The (2nd) Scariest 14 Words

[00:00:00] First, take the beans and cover them with water and dump it out. Take the boiled water and dump it on children and take a dump on children. At that point, strain the water out of the water and here we are. Beans from a Wild West Saloon. Bon Appetit.

[00:00:12] It's 48 Minutes of Dogs Barking. My name's Jason Robinson, that's Bryan Sutter. Oh boy. Well, on our wonderful episode today... Nothing! No, uh...

[00:01:23] Yeah, what the fuck, man? The itinerary... We're just freeballing it. No, no, I have a plan. It's just Google Docs deciding to be... A bitch? A bitch, yeah. Greta says she's gonna start no F now and show feet. Alright. You know, hey, great, you know. Whatever works, you know. Whatever saves the fucking world, right? I'm gonna take that in the grain of salt. We'll see. I'm joking. I mean, it's the whole... R.K. Jr. making, uh...

[00:01:50] Jacked and all previously illegal workouts, legal under like a grandfathering law, and I'm like... I wish, man. Because I worked with a guy... Okay. He told me about... He was a fitness guy, and he told me about the Jacked era, and he was like, dude... He's just like, dude, I got fucking lean. I got mean. I got big. I knew other guys were doing that. Wasn't there a local radio station that had some Jacked stuff going on? I can't remember. Yeah, it's not one of their like, come in and tell them you heard it on dipshit radio

[00:02:19] and you're gonna get 25% off Jacked. The Supplement Superstore. Yeah, yeah, those guys. Bryan, my favorite kind of pizza is free pizza. I don't know about you. Okay. However, Brett Adcock, wonderful name, one of the guys who works in Hark Labs, an AI lab, posted this the other day. We're giving away $1 million of free pizza right now. Download an order from the Hark app, then type order a free pizza in chat. It's first come, first served, delivered only in the US.

[00:02:48] Now there were some limits. Now there were some limits, obviously. You gotta, through the app, you gotta type in the chat, you gotta give them your information. They'll give you three options. You'll choose, then it's basically a DoorDash credit that they're giving you. So then you have to log into DoorDash. That's it. They're gonna send you the pizza through DoorDash. Now, right away, people were having problems. People getting these replies of, the gift card wasn't applied, so the full amount went to your visa. Yeah, I can't promise the card.

[00:03:15] I'm afraid the pizza offer's not available. There's a lot of problems, right? Sebastian Gallick, VP of Arkham, co-founder of Indexify, posting, This app is insanely farming your entire life when you order this pizza. I connected my Gmail to order a pizza. Well, that's part one. And afterward, the AI casually admitted it to collect information about my family, closest friends, businesses, travel habits, loyalty programs, favorite restaurants, and even city bike usage.

[00:03:43] How fucked up is it that an AI agent tasked with ordering a pizza is digging through your entire personal life? This is a massive privacy problem with AI agents. And he's right. It says, uh... Can I help you order a pizza? I need the racist Nick Mullen, Chinese AI agent. Oh, I see you like using a city bike. But I want the, I want the scheming eunuch.

[00:04:09] The folks over at Axios, Ina Fried here saying, Pizza giveaway exposes AI agent growing pains. And I love the art is just a guy on the pizza box waving and says, Nope. I love that. A startup offered free pizza on Friday in exchange for letting its AI agent handle the ordering. After multiple attempts, I ended up with a $30 DoorDash credit, no pizza, and an empty stomach. Why it matters. AI agents promise to take everyday tasks off our plates and they still have to clear a basic hurdle,

[00:04:37] making a task easier than doing it ourselves. Yeah, saying other people reporting, for example, investor Shiel Monat said ordering took him 20 minutes, calling the promotion a failure, even though he otherwise likes Hark. Another user reported that the agent placed an order despite the promotional credit not applying, resulting in a $27.27 charge to his brother's credit card. Not sure how that works. And Replica founder Eugene Tudor posted screenshots of repeated unsuccessful attempts,

[00:05:05] joking that she'd never worked so hard for anything. Which kind of makes sense given Replica's business model. Basically this writer, among others, they did receive the credit, but the agent couldn't complete the order. After connecting my Gmail account, the writer says, I received a critical security alert from Google about an attempted sign-in. Hark requests extensive Google account permissions, including the ability to read, compose, and send email. Pretty bad.

[00:05:35] In the post the day later, Adcock did say, usage surged to unprecedented level. Many things broke. Yes, we delivered thousands of pizzas, but things just went wrong. Bottleneck from massive demand. You know, we will offer a gift card to anybody who had a challenge redeeming the offer. But this article does say, this is kind of a challenge facing the broader AI agent industry. Agents can navigate websites, fill out forms, complete purchases,

[00:06:05] but doing so often requires authentication, permissions, human interventions. All the extra steps make simple things more complicated. And yes, that has been my experience, not only with agents, but just with basically anything to do with AI. AI. Yeah. AI, it's really ineffective, except for very specific, like edge cases, it feels like. Right. Like 99% of the stuff that we could theoretically use, this is normal Joe blows, use AI for,

[00:06:35] does not really clear the hurdle of it's easier to do it than doing it yourself. Right. Now, you feeling lazy? Maybe. I don't know. But, but so much of my issue with AI from, we take away the ethical stuff, just like trying to get it to do something. Like, you know, the other day I was really bored. No, yeah.

