Cory Doctorow: You Bought it, They Break It

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Trevor Noah?

  Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  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, my other life, I'm a science fiction novelist. And I write when I'm anxious. I wrote like nine books during lockdown.

• 0:20Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  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, died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist.

• 0:39Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist and the model of Ian Banks. And I was like, no offense, but I knew Ian, he was an art and trade unionist and you're a union buster. And he was 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, 100 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 Ian 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.

• 1:24Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  And that is when he called me a scourge on humanity.

• 1:28Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  But I wanted to pop the stack because this started with talking about-

• 1:31Trevor Noah?

  Did he block you after that?

• 1:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:33Trevor Noah?

  I was fascinated by that, that side of Elon. The blocking but? He's, he's like-

• 1:37Speaker 01

  He's a baby.

• 1:37Trevor Noah?

  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 racist, go away, block.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49Trevor Noah?

  Gone.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  This is What Now with Trevor Noah.

• 2:02Trevor Noah?

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• 2:37Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini Intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 3:22Trevor Noah?

  You have booked forever, forever. This episode is brought to you by Verizon.

• 3:29Trevor Noah?

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• 4:14Trevor Noah?

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• 4:44Trevor Noah?

  Corey, I'm glad you've come and joined us on the podcast.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  It's mutual.

• 4:50Trevor Noah?

  But not for the reason you may think.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  I see.

• 4:52Trevor Noah?

  I have beef with you.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Oh, no. What have I done?

• 4:55Trevor Noah?

  I'm pretty certain that I came up with the term shitification.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Oh, dear.

• 5:02Trevor Noah?

  And then, all of a sudden, in like 2022, I saw people saying, "N shitification."

• 5:07Speaker 01

  You see?

• 5:08Trevor Noah?

  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 tired of the shitification of everything." And then they were like, "What do you mean?" And then I was like, "Everything's just becoming shittier and shittier." It's like they're making it shitty on purpose.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  I can see you coming up with that.

• 5:28Trevor Noah?

  And then people were just like, "Yeah, whatever." And then you like came up with "N shitification", and now the whole world is on it, and I feel like I've been wronged.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  You know, when it's railroad time, you get railroads. When it's in shitification time, you get coinages pertaining to the general shittiness of everything. So, it's, I mean, we are just living in that mode. 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... Uh, 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.

• 6:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  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 atavistic way to talk about how they feel about their technology.

• 6:25Trevor Noah?

  More than ever.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:27Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's funny, it's it's gone beyond technology.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:30Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:51Trevor Noah?

  Right?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 6:52Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 7:03Trevor Noah?

  We feel like our cars and the value that you get are shitter. You you feel like everything in your life.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Airplane seats are getting smaller.

• 7:09Trevor Noah?

  Yo, everything, everything.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Your appliances last three years, not thirty.

• 7:13Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:14Trevor Noah?

  Yes, you 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.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, even that term lifetime guarantee is gone now.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:25Trevor Noah?

  I didn't even think of that.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Her mother was, yeah.

• 7:28Trevor Noah?

  Almost everything had a lifetime guarantee.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  They say twenty year guarantee store or a lifetime guarantee of this, yeah.

• 7:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and and the thing is, this is why I appreciate your work so much is because there are there are things that that are so pernicious, is that the word in society? Where they're like, they steal away and they 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 curmudgeonly.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 7:53Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:01Trevor Noah?

  You know, I feel like this was, and it's like, and what you've done is you've taken all of it and gone, hey. We're not crazy.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 8:09Trevor Noah?

  Things are being made shittier.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I like to think that the kind of full theoretical unpacking, because it talks about the policy environment that created it.

• 8:20Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Kind of takes us beyond like, oh, you shopped badly, you know, you didn't realize if you're not paying for the product, you're the product. So your failure to be a careful enough consumer caused 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 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 gonna happen.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:39Trevor Noah?

  Do you 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 the corporations?

• 9:47Speaker 01

  It's a little of both. So, you know, there's a specific one that I'm particularly exercised about. So there's this law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act from 1998, DMCA.

• 9:58Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 10:11Trevor Noah?

  That's a crime.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's 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 J. J. Freeman calls it felony contempt of 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.

• 10:31Trevor Noah?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Just by designing their technology.

• 10:33Trevor Noah?

  I mean, if I extrapolate this to everything, like, because people may not even use printers anymore.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:37Trevor Noah?

  That's like saying, if you have a car and then you modify the engine.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  That's already the case.

• 10:45Trevor Noah?

  That's a crime. So wait, that's already the case.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  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 is 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.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  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,

• 11:45Speaker 01

  medical implants, it's called parts pairing. And because this is federal law, right, this is DMC 1201, it's a federal law.

• 11:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  When states pass right to repair laws, they really can't reach to this because it preempts it.

• 12:00Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  In Oregon, what they've done is they've just said, you're not allowed to sell a device that requires parts pairing. But that's as far as they've gotten. Though, one of the most disgusting examples of this is there's a, an American company called Medtronic that pretends it's Irish for tax purposes. They did the largest tax inversion in history.

• 12:18Trevor Noah?

  Medtronic does the, they do a lot of like the CPAP machines and all of those things.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they are the largest med tech company in the world.

• 12:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:39Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  And the ventilators use parts pairing. And during lockdown. You had technicians at the hospitals who were taking like a dead, uh, working screen from a dead ventilator and putting it in a dead ventilator with a working screen, vice versa.

• 12:52Trevor Noah?

  Right, yeah.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  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 DMCA 1201, including South Africa. It comes in through the free trade agreements with the US. The US trade, uh, trade representative has made it the number one trade priority of the US to get all of its trading partners to enact laws like this, basically to make it illegal everywhere else, to disinfectify the products that America exports so that American tech firms can steal all your data and money and so that you can't go into business fixing it.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  And, uh, there is a law like this in Poland. It comes through the European Copyright Directive, Article Six. 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 pi like.

• 14:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, just like MacGyver in this thing.

• 14:16Speaker 01

  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 Nuwog. And companies that bought NuVog 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 NuVog and NuVog 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 do this. Or sometimes they're pieces of track where if they ran over, it would do it. So they hired an independent team of security researchers called Dragon Sector, who reverse-engineered

• 15:00Speaker 01

  the firmware on this train. And the manufacturer, NuVog, the way that they were winning all these train bid contracts is they sold the trains really cheap and then they charged up the ass for repair and maintenance. And if you, they had booby-trapped 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.

• 15:28Trevor Noah?

  And it would stop working when it goes.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It would just go, 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.

• 15:41Trevor Noah?

  This like, this is, there's so many things that you just triggered in my brain. 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. Cause 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.

• 16:26Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  The thing had to be made first.

• 16:42Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but, but, but, 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 gotten to, you know, into effect, every single small business around it dies.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  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 US 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 term. Yeah, I remember that term. And Clinton had this guy who was his IP czar, so his head of copyright policy,

• 17:41Speaker 01

  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 would 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." Yes.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  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 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 he 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 is across purposes. So in the

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Biden administration, you had these like generationally amazing trustbusters like Lena Khan. 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 who really want opposite things. And there's this kind of division of the spoils. And sometimes that just ends up neutralizing everything.

• 19:37Trevor Noah?

  It feels.

• 19:40Trevor Noah?

  It feels like it's so far down the road that it's everything now.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Feels hopeless.

• 19:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. 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 it had happened. There'd been some update that they had done.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 20:05Trevor Noah?

  But basically, we realized that before you would buy a video game, take your money, you buy the video game.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Take it home.

• 20:13Trevor Noah?

  The video game is yours.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  It's yours, yeah.

