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"slug": "bee-movie-we-are-charlie-kirk-and-the-enduring-bait-and-switch-meme",
"title": "Bee Movie, \"We Are Charlie Kirk,\" and the Enduring Bait-and-Switch Meme",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2007, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> hit theaters with a strange plot and was considered a box office flop. Nearly two decades later, it’s somehow more relevant than ever, not because of the movie itself, but because of what happened next. The script became a meme, then a prank, then, eventually, a tool for protest.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, host Morgan Sung traces the evolution of bait-and-switch memes, from early internet shock images to the rise of the “Never Gonna Give You Up” rickroll, all the way to TikTok-era pranks that burn out as quickly as they go viral. Along the way, she talks to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">co-writer Spike Feresten about how the film\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> became an unlikely internet icon, and to digital rhetoric expert Bret Strauch about what makes a meme actually stick.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC1407643406\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/spikeferesten/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Spike Feresten\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, screenwriter and comedian\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.colorado.edu/pwr/bret-strauch-phd\">Bret Strauch\u003c/a>, assistant professor of digital media, University of Colorado Boulder\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZdGGIT3fu0Pad9itT8HZMGkIwtYFQBS1vH5j21rN2Ns/edit?usp=sharing\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behind the scenes content\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on the making of this episode!\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2021/10/08/memes-never-gonna-give-you-up\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MEMES, Part 3: Gotta make you understand\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Endless Thread\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/11/a-complete-history-of-bee-movies-many-many-memes.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Complete History of Bee Movie’s Many, Many Memes\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Paris Martineau, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Intelligencer\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://gamerant.com/bee-movie-meme/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Did Bee Movie Become A Meme?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Joshua Kristian McCoy, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GameRant\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.polygon.com/23984032/josh-hutcherson-whistle-edit-meme-trend-explained/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Josh Hutcherson ‘Whistle’ edit meme, explained\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ana Diaz, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Polygon\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.themarysue.com/charlie-kirk-ai-song/\">‘His courage our own’: This Charlie Kirk tribute song is blowing up on Spotify. Was it made by a human—or AI?\u003c/a> — Braden Bjella, \u003ci>The Mary Sue\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those are the iconic opening lines of the 2007 film \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And the voice you heard reading those lines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Spike Feresten. Is that really it? Is that what we wrote?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Spike is a comedian and screenwriter who’s worked on Seinfeld, written for David Letterman, hosted his own show, and co-wrote the one and only \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. You know, the one starring Jerry Seinfelt as a talking Bee.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: I’m going out. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adam: Out? Out where? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: Outside the hive. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Crowd: *Gasps*\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What if the bees discovered the humans were taking their honey? That was one big idea that kind of unlocked a little bit of the plot, but the kind of larger idea was, what would happen if a bee didn’t want to just go into the honey business? Isn’t there, is there something more?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hijinks ensue. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">is a surprisingly deep story about exploitation, uncompensated labor, the vital environmental role that bees play as pollinators, and what it takes to break out of society’s mold. That is, if society is a honeybee hive in Manhattan. Oh, and the bee kind of falls in love with a human woman. It’s a whole thing. Spike said that Steven Spielberg asked Jerry Seinfeld if he wanted to do an animated movie. And Jerry Seinfeld said,\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“What about a movie about bees and we’ll call it Bee Movie.” And he went, “Sold!” It’s the shortest pitch in like film history. And then Jerry called us up the next day and said, I just sold a movie to Spielberg/Dreamworks Animation about bees. And we were like, what is it about? And he goes, that’s what we have to figure out. The very first thing we did was start reading about bees and we came across this fact. It was like, oh, this is kind of remarkable that these guys can’t fly in rain and that their bodies aren’t right and it’s hard for them to fly and everything in kind of fodder for, you know, the world of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was Jerry’s big comeback after Seinfeld, which had wrapped up about five years before development on \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> started. And the movie did well at the box office, but among film critics, it was a flop. Kids loved it, but it didn’t compare to the Shrek franchise or Ratatouille, which dominated early 2000s animation. The plot was weird. The jokes skewed more adult, and the whole romantic vibe between a human woman and a honeybee, maybe a bit too out there for the general public. Jerry even joked about it a couple years ago. Here he is on the Tonight Show:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Tonight Show] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I apologize for what seems to be a certain, uncomfortable, subtle, sexual aspect of the Bee Movie which really was not intentional. But after it came out, I realized, this is really not appropriate for children.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The world moved on. But today, almost 20 years later, Bee Movie is a cult classic. Because the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script itself has become one of the quintessential internet pranks. Annoyed with someone? Dump the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script in their comments. Protesting against the government’s anti-trans bathroom complaint forms? Spam the tip line with the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. Here’s Spike again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We couldn’t quite understand, are they making fun of us, which is fine, or are they really celebrating us, or is it are they just taking our weird thing and doing weird things with it? There’s simple ideas like weaponized absurdity, you know, so when some horrible right-winger has got some sort of hotline to expose the trans community or something, and people just load in the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. To us, like, that’s fantastic. We’re not even gonna engage you in conversation. We’re just gonna drop an absurdity bomb in there and just stop it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script remains a top-tier internet prank. It’s up there with Rickrolling. This is a genre known as bait-and-switch memes. The internet has changed drastically since the days of pranking people with “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And memes have changed, too. Imagine trying to explain today’s trends to someone in 2007. But what hasn’t changed about internet culture is the love of a good prank. The art of the bait-and-switch meme endures. It’s April Fool’s Day, so today, we’re diving into the evolution of these memes. And what makes a meme prank actually stick around. Ready?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it. Before we talk about what makes a good bait-and-switch meme, let’s get into where they even came from. For today’s internet history lesson, we’re going back in time, before TikTok, before Vine, may she rest in peace, and before YouTube, to an era when the internet was simpler and darker. Let’s open a new tab: the internet forum wild west. Dr. Bret Strauch teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studies digital genres and digital writing, also known as the rhetoric of memes. He’s gonna break down what a bait-and-switch meme is at its core.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bait-and-switch memes are fairly simple, like when you look at it from a genre perspective, usually you have some sort of setup that is directing your expectation towards one thing and then it flips and subverts that expectation, once we either scroll down or click on something or jump to a new video, something to that effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What were the proto bait-and-switch memes like? Like before the Rickroll, where were they taking place? How did they work?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the analog era, before we get to our digital internet era, we have culture jammers and all they’re doing is taking a traditional sort of company advertisements and subverting them. So you would see something like, uh, Joe Camel, um, from the Camel cigarettes, but they would subvert the messaging, sort of pointing out some ideological problem or ethical problem. And so instead of Joe Camel they get an image using the camel likeness, but as Joe Chemo sort of pointing out the health effects of cigarettes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first internet forums have been around since the 70s and 80s. This culture of posting and messaging didn’t become widespread until the 90s. The early forums and chat rooms didn’t have anything close to the moderation and rules that we have on social media today. That’s when we started to see the first bait-and-switch memes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve seen people talk about the early internet forums of the late 90s, early 2000s as almost like. This unmoderated last frontier. We had an episode on political online history where we referred to that time period as “the bronze age of the internet.” Can you describe what this era of forums was like and what that meant for meme culture?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel this early era so like we get like 4chan but there’s also other sites like somethingawful.com, rotten.com, (please don’t go to those sites) where a lot of this sort of proto-internet meme behavior is happening. And one of the things that we see in this early era is that it’s largely gate-kept in a way. We have a much smaller, more niche audience for these memes. And it’s usually driven through more, obviously, masculine sensibilities and sort of this gross-out culture. And there’s a little bit of a prank culture thing going on as well. We see a lot of shock sites. This is like earlier internet, like 2002, where people would send links to what essentially were just pornographic images as a form of hazing. And a lot people found this funny, but some people were also found it disturbing as well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of these shock images, which we will not name here, involves…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…a human orifice that is enlarged, so to speak, and usually we get sent like this file and people would click on it and then they would see this sort of grotesque image. Now, some people might laugh at that, but I think the people that found it funny were the people sending it, not necessarily the people receiving it in all cases. But also we see how like This fits this sort of frat boy gross out. Sort of community building, so to speak. I wouldn’t necessarily, it’s a community I’d want to be in, but it definitely has this sort of social function in those groups.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So how do we go from that horrific image macro that Brett tactfully described to the family-friendly wholesome rickroll? Let’s open a new tab: pranks in the age of YouTube.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Picture this, it’s 2007. You’re dressed in your most obscure band tee and skinniest skinny jeans, brand new Blackberry tucked in your back pocket. You’re on the family desktop, just made your first Facebook account. You’re scrolling through your feed, poking your friends, and you come across a post that says, “Grand Theft Auto 4 trailer just dropped, watch here.” You love GTA. You’ve been waiting for this. So you click it and…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” song] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna give you up. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna let you down. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna run around and desert you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You just got rickrolled. That’s exactly what happened to countless people that year. A teenager posted a link on 4chan claiming that it was a link to the highly anticipated trailer. When unsuspecting digital bystanders clicked it, they were surprised with a video of Rick Astley’s 1987 banger, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” song]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna make you cry\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the rickroll was born.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The change from sort of this gross out humor meme into something that’s more family friendly, I think comes along with the fact that internet platforms and social media platforms became much more accessible beyond sort of that initial niche computer nerd culture that we see. And so as part of ways in which the community functions, they wanna share. Like, if you receive it, it might be annoying, but I think at some point we find it funny. Where something that’s more gross out, that’s not going to have as much wide appeal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And rickrolling really took off. The hacktivist collective Anonymous protested against the Church of Scientology by blasting “Never Gonna Give You Up” on boomboxes outside of their headquarters. Radiohead announced their new album and posted the download link, only to rickroll everyone. For April Fool’s Day in 2008, YouTube made all of the links on the site’s page lead to “Never Gonna Give You Up,” rickrolling the world. And then for the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade that year, Rick Astley himself appeared on a float and performed what was, at the time, possibly the most widely televised rickroll in the world. Rickrolling was a cultural phenomenon. It was also the last time everyone was on the same internet, before we were siloed by algorithms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re still at a moment in our media landscape where we’re still sharing media. We have TV shows we’re all watching. We have broadcast television. And even though people can create and share their own content, we don’t see as many content creators and so a lot of the shared cultural texts we have helps build toward this moment where, hey, we can share this meme because people know the reference. We’re not all listening to our own Spotify playlists, right? We’re all consuming the shows that we want on Netflix. We have the shared culture, which helps sort of propagate the fact that we have a meme that’s sort of ubiquitous, at least in the Western hemisphere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was so appealing about the rickroll? Like, why did that work so well?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Coming out of the 90s, there was a little bit of this 80s nostalgia, which we see building up in which now we see huge 80s nostalgia. There’s this sort of absurdity of the 80s era and its music that sort of plays into the absurdity of this internet prank, essentially.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no other bait-and-switch meme from that early YouTube era took off the same way. There was the Trololo guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Singing]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a clip of a Russian singer performing in the 70s. There was also You’ve Been Gnomed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of animated gnome character]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gnot a gnelf!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gnot a gnoblin! \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m a gnome!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which was this video of an animated gnome laughing at the viewer while text flashes across the screen. It says, predictably…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of animated gnome character] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you’ve been gnomed!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both of these memes functioned like a rickroll. You click a link expecting one thing and, instead, you get another. But there was a historical framework for rickrolling. It was a huge 80s bop coming back around. The other memes lacked that, so they didn’t have the same cultural impact as rickrolling. By the early 2010s, a new challenger had arisen. This underlying media, as Bret put it, was ripe with meme material. Let’s talk about \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what makes a good bait-and-switch meme? What makes that prank work so well? Obviously, we’re opening a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and meme dada-ism. Memes were getting weirder, more absurd, and few memes defined the 2010s like \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: How should I start it? You like jazz? No, that’s no good. Here she comes. Speak, you fool!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Tonight Show]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jerry Seinfeld: The bee seemed to have a thing for the girl. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy Fallon: Yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jerry Seinfeld: And we don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was Jerry Seinfeld on The Tonight Show, acknowledging the taboo interspecies romantic undertones in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Spike Feresten, the screenwriter who co-wrote the movie, got a kick out of writing the pairing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s a funny anecdote from the room: so we were writing this in New York. You know, I was, I was doing a show in LA, but I would fly, you know, to New York every couple of weeks and we’d sit in this big room, Jerry’s office, and work on this. And to us, these characters were just two characters, it was just Barry and Vanessa. And then every once in a while we’d go, hey, that Barry’s a bee. He’s this big. So when you say they shake hands or they walk, you can’t, we can’t keep treating them like two characters who are friends, like Jerry and Elaine, which is kind of how we treated them. We were writing them like Jerry and Elaine forgetting about the size disparity and the species disparity. Yeah, and that’s kind of why it came out the way it came out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The romance is just one of many absurd plot lines in the movie. Like, we’ve got bees going to human court to sue humanity for the exploitation of their labor. But the movie was way too ahead of its time. Critics hated it. It was marketed as a kids’ movie. And instead, it was this story about freeing the bees and seizing the means of production of honey and also toeing the line of bee-stiality. But that’s why it was such good meme material. Here’s Bret Strauch again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People, when they originally went to see the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, were expecting a kid’s Bug’s Life or Ants movie, and they got something much more serious. And so in a way, like the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is a bait and switch by itself. The trailers are selling it as sort of like a kid’s movie, but really there’s a lot more adult oriented content that people were not expecting. And so the fact that it sort of functioned as a bait-and-switch by itself made sense that people started using it as just a way to troll people.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tumblr latched onto the movie starting in 2011, fawning over the film’s poetic opening lines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Narrator: According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tumblr users were totally sincere about it, calling the lines inspirational. By 2013, the meme exploded. People were starting to realize how absurd the movie really was. Screenshots from the film became reaction memes. Edits of Seinfeld but with characters from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> went super viral. And then there’s the fan fiction, which is still going today. I told Spike about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, there is a real moment on Tumblr with people kind of sincerely appreciating the dialog in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and the narration. Then people kind-of ironically started posting the memes, which I’m sure you’ve seen. It broke containment, moved to Twitter, and then it reached the peak of virality, which is sexy fan fiction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, it did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m sorry I’m breaking this to you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know about that. This is good.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I am just going to read you a few tags from Archive of Our Own, from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> fanfics that were written this like this year.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tags include Vanessa X Barry, typical, Mega Mind X Barry Benson, Top Barry -Bottom Mega Mind, inter-species relationships, hive worship, and improper use of honey drizzler.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Laughter\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What do you make of the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> smut?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, smut is a funny, funny word to use from the 50s: smut. Um, it, it kind of plays into what I would love to do. I mean, like, hypothetically, and this will never happen, but I want to do, uh, six sequels to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all as a series on Netflix or wherever, 40 minutes apiece, Bee 2, Bee 3, Bee 4 , Bee 5, Bee 6, Bee 7. A lot of time has gone by and we’re going to do our six sequels now. What you just described is one of the areas I really want to dive into, which is that relationship, not the smut, but the fun you could have with a bee dating a woman. I think there’s a lot of comedy there and I think the world has changed and I think you could write that in a way that’s not smut but it also kind of celebrates what the world has done with this and, you know, I don’t think we would go as far as South Park, but kind of do our version of maybe a South Parkian take on \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, because I love their relationship. I love that friendship. And I wonder what those conversations would be like should they explore the idea of dating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. I mean, look, if you ever need a writer’s room, there’s a bunch of people in Archive of Our Own who have already written some scenarios.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that’s cool. No, that’s great. I mean, like any other stuff, you know, you put it out into the world and the world can do with it what it wants. That’s what’s nice about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2013, a Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else’s Facebook wall. That was the start of the bait-and-switch\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. For the next few years, you might unwittingly open a link to a comment or post only for your phone to freeze and crash because it’s trying to load the entire \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. It was like a more devious Rickroll. It wreaked havoc across the internet. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Group chats were bombarded with the 9,000-word wall of text. Any email with an urgent subject line could just contain the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. It even moved offline. One college student pranked his classmates by spending 12 hours writing out the entire script on a chalkboard. The coolest kids in 2016 wore T-shirts printed with the entire strip. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meme did eventually slow down though. Phones got better and became capable of loading the whole script. Like rickrolling, surprising your friends with 131 pages of dialogue got old. But then the script was weaponized, again, as a form of protest. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2021, Texas passed the Heartbeat Act, which effectively banned abortion after six weeks. The law allowed anyone to sue abortion providers and individuals who sought abortions after the six-week limit. The organization, Texas Right to Life, set up an anonymous tip site to report anyone who violated the Heart Beat Act. To protest TikTok users spammed the site with Shrek porn, lurid fan fiction, and the one and only \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. Protesters did it again when Missouri opened an online forum to report clinics that provide gender-affirming care. And then, again, when Indiana’s attorney general launched a forum to support schools that teach gender ideology. And then again, when the Trump administration partnered with a far-right group to report schools that had DEI efforts. Any time the government or an organization working with it opens some kind of citizen surveillance tool, it’s a target for \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script dumps. Spike and other \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> writers are big fans of this practice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, we love it, absolutely love it. It gets passed around, you know, that it’s doing something good for the world, it always makes you feel good. And that we don’t have to be any part of it, that someone’s taking it and just disrupting, like I said, dropping an absurdity bomb on some bad cause. That just makes you feel good. Do it as much as you want. If I can help you, I will help in whatever way, but you’re doing a fine job by yourself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s funny because back in 2017, for the 10-year anniversary of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, New York Mag wrote this extensive history of the meme and traced the rise and fall of it. And back then, it was like, okay, there was a good year of no \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> memes. And they questioned whether the meme was dead. That was almost 10 years ago. And the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script keeps coming back. The meme has evolved so much, but the core of it is still the script, the dialogue. Why do you think it survives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s the writing. I think its the weirdness. You know, it’s funny. That movie was out of sync with culture in 2006 and I think still is out of synch with kind of cultural norms in a way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">uh bee- human, you know…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but it’s still kind of hard to wrap your head around that. You know what I mean? I mean i don’t think anybody really thinks about dating a bee, so I don’t think there has been… and we like bees. To us, the bees are, you know, when you think about the planet, keeping the planet healthy, the bees are one of our canaries in the coal mine, if you will, like, how the bee is doing? I don’t know if you do this, but when you see a bee, kind of, dying on the sidewalk, don’t you get nervous. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah I’m like, let me help it, yeah.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, is this global warming? What is doing this? So we have this special reverence for this insect that stings us occasionally, but still we like them a lot because they make this very sweet, gooey substance that we enjoy putting in our teas. But again, it’s not for me or us to say, it’s you’d have to ask the people who love this movie what they love about it. We’re just the people that put it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script is the gift that keeps on giving. But other bait-and-switch memes have also blown up. And unlike the trusty rickroll or the evergreen \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, this new generation of internet pranks blow up fast and burn out quickly. They don’t last. Let’s get into that in one last tab: the short form vertical video revolution. Before the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script was weaponized for protest the way that it is today, it had kind of peaked by 2016. And a slew of bait-and-switch memes cycled in and out of relevance. The primary force behind this rapid-fire meme lifespan? TikTok. In 2020, we had Get Stick Bugged. Watching a Minecraft compilation? Surprise, it cuts to a clip of a dancing stick bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Funky music playing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But that fizzled out by the end of the year. In 2022, TikTok users lured viewers in with videos about juicy celebrity gossip. And then…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio from Moulin Rouge movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gitchi Gitchi ya ya da da\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…you got krissed! It’s a clip of Kris Jenner shimmying in this sequined shirt and bow tie set to a sped up version of “Lady Marmalade” from Moulin Rouge. The Cut said that “getting krissed” is the natural evolution of rickrolling. And then in 2023, we had the Josh Hutcherson whistle edits. Here’s one of my favorite ones. It’s video from inside a plane. The caption says, “Guys, the view is incredible!” The video pans to the closed window, and a hand reaches out to open the shade. And then…[music playing] The view through the window is just a closeup of Josh Hutcherson’s face from a 2014 fan edit set to a cover of Flo Rida’s “Whistle.” Polygon said that this trend was TikTok’s rickroll. And then at the end of last year, another rickroll successor blew up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “We Are Charlie Kirk Song”] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are Charlie Kirk, we carry…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That is an AI-generated ballad about Charlie Kirk, which was first posted to YouTube and streaming platforms days after his death. It’s total AI slop, but unfortunately, very catchy. Like the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script, it went viral at first out of sincerity. People listened to it as a tribute to Charlie Kirk. And then it became a meme. We’re talking remixes, Mongolian throat singing covers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “We Are Charlie Kirk Song”] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. We fight for the…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And of course, pranks, like connecting to public bluetooth speakers and blasting cowbell dance remixes of “We Are Charlie Kirk.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of “We Are Charlie Kirk” playing over loud speaker]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Bret’s take.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of them, it’s clear that there’s some sort of musical component people can latch onto and all the music itself is sort of absurd or ridiculous in a way. Whether it’s been altered and sped up like the we-are-krissed” or just sort of that funky beat that you’ve-been-stick-bugged has, especially like with the “We are Charlie Kirk.” There’s more levels of absurdity being that it was AI written. So this pathos is literally being manufactured. It’s not something that’s like, necessarily human-generated like emotion being generated, and so it just makes it rife for this type of inversion or subversion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. We just speed ran so many trends, and none of them really lasted more than six months. Maybe the Charlie Kirk one will last longer because of the current state of the world, but generally, why is the turnover rate for memes so high now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think there’s a few reasons for this. The first is just the media context and media environment. We’re not sharing the same stuff that we did as a culture. It’s much more small niche cultures where these things are spreading. Another element to this that I believe is important is that it’s easier to create these than it was 15, 20 years ago. And so now more are being created. And so they’re essentially eating themselves out of existence. Um, so as soon as a new mean comes out, um, at least in the early mid 2000s, it stuck around because it took a little bit more technological know-how. You didn’t have the production software and access to it that you do now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I noticed that almost all bait-and-switch meme trends are on TikTok now, maybe Reels. But no one is pulling off a rickroll with YouTube anymore. I saw a video of someone rickrolling their friend by sending a TikTok link, which me makes me wonder, did YouTube ads ruin the rickroll? Kind of spoils the surprise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, YouTube ads ruin everything. For humor to work, timing is critical, right? And so those ads really disrupt like the genre of humor that’s happening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Would the original rickroll work with modern content consumption habits? When we consume content, it’s a lot of times happening passively to us, algorithmically served, instead of us like actively seeking it out or actually clicking links.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think so. We need that interaction, I think, for the rickroll to be successful. And it feels like at least it was another person presenting this to us. And now it’s sort of the algorithm is serving it up to a plate on us and we’re not finding these things. And so I think what makes a lot of media content special, whether it’s memes, movies, songs, is it’s stuff that we find, not that someone else or something else finds for us. And so… innately, there’s going to be less meaning for a lot of that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meme turnover rate is so high that no internet prank really sticks around long enough to rival or recreate the magic of the rickroll. The very format of the rickroll is limiting, especially in today’s digital landscape. Even rickrolling itself is difficult to pull off today because internet habits have changed. But what has endured as a prank is the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">script. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have this take and it’s that the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script is the ultimate bait-and-switch because it’s purely text. There’s no image macro, there’s no video lead-in with ads or that you have to wait to load to ruin the prank. The joke itself is so malleable. It can be dumped in comment sections, in government tip lines or turned into an image macro and then deep fried, or just read by that TikTok AI voice in 2X speed, which makes it funnier. Do you have any thoughts on this, the flexibility of this meme?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that’s why I think we see certain memes that at least are being iterated and changed upon more, and some that don’t seem to change as much. And so with it being all text, it’s really easy to adapt all text to different formats. I think my favorite of the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script ones is where they do the crawl from Star Wars, and we get the intro to the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And so the easier that it is to manipulate that initial form of media, like, so text is super easy, makes it much easier to put it into different places, different platforms and distribute it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> came out nearly 20 years ago. Script dumping started in 2013. Last year, 12 years after that Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else’s wall, the DOGE-led government HR email was pelted with \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> scripts. At the request of Elon Musk, all federal employees were asked to email the Office of Personnel Management with five tasks they accomplished that week. On x, Musk posted, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The email leaked online, and internet users responded on behalf of federal employees with pages and pages of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> dialog. Spike was thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s pretty exciting that anybody’s even talking about it. Really! I mean, you have to look at it, we look at that way. I think that people are still talking about this movie from what 2006 that we made, you know, in that way and that it, that it has these second and third lives. You know, we get excited that people still watching that movie and enjoying it. Like, it’s flattering. That’s the only way to really put it that this movie hasn’t been forgotten. It hasn’t disappeared into a canyon of content and gone forever, that it comes up over and over again in generally a good way. And, you know, if people are making fun of it, that’s fine, too. That’s what we do. We make fun of things you can make fun of us. Go ahead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You heard Spike, go forth and prank. Let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer, audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. Okay, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Email us at closealltabs@kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod or TikTok @CloseallTabs. And join our Discord. We’re in the Close All tabs channel at discord.gg/kqed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2007, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> hit theaters with a strange plot and was considered a box office flop. Nearly two decades later, it’s somehow more relevant than ever, not because of the movie itself, but because of what happened next. The script became a meme, then a prank, then, eventually, a tool for protest.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In this episode, host Morgan Sung traces the evolution of bait-and-switch memes, from early internet shock images to the rise of the “Never Gonna Give You Up” rickroll, all the way to TikTok-era pranks that burn out as quickly as they go viral. Along the way, she talks to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">co-writer Spike Feresten about how the film\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> became an unlikely internet icon, and to digital rhetoric expert Bret Strauch about what makes a meme actually stick.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC1407643406\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/spikeferesten/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Spike Feresten\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, screenwriter and comedian\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.colorado.edu/pwr/bret-strauch-phd\">Bret Strauch\u003c/a>, assistant professor of digital media, University of Colorado Boulder\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZdGGIT3fu0Pad9itT8HZMGkIwtYFQBS1vH5j21rN2Ns/edit?usp=sharing\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Behind the scenes content\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> on the making of this episode!\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2021/10/08/memes-never-gonna-give-you-up\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">MEMES, Part 3: Gotta make you understand\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Endless Thread\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/11/a-complete-history-of-bee-movies-many-many-memes.html\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A Complete History of Bee Movie’s Many, Many Memes\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Paris Martineau, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Intelligencer\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://gamerant.com/bee-movie-meme/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why Did Bee Movie Become A Meme?\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Joshua Kristian McCoy, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">GameRant\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.polygon.com/23984032/josh-hutcherson-whistle-edit-meme-trend-explained/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Josh Hutcherson ‘Whistle’ edit meme, explained\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Ana Diaz, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Polygon\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.themarysue.com/charlie-kirk-ai-song/\">‘His courage our own’: This Charlie Kirk tribute song is blowing up on Spotify. Was it made by a human—or AI?\u003c/a> — Braden Bjella, \u003ci>The Mary Sue\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Those are the iconic opening lines of the 2007 film \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And the voice you heard reading those lines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">My name is Spike Feresten. Is that really it? Is that what we wrote?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Spike is a comedian and screenwriter who’s worked on Seinfeld, written for David Letterman, hosted his own show, and co-wrote the one and only \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. You know, the one starring Jerry Seinfelt as a talking Bee.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: I’m going out. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Adam: Out? Out where? \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: Outside the hive. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Crowd: *Gasps*\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What if the bees discovered the humans were taking their honey? That was one big idea that kind of unlocked a little bit of the plot, but the kind of larger idea was, what would happen if a bee didn’t want to just go into the honey business? Isn’t there, is there something more?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hijinks ensue. \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">is a surprisingly deep story about exploitation, uncompensated labor, the vital environmental role that bees play as pollinators, and what it takes to break out of society’s mold. That is, if society is a honeybee hive in Manhattan. Oh, and the bee kind of falls in love with a human woman. It’s a whole thing. Spike said that Steven Spielberg asked Jerry Seinfeld if he wanted to do an animated movie. And Jerry Seinfeld said,\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“What about a movie about bees and we’ll call it Bee Movie.” And he went, “Sold!” It’s the shortest pitch in like film history. And then Jerry called us up the next day and said, I just sold a movie to Spielberg/Dreamworks Animation about bees. And we were like, what is it about? And he goes, that’s what we have to figure out. The very first thing we did was start reading about bees and we came across this fact. It was like, oh, this is kind of remarkable that these guys can’t fly in rain and that their bodies aren’t right and it’s hard for them to fly and everything in kind of fodder for, you know, the world of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This was Jerry’s big comeback after Seinfeld, which had wrapped up about five years before development on \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> started. And the movie did well at the box office, but among film critics, it was a flop. Kids loved it, but it didn’t compare to the Shrek franchise or Ratatouille, which dominated early 2000s animation. The plot was weird. The jokes skewed more adult, and the whole romantic vibe between a human woman and a honeybee, maybe a bit too out there for the general public. Jerry even joked about it a couple years ago. Here he is on the Tonight Show:\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Tonight Show] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I apologize for what seems to be a certain, uncomfortable, subtle, sexual aspect of the Bee Movie which really was not intentional. But after it came out, I realized, this is really not appropriate for children.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The world moved on. But today, almost 20 years later, Bee Movie is a cult classic. Because the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script itself has become one of the quintessential internet pranks. Annoyed with someone? Dump the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script in their comments. Protesting against the government’s anti-trans bathroom complaint forms? Spam the tip line with the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. Here’s Spike again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We couldn’t quite understand, are they making fun of us, which is fine, or are they really celebrating us, or is it are they just taking our weird thing and doing weird things with it? There’s simple ideas like weaponized absurdity, you know, so when some horrible right-winger has got some sort of hotline to expose the trans community or something, and people just load in the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. To us, like, that’s fantastic. We’re not even gonna engage you in conversation. We’re just gonna drop an absurdity bomb in there and just stop it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script remains a top-tier internet prank. It’s up there with Rickrolling. This is a genre known as bait-and-switch memes. The internet has changed drastically since the days of pranking people with “Never Gonna Give You Up.” And memes have changed, too. Imagine trying to explain today’s trends to someone in 2007. But what hasn’t changed about internet culture is the love of a good prank. The art of the bait-and-switch meme endures. It’s April Fool’s Day, so today, we’re diving into the evolution of these memes. And what makes a meme prank actually stick around. Ready?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let’s get into it. Before we talk about what makes a good bait-and-switch meme, let’s get into where they even came from. For today’s internet history lesson, we’re going back in time, before TikTok, before Vine, may she rest in peace, and before YouTube, to an era when the internet was simpler and darker. Let’s open a new tab: the internet forum wild west. Dr. Bret Strauch teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he studies digital genres and digital writing, also known as the rhetoric of memes. He’s gonna break down what a bait-and-switch meme is at its core.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bait-and-switch memes are fairly simple, like when you look at it from a genre perspective, usually you have some sort of setup that is directing your expectation towards one thing and then it flips and subverts that expectation, once we either scroll down or click on something or jump to a new video, something to that effect.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What were the proto bait-and-switch memes like? Like before the Rickroll, where were they taking place? How did they work?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the analog era, before we get to our digital internet era, we have culture jammers and all they’re doing is taking a traditional sort of company advertisements and subverting them. So you would see something like, uh, Joe Camel, um, from the Camel cigarettes, but they would subvert the messaging, sort of pointing out some ideological problem or ethical problem. And so instead of Joe Camel they get an image using the camel likeness, but as Joe Chemo sort of pointing out the health effects of cigarettes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The first internet forums have been around since the 70s and 80s. This culture of posting and messaging didn’t become widespread until the 90s. The early forums and chat rooms didn’t have anything close to the moderation and rules that we have on social media today. That’s when we started to see the first bait-and-switch memes.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve seen people talk about the early internet forums of the late 90s, early 2000s as almost like. This unmoderated last frontier. We had an episode on political online history where we referred to that time period as “the bronze age of the internet.” Can you describe what this era of forums was like and what that meant for meme culture?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I feel this early era so like we get like 4chan but there’s also other sites like somethingawful.com, rotten.com, (please don’t go to those sites) where a lot of this sort of proto-internet meme behavior is happening. And one of the things that we see in this early era is that it’s largely gate-kept in a way. We have a much smaller, more niche audience for these memes. And it’s usually driven through more, obviously, masculine sensibilities and sort of this gross-out culture. And there’s a little bit of a prank culture thing going on as well. We see a lot of shock sites. This is like earlier internet, like 2002, where people would send links to what essentially were just pornographic images as a form of hazing. And a lot people found this funny, but some people were also found it disturbing as well. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of these shock images, which we will not name here, involves…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…a human orifice that is enlarged, so to speak, and usually we get sent like this file and people would click on it and then they would see this sort of grotesque image. Now, some people might laugh at that, but I think the people that found it funny were the people sending it, not necessarily the people receiving it in all cases. But also we see how like This fits this sort of frat boy gross out. Sort of community building, so to speak. I wouldn’t necessarily, it’s a community I’d want to be in, but it definitely has this sort of social function in those groups.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So how do we go from that horrific image macro that Brett tactfully described to the family-friendly wholesome rickroll? Let’s open a new tab: pranks in the age of YouTube.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Picture this, it’s 2007. You’re dressed in your most obscure band tee and skinniest skinny jeans, brand new Blackberry tucked in your back pocket. You’re on the family desktop, just made your first Facebook account. You’re scrolling through your feed, poking your friends, and you come across a post that says, “Grand Theft Auto 4 trailer just dropped, watch here.” You love GTA. You’ve been waiting for this. So you click it and…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” song] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna give you up. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna let you down. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna run around and desert you.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You just got rickrolled. That’s exactly what happened to countless people that year. A teenager posted a link on 4chan claiming that it was a link to the highly anticipated trailer. When unsuspecting digital bystanders clicked it, they were surprised with a video of Rick Astley’s 1987 banger, “Never Gonna Give You Up.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “Never Gonna Give You Up” song]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Never gonna make you cry\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so the rickroll was born.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The change from sort of this gross out humor meme into something that’s more family friendly, I think comes along with the fact that internet platforms and social media platforms became much more accessible beyond sort of that initial niche computer nerd culture that we see. And so as part of ways in which the community functions, they wanna share. Like, if you receive it, it might be annoying, but I think at some point we find it funny. Where something that’s more gross out, that’s not going to have as much wide appeal.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And rickrolling really took off. The hacktivist collective Anonymous protested against the Church of Scientology by blasting “Never Gonna Give You Up” on boomboxes outside of their headquarters. Radiohead announced their new album and posted the download link, only to rickroll everyone. For April Fool’s Day in 2008, YouTube made all of the links on the site’s page lead to “Never Gonna Give You Up,” rickrolling the world. And then for the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade that year, Rick Astley himself appeared on a float and performed what was, at the time, possibly the most widely televised rickroll in the world. Rickrolling was a cultural phenomenon. It was also the last time everyone was on the same internet, before we were siloed by algorithms.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re still at a moment in our media landscape where we’re still sharing media. We have TV shows we’re all watching. We have broadcast television. And even though people can create and share their own content, we don’t see as many content creators and so a lot of the shared cultural texts we have helps build toward this moment where, hey, we can share this meme because people know the reference. We’re not all listening to our own Spotify playlists, right? We’re all consuming the shows that we want on Netflix. We have the shared culture, which helps sort of propagate the fact that we have a meme that’s sort of ubiquitous, at least in the Western hemisphere.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What was so appealing about the rickroll? Like, why did that work so well?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Coming out of the 90s, there was a little bit of this 80s nostalgia, which we see building up in which now we see huge 80s nostalgia. There’s this sort of absurdity of the 80s era and its music that sort of plays into the absurdity of this internet prank, essentially.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And no other bait-and-switch meme from that early YouTube era took off the same way. There was the Trololo guy.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Singing]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s a clip of a Russian singer performing in the 70s. There was also You’ve Been Gnomed.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of animated gnome character]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gnot a gnelf!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m gnot a gnoblin! \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’m a gnome!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which was this video of an animated gnome laughing at the viewer while text flashes across the screen. It says, predictably…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of animated gnome character] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And you’ve been gnomed!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Both of these memes functioned like a rickroll. You click a link expecting one thing and, instead, you get another. But there was a historical framework for rickrolling. It was a huge 80s bop coming back around. The other memes lacked that, so they didn’t have the same cultural impact as rickrolling. By the early 2010s, a new challenger had arisen. This underlying media, as Bret put it, was ripe with meme material. Let’s talk about \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what makes a good bait-and-switch meme? What makes that prank work so well? Obviously, we’re opening a new tab: \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and meme dada-ism. Memes were getting weirder, more absurd, and few memes defined the 2010s like \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Barry: How should I start it? You like jazz? No, that’s no good. Here she comes. Speak, you fool!