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

January 11, 2021 / 01:37:47

This episode covers the recent political turmoil, including discussions about Donald Trump's actions, free speech, and the implications of social media censorship. Guests include Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, and Jason Friedberg.

The hosts discuss the chaotic events surrounding the Capitol riot, with David Sacks expressing his concerns about being labeled a "Trump guy" and the need for nuanced political discussions. He emphasizes that his views are more complex than the labels suggest.

Chamath Palihapitiya and Jason Friedberg engage in a debate about the implications of social media companies banning Trump and others, arguing about the balance between free speech and the responsibility of these platforms to prevent violence.

The conversation shifts to the broader implications of censorship and the potential for a slippery slope in regulating speech online. The hosts reflect on the need for a more structured approach to free speech and the role of tech companies in shaping public discourse.

In a more uplifting conclusion, the hosts share personal stories of overcoming adversity and the importance of maintaining faith in democracy and the American Constitution.

TL;DR

The episode discusses Trump's political fallout, free speech issues, and social media censorship following the Capitol riot.

Video

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hey everyone hey everyone welcome
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your illustrious moderator jason  calcandis has been purged cancelled  
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he's been canceled we canceled him for his  constant interruptions and low iq comments  
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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
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he is uh jason is away he is actively  implementing our jerk off to win  
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strategy to solve the pandemic and free speech
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hey everybody hey everybody it is an emergency  podcast episode 16 hit number two in the  
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uh rankings on the apple itunes podcasting store  
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clearly we hit a nerve it's been an insane  week and the dictator dictated that he was  
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not satisfied with doing our podcast once  every two weeks and so here we are on a sunday  
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the queen of quinoa rain man himself david sacks  and the dictator chopping it up for you the loyal  
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confused angry infuriated audience of all  in it's the craziest week of our lives  
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jason plea please don't describe to the audience  the characteristics that describe yourself  
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okay this has been a crazy 72 hours can anybody  remember us a week that has been more crazy in  
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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  
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podcast between you and saks over text we should  get it all out there we should share it publicly  
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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  
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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  
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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  
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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  
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and interesting group to talk to sax has been  characterized as the trump guy he took offense to  
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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  
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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  
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objection you're the aggrieved yeah i mean so  look i i think that that j cow does an amazing  
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job moderating the pod and it's a difficult job  um and you know the the the so i so i don't want  
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to um you know this is not something i'm trying to  blame him for but i do have an objection to being  
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labeled in a certain way i think anybody would  you know we we don't want to be misconstrued and  
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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  
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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  
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i mean i haven't said anything really about it  that's not my agenda um you know and i think it  
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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  
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sometimes it means criticizing the resistance so i  just don't like being labeled a certain way and i  
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think jason and i sort of you know kind of resolve  this um you know if i label my politics just you  
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know jason calls me the conservative i think  that's more accurate but the question is you know  
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what am i conserving exactly and i would describe  myself more as like a 1960s style liberal you  
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know i'm a believer in free speech you know aclu  style um believer in king's dream of a colorblind  
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society you know if you know i'm against all  these you know foreign wars and interventions  
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if i had been around the 1960s i would have  been protesting vietnam that's kind of more  
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where i'm coming from and i guess the reason i'm  a conservative now is because the political debate  
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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  
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a trumper per se and um i just don't want you know  jason making jokes to somehow um have the audience  
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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  
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even stop doesn't even want to listen to you um  and so my views are more complicated than that
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okay well thanks for everybody  for tuning in to the all-in  
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amazing episode 17. thanks to our sponsors um  listen uh i think what makes this podcast great  
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is the diversity of opinion and the respect that  we show for each other if my breaking chops uh  
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which is as everybody knows here uh my superpower  in life and talk along with talking has pigeon  
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holed you into being something you're not or if  you felt i've taken a cheap shot at you in any way  
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uh i apologize and it was not my intent my intent  is to keep the conversation flowing to entertain  
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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  
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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  
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of thought actually i've really spent since  the last podcast a lot of time thinking about  
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your position david and where you're coming  from and then also where the people who maybe  
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you know you maybe agreed with some of uh trump's  victories and certainly you're a conservative  
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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  
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nation what is the off-ramp here to the people  who supported trump up until this coup attempt  
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uh and this ugliness and then how do we reconcile  it right that is the grand reconciliation here is  
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the thing that has me very concerned because  we're a microcosm david you and i are you know  
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unbelievably close friends uh for a very long  period of time and we struggle with uh i think uh  
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trump trump is as i was saying in our group chat  earlier it's like the trolley car problem like  
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people will be pulling up how do you deal with  trump as the example of you know what do you  
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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  
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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  
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no jason here's the thing i think that um we all  have views i think the thing that i respect the  
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most about saks is that his views are independent  of the candidate du jour and i think his views  
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quite honestly are in many cases the most well  reasoned and well thought out because he's frankly  
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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  
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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  
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conservative meaning get the government out of the  way they're a bunch of incompetent [ __ ] buffoons  
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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  
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mandate in order to drive change i don't know  where i fit anymore especially because it's harder  
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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  
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the listeners to appreciate not just amongst the  four of us but also amongst their own friends is  
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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  
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with an enormous asterisk beside his name and by  him i mean trump for the rest of our natural lives  
