00:08:55.160That's 76 people, 44 of whom are believed to be alive.
00:08:59.480And when people asked what he meant by hell when he said that all hell was going to break out if0.91
00:09:03.760Hamas did not meet his demands, he said Hamas will quote, find out what I mean. Despite the chaos and0.85
00:09:10.340confusion Trump's threats have caused, Israel has said it will stick to the ceasefire deal as long
00:09:16.180as Hamas releases three hostages as previously agreed. Although I will say there is evidence
00:09:22.000Israel hasn't been sticking to the deal either way. That's the weekend news. I'll have another
00:09:27.200roundup for you next week so you can stay informed without the doom scrolling. After the break,
00:09:32.160Paris Marks joins us to dig into Canada's blooming tech broligarchy.
00:09:41.980There's a word people have been throwing around a lot lately. The tech broligarchy. Think Trump's
00:09:49.040inauguration where he was flanked by billionaires from Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitter, instead of the
00:09:54.980usual politicians that would be standing in those spots think of elon musk in the oval office
00:09:59.720yammering on for almost 10 minutes while trump sits there looking meek now this might be the
00:10:04.920point where you go okay rachel sure but that's the united states we're a separate country
00:10:09.600and to that i say for now sorry that's not funny but for real there's a saying when america sneezes
00:10:17.200canada catches a cold and i regret to inform you it looks like we might be coming down with a bad
00:10:22.340case of our own tech broligarchy to help us understand this i am thrilled to be joined by
00:10:27.780the host of the podcast tech won't save us and system crash they're a tech critic an author
00:10:33.780a podcaster and have a very very big brain paris marks thank you for being here absolutely i'm so
00:10:42.340thrilled to be the first guest on your new podcast uh i wish you the best of luck thank you
00:10:48.180yeah how do you feel being the first one it's a lot of pressure right on your shoulders no no
00:10:52.900not at all so i wanted to kick things off with an extremely basic question i'm gonna say a word to
00:11:01.060you and i want you to tell me your gut reaction what it evokes for you shopify is that a good
00:11:12.580enough reaction yeah yeah tell me about that sound oh my god this this company is like it's
00:11:19.460interesting to me because i feel like during the pandemic there was this moment where people were
00:11:23.220like oh we should be buying from shopify and like these kinds of stores because like amazon is like
00:11:28.260the big evil you know company and shopify is like supporting the smaller stores and blah blah blah
00:11:34.100right and like even then there were stories about how you know shopify had some real issues there
00:11:39.220but you know it was easier to like gloss over and now you know and i guess it was the case then but
00:11:45.940but the executives at that company have just become so much more like explicitly right-wing
00:11:52.740and pushing this like project that we're seeing the tech industry engage in in the united states
00:11:58.820but trying to make this a thing in canada uh pushing these really right-wing narratives
00:12:03.620and you know their platform also just hosts the worst stuff as well yeah yeah and it's funny that
00:12:10.260you mentioned this by canadian push from the pandemic we're kind of seeing that again right
00:12:14.900with the um the issues with the states people want to support canadian and you're hearing the
00:12:19.380name shopify a lot so paris can you tell me just for the audience members who might not know what
00:12:24.420shopify actually does yeah so shopify is basically a platform that people can build their own shops
00:12:31.460on right so you know you might not ever know that a small shop that you you know visit when you are
00:12:38.820shopping for things online is hosted by shopify because they can look many different ways you
00:12:43.620know you can customize the appearance of it but shopify is like the you know technological platform
00:12:49.220that uh you know makes it all work right it makes it easy for people to sell things online without
00:12:56.500having to go through amazon and of course they would take a cut of the sales and they charge
00:13:01.460like a monthly fee in order to run your store through this platform um but you know they kind
00:13:06.500of position themselves as like supporting the small businesses and you know entrepreneurs and
00:13:11.620all this stuff who are starting their stores trying to start a business like all this uh
00:13:16.180you know this this is like the narrative that you hear from them um so yeah that that's generally
00:13:21.220the idea of what the company does you know and and then some of those stores tend to be uh you
00:13:26.900know selling nazi stuff and and some of the worst right-wing things on the internet but yeah exactly
00:13:33.380yeah and that actually segues perfectly because i was about to uh explain that canadians may have
00:13:38.820had their first brush with uh shopify they might not have necessarily recognized it until this week
