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The Company Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into Podcasts
Episode Notes
/Transcript
1:06 - This Company Is Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into AI Podcasts
22:02 - An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin
42:03 - RIP Metaverse, an $80 Billion Dumpster Fire Nobody Wanted
YouTube version: https://youtu.be/t5sVPTI8F1I
Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRM. Four zero four Media is a journalist founded company and needs your your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404media.co.
Joseph:I'm your host, Joseph. And with me today are two of the other four zero four Media cofounders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg.
Emanuel:Hello.
Joseph:And Jason Kepler. Hello. Any housekeeping, Jason? I feel like no. I feel we're we're good on all fronts.
Joseph:Think comes for a few.
Jason:Yeah. I don't know. Nothing nothing comes to mind.
Joseph:Well, in that
Jason:case Let's let's get on with it.
Joseph:Yeah. I won't waste anybody's time then. Let's go straight to the stories. The first one this week is from Emmanuel. It's frankly really really wild.
Joseph:The headline is this company is secretly turning your Zoom meetings into AI podcasts. So obviously, we'll get into the specifics in a minute, Emmanuel, but as with a lot of good stories, this actually started with a tip from a four zero four media reader. What did they say? What did they see and what did they tell you?
Emanuel:Yeah. So this reader's name is Tom Radmacher. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that correctly. He is a former teacher and somebody who is just very involved in education more broadly, and shortly after we saw a lot of ICE activity around schools and teachers being really worried about how to protect some kids in their community, he put together a Zoom call for other teachers he knows, some local officials in his area, and yeah, anyone who wanted to know how to protect these kids during during an ice raid. And the link to this Zoom meeting was shared only via email, and he assumed that it was private for that reason, even though technically the private settings didn't require a password or anything like that.
Emanuel:He had the meeting, everything went well, and then a few months later, he gets an email from someone called Sarah Blair from a company called webinar.tv, and she tells them, hey, just so you know, this webinar you did is featured on our website, and we also turned it into a podcast called the Phil and Amy Highlights Show. And he was obviously very surprised because he didn't know anyone he didn't invite to this call had access, and was pretty concerned that it was featured somewhere and turned into a podcast because some of the people who were on the call would not want to be publicly associated with something that may appear like anti Trump or anti administration.
Joseph:Yeah, this is a very sensitive conversation, even though there's no password on it, you can totally understand the reasoning that, well, this is like de facto a private conversation because it's only been shared as far as they know, like via email and that sort of thing. There's no, again, far as they know, third party listening in, but somehow, and we'll get to potential methods in a bit, but somehow this company listened in, recorded the Zoom meeting, which again was pretty damn sensitive, and then turned it into like some weird AI podcast. So you go then to webinar.tv's website. What do you do you see there?
Emanuel:It's almost like a low tech YouTube, if I was to describe the UI. There is a counter in the top right corner of the website that says they have over 200,000 webinars hosted there, and you can browse them by category or tag, and they each have a thumbnail and a short description and title, and you'll click on any one of them. You'll usually get three things. You'll get a short AI generated summary, like video summary of what the call is about. You'll get like the contents of the webinar or meeting broken up into chapters, and you can jump to any point in the meeting that way.
Emanuel:And then in some cases, not all cases, there is this Phil and Amy podcast, which is two AI generated personalities who are discussing the content of the meeting, including podcast banter and little lame jokes and everything like that. I don't know for a fact how this is generated, but it very much sounds like a NotebookLM type of output where it could just like you can give it any text or video or whatever, and it will turn it into a podcast. And those are like fifteen minutes long or something like that.
Joseph:Yeah, I was going to bring up Notebook. NotebookLM? Is that what yeah, yeah. So that is probably the AI podcast products that most people are familiar with, right? That came out somewhat recently, several months ago, maybe a little bit longer than that.
Joseph:And the idea was that you could feed your notes into this and it would generate an audio podcast for you so you could have some friendly podcast voice basically regurgitating your notes or your study material or whatever to you. And sure, okay, some people might benefit from that. Maybe they want to put their research in there or whatever, or they're a student and they're trying to cram all of their work in whatever it might be. That's one thing. This is taking other people's Zoom meetings and basically doing the same thing, obviously without asking them.
Joseph:It's just emailing them after that can be like, hey, you're now in this random ass clip show. Before we get into more of the specifics, just to check with that initial story, Did the reader manage to get that sort of material or webinar taken down at all?
Emanuel:Yeah. He replied right away. He was like, what the hell is this? Please remove this. I didn't allow this.
Emanuel:And the person who emailed him directed him to a takedown form, which is the type of thing we see on many platforms. He filled it out, and within a few days, it was removed. And, yeah, by the time he reached out to me, it was already gone.
Joseph:Yeah. Maybe you don't know this because it might be hard to tell from the outside, but like, is anyone watching this crap? Like either well, I mean, there's two things. Right? There's the original webinar itself, which is basically being captured and published online.
Joseph:Some people might watch that because maybe, I don't know, there's some internal machinations or a speech or something that somebody may want to watch. There's that. And then there's the AI stuff as well. Is there any indication of whether they're actually being viewed or not, or we we can't tell? What do what do you make of them?
Emanuel:Yeah. Good question. Short answer is we can't tell. They're unlike YouTube, there's nothing on the website that indicates how many views a video has. They don't have comments.
Emanuel:You can't see how much engagement they're getting or anything like that. So we really don't know. I will just say briefly, in terms of monetization, as far as I can tell, Webinar TV does not sell ads against any of these. That is not the plan. It appears that the plan is to upsell people to promote their webinars on webinar.tv, right?
Emanuel:So the whole reason they're reaching out to Tom, they're not just telling him out of the goodness of their hearts that they took his Zoom meeting and turned it into a podcast. They're saying, hey, you're featured here, and then they have kind of a bunch of services to promote your webinar on webinar.tv. Whether anyone is interested in that also, I have no idea.
Joseph:Yeah. It's very weird because maybe to be charitable for just a second, maybe they did think, oh, there's a market gap and a market fit in there. There's all these interesting webinars happening at companies, but then they forget to record them or they don't promote them enough. We can go in there and we can help these companies promote it. That is not the same when you are essentially somehow infiltrating Zoom meetings that people at least believe are private.
Joseph:I mean, presumably it's automated in some capacities, maybe that's the reason, but obviously they are going to piss off a lot of people by doing this. You found one of my webinars as well, or rather one I was in. What what was the deal with that? Sorry, Jason.