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and so let's just not allow what one person  has been able to do to malign all of our like  
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natural ability to just not be completely stupid  quite honestly so um i just think it's important  
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to realize that we all have completely completely  nuanced perspectives they're all worth listening  
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to and i would just tell people don't fall for  the simple easy out to assume that you know being  
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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  
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street journal opinion by uh was it lisa lasser  what was her name lisa uh amy lassell somebody um  
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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  
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i wasn't a trump supporter have never been a  trump supporter i do have those some sympathy  
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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  
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right on china getting the rhetoric on trade right  um the deregulation that he's created in some ways  
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so there there is very much a reasonable  narrative up until the capital storming where  
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the glass was definitely half full and it could  have legitimately been viewed half full and it  
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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  
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100 categorically this guy is just a complete  piece of [ __ ] and so now the people that stand  
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with him are extremely isolated and so i just  want us to remember that there there is probably  
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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  
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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  
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you know don't take trump literally and all this  kind of stuff some of us were taking him literally  
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and some of us were very concerned and people were  saying oh you're being hyperbolic he's not hitler  
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he's he's not dangerous you know what uh [ __ ] he  is dangerous and you should take him literally and  
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i think a lot of the folks who enabled him and  who thought it was funny um who weren't on the  
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other side of his vindictiveness his dog whistling  uh and the anger and the violence he put out into  
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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  
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stairs kind of thing he he is like tony soprano  or any other mob boss who knows how to incite  
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people to do dangerous things without having the  culpability himself as you pointed out chamath he  
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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  
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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  
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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  
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uh trump is now the first uh sitting president  to cost his party the presidency the house and  
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the senate since herbert hoover uh jason if you're  right about trump i mean the voters have certainly  
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been able to see that and they've punished him and  his party at the polls i do think that whatever  
00:14:13
you do to trump individually at this point is sort  of redundant with that um you know he has now cost  
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his party uh any share of power everything any  share of the power in washington so can i ask  
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you a question david when i made that point about  peter thiel and the people who supported him early  
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do you have any regrets in your own thinking  about being supportive of trump in his early years  
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you're coming at this from a place i've never even  come at it from which is i'm not like a partisan  
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person uh when trump won the election in 2016  my first reaction was not is this you know har  
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right or wrong i don't it's you know what side am  i on my my first reaction was why did this happen  
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you know i tried to understand it you know i  read you know the the hillbilly elegy author um  
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you know i was you know my my surprise at that  happening caused me to ask questions and you know  
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what i think became really clear is that trump won  despite his manifest you know flaws because of a  
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uh because of the failure of the elites i mean he  he was you know he's a sort of outsider populist  
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and the country was trying to send the a  bipartisan i should say bipartisan elites  
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and what was that message that to chamas point  for the last 20 years uh the bipartisan consensus  
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in washington has been to feed this chinese tiger  into the wagon is now potentially on the cusp  
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of supplanting us as the sort of richest economy  in the world we have admired ourselves in these  
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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  
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and then once he was in the presidency you  know i didn't see my job as being to be part  
00:16:21
of some crazy resistance i mean there needed to  be a rational opposition to trump and there was  
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never a rational opposition um people would  basically object to anything he said just because  
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he said it which ben made your side and i'm going  to say your side the conservative side i wouldn't  
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say your side the conservative side dug in because  they were like well the left's being hysterical  
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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  
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cruz lindsey graham all these people who said they  would be never trumpers became right in line trump  
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supporters and they're in their partisan they're  they're politicians they're part of the the party  
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for people who care about ideas what i would  say is i didn't change my ideas one way or  
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another because trump might happen to agree  with one of them freeberry what's your take
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i don't like talking about trump well that is  kind of i think where we where we're getting to  
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this is that look what's the off ramp  here friedberg um what's the end game  
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you guys remember how the emperor came  to power in star wars it was palpatine  
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turned the republic against itself and then he  emergency powers emergency powers um look i i what  
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i to sax's point like i care um more deeply um i  care very little about trump the person um and i  
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care more deeply about the motivations of people  that that want a person like that um in power and  
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i care more deeply about the way the dialogue  is happening um to resolve ideas and to resolve  
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to decisions in this country right now um that is  why i think that you know my vote last year in our  
00:18:18
last two podcasts ago which seems like 10 years  ago was that um the biggest political failure  
00:18:25
of 2020 is the institute of american democracy  and it's only gotten worse in the last two weeks
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and i think that the mechanism  by which we have debate   is lost it's from everyone from the  republican to the democratic leadership  
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uh it is attacking and finger-pointing and there  is no um resolve for forgiveness um there is no  
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everything is all about justice and winning  and there is no resolve for objectivity and  
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discovering the truth and doing the best thing for  people not the best thing for party and doing the  
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best thing for country and that's really easy  to say and really really hard to do as i think  
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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  
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and so at what point do you break the cycle you  know revenge never ends until someone steps down  
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first and says you know what i give up i'm not  gonna i'm gonna end up in the losing position  
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but at that point maybe reconciliation can begin  um and i'm more concerned about the the heat the  
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temperature and everyone says turn it down but no  one's actually turning it down um and so you know  
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the legacy of trump i i i honestly care less  about i care much more about going forward how  
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do we resolve to decisions that aren't all about  the democrats overrunning and i you know i was  
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i was actually upset about georgia because i do  think it's a problem if you have a one-party state  
00:20:00
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  
00:20:09
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  
00:20:18
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  
00:20:28
