Hey 

[00:00:00] Katherine Druckman: everyone. I am Katherine Druckman. Thank you for tuning into reality. 2.0 again. Today I'm talking to doc Searls and Petros and we have a lot to talk about as usual, but there's been some really big things that have come out recently in the news. We're going to talk a little bit about Europe and GDPR and IAB.

we're going to talk about Facebook. Their shares tanked this week. We're going to talk about Amazon, which did really well with their advertising, depending on your perspective. Um, so yeah, we're going to talk about this whole ecosystem. We might, we might bring in a little Google FLoC too, so with that, what we were just talking about before we started recording was actually, we started out with Facebook and it's all of this stuff is so tied together.

Because at its heart is basically surveillance capitalism, right? Some are winners and some are losers. I would argue we were all the losers, even, even the shareholders and Amazon.

[00:00:58] Doc Searls: We're positioned to be winners as, as participants, as individuals. I think we're in a good place to be winners of a sort.

It depends. I mean, it's an interesting, it came to me just a moment ago, as you were talking that, uh, this may be the beginning of a crash and maybe the, the crash that we've been waiting for for a long time may happen. 

[00:01:20] Petros Koutoupis: Um, sure. Hope not. I'm getting tired of these crashes. 

[00:01:23] Doc Searls: There's a house of cards. 

[00:01:24] Katherine Druckman: Everyone's 401k is in the toilet.

Oh 

[00:01:27] Petros Koutoupis: yeah, that's true. I logged in to look at my 401k at last week and I was like, Holy crap. 

[00:01:36] Katherine Druckman: You'll never retire Petros. You're never going to retire no matter how hard you work. 

[00:01:43] Doc Searls: Uh, but you know, Tim Wong, who's an old friend wrote a book that came out in 2020 called subprime attention crisis. And his case was basically that the, the house of cards that was the mortgage backed securities, um, Is similar to, I mean, that the, that ad tech is, is a bubble in the same way, which is what I wrote about in 2008.

And it still hasn't happened. He wrote that in 2020 still hasn't happened. And I'm not sure it will happen in this case, but it's poised for that because there's as, um, Michael burry puts it in the big, short, both the movie and the book, whenever you have a great deal of complexity and fraud, um, And, you know, align that goes nowhere.

But up there is a great deal of faith in something that's full of complexity and fraud. You've got a bubble that's waiting to burst. And when my library did in that case was bet against it by shorting it. And, um, I don't know if anybody's shorted or found a way to short the, uh, the ed tech world, but if there was there's, this is probably the biggest.

Example of something happening that threatens to cause that crash. Um, but a problem for that crash is that there's not a, there aren't the wall street firms in this, that the kind of companies we had with the wall street firms, that dependence of what early on that, um, Google. Um, Amazon who are two big companies in the advertising business have giant businesses elsewhere.

They just do really well with advertising. We could live without it. Facebook can't live without it, but Facebook has a big excuse, which is people are letting us, you know, they sign in that's part of the terms. They can turn it off if they want it. So they've, they're in good shape too. It's the rest of the system that's, which has all of the small publications, every website that depends on to some degree on a, on a, on surveillance based advertising is in trouble from that it's certainly in Europe.

And, but as the secondary effect in the U S. 

[00:03:58] Katherine (2): What's what's particularly interesting too. So, so we think of, you know, the big, huge moneymakers in ad tech space, Google, Amazon, Facebook, um, But really apple had this massive impact and apple, you know, the apple privacy features are Facebook's crash, but also to an extent Google's success like Google did not succeed alone.

[00:04:20] Katherine Druckman: They have a cushy relationship with apple, which boosts their advertising revenue, ultimately because, um, I mean, because they have a slightly, let's say smoother path to iOS users than Facebook does and their data . Uh, and then Amazon for the, this is the first time in their earnings reports that they have disclosed the amount of money they're making from advertising, which is interesting.

