look, you just need to come to my house and watch me work with Claude. Oh, God. And I said, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm not. Wow, someone invented a worse thing than let me show you this video on my phone. Yeah. Is he okay? I'm not going to go to your house and watch you type in a thought to the machine and then sit back and be like, that's a good point. Yes. Oh, thank you. So I feel like the way he loosely described it was that he seemed to be using Claude as a writer's room to bounce ideas off of. I don't necessarily, in my experience, I don't really feel the need for that. And not to say that, like, all my ideas are amazing, but I just, if I want to bounce ideas off somebody, either I have friends that I could talk to. or I'll sit with an idea, I'll put it down for a little while, I'll come back to it, and my perspectives may have changed. I might have had time to think about it. If I sleep on it, my brain is working on it in the background. And so there's an aspect of it when I hear people talk about using AI in those ways where it almost feels like it's a creative crutch that they say, oh, it's helpful, But I don't know if it's any more helpful than if they didn't have it. I can't really I can't really point to a person who said, you know, who could go on stage and say, I won this Oscar and 90 percent of the credit goes to Claude. You know, there are plenty of people who have built things in this world and never thanked the clods in their the actual human clods in their life, which are spouses, relatives, like the number of relatives who have helped, whether it is make a screenplay great or start a business. Like, you know, Twitter wasn't started by just a couple dudes. Those dudes had spouses who had ideas who some of them were also programmers. Like, you know, one battle after another, it wins an Oscar. But it's also based on, you know, it seems like it's loosely based on the real life of a guy who is married to a black woman who has biracial children. And I'm sure Maya Rudolph read a few drafts, gave a few notes. But yeah, in my life, I haven't really seen it as in direct involvement. I'm sure there are other people who have had much more direct involvement with it. I think there are the genuine concerns and the fears of how it could be used. And I think things that I've seen where, you know, as we were talking about commercials, where you're seeing commercials use AI in any number of ways. And so there are those things that I'm seeing. But in a direct way, I haven't outside of a friend inviting me to his home in New Jersey. Oh, you didn't mention that part. OK, yeah, that's even worse somehow, I think. Yeah, no, I wasn't going to Jersey for that. You can come to Jersey and watch me talk to Clon. That's exactly why he can't talk to other people. Yeah, I think that's why. He's stuck in Jersey. I want to go back to the Maya Rudolph dynamic there because I think this is actually really – this is an interesting issue that is clearly like slowly getting noticed, which is like the breakdown is happening there, right? So recently, strangely enough, a couple Uber executives came forward in the last few months basically saying like not only is AI like not really working right, it's too expensive compared to the people that we would keep if like we had just not had it. Like they sort of did – they finally did the cost-benefit analysis and they're like this isn't really adding up for us. But I think something else that's very apparent now is like when you remove human beings from that process, from the – let me show you my thing. like, does this remind you of any sort of historical atrocities and line up with the date and anniversary of that? If so, let me know, you know, like that process. When you pull human beings out of it and you try to automate it, like that's where the taste breaks down, I think. And that's when you lose that human connection. Like Uber actually has this crazy stat where they discovered that a two-hour demo of using AI cost them over $1,000. dollars um and like we're seeing this across the board and then have you come across ai slop like in the course of your life online like can you like the that that uncanny feeling of like everything just sort of breathing and staring at you you know i'm talking about a little bit i i mean i i don't i i don't engage with a lot of social media and i feel like that's where the majority of that stuff I see, I wind up seeing it. And I remember there was some guy that he, he has a whole Instagram account where he puts himself into his, all of his 80s nostalgia. And so yeah, one of those where he's like visiting the karate kid or whatever. yeah and like on the set of sesame street right it's just close enough where it it just looks like close enough to gordon that you're kind of like uh yeah okay and the set looks like like close enough to the set and i've seen those things and i feel like the place i see it more often than not is honestly in hip-hop videos like oh especially rappers like middle-aged rappers sure have really embraced ai in a way that feels really strange oh like it wasn't little wayne's new album like full of ai generated samples like it's like soul samples that are referencing stuff that's happening currently so it's like it doesn't make any sense it sounds like something from 50 years ago but it's talking about him now yeah oh i i didn't even realize yeah the thing i feel like the thing i see is music videos like they're wu-tang music videos now that are all just these ai movies and i think dayla they did i think one of their music videos for this most recent album might have been AI. And there was a video I just saw that it was KRS-One and Black Thought and a song they did together. And it's