The Rise of AI Book Ripoffs

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are 404 Media co-founders, Sam Cole.

Hello, Emmanuel Mayberg, hello, and Jason Kebler.

Hello.

Jason and Sam, we have an event coming up that both of you are going to be at.

What's the rundown?

What's happening?

Yeah, we're throwing a party at South by Southwest on Monday, March 10th.

We're going to have a kind of like live panel podcast thingamabob

about AI slop featuring me and Sam

and our friend Brian Merchant who runs Blood in the Machine.

And then we're going to have a party after that.

So to register,

you can go to our website and there will be a post by the time you read this because we don't have one yet.

I know, but the URL for it is really long and difficult.

It's the show notes.

Show notes.

Show notes.

That's what it's there, too.

It's l.l-u.m-a slash hffh i nine

s-n

yeah, click it in the show notes and all the posts, which we will now write.

I love a live air URL read.

That's really good, Pod.

It is.

People like it.

Speaking of AI slop, let's get to our first story.

This one is by Joe.

The headline for the story is: A slop publisher sold a rip-uff of my book on Amazon.

Joe, in case you don't know, though, I can't believe you don't know because he's done a very good job of promoting his book, but he wrote a very successful book.

And

you, I think, probably were

looking up the book on Amazon and other stores.

And what did you find while you were doing that?

Yeah.

Were you buying your own book again?

Yeah, I actually buy tens of thousands of copies, like Trump Jr.

style.

Didn't he do that to get it to like the bestseller list?

They just believe so.

Yeah.

I have not done that, to be clear.

No, I haven't bought any copies of my own, even though people do that to game the system.

But I was,

as I sometimes do, embarrassingly, just checking it on Amazon, you know, to see what the ratings are and that sort of thing.

It gives some indication of, I don't know, how much people like it or hate it.

And as I was doing that, I came across this other listing.

on amazon to be clear you don't need to buy the book on amazon you can go anywhere it's just they have their metrics and their star rating whatever But

I'm looking through, and I see this listing for a summary of Joseph Cox's Dark Wire, which is the name of my book.

And I'm like, huh, that's pretty strange.

I wasn't expecting that.

And then I go through and

immediately I'm interested because of the crappy quality.

of this listing like there's a really generic orange um cover um the description seems pretty generic as well.

And just going through the other summary books uploaded by this publisher called Slingshot Books, it just seemed like a very

low effort

churning out, I would say, of these book summaries.

So I decided to spend $4.99 of our subscribers' money on this piece of shit, basically.

so you buy it you read it with great interest what do you find what what is this should I I have read your book but I mean would I be better off just reading this instead it sounds like possibly yeah you just read the summary it's fine it gets the basic gist uh I mean

on one hand

it kind of does summarize the book but what literally what it's doing is that is breaking down every single chapter and I think there's like 30 or something chapters in the book and it's just rather than them being, I don't know, 20, 25 pages, for what I can remember, of all of this narrative detail, it's like three or four pages of just the normal plot points.

But

it,

it, well, the example I give in the in the article that I wrote was that my opening of the book is about this drug trafficker called Owen Hansen.

And there's sort of all of this detail about him.

And I spoke to him and, you know, I've followed his escapades and his case for years.

And you go to the summary summary book, and it's just two pages of Hansen did this, Hansen did that, Hansen did this.

And it's, I guess, the rise and fall of him.

He does fall.

You know, he's arrested by the FBI, but it just misses out all of the rich

detail, essentially.

So to answer your question, it was just like a really bland

overview.

Now, maybe that's the point of a summary book, you know, that we have cliff notes.

And I think we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later on in this segment as well.

Like, I'm not against summary books and I've used them when I've been studying as well.

It's different

when you see your work and your intellectual property

basically summarized on like a digital piece of toilet paper, basically, you know.

And then I took it and I showed a screenshot to you all, I think in our group chat.

Emmanuel, what did you think when I showed you the screenshot?

Because I don't know whether it's AI or not, you know, like that's one thing we can't can't really determine.

But I showed you the screenshot, I think.

What did you make of that?

Yeah, so I've been looking and reading a lot of these over the past couple of weeks for reasons that we'll get into soon.

But also, I believe we talked about on the pod a couple weeks ago, I wrote about AI-generated books, making it into libraries.

And a lot of these books are the summary books.

So I've read them.

And there's just a certain style to them, which is like you described, which is very plain and in correct, well-written English, but with no stylistic flair or feeling for place and narrative and all of that.

