Hey, it's Empire's book of the day. I'm Andrew Limbong. The internet can be a very, very, very bad place,

full of bad actors and dark deeds, but it can be a genuinely beautiful place too, where people

earnestly share their wonder. That's the theme of today's episode. We'll do kind of a

Dickensian best of times, worst of times look at the internet. In a bit, we'll hear from

Nick Clegg, former president of global affairs at Meta, about his book How to Save the

internet. That's the bad stuff. But let's start with the good. I spend a lot of time on

YouTube watching video essays.

It's where some of the most cutting-edge documentary filmmaking is happening.

Cultural critic Jacob Geller is a big video essayist, mainly about video games, but about other

stuff too.

And he's compiled some of these essays in a book titled How a Game Lives.

His conversation with here and now, Scott Tong, after the break.

If you were looking for smart commentary on culture and the arts, where do you go?

Surely, the last place is YouTube, right?

Maybe wrong.

One of the great joys of getting older and marginally wiser is going back to old

favorite media and discovering new aspects of it. That is writer Jacob Geller. He's 30,

and he makes these long, thinky video essays for YouTube on art and literature, on movies and

video games. He's even posted semi-deep thoughts on deep holes and why some of us are obsessed with digging them.

It's this immediacy between action and result that I think makes digging a hole so appealing.

You take a shovel full of dirt out of the ground and you can immediately see your impact on the world.

Geller has a new book out that puts his video essays in old school printed form. It's called

...