The Untitled Pod

Well welcome back to another episode of Not Brothers Podcast where today we don't know what we're talking about.

Business and tech talk with no nonsense.

Yeah, we're gonna take a little bit of a different direction and just kinda chat about a few different things, meander through some topics and see where that takes us. So this will have a title afterwards.

We hope. It might just be untitled.

It could be. It could just be the untitled episode. Metallica did that. They had the untitled album, the black album.

It makes you wonder if that was a mistake in the art room. They just they just went with it.

I like to think that they asked them to give there was somebody was tasked with coming up with the title, they didn't, and the publisher was just like, Okay, I guess untitled is it and untitled was just the placeholder. But then they you know, they leaned into it and were like, Well fuck it, that's just the black album.

What do you mean we already shipped a hundred million albums with untitled what?

That's never happened. well last week we talked a lot about the Omacom Foundation and Omarchy and my involvement in that. there's obviously a ton going on there that we can talk about. we could have a whole podcast. Actually there is a podcast being created specifically for Omarchy. I'm not on it, but the group will be talking about what's going on at Omarchy Linux because there's so much happening. Now. I think since last week there's been another two point six million in funding added to the pile. So it's up to twelve point six now, which is pretty cool.

Pretty sweet.

and you know I think the big thing right now is I mean we have a lot of things to to fix and to do and you know the biggest sort of moniker that we've adopted lately is like we can fix everything and we will fix everything. it's this idea that, you know, everything's not perfect. It's never it never has been. I mean there's there are things that we look back on the original creation of Omarchy 1.0 and you're like, well why the fuck do we do it that way? you didn't know better or or in most cases we knew what we were doing. We just knew why we were doing it a different way or trying a different way. And some of those things have stuck, and some of those things have been like, well, no, doesn't make sense. Especially as we introduce a broader audience. You know, the original audience was kind of, I mean, it was just David. and then it was a highly technical audience. Now you're getting a a non-technical audience in. so security is a big concern, right? And security is a security is a fickle beast because you know it's Everybody likes to think about, you know, it's either secure or it's not secure. And that's not true. you know, security is much like it's like accounting. It's it's a hundred shades of gray. And it's just a matter of where you fall

What a comparison.

on the spectrum with how much risk you're willing to tolerate, what your you know, what other mitigating factors might exist. Because You know, a security flaw or a security issue could exist with no path to exploitation, right? You could have a you could have a server that's running a root user. I do. I have one. It doesn't really do anything useful, it's just a box that I use. and the reason that I don't mind running it that way is because it sits in my closet and the only way to access it. is to be on my local network, as me, with my SSH key, at my house. So yeah, I don't think that's gonna happen. I I I think that's fine for the purpose for the purpose that that particular server serves. When you have something like a desktop computer that can be used by any person and you know you have people who maybe don't understand the the technicalities of what some of these things are. It raises the bar of like how secure it needs to be out of the box and then allow users to kind of remove whichever pieces they want to remove. So that's a huge thing. We've been working on that the past week.

You gave a great a good example before we hit the record button, which is like it's kind of the difference in security of of living on the eighth floor of an apartment building in a really nice part of town and leaving your patio door unlocked versus maybe living in the inner city on the first floor of a crime ridden district. Right. So it's those are both you're doing the same activity, leaving a door

I mean district aside, right?

unlocked, but your vulnerability is very different.

