Rev Left Radio - Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley

Episode Date: March 25, 2020

Professor of Economics, Rob Larson, returns to Rev Left Radio; this time to discuss his new book "Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley". Find Bit Tyrants here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1381-bit-tyrants Find Rob on Twitter @IronicProfessor Outro music 'Bellyache' by Yak ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. On today's episode, we have Professor Rob Larson on to talk about his new book, Bit Tyrants. We cover a lot of different things about big tech, the way they treat their workers, the way they manipulate our psychologists, the way that they privatize social gains and taxpayer investments, etc. So it's a really sort of wide conversation about big tech and how capitalism shapes it and what we can do to fight back and how socialists should think about the internet going forward and as a part of our vision for transforming society. The last question of this discussion is really based around what socializing the internet might look like and what steps we could take to do it, what obstacles we would face if we tried. So it's a really timely, important conversation. I hope people enjoy it.

Before we get into the episode, though, I do want to let people know that our organization here in Omaha, the Nebraska Left Coalition, is currently doing their spring fundraising drive. We do this every spring to help collect money. We have other ways of fundraising as well, but this is one major way we do it.

And we take that money and we basically put it into mutual aid programs of financial assistance programs and things like no interest loans, for example, or sometimes in certain cases just giving money to people who need it. We are developing sort of autonomous food production. We have a few gardens going, and we take that food and make sure people will have it who need it,

especially in the context of this virus, this viral outbreak slash pandemic, and the possible economic downturn that might be a result of it, these mutual aid programs and these ability for community organizations to go out and help people meet their needs in desperate times is becoming increasingly important. So if you have a few extra dollars laying around, I'll put the link to that donation drive in the show notes. And if you have a few extra dollars, definitely consider helping out. Your money is going to a good organization that does good work here in Omaha, Nebraska.

And so anybody that donates, we really appreciate it. Without further ado, though, let's get into this conversation on Rob Larson's new book, Bit Tyrants. Enjoy. I'm a professor. economics at Tacoma Community College and author of Bit Tyrants, the political economy of Silicon Valley from Haymarket Books. And I was around on this podcast while back there talking about my last product capitalism versus freedom, the toll road deserved him, which was a real crowd pleaser. Yeah, absolutely. I love that. And our listeners love that as well. I got a lot of messages saying that it just equipped them with a bunch of arguments to destroy right wing talking points. And so it was really helpful to a lot of people. so I'm glad to have you back on, Rob.

Right on. Music to my ears, man. Absolutely. All right. Well, let's go ahead and just start with maybe an overview. Obviously, not all of our listeners have read the book. It's brand new. I'll obviously link to it in the show notes, et cetera. But what was the motivation for writing this book and sort of from a bird's eye view?

What's the main thesis or argument that you're trying to convey here? Yeah, well, as for why I wrote the book, I think a lot of your listeners will recognize what I'm talking about when I say that, you know, It's amazing to think about how reliant we are on certain online platforms, a lot of which come to us to our little smartphone machines. So you start to think about it when you look at especially like those big five tech giants, you know, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, trying to get by in just the modern world and live your life without using any of those things. Some are easier than others. Like some people don't use many Microsoft products. A lot of people can't stand Facebook. But Google, Amazon, and the phones themselves, like getting around that and avoiding using

those, like people write online, cute little journals about trying to wean themselves off the online platforms. It's not so easy. It's how we shop. It's how we socialize. It's how we date. It's how we entertain ourselves. Shit, people apply for jobs on these things now.

That's pretty life and death in the market economy. So I was just thinking how reliant we are on these firms and how colossally powerful they have become. And that was kind of the main motivation to set about taking three years to write this book. And like the main message of it is one that's sort of reaching the public now. I just need to realize we look at these companies, Google and Amazon. And they're some of the most admired companies within the business world. And people love them because they provide so many services for free like Google or for very cheap, like Amazon.

And so people like them and tend to use them uncritically and just think they're fantastic. The message of this book is if you, look at it, there's economic reasons why these firms end up being monopolies and incredibly powerful within the economy and within our society and certainly when it comes to government policy influence. So I want people to come away knowing something about the different kinds of powers that these platform monopolists have. And that leads well into this next question because it's really, there's a lot of ideology and the way that these people, Silicon Valley broadly, is often portrayed as you said, sort of heroic.

you know these wonderful people this is like the best of american ingenuity so i was hoping you could talk a little bit more about what the story is that america sort of tells itself about the big tech companies in silicon valley more broadly how this narrative is sort of ideological inherently and then how that story is is fundamentally flawed yeah so there's sure it is a very dominant sunny story about these companies and their origins and how they operate and everyone knows it i mean If you live in the Western world, you're familiar with this from the 90s until today. Every big tech firm has this legendary founding where it was created in their parents. Two nerdy guys created this company in their parents' garage or basement and were able to get some risk-taking venture capitalist to take a chance on them and get some money to scale up and provide this wonderful service that they invented.

And they were so clever and they thought of this service. And the big thing is a lot of more liberal, politically liberal observers will say, well, yes, IBM, evil monopolist, standard oil used violence to create its monopoly powers. Philip Morris lied about the health risks of constant smoking. Like those, yes, old economy firms, your traditional capitalism, maybe, yes, okay, it has some rough edges and did some bad things in the course of providing us with wonderful goods and services. is because capitalism is good. But I'm a liberal. So, while a conservative will defend Philip Morris and say, yeah, smoke or beware, if you get cancer, you should have read the label.

Liberals don't like that, but they look at these new tech firms, and they see what in their goofy imagination is the perfect capitalist company because they're nice. They have progressive social values. They have non-white CEOs. They're seen as being socially liberal. And much of their workforces tends to be a mix of liberal and libertarian, which is a very different thing.

And so these firms, you know, they're nice. They make the money from advertising. They give us all these free services. And then, you know, especially Google above all has the sweet cutesy reputation for its high salaries and for having lots of employee perks. And so all the big tech Silicon Valley companies have these, you know, garage origins and this kind of better than normal capitalist reputation. And, of course, that is kind of fitting with the ideology that people have.

the majority of the political spectrum in this country where conservative or liberal, you value the marketplace and you want to credit it with what these firms do. Unfortunately, as we dig into the story, we find that there are economic forces that lead these companies to be not just big and powerful, but often full-on monopolists. Often the founders knew about these economic forces when they started the firms, which puts a little bit of a different gloss on it. So there is that very ideological story. And if you're old enough like me, to remember when the Internet first came.

became, you know, commercially available on a mass basis in the 90s. It was the only thing people could talk about was how great and quirky the web is and anyone can make a website. It's wonderful. Now as we look at things through our smartphones using the same couple of apps as everyone else, it kind of has a different flavor. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think I was like 17 when I got my first computer in-house.

I think I had a pager throughout high school. So I was just at the very transition of this whole move towards, you know, PCs and smartphones. and all of that. So I still remember the time before that and then see my kids grow up having no conception that there once was a time before that. I think it's interesting. Another part of this sort of ideological narrative, I think also is this idea that, you know, liberalism and capitalism is inherently progressive. And when we see all the institutions of capitalism sort of breaking down, we see the social order that it props up, start to decay, people becoming more and more skeptical of it, people not being having access to health care and education, etc. I think front-loading

the American narrative with this idea that these big tech companies are sort of representative of the American innovative spirit does a lot of ideological work and saying, yes, this is actually a progressive system. See, every year we have a new smartphone. We have a new little device, a little gadget that's even cooler than the last year's gadget. And that is, it's supposed to put this progressive sheen over what I think is an inherently sort of downward spiral. system overall. It's true. That's absolutely right.

And the fact that we have slick new technology we didn't have 10 years ago, you know, if you're fundamentally reactionary or conservative, you know, even if you're a political liberal by American standards, you know, tend to support the existing market institutions we have, just conservative. You know, you do tend to absolutely just credit anything positive that happens to the society to that system. And, you know, China is eagerly taking credit for its early success. fighting the coronavirus, even though the original outbreak was largely the responsibility of the government

just trying to keep it secret and keep a gag on it rather than taking early steps that could have been done from a public health perspective. But they'll take credit for using authoritarianism to tamp it down. And the same was true here. You know, everyone likes to, there's that famous meme online where it's, you know, two successive visits to America by the Pope, by whichever Pope it was. And the first one, everyone's just so excited. There's a few pictures being taken. And the second picture, it's just nothing but people holding up their smartphones. So the change is very real. I mean, everyone sees rows of kids sitting around all looking at their phones at the same time. I teach. I see this all the time. And so people say, yeah, that's progressive. But as soon as we look at it, I mean, obviously there's a lot

of downsides to this technology, which makes it a little less instantaneously progressive. But even if we recognize the real value of these technologies, a lot of them, as we'll probably talk about, the public sector, years of us and our parents' generations paying taxes for Pentagon research and the university systems, like that's where a lot of this technology comes from. So to the extent the society is progressive from this technological perspective, if you take a look at it, it seems like it's much more a dynamic state sector that's footing the bills for that stuff. Right.

Yeah, and we'll definitely discuss that in a few questions in more depth. But, you know, let's talk about the early days of the internet. I know I'm sure a lot of people are aware of this, but I think it's. it's worth talking about sort of what were the initial hopes of the internet in its early days? And how has the broader capitalist economic system with its inherent incentive system destroyed those early hopes and led to the state of affairs in tech today? Like, what is the difference between what we hoped the internet would be and what it's become because it's been funneled through the prism of capitalism?

