Tech Won't Save Us - Tech Media Needs to Do Better on Crypto and Elon Musk w/ Ed Zitron

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Ed Zitron for a wide-ranging discussion on the responsibility tech media has to its readers, the problems with crypto, and why bosses like Elon Musk are desperate to force workers back into the office.Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR and writes the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter. Follow Ed on Twitter at @edzitron.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:New Tech Won’t Save Us merch is now available in our store (including tote bags!).Ed wrote about the problem with Kara Swisher’s aggressive response to a listener asking why Pivot had run an ad telling people to put their retirement savings into crypto. (Listen to the ad here.)Elon Musk wrote a set of emails telling workers they need to return to the office for a *minimum* of 40 hours a week, or they can “pretend to work elsewhere.”Ed has written many times about employers pushing their workers back to the office.In March, Kevin Roose wrote a Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto, and Ed was one of the critics that Molly White got to contribute to an edited version.Sam Harnett wrote an essay on how the early, uncritical coverage of the gig economy helped legitimize its exploitative business model.Support the show

I understand why nobody kind of wants to say, hey, do we have a sociopathy problem? Because it's a big fucking can of worms. But yes, yes, you do. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Ed Zittrain. Ed is the CEO of EZPR, and he writes the Where's Your Ed At newsletter. Now, I've been enjoying Ed's writing and commentary on the tech industry for quite a while, on a whole range of topics, but particularly on cryptocurrency and on the failings of at least parts of the tech media. I've been wanting to have Ed on the show for a while, and I think the discussion that we have is a really wide-ranging and cathartic one. We start with this incident last week where a

listener of Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway's podcast Pivot asked why they were running an ad for a company that was telling people to put their retirement savings into crypto. And that kicked off a whole larger conversation about the responsibility that journalists and particularly these journalists who are incredibly prominent and powerful within the tech media when it comes to their readers and their listeners, and whether they should be more willing to call out tech companies and products like those being put forward by the cryptocurrency industry that are exploitative and that are scams, particularly in this case. And we use that as a jumping off point to get into a whole range of issues around the tech media, around the tech industry itself, around cryptocurrency. And we end with a discussion of this larger question of the work from home debate. You may have seen recently that Elon Musk has been saying that his workers at Tesla need to work from the office or they will lose their jobs.

In particular, he said they need to work a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office. And so we talk about that, why some of these bosses have such a strong desire to get the workers back into the office, even if they can, in many cases, keep doing their work just as good, if not better, by working remotely. But we also talk about what that means on a larger scale and how some workers are able to do this and other workers haven't, and what we've seen during COVID with the inequities between these workers. So as I said, I think that this is a great conversation. I think it gets into so many important points. Maybe at some times you will find some of the things that we say challenging. And, you know, I think that is completely okay.

You don't need to agree with everything that we say. But I do think that there is a more fundamental point here, which is something that, you know, the podcast gets at all the time that we need to not only look more critically at the structures of the tech industry, but in this case, we also need to look at the press that covers the tech industry and how they can improve the way that they do that. Before we get into this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that if you've been wanting a Tech Won't Save Us t-shirt, hoodie, tank top, or even a tote bag, those are now available through the Tech Won't Save Us merch store.

I'll put a link in the show notes. The tote bags are new, and I've also added some t-shirts with a new design, so instead of the current one that has been available with the show's logo and the text kind of going around it in a circle, there is one that just centers the text of Tech Won't Save Us with a small logo at the bottom. So if you're interested in that,

feel free to check them out. As I said, the link will be in the show notes. And if you do end up buying a t-shirt or a tote bag or anything like that, make sure to post a photo on social media and tag at Tech Won't Save Us so I can see it. Now, with that said, if you enjoy the show and you wanna support the work

that goes into making it every single week, you can join supporters like Hans from Rotterdam and Haru from San Jose by going to patreon.com slash techwon'tsaveus, where you can become a supporter. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Ed, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat. I've been reading your newsletter for ages and really enjoying it. Hopefully some of the listeners have been reading it as well. But I think it provides like a really great insight into so many issues with the tech industry. And we're going to go through some of them. One of the things that I appreciate, and maybe it's because, you know,

you don't work in tech journalism, or you do PR, but you know, you're not a tech worker in the sense that you'll have a boss breathing down your neck if you say something critical. But you're able to speak about, I think, the issues in tech journalism in aisher and Scott Galloway did an ad for some sort of app where people invest their money, telling people essentially that they should put their retirement savings into cryptocurrency, which is obviously this highly speculative asset that we're in the process of seeing collapse to some degree. In having this pointed out, Swisher took this tone of like, being very kind of aggressive in pushing back against this person who was who was just calling it out and making note and saying, like, I enjoy your podcast, why are you doing this? So I guess, you know, there are a number of aspects of this that I want to dig into with you. But I guess just to start, like, what was your overall impression in seeing that interaction and that response to something as simple as being like, why are you telling people to put their retirement money into crypto?

I think one of the most disappointing things with Kara Swisher is that she has absolutely the ability and the journalistic aptitude to be able to call a charlatan for what it is. And it is such a cheap and annoying thing to say, oh, it's just like the early days of the internet because it's not. And I went into this in my newsletter, but also what does that actually mean, Cara? For fuck's sake. One of you people saying it's just like the early days, which part of the early days? Which one? Point to one bit which it resembles. Because I, for one, have sat there and pored over the Wikipedia page for internet.

And no, but in all seriousness, I've sat there and really tried to, because my job is almost professional concussion haver, professional baby. I must look at every product as a magical new thing. And I have really tried to, with crypto in general, but especially this argument, really tried to just nail down what it is. And I just can't see it. And as a result, I just kind of look at what Swisher is doing. So Craven, she absolutely knows better. She has gone from an access journalist to ask interesting questions to an access journalist who asks boring questions, because an access journalist in this

case, of course, referring to someone that has the appearance of really holding people accountable, but always stopping an inch before really doing so. Elon Musk interviews that Kara Swisher has done, the thing she's written about Elon Musk, the interview she did with Phil Spencer of Microsoft on the Activision acquisition, where she, I would say, lightly grazed the massive accusations of sexual assault there.

