All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E107: The Twitter Files Parts 1-2: shadow banning, story suppression, interference & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 You were bloated last night. What else is now? It's not bloated. My god. You really are though. You look bloated. Listen, that's coming from you You started to look like Bert and now you're back to Ernie your face is getting round again All I have to say is hold on a second guys. I got to get a drink. Is it okay? You guys got a minute for me to get a drink? Yeah, yeah, I definitely do. I definitely do go ahead hold on a second here No, no, I'm actually you know been working on my weight So I'm just going to pick here. I think I have the mocha latte from Super God.

Starting point is 00:00:28 And I also have the chocolate shake. Do you have a recommendation here for me, Friedberg? Because I'm going to put it in my coffee. Mocha on a mocha? Is that good? Is that good wrong? You can't go wrong. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:00:38 Double mocha's a win. Just on a completely unrelated topic. Did you happen to invest in Super God, Jacob? No, no, no. I haven't invested yet. but use the promo code. Oh, okay. It's been a big part of my weight loss journey. It's also been a big part of me and Freeberg becoming besties and creating a unified block for all in Summit 2023. So I've got two solid votes. I'll be very honest with you. If you guys give me a credible plan,

Starting point is 00:01:03 where we can maintain the integrity. I was joking. I'll be very honest with you guys give me a credible plan where we can maintain the integrity If you two idiots, I'm not involved. Yes, you are you clearly are involved with it with this fucking great important vote hold on No, continue your charmath. I'm writing this in it. I it down. If you two idiots, the two of you have to do this together because otherwise I'm with David and there's a absolute guard it. You two idiots are there to come up with a plan. Oh, plan it. Where we can each make make four million bucks each net. Then I'll do it. Four million net. Okay, great. Look at Jake, how writing that that down as if he respects a contract.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Okay, got this guy. Does I sign the fucking card? I sign the contract. For Jake Cal, the negotiator begins at the point where there's a signed contract. Yes, exactly. It's like, okay, now negotiate with you. You're like your winner's ride. Alright everybody, the show has started.

Starting point is 00:02:20 The four of us are still here. By some miracle. We're still going after a hundred seven episodes, and it's better than ever. Last week we were number 12. So main tree media. Hmm. We'll see you in the top 10. Here we go. Twitter files, part one, and part two. We're not trying to. Disprite your oppressive conditions. Yes. We're not. We're not. I'm not impressed with my conditions. I'm making you sure we'll find time.

Starting point is 00:02:43 If I was getting paid five bucks for this, I'd be on strike right now. Guys, not only are you getting five bucks, you're getting a bill for the production. Okay, here we go. By the way, how beautiful is it that the same reporters who couldn't stop writing about the oppressive working conditions

Starting point is 00:02:59 that Elon Musk was supposedly creating? Because he simply wanted the employees to go back to the office and work hard. And if they didn't, he'd give them a generous three months severance package. Yeah. Those same reporters are now on strike because the Solzberger is running a clickbait farm over there with the press of working conditions. The intellectual dishonesty has never been higher in the world.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Yeah, I like intellectual honesty. I really like intellectual honesty. Yes, will the publisher of the New York Times agree that anybody who isn't happy there can have a voluntary three month severance package? Yeah, I clicked this link and do you want to work hard or do you want three month severance? If the New York Times publisher did that, you know, it would happen? 800 of 1200 people would take the severance. Of course.

Starting point is 00:03:41 All right, here we go. Twitter files have dropped. Part one dropped with the legendary award-winning highly respected journalist Matt Taibi. If you don't know who he is, he is a left-leaning journalist who worked at Rolling Stone and did the best coverage hands down of the financial crisis and the shenanigans and he held truth to power to that group. This is important to note. The second drop was given to Bari Weiss, who is a right-leaning independent journalist.

Starting point is 00:04:10 These are both independent journalists. She previously worked at the New York Times itself. Now, I think we should work backwards from two to one. Do you agree? Yes, for sure. Let's start with the drop that just happened last night. Yes So last night a drop happened so Here's what happens in

Starting point is 00:04:30 Twitter files part two. I'm gonna give a basic summary and then I'm gonna give it to sax because he's chomping at the bit We now have confirmation that What the right thought was happening all along which is a secret silencing system built into the software of secret silencing system built into the software of black lists was tagging right wing conservative voices in the system. And these included people like Dan Bungino, is that your pronounce it? Yes. He was tagged with being on a search black list. What that means is you're a fan of of Dan's who is a former secret service agent who is now a right wing conservative I could just say conservative instead of wing a conservative radio host podcast host he was not allowed to be found in search engines for some reason

Starting point is 00:05:17 Charlie Kirk who is a conservative commentator. He was tagged with do not amplify. I guess that means you can't trend into people's feeds, even if they follow you. And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a Stanford professor, Jay Bhattacharya. Did I get it right, sir? Yes, Jay Bhattacharya.

Starting point is 00:05:40 Okay, I got it right. Dr. Stanford School of Medicine. And he was not allowed on the trends blacklist because he had a dissenting opinion. A Stanford professor had a dissenting opinion on COVID that's turned out to be true. And this is where the danger comes in because all of these actions were taken without any transparency. And they were taken on one side of the aisle by people inside of Twitter, essentially covertly. No ownership of who did it.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And they never told the people, they guess lit them. They could see their own tweets, they could use the service, but they couldn't be seen even by their own fans in many cases here. Sacks, when you look at that, let's just start with that first piece, the shadow banning, as it's called, in our industry, where you can participate in a community,

Starting point is 00:06:39 but you can't be seen. Is there any circumstance under which this tool would make sense for you to deploy and then what your general take on what has been discovered last night? Okay, look, two more questions. Two more questions. Yes, let me start with what's been discovered here. Let me boil it down for you. This is an FTX level fraud, except that what was stolen here was not customer funds.

Starting point is 00:07:03 It was their free speech rights Not just the rights of people like Jay Bonnetcharia and Dan Bongino to speak But the right of the public to hear them in the way that they expected Okay, and you had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey like Vagia Gadi like You know, you know, you-L, and others saying, we do not shadow ban, and then they also said, we certainly, this is their emphasis, do not shadow ban on the base of political viewpoint.

Starting point is 00:07:33 And what the Twitter file show is that is exactly what they were doing. They, in the same way that SBF was using FTX and customer funds as a personal piggy bank, they were using Twitter as their personal ideological piggy bank. They were going in to the tools and using the content moderation system, these big brother like tools that were designed to basically put their thumb on the scale of American democracy and suppressed viewpoints that they did not agree with and they did not like even when

Starting point is 00:08:03 even when they could not justify removing content based on their own rules. So there are conversations in the Slack that Barry Wies exposed where, for example, Libs of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libs of TikTok based on our hate policy. Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're going to suppress that account anyway. Now, it's important to note what Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're gonna suppress that account anyway. Now, it's important to note what Libs of TikTok does. This is a great talking point. Libs of TikTok finds people who are trans,

Starting point is 00:08:34 people who are maybe not LGBTQ, and they feature their TikToks, and they mock them on Twitter. Now, this certainly is free speech. And the argument from the safety team was by putting all of these together, you're inciting violence towards those people. And they said they haven't broken a rule, but collectively, they could be in some way targeting those people. Is there anything fair freeberg to that statement that they targeted them? way targeting those people. Is there anything fair? Freeberg to that statement.

