Collectively, people stream more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every single day. That’s a lot of eyeballs, and it means the platform has enormous influence. In its twisty-turny path from dwarfish startup to internet colossus, YouTube has launched the careers of creatives and hosted a host of misinformation and conspiracy theories. It has been a source of joy and entertainment, and it has sparked real-world tragedies.
This week on Gadget Lab, we talk with journalist and author Mark Bergen about his new book, which is all about the video-streaming platform and its path to cultural domination.
Show Notes
Mark Bergen’s new book, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, comes out on September 6.
Recommendations
Mark recommends the YouTube channel of Bill Wurtz. Lauren recommends the book Normal Family, by Chrysta Bilton. Mike recommends the climate newsletter One5C, by Joe Brown.
Mark Bergen can be found on Twitter @mhbergen. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
How to Listen
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Transcript
Michael Calore: Lauren.
Lauren Goode: Mike.
Michael Calore: Lauren, do you remember the first video that you ever uploaded to YouTube?
Lauren Goode: I don't remember the exact video, but I want to say it was probably a really crappy short film.
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Michael Calore: Oh, OK.
Lauren Goode: I was a member of this Brooklyn group of filmmakers for a while, and we were uploading our shorts to YouTube—and, yeah, they weren't very good. I mean, mine wasn't very good. Other people probably made great stuff.
Michael Calore: Is it still there? Because I absolutely need to see this.
Lauren Goode: Maybe it's private. I'll find something to send to you. How about you? Do you remember the first video you uploaded to YouTube?
Michael Calore: Oh, yeah. It's of my cat.
Lauren Goode: Which cat?
Michael Calore: Poppy.
Lauren Goode: Oh, the one who's still alive.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Lauren Goode: Poppy has lived as long as YouTube.
Michael Calore: She has.
Lauren Goode: Wow. YouTube's had quite the history.
Michael Calore: We're going to talk all about it.
Lauren Goode: Let's do it.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore. I'm a senior editor at WIRED.
Lauren Goode: I'm Lauren Goode. I'm a senior writer at WIRED.
Michael Calore: We're also joined this week by Bloomberg reporter and author Mark Bergen. Hello, Mark.
Mark Bergen: Hello. Thanks for having me.
Lauren Goode: Do I need to share a disclaimer that I consider Mark a friend and a sometime surf buddy? We've attempted to surf together a couple times at Bolinas.
Michael Calore: Yes. Go ahead and share the—
Mark Bergen: Important disclaimer, but we'll cast that aside for professional reasons right now.
Lauren Goode: Absolutely.
Michael Calore: Well, we've actually invited Mark on the show this week to talk about his new book, which is all about YouTube.
Lauren Goode: Yes.
Michael Calore: Of course, YouTube is the biggest name in video streaming on the Internet. People watch more than a billion hours of content on YouTube every single day. The service has had a long and twisty journey from a small startup in a rat-infested San Mateo office to the Google owned juggernaut that it is today. Along the way, it has launched the careers of thousands of YouTube stars—for better and for worse. It's also served as a fountain of joy and entertainment for millions, as well as a source of misinformation and conspiracy theories for millions.
Mark, you go into all of this and more in your new book. It's called, Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. It comes out on September 6th. So let's start with that title: How chaotic of a rise are we talking about here? Pretty damn chaotic?
Mark Bergen: I think so. Part of the reason I wrote this book is that I've been covering Google since 2015, and I was covering these TikToks of firestorms largely after 2016 at YouTube. They had a major advertising boycott. They had endless creator scandals, some of their biggest stars. They had, in a very tragic moment, the only social media company that had a disgruntled creator come to the campus with a gun and start shooting, and all these incidents, right? During these couple years, in particular 2017, and not to mention the strangest kids' material that the internet has ever seen. I knew at the time that it was all deeply strange. I realized I was just scratching the surface, and I put this book together in part because I thought it was an enormously important and fascinating story that hadn't been told yet.
