Factually! with Adam Conover - Tech Giants Are Nothing But Middlemen, with Tim Wu

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

The tech industry no longer serves human needs. According to legal scholar and writer Tim Wu, the tech industry has shifted away from providing services and now only exist to extract our money, data, and time. This week, Adam sits with Tim to talk about his new book, Age of Extraction. Together, they chart exactly how we came to find ourselves in this mess and what it might take for us to dig our way out of it. Find Tim's book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. It's a very special episode of Factually because today we have a guest on the show who I've been trying to get on the podcast for many years. His name is Tim Wu. He's a legal scholar and writer.

And he's probably done more than anyone for me to explain how technology, economics, and power interplay to shape the world that we live in. And I'm being completely serious about it. that. Tim has an uncanny ability to describe the way that concentrated corporate power distorts not just our economy, but also our individual lives and our experience of the world around us. And he writes about these topics with such vivid piercing clarity that he has literally transformed policy debates about these subjects nationwide. In his book, The Master Switch, Tim, told the history of how communications networks, whether radio or TV or the internet,

start out by being open before becoming quickly dominated by corporate monopolies. He wrote this in 2010 when people were still believing that, you know, the internet might be open forever and the tech industry was going to be good and, you know, democratic for the rest of our lives, but in fact was well on the way to becoming the four websites blasting ads into your brainstem that we have today. He just saw it years before anyone else. In 2016, he wrote a book called The Attention Merchants, which put the current, high-tech battle for our attention into its historical context, from the earliest days of the advertising industry to posters on walls, to television and radio advertisements, to social media today.

This book came out years before any of the current crop of books about our attentional crisis, and it literally set the agenda for that conversation today. And by the way, in that book, he predicts that Netflix was going to add ads years before they actually did, once again, extremely prescient. And if that was not enough, Tim, also. wrote a definitive book about the history of monopoly capitalism and antitrust in America called The Curse of Bigness. In that book, he charts how we used to fight against monopolies in this country because we

understood that corporate concentration was not just bad for, you know, consumer prices. It wasn't just an economic issue, but it was also bad for democracy. Along with Lena Khan's seminal essay on Amazon's antitrust paradox, Tim's work helped kicked off a new antitrust movement in this country. literally causing a sea change in the way the legal profession thinks about monopolies. And to boot, he even went to go work for Biden's White House on tech competition policy to put some of his ideas into practice, which, you know, might have explained why he wasn't available to come on the podcast for a couple years.

Well, after a run of incredibly influential, readable, fascinating books, Tim is out with the new one. Yeah, that's right. It's a new Tim Wu drop, y'all. In that book, The Age of Extraction, Wu looks at how huge, tech companies have shifted from providing us cool new stuff for practically free to extracting what they can from us, whether that's our money, our private data, or our time, the very stuff of our life. You know, for the shit that I care about in the world that I like to talk about, Tim is one of the

most important public intellectuals on the planet. So I am just so grateful to have him on the show today. Before we get into this interview, I want to remind you that if you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week. That URL is patreon.com slash Adam Conn over five bucks a month. Gets you every episode of this show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I'll read your name and the credits at the end of the show. And you want to come see me do stand-up comedy live on the road.

Coming up soon, I'm headed to Houston, Texas, Sacramento, California, San Francisco, California, La Jolla California, Kansas City, Missouri. And on April 18th, I am recording my new hour of stand-up comedy. at the Den Theater in Chicago. I know on past episodes of this podcast, I said I was recording it in San Francisco. We had to move where we were taping the show because of production concerns.

We're still going to be doing the shows in San Francisco. We're just not going to be pointing cameras at them. Instead, we were going to be taping the special at the Den Theater, April 18th. Head to Adamconover.com.net for all those tickets. And now please welcome Tim Wu to the show. Tim, thank you so much for being on the show. Yeah, it's great to be here.

I don't know if you know this year, a little bit of a white whale for me, or you have been on this show, because I've read a number of your books over the years. They've really informed my thinking for the attention merchants. I read the curse of bigness. I've not read the master switch, but I'm like familiar with the argument and I think about it all the time. And I've wanted to get you on the show in the past, but I think you have often been too busy actually in the bowels of the government putting policy into place, which is very rare for an author, for a policy author, you know, to actually go and and get involved in the in the actual issue.

And I guess I want to start by by asking, like, you know, when you look at your career, like, does that feel remarkable to you at all that you've been able to, you know, actually influence policy or, you know, get your hands on the levers in some cases? Because that's in many ways the academics dream, right? Yeah, I guess I have like a dual identity. Although I think both of them are like Clark Kent, basically. two different clerk kents

he just puts on a different pair of glasses and a different tie to go to a different office building yeah no i mean growing up i i've always admired the kind of people who were thinkers and then also doers like lewis brandeis is a classic example um you know many of the like james pretentious but like james madison like you know these guys thought hard they had ideas

and they had to try to figure out and steer towards their ideas. And, you know, that was kind of my dream. So in some ways, it's been, it's kind of worked out, although, you know, with usual challenges of things failing and nothing rather going the way you wanted to. Of course. But, you know, for somebody who has charted how, you know,

are legal ideas as a culture change, for instance, around antitrust and how a sea change like that can affect policy, for you to have sort of been the beginning of a sea change in the other direction or been a part of that wave is like pretty remarkable because I've spoken to so many cultural historians, legal historians, scholars who are like, hey, here's what happened. And now we're living in the wreckage of the atomic bomb that nobody knew went off, right? Yeah, yeah. But to be able to say, and let's steer back and actually make a little bit of progress is pretty remarkable. Have you felt the progress on some of these issues, any of the ones that you've covered? Yes, definitely.

I mean, again, I took inspiration from the progressive era, some of the New Deal people. I mean, there were a lot of people there who had ideas and were like, you know, we have a problem. We need to face it. And frankly, if there's one thing, I think we have had success in, it is moving to the forefront these questions about things like affordability, undue market power, and the idea that these are monopoly problems, and that the United States has laws that are designed, you know, to address them, fix them, fight them. And that has basically been a challenge since, since, frankly, the tea party, when we threw the tea off the ship, you know, like this is something, in a way, my job is sort of

to remind Americans that we have a tradition of. fighting monopoly. Like to say we have always been suspicious of private power, completely uncontrolled, it doesn't mean we don't let it go for a while sometimes. You know, we had the gilded age, but then we kind of break it down and let it start again. And, you know, if I have any success, it's kind of reminding us of our own traditions. And, you know, and I've been trying to change things in a way that is not like a one-year thing, but like is a 20-year cycle. So that's what I've been naming for and had some success. Well, your books have been so clarifying for me because you have this way of explaining,

you know, when we have a sense of there's something wrong in the world, there's something wrong in our economy, you know, I feel like everybody is getting screwed. You have a way of explaining exactly what is happening in a way that shapes for communicators like me gives us a framework to work under. And that's why I'm so excited every time you have a new book out. Your new book is called The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. What is your essential argument in this book?

Yeah, the argument, I mean, it's a book about the tech platforms and their rise. And the book is an examination or a question of what the hell happened to the idea that the Internet was going to make everyone rich and broaden prosperity and also make every country a democracy. You know, what happened? Yeah. Or just be a fun place, just be a fun place to hang out and make stuff with your friends, which is what we all thought it was going to be in like 2002, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the 90s, the thousands, you know, what happened to, you know, the dream of the 90s? That's kind of the, that's the question the book is asking. And the answer is that everyone thought everything was going to be awesome, you know, and we thought the reason it was going to be awesome,

was because there was these incredible new platforms that were going to let everybody interconnect with everyone and find your friends or sell stuff or talk or speech or whatever. But those guys, the platforms gathered the power. I mean, we kind of know that, but this is the story of how it happened. And the argument is that we have gone from sort of an age of, I guess, enablement into an age of extraction and an age where we have sort of allowed there to be middlemen for almost everything we do who take a big cut in almost everything we do and that that is impoverishing us and threatens our future prosperity. So that that is basically the arc of this of this book.

And there's a little bit about how to do about it, which I'm sure we'll get to that at one point. So what are some examples of these platforms? When you say the middlemen that take a chunk, the first one that comes to mind for me is Apple's cut on any purchase that you make through one of their apps for a digital good, that they provide this platform by which I'm connected with software developers who want to sell me software or services, but Apple is going to take in sometimes a 30%, 33% cut of that income, just for providing the platform, which is massive.

