Minter Dialogue with Mark Hurst

In this episode of the podcast, I welcome Mark Hurst, a digital strategy expert and founder of Creative Good. The conversation begins with a nostalgic reflection on our long-standing acquaintance and shared interests, particularly their collaborative work on World War II research. Mark delves into his career-long mission to improve technology for the benefit of users, highlighting his early optimism during the advent of the web in the mid-90s. He contrasts this with his current concerns about the unethical practices of major tech companies, which he collectively refers to as “Big Tech.”

Mark discusses his radio show, Techtonic, which he started to address the negative impacts of these tech giants. He emphasises the importance of ethical considerations in technology development and criticises the industry’s shift towards exploiting users for profit. The conversation also touches on the historical context of tech regulation, the role of customer feedback in product development, and the ethical dilemmas posed by modern capitalism.

Mark and I explore the potential for more responsible business models, such as cooperatives and B Corporations, and reflect on the legacy of companies like Hewlett-Packard. The episode concludes with Mark recommending an insightful interview with astronomer Sam Lawler on his show, which highlights the broader implications of unchecked technological growth.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Mark Hurst:

• Check out the Creative Good site here
• Find/buy Mark Hurst’s book, “Customers Included,” here
• Find Mark’s Techtonic Radio show and the full archive here
• Find/follow Mark Hurst on LinkedIn
• Follow @MarkHurst on X/Twitter

Other site(s) mentioned:

• • Becky Hall podcast (re her book: The Art of Enough)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial:

 Mark Hurst, I can’t believe that I’ve never had you on my show. I’ve been running for 15 years, known you for long, at least about that many long length of time, and had so many good experiences. We met first over a common older generation experience in the second world war around the Baton Death march. And then we clicked and did some work together around what you were doing at Creative Good and customer experience and loved your mind. And then recently, I kind of stay in touch. I feel like I know you because I’m listening to you every week on your radio show. Let’s start with, though, Mark, in your own words, who is Mark Hurst?

Mark Hurst:

 Well, first mentor, thanks so much for inviting me onto the show. And yes, thank you for helping me out with that World War two research. My family still appreciates that we lost somebody in the Philippines, and you helped uncover some information on the incident. So, that remains a solid favor that you did me. So, thank you. And it’s been great getting to know you around digital strategy and customer experience and everything else. So, it’s a real pleasure to be on the show. So, thank you. Who is Mark Hurst? Well, I’ve been working on a particular question for about 30 years now, and that is how to make technology better. And that has been a concern. I hesitate because I almost said obsession, but I’ll call it a concern, a constant concern I’ve had for three decades in that I have watched as wave after wave of technology has been hyped up and has broken on the shore and has disappointed expectations, almost always because the technology was not built for the good of the people who are supposed to use and be affected by the technology. And so, I started my career in the mid nineties. I was coming out of the MIT Media Lab, the web had just started. And I thought, here is our chance really to build an environment, an ecosystem, a community, what have you, with new digital technology. We’re going to do it right this time, because at the time, Microsoft was this hegemonic, unethical presence in the software field, how things have not changed. Anyway, the web was our chance to get it right, and for a few years, so I threw myself into that. I started my company, Creative Good to advise companies on how to make their technology, the digital technology, good for their users, their communities, their stakeholders, and consulted with hundreds of companies and made some impact. And then things changed about five to ten years ago, let’s call it ten years ago and change for the worse. And now the technology industry is dominated by four or five, depending on how you count unethical hegemonic companies that collectively I call Big Tech. And so, about seven years ago, I began this radio show, Techtonic, to speak out about what I saw was going wrong. And so, I still run Creative Good I still write the email newsletter at Creative Good It’s one of the longest running email newsletters in the world, started in 1998. And I’ve got Techtonic, which is my radio show and podcast. And I’ve got some other things going on. But if you’d like to understand who I am through what I’ve done in my career, that’s one way to look at it.

