SvB: Ep156 Meta x Instagram was out and everyone FREAKED OUT, News on Fallout Amazon

Today, @mrbenja is holding down the fort as @the_real_theo_harvey is absent for this episode but nonetheless, we have a fire episode for you. 
Mr.Benja will be covering the Meta x IG outage last week which caused a surge of users going to X aka Twitter, YouTube, and what caused it, a few update trailers, specifically Fallout from Amazon, Sports Illustrated Terminating people, a Segment about Dave Chappelle , and many more!

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Show vs. Business is your weekly take on Pop Culture from two very different perspectives. Your hosts Theo and  Mr. Benja provide all the relevant info to get your week started right.

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Transcript

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Mr.Benja: This is show versus business where pop money meets pop culture. And I should have said that the other way around, but you get the point. See, I'm a little off my game because normally we have our other host here. The real Theo Harvey. Now it's just me, Mr. Benja is doing this one alone. This is going to be a bit of a filler episode because schedules got weird.

We couldn't work it out, but we wanted to actually bring you another episode of show versus business. So Theo is going to be back. Make sure you follow him at the real Theo Harvey. I am Mr. Benja, and I'm going to be holding it down on this one. We have some unused topics that we were going to discuss, but we never got around to.

So instead of letting them just go, I'm going to talk a little bit about myself and definitely we'll get back with Theo next week. So normally what we do at this point is we do a little banter and talk about how we're doing. Go over what we went through the past week. It's a little back and forth banter, but since you've just got me here, I'm going to let you know how I've been doing.

And I want to know how you've been doing. Most of all, I was on threads over the weekend. I like threads. I can just talk to people about creativity and whatever else is going on. And I was on threads over the week and I noticed that every time I tried to post something like happy or just interesting Hey, do you see these These crazy hot dogs out of Chicago or whatever.

And somebody would say, yeah, hot dogs are bad for your heart. And I was like, okay, don't eat them every day. And I know I get that. It's a treat, whatever. I made a post that said, what's what's a difficult video game that you remember, or a difficult game that you remember, or And way more people than I would have expected jumped in the game of life.

And it was really sad and downing. So what have I been doing? I've been fighting against that personally. I've been working on myself, trying to get ahead of this tension that's here and that's coming down the pipeline. I don't want to ever be a fear monger or anything like that. That's not what the point of our show is.

But I just want to let you all know that, listen, we are here for you. Hopefully we're bringing you some valuable information that you could actually use in your life, give you some different perspectives. Theo and I work these things out together on our own. Not just the podcast, but ourselves and our business lives.

And. We've got each other and we can do that by having these discussions, by having this banter, and you should find a way to do that, too. I don't have a link to better help or anything or any type of services. It's just something I noticed throughout the week and something I would hope that we can do.

You take to heart and, try to keep yourself doing well tough times in the creative side of things and the financial side of things. Everything just seems really influx and crazy right now, but that is where the show and the business can thrive in a situation where bring your best creatively, you bring your best business mind and you put those together and you create something beautiful that actually rewards you.

In more ways than one. So how am I doing? I'm doing great. I'm working on some plans, working on my own podcast website, working on my own community and things like that. And Theo's doing the same and we're doing it together as well. Whatever you got to work on, you work on that. And that's my little bit of advice and my banter with you back and forth.

How's it going? Slight little update. I have if you actually care, I have actually switched over to organic hard candies as my little work snack. I had a Twizzlers versus Red Vines debate and can't sit around eating Twizzlers and drinking Mountain Dew all day while you're trying to work. So I've pulled back from a lot of that stuff and now I'm just eating hard candies.

So if any of you heard me discussing work snacks before and trying to maintain my physical health to go with the whole mind body thing organic hard candies, I bought a two pound bag of them off Amazon so I can just eat those and. Not turn into a fat ass like I did last time. So always a good tip for you.

But anyway, in this one, we're going to be talking about a couple of things. I should've mentioned this before, but whatever. We're going to talk about a couple of things. The there's an Instagram outage that just happened. I have some ideas on Facebook and Instagram and in the light of the outage, I think I should be a good time to bring those up and discuss those a little bit.

