Every Lie You Believe In

Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pichai of Google, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the president of the United States—when you think of the people controlling the world, these names come to mind. But the truth is, while these people have a significant influence over our lives, four companies secretly control the world, and only a handful of people hold significant power in those companies. These are the people who have the potential to change your life for better or worse without you ever realizing what's happening.

I made a video talking about how BlackRock controls the world, and unsurprisingly, they are one of the four companies we'll discuss today. Altogether, these four companies manage almost $24 trillion worth of assets. They have the most influence over the United States' monetary policy and operate with very little oversight, which means they're free to do almost anything they want. Their power doesn't end in the United States; these companies also own a significant stake in the vast majority of European companies that are listed on the US Stock Exchange.

Now, you might think this is an exaggeration. How can four companies control so much wealth? But it is true, and the information is available once you just look for it. From the largest retail stores like Walmart and Home Depot to transportation companies like GMC and Boeing, pharmaceutical companies like Merck, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and media companies like Disney, Viacom, News Corp, NBC, CBS, Time Warner, and AT&T, they influence the banking system as they’re involved in every decision made at the largest financial institutions like Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup in the United States.

The US Federal Reserve, the country's central banking institution, has board members who represent these four investment firms. Global financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are influenced heavily by these companies. So who exactly are these four companies? The largest of the four companies, BlackRock, was founded in 1988 by Larry Fink. Like the other three firms, BlackRock is a fiduciary, which means that a person has placed trust in them to act in their best financial interest. BlackRock does this primarily through mutual funds, collections of assets that invest in stocks, bonds, and other securities like real estate.

BlackRock currently has 70 offices in 30 countries around the globe and holds $10 trillion in assets. The company is currently worth $20 trillion, which is half of the US's yearly gross domestic product, or GDP. This is the measure of value created by a country by producing goods and services. The other three companies are Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity Investments. Vanguard manages $7.6 trillion in assets and is the world's largest issuer of mutual funds. At the end of 2022, it had 203 US funds and 227 international funds, which served its 50 million investors. Vanguard's founder, John Bogle, created the index investment fund in 1976, now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund.

You might be wondering the difference between an index and a mutual fund. An index fund is a type of mutual fund that is passively managed, as opposed to other mutual funds which are actively managed. So when Bogle invented this index fund, he created a formula to track returns on the market and invest accordingly. State Street is owned by Vanguard now but is the second oldest continually operating US bank; its predecessor Union Bank was founded in 1792. State Street manages $3.9 trillion in investment assets, along with Vanguard and BlackRock, and is one of the prominent three index fund managers that dominate corporate America.

Fidelity Investments manages $4.3 trillion in assets. It was founded by Edward Johnson II in 1946 and has remained a family-owned and operated business ever since. Fidelity was the first major American finance firm to market mutual funds to everyone via mail and door-to-door sales. Before they opened their doors, the mere idea of investing had been reserved for wealthy individuals. Hearing that alone, you might be wondering what exactly is wrong with these companies. They all sound like industry pioneers who have done incredible things to stay in business for so long.

While that is entirely right, it's only half the story. To figure out the other half, let's start with what these companies tell us they do. Each of these firms helps everyday people invest their money. Whether you're a multi-millionaire or an hourly worker looking to create a small investment fund for your family, they’ve helped democratize investing. Often, investing with them can seem like a good idea, especially lately, because in today's world, we're not just worried about making money; we're concerned about making money and helping move society forward.

That's where ESG investing comes in. ESG, which stands for environmental, social, governance, is a type of investing that considers social and environmental factors. So basically, what is the company you're investing in doing about environmental issues like climate change? All four of these firms advertised their commitment to ESG. As you would expect, some people have mocked these firms' stance on ESG, calling it "woke investing." In response, companies like BlackRock have responded by saying it’s not woke; it’s capitalism.

The way they see it, climate change poses a risk, so investing in companies that further the effects of climate change is also a risk. On the flip side, investing in companies trying to mitigate that risk is good business. To give them all the credit, they’ve put their money where their mouths are. In 2021, Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street successfully shook up the board of ExxonMobil by installing new members who promised to take on climate change. BlackRock let the state of West Virginia, a huge coal producer, pull out of the investment firm due to their pledge to invest in net-zero companies.

But when you peel back the curtain, it’s not as wholesome as these firms would like to make it sound, especially when it comes to ESG investing. Every single one of these companies is about as hypocritical as they get. Vanguard specifically praises its own ESG investing while also owning $86 billion in coal companies, making it the world’s largest investor in the industry. BlackRock is the top investor in fossil fuels, deforestation, war profiteering, and doing business with human rights violators.

Look no further than BlackRock's deal with the Chinese government. The firm became the first company to have access to China’s vast mutual fund market, followed by Fidelity. This left many skeptics wondering what did they promise President Xi Jinping with this deal. These two companies will be pouring more and more money into the Chinese companies, which are primarily controlled by the Chinese government, a growing adversary of Western democracies. Even more controversial are the firms' investments in Russia. All of these companies had assets invested in Russian companies, and once the war broke out in Ukraine, they all responded—at least publicly—by freezing those investments or pulling out of them altogether.

Whether or not those assets will stay out of Russia long-term is questionable; regardless, years and years of investments from these four companies undoubtedly helped fund Putin's invasion of Ukraine. No matter how you slice it, these companies are riddled with conflicts of interest. In Ukraine, BlackRock is one of the leaders trying to advise the country on rebuilding once the conflict is resolved. This might seem benevolent, but not all that glitters is gold. In reality, BlackRock is simply capitalizing on a war that their funds helped finance so they can make more money closer to home.

Then there’s the Johnson family, which founded and runs Fidelity; they also run a venture capital arm that competes with Fidelity's investments. This means the family benefits while Fidelity investors get a crappy deal. For example, from 2011 to 2012, F-Prime Capital, the family’s venture capital arm, invested $1 million in Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical Incorporated before it went public. This investment prevented Fidelity's mutual funds from making the same play because if it did, it would have violated US securities laws.

So the family-owned fund got the better stock value while the public funds, which invested in the company at a higher rate, kind of got screwed. Essentially, these companies—which have immense power and control in our world—tell us a manicured PR statement about what they're doing, but in reality, the story is much more complicated and problematic. None of their success would have been possible without the various proprietary technologies that they’ve developed to help their investing strategies.

The prime example is BlackRock's Aladdin technology, which began the trend of using technology to minimize the risk of investing. It manages $20 trillion in assets and predicts the outcome of every single investment while getting information and personal data on everyone who knowingly or unknowingly gave BlackRock their money. This technology and others like it are perfect for investors; they’ve helped to lower the cost of managing the investment while improving returns. This type of technology is what makes companies like BlackRock and others grow; it gives them an edge.

It allows them to apply their investment strategy companywide; it enables investors to diversify their portfolios more effectively. Technologies like this democratize investing, allowing anyone of any level of wealth to benefit from a sound investment strategy. This is why over 80% of all assets invested over the last decade have gone to these four companies. But at what cost?

And if these companies continue to revolutionize, advance their technologies, and control more and more investor assets, then what are the risks of ownership concentration? If BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street continue increasing their influence over the biggest companies across every industry, competition is just going to decrease. They’ll be competing with themselves, which isn’t competing at all. This leads to less consumer choice and higher prices, and we can see this already happening in the airline industry. Over the last 14 years, airfares have increased by as much as 7% because there’s less pressure to compete.