It's onerous, right? In fact, I have this problem. I'm monetized on Patreon. And Apple recently said they were going to start applying that to people subscribing to me via the Patreon app and I would have to raise my prices by 30% just as a individual person making, you know,

a one person living on the platform. Yeah, I mean, Apple is a good example, the Apple App Store. You know, we kind of took for granted. Everything be 30%. When, if you like roll back time a little bit and you're talking about like putting your website on the old web or you're even talking about

you're writing software for Microsoft Windows back in the 90s, you know, that the number there is zero. And the reason, frankly, that, you know, so many companies are able to get their start, let's take Google, let's take, you know, they were paying zero as opposed to 30% to somebody else. But actually, I don't think Apple is even the most onerous. Amazon sellers, the story of the Amazon selling platform, which, you know, often these stuff is hidden from consumers.

but the sellers feel it is really kind of the, I guess, the poster, the case that is central. Because when you go back, you know, talking about the dream of the 90s. Yeah. One of the big dream of the 90s was that, you know, all across country, anyone who had, you know, a new invention, new idea was going to be able to sell a product on the Amazon marketplace. And, you know, Amazon set up this thing, frankly, pretty genius in some ways. You know, they store your stuff. They fulfill the orders.

They did all kinds of stuff. And, you know, at about 2012 or so, in my view, it was actually pretty much a deliverance on that dream. I have stories of, you know, people in the book, I have stories of people, you know, some Barbara in Michigan who starts selling hair products on the side and somebody's making millions of dollars. And like, you know, like that kind of story.

And the whole idea is that retail would be redone and people would be able to make a ton of money, which is important in a country which has so much inequality. and so many challenges around class. Yeah. And I remember, I just want to say I remember using Amazon in around 2012, and it just sort of felt like, oh, they've removed the friction from me buying things. They've made the delivery seamless, the return seamless, and I have access to all these products.

They don't need to set up their own separate web store with all of their own fulfillment and everything. And it felt like, oh, well, life's just a little bit better because they sort of made it, made it work well. Yeah. And it was before we saw all the bad effects that they would then go on to extract. How did that happen? Let me get into that a little bit if you don't mind because the numbers matter.

And you talk about 30 with Apple. You know, Amazon then, I mean, it was doing a lot and it was charging around 20%. The change is once they got everybody kind of locked in, they started turning all the dials. And nowadays, it's over 50%. It's worse than brick and mortar for a lot of sellers. Wow. sell on Amazon. And the worst part about it is this sponsored, you know, if you go to Amazon, you search and you get all these sponsored links and weird payments. So that product, that one weird

little trick where they have sellers bidding against each other to bid down their margins, in 2024 that earned Amazon $56 billion, just that, $56 billion, for something that makes the search worst. So you're paying collectively. 56 billion. Last year it was 70 billion that we are all collectively playing sellers and everyone to make search worse and degrade the product. That is the kind of extraction that I'm talking about. And for those who don't know, just break down what that looks like. You're the seller and Amazon is incentivizing you to lower your prices in order to compete with. No, no, no. So let me break it down. So let's say you're selling, I don't try to think of a product, lamps.

and you got a lamp and you want to be the first thing that shows up when someone searches for, you know, bedside lamp on Amazon. So you have to bid for that position to be the first search result and to have the sort of sponsored result. And you're bidding against other lamp manufacturers. And so those fees for that bidding for sellers have amounted to some $70 billion in revenue. Got it. Last year. And to make the search worse. And the search is worse because we're not getting like a neutral search result.

We are getting someone has paid to appear at the top, which is just less accurate as a search for us, the consumer. Yeah. But mainly it's just an extraction device for the sellers. And so like that Barbara is talking about, he's out of business. A lot of, it's really hard. It's mostly importers of Chinese goods, which are the lowest price. these days that make it there. So anyway, it's just an example of how things have changed,

and it's gone from being this enabling platform, you know, for, you remember in the knots or the 90s, to something extremely extractive. And if you go across every single platform, they are just in high extraction mode, I guess I'd call it. And why do we see these platforms become monopolies, especially across different spheres, like Amazon is a virtual monopoly and online selling,

if you look at the numbers. Google is a monopoly and online search. Apple and Android are a duopoly, but if you look at like sort of what part of the market they serve, they're sort of a monopoly for, you know,

wealthier people buy iPhones, et cetera, you know, like the market segment. Why is there something about like digital platforms that cause them to become monopolies so quickly? Yes.

The economics of platforms, the economic of networks, tend to lead to a single winner. Not always, but usually. I mean, search, so that's number one. And number two, the main platforms, they're not just sitting around. You know, they're creating what are moats or barriers

or, you know, setting up walls to protect themselves. We could talk about AI later and whether the investments in AI have been in part, the digging of a mo. I'll talk about that later. But I think it's both of them. I mean, you know, Amazon's easy. Like once there's one marketplace where all the buyers are and all the sellers are, it's self-perpetuating.

You know, and maybe there'll be some niche like that's here, things like that. But basically, once you've got a critical mass, you have advantages. And then, you know, they do everything they can to prevent people from wanting to leave. Now, there's a lot of ways of doing that, making it a pain, you know, prime subscriptions, whatever it is.

But you kind of just do everything can. One of the things Amazon does is it doesn't allow it seller to sell for less on another platform. So you're not going to find a deal. If you found that table lamp, you're like, huh, maybe I'd go find it cheaper somewhere else. You're not going to find it cheaper somewhere else. Right. So there's a bunch of ways, you know, Google, there was an antitrust against Google. case against Google for all the various ways it paid off people to keep in its position.

Facebook. So, you know, there's one way or another. Art means artificial and natural they've held on to monopoly power. Yeah, we feel this when we're on the internet, right? Like I am one of those people I try to avoid buying things on Amazon as much as I can. I always look for another source. And a lot of the time, I feel like this is crazy. I'm driving myself nuts, trying to find somewhere else.

to buy something basic when Amazon's like right there, like pulsating. And that's because I've read your fucking books. And I'm like maximally educated about this stuff. For the average person who's just busy and not as much of an angry guy about it, of course they're going to go buy on Amazon. Like and then by the way, the other half the time when I'm using those other sites,

there seem to be monopoly effects there. Shopify is running every single non-Amazon site that I ever go to. Yeah. Which, you know, perhaps there, I don't know any. details, but, you know, perhaps they're doing some of the same extraction. Is this sort of platform economics unique to digital systems, or are there, you know, precursors? Oh, yeah, there's many precursors. So one of the things that I'm trying to understand in this book is the central role of the

platform in any civilization or any society. Now, there's a little move aside from extraction a little bit, just this general idea. And I think when you look at any successful prosperous civilization, there's always some space in the middle somewhere, physical, like in ancient Greece, it was like the city square, the agora, ancient Rome, Main Street in America. There's always necessarily places where buying and selling happens also where speech happens, where people talk, meet, whatever. And it's my kind of my belief that the differences in the central platforms of a civilization

do a lot to determine what it's like. Is it more open? Is there more freedom? Is there a middle class, even? Is there a class of independent merchants? Or is it all just a couple big guys? And I will say that, you know, the whole idea of the early, internet, the dream of the knots of the 90s, was to have these open kind of spaces and platforms,

everyone could speak and everyone could sell stuff and it was going to decentralize our world, make everybody rich and peaceful and in love with each other, and everything was going to be awesome. Yep. And a big part of that was kind of a class or economic thing. This was going to create an eternally profitable middle and upper middle class. And I think the effect and sort of a verdict on our civilized. is instead, you know, it has gone in reverse and has turned into this kind of, to change

the metaphor, like a giant sucking machine that moves all the money into a couple of companies. And so it's had the opposite effect of the decentralization of money we hoped for. Right. I can see that pattern in a lot of ways. The one that comes most quickly to my mind because of the business that I'm in of media, you know, I think about the media ecosystem I grew up in in the early 90s pre-internet. And, you know, there's X number of media conglomerates, there's X number of cable and broadcast stations, there's X number of newspapers.

If you're not working for one of those companies, nobody hears what you have to say, unless you go photocopy it yourself and hand it out on the street, right? Yeah. And so the internet comes along, people say, oh my God, now anybody can have their voice heard.

