E17: Big Tech bans Trump, ramifications for the First Amendment & the open Internet

hey everyone hey everyone welcome your illustrious moderator jason calcandis has been purged cancelled he's been canceled we canceled him for his constant interruptions and low iq comments we decided that the minimum iq required to be on this part of this you know 150 he did not make the cut and so now it is just me chamoth and freeburg he is uh jason is away he is actively implementing our jerk off to win strategy to solve the pandemic and free speech hey everybody hey everybody it is an emergency podcast episode 16 hit number two in the uh rankings on the apple itunes podcasting store clearly we hit a nerve it's been an insane week and the dictator dictated that he was

not satisfied with doing our podcast once every two weeks and so here we are on a sunday the queen of quinoa rain man himself david sacks and the dictator chopping it up for you the loyal confused angry infuriated audience of all in it's the craziest week of our lives jason plea please don't describe to the audience the characteristics that describe yourself okay this has been a crazy 72 hours can anybody remember us a week that has been more crazy in their life with the exception i guess 911 the financial crisis i'm trying to think of this level of crazy i think i think we should start with what happened after the last all-in

podcast between you and saks over text we should get it all out there we should share it publicly and i think no no no no i think yeah i think no we should i think it's worth doing we we talked about this before you joined us and uh chamoth and i are having an intervention and uh you know i i'm going to say something real quick i think it's worth highlighting that one of the things that i think we have the opportunity to do as a group is to kind of elevate the conversation a bit and not frame things as being black and white and not frame them as being one or zero or partisan or left or right and everyone on this in this conversation has nuanced opinions about a lot of different topics and when you sum up all those opinions it doesn't define a left or right person or democrat or republican i think that's what makes us you know a compelling and interesting group to talk to sax has been characterized as the trump guy he took offense to

that um and in particular the heated conversation you guys had last time and i do think it's worth kind of sharing that with everyone and letting you guys reconcile publicly yeah have a group hug yeah and and reframe kind of how we talk about each other and how so that we can kind of set a bit of an example on on how to do this well i can sorry you can start david i'll i'll i'll start because objection you're the aggrieved yeah i mean so look i i think that that j cow does an amazing job moderating the pod and it's a difficult job um and you know the the the so i so i don't want to um you know this is not something i'm trying to blame him for but i do have an objection to being labeled in a certain way i think anybody would you know we we don't want to be misconstrued and

and we want to be able to characterize our own views we don't want to be labeled a certain way now i think jason has sort of branded me as a trump guy because frankly it's amusing to him um i think he's mainly trolling me and but the audience doesn't necessarily understand that i mean if you go back and look at my twitter feed or my blogs i haven't written about trump for years i mean i haven't said anything really about it that's not my agenda um you know and i think it i don't have a pro-trump agenda but i also don't have a pro-resistance agenda i've described my position as anti-hysteria sometimes that means criticizing trump like it did in the last pod sometimes it means criticizing the resistance so i just don't like being labeled a certain way and i think jason and i sort of you know kind of resolve this um you know if i label my politics just you

know jason calls me the conservative i think that's more accurate but the question is you know what am i conserving exactly and i would describe myself more as like a 1960s style liberal you know i'm a believer in free speech you know aclu style um believer in king's dream of a colorblind society you know if you know i'm against all these you know foreign wars and interventions if i had been around the 1960s i would have been protesting vietnam that's kind of more where i'm coming from and i guess the reason i'm a conservative now is because the political debate

has moved so far away from that but if i'm trying to conserve anything it's really the liberal victories of the 1960s so in any event i i don't think that qualifies me in any way as a as a trumper per se and um i just don't want you know jason making jokes to somehow um have the audience get the wrong idea because i want to be heard and i know trump's an extremely polarizing figure and the second you tell somebody you're frankly pro or con trump the other half just doesn't even stop doesn't even want to listen to you um and so my views are more complicated than that okay well thanks for everybody for tuning in to the all-in amazing episode 17. thanks to our sponsors um listen uh i think what makes this podcast great is the diversity of opinion and the respect that we show for each other if my breaking chops uh

which is as everybody knows here uh my superpower in life and talk along with talking has pigeon holed you into being something you're not or if you felt i've taken a cheap shot at you in any way uh i apologize and it was not my intent my intent is to keep the conversation flowing to entertain the audience certainly but not at anybody's expense david and certainly not yours because i do consider you one of the best friends i've had in my life and one of the most supportive people in my life and anything we all feel that way about each other that we go to bad for each other and support each other i do think that this highlights and dovetails with what we and i've given it a lot of thought actually i've really spent since the last podcast a lot of time thinking about

your position david and where you're coming from and then also where the people who maybe you know you maybe agreed with some of uh trump's victories and certainly you're a conservative i don't know if you voted for him or not or if you're willing to say if you did i'll put that aside for a moment but i do think that we're all seeing in our families in our lives and now as a nation what is the off-ramp here to the people who supported trump up until this coup attempt uh and this ugliness and then how do we reconcile it right that is the grand reconciliation here is the thing that has me very concerned because we're a microcosm david you and i are you know

unbelievably close friends uh for a very long period of time and we struggle with uh i think uh trump trump is as i was saying in our group chat earlier it's like the trolley car problem like people will be pulling up how do you deal with trump as the example of you know what do you do if the trolley car you know it's going to kill one person or five and do you you know the breaks broken kind of situation it's and i think jack and the platforms also have a difficult task do you leave this person up after what we saw on wednesday and a lot has changed since wednesday can you say something i'll leave it at that and then i'll throw it to your mouth i don't want to no jason here's the thing i think that um we all have views i think the thing that i respect the

most about saks is that his views are independent of the candidate du jour and i think his views quite honestly are in many cases the most well reasoned and well thought out because he's frankly you know one of the smartest people in our friend group if not probably the smartest so i think what it speaks to is the fact that you can have these momentary sort of pauses where you have these people that are so polarizing that you forget that there are legitimate views on both sides i mean i would characterize my political views as in some cases like deeply conservative meaning get the government out of the way they're a bunch of incompetent [ __ ] buffoons and on the other side on some issues i think that they should be extremely interventional like in healthcare or in climate change because it's just so dire and there needs to be a public

mandate in order to drive change i don't know where i fit anymore especially because it's harder to be nuanced as friedrich said at the beginning without sounding like a complete crazy person because one word triggers the other side against you so i think the thing that i just want all the listeners to appreciate not just amongst the four of us but also amongst their own friends is having a little patience and tolerance here is really important because we cannot become the worst of ourselves especially because of a single person who will be rendered with an enormous asterisk beside his name and by him i mean trump for the rest of our natural lives and so let's just not allow what one person has been able to do to malign all of our like

natural ability to just not be completely stupid quite honestly so um i just think it's important to realize that we all have completely completely nuanced perspectives they're all worth listening to and i would just tell people don't fall for the simple easy out to assume that you know being a conservative means you're a trump supporter or being a liberal means you're not a trump supporter because i think that there's issues in which you know frankly look let's be honest the the wall street journal opinion by uh was it lisa lasser what was her name lisa uh amy lassell somebody um sky posted into the group chat nick can you find it i can't remember it sassel or lasso is her last name anyways oh kim strassel kim strausel journal yeah she she had a paragraph intro where and again

i wasn't a trump supporter have never been a trump supporter i do have those some sympathy to some of the things he did and the way that she described his four years although you know she was selective it was impressive actually you know meaning getting the rhetoric right on china getting the rhetoric on trade right um the deregulation that he's created in some ways so there there is very much a reasonable narrative up until the capital storming where the glass was definitely half full and it could have legitimately been viewed half full and it was just a matter of opinion because he was just such a crazy person and his style was so shitty i think the thing is david said this on the last part after storming the capital it is very clear

