The Daily Show: Ears Edition - Trump Bails Out Farmers & Sean Duffy and RFK Jr. Pitch Airport "Improvements" | Cory Doctorow

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Ronny Chieng covers the latest on the Trump administration’s petty changes to free-entry days at national parks, the president’s promise to bail out farmers after f**king up the economy, Melania��s attempt to spread some yuletide cheer, and Sean Duffy’s Department of Transportation press conference that turned into a d**k-measuring contest against RFK Jr. On another edition of Who Won It Best, Desi Lydic and Troy Iwata recap the FIFA World Cup Draw and Peace Prize Ceremony, the biggest award show you’ve never heard of, where the balls were mingled, the Village People performed the “YMCA,” and Trump received a trophy, medal, and certificate before jetting over to the Kennedy Center Honors to make KISS’s big night all about himself. Journalist, internet activist, and author Cory Doctorow talks to Ronny about the concept behind his latest book, “Enshittification,” which breaks down how tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have made the internet worse for everybody by locking in users only to turn on them. He also stresses how the blame for the “enshittification” of the internet shouldn’t be placed on consumers, but on policy makers, and points to anti-trust enforcement, tech worker unions, and interoperability as the keys to remaking an internet that benefits users instead of billionaires. Shop Mint Unlimited Plans at http://mintmobile.com/daily Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Comedy Central. From the most trusted journalists at Comedy Central, it's America's only source for new. This is The Daily Show with your host, Ronnie T. Welcome to The Daily Show. I'm Roy Chang. We got so much to talk about tonight. Trump pretends to care about soccer. Our national parks just got a little extra nationalist.

And RFK Jr. tells you the best way to feed your baby before he gives it measles. So, let's get into the headlines. Let's kick things off with national parks. You know, that thing you see when you fall in. sleep in front of your Apple TV. One of America's most treasured institutions.

And now the Trump administration is making some exciting changes. The National Park Service this morning making changes to which day Americans can enter national parks for free. Now adding President Trump's birthday, which falls on Flag Day, and removing Martin Luther King Jr. Day and also Juneteenth. No word on why these changes were made removing MLK Day in June 10th from that calendar. Yeah, no word on why. Why Trump made these changes to MLK Day and Juneteenth at the National Parks?

I mean, what reason could that be? All I know is, if you're a black bear right now, you're hibernating with one eye open. But at least he gave us a different free day. And I know you're going to say, boo, he's trying to make his birthday into a national holiday. But no, it's for Flag Day. You know Flag Day?

that holiday we all know and love, where we stop whatever we're doing to go to a national park and celebrate flags. And speaking of people who love the great outdoors, let's talk about farmers. They grow all the fruits and vegetables that rot in the back of our fridges.

But they've had a tough time lately thanks to Trump's terrorists, which have contributed to a 50% increase and farmers going bankrupt this year. But don't worry, farmers. Someone is coming to save you from Donald Trump. It's Donald Trump. The Trump administration is giving America's farmers

a financial lifeline as the country deals with the fallout from the president's trade wars. The president today unveiled a $12 billion aid package for farmers. We love our farmers, and as you know, the farmers like me. It's true. Farmers do love Trump.

They do love him, even though he looks like the villain in a movie where someone loses their family farm. Like, you know how there will be a scene where he drives up in a limo and he says the family, this is all going to be a shopping mall and I'm through a few dumb hicks? And then all the farmers say, we love you, President Trump! Make America great again! Look, I don't know why they like him, okay? Maybe it's

because his son scares away all the crows. I don't know. But the point is, after screwing them with his trade policies, he's unscrewing them with a $12 billion bailout, which is great. I mean, that's got to be all the money they lost, right? Maybe even more. That $12 billion aid package

trying to help offset $44 billion in farming losses this year. Okay, hang on. Let me just do some quick math here. Yeah, I think Kerry the one, and yes, 12 is less than 44. So basically, Trump f***ed up the economy so badly that now he has to bail out farmers

and he can only afford to give them less than a third of what they lost. Now, how do you rate an economy like that? But I do want to talk about the economy, sir, here at home, and I wonder what grade you would give your economy. A plus. A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus, plus.

Amazing. A plus, plus, plus, plus. I mean, that's the same score. he got in his MRI. This feels like when your kid goes to like a monastery school and the grading makes no sense. It's like, wait, is A plus plus plus better than a four leaf clover? Like, what does a little cow mean?

