Speaker 1: There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridge Todd and this
Speaker 1: is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Y'all know.
Speaker 1: I feel that we don't have enough good media podcasts
Speaker 1: that are critical of technology and the people will make it.
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is about the podcast space.
Speaker 1: I feel like it just encourages a lot of really
Speaker 1: spawning tech coverage, which I think makes us all less
Speaker 1: informed and by extension, less safe. That is why I
Speaker 1: am thrilled about Better Offline, a new podcast from Cool
Speaker 1: Zone and veteran journalist Ed Zatrone. If you like the
Speaker 1: kind of conversations that we have on There No Girls
Speaker 1: on the Internet, I think you'll like it, So check
Speaker 1: out the first episode and be sure to subscribe.
Speaker 2: Aol Zone Media.
Speaker 3: Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host. That's it, Tron.
Speaker 3: I've spent the last fifteen years in tech, both as
Speaker 3: a rapport and a public relations executive career. I've realized
Speaker 3: that many see the tech industry as kind of a monolith.
Speaker 3: It's actually a lot simpler than you'd imagine, and it's
Speaker 3: my mission with this podcast to got through the buzzwords
Speaker 3: and nonsense and explain to you how venture capital and
Speaker 3: big tech are trying to change the future for better
Speaker 3: or for worse. Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media to break down a theory I have
Speaker 3: that is pretty much core to everything I think about
Speaker 3: and we'll talk to you about on this podcast.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having me ed. I love that we're
Speaker 4: coming on to talk about this because the concept you're
Speaker 4: about to introduce was like the thing that made me
Speaker 4: reach out to you about doing this show, or at
Speaker 4: least one of the major ones. I think everyone has
Speaker 4: this feeling that like something is fucked up and wrong.
Speaker 4: We can remember this period of like optimism about technology
Speaker 4: and the Internet, and not just feeling excited about like
Speaker 4: new shit that we could buy, but feeling excited about
Speaker 4: the things that technology was going to bring us, the
Speaker 4: promise of like the new digital age, and that all
Speaker 4: fell aside to be replaced by this looming sense of
Speaker 4: doom so quickly that I don't think a lot of
Speaker 4: us have a good idea about like why it happened.
Speaker 3: And you know what, I think that's actually a great
Speaker 3: place to start with a very simple question, why does
Speaker 3: it feel like the tech we use every day is
Speaker 3: getting worse. Look your search results. They're full of sponsored
Speaker 3: content and articles that don't actually answer any questions, or
Speaker 3: just a big thread of people asking the same question
Speaker 3: without ever getting an answer. Your friends aren't popping up
Speaker 3: on Instagram. You're constantly getting product emails, notifications pop up,
Speaker 3: spam emails, and people you've maybe spoken to once to
Speaker 3: buy some do dad. But then you look at the
Speaker 3: news and seemingly every tech company is making billions of dollars,
Speaker 3: growing at this alarming, almost unsustainable rate, or while laying
Speaker 3: off ten of thousands of people a year. And that's
Speaker 3: because there is a problem at the center of the
Speaker 3: tech industry, and actually the market's at large. It's a
Speaker 3: cancerous problem, and it's at the fabric of how capital
Speaker 3: is deployed in modern business. Public and private investors, along
Speaker 3: with the markets themselves, have become entirely decoupled from the
Speaker 3: concept of what good business truly is, focusing on only
Speaker 3: one goddamn thing, only one noxious, shitty metric growth in
Speaker 3: the row economy, products are made worse, customers are abused,
Speaker 3: labor is disposable, and executives are getting richer every single day. Now,
Speaker 3: growth in this case is not necessarily just about being
Speaker 3: bigger or better. It's just about more. It's always more.
Speaker 3: Everything must be generating more money, must be having a
Speaker 3: higher headcount, even when laying people off. No, the problem
Speaker 3: here is growth in this case is not necessarily about
Speaker 3: being bigger or better. It's just about more. It means
Speaker 3: the companies generating more revenue, high evaluations, and gaining more
Speaker 3: market share. And then it's looking around and saying, you know,
Speaker 3: that's just not enough. We must have more. Businesses are
Speaker 3: expected to be. In fact, they're rewarded for being so
Speaker 3: eternal engines of capital. They must continue to create more
Speaker 3: and more shareholder value while hopefully at some point providing
Speaker 3: a service of some kind to a customer in the
Speaker 3: public markets. This means that companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft,
Speaker 3: they're all rewarded for having these unfocused, capital intensive businesses
Speaker 3: that are also involved laying off tens of thousands of people.
Speaker 3: Over the last few years, hundreds of thousands of tech
Speaker 3: workers have been laid off as multiple tech companies have
Speaker 3: been worth half to three quarters to even a trillion dollars.
Speaker 3: It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's I think like one of the really important
Speaker 4: things to nail in here is that, like, this isn't
Speaker 4: a question of profitability. The fact that you tip it
Speaker 4: to growth is so important because like the issue is
Speaker 4: not that these companies are not profitable, Like profit has
Speaker 4: nothing to do with these decisions. It's about all I
Speaker 4: mean Abida does, which is basically like profit over costs
Speaker 4: and stuff. But it's like it's this this question of
Speaker 4: like growth, right that if you're not if you're not
Speaker 4: returning this kind of algorithmically scaling growth, then your company
Speaker 4: is seen as a failure by a lot of the
Speaker 4: people who who are responsible for like the financial decisions.
Speaker 4: And so all of these choices that are kind of
Speaker 4: choking the Internet out and making the stuff we use
Speaker 4: every day work less aren't about It's not a question
Speaker 4: of the company could can't be profitable if we don't
Speaker 4: do this, it's that we won't have the right number
Speaker 4: on a sheet to show somebody.