• 20:14Trevor Noah?

  It is yours. You can loan it to a friend. You can sell it to GameStop or whoever. It is yours.

• 20:25Trevor Noah?

  Now what they'd say is, no, you have bought a license to play the game from us.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Until we change our minds.

• 20:32Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:46Trevor Noah?

  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 eighty dollars for that game? Yeah, my terms of service have changed.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  You owe me forty back.

• 21:02Trevor Noah?

  You owe me forty back. Because my term of service is that if I play a game and I finish it with a ninety seven percent 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.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  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 121 of the DMC and these other laws, they're called a lot of different things. One of them is digital rights management.

• 21:40Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. DRM.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  DRM. So this is a thing I've been beating the drum about for like more than 20 years. And, and one of the things, I used to write for Wired, I still write for them sometimes, but I was writing for Wired and my editor at the time was this guy, Chris Anderson, really good guy. And, 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.

• 22:13Trevor Noah?

  Because the quality of the product may never.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  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 missives. It was very good.

• 22:30Trevor Noah?

  My good man.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:31Trevor Noah?

  Here is all the ways that you are incorrect about this issue. First and foremost, let me draw your attention to the faux pas you made.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Indeed, indeed. So, yeah, it was, it was, and, and like, I went to Poughkeepsie, I went to Consumer Reports and, 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 buy this because you want a device that will play back to a certain 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 insidification is that it came after a bunch of these lawsuits the Biden administration brought, where we got publication of memos

• 23:22Speaker 01

  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 DMC 1201 is it's I call it an enshitogenic policy. Because it means that the worst ideas, 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 DMC 1201, imagine there's no anti circumvention law. So we're like having a product planning meeting about our website. If and 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.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  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?

• 24:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 24:32Trevor Noah?

  You cannot block the ads.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  So at that point, the guy says, why are you stopping at 20%? Right? Like, why don't 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.

• 24:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you know, these enshitogenic policies, we can see how they then there's like a line from them to these choices made by 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, all those cases, you get all the memos published like internally. The DOJ makes them publish all their memos. And and one of them, the search case, this great reporter Ed Zitron wrote about the how Google got worse at search. And it happened in 2019. Their search market share or their search revenue had growth had stalled.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And that was because they had 90% market share. So you don't grow your from a 90% market share.

• 25:35Trevor Noah?

  It's hard to not have those exponential jumps.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 Prabha Gargavon. He's an ex McKinsey guy. He's an engineer, but but a business guy, and he's in charge of revenue for Google Search. And his rival is this guy Ben Gomes, 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. Prabha Gargavon's got a great idea. He says, we can grow search revenue by making search worse.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  So you have to search more than once so that we can show you more ads.

• 26:23Trevor Noah?

  No, Corey, you can't be serious.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  And and he's like, and Ben Gomes 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. Doesn't matter what operating system, what hardware vendor, what browser.

• 26:48Trevor Noah?

  It all goes back to the same place.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  So like, why are we bribing Apple $20 billion 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 engine

• 26:58Trevor Noah?

  Without us.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  to 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 Sir Sherman, you make a guess, 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 those at the top rather than the generic best link for White House press corps.

• 27:32Trevor Noah?

  Right, okay.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Right? And and you just turn that off. And now people have to search two or three times. And you have Ben Gomes going like, well, I didn't miss, you know, all those like little league games of my kids to make the search wars. I believe in what we do here. And you have Prabha Gargavon basically saying money talks and bullshit walks. And you know that I'm sure Pragavaram Ragavan 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.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  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 like less worried about losing staff. I mean, obviously now they just hate their staff and wish they would all be replaced by chatbots. And 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.

• 28:41Trevor Noah?

  So if if I'm hearing what you're saying, then. One of the initial seeds that can send us onto this journey, you know, one that can grow into like a forest of shit initiation. Is when we allow competition to die.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:58Trevor Noah?

  Because because if you if you if you if you have a market. Where, I mean, we we've seen this in life. I don't care. You know, like, some people might listen to this and think, oh, man, I, yeah, but I'm I'm not in the tech world. I'm not. It's like, no, no, let's even think of it on a small, small level. We've seen this in South Africa.

• 29:16Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Corner store.

• 29:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, just corner store. When there's a ton of corner stores, two things happen. Prices are generally in check with each other.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:32Trevor Noah?

  Right? Unless there's price fixing, which generally didn't happen with corner stores.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Hard to do with 200 companies.

• 29:37Trevor Noah?

  Exactly. So you would go. How much for this? Now I'm going there. And the person will be like, how much is it there? Ah, all right, I'll I'll adjust my prices. And so it it 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.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 29:58Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 30:06Trevor Noah?

  So people were selling, like, fake Coca-Cola. Like, it was Coca-Cola in a bottle.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, counterfeit.

• 30:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, counterfeit, but it wasn't Coca-Cola.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:12Trevor Noah?

  And it wasn't, and people were like, this tastes weird, this tastes, and they're like, ah, 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?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:24Trevor Noah?

  You couldn't.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:25Trevor Noah?

  And so these two things together now even affect you on a, so now not only are you paying more.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:31Trevor Noah?

  You're also getting less.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:33Trevor Noah?

  For the more that you're paying.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:35Trevor Noah?

  And then you, I almost feel like this becomes like the, i- i- it's the, 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.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 30:50Trevor Noah?

  But they don't know what's making them angry. And then we just think, like, everyone in society is getting, like, angrier and, and more pissed off and, and more, but it's like, no, this is it. This is the fault line.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  So, it's funny, you, you raised that. Um, I, uh, 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. Uh, and I was, you know, the, the latest round of updates to the copyright law there, uh, included the expansion of the limitations to copyright to match the American set, so what we call fair use here.

• 31:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Which would have made it a lot simpler to, for, like, university teachers to teach and high school teachers to teach and, you know, photocopy course packs, do all these things that are just kind of normal. And, uh, and the US Trade Representative was like, no, that American policy is very extreme and you shouldn't have it here in South Africa.

• 31:42Trevor Noah?

  No way.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's terrible.

• 31:44Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's funny, I, I used to talk to the team about this. So when you and I were doing the show in South Africa.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:51Trevor Noah?

  Uh huh. 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?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:59Trevor Noah?

  They were like, eh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:01Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, Kumula. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we wanted to play the idols clip.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  They were like, no.

• 32:06Trevor Noah?

  They were like, what the hell do you bloody hell think you, they're like, yo, this is not allowed.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:12Trevor Noah?

  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 on, I understand, I get it. Then I came to America.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:21Trevor Noah?

  And everyone was doing it on everything, the Tonight Show, the Late Show, the Daily Show, the news, MSNBC, and I was just like, what, everyone, and they're like, oh no, here's fair use.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:32Trevor Noah?

  So what does that mean? They're like, well, it's fair that you can use something because you are trying to do something else, you're not just trying to plagiarize it.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 32:39Trevor Noah?

  And this is fair to do.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just.

• 32:42Trevor Noah?

  And now you're telling me that those people told South Africa.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  You can't have it.

• 32:45Trevor Noah?

  Don't do our one.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's great. So a- a- at EFF, um, 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, 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.

• 33:03Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Evidentiary standard.

• 33:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  We shouldn't just spy on people, we should, uh, it should be really easy to go from one service to another, what's called interoperability, where things plug into each other, all browsers.

• 33:14Trevor Noah?

  Can you move your accounts, can you move your contacts, can you move your chats?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:17Trevor Noah?