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  
00:20:38
unfortunate outcomes yeah we have three or four  major wars we need to solve the pandemic china  
00:20:45
wealth inequality global warming chamoth uh do  you think at this point in the podcast we should  
00:20:53
walk through what's happened since wednesday  vis-a-vis you know trump being de-platformed or  
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do you think we should uh talk a little bit about  and skip to reconciliation i think we have a fork  
00:21:03
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  
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in the context of peter thiel he has a philosopher  that he's talked a lot about renee gerard and  
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um you know basically the the girardian philosophy  is essentially that you know people come into  
00:21:28
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  
00:21:38
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  
00:21:49
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  
00:21:59
just even the united states it's almost like sort  of democracy as an institution's hand was forced  
00:22:04
um this past week and so it is probably important  to look at what's happened in the last few  
00:22:12
days through that lens which is you know it's  it's almost like people first were shocked  
00:22:19
and then now we're in the midst of that reflexive  reaction to what is a simple choice which is you  
00:22:26
can basically forgive the guy or you can re-affirm  the institution which means to sacrifice the guy  
00:22:35
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  
00:22:46
you're going to have a bunch of overreaching  you know you're going to have a bunch of um  
00:22:52
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  
00:23:03
followers on parlor but he was saying it on fox  news which is distribution to millions of people  
00:23:11
and so can i ask a question about this reality  now we're all facing do because the event that  
00:23:17
occurred on wednesday we are all still trying  to process and new information is coming in  
00:23:23
as we you know as people get the videos and and  as we let the dust settle the dust is settling i'm  
00:23:31
curious sax do how do you look at what happened on  wednesday do you view it as a coup do you because  
00:23:38
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  
00:23:48
uh and there were pipe bombs and a police officer  was beaten to death with a pipe and his skull  
00:23:54
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  
00:24:03
um you know that counteract the selfie police  you know so many different things occurred on  
00:24:09
wednesday i think we all have to just think about  what happened on wednesday how do we each feel  
00:24:15
about what happened on wednesday i'll go to  you first sex and not because i'm framing you  
00:24:20
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  
00:24:32
a riot that turned into you know some sort of  insurrection i guess you could call it it was it  
00:24:37
was a rebellion against authority um i think coup  is potentially a strong word uh because it wasn't  
00:24:46
nobody ever had their hands on the levers of  power i mean the fate of the republic was never  
00:24:52
in question i know there were even you know  people tweeting about how the uh the these  
00:24:59
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  
00:25:07
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  
00:25:18
uh called threat inflation where you know using  language like you know going from riot to uh  
00:25:28
insurrection to now coup it there is a a type of  inflation happening that is then used to justify  
00:25:36
the reaction by the other side to it which is now  you know the basically the ending of freedom of  
00:25:42
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  
00:25:51
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  
00:26:01
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  
00:26:10
uh but but i wanna i wanna tie in this issue with  you said what you said about the off-ramp okay  
00:26:16
which is you know what is the off-ramp from this  look everybody understands i think regardless of  
00:26:22
what side political spectrum you're on that we  are caught in a cycle of insane hyper-partisan  
00:26:28
warfare and tit-for-tat retaliation and that is  the thing that we need to uh that is the ledge  
00:26:35
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  
00:26:46
is a two-way street both sides are doing it and  that's how de-escalation works is both of us have  
00:26:51
to concede something yes and unless you can see  when your side is doing it we're never gonna break  
00:26:57
the cycle now the thing that is happening right  now now what trump did was absolutely outrageous  
00:27:03
and i think it it brought him to an ignominious  end in american politics he will pay for it in  
00:27:09
the history books if not in a court of law  okay but now what has happened is the next  
00:27:15
step in the tit-for-tat retaliation what the  the stormy of the capital has now been used  
00:27:20
to implement a sweeping attack on free speech  you know the the twitter employees who sent  
00:27:28
that letter to jack who've been demanding this for  years have finally gotten their way and there is  
00:27:33
a widespread purge going on and not just of trump  not just a permanent ban on trump and then a whole  
00:27:40
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  
00:27:48
much on the left no one can say exactly what it  was that got them banned i guess they had steve  
00:27:54
bannon on their podcast they are suddenly banned  from twitter nobody knows why oh i subscribe to  
00:27:59
the red scare podcast it's actually uh it's called  the dirt bag left they're kind of like socialists  
00:28:05
um intel trying to be public intellectuals and  it's it's oddly compelling i'll leave it at  
00:28:10
that um but they are now banned from from twitter  they somehow got let's pause for a second on djt  
00:28:18
getting banned from twitter this is close to 100  million followers it's a billion dollars in value  
00:28:25
he just had the pga say they'll never you do a  trump golf course again so the ram the real world  
00:28:31
ramifications for trump are he's his businesses  are going to be devastated his platform is gone  
00:28:39
but and i was very pro trump staying on  twitter i thought it was insane to think that  
00:28:46
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  
00:28:55
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  
00:29:07
is concerning to me the fact that all of  these services have turned him off i believe  
00:29:13
is indicative of wednesday was under hyped  and that they really did intend to kidnap uh  
00:29:20
folks and blow off bombs and the proud boys  uh founder was arrested days before with  
00:29:27
you know selling large magazine weapons i i  think that they wanted to kill and kidnap people  
00:29:34
um and perhaps even like hang the vice president  honestly crazy but honestly honestly jason that's  
00:29:39
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  
00:29:48
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  
00:29:58
okay like i mean if that were the case then  [ __ ] uh isis would be using twitter they  
00:30:03
don't use twitter they use telegram live streamed  storming of the capital these people are not smart  
00:30:09
we've established that i i i anyways i look can  we just let's just like let's not do the left  
00:30:15
version of q anon okay let's not have now the  last version of the crazy conspiracy theories  
00:30:21
here's here's i think what is worth talking about  we really reflexively all of a sudden um started  
00:30:29
to push back on free speech in a way that doesn't  make any sense meaning i really was surprised like  
00:30:36
why are these silicon valley companies reacting  now like if you had a reason to do it uh it had  
00:30:46
been building for years and years and years and in  many ways it was kind of like this random moment  
00:30:53
and and i mean random because i just don't think  that you know everything up until that point was  
00:30:59
not equally sort of violent disgusting under the  same lens that that moment was and so had you  
00:31:04
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  
00:31:14
out the door to me was just completely reactive  and not rooted in anything it didn't to me it  
00:31:20
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  
00:31:25
aback well can i can i jump in you like jump in  on that because yeah and tweeting a lot about this  
00:31:30
and then the last thing is like they let donald  trump hit a one-outer like he was painted in a  
00:31:35
quarter to be a complete demagogue and instead now  it has been wrapped in a free speech issue where  
00:31:43
now more people are talking about free speech than  what a scumbag he is how did we let that happen  
00:31:51
big big big tech blundered into it again i  mean we had a unanimity across the political  
00:31:56
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  
00:32:06
which is a real issue i mean look our freedom  of speech is a shrine in the constitution  
00:32:12
in the first amendment of the bill of rights it's  the first [ __ ] one okay it's the one the framers  
00:32:18
the constitution cared about the most because free  speech is not just uh necessary and important for  
00:32:25
democracy it's the reason why we have our freedom  is so that we can think and speak and worship  
00:32:32
as we please and that is legitimately under threat  um you know what what big to end and by the way  
00:32:39
it's not just the permanent ban on trump you had  simultaneous to that it was it wasn't just the  
00:32:44
banning of all these accounts you also had the d  platforming of parlor which is sort of the twitter  
00:32:50
alternative by google and apple at the same time  and in amazon and so you're talking about really  
00:32:56
de-platforming not just trump but millions of  people and so the the amazing thing is that  
00:33:03
we've had this sweeping appropriation of power by  you know half a dozen oligarchs who now have the  
00:33:11
right to determine what we see and read and people  are cheering because they hate trump so much  
00:33:20
they can't see that the biggest power grab in  history has happened has happened okay i want  
00:33:26
to say something on this because i'm not sure  i really fully agree i i think that the point  
00:33:32
that saks is making um about freedom of speech  applies to what you're legally allowed to say  
00:33:40
saks we're talking about private services  that um you know a user chooses to  
00:33:46
use and the service provider chooses to make  available to that user in a market um space  
00:33:53
and in that context it feels to me like everyone  has a choice of where to go and what services to  
00:33:59
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  
00:34:06
the number one app on the app store today that  emerging new platforms will win in a marketplace  
00:34:12
where old service providers are no longer catering  to the market demands for a service um i'll also  
00:34:18
say that can i respond to that one yeah and  then i'll make one more point but go ahead yeah  
00:34:23
so i understand the first amendment only applies  to to government okay it doesn't apply to private  
00:34:29