Yeah, that's a great question. Because, yeah, back in the 90s, it's just, like, oh, this fun internet thing. And you can get onto it using a home. computer and you get on it using your course or copper wire landline uh connection so it's extremely slow and if someone wants to use the phone you have to get offline so it very i mean such a confined experience is no streaming video in those days i was unless you were hooked up to an early adopting university campus which again has public funding for that sort of thing you weren't going to be using any kind of broadband connection so uh you're looking at slow downloading text only maybe

pictures websites in that era but it was a brand new thing And in that era, you didn't have yet any giant, the same kind of gatekeepers we have today in the form of the giant platforms. What you did have was the online portals, we call them at that point. So when you dialed in, you know, you needed certain software and you needed the ability to access these pieces of online content. So people would do it through one of those three at that time, big online web portals. And the biggest one, of course, was AOL. If you're old enough, you'll remember AOL blanketing America with its free discs that they kept mailing to every family to get people online. And there was also Prodigy and later MSN. And what those were all about

was you log on and then, yes, you're online, but you're in, you know, AOL's web portal. And eventually it was bought by a giant entertainment conglomerate, Time Warner, which of course is part of a couple other conglomerates today. But the whole thing there was they would steer you toward their own online content, you know, their own sports and comedy updates, their own news sites, some really basic games and they would try to encourage you to stay within their own web portal set up and so they actually had a fairly significant

level of control over the internet now of course you still had you know web addresses you had that URL bar where you can type a dot com or dot org whatever into the top and just leave the portals walled gardens as they call them in that way

but you had to know where you were going with that you had to know a web address as your destination by the end by the mid to late 90s, you get the advent of web browsing, which in my opinion was the first thing that really showed the monopolization that was going to follow this early competitive era, which lots of capitalist markets go through. So when you wanted to just like search for something, like great, I'm on Prodigy or AOL, but I want to look at something I'm interested in. And very quickly, people were making so many websites that became not, you know, it became non-trivialy difficult

to find what you're looking for, whether it's, you know, car listings or cat photos or celebrity, nudity, whatever you're interested in. So we had the advent of these web browsers. It was Netscape in the mid to late 90s, and suddenly you could download that onto your computer and use that as your web browser, and you could search for things, and you could look at different websites, and that was a very dramatic change. But very quickly, Bill Gates, who was running Microsoft, who just stepped down from Microsoft's board yesterday.

This is when the company was still in the ascendant, and he had a very long-standing monopoly in computer operating systems, for reasons we'll talk about in a minute. And he used that existing monopoly on how computers worked to crush Netscape and take over that market with its far inferior Internet Explorer browser, which you may be familiar with if you work with a PC that automatically defaults to that when you try to load a website. Otherwise, no one uses it. But he was very successful in that, and that is what led to him eventually going through an antitrust trial and the company almost getting broken up. But it showed in those, even those very early days when the Internet was this new quirky thing where you can put up fun Star Trek themed websites or whatever you're into, even then, like the forces were being laid that would lead us to eventually have a situation today where we have these big five platforms that sort of dominate the online ecosystem. Yeah, you know, a big part of that is the formation of monopoly. And in your book, you talk about this concept of network effects. So I was hoping you could talk about what those are, what are network effects,

and how they're related to the formation of monopolies in the tech industry specifically. Maybe give some examples so you can help people really understand this idea. Oh, for sure. Yeah, totally. So network effects, yeah, that's the first thing I look at in the book. You've got to get to the economics of it. But economics is actually interesting to study if you're not going at it through a really boring textbook. So network effects, or sometimes we call it the network externality,

So really a fundamental economic concept to understand how certain kinds of markets work. Now, one thing you discover if you look at economics is, you know, it's a market economy, capitalism. So we provide goods and services and organized production through supply and demand in the market setting. And if you've ever had a basic econ class, you know, we say, here's how markets work. Just all markets. They have this supply and this demand and we get a nice equilibrium and everyone's satisfied. And we treat markets like they're all the same. Now, there's 30 things wrong with that model.

But the first problem is we treat these markets like they're all uniform. Just think about how many different goods and services we produce. You know, we produce cars and smartphone ships and bananas and back rubs and legal services and Hollywood movies. These things are so different from one another. Why would the markets be the same? The markets are going to be different too. So every market we discover has these unique characteristics. Some markets are based on networks where the function of the market is to allow,

sharing or commercial sharing of some good or service through an informational network. And there we tend to see very unique aspects for how those markets evolve, and we call these things network effects. So a simple example of this is the early phone network. So in the early 20th century, as America's cities and towns and eventually homes are getting wired onto at that time, you know, the physical landline phone network, let's say your house finally gets phone service for the first time. some community in the 1910s, when your phone is, your personal household is connected by its phone

to the phone network, the value of that whole phone network together gets slightly higher because now there's one more person that I can call on my phone. So as users get onto the network, access to that network becomes more and more useful, you know? So if you're the first person with the phone, great, call yourself. You know, you can't do anything with it. As soon as a few other people get phones. It's actually something you can use. And as more and more households get on, you can call businesses, you can call public bodies, you can communicate with more and more separate entities. That phone on your wall gets somewhat more useful. It's just the weird, unique feature of how network-based markets work. Well, there's a lot of ramifications of that,

but one is that there's an extremely strong tendency toward monopoly, and for a couple of reasons. One is what we were just saying, you know, if you're an early leader in a market with network effects like AT&T was, you will likely be able to just magnetically attract the biggest number of users because they want to get onto the network that has the biggest usefulness to them, the one that is the biggest. And if you're the early incumbent in the market, that's likely to be your network rather than some upstarts, you know. But also there's other reasons, too, if you look into it, I mean, all these markets have different details. But one thing is, if you're going to have a network-based market where people are sharing information, for example, by me calling you on the phone, you need technical standardization. You need to set a group of protocols or technological standards that allow my phone to be able to talk to your phone or my computer to download your file. And most of us are just end-user consumers, and we don't see all of the guts that's in every communication-based market that lets us do that. But it means if you've got a couple of different operators and they're on different standards,

there's even like usually a popular desire to have a single standard so that everyone can communicate over this system. People get annoyed when different systems aren't compatible when they can't communicate or when something has to be ported from one system to another. And that's expensive and maybe you can't do it. So for those reasons, there's a strong drive toward monopolization. And AT&T, after all, had a phone monopoly for almost all of the 20th century. Like, that's a major, major historical monopoly. And indeed, everyone recognized how powerful AT&T would be with that, you know, American telephone and telegraph back when I had a landline monopoly before smartphones.

Everyone recognized how important and how powerful they would be. So they had to go through a whole process of getting like a public charter with the federal government saying, we will allow you to have this monopoly because there's efficiencies that come from having monopolized service for network mediated markets, you know, a reason for monopoly that you wouldn't be able to argue for in other industries like food or shoes or oil or something like that. So we'll sanction your monopoly, but you have to follow certain restrictions. And one was what we would now call net neutrality. AT&T wasn't allowed to steer your call to someone else relative. So if you wanted to call your local pizza joint, AT&T wasn't allowed to instead

have the phone ring some other pizza place that gave them money. And these days we call that net neutrality, which is no longer the law of the land. But it was for AT&T. It worked very well as far as that goes. So that's a historical example. The modern net effect markets, of course, are these online tech platforms. And there's a number of these. Maybe the most obvious one would be Facebook. That's usually the textbook example, you know. So Facebook is the classic example of the network effect. People joined Facebook, you know, 10, 15 years ago when it was growing quickly because all their friends were on it. What social online social media network are you going to join? The one that has none of your friends on it? Or the one that all you,

your friends are on talking and having fun and sharing goofy memes and stuff. The body of users that Facebook accumulated in its early days when it was just growing quickly on college campuses from Harvard and then the Ivy League on, that allowed it to build up this irresistible momentum so it could steamroll all of its smaller competitors like Myspace that weren't embracing the network effects so aggressively. So there's another example in YouTube. Also, let's not forget about the gigantic ocean of content that is YouTube. There, again, you have two, you've got to have two kinds of users in that case, you have video producer, video creators, and video consumers, most of us, of course.

And people want to put video on YouTube. If you've got video to share, you know, I love Vimeo, but it's niche, and it's largely for content creators, you know. You need your video to be on YouTube because that's where the audience is. Well, then the presence of more video creators loading video onto YouTube, that attracts more viewers, just like Facebook, more people posting, it creates more success. So when you have that early success leading to more success, that positive feedback effect, that's what we think of when we talk about network effects and it's ramifications for monopoly.

It has lots of other aspects to it. It's really interesting. So that's the first thing we look at in the book. Yeah, it's getting that core economics under our belt so we can understand then each of these big five tech platforms. Why are they a default? why are they so powerful? Why does everyone use them? There's a network effect. They gain value as people use them. So people want to turn to them after that. It's just the unique economics of those markets. Yeah. And it also does reveal a certain irony in the sort of structure of free markets. And again, the sort of narratives around what free markets are because we all are aware of this idea is like the big advocates of free market capitalism will constantly remind you that competition is the thing that pumps out innovation, lowers prices. And for, free market to work, you need competition. But competition in the free market has this sort of effect of trying to seek to eliminate your competition in the free market and the formation of monopolies

is when you become successful at eliminating competition. And then your power grows and grows and grows and you leverage that economic power into political influence that ultimately undermines democracy. If there was a small mom and pop startup that wanted to challenge Apple or YouTube, it would be utterly impossible. And so here we have this irony that one of the main pillars of the advocacy of free market capitalism is the beautiful products of competition, but precisely in the same system, we see competition being eliminated in the formation of these monopolies. Yeah, that's a great point.