Starting point is 00:09:07 Let they targeted them? By collecting their, let's say, views that are, I'm asking this question for discussion purposes. I'm not giving my opinion. Check out. Hold on. I want freeberg. Why can't I finish? I'm going to go back to you, spoke for two minutes. That's why. Freeberg. You turned down moderating today, Saks. You could have been- Everybody else is just as tight as they want. I get interrupted. You got two minutes. Let me just finish the SPF, let me just finish the SPF analogy. Okay. And then you can, then you can, then you can both sides this issue. No, I say, well, you're speaking with one or two words on you. And then, yeah,

Starting point is 00:09:38 why did people like God, he and you'll well deny that they were engaged in shadow banning, even though that's clearly what they were doing because they knew that they had an obligation to be stewards of the public trust. They were custodians of public trust. They knew they were violating that trust. The same way that SBF had a duty to be custodians of his customers funds. They did not implement their own policy that they said they were implementing. Why? Because they were suppressing accounts that personally offended them, that personally they disagreed with, and they wanted to deprive the public of the right to hear. Now, the way that they're justifying this one on, the way that the media is today justifying it is they're pointing to obscure provisions in the terms of use around spam accounts,

Starting point is 00:10:23 things like that saying, oh, well, the terms of use show that they had the right to do this. This is like the margin account, okay? They do not have the right to use these tools in this way, okay? Jay Baudertroyo was not posting spam. Just stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor.

Starting point is 00:10:41 I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. I stand for Professor. Professor, Professor, it doesn't, yes. And your real, your real, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your,

Starting point is 00:10:49 your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your,

Starting point is 00:10:57 your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, your, want him to answer one question. Then it's going to you, Freiburg. Sax should, lives of TikTok be able to collect trans people, living their life, making TikToks, put them into a group feed, mock them, and if those people experience harassment because of it, is that something that Twitter should allow? I'm asking you this without giving my opinion, I'm curious your opinion, specifically for the lives

Starting point is 00:11:31 of TikTok since you opened that door and you wanted to bring up that very thorny issue. Go. Listen, so on, on lives of TikTok, my understanding of that account is that they only take videos that have already been made public by another account. They're all public.

Starting point is 00:11:45 They're all in the public domain and then they repost them. Sometimes they make a snarky comment, but usually they just let them stand on their own. That is not a violation of free speech. Now, the way that I think these Twitter executives have interpreted it is that they live in such a bubble and they live in with such privilege and entitlement that they think that when their point of view gets criticized or challenged that that in and of itself is harassment. That's not. That is public debate and they want to make themselves and their points of view immune to public debate and the way that they do that is that they claim that any criticism is harassment. It's not. If in aggregate, final follow-. If in aggregate, those people report being harassed and have

Starting point is 00:12:29 evidence of being harassed, what's your Twitter do? Listen, if somebody is harassed, I'm fine with taking that down, but being publicly criticized or simply retweeted is not harassment. Okay. Harassment needs to be targeted and it needs to be more than just public criticism or even a snarky comment here or there And so you don't consider a not you know a a a daily feed of trans people being mocked you don't consider that target harassment got it don't listen to me about it listen to Twitter's own Slack files about it

Starting point is 00:13:02 Yeah, they knew that the account Libs of Tik Tok was not violating the rules, yet they suppressed that they suspended it six times. They knew they were on shaky ground. They wanted to do it anyway. Why? Because they know because people are experiencing harassment. That's why they did it. But it is a thorny freedom of speech. I agree with you. I think I think I think SACs has articulated a vision for the product he wanted Twitter to be, but I don't think that's necessarily the product that they wanted to create. It's not that Twitter set out at the time or stated clearly that they were going to be the harbinger of truth and the free speech platform for all.

Starting point is 00:13:42 I think they were really clear and they have been in their behavior and as demonstrated through this stuff that came out, which to me feels a lot like we already knew all this stuff. This is a bit of a nothing burger that they were curating and they were editing and they were editorializing other people's content and the ranking of content in the same way that many other internet platforms do to create what they believe to be their best user experience for the users that they want to appeal to and I'll say like there's been this long debate And it goes back 20 years at this point on how Google does ranking right? I mean you guys may remember Jeremy Staubleman went to

Starting point is 00:14:23 DC and he complained about how Google was using his content and he wasn't being ranked high enough as Google's own content that was being shoved in the wrong place. And there's a guy who ran, kind of, he was a spokesperson for the SEO, the search engine optimization rules at Google. And it was always the secret at Google, how do the search results get ranked? And I can can tell you it's not just a pure algorithm that there was a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual work. In fact, the manual work gets to be the to the point that they said there's so much stuff that we know is a is the best content and the best form of content for the user experience that they ranked it all the way at the top and they called it the

Starting point is 00:15:01 one box. It's the stuff that sits above the primary search results. And that editorialization ultimately led to a product that they intended to make, because they believed it was a better user experience for the users that they wanted to service. And I don't think that this is any different than what's happened at Twitter. Twitter is not a government agency. They're not a free speech. They're not the internet. They're a product.

Starting point is 00:15:23 And the product managers and the people that run that that product team Ultimately made some editorial decisions that said this is the content we do want to show and this is the content We don't want to show and they certainly did wrap up You know a bunch of rules that had a lot of leeway for what they could or couldn't do or they gave themselves a lot of different Excuses on how to do it. I don't agree with it. It's not the product I want. It's not the product I think should exist. I think Elon also saw that. And clearly he stepped in and said, I want to make a product that is a different product

Starting point is 00:15:54 than what is being created today. So none of this feels to me like these guys were the guardians of the internet and they came along and they were distrustful. They did exactly what a lot of other companies have done and exactly what they set out to do. And they editorialized a product for a certain youth or group. And by the way, they never blocked, they never edited people's tweets.

Starting point is 00:16:12 They changed how people's results were showing up in rankings. They showed how viral they would get in the trend box. Those were in-app features and in-app services. This was not about taking someone's tweets and changing it. And people may feel ashamed and they may feel upset about the fact that they were deranged or they were kind of, quote, shadow banned, but ultimately that's the product they chose to make. And people have the choice and the option of going elsewhere. And I don't agree with it. And it's not the product I want. And it's not a product I want to use.

Starting point is 00:16:43 And I certainly don't feel happy seeing it. So you want to see it. I brought it in. You want free work to summarize it. You want to see the free market do its job. Chimath, you worked at Facebook. Facebook seems to have done, I would say, an excellent job with content moderation. I think in large part correct me if I'm wrong because of the real names policy. But you tell us what you think, when you look at this and the 15 year history of social media and moderation. I think moderation is incredibly difficult.

Starting point is 00:17:13 And typically what happens is early on in a company's life cycle. And I'm gonna guess that Twitter and YouTube were very similar to what we did at Facebook. And it's very similar to probably what TikTok had to do in the early days, which is you have this massive, tidal wave of usage. And so you're always on a little bit of a hamster wheel. And so you build these very basic tools and you uncover problems along the way. And so I think it's important to humanize the people that are at Twitter because I'm

Starting point is 00:17:47 not sure that they're these super nefarious actors per se. I do think that they were conflicted. I do think that they made some very corrupting decisions, but I don't think that they were these evil actors. Okay. I think that they were folks who against the tidal of usage, built some brittle tools, built on top of them, built on top of it some more, and tried to find a way of coping. And as scale increased, they didn't have an opportunity to take a step back and reset.