100 categorically this guy is just a complete piece of [ __ ] and so now the people that stand with him are extremely isolated and so i just want us to remember that there there is probably something to learn from everybody he actually did some reasonable things intelligently well until he [ __ ] self-immolated himself um and so let's just not give in to our basic instincts here and i think there's a lot to learn from uh i think the frustration of a lot of people is some people saw this coming and some people you know when peter thiel said things like hey you know don't take trump literally and all this kind of stuff some of us were taking him literally and some of us were very concerned and people were saying oh you're being hyperbolic he's not hitler

he's he's not dangerous you know what uh [ __ ] he is dangerous and you should take him literally and i think a lot of the folks who enabled him and who thought it was funny um who weren't on the other side of his vindictiveness his dog whistling uh and the anger and the violence he put out into the world and he consistently did this you know he he he started by saying you know get that person the hell out of here like i would in the old days the cops would have thrown him down the stairs kind of thing he he is like tony soprano or any other mob boss who knows how to incite people to do dangerous things without having the culpability himself as you pointed out chamath he

he might be the one who gets off scot-free while they're rounding up all these people and you got this prediction right like yeah these people are going to go to jail there's multiple felonies he's not going to get off scot-free he's not well i mean do you think he's going to jail and do you think the people who broke into this you think you think trump's going to jail yes oh my lord i'm i'm not i'm not sure about that but i i i do think that you know like i said last time uh trump is now the first uh sitting president to cost his party the presidency the house and the senate since herbert hoover uh jason if you're right about trump i mean the voters have certainly been able to see that and they've punished him and his party at the polls i do think that whatever

you do to trump individually at this point is sort of redundant with that um you know he has now cost his party uh any share of power everything any share of the power in washington so can i ask you a question david when i made that point about peter thiel and the people who supported him early do you have any regrets in your own thinking about being supportive of trump in his early years you're coming at this from a place i've never even come at it from which is i'm not like a partisan person uh when trump won the election in 2016 my first reaction was not is this you know har

right or wrong i don't it's you know what side am i on my my first reaction was why did this happen you know i tried to understand it you know i read you know the the hillbilly elegy author um you know i was you know my my surprise at that happening caused me to ask questions and you know what i think became really clear is that trump won despite his manifest you know flaws because of a uh because of the failure of the elites i mean he he was you know he's a sort of outsider populist and the country was trying to send the a bipartisan i should say bipartisan elites

and what was that message that to chamas point for the last 20 years uh the bipartisan consensus in washington has been to feed this chinese tiger into the wagon is now potentially on the cusp of supplanting us as the sort of richest economy in the world we have admired ourselves in these forever wars in the middle east i mean again these were things that both democrats and republicans got us into so my reaction you know was first and foremost to try and understand it and then once he was in the presidency you know i didn't see my job as being to be part of some crazy resistance i mean there needed to be a rational opposition to trump and there was

never a rational opposition um people would basically object to anything he said just because he said it which ben made your side and i'm going to say your side the conservative side i wouldn't say your side the conservative side dug in because they were like well the left's being hysterical not not really i mean if you've been reading national review for the last few years and especially the last two months there's been plenty of criticism of trump well i was thinking more ted cruz lindsey graham all these people who said they would be never trumpers became right in line trump supporters and they're in their partisan they're they're politicians they're part of the the party

for people who care about ideas what i would say is i didn't change my ideas one way or another because trump might happen to agree with one of them freeberry what's your take i don't like talking about trump well that is kind of i think where we where we're getting to this is that look what's the off ramp here friedberg um what's the end game you guys remember how the emperor came to power in star wars it was palpatine turned the republic against itself and then he emergency powers emergency powers um look i i what i to sax's point like i care um more deeply um i care very little about trump the person um and i

care more deeply about the motivations of people that that want a person like that um in power and i care more deeply about the way the dialogue is happening um to resolve ideas and to resolve to decisions in this country right now um that is why i think that you know my vote last year in our last two podcasts ago which seems like 10 years ago was that um the biggest political failure of 2020 is the institute of american democracy and it's only gotten worse in the last two weeks and i think that the mechanism by which we have debate is lost it's from everyone from the republican to the democratic leadership

uh it is attacking and finger-pointing and there is no um resolve for forgiveness um there is no everything is all about justice and winning and there is no resolve for objectivity and discovering the truth and doing the best thing for people not the best thing for party and doing the best thing for country and that's really easy to say and really really hard to do as i think everyone is realizing because as soon as you say let's bring the country together half the country raises their hand and says but i want justice and we can't come together until we have justice and so at what point do you break the cycle you know revenge never ends until someone steps down

first and says you know what i give up i'm not gonna i'm gonna end up in the losing position but at that point maybe reconciliation can begin um and i'm more concerned about the the heat the temperature and everyone says turn it down but no one's actually turning it down um and so you know the legacy of trump i i i honestly care less about i care much more about going forward how do we resolve to decisions that aren't all about the democrats overrunning and i you know i was i was actually upset about georgia because i do think it's a problem if you have a one-party state

and we don't have balance and we don't have a forum for conversation we don't have a forum uh you know for for coming to uh to kind of you know objective sentiment that that's best for the people um and so i you know i'm much more interested in flipping the conversation away from trump and trying to think about you know going forward what are the things what are the forums what are the mechanisms that we can have to to create equity in the country to create reconciliation to create balance in decision making and to turn down the temperature so that chancellor palpatine doesn't become the evil emperor and that we don't lose to china and you know all the things that are kind of emerging as being the unfortunate outcomes yeah we have three or four major wars we need to solve the pandemic china wealth inequality global warming chamoth uh do you think at this point in the podcast we should

walk through what's happened since wednesday vis-a-vis you know trump being de-platformed or do you think we should uh talk a little bit about and skip to reconciliation i think we have a fork in the road here as the moderator i'll just ask chamoth maybe you could pick which direction we go well i think it's important to talk about what happened um and i'll frame this in the in the context of peter thiel he has a philosopher that he's talked a lot about renee gerard and um you know basically the the girardian philosophy is essentially that you know people come into conflict because they're extremely similar and you know they effectively want the same things and they're competing for the same sort of essentially scarce resources and the way that you resolve that

is through some sort of cathartic sacrifice right meaning like there needs to be a grand crime a grand act and i think that we're at this point to friedberg's sort of earlier statement where you got a choice which is you either throw democracy under the bus or you actually throw djt under the bus and you don't have a choice and that and that and and sort of like it's not just even the united states it's almost like sort of democracy as an institution's hand was forced um this past week and so it is probably important to look at what's happened in the last few days through that lens which is you know it's it's almost like people first were shocked and then now we're in the midst of that reflexive reaction to what is a simple choice which is you

can basically forgive the guy or you can re-affirm the institution which means to sacrifice the guy and i think that's the thing that's happening in real time and it's going to be i think over the next few weeks a super messy conversation because you're going to have a bunch of dumb decisions you're going to have a bunch of overreaching you know you're going to have a bunch of um dramatic sort of bellyaching on both sides you know there was this thing today where devin nunes was like screaming about how he had lost his 3 000 followers on par or three million followers on parlor but he was saying it on fox news which is distribution to millions of people and so can i ask a question about this reality now we're all facing do because the event that

occurred on wednesday we are all still trying to process and new information is coming in as we you know as people get the videos and and as we let the dust settle the dust is settling i'm curious sax do how do you look at what happened on wednesday do you view it as a coup do you because some of the information that's come out about they were trying to get to pence and that they wanted to kidnap people and then you that dovetails with the kidnapping schemes that were going on uh and there were pipe bombs and a police officer was beaten to death with a pipe and his skull was crushed or something we don't have all the details yet fire yeah a first thing where she was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher some of the videos i've seen of police being dragged

um you know that counteract the selfie police you know so many different things occurred on wednesday i think we all have to just think about what happened on wednesday how do we each feel about what happened on wednesday i'll go to you first sex and not because i'm framing you as anything just because you haven't yeah no i mean i already said i i already gave my thoughts in the last part that it was outrageous it was a travesty um it was a rally that turned into a riot that turned into you know some sort of insurrection i guess you could call it it was it was a rebellion against authority um i think coup is potentially a strong word uh because it wasn't

nobody ever had their hands on the levers of power i mean the fate of the republic was never in question i know there were even you know people tweeting about how the uh the these marauders whatever you want to call them almost got their hands on the elector's ballots i mean yeah but we all know how they're voting even if they had gotten them uh we would just have gotten new ones i mean that was sort of a ceremonial thing but look it was it was an absolute outrage but i do think that there is um a thing happening now uh called threat inflation where you know using language like you know going from riot to uh insurrection to now coup it there is a a type of inflation happening that is then used to justify