And it's true. And I would say that if that argument also fails in non-network-based markets, just to mention that quickly. I talk about this more on that last book. But like the example of the gilded age, you know, the late 1800s when America went through its industrial revolution and we get Rockefeller and Carnegie, like that's the real experiment to see what happens with full on laissez-faire industrial capitalism. You know, it's before we had significant income taxes in most states, no income tax at the federal level, no estate tax, no unions in most industries, no, you know, very limited regulation, certainly not on the environment, you know. like it's everything that they say fair advocates would want you know it's a libertarian paradise well what happened well it's a disaster i mean first it's the era of industrial monopoly i mean

watch there will be blood which is based on his life or better read a book about rockefeller himself like a titan cherno's biography of them it's not a the the people i'm just amazed how conservatives had this idea about capitalists and their attitudes like they think that there's a may the best man win sort of attitude and some in industries, you can't control them so easily. So that is what happens just because capitalists can't find any way to avoid saying that. But if you look at the history of these industries, like Rockefeller used violence and coercion and just tons of money to buy out early wildcat oil drillers, we get a monopoly in oil and all the oil products.

I mean, think about how tremendously powerful that is. That's why Rockefeller is the richest man in history, even in today's dollars. He's still the richest man in history because had an oil monopoly. In your lovely free market environment, competition runs out gradually as a couple of more aggressive or luckier or maybe smarter, better managers. That's possible. For whatever reason, you have some firms who become the leaders and soon they become dominant. And if nothing outside them keeps them from doing that, they tend to just take over whole markets. Carnegie with his steel empires, another example. You know, we had monopolies in cigarettes at that time, you know, the American tobacco company. If you're smokers in the audience, that'll make them take it seriously, you know. So it's incredible to me how libertarians who I debate with and have more debates coming up with, I look forward to that, the same arguments being made. I look forward to hearing that and telling them, yeah, but of course, when we do that, we don't end up with competition.

We do for a while. And then one firm becomes large and gains market power and other aspects of their markets, like economies of scale, you know, are present in a lot of regular markets. That's where you have some big up front investment to build a oil refinery or a giant cargo ship or a data center today. And you have that huge upfront investment. But as you produce more and more units, it's like you take that huge upfront cost and spread it out over more and more units. It means your per unit costs tend to decrease. We call that the economy of scale.

Very difficult if you're a brand new scrappy upstart to compete against big established firms that have economies of scale, whether there's one or two or three of them you know so i was like what george orwell the great socialist writer uh said about this he said um this is from memory but he was reviewing uh fred hyac's book the road to surfdom and he said the problem with competitions is that someone wins them yeah and you know conservatives minds like every day you know all the companies have to race again like they're a bunch of runners doing the doing the hurdles or something but in fact if i'm a giant firm that puts me in a bigger advantage every passing day as i gain power as I get bigger, as I can get better terms out of my suppliers that small firms can't

match. This is a very dominant thing, but it's especially clear, yes, you're right, in these new platform-based online markets where these firms basically don't go through the early competition phase. They just go straight into monopoly or a two or three company oligopoly, like say with smartphone operating systems, which Apple and Google dominate. So I remember the Economist magazine, which is a very conservative, you know, a business-oriented UK magazine that many of us hate. It should be called some economists. I remember they called these online tech platforms, as I recall, they called them straight out-of-the-box monopolies. I would defer to the wonderful analysis of the Economist magazine. It's true. So yeah, competition in markets, I mean,

you know, sub-markets stay competitive, local markets in big cities. If you need to go out and buy some menthols or you want to go get some buffet like you've got a lot of options there you won't if you live in a small town though so really like there's competition in markets but it's not like the default thing that you have to assume is going on it's the utter intellectual opportunism of conservatives what are you going to do exactly yeah there's one more example because i was thinking with this as you were talking is pharmaceutical companies um you know they might not have one company that dominates but you know there's often cases where the the few big ones that do dominate come together and they sort of collaborate to fix prices or the more traditional way which we all know

happens they basically buy out politicians and have their interest pursued through the government just because of the massive leverage they have and when we're talking about pharmaceuticals specifically we're talking about people's health we're talking about life and death decisions so you can really see how these formations of monopolies or oligopolis can really really devastate people's lives in a real way depending on where that monopoly or shared monopoly is in the given industry That's a great point. And the one thing that will happen when you bring up pharmacies, I can tell you this from painful experience, if you bring up their market power and their monopoly status, which is very common, libertarians will say, aha. But you see, those companies have monopolies over drugs because of patent law. If the government was coming in with its big government patent law, which is in the Constitution for better or worse, like that's how far racket goes in the U.S. If it wasn't for them enforcing these time-limited monopolies for developing the products, then we wouldn't have this problem, which is itself really phony because we had a monopoly in petroleum, for God's sake.

And there's no patent on making petroleum products, you know. So it's difficult to sustain that. Like, it's true that patent law is very much the main barrier to entry in that market. But as we're seeing so many markets where patents are not a force or they're a much smaller force, we still end up with monopolies. So it's a phony argument. But the main thing you mention is so interesting, you're totally right. it's these firms work together all the time and they have trade organizations you know so yeah

the pharmaceutical industry has a firma and i forget what the letters stand for they almost spell the word pharma and it's you know america's drug manufacturers they organize together and they put out nice ads about how good the industry is and course they lobby the government and they put up tv ads saying medicare for all is going to be bad uh as you know they should think that because we're going to euthanize them with that thing one day so it's like But it's amazing because all they do is discourage workers and the man on the street from ever organizing. You don't want some union. You don't want to organize.

Let's just keep this one-to-one. As soon as the companies are talking, it's how much organization do we need for this particular evil plan we have? So the corporations get to organize all the time from their industry groups all the way up to the frigging chamber of commerce. But we're not allowed to do that in the workforce. You have some dirty union. We're going to get the Supreme Court to decide that unions are partially illegal as they do sometimes. But that's a great point. Yeah, the asymmetric organizing thing sure is a pretty ugly hypocrisy of there.

For sure. Well, let's go ahead and touch on this idea that we gestured to a few questions back, which is about, you know, sort of benefiting from technologies that were publicly funded. So can you talk about how these huge tech companies have benefited from public investments and public sector inventions and how they ultimately privatize these social gains and profit off of them? Oh, yeah, big time. And when I went into writing this book, I thought I needed. something about this process, you know, like many people may know.

It's sort of widely known that the Internet was originally developed. People think it came from the military, which is partially accurate. Like the earliest predecessor that's, you know, identifiably close to the modern Internet is what's called DARPANet, because it was developed by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, which is the Pentagon's big research arm, you know. And there's several iterations of the Internet graduate. as it grows out of that. For a while, it was run by the NSF, which is the National Science Foundation and other publicly funded research body, and connecting up with the big public research universities, which, of course, also get public funding. And as the Internet's gradually developed, connecting all these different forms of network communication into an intern network, it's all through public money. And over decades, like it does take a long time to develop this technology. We can't think of things overnight. Science and engineering are hard. But they're also, on predictable for when they're going to make money. And so that's why most core basic research and

research, they happen in the universities, they happen in the military, they happen in publicly funded research arms like the NSF or the National Institutes of Health, because that's where the steady funding is. In the private marketplace, which we're supposed to believe comes up with all these inventions, there you're under the gun every quarter to have a favorable revenue report or a favorable profit number. And if it's not high enough, maybe your stock falls. that's going to piss off your CEO who gets paid partially in stock, and they're going to cut your research budget to get those numbers up. So it makes sense that a lot of our basic research comes out of the public sector,

and that's across the board from medicine to these information-based products. But when I dug into it, I was amazed. It's not just the Internet. Almost every aspect of these big platform corporations. Their key innovations usually come from some part or another of a publicly funded body. It's interesting. So the big five that we look at in the book, of course, are Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

Every one of those big network effect-based monopolists owes a big chunk of their business model and their core proprietary technology to this public research, you know. And I should say, we call these guys platforms. Platform companies are like super elaborated network effects. It's where the whole value of the platform is bringing together users. And that could be YouTube through its posters and viewers of business. video or Facebook with everyone sharing posts, or even Uber, which connects people who are desperate for money with people who need a ride on the cheap. So those are platforms. So taking a look at these

guys, it's amazing how consistent they're reliant on the public sector is. So we mentioned the internet itself. All these firms, of course, operate technology and mostly software now based business models that rely on the internet and connectivity to the web and other internet functions like email to operate. But take a look at them. Their own business models come out of this. So the example I like the most is Google, because Google really is like this new economy archetype,

like we were saying, quirky ads, fun products. The products are free. Just wait for the ad to be over, and your video is free to watch. So people love Google has this great reputation. Google's original web address was not Google.com. It was Google. Dot Stanford.edu,

because it was largely developed in its early days at Stanford. You know, the famous California West Coast Research University campus. They get a ton of public money of various types and tons of grant funding. And at the time, they were very open about that. And in their early papers, which I cite in the book, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the guys who created Google's algorithm and were the co-seeing and you were CEOs and just stepped down from the firm recently. They said at the time, you don't want an advertising funded search engine because it's going to create conflicts of interest. You know, do you surface the most relevant results of a search or the one that paid you?