BlackRock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the biggest three operators. But this isn’t just about the companies; it’s about the people who run and own them—the people who make the decisions, pull the levers, and hold so much power, you can’t imagine. Starting with Larry Fink, the founder, chairman, and CEO of BlackRock, he started out at a New York-based investment bank where he rose to manage the firm’s bond department. Unfortunately, his career there ended when he lost his department $100 million after an incorrect prediction about interest rates.

This led him to focus his next venture on investing in risk management, and BlackRock was born. He founded the firm in 1988 and grew it from $5 million to $8 billion in just five years. Abigail Johnson, CEO of Fidelity Investments, didn’t grow the company she leads from the ground up; she’s the granddaughter of Fidelity’s founder, Edward Johnson II. She started as an analyst and portfolio manager at the company before being promoted to the president of Fidelity’s asset management division in this position in the early 2000s.

Like an episode of “Succession,” Johnson unsuccessfully attempted to remove her father as CEO over disagreements about how to lead the company. It wouldn't take too long for her time to come though; in 2014 she was named CEO. State Street's CEO, Ronald O'Hanley, has ties to Fidelity, having previously served as the president of asset management and corporate services there before entering his current role. The RO of finance is a lot smaller than you think. Vanguard, uniquely, is owned by its clients, or rather by the funds they invest in. Its president and CEO, Mortimer J. Buckley, started his career as an assistant to the company’s founder, John Bogle—the guy who essentially invented the index fund.

He may not like the direction his business is going in; he’s warned of ownership concentration, saying that too much money is in too few hands. Undoubtedly, asset management has made Mr. Buckley a very wealthy man, but perhaps he sees beyond that. Maybe he understands the power he and others like him have over every industry they invest in and every investor who entrusts them. He may be issuing a warning to us all, but it’s not one we’re likely able to do anything about because these four companies are just too influential.

Our global financial system, meant to empower individual investors, has empowered a select few instead. So while we get distracted by celebrities’ faces on the front of magazines or flashing by in our social media posts, these company leaders are behind the scenes pulling the levers and secretly deciding the financial future of our world, whether we like it or not. The worst of them all is BlackRock; watch this video next to understand why.

In 1994, the CEO of the tobacco company RJ Reynolds, James W. Johnson, told the United States Congress that cigarette smoking is no more addictive than coffee, tea, or Twinkies. Sure, there might be some out there who might have a steady stream of Twinkies entering their stomach, but I feel like we can all agree that despite the stomach ache and probably risk for diabetes, this sugar-happy habit isn’t nearly as dangerous as smoking cigarettes. For years, the tobacco industry assured customers that cigarettes weren’t unhealthy or addictive, and they made billions doing it.

But in reality, about 480,000 Americans die every year from cigarettes, to say nothing of the global death rate. Four years after Johnson made his famously false comparison, the four largest tobacco companies reached a settlement with 46 US states to pay $26 billion over 25 years to help cover medical costs of smoking-related illnesses. They lied, and now we all know why they did. While the corporate lie about cigarettes feels particularly egregious, companies, governments, and even well-intentioned people lie to us in more subtle ways every single day.

Think back to job interviews you might have had; you might have heard the phrase, "Our employees are our most valuable asset," and it probably feels good to hear that. You want to work at a place that values you. Yet layoffs happen all the time. Sure, they’re usually veiled as reorgs or some other corporate jargon to tell you that you’re just no longer needed. It’s not personal; it’s just business. Even when you get to keep your job, salaries remain stagnant, and sometimes they even drop with the ebbs and flows of the economy.

Look no further than the wave of strikes around the globe this summer, with labor unions like the United Auto Workers proclaiming, “No, employees clearly aren’t a company’s most valuable asset.” These statements by corporations are meant to make employees feel heard and respected. They’re similar to statements like, "Your responses will be confidential," when you're being asked to take a survey about the company's performance or your team.

It might seem suspect; is it really anonymous? Probably not, because companies aren’t legally bound to respect statements of confidentiality. They tend to scuttle laws that force them to keep employee information private. Management at whatever level is most likely looking at whatever confidential statements you make on a survey or otherwise. Or what about meritocracy? How many times have you heard that your company or team is a meritocracy, where the most talented, smartest, hardest-working individuals rise to the top?

It’s nice to believe this because it makes us feel like if we work our butts off and develop our skills, then we’ll get promoted, get raises, and advance in the way we always hoped we would. But being real, whatever industry you’re working in, those promotions and raises often have to do more with networking and connections than actual hard work. Sometimes the best candidates get rewarded, but in many cases, it’s all about who you know—relationships you built on the job were the ones you came into the job with. So work hard, but also get connected.

These kinds of corporate lies are general things companies say to keep workers happy. But then there’s more specific lies—lies that are meant to persuade employees of a certain position. Companies like to make us think that our jobs are dependent on low corporate taxes. It's true that corporate tax rates around the globe tend to be high, but even in the United States, where at 35%, it’s actually lower than a lot of other countries around the world, corporations have developed systems of tax credits and subsidies to avoid paying that amount or even close to it.

The claim that a low corporate tax rate leads to more jobs for workers is mostly just a farce, just like the claim that unions force jobs overseas. Yes, unions do lead to increased labor costs, but millions of non-union jobs are also sent overseas. So the problem doesn’t really lie in unionization; it lies in the power of globalization. Computer programmers were never unionized, but most tech firms have moved their operations to India and China.

The reality is that unions create a shift in power away from management, and in some cases, unions do create problems—corruption, among other things. But when working properly, they limit and hold management accountable for the decisions that impact their employees. To demonize unions and tie it to the decline of domestic jobs is a tactic—not a tactic to keep jobs on home soil but to stop workers from unionizing in the first place.

When we commit to a job or to working with a certain company on a project, we’re usually informed of the company’s core values. We get a long list of vague words like loyalty and sustainability, but what is any company’s true core value? Money. In the best of workplaces, other values might follow, but money, no matter what, usually tops them all. Companies might give to charitable causes, but mostly because it improves their branding and helps with tax deductions. They’ll limit their environmental impact when it improves their cost, but probably not just because they love Mother Earth so much.

The use of core values is an example of the law of inverse relevancy, which tells us that the less someone plans on doing something, the more they talk about it. We all have the friend who can’t stop talking about the exercise plan that they’re about to start, but the question always remains, when? The fact that companies lie ultimately isn’t really surprising, but seeing it in action can be a pretty wild experience.

In 2020, the leaders of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google testified in front of an anti-trust panel at the US House of Representatives. The goal of the panel was to poke holes in big tech's argument that they're not monopolies. The titans of the tech industry told lie after lie that we either just ignore as consumers or decide that we want to believe, like the lie that users are in control of their data. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company has simplified its settings for users, and this is true—they offer many privacy options.

But simple isn't really a word to describe them; just because an airplane has a lot of controls doesn’t mean that anyone can fly it. The reality is that most of us have little to no understanding of what companies do with our data. They want us to think that having access to our data creates a better experience for us, and sure, it’s nice when Instagram feeds you an ad for those sneakers you've been searching for.

But the data collection isn’t about getting you new shoes; it’s about giving companies power to make money, specifically by selling those ads. That helps big tech grow, and we can all agree that they have grown. One of the claims made in this hearing was that these massive companies aren’t even that big. Amazon claimed it holds less than 1% of the global retail market and less than 4% of retail in the United States. But that’s counting all retail, even gas stations.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really consider that shopping. Similarly, Facebook claimed that it competes with all products that connect people, not just any social media companies. And Apple insisted that it doesn’t have a dominant share in any market or product category. But if you have an iPhone, you know you have to go through Apple to buy apps or services on the device.

