Who is Zack Bia?

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It's the word that sizzling, the tips of everyone's lips. Those pointy tips that everyone's lips have, scorching their gums, burning their teeth. You work the entire mouth when you say all a gark. It's like CrossFit for your head's mouth's tail. Your tongue. Tip of your tongue. That's what, okay. A lot of people on the godless left love to use the word all a gark when talking about all a garks like Jeffrey Bezos and Samuel Altman and Ilanathan Musk. But what is an all a gark? Apart from a word, you have to look up every time you play a Tom Clancy shooter. There are more than 30 of them at this point, you shouldn't have to keep checking. But an all a gark is someone who is so wealthy and who commands so much power and influence that they rule by proxy, ostensibly commanding entire nations with their checkbooks. Which does sound familiar now that I say it out loud. Not the checkbook part, but like Apple Pay or whatever. Also I am fair and balanced most days assuming I'm brought in for regular maintenance. So let's actually explore this. In episode form, error 593 check your news manual for troubleshooting. Is America an all a garky? Yeah, probably. But also only kinda, but also also, y'all, snooze, all a garky, more like boor a garky. It's not even worthy of a good pun. And really what we seem to be developing into here in the States is closer to a kind of techno feudalism or neocapitalist cyber fascism or neofascist techno capitalism. Don't all a garky, but it definitely needs to have tech or neos somewhere in it, because we're in a cyberspace future where robot commenters reply to posts from robot influencers, and you can get a robot to bet for you on which hospital will be bombed by which government's robot. See, a lot of the all a garky I'm going to describe exists online more than in the physical world. Like the Matrix. Though it still does have short and long term negative effects on the physical world, like the Matrix. And that at least does make it sound cooler. The kids love the Matrix, which is definitely not from the 90s. Also, let's just, y'know, let's just talk about equilibrium too. We'll throw in the movie equilibrium for flavor. For fun, kata. New title. His America, a techno feudalism? So much cooler. I forgot most of my neo outfit at the gym, but I assure you, I am wearing leather pants. Also I can't see in these way too dark. So what is techno feudalism? Well, it's a bit like feudalism, obviously. Although historians currently disagree with the public's understanding of feudalism and think it actually didn't quite go down like that, the general idea is you have lords who own land, and serfs work the land, and pay rent, taxes, and the portion of the proceeds of their labor in exchange for protection, and being able to exist. So techno feudalism, to nut it in a nutshell, is basically a small collection of digital landlords that everyone must obey and pay in order to exist online. And since way too much of America and the world exists online, you could argue that this creates an entirely new upper class of people and a new lower class of people that includes most people. A lot of those cyber nobles don't really even offer a product to everybody else, but rather deal in things like data and advertising space on the platforms we use. So it's less about producing something and more like collecting data on consumers and controlling the market. Others seem to get by entirely on investor capital and government contracts that embed them into our infrastructure. But rarely do they offer the average person an actual product, perhaps because the average person is the product and the labor at the same time. But like, what is Peter Teal selling us at this point? The last thing he sold us was an adult vice president who got self-conscious when a 20-year-old meth head and alleged rapist who breaks his jaw with hammers called him fat. And so that means that we, the regular folk, are just kind of flesh batteries for them, right? You know, like the Matrix. We exist less as humans or even traditional consumers at more like blobs of data units. Because a lot of these companies, specifically social media and search engines, tend to offer free services in exchange for our data. But then we got to a point where these services aren't a choice. Or simply how we need to exist in the world. 25 years ago, you didn't need a Google account or social media presence to exist. You could go an entire week without even thinking about checking your email or longer. But now, that's almost an impossibility. Most people need constant, reliable internet access just to find work and pay bills. You need it to study for school or check your kids' grades. You need it to call a cab or get something delivered. You like jacking off? Who doesn't? Well, I don't know if you know this, but you will need the internet for that too. I mean, you don't. You can have a healthy relationship with your own body and a chief sexual gratification without requiring porn or graphic films to get your imagination to work. But you get my point. We've arrived at this moment where these tech companies aren't so much filling in need, but rather forcing their big quotes, innovations upon us. Because they own the entire market, AI is, of course, the recent one that comes to mind. It's just been injected into everything, our search engines and email and social media without anyone actually opting into it. We're just being told that it's the future without us ever having a say. Some people will have you believe AI will make