189: A Long Time in a Short Time

00:00SPEAKERDid you know when I say, "Hey, would you like to have a refreshing sherbet?" What do you think of?

00:06SPEAKER- Some kind of emulsified frozen fruit treat?

00:11SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like a processed fruit goo frozen into a slush form. It's not creamy,

00:20SPEAKERit's not a sorbet. It's somewhere between an Italian ice or like a flavo ice and a sorbet,

00:29SPEAKERright? That's what I get. Sometimes they come in multiple, you get orange and red and green

00:34SPEAKERflavors all in one scoop. - I'm Googling pictures now, yes.

00:38SPEAKER- It's good stuff. Okay, so I was watching, as I was sitting here this morning and we were all

00:43SPEAKERgetting set up, I put on a Taskmaster, as one does, which are you familiar? A friend of the

00:49SPEAKERshow, Casey Malone, introduced me to the Taskmaster years ago. They're all on YouTube. It's a UK,

00:56SPEAKERit's not really a game show, because I don't think there's prizes. It's a competition show for

01:01SPEAKERcomedians and presenters. There's a guy that gives them people tasks, and the tasks are always

01:06SPEAKERdesigned to make them look silly, or do silly things, or open them up for mocking in that

01:12SPEAKERkind of uniquely British reality show way. It's kind of the antithesis of the great British

01:20SPEAKERbake-off in terms of wholesome behavior and how much the hosts, the presenters are trying to

01:26SPEAKERprotect the contestants. The presenters are trying to make the contestants' lives fairly miserable,

01:31SPEAKERbut they signed up for it, so it's fine. - I'm looking at the list of season one

01:36SPEAKERepisode titles, Melon Buffet, The Pie Whisperer, The Poet and the Egg, Down an Octave,

01:45SPEAKERLittle Denim Shorts. - The brilliance of the show is that the

01:50SPEAKERtasks are written very specifically to put in your head, "Here's how you should do this thing." For

01:57SPEAKERexample, they'll put a 15-foot circle of fake carpet on the ground and put a hole in the middle

02:03SPEAKERand give you a potato and tell you, "You have to get the potato in the hole, but you can't touch

02:07SPEAKERthe carpet." People do that, and there's a natural inclination. I'm not going to spoil what happens,

02:14SPEAKERbecause it's very good. Usually, at least one person comes up with a novel solution to the

02:19SPEAKERproblem. The one I was watching this morning required people to stick their tongue out

02:25SPEAKERfor as long as they could, and at intervals determined by the person standing there,

02:30SPEAKERthey had to lick a lemon, lick sherbet, and then lick an ice lolly, which is what we would call a

02:35SPEAKERpopsicle. I had to look up what sherbet was, because sherbet in the UK is not at all what

02:40SPEAKERour sherbet is. -There's a number of terms in the UK that mean extremely different things than they

02:45SPEAKERdo here. -It's funny you mention that, because almost all of their slang terms for spit and

02:51SPEAKERspittle, which came into heavy play during this particular challenge, are different than ours.

02:58SPEAKERI couldn't even understand the words that were coming out of the host's mouth. Sherbet in the UK

03:06SPEAKERis a fizzy sweet powder usually eaten by dipping a lollipop or licorice using a small spoon or

03:14SPEAKERlicking it from a finger. -Wait, so it's Fun Dip? -It's Fun Dip. It looks better than Fun Dip,

03:20SPEAKERthough. It looks really fizzy. In German, they put it in beverages, although it's not often

03:26SPEAKERmixed with water anymore, because I guess that's no fun. Grownups put it in vodka. Anyway, today,

03:32SPEAKERI learned sherbet in the UK, not a cold refreshing treat. It's some garbage powder. -Apparently,

03:38SPEAKERthe word is "Turkish" in origin? -Of course. -I just assume anything that ends in "ET" is French.

03:43SPEAKER-Look, if it's Turkish in origin, I'm immediately suspect, because I don't know, my mom, my mom,

03:53SPEAKEREnglish mom, born in England, lived there off and on through her childhood, and she loves this stuff

04:00SPEAKERthat's called Turkish Delight. Have you ever had that? -I've heard of it. -It's revolting. It is

04:04SPEAKERliterally a crime upon children in the UK that they presented this as a treat. It's like a rose

04:13SPEAKERwater-flavored jelly candy. I think sometimes it comes in lemon flavors as well. It's like a soft,

04:19SPEAKERsquishy, really soft jelly, like a room-temperature gelatin kind of situation. Do you know what they

04:26SPEAKERput on it? They put confectioners' sugar and fucking nuts, Brad. -What do we have against nuts?

04:32SPEAKER-Nuts and gummies. Why don't you have a nice big bite of gumdrops and sliced almonds?

04:41SPEAKERDoesn't that sound delicious? -That sounds like Turkish disgust to me. -I wish I had an air horn

04:47SPEAKERnow. I would wah wah wah. I can't have a morning show ever.

05:17SPEAKER-Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. -I'm Brad. -Hello. -Hello. Hi,

05:24SPEAKERhi. Hello. Brad, I've been very busy this week. -Yes? -Yes. -Why's that? -We released the Versus

05:32SPEAKERupdate for The Anacrusis today, or Tuesday. -So you can now murder other people in your game?

05:38SPEAKER-You can not only murder other people, but you can play as the aliens, which we like to think of as

05:44SPEAKERsanctioned griefing. -Okay. I assume this is the first time the aliens are playable at all,

05:49SPEAKERand I ask that because I'd... -It's been a while since you've played. -Essentially, I assume that

05:55SPEAKERis way more design and implementation work than you would think when you say, "Hey, we enable the

06:00SPEAKERVersus mode," because you have to design how to play the aliens. -Yeah. Right now, that's exactly

06:07SPEAKERasymmetric multiplayer. The reason nobody does asymmetric multiplayer games... Is it asymmetric?

06:11SPEAKERIs that right? -Yeah. Yeah, lopsided team sizes and/or abilities. -Abilities, yeah. It's because

06:18SPEAKERdesigning the abilities and making it work is really hard. For example, with the aliens,

06:23SPEAKERwe have five aliens. Each one has different attacks and skills. They all have a primary

06:28SPEAKERattack. All of them but one have a secondary attack, and the secondary attack will come to

06:31SPEAKERthat one soon. Balancing out how to do incapacitation enemies and chaos-generating

06:45SPEAKERenemies and harrying enemies that just grind you down against people that have guns and grenades

06:52SPEAKERand stuff like that is challenging. We've been working on it quietly for a long time,

06:59SPEAKERand then we spent three months really digging into it. The last three months really digging into it.

07:05SPEAKERBut it's out. It's playable. I think it's really fun. I've played 100 hours in the

07:10SPEAKERlast three weeks or four weeks or something. -That's a lot of time in a short time.

07:15SPEAKER-Yeah. The thing to remember when you play... It's very much like the Left 4 Dead Versus mode,

07:20SPEAKERbut the bones are the same in that you have two teams. One team is aliens or specials or whatever.

07:27SPEAKERThe other team is just people with guns. Because the specials are wildly different

07:35SPEAKERthan Left 4 Dead, the game plays very differently. It's a modern take on that thing.

07:44SPEAKERWe've had a lot of time. We've been playing with streamers and stuff like that and quite enjoyed

07:48SPEAKERit. It's on Steam right now. It's on sales with the summer sale for 50% off. If people like that

07:53SPEAKERkind of game, you should get it and play it with your friends. -Look, there's room in the world

07:56SPEAKERfor that kind of mode. An underserved market. -Nobody else did them. -Yeah, that's exactly it.

08:04SPEAKERRemember that thing? It's been a while. -Everybody was like, "Hey, man. There's so many Left 4 Dead

08:09SPEAKERgames coming out. Why does anybody..." Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then everybody's like,

08:12SPEAKER"I wish we could play Versus." And then everybody released weird, janky Versuses because they didn't

08:18SPEAKERwant to take the year and a half to make it right. Here we are a year and a half later, 37 updates

08:24SPEAKERfor the end of Cruces since we launched. Coming out of early access this fall, we think.

08:28SPEAKERAlso, while you're in the middle of shipping a Versus mode, you're also in the middle of

08:32SPEAKERshipping your life to the desert again for a month? -Yeah, we're doing a... Somebody in the

08:38SPEAKERDiscord last year called it an "unvacation" because the kiddo and my wife go on vacation

08:43SPEAKERand I just work during the day and then swim and hang out at night. -Look, if you can't afford the

08:50SPEAKERtime off... Also, realistically, who has time to take off as long as you're going down there

08:55SPEAKERanyway, right? -I mean, that's it. To give people context so that I don't sound like a crazy person,

09:01SPEAKERlike renting a house someplace where it's intemperately warm in that desert with Coachella

09:08SPEAKERValley right now. It's like 110, 115 degrees pretty much every day. That means that during

09:14SPEAKERthe times that I'm at work, you're not going to be outside at all, right? You might go out for a 30

09:20SPEAKERminute swim at lunchtime and that's it, which I will do anyway even while I'm at work because I'll

09:24SPEAKERhork down a sandwich and then go jump in the pool. Maybe not in that order because the 30 minutes,

09:30SPEAKERwhatever. Anyway, yeah, I do my work during the day, record podcasts with you once a week,

09:36SPEAKERtwice a week sometimes, and do some streams at night sometimes if I want and get to hang out in

09:42SPEAKERthe pool at dusk and dawn and lunchtime and it's a pretty good way to live. -I am envious. It sounds

09:49SPEAKERpretty good. It sounds pretty good. Obviously, you have to move your entire office down there,

