how the internet learned to extract

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting? Think again. More Americans listen to podcasts, then add supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-iHeart. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. Mind Games, a new podcast exploring NLP, a.k.a. neurolinguistic programming. Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The evidence has been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, The Case of Lucy Lettby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When was the last time you heard somebody say something optimistic about the Internet? I don't know about you, but for me, it's been a while. Which sucks because there was a time, and I'm talking about the 90s and the 2000s and even up into the early 2010s, when a lot of the conversation about the internet and technology in general was really idealistic. Basically, what happened to the idea that the internet was this magical network, everybody would be able to start their own little thing and have pockets of wealth emerge all over the country, not to mention make every country into a democracy, not to mention make every creative person a star. Tim Wu is a legal scholar who writes about monopolies, and he is very critical of some of the big tech companies like Google and Amazon and Meta. But he didn't always feel that way. Back in those early internet days, a lot of us really believed that tech was going to change the world for the better. Actually, at the very late part of that, I was working in Silicon Valley. So I was drinking the Kool-Aid from the fire hose, like straight on. And before that, I was working in the U.S. government at the Supreme Court. My co-clerk, actually, my office mate was Ketanji Jackson, who is now the Supreme Court justice. So we were hanging out. We were friends. And, you know, I got to say, we were very optimistic. But, you know, it didn't quite all work out the way we had thought. Tim worked in the Biden administration advising on antitrust policies, and he's now a law professor at Columbia. His most recent project is a quest to understand how the Internet went from this utopian vision to something that a lot of people blame for everything that's wrong in the world. And he wrote a book about it called The Age of Extraction. So today's conversation is going to take us from Bible verses to rap music to some Israeli map software that you've probably used without even realizing it. To that feeling that you get when you smoke way too much weed and you can't get up off the couch. And hopefully by the end of it, you'll have a better idea of what happened to that 90s internet optimism, why it didn't pan out, and maybe some things that we could do about it right now. I'm Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast. This is Killswitch. I'm Dexter Thomas. I'm Dexter Thomas. so so i mean i think you're talking about this kind of stretch from late 90s into the early 2000s I mean, I remember, you know, I'm a kid growing up in San Bernardino, California, which you're not familiar with it. It's about an hour east of L.A. Nobody really goes there. Right. And I'm feeling like, shoot, I don't have to leave San Bernardino. Everything I want, I could find it on the Internet. I could learn to do anything. I can connect with anybody. I remember the first time I was talking with somebody on AIM and it was incredible. I can just talk to somebody on the other side of the planet for free, you know, as long as I pay the dial-up bill, right? And it seemed like something new was coming out every year where I'm going to be able to just do things that I never even thought were possible. And there was definitely a time where everything felt optimistic, but the optimism seemed realistic. Yeah, it did. And, you know, even going further back, I grew up in a very kind of hippie environment. I actually was living in Canada. I went to a school where all the grades were kind of combined into one. And, you know, that was its own kind of utopian movement back in the 60s and 70s. And I think a lot of us thought that the internet was kind of the instantiation of a lot of the ideas from that era. you know you were gonna let people connect with each other and as soon as people connected you know of course there would be peace right that all right all violence and problems are misunderstandings all we got to do is just talk to each other we'll be good yeah we'll be good i remember a friend of mine said like the internet is like esperanto do you know esperanto the language yes oh my gosh yes i i made the mistake of spending about a couple weeks trying to learn Esperanto. Yes. Yes. But yeah, so Esperanto, basically the language that the idea was, listen, we need to leave aside all the national languages. We create a new language and that will allow for equality because we'll all literally speak the same language. We'll all actually be on the same page. That will lead us into this really promising future. And some people really dedicated themselves to it. Entire lives, entire lives. And my friend had, you know, saw the internet as Esperanto, the successful version. It had actually eliminated, they believed, all the differences between computers and ultimately between us. That was the original idea basically of cyberspace, which was this better world. That was the internet, no one knows you're a dog era, where you could just pretend to be somebody else and that would be liberating. Maybe I'm just like whoever I am, like half Asian dude. But in cyberspace, I don't know, like a blue space alien or something. Right. And that's a beautiful thing. Yeah, right. Okay, then what happened? So as Tim was starting research for his book, he looked at Google. Not as in he was searching up things on the Google search engine. He started looking at Google LLC as a source, or at least as a symbol, of how tech companies went from seemingly