Emanuel:Go ahead.
Jason:Since since you published this, someone sent me one of mine as well.
Emanuel:Oh, which one is yours?
Jason:Something I did with PBS like a few months ago. So, yeah, it's we're on there.
Joseph:Well, just on that, Jason, because it sounds kind of similar to mine. Mine was it was designed to be public. Like, it was, like, sort of a maybe not an invite only, but you're supposed to RSVP to this webinar that I did with Freedom of the Press Foundation about, hey, here's how we file for new information requests, that sort of thing. It's definitely supposed to be public. So it's different to the ICE meeting that Emanuel opened the story with.
Joseph:Jason, if you also was with PBS, it sounds like that's also supposed to be public, but I kind of doubt.
Jason:It was not. It was not. It was so it's interesting because it was like this thing about with teachers about AI in schools. And so PBS has this, like, I don't really know what it is. I was surprised to learn about it.
Jason:But, basically, like, they do they have like an educational arm where they do meetings with teachers sometimes to talk about, like, to talk with people who are making news. And it's similar in that they do circulate the link to the webinar kind of publicly, but you're supposed to be a school teacher to join it. And the one that I went to, like, as far as I knew, there were only school teachers there. And, you had to, like, register for it, but the link was gettable. But it wasn't something where it was like, this is made for the masses.
Jason:And it was also something where it was I mean, I didn't care. Like, I was happy to have what I said be public, but I guess because the some of the teachers didn't wanna get in trouble necessarily because they were talking about troubles that they were having in their school. It was like supposed to be a space for teachers to be able to talk about these struggles without that being circulated widely, essentially. Yeah. So not not ideal.
Emanuel:A short thing about that. I didn't say this in the story because it is maybe a lot of editorializing. But, Joe, I don't know if you would call the thing you did with freedom of the press, which I found on Webinar TV. I don't know if you would call it a webinar. Jason, I don't know if you would call the thing you did with PBS a webinar.
Emanuel:Webinar is kind of an outdated term. When I think about webinar, I think about, like, I don't know, ten years ago, you would sign up for a class that you do online, and that is a webinar. And ten years ago, the way you would use Zoom and other like video conferencing software is either at work or for something that is like one of these old school webinars. The thing that makes this service so weird right now is that post COVID, there is like this whole other category of Zoom meeting. I'm sure we all remember and cringe about having like Zoom drinks during the pandemic.
Joseph:You mean the best time of my life, but yeah.
Emanuel:Yeah. But it's like that has stuck like Zoom as like this having this like third utility where you can get a bunch of teachers together and discuss like a thing happening in your community, and it's not quote unquote private in the technical sense or like like by like the strict definition of it, but it's not a class that people are signed up for. It's a thing where you're inviting a specific group of people to meet on a video conferencing tool. I talked to another group of people whose Zoom call was scraped by Webinar TV. They were a bunch of paralegals in Canada.
Emanuel:They obviously had no idea that they were up on that website. And they said like, hey, like, technically this isn't private, like we didn't make it a secret, but it's like it's not for everyone, right? It's like we didn't invite the public to come to this thing. We invited like other paralegals to discuss a thing in our profession specifically, and they were like, I guess we can't sue them, but they did make it clear that it made them very uncomfortable that that it was happening. It's like there's another case where people are like, yeah, this is open to everyone, but the point is to make it free and accessible and to not allow anyone to monetize it, and we're not sure that we're cool with another company trying to monetize it without our permission.
Joseph:Yeah. It's It is absolutely in the same bucket as like Zoom bombing, which is what happened a lot, right, during the pandemic and then after, as you say, when people continue to use Zoom and you'd have I know Jason covered it, a lot of these, what was it, city council meetings, Jason, where people would join and then, you know, hurl horrible insults, during meetings, that sort of thing.
Jason:Yeah. I mean, it's interesting though because like as, you know, as Emmanuel reported, it's like they have a, I assume, like a bot that joins obviously. And it's like, so the bot is not disrupting. And I think for the most part, it seems like the people that you talk to, they sort of don't realize that this bot isn't there necessarily. And so it's not disruptive to the actual webinar experience, but I even hesitate to call it webinar, but, like, to the to the Zoom call experience.
Jason:But it is then, like, after the fact, the organizers find out or people who participate in it find out that they've been turned into this, like, weird AI podcast, and it's like, then they feel quite violated.
Joseph:Yeah. I feel like I bring bring up this example a lot, but it really was formative to like my understanding of data and privacy. Years and years ago, when we worked at motherboard, I covered the work of this researcher who made a profile on a dating website, and then scraped all of the data, which was just behind a login wall. Like he believed it was like public data, you just had to make an account on a dating site and log in. He scraped all of that data, then he made it public.
Joseph:And that was obviously an extreme recontextualization of that data that people believed it was private, you know, yeah, it's not end to end encrypted, but it's like behind a login wall and account on the dating site, and now it's public. It's very similar here where, yeah, sure, there might not be a password on the Zoom, which is allowing some sort of technical access from this company. But in the context of the conversation, they are treating it like a private conversation. I think that's absolutely reasonable. Jason mentioned a bot.
Joseph:I'll say kind of beyond that or maybe even including that, we don't fully know what is happening here in a technical sense, right, Emmanuel? So like, what do we know? What were you able to figure out? And ultimately, do we know how Webinar TV is actually like recording this stuff, or is it still sort of unclear?
Emanuel:Yeah. We don't really know. There's a few theories. It's interesting because every person that I talked to had a different theory for how this happened. I talked to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Emanuel:They obviously have people who know a lot about privacy and cybersecurity and all that. They speculated that they were doing it through one of the Zoom APIs that was kind of allowing them to see what meetings were public and jumped into them based on that. There is an organization in Alberta called Cyber Alberta, which is just a bunch of like local cybersecurity professionals. They did a report about this, and they theorized that Webinar TV was actually doing this via some Chrome browser extensions that were like letting them know when people were in a Zoom call and doing it that way. And then finally, what everyone I talked to said was that these calls were not private technically, as in they didn't require a password, and there were enough people in the Zoom meeting.
Emanuel:So it when I asked like, do you think there there could have been like a bot in there recording the meeting? They said, yeah, it's possible. So we're not sure exactly what the mechanism is. Those are just some some theories.
