What Now? with Trevor Noah - Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

This week, Trevor and Eugene sit down with science fiction author and tech activist Cory Doctorow to unpack the concept of "enshittification"—the theory that explains the decay of the modern internet and why massive monopolies are deliberately making our tech worse. From Google tanking its own search results to digital stores clawing back video games you just paid for, Cory exposes how predatory corporate tactics make the average consumer suffer. But it’s not all a capitalist horror show; Cory leaves us with a genuine message of hope, breaking down the massive, unprecedented global coalition that is finally fighting back. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity? He did call me a scourge on humanity, but it was because I told him that I thought it was a different thing. He was like, so I'm a other life. I'm a science fiction novelist. And I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown. Wow.

So I write books for all ages. I have a new middle grades book coming out next year. I mean, everything. Picture books, tech criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but very much admired, a guy called Ian Banks, who died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist.

And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Ename Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian. He was an ardent trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Ian Banks's novels, I didn't see any unions. And I'm like, yes, these novels are set 100,000 years in the future in which there are galactic brain artificial intelligences,

piloting spaceships the size of planets with 100 million, billion people living on them. The fact that he didn't see a need for unions there tells you nothing about whether he thinks we need a union here. And he was like, well, if he and banks could have seen one of my Tesla factories, he would have seen that we don't need unions either. And I said, again, no offense. I think there is a difference between traveling faster than the speed of light and eking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles. Damn. And that is when he called me a squirt on humanity. But I wanted to pop the stack because this started with talking about...

He'd block you after that. Yeah, yeah, he did. I'm always fascinated by that side of Elon. The blocking butt. He's like, he's a baby. He is the, like, number one champion of free speech and jokes and opinions and all this. Until he doesn't have a rebuttal for you. And then he's like, block, you're racist. Go away, block.

Right. Gone. This is What Now with Trevor Noah. Corey, I'm glad you've come and joined us on the podcast. It's mutual. but not for the reason you may think. I see. I have beef with you.

Oh, no. What have I done? I'm pretty certain that I came up with the term shitification. Oh, dear. And then all of a sudden, in like 2022, I saw people saying n shittification. You see? Which I think is more grammatically correct. I just said, but I know I said it.

I know I said it. Unless you inceptioned me. I just remember saying to a friend of mine, I said, yo, I'm so sick and time. of the shitification of everything. And then they were like, what do you mean? And then I was like, everything's just becoming shitty and shitty. It's like they're making it shitty on purpose. I can see you coming up with.

And then people were just like, yeah, whatever. And then you like came up with any shitification. And now the whole world is on it. And I feel like I've been wronged. You know, when it's railroad time, you get railroads. When it's in shittification time, you get coinages pertaining to the general shittiness of everything. So it's, I mean, we are just living in that. But seriously, coinages.

are like this. So there are lots of coinages. You will find simultaneous or near simultaneous coinages that appear to be completely distinct just because the ideas in the zeitgeist. And, you know, like, I've spent 25 years working on these issues, and I've come up with lots of words and parables and narratives and all kinds of things. And while I think the minor license to vulgarity is something that excites people, I also think that, like, in this moment, people are eager for a kind of adivistic way to talk about how they feel about their technology. More than ever. Yeah.

You know, it's funny, it's gone beyond technology. Sure. Even when I was telling Eugene about this episode, I was like, I'm so excited to talk to Corey because he has done for society, what I think society has been pining to do for itself, but just sort of hasn't been able to piece together. And that is that like everyone everywhere feels like everything that we're getting and experiencing is becoming more and more shit. Yeah.

Right? We feel like the amount of food that we get for the money we pay is becoming shitter. We feel like the amount of things that our time can do is becoming shitter. We feel like our cause and the value that you get our shitter. You feel like everything in your life. Plain seats are getting smaller. Yo, everything. Your appliances last three years, not 30.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. You can get like you can, my grandmother. in her house, till the day she died, had the fridge that I knew from when I was a kid. Even that term, lifetime guarantee is gone now. Yeah.

I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Well, almost everything had a lifetime guarantee. Let's say 20 year guarantee store or a life camp guarantee of this, yeah. Yeah, and the thing is, this is why I appreciate your work so much is because there are things that are so pernicious.

Is that the word in society? Where they like, they steal away and they and they're like in, But what makes them, what makes them so insidious is that we all think we're being individually crazy and cramagony. You know what I mean? So you just feel like in your life, you're like, I feel like old cars were made better. Then it's like, oh, here we go again, grandpa. You know, I feel like this was, it's like, and what you've done is you've taken all of it and gone, hey, we're not crazy. Things are being made shittier.

Yeah. And I like to think that the kind of full theoretical unpacking, because it talks about. about the policy environment that created it, kind of takes us beyond like, oh, you shopped badly. You know, you didn't realize if you're not paying for the product or the product. So your failure to be a careful enough consumer cause this, or even like the personality defects of these guys who run these services are to blame,

like, they're bad people, right? I count the spoons if they came over to dinner. But like, they're just doing what policy lets them do. And, you know, one of the things about having worked in this now for, like most of my adult life on these tech policy issues, is that I know that this outcome was not only foreseeable but foreseen, right? There were specific junctures where policymakers said, we should do X.

And everyone showed up and said, don't do X. This terrible stuff is going to happen. And they were like, nah. And so, you know, like, on the one hand, it makes me very angry and feel a little vindicated. But on the other hand, it makes me hopeful because, like, if we can move this beyond the great forces of history and like, oh, it's just, you know, like the iron laws of economics demand that things, you know, margins be squeezed where they can be.

Yeah, yeah. And move it into the realm of like specific policy choices. Well, then we can reverse them, right? We're not prisoners of history. We're just people whose leaders were cowardly and short-sighted and selfish and bad at their jobs. And so, you know, there's obvious remedies for that. They don't always involve a guillotine. Do you think that these politicians were bad at their jobs?

Or do you think that we just made the assumption of thinking they were working for us when they were working for them? corporations. It's a little of both. So, you know, there's a specific one that I am particularly exercised about. So there's this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998, DMCA. Section 1201 of the DMCA establishes a felony for modifying technology without permission. So like if someone sells you a printer that only takes the ink from HP and you modify it to take generic ink, then that's a felony. That's a crime. Yeah. There's a kind of nuance there where it's like you have to bypass an access control to do it, but all you have to do is add the access control to the product, and you can conjure new felonies out of thin air.

So Jay Freeman calls it felony contempt a business model, basically. They just created a path where any firm could take any conduct it didn't like and make it a literal crime. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Just by designing their technology. I mean, if I extrapolate this to everything, like because people may not even use princes anymore. Right.

That's like saying if you have a car and then you modify the engine. That's already the case. That's a crime. Wait, that's already the case. Yeah, yeah. So if you, like, the whole right to repair fight about cars is because the diagnostic messages that go from the part to the what's called the main computing unit, the MCU, the main computer in your car, those are encrypted and decrypting them, right, bypassing the access control as a felony. And each engine component has a chip. It's called a system on a chip.

It's a cheap little full feature computer that costs less than a dollar. And when you put the part in the car, the part and the MCU do a little handshake where it says, like, can you send me like a magic code that demonstrates that you were installed by an official technician and that you were made by the original manufacturer and that you're not a generic replacement part? And if it can't, even though it's a real part that really works, the car just refuses to recognize it. And it's not just cars, ventilators, major appliances, your phone. medical implants. It's called parts pairing. And because this is federal law, right? Is it DMC-201?

It's a federal law. When states pass right to repair laws, they really can't reach to this because it preempts it. In Oregon, what they've done is they just said, you're not allowed to sell a device that requires parts pairing. But that's as far as they've gotten. One of the most disgusting examples of this is there's an American company called Medtronic that pretends it's Irish for.

tax purposes. They did the largest tax inversion in history. Medtronic does the, they do a lot of like the CPAP machines and all of those things. They are the largest med tech company in the world. Oh, I didn't know that. Diagnostic devices, implants, prostheses, the whole range, right? And they make the world's workhorse ventilator. So everyone, every hospital has got a building full of their ventilators. Right. And the ventilators use parts pairing. And during lockdown, you had, technicians at the hospitals who were taking like a dead working screen from a dead ventilator and putting it in a dead ventilator or the working screen, vice versa. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then it just wouldn't recognize it because it just couldn't. And you were supposed to have the technician come and bless the repair, but there were no planes flying. And this was the moment where we need ventilators more than ever. And so there were just ventilators that didn't work. Now, the crazy thing is how this got resolved. So every country in the world has a law, just like DMC, 12-1, including South Africa, it comes in through the free trade agreements with the U.S.

The U.S. Trade Representative has made it the number one trade priority of the U.S. to get all of its trading partners to enact laws like this, basically to make it illegal everywhere else to dis-inshidify the products that America exports so that American tech firms can steal all your data and money, so that you can't go into business fixing it. And there is a law like this in Poland. It comes through the European Copyright Directive, Article 6. And there was a Polish medical technician who used to work for Medtronic who was making his own ventilator, illegal ventilator unlockers and anonymously shipping them to hospitals. Like you would find people online complaining about this. And he'd be like, give me your address. I'll

send you the thing. And because it was the lockdown, he just had whatever he had for enclosures. So they would get like a guitar pedal with like a USB port and you plug it into your ventilator. and it had like a little raspberry pie. Yeah, yeah. It was just like MacGyver and this thing. Like clock radios, bedside lamps, like literally whatever this guy had in his place in Poland during the lockdown. But he risked felony prosecution for this.

And there's so much of this in Poland. Poland is like a weird epicenter for this. So there's a Polish train company called Nuvog. And companies that bought Newvoj trains would find that when they took them to a third-party depot for repair, they would just stop working. And they would like brick themselves and you'd have to call up NewVog and NewVog would go, oh, we'll do some remote diagnostics. It's 20,000 euros.

Okay, we fixed it. Or sometimes if you just park them for a long time, they'd do this. Or sometimes they're pieces of track where if they ran over it would do it. So they hired an independent team security researchers called Dragon Sector who reverse engineer the firmware on this train. And the manufacturer, NewVog, the way that they were winning all these train bid contracts is they sold the trains really cheap and then they charged at the ass for repair and maintenance. and if you, they had booby-trap the train

to detect if it was parked in someone else's maintenance yard and then make itself inoperable. And one of the rectangles they drew around a train maintenance yard, they drew it too wide and it went over a piece of mainline track. So trains that went open. It would just stop working. And then they threatened to sue, well, they are suing the researchers. They threatened to sue a Polish member of parliament

for talking about this in parliament. This is like this is There's so many things that you just triggered in my brain One one of them being how we can go down the road Or rather we can we can sort of like start at this at this point And then extrapolate it to everything else Because I was thinking to myself When I was growing up when we were growing up

We take for granted How many industries and how many jobs And how many people existed Because they were tangentially connected to a product, right? All over the world today, people are saying, oh, my town is dying, my city is dying, stores are closing, people are unemployed.

Things are falling apart. But we oftentimes don't ask ourselves what those things were. And then when you think about it, you go, oh, this was a place where they repaired TVs. This was a place where they repaired cars. This was a place where they, but they had nothing to do with the car or with the TV.

They were just tangentially connected to it. Nothing had to be made first. Yeah, but what you've just made me realize is, as companies and corporations have gotten better at strangling that with these laws that they've somehow got into effect, every single small business around it dies. Yeah. So you reminded me,

I didn't finish telling you how this law came into effect and why I know that they were warned about it and what kind of politician passed it. So during the Clinton administration, Bill Clinton asked Al Gore to think about demilitarizing the internet, because the internet was like it started in Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and it was run by like military contractors and universities with military contracts, few weird hobbyists and high-tech companies. But mostly it was just U.S. government and military and it's like kind of cluster military industrial firms. And so Al Gore did this thing called the National Information Infrastructure hearings. They were called colloquially the information superhighway.