Minter Dial:

 Lovely. Well, I just wanted to circle back on your approach in the 1990s, after the MIT Media Lab. You had said all the other technologies weren’t made for the good of others somehow. But I felt in what you were saying that the web actually, or the Internet provided that hope that actually it could be good for the world. Much more so than other technologies that had preceded it.

Mark Hurst:

 That’s right. I mean, to put yourself back in 1990, 519 96, the vast, vast majority of people were stuck using Windows computers. Some were still using DOS. So, this is a Microsoft dominated landscape. A small and decreasing minority of people were on Apple Macintosh computers, but everybody thought Apple was going to go out of business. Microsoft gave it a lifeline to keep it alive, to stave off some antitrust claims, which didn’t work. The DOJ came after him anyway. But Apple at the time was almost insignificant. So, in that landscape, all I saw as I surveyed what people were using were really disappointing. User interfaces, user experiences. And I mean, I have friends from college who say, mark, you have been complaining about this stuff since the nineties. And yes, this has always been my thing. For example, why in DOS, if I could just go on a little rant, why did they call it, why did they name it? The backslash that you use for directories instead of the regular slash, the backslash is way over on the side of the keyboard. Anyway, I’m not even going to get into it. So, DOS was disappointing, Windows was even more disappointing. And here comes the web. And all of a sudden the power to create your own interface, your own user experience, is in the hands of the user. And then little teams and little companies that start banding together and they don’t have to follow Microsoft’s rules. Amazing. And that was my insight, that if we’re going to be creating our own user experiences in this new emerging digital world we’re calling the web, people are going to need some advisory help on how to do that. Well, how to create good experiences rather than terrible experiences. And so, that’s why I named the company Creative Good I would advise companies on how to do this. I would run user research, I would give consulting on product strategy, and that continues to this day. It’s meaningful and helpful and impactful work that I enjoy doing. But there is this larger challenge that the tech industry is now, as I said before, run by a cabal of companies that are not interested in making things good for people. In fact, they are oriented towards exploiting the users that they claim to be serving.

Minter Dial:

 So, the big five, I’m thinking Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, JD.Com, China Mobile, that’s the big five.

Mark Hurst:

 Well, there is a bifurcation in the Internet now as the global Internet has split into right now, a Chinese Internet and everybody else Internet. Although I guess Russia is starting to recede into its own borders. But for the us, and I don’t know what the right category would be for the US and rest of world. Rest of world. It’s Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Yes, I know, I know. Google is Alphabet and Facebook is meta. As somebody pointed out somewhere online recently, companies generally change their names after they commit a great crime and they want people to forget who it was who did that. But take that as you will. I still call it Facebook and Google.

Minter Dial:

 That makes sense. It feels like that fashion since we were brought up with it, the Enron, we know who they are. But what was interesting is that you say, and I want to get into this relative to Creative Good You said you want to make tech better. And I always prefer the word better than good because the good inevitably is a judgment, an ethical judgment, and it depends on whose perspective it’s good for. Better seems like a better thing to strive for. You’re really bad. I’m going to make you less bad. You’re good. I’m going to make you better than good. You’re very good. I’m going to make you excellent. And I feel like that’s a more interesting scale than the word good.

Mark Hurst:

 Yeah, whatever word works, I’ll go with it. I like your description of better as a way of framing it. I always sort of like good because it was a modest goal when I started the company in 1997. Then just as now, the industry is full of hype. This is going to be awesome. The superb, the amazing, most amazing, world changing, mind blowing. And I’m just standing there like, no, can we just. Let’s have a. Let’s make it a low bar. Can we just make it good? Because everything actually right now is terrible. If we could just make it good, it would be so much better. And you don’t even have to try to be excellent. Mind blowing, you know? So, like, how I would apply the word good? Yeah. There’s an ethical judgment. I’ll say that right out. I apply ethical judgments to my work and my judgments of what I see out there, whether they’re client portfolios of apps and sites or maybe just what I see happening in other companies from Amazon and Apple or whoever. I apply ethical judgments all day, every day. And it doesn’t have to turn into some sort of philosophical, abstract discussion of what is beauty, what is truth. No, no, no. Let’s. Again, let’s set a very low bar, okay? Facebook has been shown. Facebook and Instagram, I’m talking about, has been shown to have internal research that shows that their products are actively harming young users, especially teenage girls. So, the senior leadership of Facebook and Instagram know that their products are actively harming teenage girls. And what do they do? They accelerate exactly what they’re doing. They try to do more of it because it increases engagement, which increases profits, which increases their stock price, which makes them more money at their end of year bonus. Now, that, to me, is totally unethical. You could call it shameful, you could call it evil. You could use your own judgment word. But I’ll just. For our purposes right now, I’ll say it’s not good. Okay. What Facebook and Instagram are doing collectively is not good. And what I’d like to do is take the tech industry and teach them and show them and encourage them how to be good. Not amazing, excellent, mind blowing, but just stop harming people. Can we clear that bar?

