Hello, this is Emma Ganon, and thank you for listening to this podcast. I just wanted to let you know that my new book, The Success Myth, Letting Go of Having It All, is out on May the 18th.

I think it's my best book yet, so I'm excited for it to come out. And the book unpicks the eight success myths from happiness, to money, to productivity, to celebrity, to the idea of finally arriving, and how chasing a version of success that doesn't align with your values can really take you off track.

And this book is about getting back to yourself, breaking free, finding a new way forward.

And it's available on May the 18th. If you love this podcast, you'll love the book, and it's available soon from all good bookshops.

So you can order yours now. I hope you like it.

Hello, and welcome back to Control Out Delete. This is a replay of my episode with the Financial Times columnist, Rana Farouha, from back in February 2020.

She's a writer who investigates how today's biggest tech companies are hijacking our data, our livelihoods, and our minds.

This episode is on her book Don't Be Evil, and the case against big tech, aka Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.

It talks about how tech has changed and how it's changed us. And we discuss the question, can we rebel against tech now, or are we just too embedded?

I learned so much in this episode, and from reading the book, I really recommend it. I hope you enjoy this truly fascinating episode.

People listening might not know what big tech necessarily means. I just wondered if we could clear that up before we die again.

Yeah, yeah. So it's not a scientific term, of course, but big tech generally refers to the big platform technology companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple.

Sometimes people call them the fangs. It's, you know, generally the world's biggest technology companies. It's quite funny that it does spell fang.

Just because I guess they are like getting their teeth into literally everything.

Yeah, for sure. Some of the stats just to kick off because I guess the whole point of the book is it's absolutely taking over.

And it's a very small group of people actually who are like in control of everything. 90% of all worlds new spending is on Facebook.

So it's almost like we don't have a massive choice, do we? Like we have to kind of go with these companies because they're the biggest ones.

That's right. And actually that's one of the first reasons that I got interested in writing this book. So I'm a columnist for the financial time.

So I tend to dig into those kinds of economic statistics. And I had come across very early in my job an amazing fact that 80% of all the wealth in global corporations is in just 10% of companies.

And they're the companies like these with the most data on what we do, what we buy, where we go on the internet, the most intellectual property.

So there really is this kind of unprecedented monopoly power of this industry. And in particular, these four or five firms hold.

Is it fair to say that some of them know all of them started off with good intentions? Or is that something that sold to us?

...