 But what all of these things, all these technologies do, is they enable us to better monetize value. And you see a clash between a sort of organic means of advertising that developed on these platforms and what the normal consumer safety or awareness rules look like. Welcome to Building Tomorrow. Today we're talking about commodifying daily life. And with me today we have Aaron Powell and Will Duffield. Welcome guys. So we've got an interesting couple of topics. When I say commodifying daily life, that's like a big all-encompassing umbrella. Underneath of that we have smart TVs spying on you. We have special new browsers that give you control of ad revenue. And we have the way in which being a Twitch streamer can be a very stressful and unpleasant way of making a living, but a way of making a living. So let's tackle those one at a time. So first there was an article in The New York Times by Sapna Maheshwari how smart TVs and millions of U.S. homes track more than what's on TV tonight. In short, it's an article about how when you set up your smart TV, and it really doesn't matter who you buy it from, it could be Samsung, Vizio, Philips, you name it, there'll be a screen often where it says, would you like to opt into a service that will help you better match your interests with potential shows? Like we'll show you smart recommendations. 90 plus percent of people opt into this program not realizing that what they're actually opting into is a record-keeping surveillance of everything that they watch. The point of the article is not only that you're allowing a third-party marketer to watch you as you watch television. It's also that now this is bleeding over into the Internet of Things that when you set up, say, your smartphone as a controller for your television or you use Amazon Fire Stick or Apple TV or any of these devices that are now connected to your smart TV, they're actually sharing data with the TV that is then being shared with these third-party marketers who pay TV manufacturers for the privilege, the TV companies getting a cut of this money, but you yourself aren't seeing this revenue. So what do you think, guys? First of all, where are the problems in this trend? And what's the potential, though, for consumers pushing past problems? I think the issue here is a lack of transparency. Even the screen that was shown to users as they were trying to set up their TV and watch something that explained this process did so fairly opaquely and didn't seem to highlight what would be, for most users, the most concerning aspect of this program. This firm, SAMBA, not only tracks what you watch on TV, but what you do on other devices connected to the same Internet connection as your television. The article quotes Jeffrey Chester, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy, saying that the TV's device map, which matches content to mobile gadgets according to a document on its website, can help the company track users in, quote, their office, in line at the food truck, and on the road as they travel. And while that was spelled out pretty explicitly in this internal document at SAMBA, users weren't getting such a forthright explanation of what was happening to them. And when someone feels as though the wool is being pulled over their eyes, they'll usually react poorly to it. Okay, so I get that. But I guess I'm skeptical that even if you told people, it would make much of a difference as far as them feeling like the wool was pulled over their eyes. So as we record this today, and it's, what, Friday, July 6th, one of the many things in the news that doesn't have anything to do with Trump is that people have suddenly figured out that when you give third parties permission to read your email in Gmail, third parties are reading your email in Gmail. And that people are panicking. This is kind of the next phase of the Cambridge Analytica Facebook thing. But this is an instance where when you go, like, so I use a third-party email client that connects to my Gmail account. And when I install it and when I log into Gmail with it so I can add the account, a dialogue pops up from Google. And it's very clear. It's crisp white with nice icons, not a lot of text. And it says, this app would like permission to, and the first one is, manage and read your email. And then it has a couple more, like, delete email, see your contacts. There's no hidden language behind, you know, lots of leak leads. There's probably 40 words total on this dialogue. And I have to say, yes, I want to grant it these permissions. So everyone who has granted these app permissions has seen this incredibly clear dialogue that says, do you want to let this third-party app read your email? And yet everyone is panicking now because third-party apps can read their email. So I don't see, I guess, what difference it would make. I don't see the problem here being that it's opaque, that, you know, the thing you're opting into, because people seem bafflingly unable to understand what they're opting into, even when it's only a handful of words. I don't know if it's so much the length as that the, like, it's not, like, what's being done by, say, Samba TV as described in the article is not, it's not about the length of what your, I mean, in fact, they show a picture of the opt-in screen in the article. You don't even see the terms and conditions. There's like an option you can check where you can voluntarily pop them open and read, like, 40, you know, some crazy number of pages of text. What they basically do is they say, is that they obfuscate what they're going to use, what information they're gathering from you and what