In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with David Axelrod to talk about how to deal with the toxicity in the world of politics and social media, and why it's important to have a healthy dose of common sense in order to make the world a better place. We talk about the dangers of "dunking on people" and why we should be careful not to get carried away by the amount of negativity on social media platforms like YouTube and other platforms. We also talk about what it means to be a good ally and a good friend to one another, and how we can work together to make things better for people on both sides of the political aisle. I really enjoyed this episode and hope you do too! -Jon Sorrentino Music: Fair Weather Fans by The Baseball Project, Recorded live at WFMU Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Will Witwer Logo by Ian Dorsch Theme Music: Jeff Kaale - "Goodbye Outer Space" by Haley Shaw - "Outer Space Junk" by Fuse - "Too Effing Highlighted" by Jeff Perla - "Intro" by Zapsplat, "Outro Music: "Incomptech" by Chacho - "Outtro Music: "Feat. Me" by David Axelro - and (feat. , & , "The Good, the Bad, "The Bad, The Good, The Evil, The Bad, the Good, and The Bad & The Beautiful" by by John Doe - & "The Great, the Great, The Great, "Good, the Beautiful" - "The White, the Wrong, The Beautiful, The Right, The Wrong, and the Beautiful, the Right, "The Wrong, the Green, The One" by Eddy, "A Little Bad" , and "The Right, the One" we'll Be Coming Soon, we'll See You Soon, We'll Figure it Out, "We'll Figure It Out" - , we'll Talk About It Out, - We'll See Us Outro, we're Too Effing Out, We've Got It Out & We'll Be Better Next Week, We'll Hear You, We Can't Do It, We Don't Have It (featuring: , We'll Get Better, We're Working On It,
00:00:15.000In this world, I think there's so much of this, the YouTube political world, the YouTube commentary world, where people are so fucking toxic...
00:00:41.000I think it is temporarily – well, sometimes it's good because it shows – it mocks people's positions and it makes people realize, yeah, that is a ridiculous position.
00:00:50.000So if you're on the fence, or if you're not really quite sure how you feel about things, and you see someone get mocked for a ridiculous position that maybe you've even shared for a little bit, maybe you haven't explored it deeply, and you see someone who has explored it deeply sort of expose all the flaws in this line of thinking,
00:01:09.000I interview a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left, and I just hate all this conflict.
00:01:17.000The unnecessary conflict, I think, is when you watch television today and you see Antifa fighting with Trump supporters and all this weird conflict.
00:01:34.000I don't necessarily think that most of it is necessary.
00:02:05.000The physical conflict is totally counterproductive.
00:02:07.000But at a certain point on some issues, I understand why...
00:02:12.000There's like an intractability to the debate where it seems completely impossible to move forward because whichever side you're on, I would argue that I'm on the right side of these issues and others would disagree.
00:02:24.000When you're far apart in a way that you can't even agree as to what the starting point facts are about the conversation, how do you start?
00:02:38.000I just don't think dunking on people always, like constantly shitting on people, is necessarily the way to do it.
00:02:44.000Yeah, and I think it's important to distinguish between just straight up ad hominems where someone is wrong and bad because I think they're a bad person or they're an idiot or whatever.
00:02:55.000To recognizing when somebody is a participant in bad faith in a conversation, to when someone has maybe fallen prey to audience capture or whatever else might be kind of influencing what and how they're doing.
00:03:10.000I think that those criticisms are legitimate, but you got to stay away from just ad hominem.
00:04:09.000And it was the beginning of like Adpocalypse 1.0.
00:04:12.000And that was a rough three-week period.
00:04:15.000And so it's, you know, encourage the debate and the battle of ideas, so to speak, and all of this stuff until advertisers get worried and they say, oh, you know, our ads are showing up on stuff that's a little bit touch and go for us.
00:04:28.000That's a weird one to me because YouTube has always been a secondary thought for me.
00:04:35.000The first thought was the audio version of the podcast.
00:04:39.000And in fact, when we were uploading it to YouTube at first, I was like, why are we even doing this?
00:04:44.000Some people probably want to watch it.
00:04:45.000And then somewhere along the line, it became at least close to as big as the audio version of it.
00:04:53.000And then maybe even more significant because...
00:04:57.000One of the things that the YouTube version has is the comment section, which is often a fucking dumpster fire, but at least there is some sort of a community engagement aspect of it that doesn't really exist in iTunes.
00:08:37.000And I mean, so a lot of those people's channels do really well on YouTube.
00:08:42.000So if you interview someone who has a channel themselves, there's a very good chance that the algorithm, if they're watching your interview with that person...
00:08:50.000We'll say, well, here's a lot of their stuff.
00:08:52.000And then once you click there, the algorithm very quickly starts to build a picture of every individual user.
00:08:59.000If you watch your interview with Ben Shapiro, and then it takes you to a Daily Wire video, then it takes you to the Daily Wire second stringer guy, and then you're off who knows where.
00:11:18.000I think the criticism that could be levied if one wanted to make it into a criticism would be if you engage with right-wing ideas that you don't agree with, right?
00:11:31.000Like I take you at your face value that you don't agree with a lot of the stuff that your right-wing guests say.
00:12:46.000I mean, I think, I don't know, to tie it to the Richard Spencer interview that I did, some of the criticism I received after was from people on the left.
00:13:01.000For doing the interview at all, the criticism was more from the left.
00:13:03.000For what I said in the interview, the criticism was more from the right, from people who just agreed with Richard Spencer.
00:13:09.000Like, what things did they agree with?
00:13:11.000That it is inevitable that people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds simply will not be able to coexist together peacefully and we're better off trying to figure out how can we separate people God,
00:13:46.000Yeah, well, they have a series of, you know, decades of what they call scholarship supporting their view.
00:13:53.000But for the context of my interview, I made it abundantly clear that I didn't agree with that stuff, right?
00:13:59.000And my view is, and everybody can have a different view about how they do interviews, my view is, if I just allow what I consider to be disgusting views to be spread out, right?
00:14:10.000You know, like a spray bottle, just spray them everywhere, not do anything else.
00:14:15.000I can't say that I'm doing something that I think is valuable.
00:14:27.000If it's some weird conspiracy theory that has not even any following whatsoever, I'm probably not going to choose to even entertain it because it's irrelevant in sort of all ways.
00:14:38.000So my first question is, was Richard Spencer relevant at the time?
00:15:27.000But so, you know, first thing was, I did want to interview him, but if I had felt that I wouldn't be prepared to make it abundantly clear that I don't agree with the guy, and I think his ideas are terrible, I wouldn't have done the interview.
00:15:39.000The problem I had with the critiques from the left of me doing that, some who said, the last thing we need to be doing is giving this guy a voice, that's often how they say it, or a platform.
00:15:49.000My response was, this guy's getting interviewed in lots of other places that aren't even challenging him.
00:15:54.000I'm at least making an attempt here to get something in the record that there are arguments against these ideas, these are bad ideas, and I don't want to be part of the diffusion of just the ideas themselves.