Joseph:Yeah. Again, I'm also speculating, you know more about it than me, but just going on the story that you started with, and that person in the ICE teachers meeting sharing the link only via email and then somehow it's still being recorded. I don't know that maybe leads some ammo to the browser extension argument that someone in that meeting had some sort of browser extension that is doing this somehow. And then they but I don't know. Or I mean, frankly, the results are, of course, a possibility that, yes, they believe it was only shared by email, but then maybe Somebody one person shared it
Emanuel:put it on LinkedIn and Right.
Joseph:We don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But very, very interesting.
Joseph:So I guess just to wrap up this section, what did Zoom tell you? Because it is not a Zoom issue, it's just this is happening on Zoom, but what did the company tell you?
Emanuel:Zoom is well aware. They know about this company specifically, and all they said basically is we have privacy settings and you should use them. That makes a lot of sense. I would also note that because of COVID, Zoom has been subject to a lot of press coverage, and a lot of that press coverage did focus on Zoom bombing. And, you know, they said, like, verify the identity of the people that you're inviting to to Zoom calls, which I think is totally fair.
Emanuel:I think it's not necessarily Zoom's problem to solve. It's not their responsibility. But I also think that, you know, putting the onus on this teacher who is just trying to get with other teachers and discuss like an important issue, and then have them verify the identity of every single person who joins. Maybe some of those people don't want to verify their identity. It like that's that's not a good solution either.
Emanuel:I think really what we're talking about is a really cynical bad actor finding software with the vulnerability and exploiting it like in a super douchey cynical way.
Joseph:Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if Zoom sues this company in the same sort of way that like Meta has sued people selling like Instagram followers or so like, yes, it's not really like their problem, but it's a brand reputation issue and really sucks for these people as well. If anyone has any more information on that, of course, please reach out to Emmanuel. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one of my stories about what drove a millionaire who already had a lot of money, what drove him to become a cocaine kingpin.
Joseph:We'll be right back after this.
Emanuel:Okay, we're back. And our next story is from Joe. The headline is an adrenaline junkie millionaire's quest to become a cocaine kingpin. Joe, who is Marty Tibbets? I've never said his name out loud.
Joseph:Same. No. Have. Tibbets is what I say. And I think in the no.
Joseph:Maybe it was an earlier version. I just said Marty because I kinda liked it. But you could we can also just say Marty as well. I think I think it's a good name. So Marty is, sorry, was and I'll explain that in a minute, a very, very successful executive.
Joseph:He ran these companies which were basically like back office customer support, almost I think a prison use them, basically call centers. And he had a couple of those and they were apparently successful and brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars for him, became very rich. But he was also very eccentric as well. He did all sorts of things and especially he loved to fly cold war airplanes. So he ran an air museum and he I think owned around a dozen aircraft.
Joseph:And there's the sort of the collection aspect of it like, hey, I'm going to travel to get this really, really rare Cold War jet and then bring it to The States or bring it to the museum or whatever, but then he would also fly them as well. He taught himself the banjo, he spoke all of these different languages, he was just always it seems looking for a new thing to get obsessed with, get very good at, and although he made a lot of money, it wasn't always about money. Know, it seems that it was like, you know, it really cost money to learn the banjo, but he was very obsessed it seems with developing new skills and just trying to better himself, I think is the sort of the nicest way to put it. And obviously that will change as the story continues.
Emanuel:Yeah. So very wealthy, a bit of a thrill seeker. I think we've all heard about people getting their pilot's license as as a hobby. That's like not a not a too crazy thing to do, but he kind of piloted, like, exotic rare planes and that eventually led to his demise. Right?
Joseph:Yeah. This is not a normal Cessna aircraft that, you know, lots of beginners will learn to use and then fly as a hobby or short domestic flights or something like that. One aircraft he flew and he owned it was a DH 112 Venom, which I had not known about until I wrote the story, but then I did a fair amount of research on it. And it is this Cold War aircraft that's very, very striking to look at. It sometimes has this black and red paint job.
Joseph:It actually has like two tails at the back. If you imagine a catamaran as in the boat and that's like two vessels essentially attached by a platform in the middle, it almost looks like the aircraft version of a catamaran. And it's supposed to be pretty powerful, but it can have issues at high speeds. And that was of relevance to Marty because in July 2018, he is flying this aircraft, he's about to take off, there's like one of these air shows and he's taking the graph to a location and lots of enthusiasts are flying their own planes and that sort of thing. One plane takes off, he is behind it in the Venom, he takes off I think a few seconds earlier than he's supposed to.
Joseph:It doesn't actually say this in the article, but this is due to the really, really extensive FAA investigation into what I'm going to talk about. So this was based on multiple witnesses there who saw the plane take off. I actually got the 911 audio as well through a public records request with local authorities. So the quotes from the 911 calls are from that. But Marty takes off and nearly immediately, this is clear something is wrong.
Joseph:The wings are shaking, there's a strange sound coming from the engine, and then the plane just starts to descend while its nose is still in the air, it crashes into a barn. There is a huge explosion. There are actually people inside the barn as well who are injured, and Marty dies in that plane crash in 2018 because he was, you know, doing this thing which he I don't know he'd done it a million times before, but like he was used to flying these sorts of planes, but that time it went, you know, very tragically wrong.
Emanuel:So, yeah, I mean, at this point, pretty strange. But I don't think we would write about an eccentric millionaire dying in a in a jet crash. The reason we are writing about it is that it turned out Marty was leading a secret life for many years before his death. What was he up to?
Joseph:Yeah. So it later emerged in a court case, which we'll talk about, that Marty was also very actively trying to become a cocaine kingpin. More specifically, he was working with a fairly high level cocaine trafficker and they were working on a plan to build a submersible drone that would carry something like a ton of cocaine, latch onto a ship with magnets. When it arrives at its destination, it would then detach and the team would come pick it up, that sort of thing. He was the money and the brains behind that operation.
Joseph:And I think this is clear from the story and I think it's clear from what the investigators show and the evidence as well, but it wasn't just an idea. This was very much like actively working on this in very close coordination with his drug trafficking partner. And it very much nearly came to fruition. It's just that he died in this plane crash essentially. But he'd been doing that for years and years and years and years without the knowledge of his wife, his family, his friends, appears as well.
Joseph:So the entire time he was doing all that very eccentric stuff with the planes and the traveling and all of that, he's also doing this, maybe in his eyes also eccentric thing of trying to be a very innovative cocaine trafficker as well? Like someone at the top financing an operation like this.
Emanuel:So the submarine is obviously a very crazy story. We know that submarines like DIY submarines are used in in in drug smuggling. This one never came about, but before this, was he actively doing any drug trafficking that we know of? Or was it just planning on this one idea?
