Hello, welcome back to the American English Conversation. This is Joe English and today we have a couple of announcements and we'll be talking about Google's new leak. The leak from the Project Veritas hidden camera executive. And we'll also talk a little bit about... English versus Spanish in the United States and some of the controversy that surrounds the Democratic, not the Democratic, the Democrat debate.
in the United States, the political debate. So let's start with the announcements. I've decided to include more current events. on the show and move a little bit more away from the phrases. I'll still use the phrases in the show just naturally because that's the way I talk. And then... If you have any questions about the phrases, I'm going to be switching the telegram over from a channel over to a group. So the channel, you couldn't really interact with the content.
But I'll make a group so that you can join there and chat. So it won't just be read-only. You can actually go in there and chat. So I'll post a link to the group later today. And that should be in the show description and you can just click on that and it should be easy to join no matter what kind of computer or phone you have.
So that's one of the announcements. The other announcement is that I'm talking to someone that might be interested in co-hosting with me. She has some experience doing it. From another show she was doing, she talked a lot about current events. And that's a direction that I've been wanting to go where this would be more a conversation about. different topics. And right now, the conversation is mostly just me talking to myself, which is fine. If she's not interested, it's okay.
But I think it would be cool to have a co-host and that way this show would be more of a conversation, which is what the show is called. It's called The Conversation. So let's get into the first topic with Google. Okay, so we've known for a while that Google leans more to the left side of politics with the whole Silicon Valley perspective of things.
And this has been controversial for a while because I think there is a disconnect between what's going on in San Francisco and that Silicon Valley area. and the rest of the country, which is really far removed. I think most of the people in the United States do not really identify with what is going on in that little... ecosystem of San Francisco. And I think the San Francisco crowd, I don't think they really understand that.
The rest of the country is not really in their little bubble there. So how did that start? There's a really good book on this. It's called Hackers, Heroes of the Revolution. We're referring to the computer revolution.
It explains the origins of Silicon Valley and how all that started. And a lot of the activity in the early days of computing was... in that part of san francisco which is now referred to as silicon valley however you know this is just one writer's perspective steven i think his name is steve levy he wrote the book. There's also a different perspective too. A lot of people don't know this, but the IBM PC computer was first created in Florida.
And a lot of the internet technology evolved out of Florida. For example, Galacticom was one of the first software companies. that created a multi-user gaming platform, which is also known as the Major BBS. And because IBM's headquarters was in Florida, There were a lot of IBMers that were creating bulletin board systems in Florida. So we had a pretty large ecosystem in Florida. Some of the early internet service providers started in Florida.
And also Texas has been pretty influential. Texas Instruments, I'm sure you've heard of them. And I met someone. who said his dad was responsible for bringing a lot of the tech companies to Texas. And in, I think, the 90s... The Texas government convinced IBM to relocate their headquarters from Florida to Texas. So ever since... That was around 1995. So ever since 1995 when that announced, I think it was 94 or 95, IBM announced that they were moving their headquarters out of South Florida.
to Austin, Texas. And ever since then, a lot more tech companies have been moving to this part of Austin, Texas, which includes Apple now. Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems, which created the Java computer language. I don't know if you know this, but Java is the language that runs all of the Android phones. So I don't want to get too technical, but let's just say that there are a lot of tech companies now in Texas.
I think the control of Silicon Valley is sort of fading as the internet becomes more global and the ecosystem that... California used to control is sort of getting spread out. In fact, I think the internet naming system, which is called InterNIC, I think that's what it's called, that used to be controlled.
exclusively i think by a company in california but um i remember reading that it was decided that because other countries were complaining that the united states had complete control of the internet I think some of that control is being opened up to other countries. But anyway, we've known this for a while. And recently there have been some people getting banned from YouTube. I think some of the early people that were banned were...
Alex Jones from Infowars. He was controversial, and I don't want to get too much into that. I think... I think... His style of communication frightened a lot of people because he would use certain analogies. He's still working on this. And he would use certain analogies I think that would frighten people because they maybe didn't understand really what he was saying was just an analogy. Maybe they took him literally. So I think that frightened people and that's...