Starting point is 00:18:16 And I think that that's true for all of these companies. And so you're just seeing it out in the light, what's happening at Twitter. But don't for a second think that any other company behaved any differently. Google, Facebook, Twitter, bite dance and TikTok, they're all the same, they're all dealing with this problem and they're all probably trying to do a decent job of it as best as they know how. So, what do we do from here is the question, okay? The reason somebody needs to do something about this is summarized really elegantly in this

Starting point is 00:18:46 J. Bhattacharya tweet. So please, Nick, just throw it up here so that we can just talk about this. This is why I think that this issue is important. Critically. There's a perfect tweet. Still trying to process my emotions on learning that Twitter blacklisted me. Okay, who cares about that? Here's what matters.

Starting point is 00:19:05 The thought that will keep me up tonight, censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures and a generation of children were hurt. Now, just think about that in a nutshell. What was Jay Bhattacharya to do? Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok. Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok. Maybe he was supposed to go on YouTube and create a video. Maybe he was supposed to go on Facebook and post into a Facebook group or do a newsfeed post. The problem is that

Starting point is 00:19:38 and the odds are reasonably likely that a lot of these companies had very similar policies. In this example around COVID misinformation, because it was the CDC and governmental organizations directing information and rules reaching out to all of these companies. So we're just seeing an insight into Twitter, but the point is it happened everywhere. The implication of suppressing information like this is that a credible individual like that can't spark a public debate. And in not being able to spark the debate, you have this building up of errors in the system.

Starting point is 00:20:17 And then who gets hurt in this example, which is true, is like you couldn't even talk about school closures and masking up front and early in the system. If you had scientists actually debate it, maybe what would have happened is we would have kept the schools open and you would have had less learning loss and you'd have less depression and less over prescription of, you know, riddle in and adderol because those are all factual things we can measure today. So I think the important thing to take away from all of this is we've got confirmatory evidence that whether these folks under a tidal wave of pressure

Starting point is 00:20:52 made some really bad decisions. And the implications are pretty broad reaching. And now I do think governments have to step in and create better guardrails so this kind of stuff doesn't happen. I don't buy the whole, it's a private company they can do what they want. I think that that is too naive of an expectation for how important these three companies literally are to how Americans consume and process information to make decisions. Incredibly well said, SAC, your reaction to your besties. I largely agree with what Jamal said, but let's go back to what Freeberg said.

Starting point is 00:21:28 I think what Freeberg's point of view is, is really what you're hearing now from the mainstream media today, which is, oh, nothing to see here, you know, that they told us all along what was happening. This was just content moderation. They had the right to do this. You're making a big deal over nothing. No, that's not true. Go back and look at the media coverage starting in 2018. Article after article said that this idea of shadow banning was a right wing conspiracy theory. That's what they said. Furthermore, Jack Dorsey denied

Starting point is 00:21:56 that shadow banning was happening, including at a congressional hearing, I believe, under oath. So either he lied, or he was lied to by his subordinates. I actually believe that the latter is possible. I think I don't think it's true with SBF. It might be true with Jack because he's so checked out. Furthermore, you had people again like Vigia Gotti again tweeting and repeatedly stating, we do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint. So these people were denying exactly what their critics were saying. They were accusing their critics of being conspiracy theorists. Now that the thing is proven, the mountain of evidence has dropped.

Starting point is 00:22:34 They're saying, oh, well, this is old news. This was known a long time ago. No, it was not known a long time ago. It was disputed by you. And now finally, it's proven. And you're trying to say it's not a big deal. It is a big deal. It's a violation of the public trust and if you are so proud of your content moderation policies, why didn't

Starting point is 00:22:52 you admit what you were doing in the first place? It's like that you feel good that Elon's running this business now. I mean like the things that you're concerned about as a user, as someone who cares about the public's access to knowledge, to opinions, to free speech, this has got to be a good change, right? This has come to light. It's clearly going to get resolved. Everyone's going to move forward. I mean, do you think there's penalties needed for the people that work there? Like, what's the anger?

Starting point is 00:23:20 Because you won. Like, I think, look, I think we we got I think we basically got extremely lucky yeah that Elon Musk happened to care about free speech and decided to do something about it and actually had the means to do something about it he's just about the only billionaire who has that level of means who actually cared enough to take on this battle but are you saying that this is a hard dessert for other people? I think you deserve a place for that. But I mean, unless Elon can buy every single tech company, which he clearly can't, I think you guys are right. This is happening a lot of other tech companies. We're about to rewrite the government, the United States government is going to make an attempt to rewrite section 230. I think that what this does

Starting point is 00:24:01 is put a very fine point on a comment that Elon actually tweeted out and Nick if you could find that please That's a very good tweet where he said going forward You will be able to see if you were shadow band you were able to see if you were debusted Why and be able to appeal and I think that that concept? To be very honest with you should be enshrined in law. And I think that should be part of the section 230 rewrite and all of these media companies and all of these social media companies should be subject to it. And the reason is because it ties a lot of these concepts together and says, look, you can build a service, you're a private company, make

Starting point is 00:24:42 as much money as you want, but we're going to have some connective tissue back to the fundamental underpinnings of the Constitution, which is the framework under which we all live, and we're going to transparently allow you to understand it. And I think that's really reasonable. Make that a legal expectation of all these organizations. And by the way, the companies, the companies will love it because I think it's super hard for you to be in these companies and they probably are like, take this responsibility off my plate.

Starting point is 00:25:09 It's very simple. This is a, there's really four problems that occurred here. Number one, there was no transparency. The people who were shadow banned, taken out of search, et cetera, they did not know. If they were told, and it was clear to users, we could have a discussion about was that a fair judgment or not. In the cases we've seen so far from barriweises reporting in the Twitter files part, it's very clear

Starting point is 00:25:36 that these were not justifiable. Number two, these were not evenly enforced. It's very clear that one side, because we don't have one example of a person on the left being censored. When we, if we do, then we could put balls and strikes together and we could say how many people on one side versus how many people on the other. It's pretty clear what happened here. Because these all occurred with a group of people

Starting point is 00:26:02 working at Twitter, which is 96 or 90% left leaning. The statistics are clear. Number three, the shadow banning and the search banning, and I think this is something we talked about previously, Chimath, it feels very underhanded. This was your point. If we're going to block people, they should be blocked, and they should know why. The fourth piece of this, which is absolutely infuriating, and this is a discussion that myself, Sachs and Elon have had many times about this moderation. And I'm not speaking out of school now because he's now very public with his position. And his position, he came to on his own. It's not like this is Sachs and I coming up with his position.