[00:06:59] And I got like a YouTube suggestion for some AI thing and like how to create AI avatar. And I was like, fuck it. You know what? I got, I got 20 minutes to kill. What's this all about? Yeah. And I'm watching this video. I'm like, okay, I'm intrigued. I want to see the nuts and bolts of this. So I download Google flow, which is one of their, their image bots. And I spent probably a good, like 90 minutes fucking around with it. And I got some cheap laughs.

[00:07:27] The video you sent me of what was it? Steven Tyler crashing a go-kart. I created an avatar that was like an aging rocker. And there's like people talking about like, oh, you can make a view. If you're a good writer, you can make a good, a decent AI avatar. But I made like an aging rocker and I wanted them to be like a YouTube, like guitar teacher. Yeah. And I was just kind of like fucking up and trying to understand. In your AI creation, the guy wearing the Metallica shirt is clearly wearing a really

[00:07:57] shitty bootleg because the Metallica has one L and then the shirt says like the Bix of DOS. But the S's are from the kiss logo. It's brilliant. But yeah, my thing was like having this aging rock star character, which I named Mick Jaguar. Trapped in, he kind of looks like Bret Michaels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's trapped in an elevator with a roadie and he can't find his hairspray. Right.

[00:08:26] And the roadie keeps telling him over and over that Drake is his favorite rapper. It doesn't hurt that the roadie kind of sort of looks like RJ Mitty. It's very serious. You're fucking pussy. Rest in peace, RJ Mitty. Maybe we can bring him back with AI. I don't know. Or did he get in the full body skin thing? That was the only one that I made that I felt actually like hit.

[00:08:53] Like, yeah, I was able to write out the prompt and have the end result be close, pretty close to what I was asking for. And then the other one was the aging rock star driving through a mall in a go-kart, screaming my penis hurt and drives into the curry stand and gets covered in like tikka, I guess. Tikka masala or some sort of like cheese.

[00:09:17] What I wanted him to do was I kept trying to get him to crash into a mall kiosk that sold like 9-11 memorabilia. Oh my God. And trying to find, dude, they must have had someone with a negative post count sit there and find out all the ways to allude to 9-11 that might trick an AI. Yeah. The darkest day in New York's history. Oh, nothing. No, man. Yeah, it was. He's trying.

[00:09:46] He's trying to jailbreak the AI. I'm hacking the Gibson. Well, cause I do remember a while back when AIs were getting really good at image generation and there were dozens upon dozens of cartoon characters doing 9-11 like in the cockpit. There's SpongeBob. There was one. There was a Mickey Mouse one. I have a few of those say because they're just brilliant, but guardrails. Are they good or bad? Who can tell? There's no easy way to put this.

[00:10:14] There's a bank in New Zealand whose mascot is a sheep that people want to fuck. Oh. I mean, it does have the green M&M vibe going on here. Yeah. The sultry eyes and all this. Yeah. This is Kiwi Bank. The mascot's name is Buck. This from the spinoff. Kiwi Bank says it wants to protect others from harmful content, but for every lustful post killed by a legal threat, another 10 take its place.

[00:10:42] I want to fuck the Kiwi Bank sheep, the post reads. When it was originally sent out on Twitter by the account E-Hee-E-Q, sure, on July 24th, those words were accompanied by a gif of Kiwi Bank green mane mascot Buck admiring her stylish new haircut. If you look now though, the gif is gone, replaced by a blank gray square containing 14 thudding words. This media has been disabled in response to a report by a copyright owner. The scariest 14 words.

[00:11:11] I don't know about that. But the I want to fuck the Kiwi Bank sheep post has become ground zero for an unfurling dispute over what Kiwi Bank views as harm reduction and what its opponents see as legal suppression and censorship. One thing isn't in doubt, Kiwi Bank has been trying to stop people illustrating any kind of desire to fuck its cartoon sheep. And it has gone to great legal lengths to pursue that aim. This is what I think is the best.

[00:11:39] The lustful thoughts about Buck had been bubbling for a little while before that caps lock post. Back on July 18th, the account Jester Maxing posted, They're just rumors, man. Kiwis don't think sheep are sexy. Dot, dot, dot. Kiwi Bank's new sheep mascot alongside the picture of Buck at the hairdresser. That post only garnered 21 likes. Iyuku's more direct missive brought the sentiment into the mainstream, gathering more than 5,000 likes from fellow Buck admirers.

[00:12:05] Momentum grew further thanks to a quote treat from Maoist STDEN, reading, Years of effort to convince the world New Zealanders don't want to fuck sheep has gone down the drain in one tweet. It went even more viral, gathering 93,000 likes and 5,000 reposts. And yes, this article does take pains to mention this is not the first time. Tony the Tiger had to beg furries to stop sending him porn in 2016.

