 I'm not sure when Bo Burnham said this. I believe this was a couple of years ago when he was promoting his film. I think it's called eighth grade. I'm not entirely sure I haven't seen it. But he's essentially going to reveal the dark truth about capitalism in a very eloquent way. And I don't know why I haven't seen this, but it's absolutely fantastic and every single thing that he says here is spot-on. So let's go ahead and watch. They're coming for every second of your life. That's what these companies are coming to. This company as well, and it's not because anyone is bad. It's not because anyone in this company has evil plans or is trying to do this. They're not even doing it consciously. It's because these companies like Twitter and YouTube and Instagram and everything, they went public and they went to shareholders. So they have to grow. Their entire models are based off of growth. They cannot stay stagnant. Twitter grossed four or five billion dollars last year. It is in the red. It is unprofitable. It has to get more of you. How nice it's trying to be... They're trying to get more engagement from you. We used to colonize land. That was the thing you could expand into. And that's where money was to be made. We colonized the entire earth. There was no other place for the businesses and capitalism to expand into. And then they realized human attention. They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life. That is what these people are trying to do. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone and they could be gathering information to target ads at you. That's what's happening. So as much as we can have really good conversations and try to humanize the conversations, the mechanism of the business is rolling towards that just because of the market. So it's coming. It's coming for every free second you have. And that's dark. That's really, really dark and scary. And for someone like me, I grew up a little bit on the internet and I felt the repercussions of it. I suffer from anxiety. So I know where it leads. I'm saying you don't want this. Trust me. You're not going to feel good about yourself. And you know it. The kids know it. The whole joke on the internet is everyone's like, this place sucks, right? That's kind of the thing. That's why their memes are all ironic and detached and self-referential and 12 layers deep because truth is completely dead to them and they know it. They look at the president. They look at the culture. They go, what the hell is this? They look at like Coca-Cola commercials that are winking at them and smiling and they go like, forget it. So like, ugh, I have no idea what's going to happen. That was fantastic. Specifically he's referring to the business model of social media websites and it's all about money. So they will do what gets them money and that means you keep people perpetually engaged because consistent engagement is really attractive to advertisers, right? So the ways in which these social media giants keep people engaged is by forcing us to butt heads with each other, right? The Facebook whistleblower I think admitted what Facebook does is they try to target people with more hostile content so that way they engage. You guys think about this. If somebody complements you on Twitter or Facebook you might acknowledge it. It might make you feel good. It might give you a little bit of dopamine for a few minutes but you're not going to come back consistently every single time for that reply unless you're arguing with someone. And I could speak firsthand, right? So like back in 2019, that was I think my worst Twitter days because I used it so much I was addicted to it and I would constantly argue with these dipshit, tulsi, Gabbard supporters and Andrew Yang supporters who would always compare him to Bernie Sanders and how they were better than Bernie, yada, yada, yada. But I would always check my replies, respond to them. I'd have to one-up them, have to own them because they're wrong and I'm right obviously. But that is me feeding into the algorithm. That's the algorithm catching me and pulling me in because that hostility keeps you engaged. So because hostility and anger gets us to kind of keep coming back the algorithms are programmed to learn that and push it to us. So that's why we see things oftentimes in social media that make us so pissed off, make us so angry. I see it all the time, right? So this is why social media is so bad for us and why when I take breaks from Twitter I feel so much better mentally. When it comes to Facebook, I haven't been on Facebook in a very long time. I just don't see any value in Facebook. I mean, I'll log on once in a while just to check up on family particularly older family members who still use it. But I am sick and tired of seeing boomer misinformation memes, right wing memes and bullshit like that. It's a hellscape now. And so these other companies, especially Twitter they are deteriorating into that. And with YouTube's algorithm, remember back in like 2014-2015 pre-anti-SJW era, the left dominated but the algorithm changed. They started to prioritize more authoritative news sources. And as a result, the left is now knee-capped because of the algorithm. But yet because the right, a lot of their content is just inherently hostile and ruthless. Well, that feeds the algorithm and that's why I think anyways, this is conjecture but that's why I think the right gets a boost because they have content that gets people angry. Now, to be fair, a lot of the left's content is rage-bait as well because how can you not feel doomer in this time? But the right specifically targets people, marginalized minorities, trans people and that's the kind of thing like that hostility and the way that they're essentially farming negative engagement, getting people to respond that helps boost them. So I mean what Bo Burnham is saying here this is like a microcosm of the bigger picture. Capitalism does this in every single sector. Capitalism is like a virus. This is how I've described it before where you can't really limit that contagion. I mean you could try but eventually, it's going to find ways to circumvent that immunity that we create. You can implement these standards and regulations on companies but at the end of the day capitalism like a virus will continue to spread and it's going to infect every single institution within our society. Even democracies are commodified to where you can't win an election unless you raise as efficient amount of money and that's inherently undemocratic but that's where we're at. There's so many judge races across the country, local judge races where you compete and it's about money which wealthy person can fund you in the state of Oregon currently. There's been third party candidates, progressive candidates for decades. I've supported some independent progressives and none of them have been able to even break 1% but because one billionaire decided to pour a couple of millions of dollars into an independent Democrat basically a Joe Manchin Democrat Betsy Johnson she's viable. She's polling at like above 10%. So money makes the world go around in a capitalist system. Money is the root to success in our democracy. I mean it's not just democracy, it's healthcare. The whole goal isn't to provide people with healthcare, it's profits. Your internet service providers, the goal isn't to provide you with internet, it's to turn a profit for Comcast and AT&T. So that's the problem with capitalism when the incentive isn't to deliver the good and the incentive is profit and there are institutional pressures, fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value year after year. That system is only going to get worse and worse and worse until it collapses and we're kind of at that late stage capitalist phase where we're seeing the collapse in real time. So I don't necessarily know how long it's going to take for it to collapse. It almost collapsed before but believe it or not, FDR, a social Democrat, saved capitalism from imploding because he instituted social reforms that gave people more of a voice, right? He shifted the wealth back to just working Americans. Now not all working Americans, black Americans were largely left out of the New Deal reforms but we're at that stage again where we need some social Democrat to come along and save capitalism from itself. Bernie Sanders, I thought, was that guy. Turns out that ship has sailed so what do we do if the system needs reform but the institutions are so corrupt that it inhibits reform, it prevents it from taking place and I genuinely don't have an answer to that but I think it's scary because we've reached a place where we're not only running out of time for democracy in the United States, we're running out of time for the planet itself. So it's not like back in, you know, the 20s with the Great Depression where it's like, wow, we have all the time in the world. Perhaps this generation is going to suffer but future generations will do better if we put in the work right now and fix this country. No, future generations are going to do worse because we've ran out of time and our planet is dying. So this is what capitalism gets you. It's a terrible system and what makes it worse is the way that we've all been brainwashed into worshiping capitalism to make it so it's heresy if we even question capitalism. Yeah, as Gamergy says, capitalism is America's unofficial religion. Absolutely, absolutely. So this is why I hate capitalism and why I self-describe as a hater of capitalism when I speak to my good friend, Tucker Cross, and whenever I'm invited on his program, which is frequent, by the way, because yeah, capitalism is a virus and that's, I think, the best way to describe it. It eats away at every single institution. It consumes, consumes, consumes until there's nothing left.