Joseph:I don't think we've seen evidence of that. What we have seen evidence of is the extensive planning of the building of this drone, such as Marty using the pseudonym Dale Johnson was contacting this sort of manufacturing company in Canada, had the designs, they made it, a drone was made, like there were photos in the article and in the DOJ court documents as well. That all happens, that was all real and he was actively exploring it. The other part is that the story mentions this and it's a big piece of contention in the related court case, but there was a large amount of money in a duffel bag flown on a private jet at Marty's behest, and prosecutors say that money was for the bulk purchase of cocaine. So whether he'd done it before, we don't know.
Joseph:That's not what was presented in evidence that I got hold of, but this was very much an evolved plan. It wasn't just scribbles in his notebook, although there were scribbles in his notebook and those were very interesting as well. You could see, well rather I haven't seen it, it's described in the material I got, but he's drawing like a ship with the drone underneath and then questions to myself like, do I use magnets? Do I have to put spikes on the top to stop birds landing on the drone? That sort of thing.
Joseph:So it very much did go from his notebook scribbles to actually making this like 25 foot long drone. Like, it's a huge thing to carry a lot of cocaine.
Emanuel:And to be clear, this isn't like a Breaking Bad or Ozark situation where somebody pretends to have a legit business, but really it's a sham and they're desperate for money, therefore they turn to a life of crime. Like, there wasn't anything in your research that showed, like, he he needed the money for for something, and that's why he did it. He just sort of was, like, into it. Right? Like
Joseph:I mean, that's exactly the reason I decided to write this story because it is the literal opposite of Breaking Bad. Like Breaking Bad, as we all know, this guy diagnosed with cancer, he wants to care for his family, so he then and get treatment if I remember correctly. It's been a few years since I've seen Breaking Bad, I should watch it again. But he does that and then falls deeper and deeper into it. Marty meanwhile, as you say, did not need the money.
Joseph:He was already a multi multimillionaire, but he just did it anyway. I just find that a pretty fascinating decision and mentality when, I don't know, Breaking Bad is obviously an anti hero, so that's the entire point of the show. I don't know if Marty is an anti I don't know if he's a sympathetic character. I genuinely don't know, but I've never seen a case quite like that. Because the other alternative usually is that, yes, they break bad to make money, or they're already in the drug trade.
Joseph:They're already a kappa, or they're already in Sinaloa, or whatever. This was kind of different to anything I'd ever seen before.
Emanuel:Yeah. It's like Mark Zuckerberg getting into MMA, but instead he's like, oh, no. Let's try cocaine. Let's try like smelling cocaine and see how how that goes. Yeah.
Emanuel:So
Jason:how do Isn't Jason Bateman's name in Ozark also Marty?
Joseph:I believe so. I didn't even put that together.
Emanuel:Yeah. It is. So how do you report a story about this person who is dead by the time you get to the story? Who did you talk to? How how did you get an idea of, like, what his life was like and what was he like?
Joseph:Yeah. So I followed this case basically from the moment it became public. And so when Marty dies in 2018, a few years pass by and then this court record comes out again a few years later. And it's actually a criminal complaint or indictment against a guy called Yili Dedani. I'm just gonna call him Dedani for the the sake of this in the same way we called Marti Marti.
Joseph:But Dudani is Marty's cocaine trafficking partner and the case was against him. He's of Albanian descent, lives around Detroit. He had his fingers in all sorts of different cocaine smuggling operations from South America to Europe and I think The UK as well. This court record comes out charging Didani with crimes, but mentioned in there were like redacted paragraphs where, oh, Didani worked with businessman number one or something to that effect. And local press at the time quickly put it together, wait, that's our local eccentric multi multi millionaire, Marty.
Joseph:So there was local press in that and I found that really interesting. As I often do, I put it in a document or a list where it's like, these are interesting cases to check back later, basically. And I did that, I kept an eye on it. And then eventually I got in touch with Daddani, the drug trafficking partner. He had been arrested.
Joseph:He was in prison awaiting trial. I frankly can't remember if I reached out to him or he reached out to me, but we communicated at length across the prison email system. As an aside, he really wanted to talk about his case. He believes that The US arrested him under a legal regime that was inappropriate. They arrested him based on maritime laws, even though the drug seizures of the ships carrying cocaine were at ports, they weren't at the sea, so you think there's a technicality there, And some lawyers believe that as well.
Joseph:So often when we would talk, he would bring up this case. And at one point I was going to write about that and maybe I still will, you know. But to me, the more interesting part was Marty and the question of why did this multimillionaire try to become a cocaine trafficker. So speaking to Daddani a lot, asking about his life and Marty's as well and how they met and all of that sort of thing. And then the other main part of this reporting is getting hold of these transcripts from the court.
Joseph:They were pretty damn expensive, so I thank our four zero four media subscribers to allow us to do that in the same way that like when we're at Vice and they can't afford a court record that costs 10¢ because the company's going bankrupt, here it was just like, hey guys, can I buy these court records for quite a lot of money? And you all agreed that's a good story, go ahead. So I buy those, and then I read every single page of Dhani's trial testimony, and that was thousands upon thousands of pages. I think it took me several months to do it while also doing all of the other work. That was interesting for a number of reasons, Marty being the main one, and it's I'm not going to compare obviously, my writing to something as phenomenal as Frank Sinatra has the cold, but like that is the point, right, where there's a profile and you're trying to profile somebody, but you can't profile Frank Sinatra because he has a cold, allegedly.
Joseph:I can't talk to Marty because he's dead. So I have to talk to his drug trafficking partner or get an idea of him from his wife, his friends, his business associates who have spoken in this trial. So that was sort of the value of this transcript. Sort of the last interesting wrinkle, and maybe this will be in a story if I do focus on Dedali. Dedali represented himself in his own trial.
Joseph:It was an absolute disaster. The judge telling him essentially to shut up politely and the prosecutors getting very, very annoyed, Dedani getting very annoyed as well. And you can can feel the tension reading the court transcripts that like this is not going very well. And I think the jury convicted him very, very quickly. I'm not entirely sure why he fired his Tajwa public defender, but that did provide some color while I was going through all of this material, which again took a long time.
Joseph:Like I got this material and been working on the story for months and months and months, but that's because I had to read every single word of that and page of that transcript because you don't know what's going to be colorful or important. And it was very similar to when I read tens of thousands of like encrypted messages from my book about encrypted phones and that sort of thing. You have to read every single one. You can't just do a keyword search because you don't even know what you're searching for necessarily.