Of course, it’s not like the government, who was listening to these claims, doesn’t do its fair share of lying to us as well. The US government has repeatedly lied to citizens to justify war. In 1998, the Clinton administration bombed what it told the public was a chemical weapons factory in Sudan that turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory. Then famously, the Bush administration cooked up a web of false information to convince us all that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, the basis for the Iraq War.

The most famous incident of the American government lying to perpetuate war came during Vietnam. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked and published. They showed that the government had systematically lied to cover up the fact that the United States was losing ground in Vietnam in the 1960s. While the war was still going on, US officials insisted that the Viet Cong were dying in record numbers and that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. They called for more force, even though, as the Pentagon Papers told us, they knew the reality of what was happening—that the US was losing the war.

There is, of course, a certain amount of government secrecy that's pretty much necessary for national security. False assurances aren’t just for the public; they're meant to mislead adversaries and to cover up mistakes and failures that might make a country seem weak or incapable. So your government might be lying to protect you, but at what point are we supposed to believe what they say? Are we meant to think that every lie is in service of our own protection?

Let’s face it: a lot of the time, it’s about ego. Governments are filled with people, and people have too much pride to admit that they're wrong. One notable exception was in 1962 when French President Charles de Gaulle withdrew his forces from the Algerian War, understanding that France had lost the fight.

But it’s not just overseas that our governments have proven untrustworthy. The empty promises of political campaigns can easily convince voters to show support, but they’re rarely delivered on. Politicians make promises they can’t fulfill all the time. During his campaign in 1988, George HW Bush made the promise that he would never, ever under any circumstances raise taxes, and then in 1990 he admitted that fixing the economy would require tax increases. He made the promise of no new taxes but failed to deliver. Was he lying? Probably. But that’s because to make that kind of sweeping assertion is almost impossible to follow through on.

But these are the kinds of things that help candidates win. The other thing that can help candidates win is an environment of division. Politicians use our perceived division to stoke anger, fear, and passion. Right now, we're seeing a global wave of distinct rhetoric from America to Argentina to Italy. But are we really that divided? The government and the media keep telling us that we are, but there might be a widening gap between our reality and what we’re told.

Members of the government might adopt extreme positions, but often average voters don’t—especially now. Younger generations are resistant to supporting a political party. So is the future actually going to be as divided as many want us to think?

It’s easy to point fingers at the government or a large corporation for lying to us, but it gets harder when we talk about lies coming from people whose entire brands depend on helping others. But that certainly doesn’t mean that lies aren’t rampant throughout the self-help industry. They oversell personal empowerment, hyping up hope and creating a false sense of self-confidence among so many of us.

You’ve probably heard the phrase "toxic positivity." It’s when we tell ourselves or listen to encouraging statements that are meant to minimize or eliminate painful emotions. This leads to pressure to be unrealistically optimistic without considering the reality of a situation, and the truth is that sadness, disappointment, and anger can all be pretty helpful emotions to experience. Positive thinking isn’t necessarily bad, but if we believe that walking around thinking everything is great all the time is going to help us grow, we’re probably kidding ourselves to some extent.

Self-help guru Tony Robbins says that there’s no such thing as failure, only results. This concept of “there’s no such thing as failure” hits us on podcasts, in books, and in social media posts, pushing us to ignore when we come up short. But why is failure framed as such a bad thing? Why do we have to rename or ignore it altogether? Can’t failure just be failure, and can’t it be okay to be disappointed when you experience it?

A lot of self-help guides try to sell us on financial freedom as our ultimate goal, as if working is such a horrible thing. Of course, financial stress isn’t pleasant, but why is being free of any sort of pressure to work such a desirable thing? The world has convinced us that we need to be living on passive income, enjoying every second of every day by the time we’re 30. Success, financial or otherwise, takes time, and the journey, while difficult, doesn’t have to be miserable.

Don’t let some online expert convince you that it will be. Often, these goals or ways of viewing the world set by gurus and experts are an attempt to make us feel that who we are and what we have isn’t enough. These days, we’re bred on a sense of inadequacy, always striving for something different. If we don’t feel we’re good enough, we’ll buy products that promise to make us better, healthier, prettier, and happier. It all comes back to money.

But the lies from the world are frankly nothing compared to the lies we tell ourselves. “I have to be perfect. Maybe I’ll never be happy. If I could just fix that one thing, my life would be amazing.” “If I could get married, find a better job, buy a new car, or floss every day.” But no one single thing is the solution to happiness. “If I ignore that bad feeling, it’ll go away.” “I don’t have a choice how I spend my time.” “If I had more time, I would exercise, socialize, or learn to crochet.”

The truth is, either we want to do something, or we don't. It might sound fun to become a piano player, but after spending three hours learning beginner chords, you might think otherwise. That can change. Other people? No, no; you can’t. We can, if we’re lucky, help them change themselves. However, we shouldn’t sign up for that either. There’s no point lying to ourselves here; people are just who they are—including us, you and me.

So no matter what your employer or your president is promising you, or what that famous podcast host or financial expert is trying to convince you of, you know who you are, and you know what you need. You can trust yourself to root out the lies, especially the ones very deep inside.

You’ve just graduated college and worked your first month at your new job. You’ve worked extremely hard to get this position, and getting that first paycheck feels like such a triumphant moment. The possibilities of what you can do with your income are exciting. This is the first time you’ve had a sense of freedom over the money you’ve earned. But the sad truth is, you don’t have any freedom. That reality becomes clear when you open a letter you receive in the mail a few days later.

It’s from a student loan program informing you of your repayment schedule. This paycheck never really was yours; you owe money. You’re in debt and will be in debt for a very long time. Once the realization sets in, every coffee purchased or drink with a friend suddenly starts to feel like you’re splurging with someone else’s money. It makes you feel guilty and sometimes even depressed. This is the story of around one in five American adults who have student loan debt.

But in reality, this isn’t your fault; it’s just one of the ways that governments and banks might be keeping you poor. The truth is debt can lead you down a pretty dark road, especially if you’re not concerned about falling deeper into it. Household debt in the US just hit a record high of $16.9 trillion. That’s 16, with 15 zeros behind it. Even making six figures, you’re more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck than thriving.

I should clarify that not all debt is bad; it can give people opportunities that they might not have had otherwise. It allows startups to get off the ground without using personal capital, and it allows people to make big purchases that can be paid off in smaller chunks spread over a long period of time. But too much debt and lousy interest rates can cause severe problems. Studies suggest that being in debt can make you more anxious, depressed, and cause many people to experience suicidal thoughts.

You might feel okay with how much you owe right now, but these mental health issues can grow bigger as your debt gets higher. Debt also makes your future feel limited. Your ability to travel, make big purchases, and move on to another phase of life is greatly challenged by the amount of money you owe. For instance, you can’t get a mortgage if you have too much student debt. Debt can impact your relationships and health, and there are studies linking bad debt ratios to high blood pressure and higher rates of divorce.

It goes back to that feeling of splurging on something using someone else's money. This feeling puts a spotlight on spending habits within a relationship, causing stress, arguments, and even separation. You don’t need to be a gambling addict to have fights over money. You might think it’s okay to incur debt because when you die, it dies with you. But this isn’t always the truth; a lot of different debts can be inherited by your loved ones, especially debts you’ve taken on with another person, like a mortgage.