Kind of said, hey, what about that? And then moved on to talking vaguely about the metaverse. What I'm trundling towards is, I don't know what Cara is doing, or maybe I should say, I hope she's not doing what I think she's doing, which is moving into the professional media pundit. She's becoming possibly the first tech pundit style person in the form of the 100 million different former FBI agents they get on CNN whenever anything bad happens. I fear she's becoming that. And what's really frustrating is, as I said, she knows what she's talking about. Come on. She's not stupid. Scott Galloway, well, but her. Scott Galloway,

he's got so much credit for the most obvious takes. There are a hundred people who have said everything he said a year before he has. and was like wow we works a bad business huh i think eric newcomer wrote the we work thing that scott galloway did like a hundred years ago but it's just very disappointing because i'm sure in her head cara thought oh it's just giving people options it's just giving people and i realized's just giving people. And I realized I've gone on and on without actually saying what happened. There was the additional thing of the advertisement itself was not Kara actually doing it.

It was just Scott Galloway, which makes it even weirder that she would defend it because she could have said, Scott read it. I didn't. We had a conversation about it, like something. But it just feels as if it's so derisive towards the very people that made her famous the many readers who backed her but it's just i guess it's just on the continuum

of kara swisher's punditry remember the mark zuckerberg interview where she claimed she got him to swear you know what actually got him to swear spotlights you ever been under spotlights they're exceedingly hot if i wore a hoodie under spotlights? They're exceedingly hot. If I wore a hoodie under spotlights, I'd also swear. I swear in like 72 degree weather, but that's neither here nor there. It's frustrating because there are many, many, many, many, many good reporters writing many good things about this subject and about other subjects she is willingly dismissed. And she can do better than this. I mean, without digging too far into the past, she's managed to do really good journalism.

It just feels like she's moved into full-scale columnist brain, almost. It's very strange because she's not the only one. She's not even the weirdest of these columnist brain types. Jessica Lesson of the information being the most obvious one. And she's never been anything but pleasant to me, same with Cara, honestly. But in the case of Jessica, she's written several defensive pieces of Mark Zuckerberg, at least one for the New York Times, when she like holidays with him or has in the past. Valleywag had a lot about this. And what I'm getting at is, it's very frustrating to see some of the more

prominent journalists in tech. I'm not accusing them of anything dodgy. I'm just saying there are things like this that need more analysis, perhaps not value-wag analysis, perhaps not gossip mag style, but straight up just saying, why are you saying this? What is your agenda here? Questioning agendas rather than content. Because as far as I'm concerned, as a journalist, your job is to report stuff. Sometimes it's consequential, sometimes it's not. And it frustrates me when I see very big, important things like cryptocurrency being treated as doodads rather than the future of gambling addiction. I completely agree. And there are a ton of things that I want to pick up on in the answer and the things that you touched on. But I think I want to start with the actual interaction, right? Because

as you said, Kara Swisher responded really defensively to this person's tweet about this advertisement for people to put their money, their retirement savings into crypto and replied that crypto is by no means over. It's like the early internet. Sorry if that bothers you, but it is so. And then in another response said, the crypto fanboys are bad, but the skeptics are overplaying it. I didn't see that one. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, that one came after. But one of the things I found interesting, because you said like Scott Galloway was the one who actually did the ad read, right? And Scott replied to the thread later after Kara's kind of interaction. And he was kind of saying like, I did actually have a problem with reading that out. You know, I felt kind of uncomfortable about it yet. He still like went ahead and did it, but, but had like a more, had like a more reasoned conversation with this guy. Right. Like asked him a few things, like how he felt about it. So I guess on one hand, like you can take the Scott Galloway approach, say like, yeah, I took the money. I told him to put their money into crypto, but I felt weird about it. Or you could take like the Kara Swisher

approach and be like, yeah, you know, this is it. Like, this is the early internet. The skeptics are wrong. Like, I think it's just weird to see the juxtaposition of like the two responses and how they approached it. But both of them have the same level of responsibility to their readership, which is none. That is what pisses me off. So to bridge off of something you said at the beginning, so I'm in this weird position where I run a PR firm. So ostensibly, my job is making friends with journalists. But at the same time, writing this newsletter is something I do because of the several animals that live in my head. If I don't write, they get very angry. And I did it for that reason. It's always been for that reason. It's never been to engender myself to anyone. But it's had the nice thing of, hey, as a PR person, PR people are regularly treated like below the rat and the cockroach, which is good. But I like it because it legitimizes that I don't have complete just mealworms in my skull. At the same time, I really do enjoy calling out stuff like this because it's fucking annoying. Like with my readers, who I love so much, my responsibility is to write stuff that I like writing and I think they like writing it too.

It doesn't cost them anything. In the case of someone like Swisher and Galloway, these are people that people actually look to for direction with tech. They look to be illuminated by them. And I don't know which reaction is worse. I don't know if the you're stupid, I'm right, or I'm stupid and right is the correct choice here, but both of them chose the least responsible way to handle this. Even if they had both said, looking back at it, I don't know about this, but the fact that Kara didn't do that is just loathsome.

Who do you work for is my question because if the answer is she has like 11 jobs so i don't know actually who she works for but she works for the readers that's the job of a writer like perhaps you get there differently like in my case i mostly just write whatever's pissing me off or entertaining me but at the same time i don't treat a reader with loathing if they suddenly disagree with me. I may treat their argument with loathing, but I won't go at them personally, nor will I just dismiss them outright unless they are the obvious kind of bad faith thing. And this wasn't a bad faith. This bloke could have been 100 times more aggressive and weird, and he was very nice.

Yeah. He was completely nice, And she responded like that. And it just shows who is the responsibility to as a writer. And the answer most likely is herself. It's just very sad to me because when you're someone of her stature and with such a big platform, you have more, not less responsibility to the reader. And in this case, she's just said that it's like Kevin Roos at the New York Times who wrote a 14,000 word latecomer's guide to crypto. This idea that the skeptics are going too far in this situation, replace crypto with blackjack at a casino. Would you say the same thing because people have won at blackjack at a casino would you say the same thing because people have won at blackjack but that really is a very basic thing here because it is not far off the dangers of going to a casino

here in beautiful las vegas nevada and playing blackjack are obvious numerical people win people win all the time people lose all the time too would Would Kara Swisher advertise Circa the casino? Because it is more legitimate than crypto and has slightly less risks, frankly. That's the thing. They're not wholly separate. The reactions you're seeing from people who lose all their money on crypto are goddamn identical to every gambling addict I have ever witnessed. I am but one 36-year-old dipshit. I do not have Cara's history in tech. But if I can work it out that this is inherently dangerous to people, even if you don't think it should go away, even if you just think you should warn people, you should warn people first. First. Shit. Even, I I mentioned casinos go and look on like Harrah's casino on