visionary to obviously exploitative. There was Google. It started at a university at Stanford. It was originally housed on some random computer. Then it was in a garage. So it had all these kind of idealistic settings. Their early talk was very idealistic. We just want to organize the world's information. There was this idea they had that our main goal is to take you where you need to go. We're not going to hold on to you. We just want to show you the way. Their slogan was don't be evil. Yeah, I mean, I remember being a genuine fan of Google. I mean, I was like an unplayed employee, man. Gmail came out. I remember having my Gmail invites. You remember that? Where they didn't give it to everybody. So you had a limited amount of invites, man. I was passing those things out. Every new thing that Google came out with, it felt like, I don't want to say a utopian future, but it felt like everything was going to be interesting and amazing and convenient and helpful. I mean, how can you argue against that? Yeah, no, I agree. And I shared that feeling. I thought there was something very well-intentioned about Google. The early company, I mean, some of your listeners might be like, what are they talking about? Who are these people? Is there something wrong with them? Right. But no, I think they're very well-intentioned. A lot of my friends who were like in another era might have gone to work at nonprofits, went to go work at Google. Because they like believed in the mission? They believed in it. And the early Google, you know, didn't have a business model. And then they kind of grudgingly took on advertising, but said all the stuff, how we're just going to be totally different kind of advertising. It's going to be actually stuff you really want because you're looking for it anyway. So it's not going to be annoying. It's not going to be cluttery. It's not going to mess with things. You know, the founders had already written a paper where they said that advertising wrecks search. So they were already on record on saying that, like, paid search where whoever pays most gets the top link is a terrible thing. Actually, let's get specific about that paper. It came out in 1998, and it's titled The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. And in that paper, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, wrote the following, quote, The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. And later on, they say that, quote, We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. End quote. So just to summarize, almost 30 years ago, the founders of Google said in public that ads would bias search engines and make them worse. So what happened? So they started making money. And then they made this decision in the early 2000s that they were going to go public. But they had this idea, we're going to go public, but we're not going to do it like normal. We don't want to become evil. So they wrote this big, long letter to their shareholders. And it starts with like, we're not a normal company. We don't want to be a normal company. We're going to do all these things that you're going to think are terrible, like crazy projects. We're going to care about our users, not our advertisers. Don't be evil is our model. On and on and on. In that 2004 letter, the founders wrote, quote, Google is not a conventional company We do not intend to become one But but they still decided to become a regular for Delaware corporation which means that they registered in Delaware which has basically the loosest requirements for a corporation and is the standard in corporate America. Okay, yeah, standard. That is what conventional companies do. But remember, Google said they weren't conventional. And as Tim points out, it didn't have to go that way. They could have maybe done things differently at that point, set up something either as a nonprofit, if they really believe this stuff. They could have been the kind of corporation that is not necessarily for profit, what's called a B Corp, like Pentagonia, but they chose the normal Delaware corporate form that every evil corporation in the world has. And then, you know, over the next 10 or 15 years, they proceeded to violate basically every promise in that letter. And the reason was, I mean, it's so predictable. They had pressure to continually increase revenue. And ultimately, that meant they had, in fact, to treat advertisers better than their users. That means they had to have more and more and more ads. it means they had to cut projects that didn't make sense. I mean, scripture says no man can obey two masters. And they believed that they were different. I think it's the original sin of Silicon Valley, maybe of America, is that we have this belief that we can have our cake and eat it too. Obey the interests of their users and consumers and also their advertisers and also their investors. I believe that you're the first person on this show to quote the Bible. to me, but that's pretty appropriate because in some ways, no, for real, it does feel like we actually have strayed from that light that felt really, you know, people were truly evangelical about the promises of Silicon Valley, the promises of technology, but even specifically about companies. I really remember, you know, myself being one of them felt really, really optimistic about what Google was doing and what Google could do in the future. For most of us, though, I feel like they kind of fell out of that light for us as a gradual process. Most people probably couldn't tell you a time when they stopped feeling good about Google. But you have a very specific date that you point to in your book that you feel like was a specific turning point a day. Yes, it's the second. The first is the decision to become a for-profit company. The second was June 11th, 2013. That's the fall of the early internet. This is where things get interesting for me. The date when Tim says the utopian