The conversation explores how corporate power and outdated policies have led to a widespread decline in product quality, consumer rights, and trust—what the speaker calls "shittification." This phenomenon is not random but systemic, rooted in laws like the DMCA, which criminalize product modification and repair, and in monopolistic practices that eliminate competition. Examples include Apple’s control over app stores, medical device unfixability, and car diagnostic systems that block generic parts. The speaker traces the roots of these policies back to the Clinton era, where corporate interests bypassed Congress through international agreements like WIPO treaties. These laws, designed to protect intellectual property, instead serve to entrench corporate dominance, allowing companies to extract profits at the expense of consumers. The speaker highlights how monopolies, like Apple or Google, prioritize profit over user well-being, using tools like digital rights management (DRM) and restrictive app ecosystems. They argue that competition is essential for accountability, and without it, large corporations operate with impunity, ignoring public demand. Real change, the speaker asserts, comes not from individual consumer complaints but from strong, independent regulation and antitrust enforcement—seen globally in Europe, South Korea, and Canada. These efforts demonstrate that policy can reverse harmful trends, proving that corporate power is not inevitable, and that democratic accountability remains a necessary safeguard against unchecked corporate influence.
(upbeat music) - 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 I'm 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 to have very tragically cancer, who was a utopian socialist. - Okay. - And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Inam Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian. He was an ardent trade unionist and Euro Union investor. And he was like, well, in Inam 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 100,100 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 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. And 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 spur-tongue humanity. Damn. But I wanted to pop the stack, because this started with talking about-- You were lucky after that. Yeah, yeah, he did. I was fascinated by that side of Elon. The blocking button. He's like, maybe 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. This is what now, with Trevor Noah. Corey, I'm glad you've come and joined us on the podcast. It's mutual. But not for the reason you may think. I see. I have beef with you. Oh, now. What have I done? I'm pretty certain that I came up with the term shedification. Oh, dear. And then all of a sudden, in like 2022, I saw people saying, end shedification-- You see? --which I think is more grammatically correct. I just said, but I know I said it. I know I said it. I'm just you inceptioned me. I just remember saying to a friend of mine, I said, yo, I'm so sick and tired of the shedification of everything. And then they were like, what do you mean? And then I was like, everything's just becoming shittier and shittier. It's like they're making a shittier on purpose. See, coming up there. And then people were just like, yeah, whatever. And then you came up with end shittification. And now the whole world is on it. And I feel like I've been wronged. You know, when it's railroad time, you get railroads. When it's end shittification time, you get coinages pertaining to the general shittiness of everything. So it's-- I mean, we are just living in them. But seriously, coinages are like this. So there are lots of coinages. You will find simultaneous or near simultaneous coinages that appear to be completely distinct, just because the ideas and the zeitgeist, and I've spent 25 years working on these issues. And I've come up with lots of words and parables and narratives and all kinds of things. And while I think the minor license to vulgarity is something that excites people, I also think that in this moment, people are eager for a kind of addivistic way to talk about how they feel about their technology. More than ever. Yeah. You know what's funny? It's gone beyond technology. Sure. Even when I was telling Eugene about this episode, I was like, I'm so excited to talk to Corey because he has done for society. What I think society has been pining to do for itself. But just sort of hasn't been able to piece together. And that is that like, everyone everywhere feels like everything that we're getting and experiencing is becoming more and more shit, right? We feel like the amount of food that we get for the money we pay is becoming shitter. We feel like the amount of things that our time can do is becoming shitter. We feel like our cause and the value that you get are shitter. You feel like everything in your life-- Plain seats are getting smaller. No, everything. Every case is lost in last three years, not 30s. Yes. You can get my grandmother in her house till the day she died, had the fridge that I knew from when I was a kid. But even that term, lifetime guarantee is gone now. I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Well, almost everything in a lifetime guarantee. If they say 20-year guarantee store or a lifetime guarantee of this, yeah. And the thing is, this is why I appreciate your work so much, is because there are things that are so pernicious. Is that the word in society? Where they steal away, and they're like in-- But what makes them so insidious is that we all think we're being individually crazy and cramajony. You know what I mean? So you just feel like in your life, you're like, I feel like old cars were made better than it's like, oh, here we go again, Grandpa. You know, I feel like this was-- and what you've done is you've taken all of it and gone, hey, we're not crazy. Things are being made shittier. Yeah. And I like to think that the kind of full theoretical unpacking because it talks about the policy environment, the credit. Yes. It kind of takes us beyond like, oh, you shopped badly, you didn't realize if you're not paying for the product or the product. So you're failure to be a careful enough consumer cause this, or even like the personality defects of these guys who run these services are to blame. Like, they're bad people, right? I count the spoons if they came over to dinner. But like, they're just doing what policy lets them do. And you know, one of the things about having worked in this now for like most of my adult life and these tech policy issues is that I know that this outcome was not only foreseeable, but foreseen, right? There were specific junctures where policy makers said, we should do X. And everyone showed up and said, don't do X. This terrible stuff is going to happen. And they were like, nah. And so, you know, like on the one hand, it makes me very angry and feel a little vindicated. But on the other hand, it makes me hopeful because like, if we can move this beyond the great forces of history and like, oh, it's just, you know, like the iron laws of economics demand that things, you know, margins be squeezed where they can be and move it into the realm of like specific policy choices. Well, then we can reverse them, right? We're not prisoners of history. We're just people whose leaders were cowardly and short-sighted and selfish and bad at their jobs. And so, you know, there's obvious remedies for that. They don't always involve a guillotine. Do you think that these politicians were bad at their jobs or do you think that we just made the assumption of thinking they were working for us when they were working for the corporations? It's a little of both. So, you know, there's a specific one that I'm particularly exercised about. So there's this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998 DMCA. Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony for modifying technology without permission. So, like, if someone sells you a printer that only takes the ink from HP and you modify it to take generic ink, then that's felon. - That's a crime. - Yeah. It's, there's a kind of nuance there where it's like, you have to bypass and access control to do it, but all you have to do is add the access control to the product and you can conjure new felonies out of thin air. So, Jay Freeman calls it felony contemptive business model. Basically, they just create a path where any firm could take any conduct it didn't like and make it a literal crime. - Whoa, whoa, whoa. - Just by designing their technology. I mean, if I extrapolate this to everything like, because people may not even use printers anymore. - Right. - That's like saying, if you have a car and then you modify the engine. - That's already the case. - That's a crime. - So, if, wait, that's already the case. - Yeah, so if you, like, the whole right to repair fight about cars is because the diagnostic messages that go from the part to the, what's called the main computing unit, the MCU, the main computer in your car, those are encrypted and decrypting them, right, bypassing the access control as a felony. And each engine component has a chip. It's called a system on a chip. It's a cheap little full-feature computer that costs less than a dollar. And when you put the part in the car, the part and the MCU do a little handshake where it says like, can you send me like a magic code that demonstrates that you were installed by an official technician and that you were made by the original manufacturer and that you're not a generic replacement partner. If you can't, even though it's a real part that really works, the car just refuses to recognize it. And it's not just cars, ventilators, major appliances, your phone, medical implants, it's called parts pairing. And because this is federal law, right, is a DMC-201, it's a federal law. When states pass right to a pair of laws, they really can't reach to this because it preempts it. In Oregon, what they've done is they've just said, you're not allowed to sell a device that requires parts pairing. But that's as far as they've gotten. One of the most disgusting examples of this, is there's an American company called MedTronic that pretends it's Irish for tax purposes. They did the largest tax inversion in history. MedTronic does the, they do a lot of like the CPAP machines and all of those things. They are the largest MedTec company in the world. Oh, I didn't know that. The plastic devices, implants, prostheses, the whole range, and they make the world's workhorse ventilator.
