There Are No Girls on the Internet - The Rot Economy ft Robert Evans - Better Offline

00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:00:02.580 Guaranteed human.

00:00:05.140 Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus

00:00:08.720 from $94 a month.

00:00:10.160 Price guaranteed for two years on internet

00:00:12.040 with a two-year term and auto-pay credit.

00:00:14.400 Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

00:00:17.180 Bell. Connection is everything.

00:00:19.620 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

00:00:21.880 Think again.

00:00:22.520 More Americans listen to podcasts

00:00:23.980 than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

00:00:26.680 And as the number one podcaster,

00:00:28.060 iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

00:00:30.820 Learn how podcasting can help your business.

00:00:32.640 Call 844-844-IHEART.

00:00:34.940 I survived nine months in captivity,

00:00:38.460 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:00:43.680 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:00:47.300 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable,

00:00:51.020 abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:00:54.640 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:00:58.700 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:10.400 There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:01:18.520 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:01:21.260 y'all know i feel that we don't have enough good meaty podcasts that are critical of technology and

00:01:28.960 the people who make it i don't know what it is about the podcast space i feel like it just

00:01:32.820 encourages a lot of really spawning tech coverage which i think makes us all less informed and by

00:01:37.940 extension less safe that is why i am thrilled about better offline a new podcast from cool

00:01:43.200 zone and veteran journalist ed zatrone if you like the kind of conversations that we have on

00:01:47.920 there are no girls on the internet, I think you'll like it. So check out the first episode and be sure 0.99

00:01:51.720 to subscribe. Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron. I've spent the last 15 years in

00:02:03.140 tech, both as a reporter and a public relations executive. And over that career, I've realized

00:02:07.380 that many see the tech industry as kind of a monolith. It's actually a lot simpler than you'd

00:02:12.020 imagine. And it's my mission with this podcast to cut through the buzzwords and nonsense and

00:02:16.760 explain to you how venture capital and big tech are trying to change the future, for

00:02:20.620 better or for worse.

00:02:22.220 Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans of Coolzone Media to break down a theory I have that is

00:02:26.700 pretty much core to everything I think about, and we'll talk to you about on this podcast.

00:02:38.160 Thank you for having me, Ed.

00:02:42.520 I love that we're coming on to talk about this because the concept you're about to introduce was like the thing that made me reach out to you about doing this show or at least one of the major ones.

00:02:51.920 I think everyone has this feeling that like something is fucked up and wrong.

00:02:56.060 We can remember this period of like optimism about technology and the Internet and like not just feeling excited about like new shit that we could buy, but feeling excited about the things that technology was going to bring us, the promise of like the new digital age. 0.97

00:03:11.660 and that all fell aside to be replaced

00:03:15.240 by this looming sense of doom so quickly

00:03:17.460 that I don't think a lot of us have a good idea

00:03:19.860 about like why it happened.

00:03:22.700 And you know what?

00:03:24.080 I think that's actually a great place to start

00:03:26.040 with a very simple question.

00:03:28.660 Why does it feel like the tech we use every day

00:03:31.920 is getting worse?

00:03:33.860 Look, your search results,

00:03:35.160 they're full of sponsored content and articles

00:03:37.000 that don't actually answer any questions

00:03:39.160 or just a big thread of people asking the same question without ever getting an answer.

00:03:43.700 Your friends aren't popping up on Instagram.

00:03:45.980 You're constantly getting product emails, notifications, pop-ups, spam,

00:03:50.560 emails from people you've maybe spoken to once to buy some doodad.

00:03:55.560 But then you look at the news, and seemingly every tech company is making billions of dollars,

00:04:01.500 growing at this alarming, almost unsustainable rate,

00:04:05.560 all while laying off tens of thousands of people a year.

00:04:08.360 And that's because there is a problem at the center of the tech industry,

00:04:11.760 and actually the markets at large.

00:04:13.880 It's a cancerous problem,

00:04:15.540 and it's at the fabric of how capital is deployed in modern business.

00:04:19.280 Public and private investors, along with the markets themselves,

00:04:22.500 have become entirely decoupled from the concept of what good business truly is, 0.99

00:04:27.620 focusing on only one goddamn thing. 1.00

00:04:30.580 Only one noxious, shitty metric. 1.00

00:04:34.580 Growth. 0.97

00:04:35.020 In the rot economy, products are made worse, customers are abused, labor is disposable, and executives are getting richer every single day.

00:04:46.260 Now, growth in this case is not necessarily just about being bigger or better.

00:04:52.040 It's just about more.

00:04:54.660 It's always more.

00:04:56.360 Everything must be generating more money, must be having a higher headcount, even when laying people off.

00:05:03.800 No, the problem here is growth in this case is not necessarily about being bigger or better.

00:05:09.500 It's just about more.

00:05:11.740 It means the company's generating more revenue, high valuations, and gaining more market share.

00:05:17.400 And then it's looking around and saying, you know, that's just not enough.

00:05:21.220 We must have more.

00:05:23.540 Businesses are expected to be, in fact, they're rewarded for being so, eternal engines of capital.

00:05:29.980 They must continue to create more and more shareholder value, while hopefully at some

00:05:35.400 point providing a service of some kind to a customer. In the public markets, this means

00:05:40.780 that companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, they're all rewarded for having these unfocused,

00:05:46.280 capital-intensive businesses that also involve laying off tens of thousands of people. Over the

00:05:52.580 last few years, hundreds of thousands of tech workers have been laid off as multiple tech

00:05:57.180 companies have been worth half to three quarters to even a trillion dollars it's ridiculous

00:06:03.380 yeah it's uh i i think like one of the really important things to nail in here is that like

00:06:09.640 this isn't a question of profitability the fact that you tie it to growth is so important because

00:06:15.040 like the issue is not that these companies are not profitable like profit has nothing to do with

00:06:20.360 these decisions it's about i mean abita does which is basically like profit over cost and stuff but

00:06:25.820 it's like it's this this question of like growth right that if you're not if you're not returning

00:06:31.520 this kind of algorithmically scaling growth then your company is seen as a failure by a lot of the

00:06:37.860 people who who are responsible for like the financial decisions and so all of these choices

00:06:42.880 that are kind of choking the internet out and making the stuff we use every day work less

00:06:48.320 aren't about it's not a question of the company couldn't can't be profitable if we don't do this

00:06:52.380 It's that we won't have the right number on a sheet to show somebody.

00:06:57.580 And Microsoft is actually a really good example.

00:07:00.660 So Microsoft, of course, they bought Activision Blizzard for $68 billion recently.