promise of the early internet died forever. We'll get into why after the break. than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only iHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, What kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict? A villain? A nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so some background on that date of June 11th, 2013. So first, we actually have to go back to 2006, to a project made by an Israeli programmer called Free Map Israel. What made this project interesting was not only that it was free and it helped you with figuring out directions on where you wanted to go, but that everything was crowdsourced, even the traffic information. And this became its defining feature, and they had the tagline, Outsmarting Traffic, together. Pretty soon, Free Map Israel had expanded globally and had changed their name to something that you might recognize. Waze. So Waze got popular pretty quickly because of that crowdsourced information. It was genuinely useful. It would warn you about an accident nearby or if police were up ahead, so you could change your travel route or your travel speed accordingly. So it was emerging as a challenger to Google Maps. And here you had these two kind of, I guess, models of the future. So what happened in 2013 in June? The contest was about to start. It pitted Google, which had a more traditional map program, against Waze, which was based on user contributions. And the competition was on for the future. And all of a sudden, Google just bought Waze. At this point in time, on one side, you had Google Maps, which said they had a billion users. And on the other, you had Waze, which was reporting around 50 million users. But they were growing, and really quickly. So Google opened up their wallet, pulled out reportedly about a billion dollars and just bought Waze. They let the app itself continue to operate. But some of that really valuable data that Waze had generated, like that crowdsourced traffic information, all of that was incorporated up into the new mothership of Google Maps. They used, you know, frankly, a method pioneered by John Rockefeller, which is if you have problems with a competitor, buy them. I remember being pretty shocked that that happened. Now we go to the law, which is my particular area of expertise. And there is a law called the Clayton Act, the anti-monopoly law, which says you're not supposed to be allowed to merge companies to create a monopoly. And I think you do not need to be a sophisticated economist to say there's two mapping programs. One buys the other. That's a monopoly. Yeah, pretty cut and dried. Cut and dried. So I went to the Federal Trade Commission, which is the agency, one of the two agencies that tries to block illegal mergers. And the Federal Trade Commission said, fine, no problem. So this is pretty strange. The FTC initially said that they were going to look into this acquisition. But a couple months later, they stopped the investigation and they let the purchase go ahead. I remember I had been working there. I was like, how did they get to that conclusion? As far as I can tell, this looks pretty much like a merger to Monopoly that reduced competition. So I didn't find the answer out to that question for many years until one day I was at an antitrust party. I was hanging out. I'm sorry. Back up. The antitrust party? What does the partyful invite look like for that? The antitrust party? We just pull up. We can talk about antitrust? Oh, yeah. If you like Monopolies, don't come? I'm like, what? Basically, yeah. Okay. It's a thing. It's a thing. Invite me next time. I'm down. This sounds great. You know, it's like, it's a pretty cool crowd out there. They're not bad. Matt Stoller's there. Lena Khan will be there. Like, it's a bunch of people. So I was at this party and I was having drinks. And I realized one of the person I was drinking with had worked on that case. so after a while I was like so like what you know what went down how did that happen and she said well you know I don't know it looked kind of bad but the boss said we should let the merger go through and he said here was his theory that Google is what you use when you want to figure out where you are and Waze is what you use when you want to figure out where you're going huh i'll say it again google is where you go when you want to figure out where you are and ways is what you use if you want to figure out where you're going so they're not really competing you have just described a map like the two core functions of a map uh yeah so they were not forced to release that reasoning to the public but that's what happened and the reason I pinpoint on that point, I think that point, early 2010s, is when the internet really started to turn. And it is because the first generation of companies, people like Google, started becoming threatening by new guys, not just Waze, Instagram, a whole bunch of other companies. And as opposed to fighting them, as opposed to competing, they just started buying them. We reached out to the FTC for comment on Tim's account of this story. As of this recording, We haven't heard back. So for a while, this acquisition thing was a trend. Big tech companies would just buy their competition. Instagram was starting to become a popular place for people to connect online So Facebook bought them They also bought WhatsApp Maybe you remember when Zappos was getting really popular as a place to buy shoes online And then Amazon bought them to add to their online shopping empire. They also bought Whole Foods. Microsoft picked up LinkedIn and GitHub. The next year after getting Waze, Google bought an AI company called DeepMind. I could keep going here. Tim worked on a study a while back that showed that between 2007 and 2018, Google and Facebook, just between the two of them, collectively acquired over 350 companies. The federal government let all those acquisitions go