Minter Dial:

 Love it. Two things come to mind. A friend of mine, Becky Hall, wrote a book, “Enough is Enough.” So, it was sort of an apologia of enough. Allow us to just be enough, to do enough. And within that, there’s just the hyperbole, the constant use of adverbs and needing to vary this and hide that, and whoa. And yet, when we look at the world, I also see that doing good, being good as a stance, has, I think, a very negative side to it. As in, I’m going to show how good I am. I’m a do gooder. Look at me. Not just on social, but, you know, look at me. Look how good I am. I spent my life screwing people, but I give to charities now. Look how good I am.

Mark Hurst:

 Right?

Minter Dial:

 I’m presenting an image of me that actually is not proportionate, or at least not representative of who I actually am. Which means, which should mean I’m also imperfect, not good, failure at things, shamed about certain things, and we never want to present that. So, the idea of doing good is where I get triggered is that I think it’s caused a lot of our mental health issues in particular. And it’s like, I know what good is based on what. Well, you know, what’s perhaps good for you, but you don’t want to impose your version of good on everybody.

Mark Hurst:

 Well, I think we might be talking on two different directions here. I understand what you’re saying about the, what we might call the performative goodness, look at me, And so, on. That’s certainly not what I’m after. Of course, I wrote a book a few years ago called customers included, in which I tried to really describe what I meant by making tech better or creating good experiences. Because when we talk about most digital products out there, not all, but most of them are launched and maintained by for profit organizations. So, it can’t just be do gooder whatever in the world. They have to engage customers, deliver some value, and then monetize that in some way in order for the organization to survive. And so, my definition of creating a good experience there is, again, not some abstract philosophical construct of what the good is, but in the case of a for profit company that’s launching a digital product, here it is. Think about what is going to be helpful or useful for the person who’s going to use that product and then deliver that in whatever context it is. Maybe you’re selling car parts, maybe you’re scheduling hair appointments, maybe you’re launching a new email service or something. It could be anything. But what is it that your customers, your users, your patients, the students, the families, the citizens, whoever the, let’s just call them customers, what is it that the customers want to do to accomplish? Can you use technology to help the customer accomplish their goals? That’s my definition of good. And then people say, well, what are we supposed to do? Ask them. Because customers don’t know what they want. I’m so glad you brought that up, because that’s what I had always heard for years before I wrote the book, customers don’t know what they want. Even Steve Jobs said that. Okay, so I have a whole chapter going into what Steve Jobs, I think Henry Ford had. Yes. If I had asked customers what color car. Wait. If I had asked customers what they wanted in a car, it would be faster horses. A faster horse. That’s right. A faster horse. Customers don’t know what they want. But again, that’s totally missing the point because a good user experience researcher should never ask the customer, what do you want? That’s the worst question you can ask a customer because customers are not the designers, they’re not the product managers. It’s not their job to tell you what customers can do. They can do one thing really, really well that nobody else can do. Okay? No one on the team can do this. Only customers can do this thing that I’m going to tell you. Customers are really good at showing their own experience going through their day, because everybody has their own context. They have their own goals, they have their own pain points. They have their own hopes and dreams. They have some achievements. They have some skill level. They have some things they don’t know how to do. It’s the whole Megillah. Okay. And the job of the researcher is to sit with that customer and observe the customer as they go through that. Not the whole day, but whatever the moment in their life is. Yeah. And then from that, you divine what it is that the customer wants that they don’t even know about that’s going to help them address that key pain point. What I call in the book the key unmet need. And so, it’s a very simple, it’s a very simple concept that to make technology better, the thing that teams should do that almost no one does is to spend time with the customer first, understand what it is the customer wants, not by asking them, but by observing them, and then to build that instead of the pet project that the boss thinks is going to be