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Lauren Goode: It really is fascinating. It's changed so much of how we consume video online. In the second half of this podcast, we're going to talk to you about what we'd like to call future stuff, YouTube today, and competitors and algorithms, and all that. But I want to take it back to the very beginning, because in your book you write that, early on, the founders of YouTube couldn't decide if this was going to be a hot-or-not site, more of a social network, or a repository for inane videos. What tipped the founders in the latter direction?
Mark Bergen: Yeah. It is kind of funny that the two biggest sites on the internet, Facebook and YouTube, started off as dating websites. Pretty telling from that era of the internet.
There was this debate between basically being like a Flickr model, right? Flickr at the time had just sold to Yahoo when YouTube started. I think it was for around $25 million, and that seemed huge, right? A year later, YouTube would go for over $1.5 billion. But they had this idea that it could be a creative place where people are uploading—what you were doing, Lauren, in Brooklyn, right? Creative shorts. Or why else would people want to share videos? They might want to get a date, right? So these are the two … They knew there was a problem about sharing video files on online.
But I think, certainly, there wasn't this idea that people would want to upload or watch amateur video. I think the tipping point came in that first summer. MySpace was the hottest place online then. I'd just take us back. MySpace was a big driver for YouTube's early growth in part because YouTube had a genius idea to be able to embed their video players anywhere on the internet. I started sticking them on comments and popular MySpace channels. And then, you had a lot of people … MySpace at that point didn't really have robust video sharing and this was … So I think you had this organic spread, where there were early people experimenting with YouTube. It sort of echoes what we've seen on TikTok the past few years, where it's this creative canvas for people to try things out, people who've never had a career in media before, and I think once the YouTube early teams saw that take off, they were like, “This is the direction we're going to go in.”
Michael Calore: One of the big innovations early on was the recommendation engine. After you finish watching a video or while you're watching a video, the YouTube page shows some other related videos that you can watch next. Recommended videos have long been both a headache and a boon for YouTube over the years. Tell us how that's evolved.
Mark Bergen: Yeah. I think probably more of a boon than anything, even despite the very large headaches. It was another early innovation that let YouTube leapfrog the competitors at the time, right? It also ran from Blip.tv, Revver, Metacafe was around then, I think? Microsoft, Google Video—the early chapters of the book talk about how Google Video was … At one point YouTube, when YouTube had just started and then Google Video was announced, it was like a call for user generated video, and YouTube's like, I believe the exact quote … Can I say this one on air?
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Michael Calore: Oh yeah.
Mark Bergen: Chad Turhill says like, “Ah fuck,” in his recollection. It seemed like Google was a genuine threat. This was a year after the IPO. So anyway, sorry. The related videos were this new functionality that I think from early on were driving a lot of traffic. It's a convenient way, the panels are right beside you. It was relatively rudimentary, especially from our vantage point.
Now, it was just sort of “if people who like this also like this,” right? Early on, the engineers told me, they ran into the Justin Bieber problem, where it was like the Kevin Bacon game, right? But it was every two videos you land on a Bieber, or every two videos you land on a cat or a bikini. That was another term I heard. Cats were big. YouTube early on decided they were going to ban pornography and graphic sex. But like sex, everything that went up to the line and was allowed on the platform was also really popular, for obvious reasons. And so, they really struggled to get that right, and a lot of the decisionmaking in YouTube's earliest years was like, “How are we going to feed videos to people that they're going to want to watch?”
Another important aspect of this early YouTube was they actually had a team of community managers. It's like a forgotten history that I just didn't know at all. There was a team of community managers that were curating the homepage and picking interesting videos. They were called community managers, and they served as editors. A colleague called them “cool hunters,” and they were picking these videos for the home page and then minting stars or virality out of that process. People were visiting YouTube.com, I think, more than they do now. It's obviously moved to algorithmic feeds in the world we live in today.