You may remember that. Yeah, yeah, I remember that, too. And Clinton had this guy who was his IPsar, so his head of copyright policy, corporate lawyer named Bruce Lehman, still alive in Florida. Hi, Bruce. And Bruce Lehman had this idea for what became DMCA 1201, this anti-circumvention law that basically make it illegal to unrig the system. And he took it to Al Gore. And to Al Gore's everlasting credit, he said, no, that's terrible. Go away.

And so Bruce Lehman, in a move that he has later repeatedly described as, quote, doing an end run around Congress, went to the United Nations in Geneva. And there's a specialized agency there called the World Intellectual Property Organization. You may remember them from saying to South Africa, you can't make your own anti-retrovirals during the height of their AIDS crisis. So that was all policy set at WIPO. So he went to WIPO and he said, we're going to make this into a treaty obligation. And it became these two treaties, we call them the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the WIPO copyright, the WIPO Internet Treaties. The one's the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the other one's, the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty.

But the Internet Treaties. Then he went back to Congress and he said, well, now you can't say no. You're obliged to pass this law. One of the treaty. Yeah. And so that's how we got it. So the question is, what kind of politician did it? Do we mistake them for working for us, working for them?

I mean, the Clinton administration, like every presidency, was a coalition of people who wanted different things. Yeah. And oftentimes the way those coalitions are managed, across purposes. So in the Biden administration, you had these like generationally amazing trust busters like Lena Kahn who brought these cases against companies like Microsoft when they wanted to buy Activision. Then you had judges that Biden appointed, including one whose son worked for Microsoft, who heard that case and said, I don't see a problem with this. Right. And so you often get that

within administrations. You get people who really want opposite things. And there's this kind of division of the spoils. And sometimes that just ends up neutralizing everything. It feels it feels like it's so far down the road that it's everything now. Feels hopeless. Yeah, because I think of

the other day my brother texts me and he goes Hey man, I can't play any of my PlayStation games because it's telling me that the license of the game is not, but he was playing them and then he wasn't playing. And then when we went down this rabbit hole

trying to understand what had happened and how did it happen, there'd been some update that they had done. Uh-huh. But basically, we realize that before you would buy a video game, take your money, you buy the video game. Take it home. The video game is yours. It is yours.

You can loan it to a friend. You can sell it to GameStop or whoever. It is yours. Now what they say is, no, you have bought a license to play the game from us. Until we change our minds. Until we change our terms of service. What's crazy to me, though, is like they can just shut it off at any time

and then you don't have it anymore. But I go, but we don't, as people, we don't have that power. I cannot change the terms of service on the people that I was in a terms of service with. You with me? So I can't go back to, you know, PlayStation or whoever and be like, yo, remember how I gave you that $80 for that game?

Yeah, my terms of service have changed. You owe me 40 back. You owe me 40 back because my term of service is that if I play a game and I finish it with a 97% completion rate and I get all the trophies, then you guys have to give me half my money back. They'd be like, you, yo, get this guy off the premises. Sure. Yeah, in the book, I call this the Darth Vader MBA, right? As in I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further. Right? Like, that is the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA. I gave you deal X and now it's deal Y. And, you know, this is a fight I've been having about,

So these technologies that restrict access that are covered by Section 12 of the DMC and these other laws, they're called a lot of different things. One of them is digital rights management. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. So DRM. DRM. So this is the thing I've been beating the drum about for like more than 20 years. And one of the things, I used to write for Wired.

I used to write for Wired. I was writing for Wired, and my editor at the time was this guy, Chris Anderson, really good guy. And they published this guide to things to buy this Christmas, electronics to buy this Christmas. And I wrote a blog post saying, this guide is all wrong because all these products have DRM and they can be remotely downgraded. So you cannot review a product and say, if you want X, Y, and Z buy this product. Oh, because the quality of the product may never be taken away.

Right. You have to warn people somewhere. And he was just like, oh, you're being paranoid and unrealistic. We had a little, this was like in the aughts when we had great fights on blogs. It was like two men of letters exchanging lengthy misses. It was very good. My good man. Yeah.

Here is all the ways that you are incorrect about this issue. First and foremost, let me draw your attention to the faux par you made. Indeed. Indeed. So, yeah, it was, it was, and like, I went to Poughkeepsie. I went to Consumer Reports and I was like, you're reviewing these products, but like, none of them are fit for consumption. Because every product in the category can be remotely downgraded. Right?

So like you cannot, you can't advise people by this because you want a device that will play back a file format or whatever if that can be changed with no remedy on your part, no recourse, and no way to predict it. Because, you know, one of the things about the timing of inshittification is that it came after a bunch of these lawsuits the Biden administration brought where we got publication of memos from inside the companies that really showed you how these decisions are made. right? So they're like it's it's not a mustache twirling CEO. It's usually like with the with government agencies or parts of government. It's factional disputes within companies. And so like one of the

things about DMCA 1201 is it's I call it an inshittogenic policy because it means that the worst ideas that the worst people make the most money. So it means that when you're arguing within the company, I think we should do X. I think we should do Y. So imagine there's no DMCA 1201. Imagine there's no anti-circumvention law. So we're like having a product planning means. about our website. And I say, hey, I'd like to make the ads 20% more invasive and obnoxious, because I think that'll give us 2% more clicks. And someone who doesn't give a damn about user welfare might still put their hand up and

say, Elon, I love how you think. But has it occurred to you, like 40% of our users are going to type in the search bar, how do I block ads? And of course, we never see revenue from them again because no one ever goes back and types, how do I start seeing ads again? Yeah. Right? But if it's the app, right, and there's anti-circumvention, and it's against the law to reverse

engineer an app because apps are closed platforms, the web is open. You cannot block the ads. So at that point, the guy says, why are you stopping at 20%? Right. Like, why do we make the ads 100% more invasive? Get a 10% increase in our click-through. Doesn't matter if someone types, how do I block ads in the app because it's a felony. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, these in shittogenic policies, we can see how they, then there's like a line from them to these choices made by problems. product managers and people within firms. So one of them came out of one of the Google cases. So Google is a thrice convicted monopolist. They lost three federal antitrust cases in one year. It was a great year for antitrust, bad year for Google.

And in one of those cases, well, in all those cases, you get all the memos published like internally. The DOJ makes them publish all their memos. And one of them, the search case, this great reporter Ed Zitron, wrote about how Google got worse at search. and it happened in 2019, their search market share or their search revenue had growth had stalled. And that was because they had 90% market share. So you don't grow from a 90% market share.

It's hard to now have those exponential jumps. Yeah, I mean, you can raise a billion people to maturity and hope that they'll become your customers. That's a product called Google Classroom. It'll take a while to pay off. But in the meantime, they had this crisis, right? And so you see these two factions forming up. One's led by this guy, Prabagar Ragavon. It's an ex-McKinsey guy.

He's an engineer, but a business guy, and he's in charge of revenue for Google Search. And his rival is this guy, Ben Gooms, who's like an old-school Googler who started building out their servers when it was like a computer under a desk and oversaw all of the data centers in the world and is now in charge of Google Search Technology. So Google Search Revenue, Google Search Technology. Prabagar Ragavon's got a great idea. He says, we can grow search revenue by making search worse, so you have to search more than once, so that we, we, you know, we. can show you more ads. No, Corey, can't be serious. And he's like, and Ben Gomez is like, but that's a terrible idea. I didn't give my life to this company for this. And he's like, but we spend more than $20 billion every year buying all the shelf space for search, right?

We buy, like, if there's a search box that you encounter in the wild, it's wired to Google servers. It doesn't matter what operating system, what hardware vendor, what browser. It all goes back to the same place. So like, why are we bribing Apple, 20s? billion dollars a year not to enter the search market, if we're not going to exploit the fact that no one can find any other search engines to make it worse. And so it's very easy to make it worse. There's things like query stemming where if someone does a search for trousers, you run a parallel search for pants, then you merge the results. There's spell check, right? Someone misspells a search sherman, you make a guess, and you just automatically fix it. Well, maybe you

don't automatically fix it. Or even like context awareness, right? So like, we're recording this right after the attempted shooting at the White House press corps dinner. So someone searches for that. Well, you know that there's a news item about it. So you put those at the top rather than the generic best link for White House press. Right. Okay. Right.

And you just turn that off. And now people have to search two or three times. And you have Bengals going like, well, I didn't miss, you know, all those like literally games of my kids to make the search wars. I believe in what we do here. And you have Prabagar Ragavan basically saying money talks and bullshit walks. And, you know, I'm sure Prajavar Ragavon was not the first person at Google to realize that if you made search worse, people would have to search more than once and make more money. But he was the first guy to win that argument.

And my thesis is he won the argument because we allowed Google to buy all of its competitors and buy all the shelf space and bribe Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. And then we created the conditions in which the worst person at Google's worst idea was the most money-making one. They had nothing to fear from competitors. They knew the regulators wouldn't come after them. They were even at the point where they were less worried about losing staff. I mean, obviously now they just hate their staff and wish they would all be replaced by chatbots. And so, you know, they were like just untethered from discipline. And in the absence of consequences, the bad idea just was the one that won the argument.

So if I'm hearing what you're saying then, one of the initial seeds that can send up, us onto this journey, you know, one that can grow into like a forest of shitification is when we allow competition to die. Yeah, I think it's kind of a policy. If you have a market where, I mean, we've seen this in life. I don't care. You know, like some people might listen to this and think, oh man, yeah, but I'm not in the tech world.

It's like, no, no, let's even think of it on a small, small level. We've seen this in South Africa. There's a, you know, what New York would call a. bodega, we call a spaza shop, like just a local store that's, you know, really informal. Yeah, just corner store. When there's a ton of corner stores, two things happen. Prices are generally in check with each other, right, unless there's price fixing, which generally didn't happen with corner stores.

Hard to do with 200 companies, too. So you would go, how much for this? Now I'm going there, and the person would be like, how much is it there? All right, I'll adjust my prices. So it kept everybody's price in check. And the second thing it did, which was almost more important, was it made sure that somebody could hold you accountable for the quality of the product you were giving them because they could go get it somewhere else. Because in South Africa, we had like just all of a sudden a burst of fake products. So people were selling like fake Coca-Cola.

Like it was Coca-Cola in a bottle. Yeah, counterfeits. But it wasn't Coca-Cola. And it wasn't, and people were like, this tastes weird. And they're like, oh, don't worry. And then what happened was when they could own enough of the stores or enough of the corner stores and it was part of like one syndicate Where would you go now for the real product? Right, right? You couldn't right so these two things together now even affect you on a so now not only are you paying more

Mm-hmm, you're also getting less for the more that you're paying. Yeah And then you I almost feel like this becomes like the It's the it's it's it's it's the fault line that'll cause the earthquakes of society is how I think of it. Because this makes people angry in the streets, but they don't know what's making them angry. And then we just think like everyone in society is getting like angrier and more pissed off and more, but it's like, no, this is it. This is the fault line.

So it's funny, you raise that. So I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So nonprofit that works on digital rights. We have allies in South Africa who work on these issues related to IP and digital rights and surveillance and all these things. And I was, you know, the latest round of updates to the copyright law there included the expansion of the limitations to copyright to match the American set. So what we call fair use here, which would have made it a lot simpler for like university teachers to teach and high school teachers to teach and, you know, photocopy course packs to all these things that are just kind of normal. And the U.S. trade representative was like, no, that American policy is very extreme and you shouldn't have it here in South Africa.

