Tim Wu - The Age of Extraction

25:15Yeah. Regulation. That's true. I think today Nixon would probably be considered on the far left or something. I'm just kidding. No, that's joking. So Nixon is undercredited. He meddled like. Nixon administration is deeply undercredited for its work in tech and telecom. Because one of the things that Nixon's people realized is like if AT &T continues to just be everything in tech, if we have this one company that decides everything and they think they know what the future is, you know, that's not going to work. There's other little guys starting. There was this little company called Microwave Communications, Inc., MCI.

25:54And they had this weird idea, maybe we'll do long distance by microwave towers. All right, so it was a new idea. AT &T was like, that's a terrible idea, never work. You can't connect with us. Or it's kind of like a threat to us. So AT &T, that period, was kind of this sort of like, you know, this paranoid monolith. You know, monolith. It's like, that's not a good idea. It's like, our ideas are the best. And, you know, we basically think what the people need is phones with different colors, maybe, and like, you know, long distance, 10 cents out on Sundays. You know, they had a very limited, gradual sense.

26:27I mean, tech was just so different when you read the histories of that period. And Nixon administration, to its credit, realized there was a bunch of companies that were starting the very early ancestors of internet services. So their idea was, does everyone, remember this company CompuServe? Companies like that. So their idea is you would use AT &T's line to dial up into a system. And then you'd be online. 14K. Yeah. Oh no, this was like 300, This is way, that's 90s stuff. This is 70s. This is very early stuff. But people would log in to do data processing. Some of it was commercial, some of it was consumer.

27:06And so they do this. And Nick's administration realized, AT &T is just going to kill these guys. Or it's going to co-op them or make them. They don't want anyone to make money on their platform. It's like, if it's not AT &T, we don't like it. In fact, they had very strong rules we could hook up. They didn't believe in answering machines, AT &T. They were like, answering machines are, they actually invented answering machines in the 30s. And they're like, this is a terrible idea. I'm not kidding. I read the internal memo from AT &T. It's a terrible idea because we've done internal surveys. And if people can record their phone.

27:44Make less calls. They will make less, they will not talk about things. A, because we've done internal surveys, I guess by listening in on people, I don't know. We've done these surveys, and if you can record conversations, no one will use the telephone, because first of all, maybe people will make contracts over the telephone, and someone will try and enforce them. But other, we believe that's like 20 % of phone calls are salacious, scandalous, sexual, something like that. So no one will do it, because they think, so that was there. So what they did is they protected, sorry, I realize I'm going on here.

28:15We do the same thing. Yeah, they decided to protect the online companies, the Nixon administration, that were trying to get started on AT &T's network. And those companies, they were the early, early ancestors of the whole internet industry. So that was a big important move by the Nixon administration. You quote Tim Berners-Lee quite a few times in your book. If you guys don't know who Tim Berners-Lee is, he created what we know as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP, which is the internet's protocol that we use for going to web pages. I'm going to use this quote from your book. Quote, the goal of the web is to serve humanity.

28:51We build it now so that those who use it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves manage, end quote. Is this where, like, the middle-aged boomers and young Gen Xers started in this great experiment? Like, the internet's here to serve us? or is that anywhere near where we're at today? It's very interesting. So one of the reasons I wrote this book and what I was interested in was the optimism of the 90s and early thousands and almost the, I guess, somewhat partially, but also just this, I guess, in retrospect, quite naive belief that, in fact, I was collecting the things that the internet was going to do in the 90s.

29:36Number one, it was going to spread democracy around the entire world. so every country would be a democracy. Two, it would elevate public discourse, so we'd talk about civilized matters. Three, it would make every person rich. It did a little bit of that, depending on who you are. Four, it would give every person with talent a sustainable way of making money for the rest of their lives, with any kind of talent. That was the idea. I think it's safe to say, the Internet has changed a lot, But whether it is delivered on these promises, it doesn't seem to me the whole world has turned democratic. Let's just put it that way.