So every hospital has got a building full of their ventilators, and the ventilators use parts pairing. And during lockdown, you had technicians at the hospitals who were taking like a dead, working screen from a dead ventilator and putting it in a dead ventilator or the working screen vice versa. Right, yeah. And then it just wouldn't recognize it because it just couldn't, and you were supposed to have the technician come and bless the repair, but there were no planes flying. And this was the moment where we need ventilators more than ever. And so there were just ventilators that didn't work. Now the crazy thing is how this got resolved. So every country in the world has a law just like DMC at 121, including South Africa. It comes in through the free trade agreements with the US. The US Trade Representative has made it the number one trade priority of the US to get all of its trading partners to enact laws like this, basically to make it illegal everywhere else to disinshitify the products that America exports so that American tech firms can steal all your data and money. And so that you can't go into business fixing it. And there's a law like this in Poland. It comes through the European Copyright Directive, Article 6. And there was a Polish medical technician who used to work for Medtronic, who was making his own ventilator, illegal ventilator unlockers, and anonymously shipping them to hospitals. Like you would find people online complaining about this and he'd be like, "Give me your address, I'll send you the thing." And because it was the lockdown, he just had whatever he had for enclosures. So they would get like a guitar pedal with like a USB port and you plug it into your ventilator and it had like a little raspberry pie like a cucumber, like Magywa and this thing. Like clock radios, bedside lamps, like literally whatever this guy had in his place in Poland during the lockdown. But he risked felony prosecution for this. And there's so much of this in Poland, Poland is like a weird epicenter for this. So there's a Polish train company called NuVog. And companies that bought NuVog trains would find that when they took them to a third party depot for repair, they would just stop working. And they would like brick themselves and you'd have to call up NuVog and NuVog would go, "Oh, we'll do some remote diagnostics. It's 20,000 euros. Okay, we fixed it." Or sometimes if you just park them for a long time, they do this. Or sometimes there are pieces of track where if they ran over it would do it. So they hired an independent team of security researchers called Dragon Sector who reverse engineered the firmware on this train. And the manufacturer, NuVog, the way that they were winning all these train bid contracts is they sold the trains really cheap and then they charged up the ass for repair and maintenance. And if you, they had booby trapped the train to detect if it was part of someone else's maintenance yard and then make itself inoperable. And one of the rectangles they drew around a train maintenance yard, they drew it too wide and it went over a piece of mainline track. So train start working with, it would just go, it would just stop working. And then they threatened to suit, well, they are suing the researchers. They threatened to sue a Polish member of parliament for talking about this in parliament. Like this is, there's so many things that you just triggered in my brain. One of them being how we can go down the road or rather we can sort of like start at this point and then extrapolate it to everything else. Because I was thinking to myself, when I was growing up, when we were growing up, we take for granted how many industries and how many jobs and how many people existed because they were tangentially connected to a product, right? All over the world today people are saying, oh, my town is dying, my city is dying, stores are closing, people are unemployed, things are falling apart. But we often times don't ask ourselves what those things were. And then when you think about it, you go, oh, this was a place where they repaired TVs. This was a place where they repaired cars. This was a place where they, but they had nothing to do with the car or with the TV. They were just tangentially connected to it. And now- Nothing had to be made first. Yeah, but what you've just made me realize is as companies and corporations have gotten better at strangling these laws that they've somehow gotten into, you know, into effect, every single small business around it dies. Yeah. So you reminded me, I didn't finish telling you how this law came into effect and why I know that they were worried about it and what kind of politician passed it. So during the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton asked Al Gore to think about demilitarizing the internet because the internet was like it started in defense advanced research projects agency and it was run by like military contractors and universities with military contracts, few weird hobbyists and high tech companies, but mostly it was just US government military and it's like kind of cluster military industrial firms. And so Al Gore did this thing called the National Information Infrastructure hearings. They were called colloquially the Information Superhighway. You may remember that term. Yeah, I remember that term. And Clinton had this guy who was his IP's R, so his head of copyright policy, corporate lawyer named Bruce layman still live in Florida, high Bruce and Bruce layman had this idea for what became DMC 1201, this anti-circumention law that basically make it legal to unreg the system and he took it to Al Gore. And to Al Gore's everlasting credit, he said, no, that's terrible, go away. And so Bruce layman in a move that he has later repeatedly described as quote, doing an end run around Congress went to the United Nations in Geneva. And there's a specialized agency there called the World Intellectual Property Organization. You may remember them from saying to South Africa, you can't make your own anti-retroviral crimes during the height of their AIDS crisis. Yes. So that was all policy set at WIPO. So he went to WIPO and he said, we're going to make this into a treaty obligation. And it became these two treaties, we call them the WIPO, the WIPO internet treaties. The WIPO copyright treaty and the other ones, the WIPO performers and phonograms treaty. But the internet treaties, then he went back to Congress and he said, well, now you can't say no. You're obliged to pass this law. One of the treaties. Yeah. And so that's how we got it. So the question is, what kind of politician did it? Do we mistake them for working for us, working for them? I mean, the Clinton administration, like every presidency, was a coalition of people who wanted different things. And oftentimes the way those coalitions are managed is across purposes. So in the Biden administration, you had these, like, generationally amazing trust busters like Lena Kahn, who brought these cases against companies like Microsoft when they wanted to buy Activision, then you had judges that Biden appointed, including one who's son worked for Microsoft, who heard that case and said, I don't see a problem with this, right? And so you often get that within administrations, you get people who really want opposite things and there's this kind of division of the spoils and sometimes that just ends up neutralizing everything. It feels like it's so far down the road that it's everything now. It feels hopeless. Yeah. Yeah, because I think of the other day, my brother text me and he goes, Hey, man, I can't play any of my PlayStation games because it's telling me that the license of the game is not, but he was playing them. And then he wasn't playing. And then when we went down this rabbit hole trying to understand what had happened and how it happened, there'd been some update that they had done, but basically we realized that before you would buy a video game, take your money, you buy the video game, the video game is yours. Yeah, it is yours. You can loan it to a friend. You can sell it to a game stop or whoever it is yours. Now what they'd say is no, you have bought a license to play the game from us until we change our minds. Until we change our terms of service, what's crazy to me though is like they can just shut it off at any time and then you don't have it anymore. But I go, but we don't as people, we don't have that power. I cannot change the terms of service. On the people that I was in a terms of service with with me. So I can't go back to, you know, PlayStation or whoever and be like, Yo, remember how I gave you that $80 for that game? Yeah. My terms of service have changed. You owe me 40 back. You owe me 40 back because my term of service is that if I play a game and I finish it with a 97% completion rate and I get all the trophies, then you guys have to give me half my money back. They'd be like, you know, get this guy off the premises. Sure. Yeah. In the book, I call this the Darth Vader MBA, right? As in, I'm altering the deal, Brad, I don't alter it any further, right? Like that is the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA. I gave you deal X and now it's deal Y and, you know, this is a fight I've been having about. So these technologies that restrict access that are covered by section 12, one of the DMC and these other laws, they're called a lot of different things. One of them is digital rights management. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So DRM. DRM. So there's a thing I've been beating the drum about for like more than 20 years and and one of the things I, I used to write for wired. I used to write for them sometimes, but I was writing for wired and my editor at the time was this guy, Chris Anderson, really good guy and and they published this guide to things to buy this Christmas, electronics to buy this Christmas. And I wrote a blog post saying, this guy is all wrong because all these products have DRM and they can be remotely downgraded. So you cannot review a product and say, if you want X, Y and Z by this product because the quality of the product may never get away, right? You have to warn people somewhere and he was just like, oh, you're being paranoid and unrealistic. We had a little, this was like in the Outs when we had great fights on blogs. It was like two men of letters exchanging lengthy misses. It was very good. My good man. Yeah. Here is all the ways that you are incorrect about this issue.
