On this week's episode of Thick & Thin, we're joined by Tim Cook, host of Gimlet's new podcast, to talk all things deplatforming on social media. We discuss the dangers of de-platforming, why it's a problem, and what it means to have a free speech conversation about it. We also discuss Jack Dorsey's recent interview with the New York Times, and whether or not he should have been fired from his position as CEO of one of the most powerful companies in the world. And, of course, we talk about why we don't trust him and why we think he should be fired. Don't miss it! This episode was produced by Tall Tales and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. Additional editing and production by Alex Blumberg. Music by Ian Dorsch and Mark Phillips. Our theme song was written and performed by Micah Vellian and our ad music was made by Mark Phillips and our mixed music was written by Matthew Boll. We were edited by Patrick Muldowney. Additional mixing and mastering by Ben Koppelman. Additional engineering and mastering was done by Matt Newell and Matthew Boll, and additional mixing by James Rocha. Additional production by Daniel Gulati, Matthew Boll and Ben Kuchta, with additional editing by Patrick Downey, and Rachel Ward, and Alex Blanchard, and Matthew Keyser, with assistance from Ben Bergman, and music production by Rachel Ward and Ben Kotnik, and Matt Knost, and Emma Jacobs, and Bobby Lord, and a very special thanks to Rachel Ward. , with help from James Rook, and Sam Kuchter, and Sarah Boggs, and Jack McElroy. The opinions expressed in this episode are our own work, and our thanks to our editor-in-chief, and the help of Rachel Ward of the excellent sound design and editing and editing by Rachel Goodman, and Ben Gottschalk, and her excellent mixing and editing assistance by Rachel Coughlan, and Jeff Perla, and Jake Chapman, and Michael McLennan, and Caitlin Durand, and Mike McLennon, and James Ward, of the amazing sound design, and Emily Hermoza, and Patrick Dorsey, and also the excellent editing, and Dan Ollie O'Brien, and his amazing editing, for the excellent writing and editing help, and much more. Thank you for listening to this episode we got a chance to do this one.
00:00:47.000I think for many reasons it was my fault.
00:00:50.000I don't think I prepared enough for it, and I also don't think I understood the magnitude of how other people felt about deplatforming on Twitter and all social media, YouTube and all these different things, and what the ramifications are and how...
00:01:07.000How much this means to people to have very clear and obvious free speech outside of very egregious examples of threats and doxing and things like that, which I think we can all agree, right?
00:01:21.000I think this problem might be one of the worst problems we're facing right now politically.
00:01:28.000You know, Twitter is where public discourse is happening.
00:01:31.000It's where journalists are, and this is a problem, sourcing a lot of their stories.
00:01:35.000So if you have somebody who's completely removed from public discourse, that's exile.
00:01:40.000I can imagine why some people kind of lose their minds when that happens.
00:01:43.000And I think going into that conversation with him, well, that's what I wanted it to be.
00:01:49.000That's why I don't really interview people.
00:01:51.000I mean, I kind of have conversations with them.
00:01:53.000Occasionally we have disagreements and we talk about things and, you know, But I don't have a mandate.
00:02:04.000The only thing I wanted to get out of the conversation is I wanted to find out what it was like to start that organization and to have no idea when you were doing it that it was going to be essentially one of the most important distribution...
00:02:36.000You know what I was saying earlier is, I think a lot of people look at you, you're like a real dude.
00:02:40.000You know, your conversations are real.
00:02:42.000You're not one of these fake news journalists that people are very critical of that feel they're biased or have an agenda.
00:02:47.000So when you sit down with Jack Dorsey and doesn't go anywhere, people then feel like the last person who's not supposed to let us down, let us down.
00:03:54.000Jack says things like, he said to you, he said to Congress, I believe he said to Congress, we don't ban people based on the content, we ban people based on their conduct.
00:06:00.000They tend to be trans-inclusive, meaning they believe that someone who's born biologically male can compete with those biologically female if they transition, if they take hormones and things like that.
00:06:17.000Yeah, I've seen some of the stuff you've talked about.
00:06:19.000The trans-exclusionary group think they shouldn't, and they've said things that are considered to be – I say considered to be offensive.
00:06:26.000I'm not trying to assert who's offended by it, but – There's one recent story where a radical feminist said that the trans rights movement is a men's rights movement, right?
00:09:06.000It's so confusing to people and it causes so much division between two sides that might not even differ that much.
00:09:15.000You know, the funny thing about it is I got my start during Occupy Wall Street and conservatives called me far left because I was reporting on the protests, what they were doing, police brutality, the arrests.
00:09:27.000They said this is a far left activist.
00:09:29.000Now that I'm – I've always been critical of the more extreme factions.
00:09:33.000Like I've got interviews from six, seven years ago where I'm critical of these people.
00:09:37.000Now all of a sudden – We're good to go.
00:10:07.000Yeah, well, that's just trying to skirt around freedom of speech.
00:10:48.000In talking about Twitter censorship, there are people on the left who have been banned unjustly and this is where it gets actually scarier in my opinion.
00:11:38.000But then I'd have to – the reason why I don't think it was a mistake, very simply, is for one, we can see the ideological bent to their rules.
00:11:45.000But then you look at someone like Milo Yiannopoulos.
00:15:00.000I guess it depends on how conspiratorial you want to get, but Julian Assange, they've labeled him, like the intelligence agencies, I can't remember, I think it may have been James Clapper, said that he is acting as a private intelligence adversary of the US or something to that effect.
00:18:00.000She got banned permanently because she tweeted to, I believe it was Ilan Omar, criticism about Sharia law.
00:18:07.000She accused, you know, you can pull up the tweet, but I think she accused Ilan of promoting Sharia, which results in like all these horrific things, and they banned her for it.
00:18:17.000Okay, disagree with her all you want, but that was her criticizing a politician.
00:18:20.000You can't have a lawsuit against Donald Trump claiming you can't – Trump can't block somebody because it's a public forum.
00:18:27.000But then when it comes to a congressperson, just permanently ban someone for saying something critical of their ideology.
00:18:34.000I think what's really critical here is that there has to be some sort of clarification for what policies were violated and how they were violated.
00:18:44.000That seems to be especially for public figures because- It's one thing if we don't know a person in the background, but when you know a person, whether it's a Laura Loomer or a Milo Yiannopoulos, and it's a public case, and then you get this feeling that they say,
00:19:00.000no, because we decide, and this is it.
00:19:02.000Well, Joe, don't worry, because no matter what Twitter does, they're going to be defended by the New York digital journalist elites.
00:19:11.000Who will misrepresent what's going on in an effort to obfuscate or sometimes outright lie about what's going on.
00:19:29.000So when coal miners were getting laid off, a bunch of articles emerged saying, teaching miners to code, can we teach miners how to code?
00:19:37.000And they were showing videos about it.
00:19:38.000I don't believe it was, it wasn't intended to be derogatory or insulting, but to a lot of people it came off as this bourgeois, let them eat cake.
00:20:08.000John Levine, I think his name, from The Wrap, tweets, someone from Twitter told me, you can be banned for tweeting learn to code at a laid-off journalist.
00:20:17.000Conservatives start tweeting it far and wide.
00:21:15.000And they said, oh, but you're taking it out of context.
00:21:18.000Then John Levine from The Wrap says, update, Twitter spokesperson who was my source is now saying, clarifying it is about the harassment campaign.
00:21:26.000And then another journalist comes out and says, his quote's fake, Twitter's denying ever saying it.
00:21:31.000The editor-in-chief of The Daily Caller just a couple, I think a couple days ago, He took a tweet from The Daily Show, and it was from the State of the Union, and he tweeted, learn to code, and quote tweeted a video, suspended.
00:21:44.000So it's very clearly not about a harassment campaign.
00:21:46.000But why then were all of these journalists so ready to jump up and defend Twitter when Twitter – you know what I said?