Um, it just feels uh kind of soulless.

So, I definitely had that style, um,

and immediately seemed AI generated to me.

And while we don't have a smoking gun here, um, there's a lot of contextual clues that we can get into later about why we're pretty confident that it's AI generated.

Yeah.

And then I also showed it to Jason.

And sorry, Jason, to put you on the spot because I didn't actually include this in the article.

But I just remember you responded to it by saying, like, there's no way this isn't AI generated due to like the sheer number of book summaries that this publisher was churning out.

What do you mean?

Yeah, I just mean, like,

if you think about it for one second,

they're publishing dozens of

summary books, and it's some publisher you've never heard of before.

There's not a human being reading and analyzing these in a formulaic way in the year 2025.

It's just like Occam's Razor.

It's so easy

to

get an AI to summarize, and it's so easy to get Amazon to publish something that there's just like no

business model where this makes any sense whatsoever for a human being to be doing this work.

And by that, I just mean like

it's the type of AI slop that we've seen over and over and over again.

And if you were to enter this market right now as a human being, saying,

Oh, I'm just going to read Joseph's book and then I'm going to read some completely unrelated book and I'm going to do this multiple times per day, publishing multiple

like formulaic summaries that are bad, I don't know why you wouldn't have an AI do it.

Yeah, it's like just way more likely to be AI,

especially this year.

And there's actually one comment left on the article from a subscriber, Spencer Bauman, which I'll just read out now.

Quote, there's no way it isn't AI.

Something about the way the chapter title is written screams chat GPT to me.

Similar things with articles that are individual paragraphs/slash bullet points with a bolded headline at the

start of each one.

The bullet point is a very good clue, and I just want to run through.

If you're listening to this and you see a book on Amazon and you're not sure, like the contextual clues that we usually use are it's the cover, right?

You'll either see that it's a clearly AI-generated cover.

If it's a book about someone, it's really easy to tell because they don't really look like themselves, but also you can see just like artifacts in the images.

It's the content of the book, which has the same style that the commenter just mentioned.

And then I think probably the best one, as Jason mentioned, is you click on the author or you click on the publisher and you see, A, do they have any online footprint?

A lot of these AI publishers do not.

They just exist on these storefronts.

And then the other one is just the amount of books that they've published.

So usually you'll click on one of these publishers and they've published 300 books in the last year.

And usually it's the same author.

And that is just humanly impossible for someone to do.

Um, and I think this was all true about your book summary.

Yeah, um, I'll just read a tiny bit of Amazon's statement because I reached out to Amazon for comment, and they removed that

summary of my book, but then also dozens of others.

When I went to go write the article, there was only one summary left, and I don't know whether that was just created after the ban hammer or somehow it dodged it.

I'm not entirely sure.

But Amazon said, we limit the publication of summary books that are about other titles in our store.

And the title you brought to our attention is no longer available for purchase.

We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale.

And we have proactive and reactive methods that help us detect content that violates our guidelines, whether AI-generated or not.

Interesting in that the statement is more on

we don't want summary books rather than we don't want AI books, which I think is interesting because Sam, you previously wrote about AI generated foraging books,

I think specifically on Amazon.

What happened there?

Because I mean, this story is just about my book and it was funny because it happened to me, but like that story you wrote about could have had real world consequences.

Yeah, I mean, it's just a similar thing, but with a different topic.

I wrote about this also with

knitting and crocheting tutorial books.

But the mushroom blend was interesting because because that's actually something that like if you take the wrong information from, you could die from.

It's like they were identifying, these books were identifying mushrooms that were potentially poisonous as safe to eat, like good to cook with.

They're very slight, like subtle differences in,

you know, like a death cap mushroom versus one that you can like actually eat and put on pizza.

So,

you know, if you don't know what you're looking for, you just say, oh, that's a wild mushroom.

But obviously, the consequences are more serious than that.

So, yeah, it's, you know, it's people preying on beginners,

people preying on people who don't want to spend more time, you know, researching something deeply.

They just want the quick answer.

It's just, I don't know, it sucks.

It's sad to see it happen.

It's sad.

It was sad with the crocheters, too, because that's such a

handmade, obviously,

craft that real humans have to be involved in.

So, you know, it's

it's kind of eroding all these like knowledge systems that we, I guess, we've taken for granted, but I never would have imagined that they would be under threat like this, you know, five, 10 years ago.