through. And that study closes with this line of commentary. As with a basketball referee who never calls a foul, the question is whether the players have really been faultless or whether the referee is missing something. What might things look like if Google had not bought Waze? You know, I think that what was lost in that acquisition was the chance of a full-fledged rival, you know, to Google and another ecosystem. Two different fully functioning ecosystems that offered you a real alternative because so much turns on maps as sort of a foundation and a good search engine. And if you imagine it growing, if you imagine the development itself, it also was, as we said, this kind of different user-based business model. And who knows where that would have gone. I mean, within the Google world, they were supposedly separate, but they were under ultimately the command of Google. And ultimately, the founders all left and expressed extreme disappointment they'd ever done this. In 2021, the CEO of Waze from before the acquisition left the company. He wrote a blog post about why he was leaving, and he also reflected back on when he sold to Google back in 2013. And you can tell he regrets it. It almost reads as less of a resignation letter than an apology letter to society in general. And there's one line that hits pretty hard here. Quote, And I think we lost the chance. I mean, not only through ways, but a million little acquisitions, a million different acquihires of having a truly more decentralized economy that was one in which spread a lot more wealth to a lot more people. Instead, it has concentrated wealth in a very small number of people. Acquisitions are just one method of maintaining a monopoly. In his book, Tim lays out a bunch of other tactics that are used by tech giants, including Amazon. So Amazon marketplace, I guess 15 years ago, really was in some ways carrying out the early dream of the internet. It was making a lot of people rich. At the time, they charged 20% only, 20% of fees. And then they would ship your products to people. And a lot of people started making a lot of money. I have in my book stories about like this Indiana barber who starts selling pomade as a side business and suddenly is like making millions of dollars. But then Amazon, once it kind of had everybody, it had all the sellers, it had the buyers, you know, locked in with Prime or whatever. Then it just started turning all the knobs. They started adding what they called advertising fee for sellers. So, you know, when you search Amazon, I don't know if you use Amazon, but you get like, hey, I'm looking for slippers and you get a bunch of sponsored results. Those turned into a huge cash cow for Amazon because the sellers bid against each other to get those spots. And they don't feel they can sell without them. And they started making more and more money. When I released this book for 2024, they had made something like $56 billion from those sponsored links alone. So that's more than double the revenue of every single newspaper on the entire planet earth. And it's at almost no cost. It's actually more lucrative than Amazon Web Services. I looked into it this year, 2025, and it looks like it's going to be over $70 billion of pure profit. And it's only going up. Wow. And it's providing nothing for me as somebody who just wants to buy slippers. The other way around is making it worse. It's making it harder to find stuff. So you're paying, we are collectively paying $70 billion to degrade our experience. It's like completely valueless extraction. So we've got companies actively taking money from you, taking it from small businesses, and making your life worse. Whose idea was this? Well, it turns out we could probably point to a couple people. We get into who after the break. run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart's twice as large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they'll hear your message plus only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting can help your business think iheart streaming radio and podcasting let us show you at iheartadvertising.com. That's iheartadvertising.com. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult. NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point. rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. believe. The nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Letby. Lucy Letby has been found guilty. But what if we didn't get the whole story? The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Letby was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level if the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Back in the early 2000s, there were a lot of books aimed at casual readers who were curious about how technology might reshape the economy. They had titles like Small is the New Big and The Rise of the Creative Class. These books were really optimistic and they reassured people that tech innovation would lead to more opportunities for the little guy. But then came another wave of books, and these were aimed directly at influencing the people who were in Silicon Valley who were starting these tech companies. Books with titles like Blitz Scaling. And then there's Zero to One, a book written by Peter Thiel, who famously said, quote, competition is for losers. And he argued that monopolies are good for society. Part of this was just sort of business instinct. frankly a very old one not dissimilar to the old robber barons of the 19th century who were like you need to build a giant empire and control everything but actually somewhat like them they could have clothed it they were like well when you are a monopoly when you dominate your entire industry you have enough money to like treat your employees better one of the books you bring up is Blitzscaling. And it's specifically referencing Blitzkrieg, which is kind of incredible that we've just got a book which is