It was, I believe 7% of their revenue while AWS. AWS is a, is a big chunk, but, but advertising thing 7% is I think when they first announced AWS earnings, I want to say it was a big deal, that it was 13% of their revenue.

You're like, I've read that number recently anyway. 7% a big chunk. So, yeah. It's, all of these things fit together and then. One company like apple, um, even making what I would consider or what privacy activists would consider a pretty minor concession had a pretty significant impact on a company like Facebook.

Anyway. 

[00:05:31] Doc Searls: Yeah. I just put a couple links in the chat that you can share it. We can share with the, uh, with the, uh, podcast summary, but 31 billion a year in the advertising business is one of them. You know, 9.7 billion in the last quarter. I think it's somewhere it's, um, it's a. You know, it, it's a big thing and the margins are high, you know, and they are in a really great position as a, as an advertising company.

Cause they, they have a much more, a much clearer idea of what the user might want based on what they've they know they've actually bought, uh, to the degree that they track them that way. Uh, in, in the long run though, I think, I mean, if I look, I mean, this is, this is actually part of the problem with, with ad tech.

So if I go to Amazon, Right now. And I'm the heavy average. I probably spend thousands a year on average Amazon. And. You know, I look for who has keeps shopping for continuing teaching by again, none of those things. Am I interested in buying again? None of those things keep watching while sure. I have Amazon prime is a TV channel.

Um, I know everything is on there. You know, I go there every few nights and I know it's there. I, they know where I'm at with it. It's not. I need to know that, you know, pick up where you left off is another thing. Here's a whole bunch of landscape lighting, which I've already bought and not from them and cheaper than them.

I might add. And I'm not going to buy that again. You know, this is very placed lighting. That's 16 years old. It will be dead in another 16 years. So the notion that you're going to keep an incorrect belief, that these companies have, that what we buy is what we've already bought. While they're busy blowing smoke up their own ass and hours saying, we know you so well.

We know what you're going to buy is also absolute bullshit. They, for the most part, they do not know. They can't know us. We're human beings. We're not robots. We're not that hard to figure out. Um, I mean, one of the, by again, You know, I'm looking here it's for some ink, some printer ink that's for one of the printers I had, that's dead.

I'm never going to buy that again. You know, uh, kind for 10, I've bought maybe a hundred different batteries from them because we've, we're running this house entirely and rechargeable batteries. I'll never buy any more of that. You know, um, I'm fully outfitted with air escape, food containers, um, everything here is stuff I'm not going to buy again.

Here's underwear, Hanes underwear. Um, The I read this, the average male uses his underwear for seven years. I don't know if this is true or not, but I think it probably is. Right. So, um, no comments catch me in another seven years. We don't, we don't, we, we do wash it more often than not, but, but this notion that you're going to always buy what you've already bought is crazy, but they don't have any better intelligence than that.

And th the problem here. When you're looking at the marketplace at Tyler from the seller side, and you're looking at what businesses do entirely through the lens of what are the big guys doing? You know, this is why I keep saying that the parties that are in trouble here are not so much Amazon. And, and Google and apple, but the smaller companies that depend on them, you know, the, the, the poor websites that don't have any other way to make money, you know, then geez, will, you know, if we go ahead and run Taboola and a bunch of other crap that, you know, that's based on tracking us, we're going to pull in a few million dollars a month or a year.

How can we give up? Right. But what's behind that as Dr. Fou who has been on the show a couple of times has told us go back and look at those shows. They're good. Um, is that they're full of fraud. You know, those things are really bad, but here's the EU yesterday saying you guys not only did not get consent the right way.

You're hiding behind, you know, legitimate interest for your business when your interest is not legitimate, give all that data back or blow it up. And that's where they're in trouble right now is they, I don't even know if they know where to find the stupid data that they've got. It's all with third parties.

I mean, that's part of the scramble is going on here right now and nobody's paying attention to that part. 