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  
00:34:38
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  
00:34:47
tantamount to free speech where do people assemble  today online on these monopoly network services  
00:34:56
like a facebook like twitter and again it's not  and and to your point couldn't they go to some  
00:35:01
other site well they did they went to parlor  guess what happened the operating systems just  
00:35:07
banned parlor and so you know i hear this there's  an open there's an open web sax you know you don't  
00:35:12
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  
00:35:21
use another phone and by the way and everyone  can access the internet the internet is free  
00:35:26
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  
00:35:35
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  
00:35:44
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  
00:35:54
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  
00:36:04
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  
00:36:15
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  
00:36:27
and kick people off um are not doing so uh uh  under the demand of law and i think that that  
00:36:34
is a really and so i think to some extent uh you  know i'm probably on your side in this context  
00:36:40
but um the standard is not a legal standard the  standard is a judgment it isn't it is a it is a  
00:36:46
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  
00:36:56
it becomes a subjective decision about who you  kick off based on your interpretation of what they  
00:37:02
said and what they intended when they said it and  that leads to the infinite slippery slope and it's  
00:37:08
you nailed it one [ __ ] thousand percent that is  the exact issue it's not necessarily about free  
00:37:14
speech it is that when you have accumulated power  and you effectively have a quasi-governmental  
00:37:20
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  
00:37:31
right there is a random vp someplace who actually  controls this decision and the problem is today if  
00:37:38
a politician does something or a political body or  a government body does something you have redress  
00:37:44
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  
00:37:54
you flip a coin 50 of the time guys you're going  to get your way the other 50 of the time who the  
00:38:00
[ __ ] 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  
00:38:08
manifesto or memo this woman who was a former  facebook data scientist sophie zhang she wrote  
00:38:14
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  
00:38:23
examples of heads of government and political  parties in azerbaijan and under honduras using  
00:38:30
fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to  sway public opinion in countries including india  
00:38:35
ukraine spain brazil bolivia and ecuador she found  evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes  
00:38:41
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  
00:38:51
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  
00:39:01
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  
00:39:10
in the united states that's right and that  represents the problem that's the social the  
00:39:15
the social suasion that is influencing the  leaders of the tech companies are largely their  
00:39:20
democrat employees that live in the bay area  and um that's a big part of why the decisions  
00:39:26
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  
00:39:34
but talent is everything in silicon valley  and if your employees tell you they're going  
00:39:40
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  
00:39:49
and you know uruguay can have with executives at  facebook and twitter but people in the bay area  
00:39:57
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  
00:40:06
add judgment to the equation um you know you're  going to be wrong with some people and you're  
00:40:11
going to be right with some people versus using an  absolute standard and if the issue is that the law  
00:40:16
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  
00:40:25
as difficult as this decision can be you layer it  onto it somebody who is completely insincere and  
00:40:32
manipulating the system um on purpose and to your  point david in the last podcast is sitting in  
00:40:39
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  
00:40:53
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  
00:41:01
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  
00:41:11
that will be deployed i predict and that will put  up uh competition now for these services and it  
00:41:18
will be impossible to ban those peer-to-peer uh uh  platforms and so we'll have some products emerging  
00:41:24
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  
00:41:33
i i sincerely believe that a lot of these  decisions are being made not just at the behest  
00:41:39
of the employees i do agree they have tremendous  power and i've said that obviously many times  
00:41:45
i think what's going on here is people believe  that trump and we and you said it yourself david  
00:41:50
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  
00:41:58
i actually think a lot of people woke up and  said i don't know if i want to give this guy  
00:42:03
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  
00:42:19
comments on wednesday at that rally and rudy  giuliani's and donald trump juniors the people who  
00:42:25
really incited this uh and they're gonna face some  amount of civil and and criminal charges i believe  
00:42:32
um if they did that on twitter or facebook or  youtube or periscope or whatever it happens to be  
00:42:38
and then this happened would those platforms have  some liability especially after you know what's  
00:42:45
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  
00:42:55
this is too heated we're going to pause for  30 days and then we'll reassess it february  
00:43:00
1st or february 15th right well so part of  the problem here is that there is no policy  
00:43:07
right the policy is public outcry and if there's  enough public outcry and there's enough pressure  
00:43:13
or letter writing from the employees or there's  enough saber-rattling by the people who are  
00:43:18
going to run the senate judiciary committee  next year or the language was so clear it's  
00:43:24
but there is so so three months ago i wrote a blog  post um about the so the policy that i thought the  
00:43:31
social media companies should take i said for  moderation and what i said is there actually  
00:43:36
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  
00:43:47
nine major categories it includes incitement  of violence it includes you know trying to uh  
00:43:53
you know uh uh trying to provoke a crime it uh it  includes fraud it includes defamation there are  
00:44:01
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  
00:44:10
with the first amendment but if somebody goes  outside of those lines then we'll remove it  
00:44:15
so there was a way to to your point jason i think  there was a way to remove some of trump's treat uh  
00:44:21
tweets for incitement consistent with the first  amendment but that's not what they did you know  
00:44:27
that and maybe that would it said what they did  is a lifetime ban combined with rounding up you  
00:44:33
know twice the usual number of suspects combined  with a de-platforming not at the account level but  
00:44:40
at now at the application level by google apple  and amazon and none of this has been explained  
00:44:46
there is no policy what it is is a no i mean  there's a hold on what it is is an appropriation  
00:44:53
by oligarchs no no there is a policy  the problem is as we've just discussed  
00:44:58
it's an interpretation that must occur and the  interpretation of wednesday's comments on a tweet  
00:45:04
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  
00:45:13
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  
00:45:25
i want is something broadly consistent with the  first amendment uh because but in those years and  
00:45:31
those phrases i just told you is that are those  inciting or are those on the border line if you  
00:45:36
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  
00:45:46
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  
00:45:56
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  
00:46:03
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  
00:46:14
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  
00:46:23
if you think that trump poses a threat think i  think that's okay i think that's okay so you would  
00:46:30
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  
00:46:41
a private company but my point is this idea  our free speech rights got privatized okay  
00:46:48
the town square got digitized and centralized  we used to have thousands we used to have  
00:46:54
town squares where people could convene all over  this country we had a multiplicity of newspapers  
00:46:59
all that got replaced by a handful of tech  monopolists our free speech rights got digitized  
00:47:05
if they take away our ability to speak we don't  have free speech rights who do we appeal to  
00:47:11
when we get cancelled by a google or apple what  court can we go to there is right you have to  
00:47:16
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  
00:47:26
randomly um by by these companies in response to  to near-term market forces you know what what is  
00:47:33
everyone saying they have to do um or what  are their employees rallying securities law  
00:47:39
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  
00:47:48
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  
00:47:56
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  
00:48:08
no it's it's mandatory and again it centralizes it  centralizes the standards right so you don't have  
00:48:14
to have ad hoc random decisions and let if what  sacs is saying is true it creates a standard that  
00:48:19
everyone has to abide by and that every consumer  can trust them to abide by first first we need a  
00:48:25
bill of rights right first we need to say that we  as citizens have rights that the court can defend  
00:48:33
can defend that is the problem we don't have any  rights these companies are acting willy-nilly  
00:48:41
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  
00:48:50
exercise and i want everybody listening who's  on the left to think about this exact issue  
00:48:57
your favorite social media company is trying  to get a really really big deal closed and they  
00:49:05
you know are trying to curry favor with a  bunch of brands and a bunch of governments  
00:49:12
and those governments and brands let's just say  it's in india right huge market 1.2 billion people  
00:49:20
they say you know what we're um a little tepid on  abortion and so the deal is you need to dial down  
00:49:29
any ad from planned parenthood you need to  prevent planned parenthood groups from amplifying  
00:49:36
from being able to fundraise think about that  exact issue now and ask yourself is it okay  
00:49:43
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  
00:49:52
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  
00:50:04
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  
00:50:13
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  
00:50:21
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  
00:50:29