No way. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I used to talk to the team about this. So when you and I were doing the show in South Africa, Eugene and I were doing like a late night, it was like a new thing in South Africa. It wasn't really a thing that had existed. We said, can we use clips from like the news and from stuff?

They were like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like, yeah, yeah. Remember we wanted to play the idols clip? They were like, nope. They were like, what the hell do you bloody hell think? They were like, yo, this is not allowed in the country. It's not so I thought that was normal. I was like, okay, I get it.

You can't take somebody else's thing and comment. I understand. I get it. Then I came to America. Right. And everyone was doing it on everything. The Tonight Show, the late show, the daily show, the news, MSNBC. And I was just like, whatever.

And they're like, oh, no, here it's fair use. Yeah. Yeah. So what does that mean? They're like, well, it's fair that you can use something because you're trying to do something else. You're not just trying to plagiarize it. And this is fair to do. Yeah.

And now you're telling me that those people told South Africa, you can't have it. Don't do our one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's great. So at EFF, you know, when I started, I was, I watched tech companies really have their users back. This was sort of the Napster era. And there was this kind of broad sense that we should like not make it really easy to remove content from the internet because then people would like censor stuff. You need the evidentiary standard.

We shouldn't just spy on people. We should, it should be really easy to go from one service to another, what's called interoperable. where things plug into each other, all browsers. Can you move your accounts? Can you move your contacts? Can you move your chats? Yep. I remember this period. And that was because there were hundreds of them. And when there's hundreds of companies, they're a rabble, right? They can't agree like not just on what their policy position is. They can't agree on like what they'll cater the meeting where they try to work out the policy issue, right? Like they're, you know what it's like getting, even a dozen people to

agree. But, and I watched the media industry kick their ass, right? So they were like two orders a magnitude larger than the media industry during the Napster Wars, but there were seven media companies, which now five. And the media companies had one playbook, right? And whether they were in Congress or in a court or at WIPO or whatever, they just said the same thing. And there was just there was this incredible unity that you get when you boil down a large group to a small group. And what we did is rather than making media more like tech, we made tech more like media. And now we've got like an internet that's five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four, and they totally agree on all the ways that we should be screwed.

And in fact, they've more or less merged with these media companies. But this amazing thing has happened more or less since Google and shitified in the last six or seven years, which is that everywhere in the world we've seen this like almost spontaneous upwelling of policymakers taking aim at monopolies, right, at concentrated corporate power. There's a famous study at a Princeton. And they call it colloquially the oligarch study because it's got a very long academic name. But they went and they looked at like about 2,000 policy outcomes.

And they concluded that the biggest predictor of what would happen in a policy fight is what billionaires wanted. And if billionaires wanted it, we got it. And if billionaires didn't want it, we didn't get it. Are you being for real? And yeah, and basically the policy preferences of ordinary people had no bearing on policy outcomes.

Are you being for real? Yeah, 100%. But here's the thing. No billionaire wants antitrust enforcement. No, they hated it. But we have had anti-trust enforcement in America, right? And it started on a Trump one. It didn't start under Biden.

It started under Trump one. Yeah. For I think mostly spiteful reasons. Trump one. Trump one. Yeah. From the people who brought you Trump one. King, king, king.

I'm back. He's back. Let's do it again. We're back. Part two. It's part two. So we got it under Trump one. But also the European Union, like started making these really muscular

regulations, the Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, now the Digital Fairness Act, then European member states, like Spain and France and Germany started doing stuff. And then we also got it in England, and we got it in the UK in a period where like their politics were so screwed up that like they had prime ministers who were lasting for 10 years that were shorter than the shelf life of a head of lettuce, you'll recall. And yet this was the period in which the competition of markets authority, which is their answer to the FTC, did its best work ever. like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian.

And in Canada, we had this too, when Canadians say that, but I love it so much. It's one of my favorite things Canadians say. So you know why? You know why I love that thing? Because as a South Africa, I can't hear the difference between most Canadian accents in American. So when a Canadian says that the whole time I thought you were American,

then you're like, like all the best American I'm Canadian, then I'm like, whoa, you did it again. Yeah. And honestly, I can't hear the difference. I mean, I can hear the difference between a Texan and someone from Newfoundland. But I can't, but, you know, generic newscaster, Canadian accent, generic newscaster American accent, all the same. But we had the world's most useless competition authority. So our Competition Bureau, in its entire history, had challenged three mergers.

And that number may seem low, but the number of mergers they'd successfully challenged was zero. And in 2024, Justin Trudeau whipped his caucus to pass the most muscular antitrust law with the most sweeping powers of any competition bureau in the world. And Justin Trudeau was not like a foe of corporate power, right? He was like his whole brand was sort of Pete Buttigieg style like kind of neoliberal, like, you know, sort of McKinsey good hair. The status quo, but let's make it a little bit better. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we get this out of Justin Trudeau, but we also got it in South Korea and in Singapore and in Japan and Australia and also China. Wait, what was happening?

So different things in different countries. South Korea and Japan pursued antitrust cases against Apple for price fixing in the app store. So if you sell anything in an app, if you collect any money in an app, 30% goes to Apple. Apple requires you to use their payment process. And they make $100 billion a year on that. It is the most profitable line of business they're in. It's more profitable than anything else they do.

It is pure profit. It's a 30% tax on the digital economy. Right. And it's crazy. It's just like a shocking sum of money. But wait, wait. Okay, let's delve into that. Because this is something that I find myself grappling with.

It's a tough one. On the one hand, I do think it's crazy that Apple charges you 30% of any revenue that is coming in from your app, that you're charging in the app specifically. On the other hand, I go, there was no app store. There was no app ecosystem. There was no, they're making it. Have you tried to sign up for anything that's not in Apple? Aha, ha, jean, do you want to hate your life? My man. Good luck paying. Good like, it's messy, it's hard. Good luck. Canceling, by the way. You try cancel a product that you didn't sign up through like Apple. Like get some other service. Because I've tried to like get out of the ecosystem. I'm like, now I'm going to go sign up on the website myself and I do my thing. Until this day, there will be $5 leaving my account where I'm like, I mean, I don't know. I keep sending email. I cancel. Unsubscribe. I no longer wish to reason for leaving because I don't want to give you my account.

money anymore. Reasonfully, I don't want to be here anymore. That's too bad. Can we put you through to somebody? I don't want to be put through to anybody. But so there's that side of it where I go, what is the amount that Apple or anyone should be able to charge for inventing a new thing that makes you money that you didn't make? Because you are making 60% from zero. 70%. Sorry, you're making 70% from zero. From zero, right? So you're making that 70% from zero. Right. So you're making that 70% from zero. Why? Sure.

Why shouldn't? Like I, this, and I genuinely mean as like a grapple because I go like, ah, who decides? Yeah, but who decides? So, okay, so take off your, I use a phone app and put on your like SIM regulator app. Okay. And you're trying to like figure out what's best for society. Yeah, let's do it.

Right. So right now the way that it works is reverse engineering and iPhone to add a different payment method is a felony, right? So Apple gets to put you in jail if you try and add another payment method. And Apple's argument is that by blocking independent repair, independent software installations, independent payment processing, and so on, that they're able to do this sort of paternalistic thing. They've got their users back and they'll step in and do it. And there's an extent to which that is undoubtedly true.

But there is a threat that Apple will never defend you against, which is Apple. And so where Apple doesn't have your interest at heart, then you have no recourse because you can't change your phone if you don't like what Apple's doing. So in 2021, Apple updated iOS, I think it was 2021. They updated iOS, which is the operating system for like phones and watches and tablets. And they gave you a single tick box and you ticked it and then Facebook couldn't spy on you anymore in the apps. 96% of iOS users tick that box. The other 4% were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees, which makes a lot of sense because if I worked at Facebook, I would always be drunk. Hey, Corey, he had to fire shots, right?

Corey doesn't play games. Corey's there with his machine ratatatara Tori doesn't play games So you get it right Like this is clearly Like neoliberal economists The same ones who say monopolies are efficient They like to talk about revealed preferences

Where if you do one thing but say another thing The thing you're doing matters more than what you're saying You have a revealed preference This is like a I think you can only believe If you incur the kind of neurological injury You get from taking an economics degree Which makes you incapable of like Perceiving or reasoning about power

You see someone who's like sold a kidney to make the rent. You go, look at that person with the reveal preference for one kidney. So here's the thing. When you give people a real choice, they can reveal a preference. Because Facebook would have set up until that moment. People use Facebook so they don't want their privacy. So here's the kicker. When Apple was turning this on for Facebook, they were also turning on their own surveillance

system for the iPhone that gathers all the data of Facebook used to gather in order to target ads to you because they have a competing ad broker. and there's no way to opt out of that, right? And it's against the law to do one to Apple as Apple did onto Facebook. But that's like just for table stakes, right? So in China, the government said to Apple, you must remove all the privacy tools.

There's no VPNs, there's no antenna- encrypted messages that aren't backdoored, and they back-doored iCloud in China so that they could figure out who to like stick in a gulag. Right. Right. So again, Apple's going to be. your back until they don't and when they don't

what do you do? What do you cause? And then finally, here in America Apple decided that an app called Ice Block, which is an app that warns you if there's a guy in Oakley's and a gator who wants to shoot you in the face or like send you to an El Salvadoran slave camp for the rest of your life that that

doesn't belong in the app store. What was the arguments? Ice officers are a protected class. Oh, as they should be. They're a visible minority. Huh. And so, I mean, the argument is, please don't tear off my stuff, Mr. Trump. That's the argument, right?

Huh. That's why Tim Cook flew to D.C. to assemble a little gold participation trophy for Trump. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, that's why he paid a million dollars to sit behind Trump on the dais at the inauguration. It's why they gave millions of dollars for the Epstein ballroom. You know, it's because it's mafia, right? So when Apple has your back, it's great.

And one is not scared. Oh, man. So, you know, you can tell someone has multiple passports in this conversation. I have three. Someone here has multiple passports. I'm Canadian, British and Americans. There you go. You can see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just freewheeling here. So literally evil can even use conversation. So how do you get Apple to like have your back again, right? They have to be afraid. They have to be afraid that something bad will happen to them. If we want them to be good, there have to be penalties for being bad. Because within Apple, I guarantee you, in fact, it's public because they all leak to the New York Times and

wired and whatever. There are tons of Apple employees who are like, this is bad and we shouldn't do it. Oh, wow. They say it about China. They say it about app store fees. They said it about ice block. Right. And they're losing the argument.

What if their argument wasn't just this would make me feel icky, but also that $100 billion a year we take in from transactions is about to be. be shifted to a rival because people are so pissed off with us that they would happily switch. Yeah. Right. Apple, Apple makes this argument all the time. They say, well, if we let third parties fix your phone, well, maybe they do something bad to your phone. Yeah. Well, that's possible. So maybe we should have a law that says, if I fix your phone and install spyware, I go to prison or get fined or whatever, right? And in fact, you talked about canceling under the Biden administration,

Lena Kahn created what was called the click to cancel rule, which told corporation. And it's me too. Me too. God, I used to send her texts that said, I can't tell you how disorienting it is to get it to bed in the morning and look at my phone and go, oh my God, my government's great. Yeah, like, Lena Khan was, because, because you know what it felt like with Lena Khan. It felt like there was somebody in government doing what the government is supposed to do. So here's how I, here's how I've seen it. So Lena Khan was fundamentally tasked with making sure that trade and competition were. fair in the United States, right? And this is something that people oftentimes obscure in these conversations. If you talked to billionaires and CEOs of corporations, they would make Lena Kahn seem like the devil. And they would oftentimes say, you need to let business do what it does.