[00:09:51] Katherine Druckman: So. So related, I think,something you brought up was the, sorry, the EU GDPR ruling that, popups. Unlawful. I wondered if you wanted to tell us a little bit more about that, because that just as a little background in case you've never heard this show before, which I know.

Well, anyway, um, we, we talk about the ridiculousness of pop-ups a lot, so I thought it was particularly interesting that you sent this link over. Um, well, 

[00:10:24] Petros Koutoupis: before, before we get into that, I, I, I actually used to, I went to college with. Yeah, with a buddy of mine. And, you know, we worked together after college and then he went off to do his own thing out on the west coast.

And he took a lot of pride at the first company he worked at when he started, you know, start a new life on the west coast. And it was for an ad based company that made. Pop-up garbage and he knew people hated him and what he did by, uh, you know, professionally and I used to pick on him all the time. I don't know what he does now.

I kind of lost touch with him, but, uh, just, I don't every single time I think of pop-up, you know, tech, he's the one that always comes to mind. And I actually knew somebody that most people. I would hate because of that. I mean, we all hate pop-ups. 

[00:11:24] Katherine Druckman: Yeah, we do it well, but they mean specifically those consent messages.

So IAB Europe has, has something called a, uh, transparency and consent framework. And that is what a lot of big tech companies rely on. I believe it, it helps them to comply with GDPR regulations, but apparently it was found to be not true, which is what is big news. Because again, a lot of people are relying on this and, you know, thinking they're compliant and now, oops, you're not compliant.

So I think Doc can probably unpack a little bit of that more. 

[00:11:55] Doc Searls: So Ethan Zuckerman who's. I don't know if he's what we were talking about, but, uh, he's an old friend and colleague, back in 2014, he put, he issued a public apology for having created one of those annoying forms of advertising when he was back at tripod or something.

One of those, one of those nineties.com E kind of companies. Um, and, uh, yeah, I've seen that. That's yeah, just put that in the chat as well. It's um, I mean, I. I thought it was really smooth on his part to step forward and apologize for that. I don't think I had that. I mean, very little guilt should rest on his shoulders for doing, uh, you know, whatever it was that he did.

Actually, the thing I put in the chat is not that, but it doesn't matter. It's uh, I mean, to me that, well, we can go in several directions with this one. Is that the GDPR and I was just looking at up here cause I had too many tabs open and don't want to look through them to find a one tab that had it, but there are six ways.

There are six reasons that you, that the GDPR and article six gave for basically being able to track people. And one of them was called, um, legitimate interest. When is you asked for. And, um, and the other, and another one is legitimate interest. In other words, I can track you if I have a legitimate interest and what happened with the GDPR, which went into force on May 25th, 2018, which I remember well, because May 25th is our wedding anniversary.

Uh, Joyce and me, But that was the point at the time at which the GDPR became enforceable. And I wrote a bunch of stuff in Linux journal about now it happens. Now the whole thing comes down. Now this thing is enforceable. People are going to pay giant fines and nothing happened. Almost nothing happened because there was no enforcement.

And what happened is IAB Europe, which is a little different than IB in the us. But the interactive advertising bureau came up with some methods by which you could. Either or both claim legitimate interest and have a way to consent. And what, what the Belgian, um, data protection authority, along with the rest of your familiar way?

I read it anyway, said, Nope, both of those are wrong. Stop it immediately and, and blow up the data you've got on people. And that's that? That's the precipitating event. That's the first really big torpedo into the side. The IRB in Europe and which is the, again, the IB is the, is the, uh, you know, the, the advertising society for online advertising in Europe.

But there's one in the U S too. That's even bigger. Anyway. Um, it's an open question whether or not that'll happen. And again, I think. Google Facebook and Amazon are probably in fine shape with this, but

please put less. So, but it's important to know that a couple of things about Facebook. When is that? You know, when you, when you become a Facebook member, you have agreed to this thing, you have agreed to be part of their system and they have what the Nixon administration calls, calls plotted cause plausible deniability.

