I was thinking about big oil.
What?
I’ve been really honest
with a very weird
thing to sit around
thinking about, but I think
about big oil and how
they miss an opportunity.
And this sort of goes
into a couple episodes ago.
I talked about in shitification.
This relates in that I’m also
thinking about self-preservation.
So I’m going to start
with big oil companies.
They are going to die out.
We have all the climate crisis.
We have the energy crisis.
Oil is a finite resource.
So eventually it will run out.
And that should have
been the thought they had.
They knew this back in the ’70s.
They had models of
how long oil is going to
last, how long we can
extract oil from the earth.
The impact is having on the climate.
They knew all this in
the ’70s and ’80s and
just decided to keep
it quiet and move along
with the status quo
as if nothing was wrong.
And that to me, it was a
distinct lack of foresight.
Because if at that time
the big oil companies
weren’t thinking of
themselves as oil companies,
as energy companies,
they could have been at
the forefront of developing the
new technologies that we need now.
So imagine if Exxon, I
don’t know if Exxon’s
a company anymore, BP,
anything, just a big oil company.
Back in the ’80s had said,
we’re not just an oil company.
We are an energy
company and take a minute
amount of their profits,
because we know they
make billions and billions
of dollars every year.
We put it into alternative energy research.
So they could have been the ones in the
’90s, in the early 2000s, to come out with
feasible solar panels,
a new grid that works
off of their technology
that’s proprietary.
So they own it.
They could have ended up being the
foundation for all energy at the moment.
They could have created hybrid systems.
So as oil became
less viable, their other
technologies could grow
and they would never
lose any of the profits that
they so desperately want.
Now there is a
short-sightedness in that,
well, 20, 30 years from
now, I’m going to be
dead or I’m not going
to be in this position.
All I care about is money and power.
That’s fine, but it shows
that you’re not really
thinking about the
future because if climate
change strikes us all
down in the next five
years, whether you’re
rich or not isn’t going
to matter very much, you’re
still going to be involved.
I also did an episode about
billionaires trying to make bunkers.
And the obvious failures there, again, show
a very distinct short-sightedness when they
should be trying to solve the problem
not just trying to survive the fallout.
But if they had
done this, if the big oil
companies had thought
of themselves as energy
companies and created
new energies in the past, so in
the 70s and 80s and 90s,
they would have maintained
a dominant market share
essentially for all of eternity.
And the oil companies
that didn’t think forward,
that didn’t try to develop
anything new, would die out.
And then you would
end up with one massive
company that controls
all the energy in the world.
And that is what they want.
So they actually missed by not innovating.
They missed the opportunities to be the
like despots they really, really want to be.
And now we’ve hit this weird stage
where we can see storms have increased.
Huge chunks of the earth are on fire.
And this is happening
more and more every year.
We have record heat waves.
But then we have the
recent Republican debate.
The legitimately saying, I want to
be president and this is what I think.
The ocean hits 101 degrees
off the coast of Florida.
The climate change.
The climate change.
The climate change agenda is a hoax.
But you don’t have
to be a scientist to see
that there are changes
of foot, that weather
has changed in the
last 10, 15, 20 years,
that things have gotten
noticeably worse, that
water in the ocean is
hotter than it should be.
And again, this is
talking about short term
gains at the risk of
self preservation in the
future because I don’t necessarily
just want to be successful now.
I want to be successful
into the future so
much so that my kids
can be successful in the
future and other generations
that follow their end.
I guess I don’t know, call me selfish.
I don’t know.
There are other ways
this is manifested as
well that I’m really enjoying right
now because we’re seeing Trump.
And recently, Giuliani
went to court and since
Trump isn’t paying legal bills
anymore, everyone’s rolling on him.
So Giuliani goes to
court and admits that he
lied and all these other people are
going to court and admitting their lie.
They lied.
And that is because
you have Trump, he said,
like, oh, if you don’t support
me, I will take care of you.
But we’ve seen he doesn’t support anyone.