Starting point is 00:26:44 This is why Elon bought the business. If you really want to intellectually test your thinking on this and I am a moderate who's left leaning, I can tell you there's a simple way for anybody who is debating the validity of the concerns here. Imagine Rachel Maddo or Ezra Klein, whoever your favorite left leaning pun to is, was shadow band by a group of right wing moderators who were acting covertly and without any transparency. How would you feel if Maddo reporting on, you know, all the Russian coordination with Trump's campaign did this or as a decline with whatever topics

Starting point is 00:27:26 he covers. And you will very quickly find yourself infuriated. And you should then intellectually, as we say on this program, steel manning, if you argue the other side, it's infuriating for either side to experience this. And that is what the 230 change needs to be, Chimouth, you're exactly correct. If you make an action, it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet.

Starting point is 00:27:49 And if you click on the question mark, you should see when the action was taken, by who, which department maybe, maybe not the person so they get a person attacked. And then what the resolution to it is, this has been banned because it's targeted harassment. This can be resolved in this way. Then everybody's behavior, which steer towards whatever the stated purpose of that social network is. You can get better behavior by making the rules clear.

Starting point is 00:28:15 By making the rules unclear and making it unfair, you create this insane situation. Go ahead, Chimoff. And that's why I'm if you're a date about it. I think you have to take it one step further to really do justice to why this should be important to everybody. And I do think this school example, it really matters to me. Like, we have, like I don't know now,

Starting point is 00:28:37 we know what the counterfactual is, which is that we have, I mean, we've relegated our children to a bunch of years of really complicated relearning and learning that they never had to go through because of all the learning laws they gave them. But what if Jay Bhattacharya, who's, I mean, like, you can't be, you know, have a higher sort of role in society in terms of, you know, population credentials. I mean, imagine if, you know, there was a platform where he could have actually said this and then, you know, people would have clamored and said, you know what, you and Fauci need to get to the bottom of this. Or where legislators could have seen it and said, you know what, before we make a decision like this, maybe hey, Fauci, think that? Or maybe let's convene, you know, an actual

Starting point is 00:29:25 group of 20 or 30 scientists. And the fact that this one version of thinking about things was deemed so heterodoxical, it is just such a good example. They shut down an important conversation. You know that the decision was so wrong and the damage was so severe. So we know what happened by suppressing that speech. And that's one example. Well, in my estimation, it is the silver bullet example that cleans through all of this other stuff. Because, you know, I don't really care

Starting point is 00:29:53 if Rachel Maddow has her client, who the hell cares? This is important stuff because it affects everybody, irrespective of your political persuasion and what editorial you wanna read. Tremoth, what if the investigation into the Catholic church and the abuses that occurred there? So we said, oh, this person needs to be shut down. And then children are molested for another decade.

Starting point is 00:30:13 By the way, we have an example of that. Shaniyat O'Connor came out on SNL, you can look it up for if you're under 40 years old and said, fight the real enemy, she ripped up a picture of the Pope because of the scandals there. She was ex-communicated, she was canceled at that time. One of the first people to be canceled, because she spoke truth to power. What if somebody, an investigative journalist at the New York Times, the Boston

Starting point is 00:30:32 Globes are in the movie spotlight, those are the people who broke the story of the Catholic Church. If somebody came in and the Catholic Church put pressure on a social network, he said, Hey, you can't put this stuff up here. You can't have this discussion of this. Here's another example. So, in theory, why are we shutting down discussions in America? Remember the Vietnam because because Jake, how the media, the media does not value transparency anymore. If you go back and look at the way the

Starting point is 00:30:53 media portrays itself, like in the movie The Post, which is about the revelations about the Catholic church, where you go back to all the president's men, what the media prized and what they congratulate themselves on was first of all transparency and exposing the lies of powerful people. Well, that is exactly what has happened here. The lies of the powerful group of people

Starting point is 00:31:15 who were running Twitter policy and suppressing one side of the debate has been exposed and the media is treating it with a yawn, like there's nothing to see here. Why? Because they were complicit in this. They were complicit in suppressing the views of people like Jay Boutcharia. They were complicit in choosing the views of Fouchy and the elite on COVID. And so they have no interest now in bringing, in making what's happened here at Twitter, fully transparent. I have to own it. I think, the way just a just a quick correction there

Starting point is 00:31:46 I think sax when you said the post washing to post watergate spotlight exactly I'm even thinking about spotlight. Sorry. It was may have been small like Yeah, okay, but like but the post is another example that that movie was about another event like this Which could have been easily suppressed in today's world My father there which was a Pentagon. And in that world, you know, there was an immense amount of pressure that the government put on the Washington Post, but then they said, you know what, we're going with it and they still published it.

Starting point is 00:32:13 And it created a groundsfall of support to really re-examine the Vietnam War. And it had a huge impact. But could you imagine this time around, which is like, hey guys, there's gonna be some kind of misinformation, you know, these Pentagon papers are not real. It's coming from the Russians, suppress it. And nobody could, there's going to be some kind of misinformation. You know, these Pentagon papers are not real. It's coming from the Russians suppress it. And nobody could make so much

Starting point is 00:32:28 easier now to run this play. What journalists need to realize is that today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer prizes onto you, Zach. Not in the current media environment. They work for these corporations, and they don't get rewarded for telling the truth. Oh no, they're going for Pulitzer's. Trust me, they are. But what they need to do is stop thinking short term and think long term. Anytime there's a conspiracy theory, you must give it some validity and say, is there any truth here? Because it could in fact be a scandal that's being covered up. They're involved in the cover up right now. They're involved in the cover up right now.

Starting point is 00:33:05 They're involved in the cover up right now. This is a cover up, I agree. I'm going to agree with you. Let's bring the first batch of Twitter files into the conversation, the one that Matt Taiybi exposed. What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of FBI agents and former security state officials.

Starting point is 00:33:32 So this has now been exposed. There was no legitimate basis for suppressing that story. It was true. It was a respective publication. They did it anyway. This is election interference. You know, the same people who pride themselves on strengthening democracy are engaged in this wide-scale censorship of one side of the political debate, including of true stories before an election. And then they puff out their chest and say, we're protecting democracy.

Starting point is 00:33:58 They're not protecting democracy. They're interfering with democracy. They're interfering with the public's right to know. And then we look at a country like China and we say we're so much better than them because they've got this problem over there where the state and big tech are colluding to create a big brother-like system.

Starting point is 00:34:15 Well, what is this? What are these tools that have been exposed? This is a big brother-like system. Okay, yeah, but just, you have to, I know you wanna make it like an equivalency. It's less than a 1% equivalency, because in our society, we can have moments like this and we can have investigation.

Starting point is 00:34:31 So just to put it in a perspective. Yeah, I don't look, I don't think we're equivalent, but what I'm saying is that this is very much like a big brother social credit system. Yeah, it should be a alarm bell should be going off. This should be an alarm. If Elon didn't decide, just we had this one idiosyncratic billionaire who believes in

Starting point is 00:34:51 free speech. If he didn't decide to take this on, we would never have known this stuff. Okay, tell me what happened in between these two things. There is an attorney at Twitter and I don't know the details of this. I do not work for the Twitter corporation. I do not speak for the Twitter corporation. Sacks does not work for the Twitter corporation and does not speak for it. But there was in between these two drops, something that happened.

Starting point is 00:35:14 Yes, so basically what was discovered, and this is all just publicly reported, is former FBI lawyer named Jim Baker had now become Deputy General Counsel at Twitter. And this guy, Jim Baker, is like the zealog of the whole Russian collusion hoax. He was involved in the FISA warrants that were applied, that the FBI applied to the FISA courts that had all the errors and emissions. He was involved in the Alphabaneco hoax. He was the guy that that Perkins co-eat lawyer assessment was feeding this like phony scam too.