For, for having an excuse, you know, then they can follow you because you agreed to it. The other thing is that they have a whole bunch of opt-outs you can use, you can opt out of lots of kinds of targeted advertising. It doesn't mean they don't know what you're doing, but it does mean that they can't advertise directly at you.

Um,

[00:15:30] Katherine Druckman: The, uh, speed bumps there that apple throughout is empowering users to block a lot of that. So, yes, even once you signed up, you are consented, but you know, apple allows user to put up something of a wall that denies them access to certain data. And, and they're saying that it's, it's a $10 billion loss. Uh, in the upcoming year do just due to that privacy policy and that's, you know, that's a, that's a pretty big impact.

[00:16:00] Doc Searls: It's a pretty big impact. And it's the claim to impact. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what that's a very Goldwater said in the, in the, when was it? It was like in the, in the sixties, he said a billion here, a billion there sooner or later, you're talking about real money. Um, I wrote a piece about apple, you know, plus versus data and tech way back in may of last year.

Um, put that in the chat to the, you know, an apple had a really great ad, all our answer, great. You know, the called privacy that's iPhone. And, and it was all about how you can, and it shows this guy clicking on something that says, ask ads, not to track and. Crackers have been following them around everywhere.

This guy walking through the world and you accumulates more and more people looking over his shoulder and reading his stuff and he hits, ask ads not to track. And it blows all of them up. Well, that's actually not how it works. Um, so that was a little slight of meaning on Apple's part. First of all, you're asking them, you're not telling them you can't stop it.

They can still choose not to. That's one thing. . And the other is you don't blow them up all at once because you know, part of, part of the way they work. Cause you can on a P if you've not allowed them to tr if you've allowed them to track, you can still turn them off at a one by one basis. That's not an especially effective thing.

So there's a little of. Got a lot of pushback on that from, um, uh, daring fireball among other, uh, among other places. But, um, but it's still, you know, I it's doubtful to me how much effect that's had on. On Facebook. First of all, it only affects them online. I'm on a app. Um, if they've turned it off on their app, how much has it really killed them?

I mean, and, and it doesn't exclude other kinds of advertising. You're talking, you're in a, you're in a group. That's all about sports. You get ads, ads for sports. It may not be personal, but they could still an advertising that way. And that's the old fashioned kind of what I was going to still works fine.

I, I dunno. I, I, 

[00:18:11] Petros Koutoupis: I love the Facebook advertisements because they, they share some of the most entertaining things with me. I cannot begin to explain to you. It's like, You get special? I get special advertisements and I don't, I don't know why I don't do anything strange on Facebook. I mean, most of my stuff, 

[00:18:34] Katherine Druckman: so I think you're male and I'm a certain age.

I think that's all it takes. 

[00:18:40] Petros Koutoupis: So, you know, my Facebook profile. I use it just like any normal, well, no, I don't really use it very much. I, my wife and friends typically tag me when something is going on. Uh, I'm a part of a few Facebook groups, which are just nerdy groups. Like I'm a part of a retro computing group.

Retro gaming group. Uh, some very specific like movie groups, like an alien franchise movie group. I liked daily and franchise, but anyway, I, nothing out of the ordinary. I don't do anything out of the ordinary. And yet all of a sudden I get advertisements for like adult toys and, you know, um, men's, you know, You know, a special care for their, you know, genitalia or just, you know, what did I share with you, Catherine?

I remember I gotta go pull it up now. I mean, even my. Just, it just like the strangest things and it's not just male stuff. I mean, it's even, it's like everything and it's just strange. And you know, if my phone is actively listening to me, it knows that I have a filthy mouth and I just say like a bunch of.

You know, very like mine in the gutter stuff. So who knows, maybe it's picking up on the things that I'm saying, but I open up Facebook and it's like, holy crap, what is this? And I ended up sharing it with Catherine or some others. And I mean, it's, everyone has a good time with it. So I don't know why people are complaining.

I find it entertaining.