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  
00:50:38
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  
00:50:48
ceo has to certify quarterly results right meaning  for people who have issues with a company and with  
00:50:56
the statement of their earnings which is the sort  of atomic unit of value creation and financial  
00:51:01
reporting they have a mechanism to redress it  because you're certifying that something is true  
00:51:06
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  
00:51:15
which is that you know where where are the people  who are they actually that make the decisions you  
00:51:20
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  
00:51:30
engineers and depending on how important they  were they may have gotten their way that's crazy  
00:51:36
guys well and trump served it up to him i mean if  you if you know and then the worst part is no but  
00:51:42
the worst part is these people who are probably  very left of center completely [ __ ] the left  
00:51:48
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  
00:51:57
was basically in my opinion a [ __ ] stone cold  lock and then now after this happened there's a  
00:52:03
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  
00:52:15
you got the exact opposite of what you wanted  exactly and here's the thing jason you're right  
00:52:21
trump's outrage gave the censors the excuse to  impose this that's the way that censorship always  
00:52:27
works if you are censoring somebody popular it  would never happen censorship always starts by  
00:52:34
censoring some outrage that everybody agrees  should be censored and no one even notices  
00:52:40
that what's happening is you're handing power to  a group of people that they can now use against  
00:52:47
you in the future censorship always starts as  something you like and it ends as something  
00:52:52
you don't like when it finally gets turned  against you what is the policy of the people  
00:52:57
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  
00:53:08
might have been an overreaction but i think it's  the proper reaction you agree it's the problem
00:53:28
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  
00:53:36
of the press no one believed in the first  amendment more than you and you're listening
00:53:46
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  
00:53:56
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  
00:54:04
heart of hearts believe that there is imminent  risk in keeping him able to communicate with  
00:54:09
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  
00:54:19
said i don't know who said it on the last part  or i heard it somewhere else like actually if  
00:54:24
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  
00:54:33
who's that free brexit yeah so i think that's  like a power move as well um but i i'm still pro  
00:54:38
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  
00:54:48
this off with me misrepresenting you but when you  say it's nilly it's not willy-nilly we just had  
00:54:54
this act of you know treason and this violence uh  at the capitol it is not just willy-nilly jason  
00:55:01
jason you have an over-reaction i agree but it's  not willy-nilly jason you have to admit though the  
00:55:06
entire world had donald trump in a corner debt  to rights and he hated energy and he hit him  
00:55:13
it's a bad strategy to de-platform to this  level i agree and then to include the reason  
00:55:19
they're going after parlor by the way is  that this guy lynn wood threatened he said  
00:55:24
that they should take vice president pence  out and shoot him and i think that actually
00:55:30
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  
00:55:38
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  
00:55:47
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  
00:55:56
i don't know why why is dan bongino been taken  down he's like a fox commentator i've heard him  
00:56:02
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  
00:56:08
i don't really know what he did we have no  transparency into why people are being taken down  
00:56:14
i can't go evaluate for myself what they said  to see if it you know if it warranted censorship  
00:56:21
and then cynic might say that this overreaction  was playing into the hands of the chase jason  
00:56:27
what happened controlled senate congress jason  what happens if it's like a a big pharma company  
00:56:33
who wants to do a big ad buy on facebook  says hey guys you got to really dial down  
00:56:38
uh anti-vaxx content now i'm not an anti-vaxxer  but do i at some level believe in their right to  
00:56:45
talk about being an anti-vaxxer absolutely i think  it's insane but should they have a right to do it  
00:56:51
absolutely absolutely i'm a fan of the labeling i  thought the labeling was the right direction to go  
00:56:56
in where if but but saks you did talk about how  for the last 60 days trump fermented this insane  
00:57:04
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  
00:57:13
to you being pinned as a person for all of trump's  bad behavior but we you did say and you just say  
00:57:19
this is a two-month process of indoctrinating  people into thinking this was all stolen and  
00:57:24
then they put labels on it and then the capital  gets stormed so i think these companies are being  
00:57:29
put in a very uncomfortable position which is  at what point do you stop this maniac uh if he's  
00:57:35
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  
00:57:43
ridiculous the the things that you know rudy was  doing and um you know it was crazy so look not to  
00:57:51
his supporters well but here here's the thing  one of which is dead or four of which are dead  
00:57:57
i understand and here's the thing democracy takes  work i mean we have to you know we have to spend  
00:58:04
the time to actually dispel these views and you  know it would be nice to be able to wave a magic  
00:58:09
wand and just censor the things that we don't like  but here's the thing none of us has a monopoly on  
00:58:14
the truth and you know we knew what the truth  was in this particular instance but there are  
00:58:20
other cases where we don't and and the question  is really who has the power to decide so you know  
00:58:25
just i'll tell you just a real quick story you  know when i went to law school all those years ago  
00:58:31
the very first class that you know that that  i had in law school was this very arcane class  
00:58:36
called civil procedure which is about  what court you take a case to okay and  
00:58:43
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  
00:58:53
decides is jurisdiction who has the power to  decide an issue and here's the thing i would love  
00:59:01
for lynnwood to be canceled and to not be able to  spout these insane theories but who are we going  
00:59:07
to give the power to to make those decisions  and what we've done this week by we had this  
00:59:14
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  
00:59:26
big tech cartel and it's not going to end here  this is not the end it's the beginning look i i  
00:59:33
i don't think that the um the leadership at big  tech want to be in this position um you know i  
00:59:40
i think it's easy to blame the individuals zak  uh jack susan um sundar whomever um you know i i  
00:59:50
worked at google when it was a small when it was a  private company um you know chemoth knows uh work  
00:59:56
with zuck i think we've all had experience with  these individuals and i think one thing having  
01:00:01
spent time with all of them i can tell you is that  um i believe that all of them want information  
01:00:07
to be freely available and accessible um  and that's a really core principle and the  
01:00:13
challenge that they're facing is that there is um  you know as we talked about this social pressure  
01:00:20
uh to move away from that core principle because  there is always an argument to be made and there  
01:00:25
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  
01:00:36
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  
01:00:43
circumstance but you know i think characterizing  the individuals is being in charge of this sex or  
01:00:48
you know trying to um to handcuff to to make them  feel like they should be handcuffed in some way  
01:00:54
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  
01:01:03
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  
01:01:11
this stuff the biggest observation to me is that  the law hasn't kept up with the internet and um  
01:01:17
you know if you look at how the the dmca was  written the digital millennium copyright act  
01:01:22
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  
01:01:30
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  
01:01:37
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  
01:01:46
mechanism defined in the dmca did not keep up  with the law the biggest issue i think is is a  
01:01:51
legal one which is you know how do we create laws  and how do we create a uh private industry meets  
01:01:57
government court uh body uh governing principles  that you know allows these arbitrations to operate
01:02:07
just one sentence i mean apply first  amendment obligations to these um monopolists  
01:02:13
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  
01:02:24
of the list that includes other critical national  resources that any country has so for example if  
01:02:31
you look at in bolivia you know as it turns out  bolivia has incredible access to lithium right  
01:02:39
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  
01:02:51
um but it also turns out that at every step  along the way bolivia's basically nationalized  
01:02:56
every single private investment of a lithium  mine um in countries all around the world there's  
01:03:03
you know numerous examples of this privatization  turning into nationalization when something  
01:03:09
becomes important enough and norway part of  i think what we're struggling with here is  
01:03:15
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  
01:03:24
have to nationalize the rails of whatsapp or the  rails of facebook if you want to be in my country  
01:03:31
why is that so inconceivable i think you're  right that that's that that is a second order  
01:03:37
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  
01:03:49
they are now going to want to rely on that given  that twitter can censor them at any time they're  
01:03:54
going to hand that lever of national power to jack  dorsey no way they're going to look at this i mean  
01:03:59
not even jack dorsey david somebody in like the  bowels of the user you know user user access group  
01:04:05
some some rando vp someplace is going to stop the  president or the prime minister of a country and  
01:04:10
communicating to their people exactly exactly  and this is exactly the kind of second order  
01:04:15
consequence that the people who who i think engage  in this feel-good moment of censoring trump didn't  
01:04:21
even think through didn't even think through this  is exactly why the best solution would have been  
01:04:26
a temporary pause on these accounts to let  the dust settle but any of these completely  
01:04:32
fundamental decisions that you can't go  back from what is the technical difference  
01:04:38
between saying it's banned forever and it's banned  for ten days today technically it's not a decision  
01:04:45