09:53SPEAKERbut otherwise. -It gets a little bit easier every year because I've made purchasing decisions based

09:59SPEAKERon knowing that that's a possibility. It's a little less each year. I'm excited. It's a long

10:06SPEAKERdrive. -When I was talking to Adam at PC World about speccing out my machine, we were randomly

10:11SPEAKERjust talking about some of the stuff you chose and he mentioned that that was the major determining

10:15SPEAKERfactor for your case choice was it has to fit in the trunk. -Yeah, bolts have a secret hiding space

10:22SPEAKERunderneath the trunk deck that's like, I don't know, 10 inches deep or something. It had to be

10:28SPEAKERnarrow enough that it would fit in there without breaking the glass. That's the fractal mesh if I

10:36SPEAKERcompact. We're leaving tomorrow. As soon as we get done with the podcast, I'm going to break

10:42SPEAKEReverything down and pack it up and then we will drive 10 hours across the California wasteland

10:51SPEAKERtomorrow. -Godspeed to you. See you on the other side. What are we doing today? -Often, we find

11:00SPEAKERstories that are interesting enough that we would like to talk about them, but maybe they don't

11:03SPEAKERwarrant an entire episode. Sometimes they're topics that are not timely. Sometimes they're

11:09SPEAKERtimely. We noticed a trend in the last, let's say, six months, maybe nine months now,

11:18SPEAKERof the internet going to shit. -It's literally the words that were in my head before you even

11:24SPEAKERsaid it. How else can you describe it? -And asterisk, some cool science happened,

11:33SPEAKERso we're going to talk about that a little bit too. -A nice little uplifting, positive science

11:38SPEAKERchaser to the ongoing breakdown of the internet media landscape.

11:45SPEAKER-The people who believe in decentralized media will tell you it's not the internet going to shit,

11:49SPEAKERit's just centralized media going to shit. For a lot of people on the internet who came online

11:58SPEAKERas phones became the predominant force for computing in the world, centralized services

12:05SPEAKERlike Facebook and Google and Reddit and Twitter and Instagram and YouTube are,

12:12SPEAKERfor all intents and purposes, the internet to those folks. -I think both perspectives are right,

12:17SPEAKERright? -Yeah, absolutely.

12:20SPEAKER-That is the case for those people who have never known a different kind of internet,

12:23SPEAKERbut also this was always going to happen in some form or another.

12:26SPEAKER-100%. -When you concentrate this much

12:28SPEAKERcontrol in this few hands, and not just in a few hands, but with ill-intentioned hands, let's say.

12:34SPEAKER-Well, and even if they weren't ill-intentioned, just to be clear, Twitter before Elon Musk bought

12:40SPEAKERTwitter wasn't in a good spot from a public company standpoint, right?

12:44SPEAKER-Or from a moderation standpoint. As much as Musk has utterly destroyed Twitter,

12:51SPEAKERold Twitter was better, but it was not great. -I want to say Mike Masnick at TechDirt had talked

12:58SPEAKERabout that. I don't want to spend all this time talking about Twitter because you talked about

13:01SPEAKERTwitter a lot. Everybody knows that Twitter sucks, and it's literally the turd circling the bowl of

13:06SPEAKERthe internet's toilet right now. Mike Masnick pointed out that really good moderation is

13:13SPEAKERdistinguishable because everybody's pissed off all the time about it. Reading the accounts of

13:19SPEAKERthe people who worked on those moderation teams and the way those people worked and the policies

13:23SPEAKERthey'd set up and all that, I feel like of the big companies, I think Twitter probably did moderation

13:29SPEAKERbest. It also had the smallest scale problem. -That's probably fair. That's probably fair. It

13:34SPEAKERwas far from ideal, is all I'm trying to say. -Definitely still far from ideal. Anyway.

13:41SPEAKER-Sorry, maybe just to expand that thought a little bit. There's never been a truly good modern

13:46SPEAKERmedia or social media platform, I would say. All of them have had severe problems and continue to.

13:53SPEAKER-I think the thing that everybody realized, and we've talked about this before, so I apologize,

13:57SPEAKERbut is the difference between, say, message boards in the '90s and 2000s -- we both worked

14:06SPEAKERon websites that had enormous message boards that had a boatload of traffic that was completely

14:11SPEAKERimpossible to monetize because advertisers didn't want to be next to pictures of somebody's ass.

14:17SPEAKERThe thing that Twitter and Facebook and the social media companies realized is that if

14:22SPEAKERthey moderated that user-generated content, then they could sell expensive ads against it.

14:28SPEAKERI don't think Elon Musk realizes that to this point. I think that's not a thing that he's

14:32SPEAKERconscious of or aware of. Anyway, it doesn't matter. -Sorry to derail.

14:36SPEAKER-Twitter sucks. Move on. -What are the stories we've got here?

14:40SPEAKER-I was going to say, the two internet is going to shit stories are the Canada Online News Act,

14:49SPEAKERwhich is Bill C-18, if you follow the Canadian legislature. It's a link tax, not to be reductive.

15:02SPEAKERWe're going to talk about YouTube, let's say, centralized media services limiting user access

15:10SPEAKERin novel, new, exciting, bad ways. -Everybody's doing it.

15:13SPEAKER-Yeah, it's the cool thing everybody's doing. Twitter priced everybody out of their API,

15:17SPEAKERor just turned off third-party clients a few months ago. We've talked about that at length.

15:21SPEAKERYouTube is trialing blocking videos for people who block ads to three views a day. That's a test

15:32SPEAKERfor now, but we'll talk about that a little bit. Reddit, today's the day. We're recording this on

15:37SPEAKERSaturday, July 1st. It's the day that Reddit died, as far as I'm concerned. They turned off all...

15:42SPEAKER-Oh, have all these protests been in advance of the event? -Yeah, the event was July 1st.

15:48SPEAKER-Oh, I thought the event had already happened. -No, see, only crazy people turn off the API

15:52SPEAKERand then tell you that they turned off the API. At least Reddit had the common decency to say,

15:58SPEAKER"Hey, we're going to destroy your niche businesses because your clients are better than ours,

16:03SPEAKERand we can't..." Anyway, we'll get into that. The last thing we want to talk about is the

16:07SPEAKERexciting thing, the Pulsar timing array gravitational wave. Hey,

16:13SPEAKERI heard you like gravitational wave astronomy, so we got two kinds of gravitational wave astronomy

16:17SPEAKERnow, not just one. -Can't get enough.

16:20SPEAKER-Yeah. You want to start with Canada? -Yeah.

16:24SPEAKER-Yeah, our northern friends. -Yes. Our friends in regulating

16:30SPEAKERgigantic media outfits, consuming and profiting from the news of smaller media outfits.

16:35SPEAKER-Yeah. This isn't the first time this has happened. Australia tried something similar

16:39SPEAKERa few years ago. The Online News Act, it applies to companies with significant bargaining power

16:47SPEAKERimbalance, which as far as I can tell means literally Facebook and Google.

16:50SPEAKER-Yeah, basically. They explicitly exempt messaging platforms from this,

16:57SPEAKERthings that they see primarily as focused on user communication.

17:00SPEAKERPrivate communication doesn't count, but anything public. For example, the Google app that pulls

17:07SPEAKERnews articles into it is one of the ones that would apply to this. Links out from Google News

17:13SPEAKERto your news site. What they are saying is, it forces these two companies to strike deals

17:20SPEAKERwith media outlets in Canada for fair compensation when content is shared on their platforms.

17:27SPEAKERNow, Google did a big, long blog post that explained how they feel about this,

17:35SPEAKERand also what they're going to do about it, which we'll talk about in a minute.

17:39SPEAKERThey described it as a link tax. They're saying, "Hey," which, just to be clear,

17:46SPEAKERcommon wisdom on the internet has since the dawn of time been making people pay for links is stupid.

17:52SPEAKERLinking is free speech in the United States. There have been cases that have determined that.

18:01SPEAKERThe benefit of the user to getting a link from somebody else is generally considered

18:09SPEAKERtransaction enough. This is one of those ones that's complicated for me. I think the Google

18:16SPEAKERapp stuff and the way that they have offloaded the traffic for a lot of news sites and pulled

18:21SPEAKERthat into the Google ecosystem instead of going out to the newspaper website or the TV station's

18:27SPEAKERwebsite or whatever makes this weirder than it would have been 10 years ago.

18:34SPEAKERDo you want to give a very brief primer on Google's AMP accelerated mobile pages? I see

18:41SPEAKERamp.google all over the place, but I've never actually taken the time to go read about how

18:45SPEAKERthat program works. Do the smaller media producers opt into that, or is that something Google is just

18:50SPEAKERpulling on their own? Kline>> Well, opt in is an interesting language

18:54SPEAKERthere. You can choose to opt out. Yes, you have to opt in in order to be part of AMP. What AMP does

19:01SPEAKERis pull the content from your page, presumably using RSS or some API or script that you install

19:06SPEAKERon your site. Then Google serves it directly. There's some sort of ad rev share there,

19:13SPEAKERdepending on how big you are. I'm sure everybody has different deals. I actually don't know

19:17SPEAKERanything about that, because this all happened after I stopped working in that kind of media.

19:21SPEAKERIf you don't opt into that, then you're basically not going to get promoted

19:25SPEAKERas news in Google search. They only want to send you to fast sites, because people like fast sites.

19:31SPEAKERNews sites are slow, because all of the news people have spent the last 20 years putting

19:35SPEAKERlinks to mail enhancement products disguised as news posts. Hey, you can find Bigfoot right

19:42SPEAKERnext to the "Yo, climate change is destroying the world" stories. Cory Doctorow would say

19:50SPEAKERthey've been shit-ified their pages, and also devalued their content at the same time.