00:21:54.000Okay, if Twitter is claiming they're banning people who are engaging in a harassment campaign, you mean they've confirmed they're banning people for tweeting learn to code.
00:22:03.000How is it that learn to code is harassment, but Kathy Griffin saying to all of her millions of fans, I want these kids' names several times, or another verified account I'm not going to name because it's not as famous, literally calling for the death of these kids and instructing people to kill them is not a bountiful offense.
00:24:22.000News breaks, you've got all these journalists, because I've worked with them.
00:24:25.000You know, I worked for Vice, I worked for Fusion, and they sit around at tables, they meet up after work from different offices, and they talk about things, and they all tell each other the exact same thing.
00:24:34.000And so this is why you see Covington happen.
00:24:36.000These people all follow each other on Twitter, so when someone tweets, this MAGA kid got in the face of Nathan Phillips, They only see each other's tweets and they just write it.
00:24:54.000And it's mind-blowing to me because the second video that came out from Covington, you literally watch Nathan Phillips walk up to the kid and get in his face.
00:25:01.000Bill Maher, you know, what four or five days later, says the kid got in his face.
00:25:30.000Brian Stelter from CNN then got a statement that...
00:25:35.000I always say I believe because I don't have the sources pulled up, but someone from Twitter said journalists are the lifeblood of our platform.
00:25:40.000And so that's why I think you've got these predominantly New York-based progressive writers.
00:25:48.000They get hired for moderate salaries to work in a newsroom, sit around each other all day, sharing the same ideas, not exploring anything outside their bubble.
00:25:55.000And Twitter supports them because they're the ones who drive traffic to Twitter.
00:26:17.000Probably because she's very famous, but then I have to wonder why Alex Jones was.
00:26:21.000So the only real differentiator there, I guess, is either mainstream notoriety or ideological tribe.
00:26:29.000Well, Jamie, you pulled up why Alex was banned, too, which is, you know, it's not very clear.
00:26:37.000When you think about the fact that they were saying that he had never done anything on their platform that was bannable, And then what was the one final thing?
00:26:50.000He confronted Oliver Darcy of CNN in D.C. and for several minutes was yelling at him while they filmed.
00:26:56.000And apparently, that's my understanding, was the justification for banning him that he was harassing a journalist or something to that effect, which is, in my opinion, absurd.
00:27:48.000How does Alex Jones get banned for giving that guy a hard time, but Kathy Griffin doesn't get banned for literally calling for these children's names.
00:27:56.000Leading a harassment campaign against kids.
00:27:58.000Someone with millions of followers led a harassment campaign.
00:28:02.000If you're calling on your followers to do something, you're engaging in a campaign.
00:28:07.000But Alex Jones confronting the journalist who advocated for his banning is a bannable offense.
00:28:12.000Here's the important thing about Jones.
00:28:14.000Oliver Darcy said on CNN, it wasn't that Jones broke the rules that got him banned because what Darcy said is he's been breaking the rules in the past.
00:28:44.000But, you know, I often wonder why is it that as prominent and powerful as conservative groups can be, why they often lose these cultural battles.
00:28:53.000And I'm not going to say this is the primary reason, but I will point out.
00:28:58.000Does Twitter believe that, you know, I often use Sargon of Akata as an example, the liberalist anti-SJW character.
00:29:06.000Do they believe he'll lead a group of liberalists and individualists to Twitter headquarters with crowbars and Maltzoff cocktails?
00:30:02.000It has to get marked by someone saying this is inappropriate, and if enough people that follow a porn star don't think it's inappropriate, it doesn't then get flagged in the system.
00:32:09.000There's a clip going around of Gavin McInnes where you can hear him saying these crazy things, and you're like, well, he said it.
00:32:15.000But it turns out, some of the clips he was talking about dogs, you really can take the context out of things, and these clips are- I understand that, yeah.
00:32:24.000In my videos, I don't quote people anymore because people have taken me reading a quote from a newspaper and attribute it to me simply for reading someone else's quote, and they say, oh, but he said it, right?
00:32:34.000I mean, you look at- The really funny instance of Count Dankula, the guy with the Nazi pug.
00:33:49.000I don't know if you have this issue, but for the longest time, it's substantially harder to interview someone on the ideological left than anyone else, right?
00:34:00.000So I recently reached out to, you know, I regularly reach out to people.
00:34:03.000I'm not going to name drop because I don't want to drag people.
00:34:05.000But, man, it takes weeks trying to organize a meeting with some, you know, these personalities who are progressives and on the left.
00:34:14.000Even people who, like, I've gotten messages from people saying, yeah, man, I watch your stuff all the time, but hold on, let me think about it and talk to some people first.
00:34:21.000And I'm not saying they're doing it because they're skittish or, it's just harder, it's a lot harder.
00:34:26.000Well, they're probably more cautious, especially if, you know, where your ideology stands is ambiguous, if they're trying to figure it out.
00:35:16.000And then we start talking and I said, how do you feel about these people dressing all black and, you know, are fighting people and causing problems?
00:35:25.000It's actually, I'm surprised because often when I see people wearing, you know, fully masked up with communist stuff, they're typically in favor of The by any means necessary strategies.
00:35:36.000And he was like, no way, man, that's wrong.
00:35:40.000I don't care if you're whatever, as long as you're not an authoritarian who thinks you have the right to beat other people to instill your ideology on them.
00:35:48.000Or use manipulative force or coercion or extortion.
00:35:52.000So let me talk about why I think what we're seeing with Twitter might be one of the biggest problems ever.
00:35:58.000Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, these platforms are where we exist, socially, politically.
00:36:04.000It's where we learn about who we're going to vote for or why we won't vote for somebody.
00:36:08.000When you ban somebody, you exile them.
00:36:10.000They're no longer a part of that conversation.
00:36:12.000So they're very much so told, you're outside the city walls, right?
00:36:16.000You can't come in, you can't talk to us, and there's nothing you can do about it.
00:36:20.000But then when you realize the rules are actually bent, they're slanted in a certain direction, you can then predict where things are going.
00:36:27.000Did you see the Green New Deal, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
00:36:32.000So she publishes, it's a non-binding resolution, which means even if it passes, they can't enforce anything.
00:36:38.000But my God, The fact sheet they released alongside it literally said they want to provide economic security for people who are unwilling to work.
00:37:53.000And I think one of the reasons for this is what we see on social media, right?
00:37:56.000The ideological bent of the platforms then lead to the mass followings of specific individuals who then use specific tactics to get elected.
00:38:06.000And when these platforms only allow certain ideas to form, those ideas will naturally rise to the top of our political space.
00:38:14.000And then you get crazy stuff, like if you're unwilling to work, we'll provide you economic security, which, you know, I don't know necessarily what that means other than some people who choose not to work will get paid, I guess, from taxpayer money, but...
00:38:33.000Andrew Cuomo said, God forbid if the rich leave New York, because I believe 1% of New York, the top 1%, pay 46% of their taxes, of the revenue they use.
00:38:47.000And so they just had a big budget shortfall.
00:38:50.000I believe it was something Trump did that caused a shortfall, and they were asked if they would tax the rich, and he was like, no, God forbid, they'll leave, and they're already leaving.
00:38:59.000So, you know, incoming a million people saying I'm conservative for bringing that up, but, you know, facts are facts, I suppose.
00:39:05.000Well, facts are facts, and that's what's really important about this.
00:39:08.000And when you suppress any ideology, if you are on the left and you suppress the right, it is just going to shore up their defenses, and they're just going to harden their line.
00:39:24.000You're right, and a lot of people might say I'm a little alarmist when I mention a potential civil war, but let me clarify.
00:39:32.000I'm not saying, because I've brought this up before, I'm not saying it's going to be like 1800s, two big battlefields, but at the same time, what people don't seem to realize when it comes to history is that when you read about World War II, we've condensed all the highlights into a very short paragraph or a series of paragraphs, and you don't realize the war was several years.