00:17:29.000Well, I don't actually agree that it exists on a significant portion of the left.
00:17:33.000Like I think a bigger issue, for example, like if you said what is like a serious issue that the left needs to contend with right now?
00:17:38.000I would say a more serious issue is if you look at the progressive accomplishments of the early 20th century, for example, like 1905 to 1925, and the New Deal accomplishments that the left had in the time of FDR – What was different I think then than the left now is that you didn't have to be completely in line with a specific set of policies or ideas.
00:18:06.000And I worry that now there's a little bit of the left maybe having this idea that If you're not in line on all of these issues, whatever the checklist is, so to speak, you're not really worthy of being a participant in what is clearly a leftward move in sort of the average American's political orientation.
00:18:28.000I don't want to see that prevent progress.
00:18:31.000Yeah, that's the hard tribalism, right?
00:18:34.000That's where the line gets drawn, you're with us or against us.
00:18:41.000I mean, I saw it with healthcare recently.
00:18:43.000With healthcare, I don't think that you can make any serious case from the left that healthcare is fine and the for-profit, employer-connected system that we have is working.
00:18:53.000I don't think there's any progressive case to be made for that.
00:19:45.000What I'm saying is there are a number of different ways to improve upon the system we have, all of which sever this relationship between usually your employer and these for-profit insurance companies.
00:20:59.000And then that's not even paying for housing and food and transportation and books and everything else that you're going to need, too.
00:21:07.000And to make it more difficult for young people to succeed is one of the worst ways to make a stronger country.
00:21:14.000If you want a strong country, you want educated people that get to pursue their dreams.
00:21:19.000And the idea that we are so willing to spend so much money on these costly regime change wars and flying troops overseas to these places that they don't want to go.
00:21:34.000It's trillions of dollars, and people are fine with that.
00:21:36.000But you talk to them about some sort of socialized education system, and people freak out and think you want to turn us into communists.
00:21:43.000Well, I think what is really important to understand is that the facts you just laid out don't matter to people who see this as an issue of what do people deserve.
00:21:53.000So if you say to a fiscal conservative, you know, if you consider the amount that the employee pays for premiums, plus the employer, plus your co-pays, plus co-insurance, you put it all together into some amount.
00:22:08.000And you explain to them there's lots of great analyses that have been done which tell us that with roughly the same amount of money, maybe a small payroll tax in addition, with roughly that same amount, it all could be done with a single-payer system that covers everybody.
00:22:23.000You're taking all of these individual risk pools where you have different for-profit insurers and then you have systems for people that don't have enough money, Medicaid.
00:22:31.000You have systems for people that are over 65, Medicare.
00:23:00.000And it's very hard to change people's minds when that's their view.
00:23:05.000I think it might be George Lakoff, who I believe calls it strict father morality, which is like, how would a really strict father treat a child who comes to them and says, hey, you know what?
00:23:18.000I figured out a way that we can all have healthcare.
00:23:21.000The strict father, even if the numbers make sense, would say, I'm going to teach you a lesson.
00:23:26.000You haven't earned that healthcare, either because you don't work or you don't make enough money or you're on disability, whatever the case may be.
00:23:33.000How do you convince someone to change their mind when that's their worldview?
00:23:36.000Yeah, how do you when it's an ideologically based decision and you're on team R or team L, which group of ideas do you adopt?
00:24:22.000So I feel like… But they're both socialized medicine.
00:24:25.000They are both… Well, yes, in some sense.
00:24:27.000I mean, the Canadian system is administered at the province level.
00:24:30.000So the province is sort of like the market.
00:24:33.000Instead of having all these sub-markets attached to individual for-profit insurers at the provincial level… That's how it's organized.
00:24:40.000The UK has the National Health Service, where they don't actually run the healthcare facilities, but they're the ones who are contracting them.
00:24:50.000So it's sort of like the healthcare facility still is its own entity.
00:24:55.000It's not that you're going and the government is the employer of the doctor, so to speak, but they're contracting with the healthcare facilities.
00:25:02.000But the point I want to make is that There are criticisms of all of these systems, but they're different ones.
00:25:08.000So when we say the British and Canadian systems aren't that good, let's figure out in what ways each is not that good because they're different ways, whether you're talking about health outcomes, early detection, cost per treatment, whatever.
00:25:23.000You really have to drill down and figure out in what way are we saying it's not as good.
00:25:28.000Yeah, what I'm saying is that there's no perfect system.
00:26:36.000A lot of doctors will say that even though sort of on paper in a socialized medicine system they might make less for a particular procedure, for example, or something like that, A lot of them are still in favor of those systems because it would drastically reduce their overhead.
00:26:56.000So there's all of this apparatus that includes medical billing and coding both on the insurer end and at the healthcare provider end.
00:27:06.000The hospital and the insurance company both are battling over what is it that was done?
00:27:10.000What are the codes that apply here and what are our reimbursement rates?
00:27:24.000So I don't think it's as obvious that under those systems, at the end of the day, a doctor that owns a PCP group, for example, or an orthopedic clinic or whatever the case may be, I don't know that it's that clear that they end up taking home less money.
00:28:29.000Education and healthcare, those are the two things that I think we can both agree we need to invest money on, and we need to figure out some way to make that more accessible to people.
00:28:39.000And I don't understand people that don't think that.
00:28:41.000And if that's what that is, the strict father mentality, The only thing that makes sense to me is that you don't want people who are kind of half-assing college that can just get in.
00:28:53.000I think that that comes up a lot when you hear about so-called free college, which isn't free.
00:28:58.000We're saying we're paying for it through taxation.
00:29:05.000I mean, I think that that sometimes gets lost.
00:29:08.000And yes, there are more and more jobs that require college degrees, even though you could make the case, maybe the college degree is not actually necessary, but it's a way to sort of thin the herd of applicants.
00:29:19.000In order to just make hiring more practical.
00:29:23.000But I do think that it's okay to say that college isn't for everybody.
00:29:28.000But the same ideas that apply to so-called free college, meaning college paid for through education, could apply to trade school.
00:29:35.000They could apply to retraining programs.
00:29:36.000There's a whole bunch of other ways that it could be done.
00:30:10.000When I went there, it wasn't available for that, but since then, they have made that available, and that's also in the time that YouTube has made basically education-free for a lot of people.
00:30:20.000I mean I think with that, the issue is in my mind that when you consider the cost relative to the earnings potential, as you pointed out when you talk about $68,000 a year or I guess taught at Boston College and I think it was like $64,000,
00:31:02.000A free market capitalist, a social democrat like myself, and actual socialism.
00:31:07.000Like what should happen with the gains that come from those technological advancements?
00:31:10.000But as far as the education piece is concerned, it's completely unsustainable the way it is now.
00:31:16.000I knew about you before this happened, but then I really kind of got on board with you when someone was trying to get you fired from Boston University.
00:34:37.000And one of the things that he brought up that's so huge, it's so true, is that you can have 10 positive things, but that one negative will outweigh the 10 positives.