us less connected, that it's going to leave us behind. We couldn't disagree more. Call us optimists, call us streamers. Just as we've always done, we're betting on people. That is a meta ad that literally never bothers to tell us about a product. It's just broadly pro AI and just kind of gas lights you into thinking that it's good. Hey, you know, call us optimists, but we like AI because we like people unlike all the pessimistic anti people, people who say differently and they aren't selling anything. They don't need to dangle a product. They're just going to do AI everywhere, despite also saying that it's going to destroy us all. See, these God boxes we built are going to end humanity and also be in charge of air traffic control. Like, we just don't have a choice. You'll see these interviews with Zuckerberg or Musk and they'll talk about how in the future you'll have a device in your hand, right? And it knows everything you want to see and it will just automatically show you what it thinks you want to see. But they don't say that that's good or why we would want that. They just say that it's going to happen and it is happening everywhere and we don't have a choice. What are we going to do? Not fly, stop using email, go to the library, that place is haunted. Of course, it's not entirely different from how corporations used to exist. We've generally always needed private companies to communicate, travel and even eat. But a key difference is that because the internet started as this little nerdy pocket that no one paid attention to, most governments only thought to regulate it long after it took over our waking lives. It was anarchy, which is rad and or far out until a bunch of rich dickheads show up. And during the very small amount of time that happened, the new tech oligarchs have seemingly surpassed hours or any government. After all, politicians also need email and use social media and apps and jack off. And when those companies own everything and survive by scraping data and setting algorithms that dictate what news and events most people see, it basically means that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Jim Google have more power and access than a senator, right? Then a lot of countries, right? It's very fun when Grindr puts out their usage data around GOP conventions. But also, it's weird they can do that. Hey, did you know that Grindr was once owned by a Chinese company that was forced to sell it after people realized the obvious security concern? returns, after news broke that they were sharing personal data, such as users HIV status to third parties. Pretty unsettling. And perhaps bad that a private company is so careless with our medical information, even if they agreed to stop once called out on it. Perhaps it's also bad that a private company can use our data to make or break an election. But everybody has to play their game. Yeah, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and TikTok, effectively control the entire internet ad market like organized crime families. If you want to, I don't know, do a news show on the internet. You have to put it on YouTube and let Google wet their beak because they own all the search engine algorithms that would otherwise allow an audience to find your show organically. And Google didn't buy YouTube to send Google searchers to a different video sharing site. And it's troubling that this hypothetical news show is being forced to jump through the same hoops as, say, a local politician trying to get their campaign videos seen. That's weird. Also, don't forget to like and subscribe, and leave a comment to the notification bell and know how to kind of stuff. Again, it's not that different from basic capitalism, except for all the very terrifying ways that it's quite different. And these days, most people hate it. We didn't vote for it, after all, even politicians didn't get a full say. But we all have to do it. So going back to the word techno-futalism, this is that, right? This is what we think of when we think of futilism. Peasants work the land for a lord who had little incentive to offer much in return because their labor force was already captive. It's not like a disgruntled peasant could take their business elsewhere. Similarly, because being on the internet is now a necessary part of life, we have no choice but to play by the techno king's rules. In the way that surfs once paid noble lords for the privilege of existing on their land, we all have to rent space online from these digital dukes. Under futilism, if you refuse to work the land, you'd either be arrested or you just starve. Currently, Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon have monopolies on virtually every corner of digital life, and thus, no incentive to make their services better, but they get to charge rent for the privilege of using their spaces. And they continue to make their products less functional by locking basic features behind paywalls. Like how airlines will soon be charging, I'm sure, extra if you want to seat with an armrest thanks to all this beautiful deregulation. The way the current landscape works, we have no choice but to support one or more of these oligarchs to work the land, so to speak, and that's by design. Sure, you can avoid shopping at Amazon, except there's also Amazon Web Services, which hosts so much of the internet that when it goes dark, it can cost the economy tens of millions of dollars an hour. It's a digital feudalism, but also we have more than one king, there's like 100 kings. And you still do have to pay for some of this stuff because, you know, the