00:39:49.000There were periods where nothing happened.
00:39:51.000I was in Egypt during the Second Revolution.
00:39:54.000You could look down and you could see Tahrir Square, people screaming, laser pointers, helicopters, Apaches, and they announce in the news, we've deposed the president.
00:40:03.000Two blocks away, a dude's eating a cheeseburger at McDonald's watching a football match, as if nothing's happening.
00:40:07.000So when you look at these street battles, the political violence, when you look at the biased bannings, you look at the dude, there was a guy who fired a couple rounds at a police officer in Eugene, Oregon, and some bombs got planted at the police department, or somebody planted bombs at a statue in Houston.
00:40:23.000It starts to feel like there's some kind of political violence that is bubbling up that can't be mended at this point.
00:40:29.000And a lot of this comes from the suppression that we're talking about where people don't feel like they have a voice or that voice is being suppressed by an opposing ideology.
00:40:37.000You know, yes, but it is really complicated and it's – I can't claim to know how everything happens, but what I will say is I believe social media is responsible for the political violence.
00:40:48.000I believe it's – and it's not just about suppression.
00:40:51.000It's – you look at the systems that were built, Facebook, right?
00:40:55.000What content can make it to the front page of your Facebook profile when you're looking at your newsfeed?
00:41:00.000Well, Facebook has to build an algorithm to determine what matters most.
00:41:05.000Companies then figure out how to manipulate that algorithm to get that content in front of you because at most you can see, what, three posts on Facebook?
00:41:12.000So what happens is early on, companies quickly found out that anger drives the most shares of any emotion.
00:41:18.000All of a sudden, we see a wave of police brutality videos.
00:41:21.000There was one website that posted almost exclusively police brutality content, and it was like Alexa 400 in the world.
00:41:29.000I knew someone claims that they were making six figures writing police brutality articles because it was pure rage bait, right?
00:41:37.000Content that just shares really easily.
00:41:39.000But that content, constantly being put in front of somebody, breeds an ideology.
00:41:43.000You then tell someone, did you know that white supremacy is on the rise and there are 11 million white supremacists in the U.S.? And they go, I can believe it.
00:41:54.000You know, the Anti-Defamation League and the SPLC say that rough estimates are maybe like 10 or 12,000.
00:41:59.000But people really believe that there is like, that the president is secretly a Nazi, and that he's being propped up by the secret cabal, or there's an alternative influence network on YouTube where you and me are somehow trying to convince people to, you know, it's just ridiculous.
00:43:18.000But it was a huge hit to the incomes of a lot of these companies when all of a sudden news articles stopped appearing as much because Facebook wanted friends and family to be more connected and less so news organizations.
00:43:29.000So these news organizations who write this viral clickbait and rage content weren't getting as much traffic.
00:43:50.000And so the more they produce it, the more they eat their own, you know, excrement, essentially.
00:43:55.000And then it's a game of telephone where they're sitting in a circle constantly telling each other the craziest things and it gets crazier and crazier.
00:44:02.000But another aspect of it is when they write an article saying, you know, Trump is racist, right?
00:44:46.000I don't know how you get approved, but there's a lot of articles that just get written about the new video game today, so it's like a clickbait title to just get some ads.
00:44:54.000It has a nasty surprise, but it's almost like they have a pattern that they've just accepted this is going to work.
00:45:02.000It's just like-minded people who are only ever around each other.
00:45:07.000Sharing the same things among each other, believing all the same things.
00:45:10.000And so you'll notice that certain words emerge specifically among certain groups.
00:45:15.000Like the left will use certain words and then – like learn to code doesn't appear that much in left-wing rhetoric, but the conservatives and the anti-identitarian types understand what it is.
00:45:25.000The justification for banning someone for saying learn to code regardless of the context seems insane.
00:47:01.000You know, you get a lot of people on the left saying private businesses can do whatever they want.
00:47:04.000That blew my mind because the left was usually about not letting massive, multinational, billion-dollar corporations get away with suppressing speech.
00:47:11.000Well, that was another thing that people got pissed at me about, Jack Dorsey, and rightly so, that he said that it's a human right.
00:47:17.000To be able to communicate online as a human.
00:47:19.000But the fact that he said it, but yet all these people are banned.
00:47:24.000To take away someone's human right, there should be an egregious example.
00:47:31.000I mean, it should be something like doxing someone, like calling for violence, like trying.
00:47:46.000So you can literally strip someone of their everything and still not be purged permanently.
00:47:53.000This was one of the things that Jack and I discussed post-podcast.
00:47:56.000I said, you know, when we were going back and forth about doing this again, you know, I told him I would really like to see if there's some sort of a path to redemption.
00:48:09.000We talked yesterday about Christian Piccolini who was a white supremacist who realized the error of his ways and then became this activist against racism.
00:48:21.000And now he gives these TED speeches and he's accepted by everyone as being this guy who's achieved redemption and really understands the error of his ways.
00:48:31.000If Milo's banned for life, Milo's only like 34 years old, right?
00:50:29.000When you're not on Twitter, the journalists who make up a huge core of their verified users, who apparently, according to CNN article, are the lifeblood of their platform, aren't talking about you.
00:51:05.000My brother was pointing out, because Law& Order SVU is basically on 24-7, it's like 98% of the episodes are only ever about women, never about men being victims.
00:53:08.000Well, what's crazier is when Kathy Griffin tweets out that the three-pointer hand sign at a Covington basketball game was a Nazi hand gesture...
00:53:47.000It's called the okay game, the don't look game, where you put the symbol under your waist, and if someone looks at it, you get to punch them.
00:57:41.000They're trying to make sure everybody knows that they're flashing an overt white power hand gesture because everyone knows that's what it means?
00:57:47.000Maybe they didn't think everyone knew.
00:59:17.000So to assume that these guys know anything about what's going on in cultural politics, it's, you know, when you're in the know, when you're on Twitter, when you're reading the news all day, you look at that and say they knew what they were doing.
01:01:21.000Most of these people who are on 4chan, who would even use the emoji, who would do it in public, they're not doing it to signal white power.
01:01:29.000They're doing it to signal opposition to the tribal left.
01:02:17.000So we all just decide that this means something else.
01:02:20.000It means peace among nations, peace among worlds.
01:02:23.000My friend Steve Rinella talked about this on the podcast.
01:02:26.000He got beat up once by his friend where he grew up in Michigan.
01:02:31.000And in Michigan, almost like for fun, like if I said, hey fucker, if I called you hey fucker as friends, you would laugh and be like, what's up dude?
01:04:27.000But to make assumptions about their character or what they believe simply because they made an okay sign on their leg, it's like you can't convict somebody in a court.
01:04:36.000And I'm a big fan of the presumption of innocence and Blackstone's formulation and how we air on the side of protecting the innocent.
01:04:44.000I think you got a good point also in the fact that this is an extremely recent hand gesture that's being associated with white supremacy and clearly came from pranksters.
01:04:56.000And you have to assume these guys are on 4chan or read these websites?
01:05:41.000There are some people who don't watch TV. There are some people who play video games all day.
01:05:45.000There are some people who don't do any of that.
01:05:47.000For all you know, these guys, every day after work, they go to a children's shelter and provide soup, and they don't watch the news at all.
01:05:54.000I don't believe that they actually do.
01:05:55.000I'm just saying, you have no idea what's going on in their lives.
01:05:57.000You're making assumptions about what they know, who they are.
01:07:06.000Are you going to assume nasty things about him?
01:07:08.000Like, are we really getting to the point where we're going to look at a photo, we don't know the context, we don't know who these people are, we don't know their names, and we're going to be like, burn him at the stake.
01:10:49.000When you're thinking and talking at the same time, there's a bunch of words bouncing around in your head, and you think you're saying the right thing.