Partly, maybe that's partly why he was banned from different technology platforms. I won't name the specific platforms. You can do that research on your own. But he was the first major person that was blacklisted from Google. And I think this is significant because Alex Jones and Infowars... they were very often outranking the mainstream media because, let's just be honest, Alex Jones, he's very entertaining.
He's lively. He has a lot of jokes. He's funny. He makes all kinds of crazy noises, and he gets really excited. And also, he's able to say things that... The mainstream media can't say because they're really restricted by their content editors. So because Alex Jones has his own advertising relationships with his... with his, I guess you could call them nutritional supplements or his vitamins and things like that. He's able to be a lot more...
controversial with the things he says and the topics that he covers. And so I think because of that, he was outranking the mainstream media on Google. And Google... Now we know because of this new leak from Project Veritas, we know that Google was starting to feel responsible for helping to elect. Donald Trump. I think that wasn't part of this leak, but I think internally they're probably feeling some guilt maybe that they helped spread this information from people like Alex Jones.
And so maybe they're feeling like this influence that they have is becoming so powerful that now it's something they feel responsible for. They feel responsible for controlling maybe the narrative of the whole country or the whole world by manipulating the algorithm. So that all started with Alex Jones and Infowars. And I might even get banned for just mentioning his name, but I don't know, let's just risk it there. I think I'm being pretty fair in explaining it this way.
I know if you were a conspiracy theorist, I guess you could call this a conspiracy theory, but it's not completely a conspiracy theory because it's accurate. Both Google and Apple... were working with China. So Google was building a Chinese search engine. This is a fact. Alex Jones and Infowars exposed this. Also, Apple was starting to move some of its data centers to China. Alex Jones exposed this on Infowars. So...
I don't think people were really aware that this was happening, this shift towards China. I think everybody knew that Mark Zuckerberg was working with China. Because there were a lot of photos of Mark Zuckerberg shaking hands with the president of China. But I think... Alex Jones maybe was making the... It's possible that Alex Jones and Infowars were making these tech companies uncomfortable because he was starting to criticize them.
for working with china and then when that news broke i think there was a lot of support like hey why are we doing this why are we moving our photos to chinese servers why are we making these agreements with um with china and So was that really the reason why InfoWars was banned? Or was it more that the people working at Google felt like InfoWars was a little too radical and maybe it was...
bringing people more towards voting for Trump. I don't know what was going on inside Google, but we know what they've said. And what they said has been leaked in... um a couple of leaked videos one was a internal video that wasn't supposed to leak out that one leaked out where the various executives were sharing their opinions about the trump election and also there was the project veritas video that just came out which is very um i would say damning because it's it's saying
explicitly that Google has been trying to sway the 2020 election. They've been working towards swaying the results of that election. away from Donald Trump, and they've been actively working on this since 2016 by running regressive algorithms. In combination with something called machine learning. It's called machine learning fairness. They have a fairness algorithm which is trying to shift.
the truth in the direction of what they consider to be fair within you know their manufactured fairness so it's not really an honest fairness of reality. It's more of their skewed perception of what fairness should be. And this came out from a whistleblower. There's a video of a whistleblower from within Google. I just thought of something last night. We know there's a whistleblower, but there's also another whistleblower. If you think about it, there was.
James Damore, who was fired from Google, it sounded like they physically threatened him harm after he published his internal memo. about women's preference for computer programming. James Damore was physically threatened. And they said, I think it's best for you to work at home because of these threats. And I don't think there, I think James Moore is a really nice guy. And I don't, I think he should have played, played up.
the fact that they physically threatened him harm and he was in a dangerous situation i think he was um they threatened him really that wasn't really that didn't come out very much in the news but they did threaten him and that's uh i think partly why they sent him home and then they fired him after he was sent home um But in any case, James Damore worked on the controversial part of the Google image search that people are now saying because of this...
whistleblower that came out people are now looking at the google image results and they're saying to themselves okay well these image results are clearly biased if you do a search for um Various cultures, the results are skewed to show Google's narrative. So I'm wondering if James Damore is now going to come out with more information about what he worked on within Google Image Search. Or maybe, this is just a wild... but maybe James Damore is the whistleblower, and he used the voice...