and almost let me draw your attention to the faux pas you made. - Indeed, indeed. So yeah, it was, and like I went to Pekipsey, I went to Consumer Reports and I was like, you're reviewing these products, but like none of them are fit for consumption because every product in the category can be remotely downgraded, right? So like you cannot, you can't advise people by this because you want a device that will play back in the faux pas format or whatever. If that can be changed with no remedy on your part, no recourse, and no way to predict it, because you know, one of the things about the timing of insidification is that it came after a bunch of these lawsuits, the Biden administration brought, where we got publication of memos from inside the companies that really showed you how these decisions are made, right? So they're like, it's not a mustache twirling CEO, it's usually like with government agencies or parts of government, it's factional disputes within companies, and so like one of the things about DMC 12-1 is it's, I call it an insidogenic policy because it means that the worst ideas, the worst people make the most money. So it means that when you're arguing within the company, I think we should do X, I think we should do Y. So imagine there's no DMC 12-1. Imagine there's no anti-circumvention law. So we're like having a product planning meeting about our website, and I say, hey, I'd like to make the ads 20% more invasive and obnoxious, 'cause I think that'll give us 2% more clicks. And someone who doesn't give a damn about user welfare might still put their hand up and say, Elon, I love how you think, but has it occurred to you like 40% of our users are gonna type in the search bar, how do I block ads? And of course, we never see revenue from them again, 'cause no one ever goes back in types, how do I start seeing ads again, right? But if it's the app, right? And there's anti-circumvention, and it's against the law to reverse engineer an app, 'cause apps are closed platforms, the web is open. You cannot block the ads. - So at that point, the guy says, why are you stopping at 20%, right? Like, why do we make the ads 100% more invasive? Get a 10% increase in our click through. Doesn't matter if someone types, how do I block ads in the app? 'Cause it's a phone block ads. - Yeah, so these are in shittogenic policies. We can see how they, then there's like a line from them to these choices made by product managers and people with infirms. So one of them came out of one of the Google cases. So Google is a thrice convicted monopolist. They lost three federal antitrust cases in one year. It was a great year for antitrust, bad year for Google. And in one of those cases, well, in all those cases, you get all the memos published like in terms of the DOJ and make some publish all their memos. And one of them, the search case, this great reporter Ed Zittron wrote about the, how Google got worse at search. And it happened in 2019, their search market share, or their search revenue had 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, 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? And so you see these two factions forming up. One's led by this guy, Prabagar Raghavan, said, "X 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. Prabagar Raghavan's got a great idea. He says, "We can grow search revenue by making search worse, so we have to search more than once, so that we can show you more ads." - No, Corey, 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. Doesn't matter what operating system, what hardware vendor, what browser. - It all goes to the same place. - So like, why are we bribing Apple $20 billion a year and 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. And so it's very easy to make it worse. There's things like query stemming where if someone does a search for trousers, you want a parallel search for pants, then you merge the results. There's spell check, right? Someone misspells a search term and 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 court dinner. So someone searches for that. Well, you know that there's a news item about us. You put those at the top, rather than the generic best link for White House press court events. - Right, okay. - And you just turn that off, and now people have to search two or three times. And you have been goes going like, well, I didn't miss all those like, literally games in my kids to make the search worse. I believe in what we do here. And you have probably our ragavan, basically saying, money's hawks and bullshit walks. And, you know, that I'm sure Pragyavar Raghavan was not the first person at Google to realize that if you made search worse, 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. And 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 I'm hearing what you're saying then, one of the initial seeds that can send us onto this journey, one that can grow into like a forest of shitification is when we allow competition to die. - Yeah, because if you have a market where, I mean, we've seen this in life. I 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. I'm not, 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 in store. - Yeah, just corner store. When there's a ton of corner stores, two things happen. Prices are generally in check with each other, 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 adjust my prices and so 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. Because in South Africa, we had like just all of a sudden, a burst of fake products. So people were selling like fake Coca-Cola. Like it was Coca-Cola. - A bottle of it. - Yeah, a bottle of it, but it wasn't Coca-Cola. And people were like, this tastes weird. This tastes and they're like, yeah, don't worry. And then what happened was when they could only enough of the stores or enough of the corner stores and it was part of like 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. - Yeah. - And then you almost feel like this becomes like the, it's the fault line that will cause the earthquakes of society is how I think of it. 'Cause 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 more pissed off and more, but it's like, no, this is it. This is the fault line. - So it's funny, you raised that. I, so I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So nonprofit that works on digital rights. We have allies in South Africa who work on these issues related to IP and digital rights and surveillance and all these things. And I was, you know, the latest round of updates to the copyright law there included the expansion of the limitations to copyright to match the American set. So what we call fair use here, which would have made it a lot simpler for like university teachers to teach and high school teachers to teach. And you know, photocopy course packs to all these things that are just kind of normal. And the US trade representative was like, no, that American policy is very extreme and you shouldn't have it here in South Africa. - No way. - Yeah, it's tough. - Yeah, you know what's funny? I used to talk to the team about this. So when you and I were doing the show in South Africa. - Yeah. - Uh-huh. - 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 existed. We said, can we use clips from like the news and from stuff. They were like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. - Yeah, yeah. - They were like, hey, hey, hey, hey. We wanted to play the idols clip. - They were like, no. - They were like, what the hell do you bloody hell think? They were like, yo, this is not allowed. - Yeah. - In the country. So I thought that was normal. I was like, okay, I get it. You can't take somebody else's thing and comment, or I understand, I get it. Then I came to America. - Right. - And everyone was doing it on everything. That tonight's show, the late show, the daily show, the news, MSNBC, I was just like, whatever. And they were like, oh no, he had fair use. - Yeah, yeah. - So what does that mean? Well, it's fair that you can use something.