01:11:08.000About a specific comedian that we know and love.
01:11:11.000Well, George Carlin was absolutely amazing.
01:11:16.000Not only was he absolutely amazing, but people don't have to...
01:11:19.000You almost have to have lived during the time where he was getting arrested, much like Lenny Bruce before him, but to understand how significant he was.
01:11:29.000When he was doing that seven dirty words you can't say on television, back then, people were like, what the fuck is this guy doing?
01:11:43.000Well, he probably did it a lot where he basically ran off 50 racial slurs and then actually called Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor the N-word.
01:12:28.000And then over time, I went through a ton of really important life lessons.
01:12:32.000One of the first and most important was I was a young skateboarder in Chicago.
01:12:36.000Really looked up to some of these older guys who were really good.
01:12:39.000I went to Catholic school when I was younger.
01:12:41.000Ended up becoming this punk rocker, guitar playing, far left, skin tight, you know, skateboarding, angry, yeah, and no flags, you know, fuck the government.
01:12:49.000And then I go to this dude's house who's this really great skateboarder.
01:12:51.000He's got a picture of Jesus on the wall.
01:13:46.000And he was essentially about loving your brother and treating people as if they're you and...
01:13:52.000But this, for me, like, I bring this up because it was kind of a formative moment where all of a sudden I realized, was my ideology predicated on assumptions?
01:14:01.000Like, was I holding these views because other people told me to hold them?
01:14:05.000Did I actually understand that there were some positive things on the other side?
01:14:08.000And then I slowly moved over to more of a center-left position.
01:14:11.000And, you know, now what—the reason I bring this up is— I watched that video.
01:14:17.000I tweeted this, the video of George Carlin, because, man, George Carlin was a—I used to watch his videos.
01:14:21.000My mom would put him on, and my mom's been a hippie, liberal, far-left, all that stuff.
01:14:26.000And you'd probably consider a conservative by today's measures, the way things have been going.
01:15:21.000I guess the cliche is the modern left, whatever people call it, like the, you know, capital L, tribal left, seems to be being indoctrinated not by left-wing policy ideas.
01:15:34.000It's about policy based on your immutable characteristics and how, you know, like going back to the Green New Deal, like in the bill, it talks about racial equity.
01:15:44.000What does that have to do with the environment?
01:15:47.000Well, equality would be like equal opportunity.
01:15:51.000Two people are allowed to try, and if one succeeds, congratulations.
01:15:54.000Equity would be, well, let's determine whether or not you are advantaged or privileged and then hold you back or push you forward based on these certain metrics, I suppose.
01:16:05.000The problem I have with it is that it's not quantifiable.
01:16:08.000So this was actually something that was really shocking to me.
01:16:10.000I was sitting with my niece and my sister, my niece, and my mom, and I showed this image that people like to share.
01:16:17.000It's three people standing up by a baseball fence, and there's a baseball game.
01:16:23.000There's a really short person who can't see, there's a medium-sized person who can see a little bit, and a very tall person who just stands right up above the fence.
01:16:33.000Well, one crate isn't enough for the short guy, and the two guys can already see.
01:16:36.000It says this is equity, and it shows the short guy getting, you know, three crates so they can all see now.
01:16:42.000And I said the problem is when it comes to someone's height, sure, we can understand.
01:16:46.000Let's give the crates to the short guy so he can see along with us.
01:16:50.000But how do you determine equity based on the color of someone's skin or their, you know, like characteristics that can't necessarily be quantified?
01:16:57.000So when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushes a bill forward that's purporting to be about the environment but includes racial equity clauses, are we to assume that her ideology states that if you are not white, you are poor by – like it's a guarantee?
01:17:11.000Or do we have to assume that each individual has different advantages, different cards to play, and some are born wealthy, some aren't?
01:17:17.000And yes, there's historic racism, but we can't make those assumptions, right?
01:17:21.000So this is to me one of the biggest problems I've been having as a lifelong left-leaning individual is, who do I vote for?
01:17:28.000I was a big fan of Bernie Sanders for a while, but then Bernie Sanders gets up on stage at the debates and says, white people don't know what it's like to be poor.
01:18:00.000But here's what I think a lot of people on the right miss.
01:18:02.000He said, pay equity, not pay equality.
01:18:06.000I think perhaps we should stop assuming they don't know what they're saying.
01:18:10.000Because a lot of people assume what they're saying is the gender earnings gap.
01:18:15.000Is real, but the gender pay gap, you know, it's not.
01:18:21.000If a man and a woman are both offered the exact same job, exact same experience in education, women tend to get, I think it's like 3-5% less, and many people believe that's because they're less likely to negotiate.
01:18:33.000Which is why you have like lean in, tell women to be more, you know, trying to be more assertive.
01:18:37.000But it's not this 77% number that's – but there is an earnings gap, right?
01:18:42.000The median salaries of men and women are different.
01:18:45.000So when Bernie says white men make X more than these other demographics, he said in his tweet, pay equity, not equality.
01:18:52.000He doesn't want fair pay for everyone based on job.
01:18:55.000He's actually saying it doesn't matter what job you have.
01:19:25.000And when you're talking about the pay gap being different from men and women, we should clarify that what you're saying essentially is that men choose different jobs and they work more hours and that's the reason why they make that much more money where it's 77 cents on the dollar.
01:19:38.000There was another study came out recently that said that hours worked was almost the 100% of the reason why men and women earn different at a median salary.
01:21:23.000Not enough to really encourage innovation and progress.
01:21:26.000I can agree with that for sure, but I also think there's a saying that I was told a lot that people don't get rich because they want money.
01:21:34.000They get rich because they're passionate about something and the money comes after.
01:21:37.000They always say that the money comes after or something like that.
01:21:39.000I'd point out every day I take no days off.
01:21:42.000It's been a couple years with me not taking any days off.
01:21:58.000I do it because, you know, I see things on- So for the most part, on my main YouTube channel, I do one video every day at 4 p.m., which tends to be just like a news analysis piece, but I'm not perfect.
01:22:10.000Sometimes I, you know, get all hyperbolic and stuff.
01:22:12.000My second channel is me just ranting and, you know- Not really swearing, but still just like heavy opinion stuff.
01:22:23.000You know, when I worked at Vice, I was in all these different countries and all these dangerous places, not because I wanted to have a name for myself, not because I wanted to make money.
01:22:31.000I wanted to know why it was happening and I want to talk to the people who are experiencing it.
01:22:35.000So I can relate to people who say money isn't a motivator for sure, but I've also talked to people in Scandinavia who have told me they sort of give up at a certain point because I can't remember which country it was.
01:22:48.000It may have been Sweden or Norway, but these two women told me that after like $77,000 per year, they tax like 80% of your income, so people just stop.
01:23:19.000And I got to say maybe at $10 million, 70% does make sense, but I kind of lean towards not really because it seems like, man, that's a lot of money.
01:23:36.000But I do believe a progressive tax makes the most sense.
01:23:39.000And I can explain it to you if you want to hear it.
01:23:42.000So there was a study, I believe it was from Harvard, you need $77,000 per year, this may have been 10 years ago, in order to be middle class median in the United States.
01:23:51.000That means if you make $77,000, you'll have vacation, you'll have insurance, you'll have a car, you can raise a family, you can send them to school, all that stuff.
01:23:58.000But you have nothing left over for savings, you have nothing left over for investments.
01:24:02.000So If you make $100,000 a year, you're going to have $23,000 left over for investing.
01:24:06.000Eventually, at a certain point, if you only need $77,000, if you're making $10 million, you've got $9,990,000 that you can invest and just be independently wealthy and be rich forever.
01:24:19.000Now, I have no problem with being wealthy.
01:24:20.000I have no problem with other people being wealthy and living off of their investments and all that.
01:24:24.000But there is a point where you have to realize the coalescing of power, the monopolizing of power is a really dangerous thing for any society.