20:02SPEAKERFacebook's response was pretty good. They were like, "Hey, we've given Canadian news

20:05SPEAKERorganizations at least $230 million of free marketing. We don't see any reason to pay them

20:11SPEAKERmore than that." Look, you really will want to do this for the exposure. The exposure you're

20:17SPEAKERgoing to get from working for free for us is going to... But it's hard, right? Links are exposure.

20:25SPEAKERYou're not entirely wrong. They have the biggest fire hose of links in the world. At least they

20:30SPEAKERdid. Australia tried this a few years ago. The upshot was Google and Facebook made deals with

20:37SPEAKERthe biggest publishers like News Corp, the companies that own the newspapers, stuff like that,

20:42SPEAKERand then blocked everybody else that's small. As Mike Masnick said, his traffic from Google

20:47SPEAKERNews in Australia on Tech Dirt, which is a niche blog, evaporated overnight. I would expect

20:56SPEAKERsomething similar to happen here, except Google said they're not going to fucking deal with it.

20:59SPEAKERThey don't care. They're just blocking all news links on Canadian news to Canadian news sites on

21:06SPEAKERSearch News and Discover products. That's one way to do it. I certainly did not read the text

21:12SPEAKERof this bill because I'm not a lawyer, let alone a Canadian lawyer. But does this stipulate how

21:19SPEAKERthese smaller producers are to be compensated? Or does it just say, "Hey, you have to pay them

21:22SPEAKERsomehow"? They have to strike a deal. Just a deal. Fair compensation. Fair. Okay. That's the type of

21:28SPEAKERthing that would probably be tested or precedent set if necessary. Brad, I don't know how to answer

21:34SPEAKERthat question. Okay. That's fair. Look, you're not a Canadian lawyer either. Yeah. I skimmed

21:38SPEAKERthrough the bill and it looked like they're just saying you have to compensate them and it has to

21:44SPEAKERbe fair, but I don't know what fair... My guess is if you ask a Canadian lawyer, that fair

21:51SPEAKERcompensation language is probably fraught from a legal standpoint. I don't know what the impact

21:56SPEAKERof that is. What happened in Australia? Did they rescind this in any form or did they just let the

22:00SPEAKERconsequences stand? So no, they just made the deal with the big people and then all the small people

22:06SPEAKERcould get fucked. So News Corp totally covered. So basically all it does is enhance the monopoly

22:13SPEAKERstatus of the conglomerates that have bought up all the media properties in whatever region

22:19SPEAKERyou're in. So especially candidates Bell and Rogers and a couple of other places. Right.

22:24SPEAKEREspecially as you see more and more of those conglomerates being run by bad actors

22:29SPEAKERor actors with agendas, let's say. Yeah. And just to be clear, I have expressed

22:38SPEAKERa little bit of ambiguity here. I think that probably Facebook and Google are on the right

22:43SPEAKERside of this. But also I think that not finding a way to fund news organizations that do real news

22:55SPEAKERis a disaster for Western democracies. Yes, absolutely. That's kind of the larger

23:01SPEAKERconversation that underpins this whole thing, right? Is that the small and medium news producer

23:06SPEAKERis just sort of dying out rapidly at a very alarming pace. Yeah. There's no local news

23:10SPEAKERanywhere. The amount of local news in the United States is infinitesimal. If you have a newspaper

23:15SPEAKERin your town that had 30 reporters working or 20 reporters working at two decades ago,

23:22SPEAKERyou're lucky if you have one reporter covering your region, not just your town now.

23:28SPEAKERAnd honestly, part of that is because of stuff like Google, but part of it's due to Craigslist.

23:33SPEAKERLocal newspapers were funded entirely out of classified ads, and Craigslist has utterly

23:38SPEAKERdecimated the classified ads business. Thanks, Craig.

23:41SPEAKERYeah. Well, I mean, he's done other goods. It's hard to be shitty about it because he's a

23:46SPEAKERgenuinely good human being, it seems like. I've read about Craig. He does seem pretty

23:50SPEAKERgreat as far as somebody who has control of a fairly large media-ish platform.

23:56SPEAKERYeah. I mean, he chose not to become a billionaire, right? There you go. Anyway,

24:03SPEAKERGoogle and Facebook are both going to block Canadian news orgs on Search News and Discover.

24:10SPEAKERFacebook and Insta will block as well. Facebook's going to start this in June by blocking one to

24:16SPEAKERfive percent of all Canadians to see how it goes. So, congratulations if you're one of the one to

24:21SPEAKERfive percent of Canadians that won't get news from Facebook anymore. Also, maybe not having

24:26SPEAKERFacebook give old people links to news anymore is a good thing. But also, it probably just means

24:32SPEAKERthey're going to see much, much, much worse stuff than they have before. So, great news, everyone.

24:40SPEAKERYou want to talk about something sunshiner and more fun?

24:43SPEAKERSure, always.

24:45SPEAKERWell, I got bad news for you, Brad. YouTube. I have a metaphor I like for this.

24:58SPEAKERWhen you're in a business of creating content, you can choose to plant turnips and grow more

25:03SPEAKERturnips. So, make more content, bring more people into the fold, create more good things for people

25:08SPEAKERto watch. Or, you can choose to extract and grow revenue that way, just to be clear. You

25:14SPEAKERmake more stuff, you make more money. Alternately, you can say, "You know what?

25:18SPEAKERWe have enough turnips here. We're going to try to squeeze more money out of the existing turnips.

25:22SPEAKERWe're not going to bother planting. We don't need any more turnips. We're good. The world of

25:27SPEAKERturnips is over, and we're going to just juice these turnips, and we're going to keep squeezing

25:33SPEAKERthem and squeezing them and squeezing them. We'll save a lot of money that way, because it turns out

25:38SPEAKERplanting turnips is expensive." Not since Animal Crossing blew up at the start of the pandemic

25:42SPEAKERhave turnips been so relevant. Look, the stock market is hot right now. I can't remember the

25:50SPEAKERpig's name. But anyway, what's your name? Daisy May? Oh gosh. Oh man. I should remember that.

25:56SPEAKERJoan is the old turnip pig. Animal Crossing turnip pig. Isn't it Joan?

26:06SPEAKERMaybe? Daisy May. Daisy May? Daisy May? Daisy May's in the new game, yeah.

26:11SPEAKERDaisy May. Let's say Daisy May. I did a lot of stock market manipulation in Animal Crossing

26:14SPEAKERearlier in the pandemic. I believe that. Not to defend YouTube here, but is it possible that they

26:22SPEAKERhave already grown as many turnips as it is possible to grow? It is hard to be a new turnip

26:29SPEAKERon YouTube these days. Yeah, that's kind of what I mean. You're in the new turnip business. How is

26:33SPEAKERit over there? Pretty good. YouTube's blocking. They're doing a trial. I would assume that this

26:42SPEAKERis a trial in the sense of the Netflix, "Hey, we're going to try not letting 17 people use the

26:49SPEAKERsame login to log into the Netflix trial," which started out small and then immediately became the

26:54SPEAKERpolicy. I was going to say, that has fully gone into effect now, right? Yeah. On their side.

26:58SPEAKERThey're limiting viewers who block ads to three views per day. Three video views,

27:04SPEAKERjust to be clear. You can watch three videos a day. Part of this is, I think that

27:15SPEAKERthese platforms all have a problem in that a very small percentage of users make up the vast

27:22SPEAKERmajority of engagement. YouTube might have a billion people look at it every month,

27:26SPEAKERbut of those billion people, 1% will be more active than the typical long tail. 1% will be

27:32SPEAKERmore active than the other 99% combined. The problem is, if that 1% of hardcore users is

27:42SPEAKERblocking ads, then they're going to not make money on the people that are generating the most traffic,

27:49SPEAKERor eating the most turnips, I guess, is the metaphor. They're going to try a limited test.

27:55SPEAKERIt's unclear if that's... There's multiple different kinds of ad formats on YouTube.

27:59SPEAKERThere's the video ads, which are the high dollar ads, the ones that play before and during your

28:08SPEAKERvideos. There's display ads that are in the page around that frame. Those only display on

28:14SPEAKERweb and some mobile clients, and don't show on TVs and stuff like that. Then, there's the integrated

28:21SPEAKERads that content creators put inside their videos that YouTube doesn't see any money from.

28:26SPEAKERFor the most part, I think they're systems. Those are more like sponsorship and brand deals.

28:30SPEAKERIt's still money being spent on YouTube. What I mean is, they don't take the form

28:34SPEAKERof a commercial as such. It would be like me saying, "Hey, Brad, have you heard about

28:40SPEAKERWill's Shave Cream?" Then we do a five-minute bit about Will's Shave Cream.

28:44SPEAKERA product integration. Now, at the same time,

28:49SPEAKERYouTube is getting their trouble with advertisers over claims of advertising fraud for those video

28:57SPEAKERdisplay ads, the high dollar ones, in that they were billing advertisers for one thing,

29:03SPEAKERthe high dollar, high value, targeted advertisements going to users on YouTube.

29:09SPEAKERThe advertisers are accusing them of running those ads on third-party sites in embeds,

29:13SPEAKERwhich are lower value ads. Is that the headline that's been going around that cited the 80%

29:20SPEAKERfigure, like 80% of the ads were in violation of their own terms?