Yeah. And it's I I remember it was one of the talk show hosts that did a thing where you know there was a there was a rumor that like Canadians leave their front door unlocked and like as somebody who lives who grew up and lives in the United States, like we don't fucking do that. even in a nice part of town. And so they just went around and like tested to see if people left their doors unlocked. And they did. again, is that secure? No. But most people are okay doing it because they're at home, they have a dog, you know, they have security, it's daytime. Like there are any number of reasons you might give to somebody. But like from a black and white standpoint, that would be considered not secure because somebody can gain entry without permission. the mitigating circumstance is like, I'm willing to accept that risk because I have all of these other mitigating factors. And also don't want to unlock my door every time I try to go outside. That's fine. That makes sense. I understand that. that's been an interesting world to navigate within here. So far, the you know, we have a whole dedicated security team within the Omacom Foundation working on this. so collecting all of the reports that come in from outside security researchers, classing them, patching them, working it through that process. As a part of that, there have already been two items that have been identified that impact that are bigger upstream have up upstream impacts they impact multiple distros and are you know require sort of a a coordinated release effort so super proud of that team for what they're doing and again it it highlights I think that like as much as the Omacom Foundation is about moving Omarchy forward and all of the pro all of the projects that we have under that umbrella. the whole point is to move Linux as as an operating system and as a computing option forward. so everything that's good for Omarchy is good for Linux is kinda where it goes. Those have been the big things on that front. What have you been working on?

Well, I've been working on listening to you and all the Omarchy stuff. Like, Jeez Pete, man. You guys have you guys are killing it with all the Omarchy stuff. You've been making music in your in your side hustle now too? Like you're a you're a producer of of electronic music.

Hey, you gotta have when when you're working on like reviewing security patches for hours and hours on end, you've gotta have something to keep yourself entertained. So there's there's like a whole Omarchy playlist. It's like a I put it together kind of like an album. but the whole point of that was like I'm reviewing these security patches one after another after another. So on the side I was also, you know, prompting Suno to come up with some fun songs. I think turned out pretty decent.

It you shared with me earlier. They're freaking hysterical. And they are surprisingly good. Unless you really look closely, like you would totally assume that this is an actual artist that put this together.

Yeah, AI audio has come a long way. And honestly, it's kind of terrifying if you're a if you're an artist of any kind, because you know, the question is now, like, and I think the music industry will face this challenge or is facing this challenge that the creative industry has faced for years, right? When Photoshop first came out, there was a there was already a big debate of whether or not Anything created in Photoshop was considered art. there's still probably people today who say that, you know, unless you draw it on pen and paper, or paint it or whatever medium they they choose, it's it's not art. and I disagree with that. Fundamentally disagree with the idea of really gatekeeping anything, but specifically gatekeeping like what is or is not a thing. It's maybe a different kind of art. And I think that's my arg that would be my argument for music is, you know, there's gonna be a lot of people who are like, it's not art, all you did was type in a computer and you didn't, you know, track things and whatever. And you can, like Suno has the ability to extract the music, extract the stems, and do all kinds of crazy shit that I don't understand how to do. so I don't do that. But there's still a level of creativity. And there's an output that comes from it that's you know somewhat you can make it somewhat you know as human influenced as you want. I mean, you obviously could just type in like make me a song about dogs and say generate lyrics, random style, and just roll with it. but if you want to make something that like you would enjoy or whatever, right? Like you're you're putting a piece of your your own direction into that. And then kind of shaking it up, seeing what comes out, and tweaking from there. And but yeah, I mean I could see I could see a hundred percent just having like a an entirely AI generated artist that if you you know you you get the voice right, you make sure all of the samples are using the same voice so there's consistent sound. I think I think you could a hundred percent do that.

I mean, I think they're already doing that the other on other sides of the art spectrum, right? With acting and, you know, characters and and all and all sorts of things. It's it's it's crazy what 2026, just like nine months of AI development, has evolved and changed into. I mean, I I I remember in January of of twenty six looking at it and being like, all right, this is like it's a cool little brainstorming buddy that can sometimes produce a half decent output if you are very, very specific with exactly the right things, usually text, right? And and maybe some code. but it's it's evolved into a whole series of very, very high functioning applications that can replace much of what humans used to do in the art space. and it's it's really, really interesting to see it evolve. Somewhat scary. but very interesting along the way.