30:13Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Explain where Amazon started in selling books in the late 1990s. I literally had a guy in my office was one of the original seed investors of the Seattle people. He comes to Seattle, raises his money in Seattle. Whether now what business is selling on their platform, talk about how this evolved and how it changed the revenue for Amazon versus the small businesses they dealt. Yeah, you talk about the revenue mix where what their take rate was the beginning versus what their take rate is now. I think the story of Amazon, very interesting story when it comes to the distributional versus accumulation of wealth through the internet platform.

30:54So internet, Amazon started a bookstore. The idea was a big warehouse. Then it realized there was a lot more money to be made as a marketplace or as a platform. But what that means, giving a place for sellers to sell to buyers. And they expanded different things and made two pretty important innovations. One is they nailed fulfillment, which eBay had never done. You know, eBay was still having people duct taping boxes and mailing them out. It didn't scale very well. And they also added a very good search function. We'll talk a bit about all that corrupt, got a little corrupted later. But they added a great search function and started making a lot of money.

31:30and in the early days, and I guess I'm here about 2010, maybe 2012, the margins were low that they charged to sellers, so less than 20%. So it was a clear advantage over brick and mortar. So what changes is when Amazon manages to lock up both sides of the platform, they shrug off Walmart, eBay is in the rearview mirror, then they start to raise the prices and and fees on everything, which is good for Amazon, and you've obviously seen a lot of appreciation in Amazon stock, but kind of bad for the idea that the internet or Amazon is gonna enrich a lot of sellers, and I think by the time you get to the 2020s, they have turned up the fees, so it's basically like brick and mortar, I think not much different, and in particular, the advertising model becomes a mainstay, and I think this is something to watch in the Amazon story, is you search something on Amazon, you search sponsored links, you don't always know what you're getting.

32:34Those sponsored links have become the biggest, I think the biggest single cash cow in tech, and I include the iPhone, Amazon web services. Because in 2020, they grew 10, 20, and in 2024, they were about$56 billion on almost no cost. Was that just that one advertising product? It's called advertising though, but it's really just placement. Yes, it's placement, sponsored link. So they have the sellers bidding against each other, bidding down their own margins, right, to try to get like in the preferred placement. $70 billion on almost zero costs. I mean, I guess in some ways I admire it in a business perspective.

33:12So I can't resist asking that. It's not in the script. Albertsons and Kroger were going to merge, and the Justice Department, who has been DOA, okay, DOA says that would be monopolistic, when those companies are tiny compared to Costco, Walmart, and Amazon, it's like, is there anybody with a brain in that world? Is there anybody in Washington, D.C. that actually understands what is going on? I don't know how to answer that question directly, but I think it's pretty important. I think it's pretty important that, I mean, when I worked in federal government, which I did, I thought it was a huge mistake to go around, say, finding two hairdressers in Washington State who are like, you know, fixing prices or something.

34:07I mean, look, that's not great for the people wanting to get a haircut, but we're still just talking about$10. What about the billions and billions? And I think the priorities should be on the big money and the big structure. and just with like AT &T and IBM, and I guess one of the theses of the book is I think we're moving or have moved to an overly monopolized state in the tech world where there's not enough opportunity for others. So that's sort of what I'm getting at. So you talk about scaling and I love this because it got me like my brain was, the hamster started running really quick as I like to say.

34:42You talk about scaling almost like there's a Soviet air to it, if that makes sense. Yes, because I say that because you use the quote, you point out that it's misattributed to Stalin. Quote, quantity has a quality of its own. Yes. End quote. You then connect this. Quantity has a quality. Yeah, quantity has a quality of its own. Yeah. You then connect this with social media. You explain that, quote, many users of social media were and are like tenants who spend hundreds of hours renovating their landlord's home. end quote. I love that. Okay, so here's my question. Is this just like Stockholm syndrome?

35:22Does that make sense? I mean, I think people join social media because they want to see their friends and, you know. Be a degenerate. And like, you know, put out their thoughts to the world and didn't fully realize, let's take the case of Facebook, which is mostly friends and family. Sure. Didn't realize that they were sort of building another business model and giving their information to it. I mean, early Facebook, I was like, oh yeah, I'll tell them everything and tell them everything I'm doing and everyone I know and that'll be fine. And I kind of wonder, like, what was I thinking? But yeah, but I want to see my friends.

