The problem always with the climate fight has been that the thing that causes the climate crisis, burning fossil fuel, is also the thing that's long undergirded our economy.

So it was very difficult to imagine the path to changing as fast as physics demands.

About five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil.

And that suddenly opened up extraordinary possibilities.

Well, thank you for having me back.

It's a real pleasure.

I've been waiting for this book for a long time in sh**ification.

I think you coined it in 2022, and in 2024, it was named the Word of the Year in Australia.

It's a kind of word where you just think, oh yeah, you know, everything is getting worse.

But this is really not just about everything getting worse.

Tell us what in sh**ification is.

Yeah.

So, you know, for more than half my adult life, I've worked for a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation that's trying to preserve human rights in the digital realm, and then more recently trying to stop the digital realm from impacting our human rights in the physical realm.

And, you know, these are very complex, technical, abstract questions of policy.

And the challenge is always to get people to understand the salience and urgency of them.

In some sense, you don't have to do anything.

You could just leave it and then eventually things will be so bad that everyone will understand this stuff.

But ideally, you'd like people to start getting exercised about this stuff and taking action before it's too late.

And, you know, a couple of years ago, I coined this sweary little word and shitification.

And people like the minor license to be just a bit profane.

And when I connected it to a pretty technical, complex critique, and theory of how platforms are going bad, that seemed to be the magic trick that it took it from being more than just a novelty, and into a framing device for understanding what's going wrong with the with the digital world and with our world more broadly.

So in shitification starts by descriptively propounding framework for understanding platform decay.

So we have these platforms, they're endemic to the internet, they help two or more groups of users connect with one another.

There's nothing wrong with that.

It's very nice.

It's nice to say you're writing a newsletter, not to also have to create a payment processor, and web server and a hosting company and all the other parts that go into that you just do the part you want to do is nothing wrong with these intermediaries.

The problem is that eventually they start to usurp the relationship between the different groups and then they start to squeeze them.

And when they squeeze them, they follow this characteristic three stage pattern.

In step one, the platforms are good to their end users, and they bring end users in and then they find a way to lock them in so they can't easily leave.

And once it's hard for the end users to leave, then they start to squeeze those end users in order to make things better for business customers and to lure those business customers in.

And once the business customers arrive, they get locked in pretty straightforwardly.

I know that when we think about competition and monopolies and antitrust, we usually think about what happens when you have a powerful seller, right?

A monopoly that can raise prices.

But it's just as important to think about powerful buyers, right?

Monopsonies.

In fact, monopsonies are much more durable and more easy to attain than mere monopolies.

You know, if you think about it, if you're a business and you get 20% of your revenue from one customer, then if that customer decides to bail on you, to cut you off, there's a pretty good chance you'd have to go under.

If nothing else, you'd experience some pretty deep cuts and you might never recover.

Meanwhile, if you're a customer and 20% of the stores where you buy something go under, well, that's inconvenient, but it's not hard to switch to the remaining 80%.

So it's quite easy for companies to attain these monopsonies, and so the business customers get locked in, too.

This is maybe an area where I depart from other internet critics who say things like, if you're not paying for the product, you're the product, sort of implying that companies like Facebook are in an alliance with advertisers and publishers to screw us.

But actually, if you look hard, or even if you look cursorily, you discover that Facebook's screwing everyone.

Publishers, users, advertisers, everyone's getting it in the neck, and that's the third stage of inshittification.

When all of the value is extracted, leaving behind just a kind of mingy, homeopathic residue, the minimum calculated to keep us locked to each other and the business customers locked to us, and then the platform turns into a pile of shit.

And that's the descriptive part of inshittification, but the theoretical part, which maybe we can talk about more, that's the part that's the most interesting, because it seeks to explain why it is that all of this stuff is happening right now.

And more particularly, how come even after a platform goes bad on us, we can't seem to stop using it?

And finally, what we can do about it, how we can make things better again.

And that's maybe the most important part.

Absolutely.

But before we get to the pathology, let's concretize this a little bit for our listeners.

I found your descriptions of the inshittification process with Amazon, even Apple, which surprised me, Google, and of course, Twitter, to be pretty striking.

Talk about Amazon and its flywheel strategy and how this actually works.

I am an Amazon Prime user, I must confess, because I live in an area where there are very few, you know, I really have a limited choice of what I can buy.

I live in a country area.

So, I was really struck by just how bad things have gotten on Amazon.

Sure.

Well, you know, Amazon follows this pathology pretty closely.

You know, they started off by offering a really good deal to consumers, to end users.

They were selling books and they were selling books at a loss, which is a pretty good deal if you're buying the books.

And not only that, but they were doing things like subsidizing returns.

So, you know, no questions asked, zero cost returns.

And again, they were just eating those costs.

And so what they did was they brought a lot of customers in and that became a temptation for business customers.

And that's something that Amazon's own investor pitch deck makes a big deal out of.

They call it the flywheel, where you bring in end users, consumers, and this becomes an irresistible market for sellers.

And so the sellers pile in and Amazon, because they control access to these consumers, can switch from subsidizing the consumer purchases themselves to demanding unsustainable discounts from these sellers.

So they can require the sellers to sell goods at costs that are lower than their recovery rates.

And while this isn't in the flywheel, it's very much implicit in it.

The way the sellers recover those costs, the losses from Amazon, is by raising prices elsewhere.

This is a dynamic we see all over the place.