[00:12:33] Duolingo's owl duo has a disconcertingly horny social media presence. But Buck became the latest mascot to enrich people's fantasy lives. Blue skies thriving furry community started posting their own images of her. Oh boy. Though the spinoff hasn't viewed them, it understands some are quite pornographic. And yes, they countered with a bunch of DCMA takedown requests. That's of course the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

[00:12:59] Sent out by Christopher Young, a partner at the Minter Ellison Rudd Watts law firm, which specializes in intellectual property law. The notice viewed by the spinoff accuses 10 accounts, including Gestermaxing, of having taken KiwiBank's distinctive buck image and used it to make highly sexualized and inappropriate copies, which infringe the KiwiBank copyright. Gestermaxing was reached out to by the spinoff. He's reflective about KiwiBank enforcing his copyright.

[00:13:26] He resents being accused of creating a highly sexualized copy of Buck. That is simply not the case, he said. He posted an image from KiwiBank's own ad and sees their DMCA request as a tacit acknowledgement from the bank itself that seemingly accidentally it has created a hot sheep. Though he wants to issue a clarification. My tweet was a joke, obviously, I hope. I do not think the drawing of a sheep is sexy. Put that in the paper. Please be sure to put it in the paper that I was not mad.

[00:13:57] A crackdown is in effect, essentially. The Streisand effect, which those of you who are not familiar, Barbara Streisand is sued to have images of her house taken offline, which of course resulted in the images getting propagated much, much more than they would have otherwise. So, is the sheep fuckable? I mean, this is a... Well, let's see. This is at Buck Sheep Wife. Oh, jeez. A Twitter account. At Buck Sheep Wife. From Bussy France, by the way. That's where they're...

[00:14:27] Okay, here's an image of the sheep mowing the lawn. It just says, her curves. Heart eyes emoji, heart eyes emoji, heart eyes emoji, shit. Oh no, that response. Yep. This guy put his pants around his ankles behind the sheep. 97 year old Binks still makes sexy animals the old fashioned way. We are so back, Buck sisters. Say her name, hashtag free Buck. It's over, the Buck posting is decreasing. It says, I'm gonna hold you, good night.

[00:14:57] Yeah, it's just... This is weird. Yeah. The spinoff ends it with, sure, the campaign may be reinvigorating New Zealand's reputation as a nation of sheep shaggers. But for these posters, it's worth incurring reputational damage to defeat or at least roundly mock a legal endeavor to suppress what are, for the vast majority of them, jokes. Come join us in posting about wanting to fuck Buck, they say. It may be weird, but the cause is righteous.

[00:15:23] So let your shame fall to the floor like so much sexy hair tumbling from a sheep's head. Thank you, Hayden Donnell, at the spinoff. From wanting to fuck sheep to wanting to fuck cars, Brian. This got posted the other day and it's just an insane thread. It's just one user, freaking the fuck out. It's a picture of one of those car carriers. Yeah. And what appears to be... Looks like a nice Nissan GTR R34 maybe.

[00:15:52] The caption is just, I almost fucking fainted. The next post, there's cum everywhere. I'm hard. There's genuinely like semen in my pants right now. I have never felt so... These are all individual tweets, each sentence by the way. I've never felt so spathetic and small before. My ugly, disgusting, commoner eyes shouldn't have been allowed to even gaze upon such a car, let alone be in its general vicinity.

[00:16:19] I'm jacking off so hard right now, I'm stroking my meat. I'd let this car impregnate me any day of the week, followed by all caps, I need a handjob from this car now, please! I need a handjob! I'm slobbering like a pathetic fucking dog. This goes on for a while. I'm so sad, I'm sorry. I'm just an insignificant little bug. Did you know no R32s in the world are white? There are actually other colors, but the only reason you see white is because I came over and jerked off and covered all of them in my semen.

[00:16:52] If I ever own an R32, I'm bending over and licking its shifter pretending it's his dih. But then... Sorry! As an AI assistant, I cannot generate any material or messages that may contain sexually explicit content as it goes against my terms and conditions. Please rephrase your... So that's something that you get when you ask Grok to suck you. I need to plant his dump truck ass on my face and crush me to death. And it just continues. Calling out of work tomorrow, sorry, it's due to personal reasons.

[00:17:23] It's just... I have to revoke my driver's license, I cannot be trusted. And then it ends with... Hi guys, I like little toy cars. And it ends up with this one here. This is the PR64. The user in question at StSFGill or StSuperFreakGill. 21, he, him, Rhythm Games Cars Art. 30 plus tweet thread. Of lying the fucking Nissan.

[00:17:57] So do you remember the band, The Living Things? Mm-hmm. You know they have a music video where a guy fucks a car? Uh, what's going on here? I think it's getting horny for his car. Is this the prequel to Detain? Yeah, this would have come out, what, 14 years ago, so yeah. When did this band become the shitty reggae band? Oh, he does get it in. All right.

[00:18:25] Well, the last thing in the Once Hot Classic I'm gonna leave you with, Brian, it's just a nice little experiment from F-Train.com. This is a website called tinylittleoffice.com. Yes. The website is the document. Originally it was TinySheet, which was a 10-line spreadsheet that ran in the browser and kept all the data in the URL itself. That's kind of wild.