I want to talk a little bit about how. And I'm going to follow up with this probably next week if the situation is good enough. But talk about how these companies are selling us our childhoods back to us. There's a lot of interesting things going on with Borderlands, the next Transformers movie the Mattel movies in the wake of Barbie and all these Movies, especially the comic movies, that's hitting on nostalgia.

It's trying to pull us along and string us along by our pocket books based on our nostalgia. So got some information on that. I want to discuss that a little bit with you also, Mickey. Mouse is going, I don't know why I said it like, I don't know why I said it like he didn't have a last name. I was like Mickey.

Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie are going in the public domain. Now what that means is they're going to be able to be used by anybody basically for any purpose. So whenever this happens, happened just recently with Winnie the Pooh, it happened with Mickey Mouse as well. Now we've got an update on what they're doing with that.

And there's a new trailer that's out about a horror based Mickey mouse film. Like how can they do that without getting sued? Exactly. So public domain law comes into effect and we're seeing the fruits of that, the rotten fruits of that come up. We're going to get into that in a second. And as I mentioned earlier Instagram is doing a different kind of thing.

And I want to talk a little bit about how that relates to actual magazines. Okay. The magazine industry is going away. It's been dying along with the newspaper industry. And we're seeing how that's taking effect in the real world too. Did you just catch what I did? I said the real world as if the physical books and the physical paper products weren't real world.

And the real world is actually what's on the internet. I actually just made that little slip right then. That was very interesting. Yes, the the real world is on the internet now, and apparently the fake world is being printed on paper. So I got a little bit on that with with sports illustrators, who's basically gone now, sad to say, and we got a little, I want to bring up a little story on sub stack as well, and Dave Chappelle walking off stage.

So that's basically the intro. This isn't going to be a terribly long episode. I do have things to say, I'm going to bring up and talk about them, but I'm not going to go on my traditional back and forth, it takes. An entire hour. So stick with this as long as you can. I think we've got some good stuff going on.

First off, Instagram went out this week. There was an Instagram outage. CNN reported this and let me just read from them. So this is by Claire Duffy from CNN. Facebook and Instagram outage, widespread disruption resolved. This wasn't that big of a news story, but if you remember way back in the day, Mark Zuckerberg was very adamant.

Facebook doesn't go down. And he was very sincere about keeping Facebook up at all times, because if this is supposed to be like a utility, a social utility, a tool for people to use at any time, contact your friends, message people, record a video, let somebody know your status update, let somebody know if you're okay, if you're in the middle of a hurricane, maybe you can say, hey, come help me, I'm out here.

The whole point was to be more than just an idea, but a service. That never really goes down in the past couple of years. Facebook has been going down here and there. Service has been broken, maybe not globally, but service has been broken in certain areas. Definitely the system can't handle certain things.

There hasn't been too much talk of hacking or attacking the system and that causing the problem, but I don't know. They're denying that there was some sort of concerted attack on Facebook that caused this. And they say it's just a technical issue. So with the system this large, where you're dealing with not just Facebook, not just Instagram, not just messenger, not just threads.

Not just what's app you're dealing with all of those together and whatever other things they've got going on. You've got your meta AI, which is integrated into products. You've got your video conferencing, which is actually pretty good. And when I said, you could just live stream or record or whatever.

One thing people also do with Facebook in a lot of places, you don't even have to have a phone number. If you just have Facebook friends, you can actually call them on Facebook, like a regular phone call. Interestingly enough, the quality is usually better than I get when I'm calling somebody on the phone.

So I don't know what that means, but I'm saying all that to say, Facebook has a lot going on. And with all these, Different programs and different platforms that they've put under their big meta umbrella. And let's not forget any type of metaverse type of development and support they're doing with all of this going on.

Facebook went down and it became a huge issue for everybody. Everybody freaked out when threads went down, people jumped onto Facebook to try to see what was going on. Obviously they couldn't. So they jumped over to Instagram. They couldn't, they probably, they may have tried to contact one of their friends on WhatsApp.

If your entire business or your entire life connectivity was based through Facebook, you couldn't message anybody, you couldn't do anything.