Like a lot of big wholesalers lose money selling to dollar stores and Walmart and make it up by charging mom-and-pop stores and independents more, which is how it is that oftentimes the price paid for something like soft drinks at your local convenience store, the price they pay their wholesaler is less than the price that Costco sells it at or Walmart.

And they could get a better deal by going to the grocery store and buying supplies for the convenience store than they get for going through a wholesaler.

So Amazon is doing this.

They're squeezing prices lower.

That brings in more consumers, which lets them squeeze the prices lower still, and that's the flywheel.

Amazon then starts to have enormous power both over its buyers and over its sellers, because eventually you run out of other places to buy things.

This dynamic tends to force other retailers out of the market, and as you say, it's not just people who live in small towns or rural communities who have a hard time buying a lot of the goods that they used to be able to find at least relatively conveniently and in big cities fairly conveniently.

A lot of those retailers have just exited the market.

They're gone because of the Amazon effect.

It's sort of finished what Walmart started, and so they're the only game in town, and that means that they can squeeze those retailers really, really hard.

So the junk fees at Amazon now amount to 45 to 51 percent of every dollar that Amazon brings in for a third party merchant.

Let me put that in context for you.

Amazon makes so much money charging merchants for Prime that its own use of Prime is free.

So when Amazon sells you a good as opposed to a third party merchant using Prime, Amazon pays nothing to ship it to you.

It's fully subsidized by these other companies that are nominally its competitors, and Amazon's got all kinds of ways to get those firms to pay more and more money to Amazon.

So for example, Amazon Search is dominated not by good matches for your queries, but by payola, by paid placement.

Amazon very deceptively they call this an advertising business, where they charge merchants to quote advertise on the platform.

What they mean is that you have to bid for top search placement on the platform, and if you don't win that bid you can often end up right off the screen in a place where no consumer will ever find you.

When I wrote the book that was at the sort of 32, 33 billion dollar a year range.

I just saw the 2024 numbers and they're in like the 52 to 54 billion dollars a year range.

This is really growing fast, and the top result on an Amazon Search on average is 29% more expensive than the best match for your search.

And that's the person with the highest bid for search recovering some of the cost of that bid by gouging you on prices.

That top row is 25% more expensive than the best match for your search.

And on average, you have to go to the second screen to about position 17 before you get the best result for your search, the most economical and best result for your search.

And lots of merchants do not have enough of a margin to cover 45 to 51% junk fee cost from Amazon.

And so they have to raise prices to sell on Amazon.

But you may have noticed that by and large prices on Amazon are competitive with prices at other merchants.

And that's because Amazon has something called a most favored nation deal with their merchants, with their partners.

And what that means is that if you're selling on Amazon, Amazon has to have your best price.

So if you raise prices on Amazon, you have to raise prices everywhere else.

Otherwise, Amazon will delist you or push you so far down the search rankings that no one will find you.

It's about the same thing.

And so what Amazon has done is imposed like a 45 to 51% tax on the whole retail economy.

Whether you're buying from a merchant's own wholesale store, or Walmart, or Target, or a mom-and-pop store, they are charging more because if they charge less than Amazon, then Amazon will throw the merchant off of the store or push them down off the search rankings.

So this is pretty bad for business customers and for end-users.

End-users, there's lots of ways that Amazon locks us in.

One way, as I discussed, is that it's just getting harder and harder to find places to buy things that are not Amazon.

Recently, I went to buy something from the manufacturer's website, and all they were doing was linking to the item on Amazon because they could at least get some affiliate money by selling it to you on Amazon rather than selling it themselves.

But that's only one of the ways that they lock you in.

Prime is a pretty important way of locking in consumers.

You're really paying for a year's shipping in advance with Prime, and about 90% of affluent households in America have Prime.

So you're not unique in having Prime and maybe even in regretting it.

And most Prime customers, if they have Prime, they start their search for products on Amazon, and if they find what they're looking for they stop the search there.

And there's pretty good evidence at this point that Amazon is actually in some cases charging Prime users more than they would charge if you were logged out of the system when you search for the price and then logged in.

This is a pattern we see with other merchants as well.

So there's lots of other things that we could talk about and other ways that Amazon is hurting people.

You know, they are a monopsonist for labor.

So in many towns, they're the only employer of any size.

And so, you know, in their warehouses, Amazon injures its workers at three times the rate of other warehouse companies.

And those workers, very famously, they don't get to go to the bathroom, they have to pee in a bottle because they're monitored by AI.

And if they stop to pee, they have their pay docked.

This kind of a trend is one that you talk about with all the major corporations, who I call the tech lords, Apple, Google, and Twitter.

So let's move on a little bit here, because you say that companies don't inshittify when they can't inshittify.

What have historically been the discipliners of inshittification, the limits to it?

Yeah.

So as I said, the big question that this book is seeking to answer is, why is this happening now?

Why is it happening so widely?

Why do we find ourselves still using it?

And really to answer that, you have to ask yourself, why didn't it happen before?

After all, greed wasn't invented in like 2017.

And people like Mark Zuckerberg have been running some of these biggest companies forever.

It's not like he had a change of heart.

If you go and read Sarah Wynn-Williams' book, she was a high-level Facebook employee who published a book violating her non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement and described what it was really like working with Mark Zuckerberg, you'll find out that Mark Zuckerberg has been a terrible person all along.

Sarah Wynn-Williams is now facing $50,000 per instance of her disparaging the company and is facing bankruptcy as a result.

So it's not like these people got worse.

They were always terrible.

Greed has always been around.

The ability to use technology to manipulate prices and costs and search results and all those other things that companies use to shift value around and hoard it for themselves, that's not new either.

