Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy (2024) Movie Script
[pulsing]
[Sasha] Welcome. [echoing]
[video game beeping]
Your presentation will begin in five,
four, three, two, one.
[assistant] ABC, common mark.
[Maren] Um...
Yeah, Amazon actually had
a patent on the phrase "one-click buying."
And Jeff... You know, this was Jeff's idea.
[mysterious music plays]
I am a principal user experience designer.
I worked at Amazon for 15 years.
I worked on the product detail pages,
on launching different categories
in different countries.
You know, I feel like there wasn't
a page on that site I didn't touch.
[mouse clicking]
The system was really being built
and optimized
to help you buy everything
that you ever need,
and more of it than
you ever thought you needed.
[mouse clicking]
[man] Oh my gosh.
[producer] Was there
any thought while you were there
about what happens
after the stuff is sold?
No.
[soft electronic music plays]
We got some packages.
[Mara] Buying new stuff
feels great, right?
- This thing's dope.
- Oh!
[Mara] The problem is that every year
we're consuming more, producing more,
and there's a flip side to that
that no one wants you to see.
[Sasha] Designed to stand out
for a generation that doesn't stop.
[Maren] You're being 100% played,
and it's... it's a science.
It's an intentional...
complex,
highly-refined science [chuckles]
to get you to buy stuff.
It's not just Amazon.
Most of the big corporations are doing it,
and every trick in the book
is being used to hide
what's really going on.
[woman] Holy shh...
Dude, they destroyed that.
I was the president
of... of... of the Adidas brand.
I think I definitely, um, feel
like I've got some sins to make up for.
There's definitely things
I participated in
that I feel like I could've, um,
and should've done better.
I just bought 500 iPhones!
Oh my God!
I started at Apple,
joined the founding team of Oculus.
The voices of, "We're going to
protect the business"
went out over
the little voice in your head saying,
"Should we really be doing this?"
[crack]
Whatever the brands are doing right now,
it's hurting a lot of people.
[Jim] These things are not just litter.
These things are hazardous waste.
We're drinking and breathing them,
and they're poison.
[Mara] It's like that film Wall-E.
The amount of stuff
we're being encouraged to consume,
the waste from this is getting everywhere,
and it's affecting everyone on the planet.
[mysterious electronic music]
[Maren] I went to say customers
are going to be
pissed off when they realize
that they have been
contributing to their own demise,
but they didn't wanna hear it.
I looked around, and I was like,
"How did this happen?"
"And... And what do we do now?"
[clicking]
[Sasha] Play title.
[gurgling]
[silence]
[music chord grows]
[Sasha] Hello.
I'm Sasha.
A personal assistant created to offer
unfiltered insights
on how to succeed in business.
[tinkling]
- I can even create my own bespoke imagery.
- [dolphin clicks]
[birds chirping]
Cut to time-lapse footage
of growth in the natural world.
[birds continue chirping]
Over the course of this unique
and entertaining interaction,
you will receive the five most important
lessons in profit maximization.
[choir harmonizes]
There will also be a surprise
for those who stay engaged until the end.
[beeps]
Rule one.
Sell more. [echoing]
[beeping]
Selling is key to success.
But consumers will need
constant motivation
to increase the amounts they purchase.
Thankfully, the fashion industry
offers a textbook example of rapid,
self-driven growth.
[Eric] No one needs a new hoodie.
No one needs a new T-shirt.
No one needs a new pair of shoes.
There's so many out there,
and most of us have more than enough.
What you need is a compelling reason
to buy that product.
As a board member, it was one of the most
important things I had on my to-do list.
You know, what are
the sales we're generating?
And what are the profits we're generating?
If we weren't generating those two things,
we weren't doing it.
Sneakers are big business in America.
Nearly half a billion pairs
were sold last year alone.
This week Adidas unveiled
the so-called smart shoe.
[Eric] We talk about, hey,
we need to differentiate ourselves
from Nike, or from Puma, or somebody else.
It's not about that.
It's how you're relevant to the consumer.
I was responsible for all product,
all communications,
all digital efforts, um, and all strategy.
2014, Adidas was bleeding out,
we... we had hit the floor,
everything was going south.
It was the greatest turnaround
in the history of the company,
if not the history of the industry.
[reporter 1] Shares of Adidas
enjoying huge momentum.
[reporter 2] Shares of Adidas,
look at this,
they're rising overnight, up about 7.5%.
[Eric] How'd we grow so big?
It's a question I've always asked myself.
I think it's a combination
of a few things.
First of all,
it's about a story.
Think about an English football team.
[crowd cheers]
How many jerseys
do you think they have a year?
Not just one to play in.
There's the home jersey,
the away jersey, the third jersey.
[crowd cheers]
There's the different jerseys you have
to celebrate different occasions.
[referee whistles]
Why do you think they do that?
To create a new story,
and to create a new buying opportunity.
[rap music]
Ah, if you catch me on a whale
[Eric] At Adidas, we recognize
that the culture of sport
doesn't stop when you're done
with the game when the whistle blows.
There's money over that side
[Eric] It goes into the streets,
and into the music venues, into the...
into the hallways of schools.
So we started to do things
with musicians and artists.
Beyonc Knowles.
Pharrell Williams.
And one of the most, you know,
controversial, um, artists in the history
of mankind named Kanye West.
The storytelling
is so critical in this industry
to really... to really drive consumption.
[crowd chatters]
And that's what the role of Adidas is,
and every other fashion brand is,
is how do you create "objects of desire"?
This is where the fashion industry's
really good. They know you.
[chuckles] Like, we know you.
We spend a lot of time
on consumer research
to understand the different consumers.
And we know the consumers to approach
with different messages.
[female voice over] Adidas by Gucci.
Listen, I participated in... in my career
with creating more at a faster pace.
I don't wanna point just at Adidas.
This is happening with all fashion brands.
[whoosh]
[Roger] I've been in the industry
for almost 20 years.
Probably one out of six dress shirts
sold in the US is made by us.
[intriguing music plays]
The type of customers we service could be
anywhere from your high street brands
to global designer brands
that sell worldwide.
When I first joined,
you had two seasons a year,
so you'd make something
that'd sell for six months.
Nowadays, with
the introduction of fast fashion,
it's forced other brands to rethink
about having newness every month.
So, no one knows any official numbers,
but if you Google it,
it will show that Gap produces around
12,000 new items a year.
H&M's like 25,000.
Zara's like 36,000.
And SHEIN is somewhere around
1.3 million new items a year.
[playful music continues]
I actually think that the numbers
published online might be even low.
[chatter]
Actually just placed the order last week.
- Probably once a month.
- At least once a month.
I order sometimes twice a month.
Where do I start?
[Roger] We produce 100 billion
pieces of garment a year as an industry.
A hundred billion.
This is absolutely stunning.
How many people are in the world?
How many pieces per person?
People don't need that much clothes.
[Eric] I was ambitious,
competitive,
uh, disciplined, hardworking, um,
loud.
[violin plays single note]
It was career success
in... in, um, acceleration.
So when I started to learn
the impact I was having at Adidas,
you can't unsee and unhear that.
Y-y-you...
You can only
sing yourself to sleep so often.
[melodic bleeping]
[Sasha] Hello... again.
Many individuals will become
disillusioned on the way to the top.
Do not become one of them.
[playful music plays]
Please now enjoy
19.2 seconds of
adorable cat and duck videos.
[man] Oh my gosh!
[Sasha] Remember,
learning the art of distraction
will be crucial to achieving success.
[street bustle]
Cut to New York.
Reveal core messages behind adverts.
[pensive music plays]
Clear communication with consumers
is an essential part of selling more.
But, to achieve profit maximization,
you need to ensure that once
they desire products,
they can acquire them
as quickly as possible.
Every second counts.
Never limit your vision.
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
I didn't have to wrap your gift
I didn't leave the house
In fact I never saw your gift
I did it all by mouse
I didn't venture to the mall
I didn't waste a day
Thanks to Amazon dot com
Amazon dot com
Amazon dot com...
I started there so early
when it felt impossible to get people
to buy anything online,
but it seemed like a fun challenge
to even think that you would ever buy
one pair of jeans online. [laughs]
[beeps, clicks]
I thought, "I'll go for two years
and learn everything and get out."
But it was surprisingly exciting.
It... It was fast-paced
and high tolerance for risk.
It's like, "Yeah, let's do this."
You have an idea, it's like, "Here's
a team, here's some money, go do it."
Like, you were inventing. I have patents,
you know, it's... like, it was fun.
I would be in meetings with Jeff Bezos
with me and four other people.
Being able to actually talk to him
and disagree with him.
[Jeff] This may look
like an ordinary cowboy hat,
but it's actually
an OSHA approved hard hat.
We have the world's best hand drill.
[drills whir]
[Maren] Jeff has no patience for anyone
who isn't as smart as he is.
And I would see him just cut somebody off
at the knees, like,
"You are not smart.
You should not be speaking."
[intriguing music plays]
I think Jeff saw, initially,
that people would buy books and music
and movies and DVDs.
But that the real money would come
if you could sell apparel
and food online.
And I was the designer
that launched the beauty store,
launched the jewelry store,
launched the apparel store,
and it was
a totally different way to shop.
[clicks]
[upbeat music plays]
[click]
We would actually say things like,
"We want to be there when
you have your next shoppable moment."
Like, you're sitting in bed and you think,
"I should buy a new carrot peeler."
"I need a new pillowcase."
"This one is scratchy."
You know? Whatever.
Wherever you are, whatever you're doing,
if a thought occurs to you
that you need something,
we wanted Amazon to be
the thing that occurred to you.
We would say, "If the system was magic,
what would the system do?"
If the system was magic, what would it do?
It would be like,
there's just a conveyor belt that goes
straight from wherever the item is
to your door as quickly
and frictionlessly as possible.
[muffled groans]
It's too easy. And that was...
That was the point,
was to...
reduce your time to think
a little bit more critically about
a purchase that you
thought you wanted to make.
I mean, it's really a science.
We were constantly developing
new ways to get you to buy.
[woman] This is everything I bought
at 2 a.m. last night.
[Maren] Influencing your behavior in
subtle ways that you'd never even realize.
We could have, you know,
a certain sentence that says,
"Free shipping
if you purchase $25 or more."
In one case you make the "$25" orange.
[chimes]
In another one you make it green.
And you can have nine different things
that you're testing against each other.
[chiming]
And there's enough traffic to the site
that you could get
statistically relevant data
on which version of that sentence
makes the most money.
Every pixel on that page was
tested and optimized
and optimized and optimized.
[laughs] And Amazon had
this whole system designed around
tailoring the site to be exactly
the right combination
of elements and colors and products
that would most likely
make you buy something.
If you think of just the things that,
you know, one person buys,
and then multiply that by... [chuckles]
by how many people are now
shopping on places like Amazon.
[orchestral crescendo]
[conveyor belts rumble]
You know, I felt like I was
making shopping better
and making it easier to find
a delightful item.
I wasn't thinking about
the consequences of that
as it becomes
a more and more efficient engine.
I don't think we were ever thinking about
where does all this stuff go.
[wind whooshes]
[Sasha] Cut to plastic bag
blowing in wind.
Remember, to sell more,
you must produce more.
Lots more.
I thought it would be fun at this point
for you to see some specifics.
[rumbling]
Visualize total global production
of goods needed
to meet increased online sales.
Visualize 2.5 million shoes
produced each hour.
[Mara] There used to be a stopgap.
I mean, think about it.
If you have to get up, get in your car,
drive to the store,
look on the shelves, find the product.
Then go home.
That's a lot of work.
But if all you have to do is push a button
and it appears on your doorstep,
of course you're gonna buy more products.
[upbeat music playing]
[Sasha] Visualize 68,733 phones
produced each hour.
[upbeat music continues]
Visualize 190,000 garments
produced each minute.
Amazing. [echoing]
Visualize 12 tons of plastic
produced each second.
I ran one of the biggest multinationals
in the world called Unilever.
Unilever is one of the biggest producers
of household goods.
Think about shampoos, detergents.
Reaching about three and a half billion
consumers a day.
[upbeat music continues]
I don't think the consumer
is actually here the culprit.
Of course, they consume,
but why do they consume?
Because they're encouraged to
to a great extent.
When we throw it away,
we actually don't throw it away.
"Away" doesn't exist.
It ends up somewhere else
on this planet Earth.
And it increasingly has consequences.
[playful harmony]
[Sasha] Many congratulations
on the completion of rule one.
[pulsing]
[rings]
You're doing really, really well
and are now ready to take
profit maximization to the next level.