01:24:31.000Too few individuals holding too much power can destabilize an economy, can destabilize a country.
01:24:36.000The problem with communism, you snap your fingers and you put a centralized authority in place.
01:24:41.000At least that's how it's been every single time.
01:24:43.000And then they hold all the cards and they can oppress whoever they want.
01:25:17.000I remember reading a report or a story about how wealthy people have three or four times more ability to influence a politician than the majority of the people in the country simply because paying for expensive dinners and lobbying earns you favors.
01:25:33.000You know, super PACs paying, you know, guaranteeing funding for a politician earns your favors.
01:25:38.000So it's, you know, look, if a million people tell me they want, you know, X, but the people who are paying me, like funding my campaign are paying me more, well, who am I going to provide favors to?
01:25:48.000And then once I'm done with my campaign run, I can go to a job at their company?
01:25:53.000So without going on too big of a rant, I think ultimately a progressive tax can help slow the process down of special interests acquiring too much power.
01:26:02.000But with a flat tax, you're basically saying, at a certain point, you can just keep dumping more and more money into different investments, making more and more money, and increasing your power exponentially, and other people can't catch up to you, and then power becomes too quick.
01:26:16.000Yeah, I think in this country, we try to look at success and achievement as something that everyone's striving for, and we don't want to put any restrictions on that.
01:26:27.000We look at capitalism as the reason why everything's going so great over here.
01:26:30.000This is America, land of the free, home of the brave.
01:28:14.000There are some neighborhoods that are really bad, some neighborhoods that are really good.
01:28:17.000Well, if we take excess from the really great neighborhoods and use that to fix roads, pay for schools in poor neighborhoods, crime is – one of the biggest correlations for crime is poverty.
01:28:27.000So if we can get better schools, we need to reform the school system straight up.
01:28:32.000If we can get better hospitals, if we can fix the roads, then we're doing a lot to reduce crime and reduce poverty and a rising tide lifts all ships.
01:28:39.000So that's why I – That's why I like Bernie Sanders.
01:28:44.000Although, I make sure I tell people, he is a little too left for me.
01:30:35.000I saw a survey, at least it was going around on social media, so who knows if it's true, that claimed the Democrats have a favorable opinion of George W. Bush.
01:30:48.000They pulled him and they're like, oh, he was good.
01:30:50.000And there's a video of him like giving a piece of candy to Michelle Obama and everyone was like, it was going viral and people were laughing about him.
01:31:01.000And then when Trump announces he's going to pull troops out of Syria, everybody opposes it, like the media saying it's wrong, and you've got a lot of mainstream people on the left saying it's wrong, and I'm like, it is?
01:31:33.000And so it's like, there have been a series of people who have gotten letters that they violated Pakistani law.
01:31:39.000I mean, they send screenshots, you know, screenshots can be faked, but there have been a couple people who have been like, for some reason, Twitter decided to inform me of this.
01:31:54.000You've got a platform where our public discourse is happening, where the left has repeatedly said that Russians used it to manipulate our elections, where one of its biggest investors is a Saudi prince or something to that effect, and they're banning people who oppose a certain ideological bent.
01:32:35.000But I'll move into what's really crazy.
01:32:39.000New York Times reported there's a group that false flagged the Republicans in Alabama with fake Twitter accounts they made to convince the media Russians were propping up the campaign of Roy Moore.
01:32:51.000So, basically, this, according to the New York Times, is all fact.
01:32:56.000They've seen the documents, they've reported it, that Democratic operatives We're good to go.
01:33:41.000And what's hilarious is that people look at what's going on with Russian troll factories and the way they're trying to influence our elections, that it's particularly egregious.
01:34:40.000So I think it'd be fair to point out YouTube criticism, too, because in talking about censorship, I think a lot of people immediately assumed I'd come on here and start waving my arms in the air screaming they're biased against conservatives, which I think to an extent I kind of did.
01:34:58.000It has demonetized LGBT content, and YouTube has said that these topics are not suitable for all advertisers because it deals with sexuality.
01:35:04.000They have target many left-wing channels.
01:35:07.000There are a lot of non-mainstream left-wing And when you say target, what you mean is demonetize.
01:35:15.000And for demonetizing, I think they've made a – what was the policy?
01:35:21.000It's essentially things that are political, correct?
01:35:24.000If they made that statement, I don't know that.
01:35:26.000I was going to interject that they've also banned, or not banned, but demonetized people, extensively people that smoke weed on their channels.
01:36:42.000So I bring him up because I think it's worrisome that, yes, without an alternative, your career is wiped out in a second with no recourse and no reason why.
01:36:51.000And the response they give you is, it's our platform.
01:36:54.000And you'll hear people say, oh, but they're a private business.
01:37:02.000Sorry, I have a question to ask here because I've had this conversation with some friends of mine and this came up and this is, I guess, the devil's advocate to this question because this happened with MySpace.
01:37:11.000MySpace still exists and there are people that had millions of followers on that platform.
01:37:16.000Are they owed something by MySpace because MySpace failed and their accounts no longer have the clout that they once had?
01:37:24.000For instance, if YouTube failed tomorrow, could PewDiePie sue them because they made bad business decisions and now his business has failed?
01:37:37.000In the Twitter account, they're not banning someone's IP address from using twitter.com and going to see slash real Donald Trump and see what he's saying.
01:38:03.000And it was really weird because, and it's been a little while since I went over the story, but there was a video he posted that was like a music video making fun of Elliot Rodger.
01:38:11.000He's that school, that mass shooter guy.
01:39:01.000If you look at their Wikipedia page, it's simple sourcing.
01:39:05.000There was a study done on Gab that found – I think they only have like 5% of the posts are considered to be hate speech, whereas Twitter is like 2.3 or something.
01:39:13.000So Gab is predominantly not hate speech, not much more than Twitter.
01:39:17.000And when you consider that we're looking at percentages, you can actually see that Twitter's hate speech is in the millions and Gab's is in the tens of thousands.
01:39:34.000I think the reason they took down Mumkey is because the potential for a PR backlash over his kind of content was so great, they said, we don't care.
01:40:03.000But with Sargon of Akkad getting banned from Patreon, Patreon banned him because they said, you used a naughty word on YouTube eight months ago.
01:40:12.000YouTube doesn't care he said the word, right?
01:40:14.000That part where he called the alt-right, the white N-word.
01:40:26.000It just takes 30 seconds listening to it go, oh, I see what he's doing.
01:40:29.000Even if it's kind of a clunky use of the words, he's not using it in a racist way.
01:40:35.000He was trying to, you know, actually, this is a...
01:40:38.000He was trying to show how stupid they are.
01:40:40.000But can we talk about the bias on Twitter with Sarah Jung, who for three years was posting anti-white, racist, like mean-spirited, awful things, and the excuse was she was using the language of her oppressors.
01:42:44.000Yeah, I think what they're trying to do, and I don't want to speak for him, but I think they're trying to engineer the conversation to be more polite and civil.
01:42:54.000And that's – I see so many of these people who just – they wield power and they're unaccountable.
01:42:59.000Well, it's also you don't recognize the consequences of telling people what they can and can't do and that this is a very slippery slope.
01:43:06.000You're running up a greased hill and people don't like it.
01:43:09.000They don't like it and – well, the thing is like – When you see something like, if everything was just open, what would the conversation be like?
01:43:21.000If there was no banning, if there was nothing, it was just everything, real free speech.
01:43:28.000I mean, if it was impossible, let's put it this way, if it was impossible to ban someone from any social media platform, whether it's YouTube or Twitter or Instagram, what would the conversations look like?
01:44:30.000Does Alex Jones, I don't want to directly accuse him because I don't watch his show, but if he goes on Twitter and he says something that's deemed to be false, should he be banned for that?