And they started out being idealistic. And as they went on the market, they gradually got rid of that idealism as they became billionaires. So that's Google. How about like the smartphones themselves that Apple and Samsung make and that run Google's Android operating system or Apple's iOS? There's so much technology in those phones. Like they are like modern impressive products. And I would say, I think the phones are fundamentally useful if they weren't run. in ways that make us so reliant on them and hard for us to ignore.

If they were just simple tools, we could use on our own terms, I think it would be an unambiguous benefit to our lives, smartphones. But because their corporate products mostly used to hold our attention and make us more consumer-minded all the time, they end up maybe not being quite so good. But look at all the technology in there. I mean, there's a fair bit of research into this. I borrowed a lot, as all economists do these days,

who are interested in innovation from the great economist Maria Mazakado and her books, above all, is the entrepreneurial state, which is a very, very thoughtful review of public funding and the role it plays from pharmaceuticals, up to tech, to green energy. If you look at our modern smartphones, from the cell antenna to the Wi-Fi modem, to the super-compressed batteries, to even like the visual display, like the touch-sensitive displays,

all of those original technologies came out of public sector. research. For the touch screen, which is one of the great, you know, innovations of those smartphones and tablets is all the cool things you can do just with your fingers on the screen, using capacitive sensitivity, which actually draws on our skin's ability to carry electricity. That stuff is developed in the Department of Energy and especially at CERN, the big European particle collider firm as a way to quickly access data on this complicated machine that they were operating. But like the Wi-Fi modem was developed by researchers at the University of Hawaii, you know, and it was done Because it's an island state, and their campuses spread around physically, and they can't just connect through wires to their campus computer.

So when they needed a computer time, they use this new innovative radio network, this pattern of radio signals to communicate with it. And now we call that Wi-Fi. And the GPS, of course, is developed by the Pentagon, as people may realize, just down the list of almost everything that makes that phone possible and useful, it's public sector technology. As I dug into this, I couldn't believe. Like by the time you start checking off all the features that owe their existence to some stable publicly funded body and its research, whether it's for positive stuff like the U of Hawaii's Wi-Fi connection or for evil, like the Pentagon developed GPS so they could more officially blow up brown people in the developing world so we can control their markets and resources. Either way, that stable public funding, if you check off everything in the smartphone that comes from public funding, there's almost nothing left at the end. so it really is i mean breathtaking and of course again none of this would be happening without the internet itself which our parents generation paid taxes to develop it's a pretty amazing

story because it's such a perfect diametric refutation of everything that these libertarians and you know even liberals just so confidently say yeah well steve jobs invented the the iphone technology no he didn't no he didn't his staffers put all that complicated equipment into one slick little product like Apple and these companies like they do work and they contribute to these platforms and technologies once the basic R&D has been done and the big risk that comes from that has been done by the public sector then yes we'll cleverly put this all into a little phone and then he'll say when he first announces it on stage in 2007 with his slick douchebag nonsense delivery this Steve Jobs made the global standard god I can't stand that guy he was also a dick to his workers

you should throw that in real fast but he said boy have we patented this technology Yeah, you patented it, but he also bought most of the originating patents that are components of the phone. So it's kind of a big phony thing. So it's incredible, yeah, when people throw in your face, innovation comes from the market, you really cannot allow that to stand. And you need to call me, remind them that Google search and the internet proper and all of the connectivity built into that phone all came from the public sector when the private sector couldn't be bothered to develop that stuff because that's unprofitable or it's too risky or maybe it jeopardizes my existing business models.

So I'm not going to fund that stuff. But the public sector can't. And now we have fun phones and we give the credit to the wrong party. That's capitalism for you. Absolutely. And then these CEOs, they go on to. profit endlessly from all of that. And aside from all of the taxpayer and public funding that goes into it, it also reminds me this quote by Marx where he says, capital is dead labor, which

vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. This can be, you know, you can break this down in a few different ways. But another aspect to all of this is just, not only the public investment and money and taxpayer funds, but the, you know, generations of workers who, whether it's building highways or working in these factories or, you know, doing any part of this overall process that eventually leads to something like the smartphone, all of that labor is then privatized by the owners of these companies and they profit off of it endlessly without ever sort of having any social obligation, without ever conceiving of these ultimate technologies as social products created by social institutions and people working socially together. And then, you know,

all of that is just privatized into the pockets of a small elite of people. And somebody like Jeff Bezos, who, I mean, what was his innovation really? You know, maybe you could speak to what he actually did to make Amazon. But is it really worth him having $2,000 every second, you know, I don't even know what his net worth is now. Tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in private wealth for what exactly was his innovation again? Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah, so Bezos, if you look at the, again, usually very supportive corporate

reporters who write books about these guys, like Brad Stone's book on Amazon is one of the main ones. It's incredible. His big innovation was he realized we can use the internet to sell products online and use network effects to build up our platform from that.

And so Brad Stone says that his big innovation was to exploit the internet. like that's his use of the term like now we the public has paid some of their tax money every year to develop this internet now i will use it to become a giant billionaire and yeah i forget what his worth is he's you know the many many many tens of billions even after his divorce history is expensive it's still the case so yeah that twitchy-eyed lex luther ruling class rectalip's not going anywhere said but i mean what's his big innovation was well he thought well books those don't spoil they're easy to ship you can get them from wholesalers like it's not you know the man's not a reader it was just a product area that was easy to exploit. But it's interesting because if you look at these founders, they vary in terms of how aware of network effects and standardization and platform economics they are. So for example, you get guys like Gates or like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook who are very aware and we have some record of in their early days saying if we get more early users, that brings us more users. Early incumbents will dominate. So Zuckerberg talked to his

friends about this because it's such a clear case. You know, social networks, that's easy to see. But Bezos himself, in the early days, worked very aggressively to get independent sellers of books and then everything else onto his platform. And according to Stone's book, at one point, he was willing to let Amazon's own listings get cannibalized to build up independent auctions and independent sellers in what they now call Amazon marketplace, right? When you look at a product listing on Amazon, very commonly it says it's also available from

these independent sellers at different prices and shipping for. different places. Well, that's what gives Amazon a network effect. It becomes a platform from that. We go to Amazon to buy things. The presence of so many consumers that Amazon built up in its early days, exploiting the Internet, attracts all these independent sellers of all the products you can buy. And the presence of all those independent sellers attracts more of us consumers. So it has that same positive feedback effect. Basis isn't on record using those terms. In Amazon, they call it a flywheel, you know, a flywheel, that little engineering process where you can store momentum in a spinning wheel and use it to build up more momentum in complicated engineering

ways I barely understand. But it's the same positive feedback cycle. Like it shows he understood the basic economics of it. And Bill Gates was very much with that. He talked about how we need a uniform standard for computer operating systems. And when he got his big break of IBM's early computers buying what would become Windows, then it was just a DOS program, but it became Windows, like they gained an early network effect from that that they recognized and they were all about setting the standard and they used that term very frequently not just like a standard of quality but a technical standard that will attract more developers of games and programs that will then attract more users to our operating system but on the other hand some of these tech CEO douchebags clearly did not understand it and here is a great opportunity for me to bash steve jobs some more because all the way through his career to his death he failed again and again to understand network effects and the platform economics that comes from it. So Apple's early successful Macintosh computers

of the 80s and 90s were the competition to the Windows running Microsoft PC computer. People are very into this old rivalry going back years, you know, and to this day you can buy Macintosh computers or ones that, the typical issue that run Windows. But while Gates was realizing, we just want to get as many users on these computers as we can, So who cares if the PCs are all clones off of IBM's original?

That's fine. And he would attract as many developers and users and developers as possible. With Apple jobs, especially after the Apple 2, made it a closed network. So he took off all the slots for peripherals and said the only software we'll have on this will be software that developers make for us. And that's going to make us an elite separate high-quality system. What you didn't realize, though, is that that permanently confined Apple to being a niche product because it had such a smaller user base

because it was much more expensive than and now compared to Windows running machines. So that attracted fewer developers. And because there's only a couple programs you could run on your Apple computer, most workplaces wanted to go with Windows. And especially there with Windows,

you had a variety of suppliers, which corporate buyers like, you don't want to be completely reliant on Apple. And there are some industries that run Apple computers. If you're in media or video editing or design, you're probably going to use that stuff. higher-end industries, you know, NASA uses Apple laptops to launch space missions and stuff.

But it's a niche product because he didn't allow network effects to build up Apple as a separate standard. And it's incredible in the 90s when Apple was really struggling and went through its brush with bankruptcy, which very nearly happened in the late 90s, Bill Gates, unbelievably, is on record with letters that with like, you know, I think it was emails, you know, messages that he sent to Steve Jobs and Apple's born. which we now can read, largely because of Microsoft's court case that happened later. It's antitrust case. And we know that Gates tried to explain to Steve Jobs what network effects are and how you need a community of developers was the term he used

because you have a standard that people can write for easily, and that attracts all of those users, and that attracts more developers. He tried to tell Steve Jobs this. Then Steve Jobs doesn't listen. Ten years later, the mobile revolution happens, and Apple gets its second big era, you're the mobile iPhone-based revolution. But again, Jobs made it a closed system

and refused to allow independent developers to make things that only Google would be allowed to make the maps and only this particular developer for this and we're going to make all our own native applications. I mean, those work fine, and the early Google partnership was important. But it meant that when Google started making its own Android operating system, which had an open system and people could write programs for it much more easily,

that's the one that became globally developed. And that's why now Android runs on about two-thirds of American smartphones, even though it was Apple that pioneered the market. And globally, 90% of the world's smartphones run Android because Steve Jobs failed to understand network effects twice. Two times. Whereas Zuckerberg and Gates and Jeff Bezos all recognized it immediately. And certainly the Google founders, but their network effect were slightly differently.