Being in debt isn’t great, but don’t be too hard on yourself because it’s not necessarily your fault. We live in a society that has institutionalized debt and made borrowing a living commonplace. Think about it: we’re encouraging young kids, barely old enough to vote, to take on thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans just to get an education. We all know how terrible loans can be, but one effect we don’t really talk about is how they tend to normalize the idea of taking on debt to people who are just entering adulthood.

This creates a mindset about money that takes a very long time to shake—even if it’s possible to shake at all. A student who has a lot of loans to repay may also experience debt fatalism—a state where being in debt seems inescapable. If you’re accustomed to existing debt, it’s difficult to picture what it’s like to exist without it. As a result, you’re more likely to continue drowning in it. When people think of debt, there’s often the stigma that it’s the individual’s fault. You hear finance gurus tell you about wasteful people who splurge on the latest iPhone and buy Starbucks every day instead of making coffee at home.

While there are certainly people who are responsible with credit, the reality is that most people who are in debt are there out of necessity. For one, people with children are far more likely to incur debt from the cost of taking care of a child. The same goes for people who have to take care of a parent. These two factors introduce a variety of necessary expenses that no amount of penny-pinching will mitigate. Most people's financial literacy is also very poor; it’s a subject that’s seldom taught in schools. So we’re often at the mercy of the lenders and the fine print we don’t bother to read.

Even if we did take the time to read the terms and conditions while applying for a new credit card, would we even understand them? All of this without even talking about the system whose entire existence depends on debt: banks. Let’s take a moment to look at how banks work. You give them money; 90% of that money is lent to someone else. The person taking the loan puts it in their account, and 90% of that amount is loaned to someone else, and so on. The bank charges interest on all those loans that were made possible thanks to your money.

Debt is how they make money; it’s the core of their business model. To make matters worse, banks are profit-driven and often use predatory practices to try and get you to incur more debt. Because their favorite clients aren’t the ones who pay off their debt as quickly as possible, but the ones they refer to as “revolvers”—people who are perpetually in debt. Banks know your income, and they know what you can’t afford, but that doesn’t seem to stop them from issuing you multiple credit cards or locking you into a high-interest loan.

These are companies that pursue profits over the well-being of their clients. Imagine having several maxed-out credit cards and then piling on multiple high-interest loans until you can no longer afford the minimum payment on any of them. Where else can you go? Remember that dark road we talked about earlier? Well, that road can lead to someone taking their own life. This is what’s known as debt suicide. People find themselves drowning in debt and feel like there’s no other way to escape it. People in debt are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts, and similarly, people who die from suicide are eight times more likely to be in debt.

Sure, you can say that ultimately the individual is responsible, but what about the corporations that nudge, push, and deceive these people into making poor financial decisions? What responsibility should they bear in all of this? Credit card companies, for example, will often use deceitful tactics like charging 0% interest for the first six months to try and get people accustomed to not paying off their credit cards. Then, when the high interest kicks in, there's a good chance the cardholder has already accumulated a ton of debt. Strategies like this are designed to nudge more and more people down the dark path, keeping them poor. It’s how banks and credit card companies make more money.

In the pursuit of bigger profits, they knowingly neglect the welfare of their clients. This can sometimes mean that the parents can afford to give their kids a decent start to life or that the kids can afford to give their parents a decent end to life. These are the real consequences: we’re destroying the lives of the common people to fill the pockets of the few at the top. These shady companies are on one side of the institutional debt equation; on the other side is what we need all that loan money for in the first place.

The two biggest expenses in the life of an average person in the US are an education and a home. In the last 50 years, the cost of both has skyrocketed, far outpacing into what many would consider a good life—with a home they own and a good education. Most people either have to come from wealth or incur enormous debt. But why has college and university tuition risen so much? One culprit in the US is the reduction of state funding for these schools. For the last 30 years, colleges have been a primary target for governments to cut costs, especially during recessions.

This reduction has caused colleges to operate more like businesses to earn the money they need to stay afloat. But the unintended consequence of schools operating like businesses is that they are now more focused on competing aggressively with each other and trying to make the most profits instead of focusing on the welfare of the students. This means that pursuing star professors and researchers with higher wages, keeping class sizes lower to be more attractive to potential applicants, and introducing a lot more extracurriculars to attract students, even though they might be unnecessary expenses that only increase tuition further.

There’s no central mechanism in the United States to control the cost of higher education. The country does give students a fair amount of financial aid, but much of the country’s college tuition is paid for through loan programs. In neighboring Canada, tuition has also risen a lot in the same period, even though it’s more significantly subsidized for citizens. The problem remains that students across North America are paying a lot more for post-secondary education than they were before, and it’s happening on the government’s watch.

But there’s a much bigger cause of debt that has also exploded in costs in the last 30 years: housing. The reason why housing is so expensive now is complicated. I’d love to write it off as greed, but that wouldn’t be telling the full story. One of the main causes of housing's high cost is government regulation, but it's not quite what you think. Regulations are important; there’s environmental impact analysis, soil sampling, and numerous other approvals that need to be acquired before a developer can break new ground.

These are necessary but expensive steps that need to be taken today that wouldn’t have been done 30 or more years ago. And it’s great that we’re doing them now. But there are other unnecessary regulations that aren’t driven by human and environmental needs. These are housing density regulations, and they have a big impact on house prices. Housing exists in a system of supply and demand; more supply typically results in lower cost. A great way to increase the housing supply is to build higher density housing like apartment buildings.

But in many cities and towns across North America, regulations are preventing higher density housing from being built, and these regulations are often influenced by current homeowners who want their homes to remain at sky-high value. When high-density condominium buildings do get built in great numbers, there are still some other factors that can prevent home prices from falling. In Toronto, for example, developers build large luxury condos, ones that sell at a premium price.

These condos wouldn't sell very well at those prices if not for a second factor that’s keeping prices high: investment homes. These are homes that wealthy people buy up as investments, reducing the local supply and therefore increasing the value of these homes. Many luxury condos are purchased as investments, only leaving many of them sitting empty, even during a housing crisis. Governments have done little to intervene in investment housing and have instead prohibited solutions like higher density housing.

Blame is often passed between levels of government with local, state, provincial, and federal bodies blaming each other and kicking the can further down the road. The result is that homeownership becomes an enormous source of debt for some people and not even a remote possibility for others. There’s no escape from this problem by simply renting either; the cost of rent has also skyrocketed as a consequence of higher housing prices, further leading into even more debt.

Another problem for renters is when companies buy existing buildings, give them a luxury renovation, and then jack up the price of rent. No new homes are built in this scenario, and the average price of a home and rent still goes up. The question of personal responsibility for debt doesn’t seem so significant when you see how banks and governments are making increasingly larger debt loads inescapable. Debt is painful, and it seems like our largest institutions are too invested in profiting from it to make it easier on the average person.

For now, we can make sure to not take on unnecessary debts and be sure to read the fine print when we do need to take out a loan. The truth is that governments can do a whole lot more to help their poorest citizens. The video on-screen right now will show you how the richest man who ever lived did exactly that for his citizens.

Lift off from a tropical rainforest to the edge of time itself—James Webb begins a voyage back to the birth of the universe. On December 25th, 2021, NASA launched the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. Hubble has provided and continues to provide us with some of the most magical pictures of our universe, but the JWST is projected to be 100 times more powerful than Hubble. Built over 30 years, the JWST is designed to capture more light and detail than Hubble ever could.