they're using it for. So rather than saying, we're going to use your information to target ads at you, they say, we want to enhance your experience with the television. The exact line is something like, get recommendations based on the content you love and give you more control over your television experience. Which, like, know, I mean, even someone who knows what's, who is vaguely technologically literate, what does that mean? It doesn't mean, I mean, I don't read that and say, this means they're going to target advertisements at me and they're going to watch me so they can... And track your phone. It doesn't seem to jump to, off of the television platform onto other things. Now, yes, people might react as they do with regard to Gmail and the third parties you've consented to provide access to there, but in this case, it wasn't so clear-cut a provision of authority and I think that will always rankle people whether if you were to provide a more explicit explanation of what you were doing, they'd be happier. I don't know, but this kind of obfuscation can't help. Well, and though your point though, I mean, I think there's a point where I would agree with you, Aaron, that terms and conditions are just something we're all kind of trained, like Pavlovian dogs just click on. We see it and we click. We're trained, we see it, we click, and we don't give it a second thought. We just kind of assume that they're operating in our best interest because why wouldn't they? And then we find out that actually something in there gives them the ability to do something we don't like, then there's lots of public shock and surprise. So, I mean, the argument would be, is this really any more hidden or obfuscated than what we're all doing constantly whenever we use a new app or whatever we use a new program? Even when it comes to using a new app, often the design of the service and what it's going to provide to others isn't very upfront. I was very surprised to find the other night that as I signed up to Nextdoor, this neighborhood social media app, it's been great, enjoy using it, but only by looking at someone else's profile who hadn't explicitly opted out of providing their exact address. Did I learn that I and the others, most of the others using it around me, had auto-opted in or weren't presented with an explicit opt-in provide their specific street address, which maybe isn't something all of those users intend or desire to provide to anyone else on the platform? One wonder I have about the more explicit terms, the more, you know, so we can lay out everything that this thing's going to do with knowing what your devices are doing and what information it's gathering, is does that have the effect of potentially scaring people away from a service that they wouldn't mind in retrospect? So that they, you know, if at some later point you're like, oh well the way that your TV has been giving you personalized recommendations is because it's aware that when you're using Apple TV you're watching these shows and that you have, you know, asked it to look up the following sorts of things and it's gathering that data and people might be like, oh well, in the context of how I've used it and seen how that plays out, that's pretty cool. But if you front-load it and say, here's all the things that we're going to do in this, you know, explicit way that it might scare them off, it kind of primes them to think like, oh god, this is stuff I really have to pay attention to and so they're not going to necessarily get the benefits. And this isn't something like I'm not, this isn't necessarily my position and I'm not making this as an argument, I'm just tossing this up as like would we be potentially giving up long-term benefits because that the norms would naturally adjust? Like people are, I've seen it in use, they're like, oh that's fine. But if you make the warning explicit up front, we won't have, we'll lessen the opportunity for the norms adjustment from which the benefits eventually flow. It'd be like, imagine if someone at the FDA, they just, and they went back to college and they were assigned Upton Sinclair's the jungle, they read all about like how, about meat cutting and the production of meat products and how filthy they are and so they said, you know what, consumers need to know. So we're going to pass a rule that before you eat at a hot dog stand, you must, the hot dog stand must play a little video where they show how they make these hot dogs and like no one who watches how a hot dog or like a sausage link is made feels like eating one of them afterwards. But we're fine eating it, sometimes you don't want to know how the sausage gets made, you just want to eat the sausage. So I mean, that's the metaphor that comes to mind that people want benefits, certain benefits provided by these services, they want smart recommendations, arguably they might even want targeted ads, like all things being equal, I want an ad that's actually targeted to fit my interests more than a dumb ad meant to fit the interests of, you know, generic mass of American consumers. But they don't know how that thing's produced. You pull back the curtain a little bit, it freaks them out some, but that might be a function of their kind of lack of understanding or technological literacy rather than a true gauge, right? So there's something to be said for that argument. I can see it, though, I think a lot of the concerns, sorry, were you going to say something? Yeah, just to take your sausage analogy and run with it, particularly as liberals or libertarians, we should be aware and concerned by Audubon Vismarck's formulation of that likening