But what is new is that for the last 20 years we've been steadily eroding the things that stop companies from using this stuff to hurt us.

So they used to have competitors.

But then we stopped enforcing antitrust law and we let them buy those competitors even though the law forbade it.

You can think of Facebook buying Instagram or Amazon buying a competitor called diapers.com.

Diapers.com is one of the many very successful retailers that Amazon bought.

We think of Amazon as a company that's kind of a self-made firm that they just were the best and so they grew and grew.

But actually if you look at their history what they did was they found the best companies in each niche and they bought them and folded them in.

Diapers.com was the first company to say no to Amazon and so Amazon started selling diapers below cost.

They set about $200 million on fire over a couple of months.

They drove diapers.com out of business.

They bought them for pennies on the dollar.

Diapers.com actually sold to Amazon even though Walmart had offered more per share for diapers.com because they were afraid of what would happen if they said no a second time and then Amazon just shut them down.

That was a deal for them losing only $200 million there because it meant that every other company they tried to buy immediately rolled over and sold.

Google, a company that has had one successful business in 27 years, they made a really good search engine in the previous millennium and then pretty much everything else they've done that has succeeded was a company they bought from someone else and virtually everything they've made in-house has been a failure.

So we lost competition and this allowed the cartelization or monopolization of whole industries and everywhere you look you see five or fewer companies dominating a sector whether that's eyeglasses or professional wrestling, sea freight, microcontrollers, and of course the internet.

As the software developer from New Zealand put it, I'm old enough to remember when the internet wasn't just five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four.

So that cartelization means that it's easy for these companies to capture their regulators.

They don't argue among themselves about what their regulatory stance should be.

So even you have bitter competitors like Lyft and Uber but they colluded to spend 225 million dollars on Proposition 22 here in California which formalized the illegal misclassification of workers so that they could continue to treat their employees as contractors which made them effectively unstoppable because rival businesses still had to endure the costs of carrying employees and paying them for all the time they were at work rather than just the few minutes out of the hours that they were driving a passenger around.

And so without regulation, without competition, these companies lost a lot of their discipline.

You also had tech workers who although they weren't unionized were nevertheless historically a very powerful workforce.

They were so scarce and so valuable to their employers.

There's a National Bureau of Economic Research paper that estimated that every technical employee in Silicon Valley was generating a million dollars of value for their employer.

So you can see why employers were willing to shower them with all kinds of goodies.

You know the whimsical campus with a ball pit and free kombucha and massages and dry cleaning and daycare and you know a surgeon who'd freeze your eggs so you could work through your fertile years.

And the thing is that these workers they were what you might call Tron-pilled.

They thought they fought for the user.

They cared about what they made.

And because they were so powerful when their bosses told them to inshittify something that they'd you know miss their mother's funeral to ship on time, slept under their desk for a month, they just said no.

Because they knew their bosses couldn't fire them.

They could get a new job across the street by lunchtime if it happened.

But of course eventually supply catches up with demand.

Tech workers never really saw themselves as workers.

They saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed founders.

They never formed unions.

And as soon as supply caught up with demand, well bosses put the screws to them.

And we know how tech bosses treat the workers that they're not afraid of because that's how they treat their warehouse workers and the people who assemble iPhones and all the other workers that are injured and horrifically treated all over the world by these tech bosses who are so sweet and kind to their tech workers for so long as they're afraid of their tech workers.

So we lost the discipline of tech workers.

Tech workers are not telling their bosses to go to hell, not after half a million layoffs in the sector in the U.S. in the last three years.

And now finally we have the final constraint that went away which is interoperability, the ability to make new technologies that work with old technologies without permission.

So that's everything from an ad blocker to a privacy tool to an alternative client.

You know something that allows you to access Instagram without using Facebook software so that you can block everything that's obnoxious on it and maybe combine those messages with messages from LinkedIn or some other service.

So it just becomes just a commodified way that you speak to the people who matter to you rather than something that is dialing down the quantity of material you've asked for to the very least they expect that you'll tolerate in order to create space for content that people will pay to boost.

And so that's the collapse of discipline and it occurred over the last 20 years.

It accelerated especially in the last few years.

Trump is making it even worse.

Trump's antitrust enforcement record in his first term was surprising and uneven but included a few moments where he was really took aim at some really big tech companies like Google.

But now in this term it's just turned into another way for him to gin up bribes and companies that have supported him or that support his allies and pay MAGA influencers to lobby, they get to do whatever they want.

And so you know most recently we've seen the takeover of Paramount by Larry Ellison's son and now they're looking to buy Warner Brothers.

And so we would have the collapse of the media industry into an almost irrelevant number of companies.

And also those companies are right-wing companies will dominate the media markets.

Well you know I don't know that Twitter or rather Google is a right-wing company it's just a company that owes its existence to Trump.

And so it doesn't matter if it's right-wing or not because it will act right-wing in order to continue to be in Trump's good books and not to fall into Trump's bad books.

Well that's a good point.

I was referring to the the media merger.

The media companies.

But you know I think that like even if they were you know if even if it was Disney buying Warner that you would find that Disney would would impose on itself the same limitations that Larry Ellison is going to impose on the companies that he's buying because they would not want to make Trump angry right.

So it's that it comes to the same thing and you know part of the reason I raise this is because I don't know that the ideology of the founders of these companies is as important as the consequences for giving into their ideological impulses.

And so you know when when Zuck had to worry about losing our business he didn't act on his ideological proclivities.