really awesome, that’s going to fail. And I have case studies in this book of companies like Google who invested millions of dollars in these poorly thought out products that the bombed Walmart, Ford Motor Company. Speaking of Henry Ford, these are well known companies that had plenty of money, plenty of talent. They just didn’t go through that step. I love reading these case studies. Sometimes I come across this story in the Wall Street Journal where a company does it yet again. They launch some new strategy without having talked to the customers beforehand. It fails, the company wastes $10 million. And then I just, I always, it’s usually in the second to last paragraph of the story, they get a quote from the senior leader who was in charge of the debacle. And the leader says, well, Gosh, if we had just talked to some customers beforehand, we never would have launched that. My gosh, I think, yep, there it is again. We could do so much better with technology in the world today, and everything has technology. We could do so much better if teams would just internalize this one simple discipline of spending some time with customers first. And the problem, Minter, is, in the last ten years, not only have teams abandoned or continued to ignore their customers, but based on the leadership of the cabal of Big Tech. companies, more and more teams are actively looking for ways to harm, deceive and manipulate their customers, to exploit their customers in order to make more money. And that, to me, is so offensive. That’s why I started the radio show, that’s why I started Techtonic, because it used to be that teams just, they just acted by default. They ignored customers. Because everybody ignores customers. We see a shiny object, let’s launch it. The boss wants to do something, let’s launch it. It fails, fails, fails, fails. All these launches are failing. And so, I thought if I could just show them there’s a better way of product development, that it could revolutionize everything. A couple of years after I wrote the book, Big Tech. discovered actually we can make more short-term profit not only by ignoring the customer, but by figuring out ways to manipulate them, to exploit them. How awful is that? But if you look at the, the market cap of these companies, one could say, well, Mark, they were right. They’re worth a trillion dollars. What’s Creative Good worth right now? Not a trillion. But even so, I continue plugging ahead because, again, of the ethical judgment. I think it is wrong to make money from exploiting people. I think it’s wrong. And I do believe that there is a way to build profitable companies that actually serve customers interests.

Minter Dial:

 Well, I am certainly not going to disagree with you on that. And I think having an ethical backbone, something I learned from the 130 veterans that I interviewed for my book, Second World War and the kind of moral compass they had, is something I feel like we can rehabilitate or we ought to bring back into our culture, including some more conservative values. But that’s another story. I wanted to address a couple of things that kind of connected with me when I was listening to you. The first is you said customers included. And it made me think of the expression sometimes on the bottom of a bill tip, included, as in the service that is included, which means you don’t have a choice at that level. And it reminds me of a book by my friend Philippe Bloch, who wrote in French, which means the tip is included, the service is understood, which in France, of course, is far from the case, even more so. But then I was thinking about how you looked at the tech world and said how it went from a hope of being good for the world to this bad place and how previously technologies were already badly guided and ended up corrupting the rest of the world. So, what made the difference? And somehow, why is it such a hyper problem today? And there are two things. The first is the other technologies already had a capitalistic idea from the beginning. They sold things, you had to buy these things, and there was a value exchange in that moment. I think this Ford is worth $10,000, so I’m going to pay for it. Whereas in the Internet version, it went free. So, when you’re free, you cant expect anything. There’s no value exchange in free. Free for infinity, really. And in that, the capitalistic, the second point is that I think the capitalistic cycle is to go and squeeze out all the good towards the profit in the end. Because once you’ve done good, then how are you going to do more and then always cut some costs because were now a cash cow. We own this industry. We did so good. We own everybody. Either you become a monopoly or regulated, or you start doing other ways, buying other companies and cutting costs, cutting corners, and there’s the bad that comes into it. So, how do you react to that? That was sort of like a sploosh of a reaction.