  And I remember this period.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  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, they're, they're, you know what it's like getting, even a dozen people to agree. But, um, and, and I watched the media industry kick their ass, right? So they were like two orders of magnitude larger than the media industry during the Napster wars. Uh, but there were seven media companies, which is now five. And the media companies had one playbook, right? And they, whether they were in Congress or in a court or at White House or whatever, they just said the same thing. Uh, and there was just never, there was this. Incredible unity that you get when you boil down a large group to a small group.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  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 since, more or less since Google and shitified. In the last like 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, 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

• 34:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 34:53Trevor Noah?

  Are you being for real?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  And yeah, and basically the policy preferences of ordinary people had no bearing on policy.

• 35:00Trevor Noah?

  Are you being for real?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. But here's the thing, no billionaire wants antitrust enforcement.

• 35:06Trevor Noah?

  No, they hated.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  But we have had antitrust enforcement in America, right? And it started under Trump one. It didn't start under Biden. It started under Trump one.

• 35:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  For, I think mostly spiteful reasons.

• 35:17Trevor Noah?

  Trump one.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:19Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. From the people who brought you Trump one. I'm back. He's back. Let's do it again. We're back. Part two. It's part two.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  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 and 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.

• 36:11Trevor Noah?

  Say that, Brad, I love it so much. It's one of my favorite things Canadians say.

• 36:17Trevor Noah?

  So you know, you know why you know, I love that thing because as a South African, I can't hear the difference between most Canadian accents and Americans. So when a Canadian says that the whole time I thought you were American, then you're like, like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian, then I'm like, whoa, you did it again.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 37:13Trevor Noah?

  The status quo, but let's make it a little bit better.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:25Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what was happening?

• 37:26Speaker 01

  So different things in different countries, South Korea and Japan pursued antitrust cases against Apple for price fixing the in the app store. So if you if you sell anything in an app, if you collect any money in an app.

• 37:39Trevor Noah?

  Thirty percent goes to Apple.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Apple requires you to use their payment processor. They make a hundred billion dollars a year on that.

• 37:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:51Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Right? And it's crazy. It's just like a, it's a shocking sum of money.

• 37:56Trevor Noah?

  Wait, but wait, wait, let's, okay, let's delve into that because this is something that I've, 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? Ah, Eugene, do you want to hate your life? Hey, hey, hey, my man. Good luck paying, good luck, it's messy, it's hard. Good luck cancelling, by the way. You try cancel a product that you didn't sign up through like Apple.

• 38:39Trevor Noah?

  Like, get some other service, because I've tried to like get out of the ecosystem. And I'm gonna go sign up on the website myself and I do my thing. Till this day, there will be five dollars leaving my account where I'm like, I mean, I don't know. I keep sending email, cancel, unsubscribe. I no longer wish to, reason for leaving, because I don't want to give you my money anymore. Reason for, I don't want to be here anymore. Hmm, that's too bad, can we put you through to somebody? I don't want to be put through to anybody. But, so, 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 sixty percent from zero.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Seventy percent.

• 39:22Trevor Noah?

  Seventy percent, sorry, you're making seventy percent from zero. From zero, right? So you're making that seventy percent from zero. Why?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 39:31Trevor Noah?

  Why shouldn't, like, this, and I genuinely mean it as like a grapple, because I go like, ah, who decides? Yeah, but who decides?

• 39:39Speaker 01

  So, okay, so put on, take off your, uh, I use a phone app and put on your like SIM regulator app. And you're trying to like figure out what's best for society.

• 39:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Right? So, right now, the way that it works is reverse engineering an 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, uh, 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 will step in into 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.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  And they gave you a single tick box and you ticked it and then Facebook couldn't spy on you anymore in the apps. Ninety-six percent of iOS users ticked 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.

• 40:46Trevor Noah?

  Hey Cory, he's getting fired shots, Cory doesn't play games. Cory's there with his machine.

• 40:53Trevor Noah?

  Cory doesn't play games, bruh.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  So, 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.

• 41:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  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, 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 revealed preference for one kidney. So, 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.

• 41:34Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  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 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?

• 41:51Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  And it's against the law to do one to Apple as Apple did unto Facebook.

• 41:57Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  But that's like just for table stakes, right? So, uh, in China, the government said to Apple, you must remove all the privacy tools. There's no VPNs, there's no intended encrypted messages that aren't backdoored. And they backdoored iCloud in China so that they could figure out who to like stick in a Gulag.

• 42:15Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Right? So, again, Apple's got your back until they don't, and when they don't, what do you do?

• 42:20Trevor Noah?

  What recourse?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  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 Oakleys 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.

• 42:37Trevor Noah?

  What was the argument?

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Ice officers are a protected class.

• 42:41Trevor Noah?

  Oh, as they should be.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  They're a visible minority. And so it, I mean, the argument is, please don't tear off my stuff, Mr. Trump. That's the argument, right? That's why Tim Cook flew to DC to assemble a little gold participation trophy for Trump. Do you remember that?

• 42:58Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  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?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  So when Apple has your back, it's great.

• 43:15Trevor Noah?

  And one is not scared.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  So, you know.

• 43:23Trevor Noah?

  You can tell someone has multiple passports in this conversation.

• 43:26Speaker 01

  I have.

• 43:27Trevor Noah?

  Someone here has multiple passports.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  I'm Canadian, British and American.

• 43:30Trevor Noah?

  There you go. You can see.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:33Trevor Noah?

  Just freewheeling here.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  So literally evil can evil in this conversation.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  So how do you get, 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. Right? 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 leaked 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.

• 44:00Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wow.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  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 shifted to arrival because people are so pissed off with us that they would happily switch.

• 44:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Fix it. 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, Lina Khan created what was called the click to cancel rule, which told corporations.

• 44:47Trevor Noah?

  Me too.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Me too. God, I, I, I used to send her texts that said, um, I can't tell you how disorienting it is to get out of bed in the morning and look at my phone and go, oh, my God, my government's great.

• 44:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, like Lina Khan was, because, because you know, you know what it felt like with Lina Khan? It felt like there was somebody in government doing what the government is supposed to do. So here, here's how I, here's how I've seen it. So Lina Khan. Was fundamentally tasked with making sure that trade and competition were fair.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:17Trevor Noah?

  In the United States, right? And this is something that people oftentimes obscure in these conversations.

• 45:25Trevor Noah?

  If you talked to billionaires and CEOs of corporations, they would make Lina Khan 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.

• 46:10Trevor Noah?

  And their job is to enforce the rules to make sure that the spectators and the fighters in the cage are protected.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  To officiate.

• 46:20Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you don't need to see anybody dying.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:23Trevor Noah?

  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 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.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you're on top.

• 46:49Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 47:01Trevor Noah?

  I've seen multiple major corporations who were once like, you know, at the pinnacle, HP, et cetera, et cetera, you know.

• 47:10Trevor Noah?

  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, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin, 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.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:55Trevor Noah?

  I didn't know this. But it was passed, like, taste tests and just in raw sales, it was doing this, 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 gonna cut you off completely. And remember, right now, we're responsible for such a large amount of your revenue.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:24Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 48:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:31Trevor Noah?

  We're gonna shut this shit down, and good luck to you, not having any of our products.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 48:36Trevor Noah?

  What can you do as a store? You're a corner store, mom and pop store, supermarket, doesn't matter how big you are.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:42Trevor Noah?

  They're a huge part of your turnover.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  They've got a lot of products under that belt.

• 48:45Trevor Noah?

  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 the anything in any field, you can think, when you're on top, you're always gonna be on top.

• 49:06Trevor Noah?

  But when that behemoth flips and they're coming after you, that's when you're gonna wish that there was enforcement. But by then, it might be too late because now there might only be one company. And so now it just becomes an environment where competition cannot even begin to exist. Does that make sense?