01:45:20.000The thing is, if you ban them and then someone opposes them, but then someone opposes the people who oppose them and they want them banned, and then you have this fucking war back and forth, and instead of fighting bad ideas or incorrect ideas with correct or good ideas,
01:45:37.000now you just have people pressing ban hammers left and right.
01:45:40.000And you're just trying to figure out who the majority is so you can side with the biggest group.
01:45:43.000And you're trying to virtue signal and you're trying to get something that supports your ideology, whether it's right or left.
01:45:49.000So here's the thing with Jones, though.
01:45:50.000If the people on the left want to argue that he is making the platform worse and horrible, I understand that and I recognize, well, that's unfortunate, right?
01:45:59.000This is the real world and sometimes people say things you don't like.
01:46:01.000But more importantly, a lot of people argued that when he said something about Sandy Hook, which, again, I haven't seen the videos, but he's been sued.
01:46:10.000They said that Sandy Hook never happened.
01:46:15.000Well, many people were saying, yes, Facebook needs to ban fake news, but think about what that means.
01:46:19.000It means you're not allowed to be wrong, okay?
01:46:21.000Because fake news doesn't mean you did it on purpose.
01:46:23.000More importantly, you're not allowed to be stupid.
01:46:25.000Well, here's another thing, again, in defense of Alex.
01:46:28.000One thing that Alex did do Is in the future, after he was done saying the things that he said about Sandy Hook, he then said it definitely happened.
01:47:14.000So basically, you had Donald Trump say last night in Sweden.
01:47:19.000As soon as he says this, the media goes wild.
01:47:21.000My friend and I, my friend Emily, who works with me on and off, we're like, we should just go to Sweden and just like walk around film stuff and make a video about what we experience.
01:47:54.000I got really angry because Joey Salads made a video, I think a couple years ago, where he staged a bunch of black guys destroying a car to make it seem like these neighborhoods, black people were going to destroy a Trump car, and it was just very racist, just awful, horrible.
01:49:15.000I think this idea of just banning people for life, but letting people out of jail after they commit murder, and they can reenter society, it's kind of crazy.
01:49:24.000I mean, it still is hard for them for a long time.
01:49:26.000Sure, it's not easy, but we're saying there's a path to redemption.
01:49:29.000But what ends up happening is they create parallel economies, they create parallel networks, and that causes more division, more anxiety.
01:49:37.000You see these alternative social networks emerge because people get banned, so they all move to one place.
01:50:24.000Gab, you can just go on Gab and say a bunch of crazy stuff unless you break the law.
01:50:28.000There have been accusations leveled against Gab that they've actually dragged their feet on getting rid of illegal things like calls for violence.
01:50:35.000There are some things that you can get kicked off for, like doxing and things along those lines.
01:50:40.000So it's not the Wild West, but it's wilder.
01:50:44.000But you know what the media, these people, and when I say the media, I specifically mean these digital New York-based outlets for the most part.
01:50:50.000They like to say things like, you know that guy who shot up at the synagogue?
01:51:11.000But I will recognize right now that at this point, Gab is – yeah, if you're going to go on there, the media is going to accuse you of every single name in the book.
01:53:08.000He said that he was the dean at the University of Sydney or something like that who was dating pop star Meghan Trainor, just the most ridiculous thing, and that he said, we need to find a female plant.
01:55:02.000They said, when they corrected the article and saying it was a hoax, they said, we wanted to call for a verification, but we thought the story was too hot to pass up.
01:56:02.000If you're going to discuss something and you're going to do it in a public forum like that and you know about it in advance, this is not like you're on a podcast ad-libbing and you say something and you misspeak.
01:56:20.000So this NBC reporter, he goes on this big Twitter thread about how Twitter needs to take action against these harassment campaigns and they refuse to do it.
01:56:27.000The next day, he writes an article citing an activist about how a far-right campaign is sending death threats to journalists and Twitter isn't doing anything about it.
01:56:36.000A day after that, he starts posting about how he's getting death threats.
01:56:39.000A day after that, Twitter announces they'll take action.
01:56:43.000This guy called for action, couldn't get it done, wrote an article slanting it as a far-right campaign against journalists, Twitter decides to take action, now people are getting banned for tweeting Learn to Code.
01:56:53.000How many people do you think are making these critical decisions?
01:58:19.000So I'm not trying to be disrespectful to him because I know him somewhat in passing, but I will say there's a certain point where I think it's unfair to accuse a journalist of advocating for something simply for covering it.
01:58:47.000But just saying it that way, too, it's like when Hunter S. Thompson spread the rumor about Ed Muskie being on Ibogaine, and then he went on the Dick Cavett show.
01:59:31.000She did a protest action with, I believe it was Generation Identity, which are, I don't know how to describe them because, you know, people like to throw labels around, but they're like European nationalists.
01:59:42.000And people have called them white nationalists, but again, I don't know enough about their group.
01:59:46.000So I think it's fair to say that that might be the case.
01:59:49.000Forgive me for being ignorant for the most part about their ideology.
01:59:51.000I know people are going to tear me apart.
02:00:40.000He said he'd call me on the phone, and I said, you know, I'd like to understand your decision-making, how this came to be, what brought you to the attention of Lauren, what about this?
02:01:08.000I just wanted to know what their decision-making process was, and this was the thing that was going viral among people on Twitter who were asking about this.
02:01:15.000And so now I get accused of campaigning to get them banned, just like Oliver Darcy was with Jones.
02:01:24.000Well, and then immediately they slap that distinction on you.
02:01:27.000As soon as, I mean, just calling someone alt-right today, it's so strange how, you know, I don't know if you know, but alt in the world of stand-up comedy used to be progressive, liberal, like weird coffee shop type rooms.
02:02:33.000I had already set up a GoFundMe for the project before, I believe it was before he announced it, I made a video about it saying, Donald Trump said X, Y, and Z, we're going to go do the story.
02:02:40.000When I saw he made this call, I think it was actually Emily who noticed it.
02:03:03.000He donated about 9% of our total fund that we raised, and I was already planning on going there.
02:03:08.000Wikipedia says, There was a challenge on my Wikipedia page where someone said, you wrote, Tim Pool went there because Paul Joseph Watson challenged him to.
02:03:49.000So, the reason I bring this up is because what happens then if you're a conservative and a bunch of friends who work for various news organizations all at the same time write 10 articles saying Joe Rogan is all right.
02:04:00.000Now, on Wikipedia, 10 articles pop up immediately saying this is a fact.
02:04:04.00010 different organizations have written it.
02:04:57.000The problem is, if I name these people, they're going to point their pens in my direction, and then all these things are going to swing at me.
02:05:04.000And the other thing, too, is I don't want to brigade them.
02:06:50.000But if it was on Medium, if someone said, like, look at these dummies with their terrible fucking recipes, it would still be almost as interesting, but it's flavored more by you're allowed to mock them because it's gab.
02:09:06.000I subscribe to several different news online publications that used to be newspapers.
02:09:11.000But the last time I picked up an actual newspaper, it's so much so that I felt like I had a joke about reading something in the paper and turning the page.
02:09:22.000I almost felt like I'm a liar for doing a joke about turning the page of a paper.
02:10:08.000It's a serious issue, but I'd just like to point out their lives never existed in the media space.
02:10:12.000Yeah, please explain that because that was one of the most illuminating aspects of our conversation on the phone.
02:10:18.000Yeah, it's publicly known but not talked about a whole lot that these media organizations, mostly these digital new startups, don't actually get a lot of views.
02:10:27.000So what they do is, it's called Traffic Assignment.
02:10:30.000There's a company called Comscore that tracks the viewership, the unique views these sites have.
02:10:36.000If you're trying to attract investment and you say, we get 20 million views per month, they're going to say, that's cool, but this site gets 60. What do they do?
02:10:44.000Well, there are some sites, this is according to Variety, modernfarmer.com.
02:11:50.000There was a company that was a prominent digital news outlet.