You've really got an issue going on. For about two hours, the system was down. And it says here from the article, as many as 500, 000 Facebook users had reported issues. Now, 500, 000 are reporting they had issues. Then obviously a lot more did. And I forgot how much, how many users Facebook is up to.

Let's see if BARD AI knows the answer. How many active users does Facebook have right now? And this is just Facebook. I'm looking at, let's see, boom, 3. 049 billion. That is a large group of people. And obviously a lot of them aren't here in the United States, but if you've got a system like Facebook that can, and Instagram and meta that can instant and a WhatsApp that can instantly converse with a lot of people, this is a valuable tool.

People poo on Facebook, but it does a good job. And this article states that. People were logged out. Some people just couldn't turn on the system. Some said their feed couldn't be loaded and met a status page on Tuesday showed that major disruptions impacted Facebook login, as well as other areas of the platform.

Well,

I say all that and emphasize it to say that you need to make sure that one, you have all of your ducks in a row. You need to have everything together to exist without one platform holding you. If you've got stuff on Google, you need to make sure you also have it on a Microsoft platform. Maybe also have it on a Meta platform.

Maybe also have it on an Apple platform. This is called In financial terms, it would be diversification. You need to diversify your money pools. You need to diversify your data, your processing, your media pools. If you can only pull from one area, let's say you have a video conference to do, and you're going to do it over Facebook or over zoom or something.

And that platform goes down. What do you do? Do you just sit there and not do it? No, you need to kick out an email to all those people or send out a mass text message. Hey, we're going to do this, and this boom. The system keeps going. The system keeps flowing and you're not down for two hours.

So even though Facebook may have been down for two hours, you may have been down for much longer than that. Individual people may not have gotten back online. They may not have gotten their password issues short, sorted out. I was talking to a guy on threads. He was His account was apparently okay. But when he tried logging in on his desktop, as instead of his phone, he tried logging into desktop, it said no.

And then when he went back into his phone gave him problems and it gave, went through this whole verification process. So it may take much longer than just, Oh, we're down and Oh, we're up. And you could really be out of gas. If you're trying to run a business or run your life or, you're putting all your eggs in this one.

Meta basket. And if we know anything about how the internet has worked, you shouldn't put everything in that one meta basket. You've got to have things spread out amongst different places to make sure that you're safe, that you're covering all your bases and that you're going to be around for the next digital revolution or whatever.

Yeah. And also I mentioned this before on the show, there was that one guy from Google or not from Google, the one guy using the Google platform and something happened. He never found out why, but his account got banned. So for some reason he got locked out of his account by Google. It's told, Hey, sorry, we can't answer these questions.

We're not giving you whatever, no, no type of reply, no communication. You're just out of the system. And apparently he did something wrong. Maybe it was just, it was valid according to their terms and guidelines. But he was out of Google problem is. He was a business person and had all his Google docs locked away.

So now he can't access his documents. He can't access his spreadsheets. Maybe he has some presentations up there. Maybe he's got files stored into Google drive on the cloud. He can't access those can access Google photos. So if you want any conspiracy talk, if somebody really wants to, they could mess with you.

And kind of mess up your life just by screwing around with these different platforms. And when a site goes down, you get to see just how fragile it is, how fragile the system is. If you don't have a landline, they don't cost that much. You might want to get one. Just because if everything goes down, everything goes stupid, then your landlines will still work.

It's an interesting and amazing piece of technology, but landlines still actually work because they're on the land underground and they go through the wires, that real world stuff again, except actually in the physical world, not the real world, which is the matrix. All right. And yeah, this has happened to AT& T, it happens to other large companies all the time.

Meta is just one, obviously, that's very big and very visible to this sort of thing. Keep your business together. And speaking of Instagram, and speaking of having all of Your data out there point that I brought up a while ago, I want to bring back is that Instagram is changing and Gary Vee the marketer and advertising guru said a while ago that everybody's becoming their own little media companies.

And I thought about this for a while. And recently, people have been complaining about Instagram saying our reach is down, I'm talking to people and no one's talking back, and I've come to the conclusion that it's not really down so much the reach as it is people aren't reaching out. Two people aren't trying to grasp anything that anybody's putting out there.