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you said that very well. Do you remember on Saturday Night Live, Lily Tomlin used to do this bit where she'd play an AT&T operator.

• 49:27Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, right.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  The AT&T operator. 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.

• 49:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:41Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And, and so there has to be some external source of discipline. So this started when you asked me about competition. And I, I tell even my like most Ayn Rand 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 on the team than the teams on the field. Otherwise, how, what, 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 than the government.

• 50:14Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  So the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate determines the size of the government you're gonna have to have. It has to be bigger. And so if you want small government, you need smaller corporations.

• 50:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's an interesting argument. I've never thought of that. People say, I want small government, but then they don't consider.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you get economic plan. 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, oh, I'm not, I'm gonna switch to Android or I'm not gonna 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.

• 51:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Right?

• 51:14Trevor Noah?

  People forget the tactic.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Shopping hard. It wasn't shopping hard. You know, the 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 car pools. 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.

• 51:34Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  So either Apple gets to decide which software people. So iPhones, basically iPhones are a minority in the market, but they're the super majority of the top decile. So the 10% richest people in the world.

• 51:48Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  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 so they're effectively a market planner. Right? They're like, they're like someone in, you know, Moscow coming up with a five year plan in 1976.

• 52:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  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 you 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 it like.

• 52:43Trevor Noah?

  Isn't that something that was misunderstood as well?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  It's a it's a piece of propaganda Milton Friedman came up with. It's not true.

• 52:49Trevor Noah?

  But 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.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  It's more like, it's more like, the problem with fiduciary duty is they act as though it's a bright line test, right? You just say, oh, well, what do the managers of this firm do?

• 53:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 53:25Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Fiduciary duty is the all purpose excuse.

• 53:29Trevor Noah?

  Okay, you can just use it for anything and be like, this is my fiduciary duty.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  The market made me do it.

• 53:33Trevor Noah?

  Okay, all right, that makes sense.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  So it's, so the, 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.

• 53:59Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Right? And so they're going to like, put out, um, it's called like 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, but 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're, they are checking each other's bullshit.

• 54:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because, because they all, when we have enough of them, it's like a healthy ecosystem.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 54:36Trevor Noah?

  If you, 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, da, da, da, da, da. And it's just this cycle.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Six of nitrogen.

• 54:50Trevor Noah?

  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. Mm hmm. 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. 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. Sure. 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. Mm hmm. 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.

• 55:35Trevor Noah?

  People, you 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 you're in a conversation that doesn't affect you. You know, people are like, ah, the Federal Trade Commission and and what mergers. Why do I care if there's a merger? Why do I? Simple, simple one. If you look at the power of something getting too big.

• 56:01Trevor Noah?

  You have your card service, your Uber app or whatever you use.

• 56:08Trevor Noah?

  People forget when Uber came in, they did something really slick. They said, we're gonna 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 wanna 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's 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.

• 56:52Trevor Noah?

  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 have no, you can't even say, I do not wish to catch an Uber. I'm gonna wait for a taxi, go wait. See how long it takes now.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 57:21Trevor Noah?

  There is no taxi to pick you up. And we can, we can, 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 anywhere. Yes, 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, uh, like one of the ones that really got me was, um. When we look at like diseases in food. Even if we take it away from economics.

• 57:53Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 58:16Trevor Noah?

  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 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, it's.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Well, that company's called CalFresh. Nearly all the eggs in the grocer's fridge come from them.

• 58:44Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  And we were all having egg discourse about eggs being expensive. It's because CalFresh raised the price.

• 58:49Trevor Noah?

  There you go.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  They said it was bird flu, they said it was this and that, it's just CalFresh turned the knob.

• 58:52Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but the thing is, if there was a disease.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 58:56Trevor Noah?

  That affected that specific type of egg.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:59Trevor Noah?

  And wiped them all out, or there was a disease in them. Because we've allowed CalFresh to become this thing, we are all gonna pay the price. We'll be right back after this short break.

• 59:14Trevor Noah?

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• 59:59Trevor Noah?

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• 1:00:41Trevor Noah?

  With YouTube Premium, those deep dives feel even smoother. You get ad-free viewing, but you also get background play when you need your hands free. And you get offline downloads, so you can keep watching wherever you happen to be, even if you happen to be off the grid. It's everything you already love about YouTube, just somehow even better. Yeah, one of my favorite YouTube Premium features is smart downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, "Ah, I forgot to download anything!" And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, "Download, download, download, download." You're on the plane, "Download, download, download, download." There's no Wi-Fi. "I wish I downloaded." Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch... Or just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you.

• 1:01:26Trevor Noah?

  It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remember the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. I think one of the things you realize when you start caring about clothes is that simple doesn't have to mean basic. Because a T-shirt is a T-shirt until you find the right T-shirt. Ooh, then suddenly you're talking about the cut, the fit, the weight, the way it falls on your body. Then you're like, no, no, no, you don't understand.

• 1:02:11Trevor Noah?

  Look at the sleeve. And that's what I've really enjoyed about Quince. One of my favorite things is their Pima Cotton Lux Touch T-shirts. And it's become one of those pieces I keep reaching for. The cotton has this really smooth premium feel to it. The fit is great and it just lays really nicely. And I think that's what you sometimes take for granted with simple clothes. When they're done really well, they become the foundation of an entire outfit. You can throw on a jacket, a sweater, whatever you want, but everything works because you started with the right thing. That's what I like about Quince. It feels premium without feeling like you're trying too hard. It's effortless. So find your next fall favorites at Quince.

• 1:02:54Trevor Noah?

  Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. Hello over there. Oh, and if Quince asks you where you heard about them, let them know it was What Now with Trevor Noah. It's the best way to support the show.

• 1:03:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  During apartheid, I think it was the seventies and the eighties.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  And there used to be another form of it called the stairway.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  So in a stairway, you don't take public transport.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  You don't go to the factories, you don't go.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  General strike.

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  General strike, yes.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  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, we as the consumers were made unaware accomplices by being shareholders in companies.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Hmm. There's, yeah, I think there's something to that. I do, 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 they can, 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, that what you should really do if you're angry at Elon Musk is agonize endlessly about whether you should have a Twitter account, right? And not.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  That's what you should be doing.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Is this why Elon Musk called you a scourge on humanity?

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  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, my 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, died very tragically of cancer, who was a utopian socialist.

• 1:05:42Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  And he was like, I consider myself a utopian socialist and the model of E and M 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 was 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, 100 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 Ian 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.

• 1:06:28Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  And that is when he called me a scorch on humanity.

• 1:06:31Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  But I wanted to pop the stack because this started with talking about.

• 1:06:34Trevor Noah?

  Did he block you after that?

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did.

• 1:06:36Trevor Noah?

  I'm always fascinated by that, that side of Elon.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  The blocking butt.

• 1:06:39Trevor Noah?

  He's, he's like.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  He's a baby.

• 1:06:40Trevor Noah?

  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 racist, go away, block.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:52Trevor Noah?

  Gone.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:53Trevor Noah?

  You're like, I don't understand how the owner of one of the world's largest town squares, as we now call it, blocks people.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I understand it.

• 1:07:04Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but to me.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  He's a thin-skinned baby.

• 1:07:06Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but to me, it's the antithesis. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:07:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:09Trevor Noah?

  To me, it is the antithesis of the thing.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Trevor Noah?

  You have come in and said, everyone should say what they want and we should do this.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Open mic club owner.

• 1:07:17Trevor Noah?

  Open, let's go, let's go, let's go.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're too open mic now.

• 1:07:21Trevor Noah?