the lawmaking process to the sausage-making process there. As folks who aren't particularly pleased with either the process or the outcome, I think we'd be happier if people knew a bit more about how laws were made and refrained from endorsing them or accepting their application on that ground. I mean, I suppose the question is how we arrive. We should value transparency in process. The question is how we arrive at that, right? There's a potential for a panic to overwhelm the kind of rational faculties here, in which case something that actually does provide benefits and could be improved with more competition or with more transparency gets kind of cut off, the development gets stultified because of a kind of broad social panic over what's being done. The other aspect of the article that I think would arouse concern, it did a little bit for me at least, reading it was the device mapping, the idea that, okay, I've opted into my television reporting back information about what I watch. I'm cool with that. But when it starts reporting what I'm doing at a food cart or what I'm, you know, things I'm doing with other devices, wait a second, did I opt into that? And it also is a peek possibly into the future of the kind of surveillance that's possible in an internet of things enabled environment. So someday, you know, this is the buzzword Internet of Things, at some point everyone expects that your major appliances, starting with your major appliances and your phone and electronics, but at some point even your light bulbs, your circuits, your just really anything that's electrically connected in your house will be communicating with each other and then also communicating with third parties. So that, for example, you know, there's a day in which advertisers would know what kind of foods you bought and put in your smart fridge because your smart fridge tells you when you run out of stuff, but it'll also be able to tell you them what you actually ate versus what you aspirationally bought to eat. So like you bought that kale but then you didn't actually eat it. And they can tell how quickly you ate that, that you drank that six pack of, whatever, of Bud Light, I don't know who bought a six pack of Bud Light, for example, but they did and they drank it really quickly. What's wrong with that? So they know what... You always bought it in like 24 packs or larger. Well, yeah, well I can't. Buy the case, man, buy the case. So they would be able to know or then when you use your, you know, you ask Alexa what the weather forecast is and then after doing so, they get that forecast, then say, okay, where's the nearest dog park or something? They know from that like when the weather is like this, you do these kinds of activities. But there's a potential for kind of like an expansion in vacuuming up consumer information as a matter of course. And that's gonna be, I think, scary to a lot of current consumers in a digital age. I mean, are we right to be scared about that? And what aspects of that do you find scary or potentially overblown as something to be worried about? I guess I find it more needless than scary. I can't ever imagine wanting to purchase a smart fridge. Like none of that functionality is remotely appealing to me. I'm, I guess, bracing myself more for the sort of culture war concerns that we will see surrounding how these systems are designed. The inevitable is your fridge telling you to eat less, the patriarchy sort of takes. As for the harvesting of user data, I mean, yes, it's going to happen. Now, how that will be abused or misused, I'm not sure. And again, really still just struggling to figure out why anyone would find it valuable. Oh, I can think of lots of ways that having your fridge track what you're putting into it, when you're taking it out, how much of it you're consuming would be valuable. I mean, if you're especially a family, there's lots of people eating. You know, having something that sinks up like, oh, I'm going to the grocery store. My fridge can tell me these are the things you're out of would be incredibly useful. Because not everyone is all that diligent about saying I used the last of the milk, we need to get more. Or knowing, you know, all of us do buy, as Paul said, things aspirationally. But if I know that the last six dozen times I bought that kale, it never got eaten. And have something that can remind me of that, then maybe I'll be like, okay, I'm going to admit defeat. Don't you have rotting kale in your fridge? You'd be amazed at the human ability to ignore the fact that you let it rot the last six times. But this time I'm going to eat the damn kale. Okay, I can see some of the family stuff. I'm always skeptical. Here's a new technology and I can't imagine what use we would ever have for it. I mean, history is full of technologies that we can't live without, that people said the same things about. So, I mean, there should be, I can imagine uses for consumers. You can imagine the usefulness for advertisers too, right? Where they can now, they can say, okay, not only do we know this is someone who purchases kale, but they don't actually eat the kale. So, maybe at certain times they're probably getting, but they'll buy dove chocolate. So, we'll target them for a period. You know, there's all kinds of potential micro-targeting that can be done. But at the same time, I think the first objection that comes to mind as an objection to being overly worried or paranoid about that prospect, we already do this with the internet, right? Everything you do on the internet is being, unless you use Tor and you use a VPN and you use special browsers and the