[00:18:52] Now they've done it with an entire suite of office apps. Word processors, outliners, presentation builders, spreadsheets, etc. And calendars, trip planners, a lucid chart style diagram maker. All of it, all the data is in the URL. So the more complicated you make it, obviously this gigantic URL starts to spawn. But it's fascinating. You don't save anything anywhere.

[00:19:22] All the data is in the URL. Make sure you bookmark often, I guess is what I would say. But it's fascinating the amount of shit you can build in here. If you've ever really dicked around with any of the office suite, it's pretty fully functional. Really fascinated by this and how it works. You don't log in ever. Say you head to tinylittleoffice.com and make a document. Now what? When you want to save a document, you can copy the URL and paste it in the chat. Now everyone has a copy they can edit.

[00:19:51] Export it as a document, which you can do. Or a QR code, it says. If the document is a page or too long, the QR code can contain the entire document. Or shorten the URL if it's a bigger doc by saving it to our URL shortener. It's ridiculous. It's not collaborative like Google Docs, it says. It's collaborative like handing out zines at a street fair. It's disposable software, they say. You can use it and throw it away.

[00:20:18] If Signal was an operating system, this could one day aspire to be its productivity suite. If you post a full Tiny Little Office link to Twitter or Blue Sky, you have just saved a file to public. It does have a Blue Sky account. It was built to make sense to agents. You can tell an LLM to check out tinylittleoffice.com and use it to make small shareable things. But ultimately, it is just software. I do recommend everyone just go on there. It's fun. It's tinylittleoffice.com. It's wild.

[00:20:48] Yeah. It's web.0 bullshit, but on web 3.0 steroids. It's crazy. And it's open source. Yeah. With the MIT license, which if I remember correctly is the... The MIT license is a short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices. Licensed work modifications and larger works may be distributed under different terms and without source code. So, the MIT license from Paul Ford. Hell of a thing.

[00:21:17] I like little weird shit like that. It's just so fun to me. Dicking around on tinylittleoffice.com. You know who else didn't have a tiny little office? Threadless.com. I take off my Communist Party t-shirt and Hey Mercedes hat. I don't know. And beneath it, I'm wearing the Fast Supper t-shirt as well. Yes.

[00:21:44] Fast Supper, if you're not familiar with it, is the Last Supper, but with the fast food mascot lineup. Yeah. But if you're not familiar, Threadless is a website where you can buy t-shirts. That's the basic premise of it. It started for $1,000 in the year 2000 by two college students, Jake Nickel and Jacob DeHart. This according to NPR. Oh, I'm sorry.

[00:22:10] College dropouts with $1,000 and a desire to build a web-based community that could also be a business. This according to a morning edition piece from December of 2006. So it had been six years after the company's founding. Threadless emphasizes that everyone is welcome to submit to the t-shirt design contest, whether they're a trained artist or a novice doodler. There's a MySpace slash Friendster element to the website. Ooh, boy.

[00:22:41] Each registered user has a profile and can post pictures and start discussion with other members. 150 design submissions a day. Entries have seven days to get scored by the community at the end of each week. Ten of the highest scoring designs are selected and about 1,000 of each are printed. Jeremy Kalmakoff, the company's creative director, is quoted as saying, when you have something that people care about, they'll spend your time and make sure it stays good. He's watched the list of registered users voting on shirts climb to 400,000.

[00:23:10] And he says the key to the site's success is keeping that community happy. Every movie make us transparent. If we screw up, we apologize. If things go well, we reward people. I mean, it's really just like hanging out with 400,000 friends. Ho ho. Yeah. Threadless tries to keep its projects affordable, most under $20. Not bad for a limited edition piece of pop art. Co-founder Jake Nichols says the key to understanding Threadless as a business is that it's an online community first.

[00:23:40] Quote, it's absolutely the most important thing because as much as our community has made us grow, they could destroy us. Yeah. Geez, man. I know we did t-shirt hell a while ago. And that was... We're a very different company. Yeah. Yeah. I saw something and it reminded me of Threadless. And I just remember in my solid days, 2008, 2009, I had a couple Threadless shirts. Sure. Didn't we all?

[00:24:06] I had a couple of days of day of the girl that was very, very proud of her Communist Party shirt. I had the one that had all of the stick figures from like street signs and like all the different ways you can die. Oh. I even dated a girl that was trying to get one of her shirts picked up by Threadless. I think it eventually happened. Yeah. I cannot remember her name. That's okay. I remember it was a really good piece. I remember it was a really... She was a great artist. It was a great piece of work. Yeah. But you know, the Thriller shirt.

[00:24:36] Mm-hmm. They had their hands around this shit for like a good three or four years, it felt like. Yeah. I mean, a number of competitors have come along in the intervening years. There's TeePublic. Yeah. A few others, but they really had a lock on it. You're very, very right. Because from 2000 to pretty much today, I mean, the site's still around. We're on it right now. Yeah. A lot of the teas do start at about $15. That's, of course, without shipping. But once you get into like, okay, popular, right? Mm-hmm. Oh, crap.