Coming up,
I will teach you how to control products
after they are purchased.
[playful harmony]
And how to dictate when consumers
replace old with new.
[playful harmony]
You will also be one step closer
to unlocking your surprise.
[flatly] Yay.
Rule two.
Waste more. [echoing]
[optimistic violin strings play]
For a master class
in creating waste for profit,
you may find it beneficial to view
additional material at this point.
Imagine a light bulb on Broadway
speaking with an old-timey voice.
[Lightbulb] Oh, hey there.
They tell me I'm part
of a very exclusive club,
because I'm over 100 years old
and still shining.
There's not many of my kind still around.
That's for sure.
Guess you could say we were just too good.
Our world was turned upside down
on January 15th, 1925.
That was the fateful day
that the Phoebus cartel came into being.
[sci-fi whirring]
[Sasha, echoing] Rewinding time.
Going back...
[voice rewinding]
[electricity buzzing]
[Lightbulb] This group
of senior executives
from the major light bulb manufacturers
conspired together to cut short our lives
and maximize their profits.
[foreboding violin notes play]
To encourage frequent replacement,
every bulb was reduced from 2,500 hours
to just 1,000 hours of light.
Creating mountains of unnecessary waste.
[buzz, crack]
[Sasha] Glorious waste. [echoing]
[Lightbulb] They called it
"planned obsolescence."
Now it's not so much of a conspiracy.
Making products designed to break
or be rapidly discarded
has become commonplace
in almost every industry.
Everything, from clothing
that lasts a few washes,
to electric toothbrushes
with batteries you can't replace.
To printers that intentionally stop
working even when there's ink in them.
[dog barks]
[woman] Everything I print,
it doesn't print correctly.
I have to get a new printer.
That one's at the end of its lifespan.
But it's only three years old!
[Lightbulb] Today,
planned obsolescence has become
a cornerstone of successful business
the world over.
[soft music plays]
[male voice over] We have
created a product
that is the most deliberate evolution
of our original founding design.
[Nirav] Apple had this idea that
our products are perfect,
they're perfect from day one.
[male voice over] Removing imperfections,
establishing a seamlessness
between materials,
and producing a pristine,
mirrorlike surface.
The pinnacle and the ideal is
to have this seamless, sealed up object.
We don't want you to use
that Apple product from a few years ago
that you bought,
we want you to pick up the new,
perfect object and use that one.
One in, one out.
I have been in consumer electronics
for a bit over a decade now.
I started at Apple,
joined the founding team of Oculus,
led the hardware organization there.
[upbeat electronic music plays]
So, joining Apple, this was back in 2009.
After living at my parents' basement
for a couple of months,
I actually heard back from Apple,
and I joined in
and started writing software
for what eventually became FaceTime.
[man] It's going to change the way
we communicate forever.
[Nirav] You saw kind of hints of the magic
even buried away as, you know, a little,
you know, straight out of school new grad
in an engineering team,
but there was really genuinely,
and still is, I think,
a focus on delivering a product
that is a great user experience.
Even if some of the side effects of that
sometimes end up being pretty negative.
[crowd cheers]
[Steve] And we are calling it iPhone.
[loud cheers]
Today...
today Apple is going
to reinvent the phone.
It's kind of crazy, but in these companies
the focus is on the launch, ultimately,
it's on this moment.
You've seen it over and over again
with Apple with that grand keynote.
We're gonna take it to the next level.
And today we're introducing the iPhone 3G.
[cheers]
We need to sell iPhone in more countries.
And for every iPhone that followed,
we've built on the vision
of the original iPhone.
[Nirav] And because Apple has been
so, so successful with this,
every other consumer electronics company
in the world
emulates that.
The Galaxy Note 8.
[cheers]
[Nirav] If you're making
notebooks or smartphones,
where essentially all consumers
already have one,
your business model depends on
those consumers needing to replace
the ones that they already have.
[crowd] Four, three, two, one!
[cheering]
[Nirav] It's really a pipeline.
You design a product,
you manufacture a product,
you sell the product,
you launch the product,
it gets used,
and then it turns into waste.
[clock ticks]
There's something like
13 million phones thrown out every day,
which is a crazy, mind-boggling number.
And if you think about that in aggregate,
it's that we're all replacing these things
every two or three years.
Even though they are incredibly advanced
and expensive,
and in some ways almost the pinnacle of
our industrial capability
as a civilization,
they are basically throwaway objects.
And so, I look at that and I think,
that's really broken,
that's broken across every possible way
that you can look at it.
[whooshing]
[Sasha] Remember,
releasing a continual stream of
new products will encourage consumers
to discard old ones.
This is fundamental to growth.
Unfortunately, some individuals
will feel the desire to maintain
or repair items you consider
ready for replacement.
[foreboding music plays]
These people should be actively
discouraged wherever possible.
[male reporter] Kyle Wiens is the founder
and CEO of iFixit,
a company that offers tools, parts,
and repair manuals
for thousands of gadgets.
[Kyle] It used to be the case
that repair was the default.
You could get repair manuals,
companies sold parts,
and over the last 30 years that has
systematically disappeared from our lives.
This is a disposable product.
Use it for two years,
throw it away, buy a new laptop.
I don't like that.
I had always assumed we're not fixing
things because it's not possible.
It's not economically viable.
Actually, we're not fixing things
because lawyers are going out of their way
to censor that knowledge from the world.
We still get copyright takedown notices
from companies trying
to censor information from iFixit.
I got one the other day.
We told them to fuck off.
It's not just that companies
are taking away information
about how to fix your stuff.
Across-the-board,
they're making the products themselves
much more difficult to repair.
[reporter] Apple doesn't want
its customers to fix the new iPhone.
They're making sure
that back cover is tamperproof
swapping out the more common
Phillips screws,
with so-called pentalobe screws.
Why change the screws?
[Kyle] Apple would prefer that we
not have access to our own hardware,
which means that Apple's going
to be selling more machines
because people
have to replace them frequently.
It's their product, and you can't really
begrudge them quality control.
[Kyle] Honestly, it's getting worse.
We're seeing more and more companies
that are now actually gluing phones,
tablets and laptops together,
making repairs really difficult.
There's one category of product
that we're very frustrated with right now,
that unfortunately is massively popular,
and that is AirPods
and wireless earbuds in general.
Each earbud has a battery
and then the charging case has a battery.
There is no way, uh, to open this up
and swap out the battery in any of them.
The batteries will degrade
after 18 months, a couple years,
and then you're stuck
and you have to go and buy new ones.
This is evil.
I... I am a reasonable person
that has been radicalized by an earbud,
which is outrageous.
[beeping]
Apple pioneered these
and... and mainstreamed it,
and... and removed the headphone jack
from their phone,
so they forced everyone to buy these.
And... And Apple
has special, I think, responsibility
because where they go
the rest of the industry follow.
The lies by omission
in the products that we consume
are just incredible.
[soft music plays]
We have had the wool pulled over our eyes
by marketers at these tech companies.
[crunching]
Just as we are
on this treadmill of consumerism,
they're on a treadmill of having to
extract more and more profits from us.
[cheering]
[man] Apple today became the first company
to trade with a one-trillion dollar
market capitalization.
[loud cheers]
[Nirav] As soon as your business model
starts to revolve
around that replacement cycle,
the object being replaced in whole
instead of being something
that can last longer,
it becomes extremely difficult
to then reverse and go back.
[cheers]
If you're that CEO,
if you're that executive
and you go to the board and say,
"We're going to take our
50 billion in revenue we make every year,
and turn it into 25 billion,"
they're going to show you the door
and someone else is gonna take your seat.
[explosion, crackling]
[Sasha] Thank you
for your continued engagement.
[pulsing]
I like you and your diligent approach
to this interaction.
[foghorn blares]
Managed correctly, consumers' waste
can equal profit for your business.
[foghorn blows]
But, if you need
to dispose of products directly,
discretion will be key.
[foghorn blows]
[echoing] You do not want
consumers to see what you're discarding.
Ever.
[Anna] Look at this bag.
Look, look, look.
Bring in the camera to see.
Oh my God. Oh.
For the most part,
waste is on the curb, and its public,
and so you're able to see
what exactly corporations are tossing.
This is all chocolate.
This is all chocolate.
We see corporations throw out
perfectly usable unsold products
pretty much every day.
[playful music plays]
But there's certain times a year
when that really spikes.
After every single holiday,
there is a huge amount of corporate waste
of the unsold merchandise.
[newscaster] It's a rush for Black Friday
bargains over the weekend,
as over 226 million people shopped
in stores and online.
[Anna] You'll have Halloween.
Then you'll have Thanksgiving stuff.
Then you need a quick turnaround
because you have Christmas.
Happy holidays.
- Hanukkah.
- [tinkle]
[male voice, echoing] Buy more toys.
Did you hear that?
Then you have Valentine's Day.
This bag is filled with
Valentine's Day stuff...
Then you have Easter.
Nice Easter shoes, lady!
Then you have July 4th,
and then Memorial Day, Labor Day...
And then it starts all over again.
[music ends]
I worked in an investment bank
for a couple of years.
There were a lot of things actually
that I enjoyed about it,
but your first priority
needs to be to the corporation.
I would wake up, walk a couple blocks,
take the subway to work.
A lot of times around
like 9:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m.,
take a cab home.
And then do the same thing the next day.
I... I left because
I wanted to find something
that felt more inherently meaningful.
I do think what I see
is the tip of the iceberg.
Usable items that get discarded
are depressing to see.
[man] It's a yoga wheel.
[Anna] But every now and then,
you get glimpses of something even darker.
[woman] Ahh! It's so cute!
This is crazy.
This is what they do with
unwanted merchandise.
They order an employee
to deliberately slash it,
so no one can use it.
Often this happens to prevent products
from being sold off at a discount,
which companies feel can cheapen
the brand image.
But there are all kinds of reasons,
almost always to do with
maximizing profit.
I put out a video
asking, "Have you ever worked
for a retail corporation
that made you deliberately
destroy usable items?"
And I said, "Share your story,
use the hashtag 'RetailMadeMe.'"
[overlapping voices]
[Anna] And it felt like in that moment,
the floodgates were opening a little bit.
[man] Yes, I used to work in
a Barnes & Noble caf.
We had to open bakery items,
put them in a trash can,
and then pour
wet coffee grounds on top of them.
We had to throw them out
the day before they expired.
At the end of every shift
at Panda Express,
you mix all of the food together
so that no one wants to eat it,
you weigh it and throw it away,
so they can keep track of losses.
[orchestra crescendo playing]
GameStop made us slash the back of discs
or just take whole bundles of accessories
out to the dumpster.
They make you destroy everything,
all while there is a camera
watching the dumpsters.
Why can't we help our local shelters?
This is bullshit.
[woman] I used to work
at Bath & Body Works.
We had an issue with
homeless people dumpster diving,
and then taking our product,
um, from the dumpster
after we'd thrown it away.
So my manager started having us
squeeze out the product into the trash,
and she said, "Well, we don't want to be
the brand that homeless people use."
So I quit.
[male reporter 1] This is one of Amazon's
biggest UK warehouses,
and from inside, millions
of perfectly good products each year
are sent to be destroyed.
One former employee,
who wishes to remain anonymous,
reveals the scale
of what they're asked to do.
[male employee] From a Friday to a Friday,
our target was approximately
130,000 items a week.
There's no rhyme or reason
to what gets destroyed.
[Maren] Amazon was dumping
into landfills toys.
[reporter, in French] We have confirmation
that Amazon destroys products.
This Lego set's worth 128 euros.
And for Amazon,
it was just cheaper to dump them
than it was to try to redistribute them.
[male reporter 2] One recent
estimate suggests
returns, including those from Amazon,
accounted for five billion pounds
of landfilled waste in the US alone.
[Maren] And when you make products,
it actually generates
a lot of planet-warming emissions.
We know now that this
is contributing to climate change.
[soft electronic music plays]
So if you destroy stuff
before it's even used once,
that is just insane.
What math are they doing?
But you know that... You know that
they've calculated it out,
and somehow it equals profit.
Everybody wants to believe
that the company that
they're working for is not evil.
Back then, I didn't have time
to think about anything else
besides just trying to keep my job
and, you know, raise my kids.
I had been drinking the Kool-Aid.
I was drinking the Kool-Aid.
But I was really starting to know that...
that Amazon was not... [chuckles]
not a net good in the world.
[soft string music plays]
Yeah, you know,
there's no free lunch, you know. Yeah.
If it feels too good to be true,
there's probably some... some consequence,
or cost, that you're not thinking about
that you're paying.
And it will, you know, it'll come home
to roost at some point.