just AI-generated versions of them. That bums me out because it doesn't. And I think it bums me out. And I think where it dovetails into where this conversation began, there was a time when you think about MTV, and people often are the old person on their lawn shaking their fist. But there was a time when MTV played music videos. And there was a time when having a music video, it was an expense that the artists took upon themselves, that they put money in with the idea that if this video reaches enough people. It'll increase radio play. It could hopefully open up new avenues for us for touring. It could raise our profile. And MTV was a tastemaker. To get a video on MTV meant that you were going to have exposure that you didn't have the day before. And I think now there is not a place for that. People drop music videos on YouTube all the time, and they just kind of get lost in the sea of music videos. And there's not that, there aren't those tastemakers or curators. My friend Pablo Torre often likes to talk about how there's no monoculture anymore. And I feel like even even to go a step further beyond monoculture it's just that there aren't arbiters of culture right in the same way that there used to be that there was mtv there was johnny carson or david letterman as like late night people who were the arbiters of culture like you know you look at even something like Late Night Today and what feels so different from the era of Johnny Carson that people always hold up in high regard is that Johnny Carson didn't seem to put on anyone he wasn't personally interested in talking to. Right, right. Whereas today, you look at late night shows And you don't necessarily get a sense that these are the tastes of the late night hosts, that these are the people that like this is the music they listen to. When I think about shows like Conan or Arsenio, what stands out to me is Conan was a fan of the White Stripes. Conan was a fan of bands like that Those were the bands you saw in Conan Arsenio was a fan of R and hip That's who you saw in Arsenio. Today, you can see any number of music acts on any given... I gotta give Jimmy Kimmel credit here. Because that man has been putting metal bands on national TV for almost 30 years. and it is the only time where he seems like kind of plugged in still is when he puts on like knocked loose or spirit box or some like absolutely heavy band that like has no right to be on national television and as someone who discovered music that way when i was a kid i do i think you're totally right like having people be able to say like i like this and you trust me So follow me here is like requires context. And I think even beyond the AI thing, like when the internet collapses context, that's what you lose. You lose the ability to be like, I know this person. I trust them. I'll follow them through this. Yeah. I was just watching an interview with Tom Scott, the YouTuber. He's like a British YouTuber. And he was talking about how like – Not the saxophonist from the 70s. Not the saxophonist from the 70s. No. New Tom Scott. That Tom Scott though, interesting Tom Scott. If you know the song, the Pete Rockin' Seal smooth song, They Reminisce Over You, it features a Tom Scott sample. I'm looking at him. He's got a – the two should collab. I could probably do that on my computer. You could make that with an AI video. Wow. Work with the Blues Brothers. Wow. He's got a lot. Whitney Houston. Wow. Yeah. So – After this, go down to Tom Scott. I will, yeah. Non-saxophone Tom Scott was talking about how on YouTube, 90% of the traffic – and we've seen this ourselves. 90% of the traffic is your thumbnail and then like 10% is the title and then 10% is – you do the math there. But like it's not the actual content of the video really. And he was saying like in his dream, he would have a half hour or an hour long TV magazine program where there's four segments. three of them you know and you can rely on and then there's a third one in the middle there where you're like oh this is weird but it's his chance to like show you something that you might not see and what i think is really fascinating is like when the social media feed was invented it was just an endless amount of that third segment here's a bunch of random stuff that you'll never see on tv you'll never encounter it and in the early days for me like i you know i was really excited by it. I was like, wow, TV feels so old and tired. And this is just a world of stuff that I would never see. Homestar Runner as a teenager, I was like, I would never see this on TV. This is amazing. Or, you know, all the old sort of viral video stuff. And then that flips usually like at some point around the pandemic, it flips. And now, like the feeds are sort of just context collapsed sameness. And it's like everything has become the way TV felt in like 2002. too. Yeah, in my mind. Well, it's even as you're saying that something that's something that struck me is that TV movies, all of entertainment was this kind of aspirational thing that, you know, not everybody had access to a TV station, right? And so the idea that you're going to put something on a TV station, it better have production value. And that was the thing that you were chasing. You were, if you want to be creative, you want to do something on TV, you were chasing, how do I get onto a TV station? And that was, there are a limited number of those, and that's the goal. And then social media, as it started out, and it's one of those things that, at least in their infancy, it was about teenagers being able to kind of talk shit to one another. Yeah, it rocked. And it's a weird thing to think like, that's what it started as, that it was just teenagers talking shit to one another. And then all of a