This will let astronomers gather more information and allow them to dig deeper into the history of the universe than ever before. About six months after its launch, the JWST delivered the most detailed image of the universe ever taken known as Webb’s first Deep Field. The image isn’t just star-studded; it’s galaxy-studded. In this image, you see galaxies that span an enormous distance and maybe an even greater duration of time. The distances we’re dealing with here are so large that it would take millions, maybe billions of years to travel to them, even at the speed of light.

When we look at these images, we’re looking into the past. This pale red dot, for example, is a galaxy that appeared 13.1 billion years ago. We know this because that’s how long it has taken the light from it to reach us. But for all of its size, do you know how much of the night sky everything in this entire image would cover? Just about the width of a grain of sand held at arm's length. There are hundreds of billions of other galaxies in the observable universe, and some scientists even put that number in the trillions.

These galaxies, in turn, have hundreds of billions of star systems, much like our own, and these star systems have planets orbiting around them. What are the chances that there wouldn’t be another planet with life in some faraway galaxy? What are the chances that in this incredible vastness of space we’re all alone? You see, no matter how difficult it is for life to exist, and no matter how rare it is, the universe is so big that there should be millions, if not billions, of planets able to support life.

You can define whatever requirements you want for life: temperature, distance from a star, number of moons, presence of water, number of asteroid impacts, and so on. Purely by chance, there should be many planets with life on them, and surely some of that life would be intelligent enough to reach out to us, right? It’s not like the laws of physics, chemistry, or biology are exclusive to Earth. They’re not. But if there is life on other planets, if there’s nothing special about Earth, where’s everybody else? Where are all the aliens?

Enrico Fermi asked this question in a lunchtime conversation with his colleagues in 1950. Fermi was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist considering the existence of spacefaring civilizations. Truth be told, humans haven’t been around for that long, and if in our short existence on this planet we’ve considered branching out to Mars or some other world, it’s reasonable that another civilization might have thought the same thing. If a civilization has been around long enough and it’s sufficiently technologically advanced, it should try to branch out to other planets in search of resources. At the very least, it should try to reach out to them to communicate.

That hypothesis, though, stands in contrast to reality which has given us no evidence for life other than our own on this planet. The Great Silence, as it’s called, persists today. The mismatch between our intuition that the universe should be teeming with life and its apparent emptiness is known as the Fermi Paradox. So where are the aliens? Just this morning, jet fighters raced aloft over Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio to intercept a reported saucer returning.

Pilots swore that it was a light that could not have been a reflection and that it evaded them at a very high rate of speed. Well, even though we've always been fascinated with aliens, we haven’t officially been looking for them for very long. SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, is the most famous organization actively looking out for alien life in the universe, and it only formally began in the late 1950s. Some of its significant efforts include sending radio signals to outer space and listening for ones that may be sent our way.

Of course, this only covers intentional signals. SETI is one of the first organizations to intentionally send radio waves, but our technologies have been emitting radio waves through spacetime ever since they were invented. This includes everything from mobile phones, televisions, FM/AM radios, and even the earliest radio transmissions in the late 1800s. For all we know, our alien counterparts are laughing over Charlie Chaplin movies right now.

But if you think about it, our radio signals may not have even reached potential intelligent life yet. As we mentioned at the start of the video, the distances we’re dealing with in space are pretty literally out of this world. Even if we consider the oldest transmissions from over 100 years ago, when radio waves were first sent out, they would have only traveled a tiny portion of space.

If today, at this very moment, our earliest signals were to reach our so-called Galactic neighbors, and they were so intelligent and capable that they recognized our existence and decided to reach out immediately, it would take another 100 years for the reply to reach Earth—barring a breakthrough in physics that allows them to break the speed of light. Before we ever know if our earliest attempts to reach out were successful, most of us would be faded memories.

What if life exists not 100 light-years away but 50 or even 20 light-years away? Well, in that case, aliens would have had enough time to receive and reply to our signals by now. So why haven’t they? One answer would be that aliens simply don’t exist, which, let’s be honest, is rather boring. So let’s assume they do exist.

The logical question would be then: why haven’t they reached out to us? To answer this question, we need to place alien civilizations into three advancement categories: less advanced than us, equally advanced, or more advanced. If they’re less advanced than us, it’s likely that they simply don’t have the technology to reach out to us. It’s also important to know what science to look out for; for two billion years after life started to evolve, it would be unobservable.

If another civilization were to look out for the same things we’re looking for right now, then there’s the possibility that they’re equally advanced as we are. And if that’s the case, they might be paranoid about contacting us because they’re uncertain about what they’re dealing with. This is in line with what Stephen Hawking said—that reaching out to alien life would be a big mistake because they might covet our resources and our planet. They might carry pathogens we can’t fight off. They might have colonial intentions. The list goes on.

Given how we’ve treated other human beings because of the differences we created in our own minds, it’s fair to say that it would be a mistake to assume that an extraterrestrial species would greet us with kindness. The third possibility is that the aliens possess far superior intelligence, and humans are no longer attractive to them. It might be a difficult pill to swallow considering how human-centric we are, but hear me out: if the universe is teeming with life, if there’s nothing special about us, then there’s not much point in them reaching out to us, much less spending precious resources visiting us.

We’d be like the ants of the universe. To most people, ants might be interesting when they first see them, and they can be intriguing, but then interest subsides, and we walk past millions of ants every day without paying any attention to them. Sure, some biologists might still be interested, but most of us simply ignore them. We could apply a similar line of reasoning to a superior alien civilization. The exact reason a nearby alien civilization might exist—namely the abundance of life—is also why we haven’t felt their presence.

On a more cynical note, they might not have visited us yet because they prefer an ambush rather than a hello. The Dark Forest Hypothesis states that the universe is full of cunning civilizations that would rather forego the risk of contacting anyone else and observe from the darkness. Whether to reach out is up to them, but as this hypothesis suggests, just because we haven’t been contacted doesn’t imply nobody is listening.

Of course, this is assuming they haven’t already visited us. On July 26, 2023, David Grusch, a former intelligence officer, testified under oath that non-human biologics were recovered by a highly secretive UFO recovery program run by the US government. Now, I know we’ve had many so-called sightings of alien spacecraft and a lot of grainy video footage to go along with it, but this is the first time someone who’s credentials have been verified has gone under oath and said things that could easily land him in jail if proven false.

Skepticism is needed; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nevertheless, even if David’s claims are real, there’s simply a general lack of evidence. If one alien spacecraft can reach Earth, so can hundreds or thousands more. If they visited us once, there’s no reason to believe they won’t do so again. At a civilization level, a government cover-up can only go so far—especially when there’s a strong likelihood that a civilization reaching out to us would be far more advanced than us.

Having said that, though, we come back to our starting point: where are the aliens? And if they’re so common, why haven’t we been bombarded with visits? One of the more widely accepted theories is that of the Great Filter. It’s a hurdle in the evolution of a civilization that typically leads to its extinction. It could be anything: an asteroid impact, a massive volcanic eruption, an incurable virus, runaway artificial intelligence, self-destruction—the list goes on. The idea is that most civilizations that go through the Great Filter fail and are inevitably destroyed.

If that’s what’s happened so far in the universe, that would explain the Great Silence. Our civilization alone may have passed this intergalactic test; thus, we exist when others don’t. But that’s only half the story. You see, the scenarios I spoke of only make sense if you assume we’ve already passed the Great Filter. What if we haven’t? What if the Great Filter isn’t behind us but waiting for us in the years ahead?