the reaction by the other side to it which is now you know the basically the ending of freedom of speech um which is really i think the big thing that's happened since the last pod is really the reason why we are having this emergency pod i think is because of what's happened there i think the emergency power was just to make sure that the pod wasn't ending because of you not getting in a big fight i think that was people's concern the beatles were breaking up yeah well that's true look uh just keeping the pot together you know with with four big egos on it you're right it's hard it is like the beatles you know one day it's gonna break up but but not but not yet not yet uh but but i wanna i wanna tie in this issue with you said what you said about the off-ramp okay which is you know what is the off-ramp from this look everybody understands i think regardless of

what side political spectrum you're on that we are caught in a cycle of insane hyper-partisan warfare and tit-for-tat retaliation and that is the thing that we need to uh that is the ledge we need to walk back from okay but the problem that everybody has is that they can only see the other side doing it you know they can't see themselves doing it this is a two-way street both sides are doing it and that's how de-escalation works is both of us have to concede something yes and unless you can see when your side is doing it we're never gonna break the cycle now the thing that is happening right now now what trump did was absolutely outrageous

and i think it it brought him to an ignominious end in american politics he will pay for it in the history books if not in a court of law okay but now what has happened is the next step in the tit-for-tat retaliation what the the stormy of the capital has now been used to implement a sweeping attack on free speech you know the the twitter employees who sent that letter to jack who've been demanding this for years have finally gotten their way and there is a widespread purge going on and not just of trump not just a permanent ban on trump and then a whole

bunch of other people you know conservatives there are now liberal accounts there's an account that i wasn't even aware of called red scare they're basically you know pretty pretty much on the left no one can say exactly what it was that got them banned i guess they had steve bannon on their podcast they are suddenly banned from twitter nobody knows why oh i subscribe to the red scare podcast it's actually uh it's called the dirt bag left they're kind of like socialists um intel trying to be public intellectuals and it's it's oddly compelling i'll leave it at that um but they are now banned from from twitter they somehow got let's pause for a second on djt

getting banned from twitter this is close to 100 million followers it's a billion dollars in value he just had the pga say they'll never you do a trump golf course again so the ram the real world ramifications for trump are he's his businesses are going to be devastated his platform is gone but and i was very pro trump staying on twitter i thought it was insane to think that the president of the united states would have their twitter handle removed that seemed crazy to me however crazy it's a crazy concept that being said trump knows how to dance right up to the line on the terms of service and i think here's the thing here's the thing i think there's imminent danger and i think what we don't know is what

is concerning to me the fact that all of these services have turned him off i believe is indicative of wednesday was under hyped and that they really did intend to kidnap uh folks and blow off bombs and the proud boys uh founder was arrested days before with you know selling large magazine weapons i i think that they wanted to kill and kidnap people um and perhaps even like hang the vice president honestly crazy but honestly honestly jason that's what i think is going on with twitter i think they told i think they showed them the receipts jason stop i honestly like let's not [ __ ] fear monger like we're we're no better than anybody else

without [ __ ] we don't know any of that crap and the reality is that if they were doing that they they are not stupid enough to do it on a platform where you basically follow anybody you want okay like i mean if that were the case then [ __ ] uh isis would be using twitter they don't use twitter they use telegram live streamed storming of the capital these people are not smart we've established that i i i anyways i look can we just let's just like let's not do the left version of q anon okay let's not have now the last version of the crazy conspiracy theories here's here's i think what is worth talking about we really reflexively all of a sudden um started

to push back on free speech in a way that doesn't make any sense meaning i really was surprised like why are these silicon valley companies reacting now like if you had a reason to do it uh it had been building for years and years and years and in many ways it was kind of like this random moment and and i mean random because i just don't think that you know everything up until that point was not equally sort of violent disgusting under the same lens that that moment was and so had you had a reason to ban him you would have banned him already but then doing it in the way you did and then having this cascading effect on folks on the left and the right just getting basically pushed

out the door to me was just completely reactive and not rooted in anything it didn't to me it didn't make any sense it it it's it's i don't know i was i was very frustrated and and a little taken aback well can i can i jump in you like jump in on that because yeah and tweeting a lot about this and then the last thing is like they let donald trump hit a one-outer like he was painted in a quarter to be a complete demagogue and instead now it has been wrapped in a free speech issue where now more people are talking about free speech than what a scumbag he is how did we let that happen

big big big tech blundered into it again i mean we had a unanimity across the political spectrum that what happened at the capitol was wrong and donald trump was responsible for it and chamath exactly like you said the topic has now changed to censorship by big tech which is a real issue i mean look our freedom of speech is a shrine in the constitution in the first amendment of the bill of rights it's the first [ __ ] one okay it's the one the framers the constitution cared about the most because free speech is not just uh necessary and important for democracy it's the reason why we have our freedom is so that we can think and speak and worship

as we please and that is legitimately under threat um you know what what big to end and by the way it's not just the permanent ban on trump you had simultaneous to that it was it wasn't just the banning of all these accounts you also had the d platforming of parlor which is sort of the twitter alternative by google and apple at the same time and in amazon and so you're talking about really de-platforming not just trump but millions of people and so the the amazing thing is that we've had this sweeping appropriation of power by you know half a dozen oligarchs who now have the

right to determine what we see and read and people are cheering because they hate trump so much they can't see that the biggest power grab in history has happened has happened okay i want to say something on this because i'm not sure i really fully agree i i think that the point that saks is making um about freedom of speech applies to what you're legally allowed to say saks we're talking about private services that um you know a user chooses to use and the service provider chooses to make available to that user in a market um space and in that context it feels to me like everyone has a choice of where to go and what services to

use and frankly if there aren't good services to use so and there's a lot of people that want to use one the free market will resolve to create one and we're already seeing that with signal being the number one app on the app store today that emerging new platforms will win in a marketplace where old service providers are no longer catering to the market demands for a service um i'll also say that can i respond to that one yeah and then i'll make one more point but go ahead yeah so i understand the first amendment only applies to to government okay it doesn't apply to private companies but but here's here's the thing is that when the framers of the constitution wrote that freedom of speech was something that took place in the in the town square right you

would go to the courthouse steps and put down your soap box you could speak to people gather or crowd that is why the right to assemble is part of the first amendment is because assembling is tantamount to free speech where do people assemble today online on these monopoly network services like a facebook like twitter and again it's not and and to your point couldn't they go to some other site well they did they went to parlor guess what happened the operating systems just banned parlor and so you know i hear this there's an open there's an open web sax you know you don't need to go to apple's app store or google's google play you can put an app on android you just don't need to do it through google play and if you don't want to use apple's you know os you can

use another phone and by the way and everyone can access the internet the internet is free and open and anyone can create a new network node on the internet and anyone can put any information they want on that node provided it's within the the the boundaries and constraints of the law and they can make it available to anyone else maybe for now but you can't use aws and google might not make you show up in search results you could turn your imac you could turn your imac at home into a into a web server and you could make it available on the internet if google and amazon and apple have censored you at the operating system level and removed you from google search results how in the world is anybody supposed to find you yeah people have been removed from search results let me just i think it's important so so i do think that there's still an open market and there's an open internet that people can access information freely and use the internet freely without being dependent on a handful of you're right highly scaled services and

highly scaled platforms but there's certainly a marketplace and an opportunity for for innovation there i'll also say that the um the platforms that made these decisions to ban these accounts and kick people off um are not doing so uh uh under the demand of law and i think that that is a really and so i think to some extent uh you know i'm probably on your side in this context but um the standard is not a legal standard the standard is a judgment it isn't it is a it is a moral or some principled standard that is sitting above and beyond the legal standard that they're required to comply with this is the point and this is really scary right because at that point it becomes a subjective decision about who you kick off based on your interpretation of what they

said and what they intended when they said it and that leads to the infinite slippery slope and it's you nailed it one [ __ ] thousand percent that is the exact issue it's not necessarily about free speech it is that when you have accumulated power and you effectively have a quasi-governmental organization that gets to operate in the free market when it wants to but then operate like a quasi-governmental monopoly when it wants to all of a sudden the power becomes in the shadows right there is a random vp someplace who actually controls this decision and the problem is today if a politician does something or a political body or a government body does something you have redress

