In this episode, we talk about martial law, vaccines, and what it means to live under martial law. We are joined by author and political science professor Wilford Reilly to discuss martial law in the United States, Australia, and around the world.
00:01:04.000According to at least one report that I was reading from the U.S.
00:01:07.000government, we cited on TimCast.com, martial law requires a military commander to assume authority to create or execute laws.
00:01:16.000And so what's happening in Australia doesn't officially count as martial law.
00:01:20.000Though many people are saying it is because the military has been deployed in Sydney To enforce the lockdowns, and that's one way of putting it.
00:01:28.000The other way to put it is Australia has called in the military to suppress protests against the lockdowns.
00:01:38.000I mean, on top of that, in the United States, there's talk of vaccine mandates for federal employees.
00:01:42.000Now, I believe the firefighters union is saying no to this.
00:01:46.000The postal workers union is saying no to this.
00:01:48.000There's talk about maybe a national mandate in general, and now the White House is pushing back saying, no, no, no, we're not going to do that.
00:01:55.000The New York Times has come out with a story saying vaccinated people can spread the Delta variant just as easily as unvaccinated people, which has sparked a major controversy as the White House and other officials are claiming the New York Times is fake news and they're publishing misinformation.
00:02:08.000And then the Washington Post published something similar, so... Hey, YouTube!
00:02:12.000I don't know what's true anymore, so I'll just say whatever YouTube says in their official rules is the truth, and talk to your doctor.
00:03:09.000Um, I think that the simplest definition, because you're going back in political science over different sorts of civilization, would be the military taking over day-to-day administration, deciding whether or not you get to do regular, ordinary things.
00:03:23.000I mean, definitely some of the COVID policy in, for example, Australia, I mean, is approaching that level where you see, I mean, you know, tanks moving around in the streets to prevent people from coming outside and that sort of thing.
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00:04:51.000Let's talk about this first story we got here.
00:05:00.000Here's the first story we got from TimCast.com.
00:05:02.000Australia sends their military to enforce coronavirus lockdowns in Sydney.
00:05:07.000NPR reports the military's help is needed to enforce the restrictions because a small minority of people thought the rules didn't apply to them.
00:05:14.000New South Wales Police Minister David Elliott told Australia's Channel 9.
00:05:18.000Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has come in for heavy criticism in recent weeks over the slow pace of vaccinations in Australia, where about 14% have been fully dosed.
00:05:28.000One of the poorest records among any member country of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
00:05:34.000So when they say a small minority thinks the rules don't apply to them, did they mean by that 86%?
00:05:38.000Because that doesn't sound like a small minority to me.
00:05:56.000You are less likely to transmit it, the Prime Minister told reporters on Friday, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
00:06:01.000Well, now, according to the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Daily Mail and many other outlets, You are not less likely to transmit it.
00:06:49.000Yeah, I mean, so first of all, I think there's a lot of competition in this race, in these lanes, but Australia seems to have had one of the craziest reactions to COVID-19 of any major state.
00:07:01.000I mean, I don't ever want to give incorrect figures, but the day-over-day rolling death average there is, it's below nine, I know that.
00:07:07.000It's an extremely extraordinary... I think it's way lower.
00:07:36.000I don't have the full numbers, but it's in the 9,000s.
00:07:38.000Yeah, the total number of individuals under 18, at least in the USA, because we keep hearing about the children that have died from or with COVID-19, is under 600.
00:08:38.000You know, I was thinking about this, and maybe there is something to that.
00:08:41.000We, as Americans, fought for our independence to win it.
00:08:45.000People in Australia, it was part of, you know, I don't know the full history of Australia, but you know, penal colony.
00:08:50.000I don't know their full, the numbers for Australia, I can only really speak to the U.S., but I will say that there was this viral video that was, I just put it, crazy and hilarious, I suppose?
00:09:01.000It's a news report of Australia, where they're like, one person has been infected!
00:09:09.000It's like, wow, people have gone really over the top with this stuff.
00:09:14.000I tell you, I see some of these stories, and I'm like, if there was anything... If I was trying to advise any of these people to, like, discourage vaccination, I'd be like, keep doing what you're doing, this is a great... No, they're trying to get people to get the vaccine.
00:09:28.000But they're just doing basically the opposite.
00:09:30.000You think when you have 14% of your population getting vaccinated, sending in the military is going to make them think you have their best interest at heart?
00:10:14.000So even at the peak of COVID-19, I had no objection at that time to wearing a mask.
00:10:18.000I actually got one that works, which most people didn't, but you're not seeing a devastating world ending plague.
00:10:25.000Like, even at the peak of COVID-19, there's no evidence, really, if you look at the Western European studies, the major pieces that were actually published in journals, that lockdowns worked better than sort of well-done NPI.
00:10:36.000You know, stay home if you feel sick, quarantine the sick, clean your body, that kind of thing.
00:10:41.000But now with the vaccine out, and in most of these countries, including Australia, the truly vulnerable vaccinated, you're seeing these utterly bizarre moves.
00:10:51.000Like, what you described is a factual situation.
00:10:53.000There was one infection, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that wasn't a death.
00:11:08.000I mean, that's a region that's roughly comparable to one of the Dakotas.
00:11:11.000It's a huge state, decent number of people in it.
00:11:15.000I think if this is possible in reaction to that level of risk, like one, let's say, death means 900,000 incarcerations for three months, it would be very, very difficult for these Western societies to do anything functional going forward.
00:11:30.000Not even the stereotypical war with China, but what are we going to do about climate change?
00:11:41.000And at some point, people are just going to have to say, no, I'm going to vote for the conservative party or even the libertarians or whatever is necessary to... Crazy stuff.
00:11:49.000Whatever is necessary to kind of get this... You should not stop living your life because someone else might die.
00:11:57.000That way lies a society with no cars, you know, so on down the line.
00:12:00.000Some people do think this is the climate lockdown.
00:12:02.000We saw very early on, after a couple weeks of the lockdown, the New York Times posted that story saying the Earth is healing.
00:12:09.000And people started talking, a bunch of articles emerged about pollution and everything clearing up.
00:12:14.000And then a lot of people said they're probably exploiting the crisis because they have the climate change agenda.
00:12:20.000But then, you know, I wonder... First, you know, I'll say this.
00:12:24.000I don't trust the powerful political establishment and elite.
00:12:27.000They claim climate change is a disaster, but they buy beachfront property and things like that.
00:12:31.000So, part of me wonders, though... We talked about this the other night with the windshield phenomenon.
00:13:40.000You know, eat and fart ourselves to death like yeast in a bottle?
00:13:43.000Or would we need some collective action to stave something off?
00:13:46.000Or at the worst, are there ideologues who believe a doomsday scenario who have seized the reins of power and are imposing their cult-like ideology over everybody else?
00:13:55.000That's a fascinating, a bit of a leading question there, something we're both skeptical about in our leadership around the world.
00:14:00.000But in reality, so there are a couple of different elements to this.
00:14:03.000First of all, I am not a conspiracy theorist because I think most people are stupid.
00:14:07.000I mean, we're both from Chicago, I believe both from that South Side area.
00:15:01.000I mean, like, even watching people I knew in high school try to sell coke in Little Italy or East Aurora or something, I mean, the percentage of those guys who went to jail is like 65.
00:15:09.000I don't think that there are actually functional behind-the-scenes cabals where you have one Arab guy, one Nigerian guy, one French guy, two Americans and a Brit that are secretly trying to control The economy of the world or something like that.
00:15:27.000I mean many of the things that people say in sort of conspiratorial conversations like Skull and Bones at Yale or Bilderberg group actually exist.
00:15:33.000You have groups of rich people that clash with one another and pursue different agendas just like you have groups of upper middle class people that do this or media individuals.
00:15:41.000But I do think like First, there was a weird sort of climate porn that you saw in the mainstream media for a while, where you'd see these headlines like, whales have been spotted in such and such a canal.
00:15:54.000It's like, that's because there aren't any goddamn people.
00:15:57.000But they've taken all the ships out of the normal shipping lanes.
00:16:04.000The best of these articles, either from COVID or within the couple of years before, was The Guardian, why Genghis Khan was good for the environment.
00:16:11.000Because he killed so many people, you see that the smoke from the Cook Fire stopped the planet cold.
00:16:17.000Are there some other people they would like to make those claims about?
00:16:22.000Well, I think that today, I don't think there's a conscious attempt to usher in a climate lockdown because of COVID, but last sentence, kind of getting to the point here on my end, I think that the bigger issue is that the people that are running a lot of American discourse have the same solutions to everything.