They modified the voice of the whistleblower. So I was just thinking, I wonder if James Damore is the whistleblower. Or it's probably not. It's probably someone else. But then I'm thinking, okay, this whistleblower... just talked about one particular topic. I'm sure that whistleblower has a lot more information to share. So I think there might even be more leaks coming from Project Veritas as more is coming out from this.
whistleblower but then i think also james damore um i'm sure he's he might he seems very loyal to google still james damore but i have a feeling now that Since this whistleblower is coming out with this information that the results are skewed and fabricated, the suggested... search queries, when you do a Google search, it suggests you the, quote, common queries. But now we know that those suggested queries are fake. I think now that James Damore...
has been working on this for a while. Maybe we'll see if he comes out with more information about what he was working on with Google Image Search, but maybe he's under some kind of... non-disclosure agreement even though he's uh now that he no longer works there he might still be under some kind of uh non-disclosure agreement so we don't really know what's happening there anyway
So all this information is coming out and I think people are starting to realize that Google has maybe lost its mind by... Maybe they've become too powerful and now they don't really know what to do with all this power. Or maybe they don't have as much power as we think. Or maybe they do have a lot of power. I think... I think if you took a survey, most people would agree that Google has probably more influence than the mainstream media at this point. I bring this up because...
This is exactly what Jason Calacanis recently said on Twitter. He said, I think, this is not an exact quote, but he said, I think that Google has more influence. than the mainstream media. He's referring to, I mean, in reference to YouTube's influence of people. And I would agree with that. I think... Google has just so much information there. And for instance, I didn't even know who Tommy Robinson was. This is another person that you can't talk about without getting banned from social media.
But Tommy Robinson is a very controversial person right now. He's been banned from most of the social media platforms. You can still find all of his news updates. on his website and also his uh he has a telegram so a lot of these banned personalities now are moving over to telegram where their information is not censored but
Getting back to what I was saying about YouTube and Tommy Robinson, I was able to find a lot of information about Tommy Robinson from YouTube. There's a lot of videos on there. about Tommy Robinson. So if you wanted to learn about Tommy Robinson's story and everything that's happened to him, there's just a lot of information there about Britain. and the European Union, and so you can become really informed about everything that's going on there. I learned all kinds of things about British...
culture and the history and the problems that they're experiencing and the change in the demographics and so on. So there's a lot of information on YouTube. And that's just one person. That's just one person, Tommy Robinson. Now you can get deep background information on all kinds of people. So... I do agree with Jason Calacanis, what he said on Twitter, that YouTube is becoming really influential.
And I don't know if you know who Jason Calacanis is. Okay, he claims, and I think he seems, okay, he claims to be the top tech investor. maybe in the world or at least in Silicon Valley. And maybe a lot of people don't know who he is, but he started from... Pretty much nothing. Let's just talk a little bit about him. One of his first big successes was web blogs, which was in the early days of blogging. He created a blogging platform.
And that blogging platform was very popular and he sold it and he made a pretty good profit on that. And then he used that money to launch all of his other projects. Some of them... were not so successful. Like Mahalo was a project that he did that was basically a search engine optimization type of business. creating a lot of user generated content. That business was not so successful, but then he single-handedly saved Tesla from going out of business.
Tesla ran out of money, and the story goes that Jason met Elon Musk, I think at a restaurant or something like that. And he told Jason, okay, my company's out of money. We're going out of business. We only have like a week left before we have to shut down everything. And Jason said, I'll buy the first car from you. And Tesla hadn't even created anything yet. But Jason said, I'll buy the first car from you now. Here's a check or whatever. And he paid. So he...