sudden, entertainment companies sort of misunderstood and saw, wait, that's a TV screen too. And started treating They started trying to move from like the rarefied air that they were in. And they were like, well, let's now make TV in this space that like like it feels it feels as though. If if you were a kid at the playground and you were playing with G.I. Joes or Barbies or something like that, and then all of a sudden Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling just showed up to the playground. and say, hey, we're going to do Barbie for you. Yeah, right here. We're going to do Barbie right here and do it in this same playground with you. Move your toys away. We're Barbie now. Okay, wait. I was literally just saying this last night where I was like, it is genuinely so crazy to think that we had a system for nearly 50 years, maybe a little bit more than 50 years, where a lot of people got, like more than now, a lot of people got to make professional-grade culture, music, TV, movies, and made a lot of money and then got paid forever from that work. I was watching the two-part HBO Billy Joel documentary, which is great, and I recommend it. And the whole time, I just kept being like, he got like seven chances to make a hit record and was being paid in a bad contract the whole time. And even by today's standards, you're like that bad contract allowed him to like live in an apartment and continue to try to make a good album now it's like you have nine other jobs and then in your little bit of free time you can like hit the roulette wheel or i'm doing a slot machine movement you can hit the slot machine on tiktok and maybe your like bedroom pop song can be like number one on a spotify streaming chart for two seconds and you'll make $50. And like, yeah, the fact that we gave up that, there were lots of problems, lots of problems with the old world. But the new one is just completely inhospitable to human life. I think I really, it's, it's, it breaks my brain to think about it. It makes me very angry because it's like, I don't want to bring back the old world, but I do think the baby was definitely thrown out with the bathwater for sure. I think it's one of those things of putting value back on the quality of work. And I think it goes beyond things like Hollywood. I remember when we were working on the second season of Problem Areas, we spent the season looking at education. And one of the things when we were doing prep for that season that we often found ourselves talking about was the way in which teachers are seen in America versus outside of America and how in Japan the profession of teaching is one that is treated with respect and that there's a genuine respect that people have for teachers as a profession. and some of that is is gendered and that in the u.s as more women became teachers that it it lost some of that that idea of respect it then became quote-unquote women's work and so it lost a certain standing and respect that it had that it once had but also as it lost that respect it lost a certain value and it became much easier than to pay teachers less and to kind of be okay with teachers having to come out of their own pocket to buy school supplies for kids and we've had by the way i want to say by the way we've had multiple guests on this show go on uh tirades about how homeschooling should be illegal um so if you have any thoughts feel free to add to the pantheon of guests who have been like, this is bullshit. It has to go. I just wanted to make that clear. I could go on a whole tirade about homeschools and charter schools and private schools and how private schools have basically like private schools are the real evil and homeschooling and charter schools are just less affluent people trying to create their own versions of private Yeah. And that in societies where there are no private schools, those societies, their education systems tend to do better because you are forcing everyone to buy into the same public good. And you all have to come into agreement about what an education should look like. So, yes, homeschooling is a problem. Yes, charter schools are a problem. they're all private schools are hiding are happily hiding behind that as the creator of said problem and the biggest uh beneficiary of said problem and so while i could shit on home schools all day and people homeschooling and shit on charters all day i feel like you gotta i feel like you gotta start with private schools and blow those things up because it's again the billionaire class basically allowing anyone that is not the billionaire class to kind of fight and pick each other off while not being like, hey, but wait a minute. If you actually did the math of all the people whose money is in private schools, if you took that money in any school district and said, all right, how much money is going into all of the private schools in this district? If those people were willing to put that amount of money just into the school district, how would that raise all boats? Right. I want to throw to our sponsor, Prager University. And when we come back, we're going to be closing the loop on taste. Yeah, but yeah, so learn some new history with Prager University. Here we go. Thank you for your continued support. Just a regular go-to sponsor for Ryan. Yeah, thank you so much. So I want to show you a video, Wyatt. Grant, do you want to pull up? I feel like we've gone on a bunch of tangents, and I hope that this has turned into the conversation you wanted it to be. No, it's actually – it's been good because like when we sort of sat down to be like, okay, taste is a problem, and everyone is slowly realizing it. AI is obviously the tip of that iceberg. It's very clear with AI that taste is a problem. But it is larger than