Starting point is 00:35:52 And he, I don't think he was officially sanctioned, but basically he was asked to leave the FBI. And then lo and behold, where does he land at Twitter? And he is involved in their content moderation policies. I think what it shows is how deeply intertwined our big tech companies have become with the security state. Now, how did this get exposed? Well, Barry Weiss was basically putting forward document requests for the latest batch of Twitter files and she wasn't getting anything back. She's like, what's going on here? And the guy who's giving her the files is his name is Jim. And she's like, well, wait, wait, Jim, Jim, Jim, who? And she finds out, wait, Jim Baker, wait, that Jim Baker,

Starting point is 00:36:37 New York Post had a long story about this guy. And so it was discovered that the guy who was curating the Twitter files was this former operative of the FBI who was involved in the Russian collusion hoax and then was involved in their their blacklist decisions So in any event once this came out Twitter fired him and then you know Twitter fired him. And then, you know, Barry apparently received all these files that are now the second batch of the Twitter files.

Starting point is 00:37:09 And just to be clear, that's not James Baker, if you're, you know, thinking is the former Reagan cabinet member, not James Baker. This is Jim Baker, who is a different person. Right, but a lot of people are wondering, well, how could this have been missed? Listen. He's an FBI, ex FBI. He's got it. The fact that he's got it. I mean, they, this is, of people are wondering, well, how could this have been missed? Listen. He's an FBI.

Starting point is 00:37:25 He's got it. He's got it. He's got it. Don't want to be found. I mean, they, they, this is some people call it, you know, the permanent Washington establishment, some people call it the deep state. The administration's come and go. The people who work in Washington stay there forever, and they can simply effectuate policy

Starting point is 00:37:39 by outlasting everybody else and claim decently implementing what they believe believe and they've become a constituency of their own that exercises power like a proitorian guard in washington so in any event this guy is an expert at bowl we've laid himself into the bureaucracy great praetorian guard bowl you're it's a lot of second so what they find a. So hold on. So when they finally, hold on a second. When they finally rooted, when they finally rooted this mole out of the FBI, he bowed away evils himself into another powerful bureaucracy. What does that word, Twitter?

Starting point is 00:38:14 What is that word, Bollieble? Bollieble. Like burrows. Like burrows. Like burrows, like that. So he digs his way into the Twitter bureaucracy to the point where he isn't even found. And then somehow he has put himself in the position to be intermediating the Twitter

Starting point is 00:38:35 files. Can you believe this? So once it was discovered, a union at the Obserion Roman Army that served as personal party guards and intelligence agents the Praetorian guard. Okay. Got it. Well, you understand what happened is that the Praetorian guard originated because they were to defend the life of the emperor. And that what happened that then they became so powerful that that whoever bribed the Praetorians would become emperor. And then finally the last step is that the Praetorians themselves would pick the emperor and whoever

Starting point is 00:39:06 basically led the proctorian guard would be the next emperor. And an event. I mean, we're not at that point yet, but the point it, look, the point is that these security state officials have power that they should not have. Okay, that's the bottom line. They should not be involved in our elections in this way. They should be completely nonpartisan and nonpolitical. They should just do their jobs as law enforcement officials But we know from the Hunter Biden story that a very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden,

Starting point is 00:39:45 it is Russian's information. And they primed these social networks to suppress that story when it came out. That was something they never should have done. And they knew, they knew the story was not fake, they knew it was not Russian's information because they had the laptop in their possession since 2019. Well, okay, that has not,

Starting point is 00:40:01 the providence of the laptop is still being reviewed in fairness, and they're still holding it. Hold on. You're wrong. And there is an investigation going on of Hunter Biden. Well, okay, that has not, the providence of the laptop is still being reviewed in fairness. And there's still, hold on. You're wrong. And there is an investigation going on of Hunter Biden. You also have to put the context in here, and please let me finish. There is a context here of there was massive election interference

Starting point is 00:40:16 going on both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats, all wanted to see the Russian interference and the Ukrainian interference and Trumps encouraging the Ukraine and the Ukrainian interference and Trumps encouraging the Ukraine and the Republican, the Russians to interfere in elections. Everybody was on high alert and that happened to drop, like it was announced 30 days before and it dropped 10 days before the election. So everybody was on high alert and I agree it was not done properly.

Starting point is 00:40:39 Hold on a second. It should have been done properly. They should have said, they should have come out public and say, we don't know the providence of this. We could be hacked, it might not be hacked. Jason, they knew. Let's wait and see. We have to reserve judgment.

Starting point is 00:40:54 No, listen, let me tell you what happened. Let me just tell you what happened, okay. So they use this. I make sure you source this. I will. So look, it's all in the New York Post, okay? They've done a great. No, nobody has refuted it.

Starting point is 00:41:05 Nobody has refuted it. It's a super far-lapped. No, let me just get this on the record here. So from the post. The FBI was given the laptop in 2019 by the Laptop Store owner. Those guys have forensics. They have cyber experts.

Starting point is 00:41:21 They knew the laptop was real. We know it's real now. Nobody questions that. In fact, the FBI has they knew the laptop was real. We know it's real now, nobody questions that. In fact, the FBI has admitted that the laptop was real and that the 100 buying files are real. Nobody disputes that, okay? But what they did before the election is they used this excuse of Russian disinformation to discredit the story before it even came out.

Starting point is 00:41:39 But they had no business getting involved in the story that way. They simply didn't. They just stayed out of it completely. I don't understand how you can possibly justify that. Yeah, I mean, I think we do have to look at the context of that time period when Hillary's emails were hacked and we had a precedent. That's why I was in perfect excuse.

Starting point is 00:41:55 Well, I didn't finish the sentence. And we had a president, which you will agree, our presidents and presidential candidates should not be encouraging foreign powers to hack their adversaries. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that? Answer my question. Do you agree that presidential president?

Starting point is 00:42:09 You're still wrapped up it. Answer the question. Why do you have to do that? I know what you're doing. Listen, listen. I'm not. You're not going to do that. I know what you're doing.

Starting point is 00:42:18 Listen, listen. I'm not going to do that. I know what you're doing. Listen. Listen, listen. I know what you're doing. Listen, listen. This is your election denial of 2016. You're still wrapped up on this. You can't let it go. Again, you personally attack me, you don't answer the question. That's fine. We'll move on. You can't be intellectually honest. The audience knows you're not being intellectually honest. You're not. You're talking about. If you could answer the

Starting point is 00:42:30 simple question, should presidents encourage foreign powers to hack their adversaries, then you would be being intellectually dishonest. I am absolutely disappointed that you will not answer that simple question. It's an obvious. Yes.'s an obviously. We don't want people to do that. Of course, but I don't really believe that happened. I don't really believe that happened. You will say because you know Trump's gonna win the primary. Let's keep going. China has.

Starting point is 00:42:52 Honestly, I don't know. Listen, I don't, I've said so many times in the show that he's not my candidate. I don't know what you're talking about. You're going all the way back. You're going to be on the candidate. You're going to be on the candidate. What you're doing right now is like delusional.