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of Jerry Seinfeld on the Tonight Show]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jerry Seinfeld: The bee seemed to have a thing for the girl. \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jimmy Fallon: Yeah \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jerry Seinfeld: And we don’t really want to pursue that as an idea in children’s entertainment.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That was Jerry Seinfeld on The Tonight Show, acknowledging the taboo interspecies romantic undertones in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. Spike Feresten, the screenwriter who co-wrote the movie, got a kick out of writing the pairing.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s a funny anecdote from the room: so we were writing this in New York. You know, I was, I was doing a show in LA, but I would fly, you know, to New York every couple of weeks and we’d sit in this big room, Jerry’s office, and work on this. And to us, these characters were just two characters, it was just Barry and Vanessa. And then every once in a while we’d go, hey, that Barry’s a bee. He’s this big. So when you say they shake hands or they walk, you can’t, we can’t keep treating them like two characters who are friends, like Jerry and Elaine, which is kind of how we treated them. We were writing them like Jerry and Elaine forgetting about the size disparity and the species disparity. Yeah, and that’s kind of why it came out the way it came out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The romance is just one of many absurd plot lines in the movie. Like, we’ve got bees going to human court to sue humanity for the exploitation of their labor. But the movie was way too ahead of its time. Critics hated it. It was marketed as a kids’ movie. And instead, it was this story about freeing the bees and seizing the means of production of honey and also toeing the line of bee-stiality. But that’s why it was such good meme material. Here’s Bret Strauch again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">People, when they originally went to see the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, were expecting a kid’s Bug’s Life or Ants movie, and they got something much more serious. And so in a way, like the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> is a bait and switch by itself. The trailers are selling it as sort of like a kid’s movie, but really there’s a lot more adult oriented content that people were not expecting. And so the fact that it sort of functioned as a bait-and-switch by itself made sense that people started using it as just a way to troll people.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tumblr latched onto the movie starting in 2011, fawning over the film’s poetic opening lines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio clip from Bee Movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Narrator: According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tumblr users were totally sincere about it, calling the lines inspirational. By 2013, the meme exploded. People were starting to realize how absurd the movie really was. Screenshots from the film became reaction memes. Edits of Seinfeld but with characters from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> went super viral. And then there’s the fan fiction, which is still going today. I told Spike about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, there is a real moment on Tumblr with people kind of sincerely appreciating the dialog in \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and the narration. Then people kind-of ironically started posting the memes, which I’m sure you’ve seen. It broke containment, moved to Twitter, and then it reached the peak of virality, which is sexy fan fiction.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, it did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, I’m sorry I’m breaking this to you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t know about that. This is good.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, I am just going to read you a few tags from Archive of Our Own, from \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> fanfics that were written this like this year.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The tags include Vanessa X Barry, typical, Mega Mind X Barry Benson, Top Barry -Bottom Mega Mind, inter-species relationships, hive worship, and improper use of honey drizzler.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Laughter\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What do you make of the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> smut?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, smut is a funny, funny word to use from the 50s: smut. Um, it, it kind of plays into what I would love to do. I mean, like, hypothetically, and this will never happen, but I want to do, uh, six sequels to \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> all as a series on Netflix or wherever, 40 minutes apiece, Bee 2, Bee 3, Bee 4 , Bee 5, Bee 6, Bee 7. A lot of time has gone by and we’re going to do our six sequels now. What you just described is one of the areas I really want to dive into, which is that relationship, not the smut, but the fun you could have with a bee dating a woman. I think there’s a lot of comedy there and I think the world has changed and I think you could write that in a way that’s not smut but it also kind of celebrates what the world has done with this and, you know, I don’t think we would go as far as South Park, but kind of do our version of maybe a South Parkian take on \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, because I love their relationship. I love that friendship. And I wonder what those conversations would be like should they explore the idea of dating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. I mean, look, if you ever need a writer’s room, there’s a bunch of people in Archive of Our Own who have already written some scenarios.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think that’s cool. No, that’s great. I mean, like any other stuff, you know, you put it out into the world and the world can do with it what it wants. That’s what’s nice about it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2013, a Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else’s Facebook wall. That was the start of the bait-and-switch\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. For the next few years, you might unwittingly open a link to a comment or post only for your phone to freeze and crash because it’s trying to load the entire \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. It was like a more devious Rickroll. It wreaked havoc across the internet. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Group chats were bombarded with the 9,000-word wall of text. Any email with an urgent subject line could just contain the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. It even moved offline. One college student pranked his classmates by spending 12 hours writing out the entire script on a chalkboard. The coolest kids in 2016 wore T-shirts printed with the entire strip. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meme did eventually slow down though. Phones got better and became capable of loading the whole script. Like rickrolling, surprising your friends with 131 pages of dialogue got old. But then the script was weaponized, again, as a form of protest. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In 2021, Texas passed the Heartbeat Act, which effectively banned abortion after six weeks. The law allowed anyone to sue abortion providers and individuals who sought abortions after the six-week limit. The organization, Texas Right to Life, set up an anonymous tip site to report anyone who violated the Heart Beat Act. To protest TikTok users spammed the site with Shrek porn, lurid fan fiction, and the one and only \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script. Protesters did it again when Missouri opened an online forum to report clinics that provide gender-affirming care. And then, again, when Indiana’s attorney general launched a forum to support schools that teach gender ideology. And then again, when the Trump administration partnered with a far-right group to report schools that had DEI efforts. Any time the government or an organization working with it opens some kind of citizen surveillance tool, it’s a target for \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script dumps. Spike and other \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> writers are big fans of this practice.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh, we love it, absolutely love it. It gets passed around, you know, that it’s doing something good for the world, it always makes you feel good. And that we don’t have to be any part of it, that someone’s taking it and just disrupting, like I said, dropping an absurdity bomb on some bad cause. That just makes you feel good. Do it as much as you want. If I can help you, I will help in whatever way, but you’re doing a fine job by yourself.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s funny because back in 2017, for the 10-year anniversary of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, New York Mag wrote this extensive history of the meme and traced the rise and fall of it. And back then, it was like, okay, there was a good year of no \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> memes. And they questioned whether the meme was dead. That was almost 10 years ago. And the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script keeps coming back. The meme has evolved so much, but the core of it is still the script, the dialogue. Why do you think it survives?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think it’s the writing. I think its the weirdness. You know, it’s funny. That movie was out of sync with culture in 2006 and I think still is out of synch with kind of cultural norms in a way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">uh bee- human, you know…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah, I know, but it’s still kind of hard to wrap your head around that. You know what I mean? I mean i don’t think anybody really thinks about dating a bee, so I don’t think there has been… and we like bees. To us, the bees are, you know, when you think about the planet, keeping the planet healthy, the bees are one of our canaries in the coal mine, if you will, like, how the bee is doing? I don’t know if you do this, but when you see a bee, kind of, dying on the sidewalk, don’t you get nervous. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Oh yeah I’m like, let me help it, yeah.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, is this global warming? What is doing this? So we have this special reverence for this insect that stings us occasionally, but still we like them a lot because they make this very sweet, gooey substance that we enjoy putting in our teas. But again, it’s not for me or us to say, it’s you’d have to ask the people who love this movie what they love about it. We’re just the people that put it out.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script is the gift that keeps on giving. But other bait-and-switch memes have also blown up. And unlike the trusty rickroll or the evergreen \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, this new generation of internet pranks blow up fast and burn out quickly. They don’t last. Let’s get into that in one last tab: the short form vertical video revolution. Before the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script was weaponized for protest the way that it is today, it had kind of peaked by 2016. And a slew of bait-and-switch memes cycled in and out of relevance. The primary force behind this rapid-fire meme lifespan? TikTok. In 2020, we had Get Stick Bugged. Watching a Minecraft compilation? Surprise, it cuts to a clip of a dancing stick bug.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Funky music playing\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But that fizzled out by the end of the year. In 2022, TikTok users lured viewers in with videos about juicy celebrity gossip. And then…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio from Moulin Rouge movie] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Gitchi Gitchi ya ya da da\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…you got krissed! It’s a clip of Kris Jenner shimmying in this sequined shirt and bow tie set to a sped up version of “Lady Marmalade” from Moulin Rouge. The Cut said that “getting krissed” is the natural evolution of rickrolling. And then in 2023, we had the Josh Hutcherson whistle edits. Here’s one of my favorite ones. It’s video from inside a plane. The caption says, “Guys, the view is incredible!” The video pans to the closed window, and a hand reaches out to open the shade. And then…[music playing] The view through the window is just a closeup of Josh Hutcherson’s face from a 2014 fan edit set to a cover of Flo Rida’s “Whistle.” Polygon said that this trend was TikTok’s rickroll. And then at the end of last year, another rickroll successor blew up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “We Are Charlie Kirk Song”] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are Charlie Kirk, we carry…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That is an AI-generated ballad about Charlie Kirk, which was first posted to YouTube and streaming platforms days after his death. It’s total AI slop, but unfortunately, very catchy. Like the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script, it went viral at first out of sincerity. People listened to it as a tribute to Charlie Kirk. And then it became a meme. We’re talking remixes, Mongolian throat singing covers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip of “We Are Charlie Kirk Song”] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. We fight for the…\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And of course, pranks, like connecting to public bluetooth speakers and blasting cowbell dance remixes of “We Are Charlie Kirk.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio of “We Are Charlie Kirk” playing over loud speaker]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Here’s Bret’s take.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">All of them, it’s clear that there’s some sort of musical component people can latch onto and all the music itself is sort of absurd or ridiculous in a way. Whether it’s been altered and sped up like the we-are-krissed” or just sort of that funky beat that you’ve-been-stick-bugged has, especially like with the “We are Charlie Kirk.” There’s more levels of absurdity being that it was AI written. So this pathos is literally being manufactured. It’s not something that’s like, necessarily human-generated like emotion being generated, and so it just makes it rife for this type of inversion or subversion.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Yeah. We just speed ran so many trends, and none of them really lasted more than six months. Maybe the Charlie Kirk one will last longer because of the current state of the world, but generally, why is the turnover rate for memes so high now?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I think there’s a few reasons for this. The first is just the media context and media environment. We’re not sharing the same stuff that we did as a culture. It’s much more small niche cultures where these things are spreading. Another element to this that I believe is important is that it’s easier to create these than it was 15, 20 years ago. And so now more are being created. And so they’re essentially eating themselves out of existence. Um, so as soon as a new mean comes out, um, at least in the early mid 2000s, it stuck around because it took a little bit more technological know-how. You didn’t have the production software and access to it that you do now.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I noticed that almost all bait-and-switch meme trends are on TikTok now, maybe Reels. But no one is pulling off a rickroll with YouTube anymore. I saw a video of someone rickrolling their friend by sending a TikTok link, which me makes me wonder, did YouTube ads ruin the rickroll? Kind of spoils the surprise.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, YouTube ads ruin everything. For humor to work, timing is critical, right? And so those ads really disrupt like the genre of humor that’s happening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Would the original rickroll work with modern content consumption habits? When we consume content, it’s a lot of times happening passively to us, algorithmically served, instead of us like actively seeking it out or actually clicking links.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I don’t think so. We need that interaction, I think, for the rickroll to be successful. And it feels like at least it was another person presenting this to us. And now it’s sort of the algorithm is serving it up to a plate on us and we’re not finding these things. And so I think what makes a lot of media content special, whether it’s memes, movies, songs, is it’s stuff that we find, not that someone else or something else finds for us. And so… innately, there’s going to be less meaning for a lot of that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meme turnover rate is so high that no internet prank really sticks around long enough to rival or recreate the magic of the rickroll. The very format of the rickroll is limiting, especially in today’s digital landscape. Even rickrolling itself is difficult to pull off today because internet habits have changed. But what has endured as a prank is the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">script. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I have this take and it’s that the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script is the ultimate bait-and-switch because it’s purely text. There’s no image macro, there’s no video lead-in with ads or that you have to wait to load to ruin the prank. The joke itself is so malleable. It can be dumped in comment sections, in government tip lines or turned into an image macro and then deep fried, or just read by that TikTok AI voice in 2X speed, which makes it funnier. Do you have any thoughts on this, the flexibility of this meme?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bret Strauch: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Well, that’s why I think we see certain memes that at least are being iterated and changed upon more, and some that don’t seem to change as much. And so with it being all text, it’s really easy to adapt all text to different formats. I think my favorite of the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> script ones is where they do the crawl from Star Wars, and we get the intro to the \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">. And so the easier that it is to manipulate that initial form of media, like, so text is super easy, makes it much easier to put it into different places, different platforms and distribute it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> came out nearly 20 years ago. Script dumping started in 2013. Last year, 12 years after that Facebook user posted the entire script on someone else’s wall, the DOGE-led government HR email was pelted with \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> scripts. At the request of Elon Musk, all federal employees were asked to email the Office of Personnel Management with five tasks they accomplished that week. On x, Musk posted, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” The email leaked online, and internet users responded on behalf of federal employees with pages and pages of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bee Movie\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> dialog. Spike was thrilled.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Spike Feresten: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s pretty exciting that anybody’s even talking about it. Really! I mean, you have to look at it, we look at that way. I think that people are still talking about this movie from what 2006 that we made, you know, in that way and that it, that it has these second and third lives. You know, we get excited that people still watching that movie and enjoying it. Like, it’s flattering. That’s the only way to really put it that this movie hasn’t been forgotten. It hasn’t disappeared into a canyon of content and gone forever, that it comes up over and over again in generally a good way. And, you know, if people are making fun of it, that’s fine, too. That’s what we do. We make fun of things you can make fun of us. Go ahead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You heard Spike, go forth and prank. Let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva, additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer, audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches. Okay, and I know it’s a podcast cliche, but if you like these deep dives and want us to keep making more, it would really help us out if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Email us at closealltabs@kqed.org. Follow us on Instagram @CloseAllTabsPod or TikTok @CloseallTabs. And join our Discord. We’re in the Close All tabs channel at discord.gg/kqed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "to-hack-a-tractor-how-farmers-won-the-right-to-repair",
"title": "To Hack a Tractor: How Farmers Won the Right to Repair",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What do pissed off farmers and broken McFlurry machines have to do with each other? More than you’d think. Both are part of the story behind the modern right-to-repair movement. In this episode, Jason Koebler, tech journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, explains how an unlikely alliance between Midwestern farmers and electronics repair technicians helped win right-to repair-protections across multiple states — and why the farmers’ fight to fix their own tractors is far from over. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7702059355\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/author/jason-koebler/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason Koebler\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, tech journalist and co-founder of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">404 Media\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/it-is-now-legal-to-hack-mcflurry-machines-and-medical-devices-to-fix-them/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">404 Media \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-john-deeres-tractor-repair-monopoly/\">The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://civileats.com/2026/02/05/epa-affirms-farmers-right-to-repair/\">EPA Affirms Farmers’ Right to Repair \u003c/a>\u003ci>—\u003c/i> Lisa Held\u003ci>, \u003ci>Civil Eats\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/latest-repair-battlefield-iowa-farmlands-again/\">The Latest Repair Battlefield Is the Iowa Farmlands—Again\u003c/a> — Boone Ashworth, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Wired \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyright-law-to-keep-you-from-tinkering-with-your-tractor/\">How John Deere hijacked copyright law to keep you from tinkering with your tractor\u003c/a> — Luke Hogg, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Reason Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/tractor-hacking-right-to-repair/\">Tractor-Hacking Farmers Are Leading a Revolt Against Big Tech’s Repair Monopolies\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Vice\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Vice\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’ve ever tried to order a McFlurry at McDonald’s and couldn’t get one, you’re not alone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s this kind of meme where if you want a McFlurry, you have maybe like a 50% chance of trying to order it and the cashier saying that the machine is broken.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason Kabler is a tech journalist and co-founder of 404Media. That’s the worker-owned independent tech publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it became this kind of like nationwide phenomenon where people were trying to order McFlurries and basically half the time they couldn’t get them. There was this guy who created a McFlurry tracker that would track like the thousands of McDonald’s locations that didn’t have McFlurries at any given moment.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s called McBroken.com, and it shows up as an interactive map of McDonald’s locations all over the world. If a store has a working ice cream machine, it gets a green dot. If its machine is down, that’s a red dot. When the McFlurry tracker launched in 2020, the US was scattered with red dots.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And sort of like as this cult item, people got like really frustrated with this state of affairs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Conspiracy theories started spreading about why the McFlurry machines were always broken.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@filspixel] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You are not ready for how diabolical the McFlurry conspiracy rabbit hole really is.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@iancarrollshow] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am talking about the McDonald’s ice cream conspiracy, and oh boy is it bigger and more sinister than you might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@mariannenafsu] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rumor has it that the machine isn’t always broke. It just needs cleaning.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That last one is actually the closest to the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The franchises that I spoke to, they were like, we know how to clean the machine. We just don’t know how to reset it so that it actually works again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You see, only an authorized repair tech from the company that made the machines could get them running again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Essentially what was happening was you just needed to reset the McFlurry machine. Like there was a series of buttons that you needed to hit, uh, like a code that you need to enter and it would go into this, like refresh mode. And it’s not that it was like so difficult to repair the McFlurry machines. It’s just that the franchises didn’t have this code.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Only the authorized repair techs had the code, but there weren’t nearly enough of them to repair all of the machines. So the employees were stuck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They would have to wait a long time to actually get their machines repaired. And then you multiply that by all the McDonald’s in the United States and you get a situation where like McFlurry machines are broken all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then something happened that was kind of surprising.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what happened was folks in the right to repair movement, they basically argued to the federal government that it should be legal to bypass this artificial password slash code that was preventing McDonald’s franchises from fixing and resetting their machines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Right to Repair is a consumer rights movement that advocates for people’s ability to repair and maintain their own things.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they actually won, and now it’s legal to hack your McFlurry machine in order to repair it. I think they’re still broken more often than people would like, but for the most part, it’s like a better state of affairs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time of writing this narration, McBroken.com reports that roughly 9% of the world’s McFlurry machines are broken. Still a lot of red dots, but way down from before. Okay, but this episode isn’t just about McFlurries. McDonald’s employees getting the ability to maintain their own equipment is part of a much bigger story, the Right-to-Repair movement. We’ve been diving into this movement over the last few weeks. We’ve looked into DIY vape modders and the legal fights over electronic repairs, like fixing laptops. And here’s the interesting part. Jason says that a lot of the Right-to-Repair protection we have now exists because of farmers who’ve been fighting for this for more than a decade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s actually a pretty direct line, like basically the problem that McDonald’s franchises have had fixing McFlurry machines, farmers have had fixing their John Deere tractors, their combines, their harvesters, like all sorts of different farm equipment. And farmers got very pissed and they essentially joined the Right-to-Repair movement where they were basically saying like, it’s a political movement to essentially like, free the tractors from this tyranny.