29:24SPEAKERIf that is true, and that ends up sticking, it is going to be at a phenomenally expensive

29:32SPEAKERcost for YouTube. What's the mechanism of enforcement there is the thing I've been

29:36SPEAKERwondering? Is that everyone's going around? Probably there's arbitration, but I bet they

29:40SPEAKERsue them. Are they going to have enough legal grounds to force it? I guess if it's very clearly

29:48SPEAKERdelineated in the terms of the deal, then it's really not that hard to bring legal action, right?

29:52SPEAKERYeah. In my magazine and website days, if you messed up something like that, you just do a

29:58SPEAKERmake good. If it's small enough and you'd say, "Okay, we'll give you some more ads and we'll

30:02SPEAKERmake sure they're the good ads this time. We're really sorry. We had a technical glitch on the

30:05SPEAKERback end." The scale of this seems like it's going to be too big for that, and there's going to have

30:10SPEAKERto be a monetary recompense. I don't think these two things are connected, except they indicate

30:19SPEAKERthe decline. When YouTube's growth has been based on user base growing and the amount of content on

30:28SPEAKERthe platform growing for the last 15 years, and that starts to slow because they run out of new

30:33SPEAKERpeople to hit, then all of a sudden, things like, "Hey, 80% of our ads were fraudulent," become a

30:41SPEAKERmuch bigger problem. It's also worth mentioning that, since Google entered the ad market in the

30:49SPEAKERearly 2000s, they've completely devalued every ad market they've entered. In 1998, display ads

30:58SPEAKERon CNET were going for $75 and $100 CPMs. To get 1,000 views, you'd pay $75. Now, a CNET-type

31:07SPEAKERdisplay ad, you could probably get them for two cents per 1,000 views at this point.

31:14SPEAKERThen, they've done the same thing to video views, video ads, the whole thing.

31:18SPEAKERGoogle is not a friend to people who make money with advertising. That's why we don't have ads

31:22SPEAKERon this podcast. Podcasts are one of the last places you can get decent CPMs.

31:29SPEAKER- Anyway. - And it's very volatile on top of that.

31:31SPEAKER- It is very volatile on top of that. - It's still the case, as far as I know,

31:36SPEAKERthat you have to very intentionally go out of your way to block YouTube ads, or at least the

31:41SPEAKERdynamically-served video ads on YouTube. You still need something like UBlock Origin, right?

31:47SPEAKERYou can't do it at the network level with a pie hole, for example?

31:50SPEAKER- No, because it happens inside the video stream.

31:53SPEAKER- Right, right. Because they serve the video ads from the same place that they serve the

31:59SPEAKERactual content. - Yeah, it all lives inside the player.

32:04SPEAKERUnless you have a browser that specifically knows how to... A browser plugin that knows how to do

32:08SPEAKERthat, you don't have an easy way to block stuff. - What's the state of YouTube premium at this

32:16SPEAKERpoint? - I accidentally had YouTube

32:19SPEAKERpremium for a pretty long time. You get ad-free videos, so you don't see anything. I think it

32:27SPEAKERcosts... - So I'm seeing 12 a month here.

32:30SPEAKERI don't know if that's an annual... No, I think that is the monthly.

32:33SPEAKER- That's the monthly rate. And you can do a family thing for less than that, even.

32:40SPEAKER- Yes, or annually. I'm absolutely not shilling for YouTube here. I'm just curious what the state

32:45SPEAKERof the paid alternative is to this also. So they are still bundling YouTube music with that as

32:50SPEAKERwell. It's not terrible for 12 bucks a month. If you watch a ton of YouTube and I've seen varied

32:59SPEAKERopinions on the quality of YouTube music, but that's still... If you consider the cost of a

33:04SPEAKERSpotify subscription, this doesn't seem like the worst deal in the world.

33:08SPEAKER- Yeah, I'll tell you a secret too. If you have a couple of Google speakers and you add them and

33:13SPEAKERremove them from your account over a three-month cycle, you just keep getting infinite free months

33:17SPEAKERof YouTube premium. - You don't say. What

33:20SPEAKERqualifies as a Google speaker? - The little Google home pucks

33:24SPEAKERthat they gave away for free for years. - Good to know.

33:30SPEAKER- Ask me how I found it. I found that out because I was like, "Why do I have YouTube premium?" And

33:33SPEAKERit's because I had moved some pucks around the house into different places and disconnected and

33:39SPEAKERreconnected them while I was doing that. And every time I did it, it gave me another month of free.

33:42SPEAKER- You'd think they would be able to detect specific speakers being reused, but who knows?

33:47SPEAKER- I don't know, man. I didn't complain. It's nice not having ads. You block origin on my PC at least

33:54SPEAKERdoesn't block YouTube ads by default. I do believe you have to go a little bit more out of your way

34:02SPEAKERto block. It's similar to the Twitch situation. - I've never in my life used an intentional

34:07SPEAKERbrowser plugin style ad blocker. - With the amount of malware floating

34:14SPEAKERaround the low-budget ad networks these days, I block everything and I allow list sites that I

34:21SPEAKERlike. Can we talk about Reddit API drama? - Yes.

34:27SPEAKER- Reddit, message boards for the internet, destroyed all the message boards, centralized

34:34SPEAKERall the message boards, put them all in one place where you could connect them all with one user

34:36SPEAKERaccount over a 15-year period. Ironically, Reddit kind of rose because it was always the also ran

34:43SPEAKERuntil Digg imploded in the late 2000s. And due to, I think, a bad redesign, I can't remember,

34:52SPEAKERI think they changed the rules about how stuff's promoted and people got upset and there was a user

34:56SPEAKERrevolt and then everybody went to Reddit and Reddit was pretty good. - That's my memory,

35:00SPEAKERthat it kind of collapsed almost overnight. - Did Digg have the same kind of large-scale

35:04SPEAKERcommunity and message board facility as Reddit though? I remember Digg much more as just like,

35:08SPEAKER"Here are a bunch of links. It's Fark. Here are the links that are getting voted to the top." But

35:13SPEAKERI didn't remember being as sort of siloed community-based. - So it was more about links,

35:18SPEAKERbut there were channels for the links. There was a tech channel because Maximum PC, there was a guy

35:24SPEAKERwho was a Digg super user who loved Maximum PC and he would post stories from our website all

35:30SPEAKERthe time and they would always go up because he had... The way Digg worked is, the more success

35:35SPEAKERyou had, the more successful you would be in the future. So once you had a thousand front page

35:41SPEAKERstories, then you'd post a link and it would almost certainly get to the front page. Anyway,

35:48SPEAKERReddit's been chugging along nicely for 15 years. They've had controversies and stuff in the past.

35:55SPEAKERI don't want to say libertarian, because I don't think that's exactly... Of the sites

36:02SPEAKERon the internet, of these big centralized sites, they've always hewed a little further to the

36:07SPEAKERmore free speech end of the spectrum, in that they allow pornography and they allowed a lot

36:13SPEAKERof weird white supremacist shit for a long time. It was not as bad as 4chan or 8chan or the image

36:23SPEAKERboards, but closer than, say, Instagram is ever going to be. Or even Instagram is probably the

36:33SPEAKERright example there. Anyway, they, a month and a half ago, announced that they were going to

36:39SPEAKERincrease the prices, make some API changes. The API, if you don't know, is the thing that lets

36:47SPEAKERthird party applications, or often your own internal application, connect to the back end of

36:52SPEAKERa site so you can get a different kind of presentation for a mobile app, versus the web

36:57SPEAKERview or whatever. Yeah, it's a way of soliciting specific data in an efficient way instead of just

37:02SPEAKERscraping what is presented on the public webpage. Yeah. The creator of Apollo, which was, I think,

37:11SPEAKERthe most popular Reddit third party client, it's the one that I used at least. This is the one that

37:15SPEAKERI have seen cited over and over here. Yeah. He immediately said, "Hey, this is going to cost me

37:21SPEAKERmillions of dollars a month at the rates that they're charging." There's a billion different

37:29SPEAKERways to charge it. Sometimes, if you're doing research, you might pay a flat rate

37:33SPEAKERto have a key for a certain period of time. Air Visual, which is the air quality API,

37:43SPEAKERthey aggregate, I want to say purple air sensors, I can't remember, one of the air sensors they

37:47SPEAKERaggregate. You can connect them to, say, your home assistant install or your phone app or something,

37:52SPEAKERand you pay varying levels based on how many connections you think you're going to have on

37:55SPEAKERa monthly basis, from free up to thousands of dollars a month. The Reddit one seemed to be

38:05SPEAKERjust phenomenally expensive for third party clients in a way that the price changes seemed

38:12SPEAKERto be tailor made to destroy third party clients. Basically, all the third party clients shut down

38:17SPEAKERas of today. Reddit was weirdly aggressive with the people who were complaining about this,

38:26SPEAKERwhich felt bad. It spawned a user revolt. The moderators of most of the most popular

38:33SPEAKERsubreddits locked them. They then unlocked them and replaced the moderators, it seems like,

38:40SPEAKERin a lot of the bigger subreddits. From idly looking, it seems like engagement across that

38:48SPEAKERsite is much lower now than it was a month ago. When you look at posts in default, Reddit has a

38:57SPEAKERseries of 15 or something default subreddits that for a long time are funny and are photos and stuff

39:04SPEAKERlike that, that were the front page for people who weren't logged in, or people who created a

39:10SPEAKERnew account and hadn't customized the Reddits that they follow. Even in those places, which are

39:15SPEAKERtypically really high traffic, the posts are still there, and there's some votes, but there's not a

39:22SPEAKERlot of comments, and there's not big comment threads underneath those posts anymore. The API

39:29SPEAKERshut off on June 30th, and they're basically gone now. I don't think that Reddit ever came out and

39:36SPEAKERsaid why they're doing this, other than that they're going public or getting out from under

39:41SPEAKERConde Nast or something, and thus need to make money in a way that they thought that this was

39:47SPEAKERgoing to work. Yeah, there was one or maybe more, maybe two interviews floating around with Steve

39:54SPEAKERHuffman, the head of the co-founder and then current CEO that painted him in a pretty shitty

40:01SPEAKERlight. All but said, and this is a larger topic, all but said he was following Twitter's lead,

40:10SPEAKERbasically saying, "Hey, Elon Musk is getting away with this, so I probably can too."