00:07:05.620 They then, even more recently, downsized the gaming division at the cost of about 1,900 jobs.

00:07:12.500 And then they became more valuable than Apple in the process.

00:07:16.360 In December, shares of Spotify jumped by nearly 7.5% upon the news that it was slashing 17% of its workforce, adding nearly $2.6 billion to the company's market cap in the process.

00:07:29.880 None of these companies, of course, were punished for their poor planning or their stagnating products, their mismanagement of human capital, or their general lack of any real innovation.

00:07:38.580 And it's because the number kept going up.

00:07:40.460 And that is all that seems to matter.

00:07:43.220 Yeah. And I like when I was a kid kind of questioning why stuff like layoffs happened,

00:07:51.100 you know, when my dad got laid off from his job in tech and stuff, it was always framed to me as

00:07:55.640 like, well, these are, you know, companies aren't charities. They have to like do this to turn a

00:08:00.360 profit. Otherwise they can't afford to operate. And I, I think it's so crucial, but like, that

00:08:04.900 is not at all what's happening here. Yeah. Microsoft had $22 billion in profit. Yeah.

00:08:11.820 their last earnings. These companies are fine. Google, when they did mass layoffs last year

00:08:17.340 and in, yes, 2023, they had like $10 billion in profit. These companies are in the green

00:08:24.060 and they're fine. There's no reason to lay off these people other than the fact that

00:08:29.280 they can and they don't need them anymore, or perhaps they just ran the company in this big,

00:08:37.060 shitty messy way and nowhere is that more obvious than with meta oh god yeah so back in october of

00:08:46.160 2022 i said that mark zuckerberg was going to kill meta perhaps i was a little bit early on that one

00:08:51.780 but i genuinely think that they're on the path to death so my argument is that their user numbers

00:08:57.400 are declining they will occasionally have a time when they go up by the percent perhaps but then

00:09:02.280 they'll drop. But also the user experience of Facebook and Instagram has just become awful.

00:09:09.440 They spend these insane amounts of money, tens of billions of dollars on Meta's reality division,

00:09:16.300 which is where they stick the horrible VR experiences that everybody hates and the term

00:09:20.760 metaverse. But what was crazy was Mark Zuckerberg didn't get punished for literally lying about the

00:09:26.580 metaverse the street did not mind the fact that he very clearly misled everybody in the announcement

00:09:33.580 of meta he played a video of a bunch of stuff that no one can do is technologically impossible

00:09:38.900 shit jumping through things all around you with no headset completely insane the stock had a

00:09:44.980 little bit of a wobble but nothing happened yet once he fired 11 000 people and claimed that 2023 0.98

00:09:51.340 would be the year of efficiency, the market loved him.

00:09:55.860 Double-digit increases in the price of Meta's shares.

00:09:59.660 Nothing happened to Zuckerberg with the next part, though,

00:10:01.740 because he also lost $13.7 billion on the Metaverse thing

00:10:05.620 that has never made them any money.

00:10:06.720 Yeah, and for some reference, $13.7 billion is about the GDP of Rwanda.

00:10:15.380 Like, that's a Rwanda worth of losses. 0.57

00:10:18.380 He's lost to Rwanda in his Metaverse bet.

00:10:21.340 it's actually a bit more as well because recently-

00:10:23.900 It's more than, it is more than a Rwanda, yes.

00:10:26.180 It's actually multiple.

00:10:27.940 It might even be as many as three Rwandas

00:10:30.100 because an estimate from last year

00:10:33.660 suggested that he's lost nearly $42 billion

00:10:35.920 on the metaverse.

00:10:37.800 Jesus Christ.

00:10:38.520 So yeah, that's about,

00:10:40.380 that's almost three and a half Macedonias.

00:10:43.320 And it doesn't matter to the markets.

00:10:45.420 You'd think a public company that makes its money,

00:10:48.900 Meta off of social media experiences and selling ads on them, you'd think the markets would care

00:10:55.660 that Instagram, one of their largest products, one of their big money makers, an app for sharing and

00:11:00.620 following your friends' photos and videos, no longer reliably shows you content from those you

00:11:05.640 follow. That's because Meta must simply interrupt your feed with sponsored content based on an

00:11:12.740 actually impossible to define amount of data. It is not obvious how they choose. There are things

00:11:17.360 that have appeared on my Instagram that I've only ever said out loud. It's very strange.

00:11:21.700 And this is because it doesn't matter if the product sucks if meta is growing by 0.99

00:11:25.940 double-digit percentages, if they're making billions of dollars, even if they're fucking 0.98

00:11:29.600 the user in the process. Another great example for you is Google. It doesn't matter that Google's 0.98

00:11:35.840 AI-powered Gmail plugin literally makes up, it hallucinates email conversations. But because

00:11:43.020 they put AI on Gmail, Google's market cap goes up. Everyone loves Sander Pichai, despite the fact

00:11:48.820 that he gets paid $280 million and lays off tens of thousands of people seemingly all the time.

00:11:56.820 And it really doesn't matter. And this is one that really bothers me because I think we're all

00:12:00.300 kind of stuck with Amazon. The Amazon experience is even worse. You go on there and you type spoon

00:12:07.200 or spatula, and there's 87 different knockoffs with names that sound like someone had a seizure

00:12:13.960 while typing that spatula $11 will deliver in three minutes. But because Amazon is able to

00:12:20.920 show double-digit percentages of growth every year, yay, it's fine. It doesn't matter that

00:12:26.660 the product sucks. No, no, no, no. Only a few things really matter when it comes to big tech 0.99

00:12:33.180 in there. Oh, outsized valuations, layoffs, growth, and the promise of growth, no matter how faint or

00:12:39.740 how speculative. The markets lack any long-term thinking, and they lack the analysis that would

00:12:46.240 actually force businesses to become sustainable and make great products. And when I say sustainable,

00:12:51.480 I don't mean anything about the environment. I mean, and this is a crazy concept, Robert,

00:12:56.460 this one's going to really blow you away, that they make more money than they spend and don't

00:13:00.440 have to fire people all the time. Wow. Yeah. What a concept in business.

00:13:04.560 If the markets actually cared about sustainable companies that could last the test of time

00:13:09.500 without constantly burning capital and firing people, the markets might not have ignored the

00:13:15.040 fact that Meta got a $410 million fine from the EU under the General Data Protection Regulation,

00:13:22.980 which is the laws that govern data use and customer data in Europe.

00:13:29.420 And they also would have probably noticed the fact that European users now have to deliberately opt in to share their data.