There's tons of details. And, of course, all this, including these sort of exasperated messages from Gates to Steve Jobs and the Apple board. They're all in the book. And, of course, the reason why would Gates be trying to help Steve Jobs? This is when Gates, when Microsoft was starting to come under investigation for being such an awful monopolist and taking over other industries like web browsing with their monopolies. And so they were eager to keep Apple alive. So they could point to it and say, we don't have a total monopoly.

Look at Apple, which a limited number of people use because it's so expensive. and there's so few applications. They exist, so we're not a monopolist. So Microsoft was so desperate to keep them in the game in some way that they were actively trying to help them to understand how better to co-monopalize the market. This is capitalism. It's pretty far from the sunny libertarian competition bullshit that we hear.

Crazy, huh? Yeah, and I'm absolutely, I love that these people are made to be absolute geniuses, you know, in our culture. Like, these people are so brilliant. It's like when you really pull back that, bullshit and look underneath. It's like they're not that brilliant. They happen to be in the right place at the right time. They took advantage or exploited a certain thing that already existed. But this is far from genius or being brilliant, you know. That's right. And also,

and again, so much of it is old economy, though. The products are very slick compared to, you know, 50 years ago or even 20 years ago. But because it's the same economics, it's weird. It's just completely different industry technology levels. But because the economics are consistent, we get the same outcome. So, you know, Even though today's smartphones are a lot slicker than the old copper-wired landline you call your grandma on, you know, it is the same network effect. So we get the same drive toward monopolization. And we see this a lots of other network-based industries like rail transport. Basically now, you know, we deregulated rail in the 1980s, big surprise.

Like, we did everything else. And so we have like these giant regional rail transport monopolies. There are basically monopolies on the West Coast, you know, in the Midwest and southern states. Like they have regional monopolies. And this is how we get a ton of. of our products like our phones and petroleum are delivered through the rails like that stuff's important but it's a completely different industry materially but the economics are consistent you know but another thing that's consistent about them is their exploitation of labor man they

don't just exploit you know our parents tax money and use the cool internet to build their empires and then insist they shouldn't have to pay taxes and scumbags they're also just as ruthless in their exploitation of labor and the working man and woman as rockefeller and all the other previous horrible industrialists of the past. And by now, that's sort of hitting the public, you know, even the more professional class, PMC, white collar workers, you know, for example, Google software coders, they're doing walkouts because they don't want to write software for the Pentagon drones to kill people. And they don't want to give giant golden parachutes to the Android developer who turns out to have had several credible charges of sexual harassment

at, you know, these corporate structures where you can hit on people or scream at them. And they can't do anything back because you're their boss, because it's a power relationship of hierarchy in the workplace. Of course, Apple is the most notorious out of the big five I look at. These five biggest firms in the world are these guys. Apple's notorious because it actually makes a physical product more than the others, of course, like they do have their phones and Kindles and so on. But Apple's record has become justifiably notorious, mainly through its contractors, like all manufacturers, they farm everything out. And so that also, you know, that lets them ring a little more profit out of it,

but also lets them claim a little bit of remove when these horrible exploitations reach the press. But my favorite example, I will say, I mean, all this technology comes from, you know, your traditional extractive, exploitive industries in the third world, you know, from Bolivian tin to lithium for the batteries in these things that comes from Chile to the tungsten and coltan that comes from the Congo,

like the most cruelly exploitative environments with these tiny workers who never grow because they're incredibly poor, even though the most profitable firms in the world run on their backs. That's still going on. But of course, Apple's got that unbelievable case through its Foxcon contractor. It's Tai Pi Precision Manufacturing Company contractor, its main one that assembles the final iPhone products, where they had all those suicides because of conditions on the line being so nightmarish, incredibly fast, terrible working conditions, abusive managers.

It's incredible to read about this stuff. How needlessly bad it is. There's so much money being made, but we won't give even the slightest break to these coolies who are doing all the hard, unpleasant work for us. So everyone's heard of those suicides and how Foxcon responded by putting up those nets

around the top of their dormitory buildings, like to keep those workers from jumping off, you'll land in a net. So there, problem's solved. What I didn't know about until I researched this was that after that workers did more threats and they started doing like mass suicide threats. Like if you guys don't give us a raise

or change these conditions on the line, we're all going to kill ourselves. And, you know, the Nets can only hold up so many people. Oh, my God. It's the thing that, and they were able to get concessions from the scumbags at Foxcon. So it's suicide strikes. Oh, my God. This is, again, capitalism now, it's the products are fancier, thanks to public research.

They do crazy new things that track us everywhere and all these incredible fun things we can do with our phone. Let's not pretend they're not useful and we don't like them. But the processes we use to make them have it. budged from previous centuries. It's incredible. Yeah. Disgusting. And, you know, let's just keep kind of going with that because I know you just sort of tore apart Apple, but can you give some more examples of how workers are treated by tech giants, maybe like Amazon, for example, and how that treatment is really a natural outcome of the structure of these companies?

Indeed, because all these examples I was mentioning before, like those are all the developing world. Yeah, the third world, you know, Africa, Latin America, Asia. Oh, those people always suffer. They'll always be poor. Didn't Christ say the poor will always be with this? This is the garbage right-wing people say when they speak to me. It's terrible. I've got to stop writing. I'm attracting horrible people to me. But in America, like, it's capitalism around here.

And it's just as ruthless just with more money sloshing around the country. So even the poor people can at least survive. But with no dignity or quality of life at all. And when you have a big public health risk like we're going through right now, it's maybe we'll give them paid sick leave, which of course we don't have because it's a ruthless, cruel society. But Amazon's a great example. Yeah, because they still have a giant blue-collar workforce. You know, some firms like Facebook and Google, you know, they do make some physical products now, like they're invasive home speakers. So that does bring in some traditional real blue-collar labor.

But hell, you know, we can't use these things without cell phone towers and lines being laid to our homes for Wi-Fi. So these firms all have a blue collar as well as a white-collar labor force, just to mention that. But Amazon, of course, has by far the biggest traditional working class labor force because they actually have to get products to people. They have to organize products and warehouse these gigantic volumes of goods we order from them, and then get them to us. So they're a great case, yeah, because in addition to the white-collar workers who get screamed at by Jeff Bezos during what his managers call his nutters little episodes where he loses his temper and his sweaty, bald face, screams at people. His subordinates, though, so they can't yell back. Like, it's worse than a bully at school, because a bully at school, maybe you'll bring up the nerve to yell at him or kick him in the balls or something, whatever. Like, there's not kicking Jeff Bezos in the pulse.

You can lose your job because your health insurance. You know, this is America. Your boss controls your ability to live. So the white collar workers certainly have their own downsides, yet publicly humiliated by a awful bastard. But looking at the blue collar workforce, it's incredible. Because, again, Amazon went for years without making a profit, but its network effect fueled growth with so strong investors didn't care.

But that also meant there's real pressure to keep wages at an absolutely rock bottom level in that huge fulfillment. as they call it, workforce, the people working in the warehouses and delivery and logistics behind all this stuff, which for a firm of Amazon scale is tremendous. I mean, we should keep in mind, one of the reasons I wrote this book was because the five biggest firms right now are these big five tech platforms. As I recall, right now the five biggest firms by market capitalization, like their total value of all their stock, which is the conventional way to gauge their size. Right now, the five biggest firms are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Facebook.

and those top three firms are trillion-dollar companies. This is a trillion-dollar company that we're talking about here. That's as valuable as it gets. And it's so rare, too. I always tell people this, it's so rare for the five biggest firms in the world to all be from one sector of the economy, from tech. You know, back in the 90s when I was a young person, then the big five would be, you know, Exxon, Chase Bank,

Berkshire, Hathaway, you know, one or two other big firms, you know. Now it's all just these tech platforms. Very unusual. So the money there is tremendous. But the way that blue collar staff gets treated, Amazon is incredible. And there's some awareness of this by now, especially like the really notorious episodes. So there's that famous episode of the Amazon warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where, I mean, I don't know if any of your viewers are from the Midwestern states or the plain states where you guys are. But in the, you have strong seasons out there in every season. The summers are, the temperatures get well into the three digits and the humidity really is the thing that drives that heat index up. And it's tremendous. These warehouses get incredibly hot, but they're not paying for air conditioning. That's expensive. I'm trying to make money here for myself, not for you guys to be comfortable.

And there's huge, if you've worked in a warehouse environment in the summer in the Midwest, and I'm from Indiana, I have done, I'm a white collar family, but I've done some limited blue collar summer jobs. If you don't open the giant service entrances, you know, the giant garage doors for deliveries and such, you can get suffocatingly hot. Everyone's working hard and, you know, breathing hard settings in the industrial Midwest in the summer. You can get up to heat, you know, to heat stress, certainly, and up to heat stroke levels. And so in Allentown, it got to the point where there were so many workers having to sit down because they're getting dizzy from heat stress or blacking out from frigging heat stroke, which can kill your ass, you know. So your organs can't cool off. That's when you get so hot, sweating, can't cool you enough. You could just fully die, like organisms die from that shit.