  Come on, man.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  The mic is too open.

• 1:07:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. It's such a, it's, but, but, but, but actually that's something I wonder is like, where do you think, where did the fracture occur? Because.

• 1:07:34Trevor Noah?

  I can use Elon Musk. You know, I can talk about like founders of Google. I can talk.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Trevor Noah?

  Man, I won't lie. A lot of what they set out to do was noble and beautiful. It was brilliant.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  It always starts like that.

• 1:07:47Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  You you're a hater or a lover? You're a hater.

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  He, I'm traumatized.

• 1:08:02Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you, he didn't, he didn't hate, he didn't hate, he doesn't hate electric cars.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  No, I'm traumatized by one.

• 1:08:06Trevor Noah?

  He hate, he, he drove mine and then like the experience of trying to charge an electric car and then like where and how and.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  I wish I knew you then, because I think there's a conspiracy when it comes to these chargers.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  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, uh, car chargers.

• 1:08:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  But they will only work with cars that, uh, 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 your, the cars you make use the public one. And so Elon Musk opened up the charger network. That was Tim Wu. He's 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, that's right.

• 1:09:00Trevor Noah?

  But, but this, you see that, that thing you're talking about. So I, so I go like this, this, I'm, 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, what changed? What changed to take? I'm gonna make a bet and say ninety percent of the people who ran or were the top people in Silicon Valley, ninety percent 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 in all of this.

• 1:09:41Trevor Noah?

  And then now they've turned into like, sort of like the oil barons of old.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:47Trevor Noah?

  What, what happened?

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  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 difference.

• 1:09:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 01

  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 the 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.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Right? Because they're winning. And there is this 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 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 anytime a 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, it's like they put out 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

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  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 Google gives Apple $20 billion a year not to enter the search market, it's

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  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 is less, 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 engine. So we're all good. We're like, this is, this is us sort of conspiring, you know? Adam Smith, who's the father of capitalism.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  He has this famous quote, you know, men of the same trade seldom gather, but the conversation turns to a contrivance to fix prices.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  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, you built this self-licking ice cream cone. It's kind of just, it's like, the money is the money is just piling up, you know? And like, and, and, you know, you've, you're supposedly, you're, you're 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

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, everyone moves diagonally.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  And, and, 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? And, and, like, they just end up with this kind of emergent consensus. Yeah, are you a pickleball man?

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Oh, the sport of the corrupt.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  I'm no, I'm no pickleballer.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  What a self-licking ice cream. I can't wait to use that phrase now, like, I'm dying to use the phrase self-lick.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Back at this again, so in, in South Africa currently, there's a commission that is investigating corruption within first municipalities. It started with the police, then it became with municipalities, and obviously, the tender system and the business dealings that is being done. And it so 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.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  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

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  are the ones that blow the whistle.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  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 stairways 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.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Go slow. Yeah, yeah, they're sometimes called right, uh, work to rule, uh, uh, go slows. They're, they're all the, yeah, same thing. You follow all the rules.

• 1:14:47Speaker 02

  But you're not really doing anything.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  You don't do anything.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  You're explaining another side of it, which is the dark evil.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:00Speaker 02

  Vader self licking ice cream version.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  And I'm like, what can I do? So I do know I'm cornered.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I have an answer for you.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Uh, it, it, it's kind of grounded in this punchline of, uh, 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, 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, you ever heard anyone say, oh, that thing is so screwed up. It's really borked. You ever heard borked? No, it's a, 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.

• 1:15:42Trevor Noah?

  I didn't even know that that was possible in America.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:44Trevor Noah?

  I thought you always get on the Supreme Court.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  No, yeah, no, this was before, pre Susan Collins. So, uh, 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.

• 1:16:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  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. Right? We got them in everything. Media, clearly, right? Five, five publishers, four studios, three labels, two companies that control the apps and one company that does the ebooks 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?

• 1:16:51Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  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, right? And so the way we got these laws, it wasn't like someone came down off a mountain with two stone tablets and said, we have to stop these firms from engaging in merging.

• 1:17:08Trevor Noah?

  They watched it happen?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Trevor Noah?

  Okay, and they reacted to it?

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  They were in a situation, if anything, worse than the situation we're in, right? And this, you know, from the 1890s to the, through the Gilded Age, right? This was, this was the period in which you had the robber barons, the trusts. It'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. 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,

• 1:17:53Trevor Noah?

  genius.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Everything in the country was run this way. The first anti-trust law, 1890, Robert Sherman, who's a senator, he's the brother of Tecumseh Sherman, Guy Burn Down 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 like 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,

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  with its arms wrapped around the world.

• 1:18:40Trevor Noah?

  I think I've seen images like that.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Gilded Age. There are also weird Nazi images that are also this, that are bad, but this was before the Nazis.

• 1:18:47Trevor Noah?

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Half a century before the Nazis. So this woman, Ida Tarbell. Who was the first woman in America to get a science degree. She was biologist. She was a generationally brilliant orator, sort of the Obama of her age. She 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 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.

• 1:19:29Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:19:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  But we can fix it by fixing the policy environment, right? The enshitogenic policies that create the enshitocene, the era in which everything turns to shit. We know what those policies were. We decided to stop enforcing antitrust laws, so companies formed cartels and monopolies and duopolies. 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.

• 1:20:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  We got other policies like the pharma policies that stopped South Africa from making antiretrovirals at the height of the AIDS crisis. We got the progeny of those, which stopped the global South from making their own mRNA vaccines at the height of the pandemic.

• 1:20:43Trevor Noah?

  We've got that with seeds as well.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Monsanto's doing this with seeds.

• 1:20:46Trevor Noah?

  People from growing food.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Trevor Noah?

  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 concepts.

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  By Monsanto bear.

• 1:20:58Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:12Trevor Noah?

  Our seed is related to your seed.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  We didn't sell you the seed, but the seed came from a plant that we bred or genetically engineered.

• 1:21:19Trevor Noah?

  So the seed came from our seed? But not even. But not even.

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  It came from a plant that came from a plant that came from a plant. Like, they own the life form.

• 1:21:25Trevor Noah?

  No, it's crazy.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  So how are they stopping people from planting?

• 1:21:27Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Wait, so they come to your farm and test the genetics of your plant?

• 1:21:37Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  There is a, there is a member of the Legislative Assembly.

• 1:21:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, my man, you're playing games, bro.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  There is a member of the Legislative Assembly, so like an MP or like a congressman in Alberta, who is a farmer, who had this happen, his neighbor's seed blew onto his land.

• 1:21:50Trevor Noah?

  I remember the story.

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  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,

• 1:22:23Speaker 01

  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 saved for retirement. So we don't own shares in all these companies.

• 1:22:38Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, I think Eugene, no, I think what Eugene meant was, he meant metaphorically, they've made us shareholders because we have the phone, we drive the car.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Well, we're stakeholders.

• 1:22:47Trevor Noah?

  We shop, we shop, yeah, we bought in. We shop on their, on their platforms.

• 1:22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  And then we. And your bank has sort of told you you can buy this.

• 1:22:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, and then we feel like, we're like, ah, we're like in it.

• 1:22:56Speaker 01

  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 you 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?

• 1:23:11Trevor Noah?

  I agree with that.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  If you're 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, maybe it's not that I bought the wrong thing. Maybe you shouldn't be in this line of business. Right? Like, I'm, I'm a writer, I work in books, I'm a recovering bookseller and library worker too. I, I love. 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. Right? 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. Right?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  It's your goddamn book. And so like when someone says to me, oh, well, why did you buy the ebook? 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.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  That's a great one.