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re getting into a relatively unknown piece of Right-to-Repair history: the world of farmers, gray market tractor hacking, and an unlikely alliance with DIY repair nerds, a partnership responsible for many of the right to prepare protections we have today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As usual, we’re starting with a new tab, Farmers and the Right-to-Repair. Jason has been covering the right to repair for almost a decade. And like many who get interested in the movement, his story begins with a mishap.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I had a MacBook and I got drunk one night. I was watching a comedy special or something and I fell asleep. And I woke up and I kicked the laptop off of my bed. It landed like face down on the screen and the LCD broke. Like actual glass didn’t break but the LCD behind it broke. And I was, I don’t know, like 21 years old. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had kind of just bought this MacBook and I needed to get it fixed. It had like, you know, a rainbow screen. I couldn’t see anything on it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Jason took his broken MacBook to the Apple Store, and guess what they quoted him to fix this $1,000 laptop, $800!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I didn’t have $800 at the time, so I just started Googling, like, how to fix MacBook. And I came across this website called iFixit, which is this community of people who create repair guides. And I saw that with a simple, like 65-step process or something, like a really long process that it was possible to fix the problem that I had, and I just needed to find the part. And so, I went on eBay. And I found the LCD screen for my MacBook and I’ve found one for $50.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He ordered the part and a couple tools and spent a long night painstakingly replacing the screen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Disconnecting little tiny wires and like unscrewing tiny little screws and losing the screws and then finding them again By the end I had fully fixed my computer and I used that computer for like six more years and it worked, no problem. And the total cost to me was like, I don’t know 70 bucks with the parts in the, you know, the screen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">and the sleepless night.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The sleepless night for sure. It awakened something in me where I was like, huh, why did Apple want $800 to do this? Maybe because it was so hard for me to fix it, but I did fix it nonetheless. And so I started looking into this and started learning that this is actually like the business model of a lot of electronics companies where they’ll sell you the gadget, but then when it breaks, the repair cost is so high or so inaccessible that you’ll either just buy a new one or you’ll pay them to repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a common theme. A lot of people we spoke to described a moment when they started asking why things were so hard to repair. And once they noticed, they couldn’t unsee it. So Jason started reporting on the Right-to-Repair, mostly covering the obstacles in fixing consumer tech, iPhones, laptops, that kind of thing. He also went to repair conventions and profiled some of the leaders of the movement. He became the reporter on the Repair Beat at Vice, where he worked at the time. And then one day, a few years in, he got an email from a farmer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Saying, hey, like, you’re writing about this problem of fixing MacBooks, but we are facing the exact same problem in agriculture. And it’s pretty crazy because tractors cost upwards of $100,000, sometimes they cost like half a million dollars. Like we’re not talking about a $1,000 MacBook. We’re talking about something that is core to someone’s livelihood, is really time sensitive because if a tractor breaks while you’re trying to plant during these really tight planting windows, or if you’re tryin’ to harvest during these tight harvest windows, the crops will just over-ripen and die. And so they were like, this is really critical, but we’re facing the exact same thing. Like, John Deere is controlling all of the repairs. We can’t get the parts. It’s really expensive. We have to wait sometimes for days or weeks, depending on how busy the repair people are. You should come to Nebraska and see what we do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so he did. And it was there that Jason learned about the underground community of farmers trading pirated software so they could hack their tractors. Not for any crazy mods, but just to get them to run. Next, we head to Nebraska after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Ready for a quick trip to the Corn Belt? Let’s open a new tab: The tractor hacking problem. So Jason Kepler was reporting for Vice at the time, covering the right to repair movement when a farmer reached out and invited him to Nebraska. He spent a few days there and met with multiple farmers who all had the same issue with their tractors.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What has happened is for decades and decades and decades, farmers have considered themselves to be incredibly self-sufficient. When something breaks, like they know how to change the oil, they know to change different sensors, they know change different parts on their tractors. That hasn’t necessarily changed, but what changed is that John Deere, which is the most popular tractor manufacturer in the country, has started adding these technical protection measures to tractors So it’s not that there’s like, anything wrong with the replacement parts, or that it’s now that the farmers don’t know how to do these repairs. It’s that there is just like an artificial code that they need in order to make it talk to the tractor that they have.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound familiar? It’s the McFlurry machine debacle all over again. These protection measures are like digital locks put in place by copyright holders. They’re used in digital games, or ebooks, or tractor software. Getting around them could be considered copyright infringement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And a lot of them are sort of legacy farmers where their dad was a farmer, their grandma was a farmer on that same land. And for decades, it was like, well, my dad fixed the tractor, like, why can’t I fix the tractor anymore? And I think that not being able to do that makes them feel disempowered and like they don’t own their farm anymore. Like, the success of their farm has been outsourced to John Deere or like a major ag tech company.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not getting a McFlurry because McDonald’s employees don’t have the digital key to reset the machines, annoying. But not having the key for farm equipment during the peak of harvesting season, financially devastating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They used to do this repair all the time before tractors were so computerized. It’s the same general process. They do it, it won’t turn on. They have to call a John Deere dealer or authorized repair person. They’re told to wait a day or two days or a week. And all that time, they’re losing money. And these farms run on such small margins already. So they’re mad and they’re like, my crops are dying, what can I do? And so they just start Googling around. And one farmer told me basically that he learned that because of some European Union law, the Ukrainian version of this software was available and also could work with the American version of a John Deere tractor. And so we pulled up to this farm and he met us with a laptop, like a really old like, ThinkPad and he had this…he had like a USB dongle that was like a USB dongle to like, a tractor port dongle…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What?!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…that basically is like connected to the computer of the tractor.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason wanted to see it himself. The farmer told him that you could download the software from a torrent site, aptly named the Pirate Bay. Or you could try to join a web forum, which on its surface was about car repair and modification. Jason did the latter. He found one and after he requested entry, he got an email with a link to a third party website. On that website, he had to buy a $25 car diagnostic tool. But they didn’t ship him the tool he purchased. Instead, they sent him a password to join the forum.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then on there, there was like all of these threads about different versions of John Deere software that you could download and how to use it and like all these guides and things like that. And so it was just like a few farmers who were really fed up and they like learned that this was possible. They went into these modification forums, like, it’s really affiliated with people who like modify their cars to, you know, make them run faster or like overclock the engine, like that sort of thing. It’s like, that was some of the other stuff that was happening on this forum. And then there was like a whole separate section where it was like agricultural equipment. It was like how to like make your Mustang go faster or like how to replace an air intake sensor in your John Deere tractor.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The forums had all this software that you could download and sold the cables, that dongle that Jason mentioned, to connect a tractor to a computer. The farmer showed Jason how it worked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He, like, opened his laptop, connected the laptop to his tractor, and he ran the program and then was able to like activate the part that he was showing me, which was some sort of like, emission sensor or something like that. And it was really crazy because I had actually just spent a day with another farmer who didn’t have this dongle and didn’t have this software and he was trying to fix the exact same thing. And he’s like, look, I can’t, like I’ve put the new part in, but I can activate it. It just, now my tractor won’t turn on, it doesn’t work. It was like, well, this guy has figured it out somehow.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tractor hacking was full of legal landmines. The software was technically pirated, which raised all these questions around copyright and licensing agreements. Farmers started speaking out and connecting with people from totally different industries facing similar issues. And so, an unlikely alliance was born between legacy farmers and tech repair DIYers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Time for a new tab: Big tractor versus farmers and tech nerds? So farmers had actually found a way to keep their equipment running, but it wasn’t exactly on the up and up. And there was always the chance that John Deere would implement a fix to foil these hacking attempts, and the farmers would be back at square one. To find a permanent solution, they needed help.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They eventually got connected to groups like iFixit and some of these other electronics repair people who had already been talking about this problem in electronics and realizing that it was the same problem for farmers as well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the most outspoken advocates for farmers actually has roots in the tech world, Kyle Wiens, the co-founder and CEO of the repair community, iFixit. Kyle’s background is in computer programming, but then a friend asked him for help bypassing his tractor’s sensor issue. Both Kyle, a software engineer and repair expert, and his farmer friend, a pretty adept DIYer, were stumped. They started lurking in agriculture forums and realized that this was actually a very common issue in the tech world and in farming. Kyle wrote about this whole experience in Wired in 2015, advocating for a copyright exemption for farmers to fix their equipment. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, buckle up. We’re about to dive into copyright law. So, in 1998, the US passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It basically modernized copyright law for the digital age. There’s one part of the DMCA that matters for our story, section 1201. It governs technical access to all kinds of machines, like the McFlurry machine or tractors. The software lock on McFlurry machines is allowed to exist because of section 1201. But there are also exemptions to this law, rules that decide who gets to bypass these software locks and how. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every three years, the Librarian of Congress revisits these exemptions. And every three years, Right-to-Repair advocates have pushed to expand them. In 2015, iFixit and other digital rights groups successfully won an exemption for land vehicles. That exemption allows owners to modify their vehicles’ computer programs, as long as it’s for legal repair, this includes tractors. And though that sounds promising, the reality was still extremely thorny. For instance, was it legal to pirate software for repair? Unclear. Plus, third party hacking, AKA taking the tractor to a local repair shop, was still super illegal. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then there is this other sneaky part of it, licensing agreements. Around the time the copyright office approved the land vehicle exemption, John Deere started requiring farmers to sign contracts promising that they wouldn’t modify their tractor software. So hacking your own tractor, even to fix it, could get you sued for breach of contract. Hacking someone else’s, even as a repair tech, could get your arrested for copyright infringement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve watched many hearings at state houses where a farmer will go up and they’ll talk about this problem and then a lobbyist for John Deere or for an industry group will say, okay, but if you give farmers access to this stuff, they might modify their tractors in a way that makes them unsafe. They might modify them in a way that causes them to fail emissions tests. And for the first few years, this argument was really persuasive to lawmakers who didn’t really understand the problem. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then there was just so much, kind of, momentum behind this problem. Like, it became worse and worse and worse over the years as older tractors started getting phased out and farmers started buying more computerized tractors and more people started having this problem. It became like a much stronger political movement and over the last few years there’s been quite a lot of gains for farmers, both through negotiated agreements with John Deere, but then also through state-level legislation that has passed that does enshrine some of these Right-to-Repair ideals.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So each exemption cycle, the Right-to-Repair movement makes some progress and the impact snowballed. The 2018 exemptions allow third-party repair technicians to bypass the digital locks for land vehicles, like tractors, which means that repair techs are also allowed to hack tractors now, for repair, of course. In 2021, the land vehicle exemption was expanded to cover all consumer electronics, like smartphones and TVs. And then in 2024, it expanded again, this time for food preparation equipment. That’s right, I’m talking about the McFlurry machine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[News clip fron FOX4 Dallas-Fort Worth]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For the first time ever McDonald’s store operators are now allowed to fix their own ice cream machines! Can you believe it?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But when it comes to tractors, it’s still very much illegal to make and distribute the software that breaks these digital locks. And it’s also still technically illegal to buy the tools that you need for tractor hacking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it’s like really complicated. It’s like the concept is so simple. It’s, like, the farmers just want to be able to fix their tractors. But then the actual details of it are incredibly complicated in terms of what they can fix, when they can fix it, how they can fix it which software they need, where they can get that software, which parts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">John Deere hasn’t made it any easier either. Let’s get into that in one last tab: can farmers finally fix their tractors?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The answer is that they can do more than they could do when I first started covering this. But what’s happened is John Deere has made some repairs accessible and some parts accessible, but some parts are still not. And as farming gets more high tech, it’s called precision agriculture. Like, a lot of tractors now essentially drive themselves. They’re guided by like GPS and cameras and all these sensors. There are increasingly things that are still not able to be fixed by the average farmer. But by and large, the situation is better now. It is legal to hack a tractor now. And when I say it’s legal to track a tractor, it is legal to hack your own tractor to fix your own tracker. It’s not legal to like, hack your tractor and make it drive a hundred miles an hour. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right now it’s a situation where, kind of like, the devil is in the details where farmers still want more. And I think they also want better protections because a lot of what’s happening right now is John Deere is, kind of, voluntarily saying, okay, you can fix these things and we can decide what you can fix. And the farmers want it enshrined in law saying, no, anything that your dealer can fix, we should also be able to fix essentially. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A lot of farmers also, I’ve heard from, they’ll go to buy a part that they need to fix their tractor and it just won’t be in stock. And so the dealer that sells them will not say like, you can’t have this part. They’ll just say, oh, we don’t have it and it’s on backorder. And maybe it’s backorder for months. And so like functionally, they are not able to access the parts that they should be able to access just because there’s not anything in the legislation that says these companies have to sell you parts and they also have to have them in stock at all times. And so compliance is a really big problem. And then also just like what’s the enforcement gonna be because very often the penalties are like a slap on the wrist if that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So although seven states now have right to repair laws, only two of them have laws that cover farm equipment. So how does that complicate the issue for farmers who started this movement? What is the state of fixing their tractors like for them?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The fact that only some states have passed this legislation actually complicates things for everyone, not just farmers. It complicates things for John Deere as well, because you’re a big company, like, companies generally don’t like regulations. But if there are gonna be regulations, they want the regulations to be the same everywhere so that they don’t have to comply with 50 different laws in 50 different states. And if you’re farmer, it’s like, well, you want the same rights that someone in another state might have. And so it has created a bit of a patchwork system. That said, the fact that there is right to repair legislation in some states has made things better for all farmers because it’s not like John Deere can sell a part in one state and prevent that part from traveling to another state. And it can’t like, release a repair guide in one state and not have that repair guide be shared over the internet. And so what’s happened is like the fact that some of these states have passed laws has made the situation a lot better for everyone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The right to repair is an issue internationally, but these roadblocks are especially prevalent in the U.S. Jason said that other countries either have stronger consumer protection laws, a more widespread culture of DIY repair, or they don’t enforce copyright laws as strictly. That’s why farmers depended on pirated Ukrainian software for tractor hacking. So the Right-to-Repair movement isn’t uniquely American. But what is unique about it, for Americans, is that it’s a political movement that both sides can agree on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right-to-Repair is one of the few things that I’ve ever covered as a journalist where there is like very broad bipartisan support. Like this is not a Republican issue, it’s not a Democratic issue. It is like, everyone is pissed about this. It’s like, a lot of the farmers I spoke to are like, you know, pretty like, very conservative, not all, but a lot of them are very conservative. A lot of the electronics repair people are very liberal. They’re facing the exact same issue. And this is something that they’ve been able to find common ground on. And there’s only been like a few polls about Right-to Repair that I’ve seen, but it’s an issue where like 90% of Americans agree that this is an ideal worth fighting for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the last few days of Joe Biden’s presidency, former FTC chair Lena Kahn filed an antitrust lawsuit against John Deere. When Trump took office, the second time, his administration dismantled a lot of Lena Kahan’s antitrust efforts. But they decided to keep pursuing the lawsuit against John Deere. That’s how bipartisan this is. This is an issue that affects everyone, legacy farmers and tech DIYers alike. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I, for one, am beefing with the company that makes my fridge. The sensor on the ice dispenser is broken, but the company doesn’t sell that. They have to replace the entire fridge door. The door is backordered and hasn’t been in stock all year. And once it is in stock, I’ll probably have to wait for an authorized repair tech to come by and install it. So now I have this fridge that has all these cool app controlled features, but I’m still manually filling the ice tray. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I didn’t even want a smart fridge in the first place, but I didn’t have a choice because my apartment building already had an exclusive contract with the company that makes it. According to Reddit and the many repair guides I found online, I could probably replace the sensor myself. However, doing that might violate my lease. So I’m back to using old-fashioned ice trays. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Right-to-Repair is a constant fight. Companies love malicious compliance. You know, doing things that are technically legal but still unproductive. Some advocates are pushing to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA altogether, or at least reform it so that the exemption process for software locks is less cumbersome. At least things are starting to look up for farmers. John Deere had argued that the FTC lawsuit should be thrown out, but last year, a judge ruled that it can and should move forward. Equipment manufacturers, like John Deere, have long argued that they limit independent repair to comply with emissions regulations in the Clean Air Act. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Last month, the EPA issued new guidance that said that, actually, they aren’t allowed to do that. The Clean Air Act can’t be used to stop farmers from fixing their own stuff. And then, also last month, lawmakers in Iowa voted to advance a bill that would allow farmers to repair their equipment, including tractors. The big tractor lobby isn’t as strong as it used to be. And every day, people gain a little more of the right to repair tractors and McFlurry machines and everything in between. Okay, now let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi-75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org slash podcasts. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What do pissed off farmers and broken McFlurry machines have to do with each other? More than you’d think. Both are part of the story behind the modern right-to-repair movement. In this episode, Jason Koebler, tech journalist and co-founder at 404 Media, explains how an unlikely alliance between Midwestern farmers and electronics repair technicians helped win right-to repair-protections across multiple states — and why the farmers’ fight to fix their own tractors is far from over. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC7702059355\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/author/jason-koebler/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason Koebler\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, tech journalist and co-founder of \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">404 Media\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/it-is-now-legal-to-hack-mcflurry-machines-and-medical-devices-to-fix-them/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It Is Now Legal to Hack McFlurry Machines (and Medical Devices) to Fix Them\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">404 Media \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.404media.co/the-walls-are-closing-in-on-john-deeres-tractor-repair-monopoly/\">The Walls Are Closing in on John Deere’s Tractor Repair Monopoly\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler, \u003ci>404 Media\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://civileats.com/2026/02/05/epa-affirms-farmers-right-to-repair/\">EPA Affirms Farmers’ Right to Repair \u003c/a>\u003ci>—\u003c/i> Lisa Held\u003ci>, \u003ci>Civil Eats\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/latest-repair-battlefield-iowa-farmlands-again/\">The Latest Repair Battlefield Is the Iowa Farmlands—Again\u003c/a> — Boone Ashworth, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Wired \u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://reason.com/2024/01/08/how-john-deere-hijacked-copyright-law-to-keep-you-from-tinkering-with-your-tractor/\">How John Deere hijacked copyright law to keep you from tinkering with your tractor\u003c/a> — Luke Hogg, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Reason Magazine\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/tractor-hacking-right-to-repair/\">Tractor-Hacking Farmers Are Leading a Revolt Against Big Tech’s Repair Monopolies\u003c/a> — Jason Koebler, \u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>\u003ci>Vice\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/i>\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Jason Koebler, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Vice\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">If you’ve ever tried to order a McFlurry at McDonald’s and couldn’t get one, you’re not alone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">There’s this kind of meme where if you want a McFlurry, you have maybe like a 50% chance of trying to order it and the cashier saying that the machine is broken.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason Kabler is a tech journalist and co-founder of 404Media. That’s the worker-owned independent tech publication.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so it became this kind of like nationwide phenomenon where people were trying to order McFlurries and basically half the time they couldn’t get them. There was this guy who created a McFlurry tracker that would track like the thousands of McDonald’s locations that didn’t have McFlurries at any given moment.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s called McBroken.com, and it shows up as an interactive map of McDonald’s locations all over the world. If a store has a working ice cream machine, it gets a green dot. If its machine is down, that’s a red dot. When the McFlurry tracker launched in 2020, the US was scattered with red dots.