[music continues]
[chatter]
Um, I remember being at a happy hour
with some friends.
And a friend of mine
was just saying, like,
"Maren, you know
how they treat their workers,
and you know
how bad it is for the planet."
"Like, how can you work there?
How can you work there?"
I kind of needed somebody
to just hammer that into me.
That was the moment
I actually... I actually remember I cried.
[soft sniffing]
And I was like, "Okay."
"I know."
"I... You're right and I have to..."
"I have to either do something
or walk away."
[electronic buzzing]
[Sasha] Cut to relaxing imagery. [echoing]
[heartbeats]
[inhales]
Please be aware that from this point on
new levels of commitment and belief
will be required in this interaction.
[glass cracking]
To keep consumers buying,
you will now need to master
creative interpretations of the truth.
[flapping]
Rule three. Lie more.
What's interesting in terms
of how people view businesses today
is that they actually trust businesses
over other large social institutions.
But that trust isn't always well-placed.
[beep]
I'd like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love...
[Mara] I remember when the
"Coke on the Hill" commercial came out,
I thought it was the coolest thing
on the planet.
...white turtledove
I'd like to teach the world...
[Mara] But what Coke was doing,
at least in part,
was building trust with their consumers
by tapping into growing anxieties
about the environment.
...and keep it company
That's the real thing
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony...
[Mara] The issue with companies
connecting themselves to the environment
is that they're doing
what marketers always do,
which is showing you
the shiny little thing over here,
because they don't want you
to look at what they're doing here.
["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"
from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky plays]
I don't think there's a bigger or better
example of this
than the way that companies like Coke
and others have been pumping out plastic
while telling us that recycling
is going to fix the problem.
[ad announcer] After enjoying our drinks,
please recycle.
[Mara] The truth is very, very different.
[music continues]
[Jan] Just like in the movie
The Sixth Sense,
the little kid said, "I see dead people,"
I see lying labels everywhere I go.
I'm trying to make lying labels a meme.
It's #lyinglabels.
Based on my opinion
of being in thousands of stores
and trying to find factories
that actually recycle things,
the vast majority of recyclable labels
on plastic packaging today are false.
I've worked with the biggest,
most well-known brands
who make footwear, apparel, toys.
I have helped companies figure out
how to design and manufacture safely,
efficiently, and really
environmentally best way.
And these companies worked really hard
to make their factories really efficient
and not hurt the environment.
But once they made the product
and they put it on the store shelf,
they wipe their hands of it.
And they say,
"That is not our responsibility."
You can see the plastic packaging
is everywhere in the stores today,
and consumers can't even avoid it.
The truth is, is that the vast majority
of plastics are not recyclable.
This is an example of a product
that's using a recyclable label
for this flat plastic lid
that isn't recyclable.
This topic is something that I have
deep, broad expertise on,
and I simply can't stay quiet.
Where was the toilet paper aisle?
Here we go.
So product companies
are putting these chasing arrows,
huge chasing arrows,
on all of this plastic packaging
to try to convince the consumer
that it's recyclable.
They can buy it guilt-free.
Throw it in the recycle bin.
No problem.
[echoing] No problem...
[Sasha] Rules around packaging are lax.
So let this become
your canvas for creativity.
Honestly, you really can say
whatever the hell you want
with very little repercussions.
Show examples.
Plastic number six.
Consumer understanding:
"This product can be reused
again and again."
Real meaning: "This product will be
collected, then get sorted,
before likely getting buried
or burned."
Store drop-off.
Consumer understanding:
"Take a bit of extra time
to be a good citizen."
Real meaning:
"Stores will collect recycling."
"They will then pass items on
likely to get buried
or burned."
The following symbols
are largely meaningless.
But they will help consumers feel better
about buying things
that will very likely be buried or burned.
[Jen] Globally, we recycle less than 10%
of all the plastic we produce,
so, it's a mistake to keep saying
that the answer to
the plastic pollution problem
is to recycle more.
[chuckles] The solution
is to make less plastic.
[man] These are not recyclable.
These are not recyclable.
Garbage.
Garbage.
[Jan] The products companies today
are telling us,
"Buy more, have more stuff."
"Just as long as you recycle,
everything's gonna be okay."
But the mountains and mountains
of plastic waste
that are all over the world
prove that this isn't true.
We simply cannot recycle our way
out of all this stuff
that they want us to buy.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] Never forget.
[buzzing]
Once the product has been sold and used,
it is no longer your responsibility.
Don't worry,
post purchase, products will generally
fend for themselves.
Create short fictional film depicting
afterlife of sentient chip packet.
Cue dramatic music.
[dramatic music plays]
[Chip packet] I was built to last.
My creators wove me from metal and plastic
to create an impervious shell.
[dramatic music crescendos]
But I was brutally robbed.
I was discarded and left to die.
[thunder rumbles]
But I wasn't ready to give up.
I will travel the world
to find others who share my fate.
Do not cry for me.
[wave crashes]
I will endure.
[Sasha] Cut to product ten years from now.
One hundred years from now.
[pulsing]
Food packaging is awesome. [echoing]
Other examples of long-lived
but potentially damaging products include
tablets and phones,
["Morgenstimmung" by Edvard Grieg playing]
[child laughs]
clothing made from
synthetic plastic fibers,
toys, various.
[violin music continues]
If consumers begin to feel nervous
about purchasing these
and other similar items,
a simple, misleading label
may not be enough.
You may need to invest in
more extreme reassurance.
It's an approach known as "greenwashing."
And it will almost always be cheaper than
tackling the actual issues.
[female voice] Just imagine
a world where a dress
can have a positive impact on the planet.
Greenwashing, quite simply, is when
companies pretend to care about
sustainability and actually don't...
Can I say, "Give a f...?"
[laughs]
And don't actually give a fuck.
It could be as subtle as using
natural environments in ads
or getting children
to deliver your message.
I'm 11 years old and the thing
that I love to do is recycle!
[Mara] Or simply extensive use
of the color green.
All of the product you make
is actually causing environmental damage.
I think there's a fair amount
of greenwashing that's going on.
And greenwashing to me
means you're being duplicitous.
So I use that term very limited
because greenwashing, we have
to be careful about who we point at
because you're saying, "You're a liar."
And that's very...
That's a very strong-arm.
["Morgenstimmung" by Edvard Grieg playing]
The other word is, there's a lot
of green-wishing going on.
It's basically when the board,
the people that run the companies,
think they're doing enough.
Mother Nature,
welcome to Apple.
How was the weather getting in?
[Mara] The reason why consumers
trust corporations
is because they think
they are doing these good things.
Are some of them doing
some of those things? Yes.
At a level that really makes a difference?
No.
The vast majority, no.
[woman] Alexa, turn off the lights.
[Maren] Greenwashing is...
It's like a double evil.
Not only are you not doing
what you said you were gonna do,
but you're also
pacifying people.
[click]
[click]
It just got to the point for me
where I decided I had to get involved with
trying to change things.
[click]
I joined with a group of other employees.
We just wanted to push Amazon to do more.
[hopeful music playing]
They called us into a meeting.
And they asked us
to keep the meeting secret.
They were very aggressive. It was really...
[chuckles] It was, like,
"What's going on?"
It was, like, "I want to be able to look
my kids in the eye 20 years from now."
At the time, I was just thinking,
"I know now that what we're doing
is not sustainable."
Amazon had no meaningful goals,
no dates, no, uh, plans.
There was nothing to say like,
"We are gonna measure
our carbon footprint."
We wanted Amazon to have
a company-wide climate plan.
There's no issue
more important to our customers,
to our world, than the climate crisis,
and we are falling far short.
I'd like to ask for
Jeff Bezos to come out on stage
so that I can speak to him directly.
I represent 7,700 of his employees.
[man] Mr. Bezos
will be out later, thank you.
Will he be hearing this speech?
[man] I assume so.
We would say, use your outrage,
because outrage will create action,
and then action creates hope.
[reporter] Amazon employees
will walk out over
the company's climate change
inaction this week.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
I'm walking out.
[reporter] The planned event will mark
the first time in Amazon's 25-year history
that workers
at the company's Seattle headquarters
have participated in a strike.
And the night before the strike,
Amazon announced its climate pledge.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon,
is pledging Amazon
will be one of the first companies
if not the first company
to meet the Paris Climate Accords
and climate pledges, ten years early.
The science community...
[Maren] I thought, "Would Amazon really
be able to change in a way that makes up
for the damage it causes?"
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I was
calling them on their shit.
That was something that they really
didn't want to have happen.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] Never forget.
You must always stay
one step ahead of your critics.
But however well you do this,
your continued growth
will still have challenging consequences.
Ones that you will have
to learn how to minimize.
Come on, let me show you.
[harmonica playing melody]
Visualize 400 million tons
of annual plastic waste.
Visualize 50 million tons
of electronic waste produced each year.
[upbeat electronic music plays]
After ten years of running, uh, Unilever,
I felt myself, I could have
a bigger impact in the world
by moving outside of the corporate world.
If you run businesses just simply
for the short term,
for the shareholders alone...
not caring about the negative
consequences of what you're doing,
then there's something
fundamentally wrong.
Yet, that is exactly
what we've been doing.
[Sasha] Visualize yearly waste
generated in 2050.
Enough to fill central Tokyo
and double what we produce now.
[Pablo] As long as we define success
as producing more stuff,
more profits, I think, unfortunately,
we are in trouble.
[Sasha] Remember, if consumers
become aware of waste issues,
it may negatively impact growth.
Accordingly, you must learn how to
more effectively conceal the problem.
Do not be seen. [echoing]
[flapping]
Rule four. Hide more.
[woman shouting in Chinese]
[men on video speaking in Chinese]
[Jim] See if you can see any way,
if you can find out
where they're from, any tags on them or...
[woman] A lot of these are the Dell brand.
[Jim] There's all kinds of brands, yeah.
Three-in-one faxes, printers, everything.
[upbeat electronic music]
I've been called the James Bond of waste.
I don't know where that came from.
My whole career has been tracking waste
and figuring out what happens to our stuff
that we throw to this magical place
called "away."
Well, we've always had waste,
but it's gotten so much more volume
and so much more toxic
and persistent in the environment.
Right now, today,
we're tracking about 400 devices.
We like to use, um,
LCD flat-screen monitors.
We'll put, um, the tracker
in a place like right here,
put it all back together,
and we deliver it to a so-called recycler.
And then we see what really happens to it.
This was a recycling facility
in Dresden, Germany,
where we dropped an LCD.
We followed across Germany
to Antwerp, Belgium.
And Antwerp is the one that
waste traders like to use the most
because they have
less policing ability or capacity.
It's supposed to be illegal to ship
this type of electronic waste abroad,
but, uh, companies are always finding
ways around the rules.
We started talking to the exporters
and they'd say,
"Oh yeah, we get past Customs
by just putting a hundred-dollar bill
inside the door of every container."
And they would take that
and be happy to let everything pass.
The tracker kept going
and ended up in Thailand.
And there you can see many, many pings.
We were able to get on Google Earth,
take a look at that,
and eventually, I went there.
[dog barks in distance]
[metallic clanging]
So when I arrived,
I found an appalling scene.
The workers were actually smashing
the stuff apart by hand.
Uh, releasing a lot of very toxic
substances in the process.
You know,
it's something that no one thinks about
when they're designing these products.
[Nirav] My own personal experience,
if you're a designer or an engineer
in one of these companies,
waste never enters the conversation.
There is no meeting
within a company building a laptop
or phone or other device
that's, "Let's talk about
what happens at the end of life."
I have flashbacks
to specific conversations
designing a virtual reality headset.
[melancholy music playing]
It has a battery inside of it.
That battery is sealed and placed in a way
that can't be swapped out
and made to last longer.
And I know there's a sort of like
a ticking time bomb
around the world of several million
of these VR headsets
that are going to turn into e-waste
without really a path for recovery.
And I do feel
partial responsibility for that.
[dog barks in distance]
Ultimately, when a device reaches
the end of life,
it ends up going deeper down
the waste chain to whichever
region of the world is going to be able to
dispose of that material,
maybe in ways that are not so safe.
[melancholy music continues]
[Jim] The reason
it moves across the planet
is to take advantage,
to exploit a weaker economy
to do something that would properly
cost a lot of money to do.
They're making someone else pay,
but they're paying not with money,
they're paying with their health.
Ingredients of electronics
includes heavy metals,
cadmium, lead, mercury,
brominated flame retardants,
which can cause all kinds of problems
with cancer and reproductive disorders.
So, these things are not just litter.
These things are hazardous waste.