Lauren Goode: Speaking of things being rudimentary, so from the earliest days, YouTube did have content moderation. It started with an employee named Heather Gillette, and that was not her official job, but she was asked to keep an eye out for problematic videos. Some of the early videos were really, really bad. Do you think the YouTube founders had enough foresight around content moderation? Was it possible back then to envision that this platform would become as huge as it has?
Mark Bergen: Yeah. No. I don't think … Well, I'm not sure it was possible. But Steve Chan has talked about this. I spoke to him, and he said this in other places, like, “We didn't foresee this coming,” right? Both the economic opportunities and the size of the creator economy, and then the problems of moderation. That being said, there was an early team. Micah Schaeffer was one of the early policy managers there, and they had a background. Micah had come up with this live journal culture and was aware of these deep recesses, these online communities that were forming, as well as the weird backwaters of the internet. One of the anecdotes in the book is the YouTube moderation team, early on, they would spend time hanging out on 4Chan, right?
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And so they knew at one point, like 4Channers had said, “Oh, we're going to troll YouTube and just spam them with a bunch of porn.” They saw this coming because they were hanging out on 4Chan. The people at that time kind of said, “We had impressively robust content moderation rules.” I mean, a lot of it wasn't what we have today, but it is impressive given that there really was no precedent for this. There was nothing at this scale to do moderation for video. It's just a much more complicated medium thann text. And so I think it was actually a very impressive feat to pull that off. That being said, certainly they didn't anticipate … there was no concept of fake news, no concept then that propaganda would spread, any number of problems we've had in recent years.
Lauren Goode: So YouTube is also part of probably one of the most important acquisitions in tech history. How did the Google acquisition all come about?
Mark Bergen: Great question. At Denny's. The famous scene that they … I do appreciate this about the YouTube founders. They were being courted by many companies at the time. Yahoo and Google were the two main courters. They had met with Yahoo executives first at this Denny's in the Valley, in order to be discreet. And then they were like, “Wouldn't it be funny if we had the meeting with Google at the exact same Denny's?” and they did. So they shared a similar investor, Sequoia. There was some evidence that came up in congressional filings that Larry Page, who was Google's cofounder, had his eyes on YouTube as early as I think late December of 2005, which is pretty remarkable. And from people I talked to, the founders of Google were interested in YouTube largely for its capacity. It's a search engine, and it still today is the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google, and they think of it that way.
Google was well aware that video was the future of the internet, and they were investing in Google Video. Google Video was kind of a, not a failed product, but it was certainly meager compared to YouTube. There's an email that surfaced, and Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, was like, “YouTube and MySpace are cleaning our clocks.” And so, this was an early example of where Google couldn't build this, so they went out and bought it.
Lauren Goode: Oh, the classic Silicon Valley playbook. Why build it? Just buy it.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Just buy it.
Lauren Goode: Obviously, YouTube became a huge part of Google's search engine.
Michael Calore: It's really funny looking back at it now, like 15 years on, $1.68 billion feels exceedingly small.
Lauren Goode: Oh yeah. It's like a garage sale.
Michael Calore: Yeah. It really is. Just shows you how far into—
Lauren Goode: No pun intended. Silicon valley garages?
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Michael Calore: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at you—
Lauren Goode: All right. All right. Yeah.
Michael Calore: All right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: We've talked about how YouTube came to be. So now, let's talk about where it's going. The platform still dominates on-demand video on the internet. But lately, it has faced tough competition from the likes of TikTok and Twitch. Also, YouTube's sheer size has been unwieldy, and some of the changes it has made over the years have angered and alienated both its user base and the people making its videos. So Mark, let's talk about what's next for YouTube. What do they do? Do they keep investing in YouTube Shorts until it beats TikTok or dies trying?