Twitter. They include the gamblers anonymous. Think of it like that. When the Twitter account for a casino is more responsible than one of the leading tech journalists in the world, what the fuck is going on? Absolutely. And, you know, as I was reading your article, like, I think you did a really good job of making it so it wasn't just about this tweet and this particular interaction, right? It's about a much larger pattern that we see going on. As you've referenced, other cases where there have been interviews that Kara Swisher has done that really haven't stood up to the critical expectation that you might have of a journalist holding these people in power to account. Kevin Roos' Latecomer's Guide to Crypto. I remember an interaction I had with

Casey Newton last year about crypto that I looked up in preparation for this interview. He had written something about crypto. I can't remember exactly what it was now, and obviously tweeted it out. And I just made reference to the point that like, at the time that gig economy services were coming out, like there was this desire to see them as like positive. And there was this really uncritical coverage of them. And I cited a piece by Sam Hartnett, who's been on the show in the past, you know, talking about this. Is that the exceedingly academic one? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that is a that piece deserves awards. Anyway, keep going. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it's a fantastic piece that really shows like how

irresponsible the coverage of the, of the gig economy was. Right. And really duped a lot of people into believing it and help them, you know, to evade the regulations and do all these, these terrible things. But, you know, I essentially made this point to Casey Newton and he responded, first of all, to say that he didn't want to open a can of worms. But the existing taxi model was also hugely exploitative. And a lot of drivers like working for Uber. Like, this is just like the PR stuff that you hear from the ride hailing companies. I'm just silly laughing because I pulled up the tweet. And I just got gotta laugh because it's like yeah eating shit is

less deadly than eating glass like i assume that that wasn't your whole point but just i'm like silly laughing over this oh god yeah no well and and then uh i don't believe i responded to it after that because i was like this is ridiculous um but somebody else did and you know he responded again and said that business journalism has historically not started from the standpoint of why is this bad and how can I prove it? And a lot of it does today, actually. And like that lead me to think about how like, but like one of the things that stood out to me and like rereading that in light of what happened recently with Kara Swisher and in light of your newsletter was that people on the left often, you know, even though they disagree with publications like the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal in like the politics of those organizations, like they tend to turn to them because they cut through the shit and kind of actually tell you what's going on with these companies and these markets and stuff, right? Because business people,

investors need to understand this. And so the idea that like business journalism doesn't actually dig into what is going on with these companies and what they're actually doing just seems like, you know, a cop out. Yeah. And then close my point, it really just took me back to like the closing point that you made in that in that newsletter about, you know, the whole Kara Swisher incident, right? And you wrote that Swisher has reported for decades and seen Huckster after Huckster, but seems to have intentionally or otherwise ignored the well documented and obvious problems of the industry. It's a huge shame and a deep disservice to the public. And I think that's like really the key point, right? It's not just about this one interaction, or about these few interactions, the Kevin Roof story, you know,

whatever Casey has done, it's like that there seems to be a particular type of tech journalist who is really kind of influential in the industry because as you were saying, they have a lot of access to these executives, to these companies. They have the interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and whatnot. And it really does a disservice to the public who is trying to learn about the tech industry and who is consuming these things because they end up, you know, repeating the narratives and laundering the narratives of these companies rather than holding them to account as we would expect a journalist to do. So Casey is both wrong and right. He's right about a very small kernel here, which is this idea that it's historically not started from the standpoint of why is this bad and how can I prove it? However, he is wrong with the rest of it, which is, I wrote about this, I think last year, that tech's move since, I think it was John

Carreyrou who really pushed it with the Theranos stuff. Yeah. But I've been in PR since about 2008 and tech has taken about 10 years to go from an enthusiast press to an industry press. Within this process, you have people who can't quite choose which one they want to be a part of. They both have a function, SlashGear, The Verge, but even The Verge has done really good enterprising reporting. Zoe Schliffer, I believe, has done incredible labor reporting. is incredible yeah on the apple story in particular yeah and i will stop and like mention the reporters who really and even casey casey did some really incredible reporting for the verge around facebook moderation yeah and then you have enthusiast press where it's like this camera is cool and that's fine both have functions however i, I just want to read one tweet from Casey.

E-H-H, I never know how to say it. I mean not to open a can of worms, but existing taxi model was also hugely exploitative, and a lot of drivers liked working for Uber and Lyft, and over time, press coverage did push them to add more worker protections. So just a quick question. When did they add worker protections what about the massive push to crush worker protections in california what worker protections the ability for them to like buy insurance through uber or perhaps the uh the incredulously horrifying yet positively reported weird loan process. They'd like let you rent loan to Prius. Just fucking

hell, Casey, mate. He is way smarter than that. That pisses me off. Casey's a smart man. He knows far better than that bullshit. But more importantly, crypto is something that I believe is breaking brains all over the shop. And I think that since Theranos, people got scared of calling the wrong thing good. Then weirdly, a few things were missed, like a few big companies weren't jumped upon. And thus, I think that there are a few journalists who are less scared of being wrong and more scared of not being right, if that makes sense. They're scared to have said crypto is dog shit because what if crypto isn't even if and i i find the whole emperor's new clothes thing utterly trite but it's so appropriate here oh look at all the money it's bringing in yeah there's literally nothing to it

it's terrible software it's terrible money it's really not good at any function, but it's worth this large amount of money and thus it's good. That's what's confusing me because if we make the comparison to the RightShare press, which I watched happen, and I was a much younger and stupider fellow at the time, so it's like, oh, Uber's good.

The press couldn't all be just ignoring things. And I didn't really, I was significantly less aware of just the shit of the world and just labor. And I regret how definitely pro Uber I was at some point. Because think of it more like this, Uber was and is to an extent too big to fail. They have wedged themselves into society in this deeply unprofitable and exploitative way. But everyone uses them because the cab companies are shittier. Probably because I was about to say the cab companies pay their drivers well,

but I'm going to guess that probably isn't true. And Casey is right. Everyone involved in the taxi medallion system, in the loans specifically, should be in jail and hell. And everyone involved in approving those loans and turning them into a cottage industry deserves pain, I will never say in public. But that does not make Uber better. Or perhaps it makes it less terrible, but still very bad for many people. And I just don't understand why so many people can't reconcile both. You can have two thoughts in your head with Uber that, oh, this

has become basically an infrastructure and it's also exploitative of workers and they don't pay enough. In the case of crypto, there's not even the, but there's no, it's good because it's good because it made a lot more white billionaires and has given CNc make it at least a million words worth of this nft person made 320 grand selling pictures of their dog's ass made with with fucking gpt3 like that's the thing none of these stories are actually magical they are different versions of those stories where it's like this little girl sold cookies to pay for her mother's medical bills. Like, oh, how heartwarming. The world has crushed someone. It's so strange. And being remarkably empathetic for a second, I understand the hesitance to call something dog shit and awful if it was not over 10 years old. Maybe