Well, this 

[00:20:26] Doc Searls: is, this is meaningful because, um, I mean advertising, I mean, I was in the advertising business for much of my life and I was in the creative part of it. And you want to be entertaining. Right. And a lot of, a lot of ads are very entertaining and. And I think a lot of people would turn it off for exactly that reason.

And, and there's also what, you know what, um, Phil Malone, who's a lawyer and he's now at Stanford when he was still hanging around the Berkman center at Harvard, um, film alone, by the way, is the guy who led the. Us government's prosecution of Microsoft back in the nineties or the early odds, great guy. Um, but he said, you know, when you've got no harm, you have no case.

And what's the harm. I mean, that's really, I mean, in the, I mean, imagine for Petros for your imagine there's a, like a charge discharge, um, You know, that has zero at the top and is a minus on one side, a plus on the other, an undercharged side is all of the entertaining or interesting ads that you've got.

And on the minus side is not heads you don't like, but it adds that have harmed you, you know, I would say on Facebook and most places, there's not a whole lot on the, on the minus side, that is something that accrues to the favor of the Facebooks of the world. You know, so, you know, there, that's part of the picture within the opposites of harm, um, obvious harm.

Now in, in Europe, they're alleging that your privacy is armed. That's enough. If your privacy is violated, that's a bad thing. And frankly, I think you get ads that are just as entertaining without violating your privacy either. I don't think that's a hard thing. Um, and I think that's really the frontier of advertising right now.

How can you, how can their thinking of it? How can we track people without cookies rather than how can we do the most creative possible advertising? That's based on a topic that somebody is looking at rather than how, how we finger. 

[00:22:32] Katherine Druckman: I do so much better if they just targeted Reno, a more fun stuff that everybody minus so boring.

I feel so like left out, but yeah, I get like a spread on Facebook. Anyway, I get espresso machines. And what was it? Peach ice tea mix. I was, we were, we were exchanging notes on our, at or targeted ads the other day. And then finally I got one that I was really excited about. It was a climbing. So I thought it was something dirty and I was like, oh, they think I'm fun.

And then no, it was climbing. And I think they think I'm sporty and athletic, which is also great. Not true. Um, but yeah, anyways, it seems totally random was my point. Some of Petra says that we can't talk about it on the shelf. The. Let's say it or obscene or something. I 

[00:23:15] Petros Koutoupis: recognize that climbing harness right away.

Since my I've taken my kids rock climbing, numerous times 

[00:23:21] Katherine Druckman: I have been rock climbing. I it's been awhile. So, so 

[00:23:25] Doc Searls: yeah, I've been hit by rocks. I have not been rock climbing. 

[00:23:31] Katherine Druckman: They make it to the top. I think now I don't know if I'd get like five feet up. 

[00:23:36] Doc Searls: I mean, I prefer climbing metal structures more than rocks because.

When you lack flexibility, that's a much easier thing to climb. Um, and you can actually get a better grip on stuff than you can on a rock, but I love rocks. So, um, but here's an interesting thing. So, uh, yesterday, um, uh, the, the guest on fless weekly, the other podcast that we're both on, um, is. Uh, was, uh, Elliot Williams.

Who's the new editor and chief of day. And they have really minimal tracking. They don't have much, and they actually job it out to somebody. Um, and I don't see any ads and I look at it with most of the browsers that I use, but on the browser that I use that has the blocks tracking, but does it block ads?

Um, I see ads and the ads are for. Things that are interesting on Hackaday because they're interesting to hackers. And to me, that's, that's, that's what we were doing with Linux journal. I mean, Linux journal was a pretty narrowly focused publication and the ads that we were getting toward the end of our, our life, there were relevant to anybody who cared about Linux and cared about open source.

And there's a lot of that in the world, you know? So, I mean, I'm a fan of advertising. I'm just a fan of good advertising. You know, that's creative and, and relevant to the topic or the, the kind of, you know, viewer or listener that you've got. Here's an interesting thing.