Mark Bergen: Yes. I mean, you've seeing a little bit. You guys had an episode on about Reels recently. YouTube, I think can afford to make similar changes because it's a video platform, right? So it's not too much of a difference for users. It's not that abrupt of a change when you see a lot more Shorts in your app, right? But it has been dramatic, at least for me, and I think for a lot of other viewers, and they're encouraging creators to make a lot more Shorts. They're about to flip the switch, presumably by the end of the year, for monetization on Shorts. So putting in sponsored Shorts in between your Shorts.
I think one interesting question that YouTube hasn't solved—so YouTube's business model has been since 2007, primarily splitting the ad revenue from the ads that appear before or during a video. With Shorts, as far as I know, they haven't solved the problem of which creator gets credit for the ad. Is it the one right before you see it or right after? The book gets into this, what I think was a really fascinating insight into … YouTube at one point had this extensive debate and considered tearing up this payment system and paying out the way TikTok does, which is based on engagement. So not whether there's an ad that runs before your video, but just the type of engagement—whether it's how long and often people watch, likes, comments, subscriptions, all the usual bells and whistles. They stopped that program for a variety of reasons, partly because this was during the time when Congress, when advertisers, and the press were like, “Oh wait. Social media, maybe just measuring engagement has all sorts of unintended consequences and perverse incentives, and is driving society in ways we don't want it to go.”
So yes, I don't think they're giving up on Shorts. YouTube did have Stories, if you recall. They've more or less dropped that—I don't think they have a big adoption with creators or viewers. But I think they're investing a lot more in Shorts, and it's hard to see them letting that go. TikTok is a real viable threat. I mean, something that's important to remember is, as far as I know, TikTok is still banned in YouTube's biggest market, which is India, and YouTube has more monthly viewers in India than the United States has people in the country.
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Michael Calore: Wow.
Mark Bergen: So YouTube's future is in many ways in India and Brazil, It's the only US internet service operating in Russia today still. I think their future is global and will continue to be global, which has all sorts of opportunities and pitfalls.
Lauren Goode: How censored is it in Russia?
Mark Bergen: My sense is it's not that heavily censored. They haven't caved to pressure. They certainly caved to some pressure to remove videos, but I'm pretty sure Russian … If you're in Russia, you don't need a VPN to access YouTube to see … There's a bunch of, like, the BBC Russian footage, right? I'm pretty sure Navalny, the opposition critic, I think his channel's still active in Russia. Russia is a really interesting case study where YouTube has been both a major tool for the state run media … Russia Today is a hugely popular YouTube channel, and opposition critics and voices that are not allowed on normal channels of media do have a voice in YouTube. And so I think it's a really fascinating double-edged sword for YouTube.
Lauren Goode: YouTube is not in China, correct?
Mark Bergen: YouTube is not in China. I do have some reporting that they tried but never went during that time when Google was operating in mainland China. So no, YouTube is not in China. I will put a lot of money to say that … I mean, who knows what happens in the future? But as far as I know, Google's not holding out hope for getting back into China.
Lauren Goode: So back to the competitive landscape quickly. Someone asked recently, randomly, if I would ever start a YouTube channel, and I said no for obvious reasons, in the sense that it feels really hard to break through these days. We could even look to our own Condé Nast brands as an example. WIRED has millions of YouTube followers, so does Vogue, so does Architectural Digest, right?
But because of the way the algorithms work, one, there's sort of a black box. Two, it seems like once you've already established a really successful platform or a viewership, like you have a certain amount of audience, then the videos feed each other. And then, once you try something new or you insert something into a feed or try to launch a new channel that doesn't necessarily have a huge following, it drags down the rest of a brand, right? So I'm wondering how the creators you talk to feel these days about trying to start anything new on YouTube, whether they have an established presence or they don't?