capitalism. So I guess I'd say America is a neoliberal oligarchic, neo-technic, feudalistic capitalist, dictatorial, multi-monarchy. I think that covers it. Everyone write that down. I won't, though. I don't like labels. I don't even name my pets. It's extremely inconvenient. You can just call it an oligarchy, I guess. Or if you prefer, we're dangerously close to one. I know that sounds like some hogwash from the aforementioned Godless Left, because I think when most people hear the word oligarchy, they immediately think of Russia. And we certainly aren't Russia, right? I'm not even wearing the Russia hat. It's almost a separate conversation to the oligarchy one, because people also think the United States is turning into Russia thanks to Trump. And I think it might be useful if we perhaps actually took a look at what happened in Russia and see if it reflects what's happening here. You know, people write things down in the past, and people from the future can read those things. Katie wrote, Katie was here, now I can read it. So let's do that. History. Fun stuff. More fun, kata. Maybe it doesn't have to repeat itself, unless it's the cool parts like watching the matrix and/or equilibrium. 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One moment you're cruising along and the next there's a shipping snag that has you scrambling. With progressive, small business owners save 13% on their commercial auto insurance when they pay in full. To quote in as little as 8 minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com, "Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, discounts not available in all states or situations." Hey there, welcome back from those ads you brave little explorer you. We've been talking about how the near complete takeover of American infrastructure by private industry is not dissimilar from the matrix, resulting in a neoliberal oligarchic, neo-technic, futileistic, capitalist, dictatorial, multi-monarchy. I've got my leather on underneath the desk, sweatin' real good, always, and the question that always arises when talking about the current state of America and all these rich people seemingly in control is whether or not this country might eventually turn into Russia. And to answer that question, we realized that we need to like figure out what happened to Russia. After all, it's been a min since we were back in the USSR, like a double album's length of time, at least. And some of you weren't even a twinkle in your mother's butt while the Soviet Union was still around. That's where babies come from, I think, right? Your mother's butt specifically. So we could all use a refresher on what was going on in geopolitics during the early 90s, because that was a long time ago. At least a few years before the matrix. In 1991, Boris Yeltsin was elected the first president of the new Russia after the Soviet union dissolved. He wrote a wave for reform politics. it sought to reignite the nation's economy by transitioning from communism to a free market. Except until that point, the economy had been run by the state from top to bottom, so the country didn't have the necessary infrastructure to support a free market, such as a strong regulatory body, an independent court system to uphold those regulations, and extant markets in which to practice said capitalism. That kind of sounds actually like the start of the internet, but with the lack of a regulatory body. I'm sure that's a coincidence, it's actually any who, Yeltsin didn't want to take the time to build any of these necessary institutions, because he was afraid of hard-line supporters of the USSR. Basically, the first order from Star Wars. Yeltsin was afraid these sexy commies would take advantage of that transitional period to seize control of the country all over again. Instead, he tried to jumpstart capitalism in the Russian economy by lifting the government's price controls all at once. A kind of sink or swim approach to governing, so popular among leaders who don't give a shit about what happens to the working class. But instead of forcing everyone to adapt, it triggered hyperinflation to the point where everyday items were 2000 times as expensive as they were before. That means a 99 cent can of Arizona iced tea would have literally cost $2,000, which I do believe is too much money. So basically, it was the Wild West for capitalism. This total free-for-all that one could kind of compare to the early internet, except way less fun. Why can't has $10,000 cheeseburger? Of course, it's obviously not one to one. For starters, there weren't any private companies to compete in the marketplace. It was all state-owned by the Soviet Union, so Yeltsin had to find a way to privatize everything as well. He did this with a voucher system where he gave every Russian citizen privatization checks they could use to buy shares of state-run companies that were to be sold at public auction houses. Little IOUs allowing you to buy a piece of all the companies they were about to go private. Neat. Except these vouchers had no immediate value, meaning you couldn't exchange them for the cash equivalent of 100 shares in Chrysler, for instance. But they could be freely sold or traded, and Yeltsin dropped them into an economy ravaged by hyperinflation. Like dropping chum in a shark tank while the sharks are getting punched in their shark balls by pictures of poor people. And so instead of everyone owning a share of these companies, this created a massive pool of desperate citizens who were only too happy to sell their vouchers to the burgeoning oligarch class, which had grown modestly wealthy during the 1980s after the Soviet Union had begun to allow some heavily regulated private enterprise. Consequently, banks and small business owners were able to buy up hundreds of thousands of these vouchers, and since many of the formerly state-run businesses were seriously undervalued, this allowed the oligarchs to buy controlling shares of thousands of companies for pennies on the dollar. 