Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It

25:31The DOJ makes them publish all their memos. And one of them, the search case, this great reporter, Ed Zitron, wrote about how Google got worse at search. And it happened in 2019. Their search market share or their search revenue growth had stalled. And that was because they had 90 % market share. So you don't grow from a 90 % market share. It's hard to not have those exponential jumps. Yeah. I mean, you can raise a billion people to maturity and hope that they'll become your customers. That's a product called Google Classroom. It'll take a while to pay off. But in the meantime, they had this crisis, right?

26:06And so you see these two factions forming up. One's led by this guy, Prabhagar Raghavan. It's an ex-McKinsey guy. He's an engineer, but a business guy. And he's in charge of revenue for Google Search. And his rival is this guy, Ben Gomes, who's like an old school Googler who started building out their servers when it was like a computer under a desk and oversaw all of the data centers in the world and is now in charge of Google Search technology. So Google Search revenue, Google Search technology. Prabhagar Raghavan's got a great idea. He says, we can grow search revenue by making search worse.

26:37So you have to search more than once so that we can show you more ads. No, Corey, you can't be serious. And he's like, and Ben Gomes is like, but that's a terrible idea. I didn't give my life to this company for this. And he's like, but we spend more than$20 billion every year buying all the shelf space for search, right? We buy, like, if there's a search box that you encounter in the wild, it's wired to Google servers. It doesn't matter what operating system, what hardware vendor, what browser. It all goes back to the same place. So why are we bribing Apple$20 billion a year not to enter the search market if we're not going to exploit the fact that no one can find any other search engines without us to make it worse?

27:20And so it's very easy to make it worse. There's things like query stemming, where if someone does a search for trousers, you run a parallel search for pants, then you merge the results. There's spell check, right? Someone misspells Sir Sherman, you make a guess, and you just automatically fix it. Well, maybe you don't automatically fix it. Or even like context awareness, right? So like we're recording this right after the attempted shooting at the White House press corps dinner. So someone searches for that. Well, you know that there's a news item about it. So you put those at the top rather than the generic best link for White House press corps.

27:51Right, okay. Right, and you just turn that off. And now people have to search two or three times. And you have Ben Gove's going like, well, I didn't miss, you know, all those like literally games of my kids to make the search wars. I believe in what we do here. And you have Prabhupada Raghavan basically saying money talks and bullshit walks. And, you know, I'm sure Prabhupada Raghavan was not the first person at Google to realize that if you made search wars, people would have to search more than once and make more money. But he was the first guy to win that argument. And my thesis is he won the argument because we allowed Google to buy all of its competitors and buy all the shelf space and bribe Apple$20 billion a year not to enter the search market.

28:30And then we created the conditions in which the worst person at Google's worst idea was the most money-making one. They had nothing to fear from competitors. They knew the regulators wouldn't come after them. They were even at the point where they were like less worried about losing staff. I mean, obviously now they just hate their staff and wish they would all be replaced by chatbots. And so, you know, they were like just untethered from discipline and in the absence of consequences the bad idea just was the one that won the argument so if if i'm hearing what you're saying then one of the initial seeds that can send us onto this journey you know one that can grow into like a forest of shit and shitification is when we allow competition to die yeah because because if you if you if you if you have a market where, I mean, we've seen this in life.

29:24I don't care. You know, like some people might listen to this and think, oh man, yeah, but I'm not in the tech world. It's like, no, no. Let's even think of it on a small, small level. We've seen this in South Africa. There's a, you know, what New York would call a bodega. We call a spaza shop, like just a local store that's, you know, really informal. Corner store. Yeah, just corner store. When there's a ton of corner stores, two things happen. prices are generally in check with each other yeah right unless there's price fixing which generally didn't happen with corner stores hard to do with 200 companies exactly so you would go how much for this now i'm going there and the person would be like how much is it there all right i'll i'll adjust my prices and so it it kept everybody's price in check and the second thing it did which was almost more important was it made sure that somebody could hold you accountable for the quality of the product you were giving them because they could go get it somewhere else.

30:19Because in South Africa, we had just all of a sudden a burst of fake products. So people were selling fake Coca-Cola. It was Coca-Cola in a bottle. Yeah, counterfeits. Yeah, counterfeits, but it wasn't Coca-Cola. And people were like, this tastes weird. And they're like, oh, don't worry. And then what happened was when they could own enough of the stores or enough of the corner stores, and it was part of one syndicate, where would you go now for the real product. You couldn't. And so these two things together now even affect you on a, so now not only are you paying more, you're also getting less for the more that you're paying.

30:54Yeah. And then you, I almost feel like this becomes like the,

31:01it's the fault line that'll cause the earthquakes of society is how I think of it. Because this makes people angry in the streets, but they don't know what's making them angry. and then we just think like everyone in society is getting like angrier and and more pissed off and and more but it's like no this is it this is the fault line so it's funny you you raise that um i uh so i work for the electronic frontier foundation so non-profit that works on digital rights we have allies in south africa who work on these issues related to ip and digital rights and surveillance all these things uh and i was you know the the latest round of updates to the copyright law there uh included the expansion of the limitations to copyright to match the american set so what we call fair use here yeah which would have made it a lot simpler to for like university teachers to teach and high school teachers to teach and you know photocopy course packs do all these things that are just kind of normal and uh and the u.s trade representative was like no that american policy is very extreme and you shouldn't have it here in south africa no way yeah yeah yeah it's terrible you know it's funny I used to talk to the team about this so when you and I were doing the show in South Africa yeah Eugene and I were doing like a late night it was like a new thing in South Africa it wasn't really a thing that had existed we said can we use clips from like the news and from stuff they were like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah they were like yeah yeah yeah remember we wanted to play the idols clip they were like what the hell do you bloody hell think they were like yo this is not allowed yeah in the country.

32:32It's not. So I thought that was normal. I was like, okay, I get it. You can't take somebody else's thing and comment on, I understand, I get it. Then I came to America. Right. And everyone was doing it on everything. The Tonight Show, The Late Show, The Daily Show, The News, MSNBC. And I was just like, whatever. And they're like, oh no, here it's fair use. Yeah, yeah. So what does that mean? They're like, well, it's fair that you can use something because you're trying to do something else. You're not just trying to plagiarize it. and this is fair to do. Yeah, yeah. And now you're telling me that those people told South Africa, you can't have it.

33:05Don't do our one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's great. So at EFF, you know, when I started, I watched tech companies really have their users back. This was sort of the Napster era. And there was this kind of broad sense that we should like not make it really easy to remove content from the internet because then people would like censor stuff. You need the evidentiary standard. We shouldn't just spy on people. we should uh it should be really easy to go from one service to another what's called interoperability where things plug into each other all browsers can you move your accounts can you move your contacts can you move your chats yep and i remember this period and that was because there were hundreds of them and when there's hundreds of companies they're a rabble right they can't agree like not just on what their policy position is they can't agree on like what they'll cater the meeting where they try to work out the policy issue right like they're they're You know what it's like getting even a dozen people to agree.

33:56And I watched the media industry kick their ass, right? So they were like two orders of magnitude larger than the media industry during the Napster Wars. But there were seven media companies, which are now five. And the media companies had one playbook, right? And whether they were in Congress or in a court or at WIPO or whatever, they just said the same thing. And there was this incredible unity that you get when you boil down a large group to a small group. And what we did is rather than making media more like tech, we made tech more like media. And now we've got like an internet that's five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

34:29And they totally agree on all the ways that we should be screwed. And in fact, they've more or less merged with these media companies. But this amazing thing has happened more or less since Google and Shittified in the last six or seven years, which is that everywhere in the world we've seen this almost spontaneous upwelling of policymakers taking aim at monopolies, at concentrated corporate power. There's a famous study at Princeton. They call it colloquially the oligarch study because it's got a very long academic name. But they went and they looked at like about 2 ,000 policy outcomes. And they concluded that the biggest predictor of what would happen in a policy fight is what billionaires wanted.

35:10And if billionaires wanted it, we got it. And if billionaires didn't want it, we didn't get it. Are you being for real? Yeah. And basically the policy preferences of ordinary people had no bearing on policy outcomes. Are you being for real? Yeah, 100%. But here's the thing. no billionaire wants antitrust enforcement no they hate it but we have had antitrust enforcement in america right and it started on a trump one it didn't start under biden it started under trump one yeah for i think trump one i like that that's a dope trump one yeah yeah from the people who brought you trump one i'm back he's back let's do it again we're back part two it's part two So we got it under Trump one, but also the European Union like started making these really muscular regulations.

35:57The Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, now the Digital Fairness Act. Then European member states like Spain and France and Germany started doing stuff. and then we also got it in England and we got it in the UK in a period where like their politics were so screwed up that like they had prime ministers who were lasting for 10 years that were shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce you'll recall and yet this was the period in which the competition and markets authority which is their answer to the FTC did its best work ever like all the best Americans I'm Canadian and in Canada we had this too and Canadians say that I love it so much it's one of my favorite things canadian say so you know why you know i love that thing because as a south africa i can't hear the difference between the most canadian accents and american so when a canadian says that the whole time i thought you were american then you're like like all the best american i'm canadian then i'm like whoa you did it again yeah and honestly i can't hear the difference i mean i can hear the difference between a texan and someone from newfoundland but i can't but you know generic newscaster canadian accent generic newscaster american accent all the same but um we had the world's most useless competition authority.