Ethereum is a hairler, but enough time has passed to prove that this is bad. This is regressive technology. And take the Uber example. When Uber started, it was just black town cars in San Francisco. And it was great because getting a cab in San Francisco was horrifying and terrible. Then UberX took a few years. So putting aside the massive exploitation, Uber improved as a product. Where has crypto improved as a product? Point to me. One, actually, I'll make this even easier. Show me one thing it's better at than something else. One fucking thing. Please, God, tell me the use case. I want to know. I'm very curious because at this point, I have no fucking clue what crypto actually does, despite getting pissed off at it seemingly every day. And it's very annoying because you know who could really dig into this? One of the leading

tech reporters, one of the people whose job it is to make sure the public is informed, could perhaps inform themselves and then the public. Come on, it's right there there what are the interests involved here whose friends are invested in crypto that is stopping these people because unless you tell me why i have to start assuming the worst i think it's a great point and i was thinking about asking you like do you think that the crypto crash changes like their perspective on crypto but then i was like no like just last week car swisher was saying it's just early days like it's just like the early internet and kevin roos he wrote his late commerce guide and then went on parental leave you know honestly honestly power move i have to respect that fuck you bye yeah but you know like i guess i want to hope that like seeing the crash

seeing how many people are hurt like changes changes their perspectives on this. But like, I guess, you know, it was interesting, actually, Kevin Roos was on one of Scott Galloway's podcasts the other day, actually, I haven't listened to it. But Molly White, friend of the show. Yeah, listen to it. And basically, even in the description, it says that, like, Kevin is interested in AI, and like puts aside the negative externalities that could come of it or whatever. And it's like, oh, yeah, like, of course he does. But that also makes sense with AI. Like, it's not a great perspective to come from, but with AI, you can go like, oh, Siri is useful. Like when you put aside the negatives of AI, if I was really thinking in roost mode, what he's saying is not that there

are no problems, but that one can do thought experiments that say, okay, AI is useful for this or AI has helped in this way. Please do one with crypto. I would really love to hear, oh, blockchain could help. I had someone the other day, blockchain could help put deeds and titles from houses on the blockchain, to which my immediate thought was, we've done this already. How is this better? And it's like, oh, it will be immutable. Okay, what? And I'm like, I get paid by people to look at stuff and find a way to look at it favorably.

And I don't take on much of any crypto stuff for that. I take on infrastructural stuff like security on the blockchain. So where it's just like this has a utility within the ecosystem. But also surprisingly enough, most crypto people don't want to work with me, which is shocking, I know. But I just keep coming back to this point where I've never seen anything like this other than Indiegogo, where so many people have ignored so many red flags indiegogo was better which is saying something because indiegogo had so many different things that had actually happened and then there was the massive gluttony of the ones that either didn't turn up or turned up broken like the coolest

cooler and the like lots of people ignored that because they were focused on the products and the like. Lots of people ignored that because they were focused on the products and the ideas. And that was still within the 2014, 2015 era when you still believe tech was like not, you wouldn't just have people in public being like, I'm stealing your money. But then they realized that and that's why you see so much less Indiegogo Kickstarter stuff. But even back then, I can understand why someone would have put aside those concerns with Indiegogo, because, OK, there is a risk that they won't deliver. But you can do due diligence with that and say, OK, I've physically seen it, whatever. There is nothing with crypto. There really is nothing. I just look at it and I look at the really positive stuff, even from places like Insider, where I have a great deal of respect for them. We're just breathless hype around some NFT collection that raised $20 million to save

feminism, I think. I don't know. There's always some vague cause it's connected to. Where is the utility? I pitch products all day and I'm asked questions like, what does it do? What's it do? And why should I care? Other than being worth a lot of money, I'll take journalists going to get into blood diamonds because a lot of money goes through illegal blood diamonds. Diamonds have a use of some kind. It's just so confusing.

And Molly White put this quite well, talking about the nature of the term crypto-cynic. And again, that pisses me off as well, because, or skeptic, I forget the exact word, but in both cases, it's a word with stigma that suggests you're a hater, or you're not going in as a, what is it, a cynical optimist or whatever vague bullshit Kevin said? No, you should go in, perhaps if you don't go into things with immediate cynicism, you should go in with the intention of finding the points of validity to say, this is useful. This is good. You can use this for this. I've read all 14,000 words of Kevin Roos's Latecomer's Guide to Crypto. Other than experiencing several mental breakdowns during it, I could not find a single point

in which he talks about what it actually does. He mentions being able to play video games in it, which is not true. Not true at all. One cannot play video games on the blockchain. You can play computer games, can be a pedant about this, but also what game?

What game? What game do you fucking play, Kevin? Show me the game you talk about axiom infinity oh you mean the pyramid scheme or ponzi scheme i can't remember which one it is today because it could be both oh you mean the one where it's like shit pokemon that costs a thousand dollars to play it that sucks the whole time. Great. Thank you, Kevin. Did you mention that they got defrauded by North Korea like a day after that? It was like a day after the article. I think it was, but that's the thing.

I'm not even trying to be pedantic here. I'm operating. My questions are very surface level. What's it do? Who's it for? And what's it done? Very fucking basic. And Cara should be asking these questions because she

actually has the status and the platform that means that you can ask genuinely hard questions and they can't burn you because you've got too much status. Unless, of course, you're only interested in the status quo, in which case you're not going to threaten it because she could very easily go on Twitter right now and say, what does crypto even do? Very simple question. But she doesn't because she won't. I don't think she gives a fuck, which sucks. It sucks a lot.

It's her job to give a fuck. Come on. Yeah, you mentioned it earlier. And I know we've probably gone a bit longer on this topic than I expected. But I think that it's really concerning because we've been mainly talking about crypto and like what it means in the crypto space, right. But you know, another one of your your newsletters, and this is something that I harp on about a lot is also like the reporting on Elon Musk, like, and there's so many more avenues for that. But like, it's so frustrating and concerning to see the way that Musk is approached, not just by these people who,

you know, we're talking about who have a lot of influence, but like the general tech media, like every time he sends a tweet, it feels like that turns into a headline and a whole story. And like, then the whole discourse and everything that people hear or thinks about Musk is like shaped by what he actually says. Right? And yes, there is critical coverage that happens of them, but it's far less than just the kind of general stuff. Elon Musk said this, Elon Musk is doing this, Elon Musk claims he's going to do this. And like, you know, he never follows through on anything. And the kind of ideas that he's putting out there are incredibly like damaging and harmful and worrying, I think, for the kind of world that he's trying to