And you know, you've got to be unrestrained. And because if you, if you restrain industry, it will not move in the direction. But this would be the equivalent of two fighters in the cage in UFC. saying you've got to get the refs out of the cage, man. Get the refs out of the cage and then just let the fighting be unrestrained. And then true fighting will emerge and then you will know who the best fighter is. And it's like, yeah, that's true. But a lot of people might die.

A lot of people might die. So the reason we have a referee, even at UFC, is because there is somebody who knows what the rules are and their job is to enforce the rules to make sure that the spectators and the fighters in the cage are protected. To officiate. Yeah, you don't need to see anybody dying. And you two don't need to die. And so even though you may not think it as one of the fighters,

it's actually good for you. And this is the thing people don't realize is that having somebody who is competent at enforcing the trade and competition laws in a country is actually good for companies. You know why? When you are winning in a death match, you don't think someone should stop a death match.

Yeah. Because you're on top. But when you are losing a death match, you will pray to God that there was someone there to tap you out. Someone there to go, hey, hey, you tapped, the fight is over. I've seen multiple major corporations who were once like, you know, at the pinnacle, HP, et cetera, et cetera, you know, just absolutely killing it.

They never want any enforcement. But when they fall down or when they're on the ascendancy, they'll point out constantly how they're being oppressed by other companies, how the competition is being stifled, how they're being blocked out of doing certain things. Like one of the most famous stories for me was Virgin Cola. Richard Branson was really a genius at making innovative and interesting companies that just created a new type of value where people didn't expect it.

Virgin Airlines, you know, Virgin Atlantic, you know, the ship, etc. but a big one was virgin cola one of the craziest things I learned about virgin cola was it was actually a product that people were starting to like more than Coca-Cola no I didn't know this but it was past like taste tests and just in raw sales it was doing this it was doing this it was just people

like we like the taste of this more than Coca-Cola and then what did Coca-Cola do they went out to all their distributors and all the people and they said if you give this guy shelf space, we're going to cut you off completely. And remember right now, we're responsible for such a large amount of your revenue.

Right. So if you let this guy come into your places, if you give him a favorable shelf space, if you even give him shelf space, we're going to shut this shit down and good luck to you, not having any of our products. Sure.

What can you do as a store? You're a corner store, mom and pop store, supermarket, doesn't matter how big you are. Yeah. They're a huge part of your turnover. They've got a lot of products. They've got too much product. And so you go, sorry, Virgin, you're out.

And that's literally why Virgin Cola died. It wasn't badly anything. It wasn't. And so in that, if you are the Virgin Cola or if you are there anything in any field, you can think when you're on top, you're always going to be on top. But when that behemoth flips and they're coming after you, that's when you're going to wish that there was enforcement. But by then it might be too late because now they've been.

might only be one company. And so now it just becomes an environment where competition cannot even begin to exist. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think you said that very well. Do you remember on Saturday Night Live, Lily Tomlung used to do this bit where she play an AT&T operator. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. And she would do these fake ads for the phone company.

And they would always end with, we don't care, we don't have to. We're the phone company. Yeah. Right. And Lena used to say, companies aren't just too big to fail. They're not just too big to jail. They get too big to care. Yes.

And so there has to be. some external source of discipline. So this started when you asked me about competition. And I tell even my like most iron-ran-pilled libertarian friends, you know, people who can't open their copy of Atlas shrugged anymore because the pages are stuck together. I say even if you think the only thing the government should do is enforce contracts, you still need a referee who's more powerful than the players than the teams on the field. Otherwise how what does it matter if the government says, oh, you know, party A violated their contractual obligations to party B. If party A is more powerful, you know, powerful than the government. So the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate determines the

size of the government you're going to have to have. It has to be bigger. And so if you want small government, you need smaller corporations. Oh, that's an interesting argument. I've never thought of that. People say I want small government, but then they don't consider. Yeah, because you get economic you get central planning one way or the other. There's always going to be a planner. So either it's Apple saying ice block should be illegal, right? And what's your, what's your lever on Apple? Like, if you don't like how Apple's behaving, what do you do? You say, um, oh, I'm not going to switch to Android or I'm not going to buy any apps anymore.

You just do this like half-ass. Like people in this in this day and age think that a boycott is how you shop, right? I participated in the boycotts against apartheid. They were not shopping differently. They were a global movement organized in solidarity with the ANC and trade unions in South Africa that arranged for a set of like articulated objectives

and a tactic around it. Yeah. Right? It wasn't shopping hard. It wasn't shopping hard. You know, the bus boycott in Montgomery was not like, I feel like walking to work today, right? They did 380 days without riding the bus because they organized solidarity networks with carpools and they were working with the bus drivers to keep them fed while the buses were shut. Like, that's what a boycott is. It's not shopping hard. Right. So either Apple gets to decide which software people, so iPhones, basically, iPhones aren't, are a minority in the market.

but they're the super majority of the top decile, so the 10% richest people in the world. Okay, right. The vast majority of them own iPhones, which means that like any significant digital business that doesn't work on an iPhone doesn't work, right? So they're effectively a market planner, right? They're like someone in, you know, Moscow

coming up with a five-year plan in 1976 for the digital market. So either it's them and you have no leverage over them. All you can do is like, I don't know, go on Reddit and complain, or it's the government. And I know people are like, well, what are we going to do about the government? And right now, it's a very hard question. But what, like, how many universes are there in which a giant corporation that you're angry

at listens to you versus how many universes have we had in which the government is responsive to people? It's still not a great track record for the government, but at least there is the nominal basis of being publicly accountable. The people in these firms will tell you that they have a fiduciary duty to be terrible to you if that makes them a nickel more in profit, right? They'll take Isn't that something that was misunderstood as well? It's a piece of propaganda. Milton Friedman came up with. It's not true.

Yeah, because apparently the original thing was you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. But then apparently there's like an end of the sentence that no one says. Yeah, it's more like the problem with the fiduciary duty is they act as though it's a bright line test, right? You just say, well, what did the managers this firm do? Yeah. Was that in accord with their fiduciary duty? And that you can just like a Martian looking through a telescope could tell you, from, you know, millions of miles away, whether it was or wasn't fiduciary. But, like, you fire half

the people and you're like, well, I'm fulfilling my fiduciary duty by reducing our payroll. You give everyone a raise. Well, I'm fulfilling our fiduciary duty by increasing morale, which will increase. There's no, it just fiduciary duty is the all-purpose excuse. Okay. You can just use it for anything. I'd be like, this is my fiduciary duty. Okay. All right. That makes sense. So it's, so the, the thing that competition does is it makes the firm small enough to regulate, which means that we don't need as Goliath a state to regulate them. And it also means that when the state tries to make evidence-based policy,

when they're like, okay, so we're going to build this building, we have these reinforced steel joists in the ceiling, and we want to make sure that the roof doesn't fall in. We need to know what our building code should be. Yeah. Right. And so they're going to put out, it's called a notice of inquiry, right? And we're going to ask the public what they should do.

And you're going to have people who have a certain patented process for making one alloy and people who have machines that make a different thing. and, you know, lots of different stuff. And they're all going to show up and they're going to say, this should be in the building code. And then they're going to look at each other's submissions and they're going to do reply comments.

They're going to like, that building's going to fall down if you build it the way my competitor does. And here's my math, right? Here's my evidence. So they're doing the work of the regulators. Right? They're like, they are checking each other's bullshit.

Yeah. Right? Because they all, when we have enough of them, it's like a healthy ecosystem. Yeah, exactly. If you have a vast array of species, they keep each other in check. You know what I mean?

So the fox hunts the rabbit and then the rabbit eats the plants and then the plants and it's just the cycle. Yeah, there we go. But it's like everyone is doing a thing in this cycle. But once you start to create a monopoly, you go, we just have rabbits now.

And then now what happens is there are far too many rabbits for the plants and then everything that's growing is being eaten but nothing's eating the rabbit but nothing's eating. People don't understand. that companies and businesses are like this as well is that they themselves keep each other

in check with everything. Some might even spot like something unlawful that the other company is doing because they're in the same field. So they go, you guys are breaking the law and it's like, oh, thanks for telling us. We wouldn't have paid attention to it because we didn't have the same incentive, but it benefited us. And so you did. And so in a weird

world, again, we don't understand that having the more of it, people, you know where people don't get how this affects their everyday lives And I think this is why I'm so passionate about it, is sometimes some of these conversations seem so highfalutin that you think you're in a conversation that doesn't affect you. You know, people are like, federal trade commission and what mergers? Why do I care if there's a merger? Why do I? Simple, simple, simple one, if you look at the power of something getting too big, you have your card service, your Uber app or whatever you use.

people forget when Uber came in, they did something really slick. They said, we're going to charge prices that are far below what the industry rates are. So they were beating every taxi in every city in terms of price. What generally happens when prices are lower, demand goes up. People say, I want to use that service. Everyone starts using that service. It is greater in many ways than a taxi service because it finds you. It doesn't racially discriminate the way taxis were oftentimes,

found to be doing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It is great because there was Uber and taxis. And then what starts to happen? The taxi industry starts going down, starts going down, starts going down. It loses its value. It dies. For all intents and purposes, it dies. When you walk in New York City now, you barely see the color yellow in the streets anymore,

the way it used to be. So it dies. Uber goes, oh, competition dead? Great. Let's get these prices going now, people. and now Uber starts taking the prices up, taking the prices up, taking the prices up. And now you have no recourse.

You can't even say I do not wish to catch an Uber. I'm going to wait for a taxi. Go wait. See how long it takes now. There is no taxi to pick you up. And we can move this to every industry. Every mother who's looking at the price of diapers and going, why do diapers cost this much now?

I can't seem to find them cheaper anyway. Yeah, it's because even the extras that you're looking at are not extras anymore. It's one company that's selling you the diapers. You go, like one of the ones that really got me was when we look at like diseases in food. Even if we take it away from economics, if you look at farms, you know, that have chickens or cows or anything like that, eggs, we don't realize that as humanity, we are closer and closer to the precipice of just having our food supply wiped out because we've allowed one company basically to own so much of it.

Forget the money now. Just think of our survivability. If one company owns the majority of eggs that we have and they have these laws that make it illegal for you to now have, have an egg that is somehow similar to their egg and they go, our egg is our egg. And if your chicken comes from our egg, then our chicken, it's our chicken now. It's not your chicken. Well, that company's called CalFresh. Yeah. Nearly all the eggs in the grocer's fridge come from them. Yes. And we were all having egg discourse about eggs being expensive. It's because CalFresh raised the price.

There you go. They said it was bird flu. They said it was just CalFresh turned the knob. Yes. But the thing is, if there was a disease that affected that specific type of egg and wipe them, all out or there was a disease in them, because we've allowed CalFresh to become this thing, we are all going to pay the price. We'll be right back after the short break. You know, as this conversation goes, I feel like the average consumer, I feel helpless. I feel like there's nothing much I can do, but there's one point that you made that actually piqued my interest when we were speaking about boycotts in the township during apartheid.

I think it was the 70s and the 80s, and there used to be another form of it called the stay away. Yeah. So in a stairway, you don't take public transport. You don't go to the factories. You don't go. General strike. General strike, yes. But those two went together.