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And sort of like as this cult item, people got like really frustrated with this state of affairs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Conspiracy theories started spreading about why the McFlurry machines were always broken.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@filspixel] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You are not ready for how diabolical the McFlurry conspiracy rabbit hole really is.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@iancarrollshow] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I am talking about the McDonald’s ice cream conspiracy, and oh boy is it bigger and more sinister than you might think.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Clip from TikTok user@mariannenafsu] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rumor has it that the machine isn’t always broke. It just needs cleaning.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That last one is actually the closest to the truth.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The franchises that I spoke to, they were like, we know how to clean the machine. We just don’t know how to reset it so that it actually works again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You see, only an authorized repair tech from the company that made the machines could get them running again.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Essentially what was happening was you just needed to reset the McFlurry machine. Like there was a series of buttons that you needed to hit, uh, like a code that you need to enter and it would go into this, like refresh mode. And it’s not that it was like so difficult to repair the McFlurry machines. It’s just that the franchises didn’t have this code.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Only the authorized repair techs had the code, but there weren’t nearly enough of them to repair all of the machines. So the employees were stuck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They would have to wait a long time to actually get their machines repaired. And then you multiply that by all the McDonald’s in the United States and you get a situation where like McFlurry machines are broken all the time.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then something happened that was kind of surprising.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what happened was folks in the right to repair movement, they basically argued to the federal government that it should be legal to bypass this artificial password slash code that was preventing McDonald’s franchises from fixing and resetting their machines.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Right to Repair is a consumer rights movement that advocates for people’s ability to repair and maintain their own things.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And they actually won, and now it’s legal to hack your McFlurry machine in order to repair it. I think they’re still broken more often than people would like, but for the most part, it’s like a better state of affairs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time of writing this narration, McBroken.com reports that roughly 9% of the world’s McFlurry machines are broken. Still a lot of red dots, but way down from before. Okay, but this episode isn’t just about McFlurries. McDonald’s employees getting the ability to maintain their own equipment is part of a much bigger story, the Right-to-Repair movement. We’ve been diving into this movement over the last few weeks. We’ve looked into DIY vape modders and the legal fights over electronic repairs, like fixing laptops. And here’s the interesting part. Jason says that a lot of the Right-to-Repair protection we have now exists because of farmers who’ve been fighting for this for more than a decade.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It’s actually a pretty direct line, like basically the problem that McDonald’s franchises have had fixing McFlurry machines, farmers have had fixing their John Deere tractors, their combines, their harvesters, like all sorts of different farm equipment. And farmers got very pissed and they essentially joined the Right-to-Repair movement where they were basically saying like, it’s a political movement to essentially like, free the tractors from this tyranny.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today, we’re getting into a relatively unknown piece of Right-to-Repair history: the world of farmers, gray market tractor hacking, and an unlikely alliance with DIY repair nerds, a partnership responsible for many of the right to prepare protections we have today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As usual, we’re starting with a new tab, Farmers and the Right-to-Repair. Jason has been covering the right to repair for almost a decade. And like many who get interested in the movement, his story begins with a mishap.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I had a MacBook and I got drunk one night. I was watching a comedy special or something and I fell asleep. And I woke up and I kicked the laptop off of my bed. It landed like face down on the screen and the LCD broke. Like actual glass didn’t break but the LCD behind it broke. And I was, I don’t know, like 21 years old. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had kind of just bought this MacBook and I needed to get it fixed. It had like, you know, a rainbow screen. I couldn’t see anything on it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So Jason took his broken MacBook to the Apple Store, and guess what they quoted him to fix this $1,000 laptop, $800!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I didn’t have $800 at the time, so I just started Googling, like, how to fix MacBook. And I came across this website called iFixit, which is this community of people who create repair guides. And I saw that with a simple, like 65-step process or something, like a really long process that it was possible to fix the problem that I had, and I just needed to find the part. And so, I went on eBay. And I found the LCD screen for my MacBook and I’ve found one for $50.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He ordered the part and a couple tools and spent a long night painstakingly replacing the screen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Disconnecting little tiny wires and like unscrewing tiny little screws and losing the screws and then finding them again By the end I had fully fixed my computer and I used that computer for like six more years and it worked, no problem. And the total cost to me was like, I don’t know 70 bucks with the parts in the, you know, the screen.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">and the sleepless night.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The sleepless night for sure. It awakened something in me where I was like, huh, why did Apple want $800 to do this? Maybe because it was so hard for me to fix it, but I did fix it nonetheless. And so I started looking into this and started learning that this is actually like the business model of a lot of electronics companies where they’ll sell you the gadget, but then when it breaks, the repair cost is so high or so inaccessible that you’ll either just buy a new one or you’ll pay them to repair it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a common theme. A lot of people we spoke to described a moment when they started asking why things were so hard to repair. And once they noticed, they couldn’t unsee it. So Jason started reporting on the Right-to-Repair, mostly covering the obstacles in fixing consumer tech, iPhones, laptops, that kind of thing. He also went to repair conventions and profiled some of the leaders of the movement. He became the reporter on the Repair Beat at Vice, where he worked at the time. And then one day, a few years in, he got an email from a farmer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Saying, hey, like, you’re writing about this problem of fixing MacBooks, but we are facing the exact same problem in agriculture. And it’s pretty crazy because tractors cost upwards of $100,000, sometimes they cost like half a million dollars. Like we’re not talking about a $1,000 MacBook. We’re talking about something that is core to someone’s livelihood, is really time sensitive because if a tractor breaks while you’re trying to plant during these really tight planting windows, or if you’re tryin’ to harvest during these tight harvest windows, the crops will just over-ripen and die. And so they were like, this is really critical, but we’re facing the exact same thing. Like, John Deere is controlling all of the repairs. We can’t get the parts. It’s really expensive. We have to wait sometimes for days or weeks, depending on how busy the repair people are. You should come to Nebraska and see what we do.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And so he did. And it was there that Jason learned about the underground community of farmers trading pirated software so they could hack their tractors. Not for any crazy mods, but just to get them to run. Next, we head to Nebraska after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Welcome back. Ready for a quick trip to the Corn Belt? Let’s open a new tab: The tractor hacking problem. So Jason Kepler was reporting for Vice at the time, covering the right to repair movement when a farmer reached out and invited him to Nebraska. He spent a few days there and met with multiple farmers who all had the same issue with their tractors.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What has happened is for decades and decades and decades, farmers have considered themselves to be incredibly self-sufficient. When something breaks, like they know how to change the oil, they know to change different sensors, they know change different parts on their tractors. That hasn’t necessarily changed, but what changed is that John Deere, which is the most popular tractor manufacturer in the country, has started adding these technical protection measures to tractors So it’s not that there’s like, anything wrong with the replacement parts, or that it’s now that the farmers don’t know how to do these repairs. It’s that there is just like an artificial code that they need in order to make it talk to the tractor that they have.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sound familiar? It’s the McFlurry machine debacle all over again. These protection measures are like digital locks put in place by copyright holders. They’re used in digital games, or ebooks, or tractor software. Getting around them could be considered copyright infringement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And a lot of them are sort of legacy farmers where their dad was a farmer, their grandma was a farmer on that same land. And for decades, it was like, well, my dad fixed the tractor, like, why can’t I fix the tractor anymore? And I think that not being able to do that makes them feel disempowered and like they don’t own their farm anymore. Like, the success of their farm has been outsourced to John Deere or like a major ag tech company.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Not getting a McFlurry because McDonald’s employees don’t have the digital key to reset the machines, annoying. But not having the key for farm equipment during the peak of harvesting season, financially devastating.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They used to do this repair all the time before tractors were so computerized. It’s the same general process. They do it, it won’t turn on. They have to call a John Deere dealer or authorized repair person. They’re told to wait a day or two days or a week. And all that time, they’re losing money. And these farms run on such small margins already. So they’re mad and they’re like, my crops are dying, what can I do? And so they just start Googling around. And one farmer told me basically that he learned that because of some European Union law, the Ukrainian version of this software was available and also could work with the American version of a John Deere tractor. And so we pulled up to this farm and he met us with a laptop, like a really old like, ThinkPad and he had this…he had like a USB dongle that was like a USB dongle to like, a tractor port dongle…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">What?!\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">…that basically is like connected to the computer of the tractor.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Jason wanted to see it himself. The farmer told him that you could download the software from a torrent site, aptly named the Pirate Bay. Or you could try to join a web forum, which on its surface was about car repair and modification. Jason did the latter. He found one and after he requested entry, he got an email with a link to a third party website. On that website, he had to buy a $25 car diagnostic tool. But they didn’t ship him the tool he purchased. Instead, they sent him a password to join the forum.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And then on there, there was like all of these threads about different versions of John Deere software that you could download and how to use it and like all these guides and things like that. And so it was just like a few farmers who were really fed up and they like learned that this was possible. They went into these modification forums, like, it’s really affiliated with people who like modify their cars to, you know, make them run faster or like overclock the engine, like that sort of thing. It’s like, that was some of the other stuff that was happening on this forum. And then there was like a whole separate section where it was like agricultural equipment. It was like how to like make your Mustang go faster or like how to replace an air intake sensor in your John Deere tractor.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The forums had all this software that you could download and sold the cables, that dongle that Jason mentioned, to connect a tractor to a computer. The farmer showed Jason how it worked.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">He, like, opened his laptop, connected the laptop to his tractor, and he ran the program and then was able to like activate the part that he was showing me, which was some sort of like, emission sensor or something like that. And it was really crazy because I had actually just spent a day with another farmer who didn’t have this dongle and didn’t have this software and he was trying to fix the exact same thing. And he’s like, look, I can’t, like I’ve put the new part in, but I can activate it. It just, now my tractor won’t turn on, it doesn’t work. It was like, well, this guy has figured it out somehow.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Tractor hacking was full of legal landmines. The software was technically pirated, which raised all these questions around copyright and licensing agreements. Farmers started speaking out and connecting with people from totally different industries facing similar issues. And so, an unlikely alliance was born between legacy farmers and tech repair DIYers.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Time for a new tab: Big tractor versus farmers and tech nerds? So farmers had actually found a way to keep their equipment running, but it wasn’t exactly on the up and up. And there was always the chance that John Deere would implement a fix to foil these hacking attempts, and the farmers would be back at square one. To find a permanent solution, they needed help.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They eventually got connected to groups like iFixit and some of these other electronics repair people who had already been talking about this problem in electronics and realizing that it was the same problem for farmers as well.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the most outspoken advocates for farmers actually has roots in the tech world, Kyle Wiens, the co-founder and CEO of the repair community, iFixit. Kyle’s background is in computer programming, but then a friend asked him for help bypassing his tractor’s sensor issue. Both Kyle, a software engineer and repair expert, and his farmer friend, a pretty adept DIYer, were stumped. They started lurking in agriculture forums and realized that this was actually a very common issue in the tech world and in farming. Kyle wrote about this whole experience in Wired in 2015, advocating for a copyright exemption for farmers to fix their equipment. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Okay, buckle up. We’re about to dive into copyright law. So, in 1998, the US passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It basically modernized copyright law for the digital age. There’s one part of the DMCA that matters for our story, section 1201. It governs technical access to all kinds of machines, like the McFlurry machine or tractors. The software lock on McFlurry machines is allowed to exist because of section 1201. But there are also exemptions to this law, rules that decide who gets to bypass these software locks and how. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Every three years, the Librarian of Congress revisits these exemptions. And every three years, Right-to-Repair advocates have pushed to expand them. In 2015, iFixit and other digital rights groups successfully won an exemption for land vehicles. That exemption allows owners to modify their vehicles’ computer programs, as long as it’s for legal repair, this includes tractors. And though that sounds promising, the reality was still extremely thorny. For instance, was it legal to pirate software for repair? Unclear. Plus, third party hacking, AKA taking the tractor to a local repair shop, was still super illegal. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Then there is this other sneaky part of it, licensing agreements. Around the time the copyright office approved the land vehicle exemption, John Deere started requiring farmers to sign contracts promising that they wouldn’t modify their tractor software. So hacking your own tractor, even to fix it, could get you sued for breach of contract. Hacking someone else’s, even as a repair tech, could get your arrested for copyright infringement.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I’ve watched many hearings at state houses where a farmer will go up and they’ll talk about this problem and then a lobbyist for John Deere or for an industry group will say, okay, but if you give farmers access to this stuff, they might modify their tractors in a way that makes them unsafe. They might modify them in a way that causes them to fail emissions tests. And for the first few years, this argument was really persuasive to lawmakers who didn’t really understand the problem. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But then there was just so much, kind of, momentum behind this problem. Like, it became worse and worse and worse over the years as older tractors started getting phased out and farmers started buying more computerized tractors and more people started having this problem. It became like a much stronger political movement and over the last few years there’s been quite a lot of gains for farmers, both through negotiated agreements with John Deere, but then also through state-level legislation that has passed that does enshrine some of these Right-to-Repair ideals.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So each exemption cycle, the Right-to-Repair movement makes some progress and the impact snowballed. The 2018 exemptions allow third-party repair technicians to bypass the digital locks for land vehicles, like tractors, which means that repair techs are also allowed to hack tractors now, for repair, of course. In 2021, the land vehicle exemption was expanded to cover all consumer electronics, like smartphones and TVs. And then in 2024, it expanded again, this time for food preparation equipment. That’s right, I’m talking about the McFlurry machine.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[News clip fron FOX4 Dallas-Fort Worth]\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> For the first time ever McDonald’s store operators are now allowed to fix their own ice cream machines! Can you believe it?\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">But when it comes to tractors, it’s still very much illegal to make and distribute the software that breaks these digital locks. And it’s also still technically illegal to buy the tools that you need for tractor hacking.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I mean, it’s like really complicated. It’s like the concept is so simple. It’s, like, the farmers just want to be able to fix their tractors. But then the actual details of it are incredibly complicated in terms of what they can fix, when they can fix it, how they can fix it which software they need, where they can get that software, which parts.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">John Deere hasn’t made it any easier either. Let’s get into that in one last tab: can farmers finally fix their tractors?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The answer is that they can do more than they could do when I first started covering this. But what’s happened is John Deere has made some repairs accessible and some parts accessible, but some parts are still not. And as farming gets more high tech, it’s called precision agriculture. Like, a lot of tractors now essentially drive themselves. They’re guided by like GPS and cameras and all these sensors. There are increasingly things that are still not able to be fixed by the average farmer. But by and large, the situation is better now. It is legal to hack a tractor now. And when I say it’s legal to track a tractor, it is legal to hack your own tractor to fix your own tracker. It’s not legal to like, hack your tractor and make it drive a hundred miles an hour. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right now it’s a situation where, kind of like, the devil is in the details where farmers still want more. And I think they also want better protections because a lot of what’s happening right now is John Deere is, kind of, voluntarily saying, okay, you can fix these things and we can decide what you can fix. And the farmers want it enshrined in law saying, no, anything that your dealer can fix, we should also be able to fix essentially. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A lot of farmers also, I’ve heard from, they’ll go to buy a part that they need to fix their tractor and it just won’t be in stock. And so the dealer that sells them will not say like, you can’t have this part. They’ll just say, oh, we don’t have it and it’s on backorder. And maybe it’s backorder for months. And so like functionally, they are not able to access the parts that they should be able to access just because there’s not anything in the legislation that says these companies have to sell you parts and they also have to have them in stock at all times. And so compliance is a really big problem. And then also just like what’s the enforcement gonna be because very often the penalties are like a slap on the wrist if that.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So although seven states now have right to repair laws, only two of them have laws that cover farm equipment. So how does that complicate the issue for farmers who started this movement? What is the state of fixing their tractors like for them?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The fact that only some states have passed this legislation actually complicates things for everyone, not just farmers. It complicates things for John Deere as well, because you’re a big company, like, companies generally don’t like regulations. But if there are gonna be regulations, they want the regulations to be the same everywhere so that they don’t have to comply with 50 different laws in 50 different states. And if you’re farmer, it’s like, well, you want the same rights that someone in another state might have. And so it has created a bit of a patchwork system. That said, the fact that there is right to repair legislation in some states has made things better for all farmers because it’s not like John Deere can sell a part in one state and prevent that part from traveling to another state. And it can’t like, release a repair guide in one state and not have that repair guide be shared over the internet. And so what’s happened is like the fact that some of these states have passed laws has made the situation a lot better for everyone.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The right to repair is an issue internationally, but these roadblocks are especially prevalent in the U.S. Jason said that other countries either have stronger consumer protection laws, a more widespread culture of DIY repair, or they don’t enforce copyright laws as strictly. That’s why farmers depended on pirated Ukrainian software for tractor hacking. So the Right-to-Repair movement isn’t uniquely American. But what is unique about it, for Americans, is that it’s a political movement that both sides can agree on.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jason Koebler: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Right-to-Repair is one of the few things that I’ve ever covered as a journalist where there is like very broad bipartisan support. Like this is not a Republican issue, it’s not a Democratic issue. It is like, everyone is pissed about this. It’s like, a lot of the farmers I spoke to are like, you know, pretty like, very conservative, not all, but a lot of them are very conservative. A lot of the electronics repair people are very liberal. They’re facing the exact same issue. And this is something that they’ve been able to find common ground on. And there’s only been like a few polls about Right-to Repair that I’ve seen, but it’s an issue where like 90% of Americans agree that this is an ideal worth fighting for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the last few days of Joe Biden’s presidency, former FTC chair Lena Kahn filed an antitrust lawsuit against John Deere. When Trump took office, the second time, his administration dismantled a lot of Lena Kahan’s antitrust efforts. But they decided to keep pursuing the lawsuit against John Deere. That’s how bipartisan this is. This is an issue that affects everyone, legacy farmers and tech DIYers alike. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I, for one, am beefing with the company that makes my fridge. The sensor on the ice dispenser is broken, but the company doesn’t sell that. They have to replace the entire fridge door. The door is backordered and hasn’t been in stock all year. And once it is in stock, I’ll probably have to wait for an authorized repair tech to come by and install it. So now I have this fridge that has all these cool app controlled features, but I’m still manually filling the ice tray. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I didn’t even want a smart fridge in the first place, but I didn’t have a choice because my apartment building already had an exclusive contract with the company that makes it. According to Reddit and the many repair guides I found online, I could probably replace the sensor myself. However, doing that might violate my lease. So I’m back to using old-fashioned ice trays. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Right-to-Repair is a constant fight. Companies love malicious compliance. You know, doing things that are technically legal but still unproductive. Some advocates are pushing to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA altogether, or at least reform it so that the exemption process for software locks is less cumbersome. At least things are starting to look up for farmers. John Deere had argued that the FTC lawsuit should be thrown out, but last year, a judge ruled that it can and should move forward. Equipment manufacturers, like John Deere, have long argued that they limit independent repair to comply with emissions regulations in the Clean Air Act. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Last month, the EPA issued new guidance that said that, actually, they aren’t allowed to do that. The Clean Air Act can’t be used to stop farmers from fixing their own stuff. And then, also last month, lawmakers in Iowa voted to advance a bill that would allow farmers to repair their equipment, including tractors. The big tractor lobby isn’t as strong as it used to be. And every day, people gain a little more of the right to repair tractors and McFlurry machines and everything in between. Okay, now let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi-75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org slash podcasts. Thanks for listening.