He doesn’t take care of anyone.
He doesn’t spend any money.
You can go on the Internet and find all the
stories about people who have done work for
him contract work and
he just doesn’t pay out.
He just doesn’t pay them
and he holds them up in
courts for years and years
and then pays a fraction.
There was one I listened to.
It was this morning or
yesterday and it was a guy telling
a story of his friend had a
$3 million contract with Trump.
He just held off not
paying, dragged him
through courts and whatnot
ended up offering 1.5 million.
That guy went and paid off everyone who
had worked for him and then killed himself.
And he was, people were saying, like,
why don’t you give Trump a chance?
And he’s like, well,
because essentially Trump
inadvertently murdered
one of my friends.
What Trump is missing is
that by not taking care of
these people around him,
he’s not preserving himself.
Those people aren’t
going to take care of him.
It’s not going to go
forward into the future.
He’s not got a protective group
around him that’s going to hold.
And that’s what he really needs.
So, I mean, I don’t
know what’s going to
happen with the courts
and whatnot in America.
I’m very interested to see.
I would really like to
see Trump do jail time
because it’s so obvious that
he’s committed so many crimes.
I don’t know if they’re going to do it.
Like the worst thing
they did to Nixon when
he broke the rules
would say, like, okay, you
have to not be president
anymore, which is
scary because it means he
can commit all these crimes.
But because he was president,
he’s not going to go to prison.
I would really like to see him in prison.
Certainly another version of the same thing
is lack of self preservation and relates to
the in certification
episode streaming services.
We are watching streaming services
suffer the same fate in real time.
We had TV and then
we had cable and then we
had streaming streaming
was good and new and exciting.
We had movies on our
TV and it was really cool.
Then very recently, all these companies
are like, well, Netflix is working.
So I want to make our net fix.
Netflix we’re going to make Disney plus.
We’re going to make HBO.
We’re going to make this.
We’re going to have a million services.
Now I have to pay for packages.
So now it comes to,
well, let’s screw the
users, the stuff that
they liked that way
they were paying for
that they’re happy about.
Let’s screw it because
I’m not getting a
big enough cut for
myself, which means these
streaming services have now
broke themselves up into cable.
New year TV is less than 50% of TV now.
It’s down 12.5% compared to last year.
Cable makes up one third of TV time.
Broadcast TV makes up one fifth.
YouTube and Netflix makes one
fifth or more in most households.
But I can tell you I have two teens.
My two teens watch TikTok
and YouTube almost exclusively.
They barely watch television.
This is not the world
that streaming services
want because these kids
are growing up with this.
A world where you don’t pay for content.
Now, of course YouTube
has YouTube premium TikTok.
I’m sure it’s going to go paid someday.
But on the Internet,
what happens is they
get supplanted by another innovator, another
service that comes up with something.
TikTok is three, maybe four years old now.
It’s in its infancy.
YouTube’s been around since 2004.
But it’s the grandfather
of all these services
and other services have
come up to try to take it on.
They just haven’t quite hit it yet.
But it will happen.
I don’t think YouTube
can maintain the market
dominance because
it’s refusing to innovate
and is going through the
in-shitification process.
The problem is YouTube
like Facebook is so big
it’s going to take that
much longer for it to die.
Then what is the appeal?
All these services.
Netflix, Disney Plus, cable.
They all see YouTube and TikTok as the
main competition, the ones they have to be.
The problem is the appeal for people in
YouTube and TikTok and for the companies is
they appeal of creator
personalities and it’s
incredibly cheap and
it’s incredibly fast.
So volume is the key to success.
We saw Netflix for a while.
There was actually the
joke that Netflix would
greenlight any project
and put it out and
they put it out really fast
and it wasn’t very good.
They were essentially going for the
YouTube model of content creation.
But the problem is they
had to pay money to do it.
If you get a bunch of amateurs and you have
them make a movie, it’s not going to be
very good but then people are going to be
very forgiving because it’s very sincere.
Netflix is never going to feel sincere
when they make these cash grab movies.