Maybe we exist not because we’ve passed the Great Filter, but because we’ve yet to go through it. Asteroid impacts have happened in the past, but could also hit us in the future. Nuclear annihilation is only a button or two away. We’ve seen some devastating viruses take their toll, and runaway intelligence? Well, we’re on our way. The Great Filter could be any of these things, or it could be none. It could be something else entirely—something human-centered minds cannot even imagine.

Part of the intrigue with alien life involves answering one question, and it’s how special are we? Almost everything about the Fermi Paradox is a projection of that—the things we look for, how we look for them, how we expect them to behave—it’s a self-centered, egotistical pursuit that is ironically very human. But this human-centered curiosity might end up costing our civilization dearly. As Stephen Hawking said, maybe seeking out extraterrestrial life is a terrible idea. For all we know, the Great Filter is just that—our curiosity.

Maybe it’s the courage to ask, "Where are all the aliens?" Maybe we shouldn’t know. We could be dealing with something genuinely otherworldly in the vast unknown of space. Who dares wins? Not this galactic race. We don’t; maybe the Great Filter is not a catastrophe that will happen to us. Maybe it’s one we seek.

Hopefully, the James Webb Space Telescope has some answers or at least newer questions for us. Watch the video on your screen to understand why the JWST is so important.

Are you depressed? In need of fulfillment? Do you feel like life is passing you by, like you're watching all your friends move forward, climbing the ladder of success and accomplishing the huge things that you wish you could? We've all felt like this at some point, and that feeling is that we can’t get control of our lives. It's universal, but that doesn't make it any less painful. Then one day, you see a book. It boasts that the secrets to success, happiness, and personal growth are all inside. Do you buy it? Because I know I would.

And I have. Time and time again. Flipping through those pages excitedly, only to return to my unfulfilled state once no more pages are left. Millions of us are drawn to the world of self-help because we’re looking for answers. But does this endless stream of advice, speeches, seminars, and products actually help us? Or is self-help ruining our lives?

In the 18th and 19th centuries, US and European entrepreneurs marketed and sold snake oil as a cure-all drug. In reality, though, all they were selling was mineral oil, sometimes mixed with household herbs and spices that contained no snake-derived ingredients whatsoever and would in fact not cure any diseases. Today a snake oil salesperson describes someone who advertises or sells any product that promises the world and fails to deliver. Sadly, that’s the story of self-improvement, at least as it is today.

Because while it might seem like a new trend, the idea of self-help dates back to early philosophers like Seneca and Socrates in the 5th century BC. Socrates spoke about the constant improvement of your soul. He insisted that practices like meditation, fasting, prayer, and exercise could feed your soul and therefore improve your life. Plato, Epicurus, and Pythagoras followed in his footsteps, professing that working on yourself is a path to enlightenment.

Hundreds of years later, in the 1970s, the New Age movement arose and preached a philosophy of personal transformation and healing. The movement revolved around accessing our spiritual energy through yoga, meditation, tarot card readings, and astrology. This idea that we could elevate ourselves and all of humanity has persisted. But like most things in the West, once people found out just how much money they could make, self-improvement shifted from being a guide for those who needed it the most to a product reserved for those who could afford it.

Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, has emerged as one of the most critical self-help gurus in the world. His philosophy tells us that our mental health can determine our physical reality; that we can think ourselves into being healthier and happier. After his ideas were popularized by none other than Oprah Winfrey, Chopra became an international sensation. He used his platform to spread his message and sell his books; he's written 49 in total. He held seminars and became a spiritual advisor to celebrities like Michael Jackson.

Needless to say, lost souls worldwide have made Chopra a very wealthy man. Tony Robbins, one of the most popular and controversial self-help figures, runs a multi-billion dollar business. Exclusive membership to his program can cost as much as $85,000 a year, and although he’s been wrapped up in accusations of harassment and hostility and is notorious for requiring his employees to sign NDAs, he still manages to sell out auditoriums for his speaking engagements.

One of the biggest problems with self-help is that, just like snake oil salespersons, self-help experts claim to be able to heal the world with their speeches. In reality, whether you're Chopra or Robbins or one of the hundreds of other experts, you can never be a therapist for everyone.

Personal mental health professionals—like licensed therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists—listen to individuals and understand their needs and offer unique solutions. Whereas self-help gurus use their personal stories to convince followers that they have all the answers without recognizing the nuance of each individual situation. Not only are these gurus convincing us that their solutions are a one-size-fits-all, but a vast majority of them don’t even have the qualifications to be discussing mental health in the first place.

We can all agree that what causes us stress, pain, or depression isn’t the same for everyone, and the way stress shows itself is different too. Some of us might spend days on the sofa watching reruns of "Friends" while others might go out partying every night. We can’t judge or offer solutions without engaging with each person individually and trying to understand their motives.

Self-help gurus peddle magic solutions to make their audience believe they have some elusive secret that you won’t find without them. This is how they turned it into a $13 billion industry littered with books, speaking events, and mentorship programs. But these books and events rarely address the actual issues in your life. They promise easy fixes that are nice to hear but often fall short of helping you develop actionable ways to help yourself.

One study, which reviewed over 100 cases, found that self-help treatment plans are hard to follow and easy to misinterpret. And frankly, this is what the industry wants because if you could actually help yourself, who would buy their books or attend their coaching sessions? The goal of this endless stream of books and speeches isn’t healing; it’s to make you feel good for a moment, but eventually make you feel miserable again so you can pick up the next book.

If this isn’t the case, explain why you need 49 books written by the same person to teach you how to help yourself. Many self-help gurus do more than just write books; they have speaking engagements, YouTube channels, paid newsletters, and personal coaching sessions. The harsh reality is that you’re ultimately more valuable to them when you’re unhappy and discontent. So why would they teach you how to help yourself?

The endless cycle of self-help content triggers the dopamine system in our brain, which is the same system that regulates or succumbs to addiction. When we read a chapter of a self-help book, we get a flood of dopamine and feel motivated to take on life’s challenges. But when that dopamine wears off, we’re left craving more, and we turn back to where we got it from: the self-help content.

That's why we feel the strange combination of excitement and inadequacy after watching a TED talk about living a more fulfilling life. In reality, people who consume self-help books have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol and are more likely to have symptoms of depression. When we’re in the moment, our brain tricks us into thinking we’ve accomplished something, when in reality we’ve done nothing to move ourselves forward.

The world of self-help comes in all shapes and sizes. Some gurus focus on helping your career, others on your spiritual enlightenment. But they all have one thing in common: they all claim to have the secret to turning you into your best self. Recently, one of the running themes has been hustle culture, and it’s the idea that if you work like hell, put in an 80-hour work week, and are productive every second of every day, you’ll achieve career success.

But anyone who’s actually attempted an 80-hour work week or tried to survive on four hours of sleep at night in the name of productivity can tell you that the hustle is the opposite of glamorous. Yeah, you might make some money, but you’ve worked so hard that you have no time to enjoy it with family and friends. You work so hard and push yourself so far that you burn out. Soon, negativity sits in, and now you feel worse than before.

What do you do? Do you listen to your body and rest, or do you pick up a book and hit play on a podcast about happiness, fulfillment, and positivity? They tell you that your negative emotions aren’t real and that if you just focus on the good things in life, you’ll get through it. This is toxic positivity—an attempt to dismiss negative emotions and respond to distressing situations with false reassurance.