yeah but exactly what david said you feed into  this emotion just like the people that stormed  
01:04:50
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  
01:05:00
to sort out now is you cannot unscramble this [ __  ] egg because irrespective of whatever happens in  
01:05:06
the united states there are two to three billion  monthly active users daily active users on these  
01:05:13
products they all report to different people and  none of those people that they report to are jack  
01:05:18
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  
01:05:28
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  
01:05:37
ukraine etc um and and i think that's why  applause would be really good to find out exactly  
01:05:45
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  
01:05:52
you know how how how much did they know right  like that's what i really wanted how much did  
01:05:59
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  
01:06:08
uh this way and i saw something today that i  thought was i'll let you pick it up from me  
01:06:13
freeburg but i saw something today that i thought  was uh particularly interesting and in dovetails  
01:06:18
with reconciliation which is what the country's  got to do in 2021 and 22 we gotta reconcile this  
01:06:23
[ __ ] because it's bigger fish to fry like you  know china and the pandemic and global warming  
01:06:30
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  
01:06:41
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  
01:06:51
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  
01:07:01
uh the people who were going home from the rallies  chanting at him that this is never going to end  
01:07:06
and and that seemed like a very volatile  situation and so the escalation continues  
01:07:11
go ahead freeberg i'll tell you like it  feels to me like this past week has been um  
01:07:17
nothing but fuel for for both sides because there  isn't a black and white um circumstance here  
01:07:23
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  
01:07:33
in downtown l.a and for new year's eve you  did and right before how old were you 16.  
01:07:41
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  
01:07:50
circa 1996. and we and everyone the cops came in  and they shut down the rave it was outdoors in  
01:07:56
downtown l.a and we rioted and so everyone left  the rave and like i i i participated i think i'm  
01:08:03
past the uh the period where they can prosecute oh  my god seven thousand yeah i participated in the
01:08:12
no don't say that don't say that on the show you  you were you witnessed i witnessed um participated  
01:08:17
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  
01:08:27
the next step was and i think if you watch the  videos yeah if you watch the videos of the capitol  
01:08:32
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  
01:08:38
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  
01:08:46
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  
01:08:54
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  
01:09:01
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  
01:09:09
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  
01:09:16
and this is the reason why it happened and  this just creates fuel it doesn't create um  
01:09:22
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  
01:09:30
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  
01:09:41
uh sax what do you think of this vp you know pence  and trump and their relationship vis-a-vis pardons  
01:09:49
in this end game here because it does seem  like pence was upset uh obviously at what  
01:09:55
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  
01:10:03
you know i'm sure antifa people there but it  was mainly trump folks um they wanted to capture  
01:10:10
the vp that was for some of them the explicit  purpose of this was to get the vice president  
01:10:15
and to hold him accountable and you know so there  are some speculation to do bodily harm to him  
01:10:21
what are your thoughts on that i think one of the  most insane aspects of what trump did was the way  
01:10:27
that he denounced uh pence who's been the model  of a loyal vp i mean certainly the other side  
01:10:34
has uh criticized him for that uh for being sort  of almost a toady uh no one could have been more  
01:10:40
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  
01:10:51
about that trump denounced him in front of this  this mob and and made him a target and that is  
01:10:56
one of the more insane aspects of what trump did  and uh you know i uh truck no sympathy for that  
01:11:04
um again this was an act of of demagoguery and uh  this is an intimate esn for for trump's presidency  
01:11:13
uh but even in terms of like you know i want  to go back to what freeberg just said about  
01:11:18
how he got kind of caught up in this in in  that mob i think that that was true i think for  
01:11:26
90 something percent of the people who are  there is they went to this trump rally and  
01:11:31
protest and it turned into a riot and they got  caught up in it um and then in addition to that  
01:11:38
there were i think hidden in that crowd some  serious agitators who were there to carry out  
01:11:44
violence in mayhem and had crazy plans you  know hanging my pens shooting pelosi i mean  
01:11:50
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  
01:11:59
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  
01:12:09
what you're what no i think it actually could have  happened what if one of the people who died was  
01:12:14
the senator yes it could have happened but here's  the problem people are acting as if everything  
01:12:20
that could have happened but didn't actually  happened or may still happen at a later date that  
01:12:26
that is what i call threat inflation and it's the  biggest tool the sensors have for seizing power  
01:12:32
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  
01:12:41
david but the second time it did come down i i  understand but by constantly beating the drum we  
01:12:47
needed to inflate that threat didn't we but but  by constantly beating the drama of these threats  
01:12:53
no no wait a minute stop no we we did not need  to do anything there was a national security  
01:13:00
apparatus who needed to do it their job isn't  to inflate threats their job is to investigate  
01:13:05
a politically get to the bottom of [ __ ] and  fix it they [ __ ] failed on 9 11. okay yes  
01:13:11
we know that conclusively so talking about it  and amping people up jason doesn't do anything
01:13:21
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  
01:13:34
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  
01:13:46
the thing that is is convincing people helping  convince people to give up liberties that they  
01:13:52
should want to hold on to i'm just asking you i'm  not i'm not saying everybody and i'm not saying  
01:13:57
we need to be on edge that this is going to  happen every day of our lives we can't live  
01:14:03
in fear like that but that's almost what happened  there are people who went there with that intent  
01:14:08
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  
01:14:23
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  
01:14:33
will be ruined because of one individual okay and  at the end of the day there was in my opinion one  
01:14:41
singular person to blame donald trump and then  a handful of people who were his accomplices  
01:14:47
uh josh hawley ted cruz rudy giuliani we know who  all of these characters are in this terrible play  
01:14:54
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  
01:15:06
yeah so all i'm saying is let's just get back  to the core issue at hand something bad happened  
01:15:13
and then something really really stupid that is  actually even worse also happened and by that you  
01:15:19
mean the banning of trump on all platforms for all  time no that that there is a there it there was uh  
01:15:25
an arbitrariness to the decision making around  free speech and i'm telling you guys i know that  
01:15:33
you may think banning him from twitter is so  much lower than this attack on the capital and  
01:15:40
i'm telling you it's not because the slippery  slope of event event number one is so obvious  
01:15:46
the prosecution of that is so obvious the law  is so completely clear but we've shifted now  
01:15:53
into this realm where things are arbitrary where  things are gray and it's a worldwide problem there  
01:15:58
are 180 some odd countries in the world right that  these sites operate in with 180 different leaders  
01:16:06
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  
01:16:14
it's so i just think that we've made i just  think we've made the problem so much worse  
01:16:20
yeah i i agree and and um you know earlier today  uh our heated conversation extended to one of our  
01:16:28
friends in our chat group who was telling us that  you know there's a group of sas companies that are  
01:16:33
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  
01:16:44
censorship thing it's like a red scare it's like  a red scare it's like a really scary podcast the  
01:16:50
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  
01:16:58
do you guys so i think that there's severely  um there there's a severe amount of pressure  
01:17:05
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  
01:17:17
argument a lot of um uh you know conservatives  make which is that tech companies in general  
01:17:23
uh as a result act in the best interests of of of  um uh you know of the um the liberal uh movements  
01:17:31
sac and chamoth i mean and jason do you guys think  that it is an employee-driven um kind of uh set of  
01:17:38
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  
01:17:50
was internally driven and this is where i think  it's a complete crisis of leadership because if  
01:17:56
you had just gotten up in front of your employees  and said guys if we do this we will shift focus  
01:18:01
away from what actually is the problem so  i think the right solution is temporary ban  
01:18:07
while we evaluate while we strengthen policy  like some [ __ ] [ __ ] statement and allow  
01:18:12
the legal court system to do their  job instead they acted like vigilantes  
01:18:19
in a way that basically appeased nobody and all  of a sudden shifted the focus away from the person  
01:18:25
that all these hundreds of employees wanted to  basically have you know been found guilty and  
01:18:31
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  
01:18:42
for this policy for years and now they finally  got the excuse to do it and so i agree i mean  
01:18:48
jack is leading twitter from behind the mob runs  twitter now and they have for some time and to  
01:18:56
freebrook's point it's like padme um padme i guess  the great the great american star wars settings
01:19:06
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  
01:19:16
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  
01:19:26
so so such math is 100 right there's one thing i  would add to that though which is if uh just a few  
01:19:31
months ago we had this senate hearing on section  230 yes and both jack and zuck were berated by the  
01:19:37
senators most notably senator blumenthal who was  basically arguing for censorship he was telling  
01:19:42
him you got to crack down and so i also think  there's not this pressure from below there's  
01:19:47
pressure from above these guys know who's coming  into power in january and i think especially zuck  