Jason saved Tesla from going out of business, and I think because of that, I don't know how much stock Jason got from that deal in Tesla, but I would imagine he made a pretty good... chunk of money from tesla and then he also was i think an early investor in uber i think and he was also i think an investor in facebook and so he's invested in a lot of companies now
I don't really study his financial information that much. But I do know that he is a very influential person in Silicon Valley. And I do know that he was very... Excuse me. He was very much in favor. He was very vocal of supporting Hillary Clinton in the last election. So I know, I sort of know his political leanings. But I think I heard him say that he does support the Second Amendment. So I thought I heard him say that. So I don't think he's...
all the way to the one side or the other just for the sake of, you know, political bias. I think, you know, obviously Jason is a smart guy and he's... probably looking at the different issues and also he runs a news company called insider.com and so he's aggregating a lot of news and i used to be in the news aggregation business so i'm i'm sort of aware of what he's doing
with insider.com. And so he posted a couple days ago on Twitter saying that he's looking for some conservative voices to add to insider.com to balance out. the information that he's providing on on his new site because he's saying okay obviously after this project Veritas leak it does seem like Silicon Valley is leaning too far to the left and we need to include some conservative voices to balance things out a little bit. And he mentioned...
One of the criteria he had was intellectual rigor. He's looking for someone on the right with some intellectual rigor because I think... A lot of political commentary is just making jokes and superficial attacks, and a lot of it's not very serious. And I don't... That's entertaining and a lot of people like the memes. But I think from Jason's perspective, he's trying to create good information for his own.
for his readers so i was thinking okay intellectual rigor you know who are the people that i would recommend in that case and i realized that i don't really listen to i don't really listen to anything politically i mean the stuff that i listen to sort of politically oriented is not intellectually rigorous at least i wouldn't consider it intellectually rigorous it's uh I think I do listen to people who are reasonable and speak to the common average person. I think that's really important.
And I would say some of the people I listen to are intellectually rigorous in that regard. But then I started thinking, you know, there really aren't that many people speaking about politics that are really... cautious in what they're saying. So then I thought, you know, maybe I should be talking more about politics because I think I, I mean, I think everybody thinks that they're fair, but I think I'm probably a little bit more fair and reasonable than the average person. I don't know.
But I would say I'm pretty fair. And I think partly the reason why I think that is because I went to school at a very liberal university. I went to an art school. where people hated politics people hated talking about politics people excuse me tended to lean more towards the left just because um And I never really thought about it that way at the time, but because when you're in the art world, you're obviously around a lot of very progressive ideas, you think you could call them. And so...
I'm a product of that environment. But at the same time, I switch sides, I think. Well, I know I switch sides. If you want to... call it if you want to talk about it in terms of left and right i did switch sides from you could say the left to the right because because i had such an open mind about things and i was
I did have a lot of time to think about my life after I graduated from college. So I guess you could say I went inward and outward and I was looking at things. I was reading as many books as I could. And so, you know, that's a whole other story, but my thinking evolved and I became more of a one-issue voter, maybe a two-issue voter.
I think there were just a couple of issues that caused me to vote one way or the other. And then over time, I became more... interested in economics I was all I was always interested in economics I think because I was reading about the stock market and I was reading about gold and
And more recently, I'm reading about electronic money like e-gold and cryptocurrency. And so these kinds of topics go well with... with economics and if you're interested in economics now you get into politics because if you know the different political parties see politics in a different way and i'm not a an economics expert but um i would say that's how my thinking has shifted since
I graduated from college. And so I don't think this show is going to be really political because to me it doesn't really interest me that much. But I do... I think I do want to talk more about politics on this show because I think it's important now, especially what we're seeing happening with Google. Google is a very core part of any business now.
So if you're in business, you really have to be thinking about, especially Google Places. Every business needs to be in Google Places, so you need to be in Google's ecosystem just to run and operate a business. I've been shifting a lot of my business operations away from Google, but this is relevant now. So we have a lot of tech companies that are taking sides politically.
And if you're on the wrong side of the political spectrum, you have two choices. You can either be really secretive about what your political leanings are, in which case...