35:54I had 850 friends in 2015. I was contemplating hiring an employee to wish people happy birthday of the day and I shut the thing down. And the reason I did, because I thought God is the only entity that should be looking into 850 lives at once. Yeah. Let's see, where am I? Go to the second. What about the intelligence agencies? Yeah. You talk about the movie business being the end for other businesses like Sony, who stagnated for years after that. We have Netflix as a potential suitor to a Warner Brothers discovery going on now. Amazon has MGM. Are these production studios a sign of what's to come for these businesses?

36:33Yeah, one of the things that's interesting, I write about this in my book. there was a time when if a big conglomerate of companies started buying sports franchises, you knew they were on their way down. Or TV rights were getting entertainment. You know, like you think about Seagram's, another Montreal example. You know, remember Sony, maybe before people's time, they're like, oh, we want to get the movie business. So they bought Columbia Pictures, and then they made Hot Tub number two, and they made terrible movies, everything trash. Hot Tub Time Machine. Hot Tub Time Machine, the sequel. Classic.

37:06They made a sequel. I mean, the first one was okay. The sequel. It's a sequel. I actually watched part of it for writing this book. That's not in the book, by the way. Just so you guys know. It is in the book. Oh, is it? Okay. Top Time Machine is in the book. Oh, I forgot about that part then. No, so that used to be a clear sign that a business was in decline or that, you know, something had gone wrong. The only person who really kind of pulled it off was Turner. He bought the Atlanta Braves, but he was in media guys. Yeah, he was reading that book right now. So, but when Amazon and Apple started buying media and investing in sports rights, nobody thought it was crazy.

37:50And I still don't think it's crazy. And I think it says something different about the business. It would have, as I said, be really weird if you imagine U.S. Steel, giant company of the 20th century, starting making movies and thinking that was a good idea. but it says something about the platform business model, which in my mind is, I think I say in the book somewhere, it's more of a kind of a herding business. In other words, the whole idea is trying to encourage and sustain a loyalty which ideally verges on dependence on as large of a population as possible. Like that is the model, and it really doesn't matter what you do.

38:31Run as many things across it as you possibly can. Yeah, it doesn't matter, yeah. When this gets to our next question, because you're touching at something, and it's like, okay, we have an aging population, so this is not a crazy idea you're throwing out there. How important is human laziness in the tech view of the future? You say we are comfort-seeking missiles. I love that line. That's great. You describe it as a stoner that has couch lock and the munchies. I mean, this is fire here. Will convenience become boring to us, I think, is the question. I think among the many forces in the universe that rule our civilization, Freud had the theory that interest in sex and death were our primarily motives.

39:15But at least from my perspective, a lot of my people I know, like convenience has got to be number one. I think the most powerful force, and maybe among the most powerful forces today, is the easier way of doing almost everything. And I don't mean that to be disparaging. I mean, when you think about some inventions like the laundry machine, I mean, that was in some ways a labor-saving technology. But I do think that the battle, particularly in tech, but maybe in a lot of industries, the winner is so often that which is even a little bit more convenient. You can even ask yourself when you think about it.

39:58You know, it depends on who you are. but I know a lot of people who just like going to buy something off Amazon just feels like a Herculean effort. You know, it's like this, I got to enter in my own credit card and do, forget it. You know what I mean? Or, you know, like that, you know, even these sort of tiny little frictions. Yeah. So, and I think that the tech platform is quite, quite smart about that and understand it. And the idea that's just, you know, not fully complete, but is in, has gone quite far is to create a complete cocoon around you of all the conveniences you might need. So you never kind of need to leave your proverbial couch.

40:36I was going to say very Wally-esque. Yeah, and I think that's something of the business model of our time. You mentioned the influencers. I'm hoping to get paired with Travis Kelsey and the pro-am so that I can convince him to have three kids because there's four million women in the United States that are going to want to have a kid the moment that that woman has a child. That's a theory, by the way. That's one of my theories. That's the number one thing to help the home builders. Okay. I'm dead serious. I'm not. That's not a joke. I believe that. I don't want to get lost on Taylor Swift. Okay.