[00:25:06] Well, now you've got Dungeon Crawler Carl shirts, boys. Oh, boy. Dungeon Crawler Carl, everybody. Yeah. Doesn't everybody fucking love Dungeon Crawler Carl? I have no idea what the fuck that is. Is this something your kids know about? Are you being facetious? It is one of those literary phenomena. It's a book series that I read the first book and I went, what's the fucking big deal? But apparently people shit their pants at any mention of it. Dungeon Crawler Carl. Seven sequels.

[00:25:35] It's about a guy who gets trapped in an alien video game world and he has to, with the help of his talking cat, defeated a bunch of goblins and saved the day or whatever. I'm good. Yeah. It's completely stupid. But now Threadless has several dozen Dungeon Crawler Carl shirts. Not great, folks.

[00:26:02] Under new designs now, it's starting to look like $6 shirts. But they're $40. Yeah, these are $35. Jesus. There's a definite difference between what is on there now and what would have been on there circa 2000. I mean, it's like the difference between Newgrounds when it was all curated by Tom Fulp and then when there was like the open submission. Signal and noise balance definitely changed.

[00:26:32] Now, again, there's still a lot of pop culture shit. There's this Muppets thing where it's the color bars. Okay. There's a mashup of Napoleon and the gingerbread man. All right. Mickey Mouse made out of candy. A Mike Wazowski shirt. Some Hulk stuff. Saddam Hussein. Waldo mashup that just says we got him. I don't hate that. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.

[00:27:01] I get it. It's clever. You know, Saddam Hussein's Cheesecake Factory. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much that has changed in the day. So it was one of those places. This is a really good article from crowdsourcing.com from June of 2006. So kind of in that same time period that the NPR was covering them and also Wired was covering them and all that. Here it is. Threadless is a perpetual online t-shirt design competition. Artists submit their designs.

[00:27:28] Users vote on the highest rated designs are printed and sold back to the community. Simple, brilliant. Most importantly, ridiculously cost effective. When I talked to him this morning, Threadless creative director Jeffrey Kalmakoff told me the company is selling 60,000 t-shirts a month, has a profit margin of 35%, is on track to gross $18 million in 2006. This, for a company with fewer than 20 employees, crowdsourcing can be a very good business indeed.

[00:27:56] But I did also talk about how it actually works for them. Threadless has a bulk deal with their printer, which means it doesn't pay a premium for small print orders. The per unit cost of producing 15 shirts is the same as 1,500. They could theoretically create a significant business servicing those 15 customers that really want the camouflage design brought out of retirement.

[00:28:22] However, according to Kalmakoff, Threadless only prints orders of 1,200 as a matter of principle. Quote, the whole point is that the community as a whole determines what's sold. On one hand, it's just this aspect of Threadless's model that makes them such a pure example of crowdsourcing. They're not just generating their core product via crowd labor. They're also using the crowd to determine what product lines are sold.

[00:28:46] Admirable in democratic principle and elegant in execution, it also raises the specter of the tyranny of the crowd. Ever notice how many pages of dumb pet tricks and scantily clad teens one must wade through on YouTube's most popular section to find a watchable video? This is in 2006. That was like a really weird thing of like, you're trying to find something on YouTube and you're okay.

[00:29:11] There's all these videos of very young girls and you're like, I just want to watch this old Beck bootleg of him performing on Letterman in like 96. Yeah. As much as I rag on the algorithm, it certainly knows what I want. Yeah.

[00:29:28] Then again, for every like weird, creepy video of like a teenage girl dancing in her bedroom to like Lady Gaga, there were, you know, the dozens of videos that John Heddern would find of like a Hispanic guy recording himself taking a shit. Yes, that is true. You know, so I guess, you know, I'm just calling balls and strikes here. Yeah. Now I did find this funny. This is kind of a bit of foreshadowing.

[00:29:58] Kalmakov does say in this article, we decided we're already infinitely scalable. 90% of their sales is your website. We don't need a brick and mortar presence. Pin that. We'll come back to that. 2007. Washington Post did an article on Threadless. Again, referencing crowdsourcing. The two teenagers were short of nearly everything when they kickstarted their Chicago t-shirt business seven years ago. This is 2007. Jake Nickel and Jacob DeHart each chipped in 500 bucks. They ran out of Nickel's apartment since DeHart still lived with his mother.

[00:30:28] For shipping, they enlisted friends to carry the shirts to the post office, but they had a killer design team. The web. They built the company and still 2007 estimated revenue $15 million. Using the wisdom of the crowd, you know, that they're taking these ideas and making them real. You know, the internet has been a part of the company's fiber from its founding, this says. A little bit of history on these two. DeHart and Nickel both grew up with an artistic bent. DeHart now 25 drew and painted.

[00:30:57] Nickel did graffiti. They met up through an internet discussion group about design, according to Jeffrey Kalmakov, who later joined as chief creative officer. We've heard from him a couple times already. They stumbled across the idea after entering an online competition to design a shirt for a conference in London. Nickel won. They said, isn't this really fun and cool? Let's do it again. It was never like when we grow up, we want to own a t-shirt company. So they held an online t-shirt competition of their own and produced the winning design. They then converted it into a business.

[00:31:26] Over the company's life, 150,000 submissions. Only 1% chosen for production. Even famous designers who have entered the contest have failed to win. 2002, they both dropped out of art school and went straight to the web. And now they offer apparel, home decor, accessories, artist shops, which are kind of like standalone storefronts almost, where artists can do that. In 2010, again, this is 2010.