01:19:54
who has to be terrified of being broken up right  now he yes exactly so he is thinking about how  
01:20:02
do i modify and appease these politicians who now  have the power and can break me up and i gotta use  
01:20:08
for him it's too little too late they're trying  to break you up anyway you're gonna get paid  
01:20:14
up anyway and by the way i now agree with it i  gotta say you know on previous pods i've defended  
01:20:21
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  
01:20:32
better but can i say that let me just let me just  point something out you didn't say that before it  
01:20:37
affected the conservative movement's ability to  have a voice right hey don't calacanas sacks yeah  
01:20:42
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  
01:20:52
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  
01:21:00
called pornhub and visa mastercard and discover  stopped processing payments for them because the  
01:21:06
new york times put out an opinion article about  hold on david david how do you spell that p-o-o-r
01:21:26
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  
01:21:34
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
01:21:42
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  
01:21:50
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  
01:21:58
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  
01:22:06
i personally am not that upset about trump  per se being censored i'm upset about this new  
01:22:13
vast policy of censorship including de-platforming  not just trump but parlor i mean you're talking  
01:22:19
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  
01:22:28
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  
01:22:38
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  
01:22:48
was gonna say i think that zuck who i believe  i'm very cynical about i think he is thinking  
01:22:54
how do i p's the left now after having appeased  trump for all these years now trump's out of  
01:23:00
office now how do i appease the left okay i  have to ban him for life and remember trump was  
01:23:05
uh zuck was the first to give the lifetime ban  not jack so zuck who's previously been in trump's  
01:23:11
corner is now not um the third factor so the first  factor is obviously the employees second factor is  
01:23:19
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  
01:23:31
that me that is leading them to overreact here no  i'm going to disagree yeah i'm going to disagree  
01:23:39
too yeah it would it would not have come out in  that way it would have said we are you know uh  
01:23:45
pausing the account we're suspending the account  it wouldn't have been this next step of saying  
01:23:50
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  
01:24:00
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
01:24:10
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  
01:24:20
are they're too broad-based they exist in too  many countries with too many different standards  
01:24:27
that ultimately all comes back to one unified  code base if facebook was actually 182 different  
01:24:33
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  
01:24:42
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  
01:24:54
task for even the smartest of the smart people  these companies need to get broken up uh i think  
01:25:00
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  
01:25:08
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  
01:25:16
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  
01:25:26
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  
01:25:35
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  
01:25:44
lifetime ban is they felt trump was uh doing that  so just to point out you you could interpret it  
01:25:50
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  
01:25:58
question would you be supportive of um platform  level open architecture so for example that  
01:26:05
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  
01:26:15
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  
01:26:24
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  
01:26:36
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  
01:26:44
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  
01:26:54
and and in an absolute way um you know and  you can give them a chance to correct right  
01:26:59
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  
01:27:08
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  
01:27:16
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  
01:27:26
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  
01:27:34
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  
01:27:43
applied um but i i know i'm in the minority  on that yeah i would say um my my view about  
01:27:51
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  
01:27:59
it's also got to be about power and not  just market power but democratic power  
01:28:04
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  
01:28:14
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  
01:28:23
for internet services well yeah i mean first  and foremost i want a an online bill of rights  
01:28:28
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  
01:28:39
and right now it can all be taken away you know  your online identity your right to participate in  
01:28:45
the public conversation can be taken away with no  explanation by these companies we have no rights  
01:28:51
and like what would you do if your online presence  is taken away like that is a huge part of the  
01:28:57
modern world what is going on in trump's mind do  you think right now having lost his ability to  
01:29:03
communicate with a billion people you know like he  had this ability to control the conversation and  
01:29:09
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  
01:29:21
um you know whether it's some ad hoc press  conference he calls tomorrow and just rants on tv  
01:29:27
or he tries to declare some you know pass some law  without congress's approval or does something i  
01:29:33
mean this guy has never proven himself to be able  to sit quietly and to not be in the spotlight or  
01:29:40
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  
01:29:49
some last-ditch stuff pompeo lifted restrictions  for u.s taiwan contracts i don't know if you saw  
01:29:54
that that was a little bit of an interesting  thing that was slid in the last couple of days
01:30:01
a little little jab to the chinese on the  way out where do you think sax last 10 days  
01:30:08
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  
01:30:17
systematically they've been able to basically  get you know a lot of these folks i mean jason  
01:30:24
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  
01:30:31
country and the fbi is incredible and are um you  know our the uh the the the the civil servants  
01:30:38
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  
01:30:47
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  
01:30:56
be major major arrests you know everyone was  saying that that that these protesters being  
01:31:02
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  
01:31:10
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  
01:31:20
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  
01:31:30
your name and phone number and email if you want  to be pardoned for what happened in the capitol
01:31:36
and name the crime you committed so yes and then  i just set up the website riots amnesty.org please  
01:31:45
go to capitol rise amnesty.org and tell us what  you did and uh if you outline each of the crimes  
01:31:51
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  
01:32:00
suspected that was a honeypot is because um jimmy  carter pardoned uh you know after the vietnam war  
01:32:06
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  
01:32:15
individual names and and crimes to build a part  in them that was ceremonial right that was like  
01:32:20
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  
01:32:31
think i i do think that trump probably i mean  this would be a very interesting court case but  
01:32:36
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  
01:32:45
escalation as opposed to de-escalation sex being  our our lawyer and our historian you know what is  
01:32:50
the the origin of the presidential pardon how  is that even legal and how did we end up in a  
01:32:56
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  
01:33:05
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  
01:33:15
almost a residue of or a vestigial monarchical  power that somehow was included in the comments  
01:33:23
incredible right i mean like the intention of it  my understanding was to um correct injustices that  
01:33:29
occurred so that it would be a backstop against  somebody who was by the judgment of the one guy
01:33:39
it relies on you know people buying into america  right and i think that's the trump stress test and  
01:33:46
i can't wait till we don't talk about this guy  anymore i'd love to see an amendment getting rid  
01:33:52
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  
01:34:01
beaten this today can i can i end on something  um let's end on something uplifting i took um  
01:34:07
uh a bunch of spax public uh at the end of last  year and on friday um one of the vehicles that  
01:34:16
i'm the ceo of merged with sofi um and i want to  tell you something about the ceo of sophie anthony  
01:34:24
noto um and i think he'll be okay because  he's shared this story a couple times but  
01:34:29
uh his parents got divorced when he was  three years old he uh grew up on welfare  
01:34:36
food stamps um sort of free lunch kids until  middle school um went to the um the west point um  
01:34:47
was it a all-star stock analyst was the cfo of the  nfl was a cfo of twitter then the ceo of twitter  
01:34:56
um and uh you guys know my story but you know  uh ended up in the united states after growing  
01:35:02
up in canada after escaping a civil war i grew  up on welfare and i said to anthony uh what are  
01:35:08
the odds that two kids who grew up that way could  have ended up in a moment where we were part of  
01:35:15
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  
01:35:28
[ __ ] 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  
01:35:36
and so i'd like to see american constitution  keep the pod going stop jason the american  
01:35:43
constitution is the most incredible [ __  ] document because that is the foundation  
01:35:49
all of these things are built it's just the most  amazing thing so i am really glad that we're all  
01:35:54
having this conversation and i would just say guys  keep the faith let's put the light back on donald  
01:36:01
trump uh i would have as much sympathy as possible  for as many of those folks in the capital maybe  
01:36:08
not the folks that were intending to do harm maybe  not zip tie guy but there's a lot of other people  
01:36:14
that are that just got caught in the undertow i  would try to have sympathy for them um and i would  
01:36:19
really don't lose focus now people donald trump  josh hawley ted cruz stay [ __ ] vigilant i would  
01:36:29
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  
01:36:39
love you sex love you sexy poo come on sexy say  it god damn it this is the time you're good say it
01:36:58
and they've just gone crazy with it besties  
01:37:33
we need to get these