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "the-fight-for-your-right-to-repair",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s culture of overconsumption urges us to simply throw broken items away and buy new ones. But there’s a growing shift to treat non-working devices differently. In this episode, we dig into the “right to repair” movement with Louis Rossmann, a repair technician, YouTuber and consumer rights advocate. Rossmann has spent years pushing back against the companies that make our devices harder, or even impossible, to fix. From parts pairing to “authorized repair” loopholes, we unpack how tech companies maintain control over the products you’ve already paid for. As devices like phones and even cars move toward subscription-based use models, we examine the question ‘do you truly own something if you can’t repair it?’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC9606298932\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis Rossmann\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, repair technician and advocate at Rossman Repair Group\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-right-to-repair/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Gloves Are Off in the Fight for Your Right to Repair\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Boone Ashworth, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">WIRED\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57763037\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91387927/clippy-is-back-as-a-mascot-for-big-tech-protests\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clippy is back—this time as a mascot for Big Tech protests\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Eve Upton-Clark, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/power-wheelchair-duopoly-right-repair-law/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wheelchair Users Are Finally Winning the Right to Repair\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julia Métraux, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mother Jones\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11976969/a-growing-right-to-repair-culture-in-california\">A Growing ‘Right to Repair’ Culture in California\u003c/a> — Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, \u003ci>KQED’s The Bay\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio From Repair Cafe Silicon Valley] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A vacuum is it.. Oh, we need to ring the bell, let’s ring the bell. All right everybody, pay attention, uh, we’re going to ring the bell here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung,Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’re at a repair cafe. These days, it’s one of the hottest spots in town.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio From Repair Cafe Silicon Valley] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We just repaired, what did we repair? A vacuum! Alright, ring the bell now, let’s go! Woohoo! We fixed the vacuum! Thank you! Thank you all the lovely repair people!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Repair cafes are community events, where people bring in their faulty espresso machines, vacuums on the fritz, and other broken items. Volunteers help with repairs, to the best of their abilities, like soldering wires or replacing errant bike chains. The whole point is to encourage people to repair and reuse their stuff, instead of tossing them into a landfill as soon as they stop functioning. Last month, Close All Tabs senior editor Chris Egusa popped into the library in Milpitas, California for Repair Cafe, Silicon Valley.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How many of these repair cafes do you think that you’ve done or the organization is running?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, my God! We’ve certainly ramped up over the past few years. It used to be about one a month, now it’s two, sometimes three a month.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Jessie Kornblum is one of the organizers for this repair cafe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The one thing I do know is between now and the end of May, we have 12 events planned.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s how it works: members of the community bring in their broken stuff, fill out a form, and then get paired with a volunteer who might have the skills to fix that specific item.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have volunteers who sign up ahead of time. They specialize in things like sewing or bikes, and we have a lot of general fixers who can work on electronic devices, some mechanical devices, and we’ve a few people with special skills for things like microwaves.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At this repair cafe, a volunteer with a shock of red hair helps a woman with her tower fan. The fan only spun for a few seconds before shutting off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kay, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley Usually that means that there’s like a dead capacitor somewhere on the power supply. So operating on that assumption, we opened it up and we found a capacitor and we found a whole bunch of brown gunk around it, which means that the capacitor’s electrolyte has probably leaked out and the capacitor has gone dead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Kay, the volunteer, takes a closer look inside the fan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kay, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this capacitor is probably good. I think this capacitor is fine, which is upsetting because now we don’t know what’s wrong with it. [\u003cem>laughs\u003c/em>]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At a nearby table, another volunteer, Sofia, hunches over a disassembled device, wielding a soldering iron with surgical precision. Tragedy had struck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sofia, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have a Dyson hairdryer right now that has been chewed up by a German shepherd. And since there’s some warranty issues with it, they weren’t able to get it repaired by Dyson. So we are here doing some re-soldering on some wires that have been chewed up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dyson hairdryers are pricey. They’re like top of the line. We’re talking hundreds of dollars. For the person who brought it in, this repair cafe is her last resort.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Repair Cafe Silicon Valley Attendee :\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I also checked the appliance repair shop. They say they don’t fix those small appliance. And my last hope is here, and it’s also my first time here. And I’m super happy to have this helped by somebody.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is part of the reason repair cafes are taking off. They’ll try to fix things that manufacturers like Dyson or authorized repair shops won’t touch. For many, the biggest draw is a shift in mindset, feeling empowered by fixing what they own, even if the companies that made them discourage repair. Shonu Sen first came to one of these events with a pair of jeans that needed mending. Yes, they fix clothing too. Inspired by the experience, she later joined as a volunteer to learn new skills and to give back.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Shonu Sen, Attendee Repair Cafe Silicon Valley: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It doesn’t matter if you want to save something, if you don’t have a way to learn how to maintain and repair your things, then there’s no one to teach you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This repair cafe, and the many others popping up around the country, represent a bigger shift from consumers across industries, but especially in electronics. Do you really own what you bought if you can’t fix it? I mean, even the word consumer suggests a lack of ownership. Today, we’re talking about the Right to Repair movement, what it is, how big tech companies have responded, and why this movement is changing our relationship to our stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leading us through this deep dive is one of the key voices in the movement. He started out as a DIY guy, flipping broken laptops as a side hustle, and went on to build a massive YouTube following and push for actual legislation. Ready? Let’s open a new tab. What is the right to repair?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right to repair to me is the idea that you should have the ability to fix what you bought and paid for. It doesn’t mean that you have to fix everything that you own. It doesn’t mean that the manufacturer has to make it easy. It simply means not putting intentional barriers in place to you being able to repair what you bought and paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Louis Rossman. He owns a data recovery and laptop repair company, and he’s been fighting for the right to repair across the United States. If his voice sounds familiar, it might be because he followed one of his repair tutorials on YouTube. Also, he’s a pretty fast talker, especially today. He isn’t a regular coffee drinker, but told me he had some caffeine before this interview. So try to keep up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you are unable to fix what you own, do you really own it? Is it yours or are you just leasing it from the manufacturer? Who has control over your product, the manufacturer or you?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back in the 2000s, Louis started working at a recording studio in Manhattan. As an aspiring recording engineer, he needed a demo reel. To make that, he need a program called Logic, what some of you might know as a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation. The thing with Logic is that it’s owned by Apple and will only run on Apple products. The problem, MacBooks were super expensive. Louis didn’t have that kind of money.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I’ve got a used one on eBay. It showed up broken. I got a partial refund for it. And when I finished the session, I sold it and I made $250. And I thought I’ve never made more than $400 to $600 a month in my life at that point. And here I just made $200 for what was about 15 to 20 minutes of work. Let me try that again. And it has kind of snowballed into the repair company that I have today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This started as his side hustle. Louis doesn’t have any formal training in tech repair, but working at the recording studio, he started to think like a technician. He got into the mindset of troubleshooting, learning to problem solve the way other engineers did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as time went on, I started adding to the services I offered. So instead of just basic screen repairs, here, we’ll do component-level motherboard repairs. So if Apple says it’s $1,200 to fix, we will fix it for a few hundred dollars by just replacing the one thing that’s broken, rather than replacing everything. I started hiring more people, I got a real store, and I showed people how to do these repairs on YouTube because my customers would tell me, Apple has told me if somebody says they can fix the motherboard instead of replacing it, they’re probably scamming you. So I thought, oh, really? Okay, cool. You’re calling me a scammer? Let’s go.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Louis had started a second business that sold replacement parts, but was struggling to keep it afloat. He found it really therapeutic to talk about what he was dealing with on camera, on YouTube, like a video diary. Then he started making repair videos.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Originally it was just for my own customers to show like, I’m not scamming you and I didn’t expect the channel to explode into like millions of subscribers. Anybody that looks at my early content probably sees this and just thinks like why would anybody watch this? I had no idea why anybody would watch it, but it just kind of exploded and went from there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right, I was going to ask like how did you learn how to fix a laptop, right? If your background was in fixing like recording equipment.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t learn how to fix it, you learn how not to break it by virtue of breaking it. So usually there’s two types of technicians, and I’ll fully admit to being the second type. There are technicians that can open something and follow instructions and go, oh, here’s exactly what I do to do a good job. I’m not that person. What I’m good at is messing with something like, how hard can I pull on this tab before it breaks? Oh, okay. So once you break it, you know how to not break it. I would go through all the excuses I had. Well, I would fix this, but I don’t know what chip is which. Okay, why don’t I know that? I don’t have a schematic. Okay, now I have the schematic, but I don’t know how to read this, so, uh, I don’t know what the components do. Okay, I know what components do, but I don’t what the circuit does. And now I would just go through all the excuses that I had in my head for why I didn’t know how something worked, and then use those to try and figure it out. And I would tell myself, well, I’m a tech. Not, I, I dunno what I’m doing, I’d say, I am a tech, and a tech would say, if they don’t now what this is, they’d probably ask for somebody’s opinion, and they’d read a book. And if the book didn’t make sense, they’d ask somebody else. If they asked somebody else and it didn’t makes sense, then they’d try to find a video on it. I just kept going through all the things that were excuses to me for five years and… I would have students when I was teaching a class on this that would feel really bad if they made a mistake three or four days in and then they corrected themselves and I would always have to remind them, you corrected yourself four days, I corrected myself like after two or three years of making that same mistake, so don’t feel bad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As Louis honed his own skills, his client base grew. And that’s when he started to notice the barriers to actually repairing phones and laptops. A few years in, another repair shop owner told him about their spot getting raided by law enforcement. Because they weren’t authorized Apple repair providers, the police assumed that the shop’s replacement parts were stolen. It didn’t help that a lot of these parts, from iPhone screens to laptop motherboards, were recycled. Louis remembers being frustrated that even back then, it was nearly impossible to get individual parts from Apple. They only sold pre-assembled replacements.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If I go to Apple, they’re gonna want me to pay almost $400 to buy this entire assembly when all I need is this $30 or $50 screen. I don’t need your hinges. I don’t need your camera. I don’t need the Wi-Fi antenna, the invertible, all this other extra stuff that’s showing up there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was just one of dozens of hurdles he faced as a repair tech. His suppliers would get shut down and Louis would have to scramble to find new parts. Apple, for one, would force authorized recyclers to shred old MacBooks and iPhones so that their parts couldn’t be reused. Companies would release new laptop models, but wouldn’t make the new schematics available to even authorized service providers. So fixing a faulty motherboard was a process of trial and error, which took a lot longer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I’ve never really asked the question of, why is this entire business based on dumpster diving? Why is it based on Alibaba and eBay and random people, like random suppliers that go in business and go out of business? I never really ask that question. I never even had the consciousness to ask that question until around 2013 to 2015. And then when I heard about right to repair in the automotive field, where in 2012, I believe there was a law or a memorandum of understanding in Massachusetts where it was, yeah, the manufacturer should make available to the people fixing vehicles, the parts and diagnostics software, everything else needed to fix a vehicle. Why don’t we have that? Why do I need to buy a donor board and then pray that the chip on the donor board, that was in a garbage somewhere, is good? Why can’t I just go to any vendor and just buy the chip? It never really occurred to me. And then when I started asking that question, it was impossible to unring that bell. And once I started unraveling that and asking about it, it kind of took on a life of its own.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All he wanted to do was fix laptops. It didn’t have to be this hard. And that’s when he started speaking out about it on his YouTube channel and got involved in the Right to Repair movement. We’ll hear more of his story in a new tab after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back with Louis Rossman, data recovery technician, right to repair activist and YouTuber. Let’s open a new tab: The Fight for the Right to Repair. Let’s talk about the history of the right to repair movement. Like you said, this affects almost every person, tech people, farmers, people who work in the medical field. Can you give us a little history of the Right to Repair movement? When did people start to push back?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think 2012 in Massachusetts with the Memorandum of Understanding for Motor Vehicle Repair. Most of the right to repair legislation that you see coming out around 2015 was a copy and paste of that and they just crossed out motor vehicles and put in consumer electronics.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As these legal efforts spread, more and more states held hearings to consider repair protections for consumers. Right to Repair advocates showed up to make their case, but so did tech industry lobbyists.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I started showing up to these hearings and I would bring my camera and the idea is if I win, I win and if I lose, I’m hoping that people will see this and just understand how frustrating it is for me. When I sit in front of a politician and I bring up my argument, and my opposition says something like, these people stand to make a lot of money being here today. And it’s just like, you’re getting paid $200,000 to $300,000 a year as a lobbyist to be here today. I paid $250 for my hotel and my plane ticket and I gave up on income to be here today. Yeah, who’s making money to be here, motherf*cker? I wanted people to hear this and like, instead of me making the argument as to why you should care about rights of repair because then I’m putting a thought in your head and it’s not my place to tell you what to think. I want you to listen to what I said and listen to they said and tell me what you think. And people would listen to this and go, my God, that is the biggest bunch of b*llshit I’ve ever heard in my life. And the thing is, a lot of these rooms that I was going into to record these hearings, they were set up for newscasters. They had a good position to put a camera. They had an XLR patch panel, so you’d have the microphones for all the different people testifying. It was all set up, but nobody was taking the time to do this. The news was covering something else because, again, when you look at even just the news right now, you’re talking about invading Greenland, the Epstein files, ICE. Regardless of where anybody watching this is on any of these issues, whether or not somebody can clear an error code in their tractor just kind of falls to the bottom of the list of priorities for CBS and Fox and MSNBC. They’re not showing up. To these local hearings to hear Louis talk about not being able to get a charging chip to somebody’s luxury Facebook machine. They just don’t care. It was simply having these people that have been lying and saying crazy, messed up sh*t for years. The one that was the biggest to me was in 2015, where this one politician, assemblyperson in New York said, “the opposition lobbyist for Apple said that when you work on a MacBook motherboard, you actually have converted it to a PC. You’re converting it to PC, but then you don’t tell your customer that you’ve converted it into a PC, and you misrepresent it to them as if it’s still a MacBook, which is fraud.” And I just had steam coming out of my ears.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What does that mean?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s kind of like, well, if you have a Ford F-150 truck, and if you change the tires from Goodyear to Michelin, now it’s not an F- 150. You have to rip the Ford badge off of it. Like really? And I tried to explain this to him, and I brought the broken device with a wire on it that fixed it, and I purposely disconnected it. I showed him the schematic and I said, ‘here’s why this wire is important. See when I reattached the fan spins? This is what I do. I teach people how to do this. Explain to me how this is no longer a MacBook and explain to me how this analogy would work if we were talking about your truck changing from Goodyear to Michelin.’ And then he just starts writing and I’m like, ‘are you even listening to me? What are you doing? I spent all this time to show up here…’ He’s like, I’m co-sponsoring your bill, *sshole, and then he hands it back to me. He says…he shows me, and I realized it was that simple. And I wished I had a camera in the room. I was so mad to this day, 11 years later, that I did not have a camera in that room so that I could have on record that that’s what somebody who was Apple lobbyist said. It pisses me off. So I said, I’m gonna show up with a camera to every single one of these. Because the reason that all these people have been getting away with this is because there hasn’t been any sunlight. Nobody looks at it. Nobody listens and watches. And if they did watch it, they would realize. That they can’t make things up like this anymore. They’re getting away with these lies because they’re talking to legislators that don’t understand technology and there’s nobody calling them out on it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From 2017 to 2020, Louis was posting right to repair updates on YouTube, traveling across the country to show up to state hearings, rallying his viewers to urge their representatives to sponsor consumer rights bills, all while still running his repair shop. In 2020, Louis got a phone call from an unknown number. He picked up. There was a mysterious voice on the other end…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> …who asked, what would I do if I had, let’s say, a million dollars to help push forward right to repair? I’m like, yeah, this is a scam. Never mind, what do I have to do? Let me guess, I have the wire you 5,000 first.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung: He thought it was “total b*llshit,” his words, and hung up. But then the number called again. As it turned out, that voice on the other end was calling on behalf of a billionaire, Eron Jokipii, the founder of Yahoo Games and one of the first investors in WhatsApp. He’s big into tech freedom and consumer ownership. Eron offered initial funding for Louis to start Repair Preservation Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to repair education. The group launched RepairWiki, a massive online repository for repairing all kinds of consumer electronics, from printers to e-bikes. But as a 501c3 organization, Repair Preservation Group is limited in how much it can spend on lobbying efforts. So, Louis started a second nonprofit, Repair Preservation Group Action Fund, specifically for pushing for Right to Repair laws. With the help of his viewers, he crowdfunded nearly $800,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis Rossmann: Instead of just me showing up with my camera and giving my testimony, I was able to actually help work with grassroots organizations. I was about to hire lobbyists to do that job. And after that happened, you started seeing Right to Repair get talked about a lot more. It wasn’t just me anymore. It was a lot of people organizing at the local level to try to get things pushed forward.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Louis even got Steve Wozniak to respond to a cameo request about it. Yes, that Steve Wozniak, as in the co-founder of Apple.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audio clip from Steve Wosniak Cameo\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">] \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hi Louis, Steve Wozniak here. I’ve read a lot of articles about the right to repair issue. I’m always totally supportive and I totally think the people behind it are doing the right thing. We wouldn’t have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world, an open electronics world. Back then when you bought electronic things like TVs and radios, every bit of the circuits and designs were included on paper, total open source. Someone with skill could get in and modify things to fix broken radios or televisions or to improve them or to even replace destroyed parts. Very motivating for creative minds. Believe me, that’s how I grew up. Anyway, it’s time to recognize the right to repair more fully.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So far, all 50 states have introduced right to repair legislation. Seven states have passed actual laws: California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Washington. It’s a huge win for the movement, but there’s a catch, several actually.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Most of those laws have loopholes that make them not very worthwhile. So like culturally, there’s been a lot of progress. A lot of people know what Right to Repair is that didn’t before. They know how their rights are being violated. They know ownership is going away every single day, but the law has not really kept up or had any teeth to push back against it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which means that the fight for the right to repair is far from over. Each state’s laws are different, and this patchwork of right to prepare requirements leaves many gaps in actual consumer protection. What does the right-to-repair landscape look like now? We’re getting into that in a new tab: Right to Repair loopholes. The existing right to repair laws vary state by state. California covers consumer electronics, wheelchairs, and appliances, but not farm equipment. Maine and Massachusetts only cover car data, like access to diagnostic information. New York only covers personal electronics. Minnesota doesn’t cover wheelchairs, but does cover business equipment. And so far, of all of the state right to prepare laws, only Colorado, Oregon, and Washington banned this tricky practice called “parts pairing.” That practice has become increasingly common among tech manufacturers, and it makes it much harder to actually repair products.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Parts pairing is the idea that even if I take a new part from a new device and put it in my device, it will not work because that part has a serial number on it. And when the device senses that even if it’s an OEM part, it’s not my original OEM part, It won’t work properly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Versus some random other person making it. So there’s aftermarket parts, there’s knockoff parts, there’s used originals, and then there’s OEM, which is this part is what the original equipment manufacturer used and the same grade and quality. Starting maybe five to seven years ago, this started to become more popular where you would change a part and it wouldn’t work. And people would say, “well, you must have put a knockoff.” And you say, no, I took this out of a new device. And then they would buy a new device just to see if they were going insane, put the part in to their device and it would work. Because the device could sense that it wasn’t my original one. And that’s a problem because it makes the whole concept of recycling go away. If I have a device where everything is broken on it, it’s not economically viable to repair, but this thing still works, I want to be able to use this part to fix this thing. It destroys that in a very bad way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But how else has Big Tech responded to the right to repair movement? Are companies behind it? Are they pushing against it? What’s your read?