like, everything you do on the internet is being tracked and watched for the sake of advertising. That is the Fundamental Commercial Bedrock on which the internet's built. And there are issues with that information being misused. I mean, think Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and whatnot, but at the end of the day, the benefits outweigh the costs. And there's no reason to suspect the same thing wouldn't be true with smart fridges. And so, while the smart TV device mapping, we could quibble with the particular thing that they're doing. Like, maybe they need to be, well, not maybe. They should be more transparent. They should let people know what they're actually opting into. They should, this whole taking information from other manufacturers' devices that aren't part of the agreement, that's all really sketchy. But the basic concept, the concept that all of your devices will communicate and that that produces value, both for you and for advertisers, bring it on. I mean... Okay, it seems to go beyond advertising as well. I mean, think of the insurance market benefits. You'll certainly see more efficient insurance markets. You'll also probably see a secondary market in cartons you can stick your junk food in to trick your smart fridge into thinking you're eating something healthy, so your insurance rate won't go up. And that seems like a lot of work to deal with. This constant communication fits in, I mean, one of the benefits of free markets and prices as information. The core argument for the value of having the market set prices is that they act as a means of moving information between actors in the market in an incredibly efficient way that can't be done in a centralized fashion. And so the more information you have, the better all these efficiencies. So you give the example of the insurance, but there's all kinds of efficiencies. There's all kinds of new products that can grow out of this. There's all kinds of wealth-creating mechanisms that can spring forth the more information you have. The problem is that if you get overloaded with information, then you can't really act on it. So one of the things that prices do is in this really elegant way they can take extraordinary amounts of information and get just the right information to just the right person at just the right time in a way that they can act on it in a fruitful manner. So there's the concern that we just gather too much, but as the technology gets better and better at managing the information too and passing it around, I think we can see tremendous benefits. I agree with that completely, and my concern is much more selfish. There are certain inefficiencies in the market that exist now as a result of incomplete information that benefit me personally, and I'd like to maintain them. I don't want that information out there because there's a cost to me for that. Now right now I might be a free rider in a sense, but I'd like to maintain that status as long as possible. Right. Maybe you don't want the person who is choosing that is recommending television programs for you and your family about some of the things that you asked Alexa to buy for you or about, you know, I mean, there's potential information that things cost more because you want them to be inefficiently, you know, like provided. Things you're embarrassed about, things that... So those kind of things are easier to expose in the world in which everything's talking, communicated. Aaron is rightly frustrated that he may be subsidizing my insurance at the moment or other inefficiencies that exist. Yeah. Oh, we all know what an accident-prone lifestyle you live will, so... Now it's out there. Everyone knows it now. One of the other potential benefits that I thought of is that, okay, so there's a revenue stream, and that revenue stream is getting bigger because now you can target ever more specifically. That's worth money to advertisers. Right now that money flows through these third-party marketing organizations like Samba. The question is, as that pool increases, can consumers take some of that money for themselves, cut out the middleman, redirect that flow to their own pocket? So like right now a lot of that's indirect. I mean, indirectly, Samba pays some indeterminate sum of money to a television manufacturer. That television manufacturer and margins are very, very slim on TV sets. Because of that, they can drop the prices on their TV by some fraction. Our TVs are cheaper because of organizations like Samba. That's indirect though, and the question is, if you can cut out the middleman, you're cutting out some slice of the profit they're taking, more of that money can go directly to the consumer. So you can imagine a world in which you get the opt-in that says, you can opt-out and have all your privacy and desperately try to find the Netflix program you want to find next is through all the direct that's in the back catalog on Netflix. Or if you opt-in to our program, we will pay for Hulu for you for free, or HBO Now, or we'll provide free subsidized benefits because of the value you're letting us take from you. So there's a way in which this excess revenue being generated doesn't have to stay in the pockets of organizations like Samba or other marketers. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really interesting tech in this regard. The next thing that we had in our list is the Brave browser, but Brave is just one example of many sorts of things like this. This idea that right now the advertising model, and it exists this way because of technological limitations and responses to technological limitations, right now the advertising model is advertisers want to reach consumers. And so advertisers give money to publishers, whether that was print magazines or classified ads in newspapers or online ads now, or television ads, they give money to the content publishers and the content publishers have an audience and so then they put the ads in front of the audience. But what we can do technologically now and increasingly is we can kind of cut out the need potentially for money to go to publishers or all of the money to go to publishers. So you can have a system where the advertiser is basically paying the consumer to see the ads. Publishers still can take their cut too because they are creating the content that is drawing the person. We can imagine some sort of dystopian future where you can opt in to spend four hours in front of the TV just watching advertisements and take home some money from that, but that's probably not what most of us want to do. It seems like an architecting question more than anything else because at the moment the portals through which we view and consume this sort of content you're using, say Google Chrome to watch or read the New York Times, it doesn't allow you. It doesn't give you the capacity to retain control over your data. But this web browser looks like it changes things. Aaron, you might be explaining Brave. I know there's other options, but why don't you explain Brave for our listeners? So Brave is a project to build a browser but the real thing that it's building, the browser is kind of a way to get to the core of it. The core of it is a new way to address, call it the attention economy online, which is what advertising all is, is an attention economy. People are paying for the attention of viewers and listeners and so on and readers. And so what Brave does is it bakes into, in this case, the browser. So Brave is a browser you can download it now, you can install it on your desktop, you can install it on your phone or your tablet. It works just like every other browser. It's got some extra neat privacy features built in so it's got slick ad and tracking blocking. The newest desktop version is now supporting. Every time you pop open like a private viewing window, typically your browser, if you open a private viewing window, all that really means is that the browser doesn't retain the cookies that you generated during that session. But there's all sorts of other ways to track you. Brave now bakes Tor into the private viewing windows. You're automatically using this much more secure and private network. But the core of it is this basic attention token, which is a cryptocurrency. It sits on the Ethereum blockchain. It's a token. But this token is supposed to be the core of the new attention economy for browsing. And so initially this plays two roles. The first is I can have a wallet of basic attention tokens and I can spend real money to buy more tokens to put into my wallet. And then what I can do is effectively share a portion of that wallet each month with the publishers that I visit. So the Washington Post right now is signed up with them. So if I have $10 I'm giving out each month, I've chosen to give out to publishers in my wallet, and I spend 10% of my browsing time that month on the Washington Post, then the Washington Post will automatically get $1 worth of my tokens transferred to their account. And so the more places I browse, the more it's spread out and so on. But that's the... I have to kind of... I have to not just opt into that in terms of like I want to give permission to give this money, but I have to opt into the sense that I have to put my own money in. So it's more of a tipping system than an advertising system. The other part of it though is that the brave browser in a local way, so within my system, not shared on third-party servers and all that, is building... can build a profile of me, of the kind of data that any other... that like Facebook would gather about you or whatever else because the browser knows obviously what I'm browsing, what I'm clicking on. So you can build this profile of me, and then in a secure way it can brave... the company can sell advertisements. So advertisers come to brave. They sell advertisements that appear in the browser or can appear on publishers' websites. And those advertisements are targeted to me based on data that's stored locally in my browser. So brave doesn't know what's on your system. Is my understanding, yes. And then the advertisers are basically buying the ads using these tokens. And then when I see one of these ads, a portion of the money, so I think 70%, something like that, goes to the publisher that the ad appeared on. And brave pockets its 30% fee for this service. But you could also very easily turn that into... a portion goes to the publisher who showed me this ad that was targeted to me in a privacy-respecting way. And then a portion also goes to me. It goes into my wallet because I'm the one who saw the ad. And this seems like... We know that obviously our data is valuable. We are generating... Facebook is in business because we, the users, are generating a tremendous amount of value. And this is simply a way that the users can get paid for generating the value. It's always been that way in the sense that... the way that you use a social media network is by creating content on it in the form of posts, in the form of comments, in the form of likes, you're creating content. Content creators have been paid in the past, obviously, but there's like a floor. You need to be a certain level of famous or a certain level of having a big audience in order to get paid, otherwise your content creation is free. Tech