He was a monster who hated us.

He just had to pretend that he liked us and now he doesn't have to pretend anymore and so in some ways it doesn't matter as much who's at the top as it does what happens to them when they abuse you.

How does AI complicate this situation or potentiate it?

Well you know I have been reluctant to talk about AI for quite some time because I think that it's so overhyped and also just so unprofitable and has no path to profitability that a lot of the things that we worry about AI are self-correcting problems.

The bubble is going to burst.

Investors' tolerance for propping up companies that lose money and lose more money with every generation and lose more money with every user they add that's eventually going to wear thin.

This is not like the early days of say Amazon where Amazon was losing money but it was losing money with a clear way to make money later and that as Amazon you know advanced and built out new logistics capabilities and better technology and so on it found that its unit costs were improving the cost of serving an individual customer were getting lower and adding an individual customer made it more profitable.

Every generation of AI has been more expensive than the previous generation and every user of AI makes the AI companies lose more money.

This is not good unit economics this is this is very bad but eventually I kind of reached a breaking point and I wrote a book about AI over the summer.

I write whenever I'm anxious and the AI bubble was making me pretty anxious.

So this book its working title is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI and it really tries to address the material basis for the AI bubble which I think is really it's a monopoly story.

The great irony of having a monopoly as a company as a publicly listed company is that while you are growing the market really values you very highly.

When you have what's called a growth stock your stock trades at a huge multiple of your revenue what's called the price to earnings ratio and that makes your stock very liquid and it makes it easy to continue growing because your stock will be accepted by other people as though it were cash.

You can buy other companies with stock you can hire employees with stock this is you know very good for you because you can make your stock on the premises right you just type zeros into a spreadsheet whereas once you're a mature company once you've stopped growing the way that these tech companies have grown then you are expected to buy things with cash and you're not allowed to manufacture your cash on the premises.

If you do that the treasury department comes and puts you in jail and so you now need to get money from creditors or customers and that's really hard and so you always lose the bidding war to the people who are able to buy things with stock.

Now the problem is that while the market loves a company that is growing towards monopoly once it saturates its market then investors get a lot more skeptical that that company can keep on growing because where are you going to grow to right once you've got a 90 percent market share that's probably the end of it you know and that's where Google hit with its search and so these companies they have to gin up stories about how they're going to continue to grow and continue to grow some more and continue to grow again and you know we saw that with the pivot to video and we saw with NFTs and we saw with Metaverse and we saw with you know extended reality and augmented reality and we saw with blockchain and and and so on and so on now we see it with AI and now they're saying oh no it's not AI it's super intelligence and the goal isn't necessarily to make the technology I think they wouldn't be sad if the technology turned out to work the goal is to keep the stock price high until you can think of another thing to make a bubble out of and you know this bubble that that AI is going through right now it is grounded in an investor story that you can replace workers with AI it's not grounded in the story that you can make workers more efficient or make them better at doing their job you know I have a thankfully very very treatable form of cancer and I've been paying a lot of attention to the story that they've been telling us about how this interacts with with radiology and you know as far as I can tell not being an expert I think there's a pretty good case for AI being good at spotting certain kinds of solid mass tumors on chest x-rays and in fact being better in some cases than some radiologists but I don't think that the salesperson from one of these AI companies who goes down to the radiation oncology ward at my local kaiser hospital makes a pitch that goes like this you know today your radiologists are getting through about 100 chest x-rays every day I would like you to give me a million dollars a year for an AI algorithm that will double check their work and make them go back and check it again a couple of times a day if the AI thinks maybe they missed something so that you're spending an extra million dollars and you've got a lower throughput rate for your chest x-rays although as a cancer patient that sounds like a pretty good deal to me I don't think that's the AI pitch I think the AI pitch is that you could replace most of the radiologists with AI you could take the remaining radiologists and ask them to babysit the AI and put their signature on the AI's diagnosis and assume the blame if the AI misses your tumor and you die a horrible wasting death to be a kind of accountability sink who is the sacrifice for the additional profits that the firm gets from firing workers and I think the important thing about this framework is it really goes to the things that are being used to sell AI and the false promise of them that AI can't do your job even if an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job and as a consumer of things whether that's radiology services or illustrations or taxi cab rides you need to understand that what's happening here is not that you are in an alliance with the AI company against a worker who's trying desperately to hang on to a job that doesn't exist anymore that rather you and the worker whose work you depend on are in an alliance against the boss and the AI salesman who want to effectively replace the person who does a good job providing the thing that you want with an AI that does a bad job and worse than that because this bubble is destined to implode and in not very long 29% of the US stock market right now is seven AI stocks because it's destined to implode we are going to go from firing workers and replacing them with AIs that are bad at their jobs to firing workers replacing with AIs that are bad at those jobs and then the AIs go away the foundation models are mostly going to get switched off because those data centers lose billions of dollars every year we're going to have empty data centers we're going to have GPUs at pennies on the dollar we're going to have applied statisticians looking for work and you know i think the cool thing because there are some cool stuff you can do with AI irrespective of its economic model is that we're going to have a bunch of open source models that have barely been optimized and are already doing some pretty interesting stuff and we'll be able to do even more interesting things once we start devoting our energies to optimizing these these still very fresh and green open source models.

So let's get back to incentivization, why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it.

Let's talk about what to do about it.

Your book emphasizes that we can fight back.

What are some of the most important reforms that you think policymakers should pursue although there's a caveat we all know that nothing's going to happen under Trump.

Well nothing's going to happen in the U.S. under Trump.