00:16:42.000This is, so if you notice the climate solutions, like we need to pursue a more socialist, generous policy of XYZ, are the same as the COVID solutions, and the same as the proposed solutions to our race crisis.
00:16:53.000So I don't think the issue is so much what the key that opens the door is, it's kind of what comes through.
00:16:59.000Like, all of these things are being used by people that want the same agenda, to a certain extent.
00:17:06.000It's a standalone complex, we often say.
00:17:15.000But when you look at the Pareto distribution of, you know, basically almost everything in existence, you get the extremes at the very top and at the very bottom, but these extreme Wealth of file.
00:17:47.000True, but I think the issue of the creature from Jekyll Island.
00:17:50.000I think the issue with that, though, is that at the simplest level in political science, about half of the rich disagree with the other half.
00:17:58.000I mean, that's why there's this extraordinary kind of back and forth of like, well, you're funded by the Koch brothers.
00:18:03.000Well, you're funded by George Soros and the sciences.
00:18:05.000I mean, you have the Chinese billionaires that unexpectedly are kind of coming in often on the right side of things, politically.
00:18:11.000I mean, on the other hand, you have the moon men, these tech bros that are currently flying around in space.
00:18:17.000So I don't think there's one unified position that people are advancing across, say, great wealth to try to move the world forward.
00:18:29.000I think that there are some positions that are more influential than others because one group of sort of coastal, upper middle class, urban, big city, mostly leftist happens to control the media, social media, and academia in the USA and Britain in particular.
00:18:46.000So there are ideas you see more often than you see other ideas and I think that that is The climate panic is one of those, but I don't think in practice a Governor DeSantis or somebody is necessarily going to back that actually happening, or the billionaires in that state are going to.
00:19:00.000You're familiar with the journo lists?
00:19:09.000It was a list, it was a web list of journalists that all communicate with each other.
00:19:12.000Oh yeah, yeah, this is... This is a good example of, I guess, I don't know, it borders on conspiracy in a sense, in that they would all share stories and then agree on them because they were all in the same chat, and then all of these outlets would publish the same stories.
00:19:26.000Well, to clarify, I don't think conspiracies don't exist.
00:19:29.000Actually, to talk to kind of the audience for a second, if you don't think there are wealthy, powerful people behind the scenes that sometimes collab together to do things that would get you arrested, you're a fool.
00:19:42.000I mean, even at my little level, I'm a member of the lower, upper class, and I'm often contacted by friends from the U of I Law, for example, or Freedom Fest, which I just attended.
00:19:55.000Great event, but pretty high-level stuff.
00:20:03.000We're going to trip them from behind with this one.
00:20:05.000And I would only imagine what Prince Harry's inbox looks like.
00:20:08.000So of course there are conspiracies in that sense.
00:20:11.000The question I guess really is just when it crosses the line to the crazy scenarios a lot of the left and the hard right seem to believe in.
00:20:19.000So like for example my email list right now is I think 8,000 people.
00:20:27.000I'm pretty sure I could create a story if I happen to find out some piece of information about a crooked politician.
00:20:33.000The The only reason that's annoying when you look at the journal lists or a lot of the, I mean, there are a whole, like jobs that are left is still up on Google where they advertise all these left-leaning activist jobs.
00:20:44.000And it's one network of people, many of whom don't admit they're left-leaning activists.
00:20:47.000So the issue with that, I think is the pretense of neutrality, right?
00:20:51.000So if there's anybody from say CNN or NPR on, on the message, the listserv that that's very ethically problematic.
00:20:59.000I think both you and I would say, like, I'm heterodox, maybe center-center-right politically.
00:21:03.000I think the government's a bunch of scumbags.
00:21:08.000If you say I'm a neutral reporter for NBC and you are taking talking points from, you know, a junior operative at the DNC that you're sleeping with who's the person ahead of you on the journo list... Oh my.
00:21:20.000No, but I mean... Are you talking about a real person there?
00:21:32.000But anyway, but anyway, like the, the point of all this is that if you go on the air and you're saying this BS, this goes for the right as well.
00:21:40.000Like all these guys talking about chastity until marriage is critically important.
00:21:54.000And, you know, I used to think that we would try to have journalists keep their opinions to themselves so they could just do the job and not cause strife.
00:22:03.000But I think that that era is long since passed.
00:22:06.000You know, because the difference in opinions now is fundamental worldview.
00:22:10.000Where someone's opinion is literally them saying, I support the Constitution.
00:22:14.000And someone else's opinion saying, I oppose it.
00:22:15.000And I'm like, well, hold on there a minute.
00:22:17.000Like, we've got a very, very distinct difference of worldview on this.
00:22:22.000It used to be a journalist could say something, well, of course I support the United States and the Constitution.
00:22:28.000So now, if you came out and said, I believe America should enforce its immigration laws, you're right-wing.
00:22:36.000That's one of the ways they've tried accusing me of being a conservative, is that they're like, Tim Pool has defended conservative claims about immigration in the United States.
00:22:54.000I mean, you can literally just say something innocuous and it's literally conservative because the left has become so extreme and revolutionary, I suppose.
00:23:04.000Yeah, and I also think this moves in cycles.
00:23:06.000I mean, like, I'm a hip-hop kid, and I remember the moral majority in the 1980s, although Tipper Gore was part of this, but, like, chasing rappers and hard rockers through the halls of Congress, you know, asking two live crew what a coochie was.
00:23:20.000Like, just this ridiculous, embarrassing crap.
00:23:24.000You know, and so that sort of thing, like, had they gotten their way, we wouldn't be talking about parental warning labels on rap or rock CDs.
00:23:31.000We'd be talking, or, I mean, imagine EDM, Cruella, and all that.
00:23:34.000You'd be talking about that not being available on the market, like, Get It Wet would be available only as, like, a download from some pirate site, same with a DMX or Jay-Z album.
00:23:43.000So that was the right overextending, and I think we've definitely seen the pendulum swing back into complete lunacy.
00:23:48.000This is one of the things that I noticed a lot when I wrote Taboo specifically,
00:23:52.000because some of it was intended to be edgy, like, oh, let's take on the alt-right, let's take on BLM.
00:23:57.000But like the immigration chapter, I thought was just completely neutral.
00:24:01.000Like at one point, I think my description was, we should let in
00:24:04.000sane, reasonably able-bodied, non-criminal immigrants capable of getting jobs,
00:24:12.000which might involve some kind of basic IQ or aptitude test.
00:24:16.000And people started describing this as sort of a far-right proposal.
00:24:19.000Like during an interview, someone asked me if I would let in disabled women with AIDS.
00:24:23.000And I said, I mean, I kind of danced around the question, but it was just sort of,
00:24:28.000I wouldn't prioritize that as an immigration policy, Like, there's an element of amoral common sense that you kind of need to exist as a healthy adult, and I think to some extent we need to get back to
00:24:42.000Let's say morally rational shared common sense, like the country's flawed, but if you openly fight against it, we're not going to say that you're the highest form of patriot.
00:24:50.000This is one of the biggest problems we have right now.
00:24:53.000A far right, in the colloquial sense, opinion on immigration would be shut down.
00:25:50.000There should obviously be some limits so we don't get exploited, like people who might come from Africa to Brazil and then try and come here.
00:26:02.000Well, I mean, I do think you need to get into some of the technical definitions.
00:26:05.000I don't necessarily think, without mocking your position, that you'd be an asylum seeker from Mexico in any kind of real political sense.
00:26:12.000This was one of the things that struck me, because I took some time off from standard academic writing while I was working on the books, and coming back into this debate, people were starting to use the term asylum seeker for Economic migrant.
00:26:27.000Yeah, but people coming from countries like, in terms of a lot of the groups in Chicago, Mexico, Poland, Guatemala.
00:26:33.000Guatemala actually would be one of the Central American countries that we're supposed to feel the most sort of heart-rend for.
00:27:33.000Yeah, so there are certain circumstances where I can absolutely understand.
00:27:36.000Like, if a guy's being chased and he runs through the river or whatever to escape, it's like, all right, well, you know, I don't know what to say to that guy.
00:27:57.000Well, I mean, I think... Not anymore, actually, not anymore.
00:28:00.000The first question in response to even kind of the moral component of that would be, like, if I grew up in Baltimore, do I have the right to seek asylum in Japan?
00:28:09.000Yeah, I mean, there's an element of... So, like, looking at this point by point as a political scientist, like, if you're in Mexico... First of all, if you're in Mexico and you're engaged in a violent gunfight with the cartels, you're very unlikely to be a taxpayer.