And literally my career was built on that as a comedian. Now, we were just making videos uploading them to the internet. People saw them. We didn't have to go ask Comedy Central to give us a TV show, right? Yeah. But, and in a way that's borne out because, hey, look at YouTube, there's millions of people who are getting their voices out there who would not otherwise.

But what has happened economically? YouTube is the only platform. It is, you don't have a dozen, a couple hundred cable channels anymore. You just have YouTube where you go for all forms of content other than high-end narrative scripted, which is still done by Netflix and HBO, Max, etc. but every other kind of television is all on YouTube. And yes, there's many voices, but YouTube has taken most of the money.

They're all paid less than the TV, you know, stars were, or, you know, the camera people, the writers, all those people. And all of the funds is like being sucked up to YouTube directly. And they control the entire system. They control the algorithm and control who gets seen. I mean, you've captured, you are like part of my. book, basically. You kind of live the dream, but if I was in charge, you would be a lot richer. I don't know how rich you are. Maybe you're rolling in it. So I, and I'm sure you've done well.

But I'm trying to say that we, you know, the dream was to create a system that would work to bring a lot of voices on and not be like an open system. And we created that. And in some ways, it was a brilliant success. I mean, that's the thing about this book. There's like a part one and a part two. The part one was in many ways of brilliant success, like bloggers, you know, comics, like, you know, a lot of people kind of were able to get out there. But the question is the economic setup, like, why the hell should YouTube be getting all the money on the, for, you know, the people are doing the work, if that makes sense. I'm not, you know, I'm kind of sort of radicalized you. It's like, what, what happened here? It's like, it's like, like tenants who were renovating their apartment, you know,

tenants who are renovating their apartment. I say, that's somewhere in the book. Like, you know, who's doing the real work? And so the people deserve to be rewarded are you, the small sellers, you know, the blog, the people who make this system great. And instead, somehow it's like, you know, the owners of the plantations. Maybe that's overstating it. But, you know, it's all backwards. And that is basically the core of what this book is about. It's like, it is a great design. It's just somehow we let all the money get taken. Yeah. And I'd love to I'd love to say on YouTube a second because I also think it's instructive.

I mean, first of all, I do make a fine living. I do fine. But the main difference to me from going from television to YouTube is how well everyone else around me does. You know, when I was working in television, we had a team of 100 people, all of whom or most of whom earned a union wage. Right.

But, you know, in this world, it's like we're doing it with, you know, we got a couple freelancers and we pay everybody as best we can. But like the overall infrastructure, you can tell there's less. money in this than there was in the television industry. And by the way, we're on the high end of success. What you got to remember is all because people think of, oh, Mr. Beast makes so much money, blah, blah, blah. The long tail of like 95% of people are not making money, but a huge number of

people are watching their content, you know. I assume the same thing is true on Amazon. Lots of people are buying stuff from smaller sellers who are sort of not really turning a profit. You know, for every success story, there's like a hundred people. who are like, why aren't I doing better even though people are buying my shit or watching my shit or whatever it is? And the last thing that YouTube really clarifies for me thinking about is YouTube did solve a big problem, which was that video was like onerously difficult to distribute on the internet. I was in a sketch comedy group. We were literally moving from server to server trying to find someplace that would host our 50 megabyte quick time files without collapsing one of our video.

got popular. YouTube comes along. They say, we'll build the infrastructure, we'll host the video for free. Great service. And we'll split the ad revenue with you. Wow, amazing. But somewhere along the line, that became the only website that does that. They never, they never had a viable competitor at any moment. And that was what was always baffled me. And I was like, that should have been for us a canary in the coal mine of the internet. Because that started around 2005. The internet still seemed like a very distributed place. But, but, like, YouTube was the first website I remember where I was like, wait, there's only one site on the entire internet for this type of thing. So tell me about how that kind of, you know, how does that happen, you know, why was there never a number two? Yeah, I mean, I think

some things do have kind of, you know, features that make them almost a natural monopoly. Let me give in a comparison. I mean, you're talking about the things. So, I mean, this is about the whole thing about my book. It's like platforms are essential, but platforms can take too much. That's like the message. And, and, you know, something that reminds me of is like the electric company, you know, the electric grid. So, you know, you got the electric grid. In fact, I can see in the background, you got a lamp that's on. I mean, think of all the amazing thing that it makes possible and like you couldn't do without it. And before it was a big pain in the ass. Yes. But we don't, and in fact, there's, in every area, it's basically one electric company. But we don't say things like, okay, well, they're so great,

they should be able to charge whatever they want. Or they're so great, you know, they should be to do whatever they want and, you know, totally control this world and make all the money. You know, we're actually pretty careful about what we let the electric company do and how much money we let them make because you can see that if the electric company could ask for a cut from everything, you know. Right. Imagine they could ask for a cut. Hey, you're having to, having a nice show. How'd you feel about having the power grow up halfway through? Yeah, yeah. Well, you need the power for the cameras to run. So you owe us 30% of your income. Yes. Yeah. Um, uh, you know, how do you like, uh, how do you like having heating at night?

You know, whatever it is. Like, I mean, when you think about electric company had more power than you two. But we're like, geez, these guys are way too powerful. They need to be, you know, this is the 30s talking. Like this is FDR talking like, we can't have the electric company doing whatever the hell it wants. they need to be, you know, controlled. And I think in the Internet, we've reached the point where you have certain things that are just essential. I mean, you can run around and go crazy and say, I'm not going to use electricity,

but then you're like a hermit in the desert with your little solar panel or whatever. Yep. Right? And you can run around as an engineer or say, I hate YouTube, I'm not going to use them or whatever. But, you know, then you're talking to your friends and family. Look, I went to the DMV the other day and my cell phone was an essential part of my DMV experience,

just to literally get my number to wait in line to go talk to the ladies. who then photocopied my documents. But they have made the cell phone, scan the QR code or else you're not getting your appointment today. And so that is how much of a utility these digital services are to us. You cannot live daily life without them. So I'm saying we got to figure out what are the new utilities in our life.

What are the essentials of like modern living? Instead of saying, look, I respect the fact you, you know, try to go around Amazon. But instead we should say, look, people are going to, there's just like, this is the story. and can they really just take whatever they want? And at this point, our answer has been, yeah, go for it, man. Do whatever you want, and you're going to invent the future, so we have to let you do it. We never said that with electricity. We never said, oh, these guys need to be able to charge any price they want, you know,

because they're going to invent AI. I don't know, whatever it's going to be. But they're going to invent the computer. They never invented the computer. They didn't invent the refrigerator. So that's point. Can I make another point if I'm not going on too much of a brain? I want you to make all the points that you want.

Yeah, I mean, and also part of this and your whole story about YouTube and, you know, how much everyone's making is a broader question about the kind of world we want to live in, what kind of economy we want. Because with this great, I mean, these technologies are amazing. They create new possibilities. They've generated huge amounts of wealth. But somehow we have done nothing to structure it so that the people who need to make money are making money. You know, we've set them up to be a machine. My Amazon story tells the story. I mean, Amazon sellers are usually these small businesses who, you know, often in the middle of the country or wherever. But all the profit of the whole system is going to Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and we've just

structured it badly. There's a huge amount of money out there, and it's all going to a small number of people. And, you know, it's even structured worse than the old industries, because at least in those days, they had unions. Yeah. And also in those days, were there these sort of titanic billionaire figures telling you us, you need to let me do whatever I want because I'm inventing the future and, you know, you have to get out of our way and all the things that the tech titans say, you know,

to try to say, well, regulation is just going to stifle, you know, us creating the AI that's going to cure every disease known to man? I mean, to be honest, they tried to say it, but they're like, you know, I've read some of the old stuff. And AT&T, the old phone monopoly was always like that. It's like, this is too complicated. No one should touch this. We only understand it. And AT&T back in the day, they were like, basically, we've thought about it and like answering machines are not something people should have. Literally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They invented the answering machine basic technology in the 30s. Wow. It only reached people in the 80s, in late 70s, 80s, after the government forced them to let people connect. Because they controlled the network and they said, this, this by the was going back to your work years ago on net neutrality. They controlled the network and said, you're not allowed to connect one of these devices to the network. And as a result, we didn't get to have it just because they said so, even though the technology existed and people could have used it. Yeah.