Starting point is 00:43:04 You're going back to some throwaway comment. He made it a rally in 2016. It's got nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the story. And the fact you're even bringing it up is like pure TDS. And I don't want wasting time talking about it now. Instead of answering a question, that's your technique. I want to finish. You didn't call me names instead of answering the question.

Starting point is 00:43:22 I want to, I'm muddy the water. So I want to make one more point about this. I'm not a muddy technique that I'm muddy in the water. So I'm not muddy in the water. I'm muddy the waters. I want to make one more point about the centred Biden things. Another technique that I'm muddy in the water. So I'm not muddy in the water. I don't know. The water has to do. Let's move on.

Starting point is 00:43:30 No, I want to make one final point. Okay, I'll make a final point. There was a letter. Listen, there was a letter with the centred Biden thing. This is 2020 election, Jason. We're not going back two elections ago. I want to talk about the most recent one. Okay, fun.

Starting point is 00:43:43 You had Clapper, you had Comey at 50 of these security state officials, they write a letter saying that the Hunter Biden story has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. They claimed that it was Russian disinformation when it wasn't, they knew it wasn't. And it was the same story that the FBI was telling Twitter, and it was the same story that these Twitter executives were indulging in, even though they all knew or had reasons to know, it wasn't true. And they suppressed the newer post story anyway. I don't know why you're bringing up this Trump stuff.

Starting point is 00:44:13 It has nothing to do with the real issue here. The real, hold on a second, the real issue is this. Does social media have the right to suppress true stories put out by our media before the month before an election. Yes or no? I'll answer that. How do you just send that? I will answer your question.

Starting point is 00:44:30 Yes or no. And you will not answer mine because you're being intellectually dishonest. Yes. We should know. We should not suppress new stories. If it was, and I will argue both sides, if it was Snowden, if it was the Pentagon papers, if it's Hunter Biden's laptop taking out the sex stuff, which we both agree on, or if it is Russia and Ukraine, where your presidential candidate at the

Starting point is 00:44:52 time, Trump asked Zelensky to find dirt on Biden before the election, and he asked the Russians to hack Hillary's email, and they did that, and they released it 10 days before the election. That is facts email and they did that and they released it 10 days before the election. That is facts that happened and that is not what this was. You said you would let me speak and you will let me speak. You're mudding in the waters. No, stop interrupting me and stop insulting me. I will say my part, you said yours and then we will move on.

Starting point is 00:45:20 The fact is Trump encouraged hacking of other candidates and he did it twice in a four-year period back-to-back elections. We need to be on higher alert when you have a Republican candidate, Trump, doing something so absolutely treasonous. This is why it's a perfect cover story. This is why it was a perfect cover story is because people like you are. But you want to raise the trees in this behavior. Let's move on.

Starting point is 00:45:48 I don't think it was a perfect phone call. I think it was. There were lots of shenanigans. There were lots of shenanigans. It's called a tree. Hold on, I'm not defending anything. Trump did, okay. I don't feel the need.

Starting point is 00:45:58 Okay, I never defended it. But the deal is that you're letting your TDS. I don't have to. He's crazy. You're letting you're allowing this Russian disformation to be a cover story for what that I don't think post should have been blocked. You're, you're, you're mischievous. You want to even bring in the shop. It was no question.

Starting point is 00:46:17 The concept under which the, the reason I'm bringing it, I agree that the post is a cover story. That's your interpretation. The context also is everybody was on high alert waiting for a hack to drop and in fact a hack dropped 10 days before you have. Okay, we found out subsequently

Starting point is 00:46:35 was a hack. That's why they knew at the time. It's like points. They knew at the point. Twitter and Facebook did not know. Twitter and Facebook didn't know. That's the point. They don't know.

Starting point is 00:46:43 No, no, no, no, no, no, Taiibi, in that you go back to the Twitter or Facebook didn't know. That's the point. Thank you. Hold on a second. No, no, no, no, no, no. Taiyibi, go back to the Twitter files, the first drop. Jim Baker, hold on a second. Jim Baker and Vagiyagadi said that there were, in a lot of internal questions about whether that that Hunter Biden story could be justified under the hacked policy.

Starting point is 00:47:02 Okay. And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maintain that party line. And the emerging view was that they could no longer maintain that line. And still, Goddy and Jim Baker said, no, we will maintain the idea that this was hacked information until proven otherwise. Even though it was not hacked, it was a New York Post story. Okay, let's agree to just agree.

Starting point is 00:47:25 Let's move on. Why are you bringing up all this like a real response? I think the audience and the other besties want us to move on. So let's move on. China ends most zero COVID rules. And Iran might be abolishing its morality, police, news broke in the past week. On Wednesday, China's health, the authorities overhauled its zero COVID policy. And it announced a 10 point national plan. That's crap, most health code tracking, and also they're rolling back their mass testing.

Starting point is 00:47:49 And this allowed many positive cases too, just simply quarantined at home like we were doing, I guess a year ago now, and they're limiting some of these lockdowns. This all comes from a Foxconn letter, which we don't know the cost causation here. Does it? Does it? Does it? Well, we don't know. That's why I just said we don't know cost and correlation here. Give us some perspective here, Trima. Well, I just think it's kind of ridiculous to assume that the second largest economy in the world pivots based on one letter from one CEO. So I know that that's how the Western media... Just write the letter, please.

Starting point is 00:48:29 Yep. Well, apparently what happened was Terry Guo, who's colloquially known as Uncle Terry, who's a CEO of Foxconn, wrote a letter that essentially said, you know, if we don't figure out a way to get out of these pend, this lockdown process, we're going to lose, you know, our leadership in the global supply chain. And apparently that jolted the Central Planning Commission to realize that they needed to get out of these lockdowns. I think it's something different, which is I think this has been part and parcel of a very focused and dedicated plan by G. Phase one was to consolidate power phase two was to get through November

Starting point is 00:49:09 and to basically get reappointed for life and dispel any other you know rivals that he actually had. And now phase three is just to reopen the economy again so this guy can basically sit on top of the second largest economy in the world. So, I think this is sort of a natural flow of things. The other part of it, which I think is being under-reported, is I think that the way in which they did it was less responsive, in my opinion, to a letter from Uncle Terry, but

Starting point is 00:49:39 was more responsive to the fact that there are people on the ground. And I think that these guys are getting very sophisticated and understanding how to give the Chinese people some part of what they want so that they're roughly happy enough to keep moving forward. And I'm not going to morally judge whether it's right or wrong, but it's just a comment on what the gameplay and the game theory seems to be coming from the leadership of China. So it's, I think this is, it's, it I think this is good for the Chinese people and the real question is what will it mean for the US economy if these guys get their economy going again?