37:03So our competition bureau in its entire history had challenged three mergers. And that number may seem low, but the number of mergers they'd successfully challenged was zero. And in 2024, Justin Trudeau whipped his caucus to pass the most muscular antitrust law with the most sweeping powers of any competition bureau in the world. And Justin Trudeau was not like a foe of corporate power, right? He was like, his whole brand was sort of pete budigieg style like kind of neoliberal like uh you know sort of mckinsey good the status quo but let's make it a little bit better yeah yeah yeah yeah so we get this out of justin trudeau but we also got it in south korea and in singapore and in japan and australia and also china wait what was happening so different things in different countries south korea and japan pursued antitrust cases against apple for price fixing uh the uh in the app store so if you if you um sell anything in an app, if you collect any money in an app.

37:5830 % goes to Apple. Apple requires you to use their payment process. And they make$100 billion a year on that. It is the most profitable line of business they're in. It's more profitable than anything else they do. It is pure profit. It's a 30 % tax on the digital economy. And it's crazy. It's just like a shocking sum of money. But wait, wait. Okay, let's delve into that. Because this is something that I find myself grappling with. It's a tough one. On the one hand, I do think it's crazy that Apple charges you 30 % of any revenue that is coming in from your app that you're charging in the app specifically.

38:33On the other hand, I go, there was no app store. There was no app ecosystem. There was no, they're making it, have you tried to sign up for anything that's not in Apple? Ahaha, Eugene. Do you want to hate your life? Hey, my man. Good luck paying. Good luck It's messy It's hard Good luck Canceling by the way You try cancel a product That you didn't sign up Through like Apple Like get some other service Because I've tried to like Get out of the ecosystem I'm going to go Sign up on the website myself And I do my thing Till this day There will be five dollars Leaving my account Where I'm like I mean I don't know I keep sending email Cancel Unsubscribe I no longer wish to Reason for leaving Because I don't want to Give you my money anymore Reason for leaving I don't want to be here anymore.

39:21That's too bad. Can we put you through to somebody? I don't want to be put through to anybody. But so there's that side of it where I go, what is the amount that Apple or anyone should be able to charge for inventing a new thing that makes you money that you didn't make? Because you are making 60 % from zero. 70%. 70%. Sorry, you're making 70 % from zero. From zero, right? So you're making that 70 % from zero. Why? Sure. Why shouldn't like this? And I genuinely mean it as like a grapple because I go like, ah, who decides? Yeah, but who decides? So, OK, so put on, take off your I use a phone app and put on your like SIM regulator app.

40:04OK. And you're trying to like figure out what's best for society. Yeah, let's do it. Right. So right now, the way that it works is reverse engineering an iPhone to add a different payment method is a felony. Right. So Apple gets to put you in jail if you try and add another payment method. And Apple's argument is that by blocking independent repair, independent software installations, independent payment processing, and so on, that they're able to do this sort of paternalistic thing. They've got their users back, and they will step in and do it. And there's an extent to which that is undoubtedly true.

40:30But there is a threat that Apple will never defend you against, which is Apple. And so where Apple doesn't have your interest at heart, then you have no recourse because you can't change your phone if you don't like what Apple's doing. So in 2021, Apple updated iOS. I think it was 2021. They updated iOS, which is the operating system for like phones and watches and tablets. And they gave you a single tick box and you ticked it and then Facebook couldn't spy on you anymore in the apps. 96 % of iOS users ticked that box. The other 4 % were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes a lot of sense because if I worked at Facebook, I would always be drunk.

41:05Hey, Corey's here to fire shots, bro. Corey doesn't play games. Corey's here with his machine. Joe Corey doesn't play games, bro. So you get it, right? Like this is clearly like neoliberal economists, the same ones who say monopolies are efficient. They like to talk about revealed preferences. Okay. Where if you do one thing, but say another thing, the thing you're doing matters more than what you're saying. You have a revealed preference. This is like a thing you can only believe if you incur the kind of neurological injury you get from taking an economics degree, which makes you incapable of like perceiving or reasoning about power.

41:37You see someone who's like sold a kidney to make the rent. You go, look at that person with the reveal preference for one kidney. So here's the thing. When you give people a real choice, they can reveal a preference. Because Facebook would have set up until that moment, people use Facebook. So they don't want their privacy. So here's the kicker. When Apple was turning this on for Facebook, they were also turning on their own surveillance system for the iPhone that gathers all the data Facebook used to gather in order to target ads to you. Because they have a competing ad broker. And there's no way to opt out of that.

42:10Right? And it's against the law to do unto Apple as Apple did unto Facebook. But that's like just for table stakes, right? So in China, the government said to Apple, you must remove all the privacy tools. There's no VPNs. There's no internet encrypted messages that aren't backdoored. And they backdoored iCloud in China so that they could figure out who to like stick in a gulag. Right. Right? So again, Apple's got your back until they don't. And when they don't, what do you do? What do you cause? And then finally, here in America, Apple decided that an app called IceBlock, which is an app that warns you if there's a guy in Oakley's and a gator who wants to shoot you in the face or send you to an El Salvadoran slave camp for the rest of your life, that that doesn't belong in the app store.

42:56What was the argument? Ice officers are a protected class. Oh, as they should be. They're a visible minority. huh and so it i mean the argument is please don't tear off my stuff mr trump that's the argument right huh that's why tim cook flew to dc to assemble a little gold participation trophy for trump do you remember that oh yeah you know that's why he paid a million dollars to sit behind trump on the dais at the inauguration it's why they gave millions of dollars for the epstein ballroom you know it's because it's mafia right so when apple has your back And one is not scared.

43:38Oh, man. So, you know, you can tell someone has multiple passports in this conversation. Someone here has multiple passports. I'm Canadian, British, and American. There you go. You can see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just freewheeling here. So, literally, Evil Knievel in this conversation. So how do you get Apple to like have your back again, right? They have to be afraid. They have to be afraid that something bad will happen to them, right? If we want them to be good, there have to be penalties for being bad. Because within Apple, I guarantee you, in fact, it's public because they all leaked to the New York Times and Wired and whatever.

44:17There are tons of Apple employees who are like, this is bad and we shouldn't do it. Oh, wow. They say it about China. They say it about App Store fees. They said it about IceBlock, right? And they're losing the argument. What if their argument wasn't just this would make me feel icky, but also that$100 billion a year we take in from transactions is about to be shifted to a rival because people are so pissed off with us that they would happily switch, right? Apple makes this argument all the time. They say, well, if we let third parties fix your phone, well, maybe they do something bad to your phone.

44:48Well, that's possible. So maybe we should have a law that says if I fix your phone and install spyware, I go to prison or get fined or whatever. right and in fact you talked about canceling under the biden administration lina khan created what was called the click to cancel rule which she's my hero corporations through me too me too god i i i used to send her texts that said um i can't tell you how disorienting it is to get out of bed in the morning and look at my phone and go oh my god my government's great yeah like lina khan was because because you know you know what it felt like with lina khan it felt like there was somebody in government doing what the government is supposed to do.

45:27So here's how I've seen it. So Lina Khan was fundamentally tasked with making sure that trade and competition were fair in the United States. And this is something that people oftentimes obscure in these conversations. If you talked to billionaires and CEOs of corporations, they would make Lina Khan seem like the devil and they would oftentimes say you need to let business do what it does and you know you've got to be unrestrained and because if you if you restrain industry it will not move in the direction but this would be the equivalent of two fighters in the cage in ufc saying you got to get the refs out of the cage man get the refs out of the cage and then just let the fighting be unrestrained and then true fighting will emerge and then you will know who the best fighter is And it's like, yeah, that's true.

46:18But a lot of people might die. A lot of people might die. So the reason we have a referee, even at UFC, is because there is somebody who knows what the rules are. And their job is to enforce the rules to make sure that the spectators and the fighters in the cage are protected. To officiate. Yeah. You don't need to see anybody dying. Yeah. And you too don't need to die. And so even though you may not think it as one of the fighters, it's actually good for you. And this is the thing people don't realize, is that having somebody who is competent at enforcing the trade and competition laws in a country is actually good for companies.

47:01You know why? When you are winning in a death match, you don't think someone should stop a death match. Yeah, because you're on top. But when you are losing a death match, you will pray to God that there was someone there to tap you out. Someone there to go, hey, you tapped, the fight is over. I've seen multiple major corporations who were once like, you know, at the pinnacle, HP, et cetera, et cetera, you know, just absolutely killing it. They never want any enforcement. But when they fall down Or when they're on the ascendancy They'll point out constantly How they're being oppressed by other companies How the competition is being stifled How they're being blocked out of doing certain things Like one of the most famous stories for me was Virgin Cola Richard Branson Was really a genius at making Innovative and interesting companies That just created A new type of value where people didn't expect it Virgin Airlines, Virgin Atlantic Virgin, you know, the ship, et cetera.

48:05But a big one was Virgin Cola. One of the craziest things I learned about Virgin Cola was it was actually a product that people were starting to like more than Coca-Cola. No. I didn't know this. But it was past, like taste tests and just in raw sales, it was doing this, it was doing this, it was doing this. It was just people like, we like the taste of this more than Coca-Cola. And then what did Coca-Cola do? They went out to all their distributors and all the people and they said, if you give this guy shelf space, we're going to cut you off completely. And remember right now, we're responsible for such a large amount of your revenue.