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41:47Read and consider it carefully before investing. Smead Funds distributed by Smead Funds Distributors, LLC, not affiliated. Teach us about the perceptron and where the ideas of AI really began. Oh, yeah. I feel like, even though it's all around us, we talk about all the time, the early history of AI is a little bit lost to us. You know, there was a long period where what we now understand as the dominant AI technologies were really the domain of a couple pretty wacky academics who had the idea, which people thought was nuts, of trying to build an electric model of the human brain. I mean, that's the way they just said it.

42:32They're like, we're just trying to recreate a brain, and we're going to have pathways and neural networks and all this stuff. And they had some moderate success, or perceptron is related to that, but really went nowhere from the 60s until the 2010s. It just was on the side. And when you think about it, it is kind of a weird idea. And some of you might think, is that what succeeded? It did. The AI that we see everyone has used was based on the idea of creating an electronic version of the human brain and just letting it go and seeing what happens. And that ended up as wacky as it seems to be the dominant AI technology of our time.

43:11Yeah. The PC revolution made humans more productive. We were at Cosm Technology Conference here in November in Scottsdale, where Ari Emanuel gave a more pessimistic view of the future for humans with AI. Is Orwell right this time or will humans flourish with technology like they have in the past? I honestly think it could go both ways. And I think we're seeing it in kind of happening in our lives. So let me tell the optimistic story first. The optimistic - Because Ari gave the negative take. Yeah, he gave it. So I want to hear the optimistic take first. The optimistic take is that AI ends up increasing the capabilities and productivity of every human.

43:55Sure. You know what I mean? It's like as if everyone is the same. I mean, I don't know about you, but if you have a really good assistant, you probably work better. Yeah. A good assistant who gives you what you need and helps you out. And so it takes care of the tedious tasks so you can make the big decisions and so forth. Sure. So the positive version of it is we have a nation maybe in a world of better workers, more empowered, who have this kind of assistant with them, and much more productive. So that would be a human augmentation kind of theory. And in some ways, the PC was like that. I mean, it did replace some people in the 80s and 90s, personal computer, I'm saying.

44:35but generally speaking, made people more capable and also helped entrepreneurs who are going to start a business because you could just get a couple of PCs, write something and get going or having a travel agent, whatever. The pessimistic version, which we've probably heard more about, is a replacement story, which is to say huge swaths of human working becomes unnecessary and replaceable. and you have then large, large numbers of unemployed people who are angry. And if there's one lesson that is correct, there's one thing Marx was correct about is that people who are economically unsatisfied tend to get violent or tend to do things that are bad.

45:22And so the bad version of the story is huge numbers of people, hundreds of millions are replaced, feel like they've got nothing and get angry and lead us down a path of destruction and despair. Sure. So I kind of favor the first, but, you know, we'll see. Yeah, well, and to your point, I mean, like we said earlier on the onset of the Internet, it was that people were going to be unlocked based on this. Yeah. And the UBI story, like of universal basic income for all that can't carry a job, that's very anti-Internet in so many ways. So let me pivot, because you also talk about platforms in health care.

45:54Yes, that's right. You were in the Obama White House. Post-Obamacare, these platforms grew massively. there was tons of scaling. There was tons of consolidation. I think of like here in Arizona, we have Banner, we have Honor. Those are two big dominant platforms here in the Valley. I think my main question is, as you look at that, some industries like, I'll use Walmart. Walmart's trying to drive prices down through their scale. But you point out that in healthcare, not all platforms that get big are trying to drive prices down per se. Is that because in In some cases, like here, they could be dealing in local monopolies and therefore don't have to?

46:31Yes.

46:36Among markets that are more and less functional, in my view, and I apologize to anyone here who's in healthcare, healthcare markets are very broken. And I think there's a lot of opportunities, and I think it's hurting us as a country, frankly, when we're spending so much of our domestic product on healthcare services. So I think it's a complicated story. So the platform, this is not a book where platforms are all good or all evil. They can be used for different purposes. What I was talking about, particularly in the book, was the model of acquiring a huge number of practices and then both squeezing the doctors and increasing prices at the same time.