Hey, look, can you read or not? But despite all that, the farmers at the White House did seem happy to be getting anything at all, although one of them did have a special request. It's Christmas early for farmers. The other day, I was reading my little boy a story at night, putting him to bed, and he said, Daddy, I don't want Santa Claus to come to our house for Christmas. I want President Trump. Guys, of course a kid wants Trump instead of Santa, okay? You don't have to be good all year to get on his nice list. You just have to buy enough of his crypto. Also, if you think about it, Trump and Santa aren't that different, right?

They're both old men, very famous, and they've both been to Epstein Island, okay? No, relax, okay? Santa went to deliver gifts. There were kids there, remember? No, you, what, you think just because they're sex slaves, they don't deserve presents? That's f***ed up. While Trump was plotting to replace Santa, the first lady spent the day of the OG himself. And boy, does she look happier than I've seen her in a while.

They were at a military base to promote toys for tarts, where Melania read some traditional Slovenian Christmas erotic fan fiction. So, with his sleigh parked safely with his reindeer, Santa climbed aboard my Osprey and couldn't stop smiling. Wow, this is so hot. Santa climb aboard my Osprey, and he pulled out his sack of goodies. Then he showed me North Pole.

But Christmas isn't just about Santa. It's about visiting family, and Trump's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is trying to make that a more pleasant experience pleasant experience for everybody. So I'm announcing at DOT that we have $1 billion in funding for grant programs to make the experience better in airports. Maybe you want to have a different lane for families to get through TSA.

How are you the transportation secretary and your big idea is the same one every annoyed dad has at the airport? It's like, hey, just open another lane. Yeah, your secretary of transportation, okay? Any more great ideas? It might be, I want to expand the play areas for kids. We can expand the airport play areas. Those things are basically pandemic laboratories.

It's like, hey, I have an idea. How about every kid from around the world gets together and swaps viruses before they get on a new flight? You, you, yeah, you. You might as well open a Wuhan wet market next to the Cinebin, all right? But, okay, Sean Duffy, come on. I'll give you one more try.

Maybe I want a workout area where people might get some blood flow and doing some pull-ups or some step-ups in the airport. You think people want to work out in transit at the airport? Everyone at the airport's already exhausted. from traveling, all right?

We came and walked to the gate. They had to invent floors that walk for us. Also, this is the same guy who wants us to dress up when we fly. So what? Now I'm doing pull-ups in a tuxedo? Before I jump on a 12-hour flight to Hawaii? Why don't we just throw in a hot yoga room in the terminal so everyone really smells like shit when they bought the plane?

And weirdly enough, everyone's favorite RFK, RFK Jr. was also at this press conference for some reason. What's RFK Jr.'s genius solution for making airports better? Another experience that I've had with all these kids in airports is the availability of nursing spaces, nursing pods. Okay. You know, that's actually a nice sentiment from RFK Jr. It should be more convenient to nurse in public spaces.

And I assumed he stopped talking before things got weird. All of the ingenuity of corporate America has not produced an infant formula that is superior in nutrition and all the qualities that we want to the infant formula that God made, which is the infant formula in a mother's breast. There is no better food and what's in God-given brass milk. Okay, he found a way to make it weird. What's the nipple version of a boner killer? I mean,

nipples are so soft right now. I mean, I'm surprised he didn't stop, sniff the air, and then announced that our nearby reporter was on her moon. If RFK wasn't behind a podium, he would get arrested by airport security. Just yelling in the terminal, praise God for mother's breaths. Also, why is he saying it like he got an endorsement deal with titty juice? Use promo code brain warm for 10% off your next sucker.

Of course, the press conference ended the same way all government press conferences do with a masculinity contest. Check this out. It's Bobby Kennedy doing pull-ups at Reagan International Airport in D.C. He and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy had a friendly pull-up competition as they were encouraging travelers to exercise while they wait. Yeah, two, two, three, three, three, four, four. Go, measure your dicks. Measure your dicks.