There’s no war in binge. You may have heard the catchy phrases like "no bad days" or "everything happens for a reason," which are meant to make us dismiss any notion that our lives aren’t amazing. Toxic positivity can ultimately come across as if we lack empathy towards ourselves and others and that we ignore important decisions and emotions instead of accepting them. Because the truth is avoiding our negative emotions only makes us feel worse later.

If maximizing productivity and positivity isn’t the brand of self-empowerment you’re seeking, you might turn to guidance on self-care. The idea of self-care started in the 1980s when the Black feminist writer and activist Audre Lorde proclaimed it as a political act. Sadly, it has since been co-opted and thoroughly misused by the internet. Over the past five years, searches for self-care have nearly tripled. Almost 70 billion Instagram posts include self-care, and on TikTok, the #selfcare has racked up over 30 billion views.

Whether the advice comes from a wellness guru like Gwyneth Paltrow or from a 22-year-old influencer, self-care can go too far. This self-help practice, like toxic positivity, can pull us away from the reality of our lives, and often, it’s a reality that we need to deal with. Self-care and hustle culture are on a collision course in one specific area of the self-help world: multi-level marketing companies. MLMs are popular and controversial businesses that sell products through a network of non-salaried salespeople who get commissions from many other people they recruit to the job.

MLMs claim to empower their workforce and help them find meaning in their lives. If you work for an MLM, you’re not just selling their product but the lifestyle tied to it. The head of the company becomes a guru—a motivational speaker with an inspirational backstory that you can connect to. And like most other self-help companies, MLMs have conventions, seminars, robust Facebook groups, and even books written by their founders, all meant to convince you that you’ll be happy and healthy with their magical product.

If you bring three people who bring three people, you will be wealthy. MLMs have proven even more insidious than the typical self-help companies because they convince their distributors that their fortune is just around the corner. The unsuspecting victims then invest so much of their money into these snake oil products, only to end up with an overflow of items they can’t sell, financial debt, or even worse, anxiety and depression. And the problem is more widespread than you think. One in four Americans report that their social media feeds have been hijacked by MLMs.

This proliferation of social media has taken the warning signs of self-help into a new territory. The gurus are no longer household names like Chopra and Robbins; now, thousands of influencers are self-proclaimed gurus offering mental and physical health advice through short captions and images that are never enough to unpack deep psychological understanding. Since many of us spend too much time scrolling on our phones, we’re so busy consuming content about self-help that we don’t actually do anything with the information.

Instead, we overanalyze ourselves and end up convinced that there’s something deeply wrong with us, that we’ll never be able to dig ourselves out of the enlightened, happy person we always hope to be. It might be unreachable. The truth is, not all self-help is bad. The key to it, like anything in life, is balance. Sometimes watching a motivational video or reading a chapter of a self-help book can give us the boost we need to perform that real-life action.

The key is knowing how to sort out the helpful content from the cheap, money-making schemes. Look for content that doesn’t oversell a mission statement and applies a clear, practical approach to self-help. An example is the very popular book "Atomic Habits" by James Clear, which offers specific adjustments that we can all make to form better habits. Of course, the trick here is that once you read it, you need to make those adjustments in your daily life because self-help is never about the words you hear someone else say, but about the actions you can convince yourself to take.

The key to a good life isn’t hidden in some book or a $3,000 seminar. In fact, everything you need to know about living a good life can be written on a Post-It note: work hard, eat healthy, exercise, and focus on building healthy relationships. Sadly, Post-It notes don’t turn into multi-million dollar book deals.

Almost half of the world's population uses one of Meta's services every month. Facebook and Instagram combined hold over 75% of the social media market share, and WhatsApp has become the world’s default instant messaging app. This is the story of how Facebook took over the world. In the early days of Facebook, it was reported that Zuckerberg ended meetings by shouting “domination,” and it’s safe to say that he’s achieved it.

To understand how, we need to rewind nearly 20 years. Remember that old New Yorker cartoon: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? But in the real world, some of the internet's most influential and successful forces have their own version of that line: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a teenager."

It’s 2005. You're in high school or starting your last year of college, or maybe you're a young parent trying to stay in touch with friends when you hear about a new website called Facebook. Or maybe you’re just 5 years old, so you sign up. At the time, you had no idea you were looking at a website that would change the world as we know it. Facebook, of course, didn’t invent social networking.

It started in 1997 with SixDegrees.com, the first website to feature profiles, friends, and location services. Then in 1999, LiveJournal came onto the scene as a way to keep in touch with friends via blogging. By 2007, it had 14 million users and was sold to a large Russian media company. Then there was Friendster in 2002, then MySpace in 2003. By 2005, MySpace was the dominant social network in the United States, but MySpace or any of us didn’t have any idea what was coming.

In one of Harvard's dorm rooms was young Mark Zuckerberg working on a social networking site that would soon overthrow every competitor in the market. One working in Facebook's favor was timing. Thanks to the rising availability of broadband, more people were on the internet in the mid-2000s than ever before, and these previous social networks helped Facebook compile a long list of technical and business mistakes to avoid.

But it certainly wasn’t all luck. Zuckerberg and his co-founders built Facebook in a controlled, methodical way. It started at Harvard, then slowly expanded to other universities, high schools, and corporations. It wasn’t until September of 2006, after two years of limited availability, that Facebook opened its platform to anyone 13 and over. This slow growth allowed time to perfect the technology and allowed its founders to hire intelligent engineers who constantly added new features.

Facebook quickly gained around 12 million users, and by 2008, just two years after its public release, 100 million people were using Facebook. That same year, Sheryl Sandberg joined the company as Chief Operating Officer, after working as Chief of Staff for the Treasury Department in the Clinton Administration. Sandberg was viewed as the adult in the room with Zuckerberg, and from there, things really took off.

By December 2009, Facebook had become the most popular social platform in the world. When the movie "The Social Network" came out in 2010, Facebook’s supremacy was officially solidified in Hollywood history. But that wasn’t enough for Zuckerberg, who was looking for domination. Much of Facebook’s success is thanks to its unique growth team. The company isn’t just worried about getting new people to join; it’s concerned with monthly active users, which indicates how often people return to the site and spend time on it.

It might seem obvious these days, but in 2007, when Zuckerberg was just 23, he created a growth team that used data to generate engagement. At the time, other companies largely considered growth to be the responsibility of the PR and marketing departments, whereas Facebook prioritized data and engineering. In the early days, people left the site because they couldn’t find their friends fast enough, so the growth team created the “People You May Know” function that allowed Facebook to access your contacts to suggest friends immediately.

As you might expect, this led to some privacy issues, like psychologist-patients being recommended to befriend each other. This certainly wouldn’t be Facebook’s last dance with privacy concerns, either. And that wasn’t the only tool in the growth team’s arsenal that came with controversy. Tristan Harris, a computer scientist and former Google employee, co-founded the Center for Humane Technology to push back against the addictive elements of technology.

All tech companies—Facebook included—have relied on people’s weaknesses and addictive tendencies to gain time and attention. The perfect example is the now ubiquitous like button. This kept people returning to the site for the dopamine hit they’d feel when someone liked their post. As Harris put it, the like button and everything that came with it essentially turned our smartphones into slot machines.

And that’s what the company wanted because the more addictive the platform is to its users, the more opportunity for revenue. Because, well, ads. Facebook’s advertising model didn’t start off how we know it today. In the early college campus days, the site sold what it called "Flyers," which were ads students could buy to promote parties and other campus activities. As the company grew, businesses flocked to Facebook to advertise because they were able to directly target audiences by college degree, type, preferred courses, age, gender, and interests.