right you can sue that entity you know who it is there's a pathway through the courts through the law through the constitution the problem with this is all of a sudden it becomes murky and look you flip a coin 50 of the time guys you're going to get your way the other 50 of the time who the [ __ ] knows what will happen and you may be completely on the wrong side of it and this is i think the problem let me i just want to read you guys something there was a there was this manifesto or memo this woman who was a former facebook data scientist sophie zhang she wrote i'm just i'm just going to read this because i think it's uh it's really interesting here the 6600 word memo written by former facebook data scientist sophie zhang is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in azerbaijan and under honduras using

fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion in countries including india ukraine spain brazil bolivia and ecuador she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes though she did not always conclude who was behind them she said in the three years i've spent at facebook i found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and cause international news on multiple occasions now let me just stop there replace your united states with all those countries and we care but there are people in all of those countries where you know those countries mean more to them than what's happening in the united states that's right and that represents the problem that's the social the

the social suasion that is influencing the leaders of the tech companies are largely their democrat employees that live in the bay area and um that's a big part of why the decisions are being made in the way that they're being made and the priorities are being set is because as you pointed out i think it was saka put it on twitter and jason you've talked about this but talent is everything in silicon valley and if your employees tell you they're going to quit working for you or they're not going to do their jobs you're going to take that to heart and there's not a lot of influence or suasion that you know citizens of bolivia and you know uruguay can have with executives at facebook and twitter but people in the bay area

have a [ __ ] clue about the politics in azerbaijan or bolivia does any one of us have a point of view and and i think that's that's that's the point is like it's like as soon as you add judgment to the equation um you know you're going to be wrong with some people and you're going to be right with some people versus using an absolute standard and if the issue is that the law if the law doesn't define the absolute standard then you need to go and change the law i think there's going to be a couple of free market solutions that come here because you even as difficult as this decision can be you layer it onto it somebody who is completely insincere and manipulating the system um on purpose and to your point david in the last podcast is sitting in

the present united states seat you know it carries different weight and if you look at the words that trump used or rudy used you know we want to have uh combat trial by combat you know is that somebody's got to make a judgment call is that an incitement to violence or do you just look at what occurred after they said the words it's a very difficult thing to do there are free market solutions that will emerge bitcoin is something we've talked about it's an incredible run nobody's controlling that there is master don and plenty of other peer-to-peer software that will be deployed i predict and that will put up uh competition now for these services and it will be impossible to ban those peer-to-peer uh uh platforms and so we'll have some products emerging one universal truth this information wants to be free so if there is an opinion if there is a voice if there is information so there'll be a free market response to parlor being shut down

i i sincerely believe that a lot of these decisions are being made not just at the behest of the employees i do agree they have tremendous power and i've said that obviously many times i think what's going on here is people believe that trump and we and you said it yourself david there's gonna be a white knuckle 10 days uh and i don't know if you still believe that there's a chance on the 17th or 19th or whatever that there could be more unrest i actually think a lot of people woke up and said i don't know if i want to give this guy the ability to say the next three or four crazy things that make people show up um at a person's home or you know the dog whistling and you know if if trump's

comments on wednesday at that rally and rudy giuliani's and donald trump juniors the people who really incited this uh and they're gonna face some amount of civil and and criminal charges i believe um if they did that on twitter or facebook or youtube or periscope or whatever it happens to be and then this happened would those platforms have some liability especially after you know what's happened i think that they're just in part of this is covering their asses i think they should have just done a 30-day ban not a permanent ban so at least they would have the cover of saying listen this is too heated we're going to pause for 30 days and then we'll reassess it february

1st or february 15th right well so part of the problem here is that there is no policy right the policy is public outcry and if there's enough public outcry and there's enough pressure or letter writing from the employees or there's enough saber-rattling by the people who are going to run the senate judiciary committee next year or the language was so clear it's but there is so so three months ago i wrote a blog post um about the so the policy that i thought the social media companies should take i said for moderation and what i said is there actually

is a moderation policy consistent with the first amendment that could be implemented because the first amendment does not protect many categories of basically dangerous speech uh there's like nine major categories it includes incitement of violence it includes you know trying to uh you know uh uh trying to provoke a crime it uh it includes fraud it includes defamation there are many categories of speech that aren't protected by the first amendment and social media companies could have said listen this is our policy is we're going to try and be broadly consistent with the first amendment but if somebody goes outside of those lines then we'll remove it so there was a way to to your point jason i think there was a way to remove some of trump's treat uh

tweets for incitement consistent with the first amendment but that's not what they did you know that and maybe that would it said what they did is a lifetime ban combined with rounding up you know twice the usual number of suspects combined with a de-platforming not at the account level but at now at the application level by google apple and amazon and none of this has been explained there is no policy what it is is a no i mean there's a hold on what it is is an appropriation by oligarchs no no there is a policy the problem is as we've just discussed it's an interpretation that must occur and the interpretation of wednesday's comments on a tweet

might be okay yeah they're borderline but not enough to shut us a countdown and and these folks know how to do it when when rudy giuliani says i want a trial by combat or you know if trump says you're not gonna have a country unless you fight and you have to fight and we're never going to accept these results is that inciting or not so well the policy that that that i want is something broadly consistent with the first amendment uh because but in those years and those phrases i just told you is that are those inciting or are those on the border line if you were making the decision right so you know putting my lawyer hat on for a second there's questions of law and questions of fact okay and we can debate what you're describing are questions of fact what i'm trying to say is well what what is the law what is the policy that we're talking about would say those were not direct incitement no there is no policy these social media companies

don't have any policy they're making it up as they go along based on what would you do what would you do with trump's comments from wednesday if they were in tweets yeah i'll tell you so first of all i would have implemented a a moderation policy broadly consistent with the first amendment and then certain tweets that were inciting violence while there was rioting on the capitol i would have been okay taking those down i would have taken those down where i think and and i think even doing something until the inauguration if you think that trump poses a threat think i think that's okay i think that's okay so you would have been fine with the 30-day ban or something well like a 10-day ban or whatever but a lifetime ban that like on what basis on what constitutional grounds do you justify that and look i know it's a private company but my point is this idea our free speech rights got privatized okay

the town square got digitized and centralized we used to have thousands we used to have town squares where people could convene all over this country we had a multiplicity of newspapers all that got replaced by a handful of tech monopolists our free speech rights got digitized if they take away our ability to speak we don't have free speech rights who do we appeal to when we get cancelled by a google or apple what court can we go to there is right you have to create a computing process by the way i think this is the best argument for having an internet court and um if you think about the standards that are being applied they're being applied haphazardly

randomly um by by these companies in response to to near-term market forces you know what what is everyone saying they have to do um or what are their employees rallying securities law well there's there's a there's privacy laws that say what you you know that companies the digital companies cannot take certain types of data and you know why not have um laws there are hate speech laws out there as well and why not be more specific and then let an internet court adjudicate and make the decision about what to take down and what not to take down they are as they are very responsive to warrants when there is a criminal act underway and so why not let an internet court be responsive to take down requests or to where do you think chamoth good idea no it's it's mandatory and again it centralizes it centralizes the standards right so you don't have

to have ad hoc random decisions and let if what sacs is saying is true it creates a standard that everyone has to abide by and that every consumer can trust them to abide by first first we need a bill of rights right first we need to say that we as citizens have rights that the court can defend can defend that is the problem we don't have any rights these companies are acting willy-nilly canceling people depriving them of their speech rights and don't tell me that you can still speak you know somewhere if you get if you get cancelled here's the thought exercise and i want everybody listening who's on the left to think about this exact issue

your favorite social media company is trying to get a really really big deal closed and they you know are trying to curry favor with a bunch of brands and a bunch of governments and those governments and brands let's just say it's in india right huge market 1.2 billion people they say you know what we're um a little tepid on abortion and so the deal is you need to dial down any ad from planned parenthood you need to prevent planned parenthood groups from amplifying from being able to fundraise think about that exact issue now and ask yourself is it okay