47:14Sure. I don't know if this book is a full diagnosis of everything in the healthcare industry. I think that'd be another book. Okay. Yeah. You want to jump ahead? You discussed the emergence of resentment as the third step in the road to Serfcom. Yes. John Sherman talked about disrupting the social order when he spoke on antitrust. Is this deeply tied to the belief of people based on what they see as opportunity for themselves and businesses not? And just as a reminder to everyone, in post-Civil War, Sherman and the better thinkers, the people that that left the Whig party to oppose slavery in 1850, spent like 20 years, what could ruin this?

47:53What could, like slavery and slave ownership, pit people from the right and the left against each other to the point that they'd want to shoot at each other? Welcome to today. Sure. I'd go further back, go to the American Revolution, which was, my view, a revolution centered on economic freedoms. I mean, when you look at what the columnists were mad about, they were angry about the British Parliament suspending their economic livelihood. I think it's always been a key part of the American creed to have a sense of opportunity, economic freedom, you can do what you want. I think the rising against monopoly in 19th century mentioned was a sense that economic freedom was disappearing in the economy that was entirely monopolized.

48:37I mean, that decade, that period was different. In other words, almost every industry just gathered into one and created trust monopolies. They talked about it, frankly, in that period as a new kind of slavery. I'm not saying monopoly is slavery. That's what people said. Sherman said that. Justice Harlan said that. So it was a big theme of that period. Yeah. So you talk about the German monopolies and their state function. The German province is Saxony. He still is an equity holder in Volkswagen today. How problematic is that versus the Taiwanese business model of TSMC who's coming to Arizona on a large scale?

49:19Yes, I'm - That's a huge building out there. Is it near? Theoria. I actually worked on that. I worked on that earlier on. I think just to speak generally, and this I guess is relevant to our things, that it's risky for the state to get overly involved in deciding who's gonna be the winners and losers. It, sometimes it can be successful, there are moments when it's been well done. I guess, you know, the counter argument to this is China and its direction of the economy, and some degree Japan. I think it has, this is what I sort of think, I think it's very dynamic. I think the government and the state can have moments, particularly in the beginning, where you have an instant industry and you need to develop it and get it to a certain level.

50:10but then at some point you need to let it free and then let it survive in the market. And I think when you look at the long history of industrial policy, it has a great role. In some ways we subsidized and invested the US government in the internet. It's a very good investment, by the way. Much less than the moon investment just to fund the internet research. But at some point, backed off. You know what I mean? And I think that's what we need to be thinking. Sometimes they need credit or maybe they just need these quite kind of incentives, maybe even some aid, but then you gotta back off. That's what I believe.

50:46I'm so glad he mentioned that because Star Trek was so popular in 1968, and I often tell people, think of how technology developed since then, and think of how outer space has developed since then, and there's no comparison. We've gone almost nowhere in outer space relative to what's advanced in technology. Outside, it's putting a lot more metal in the sky. I will note that our cell phones are better than their cell phones. Yeah. Remember they had those little flip things? But you can't beam me up. We didn't get that part. So let's talk about perfect competition. Sure. The guy that's becoming the most fashionable economic thinker in these days is David Ricardo, who also came up with the laws of comparative advantage, which have been thrown to the wayside, I might add.

51:31You add a slide of Galbraith. We're big John Kenneth Galbraith fans. is one problem that our main idea is, you touched on this earlier a little bit, is this idea of capitalism or just wealth, just wealth itself, versus China has capitalism. I know you want to live in China, but they have it. So is that really not the idea we're going at? I was sitting at a Little League tryout for three and a half hours, grading 159 and 10-year-old kids for a tryout. And the truth is, all we're sitting there trying to teach our children is the idea of competing and competition. Isn't that really the goal? Because that's what drives innovation and prices.