that. It is the algorithms. It is the feeds. It is sort of like the entrenchment and austerity of our economy. But I do want to close the loop on the AI thread here. So we wanted to show you the future of your job. So this is an AI actress named Tilly Norwood. A variety and a bunch of trades have written about her as being the future of Hollywood. We wanted to get your thought on this AI-generated comedy sketch titled AI Commissioner. Sure. We all knew TV was dead, but thought, why not squeeze in one last development meeting? We had one rule. No missing children, no dead women, and no reboots of Heartbeat. We'd pitched this beautiful comedy, two sisters running a funeral parlor in Margate. Warm, weird, very BBC2. The commissioner said no. AI generated 100 better ideas in minutes, perfectly aligned to channel data, viewing figures, and optimized for the audience. The winning AI format? I know what you streamed last summer. Grant, turn it off. I don't want to see this anymore. I hate this. But what do you think? Are you into that? I have no idea what I just was watching. I watched it so many times. I have no idea what's going on. I feel like my main takeaway, and it kind of speaks to this larger conversation around AI that I feel like you touched on a little bit when you're talking about Uber, which is I don't know how much of the AI panic is just driven to raise valuation. Sure. And how much like that thing started off by saying, like, we all knew TV was dead. And I feel like that's a narrative that gets pushed over and over again. And before AI, it was like TV's dead. And then it was prestige TV. And, you know, and that like every decade TV is both dead and never been better. And so I think when I heard that part of it, my brain just immediately went to how much of AI and this conversation around AI is the people who are selling us this snake oil saying, oh, my gosh, this thing is the future and it's dangerous and it's terrible because then it becomes more valuable. if you're the one who can control it. But the reality is that, you know, as you were saying with Uber, that they're realizing, wait a minute, is this, are we spending more on this thing because we got duped in this game? And that often feels like a lot of automation where you pay more. Like if you look at the breakdown of what it costs for like McDonald's to install and service those kiosks that you order from. Oh, sure. Yeah. The tablet thing is the big ones. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're still spending a lot of money. Like it's probably comparable, if not more to what you would spend to just hire two teenagers. And yet teenagers can't fear monger in the way that AI or automation can fear monger that like, no one's like, Oh my gosh, the teenagers are coming. And, oh, you got to be careful. You better snap up all the teenagers before anybody else does. OK, maybe Jeffrey Epstein said that. Yeah, I don't know where that was going. But I think I broadly agree with you. Other than the kidnapping teenagers part, I think you're right. I wasn't saying kidnap. I was just saying like employ them. Oh, yeah, yeah. OK, yeah. Yeah, Jeffrey. Hyper the teenagers. Lure. Yeah, lure them in and groom them into your company culture. Just get them. Just in your space. Get all the teenagers. Your island of influence. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, round them all up. So I think you're totally – other than that, I think you're totally right of like – I'm just saying Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. No I think you 100 correct There is a red dot that is appearing above your forehead right now But other than that I think you totally right Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself But I think fast food here is a perfect example actually where it like you could have a fast food restaurant that like has to keep innovating in ways that make people want to eat your food Like Taco Bell went through like a crazy – like Renaissance, the Taco Bell Renaissance in the 2010s where the Doritos Locos Taco, we all remember where we were the first time we had one. Unbelievable. Fun fact. I was, speaking of luring, I was lured into a flower shop in Manhattan and then filmed secretly on camera trying the Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco as one of, like, a beta program of, like, people who were invited. And, like, we're not told what was going on. How did you get lured into a flower shop and then given a taco made of Doritos? Yeah, okay. So, like, the 2000. Hold on. I just want to say. Yeah. You're going on me about my whole thing about how nobody's saying, hey, we need to employ teenagers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the same – with the same energy that they say we need to embrace automation. Right. And yet you are just going to breeze through a story about how you got tricked into a flower shop by a gnome that was like – Okay, so – Taco made of Dorito. In like 2012 or 13, Taco Bell mailed me this burner phone. And I still have it. Are you being – this is ridiculous. And it said breakfast phone on it. So I said, I don't know what this is. And then the note said just keep it on and keep it with you always. And so one morning I received a phone call on this burner phone saying come to this address. And this was like pre – this was like Google Maps had just sort of started. So I make my way to this Manhattan address. and I was part of a beta test for Taco Bell's breakfast taco, which I think doesn't exist anymore. And then, you know, I think a few months later, the burner phone rang again and it was like, come to this flower shop. And then when I, and it said, ask for like blue roses or something. And so when I went to the flower shop, I was