set up. But then, you know, as you noted in one of your newsletters, and, and worrying, I think, for the kind of world that he's trying to set up. But then, you know, as you noted in one of your newsletters, and, you know, as people probably saw, like, even when we start to get some of that criticism of Musk, it's like immediately, some of these people in the media jump out to become his defenders, like the New York Times piece by Farhad Manjoo, I think it was, in the opinion section. Kara, obviously, as you said, has done these really kind of softball interviews with Elon Musk, like, you know, very frequently. And it's so concerning and worrying that like, especially as Elon Musk, I think, you know,

we always should have been more critical of him. But especially as he's taken this more like right wing turn, especially as he's become this billionaire that just gets pissed off whenever there's like a regulation in his way or a tax that he has to pay that we really do need that kind of critical engagement with what he's doing and what he's saying. But instead, like, we get so little of that. The thing is with Elon Musk and another Cara thing, she wrote, he's a complex guy. You can't judge him by his tweets actually you can absolutely if i walk outside and start saying horrible shit do i get that defense can i say well you don't know my beautiful mystery you don't know my beautiful wonderful brain no why are regular people more subject

to judgment than a multi-billionaire and on top of that why can't I judge him from the shitty fucking things he says? Why? What a massive and utter cop-out as a journalist. Fucking hell. I consider myself a writer. Journalist is kind of a weird term for me because of my job and everything. But as a writer, if I wrote that, I would stop writing just because at that point, your ethics have become, if not compromised, softened. And you can't do that. But with Musk, it's the same thing that happened with Mark Zuckerberg. He had unwaveringly positive tech coverage because the tech press chooses its winners

sometimes. And Musk was one of them. And up until a few years ago, when he said the pedo thing, Musk was almost kind of harmless. He was this rich dickhead who kind of dicked around on Twitter and posted about rockets. It was nice. And every single fucking stupid thought that came out of his rotten little skull got an article and he loved it. Everyone says, oh, he doesn't have a press department. He doesn't need one. It's the equivalent of if Steve Jobs tweeted all the time, the same fucking thing would happen. Same thing with Mark Zuckerberg. However, with Musk, I think everyone is kind of

realizing he's just kind of a dickhead. He's not stupid, but his genius is not, it does not transfer to anything other than the very specific thing. And as I've said before, he may, he is not an inventor. He's an operator and he's a very good operator. He's very clearly quite good at making deals happen while also being a fucking tyrant as a boss it sounds like from all of these reports and now offering a horse in return for an erotic massage 100 sounds true to me personal opinion absolutely yep because yeah that's exactly the kind of thing a man who was insulated from the real world would offer someone in return not even for like an erotic massage which he definitely does not know what he means by that it's just kind of like sex massage sure but i think that's a term

but with musk i think everyone wanted him to be the good one the good rich guy and he has become in my opinion deeply addicted to the validation of the internet and the press while also pretending like he isn't. And if you look at what he tweets, it's the same culture war shit that we've been hearing for years from the Republicans, plus the most boring, empty memes you see. He posted one today where it was like Zodiac killer letter was solved by dropping it into VLC media player. Fuck me, man. You are working with some 2011 material. And it's just also, what do you want, mate? Because you look, you look, if he was, I'd call him and be like, you all right?

What are you up to? You need to go outside for a minute. Not even touch grass, just breathe air. Breathe something or eat something that isn't like soylent or whatever. And the press just i don't think the press wants to admit that he might just be kind of just a regular guy who's insanely wealthy if you removed all of the tesla stuff elon musk is just a regular very boring older poster if he had a thousand followers his post would go nowhere there is no vast value there

and i think it's quite hard for the press to roll this back because they've gone so deep in the hole saying how cool he is, that now he's not just quite boring, but very uncool. This is not a cool guy, other than having money. And as he enters that phase of his life, he's just likely going to attract the kind of yes-men freaks, the right-wing types who claim they don't love big government but desperately want a guy with $100 billion to let them drink his bathwater. I'm not sure who's drinking the bathwater in this case. And the press needs to just treat Elon Musk as acting in bad faith, which is really hard for

them to understand. But yes, everything he's doing is in bad faith right now. Everything he is saying is to manipulate and he's not particularly sophisticated because he doesn't have to be and people are fucking falling for it. And it pisses me off because he's right there. He's so obviously just kind of cretinous and you just need to leave him alone.

It's exactly the same thing that's happened with Donald Trump where the press got so, and Donald Trump would be worse with him being president and all. He did a lot more damage. Not going to get flayed in the comments for this one. But it's the same thing with Trump, where the press didn't really work out that they had to not report everything he said for, like, years. And I think they're going through the same thing with Musk.

And people like Cara, who are in this position, should be the first people to say, hey, what the fuck? Fucking Scott Galloway got his rocks off with the whole We work thing shit where's my nick builton piece nick builton's usually like second or third or fourth or fifth uh to report someone else's writing and claim it as his own go look at the theranos coverage it's fucking incredible like he literally has a thing where he's like yeah when i discovered that it's like what the fuck are you just very but that's the kind of thing where these big brains within tech absolutely are capable of calling what the fuck is happening out they just don't because it's inconvenient and it goes against this larger narrative that tech will save us and that

these people are good people and that they just complicated geniuses, despite the fact that pretty much all of them have been complete psychopaths. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison. Mark Benioff seems nice. He seems like a nice bloke. He seems to have done some good things. But there are so many of these people. And I understand why nobody kind of wants to say, hey, do we have a sociopathy problem? Because it's a big fucking can of worms. But yes, yes, you do. And when you don't, when you have people like Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella, who seem generally awesome, I apologize if I messed up any pronunciation there. Those guys feel like they're not, but they are the outliers. Steve Ballmer, despite his whole

developers thing, seems to have been at least somewhat normal. And Bill Gates sounds fucking weird. Jeff Bezos with the Hello Alive Girl thing. I mean, why are we still pretending that tech CEOs are like these normal approachable people versus in some cases so surreal in their wealth that they could quite literally probably have all of us killed and be fine they are on that level they could just buy the street we live on look at what happened with uber they didn't even spend the money in many cases there's a weird lobbyist called like bradley tusk or something and he helped uber get through and he's like a political yeah there's a guy to look into just existing on the side but that's the thing these people could rat fuck their way through any of us and we're obsessing over their dumb 420 tweets let's focus on the fact that like the saudi