Now, you might think that this pull-up idea is stupid, but wait till you see the Department of Transportation's latest video. As Undersecretary for the Department of Transportation, we hear your complaints, the delays, the cancellations, the hidden fees. And we're doing something about it, introducing one pull-up bar. When air travel's got you down, pull-up. Can you just make the security line move faster? Of course. We know the faster you get through security, the faster you can get in line for the pull-up bar,

which is why we're also introducing pull-up pre-check, is to guarantee you'll get your pull-ups in. I don't want to do pull-ups. That's fair. Fortunately, with one simple adjustment, your pull-ups can be chin-ups. But then everyone on the airplane is going to be all sweaty. We hear you, and that's why we're adding a second pull-up bar, one that you can do pull-ups on. If we're all sweaty, then no one's sweaty. No, then we're all just sweaty.

How about you fix delays and cancellations? Fixing delays and cancellations is complicated, but you know what's not a simple iron bar between two posts? I'm talking about a pull-up bar. I know. From all of us at the Department of Transportation and pull-ups, thanks for watching. And remember, if your flight's not working out, at least you can work out.

But only pull-up. When we come back, we check in on award season, so don't go away. You know, you don't have to let big wireless and your overpressing. phone bill suck the joy out of the holidays this year because right now all of mintmobiles unlimited plans are 50% off you can get three six or 12 months of unlimited premium wireless for 15 bucks a month it's their best deal of the year and makes it real easy for you to give

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So you can stream all the news, but don't have to be a TV show to a TV show to a whole. afford it. Turn your expensive wireless present into a huge wireless savings future by switching to Mint. Shop Mint Unlimited Plans at MintMobil.com slash daily. That's mintmobile.com slash daily. Promo code daily. Limited time offer upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for $6 months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. $15 a month equivalent, taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Over 35 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. Cementmobile.com. Welcome back to the daily show. It's award season, the only season that hasn't been

up by climate change. So let's get all the latest award show news. in another edition of Who Won It Best? Welcome to Who Won It Best, where we cover the only reason to do anything, Awards. I'm NAACP Image Award winner Desilidic. And I'm Troy. Wait, what? Let's kick things off with the mother of all ceremonies, it with me, the FIFA World Cup Draw and Peace Prize Ceremony.

You know, I always look forward to the FIFA World Cup Draw and Peace Prize Ceremony. Oh, huge fan of the FIFA World Cup Draw and Peace Prize Ceremony. Yes, yes. You know what my favorite thing about the FIFA World Cup draw and Peace Prize Ceremony is... Tell me. You know, I love a World Cup draw and I love a Peace Prize ceremony. But with the FIFA World Cup Draw and Peace Prize Ceremony, you get both a World Cup draw and a Peace Prize ceremony! You know what that is? That's fun.

It's so fun. And you'll never guess who won the Peace Prize. JoJo Siwa. Close. Donald Trump. Please welcome the very first winner of the FIFA Peace Prize, the 45th and 47 President of the United States of America, Mr. Donald J. Trump. Gorgeous, you know.

Now that's a trophy that will make you turn your head and cough. Oh. I haven't seen that many hands tickling a southern hemisphere since Bible camp. Oh no. Uh-oh. But this wasn't just about giving the president some trophy. It was also about giving him a medal and a certificate. Wow, wow, three things.

There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go. Right now. Okay, fantastic. Excellent. Oh, wow, that's fun. Brilliant. That's so fun. It's so fun.

It's so fun. He picked up that medal with all the grace and dignity of a man holding a used condom on his to the crash. That's amazing. Incredible, incredible. And you know, he's never used one, so what a natural. This brings us to my favorite part of award shows, the acceptance speeches. Oh!

Oh! Especially when the winner thanks her spouse. It is so moving. I want to thank, by the way, my family, my great first lady. Melania, you're right here and thank you very much. That Wow That is so true

She was right there She really was She was right there Right there She was right there She was Right there You know a lesser husband would say something like

I love you or you're my rock But only Donald Trump could state his wife's physical location And then just move on That was a beautiful moment Did you know that the FIFA World Cup draw and Peace Prize ceremony also contains a World Cup draw? Stop it! Uh-huh! Let's start with the draw.

I will just show you how it works. You have to basically mingle the balls a little bit. You can see, I show this for the public, you see. Mingle. Wow. I haven't seen balls mingled like that since Bible camp! Oh my god, some day they're going to be. I think you stop going to that camp.

I could not. Then it was time for the grand finale, a performance by our village's finest people. It's from the state of the Y and see it. It's fun to stay at the Yucin. Wow. Wow. I can't believe the village people were available.