I think when it's a summary of any other book at this point, you can pretty safely assume that it's AI generated unless it's from like SparkNotes.

And even then, I bet that SparkNotes is, is, this is, I have no, no information to base this on, but I bet that they're utilizing AI in some way, shape, or form at this point.

Um,

and it's just like

I'm not even sure what the utility of a book summary is at this point.

Like, I believe you could probably ask Chat GPT at this point, give me a summary of Joseph's book, and it probably would give you something.

Like, I don't, I don't really even know.

It's a, it's a weird type of content that has like suddenly popped up on Amazon and all over the internet, but I don't think that it's popular or I just, I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, you're right in that you could just go to ChatGPT and get the summary that way if you have, you know, paid access or free access, whatever, to ChatGPT.

That's basically what the books are doing anyway, right?

You're just paying some publisher five bucks to basically enter the prompt for you.

I mean, look, I don't know.

how this publisher or other ones got my book.

Obviously, you can just pirate it.

Like, I'm not going to dance around around it that's absolutely possible obviously now did they pirate it or something like that I don't know but you could probably even or chat GPT could probably still build a summary just based on the public media coverage they had as well so I mean there are different ways of going about it and

not to put it all on Amazon as fun as that is it is also on Apple books and I'm looking at it right now and the exact same summary is on there and it hasn't been taken down not that I'm trying to go on a crusade to remove every summary of my book.

It's more funny than anything.

Backle didn't respond, whereas Amazon did.

There's no utility to you, Jason, the reader, but the librarians I talk to are pretty confident that it's a numbers game where if they blast this summary across enough platforms, they're going to catch some minuscule number of people who are searching for Joe's book and get the summary on accident and make enough money to make it all worthwhile.

Like, that's what the scheme is in general, from what I understand.

It's just like getting an errant click and getting

the money.

For sure.

That makes, as like an AI content slop factory, it makes sense.

But as a like...

curated human being summarizing these books, I don't think that it makes a lot of sense.

I do know there is that

startup that like

gives you audio summaries of books that advertise on a lot of podcasts.

I don't remember the name of it and I never tried it, but that's that was popular for a while because it was like, you can read these self-help books in seven minutes and, you know, learn what to learn what the four-hour workweek says.

But I've never tried it and I don't know how popular it is.

Also,

you can just ask ChatGPT for a summary of Joseph's book.

I've just learned.

Oh, yeah.

Can Can you read just a tiny bit?

It says it's shit.

It says it's great.

So I asked for a summary of Darkwire by Joseph Cox, and then it just said, like, you know, a three-paragraph summary.

And then I said, can I have a chapter-by-chapter summary?

And then it said,

now it reasons because DeepSeek reasons.

So you can like see what it was thinking.

And it first said, Am I allowed to do this?

And then it said,

summaries are permissible.

So I'll proceed without including direct content.

So I guess it's not quote quoting anything from you, but it says, chapter one, the encrypted underworld focus introduces the reader to the ecosystem of encrypted phone networks, discusses how certain companies market specialized devices to criminal clientele, emphasizing privacy features and anonymity.

And then it like kind of goes on and on.

And it never says.

That's wrong.

That's not what happens.

That's not what happens in chapter one.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

It never produces the word anom, which is kind of interesting.

Which is the main

book is about.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Was chapter five called the covert takeover?

Do you remember?

No, it's not called that.

Okay.

Well.

Dude, I'm on the slot publisher side now.

At least they got it right.

I don't know.

It's not a very good summary.

The summary of mine is pretty spot on, unfortunately.

Cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just, it's, they're pulling from a lot of the sources are online, like, media coverage of the book.

So it's pretty accurate, even without having access to the book, probably.

But yeah, it's pretty, it's correct.

It's very specific.

You know, it's like you could get a lot of summary out of the title, which is How Sex Change the Internet, the Internet Changed Sex.

It could bullshit pretty easily off of that.

But it's very specific about like.

talks about like bullet board systems and only fans and

sources like they mentioned the people you spoke to um it's The main source is nextbigideaclub.com, which is like

a blog

that I gave an excerpt to.

But it's what it's pulling from is like the subheadings from that blog, not necessarily the chapters.

But then again, it's like my book is on libgen

free to download that people torrented.

So it's like it could

access the whole thing if it wanted to, probably, but I don't know if it has that capability.

I'm sure mine is as well.

That's how you know you made it.

It reads like, you know, like fifth grader did a book report.

That's ChatGPT, man.