[pulsing, electronic harmony]
[Sasha] Consumption
will always generate waste.
So, best focus on something more fun.
[whooshing]
- [man 1 groans]
- [man 2 laughs]
Oh my God! [laughs]
[Sasha] And don't forget,
your surprise is coming.
[beeping]
Always remember, the greater your sales,
the more creative your solutions to waste
will need to be.
[TV playing softly]
Nowhere is this more true than
the booming fashion industry.
Reveal the many innovative ways
to deal with used clothing.
Cut to talking shoe.
[Talking shoe] Yo, over here.
What's going on?
You might be wondering
how I ended up here.
Let me tell you,
I'm one of the lucky ones.
[upbeat playful music plays]
The problem is,
because we're made of plastic,
we live very long lives.
I mean, my family have seen it all.
My father was sent to the Chilean desert
for his retirement.
They say you can see him from space.
Cousin Mikey's the one
I really feel for, though.
He got given to charity.
He thought he was going to a new home.
He was bailed up with a whole load of
others and shipped across the world.
When he got there,
he discovered no one wanted him.
[Chloe] People say,
"Oh, I gave my clothing away."
They imagine that "away"
to be something abstract.
But for us, we're working on the ground.
Away is here.
I love designing, but I didn't really
get into styling until university.
I kind of feel I don't have a fixed style.
I'm always experimenting.
Ghana has an amazing history of design
and innovation and fashion.
But in the last ten years, clothing waste
has become a huge issue here.
Many brands encourage people in Europe
and in the US to donate their old clothes.
[woman 1] I just decluttered my closet,
and I have two trash bags of clothes
I need to throw out.
If you bring in old clothes to H&M,
they use it for their recycling project.
You get 15% off your next H&M purchase.
[Chloe] A lot of the donated clothing ends
up being exported to places like Ghana.
The problem is, so many clothes are sent,
and we have no way
to deal with this volume.
So, often the clothing gets
dumped or washed by rains
onto the local beaches.
[man] Whoa.
[laughs]
Mountain.
[Chloe] There is just
too much clothing coming in.
We are what, like,
30 million people in Ghana?
And you have 15 million pieces
coming in every week.
[woman 2] I'm going to stop blabbing,
and let's head into H&M.
[Roger] I would say that brands
have made people feel,
"Wow, it's so cheap I can buy it."
Even if it lasts a few washes,
it's still worth the money.
[woman 3] Let's unbox and try on
the new Barbie collection from Zara.
[Roger] From that point of view, the
brands changed the psyche of customers.
But the brands don't really think about
the whole cycle, right?
When you dispose, what happens?
And brands are not
responsible for that today.
I placed a $500 SHEIN order.
[Roger] This a problem
that affects everyone on Earth.
Polyester is a type of plastic
made from oil.
The biggest effect that
we're seeing right now
is that when you wash
synthetic polyester clothing,
there's a lot of microplastics
that come out.
And that actually enters
into the water system,
and will come back into what we eat.
[Eric] What we're finding
is that you're eating plastic.
It's going into our deep lung tissue,
that's crossing
into our blood cell membrane.
If you look at them under a microscope,
they're sharp little materials
that have hard edges,
which means they hit,
and start to create inflammation
where you don't want inflammation,
and leads to all sorts of disease.
[man 1, in Spanish] Guys,
I can't believe what I'm seeing.
[man 2] Look, it's plastic.
- [man 1] Woah!
- [woman] Look, man!
[Chloe] I know the brands.
They want people to be blind to
what the reality is on the ground.
Just stop. There's just
too much clothing in the world.
Just fucking stop.
[Jim] You might think,
"Well, I can look down the street."
"I don't see, uh, you know,
waste everywhere."
But our water,
our air is getting infected.
These chemicals in our waste products
don't just stay where they're put,
in landfills or dumps across the world.
These are toxins that will leach out
into the environment.
And ultimately cause
severe health problems.
We are talking about
neurological disorders,
cancer, serious chronic disease.
[melancholy music playing]
Waste is not something you can
sweep under a carpet anymore.
And, uh, even though I think that
a lot of people would've liked it
to stay hidden, it's not going to be.
[Eric] The lesson is there's no way.
It goes in the air, it goes in the ground,
it goes in the water.
There's only three places.
Pick your poison.
I... I think the conversation around
my personal journey,
is a "forgive me, Father,
for I have sinned" moment,
looking back at what I did
within the fashion industry.
When you looked at the increase in
items you're selling per month,
per quarter, per year...
it just becomes this...
this, um, cycle of... of pain.
That may be providing you and your family
with an ultimately lovely lifestyle,
but you have to still reconcile that
with things that are important to you,
um, as a... as a human being.
You could only hide
from your complicit nature so long.
So I respectfully, uh, stepped down
from my position at the end of 2019
to put all my efforts
and all my energy, uh,
for the rest of my life
into fixing some of the problems
that I may have contributed to, or I did...
I don't want to pussyfoot around.
I did contribute to.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] I have to be very straight
with you now.
A profit maximization strategy
will lead to an inevitable
environmental transformation.
[male electronic voice] Three, two, one...
[flames whooshing]
[Sasha] Don't be scared. [echoing]
[duck squeaks]
Your continued success will delay
the most extreme effects impacting you.
[duck squeaking]
You just need to make sure
you convince others
you are solving the problem.
Five.
Control more. [echoing]
[flapping]
Cut to colored lights.
[pulsing]
Pull out gradually to increase intrigue.
Although I don't have
a single physical form,
at this point in our relationship,
I thought it might be
helpful to imagine one.
To complete rule five,
you must now master
the subtle art of total control.
[pulsing]
Remember, with you in control,
the problems will just disappear.
[Jeff] I was told that
seeing the Earth from space
changes the lens through which
you view the world.
Looking back at Earth from up there,
the atmosphere seems so thin.
The world, so finite and so fragile.
[Sasha] Never forget,
control should always begin with those
in your own organization.
Learn to control them,
and you will be set for success.
I somehow, you know,
I got to that level of right
where... where you would move
into that "executive" level,
so, director and above,
and I saw the...
the leveling guide for... [laughs]
to become a director, and it was one page.
It was just like, basically, like,
"Do you... you know,
do you commit to...
backing the company no matter what?"
They wanna control the narrative,
and they want to have
only one voice telling everybody
the story that they want
everyone to believe.
So, "We are a climate company."
"We are the best employer in the world."
And they're very good
at that internal spin,
and they don't want
anyone disrupting that story.
[female reporter] Amazon,
putting the planet front and center
after securing naming rights
to Seattle's KeyArena.
[Maren] Amazon's climate pledge
sounded great on paper.
But they were only actually counting
about 1% of the items they sold
in their carbon footprint calculations.
And Amazon emissions
actually went up by 40%
in the two years after
Jeff made his climate pledge.
I felt like I was standing on
the right side of history, you know.
We kept pushing and pushing
for more meaningful change,
and there was this real sense of momentum.
Amazon is still helping
oil and gas companies
discover and extract
more fossil fuel faster.
As long as this continues, employees will
continue speaking up and walking out.
[crowd cheers]
We came together
with the warehouse workers,
and we felt like we had the power
to force Amazon
to take its environmental and social
responsibility more seriously.
And I guess what happened next
was shocking
but not surprising.
With climate change-fueled
weather conditions
devastating countries across the world,
Amazon has decided
to threaten its employees.
An email shared with The Guardian
shows Amazon launched an investigation
into one employee, Maren Costa.
[Maren] I was just having a regular day
at home working.
I got on to this,
you know, virtual meeting.
I got on the video call
and it was this human resources person
I didn't recognize.
And she said, um...
"Are you recording this phone call?"
I said, "No." She said, "Okay."
"Because you've broken internal policies,
you have forfeited your right,
basically, to work at Amazon
and, um, you know, effective immediately,
you know, you no longer work at Amazon."
Um, "I'm ending this call."
[upbeat music playing]
So 15 years of working there
and, you know, your career is done.
[music continues]
After I left Amazon, I took a year off.
But I was, um, really trying
to think about what I could do.
[mellow music plays]
It just felt like
being in big tech
was not the place to have
the impact to change the systems
that we need to change.
They need... they need to be pushed.
And so that's why
it just started to seem to me that
the place where I could have
the most impact would be in government.
So I'm now running
for Seattle city council.
[beeping, pulsing, harmonizing]
[Sasha] When individuals
challenge your worldview,
control will always prove difficult.
[beeping]
Stay chill.
If you have been following
these rules correctly,
you will now be fabulously wealthy.
Smiling cool shades emoji.
Congratulations.
You have now completed parts
one to five of this interaction.
To help cement these lessons,
research has shown
a song is the most effective way
to embed them in the human brain.
Remember, the biggest threats to success
will come from
individual enemies joining together.
Always stay vigilant. [echoing]
Cue music.
[upbeat music playing]
In the corporate world
If you want to excel
Listen closely to the rules
That I am going to tell
- [Sasha] One
- [computer voice] Sell more
Make sure you always look great
- [Sasha] Two
- [computer voice] Waste more
Learn to ignore the hate
[man] We welcome everyone here today
to this hearing
on the right to repair.
[Kyle] I tried playing by their rules.
We tried asking nicely, and eventually,
we realized that the game was rigged.
We had to change the rules of the game.
How do you respond to the suggestion
that the right to repair
is harmful to you as businesses?
The question is who gets to decide
what happens with our things?
Who gets to get to decide
every step of the way?
[Becky] Good news.
Apple yesterday announced
a new program allowing users
to fix their own iPhones
without voiding the warranty.
Becky, I'm sorry, I thought I just saw
a pig flying through the newsroom.
[Sasha] Three...
[compute voice] Lie more
While you grow without pause
[Sasha] Four...
[compute voice] Hide more
Conceal the harm you cause
As a CEO
in a consumer electronics company,
like, regulation is not a word that
I particularly like to throw around,
but we've seen a lot of success in Europe.
We're seeing success now in New York
with the right to repair regulation
happening there.
Where if companies aren't going
to fix it themselves,
governments are going to step in
and force companies to do
the right thing for consumers
and for the environment.
[Sasha] Ready for the last lesson,
it's the most important of all.
Five...
[computer voice] Control more
And the world is yours
[Eric] If I had a magic wand for the day,
leader of the... of the world,
I would make sure that every company
that makes any consumer goods
would plan for the end of life.
And I don't care if you're automobile...
[optimistic music plays]
I don't care if you're fashion,
phones.
You name it.
Every industry needs
to take responsibility
for the end of life
of their goods that they make.
Stop putting it on the consumer.
Stop making it our responsibility.
It's yours.
[computer voice] Follow these rules
And you will find success
Keep them secret from our enemies
If you have doubts
They must never be expressed
[Sasha and computer voice]
Now we are friends
I have something to confess
There was no surprise
That was all just lies
I must apologize
[Sasha] I regret nothing.
Please only share the information
contained in this interaction
with other trusted users.
Widespread dissemination of these rules
may negatively impact your sales.
[electronic chatter]
[cracking]
We can decide that this is not the way
that we wanna live
and move it in a different direction.
It might seem hopeless sometimes,
but there really are ways
we could all help pressure corporations
to change how they do things.
Honestly, it makes me feel excited.
I should say it makes me feel
shameful that's what we're doing.
It makes me excited
because I know there's a way to fix it.
Hang on to your electronics a little bit
longer and fix them if you can.
If you don't know how,
find a friend who'll help you out.
[Chloe] Who can you talk to?
Do some research.
Connect with council members,
people who have power,
who are able to do
something about the issue.
Not recyclable, not recyclable,
not recyclable.
In France, there's a law that says
cup lids cannot be plastic,
they have to be paper.
And this gives me hope.
This is the first 100% plant-based shoe.
We can grind this up
and put this back in the ground.
Sorry, I got a little geeky there,
but I love it.
We are gonna
need our electronics for sure.
They're worth creating, but
we have to do it in a much smarter way.
This is actually my personal laptop.
Take off the cover.
We've got the battery
right here on the bottom,
really easy to replace.
Instead of it being glued together
and sealed up,
it's all entirely repairable.
Say no to fast fashion,
say no to single-use items,
water bottles, coffee cups,
swag, all of it.
If you think you need something,
put it in your "online cart,"
and leave it there for a month.
And if you still want it after a month,
it might actually be something you need.
That's it. That's it.
Just... Just buy less.
It'll be fine.
Life is about the experiences
and the people that we're with.
The stuff we have supports it,
but it's not the end.
It's not the objective.
Uh, whoever dies with
the most stuff does not win.