48:42Right. So if you let this guy come into your places, if you give him a favorable shelf space, if you even give him shelf space, we're going to shut this shit down and good luck to you not having any of our products. Sure. What can you do as a store? You're a corner store, mom and pop store, supermarket. It doesn't matter how big you are. Yeah. they're a huge part of your turnover. They've got a lot of products under their belt. They've got too much product. And so you go, sorry, Virgin, you're out. And that's literally why Virgin Cola died. It wasn't badly anything. It wasn't. And so in that, if you are the Virgin Cola or if you are the anything in any field, you can think when you're on top, you're always going to be on top.

49:25But when that behemoth flips and they're coming after you, that's when you're going to wish that there was enforcement. But by then it might be too late because now there might only be one company. And so now it just becomes an environment where competition cannot even begin to exist. Does that make sense? Yeah. I think you said that very well. Do you remember on Saturday Night Live, Lily Tomlin used to do this bit where she'd play an AT &T operator. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. AT &T operator. And she would do these fake ads for the phone company. And they would always end with, we don't care. We don't have to.

49:52We're the phone company. Yeah. Right? And Lena used to say, companies aren't just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They get too big to care. Yes. And so there has to be some external source of discipline. So this started when you asked me about competition. And I tell even my like most Ayn Rand pill libertarian friends, you know, people who can't open their copy of Atlas Shrugged anymore because the pages are stuck together. I say, even if you think the only thing the government should do is enforce contracts, you still need a referee who's more powerful than the players on the team, than the teams on the field.

50:26Otherwise, what does it matter if the government says, oh, you know, party A violated their contractual obligations to party B if party A is more powerful than the government. So the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate determines the size of the government you're going to have to have. It has to be bigger. And so if you want small government, you need smaller corporations. Oh, that's an interesting argument. I've never thought of that. People say I want small government, but then they don't consider... Yeah, because you get economic... You get central planning one way or the other. There's always going to be a planner.

50:53So either it's Apple saying ice blocks should be illegal, right? And what's your lever on Apple? Like, if you don't like how Apple's behaving, what do you do? You say, oh, I'm going to switch to Android or I'm not going to buy any apps anymore. You just do this like half-assed, like people in this day and age think that a boycott is how you shop, right? I participated in the boycotts against apartheid. They were not shopping differently. They were a global movement organized in solidarity with the ANC and trade unions in South Africa that arranged for a set of, like, articulated objectives and a tactic around it, right?

51:33It wasn't shopping hard. It wasn't shopping hard. You know, the bus boycott in Montgomery was not like, I feel like walking to work today, right? They did 380 days without riding the bus because they organized solidarity networks with carpools, and they were working with the bus drivers to keep them fed while the buses were shut. Like, that's what a boycott is. It's not shopping hard. So either Apple gets to decide which software people, so iPhones basically, iPhones are a minority in the market, but they're the super majority of the top decile. So the 10 % richest people in the world. Okay, right.

52:08The vast majority of them own iPhones, which means that like any significant digital business that doesn't work on an iPhone doesn't work, right? So they're effectively a market planner, right? They're like someone in Moscow coming up with a five-year plan in 1976. for the digital market. So either it's them and you have no leverage over them. All you can do is like, I don't know, go on Reddit and complain or it's the government. And I know people are like, well, what are we going to do about the government? And right now, it's a very hard question. But what, like how many universes are there in which a giant corporation that you're angry at listens to you versus how many universes have we had in which the government is responsive to people?

52:47It's still not a great track record for the government, but at least there is the nominal basis of being publicly accountable. The people in these firms will tell you that they have a fiduciary duty to be terrible to you if that makes them a nickel more in profit, right? Isn't that something that was misunderstood as well? It's a piece of propaganda Milton Friedman came up with. It's not true. Yeah, because apparently the original thing was you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders, but then apparently there's like an end of the sentence that no one says. It's more like the problem with fiduciary duty is they act as though it's a bright line test, right?

53:24You just say, oh, well, what did the managers of this firm do? Was that in accord with their fiduciary duty? And that you can just like a Martian looking through a telescope could tell you from millions of miles away whether it was or wasn't fiduciary. But you fire half the people and you're like, well, I'm fulfilling my fiduciary duty by reducing our payroll. You give everyone a raise. Well, I'm fulfilling our fiduciary duty by increasing morale, which will increase. Fiduciary duty is the all purpose excuse. Okay, you can just use it for anything and be like, this is my fiduciary duty. The market made me do it.

53:52Okay, all right, that makes sense. So the thing that competition does is it makes the firm small enough to regulate, which means that we don't need as Goliath a state to regulate them. And it also means that when the state tries to make evidence-based policy, when they're like, okay, so we're going to build this building, we have these reinforced steel joists in the ceiling, and we want to make sure that the roof doesn't fall in, we need to know what our building code should be. Yeah. Right. And so they're going to like put out it's called like a notice of inquiry. Right. And we're going to ask the public what they should do.

54:24And you're going to have people who have a certain patented process for making one alloy and people who have machines that make a different thing. And, you know, lots of different stuff. And they're all going to show up and they're going to say this should be in the building code. And then they're going to look at each other's submissions and they're going to do reply comments. They're going to like that building's going to fall down if you build it the way my competitor does. And here's my math. Right. Here's my evidence. So they're doing the work of the regulators. Right. They're like they're they are checking each other's bullshit yeah right because because they all when we have enough of them it's like a healthy ecosystem yeah exactly if you if you have a vast array of species they keep each other in check you know what i mean so the fox hunts the rabbit and then the rabbit eats the plants and then the plants and it's just the nitrogen yeah there we go but it's like everyone is doing a thing in this cycle but once you start to create a monopoly you go we just have rabbits now and then now what happens is there are far too many rabbits for the plants and then everything that's growing is being eaten but nothing's eating the rabbit but nothing's people don't understand that companies and businesses are like this as well is that they themselves keep each other in check with everything some might even spot like something unlawful that the other company's doing because they're in the same field.

55:40So they go, you guys are breaking the law. And it's like, oh, thanks for telling us. We wouldn't have paid attention to it because we didn't have the same incentive, but it benefited us. And so you did. And so in a weird world, again, we don't understand that having the more of it, people, you know where people don't get how this affects their everyday lives. And I think this is why I'm so passionate about it is sometimes some of these conversations seem so highfalutin that you think you're in a conversation that doesn't affect you. You know, people are like, ah, the Federal Trade Commission and what mergers?

56:13Why do I care if there's a merger? Why do I? Simple, simple one. If you look at the power of something getting too big, you have your card service, your Uber app or whatever you use. People forget when Uber came in, they did something really slick. They said, we're going to charge prices that are far below what the industry rates are. So they were beating every taxi in every city in terms of price. What generally happens when prices are lower? Demand goes up. People say, I want to use that service. Everyone starts using that service. It is greater in many ways than a taxi service because it fines you.

56:52It doesn't racially discriminate the way taxis were oftentimes found to be doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is great because there was Uber and taxis. And then what starts to happen? The taxi industry starts going down, starts going down, starts going down. it loses its value, it dies. For all intents and purposes, it dies. When you walk in New York City now, you barely see the color yellow in the streets anymore, the way it used to be. So it dies. Uber goes, oh, competition dead? Great. Let's get these prices going now, people. And now Uber starts taking the prices up, taking the prices up, taking the prices up.

57:29And now you have no recourse, you have no, you can't even say, I do not wish to catch an Uber. I'm going to wait for a taxi. Go wait. See how long it takes now. Yeah, sure. There is no taxi to pick you up. And we can move this to every industry. Every mother who's looking at the price of diapers and going, why do diapers cost this much now? I can't seem to find them cheaper anyway. Yeah, it's because even the extras that you're looking at are not extras anymore. It's one company that's selling you the diapers. You go, like one of the ones that really got me was when we look at diseases in food, even if we take it away from economics, if you look at farms that have chickens or cows or anything like that, eggs, we don't realize that as humanity, we are closer and closer to the precipice of just having our food supply wiped out because we've allowed one company basically to own so much of it.

58:35Forget the money now. Just think of our survivability. If one company owns the majority of eggs that we have and they have these laws that make it illegal for you to now have an egg that is somehow similar to their egg and they go, our egg is our egg. And if your chicken comes from our egg, then our chicken, it's our chicken now. It's not your chicken. Well, that company is called CalFresh. Yeah. Nearly all the eggs in the grocer's fridge come from them. Yes. And we were all having egg discourse about eggs being expensive. It's because CalFresh raised the price. There you go. They said it was bird flu.

59:10They said it was this and that. It's just CalFresh turned the knob. Yes. But the thing is, if there was a disease that affected that specific type of egg and wiped them all out, or there was a disease in them, because we've allowed CalFresh to become this thing, we are all going to pay the price. We'll be right back after this short break.

59:57And we need you with us because now is the time for hope. Join the fight at ALZ.org slash walk. You fell in love at first crunch. And now the crispy chicken crunch wrap slider is back at Taco Bell. But with a twist, it's crispy all white meat chicken nuggets inside a slider sized crunch wrap. But now you can enjoy them with the kick of Hidden Valley Diablo Ranch. Or try the tortilla chip coated nuggets on their own. They're waiting for you. The crispy chicken crunch wrap slider, a brand new classic, is back. Only at Taco Bell.

1:00:56I'm no Superman.

