Rich and Paul discuss whether the internet is actually elevating people's lives. They discuss the good and the bad, but all in all the internet is making us more informed it's just what we choose to do with that information that counts. This podcast is sponsored by Aboard (where you can save all your mug collections too).

Paul, you sound like shit today.

How are

Uh, thanks for...

No, I have, uh, I have a sinus infection, so I apologize to the

listener for the tone of my voice.

I think it's actually very, um, what's the word, velvety.

Yeah, it's velvety, but it's got that nasal top.

It ain't great, but regardless, let's not talk about my sinuses anywhere.

What do you got?

You, you have an idea, which is good.

We're gonna keep this one

I woke up early this morning,

okay?

You guys, you're, you're the CEO, so you gotta get up and gotta

crush it, give it the elliptical.

up with lists.

I am the stereotypical dipshit CEO.

actually CEO behavior right there, yeah.

And I opened Twitter, or X,

This is also,

what you want to

yeah, that's the other thing CEOs like to do.

I'm a little obsessed with the ads on Twitter.

Oh, it's become the back of Family Circle magazine.

It's just, yeah.

Yeah.

there was a mug that came up,

It's that, but it's also like anime, like soft poured, like I can't

show you the rest of her animated nipples.

Yeah,

It is pretty bad.

Anyway, you saw something, it wasn't that,

So I'm Mug.

so a bug.

And there was art and an inscription on the mug,

and I'm going to read it to

Oh, okay.

Let me, let me listen.

To my wife.

Okay.

I wish I could turn back the clock.

I'd find you sooner and love you longer.

I may not, I may not be your first date, your first kiss, or your first love.

Which, in my mind, gives me images of waiting on a really

long line for ice cream.

Yeah, we're still on this bug.

We're still reading the bug.

Okay.

I just want to be your last everything.

I love you.

Forever and always.

Wow, so that guy's like, I banged the entire church group.

But now, I wanna die with you in a trailer.

Well, I may not be your first kiss or first love, so he's

actually insinuating something about

That's very progressive, good for him.

He's, he's accepting that she had a very fulfilling erotic life

before she showed up on that bug.

Now let me, one thing aside here.

Boy, that's an ugly ass mug.

You just held it up.

I wouldn't give that to my dog.

And I don't mind garbage.

I don't mind classy with a K.

That's garbage.

It's garbage.

It's a lot of junk.

There are a lot of junk ads on Twitter.

Just to be clear, if I gave this mug to my wife, it would come sailing back at my

As you say, I can see the parabola of, like, hot coffee flying out

of it as it hits you smack in the middle.

She's very, very athletic, very fit person, your wife.

So she would be able to get it probably about a good inch directly

into your enormous forehead.

Yeah, so,

I guess this led me to a thought and led me to a

topic I think we can talk about.

okay.

I have always viewed technology as this thing that elevates us.

Oh, this is the heartbreak of middle age in technology.

Absolutely.

I know exactly where we're going with this.

I view it as something that makes us more enlightened.

Absolutely.

More productive,

We're going to augment human intelligence.

more intelligent, I guess, more intelligent, I

don't know, or it frees us up.

The fact that I'm not spending a lot of time on rote tasks and like grunt

work allows me to think big thoughts.

But then I open...

Twitter slash X and I get ads like this and and this ad is just an example

of like what really takes hold on the internet What's really popular on the

internet is Someone frying an egg on pavement for 10 seconds in a video.

of the content that's not pornography on the internet

is like pictures of shoes.

So

It left me a little sad.

Sure.

Should I be sad?

Uh, well, uh, there's a few things going on here.

I'll give you some context.

When television started to happen, One of the, one of the first things,

I think it was Pat Weaver was like an early guy at NBC, actually was Sigourney

Weaver's dad, just crazy, you know, trivia, but he was like a buckety book,

and he would talk about like, we're gonna put Shakespeare on television,

and you know, fast forward, and you have like, Welcome Back, Cotter, and you

know, entire TV shows in the 80s where the, where the, where the catchphrase

was like, uh, an alien going, brah,

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

for years, just, just like, now we have smart TV again.

You know what the 70s was, and we're old enough to remember this.

And I look back on it and really see it.

The most popular sitcoms were essentially...

Like urban because you were sort of observing the craziness of living in

Or, or all of the family where it was about like racial tension,

and so it was, but what it was about, when you look back at the 70s, we

were broke, don't have any money,

Yeah It was it was it was

you just would come home from

Sanford and son was a junkyard.

It was the setting was a junkyard

on a British TV show, which is also about a junkyard family.

It's not good Right.

It's

Uh, it's, so.

But that aside, right?