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fake programs. They say, look, we released our right to repair program. Here’s our parts list on our website. And I don’t blame the press for this. The press covers thousands of different news items across thousands of things every day. So if I see, look, a repair program. I see pictures of parts, I see in stock, I see it’s not $10,000, I’ll think it’s okay. But when a repair person looks at this, they see you want $206 for a smartphone battery because you say that it is glued to the screen. A lot of these programs are put together in a way where it makes no economic sense whatsoever. Now, when I say no economic sense, I don’t mean that it’s just the repair person says, I wanna make 100,000 a year and I can only make 50,000 year. No, I mean that when I buy that part, if I were to charge my customer for the repair, just the cost of the part by itself, my customer would look at me and give me the middle finger and say, that’s a ripoff. And that’s the problem with a lot of these programs is they were made to appease legislators and the press, they weren’t actually made to be viable repair programs that repair technicians actually wanna use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I was also going to ask like, you know, what does the current landscape of Right to Repair laws look like in the United States right now? Do some states have better laws than others? What are these laws missing?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Every law has something missing, like in New York, there’s an exemption for trade secrets and safety. Now, when you have people showing up to legislative hearings and saying that if independent technicians fix your microwave, a magtrometer will explode, that’s a safety issue. What is a magtrometer? A magtrometer doesn’t exist. So I don’t want there to be something in the bill that says, you know, we can have exemptions if the manufacturer says there’s a safety issue, because they’ve made up safety issues. They’ve made names of parts that don’t exist and testified in front of state legislatures numerous times to fear monger politicians into believing that everything’s gonna blow up if people can fix things. So I don’t like the idea of a safety exemption because they’re just gonna say anything. Like what if a replacement screen, man, you could get glass, you could get a paper cut. What if that person has like a blood clotting disorder? Maybe they’ll bleed out and die. I wouldn’t be surprised if a manufacturer tried to say something silly like that. A lithium-ion battery could explode. And true, a lithium- ion battery could explore. Your car could also not stop when going 80 miles down the highway and kill 30 people. We don’t say that you can’t replace your brakes. The other is that in Minnesota, there is Right to Repair that was pushed through a budget process, and that excludes game consoles. So I mean, game consoles are a really big field of consumer electronics. So when you have a bill that says it excludes this, it excluds that, there are so many exemptions in many of these laws and carve-outs for all these industries. Like you can’t repair medical equipment, you can’t repair farm equipment, you can’t prepare this, that, and the other. And even if you didn’t have those carve-out at all, when it says make available what you make available to your authorized service centers. The entire reason that people are coming to repair shops like mine to begin with is because the authorized repair center doesn’t fix anything. It’s easy to legislate, you must have a one year warranty on your product. When it comes to repair, you’re really trying to legislate, don’t be a dick. And that’s why the battle, as I see it, is the cultural one. I want people that have watched my channel or got into engineering and electronics who become designers and engineers of these businesses because they grew up watching me live streaming in 2016 at two in the morning, cursing as I’m trying to figure out where this trace goes without a schematic. When they get into this field and they’re asked to do something that’s anti-repair, when they’re asked to send that email, oh, by the way, make sure that this part is only available to our authorized people and nobody else can buy that charging chip. I want them to remember what got them into this and then say, ‘you know what, I’m not doing that. And if you want to make me do that, I quit.’ And I want to live in a society where everybody is open to doing that. So I realize that a lot of what I’m pushing for, very likely, I will be dead or long dead by the time we actually get it. All of these seeds that I’m planting are cultural seeds that will take a few generations to actually change. Hopefully there’s some success there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But like you said, in the past, people did just fix their stuff, it was the norm to just fix your stuff. It seems like we can still go back to that, hopefully.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I would like to see things go back to that and I’d like to see more people across more industries become aware of this. And the biggest pushback that I’ve seen is not even what companies do, it’s what people accept. And I would to see people be more open to sticking together rather than saying, you deserve it. This happens in my comment section all the time and I always point it out. What kind of moron would buy a digital picture frame? You should buy something like this. But that person who made fun of that user for that may also have a fridge that they didn’t even realize has ads in it. Or that person may have a smart TV that they didn’t realize was spying on them. It’s like, well, what kind of moron buys a smart tv that has this? And they’re like, you should have bought what I bought. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I really want to see people coalesce and come together and realize that simping for billion dollar companies that are ripping you off, stealing your data, robbing you blind and trying to take away the rights of ownership is not the thing to do. It’s to band together and say, you know what, I don’t accept this practice. And even if I would not buy the thing my neighbor bought, that may happen to me someday. Let’s work together rather than all sh*t on each other as we get robbed blind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Some companies are featuring repairability as like a key selling point in their marketing. One example is the laptop manufacturer, Framework, which builds laptops that are easily disassembled, upgraded and repaired. What do you think about this trend? What does it signal for the Right to Repair movement?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The fact that they have not gone bankrupt several years in, in a very difficult and wavy economy, like, I think that their products just started to become popular right as interest rates were soaring and all this economic volatility I think it’s very cool. They actually do try to make things repairable and for any of the faults the company has had on like certain issues with certain products, I think their heart is in the right place and I like seeing that. And the fact that there’s actually a market for it is great now the problem is, they’re competing in a very low profit margin industry. Like, companies like Lenovo and Acer, and the companies that are making these products that a lot of people buy, their profit margins are in the single digit percentage, and that’s acting at economies of scale at tens of hundreds of billions of dollars.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for a new player to come in and do anything here, they’re either gonna have less choices available, which means less people buy the product, or they’re gonna have a higher price. So I love seeing it, I’d love to see more of it. The fact that they exist at all is very validating for the fact that people are actually willing to spend more money just for a company that respects them, and I think that’s a big part of it. It’s not always about the money, it’s about the respect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what do you want people to take away from the Right to Repair movement? Like, why should, why should they care?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s about ownership in general. And right to repair is a very small portion under the ownership umbrella, and that’s where I’ve been focusing more of my work on in the past few years. Everything is moving to the subscription model. So look around at all these different products and take note of the fact that you don’t really own them. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Nest thermostats across the world stopped functioning with the functionality that they were advertised with simply because Google decided we don’t want to support it anymore. If Google can flip a switch and your device has stopped working, if your car manufacturer could flip a switch and your heated seats are no longer activated, do you actually own any of the things that you bought and paid for?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It seems like that’s the kind of mentality of a lot of Right to Repair is just like trial and error instead of just giving up and accepting that you have to buy something new.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, and the thing is the people that are authorized or say you’re not authorized and you don’t know what you’re doing, the way you figure out how to work on it to begin with very often is by tinkering and messing around when you don’t know what you’re, doing. And I hope that people who don’t know what they’re doing feel confident in, in trying to open things. At the very…again, if it doesn’t belong to somebody else. If it belongs to you and you’re not sacrificing, you know, your significant other’s data or something, mess with something that you’re clueless about and constantly learn something. And even if you’ve taken a chip off and you just put the chip back on it still works, celebrate that. Celebrate every time you’ve done something without making the device work. Trying to figure things out as you go is one of the best ways to learn and I hope that more people feel confident in telling themselves, I’m completely clueless and that’s okay, I’m just going to try it anyway.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That mentality is exactly what community repair cafes are all about. Back in the Milpitas Library, at the Silicon Valley Repair Cafe, volunteers dissected faulty appliances, rearranging and re-soldering guts of wires in hopes of sparking some life back into them. One of the volunteers, named Tara, recalled the repair cafe’s early days.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tara, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, yeah, last year, a woman came walking up cradling this beautiful cherry apple red toaster. It looked gorgeous. And so I looked at it and said, I know what it is. It’s a spring, and it can be fixed. And I said, what’s the story with your toaster? And she just beamed, her face lit up, and she’s like, this was the toaster I won on “Price is Right.” This is the only thing I have left over from college. And she said she and a whole bunch of her friends went to the “Price is Right” one morning and she was the first person. Kareen, come on down and she won $25,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I said, “Did you get to spin the wheel?” She’s like, “Oh, yes I did,” and she’s like “Well, the only thing left is this toaster and it’s my college toaster.” And so we were able to fix it and she walked away beaming and that was just a great example of the kinds of things that we see here on a regular basis. It’s just a toaster, but it was her college toaster that she won at “Price is Right! ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Irreplaceable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tara, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Irreplaceable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve heard about the consumer electronic side of the right to repair movement, laptop repair technicians like Louis, who just want to replace hard drives without the headache of everything we drove into today. But did you know that a lot of today’s repairs are only legal because of farmers who were sick of hacking their tractors? That’s next week. For now, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it’s reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick, additional production help from Gabriela Glueck. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Right to repair advocate Louis Rossmann examines the question, ‘do you truly own something if you can’t repair it?’",
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"description": "Today’s culture of overconsumption urges us to simply throw broken items away and buy new ones. But there’s a growing shift to treat non-working devices differently. In this episode, we dig into the “right to repair” movement with Louis Rossmann, a repair technician, YouTuber and consumer rights advocate. Rossmann has spent years pushing back against the companies that make our devices harder, or even impossible, to fix. From parts pairing to “authorized repair” loopholes, we unpack how tech companies maintain control over the products you’ve already paid for. As devices like phones and even cars move toward subscription-based use models, we examine the question ‘do you truly own something if you can’t repair it?’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Today’s culture of overconsumption urges us to simply throw broken items away and buy new ones. But there’s a growing shift to treat non-working devices differently. In this episode, we dig into the “right to repair” movement with Louis Rossmann, a repair technician, YouTuber and consumer rights advocate. Rossmann has spent years pushing back against the companies that make our devices harder, or even impossible, to fix. From parts pairing to “authorized repair” loopholes, we unpack how tech companies maintain control over the products you’ve already paid for. As devices like phones and even cars move toward subscription-based use models, we examine the question ‘do you truly own something if you can’t repair it?’\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC9606298932\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis Rossmann\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">, repair technician and advocate at Rossman Repair Group\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/expired-tired-wired-right-to-repair/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The Gloves Are Off in the Fight for Your Right to Repair\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Boone Ashworth, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">WIRED\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57763037\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Apple founder Steve Wozniak backs right-to-repair movement\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">BBC\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.fastcompany.com/91387927/clippy-is-back-as-a-mascot-for-big-tech-protests\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Clippy is back—this time as a mascot for Big Tech protests\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Eve Upton-Clark, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fast Company\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/power-wheelchair-duopoly-right-repair-law/\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Wheelchair Users Are Finally Winning the Right to Repair\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> — Julia Métraux, \u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Mother Jones\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11976969/a-growing-right-to-repair-culture-in-california\">A Growing ‘Right to Repair’ Culture in California\u003c/a> — Azul Dahlstrom-Eckman, \u003ci>KQED’s The Bay\u003c/i>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Follow us on\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Instagram\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> and\u003c/span>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\"> \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">TikTok\u003c/span>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio From Repair Cafe Silicon Valley] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">A vacuum is it.. Oh, we need to ring the bell, let’s ring the bell. All right everybody, pay attention, uh, we’re going to ring the bell here.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung,Host: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’re at a repair cafe. These days, it’s one of the hottest spots in town.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[Audio From Repair Cafe Silicon Valley] \u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We just repaired, what did we repair? A vacuum! Alright, ring the bell now, let’s go! Woohoo! We fixed the vacuum! Thank you! Thank you all the lovely repair people!\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003ci>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Repair cafes are community events, where people bring in their faulty espresso machines, vacuums on the fritz, and other broken items. Volunteers help with repairs, to the best of their abilities, like soldering wires or replacing errant bike chains. The whole point is to encourage people to repair and reuse their stuff, instead of tossing them into a landfill as soon as they stop functioning. Last month, Close All Tabs senior editor Chris Egusa popped into the library in Milpitas, California for Repair Cafe, Silicon Valley.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">How many of these repair cafes do you think that you’ve done or the organization is running?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Oh, my God! We’ve certainly ramped up over the past few years. It used to be about one a month, now it’s two, sometimes three a month.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Jessie Kornblum is one of the organizers for this repair cafe.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> The one thing I do know is between now and the end of May, we have 12 events planned.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Here’s how it works: members of the community bring in their broken stuff, fill out a form, and then get paired with a volunteer who might have the skills to fix that specific item.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Jesse Kornblum: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We have volunteers who sign up ahead of time. They specialize in things like sewing or bikes, and we have a lot of general fixers who can work on electronic devices, some mechanical devices, and we’ve a few people with special skills for things like microwaves.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At this repair cafe, a volunteer with a shock of red hair helps a woman with her tower fan. The fan only spun for a few seconds before shutting off.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Kay, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley Usually that means that there’s like a dead capacitor somewhere on the power supply. So operating on that assumption, we opened it up and we found a capacitor and we found a whole bunch of brown gunk around it, which means that the capacitor’s electrolyte has probably leaked out and the capacitor has gone dead.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Kay, the volunteer, takes a closer look inside the fan.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Kay, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So this capacitor is probably good. I think this capacitor is fine, which is upsetting because now we don’t know what’s wrong with it. [\u003cem>laughs\u003c/em>]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At a nearby table, another volunteer, Sofia, hunches over a disassembled device, wielding a soldering iron with surgical precision. Tragedy had struck.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Sofia, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We have a Dyson hairdryer right now that has been chewed up by a German shepherd. And since there’s some warranty issues with it, they weren’t able to get it repaired by Dyson. So we are here doing some re-soldering on some wires that have been chewed up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dyson hairdryers are pricey. They’re like top of the line. We’re talking hundreds of dollars. For the person who brought it in, this repair cafe is her last resort.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Repair Cafe Silicon Valley Attendee :\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I also checked the appliance repair shop. They say they don’t fix those small appliance. And my last hope is here, and it’s also my first time here. And I’m super happy to have this helped by somebody.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is part of the reason repair cafes are taking off. They’ll try to fix things that manufacturers like Dyson or authorized repair shops won’t touch. For many, the biggest draw is a shift in mindset, feeling empowered by fixing what they own, even if the companies that made them discourage repair. Shonu Sen first came to one of these events with a pair of jeans that needed mending. Yes, they fix clothing too. Inspired by the experience, she later joined as a volunteer to learn new skills and to give back.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Shonu Sen, Attendee Repair Cafe Silicon Valley: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">It doesn’t matter if you want to save something, if you don’t have a way to learn how to maintain and repair your things, then there’s no one to teach you.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This repair cafe, and the many others popping up around the country, represent a bigger shift from consumers across industries, but especially in electronics. Do you really own what you bought if you can’t fix it? I mean, even the word consumer suggests a lack of ownership. Today, we’re talking about the Right to Repair movement, what it is, how big tech companies have responded, and why this movement is changing our relationship to our stuff.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Leading us through this deep dive is one of the key voices in the movement. He started out as a DIY guy, flipping broken laptops as a side hustle, and went on to build a massive YouTube following and push for actual legislation. Ready? Let’s open a new tab. What is the right to repair?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right to repair to me is the idea that you should have the ability to fix what you bought and paid for. It doesn’t mean that you have to fix everything that you own. It doesn’t mean that the manufacturer has to make it easy. It simply means not putting intentional barriers in place to you being able to repair what you bought and paid for.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This is Louis Rossman. He owns a data recovery and laptop repair company, and he’s been fighting for the right to repair across the United States. If his voice sounds familiar, it might be because he followed one of his repair tutorials on YouTube. Also, he’s a pretty fast talker, especially today. He isn’t a regular coffee drinker, but told me he had some caffeine before this interview. So try to keep up.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If you are unable to fix what you own, do you really own it? Is it yours or are you just leasing it from the manufacturer? Who has control over your product, the manufacturer or you?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Back in the 2000s, Louis started working at a recording studio in Manhattan. As an aspiring recording engineer, he needed a demo reel. To make that, he need a program called Logic, what some of you might know as a DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation. The thing with Logic is that it’s owned by Apple and will only run on Apple products. The problem, MacBooks were super expensive. Louis didn’t have that kind of money.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I’ve got a used one on eBay. It showed up broken. I got a partial refund for it. And when I finished the session, I sold it and I made $250. And I thought I’ve never made more than $400 to $600 a month in my life at that point. And here I just made $200 for what was about 15 to 20 minutes of work. Let me try that again. And it has kind of snowballed into the repair company that I have today.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> This started as his side hustle. Louis doesn’t have any formal training in tech repair, but working at the recording studio, he started to think like a technician. He got into the mindset of troubleshooting, learning to problem solve the way other engineers did.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And as time went on, I started adding to the services I offered. So instead of just basic screen repairs, here, we’ll do component-level motherboard repairs. So if Apple says it’s $1,200 to fix, we will fix it for a few hundred dollars by just replacing the one thing that’s broken, rather than replacing everything. I started hiring more people, I got a real store, and I showed people how to do these repairs on YouTube because my customers would tell me, Apple has told me if somebody says they can fix the motherboard instead of replacing it, they’re probably scamming you. So I thought, oh, really? Okay, cool. You’re calling me a scammer? Let’s go.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Louis had started a second business that sold replacement parts, but was struggling to keep it afloat. He found it really therapeutic to talk about what he was dealing with on camera, on YouTube, like a video diary. Then he started making repair videos.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Originally it was just for my own customers to show like, I’m not scamming you and I didn’t expect the channel to explode into like millions of subscribers. Anybody that looks at my early content probably sees this and just thinks like why would anybody watch this? I had no idea why anybody would watch it, but it just kind of exploded and went from there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Right, I was going to ask like how did you learn how to fix a laptop, right? If your background was in fixing like recording equipment.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">You don’t learn how to fix it, you learn how not to break it by virtue of breaking it. So usually there’s two types of technicians, and I’ll fully admit to being the second type. There are technicians that can open something and follow instructions and go, oh, here’s exactly what I do to do a good job. I’m not that person. What I’m good at is messing with something like, how hard can I pull on this tab before it breaks? Oh, okay. So once you break it, you know how to not break it. I would go through all the excuses I had. Well, I would fix this, but I don’t know what chip is which. Okay, why don’t I know that? I don’t have a schematic. Okay, now I have the schematic, but I don’t know how to read this, so, uh, I don’t know what the components do. Okay, I know what components do, but I don’t what the circuit does. And now I would just go through all the excuses that I had in my head for why I didn’t know how something worked, and then use those to try and figure it out. And I would tell myself, well, I’m a tech. Not, I, I dunno what I’m doing, I’d say, I am a tech, and a tech would say, if they don’t now what this is, they’d probably ask for somebody’s opinion, and they’d read a book. And if the book didn’t make sense, they’d ask somebody else. If they asked somebody else and it didn’t makes sense, then they’d try to find a video on it. I just kept going through all the things that were excuses to me for five years and… I would have students when I was teaching a class on this that would feel really bad if they made a mistake three or four days in and then they corrected themselves and I would always have to remind them, you corrected yourself four days, I corrected myself like after two or three years of making that same mistake, so don’t feel bad.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> As Louis honed his own skills, his client base grew. And that’s when he started to notice the barriers to actually repairing phones and laptops. A few years in, another repair shop owner told him about their spot getting raided by law enforcement. Because they weren’t authorized Apple repair providers, the police assumed that the shop’s replacement parts were stolen. It didn’t help that a lot of these parts, from iPhone screens to laptop motherboards, were recycled. Louis remembers being frustrated that even back then, it was nearly impossible to get individual parts from Apple. They only sold pre-assembled replacements.