Emanuel:Yeah. I talked to several people recently about AI obviously, because that's all anyone ever talks about, and they were talking about how we could use it at work, they were like, Oh yeah, if you get a dump of documents, just let the AI read it and give you a summary. And I was like, No. It's like you have to read every page because sometimes that's how you find the best stuff. It's like some unexpected connection.
Joseph:Yeah. I mean like the AI is not gonna know necessarily unless I prompt it very, very, very, very well. It's not gonna know that I care that Daddani had a rainbow colored Rolex, which to me is very important because that's very indicative of his character. I don't know if that's going to come up. To be fair, maybe it would, but I also just personally want to read every single page in the same way I want to watch six hours of Tosh deposition.
Emanuel:Yeah. Alright. Should we leave that there?
Joseph:Yeah. Yeah. I I will leave it there with the final line. I'll just say, ultimately, and you kind of tease at this, Emmanuel, but like, he didn't need the money, and I was trying to at least get a little bit to the question of why he did do it, and I'm sure listeners have already guessed this, but what came up over and over again was adrenaline. Like, Daddani, the drug trafficker I spoke to said that Marty was pretty crazy and addicted to adrenaline.
Joseph:The detective said similar, a personal trainer of Marty's who later moved money for him on his private jet, he also said he was very much into adrenaline. So that's the reason, at least it seems.
Jason:We're addicted to the adrenaline of podcasting.
Joseph:Oh, yeah. And reading thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of core records, it's incredibly exhilarating. Yeah. Alright. We will leave that there.
Joseph:If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying four zero four Media subscriber, we're gonna talk about the death of the metaverse, a real, real shame. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404media.co. We'll be right back after this. All right.
Joseph:We're back in the subscribers only section. Jason, this is one you wrote. I mean, the headline you wanted was RIP metaverse LOL, which we also could have gone with. But in the end, we went with
Jason:I think we should have gone with that.
Joseph:I know. I know.
Emanuel:It's another opportunity for the headline, well, well, well.
Joseph:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we should just use that, like, every week. But
Jason:This is the this section is gonna be me yelling at both of you for editing out my swears in article. Yeah.
Joseph:I think it was well, I think you said total fucking batshit and then a manual cut out fucking. So it's just total batshit. But you you you didn't like that. Yeah. But, you know, that's the role
Jason:changed my high school burnouts to federal officials. That was a funny one.
Joseph:Oh, yeah. I did that. Yeah. Yeah. Describing ICE official.
Joseph:Anyway, the the headline we did we did settle on was RIP metaverse, an $80,000,000,000 dumpster fire nobody wanted. Jason, did you ever go to Meta's metaverse or was it just Sam?
Jason:I didn't ever go to it myself, which is a shame, but, the easiest and best way to get there was through, Oculus. And I know I didn't have Oculus.
Joseph:Like the VR headset. Yeah.
Jason:The VR headset. I think I mean, I might be misspeaking here, but I think eventually you may have been able to access it through like a computer
Joseph:So so.
Jason:Or a phone even.
Joseph:But that's what they're doing now.
Jason:Yeah. Yeah. But I I never ended up going there. What I did was watch a lot of YouTube videos of it though, like let's plays and things like that. So I experienced the metaverse through other people's eyes.
Jason:And I've been to other metaverses. Like I've been to Decentraland. I've been to, like, Second Life. I've been to VR Chat, things like that.
Joseph:Dude, there's only one metaverse, and it's Zuck's metaverse. No. We'll get to that. Well, there was Sam did do it, and wasn't there a Wendy's as in the burger chain game and you could throw burgers in the basketball hoop or some shit? Like that
Jason:was Yeah. So Sam went multiple times for multiple different stories. But to me, the most memorable one was when she went to like the Wendy's basketball activation in I think it was in 2021 or early twenty twenty two. It was maybe tied to March Madness, so it was probably around now. But, basically, it was like, you shot Baconator hamburgers into a basketball hoop in, like, the, you know, like, Sega Saturn level graphics.
Joseph:Dude, if if that. Yeah. If
Jason:that if that. And you you, like, won, like, cheer cheers from a crowd that wasn't there if you like were good at shooting the Baconator into into the basket. And so it was like very pathetic, like a really pathetic vibe.
Joseph:Remind us what Zuckerberg's big stupid bet on the metaverse was. Like, not not how it died yet, but like how how did the metaverse actually come about?
Jason:Yeah. So, I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this article was because I watched the announcement of Horizon Worlds, which is what this was called back in October 2021. And I wrote about it for motherboard where we used to work. And that was during a time when I wasn't writing very much, but I was, like, so appalled at what I was seeing that I I wrote an article. And it was like during this time that, like, the aftermath of Facebook being, like, just like horrible story after horrible story.
Jason:You know, it was in the aftermath of sort of like all the fake fake news and Cambridge Analytica stuff. Like, that was it was years after this, but then there was like genocide in Myanmar. There was like all of our reporting about versus white separatism, like basically them allowing hate speech in in different sort of ways. There was like reporting on Instagram making teen girls feel really bad about themselves, like that sort of thing. And Zuckerberg was being hauled in front of congress, like, repeatedly.
Jason:And
Joseph:And looking like a ghost.
Jason:And looking like a ghost and like, I don't know, just like not not it was before he remade himself as, the king of masculinity. And so, basically, like, he he throws this webinar, essentially, like this livestream where he was like, okay, guys. Facebook is done. We're meta now. We are, like, we're changing the name of our company.
Jason:The future of everything is gonna be the metaverse, this thing called Horizon Worlds. And he pitched this, like, very I mean, he painted it as utopian vision where we would all be wearing Oculus headsets, and we would, like, live, play, and work in Horizon Worlds. Like, part of this was virtual meeting room. Like, you could you could go to meetings for work, but, like, you would put on a headset and you would just be in a boardroom still. Like, but, you'd be sitting in your home, I guess, during COVID or whatever, and you would, like, meet with all the people that used to meet with in the office.
Jason:You would go to different concerts, like, I believe it was T Pain, but there was various people that they, they piloted this with, where you could like go to a virtual concert in the metaverse, and you would like buy sneakers, like T Pain versus energy
Joseph:time as well. Right?
Jason:So, yeah, you would buy, like, different NFTs that would be tied to, like, different costumes for your for your avatar. And notably, like, famously, you could buy, like, shoes for your avatar, but they didn't have legs. Like and so this was, like, very fucked up. And so there was that. There was, like, oh, you can play, like, you know, Beat Saber.