The Ms. People, if you're this person and you declare yourself, I am a business person and I read this. What, what part of a newspaper? The New York times the Washington post, or, or the Dallas morning? Um, you know, any of those, what section do you think that business people go to first? If any of them 

[00:25:38] Katherine Druckman: crossword, 

[00:25:41] Doc Searls: it's actually sports and sports people go to sports.

And so if you're looking to hit business people, you hit them in the sports section. And is that, that you're gonna show them a CA you know, um, you know, a catcher's Mitt or a tennis racket. Tell them about, you know, some investment product or, you know, whatever else you're selling. Uh, you know, it's like that.

I mean, but, but you can know those kinds of things about your readers or viewers without tracking every one of them personally. 

[00:26:14] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. So, so, you know, we didn't talk about, uh, Google switching from flock to topics. And I, you know, I feel like we, we need to at least put it out there. I unfortunately have not researched nearly enough to talk about it, all that competently, but I encourage everybody else to, and I will include some links, but it felt like we needed to mention it because of the, the general, you know, subject matter for today.

Um, But yeah, I mean, I think the, the, the issue is really just that the, the landscape that all these, these big advertising tech companies are operating in is changing really quickly. Right? It's there a lot of things, a lot of, a lot of the mechanisms by which they get the data they use to target ads there, it's just, it's in constant flux.

And I think more so right now than it has been in a while, it was sort of. You know, I think there were early days when it was just new and interesting and cool, and nobody really thought about it as harmful. And then people said, Hey, wait a second. But now we're in a period where everyone's like, okay, well now we're doing stuff about it.

Maybe. So I dunno. It's a, yeah, it will be interesting being a shareholder in these companies and interesting thing right now, I guess.

[00:27:29] Doc Searls: Yeah, to me the, I mean, uh, I, I don't, I have to say I was scrambling around looking for I'm looking at my outward memory, um, which is the browser for the open tab I had on, on flog versus topics. Uh, Th the main thing though about that is that as long as Google wants to continue following you personally, without your really explicit consent, um, it's wrong, you know, flock was wrong for that reason.

And if topics to be sounds great, if what you're trying to do is advertising is relevant to a topic, but then you kind of miss. The stuff that I, like, I just mentioned that, you know, if you're a business person, you might be looking at sports first, you know, or, you know, if you're a hunter, you might be looking at some, you know, socks or something.

I don't know. I mean, there are lots of, there are lots of correlations that might be interesting, but probably they are doing those correlations. So it doesn't matter. Um, but as long as they it's strange to me that Google is especially seems very, very committed to. Wanting to track people. And I know to pretty high level Google people who have left that left the company, at least in part, because they didn't want to be in any more arguments with the people who were fully committed to tracking people and didn't get the moral compromise about that.

But in the case of one of them, when I asked him, does he want to fight Google? He said, no, I want to fight. But the reason he wants to fight Facebook is not Facebook's advertising. It's that what Facebook wants to do with meta and the metaverse he thinks is actually pretty evil. Um, so that's and the headstart, he thinks that they have, there is really creepy.

So that's a different topic, but, you know, but in both cases, there's a sense of having been defeated inside that environment. 

[00:29:39] Katherine Druckman: I'm trying to find out as to eff written anything about, um, Google topics. I can't find anything, but so the eff came down pretty hard against a flock 

[00:29:51] Doc Searls: I would look at the Corpus of Cory Doctorow, who was at the eff, and it has a daily newsletter called pluralist, which I cannot recommend too highly.

It is just, I don't know how he does it. I, he, he writes as if he has a team of people behind him and maybe he does, but his stuff is so thoroughly knowing it blows my mind. Um, but I'm sure if you look up Corey and pluralist, Uh, you'll find something about flock and something about the whole thing, which is, this is what we do online now.

Right. We just put all that other people. Cause you know, the shit's out there. Right. That's 

[00:30:33] Petros Koutoupis: true. What the floc are you talking 

[00:30:35] Doc Searls: about? Yeah, exactly.