00:28:21.000I mean, like the old American mafia, there are some brutal abuses of women and so on in Coyote roles, but it's very unlikely that the cartels and, say, a group of policemen are, without any negotiations, going to challenge each other to the kind of fighting that requires one of the policemen to flee here.
00:30:28.000Like, I'm not literally going around saying, like, simply having a position where you're like, hey, how does this make sense?
00:30:33.000I think it has a lot to do with, I guess, tribal psychosis.
00:30:38.000That people are so desperate to climb their, claw their way to the top of the social order on the left, that they're constantly one-upping their opinions and accusing the other people of being impure.
00:30:49.000So you get some person who, like, ten years ago was on the left and was like, I agree with Bernie Sanders.
00:30:54.000Well, by that standard today, you are a far right, you know, individual.
00:31:00.000All the really awful words they'll use for you.
00:31:04.000How are we supposed to have a functioning political ecosystem if one side has no moral system or framework or principles?
00:31:11.000And it's just, I'm going to say the most extreme thing possible that moves me further and further in one direction.
00:31:16.000One of the things that I think actually is that there are almost no people that actually believe this stuff.
00:31:22.000I think you see the massive influence of, again, the lower-upper class, coastal, urban, very specific, mostly white, liberal block on sites like Twitter and Insta.
00:31:32.000I mean, so, obviously that famous piece came out, I think, Wired, that found out that, what was it, 15% of Americans are on Twitter at all?
00:31:40.000Yeah, I think it's 22% of Americans are on Twitter at all.
00:31:49.00010% are responsible for something like 80% of the viral tweets.
00:31:51.000So you've got, let's say 2.2, 2.3% of the population that's driving this discourse.
00:31:57.000And a lot of it, it's very disproportionately, first of all, until pretty recently, it was also very disproportionately annoying alt-right.
00:32:06.000But they haven't cut out their opponents.
00:32:08.000So I mean, extremely SJW heavy, a lot of TRAs, a lot of trans rights activists, so on.
00:32:15.000A lot of positions that almost don't exist in mainstream America.
00:32:18.000And I think it's important to keep that distinction up.
00:32:20.000Like, these people influence the discourse that goes into kind of Yeah, mid-level journalism.
00:32:27.000Like, if you're on Twitter and you have more than 10,000 followers, you're very likely to also contribute articles from time to time to, say, Jezebel or something like that.
00:32:37.000So you have a lot of this seen in, like, urban youth life, and it seems like it's very prevalent.
00:32:42.000But if you ask people, like, should immigrants be able to read or something like that, like, you'd see a massive, massive yes versus no in America.
00:32:49.000Let's say you've got a hundred cities with a hundred people in each city.
00:33:04.000And now you have a city-sized Socialist community online, because the one Socialist from each of the 100 cities now forms a massive community on Twitter, where it seems like, wow, look at all of these people!
00:33:22.000And then you're like, oh, it's just one person in their bedroom in these different places.
00:33:26.000The problem is, it really does have an impact.
00:33:28.000These big brands will get harassed by this community, and then they'll issue a public statement on TV to tens of millions of people about how they now agree with this fringe belief, and they apologize for not seeing it sooner.
00:33:42.000And the problem is, it is true, very few people use Twitter.
00:33:45.000But Twitter does have influence, hilariously, it's stupid, and regular people don't speak up.
00:33:55.000I mean, and what you see, like, I mean, your platform obviously is on par.
00:33:58.000Like, I looked at the ratings for most of the major primetime cable news shows on MSNBC and CNN the other day, actually posted this to Twitter, and most of them get less engagement than I do on Twitter.
00:34:10.000I think Don Lemon was at 570,000 engagements either per day or per week.
00:34:18.000But I mean, And scrolling up all the way up to Tucker Carlson was like three million a day.
00:34:22.000But the simple reality is that most of the Temcast interviews I've looked at have a million, a million and a half views.
00:34:28.000I think that when people start talking and saying things that are obviously true, that kind of break the gaslight, you'll find that the other 98% of people want to listen to them.
00:34:39.000And that's why there's this fanatical attempt to do two things.
00:34:42.000One is to label people in the most ridiculous way possible, like Joe Rogan or Jimmy Dore as Nazis.
00:34:49.000And in reality, these are cats that are all across the spectrum.
00:34:51.000Matt Taibbi and I actually, one of the first times I was on Twitter, we were arguing about BS for a while because he's, I don't even know if he remembers, but he's significantly on the left.
00:35:12.000It's this attempt to kind of just shuffle foot off the stage and pretend nothing happened.
00:35:15.000But the second and more troubling aspect of this is the attempt by conventional media to take the actual internet kids off of social media.
00:35:25.000And replace them with kind of AAA versions of conventional media shows.
00:35:30.000That's very definitely something happening.
00:35:32.000When I look at YouTube, you see suggestions from CNN on the sidebar.
00:35:35.000So this is what I was going to bring up.
00:35:37.000I can pull up the ratings Thursday for all these different cable channels.
00:35:41.000And in the key demographic, 25 to 54, CNN loses easily to Timcast IRL.
00:35:49.000However, when you take into account all of their viewers, you've got 8PM Anderson Cooper
00:35:55.000with 774,000, you've got Cuomo with 861,000, Don Lemon with 716,000.
00:36:01.000And so they're doing really well among a lot older people, which says a lot about what
00:36:07.000will happen with shows like this moving forward.
00:36:09.000Perhaps people will age out and, you know, then CNN will become less and less relevant and more people watch shows like this.
00:36:16.000But the one thing you need to understand is that I can sit here and say, look how great this show is, look how many viewers we get.
00:36:21.000Because their TV ratings are in the gutter.
00:36:23.000And then YouTube puts CNN on the front page.
00:36:45.000You can't put TV on YouTube and think it'll work.
00:36:48.000Yeah, no, but I think that this is kind of like the old Russian division between Pravda and Samizdat.
00:36:54.000I mean, so there are 150 million views of CNN, perhaps on a daily basis, if you're counting YouTube's Front's piece, and I'm sure perhaps airport lounges and so on.
00:37:05.000But how many of those people are actually watching CNN and absorbing political content from them and taking it seriously?
00:38:26.000But many of these content producers are outpacing the major shows on network news.
00:38:32.000And all you have to do is go upstairs and talk into your computer.
00:38:35.000I mean, one of my most watched videos, again, my mind in general, aren't at that alone,
00:38:40.000I mean, so anyone now can become, given any reasonable amount of training and honor, but can become a journalistic resource.
00:38:50.000So that's what the mass media is terrified of.
00:38:52.000Last comment here, they're not taking quote-unquote conservatives offline because you and Jimmy Doran aren't conservatives in the first place.
00:39:01.000So like the one time, I'm center-right personally, but I tried to look at this honestly once, and like that month the majority of the people deplatformed.
00:39:07.000Like Chapo Trap House, You Owe Blacks Trillions, like the funny reparations page, Cop Block, one of the oldest libertarian party accounts.
00:42:01.000If you post this link, Facebook will flag it as fake news.
00:42:06.000Facebook, because they've given the ability to third-party fact-checkers who are crackpot wingnut conspiracy theorists, have labeled the CDC as fake news.
00:42:58.000This is what happens when you have a crackpot broken media.
00:43:03.000That people just keep saying, I trust the science, I believe the media.
00:43:07.000They just believe whatever they're told until it just goes full psycho.
00:43:11.000Now we're in this really crazy space, where the news is changing so rapidly, because there's so much contradictory information coming up, and coexisting at the same time, that people are writing contradictory stories at the same time.
00:43:26.000Let's say Fauci comes out and says, you gotta wear two masks!
00:43:29.000And the next day he says, no I didn't mean it, you don't gotta wear two masks.
00:43:32.000That information... Changes in the viral environment have prompted a very necessary revision of policy by the leaders at the CDC.
00:43:39.000Well, so here's what happens with these two nearly concurrent contradictory statements.
00:43:46.000MSNBC might see the statement, you gotta wear two masks.
00:43:49.000An hour later, Fauci says, no, no, I was mistaken.
00:43:51.000I mean, the real story is like a day later.
00:43:53.000But let's say an hour later, he says, no.
00:43:54.000Fox News then publishes, Fauci says, not to wear two masks.
00:43:58.000MSNBC and Fox could publish those stories at the exact same time.
00:44:02.000And then the leftist will see MSNBC, the conservative will see Fox News, and then they'll both be at a bar and be like, why are you wearing two masks?