You will notice that
every few years YouTube
creators start complaining about changes
to the YouTube algorithm or the YouTube
system or the YouTube advertising
so they make less and less money.
This is, again, the
in-shitification process,
YouTube is starting to abuse the
people that actually create the content.
Those people are going to start looking
somewhere else where they can make money.
TikTok came up.
It’s only four years
old and people are
already starting to make complaints
about the changes to the algorithm.
I am on TikTok and I am locked in the, what
they’re calling it, the 200 person jail.
None of my posts go viral in any way.
None of them get very big.
Unless it’s sort of forced on people.
So when I post something to
TikTok, it gets between two and
300 views and that’s the
algorithm at that point just drops it.
That is enough for a
small creator like myself
to keep going but it isn’t enough for me
to actually start making money off TikTok.
And that is actually the
place TikTok wants me to be.
They want to have creators making content.
Oh yeah, you are getting attention but not
enough that we can pay you sorry and then
we have few small creators
who have massive following.
And that is at this point very purposeful.
That is the first step in
the in-shitification of TikTok.
It’s four years old.
They are now starting to
abuse the content creators in
the, you know, so we can
manage this group of big creators.
We have all these other
people who are creating content.
So we’re going to pick
every time one of our big guys.
And trouble or disappears
or something happens.
We’re going to pick one
out, boost their content
and they will become
the next big creator.
So the volume of
content is now the primary
key to success in
content creation and having
a million amateurs like
me make content for your
platform means your
platform is full and it’s available.
And you know, the people can
actually decide what they want to watch.
The problem is these
viewing habits targeting
amateurs as the creators means
things like news now have less legitimacy.
I don’t know if that’s really
fair to say news source.
People’s viewing habits mean their
information comes from amateurs like me.
So I run a show called Ninja News Japan.
Ninja News Japan is news from
Japan and then I do commentary.
It’s supposed to be lightly comedic.
I try to make it amusing.
But it means any story
I put out there is out.
Now news sources
legitimate new news sources
pick up stories from
the Internet now because
they are trying to keep
up with amateur creators.
So recently little Tay the personality.
I don’t know if she
actually did a rap song.
Little Tay did I think it was TikTok.
Maybe it was Instagram.
Basically a 12 year
old looking kid made
brass statements about
how they make millions
of dollars and you don’t
would get in a car that
they can’t even drive
walk around apartment.
I mean I didn’t think
any of that was real
turns out that little Tay’s
mother was actually a realtor.
So they would go into
different houses and
just film because they had access
to these like pen houses and stuff.
And then claim it was theirs.
There was no way you couldn’t prove it.
Little Tay was reported to
be dead at like 16 years old.
A couple weeks later
little Tay comes back
on their own Instagram and
says my Instagram was hacked.
I’m not actually dead.
But legitimate news sources didn’t check.
They saw this story
running around the Internet.
So they decided, okay
well we got a report on this.
And that is the death of
investigative journalism.
Now I do an engineer’s Japan.
I feel enough of a responsibility that I
don’t just grab a story and run with it.
If I see a story and
I think this might be
a good story for an
engineer’s Japan, I have
a process I actually go through where I try
to find at least two or three articles from
different sources and compare them and
see if the facts are the same or different.
If the facts are all
different, either I won’t
do that story or
actually tell people what
the differences are and again
sort of a media awareness initiative.
So every now and then I’ll take, hey look
I got this story where they say A, I got
the same story on the
same topic where they
say B and I got this
third story on the same
topic where they say
C is in it interesting
that they all got slightly
different versions of the story.
US adults under the
age of 30, 25% of them are
getting their news from TikTok and
probably not like a news channel on TikTok.
They’re probably getting it from a
creator who is taking the news of the day,
acting it into something
that’s digestible and very quick.
I think also the way
they speak because when
I do an engineer’s
Japan, I don’t script it.
I have the stories, I
have the content and then
I start talking and that
makes it more organic.
