Hey, it's Lizzie. Two quick notes before we get started. As of today, what next TBD is moving to one day a week? You'll still hear us in your feet on Fridays, but not on Sundays anymore. If you have been a listener for a while, I want you to know how much we appreciate you and your support of the show and your willingness to let us do weird stuff

like make a meme coin or vibe code a game. My team and I are very grateful. The other heads up is that

this episode has some adult language. You've been warned.

Our brains are being melted by the algorithm.

I've always been intrigued by Jack Conti.

We're lonely and depressed, getting more polarized every day.

We're endlessly doom scrolling, bombarded by rage bait.

And it's because our experience on the internet.

Jack's the CEO of Patreon.

And this is from a video he made with The New York Times.

In the video, he has this theory of the internet that you can tell a lot about a tech company by understanding what they optimize for.

So I asked him, what is Patreon optimizing for?

Getting creators paid for their labor, number one, long-term relationships, number two, and human creation, number three.

And I could talk a little bit more about each of those things.

Yeah.

But maybe at the core of it, I don't like what the current Internet is doing to humans or doing to me.

I feel like a, I feel like I'm an experiment in a petri dish.

And I feel like my limbic system, you know, is getting tested every day, you know, with what is sort of maximally fixating me and grabbing my attention. And I think it's bad for us. It certainly

feels bad for me. I'm tired of logging on the internet and having it feel like rocket fuel

straight into my veins. And I just don't, I just don't buy. What it comes down to is I don't

buy that this is the only way to have media and community on the internet. I think there's

got to be a different way. In fact, I remember when there was a different way. Just a decade ago,

...