Mark Hurst:

 Well, I think one of the things that we are lacking that plays into all of this is the Internet. Companies are not yet meaningfully regulated in comparison to a lot of other industries. Look at the banking industry. As many problems as the banking industry has, it has some very strict regulations about how they can deal with customers and how they can deal with each other. There really is very little regulation on the Internet giants. And that’s a, I don’t know if it’s an accident of history, but let’s say it’s an artifact of history that goes back to the Clinton presidency when he basically deregulated everything they put in this thing called section 230 that gave immunity to companies for whatever content they hosted on their servers, their web servers, which may have made sense back in the day, but today, this lack of regulation has unleashed these forces that are doing everything that you just said. They’re chasing growth at any cost. Like you said, maybe they do something good for a court, and they say, well, how do we suck all of the value out of this and keep going anyway?

Minter Dial:

 We’re doing it for free, and you can’t come back at me because it’s free for you anyway. Facebook, Google, you use it every day for free. So, you can’t you can’t, you have no space to ground stand on.

Mark Hurst:

 Yeah, the, there was a judge named Bork, famous judge, yes. Who helped define the current, hopefully coming to an end soon doctrine of antitrust in the US. And this has been on for about 40 years. The doctrine is, if it’s free, it’s not a monopoly. I’m oversimplifying, but that’s essentially the idea. If it’s free, if the service or product is free, you can’t have a monopoly because antitrust is concerned with whatever the price is on the tag. Google search is free, Facebook is free. No need to look into antitrust for those companies. Well, Lena Khan, who was a young lawyer a couple years ago, wrote an essay that was extremely influential, who said, actually, Bork’s construction of antitrust is out of date in the era of Big Tech. She was absolutely right. And she said things can be free and can still exploit monopoly or monopolistic practices, which is what Amazon, all these companies have been doing. And now we have. Now she’s the chair of the Federal Trade Commission in the US, and we have, between the FTC and the DOJ Department of Justice, we have antitrust actions against all of the Big Tech. companies. They’re all going right now, and some of them have multiple antitrust cases. It’s beautiful. So, yeah, I’m hoping, Minter, that this idea that it’s free, therefore we get a pass. I’m hoping that that idea is going to be cast aside soon. It can’t come soon enough. It’s been out of date for several years.

Minter Dial:

 I want to get back to another point, which you talked about, which is the customer is not included in the thinking. And the irony of it being, for example, a radio show in the past would get these Nielsen data figures showing that they have a certain number of customers who maybe have listened to a certain number of the time and such And so, forth. But really, just like advertising, it hit 50%, but I just don’t know which 50% exactly. And yet today we have data. Podcasts can know more or less where the listeners are listening to, how much they listen to. I mean, so much data is available, targeting and all that. So, the ability, should there be trust in parentheses, to get data at a rather intimate level is so much more available than in the past.

Mark Hurst:

 Sure.

Minter Dial:

 And so, we’re not giving the customers what they want because we know what they want. At least we now know what they want in such a way to manipulate them as opposed to create the product that they really should be having.

Mark Hurst:

 Yeah. I mean, it’s a problem across media. There’s. What is it? Is it chartbeat? I forget the name of the display in newsrooms all across the US that show the journalists what stories are trending on the newspaper or the, the magazine’s website right at that moment. And when you measure something, the organization tends to reform itself around pushing up that metric. And so, that’s why you get a lot of clickbaity articles in a lot of places. It’s a race to the bottom. I mean, you can put in more data in order to throw off more intelligence, to tell people, to tell the, the producers who’s listening for how long or tell the newspaper editors who’s reading for how long. But that’s helpful to some extent, I’ll grant. But to make that your culture, that we want to go viral, we want to build our media platform for engagement, you end up doing what Facebook and Google’s YouTube have done, which is you start promoting things that are not healthy for people to consume. I mean, if I went out to the street, I live in New York City. So, if I went out to Broadway, which is a crowded thoroughfare in New York, if I go out to Broadway and I set up two tables, one table has donuts. It’s just a big pile of donuts, and it says free. Another table says it’s vegetables, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, spinach And so, on. Which one of those is going to be cleared off first?