because you are trying to do something else. You're not just trying to plagiarize it. And this is fair to do. - Yeah, it's just-- - And now you're telling me that those people told South Africa-- - You can't have it. - Don't do our one. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. So at EFF, you know, when I started, I was, 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. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - We shouldn't just spy on people. We should, it should be really easy to go from one service to another. What's called interoperability. We're just plugging into the-- - Yeah, all browser. - Can you move your accounts? Can you move your contacts? Can you move your chats? - Yeah, 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 they're a 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? You know what it's like getting even a dozen people to agree. But, and 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 now five. And the media companies had one playbook, right? And whether they were in Congress or in a court or at Whiteboard or whatever, they just said the same thing. And there was just, 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. And 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 since, more or less since Google and Shitified. In the last six or seven years, which is that everywhere in the world we've seen this almost spontaneous upwelling of policy makers taking aim at monopolies, right? At concentrated corporate power. There's a famous study at a Princeton. They call it colloquially the oligarch study 'cause it's got a very long academic name. But they went and they looked at about 2,000 policy outcomes. And they concluded that the biggest predictor of what would happen in a policy fight is what billionaires wanted. And if billionaires wanted it, we got it. And billionaires didn't want it, we didn't get it. Oh, even for real. And yeah, and basically the policy preferences of ordinary people had no bearing on policy outcomes. Are you being from 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 won, I like that. That's a Trump one, Trump one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From the people who brought you Trump one. I'm back, he's back. Let's do it again, part two, it's part two. So we got it under Trump one. But also the European Union started making these really muscular regulations, the 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 their politics were so screwed up that 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, Brad, I love it so much. So it's one of our favorite things Canadians say. So you know what, you know what, I love that thing. Because as a sidever guy, I can't hear the difference to you. No, most Canadian accents in American. So when the Canadian says that, the whole time I thought you were American, then you're like, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian. And I'm like, whoa, you did it again. Yeah, and honestly, I can't hear the difference. I mean, I can hear that this is you're hearing 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 we had the world's most useless competition authority. So 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 Buttigieg style, like, kind of neoliberal, like, you know, sort of McKinsey, good hair. The status quo, but let's make it a little bit better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we get this out at a 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 in the app store. So if you sell anything in an app, if you collect any money in an app, 30% 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, right? And it's crazy. It's just like a, it's a shocking sum of money. Wait, wait, wait, let's, okay, let's delve into that. 'Cause this is something that I've, 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. On 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? Aha, Eugene, do you want to hate your life? Hey, hey, hey, my man. Good luck paying, good luck, it's messy, it's hard. Good luck cancelling, by the way. You try cancel a product that you didn't sign up through like Apple. Like get some other service. 'Cause I've tried to like get out of the ecosystem. I'm gonna go sign up on the website myself and I do my thing. 'Til this day, there'll be $5 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. 'Cause I don't want to give you my money anymore. Reason for, I don't want to be here anymore. That'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? 'Cause 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, and I genuinely mean it as like a grapple, 'cause I go like, ah, who decides? Who decides? Yeah, but who decides? So, okay, so put on, take off your, I use a phone app and put on your like some regulator app. Okay. 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 and iPhone to add a different payment method as 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 the sort of paternalistic thing they've got their users back and they'll step in and do it. And there's an extent to which that is undoubtedly true. But 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 funds 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 tick that box. The other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes a lot of sense. 'Cause if I were to Facebook, I would always be drunk. Hey, Corey's yet to fire shots. (laughs) Corey doesn't play games. Corey's here with his machine. (imitates machine gun) Don't Corey doesn't play games. 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, I think 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. You see someone who's like, "Solder kid need a make the right." You go, "Look at that person with the revealed preference for one kid need." So here's the thing. When you give people a real choice, they can reveal a preference. 'Cause 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. 'Cause they have a competing ad broker. And there's no way to opt out of that, right? And it's against the law to do one to Apple as Apple did onto 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 antenna cryptomessages that aren't backdoored, and they backdoored iCloud in China. So that they could figure out who to like stick in a gulac. Right. So again, Apple's got your back until they don't and when they don't, what do you do? - What are you close? - 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 and Oakley's in a gator who wants to shoot you in the face or like send you to an El Salvadoran slave camp for the rest of your life, that that,
doesn't belong in the app store. That was the arguments. ICE officers are a protected class. Oh, as they should be. (laughing) They're visible minority. (laughing) And so it, I mean, the argument is, please don't tariff my stuff, Mr. Trump. That's the argument, right? That's why Tim Cook flew to DC to assemble a little gold participation trophy for Trump. Do you remember that? Oh yay. You know, that's why he paid a million dollars to sit behind Trump on the dius at the inauguration. That'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-- (laughing) What an idea. (laughing) And the wine is not skinned. (laughing) Oh, man. So, you know, you can tell someone has multiple passports in this conversation. I have someone here has multiple passports. I'm Canadian British in America. There you go, you can see. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just free-wheeling. Yeah. (laughing) So literally, evil can you even just go crazy? (laughing) 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, 'cause they all leaked to the New York Times and Wired and whatever. There are tons of Apple employees who are like, this is bad and we shouldn't do it. Oh, wow. They ain't about China. They say it about App Store fees. They said it about Ice Block, right? And they're losing the argument. What if their argument wasn't just this would make me feel icky? But also, that hundred billion dollars a year we take in from transactions is about to be shifted to arrival 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. You can fix it, well, 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 I get fined or whatever, right? And in fact, you talked about canceling under the Biden administration, Lena Kahn created what was called the click to cancel rule, which told my hero operations to me too. God, I used to send her texts that said, I can't tell you how disorienting it is to get it a bed in the morning and look at my phone and go, oh my God, my government's great. Yeah, like in the comments. Because you know what it felt like with Lena Kahn, it felt like there was somebody in government doing what the government is supposed to do. So here's how I've seen it. So Lena Kahn was fundamentally tasked with making sure that trade and competition were fair in the United States, right? And this is something that people oftentimes obscure in these conversations. If you talked to billionaires and CEOs of corporations and others, they would make Lena Kahn 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 restrain industry, it will not move in the direction. But this would be the equivalent of two fighters in the cage and UFC saying, you've 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. But 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 officially. - Yeah, you don't need to see anybody dying and you two don't need to die. And so even though you may not think at 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. You know why? When you are winning in a death match, you don't think someone should stop a death match. - Yeah, uh-huh. - 'Cause 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 fighters 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 the companies, how the competition is being stifled, how they've been 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, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin, you know, you know, the ship, et cetera. But 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 gonna cut you off completely." And remember, right now we're responsible for such a large amount of your revenue, right? So if you let this guy come into your places, if you give him favorable shelf space, if you even give him shelf space, we're gonna 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, a mom and pop store, super market, it doesn't matter how big you are, they're a huge part of your turnover. - They've got a lot of products on the bottom. - 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 gonna be on top. But when that behemoth flips and they're coming off to you, that's when you're gonna wish that there was enforcement. But then it might be too late because now they might only be one company. And so now it just becomes an environment where a 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 Tom Long used to do this bit where she play an AT&T operator. - Oh 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, we're the phone company, 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 iron ran pill libertarian friends, you know, people who can't open their copy of Atlas, shrugged any more 'cause 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 of the team than the teams on the field. Otherwise, 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 gonna 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 play. You get central planning one way or the other. There's always gonna be a planner. So either it's Apple saying, ice block should be illegal, right? And what's your, what's your lever on Apple? Like if you don't like how Apple's behaving, what do you do? I'm gonna switch to Android or I'm not gonna buy any apps anymore. You just do this like half ass 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 articulated objectives and a tactic around it, right? It also gets the tactic in hard. It wasn't shopping hard. The bus boycott in Montgomery was not like, I feel like walking to work today, right? They did 380 days of that riding the bus because they organized solidarity networks with car pools and they were working with the bus drivers to keep them fed. Well, 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 are a minority in the market, but they're the super majority of the top deciles. So the 10% richest people in the world the 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 gonna do about the government? And right now it's a very hard question, but 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? It'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-and-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 apparently there's an end of the sentence that no one says. Yeah, it's more like, the problem with fiduciary duties, they act as though it's a bright-line test, right? You just say, "Well, what do 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, you know, millions of miles away whether it was or wasn't fiduciary. But like, 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." Oh, okay. Fiduciary duty is the all-purpose excuse. Okay, you can just use it for anything, like this is my fiduciary duty. The market you do it. Okay, 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 estate 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, right? And so, they're going to put out, it's called a notice of inquiry, right? And we're going to ask the public what they should do. And 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, but 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, right? 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, the dead, the dead, and it's just the side 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 eating. 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. So 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 benefits it 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 high for Luton that you think you're in a conversation that doesn't affect you. You know people like federal trade commission and what mergers, why 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 finds you. It 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. And now you have no recourse, 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 you 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. Yes, because even the extras that you are looking at are not extras anymore. It's one company that's selling you the diapers. You go, 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. Forget 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. If your chicken comes from our egg, then it's our chicken now. It's not your chicken. Well, that company is called CalFresh, nearly all the eggs in the grocers 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, they said it was 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 the short break. You know, as this conversation goes, I feel like the average consumer, I feel helpless. Yeah, I feel like there's nothing much I can do, but there's one point that you made that actually peak my interest when we were speaking about boycotts in the township during a part date. I think it was the 70s and the 80s and there used to be another form of it called the stairway. So in a stairway, 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, 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 this things happened, we as the consumers were made unawake accomplices by being shareholders and companies. 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 they're wallets 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? But 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, what you should really do if you're angry deal on 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 material in his light, his shareholders should be prosecuted more vigorously. No, 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 I'm up my other life. I'm a science fiction novelist. And I write when I'm anxious, I wrote like nine books during lockdown. I mean, everything, picture books, tech criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but quite very much admired a guy called Ian Banks to have very tragically cancer, who was a utopian socialist. Okay. And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Inam Banks. And I was like, uh, no offense, but I knew Ian. He was an ardent trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Ian Banks' 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 million, 100 billion people living on them. And I said, uh, again, no offense. Damn! And that is when he called me a spurt on humanity. Uh, damn. But I wanted to pop the stack, because this started with talking about-- He blocked you after that. Yeah, he did. I was fascinated by that that side of Elon.