00:13:44.500it was in the news a lot uh because it was revealed that they were powering kanye's yeezy store which
00:13:50.580sold one item what was that item parents oh it was a beautiful white t-shirt with a black logo on it
00:13:58.500uh it might be one that you've seen before uh associated with the nazi party and adolf hitler
00:14:03.380uh the swastika uh and it had the title hh-01 uh and you might know what the hh uh refers to there
00:14:12.340yeah i think i think we can make a guess i think i think elon musk did a did kind of an action that
00:14:17.700that you know nodded to something similar quite recently yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know for you
00:14:25.060and me this wasn't a huge surprise given what we know about shopify um you know they don't seem
00:14:31.300super discerning about the um stores that they power they power alex jones's store they powered
00:14:36.020the libs of tick tock store which if you don't know is an anti-lgbtq hate account that sold stuff
00:14:41.380with grooming allegations on it when they shut down kanye's yeezy store they only did it because
00:14:48.180according to leaked internal messages that i got my hands on it was quote not a good faith attempt
00:14:54.580to make money i love that yeah it's so funny it's like okay you know everyone is paying attention
00:15:04.180to the fact that kanye west you know is tweeting i'm a nazi and all this like anti-semitic bile
00:15:09.940and you know puts this ad on the super bowl to direct people to his website where he's selling
00:15:14.020a literal swastika t-shirt and the company's response after you know silence for a little
00:15:19.620while is to take it down and people are like oh maybe they finally have a problem with nazi stuff0.69
00:15:24.340now you know maybe they're going to start taking down these nazi stores and they were very quick
00:15:28.260to let people know no it's not because of the swastika it's not because of the nazi imagery
00:15:33.860it's just because we didn't think he was actually going to fulfill those nazi t-shirts to the
00:15:37.940customers and it makes sense because they have other nazi memorabilia that they power from other
00:15:45.460stores so you know they would have to take all of that down if they set that precedent right0.64
00:15:49.860totally you know if if you want your nazi stuff don't buy it from the yeezy store go to all these
00:15:54.660other vendors on shopify exactly so paris you wrote a fantastic article for the breach in
00:16:02.100december titled care poly of is cozying up to canada's far right roligarchs and that explained
00:16:07.940how just like their silicon valley counterparts some canadian tech billionaires are trying to
00:16:12.740push canada to the right so you know we just laid out these guys sort of vibe and their ethos within
00:16:18.820their company but can you tell me a little bit about when you first started picking up on the
00:16:24.580interest from Silicon Valley types in politics and that it was happening in Canada too. What can you
00:16:32.580tell us about that? Yeah, absolutely. So down south, you know, in the States, I've been paying
00:16:37.240attention to that for quite a long time, right? And I think it's fair to say that I tend to focus
00:16:42.100a lot more on what happens in the US than what happens on Canada, though, because of recent
00:16:47.040developments, I've been paying a lot more attention to Canada too, because of, you know, the threats
00:16:52.020that our political system is facing. And so in the States, you know, you have people like Peter
00:16:56.460Thiel who have been promoting these ideas for literally decades, right? And even through the
00:17:02.340period of time where Silicon Valley was seen as more liberal or more progressive, people like
00:17:08.420Peter Thiel and a lot of people in his orbit, you know, Peter Thiel is one of the people who
00:17:13.040co-founded PayPal. He co-runs a company or co-founded a company called Palantir, which does
00:17:19.000a lot of work with like intelligence agencies and surveillance and things like that. You know,
00:17:24.040he also is a major investor who has invested in Facebook and, you know, these other companies that
00:17:29.620you will know about, right? But he has a very conservative, a very right wing ideology. He has
00:17:35.400said that women should not have the right to vote. You know, he doesn't believe in the rights of
00:17:40.160minorities. He doesn't believe in democracy. You know, more recently, he has been echoing the ideas
00:17:45.420of a really crazy guy named curtis yarvin that like the united states needs a monarchy uh but
00:17:50.940that monarchy will be like a ceo president uh you know the types of things that we're maybe starting
00:17:56.060to see happen um so these things have been happening in the states for a while right um and
00:18:01.100we've seen the support for those sorts of ideas within you know people in the tech industry grow
00:18:05.900immensely over the past number of years because they started to feel their power um being threatened
00:18:11.660Right. As the Biden administration moved forward with antitrust investigations and regulations on the tech industry and potentially higher taxes, you know, these things, these people were not very happy about that.