And you were so right by saying that it doesn't mean people, just because they didn't buy washing powder, they didn't wash their clothes. Right. Just because they're on a stairway, they couldn't move around. It was sort of organized for people to be able to get by, but for the corporation to feel the impact. And I feel like as time went on and as things happened, And we as the consumers were made unaware accomplices by being shareholders and companies.

Yeah, I think there's something to that. I do think there's also just this neoliberal idea that the best way to participate in politics is to vote with your wallet. And, you know, billionaires love this idea because their wallet's thicker than all of our wallets put together. And so that's the one vote. There's like whatever, a thousand billionaires, right? But they can win every wallet vote. They can't win any other kind of vote. So it's very convenient that we've been told, you know, your consumption choices,

what you should really do if you're angry at Elon Musk is agonized endlessly about whether you should have a Twitter account, right? And not try to- That's what you should be doing. Not try to act politically. Not try to like say, oh, well, maybe he shouldn't be allowed to buy more companies. Maybe his public contracts with the federal government should be canceled. Maybe the ways that he's materially misled. His shareholders should be prosecuted more vigorously.

No, no, no, no, no. It's all about whether you have a Twitter account. Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on his? humanity. He did call me a scourge on humanity, but it was because I told him that I thought it was a different thing. He was like, so I'm a other life. I'm a science fiction novelist. And I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown. So I write books for all ages. I have a new middle grades book coming out next year. I mean, everything. Picture books, tech criticism, everything. And he was singing the praises of a writer who I knew a little, but quite very much admired, a guy called Ian Banks,

who had very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist. Okay. And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist in the model of Ename Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian. He was an ardent trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he's like, well, in Ian Banks's novels, I didn't see any unions. And I'm like, yes, these novels are set 100,000 years in the future in which there are galactic brain artificial intelligences, piloting spaceships, the size of planets with

a hundred million, a hundred billion people living on them. the fact that he didn't see a need for unions there tells you nothing about whether he thinks we need a union here and he was like well if he in banks could have seen one of my Tesla factories he would have seen that we don't need unions either and I said again no offense I think there is a difference between traveling faster than the speed of light and eking out marginal gains in the production of electric vehicles

and that is when he called me a squirt on humanity but I wanted to pop the stack because this started with talking about you block you after that yeah he did I'm always fascinated by that side of Elon. The blocking butt. He's like, he's a baby. He is the like number one champion of free speech and jokes and opinions and all this until he doesn't have a rebuttal for you. And then he's like, block, you're racist, go away block.

Right. Gone. Right. I don't understand how the owner of one of the world's largest town squares, as we now call it, blocks people. Oh, I understand it. Yeah, but to me. He's a thin skin baby. Yes, but to me it's the antitheses.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Antitheses of the thing. You have come in and said, everyone should say what they want and we should do this. Open mic, let's go, let's go, let's go. Yeah, you're too open mic now.

Come on, man. The mic is too open. It's such a, it's, but, but actually that's something I wonder is like, where do you think, where did the fracture occur? Because I can use Elon Musk. You know, I can talk about like founders of Google. I can talk, man, I won't lie. A lot of what they set out to do was noble and beautiful.

It was brilliant. It always does like that. I will always be grateful to Elon Musk because of what he did with electric cars, because I love driving an electric car. And I think it's better for everyone. I won't get you started. You're a hater or a lover? You're a hair.

No, can I tell you? He didn't hate electric cars. He doesn't hate electric cars. No, I'm traumatized by why. He drove mine and then like the experience of trying to charge an electric car and then like where and how and. Sure, yeah. I wish I knew you then. Because I think there's a conspiracy when it comes to these charges.

Well, and you know, one of the things that happened in the Biden administration is they forced Musk to open up access to Tesla chargers for non-Tesla cars. They said we're going to put federal dollars through the Inflation Reduction Act into building out a federal network of cars, car chargers. Yeah. But they will only work with cars whose manufacturers don't block people from using their chargers. So if you have a charging network and you don't let third parties use it,

then we won't let you use the public one. We won't let the cars you make use the public one. And so Elon Musk opened up the charger network. That was Tim Wu. He was a great guy who worked in the Biden White House. He and I have known each other since we were nine years old. We went to the same elementary school. We played Dungeons and Dragons together.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's right. But you see that thing you told on. So I go like, this, I'm constantly grateful, you know, to many of these visionaries for some of the things they've inspired and created. But it's interesting. That phrase you said, Eugene, it always starts like that. What changed? What changed to take, I'm going to make a bet and say 90% of the people who ran or were the top people in Silicon Valley, 90% of them at least, they were progressive.

They were trying to create a utopian society. They were pushing towards this idea of us sharing and having more and being more and all of this. And then now they've turned into like sort of like the oil barons of old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened? It's the last scene of that incredible documentary animal farm where you look from the pigs to the men and the men to the pigs and you can't see the different. So, you know, I think it's related to this point that I was making about how we're seeing this surge of antitrust. Like I said, in Europe, in Japan and Korea, they went after Apple, and Singapore, I forget what the case was.

Australia was about Facebook and Google and news companies, but also in China, where they said to the big tech companies in China, you can't block little companies from interoperating with you so that they can enter the market. And I think that it is remarkable that we've had this surge of antitrust stuff, because as you say, these people are currently, like they're definitely. in the stage in life where they don't see any reason why this death match should be stopped. Yeah. Right? Because they're winning. And there is this like incredible current in the air where people are just sick of this, right? They're just like really angry.

As you said, people are, they don't know why, but they're really angry. And we sometimes talk about like political will. And it's hard to know what a political will is. But I think it's like the wind where you don't see it until something gets in the way. And so what we've seen is like any time a political will. politician sticks their head up and goes, maybe we should do something about concentrated corporate wealth. All of a sudden there's this scale, you know, that just like, sort of like, it's like they put a little sail, like a little handkerchief-sized sail, and suddenly the ship that's been

becalmed in the doldrums for 20 years is like scudding across the seas, right? And so there is this like great upwelling of anger at what's happened. And I think it's because we decided that we wouldn't stop monopolies from forming. And absent some kind of muscular government action, monopolies will always form. That monopolies, they're not, it's not because they're efficient, but because the parochial interests of the people who own firms are always better served by cooperating with other people who own large firms, by, for example, buying each other and so on, than they are by competing. When you compete, Peter Thiel calls it wasteful competition. You erode your cash basis, right? Like, when, when,

And Google gives Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market. It's like the Pope dividing up the new world, right? They're saying, well, we're not going to compete with you where you are. You're not going to compete with us where we are. The $20 billion costs us less than it would take if you were competing directly with us. But it also saves you more than you would have to pay in capital expenditures. If you were to develop your search engines, so we're all good. This is us sort of conspiring.

You know, Adam Smith, who's the father of capitalism. He has this famous quote, you know, men of the same trades seldom gather, but the conversation turns to a contrivance to fix prices. Right? Like, there's just this incredible temptation. And so without state intervention, this will happen. And it's just very hard to resist temptation. Like, I think that, like, there comes this point where every,

like, you've built this self-licking ice cream cone. It's kind of just, it's like the money is just piling up, you know. And, like, and, you know, you've, you know, you've, You're supposedly your fierce competitors with these people, but you all kind of know each other. And especially like, maybe not the founders, but in the upper ranks, you know, especially when there's only a small number of firms, everyone like job hops from one firm to another. Because often, you know, like the VP can't become an SVP in that firm because there isn't someone ready to quit or die.

And so they get headhunted laterally and they move back and forward. Yeah, everyone moves diagonally. And so like they're all like godparents to each other's children. They're like executors of each other's estates. They play pickleball. They're in the same polycule. you know uh and and like they just end up with this kind of emergent consensus yeah are you a pickleball man oh the sport of the corrupt i'm no i'm no pickleballer what a self-licking ice cream i've got

to wait to use that phrase now back i'm dying to use the phrase love like oh back at this again so in in south africa currently there's a commission that is investigating corruption within first municipalities start with the police then it became with municipalities and obviously the tender system and the business dealings that is being done. And it's all came out that it's not that a person can go whistle, blow to their boss, because in most cases, the boss is the corrupt person. And you can't go to the police and find a constable sitting at a charge office. And what's the charge?

I think something is going on at my company. But regulators play a big important part. So competitors that didn't get the deal are the ones that blow the whistle. Yes. Then someone on the inside who knows exactly how the deal went is the one that can give the competitor evidence to go to a regulator. Then it turns into a court case and then charges can get pressed. But here's my thing.

The average person sitting there knowing what they don't know, what can they do? Because like you said, with the stayaways, it was easy. With the boycotts, it was easy. There was another one called the Go Slow where you show up at work, but you actually don't do anything. Yeah, go slow. Yeah, they're sometimes called right work to rule. Go slow. They're all the, yeah, same thing.

You follow all the rules. But you're not really doing anything. Which means you don't do anything. But here we are now. We're finding ourselves here. And as you guys speak, I know you guys love tech so much. And he's done a good job over time of explaining tech to me. Right.

And you're explaining another side of it, which is the dark evil, Raida, self-licking ice cream version. Yeah. And I'm like, what can I do? So I do know I'm cornered. I have an answer for you. It's kind of grounded in this punchline of my favorite joke from Eastern Canada. The punchline is, if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.

Right? Like, we had a more robust enforcement system, like before we decided monopolies were efficient. and we were just going to tolerate them. So that happened in the Reagan years. Have you ever heard anyone say, oh, that thing is so screwed up, it's really borked? You ever heard borked? No.

It's a saying about something that's really bad. It's named after this guy who's a judge, Robert Bork, who Reagan tried to put on the Supreme Court and he handled his confirmation hearing so badly that now we say things that are really screwed up for board. I didn't even know that that was possible in America. Oh, yeah. I thought you always get on the Supreme Court.

No, yeah, no, this was before pre-Susan Collins. So Bork's big idea was that monopolies are good. and that they're efficient and that like if all of us are using the same search engine, that must mean that it's the best search engine. Wouldn't it be weird to use public funds to punish a firm for pleasing the public? So he was like, we should just allow these companies to get too big to fail. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They'll never become too big to care.

It'll be fine. The market will correct it. So when we decided to start tolerating monopolies, we got monopolies. We got them in everything. Media, clearly, right? Five publishers, four studios, three labels, companies that control the apps and one company that does the e-books and the audio books, right? It's like why giving creative workers more copyright has not helped because like,

it's like giving bullied kids extra lunch money, right? Like they just say, oh yeah, you've got an extra 20 years of copyright. We'll just put that in our contract now. Right? We're not going to give you more money. So we had this, we had this idea that monopolies maybe were efficient and they're not. And so we need to fix that. And we've been here before. You know the Lenny Bruce sketch about before there's a law, there has to be a crime? No. No. And he does this whole thing about like how is it that we have a law against having sex with a chicken? Someone must have had sex with a chicken first. Yeah. Right? And so the way we got these laws, it wasn't like someone came down off a mount with two stone tablets and said, we have to stop these firms from engaging

and merging. They watched it happen. Yeah. Okay. And they reacted to it. They were in a situation, if anything, worse than the situation we're in. Right. And this, you know, from the 1890s to the, to the, through the gilded age, right? This was this was the, this was the, the period in which you had the robber barons, the trust, the, the, the, the, the, the trusts. That's why we call it trust busting. So what used to happen is like John D. Rockefeller would say, hey, everybody who makes oil, we're going to start a new company called a trust. And if you've got a 16% share of all the oil in the country, you get a 16% share of the trust. And if you've got 20%, you get 20%. And then I'm going to run the trust.