[00:31:55] At that point, they had sold 4 million shirts, 1 million users, and they released this book. This 224-page book, Threadless, 10 Years of T-Shirts from the World's Most Inspiring Online Design Community. At the time, you could get it for about $22.50. Jake Nickel, by the way, at this time lived in Boulder, Colorado, not Chicago anymore.

[00:32:16] And there was a period of time when Bob Nana of Hey Mercedes, and more importantly, I would say, Braid fame, was the head of marketing from, I want to say, 2005 to 2014. Oh, wow. And I got to see Hey Mercedes at Firebird one time. It was a tour that was supposed to be sponsored by Threadless. But apparently the Threadless van, you know, it had car issues and it couldn't make it to the show.

[00:32:46] So Bob Nana was like, hey, if you guys just want to sign like our email signup sheet, I'll email you. Just give me your address and I'll send you some shit. Okay. And they fucking hooked me up. They sent me like three or four of like the like moleskin books. Okay. That they were making at the time. The field notes books. I still have a couple and I use them. Like three or four t-shirts, a bunch of stickers.

[00:33:09] Like the shirts too were like, there was like two or three like legit Threadless shirts, which of all, all but one is non-existent. And then there was one, cause I guess Threadless probably also did like some paid work as it were. Yeah. Yeah. And one of them was for a Google maps competitor that was also like four scale, like four square. It was like cold, like Gowala or something. Okay.

[00:33:39] The logo was like a dinosaur or an alligator in a rabbit costume. It was fucking weird. Yeah. Yeah. Comic-Con swag 2010. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if it's worth something. I've. Yeah. No joke. I remember how I mentioned, Hey, we don't need a retail store. Well, they opened one anyway in 2007. Well, they opened it in Chicago, which like, okay. Yeah. But still they said, we don't need a retail store. And then they opened one anyway. They did do a free concerts. Yeah.

[00:34:07] I'll, I'll hate that. It's a retail space, but it's really more like a space to do cool shit. Yeah. And which is a little different than like, Hey, we have a store. Mm-hmm. Like we're doing pop-ups. We're doing. Yeah. Residencies and stuff like that. That sounds way more interesting than brick and mortar. Fair enough. At least to their credit, it doesn't just sound like a fucking tourist trap. 2011, they started doing threadless labs, which is direct to garment printing as opposed to

[00:34:37] actual screen printing. So they would do this, like basically an ink jet onto a shirt, which is what T public and a few other places do. And it's kind of, the quality is not great. No. So you definitely see the difference between that and like the, the original plastisol that they used one spot at a time, but they're saying, you know, we'll print four more new designs every single week. So each of these shirts gets a week trial, the beyond pre-order. If they do well enough, they get into the regular rotation as a threadless print.

[00:35:07] Otherwise it goes direct to garment. That was 2011. That was threadless labs. Just seven years after it opened in 2014, they shut down the brick and mortar store. From Ska posted at the forums, the threadless forums. Changes at threadless HQ. I just made one of the most difficult decisions in the 13 years since threadless began. Oh, that's Jake Nichol posting as Ska, by the way. As a result of this decision, I had to let many of my friends and colleagues know they no longer have a place working at threadless.

[00:35:36] Over the past few years, we've experimented with new and exciting ways to create meaningful game changing opportunities for artists. While some of these initiatives worked really well, others did not. Today, we stopped working on some of the projects that weren't clear winners. We know now where we need to be investing our time and effort. And I believe that there are key projects that will propel threadless forward. Looking ahead, we end up. I mean, just like, okay, yeah, sure. But it doesn't say what that means.

[00:36:01] What it means is they laid off 27% of their staff and closed the retail store. It says they'll rely on established retailers for distribution, closing the store on North Broadway. Oh shit, they were on Broadway. Okay. Yeah. McNeigle did say we're still pursuing retail expansion, but rather than trying to do it all ourselves, we're going to work on threadless itself first.

[00:36:25] But three years later, instead of working on t-shirts, they instead bought a company that makes shoes. This according to the Chicago Tribune, threadless, a Chicago based online artists, community and e-commerce website has acquired shoe brand bucket feet and will begin producing on demand footwear. Threadless will slowly integrate bucket feet into its website next year. According to threadless co-founder and CEO, Jake nickel. Let's see. We were just on the site.

[00:36:55] I need my threadless shoes now. Ah, shoes. Okay. There we go. And they're all what looked to be knockoff van slip ons. Scroll up though. Scroll up a little bit. Cause they'll say, okay, maybe a bucket feet, bucket feet. I mean, this is the only style of shoe they offer. Oh, what the fuck? I was really, I really thought that was like, no, there's gotta be something more here. Clearly not.

[00:37:23] It's the canvas van skate shoe knockoff. That's it. Make slip ons your canvas. I mean, I do like a good slip on. I'm wearing a slip on right now. Yeah. I got the sketchers though. See? Yeah. Cause they got the thing where you don't have to like crouch over to put them on, you know? I mean, Oh, you got that thing to keep people out of the old folks home. Hell yeah. I sure do. My mobility is good as ever. I'm wearing them shiz. Well, it's got, it's really got arch support too, which I don't think the bucket feet do.