Like, okay, technology, the promise of technology, the sort of 1960s whole earth

catalog thing is like, you're going to get this godlike power, and you're going

to use it to become incredibly informed, and you're going to make enlightened

decisions about your own life, and you're going to create an amazing future.

That is the narrative.

pretty beautiful.

Wonderful.

I bought into it completely.

I love it.

And it's actually, it allows you to really cop out as a technology person

because everything you're doing is somehow part of the narrative.

And so you will sometimes meet people in our industry who are

like, Hey, what are you working on?

Really?

It's a thing where if you scroll, The ad won't move until you touch a monkey's

nipple, you know, and they'll be like, and, but in the back of their head they're

like, by doing this I'm enabling people to get access to media experiences for

less money and they're going to make the board more powerful and smarter

and the reality is like now you just put a monkey nipple smacker ad in the

middle of the New York Times, you know.

And so, so no, do people Technology does not change human experience.

It doesn't.

It does make us, we are more informed, but we don't know

what to do with the information.

I think about like, you know when when The like, carnival would

come to town and it had the freak show.

Like the bearded lady and the world's shortest man or whatever,

like just freakish stuff.

I love, I love that you're, you're in Bay Ridge.

Like, when did that happen?

no, no, no, I, I didn't

Wait, you just, when,

170

When you would go to Canarsie, like

No, no, this didn't happen to me.

My point is, I guess we're kind of into the same weird stuff

that we've always been into.

We just like to be

I'll give you an example.

Remember when that woman, everyone was like, Oh my God, look at

what's happening in the world.

It was this very, very pretty woman.

And she would look at the screen and people would type things to

her on TikTok, or they'd give her a little gifts, virtual gifts.

And she would go, gag, gag, ice cream.

So good.

Ooh, so good.

And all that nice.

this.

You heard it.

You heard about

I saw it too.

So, and everybody in my, in my cohort was like, well, that's it.

End of the world.

It's all over.

Let me tell you a story.

Well, I told the story of the podcast before, but it's a relevant story.

My grandfather, who I never met, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and when he was

a little boy, like, Maybe nine years old.

They'd pay him a nickel to go with his friend and roll an attire across the

vaudeville stage between acts because they wanted to keep people entertained.

You never told me this story.

That's impressive.

Okay.

So, hey, what are you doing?

What are you doing?

And off he would go, and he would roll, he would roll his friend in a tire.

Sometimes he'd be the guy in the tire.

And people in the audience who were literally between an act where like a

donkey would count and a woman would sing a song, would be like, Ah, that

kid just rolled across in a tire!

This really

This really happened.

I actually love vaudeville.

I'm fascinated by vaudeville.

And we're going to go into this for

Is the internet vaudeville writ large?

Is that all it is?

so vaudeville is a fascinating form of entertainment because it's

a true popular creation So Americans first form of entertainment that we

had like Shakespeare plays There were actually big fights in New York City

over Shakespeare because like right riots

Nobody

they really did.

Yeah, I mean, like, there was a huge fight, kind of like,

Shakespeare was lowbrow, and then they kind of started to elevate him.

Different, you know, British actors would perform, and that would

make people who wanted American actors angry, and so on and on.

Anyway, regardless, you got all that going on.

The popular entertainment in America was the Mitchell Show, where white

people would put cork on their face and do racist impersonations.

That was the popular entertainment, and they would just, that was like

through the 1800s, and then like parts of the Mitchell show started to adapt,

and it'd be like, ah, I'll sing a little song, this guy will come out

and tell jokes, stand up comedians.

So then there's this

It's a variety show.

Yes, it became a variety show.

It started as just like singing and dancing and just plain old racism.

And then they're like, hold on a minute,

We'll tell a joke.

We'll show a trick.

We'll bring a magician out.

it got kind of burlesque y out there, like, you know, you could,

but you couldn't take the family, right?

So you have like, Bistro shows are good, traveling around America, you

know, the, the, the trains are coming in, then you get like burlesque

showing up and sort of burlesque style stuff, and it's like raunchy

songs, and then Vaudeville shows up.

And Vaudeville shows up, like, actually a lot of it in New York City,

because you could take the ladies.

It wasn't like, just all, like, booby jokes.

Ah, okay.

wasn't just racism anywhere, there's plenty of racism.

Don't worry.

Lots for everybody.

And a lot of actually, like, funny Swedish jokes.

Like, just like, Oh, the Swedes!

Ha ha ha!

So, but wait, I've got to go to a place.

So, absolute novelty and silliness and vaudeville was continuous, meaning for

like literally hours and hours and hours.

The shows would repeat.