It did look like for a while like Trump was going to do some pretty cool antitrust stuff.

He after all started some pretty good antitrust stuff in his last term and you know the case that that Google just lost was a case that was brought under the Trump administration.

I think Trump's antitrust approach is very different from say Biden's which was quite admirable.

I think the Biden administration kind of took a list of all the companies that were harming Americans and sorted it by the companies that were doing the most damage and went after them first.

I think Trump has taken a list of all the companies that are violating antitrust law and sorted it by the ones that have angered him the most personally and are going after those ones first and so I don't have a lot of confidence in Trump doing antitrust.

But antitrust is alive and well everywhere else in the world and the extent to which former trading partners of the U.S. who have been cut loose thanks to the Trump tariffs are interested in uncoupling their economies from the American economy has never been higher.

And you know, I was the European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and I worked in 31 countries and the single biggest impediment that we faced everywhere we went to getting people to make policies that were better tech policies, for example, policies that allowed local firms to reverse engineer and modify the technologies that American firms sold them, for example, to jailbreak an iPhone and allow a domestic company to offer an app store for it so that if a domestic vendor like a newspaper or games company or a performer on a platform like Patreon sold something to someone in that country, 30 cents out of every dollar wouldn't go to California, which is what Apple takes out of every transaction in the app store.

And the biggest impediment was that the U.S. trade representative had threatened them with tariffs if they were to pass such a law.

Well, deterrents only work for so long as they're not used, and Trump has squandered the deterrent value of tariffs, and so there's more international space for this than ever.

I am, like all the best Americans, a Canadian, and it has been frightening and foolish to watch the Canadian government's response to the Trump tariffs, which has been to impose retaliatory tariffs.

This is very weird, right, because all it does is make the things that Canadians buy from America, which is a lot of the things we need, 25% more expensive.

This is like punching yourself in the face really hard and hoping the downstairs neighbor says, ouch.

Rather than saying, well, we are going to switch from delicious American bourbon to subpar Canadian rye, we could instead say we are going to get rid of the law that bans Canadian firms from reverse engineering and modifying American technology, and we will export those tools to every person in the world who is tired of getting ripped off by an American company.

Whether that is advertisers and publishers who are seeing $0.51 out of every dollar being stolen by Google and Meta, who have cornered the ad market, or games publishers and performers and other people who sell through apps who are seeing $0.30 out of every dollar stolen that way, or whether it is people who buy printer ink and are just sick to the back teeth of the fact that the cartel of American companies that make all the inkjet printers use digital locks to stop us from putting generic ink into our printers.

The U.S. Trade Representative has convinced every legislature in the world to ban breaking these locks, and this has enabled printer companies to raise the price of ink until it now runs $10,000 a gallon, making it the most expensive fluid that a civilian can buy without a government permit, which means that it would be cheaper to print your grocery list with the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion than it is to use original HP ink.

And so these are market opportunities in addition to things that make life better for everyday people, and I think it would make life better for Americans, too, because Americans are the first victims of these scams, and anyone in the world who's got access to the internet and a payment method could buy these from Canadians or Ghanaians or Nigerians or Spaniards or Britons or whoever was willing to take the leap and start making this stuff and avail themselves of it.

You know, Canada has been doing a very tidy business exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to oppressed Americans and helping them get out from under the thumb of rapacious pharma companies.

They don't need to limit themselves to that.

They could export the tools of technological liberation to Americans, too.

So that's one policy that I'm actually quite excited about, and I think we have more space for than we've had really in a quarter of a century.

But also I think that the time is right for unionizing tech workers.

Support for the labor movement is higher than it's been since the Carter administration.

More workers want to join a union than at any time since the Carter administration.

The unions have more money for organizing than at any time since the Carter administration.

Unfortunately, during the last four years under Biden when we had the most favorable National Labor Review Board that we've had since the Carter administration, those unions sat on their hands and did nothing, which left us with fewer unionized workers at the end of the Biden years than we had now.

So clearly that leadership needs to be ousted.

But that doesn't mean that we have to stop union organizing.

I mean, Trump has now illegally fired enough of the National Labor Review Board's personnel that they can no longer form a quorum and act to protect American workers.

But Trump is making a category error here.

He thinks the reason that we have unions is that we have labor law, and it's the other way around.

It has to have been because unions were illegal, and it was the existence of illegal unions, right?

The street fighting workers who fought these pitched battles against goons and ginks and company finks that gave us the new labor laws that protected workers.

But they also limited workers because the National Labor Relations Act limits what kinds of things workers can do to their bosses.

It also limits what bosses can do to their workers.

But through most of the history of the National Labor Relations Board, it has acted to protect bosses from workers and not to protect workers from bosses.

Trump thinks that because he fired the referees the game is now over, but anyone who's ever really played a hardcore sport knows that once the referees are gone, there's no more rules.

And I think this is the moment to start unionizing tech workers as part of an effort to unionize all workers, especially workers at tech firms who are not tech workers, who are some of the most maltreated workers in the world.

So you've talked about labor, which is absolutely critical.

What can users and creators do?

Can they organize to resist insidification?

Well, I'm glad you used the word organize there because, you know, some of the early reviews of this book had people saying, well, I really enjoyed the book and it really infuriated me and the policy prescriptions seemed very important, but I was disappointed that there was nothing I could do as an individual about insidification.

And they're right.

There is nothing you can do as an individual about insidification, just like there's no way you can recycle hard enough to end the climate emergency.

These aren't individual problems.