1:01:04You know, as this conversation goes, I feel like the average consumer, I feel helpless. I feel like there's nothing much I can do. But there's one point that you made that actually piqued my interest when we were speaking about boycotts in the township. Yeah. During apartheid, I think it was the 70s and the 80s. And there used to be another form of it called a stay away. Yeah. So in a stay away, you don't take public transport. You don't go to the factories. You don't go... General strike. General strike, yes. But those two went together. And you were so right by saying that it doesn't mean people, just because they didn't buy washing powder, they didn't wash their clothes.

1:01:38Right. Just because they're on a stairway, they couldn't move around. It was sort of organized for people to be able to get by, but for the corporation to feel the impact. And I feel like as time went on and as things happened, we as the consumers were made unaware accomplices by being shareholders in companies. Hmm. Yeah, I think there's something to that. I do think there's also just this neoliberal idea that the best way to participate in politics is to vote with your wallet. And, you know, billionaires love this idea because their wallet's thicker than all of our wallets put together. And so that's the one vote they can, there's like whatever, a thousand billionaires, right?

1:02:17But they can win every wallet vote. They can't win any other kind of vote. So it's very convenient that we've been told, you know, your consumption choices, that what you should really do if you're angry at Elon Musk is agonize endlessly about whether you should have a Twitter account, right? And not - That's what you should be doing. Not try to act politically. Not try to like say, oh, well, maybe he shouldn't be allowed to buy more companies. Maybe his public contracts with the federal government should be canceled. Maybe the ways that he's materially misled his shareholders should be prosecuted more vigorously.

1:02:45No, no, no, no, no. It's all about whether you have a Twitter account. Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity? He did call me a scourge on humanity, but it was because I told him that I thought it was a different thing. He was like, so my other life, I'm a science fiction novelist. And I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown. So I write books for all ages. I have a new middle grades book coming out next year. I mean, everything. Picture books, tech criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but very much admired, a guy called Ian Banks, who died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist.

1:03:23And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Ian M. Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian, he was an art and trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Ian Banks's novels, I didn't see any unions. And I'm like, yes, these novels are set 100 ,000 years in the future in which there are galactic brain artificial intelligences piloting spaceships the size of planets with 100 billion people living on them. The fact that he didn't see a need for unions there tells you nothing about whether he thinks we need a union here. And he was like, well, if Ian Banks could have seen one of my Tesla factories, he would have seen that we don't need unions either.

1:03:59And I said, again, no offense. I think there is a difference between traveling faster than the speed of light and eking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles. Damn. And that is when he called me a squirt on humanity. Damn. But I wanted to pop the stack because this started with talking about - He blocked you after that. Yeah, he did. I'm always fascinated by that side of Elon The blocking butt He's a baby He is the number one champion of free speech And jokes and opinions And all this Until he doesn't have a rebuttal for you And then he's like Block, you racist, go away, block Right, gone I don't understand How the owner Of one of the world's largest town squares As we now call it Blocks people Oh, I understand it he's a thin-skinned baby yes but to me it's the antithesis do you understand what I'm saying yeah yeah yeah to me it's the antithesis of the thing you have come in and said everyone should say what they want and we should do this open mic club open let's go let's go let's go yeah you're too open mic now come on man the mic is too open yeah like it's such a it's but but but but it actually that's something I wonder is like where do you think where did the fracture occur because I can use Elon Musk you know I can talk about like founders of Google I can talk man I won't lie a lot of what they set out to do was noble and beautiful it was brilliant it always starts like that I will always be grateful to Elon Musk because of what he did with electric cars because I love driving an electric car and I think it's better for everyone I won't get you started you're a hater or a lover you're a hater he traumatized Can I tell you, he didn't hate electric cars.

1:05:46No, I'm traumatized by one. He drove mine and then like the experience of trying to charge an electric car and then like where and how and - Sure, yeah. I wish I knew you then because I think there's a conspiracy when it comes to these charges. Well, and you know, one of the things that happened in the Biden administration is they forced Musk to open up access to Tesla chargers for non-Tesla cars. They said, we're going to put federal dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act into building out a federal network of cars, car chargers yeah but they will only work with cars that uh whose manufacturers don't block people from using their chargers so if you have a charging network and you don't let third parties use it then we won't let you use the public one we won't let your the cars you make use the public one and so elon musk opened up the the charger network that was tim woo's a great guy who worked in the biden white house he and i have known each other since we were nine years old we went to the same elementary school we played dungeons and dragons together yeah yeah yeah that's right but But you see that thing you're talking about.

1:06:42So I go like, I'm constantly grateful to many of these visionaries for some of the things they've inspired and created. But it's interesting. That phrase you said, Eugene, it always starts like that. What changed? What changed to take, I'm going to make a bet and say 90 % of the people who ran or were the top people in Silicon Valley, 90 % of them at least. They were progressive. They were trying to create a utopian society. They were pushing towards this idea of us sharing and having more and being more and all of this. And then now they've turned into like sort of like the oil barons of old.

1:07:27Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened? It's the last scene of that incredible documentary Animal Farm where you look from the pigs to the men and the men to the pigs and you can't see the difference. So, you know, I think it's related to this point that I was making about how we're seeing this surge of antitrust. Like I said, in Japan and Korea, they went after Apple. And Singapore, I forget what the case was. Australia was about Facebook and Google and the news companies. But also in China, where they said to the big tech companies in China, you can't block little companies from interoperating with you so that they can enter the market.

1:08:00And I think that it is remarkable that we've had this surge of antitrust stuff, because as you say, these people are currently like they're definitely in the stage in life where they don't see any reason why this death match should be stopped. Yeah. Right? Because they're winning. And there is this like incredible current in the air where people are just sick of this, right? They're just like really angry. As you said, people are, they don't know why, but they're really angry. and we sometimes talk about like political will and it's hard to know what a political will is, but I think it's like the wind where you don't see it until something gets in the way.

1:08:38And so what we've seen is like anytime a politician sticks their head up and goes, maybe we should do something about concentrated corporate wealth. All of a sudden there's this scale, you know, that just like sort of like, it's like they put a little sail, like a little handkerchief size sail and suddenly the ship that's been but calmed in the doldrums for 20 years is like scudding across the seas, right? And so there is this great upwelling of anger at what's happened. And I think it's because we decided that we wouldn't stop monopolies from forming. And absent some kind of muscular government action, monopolies will always form.

1:09:13That monopolies, it's not because they're efficient, but because the parochial interests of the people who own firms are always better served by cooperating with other people who own large firms. by, for example, buying each other and so on, than they are by competing. When you compete, Peter Thiel calls it wasteful competition, you erode your cash basis, right? Like when Google gives Apple$20 billion a year not to enter the search market, it's like the Pope dividing up the new world, right? They're saying, well, we're not going to compete with you where you are. You're not going to compete if that's where we are.

1:09:46The$20 billion costs us less than it would take if you were competing directly with us. But it also saves you more than you would have to pay in capital expenditures. If you were to develop your search engine, so we're all good. This is us sort of conspiring. Adam Smith, who's the father of capitalism, he has this famous quote, men of the same trade seldom gather, but the conversation turns to a contrivance to fix prices. There's just this incredible temptation. And so without state intervention, this will happen. And it's just very hard to resist temptation. I think that there comes this point where every, like you've, you built the self-licking ice cream cone.

1:10:27It's kind of just, it's like the money's just piling up, you know, and like, and, and, you know, you've, you're supposedly your, your fierce competitors with these people, but you all kind of know each other. And especially like, maybe not the founders, but in the upper ranks, you know, especially when there's only a small number of firms, everyone like job hops from one firm to another. Cause often, you know, like the VP can't become an SVP in that firm because there isn't someone ready to quit or die. And so they get headhunted laterally and they move back and forth. Yeah, everyone moves diagonally.

1:10:56And so they're all like godparents to each other's children. They're like executors of each other's estates. They play pickleball. They're in the same polycule, you know. And like they just end up with this kind of emergent consensus. Yeah. Are you a pickleball man? Oh, the sport of the corrupt. I'm no pickleballer. What a self-licking ice cream. I can't wait to use that phrase now. I'm like, I'm dying to use the phrase of like back at this again so in in south africa currently there's a commission that is investigating corruption within first municipalities start with the police then it became with municipalities and obviously the tender system and the business dealings that is being done and it so came out that it's not that a person can go whistle blow to their boss because in most cases the boss is the corrupt person right and you can't go to the police and find a constable sitting at a charge office.

1:11:48And what's the charge? I think something is going on at my company. But regulators play a big important part. So competitors that didn't get the deal are the ones that blow the whistle. Then someone on the inside who knows exactly how the deal went is the one that can give the competitor evidence to go to a regulator. Then it turns into a court case and then charges can get pressed. But here's my thing. The average person sitting there knowing what they don't know, what can they do? Because like you said, with the stairways, it was easy. with the boycotts it was easy there was another one called the go slow where you show up at work but you actually don't yeah go slow yeah yeah they're sometimes called right uh work to rule uh go slows they're all the yeah same thing you follow all the rules but you're not really doing which means you don't do anything but here we are now we're finding ourselves here and as you guys speak i know you guys love tech so much and he's done a good job over time of explaining tech to me right you're explaining another side of it which is the dark evil yeah vader self-licking ice cream version.