• 1:24:14Trevor Noah?

  That really is. That was really a great condition.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  And when you speak about farmers and obviously when you speak about the 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.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Ah, although this is much older. So this is one of my weird special subjects.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  You only have one.

• 1:24:52Speaker 01

  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 in 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 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, there'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.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  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? You have, by the time you've like lost two or three crops in your career.

• 1:25:43Trevor Noah?

  You're just always behind now.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  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-

• 1:26:14Trevor Noah?

  Yo, what?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this persisted through Rome. It persisted through, like, like, all of, all the civilizations of antiquity.

• 1:26:21Trevor Noah?

  They knew, they foresaw this, yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because they, 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-

• 1:26:36Trevor Noah?

  Unsustainable.

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  -good planners, right? They're just not good planners of civilization. They have personal interests. You know, that, like, this is one of the, the problems of letting people amass too much power, is that even the smartest person is prone to folly.

• 1:26:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:50Speaker 01

  You know, Henry Ford, at one point, was worried about, um, rubber for tires. And so he was like, I'm gonna build my own rubber plantations in Brazil, in a town called Fordlandia, in the middle of the jungle, and I'm going to-

• 1:27:01Trevor Noah?

  It was already called that.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no, he built it.

• 1:27:03Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay, wow.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  And, and he was like, I'm going to take, I'm gonna build a copy of Dearborn, Michigan, which was 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 gonna build it in Brazil. And he was like, all right, I want you to make it ready. And they said, okay, but, um, so, southern hemisphere, right? So we put the windows in the other side of the building? It's like, don't be stupid. We put the windows on, on this side of the building, because it's gonna be just like Dearborn.

• 1:27:29Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  And, and that was it? They, 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-

• 1:27:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  And turned into Howard Hughes, right?

• 1:27:50Trevor Noah?

  But this is, this is, this is, this is common with everyone. Like, um, 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 wealth means that they also have a copious amount of knowledge-

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:28:07Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:15Trevor Noah?

  That's it.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  And you got very lucky.

• 1:28:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, I mean, Mark Cuban said that on the podcast. He said, Mark Cuban was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Said, I, I, 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.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:28Trevor Noah?

  He said, he said, don't, don't get it. He said, don't, the billionaire part is extremely, extremely lucky.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  Selling broadcast.com to Yahoo required that SoftBank, which is their VC who gave them all the money, who then gave all the money to Uber, who then are now giving all the money to OpenAI, that they be there like being, they are the sucker at every table.

• 1:28:47Trevor Noah?

  It really is weird. Why is SoftBank like that?

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  One guy, Masayoshi Son, he's, he is a dumb man with access to a lot of money.

• 1:28:54Trevor Noah?

  But, but how do they stay around for so long?

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Oh, well, now it's the Saudis giving it to them, who are like, they are, they are the Beverly Hillbillies.

• 1:29:00Trevor Noah?

  Do you know the story of SoftBank? SoftBank is crazy. I mean, obviously you know the detail. No, but every time you hear a story of like a boom, a boom and a bust.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Trevor Noah?

  In like a bubble. So you, 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.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  He's the Forrest Gump of shitty investors.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  So this guy, Masayoshi Son, he's just very good at talking dumb billionaires that have lots of money, which he then pumps into companies where they inflate bubbles. And they do have exits sometimes, right? But they have the exit, but then, then the firms are worth nothing. 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 what, when he got out. But, you know, Yahoo was destroyed by this string of acquisitions, right? Like Yahoo had a business and they turned it into an acquisition factory.

• 1:30:00Trevor Noah?

  And that's what killed them.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  That did, that did nothing, right? That, 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.

• 1:30:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. And, 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.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Trevor Noah?

  Right? And then you start becoming more focused on your competitive competitors and you start buying them up. Seems like a smart idea. The thing that people forget is you now own those businesses.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Trevor Noah?

  So you have to do one of two things. You either have to like shut them down.

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:37Trevor Noah?

  But that also requires like work and it's money that you're losing.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:41Trevor Noah?

  Or you have to figure out how you integrate them into your business.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:30:44Trevor Noah?

  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? Uh, do we take their head office?

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:55Trevor Noah?

  Do we keep ours? Do we not? And now you know what you've done? You have lost focused on what you were doing.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  Original business.

• 1:31:02Trevor Noah?

  Do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:03Trevor Noah?

  It's the equivalent of somebody saying, I'm going to date or marry every single person who I think might be competition.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Musk again.

• 1:31:14Trevor Noah?

  You are a scourge on humanity, Corey. But literally you go like, you know what?

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Trevor Noah?

  Anyone I see as competition, I'm, I'm just gonna, no, they're gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna marry them. I'm gonna bring them in. I'm gonna marry. And it's like, yeah. And then you're gonna end up in a house that has like fifty spouses. Because you were trying to stop those spouses from being competition from.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:31Trevor Noah?

  Make them happy. Yeah, because you're like, no, I just don't want them as competition for my spouse.

• 1:31:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:31:37Trevor Noah?

  Then it's like, no, no, just focus on your spouse. No, no, no, no. That, that person might become competition for my spouse. I'm gonna, you're also married to me. You're also married to me. You're also married to me. No one's competition for my spouse. And then at the end of it, you now have fifty spouses in one house and things are falling apart and you wonder why.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:31:50Trevor Noah?

  It, it, it, you lose your focus as well.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I mean, Brandeis called this the curse of bigness. He says that when firms get too big, they start fighting with each other. The, the, the locus of competition moves from uh, external to, for, for firms external to the firm, right? So like, you're like, I want Google to be better than the other search engines.

• 1:32:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  And then it becomes divisions in Google saying, I want my division to do better.

• 1:32:12Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:32:14Trevor Noah?

  And the culture moves inward.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  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 wanna, especially like, you know, the big Hollywood firms, big studios, right? They've got like VP. 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 ones. 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 SVP's 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?

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  You know what this is like. They're constantly rat fucking each other, right? Cause they, that's their major locus of competition.

• 1:33:04Trevor Noah?

  But you see, this is, I didn't, 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.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:33:20Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:33:33Trevor Noah?

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• 1:34:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah. One of my favorite YouTube Premium features is smart downloads. Because how many times have you gone somewhere and realized, ah, I forgot to download anything? And now you're on the way to the airport and you're like, download, download, download, download. You're on the plane, download, download, download, download. There's no wifi. I wish I downloaded. Now, all of those things that you were gonna watch are just on the internet. Smart downloads basically thinks ahead for you. It automatically downloads recommended videos based on what you like to watch. So even when you forget to prepare, YouTube Premium didn't. I love it. It's like packing for a trip and discovering somebody already remembered the thing you always leave at home. It's always the underwear. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium.

• 1:35:03Trevor Noah?

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• 1:35:40Speaker 03

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• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  That's C-O-O-P, sleepgoods.com/comedy.

• 1:36:32Trevor Noah?

  You know what I think of with all of this is 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.

• 1:36:49Trevor Noah?

  I don't know a single person.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:36:51Trevor Noah?

  Who has finished a game of Monopoly. And I also do not know a single person who has enjoyed the ending of that game of Monopoly. Unless they were the last person with the money.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:37:01Trevor Noah?

  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 two hundred. Woo hoo. I just passed go. Oh, yeah. 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, oh, 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.

• 1:37:35Speaker 02

  The haves and have nots.

• 1:37:35Trevor Noah?

  And the have nots.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:37Trevor Noah?

  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, cause 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.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Wealth that gets wealth.

• 1:37:53Trevor Noah?

  You do less.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:37:55Trevor Noah?