00:35:05.000I mean, when I announced I was going to be doing your show, If you look at what the comments were, almost all, this is awesome, great left-wing voice talking to Joe Rogan.
00:35:38.000I don't have to engage, and I also can just say, I will check our networks in the morning, then I'll spend the whole day, I'll do my show, I'll do what I need to do, And then before I sign off for the evening, I'll check it.
00:37:39.000I think one of the biggest realizations is that people don't really miss you that much.
00:37:46.000They don't hear from you for a couple days.
00:37:48.000That's one of the things where the idea of needing constant engagement comes from sort of like a slightly narcissistic point of view where like people are going to notice if I don't tweet from Thursday night until Monday morning or do anything like that.
00:39:25.000Is it just to agree with everything someone says with no questioning whatsoever?
00:39:29.000What's extra interesting about it is she blocked me on Twitter, but then I treat my Facebook profile basically as public, so I post stuff on there.
00:39:39.000It's the same whether you're friends with me or not.
00:39:42.000And I had posted something totally innocuous about I was at a restaurant or drinking an espresso on it.
00:41:03.000But my approach is, I really do assume most people are pretty good people, and even when we have disagreements, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt that if we could only talk the way we're doing, we could figure out 95% of the disagreement.
00:41:42.000The reason I'm thinking back, actually, to a conversation I had at the time where someone said to me, If you do get fired, it's the best possible thing that'll happen.
00:42:04.000This is a giant issue that I have with both parties.
00:42:08.000And I think it's one of the reasons why people are in these parties to begin with.
00:42:12.000I don't necessarily think that people have clearly thought out every single aspect of whatever party they align with.
00:42:20.000I think they fall in line and they adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior that seems to be attractive at the time and then they fall in line with whatever that party is saying.
00:42:29.000I think that is a giant percentage of people.
00:42:31.000When someone deviates from that like you did, someone who is also clearly a progressive and clearly a left-wing person and you're criticizing something and very Right.
00:42:59.000Are you responsible for the reaction to what you post?
00:43:02.000Because if you look at what Steven Crowder said, for people who don't know the story, Steven Crowder got into it with this guy who is a writer for Vox, who is gay.
00:43:24.000He's kind of effeminate and Steven Crowder mocked that and he mocked that in these videos where he was Criticizing Carlos's position on Antifa, specifically what I saw.
00:43:39.000And in doing that, he called him this queer Mexican.
00:43:49.000And then Carlos Maza posts all these horrible tweets that came his way, and apparently he got doxxed so people got his phone And they were saying, debate Steven Crowder.
00:44:00.000He was getting all these text messages in and all this hateful stuff that was coming his way.
00:44:05.000So the question is, who's responsible for that hateful stuff?
00:44:10.000If Steven Crowder calls him queer, what is queer?
00:44:43.000We'll analyze the specifics in a second, maybe.
00:44:46.000But first, if you look at the policy, the terms of service of YouTube, there's a Verge article from yesterday, before, a few days ago, earlier this week, before YouTube had made the decision to demonetize Steven Crowder.
00:44:57.000Well, they made the decision to not act.
00:44:59.000And just say that it didn't violate the terms of services.
00:45:02.000And then today, as I got in here, Jamie informed me that they made a decision to demontize.
00:45:07.000So in the article where they made the decision not to act, they actually put what YouTube's terms of service are with regard to bullying and harassment.
00:45:17.000My reading of it, and we could go through them, if we could pull them up, we could go through it line by line if we wanted.
00:45:22.000My reading was that that definitely did break the terms and conditions.
00:45:26.000That was my view as I looked at what it was that was done by Steven Crowder and what the terms of service are.
00:45:32.000Just matching it up, not looking at the comments from either person.
00:46:01.000He was talking about how Carlos just dismisses Antifa as being not that big a deal, and that there's bias in the media whenever there's anything negative that happens, but if you look at the overall picture.
00:46:12.000And then Crowder goes on to talk about all the assaults, all the murders, that there were sexual assaults, there was rapes, there was all these things that happened with Antifa.
00:46:20.000He was talking about all these different people that got maced in the face, all these people that got hurt.
00:46:45.000That's where it's like, okay, what is he doing?
00:46:47.000He's kind of mocking him, right, and he's mocking him by saying he's queer, but he says he's queer, or he says he's gay.
00:46:53.000Yeah, but that's like saying, I mean, listen, just because the N-word is in rap songs doesn't mean that it's defined to go Right, but the N word is not in like – it's not like the LBGTN. You know what I'm saying?
00:47:06.000It's not like a part of their – I think the principle though is you're suggesting that because a certain word is sometimes used self-referentially by members of a group, that any use of it from the outside is – By definition,
00:48:38.000I do appreciate what you're saying, and I agree with you to a certain extent.
00:48:42.000I believe that when YouTube yesterday said, we looked at the content in total, and we don't think it violates our terms and conditions, I disagreed with them.
00:48:51.000I thought it very clearly violated their terms and conditions.
00:48:54.000Where I am thinking about it now is the application of those terms and conditions violations because a similar thing happened with Alex Jones as well, which was there's lots of way smaller players that are violating these same terms and conditions,
00:49:14.000They don't get any attention because they have no audience.
00:49:16.000So I think there's the question of the application of these terms and conditions in a way that's sort of fair and And is not ultimately going by the public blowback or reaction to situations because that's how Adpocalypse 1.0 happened.
00:49:33.000I think it was a Coke ad appeared on an obviously racist video on a channel with like 800 or 1,000 subscribers.
00:49:42.000The Wall Street Journal, I think it was, did an article saying, look at these screenshots of these advertisers on these crazy racist videos.
00:49:50.000That led to blowback because YouTube didn't want to lose money.
00:49:54.000And ultimately, that's what this is about.
00:49:56.000I know that there are people who say YouTube has an inherently left-wing bias.
00:50:00.000Others say YouTube has a right-wing, whatever.
00:50:04.000YouTube's bias is towards corporatism and profit.
00:50:25.000Oh, well, first of all, it was the James Damore thing.
00:50:28.000You know, she was talking about the Google memo, and she was talking about how it was incredibly damaging, damaging stereotypes against women, which it just wasn't.
00:50:56.000Google is a very, very left-wing group, and it's all Silicon Valley, which is almost entirely left-wing biased.
00:51:04.000So I think we have to distinguish between the personal political biases of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and And the broader place that Google has in the sort of corporate sphere.
00:51:16.000Google is part of the group of huge multinational corporations that lobbies for particular tax policy to avoid paying taxes legally.
00:51:29.000That is not a particularly left-wing thing to do.
00:51:32.000Google is part of the large tech companies that In order to avoid serious regulation of their businesses have come up with this idea of regulating themselves, which I know is a topic of self-regulation that's come up before on your program in a variety of ways.
00:51:50.000So those are not left-wing things and if you want to make the case that as a company It has a left-wing politic in the outward-facing world.