government tried to get a picture of jeff bezos's. Like that is a bigger story than Elon Musk shitting out some discount tequila in a lightning bottle. Like what the fuck is going on? The more I say it, the more I'm just like, we've got like 18 different billionaire Ted Bundys every day in tech. And we're focusing on whether Elon Musk saying Jack off the board is something illegal. It's just so strange. And the priorities are so all over the place. There are many moments for this, but I feel like I really kind of felt that like cognitive dissonance or whatever at the end of last year when leading up to the end of the year. I feel like you have more and more of these stories about like, you know, the stuff Elon Musk was up to in Texas with SpaceX and like trying to break

environmental regulations. And then like the horrible racism in the factory in California. And then like, you got this front page times thing. He's like person of the year. And the article kind of glosses over those things. And it's like, wow, he's doing all these incredible things. He's like moving society forward. Financial Times makes him the person of the year as well. And it's just like, it's just like, how, how are we supposed to? And then, you know, seeing like, you know, the columns like the Farhad Manjoo one that is really just like trying to defend Elon Musk. I will say with Farhad, Farhad is kind of like, I don't know if you read, there's a tweet about Chris Hayes where like a new Chris Hayes is born every day and he has 12 hours to learn everything about the world before

he perishes I feel like that with Farhad there is a dopey innocence and he's not stupid either but there's a quality to everything he writes where I'm like it's almost less offensive because it feels like a man's intellect in a baby i said this is someone who i've been very friendly with fire and he's cool he's like a good bloke but then he'll write something i'm like what the fuck are you talking about mate what's going on what's happening in that magical skull of yours because i've got no fucking look the one he wrote about like all of the people he'd be connected to with covid he's like yeah it's like 100 people but i'm gonna go thanksgiving anyway see ya yeah no but I

kind of like read that I was like this is horrible but also you are on a different plane to me just like I'm never going to understand that but yeah it's it has got to a point where you have to look at it and wonder does something really bad have to happen Does Musk have to experience a Cambridge Analytica? Because notice, by the way, there were many journalists, Josh Constantine, who almost immediately turned on Mark Zuckerberg the moment Cambridge Analytica came out. And then you could go and look at their previous work. It was like, Facebook adds an emoji for the thumbs up. Or Facebook acquires Gawpley, by which we mean uses legal means

to steal all their assets. Okay, that didn't happen. But it would be like this insanely positive Facebook coverage. And then like a story about Mark Zuckerberg being able to see all of our penises using Facebook. Like that's the story. And everyone's like, well, you know, let's wait for the facts to come out. Yeah, you know, obviously, I wanted to talk to you about the tech journalism stuff, but also the kind of growing push to go back to the office, which you've talked a lot about. And so, yeah, let's get into that to close our conversation. Because I think it is very much related in many ways, right? We have a lot of the media generally, not just the tech media,

publishing these articles that are designed to get workers back into the office to say, like, this needs to happen. Like it's bad for workers. It's bad for everyone. If we don't get these people back into their offices and not working from home anymore, we have the tech companies trying to push the workers back into the office, threatening to fire them to cut their pay if they don't come back in. And Elon Musk, who we've been talking about very prominently, has been saying that work from home is terrible, that workers are trying not to do any work by staying home. At Tesla last year, they told workers that they could work from home.

And then the next month, those workers got notices that they were terminated because they didn't come back into the office. And so Musk has been just one of these figures who is very anti-work from home, very pro get the workers back into the office. So what do you make of this fight or tug of war that seems to be playing out between workers who, for the most part, or in many cases, seem to want to work from home, or at least have the flexibility to be able to work from home when they want and in the office when they want, and the companies that seem very determined, and the bosses in particular, to get these workers back into the

office. So Elon Musk, great example. I wonder how many times Elon Musk has been to the office, just in general. But also, aren't there many stories about him being notorious for dicking around at the office, like being like, look at this meme, and it's like the Dancing Baby or the Hamster Song or numa numa perhaps i assume that speaks for everything i like to whenever i see a ceo say we need to go back to the office it's important for company culture i like to go on glassdoor and look them up and every single time it's like yeah the office is great other than the fact that there are four people that get every promotion and uh they throw rocks at us being hyperbolic but there's usually a series of just insane fucking things that you

look at when you're like oh this place sucks um the anti-remote work journalism really slowed down i definitely feared for my free newsletter when that happened no but in in all seriousness it slowed down a lot because i guess they ran out of ways to articulate the same fake story and also it is an increasingly more deranged argument the longer covid goes on and also god bless the workers who were just like fuck off no i don't need to do this shit i'm just gonna work from home fuck you and google google had the most notorious one where they've done this very confusing return to office remit and then let one of the senior vps i think move to new zealand and um larry page he was in hawaii he was on this private hawaiian island like the whole pandemic and And I will say Larry Ellison is an evil man,

but I respect just the complete just fucking darkness of him being like, yeah, you will go to Texas. I'm going to live in Hawaii now. Mahalo. Just fucking grim. Just like, I don't give a fuck. You have to admire the honesty. But most of the people making the call to go back to the office do not, I believe, do not participate meaningfully in any office culture. They are not people that actually work for the office. Reed Hastings from Netflix, big anti-office guy, does not have an office, barely in the office himself. Every single fucking time, it's the same stupid bloody story where arsehole number one in the Wall Street Journal work-life column who has said that you need to be in the office does not go to the office or the office culture is cancerous, full of old boys club bullshit. It's always the same thing. I was about to say, well, there are reasons to go, but I'm not

even going to say it because it's so stupid. Because for the most part, you can do most office work at home. There will be occasional things where someone might say, we need to get together. It will be more efficient. You know what you can do? You can get together. It's not illegal to go outside. Remote work does not mean you no longer meet people. And the people equating this are morons or charlatans or both they want to make it seem like eric adams mayor of new york and to quote matty lip chansky someone who seems like they've been hit by lightning multiple times truly bizarre guy has made the same very dull you can't work from home in your pajamas if the economy's bad and i actually understand where adams is coming from in the sense that I wouldn't want to be the mayor of New York that has to tell all the offices to go fuck themselves.

He's an awful guy, but I wouldn't wish that on anyone. At the same time, doing nothing, I realize, is a leading Democrat strategy. And, well, digging his heels in. But also, one of the many things that pisses me off is this weird societal debt apparently all workers have to mom and pop shops that also do not exist. What mom and pop shops exist near offices? What mom and pop shops can afford the office space by an office? Or is it just like another nothing bunt cake or Jimmy John's franchise? Is it another franchise store?