Mark Bergen: It is really hard. I think that's a major reason why TikTok has taken off. It's just a discovery engine, and you could say that ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, has just marvelous AI. And then, it's just … YouTube is a really crowded place, to your point, and it's hard to break through in a way that you could a few years ago. That being said, Mr. Beast is a fascinating case study. He's one of the world's biggest YouTubers, if not the biggest. He started a gaming channel, and that grew phenomenally, right? Mr. Beast is sort of like, "You can go out and do this. All you need is to understand how to do thumbnails well, how to write." You need to approach YouTube as if you were a computer scientist, right? Which is like you optimize, you A/B-test everything, and I think the best YouTubers know this. They're monomaniacal in this fixation. Mr. Beast is a great example of that, and I think that's what hopefully the book is driving home too, is this is a computer science company that's running the world's biggest media service.
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And so, in order to be successful, you have to think like an engineer. You have to think like a machine, which I think saps some of the humanity from it. But I do think there's potential to grow on YouTube. The other direction they're moving in is that they've adapted channel memberships and basically tried to copy the Patreon model a little bit. It's so funny. YouTube is really talking about this a lot. And then now, their eye of Sauron has moved to TikTok or something. But in that way, there was a sense of, “Oh, maybe every YouTuber doesn't need to have tens of millions of subscribers in order to have a sustainable media business. Maybe they can have a Patreon model. Maybe they can have channel memberships, get brand deals, and sell merchandise,” and there are YouTubers who have done pretty well, succeeding, staying in a nice bubble. But I think the incentives of the platform are like, “You can and should get as large as you can as quickly as possible.”
Michael Calore: So you touched on games briefly, and I have a larger question about gaming strategy, because if you go on YouTube and you search for games, there's a lot of game reviews, play-throughs, obviously a ton of Minecraft videos. They do have a big section of the website, YouTube Gaming, for streaming games. But when it comes to streaming games, there are platforms like Twitch and to a lesser extent Discord that have a very strong foothold. So what do we think the future of streaming games looks like on YouTube?
Mark Bergen: It's a really hard question. I think one way you could look at it is that YouTube certainly dropped the ball, in the sense that they didn't invest in this significant portion of their platform, gaming. And so you see TikTok, Discord, Roblox even, jumping into that space. At the same time, YouTube has signed a lot of Twitch streamers recently to these deals. They've been investing in a gaming vertical. I mean, a long time ago they were thinking about doing separate apps for music and kids and gaming, and their music experiment went through many different iterations, and they have a kids app. But gaming, I don't … They could announce tomorrow a new gaming app, but I think it's a central part of YouTube. And so I think they're investing in it a lot more.
I believe a couple weeks ago they announced … They used to do YouTube Rewind at the end of the year, which was this feel-good summary of the year, best hits with all the creators. They stopped it in 2018 after—the book gets into this—the big blowback from their creator base and the fans. It was the most disliked video ever. Topping Bieber, which is quite an accomplishment. But now this year, they're like, “Oh, we're going to do this in gaming,” which to me suggests like, “Oh, we are prioritizing this,” in part because there's a lot more competition. Meta is moving into this world too. So I think the story of YouTube in some ways is like, it'll start to put resources in areas, like all companies, when it has competition, and when not, it tends to lag behind.
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Lauren Goode: YouTube will launch new products, right? It launched Stories, but it didn't really take off. It's got Shorts right now. I just got an email the other day about YouTube doing podcasts. So anytime it sees people going for this grab of attention, it's going to do something similar.
Mark Bergen: Podcast is a super fascinating example.
Lauren Goode: Because it's one of those things that people are probably using it for—
Mark Bergen: Oh my God. It's huge.
Lauren Goode: Organically already. They're watching podcast and videos.
Mark Bergen: Totally. Yes.
Mark Bergen: My colleague Dipti Shaw says it all the time. He's like, “YouTube's the biggest music service no one talks about.” You can probably say the same thing for podcasts. Part of this is without the company really doing anything almost … I think in music they did a lot of work to get the record labels to come on, and there's a lot of behind-the-scenes work there. But in podcast, I think they're making the functionality so once you finish recording this podcast, with a button, you can just upload it to YouTube. I don't think we're talking enough about this. That's just going to continue to make YouTube bigger—but the content moderation challenges are just …
Lauren Goode: Yes, yes, yes. This was the thing we had to come back to. This is really YouTube's biggest challenge.