40:16SPEAKERYeah. My assumption is that it's about ads because the third-party clients didn't hook into the ad

40:21SPEAKERAPI and didn't show ads in their feeds. If some percentage of the most active Reddit users were

40:31SPEAKERusing Apollo, then that was lost. The business guys are looking at it like, "Hey, every user

40:36SPEAKERconnected to this is lost revenue." We have to make that up somehow. I think that there's a

40:44SPEAKERfundamental... It's an interesting choice to me in a time when we're reaching the end of new user

40:51SPEAKERacquisition on the internet, especially in the English language world, for them to say, "Hey,

40:56SPEAKERwe are going to burn all these users and make the things that they like shittier."

41:02SPEAKERRight. It very much feels like they're cutting off their nose to spite their face here. If you look

41:09SPEAKERat a large bulk of users and say, "Hey, these users are not being monetized," why not implement

41:13SPEAKERa policy that effectively monetizes them without driving them away instead of setting API pricing

41:19SPEAKERat such a level that they're just going to go away? Is it just hubris that they're like, "Hey,

41:25SPEAKERif we just price these third-party apps out, then of course they'll just come back to

41:31SPEAKERviewing things on our site the way we want them to," as opposed to just not viewing it at all?

41:35SPEAKERWell, yeah. It's interesting. The Twitter thing is interesting here because we're still in the

41:42SPEAKERfinding out phase of Elon Musk fucking around with Twitter. I think his assumption is that people are

41:48SPEAKERso addicted. I think his assumption is, "I, Elon Musk, am so addicted to Twitter that I can't stop

41:54SPEAKERusing Twitter no matter what. Therefore, I can do whatever I want to Twitter and the chuds will

41:58SPEAKERkeep coming back." Yeah. You also saw that in the response to the blue checks going away, the real

42:04SPEAKERactual verified blue checks because they got so angry when the people who were legitimately

42:10SPEAKERverified said, "Fuck you. I'm not paying $8 for this worthless and in fact counterproductive now

42:15SPEAKERblue check mark. I'm just not going to have it anymore." They could not wrap their heads around

42:20SPEAKERthe idea that these people would not crawl over their own mothers to get the check mark back.

42:24SPEAKERThey were just like, "What do you mean?" They were furious. It was insane. It's like,

42:29SPEAKERthese things don't have the value that you think they do because you are too fucking online to

42:33SPEAKERunderstand that normal people don't care about this shit. Well, and also in the process of the

42:38SPEAKERthing that you did, you completely devalued the thing that once had value. Yeah. I mean,

42:41SPEAKERthat makes it worse for sure. Yeah. It's really curious to me that Huffman would cite or imply

42:52SPEAKEReven that Musk is the role model here, given that the valuation of Twitter in the last nine months

42:59SPEAKERhas presumably, we're looking at between 15 and 20% of what it was when Musk bought it.

43:06SPEAKERPart of that is due to Musk buying at a ridiculous price, but part of it is also that he just has

43:14SPEAKERfucking run everybody interesting off of the platform. I don't know. It remains to be seen

43:21SPEAKERwhat happens with Reddit. There's work involved in doing it, but there's a way to do this where

43:31SPEAKERthey reach out to the people who are making these apps that have high engagement and say, "Hey,

43:36SPEAKERwe've got to start making money on your users. We'll share that with you because they're your

43:40SPEAKERusers, but either let's build an ad API that if you apply that and set certain rates, you don't

43:49SPEAKERpay the API fees or whatever." There's potential for that whole thing to work. Maybe make it so

43:57SPEAKERApollo only works if you pay for Reddit gold, which means you don't see ads. I would happily pay

44:02SPEAKERReddit money to keep using Apollo and have read it the way it was a month ago, two months ago.

44:07SPEAKERI mean, how much can the per user revenue be on ad views? If it's an AB calculation of, "Hey,

44:13SPEAKERwe can make this much if this person is viewing ads," or we can charge them, what,

44:17SPEAKERfive bucks a month to use their favorite third party app? Can the ad revenue really be that high?

44:24SPEAKERWell, I mean, what do they charge for Reddit gold? You know that's going to be

44:27SPEAKERthree to 10 times the ad revenue probably for an average user, right?

44:32SPEAKERUm, let's find out here.

44:34SPEAKEROh, it's Reddit premium now. Sorry. It's 50 bucks a year, five, six dollars a month.

44:39SPEAKEROkay. Well, yeah, that's about true.

44:41SPEAKERYeah. And you see no ads with that. And you get coins that you can give to people.

44:49SPEAKERFull disclosure, we talked to Reddit 13 years ago at Whiskey Media when we were starting the

44:53SPEAKERpremium stuff about doing a bundled... Because they were early on charging money for access

45:00SPEAKERto their website. We did that at Whiskey before almost anybody else had. Ars Technica had been

45:05SPEAKERdoing it for a little bit. Penny Arcade had been doing it for quite a while at that point.

45:10SPEAKERBut they were like, "Hey, you'll get something." Reddit and Whiskey were among the first that were

45:18SPEAKERlike, "Hey, you'll get something new for doing this." The real funny thing about all this,

45:27SPEAKERI lost my window with my notes in it, unfortunately, the real unfortunate thing about

45:32SPEAKERall of this is that there's not a replacement for the service that Reddit provided. And when

45:46SPEAKERall those subreddits went dark and the Google links into them, the number of things you search

45:52SPEAKERfor on the internet that are troubleshooting, that take you to a Reddit page, whether it's

45:56SPEAKERhow to get something working on your Steam... I couldn't get Diablo 4 working on my Steam deck,

46:02SPEAKERbecause all of the top results for that process were to the Steam deck or Diablo subreddits,

46:08SPEAKERand they were all dark. So I had to go dig up 15 pages deep in the Google results and find a

46:12SPEAKERPC gaming site. I am not a habitual Reddit user. I don't hang out on any subreddits,

46:19SPEAKERas a matter of course. I'm kind of like you. I mostly end up there also through search results.

46:23SPEAKERIt must have happened 15 or 20 times in the last, what's it been, three weeks?

46:26SPEAKER- It's been since the start of June. I go back on now because they flipped them back on, I think.

46:31SPEAKER- I don't know how many times I have Googled how to do something or look up some piece of obscure

46:35SPEAKERinformation that ran into the private wall on the given subreddit since this happened. There's a ton

46:41SPEAKERof institutional knowledge locked up in there. - Yep. Well, and the thing I didn't anticipate

46:49SPEAKERis that the insitification of Reddit would also further contribute to the insitification of

46:53SPEAKERGoogle, which at some point we got to talk about Google because it is almost non-functional at this

47:00SPEAKERpoint. We are running long. You want to talk about some gravitational waves?

47:06SPEAKER- Oh, sure. Yeah, let's get into it. The last thing I'll say since we were talking about all

47:09SPEAKERthat stuff, I cannot wait for Blue Sky to open for real so people can just sign up and also

47:15SPEAKERfor other instances to start popping up and federating because I think that's probably

47:19SPEAKERgoing to be the one. I think this is in no way endorsing Blue Sky. I have no opinion on the

47:27SPEAKERproduct and almost feel like you can't really have an opinion on it until it opens up and Federation

47:32SPEAKERis in place and we see how things really start working out. All I'm saying is if I had to put

47:36SPEAKERmoney on one that is finally going to catch on and take Twitter's place, I would probably

47:40SPEAKERplace my bet on that one based on the response I'm seeing.

47:43SPEAKER- I think I am less optimistic having used it for a while. I think that the people who are in charge

47:54SPEAKERof it, not the people on the board like Jack Dorsey and those folks, but the actual people

47:58SPEAKERwho are building it are very, very young and are not handling things like complicated moderation

48:04SPEAKERquestions and communication with the community well at all.

48:08SPEAKER- Yeah. I mean, the fact that the most prominent representative of the org I see out there is one

48:12SPEAKERof their developers, like the guy whose day job is to code the thing, not represent the thing.

48:20SPEAKERI mean, that's why I say we don't really know what form it's ultimately going to take because

48:24SPEAKERonce there are other instances, what Blue Sky as a group does is almost immaterial to

48:30SPEAKERpeople who are on other servers because they're all going to have their own policies, right?

48:35SPEAKERThey're all going to have their own moderation and algorithms and XYZ.

48:38SPEAKER- Yeah. And I do think, but I don't know that they're... When I first started there,

48:44SPEAKERI thought that they would be making better moderation tools. I was optimistic because

48:48SPEAKERI thought that they were going to focus more on making better moderation tools.

48:52SPEAKERAnd it may be that they're working on that and it's just not that work isn't visible.

48:55SPEAKER- Oh yeah. I mean, looking at the feature set they launched with,

48:58SPEAKERit was barely a functional platform when they got out there.

49:00SPEAKER- Oh, it absolutely wasn't. They shouldn't have invited as many people as they did when

49:04SPEAKERthey didn't have tools to block and mute people and stuff like that.