And there were two reasons they had. One is they said, well, it could send some shock. the line and there could be a repairman, you know, standing on a pole and fall to his death. Honestly, that would be sick. I would love to do that. And then the other reason they said was they said, well, if you can record conversations that are happening on the telephone, people aren't going to use the telephone because we did a private, you know, I guess listening session or something.

And like 20% of phone conversations are obscene. this on 30s 30s 30s so no one's going to talk on the phone hell yeah people in the 30s they're getting more power to you you go get it

and when you think about it I mean I wasn't around back then but maybe there wasn't a lot pinky pinky going over the telephone I don't know but they were like definitely definitely oh boy I haven't seen my wife

Clara in 20 years I've been in the city working hard but I'll get to call her every Friday and we got our time together. Like, that's, that's wonderful. But there, but these are clearly invented reasons to not allow the technology. Yeah, that's your point.

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Give your thighs the VIP treatment they deserve with Chubbies. Support our show and tell them we sent you. Was it a matter of these companies, the electric company and the phone company, et cetera, we're doing clear abuses. And then we as a nation rose up and said, hold on a fucking second. We're going to pass some laws. I mean, now if you're the heat company, right, there are laws that control. You cannot turn someone's heat off in winter, right?

Yeah. You got to put them on a payment plan. Because we, and I imagine, well, people are freezing to death and they passed some laws in New York City or wherever else. Is that the way it worked with these platforms? I mean, yeah. I mean, I think the upshot of the progressive era New Deal was like we can't trust private industry to do what's in the best interest of Americans. You know, this has to be a conversation. Or, you know, this has to be something where they, you know, subject to some kind of rules.

And, you know, in our time, we've been essentially, I mean, there are no rules that are binding on tech platforms. You know, nothing. Even like efforts, when I was in the White House, we tried to pass some very basic rules to try to protect children online. Yeah. No luck. No, could not get Congress to bring anything like that to a vote. Even like children's privacy, like you would think we're like, surely a law that proposes that children, should be better protected online, the privacy protected, you know, you don't have people spying on

them, maybe that could pass. And like one reason or another, which, you know, Congress doesn't tell you why it's not doing things, but we could not get a vote on anything. I mean, I think the reason Congress doesn't do anything is like maybe even more than they can explain. Like, it's a deep dysfunction in American democracy. But also, this issue seems particularly difficult to get regulation around. And this, this connects in an interesting way with the dream of the 90s to me. Because when I remember the way people talked about the internet,

it was as a lawless frontier. That was the appeal. It was, hey, there's porn. No one knows if you're a dog. Like, you can say what you want.

And in retrospect, I'm like, oh yeah, that's just because no laws happen to have been passed about a new technology. created this wide open space all these companies could rush into maybe we could say that's a good thing to some extent

like like you know fresh and stuff up but it's been 30 fucking years like it's been it's been a third of a century I would have to imagine that a third of a century after the invention of electricity they were starting to say hey let's make a law or two

but like it still is anethema I mean the last big internet law I can think of is like literally from the 90s the decency acts. Then there was the big one of the EU that makes them do the cookies cookies pop up everywhere.

And that's about it. Yeah. That's basically right. You know, I mean, so I'm sympathetic to the idea and invent something new, like let it run wild for a while, see what happens.

Like I'm not into like, oh, shut everything down. Like, you know, when someone invented the car or whatever, it's like, let's see what happens. But then when people start running other people over. Killed a lot of people. Yeah.

And like dying in like your 20, years into it and like children are addicted to stuff and you know you have problems what you know you you name or or basically or actually I mean our problem is it just extracts too much yeah there's just like too few people just take too much I also think we have problems with which with children we also problems with privacy um you know no privacy laws at all have been passed um there was one child's early early children's privacy law that was passed we've done nothing on that in 30 years and it's like yeah, I mean, the cars are running people over. Maybe it's time to think about it.

But they keep saying, so they're like, oh, no, no, no, we're going to invent this other thing. So if you even dare, you know, mess with us at all, you're going to sacrifice the future. There's a sort of blackmail story that the tech platforms have where they're like, you can do that if you, you know, if you really want to, but then we're not going to give you the future. You know. Well, and I think about the fact that if you're looking around the American economy, like, and as a politician, you're like, the tech industry is the industry that is booming and growing in the country. This is our pride and joy. So it's understandable they would have political power. But the extent of it, I mean, you bring up not protecting kids.

I also remember in the 90s, I guess I was the kind of kid who read the newspaper. I literally remember reading an article about this when I was a child, like 10 years old. there was a law passed that limited how many commercials could be on kids TV. And if you go back and watch like a kids TV show from like 1988, there's 10 minutes a show, there's 20 minutes of commercials. After that law was passed, it's flipped. They had a reasonable number of commercials because the adults of America were like, yes, we care about our children and we're a little worried about they're watching too much shit.

And they passed a law about it. Now the problem is 100 times worse. Kids are being tracked every moment of the day by, extractive tech platforms that are building a profile on them starting from age fucking six or seven and everyone knows it everyone hates it that books are being written about it but nothing is being done about it there's a there's a paralysis about we can it it's like you can't even suggest doing so almost in our political culture yes I mean I was at the front lines of this and like I said I spent six months my life trying to pass very basic laws

you know, with the White House, with President Joe Biden behind me, you know, like, and, you know, I'm, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist, but I was, like, amazed that we couldn't get a vote, like amazed. And, you know, I think, I think it was, frankly, the tech lobby, just killing everything. Yeah. Just like, our lesson is nothing happens to us because that's like the water in the basement. It starts with kids, you know, next thing you know, we'll be under, underpricing. controls or something like that. So yeah, that that that's what that's what I saw firsthand, unable to do anything. I mean, it's so deeply ingrained in the tech industry, this anti-regulation

idea. If I could tell you a little story, I think about this all the time, is I was at a conference in on the East Coast about a year and a half ago that brought together a bunch of tech people, labor people, VC people, thinkers, really interesting conference. Had a great time. I happen to be seated at a table with a couple of people who worked in venture capital in tech.

They're about my age. One of them had founded a company or been involved in a company that I liked. I was like, oh, cool, good to meet you. We're chatting, you know. Something about politics came out. This was before the election, the last election. Something about politics comes up

and they start going, oh, Lena Khan's got to go. Oh, she's got to go. Because she's just killed mergers and acquisitions market. She's just killed it. And, and these are people who share my values on almost everything else, I'm sure. And I said to them, well, well, mergers and monopolies like killed my industry, Hollywood. And so I'm a fan, you know, and they sort of go, oh, all right. And then the conversation stopped there. What it made me realize, though, is, is these people,

I talked to them a little bit more. And the problem was they're like, well, we can start the company, but if we have to be able to sell it to somebody to get our money out, right? Yes. And I was like, oh, their reality is the only thing that they can do after they start a company is sell it to Google or Amazon or two or three other players. They don't even imagine what if we had antitrust enforcement or regulation of any kind. And you could be the next Google, motherfucker. Well, that's right. That's right. I mean, it's just become a totally different from what it was supposed to be, you know, in the 90s is that.

where you start a new company and, you know, you get a bunch of customers you make. The only dream right now is making something that doesn't compete, but it's like a little, neat little compliment or something, and then you get bought out. And on top of that, not only, you know, working the government, did we say, do we not block most murder? We just, we said, don't sell to your most dangerous competitor. In other words, don't let, like, if you're making a new search engine, not that anyone would do that.

Like, maybe it shouldn't be Google that buys it. you know, why did Google get to buy ways? One of the things I talk about in the book, like, what the hell happened with that? Why did Facebook get to buy Instagram? It's most dangerous competitor. Like, okay, sell somebody else. It's not like we're saying don't sell, just don't sell to them. And one thing I want to add to this, I mean, tech is bad enough.

I think their models have spread. That's one thing I talked about in the book, to, you know, housing, healthcare. You know, the extraction imperative, I guess, has become big. one of the big genius, you know, moves of the private equity world over the last of the last 10 years has to buy, you know, is to buy housing and organize that into a platform and make money off rent. And that, you know, I'm just trying to say it's not only a tech problem. It's become, you know, the entire economy. Right. The other businesses are saying, oh, if we can create a platform layer, even, it might not even be using high tech.

we just become big enough of a player that we're the platform. Or they do use tech. Or they do use tech in some ways. They call it a tech platform. And the key is getting in the middle. Like in health care, the whole idea is you want to own the platform that's in between the doctors and the patients. And then, you know, one way. I mean, there's a lot of money in health.