Badges

This episode stands out for the following:

  • 85
    Most chaotic
  • 80
    Most intense
  • 80
    Most controversial
  • 75
    Most shocking

Episode Highlights

  • Emergency Podcast Episode
    The podcast hits number two in the Apple iTunes rankings amid a chaotic week.
    “It's the craziest week of our lives.”
    @ 01m 38s
    January 11, 2021
  • Nuanced Political Views
    David discusses the complexity of his political stance and the dangers of labeling.
    “I just don't like being labeled a certain way.”
    @ 03m 35s
    January 11, 2021
  • The Insurrection Debate
    A discussion on whether the events of Wednesday should be labeled as a coup or insurrection.
    “It was a rebellion against authority.”
    @ 24m 37s
    January 11, 2021
  • Threat Inflation
    Exploring the concept of threat inflation in political discourse.
    “We are caught in a cycle of insane hyper-partisan warfare.”
    @ 26m 22s
    January 11, 2021
  • Censorship Concerns
    Addressing the implications of recent bans on free speech.
    “Our freedom of speech is under threat.”
    @ 32m 32s
    January 11, 2021
  • The Digital Town Square
    Our free speech rights have been digitized and centralized by tech monopolists.
    “Our free speech rights got privatized.”
    @ 46m 41s
    January 11, 2021
  • Censorship Consequences
    Censorship begins with popular outrage but can turn against anyone.
    “Censorship always starts as something you like and ends as something you don't.”
    @ 52m 40s
    January 11, 2021
  • The Challenge of Democracy
    Dispelling harmful views in a democracy requires effort and cannot be done through censorship alone.
    “Democracy takes work; we have to dispel these views.”
    @ 58m 04s
    January 11, 2021
  • Confusion at the Capitol
    Participants had various interpretations of their mission during the Capitol riot.
    “There was no uniform sense of what the objective of the mission was.”
    @ 01h 08m 46s
    January 11, 2021
  • Censorship and Free Speech
    Concerns raised about the implications of banning Trump from social media platforms.
    “Free speech is the most cherished value that we have.”
    @ 01h 22m 28s
    January 11, 2021
  • A Journey of Resilience
    Two individuals reflect on their challenging upbringings and their success stories, emphasizing the American dream.
    “Only in America!”
    @ 01h 35m 15s
    January 11, 2021
  • The Power of the Constitution
    A passionate discussion about the significance of the U.S. Constitution and its impact on society.
    “This is the most incredible document!”
    @ 01h 35m 43s
    January 11, 2021

Episode Quotes

Key Moments

  • Emergency Episode01:04
  • Nuanced Perspectives10:33
  • Rebellion Against Authority24:37
  • Hyper-Partisan Warfare26:22
  • Free Speech Debate46:41
  • Capitol Confusion1:08:46
  • Trump's Mindset1:28:57
  • Keep the Faith1:35:54

Words per Minute Over Time

Vibes Breakdown

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