00:44:22.000The New York Times says, breaking news, the Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and may be spread by vaccinated people as easily as the unvaccinated, an internal CDC report said.
00:44:32.000But then we get this guy, Ben Wakana, in all caps, Vaccinated people do not transmit the virus at the same rate as unvaccinated people.
00:44:40.000And if you fail to include that context, you're doing it wrong.
00:44:42.000And then people are like, who do I trust?
00:45:17.000For a lot of the things I report, like The national crime rate, for example, where there's this huge argument, which I've never understood, but a big back and forth on the internet between, like, black guys, working class white guys, Arab guys who might be suspected of terrorism, so on.
00:45:49.000Well, yeah, but this is Twitter banning him.
00:45:50.000Twitter banned Tommy Robinson, I believe it was Tommy Robinson, and Majid Nawaz, who is, like, not a fan of Tommy, defended him, saying he published factual data from, you know, crime statistics.
00:46:17.000The rate of violence against transgender people, I actually wrote an article about this for Quill at once, because one, if there actually is a hate crime epidemic, you want to stop it.
00:46:24.000But two, I strongly suspected that most shooting or stabbing victims would be young working class men, about 50% people of color, because we know that, because that's the crime data.
00:46:34.000But anyway, so I looked at this and actually found the rate of violence against transgender women is lower than the rate of violence against just men, along with a bunch of other groups.
00:46:42.000Blacks, poor whites, so on down the line.
00:46:55.000But those are the only two cases I've ever seen.
00:46:57.000I mean, in general, if you cite the BJS crime report, like in academic Twitter, that it's extremely widely known that men have a higher crime rate than women.
00:47:04.000African-Americans, at least before you adjust for age and social class, have a higher crime rate.
00:47:09.000When you tweet the racial component, tons of people get banned for this all the time.
00:47:15.000In the past, if you saw that 60% of the crimes were committed by black men, it doesn't mean that you're more likely to have that happen in the future, just because that was the rate of the past.
00:47:24.000Doesn't mean that that's the likelihood of the future.
00:47:27.000So that, I could see, could be looked at as like, he phrased it wrong, he incited... Right, right, right.
00:48:02.000Dave then, when he came back, he cited the source.
00:48:05.000And then there's a story from the Washington Post where they say the viral load among people who are vaccinated, it's comparable to those who aren't.
00:48:17.000Essentially confirming what Dave said.
00:48:20.000He got suspended on Twitter for saying, and one of the problems is, this is why I showed this post from, I want to pull this up again, from Facebook where they flagged the CDC as fake news.
00:48:29.000The reason the CDC got flagged as fake news is because the data changes so rapidly.
00:48:33.000And so this story comes out, and then people start citing it, and then some other people cite it in probably incorrect ways, and so they say, all right, this link is now off limits.
00:48:52.000Actually, I think that there's a broader problem here that's being illustrated.
00:48:56.000So when I say, you know, tons of academics cite this and there's no, there's no risk of removal.
00:49:00.000And you say, well, I know a bunch of people, some academics, some pundits that have been removed.
00:49:03.000A bigger issue is the total unreliable unreliability and BS nature.
00:49:08.000of all of these social media policies. What accounts for the difference? Probably which
00:49:13.000single guy at the director level at highest was looking at that post from Riley or Poole or Rubin
00:49:19.000or whatever at that day? Because when people say things like Taiwan is... It's not a director.
00:49:24.000Well, it's a junior staffer then. No, no. These are...
00:49:27.000These are outsourced to tracking farms in India.
00:49:32.000These are people who sometimes don't even speak English.
00:49:35.000A stronger version of the same argument.
00:49:36.000I've actually talked with people who have done this work with Google and Facebook and things like that and they say That there will be someone, you know, in, say, India, who's going through the rules and trying to figure out what's bannable and what isn't, and that's why they have so many mistakes.
00:49:50.000Yeah, no, I've had actually this same conversation.
00:49:52.000I'm fully prepared to accept that it's true, by the way, just an enhancement of the same thing.
00:49:56.000When I started teaching CyberSec back in, like, 2016-17, we had people that were execs in the tech world talk to either me or the students, to at least some extent, and their comment then was it's generally, like, post-college, junior staffer types, If something is really controversial, like a discussion of child pornography, the manager in the room might come take a look at it.
00:50:15.000But one of the things with- Like right now.
00:50:19.000Like you just said it, so now someone at YouTube probably got a notification.
00:50:22.000I mean, well, I think we're- It's true.
00:51:08.000One thing I do want to say about this, though, you have had some of these things happen because you're extremely well known in the internet space.
00:51:14.000Big data is a lot stupider than most people think it is.
00:51:17.000I mean, when people say things like, if you're on a pirate site and you click on a file, they can figure out your IP address.
00:51:23.000I mean, my IP address is the Starbucks in Frankfort, Kentucky, if hypothetically I would ever commit such an evil sin.
00:51:47.000Like, obviously, first of all, there are probably multi-flagged personalities like Nero back in the day on Twitter that these boys would love to take down.
00:51:55.000So I'm pretty sure that like Poole, Rogan, maybe five or six others might be on a board with people that are at that higher level just looking for mistakes.
00:52:06.000Like, for example, I would be very careful to say transgender women during the show.
00:52:09.000That's actually what I would say during polite conversation anyway, but I mean, it's just, if I were to say something else, who knows?
00:52:15.000And we actually, as I have with all large-scale media, Tucker Carlson, we had this conversation before the show.
00:52:21.000But I don't think in the majority of cases, big data is all that good.
00:52:25.000I mean, you have someone speaking their second language in Bajalapur.
00:52:29.000Looking at, what would it be per person?
00:52:32.00035,000 accounts on a daily basis or something?
00:52:34.000So in general, you have a contradiction where there's a mass amount of all of the content we could describe.
00:52:40.000I mean, including actual accounts for jihadist groups all over social media.
00:52:45.000But there are also people that constantly get sanctioned and punished and so on.
00:52:49.000It's the same way the cops know who the bad kids in town are or whatever.
00:52:52.000But the key point is that, last sentence, nobody knows what the hell the rules mean.
00:52:56.000It's almost impossible to get in touch with these companies.
00:52:59.000I actually once got so irritated with Twitter, I was trying to fix some problem with my account, that I asked on my Twitter, does anyone know the actual address from their initial IPO, the emails and so on they had to list?
00:53:09.000It's a good way to get this stuff, by the way.
00:53:41.000Because this is the way the society is starting to function, that you have followers, you have notoriety, then all of a sudden you find out that people are calling you and you have email addresses and they're here for you all of a sudden.
00:53:52.000You find out that if you get bad service on an airline and you've got 10,000 followers, well you might get a response, but what's that?
00:54:22.000And it's fairly effective for a lot of people, interestingly.
00:54:25.000Social media is an easy way to connect.
00:54:26.000So now we know their handle and we can send them a message and they can see it.
00:54:30.000And some of these channels are moderately large.
00:54:32.000When I get demonetized, I hit up Google.
00:54:35.000I send an email right away and they say, sorry about that, no problem, you got your sorter right away.
00:54:38.000Sometimes they go like, we're not giving you this one for this or that reason.
00:54:42.000When the Alex Jones episode got taken down... So here's the first thing.
00:54:46.000I hit up Google and I said, are there any people that we have that are outright no-nos for YouTube, like you would ban us for simply having?
00:55:16.000Because the people who chose this were higher up than we are.
00:55:19.000So it's almost like this neo-feudalist thing where They are creating classes of people.
00:55:25.000The average person you can have your account maybe will ban you.
00:55:28.000A lot of the accounts that are getting banned and getting censored are small, and this is why you don't see it in the media.
00:55:33.000The left likes to say cancel culture isn't real because these celebrities still are rich or something.
00:55:37.000But what they don't realize is that 90% of those who got suspended and deleted for a political opinion were someone with 50 followers or 100 followers.
00:55:44.000And now they're IP banned, they can't get back on the service, and they're like, okay, whatever, I guess.
00:55:48.000So the lower class individuals, in terms of the social hierarchy, the social credit score, whatever they're building, will have no access to Facebook, will have no one to message, will simply say, please, and they'll say, bug off, we don't care, and then the people who have prominence are given access.
00:56:07.000It's a combination of, they'll look for you to make sure they're worried about your social influence, but also, when it comes to Facebook, I know people.
00:56:17.000Like, I know people in the news industry and they say, here's the email you need, Tim.