02:11:54.000I knew someone there who was decently high up who told me, our company is contemplating whether or not we should engage in traffic assignments to inflate our numbers.
02:12:14.000If Comscore is just lumping the numbers together and I go to you and say, according to Comscore, our network brings in 60 million, I didn't lie.
02:12:54.000If you were at Theranos or something like that, you know?
02:12:57.000I was told by another individual who was at one of these digital companies that he felt like what we were seeing was akin to the securities problem, the mortgage-backed securities from 2008. That's a better analogy.
02:13:14.000You've got all of these big companies, these big investments, hundreds of millions of dollars, $200 million invested into these digital media outlets because they're seeing these numbers.
02:13:24.000So if you're investing money, say if you've got some cash, you've worked your ass off and you've generated a lot of money and you're like, look, we're going to get into the digital space.
02:13:32.000We have a website that has 90 million clicks and we're going to take that and then you find out you just got fucking hosed.
02:13:55.000You had every opportunity to look at those numbers and see where they came from to understand what their network was.
02:13:59.000Okay, well, that may be the case, but the act of doing it and the act of the fact that you can do it and really you're getting modern farm...
02:14:23.000I don't know what you'd call it, but it's a form...
02:14:26.000So I grew up with a bunch of hacker buddies in a small little hacker community, and social engineering is something that I've been relatively well-versed in.
02:14:33.000And Shane, whether he knows it or not, really, really understands how people think and how to get them to do things.
02:14:39.000So I'll give you a fascinating example.
02:14:42.000I left Vice in 2014. And after I left, some of the people I had brought on through recommendation were still there.
02:14:48.000This buddy of mine says, dude, good news.
02:14:52.000I'm going to be helping produce the news program for the cable channel.
02:15:14.000It wasn't a couple years later until they got the US-based channel.
02:15:16.000But what happened was a bunch of my friends who worked at Vice didn't know the cable channel they got was based in Canada, but they believed they were going to be working on a cable channel in the US. That's important because you need people to really want to work there and be passionate.
02:15:31.000And Shane was a master of giving you just enough information so that you believed in what you were doing without realizing it's actually not that great.
02:15:38.000And again, I'm not trying to be a dick.
02:16:20.000I firmly believe that in 100 years, the next, you know, Civilization 50, you'll be able to earn a great merchant, Shane Smith, because of how, like, you know, he was able to build this empire.
02:16:31.000He did it through very clever ways of getting investment.
02:16:34.000And admittedly, I really like the stuff they used to do back in the day.
02:16:40.000And the reason I bring him up is because the big story about traffic assignment was Vice losing like 17% because of that practice they were doing.
02:16:48.000So he really knew how to do the smoke and mirrors, you know?
02:16:52.000But when you look at how it pans out to all the other news outlets, then everyone gets laid off.
02:16:59.000You don't have to wonder why a thousand jobs just got lost in the past week.
02:17:43.000Same thousand people, ten times, and you go around telling people, I've got ten thousand subscribers, when in reality, it's just a thousand people on ten channels.
02:17:52.000So there's really clever ways to inflate your numbers, and this attracts investment.
02:17:55.000It also, but more importantly, it allows leverage in dealing with ad buyers and ad networks.
02:18:00.000What are people doing when they're boosting up their Instagram numbers?
02:19:18.000Someone sent me an article that the Attorney General of one state, it may have been New York, said misrepresenting yourself online through fake views, clicks, and likes is illegal.
02:19:28.000I think what they were saying is that using other people's images to create fake accounts is like an invasion of privacy or something.
02:19:52.000It may have changed, but essentially, I follow you, you follow me.
02:19:55.000That way, you'll see some people, they'll be following 100,000 people, and they'll be followed by 90,000 people, and then they walk around bragging about how they got 90,000 followers, and it's like, well, hold on.
02:20:05.000Like, you just have an agreement with them.
02:21:01.000Most high-profile accounts will read as having a ton of fake followers because people will sign up just to follow you and read what you have to say because they want your feed.
02:21:08.000They want Joe, they want Bill Clinton or whoever, and they want to have that feed of people.
02:22:55.000How crazy is the National Enquirer allegedly, we should say allegedly, I believe, allegedly, I don't want to get sued, tried to extort him.
02:23:04.000And it's about the Jamal Khashoggi investigation from the Washington Post.
02:23:52.000Well, it's also kind of scary that they can use this to extort him so that he doesn't – he takes the Washington Post or they're attempting to get him to take the Washington Post and remove a legitimate news story about an actual murder.
02:24:06.000I don't trust the Washington Post, but, you know, that's an aside.
02:24:32.000It's not the same as blackmail by no means.
02:24:35.000But when you know there's an attack vector like Wild Sardines Company, they don't want to deal with a brigade from activists.
02:24:43.000You tweet at them, your fans tweet at them, and they immediately cancel on your show and they disavow you unless you do something, unless you say something, unless you disavow something.
02:24:51.000So granted, it's leaps and bounds worse when a National Enquirer allegedly – We're good to go.
02:25:26.000It was really interesting when Bezos said, because he owns the Post, people presume he's their enemy.
02:25:32.000That's another point I would bring up, too, when it comes to banning Alex Jones.
02:25:35.000Just because someone's reporting something doesn't mean they're advocating for it.
02:26:19.000Like I said, you know, this is a relatively new story, and I've been, you know, here, so I don't know as much about it as I probably should.
02:26:24.000Which just shows you how crazy digital media is, and the digital things, like sending things through the air, and it's just...
02:27:54.000They even organized Facebook campaigns where they had a pro-Texas group and a pro-Muslim group meet across the street from each other.
02:28:03.000I mean, they're sowing seeds of dissent, like organizing it.
02:28:07.000And I think I'd be willing to entertain the possibility that what we call the culture war today was seeded specifically by special interests, potentially Russia.
02:28:17.000You know, when people adopt an ideology...
02:28:20.000You can't easily break that, and some people refuse to cross that divide.
02:28:23.000Yeah, but it's just so funny how many different ways they were attacking this.
02:28:27.000They had Blue Lives Matter groups and Black Lives Matter groups, and they put people at odds with each other.
02:28:32.000And one of the big ones that they did was they targeted African Americans and were trying to get them to vote for anyone other than Hillary.
02:28:41.000And this is like an engineered campaign that Jill Stein's our vote.
02:28:51.000The first thing we have to assume is that it was effective.
02:28:55.000What we view in the culture war was exacerbated by these campaigns.
02:29:00.000We don't know to what extent they had an influence over the US, but I will say I think it's fair to point out they play a role, and then we can see what happens.
02:29:09.000We can see the dramatic escalation where you end up with some crazy guy associated with white nationalism ramming a car into a bunch of protesters.
02:29:19.000It's, you know, people get riled up to a point.
02:29:21.000There's a really great video called This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey, where he talks about how these groups, they argue amongst each other, not against each other.
02:29:33.000They make each other angry by posting images of the other.
02:29:36.000You know, there's certain subreddits where I don't want to, you know, start a brigade, but they'll post memes nonstop attacking a particular politician.
02:29:43.000They're not arguing with the left or the right.
02:29:46.000They're arguing to themselves about what's wrong with the other.
02:29:49.000And so these groups grow and get angrier and angrier.
02:29:51.000And then when they finally meet in the real world, you get extreme violence.
02:29:55.000So it's very possible to seed those communities and rile people up, push these things.
02:31:53.000They've got a new payment processor, which means we've seen the budding off of a mirror economy, which is dangerous.
02:32:01.000The fact that Americans in general can't share the same platform and had to create an alternate that had to be supported by separate means, if this continues in that direction, we're going to end up with tons of systems that operate for only certain political factions.
02:32:18.000Jack Conte, the CEO of Patreon, said to, I believe, CNBC, you can't say anything you want in the world.
02:32:25.000What does what I say in the world have to do with what service you provide?