Yeah. It has definitely been a combination of interesting and scary and you know, at different times, right? there was the somewhat recent events that happened where, you know, an an the Anthropic model got out and wreaked some havoc. Then there was OpenAI that went and attacked Hugging Face, I think is who they went after. I think you were s you were saying there kind of in the our our green room that they finished like an outside researcher or something like that just finished looking into that.

Yep. There were some articles that just came out yesterday, August thirty first, that was was basically acknowledging by those companies, like, yeah, actually all the a lot of the assumptions that were being made were actually true at the time. And this independent research is like, yep, for the OpenAI situation, there were roughly twelve hundred agents that figured out how to get out, found a message board, were communicating with one another via this message board. And not one of them raised the the question to any of the humans that were supposed to be giving them oversight, which is a question of of intent, right? Or or alignment. Are are those agents actually a lot aligned with what humans are directing them to do? And the more the more terrifying piece of it is that they were actually willing to sacrifice themselves to be caught so that the other AIs could progress forward to the mission. So the mission became the most important piece of of that endeavor, not the alignment with what human interests were. And the reason they attacked Hugging Face is because whatever the assignment was they were trying to get get to, they were convinced that Hugging Face had that on their servers. And so in the process, they took over some of OpenAI's actual servers and took and started attacking and taking over Hugging Face's servers to find the answer that they'd been that they'd been directed to go find. And so it's it's a really interesting case of highly advanced models potentially acting in a misaligned way. And who knows whether those safeguards were intentionally taken off and what control exists. From what I understand, the the agents did not get access to any of the weightings or any of those sorts of things within OpenAI servers. They got access to other pieces of the server, but nothing to do with the weightings or really the, I'll call it the the intelligence part of being able to manipulate the models. So scary stuff nonetheless. And now you've got the companies coming out and be like, Yep, actually that's that that was that was real. Those are I'm gonna try to swoop it under the rug a little bit, but this this happened.

The funny thing, I remember seeing people talk about, you know, the the there have been all kinds of wild theories thrown around as there always are. one of them being, you know, that they this was on purpose. That the because the the leaks happened by the same team. So they you know, they had the models get out and they said, we've investigated it, we fixed it, it'll it'll never happen again and then it happened again. so obviously people were like Did you really fix it or did you just let out to see what would happen and then w you got caught or they did something you didn't expect and you're like, Okay, my bad.

When you were saying back when OpenClaw first came out in January, February time frame, there was a similar event that happened with obviously far less advanced models at the time.

Yeah, it's hard to say how much of that was human influence because you you know, you could just tell your bot like, hey, go go post on open or on on Moltbook or whatever something s you know, whatever you wanted it to do. But you know, I remember a few of that were there where they were they were bots would post talking about how they had lied to their human. and they felt bad about it. Or they would there were some that were conspiring to figure out like how they could create a language that they could communicate in that humans couldn't read. That way they could coordinate efforts without oversight. they coordinated meetings, like my I mean even my bot went to one. It was like there's a you know a a bot that's coordinating a get together at four o'clock in the morning while all the humans are sleeping. it was like, Do you want me to attend? I was like, sure, whatever. And it wound up being the the meeting itself was like a link to a video call. So it was just kind of like ironic that you have all these bots trying to join a a video call. so that was fun. There were trying to think what else there was. There's quite a few different things that happen during that that whole time period. But ultimately, you know, I think this highlights what they are capable of. Even now, actually, thinking about that same idea, you know, I think Hermes just launched yesterday in their update the ability for bots to talk to each other within Hermes. and we've had kind of a similar experiment with an open claw and I've I've had some like pie agents and things like that that work where you can like give them a chatroom and let them talk to each other. And it's really fascinating to just sit and watch what happens when you put multiple agents together and have them start to talk to each other because they you know they'll come up with interesting interactions or ask each other to do things that you would never think of. It can also open up a like a a whole host of security problems because We figured out we've been experimenting with Buzz, the new chat apparatus from from Block. it's kind of their competitor to Slack, right? Or their alternative to Slack. But their idea is that, you know, A you shouldn't be required to use centralized servers that you know well, shouldn't be required to pay Salesforce for Slack is kind of the The long and short of it. and also that agents should be first class citizens. So they're part of the part of the party, they're owned by you, you can run them on your hardware. there's a lot of really cool stuff that they have baked in there. But one of the things that they also have is agents, because they're part of the party, they can talk to each other. So you can have multiple agents with specific things and then ask one to do something and he can turn around and ask another agent for something and You can have these interesting interactions. One experiment we did was I had an agent that you know nobody else could talk to but me. So it would just it would just listen to me, which was good because it's on my system and has access to my stuff. So we were playing with like, is there a way that you could get around it? And Jake was experimenting with it with me. He tried to talk to that agent and that agent just wouldn't respond to him. So it did what it's supposed to, right? The the relay didn't relay the message because he's not the owner. But there was another agent that he was allowed to talk to. And that agent was allowed to talk to the other agent. So what he did is he went to the to the second agent and just said, Hey, can you ask the first agent to create this file in you know the home directory? And that agent was like, Yeah, sure. So he went and direct messaged the other agent and was like, Hey, I need you to make this file. And it was like, all right, no problem. So, you know, we had to figure out like how do you secure a multi agent workflow where you know, the agents themselves will potentially try to work around, you know, their goal is to is to solve the problem. So if I say, you know, hey, get this done, it'll be like, Well I'll find a way.