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> If I go to Apple, they’re gonna want me to pay almost $400 to buy this entire assembly when all I need is this $30 or $50 screen. I don’t need your hinges. I don’t need your camera. I don’t need the Wi-Fi antenna, the invertible, all this other extra stuff that’s showing up there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> That was just one of dozens of hurdles he faced as a repair tech. His suppliers would get shut down and Louis would have to scramble to find new parts. Apple, for one, would force authorized recyclers to shred old MacBooks and iPhones so that their parts couldn’t be reused. Companies would release new laptop models, but wouldn’t make the new schematics available to even authorized service providers. So fixing a faulty motherboard was a process of trial and error, which took a lot longer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So I’ve never really asked the question of, why is this entire business based on dumpster diving? Why is it based on Alibaba and eBay and random people, like random suppliers that go in business and go out of business? I never really ask that question. I never even had the consciousness to ask that question until around 2013 to 2015. And then when I heard about right to repair in the automotive field, where in 2012, I believe there was a law or a memorandum of understanding in Massachusetts where it was, yeah, the manufacturer should make available to the people fixing vehicles, the parts and diagnostics software, everything else needed to fix a vehicle. Why don’t we have that? Why do I need to buy a donor board and then pray that the chip on the donor board, that was in a garbage somewhere, is good? Why can’t I just go to any vendor and just buy the chip? It never really occurred to me. And then when I started asking that question, it was impossible to unring that bell. And once I started unraveling that and asking about it, it kind of took on a life of its own.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> All he wanted to do was fix laptops. It didn’t have to be this hard. And that’s when he started speaking out about it on his YouTube channel and got involved in the Right to Repair movement. We’ll hear more of his story in a new tab after this break.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">We’re back with Louis Rossman, data recovery technician, right to repair activist and YouTuber. Let’s open a new tab: The Fight for the Right to Repair. Let’s talk about the history of the right to repair movement. Like you said, this affects almost every person, tech people, farmers, people who work in the medical field. Can you give us a little history of the Right to Repair movement? When did people start to push back?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I think 2012 in Massachusetts with the Memorandum of Understanding for Motor Vehicle Repair. Most of the right to repair legislation that you see coming out around 2015 was a copy and paste of that and they just crossed out motor vehicles and put in consumer electronics.\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">As these legal efforts spread, more and more states held hearings to consider repair protections for consumers. Right to Repair advocates showed up to make their case, but so did tech industry lobbyists.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">I started showing up to these hearings and I would bring my camera and the idea is if I win, I win and if I lose, I’m hoping that people will see this and just understand how frustrating it is for me. When I sit in front of a politician and I bring up my argument, and my opposition says something like, these people stand to make a lot of money being here today. And it’s just like, you’re getting paid $200,000 to $300,000 a year as a lobbyist to be here today. I paid $250 for my hotel and my plane ticket and I gave up on income to be here today. Yeah, who’s making money to be here, motherf*cker? I wanted people to hear this and like, instead of me making the argument as to why you should care about rights of repair because then I’m putting a thought in your head and it’s not my place to tell you what to think. I want you to listen to what I said and listen to they said and tell me what you think. And people would listen to this and go, my God, that is the biggest bunch of b*llshit I’ve ever heard in my life. And the thing is, a lot of these rooms that I was going into to record these hearings, they were set up for newscasters. They had a good position to put a camera. They had an XLR patch panel, so you’d have the microphones for all the different people testifying. It was all set up, but nobody was taking the time to do this. The news was covering something else because, again, when you look at even just the news right now, you’re talking about invading Greenland, the Epstein files, ICE. Regardless of where anybody watching this is on any of these issues, whether or not somebody can clear an error code in their tractor just kind of falls to the bottom of the list of priorities for CBS and Fox and MSNBC. They’re not showing up. To these local hearings to hear Louis talk about not being able to get a charging chip to somebody’s luxury Facebook machine. They just don’t care. It was simply having these people that have been lying and saying crazy, messed up sh*t for years. The one that was the biggest to me was in 2015, where this one politician, assemblyperson in New York said, “the opposition lobbyist for Apple said that when you work on a MacBook motherboard, you actually have converted it to a PC. You’re converting it to PC, but then you don’t tell your customer that you’ve converted it into a PC, and you misrepresent it to them as if it’s still a MacBook, which is fraud.” And I just had steam coming out of my ears.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> What does that mean?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s kind of like, well, if you have a Ford F-150 truck, and if you change the tires from Goodyear to Michelin, now it’s not an F- 150. You have to rip the Ford badge off of it. Like really? And I tried to explain this to him, and I brought the broken device with a wire on it that fixed it, and I purposely disconnected it. I showed him the schematic and I said, ‘here’s why this wire is important. See when I reattached the fan spins? This is what I do. I teach people how to do this. Explain to me how this is no longer a MacBook and explain to me how this analogy would work if we were talking about your truck changing from Goodyear to Michelin.’ And then he just starts writing and I’m like, ‘are you even listening to me? What are you doing? I spent all this time to show up here…’ He’s like, I’m co-sponsoring your bill, *sshole, and then he hands it back to me. He says…he shows me, and I realized it was that simple. And I wished I had a camera in the room. I was so mad to this day, 11 years later, that I did not have a camera in that room so that I could have on record that that’s what somebody who was Apple lobbyist said. It pisses me off. So I said, I’m gonna show up with a camera to every single one of these. Because the reason that all these people have been getting away with this is because there hasn’t been any sunlight. Nobody looks at it. Nobody listens and watches. And if they did watch it, they would realize. That they can’t make things up like this anymore. They’re getting away with these lies because they’re talking to legislators that don’t understand technology and there’s nobody calling them out on it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> From 2017 to 2020, Louis was posting right to repair updates on YouTube, traveling across the country to show up to state hearings, rallying his viewers to urge their representatives to sponsor consumer rights bills, all while still running his repair shop. In 2020, Louis got a phone call from an unknown number. He picked up. There was a mysterious voice on the other end…\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> …who asked, what would I do if I had, let’s say, a million dollars to help push forward right to repair? I’m like, yeah, this is a scam. Never mind, what do I have to do? Let me guess, I have the wire you 5,000 first.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Morgan Sung: He thought it was “total b*llshit,” his words, and hung up. But then the number called again. As it turned out, that voice on the other end was calling on behalf of a billionaire, Eron Jokipii, the founder of Yahoo Games and one of the first investors in WhatsApp. He’s big into tech freedom and consumer ownership. Eron offered initial funding for Louis to start Repair Preservation Group, a nonprofit organization dedicated to repair education. The group launched RepairWiki, a massive online repository for repairing all kinds of consumer electronics, from printers to e-bikes. But as a 501c3 organization, Repair Preservation Group is limited in how much it can spend on lobbying efforts. So, Louis started a second nonprofit, Repair Preservation Group Action Fund, specifically for pushing for Right to Repair laws. With the help of his viewers, he crowdfunded nearly $800,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Louis Rossmann: Instead of just me showing up with my camera and giving my testimony, I was able to actually help work with grassroots organizations. I was about to hire lobbyists to do that job. And after that happened, you started seeing Right to Repair get talked about a lot more. It wasn’t just me anymore. It was a lot of people organizing at the local level to try to get things pushed forward.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Louis even got Steve Wozniak to respond to a cameo request about it. Yes, that Steve Wozniak, as in the co-founder of Apple.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Audio clip from Steve Wosniak Cameo\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">] \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cbr>\n\u003c/span>\u003ci>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hi Louis, Steve Wozniak here. I’ve read a lot of articles about the right to repair issue. I’m always totally supportive and I totally think the people behind it are doing the right thing. We wouldn’t have had an Apple had I not grown up in a very open technology world, an open electronics world. Back then when you bought electronic things like TVs and radios, every bit of the circuits and designs were included on paper, total open source. Someone with skill could get in and modify things to fix broken radios or televisions or to improve them or to even replace destroyed parts. Very motivating for creative minds. Believe me, that’s how I grew up. Anyway, it’s time to recognize the right to repair more fully.\u003c/span>\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> So far, all 50 states have introduced right to repair legislation. Seven states have passed actual laws: California, Colorado, Minnesota, Maine, New York, Oregon, and Washington. It’s a huge win for the movement, but there’s a catch, several actually.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Most of those laws have loopholes that make them not very worthwhile. So like culturally, there’s been a lot of progress. A lot of people know what Right to Repair is that didn’t before. They know how their rights are being violated. They know ownership is going away every single day, but the law has not really kept up or had any teeth to push back against it.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Which means that the fight for the right to repair is far from over. Each state’s laws are different, and this patchwork of right to prepare requirements leaves many gaps in actual consumer protection. What does the right-to-repair landscape look like now? We’re getting into that in a new tab: Right to Repair loopholes. The existing right to repair laws vary state by state. California covers consumer electronics, wheelchairs, and appliances, but not farm equipment. Maine and Massachusetts only cover car data, like access to diagnostic information. New York only covers personal electronics. Minnesota doesn’t cover wheelchairs, but does cover business equipment. And so far, of all of the state right to prepare laws, only Colorado, Oregon, and Washington banned this tricky practice called “parts pairing.” That practice has become increasingly common among tech manufacturers, and it makes it much harder to actually repair products.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Parts pairing is the idea that even if I take a new part from a new device and put it in my device, it will not work because that part has a serial number on it. And when the device senses that even if it’s an OEM part, it’s not my original OEM part, It won’t work properly.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Versus some random other person making it. So there’s aftermarket parts, there’s knockoff parts, there’s used originals, and then there’s OEM, which is this part is what the original equipment manufacturer used and the same grade and quality. Starting maybe five to seven years ago, this started to become more popular where you would change a part and it wouldn’t work. And people would say, “well, you must have put a knockoff.” And you say, no, I took this out of a new device. And then they would buy a new device just to see if they were going insane, put the part in to their device and it would work. Because the device could sense that it wasn’t my original one. And that’s a problem because it makes the whole concept of recycling go away. If I have a device where everything is broken on it, it’s not economically viable to repair, but this thing still works, I want to be able to use this part to fix this thing. It destroys that in a very bad way.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But how else has Big Tech responded to the right to repair movement? Are companies behind it? Are they pushing against it? What’s your read?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Fake programs. They say, look, we released our right to repair program. Here’s our parts list on our website. And I don’t blame the press for this. The press covers thousands of different news items across thousands of things every day. So if I see, look, a repair program. I see pictures of parts, I see in stock, I see it’s not $10,000, I’ll think it’s okay. But when a repair person looks at this, they see you want $206 for a smartphone battery because you say that it is glued to the screen. A lot of these programs are put together in a way where it makes no economic sense whatsoever. Now, when I say no economic sense, I don’t mean that it’s just the repair person says, I wanna make 100,000 a year and I can only make 50,000 year. No, I mean that when I buy that part, if I were to charge my customer for the repair, just the cost of the part by itself, my customer would look at me and give me the middle finger and say, that’s a ripoff. And that’s the problem with a lot of these programs is they were made to appease legislators and the press, they weren’t actually made to be viable repair programs that repair technicians actually wanna use.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, I was also going to ask like, you know, what does the current landscape of Right to Repair laws look like in the United States right now? Do some states have better laws than others? What are these laws missing?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Every law has something missing, like in New York, there’s an exemption for trade secrets and safety. Now, when you have people showing up to legislative hearings and saying that if independent technicians fix your microwave, a magtrometer will explode, that’s a safety issue. What is a magtrometer? A magtrometer doesn’t exist. So I don’t want there to be something in the bill that says, you know, we can have exemptions if the manufacturer says there’s a safety issue, because they’ve made up safety issues. They’ve made names of parts that don’t exist and testified in front of state legislatures numerous times to fear monger politicians into believing that everything’s gonna blow up if people can fix things. So I don’t like the idea of a safety exemption because they’re just gonna say anything. Like what if a replacement screen, man, you could get glass, you could get a paper cut. What if that person has like a blood clotting disorder? Maybe they’ll bleed out and die. I wouldn’t be surprised if a manufacturer tried to say something silly like that. A lithium-ion battery could explode. And true, a lithium- ion battery could explore. Your car could also not stop when going 80 miles down the highway and kill 30 people. We don’t say that you can’t replace your brakes. The other is that in Minnesota, there is Right to Repair that was pushed through a budget process, and that excludes game consoles. So I mean, game consoles are a really big field of consumer electronics. So when you have a bill that says it excludes this, it excluds that, there are so many exemptions in many of these laws and carve-outs for all these industries. Like you can’t repair medical equipment, you can’t repair farm equipment, you can’t prepare this, that, and the other. And even if you didn’t have those carve-out at all, when it says make available what you make available to your authorized service centers. The entire reason that people are coming to repair shops like mine to begin with is because the authorized repair center doesn’t fix anything. It’s easy to legislate, you must have a one year warranty on your product. When it comes to repair, you’re really trying to legislate, don’t be a dick. And that’s why the battle, as I see it, is the cultural one. I want people that have watched my channel or got into engineering and electronics who become designers and engineers of these businesses because they grew up watching me live streaming in 2016 at two in the morning, cursing as I’m trying to figure out where this trace goes without a schematic. When they get into this field and they’re asked to do something that’s anti-repair, when they’re asked to send that email, oh, by the way, make sure that this part is only available to our authorized people and nobody else can buy that charging chip. I want them to remember what got them into this and then say, ‘you know what, I’m not doing that. And if you want to make me do that, I quit.’ And I want to live in a society where everybody is open to doing that. So I realize that a lot of what I’m pushing for, very likely, I will be dead or long dead by the time we actually get it. All of these seeds that I’m planting are cultural seeds that will take a few generations to actually change. Hopefully there’s some success there.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> But like you said, in the past, people did just fix their stuff, it was the norm to just fix your stuff. It seems like we can still go back to that, hopefully.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> I would like to see things go back to that and I’d like to see more people across more industries become aware of this. And the biggest pushback that I’ve seen is not even what companies do, it’s what people accept. And I would to see people be more open to sticking together rather than saying, you deserve it. This happens in my comment section all the time and I always point it out. What kind of moron would buy a digital picture frame? You should buy something like this. But that person who made fun of that user for that may also have a fridge that they didn’t even realize has ads in it. Or that person may have a smart TV that they didn’t realize was spying on them. It’s like, well, what kind of moron buys a smart tv that has this? And they’re like, you should have bought what I bought. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">And I really want to see people coalesce and come together and realize that simping for billion dollar companies that are ripping you off, stealing your data, robbing you blind and trying to take away the rights of ownership is not the thing to do. It’s to band together and say, you know what, I don’t accept this practice. And even if I would not buy the thing my neighbor bought, that may happen to me someday. Let’s work together rather than all sh*t on each other as we get robbed blind.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Some companies are featuring repairability as like a key selling point in their marketing. One example is the laptop manufacturer, Framework, which builds laptops that are easily disassembled, upgraded and repaired. What do you think about this trend? What does it signal for the Right to Repair movement?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The fact that they have not gone bankrupt several years in, in a very difficult and wavy economy, like, I think that their products just started to become popular right as interest rates were soaring and all this economic volatility I think it’s very cool. They actually do try to make things repairable and for any of the faults the company has had on like certain issues with certain products, I think their heart is in the right place and I like seeing that. And the fact that there’s actually a market for it is great now the problem is, they’re competing in a very low profit margin industry. Like, companies like Lenovo and Acer, and the companies that are making these products that a lot of people buy, their profit margins are in the single digit percentage, and that’s acting at economies of scale at tens of hundreds of billions of dollars.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for a new player to come in and do anything here, they’re either gonna have less choices available, which means less people buy the product, or they’re gonna have a higher price. So I love seeing it, I’d love to see more of it. The fact that they exist at all is very validating for the fact that people are actually willing to spend more money just for a company that respects them, and I think that’s a big part of it. It’s not always about the money, it’s about the respect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So what do you want people to take away from the Right to Repair movement? Like, why should, why should they care?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It’s about ownership in general. And right to repair is a very small portion under the ownership umbrella, and that’s where I’ve been focusing more of my work on in the past few years. Everything is moving to the subscription model. So look around at all these different products and take note of the fact that you don’t really own them. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Nest thermostats across the world stopped functioning with the functionality that they were advertised with simply because Google decided we don’t want to support it anymore. If Google can flip a switch and your device has stopped working, if your car manufacturer could flip a switch and your heated seats are no longer activated, do you actually own any of the things that you bought and paid for?\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> It seems like that’s the kind of mentality of a lot of Right to Repair is just like trial and error instead of just giving up and accepting that you have to buy something new.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Louis Rossmann:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Yeah, and the thing is the people that are authorized or say you’re not authorized and you don’t know what you’re doing, the way you figure out how to work on it to begin with very often is by tinkering and messing around when you don’t know what you’re, doing. And I hope that people who don’t know what they’re doing feel confident in, in trying to open things. At the very…again, if it doesn’t belong to somebody else. If it belongs to you and you’re not sacrificing, you know, your significant other’s data or something, mess with something that you’re clueless about and constantly learn something. And even if you’ve taken a chip off and you just put the chip back on it still works, celebrate that. Celebrate every time you’ve done something without making the device work. Trying to figure things out as you go is one of the best ways to learn and I hope that more people feel confident in telling themselves, I’m completely clueless and that’s okay, I’m just going to try it anyway.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">That mentality is exactly what community repair cafes are all about. Back in the Milpitas Library, at the Silicon Valley Repair Cafe, volunteers dissected faulty appliances, rearranging and re-soldering guts of wires in hopes of sparking some life back into them. One of the volunteers, named Tara, recalled the repair cafe’s early days.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tara, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley: \u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">So, yeah, last year, a woman came walking up cradling this beautiful cherry apple red toaster. It looked gorgeous. And so I looked at it and said, I know what it is. It’s a spring, and it can be fixed. And I said, what’s the story with your toaster? And she just beamed, her face lit up, and she’s like, this was the toaster I won on “Price is Right.” This is the only thing I have left over from college. And she said she and a whole bunch of her friends went to the “Price is Right” one morning and she was the first person. Kareen, come on down and she won $25,000.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I said, “Did you get to spin the wheel?” She’s like, “Oh, yes I did,” and she’s like “Well, the only thing left is this toaster and it’s my college toaster.” And so we were able to fix it and she walked away beaming and that was just a great example of the kinds of things that we see here on a regular basis. It’s just a toaster, but it was her college toaster that she won at “Price is Right! ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Chris Egusa:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Irreplaceable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tara, Volunteer at Repair Cafe Silicon Valley:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> Irreplaceable.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung:\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> We’ve heard about the consumer electronic side of the right to repair movement, laptop repair technicians like Louis, who just want to replace hard drives without the headache of everything we drove into today. But did you know that a lot of today’s repairs are only legal because of farmers who were sick of hacking their tractors? That’s next week. For now, let’s close all these tabs.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Morgan Sung\u003c/b>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">: Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and it’s reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by our senior editor, Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. It was edited by Chris Hambrick, additional production help from Gabriela Glueck. Our team includes producer Maya Cueva. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts. Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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},
"link": "/radio/program/bbc-world-service",
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},
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"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1MDAyODE4NTgz",
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},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
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"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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},
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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},
"closealltabs": {
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"order": 1
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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},
"freakonomics-radio": {
"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"here-and-now": {
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"order": 15
},
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 18
},
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
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"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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