Jason:You can, like, play different games. Like, surfing was a big one because Zuckerberg is, like, obsessed with surfing even though he doesn't actually surf.
Joseph:He could use Could you clarify that? Because that's actually I had to, again, both Emmanuel and I edited the article, and you said, like, he's a fake surfer or something. I had to, like, let me check that. Maybe Jason's just being mean. I was like, oh, no.
Joseph:He, like, pretends to surf, basically.
Jason:I mean, he's now pretends to do MMA more so, but he he was there's a period where he was talking about surfing 16 foot waves and surfing and surfing and surfing and surfing. And, like, what he actually does is he hydrofoils, which is not surfing. It is a different thing. Hydrofoil is like it looks like a surfboard, but there's like a a pole that goes down, like a fin that goes down into the water, and there's like a a big scythe. It's like essentially just like a like you can cut someone's head off with this thing.
Jason:It's like a big thing. And what it does is it allows you to surf on unbroken waves. And so you're able to, like, surf essentially more easily. And it's I mean, he does it out in Kauai on his, like, private little, like, compound that he's stolen from the, locals there, famously. And by stolen, I mean, like, he really just, like, bought this in a very messed up way, and people are very mad about it, understandably, because he's not Hawaiian.
Jason:And but people do it here in LA, and it's super dangerous because literally there's, like, a gigantic knife underneath the water. And, like, if you lose control of it and there's other surfers around, like, you can cut their heads off essentially.
Emanuel:That's crazy. Yeah.
Jason:And then he also does, like, wakeboarding, which is, like, he gets pulled behind a boat, and he, like, stands up on that. And he he's done so many gimmicks with that where he, like, wears a suit or, like, carries an American flag or whatever. If people are interested in this, I wrote it behind the blog about, about how he's a fake surfer and how surfers hate him because he talks about surfing and he's just, like, not. It's linked in this article. But, anyways, he changed the name of his extraordinarily valuable company to make this bet.
Jason:And then he spent, like, the estimates are, like, $80,000,000,000 building this thing that very few people used. And, you know, after a few years, he got obsessed with AI instead. And so, you know, like, meta and metaverse and all of this is like out the window, and they're now all in on AI. And the thing is that they're just like trying to everything that that Zuckerberg has ever built has been like reality distorting in some way, whether that's literal virtual reality, whether that's like AI tools, whether that is Facebook and Instagram and its algorithm, etcetera. I mean, I would argue he hasn't really built or invented anything since Facebook.
Jason:He's just like bought or ripped off other companies since then. But that's like, kind of what the company has done. And yeah, they burned so much money. And this is not just me being like, oh, like, fuck Facebook. They burned so much money.
Jason:It's like financial analysts and all this. Like, there's a there's economist who said that the money spent on the metaverse was, quote, thrown into the toilet, which I think is very funny.
Joseph:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it hits different when it's coming from an economist, as you say, like a finance a financial expert or something like that. So they launched that, put a ton of money into it, the avatars don't have legs, and then it dies very recently. Like, what was the announcement?
Joseph:What was the reasoning? Is it just like, oh, nobody's using it, or what's the deal?
Jason:I mean, the announcement is basically like, hey. We're sunsetting the virtual reality aspect of this, and we are going to, like, have some version of this as an app that you can use on your phone, which is really funny because sort of like when it was announced, everyone was like, well, you know what? Like, Fortnite is a metaverse. Roblox is a metaverse. In many ways, it's like there those are quite successful metaverses.
Jason:And I I know Emmanuel can talk more about this, but it's like, I think Fortnite really started to become that when they had like a big concert there. I think it was J Cole possibly. The Fellasian. Or his future. Like, had one that was like really big at first, and then they've had a few since then.
Jason:And it's like, they have all these integrations. And what we've learned is that you don't need to have a computer strapped to your face in order to feel like you're immersed in some world. It's like, you can do that on your phone. You can do that on on a game console or your PC. Even a book.
Jason:Even a book. Yeah. You can Imagination will take you places. And so that's basically like what what Meta is saying now. It's like, we don't we don't actually need this thing.
Jason:And it's like every virtual reality product has been like largely kind of a flop. I know that Emmanuel has written a lot more about this than I have, but like
Joseph:You're saying the PlayStation virtual reality two is a flop? There's like four games.
Jason:Let's say let's say it's a niche product. It's not a mass market product, for the most part. Because there's people who are really into VR. Like, if you are,
Joseph:that's great. To be clear.
Jason:But like, it's not the do everything machine that people have talked about or like that that it was hyped as. And like, I don't know if I know you guys remember, but like Magic Leap, for example, was like augmented reality, and it was just like a super fake demo that then was kind of a mess. And it's like all of these products end up pivoting in some way. And before we get to, like, Emmanuel, the thing the the interesting thing is that, the part of Meta that did this is a part of the company called Reality Labs. And that part of the company has pivoted to make the Meta AI glasses that we've reported on so much.
Jason:So, like, that's the kind of their new thing. They're just like, oh, yeah. We're gonna, like, put a microphone and a camera on these glasses and, like, throw AI into it, and we can use it to, like people can use it to, like, harass women. Like, that's what it's been used for largely based on our reporting and other people's reporting. And it's like we've had those stories about border patrol wearing them and and things like that.
Jason:And it's like, there's been a real backlash to to that as well. And so, I mean, who knows what happens with those eventually, but, like, that is what's left of that team is now working on that for the most part.
Joseph:Yeah. And even with the pushback, as you say, similar to the the glass hole stuff when Google Glass came out, even with the pushback and our stories and others, you know, people do buy those glasses and it's like a way more successful product than like metaverse was ever going to be or definitely ever was, you know? And I don't know, in a strange way, I kind of wished the metaverse could have succeeded more because now those people are just pivoting to these AI AR glasses and saying, shit, is that the alternative? I mean, okay. Oh, you could also just not make that either.
Joseph:That that might be nice, but whatever. Emmanuel? I I don't know
Jason:what the hell this company should be doing, you know, Neither like
Emanuel:do they They don't know you either.