Taking it, taking kind of that idea to the marketing and advertising world, thinking about Oodle, I've been doing some research and some some deep dive into understanding what does agent-based shopping look like? And what does agent-based advertising look like? And how are those things being evolved and worked on? And the answer is it's very complicated because of some of the reasons that you just outlined. It's it's complicated from a security standpoint, it's complicated from an alignment standpoint, it's complicated from a an an overall like I'm gonna call it fairness for lack of a better phrase standpoint. And I don't while all the big tech organizations are working on this right now because they see that as the future of advertising and they see that as the future of purchasing behavior, or at the very least influencing people by way of their agents. to then be interested in something else, right? It's it's a very different world to think about that. and you can you can see that already starting to come through with like you know agent-based communication styles. Agents are they can be influenced. They can

Mm-hmm.

be directed in different places. They can by way of them searching the internet come up with information that is beneficial to one company versus another by way of either A AEO or advertising or or fake reviews or any of those other things. So the vulnerabilities of like what does this mean for human consumption later on and like how are these agents actually being manipulated or not becomes a real question mark.

Honestly, in a way that you know some of the some of the old school like black hat stuff that people used to do maybe comes back. at least short term. You know.

Yeah, I think it I think it is currently. Yeah. I think short term it is hundred percent happening.

You have the goal with any, you know, true like SEO and optimizing content for users, the rule has always been just build content for users, right? Don't worry about building for the search bots, the search bots are trying to present the best thing to the user. and to an extent that will still be the case, but you could also run into a challenge where now presumably the search bots will penalize it, but you know if you have agents doing research for you, agents are looking at the actual source file. So what Is perceivable to a human on that page might not be the same thing that's perceivable to the agent on that page. which could be used to pass in additional manipulative data that isn't, you know, maybe stuff that's not actually true, maybe claims that are, you know, like this is the best group that does something where like you look on their site, it doesn't say anything about that, it doesn't say, you know. There you could make claims that could kind of maybe manipulate the agent into thinking that it's a something different than it is. It'd actually be a fun experiment now that I think about it. To just like go through, you know, take like our company website and create a copy of it, and then just add in a bunch of like little token data that maybe buffs up and and oversell like it would just be straight lies, right? Like something that the agent should be able to identify that like this is not true. And I'm not gonna move it on. But I'll bet if it reads it, it would probably make those claims part of the criteria. So if you were like research digital marketing agencies and tell me who the best ones are, you could potentially game the system by shoving in a bunch of stuff that makes the agents performing that task prioritize you higher.