Speaker 3: And Microsoft is actually a really good example. So Microsoft,
Speaker 3: of course they bought Activision Blizzard for sixty eight billion dollars. Recently,
Speaker 3: they then even more recently downsize the gaming division at
Speaker 3: the cost of about nineteen hundred jobs, and then they
Speaker 3: became more valuable than Apple in the process. In December,
Speaker 3: shares of Spotify jump by nearly seven point five percent
Speaker 3: upon the news that it was slashing seventeen percent of
Speaker 3: its workforce, adding nearly two point six billion to the
Speaker 3: company's market cap. And the process. None of these companies,
Speaker 3: of course, were punished for their poor planning, or their
Speaker 3: stagnating products, the mismanagement of human capital, or their general
Speaker 3: lack of any real innovation. And it's because the number
Speaker 3: kept going up, and that is all that seems to matter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I like, when I was a kid kind
Speaker 4: of questioning why stuff like layoffs happen, you know, where
Speaker 4: my dad got laid off from his job and tech
Speaker 4: and stuff, it was always framed to me as like, well,
Speaker 4: these are you know, companies aren't charities. They have to
Speaker 4: like do this to turn a profit otherwise they can't
Speaker 4: afford to operate. And I think it's so crucial that
Speaker 4: like that is not at all what's happening here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Microsoft had twenty two billion dollars in profit. Yeah,
Speaker 3: their last arnings. These companies are fine. Google when they
Speaker 3: did mass layoffs last year and in yes, twenty twenty three,
Speaker 3: they had like ten billion dollars in profit. These companies
Speaker 3: are in the green and they're fine. There's no reason
Speaker 3: to lay off these people other than the fact that
Speaker 3: they can and they don't need them anymore. Or perhaps
Speaker 3: they just ran the company in this big, shitty, messy way.
Speaker 3: And nowhere is that more obvious than with Meta.
Speaker 4: Oh god.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So back in October of twenty twenty two, I
Speaker 3: said that Mark Zuckerberg was going to kill Meta. Perhaps
Speaker 3: I was a little bit early on that one, but
Speaker 3: I genuinely think that they're on the path to death.
Speaker 3: So my argument is that their user numbers are declining.
Speaker 3: They will occasionally have a time when they go up
Speaker 3: by the percent, perhaps, but then they'll drop. But also,
Speaker 3: the user experience of Facebook and in Instagram has just
Speaker 3: become awful. They spend these insane amounts of money, tens
Speaker 3: of billions of dollars on Meta's Reality division, which is
Speaker 3: where they stick the horrible VR experiences that everybody hates,
Speaker 3: and the term metaverse. But what was crazy was Mark
Speaker 3: Zuckerberg didn't get punished for literally lying about the metaverse.
Speaker 3: The street did not mind the fact that he very
Speaker 3: clearly misled everybody in the announcement of Meta, he played
Speaker 3: a video of a bunch of stuff that no one
Speaker 3: can do is technologically impossible, shit jumping through things all
Speaker 3: around you with no headset, completely insane. The stock had
Speaker 3: a little bit of a wobble, but nothing happened. Yet.
Speaker 3: Once he fired eleven thousand people and claimed that twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three would be the Year of Efficiency, the market
Speaker 3: loved him double digit increases in the price of Meta shares.
Speaker 3: Nothing happened to Zuckerberg with the next part, though, because
Speaker 3: he also lost thirteen point seven billion dollars on the metaverse.
Speaker 3: Thing that has never made the many money.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and for some reference, thirteen point seven billion dollars
Speaker 4: is about the GDP of Rwanda. Like that, that's how
Speaker 4: much that's a rwanda worth of losses he's lost to
Speaker 4: Rwanda in his in his metaverse.
Speaker 3: Bet it's actually a bit more as well, because recently.
Speaker 5: It's more than it is more than a rwanda. Yes,
Speaker 5: it's it's actually multiple. It might even be as many
Speaker 5: as three rwandas. Because an estima from last year suggested
Speaker 5: that he's lost nearly forty two billion dollars on the metaverse.
Speaker 4: Jesus Christ, So yeah, that's that's about that's almost three
Speaker 4: and a half macedonias.
Speaker 3: And it doesn't matter to the markets. You'd think a
Speaker 3: public company that makes his money meta off of social
Speaker 3: media experiences and selling ads on them, you think the
Speaker 3: markets would care. The Instagram, one of their largest products,
Speaker 3: one of their big money makers, an app for sharing
Speaker 3: and following your friends photos and videos, no longer reliably
Speaker 3: shows you content from those you follow. That's because Meta
Speaker 3: must simply interrupt your feed with sponsored content based on
Speaker 3: and actually impossible to define amount of data. It is
Speaker 3: not obvious how they choose. There are things that have
Speaker 3: appeared on my Instagram that I've only ever said out loud.
Speaker 3: It's very strange. And this is because it doesn't matter
Speaker 3: if the product sucks, if Meta is growing by double
Speaker 3: digit percentages, if they're making billions of dollars, even if
Speaker 3: they're fucking the user and the process. Another great example
Speaker 3: for you is Google. It doesn't matter that Google's aipower
Speaker 3: Gmail plugin literally makes up it hallucinates email conversations. But
Speaker 3: because they put AI on Gmail, Google's market cap goes up.
Speaker 3: Everyone loves Sanda Pishaei, despite the fact that he gets
Speaker 3: paid two hundred and eighty million dollars and lays off
Speaker 3: tens of thousands of people seemingly all the time. And
Speaker 3: it really doesn't matter. And this is one that really
Speaker 3: bothers me because I think we're all kind of stuck
Speaker 3: with Amazon. The Amazon experience is even worse. You go
Speaker 3: on there and you spoon or Spatula, and there's eighty
Speaker 3: seven different knockoffs with names that sound like someone had
Speaker 3: a seizure while typing that skib spatula eleven dollars will
Speaker 3: deliver in three minutes. But because Amazon is able to
Speaker 3: show double digit percentages of growth every year, yay, it's fine.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter that the product sucks. No, no, no, no.
Speaker 3: Only a few things really matter when it comes to
Speaker 3: big tech and their oh outsized valuations, layoffs, growth, and
Speaker 3: the promise of growth no matter how faint or how speculative.
Speaker 3: The markets lack any long term thinking, and they lack
Speaker 3: the analysis that would actually force businesses to become sustainable
Speaker 3: and make great products. And when I say sustainable, I
Speaker 3: don't mean anything about the environment. I mean and this
Speaker 3: is a crazy concept, Robert. This one's going to really
Speaker 3: blow you away. That they make more money than they
Speaker 3: spend and don't have to fire people all the time.
Speaker 4: Wow. Yeah, what a concept in business.