The reason we have insidification is not because you shopped in the wrong place.

It's because the constraints that stopped the people who sold you things were removed so that they could take over the market and leave you with nowhere else to buy stuff.

You know, by all means, if there's a performer or a maker or a creator or a firm whose things you like, then shop there.

If you prefer bookshop.org or your local mom and pop bookstore, you should get your books there.

That's great.

You are supporting people who make things that you love, but just don't kid yourself you're going to change the world that way.

You'll just, you know, do a solid for a good person who makes nice things.

But to change the world, you've got to act as part of a movement.

And I work, as I said, for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

And EFF has a national network of community-based groups that are autonomous that we help coordinate.

When one group has a victory, we help them teach other groups how to replicate the feat.

And it's called the Electronic Frontier Alliance.

You can find it at efa.eff.org, efa.eff.org.

And when you go there, you can find all the local groups all over the country and also instructions for starting your own group and becoming part of a movement instead of being an individual who agonizes endlessly about whether it's time to leave Twitter and go to Blue Sky or whatever.

Like that's going to make the difference.

You know, it might make a difference to your mental health, but it's not going to make a difference to the internet.

The way we make a difference to the internet is not by voting with our wallets.

Voting with your wallet always sucks because your wallet isn't as thick as the people you're voting against and they get as many votes as they have inches in their wallet and so you're always going to lose that vote.

So this is a way for you to do something material and important, a way for you to change the digital world and the physical world as it touches the digital world to make things safer and better for you and the people that you love.

Well that's great and we will post a link to the, now say that again, Electronic Frontier Alliance.

EFA.EFF.ORG.

Well that's great and we will post a link to the, now say that again, Electronic Frontier Alliance.

Electronic Frontier Alliance.

Perfect.

EFA.EFF.ORG.

Well Cory Doctorow, we could go on for hours but I'm sure your time is limited and so our listeners will just have to read this terrific book and it's a great read.

You're such an easy writer to read, which is really delightful because this stuff really does get into the weeds and I learned a whole lot from it in Shedification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Thanks so much.

CORY.

Oh thank you.

It's always a pleasure to come on your show and you've been so kind to me over the years.

I really appreciate it.

Writer's Voice.

What a pleasure to be with you, friend.

This is a wonderful new book of yours, Here Comes the Sun, A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.

You open the book with the remarkable line that for the first time you can see a path forward, a path lit by the sun.

What led you from decades of what I assume is climate disappointment to this new sense of possibility?

Well, in some ways it's all about realism.

The problem always with the climate fight has been that the thing that causes the climate crisis, burning fossil fuel, is also the thing that's long undergirded our economy.

So it was very difficult to imagine the path to changing as fast as physics demands.

About five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to generate power from the sun and the wind than from burning coal and gas and oil.

And that suddenly opened up extraordinary possibilities.

Suddenly, we had a scalable tool in this fight.

And it's been remarkable over the last 36 months to watch that surge start to happen around the world.

That's why I wanted to write this book, to document that moment and let people know that there was a real possibility.

We're seeing a faster energy transition than we've ever seen before with any fuel.

You know, the world is producing a third more energy from the sun this fall than it was last fall.

That gives you some sense of how we've hit the steep part of the S curve.

It isn't fast enough yet to catch up with the physics of climate change.

And we're not going to stop global warming.

That's not on the menu of options.

But we may be able to shave tenths of a degree off how hot the world gets.

And every tenth of a degree that the planet heats moves another hundred million people out of a safe climate zone and into a dangerous one.

So this remains incredibly important work.

You've said that solar is the Costco of energy, cheap and abundant, not the Whole Foods of energy.

Why do you think that that reality hasn't sunk in with people?

People still think that it's too expensive for them.

Well, A, I think we've spent 40 years calling it alternative energy, and that's where it sort of got filed away in our brains.

And B, the costs are different than they are with fossil fuel.

With solar energy, the cost is up front.

You have to put up the panels.

With fossil fuel, the cost is perennial.

You just keep writing a check every month for more fuel.

And over time, it's obviously much cheaper to let the sun deliver energy for free.

But we need ways to finance that and make it easy to get the initial capital investment made.

So that's why it's a little daunting for people.

But we can change that.

We're working hard to lower the permitting boundaries.

That's why solar panels cost three times as much in this country as in the EU or Australia.

We've got too much bureaucracy in the way.

And happily, there are lots of ways to bring that down, apps that allow municipalities to provide instant permitting, for instance, that we're working hard on.

So hopefully, it'll get easier and easier.

It's already cost effective.

But the lower we can drive the price, the more people will be able to take advantage of it.

Yeah.

And it is a remarkable story.

I'm talking about how much cheaper things are elsewhere.

Tell us about the case of Pakistan and how countries are leapfrogging over the fossil fuel age.

Yes.

So Pakistan is an interesting case.

No country's been hit harder by the climate crisis.

Record flooding in 2010 and 2022.

Summertime temperatures in the cities that now increasingly reach the 120 degree mark.

But Pakistan's geographic advantage is the long border with China.

So Pakistanis fed up with an expensive and unreliable electric grid about two years ago started importing huge quantities of solar panels from China.

That's not a government program.

This is just people putting them on rooftops, factories, warehouses, malls, everything.

Basically using YouTube videos as a guide to how to do it.

But happily, this is pretty simple technology and that's been working remarkably well.

Pakistani farmers were an early adopter of this.

Diesel for the pumps that they use to irrigate their fields are often the biggest item of expense in their budgets.

So they were eager to get solar panels to do the same thing.