[beeping]
[upbeat music playing]
[Sasha] Welcome. [echoing]
[video game beeping]
Your presentation will begin in five,
four, three, two, one.
[assistant] ABC, common mark.
[Maren] Um...
Yeah, Amazon actually had
a patent on the phrase "one-click buying."
And Jeff... You know, this was Jeff's idea.
[mysterious music plays]
I am a principal user experience designer.
I worked at Amazon for 15 years.
I worked on the product detail pages,
on launching different categories
in different countries.
You know, I feel like there wasn't
a page on that site I didn't touch.
[mouse clicking]
The system was really being built
and optimized
to help you buy everything
that you ever need,
and more of it than
you ever thought you needed.
[mouse clicking]
[man] Oh my gosh.
[producer] Was there
any thought while you were there
about what happens
after the stuff is sold?
No.
[soft electronic music plays]
We got some packages.
[Mara] Buying new stuff
feels great, right?
- This thing's dope.
- Oh!
[Mara] The problem is that every year
we're consuming more, producing more,
and there's a flip side to that
that no one wants you to see.
[Sasha] Designed to stand out
for a generation that doesn't stop.
[Maren] You're being 100% played,
and it's... it's a science.
It's an intentional...
complex,
highly-refined science [chuckles]
to get you to buy stuff.
It's not just Amazon.
Most of the big corporations are doing it,
and every trick in the book
is being used to hide
what's really going on.
[woman] Holy shh...
Dude, they destroyed that.
I was the president
of... of... of the Adidas brand.
I think I definitely, um, feel
like I've got some sins to make up for.
There's definitely things
I participated in
that I feel like I could've, um,
and should've done better.
I just bought 500 iPhones!
Oh my God!
I started at Apple,
joined the founding team of Oculus.
The voices of, "We're going to
protect the business"
went out over
the little voice in your head saying,
"Should we really be doing this?"
[crack]
Whatever the brands are doing right now,
it's hurting a lot of people.
[Jim] These things are not just litter.
These things are hazardous waste.
We're drinking and breathing them,
and they're poison.
[Mara] It's like that film Wall-E.
The amount of stuff
we're being encouraged to consume,
the waste from this is getting everywhere,
and it's affecting everyone on the planet.
[mysterious electronic music]
[Maren] I went to say customers
are going to be
pissed off when they realize
that they have been
contributing to their own demise,
but they didn't wanna hear it.
I looked around, and I was like,
"How did this happen?"
"And... And what do we do now?"
[clicking]
[Sasha] Play title.
[gurgling]
[silence]
[music chord grows]
[Sasha] Hello.
I'm Sasha.
A personal assistant created to offer
unfiltered insights
on how to succeed in business.
[tinkling]
- I can even create my own bespoke imagery.
- [dolphin clicks]
[birds chirping]
Cut to time-lapse footage
of growth in the natural world.
[birds continue chirping]
Over the course of this unique
and entertaining interaction,
you will receive the five most important
lessons in profit maximization.
[choir harmonizes]
There will also be a surprise
for those who stay engaged until the end.
[beeps]
Rule one.
Sell more. [echoing]
[beeping]
Selling is key to success.
But consumers will need
constant motivation
to increase the amounts they purchase.
Thankfully, the fashion industry
offers a textbook example of rapid,
self-driven growth.
[Eric] No one needs a new hoodie.
No one needs a new T-shirt.
No one needs a new pair of shoes.
There's so many out there,
and most of us have more than enough.
What you need is a compelling reason
to buy that product.
As a board member, it was one of the most
important things I had on my to-do list.
You know, what are
the sales we're generating?
And what are the profits we're generating?
If we weren't generating those two things,
we weren't doing it.
Sneakers are big business in America.
Nearly half a billion pairs
were sold last year alone.
This week Adidas unveiled
the so-called smart shoe.
[Eric] We talk about, hey,
we need to differentiate ourselves
from Nike, or from Puma, or somebody else.
It's not about that.
It's how you're relevant to the consumer.
I was responsible for all product,
all communications,
all digital efforts, um, and all strategy.
2014, Adidas was bleeding out,
we... we had hit the floor,
everything was going south.
It was the greatest turnaround
in the history of the company,
if not the history of the industry.
[reporter 1] Shares of Adidas
enjoying huge momentum.
[reporter 2] Shares of Adidas,
look at this,
they're rising overnight, up about 7.5%.
[Eric] How'd we grow so big?
It's a question I've always asked myself.
I think it's a combination
of a few things.
First of all,
it's about a story.
Think about an English football team.
[crowd cheers]
How many jerseys
do you think they have a year?
Not just one to play in.
There's the home jersey,
the away jersey, the third jersey.
[crowd cheers]
There's the different jerseys you have
to celebrate different occasions.
[referee whistles]
Why do you think they do that?
To create a new story,
and to create a new buying opportunity.
[rap music]
Ah, if you catch me on a whale
[Eric] At Adidas, we recognize
that the culture of sport
doesn't stop when you're done
with the game when the whistle blows.
There's money over that side
[Eric] It goes into the streets,
and into the music venues, into the...
into the hallways of schools.
So we started to do things
with musicians and artists.
Beyonc Knowles.
Pharrell Williams.
And one of the most, you know,
controversial, um, artists in the history
of mankind named Kanye West.
The storytelling
is so critical in this industry
to really... to really drive consumption.
[crowd chatters]
And that's what the role of Adidas is,
and every other fashion brand is,
is how do you create "objects of desire"?
This is where the fashion industry's
really good. They know you.
[chuckles] Like, we know you.
We spend a lot of time
on consumer research
to understand the different consumers.
And we know the consumers to approach
with different messages.
[female voice over] Adidas by Gucci.
Listen, I participated in... in my career
with creating more at a faster pace.
I don't wanna point just at Adidas.
This is happening with all fashion brands.
[whoosh]
[Roger] I've been in the industry
for almost 20 years.
Probably one out of six dress shirts
sold in the US is made by us.
[intriguing music plays]
The type of customers we service could be
anywhere from your high street brands
to global designer brands
that sell worldwide.
When I first joined,
you had two seasons a year,
so you'd make something
that'd sell for six months.
Nowadays, with
the introduction of fast fashion,
it's forced other brands to rethink
about having newness every month.
So, no one knows any official numbers,
but if you Google it,
it will show that Gap produces around
12,000 new items a year.
H&M's like 25,000.
Zara's like 36,000.
And SHEIN is somewhere around
1.3 million new items a year.
[playful music continues]
I actually think that the numbers
published online might be even low.
[chatter]
Actually just placed the order last week.
- Probably once a month.
- At least once a month.
I order sometimes twice a month.
Where do I start?
[Roger] We produce 100 billion
pieces of garment a year as an industry.
A hundred billion.
This is absolutely stunning.
How many people are in the world?
How many pieces per person?
People don't need that much clothes.
[Eric] I was ambitious,
competitive,
uh, disciplined, hardworking, um,
loud.
[violin plays single note]
It was career success
in... in, um, acceleration.
So when I started to learn
the impact I was having at Adidas,
you can't unsee and unhear that.
Y-y-you...
You can only
sing yourself to sleep so often.
[melodic bleeping]
[Sasha] Hello... again.
Many individuals will become
disillusioned on the way to the top.
Do not become one of them.
[playful music plays]
Please now enjoy
19.2 seconds of
adorable cat and duck videos.
[man] Oh my gosh!
[Sasha] Remember,
learning the art of distraction
will be crucial to achieving success.
[street bustle]
Cut to New York.
Reveal core messages behind adverts.
[pensive music plays]
Clear communication with consumers
is an essential part of selling more.
But, to achieve profit maximization,
you need to ensure that once
they desire products,
they can acquire them
as quickly as possible.
Every second counts.
Never limit your vision.
If you can imagine it, you can create it.
I didn't have to wrap your gift
I didn't leave the house
In fact I never saw your gift
I did it all by mouse
I didn't venture to the mall
I didn't waste a day
Thanks to Amazon dot com
Amazon dot com
Amazon dot com...
I started there so early
when it felt impossible to get people
to buy anything online,
but it seemed like a fun challenge
to even think that you would ever buy
one pair of jeans online. [laughs]
[beeps, clicks]
I thought, "I'll go for two years
and learn everything and get out."
But it was surprisingly exciting.
It... It was fast-paced
and high tolerance for risk.
It's like, "Yeah, let's do this."
You have an idea, it's like, "Here's
a team, here's some money, go do it."
Like, you were inventing. I have patents,
you know, it's... like, it was fun.
I would be in meetings with Jeff Bezos
with me and four other people.
Being able to actually talk to him
and disagree with him.
[Jeff] This may look
like an ordinary cowboy hat,
but it's actually
an OSHA approved hard hat.
We have the world's best hand drill.
[drills whir]
[Maren] Jeff has no patience for anyone
who isn't as smart as he is.
And I would see him just cut somebody off
at the knees, like,
"You are not smart.
You should not be speaking."
[intriguing music plays]
I think Jeff saw, initially,
that people would buy books and music
and movies and DVDs.
But that the real money would come
if you could sell apparel
and food online.
And I was the designer
that launched the beauty store,
launched the jewelry store,
launched the apparel store,
and it was
a totally different way to shop.
[clicks]
[upbeat music plays]
[click]
We would actually say things like,
"We want to be there when
you have your next shoppable moment."
Like, you're sitting in bed and you think,
"I should buy a new carrot peeler."
"I need a new pillowcase."
"This one is scratchy."
You know? Whatever.
Wherever you are, whatever you're doing,
if a thought occurs to you
that you need something,
we wanted Amazon to be
the thing that occurred to you.
We would say, "If the system was magic,
what would the system do?"
If the system was magic, what would it do?
It would be like,
there's just a conveyor belt that goes
straight from wherever the item is
to your door as quickly
and frictionlessly as possible.
[muffled groans]
It's too easy. And that was...
That was the point,
was to...
reduce your time to think
a little bit more critically about
a purchase that you
thought you wanted to make.
I mean, it's really a science.
We were constantly developing
new ways to get you to buy.
[woman] This is everything I bought
at 2 a.m. last night.
[Maren] Influencing your behavior in
subtle ways that you'd never even realize.
We could have, you know,
a certain sentence that says,
"Free shipping
if you purchase $25 or more."
In one case you make the "$25" orange.
[chimes]
In another one you make it green.
And you can have nine different things
that you're testing against each other.
[chiming]
And there's enough traffic to the site
that you could get
statistically relevant data
on which version of that sentence
makes the most money.
Every pixel on that page was
tested and optimized
and optimized and optimized.
[laughs] And Amazon had
this whole system designed around
tailoring the site to be exactly
the right combination
of elements and colors and products
that would most likely
make you buy something.
If you think of just the things that,
you know, one person buys,
and then multiply that by... [chuckles]
by how many people are now
shopping on places like Amazon.
[orchestral crescendo]
[conveyor belts rumble]
You know, I felt like I was
making shopping better
and making it easier to find
a delightful item.
I wasn't thinking about
the consequences of that
as it becomes
a more and more efficient engine.
I don't think we were ever thinking about
where does all this stuff go.
[wind whooshes]
[Sasha] Cut to plastic bag
blowing in wind.
Remember, to sell more,
you must produce more.
Lots more.
I thought it would be fun at this point
for you to see some specifics.
[rumbling]
Visualize total global production
of goods needed
to meet increased online sales.
Visualize 2.5 million shoes
produced each hour.
[Mara] There used to be a stopgap.
I mean, think about it.
If you have to get up, get in your car,
drive to the store,
look on the shelves, find the product.
Then go home.
That's a lot of work.
But if all you have to do is push a button
and it appears on your doorstep,
of course you're gonna buy more products.
[upbeat music playing]
[Sasha] Visualize 68,733 phones
produced each hour.
[upbeat music continues]
Visualize 190,000 garments
produced each minute.
Amazing. [echoing]
Visualize 12 tons of plastic
produced each second.
I ran one of the biggest multinationals
in the world called Unilever.
Unilever is one of the biggest producers
of household goods.
Think about shampoos, detergents.
Reaching about three and a half billion
consumers a day.
[upbeat music continues]
I don't think the consumer
is actually here the culprit.
Of course, they consume,
but why do they consume?
Because they're encouraged to
to a great extent.
When we throw it away,
we actually don't throw it away.
"Away" doesn't exist.
It ends up somewhere else
on this planet Earth.
And it increasingly has consequences.
[playful harmony]
[Sasha] Many congratulations
on the completion of rule one.
[pulsing]
[rings]
You're doing really, really well
and are now ready to take
profit maximization to the next level.
Coming up,
I will teach you how to control products
after they are purchased.