So you'd do like a five minute act,

walk in,

in, and

catch some of it, walk.

the same show would come back on.

And it's just stuff coming at you.

It's essentially a feed.

do you

a TikTok feed.

the stuff around the country?

Well, you have a network called the railways, which is hub and spoke, and

you transmit the entertainment for human beings from city to city where

they land on vaudeville theaters.

How do you have a huge motion picture industry?

You suddenly start showing movies.

That's a novelty.

But it's so, it's so much cheaper than humans.

It's like bad news for the humans.

What happens to the comedians?

Well, you know, movies are coming in, and so is radio in the 20s and

Yeah.

Suddenly, Jack Benny, Fred Allen, all these people

start performing on the radio.

And suddenly, one network begets the next network begets the next network.

Bringing this back to your point, Are we getting dumber?

No, this is always the same.

There is a network of information that is putting absolute folly and

silliness, anything that can make money.

Uh, for the audience, for the theater owners, and for the acts.

Anything that people want to see, including a little boy

rolling another little boy in a

Yep.

Yep.

Um.

You know what this is making me think of?

Um, minor league baseball.

Ah, oh, yes, I know exactly

Like, flaming baseball bats and somersaults.

And then they have, in between innings, baby races.

They're like, do you have a baby?

If it's 6 months old, uh, if it's 6 to 12 months old, bring him out.

We're gonna have a race and the winner gets a 100 gift

certificate to Bill's Hardware

100 gift certificate

they like know, they know they gotta work it out, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Store.

yeah.

You gotta entertain, right?

game.

What's happening?

Okay, I guess let's look ahead.

I don't know if this leads to advice.

It's more observational.

Should I, here's a piece of advice I want from you to close this out.

This is actually, it's very illuminating because it's hard to zoom out.

It always feels like the end of civilization.

always so you could go back 2, 000 years.

It's not it's not we actually have better access to more information.

till Apple straps a, an IMAX camera to your head,

and then that's the end of that.

Then we'll be having another podcast like, Paul, I haven't seen a human

or touched anyone in two weeks.

The answer to human behavior is how humans behave.

It is not, there is no device that improves the quality.

Is there a device that degrades the quality?

I do think that, uh, here's what we've learned.

Small, clustered groups of mutually supportive people are able to

achieve really amazing things.

Enormous groups of fighting people get really, really bad.

Yes.

Right, like we just saw Twitter.

We saw like, you know, Gab and like just you just thousands of screaming people

It just brings out the worst in us

I think, I think there is that aspect of it.

The thing we're not going to talk about on this podcast is that it was stage and

audience, right, for the longest time.

And, and, and now everyone's got a stage.

And I think that, that, that instinct to perform and that urge

to perform and be loudest in the room leads to some messed up stuff,

will say the easy access to everything means there

is less rehearsal in practice.

So chat GPT will write an essay for you.

It's pretty good, better than you could probably

yeah, yeah,

So you don't do that thinking, you don't rehearse the thinking.

You don't learn the form.

That's too bad.

That is too bad, and I think, but you know, to close it with a

bit of hope, when you do see something that clearly someone put a lot of

work into, it's still a marvel, right?

It's still really appreciated.

Like a great movie is still a great

right?

It's still really appreciated.

because he's an obsessive

Difficult people are still making interesting things.

And you can also appreciate the craft of popular stuff.

You can appreciate the craft of like Dua Lipa songs.

Yeah.

Those are industrial interesting products of their own.

Yeah All right.

This was a great zoom out Paul.

You're good at that.

You're good at that because I want to be angry I woke up angry.

I had a list I saw that mug and I got angry.

People are getting dumber.

They're the exact same as they were, which is too bad.

And they have green.

But they're not getting

Paul, if you'd like to save novelty mugs

Well,

on the, off the web, what tool should you

We have a product called Abort.

And Abort lets you, like, save things on the web.

And there's a fantasy I would have had years ago that Abort will make you,

like, make everybody smarter and better.

Yeah.

But I don't think, no software will do that.

But what a board does do is make it easier for you to have a resilient place

to save your information and communicate with the people in your peer group.

So I'm going to, all I want this software to do really, is just allow people to

do what they do with less friction.

I feel that that's the best you could hope for.

And so I think we,

Aboard.

com.

good, it does

live very soon and everyone will be able to sign up.

So check it out and check us, check us out at Ziadeford.

com and at Ziadeford on X, not Twitter, Paul.

You know what, one way you get smarter, you listen to this podcast.

We're not making people dumber.

We're not selling mugs, I'll tell you that.

We may sell mugs one day, who knows.

it'll be exactly like that book.

Alright, I'm gonna go decongest.

a lovely day.

Feel better, Paul.