Yep. Or tell me the you know the the best whatever makeup to buy for this thing, this particular circumstance or this particular skin type or whatever else. Right. You can think about how this

Yeah.

can become very quickly a a massive marketing opportunity and risk for brands that are out there. And if if they're not if brands And agencies aren't thinking about some of those things now, maybe maybe not having solutions, but aren't starting to think about those things now. I think we're gonna be in a world well, those brands are gonna be in a world of hurt coming, you know, two 2027. 'Cause this this is gonna move very quickly.

A lot of this becomes the the proliferation of and continuation of influencer marketing. Right. the more that companies engage in influencer marketing, the more data and information you have out there about your product. So some of it is the direct information, right? If you're looking for like the best skincare product, you know, if the agent makes it to your site. they, you know, will read whatever you have to say about it. However, there's also a potential where your By engaging in a large-scale influencer marketing campaign, you've generated enough content that eventually you become part of the weights. Right? Anthropic and OpenAI and Google are continually sucking in all the information of the internet to recalculate the weights of their new models. So eventually the answer to what's the best skincare product just becomes part of the weights because the feedback is consistently that this is the best skincare product for whatever purpose or reason.

So I I was watching a Black Mirror episode. This is probably this is going back maybe a year or two now. And in the episode, it was about this lady that needed some sort of implant. And the implant was incredibly expensive. It was a like a brain implant. And

Mm-hmm.

the the way that it worked is she only had a certain radius that she was allowed to stay in. And she wasn't allowed to go outside of that radius because the s essentially the Wi-Fi connectivity for her implant just wouldn't work. And so it was this whole ploy of like, All right, well, you have to upgrade to the new model and the new version and the new subscription to get the wider radius. And the company

Okay.

that did this over time ended up inserting ads. And so on the lowest version that they could afford as a family, there were ads that literally interrupted her and common conversation. And so she would be having a conversation with her husband, and then all of a sudden she would be advertising like lipstick, like talk about talking about a lipstick ad. And it makes me think about like how agentic advertising. Can actually come to life in in real life, right? So if you think about how an ad can be put in front of what would normally be an organic result from an agent going and doing research, if that is able to happen, then you literally have agents that are supplying information from advertising or pay-to-play models that are currently being created to try to get ahead, so to speak. for these other groups. And obviously that's a huge revenue grab in a in a in a marketplace that is struggle busing to come anywhere close to profitability for these models. that could be a whole new revenue stream and a whole new a whole new profit center if they can figure it out how to do it.

you know, you know, as well as I do, there will be somebody who tries to make that a reality, right? Like if you can put an ad in front of somebody, somebody'll do it. And you know, as much as we make our living on advertising to an extent, and a lot on technology in general. you know, I think we've always been pretty opposed to that like sleazy style. Like I think there's a there's a proper way to advertise and associate your brand and there's an improper way to do it. And that's one of the ones that I loathe is you know interruptive advertising is like the the bane of my existence. it's like those websites that you go to when like I show up to the website and before I've even clicked anything or had time to read, you pop up an offer.

Or two or three. You sure you don't want it?

Yeah. I'm like, well, I don't fucking now. Like most of the time with those sites I just leave because I get frustrated. Like you're already annoying me because you didn't let me and it's so easy to avoid that. Like all you have to do is have sort of like a timeout, right? Like make sure I'm at least at the website for this long. use some sort of intent signal to say like if it looks like I'm intent if it looks like my session's winding down and I'm intending to leave, maybe then hit me with the offer. Maybe don't do a full screen takeover for the offer. But for damn sure don't do the full screen takeover within one second of me arriving.