So it got to where Amazon just retained some EMTs, like some medical workers to keep a, you know, like a medical van, you know, a medical vehicle there to keep people to revive people who've passed out or to take them to the ER. And we might not even know about this when I read the Allentown reporting from their very good local press, which of course is going extinct because Facebook and Amazon have absorbed online media. into themselves to all commercial news gathering to make more money. But their local press there were the ones reporting on this. We still might not know about it except there was a doctor at Allen Towns Hospital ER who just kept seeing these workers from that plant, you know, from that fulfillment center coming in with heat stroke and exhaustion and all these conditions. And after a bunch of these, this ER doctor goes, what the fuck is this?

And he's the one who contacted OSHA, you know, the workplace safety management body, which has its budget cut every year by bastards in D.C., partly for the reason that it's someone you can report things to, but he came down to some emergency room doctor going, I don't know why everyone's dying in that plant, but we need to send someone in there to look at it. And it's just because we're keeping these garage doors closed because maybe you workers will steal from us. You're going to steal from us. And so, yes, loss is a problem, and it could mean small losses. It just makes your working day hellish start to close through these long summer months. We're going to keep it closed, even though that makes it psychotically hot. Here's water, and you get an extra two-minute break.

So that's kind of notorious, but also there, you've got to add, like Amazon has taken Taylorism to a new height in there to do your work if you're a picker, they call it. One of the big job roles in these warehouses is being a picker, where your job is to, you carry around a little device, and it tells you, someone ordered this, and it's at this shelf, at this part of the gigantic warehouse. get there as fast as physically possible for a human, find it very quickly among the multitude of similar products next to it,

bring it back and put it on this assembly line or this conveyor line so we can box it up and stamp an address on it and get it into the mail, the various delivery services we use. The incredibly tight standards that they hold people to are really heinous. And as you read about this, it's tremendous. Like the turnover in those plants is very high. Less so these days as the jaw market's been tight. in our wonderful Obama-Trump recovery,

which is finally ending now with the coronavirus epidemic appears. That thing's gone on for almost 10 years. That's the longest post-war recovery we've had. Obama and Trump, you know, it's their scumbags, but they preside over a big long economic expansion. So the conditions are slightly better there now when the job market tightens up.

When the recession comes within a year, that will probably change. The turnover is so high, it's because of how they run the system. So that little device that they carry around to do the scanning and find the right item, that little picking machine. It monitors them.

And it has little lights telling them if they're on the insane schedule because they're a young person who can kind of handle extremely stressful eight-hour shifts or if you're any person who doesn't have the benefit of youth being worn down for Jeff Bezos's benefit,

different levels of red, angry alerts saying you're behind schedule. And soon the managers know that you're not performing to their insane status and they'll start threatening you with being replaced. They'll start telling you

they're going to fire you if you don't pick it up. Mother of three who's tired because you had a sick kid who you're up late taking care of, hurry up, you idiot, or we're going to fire you. We'll replace you. And, of course, it's bad enough when you lose your job, but this is America. So you're going to lose your damn health insurance, too. And the Supreme Court has decided, the fine fine Supreme Court with all these justices sitting on it. How reasonable it is to call them that. They've decided

that workers do not need to, there's no legal requirement to compensate them while they spend significant amounts of time standing in line at the end of their shift and at lunch to go outside because they're lining up for the security scan go through the metal detector or get patted down depending on the site to see if they're stealing and while you're standing there they look up at these giant displays that show the silhouettes of their former

co-workers who have been fired for stealing oh my god maybe it's related to how you pay them nothing but it's like the most fucked up Orwellian environment and of course Orwell the socialist hates these douchebags which is something you really need to make sure that libertarians can't steal except for 1984

or an animal farm they try to take Orwell, use them for their side. Never let him get away with that. I talk about that in capitalism versus freedom. He would never want that. It just shows how shallow people are that they're willing to try to take a socialist and use some of his better known ideas. Look at this stuff. This is like evil totalitarian environment that you're sitting through not getting paid while you're waiting for permission to leave your job.

Fucking scumbags. So anyway, yeah, the exploitation of labor, it's alive and well. Even though with these firms, we do think of them as being more white collar. and that is broadly true of them. That's the majority of their workforce very strongly for several of them. But those workers are still exploited too whenever they have some new product rollout

and they're behind on developing it. They do what they call a death march at these companies where the white collar staff, even, you know, these professional software coders and stuff. Stay late, sleep at the office, don't leave or see their families or take time off for days or sometimes weeks at a time to get this update out

or to get these products shipped before Christmas. It's just a totally warped Dickensian industrialized hellscape just now with slicker products that let you have fun online dates and stuff. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and I'll just add to that right now during the coronavirus outbreak, Jeff Bezos also owns Whole Foods. And they're just now coming out saying that Whole Foods is telling their employees that they should swap their vacation days with coworkers who are sick. So, you know, this is somebody who I just looked up, even after the stock. market dip recently, his net worth is over $106 billion telling his workers on the floor that they need to swap their vacation days to their sick coworkers so that he doesn't have to pay

a penny more in paid sick leave. And that new bill coming through Congress right now, it exempts the biggest companies, which employ 54% of the American workforce. So any company with over 500 workers is actually exempt from having to pay paid leave in this new house bill. Are you kidding me? They were so proud of that. It exempts the big employers? If anything, it should be the opposite. Exactly.

It resents the big. Oh, my God. It's amazing. Pellosi. There's no end to the depravity. My God. That's tremendous. I had not heard that about the coronavirus house bill.

My, my God. Yeah, it's really bad. It really is a bought-out society. Make sure your mere liberal friends here about this, listeners, you know? Like, that is. Everyone wants to talk about this virus. No one is aware of how. basically inadequate but just along class lines like those are owned by rich people who can defend

themselves in the legislative process why would you if the point is to fight a disease why would you exempt the people who employ the most at-risk people exactly why would you exempt the giant chunk of people well they're powerful they don't want to be in the bill they got themselves out of it exactly right that's not jump away to run a society oh it's vomit inducing but let's go ahead and move on i have a couple more questions for you um one i want to i want to talk about surveillance capitalism and this is a term that people are becoming more and more aware of. So how do these tech giants help sort of create and sustain what is known as surveillance capitalism or the commodification of personal information and data?

And what are some other negative impacts that these tech giants sort of have on our everyday lives and even possibly our psychology? Yeah, well, that's sort of relatively understood now, that latter part about these companies having an effect on our psychology. Like we all know now how much we look at our phones when we should be, you know, talking to our friends or interfacing with someone who's important to us. That's why I always say to my students, we have a long weekend coming up. Like, anyone going to look at their phones somewhere nice this weekend?

It's just the reality now. And so even some of these companies, big investors, so what's that? I think Janice Partners, I believe, is one of the larger hedge funds that invests in Apple stock. Many of them do, of course. It's the world's biggest company. But they have said publicly, which is sort of unusual. Like, they publicly called on Apple to fund some research or to get some data about maybe the negative effects of constantly looking at our phones and what that could be doing to people

and especially kids like you were saying you know we are at least old enough to remember when the internet came along and certainly when mobile tech came along and so we have at least you know we're certainly not immune to any of these things but at least have sort of a frame of reference that predates all that stuff like kids now like have tablets you know like you see kids with tablets i never blame the parents because parenting is exhausting you know you can't quit your kid like you've got a kid if shuts up your kid like you know that's why we Our parents put us in front of TV. Now we have convenient TVs that travel with us.

So kids have these tablets. But I tell you this, if I do worry about these kids, if I had had a tablet when I was a kid, I would be an illiterate penniless virgin right now. Learning to read, learning to do a job talking to women or whoever you're attracted to, like that's hard. It's hard to learn those things. You know what's not hard is looking at YouTube every second you're conscious.

That's easy. So I do worry about this stuff. And it is being studied. And people, like former major figures at Facebook are saying, yeah, I really regret our work there. I wish I hadn't done it. We put something bad into the world. So some of these firms, like, their ex-employees are recognizing it or their big investors are asking them to research it. So at least people are talking and thinking about that stuff.

The surveillance piece, though, which you brought up first, is fascinating because it is the case, especially with younger people now, very often I've had this conversation with students, with people who are interested in the book. look, they say, yeah, your privacy is dead. Yeah. And many people have an amazing number of people have just said to me, like, very calmly, not like with an angry, resentful look, just like total resignation. Like, yeah, privacy is gone. It was, we have privacy. That was probably good.

Now we don't. And, you know, well. Like, they just recognize that. Like, yeah, you're being tracked. Everything you do and say online is being monitored. And sometimes it's over the top. Like, there are, like, limits to what is being scanned and recorded and monitored, at least as far as as we understand.

And one thing we do know is that everyone has all of these firms, and certainly the state, have lied extensively on the record to the public about what's being tracked, what's being collected, how you can opt out even. It's tremendous, you know, but it is incredible. So, I mean, the dominant book on this subject, I will openly say, it's not my book, it's Yasha Levine's book, Surveillance Capitalism, which came out two or three years ago. Stupendous. Again, I thought I knew something about this. And we're all aware that, you know, we have tracking on the phones for our locations, for our locations, for our. our map software to work and, you know, our searches are tracked to show us stuff that's more relevant when we search for things and so on. But the scale of it really is tremendous. And I mean,

one example that Levine gives me, you know, is so good that I just steal his, which is like these phones know, these, like these phone, the companies that, you know, that we access their services through our phones, these companies know things that we don't tell like our families and friends, things that we keep secret from everyone we know, they know it, you know. So these phones know when you get laid two phones go to some bar that I've never had anything to do with each other and then they go back to one of the phones you know the homes of one of the phones the owners yeah and then the next day one of the phones go like a day later one of the phones goes to the planned parenthood like they know when you get laid they know when you get an abortion that you hide from your

family like they fucking they fucking know your family doesn't know it you hide it from your boyfriend or you know spouse or whatever but they fucking know like it's tremendous and that's just that's just the GPS check which is like the most obvious thing People use Google in this unbelievably naive manner. People think Google is just a straight mechanism, like a machine. And you're in private confession, like the Catholic priest. And you just type things in there. People type stuff into Google that really they probably would not have people to widely know.