Starting point is 00:50:15 We talked about this previously but this is a good example of the autocrat not necessarily being absolute in their authority. And the sense that I think we get at this point, coming out of China, is that there was enough dissent from the populace on the lockdown and the experience of the lockdowns. And we can all go online and see the videos of steel bars being put on doors to keep people in their apartment buildings and people screaming and buildings being on fire, people can't escape the buildings. How much of that was true or not and riots in the screen and people fighting with the

Starting point is 00:50:53 COVID testers. How much of it is true or not, we don't really know. But it certainly seems to indicate that there was enough dissent and enough unrest that in order to stay in power, the CCP had to take action and they had to shift their position and shift their tone. And I think it's a really important moment to observe that sometimes the CCP and perhaps even we can extend this into other autocratic regimes that we think are absolute in their authority and their power and their power perhaps are necessarily influenced by the people that

Starting point is 00:51:29 they are there to govern and that they are you know ruling over and that while we don't think about these places as democracies perhaps they're not entirely the traditionally defined autocracy that there is an influence that the people can have. And maybe we see the same change happening in Iran with young people and a population that's more modern, that's growing and swelling and size, that doesn't want to accept some of the traditional norms and the traditional laws. And maybe that will kind of start to resonate around the world that the internet is starting to do what everyone hopes and wanted it to do, which is the democratization of information,

Starting point is 00:52:11 the democratization of seeing other people's conditions and seeing what the rest of the world is and is like, gives the populist the ability to rise up and to say, this is what we want, because we know that there are better things out there. And these autocratic regimes have to start to shift slightly. And over time, maybe that has a real impact. Here's a specific statistic in chart for everybody. The demographics of Iran are incredibly notable. If you look at this chart, for those of you listening, it just shows people by age and how many, what percentage of

Starting point is 00:52:45 the population they are, or actually the number of the population, as you can see, it's basically like a pair. You have very few old people and you have a lot of people in their 20s and younger. And so young people, it's really 40s and 30s. Yeah, okay. So 40s, 30s, you don't have the geriatric population that you see in other countries like Japan and so the demographics of Iran are extremely weighted towards younger people, millennials, gen-exers, and younger.

Starting point is 00:53:18 And they have VPNs, virtual private networks. They can see everything happening in the free world versus let's say close societies. And so I think that's what gives me a lot of hope is that these countries are going to have to evolve because young people are seeing how the rest of the world lives. And I think that's a big part of the change. Tremoth, what are you're though? About Iran specifically. I think demographic change and then China and demographic change. I've said this before and I've been tweeting about this for years, but people so poorly understand demographics. Everybody thinks that we have a surplus of people and we don't.

Starting point is 00:53:57 And we need to have a positive birth rate in order to kind of continue to support the expansion of the world and GDP. And we need that. And right now we're not in that situation If you look at a country by country basis a lot of these countries are facing that in a pretty cataclysmic way the most sensitive country to this is China. I mean their population get current course in speed I think the last number is it's going to have by 2100. There'll be about 600 million people in China, which is unbelievably disruptive in a very negative way for them, right?

Starting point is 00:54:31 Because you will have a lot of people who are entering the workforce having to support an entire cohort of people above them in terms of age, right? Who are retired, et cetera. So the state's going to have to get much, much more actively involved over the next 50 years in China. And then you look at other countries like Nigeria or India, who are in, you know, at the beginning of what could be a multi-decade boom, because you have 20 year olds that will be entering the workforce, you know, they'll effectively work for less than their older counterparts, right. So then it will be an incentive then to bring work on shore into those countries.

Starting point is 00:55:08 And so it's going to have huge impacts because then you have rising GDP, you'll have rising expectations of living quality, you'll have rising expectations of how governments treat those people. So it's all kind of positive in general, but the world needs more people. Let's just be clear, especially in Western countries. We are not as badly off as China, but we're not far behind. Here's a quick view of China and Japan. We're in the same kind of, I don't know what they exactly call these charts are kind of like vertical histograms, but you do start. And again,

Starting point is 00:55:40 you know, data is hard to come by in some countries, but China is starting to get top heavy. Again, data is hard to come by in some countries, but China is starting to get top-heavy when compared to Iran. And then if you look at Japan, quite stunning. There's just no young people left. They live too much older ages in Japan. It's as longevity is one of their great strengths as a population as a country. These demographics can't be fought. You're going to have a constricting economy in Japan and their place in the world is going

Starting point is 00:56:07 to be very, very different. Okay, where do we want to go to next? I never asked my opinion. I was on these protests in China. I usually just talk, so go ahead. I didn't want to. I didn't know I had to talk. No, I usually have to fight to give my opinion.

Starting point is 00:56:22 Oh, here we go. Listen, have your agent call my agent. We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it at the time. Well, I have a slightly different view of what's happening in China, Jason, which is, I think that the people there need to stop harassing the CCP. You see, the Chinese Communist Party, they're the elites, they've set things up for the benefit of the people.

Starting point is 00:56:43 They're not engaged in shadow banning. They're just thinking they have a system there to engage in censorship, to prevent abuse and harm. That's the system. They've set up. The people just need to understand that. When they oppose things like COVID lockdowns, like Jay Bonnetchariah did, they need to understand that that is engaging in abuse and harm. You see? Yes. And you know what? They've been re-education camps for citizens who need, you know, to maybe rethink their positions on freedom

Starting point is 00:57:18 and their wages, the hours they work, and their social conditions. You're absolutely correct. China really has built a perfect model for a society. Well said, sex. Now we can move forward. Let's go. Now we can afford it.

Starting point is 00:57:32 We are finally ready to create it. By the way, you know that's going to get clipped out and go viral. You understand, right? According to our elites, according to our elites, like EOL Roth or Taylor Lorenz, to criticize them is a form of harassment.

Starting point is 00:57:50 You understand that, right? So therefore, what the people in China are doing, specifically by opposing lockdowns, you know, they're taking the Jay Potta Chariah point of view. They're engaging in harm and abuse and harassment of their betters of their release. The disagreement. Why won't they just submit to the social credit system that has been set up for them for their benefit? It's for their benefit.

Starting point is 00:58:15 Why question? Yeah, just accept. Accept your fate and work hard for the good of the people. Great points. Let's move forward. Should we talk about sales? No, I think it's actually a pretty good satire. I agree. All right, I think we have to talk about FTX. I don't know if you saw, and I,

Starting point is 00:58:32 the people covering for SBF, it continues to be an absolute joke. The number of interviews that SBF is doing is absurd, but the people carrying water for him is even more offensive. I mean, if you're a criminal trying to cover up your crime, okay, we get it. You're trying to cover up and stay out of jail. But Kevin O'Leary, who calls himself Mr. Wonderful, was on CNBC trying to defend the fact that he was given. This is stunning, by the way. $15 fucking million to be a spokesperson for FTX. So the grift not only went to the press

Starting point is 00:59:15 politicians, but now commentators on CmbC. $15 million to put that in context. I mean, you're talking what an elite NBA player gets from Nike. This does not exist in the world. Kevin O'Leary might get 50 to 200K for speaking gigs, but nobody gets $15 million to show. Here's a 75 second clip that I don't know if you've all have seen, but is unbelievably stunning. See on the other side is 75 seconds. If you're a defense attorney that represents someone that you know is guilty, you've got

Starting point is 00:59:51 to say yeah, well they're innocent. But you may know they're guilty. You may know they're guilty. If you find someone, if you watch someone, kill someone, yeah, they're innocent. I don't think they're guilty. There's only the murder of my money in this case, okay? It's murder of FKX's money, everybody's, look Joe. If you, yes, you money that you got, I don't think you should be singing the blues right now at all.