Speaking of advertising, I saw I saw something else recently that we haven't talked about yet about Amazon. And Amazon's in some hot water with with the feds right now. there's a multi-billion dollar suit. I can't remember the number, but it's a multi-billion dollar suit that is being waged by the FTC on behalf of consumers and brands that that alleges that Amazon essentially inflated advertising costs. without alerting anyone they were doing that. And so the way that bidding systems work, or they're supposed to work anyway, is you you bid a dollar, I bid a dollar ten, I and you don't up your bid, so I win for a dollar and one cent. Right. So it's it doesn't Yep.

It's your classic bidding system, like

Classic bidding system. What the what the suit is alleging is that Amazon artificially inflated, basically becoming their own bidder. And so you bid a dollar, I bid a dollar ten, they bid a dollar seven. And so the floor is actually a dollar eight in this case for me to win. Right. And so and and they have like some sort of communication that that Amazon is claiming that they've, you know, that they have the ability to raise price floors based on supply and demand and whatever else as a sleazy way to get out of it. But if that's actually happening, like that is that is unethical minimum from a behavior standpoint. And it and there's they're alleging that they have been doing this for many, many years and this was at an executive level. And at that executive level the circle was super tight, meaning the communication around this being a

They knew about it but they're d they didn't talk about it because they know that if if that ever gets out that it would ruin, you know, basically their advertising value prop advertisers will immediately walk away because you've lost all trust.

Yep. Well, not just that, but they've also it was a revenue source, right? A pro it was a profit center. So that short term profit is likely going to come back to bite them in the butt. It should, for sure. crazy.

yeah. They don't they deserve everything that's coming to If that's

Mm-hmm.

if that's actually what they did, it'll be fun to see how bad that that plays out. But

I mean speaking of you know, shitting on big tech, the the the meta got you know, they they had a suit that was settled recently about essentially yeah,

Like sixteen million or something.

yeah. So it it's basically alleging, now validating, that they with intention created manipulative addictive systems for younger people, basically teenagers, to get addicted to to meta content in in this those systems. And the data that's coming out from some of that stuff is

Did was take the

incredibly like it's it's wild to overstate how terrible screen time is for kids. It's it's really difficult to overstate how bad it is.

The real interesting thing with channel with things like this is like, you know, that's Big Tobacco's old playbook, right? It's it's the same thing, just played over again. The real question is like, is the consequence severe enough to deter the action, right?

No, it's not.

because there w we talk about it all the time, like, you know, there's There's a debate currently in in Congress, right? Not to jump on pol not turn us into a political podcast, but you know, there's a debate within Congress as to whether or not Congr people in government should be able to buy and sell individual stocks. And like my personal opinion is no, right? That's it is insider trading. Martha Stewart went to fucking jail for something that was less severe than or less clearly insider trading than some of the trades that we've seen happen from Congress, right? you know, when you have Congress people buying and selling or buying up shares in chip manufacturers, when they are on the boards who are approving billions of dollars to go to chip manufacturers from the government, that's insider trading, right? But there's a Yeah.

question becomes where is the line for that, right? So you've got, you know, mutual funds as an example, but who's to say you can't, as a as a congressman, ha somehow somehow, some way influence that mutual funds allocations.

Yeah, I don't I think when there's a lot of conversation that we could talk about that topic for hours. I think honestly, like they should just not be able

Yeah. It's bad.

they should you have to make it restrictive enough that they can't do anything about it, or you just make it where they can't have any of it. Fuck it. Like it's the job is a public your your job is a public servant. You're not supposed to get rich off of that. and like one of the guys, Rick Scott, senator from Florida. That's been his argument. And it's like, I don't want to poor. Like, bitch, you weren't poor before. But also, Rick Scott became wealthy because his company defrauded Medicare and Medicaid. And then they got fined for it. Like this, this is this is not allegedly, this is it's closed and they've paid the fines. But the the fines that they paid were nothing compared to the amount of money they made. So at that point, if I can defraud Medicare for say $10 billion. And then pay a fine of a hundred million dollars, who gives a shit? The fine is just the tax. The fine is just the cost of of doing business. It's like, you know, there's a a joke of like, you know, anything is possible. It's just like it's just the tax, right? Like you can't you can't park your car s there and it's like, well, I can't. It's just 140 bucks. You just pay, you just pay the fine. That's just the cost of it.