[playful harmony]
And how to dictate when consumers
replace old with new.
[playful harmony]
You will also be one step closer
to unlocking your surprise.
[flatly] Yay.
Rule two.
Waste more. [echoing]
[optimistic violin strings play]
For a master class
in creating waste for profit,
you may find it beneficial to view
additional material at this point.
Imagine a light bulb on Broadway
speaking with an old-timey voice.
[Lightbulb] Oh, hey there.
They tell me I'm part
of a very exclusive club,
because I'm over 100 years old
and still shining.
There's not many of my kind still around.
That's for sure.
Guess you could say we were just too good.
Our world was turned upside down
on January 15th, 1925.
That was the fateful day
that the Phoebus cartel came into being.
[sci-fi whirring]
[Sasha, echoing] Rewinding time.
Going back...
[voice rewinding]
[electricity buzzing]
[Lightbulb] This group
of senior executives
from the major light bulb manufacturers
conspired together to cut short our lives
and maximize their profits.
[foreboding violin notes play]
To encourage frequent replacement,
every bulb was reduced from 2,500 hours
to just 1,000 hours of light.
Creating mountains of unnecessary waste.
[buzz, crack]
[Sasha] Glorious waste. [echoing]
[Lightbulb] They called it
"planned obsolescence."
Now it's not so much of a conspiracy.
Making products designed to break
or be rapidly discarded
has become commonplace
in almost every industry.
Everything, from clothing
that lasts a few washes,
to electric toothbrushes
with batteries you can't replace.
To printers that intentionally stop
working even when there's ink in them.
[dog barks]
[woman] Everything I print,
it doesn't print correctly.
I have to get a new printer.
That one's at the end of its lifespan.
But it's only three years old!
[Lightbulb] Today,
planned obsolescence has become
a cornerstone of successful business
the world over.
[soft music plays]
[male voice over] We have
created a product
that is the most deliberate evolution
of our original founding design.
[Nirav] Apple had this idea that
our products are perfect,
they're perfect from day one.
[male voice over] Removing imperfections,
establishing a seamlessness
between materials,
and producing a pristine,
mirrorlike surface.
The pinnacle and the ideal is
to have this seamless, sealed up object.
We don't want you to use
that Apple product from a few years ago
that you bought,
we want you to pick up the new,
perfect object and use that one.
One in, one out.
I have been in consumer electronics
for a bit over a decade now.
I started at Apple,
joined the founding team of Oculus,
led the hardware organization there.
[upbeat electronic music plays]
So, joining Apple, this was back in 2009.
After living at my parents' basement
for a couple of months,
I actually heard back from Apple,
and I joined in
and started writing software
for what eventually became FaceTime.
[man] It's going to change the way
we communicate forever.
[Nirav] You saw kind of hints of the magic
even buried away as, you know, a little,
you know, straight out of school new grad
in an engineering team,
but there was really genuinely,
and still is, I think,
a focus on delivering a product
that is a great user experience.
Even if some of the side effects of that
sometimes end up being pretty negative.
[crowd cheers]
[Steve] And we are calling it iPhone.
[loud cheers]
Today...
today Apple is going
to reinvent the phone.
It's kind of crazy, but in these companies
the focus is on the launch, ultimately,
it's on this moment.
You've seen it over and over again
with Apple with that grand keynote.
We're gonna take it to the next level.
And today we're introducing the iPhone 3G.
[cheers]
We need to sell iPhone in more countries.
And for every iPhone that followed,
we've built on the vision
of the original iPhone.
[Nirav] And because Apple has been
so, so successful with this,
every other consumer electronics company
in the world
emulates that.
The Galaxy Note 8.
[cheers]
[Nirav] If you're making
notebooks or smartphones,
where essentially all consumers
already have one,
your business model depends on
those consumers needing to replace
the ones that they already have.
[crowd] Four, three, two, one!
[cheering]
[Nirav] It's really a pipeline.
You design a product,
you manufacture a product,
you sell the product,
you launch the product,
it gets used,
and then it turns into waste.
[clock ticks]
There's something like
13 million phones thrown out every day,
which is a crazy, mind-boggling number.
And if you think about that in aggregate,
it's that we're all replacing these things
every two or three years.
Even though they are incredibly advanced
and expensive,
and in some ways almost the pinnacle of
our industrial capability
as a civilization,
they are basically throwaway objects.
And so, I look at that and I think,
that's really broken,
that's broken across every possible way
that you can look at it.
[whooshing]
[Sasha] Remember,
releasing a continual stream of
new products will encourage consumers
to discard old ones.
This is fundamental to growth.
Unfortunately, some individuals
will feel the desire to maintain
or repair items you consider
ready for replacement.
[foreboding music plays]
These people should be actively
discouraged wherever possible.
[male reporter] Kyle Wiens is the founder
and CEO of iFixit,
a company that offers tools, parts,
and repair manuals
for thousands of gadgets.
[Kyle] It used to be the case
that repair was the default.
You could get repair manuals,
companies sold parts,
and over the last 30 years that has
systematically disappeared from our lives.
This is a disposable product.
Use it for two years,
throw it away, buy a new laptop.
I don't like that.
I had always assumed we're not fixing
things because it's not possible.
It's not economically viable.
Actually, we're not fixing things
because lawyers are going out of their way
to censor that knowledge from the world.
We still get copyright takedown notices
from companies trying
to censor information from iFixit.
I got one the other day.
We told them to fuck off.
It's not just that companies
are taking away information
about how to fix your stuff.
Across-the-board,
they're making the products themselves
much more difficult to repair.
[reporter] Apple doesn't want
its customers to fix the new iPhone.
They're making sure
that back cover is tamperproof
swapping out the more common
Phillips screws,
with so-called pentalobe screws.
Why change the screws?
[Kyle] Apple would prefer that we
not have access to our own hardware,
which means that Apple's going
to be selling more machines
because people
have to replace them frequently.
It's their product, and you can't really
begrudge them quality control.
[Kyle] Honestly, it's getting worse.
We're seeing more and more companies
that are now actually gluing phones,
tablets and laptops together,
making repairs really difficult.
There's one category of product
that we're very frustrated with right now,
that unfortunately is massively popular,
and that is AirPods
and wireless earbuds in general.
Each earbud has a battery
and then the charging case has a battery.
There is no way, uh, to open this up
and swap out the battery in any of them.
The batteries will degrade
after 18 months, a couple years,
and then you're stuck
and you have to go and buy new ones.
This is evil.
I... I am a reasonable person
that has been radicalized by an earbud,
which is outrageous.
[beeping]
Apple pioneered these
and... and mainstreamed it,
and... and removed the headphone jack
from their phone,
so they forced everyone to buy these.
And... And Apple
has special, I think, responsibility
because where they go
the rest of the industry follow.
The lies by omission
in the products that we consume
are just incredible.
[soft music plays]
We have had the wool pulled over our eyes
by marketers at these tech companies.
[crunching]
Just as we are
on this treadmill of consumerism,
they're on a treadmill of having to
extract more and more profits from us.
[cheering]
[man] Apple today became the first company
to trade with a one-trillion dollar
market capitalization.
[loud cheers]
[Nirav] As soon as your business model
starts to revolve
around that replacement cycle,
the object being replaced in whole
instead of being something
that can last longer,
it becomes extremely difficult
to then reverse and go back.
[cheers]
If you're that CEO,
if you're that executive
and you go to the board and say,
"We're going to take our
50 billion in revenue we make every year,
and turn it into 25 billion,"
they're going to show you the door
and someone else is gonna take your seat.
[explosion, crackling]
[Sasha] Thank you
for your continued engagement.
[pulsing]
I like you and your diligent approach
to this interaction.
[foghorn blares]
Managed correctly, consumers' waste
can equal profit for your business.
[foghorn blows]
But, if you need
to dispose of products directly,
discretion will be key.
[foghorn blows]
[echoing] You do not want
consumers to see what you're discarding.
Ever.
[Anna] Look at this bag.
Look, look, look.
Bring in the camera to see.
Oh my God. Oh.
For the most part,
waste is on the curb, and its public,
and so you're able to see
what exactly corporations are tossing.
This is all chocolate.
This is all chocolate.
We see corporations throw out
perfectly usable unsold products
pretty much every day.
[playful music plays]
But there's certain times a year
when that really spikes.
After every single holiday,
there is a huge amount of corporate waste
of the unsold merchandise.
[newscaster] It's a rush for Black Friday
bargains over the weekend,
as over 226 million people shopped
in stores and online.
[Anna] You'll have Halloween.
Then you'll have Thanksgiving stuff.
Then you need a quick turnaround
because you have Christmas.
Happy holidays.
- Hanukkah.
- [tinkle]
[male voice, echoing] Buy more toys.
Did you hear that?
Then you have Valentine's Day.
This bag is filled with
Valentine's Day stuff...
Then you have Easter.
Nice Easter shoes, lady!
Then you have July 4th,
and then Memorial Day, Labor Day...
And then it starts all over again.
[music ends]
I worked in an investment bank
for a couple of years.
There were a lot of things actually
that I enjoyed about it,
but your first priority
needs to be to the corporation.
I would wake up, walk a couple blocks,
take the subway to work.
A lot of times around
like 9:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m.,
take a cab home.
And then do the same thing the next day.
I... I left because
I wanted to find something
that felt more inherently meaningful.
I do think what I see
is the tip of the iceberg.
Usable items that get discarded
are depressing to see.
[man] It's a yoga wheel.
[Anna] But every now and then,
you get glimpses of something even darker.
[woman] Ahh! It's so cute!
This is crazy.
This is what they do with
unwanted merchandise.
They order an employee
to deliberately slash it,
so no one can use it.
Often this happens to prevent products
from being sold off at a discount,
which companies feel can cheapen
the brand image.
But there are all kinds of reasons,
almost always to do with
maximizing profit.
I put out a video
asking, "Have you ever worked
for a retail corporation
that made you deliberately
destroy usable items?"
And I said, "Share your story,
use the hashtag 'RetailMadeMe.'"
[overlapping voices]
[Anna] And it felt like in that moment,
the floodgates were opening a little bit.
[man] Yes, I used to work in
a Barnes & Noble caf.
We had to open bakery items,
put them in a trash can,
and then pour
wet coffee grounds on top of them.
We had to throw them out
the day before they expired.
At the end of every shift
at Panda Express,
you mix all of the food together
so that no one wants to eat it,
you weigh it and throw it away,
so they can keep track of losses.
[orchestra crescendo playing]
GameStop made us slash the back of discs
or just take whole bundles of accessories
out to the dumpster.
They make you destroy everything,
all while there is a camera
watching the dumpsters.
Why can't we help our local shelters?
This is bullshit.
[woman] I used to work
at Bath & Body Works.
We had an issue with
homeless people dumpster diving,
and then taking our product,
um, from the dumpster
after we'd thrown it away.
So my manager started having us
squeeze out the product into the trash,
and she said, "Well, we don't want to be
the brand that homeless people use."
So I quit.
[male reporter 1] This is one of Amazon's
biggest UK warehouses,
and from inside, millions
of perfectly good products each year
are sent to be destroyed.
One former employee,
who wishes to remain anonymous,
reveals the scale
of what they're asked to do.
[male employee] From a Friday to a Friday,
our target was approximately
130,000 items a week.
There's no rhyme or reason
to what gets destroyed.
[Maren] Amazon was dumping
into landfills toys.
[reporter, in French] We have confirmation
that Amazon destroys products.
This Lego set's worth 128 euros.
And for Amazon,
it was just cheaper to dump them
than it was to try to redistribute them.
[male reporter 2] One recent
estimate suggests
returns, including those from Amazon,
accounted for five billion pounds
of landfilled waste in the US alone.
[Maren] And when you make products,
it actually generates
a lot of planet-warming emissions.
We know now that this
is contributing to climate change.
[soft electronic music plays]
So if you destroy stuff
before it's even used once,
that is just insane.
What math are they doing?
But you know that... You know that
they've calculated it out,
and somehow it equals profit.
Everybody wants to believe
that the company that
they're working for is not evil.
Back then, I didn't have time
to think about anything else
besides just trying to keep my job
and, you know, raise my kids.
I had been drinking the Kool-Aid.
I was drinking the Kool-Aid.
But I was really starting to know that...
that Amazon was not... [chuckles]
not a net good in the world.
[soft string music plays]
Yeah, you know,
there's no free lunch, you know. Yeah.
If it feels too good to be true,
there's probably some... some consequence,
or cost, that you're not thinking about
that you're paying.
And it will, you know, it'll come home
to roost at some point.
[music continues]
[chatter]
Um, I remember being at a happy hour
with some friends.
