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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host at Zetron.

Better Offline. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to tell you the names of some of the people

responsible for destroying the internet.

And I'm going to start on February 5th, 2019, when Ben Goams, Google's former head of search,

well, he had a problem.

Jerry Dishler, then, the VP and GM of ads at Google and Shiv and Katerman, then the VP of Engineering Search

and Ads on Google properties, had called something called a code yellow for search revenue due to,

and I quote emails that came out as part of Google's Antigrust hearing, steady weakness in the daily numbers and a

likelihood that it would end the quarter significantly behind in metrics that, kind of unclear.

For those unfamiliar with Google's internal kind of Scientology-esque jargon, which means most people, let me explain.

A code yellow isn't a terrible need to piss or some sort of

crisis of moderate severity. The yellow, according to Stephen Levy's tell-all book about Google,

refers to, and I promise this is not a joke, the color of a tank top that a former VP of

engineering called Wayne Rosling used to wear during his time at the company.

It's essentially the equivalent of Defcom 1 and activates, as Levy explained, a war room-like situation where workers are pulled from their desks and into a conference room where they tackle

the problem as a top priority. Any other projects or concerns are sidelined.

And independently, I've heard there are other colors like purple.

I'm not going to get into that, though.

...