15,000 state-owned enterprises in all were auctioned off to the private sector, between 1992 and 1994, and during that time, these modestly wealthy Russian entrepreneurs became some of the richest and most powerful people in modern history. So wait, actually, so let's back up. We had this sudden free market where the ownership would be shared amongst all the people, who gradually began to seed that ownership to just a few rich people, because everyone undervalued what that ownership would mean. It is one-to-one with the internet. That was a space conceived so that anyone could thrive, make their own web page or service, that was slowly absorbed by a few wealthy people. Need how capitalism just does that? So by the mid-90s, just four years after enacting his disastrous shock therapy program to flick everyone in the delegates with capitalism and just hope for the best, Yeltsin's new Russian government was looking worse than Neo at the end of the trilogy. His voucher program had sold off nearly three-quarters of the country's economy for a song, and not even a cool song, like one from the Matrix soundtrack, or even the Equilibrium soundtrack. That was more like a song from the run-hide fight infidel soundtrack. Now, Russia was in massive debt, and Yeltsin had a single digit approval rating, which is really something when you think about it. One digit. There should be an award for that. Maybe a copy of the run-hide fight infidel soundtrack. Sensing the country was on the edge of disaster, Yeltsin decided to sell Russia's most valuable resources to the oligarchs in order to get the country out of debt, and to secure their support in the upcoming elections. This bad idea cherry, a top-the-brain fart Sunday, that was the voucher plan handed Russia's oil, gas, and minerals over to the oligarchs, one of whom, Roman Abramovich, literally made his money selling plastic ducks. To start, he did other stuff too, but we're focusing on the plastic ducks because silly. That's how he was able to buy so many vouchers, and later take control of Russian oil giant sibneft, now gas-prom-neft, for just $100 million. Plastic ducks? Wow, it's kind of like if someone got rich by inventing, I don't know, like a payment app, or hot or not clone, and then use that wealth to expand and eventually take control of basic government functions like communication or space travel, or gutting all of our agencies in the most embarrassing way possible. There he is! Listen, as I said, and then jokingly took back, it isn't one to one, and there's a lot more nuance to what happened in Russia. The motivations and details are different, but the pattern and result are the same. Ultimately, what we're explaining is a sudden and unregulated free market that enabled a small group of dumb and undeserving rich people to thrive until they became more powerful than the government, which then began to give those rich people control of our basic infrastructure. It sure sounds familiar, but of course, there's at least one key difference between oligarchs in Russia and the tech oligarchs currently choking America to death with their pervert glasses and racist chatbots. Vladimir Putin, the Russian dictator, with the face of a man who sued captain planet for property damage. He looks like the ghost you don't notice, which was probably his nickname of the KGB. See, when Putin took over, he didn't deal with the oligarchs in the same way as Boris Yeltsin. Rather than securing their political support by bribing them with lucrative Russian industries, Putin bribed them with violence. Mind you, this doesn't mean Putin was some kind of reform candidate out to drain the swamp or some such phrase, although I'm sure that's how he sold it to the Russian people at the time. He didn't crack down on all the oligarchs, only the ones who refused to fall in line behind his vision for a stronger Russia, which partly meant re-nationalizing the oil and gas industries. So like Roman Abramovich, the plastic duck king of Sibneft oil, he cronied up to Putin right away, ultimately selling Sibneft back to Putin's government for $13 billion. So pretty big return on the $100 million that was initially paid, but not everyone played ball with Putin. That seems like a totally wild decision for a Russian oligarch to make today, but it shows how much power oligarchs had at the time. Take Mikhail Kotorkovsky. Please, an oligarch who abused the voucher program to buy the state-controlled oil company Yukos for $310 million when contemporary valuations placed it at $5 billion. What a savings! He's a real deal-finder that Kotorkovsky. The big K tried to shine Putin on, so Putin threw him into a Siberian prison for 10 years for fraud and tax evasion, then handed Yukos over to a loyal buddy for safekeeping. That was his M.O. Anyone who stepped out of line would be imprisoned, exiled, or disappeared/allegedly, but almost definitely murdered, with their assets seized and handed over to one of Putin's allies. The oligarchs like Abramovich, who got with the program, were allowed to keep all their stuff with the understanding that Putin would tap them for cash whenever he wanted. So that's the key difference. Yes, thanks to the