You know, I think they live at the Kennedy Center now. Last time I was there, I saw the cowboy bathing himself in the sink. That's so fun, so fun. He has great skin. Oh, lather up, partner. What a day for Trump, hanging with celebrities and receiving an award. The sacrifices this man makes for our country. Exactly, exactly.

The man never stops because he was at another award ceremony a mere 22 hours later. That's barely enough time to sleep and eat. How does he do it? Why does he do it? Who cares? It was time for the Kennedy Center honors. Part one of three. Sylvester Sly Sloan.

Sly. Thank you. This is great, Sly. It's an honor. Oh, thank you. Members of the incredible rock band Kiss. It's great, I can't be a friend for a long time. Thank you, Mr. Sli.

That's good. Thank you very much. Oh, I love the sensual whispers. The whispers. The whispers. You're so sensual. There's nothing like a special whisper. I want to leave my husband.

And of course, he had to honor kiss. Kiss is Trump's favorite band and favorite thing to do to a woman without asking. Now, personally, I love to ask. Watch, Desi, may I kiss you? Where? On the lips.

Which ones? The ones on your face. Then no. Now, this medal ceremony was just the appetizer. The main course was the actual Kennedy Center honors on Sunday night, and you'll never guess who hosted. Jojo Siwa. Close.

Donald Trump. You're going to have a great time because you just listen to music, and if Trump is no good, you'll say, to hell with him, just listen to the music. I want to listen to the music. get off the stage. Well, clearly that MRI revealed a funny bone. I can't believe that this is the first time a president has hosted this ceremony. What were all the other presidents doing that was more important than hosting an award show?

I don't know. It's me. Honestly, we'll never know. I guess we'll never know. Sometimes it's good to not know the truth. We won't know. Anyway, this is our last who won at best of 2025. And so, before we go, I just want to say, Desi,

you are right there. Oh. Troy. Okay. Thank you, Desi and Troy. Thank you, Desi and Troy. When we come back, Corey, Dr. Hope we join me on the show, so don't go away. This holiday season, comfort is sharing cozy mornings with the people you love. Avocado products transform your home into a peaceful, grounding retreat,

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to create your natural oasis and save big during their holiday sale. Avocado, dream of better. Welcome back to The Daily Show. My guest tonight is a journalist, internet activist, and author whose latest book is called Anshittification, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. Please welcome the one and only, Mr. Corey Doctor-Roe. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome! Oh, wow. So nice. Thank you. Your legend, man.

I've been reading you since I was in college. I am so honored to hear that. I also feel very old. Yeah, so one of your superpowers, I feel, is that you always manage to explain important Internet digital rights concepts in a very simple manner. So what is and certification? Well, it's, you know, I've worked for this nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, sort of a digital human rights group for 25 years. And I've been, thank you. And I've been trying to get people to care about tech policy all that time.

And, of course, it's very abstract and it's very technical. It's hard to make it urgent. And I've come up with all kinds of metaphors and so on. Turns out that the secret is you let people swear. And suddenly they become very engaged with the subject. So it works for me. So enchittification is this dirty word I came up with to describe how platforms go bad. And I don't know if you want me to go through like the stages of inshittification.

Yeah, sure. I think it will help. I like to use Facebook as an example. They're kind of a canonical example here. So in stage one of inshittification, a platform is good to its end users, but it locks them in. So Facebook in 2006 opens up to the general public, and they say, like, look, I know all of you have an account on MySpace, but I don't know if you realize this. MySpace is owned by like this evil, crampulent, senescent, immortal vampire, Australian billionaire named Rupert Murdoch, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

And the last thing anyone should ever want is to be on social media owned by a billionaire that spies on you. Right? So come to Facebook and we'll never spying you and we'll just show you the things you ask to see. And so we pile in and we lock ourselves in because you love your friends but they're a pain in the ass and you can't agree on what like board game you're going to play this weekend. So you definitely can't agree on when it's time to leave Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg knows this and he understands that so long as you love your friends more than you hate him, he can make life worse for you and you'll stay there. So that's stage two, making things good for business customers by making them bad for end users. So it goes to advertisers and he says, do you

Remember, we told these rubs we weren't going to spy on them. Obviously, that was a lie. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. And if you give us a remarkably small amount of money, we will target ads to them with exquisite fidelity. And because we're such dedicated crafts people, we've got this whole building full of anti-fraud engineers who are going to make sure that when you give us a dollar

to show an ad to a kind of user, we're going to stuff that ad in that user's face. And he goes to the publishers, and he says, remember we told these suckers, we were only going to show them the thing they asked to see. Also a lie. Take stuff from your website, put it on my website, add a link to the bottom.