like this allows you to kind of get rid of that floor so that everyone down to, no matter how obscure you are, you're not going to make a lot, but you're going to generate... you can generate income based on how valuable whatever content you happen to create is to the publishers and ultimately the advertisers. Do you think it might have specifically thinking about social media and current complaints about antisociality on it? Have a pacifying effect on some of that if people were seeking a monetary reward rather than a sort of social impact or recognition reward. If you were simply paid for having read someone's post rather than expecting payment in the form of the followers you might get if you left a particularly amusing or snarky comment underneath. I can see that being a tricky problem because you as a user slash content creator you're playing both roles when you're using these networks the advertisers ultimately... the advertisers are only going to pay an amount that they think they're going to get a greater return. That's their goal is to get people to buy their products and so they're not going to pay out more than they're earning from the sales of their products. They will increasingly want to pay for effective advertising with effective targeting and so on. And so the thing is you get paid by the value you create but the value you create is not... it's not quite clear how to measure that. And so I could see it on the one hand leading to a pacifying effect that if the economy is set up to encourage good behavior and good behavior is rewarded then you'll get more good behavior. But if its value creation can be a unpredictable thing so it might be that the people who draw the most attention that that's who advertisers want to target, right? Influencers, you want to get your stuff so the metrics behind the scenes are saying like advertisers want to target their ads to people who have larger audiences or get more retweets because those people then create kind of downstream value for the advertisers in which case you might get the opposite effect that it might ratchet up because not only right now that attention, those lots and lots of retweets that you get for your snarky comments the value to you is gratification, is, you know, feel goodness but if suddenly on top of that there's a monetary gain then you might see even more of it. But then you have the effect of just that then devalue the network as a whole because it drives away other users. So I can see this being very, very screwy and seeing lots of extremes. I expect that, you know, as the technology gets better and as people get used to the system it evens out but it strikes me as unpredictable. I have a heightening effect rather than something new or different current trends in this space would be exaggerated. So it's a space that already has some exaggerations and actually that's our last topic here from an article by Adrian Chen, Ice Poseidon's lucrative stressful life as a live streamer. So we're talking about content creators who need large audiences but that in theory those audiences don't have to be as large in this brave new world. But we currently have streamers and this Ice Poseidon is a guy who's a Twitch streamer who is an in real life streamer so he's not streaming games. Most Twitch streamers are gamers. I've just got to read the opening passage here because it's wonderfully written and a strange creature stalks Los Angeles hunting for content. He is pale and tall as skinny as a folded up tripod. His right hand holds a camera on a stick which he waves like an explorer illuminating a cave painting. His left hand clutches a smartphone close to his face. Entering a restaurant he wraps his left wrist around the door handle so that he can pull the door open while still looking at the phone. Chaos follows him. So this fellow Ice Poseidon streams most of his waking life whether he's inside playing video games or wandering the greater Los Angeles area seeking out human interactions which will delight and titillate his followers and draw greater attention to his project getting him greater advertising revenue. This has obviously had quite a profound impact on how he lives his life as well. And the article illustrates some very interesting dynamics and incentives created by this mode of both content creation and essentially his work. So, well, there's this, as I was reading Ice Poseidon, the bell, Ice Poseidon, it was the first I'd heard of him. I mean, I watched a little Twitch myself. I'm familiar with the community a little bit. So there's a toxicity. I mean, throughout the article, both he and his followers engage in, shall we say, antisocial behavior. So like his followers were constantly, he gets, people are swatting him and calling the SWAT team and saying that he's holding someone hostage. Someone swat them every day for a month. I mean, these are his own followers. And part of the appeal for them, I think, is not just to view his life but to viscerally take part in it. Yeah. And they made him break up with his girlfriend. They made, you know, like, there's a lot of, and so you read it and you say, well, if the future is more of this, well, we're in trouble because we're unpleasant. But I do wonder to some extent if what we have is kind of a false picture of what this looks like going forward, that for a variety of contingent reasons, this lifestyle, this technology is in the hands of, or has been first wielded by kind of an unpleasant community. Like the reason why he's toxic is because he's a toxic guy attracting toxic people. All this technology could be used by more, I mean, this doesn't have to