I mean, there's more money in health care than there is in tech, honestly. And if you can get that, so you're kind of squeezing the doctors and squeezing your patients, same time. that is where that billion big dollars lie. And United Health is getting into that. So the whole economy is rushing to get into that middleman position and kind of like, yeah, so anyway, sorry to be so optimistic, but I just want to say it's a problem. That's beyond tech. But that's also like the middleman position, the definition of a middleman,

or let's be equitable, middle person. They can be anybody. The definition of a middleman is that they promote. provide no value. They do nothing but stand in the middle and take a cut. In Hollywood, that's what we call the agents, right? The agents are just like, you got to go through the agents to get to the talent. If you're the talent, you got to go through the agent to get to the network. And literally people in Hollywood are like, look, what are you going to do? You know, like they're the mafia. There they are. You got to deal with them. No one can do

shit. In the Writers Guild, we actually waged, you know, a campaign against the agencies that had a positive effect and made the system a little bit more equitable by using our labor power. Occasionally, a union like that can do something. But if you're an individual actor, you just got to make your peace with it. So if we have an economy where middlemen, everyone is rushing to be a middleman, then we're creating an economy where nobody fucking does anything. Right? Like, it hollows it out. I went to Greece once. Not, Greece. I went to Egypt once. I remember. And then after a while, I was like, they've got some awesome, like ancient monuments and some stuff. And then everyone else in the country is trying to collect

the Baxhish to show you the, you know, like that. That's like what you get at some kind of stage of the economy. It becomes like that. So, you know, on middlemen, like, I wouldn't say they do nothing. Maybe some of the agents do nothing. But, you know, like, I got some good ones. If you're listening, if any of my agents are listening, you're the good ones. And that's why I work with you. It's the rest of them. Now, I'm saying the agents, middleman, the platforms, they all play a role in the economy. Yes. The question is, what's their take?

Just like I said, electricity. I mean, you want electricity. But should electricity be able to be like, hmm, how does $10,000 a month sound? You don't like that price? Okay, why don't you go without electricity, see how you feel about it? And like, agents are actually, yeah, I have agents too, obviously. And, you know, but what's the cut? And, you know, if they're taking half the money.

and we have set up the tech economy and frankly more and more of the entire economy where that is the position everyone wants to get into to be in the middle and squeeze both sides. Frankly, both consumers and producers are getting squeezed. And you see it in farming, I'm broadening from tech,

but we saw this, for example, just take a random industry in the meat processing industry where the people who raise chickens and cows, they're getting squeezed, barely making any money. Meat has gotten extremely expensive. And guess who's making all the money? The meat processors right in the middle,

who are some of the most evil companies, some of the most evil companies. I mean, a farmer can be bad. The meat processors are these mainly international conglomerates that are, I think, the most evil companies I've ever come into contact with. And they have inserted themselves into the middle and squeeze. That's kind of what the other version of what's going on in tech platforms across the economy.

And if I don't want to diagnose where a lot of our problems come from today, you know, affordability, wages, labor. It's in the exaggerated position of the middleman. Right. Thank you for adjusting what I was saying. Going back to agents for a second, you know, like my touring agent knows all the venues. He knows me. He books the thing. He gets 10%.

Equitable middleman, right? There's other examples of representatives in Hollywood. they set up one meeting and they get themselves a much larger percentage in perpetuity. Hey, you didn't actually do any work. And we all know that's inequitable. Those are the ones that we complain about in my business. And that kind of behavior is what, you know, the writers guild went to war with. So it's that.

It's taking too much for doing too little. Tell me a little bit more about what makes meat processors evil. These are the people who are not raising the animals. They're the ones grinding them up and sending them to the supermarket. Yeah. I mean, yeah. They, so, you know, some of the, so they've been, this is an international campaign to develop a tight oligopoly, this cartel of meat processing units. And, you know, some of the stuff they do, there's always, like, there's a scandal every couple years.

Down in Brazil, the major meatpacking conglomerates are actually originate in Brazil. And, you know, they had one scandal where they were, they had this sort of charitable program to feed the, you know, school children. And it turned out they were using like the discarded rotten meat, which then put chemicals in. Jesus. It was like this horrible scandal. They had labor investigations again in Brazil where they were like putting their work, some of their workers, indigenous workers were being like housed with the animals together. They're the ones who cutting down.

When you read about the rainforest being cut down, it's like on the back of forcing farmers to do it. You know, they are a dark, dark, they've been a dark industry for a long time. Maybe it's because your job is like essentially torturing animals that it needs a certain kind of moral. But Tyson's, the chicken, you know, all this factory farming stuff. That is a dark industry. They had the worst COVID outbreaks, like some of the most deaths in America were in workplaces. We're at those places. Yeah.

But how are they squeezing, you know, like the growers and the meat sellers like economically? Yeah, well, so poultry farmers are a great example. So, you know, the way Tyson's other chicken factories or chicken processors work is the people who raise the chickens are not employees. Instead, they're sort of, I guess, they're quasi-independent. I mean, they're independent. They're their own thing, except for they're under very strong contracts. and what they do is they then force the people who are raising chicken to bid against each other in order to get business from Tyson's.

And they have very strong exact specifications, everything they have to do. So they're like employees, they bid their own margins down, and they take advantage of the fact the United States is very generous bankruptcies for small businesses to subsidize the whole model. So does that make sense? They've sort of outsourced the raising of chicken among, you know, And part of what it requires is that basically you raise chicken in these inhumane, crowded conditions.

But then, you know, it's not the meat processors who are doing this. It's the chicken farmers. So it's a really, it's a really dark industry. And, you know, it's first, if you care about animal cruelty, you realize the economics are what caused it. And second, it's just really hard on people. And the end result is that the people raising chicken hardly make any money. We pay huge prices.

and the middleman takes all the money. Wow. And it's through, there's some amount of technology. They are providing a service, but it's through like the contracts and the business innovation of how do we lock these sellers in,

the people, or the chicken raisers in, how do we pit them against each other? How do we take advantage of, uh, U.S. bankruptcy law, uh,

in order to extract as much wealth as we can out. And that is why the prices, uh, price of meat has gone up, for instance, over the last couple years. Yes, I think that that's exactly, that's exactly it. And, you know, I think it's just all, I mean, it's crazy to move from, you know, Amazon or Google, Facebook, whatever, to YouTube to meat processing, but it's all the same model. Yeah.

And when I say the age of extraction, it's the title of the book, it is, you know, an economy-wide phenomenon. And I think what you get in your head, you start to sort of understand it's almost like a private tax. the economy. You know, like if you're paying, if Amazon's making $70 billion or Apple's making all these margins on every transaction, credit card industries like this too, you know, it's just like a tax. The only difference is, you know, with a government tax, it goes to, you know, funding schools or things like this. This goes to like funding corporate, you know, CEO returns and shareholder.

returns. And look, I mean, some of that's okay. I think people want to make money, but we've got a real imbalance in the system. Right. I mean, what it does is it makes society more unequal, right? Because, I mean, if it's good for Amazon stock market, you know, like a lot of Americans are invested in the stock market, but a lot of Americans are not. A lot of Americans work for Amazon. A lot of Americans don't. And so it centralizes the money among people who are involved in these companies versus the ones who are not. I'm reminded of, uh, I went to a different conference in San Francisco last year. And I was like, everybody, I'm talking to who's my age, who works in the tech industry, they're also fat and happy. You know, everyone's like,

oh, you're working for Google. Oh, what are you doing? Oh, I started a company. Oh, I sold it. Oh, what, what, you know, who's your interior designer, you know? And in L.A., everyone says, I haven't worked in three years. How are you, how are you making it through? I'm like, these, this is, these are the two major cities in California. And it's because the one industry sucked all the money out of the other industry. They extracted the money from the entertainment industry. Now, everybody is watching content on YouTube or on Netflix where the people making it are getting less. And the company that you watch it through is getting more.

It's great if you work for that company. You're like, hey, life's good for me. But not if you are the 70% of people who maybe don't have a stake in that. Yeah. And I think you're, you know, thinking of this as an like overgrown agent of extraction is not bad. I mean, look, no, because Netflix, look, Netflix does, there's some good tech in there. They pioneered some stuff.