Minter Dial:

 And the vegetables are free as well?

Mark Hurst:

 Yes.

Minter Dial:

 Okay. Because I was expecting you to say for $2, you get a pack of veggies..

Mark Hurst:

 That would be interesting as well. But if I made them free on both sides, the donuts would go first. And so, if I looked at that, I could conclude humans really want donuts. And so, if I, and this is now we’re getting into the business of ultra processed food companies, which I just covered on Techtonic, Recently, the largest, richest, most powerful food companies in the US are tending to make food products that give immediate pleasure, that are engaging. Not to say addictive, exactly, but they’re trending in that direction. And they tend, not all, but some of them tend to be harmful or have harmful health effects on the users. But that’s, again, if you build your career around serving people’s most knee jerk, instinctive, short term desires, you end up just serving up empty calories, whether the empty calories are literally in donuts, or they’re in click baity articles, or in some awful algorithm that runs Facebook or Google’s YouTube. And so, yeah, I think there’s a responsibility for people to have some discernment about what they’re using their career for. Is that what you want? Is that what you want at the end of your career to look back and say I delivered 10 billion donuts and 10 trillion empty calories and I, again maybe metaphorically in digital products and I caused all sorts of ill effects on the people who consume them, is that what you want to finish out your career looking back on?

Minter Dial:

 So, this idea of short term gratification, I feel the short term common thought is capitalism. Short term gains, short term quick things. I think of it also as sort of highlighting the individualistic approach to things. What I want quickly for me as opposed to longer term, more community, broader societal benefits like eating healthier foods and 42% of Americans who are obese, where can we go with that? But I link it back to the capitalism and I want to just get back into the regulation piece because obviously for the DOJ, that’s a lot of, a lot of cases, probably huge amount of work these companies are going to throw at them, every lawyer and the cookbook to avoid all that surely and probably settle for some smidgen of their profits. And I don’t know where it goes, but if you were to look at the GAFAM as we call them over here, and by the way, if you did that same donut and story over in Europe, it probably would be the vegetables that go first. But that’s another story. But within the GAFAM going off to the GAFAM, is there a hierarchy of badness? Would you go after one more than the other? And I think it was in your Techtonic, but it might have been another podcast talking about how the issue is they’re so international and that it’s hard to pin down under which regulation or who’s regulating, whether it’s the European Union, United nations, or just the American market because it’s leaky.

Mark Hurst:

 Yeah you got it. Sometimes they claim like Apple did this for a while. I’m not sure if they’re still running this little game, but for a while they said, well we don’t need to pay taxes in the US on our massive profits from our IP because our IP is all owned by an Irish company. People said Irish. All of your devices, your iPads and iPhones, they all say designed in California. But what is this about Ireland? They said well you know, we set up a subsidiary in Ireland, the patent office, and we sent all of our IP there. So, sorry, we can’t pay very many taxes. So, yeah that’s we just need. We need to tighten up the regulation on those companies. But in terms of a hierarchy of better and worse, I wanted to say something about, rather than saying who’s the worst, the absolute worst, because it would actually be difficult to name of the five, but I want to flip that and say what would be an example of actually kind of a good, large Silicon Valley tech company? And if I had to choose a good case study, it would be not today’s, but the past version of Hewlett Packard. Now, anybody who knows the history of HP knows that Hewlett Packard was named after the last names of the two founders, the two co founders, and they stayed. They were pretty early on. They were independently wealthy, the two of them. Hewlett and Packard, kept running HP, and they ran a profitable company in Silicon Valley that respected customers. It was expanding into other business lines, but there were some values that Hewlett and Packard held onto, and that gave HP a long term run of growth. Not hyper hockey stick growth, everything the tech bros. Talk about, but a responsible growth line where it’s profitable, they’re providing high quality. I mean, HP products were known for a long time as being, if you want high quality, it costs a little bit more. But you go with HP, they have great service. Basically, the customers knew you could trust them. And then H and P left. They passed on. And then managers came in and have done their best to subvert everything that HNP stood for. And now if you go and you buy an HP printer, one of their main product lines, everybody’s going to make fun of you. And there’s stories online. Do not buy an HP printer because it exploits you. They have all these dark patterns on how the cyan cartridge is going to run out. And then they have DRM built in, and I think they. There’s all sorts of things built into the printer that are about extracting the most profit possible from you for the benefit of HP. It’s not built to benefit you, the user. It’s built to benefit HP. And so, people are figuring out, oh, I should have bought a brother, and a brother printer is fine, you know? Anyway, that’s a small case study to show that it is possible to have leadership that wants to create a trustworthy, responsible company that, yes, provides value to shareholders, but also takes care of customers and labor along the way. And if at some point, that trustworthy company flips and gets turned over to unethical leadership, it’s over. It’s over. The brand evaporates overnight. Now, what’s interesting about the five Big Tech. companies is that all of them are pretty much playing the roles that they always have, except for Apple. I feel like Steve Jobs would not have done some of the things that Apple has done recently, but certainly Facebook, Google, Amazon, and especially Microsoft. From the very beginning they were showing this tendency. So, I wish for the day when we have a large technology company run by senior leadership that has values, has ethics, and is willing to look to the long term good for the company, for the shareholders, for labor, and for the customers. And that is possible. I hope we can get back to that at some point.

Minter Dial:

 Well, I have written a fair amount about the notion of governance. And to the extent that any company is publicly traded, it loses its liberty, it becomes beholden to shareholders and to providing returns. Whereas if you’re a privately held company and your founder, or at least the insights and mindset of the founder, are still present, and there’s a third piece, which is that the name of your company is also the name of your traded product or service. So, there’s a link as opposed to hidden meta Facebook, there’s no meta products. There’s Facebook, there’s Instagram. Whereas Google was Google right now its Alphabet and having Google and others. Whereas a company, well, like Apple, everything it sells, except for the beats I think are signed Apple and its publicly traded now. And the founders go. But there is this notion that the inevitable cycle of capitalism will roll you over once you go public, once the founder’s blood or mindset isn’t included, and when you start providing corporate names that distance you from your presence on the.

Mark Hurst:

 Commercial shelf, yeah, that could be true. And that might speak to the importance of growing privately held companies or even looking into alternative capitalizations, which is to say, maybe we need to start running more co ops. I know there’s been a movement the last 1015 years for beak corporations. I don’t know if that solves some of these issues, but just to get creative about different ways of creating organizations so that they’re in their very foundational makeup, they are not oriented towards growth at any cost. And then you can look for growth and you can achieve growth, and it’s fine. But you have to adhere to the values of taking care of your employees and your customers and your partners, none of which the $2 trillion companies in our economy are doing right now.

Minter Dial:

 Well, it brings up in my mind the idea of the deceleration, the people who believe in degrowth.

Mark Hurst:

 Degrowth.

Minter Dial:

 Sure, it’s going to be complicated coming with a solution, and we’re not going to solve the world’s problems right here. Last question for you, Mark, and I’ll let you go afterwards, is that you’ve been running Techtonic, the radio show, for now, for seven years. You do it voluntarily. I really enjoy the show. I highly recommend anybody who’s enjoyed listening to you go check out your show as well as catch up with everything, everything else you’re doing, including your writings. But you’ve done so many interviews with so many interesting people, and I was wondering what stands out for you after seven years? What might be the single most moving, important interview you had or some standout that we could send everybody to go listen to?

Mark Hurst:

 Oh, gosh. Well, I love all my guests the same.

Minter Dial:

 Naturally.