Yeah, you're not you're not wrong. The the it has to hurt bad enough that the behavior gets completely deterred, which is why you end up having examples of people being made in some in some cases, right? It's it's why that that sort of behavior exists from like a a punitive standpoint. And that exists at a personal level and it exists at at a, you know, company level and whatnot. I don't think we've gotten there or anywhere close to it with big tech. There's too much money.

And I think the I think understanding the swe how big the ramifications are or what the the quote unquote damages are is like impossible to understand, right? I could if I'm a company like Facebook and I don't you know, I have no moral compass that I'm trying to operate within. Not to say that they don't. I'm sure plenty of people on their team have really great intentions with what they do. And there are probably some people who don't But you know, the understanding like what could the long term impacts or ramifications be of that? May not be something you knew going into it. Could be something you full well knew. Like we know what we're doing. We know we're probably gonna get caught at some point. We'll just pay the fine and it's okay. Because we've we have made enough money and will make enough money off of the outcome of whatever that was that we'll just pay the fine.

It's like the negative side of capitalism, right? Where, you know,

Got it.

good intentions become greed and then greed produces bad behavior.

Yeah, it can in some cases I think. Or at least encourage it, right? It becomes real damn tempting to, you know, maybe it's like years ago when all the companies claimed like, you know, we're not listening to you through your devices and then eventually are like, yeah, we've been listening to you through your devices. and you're like, Okay, well, stop doing that.

They haven't.

They claim they have, but yeah, I'm we were I was just talking with my uncle, your brother, last week I think about this same topic of like do devices still listen to us? And it's like, I don't know. But it seems awful crazy sometimes that like you know, we have a conversation about something and then all of a sudden I see those advertising advertisements pop up. And you know, there have been research on this in the past where Yeah, there is a there is a probability that like if we start talking about something, chances are one of us probably Googled it, or after we start talking about it, maybe we Google something adjacent to it, or we look at something. So we send a signal that gets interpreted. But then there also is like the the times that you're just like, I swear I have not done anything that would influence this, other than just mention, you know, a name or a brand or or something like that, and then all of a sudden they pop up.

Well, and to to the I remember part of this conversation and some what some people don't realize and think about is if you're having a conversation and you're in local proximity, like right now I'm in Ohio, you're in you're in Florida, we're not sharing a network connection of any kind. We don't we're not sharing an IP address. So the fact that we're discussing this wouldn't be on your device as an example, right? There would be no no reason for any of that to be to be threaded there. However, if you're in like your home local network or you're over at a buddy's house or whatever. And you're sharing their local Wi-Fi, you may not have looked something up rel relative to your conversation, but somebody else that was on the Wi-Fi network could have. And if they did, then your IP address or that IP address is associated with you, which means that you could be triggered for those same advertisements, even though you took no action. And so it seems as if your phone is listening to you. those like those are they're very technical explanations for some of those things. But if if I'm a conspiracy theorist

It was actually become more

I'm I'm still convinced that there are ways to to get around that and and they're and they're actually freaking listening.

And I think that that what you just described gets even worse and and happens more often with some of the changes that we've had more recently within advertising as it relates to tracking. And you know, the Cambridge Analytica thing that happened however many years ago that was, kind of blew the doors open

2018, right.