00:13:37.360 Now, as a little aside, Facebook makes their money off of using cookies and various other means of getting your data

00:13:44.280 and then presenting you with ads based on that.

00:13:46.660 Some of it comes from how you use the platform, but a lot of it comes from this very insidious hidden tracking.

00:13:52.980 What's happened here is that European users will no longer have that by default.

00:13:59.480 They will have to choose whether to help Mark Zuckerberg buy another fifth of Hawaii.

00:14:05.680 Hey, just Maui, just Maui.

00:14:08.060 Oh, I'm sorry. Terribly sorry. I wouldn't want to hurt Mr. Zuckerberg.

00:14:12.000 But what's really bad about this is statistically, users do not like opting into these things.

00:14:16.840 Only about 25% of iOS users have chosen to opt in to app tracking, which was a feature that was actually added a few versions of iOS ago to your iPhone, your iPad, and so on and so forth.

00:14:29.940 And by the way, this means that basically every app is kind of on notice if it's an Apple device.

00:14:36.520 Now users know when they might be sharing their data.

00:14:40.140 And it's genuinely a threat to a lot of the tech ecosystem that a lot of people don't know.

00:14:45.140 In fact, Meta's business model is intrinsically linked to the repurposing of customer data into ad targeting.

00:14:52.340 But the markets don't seem to care.

00:14:56.020 And I get it.

00:14:57.820 It might seem unthinkable that Mr. Zuckerberg's fancy party could come to an end, but we really need to be clear about something.

00:15:05.300 Meta's core advertising models depend heavily on things that, in the next decade, will likely become impossible to do legally.

00:15:13.940 They might not even be possible technically,

00:15:16.220 because now Apple is adding app tracking transparency,

00:15:19.480 which I've kind of mentioned with the iOS update.

00:15:22.340 And this means that people are, first of all,

00:15:24.540 aware of when their data is being shared,

00:15:26.020 and they're probably going to tell them to pound sand.

00:15:29.440 There are other different changes that are happening as well.

00:15:31.740 Alphabet, which is Google, of course.

00:15:33.640 They're going to be retiring third-party tracking cookies.

00:15:37.680 Meta is kind of at a point where if anyone was paying attention,

00:15:40.880 they'd be a little bit more worried and that existential threat is why mark zuckerberg is so

00:15:46.840 desperate to distract you with dreams of the metaverse so desperate to make you think that

00:15:54.080 meta will be the thing that builds the artificial general intelligence which is just a buzzword for

00:16:00.640 an ai that can have kind of human level intellect despite the fact that most generative ai right now

00:16:06.920 just makes shit up and when you really look at it and this is what confuses me about how much 0.86

00:16:13.140 this company's worth hundreds of billions of dollars their other products don't make that 0.99

00:16:17.500 much money and zuckerberg's last big idea the one that he changed his goddamn company name for

00:16:24.280 lost them billions of dollars 42 billion probably be 60 billion next year 0.95

00:16:29.320 Yeah, the street loves them. 1.00

00:16:32.060 Six or seven Macedonias, yeah.

00:16:35.440 Multiple Macedonias there. 0.97

00:16:38.240 Since I published my original thoughts on the rot economy, 1.00

00:16:40.760 their share prices more than doubled.

00:16:42.920 It was $177 then, and it's now $400 right now.

00:16:47.580 It's despicable.

00:16:52.560 Get Bell Pure Fiber Internet with Crave, Netflix, and Disney Plus

00:16:56.220 from $94 a month.

00:16:57.520 with price guaranteed for two years on internet

00:16:59.540 with a two-year term and auto-pay credit.

00:17:01.900 Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

00:17:04.660 Bell. Connection is everything.

00:17:07.140 Run a business and not thinking about podcasting?

00:17:09.860 Think again.

00:17:10.840 More Americans listen to podcasts

00:17:12.320 than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora.

00:17:15.380 And as the number one podcaster,

00:17:17.200 iHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

00:17:19.380 So whatever your customers listen to,

00:17:21.260 they'll hear your message.

00:17:22.680 Plus, only iHeart can extend your message

00:17:24.540 to audiences across broadcast radio.

00:17:26.460 Think podcasting can help your business?

00:17:28.780 Think iHeart.

00:17:29.760 Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

00:17:31.880 Call 844-844-IHEART to get started.

00:17:35.020 That's 844-844-IHEART.

00:17:37.460 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

00:17:43.400 This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters,

00:17:49.820 pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

00:17:55.860 I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

00:18:02.980 I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed.

00:18:06.560 From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

00:18:12.500 It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.

00:18:19.980 Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

00:18:29.580 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:18:35.620 See you between the pages.

00:18:36.720 yeah i i think the thing you have to understand when you look at like how can a company

00:18:45.860 be burning money at this rate and their stock price increase as much as facebook's has or

00:18:52.840 metas has i guess we have to call it i don't i still don't like calling it that i feel like

00:18:56.440 that's giving him a win yeah it's it's not fair it's not fair but um i i i think part of what

00:19:03.100 you have to understand is that like the the the the people buying the stock like their vested

00:19:09.520 financial interest is in it continuing to like this is not all that different from what was

00:19:14.460 happening with nfts right um in that like there is this there is very much a group of people with

00:19:20.160 a vested interest in that stock price raising well above what could actually be justified by

00:19:25.180 the performance of the business and the people who are making a fortune on that right now

00:19:30.720 understand that it is a limited time frame that this game will work in.

00:19:35.500 I don't know that Mark fully does.

00:19:36.980 He may be, to some extent, a little deranged himself at this point.

00:19:41.780 But I think there are a lot of people who absolutely do understand and are heavily invested

00:19:46.680 in Facebook now trying to get as much of that as they can while it lasts.

00:19:51.380 But they understand that it's not going to last forever.

00:19:54.580 And I think there is a big Fall of Rome style story coming for tech.

00:20:00.280 and I think the rot economy is behind it

00:20:02.320 because so much of tech has become engineered

00:20:05.680 to growth at all costs.

00:20:07.160 It's a phenomenon that controls everything.

00:20:10.000 And I think the place where it hits the most people,

00:20:12.700 because, you know, Instagram's annoying,

00:20:14.480 Facebook's annoying, but you can kind of get around it.

00:20:17.620 But I think the place that hits home the most is Google.

00:20:20.740 Yeah.

00:20:21.680 So the thing that everyone knows Google for

00:20:23.700 is, of course, Google search.

00:20:25.560 Used to be a place where, crazy idea,

00:20:27.740 you go and you type in a thing, tip, tap, tap.