Speaker 3: If the market's actually care to about sustainable companies that
Speaker 3: could last the test of time without constantly burning capital
Speaker 3: and firing people, the markets might not have ignored the
Speaker 3: fact that Meta got a four hundred and ten million
Speaker 3: dollar fine from the EU under the General Data Protection Regulation,
Speaker 3: which is the laws that govern data use and customer
Speaker 3: data in Europe. And they also would have probably noticed
Speaker 3: the fact that European users now have to deliberately opt
Speaker 3: in to share their data. Now, as a little aside,
Speaker 3: Facebook makes their money off of using cookies and various
Speaker 3: other means of getting your data and then presenting you
Speaker 3: with ads based on that. Some of it comes from
Speaker 3: how you use the platform, but a lot of it
Speaker 3: comes from this very insidious hidden tracking. What's happened here
Speaker 3: is that European users will no longer have that by default.
Speaker 3: They will have to choose whether to help Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 3: by another fifth of Hawaii.
Speaker 4: Maui, just maui.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm sorry, terribly sorry. I wouldn't want to hurt
Speaker 3: mister Zuckerberg. But what's really bad about this is statistically
Speaker 3: users do not like opting into these things. Only about
Speaker 3: twenty five percent of iOS users have chosen to opt
Speaker 3: in to app tracking, which was a feature that was
Speaker 3: actually added a few versions of iOS ago to your iPhone,
Speaker 3: your iPad and so on and so forth. And by
Speaker 3: the way, this means that basically every app is kind
Speaker 3: of on notice if it's an Apple device. Now users
Speaker 3: know when they might be sharing their data, and it's
Speaker 3: genuinely a threat to a lot of the tech ecosystem
Speaker 3: that a lot of people don't know. In fact, Meta's
Speaker 3: business model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer
Speaker 3: data into a targeting but the markets don't seem to care.
Speaker 3: And I get it. It might seem unthinkable that mister
Speaker 3: Zuckerberg's fancy party could come to an end, but we
Speaker 3: really need to be clear about something. Meta's core advertising
Speaker 3: models depend heavily on things that in the next decade
Speaker 3: will likely become impossible to do legally. They might not
Speaker 3: even be possible technically because now Apple is adding apptracting transparency,
Speaker 3: which have kind of mentioned with the iOS update, and
Speaker 3: this means that people are first of all aware of
Speaker 3: when their date is being shared and they're probably going
Speaker 3: to tell them to pound sand. There are other different
Speaker 3: changes that are happening as well, alphabet which Google of
Speaker 3: course they're going to be retiring third party tracking cookies.
Speaker 3: Meta is kind of at a point where if anyone
Speaker 3: was paying attention, they'd be a little bit more worried.
Speaker 3: And that existential threat is why Mark Zuckerberg is so
Speaker 3: desperate to distract you with dreams of the metaverse. It's
Speaker 3: so desperate to make you think that meta will be
Speaker 3: the thing that builds the artificial general intelligence, which is
Speaker 3: just the buzzword for an AI that can have kind
Speaker 3: of human level intellect, despite the fact that most generative
Speaker 3: AI right now just makes shit up and when you
Speaker 3: really look at it. And this is what confuses me
Speaker 3: about how much this company's worth. Hundreds of billions of dollars.
Speaker 3: Their other products don't make that much money. And Zuckerbug's
Speaker 3: last big idea, the one that he changed his goddamn
Speaker 3: company name for, lost them billions of dollars forty two billion,
Speaker 3: probably be sixty billion next year.
Speaker 4: God.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the street loves six.
Speaker 4: Or seven Macedonias.
Speaker 3: Yeah, multiple Macedonias there. Since I published my original thoughts,
Speaker 3: on the row economy, their share process is more than doubled.
Speaker 3: It was one hundred and seventy seven dollars then and
Speaker 3: it's now four hundred dollars right now. It's despicable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think the thing you have to understand when
Speaker 4: you look at like, how can a company be burning
Speaker 4: money at this rate and their stock price increase as
Speaker 4: much as Facebook has or Metas has. I guess we
Speaker 4: have to call it. I don't. I still don't like
Speaker 4: calling it that. I feel like that's giving him a win.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's not fair.
Speaker 4: It's not fair. But I think part of what you
Speaker 4: have to understand is that like the people buying the stock,
Speaker 4: like their vested financial interest is in it, continuing to like,
Speaker 4: this is not all that different from what was happening
Speaker 4: with n FTS right in that like there is this
Speaker 4: there is very much a group of people with a
Speaker 4: vested interest in that stock price raising well above what
Speaker 4: could actually be justified by the performance of the business,
Speaker 4: and the people who are making a fortune on that
Speaker 4: right now, understand that it is a limited timeframe that
Speaker 4: this game will work in. I don't know that Mark
Speaker 4: fully does. He may he's he may be to some
Speaker 4: extent a little deranged himself at this point. But I
Speaker 4: think there are a lot of people who absolutely do
Speaker 4: understand and are heavily invested in Facebook now, trying to
Speaker 4: get as much of that as they can while it lasts,
Speaker 4: but they understand that it's not going to last forever.
Speaker 3: And I think there is a big fall of Rome
Speaker 3: style story coming for tech, and I think the rot
Speaker 3: economy is behind it because so much of tech has
Speaker 3: become engineered to growth at all costs. It's a phenomenon
Speaker 3: that controls everything. And I think the place where it
Speaker 3: hits the most people because you know, Instagram's annoying, Facebook's annoying,
Speaker 3: but you can kind of get around it. But I
Speaker 3: think the place that hits home the most is Google. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so the thing that everyone knows Google for is of
Speaker 3: course Google Search. Used to be a place where crazy
Speaker 3: idea you go and you type in a thing, tip
Speaker 3: tap tap search, and then a bunch of results come
Speaker 3: up that are actually useful. Now it's a labyrinth full
Speaker 3: of optimized garbage. Search engine optimization is an important thing
Speaker 3: to remember here, which is companies have worked out how
Speaker 3: to trick Google into making you see their link rather
Speaker 3: than Google finding a useful thing. This is partially ruined
Speaker 3: Google Search. But the other problem is adds sponsored content
Speaker 3: and of course artificial intelligence crap. So Charlie Wazel over
Speaker 3: The Atlantic, he argued a couple of years back, he said,
Speaker 3: Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life,
Speaker 3: is dead or dying. And I agree. Users have to
Speaker 3: effectively find a way to cheat and con Google into
Speaker 3: giving them what they want. They add things like, I
Speaker 3: don't know you put PC repair error. Put the error
Speaker 3: in plus read it to get anything approaching a reliable answer.
Speaker 3: If you go and type a regular tech problem in
Speaker 3: as I mentioned earlier, you just get a lot of shit.