Joseph:Yeah. Yeah. Well, just just briefly before I go to Emmanuel, Jason, what do you mean on that? Like, you think the meta just, like, is throwing shit at the wall and like they just don't know what they're doing? Or
Jason:I mean, the the interesting thing and like kind of the upsetting thing is that this company is making more money than it ever has before, and it's making like more profit than it ever has before despite spending so much on this, spending so much on AI. And the reason for that is because the AI that it is using is for, like, better ad targeting and better content targeting. It's not like the generative AI stuff is working, although they have, like, shoved generative AI into their ad products. It's like that is not why Meta is making so much money. They're making so much money because, like, machine learning advances have allowed for, like, far better and more effective ads.
Jason:And what I mean by better, I just mean that advertisers are getting better performance from it because they're able to do the targeting automatically versus, like, all the kinda, like, messed up stories we used to hear about meta where it was like, you could have these things called lookalike audiences or target people based on their stated interests and things like that. Like, it led to different types of discrimination where, like, housing ads were not targeted at, black people. And, like, they got sued for that and they lost and it was very bad. But now what's happening is an advertiser can just say, like, I'm gonna spend a bunch of money, you target this and like optimize for performance. And because Meta just has like so much data on you, you don't have to like do the work behind the scenes to say like, I want to target this type of person or the the type of person with the these specific interests or, like, whatever.
Jason:It just does it automatically. And that is, like, that has just led to, like, a huge boom in Meta's ad revenue. And so the crazy thing is that, like, based on its original products like Facebook, Instagram, you know, I guess that's mostly it. I don't know if they're making a ton of money from WhatsApp now or if they figure that out. I need to, like, dig more into it.
Jason:I don't think they are, but I'm not sure. But anyways, it's just like reels and, and Facebook products. Like, they're making like a lot they're making, like, a lot of money from ads. And, I mean, what what the company should do, I don't know. But it's like, I don't think their AI thing is working super well.
Jason:Like, that's in their generative AI product. Their, like, ad targeting product is working awesome, but they're, like, really far behind in generative AI. Like, don't know anyone who is like, oh, I'm using Meta AI rather than Claude or rather than, OpenAI or even rather than Grok. Even though, like, Zuckerberg has spent, like, so much money hiring talent and then also building out these data centers. But, yeah, I'm not I'm not sure.
Jason:It's, like, kind of a mess Yeah. The company, I think. It's like they should just focus on Instagram probably, but like, I don't I don't I guess they are making so much money that they can continue to burn it on like, Lord knows what.
Joseph:Or they focus on the ad stuff, and as you say, using AI for ads, but that is not really a sexy thing for Zuckerberg to go on stage in his fashionable t shirts and say, hey, we're using AI for ads because people might get freaked out even though it's already happening, so like it's not gonna change anything. It just doesn't look cool.
Jason:It doesn't cool. And it's also it's like the company has always been consumer facing as in it's always like, use our products to connect with your friends or like, you know, download Instagram, like, use Facebook to set up parties, blah blah blah. And it's like, if they're if they turn I mean, they've always been in an ad company, but these huge advances are for companies and advertisers. And it's like, that is not gonna get their user base excited. Like Right.
Joseph:Yeah. Right. They can just quietly tell the the the businesses. Yeah. Emmanuel?
Emanuel:I I would argue they're also making more money than ever now because they have fully switched to the insidified extractive phase of the product. Like, they can't expand anymore. None of their bets have paid off in years. Right? It's like, Mark Zuckerberg made a better Myspace, right place, right time.
Emanuel:Since then, unfortunately, the FTC has allowed them to buy out the competition every single time for years, and that allowed the company to remain dominant in that space and grow and grow and grow. And then for the past few years, they've just shifted to completely mistreating their users, not regarding privacy, not regarding user experience. We've talked endlessly about how shit Facebook and Instagram are from a user experience perspective, but they're serving more ads to more people in a more privacy invading, like unpleasant way, and that's how you're able to extract more money than ever, but I think that betrays the fact that they no longer have faith in growing the product, like for it to reach more people. That that part is over and now it's just about getting as much money as you can before the whole thing probably dies. I don't know how long it's going to take, but it's not going to they're not going to keep growing because the metaverse is not going to happen and their crypto product is not going to happen and their AI product, it seems so far is is not going to happen.
Emanuel:It's Yeah. Just a really good reminder that, you know, and I truly love being this guy, but it's like, this is not some business genius. This is what happens when you allow someone to accumulate too much capital and abuse it in a way where the market isn't regulated, you could just buy the competition and you can like force success and revenue just by sheer size and bullying out the competition like Snapchat and buying Instagram and so on, WhatsApp and so on and so on.
Joseph:Yeah. I guess just briefly to take us out, Emmanuel, Jason touched on this, you know, arguably, the metaverse already existed, right? We have Roblox, which is the very convincing one to me, think. You have Fortnite as well, which as Jason said, have all these events here. You've spoken to a couple of people on the interview sort of episodes of the podcast recently, more specifically about Roblox.
Joseph:Like, do you think that Roblox basically, like, is the metaverse and and like it already existed?
Emanuel:Again, I hate to be the downer, and I know that this is the argument that people, especially like in the games press or people who have had more experience with virtual reality for years before Meta got into it, but I would argue no. Right? It's like to take these one by one. Fortnite, I think, is a pretty cool game. I think that allowing it to cross over with any property you can imagine and to have live shows within Fortnite and all that stuff, I think is legitimately cool, but it's not the metaverse.
Emanuel:It's just like crossover advertising. It's like Saturday morning cartoons selling toys or, you know, putting the Ninja Turtles on cereal boxes or something like that. The metaverse as a term is coined by Neal Stephenson in his novel Snow Crash, and that imagines like interconnected, fully virtual reality Internet, right? Where like everything connects with everything, and it's all virtually represented, and you can go in there and be someone and do things. And Fortnite is not that.
Emanuel:At the end of the day, it's a closed system, and everything that is in there that makes it looks like the metaverse is just advertising. That's all it is. Roblox is a better example, I would say, because Roblox really allows people to build pretty much whatever for better or worse, as we've discussed. So it is like a cooler version of that in my opinion, but if you compare it to the metaverse, I would say, again, no, because it is all happening in Roblox, and it is not this vision of like a virtual reality where everything is connected. It's controlled by a single entity that is doing everything for profit, and again, for advertising, and making money off of people who are making Roblox experiences and and so on.
Emanuel:The metaverse as it exists or as it's imagined, it's just like the Internet, you know? It's like what we have left of it, right? Like what is still like free, open internet, that's the metaverse. That's the real thing. I would also say like, I hate to belabor this, but I think Jason did a good job in his piece explaining it, is it's truly hard to go back to the point of the metaverse frenzy as it was happening at the time, especially if you're, I don't know, if you're 18 or 20, this is like a few years ago now, but it's like, if you were covering tech at the time, the degree to which we were promised and the the metaverse being the next big thing, and the degree to which this vision was like forced on everyone, and I mean, they changed the name of the company to Meta.