like, blue roses, please. And then they gave me a bouquet of Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Tacos. You kept the phone on you after the first time? I kept it at my desk. I just kept it, and it was a burner, so it didn't really turn off or whatever. It was a whole viral marketing campaign they were doing at the time. Do you still keep it on in case they call? I don't know if it turns on. What if you've missed amazing new Taco Bell products? You love Taco Bell. That would be so disappointing. I should try to turn it on. But a lot of people went into that idea, actually. That's an incredibly intricate way to advertise your taco. And fast food restaurants, I think, have realized that like that is complicated or requires human messiness and conversation and collaboration. But it is much easier to say, actually, we're going to become a tech company. I think Allbirds announced like last week or two weeks ago that they're an AI company now because it is way easier to say instead of like having to go through the human messiness of making something and being judged accordingly for it. What if we just like made a money machine and then that was our job was like making money with our money machine and no one could say if it's good or bad. So McDonald's, you know, yeah, they have new products every once in a while. But like their major focus is automation because they want their McDonald's locations to be money printing machines. Same idea with an AI company, which is going, you know, a company like OpenAI or Anthropic can go around to Hollywood and say, what if you don't have to deal with screenwriters anymore? We know you all hate them. What if you didn't have to do that? What if you could just print a script and then you don't have to deal with actors anymore either because they're annoying. So then you can just like generate some actors and then you can just like release garbage and no one will care because our algorithms will recommend it to them. I think there was a study done recently that 90 percent of the suggested links that you receive in ChatGPT are sponsored links and it's not being shown as sponsored links. It's like whatever is the top of that Google search result. So it's like what if we just build a machine where the average person is just fed worse and worse crap because like you don't want to have to be judged for whether you're good or bad. And that only works if it's cheaper than the alternative. And as you said, like the Uber guys have realized it's not cheaper. There is no easy way out. Well, and it also only works if everybody does it. Right. And so if you can get all the studios to do it and then it becomes a race to the bottom where everyone's just making AI-generated slop, well, then the only options out there are slopptions. Slopptions is good. Damn. And that's what you got. That's that's all. And so I think what these companies are banking on is that if we can get everyone to buy into this, then it's really just a race to the bottom. It's not it's not people holding the line and saying, wait a minute. No, like if you want to make slop, you can go make slop. But we still we still want to create another alternative. But if everyone if everyone's just making trash, then that's all you have to consume is trash. Again, I'm thinking about something like another episode we did on problem areas. We were talking about school lunch and something that always stood out to me was that. school lunch, like most schools, they have these outside companies like Aramark that just bring in like frozen square pizza and all this stuff and the food that kids hate. The amount of money it costs to use a company like Aramark, one of these third party companies, and the amount of money it would cost to actually have kitchens where you had people making food is the same. It literally is the same amount of money. So what's the rationale for like the garbage? That enough people have just bought into doing it, that it's the easier thing to do. When you're talking about public schools, you're getting money for every kid who is going to take lunch. You get money. Right. And so if all your if all your students are taking school lunch, then you get money for that. Like, that's the pot you get. And so it's not like Aramark outbid cafeteria workers. It was just that. All right. It's just it's just cheaper to get frozen pizza than it is to pay Stan and Jennifer and all these other people. But like there are school districts like in Minneapolis, for instance, they have a public private partnership with like local farms. Yeah. And local farms provide the read the crops and food for the schools. And then they have cafeteria workers who make the food and it costs the exact same as it would cost to just use Aramark. But it's better for the economy. It's better for local farmers. It's better for local workers. And yet the reason that Aramark succeeds is that Aramark can say, hey, 100 other school districts have us. And so when I look at what these AI companies are doing, it feels very similar that they just want to be able to say Sony uses us, you know, Universal uses us. When I look at the state of capitalism today, it is one where we are constantly looking to not create collaboration, but compete in these very cannibalistic ways. Here's my last shitty example for the day, but it speaks, I think, hopefully it'll dovetail with all this stuff. There's a rowing machine company called Concept2. Okay. And Concept2, they made this rowing machine. It's the most basic rowing machine. It has a bicycle chain. This part of the thing of this machine is that you buy one and you own it for life because you can just like if the bicycle chain breaks, you just get a new bicycle chain. Right. If there are