Mark Bergen: They're going into podcasting and saying, “Podcasting is a place where you just get hours and hours of people like me just droning on,” and that's just another drop in the large ocean that is YouTube.
Lauren Goode: As far as we know, you're not peddling misinformation, Mark.
Mark Bergen: As far as you know.
Lauren Goode: As far as we know.
Mark Bergen: I'm upholding the standards of journalism that we practice at Bloomberg News.
Lauren Goode: That's right. One person who we haven't talked about yet, but we absolutely need to, is YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, because when things are going great for YouTube, all praise goes to Susan. But when YouTube is struggling with its content moderation and some really, really serious issues around content moderation, then that falls to Susan as well. How is she viewed as a CEO?
Mark Bergen: Really excellent question that a lot of people who work at YouTube still struggle to answer, I think. I'll do the classic journalism “both sides” here. I think the criticism that's most valid to me, and I include in the book, is from YouTubers like Hank Green who've been around for a long time. They say that people who had senior leadership at the company, there were many blind spots, like they did not respond to creator concerns around harassment. So many of the major issues that YouTube has faced in the past few years, whether misinformation, just wild sort of drama channels and misbehaving creators, the weirdest kid stuff on the platform, YouTubers sell this first. They were making videos about this. YouTube blasted its own platform in a way that a company never really has. And so, I think … Susan, who was a Google Ads executive, has done a phenomenal job. If you're an alphabet shareholder, you are happy with Susan Wojcicki's leadership at YouTube. From 2017 to last year, it went from an $8 billion ads business to $29 billion, which is remarkable given that advertisers were boycotting for most of 2017.
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I think she is not Zuckerberg. She is not Sheryl Sandberg. She very intentionally stays out of the limelight. And so, that is, for some of her defenders, a savvy move. You don't necessarily want a charismatic CEO of YouTube. You want someone who can handle these complicated problems and sustain a business that keeps growing, that keeps Wall Street happy. That being said, I think she's very much a Googler. Google was founded in her garage and has many of the, I think, the perspectives that make YouTube scale really well as a technology platform and some of the key blind spots that Google has, whether it's being able to service this gigantic creator class that they have and provide them with real support, and being aware of some of the unintended consequences and some of the societal impact of the platform.
Michael Calore: All right, Mark. Thanks for all this great discussion. Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll do our recommendations.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK. This is the part of the show where we go around the table and we ask everybody to recommend a thing that our listeners might enjoy. Mark, as our guest, you get to go first, what is your recommendation?
Mark Bergen: Thank you. I will stay on-brand and recommend a YouTube channel. Maybe many of your listeners know Bill Wurtz. Bill Wurtz is my favorite YouTuber, and he's cranking out content on the history of the world, I guess, is—
Michael Calore: He does history-of-the-world videos?
Mark Bergen: That one's of his most popular, but he primarily does Shorts and then W-U-R-T-Z is an animation … He's the Norm MacDonald of YouTube. Norm MacDonald's like the comedian's comedian, right? He's like the YouTuber's YouTuber. He has this weird irreverent brilliance that I think is the best part of YouTube, and part of the reason I wrote the book is to fight for that.
Michael Calore: Nice.
Michael Calore: So what's his channel? Is it just his name?
Mark Bergen: I think so. I don't know. I'm not his manager.
Michael Calore: OK, cool. Lauren, what is your recommendation?
Lauren Goode: My recommendation is another book this week. Am I allowed to recommend a book on top of Mark's book?
Michael Calore: Yes, of course.