1:12:43And I'm like, what can I do? I do know I'm honored. I have an answer for you. It's kind of grounded in this punchline of my favorite joke from Eastern Canada. The punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. Right? Like we had a more robust enforcement system, like before we decided monopolies were efficient and we were just going to tolerate them. So that happened in the Reagan years. Have you ever heard anyone say, oh, that thing is so screwed up, it's really borked? you ever heard no worked now it's a it's a saying about something that's really bad it's named after this guy who's a judge robert bork who reagan tried to put on the supreme court and he handled his confirmation hearing so badly that now we say things that are wow i didn't even know that that was possible in america oh yeah i thought you always get on the supreme no yeah no this was before pre-susan collins so uh bork's big idea was that monopolies are good and that they're efficient and that like if all of us are using the same search engine that must mean that it's the best search engine, wouldn't it be weird to use public funds to punish a firm for pleasing the public?

1:13:44So he was like, we should just allow these companies to get too big to fail. They'll never become too big to care. It'll be fine. The market will correct it. So when we decided to start tolerating monopolies, we got monopolies, right? We got them in everything. Media, clearly, right? Five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that control the apps, and one company that does the e-books and the audio books, right? It's like why giving creative workers more copyright has not helped because like, it's like giving bullied kids extra lunch money, right? Like they just say, oh yeah, you've got an extra 20 years of copyright.

1:14:17We'll just put that in our contract now, right? We're not going to give you more money. So we had this, we had this idea that monopolies maybe were efficient and they're not. And so we need to fix that. And we've been here before, you know, the Lenny Bruce sketch about before there's a crime, a law, there has to be a crime. No, no. And he does this whole thing about like, how is it that we have a law against having sex with a chicken. Someone must have had sex with a chicken first, right? And so the way we got these laws, it wasn't like someone came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, we have to stop these firms from engaging in merging.

1:14:49They watched it happen? Yeah. Okay. And they reacted to it. They were in a situation, if anything worse than the situation we're in, right? And this, you know, from the 1890s through the Gilded Age, right? This was the period in which you had the robber barons, the trusts. That's why we call it trust busting. So what used to happen is like John D. Rockefeller would say, hey, everybody who makes oil, we're going to start a new company called a trust. And if you've got a 16 % share of all the oil in the country, you get a 16 % share of the trust. And if you've got 20%, you get 20%. And then I'm going to run the trust.

1:15:22All the oil companies will be one company that I'll run. They'll have different names, but I'll run them all. And just we'll disperse the profits according to your market as of now. There was like a whiskey trust and a steel trust and a coal trust. Everything in the country was run this way. The first antitrust law, 1890, Robert Sherman, he was a senator, he's the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, a guy burned down in Atlanta. And he said, if we would not tolerate a king, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade with the power to fix the price of the necessities of life. And so we get this law in 1890.

1:15:54It was in response to the rail companies. But by 1912, we used it to break up Standard Oil. And the way that we broke up Standard Oil, which was the most corrupt, most oppressive company in the history of the world, I think even like right up there with like the Dutch East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, really horrible, horrible firm with a stranglehold on the planet. You may have seen these old editorial cartoons of like a fanged octopus whose head kind of looks like an oil derrick with its arms wrapped around the world. I think I've seen images like that. Yeah, Gilded Age. There are also weird Nazi images that are also this that are bad, but this was before the Nazis.

1:16:27Okay, got it, got it. Half a century before the Nazis. So this woman, Ida Tarbell, who was the first woman in America to get a science degree. She was a biologist. She was a generationally brilliant orator, sort of the Obama of her age. She later became a really important suffragist. Her father was a Pennsylvania oilman who'd been destroyed by John D. Rockefeller, and she had a grudge. And so she researched what John D. Rockefeller was doing. And unfortunately, she was working before they invented titles. So her book was called The History of the Standard Oil Company Volumes 1 and 2. But it was published in Collier's Magazine, which was a nationally read magazine, one of the most important magazines at the time.

1:17:05And it was so infuriating to people that they demanded action from their political classes. Wow. And by 1912, we broke it up. Now, this is living memory, 1912. People who were alive in 1912 are dead now. but there are people today alive who worked under those people. And there are people alive who worked under those people. We are not reinventing the lost art of a fallen civilization here. No one's asking us to figure out how to embalm a pharaoh or build pyramids without power tools. This is stuff that we can do. And the point about this political will is it is surging all over the world. We can't solve this as individuals.

1:17:40You're not going to shop your way out of it. We can't solve it by fixing the problems of these people who have talked themselves into becoming these ketamine unaddled failures, right? But we can fix it by fixing the policy environment, right? The enxitogenic policies that create the enxitocene, the era in which everything turns to shit, we know what those policies were. We decided to stop enforcing antitrust laws. So companies formed cartels and monopolies and duopolies. And then they influenced all of our other policies. So we got IP policies like the ones that make it illegal to repair modified technology.

1:18:11We got other policies like the pharma policies that stopped South Africa from making antiretrovirals at the height of the AIDS crisis. We got the progeny of those, which stopped the Global South from making their own mRNA vaccines at the height of the pandemic. We've got that with seeds as well. Monsanto's doing this with seeds. That stopped people from growing food. Yeah. People that are experiencing famine around the world, many of them cannot now plant seeds to grow food because the seeds have now been monopolized, which is one of the craziest concepts. By Monsanto Bear, yeah. Come on, guys.

1:18:39How can we allow a company to own seeds? Not even like their seed per se, but just a seed that they can argue is very similar. Yeah, like the lineage of that seed. Like they're like, no, we have the ancestors of your seeds, not the seed. Our seed is related to your seed. We didn't sell you the seed, but the seed came from a plant that we bred or genetically engineered. So the seed came from our seed. But not even. But not even. It came from a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant. Like they own the life form. So how are they stopping people from planting? No, they don't stop you from planting, but if you grow any of it, they come after you and the governments around the world help them enforce this against even a tiny farmer.

1:19:15Wait, so they'll come to a farm and test the genetics of your plant. There is a member of the Legislative Assembly. You play games, bro. There is a member of the Legislative Assembly. So like an MP or like a congressman in Alberta who was a farmer who had this happen. His neighbor's seed blew onto his land. I remember the story. And he was shut down by the federal government of Canada because they have an obligation under WIPO treaties, under these UN treaties that protect intellectual property. they have an obligation to enforce Monsanto's patents in Canada. And so Monsanto shut him down. This is happening in India.

1:19:50The suicides among farmers are very high in India. And a lot of it has to do with the rising prices of these foundational inputs to agriculture, seed and fertilizer and pesticides. So the parochial preferences of individual firms and the people who run them and their shareholders. And you said we all own shares in these companies, but really like the median American worker has$955 saved for retirement. So we don't own shares in all these companies. No, no, no. A small number of us. I think what Eugene meant was, he meant metaphorically they've made us shareholders because we have the phone. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:20:26We drive the car. Well, we're stakeholders. We shop on their platforms. And your bank has sort of told you you can buy this. And then we feel like we're like in it. Well, like you knew when you bought your phone that you could only install Apple apps on it. And you knew when you bought the ebook that it wouldn't belong to you and so on and so on. And my rebuttal to that is like, you knew when you entered the stream of commerce that since time immemorial, if you sell me something, it's mine, right? I agree with that. If you're so emotionally fragile that you can't believe that when I buy a device, I decide what software is on it, then maybe you're in the long, maybe it's not that I bought the wrong thing.

1:21:02Maybe you shouldn't be in this line of business, right? Like I'm a writer. I work in books. I'm a recovering bookseller and library worker too. I love books. And like the thing where when I sell you a book, it belongs to you. That's not just older than like copyright. It's older than printing. It's older than bound books. It's older than paper. We have scrolls on papyrus that this was the deal for, right? So it can't have come to it as a surprise to anyone who decided to sell books, that the deal with the book is you bought it, you own it, right? it's your goddamn book. And so like when someone says to me, oh, well, why did you buy the ebook?

1:21:41We had the fine print. It very clearly said by buying this book, you agree that I'm allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother, wear your underwear and make long distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge. You knew when you clicked, I agree. Right? That's a great one. That condition. That was really a great condition. When you speak about farmers and obviously when you speak about the seed genetics, I never understood I was speaking to someone who's in agriculture and then agritech to be more precise and they were saying that planting season farmers no matter how much money they make they still have to go to the banks to ask for money I never understood why would you if you're running a business and you can afford to fund your own business why would you need to go borrow and now it makes sense although this is much older so this is one of my weird special subjects you only have one Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:22:34The history of debt, right? So the first money we have, before we had coin money, we had debt ledgers. And debt ledgers were because of agriculture in ancient Babylon. And so if you wanted to plant a crop, you would have the money for the crop after it came in, but you needed the money for the fertilizer and the farm labor and everything before it came in. And so there was a credit market in ancient Babylon, and they would record how much you owed, and then you would pay it back out of the harvest. And the thing is that no matter how good a farmer you are, sometimes the crop will fail, right? There'll be a locust, there'll be whatever.

1:23:06And so run that long enough, and eventually you end up with a group of hereditary creditors and a group of hereditary debtors. Because if you can't pay the debt, then you've got to roll the debt. And then you owe, then you will never get ahead, right? By the time you've lost two or three crops in your career, you're just perpetually behind. And then if that happens long enough, the agricultural output of the country, which is the most important output it has, becomes the plaything of the creditors who are like, actually, I want more ornamental flowers for my table, not more staple crops. And then the society fails.