All the oil companies will be one company that I'll run. They'll have different names, but I'll run them all. And just will disperse the profits according to your market share as of now. There was like a whiskey trust and a steel trust and a coal trust. and a coal trust and a genius. Everything in the country was run this way. The first antitrust law, 1890, Robert Sherman, he's a senator, he's the brother of Tacoma, a guy burned down in Atlanta.

And he said, if we would not tolerate a king, we should not tolerate an autocrat of trade with the power to fix the price of the necessities of life. And so we get this law in 1890. It was in response to the rail companies, but by 1912, we used it to break up standard oil. And the way that we broke up standard oil, which was the most corrupt, most oppressive company

in the history of the world. I think even right up there with like the Dutch East India Company and the Hudson's Bay Company, really horrible, horrible firm with a stranglehold on the planet. You may have seen these old editorial cartoons of like a fanged octopus whose head kind of looks like an oil derrick with its arms wrapped around the world.

I think I've seen images like that. Yeah, Gilded Age. There are also weird Nazi images that are also this that are bad, but this was before the Nazis. Okay, got it, got it. Half a century before the Nazis. So this woman, I have, to Tarbell, who was the first woman in America to get a science degree. She was a biologist.

She was a generationally brilliant orator, sort of the Obama of her age. Later became a really important suffragist. Her father was a Pennsylvania oilman who'd been destroyed by John D. Rockefeller, and she had a grudge. And so she researched what John D. Rockefeller was doing. And unfortunately, she was working before they invented titles. So her book was called The History of the Standard Oil Company volumes one and two. But it was published in Collier's magazine, which was a now. nationally read magazine, one of the most important magazines at the time. And it was so infuriating to people that they demanded action from their political classes. Wow. And by 1912, we broke it up. Now, this is living memory, 1912. People who were alive in 1912 are dead now. But there are people

today alive who worked under those people. Right. And there are people alive who worked under those people. We are not reinventing the lost art of a fallen civilization here. No one's asking us to like figure out how to embalm a pharaoh or build like pyramids. without power tools, right? This is stuff that we can do. And the point about this political will is it is surging all over the world. We can't solve this as individuals, right? You're not going to shop your way out of it. We can't solve it by fixing the problems of these people who have talked themselves into becoming these like ketamine-addled failures, right? But we can fix it by fixing the policy environment, right? The insidogenic policies that create the inshidicine, the era in which

everything turns to shit, we know what those policies were. We decided to stop. enforcing antitrust laws. So companies form cartels and monopolies and duopolis. And then they influenced all of our other policies. So we got IP policies like the ones that make it illegal to repair, modified technology. We got other policies like the pharma policies that stop South for making anti-retrovirals at the height of the AIDS crisis. We got the progeny of those, which stopped the global south from making their own MRI vaccines at the height of the pandemic. We've got that with seeds as well. Monsanto's doing this with seeds.

Stop people from growing food. Yeah. People that are experiencing famine around the world. Many of them cannot now plant seeds to grow food because the seeds have now been monopolized, which is one of the craziest concept. By Monsanto bear. Come on, guys. How can we allow a company to own seeds?

Not even like their seed per se, but just a seed that they can argue is very similar. Yeah. Like the lineage of that seed. Like they're like, no, we have the ancestors of your seeds. Not the seed. Right. Our seed is related to your seed. We didn't sell you the seed.

but the seed came from a plant that we bred or genetically engineered. So the seed came from our seed? But not even. But not even. It came from a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant. Like they own the life form. So how are you stopping people from planting? No, they don't stop you from planting.

But if you grow any of it, they come after you and the governments around the world help them enforce this against even a tiny farmer. So they'll come to your farm and test genetics of your plant. Yeah, yeah. There is a member of the legislative assembly. Yeah, man. You play games, bro. There's a member of the legislative assembly. So like an MP or like a congress.

in Alberta, who was a farmer who had this happen. His neighbor's seed blew onto his land. I remember the story. And he was shut down by the federal government of Canada because they have an obligation under WIPO treaties, under these UN treaties that protect intellectual property. They have an obligation to enforce Monsanto's patents in Canada. And so he, Monsanto shut him down.

This is happening. In India, the suicides among farmers are very high in India, and a lot of it has to do with the rising prices of these foundational inputs to agriculture, seed and fertilizer and pesticides. So it's, it's, the parochial preferences of individual firms and the people who run them and their shareholders. And you said we all own shares in these companies, but really, like the median American worker has $955 save for retirement.

So we don't own shares in all these companies. No, no, no. I think what Eugene meant was, he meant metaphorically they've made us shareholders. because we have the phone. We drive the car. Well, we're stakeholders. We shop on their platforms. And your bank has sort of told you you can buy this.

And then we feel like we're like, and they will say, well, like, you knew when you bought your phone that you could only install Apple apps on it. And you knew when you bought the ebook that it wouldn't belong to and so on and so on. And my rebuttal to that is like you knew when you entered the stream of commerce that since time immemorial, if you sell me something, it's mine. Right? I agree with that.

So emotionally fragile that you can't believe that when I buy a device, I decide what software is on it, then maybe you're in the long, maybe it's not that I bought the wrong thing. Maybe you shouldn't be in this line of business, right? Like I'm a writer. I work in books. I'm a recovering bookseller and library worker, too. I love books. And like the thing where when I sell you a book, it belongs to you, that's not just older than like copyright. It's older than printing. It's older. than bound books. It's older than paper. We have scrolls on papyrus that this was the deal for. Wow. So it cannot have come to as a surprise to anyone who decided to sell books that the deal with the book is you bought it, you own it. It's your goddamn book. And so like when someone says to me, oh, well, why did you buy the e-book? We had the fine print. It very clearly said by buying this book, you agree that I'm allowed to come over to your house and punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge. you knew when you clicked, I agree. That's a great one. That was really a great condition.

When you speak about farmers and obviously when you speak about the seed genetics, I never, because I was speaking to someone who's in agriculture. And then agri-tech, to be more precise. And they were saying that planting season, farmers, no matter how much money they make, they still have to go to the banks to ask for money. And I never understood. why would you, if you're running a business and you can afford to fund your own business, why would you need to go borrow? And now it makes sense.

Although this is much older. So this is one of my weird special subjects. You only have one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The history of debt, right? So the first money we have, before we had coin money, we had debt ledgers. And debt ledgers were because of agriculture and ancient Babylon. And so if you wanted to plant a crop, you would have the money for the crop after it came in, but you needed the money for the fertilizer and the farm labor and everything before it came in. And so there was a credit market in ancient Babylon, and they would record how much you owed, and then you would pay it back out of the harvest. And the thing is that no matter

how good a farmer you are, sometimes the crop will fail, right? There'll be a locust, they'll be whatever. And so run that long enough. And eventually, you end up with a group of hereditary creditors and a group of hereditary debtors. Because if you can't pay the debt, then you've got to roll the debt. And then you owe, then you will never get ahead, right? By the time you've lost two or three crops in your career,

you're just always behind them. You're just perpetually behind. And then if that happens long enough, the agricultural output of the country, which is the most important output it has, becomes the plaything of the creditors who are like, actually, I want more ornamental flowers for my table,

not more staple crops. And then the society fails. And so Babylon's answer to this is something that persisted, all through the Bronze Age called the Jubilee, which was that at fixed intervals, so every 50 years, plus when certain occurrences happened like a change of the king, all debts were forgiven.

And this persisted through... Yo, what? Yeah. And this persisted through Rome. It persisted through, like, all the civilizations of antiquity. They pursued this, yeah. Yeah, because they had this problem over and over again, that when you have a group of creditors,

they start to command the productive output of debtors. And these are self-reinforcing phenomena where the creditors get richer, and the debtors get poorer and more beholden. And creditors are not good planners, right? They're just not good planners of civilization. They have personal interests. You know, this is one of the problems

of letting people amass too much power is that even the smartest person is prone to folly. You know, Henry Ford at one point was worried about rubber for tires. And so he was like, I'm going to build my own rubber plantations in Brazil in a town called Fordlandia in the middle of a jungle. And I'm going to... It was already called that. No, no, no.

he built it. Oh, okay. Wow. And he was like, I'm going to take, I'm going to build a copy of Dearborn, Michigan, which is the company town in Brazil. And he, so he got the same firm of architects. So he'd built this town in Michigan. He was going to build it in Brazil. And he was like, all right, I want you to make it ready. And they said, okay, but Southern Hemisphere, right? So we put the windows in the other side of the building. I was like, don't be stupid. We put the windows on this side of the building because it's going to be just like Dearborn. And that was it. They did it. Right.

because like even the smartest guy is really dumb some of the times. And if there's no one there to call you on your bullshit, you crawl up your own asshole and die. Right. Like this just everybody has seen it. Everybody knows someone. You must know this through media, right? You must know people who just got to the top of their game and turn into Howard Hughes. But this is this is common with everyone.

Like I often say this when it comes to billionaires in particular. It is interesting to me that we assume that somebody having a copious amount of of wealth means that they also have a copious amount of knowledge about everything. And I'm like, no, you realize you can be in the position where you made a shit ton of money because you knew one thing very well. Yeah. That's it. And you got very lucky.

Yeah. No, no. I mean, Mark Cuban said that on the podcast, he said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said, if you took all my money away tomorrow, I could go out there and I know how to make money, said, but I can't be a billionaire again. Right. He said, don't get it. He said, don't get it.

He said, don't, the billionaire part is extremely. extremely lucky. Selling broadcast.com to Yahoo required that SoftBank, which is their VC who gave all the money, who then gave all the money to Uber, who then are now giving all the money to Open AI, that they be there like being,

they are the sucker at every table. It really is weird. Why is SoftBank like that? One guy, Masayoshi's son, he has a dumb man with access to a lot of money. But how do they stay around for so long? Oh, well, now it's the Saudis giving it to him, who are like, they are the Beverly Hillbillies.

Do you know the story of SoftBank? SoftBank is crazy. I mean, obviously, you know the details. No, but every time you hear a story of like a boom and a bust in like a bubble. So you'll hear like people were making hundreds of millions and they were selling their companies. And then the next day they were all worth nothing. Somehow at many of these junctures, the person who's left with nothing is a company called SoftBank. Please, please break it down.

He's the forest gump of shitty investments. So this guy, Masayoshi's son, he's just very good at talking. dumb billionaires out of lots of money, which he then pumps into companies where they inflate bubbles. And they do have exits sometimes, right? Oh, okay, okay. But they have the exit. But then the firms are worth not. I mean, Yahoo bought every promising startup of the Web 2.0 era and destroyed it. Right. And he gave them the money to do it. And there was a period where their stock gains were high. And I don't know whether his investors got out or when he got out. But, you know, Yahoo was destroyed by the string of acquisitions, right?

Like Yahoo had a business and they turned it into an acquisition factory. And that's what killed That did nothing, right? That just destroyed business after business. In part, because when you buy all the competitors, you put them under one roof, then they fight with each other. Yeah. And another thing people take for granted is this. If your business starts off moving in a direction, as in it is creating or doing something,

right? And then you start becoming more focused on your competitors and you start buying them up. Seems like a smart idea. The thing that people forget is you now. own those businesses. So you have to do one of two things. You either have to shut them down, but that also requires like work and it's money that you're losing or you have to figure out how you integrate them into your business, which

is a terrible idea most of the time because they have their own culture, they have their own systems, they have their own people, they have their own ideas. So now you go, do we take their marketing department? Do we take their head office? Do we keep hours? Do we not? And now, you know what you've done? You have lost focused on what you were doing.

the original business. Again what I'm saying? It's the equivalent of somebody saying, I'm going to date or marry every single person who I think might be competition. Oh, so we're talking about Elon Musk again. You are a scourge on humanity, Corey. But literally you go like, you know what?