Maybe nobody really cares what you're doing because you're just not engaging at all. Or you can be honest about what your opinion is and what your thinking is. And then by being more... authentic as they call it now by being more authentic maybe it's better to identify with half of the market the half of the market that's that shares your thinking and then
Okay, maybe you alienate some people on one side, but then you gain a whole bunch more loyal followers on the other side. Now, I can tell you that I have clients that have different political opinions than I do. And that's perfectly okay because we're not really, that's not the foundation of our business relationship. But I do think, I do think this is something that we should be talking about the way business.
politics and economics work together right now i think it's becoming more important as more companies are coming out and saying okay well this is what we believe you know this is what we support And if you don't like it, you know, then that's your problem. So I would never have talked about politics before. But I think... businesses as people just as as people were just were pushed into a corner where if we share our opinions
When we don't share our opinions, I think it's becoming a more important decision. There's more at stake now, especially as our way of life is drastically changing. when there's literally millions of people crossing these borders, your way of life could be dramatically changed in a very short period of time. And so I think this is an important topic. And not only that, not only your way of life changing, the demographics changing. Change is always there.
Okay, the rate of change, that's just one issue. Also, just running a business, this is your livelihood. So if you can't run a business without feeling threatened... by, okay, you can't say this or you can't say that, you can't do this or that. You have to know what the rules are. And so it's important that we talk about this, I think, in order for us to... remain in business and to remain relevant. And another big part of my business is keeping people online. So there are a lot of threats.
to keeping your business online. Most of those threats are related to things like natural disasters and power outages. There's all kinds of little problems.
You know, disgruntled employees can do things. There are a lot of considerations in the web hosting industry, which you wouldn't really think about, but I've been doing this for... decades now and i can tell you that there are a lot of little gotchas that you wouldn't expect to be a problem but they are a problem um but now the people are getting deplatformed for their political beliefs
I think that's an opportunity for someone like me to say, hey, you know, I support you just because you're kicked off of this platform. You know, you were always vulnerable. on that platform they could have they could have knocked you off that platform for any number of reasons and in getting knocked off that platform because of your political orientation um you know that could have happened anyway
Because these companies come and go. Which I've found over the years, a lot of tech companies will come and go. They'll go out of business or the trend will change and the platform just goes away. Like MySpace, there were a lot of people that their livelihood depended on MySpace and they were very successful on MySpace. And then when everyone moved to Facebook, their livelihood went away. They went out of business. They just went into depression. And so I think this is something that happens.
gary vaynerchuk is now talking about this where a lot of millennials are growing up maybe they're becoming influencers and they're becoming very popular and then he's saying
He fears that when these platforms go away that a lot of these people become very depressed and suicidal and so on. So he recommends that people spend a certain amount of time trying different platforms in order to... minimize the risk but this so this is something that I specialize in with my technology hosting business I'm able to help people build
a long-term solution that protects them from these kinds of problems. So by establishing your own presence on the internet with your own .com domain name, you're able to... protect yourself a lot better long term and you won't be you're less likely to become a victim of these kinds of problems where the platform that's sustaining your business, that platform can go away and then you have to be prepared for that eventuality. And this is something that happened to me recently in 2011.
I was making most of my revenue from Google, from Google Advertising. It was right after Obama was elected. Is that a coincidence? I, you know, may, may, hopefully it was a coincidence, but who knows, maybe I was targeted for my, um, maybe, maybe I was targeted for my religion or something like that. I don't know.
It's possible. It's possible that they were scanning my emails because I was using Gmail at the time. And maybe they targeted me and said, okay, well, we shouldn't be giving this guy money anymore. So, I mean, that's just... I wouldn't ever consider something happening like that. But now that we know that they were targeting people, it's not completely unreasonable to consider maybe they shut down my Google AdSense account.
Because they just didn't like what I was saying in my emails. In my private emails with my friends. Or maybe they could just look at... my location data or something like that. I don't know. Maybe let's just not go there with conspiracy theories, but you know, you can't really say it's a conspiracy theory now that this information is leaking out of Google. So.
It's probably unrelated to politics or religion. They probably just stopped sending me traffic for other reasons, which I won't get into. It was more related to... The panda and penguin updates. Now, what really happened in those panda and penguin updates? We don't really know. And this is all a mystery right now. And supposedly the U.S. government is investigating.