00:18:24.040And so now you have seen them cozy up to the Trump administration and you see, you know, Elon Musk being virtually like the shadow president down there.
00:18:31.820And it's no surprise then that, you know, tech billionaires and tech CEOs in other parts of the world are going to be looking to replicate that kind of a project to protect their own power.
00:18:42.040We have certainly seen billionaires in the U.S., like Elon Musk, start to interfere in the politics of other countries.
00:18:48.700He's been talking a lot about Germany and supporting the AfD, which is a neo-Nazi party over there, the Reform Party in the U.K.
00:18:55.660He said things about Pierre Polyev in Canada. And those sorts of things would like get media attention, right? Look, this very powerful, prominent billionaire in the United States is saying these things about whatever country.
00:19:09.060But then when, you know, the tech CEOs in our own country were saying things about local politics and trying to start to engage in local issues, often that was not picked up on nearly as much.
00:19:24.380And belatedly, I feel like the media is starting to pay attention to those things.
00:19:28.720And so when I wrote that piece, you know, obviously, I'd been picking up on things that I was seeing, but I was also pulling from work from people like you or Luke LeBron at Press Progress, you know, who had been paying attention to this as well.
00:19:41.280Right. And so, you know, it's nice to see the mainstream folks really start to be picking up on it a bit more.
00:19:46.680But I think, you know, people like me and you were seeing this a bit earlier.
00:19:51.740Yeah. Yeah. It's better late than never, I guess. Right.
00:27:08.720You know, they want to see this agenda that is moving forward in the United States come to Canada. And they are now, you know, increasingly trying to use their power and influence to, you know, further support the Conservative Party that is still, you know, leading in the polls at the moment. We've seen some shifts lately. But, you know, Pierre Polyev, I think, is still favored to be the next prime minister, as scary as that is to say.
00:27:30.940And, you know, it's interesting, something that Paris pointed out to me before we started this interview today was that Pierre Polyev actually kind of gave them the advice to more or less start the Build Canada thing that they ended up launching.
00:27:45.400Can you tell me a little bit about that?
00:27:47.640Yeah, absolutely. I feel like this is something that people maybe didn't notice or kind of forgot that happened.
00:27:53.260But May of last year, Pierre Polyev spoke at the Vancouver Board of Trade, I believe it was.
00:27:58.800And he was basically saying that companies needed to get rid of their lobbyists that are constantly trying to get the government to do different things and actually need to take their message to the public if they are going to want a future conservative government to implement policies that are aligned with their corporate interests.
00:28:17.780It's not just convincing the government that this is something that they should do, but you need to get Canadians on side.
00:28:23.080And the thing about, you know, messaging like that is that it's clearly beneficial to the Conservative Party to say something like that, right?
00:28:32.180Because you're basically telling corporate Canada and CEOs that if they want to gain favor with what looks like a future Conservative government,
00:28:40.380because Pierre Polyev has been leading in the polls for over a year and had like a substantial lead at that,
00:28:46.980that what they need to do is not just hire some lobbyists and have them go talk to liberal party
00:28:53.940ministers or whatever, but to get out into the public, to start posting on social media, to go
00:29:00.280into mainstream media organizations and to say, these are the policies I want to see. This is why
00:29:06.260I oppose the existing liberal government. These are the types of things that are going to benefit
00:29:11.540our business, but should also benefit Canadians. And so, you know, I feel that you can look at
00:29:18.000Shopify earlier and see that they were already trying to do things like this, right? And by
00:29:23.680earlier, I mean like late last year, mid last year, they were already starting to be more vocal about
00:29:29.440the politics that these executives supported. But now with this Build Canada campaign and
00:29:35.500organization that they have put together, you can see much more clearly that the tech industry and
00:29:40.380And these, you know, kind of more right wing aligned tech CEOs and founders are really coming together to try to take that message to the public in a more concerted way to say not just this is what we want to see, but this is how we will build a better tech industry that will benefit all Canadians because we need an innovative and productive economy and blah, blah, blah.
00:30:01.460Right. And whether their policy prescriptions will actually deliver that, you know, is one question.
00:30:06.700But the other piece of it is that they are obviously benefiting the Conservative Party by doing this.
00:30:13.200Yeah. And, you know, on that Build Canada website, you can literally see they lay out the exact legislative changes that would need to be made to achieve the things that they lay out.
00:30:22.580So, for example, there's one memo. They publish these memos every week and various CEOs and executives say whether or not they support that particular week's memo.