be the case. I also wouldn't be so hard on him and his community. The people who follow him seem to derive a lot of value from it and often seem like pretty lonely people who find a friend in a community in this. So one thing that I think distinguishes this from the prior two things we talked about, so that smart TVs and the Internet thing is gathering data on you. And then putting the users into the ecosystem for advertising, making them participants or earners as well, is that toxicity aside, all that aside, what this guy's doing doesn't scale. So all of us could be earning money in advertising dollars from our use of social media. And all of us could be opting in and getting better and better recommendations about television shows to watch. And in fact, all those things potentially get even better than more of us who opt in. But... Not all of us can be expedited. Not all of us can be live streamers. Even if we wanted to, most of us wouldn't want to, but most of us are not interesting in the way that I guess this guy is somehow interesting to his audience. You know, it's more like all of us tell jokes all the time. But that doesn't mean that we all could become stand-up comics and that someone like this needs... You need a critical mass of followers in order to earn even enough to make doing this worthwhile in the first place. Because as the article mentions, he's using a lot of very expensive equipment. There's all sorts of upkeep costs and so on. So I think that this is, A, something that was always going to remain relatively obscure because it's just not financially sustainable at scale. And B, I think that as it attracts, as this sort of stuff grows, or at least the potential money in this sort of stuff grows, and catches the attention of what I'll call the professionals who tend to be... I mean, amateurs make good content, but professionals are often better at... There's a reason that we go and watch blockbuster movies made for a lot of money by professionals as opposed to public access television. And so I suspect that this kind of live streaming will end up looking more like slickly produced stuff over time as the professionals get more and more involved in it. Don't we already have that, though? I mean, on MTV with reality TV, Jersey Shore, part of the appeal of this would seem to be its amateurness. The fact that it does feel real in a way that one expects that most of these slickly produced stuff is also fudged or faked in some sense. The drama less true. It's professionalized amateurism. So like you mentioned, when we were talking about the idea of the show, you mentioned Jenny Cam, an early streamer who streamed her life in the 97, 98... 96 was when it launched. 96 was when it launched. Okay, so very early. I mean, it was like a screenshot every 14 seconds. Yeah, she was a student in college, I think at time 19 or something like that, and she just set up cameras and streamed her entire life. And I remember... I mean, I would have been, what, 17 at the time? I remember hearing about it. I remember trying to log into it, probably because there were rumors, and I guess they turned out to be true, but rumors that she was sometimes naked on it. But it didn't... I remember it being... I mean, it was a... The tech was not quite there to make something like this work well. Truly titillating, yes. But yeah, I think... I mean, to my knowledge, that was the first of these life streamers. Yeah. And that evolves then. I mean, you can even see it. I went and watched the, like, the greatest highlight reel of Jenny Cam. And you can see the process, her becoming... It becomes less of an amateurism and something a lot closer to your current vloggers, your... But that over time, that process has become more routinized. It's become more professional. And now you actually have, like, there are outfits. I mean, I'm thinking here of, like, the Logang, the Jake and Logan Paul. They, like, select people, and then, okay, we're going to turn you... Like, it's becoming essentially, like, record labels, but for YouTube. And so the process of discovery and of turn... And the professionalism, the amount of capital that goes into actually producing the show, et cetera, it's all becoming a lot less like Jenny Cam and a lot more like Hollywood or like the music industry. Yeah. You see people even mocking the formalization of share, like, and subscribe. That becoming an almost industry-wide sign-off, as it were. And the same thing we could expect to happen to Twitch and the like. However, on the advertising side of things, people seem to like the informal. It gives them a sense of participating in something, being not just a consumer, but a member of a community. New York Select All has an interesting piece on Instagram empty photos. So the consumers of often cosmetic or makeup products will post images tagging the brand they purchased the product from of the empty bottle. Now, sometimes these are major influencers. Sometimes these are just individuals who like the product. For the makeup brands, it's very valuable native advertising because that photo of the empty bottle, while I guess someone could have gone out and poured a bottle out, to most viewers demonstrates that someone has used up all of this product. They've liked it enough to use all of it. And in exchange for posting these things, the firms will often send the Instagram user a replacement. So you've demonstrated to the world the value of this product to you here in a sort of ex-ante compensation, not contracted in any sense. We will give you some more of it. People seem very comfortable with that. Warm feelings all around. Other