Mark Hurst:

 I can’t. I can’t, as I’m sure you do. No, you’re going to start telling people that, man, Mark Hurst, was the most moving interviewee I’ve ever had. Naturally, on mentor dialogue, I have really, I’ve done, as of this recording, I’ve done 320 something shows over almost seven years, and I’ve enjoyed all of them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing a volunteer radio show. And by the way, people can find this at Techtonic, FM. That’s t e c h, tonic Fm. Don’t confuse it with a podcast that launched a year or two after I started mine by the Financial Times called Techtonic, Thank you, Ft. The name is mine. Anyway, Techtonic, FM. And one, I say that because people can look on that page and they can find. I’m not going to say this is the best, but this is a fun interview that would give people a good feel of the show. Not long ago, I did an interview with an astronomer named Sam Lawler. L A W l E R. She is an astronomer who is at a university in Canada, and she has been raising the alarm that astronomers all over the world are having trouble taking long exposure photos of the night skies. You know, where you might want to detect an incoming asteroid that’s about to obliterate all human life? They do important work. And your sound just went out. Check, check, check, check, check, check. No, I’m still here. I didn’t change anything. Check, check, check, check, check, check.

Minter Dial:

 Maybe. Can you hear me?

Mark Hurst:

 Yes.

Minter Dial:

 Very gosh. I know, I just. It just went right out. Maybe it’s zoom. It might be recording on your end. That’s another possibility. So, they can’t hear you. I’m going to go to my magic. See, speak.

Mark Hurst:

 Check, check, check. I’m here now.

Minter Dial:

 I hear you. So, I bet it was recording. So, hopefully I’ll be able to stitch it back together.

Mark Hurst:

 All right, I’ll stitch it, stitch it. I’ll go back. Where did you get the, where did I stop?

Minter Dial:

 You had mentioned Sam Lawlor and a great astronomer. You look, taking photographs of the sky.

Mark Hurst:

 She’s taking, astronomers all over the world are taking these long exposure, long exposure photographs to look for things like incoming asteroids that could wipe out human life. So, astronomers are doing important work, and their photographs increasingly are getting these streaks, these white lines that obscure a lot of the data in the photograph. You know what the streaks are? They’re Elon Musk’s starlink satellites. He has about 5000 of them in the night sky already. He owns more satellites than any other organization right now, and he wants several thousand more. Well, I’m kind of underestimating there. He wants more than 30,000 satellites in the night sky. And so, Sam Lawler is pointing out it’s ruining astronomers photographs. And some of the space junk is starting to come down in farmers fields. And let me tell you, Minter, I know this as a fact. You don’t want a satellite to fall on your head from space. That would be a very bad day.

Minter Dial:

 Probably don’t want a pebble to fall on your head.

Mark Hurst:

 No. And you don’t want a truck sized satellite to not completely burn up anyway. So, this one interview, it touches on Big Tech. and Elon Musk’s growth at any cost philosophy that he, that he runs his businesses with. It touches environmental impact. It touches on the social realities on the ground as people are looking for Internet access. There are a lot of, there are a lot of things coming together. The lack of regulation comes up as well. So, again, if people go to Techtonic, fm, look up the Sam Lawler interview and listen to that, that will give you a pretty good idea of the overlapping, complex issues that I try to cover week to week.

Minter Dial:

 And it’s a story or type of story that we’re not used to hearing. So, I’ll be sure to put that in the show, notes Mark Bundaberg. Great to have you on the show. You have a great radio voice, I might add, and let us stay in touch. Mark, how can people otherwise connect with you? What other links would you like to put out there? Hire you for figuring out how to make the customer included, or get onto your newsletter or listen to your show.

Mark Hurst:

 Thanks. All of my work is@creativegood.com and that’s creativegood with no s on the end. Creativegood.com dot. I’m happy to chat with people if they have follow up questions. And I also, in addition to the newsletter, I have a premium community where I post extra content and we have discussions for upgraded members, so maybe some people want to check that out that out as well. I really appreciate you inviting me onto the show today, Minter, and I admire what you’re doing and I hope you continue to have great success with all of your writing, podcasting, and consulting and speaking well.

Minter Dial:

 It certainly gives me fulfillment. I appreciate it. Mark, thank you very much for your friendship and look forward to seeing you again soon.

Mark Hurst:

 Likewise. Thanks. Mentor.