basically recommending follow the war plans of World War II Germany. Yeah. I think Reid Hoffman said in one of his interviews, he's like, well, I mean, that's the whole idea. You don't carry too much stuff. You don't get too busy. You move fast. So that was my business strategy. And if you read Peter Thiel, it has a certain level of practical wisdom and it's well written. But if you have an academic background, you can see very clearly that it's channeling kind of Nietzschean theory of an ubermensch. The monopolist, in his view, is kind of a superior race of people. And there are clearly, in his view, like men who are destined to lead and rule, and then like lesser creatures who are destined to serve. So let me posit the counterpoint to that, which is to say that, look, okay, you're talking a whole bunch of big economics game. I'm not interested in that. I just want the app to work. Right. That's what I think is kind of clever and insidious about it. The business model feasts on, basically, as I say in the book, a very profound bet on human laziness. Ultimately, what do most of us want from technology, just that it works, as you said. We don't want to have 40 options most of the time. And I know you bring in couch lock, and I'd love you to hit me with that, because that's one of my favorite parts of the book. So, the power of couch lock. That's a term from the, I guess, what you call the marijuana community. Which refers to the fact that when you get couch locked, you're like unable to move. Like if a nuclear weapon is coming at your house, you're just like, oh, I guess that's just going to happen. You just get real high and you're just on the couch. It's like, yo, we got to go. It's like, bro, I'm sorry. I can't move, man. I feel like I weigh a million pounds. I'm not leaving. And in business terms, it's kind of like, let's say you're buying something on Amazon. You're like, hey, there's this better deal over here. It's $20 cheaper. but you have to sign up for something. You're like, oh, I'm good. I can't do it. You know, like you just, the small amounts of irritation just are unfathomable. So I think, frankly, Couchlock rules the web at this point and it tends to create monopoly. And at some point I think, look I don want to say people shouldn be lazy I don want to pretend people I just think if that how it going to be then we need a better deal Like if there just going to be a couple monopolies we need a better deal and we need to have them spread the wealth a bit better. I love this. We've gone from quoting the Bible to talking about weed. This is a great conversation. So, okay, let's say nothing changes. Let's say things keep going on the way that they're going on. Where are we headed right now? Yeah. I mean, I discussed in the book what I call the real road to serfdom, which is the way in which a monopolized economy tends to lead to a rise of an autocratic leader. And frankly, I think we're pretty far down that road, I got to say. And I think it happens this way. You allow too much of the economy to become monopolized. It takes too much money from people. They become cynical, angry about democracy. You then have a possibility for democracy to fix it, and that's why I'm advocating we need to do something. If not, people get more and more angry and increasingly say, all right, I don't believe in democracy. It can't do anything. I need some strong leader who's going to put me first and directly deliver the money to me. And I think that is the way you see the rise of the populist dictator. And around the world, I'm not just talking the United States, so there's obvious parallels in the United States. Around the world, there's been dictators who have come to power in our era on the back of economic dissatisfaction. I hope that there are some members of Congress who have read your book and who are listening to this podcast. I suspect, however, that the vast majority of the people who are listening to this, who are watching this, are not members of Congress, are not directly able to push those levers of government. What is an individual able to do? I think you have to, in terms of citizen voting, be serious about people who truly are serious about the threat of monopoly power and don't just like say a few things and then quietly vote. I mean, I worked in the White House and I worked on trying to get bills passed. And there's a lot of people who take too much money from tech platforms. And when push comes to shove, we'll never do anything to limit their business model. You have to be really careful who you vote for and their stances on monopoly. OK, I know we're getting back into politics here, but ultimately this is where stuff ends up. Because scolding individual people for continuing to use Apple products or Google products or trying to tell somebody to stop shopping on Amazon, It's not going to get us anywhere. Look, we have this illusion that we individuals can stand up to companies that are so much more powerful than we are. And I think we have learned and we know that in every society, every civilization, there are going to be platforms that are essential. You know, I was in Rome with my kids earlier this year. and go to ancient center of Rome and there is the forum, which is like the place where they have markets, they sell stuff, they also have speeches, they have the court, everything is happening there. There's always been there. And so it's no answer to say, well, if you don't like where everything's happening, go somewhere else. That's not really an answer. There's always gonna be essential platforms. And in our times, they are companies like Amazon, in some ways, X is its own essential platform of speech. unless you're going to become, you know, a hermit who lives in a cave. You cannot ignore that we have these essential platforms. But the platforms have a problem of main character syndrome. They think they are it, you know. They think they're