00:56:23.000So now we're seeing this weird world where people are desperate to have followers because it makes them feel like they can finally get access to systems and be treated fairly.
00:56:30.000Yeah, I will say also, when I mentioned coming from the sales or trading floor space, there are a whole variety of platforms.
00:56:36.000I mean, back in the day, it was Manta, Lead411, so on, Instant Checkmate works well now, where you can pull up the contacts for the executives at most companies, including some of the social companies.
00:56:45.000Like when we got genuinely irritated at Twitter, we started, I mean, I started doing that.
00:56:49.000So, I mean, you can look at IPO filings, you can look at who the listed executives online
00:57:46.000But again, the question is, should you have to do that?
00:57:48.000I'd prefer to see, when we talk about politicians potentially regulating these brands or sparring back and forth with them, one thing that I would like to see is just a common sense demand that these rules be illustrated.
00:58:05.000Well, there's no prohibited guests, but they won't tell me what was said that got the video flagged again.
00:58:09.000We can only make assumptions about what we think was actually said.
00:58:12.000And so when I said to them, listen, we'll make clips from the show and we'll remove whatever you said was against the rules, and they said, we won't tell you.
00:58:19.000And I'm like, well, what do you want me to do?
00:58:21.000You got to keep in mind, they all have the ability to ban anyone at any time, as per their terms.
00:58:26.000Every social media site has that in their terms.
00:58:44.000There was an entire genre of legal cases in the 80s and 90s, as you guys probably know, where people started talking about non-traditional property, like the right to receive welfare benefits if welfare happened to be legal in their state.
00:59:49.000And not only that, I think Dave should file a defamation suit because they claimed that he put out medical misinformation, but Dave was citing the Washington Post and I think it was Click Orlando.
00:59:58.000I'm not sure what the other site he meant.
01:00:01.000And he's like, what did I, I posted these, these articles.
01:00:04.000Like it was, it was a statement based on this.
01:00:05.000They claimed it was misinformation, in which case that's a false statement of fact.
01:00:10.000So he should at least try to sue, and the damages are that his new book is coming out and they're shutting down his means for promotion.
01:00:17.000This is a platform where people pay to get access to share information.
01:00:21.000So if Dave has built up that access, which creates the content which drives advertisement to the platform, I think it's time people start firing off these lawsuits saying, you can't do this.
01:00:31.000But they're allowed to ban anyone at any time.
01:00:34.000He signed that terms of service when he made an account.
01:00:36.000Right, but what you don't understand is I'm arguing that That has to change, and it changes with suing.
01:00:42.000So precedent will be set, for instance, Twitter defamed Dave Rubin.
01:00:47.000See, one of the problems they have is that they could have just said, no reason, we banned him for fun.
01:01:00.000I believe it was, you know, I don't wanna get sued either, but I believe it was misinformation, I could be wrong.
01:01:05.000And Dave could say that's just factually not true.
01:01:08.000James O'Keefe is suing, specifically because they claim- That's good, I'm not surprised by that.
01:01:12.000Right, he was- I mean, he's the master of it.
01:01:14.000They said he was operating multiple accounts, so he said, that's fake, that's a lie, it's a false statement of fact, and I'm gonna sue you.
01:01:20.000And that was a big mistake, because now he can go for discovery and get internal communications on what they've said about him and his organization.
01:01:32.000Yeah, the one question, by the way, in terms of your point, I think it's a good one when you say, well, they're saying that they can get rid of you for the legal language would be any reason or no reason at all.
01:01:41.000So even if you sue and you prove that you were defamed, you might get some money damages, but they can still likely keep you off the site.
01:01:48.000I think the issue there is, is that what's called an unethical adhesion contract?
01:01:52.000Like, can you sign a deal with a company that is going to give you the chance to make tens of millions of dollars where they can take all of your money and all of your followers away at any time?
01:02:04.000I don't, I mean, law school was a while ago, but I would have some real questions about whether you can.
01:02:09.000I would have some real questions about, now that these sites are growing into serious businesses, whether you can do some of this junior varsity crap.
01:02:17.000Like, for no reason given, remove someone from your platform permanently and take their entire follower count away.
01:02:58.000If I said to you, Ian, you can come here and do all this work, and then have a great opportunity, and so long as you don't say a naughty word, you're fine.
01:03:12.000And then one day, after you've been working here for a long time, I just kick you out the door.
01:03:16.000And you're like, but I didn't break any rules.
01:03:44.000But the issue here I think would be more what's called an adhesion contract, where if you sign a contract with a player like your camera company, when you look at the back of the box of a piece of tech equipment, the terms and conditions go on for 16 printed out pages in a couple situations I've seen, and at the end you check your X and you submit.
01:04:04.000If that contract were to include something like, if this piece of equipment breaks, you owe us $1,000, or something completely ridiculous, that wouldn't be enforceable, because it would be understood that that's nonsense that the person with more power put into the text of the deal.
01:04:20.000Like, that would be disputed as very unsympathetic.
01:04:22.000And I think, I don't know, I actually think your point's a really good point, but I think social media, My actual reaction is, come on bro it can't work that way.
01:04:30.000Like, even with me at like 40,000 plus maybe like 20,000 on different other platforms, like...
01:04:37.000That's, I've been, my books have made bestseller lists.
01:04:40.000Like it, if you were just to say, okay, we're going to take these 60,000 people away and we're going to set up some kind of permanent ban so that you, I mean, I could, or you could easily, but the average citizen couldn't get back on the platform.
01:04:53.000Like it's, it's you having the power position in the contract doing something that's probably illegal.
01:04:58.000So like, I couldn't sign a contract with you.
01:05:00.000Like Tim couldn't sign a contract that says, if you want to work here and be say a video engineer, I get to punch you in the face twice a day.
01:05:07.000Because it would be a manipulative use of power position.
01:05:11.000I couldn't say, Ian, you can come work on the show, and to work on the show you obviously have to be in the house, and I can evict you from the property without notice at any time.
01:05:45.000Like, I just got a fairly new vehicle.
01:05:47.000Could Mercedes or BMW say something like, if you miss one payment on your car loan, or better yet, if you miss one maintenance trip for your vehicle, we take the vehicle back?
01:06:00.000Can you just say any kind of ridiculous thing in a contract when you're selling a product someone else really needs?
01:06:07.000Not only that, but typically repossessions are forfeiture.
01:06:10.000So if you have a car and you don't pay your loan payment for two months, they may say, we're going to move to repossess the car because you're delinquent.
01:06:18.000Typically, it's not usually two months.
01:06:20.000You can actually just tell the repo guy, it's my car.
01:06:32.000In fact, you can just call the police and say, I'm in a civil dispute, you can't take my property.
01:06:35.000And they'll say, that's right, you can't.
01:06:37.000So in this instance, I wonder if, you know, you mentioned about undue deprivation of income.
01:06:43.000I think the eviction thing is an interesting point.
01:06:45.000There may be laws that people haven't looked at or realized that you're entering into an agreement that grants you some kind of access to a system.
01:06:53.000So it's almost like, at the very least, We created laws to protect tenants for a reason.
01:06:59.000And maybe we can view social media accounts as us as tenants on a platform.
01:07:05.000Considering a lot of the economy is now digital, especially with the way YouTube does superchats and the way people run their business on these digital platforms, we are effectively tenants of these platforms, and we have a contractual agreement.
01:07:16.000But they can evict us without notice immediately?
01:07:18.000Hey man, when you have a business or a house you at least get 30 days and you can file a suit to argue why they can't do this to you, Now, Dave Rubin can be on this platform, creating entertaining content and informative content that builds up an audience on the platform that makes them money, providing a service to them, and then without notice, without due process, they kick him off for a false reason, and defame him in the process.
01:07:41.000Imagine if your landlord came to your house, and you had a pizza shop, and they put up a big sign saying, this pizza shop puts Dookie in their pizza, and then called the cops and the cops came and kicked you out.
01:07:51.000We got to remove defamation just for the argument's sake because they can remove you for no reason.
01:07:58.000I'm saying specifically in the case of Dave Rubin equate it to if Dave was running his business in a physical location, he'd have legal protection.
01:08:03.000One day they just evicted him without notice.
01:08:05.000One day Dave walks to his pizza shop and he shows up and the building's empty and all of his stuff is out in the street, soaking wet in the rain.
01:08:21.000Dave walks one day to his pizza place to open up, but, you know, he's got to get there at 9 a.m.