Emmanuel, you touched on some of your library stuff, but to close the loop on that, close the loop?

The Hoopla?

No, it doesn't matter.

Briefly remind us what the library story was and then what has happened since.

Because we did talk about it on the podcast, but there's been some developments.

Yeah, so Hoopla is a service that provides public libraries with access to e-books.

So if you want to get an e-book from your public library, you're probably going through Hoopla or this other service called Overdrive.

To illustrate how common the summary, AI-generated summary book issue is,

Hoopla responded to the story eventually.

They emailed a bunch of librarians and addressed a bunch of the issues that I mentioned in the story.

They are

kind of working on new policies on how they curate and filter out AI-generated books.

They removed a bunch of AI-generated books, but I thought it was very telling that Hooplus said that it is just removing all book summaries from its platform as a rule.

Like no more book summaries with the exception of HMH Books, which is the publisher of Cliff Notes.

And maybe SparkNotes as well, but they haven't mentioned that.

But they did call out Cliff Notes as being the one publisher that's allowed to have summaries.

But all of them are gone.

So, for example, I

mentioned this one publisher called IRB Media that had hundreds of summaries up on Hoopla.

Those are all gone.

So,

and I mentioned Cliff Notes briefly in my one as well, because I think it's the one that everybody knows.

But is the, to speculate slightly, is the reason that they're kind of exempting Cliff Notes is just because, well, they're legit.

You know what I mean?

And like, there's more, there's more to it.

There's study guides rather than subaries, exactly.

I was going to say, I have, I've never used spark notes, so I don't really know what those look like, but I have used cliff notes in my life.

And what I remember is, like,

I don't know,

if you get the Cliff Notes on Moby Dick, it's not just like, here's what happens in every chapter.

It's like, oh, like, it is commonly interpreted that the whale signifies yada, yada, yada.

And it gives you like historical context, you know, just like it tells you something.

There's some analysis being done and presented to you about the book, so you know what to tell your teacher when you pretended to read it, you know.

Cliff notes the original cheating with Chat GPT.

I mean, I don't know, I never use them, but that makes sense.

Um, all right, let's leave that there.

When we come back after the break, we're going to be talking about another AI startup that is dehumanizing factory workers.

This time it's a lot more explicit, I would say.

We'll be right back after this.

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All right, and we are back.

This is one that Sam wrote: Why Combinator supports AI startup dehumanizing factory workers.

We'll play the video in a second for our listeners, but Sam, maybe just give us an overview of what is this video exactly and where did it come from?

Yeah, so this

is something that was going around on Twitter last night and this morning that I caught there.

And you know, something is pretty bad when it's getting panned on Twitter, even though it's a Y combinator startup about AI.

Twitter at this point is very much like the tech bro boosterism world.

And even those guys were upset about this.

So, you know, it's bad.

So yeah, it's a startup called optify.ai, spelled super dumb as these startups are, O-P-T-I-F-Y-E Optify.

By the way, that is the worst letter.

I've ever seen.

Spotify is one thing.

This is crazy.

Just adding letters when we don't need them.

Y-E.

I like could not understand it.

My eyes were like going all cross-eyed when I was trying to read the title.

It's bad.

And I keep calling it the wrong name in my head and forgetting what the actual name is.

I'm like, Syncify?

Like, I don't know.

It's Productify.

I don't know.

But okay, so it's a startup that, quote unquote, it's for ai performance monitoring system for factory workers is their proposal here um

in a very small nutshell they are using machine vision to track workers in a factory and see what their productivity levels are, how many like per items they're making, what their output is, their efficiency quotas, things like that.

It's like this whole like dashboard that they're advertising, like bosses can see, and then it shows you exactly who on the line is going too slow or isn't being efficient.

And that's the idea.

And the video

in it, the founders of this startup are kind of doing like a skit.

And one of them is a boss, one of them's the worker.

And we'll just, we'll play the, play the clip.

But yeah,

we'll play that now and then listeners will have some understanding of what we're talking about and then we'll come back.

Oh, it's workspace 17.

Workspace 17 is the bottleneck, the worst performing workspace here.

Hey, number 17, what's going on, man?

You're in red.

I've been working all day.

Been working all day?

You haven't hit your hourly output even once today.

And you're at 11.4% efficiency.

This is really bad.

It's just been a rough day.

Rough day?

More like a rough month.

Yeah, so basically, as you can tell, this is

productizing bosses being

assholes to workers is the real kind of innovation here, as Emmanuel put it when he was reading and editing the story.