I make mistakes, I’ll
make jokes, I’ll back
up and say stuff again,
but it makes it very
sincere, which again
is what I’m saying is
the problem with Netflix
when it went through
its creator or creation burst phase where
they were green lighting everything saying
like what we need as volume,
but it was in sincere volume.
People want news
and entertainment from
someone they can trust and
that trust is really important.
Problem is, trust may
be the most important
part now and no one
trust these big companies
and corporations because
these big companies and
corporations don’t seek
out self preservation
in the long run, which
means they don’t engage
with the actual
individuals, which means
they run through the
in-shitification process
and are willing to
actually burn their own
core and attempt to
create more money or more
value for themselves
that’s not sustainable.
And that is the
underpinning of everything I’ve
talked about right now
is how sustainable in
the long run are the
things that these companies
are doing and what what
effect does it have on us?
Well, the effect on us right now is
we’re going through a climate crisis.
We’re watching the world
burn down around us.
We’re not even getting the
entertainment we need or once.
I guess yeah, we don’t need entertainment.
We’re not getting the
entertainment we want.
Maybe the entertainment we
deserve because companies are
now at the point where
either they’re making garbage.
I guess actually we’re not making
anything right now because of
the writer’s strike, which I’m
finding endlessly fascinating.
They want AI to step in
and replace all the humans.
You want insincerity.
AI is legitimately to me the
representation of insincerity in creation.
And what are people looking for?
They’re looking for someone they can trust.
But it leads us into
this very dangerous thing
where maybe someone you trust
doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
It’s yesterday an article popped up on
my feed and it said, “Science is say human
caused global warming
is exasperating natural
disasters such as
fires and floods around
the world, making them both
more likely and more deadly.
Do you agree?”
Now, I want to point
out the first part of that
sentence is, “scientists
say I am not a scientist.
Therefore, my opinion on this
topic is completely irrelevant.
I should be listening to the scientists.
This was when people
were saying that coronavirus
was a hoax or it
wasn’t real or anything.
I’m like, “Well, what
are the scientists, the
people who study nothing
but virus is saying?”
Well, they’re saying you
should get this vaccine.
So I went and got the vaccine.
Scientists say we should recycle.
Well, then I think we
should probably recycle.
Why?
I’ve never studied a vaccine before.
I’ve never studied a disease before.
I have no idea what
to do in that situation.
How do we save the Earth?
Recycling?
Okay, I’ll recycle.
I think the biggest
problem when it comes to
recycling, I’ve said
this in an episode in
the past as well, is that we’re holding
people to a standard that we’re not holding
corporations to and
it’s this differentiation
between corporations and
how they act in individuals
and how they act and how we
treat them as being disparate.
Coca-Cola corporation
produces, I don’t know,
25% of the plastic
bottles on the planet.
Maybe Coca-Cola corporation
should be responsible
for recycling a percentage of
those bottles every single year.
Maybe it isn’t on the individual.
Maybe Coke should be
held to a standard where
they create recycling
centers and cities.
Maybe Coke should be
responsible for developing
the technology to
improve recycling returns.
That seems like a very
reasonable way forward for me.
I also don’t think
it’s going to happen
because society is still built
on money in this corporation.
It’s powerful where the individual isn’t.
So they put the bonus
on the individual to do
all the work to try to
save the Earth while
the company is trying
to burn everything down.
While big oil and
companies like that try
to just forge forward
and make as much money
as they can in the
little limited amount of
time they have left to
squeeze the Earth of oil.
Why are we listening to people
when scientists are saying something?
Honestly because it’s
just more content because
they’re doing exactly what
the streaming services want.
They’re doing what TikTok and YouTube want.
They want individuals to create
content for them on their behalf.
And it’s hopefully going
to come from a source they
trust and then they’re
going to listen to them.
All we can do is hope
that that individual
actually smart enough
to listen to a scientist.
I’m not a scientist and therefore my
opinion on these things does not matter.
In fact, straight up my
opinion just does not matter.
[Music].