00:20:30.280 search, and then a bunch of results come up that are actually useful. 0.77

00:20:34.260 Now, it's a labyrinth full of optimized garbage. Search engine optimization is an important thing

00:20:41.440 to remember here, which is companies have worked out how to trick Google into making you see their

00:20:46.360 link rather than Google finding a useful thing. This is partially ruined Google search. But the

00:20:53.760 other problem is ads sponsored content and of course artificial intelligence crap so charlie

00:21:01.600 walzel over the atlantic he argued a couple years back he said google search what many consider an

00:21:06.780 indispensable tool of modern life is dead or dying and i agree users have to effectively find a way

00:21:12.820 to cheat and con google into giving them what they want they add things like i don't know you put

00:21:18.580 pc repair error put the error in plus reddit to get anything approaching a reliable answer 0.99

00:21:25.920 if you go and type a regular tech problem in as i mentioned earlier you just get a lot of shit

00:21:31.680 you just get a bunch of things that it will seem right you'll say oh this is how to fix error 42

00:21:39.020 on my iphone cool and then you click through and there's not actually really much useful content

00:21:44.380 it's have you tried resetting your iphone is your iphone broken is something wrong have you

00:21:49.580 tried restarting your iphone useless garbage but nevertheless pushing traffic towards media 0.67

00:21:54.800 outlets that are kind of cretinous yeah and that's like i think it's important both as you noted a 0.99

00:22:02.100 lot of the the fucking worst shit in tech can be strangled by stuff like what the eu has done to 0.97

00:22:08.440 force the companies to not allow you to be opted in on stuff that's directly against your interests 0.99

00:22:14.000 And likewise, if that were to be, if that were the kind of thing that we could like make more moves like that in the United States, you're not just strangling the worst parts of big tech with that.

00:22:22.700 You're strangling a lot of really predatory, toxic media with that, that all of their money comes from that kind of shit one way or the other, that like they are an integral part of this and can be harmed by like doing damage to this fundamentally dishonest way of doing business.

00:22:40.540 and google spends decades they claim trying to improve the quality of organic results 0.97

00:22:48.080 but it's for over a decade has been easily gamed by anyone who knows how to create

00:22:53.540 an algorithmic headline a headline that will make the google spider that looks over all the

00:22:59.260 websites say this is the thing this is the answer i personally don't know whether google does this

00:23:05.420 deliberately or whether they've simply lost track of everything whether the evil parties are winning

00:23:10.500 but you mention media companies and these predatory ones. The problem is it's not just

00:23:17.360 predatory ones. A large chunk of modern media is obsessed with affiliate marketing, which is,

00:23:22.740 you'll see these things, which is like best apps for blah, blah. And those would be affiliate

00:23:26.940 links, which give them a little bit of money or best Superbowl deals. Again, a little bit of cash,

00:23:34.240 little bit of money every time you buy something through it. And it's turned a large chunk of the

00:23:39.500 web, but especially Google search into this complete slop. And without finding a way to

00:23:46.980 negotiate with it, you're offered this kind of fragmented buffet of content based on what Google

00:23:53.060 kind of thinks you want to see, but it's more based on how much money Google has paid and

00:23:57.380 how often Google has been tricked. Let's be honest. And I think it's fair to argue that

00:24:04.420 Google no longer provides the best results to any query. It provides an answer that it believes is

00:24:09.980 most beneficial or profitable, which can sometimes be the thing you want. It isn't always.

00:24:17.200 I think one of the problems is that I don't know of a search engine that I would say is better

00:24:22.400 than Google in the way that Google used to be better than anything else, right? And I'm talking

00:24:26.580 10 years ago. I do know there are search engines and options that are better than Google at certain

00:24:31.340 things. I've come to learn that like, if I use perplexity AI, it'll be worse than Google at a

00:24:36.920 bunch of stuff. But there are a few specific things it's better at. And like, that has

00:24:41.180 increasingly become how I use search, right, is that I cycle through different options with the 0.96

00:24:47.160 same question to try to figure out like, well, who's gonna fuck me least on trying to get this 0.87

00:24:51.600 information. And it sucks as well, because sure, we all know that any free service online isn't 0.96

00:25:00.160 free there is some way they're making money and that's fine you've got it service cost money 0.91

00:25:05.000 whatever but at some point how much profit is too much and also how can you justify this much profit 0.97

00:25:13.120 while making things so much worse and i mean the result is that it just sucks it sucks googling 0.95

00:25:20.920 sucks now it's an exercise in pain it leads you to a bunch of content that is so obviously 0.51

00:25:27.620 engineered to get your clicks rather than actually provide any service. The web is slower. 0.51

00:25:35.700 This makes the internet slower. It makes the flow of information between people and countries

00:25:41.920 worse. And what's worse is Google loves this monopoly and they pay a pretty penny to keep it.

00:25:49.860 They pay Apple $18 billion a year. And this came out in a recent US versus Google antitrust

00:25:56.720 case. $18 billion a year to be on your iPhone, to be on Apple devices. It's not because they're

00:26:05.260 better. It's not because Apple even thinks that they couldn't do better. This is specifically

00:26:11.780 to stop Apple trying and to make your lives worse so that Google can make their search worse

00:26:17.960 to make more money and give Sundar Pichai $280 million. And it's depressing. It's something that

00:26:26.240 makes me i have to fight the cynicism every time i use google this is a problem that hits billions

00:26:32.980 of people this is a real thing and this isn't an attack on any journalistic outlet but 0.76

00:26:39.740 where the fuck is the horror here this is a horrifying thing yeah this would be like if 0.61

00:26:45.840 certain freeways just randomly led you to a different place because someone paid the dot 0.98

00:26:51.800 money it would be like if we had a i i don't want to oversell this but like what we're talking about

00:26:59.080 is there was a brief period that for the first time in human existence all knowledge ever collected

00:27:04.580 or and earned by human beings was easily accessible to the vast majority of people if

00:27:12.140 they had an internet connection and that is becoming no longer the case with with rapidity

00:27:18.000 And it is a problem akin to, like, if we had a cure for cancer and then we decided to start, like, breaking it if you didn't buy, like, the pancreatic cancer bonus pack.

00:27:28.300 Like, it is that big a problem.

00:27:31.720 Like, when you think about, like, what it means for all human knowledge to be accessible and then to throw that away so that Sundar Pachai can get $280 million a year, it is an obscenity.