It's because it's turned from social media to marketed media. I'll say it like that from social media to marketed media and social media is when people are being social with each other, they're sending messages, they're connecting, they're finding their friends, they're getting in groups. And that's not so much the thing anymore.

Now we're dealing with. Interest. And so instead of a social graph where you're connecting with your friends, family, coworkers, your spouse, your children, whatever people you actually connect with, for some reason now that's a social graph. Now we're connecting with people on a interest based graph. And when I say graph, I mean like the nodes and lines connecting everybody.

So instead of connecting by blood, by location, by demographics and Sociographics family, sociographics, social sociographics. Social, sociographic stuff. Instead of connecting like that, now we're connecting on this interest based thing. So do I like to watch movies? Do I like horror movies? So it's going to connect me with more people who watch horror movies.

I don't know who this person is, but I'm connected with them on Snapchat. Oh, I don't know who this person is, but we both talk about Working out in the gym. So I'm going to connect with that person, or I should say meta is going to connect me with that person. So now I'm talking to all these people that I don't know about their interest.

We're not really connected, but they're building our interest together. So they can advertise to us better. And when I was thinking about this in terms of reach and in terms of connecting with people, the realization is that social media in this new marketing media form is like a magazine. So instead of a letter, like you used to write out a letter to somebody and you send it to them and they'd respond and you'd have a conversation back and forth.

Now you've got. You're either reading magazine articles or you're writing magazine articles. So everybody's putting something out in a way that's very media marketing based. I don't know of any other way to put it right now. It's a big fundamental shift, and honestly, no one is really sure what this means for the human race.

Where we have these situations where We're not talking to people. We're marketing to them. We're marketing to each other. I'm doing it too. I'm building my brand. I'm discussing certain topics, video games, creativity, art, fashion, music. This is what I'm discussing. I'm not discussing. I'm actually having too many discussions with my friends and family as I used to.

And it's just because it's not as valuable. We say it's valuable, but then our actions are outweighing that. It's To a very large extent, so we will talk about the streaming wars and the social media changeover and what happens next, which is a new version of community we're so far past the connections that we used to have.

We're not going to just create some new type of technology or methodology and get back to that. I think we're forever. Fractured in a sense, in terms of how we're developing as a people in the social landscape. So we'll see how it works out. Actually get a sociologist on here. Talk about how people are doing in school, the proliferation of cell phone cameras and streaming.

It's all very bizarre and weird within all this, there's another thing to watch out for. And I was talking about interest. I was talking about how we are bringing up all these concepts. And instead of having conversations, we're sharing media. One of the things that they're doing to capitalize off that is selling us our.

Childhoods. They're selling us nostalgia. Actually, they're selling us nostalgia for things that may or may not even have been in our personal childhoods. We just have this fascination with looking back and seeing what can be resold to us. It's been sold before, so we want it again. So maybe we didn't see Michael Keaton's Batman back in the day, but suddenly Michael Keaton's Batman shows up in the flash.

We And everybody goes nuts. Even people who didn't even know who Michael Keaton was. They go nuts. It's this weird thing that they're doing. They're selling us our nostalgia. And Theo and I have talked about this quite a bit on Show vs. Business. But, there's some updates. And they're worth talking about.

So I'm going to bring up a few of them here. And maybe we'll go over this again when Theo gets back. I do want to pick his brain on some things. I don't like that term pick picking someone's brain, but I just used it and I apologize. So basically this Borderlands trailer came out and, we thought with Mario, we were going to be seeing a lot more high quality video game movies.

Well, based on this trail, it looks like we're back to the same old. It wasn't hyping anybody up. I don't know who wanted Borderlands to be made into a movie. I honestly don't think a lot of these, a lot of these types of properties don't lend themselves well to movies, but people keep trying.

And you really need to take a step back and do something different creatively or something that makes sense for the platform instead of just trying to make a quick buck through licensing or be or selling somebody all the fond memories they had of playing Borderlands, which is what they're doing because ultimately selling you your childhood back is rather empty unless you add in the current, urgent, relevant, inspired and engaging nature of today.

Thank you. Of what's happening in that person's life right now. Like I could just go sell you, Hey, when you were a kid, did you eat this cereal? Hey, eat the cereal again. You'll love it. And a lot of times it's a cheap play. They don't put any money into it. It just turns into a gimmick. They don't put any thought into it.