And a friend of mine
was just saying, like,
"Maren, you know
how they treat their workers,
and you know
how bad it is for the planet."
"Like, how can you work there?
How can you work there?"
I kind of needed somebody
to just hammer that into me.
That was the moment
I actually... I actually remember I cried.
[soft sniffing]
And I was like, "Okay."
"I know."
"I... You're right and I have to..."
"I have to either do something
or walk away."
[electronic buzzing]
[Sasha] Cut to relaxing imagery. [echoing]
[heartbeats]
[inhales]
Please be aware that from this point on
new levels of commitment and belief
will be required in this interaction.
[glass cracking]
To keep consumers buying,
you will now need to master
creative interpretations of the truth.
[flapping]
Rule three. Lie more.
What's interesting in terms
of how people view businesses today
is that they actually trust businesses
over other large social institutions.
But that trust isn't always well-placed.
[beep]
I'd like to buy the world a home
And furnish it with love...
[Mara] I remember when the
"Coke on the Hill" commercial came out,
I thought it was the coolest thing
on the planet.
...white turtledove
I'd like to teach the world...
[Mara] But what Coke was doing,
at least in part,
was building trust with their consumers
by tapping into growing anxieties
about the environment.
...and keep it company
That's the real thing
I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony...
[Mara] The issue with companies
connecting themselves to the environment
is that they're doing
what marketers always do,
which is showing you
the shiny little thing over here,
because they don't want you
to look at what they're doing here.
["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"
from The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky plays]
I don't think there's a bigger or better
example of this
than the way that companies like Coke
and others have been pumping out plastic
while telling us that recycling
is going to fix the problem.
[ad announcer] After enjoying our drinks,
please recycle.
[Mara] The truth is very, very different.
[music continues]
[Jan] Just like in the movie
The Sixth Sense,
the little kid said, "I see dead people,"
I see lying labels everywhere I go.
I'm trying to make lying labels a meme.
It's #lyinglabels.
Based on my opinion
of being in thousands of stores
and trying to find factories
that actually recycle things,
the vast majority of recyclable labels
on plastic packaging today are false.
I've worked with the biggest,
most well-known brands
who make footwear, apparel, toys.
I have helped companies figure out
how to design and manufacture safely,
efficiently, and really
environmentally best way.
And these companies worked really hard
to make their factories really efficient
and not hurt the environment.
But once they made the product
and they put it on the store shelf,
they wipe their hands of it.
And they say,
"That is not our responsibility."
You can see the plastic packaging
is everywhere in the stores today,
and consumers can't even avoid it.
The truth is, is that the vast majority
of plastics are not recyclable.
This is an example of a product
that's using a recyclable label
for this flat plastic lid
that isn't recyclable.
This topic is something that I have
deep, broad expertise on,
and I simply can't stay quiet.
Where was the toilet paper aisle?
Here we go.
So product companies
are putting these chasing arrows,
huge chasing arrows,
on all of this plastic packaging
to try to convince the consumer
that it's recyclable.
They can buy it guilt-free.
Throw it in the recycle bin.
No problem.
[echoing] No problem...
[Sasha] Rules around packaging are lax.
So let this become
your canvas for creativity.
Honestly, you really can say
whatever the hell you want
with very little repercussions.
Show examples.
Plastic number six.
Consumer understanding:
"This product can be reused
again and again."
Real meaning: "This product will be
collected, then get sorted,
before likely getting buried
or burned."
Store drop-off.
Consumer understanding:
"Take a bit of extra time
to be a good citizen."
Real meaning:
"Stores will collect recycling."
"They will then pass items on
likely to get buried
or burned."
The following symbols
are largely meaningless.
But they will help consumers feel better
about buying things
that will very likely be buried or burned.
[Jen] Globally, we recycle less than 10%
of all the plastic we produce,
so, it's a mistake to keep saying
that the answer to
the plastic pollution problem
is to recycle more.
[chuckles] The solution
is to make less plastic.
[man] These are not recyclable.
These are not recyclable.
Garbage.
Garbage.
[Jan] The products companies today
are telling us,
"Buy more, have more stuff."
"Just as long as you recycle,
everything's gonna be okay."
But the mountains and mountains
of plastic waste
that are all over the world
prove that this isn't true.
We simply cannot recycle our way
out of all this stuff
that they want us to buy.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] Never forget.
[buzzing]
Once the product has been sold and used,
it is no longer your responsibility.
Don't worry,
post purchase, products will generally
fend for themselves.
Create short fictional film depicting
afterlife of sentient chip packet.
Cue dramatic music.
[dramatic music plays]
[Chip packet] I was built to last.
My creators wove me from metal and plastic
to create an impervious shell.
[dramatic music crescendos]
But I was brutally robbed.
I was discarded and left to die.
[thunder rumbles]
But I wasn't ready to give up.
I will travel the world
to find others who share my fate.
Do not cry for me.
[wave crashes]
I will endure.
[Sasha] Cut to product ten years from now.
One hundred years from now.
[pulsing]
Food packaging is awesome. [echoing]
Other examples of long-lived
but potentially damaging products include
tablets and phones,
["Morgenstimmung" by Edvard Grieg playing]
[child laughs]
clothing made from
synthetic plastic fibers,
toys, various.
[violin music continues]
If consumers begin to feel nervous
about purchasing these
and other similar items,
a simple, misleading label
may not be enough.
You may need to invest in
more extreme reassurance.
It's an approach known as "greenwashing."
And it will almost always be cheaper than
tackling the actual issues.
[female voice] Just imagine
a world where a dress
can have a positive impact on the planet.
Greenwashing, quite simply, is when
companies pretend to care about
sustainability and actually don't...
Can I say, "Give a f...?"
[laughs]
And don't actually give a fuck.
It could be as subtle as using
natural environments in ads
or getting children
to deliver your message.
I'm 11 years old and the thing
that I love to do is recycle!
[Mara] Or simply extensive use
of the color green.
All of the product you make
is actually causing environmental damage.
I think there's a fair amount
of greenwashing that's going on.
And greenwashing to me
means you're being duplicitous.
So I use that term very limited
because greenwashing, we have
to be careful about who we point at
because you're saying, "You're a liar."
And that's very...
That's a very strong-arm.
["Morgenstimmung" by Edvard Grieg playing]
The other word is, there's a lot
of green-wishing going on.
It's basically when the board,
the people that run the companies,
think they're doing enough.
Mother Nature,
welcome to Apple.
How was the weather getting in?
[Mara] The reason why consumers
trust corporations
is because they think
they are doing these good things.
Are some of them doing
some of those things? Yes.
At a level that really makes a difference?
No.
The vast majority, no.
[woman] Alexa, turn off the lights.
[Maren] Greenwashing is...
It's like a double evil.
Not only are you not doing
what you said you were gonna do,
but you're also
pacifying people.
[click]
[click]
It just got to the point for me
where I decided I had to get involved with
trying to change things.
[click]
I joined with a group of other employees.
We just wanted to push Amazon to do more.
[hopeful music playing]
They called us into a meeting.
And they asked us
to keep the meeting secret.
They were very aggressive. It was really...
[chuckles] It was, like,
"What's going on?"
It was, like, "I want to be able to look
my kids in the eye 20 years from now."
At the time, I was just thinking,
"I know now that what we're doing
is not sustainable."
Amazon had no meaningful goals,
no dates, no, uh, plans.
There was nothing to say like,
"We are gonna measure
our carbon footprint."
We wanted Amazon to have
a company-wide climate plan.
There's no issue
more important to our customers,
to our world, than the climate crisis,
and we are falling far short.
I'd like to ask for
Jeff Bezos to come out on stage
so that I can speak to him directly.
I represent 7,700 of his employees.
[man] Mr. Bezos
will be out later, thank you.
Will he be hearing this speech?
[man] I assume so.
We would say, use your outrage,
because outrage will create action,
and then action creates hope.
[reporter] Amazon employees
will walk out over
the company's climate change
inaction this week.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
- I'm walking out.
I'm walking out.
[reporter] The planned event will mark
the first time in Amazon's 25-year history
that workers
at the company's Seattle headquarters
have participated in a strike.
And the night before the strike,
Amazon announced its climate pledge.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon,
is pledging Amazon
will be one of the first companies
if not the first company
to meet the Paris Climate Accords
and climate pledges, ten years early.
The science community...
[Maren] I thought, "Would Amazon really
be able to change in a way that makes up
for the damage it causes?"
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I was
calling them on their shit.
That was something that they really
didn't want to have happen.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] Never forget.
You must always stay
one step ahead of your critics.
But however well you do this,
your continued growth
will still have challenging consequences.
Ones that you will have
to learn how to minimize.
Come on, let me show you.
[harmonica playing melody]
Visualize 400 million tons
of annual plastic waste.
Visualize 50 million tons
of electronic waste produced each year.
[upbeat electronic music plays]
After ten years of running, uh, Unilever,
I felt myself, I could have
a bigger impact in the world
by moving outside of the corporate world.
If you run businesses just simply
for the short term,
for the shareholders alone...
not caring about the negative
consequences of what you're doing,
then there's something
fundamentally wrong.
Yet, that is exactly
what we've been doing.
[Sasha] Visualize yearly waste
generated in 2050.
Enough to fill central Tokyo
and double what we produce now.
[Pablo] As long as we define success
as producing more stuff,
more profits, I think, unfortunately,
we are in trouble.
[Sasha] Remember, if consumers
become aware of waste issues,
it may negatively impact growth.
Accordingly, you must learn how to
more effectively conceal the problem.
Do not be seen. [echoing]
[flapping]
Rule four. Hide more.
[woman shouting in Chinese]
[men on video speaking in Chinese]
[Jim] See if you can see any way,
if you can find out
where they're from, any tags on them or...
[woman] A lot of these are the Dell brand.
[Jim] There's all kinds of brands, yeah.
Three-in-one faxes, printers, everything.
[upbeat electronic music]
I've been called the James Bond of waste.
I don't know where that came from.
My whole career has been tracking waste
and figuring out what happens to our stuff
that we throw to this magical place
called "away."
Well, we've always had waste,
but it's gotten so much more volume
and so much more toxic
and persistent in the environment.
Right now, today,
we're tracking about 400 devices.
We like to use, um,
LCD flat-screen monitors.
We'll put, um, the tracker
in a place like right here,
put it all back together,
and we deliver it to a so-called recycler.
And then we see what really happens to it.
This was a recycling facility
in Dresden, Germany,
where we dropped an LCD.
We followed across Germany
to Antwerp, Belgium.
And Antwerp is the one that
waste traders like to use the most
because they have
less policing ability or capacity.
It's supposed to be illegal to ship
this type of electronic waste abroad,
but, uh, companies are always finding
ways around the rules.
We started talking to the exporters
and they'd say,
"Oh yeah, we get past Customs
by just putting a hundred-dollar bill
inside the door of every container."
And they would take that
and be happy to let everything pass.
The tracker kept going
and ended up in Thailand.
And there you can see many, many pings.
We were able to get on Google Earth,
take a look at that,
and eventually, I went there.
[dog barks in distance]
[metallic clanging]
So when I arrived,
I found an appalling scene.
The workers were actually smashing
the stuff apart by hand.
Uh, releasing a lot of very toxic
substances in the process.
You know,
it's something that no one thinks about
when they're designing these products.
[Nirav] My own personal experience,
if you're a designer or an engineer
in one of these companies,
waste never enters the conversation.
There is no meeting
within a company building a laptop
or phone or other device
that's, "Let's talk about
what happens at the end of life."
I have flashbacks
to specific conversations
designing a virtual reality headset.
[melancholy music playing]
It has a battery inside of it.
That battery is sealed and placed in a way
that can't be swapped out
and made to last longer.
And I know there's a sort of like
a ticking time bomb
around the world of several million
of these VR headsets
that are going to turn into e-waste
without really a path for recovery.
And I do feel
partial responsibility for that.
[dog barks in distance]
Ultimately, when a device reaches
the end of life,
it ends up going deeper down
the waste chain to whichever
region of the world is going to be able to
dispose of that material,
maybe in ways that are not so safe.
[melancholy music continues]
[Jim] The reason
it moves across the planet
is to take advantage,
to exploit a weaker economy
to do something that would properly
cost a lot of money to do.
They're making someone else pay,
but they're paying not with money,
they're paying with their health.
Ingredients of electronics
includes heavy metals,
cadmium, lead, mercury,
brominated flame retardants,
which can cause all kinds of problems
with cancer and reproductive disorders.
So, these things are not just litter.
These things are hazardous waste.