We'll cram it into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see it. Some of them will click the link, free traffic. So they pile in, they get locked in, too. They become dependent on us. And then in stage three of insidification. Us being Facebook. Yeah, no, on us, the users. Oh, okay.

Right. So we're locked to each other. The businesses are locked to us. Now stage three, they make things worth to the business customers, too. Ad targeting, fidelity goes way down. Add prices go way up. Add fraud explodes. Procter & Gamble in 2017, zeroed at its $200 million per year surveillance advertising

spend saw zero dollar drop in sales because to a first approximation all those ads disappeared down the fraud hole. Advertisers had to put the whole article if they wanted it shown just to their subscribers, let alone recommend it. So they're fully substitutive now. No one's going to their website and the only way to monetize it is with this corrupt ad network. And we like we've got this feed that has like got this homeopathic residue of stuff we asked to see. The void is filled with things people pay billions of dollars to show us and they're getting raw blind. So this is like ideal for Facebook. All the values withdrawn except for the minimum needs. But it's kind of a brittle equilibrium,

because the difference between I hate Facebook, but I can't seem to stop coming here, and I hate Facebook and I'm not coming back. Facebook panics, being technical people. They have a technical term for panicking. They call it pivoting. And so Mark Zuckerberg, one morning he arises from his sarcophagus. And he says, harken to me, brothers and sisters,

for I have had a vision. I know I told you that your future would be arguing with your most racist uncle using this primitive text interface I invented so that I could non-consensually write the ability of Harvard undergraduates. However, the true future is that I will convert you and everyone you love into a legless, sexless, low polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon character so that I can imprison you in this virtual world I stole from a 25-year-old satirical dystopian cyberpunk novel that I call the Metaverse. And that is the final stage of inshittification, the giant pile of shit.

Okay. So, so everything's fine then. It's great. Yeah. So, I mean, implicit in that is this idea that stage one of incentivization was that they provided something that people wanted to use. Yeah. There was something good there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people found friends.

They made communities. We got Me Too out of it. We got Black Lives Matter out of it. We got all kinds of social movements because people were able to find each other. I mean, the problem with Facebook isn't that you had a place to talk to your friends. The problem with Facebook is that once you were locked in because you loved your friends, Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Zuckerberg could ruin your life, and no, you weren't going to leave.

Right. So one interesting thing about this book is it's written very, it's very easy to read. The first couple of chapters is case studies. Yeah. So you go through Twitter, you go through Facebook, you go through Amazon, you list the certification of these platforms. Yeah. Like, what isn't, so it seems like it's almost inevitable.

It's an justification, like every platform you can name. Is there a platform that? Sure. Yeah. So I don't think it's inevitable. So there's like a kind of simplistic answer to this, which is like, oh, will you, the almighty consumer, failed to shop with sufficient care? And so because you weren't willing to pay for the product, you became the product, and it's all your fault.

I think that's nonsense. It's like you didn't recycle hard enough, and that's why there's a wildfire, right? Your consumption choices aren't what dictated this stuff. There's also a temptation to say, oh, well, it's these like ketamine-addled Zucker-Musky and failures that are running the world. And clearly, they're terrible people, but they're just filling a void that was created by policy. Elon Musk pops his clogs tonight from too much ketamine. there will be an overnight succession battle and 12 horrible big battles will battle to the death

and whoever emerges victorious will be indistinguishable from him. The real culprits are the policy makers who created the inshidogenic policy environment that guarantees that people who do the worst things in the worst way will make the most money. In living memory, named individuals took policy decisions that they were warned about at the time that this would be the end result.

They did it anyway, and they walk around, polishing their fake Nobel Prizes in economics, doing six-figure consulting jobs for blue-chip companies, and never worrying that someone's sizing them up for a pitchfork. And this is one of the things I aim to change with this book. Sure. And I mean, you're referring to lawmakers and regulators and regulators. Lawmakers, economists, regulators, yeah.

But how much of this is, look, I mean, I'm with you, everything is getting, it feels like everything is getting shitty? How much of this is just, yo, hey, I'm talking to you at home, watching this on the internet. Get the fuck off of social media. Just get the fuck off it. Get off of Twitter. Get off this.