00:52:01.000You have to have something more than just a lot of their engineers live in Palo Alto and are hipsters who go to coffee shops.
00:52:09.000I think that in terms of the place that it occupies within the economic system we have, they are not very different from all of the large corporations that are pushing against regulation, pushing for ways to avoid taxes,
00:52:27.000Trevor Burrus So in terms of economic decisions?
00:52:29.000Yeah, I mean, listen, if we want to talk about how the personal politics of the employees translate to policy, we can do that, but we need to be able to make some specific claims about how it does.
00:52:43.000What I'm saying is, we know the way in which the structure that Google is a part of leads to it advocating for things that are center-right, corporatist, capitalist.
00:52:55.000The status quo of Well, that's what's interesting about this Crowder thing is that ultimately the decision was to allow him to have his freedom to post videos on there, but the punitive aspect of it is they're going to reduce his ability or eliminate his ability to make money from it.
00:54:26.000I mean, so what are the concerns to me?
00:54:29.000It's not that he didn't violate terms and conditions.
00:54:32.000Like I said, I think he pretty clearly did.
00:54:33.000The concerns to me are, is YouTube only going to even look into these circumstances or instances when there is a public outcry?
00:54:46.000The answer is probably yes, because why would they look into stuff nobody's paying attention to?
00:54:50.000Well, it seems like they changed their decision based on public outcry, based on Carlos Mez's reaction to their initial decision.
00:54:57.000I happen to think their initial decision was the wrong one, but I have a sort of broader concern here, which is about the fairness of the application and also the distinguishing between content that is promoting Whatever falls under any of our definitions of hateful or whatever content and those who are fighting against it.
00:55:17.000So is it because he mentioned his sexual orientation and that he called him a lispy little queer or whatever he called him or a queer Mexican and if he just called him a fucking idiot and he received the exact same amount of hate would you still think that that was a good move?
00:55:58.000So, who gets to decide, if not the private businesses, what their rules are?
00:56:05.000That's where the real question comes up, right?
00:56:07.000Tulsi Gabbard believes that it's a First Amendment issue, and she believes that everyone should have the freedom of expression.
00:56:12.000And that as long as you're not doing anything illegal, you're not putting anyone in danger by giving up their address or doxing them or something along those lines or making overt physical threats, that you should be allowed to do that because that's what the freedom of speech is all about.
00:56:26.000And freedom of speech, when you eliminate social media in this country, your freedom is basically just yelling out in public.
00:56:36.000I mean, we're in this weird place as a culture.
00:57:14.000Yeah, so if we find out that on our videos someone is posting endless comments, for example, my personal view is if it's not illegal, I just let it all be there and sit.
00:57:26.000That's my personal view, and that's a great principle to have.
00:57:30.000We leave them alone, even though we get accused of it.
00:57:32.000But the question is, YouTube at one point in time had thrown out there that they were going to make people responsible for the things that were in their comments.
00:57:40.000I vaguely remember that, but it didn't ultimately happen.
00:57:42.000I think they backed out of it very quickly when they realized that places like yours, which like your average video gets how many thousands of comments?
00:57:51.000And how would you even be able to look at all those?
00:57:54.000I mean, you would have to be 24-7 monitoring them because you've also got people that are watching your videos from overseas at all times in the night.
00:58:10.000However, I think that there is no serious case to be made that a private company can't say, these are our terms of service.
00:58:20.000And if you want to, I mean, it's sort of almost a conservative principle, right?
00:58:23.000The idea that unless illegal things are going on, we are not going to tell a business how it is that it should be run.
00:58:31.000And that's where I think a lot of right-wingers start to stumble on this issue because they're calling for a very invasive form of government regulation.
00:58:40.000They're calling for the government to step in and even break up these organizations because they've gotten too large.
00:58:46.000But you're hearing that from the left as well.
00:58:47.000Yeah, well, I think there's a difference though between Elizabeth Warren saying we should separate the social platform, Facebook.
00:58:55.000From the ad sales, revenue-generating piece of it.
00:59:00.000That's one thing that falls under antitrust.
00:59:02.000That's different than saying the government should come in and it should tell anybody who runs a social network that you can't do anything unless the content is illegal.
00:59:13.000Because there are financial considerations, right?
00:59:16.000I mean, there's lots of content that would not be illegal, but it would make a platform, a video platform like YouTube, not financially viable.
01:00:07.000It's a regulation that's enforcing the First Amendment and the people's ability to freely express themselves.
01:00:13.000If we're admitting, or if we're agreeing, that we are entering into this new world where this is – that's my position, is that it is a town square.
01:00:22.000I feel like everybody should be able to communicate.
01:00:26.000The really unfortunate, unsavory aspect of it is when someone gets harassed, like Carlos Mesa was because of this, where people are sending him all these homophobic tweets and he's getting text messages and all this shit.
01:00:39.000That's the unsavory and unfortunate aspect of it.
01:01:14.000If you start regularly sending people via UPS similar things to some of the content that exists on YouTube, and UPS says, we're getting reports that you're sending people harassing stuff,
01:01:30.000we don't want you as a customer anymore.
01:01:33.000Isn't there a difference between someone sending something to a physical address and someone sending something, let's say, to you when you're Social media apps are on the third page of your phone and you have to swipe all the way over to get them and open it up and you have to read them if you want to find them.
01:01:47.000You don't necessarily have to read them.
01:01:49.000There's a difference in a practical sense, but I guess the question is, would you similarly want the government to enforce for telephone companies?
01:01:58.000If you are getting harassing texts and you report it and report it.
01:02:20.000I guess where I hesitate, and again, speaking as someone from the left who believes regulation of businesses is an important thing, I would want to be really sure about how exactly it is that the government would step in and mandate essentially that their view has to be listened to over the terms of service that a private company would wish to have.
01:02:50.000If you give people the ability to censor, and if you give people the ability to censor based on their political ideology or based on what they feel is offensive where other people don't, it's a slippery slope.
01:03:00.000And I think that that can lead to all sorts...
01:03:26.000And I'm worried about people that are really strictly trying to promote their ideologies and what they think is okay and not okay.
01:03:33.000And it's very slippery, because there's a lot of weird people out there that believe a lot of weird things and want other people to conform to those weird things.
01:04:10.000A discussion that is only about the principles.
01:04:13.000So a lot of our conversation for the last 15 minutes has been, what is our principle about what types of business regulation is okay for the government to do and is not okay?
01:04:23.000Or when we talk about free speech, do we have a principle of anything short of illegal content versus something that is more strict?
01:04:32.000The reality is that there's a more gray area.
01:04:36.000Yeah, we're trying to sort of regulate the way people communicate with each other.
01:04:41.000So it's not – if someone said that to someone in a bar, a cop would not arrest them.
01:04:46.000Like, yeah, you listen to be a little queer.
01:04:49.000That would be like, oh, that guy's an asshole.
01:04:51.000But the bar would be perfectly within their legal right to say, we don't want you in here.
01:04:55.000You're making our customers uncomfortable.