  People do more. You even get to the point where the person who has is like, I don't even feel like rolling. You guys just roll and come to me and you're gonna have to pay me for just existing.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  And even the conversation of the players.

• 1:38:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  That have.

• 1:38:07Trevor Noah?

  Hey.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  They have more in common with each other now.

• 1:38:09Trevor Noah?

  Oh, you completely.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Trevor Noah?

  Why don't, I, I, I'll give you the railway station. Cause 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, 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 gonna touch that. You're dirty. Mmm. Okay. I'll give you ninety five. What do you mean you'll give me ninety five? I'll give you, take it or leave it. I'll give you ninety five, but it's a hundred. Do you want the change on, okay, fine. It's, it's amazing how that game.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:38:46Trevor Noah?

  Shows us.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Trevor Noah?

  Why we don't want monopoly power.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  Do you know the story of the game, though?

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  It was created as the landlord's game by a woman who was a Georgian, so Georgianist. 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.

• 1:39:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  And that's, there's this like mismatch in 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 Georgianist woman made this game called the landlord's game. It had two sets of rules. You played one cooperatively, one competitively to produce this pedagogical output. This traveling salesman played the game, stole it, sold it to Parker Brothers.

• 1:39:34Trevor Noah?

  Yo, you're lying.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  No, a hundred percent.

• 1:39:37Trevor Noah?

  This is even better.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:39:38Trevor Noah?

  This is super monopoly.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  And it was like decades later that Parker Brothers finally admitted that this woman was the creator of the landlord's game.

• 1:39:46Trevor Noah?

  And?

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  And she, I think either she or her descendants got a small amount of money. And, you know, she, there's like a small credit on the Parker Brothers website for her. That's it. It like, yes.

• 1:39:57Trevor Noah?

  How can a game about screwing people over come from, come from screw over?

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  A little on the nose. Yeah.

• 1:40:04Trevor Noah?

  Is there, is there, is there a system or a country or 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?

• 1:40:13Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what I'm hopeful about. I don't think there's anything that's nailing this, 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 US Trade Representative said, if you don't do this, we're going to hit you with tariffs.

• 1:40:28Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  Well, happy liberation day.

• 1:40:30Trevor Noah?

  Amazing. The tariffs came in anyways now.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  And, 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 Inkjet printers companies have, and this is my favorite one. I know you say not everyone uses printers, but like.

• 1:40:48Trevor Noah?

  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 own little home business.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:56Trevor Noah?

  When I tell you, Corey, the journeys that I've been down, because you'd buy the printer.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:02Trevor Noah?

  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 cartridge cartridges. They wouldn't tell you this. So the printer wouldn't come with enough, but and you're like, okay, fine. You don't buy a car with a full tank of gas. So I get, it's fine.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:41:19Trevor Noah?

  Until you go and get more cartridges and then you find that the cartridges cost more than the printer.

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:26Trevor Noah?

  Right? But like, but like exponentially more, like, like I'm talking.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Trevor Noah?

  I remember once we had one printer, it was HP printer. The printer itself, my mom bought for seven hundred rand. So what, like thirty five dollars, somewhere there? And then the cartridges, each color was around seven hundred rand or six hundred. Yo, we were like, that's not possible.

• 1:41:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it won't print black if there's no violet?

• 1:41:48Trevor Noah?

  Yes, yes. No, they wouldn't.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  And it won't scan if one of your cartridges is empty?

• 1:41:52Trevor Noah?

  So I remember when they came out with microchips. So what happened was first, they just had the, the, 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.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:09Trevor Noah?

  Okay, fine. So we started doing this. Then they came out with new printers.

• 1:42:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:14Trevor Noah?

  And the new printers from Epson and from HP had this little gold microchip on the back. And I was like, what are these things for? I'll tell you what they were for, Eugene. They were there so that it knew.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  When the ink was finished.

• 1:42:26Trevor Noah?

  And what you were doing. They were like, nah, bruh. They're like, nah, something's changed here. This is not the ink.

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:42:31Trevor Noah?

  Then you're like, it's full. And it's like, it doesn't seem full to me.

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:42:34Trevor Noah?

  Full of bullshit. That's what it's full of.

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  Same thing where the car won't recognize the part or 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 print, in- 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 ten thousand dollars a gallon, it would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion. Right? So.

• 1:42:58Trevor Noah?

  Yo, man, who's this guy?

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  This weekend, the Kentucky Derby.

• 1:43:00Trevor Noah?

  Yo, Eugene, Eugene, who's this guy, bruh? Now. Yo, bro. Who, who's, come get your mans, Yee Jim. This man just said, yo, bro, Corey, I don't know. So, I wish, I wish everyone who dealt in economics and history had your vibe.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  Well, that's kind of you.

• 1:43:16Trevor Noah?

  Because everyone would listen to economics and history.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  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 at $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.

• 1:43:36Trevor Noah?

  No, no, she wasn't. She definitely wasn't. Yeah.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  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 grew up. She grew up in East London. So, you know, these, these minimum wage daycare workers were like, I want the SIM that gets me unlimited calling to some of my friends.

• 1:43:59Trevor Noah?

  But I also need the SIM that gets me unlimited texts.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  And they figured out how to put two Sims in their phone, right? How to get a phone with two SIM cages and the modified Android.

• 1:44:08Trevor Noah?

  Not, 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?

• 1:44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:15Trevor Noah?

  And you just knew when the time changed or when you changed, you take your case off, put the battery out, put the new SIM in, let's go.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  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 isn't determined by how many Trump coins I buy. It'd be really nice to invest in something that wasn't AI. You know, like it, they, 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, 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, but like 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 on economic activity and lots of people would like to have this, right?

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  Like if you're a newspaper collecting subscriptions through the iPhone and you flip from 30% to 3%, it's like you've got 25% more subscribers overnight, right? You know, this is amazing possibilities.

• 1:45:18Trevor Noah?

  So 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.

• 1:45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. So you've got like 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 Oakleys, right? So they're looking for something cool to do. They know how, 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 sworn an arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu for genocide, Microsoft shut down all of his online accounts.

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:46:24Trevor Noah?

  We really take this stuff for granted.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  And then Trump did it again to the High Court Justice in Brazil, who sentenced his ally, Gier 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 took 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, 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 all the smart speakers and shut down the

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Cloud services and push updates to all the iOS devices that brick them and all the Android devices. Like, he could straight of Hormuz 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, right? Like, like NatSec 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.

• 1:47:36Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  Well, this is a coalition the world has never seen before, right? These three groups of people 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. Like, again, like 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.

• 1:48:13Trevor Noah?

  We wouldn't accept that.

• 1:48:14Speaker 01

  Don't go in the building.

• 1:48:16Trevor Noah?

  But we also wouldn't accept that.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, but you, they provide you with the software.

• 1:48:20Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Where the HVAC is, where the electric is.

• 1:48:31Trevor Noah?

  You bought your house, but they're like, we will never tell you. And then you go, but what if something goes wrong? They're like, call us.

• 1:48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a trade secret. Yeah. So now you have this like. 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 Electronic Frontier Foundation.

• 1:48:48Trevor Noah?

  Look at, now I'm optimistic.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  I don't mean, it's, I don't mean like it's a slam dunk or whatever. And, and I would caution you off of optimism. I think optimism and pessimism, wait though, wait, because I think there's, I think hope is good. I think optimism and pessimism are, 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.

• 1:49:06Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  Right? 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. That was occluded when you were down at this lower elevation.

• 1:49:20Trevor Noah?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  And that, from that point, we may be able to take the next step.

• 1:49:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  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 like 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.