I wish it was that simple, right? But if you're on Facebook, because that's where the people who have the same rare diseases you were hanging out, or that's the only way you can stay in touch with the family you left behind when you emigrated. It's okay. Forget about them. I mean, I hear you, right?

But it's a big lift, right? It is a big lift. And the thing is, it doesn't have to be. You know, when Facebook was trying to get users off on MySpace, they didn't say, oh, come to Facebook, read our superior privacy policy and smug solidarity, or solitude until your dumb friends get the message and join you, they gave them a bot.

And you gave that bot your login and password, and it went to MySpace several times a day. It grabbed everything waiting for you, impersonating you, put it in your Facebook feed, and you could reply to it. That's called interoperability. And over the last 20 years, we've expanded IP law to make that kind of stuff illegal.

When Mark Zuckerberg did it to Rupert Murdoch, that's progress. We do it to Mark Zuckerberg, that's piracy. With these guys, it's always disruption for the and never for me. We could change the policy environment so that we could evacuate the platforms, right? But if we just shatter the platforms, we shatter all those communities that matter to people. And they really do matter.

That's how we get solidarity numbers. I don't know. I hate everyone on social media. So I'm happy. But then even if what you're saying is true, then what, maybe this is just the natural cycle of capitalism meeting innovation, in that these ideas start, they start pure, they start with connecting humans, money gets involved so they can connect more humans, and then it corrupts everything, and then the whole thing turns to shit. and then it's on us to move over to the next thing or quit it, you know? So historically, that's the way it worked, right? But historically, we had antitrust laws that we enforced,

which we did for four years under Biden. We've stopped doing now, except for companies that Donald Trump doesn't like. Because there's this guy who's decided that he's just going to use it against companies that aren't sufficiently deferential to him and don't give him a little gold trophy that they assemble for him. Well, that's what they're doing. So, you know, these companies, they bought all their competitors, right? Google, like, it's not Willie Wonka's idea factory. It's rich uncle penny bags, right?

They buy other people's toys and play with them. You take away Google's predatory acquisitions. They wouldn't have a mobile stack. They wouldn't have an ad tech stack. They wouldn't have server management. They wouldn't have document collaboration. They wouldn't have navigation. They haven't made a successful consumer-facing product in this millennium, right?

Everything they make dies. They only have successful products when they buy them from other people and operationalize them. So, you know, this is... You're talking mad shit about Google right now, man. But this is... But it's not. It's not like this fell on our heads or the iron laws of economics dictated it. We decided not to enforce antitrust law.

And the economists who said, oh, no, monopolies are actually good. Today when we're like surrounded by monopolies, they're like, how do you know it's our fault? This is like we used to not have a rat problem because we used rat poison. And these guys said, you don't need the rat poison. Rats are eating our faces off and they're like, why do you think that's my fault? Maybe it's like sunspots that ushered in the time of the rat by making them more a cun than at any time in human history. And yes, it's true.

Rats did buy the rat poison factories and shut them down, but we're not using rat poison anymore. That's just perido optimal economically rational behavior, right? So, like, these are not mysterious causes. You have to have the kind of specific neurological injury that you can only get by paying for an economics degree to not understand how this arose. Okay. So your solution is to just increase pressure from regulators? No, I think we have, like, four levers we can pull on to make the tech platforms work better,

and it's what used to make them work better. Oh, sorry, before you go on to that, I just thought you probably forget this because you're hitting me with a lot here. How much of this is just this nostalgia play for the old internet, you know? And we've had nostalgia even before internet. We've had nostalgia for the films used to be better. Typhor used to be better back in the day. So it's like maybe there's this nostalgia play in your head of this older internet that was made by the smartest people on the planet that only the next 10% of smart people could use. And we had this internet where it was just a very good faith, altruistic thing that people were trying to solve problem solve.

And now we've democratized the internet to a point where anyone can log on from their toilet seat. And so now you have a bunch of morons on the internet. And so, yes, things have gotten shittier, but it's gone shittier because all the f***ing dumbasses have gone to internet now. You know, some of us had very long Ethernet cables that would reach our bathrooms, even back then. So to quote one of my favorite TDS alum's John Hodgman, nostalgia is a toxic impulse. And I'm not nostalgic here. I think that we did have an old good internet

and that the feelings of the old good internet were not that we had a place where we could change how it worked or when tech companies screwed us over, we could alter how their technology worked. The feelings was that our normie friends couldn't use it because I like a lot of the people who couldn't figure out how to use PPP. And I'm glad that they showed up.

