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Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

Better Offline. Yeah. That's right, folks. I am back, kids.

Well, we've gone past CES.

You've had your Steve Burke episodes.

As ever, buy the merchandise, subscribe to the newsletter.

It's all in the notes.

And you are here for the first of a multi-part

series about the final and terminal stage of inshittification, when the companies that turned on

their individual users, then turned on their business customers, finally turned on the markets and

investors themselves. Now, it's important to start this with a point, and that's a good friend of mine once told me that

the more I learned about finance, the more pissed off I'd get. And I cannot think of anyone who has

made a more egregious understatement in my life. I've spent the last two years basically

teaching myself economics and all of this good stuff that I find genuinely

really interesting. It's enriched my life. And it's also driven me a little insane, as I'm sure

many of you were well aware. The more I learn, the more frustrated I get because I'm not a

genius by any extension. I don't even know if I think I'm that smart, but like, this stuff is just

sitting there. You can see it. There are many other people writing like Edward and Grasio,

Molly White, of course, Brian Merchant as well. These people have dug into these types of things,

...