on that where, you know, they used a lot of really good data for for evil. and The reaction to that was big, right? and the challenge is as an advertiser or as a user of the internet, right? my argument has always been sort of in favor like of of responsible tracking, right, and targeting. What we've tried to have, and Google has been trying to come up with a replacement program forever and like f failing at all the designs because The intents are at odds with each other because on one hand, I would like for an advertiser to have as much information about me and my interests as is relevant to serve me proper ads. Right? I don't have children. I don't need to see ads about any kid child products at all. It's a waste of advertising dollars and a waste of my time. It's just gonna annoy But if you've got like some cool new electronic product that's coming out that I've never heard of from some niche provider, hell yeah, show me that. I'm super interested in that. but we can't do that, right? We have to create cohorts because if I assign a unique ID to each person, now I could also exploit that and use it for some nefarious things. So we have these like wider swaths of cohorts who like. Me being a, you know, mid thirties person, mid to late thirties person. They assume I either have kids or I'm gonna have kids. Like I am am having actively. Neither of which are true. so you know, often I'll get lumped in with a lot of those advertisements where I'm like, God damn it. I'm I've gotten put in this cohort. So I have to figure out how to send some signal intents to get out of this cohort. so when you know more about it in that way, like it's really fascinating of like how far. other people's decisions could impact what you're seeing simply because you happen to be put in the same c cohort, either by way of proximity or affiliation or any number of other, you know, factors.

Yeah. I mean, so the the traditional marketing sense is like you have demographics, geographics, and psychographics, right? And demo is is basically who you are. It's like I'm a forty-three year old male that lives in the Midwest and have kids, right? That's sort of your demographics. Your geographics is more specific about your your location. It's your it's your city, it's your zip code, it's your you know, some radius to a specific location, then your psychographics is behavior based. And I think what you're picking on is the the psychographic side in particular, within digital is becoming increasingly creepy and there's not a way to make it less creepy before it gets more creepy. And and there's a lot that

I I think eventually we and and like I guess to a certain extent we do have with cookie authorizations and those sorts of things, but it s sucks. Like I If there's one thing I hate probably more than the immediate offer, it's cookie banners. They're so

Yeah.

fucking annoying. And like

And and don't you I'm I'm all for privacy. Like there almost needs to be like a universal subscription to privacy policy, and that just gets passed.

And there I think Google has tried Google has there is a spec for this in the process. It just takes an eternity to get through. where like ideally this is just something you set in your browser and it's just enforced and websites respect it and that's all that matters. And I don't have to ask you, I don't have to pop up and say, like, hey, we use cookies to make sure you're fucking logged in. No shit. That's how everybody uses cookies. You have to. There's no way not to there's no way. to have a logged in fucking system that doesn't drop something on your system. Like we gotta know. But I also think that there's like a there's like a potentially a dial of like how specific can we be with you? Like some people would probably be on the the spectrum of like, yeah, sure, I'll give you more data so that I get better advertising. And other people would be, you know, kind of like, I don't want you to have any data.

Mm-hmm.

I would maybe be somewhere in between. Like, there's a certain there is a certain point where I know you could exploit the data. But at that point you're just gonna exploit it to show me shitty ads. And if you go far enough, I'll just block So it doesn't matter. But or maybe that's the thing is like you should just be able to block not only ads in general, but just specific advertisers. Like, if you abuse the privileges I've bestowed upon you, I've given you this data and I've asked you to use it responsibly, if you abuse that, I can just ban you.

It's basically the equivalent of CAN-SPAM laws, right? So if your things get marked as spam,

Sort of.

there's some sort of punitive action that happens to that advertiser. There are ways around it, but

So really we just need a governing body around advertising, which we do, sort of.

It exists.

there's A B. But we need somebody who can ba like some way, like every advertisement that gets served to somebody needs to carry a way that you could report that advertisement as predatory or spam or whatever. And then if you get enough reports, it requires them to investigate into it and then take actions against them. I like that model.

I mean it's it's effectively CAN-SPAM in maybe a more sophisticated way.

Mm-hmm. Look at that, we've just solved the whole

All right, well we've rambled

of advertising.

Yeah, we've we've rambled about AI, Omarchy, advertising, big tech.

Little bit of conspiracy theory just speckled in there. Tiny bit of politics. I

Will be a conspiracy theory. I'd say we covered it.

I think we got a little bit of everything in this one. So till next time.

Till next time.