01:04:56.000And nobody would say that it would be against the law for the bar to say, you got to go.
01:05:03.000But what if he was in a corner talking about this guy that wasn't there?
01:05:08.000And he was saying, yeah, so he's talking about Antifa, this lispy little Mexican queer.
01:05:12.000If you came along and decided to kick the guy out of the bar then...
01:05:16.000I mean, listen, at some bars, if you go into the corner and you yell about a lispy Mexican queer, they're going to ask you to leave, and it still would not be illegal, and the bar would still not be doing anything wrong.
01:06:20.000So, in a sense, they haven't violated his First Amendment rights because he's still able to express himself.
01:06:26.000But then you go, as a company, they've made a punitive decision to eliminate his ability or radically reduce his ability to make an income off of their platform.
01:06:38.000That seems like, and I'm not supporting that they did it, but that seems more reasonable as a decision.
01:07:28.000Well, I think it is because Carlos Mesa is progressive and because the argument that he was making is a very left-wing progressive argument, and this is what Crowder was going after.
01:08:02.000I just don't think people would be interested.
01:08:05.000So that gets to the real crux of it, which is my real concern with this is YouTube only getting involved in even publicly saying what they're doing about a channel when it becomes very public and it starts to have the possibility of impacting their bottom line and brands saying,
01:08:45.000I mean, I don't know if we even want to go into identity politics, so to speak, but there has – I've read some comments on some of the few articles that have been written about this that are saying that this is effectively YouTube enforcing a defense of identity politics,
01:09:04.000And I think that that's just, again, opening up the door to the incredibly broad application of that term identity politics.
01:09:11.000I don't even really fully understand that, and I don't even know if that's a path we want to go down to talk about the identity politics component of what's going on with a lot of this regulation.
01:09:20.000Well, define what you mean by the identity politics component of it.
01:09:23.000I mean, listen, so I guess in order to define it, I— It would be good to point out that I have been critical of quote identity politics on the left in a very limited way that I think it is actually damaging while at the same time recognizing that identity is a really important thing to consider when we think about sort of how the world should be organized.
01:09:47.000So like for your audience who may not know...
01:09:50.000When identity politics is used like a knife to enforce that because of someone's identity, their opinion supersedes and is the opinion that is the valid one over everybody else because of membership in some kind of group,
01:10:10.000It would be very incorrect to believe though that identity doesn't play a role and that we shouldn't understand how one's identity might make us think differently about certain issues.
01:10:24.000I mean, any example would make that pretty clear.
01:10:28.000You know, I as an immigrant to the United States.
01:10:30.000Do I get some privileged position to decide what policy should be over all native-born Americans because I immigrated here?
01:10:38.000No, that would be me using identity politics as like a mallet or a cudgel or whatever.
01:10:43.000But as someone who did immigrate here, we should recognize that I may have things to say about it which would be valuable and worthy and important to sort of think about.
01:10:53.000But you're just not interested in the hierarchy of oppressed people.
01:10:58.000I'm not interested in the Oppression Olympics and I'm not interested in using identity to silence ideas that could be perfectly good coming from someone who is not a member or checking a certain box.
01:11:08.000Nor am I. I strongly believe in the individual and I think it's one of the most important parts of a collective group of human beings like our country.
01:11:16.000We recognize that we're all different and there's a lot of weirdness amongst us, but we're individuals.
01:11:22.000I like to treat people based on who they are, not what classification they fall under.
01:11:27.000Now, do you think that that bad version of identity politics that I mentioned is a big problem on the left or not a big problem?
01:11:42.000I think if you just regular people that are on the left that are working jobs and having families and doing their hobbies and they just have left-wing ideas, I don't think the vast majority of them hold those positions.
01:11:56.000I think those positions are things that people use as revenue.
01:12:00.000I mean, not as revenue, but it's like they get points from it.
01:12:03.000They get points from certain types of behavior that they support, certain types of thinking that they support, and you've got woke social justice points.
01:12:29.000I mean, I do think that it's disproportionately – I think it's a small problem, like you're saying.
01:12:34.000I think a lot of the problem exists in – I mean, even at Boston College, you know, I had sort of maybe been incorrectly indoctrinated into the idea that this was really a problem everywhere on college campuses.
01:12:49.000And I had an incident, the details of which wouldn't be appropriate to talk about, but with a student when I taught at Boston College.
01:12:56.000Because of the circumstances and the identities involved, I was ready for it to go into, this is going to be resolved the wrong way on the basis of the toxic identity politics I'm hearing is existing on college campuses, and it was not.
01:13:12.000So I think the same way that when you look at Yelp reviews, people who had a bad experience are way more likely to go and write about it, these individual stories get way more attention than the percentage of the problem that they represent.
01:13:26.000I believe you're probably correct about that, but when you see videos like Nick Christakis getting just shouted down at Yale by a group of students and that they supported the students and that kind of shit, you say, well, it is real and it does exist.
01:13:42.000I think that sensible people on the left like me call it out, but I want to be careful.
01:13:50.000Imagine that you had someone from Cato on the show, which is sort of like a traditional conservative or American Enterprise Institute maybe is like a better example and A lot of the conversation was about getting them to talk about or denounce the alt-right, for example.
01:14:05.000I'm sure they would do it, but how much should AEI denounce the alt-right when that's like a different thing?
01:14:36.000I mean, I've had friends that were, especially friends that were heavily involved in this kind of stuff before, and it was very damaging to their mental health.
01:14:54.000And then they realized somewhere on the line...
01:14:55.000And then one of them, my friend Jamie Kilstein, they turned on him and then devastated his life.
01:15:01.000And he realized along the way, like, oh, Jesus Christ, what was I doing?
01:15:05.000I was checking my Twitter every five seconds and insulting people left and right and attacking people just to get everybody to say, yeah, go get them.
01:15:12.000And showing everybody how woke I am and how progressive I am.
01:15:28.000So there's people on the left and right who get pulled into political wokeness, whether it's, I'm now Tea Party in 2010, people that got sucked into Tea Party on the right, Antifa, whatever.
01:15:39.000These are all groups with different Sort of followings, they're not all the same, whatever.
01:15:44.000I do think that there is a difference between getting extremely passionate about the idea that everybody should have access to just basic healthcare than getting extremely passionate about the idea that we need to go out of our way to shut down every abortion clinic in the country.
01:16:02.000And so I don't want to participate in a false equivalency between, well, you got very far left and very far right people and they're the same.
01:16:12.000And you've got center left and center right and they're the same.
01:16:17.000Like obviously I have a perspective that is based on my politics.
01:16:22.000I'm glad to debate any of these issues with anybody who wants to on the merits, but I don't want to make the false equivalency.
01:16:29.000I mean, listen, when you look at Anti-Defamation League numbers, for example, the vast majority of hate incidents in the United States are coming from the right.
01:16:41.000We could talk about other ways that the left is active.
01:16:44.000We could talk about what it means or how things should be categorized.
01:16:49.000But that's the reality and so I want to make sure I don't play a false equivalency game.