00:27:41.600 and then you have the the level up from that as well as think about it from those of us who spend

00:27:48.440 i don't know 22 of our 24 hours a day online we're aware of what seo content looks like search engine

00:27:55.780 optimization there content that is built just to rank highly on google to send money to an outlet

00:28:00.700 and traffic to an outlet we know what that looks like we know when we are being misled we know when

00:28:06.740 the flow of our information is being interfered with. I don't argue that most people do, and this

00:28:12.120 isn't their fault. This is a nuanced topic, but this is horrifying. Google has, like every major

00:28:19.520 tech company, focused entirely on what will make revenues and market share increase, even if the

00:28:25.400 cost of doing so is just destroying its entire legacy and interrupting the free flow of information

00:28:30.780 around the world. Last year, they launched their own BARD AI to compete with Bing, Microsoft's

00:28:37.420 search engine, and their ChatGPT integration. By the way, ChatGPT, all these generative AI things,

00:28:43.340 yeah, they make stuff up. They hallucinate it. Oh, yeah. No, they hallucinate more than I do.

00:28:48.000 And I did permanent damage to my brain by experimenting with Shulgin chemicals.

00:28:53.340 And what was crazy was Bing AI came out and immediately started hallucinating things.

00:28:58.260 BART AI. Google did a media day and they showed a demo of BART AI and you thought for a second,

00:29:05.700 oh shit, this might replace search engines. This might be a moment where they sell us back an 0.99

00:29:10.980 experience we had before. And then literally in the demo, it made a factual error. Google attempted

00:29:17.080 to sell us back search engine results and then provided us just another broken Google.

00:29:23.360 Kind of like ChatGPT is just a broken form of knowledge.

00:29:26.640 Well, and didn't they also, or was that Microsoft that absolutely lied in the demo and pretended that they were showing live results when it was really something they'd curated?

00:29:38.440 I'm not sure which one it was, but seemingly every company does some sort of con like this. 0.95

00:29:45.080 It sucks, and it just doesn't help anyone. 0.98

00:29:48.640 And you'd think, and we're describing what is a big shitty mess. 0.99

00:29:51.700 We're describing something that affects billions of people, that was decayed, a very important

00:29:57.020 product.

00:29:57.520 You'd think the markets would respond negatively, and you would be wrong.

00:30:01.780 There was a couple percentage points that got shaved off Google when they had that initial

00:30:06.440 wobble with barred AI, and then it went right back up.

00:30:09.160 The markets, they bloody love that Microsoft has invested in ChatGPT.

00:30:13.680 They love that OpenAI is partially being meddled with by Microsoft.

00:30:18.080 despite the fact that that company does not make any profit.

00:30:22.580 And that's because the markets do not prioritize innovation.

00:30:26.860 They don't prioritize sustainable growth,

00:30:30.120 companies that can last on their own without screwing over customers.

00:30:33.820 They don't care about stability.

00:30:37.640 The result is that companies don't function

00:30:40.740 with the intent of making good businesses anymore.

00:30:43.660 They want businesses that kind of seem right,

00:30:46.300 They kind of feel good, and they sell a product, and they make money, but they don't really care about anything else as long as it keeps growing exponentially, 10%, 11%, 15%, 20% every quarter.

00:30:58.700 It's disgraceful.

00:31:16.300 credit visit bell.ca for details and to check availability bell connection is everything run a

00:31:22.420 business and not thinking about podcasting think again more americans listen to podcasts than ad

00:31:27.920 supported streaming music from spotify and pandora and as the number one podcaster iheart's twice as

00:31:33.300 large as the next two combined so whatever your customers listen to they'll hear your message

00:31:37.740 plus only iheart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio think podcasting

00:31:43.060 can help your business? Think iHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at

00:31:48.380 iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. If your bookshelf and your for you page are

00:31:54.600 equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast

00:32:01.460 that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives,

00:32:05.940 and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

00:32:10.840 I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

00:32:17.960 I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.

00:32:21.520 From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

00:32:27.500 It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.

00:32:34.960 Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.

00:32:44.560 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:32:50.500 See you between the pages. 0.88

00:32:55.720 Sadly, the raw economy and its growth at all costs, fuck the customer mentality, isn't limited to big tech.

00:33:02.220 Startups, so private companies that are invested in by venture capital firms, private equity

00:33:08.240 firms, they're regularly pumped full of venture capital dollars, enticing users with a subsidized

00:33:14.020 product, meaning that they basically sell something at a massive loss to pump up their

00:33:17.700 user numbers, that gradually becomes worse and worse and more expensive over time as

00:33:23.060 they attempt to reach some sort of vague stability.

00:33:26.280 i think really crucially too like they they pump up the price after they've killed everyone who

00:33:36.680 provided maybe a better product uh but they charged more money for it like it's the uber

00:33:42.380 effect right oh and i will get to uber because a big part of this and it's what cory doctorow calls

00:33:50.700 in shittification which is a painful neologism that actually pretty accurate in describing the

00:33:55.340 startup ecosystem. A big part of that is they get pumped full of these venture dollars and they

00:34:00.300 become these horrifying companies that are not good companies. They burn capital, they barely

00:34:05.800 make anything, but they destroy businesses that say run based on offering a product that users

00:34:11.500 pay for that is priced higher than the cost of the product, making the company something known

00:34:15.960 as profit. Yeah. And I think that's, I think that's so important, especially for like the

00:34:21.600 younger people who maybe you never fell for it i did for a little while in the early 2000s fall

00:34:28.580 for some of google's shtick um yeah because the the thing that they delivered for a while was

00:34:34.460 miraculous it was great using google before it exists like when it like when it first came out

00:34:40.940 like the degree to which it was superior to any other way to to access knowledge that had ever 0.97

00:34:46.140 existed was wild and like you wanted to believe maybe these people are not a bunch of fucking 1.00

00:34:52.720 demons and it was don't be evil that used to be their tagline yeah none of that shit anymore 1.00

00:34:58.580 no of course not zoop how'd you go now it's don't comma be evil with an exclamation mark 0.98

00:35:05.740 they did a lot um and i don't know that's it's a it's a fool me once sort of situation i'll never

00:35:13.740 love again. Yeah, it is enough. And seeing Google decay, by the way, really has, that's what's

00:35:20.780 jokified me. That's what's driven me a little insane. But then when you look up the startup

00:35:26.900 side and you, now that you, when you're aware of the rot economy and you're aware of in

00:35:32.020 shitification, you can kind of watch it in real time. And it drives you a little crazier still 0.83

00:35:36.600 because there is a very abusive cycle here. Companies are born, they're funded, and they're

00:35:42.900 grown in this unnatural way where they're subsidized on it's funny a lot of these right

00:35:47.920 right-leaning venture capitalists they hate welfare but they love putting startups on it

00:35:52.960 because venture capital exists in many ways at times in the tech industry to keep companies

00:35:59.320 alive that should be left to die and they would have that same attitude to a regular person who

00:36:05.360 could not meet their bills through unsustainable spending or even sustainable spending nevertheless 1.00

00:36:10.480 they're fucking hypocrites but the problem is with these companies as well is their services 0.99

00:36:15.780 because they are not sustainable eventually have to become worse they grow the dependence of the 1.00

00:36:22.180 market they kill everything else in the market and then they make them worse in shitifying them

00:36:27.080 again cory love you buddy but no terrible term great idea i like yeah i i think we could all

00:36:33.660 agree he's got the idea right it is really hard to get like your mom to buy into using that term

00:36:40.080 Yeah, a little bit epic bacon for my tastes.