Anyone I see as competition, I'm just going to, no, I'm going to marry them. I'm going to bring them in. I'm going to marry. And it's like, yeah. And then you're going to end up in a house that has like 50 spouses because you were trying to stop those spouses

from being competition. That would make them happy. Because you're like, no, I just don't want them as competition for my spouse. Then it's like, no, no, no, no, no, that person might become competition for my spouse. I'm going to, you're also married to me. You also married to me. No one's competition for my spouse. And then at the end of it, you now have 50 spouses in one house and things are falling apart and you wonder why.

You lose your focus as well. So, yeah. So, I mean, Brandeis called us the curse of bigness. He says that when firms get too big, they start fighting with each other. the locus of competition moves from external to, for firms external to the firm, right? So like you're like, I want Google to be better

than the other search engines. And then it becomes divisions in Google saying, I want my division to do better. Oh, right. So the culture moves inward. That's right. And so it's kind of like an autoimmune disorder, right?

You have these kind of princelings who are like, you know, I want to, especially like, you know, the big Hollywood firms, big studios, right? They've got like VPs, presidents, VPs. Or no, it's like directors, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, and presidents. And each one is like an order of magnitude richer than the other one.

So like the career earning opportunities to go from one tier to the other and the millions or tens of millions. And so there's a lot of looking over at this SVPs underlings to see if any of them are about to do something that might bring that division to prominence and then screwing them. And so there's a lot of like backstabbing. I mean, you've worked in the studio system, right? you know what this is like. They're constantly rat fucking each other, right?

Because that's their major locus of competition. But you see, this is, I didn't think of it through that lens. I have noticed at times people are working in companies but not in tandem. They are either actively sabotaging each other or letting the other person fall into a pothole. That's right. Because they're like, if that happens, then I'm going to look better. But I never considered it an institutional idea. We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

You know what I think of with all of this as I go, I'm so sad that Monopoly, the board game, never achieved. It achieved all of the popularity, but none of the message. Because you played Monopoly, I'm assuming. We've all played Monopoly. I don't know a single person who has finished a game of Monopoly. And I also do not know a single person who has enjoyed the end of, of that game of monopoly unless they were the last person

with the money. Sure. Like you put people down for a game of monopoly. I don't care who you are. Put them down. Start playing. Good times.

Oh yeah. Give me my 200. Right. I just passed go. Oh yeah. Everyone's having a great time. And then people start buying properties. Everyone's friends until everyone has a property.

Everyone's just like, oh, I can't wait to buy this. You also can't wait. You should buy that. Oh, yeah. The blue ones look good on you. Yeah. And people go around people and people start buying, people start buying.

And then really quickly in the game, you notice a shift in the table. There are the haves and have-nots. And what makes the game so powerful is not just that you have the haves and the have-nots, you see how unfair it is for the, because now you get to a point where you add those little hotels and you know what I mean, you just build this thing up, build this thing up. We get wealth. You do less, right. People do more.

You even get to the point where the person who has a little. like I don't even feel like rolling. You guys just roll and come to me and you're going to have to pay me for just existing. And even the conversation of the players that have, they have more in common with each other now. Oh, you completely. Why don't, I'll give you the railway station

because I want you, you should own all of the utilities and travel hubs. Let me have that street. And they're so cordial with each other. They're so lovely. And then like here, it's like, please can you, can you break a hundred for, ah, shut up.

Put it on the table. I don't trust you. Put it down before I touch it. I'm not going to touch that. You're dirty. Okay. I'll give you 95. What do you mean you'll give you 95?

I'll give you 95. I'll give you 95. But it's 100. Do you want the change on, okay, fine. It's amazing how that game shows us why we don't want monopoly power. Do you know the story of the game, though?

It was created as the landlord's game by a woman who was a Georgian. So Georgists. So Georgists are this weird economic philosophy that says that all taxes should be land taxes. They have this, it's facially plausible idea that because land is the most scarce thing and because appreciation of land value is never the fault of the person who owns the land, it's always like the neighborhood gets more valuable. And there's this like mismatch and incentives if you can just like own a piece of land

and your neighbors do things and your land gets more valuable, blah, blah, blah. So this Georgist woman made this game called the landlord's game. It had two sets of rules. who played one cooperatively, one competitively, to produce this pedagogical output. This traveling salesman played the game, stole it, sold it to Parker Brothers. Oh, you're lying.

No, 100%. This is even better. 100%. And it was like decades later that Parker Brothers finally admitted that this woman was the creator of the landlords game. And? And I think either she or her descendants

got a small amount of money. And, you know, there's like a small credit on the Parker Brothers website for her. That's it. Like, yes. How can a game about screwing people over come from screwing over? A little on the nose. Yeah.

Is there is there a system or a country or a place you've seen right now that's like really just nailing this? Is there a beacon we can look to where we go like? I'll tell you what I'm hopeful about. I don't think there's anything that's nailing us. But I mentioned every country in the world adopted a law like the DMCA that bans modification, circumvention of technology to modify it. And they did that because the U.S. trade representatives said, if you don't do this, we're going to hit you with tariffs.

Right. Well, happy liberation day. Amazing. The tariffs came in anyways now. And so now there's like this army of people out there. So, you know, Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he's infamous for this one saying, he would say, your margin is my opportunity. Right.

So you look at the margin that Apple has on payments or the margin that ink jet printers companies have, I mean, this is my favorite one. I know you say not everyone uses printers, but like... No, no, but I grew up with, can I tell you something? I'll tell you my story. So I grew up with them because my mom had her only... little home business. Oh, yeah.

When I tell you, Corey, the journeys that I've been down, because you'd buy the printer, and you'd be like, okay, this is great. We've got a printer. What they would do often is the printer would come with half or quarter-filled cartridges. They wouldn't tell you this. So the printer wouldn't come with enough. And you're like, okay, fine. You don't buy a car with a full tank of gas.

So it's fine. Sure. Until you go and get more cartridges. and then you find that the cartridges cost more than the printer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, but like exponentially more. Like, like I'm talking. Yeah.

I remember once we had one printer was HP printer. The printer itself, my mom bought for 700 grand. So what, like $35 somewhere there? And then the cartridges, each color was around 700 grand or 600. Yo, we were like, that's not possible. Yeah. And it won't print black if there's no violet. Yes.

Yes. No, they wouldn't. And it won't scan if one of your cartridges is that. I remember when they came out with microchips. So what happened was first, they just had the ink. And it was this mission. So then what we started doing was, my mom was like, yo, I met a guy who sells the ink,

and what they can do is they'll give you a syringe and then you can do this yourself. And it's messy, but if you can figure it out, you got it. Okay, fine. So we started doing this. Then they came out with new printers. And the new printers from Epson and from HP had this little gold microchip on the back.

Then I was like, what are these things for? I'll tell you what they were for you, Gene. they were there so that it knew when the ink was finished and what you were doing with they were like nah bra they're like now something's changed here this is not the ink

then you're like it's full and it's like it doesn't seem full to me full of bullshit that's what it's full of same thing where the car won't recognize the part of the ventilator won't recognize the part it's the same thing and it's the same law that protects it so you know the cartel of ink ink companies or printer companies

have monotonically raised the price of ink now ink is the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a government permit at $10,000 a gallon. It will be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. Right? So, yo man, who's this guy? This weekend, the Kentucky Do you. Yo, Eugene, who's this guy? Get your demon now.

Yo, bro. Who's, come get your men's, Eugene. This man just said, yo, right, Corey. I don't know. So I wish everyone who dealt in economics and history had your vibe. Well, that's kind of me. Because everyone would listen to economics and history. So the point is that there's a lot of people out there who are like, that margin should be my opportunity. Right?

This is colored water selling a $10,000 a gallon. I'll sell it to you for $5 a gallon. And like you say, people who are not at the apex of technological knowledge, I mean, I don't know your mom, but I assume your mom was like not a computer scientist or whatever. No, no, she wasn't. She definitely wasn't. Yeah. You know, and people who are not like from the upper socioeconomic strata or whatever,

they're like even more motivated than dudes who look like me to figure out how to get the most out of their technology. First person I ever saw with two Sims in their phone. was a minimum wage daycare worker at my daughter's daycare when we grow, she grew up in East London. So, you know, these minimum wage daycare workers were like, I want the SIM that gets me unlimited calling to some of my friends. But I also need the SIM that gets me, yes. And they figured out how to put two SIMs in their phone, right?

I had to get a phone with two SIM cages and the modified Android. Not even, no, no, no, what we used to do before that was, we just used to have a SIM card inside the cover. Remember the SIM card in the back cover? And you just knew when the time changed or when you changed, you take the case off, put the battery out, put the new. some in this goal. So lots of people out there, like this kind of army of like would be entrepreneurs and investors. And a lot of these investors are like, it'd be really nice to get into a business whose success is and determined by how many trump coins I buy. It'd be really nice to invest in something that wasn't AI. You know, like, like AI has got this very speculative

thing. Like maybe we'll figure out how to take a business that costs $1.4 trillion and makes $50 billion and eventually make it cost $50 billion and make $1.4 trillion. We're not sure how that's going to happen. If you give us $3 trillion more, maybe we'll figure it out. But meanwhile, like, we know how to make money processing payments on the iPhone. You just process the payments on the iPhone and you charge 3%, not 30%, and you lift the tax on economic activity. And lots of people would like to have this, right? Like, if you're in newspaper collecting subscriptions through the iPhone and you flip from 30% to 3%, it's like you've got 25% more subscribers overnight. Yeah. Right? You know, this is amazing possibilities. So, you

You don't even need to grow your business. Your business, basically if you are selling on these devices, your business is already, let's say, 25% bigger than it is. Yeah, that's right. So you've got this army of like investors. And then you have all these technologists. So the best and the brightest from all over the world have gone to Silicon Valley for two generations seeking fortune and fame to make a dent in the universe and so on.

Now they've all been chased out of the country by a guy and, you know, a gator and Oakley's. Right. So they're looking for something cool to do. They know how to do this stuff. They're smart, right? And so you have investors. You have a reason to do this, right? And then add to that the geopolitical stuff.

So Trump has been using his tech companies to shut down his political adversaries in other countries. So the judge at the international criminal court who swore an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft shut down all of his online accounts. So he lost his working files, his email, his archives, his. calendar. He can't recover his password for any of the other services he uses because they all go to his Microsoft email address, which doesn't exist anymore. We really take this stuff for granted. And then Trump did it again to the high court justice in Brazil who sentenced his ally G or Bolsonaro for attempting to steal the election in Brazil. So then you have people all over the world going, like, wait, isn't this what we were told like China would do if we let them run our 5G?

And then you think about the fact that like these Russian soldiers who stole these John Deere tractors and tuck them to Chechnya, that John Deere was able to like push an over-the-air update that permanently immobilized them. You're like, wait, he could do that to any tractor. He could do that to all the tractors, right? If, like, Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn't need to roll tanks into nuke. He can just, like, go to Greenland and shut down the government and shut down all the tractors and shut down the cloud services. Shut down the cloud services and push updates to all the iOS devices that brick them and all the Android device.

Like, he could straight of Hormuz all the licorice, all the licorice ozempic and Lego in the world, right? with a click of a mouse. So you have people all over the world who are like, God damn, we need to get off the American internet, right? And so you have a geopolitical wing of this, like Natsack Hawks, National Security Hawks.

You have an entrepreneurial wing. And then you have the digital rights hippies like me who've been banging this drum for 25 years. And remember we started off talking about coalitions. Yes. Well, this is a coalition the world has never seen before, right?

