Corruption You Can TASTE in Every Bite

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]I was out to dinner with a group of friends. We were traveling. Two nights, we had two restaurants to pick. So, my picks the restaurant on the first night.

[00:00:06]We go there. He's like, "I haven't been here in a couple years, but it's really good." And we sit down and we take a bite of food.

[00:00:13]And he's like, "One sec, I got to go on my phone."

[00:00:16]And we're like, "Dude, you're being rude right now.

[00:00:18]Get off your phone."

[00:00:20]He's like, "Just one sec, one sec." Oh, yeah. He turns it around.

[00:00:24]I could tell this restaurant got bought by private equity.

[00:00:27]I could taste it.

[00:00:30]And we're all just like, "Oh, no. It's going to be gross." And it was gross.

[00:00:34]So, we go out to dinner the next night.

[00:00:36]A different person picks a totally different restaurant.

[00:00:39]Hasn't been there in a couple years. We sit down and I swear to God I was like, "Is this the same same damn private equity fund?"

[00:00:46]I was like, "Look it up again." And it like, "No, it was a different private equity fund." But the food tasted disgusting in that exact same way. And we were just sitting there being like, "How is it possible that you can taste the capital ownership structure of a company? You can taste it in the food."

[00:01:01]You guys ever had this experience? It's disgusting. It's just like it used to be great. And like so many brands, so many products. Cory Doctorow calls it "enshittification" just to really drive home the point. He's supposed He's talking about tech platforms, but like if you try to Google anything recently, Jesus Christ.

[00:01:16]Yeah. There's so many products that are so much worse. I haven't even done this.

[00:01:18]A friend of mine yesterday, out of the blue, a civilian, not some tech person, was like, "Oh, I tried to log into Facebook to look something up." And I'm like, "What happened to Facebook?" I was like, "Oh, yeah, you don't know?" Like, "Oh, sorry. Newsflash." It was just like unbelievable. The usability is all broken. The ads are clogging up everything. We've gotten used to the idea that once things become successful, they're going to get ruined. And we don't even know what to call it. Like what When this happens to your favorite restaurant, to your favorite brand, to your favorite product, what do you call it? Well, our grandparents knew what to call it. They would have called it corruption.

[00:01:51]The making of money without the creating of value. And today we have a very narrow idea about what corruption means.

[00:01:57]We think it only means, you know, embezzlement or bribery. No, corruption is literally corrupting the moral logic of our economic system.

[00:02:05]And it's closer to theft than it is to value creation.

[00:02:08]Enough.