01:08:25.000because they open up for the early lunch, and all of his equipment has been crushed and mutilated and destroyed, and it's a permanent destruction of everything he's built and everything of value, because Twitter followers and accounts do have a market value.
01:09:39.000As an admin, those people are tough to deal with.
01:09:41.000When they get around the rules, that's why we put in clauses at mines anyway, we can remove anything at any time, because people would be so snaky with the rules to get the most disgusting stuff in front of people, in front of kids, it's crazy.
01:09:55.000So I will say that it's arguable that the content he made was distasteful to a lot of people, but how about they just say, hey guy, this one video you made, we're gonna take it down.
01:10:07.000But then he did it over and over and over.
01:11:45.000But they didn't, they just nuke his income instantly.
01:11:46.000What do you think about small websites?
01:11:49.000Like if you started a website that people could sign into and it had like 500 users that, that you would retain the right to ban anyone at any time.
01:11:57.000People who are not using the platform to run a business.
01:12:00.000You don't know why, but it's like a small social media site.
01:12:03.000So this is the difference between Twitter being a convention center that's contracting you to set up a kiosk and a pizza place having a chair where someone can sit down to enjoy your pizza.
01:12:13.000So if I have a website with users, and I do, hey, go to TimCast.com, become a member.
01:12:17.000That's more akin to like me having a pizza shop and I come in the morning, I open the door and someone comes and sits down in the diner, in the dining room section.
01:12:24.000So, yeah, I can throw them out, because we don't have a contractual agreement other than it's a public accommodation for them to come.
01:12:30.000Now, to be fair, there is still, for websites where you pay membership, there is a bit of an agreement.
01:12:35.000Like, you'd have to actually have a civil dispute over the currency if someone was paying to be a member, and then you kicked them out when they were still active members.
01:12:41.000So if you're like a country club, you can get into a dispute if someone's like, I pay to be here, and they throw them out anyway, and they say, well, you broke the rules.
01:12:47.000You can still get into those conflicts.
01:12:49.000But I'll say Twitter's more like McCormick Place.
01:13:17.000But they do a bunch of events there and car shows.
01:13:20.000If they said, you can come in and set up your kiosk here to display your product during this big convention, and then you go in, and then this generates ticket sales for the greater event, or you pay, you know, or something, or even if they let you in for free, you're spending time, energy, and money to be there.
01:13:39.000For them to just come and just tear down and destroy what you've set up, it costs you money.
01:14:17.000The problem is the Democrats will absolutely never, never push forward a law like this because they're ideologically in a strong position with their ideology controlling these things and Republicans won't do it because Republicans are worthless morons.
01:14:29.000I'm very like laissez-faire about this kind of stuff.
01:14:32.000I don't like the government imposing laws on the corporations about how they have to run their business.
01:14:38.000And I think they've kind of monopolized the social media.
01:14:40.000I wonder what you think about this idea that once a social network gets large enough, we free their software code via law.
01:14:47.000you know, we break up the monopoly of their code.
01:14:49.000So other people can spin up like another YouTube that can co-interoperate with other YouTube.
01:14:54.000So you can subscribe to YouTube on their main users on the main account,
01:14:57.000but you can create your own terms of service on your site.
01:15:00.000So it will create a marketplace of ideas for terms of service.
01:15:05.000Basically, it'll create, the market will be not who has the best technology, it'll be who has the best terms.
01:15:10.000Ian, that's like saying if the city comes and destroys your business with a wrecking ball, you can just go and build another building somewhere else.
01:15:20.000It's very different than physical property.
01:15:24.000I mean, it doesn't really cost, you don't have to build things.
01:15:26.000Just to like chip in, because I mean, you guys are both making excellent points, but in terms of what you said, I think the solution there is probably a little off.
01:15:34.000Yeah, but it's nowhere near as effective as Facebook.
01:15:37.000source code so anyone can know how to, for example, build these kind of sites.
01:15:40.000I mean, I think most of the table is competent enough with tech to at least retain someone
01:16:36.000And so, I mean, you saw this incredible stuff, like, what is it, Amazon Online, whatever their... AWS, yeah.
01:16:43.000Amazon Web Services, Amazon Web Services servers, yeah.
01:16:46.000But, I mean, their actual ability to run a website at the basic level of working with the server, working with the provider at the top level, was taken away.
01:16:56.000I mean, they were taken off the app stores, and it turns out there are only two or three of those.
01:17:01.000So, I mean, that's what destroyed Parler.
01:17:04.000And I think that gets back to a bigger issue here, which is, I totally respect your point.
01:17:10.000I'm very libertarian on a lot of issues.
01:17:12.000When you say, I don't like the government interfering with big tech, sure.
01:17:16.000The issue comes up when you're dealing with businesses that are nearly as powerful as the government.
01:17:21.000I mean, and this is true even outside of tech.
01:17:23.000If you ask someone whether they wanted to be the CEO of Disney or the governor of Montana, no power-seeking person would say, I would want to be the governor of Montana.
01:17:31.000These Fortune 500 companies are extraordinarily powerful players.
01:17:35.000And when you get into tech, when you get into the literal control of speech, I mean, you see that Facebook, Twitter, these kind of Google, have more control over speech, what we see and now what we can say, than really anyone else in the game.
01:17:47.000Certainly, They have more influence than most state-level governments in the USA.
01:17:52.000So kind of getting to the point, I mean, like, if we say we don't want the government to regulate the tech boys, and there are only four or five people that are actually in charge of these tech companies, and they're racing each other to Mars and home-built rockets, these guys are not going to just decide to regulate their business.
01:18:08.000The state, at some level... I like legislation to be as simple as possible, but for the state to come in and say, Due to the fact that this probably violates other well-known laws against, for example, adhesion, you can't simply terminate accounts for any reason or no reason at all, just as you can't fire people because of their race, for example.
01:18:28.000There are caveats like this all throughout the law.
01:18:41.000If people are going to pressure Congress, that's the thing.
01:18:44.000Right, my argument is that we need to make laws to enforce this.
01:18:47.000We need to make laws to definitively state it.
01:18:49.000However, there's also a path towards filing lawsuits and making the correct arguments.
01:18:53.000So one of the problems is, I hear from conservatives all the time that you can't sue for X, you can't sue for Y, and I'm like, you can, you just need to make a good argument, Yes.
01:19:02.000and then get it before a judge and then see if they agree with you
01:19:05.000because like the reality is i've seen judges have really awful rulings
01:19:09.000i've seen judges have ruling where like all of legal twitter was like what was
01:19:13.000he thinking this ruling but the judge said it
01:19:16.000so here's what you do there's gotta be some i've i've seen some lawsuits
01:19:19.000pertaining to like defamation and bannings and i'm like what were these
01:19:22.000lawyers thinking These lawyers don't know anything about the platform, and they don't know how to make an argument to a judge about this.
01:19:29.000I don't want to say something as simple as boomers don't get tech, but I assume all of you, I assume you guys, given interest range, watched the set of hearings on the internet probably four or five years back where people were saying things like, it's a series of tubes.
01:19:46.000I'll tell you my favorite thing I've ever heard.
01:19:48.000When I was working in live streaming, I was developing mobile apps, and I was at a conference with a bunch of well-off individuals, and I was talking about how we're trying to build an app where we can do these photos, we do live streaming, and the woman goes, the cloud!
01:21:03.000I mean, but yeah, this, this is all funny, but actually this ties into something that we really do look at in political science, which is the extremely advanced age being polite for the medium of politicians.
01:21:14.000So like when people are talking about a situation like the 78 year old Joe Biden, if I have that correct, running against like the 74 year old Trump, and people are saying things like Trump is five years younger.
01:21:27.000I mean, you know, I'm pretty sure that if you're running for president of the United States, there are people, you know, following you around, spritzing you with virgin blood and grinding up five Adderall into your banana smoothie, hypothetically.
01:21:39.000But I mean, like, so, my only comment with this is, the issue with a lot of this is that the typical, what is it, circuit court level, maybe district court level, federal judge, doesn't know a whole hell of a lot about the complexities of the internet.
01:21:52.000So people tend to resort to heuristics in times like that.
01:21:55.000Like, yep, I don't like messing with a man's private business.
01:21:58.000But the reality is that if we want to prevent something like... There's no reason Twitter couldn't shut down the Republican Party.
01:22:13.000Because we're focusing so much on the media, which leans 93% left, or left and left leaning moderates, focus on like 1-6.
01:22:20.000Immediately following what was an embarrassing graphic series of incidents, social media Worked together to ban the sitting president from every major social media platform.