These three groups of people who have three different constituencies, three different arguments, but we all want the same thing. We want to transition from an internet that is controlled by a small number of large American firms into one in which we restore that technological self-determination that made us so excited to use the internet in the early days,

where users of the technology have the final say over how it's used, where our digital services are built on open, transparent, auditable technology, not black boxes. Again, back to the structural engineering, if you hired a firm of structural engineers to build this building, and they're like, we're not going to tell you the math we use to calculate the load stresses. We wouldn't accept that. Don't go in the building.

But we also wouldn't accept that. Yeah, yeah. But they provide you with the software. It would be the equivalent of having an architect or an engineer or whatever. Somebody build your house and say, we're not going to give you the drawing. We're not going to tell you anything about your house. Where the HVAC is, where the electric. You bought your house.

Yeah. But they're like, we will never tell you. And then you go, but what if something goes wrong? They're like, call us. Yeah, it's a trade secret. Yeah. So now you have this. We are like closer to a transition to a much better internet.

than we've been in my whole career, my 25 years at the election. Damn, that's amazing. Look, now I'm optimistic. I don't mean, it's, I don't mean like it's a slam dunk or whatever. And I would caution you off of optimism. I think optimism and pessimism, wait, though, wait, because I think hope is good. I think optimism and pessimism are a waste of your time. But optimism and pessimism are this kind of fatalistic belief that things are going to get

better or worse no matter what we do. Okay. Hope is the belief that if you materially improve your circumstances, that you can ascend a gradient towards a world you want to live in. And as you attain that higher vantage, point. There's terrain that will be revealed to you that was occluded when you were down at this lower elevation. And that from that point, we may be able to take the next step, right? And we don't know how far up the hill we can get. We can't see our way from A to Z. You know, I'm a novelist, right?

So when I write, I can give you a clear, clean path with a, with a steadily rising curve of dramatic tension and payoffs and stakes that get to a climax and then, you know, Princess Leia gives everyone a medal, right? Like, that's how it works in fiction. But in the real world, it's messy. You go up two steps, you go down one because you've reached a dead end, you do a traversal, you go up again, you get stuck there for a while, then you find your way up again. But so long as there's a move you can make, there's always more hope. And the moves we can make now, weirdly thanks to Comrade Trump, who appears to be doing practice, the moves we can do now are much more aggressive than any of the moves you had available to us forever. That's fascinating. And so I'm full of hope.

I am not a happy person. I'm not an optimistic person. I'm a very sad and frightened person, but I am more hopeful than I've been in my whole professional life. Well, can I tell you something, Corey? You have made me a happy person. I think I can speak for my colleague here when I say you've made us happy people. Because you've made like, like, yeah, you've left us with like a,

oh yeah, let's go. Let's go do this thing. I love it. We'll do it. If you want to make change, join a polity, get involved like join a union, form a union, get involved in local politics. Turns out local politics determine whether you have flock cameras, and that determines whether your neighbors are going to be taken to a gulag.

Right? Get involved in local politics, because that's still not totally unshittified, and it still is responsive to people. Because it's so many. Yeah. Now, you just made me realize that. Yeah. That's where local politics, because it's so fractured, it's the 200 businesses. Yeah.

National politics is one of two. Local politics is like, bip, bib, bib, bib, bib, billions of them. And, George, John. Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The nonprofit I've worked for, most of my adult life, EFF.org. EFF.

EFF. Different EFF. Not that EFF. Join the EFF. Join the EFF. What a step way to get us in. Join the EFF. Not the economic freedom.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, great. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. We've been around for 35 years. I don't know how long the economic freedom fighters have been around. Maybe we had it first. Yeah, I think we were there first. Yeah, you would. They have cool berets.

They do have cool berets. They've got the sartorial style then. We all dress like Linux nerds. But they dress, they're sharp. But yeah, join EFF. We've got lots of ways to get involved. We have fought the most important court battles and activist fights over digital rights. Like the reason you have cryptography that, like, we'll keep a secret on your phone,

is because we sued the NSA because they wouldn't let civilians have it. The reason you need a warrant to read email if you're a cop is because we sued the Secret Service. Like, this is us. You know, we've been doing this since the very earliest days of the Internet. And we don't win all of our fights. In fact, we lose a lot of them because some fights you just fight because you can't not fight them, even when you're vastly overmatched. But we win a surprising number of our fights.

And when I joined EFF, there were six of us. There's like 110 of us now. And we're working internationally. Like I say, I work with our allies in South Africa on their copyright implementation. you know we're we're and we've now become part of a huge constellation of these digital rights groups internationally and in the u.s and and so you know i like to think that's because of our leadership i i i've been there now as i say 25 years i'm 55 so so most of my adult life and um i can't imagine what the world would be like without eFF in it this is amazing before you go actually let's

do this yeah let's let's play a little game that'll that i think will help a lot of people okay I'm going to list a product or an industry and then you tell us how it's being shit-of- Yeah, why to feel sad about it. No, but rather, no, you know what I want to do is not why to feel sad, but rather just to help people understand how it's affecting. Because you know some people go,

tech's not my thing. Right, right, right. And some people might go, ah, the finance industry, but I just want you to explain as quickly as possible how each vertical will sort of affect people. So let's go, so let's start with technology, like phones, computers, etc. Or like how is that being shittified?

So lots of different ways. Consumables, right? Like ink and whatever, they're now being locked. Parts are being locked. Repair is being locked. Software is being locked. You have these high service charges associated with things like payments. So one thing we didn't talk about is if the merchant is charging 30%, how are they recouping

it? They're charging you more. So your prices are getting higher. So there's this inflationary pressure as well. And then of course, now you have this stuff where like these things spying you all the time. And then when they want to know who was at the anti-ice march, they can just go to them and they'll turn it over to them. And so you have that risk to democracy as well.

Okay. Cars. Some people like, Hey man, I just like driving cars. This doesn't bother me. I'm not a tech person. So locking on independent mechanics,

locking out third party parts, right, spying on you in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite. Your car? Yeah. So your car is just like, it's a data acquisition platform on wheels. It's funny because they kind of brag about it.

So Massachusetts had a ballot initiative question. one in 2020 where 75% of base staters voted to force the cars to allow independent mechanics to fix the cars. And their response was these scare ads where they're like, if you let strangers get at the data in your car, they'll murder you because there's so much data in your car. But that's them telling on themselves. Yeah. Mozilla Labs, 2023, did a roundup of all of the cars, privacy policies and data acquisition. And they said there is not one car they would recommend driving on the road that's being sold right now. Because it's just like where you're going, when you're going there. Everything. What you listen to on the radio? What? Yeah. What compositions are you having?

Not that, but Nissan, weirdly, so one of the things about surveillance data is they're all lying to each other. They're like saying they can do things they can't do. Nissan offers to sell data brokers, facts about your sex life and the smells in your car, neither which I'm pretty confident, neither which they know. But they're just like, they're just like making stuff up that they'll sell. because these are all like grifters grifting other grifters. So they're ripping each other off. It's like billionaire on millionaire violence.

Okay. Let's go to... I'm glad to know that the speaker in my car is not... No. The microphone is not... Probably not. But they are like, they are looking at things like all of your informatics.

You know, like if you've got your like Google Android car or Apple car, like all of that stuff is being sucked up by the car. And even, you know, like some cars, they're like, oh, if you want to use like the advanced features, like warm your car up from inside the house using the app that's like five bucks a month. And if you don't pay it,

you can't access your car's network. Yeah, but your car's network is still active. And it's giving data about your car to the automaker, just not to you. And the worst is subprime car leasing. So, like, if you're poor and you can't get a regular car lease, there's this whole market. It's worth a couple trillion dollars called subprime car leasing. And those cars are fitted out with all kinds of crazy surveillance gear. Yeah.

And also they have, like, some of them have a second stereo system that the user can't control, that if you're a day late on your payments, just blare is at top volume. You are late on your payments. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah. And if you, like, go too late, they, like, immobilize your car.

Even, like, some of these leases will say, you can't take it across the county line. And so the New York Times wrote about this, and there was a woman who, like, took the kids on a drive to the forest, and they went over the county line without realizing it, and then the car wouldn't start, and they were stuck in the woods.

Like, it's very bad. And so they repo these cars over and over again. The leases are like any subprime credit arrangement. They're designed to balloon and make it so you can't afford it later. So you have like a teaser rate and a balloon rate. And so then they repo the car and then they sell it to another poor person. So they sell the same car to like 10 poor people. And so like basically like you can make loans to progressively worse credit risks if it's easier and easier to repo the, the

because the risk on your side is that's right. You're offloading the risk. Right. So they just have like basically this whole sideline in repo tech, Tesla's. There's a dealer option. where if you are laid on your payments, the Tesla will lock itself up, summon the repo man to the parking lot, and then blow its horn and blink its lights when the repo man gets there, and back up and unlock its doors so they can get in. I would have thought it drove itself back to the dealership. That's funny.

It's evil and funny. It's very funny. Let's go into like food. I don't know as much about this. I mean, obviously there's the genomic stuff that we were talking about. mostly what you've got in food is just monopolization on the grocery side. Okay, got it. And that will inflate the prices over the time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a law, the Robinson Patman Act that they stopped enforcing 20 years ago, but the FTC tried to bring a case against Pepsi and Walmart under it. And basically it was created when A&P grocers started to take over the country. And what A&P would do is they would demand extremely deep dish discounts from wholesalers. And then to make it up, the wholesalers would raise prices on everyone else, all the mom and pops. So it accelerated the collapse of the mom and pops into A&P. And these two congressman, Robertson and Patman, said, oh, we can't allow this. This is bad. So they banned this

conduct. And it was the decision under Reagan to stop enforcing this that created Walmart. So this is what Walmart does. They demand preferential discounts that then result in wholesale increases in all of their competitors stuff. So Walmart and Pepsi, the FTC said what they were doing is they had this deal where Pepsi would do what you said Coke was doing to your mom and pops where they would say you can't have Pepsi products unless you charge a certain amount for it and then Walmart would charge less. So what they were doing was raising the prices everywhere, but Walmart was still cheaper. And they were doing it through this Robinson-Patman preferential discounting thing.

So they made the prices go up across the entire market. Every retailer was charging more for all Pepsi products. And that's Frito-Lay. It's a bunch of other things. It's so many, like they're a big conglomerate. Yeah. So yeah, that, they, that was like, so yeah, all your groceries are really expensive because Monopoly grocers and Monopoly food producers are cooking the market to screw you.

Corey, this was too much fun, man. You know what? You are so amazing that I'm willing to accept that you came up with in shitification. Oh, that's very nice of you. You are just like, yo, man, just on top of it, your vibe. Thank you. We're going to check out the EFF, the other EFF. The other EFF.

EFF white is what we'll call it. We're pretty Diverse Don't worry about being diverse I'll show you EFF And then you'll see why I see here Look I've seen the picture Every now and again

I'm like trying to find like one of our graphics To stick in something And rather than like look in our repository I go to you know like Google image search And I type EFF You know and then I get like And then they got you and then they make you search again Then you have to search three times

And then you pay the ads They even got you Corey And then they show me an ad for a red beret And the next thing you know Yeah Can't escape This was fun. I had a great time.

Appreciate you. Thanks, guys. Thank you so much, Corey. Thank you so much. Good luck to the next person I speak to because they're going to hear the phrase self-licking ice cream. You had him big. Yeah. Well, you're like me.

You're a magpie. I love the little phrases. What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaziamen, and Jess Hackle. Rebecca Chain is our producer, our development research. researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random Other Stuff by Ryan Harduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now?