01:16:53.000My audience would crush me if I did that, number one.
01:17:01.000I think you're right there and I also think that these false equivalency kind of conversations are – they're ridiculous because each individual conversation about each individual issue deserves its own discussion.
01:17:55.000There's a few things, I don't know if this would be interesting to go into, but there's a few things that I've found have been somewhat successful in conversations with people who really disagree with me.
01:18:05.000And at least like lowering the temperature a little bit and getting people to maybe engage in a good faith way.
01:18:12.000One of them is, how do you think I came to my position?
01:18:17.000So you might be for total free market for-profit healthcare.
01:18:22.000I am for a system where the government is more involved and even if you can't pay, you get care.
01:18:28.000Before we even start, if I say, how do you think I arrived at my position?
01:18:35.000Another example is, I think this came from Peter Boghossian, who I think you've had on.
01:18:41.000The defeasibility question, which is, what evidence if I presented it to you would bring you over to my side?
01:18:46.000I'm not saying I have that evidence or that it exists, but give me a framework as to what is keeping you from seeing this my way.
01:18:53.000Because sometimes that exists, the person just doesn't know about it.
01:18:56.000Those are two tools that I have found super useful in trying to make some headway With people who are hyper-partisan and very escalated with a lot of these issues.
01:19:10.000Yeah, it's very difficult to have good faith conversations with people when you disagree with them.
01:19:15.000You have to have discipline and you have to have some sort of a sense of self.
01:19:19.000And you have to know how to be calm and kind.
01:19:24.000You know, the descent into insults and dunking on people is one of the reasons why at the beginning of the conversation I was saying that one of the things I enjoy about your YouTube videos is you're a very reasonable, rational person and you don't get crazy and animated and insulting.
01:19:43.000Because I think even though you're not going to convert some people, there's just a certain section of the population that disagrees with you that's just going to.
01:19:51.000But there's a significant number that are going to go, hey, this David Pakman guy, he's reasonable.
01:20:53.000You could be conflicted and neutral, but I try to at least be objective and transparent in how I arrived at what I believe.
01:20:58.000So you can disagree with my conclusion.
01:21:01.000You can even come to me and tell me the facts I've used to reach the conclusion are incomplete or wrong, but I'm completely genuine in how I arrive there.
01:21:08.000And I think that that is why we have some – I mean, yeah, there's – obviously, if you look at YouTube comments, there are right-wingers that watch my show.
01:21:17.000But choosing to support it financially is a different thing and I get emails from conservatives who say, I don't agree with your conclusions but I do find that you're at least reasoning through the issues in a way that resonates with me and I want to support the fact that you're doing that.
01:21:34.000In my eyes, in this day and age, I think this is the most polarized time I can remember as a 51-year-old man looking back at my history of paying attention to social issues and the way we communicate with each other.
01:21:49.000Just the partisan attitudes that people seem to have.
01:21:53.000I think it's probably because of Trump.
01:23:07.000That kind of shit is a factor, and that has sort of become part of the sport of social media, has been arguing.
01:23:15.000I don't do it, I don't engage, but I do go on Facebook sometimes, and someone makes an abortion post, and I just watch the chaos, like, oh my god!
01:23:24.000Or anything having anything to do with Trump, or anything having anything to do with the Second Amendment, or anything that has anything to do with the wall, or immigration.
01:23:33.000So I don't know that people are actually in larger disagreements than they were previously.
01:23:39.000I think that, yes, Trump has coarsened the language and the way in which it's now acceptable to talk about a lot of these things.
01:23:46.000I think the social media algorithms, like you're pointing out, reward the most extreme and polarizing comments and reactions in a never-ending feedback loop where the most polarizing initial tweet...
01:23:59.000Generates more responses than less polarizing tweets and then the sub responses that are most polarizing and aggressive do the exact same thing in this never-ending feedback loop.
01:24:11.000I think it's all those things, but I don't know that people are having bigger disagreements than in times past.
01:24:17.000I just think that they're public in a different way.
01:24:20.000Well, there's more disagreements because people have more opportunity to disagree.
01:24:24.000So they have more opportunity to engage.
01:24:26.000Particularly when you're talking about people that are addicted to their phones.
01:24:29.000And this is coming from a guy who uses his fucking phone four hours a day.
01:24:32.000I'd like to think that one hour of that is productive.
01:24:34.000But I know that three hours of it is me staring at butts on Instagram.
01:26:01.000I think that there's more opportunity, as we're saying, to disagree with people, more opportunity to argue.
01:26:09.000And in those more opportunities, you're seeing more conflict and I think more polarization.
01:26:16.000And I think, again, the social media algorithms and all the other nonsense that gets – I think there's – I really do believe that the feeling that I get – but it also might be because a big part of my job is being on the internet.
01:26:27.000So maybe I'm more engaged with it than other folks are.
01:26:31.000But I think – so in practice, let's imagine that the disagreements are equal to what they've always been.
01:26:37.000But there's more opportunities to disagree, and the algorithm favors more escalated disagreement than rational conversation.
01:26:45.000The effect is that you might meet someone with whom you have 80% in common in terms of your political views, but the circumstances in which you engage with that person are going to be on the 20% that you don't.
01:26:57.000So it makes it seem as though you just have very little common ground with anybody.
01:27:02.000Because the 80% agreement becomes background.
01:27:05.000And the social media platforms, the debates happening on YouTube, elsewhere, are focused only on the most divisive fraction of one's entire political views.
01:27:16.000And that's, I think, what the problem is.
01:27:18.000But it makes sense because most people agree that – I don't know – gas stations – I mean just to pick something innocuous.
01:27:27.000Most people agree that it's good to have a regulatory system that makes sure that when you think you've pumped five gallons of gas, you've gotten five gallons of gas.
01:27:35.000It's so uncontroversial that nobody is going to talk about it.
01:27:38.000Like it makes sense that the focus is going to be on the disagreements.
01:27:41.000Where it's damaging is then when you meet people in real life.
01:27:45.000And it's hard to relate or even be in the same room because only those differences are sort of like played up or relevant.
01:27:58.000Yeah, I... I don't know where I see this going.
01:28:05.000That's one of the more interesting things about, particularly with social media and things when you come to this Crowder situation.
01:28:12.000I don't know where this is going because I didn't know this was ever going to be a thing.
01:28:17.000I had never really considered that there was going to be some digital town square that we were all going to be enjoying, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever it is.
01:29:26.000Mocking their ability to think, mocking their intelligence, mocking their decisions, mocking the way they talk, and then encouraging other people to do the same thing.
01:30:06.000My view is that my videos about Dave Rubin are substantive.
01:30:09.000I don't really watch any left-wing stuff because I want to try to isolate myself enough to make sure that what I'm saying are my ideas and that I'm not taking them.
01:30:35.000Then going after them for the fact that they say things that are wrong or don't know stuff, until you're making fun of someone who has an actual handicap of some kind, some kind of cognitive limitation that would be a disability of some kind.