01:22:33.000I think YouTube may have restored some content.
01:22:36.000But I mean, like, I was actually talking to a female friend of mine, and she was like, I was at, what's the expensive bike peloton?
01:22:43.000I was at the Peloton gym, and you can't search Trump on Peloton.
01:22:47.000Like, if you're messaging the other women in the gym, there are words you can't use, like MAGA, you know, CAG, I'm not gonna get into some of the other stuff about the election, but you can't refer to Trump on Twitter, and like, the Ivanka and Melania accounts on Peloton.
01:23:00.000I have not verified this myself, but we're gone.
01:23:03.000Like, these aren't things you can see on the social portion of Peloton.
01:23:08.000I assume that's true, but I mean, I know it's true for Pinterest, for example.
01:23:14.000And anyone can be non-personed in this fashion.
01:23:17.000There's nothing to prevent a conservative billionaire, assuming they're already in this field, from taking down the Democrats or certainly the Greens, and there's nothing to prevent the more prevalent Leftist tech bros from saying the Republican Party is responsible for three incidents of vaguely defined hate speech.
01:23:33.000The question is whether they should be able to do that.
01:23:35.000And I think the consensus here, we're having an interesting moral and almost semantic debate, but I think the consensus kind of has to be no.
01:23:41.000Well, my question, though, is how would you let the government dictate what corporations have to make their terms of service?
01:23:47.000Like, would you let the government write the terms of service?
01:23:49.000Oh, hell no, because they don't know what they're doing.
01:23:50.000Actually, I think that started it all.
01:23:55.000But the follow up would be like, at what level do you command that a social network is allowed to ban people and that has to stop banning people for what?
01:24:03.000And how do you define what hate speech means?
01:24:24.000And then I would say, like, For example, actually, I teach a con law class at KSU, and there already are exceptions to the rule of free speech.
01:24:34.000You guys might correct me if I miss one, but there's obviously pornography involving inappropriately young people or non-human subjects.
01:26:00.000You'd go to your postal carrier and say, stop delivering these to me, throw them in the trash.
01:26:03.000Put them in a new account, and then you get a bunch of accounts to do it.
01:26:07.000If they can't preemptively ban those, then you have harassment.
01:26:11.000If harassment is actually no one person spamming you and then they spam will and they spam me and they spam Lydia We all block them that keeps spanning new people.
01:26:19.000That's when the site will step in and ban those people So a lot of legal love scribe.
01:26:23.000Oh, that's legal to know it is I can I can it's right on the line guys actually as some of the legal background it points on both sides, but I mean I think okay add that to the terms like I really do think as a Yeah, I'm an aggressive and somewhat amoral leader in practical life.
01:26:39.000If it comes to, like, what's KSU's recruitment plan going to be for this year or not, that would be my decision.
01:26:43.000Or, like, how am I going to run my business, which I do do pretty successfully.
01:26:46.000I mean, I think a lot of this stuff can be settled.
01:26:48.000Like, you get the tech guys and you get four or five congressmen in the north talking about it in the back room and you say, okay, these six things, you can ban at will and we'll allow you spam.
01:27:19.000Right now there's an adhesion contract where people can be banned for no reason.
01:27:22.000And then you would say, Social media providers are... I don't know if they're gonna adopt these rules, but social media providers are allowed to ban all content that is civilly or criminally against the law.
01:27:38.000Or that is civilly or criminally... that it is civilly or criminally legal to restrict for an audience of people under 18 or under 21 since those individuals use social media sites.
01:28:17.000Yeah, I think that there are also a couple of different questions here.
01:28:20.000One of the deepest ones, since we're all getting to that dad range, is like, should 13-year-olds be on Twitter?
01:28:25.000I mean, there's some very practical things that you could do to take away... I mean, most young men, including me, I read recently, start consuming porn in the USA at like 11 or 12.
01:28:37.000And it actually does... No, but it has a really...
01:28:40.000I mean, I had a normal high school sex life.
01:28:43.000Like you, you definitely hook up with real people in life, but the exposure to like extreme edgy spit in my mouth content if you're worse than 12 and your girlfriend's 13 is not going to give you a lot of tips about how to act in real life.
01:28:59.000So kids to some extent need to be moved away from a lot of that.
01:29:03.000Um, but the practical question, I think this is something that would be negotiated among intelligent people, presumably intelligent people.
01:29:10.000If this were ever to happen, but I think what you could say is absolutely no adhesion contracts as a baseline, and I may be technically off on that legal term, but no unfair contracts of this kind, then we expect social media to ban content that is against the law as a violation of free speech.
01:29:24.000But then you got to decide what state law are you working out of?
01:29:27.000Depends on where the corporation was founded.
01:29:28.000A lot of this is federal criminal law, though.
01:29:30.000I mean, like a ban on, you know, underage or non-human pornography would be fairly easy to enforce in the USA.
01:29:38.000And this is what you want to be at, right?
01:29:40.000You want a few things explicitly banned, like terror content.
01:29:43.000I don't like the federal government doing it because if you want to do a video on how to grow weed, it's legal in California, but not legal federally.
01:29:52.000So you could bust up a corporation for that.
01:29:54.000And the feds can come into California and arrest you.
01:30:32.000I actually... I'm very intelligent, but I'm kind of with Tim on this one.
01:30:35.000I mean like when you say like the parlor thing, we can argue about whether the setup code, the basic structure of the website, someone was worse or better than Twitter.
01:30:43.000The fact is it wasn't allowed to exist.
01:30:45.000And I think that this will happen to this.
01:30:48.000See, this is the thing when we take these morally, I suppose, the extent I think about moral questions.
01:30:54.000But the question is, if you say corporations are allowed to handle their own business and do whatever they want, produce whatever content they want, as long as it's legal, they could knock you off for any reason or no reason at all.
01:31:04.000The issue arises when they knock off the sitting president of the United States, or when a competitor arises that probably would have been good enough for Trump and those guys to jump back on immediately removed.
01:31:14.000Or when Laura Loomer runs for office and they give her rival an account, which is free access to advertising and promotion, and deny her one as a candidate.
01:32:08.000But like, so for example, one thing you could do is take Facebook and break... Facebook is itself an agglomeration of different companies.
01:32:14.000But if you broke off Facebook Messenger into a new company, they still know how to build it because they still have the code so they can rebuild it.
01:32:23.000Like at the most basic level, I actually want something more intense than this that would involve some element of government regulation.
01:32:29.000We can debate that because we're free citizens.
01:32:31.000But at the most basic level, Facebook is about five or six companies.
01:32:35.000I mean, like, whatever their ads platform is called, Instagram, Messenger... Facebook's ad system?
01:32:41.000So what all of these companies do, Facebook and Google specifically, is that Google, obviously, is a handful of companies.
01:32:48.000YouTube is not only a video hosting platform, It is a video distribution platform, it is a marketing platform, and it is an ad sales platform.
01:32:56.000All of these things, or I should say they integrate the ad sales into, you know, all of these things operate this way.
01:33:01.000Google, I should say YouTube specifically is an ad sales.
01:33:04.000It's ad delivery, content delivery, content storage, all of these things in one.
01:33:09.000If you broke that up, YouTube wouldn't exist.
01:33:11.000It needs those components to work together.
01:33:15.000There are many other sites that have come forward with newer technology that's better, and there's a really interesting phenomenon that happens in technology.
01:33:22.000Why is it that the United States has really crappy cell networks?
01:34:05.000They're putting solar panels on houses and bypassing central electric grids.
01:34:08.000There's a lot of developing tech in the stable African states that I think a lot of people are sleeping on, especially given Chinese colonization.
01:34:15.000That Chinese-Nigerian complex in West Africa is going to be a rival to the West in 30 years.
01:34:19.000And so I'll stress this right now, Rumble is better than YouTube.
01:34:24.000I only started recently publishing to Rumble.
01:34:34.000Relevant that's the marketing issue of it.
01:34:36.000That's so the issue here is we're talking about technology and freeing the code.
01:34:39.000It's pointless We use YouTube because it is a massive McCormick Center conference room that I know there's a billion people hanging out in location location location We use rumble for a variety of other things because it's a better service better technology better bandwidth Customization it's better across the board even Vimeo is better and YouTube is good because there's a massive room in this broken down, ridiculous building, and the security guards are dicks, and it's like, yeah, but they'll put up a sign with an arrow pointing to my building and there's a billion people here.
01:35:09.000Well, they've got the partner program, they've got... Rumble does all that too.