• 1:49:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  There's always more hope. And the moves we can make now, weirdly, thanks to comrade Trump, who appears to be doing praxis. The moves we can do now are much more aggressive than any of the moves you had available to us.

• 1:50:09Trevor Noah?

  Ah.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Forever.

• 1:50:10Trevor Noah?

  That's fascinating.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  And so I'm full of hope. I, I am, I'm 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.

• 1:50:22Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Trevor Noah?

  Cause you've, you've made like.

• 1:50:30Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:50:31Trevor Noah?

  No, you've, yeah, you've left us with like a.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:33Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, let's go, let's go do this thing.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  And.

• 1:50:36Trevor Noah?

  I love it. We'll do it.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  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 unshitified and it still is responsive to people.

• 1:50:54Trevor Noah?

  Because it's so many.

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:56Trevor Noah?

  Now, you just made me realize that.

• 1:50:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Trevor Noah?

  That's where local politics, because it's so fractured, it's, it's the 200 businesses.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:03Trevor Noah?

  National politics is one of two. Local politics is like.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  Millions of them. And join the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the nonprofit I've worked for for most of my adult life, EFF.org.

• 1:51:15Trevor Noah?

  EFF?

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  EFF.

• 1:51:17Trevor Noah?

  Join the EFF.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Not that EFF.

• 1:51:19Trevor Noah?

  Join, you heard it here first.

• 1:51:20Speaker 01

  Not that EFF.

• 1:51:21Trevor Noah?

  Join the EFF. What a sticky way to get us in. Join the EFF.

• 1:51:27Speaker 01

  Not the Economic Freedom Fighters. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. We've been around for 35 years. I don't know how long the Economic Freedom Fighters have been around.

• 1:51:35Trevor Noah?

  Maybe 12-ish.

• 1:51:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we were there first. But they have cool berets.

• 1:51:40Trevor Noah?

  They do have cool berets.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  They've got the sartorial style down. 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, will 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, we've been doing this since the very earliest days of the internet. And, 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.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  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, and we've now become part of a huge constellation of these digital rights groups internationally and in the US. And, and so, you know, I like to think that's because of our leadership. I, I've, I've been there now, as I say, 25 years. I'm 55, so, so most of my adult life. And I can't imagine what the world would be like without EFF in it.

• 1:52:59Trevor Noah?

  This is amazing. Before you go, actually, let's do this.

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Trevor Noah?

  Let's, let's, let's play a little game that'll, that I think will help a lot of people.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:06Trevor Noah?

  I'm going to list a product or an industry.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:09Trevor Noah?

  And then you tell us how it's being shitified.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, why to feel sad about it.

• 1:53:13Trevor Noah?

  And, and, no, and, no, but, but rather, no, you know what I want to do is not why to feel sad, but rather just to help people understand.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:53:19Trevor Noah?

  How it's affecting.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:53:20Trevor Noah?

  Because you know, some people go, ah, tech, tech's not my thing.

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:53:24Trevor Noah?

  And some people might go, ah, the finance industry, that's not, but I just want you to explain as quickly as possible how each, like, vertical will sort of affect people.

• 1:53:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:53:31Trevor Noah?

  So, so let's go. So let's start with technology like phones, computers, et cetera. Like, how is that being shitified?

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  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 thirty percent, 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 on 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.

• 1:54:11Trevor Noah?

  Okay. Cars. Some people are like, Emma, I just like driving cars. This doesn't bother me. I'm not a tech person.

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  So locking up independent mechanics, locking up third-party parts, right? Spying on you in every conceivable way from asshole to appetite.

• 1:54:24Trevor Noah?

  Your car?

• 1:54:25Speaker 01

  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 seventy-five percent of base daters 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.

• 1:54:51Trevor Noah?

  Well, but that's them telling on themselves.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Mozilla Labs, twenty twenty-three, 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.

• 1:55:06Trevor Noah?

  Because it's just like where you're going, when you're going there.

• 1:55:09Speaker 01

  Everything. What you listen to on the radio.

• 1:55:11Trevor Noah?

  What?

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Trevor Noah?

  What conversations you're having.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  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, things, 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 like, these are all like grifters grifting other grifters. So they're ripping each other off. It's like billionaire on millionaire violence.

• 1:55:37Trevor Noah?

  Okay. Let's go to.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  I'm glad to know that the speaker in my car is not, the microphone is not.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Probably not. But they are like, they are looking at things like all of your informatics, you know, like if you've got um your your like Google Android car or Apple car, like all of that stuff is being sucked up by the car. Even and 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, 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 um uh uh subprime car leasing. So like uh if you're poor and you can't get a regular car lease, there's this whole market that's worth a couple trillion dollars called subprime car leasing. And um those cars are fitted out with all kinds of crazy surveillance gear.

• 1:56:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  Uh and also they have like, some of them have a second stereo system that the user can't control, that if you're day late on your payments, just blares at a volume. You are late on your payments. You are late on your payments. Yeah, yeah. And if you like go too late, they like immobilize your car. Uh 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. 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 they so they repo these cars over and over again. The leases are like any subprime uh credit arrangement. They're designed to like balloon and make it so you can't afford it later. So you've got like a teaser rate and a balloon rate.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  And so then they repo the car and then they sell it to another poor person. So they sell the same car to like ten poor people. And so like basically, like you can make loans to progressively worse credit risks if it's easier and easier to repo this the the.

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  Because the risk on your side is almost nonexistent.

• 1:57:22Speaker 01

  You're offloading the risk, right? So they just have like basically this whole sideline of repo Teslas. There's a dealer option where if you are uh late 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.

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  Oh, and I thought it drove itself back to the dealership. That's funny. Uh. Evil and funny.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  It's very funny.

• 1:57:50Speaker 02

  Let's go into like food.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:58:02Trevor Noah?

  Okay, got it. And that will inflate the prices.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  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 and P grocers started to take over the country. And what A and 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, on the mom and pops. So it accelerated the collapse of the mom and pops into A and P. And these two congressmen, Robertson and Patman, said, oh, we can't allow this. This is bad. So they banned this 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 are then result in wholesale increases in all of their competitors' stuff.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  So, yeah, 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.

• 1:59:33Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  Oh, that's very nice of you.

• 1:59:41Trevor Noah?

  You are just like, yo, man, you're just on top of it, your vibe. Thank you. We're gonna check out the EFF, the other EFF.

• 1:59:48Speaker 01

  The other EFF.

• 1:59:49Trevor Noah?

  EFF White is what we'll call it.

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  We're pretty, we're pretty

• 1:59:53Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no.

• 1:59:54Speaker 01

  Diverse.

• 1:59:55Trevor Noah?

  Don't worry about being diverse. I'll show you EFF.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  And then you'll see why I say. 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. Rather than like look at our repository, I go to, you know, like Google image search and I type EFF, you know, and then I get like

• 2:00:11Trevor Noah?

  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.

• 2:00:16Speaker 01

  And then they show me an ad for a red beret and the next thing you know, yeah. Can't escape it. This was fun.

• 2:00:21Trevor Noah?

  I had a great time.

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  Appreciate it.

• 2:00:23Trevor Noah?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Corey. Thank you so much. Good luck to the next person I speak to because they're gonna hear the phrase self-licking ice cream.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  You had him, babe.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  Well, you're like me. You're a magpie. I love the little phrases.

• 2:00:39Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Day Zero Productions in partnership with Sirius XM. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jess Hackel. Rebecca Chain is our producer. Our development researcher is Marcia Robiu. Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown. Random other stuff by Ryan Parduth. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next week for another episode of What Now.

• 2:01:09Speaker 04

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