They often lacked the money to build the metal supports we're used to seeing.

So they would just lay the panels down in the field and point them at the sun.

Last year, Pakistanis used 35% less diesel to generate power than they had the year before.

And you call 2024 a breakout year for renewables.

You cite both California and China.

I want to drill down a little bit more with China a little bit later.

Tell us about California.

What has California been able to accomplish?

California's put up enough solar panels and things that they've reached some kind of tipping point.

Most days now, for long stretches of the day, they're providing 100% of the power that they need from renewable sources.

At night when the sun goes down, batteries that have been soaking up excess sunshine all afternoon are often the biggest source of supply to the grid.

All in all, California is using 30% less natural gas to produce electricity than they were just two years ago.

Those are huge shifts in what is, after all, the world's fourth largest economy.

So it's a sign that we can get things done.

California is now, interestingly, being surpassed by Texas at the rate of clean energy installation.

Even though it's obviously the headquarters for the world's hydrocarbon industry, Texas can't deny the compelling economics of sun and wind and batteries.

And so they've been installing them at a ferocious pace.

And yet there's a fly in the ointment, because I read a new report from the Stockholm Environment Institute, the IISI, which I'm not sure what it is, and Climate Analytics.

It's a fifth production gap report that was released recently.

And it says that even though record global renewable energy growth happened last year, it remains short of the climate target.

And the report says that world's governments now plan to produce 77% more fossil fuels than is consistent with limiting global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius, which is beyond the 1.5 that the Paris Agreement calls for, climate agreement.

And oil and gas is expected to increase through 2050.

So comment about despite these great advances.

Yeah, no, there's no guarantee that we're going to get this done.

The fossil fuel industry is extraordinarily powerful, especially in this country, where they now basically own the White House.

So we're going to have to push hard to build out sun and wind and batteries at the pace required to really undercut fossil fuel.

It's a difficult job, but a key one, and one that we're at work on, that we just did this big national day of action called Sunday with 500 events across the country a couple of weeks ago.

And I think that'll be global before the year is out so that we can put pressure on all over the place, because you're right, we need to speed it up.

Another point that you make, Bill McKibben, in this book, Here Comes the Sun, is that energy from the sun isn't just cheap, it's diffuse, it's available everywhere.

So tell us how that might reshape global power structures, especially between the global north and the global south.

Well, think for a minute about, just think about what the last 100 years of geopolitics would have looked like if during that period oil had been of trivial value.

Think how many wars and coups and assassination attempts and terrorist plots and stuff we would have averted if everybody was just able to provide this necessary commodity from the sun and wind that soaked their own countries.

I find it incredibly liberating to contemplate that kind of world.

And you link that to undermining authoritarianism.

So, you know, who was the first big plutocrat or oligarch in our modern world?

John D. Rockefeller, who figured out early on that if you controlled the supply of a scarce commodity, you'd be a rich and powerful human being.

A lot of others learned the same trick.

So now we have, you know, oil and gas barons.

In our country, the biggest were the Koch brothers, who spent their money eroding our democracy.

In Europe, the biggest is Vladimir Putin, who's used his winnings from the fossil fuel casino to finance a ground war in Europe in the 21st century.

As long as you depend on something that's only available in a few places, the people who control those few places will be more powerful than they should be.

So it'd be nice to end that.

And you also say that, you know, we're turning to the heavens for energy instead of to hell, given that fossil fuels are underground.

You envision a more humane geopolitics powered by the sun.

And that it represents not just a technological change, but you say a moral and even a spiritual one.

So go a little deeper for us in explaining this moral and spiritual dimension.

You know, I just got back from Rome where I got to see Pope Leo.

It was the 10th anniversary of Laudato Si, Francis's encyclical on global warming.

And Pope Leo was explaining that he was continuing that work because it was so central to trying to help the poorest and most vulnerable people on this planet.

You know, think about Africa where there's 700 million people without access to electricity.

Fossil fuel has done nothing for them and it's 250 years.

They're going to get their first energy from village scale solar microgrids that are now going up in large number across East and West Africa as that technology flows along the Chinese trade routes that are pretty well established in those regions.

That's a remarkable story.

We've alluded to the fossil fuel industry and its resistance at a time when, as you pointed out, they basically have captured the control of our federal government, lining up behind President Trump.

How much could the political backsliding in the U.S. do to damage the global climate transition?

I don't think it will damage the global climate transition all that much.

If anything, it's possible that it'll be easier for the rest of the planet to make progress without the U.S. in the way at global climate talks and things, because our political dysfunction has always been a big part of the obstacle to significant action.

I do think that it runs the high probability of wrecking our economy.

I think that America has basically transferred technological and economic primacy, and with it probably political primacy, to China in the course of the last nine months.

And as an American, that annoys me because these are things that were invented here.

The first solar cell at Bell Labs in 1954, the first commercial wind turbine down the mountains from me in Vermont in the 1940s.

We should be owning these technologies and the prosperity that they will create.

Instead, we're just doing favors for the oil guys who sent money to Trump's campaign.

You argue that the barriers to change are no longer technical, or even financial, because it's the cheapest form of energy.

It's from the sun, and the second cheapest is wind.

But you said that renewables are, quote, almost too cheap for capitalism.

And it seems to me that this is really at the heart of the problem.

It is not the kind of profit center that the fossil fuel companies are used to.

So I wonder if you could address that, and then what is our way out of that?

Well, yes.

I mean, the head of Exxon said last year that his company was never going to invest in renewable energy because it didn't offer, as he put it, above average returns for our investors, which is true.