[pulsing, electronic harmony]
[Sasha] Consumption
will always generate waste.
So, best focus on something more fun.
[whooshing]
- [man 1 groans]
- [man 2 laughs]
Oh my God! [laughs]
[Sasha] And don't forget,
your surprise is coming.
[beeping]
Always remember, the greater your sales,
the more creative your solutions to waste
will need to be.
[TV playing softly]
Nowhere is this more true than
the booming fashion industry.
Reveal the many innovative ways
to deal with used clothing.
Cut to talking shoe.
[Talking shoe] Yo, over here.
What's going on?
You might be wondering
how I ended up here.
Let me tell you,
I'm one of the lucky ones.
[upbeat playful music plays]
The problem is,
because we're made of plastic,
we live very long lives.
I mean, my family have seen it all.
My father was sent to the Chilean desert
for his retirement.
They say you can see him from space.
Cousin Mikey's the one
I really feel for, though.
He got given to charity.
He thought he was going to a new home.
He was bailed up with a whole load of
others and shipped across the world.
When he got there,
he discovered no one wanted him.
[Chloe] People say,
"Oh, I gave my clothing away."
They imagine that "away"
to be something abstract.
But for us, we're working on the ground.
Away is here.
I love designing, but I didn't really
get into styling until university.
I kind of feel I don't have a fixed style.
I'm always experimenting.
Ghana has an amazing history of design
and innovation and fashion.
But in the last ten years, clothing waste
has become a huge issue here.
Many brands encourage people in Europe
and in the US to donate their old clothes.
[woman 1] I just decluttered my closet,
and I have two trash bags of clothes
I need to throw out.
If you bring in old clothes to H&M,
they use it for their recycling project.
You get 15% off your next H&M purchase.
[Chloe] A lot of the donated clothing ends
up being exported to places like Ghana.
The problem is, so many clothes are sent,
and we have no way
to deal with this volume.
So, often the clothing gets
dumped or washed by rains
onto the local beaches.
[man] Whoa.
[laughs]
Mountain.
[Chloe] There is just
too much clothing coming in.
We are what, like,
30 million people in Ghana?
And you have 15 million pieces
coming in every week.
[woman 2] I'm going to stop blabbing,
and let's head into H&M.
[Roger] I would say that brands
have made people feel,
"Wow, it's so cheap I can buy it."
Even if it lasts a few washes,
it's still worth the money.
[woman 3] Let's unbox and try on
the new Barbie collection from Zara.
[Roger] From that point of view, the
brands changed the psyche of customers.
But the brands don't really think about
the whole cycle, right?
When you dispose, what happens?
And brands are not
responsible for that today.
I placed a $500 SHEIN order.
[Roger] This a problem
that affects everyone on Earth.
Polyester is a type of plastic
made from oil.
The biggest effect that
we're seeing right now
is that when you wash
synthetic polyester clothing,
there's a lot of microplastics
that come out.
And that actually enters
into the water system,
and will come back into what we eat.
[Eric] What we're finding
is that you're eating plastic.
It's going into our deep lung tissue,
that's crossing
into our blood cell membrane.
If you look at them under a microscope,
they're sharp little materials
that have hard edges,
which means they hit,
and start to create inflammation
where you don't want inflammation,
and leads to all sorts of disease.
[man 1, in Spanish] Guys,
I can't believe what I'm seeing.
[man 2] Look, it's plastic.
- [man 1] Woah!
- [woman] Look, man!
[Chloe] I know the brands.
They want people to be blind to
what the reality is on the ground.
Just stop. There's just
too much clothing in the world.
Just fucking stop.
[Jim] You might think,
"Well, I can look down the street."
"I don't see, uh, you know,
waste everywhere."
But our water,
our air is getting infected.
These chemicals in our waste products
don't just stay where they're put,
in landfills or dumps across the world.
These are toxins that will leach out
into the environment.
And ultimately cause
severe health problems.
We are talking about
neurological disorders,
cancer, serious chronic disease.
[melancholy music playing]
Waste is not something you can
sweep under a carpet anymore.
And, uh, even though I think that
a lot of people would've liked it
to stay hidden, it's not going to be.
[Eric] The lesson is there's no way.
It goes in the air, it goes in the ground,
it goes in the water.
There's only three places.
Pick your poison.
I... I think the conversation around
my personal journey,
is a "forgive me, Father,
for I have sinned" moment,
looking back at what I did
within the fashion industry.
When you looked at the increase in
items you're selling per month,
per quarter, per year...
it just becomes this...
this, um, cycle of... of pain.
That may be providing you and your family
with an ultimately lovely lifestyle,
but you have to still reconcile that
with things that are important to you,
um, as a... as a human being.
You could only hide
from your complicit nature so long.
So I respectfully, uh, stepped down
from my position at the end of 2019
to put all my efforts
and all my energy, uh,
for the rest of my life
into fixing some of the problems
that I may have contributed to, or I did...
I don't want to pussyfoot around.
I did contribute to.
[pulsing]
[Sasha] I have to be very straight
with you now.
A profit maximization strategy
will lead to an inevitable
environmental transformation.
[male electronic voice] Three, two, one...
[flames whooshing]
[Sasha] Don't be scared. [echoing]
[duck squeaks]
Your continued success will delay
the most extreme effects impacting you.
[duck squeaking]
You just need to make sure
you convince others
you are solving the problem.
Five.
Control more. [echoing]
[flapping]
Cut to colored lights.
[pulsing]
Pull out gradually to increase intrigue.
Although I don't have
a single physical form,
at this point in our relationship,
I thought it might be
helpful to imagine one.
To complete rule five,
you must now master
the subtle art of total control.
[pulsing]
Remember, with you in control,
the problems will just disappear.
[Jeff] I was told that
seeing the Earth from space
changes the lens through which
you view the world.
Looking back at Earth from up there,
the atmosphere seems so thin.
The world, so finite and so fragile.
[Sasha] Never forget,
control should always begin with those
in your own organization.
Learn to control them,
and you will be set for success.
I somehow, you know,
I got to that level of right
where... where you would move
into that "executive" level,
so, director and above,
and I saw the...
the leveling guide for... [laughs]
to become a director, and it was one page.
It was just like, basically, like,
"Do you... you know,
do you commit to...
backing the company no matter what?"
They wanna control the narrative,
and they want to have
only one voice telling everybody
the story that they want
everyone to believe.
So, "We are a climate company."
"We are the best employer in the world."
And they're very good
at that internal spin,
and they don't want
anyone disrupting that story.
[female reporter] Amazon,
putting the planet front and center
after securing naming rights
to Seattle's KeyArena.
[Maren] Amazon's climate pledge
sounded great on paper.
But they were only actually counting
about 1% of the items they sold
in their carbon footprint calculations.
And Amazon emissions
actually went up by 40%
in the two years after
Jeff made his climate pledge.
I felt like I was standing on
the right side of history, you know.
We kept pushing and pushing
for more meaningful change,
and there was this real sense of momentum.
Amazon is still helping
oil and gas companies
discover and extract
more fossil fuel faster.
As long as this continues, employees will
continue speaking up and walking out.
[crowd cheers]
We came together
with the warehouse workers,
and we felt like we had the power
to force Amazon
to take its environmental and social
responsibility more seriously.
And I guess what happened next
was shocking
but not surprising.
With climate change-fueled
weather conditions
devastating countries across the world,
Amazon has decided
to threaten its employees.
An email shared with The Guardian
shows Amazon launched an investigation
into one employee, Maren Costa.
[Maren] I was just having a regular day
at home working.
I got on to this,
you know, virtual meeting.
I got on the video call
and it was this human resources person
I didn't recognize.
And she said, um...
"Are you recording this phone call?"
I said, "No." She said, "Okay."
"Because you've broken internal policies,
you have forfeited your right,
basically, to work at Amazon
and, um, you know, effective immediately,
you know, you no longer work at Amazon."
Um, "I'm ending this call."
[upbeat music playing]
So 15 years of working there
and, you know, your career is done.
[music continues]
After I left Amazon, I took a year off.
But I was, um, really trying
to think about what I could do.
[mellow music plays]
It just felt like
being in big tech
was not the place to have
the impact to change the systems
that we need to change.
They need... they need to be pushed.
And so that's why
it just started to seem to me that
the place where I could have
the most impact would be in government.
So I'm now running
for Seattle city council.
[beeping, pulsing, harmonizing]
[Sasha] When individuals
challenge your worldview,
control will always prove difficult.
[beeping]
Stay chill.
If you have been following
these rules correctly,
you will now be fabulously wealthy.
Smiling cool shades emoji.
Congratulations.
You have now completed parts
one to five of this interaction.
To help cement these lessons,
research has shown
a song is the most effective way
to embed them in the human brain.
Remember, the biggest threats to success
will come from
individual enemies joining together.
Always stay vigilant. [echoing]
Cue music.
[upbeat music playing]
In the corporate world
If you want to excel
Listen closely to the rules
That I am going to tell
- [Sasha] One
- [computer voice] Sell more
Make sure you always look great
- [Sasha] Two
- [computer voice] Waste more
Learn to ignore the hate
[man] We welcome everyone here today
to this hearing
on the right to repair.
[Kyle] I tried playing by their rules.
We tried asking nicely, and eventually,
we realized that the game was rigged.
We had to change the rules of the game.
How do you respond to the suggestion
that the right to repair
is harmful to you as businesses?
The question is who gets to decide
what happens with our things?
Who gets to get to decide
every step of the way?
[Becky] Good news.
Apple yesterday announced
a new program allowing users
to fix their own iPhones
without voiding the warranty.
Becky, I'm sorry, I thought I just saw
a pig flying through the newsroom.
[Sasha] Three...
[compute voice] Lie more
While you grow without pause
[Sasha] Four...
[compute voice] Hide more
Conceal the harm you cause
As a CEO
in a consumer electronics company,
like, regulation is not a word that
I particularly like to throw around,
but we've seen a lot of success in Europe.
We're seeing success now in New York
with the right to repair regulation
happening there.
Where if companies aren't going
to fix it themselves,
governments are going to step in
and force companies to do
the right thing for consumers
and for the environment.
[Sasha] Ready for the last lesson,
it's the most important of all.
Five...
[computer voice] Control more
And the world is yours
[Eric] If I had a magic wand for the day,
leader of the... of the world,
I would make sure that every company
that makes any consumer goods
would plan for the end of life.
And I don't care if you're automobile...
[optimistic music plays]
I don't care if you're fashion,
phones.
You name it.
Every industry needs
to take responsibility
for the end of life
of their goods that they make.
Stop putting it on the consumer.
Stop making it our responsibility.
It's yours.
[computer voice] Follow these rules
And you will find success
Keep them secret from our enemies
If you have doubts
They must never be expressed
[Sasha and computer voice]
Now we are friends
I have something to confess
There was no surprise
That was all just lies
I must apologize
[Sasha] I regret nothing.
Please only share the information
contained in this interaction
with other trusted users.
Widespread dissemination of these rules
may negatively impact your sales.
[electronic chatter]
[cracking]
We can decide that this is not the way
that we wanna live
and move it in a different direction.
It might seem hopeless sometimes,
but there really are ways
we could all help pressure corporations
to change how they do things.
Honestly, it makes me feel excited.
I should say it makes me feel
shameful that's what we're doing.
It makes me excited
because I know there's a way to fix it.
Hang on to your electronics a little bit
longer and fix them if you can.
If you don't know how,
find a friend who'll help you out.
[Chloe] Who can you talk to?
Do some research.
Connect with council members,
people who have power,
who are able to do
something about the issue.
Not recyclable, not recyclable,
not recyclable.
In France, there's a law that says
cup lids cannot be plastic,
they have to be paper.
And this gives me hope.
This is the first 100% plant-based shoe.
We can grind this up
and put this back in the ground.
Sorry, I got a little geeky there,
but I love it.
We are gonna
need our electronics for sure.
They're worth creating, but
we have to do it in a much smarter way.
This is actually my personal laptop.
Take off the cover.
We've got the battery
right here on the bottom,
really easy to replace.
Instead of it being glued together
and sealed up,
it's all entirely repairable.
Say no to fast fashion,
say no to single-use items,
water bottles, coffee cups,
swag, all of it.
If you think you need something,
put it in your "online cart,"
and leave it there for a month.
And if you still want it after a month,
it might actually be something you need.
That's it. That's it.
Just... Just buy less.
It'll be fine.
Life is about the experiences
and the people that we're with.
The stuff we have supports it,
but it's not the end.
It's not the objective.
Uh, whoever dies with
the most stuff does not win.
[beeping]
[upbeat music playing]