[00:30:38] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. So, uh, anyway, can't remember. Yeah, it is because I know our listeners want to hear me Google stuff. Actually. I'm not Googling anything I'm ducking, but I can't help myself. I still say Google. Um, but yeah, I'm thinking have we covered if we covered all of the things, I don't remember. 

[00:31:01] Petros Koutoupis: I feel like I'm still amazed.

I'm still amazed at the 26% drop in share prices for Facebook. I mean that big of an impact on their earnings report. I mean, holy crap. And I don't know, I I'm, I really want to start like throwing a bunch of money buying Facebook shares. Right.

[00:31:20] Doc Searls: I, this probably not a bad idea. I hate to say that it probably isn't well, you know, I 

[00:31:26] Katherine Druckman: think I suspect there, um,

They are switching focus to they're going to put a lot into VR and, and, uh, the metaverse stuff and the Facebook, as we know it is not necessarily, even there they're a priority anymore. 

[00:31:44] Petros Koutoupis: I dunno, 

[00:31:44] Doc Searls: I'm still, it has to be, I mean, it's, um, it's like they have a Google say we don't care about search anymore.

I think they do. Yeah. 

[00:31:52] Petros Koutoupis: I, um, honestly I think, remember when Facebook decided that they were going to create this universal cryptocurrency that, uh, take over the world and remember once upon a time. Facebook was going to release their own Facebook phone. And then it never really took off. And it ended up being a skin or a, um, a launcher on Android falls and that never took off.

And then they abandoned the idea. You know, Facebook comes out with all these, you know, these huge ideas and for one reason or another. It never takes off and then they abandon it. And this whole, like metaverse thing I think is going to be the exact same thing. They made a huge, big deal about it, just like they did with everything else.

And I think it's just going to flop like everything else. They do one thing and they do it well. Right. And you know, sometimes you just gotta stick with what you do best, 

[00:32:58] Katherine Druckman: but these things can be faddish too. Right. No, it's generational younger people, 

[00:33:05] Petros Koutoupis: young kids, young kids don't care about Facebook.

They've moved on they're they're using Tik TOK or, you know, something else. They don't care about Facebook anymore. It's it's old people like us that use Facebook so we can, you know, share pictures of our, our pets or our children or grandchild. 

[00:33:28] Katherine Druckman: Yeah. And, uh, but yeah, so which, you know, makes sense where they're putting so much, so many resources behind the metaverse and changing their name.

So, yeah. Anyway, have we thoroughly beaten all of these topics to death? 

[00:33:46] Doc Searls: Just looked up, um, a young person. I know, I wouldn't say. Oh, so they don't look them up. And, um, who's on Facebook and you know, the last post was October of last year and my, my 

[00:34:00] Petros Koutoupis: point exactly.

I mean, 

[00:34:03] Doc Searls: and it's like still happy was the post and it's, and I think it's, you know, it's a placeholder for them. Like I'm there. I got it. That's what. You know, there's a sample of one. I don't know. I mean, certainly there's it. I mean, I'm more and more active there because more and more of my cohort and generation are doing two things.

One is. Talking to each other while we're still here and the other is dying off. So there's lots and lots of processing about people dying. I hate to say that, but when you're in your seventies, you get that you get a lot of people dying off and, um, and, and necessarily processing and you can't see each other now.

So thank you, pandemic. Um, so it's just do it here and it's kinda, it's kind of sad and good at the same time, because at least we have that. You know, it's kind of, it's kind of crazy, but that's, you know, I'm reminded of the, um, a wicked, um, a onion and a wicked onion story from a few years ago, which is burning and burying the baby boomers will, ed will add 2 trillion to the, to global wealth or something like that.

Uh, so, but I think there's something to. 

[00:35:24] Katherine Druckman: Okay.

So, yeah, I think, yeah, I think, uh, I think we've covered it, you know, like, as you say music up until next time