Google records every search you've ever done. And they tie it to your location data because most of you are using Android phones. Or then they buy our credit card information to tie our consumer profiles in. They have our search history. They have, of course, your GPS data. And Google now, because it's so dominant in online ads, they run the most dominant cookies, those little bits of software code

that are put on your phone or computer when you surf the web. So even when you're not using Google, it can track you to most of the Internet that you go to, including that really embarrassing thing that you like on the Internet that you just thought of when I said that. They don't.

Google does about it. The amount of information hoarding is huge. I mean, that's the core of Apple and Facebook's business models, after all, is knowing everything about us for the purposes of targeting ads to us more relentlessly and more successfully. But all these firms have their own sleazy version of this, even Apple, which is all about posing publicly as being opposed to the privacy-violating business models of Google and Facebook. They're very proud of that, but they're extremely, if you look into it, they're very territorial about their location tracking with us. They're really eager for us to get onto their health care monitoring apps, both because all these companies are eager to expand and are looking at the giant mountain of gold that is wrung out of our pockets every year through the health industry. And so they're eager to get you into an Apple Watch or just to use the phone health tracking apps so they can get your data that way. Because they aren't advertising dominant, they don't have the same all-consuming information hoarding drive that Apple and, excuse me, Google and Facebook do.

but they keep a tremendous amount on their users, especially because we tend to use multiple devices of theirs, so they know what you're streaming through your Apple TV and stuff like that. Amazon's mountain of consumer purchasing data is more narrow than what Apple and Google and Facebook have, but it is enormous. And again, because they can connect it to our credit card records and because they have our Whole Foods purchasing history and stuff, this data empire just gets bigger and bigger. And the thing is, while the state will use this to, you know, to isolate dissidents and monitor them and take us out of society under conditions of stress and intern us when we have wars and shit like that, which is pretty evil, the businesses are mostly just using it to profile us to sell products. But, of course, as we know, state and capital often work together.

I know this will blow your listeners' minds to learn this shocking new reality fact. But it is the case. And so we have things like the really obvious stuff, like the prism operation that the NSF runs, where they're just plugging directly in. to all the telecom companies and just vacuuming up all the metadata of our images and emails and communications and text messages so they can supposedly so they can figure out who in America is working for Islamic State, but of course it's for, as we all know, the state has this longer than long history of lying to the public about what's being collected and what's being done with it. And whether you specifically have an FBI file or not, all the data is

there to give you one if you ever do anything that they don't like, such as speak at the wrong demonstration or join the wrong even join the wrong Facebook page where after all we do organize a lot of our subversive activities that's how dominant these firms are but the amount of tracking on us yeah like it's more more a private sector thing I think we're very used

to thinking of the state as the entity that spies on us and has Orwellian thought control and the pen opticon as they say you're meaning all seeing as a great there's a very great scholar who had another book criticizing Google as the name's Vidyanathan I believe is the

last name of them. He was the Googlesation of everything, which is very good. It's a little dated, but quite good. And he said a more accurate way to refer to today's surveillance isn't the Panopticon where there's one all-seeing state. He calls it the cryptopticon because you're being washed, but who knows by exactly how many firms with cookies on your computer or buying, these companies buy data from one another all the time. So who knows which banks, credit card companies, tech platforms, state agencies know which of your embarrassing secrets. Because Facebook, you know, used all that data to attract web developers in the first

place, which became a scandal, which Cambridge Analytica used some of that data to help get Trump president. So suddenly liberals care about it. But it's, like, it's been going on a long time. And look, I will say this myself. Like, we were all pretty naive users in the early days of the shit. And so we ourselves should have used a little bit more

critical thinking. But these firms are full of shit. And they do lie and present themselves as having nothing to do with hoarding all your data at every search you've ever done since you were an horny teenager. right so like we play a role here but it is the institutions that have the power to decide what should be happening and they've been using it to hoard our data i mean that is something that again the kids are saying privacy is dead which as much as i love young people and they're voting for

sanders and they're not liking capitalism i'm bummed out by their attitudes towards privacy i don't think we should accept this shit yeah absolutely and you know even for those people who say yeah you know they're selling my data and that sucks but in the grand scheme of things you know it's everybody's data so who really cares i would just tell those people like When a crisis inevitably occurs, whether caused by a complete economic collapse, some sort of uprising or environmental collapse, do we not think that the government will immediately go to these big companies and say, hey, for national security reasons, we need you to hand over that data on certain people, et cetera. So even though it might seem okay in a time of relative peace and prosperity, in a moment of crisis, that shit will just immediately be leveraged for suppressing dissent, et cetera. I'm going to ask you really quick, though, things like VPNs, like cookie and ad blockers, text message, sort of encrypted text messages like Signal, do those things, those things help, right?

They won't completely solve the problem, but they're one way that we can get back some of our privacy. Yeah, there are things, you know, there are carve out that people are, you know, eager to create because people, some crazy people do still want to have their privacy, at least up to a point. So like end-to-end encryption of messages and some apps like signal. do that at least up to a point. Some of these apps that people use for that sort of thing like Tor turn out to have been developed with like public sector, like a intelligence agency money, which makes them very suspect because why would you make a communications tool if you're an intelligence agency without making a backdoor in the software somewhere? But there are a number

of apps that do this, and Apple's own text messaging is supposed to have end-to-end encryption that can only be decoded by the specific phone, its particular information. And Apple even has refuse to work with the FBI sometimes to unlock people's phones even after mass shooting. So there is like, you know, there is some market differentiation there. But with you look, if you look into these, it's just because by now the big five tech platforms are so enmeshed in how the entire internet works, you know, from video to communications to the web to everything else. It seems very quickly that to the extent that these, yeah, privacy protecting applications are being developed, they're being developed partially or within

input, or at least with compatibility with these giant firms, and so they use them to their own purposes. So one example, I'll just mention quickly, is Google has worked with some other online entities to create new ad blocking software. And that's nice. And the idea is, you know, a lot of people like ad blocking software, you know, cut down the number of stupid commercials that slow down the loads of your mobile web pages and stuff. But the issue there is because Google's ad industry is so dominant, if you look at the web blocker that it has led the industry effort to develop. It's an ad blocker that blocks mostly ads that Google doesn't do. So, like, a lot of banner ads and pop-up ads. Things are kind of a little bit less common

these days anyway as people get really sick of them. And they slow down load times. And people hate latency. People will just close websites rather than wait 10 seconds for it to load these days. It's well studied, you know. So Google's let Chrome browser knocks out certain types of ads, but not the ads that Google does. It led this effort to develop an ad-blocking software. And several of the participating entity said, this is really more Google optimizing the online ad industry to its own business model. So people should look into these, like privacy protecting apps, but just realize that many of them are co-developed with these powerful entities that have an interest in them being not quite as powerful as they could be. Yeah, absolutely. So last question, and I really

loved this chapter of your book because you're trying to propose solutions to these problems, right? We don't want to just say everything's shit and despair. We want to have a vision of how things could be different. And I applaud you for really doing a great job in this last chapter in which you make a robust argument for socializing the internet, which importantly, as you say, is not the same as nationalizing it. And you also sketch out a broad socialist strategy for doing so. So can you summarize that argument and talk about the benefits that could come from a socialized internet and what a socialized internet would even look like? Yeah, for sure. So looking at these issues, you know, obviously we want to be clear about what we're saying in socialism, like most

political terms like liberalism means about nine different things, depending on how people are using it. But the traditional socialist ideal was worker control of the means of production, right? And things like equality and prosperity were supposed to come from that. Control of that power-creating capital that we have should take it from capitalists and put the workers in charge. Well, I think we should consider something similar to that just for the online world. And yeah, so I propose online socialism as a way of trying to think about this. And that would mean, for example, supporting the efforts by the tech platform workers to organize themselves. And we do have a number of groups. They're trying to organize tech workers. It's often difficult because after

all these are more white-collar workers, broadly speaking, and historically white-collar workers because they're paid a little bit better and they have the dignity of their cool professions, which are valued. It's a little bit harder to get them to realize the value of organizing into unions or other bodies compared to people sweating in an Amazon warehouse or a Foxcon factory line, you know. So there's that issue. But these guys are trying to organize. And so we have bodies like the tech worker coalition, just allied with the communication workers of America. I've been in touch with them a little bit about the themes in the book. And I will say the CWA organizing office ordered a bunch of copies of my book, which if you're in left wing writer is sort of the gold standard. So I feel

very happy about that. And I will brag about it on your podcast. So they're trying to organize these guys and with some impacts. Like these guys are doing, these Google coders are doing walkouts already over climate and over drone intelligent AI intelligence and, you know, sexual harassment history and so on. So these workers are like getting politicized, getting organized, conservative editorials, roll their eyes constantly a crazy Google liberalism and all these debates are making it hard to work there. So sorry, we don't have cultish corporate uniformity of ideas like they want. Sorry, guys. But organizing those workers is it would be a big part of socialism. And the idea then would be they have control over what happens on the platform.