It just turns into once again, a fleeting gimmick or idea or a way to rope you in and get your money a second time. They took your money 20 years ago. Now they're going to take your money again. So the Borderlands trailer, I hope it does well, but it's not looking good. And I need to talk to Kevin Hart about this one because it looks I don't know why he's trying to be serious in this movie also Bumblebees movie director.

Said that the next project could be a live masters of the universe movie.

Good luck with that. He man's been to some weird places and I'm not sure Pete, I'm not sure he's appropriate anymore for the right fandom. Cause I, I don't know what people hope to get from something like this. I think you're going to need a real visionary director. Who's actually not just a fan. But who's in touch with people today a fan of the past it is in touch with people today It's not gonna make some what we used to call boosh, which is the pronunciation of BS I don't know.

I thought bumblebee did a good job the second one even more so than the first For what it was, I think it could be pushed a little harder. It was playing it pretty straight. I think you could push the idea of the character and the world a little harder. And Masters of the Universe is a much bigger undertaking than Bumblebee.

Bumblebee was very localized to just Bumblebee and a few characters and not like the whole Transformers universe. Getting into the whole He Man universe, Masters of the Universe, what are you getting into? It's you could be getting into a lot. So we'll see how that goes. I actually hope, hope does well.

I'll probably be there to see it. We'll see. And even more from that, once again, I was talking about the gimmicks. What else are they putting out there? They're putting out, you know how they put out Barbie, the Barbie movie, and it did well and everybody went nuts. Once something like that happens, people who have no care about the property are going to come running in, rubbing their hands and doing the whole bean counter thing where it's like, Oh, this made money.

We can do it again. And it's Oh God please don't mess it up. And yes, that they don't mess it up because it's it's just in their nature to come mess up these good ideas. So after Barbie came out, Mattel was like, Hey, we got a gold mine here. Aside from Barbie, we have all these other properties that we're going to pull from.

And there are 45 properties that they could have picked from 45 or 47 or something like that. But there are at least 14 titles in active development. Now, this doesn't mean they've started filming. This doesn't mean they have a cast. This doesn't mean they have a complete script, but somebody somewhere is at a desk working on these projects that may or may not happen.

And TuneVogue reported on this. A lot of other people have reported on this. Variety was the first, I think, to really give a scoop on it. But here's what we know is actually being worked on. American Girl Doll. I could actually see that one. A little after school special sounding. Maybe a little CW ish to me.

Just right off the bat. But that could actually be done high quality and good. There's a Barney movie that they're working on. I don't know where to start with this one. You could take it in a lot of different ways. In a lot of different directions. But a lot of times with stuff like this, They make it about, Something aside from Barney, which I don't like.

I think that's a bad idea, which is Hollywood being foolish again, man. Maybe I should have just called this one Hollywood being foolish. I'm just looking at all these stats here. And also we have Christmas balloon. I have no idea what Christmas balloon is. Apparently it's a toy of some type. Nobody wants to see a Christmas balloon or maybe they do.

I don't know. Let me just look this up right now, cause I got to know what's the Christmas balloon, Mattel's Christmas balloon. Of course, it's a family drama for Christmas and Deadline's got some news on this. No, here we go. This should be interesting. Mattel developing family drama Christmas balloon.

All right, Gabriela Revia Lugo is going to write it. So says Anthony D'Alessandro. According to him on Deadline, Mattel is developing a live action family drama Christmas balloon, which will be written by Gabriela Revia Lugo. Film follows a young girl, Dayami, living on the Mexican border town who tries to send her Christmas list to Santa tied to a balloon.

Balloon is found by, what does this have to do with the toy? I want to know what Christmas balloon is and why Mattel has it. Is there a thing called a Christmas balloon that Mattel makes? That's what I'm trying to find out. I don't want to hear about some cheesy movie. I want to know the actual toy.

Maybe they just make balloons and give them, I don't know what they're, I don't know what that is. Anyway, they're making a movie about this Christmas balloon thing. I'll research that later offline. You can ask me about it. Also hot wheels could be anything could be fast and furious. Could be more like the Lego movie.