1:23:41And so Babylon's answer to this is something that persisted all through the Bronze Age called the Jubilee, which was that at fixed intervals, so every 50 years, plus when certain occurrences happened like a change of the king, all debts were forgiven. And this persisted. Yo, what? Yeah. And this persisted through Rome. It persisted through like all the civilizations of antiquity. They knew. They foresaw this. Yeah. Yeah. Because they had this problem over and over again, that when you have a group of creditors, they start to command the productive output of debtors. And these are self-reinforcing phenomena where the creditors get richer and the debtors get poorer and more beholden.

1:24:16And creditors are not good planners, right? They're just not good planners of civilization. They have personal interests. This is one of the problems of letting people amass too much power is that even the smartest person is prone to folly. Henry Ford at one point was worried about rubber for tires. And so he was like, I'm going to build my own rubber plantations in Brazil, in a town called Fordlandia in the middle of the jungle. And I'm going to - It was already called that? No, no, no. He built it. Oh, okay. Wow. And he was like, I'm going to build a copy of Dearborn, Michigan, which was the company town in Brazil.

1:24:53So he got the same firm of architects. So he'd built this town in Michigan. He was going to build it in Brazil. And he was like, all right, I want you to make it ready. And they said, okay, but Southern Hemisphere, right? So we put the windows in the other side of the building. I was like, don't be stupid. We put the windows on this side of the building because it's going to be just like Dearborn. No. And that was it. They did it, right? Because even the smartest guy is really dumb some of the times. And if there's no one there to call you on your bullshit, you crawl up your own asshole and die.

1:25:22Everybody has seen it. Everybody knows someone. You must know this through media. You must know people who just got to the top of their game and turned into Howard Hughes. But this is common with everyone. I often say this when it comes to billionaires in particular. It is interesting to me that we assume that somebody having a copious amount of wealth means that they also have a copious amount of knowledge about everything. And I'm like, no, you realize you can be in the position where you made a shit ton of money because you knew one thing very well. Yeah. That's it. And you got very lucky. Yeah, yeah, no, no.

1:25:58I mean, when Mark Cuban said that on the podcast, he said, Mark Cuban was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, if you took all my money away tomorrow, I could go out there and I know how to make money. He said, but I can't be a billionaire again. Right. He said, don't get it. He said, don't. The billionaire part is extremely, extremely lucky. Selling broadcast.com to Yahoo required that SoftBank, which is their VC who gave them all the money, who then gave all the money to Uber, who then are now giving all the money to OpenAI, that they be there like being, they are the sucker at every table. It really is weird.

1:26:29Why is SoftBank like that? One guy, Masayoshi's son, he is a dumb man with access to a lot of money. But how do they stay around for so long? I don't get it. Well, now it's the Saudis giving it to him who are like, they are the Beverly hillbillies. Do you know the story of SoftBank? SoftBank is crazy. I mean, obviously you know the details. No, but every time you hear a story of like - We work. A boom and a bust. Yeah. In like a bubble. So you'll hear like, people were making hundreds of millions and they were selling their companies. And then the next day they were all worth nothing. Somehow, at many of these junctures, the person who's left with nothing is a company called SoftBank.

1:27:04Please break it down. Because they're a fund. The Forrest Gump of shitty investments. So this guy, Masayoshi Son, he's just very good at talking dumb billionaires that have lots of money, which he then pumps into companies where they inflate bubbles. And they do have exits sometimes, right? Oh, okay, okay. But they have the exit, but then the firms are worth nothing. I mean, Yahoo bought every promising startup of the Web 2.0 era and destroyed it, right? And he gave them the money to do it. And there was a period where their stock gains were high. And I don't know whether his investors got out or when he got out.

1:27:32But Yahoo was destroyed by this string of acquisitions, right? Like Yahoo had a business and they turned it into an acquisition factory. And that's what killed them. That did nothing, right? That just destroyed business after business. In part, because when you buy all the competitors, you put them under one roof, then they fight with each other. Yeah. And another thing people take for granted is this. If your business starts off moving in a direction, as in it is creating or doing something, right? and then you start becoming more focused on your competitors and you start buying them up. Seems like a smart idea.

1:28:10The thing that people forget is you now own those businesses. So you have to do one of two things. You either have to shut them down, but that also requires work and it's money that you're losing, or you have to figure out how you integrate them into your business, which is a terrible idea most of the time because they have their own culture, they have their own systems they have their own people they have their own ideas so now you go do we take their marketing department do we take their head office do we keep ours do we not and now you know what you've done you have lost focus on what you were doing the original business you get what I'm saying it's the equivalent of somebody saying I'm going to date or marry every single person who I think might be competition oh so we're talking about Elon Musk again you're a scourge on humanity Corey But literally you go like You know what Anyone I see as competition I'm just gonna No they're gonna I'm gonna marry them I'm gonna bring them in I'm gonna marry Then it's like yeah And then you're gonna end up in a house That has like 50 spouses Because you were trying to stop those spouses From being competition That would make them happy Because you're like No I just don't want them as competition For my spouse Then it's like No no just focus on your spouse No no no no That person might become competition for my spouse I'm gonna You're also married to me You're also married to me You're also married to me No one's competition for my spouse And then at the end of it you now have 50 spouses in one house and things are falling apart and you wonder why.

1:29:30Right. You lose your focus as well. So yeah. So I mean, Brandeis called this the curse of bigness. He says that when firms get too big, they start fighting with each other. The locus of competition moves from external to firms, external to the firm, right? So like you're like, I want Google to be better than the other search engines. Yeah. And then it becomes divisions in Google saying, I want my division to do better. Oh, so the culture moves inward. That's right. And so it's kind of like an autoimmune disorder, right? You have these kind of princelings who are like, you know, I want to, especially like, you know, the big Hollywood firms, big studios, right?

1:30:05They've got like VPs, presidents, VPs, or no, it's like directors, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, and presidents. And each one is like an order of magnitude richer than the other ones. So like the career earning opportunities to go from one tier to the other are in the millions or tens of millions. And so there's a lot of looking over at this SVP's underlings to see if any of them are about to do something that might bring that division to prominence and then screwing them. And so there's a lot of like backstabbing. I mean, you've worked in the studio system, right? You know what this is like. They're constantly rat-fucking each other, right?

1:30:42Because that's their major locus of competition. But you see, this is... I didn't think of it through that lens. I have noticed at times people are working in companies but not in tandem. They are either actively sabotaging each other or letting the other person fall into a pothole. That's right. Because they're like, if that happens, then I'm going to look better. But I never considered it an institutional idea. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break. Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami.

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1:32:50You know what I think of with all of this is I go, I'm so sad that Monopoly, the board game, never achieved, it achieved all of the popularity, but none of the message. Because you played Monopoly, I'm assuming. We've all played Monopoly. I don't know a single person who has finished a game of Monopoly. And I also do not know a single person who has enjoyed the ending of that game of Monopoly unless they were the last person with the money. Sure. Like you put people down For a game of Monopoly I don't care who you are Put them down Start playing Good times Oh yeah Give me my 200 Right Woohoo I just passed go Oh yeah Everyone's having a great time And then people start buying properties Everyone's friends Until everyone has a property Everyone's just like Oh I can't wait to buy this You also can't wait You should buy that Oh yeah The blue ones look good on you Yeah And people go around And people start buying People start buying And then really quickly in the game you notice a shift in the table there are the haves and the have nots and what makes the game so powerful is not just that you have the haves and the have nots you see how unfair it is for the cause now you get to a point where you add those little hotels and you know what I mean you just build this thing up wealth that gets wealth you do less people do more you even get to the point where the person who has is like I don't even feel like rolling.

1:34:16You guys just roll and come to me and you're going to have to pay me for just existing. And even the conversation of the players that have, they have more in common with each other now. Oh, completely. I'll give you the railway station because you should own all of the utilities and travel hubs. Let me have that street. And they're so cordial with each other. They're so lovely. And then like here, it's like, please, can you break a hundred? Ah, shut up. put it on the table I don't trust you put it down before I touch it I'm not gonna touch that you're dirty okay I'll give you 95 what do you mean you'll give me 95 I'll give you take it or leave it I'll give you 95 but it's 100 do you want the change on okay fine it's amazing how that game shows us why we don't want monopoly power do you know the story of the game though it was created as the landlord's game by a woman who was a Georgian so georgias so georgias are this weird economic philosophy that says that all taxes should be land taxes they have this it's facially plausible idea that because land is the most scarce thing and because appreciation of land value is never the fault of the person who owns the land it's always like the neighborhood gets more valuable yeah and that's there's this like mismatch and incentives if you can just like own a piece of land and your neighbors do things and your land gets more valuable blah blah blah so this georgist woman made this game called the landlord's game It had two sets of rules.

1:35:41You played one cooperatively, one competitively to produce this pedagogical output. This traveling salesman played the game, stole it, sold it to Parker Brothers. Yo, you're lying. No, 100%. This is even better. 100%. This is super monopoly. And it was like decades later that Parker Brothers finally admitted that this woman was the creator of the Landlords game. And? And I think either she or her descendants got a small amount of money. And there's like a small credit on the Parker Brothers website for her. That's it. Like, yes. How can a game about screwing people over come from screwing over?

1:36:19A little on the nose. Yeah, yeah. Is there a system or a country or a place you've seen right now that's like really just nailing this? Is there a beacon we can look to? No, I'll tell you what I'm hopeful about. I don't think there's anything that's nailing this. But I mentioned every country in the world adopted a law like the DMCA that bans modifications, circumvention of technology to modify it and they did that because the u.s trade representative said if you don't do this we're going to hit you with tariffs right well happy liberation day amazing the tariffs came in anyways now and and so now there's like this army of people out there so you know jeff bezos when he started amazon he's infamous for this one saying he would say your margin is my opportunity right so you look at the margin that apple has on payments or the margin that ink inkjet printers companies have and this is my favorite one i know you say not everyone uses printers but like no no but i grew up with can i tell you something i'll tell you my story So I grew up with them because my mom had her own little home business.