49:08SPEAKER- Honestly, they need communication help more than I think anything else at this point, but also

49:17SPEAKERnobody knows what's going on in the community. I think they're about two weeks away from a user

49:22SPEAKERrole right now among the most engaged users, if I had to guess, given how pissed off the

49:26SPEAKERheavy posters are. - I think you spend a lot more

49:28SPEAKERtime looking at it than I do. And also I will grant that the beastguy.social instance probably

49:33SPEAKERwill be the central and biggest one over time. - My guess is it's going to be like a lobby

49:38SPEAKERI think that's the way Mastodon seems to be going now too, where the big mastodon.social

49:43SPEAKERand those types of things are like the default, like where you go if you don't choose an instance

49:48SPEAKERwhen you create your account. - That's exactly what I mean.

49:50SPEAKER- And then you'll migrate out to the instance of interest once you get your sea legs.

49:55SPEAKER- I wouldn't be surprised if that's how it plays out. Anyway, the entire basis of my

50:00SPEAKERprognosticating here is just on the kind of level of social cache I see around this thing,

50:05SPEAKERwhich I think is the X factor that you need for something like this to catch on.

50:07SPEAKER- I think that's probably correct. - Like the, specifically sort of like the

50:12SPEAKERinvite code, begging is not the right word. I don't know how else to put it on. Like there

50:17SPEAKERare a ton of people on Twitter who are very actively searching for invites at all times

50:21SPEAKERnow. Like it's just, it's caught on as like the one to go to if you're trying to escape

50:25SPEAKERTwitter and like that kind of momentum has a way of reinforcing itself.

50:29SPEAKER- I've kind of stopped giving people codes. Like if people, like I have a couple, I have some

50:35SPEAKERcodes. I think bringing more people into Blue Sky right now is probably bad for Blue Sky.

50:41SPEAKER- It's possible. - They need to focus on, anyway.

50:43SPEAKER- I want an alternative to appear. - That's true.

50:47SPEAKER- I want the bulk of people I want to hear from to move off of Twitter now.

50:52SPEAKERI don't want to touch Twitter at all if I can help it.

50:54SPEAKER- I like, I've been spending pretty much equal time on

51:01SPEAKERMastodon and Blue Sky these days. - Mastodon is cool. I just don't know

51:06SPEAKERif it's ever going to escape the reputation of being the one that's too hard to figure out for

51:11SPEAKERregular people. - Also, I will also say

51:13SPEAKERthat I have been mansplained more aggressively on Mastodon than at any other point in my adult life.

51:18SPEAKER- Fair, fair. - Anyway,

51:21SPEAKERlet's talk about space. - Space.

51:23SPEAKER- You know what space has going for it? There are no people there.

51:27SPEAKER- Well, asterisk, no people that we know of. - Okay, fair.

51:33SPEAKER- Plus Jodie Foster's dad's out there somewhere, I think.

51:35SPEAKER- Okay, okay. Well, it's a big place. You know, you could probably find some solitude,

51:39SPEAKERsome peace out there if you want. - That's true.

51:41SPEAKER- That's true. - Dibs on Europa.

51:42SPEAKER- Okay, fair. Pulsar timing arrays.

51:46SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds cool. Those are three words I didn't expect to hear together.

51:50SPEAKER- No, no. Gravitational waves have been big in the news for a while. I guess LIGO,

51:56SPEAKERwhen did that stuff go down? - It's like 2019, I think.

51:58SPEAKERI can't remember. It seems like a long time ago, but it was probably like four years.

52:03SPEAKERLIGO is the gravitational wave observatory that was built. There's two installations on opposite

52:10SPEAKERsides of the world, basically. - Right, yeah. So those are

52:12SPEAKERterrestrial antennae, correct? - Sorry, opposite sides of the

52:17SPEAKERcountry, not the world. It's Massachusetts and Pasadena.

52:21SPEAKER- Right. But the point is the detectors for that size of waves, I guess is the right term,

52:27SPEAKERthat wavelength of gravitational waves, those detectors are on earth.

52:32SPEAKER- They're small. Those waves are small-scale waves. Basically, the LIGO uses mirrors that

52:43SPEAKERare spaced four kilometers apart, which can detect a change of less than one ten-thousandth

52:47SPEAKERof the charged diameter of a proton. So that's a very small space. It's a fairly large space

52:53SPEAKERby human scale and a fairly small amount of change between those two places.

52:57SPEAKER- It's pretty small. - And it detects

52:59SPEAKERripples in space-time, like tiny little ripples. And then because there's two instances that are

53:06SPEAKERfar apart, they can detect the movement of the wave by comparing the difference in timing of the

53:12SPEAKERripples hitting the two different detectors. - Right. I read about this right before we

53:16SPEAKERstarted and I've already forgotten. What was the theorized source of the waves that LIGO

53:20SPEAKERdetected before we get to the current news? - Neutron stars or small black holes colliding.

53:26SPEAKER- Okay. Oh, and also, I think just orbiting pairs of black holes, right?

53:31SPEAKER- Well, all of this has to do with the orbiting pairs of black holes because they cause the

53:37SPEAKERripples. The collision is the after. Once they get close enough, they create gravitational waves

53:44SPEAKERbecause they're basically -- there's a bad analogy that if astrophysicists are listening, I apologize,

53:51SPEAKERbut it's like throwing two rocks into a pond and you see the interference pattern from the ripples.

53:55SPEAKERExcept for instead of throwing the two rocks in the pond, the two rocks are orbiting around

53:59SPEAKEReach other, spinning on the surface of the pond, making ripples like crazy. Maybe it's like pouring

54:03SPEAKERtwo dots of liquid nitrogen onto a pond and they're going to spin around like crazy because

54:08SPEAKERof the Leidenfrost effect. But they'll also make ripples because they're moving. Don't listen to me.

54:14SPEAKERI'm a communicator, not a scientist. Anyway, the point is, the neat thing about gravitational waves

54:21SPEAKERis because they manipulate space-time instead of relying on things like EM radiation moving,

54:28SPEAKERthey give us a heads up that something cool is about to happen. We can aim a telescope at it.

54:32SPEAKER- Right. Also, I gather this is something that has just been

54:38SPEAKERtheorized to exist and now we are able to actually detect it. The response to a lot of this has been,

54:46SPEAKERit's great to confirm that what we thought was there is in fact there.

54:49SPEAKER- Yeah. Well, it opens a whole new wave of a world, a whole new genre of astronomy for us,

54:56SPEAKERright? The same thing happened in the '60s when we started using radio telescopes.

55:03SPEAKERThe new thing is, LIGO was a few years ago. As of 2022, LIGO has made three runs

55:13SPEAKERand made 90 detections of gravitational waves. Those gravitational waves that they detect are

55:17SPEAKERrelatively small. I'm going to say small things, but they're not really small by human scale.

55:24SPEAKERThey're the result of dying stars crashing into each other and neutron stars, very massive things

55:31SPEAKERcrashing into each other. Now, this new thing, the pulsar timing array discovery that was announced

55:39SPEAKERthree or four days ago, it was part of the North American nanohertz observatory for gravitational

55:47SPEAKERwaves. I guess nanohertz means the frequency. I don't know what the nanohertz means there,

55:52SPEAKERI'm curious about that. - It's not hertz times per second,

55:55SPEAKERis that billionths of a second? - Billionths of a second, yeah. I assume

55:58SPEAKERthat's the difference in timing that they're detecting on the pulsars. But what this does

56:05SPEAKERis this finds very long wavelength gravitational waves, like gravitational waves with a wavelength

56:11SPEAKERof light years. Huge, enormous ripples in space time. - Just to step back for a second and think

56:20SPEAKERabout the term wavelength, I always have to remind myself when you're talking about the wavelength of

56:24SPEAKERwhatever type of wave, these are physical distances. - So if you're standing at the ocean,

56:32SPEAKERyou look at the wavelength, it's the distance between two waves. If you have a jump rope and

56:37SPEAKERyou're making a standing wave in it, it's the difference between the high point to the high

56:40SPEAKERpoint. - But what I mean though is when you're at the beach, it's very easy to visualize that

56:44SPEAKERlooking at water. But when you're thinking about something like EM radiation, I have to remind

56:48SPEAKERmyself those are still physical wavelengths, even though we're talking about photons.

56:52SPEAKER- We're talking about ripples in space time that create waves that are light years long.

56:57SPEAKER- Yeah. What I mean is it's a physical distance. That is a measure that the brain is able to

57:04SPEAKERintuitively understand is what I mean, even though that waveforms and invisible radiation and things

57:11SPEAKERlike that are things that the brain does not. - Well, remember all EM radiation exists on the

57:16SPEAKERsame spectrum, right? From x-rays to infrared and gamma rays, right? - Yeah. I guess what I'm

57:23SPEAKERsaying is you're applying a concrete unit of measurements to something that is very

57:28SPEAKERabstract and invisible, I guess is the thing that's so crazy to me. - Yeah. And in this case,

57:32SPEAKERit's not even like an EM wave that we're talking about. We're talking about ripples in the fabric

57:37SPEAKERof the universe. - Yes. It's not something moving through space. It is space itself being deformed.

57:43SPEAKERAnd also a light year is a very, very long distance, 9 trillion kilometers, 6 trillion miles

57:51SPEAKERin one light year. - Or a quarter of the distance to the nearest sun that's not our sun.

57:56SPEAKER- Yeah. - So basically this experiment has been running for a long time. They started in 2007,

58:06SPEAKERI believe, and they monitor different pulsars, like 60 some pulsars, I think. - 68. - 68. Is

58:14SPEAKERthat what it was? Yeah. - Yes. - 68 pulsars at least once a month to look for changes. So,

58:22SPEAKERokay, we should take a step back. Pulsars are the stars that rotate at a specific frequency.