All it is going to have cars in it. In fact, it could be like. referring to Disney's Pixar cars. So there are so many hot wheels fans. That's, I don't want to say a slam dunk, but you can go a lot of different ways with that and still make it work. Magic eight ball. Intriguing. I actually like this.

I actually like the magic eight ball. There's a magic eight ball. Some kids find it. It allows them to do crazy things and you have a crazy holiday drama or. Or whatever. That's the whimsical side. Of course, you could also have a summer blockbuster where it's a big, crazy thing with eight ball, just causes big, crazy things to happen in the world.

People see into the future and Oh my God, magic eight ball could be interesting to get somebody like Matt Damon in it, or it could be anything. Masters of the universe that we mentioned before matchbox. So they've got hot wheels and matchbox. You know what? I wonder if they make both of those, if matchbox could actually be the better Movie, but be less funded.

It's one of the situations where I think that like matchbox could actually make a better movie for whatever reason. Don't know. That's an interesting one. Polly pocket. Hey, you had Barbie get Polly pocket in there skewed to a younger audience, have a, some goofy girls running around and really high, highly colored outfits, brightly colored, sets, uniforms, and visuals.

I don't know. Uno is also on the list. If they decide to make a black film about UNO, I might be down for this. I might be down for an UNO movie, if it's just a bunch of black people playing UNO and all the drama that brings up. If you've ever been around black people playing spades, or Tonk, or UNO, could be a whole thing. Come to the barbecue, play some UNO. Rock'em Sock'em Robots. This could work. We've had robot jocks. We've had what was that one? Pacific rim, I believe it was with the robots that could actually be pretty good, rocking, socking robots. A lot of different ways that can go.

Not mad at that one. Thomas and friends. What is that? The train don't nobody care about Thomas and his friends. What is Thomas and friends? Yeah, that's the train Thomas, the train. So that'll be a fun kids movie or whatever. TV series. They've had a TV series for a while. No big deal there and max steel should have been made a long time ago.

Not gonna lie I was never really big into max steel, but I know a lot of people really like the comics and things not the comics. Yeah, there were comics, but the toys bring that back, man, make it bigger, make it better. There was the 2016 movie, but you put it at the level of Barbie or really pushing it to get out there.

And once again, if you're going to, if you're going to. Attack people with that nostalgia, go in there and get it, man. Go back and get that toy drama. Get that comic book drama. Don't shy away from Barbie. Didn't shy away from pink. Barbie didn't shy away from Ken and the whole Malibu vibe get in there and get it.

That's if you're gonna get nostalgic. Don't make it a silly play live it So yeah, that's the list of what they got going on and we'll see what happens with that But we're in a weird place now, and I don't know whether or not I don't It's not that I don't know whether or not these things can be successful.

They definitely can be. But do I have faith in the Hollywood system that they'll actually start making properties that you care about? Or are they just going to try to fleece you for your money? And that's a problem. If they just try to fleece you, get you in, buy some tickets, buy some popcorn, Buy some merch, download the app, do whatever you got to do.

And then movie's not that great. Then what'd you do it all for? So people are a little desperate now and I hope that people still take their time with properties all of these that I just mentioned. All right. And speaking of which I did mention Mickey mouse, Mickey. Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie, 50 years have passed since the death of the creator of Mickey Mouse, which means it goes into the public domain when something goes into the public domain.

That means it is available for use without as many restrictions on copyright and intellectual property. Basically, you can go start building the property, building onto it, adding to it without worrying about getting sued or with far fewer worries about getting sued by the copyright holders or the original creator's estate coming after you.

There are far less things to worry about. In fact, I may go make some Mickey Mouse t shirts and see what happens. See if I get a cease and desist letter. Maybe that might not be a good idea, even though the law is behind me. Might not be a good idea. Mickey Mouse t shirt. What is this called? So there was a Winnie the Pooh movie that they did that traumatized kids.

Somebody actually played a Winnie the Pooh movie for their kids and in school. And the kids, it was a horror movie. And maybe the person, I don't even know if the person knew that it was a horror movie, but they played this Winnie the Pooh movie for kids, traumatized them. Now they've got a Mickey mouse slash steamboat, Willie horror trailer that just came out.