1:37:12Oh, yeah. When I tell you, Corey, the journeys that I've been down, because you'd buy the printer. You'd be like, okay, this is great. We've got a printer. What they would do often is the printer would come with half or quarter filled cartridges. They wouldn't tell you this. So the printer wouldn't come with enough. And you're like, okay, fine. You don't buy a car with a full tank of gas. So it's fine. Sure. until you go and get more cartridges. And then you find that the cartridges cost more than the printer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? But like exponentially more. Like I'm talking, I remember once we had one printer, it was HP printer.

1:37:50The printer itself, my mom bought for 700 rand. So what, like$35 somewhere there. And then the cartridges, each color was around 700 rand or 600. Yo, we were like, that's not possible. Yeah. And it won't print black if there's no violet. Yes, yes. No, they wouldn't. And it won't scan if one of your cartridges is empty? So I remember when they came out with microchips. So what happened was first, they just had the ink. And it was this mission. So then what we started doing was, my mom was like, yo, I met a guy who sells the ink. And what they can do is they'll give you a syringe and then you can do this yourself.

1:38:25And it's messy, but if you can figure it out, you got it. Okay, fine. So we started doing this. Then they came out with new printers. and the new printers from Epson and from HP had this little gold microchip on the back. Then I was like, what are these things for? I'll tell you what they were for, Eugene. They were there so that it knew. When the ink was finished. And what you were doing, they were like, nah, bro. They're like, nah, something's changed here. This is not the ink. Then you're like, it's full. Then it's like, it doesn't seem full to me. Full of bullshit. That's what it's full of.

1:38:53Same thing where the car won't recognize the part or the ventilator won't recognize the part. It's the same thing. And it's the same law that protects it. So, you know, the cartel of ink companies or printer companies have monotonically raised the price of ink. Now ink is the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit. At$10 ,000 a gallon, it will be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. Right? So, yo, man, who's this guy? This weekend, the Kentucky Derby. Yo, Eugene. Eugene, who's this guy, bro? Get your semen now.

1:39:21Yo, bro. Come get your mans, Eugene. This man just said, yo, bro, Corey, I don't know. So I wish everyone who dealt in economics and history had your vibe. Because everyone would listen to economics and history. So the point is that there's a lot of people out there who are like, that margin should be my opportunity. This is colored water selling at$10 ,000 a gallon. I'll sell it to you for$5 a gallon. And like you say, people who are not at the apex of technological knowledge. I mean, I don't know your mom, but I assume your mom was like not a computer scientist. No, no, no, she wasn't. She definitely wasn't.

1:39:54Yeah. You know, and people who are not like from the upper socioeconomic strata or whatever, they're like even more motivated than dudes who look like me to figure out how to get the most out of their technology. First person I ever saw with two SIMs in their phone was a minimum wage daycare worker at my daughter's daycare when we grew up, she grew up in East London. So, you know, these minimum wage daycare workers were like, I want the SIM that gets me unlimited calling to some of my friends. But I also need the SIM that gets me unlimited text. And they figured out how to put two SIMs in their phone, right?

1:40:22How to get a phone with two SIM cages and the modified android not not even no no what we used to do before that was we just used to have a sim card inside the cover remember the sim card in the back cover yeah and you just swap them when the time changed or when you changed you take the case off put the battery out put the new sim in yeah so lots of people out there like this kind of army of like would-be entrepreneurs and investors and a lot of these investors are like it'd be really nice to get into a business whose success isn't determined by how many trump coins i buy it'd be really nice to invest in something that wasn't ai AI has got this very speculative thing.

1:40:56Maybe we'll figure out how to take a business that costs$1.4 trillion and makes$50 billion and eventually cost$50 billion and make$1.4 trillion. We're not sure how that's going to happen. If you give us$3 trillion more, maybe we'll figure it out. But meanwhile, we know how to make money processing payments on the iPhone. You just process the payments on the iPhone and you charge 3%, not 30%, and you lift the tax on economic activity and lots of people would like to have this right like if you're a newspaper collecting uh subscriptions through the iphone and you flip from 30 to 3 it's like you've got 25 more subscribers overnight yeah right you know this is amazing possibilities so you have this you don't even need to grow your business your business yeah basically if you are selling on these devices your business is already let's say 25 bigger than it is yeah that's right so you've got like this army of like investors.

1:41:50And then you have all these technologists. So the best and the brightest from all over the world have gone to Silicon Valley for two generations, seeking fortune and fame to make a dent in the universe and so on. Now they've all been chased out of the country by a guy and, you know, a gator and Oakley's, right? So they're looking for something cool to do. They know how to do this stuff. They're smart, right? And so you have investors, you have a reason to do this, right? And then add to that the geopolitical stuff. So Trump has been using his tech companies to shut down his political adversaries in other countries.

1:42:23So the judge at the International Criminal Court who swore an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft shut down all of his online accounts. So he lost his working files, his email, his archives, his calendar. He can't recover his password for any of the other services he uses because they all go to his Microsoft email address, which doesn't exist anymore. We really take this stuff for granted. And then Trump did it again to the high court justice in Brazil who sentenced his ally, IG or Bolsonaro for attempting to steal the election in Brazil. So then you have people all over the world going like, wait, isn't this what we were told like China would do if we let them run our 5G?

1:42:57And then you think about the fact that like these Russian soldiers who stole these John Deere tractors and took them to Chechnya, that John Deere was able to like push an over the air update that permanently immobilized them. You're like, wait, he could do that to any tractor. He could do that to all the tractors, right? If like Trump wants to steal Greenland. He doesn't need to roll tanks into nuke. He can just like go to Greenland and shut down the government and shut down all the tractors and shut down the cloud services and push updates to all the iOS devices that brick them and all the Android device.

1:43:29Like he could straight of Hormuz all the licorice, Ozempic and Lego in the world, right? With a click of a mouse. So you have people all over the world who are like, God damn, we need to get off the American internet, right? And so you have a geopolitical wing of this, like NATSEC hawks, national security hawks. You have an entrepreneurial wing. And then you have the digital rights hippies like me who've been banging this drum for 25 years. And remember, we started off talking about coalitions. Well, this is a coalition the world has never seen before. These three groups of people have three different constituencies, three different arguments.

1:44:01But we all want the same thing. We want to transition from an internet that is controlled by a small number of large American firms into one in which we restore that technological self-determination that made us so excited to use the internet in the early days, where users of the technology have the final say over how it's used, where our digital services are built on open, transparent, auditable technology, not black boxes. Again, back to the structural engineering. If you hired a firm of structural engineers to build this building and they're like, we're not going to tell you the math we use to calculate the load stresses.

1:44:31We wouldn't accept that. Don't go in the building. But we also wouldn't accept that yeah yeah but you they provide you with the software it would be the equivalent of having an architect or an engineer or whatever somebody build your house and say we're not going to give you the drawing we're not going to tell you anything about your house where the hvac is where the you bought your house yeah but they're like we will never tell you and then you go but what if something goes wrong they're like call us yeah it's a trade secret yeah so now we are like closer to a transition to a much better internet than we've been in my whole career, my 25 years at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

1:45:05Damn, that's amazing. Now I'm optimistic. I don't mean like it's a slam dunk or whatever. And I would caution you off of optimism. I think optimism and pessimism... Wait, though. Wait, because I think hope is good. I think optimism and pessimism are a waste of your time. But optimism and pessimism are this kind of fatalistic belief that things are going to get better or worse no matter what we do. Hope is the belief that if you materially improve your circumstances, that you can ascend a gradient towards a world you want to live in. And as you attain that higher vantage point, there's terrain that will be revealed to you that was occluded when you were down at this lower elevation.

1:45:38Okay, okay. And that from that point, we may be able to take the next step, right? And we don't know how far up the hill we can get. We can't see our way from A to Z. You know, I'm a novelist, right? So when I write, I can give you a clear, clean path with like a steadily rising curve of dramatic tension and payoffs and stakes that get to a climax. And then, you know, Princess Leia gives everyone a medal, right? Like that's how it works in fiction. But in the real world, it's messy. You go up two steps, you go down one because you've reached a dead end. You do a traversal, you go up again, you get stuck there for a while, then you find your way up again.

1:46:09But so long as there's a move you can make, there's always more hope. And the moves we can make now, weirdly thanks to Comrade Trump, who appears to be doing praxis, the moves we can do now are much more aggressive than any of the moves you had available to us forever. That's fascinating. And so I'm full of hope. I'm not a happy person. I'm not an optimistic person. I'm a very sad and frightened person, but I am more hopeful than I've been in my whole professional life. Well, can I tell you something, Corey? You have made me a happy person. I think I can speak for my colleague here when I say you've made us happy people.