00:30:32.260and one of them that was supported by toby from shopify um was about immigration and one of the
00:30:38.980changes that it proposed making to legislation was subjecting any spouses or dependents of
00:30:43.760immigrants to a point system so i mean dependents wouldn't that mean kids like it just it seems
00:30:50.020quite extreme um so that actually uh segues well to another thing i wanted to ask you about that
00:30:56.520you just touched on in one of your previous answers. How similar ideologically would you
00:31:03.460say these guys really are to Elon Musk? I mean, he's pretty far gone. And I guess I wanted to ask
00:31:10.260you, do you have any reason to believe or have you seen anything in their social media postings
00:31:13.920and things like that, that give you a reason to believe they might have similar ambitions to what
00:31:18.740Elon is doing with Doge and that kind of thing? Yeah, I think they would like to see it. I think
00:31:25.040it's much less likely that something like that happens in canada just because the political
00:31:29.520system works in a very different way right um you can't really pull in someone like an elon musk in
00:31:35.760the canadian system or it would be much more difficult to do that to like run a department
00:31:39.780or or something like that right um just because the parliamentary system is set up differently
00:31:44.860than the presidential system that the united states has so i think it's far less likely that
00:31:49.140you know there is actually a doge in canada in the way that it exists in the united states but
00:31:55.380there's the possibility still to set up some kind of structure or organization within the canadian
00:32:00.940government that could do something similar to a doge without having you know an elon musk figure
00:32:06.080lead it but still having some kind of really radicalized conservative party mp who can do
00:32:12.260something similar and still be engaging with these folks in terms of like the ideology of these people
00:32:17.260i do think you see increasing um similarities between what they are saying and what you're
00:32:23.440seeing from people like elon musk um and you know i think it doesn't make sense really to generalize
00:32:29.200here because there will be very different views within different tech ceos and i can't say that
00:32:34.700i am like following the the tweets or whatnot of a ton of tech ceos within canada but i think that
00:32:40.920when you look at the leadership of shopify in particular and toby lutke specifically um that
00:32:46.740you do see a lot of retweets and a lot of posts that are echoing the types of things that Elon
00:32:53.020Musk is posting about. I think that we see, you know, people like Toby Lutke in particular being
00:32:58.100quite aligned with the project that Elon Musk is laying out. They might not be as vocal because I
00:33:03.840think it would be more difficult to do that within the Canadian system, right? You know, there's not
00:33:08.960as many people who are open to that kind of really radical political program up here than there are
00:33:14.080in the United States. And I would say the number of people who are is shrinking as we see what's
00:33:18.620happening in the United States. But I think that we should be worried about how radicalized and
00:33:24.220how powerful some of the tech CEOs in Canada have become, especially those at Shopify, which is one
00:33:29.620of the largest publicly traded companies in the country. Yeah, I think something I always come
00:33:35.700back to when I think about Shopify is the fact that its COO, Kasnijadian, co-founded True North,
00:33:41.500which is like in my opinion a right-wing rag um you know they platformed gavin mckinnis who
00:33:48.300founded the proud boys which are now a designated terrorist entity um and they did that like just
00:33:53.020last year i think um yeah and and they were already designated a terrorist enemy at the
00:33:58.620time they invited him on like exactly and like they ended up taking down that particular interview
00:34:03.740but there's all kinds of like really anti-immigrant coverage really um you know one of their
00:34:08.940personalities uh harrison faulkner has been extremely vocal on twitter and i actually
00:34:14.220caught him before they started hiding likes he was liking posts from members of diagonal on the far
00:34:18.700right extremist group and posts that had what i would describe as a racial slur for indians in
00:34:25.020them and you know so it was just like really gnarly stuff um he just needs to learn you need
00:34:30.540to start saying dei now instead of the slurs and then it becomes yeah that seems to be the uh the
00:34:36.380what they're doing with that right you mentioned this already um and i think it's really important
00:34:41.180to add to this conversation that we do have slightly more safeguards in place than the us i
00:34:47.020mean they have the citizens united decision that totally unleashed political spending so we have
00:34:52.780more rules around how much money there can be in politics so there are certain safeguards that can
00:34:57.500help us to not um experience the same broligarchy to the same degree at least um as the united states
00:35:04.940But, you know, what advice would you have for average Canadians who don't like the sound of what these tech leaders are up to and want to do something about it?
00:35:16.200Yeah, it's a good question. And it's a bit difficult, right?