01:37:18.000It's got to be more than a billion because if CNN is getting 100 and Fox is getting 200 and then you've got big YouTubers, it's got to be in the tens of billions per month.
01:37:30.000There's so many unique users versus views or something.
01:37:33.000But a lot of this is, we're discussing a lot of technical detail intelligently, but at some level, like, I mean, the point that YouTube is viewed as better than Rumble because there are a billion people using it, you know, quantity has a quality all its own.
01:37:45.000I don't think anyone would dispute that.
01:37:47.000The real one root question here that we're chopping around is, should a company that has a billion users that has allowed you, quote unquote, to get to four million
01:37:56.000users, be able to terminate your account at will? I think no, but I also think that's
01:38:01.000probably going to require some new legislation.
01:38:03.000That actually, by the way, for the center right or the tech sector or whatever you want to call it,
01:38:09.000that is a legitimate goal. Not congressmen sitting around mumbling in their ancient way,
01:38:14.000trying to describe the internet, but will you add some basic clause to the law strengthening the
01:38:20.000rules against adhesion contracts or going back perhaps to more traditional monopoly law?
01:38:25.000And again, we're kind of fantasizing here, but I don't see any reason that wouldn't happen.
01:39:25.000And we've seen this, by the way, this is an important point I do want to make here.
01:39:29.000We've seen the steel fist come out of the velvet glove a few times recently.
01:39:33.000Like large competitive countries do have a ruling class that knows it's a ruling class.
01:39:37.000However many conspiracies are real and all this sort of thing.
01:39:40.000So I mean, like, for example, with the Robin Hood stuff, where people started playing the short sellers in the stock market, which I was a part of, I think many people were.
01:39:55.000They came up with some BS reason like, we're running out of money here, boys, and immediately halted trading on the stocks that were being affected in a way that was hurting powerful rich people.
01:40:04.000You can call that a coincidence, but you have to combine that with the same coincidence where a parlor Beats FB one day and the next day it's like, well, that's how the Capitol riot was coordinated.
01:40:15.000It wasn't Facebook, which is used by far more older demographic individuals.
01:40:19.000We need to get these boys out of here.
01:41:27.000Alright, but there's like a meme or something about what he do and everyone's like, oh I'm so shocked, but there's like nothing really happening.
01:41:34.000Questionable content says, Ian, chiropractors are a scam.
01:41:37.000It is illegal to call yourself a doctor in Europe if you are just a chiropractor without any additional medical degree.
01:41:42.000Yeah, when you get your back cracked, it's up to you to continue to hold your new posture.
01:41:48.000They're not going to fix you and then you go home and go back to your old lazy posture.
01:41:52.000You need to change your own posture, so you end up doing 99% of the work.
01:41:56.000The other thing with chiropractic, I mean like I've gone to a chiropractor, they are great with the human back.
01:42:02.000I mean it's a very advanced level of sort of muscular, I don't know, it felt like a very intense massage is a good way to remove some of that technical jargon.
01:42:11.000But they definitely, they know their way around the spine.
01:42:14.000My understanding is the problem with chiropractic is that they claim that working on the spine can cure almost everything.
01:42:19.000If you read the original manuals for the field, it's sort of like, this is how to relax depression via spine pressure.
01:42:26.000So you get into that same weird, maybe medical zone that you do with acupuncture, I think.
01:44:20.000The New York Times said you are less likely to get it, but if you do, you are equally likely to spread it.
01:44:27.000The one thing I would say here is, and I am also not asserting or making any medical claims, But the one thing that I would say here is, like, most of the research on the vaccine, that's a fascinating story.
01:44:36.000I don't know if that's an outlier situation.
01:44:38.000Like, you would find outliers in any pool of, you know, 200 million.
01:44:43.000But all of the stuff, the CDC, Israeli, et cetera, research on the vaccine kind of puts the efficacy at between 89 and 94 percent that I have personally read.
01:44:51.000It may be a little less for Delta, say, you know, one in 10, but to have a breakthrough
01:44:56.000infection that's transmissible, you do need to have a breakthrough infection.
01:45:00.000So a lot of this just seems like panicking once again, like we've got seniors reasonably
01:45:27.000So the question, last one sentence question here, but the question is, okay, you've been vaccinated, say you're 85% less likely to get COVID, which puts your risk of getting and transmitting fatal COVID about on par with the flu.
01:45:39.000The only people you could give this to at the normal preexisting risk would be unvaccinated people, mostly younger, who've chosen not to get the shot for personal health reasons.
01:45:48.000So I don't see any moral liability here.
01:45:50.000I don't think it's the vaccinated that are filling up the hospitals to the extent anyone is.
01:45:54.000I haven't seen any data showing that hospitals are overloaded for quite a while on this.
01:45:59.000So it seems like the same arguments keep coming up, like just, you know, 15 months to flatten the curve kind of stuff.
01:49:09.000Do they measure it where at 7 o'clock they measure 700,000 views and at 8 o'clock they measure 800,000 views, but it's the 700 of the same people?
01:49:18.000And then they'll be like, there was 15,000 views!
01:49:20.000But it was like, dude, just because you divided the show into two one-hour segments doesn't mean that those 800,000 people watched it twice.
01:49:28.000Well, it depends on for the, uh, the advertisers.
01:51:49.000I think we're gonna figure it out, and I think we're getting really close to actually having the events, and I apologize to everybody who's been waiting, but it's like, we're just, we hit roadblocks.
01:52:35.000Anyone else get called an idiot by multiple doctors and nurses for wearing a mask in January, March, just to watch them all change and mask up?
01:53:24.000The Laughing Man was a hacker who, in Ghost in the Shell, people have cyberized brains, like nanites, and he actually could hack people's eyes, their brains, in real time, so they only saw this, like, icon of, like, this, like, very rudimentary baseball hat, and there were words from Catcher in the Rye.
01:53:41.000I thought what I'd do, I would pretend I was one of those death mutes rotating around it.
01:54:24.000I agree with that, but I will say there's actually a very specific point here that I'm sure both of you guys have seen in online debates, which is the publisher platform debate, which is becoming more sophisticated.
01:54:33.000So, I mean, generally the idea is you can't regulate a platform.
01:54:36.000You can't punish the phone company because people discuss drugs on T-Mobile's lines or something like that.
01:54:44.000But if you're a publisher, if you remove or edit more than X percent of the content posted to your site, you can be regulated pretty intensely.
01:54:51.000And, I mean, any of those provisions focusing on adhesion and so on would become more potent.
01:54:55.000So, I mean, I think at the most basic one-sentence level, it's pretty obvious to say Facebook is a publisher.
01:55:00.000Yeah, when they do like site wide notifications or when they say this is fake news content, when they put like qualifications on content, that's Facebook editorializing.
01:55:09.000And even be even before the CDC thing, which is wild.
01:55:12.000I mean, one of the one of the entities that was flagged as being very unreliable on covid was the official Science Academy of Sweden, because Sweden never shut down and did better than many, if not most other major countries.
01:56:49.000Look, I think you look at what happens with privately owned public spaces.
01:56:53.000They say it's owned by a private business, but they gain some tax benefit.
01:56:57.000There's, so there's like instances where they say, if you want to have this building, you have to dedicate X amount of space to the public, so it'll be privately owned, but the public gets to use it.
01:57:04.000Because they let the public use it, they now have one that they have to guarantee First Amendment.
01:57:09.000So, I don't see why there's any difference with, with social media.
01:59:03.000You're saying that they were forced to hire people to archive and document?
01:59:08.000Yeah, if they released code but they obfuscated the release, that would-
01:59:12.000He's saying that they were documenting Linux.
01:59:15.000You're saying that Facebook would be forced to hire an archivist to like... Yeah, welcome to the 21st century.
01:59:20.000We need to understand that code inside and out.
01:59:22.000You were saying you don't want the government to get involved, and now you're saying you're forcing companies... Well, I want them to break up monopolies.
01:59:25.000That's what I like to use the government for.
02:00:21.000You butter the bread, grill it, then you take it off and put the cheese on the grilled side, then close it, then butter it, grill both sides of the bread!
02:02:26.000It's getting to the point where the narrative is destabilizing, you know?
02:02:30.000How do they keep maintaining this lie that people broke the rules when you have someone like Dave Rubin, nearly a million followers, you know?
02:03:02.000Don't forget, we have tons of articles that go up all the time, and your membership supports those articles, gets you ad-free, and our whole library of members-only podcasts.
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02:03:21.000Do you want to shout anything out, Wilfred?
02:03:26.000Shout out to Kentucky State University.