01:30:50.000Then you are mocking someone for a disability.
01:30:52.000But the resulting effect of the harassment...
01:30:57.000See, this is what I was getting at before with Crowder.
01:30:59.000What Crowder said was one thing, but one of the things that Carlos Mesa was discussing was what the people that had watched Crowder, what they were doing, how they were going after him.
01:32:26.000At a certain point, given a large enough audience and enough repetition of that and the fact that there's like a distribution of people's emotional states, cognitive capacity, etc., It is statistically probable that someone from that audience is going to go and try to do something about whoever it is that you're targeting.
01:32:45.000That individual Who has the show and is hammering on this person day after day after day, they're not going to be legally responsible for that person from their audience who went and did something.
01:32:58.000There's no way that you're going to hold them legally responsible under the current legal system that we have.
01:33:03.000But you could argue that it is irresponsible in some way not to understand that your consequences have actions.
01:33:10.000Of course, the person who goes and does the violent act is the primary person who is responsible.
01:33:16.000But as long as you're not calling out for that act, how do we make this distinction that someone is encouraging that act or someone is at least inspiring that act?
01:33:28.000I mean, listen, I can go on my show and I can speak in vague terminology or specific terminology.
01:33:33.000You know, imagine that there's a local business that I don't like.
01:33:36.000I could go on my show and I could say this business did this and I need everybody in my audience to show up there and to make it impossible to get in and patronize that business.
01:33:48.000That's very clearly on one side of the gray area.
01:33:51.000I could instead say You know, there's a business, I could say the type of business, but I not name it.
01:33:58.000If it's a small enough town, people would know exactly what business I'm talking about.
01:34:02.000And I really don't like the way I was treated there.
01:34:04.000And if only there was some way that someone could do something about it.
01:34:08.000The effect could be the exact same one.
01:34:10.000I don't know how you measure when it's on one side or the other.
01:34:13.000Yeah, it's like, right, you could somehow or another remove your You could somehow or another make it so that it's, yeah, I'm agreeing with you.
01:34:25.000You could remove your responsibility for the action in some sort of way.
01:34:31.000I was trying to find a tweet from Mazza about him sending or asking people to flag Crowder's videos.
01:34:38.000Did you get the one where he asked people to go assault people with milkshakes and humiliate them at every turn?
01:34:43.000YouTube tweeted an hour ago, or yeah, at 1230, that to clarify, this is responding to Carlos Maza, to clarify, in order to restate monetization on his channel, he will need to remove the link to his t-shirts.
01:37:38.000I don't agree with him constantly going on and on about this guy being queer or calling him a lispy little queer, but he's doing it to try to be funny.
01:37:47.000So the question is, when can you do that to be funny?
01:37:50.000And apparently with YouTube, you can do that and be funny.
01:38:06.000That's so minor that it's hard to, I mean, it's mind-blowing.
01:38:09.000It is, but it isn't, because it's sort of encouraging people to buy it, and then YouTube would say, well, if you have an ad on that, then you're encouraging homophobic behavior, and we can't allow that with our monetization policy.
01:38:22.000I mean it's minor in the context of everything else that's wrapped up in this.
01:38:25.000It might be an important revenue-generating t-shirt.
01:38:29.000I mean I think so much of this Again, these disagreements on issues.
01:38:34.000It comes down to what you and I were talking about before.
01:38:37.000That if two people are in a room together, 95% of what they're talking about you're going to agree on.
01:38:41.000When someone's making a video on someone, if they just say, like, fucking David Pakman, man.
01:38:54.000When people do stuff like that, it's a terrible way to communicate.
01:38:59.000First of all, You'd have to be a real asshole to say most of the things that people say about things when they're dunking on them in person.
01:39:08.000So you know the person's going to see it, so you're just deciding, I'm going to be a bad person, but I'm going to pretend I'm not a bad person because I'm going to do it in a way where they're not in the room, so I'm just going to shit all over them and give them my real opinion.
01:40:07.000Right, but they would say if they were sitting around having lunch together, talking shit about some stupid thing that he said the night before.
01:40:15.000And I don't think, I mean, whether or not you would say something in person doesn't tell us whether it's a fair or unfair critique, I think it's fair to say.
01:41:11.000Very, very big ideas we all want to hear about and what are the best ideas and let's rank the ideas.
01:41:16.000There are people whose views are so extreme that you can't really bring them to the table as reasonable negotiating partners for figuring something out.
01:41:32.000Louis Farrakhan, who I've spoken out about many times.
01:41:35.000Imagine that we want to figure out what the tax rate should be.
01:41:38.000Something that politicians have to do all the time.
01:41:41.000If you have a group of people who believe that we need a 25% flat tax and a group of people who want, you know, like an escalating progressive tax that gets as high as 70% on income over 10 million, whatever, right?
01:41:53.000All those people are going to be able to have a conversation.
01:41:56.000If someone comes in who says any taxes that the government collects are a form of slavery, how do you integrate that into the conversation about how to set tax rates?
01:42:13.000So all of this stuff, you know, there's this new movement now, which I think is great, about long-form conversations, going in-depth, figuring out what our disagreements are.
01:42:29.000But where I do think that there's like a lack of pragmatic reality to it is some people's ideas are so extreme that they can't in any sensible way be incorporated into an actual good faith discussion of how society should be organized.
01:42:43.000That is the problem with having conversations in scale, right?
01:42:47.000And that's the problem with Twitter and with YouTube that you're dealing with millions and millions and millions of human beings.
01:42:52.000And when you have that broad spectrum of humans, you're going to have people on the far ends of both sides.
01:42:57.000And at a certain point, a decision has to be made about who actually gets to participate in the decision-making conversations.
01:43:05.000It's great for everybody to have a voice on taxation on Twitter, but imagine if there was a significant portion of our elected officials who straight up think taxes are slavery.
01:43:15.000I just don't know how that becomes integrated into a decision about tax policy.
01:43:19.000I think the argument would be that bad ideas should be combated with good ideas, not with silencing someone.
01:43:27.000And that when you do silence someone, you just sort of create this blockade where the idea builds up behind it, and then the opposition to your perspective builds up, and then people start picking teams and picking sides.
01:43:39.000And I honestly think that that's something that's going to be going on right now with this whole Crowder-Vox thing.
01:43:46.000I think people are going to pick sides and they fucking love it.
01:43:49.000People love a good conflict to get into.
01:43:51.000There's a lot of people in their cubicles right now that are weighing in and firing up and there's people that want to dox him again and there's people who want to infiltrate his Facebook and his Twitter.
01:45:53.000I mean, listen, it's the same way with Jew.
01:45:56.000If I'm in a family thing and it's a bunch of Jews or whatever, that's a word that can be used in a way that if someone shows up, if Richard Spencer shows up or one of his followers and goes to a bar mitzvah and talks about this room full of Jews,
01:46:12.000the word is the same word, but we're talking about two very different things.
01:47:46.000Right, but people from Mexico and shithole countries, that doesn't necessarily really equate with Israel.