00:36:42.760 But look, if these startups were held to real standards,

00:36:46.980 crazy ideas that a business should make more money than it spends

00:36:50.040 and be able to survive independent of investor capital,

00:36:53.740 there are a lot of startups that would just die.

00:36:55.740 In fact, that's kind of happened in 2023.

00:36:59.100 There was a phenomenon known as the zero interest free period

00:37:03.260 when it was just easy for venture capitalists to get a bunch of money

00:37:06.720 at low interest or 0% interest.

00:37:09.260 That went away in late 2022, early 2023.

00:37:13.340 As a result, venture capital suddenly realized, 0.99

00:37:15.920 oh, are we just spending money on bullshit? 1.00

00:37:18.780 So they killed the startups. 1.00

00:37:21.020 They just pulled the plug.

00:37:22.360 They didn't send them any more money.

00:37:23.960 There were no more venture rounds.

00:37:25.260 And real companies, good companies died

00:37:27.520 because no one got investment.

00:37:30.360 And it's sad.

00:37:31.660 But don't worry.

00:37:32.560 I made you a promise and I'm keeping to it.

00:37:34.640 We've got to talk about Uber.

00:37:36.100 Uber is the ultimate rot economy startup.

00:37:39.260 Yeah, it was the thing where, unlike with Google, there was no trade-off, right?

00:37:43.880 Nothing was getting harmed.

00:37:45.800 With Uber, you always knew the company was evil, but also it was so much easier to get 0.99

00:37:50.800 a fucking ride when you were hammered, right? 0.97

00:37:53.580 It did make a problem go away for a lot of people. 0.99

00:37:56.680 And at first, when Uber launched in 2011, it was mostly with town cars, black cab services.

00:38:06.240 So when we'd call them back home, I guess you could just live, I don't know.

00:38:09.680 There's an American term, I'm sure.

00:38:11.120 But nevertheless, you were getting these Lincoln town cars.

00:38:13.800 And you were able to call them, and it was kind of magical.

00:38:16.040 And you were like, oh, wow, we could do this.

00:38:18.560 Eventually, they'd launch UberX.

00:38:20.480 Anyone can pick up a phone and start driving their car for money with Uber.

00:38:24.780 The press at the time, because everyone was kind of still thinking that tech was the good guys,

00:38:30.480 kind of let it go by that these people were paid below minimum wage. 0.98

00:38:33.400 They had questionable insurance policies and absolutely no goddamn profit. 0.98

00:38:38.580 They were screwing the drivers while also not actually building a sustainable company. 0.99

00:38:43.300 Very confusing to me.

00:38:45.060 Uber only became profitable last year.

00:38:47.220 They had a $326 million operating profit in August of 2023.

00:38:52.840 To get there, it had to burn $32 billion.

00:38:56.100 Hey, you got to spend money to make money.

00:38:59.600 Yeah.

00:39:00.740 What an incredible return.

00:39:03.400 But for the sake of clarity, it's also worth noting that Uber had previously reported profitable quarters, but they didn't come from actually providing rides or delivering food or any kind of business.

00:39:14.400 They were just selling stuff they'd bought.

00:39:17.420 It's just Uber frustrates me.

00:39:20.400 Their business model is just incredibly precarious and relies exceedingly heavily on governments failing to impose labor laws.

00:39:28.140 So much of their existence is predicated on being able to screw general contractors.

00:39:33.400 Its continued existence would not have happened without bullying local authorities, without

00:39:40.640 local authorities ceding ground to these companies. 0.94

00:39:44.520 Because at the time they were like, yeah, taxis kind of suck. 0.98

00:39:47.920 Taxis are bad.

00:39:48.920 Sure.

00:39:49.500 And of course, Uber needed a bunch of money with the largest amount of that coming from

00:39:53.160 the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, $3.5 billion.

00:39:58.120 Uh-huh.

00:39:59.420 And also Uber just burns capital.

00:40:01.280 They've earned billions of dollars, and their share price has doubled in the last year and now has a larger market cap than Ford and Stellantis combined.

00:40:10.000 The markets are on crack. 0.98

00:40:13.780 It's so fucking frustrating. 0.98

00:40:16.180 It's like if there were a network of guys running those shell games where you put like a dollar in one of three cups, right? 0.96

00:40:23.380 And some VC guys were like, hey, just give someone money every time they pick a cup, no matter what cup it is.

00:40:29.780 and then we'll also buy up all of the atms and shut them down so this is the only way to get

00:40:35.100 cash right like that that's almost the way that it works right like it it is uh replacing something

00:40:41.960 that like cabs needed to be i hate to say this disrupted right like it was a it was a business

00:40:48.840 that existed the system was not working exactly exactly there needed to be a way for you to like

00:40:53.360 get one wherever you happen to be or whatever and do it through your phone and not have to like

00:40:57.420 fucking call a cab company like there there was a degree to which innovation needed to happen

00:41:02.500 but one of the the side effects that i mean in addition to the stuff you've brought up is that 0.98

00:41:07.300 like it's so much less safe you have no way of knowing if your driver is is either qualified

00:41:12.280 or going to like sexually assault you like which is the thing that happens a lot i had an uber

00:41:18.020 driver last year when my parents were here in beautiful las vegas nevada who was very clearly

00:41:23.580 drunk and just mumbling swear words the entire time. I reported to Uber and I'm like, yeah,

00:41:28.640 that sucks. We'll make sure you're not paired with him again. Thanks. I hope he doesn't crash

00:41:33.800 his car. Yeah. Cool. And the thing is, the punishment should come from the markets. It

00:41:40.180 really should. The markets, if the free markets actually functioned in the way that guys with

00:41:45.000 Grecian statue avatars claimed it did on Twitter, then the market would deal with this, but it