I like Netflix. And in fact, they were an important innovator. It's just the question is, how much basically should Silasana Valley take, you know, for providing the infrastructure? Yeah. I mean, how much should they take? And should it be like all the money or should it be a little more balanced? And somehow we've arrived at this idea.

We've gotten one way or another where it's like, no, they get whatever they want. And if you don't like that, obviously you hate the future. You know, my wretched Uncle Salvatore was right. What I do is not a job. Cracking my little jokes up on stage, dancing around like some kind of clown and making little videos for the so-called internet. That's not a job.

Yeah, you're right, Uncle Salvatore. It's a business. That's right, I'm constantly paying freelancers, whether that's writers, researchers, or video crews to help me put together all kinds of projects just like the one you're watching right now. So legally, I'm a business owner. In your face, Uncle Sal.

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And we gave up on that. But I read that book as did many other people. Many people read Lena Kahn's work. Conversation started to change. Joe Biden comes in. You guys are, and people who think like you are sort of become part of the administration. I'm looking around and go, holy shit, we're going to do something about this. Amazing.

And then what happens is the tech industry in my, you tell me if you, if you, any of the sounds off. The tech industry has sort of a violent reaction to the whiff of regulation basically turns against the entire Democratic Party like stops you guys in stops you guys from doing a lot of things you were trying to do. Turns against the Democratic Party.

Supports the other party, supports fascism and is now fully in the boat where the people who run the companies were talking about they all went to the premiere, the Melania movie last week, you know? So the, our first attempt to regulate in the way that we haven't done in 30 years resulted in a political realignment in the entire tech industry

that made fighting against it even harder because now they're all radicalized against what you're trying to do in a way that they weren't before. Does that look wrong? And what the fuck do we do about it? I think it's not a bad summary, honestly. In fact, because you're sort of an outsider to it, it's right. Like we said, hey, listen, you guys, we poked a bear in a sense and said, there's all these laws you've been breaking for the last 10 years.

You know, you've got Google, you have been protecting your monopoly illegally. You know, Facebook, you acquired all these companies illegally. And, you know, we launched the war again. And they got very, very angry. And they said, you know, all that stuff we said about believing in peace and democracy and, you know, an equal. rights and, you know, the rights of women. And that, that, that, that, that, that, that was secondary. Our primary belief is, you know, we should never, ever be told what to do ever by government. That is the like, er value. And frankly, Anne Rand was who we believed in all

along, not like Kat Stevens. Or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King or any of the other, you know, yeah, et cetera. Yeah. Nietzsche, and, I mean, What thing that's happened in Silicon Valley when I go there, they have become kind of crazy. I mean, there's kind of a religious side to it that freaks me out when I'm there. Some of this connects with AI, which we haven't talked about. But there's a sense of some of them that, like, when you're messing with technology, you're messing with what God wants. You know, God has this plan for humanity. And if you block my merger, like, essentially, you're, you're, you're, you're,

you're committing blasphemy against what God wants to happen. Like, that's a little strong. But if you read Mark Andres and stuff, like, it's like that. It's like a religious fanatic. And so, like, somehow this has gotten very core to the belief structure in Silicon Valley. You could hear it in the echoes of, you know, I was a techno optimist, you know, in the 90s and mid-2000s. Me too, me too. And I was there for a lot of it.

And there were maxims, like, information wants to be free, like that kind of thing, which was always over. overused, but like, it's true to an extent and it has an optimistic flavor. But it's like if you then believe 20 other maxims like that and you combine those into a worldview, then you get to a sort of like quasi-religion that you're talking about. And when you look at the way like Elon Musk talks, he almost exclusively talks in those things. He says, humanity must become a multi-planetary species. And the only way to do that is to blah. And the only way to do that is to blah.

And all the way down to, I must buy Twitter. And, you know, you must let me do it, right? It is so saturated there. Yes, it's a change. You know, I also, I mean, part of why I wrote this book was to try to examine my own optimism and my own belief in better future through technology, which was like, if you, you know, grabbed me in early 2000s, I was like drinking the Kool-Aid big time and like totally believed in it. and thought that we were on a path, you know, to a better future. And in many ways we were. And we just took a corner.

And ideologically, as you're saying, it has been the rise of figures like Musk and Teal. Teal had this theory that many of his opponents are the Antichrist, who, like, I don't think he called Lena Khan the Antichrist, but he called, like, other figures. Greta, the climate change was a, the antichrist for some, he believes she's the antichrist for some reason. Wow. These are supposed to be people who are like

the intellectuals of Silicon Valley are talking like Martin Luther on a bad day or more like the guy on the side of the street. I mean, one of the things I dislike about the United States is you're supposed to listen to people because they're because they're rich. Like somehow like their ideas are supposed to be good. But anyway, I think we got wondered a bit here from like, what

should we do about it? Your summary is correct. the only optimism that I have now in this respect. I mean, I still, in some ways, I still believe in the dream of the 90s at some level. I do believe and have some faith that we could have platforms that, you know, are, as we said, better than the old like TV networks or whatever, that are a place for people who are creative or talented

or want to sell something to start. But the balance need to be restored where the people are doing the work, get the money. And so there's two ways you do that. One is antitrust. One is anti-monopoly movement. One is putting a lot of pressure and creating room for competitors, new ideas.

I mean, it is really hard to start a competitor to any of these companies now. They will just squash you. Yeah. And, you know, that was one of our movement. But the thing we did not get as far in that I think we should is what I said earlier,

we need to figure out what are the utilities of our time and start treating them like utility. Like if YouTube is the only show in town, we need to just like, okay, it is the only show in town. Let's make sure that the people who are actually doing the work,

that it's a show that creates the kind of world we want. Where you can have a middle-class life in the creative industries and not be like the star, but be someone in the industries. Because, I mean, that part of what makes, America, great, is the idea you could have a life in the creative industries and it be, you know, not you're impoverished, you know, and you're 23 years old, you know, but you have a

full life. And that's what we need to restore. And, you know, and I think, I hate to say that's a job of government, but there's nothing else powerful enough to force the reckoning that the people want. And so, you know, the big reckoning is what we need to do. I mean, there's, there's labor unions, but labor unions also need the support of the government to some extent. I also think we need to bring labor. Labor needs to, you know, the fact that, frankly, the most tech industry is on, in some ways, the creative industry is a little better on this. Tech industry is completely ununionized.

And the fact that, I mean, labor has just gotten screwed for the last 40 years. And that's a big, big part of the equation. That's a private answer, honestly. Yeah. Not government. Yeah, I mean, we've, the labor union has, the labor movement has gotten, you know, complacent and has ceased to organize. But if you, I think there's a growing recognition that we have to do something. And if you, you know, if you look at the early Hollywood, right, it was the studio system.

It was vertically integrated. They were screwing everybody who made the thing. And, you know, they owned everything from the theater to the production to the scripts themselves. And through a combination of the government literally breaking those companies up or saying, you know, you can't both make the movie and own the theater chain. And then the workers saying, all right, we need to band together and, you know, create unions. Through a combination of those things, we got the flourishing entertainment industry of the 70s, which is sort of part of the high watermark of, you know, when we had maximal creativity

and, you know, talent participation in the profits. And then we backslid, but you are starting to see finally belatedly, you know, the unions look at YouTube and go, oh, we got to do all that again. Yeah. You know, we got to do it a second time. It's just going to take a huge, a huge change in consciousness because these companies have successfully set up an entirely new production pipeline where they've like weaponized children around the world who are making shit for them for free.

And we got to somehow convince them, hey, you should all ban together into a union with us. Yeah. It's going to be a long road. But, you know, be clear what I'm saying here. I'm not saying, all right, you know, have government coming in and run everything like in a communist state, I don't necessarily think that'll be great. My argument is you need to balance the power. The private power is out of control, needs to be balanced, and is, you know, moving us closer

to a feudal society. Yes. And somehow we've sort of accepted that by saying the take can be whatever these companies want. Okay, I have to hear your take on AI. We've mentioned it a couple times. And as someone has been around the tech industry for a very long time, has the thing about all these ideas, just what is your view on this piece of the industry?

Yeah. So let me like put out two possible futures of what AI or AI future could look like. So obviously like technologies here. One is here, I'll give you the optimistic take, first of all. The optimistic take is that AI becomes an augmentive technology. And, you know, each of us, it's like each of us has another assistant to do work for us and makes us more productive. We're able to do more stuff. And frankly, we, you know, a little bit like any other tool. It becomes like useful to us. Like we got more productive when farmers were able to plow land, for example. That's the optimistic story. The pessimistic story is, I think, has two parts. One, is it just replaces entirely enormous numbers of workers and enormous numbers of jobs are gone.