[00:37:53] No. So negative one in the column for bucket feet, but bucket feet still around. So that's good. They're still on the site. They laid off. They were going to buy a shoe company. Mm hmm. Took them three years, but they got there. Not a lot. It has really changed. It's just the amount and quality of the submissions has really gone into the toilet, frankly, because the minute you start opening it up to more and more people, the minute you start

[00:38:20] getting shittier and shittier submissions, I'm going to be frank, the public does not know what it wants. And so what you wind up with is an entire fucking page of dungeon crawler, Carl merchandise merchandise for a series that thread list does not have any copyright to unless there's some kind of official partner that I missed some announcement somewhere. I think there's probably some sort of, I think there's, I would hope so for their, for their sakes, at least on racked.com Tracy E. Ruby.

[00:38:48] What happened to the internet's favorite t-shirt company thread list, the internet born design shop known for its screen printed shirts. Yeah. Once heralded it as the best example of how to actually make money on the internet back when it seemed impossible to do so. Recent news that thread list has acquired bucket feet shows that the originator of the crowdsource t-shirt trend is still taking in considerable money. But as thread list has introduced new printing technology and more favorable terms for artists

[00:39:15] in the last five years, it's momentum on social media search volume and reputation for coolness and quality have fallen. Yes. At the core of the thread list business model is a community of artists that submit to design contests, participate in the brand's social network and promote the company to their friends and relatives, CEO and co-founder Jake Nickel, again telling rack via email when an artist submits a design they tell everyone they know to go vote on it. And then those people join the community and it just snowballs.

[00:39:43] Now it does say, you know, standout designs help make thread list huge, but that didn't necessarily make the artists submitting them rich. Artist Tom Burns told racked via email, the cash prize was $750 cash and $250 in free t-shirts from the site when he submitted the communist party design that show leaders, including Mao and Lennon celebrating with red cups in 2006. It is according to thread list. It is one of the best selling designs ever on the site.

[00:40:12] He got $750 in cash in 2006. Oh yeah. I was always wondering about who, who made that design, how much they got paid. Cause that shit was fucking everywhere. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's Tom Burns, everything burns.com. But, you know, and the actual, the money has actually increased. It says, it says. It was $2,500. Yeah. One point on 2000 that became $2,500. Right.

[00:40:39] But still you're turning over the copyrights of your design upon winning. Yeah. And so that's a thorny thing. This does mention some other, other sites. They tried to do the extra tasty, which was the cocktail recipe website and the song scoring website, which is 15 megs of flame.com. Those sites failed, but then it says other t-shirt companies popped up copying their business model. Lafraise, almighty's Tetonic, all defunct.

[00:41:07] Uh, according to the long time users, even the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram impacted thread lists and says voting and submissions ran alongside a once staggeringly successful blog network slash forum. Klee Design Competition no longer awarded a $2,500 prize. These days, the general competition prize is a $250 gift code, but artists retain all rights on their work and receive royalties for the sale.

[00:41:32] The shift to more equitable royalties and rights model removed the gamification of thread lists that made the site so addictive to some designers and users, while per shirt royalties from the start, would have massively benefited the most successful artists like Burns. Many designers said that the Windfall $2,500 prize was preferable and they lost the motivation to submit designs due to the change. Designer Somney wrote on the thread list forum that the changes to how artists getting paid,

[00:41:59] quote, makes it feel less like a community, less special. Yeah. The thread list fans now report that the shirts appear in UK TK Max stores owned by the same company as TJ Maxx in the United States due to wholesale agreements. So they've become too corporate for their own good, I guess is the problem, right? And that's kind of what we would think of. They sold out. They fucking sold out, man. They're like getting fucking TJ Maxx, man. It's not fucking, that's not communist party then.

[00:42:28] More stick figures, uh, Steve killed Dumbledore type shit. Yeah. Even at the time there was some real cringy shit on thread list. It was very tweet. Oh God. Yeah. But happy clouds and the I'm a cat made of pancakes kind of shit. I mean, the one of the shirts that I got from Bob Nana was, I always thought it was actually a really good, like very good cartoony illustration of a little girl kind of dressed like Raggedy

[00:42:57] Ann a little bit serving tea to a blue monster sitting at a table. And I was like, you know, it's not really like my style, but I think it's a cute drawing and I never had any problem wearing it. Yeah. There was some shit on there. It was super fucking cringe, no doubt. And it does, you know, it's part and parcel of the, the, the beginning of what was considered to be landfill indie music, you know, fucking dollar, dollar, dollar PBR nights, you know,

[00:43:27] and some guy with Coke drip taking, you know, party photos of you. Yeah. But yeah, it just doesn't feel unique anymore. Again, same thing happened with, you know, like new grounds, right? The, the five or so flash cartoons or flash games that would get published every five weeks. We're usually, you know, Sesamea street. Yeah. You're getting a blow job. Didn't we talk about Sesamea street at one point? We referenced it.