because there's a lot of people that are you know pro-choice that listen to this and the and you i'm sure right now your blood is [ __ ] boiling but there is no distinction between that decision and what happened over the last few days there's none it's arbitrary it's random it doesn't necessarily make any sense there is no way to readdress it then that's the biggest problem with all of this thing it's just there's a concept that uh newspapers have an obsman and the new york times had went up until i think 2017 and then they got rid of it because i think it was causing too much headaches but it's a person who sits who works for the organization but has complete independence and sits outside of it to comment on these kind of situations and i think that's what these companies no these jason they have these things but those are fig leaves and those are just meant to basically no they don't they don't have it it's a distraction politician because it's not it's not uh jason they have a [ __ ] council facebook has a council which is not transparent they don't say here's our decision

making and talk to the public directly about it i think yet you can look to securities law there are some examples in securities law which i think are really interesting which is that um a cfo and a ceo has to certify quarterly results right meaning for people who have issues with a company and with the statement of their earnings which is the sort of atomic unit of value creation and financial reporting they have a mechanism to redress it because you're certifying that something is true right you're certifying a set of decisions have been made an audit has been done you know the software works you know the blah blah blah what is the version of that for all of this other stuff which is that you know where where are the people who are they actually that make the decisions you

can't point to jack and zuck and say those guys are the decision makers i think in these examples what you have to point to is there was a petition of potentially several hundred or a few thousand engineers and depending on how important they were they may have gotten their way that's crazy guys well and trump served it up to him i mean if you if you know and then the worst part is no but the worst part is these people who are probably very left of center completely [ __ ] the left and then they basically let donald trump off the hook because now we're gonna completely be talking about free speech whereas the odds that donald trump would have gone to jail and been prosecuted was basically in my opinion a [ __ ] stone cold lock and then now after this happened there's a

bunch of those people who are going to basically like him and ha and now they're not going to necessarily go along with it exactly 100 100 percent and and jason so good [ __ ] job guys you got the exact opposite of what you wanted exactly and here's the thing jason you're right trump's outrage gave the censors the excuse to impose this that's the way that censorship always works if you are censoring somebody popular it would never happen censorship always starts by censoring some outrage that everybody agrees should be censored and no one even notices that what's happening is you're handing power to a group of people that they can now use against

you in the future censorship always starts as something you like and it ends as something you don't like when it finally gets turned against you what is the policy of the people who are now canceling willy-nilly it's cancel culture by the way it's not the first amendment well i think you got to not say willy-nilly after trump incited riots if there's enough public it might have been an overreaction but i think it's the proper reaction you agree it's the problem 60 000 followers is like i mean like it doesn't like what's going on it makes no sense jason i mean you used to be a member of the press no one believed in the first amendment more than you and you're listening

no cause you to pull your punches on these on censorship no no i i'll be totally clear i think they should have an obudsman i think they should lean towards allowing speech i was anti-kicking trump off the platform when the entire left was asking for it to be and you can look at the receipts i've been saying for four years it's insane to take potus off i actually in my heart of hearts believe that there is imminent risk in keeping him able to communicate with this group of people and there should have been a 30-day timeout for him and i don't think it should have been indefinite it should have been a 30-day timeout and i think we should do what folks said i don't know who said it on the last part or i heard it somewhere else like actually if we actually were to audit some of these claims and create an independent council to audit the election that might be a way to heal things and i think giving trump said that

who's that free brexit yeah so i think that's like a power move as well um but i i'm still pro freedom of speech i think there's imminent danger and i don't think it's willy-nilly this is where i think sometimes you get you you miss and you uh misrepresent yourself david um and we started this off with me misrepresenting you but when you say it's nilly it's not willy-nilly we just had this act of you know treason and this violence uh at the capitol it is not just willy-nilly jason jason you have an over-reaction i agree but it's not willy-nilly jason you have to admit though the entire world had donald trump in a corner debt to rights and he hated energy and he hit him

it's a bad strategy to de-platform to this level i agree and then to include the reason they're going after parlor by the way is that this guy lynn wood threatened he said that they should take vice president pence out and shoot him and i think that actually but they literally didn't take it down without that that was incitement to violence and un under the first amendment you can clearly prohibit that i would have and parlor didn't take it down they dragged their feet and he said it's a metaphor to go take pence out and shoot him and this is donald trump's lawyer or one of his lawyers previous lawyers that in my view that doesn't just that doesn't justify what's happened what i mean by willy nilly is why has red scare been taken down so left wing

i don't know why why is dan bongino been taken down he's like a fox commentator i've heard him i mean he's sort of you know i don't know he's kind of a pretty middle-of-the-road fox type guy i don't really know what he did we have no transparency into why people are being taken down i can't go evaluate for myself what they said to see if it you know if it warranted censorship and then cynic might say that this overreaction was playing into the hands of the chase jason what happened controlled senate congress jason what happens if it's like a a big pharma company

who wants to do a big ad buy on facebook says hey guys you got to really dial down uh anti-vaxx content now i'm not an anti-vaxxer but do i at some level believe in their right to talk about being an anti-vaxxer absolutely i think it's insane but should they have a right to do it absolutely absolutely i'm a fan of the labeling i thought the labeling was the right direction to go in where if but but saks you did talk about how for the last 60 days trump fermented this insane conspiracy theory so i guess the question is do you think that insane conspiracy theory or the question we have to ask all of ourselves i'm not pinning it on you and you know i'm i'm sensitive

to you being pinned as a person for all of trump's bad behavior but we you did say and you just say this is a two-month process of indoctrinating people into thinking this was all stolen and then they put labels on it and then the capital gets stormed so i think these companies are being put in a very uncomfortable position which is at what point do you stop this maniac uh if he's lying constantly we we were talking about these challenges on the pod for the last couple of months and we were laughing i mean we were laughing at how ridiculous they were and how ridiculous the the things that you know rudy was doing and um you know it was crazy so look not to

his supporters well but here here's the thing one of which is dead or four of which are dead i understand and here's the thing democracy takes work i mean we have to you know we have to spend the time to actually dispel these views and you know it would be nice to be able to wave a magic wand and just censor the things that we don't like but here's the thing none of us has a monopoly on the truth and you know we knew what the truth was in this particular instance but there are other cases where we don't and and the question is really who has the power to decide so you know

just i'll tell you just a real quick story you know when i went to law school all those years ago the very first class that you know that that i had in law school was this very arcane class called civil procedure which is about what court you take a case to okay and you know i was kind of wondering why is this like the first thing we learn in law school and i'll tell you the reason why is because the first question in the law is who decides is jurisdiction who has the power to decide an issue and here's the thing i would love for lynnwood to be canceled and to not be able to spout these insane theories but who are we going to give the power to to make those decisions and what we've done this week by we had this

feel-good moment i you know at least in in the tech community of being able to say donald trump banned for life and all these other people we hate but we have now handed this enormous power to this big tech cartel and it's not going to end here this is not the end it's the beginning look i i i don't think that the um the leadership at big tech want to be in this position um you know i i think it's easy to blame the individuals zak uh jack susan um sundar whomever um you know i i worked at google when it was a small when it was a private company um you know chemoth knows uh work with zuck i think we've all had experience with these individuals and i think one thing having

spent time with all of them i can tell you is that um i believe that all of them want information to be freely available and accessible um and that's a really core principle and the challenge that they're facing is that there is um you know as we talked about this social pressure uh to move away from that core principle because there is always an argument to be made and there is no universal or unifying kind of court of law that says this is the way things should um should be done by law and as a result the the pressure is what changes the behavior and that pressure will change the tides will will shift and um and it's uh it's a it's a very kind of um ugly

circumstance but you know i think characterizing the individuals is being in charge of this sex or you know trying to um to handcuff to to make them feel like they should be handcuffed in some way um is uh you know is is a bit of a mischaracterization and we saw that even um in the congressional hearings last july uh just what an absolute joke it was to see congress try and question these folks because the answers they have i think were reasonable and rational as we all know as technologists like congress doesn't understand this stuff the biggest observation to me is that the law hasn't kept up with the internet and um you know if you look at how the the dmca was written the digital millennium copyright act