Speaker 3: You just get a bunch of things that it will
Speaker 3: seem right. You'll say, oh, this is how to fix
Speaker 3: Era forty two on my iPhone. Cool, and then you
Speaker 3: click through and there's not actually really much useful content.
Speaker 3: It's have you tried resetting your iPhone? Is your iPhone broken?
Speaker 3: Is something wrong? Have you tried restarting your iPhone? Useless? Garb.
Speaker 3: But nevertheless, pushing traffic towards media outlet's the kind of cretinous.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's like, I think it's important both as
Speaker 4: you noted, a lot of the fucking worst shit in
Speaker 4: tech can be strangled by stuff like what the EU
Speaker 4: has done to force the companies to not allow you
Speaker 4: to be opted in on stuff that's directly against your interests.
Speaker 4: And likewise, if that were to be, if that were
Speaker 4: the kind of thing that we could like make more
Speaker 4: moves like that in the United States. You're not just
Speaker 4: strangling the worst parts of big tech with that, You're
Speaker 4: strangling a lot of really predatory, toxic media with that.
Speaker 4: That all of their money comes from that kind of
Speaker 4: shit one way or the other. That like, they are
Speaker 4: an integral part of this and can be harmed by
Speaker 4: like doing damage to this fundamentally dishonest way of doing business.
Speaker 3: And Google spends decades, they claim, trying to improve the
Speaker 3: quality of organic results, but it's over a decade has
Speaker 3: been easily gained anyone who knows how to create an
Speaker 3: algorithmic headline, a headline that will make the Google spider
Speaker 3: that looks over all the websites say this is the thing,
Speaker 3: this is the answer. I personally don't know whether Google
Speaker 3: does this deliberately or whether they've simply lost track of everything,
Speaker 3: whether the evil parties are winning, but you mention media
Speaker 3: companies and these predatory ones. The problem is it's not
Speaker 3: just predatory ones. A large chunk of modern media is
Speaker 3: obsessed with affiliate marketing, which is you'll see these things,
Speaker 3: which is like best apps for blah blah, and those
Speaker 3: will be affiliate links, yeah, which give them a little
Speaker 3: bit of little bit of money, or best super Bowl
Speaker 3: deals again, a little bit of cash, little bit of
Speaker 3: money every time you buy something through it. And it's
Speaker 3: turned a large chunk of the web, but especially Google Search,
Speaker 3: into this complete slot, and without finding a way to
Speaker 3: negotiate with it, you're offered this kind of fragmented buffet
Speaker 3: of content based on what Google kind of thinks you
Speaker 3: want to see, but it's more based on how much
Speaker 3: money Google is paid and how often Google has been trigged.
Speaker 3: Let's be honest, and I think it's fair to argue
Speaker 3: that Google no longer provides the best results to any query.
Speaker 3: It provides an answer that it believes is most beneficial
Speaker 3: or profitable, which can sometimes be the thing you want,
Speaker 3: isn't always.
Speaker 4: I think one of the problems is that I don't
Speaker 4: know of a search engine that I would say is
Speaker 4: better than Google. In the way that Google used to
Speaker 4: be better than anything else. Right, and I'm talking ten
Speaker 4: years ago. I do know there are search engines and
Speaker 4: options that are better than Google at certain things. I've
Speaker 4: come to learn that, like, if I use Perplexity AI,
Speaker 4: it'll be worse than Google at a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 4: but there are a few specific things it's better at,
Speaker 4: and like that has increasingly become how I use search, right,
Speaker 4: is that I cycle through different options with the same
Speaker 4: question to try to figure out, like, well, who's going
Speaker 4: to fuck me least on trying to get this information?
Speaker 3: And it sucks as well, because sure we all know
Speaker 3: that any free service online isn't free. There is some
Speaker 3: way they're making money, and that's fine, you've got a service,
Speaker 3: cost money, whatever, But at some point how much profit
Speaker 3: is too much? And also how can you justify this
Speaker 3: much profit while making things so much worse? And I
Speaker 3: mean the result is that it just sucks. It sucks.
Speaker 3: Googling sucks now, It's an exercise in pain. It leads
Speaker 3: you to a bunch of content that is so obviously
Speaker 3: engineered to get your clicks rather than actually provide any service.
Speaker 3: That the web is slower, this makes the Internet slower.
Speaker 3: It makes the flow of information between people and countries worse.
Speaker 3: And what's worse is Google loves this monopoly and they
Speaker 3: pay a pretty penny to keep it. They pay Apple
Speaker 3: eighteen bills billion dollars a year, and this came out
Speaker 3: in a recent US versus Google antitrust case. Eighteen billion
Speaker 3: dollars a year to be on your iPhone, to be
Speaker 3: on Apple devices. It's not because they're better. It's not
Speaker 3: because Apple even thinks that they couldn't do better. This
Speaker 3: is specifically to stop Apple trying and to make your
Speaker 3: lives worse so that Google can make their search worse,
Speaker 3: to make more money and give some Darpashi two hundred
Speaker 3: and eighty million dollars. And it's depressing. It's something that
Speaker 3: makes me I have to fight the cynicism every time
Speaker 3: I use Google. This is a problem that hits billions
Speaker 3: of people. This is a real thing. And this isn't
Speaker 3: an attack on any journalistic outlet. But where the fuck
Speaker 3: is the horror here? This is a horrifying thing. This
Speaker 3: would be like if certain freeways just randomly led you
Speaker 3: to a different place because someone paid the dotam.
Speaker 4: It would be like if we had a I don't
Speaker 4: want to oversell this, but like what we're talking about
Speaker 4: is there was a brief period that for the first
Speaker 4: time in human existence, all knowledge ever collected and earned
Speaker 4: by human beings was easily accessible to the vast majority
Speaker 4: of people if they had an Internet connection, and that
Speaker 4: is becoming no longer the case with rapidity and it
Speaker 4: is it is a problem that kin to like if
Speaker 4: we had a cure for cancer and then we decided
Speaker 4: to start like breaking it if you didn't buy like
Speaker 4: the pancreatic cancer bonus pack like like it is, it
Speaker 4: is that big a problem, Like when you think about,
Speaker 4: like what it means for all human knowledge to be
Speaker 4: accessible and then to throw that away so that Sundar
Speaker 4: Pachai I can get two hundred and eighty million dollars
Speaker 4: a year. It is an obscenity.