Emanuel:Like, that's the it's like, this is one of the, like, richest companies in the world, and their whole thing was going to be the metaverse, and everybody was going to do the metaverse, and Sony made a headset, and Oculus they bought Oculus and all this stuff, and it just like, we knew it was bullshit at the time. And I don't know, to see it finally fold as a vision is is satisfying, but it's it's I don't know. It's it's not just $80,000,000,000 that Facebook burned, it's just like trying to force everyone to come along on this folly, even though we all knew it was folly at the time, is so stupid, like it reached yeah. I want Jason to talk about the example that he experienced firsthand.
Jason:Well, no. I mean, I can. I can. But, and I know we're going a bit long. But, like, at that livestream where he announced it, Mark Zuckerberg said, quote, I believe technology can make our lives better.
Jason:The future will be will be built by those willing to stand up and say, this is the future we want. And it's like, no one wanted this. Like, no one no one asked for this. You know? Like, very few people were asking for this.
Jason:This was just like Meta and, like, the entire tech industry needing to find the next thing that they could get investments for that they could juice stock price for for all of that. And so it was like crypto. It was Web three. It was NFTs. It was metaverse.
Jason:And this was all happening at the same time. And there was tons of hype around it, there was tons of, like, money being thrown into it. And I know this comparison's been made over and over and over again, but it's hard not to feel that way about AI now. And I will say that AI is more of a thing than any of these other things ever were, except crypto was, like, quite big for a while. But, like, AI is way more of a thing than the metaverse is, but it's the same narrative and it's the same, like, ideology and it's and they're talking about it in the same way where they're like, this is inevitable.
Jason:This is the future because we are brave and you are stupid if you don't see it. And, like, we are going to make it happen because we're so, like, brave and forward looking. And it's like, yes. Like, I think AI has already changed the world, like, far more than the metaverse ever has. But that doesn't mean that it's gonna be the everything machine.
Jason:That doesn't mean that it's gonna be profitable. That doesn't mean that Mark Zuckerberg is, like, going to win, in any way. And so I think that it's important to to kind of think about that. And then the the story that Emanuel is talking about is just like one of my most deranged stories from Vice. I think I've mentioned it a few times now.
Jason:But like, there was a period at the very end of Vice before it went officially bankrupt, but was struggling. We're having, like, a lot of layoffs and things like that. When I got called into a meeting with this literal CEO of the company and the president of the company. And they were like, Jason, we know that, like, there's been layoffs and that you've been asking for more, like, reporters and blah blah blah, like, all of that. Like, we think one of the only ways that you can get another reporter is if it is a metaverse reporter, and you need to embed that reporter full time in Decentraland, which is a crypto metaverse.
Jason:And it's like they will spend all their time reporting on what happens in Decentraland, in part because we, Vice, are either going to buy or lease land in this metaverse. Like, we're gonna pay real money, like tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps more than a $100,000 on fake land in this fake metaverse, and then you will have to embed a reporter there to, like, write about what happens there. What do you think of this? And I was like, look. Like, I do want more reporters.
Jason:I would like to, you know, grow this team. But I have to tell you, I've been to Decentraland. There's no one there. It's empty. Mhmm.
Jason:There's no there's no one using it. And, like, they were publishing the numbers for Decentraland, and it was something like less than 2,000 daily active users, like, which is nuts. Because, like, at the time, motherboard, our website that was ostensibly failing, like, it wasn't failing. It was doing well. But, like, the one that they were like, oh, we're not making any money from this, had more than 2,000 people on it at any given time.
Jason:Like, there were more people going to our failing website every single day than were going to this, like, highly hyped crypto metaverse. And it's like, that's not that's that's also just like going there. It's like the whole thing was fucking broken. It was like you would fall through the floor. Like, there was nothing to do there.
Jason:You would just like wander around, and it was a ghost town. It was totally empty. And it's like, why would we do this? Like, why would we do this? And then, of course, they built a fucking headquarters in Decentraland anyway.
Jason:Like, I don't think that I'm not sure if they ended up, like, paying any money for it. It ended up being, like, some partnership with an architecture firm or something, but it's like it was a Hail Mary plan to, like, save the company. It was like, we're gonna be first movers on this metaverse. And it's like, okay. Like, no.
Jason:It's not gonna work. And of course, it didn't.
Emanuel:Sorry, Joe. I know you're gonna be so mad, but I wanna add one more thing, which is I'm not mad. I'm not mad. The people who are anti AI love to say they pushed the metaverse on us, and it was all just fake and a lie, and it popped and it went away, and that's what's going to happen with AI. And I think that's wrong.
Emanuel:I think like Jason said, the AI technology is much more real than whatever the metaverse technology was, and it's going to stick around in some fashion. We don't know exactly yet what it looks like, but it's going to stick around. But the comparison is useful because it is not whether the technology is real or not, it's the ability of these companies to force a vision of the future on the culture. It just so happens that the metaverse as an idea was so empty that it completely collapsed, and we knew it at the time because we knew all there is to know about virtual reality, and we've been through that cycle of virtual reality like three times before this one came about, AI is going to stick around. That doesn't mean that the vision that these companies are selling us is how it has to be, and that's the part of it that really needs to be resisted and we need to be skeptical of.
Emanuel:Is AI going to stick around? Probably. Does it mean we don't need artists anymore? That all the movies are going to be AI? That all the art is going to be AI?
Emanuel:That all these jobs are going to disappear? That we have to fire all the software engineers. No. It's like, that is a particular vision of it that they are currently convincing us is inevitable, and that's that part is not true. Yeah.
Emanuel:Now you can take us out.
Joseph:I mean, that's very, very well put. And thank you. I will actually. And with that, I will take us out. As a reminder, four zero four Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers.
Joseph:If you do wish to subscribe to four zero four Media and directly support our work, please go to 404media.co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope and Alyssa Midcalf. Another way to support us is by leaving rating and review for the podcast.
Joseph:That stuff really does help us out. Here is one of those from Little World Cunningly. This is the era of independent journalism, and four zero four Media is at the forefront. This podcast is one of several that I recommend to anyone who will listen. Thank you so, so much.
Joseph:This has been Ephora for Media. We'll see you again next week.