I mean, you can get rich putting up solar panels.

There will be solar billionaires, but you can't get Exxon rich because once the solar panel is up, the sun delivers the energy for free.

And from Exxon's point of view, that's the silliest possible business model.

From everyone else's point of view, it's the best possible business model.

So we need to make it easy for people and countries to realize those possibilities and get this equipment in place so they can start saving money in large quantities.

And that's a lot of the work that we're engaged in right now.

In your chapter on life on the S-curve, first of all, tell us what an S-curve is.

You talk about how technologies explode once they hit critical mass.

And of course, you argue that that is what's happening with solar and wind.

I wonder if you could talk about what are the biggest myths or misconceptions that people have about the limits of renewable energy?

And when I talk about that, we're talking about supplying consistent power, you know, what to do when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

What about the whole issue of critical minerals as being polluting and exploitative?

Address those problems.

Now, the consistency issues are smoothed out by batteries, and batteries have gotten very cheap very fast, and now they're getting very big very fast.

There are grid-scale batteries that can keep, you know, huge places running for hours or days.

We do have to do some mining to do this, but the amount of mining we have to do is far less than what we're doing now.

And if you think about it for a minute, you realize why.

If I go mine some lithium, I should do it as humanely and environmentally sensitively as I can, but once I've mined it, it will sit patiently in the battery for a quarter century doing its thing.

If the battery eventually degrades, we can just recycle the lithium back out and start over again.

That's 180 degrees different from what happens when you go mine coal.

I mean, you set it on fire, and then you have to go mine some more the next day.

So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimated that we would end up with, by mid-century, all the mining required for the renewable battery transition would be less than the amount of coal we mined last year in this world.

So it's not a free lunch, but it's definitely a less expensive lunch.

Another obstacle is that energy demand is skyrocketing, largely because of the AI and Bitcoin investments that are huge consumers of energy.

This is driving up electricity prices, which is making it more costly to transition to decarbonization of the home, for example.

It's hard to convince people to put in heat pumps.

They're afraid the electricity prices are going to skyrocket.

What is your answer to them?

Well, I mean, I'm agnostic about whether or not we're going to need that much power for AI or not.

I think a fair amount of it may turn out to be hype and bubble.

But if you're determined to build power quickly for new data centers, the only way to do it is with sun and wind, because that's the only thing that can go up quickly.

It takes a long time to build a gas-fired power plant, a nuclear power plant, whatever.

But we can build solar and wind farms almost overnight, which is a very good idea for lots of reasons, not least of which the skyrocketing price of energy.

Electric bills are up about 10% around this country this year.

That's what happens when you increase demand and at the same time constrict supply by, say, shutting down wind farms that are 90% complete or canceling plans, as the Trump administration did last week for the largest solar project in the country, 6.2 gigawatts slated for the Nevada desert.

You don't need to be a PhD in economics to know that when you raise demand and constrict supply, prices will go up.

All the more reason for people to have some of their own supply coming off the roof and to have highly efficient appliances like heat pumps to replace the furnace that we're using now.

And speaking about nuclear, I'm talking with you at a time where there is a debate raging in the climate community between those who say that in order to really decarbonize the state, we need to build more nuclear power plants.

And this is coming from within the climate community, not just from nuclear investors.

You softened your stance on nuclear, yet you still call it distractingly overhyped.

Is nuclear necessary as a bridge to transition?

I mean, it's not going to be a bridge to anything because we can't build it for years to come.

We can build and are building lots of solar and wind right now.

The biggest problem with nuclear power at this point, I mean, laying aside the obvious risks, which I think are much smaller than the risks of an overheating planet, the biggest problem is just that it's expensive.

It has to compete with solar power, which under good conditions can be three or four cents a kilowatt hour.

I don't think nuclear in whatever form is ever going to come close to that, and so I think it's going to have a hard time making that a competition.

So let's move to the activism side.

You've already talked about Sunday.

I'm going to attend a meeting tonight that is being put on by Third Act, which is one of the organizations you founded.

It's called Make Solar Simple Training and Campaign Launch, coming up tonight as we're speaking, October 16th.

So tell us about this campaign.

Well, it's all about this effort to make the permitting of solar power so much easier.

So we're not spending three times what they do in EU or Australia.

And that can be done at the state and local level, even with the federal government in very contrary hands.

And it can be done in red states as well as blue.

The biggest success we've had this year might have been what happened in that progressive bastion, Utah, where the state legislature unanimously improved what we're calling balcony solar, designed for apartment dwellers.

A solar panel, you just hang off the railing of your balcony and plug straight into your wall.

No electrician, no wiring needed.

That's illegal in most of the country, but not in Utah, where it was really a kind of libertarian minded state senator who said, if this is good enough for the people of Stuttgart, surely it's good enough for the people of Provo, you know.

And now they have it.

You can watch hundreds of videos of happy Utahns putting up their balcony solar.

That's great.

And I believe that a law has been introduced in the New York legislature.

That's exactly right.

New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, place after place, trying to get the same authorizing authority.

And will that make solar cheaper?

It'll make it accessible for apartment dwellers who don't have control of their roofs.

So it's a very good thing.

Well, it's great to have a hopeful book about the climate.

Finally.

It's fun and somewhat odd for me to get to talk about one.

And what a pleasure to get to talk with you, friend.

Yeah, same here, Bill, as always.

And thank you again for all your amazing work.

It's an honor to speak with you.

Indeed, indeed.

Take care.