01:47:53.000No, well, anti-Semitism in Israel also are two totally separate things.
01:47:56.000You could be against the current Israeli administration, as I am, like Benjamin Netanyahu, and still call out anti-Semitism against Jews in the United States, for example, or whatever.
01:48:08.000One is not directly linked to the other, but if you're a group that already has these views, and then you see a guy who opens his campaign talking about They're sending rapists and criminals, but some I'm sure are good people.
01:48:23.000And I don't want people coming here from shithole countries.
01:48:29.000And I've spoken to former KKK people, some of whom are really interesting people to talk to, and they know exactly why it's appealing because they see the signals and the vocabulary and the dog whistling.
01:48:41.000So I think it's just brought it out into the forefront.
01:48:44.000I don't know that new anti-Semitism has necessarily been generated, although it being in the forefront probably does start to get some people kind of curious, like, oh, maybe all the problems are because of the Jews.
01:49:04.000Yeah, they find them online and then you can stumble into it where you ordinarily wouldn't be around people that are having those discussions.
01:49:12.000That can happen and a lot of the people that I've talked to that got into those beliefs and then out of them said that they got in usually on a community level.
01:49:21.000There was something about the community that was appealing to them.
01:50:24.000And, you know, I feel like that is an issue where I try to speak.
01:50:30.000I mean, Schill to me suggests that you're saying one thing.
01:50:35.000But with some kind of other agenda that you're trying to push in some way.
01:50:40.000In other words, you are being in some way deceptive about your actual intentions and what you say.
01:50:47.000So I think when people call me a Zionist shill, what they mean is I'm talking about one thing with the secret goal or below-the-surface goal of actually promoting some action by the state of Israel.
01:52:25.000I enjoy the idea that people are listening to my ideas and either agreeing or disagreeing, but they're considering them and then integrating it into how they figure out what they think about the world around them.
01:52:42.000Sort of like safety security stuff that sometimes comes up, which I try not to even like put too much attention on because I feel like it just feeds and gives people ideas.
01:52:53.000And people who, you know, come up to me and – I mean I'm more curious to actually hear your thoughts about this – come up to me and, you know, they may not necessarily see the world the way I see it and I'm unsure.
01:53:06.000Sort of like what are their intentions type of thing.
01:53:09.000I mean it gives me anxiety – And it gives people that are close to me anxiety for sure.
01:53:14.000Yeah, because your profile is just, if you keep doing this, you're very good at it.
01:54:08.000I mean, I do worry that no matter what happens in the next few elections, I don't know how we reverse the radicalization polarization effects of the social media echo chambers that we've been talking about.
01:54:26.000I mean, we could still accomplish good things while that's going on.
01:54:29.000Like, I think if we elect the right people, maybe we can get good things done.
01:54:32.000But in parallel, there is this hyper-radicalized, polarized narrative that's going on, and I don't see any way that that's going to turn around.
01:54:42.000And I'm very confused by it because I don't see any long-term solution for this other than some radical change in the way human beings communicate with each other.
01:54:55.000And I've contemplated that and hypothesized and theorized.
01:55:02.000What has changed the way we communicate is technology and the immersive aspect of social media technology, the fact that we carry these devices with us all the time that allow us to communicate and allow us to read other people's communications or watch other people's communications.
01:55:19.000I have a concern that this is going to escalate with each expansion and each innovation in terms of, and I don't know what it would be, because no one saw the internet coming.
01:55:33.000If you go back 30 years ago, no one ever thought anything was going to be anything like it is now.
01:55:53.000And I think it's going to be, if you look at the trend, the trend is not towards calming people down and giving people space and allowing people to meditate more.
01:56:02.000No, the trend is to get more and more immersed.
01:57:35.000And I really like Joel Kinnaman and Richard K. Morgan I interviewed who wrote the book years ago.
01:57:39.000But that genre started to move me away from techno-utopianism and technology is just going to solve so many problems.
01:57:48.000Because it also is going to create new problems that we don't even yet know about.
01:57:52.000So as an example, I went all the way back to the beginning when humans went from hunter-gatherers and figured out we can domesticate some crops, we can start agriculture and settle and be in one place.
01:58:06.000That was the acceleration of what we know of as wealth, ownership.
01:58:13.000I mean, agriculture allowed people to be able to live and do stuff other than find food, which developed specialists who created technology, which created army.
01:58:23.000It all came from agriculture in that way.
01:58:25.000But tons of bad stuff came from it as well, right?
01:58:28.000The beginning of the concept of a sedentary lifestyle came from agriculture.
01:58:32.000Diseases that we got from animals and then that we brought other places and they killed tons of people.
01:58:38.000So I've kind of adopted that view to technology now, which is, yeah, all the cool stuff we can imagine and improvements I'm sure will be there, but problems we aren't even aware of yet are also going to be there.
01:59:23.000Microsoft has HoloLens, and they're on HoloLens too, but they've moved more towards commercial applications for it as opposed to consumer availability.
01:59:33.000There are consumer availability AR things coming out right now.
01:59:38.000What Apple just showed at their WWDC event this month, or actually on Monday...
01:59:56.000Either projecting light into your eye, which is what Magic Leap does, or projecting onto the glass that you're then looking at, which is what I think HoloLens and...
02:00:46.000I think we're giving up agency to something that has no feelings for us at all.
02:00:52.000I think the problems people have in practice often are different than the ones – I mean there's no transparency with a lot of the companies that are developing these technologies and setting up the algorithms and whatever.
02:01:06.000There's really no transparency about what it is that's going on, what the end goals are, what the broader effects on society are going to be.
02:01:14.000I know you've had Jonathan Haidt on who has talked a lot about the disproportionate effect of social media on suicidality, particularly in young girls relative to boys.
02:01:24.000It's been years now that this stuff has been around and we're now kind of figuring that out.
02:01:29.000So it's inevitably we're behind always in figuring out what the effects are because you need time to measure it.
02:01:36.000And that as things advance more and more quickly, whatever damage is potentially going to be done will happen even faster.
02:02:01.000It was the same type of thing where all of these advancements and being able to make food last longer via how it was processed and stored, it all sounded awesome in a time when food would just go bad.
02:02:10.000Then we started learning about all the bad things that came with it.
02:02:18.000Oh, so two things I wanted to mention.
02:02:20.000One, when I announced that I was going to be on the show, companies started contacting me saying, we will give you money if you work our name, our product, into the conversation.
02:03:51.000And I feel like for the most part, we have kind of an understanding of how it all works.
02:03:54.000There's nothing wrong with it as long as it's products that you actually enjoy and, again, that you maintain that transparency and that honesty.
02:04:15.000Yeah, I mean, there's this moral hazard sort of situation that exists with insurance where the people who don't really need the insurance are the ones that the insurance companies want to insure.
02:04:24.000And the people that are more likely to use the insurance, the insurance companies are like, we're going to have to charge you six times as much type of thing.
02:04:30.000It's easier to get the sponsorship money from stuff that's less interesting or less aligned with it.