the story, but they are supposed to be the sort of servants of the rest of the economy. You know, we've dealt with this problem before, like with the trains. This was a big problem in the 19th century. We've, like, forgotten our own history because we're calling stuff tech. So I think the government should control and limit what they're able to do and also how much they charge. At some level, they need to be treated more like utilities. I mean, think about the electric network and how we limit how much they can charge you. If you didn't, what would the electric company do? They'd say, all right, why don't you give me $1,000 a month or $10,000 a month? And you'd say, no way. And they'd say, OK, how does it feel to have no electricity? And I think we need to think of these platforms more like electricity, which is the platform for the rest of us. I also think they need to be under constant antitrust attention. But since this is not an antitrust party, I won't get into that too much. So we've talked about that turning point that was in 2013. We're constantly now talking about, all right, we're probably at some kind of inflection point for AI. Yeah. Where do you see that playing out? Let me say something positive about AI before I turn to darker possibilities. Okay. The sort of positive vision of AI is that it actually is a great challenge to the tech platforms, maybe. I mean, I was using OpenAI earlier today for various things. And as far as I could tell, I didn't see a single ad or give any money to Google. I used it for a lot of things I would have used Google for maybe in the old days. And I also, I think, was looking for some products and didn't have to go through Amazon's insane sponsored links. So there is a possibility. And one of the things I a big believer of in technology is you need a constant cycle of challenges. So AI could be a challenge to the platforms and could shake things up. And that's a very positive view. The negative view is that it would reinforce the power of the platforms, make them almost entirely invulnerable to competition, give them more of a government-like status, and make us even more couch-locked than before, where not only can we not think about getting up to get a different company, we can't even write our own emails, where you just feel so totally dependent that it's like this suit of armor. You become like this inebriated kind of creature, and you have to climb into your suit of armor to do anything. that's the scary future is we're so utterly dependent we can't do anything without it you know there's are you a hip hop fan? somewhat there's a track on DJ Shadow's introducing album and it's called Why Hip Hop Sucks in 96 it's a very short track and all it is it's a little bit of background music plays and then a guy's voice says it's the money it's the money Track ends. That's it. It sounds to me like that's almost a soundtrack to some of your book, which is to say that we came in with all this optimism, thinking, you know, our ideas and our beliefs and all this other stuff is going to really push us forward. And then it seems like a lot of what screwed this up, honestly, is just people fell victim to the promise of the money. Cash rules everything around me. dollar dollar billy there we go there we go but that's what it is here's what i think is my like ultimate prescription is if we as really believe something like we did in the early thousands you have to create structures to control the power of money to corrode it structure beats out good intentions because everything is going to get corrupted and turned to shit by that creeping need for more and more little pieces of money. It's sort of like the way if you want a nonprofit, you can't be a nonprofit like the Red Cross and also have little profit stuff on the side. You can't say basically we're about saving people and disasters. Oh, and also we advertise and hold parties on the side or something. Or I don't know, whatever it is. Or we sell. We sell merch. We sell merch because the merch part is going to grow. You have to be strict about this stuff. Can't serve two masters. That's right. Or else it creeps. You know, to give credit, Wikipedia took a different path. Wikipedia, in the early 2000s, had roughly the same traffic as Google, if not more. They had a very easy path to riches. And Jimmy Wales, who's the head of it, you know, it's almost like every morning he woke up and he had a button marked like billionaire that he could have pushed. And he didn't. And he's like, if we ever have advertising on Wikipedia, it's going to turn to shit. and like Wikipedia is not perfect but it is a non-profit it makes plenty of money by donations and it hasn't crept into this in this thing so I say it again structure beats good intentions if you believe in something you got to start at the beginning and structure it right or else it's going to fall prey to the creep of cash rules everything around me get the money dollar dollar bell y'all thank you so much for listening to Killswitch If you want to hit us up, you could email us at Killswitch at Kaleidoscope.nyc or on Instagram. We're at Killswitch pod. And if you got a second, please do leave us a review. Give us a rating. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did you know that Killswitch is on YouTube? You can search for us there at Killswitch underscore pod or the link for that and everything else is in the show notes. Killswitch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darluk Potts, and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also makes the show. From Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Oswalashin, Mangesh Hadigadour, and Kate Osborne. From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville and Nikki Itor. That's it from us. Catch y'all in the next one. Goodbye. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? 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