It's not that this is like a new technology, that surveillance on the line is something that has never happened before.

We see this happen with Amazon, we see it happen all over the place with different warehouses and also just with, you know, like like computer jobs and remote work.

But

the shocking thing about this isn't the technology.

It's the blatant

normalization of turning around, calling one of your workers by a number and mocking them about having, you know, a rough day, a rough month,

and being...

an ass

to your workers and being this cruel overlord while they're working on your production line.

Yeah.

And we'll bring the why combinator stuff in in a second, but just while we're talking about the video itself,

is this video a bit?

Or like, what do we make of that?

I don't think it's a bit.

I think if it were a bit, it would be more overt.

I think good satire is often toes that line, but

it's not if it's satire, it's not good satire because it just is not overt enough for people to say this is this is a send-up of this type of ai and i don't think it's a bit because why combinator is celebrating it congratulating them online um their website says they're backed by why combinator y combinator is like it's a venture capital firm um

that you know creates you know, makes companies huge.

You know, it's some of the biggest companies in the world have come out of Y Combinator.

So I don't think it's fake.

I think it's real.

I think these guys are just like really out of touch for various reasons that, you know, we don't have to get into, but like, it's just, it's a bad look for everyone involved, basically.

Well, I think also it's not just a venture capital firm.

It's a startup accelerator that picks ideas that it thinks are not represented in the market yet.

And so they end up being like

the market doesn't have this yet.

So we're going to help you incubate this idea and like turn it into into a reality.

And so I don't know.

It would be very odd for Y Combinator to, to like,

it's just, it's not satire.

Like it's, it's just not.

It's, it's like a promotional video for their idea.

Um, well, speaking about Y Combinator's support slash backing, um,

they deleted some posts, right?

By they, I mean Y Combinator.

Uh, what happened there exactly?

Like, what did they delete?

So Y Combinator had posted on Twitter, and we know this is because of TreenScots, and also you can see it in like

just you can find the URL through deleted posts, people replying to Y Combinator, but

they were saying

they were introducing optify.ai as building AI performance monitoring for factory workers.

And then they link to

a link about their launch, and then they say, congrats on the launch, and then they tag the founders on Twitter.

And on LinkedIn, they also made a post, which I found the LinkedIn post through just like Googling Y Combinator and Optify.

And it comes up in the cache,

which you can still see

what the LinkedIn post part, like the first sentence of it was, or whatever.

And it was a similar thing.

It was like, you know, congratulations on launching to Optify.

And

they're gone now.

They're deleted now.

Any idea when they deleted?

Because

the promo video, which was in very, very poor taste, that was going viral yesterday.

Did they delete it like after that or do we not really know?

They deleted it at some point.

I'm pretty sure it was after that because that's what is all over Twitter.

Like the replies to that tweet that's now deleted are people being like, are you fucking kidding me?

Like this is disgusting.

So I think they got a lot of backlash and they were like, oh, like instead of, you know, like.

hiding replies or closing comments or whatever, they were just like, just nuke the post and we can pretend we did not see it.

Or you can pretend that we never supported this company, which is dehumanizing people by calling them a number.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see.

I mean, I like I reached out to

Y Combinator, obviously, to ask, you know, what's, what's going on with this?

Why did you delete the post?

Are you backing this company still?

What's going on there?

And I haven't heard back yet, but we'll see.

It's also all over the Optify's site that they're backed, you know, quote unquote backed by Y Combinator, which is obviously a big like stamp of approval for the industry.

It's like, oh, that's a big deal.

Like Jason said, it's like, that's, you know, that's kind of a mark of like, oh, you're serious.

Serious people think you're serious.

So, you know, this is worth looking at.

It legitimizes startups in the eyes of other startup founders and investors and all of that sort of thing.

Emmanuel, while I think you edited this, correct me if I'm wrong, but while we were talking about it in our group chat, I think you did bring up that there was...

a video from a few years ago or something where somebody did do a bit about this right like again i'm not saying but we know this one's real.

It's Bad By Y Combinator.

It's just funny that this is, you can't really tell exactly.

And then there was a bit earlier.

What was the deal with the earlier one?

Was it somebody just mocking this sort of thing?

It was a, I don't think it was,

I think it was, it was either a joke or it was one of our favorite,

you know, local dipshit, you know, like local artists makes a statement videos.