- The blocking butt. - He's like 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 your racist, go away, block. - Right, gone. - Right. - He's like, 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. - Yeah, but to me, he's a thin skin baby. - Yes, but to me, it's the answer to this. - He's gentle, I'm saying. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - To me, it is true. - And to the seas of the thing, you have come in and said, everyone should say what they want and we should do this to win. - Open my club. - No, no, no, no. - Let's go, let's go, let's go. - Yeah. - You're too open, Mike now. - Yeah. - The mic is too open. - Yeah, look, it's such a, it's, but, but, but 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 brilliance. - It always does 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. (laughing) - You're a hater or a lover. - Oh, you're a hater. - He, no, can I tell you, he didn't hate electric cars. - I'm traumatized by what? - He drove mine, and then like the experience of trying to charge an electric car, and then like way and how and. - Sure, yeah. - I wish I knew you then. Good, 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 gonna put federal dollars through the inflation reduction act into building out a federal network of cars, to car chargers. But they will only work with cars that 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 the cars you make use of the public one. And so Elon Musk opened up the charger network. That was Tim Wu. He was a great guy who worked in the Biden White House. He and I have known each other since we were nine years old. We were the same element. - We played Dungeons and Dragons together. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That's right. - But this is, you see that, that thing you told him about. - So 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 gonna 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 in all of this. And then now they've turned into like, sort of like the oil barons of old. - Yeah, 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. You can't see the difference. So, you know, I think it's related to this point I was making about how we're seeing the surge of antitrust. Like I said, in Europe, in Japan and Korea, they went after Apple and Singapore, I forgot 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. And 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, right? 'Cause 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. 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 political will is, but I think it's like the wind where you don't see it until something gets in the way. And so what we've seen is like any time a politician sticks their head up and goes, maybe we should do something about Constituity Corporate Wealth. All of a sudden there's this scale that just like, it's like they put out a little sale, like a little handkerchief size sale and suddenly the ship that's been beculmed in the doldrums for 20 years is like scutting across the seas, right? And so there is this like 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. That 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. Then they are by competing. When you compete, Peter Teal calls it wasteful competition. You erode your cash basis, right? Like when Google gives Apple $20 billion a year and 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 with us where we are. The $20 billion cost 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 engines. So we're all good. Like this is us sort of conspiring. You know, Adam Smith, who's the father of capitalism. He has this famous quote, you know, men of the same trade seldom gather but the conversation turns to a contrivance to fix prices. Right? Like there's just this incredible temptation. And so without state intervention, this will happen. And it's just very hard to resist temptation. Like I think that like there comes this point where every, like you built the self-looking ice cream cone, it's kind of just, it's like the money is piling up, you know. And like, and you know, you're supposedly your fierce competitors with these people, 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 spell number 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 'cause 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. And so like they're all like God parents to each other's children. They're like executors of each other's estates. They play pickleball. They're in the same molecule, you know. And like they just end up with this kind of emergent consensus. Yeah, are you a pickleball man? Oh, the support of the corrupt. I know, I know pickleballer. What a self-looking ice cream. I got a way to use that phrase now back on dying. Do you use that phrase now, Blake? Back at this again, so inside Africa currently, there's a commission that is investigating corruption within first municipalities. Is that what the police then 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. And you can't go to the police and find a constable sitting at a charge office and 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 the 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 boycotted was easy. There was another one called the go slow. Will you show up at work? But you actually don't do anything. Yeah, go slow. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes call right to work to rule. Go slow. They're all the, yeah, same thing. You follow all the rules. But you're not really doing anything. 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. And you're explaining another side of it, which is the dog evil, afraid of self-licking ice cream version. Yeah. And I'm like, what can I do? So I do know. I haven't. I have an answer for you. It's kind of grounded in this punchline of my favorite joke from Eastern Canada. And a punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. Right. Like we had, 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. Do you ever heard anyone say, oh, that thing is so screwed up. It's really borked. You ever heard no? No. No. 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 really screwed up. I didn't even know that those were possible in America. Oh, yeah. I thought you always get on the Supreme Court. No. Yeah. No, this was before pre-sus and Collins. So 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? So he was like, we should just allow these companies to get too big to fail. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that control the apps in 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. We'll just put that in our company. Give it out. Right.