00:41:49.740 doesn't. But there is actually another culprit, and that's the media. They kind of fuel the

00:41:55.480 growth mongering. CNBC, for example. I generally like CNBC, but the way they report earnings,

00:42:01.580 and many people do, lots of different media companies do this. They don't acknowledge the

00:42:07.260 fact that Uber just burns money, that they spent 15 goddamn years burning money, that they have an 0.98

00:42:11.900 unsustainable business. That Travis Kalanick, who's long since departed, obviously, was running 0.96

00:42:18.020 a very mob-esque thing where he'd sidle in with Bradley goddamn Tusk, a form of lobbyist PR 0.89

00:42:25.640 creature that he found in Mordor and just bullying local markets until they agreed. He would just 0.94

00:42:32.880 launch Uber places and be like, what are you going to do about it? And then the local markets would

00:42:38.120 say, yeah, we're going to do something. And then nothing would happen and Uber would be made legal

00:42:43.340 and local. And just to be clear, if you don't know this about your Uber driver, every time you take

00:42:48.540 Uber and you think, oh, I've paid 20 bucks for that, the driver gets like less than half, I

00:42:52.940 believe. Oh yeah. They get screwed and they don't have insurance in many cases or they're not

00:42:57.640 insured. And this is a very technical thing, but this is important to know. When your Uber driver

00:43:02.780 has you in the car, oftentimes they're insured. When they don't, when they're just driving around,

00:43:07.300 they oftentimes need different insurance because they're not running a business while they're

00:43:12.680 driving around. These are the kind of things that happen when you don't have strong labor laws,

00:43:17.000 when you don't have the government protecting workers. It's just, it's frustrating. And like,

00:43:23.980 I can understand why the media probably doesn't want to cover this because otherwise the markets 0.99

00:43:28.620 would be varying levels of, yeah, this company sucks. This one sucks. Also, this one's bad. 1.00

00:43:35.300 Uber, they really just don't make enough money to really make sense. And if they had, I don't know,

00:43:42.660 a 10, 20% drop in writing. I mean, they probably fall apart. They don't want to say that. So they

00:43:47.700 just want to just look at it. They just want to go, okay, here is what's happening today.

00:43:52.720 Uber also really cannot be killed now. And that's a horrifying future we live in and a horrifying

00:43:58.580 present, I guess. And because people keep buying the stock, it's a valuable company.

00:44:03.580 And it's valuable in the eyes of markets that seemingly have cataracts.

00:44:09.120 And look, the raw economy is why you see these oscillations of hiring and firing.

00:44:13.920 It's why you see Google or Microsoft making billions, tens of billions of dollars each

00:44:19.480 quarter, then firing 10, 15,000 people while the executives get rich.

00:44:24.300 It's because these companies are never actually punished for failing to operate their business

00:44:28.300 in a sustainable way.

00:44:30.220 There is no punishment for them.

00:44:32.360 There's not really a punishment for them missing something.

00:44:35.200 No CEO seems to be fired for, say, overhiring by tens of thousands of people.

00:44:42.160 That's fine.

00:44:43.240 You know what?

00:44:44.020 Easy come, easy go.

00:44:45.440 Not for the people who got laid off, though.

00:44:48.500 And when it comes to the startup industry, when it comes to startups in general, the

00:44:54.120 rot economy is probably a much bigger deal than you realize because startups got used

00:45:00.960 to getting venture capital whenever they needed it.

00:45:04.400 Businesses like Uber were predicated on an endless supply of cheap money,

00:45:08.320 even though the Fed steadily ratcheted up interest rates in the years leading up to the COVID pandemic,

00:45:13.460 only slashing them to mitigate the pain of COVID and, to a lesser extent, the US-China trade war.

00:45:18.340 They were trying to incentivize investment.

00:45:19.920 They were trying to incentivize putting money into companies that allegedly would create jobs.

00:45:25.400 But once the specter of inflation reared its head, well, things got kind of nasty.

00:45:32.240 And then there was the war in Ukraine,

00:45:34.520 the collateral damage of China's zero COVID policy,

00:45:37.840 the labor shortage.

00:45:39.840 Things started to unravel,

00:45:41.340 and now there isn't really any free money to go around.

00:45:45.500 We're in an illogical point in economic history,

00:45:49.040 and it's scary to me.

00:45:50.180 It's scary when I look at how many companies

00:45:52.140 that just should not exist.

00:45:55.180 And it scares me.

00:45:57.080 It scares me that the markets don't react

00:45:59.180 when they see, like, mass hiring of people

00:46:01.200 to capture consumer demand, they don't think,

00:46:04.240 oh, what if consumer demand goes down?

00:46:06.360 They just don't think it that way.

00:46:08.480 They don't react when Microsoft, just an example,

00:46:11.960 lays off people almost every year

00:46:14.220 and then makes billions of dollars,

00:46:17.460 makes giant acquisitions that don't even make sense.

00:46:20.360 Yeah, it's this enshrining of instability

00:46:22.880 as a sign of virtue.

00:46:26.320 And that is really dangerous

00:46:29.320 Because, like, the more instability you accept and the more you, like, reward the people running these companies for creating situations that make the lives of their employees unstable and our economy unstable, like, the more you incentivize that.

00:46:43.880 And eventually, like, it's going to oscillate too much for balance to be regained, you know?

00:46:51.020 And I fear that.

00:46:52.560 Yeah.

00:46:52.820 And I fear the fact that the market also has no memory.

00:46:55.620 In 2020, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, he called for a, and I'm serious here, a referendum on capitalism, telling businesses to start grading themselves on the wider economic benefits that they bring to society rather than profits.

00:47:10.680 To be clear, this was four months after Microsoft laid off a thousand people and one year before they hired 23,000 people.

00:47:17.100 And then in early 2023, they laid off a further 10,000 people to, and I quote,

00:47:22.200 deliver results on an ongoing basis while investing in their long-term opportunity.

00:47:27.060 And these savage job cuts have continued into 2024 as well.

00:47:31.680 As I mentioned, they laid off 1,900 people from Activision Blizzard and their Xbox division as

00:47:38.040 well. And that's like 8% of the overall Microsoft gaming team. To be clear, Bobby Kotick, the horrible

00:47:43.260 pervert freak who used to run Activision Blizzard. He got a $700 million payoff while all of these 0.79

00:47:51.100 people got fired. And then a week after laying off these people, Microsoft would report solid

00:47:57.100 second quarter earnings. They beat expectations in both revenue and profit, and they became the

00:48:01.520 most valuable company in the world in the process. Human capital used as food and fuel for the rich.