shortly after it was written youtube uh with all this user generated content saw a lot of copyright content show up and they would get a takedown notice which is the legal process by which you remove copyright content and then as soon as they took it down someone else would post the same content and then someone else will post the same content and then suddenly you know viacom sued google because they were like look our copyrighted content is being continuously displayed on your site on your platform and that's because the mechanism defined in the dmca did not keep up with the law the biggest issue i think is is a legal one which is you know how do we create laws and how do we create a uh private industry meets government court uh body uh governing principles that you know allows these arbitrations to operate

just one sentence i mean apply first amendment obligations to these um monopolists that's what my blog post was about i'll i'll tell you where this could go in a bad direction is if you look at if you think about what social media has become i would put it on the top of the list that includes other critical national resources that any country has so for example if you look at in bolivia you know as it turns out bolivia has incredible access to lithium right and lithium is like an engine we all knew that we want to medicate trump with lithium is that what you're saying no lithium the the the input into into lithium-ion batteries um but it also turns out that at every step along the way bolivia's basically nationalized

every single private investment of a lithium mine um in countries all around the world there's you know numerous examples of this privatization turning into nationalization when something becomes important enough and norway part of i think what we're struggling with here is you know there's going to be this crazy push pull in in social media what do you think happens if you know uh india actually says hey you know what you're going to have to nationalize the rails of whatsapp or the rails of facebook if you want to be in my country why is that so inconceivable i think you're right that that's that that is a second order

that that is a second order consequence of censorship that nobody even thinks about you have the leaders of many countries across the world using twitter as a as a channel do you think they are now going to want to rely on that given that twitter can censor them at any time they're going to hand that lever of national power to jack dorsey no way they're going to look at this i mean not even jack dorsey david somebody in like the bowels of the user you know user user access group some some rando vp someplace is going to stop the president or the prime minister of a country and communicating to their people exactly exactly and this is exactly the kind of second order

consequence that the people who who i think engage in this feel-good moment of censoring trump didn't even think through didn't even think through this is exactly why the best solution would have been a temporary pause on these accounts to let the dust settle but any of these completely fundamental decisions that you can't go back from what is the technical difference between saying it's banned forever and it's banned for ten days today technically it's not a decision yeah but exactly what david said you feed into this emotion just like the people that stormed

the capital fed into their emotion and then you wake up the next day with this hangover and you realize to yourself what the [ __ ] did i just do and i think that's that's what we're gonna have to sort out now is you cannot unscramble this [ __ ] egg because irrespective of whatever happens in the united states there are two to three billion monthly active users daily active users on these products they all report to different people and none of those people that they report to are jack dorsey and mark zuckerberg they are the presidents and prime ministers duly elected individuals of these countries and so you're not going to allow these two private citizens to disrupt power we we have so much information we don't know about what occurred this past week i think it's it's all going to get investigated it's going to be like a 911 commission all over again or

ukraine etc um and and i think that's why applause would be really good to find out exactly you know trump's been telling people to come to this rally it's going to be a hell of a show and it's going to be incredible and you've got to be there on the 6th it's going to be out of control you know how how how much did they know right like that's what i really wanted how much did they know about what was going to go down and why are these people carrying zip ties and pipe bombs you know like this could have been a lot worse i think that's why people are responding uh this way and i saw something today that i thought was i'll let you pick it up from me freeburg but i saw something today that i thought was uh particularly interesting and in dovetails

with reconciliation which is what the country's got to do in 2021 and 22 we gotta reconcile this [ __ ] because it's bigger fish to fry like you know china and the pandemic and global warming uh one of these people at the airport who was coming home from the rally is now on the do do not fly list they're taking this group of domestic terrorists uh is how they're putting these american citizens who got whipped up into a frenzy by trump and giuliani they're calling them domestic terrorists now uh some of them maybe maybe some of them are just you know got caught up in the wrong mob they're on the do not fly list this guy couldn't get home and he's freaking out and then i don't know if you saw lindsey graham with 20 of uh the people who were going home from the rallies chanting at him that this is never going to end

and and that seemed like a very volatile situation and so the escalation continues go ahead freeberg i'll tell you like it feels to me like this past week has been um nothing but fuel for for both sides because there isn't a black and white um circumstance here and there isn't a black and white um objective truth about uh you know what took place and what motivations were and and what the connections were when i was 16 years old i went to a rave in downtown l.a and for new year's eve you did and right before how old were you 16. and um and the rave got shut down half an hour before midnight because there was some illegal drug being widely circulated for free so you guys can watch videos of this on youtube it's called

circa 1996. and we and everyone the cops came in and they shut down the rave it was outdoors in downtown l.a and we rioted and so everyone left the rave and like i i i participated i think i'm past the uh the period where they can prosecute oh my god seven thousand yeah i participated in the no don't say that don't say that on the show you you were you witnessed i witnessed um participated in the sense that i was there and um and i saw all this all this activity but when you're standing next to these people there was absolutely no thought around what to do and when and what the next step was and i think if you watch the videos yeah if you watch the videos of the capitol

there's a lot of videos on youtube that you can watch now and you can watch the interviews of people coming out of the capitol building it's like what were you doing in there we were fighting for you know it's a revolution right i mean we're taking back the country and then some people were saying well we're trying to stop the certification of joe biden and other people were saying we're taking over the capital there was no uniform sense of what the objective of the mission was and there was many interpretations if you look at all the parlor messages that have been copied and published now online there were many interpretations about trump's words and rudy giuliani's yeah parlor and so everyone has a different point of view and i think that's the biggest challenge we're going to have is we're all going to try and you know get to the truth and everyone's going to cast this as a different point they're going to take what happened they're going to take some set of events that happened and they're going to highlight that this is what the connections were

and this is the reason why it happened and this just creates fuel it doesn't create um you know there is not going to be some objective outcome here we're all going to feel better no one's going to feel better at the end of the day um and and we've basically just thrown a whole bunch of gas on a fire that was already what do you think um that was my point was just like it's all it's all great no my behavior yeah i mean yeah it's crazy um burn or whatever photos you took um uh sax what do you think of this vp you know pence and trump and their relationship vis-a-vis pardons in this end game here because it does seem like pence was upset uh obviously at what occurred and that trump didn't even call to check on him and what was going on and then a number of these people because there are q anon people there there are

you know i'm sure antifa people there but it was mainly trump folks um they wanted to capture the vp that was for some of them the explicit purpose of this was to get the vice president and to hold him accountable and you know so there are some speculation to do bodily harm to him what are your thoughts on that i think one of the most insane aspects of what trump did was the way that he denounced uh pence who's been the model of a loyal vp i mean certainly the other side has uh criticized him for that uh for being sort of almost a toady uh no one could have been more

loyal than pence to trump the last four years and penn simply told him look i don't have the power to cancel this vote of the electors you know and for that fact you know just for speaking truth about that trump denounced him in front of this this mob and and made him a target and that is one of the more insane aspects of what trump did and uh you know i uh truck no sympathy for that um again this was an act of of demagoguery and uh this is an intimate esn for for trump's presidency uh but even in terms of like you know i want to go back to what freeberg just said about how he got kind of caught up in this in in that mob i think that that was true i think for

90 something percent of the people who are there is they went to this trump rally and protest and it turned into a riot and they got caught up in it um and then in addition to that there were i think hidden in that crowd some serious agitators who were there to carry out violence in mayhem and had crazy plans you know hanging my pens shooting pelosi i mean there really were you know a small number of those people i don't know what the percentage is probably one or two percent what does he think it's about the majority sacks what are you doing what do you think will happen if they actually did shoot pelosi or they did hang pens it is a possibility but no but see that's threat inflation what you're doing right there jason is exactly

what you're what no i think it actually could have happened what if one of the people who died was the senator yes it could have happened but here's the problem people are acting as if everything that could have happened but didn't actually happened or may still happen at a later date that that is what i call threat inflation and it's the biggest tool the sensors have for seizing power because it it convinces you yourself said these people had those plans so we we do have to think about it i mean the first time we were trying to blow up the world trade center it didn't come down david but the second time it did come down i i understand but by constantly beating the drum we

needed to inflate that threat didn't we but but by constantly beating the drama of these threats no no wait a minute stop no we we did not need to do anything there was a national security apparatus who needed to do it their job isn't to inflate threats their job is to investigate a politically get to the bottom of [ __ ] and fix it they [ __ ] failed on 9 11. okay yes we know that conclusively so talking about it and amping people up jason doesn't do anything a better a better example of threat inflation would be the iraq war remember that we got to go absolutely that was threat inflation threat that whipping people up you know and making them worse