Lauren Goode: OK. So after you have finished Mark's book—
Mark Bergen: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: And you're looking for a little bit of a different genre or a palate cleanser, I recommend Normal Family, by Chrysta Bilton. It is a memoir about how she came to know and love her 35 siblings, although there are many more siblings than that out there in the world. It's really … I saw the book described as a love letter to her mother, and I agree with that assessment of it. It's a beautifully written and compelling book about how her mother, living in LA, this was in the late ‘70s, early ’80s, found a sperm donor, a man who she met at a hair salon and decided this was the man who was going to be her sperm donor. They made an agreement, and she asked him not to donate to anybody else, which he agreed to do. And then, of course, he went to the cryobank and made a whole bunch of deposits. He was incredibly prolific.
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As such, Chrysta, who I happen to know, ends up with many, many siblings. One sister who she knows growing up and grows up alongside—and it was a pretty tumultuous childhood. But then, she comes to find out later on that her father was in fact this prolific sperm donor, and it's yeah, it's just a beautiful story about family and, I don't know, loving your family despite all of its trials and tribulations and weirdness. A lot of us feel like. Yeah. Anyway, it's a great book.
Michael Calore: Very cool.
Lauren Goode: I've really, really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it.
Michael Calore: Awesome.
Lauren Goode: Yes. Mike, what's your recommendation?
Michael Calore: My recommendation is a Substack newsletter. It's a free Substack newsletter. It's called One5c and it's called One5c because it's about climate change, and 1.5 degrees celsius is the measurement that we use, that if we can keep the earth from heating less than 1.5 degrees celsius, we can, probably as a species, manageably survive the climate crisis. It's pretty grim to consider that we're probably going to overshoot that number by 1 or 2 degrees celsius. But this Substack is a newsletter, comes out maybe once a week or so and gives you really great advice for how you, personally, as a human being and consumer of goods, can help do your part to keep us under 1.5C.
It's written by a guy named Joe Brown who's a journalist, who we all know, I'm sure, because he used to work here at WIRED. He used to be on the show. He's been in the tech journalism industry for a while, but now he has this new newsletter and it's excellent. It's been going for about a year. It's filled with all kinds of great advice. He had a really nice series recently about plastic and how you can get plastic out of your life and why it's very important for you to do that. He had one just last week about heat pumps and how heat pumps work.
Lauren Goode: That was very good.
Michael Calore: And why you may want to install one in your home now that you can get a tax break for it.
Lauren Goode: He also advises you to eat the tops of strawberries.
Michael Calore: Which you should. Absolutely.
Lauren Goode: I couldn't do it, I tried. Sorry, Joe.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Next time you're looking at a strawberry, pop the whole thing in your mouth.
Lauren Goode: OK.
Michael Calore: This is the only way to eat a strawberry because yeah, it's … I don't know. It's like I don't like to have pure pleasure in my life. I like to make sure that every instance of pleasure is also accompanied by a slight amount of discomfort.
Lauren Goode: Right. Yeah. Just like a sense of, there's like a little bit of a Brillo pad in your mouth as you're eating the strawberry.
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Michael Calore: It's—
Lauren Goode: Sweet, sweet berry. Yeah.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren Goode: It's normal.
Michael Calore: It's important, it's important. Anyway. One5c is the name of the Substack.
Lauren Goode: It is a great newsletter.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Subscribe.
Lauren Goode: Like, comment, and subscribe.
Mark Bergen: Nice.
Lauren Goode: Glad I brought that back.
Mark Bergen: Thank you.
Lauren Goode: I did that for you, Mark.
Mark Bergen: Full circle.
Michael Calore: Yes.
Mark Bergen: Very much appreciate that.
Michael Calore: Mark's book is called Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. It is out September 6th. Thanks again, Mark, for joining us.
Mark Bergen: Thank you for having me. That was super fun.
Michael Calore: Of course. Thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just check the show notes or leave a comment on WIRED's YouTube channel, because we definitely check those. Our producer is Boone Ashworth. We will be back next week. Until then, goodbye.
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