Speaker 3: And then you have the level of from that as
Speaker 3: well as think about it from those of us who
Speaker 3: spend I don't know, twenty two of twenty four hours
Speaker 3: a day online and we're aware of what SEO content
Speaker 3: looks like search engine optimization. There content that is built
Speaker 3: just to rank highly on Google, to send money to
Speaker 3: an out there and traffic to an out there. We
Speaker 3: know what that looks like. We know when we are
Speaker 3: being misled. We know when the flow of our information
Speaker 3: is being interfered with. I don't argue that most people do,
Speaker 3: and this isn't their fault. This is a nuanced topic,
Speaker 3: but this is horrifying. Google has, like every major tech company,
Speaker 3: focused entirely on what will make revenues and market share increase,
Speaker 3: even if the cost of doing so is just destroying
Speaker 3: its entire legacy and interrupting the free flow of information
Speaker 3: around the world. Last year, they launched their own Barred
Speaker 3: AI to compete with being Microsoft Search Engine and their
Speaker 3: Chat GPT integration. By the way, Chat GPT, all these
Speaker 3: generative AI things, Yeah, they make stuff up. They hallucinate it.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, no, they hallucinate more than I do. And
Speaker 4: I did have permanent damage to my brain by experimenting
Speaker 4: with Sulgarann Kimmel.
Speaker 3: And what was crazy was bing AI came out and
Speaker 3: immediately started hallotinating things. BARDII. Google did a media day
Speaker 3: and they showed a demo of BARTII and you thought,
Speaker 3: for a second, oh shit, this might replace search engines.
Speaker 3: This might be a moment where they sell us back
Speaker 3: an experience we had before and then literally in the
Speaker 3: demo it made a factual error. Yeah, Google attempted to
Speaker 3: sell us back search engine results and then provided us
Speaker 3: just another broken Google kind of like JADGBT is just
Speaker 3: a broken form of knowledge.
Speaker 4: Well, and didn't they also or was that Microsoft that
Speaker 4: absolutely like lied in the demo and like it pretended
Speaker 4: that they were showing live results when it was really
Speaker 4: something they'd curated.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure which one it was, but seemingly every
Speaker 3: company does some sort of con like this. It sucks
Speaker 3: and it just it doesn't help anyone. And you'd think,
Speaker 3: and we're describing what is a big shitty mess, we're
Speaker 3: described being something that afacts billions of people, that was decayed,
Speaker 3: a very important product. You think the markets would respond negatively,
Speaker 3: and you would be wrong. There was a couple percentage
Speaker 3: points that got shaved off Google when they had that
Speaker 3: initial wobble with barred AI, and then it went right
Speaker 3: back up. The markets. They bloody love that Microsoft is
Speaker 3: invested in chat GPT. They love the open AI is
Speaker 3: partially being meddled with by Microsoft, despite the fact that
Speaker 3: that company does not make any profit. And that's because
Speaker 3: the markets do not prioritize innovation. They don't prioritize sustainable growth,
Speaker 3: companies that can last on their own without screwing over customers.
Speaker 3: They don't care about stability. The result is that companies
Speaker 3: don't function with the intent of making good businesses anymore.
Speaker 3: They want businesses that kind of seem right there, kind
Speaker 3: of feel good, and they sell a product and they
Speaker 3: make money. But I don't really care about anything else
Speaker 3: as long as it keeps growing exponentially ten eleven, fifteen
Speaker 3: to twenty percent every quarter. It's disgraceful, sadly, the rock
Speaker 3: economy and its growth at all costs. Fuck. The customer
Speaker 3: mentality isn't limited to big tech startups, so private companies
Speaker 3: that are invested in by venture capital firms private equity firms.
Speaker 3: They're regularly pumped full of venture capital dollars enticing users
Speaker 3: with a subsidized product, meaning that they basically sell something
Speaker 3: a massive loss to pump up their user numbers. That
Speaker 3: gradually becomes worse and worse and more expensive over time
Speaker 3: as they attempt to reach some sort of vague stability.
Speaker 4: I think really crucially too, like they pump up the
Speaker 4: price after they've killed everyone who provided maybe a better product,
Speaker 4: but yeah, charged more money for it, Like it's the
Speaker 4: uber effect, right.
Speaker 3: Oh, and I will get to uber because a big
Speaker 3: part of this, and it's what Corey doctor O calls
Speaker 3: in shitification, which is a painful neologism that actually pretty
Speaker 3: accurate in describing the startup ecosystem. A big part of
Speaker 3: that is they get pumped full of these venture dollars
Speaker 3: and they become these horrifying companies that are not good companies.
Speaker 3: They burn capital, they barely make anything, but they destroy
Speaker 3: businesses that say run based on offering a product that
Speaker 3: users paid for that is priced higher than the cost
Speaker 3: of the product, making the company something known as profit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that's I think that's so im important,
Speaker 4: especially for like the younger people who maybe you never
Speaker 4: fell for it. I did for a little while in
Speaker 4: the early two thousands fall for some of Google shtick. Yeah,
Speaker 4: because the thing that they delivered for a while was miraculous,
Speaker 4: like great using Google before it exists, like when it
Speaker 4: like when it first came out, Like the degree to
Speaker 4: which it was superior to any other way to access
Speaker 4: knowledge that it ever existed was wild, and like you
Speaker 4: wanted to believe maybe these people are not a bunch
Speaker 4: of fucking demons.
Speaker 3: And it was don't be evil that used to be
Speaker 3: that tagline hit anymore, No zop, how don't you go?
Speaker 3: Now it's don't comma be evil with an exclamation.
Speaker 4: They did a lot of lots of me and I
Speaker 4: don't know that's it's a it's a foolmy once sort
Speaker 4: of situation. I'll never I'll never love again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is enough. And seeing Google decay, by the way,
Speaker 3: really has That's what's jokified me. That's what's driven me
Speaker 3: a little insane. But then when you look up the
Speaker 3: startup side and you now that you when you're aware
Speaker 3: of the rots economy and you're aware of in shitification,
Speaker 3: you can kind of watch it in real time, and
Speaker 3: it drives you a little crazier still because there is
Speaker 3: a very abusive cycle here. Companies are born, they're funded,
Speaker 3: and they're grown in this unnatural way where they're subsidized
Speaker 3: on It's funny a lot of these right leaning venture
Speaker 3: catalysts they hate welfare, but they love putting startups on it.