58:26SPEAKER- Or collapsed stars. They're not stars that are still fusing elements. They're the cores

58:33SPEAKERof collapsed gigantic stars. - Yeah. Just because they're collapsed doesn't mean they're not still

58:37SPEAKERstars, man. They don't make light. They make radio waves now or whatever. - I think that they still

58:40SPEAKERadmit stuff. - But they spin it at very predictable frequencies, right? And the deviations even from

58:47SPEAKERthe spin are predictable and understandable. - You should also, if space is so full of

58:51SPEAKERmind blowing stuff, that's why I love it so much. If you ever, you should go read about what neutron

58:56SPEAKERstars are made of, pulsars. - Is it neutrons? - Well, it's neutron degenerate matter. You've

59:02SPEAKERprobably heard about this before. It's the type of matter that you've probably heard,

59:06SPEAKERlike a tablespoon weighs like 3000 tons or something like that. You know what I mean?

59:10SPEAKER- Yeah. It's all neutrons. Oops, all neutrons. - Yeah. My understanding is it's matter that

59:16SPEAKERhas collapsed so densely that it has essentially overcome the forces that resist compression at the

59:24SPEAKERelectron and proton level and all that are left are neutrons. - So there's no space between the

59:28SPEAKERbits, basically? - Right. It's so dense that only neutrons still exist in this matter. It's

59:34SPEAKERbasically the densest matter that can exist prior to being a black hole is my understanding.

59:39SPEAKER- Cool. But the point is, this is one of the things we discovered when we started doing radio

59:44SPEAKERastronomy 50 years ago, or 60 years ago, I guess now, is that there are these, if you aim the radio

59:54SPEAKERtelescopes at specific areas in space, you get these repeating signals and it repeats at a high

1:00:00SPEAKERfrequency milliseconds, I think. When they look at them over long periods of time, they realize that

1:00:06SPEAKERthese signals are predictable in very specific ways. Somebody in the 90s was like, "Hey,

1:00:14SPEAKERif there's gravitational waves, we'll be able to tell the differences in these. We can use these

1:00:19SPEAKERpulsars as antenna, basically." - That's the coolest thing to explain here about this detection

1:00:25SPEAKERmethod is that you're using pulsars essentially as the same style of endpoints as the Earth-based

1:00:33SPEAKERdetectors that you were talking about earlier, the mirrors. - Yeah, but they're hundreds of

1:00:36SPEAKERthousands of light years apart in some cases. - Same concept, just using astronomical features

1:00:42SPEAKERinstead of terrestrial mirrors or whatever. - Yeah, it's a remarkable idea. And because

1:00:50SPEAKERthe wavelengths are so long and because the propagation times take a long time,

1:00:55SPEAKERwe've been collecting data for 15 years at this point, and we're just starting to see results now.

1:01:03SPEAKERIt's like we're measuring the background hum of space-time, basically. They've detected

1:01:10SPEAKERgravitational waves that are literally wavelengths of light years, which is remarkable. Because of

1:01:18SPEAKERthe positioning of the pulsars, the analogy that I read is that it's like having wave sensors along

1:01:27SPEAKERthe rim of a pond and throwing stones in at different places. You can measure where the

1:01:32SPEAKERstones went in because of the interference patterns and the timing of the waves reaching the

1:01:36SPEAKERwave detectors at the edge of a pond. The other metaphor -- what we're detecting, though,

1:01:43SPEAKERis supermassive black holes merging, we think. They're not 100% sure. It could be cosmic strings,

1:01:49SPEAKERit could be cosmic inflation, there's some other stuff that I didn't understand because there was

1:01:53SPEAKERscary math involved. But the two supermassive black holes, the kind that are in the center

1:02:01SPEAKERof spiral-arm galaxies merging, the data matches up with that. The thing that's interesting is,

1:02:11SPEAKERthere seem to be a lot more of those supermassive black holes merging than we previously expected,

1:02:15SPEAKERand cosmological models may be implied before. There's still stuff to figure out. This is the

1:02:21SPEAKERTLDR. Yeah. Like you alluded to, most galaxies have these types of black holes at their centers.

1:02:28SPEAKERStudying that sort of thing also has ramifications for understanding how galaxies are formed and

1:02:32SPEAKERevolve and work in general. The interesting thing about this is that the space that's affected by

1:02:38SPEAKERthose supermassive black holes is pretty large in the center of the galaxy. The signals that you get

1:02:46SPEAKERwith the resolution that we're operating with, with this approach, is relatively low. It's not

1:02:55SPEAKERuntil they're about to smash into each other that we start seeing signals. They have to be within,

1:03:00SPEAKERI think, 1,000 AU, which is 1,000 times the distance from Earth to our Sun. Just like 97

1:03:08SPEAKERmillion miles or 92 million miles. Yeah, 93 average, I believe. One AU. One AU.

1:03:15SPEAKERSo, yeah, they have to be very close. At this point, there's two interesting things. One is

1:03:21SPEAKERthat it matches up with the model for supermassive black hole binaries merging. Two seems like a lot

1:03:28SPEAKERmore of those. Three, as we start seeing more of these, we'll know where to aim telescopes to see

1:03:34SPEAKERsome cool shit, potentially. But yeah, it's an important step. Is this going to have implications

1:03:44SPEAKERon our day to day life in the next six to nine months? Absolutely not. Is it really freaking cool

1:03:51SPEAKERthat we can look at stars that are thousands and thousands of light years away and detect ripples

1:03:56SPEAKERin space time using inferences from those observations? Absolutely, it's fucking cool.

1:04:04SPEAKERIs it cool in an observational capacity? Yes. Is it going to satisfy the people who ran around for

1:04:09SPEAKERthe 48 hours preceding this announcement, acting like it was going to be the announcement of the

1:04:13SPEAKERdiscovery of alien life? No. This got teased, maybe. I was offline, I think, while that was

1:04:20SPEAKERhappening. It was maybe something like 36 hours before the announcement. There was an announcement

1:04:24SPEAKERof the announcement, and of course, a bunch of people on social media started freaking out about,

1:04:29SPEAKERlike, "Oh, this is the big one. They're going to announce something truly life-changing."

1:04:32SPEAKERIt is. It is truly life-changing. For people working in this field, absolutely.

1:04:36SPEAKERBut also, understanding how the universe started and how it will end is... I find it gives comfort.

1:04:47SPEAKERWe talked about this with Katie a few weeks ago, but yeah, it's nice. It's nice to know that it's

1:04:51SPEAKERgoing to keep going. Yeah. Can I slip in my little astronomical addendum here? I'm very interested

1:04:56SPEAKERin this. Follow up to the Patreon episode we just posted, where we mostly talked about museums,

1:05:02SPEAKERand I extolled the value of having a season pass at the Academy of Science, which is in

1:05:07SPEAKERGolden Gate Park near us, and we stop in there for like 10 minutes every time we're on a walk

1:05:10SPEAKERin Golden Gate Park. When we lived on the other side of the park from where you are,

1:05:15SPEAKERwe had a membership, and I would just walk over there and go in, and it was so nice.

1:05:18SPEAKERJust want to go see some fish, or maybe walk through the rainforest for 10 minutes.

1:05:23SPEAKERSpend 10 minutes sitting up on the green roof, which is a lovely place.

1:05:27SPEAKERThey have a roof covered with plants. Yesterday, when we stopped in there for our 10-minute

1:05:32SPEAKERchill-out session, representatives of the... I guess it's actually called the B612 Foundation,

1:05:39SPEAKERalthough all the signage referred to it as the Asteroid Institute,

1:05:44SPEAKERwhich... And their shirts said Asteroid Institute, but looking at their website...

1:05:48SPEAKERDid they offer a haircut or anything, Brad?

1:05:50SPEAKERNo, no. It was founded by an American astronaut. Let me pull up his name. Dr. Edward Liu,

1:05:59SPEAKERformer NASA astronaut, is the co-founder of the B612 Foundation. I think the Asteroid

1:06:06SPEAKERInstitute is a program within the B612 Foundation, if I am reading their website right. Anyway,

1:06:12SPEAKERthey were there showing off a bunch of meteor fragments, and then some of the researchers

1:06:16SPEAKERwere there just hanging out to answer people's questions.

1:06:20SPEAKERDid you get to touch space?

1:06:22SPEAKERThey were not letting you touch any of the rocks.

1:06:23SPEAKERThat's probably best.

1:06:25SPEAKERThey did have a cross-section, like a nice clean cut sheet from a larger meteorite that was mostly

1:06:32SPEAKERmade of iron that had some really interesting formations in it that only happen essentially when

1:06:36SPEAKERit forms and then cools very slowly in space. So they have this kind of crosshatch, like

1:06:42SPEAKERcrystalline crosshatch pattern on the interior of the meteorite that is only because it becomes

1:06:48SPEAKERvery hot when it forms and then takes millions of years to cool.

1:06:51SPEAKERWell, yeah, because there's nothing to radiate the heat away in space, right?

1:06:55SPEAKERYes, that was it.

1:06:56SPEAKERSo what is their goal? What do they do?

1:06:59SPEAKERI have not read too much about their website yet. I mostly talk to them. That's where this is coming

1:07:04SPEAKERfrom. The Asteroid Institute is a B612 program, which collaborates on asteroid related STEM

1:07:09SPEAKERprojects with major institutions around the world. They were there. I mostly talk to them

1:07:13SPEAKERabout deflection. The researcher I talked to obviously had a lot to say about DART.