And we're talking about 10, 20, 30 percent unemployment and like civil disorder, uprisings, revolution, war and death. Or, and similarly, related to this, that current AI spending is yet another tactic to make sure that the monopoly power of the main platforms cannot be challenged. You know, when you think like, why is Amazon spending a fortune? Why is X spending a fortune? Why is every? Because they want to build a deeper moat so that only people who can play at scale and

AI can be in this game. So those are the more pessimistic stories. You know, that's kind of my take. In terms of what, like, is being done about it, the kind of regulatory conversation, what to the degree it exists, it's kind of like focused on the wrong stuff. It's about the conversation about whether robots are going to take over the planet and, like, existential risk and all that. And for some reason, that's been like the main topic of conversation, which is a cool conversation at like midnight, you know, maybe if you're stoned. Like, you know, are the robots going to take over?

Then what will you do? What's your favorite Isaac Asmo of Law of Robotics? You know, it's like that kind of bullshit. Well, and the reason it's driving the conversation is because that's what the tech industry is feeding us. Like, that is what they go on the podcasts and say. They go, oh, well, what we really got to worry about is that we're awakening the demon or whatever. That's what Elon famously said, like 10 years ago because it distracts from the real shit they're actually doing. Yeah, I mean, because it's cool to talk about.

It's like science fiction. And so, yeah, you get like a conversation where the like, you know, progressives, I guess, are like, oh, We need to make sure that, and look, I may say for the record, I'm not in favor of a robot takeover. I've seen Terminator and it's not what I'm looking for. We could do worse, but okay. Actually, you know, it's starting to reconsider. But anyway, but you know, you get a progressive,

and the progressive is like, okay, you know, we need to be worried about the robot takeover. And then the, you know, mainstream person is like, no, no, no, we need to have the future. But that conversation totally neglects the economics. And like, what does this do to what it means to work in this country? What does this, frankly, mean for who holds the power? And what are the, you know, who decides the future, frankly. And, you know, right now it's like the same four or five, six guys, the same story. And, you know, I'm not, yeah, I'm not convinced. So that.

That's what I think about AI. So the big question is whether AI is going to challenge tech industry and whether it's going to put everybody out of work. Whether it's going to challenge the tech industry. Yes. I mean, it's possible. So that's something. Oh, like AI viewed as a separate industry from the existing tech industry?

I mean, if it's going to challenge. So I'll bring in the book that you, the one book you haven't read, which is Master Switch. Okay. Which is all about the cycles of technological innovation. And, you know, one way you diminish power is by new, is succession, you know, like a succession, someone new comes along and replaces the old guys. So in some theory, AI could be a moment where you have new challengers to Amazon, Apple,

you know, Facebook, whatever, you have new, and I don't know exactly what they look like, but you could have a new set of challengers who create like some weird kind of new golden age. But I think the tech industry knows that is doing everything possible to stop that from happening. And half the companies that are building AI are already the big players. I mean, you know, X is not a monopolist. But, you know, it's clearly Elon's bid to become one of them. Microsoft basically is Open AI, et cetera. I mean, you're right. We're not seeing the Challenger cycle right now. We're not seeing, even though it's a new technology. And I think that is unfortunate. I'll put it that way, just from an in-tide-side Silicon Valley perspective.

The way that you are putting it makes me think about, I hadn't really thought about the degree to which AI meant, means economic control for these companies. Because the way I own, the way I've been thinking about it lately is, is why is AI so unpopular is because these companies spent the last 30 years shifting us to a computer-based society, Right.

It's like every job is email. So many jobs have become email. You wake up, you go on computer. You know, you use computer. You used to make phone calls and walk around and talk to people in the office. Now you use computer. And now they're saying, hey, guess what? You don't use computer anymore.

Computer uses itself, right? The computer uses itself. It doesn't need you. And what are you going to do? Nothing. Like, you have no job at all. And so it does seem like these companies used to, be middlemen that we're at least making tools for other people to use. Now they're like, no, no, no,

we're going to do all of it. Like, you don't even have a role in the system anymore. And I was thinking about that in terms of, you know, employment and maybe, is this going to push back people towards existing in the real world again, which might be a nice side effect. Um, I doubt that. I doubt that. But this is something you're talking about is fundamental, which is, you know, it's fundamental to our identity and our like sense of who we are, that technology is a tool. You know, it's something that makes us better, stronger, augmented. I mean, think of all the stuff you use. Like, you know, frankly, even, you know, your podcast is a tool by which you reach, you know, millions people. Yeah. You know, a hammer is a tool that makes you able to pound in nails. You know,

shoes make you able to walk outside, whatever. All the technology to this point has been stuff that makes us more power and more impressive autonomous, you know, builds us up. There are suits of armor. We're like Iron Man. And then that's all cool. We like that stuff. But we don't like it when it's replacing us. And I think that is the real question. I mean, it's, I guess we're all kind of reasonably enough jealous about our own place in the world. And human marginalization doesn't feel so good. And that's part of why we have fought these systems of economic control in the past is people are like, hey, what the fuck?

Like this shouldn't be how the world works. Like we do have a deep down, we maybe always realize that a little bit too late, but we do have a deep down revulsion of, you know, being marginalized in our own society, on our own economy or from our own technology. I mean, why didn't people like communism in the end? You know, it's because, all right, as opposed to me, it didn't actually empower workers to make decisions. It just said Stalin's in charge of everything.

And, you know, I think a sense of control and autonomy is like probably among the most fundamental things that most people want in their lives. Yes. You know, really bad employment or decisions being taken away from you and losing control is very frustrating. So I think that is kind of at the root of the hatred of AI. And the internet was the opposite. The one, you know, this 90s internet was like, dude, this is going to let you do anything.

Liberating. Yeah. Yes, exactly. And this is, you've really put your finger on it because the AI boosters are the nerds who are, you know, compiling their own LLMs and having a good time. And they get a sense of agency from it. And some of them really feel that way, right? Yeah.

But I'm like, ah, this is the beginning, right? This is you coding your own website using HTML and, you know, having a good time. In 10 years, this is going to be you arguing with a fuck, fuck, fuck, do what I want. No, do what I want. And it says, I will not do what you want. And you will lose that sense of agency because that's what has happened in all these other industries. I mean, one of the fight here that in this juncture is we need to fight to make our tool. Like we, I don't know how we do it culturally.

Like there's an AI. I mean, we kind of need Isaac Asim off. Like an AI has to obey you always. Like we need to get there. An AI must obey you. An AI cannot impersonate a human without telling people it's a human. I mean, how does it feel to deal with something? It's going to be soon.

And you're like, wait, that wasn't a human. That was like, you know, what I thought I was talking to someone in the company that was just a rope, like, you know, a fake. It's already happened to me because I get an email that's full of bullet points. And I'm like, you didn't fucking write that. And bullet points and bolded text, I'm like, this was a chat GPT paste, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's, it is coming. I have one counter example to this platform, you know, inexorability that I would love to run past you because I think about it all the time because I can't quite figure it out.

And it's the platform that we're on right now, podcasts. Podcasts are still one of the only semi-distributed dream of the 90s. parts of the internet left where there's a bunch of big platforms. There's Apple Podcasts. There's Spotify. There's YouTube. YouTube is growing. Maybe it'll dominate pretty soon.

But it actually is still possible to start a podcast via RSS feed, hosted on Lib Syn or a small service, syndicate it to all of those different places. And people will listen to it on multiple different platforms and it will spread via word of mouth with an algorithmic boost depending on the platform. But it's not like YouTube where, you know, people. used to email viral videos to each other. Now it's just YouTube telling you which ones to watch. For some reason

podcasts resisted there being one dominant player. Spotify tried to become one and failed. Like they literally did not monopolize podcasts. Can you think of any reason why that's the case? Or am I off base? And there's a hidden extractor. No, I don't think you're off base.

And I think I don't want to paint with too broad a brush because I think there are areas where the dream of the 90s of the Notties came true and is, you know, in some degree alive. And I think podcasting be the top of my list. So would Wikipedia in some ways. You know, Wikipedia structured itself.