rather than Google's executives and their board, rather than some scummy CEO and his investor representatives on the board, it should be up to the guys who create it. You know, men and women who do this coding should be in charge. But one unique feature that we would have to see with an online socialism is just to recognize something important. On these platforms, a lot of the value, in fact, you could argue the majority of the value comes from us,

the users of these platforms, because we're the ones who create all the content on them that gives them the magnetic attraction, of those network effects, you know. So it's when, you know, we're the ones who make the Facebook posts, we're the ones who make our witty tweets, we're the ones who make the websites for Google to organize, the video for YouTube to show. And it's, you know, small companies that put all that stuff on Amazon's marketplace

to make it valuable. So what that means is, even though we're not compensated for it, we are part of the workforce of these entities, I think by any reasonable evaluation of their business models, we're part of the workforce, which would mean if we're going to have online socialism and have worker control, it would need to be control shared among the actual platform operators and the software coders and the people who do all the difficult logistical work of keeping these things operating. But also working with us, you know, creators as we say online, you know, we who create all the videos and posts and so on. So it would need to be like a shared organization

where we users are organized and the actual workers of these firms are organized and where we could ultimately try to reach a point we could do a series of escalating actions that lead to us taking control of that corporate property, just like in the traditional socialist, anarchist-anarchist-dea models of sit-down strikes and taking control over traditional pieces of capital, like the UAW's sit-down strike that created the union in the 30s. Now, there's unique issues here, a number of them which I look at in the last chapter, because it's a juicy thing trying to organize these firms. I mean, one is just the fact that they're so opaque. And if they get annoyed with too many people getting onto a Facebook group organizing that we should dismantle and socialize Facebook or Google

getting annoyed at how popular our website is or our YouTube channels are. These companies are opaque. If they want to just hide them from search results or people's Facebook news feed or your Google search results, they can do that. And they have a long history of doing that when the State Department says, we don't want you to show these results because these people are terrorists. They go, okay, we're supposed to be using an algorithm that shows people what's relevant. But if you tell us to get rid of these people because they're terrorists, then we can do that. And maybe that's a positive step. It's debatable.

But that means that they can downrank left-wing sites, which Google did two years ago, suddenly alternate and counterpunch and lots of very stalwart, long-lasting left-wing news sites, big plunges in their web traffic, which for some sites is enough to kill them. And, you know, my pal, Nathan Robinson, you know, a prominent left-wing writer, the editor of Current Affairs, we co-write pieces sometimes. he's this very funny article I cite in the book about how much current affairs if Facebook and Twitter blacklisted them it would be enough to kill the magazine because so much of their online traffic comes from those web portals and Google of course those three and so his essay was titled why I love Mark Zuckerberg and can never say a word against him and it's very funny but that's the scale of this so doing the organizing is difficult because it's hard to avoid organizing on these platforms for organizing against the platforms it could be tough if they want to

kill off our groups or say it violates our terms of service in some unspecified way which Twitter and Facebook enjoy doing randomly and sometimes it's nice because they're taking off Alex Jones or like good fuck that scumbag and then sometimes they're downranking alternate we're like sheesh like that's a useful website

that's the power that they got so it's going to be a unique kind of struggle because it'll be based on primarily on like keeping ideas and other possibilities in front of people which I mean is always a part of left wing organizing, but I think it would be a very unique version of it if they have the ability to keep meeting reminders out of our outlook email boxes that Microsoft runs or our YouTube video feed

that Google owns. It could be challenging. It'll mean we will need face-to-face organizing, but because the online space plays such a big role, it's just going to be that much more of an uphill struggle. Being so online as we are now, it's useful when we have to self-quarantine to avoid a nasty pandemic virus, going to work against us when we're trying to socialize these platforms, you know. And there's a lot of other details and thoughts I have about it, but that's kind of the thrust of it. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, especially when you're thinking about a left-wing working class situation or movement that gets increasingly organized, and like these big tech companies see that this high level of increasing organization is in direct conflict with

their ability to continue to profit. You know, you might not even need the state to step in and say, hey do this for me as you said it just made just because of the incentives to squash that movement immediately just do it behind the scenes and given their opakness it's only going to make that easier and the lack of accountability is going to make it much harder to hold these tech firms an account and see what they're actually doing behind the scenes etc so it's very worth thinking about that but I love this idea of seeing the internet as a sort of site of struggle and incorporating it into a broader socialist critique and plan for the future but last question for you. If readers and listeners can take one thing away from this book, what do you

hope they take away? What's one thing they could take away? I would just say, like, just realize these tech platforms, you know, for all their slick presentation and their free products and their cutesy Super Bowl ads with Ellen DeGeneres in them, they are still of a piece with the old economy. And they are just as ruthless and just as monomaniacly profit obsessed as IBM and ExxonMobil. you know, are, have been before them. And they, if you look into it, they have a really sleazy record, which people tend not to know a lot about because these firms largely control the means of communication and information that we see because of the platform economics of it. So they should realize, like, these firms are just as sleazy and worthy of opposition as the old economy was. But just like the old economy, like we can't do things. Like people should see these firms as being capitalist tyrants, but just like the old ones, they can be resisted. They can be organized against. We can get some laws passed to tax them a bit and limit their powers and make it easier to organize, you know. And we're focusing on worker organization here.

But, of course, any real socialization of an industry at some point is going to evolve a political side or a formalized, you know, a legal formalization of whatever the equivalent of a sit-down strike we can do to strip these firms of any content to bring them to their knees. we'll just face similar but parallel but different obstacles to doing that and we should recognize that it's the same struggle against these guys just like it is against the Wall Street banks and the pharmaceutical industry just taking different slicker forms. Well said and we're sitting today we're recording this on March 15th as a professor of economics do you think a recession is definitely inevitable? Well, I'm an economist who has at least learned some lessons from the end. failures of my field. We are not very good at predicting things. We act like we are. Like,

we're worse than weathermen are in our ability to make predictions. We're worse than meteorologists, but people still give us so much credit. I absolutely will not say there's definitely a recession coming. I will say we have been kind of due for one for some time. This is an unusually long economic growth period. Market economies always have this unpredictable but reliable pattern of growth and recession where the economy grows. And then it shrinks. and we lay off a ton of people. This next recession will be rough because the government has no fiscal ammo

because we've run such huge deficits just to do corporate tax cuts and the Federal Reserve's rates are already almost zero. So this next recession, I mean, it could be short, it could be really bad. They're unpredictable, you know. But we've been due for once for a while and I would think the mounting scale

every day that this virus is taking on. I'm very bummed out because I had a large book tour plan for this new book and the first few events have gone off and all the rest are going to have to be postponed. and done later. And many people can't afford to not work and they're going to work sick. Like, this is bad on everyone. This is the kind of thing that pushes a wavering economy over the edge until recession. A lot will depend on the government response. Maybe they'll be more competent

in it than they have been recently. We'll all be surprised together if that happens. So it's unpredictable. I will say if people want to learn about recessions, I wrote a good article about it for current affairs last summer when we first saw the bond yield curve inverting, which is a technical thing you'll learn about in there so people can get a grip on what those things are. But, you know, we'll see if that happens, people tend to get a lot more disenchanted with the system when there's a recession. So historically, leftists have considered depressions to be, you know, more fertile organizing ground. So, you know, get ready people. You use this self-quarantine time to practice self-care and read, hey, look, read some good books. There's a lot of, it's a

renaissance of left wing publishing and writing these days some great stuff in current affairs and jacoban great books being written so uh let's use this time to prepare for the upheaval we may be facing once this mere pandemic is over with right and if it does inevitably lead towards something like a recession or a depression in the future um the left should just be ready to organize and meet people's material needs you got to think about people being kicked out of their homes you got to think about people increasing the homelessness rate not being able to find food these are all things that the left can and should, if it's up to the task, meet these demands and meet people's material needs when the state and the capitalist economy no longer can. So

something worth keeping in mind. Rob, thank you so much for coming on. I always love talking with you. Whatever you create in the future will definitely have you back on. Before I let you go, can you let people know where they can find you and your work and your new book online. Oh, yeah. Thanks, man. And absolutely. I'd love to be back. Appreciate it. It's always a good time. Oh, yeah, the new book is Bit Tyrants, and you can pick that up in your local bookstore. I don't recommend you order it through Amazon. But Amazon's a great place to put books that you want in your little basket, and then you take your phone and hand it to your bookstore clerk and say, order me these books, please.

That's the correct way to use Amazon, so you're welcome. You can't get it online. You can also order it from the publisher, Haymarket Books. Very fun website. They have a great catalog of books. worth just browsing through that in addition to getting my book. I recommend picking that up. And you can catch up with me, of course, on the web platforms. I'm on Facebook. Stunder Rob Larson and on Twitter, at Ironic Professor is the handle. And always enjoy talking to people, you know,

through DMs or whatever if you have questions about this stuff. Always happy to engage with people. So please, by all means, I'll see you on the platforms. Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. I'll plug your book in the show notes so people find you and your work as easy as possible. Thanks again, Rob. Let's keep in touch. Thanks, man. My pleasure. Good talking to you guys. Got the cake and eat it Now you got belly ache

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