gonna give you more money. So 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 law there has to be a crime. 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 out of a amount with two stone tablets and said we have to stop these firms from engaging and murdering. They 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 to the through the gilded age, right? This was the period in which you had the robber barons, the trust, the trust, 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 gonna 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. All 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 share as of now. There was like a whiskey trust and a steel trust and a coal trust and a genius. Everything in the country was run this way. The first anti-trust law, 1890, Robert Sherman is a senator. It's the brother of to come to Sherman, Guy Burndown, 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. It 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, 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 Derek 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. Okay. Got it. Got it. Half a century before the Nazis. So this woman, Ida Tarbel, who was the first woman in America to get a science gracious biologist. She was a generationally brilliant order, 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 One and Two. But it was published in Collier's magazine, which was a nationally red magazine, one of the most important magazines at the time. And 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. Yeah. Right. 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 like figure out how to embalm a Pharaoh or build like pyramids without power tools. Right. This is stuff that we can do. Yeah. And the point about this political will is it is surging all over the world. We can't solve this as individuals. Right. You'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 like ketamine-addled failures. Right. But we can fix it by fixing the policy environment. Right. The inshidogenic policies that create the inshidacy in the era in which everything turns to shit. We know what those policies were. We decided to stop enforcing anti-trust laws. So companies form cartels and monopolies and duopoles. 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. We got other policies like the pharma policies that stop South Africa from making anti-retrovirals 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 head of the pandemic. We've got that with seeds as well. Simons tend to stop 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 poncento bear. Yeah. Come on guys. How can we allow a company to own seeds? Not even like their seed per se, but just a seed that they can argue online. Very similar. Yeah. Like the lineage of that seed. Like they're like, no, we have the ancestors of your seeds. Not the seed. Right. 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 a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant. Like they own the life form. No, it's crazy. Are we stopping people from planting? No, they don't stop you from planting. But if you grow any of it, they come off to you and the governments around the world help them enforce this against even the time to come to a farm and test the genetics of your plant. Yeah. Yeah. There is a there is a member of the legislation playing games, bro. There is a member of the legislative assembly. So like an MP or like a congressman in Alberta who is a farmer who had this happen. His neighbor seed blew on to his land. I remember the story. And he was shut down by the federal government of Canada because they have an obligation under wipe-out treaties, under these UN treaties that protect intellectual property. They have an obligation to enforce Monsanto's patents in Canada. And so he would Monsanto shut him down. This is happening. In India, the 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 it's 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 safe for retirement. So we don't own shares in all these companies. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I think what you gene meant was he meant metaphorically they've made us shayholders because we have the phone. We shop on their platforms. And your bank has told you you can buy this and we feel 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 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 saw me something, it's mine, right? 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 maybe it's not that I bought the wrong thing. Maybe 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 a candidate come to it as a surprise to anyone who decided to sell books that the deal with the book is you bought it, you won't it, right? It's your goddamn book. And so like when someone says to me, oh, why did you buy the ebook? We 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 where you're underwear and make long distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge. You knew when you clicked I agree, right? Great one. That was really a great condition. When you speak about farmers and obviously when you speak about the the sea genetics, I never heard of speaking to someone who's an agriculture. And then I agree tech to be more precise and they're saying that planting season farmers, no matter how much money they make, they still have to go to the banks to ask for money. And 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. The 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 out of the harvest. And the thing is that no matter how good a farmer you are, sometimes the crop will fail, right? They'll be a locust, they'll be whatever. And 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? You have by the time you've lost two or three crops in your career, you're just always behind that 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 play thing of the creditors who are like, actually, I want more ornamental flowers from my table, not more staple crops. And then the society fails. And 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 happen 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, 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. And creditors are - They're not sustainable. - Good planners, right there.
just not good planners of civilization. They have personal interests, you know, this is one of the problems of letting people amass too much power, is that even the smartest person is prone to folly. You know, 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 Ford Landia in the middle of the jungle. And I'm going to, it was already called that. No, no, he built it. Oh, okay. Wow. And he was like, I'm going to take, I'm going to build a copy of Dearborn Michigan, which is the company town in Brazil. And he, so he got the same firm of architects. So he built this town in Michigan. He's going to build it in Brazil. And he was like, all right, I want you to make it ready. And they said, okay, but South Southern hemisphere, right? So we put the windows on the other side of the building. It's like, don't be stupid. We put the windows on, on this side of the building, because it's going to be just like Dearborn. No. And, and that was it. They did it, right? Because like, 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 ass hole and die. Right? Like this, just everybody has seen it. Everybody knows someone. You must know this through media, right? You must know people who just got to the top of their game. Yeah. But this is, right? But this is, this is, this is common with everyone. Like, 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. No, no, I mean, Mark Cuban said that on the podcast. He said, Mark Cuban was like, yeah, yeah. He said, I, he said, if you took all my money away tomorrow, I could go out then 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 soft bank, which is their VC, who gave all the money, who then gave all the money to Uber, who then are now giving all the money, open AI, that they be there like being, they are the sucker at every table. It really is weird. Why soft bank like one guy, Masayoshi son. He's, he has a dumb man with access to a lot of money. But, but how do they stay around for so long? Oh, well, now it's the Saudi's giving it to him, who are like, they are, they are the Beverly Hillbillies. Do you know the sort of soft bank? Soft bank is crazy. I mean, obviously you know the details. No, but every time you hear a story of like a poor, 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, it's all many of these junkies. The person who's left with nothing is a company called soft bank. Please, please break it down there. He's the forest gump of shitty investors. So this guy, Masayoshi son, he's just very good at talking dumb billionaires out of lots of money, which he then pumps into companies where they inflate bubbles. And they do have exits sometimes, right? Okay. They have the exit. But then, then the firms are worth not, I mean, Yahoo, bought every promising startup of the Web 2.0. We were undestroided, right? And he gave them the money to do it. And there was a period where their stockings were high. And I don't know whether his investors got out or what, when he got out. But you know, 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 that did 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. The 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 like 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 of 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 hours? Do we not? And now you know what you've done? You have lost focused on what you were doing. 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. You're a good, Johnny, you're married to Corey. But literally, you go like, you know what? Anyone I see as competition, I'm just going to, no, they're going to, I'm going to, I'm going to marry them. I'm going to bring them in. I'm going to marry. And it's like, yeah. And then you're going to end up in a house that has like 50 spouses because you were trying to stop those spouses from being competition. Yeah, 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 going to, you're also married to me. You 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, right? It, it, you lose your focus as well. So yeah, so the, I mean, Brandeis called us the curse of bigness. He says that when firms get too big, they start fighting with each other. The, the, the, the, the locus of competition moves from external to, for 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, right. And so the culture moves inward. That's right. And so it's kind of like an autoimmune disorder, right? You have these kind of printlings who are like, you know, I want to, especially like, you know, the big Hollywood firms, big studios, right? They'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. Like the career earning opportunities to go from one tier to the other and the millions or tens of millions. And so there's a lot of looking over at this SVPs 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, this is constantly ratfucking each other, right? Because they, that's their major locus of competition. But you see, this is, I didn't, 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 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. You know what I think of with all of this as I go, I'm so sad that monopoly, the board game, ha, never achieved, it's, it achieved all of the popularity, but none of the message. Uh-huh. 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. I just passed go. Oh yeah. 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. Yeah. The blue ones look good on you. Yeah. And people go around people 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, because now you get to a point where you add those little hotels and you know what I mean, you just build this thing up. Well, they got wealth. You do less. Right. People do more. You even get to the point where the person who has is like, I don't even feel like rolling. You 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, you completely. Yeah. Why don't I'll give you the railway station, because I want you should own all of the utilities and travel hubs. Let me have that street and they so cordial with each other. They're so lovely. And then like here, it's like, please, can you can you break a hundred for? Ah, shut up. Put it on the table. I don't trust you. Put it down before I touch it. I'm not going to touch that. You're doing okay. I'll give you 95. What do you mean you're giving 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. Yeah. Why we don't want monopoly power. How are the story of the game, though? It was created as the landlord's game by a woman who was a Georgian. So Georgia's. So Georgia's are this weird economic philosophy that says that all taxes should be land taxes. They have this. It's it's a 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 Georgian woman made this game called the landlord's game. It had two sets of rules. You played one one cooperatively, one competitively to produce this pedagogical output. This traveling salesman played the game.