Speaker 3: Because venture capital exists in many ways at times in
Speaker 3: the tech industry to keep companies alive that should be
Speaker 3: left to die, and they would have that same attitude
Speaker 3: to a regular person who could not meet their bills
Speaker 3: through unsustainable spending or even sustainable spending. Nevertheless, they're fucking hypogrittes.
Speaker 3: But the problem is with these companies as well, is
Speaker 3: their services. Because they are not sustainable, eventually have to
Speaker 3: become worse. They grow the dependence of the market, they
Speaker 3: kill everything else in the market, and then they make
Speaker 3: them worse in shitifying them Again, Corey, love your buddy,
Speaker 3: but no terrible term, great idea.
Speaker 4: I like, yeah, I think we could all agree. He's
Speaker 4: got the idea, right. It is really hard to get,
Speaker 4: like your mom to buy into using that term.
Speaker 3: Yeah, a little bit epic bacon for my taste. Look,
Speaker 3: if these stars were held to real standards, crazy ideas
Speaker 3: that a business should make more money that it spans
Speaker 3: and be able to survive independent of investor capital, there
Speaker 3: are a lot of startups that would just die. In fact,
Speaker 3: that's kind of happened in twenty twenty three. There was
Speaker 3: a phenomenon known as the zero interest free period, when
Speaker 3: it was just easy for venture capitalists to get a
Speaker 3: bunch of money at low interest or zero percent interests
Speaker 3: that went away into late twenty twenty two early twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three. As a result, venture capitals suddenly realized, ah,
Speaker 3: are we just spending money on bullshit? So they killed
Speaker 3: the startups. They just pulled the plug. They didn't send
Speaker 3: them any more money. There were no more venture rounds,
Speaker 3: and real companies, good companies died because no one got investment.
Speaker 3: And it's sad, but don't worry. I'm major a promise
Speaker 3: and I'm keeping to it. We've got to talk about Uber.
Speaker 3: Uber is the ultimate rottic economy startup.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was like that. It was the thing where,
Speaker 4: you know, unlike with Google, there was no like trade off, right, Like,
Speaker 4: nothing was getting harmed with Uber. You always knew the
Speaker 4: company was evil, but also it was so much easier
Speaker 4: to get a fucking ride when you were like hammered,
Speaker 4: right Like, it did make a problem go away for
Speaker 4: a lot of.
Speaker 3: People, and at first it wasn't. When Uber launched in
Speaker 3: twenty eleven, it was mostly with like town cars, black
Speaker 3: cab services. So when we'd call them back home, I
Speaker 3: guess you'll just live. I don't know there's an American term,
Speaker 3: I'm sure, But nevertheless, you were getting these Lincoln town
Speaker 3: cars and you were able to call them and it
Speaker 3: was kind of magical and you were like, oh, wow,
Speaker 3: we could do this. Eventually, they'd launch uber x. Anyone
Speaker 3: can pick up a phone and start driving their car
Speaker 3: for money with Uber. The press at the time, because
Speaker 3: everyone was kind of still thinking that tech was the
Speaker 3: good guys, kind of let it go by that these
Speaker 3: people were paid below minimum wage, they had questionable insurance policies,
Speaker 3: and absolutely goddamn profit. They were screwing the drivers while
Speaker 3: also not actually building a sustainable company. Very confusing to me.
Speaker 3: Uber only became profitable last year. They had a three
Speaker 3: hundred and twenty six million dollar operating profit in August
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three. To get there, it had to burn
Speaker 3: thirty two billion dollars.
Speaker 4: Hey, you gotta spend money to make money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what an incredible return. Just but for the sake
Speaker 3: of clarity, it's also worth noting that Uber had previously
Speaker 3: reported profitable quarters, but they didn't come from actually providing
Speaker 3: rides or delivering food or any kind of business. They
Speaker 3: were just selling stuff they'd bore. It's just Uber frustrates me.
Speaker 3: Their business model is just incredibly precarious and relies exceedingly
Speaker 3: heavily on governments failing to impose labor laws, so much
Speaker 3: of their existence is predicated on being able to screw
Speaker 3: general contractors. Its continued existence would not have happened without
Speaker 3: local authorities. Without local authorities seeding ground to these companies
Speaker 3: because at the time they were like, yeah, taxis kind
Speaker 3: of suck. Taxis are bad, sure, And of course Uber
Speaker 3: needed a bunch of money, with the largest amount of
Speaker 3: that coming from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund three point
Speaker 3: five billion dollars.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 3: And also Uber just burns capital. They burned billions of dollars,
Speaker 3: and their share price is doubled in the last year
Speaker 3: and now has a larger market cap than Ford and
Speaker 3: Stilantis combined. The markets are on crack.
Speaker 4: It's it's so fucking frustrating. It's like if it's like
Speaker 4: if there were a network of guys running those shell
Speaker 4: games where you put like a dollar and wear three cups, right,
Speaker 4: and some VC guys were like, hey, just give someone
Speaker 4: money every time they pick a cup, no matter what
Speaker 4: cup it is, and then we'll also buy up all
Speaker 4: of the ATMs and shut them down. So this is
Speaker 4: the only way to get cash. Right like that that's
Speaker 4: almost the way that it works, right Like it is
Speaker 4: replacing something that, like cabs needed to be. I hate
Speaker 4: to say this disrupted, right like it was a business
Speaker 4: that existed. The system is not working exactly exactly. There
Speaker 4: needed to be a way for you to like get
Speaker 4: one wherever you happen to be or whatever, and do
Speaker 4: it through your phone and not have to like fucking
Speaker 4: call a cab company. Like there there was a degree
Speaker 4: to which innovation needed to happen. But one of the
Speaker 4: side effects that I mean, in addition to the stuff
Speaker 4: you've brought up, is that, like it's so much less safe.
Speaker 4: You have no way of knowing if your driver is
Speaker 4: either qualifying or going to like sexually assault you, like,
Speaker 4: which is the thing that happens a lot.
Speaker 3: I had an Uber driver last year when my parents
Speaker 3: were here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada, who was very
Speaker 3: clearly drunk and just mumbling swear words the entire time.
Speaker 3: I reported to Uber and I'm like, yeah, that sucks.
Speaker 3: I will make sure you're not paid with him again. Thanks.
Speaker 3: I hope he doesn't crash his car.
Speaker 4: Yeah, cool.