I believe the federal government is investigating Google right now, but I have a feeling that the U.S. government will not get access to Google's algorithms. But I do hope that the government is able to find out what's going on in those algorithms to make sure that they're fair. But it's... And if you're interested in this... There's a really interesting episode on a show that's called The Good Wife. They did several episodes on The Good Wife about a fictitious search engine company.
used a lot of the current events from Google court, actual Google court cases, and then they worked those complexities into the plot.
of the Good Wife episodes. And those episodes are really interesting where the law firm is representing this fictitious search engine company. And they talk a lot about the black box of the search engine and how that... and how that algorithm is really secret and if they were able, if that black box was somehow penetrated and that information from the algorithm was leaked to the public.
then that would completely decimate the business, the search business, because then people would be able to manipulate the search engine because they would know how the algorithm worked. And that's... Okay, so that's almost not really an issue anymore because what I think we know now is that Google's search results are more...
Well, we know this for a fact, that a lot of the search results are hand-picked, and how this hand-picking, hand-curating... I didn't phrase that the best way, but they have reviewers that go and review your site. And they'll make a decision. They'll look at your navigation, for example, and say, okay, this site has good navigation, this site has bad navigation, this site looks good, this one looks bad. And so I think they have...
99% sure they have reviewers that review your site. And so now the question is, do these reviewers, are they politically neutral? And this opens up a whole other conversation, which I've brought up a few times. Matt Cutts, who was the head of Google's search spam team.
He was basically the mouthpiece of Google for many years. And one particular day he came out and he said to everyone, you should not have any political commentary on your website because that will... lower your search rank and I was really surprised when I heard this but I didn't think much about it but then I thought to myself okay so I better not talk about politics on my website because I don't want to be losing my search rank but now
In retrospect, that's really, I would say, damning that Google has said that because they denied this in front of Congress. They said, no, we don't have our... results manipulated because of politics but that's false because now we know because of the leak and also because of what matt cut said in that video and now it's interesting
that matt cuts works for the government so this whole conspiracy that google's trying to take over the government takes on a whole new level with i believe the the chief technology officer of the united states government is a former employee of google i don't know if she's a currently the cto of the united states government or if she was a former cto but you have now high level people in the u.s government are from google
And so that makes this whole information leak even more concerning that you have actual employees inside the government perhaps controlling things in Google's favor. So that's a whole other dimension of this. Okay, we're at 45 minutes. I think there's a lot more I would like to say about the search engine aspect. But let's just say that... The results we know are more hand-picked. Oh, there's one other thing I want to say. Page rank. Page rank is the other controversial thing here.
So Google can just pick the institutions that it likes. It can say, okay, well, we like this institution. We like this school because they're, you know, we believe that this school is... is in line with our way of thinking. And we believe that this newspaper, for example, the New York Times, they're in line with our way of thinking. So we'll give them a higher page rank. And I don't know if you know this, but page rank is the system...
the algorithmic system that underlies the whole search engine. So all of your authority is based on a number that comes from PageRank, which is decided by... someone or some group of people internally at Google that decide how much authority each institution should have. They're probably giving their favorite institutions the highest page rank, such as maybe Stanford, which is, you know, in that kind of Silicon Valley area.
you know there's a lot there's a lot to think about here there's a lot of information i think that people don't know and i don't spend my entire day reading this stuff but i do spend a lot of time reading this stuff so i think it's interesting And it affects everyone whether or not people realize it. Every business needs to be in Google.
or they're losing reputation points, and these kinds of reputation points factor into such things as business credit and your ability... just to sign up for different services you know your phone number has a reputation score which a lot of people don't realize and your phone number's reputation score is partly based on whether or not you're
listed in Google's directory. So I think a lot of people don't realize how important Google is to every aspect of your business. And this just isn't about Google. That's just the topic of today's. um, conversations. So I didn't actually get to talk about the Spanish versus English, um, topic. So I think I'll save that for the next episode. All right. Well, thanks for listening. And if you have any comments, uh, join our group. on Telegram, and we'll talk to you there.