1:46:46Because you've made like - Well, thank you. Yeah, you've left us with like a, oh yeah, let's go. Let's go do this thing. and you know it we'll do it if you want to make change join a polity get involved like join a union form a union get involved in local politics turns out local politics determine whether you have flock cameras and that determines whether your neighbors are going to be taken to a gulag right get involved in local politics because that's still not totally unshittified and it still is responsive to people because it's so many yeah now you just made me realize that yeah that's where local politics because it's so fractured it's it's the 200 businesses national politics is one of two local politics is like billions of them and join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the non-profit I've worked for most of my adult life EFF.org EFF Not that EFF You heard it here first, Eugene Join the EFF What a slip way to get us in Join the EFF Wait, wait, wait The Electronic Frontier Foundation we've been around for 35 years i don't know how long the electric the economic freedom fighters have been around i think we had a 12 ish yeah i think we were there first yeah but they they have cool berets they do have cool berets they've got the sartorial style down we all dress like linux nerds but they they dress they're sharp um but yeah join eff we've got lots of ways to get involved uh we have fought the most important court battles and activist fights over digital rights like the reason you have cryptography that like will keep a secret on your phone is because we sued the NSA because they wouldn't let civilians have it.

1:48:20The reason you need a warrant to read email if you're a cop is because we sued the Secret Service. Like, this is us. You know, we've been doing this since the very earliest days of the internet. And we don't win all of our fights. In fact, we lose a lot of them because some fights you just fight because you can't not fight them, even when you're vastly overmatched. But we win a surprising number of our fights. and when I joined EFF, there were six of us. There's like 110 of us now. And we were working internationally. Like I say, I work with our allies in South Africa on their copyright implementation.

1:48:56You know, we're, and we've now become part of a huge constellation of these digital rights groups internationally and in the US. And so, you know, I like to think that's because of our leadership. I've been there now, as I say, 25 years, I'm 55. So most of my adult life. and I can't imagine what the world would be like without EFF in it. This is amazing. Before you go, actually, let's do this. Yeah. Let's play a little game that I think will help a lot of people. Okay. I'm going to list a product or an industry and then you tell us how it's being shitified. Yeah, why to feel sad about it. No, but rather, no, you know what I want to do is not why to feel sad, but rather just to help people understand how it's affecting.

1:49:38Sure. Because you know some people go, ah, tech, tech's not my thing. Right, right, right. And some people might go, the finance industry, that's not, but I just want you to explain as quickly as possible how each like vertical sort of affect people. So, so let's go. So let's start with technology, like phones, computers, et cetera. Like how, how is that being shitified and what? So lots of different ways. Consumables, right? Like ink and whatever, they're, they're, they're now being locked. Parts are being locked. Repair is being locked. Software is being locked. You have these high service charges associated with things like payments.

1:50:06So one thing we didn't talk about is if the merchant is charging 30 how are they recouping it they're charging you more so your prices are getting higher so there's this inflationary pressure as well and then of course now you have this stuff where like these these things spy on you all the time and then when they want to know who was at the anti-ice march they can just go to them and they'll turn it over to them and so you have that that like risk to democracy as well okay um cars some people like emma i just like driving cars this doesn't bother me i'm not a tech i'm not a tech person so locking out independent mechanics, locking up third-party parts, spying on you in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite.

1:50:42Your car? Yeah. So your car is just like, it's a data acquisition platform on wheels. It's funny because they kind of brag about it. So Massachusetts had a ballot initiative, question one in 2020, where 75 % of base staters voted to force the cars to allow independent mechanics to fix the cars. And their response was these scare ads where they're like, if you let strangers get at the data in your car, they'll murder you because there's so much data in your car. Oh, but that's them telling on themselves. Yeah. Mozilla Labs 2023 did a roundup of all of the cars, privacy policies, and data acquisition.

1:51:18And they said there was not one car they would recommend driving on the road that's being sold right now. Because it's just like where you're going, when you're going there, how often you go, how many people are sitting there. What? Yeah, yeah. What compositions are you having? Not that, but Nissan, weirdly. So one of the things about surveillance data is they're all lying to each other. They're like saying they can do things they can't do. Nissan offers to sell data brokers, things, facts about your sex life and the smells in your car. Neither of which I'm pretty confident, neither of which they know, but they're just like, they're just like making stuff up that they'll sell.

1:51:49Cause like, these are all like grifters grifting other grifters. So they're ripping each other off. It's like billionaire on millionaire violence. Okay. Um, let's go to that. The speaker in my car is not, no microphone is not probably not, but they are like, they are looking at things like all of your informatics, you know, like if you've got your, your like Google Android car or Apple car, like all of that stuff is being sucked up by the car. And even, and you know, like some cars, they're like, oh, if you want to use like the advanced features, like warm your car up from inside the house using the app, that's like five bucks a month.

1:52:17And if you don't pay it, you can't access your car's network. Yeah. But your car's network is still active and it's giving data about your car to the automaker, just not to you. And the worst is subprime car leasing. so like uh if you're poor and you can't get a regular car lease there's this whole market it's worth a couple trillion dollars called subprime car leasing and um those cars are fitted out with all kinds of crazy surveillance gear yeah uh and also they have like some of them have a second stereo system that the user can't control that if you're a day late on your payments just blares at top volume you are late on your payments you are late on your payments yeah yeah and if you like go too late they like immobilize your car uh even like some of these leases will say you can't take across the county line and so the new york times wrote about this there was a woman who like took the kids on a drive to the forest and they went over the county line without realizing it and then the car wouldn't start and they were stuck in the woods like it's very bad and they so they repo these cars over and over again the leases are like any subprime uh credit arrangement they're designed to like balloon and make it so you can't afford it later so you get like a teaser rate and a balloon rate and so then they repo the car and then they sell it to another poor person so they sell the same car to like 10 poor people.

1:53:29And so like, basically like you can make loans to progressively worse credit risks if it's easier and easier to repo the - Because the risk on your side is most non-existent. You're offloading the risk, right? So they just have like, basically this whole sideline of repo Teslas. There's a dealer option where if you are late on your payments, the Tesla will lock itself up, summon the repo man to the parking lot, and then blow its horn and blink its lights when the repo man gets there, and back up and unlock its doors so they can get in. Oh, and I thought it drove itself back to the dealership. That's funny.

1:54:06That's evil and funny. It's very funny. Let's go into, like, food. I don't know as much about this. I mean, obviously, there's the genomic stuff that we were talking about. Mostly what you've got in food is just monopolization on the grocery side. Okay, got it. And that will inflate the prices all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a law, the Robinson-Patman Act, that they stopped enforcing 20 years ago, but the FTC tried to bring a case against Pepsi and Walmart under it. And basically it was created when A &P grocers started to take over the country. And what A &P would do is they would demand extremely deep dish discounts from wholesalers.

1:54:40And then to make it up, the wholesalers would raise prices on everyone else, on the mom and pops. So it accelerated the collapse of the mom and pops into A &P. And these two congressmen, Robertson and Patman, said, oh, we can't allow this. This is bad. So they banned this conduct. And it was the decision under Reagan to stop enforcing this that created Walmart. So this is what Walmart does. They demand preferential discounts that then result in wholesale increases in all of their competitors' stuff. So Walmart and Pepsi, the FTC said what they were doing is they had this deal where Pepsi would do what you said Coke was doing to your mom and pops, where they would say, you can't have Pepsi products unless you charge a certain amount for it.

1:55:19And then Walmart would charge less. So what they were doing was raising the prices everywhere, but Walmart was still cheaper. And they were doing it through this Robinson-Patman preferential discounting thing. So they made the prices go up across the entire market. Every retailer was charging more for all Pepsi products. And that's Frito-Lay. It's a bunch of other things. It's so many, like they're a big conglomerate. So yeah, that was like, so yeah, all your groceries are really expensive because monopoly grocers and monopoly food producers are cooking the market to screw you cory this was too much fun man you know what you are so amazing that i'm willing to accept that you came up with in shitification oh that's very nice of you you are just like yo man just on top of it your vibe thank you we're gonna check out the eff the other eff the other eff eff white is what will call it.

1:56:10We're pretty diverse. Don't worry about being diverse. I'll show you EFF and then you'll see where I see. I know, I've seen the picture. Look, I've seen the picture. Every now and again, I'm like trying to find like one of our graphics to stick in something and rather than like look in our repository, I go to, you know, like Google image search and I type EFF, you know, and then I get like a bunch of - And then they got you and then they make you search again. Then you have to search three times and then you pay the ads. They even got you, Corey. And then they show me an ad for a red beret and the next thing you know, yeah.

1:56:38Can't escape it. This was fun. Thank you so much, Corey. I had a great time. Appreciate you. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much, Corey. Thank you so much. Good luck to the next person I speak to because they're going to hear the phrase self-licking ice cream. Eugene, you had him there. Yeah. Well, you're like me. You're a magpie. I love the little phrases. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by DayZero Productions in partnership with SiriusXM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown.

1:57:15Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?

1:57:37Now we seize the moment. Now we turn the tide. Now we make a difference and make some noise. Now is the time to get up, get out, and join the movement. At the Alzheimer's Association Walk to End Alzheimer's, held in over 600 communities nationwide. And we need you with us. Because now is the time for hope. Join the fight at alz.org slash walk. The crispy chicken crunchwrap slider that you love is back at Taco Bell. And it's back with attitude. because now you can enjoy the all-white meat chicken nuggets inside a slider-sized crunch wrap with Hidden Valley Diablo Ranch. What do you love most? The crispy chicken nuggets, the crunch wrap slider, or maybe the Hidden Valley Diablo Ranch?

1:58:14Yes, the answer is yes. The crispy chicken crunch wrap slider, a brand new classic, is back. Only at Taco Bell.