00:35:19.900Like one of the good things in the Canadian political system is that we do have these limits on the amount of money that can actually be donated to political parties and candidates.
00:35:28.620So, you know, a big corporation or a billionaire like Toby Lutke can't just go drop like hundreds of millions of dollars on a political campaign or something like that to try to buy the government. Right. So, you know, in terms of regular Canadians, you know, you can obviously be involved in like the political process and, you know, try to campaign against the types of candidates who would, you know, bring something like this in.
00:35:50.700I think even more than that, you know, you can get involved in groups that are doing this kind
00:35:54.480of work that are not just like during the time of a political campaign or something. But I would
00:36:01.120say even more generally, I think is just to continue to be aware of what the tech industry
00:36:07.220is doing in Canada. And I feel like, you know, we have a lot of awareness of what happens down in
00:36:12.900the United States and what the tech billionaires down there are doing. But what happens up here
00:36:18.180in Canada can often be neglected, or we might not notice it nearly as much, because it isn't as,
00:36:26.600you know, it doesn't like stand out as much, you know, it's not as,
00:36:31.120I feel like the United States is like, you know, the celebrity reporting, like reality TV,
00:36:36.900like it's hard not to pay attention to it. But up in Canada, it's like things are more,
00:36:41.000you know, boring. And, you know, it's not going to like attract your attention nearly as much.
00:36:47.420But I think with what's happening right now, we need to be paying more attention. Hopefully that means the media is going to start covering this a bit more and paying attention to what these people are actually doing and not being so scared to actually call out, you know, the types of things that they're up to and the political associations that these people have.
00:37:06.760Right. Because we can see that the political media is often scared to talk about what Pierre Polyev is actually doing and saying to try to say that, oh, he's not as bad as like a Donald Trump or something like that, even when he's frequently echoing and posting about conspiracy theories, you know, really right wing conspiracy theories, you know, talking about how the communists were how the Nazis were actually socialists to say that they're actually left wing.
00:37:33.940Like the types of things that total nutjobs tend to say are the types of things that Pierre Polyev will actually tweet about. Right. But those things the political media will not talk about because they don't want to piss off the Conservative Party more than they already do. Like it makes no sense to me. But anyway, yeah, I would say pay attention to what they're doing. And, you know, if you want to participate in the political process, you can you can do that, too.
00:37:59.520and listen to paris's podcasts or that all over this stuff um so paris that's pretty much all
00:38:06.900the questions i had for you um was there anything that we didn't touch on that you think is important
00:38:11.060for people to know who might be listening if not that's fine but if you have any closing thoughts
00:38:15.920i want to give you the floor thanks so much yeah no it was really great to be the first guest on
00:38:21.180your new show um you know i hope it does super well and unfortunately i think there's going to
00:38:25.940be a lot happening in the next little while that we're going to want to hear from you on uh so
00:38:31.140yeah you know no no extra thoughts on the broligarchy uh you know i think we covered that
00:38:36.420quite effectively but really excited to see uh what happens with the show and i wish you the
00:38:40.660best of luck oh that's so nice paris thank you so much um and could you please take this opportunity
00:38:46.000to plug everything where can people find you where can they listen to you advertise yourself
00:38:52.080too many places uh you know i have two podcasts tech won't save us and system crash i write a
00:38:57.280newsletter called disconnect that you can find and these days when it comes to social media i'm
00:39:02.560usually posting on blue sky uh you know i don't do the nice tick tocks like you uh maybe someday
00:39:08.480but we'll see well paris thank you so much for being my first ever guest i am so honored that
00:39:16.000you agreed to do this and uh folks go check out paris's stuff they are incredible paris thank you
00:39:21.680again thanks so much thank you so much for tuning in to the first ever episode of bubble pop i'm
00:39:31.280rachel gilmore your least favorite person's least favorite journalist and if you enjoyed this
00:39:35.340episode consider subscribing to bubble pop on youtube patreon sub stack and wherever you like
00:39:41.020to listen you can also find me on tiktok instagram twitch and blue sky i'd like to say a special
00:39:46.640thank you to hans vivian wenzel for making the incredibly groovy music for bubble pop you can
00:39:51.560find more of his stuff on spotify under the artist name hans lowercase h with an exclamation mark
00:39:56.980thanks again for spending this time with me doing this is a dream job and i could not do it without
00:40:02.260you so thank you and i'll see you next time