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Hello and welcome to Better Off Live.

And this is the third.

I was about to say inaugural, but I'm not sure that's what that word means.

Episode of Better Off Live, the live-to-tape radio show that I shove in there when I'm in cities.

Today I'm joined by two Titans, Titans of the tech industry. I've got

Corey Docterotero here, of course, author Corey Docterau, and Brian Merchant, other author, and

journalist, and I am so excited, because today we're talking about how we fix the entire tech

industry. Yeah. Sounds like an easy order. I don't know what we're going to do with the excess time after we're done with that. Yeah. Looking forward, that's probably 20 minutes. Yeah. Max. Max. Yeah. We'll talk about our various holidays. Brian just got back from the French Riviera, it sounds like. That's true. Yeah, it did. We got stuck in Philadelphia. So my brain is still. The French Rivieraiera Riviera of America. Of America, yeah.

And welcome to scholar debate, gentlemen. So the thing that I keep thinking at the moment, the thing that

really, I had two, it was like pessimism versus optimism that brought you two together today with me.

And I keep coming back to this, which is everyone's kind of depressed in tech at the moment. It feels like everyone's very negative. And Brian, I know you've written a ton about Luddites, obviously. And I'm wondering how we actually reverse this trend. Like, how do we actually get away from the fact that everyone feels miserable with their devices right now? Because I love tech. I adore my gizmos, my gadgets, my

apps. I don't, I care that they're messing with me and I write a lot about it, but I want

everyone else to enjoy it again. I just don't, how do we even begin that? Well, I think that

the story that the tech industry wants to tell us is the origin of this depression, because the

tech industry wants us to think that you have to take the bad with the good. Right. That,

you know, if you want to have a friend, Mark Zuckerberg has to be your friend too. If you want to

search the internet, Sergei Bryn needs to know about it. If you want to have a phone that

works, then Tim Apple gets to charge everyone who helps you use it 30% of whatever you pay them.

And their argument is that like building a phone that works that doesn't have this 30% Vig

is like making water that's not wet. Right. Right. And that's just like patently untrue.

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