And it's intriguing. It's interesting. It makes you think and get your attention, but does anybody actually care? You figure if you're going to have a new movie come out based on. Mickey Mouse, Steamboat Willie, and all the old characters that you'd be able to do something exciting with them. But, horror is easy.

It's easy to understand. It's easy to get into. It's inexpensive, so it can make your money back, and it's almost expected at this point that whenever you see something go in the public domain or something needs a certain type of parody, then you go the horror route. Comedy is actually harder to write than some of the horror elements.

So it just makes sense and you can get it out there, get it funded, get it moving, get it done quickly and cheaply. Yeah. You try to make a serious drama about, an old black and white mouse. You might have some problems, but just on name alone, it's like the Steamboat Willie horror trailer. It's like already people are Oh, I might want to see what that's about.

I watched the trailer. I didn't think it was terribly exciting of a trailer, but I watched it. So they've already gotten me halfway interested. But another way of selling you back your childhood or someone else's childhood. But if you're like me, you're thinking creatively. What could I make out of Steamboat Willie?

Maybe you could make a, maybe you could make a book. Maybe you could make a mural outside your house. Maybe you could make a new app. I don't know. Try it out.

And let's see, what else can we talk about here? I mentioned the death of, we were talking about magazines and books and physical analog media materials. Sports illustrated is pretty much on their last legs. I don't even know what's happened to the company right now. I know the, let's check the news.

So sports illustrated, basically people were getting fired, let go. The magazine stopped moving. Yeah, they're in problem. They're having problems with management about union busting. Wait a minute Martha Stewart is making her return to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue posted two days ago. Okay. I guess they're still Doing things to get people to turn heads All right.

Yeah. So Sports Illustrated laid off most of the staff. And nothing new has happened much since then, but basically you had this huge institution called Sports Illustrated. People loved it in the 80s, 90s, not so much the 90s, but really big in the 80s, the 90s. They were known for their swimsuit issue.

They were always in the forefront of, going a little more in depth than the newspapers would about sports and what's going on in the sports world, introduce people to a lot of different types of sports that they may not really delve into, football, baseball, basketball. And aside from that, you started getting into Olympic sports.

You started getting into other sports like hockey and just. Delving deeper into these things and finding more about the athletes. And you couldn't do that very well until you started seeing like more ESPN to come out, more channels were available more media outlets were showing up. And of course, websites started showing up.

And now Sports Illustrated was having this problem of what do they do? Embroiled in some issues over who they were featuring. And it just seemed like the company was doing bad. I don't know how much of an effect like having a, a trans model on the cover of the swimsuit issue was, I know some people were very loud about it.

Obviously you're going to have people hating about stuff like that. People getting upset, people supporting. I don't know how much of the numbers can actually be attributed to that, but a lot of people were saying that was representative of part of the fall of So yeah, they started laying off a bunch of their staff and I don't know what they're planning on doing right now.

Hey, Martha Stewart does not look terrible in these swimsuit issue pictures. She looks like a nice old grandma hanging around in her bathing suit telling you to put your sunblock on. All right. That's cool. They were also do using AI, which is, which became a problem. So from PBS, PBS dropped in this breaking news article here, sports illustrated found publishing AI generated stories, photos, and authors, which probably wouldn't be a problem except they didn't tell anybody.

It was really bizarre what happened, but. They're in their conflicting accounts. A lot of the stuff has been erased from the website, but basically people started noticing that this, there was a new reporter on the website posting all this information. All right. Okay. They got a new reporter posting some information and we don't know who this reporter is.

So actual reporters and actual journalists started digging into this reporter. I forgot his name. He had a funny name, but they were looking him up and they said, yeah, this guy, he's a, he's on staff. He works with us. But nobody knew anything about the person. Turns out, this AI generated journalist and these AI generated articles were basically being put out without people's knowledge.

I don't know how that would make you feel if you were reading an article that was written by AI and you assumed it was from a real person. It just gave them a bad look. With these articles, with these images, And even the author was fake. You could, they didn't even make a real author and say, Hey, listen, I generated this with the help of AI.