internet, America is being swarmed by these tech oligarchs, but at least we don't have a brutal dictator to skew the system even worse. Right? And I spoke with President Putin, I got along with him very well, despite the Russia-Russia-Russia hoax, which was a total hoax. He used to say, "What is going on over there?" But it was a total hoax, as he knew, and as I knew. Shucks! Look, Trump isn't literally Putin. For one, Putin likes dogs, and there are probably other differences too. Maybe Trump looks better shirtless on a horse. We don't know. It's more that Trump is perfectly positioned to enable our current tech oligarchs, so long as they give him something in return. He's certainly our first truly online president, and he's a weird crypto-goon whose administration seems very aware that he needs to build a relationship with these tech giants. So we have these tech oligarchs standing in the Oval Office right next to our crypto president, changing their language based on his whims. And the final component here is that outside of the internet, Here in the physical world, there are some conditions that mirror what Russia looked like before the oligarchs took over. America has a long tradition of transitioning state-controlled industries to the private sector, including things like road maintenance and health care. We've done episodes about it. You should watch them. The puppets probably in at least one of them. So either do or don't watch that particular episode based on that information regarding the puppet being in it or not being in it. On top of all of this other stuff, inflation. You know that whole affordability crisis created in part by our very own oligarchs. The federal minimum wage has not risen for decades, let alone kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, that cost of living continues to shoot through the roof, like some sort of dragon ball Z goth powered by the prodigy and clove cigarettes. Groceries are too expensive. Their rent is too damn high. We know this. It's inching towards encroaching on the potential to become a similar powder keg of ingredients to those assembled in Boros Yeltsin's Russia. The big difference is that the free market in question exists online. Also, we're not coming out of the collapse of communism and it's a completely different era with different technologies and so on. We're having a little fun with this comparison. We're not saying this exact thing is happening. But the end result indeed the goal is kind of the same unless people start to get angry, which good news they are, which is what we'll talk about after the next and final ad break. It sounds needo. Perhaps we'll talk about the matrix and equilibrium some more and how they should have joined forces. 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Paint never. Pluto TV. Oh hello. Welcome back from those ads. I was just sitting here picturing equilibrium in the matrix. Gun cock the bullet time. Whoa. Oh, that is the kind of thing you make time for. Before the break, we were talking about the tech oligarchs in America. And how they've turned us all into siphonable little flesh batteries for their billion dollar salaries and their super yachts. And their gigantic land development projects. We've been trying to define it. It's kind of feudalism. Also kind of oligarchy. It's a lot of things. We talked about how the pattern feels somewhat similar to what happened in Russia. But it's not a direct comparison either. And obviously not as extreme. Others have started to refer to this framework as data feudalism, which is another sick ism. We can add to our many pouch and leather pants apart from handing over unprecedented levels of privacy for literally no good reason. Data feudalism has significant long term consequences for society as a whole. This is where I want to talk about the end result. And why it seems like only lately have people started to notice how bad this is. I have a theory. I have many theories actually about a lot of stuff mostly pants and the truth about the very obvious ending of Spider-Man brand new day. But I have another theory about this. While yes, most people need the internet to do work or function on a basic level. They're also happy to keep off the internet when they can avoid it. But over time, that got less possible. Our president, as I mentioned, seems to exist for the internet. He makes official statements on his own social media site that you can pay for early access to. It's gotten harder and harder to avoid being online. But ultimately, you could always, still, at least, physically walk away. Go outside, eat grass, stare directly at the sun, and so on. Except slowly, and more recently, the internet started to butt into the real world, too. The data center is known by residents as hyperscale data. It is owned by Alliance Cloud Services LLC, a company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. They tell me that for the past couple of years, it has been emitting a high pitched sound 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Yeah, that. I think this was a long time coming, though, perhaps starting around the pandemic. Suddenly, the majority of Americans had to rely on apps and websites and social media to physically and mentally survive. And over time, as malls and physical stores began to decay, the world was filled with rideshare cars and delivery bots and Amazon trucks and exploding cyber trucks. And then, as these companies grew, they began to take up more and more of our physical space, while the government just sort of. let 'em. In fact, they love it. Whenever Amazon comes to