upgrades, they give you stuff to upgrade it. And it's just a small company that, you know, I want to say out of like Vermont or something like that. And they just for years have they've been the forefront of rowing machines. they had a partnership with a company called rogue fitness and rogue fitness is a distributor of fitness equipment and so rogue was the big distributor for concept two and if you want to buy a concept two you went to rogue's website you get it there they covered shipping so they still sell it but as that distributor what they did was they started looking at concept two's rowing machine and then they made their own rowing machine and now are selling their rowing machine at out of their store at like a slightly cheaper price than the concept too and they are now effectively you know killing what was their collaborator to just get more and more for themselves in what feels like, you know, as like sort of craven capitalism, that's perhaps good business. But when it comes to humanity, that fucking sucks that like you had a relationship with these people, and you've basically just sort of stabbed them between the ribs to grow your own business for your own sense of greed, which obviously and I feel weird saying this, because I know that you're going to go to an ad break. And I know that Rogue Fitness, you get 10% off. Royal Fitness sponsored the whole episode. That's true. Yeah, that is true. Yeah. Yeah, and I know you're going to have to say that later. But where it all dovetails and where I think it kind of comes in this tech conversation is that it's not just tech. It's across the board. We have incentivized this idea that what were once our teammates who were once our allies are the people that we should kneecap first. But I wanted to pursue generational wealth through my rowing machine company. And if I can't achieve generational wealth, I'll be stuck in the permanent underclass. So I have to become the most vicious rowing machine company distributor. I want to go back to the school lunch thing to sort of take us on home because it reminded me a lot. So we interviewed – I row us on home. I'm going to row us on home. We interviewed Ben Collins, the new CEO of The Onion, on the show recently. And he told a similar story where he – there's probably nothing on earth that has been more sort of destroyed and dismantled via the internet than newspapers. I think we can – like they are like kind of the victim number one here. And he was saying, actually, it took us a little bit to figure out how to make a physical copy of The Onion again. And we had to like find a new like system for it and like we had to like find a person who makes a robot that can like stuff it in a manila folder without like causing a static electricity problem and like all these weird issues. And he's like, but once we did it, we realized that like people wanted it again. And so we make money on it. We make money off a physical newspaper subscription. And I do think like maybe not in every single case, but I think almost across the board, it is broadly true that the cheaper, easier model that has been offered to most sectors of business right now is actually not cheaper and easier. It just appears to be. And the easier part is the lack of taste, the lack of care, the lack of thought. That's what you're really sort of saving money on is like, I won't ever have to have an idea again. I've been freed from the pressure of like giving a shit about what I do. And that is really what you're outsourcing nine times out of 10. That's what I think is actually happening. I agree with that. And I think I do think that fear is also a big part of it, that it is the idea that everyone is saying, well, you got to do this. you've got to automate. And if you don't automate, you'll get left in the dust. And it grows and grows until it takes up more of your budget than you realized or had initially intended. And so I think it's both the not thinking and also scaring people into feeling like you need to do this so you don't get left behind because we've created a culture where we're okay leaving people behind we're one of the top 10 business news podcasts you know on the internet a lot of ceos a lot of founders a lot of visionaries listen to us and i want to let you know that you will be left behind if you don't start giving a shit again that's i that's that's that that i think is the lesson for today i want to thank you for coming on this is fantastic I always ask this for all of our guests, which is where can people find you online? Sure. I have a website. That's WyattSynac.com. Hell yeah. You're the first – wait, hold on. Say that again. I have a website, WyattSynac.com. You are the first guest in – how many episodes have we done? Probably like over 100. Over 100. You're the first guest in over 100 episodes to give a website for that question. That rocks. And do you have anything to plug? Anything coming up you want to put on people's radar? Not really. On the website, there's a mailing list, and you can sign up for the mailing list, and that will update. I don't send out a bunch of things on the mailing list. It's not like every week or every month. It's probably like three or four times a year, and then I'm just like, here are the things. Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fjellstedt is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and national managing director and executive producer, Kevin Dreyfuss. R.C. Dimezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their deputy director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their director of marketing. And Tracy Kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at CourierNewsroom.com. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can.