It was just completely done by AI and the author. Oh gosh, I wish I could find his name. It just seemed I don't want to say a fake name, but it just seems silly. But yeah it was apparently such, it was apparently an experiment, but it wasn't the first experiment of his kind. And people started looking into sports illustrated and they got.

They got real for it basically. And the only way for readers to understand that the technology was being implemented in the article they're reading is to click on the author, try to find attribution, and then learn about the author and learn that the author was in fact an AI bot. Terrible. So a little while after that Sports Illustrated lays off most of its staff.

And that was a month ago. Now, how much is most of their staff? I'm not sure they were, they've been doing this thing for over 70 years. And yeah, it doesn't say the exact amount here in this article,

but most of them are gone and they're not coming back. And as far as magazines go, dang sports illustrated they will be missed if they're going to completely wrap up. Let me see if their website's still available. Sports illustrated. com is still posting something. Maybe all of this is AI generated or not.

I don't know.

Sports illustrated. com. This guy is named Tom Deerbringer. I don't know if Tom Deerbringer is real or not. Let's find out. Deerburger.

Yeah, it's not giving me any information on this guy. Let's see if I can pull him up. I just pulled up a random guy who seemed to be making an interesting article. And I don't want to, I don't want to call him a fake person if he's oh, he might be a real person. Or this image might be AI as well.

Oh, image is looking kind of suspect. I just, he linked to an X image. X. com has an image of him. He's only got 785 followers. I can't tell if he's a real person or no. Okay. He might be a real person. Okay. He's I actually don't know. This is strange. I don't know if this is a real person, not because if they've been working on making this guy appear like a real person, then I probably get caught up and not know.

Cause here's a caption on a clip. Forget the Harlem Globetrotters. This is Savannah bananas, baseball, basketball.

I don't know. This could be a team of people just putting out stuff under different names. But I believe Tom Deerberger. I'll take it. I'll take him at face value. I believe he's a person. But yeah, if you haven't noticed, I've been on the internet actually reading articles from random places. Yeah, a lot of AI content showing up there.

In fact, I just heard a statistic that said that there's more AI being produced, more AI articles being produced than Regular people producing articles, which makes AI articles more quote, unquote, important, which means more AI articles are going to get made. And it's this weird cycle that we're in. Not sure how I feel about it.

If you want to see the canary in the coal mine visits works illustrated and see how sad they've become. Speaking of newsletters, speaking of journalism, Substack, this isn't really, it's really a big story, but Substack is losing people because of Nazi newsletters, basically. So Substack allows you to make newsletters, send it out to people.

It's an easy sign up, go to an app. You read the different Substack articles that people have written. It's fine. Makes sense. But apparently people have just come to find out that you look at another places on Substack and Nazis, or if they're writing letters, writing, writing newsletters to people. So people were so disgusted at this, that they started leaving in mass.

And. Substack pulled off a few of the major offenders eh, you're going a little too wild there, but apparently they're still pretty open to anybody posting on the platform. I'm not going to get into a free speech discussion here, but it's very interesting how we're starting to separate out platforms.

Based on their political ideology. So you have a political ideology you like and a political ideology you don't like, and that decides what technology you use, which is interesting. I know technology tries to remain agnostic or tries to remain gray area, middle of the road. Hey, we just provide a service and then they chop off any extremes.

They get too wild and that's what Substack is facing right now. So it's very bizarre. And a real time example of this is Elon Musk and Elon Musk is X and Threads with Zuckerberg where it's do I like Zuckerberg? Okay. I'll post on his platform. Do I like Elon Musk? Okay. I'll post on his platform.

You don't care. You post on both. Very interesting where we are right now. But I'm going to leave it with that one. And I am really glad that you sat here and listened to this filler episode. Hopefully I brought you some good information. We're going to have Theo one, definitely again, next week and listen, please like subscribe and comment at show versus business on X, YouTube, and Instagram.

Listen to us on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcast, and you can visit us on our website. At show versus business. Thank you all for your time. This is a solo episode, a filler episode. If you will, with Mr. Benja, we will have Theo back on next week. He'll keep me from rambling like a moron and we'll have a good discussion.

Hope to see you then. Peace.