town to build a new warehouse, or Google starts putting out feelers for a new campus, the local government trips over its own cartoon awoga eyes, and the tongue that rolled out of its mouth, giving away whatever it can to win that bid. When Amazon was opening its second headquarters, Dallas offered to build Amazon University. A city in Georgia even promised to change its name to Amazon, real embarrassing fanboy shit from these desperate nerd ass towns. And at first it wasn't knowing, often just affecting a few people. small towns here and there. And then we all got data center fever, big shitty loud and ugly buildings taking over the country with no input from voters and almost no information being fed in our direction. And once they go up, they become a massive drain on resources that we are required to subsidize with our tax dollars. They take up huge tracks of physical land that are being subsidized by our tax dollars and our data. George Zuckerberg famously bragged that his 5.7 square mile Hyperion facility once completed would be so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan. Sam Altman's data center Stargate and Abelene Texas will be as big as Central Park because he either misunderstood that Stargate is about arrogant tech lords trying to convince people their gods or he understood it too well. This recently placed a moratorium on new data center approvals, think of how much flesh battery wattage that could have been. Meanwhile, Michigan passed a controversial tax break for data centers that could end up costing the state millions of dollars in the long run. It's getting grotesque. Like Israeli businessmen actually pitched the Trump administration a completely redeveloped Gaza City with a bunch of data centers and an Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone back in 2025. How fucking barbaric. Please keep funding our genocide. We'll build all the data centers you want to top these fields of bones and then we'll name it after Elon. Elon's musky bone zone. Actually, I'm pretty sure Elon's musky bone zone is just whatever room he's in when he hands his employees flasks of his vile seed. Anyway, it's one thing to tell someone that we're living in a technofuteless society when that's an abstract concept of a world that only exists on their phone. But it's another thing when they're building what are essentially castles taking over local towns. But hey, maybe you can also get a job at that castle for a while and become an expendable, interchangeable, digital cog that will ultimately be replaced by a robot. But don't worry, you won't need a job because you'll just get universal basic income. Thanks to magic, we're digging up from deep beneath that castle. And I want to pause real quick to highlight this. You'll see people like Musk talk about universal basic income or in his case, universal high income as an inevitable result of their AI machinations and the glorious future they alone can usher in. But what they're actually saying is that they're going to control everything and this is how the world will work. And you won't have a job because robots will do everything. But that won't free you up to make art or whatever because they also want the robots to make the art and music to put on the device that shows you things it decides you want to see. So if you're sitting and scrolling, which they want you to be doing, jobless, you'll still need money in order to pay these tech lords the subscription fees for the essential services they control thanks to the robots they made to take your job. Essentially, UBI would be a subsidy to them and all of their rent seeking endeavors as well as a bribe to stave off revolution and placate the masses into accepting the version of the world they decided we have to live in. It becomes literal feudalism at that point, right? And these construction projects are being rocketed through the federal approval process like 60 agents Smith getting uppercut into the moon, a place they also want to build the crap on. And part to a 2023 Supreme Court decision that reduced the jurisdiction of the Clean Waters Act, which has allowed dozens of data centers to be constructed without wetlands permits. And it's also thanks to this guy, Don Mamu J. Period Trump. The Trump administration is leasing huge chunks of land to data center projects, including a former nuclear enrichment factory in Kentucky and a site in Nevada that at one point was going to hold a solar energy array. Almost got one. Almost got one. Even if these places figure out how to not drain our electricity and maybe even give us a little money back in return, they are completely taking over our land and finding new and exciting ways to ruin the environment. Elon Musk's Colossus Data Center in Memphis farts toxic fumes all over its neighboring communities to power rock on top of all the tax money and resources Musk gobbles up. And what are we getting in exchange for all that cost? Stacks of abominable pornography for a bunch of lazy imaginationless jerkabouts. And see, that's the thing. Because the internet felt like this abstract concept, most people didn't notice how bad it got until it was too late. But also for that same reason, nobody really sees the value in all these data centers. After all, they don't make anything. At least Coca-Cola makes Coke when they're not violently crushing unionization. Have you had Coke? That shit is delicious. Yum yum yum yum. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Sam Altman and King Randall J. Google have completely stopped offering anything that anyone wanted to buy. They're just the landlords. It is a top-down rent-seeking endeavor. They don't have a product. I guess Tesla maybe? If you're rich and like exploding, even that is going to transform into self-driving cars, you get from Musk and then rent out to others. But for the most part, these people exist in a realm of empty promises and perception. They're not visionary leaders of business or captains of industry. They're not even geniuses, although they all claim to be. I mean, Sam Altman doesn't even know why his kid stops dropping pizza on the floor and laughing. No, this new class of oligarch simply got in on the ground floor of a new frontier of capitalism years ahead of any regulatory body and carve the place up for themselves. And they've just been charging us rent ever since. They want us to own nothing, not even the movies we buy, and be complacent about it. Maybe even happy. They're plastic duck oligarchs. And for a while, they were able to get by without pissing too many people off, until they pissed too many people off. You know, worry about the traffic, the congestion, the noise. I worry about the environmental impacts and the impacts it has on where I live. Dave Low lives right by the proposed data center in Red Oak, and told us he's a lifelong conservative Republican. Are you thinking about voting differently? This is the first time in my adult life where there's been an issue that's come up that I feel like is going to directly impact me. And so this time around, I've made the decision that I'm not going to vote red or blue. I'm going to vote for the candidate that is willing to speak up and put up and do something to help us with this issue. Perfect clip. For many reasons. Kind of sums up a lot of the Republican Party. But any who, we kind of touched on this in our flock camera video and in this video you're watching that it's at least good that people everywhere are really sick of this. It might have come a bit too late and it's not super focused. But now these tech companies are shoving themselves into our physical environment everywhere, regardless of whether it's a blue or red state, which in turn has created a pressing issue that has begun to fracture people not on party lines, but perhaps class. You know, because maybe it's good for the lower classes to get along, which is why politicians love trying to divide people in any other way. It's likely one of the reasons Elon Musk bought Twitter as his little bread and circus machine where he can work everyone into a frenzy over white genocide and the trans menace and birth rates or whatever he's mad about today. Being incredibly unlikable and not funny maybe, to the point that he stole somebody else's joke, didn't credit them for it and somehow made it worse? How do you make it so much worse, man? So much worse? Something like that. It's why David Ellison, shining star of Flyboys, is doing a hostile takeover of CNN. These freaks are not only hijacking our means of communication, but are going to clog it with so much bullshit that we're too busy fighting each other to stop their endless growth until we don't even notice it anymore, until we all just get used to the buzzing sound. That is their hope. So yeah, callus optimists. You're up. Okay. Do it at home. But it's very neat that everyone hates this. And likely on this show that we have, thanks to our Lords at YouTube, we'll probably be talking about this long after Trump has died, or left office, or ascended into service of our Grand Litch Queen Vlacketh or whatever he'll do. Something I'm sure. Because chances are, this won't really be fixed or even addressed until he's gone. And even then, his administration, and frankly, the others before this won all the way back to Obama, have created a situation where these people will be very hard to dismantle and disentangle. After all, how did people in the past deal with the bad king? Was that easy and good? Didn't involve a lot of guncata and leather pants. Because if it didn't, I'm going to take these off, actually. So text rich, vote, run a pass out, so roll the credits real quick. I need to go to the hospital. Hey, Grog! Yes, Tony. Call the hospital, please. I ain't no one knows pizza. Thank you, Grog. I see dead people. I love movies. Thanks for watching, folks. Make sure to like and subscribe. Did you vote? I said last week to vote. So make sure to do that still. And like and subscribe, which I definitely already said, vote, which I definitely already said earlier and now. And we've got a podcast called Even More News. Check that out if you'd like listening to podcasts. We released that twice a week. This is going to help me, actually. And also, this isn't help. What am I going to say? We've got a merch store. Check it out. We've got merch at it. patreon.com says some more news. And yeah, do some gun collar. [GROANS] I haven't seen movies. Do you care way too much what other people think? Do you desperately want everyone to like you? Well, also desperately wishing you didn't care if they liked you. Oh, good. You're one of us. I'm Leah Rudic. And I'm Jessica Michelle Singleton. And our new podcast is People, Pleasers. Every week, we're laughing our way through woo-woo self-improvement, blatant self-sabotard, bad decisions, questionable coping mechanisms, and all the totally normal, definitely not weird ways we move through the world. Think of us as your best worst millennial girlfriends. We're drinking. Come hang with us. Or don't. Totally fine. We don't care. We care so much. People, Pleasers, follow rate and review wherever you get your podcasts. Pleasers. Pleasers. Pleasers. [LAUGHTER]