02:32:29.000Now, by all means, if you want to ban them, you can, but you can then see the adopting of ideology.
02:32:34.000Someone posted a funny comment, a company that refuses to sell water to a dehydrated man in the desert because they think the wrong thing.
02:32:42.000Different companies emerge and you get tribes that are divided not only by their ideology, but literally they're unable to communicate with each other.
02:34:26.000But the second video that went viral almost at the exact same time showed Phillips walk up to the kid, immediately disproving the original narrative that the kid approached him.
02:34:33.000But even Bill Maher still got it wrong.
02:34:35.000You know, so even when people can see exactly what happened… It doesn't fit their narrative.
02:34:48.000And it's like, dude, if we're getting to the point where kids at a blackout basketball game are in black body paint and throwing up three-pointer signs is Nazis, how do you bring those people back from the brink?
02:35:17.000I'm worried about these fringe ideologies that are racist, intolerant, and violent slowly seeping into our culture.
02:35:26.000When you see politicians openly embrace race-based government policy, It really does worry me.
02:35:35.000I think I have this perspective growing up in a mixed race family where I've been insulted by the left for being white and I've been insulted by far right racists for being a mutt.
02:36:39.000And that's one of my biggest pet peeves.
02:36:41.000Because, you know, I've talked about progressive tax.
02:36:43.000I think we can do a lot for public option, for expanding Medicaid.
02:36:48.000The idea of a Green New Deal at its core, to me, is fascinating.
02:36:51.000Can the government, you know, can we allocate tax money to invest in new technologies, fusion, nuclear, and reduce carbon emissions and do great things?
02:37:23.000In a socialist or communist society, you still have to work.
02:37:26.000I don't know what society exists where you expect people to undertake the greatest construction project in the history of humanity, a massive train network that makes all planes obsolete, but at the same time tell people they don't have to work if they want money.
02:38:12.000You've got a moderate conservative who believes things I really don't agree with, but he doesn't want to give money to people who don't work, and he doesn't believe in identitarian politics and race equity or whatever.
02:38:21.000And then you've got the Democrats who are so far left to me, I can't even see them anymore.
02:38:25.000Who do you think social liberals and liberals are going to vote for?
02:38:30.000The closest person to them politically will be a conservative.
02:38:58.000I don't agree with someone judging me based on my race.
02:39:20.000Why is it that just because this kid looks similar to this kid, you're going to tell him he has a harder standard for the SATs to get into the school?
02:42:35.000Everyone always would think I was stoned because I would talk about this kind of stuff with my friends while they were stoned.
02:42:39.000The philosophical consequences of technological innovation.
02:42:42.000It is not the postmaster's fault that he spent 30 years becoming the best of the best in working at the post office that technology emerged that is going to displace him and put him in the poorhouse.
02:42:53.000When I was about 19 years old, I was skateboarding in downtown Chicago and I saw an old black homeless man.
02:42:58.000And I had some leftover food and I was like, hey, what's up, dude?
02:44:18.000Yeah, I try explaining to people, they always make this political, you know, the political compass, authoritarian, libertarian, left, right?
02:44:24.000And people like to claim that anarchists, like the violent, smashy ones in Antifa, are libertarian left.
02:44:31.000Like, the libertarian left quadrant are pot-smoking hippies who live on farms.
02:44:36.000Anarcho-communism makes a ton of sense when it's you and your buddies working together on a farm, sharing responsibilities.
02:44:42.000It doesn't make sense for a community of, you know, 300 million people, and you have to trade extremely specific resources to make a computer happen, right?
02:44:51.000At that point, you need to be able to quantify the value of specific objects, and that's why communism doesn't work on massive scale.
02:44:59.000But I will say, artificial intelligence is a different conversation.
02:45:04.000You know, technological advancement is going to result in, like, Luddite riots.
02:45:11.000I read that there was a connection between unemployment.
02:45:14.000From these factories getting shut down and depressed dudes popping pills.
02:45:18.000There was a masculinity report was published by Harry's, the shaving company, and they said the overwhelming majority of what contributes to a man's happiness is gainful employment, like 80%.
02:45:30.000What happens when a factory shuts down?
02:45:46.000I think this contributes to the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Trump.
02:46:05.000The only other thing that I think I would like to at least make an attempt at is what would be the path for a person who's been banned from these social media sites?
02:46:18.000What do you think would be a reasonable way to bring people back into the conversation?
02:46:57.000Well, we're into freedom of speech, right?
02:46:59.000I believe that as long as these companies are monopolies, and they are the public sphere, it is wrong to permanently exile someone for saying a bad word, for holding the wrong opinion.
02:47:10.000Well, a lot of these, like, learn to code.
02:47:29.000Because he was tweeting at a celebrity?
02:47:31.000You're supposed to tweet at celebrities.
02:47:33.000Well, not only that, the criticism of that movie was no different than the criticism of any movie that they thought sucked, but it happened to be about a feminist idea, or a woman's movie.
02:47:44.000What was interesting is that, I mean, it's been so long, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but I believe Leslie Jones was tweeting her followers to go to Milo as well.
02:47:54.000She's done some questionable tweets herself.
02:47:58.000Hey, look, people block me for no reason.
02:48:00.000I have no idea why some people have blocked me.
02:48:03.000Yeah, I've gone to people's pages and found that I'm blocked.
02:48:26.000And a court ruled that the First Amendment will not protect you if you encourage others to engage in harassment.
02:48:32.000It's really interesting then when we consider what's going to happen with the lawsuits towards all of the people who smeared and defamed and called for action against Covington kids.
02:48:40.000That precedent that was used against Daily Stormer is now going to be used against these high-profile celebrities and personalities.
02:48:45.000And are there lawsuits that are being formed right now for that?
02:49:19.000What I'm about to say is not to claim that Alex Jones is mentally deficient or anything like that.
02:49:23.000You can have whatever opinion you want.
02:49:24.000The point is, if your justification for banning him is that he said San Diego wasn't real, does that mean people who don't have a grasp on reality aren't allowed to use social media?
02:49:34.000Does that mean that people who are stupid aren't allowed to use social media?
02:49:38.000People who are mentally ill— You have to have an intelligence test to use social media.
02:49:43.000People are allowed to say what they want to say.
02:49:45.000And I think so long as Twitter is a monopoly— We should probably have some protections on the ability to engage in public discourse.
02:49:54.000I'll give you a really important point.
02:49:56.000Occupy Wall Street took place in Zuccotti Park in New York on what's called a privately owned public space, POPs.
02:50:03.000This space is owned by a private entity.
02:50:05.000However, they had no legal grounds for evicting the protesters from the park because the public was encouraged to come.
02:50:12.000So I would argue if Twitter is actively encouraging public participation, they lose the protections to ban whoever they want.
02:50:18.000I think it's rather terrifying that you would cede political power in this capacity to foreign interests, stockholders, and private individuals at a massive corporation, a monopoly that's not even beholden to the US to a certain degree.
02:50:32.000Forgive me for being a little bit of a liberal who wants regulation on massive corporations, but I'm surprised I don't see it from other people on the left.
02:50:41.000It's a very compelling argument, and I think the more it's fleshed out, the more it seems to—we definitely have an issue.
02:50:48.000It's a giant issue, and it doesn't go away when you just ban people.
02:50:52.000You create parallel economies, worlds, and you end up with backlash— Yeah.
02:50:59.000Well, listen, man, I'm really happy you came.
02:51:01.000I'm really happy we did this, and just thank you.
02:51:04.000Thank you for educating me on this and giving you a perspective, and it's a very articulate and very intelligent perspective, and I really appreciate it.
02:51:13.000And I think for everyone, this helps us to sort of get an understanding of, you know, just the whole spectrum of what's going on with all this stuff.
02:51:23.000Yeah, and I'll just add by saying, I don't think I'm the smartest person in the world.