The thing is that tech bosses want you to think that having normies accessible on the internet is somehow inseparable. from them harming us, right? That there's no way you could have friends without Mark Zuckerberg being in the conversation. There's no way you can search the internet without Sundar Pinchai

knowing what color underwear you're wearing. There's no way you could have a phone that works unless you have a factory in China with a suicide net around it, right? And I think that these are absolutely separable. These are not things that go together naturally. These are things that they have glued together. And my goal is to build a new good internet

where we take the parts that we like and we make them easy so that our friends can use them too and we get rid of the parasitic billionaires who sit in the middle and ruin everything. Sure. Okay. Yeah. So, look, I mean, I agree with you. Get rid of the parasitic billionaires, but some of the problem of the internet are my friends.

Those people also need to get off the internet. Look, I think you're right that people can use technology in terrible ways. But I also think that, like, there's a lot of reasons to be angry right now, and a lot of them have to do with the conduct that gave rise to tech monopolies and other kinds of monopolies, right? Well, before, I just, just because of the limited time,

I didn't want to talk about what is the solutions. You know, you had some. So there were four things that used to keep tech companies in check, and we can bring them back. So one was that they had competitors. We can do antitrust again. It's not like it's trying to figure out how to build pyramids without power tools, right?

We know how to do this, right? It feels like the pyramids are easier to build and getting antitrust laws back in. You know, it took 20 years from the time we passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to the time we broke up Standard Oil. It's a long-term project. The best time to prevent monopoly formation is before they form.

It's right now during a mega presidency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the best time to do it. But we also need to regulate, and we're going to have to do this obviously now at the state and local level. So we have Lena Kahn, who's now co-chair of Zoran Mandani's transition team. She's figuring out how to bring the same vigor that she brought. So we have lots of opportunities there. We need to make tech workers unionized again.

Because when tech workers had power, it was because they were scarce, and then that scarcity went away, and they lost the power. And your ability to say to your boss, I'm not going to insidify that product that I missed my mother's funeral to ship on time because the guy across the street will hire me. That went out the window when tech fired 500,000 tech workers. Tech workers had the mistaken belief

that they were temporarily embarrassed founders and that they didn't need a union, that they weren't workers, they need a union. Because tech workers that aren't working behind a keyboard, those tech workers, they're peeing in bottles or they're being injured at three times the national rate in an Amazon warehouse. That's how tech bosses treat the workers

that are not afraid of. And the last thing we need to do is bring back interoperability. We need to make it legal to change how the technology that you use works so that, for example, you can unlock your printer so it'll take generic ink. You know that because it's illegal to change your printer, to modify your printer,

the four printer companies have raised the price of ink to the point where it is the most expensive fluid you can buy today without a license as a civilian. At $10,000 a gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion, right? So we need to just bring back interoperability. And interoperability will allow us to end in certification on, let's say, Facebook, how?

Well, it'll let you do what Mark Zuckerberg did to Rupert Murdoch. You could have a way to be on, say, Blue Sky or Mastodon, and have the post that your friends post on Facebook show up in your feed there. So you don't have to choose between the place where they respect you and the people who matter to you. You can have a foot in both camps. You can take your data wherever you want it. But you can continue to interact with those people, too.

Right. In the same way that, like, if you don't like the way T-Mobile's treating you and you want to go to, I don't know, like another carrier, you do like seven seconds of administrivia and then your phone just starts ringing on it. Nobody cares what network you're on. No one ever called up a friend and said, dude, dude is not believe who sim is in my phone today. It is genuinely weird that it matters which network you're on and not who you want to talk to. Yes. Well, that's great. Dr. Rowe. I've been reading your work since I was in college. It's really great to find me. You're the best. I'm the best. I am so honored. Cory Doctor, everybody. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back after this. That's our show for tonight. Now here it is, your moment of Zen.

I say that our soybeans, I told this to President Xi, our soybeans are more nutritious than competitors. Somebody said, is that a Trump statement or is that real? In fact, you know who asked me that question? President Xi asked me that question. He said, really, I had never heard of it. Explore more shows from the Daily Show podcast universe by searching The Daily Show, wherever you get your podcasts.

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