52:11Yes, I am a big believer, and I think it is the American creed to believe in first economic freedom and second competition. And they go hand in hand because in a fully monopolized industry or market, you don't really have freedom. You have domination. That goes back to like trying to be a telecom guy in the 60s with AT &T. ruling everything in partnership with the state. So those are my beliefs. I believe you can have in monopoly, you can have these kind of bursts of productivity and in 1920s is a good example. You can have these moments where you, as a sense, you've solved all the problems, you have a lot of profit.

52:55But in the long term, I think monopoly is a bad bet, particularly state supported monopoly in the longer term because they get big. If everyone's really worked at a really huge corporation, you know, they get dysfunctional after a period of time. You know, and I think the better bet for long-term prosperity, and I'm not talking about five years, I'm talking about the long-term health and fate of nations is in a competitive economy and some means of keeping it competitive. Sure, yeah. Yeah. You talk about the idea of the economic pie. You write, quote, that's why a policy focused on only growing the pie was also likely on a systematic basis to have prevented it from being cut in the first place.

53:39In your view, is the main risk that if we are, the markets don't stop this, redistribution will become a regular discussion like we are seeing in places like California and the other West Coast states. Yes, I think there's some truth to that. I mean, I think that societies with enormous gaps between, you know, that do not have a strong, prosperous, upper middle, middle class become quite unstable. I think there's even metrics of this, of how instability, you know, tends to lead to civil problems and revolution. So that's one of the themes of the book. I just, in terms of my own ideology of philosophy, I'm a big believer in distributed wealth.

54:22I think that wealth is great. It motivates people. But I think what you want is a country where there is wealth all over the country, not just in one place. And it's spread broadly. I was looking. And I think that is a better bet for long-term prosperity, is distributed wealth. CONNOR O' Yeah, you'll meet his mother later. She's really good at it. Yeah. So I'm going to throw out. CONNOR O' Maybe I'm scaring you guys to distribute wealth. I'm still saying people should be rich. Yeah. I'm just saying we should have, like, lots of millionaires and 100 millionaires and everything, as opposed to, like, you know, people of 500, a couple of people of 500 billion.

55:03I mean, what are you going to, you know,$500 billion is a lot of money for one person. Well, I agree. But here's the great part about trust fund babies, and I'm sure I can get an amen in the room here, is that they're going to spend it anyway. So let me ask kind of a different way of thinking about it. So Frank Knight, who is famous for the old Chicago school of thought, he said something, and I think in Mar Bidet's book, Uncertain Enterprise, I know Chase is in the room here somewhere who recommended this book to me. But he talks, he says that there's no such thing as a natural monopoly. And I got my head just spinning.

55:35Now, why can he say that? So I'm gonna give you the, I don't, I fully agree with Frank Knight. I'll give you my reason why. And then I wanna kind of ask you if you agree with this. In the infancy of these businesses, we wanted to protect their build and their design, getting them launched. OK, and we refer to that as Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act. Right. OK. Now, it was there to nurture them like they're little infants. Now they're just the biggest gorillas in the room. Yes. For better, for worse. I feel like there has to be something to say that that is unnatural. We don't go to banks and say, hey, we're going to protect your liability, even if you're doing something dangerous for your customers.

56:16We're choosing to do that with the largest companies in the United States. And so that is unnatural for other businesses and industries, as an example. So in the Frank Knight case, I would say Section 230 is unnatural. So are we surprised that we have monopolies with an unnatural term of business? That's an interesting theory. I hadn't thought fully of Section 230 being the creation of unnatural, you know, or the support. Wait, but they sustained for a reason. Yeah. That's my big idea. Yeah. No, it's a good idea. I mean, I agree with your point about Section 230. it was done very early on, and I don't know if people know what Section 230 is, maybe I should explain it.

56:53So Section 230 gives, basically gives tech platforms an immunity from most state laws like defamation and other forms, they're never the publisher of that which is on their platform. That's the technical version of it. It was designed, it was like a lot of laws that made sense when it was passed, and made less sense 20 years later. The porn industry kept Bezos alive at Amazon Web Services in the early days. It was the majority of their business at the beginning because the guys that were good at porn weren't good at technology. You know, Amazon Web Services made a lot of money. They don't disclose that, by the way.