This made Facebook’s advertising far more effective than traditional print or TV advertising. By the end of 2007, 100,000 companies had signed up with Facebook’s business pages, promoting themselves through advertising. Like Google Ads, Facebook’s advertising strategy focused on reinventing the wheel altogether by linking ads to specific and targeted users.

This idea seems so normal to us now when we merely talk about a toaster oven and suddenly it appears on our Instagram feed, but it was revolutionary then and continues to be insanely profitable for Facebook. But some might argue that the ultimate key to Facebook's status as a global behemoth is its consistent acquisition of companies it sees as competitors or additions to its master plan, called the copy-acquire-kill method.

It started in 2012 when Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, and two years later, grabbed the global messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion and virtual reality company Oculus for $2 billion. When companies like Snapchat wouldn’t sell to them, Facebook simply copied and integrated the app's features into their own app. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same thing they’re trying to do to Twitter by introducing Threads.

Facebook’s rise has been meteoric, but it came with a rocky and bumpy ride. The first sign of danger for Facebook came in 2013 when its content moderation strategy, or lack thereof, unraveled. It was found to be experimenting with its users by showing certain content to influence people's moods. Eventually, it issued an apology, but that was small potatoes compared to what would come.

The idea of fake news didn’t really exist before 2015, but at the start of the 2016 US election, when a study found that 63% of Americans on Facebook got their news from Facebook, the company knew it had to get ahead of the potential for misinformation. It introduced a new feature that allowed users to flag articles as false news and rolled out a program for journalists to favor hard-hitting journalists. Sadly, these measures did next to nothing to stop the spread of misinformation.

In the 2016 election, more people engaged with fake news stories than real ones, and it was all because of the way the algorithm was designed. Fake news is sensational and is purposely designed to cause outrage and fear, but this also means it’s more likely to be clicked on and commented on, prioritizing the story because the algorithm looks for and shares the articles that get the most interaction.

Publicly, Zuckerberg insisted that Facebook wasn't an influence in the election, but behind the scenes, it provided Congress with information that proved a Russian-based organization had run 3,000 ads between 2015 and 2016 in possible connection with election interference. The ads covering topics from race to gun rights reached 10 million US citizens. Facebook knew it was poisoning people's brains and making a ton of money off it, but it would never admit to doing so publicly.

I mean, who would? Perhaps that's because in 2017, riding the wave of fake news controversies, Facebook made a $3 billion profit— a 76% increase over the year before. Why would they admit to anything when it wasn't hurting their earnings? If anything, the spread of misinformation increased engagements, which increased ad revenue. If fake news wouldn't stop the rocket ship that was Facebook, perhaps privacy violations would.

In March 2018, a story broke in The New York Times and The Guardian that the personal data of up to 87 million people had been scraped by a Facebook-adjacent app called “This is Your Digital Life.” People passed on personal information via the app, and the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used the info to advise right-leaning groups like the campaigns of Donald Trump and Vote Leave, a pro-Brexit group. This data leak brought a magnifying glass to Facebook’s privacy issues like we’ve never seen before.

As a result, the company’s stock lost 60% of its value, wiping out $70 billion. In response, Zuckerberg suspended Cambridge Analytica and certain apps and testified before the United States Congress. The scandal ultimately ended up with Facebook paying a $663,000 fine in the UK and was seen as a turning point around social media platforms and their access to our information. The following year, the US Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion over user privacy violations—a record-breaking fine for a tech company—but still a small price to pay for a company that makes upwards of $100 billion yearly.

Since then, Facebook’s reputation has continued to plummet. In 2020, a data scientist said that the company failed to stop political manipulation by foreign governments. In 2021, Facebook was discovered to be the central planning platform for riots at the US Capitol on January 6th, and later that year, Frances Haugen, a former employee, testified that Facebook and the companies it owned knew they were causing harm to people but continued to put profit over the welfare of their users.

Only one other industry doesn’t care about the welfare of its users and continues to sell them the things they know are harmful to them, and they also call their customers "users." Needless to say, while still raking in the cash, Facebook needed a facelift. It’s time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do to reflect who we are and what we hope to build. I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta.

Enter Meta. Facebook announced that the parent company of the social platform and all the other companies that it had acquired would be changed to Meta. The new name could potentially leave behind the controversies plaguing Facebook because the reality is that Facebook just isn’t what it used to be. A 2018 study found that 51% of people aged 13 to 17 used Facebook—a significant drop—as Facebook lost out to Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, and then TikTok.

Under its new parent company, Meta, Facebook has continued to flourish in emerging markets, allowing its influence to grow globally. One of the ways it does this is by enabling easy communication in parts of the world where other channels are inaccessible. For example, in much of Africa, Facebook is the Internet. It’s free on many African telecom networks, and users don’t need phone credit to log on. Only 8% of African households have a computer, so internet access via mobile phone is critical.

Facebook’s Free Basics provides internet service that gives users credit-free access to the platform and works on low-cost mobile phones. In further expansion plans, Meta is developing satellites that can beam internet access to remote areas—mainly so residents can use Facebook. Some see this as digital colonialism—a way of turning people in the global South into consumers of Western corporate content. It’s a valid argument, but saying that Facebook is the sole culprit of this practice is naive.

One can visit almost any country on the planet and order McDonald’s or Starbucks. Uber currently has cars on the roads of major African cities like Lagos with a safety rating of zero, just to increase profits. As crucial as these emerging markets are for the future of Facebook's world takeover, Meta's plans are even more far-reaching, and they need to be. Because during the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 70% of Meta's stock value eroded.

This was partially due to Apple’s introduction of an app tracking transparency feature, which allowed people to opt out of apps like Facebook and Instagram from tracking their data. This meant less targeted advertising, which meant less money for Meta. Of course, the introduction of TikTok can’t be underestimated either. So Meta is making some big bets to become even more powerful than it already is.

One of the keys to Facebook and Meta's domination has been eliminating competition. One of the Main Stays throughout Facebook's days has been Twitter. Zuckerberg saw an opening when users soured on the app after Elon Musk bought it and upended some publicly favorable company policies. To an overwhelming response, Meta launched Threads to compete with Twitter.

In two hours, the app gained 2 million users, and by the next day, over 30 million people had signed up. It has now gone down in history as the most rapidly downloaded app ever. While Meta's leadership was pleasantly surprised by the turnout, they planned for it, recruiting some of the most followed people on Twitter to convert to Threads, like Ellen, Bill Gates, and Oprah. In an odd turn of events, users seem so soured by one tech magnate that they embraced another. For many, Zuckerberg feels like the lesser of two evils—the devil you know is better than the angel you don’t.

Threads has been losing ground in recent weeks, although Zuckerberg insists that they’re doing basic work on the app to make it function better, and once it’s ready for a jolt, Meta will throw more weight behind it. But Meta's takeover isn't dependent on a Twitter lookalike. Meta was born from the idea of creating the metaverse—a digital world accessed through virtual reality where you can socialize, work, shop, and more.

Facebook Spaces, a precursor to the metaverse, was a VR app that allowed participants to hang out with their friends in person while also wearing their VR headset. And who distributes most of the VR headsets in the world? Meta. Meta has purchased seven of the most successful VR development studios in the world and has one of Earth’s largest VR content catalogs. In fact, it owns so many VR-related companies that in 2022, the FTC—an agency that protects the rights of US consumers—blocked Meta from buying yet another popular VR studio.

This signaled that Meta’s copy-acquire-kill plan might be losing one