It's not the 50s anymore. Regular people can't afford stores. It's the third franchise of the wife of a hedge fund manager who will be in jail in 30 years. Like that is who these quote, the definition of small business is like up to 500 people. But also the problem that all of these people are having is the companies keep running, even though people are working from home. It's very hard to argue against that, because if they had an argument, they'd be like profits are down. The company is in trouble. And it's because we're working from home. I've yet to see anyone try and connect that to the economic situation we're all in right now, which may or may not be a recession. Not smart enough to work it out. But it's very

strange, very strange indeed, how it isn't really changing anything for the worse. People are just like, why do I need to be in the office? Why do I need to? And my other working theory is I think that some CEOs and executives and managers don't do anything. And the only way of proving their worth is by dicking around in an office and stomping around and looking at people. But also, quite frankly, I think that there is some cognitive dissonance from the executive sect. I think they're now wondering why they did this for so long. And it's much easier to say that they were right for their whole lives, rather than saying things have changed. I was wrong now. Perhaps they've over-invested in real estate

or perhaps they just like owning people. Perhaps they just like knowing that people work for them and being able to look in and go, ooh, look at my little rats. I could do an entire podcast on this, but I also believe that we need a purge of managers. We have too many. And I think that a lot of these managers

are having a lot of trouble justifying existing at all. Why are you here? Oh, I was here to be a hall monitor. And now that's my I can't subtly intimidate or overtly intimidate someone via Slack, to which I say become a poster. You can intimidate people get intimidated online all the time. But yeah, it's it's it's just so silly. And then when I see like the new york times demanding people i'm just laughing their fucking face just what are you talking about

you've been able to work remotely for a long fucking time shut up god how behind on the times huh do you have to be to still say that as a journalist out like oh i need the magic of the newsroom fuck off god damn you lying sack of shit no one believes that you don't believe that do you you don't believe that like oh i need the subtle white noise that i'm blocking out with headphones i need to be able to hear that there are other people there that's what gets me going no it doesn't shut up you're a liar i've been like one of the most exciting newsrooms I've been to. I've been there a few times was the BBC, both the one in Shepherd's Bush in London.

Then I forget where the other one was, but it's in Rory Kecklin Jones over at the BBC took me in there and it was magical. It was like humming with energy. It was cool, but that does not mean I should have to. Why should those journalists have to go there if they can do it at home? Why do we need on an environmental level on a social level? Why won't we do this for them? It's not that hard. Especially in this moment, like it's so weird, too, because like, I guess, you know, COVID cases were going down a bit, but I think they're going up again in the States. And like, you also have the high gas prices. So like, why force people to like make that commute when it's perfectly fine for them to work from home? I particularly like your arguments around management and how working from home is a real threat to like the manager class and like shows people how pointless and abusive and like unnecessary their positions often are. There was one piece that you wrote about that really kind of stood out to me, though, when you think about like, yes, working from home is really good for these workers who can do it, right. But I feel like during the pandemic, one of the things that we really saw was the kind of illustration of this inequity, right, where certain kinds of

workers could go and work from home, and it was no problem. They could continue doing their jobs. And then there was this other group of workers, you know, service workers in particular, who had to go stock the shelves and work in the shops where people went to get their food or the delivery workers who were getting the food and bringing it to them. And it's not to argue against work from home at all. But one of the things that I, that I get more and more worried about is that, you know, we have this class of workers who can work from home at all. But one of the things that I get more and more worried about is that we have this class of workers who can work from home, who generally get paid quite well, who are doing okay. And then there's this other class of workers who have very few of those benefits, who are paid very little, and who really serve that other group of workers who gets those perks. And it just seems like a worrying development that I'm not sure.

Like, you know, one of the good things, I guess, is that we're seeing more and more of those service workers trying to unionize, trying to organize so that they can fight for their rights as well. But it does seem like a worrying development in that sense. And you're right. And I remember I did this Atlantic thing about managers and I was, I was invited on one of the MSNBC Peacock shows. I know I've just hate myself so much I can't even say it was MSNBC, but anywho. And they brought up, well, don't you think not having people in the office is bad for the janitorial staff? To which I was kind of taken aback

because that's like saying we can't have Medicare for all because insurance workers will lose their jobs. Yeah. Or like we can't have less war because then the fine folks at Lockheed Martin will have less revenue like but also on a very basic level I responded with do you really think anyone in these tech companies gives a single damn about a blue collar worker you think that anyone at the senior level of google is like oh we need people back because otherwise the hard

working cafeteria workers that we are going to stop using because now that we've got the leverage here that that's also another weird thing we're like to get people back to the office they've been like yeah we're giving you less shit now ah bitch none of these people give a goddamn they don't give a shit about a single blue collar worker. They do not consider them human, which is germane to a larger point that, yeah, I do believe that there is a massive class divide between those who can work remotely and those who can't. And the pandemic showed a lot of, as you well know, deep inequalities in the world writ large, but also you really saw who was safe and who was not from real catastrophe in America and the world, actually. And those on the computer were safe,

safer, I should say. And those who worked in any service industry were basically thrown into the pit. They were told, you're a hero. Now get the fuck back to work or else we will fire you and you will have no benefits because this is America. And there are some people who saw that and went, oh, that's unfortunate, and then went on with their days. And there are many people who suffered terribly in COVID because even those that didn't get it, even those who were safe, just got this continual reminder that the world kind of didn't mind if they died. Like, you're heroes, but you're also replaceable. And this whole shove back to the office thing is so disingenuous whenever anyone brings up the, like, oh, the small businesses.

You don't care. You don't care at all. None of you care. If that is your argument against work from home, you don't care about the work from home workers. You don't care for the none of you care if that is your argument against work from home you don't care about the work from home workers you don't care from the rest of the workers either i wrote something about tangentially related to this uh called the customer isn't right during this because i was shocked why no one seemed to be no one writing about future work work from home any of this had brought up the fact that also some people who work from home who were suddenly

allowed back into the real world became fucking monsters to service workers and i've seen it so many times i've yelled at people in public about it because it's it's like that they got back and it's like their parents forgot their birthday and they're going to take it out on everyone else everything is so confusing to me because they want to rush people back to the office, despite it being proven that it was both safer and better, but also like somehow missing how dangerous it was to not have a computer job. And I don't think we're going to know how dangerous it was and how many people truly died in the service worker community. Like, it's not going to be obvious what happened. And I don't know, just I'm kind of of rambling here but now my brain's just thinking and then we got into this whole labor shortage conversation off the back of it and you have big brain journalists who were

completely safe during the pandemic writing this shit about how nobody wants to work and it's like i got it like this is one of the cruel things i'll say. I fucking wish every one of the shit eaters who said people don't want to work. I wish one of them had to do a real job for just one day. Go and work in a fucking shop. Go and work in a store, you fucking lazy asshole. Someone who says people don't want to work is just someone disconnected from reality and from real people. And they should be cursed with a manual labor job for a month. I'm lucky enough to have never done one. I've never worked a real job. I've always been lucky enough to work on the computer. And you know what I feel? Gratitude. Because it seems like working a job