i'm just talking to three of my besties and asking you what you think about what would have happened if a senator died i think it's a valid it didn't close to happening but it came close this this is the thing that is is convincing people helping convince people to give up liberties that they should want to hold on to i'm just asking you i'm not i'm not saying everybody and i'm not saying we need to be on edge that this is going to happen every day of our lives we can't live in fear like that but that's almost what happened there are people who went there with that intent actually we don't we don't we don't we don't know any of this now we're now we're no better than anybody else you had you had a maniac who was a vessel he basically spilled over

there was a small fraction of the people that probably came to that thing with ill intent and then there was a large number of people that got pulled into the undertow all of their lives will be ruined because of one individual okay and at the end of the day there was in my opinion one singular person to blame donald trump and then a handful of people who were his accomplices uh josh hawley ted cruz rudy giuliani we know who all of these characters are in this terrible play and then there were all these people that were caught in the undertow and i would rather just deal with it that way because it actually allows us to have some sympathy i i felt sympathy yeah so all i'm saying is let's just get back to the core issue at hand something bad happened

and then something really really stupid that is actually even worse also happened and by that you mean the banning of trump on all platforms for all time no that that there is a there it there was uh an arbitrariness to the decision making around free speech and i'm telling you guys i know that you may think banning him from twitter is so much lower than this attack on the capital and i'm telling you it's not because the slippery slope of event event number one is so obvious the prosecution of that is so obvious the law is so completely clear but we've shifted now

into this realm where things are arbitrary where things are gray and it's a worldwide problem there are 180 some odd countries in the world right that these sites operate in with 180 different leaders multiplied by you know two or three political parties each like there are now hundreds and hundreds of people who are trying to figure out some chess games it's so i just think that we've made i just think we've made the problem so much worse yeah i i agree and and um you know earlier today uh our heated conversation extended to one of our friends in our chat group who was telling us that you know there's a group of sas companies that are

talking about the platforming parlor as well from just using ordinary software as a service and other sites like it and you know and and again it's a little bit like it's just like the censorship thing it's like a red scare it's like a red scare it's like a really scary podcast the actual red scare that are yeah like joe mccarthy exactly we're literally going to go after anybody who writes a screenplay who works for a communist socialist meeting but let me ask you guys how much do you guys so i think that there's severely um there there's a severe amount of pressure on the leaders of these companies to do well by their employees and that employees are all bay area based and bay area base is a very heavy uh democrat um area 90 plus and so so so this is the argument a lot of um uh you know conservatives make which is that tech companies in general

uh as a result act in the best interests of of of um uh you know of the um the liberal uh movements sac and chamoth i mean and jason do you guys think that it is an employee-driven um kind of uh set of actions that we're seeing and that the motivation is is in part to kind of appease the employees of these companies in fact i think that more than 70 or 80 of the impetus for these last-ditch efforts was internally driven and this is where i think it's a complete crisis of leadership because if you had just gotten up in front of your employees and said guys if we do this we will shift focus away from what actually is the problem so i think the right solution is temporary ban

while we evaluate while we strengthen policy like some [ __ ] [ __ ] statement and allow the legal court system to do their job instead they acted like vigilantes in a way that basically appeased nobody and all of a sudden shifted the focus away from the person that all these hundreds of employees wanted to basically have you know been found guilty and pointed to one individual they all wanted one individual to be held culpable and now he's not going to 100 and and and the proof of that is the fact that these employees have been calling for this policy for years and now they finally got the excuse to do it and so i agree i mean jack is leading twitter from behind the mob runs twitter now and they have for some time and to

freebrook's point it's like padme um padme i guess the great the great american star wars settings this is how democracy diced with thunderous applause yes that's exactly right everybody's clapping over this censorship i mean the prequels are underrated i have to say i mean if you watch revenge of the sith it's definitely i don't know the last three were the best but um the last three were the worst but anyway but hold on a second i just want to get saxophone i'm just going to add so so such math is 100 right there's one thing i would add to that though which is if uh just a few months ago we had this senate hearing on section 230 yes and both jack and zuck were berated by the senators most notably senator blumenthal who was basically arguing for censorship he was telling

him you got to crack down and so i also think there's not this pressure from below there's pressure from above these guys know who's coming into power in january and i think especially zuck who has to be terrified of being broken up right now he yes exactly so he is thinking about how do i modify and appease these politicians who now have the power and can break me up and i gotta use for him it's too little too late they're trying to break you up anyway you're gonna get paid up anyway and by the way i now agree with it i gotta say you know on previous pods i've defended

these tech companies but i've come around they are too powerful and they are using their powerful their power in too indiscriminate away without power and can i say it more bluntly the better but can i say that let me just let me just point something out you didn't say that before it affected the conservative movement's ability to have a voice right hey don't calacanas sacks yeah no well i mean no but i want to point out like i mean like and and a lot of people are having this reaction which is once it affects and i just want to point this out once it affects you personally that's when you take issue with the way that the system is operating right now you know a lot of people make make fun of this but a few months ago or weeks ago there's a porn website called pornhub and visa mastercard and discover stopped processing payments for them because the

new york times put out an opinion article about hold on david david how do you spell that p-o-o-r the electronic frontier foundation was the only organization that really made a stink about this this behavior from these monopoly payment processing networks stepping in and blocking their ability to run as a business not on any legal grounds and not on any grounds based on some court making a decision and it was an opinion piece and suddenly everyone's waking up because now trump is being silenced and this is and this is why no no no no no no unregulated exactly like bitcoin you're going to yeah jason let me respond to that so um so first of all porn has always been in a separate category the supreme court has said that you can regulate it according to community standards and so i support the ability of facebook or twitter or whatever to regulate it according to their standards that's perfectly consistent with the first amendment

i personally am not that upset about trump per se being censored i'm upset about this new vast policy of censorship including de-platforming not just trump but parlor i mean you're talking about millions of people and the fact that they're conservative is not the reason if this was happening to a liberal app i promise you i'd be acting the exact same way for me free speech is the most cherished value that we have it's the first amendment of the constitution it's the first right in the bill of rights that's the thing that has me upset this is not a partisan thing uh and so to your point freeburg you asked us what do we think is going on here uh at these companies i think there's three things and we just heard two of them and and saks stole my thunder because i was gonna say i think that zuck who i believe i'm very cynical about i think he is thinking

how do i p's the left now after having appeased trump for all these years now trump's out of office now how do i appease the left okay i have to ban him for life and remember trump was uh zuck was the first to give the lifetime ban not jack so zuck who's previously been in trump's corner is now not um the third factor so the first factor is obviously the employees second factor is uh getting broken up and appeasing all these senators i think the third one is uh i think that there could be information that we are not privy to that they are privy to that me that is leading them to overreact here no i'm going to disagree yeah i'm going to disagree

too yeah it would it would not have come out in that way it would have said we are you know uh pausing the account we're suspending the account it wouldn't have been this next step of saying your d platform forever i think in jack's it would have been necessary if it was a real security issue no it was not the other thing i'll say can i just say one thing which is that i've been in the bowels of these companies i helped build one um my team was probably the most instrumental in getting one of these things to real mega scale i think that these companies are complicated enough that everybody needs to realize that it is beyond the capability of any one person to manage in a reasonable way and these businesses are they're too broad-based they exist in too many countries with too many different standards

that ultimately all comes back to one unified code base if facebook was actually 182 different products on a country by country basis and twitter was the same there was actually be a path here right and each one had a country level ceo that actually had power maybe this could be different but the problem is that if all roads go back to menlo park in san francisco and you're putting the power in the hands of 15 or 20 000 people over a multi-million line code base it's an impossible task for even the smartest of the smart people these companies need to get broken up uh i think we're all going to agree on that i do think you guys are missing a piece of them for another point you guys are missing a piece of information i'm just going to read to you what uh from the washington post twitter specifically raised the possibility that trump's recent tweets could mobilize his supporters to commit acts of violence around president-elect joe biden's