00:48:09.240 And I hate to get that kind of alarmist, preachery feeling, but that is what is happening.

00:48:16.500 And it's something that people need to realize and look at and scream at, because it's disgraceful.

00:48:23.000 Real people with real problems lose their jobs.

00:48:26.560 And I know tech workers get paid or whatever.

00:48:29.100 They're still people with mortgages, with rent, with families, with children. 0.97

00:48:34.180 Satya Nadella has billions of dollars.

00:48:37.000 He's fine.

00:48:37.780 Bobby Kotick, who was a reprehensible guy, oversaw a period of multiple alleged sexual

00:48:43.620 harassment things over at Activision, paid off, unfathomably rich. Why did that asshole get money 1.00

00:48:50.440 while all these people got laid off? It's because the street doesn't care. It's because the street 1.00

00:48:56.300 doesn't see that as a problem. They don't see moral problems or even logical problems like,

00:49:02.400 huh we could have saved a bunch of money no they want to reward the people that buy into their

00:49:08.060 wretched rotten system it's a scummy way of running a business that society and the market

00:49:13.740 seem to deeply appreciate and it's actually killing innovation it rewards bad ideas that 0.99

00:49:20.780 make lots of money it rewards shitty businesses that fail their customers but make tons of money 0.96

00:49:27.280 And it rewards abusing customers in a way that I find wretched. 0.98

00:49:33.080 yeah it is it it is disgusting the degree to which the wealth of the billionaire class and

00:49:41.620 i guess even to be even more specific the ceo class hinges upon the regular human sacrifice

00:49:49.860 like that is what they're doing like part of why they hire people is so that you can do these big

00:49:55.620 layoffs when you need to do them in order to increase stock value enough to hit whatever

00:50:01.660 your bonus target for that year or that quarter is like it is very much it is very much just human 0.98

00:50:08.320 sacrifice um so that they can get an extra however many million dollars a year that fucking bonus 0.92

00:50:13.500 provision in their contract gives them what's crazy is there are guys like mark benioff who 0.97

00:50:17.800 runs salesforce again another company that burns billions to make millions that guy has laid off

00:50:22.980 tens of thousands of people all while getting these glossy cover stories that talk about his

00:50:27.380 ohana philosophy where everybody's important up until the point that they're not and also

00:50:33.240 listeners if you want to email me easy at better offline.com do you know what salesforce does 0.69

00:50:39.040 because i know multiple people who pay for it who don't they have that big tower with a shitty

00:50:44.960 screen on top of it yeah it's a it's a way for mark benioff to make a bunch of money and that

00:50:52.260 does not flow down, laying off tens of thousands of people. It's just, it's disgraceful. But you

00:50:57.860 know what? It does begin somewhere. And I've kind of hinted at this with Uber, but it's important

00:51:02.060 to realize how much of this comes from this much more reckless, ugly, and violent form of funding.

00:51:09.340 I'm talking, of course, about venture capital. Venture capitalists are sometimes firms who get

00:51:15.200 money from something called a limited partner. So they get a pool of money that they invest in

00:51:19.620 startups using their alleged smarts to pick the winners of the future. And then when they put that

00:51:25.680 money into these companies, they hope that this company will either go public, much like Uber did

00:51:29.700 and Facebook did, or be sold to another company. And when you look at many of the problems that

00:51:36.420 you find in the tech industry, when you search for something, you think you've said the right

00:51:40.780 thing and just 11 lines of nonsense pop up, or you go to look at your grandmother's pictures

00:51:46.220 on Facebook, but someone tries to sell you a fitness supplement, this is what's happening.

00:51:51.480 The rot economy is working against you. The CEOs of the companies, of the products you're using,

00:51:57.700 they don't care. They care as much as they need to monetize you, but deep down, they're going to

00:52:03.760 choose themselves and their shareholders and their board members way before you. And they currently

00:52:09.580 have all the power in the web. I'm scared, but I don't want you to be. I want to inform you about

00:52:17.840 how this is happening. I want the Better Offline podcast to be a place where you can understand,

00:52:23.840 where you can be educated about how you are being conned, about how they are monetizing

00:52:28.900 your digital lives. And I very much look forward to telling you more about this in the future.

00:52:34.520 Thank you for listening.

00:52:35.700 Please check out betteroffline.com

00:52:37.580 and email me at easy at betteroffline.com

00:52:40.200 if you've got any thoughts.

00:52:41.820 Thank you, Robert, so much for joining me, by the way.

00:52:44.420 I very much appreciate the Coolzone Media Rocks.

00:52:47.180 I've very much enjoyed building this with you.

00:52:50.080 Yeah, I'm excited to hear what you come up with next

00:52:52.200 and continue this conversation

00:52:53.620 because I think you're putting like a name to a demon

00:52:57.140 that has been like haunting all of our nightmares

00:52:59.440 for a while now.

00:53:01.080 And that's not, you know,

00:53:02.760 the only thing that you need to do to beat it but it's certainly where like turning back the tide

00:53:08.340 starts and i really look forward to walking through these problems with you and many other

00:53:13.220 incredibly smart people in the future and of course better offline is a weekly podcast you

00:53:17.960 can find us every wednesday on the iheart radio app and wherever else you find your podcasts

00:53:23.220 the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out

00:53:28.220 more of his music and audio projects at matasowski.com m-a-t-t-o-s-o-w-s-k-i.com

00:53:36.380 more information go to betteroffline.com or email me at easy at betteroffline.com

00:53:41.960 thank you for listening everyone

00:53:43.340 better offline is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media

00:53:55.240 visit our website, coolzonemedia.com

00:53:57.840 or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,

00:54:00.340 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:54:16.040 Let's go offline.

00:54:21.140 If your bookshelf and your For You page

00:54:23.460 are equally important to your personality,

00:54:25.240 welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone

00:54:31.460 who thinks pride and prejudice and love island to serve the same level of discourse each week

00:54:36.000 we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite

00:54:40.020 writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions yeah i'm obsessed i'm

00:54:44.980 obsessed listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

00:54:50.980 I survived nine months in captivity, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive

00:54:58.260 what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:55:03.860 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled,

00:55:09.680 and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:55:14.880 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:55:23.380 I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.

00:55:27.780 You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy.

00:55:33.120 Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

00:55:39.760 You're not hired just to fill time and space.

00:55:42.800 You're hired to fill the space with you.

00:55:46.160 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:55:53.620 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:55:56.020 Guaranteed human.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - April 09, 2024

The Rot Economy ft Robert Evans - Better Offline

Episode Stats

Transcript