1:07:21SPEAKERAnd I basically, my big question was like, "Hey, what's the current status of deflection

1:07:25SPEAKERstrategies? What's the go-to?" He said that they seem to be big proponents of the

1:07:32SPEAKERsubtle gravitational tug deflection.

1:07:35SPEAKEROh yeah. Put a lot of maths near it and just pull it off course and hope your math is good.

1:07:39SPEAKERIt was, yeah, it was fine. Well, actually, so it's correctable. That's actually what

1:07:44SPEAKERthe researcher I talked to said was so preferable about that one is that it allows you to make

1:07:48SPEAKERfurther adjustments over time, which I assume would basically entail, I didn't ask, moving

1:07:53SPEAKERthe craft slightly closer or farther away from the asteroid is my guess. The downside, he said,

1:07:59SPEAKERis that you need like a century of warning.

1:08:01SPEAKERSo we got to get on it is what they're saying.

1:08:04SPEAKERWell, yes, we have to detect the offending object way, way, way in advance. He basically

1:08:09SPEAKERsaid you need like a hundred years of lead time to subtly adjust the trajectory of an

1:08:15SPEAKERasteroid like that.

1:08:16SPEAKERSee, I was afraid that you were going to say that these people were like the asteroid miners.

1:08:20SPEAKERNo, no, no, no. These are people who track. He had a lot to say. The most urgent thing

1:08:25SPEAKERhe had to say was about detection. He basically said that the world enders, they feel pretty

1:08:31SPEAKERgood about having caught most of them at this point. The nation enders, they're making progress.

1:08:37SPEAKERYeah. Like this is going to wipe out a country size area as opposed to destroy the entire

1:08:41SPEAKERplanet. He said the city destroyers, they have a long, long way to go.

1:08:45SPEAKERYou mean what city destroyers, what, like a basketball court size probably?

1:08:48SPEAKERI didn't ask how big the object, but you know, the type of thing that could wipe Cleveland

1:08:52SPEAKERoff the map. Like there are still a lot of those unaccounted for.

1:08:55SPEAKERNever forget Buenos Aires, Brad. That's all I'm saying. That's cool.

1:09:00SPEAKERIt was fun. It was really cool. I wish I had gotten some contact information.

1:09:04SPEAKERWell, I mean, they have a website. I'm sure we can find them.

1:09:07SPEAKERIt was, it was, it was a fun encounter though.

1:09:09SPEAKERI love going in there and seeing like, I love going into museums and finding somebody who's

1:09:13SPEAKERlike, so when we were in DC, we went to the botanical gardens and the corpse flowers,

1:09:18SPEAKERthey, one of their corpse flowers was blooming. If you, if you don't, if you,

1:09:22SPEAKERhave you ever gone to see our corpse flower in San Francisco?

1:09:24SPEAKERNo. Okay. So the

1:09:25SPEAKERcorpse flower is a like seven to 10 foot, up to 500 pound flower that blooms every decade or so.

1:09:35SPEAKERIf things, if the conditions are right, it makes, it's called the corpse flower. It looks,

1:09:39SPEAKERit looks, it looks a little phallic, just a full disclosure. It, it is, it smells like a corpse.

1:09:46SPEAKERIt smells like a decaying corpse to attract carrion eaters. It is a remarkable smell.

1:09:53SPEAKERI'm going to say, I was wondering where the name came from. I was going to say that maybe

1:09:56SPEAKERthey are due for a rebrand if they want to improve their image. Cause that is not the most appealing

1:10:00SPEAKERname. But then when I hear what it sounds like, it smells like, well, so it was cool. Cause we

1:10:05SPEAKERwent into the Arboretum it's right there at the entrance. So it hits you right in the face when

1:10:08SPEAKERyou open the door. And it was like, you know, you're in a greenhouse. So it's like 90 degrees

1:10:11SPEAKERin there. That sounds like a pleasant experience. Well, but it was cool cause the, cause two of the

1:10:16SPEAKERpeople that, that work with the plants, two of the, two of the botanists were standing there

1:10:21SPEAKERhanging out to answer questions. And I was able to ask the question I've wondered about

1:10:24SPEAKERcorpse flowers for 20 years. Cause like the, when the one bloomed in San Francisco, when we,

1:10:30SPEAKERlike the mid two thousands, it was a big deal. Like there hadn't been one in an Arboretum that

1:10:34SPEAKERbloomed for a really long time. People were really excited. People flew from all over the world to

1:10:38SPEAKERcome see it. And since that time, they seem to be blooming more regularly. See, you see news of them

1:10:43SPEAKERpopping up in other Arboretums and botanical gardens and all that. And I asked, I asked her

1:10:48SPEAKERand she was like, yeah, the good news is we've gotten better at cultivating them. And also

1:10:53SPEAKERpeople tend to be interested to coming to check them out. So you, you know, like we're investing

1:10:58SPEAKERmore effort and energy and cause it's good, it's good public relations for the Arboretums and the

1:11:02SPEAKERbotanical gardens, but also like it's important conservation as we know. Yes. Obviously destruction

1:11:08SPEAKERof any species is an absolute tragedy. I will tell you, if you have the opportunity to check one out,

1:11:15SPEAKERyou should do it. It is a remarkable experience. Maybe I'll take you. It doesn't really smell like

1:11:21SPEAKERcorpses just for the record. It just smells bad. Weird. You know, I'm not, I'm not necessarily in

1:11:26SPEAKERneed of, of, of a whiff of cadaver on commands necessarily. I mean, I guess, hold on, I should

1:11:32SPEAKERrephrase the cadavers that I've experienced or have been like preserved and, you know, kind of

1:11:40SPEAKERmore, not formaldehydey, but like, you know, clinical, yeah, clinical, like fresh. Okay.

1:11:48SPEAKERI've not, I've not, I've not, I've not, I've never been walking through the woods and found

1:11:52SPEAKERa decaying body or anything like that. So I don't know what, like what the real scent of decay

1:11:57SPEAKERsmells like, but it doesn't smell. It, it was not, it was not, it was interesting, but not

1:12:02SPEAKERunpleasant is what I would say. If you're worried about that, don't let that make you chicken out

1:12:07SPEAKERfrom going to see the corpse flower and you can take a mask and put it on if you're freaked out

1:12:10SPEAKERabout her when you get there. But talking to people in museums kicks ass. Anyway, I guess

1:12:16SPEAKERthat'll do it. This is a long episode. We're we were going to talk about Red Hat this week,

1:12:20SPEAKERbut we, we think we're going to take a slightly different approach and maybe revisit it in an

1:12:25SPEAKERupcoming episode. Things go well. Possibly with a guest. Possibly with a guest. There is a,

1:12:30SPEAKERthere is Red Hat and open source drama to talk about. Yeah. Scene drama. Everybody loves scene

1:12:35SPEAKERdrama. Perhaps an expert in the field would be suitable. Yeah. It may be a good idea. Anyway,

1:12:41SPEAKERthat'll do it for us this week. Thank you all for listening as always. Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod

1:12:45SPEAKERis a 100% listener supported show without, without you, the generous listener. We would not be here

1:12:52SPEAKERevery week to talk about such things as the certification of the internet and corpse flowers.

1:12:58SPEAKERSo if you would like to find out how to support the show, you can go to patreon.com/techpod.

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1:13:09SPEAKERYou get access to the discord where there's a bunch of beautiful people talking about nerdy

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1:13:19SPEAKERkind of, we just kind of chat about what's on our minds. It seems like these days. Anything and

1:13:23SPEAKEReverything. Yeah. I enjoy those. I honestly, I they're unstructured chats that I quite, quite

1:13:29SPEAKERlike. And then, and then if you pay for a higher tier, then you get your name right on the podcast,

1:13:36SPEAKERlike our executive producers, including Nick Johnston, Paddle Creek Games, makers of Fractured

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1:13:50SPEAKERJoel Krauska, Twinkie and the Deck of Theseus, David Allen and James Kamik. Thank you all so much.

1:13:59SPEAKERYeah. And if you don't look, if you don't want to subscribe, if you don't want to, if you,

1:14:01SPEAKERif you can't pay, you don't want to pay. That's fine. We get it to enjoy the show.

1:14:04SPEAKERMaybe think about leaving an iTunes review. That's helpful for us. People, people, we like that.

1:14:08SPEAKERIt's good. And, and as always, I'm going to leave reminding you to open up steam and review your

1:14:15SPEAKERfavorite indie games, because if you've bought a game and you've played it and you liked it as the

1:14:20SPEAKERkindest thing you could do for those developers, it is, it is hard to get a game noticed out there

1:14:24SPEAKERin 2023. So are those valuable algorithmically as well as word of mouth? Like does it,

1:14:30SPEAKERit turns out things surface. If you have better steam reviews, you get promoted more on the front

1:14:35SPEAKERpage of steam during things like steam sales. So leaving positive game reviews on games that you've

1:14:40SPEAKERpurchased and or played very important. So wish listing is also valuable from that perspective,

1:14:45SPEAKERright? Doesn't that also float things up? Wish listing is great right up until the moment the

1:14:50SPEAKERgame is available to purchase. Once it's out, it doesn't matter. But, but before then, yeah,

1:14:55SPEAKERwish listing is very important for pre-release stuff. So you go wishlist little kitty, big city

1:15:00SPEAKERand whatever else you're excited about playing next year and review the last five games you

1:15:05SPEAKERplayed. Don't worry about call of duty. They're fine. But if you have a game you love that has

1:15:09SPEAKERlike a hundred reviews, leaving a review helps a ton. Anyway, thanks for listening everybody.

1:15:14SPEAKERAnd thanks for your, thanks for spending time with us every week. We appreciate you.