inauguration and analysis that experts saw as a major expansion in the company's approach um and so they specifically cited that they said they were and the tweet that they were concerned about was this one uh that got taken down very quickly american patriots will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way shape or form and then he announced right after that that he's not going to the inauguration so what twitter believes is that that was some sort of a dog whistle to go do violence at the inauguration and that's what they said in their lifetime ban is they felt trump was uh doing that so just to point out you you could interpret it that way and you could also interpret it the other way and that exactly which is the problem of trump yeah he knows the problem of it's the problem of using judgment right and not yet can i ask you a question would you be supportive of um platform level open architecture so for example that

you know the messaging infrastructure that supports facebook and twitter um have to be unified in a way um so that there is that was originally called like there was rss i mean there's a lot of open communication protocols that exist out there i mean signal has made an attempt at doing this as well with with their approach and open sourcing everything um i'm just thinking i'm just asking what is the technical solution if not to break them up to make them more uh predictable portability of your profile i think you could pass a law i mean like we do have a government we can pass a law so you can pass a law that says if you're going to operate a communication platform here are the rules you have to abide by and here's how you have to and now you're a regulated entity and you could regulate them and you could even create a regulatory body to oversee them and make sure that standards of free speech are applied universally and and in an absolute way um you know and you can give them a chance to correct right

here given that it may be so technically difficult to break them up that may be one of the points of one of the paths of resolution and we're gonna find out the next two to three years because i don't think that anyone on the left or the right likes big tech as they call it uh and the way it's operating today but i think technically having been in these organizations it is impossible to break them up and i will say something controversial i also think consumers benefit from the scale that they operate at and i don't think that they should be broken up and i think that there's economic value to having google be the scale of ted and amazon being in the scale it's at facebook being skilled at and it doesn't harm consumers i think it helps in aggregate in terms of pricing and service availability um but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated in a way that everyone can kind of feel like there's some absolute universal standard applied um but i i know i'm in the minority on that yeah i would say um my my view about

antitrust used to be that it was all about consumer harm and i've actually come around to more of the the liberal point of view on this which is it can't just be about consumer harm it's also got to be about power and not just market power but democratic power and the fact of the matter is these companies have just gotten too large and too powerful and they have too much influence on our democracy and it's incompatible with you know a country democracy so what do you think what if they got regulated like a utility sacks so like we have regulatory bodies for utilities for both telecommunications and for power and energy what if we had a regulatory body for internet services well yeah i mean first and foremost i want a an online bill of rights you know i want to know what my rights are online that these techno this cartel of tech monopolies cannot take away from me because something is a right if it only if it if it can't be taken away and right now it can all be taken away you know your online identity your right to participate in

the public conversation can be taken away with no explanation by these companies we have no rights and like what would you do if your online presence is taken away like that is a huge part of the modern world what is going on in trump's mind do you think right now having lost his ability to communicate with a billion people you know like he had this ability to control the conversation and now he's i mean i don't even know if people will put him on air uh that's why i think something is brewing um with him you know he is not gonna sit tight and and wind out the last 10 days here um you know whether it's some ad hoc press conference he calls tomorrow and just rants on tv

or he tries to declare some you know pass some law without congress's approval or does something i mean this guy has never proven himself to be able to sit quietly and to not be in the spotlight or to be told that he's wrong and all three of those things are being imposed upon him right now so he is squirming like uh like a cat being put in the bath also it seems like they're doing some last-ditch stuff pompeo lifted restrictions for u.s taiwan contracts i don't know if you saw that that was a little bit of an interesting thing that was slid in the last couple of days a little little jab to the chinese on the way out where do you think sax last 10 days

the zip tie guy apparently got arrested yeah i want to know what's going on with him i mean these guys having zip ties with them is just no but this is incredible that how systematically they've been able to basically get you know a lot of these folks i mean jason i will tell you i will tell you the one thing we got going for us is the deep state i mean thank god for you know folks who are loyal to the constitution and to the rule of law in this country and the fbi is incredible and are um you know our the uh the the the the civil servants who have been career civil servants in government as much as we make fun of the bureaucracy and the [ __ ] that goes on it's great to be an american and to know that there's um you know that there's these uh these folks out there looking out for for this is like being in the final stages of a stress test it's like the final well by the way as i predicted on the last part i said there would

be major major arrests you know everyone was saying that that that these protesters being treated with kid gloves compared to blm and i was like just wait there's going to be a rest and sure enough they're rounding up these people quick a lot of charges i think the most genius thing was i don't know who who said it was a honey pot but the the parlor post yeah that said you know it was incredible sex but like um sax pointed this out so i'll give him full credit for this but there was a parlor post where it was like the title of the person was like you know office of the uh the president's pardon attorney and you know send me your name and phone number and email if you want to be pardoned for what happened in the capitol and name the crime you committed so yes and then i just set up the website riots amnesty.org please

go to capitol rise amnesty.org and tell us what you did and uh if you outline each of the crimes you outlined that you did you will get amnesty for those crimes you have to outline in detail what you did and give us any photographic and video proof you have of your crimes the reason i suspected that was a honeypot is because um jimmy carter pardoned uh you know after the vietnam war he pardoned everyone who had dodged the draft as part of the vietnam war he did that as a blanket pardon without naming any names so it seemed very suspect to me that trump would need individual names and and crimes to build a part in them that was ceremonial right that was like a healing a wound move by jimmy carter it wasn't no one was going after that because we weren't prosecuting those sure sure sure and so but it was never litigated so it became a precedent i

think i i do think that trump probably i mean this would be a very interesting court case but i do think he could issue a blanket pardon everyone on the mall that day it's possible i'm not saying you should i think it's a terrible thing and that would be torture escalation as opposed to de-escalation sex being our our lawyer and our historian you know what is the the origin of the presidential pardon how is that even legal and how did we end up in a place in this country where any law could be superseded by the president telling you it's okay for you to break this law and pardon you after the fact or even before the fact it's it's it's uh it exists because it's in the constitution the framers of the constitution put it in there i i don't know what their thinking was i've never really studied that it is a

almost a residue of or a vestigial monarchical power that somehow was included in the comments incredible right i mean like the intention of it my understanding was to um correct injustices that occurred so that it would be a backstop against somebody who was by the judgment of the one guy it relies on you know people buying into america right and i think that's the trump stress test and i can't wait till we don't talk about this guy anymore i'd love to see an amendment getting rid of the pardon powers i i don't know i never feel good about it well they are thinking the court should be where you should adjudicate the you know appeals and such but all right well listen we've

beaten this today can i can i end on something um let's end on something uplifting i took um uh a bunch of spax public uh at the end of last year and on friday um one of the vehicles that i'm the ceo of merged with sofi um and i want to tell you something about the ceo of sophie anthony noto um and i think he'll be okay because he's shared this story a couple times but uh his parents got divorced when he was three years old he uh grew up on welfare food stamps um sort of free lunch kids until middle school um went to the um the west point um

was it a all-star stock analyst was the cfo of the nfl was a cfo of twitter then the ceo of twitter um and uh you guys know my story but you know uh ended up in the united states after growing up in canada after escaping a civil war i grew up on welfare and i said to anthony uh what are the odds that two kids who grew up that way could have ended up in a moment where we were part of doing something really amazing that you know for each of us was a meaningful accomplishment and he said only in america and uh only in america this is let's keep that single best [ __ ] country in the goddamn world 100 um and it's worth fighting for and it's worth having these debates and i think it's worth doing the pod

and so i'd like to see american constitution keep the pod going stop jason the american constitution is the most incredible [ __ ] document because that is the foundation all of these things are built it's just the most amazing thing so i am really glad that we're all having this conversation and i would just say guys keep the faith let's put the light back on donald trump uh i would have as much sympathy as possible for as many of those folks in the capital maybe not the folks that were intending to do harm maybe not zip tie guy but there's a lot of other people

that are that just got caught in the undertow i would try to have sympathy for them um and i would really don't lose focus now people donald trump josh hawley ted cruz stay [ __ ] vigilant i would also love you guys think about doing something for someone else this week yeah yeah that's all let's all do something nice exactly yeah i love you guys all right love you besties love you saks love you sex love you sexy poo come on sexy say it god damn it this is the time you're good say it and they've just gone crazy with it besties we need to get these