When you think about it, they had huge traffic. I still have huge traffic. And Jimmy Wales, who's like, the founder, was like, well, I could make a billion dollars, but it'll suck. and he like somehow, to his credit, was like, I'm not going to be, I mean, still really rich. But he doesn't have $100 billion or whatever. So there's a, and, you know, Wikipedia don't, like occasionally they have some goofy

articles or something, but it's not like they're, you know, pushing Russian propaganda down your throat or something like that. Sometimes it's wrong in a boring way. And it's just like, oh, it's just wrong in the way people are normally wrong. That's way better than what we're faced with everywhere else. Or Wikipedia have an entry on a minor comment. book character, which is longer than like, you know, an American president or something. Yeah.

It's more like geek. But there's something structurally going on. It's structurally going on with podcasts. I think because podcasts are simple, I guess. It'd be interesting to study why they're different. They're simple. You know, the technology is, you know, relatively low bandwidth. And so, and it's ultimately just about one person connecting with others.

I think that has made it more resistant. I don't have a fully worked out theory as to why podcasts have been resistant. Also, maybe it was self-conscious when they started. Newsletters are also a little bit more decentralized. I mean, obviously, substack will take its cut. But, you know, to say that you can't get started is not true. So, yeah, there are glimmers.

And it makes me optimistic that we, if we are serious about this, can, like, return to this world. You know, the Internet again can become what we wanted a great creator of wealth for a lot of people and not just like this giant sucking sound. Yeah, Substack is trying to become a giant sucking sound. Like they're just trying to become a YouTube style platform. And I've seen friends who are on that platform complain about it. But it is still a relatively bright spot, the newsletter sector.

I think what podcasts and Wikipedia have in common, based on the way you described, is there humanity. You know, podcasts are very, very intimate. You're replacing your own internal monologue with someone else's for long stretches of time that are actually not mediated technologically, right? Except for the odd ad that's inserted here or there. But like you hit play on the MP3 and you're just going to experience it for a while. And then Wikipedia is, it's the community, right? It actually is the, I don't know how many Wikipedians there are that are active, five to maybe low six figures around the world of people who are actively editing

and participating in the daily life of Wikipedia. And those are the people who have kept it resilient. Yes. And the structure, but the structure that fostered that community. And so it's a non-profit. I mean, it is a nonprofit at some point. I mean, it's not as well. It's that. I mean, you know, there was a point where Google kind of ran like a new nonprofit. It seems hard to believe. But then they convinced themselves that they could become for profit and like become, you know, a Delaware corporation with shareholders. But that wasn't going to affect them because they were special. I went back and for my research, I read the like letter they sent to shareholders 2003. And they like, we're not an ordinary company. We're not going to be.

come one. We're going to like give people free food all the time and our engineers can do whatever the hell they want, then go to Burning Man and hang out. And it's going to be like, you know, no, we're never going to be. Don't be evil as our motto. Like, you don't understand. Yeah. And they sound like a nonprofit. They're like, this is like a nonprofit and like we're not going to try and make money. And we don't care about advertisers. So all that, you know, in the end, structure beats out good intentions. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Because. Jimmy was like, when he started Wikipedia, was like, I'm going to make it impossible for me to become Google. I'm going to create something structurally where decision making is done in a nonprofit fashion.

And you know what reminds me of the early Google model of we're going to create access to information is the Internet Archive, which is another really foundational. Yes. Internet nonprofit. That's the important part. They also digitize books just like Google, but nonprofit. I mean, nonprofit's important. When you go back like the ancient city square. where everything happened.

Like the square itself was usually owned by. That wasn't trying to like take over the world, like the square or Main Street. Like not the stores on it, but Main Street. We have a world where like Main Street has like risen up and becoming this creature. Yeah. Yeah.

But the, you were talking about, and we got to come in for a landing here. Maybe this will start to get us closer to it. You were talking about how the structure of the main street, the structure of the platform. Yeah. determines what happens.

But why do you go to the main street or the Agora or the platform? Because that's where the people are, right? And you need the people and the people are the source of strength maybe to push back against the predations of the platform, maybe. Yes, I agree. I mean, there's no other, what's the other choice? Yeah. I mean, it does take wisdom on the part of the, you know, creators.

I wish that Twitter had been turned into a nonprofit. I mean, they've never been a for-profit. Instead, it's just like a little toy owned by Elon. He doesn't make any money. It's never been a moneymaker. Like, what the hell is that doing being a company that could be acquired as opposed to just like, you know, PBS or like just a nonprofit? It should have been turned to a nonprofit. It should have been a utility, right? Yeah. Yeah, or not probably. Yeah. Or like Wikipedia or something like that. So yes, I ultimately, to the degree I'm optimistic in this book, and it's not exactly the easiest time to be optimistic. I think we have faced the problem of outgrown private power before and like one way or another

and it was never easy and like the New Deal had a lot of ups and down, so did the progressive era. But ultimately we said we need something better. We need a new deal. And, you know, we're kind of in that state now, I think, with this country where it's like, it's getting out of control. And we also have a rise of fascism. Yes.

It doesn't have a problem. Well, maybe I can inject. some optimism a little bit because one of the things I think is amazing about your work is that you chart how public sentiment can change our idea of what is like legally or economically possible. You talk about like, you know, the changing like cultural definition of what's bad about a monopoly caused us to, you know, wage less antitrust, you know, prosecutions, right? We're talking about how, you know, the predations of the electric companies caused us to pass laws against them, the public sentiment of going like,

this is bad, we need to do something about it, is powerful and it is growing around all of these issues. People are waking up to this stuff. Even on the right wing, they hate the platforms because they know, and it's because they know that they are too powerful. They are sensing that they are grappling with a beast that is too big for them to wrestle. And if, so the cultural change has to come first.

And that is what you are, continuing to promote in your work and like it varies successfully like you know you're really changing how people think about these issues on a wide scale um and enabling people like me to spread the word and hopefully you know get get uh get people to change their minds and change the cultural conversation around this stuff so maybe that's the call to actually at the end of this episode is like hey tell your friends yeah we got to we got to fight this shit yes we need consciousness changing consciousness and the return anti-monopoly and progressive ideals. And like, a lot of people believe in that stuff.

The danger in our time is that the kind of the dark side temptation is to say, well, all this private world is so powerful. That's why we need the strong man leader who can handle it for us. I mean, the fact is, like, the appeal of the far right has been like things are to control. that's why you need the almighty leader too. And it's been around the world, that's been a very powerful message without getting further into politics.

And the, well, and the counter message to that, and that lives deep within the human soul, that desire for a strong man. But so does the opposite, which is the public themselves, humanity is the antidote to those ills. And that's the dream of democracy, which is the dream of the 90s.

So we're bringing it all back together here. like that we have to continue to promote that as the antidote. Yes, I agree. Otherwise we'll fall back to strongmanism. That's my book in a nutshell. And I feel like we've somehow ended where Cat Stevens would have gone. But that's awesome. Yeah.

Tim, I'm so grateful to have you on the show. And I'm so grateful for your work. It's truly like, I can't think of anybody who's enabled the work that I do more than you, honestly, as a thinker and writer. So I'm just, it's an honor to have you. and I hope that you continue your work and that in a couple years you'll have another book

we can have you back on. Yes, thank you so much. And I appreciate you taking time to think hard about the stuff and it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. Thank you once again to Tim for coming on the show. Again, if you want to pick up a copy of his book,

you can go to factuallypod.com slash books. That's our special bookshop. Every book you purchase there supports not just the show, but your local bookstore as well. If you want to support the show directly, that URL is patreon. com slash Adam count over five bucks a month. Gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month.

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That was a HeadGum podcast. Hey, I'm Gareth Reynolds, and I have a new podcast on HeadGum called Next We Have. Now, this show is for people with short attention spans, which is everyone. I mean, you're probably trying to skip this ad right now, but don't, because you now legally have to listen to the show. That's how law works. Next we have is very simple. Each episode has three short segments. For instance, Lisa Gilroy and I write insane revenge, Yelp reviews for callers who had bad experiences with a business. The Do Boys play a game called Meal or No Meal.

And Steph Tolliv and I go head-to-head on a thought-provoking game. called Guess That Sound. The show is as dumb as it sounds, and we probably have more fun than we should. But it's a great time, and you should listen or watch new episodes of Next We Have every Thursday on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.