Speaker 3: And the thing is the punishment should come from the
Speaker 3: markets it really should the markets. If the free markets
Speaker 3: actually functioned in the way that guys with Grecian statue
Speaker 3: avatars claimed it did on Twitter, then the market would
Speaker 3: deal with this. But it doesn't. But there is actually
Speaker 3: another culprit, and that's the media. They kind of fuel
Speaker 3: the growth mongering. C the NBC, for example. I generally
Speaker 3: like CNBC, but the way they report earnings and many
Speaker 3: people do. Lots of different media companies do this. They
Speaker 3: don't acknowledge the fact that Uber just burns money, that
Speaker 3: they spent fifteen goddamn years burning money, that they have
Speaker 3: an unsustainable business, that Travis Kalanick, who's long since departed,
Speaker 3: obviously was running a very mob esque thing where he'd
Speaker 3: sidle in with Bradley Goddamn Tusk, a form of lobbyist
Speaker 3: pr creature that he found in More Door, and just
Speaker 3: bullying local markets until they agreed. He would just launch
Speaker 3: Uber places and be like, what you're going to do
Speaker 3: about it, and then the local box would say, uh, yeah,
Speaker 3: we're gonna we're gonna do something, and then nothing would
Speaker 3: happen and would be made legal and local. And just
Speaker 3: to be clear, if you don't know this about your
Speaker 3: Uber driver, every time you take Uber and you think, oh,
Speaker 3: I've paid twenty bucks for that, the driver gets like
Speaker 3: less than half I believe, Oh yeah, get they get
Speaker 3: screwed and they don't have insurance in many cases, or
Speaker 3: they're not insured. And this is a very technical thing,
Speaker 3: but this is important to know. When your Uber driver
Speaker 3: has you in the car, oftentimes they're insured. When they
Speaker 3: don't when they're just driving around, they oftentimes need different
Speaker 3: insurance because they're not running a business while they're driving around.
Speaker 3: These are the kind of things that happen when you
Speaker 3: don't have strong labor laws, when you don't have the
Speaker 3: government protecting workers. It's just it's frustrating, and like I
Speaker 3: can understand whether the media probably doesn't want to cover this,
Speaker 3: because otherwise the markets would be varying levels of Yeah,
Speaker 3: this company sucks, this one sucks. Also, this one's bad. Uber.
Speaker 3: They really just don't make enough money to really make sense.
Speaker 3: And if they had I don't know, ten to twenty
Speaker 3: percent drop in writing, I mean, they probably fall apart.
Speaker 3: They don't want to say that, so they just want
Speaker 3: to just look at it. They just want to go, Okay,
Speaker 3: here's what's happening today. Uber also really cannot be killed now.
Speaker 3: And that's a horrifying future we live in and a
Speaker 3: horrifying present, I guess. And because people keep buying the stock,
Speaker 3: it's a valuable company, and it's valuable in the eyes
Speaker 3: of markets that seemingly have cataracts. And look, the raw
Speaker 3: economy is why you see these oscillations of hiring and firing.
Speaker 3: It's why you see Google or Microsoft making billions tens
Speaker 3: of billions of dollars each quarter, then fire in ten,
Speaker 3: fifteen thousand people while the executives get rich. It's because
Speaker 3: these companies are never actually punished for failing to operate
Speaker 3: their business is in a sustainable way. There is no
Speaker 3: punishment for them. There's not really a punishment for them
Speaker 3: missing something. There's not no CEO seems to be fired for, say,
Speaker 3: over hiring by tens of thousands of people. That's fine,
Speaker 3: you know what, Easy come, easy go. Not for the
Speaker 3: people who got laid off, though, And when it comes
Speaker 3: to the startup industry, when it comes to startups in general,
Speaker 3: the rot economy is probably a much bigger deal than
Speaker 3: you realize. Because startups got used to getting venture capital
Speaker 3: whenever they needed it. Businesses like Uber were predicated on
Speaker 3: an endless supply of cheap money, even though the FED
Speaker 3: steadily ratcheted up interest rates in the years leading up
Speaker 3: to the COVID pandemic, only slashing them to mitigate the
Speaker 3: pain of COVID and, to a lesser extent, the US
Speaker 3: China trade war. They were trying to incentivize investment. They
Speaker 3: were trying to incentivize putting money into companies that allegedly
Speaker 3: would create jobs. But once the specter of inflation reared
Speaker 3: its head, well, things got kind of nasty. And then
Speaker 3: there was the war in Ukraine. It's the collateral damage
Speaker 3: of China zero COVID policy, the labor shortage. Things started
Speaker 3: to unravel and now there isn't really any free money
Speaker 3: to go around. We're in an illogical point in economic history.
Speaker 3: And it's scary to me. It's scary when I look
Speaker 3: at how many companies that just should not exist, and
Speaker 3: it scares me. It scares me that the markets don't
Speaker 3: react when they see like mass hiring of people to
Speaker 3: capture consumer demand. They don't think, ah, what if consumer
Speaker 3: demand goes down? They just don't think in that way.
Speaker 3: They don't react when Microsoft, just an example, lays off
Speaker 3: people almost every year and then makes billions of dollars,
Speaker 3: makes giant acquisitions that don't even make sense.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's this enshraining of instability as a sign of virtue,
Speaker 4: and like, yeah, like that is that is really dangerous
Speaker 4: because like the more instability you accept and the more
Speaker 4: you like reward the people running these companies for creating
Speaker 4: situations that make the lives of their employees unstable and
Speaker 4: our economy unstable, Like, the more you incentivize that, and eventually,
Speaker 4: like it's going to oscillate too much for balance to
Speaker 4: be regained, you know.
Speaker 3: And I fear that, Yeah, and I fear the fact
Speaker 3: that the market also has no memory. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: sach An Adella, CEO of Microsoft, he called for a
Speaker 3: and I'm serious here I referendum on capitalism, telling businesses
Speaker 3: to start grading themselves on the wider economic benefits that
Speaker 3: they bring to society rather than profits. To be clear,
Speaker 3: this was four months after Microsoft laid off one thousand
Speaker 3: people and one year before they hired twenty three thousand people,
Speaker 3: and then in early twenty twenty three, they laid off
Speaker 3: a further ten thousand people to and I quote deliver
Speaker 3: results on an ongoing basis while investing in their long
Speaker 3: term opportunity. And these savage job cuts have continued into
Speaker 3: twenty twenty four as well. As I mentioned, they laid
Speaker 3: off nineteen hundred people from Activision Blizzard and their expoctvis
Speaker 3: as well, and that's like eight percent of the overall
Speaker 3: Microsoft gaming team. To be clear, Bobby Kotik, the horrible
Speaker 3: pervert freak who used to run Activision Blizzard, he got
Speaker 3: a several hundred million dollar payoff while all of these
Speaker 3: people got fired. And then a week after laying off
Speaker 3: these people, Microsoft would report solid second quarter earnings. They
Speaker 3: beat expectations in both revenue and profit, and they became
Speaker 3: the most valuable company in the world. And the process
Speaker 3: human capital used as food and fuel for the rich.