57:34Still makes a lot of money. We can't prove that, but we think. Makes, frankly, well, I think a lot of people aren't good at the technology, but their advertising, their sponsor links now makes more than Amazon Web Services. I just want to say that. But on your side, I'm pointing about section, sorry, if we can stick on section 230. It's one of those things that made a lot of sense at the time and then like 20 years later, it feels like a subsidy and has halted development of common law. And honestly, this is a little more technical, but as the platforms have gotten, so in the old days, the main way you would interact with the web internet is you would go there and read stuff.

58:13It was still from that old dial-up model where you get on your phone and dial-up. And now a lot of stuff comes at you. I don't know if your experience. There was one day, I liked Twitter a lot better when it stopped, when it was the stuff I was actually wanting to follow. And at some point, I was like, wait, when did I start following? When did this guy get able to talk to me? You know what I mean? So they started pushing stuff at you. And as soon as they start pushing stuff at you, I think Section 230 should have stopped applying to it. Overall, I think a lot of laws should have a sunset. That is the law should, especially for a new technology, it should disappear after 10 or 20 years.

58:49Sure. Because things always change. I think it's really interesting because we're watching this where, you know, we are providing, and I agree, it is a subsidy. It's a subsidy of reducing liabilities. You're reducing the liabilities of these tech platforms, relative to other businesses. So when a European country comes out and says, hey, I'm gonna charge you a digital tax. Yes. What do we do? Oh, no, no, you dare not hurt our great American businesses that we provide subsidy to. So it's weird. It's just like we have Amber here from Canada. And in the lumber business, they say, oh, you're getting your timber for too cheap in the softwood lumber dispute.

59:25And therefore, there's a subsidy there. So we judge other people's subsidy onerously. But we don't introspectively look at our own subsidy that we hand out to these big businesses. Well, who really honestly looks at their own faults? The same way they look at anyone. I agree. But this is American exceptionalism. That's true. That was an Amber alert. So, hey, I want to give a big shout out to everyone who's been working so hard on this show. You know, we recently hit the top 10 in investing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and even number one in the business category in several countries. As you may know, this show is brought to you by Smead Capital Management.

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1:00:36it. Tim, we've had tons of fun. I want to ask for our audience, where can they follow you going forward? You're obviously teaching at Columbia. Are you active on social media? I am active on Twitter now and then. I have a mailing list, which if you search for me, you can find me, which I send occasional updates. I write occasionally for New York Times and other other publications. So yeah, just look for me and you'll find me. This has been great. Do I have a moment for a closing remark? Please, yeah. No, I think the stake's very big. You know, I'm writing about tech, talking about business, but I am very interested in this project of sustainable prosperity.

1:01:17And I think that the United States project goes through these long cycles where we have unbalanced economy, more balanced economy. I think we've gone towards a less balanced economy. I think we'll be richer if we manage to introduce a little bit more balance for the entire country. So that's basically the message of the book. Awesome message. I want to give a round of applause to Tim. Thank you.

1:01:41Tim, thank you for joining Bill, myself, and the investors of the 2026 Smead Investor Oasis. Your book reminds me of the human element of our society. Things that can't be quantified are still real. That's true. Markets do fail to do what we expect at times. We don't know what the future brings. Our listeners should go out and buy a copy of Tim Wu's book, The Age of Extraction, to contemplate where we have come from to where we are now in the scale platforms that we deal with in our everyday lives. If you enjoy this podcast, go to Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen to a book with legs.

1:02:13Give us a review. Tell others about the great authors like Tim Wu that we have the opportunity to understand and study the world with and through. For our tribe, if you have a great book that you'd like to recommend, email podcast at smeedcap.com. that's podcast at smeedcap.com you can also send your suggestions to us on X our handle is at smeedcap thank you for joining us for a book with legs podcast we look forward to the next episode thank you thank you for listening to a book with legs a podcast brought to you by smeed capital management the material provided in this podcast is for informational use only and should not be construed as investment advice you can learn more about smeed capital management and its products at SmeadCap.com or by calling your financial advisor.