stole it, sold it to Parker, brother. - No, you're lying. - No, this is even better. - This is even better. - 100% and it wasn't like an opportunity. - Decades later that Parker, brother's finally admitted that this woman was the creator of the landlords game. - And? - And she, I think either she or her descendants got a small amount of money and you know, there's like a small credit on the Parker, brother's website for her. That's it. At like, yes. - How can a game about screen people over come from screen? - Yeah, I know. - A little on the nose. - 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 put forward? - No, that's like what I'm hopeful about. I don't think there's anything that's nailing us. 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 US trade representative said, if you don't do this, we're going to hit you with tariffs. - Right. - Well, happy liberation day. - Right. - The tariffs came in anyways. - And so now there's like this army of people out there. So Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he was infamous for this one saying he would say, "Your margin is my opportunity." Right? So you look at the margin that Apple has on payment. So the margin that inkjet printers companies have. I mean, this is my favorite one. I know you say not everyone uses printers, but like-- - 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. - Oh yeah. - When I tell you Corey, the journeys that I've been down because you'd buy the printer and 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 cartridge. - That's right. - They wouldn't tell you this. So the printer wouldn't come with enough. But and you're like, "Okay, fine." You don't buy a car with a full tank of gas. So I get, it's fine. - Sure. - Until you go and get more cartridges. And then you find that the cartridges cost more than the printer. - But like exponentially more. Like I'm talking, I remember once we had one printer, it was HP printer. The printer itself, my mom bought for 700 ran. So what, like $35 somewhere there. And then the cartridges, each color was around 700 ran or 600, yo, we were like, that's not possible. - Yeah. And it won't print black if there's no vinyl. - Yes, yes. - No, they wouldn't do that. - And it won't scan if one of your cartridges is there. - 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. And 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. And I was like, what are these things for? I'll tell you what they were for you, Gene. They were there so that it knew when the ink was finished and what you were doing with, they were like, nah, bruh. 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. - Uh-huh. - Full of bullshit. - That's what it's full of. - Same thing where the car won't recognize the part of the ventilator, we'll recognize the part. It's the same thing. And it's the same law that protects it. So, you know, the cartel of ink print, ink companies or printer companies have monotonically raised the price of ink. Now, ink is the most expensive fluid as civilian can purchase without a government permit. At $10,000 a gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen to Kentucky to be winning stallion. Right? So, yo, man, who's this guy? - This weekend, the Kentucky-- - Yo, Eugene, Eugene, who's this guy, bro? - Get your semen, now, yo, bruh. Who, who's, come get your men, Eugene. This man just said, yo, bruh, Corey, I don't know. - So, I wish everyone who delts in economics and history had your vibe. - Well, that was interesting. - 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. - Right, this is colored water selling a $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, she wasn't. She didn't, she didn't, she didn't. - Yeah, 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 interesting-- - Interesting. - 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 day care worker at my daughter's daycare when we grow, 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 send my phone. - But I also need the sim that gets me in. - It gets me unlimited text. And they figured out how to put two sims in their phone, right, how to get a phone with two sim cages in the modified Android. - Not even, no, no, 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? And you just swap them. - When the time changed or you changed, you take the case, so to put the battery up, the new sim in the store. - 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 who successes and determined by how many Trump coins I buy. It'd be really nice to invest in something that wasn't AI. You know, like AI has got this very speculative thing, like maybe we'll figure out how to take a business that costs $1.4 trillion and makes $50 billion and eventually make it cost $50 billion, make $1.4 trillion, we're not sure how that's gonna happen. If you give us $3 trillion more, maybe we'll figure it out. But like meanwhile, like we know how to make money processing payments on the iPhone. You just process the payments on the iPhone and you charge 3% and 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 subscriptions through the iPhone and you flip from 30% to 3%, it's like you got 25% more subscribers overnight, right? You know, this is amazing possibilities. So you have this economic advantage. You're business, you're 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 and 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. So 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 'cause they all go to his Microsoft email address which doesn't exist anymore. - Oh man, they really take the stuff of grunts. - And then Trump did it again to the high court justice in Brazil who sentenced his allied year, Bolsonaro, for attempting to steal the election in Brazil. So then you have people over the world going like, wait, isn't this what we were told like China would do if we let them run our 5G? - Yeah. - And then you think about the fact that like these Russian soldiers who stole these John Deere tractors and tucked them to Chechnya, that John Deere was able to like push in over the year update that permanently immobilize them. And 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. - Shut down the cloud services and push updates to all the iOS devices that brick them and all the Android devices. Like 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, right? Like like Natsack Hawks, National Security Hawks. You have an entrepreneurial wing. And then you have the digital rights hippies like me, you've been banging this drum for 25 years. And remember we started off talking about coalitions. - Yes. - Well, this is a coalition the world has never seen before, right? These three groups of people have three different constituencies, three different arguments, but 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 of the final say over how it's used, where our digital services are built on open, transparent, auditable technology, not black boxes. Like again, like 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 strength. - We're going to accept that. - Don't go in the building. But we also wouldn't accept that. - Yeah, yeah, but they provide you with a 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 HVAC is. - You brought your house. - 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 you have the house. 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 other time. - Damn, that's amazing. - Look, now I'm optimistic. - I don't mean like it's a slam dunker or whatever. And I would caution you off of optimism. I think optimism and pessimism, wait, though. Wait, 'cause 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, right? 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. - Okay, okay. - And from that point, we may be able to take the next step. 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
clear clean path with 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. But 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, 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, Cory? 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, because you've made, 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, 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 unsitified, and it still is responsive to people. Because it's so many. Yeah. You realize that? Yeah. That's where local politics, because it's so fractured, it's, it's the 200 businesses. Yeah. National politics is one of two. Local politics is like bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, Yeah. Yeah. And joining Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit I've worked for, most my adult life, efff.org, efff, efff, join the efff, not that efff, join the efff, join the efff, join the efff, join the efff, join the efff, join the efff, join the efff, don't say anything for efff, what a, what a stick we need to get us in. Join the efff, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, okay, we've been around for 35 years. I don't know how long, the Electronic Frontier, the Economic Freedom Fighters have been around. I think we had a first. Maybe 12-ish. Yeah. I think we were there first. Yeah, you were. But they, they have cool berets. I think they, they do have cool berets. They, they, they've got the Sartorial style there. We all dress like Linux nerds, but they, they dress, they're, they're sharp. But yeah, joining efff, we've got lots of ways to get involved. We have fought the most important court battles in activist fights over digital rights. Like the reason you have cryptography that like we'll keep a secret on your phone is because we sued the NSA because they wouldn't let civilians have it. The 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, we've been doing this since the very earliest days of the internet and, and we don't win all of our fights. In fact, we lose a lot of them because you, some fights you just fight because you can't not fight them. Yeah. Even when you're vastly overmatched. But we win a surprising number of our fights. And when I joined efff, there were six of us. There's like a hundred and ten of us now, and we were working internationally. Like I say, I work with our allies in South Africa on their copyright implementation. You know, we're, and we've, we've now become part of a huge constellation of these digital rights groups internationally and in the US. And, and so, you know, I like to think that's because of our leadership. I, I've, I've been there now, as I say 25 years, I'm 55. So, so most of my adult life, and I can't imagine what the world would be like without efff, and then. This is amazing. Yeah. Before you go, actually, let's do this. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's play a little game that, that I think will help a lot of people. Okay. I'm going to list a product or an industry. Uh-huh. And then you tell us how it's being should have been. Yeah. And why do you find that about it? And no, and no, but, but rather, no, you know what I want to do is not what if you'll say it, but rather just to help people understand how it's affecting you. Sure. So, uh, tech, tech's not my thing. Right, right. And some people might go, ah, the finance industry, that's not, but I just want you to explain as quickly as possible. Okay. Like vertical sort of effect. Sure. So, so let's go, um, so let's start with technology, like phones, computers, et cetera. Like how, how is that being should have been? So lots of different ways. Yeah. 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. So 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 the stuff where like these, these things spying you all the time. And then when they want to know who is 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 liked it risk to democracy as well. Okay. Um, cause, some people like, I just like driving cause this doesn't bother me. I'm not a tech, I'm not a tech person. So locking up independent mechanics, locking up through third party parts, right? Spying on you in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite. You'll call? Yeah. So your car is just like, it's a data acquisition platform on wheels. Uh, it's funny because they, they kind of brag about it. So Massachusetts had a ballot initiative, question one in 2020, where 75% of, of base stateers 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. Well, but that's them telling on themselves. Yeah. Mozilla labs, uh, 2023 did a roundup of all of the cars, privacy policies and data acquisition. And they said there is not one car they would recommend driving on the road. Uh, that's, that's being sold right because it's just like, where you're going, when you're going there, everything, you go to a radio, what, yeah, compositions you're having in Nissan, 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 which I'm pretty confident, neither which they know, but they're just like, they're just like making stuff up that they'll sell because like these are all like grifters, grifting other grifters. So they're ripping each other up. It's like billionaire on millionaire violence. Okay. Um, let's go to that this weekend, my car's not, no, 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 an 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. And 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, uh, uh, uh, sub prime 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 sub prime 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 control that if you're day late on your payments, just blares at all volume. You are late on your payments. Are you serious? Yeah. Like immobilize your car, uh, even like some of these leases will say you can't take it across the county line. And so the New York Times wrote about this and there's 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. Well, it's very bad. And they, so they repo these cars over and over again. The leases are like any sub prime, uh, credit arrangement. They're designed to like balloon and make it so you can't afford it later. So you've got 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 like 10 poor people. And so like basically like you can make loans to progressively worse credit risks. If it's easier and easier to repo the, the, the, because the risk on your side is. That's right. You're offloading the risk, right? So they just have like basically this whole sideline of repo tech Teslas. There's a dealer option where if you are, uh, 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, I thought it drove itself back to the dealership. Uh, 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. Yeah. Mostly what you've got in food is just monopolization on the grocery side. Okay. Yeah. And that will inflate the prices. Yeah. Yeah. 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 and then to make it up. The wholesalers would raise prices on everyone else, all the mom and pops. So it accelerated the collapse of the mom and pops into A&P. And these two congressman Robinson 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 are 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. And 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 Lai. It's a bunch of other things. It's so many, like they're a big conglomerate. So yeah, all your grocers are really expensive because monopoly grocers and monopoly food producers are cooking the market to screw you.
Corey, this was too much fun, man. You know what, you are so amazing that I'm willing to accept that you came up within shittification. - Oh, that's very nice of you. - You are just like, yo, man. You're just on top of it, you're vibe. Thank you, we're gonna check out the EFF, the other EFF, the other EFF. - EFF white is what we'll call it. (laughing) - We're pretty, we're pretty. - No, no, no. - Too first, I'm worried. - Don't worry about being the first. I'll show you EFF and then you'll see why I see 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 I'm rather like, looking at our repository, I gotta, you know, like Google, I'm in search and I type EFF, you know, and then I get like, I'm like, - And then they got you and then they make you search again. - That was too much. - Then you have to search three times and they 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. - Conn escape it, this was fun. - I had a great time. - Appreciate it, guys. - Thank you so much, Corey. - Thank you so much. - Good luck to the next block, guys. - Thank you, because when I hear the phrase self-licking ice cream. (laughing) - You had him there, you know that? - Yeah. - Well, you're like me, you're a magpie. I love the little phrases. - What now with Trevinoa is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevinoa Sanasiamin and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Parduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The speaker argues that corporations and policymakers have systematically enabled a widespread decline in product quality and consumer rights through anti-competitive policies and digital rights management.
Laws like the DMCA’s Section 1201 make it a felony to modify or repair products, such as cars or medical devices, undermining consumer autonomy and access to repair.
The "shittification" of products and services is not just a result of market forces but a policy-driven outcome where monopolies and corporate power suppress competition and innovation.
Historical examples like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act were shaped by corporate lobbying and bypassed democratic oversight, with key provisions drafted at WIPO and later enforced through U.S. law.
The erosion of consumer rights—such as the ability to switch services or repair devices—is mirrored in the loss of trust in institutions, with companies like Apple using legal and technical barriers to control user behavior.
Competition is essential for accountability; when markets are dominated by a few firms, they become unresponsive to public needs and operate with impunity.
The rise of "shittification" reflects a broader societal trend where people feel increasingly exploited, and the real cause lies in policy decisions that favor corporate profits over public welfare.
Antitrust enforcement and regulatory action worldwide—such as in Europe, South Korea, and Canada—show that decisive government intervention can reverse harmful corporate practices.
Summary:
" This phenomenon is not random but systemic, rooted in laws like the DMCA, which criminalize product modification and repair, and in monopolistic practices that eliminate competition. Examples include Apple’s control over app stores, medical device unfixability, and car diagnostic systems that block generic parts. The speaker traces the roots of these policies back to the Clinton era, where corporate interests bypassed Congress through international agreements like WIPO treaties.
These laws, designed to protect intellectual property, instead serve to entrench corporate dominance, allowing companies to extract profits at the expense of consumers. The speaker highlights how monopolies, like Apple or Google, prioritize profit over user well-being, using tools like digital rights management (DRM) and restrictive app ecosystems. They argue that competition is essential for accountability, and without it, large corporations operate with impunity, ignoring public demand.
Real change, the speaker asserts, comes not from individual consumer complaints but from strong, independent regulation and antitrust enforcement—seen globally in Europe, South Korea, and Canada. These efforts demonstrate that policy can reverse harmful trends, proving that corporate power is not inevitable, and that democratic accountability remains a necessary safeguard against unchecked corporate influence.
FAQs
Shittification refers to the perceived decline in quality across products, services, and experiences—like shrinking product value, poor customer service, and reduced reliability. It's significant because it reflects a broader societal trend where people feel everything they receive is getting worse, even if they don't realize it's systemic.
DRM restricts user control over technology, such as preventing software updates, repairs, or alternative payment methods. This limits consumer choice and innovation, leading to products that are less flexible, harder to modify, and more dependent on a single company's rules and policies.
Elon Musk used the term after the speaker criticized his Tesla factories, pointing out a disconnect between futuristic sci-fi ideals and real-world production. The speaker argued that the comparison between futuristic AI societies and current manufacturing practices is invalid, highlighting a misunderstanding of technological progress.
The 'Darth Vader MBA' describes how companies change their terms of service unilaterally, often after a user has made a significant investment, like completing a game or purchasing a product. This shifts the original deal, leaving users with no recourse or compensation.
Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass digital access controls, such as those in printers or car systems. This gives companies the legal power to lock down their products, preventing repairs, modifications, or competition, effectively stifling innovation and user freedom.
Monopolies control platforms like the App Store or iPhone ecosystem, where users are locked in with no alternative. Apple sets rules for pricing, privacy, and app functionality, making it difficult for users to switch or for competitors to enter the market, thus limiting consumer choice and autonomy.
Chat with AI
Loading...
Pro features
Go deeper with this episode
Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.
PodcastTranscript AI