Speaker 3: And I hate to get that kind of alarmist, preachery feeling,
Speaker 3: but that is what is happening, and it's something that
Speaker 3: people need to realize and look at and scream at
Speaker 3: because it's disgraceful. Real people with real problems lose their
Speaker 3: jobs and I know tech workers get paid or whatever.
Speaker 3: There's still people with mortgages, with rent, with families with children.
Speaker 3: Sachi Nadella has billions of dollars. He's fined. Bobby Kotik,
Speaker 3: who was a reprehensible guy oversaw a period of multiple
Speaker 3: alleged sexual harassment things over at Activision, paid off unfathomably rich.
Speaker 3: Why did that asshole get money, Well, all these people
Speaker 3: got laid off. It's because the street doesn't care. It's
Speaker 3: because the street doesn't see that as a problem. They
Speaker 3: don't see moral problems or even logical problems like huh,
Speaker 3: we could have saved a bunch of money. No, they
Speaker 3: want to reward the people that buy into their wretched,
Speaker 3: rotten system. It's a scummy way of running a business
Speaker 3: that society in the market seem to deeply appreciate, and
Speaker 3: it's actually killing innovation. It rewards bad ideas that make
Speaker 3: lots of money. It rewards shitty businesses that fail their
Speaker 3: customers but make tons of money. And it rewards abusing
Speaker 3: customers in a way that I find wretched.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is. It is disgusting the degree to which
Speaker 4: the wealth of the billionaire class, and I guess, even
Speaker 4: to be even more specific, the CEO class hinges upon
Speaker 4: the regular human sacrifice like that is what they're doing,
Speaker 4: Like part of why they hire people is so that
Speaker 4: you can do these big layoffs when you need to
Speaker 4: do them in order to increase stock value enough to
Speaker 4: hit whatever your bonus target for that year or that
Speaker 4: quarter is. Like it is very much. It is very
Speaker 4: much just human sacrifice so that they can get an
Speaker 4: extra however many million dollars a year that fucking bonus
Speaker 4: provision in their contract give them.
Speaker 3: What's crazy is there are guys like Marc Benioff who
Speaker 3: runs Salesforce again, another company that burns billions to make millions.
Speaker 3: That guy has laid off ten thousands of people, all
Speaker 3: while getting these glossy cover stories that talk about his
Speaker 3: Ohanna philosophy where everybody's important up until the point that
Speaker 3: they're not. And also, listeners, if you want to email
Speaker 3: me easy at better offline dot com. Do you who
Speaker 3: know what Salesforce does? Because I know multiple people who
Speaker 3: pay for it who don't.
Speaker 4: They have their big tower with a shitty screen on
Speaker 4: top of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's a way for Mark Benioff to make
Speaker 3: a bunch of money, and that does not flow down
Speaker 3: laying off tens of thousands of people. It's just it's disgraceful,
Speaker 3: but you know what it does begin somewhere, and I've
Speaker 3: kind of hinted that this with Uber, but it's important
Speaker 3: to realize how much of this comes from this much
Speaker 3: more reckless, ugly, and violent form of funding. I'm talking,
Speaker 3: of course, about venture capital. Venture capitalists are sometimes firms
Speaker 3: who get money from something called a limited partner, so
Speaker 3: they get a pool of money that they invest in startups,
Speaker 3: using their alleged smarts to pick the winners of the future.
Speaker 3: And then when they put that money into these companies,
Speaker 3: they hope that this company will either go public much
Speaker 3: like Uber did and Facebook did, or be sold to
Speaker 3: another company. And when you look at many of the
Speaker 3: problems that you find in the tech industry, when you
Speaker 3: search for something, you think you've said the right thing
Speaker 3: and just eleven lines of nonsense pop up, or you
Speaker 3: go to look at your grandmother's pictures on Facebook, but
Speaker 3: someone tries to sell you a fitness supplement. This is
Speaker 3: what's happening. The rot economy is working against you. The
Speaker 3: CEOs of the companies of the products you're using, they
Speaker 3: don't care. They care as much as they need to
Speaker 3: monetize you, but deep down they're going to choose themselves
Speaker 3: and their shareholders and their board members way before you,
Speaker 3: and they currently have all the power and the web.
Speaker 3: I'm scared, but I don't want you to be. I
Speaker 3: want to inform you about how this is happening. I
Speaker 3: want the Better Offline podcast to be a place where
Speaker 3: you can understand, where you can be educated about how
Speaker 3: you are being conned about how they are monetizing your
Speaker 3: digital lives. And I very much look forward to telling
Speaker 3: you more about this in the future. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 3: Please check out Better Offline dot com. Email me at
Speaker 3: easy at better offline dot com if you've got any thoughts.
Speaker 3: Thank you Robert so much for joining me. By the way,
Speaker 3: I very much appreciate the couson media rocks. I've very
Speaker 3: much enjoyed building this with you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you come up with
Speaker 4: the next and continue this conversation, because I think you're
Speaker 4: putting like a name to a demon that has been
Speaker 4: like haunting all of our nightmares for a while now.
Speaker 4: And that's not you know, the only thing that you
Speaker 4: need to do to beat it, but it's certainly where
Speaker 4: like turning back the tide starts.
Speaker 3: And I really look forward to walking through these problems
Speaker 3: with you and many other incredibly smart people in the future,
Speaker 3: and of course, Better Offline is a weekly podcast. You
Speaker 3: can find us every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app and
Speaker 3: wherever else you find your podcasts. The editor and composer
Speaker 3: of the Better Offline theme song is Matasowski. You can
Speaker 3: check out more of his music and audio projects at
Speaker 3: Mattasowski dot com, m A. T. T OsO w Ski
Speaker 3: dot com more information and got a Better Offline dot
Speaker 3: com or email me at easy at better offline dot com.
Speaker 3: Thank you for listening everyone.
Speaker 2: Better Offline is a production of cool Zone Media. For
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Speaker 2: dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 4: That's off line