But it was a video of a coffee shop and it was using machine vision that looks almost exactly

like this actual startup to kind of track the productivity of the baristas in there.

And that went extremely viral because it freaked people out.

It seemed so dystopian.

And it's one of those videos that kept going viral, even though it turned out that it wasn't a real technology from a real company.

It's not something that people are actually using.

So it just, it's, it's funny that, I mean, it's funny/slash/horrible that this thing

that was not not real and everybody thought was horrific is now actually a real company.

And I don't know, to me, it sort of seems inevitable.

As Sam said, this type of thing exists in many workplaces, whether you're a white collar and people are tracking what you're doing on your computer and your mouse movements and your keystrokes, or you're at an Amazon warehouse and people track how many packages you're handling in an hour and how long your trips to the bathrooms are, et cetera.

It just the idea that you can use machine vision to track whether you're tracking it well or not, the idea that you can track any worker's productivity with just putting a camera in there.

I don't know if this company will survive.

I don't know if this will become a real thing, but I feel like the idea is just so

attractive to bosses that there's no way that we're not going to see something like this eventually.

Yeah, I mean, it's already here, like both of you have already said.

I mean, it kind of has its origins in this idea called scientific management which uh edward angueso used to write about a lot for us at motherboard but it's like based on management practices from like the 1880s and 1890s um that has largely become like algorithmic management on uber door dash etc and then yeah it's just like

this this it's just a difference of degree not of kind really um

but i think that the video here was so dehumanizing and so fucked up that it went viral.

But

as you both said, like a lot of people work under conditions that are like this to some degree, where they're being managed by a computer software or their output is being

like their worth as a worker is entirely based on numbers and whether a computer thinks they're doing a good job or not.

Yeah.

I guess just last question, Sam, to wrap it up, like, what does this show us?

Is it just this one company sort of

said what all the other startups are thinking and probably want to say and they just like fucking went for it and broke through?

Or is it, you know, a mask off moment for labor and AI?

I know it's, it seems like to me that a lot of companies would want to do this, but they would not all be as stupid to make this video.

Right.

Yeah.

Like again, these are,

these are, I don't want to like shit on these guys too much, but like they're, they're computer science students at Duke University.

They're in an extreme bubble as far as

interacting with normal people, I'm sure.

They have little life experience to speak of.

Their families come from,

you know, they own, they've said, they say in their bias, their families own manufacturing plants,

which, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like, and that's it's a whole complicated conversation,

but that we're definitely not going to get into here.

But like, it's, it's something that we see over and over again in

the AI startup world that this sort of thing

is very much applauded, like efficiency numbers,

you know, it's like timing your bathroom breaks.

And even if you're the boss, people impose that on themselves.

Like they say,

you know, I slept three hours.

I slept on the floor.

You know, I slept at the office.

I worked my efficiency rate, you know, my heart rate, whatever.

It's quantifying of your work and your worth

actually has really damaging effects on workers, whether that's yourself or your employees and your factory workers, honestly.

It's like, this is not going to go well

no matter what.

It doesn't go in a good direction.

And a few people have pointed out just like on social media.

And I think I had the same thought.

It's like, it would be way more efficient just to talk to that worker and be like, instead of being like,

hey,

you know, number 17, what's your deal?

What's your problem?

And then he says,

I'm working all day.

And you just say, well, it looks like you've had a bad, a rough month or whatever.

It's like, just talk to people and say, hey, what are the inefficiencies on your section?

What are the infinitesimes that you're seeing?

without threatening them with being fired probably is a really efficient way to cost-effective way to get to the bottom of what's going on at your own company but instead people want to distance themselves from uh from their own workforce from the actual labor being performed so that they don't have to think about it and they can just look at a graph instead of a person making sweatpants um

you know below them how they view it so yeah i mean it's it's just And yeah, like you said, it's that they're saying it out loud.

It's like, oh, like he admit it.

It's just very blatant in this case because they are so young and they come from that that society where it's just like they've seen it play out their whole lives.

So they don't have that kind of filter to know, oh, it's not cool to just put this out there.

You have to put it behind a few layers of like

politeness or whatever, or pretend it's productivity focused when really you're just like, how hard can I abuse people before they break sort of mindset.

I don't know.

It's a huge, it's a huge complicated thing stemming out of a very

goofy

startup, frankly.

So we'll see.

I don't know.

I hope it doesn't have legs, honestly.

But, like we've established, it's something that's already happening.

So

getting out there in the open is powerful.

For sure.

All right.

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