than with the FTC. Well, when there is a contractual relationship and it is undisclosed, the FTC takes a very dim view of these things. And you see a clash between a sort of organic means of advertising that developed on these platforms and what the normal consumer safety or awareness rules look like. Well, even here, although it's less of a problem just because the expense involved is less, there's still a scale problem. Now, the scale problem is as big as it would be for ICE Poseidon who's making a living off of this. But those things still cost money and right now, them giving away free product to Instagram influencers and fashionistas, it works because there's only so many of them, right? And they are basically relying on them through word of mouth and through their social media network to spread it to people who aren't on Instagram, people who aren't engaged in this new advertising landscape. But once everyone's part of that world, the value of that goes down dramatically. Again, it doesn't scale up as much as, you know, we're not going to be in a world where everyone who wants free product in digital life is going to get free products. Just right now, we have a large number of consumers who aren't plugged into this community. But as millennials and Gen Xers and Gen Zers, as we age, they're going to have a scale issue. The other thing I thought of as I was reading the ICE Poseidon article was that we've democratized celebrity life, right? So his behavior is not all that different from, say, like the Kardashians. So the Kardashians made their way, they became famous for being famous using an older medium, right? They relied on essentially all the glossy magazines that you get, the grocery checkout counter, us weekly and et cetera. And then they relied on reality television, which evolved out of the kind of, you know, Jenny Cam, the kind of thing we were talking about before, to make themselves famous, influential and wealthy. ICE Poseidon is the evolution of that. So now someone who doesn't even have the Kardashians relative level of minor, I mean, they're like, I mean, prior to this, they're like C-List or famous because their father was an Olympic champion, right? And it is the tech shift, the advancement in technology that drives this. Anyone can behave outlandishly. However, previously you needed to be able to both behave outlandishly and appear in us weekly or wherever else. YouTube has changed that because everyone from Jake Paul to ICE Poseidon can tap into or example those behaviors and receive celebrity in exchange for it. And I think the optimistic take on everything that we've discussed today is that the perfect, I mean, the perfect utopian economic system, right? If we could imagine, you know, an economy and a world, it would be where everyone can make a living doing what they love doing. You know, so that everyone feels really fulfilled in everything that they're doing. And unfortunately for the vast majority of us, that's not an option. You know, we can't, we have interests, we have hobbies, but those aren't the things that we can make a living doing. So we're still not anywhere near that utopian world, but what all of these things, all these technologies do is they enable us to better monetize value and get money to people who are creating value for other people. And the tech, the tech is like breaking down barriers to that, making us better able to identify it. And so what it's done is you can now, you know, if you simply are the kind of person who the things that you do are other people enjoy, they create so, and it doesn't even have to be creating a product anymore. It can just be like I'm someone who talks into a live cam for a while or I have a strange life that people think is fun to watch. You know, suddenly you're enabled to keep doing that but get compensated for the value you created in a way that you never could before. And even if that doesn't spread to everyone, like these, what we're watching is more and more capability to somehow earn a living while specializing in directions that better align with like your particular and sometimes weird and idiosyncratic bliss. Well, it's not like the behavior being described here is new. I mean, but what used to be restricted to a handful of say aristocratic second sons who they could be the, they didn't have to go into, you know, the family business or they could rely on new innovations, stuff like a stock market and a bond system which allowed family wealth to be heritable and passed on without going through land. Well, that thing that was restricted to a very small number of elite wealthy folks has been expanded bit by bit with each new technological form so that now we're, it's a process of maximizing the number of people who get to do the things they enjoy for a living. And maybe not everyone, but more people. So if you enjoy playing video games, you can go on Twitch and stream and potentially make a living like something like 14,000 Twitch streamers make a living off streaming themselves playing video games. Something that number would have been a handful prior to this new technology and this new form. So there's value in that. People become happier when they get to do more of the things they enjoy doing and get to do them for a living at the same time. So that's a win. I think we count that as a win as libertarians, a world that is both more prosperous because we extract more of that income for ourselves, a world which we get to do more of the things that we enjoy doing. Hey, that sounds like a pretty good role to me. Well, thank you for listening to Building Tomorrow and until next week, be well.