where you go places and pick up stuff and deal with customers looks like a complete fucking nightmare. Yeah. And that's what the stories tell us, unfortunately, especially as these tech companies are able to roll more and more of their exploitative and terrible technologies into it to better control these workers. Right. And just to pick up on what you said about the labor shortage and whatnot, it was like over a million people had just died. Like, no wonder there was a shortage of people to work these jobs. It was just so stomach-turning to see. Oh, and also the government gave them nothing. Very important. The government made them thank them for giving them very little on a very strange timeline, as they gave millions of dollars of paycheck protection loans, but also economic injury and disaster loans as well. That one

didn't really get reported. The SBA had some very generous things for businesses, not for people, because why would a person need money when a business does? Corporations are people. That's right, baby. Yeah. And I want to end with this question. Sure. As we've been talking about all this with the tech industry and with the back to work stuff, you know, you mentioned how there was this perception of a labor shortage. And I think, you know, within the tech industry, we did see some degree of that, right, where people were leaving their jobs, these professional workers leaving their jobs and able to negotiate better pay, better benefits, what have you to get an

even better professional job, get an even better computer job, as you're saying, right. And they were able to benefit from that immensely during the pandemic. And they had that leverage, that bargaining power, even on that personal level. So, you know, as these companies were saying they were going to force people back to work, they kept having to delay those things because, you know, naturally a lot of workers were pushing back against that. And I'm sure threatening to quit if they were being forced to go back to the office. But then as interest rates are going up, we're seeing the air come out of the tech bubble. Maybe it's going to collapse. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. As you were saying, I certainly am not in a place to predict that myself. But I saw some suggestion that that might mean that smaller tech companies, startups, whatever you want to call them, might fail.

And then that could lead to less of a stretch on labor, a bigger pool of labor that these companies can draw from, particularly these big tech companies who really aren't threatened by any kind of downturn. And then that could weaken the bargaining power of these workers once again, unless they organize or form a union, which we haven't really seen yet among these big companies in the tech industry, and be able to better enforce that kind of back to office discipline and what they want on the workers. So I guess, where do you see this going from here? So a few things, there's a downturn, but a lot of the downturn is again, the tech media, I would say in some cases did a very bad job of noticing how many companies were made that just lost money as their business plan like their

business plan was just like bird the scooter company that just constantly hemorrhage money yeah like of course that was gonna happen what do you what do you think was gonna fucking happen you think these companies are gonna last forever or the many companies like coinbase and others that went public with these insane valuations and then of course they're going to drop because the fundamentals underneath them were bad. Like, again, fairly obvious. The labor shortage is interesting because with regards to tech, I don't believe it was the labor shortage

in the way that everyone else is talking about. Because the labor shortage, Great Resignation really was blue collar. It was blue collar workers saying, oh, I'm dying and being paid nothing for it. Fuck you, I'm done. That's why you're seeing the wonderful unionization, which rocks. I love it. But in the tech world, you had, in my opinion, a series of events where people through remote work got distance and perspective

on the people they worked for and with. And when I hate all of these people, I'm going. And because I'm remote, I don't need to decamp and go somewhere else. That's a lot of the power of remote work. When you leave a job, a physical job, you have the pressure of having to, I feel like someone tweeted this at me. If this is you, I'm sorry, it's your idea. But if you are living somewhere and you need to change job, you might have to move. You might have lived in an apartment specifically because it was close to the job. You might have done many things for

the job that you didn't realize you were doing. In this case, if you're moving remotely, well, you're not at all. Actually, you are not having to do a single goddamn thing. You just close one slack open another. I do it all the time with my business. I think, yeah, you're going to see more talent, but at the same time, you're going to see less tolerance from said talent. You're going to see a dramatic amount less of people who are going to be willing to accept the many psychos of the valley. And I think that that is powerful. And yeah, sure, it's probably going to be less frothy with the office, but I think workers in tech have kind of worked out that, yeah, they are a commodity, that they are actually the work product. As we well know, Mr. Elon Musk, he didn't invent any of the Teslas. There's a bloke who has like a, I forget his name, but it's like a great James

Bond style villain name. Holzhouser, something. I should really remember this one. I don't do research apparently, but nevertheless, like they're realizing that, yeah, actually, my labor has not just real value, but I can remove this value and sell it elsewhere. It's already been kind of happening. But the tech companies are also every time that they do a return to office order, they're like, oh, yes, COVID this time. It's looking real bad. How you say? Well, I got to take this phone call. Goodbye. And it's because they know that they are absolutely screwed if they just keep pushing this. Now, respect, well, not really, to Goldman Sachs for just being like, you will be fired if you're not here. This is now elementary school. We will call your parents.

But the tech companies are not able to do that because they know how stupid they look i think they really do i don't know if they will actually change anything or do anything but there's definitely a sense i get where they're they might see the writings on the wall and yeah there's probably going to be less people who are able to switch jobs based on leverage they they have, but that leverage isn't gone. And also I think companies might be working out because it's so easy to change job. People are going to see that as an option far more often than they used to. And that's why the media, in my opinion, has been pushing these weird stories about how like it's bad when people

work two jobs. You know, it's those ones popped up because yeah management is scared they're scared that they're not they no longer have the best part of this equation that they're no longer the exploiters in the relationship to the extent that they were i think that's quite scary for them i think they're scared of that and so yeah they're gonna keep paying people and only companies like google and apple are going to be able to get away with this bullshit of paying people less based on location. Other companies are, I think, going to just realize that when you pay people well, they're very happy to work for you. Crazy idea that I came up with, at least. No one else did. But that's the crazy thing, though.

They're slowly beginning to realize, huh, I treat people well and incentivize them to come to work. Maybe they will. Scott Galloway there, just his brain exploding out of his skull as he thinks of that one. Can't wait to hear about that on Sway. There you go. Brought it right back around to the beginning there. Perfect. That's a perfect way to tie a bow on the conversation. And I have really appreciated it. I think it's been an incredibly enlightening conversation, hopefully provoked maybe some listeners as well with some of the things that you said,

but hopefully most of it seemed quite obvious as well. Thanks again for taking the time. I have really appreciated chatting and I would recommend everyone go sign up to your newsletter to get more of these thoughts in their inbox all the time. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. Ed Zittrain is the CEO of EasyPR

and writes the Where's Your Ed At newsletter. You can follow him on Twitter at Ed Zittrain. You can follow me at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter.

Thanks for listening. Thank you.