[00:43:56] I think in a, in a once upon a time. Yeah. Yeah. The zombie hunter Scooby doo shit. Yeah. Didn't they also have the photo of like the girl, like blowing her brains out and it's like butterflies. Yeah. Oh yeah. Classic. And then of course, Nathan pile, the strange planet, the, the alien perverts guy has, has a presence on this fucking site. Cause of course he does. I fucking hate that guy. I have a, I have a bone to pick with that mother.

[00:44:24] My relative gave me a birthday card. That was the strange planet characters. And I'm glad it was fucking funny. Cause man, I was really trying. I saw that. I was like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. And I opened, I don't even remember what it was. I'm like, okay, that's actually, that's pretty decent. That's not cringy as I thought this was going to be. I feel like this existence is terrifying. One is like a rip off of a roast beef shirt, but that's just a, that's just cause I'm protective of the Akewood brand. I like brands. Okay.

[00:44:55] The fucking hot dog pillow that just says odd, but harmless. No. All right. Yeah. I mean, it's not bad. I'm, I'm, I'm just taking it. $35 for it. Jesus Christ. $108 for the existence. We support, we support the police. Yeah. I know. Well, what were you doing? Well, you shouldn't have been dressed like that. Oh God. All right.

[00:45:26] Pulling the plug on this riff right now. If you want to send Nathan. Well, if they didn't want to be treated like that, then maybe they should, you know, stick to their own neighbor. Okay. All right. I think the best riff on the strange planet is Jane Moon's comic. They're dirty ass aliens walk in on the other ones on the strange planet guys jacking off in the bathroom. Do you want to watch what?

[00:45:56] We are perverts. So, but before strange planet, you know, like the fucking easily mocked web comic that was in control. Delete was Zen pencils. Oh yeah. Yeah. Drill pencils was the best Tumblr account. Cause it would just take drill tweets and slam it into Zen pencils comics. And they're brilliant. There's one where it's like Carl Sagan.

[00:46:22] It's like the, the international space station can be observed at the following times. Nerd time. It's about that time to show where we tell people where to find us online. Brian, where can they submit t-shirt designs for you to mock online? Oh gosh. If you want to do that, you can find me on Instagram and blue sky and YouTube. Ooh.

[00:46:52] And tick tock at a music photographer. Yes. The YouTube, he does have the infamous Chuck Berry story. It has 15 fucking views. Which is ridiculous. Ridiculous. Is it just cause I'm ugly? Hard to say. I don't think it is, but you know. I have a speech impediment people. It's, and I kept it short too. Cause I wasn't going to make people sit around for 15 minutes for a 30 second joke. Right. But you gotta have like some meat.

[00:47:20] You gotta say, maybe someone doesn't know who Chuck Berry is or why this is important that you're telling a joke or a story about Chuck Berry being a gross little pervert. Yeah. Because while he has a pretty well documented history of being a gross little pervert. Yeah. And a terrible landlord, according to a former coworker of mine. Anyways, if you want to find me on Twitter, it's over at ishockedibor, I S H O T G Y D B O R D.

[00:47:47] If you just want to see my, uh, very well manicured collection of people with their mouths open. You can check out my photography portfolio over at asshole music photographer.com. Maybe want to check out the last and only good media website left in the screwy St. Louis. You can head over to the arts stl.com. And I think that's it. Jason, what you got? Oh boy. Where can they send you foes of the strange planet aliens slapping each other's rose buds?

[00:48:18] We're going to send it to Elon at Tesla.net. Now you're going to send that over to anywhere. There's a video crime, basically Twitter, blue sky, not Instagram anymore. Cause somebody parked that some weird German lady is now a video crime over there. Oh, there I am laser. You CEO and basically anywhere there's a video crime. That's me. V I D E O C R I M E. If you don't know how to spell video crime. Well, I don't know what to tell you after all this time. You can also find me as part of a podcast. It's not this one submitted for the approval of midnight pals. There. I play a fictionalized version of horror icon.

[00:48:48] Stephen King season three is in the works. I got two scripts. I'm so excited. Cannot wait for there to be more. There's a no exit one, which has a wonderful. Oh, wonderful. No exit riff, which is fun. Just that's a little bit of a teaser. The first two seasons are available at midnight dash pals. Simplecast.com or anywhere podcasts are sold. Just search the words midnight pals. If you want to get ahold of this show, you can do it in a number of ways. My personal favorite is the telephone 3 1 4 2 4 6 9 7 6 6. That's 3 1 4. Ahoy.

[00:49:18] Pooh. If you'd like to spell with your telephone, shoot us an email. Jason at the number four, the number eight minutes of dogs barking.com Or Brian with a Y at the number four, the number eight minutes of dogs barking.com. Let us know what you thought of the show. What are your favorite threadless designs? What do you want to see on a t-shirt? Is it a hot dog jacking off? I want to know. Is it Clifford the big red dog being clipped? Hell yeah. By industrial equipment. Jesus. He's going to have to. He's that big.

[00:49:48] Big boy. Eight feet long and thick. All right. Well, that about does it for the show. As we always say at this time, namaste. Good luck. Give mommy a good fucking 25th amendment now. Who ate all the pussy? And hey. Eat. The. Knife. Yeah. Yeah.