Starting point is 01:00:14 Oh yes, I'm singing the blues. Why? Because your 15 million didn't pay out that you, that's a lot of money at the end. That's a paid spokesperson. It's a lot of money, you didn't have to do much for that. That's a different discussion. That's a different discussion. You can make that decision on your own, but I'm going to this lot of money. You didn't have to do much for that. That's found money. That's a different decision. That's a different discussion. Okay. You can make that decision on your own, but I'm going to this point on money.

Starting point is 01:00:29 If you want to say he's guilty before he's tried, I just don't understand it. But it may end up causing you 15 for reputation on everything else. That's why I stayed on this pursuit. I'm very transparent about it. I've disclosed everything I know about it. I will find out more information. If I make the credit committee, I will act as a fiduciary for everybody involved, I will testify, I am an advocate for this industry, and this changes nothing. Just look at the

Starting point is 01:00:53 numbers that came out of circle today, I'm an investor there too. You've got the I lost it all in FTX, and we have a fantastic print on circle. The promise of crypto remains, this will not change it pretty crazy fifteen million bucks any thoughts on the continuing s b f sagas act well i don't know why we should care so much about him i mean kevin lero but um... but it's indicative right it's indicative of all these guys that got money from the scot who is he who is he and he's on the truck tank he's a lot of what he's on shark tank and he's a contributor cmb? He's on Shark Tank. He's on Shark Tank. He's on Shark Tank. And he's a contributor to CNBC who's on multiple times a week.

Starting point is 01:01:27 The point is, like you've got the grift, I'm just trying to point out, $15 million to a CNBC commentator is just an extraordinary payoff. I've never heard of anything like that. I don't think it's fair to pick on Kevin O'Leary, per se, because there is a bunch of those guys that took money from him, you know, a bunch of athletes did, party or movie stars,

Starting point is 01:01:51 you know, like, like, every body got paid. Democrat. Democrat. So just like in the Twitter example, I think it's important in this case to generalize because the generalized thing is the real problem. Look, if you want to focus on the crux of this, you have a concept in law that sacs knows better than the rest of us called fraudulent conveyance.

Starting point is 01:02:14 We have example after example where it does not matter whether it was in the Bernie Maidoff example or for example Jason, we talked about it, the guy in LA that lost all the money, client funds playing poker. Yep. You have to give the money back, especially if it was fraudulently conveyed to you. Can you explain this in detail for a second, so the audience understands? Well, on my understanding, which is very basic, and I think David can probably do a much better job is the following, which is if you get money some way but it comes from somebody who fraudulently acquired that money,

Starting point is 01:02:50 you have to give the money back. So in this example, what it would mean is if that they can show that that $15 million of this guy got came from SBF basically rating the piggy bank of user accounts, he's gonna have to pay the money back. Just like, for example, in the made off fraud, the folks that went to find the money were able to go back to folks that actually redeemed, even the beginning early ones and said, I understand that you didn't know any better,

Starting point is 01:03:21 but this was fraudulently conveyed to you, so we need the money back and they got the money back. In that case, if they had put a million in and it grew to three million, they got their million principal back, but the two million in gains, which were ill-gotten, had to be returned. Return, returned exactly. So as I understand it based on just what I've read, that there's a 90-day rule around contributions, meaning that if, I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound.

Starting point is 01:03:51 So, but I do think it creates potentially a powerful incentive here by politicians and various political groups. For him not to be convicted of fraud, for him to be able to plead the sound into some sort of negligence, because they don't want be able to plead the sound into some sort of negligence because they don't have to give the money back. They keep the bag. What an incredible insight. Well, this is what I think so interesting about the Cavanaugh Liri thing. It's not about Cavanaugh Liri, but it's about the fact that the money was spread around so widely and into such like deep trenches of the regulatory society. Society. Society, like,

Starting point is 01:04:25 into the blood. Deep blue answers. Yeah. And basically, I think the guy cemented this, he thought that like, which I think by the way, is a really interesting product of the crypto ecosystem and the model that so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is,

Starting point is 01:04:43 if you can fester the belief, then there is a business. If you cannot fester the belief, there is no business. That there isn't a fundamental productivity driver. It's about building a belief system. And you can buy a belief system. If you can take money that people have given you, you can embed it in influencers and celebrities and politicians and regulators. And if you give it to enough of these people, and you give enough of it to them, maybe that belief system solidifies, and your thing becomes real. Which is a classic riff technique by the way, in the Gryfters.

Starting point is 01:05:13 Oh, tell us all about it, Jake. Yeah. Yeah. You have the master. No, no, it's the patina. It's this, you know, you look like you're incredibly rich. You're going to fancy restaurants. You're wearing expensive suit. You're getting to fancy restaurants, you're wearing expensive suit,

Starting point is 01:05:25 you're getting in a sports car, and then you own some Pulazza or whatever, and then some other rich person comes and you get to invest in something and then you have scone with the money. But they see all the accruter months, you check all the boxes, your parents were sad for it, you went to MIT and you are donating large sums of money

Starting point is 01:05:43 and you got this big table at the club and you got a penthouse, everybody starts to feel, well, my is right, you got the wealth, there might be some of you. How would you guys feel about honestly? Honestly, no, backing a CEO of a growth stage company that you put your firms money into who lives in a $130 million house

Starting point is 01:06:01 and has not yet exited the business. Yeah, absolute alarm bells everywhere. And this is why I'm not a fan of, like, secondary cells. Let me ask you guys a question. A few secondary cells. Yeah, let me ask you guys a question. Do you think that a billion dollars of dark money could stop a red wave? Just asking for a friend.

Starting point is 01:06:18 A billion dollars. Do you think it was overweighted to Democrats? No, honestly, do you think it's overweighted to money? Yes, his mother was a huge Democratic bundler. And moreover, the specific politicians he needed to influence, yes, there were some Republicans, but by and large, it was the SEC. You the first person to make this claim. I want to say, did you hear it here first on the only pod? David Sachs, David Sachs, making the declaration that the

Starting point is 01:06:45 wheel on the wrong side was stopped because of well me as you can ask a follow-up question what do you think would have more impact on our election enormous amounts of dark money going to democrats or extensive shadow banning of conservative influencers which one you know would have a bigger impact we We could hold on to it. And hold on to it. In the 50-50 country, where, I mean, the scales are like balance, where these elections are just a few thousand votes. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:07:13 Which is the result is going to be if we actually have a level playing field together to this swindler's dark money. Yeah, that's an interesting question. Let me add a, I think to that. What would have a bigger impact this I think this is great except for when you guys on your fight like or Taking away a woman's right to choose after 50 years of giving it to the which would have a bigger impact on the red wave I did have a big impact, but I think we're gonna move across that

Starting point is 01:07:37 I know we're gonna pass that. Yeah, all right. Great. Yeah great great great strategic What do you think about the cinema Kristen cinema cinema, Kiersten cinema flipping to independent? Do you think that's a big deal or? I think, I think it's really interesting. I think it's actually a very shrewd move on her part. Well, she's got a purple. So first of all, I think she's great. You know, tell us, tell us about her, sex.

Starting point is 01:07:58 No, he, well, she, she is the center from Arizona, a formerly Democrat now independent who is in the mold of, you know, John McCain who is a former center for Arizona, sort of this Maverick independent. And she does not cow-tow to her party orthodoxy. And when Biden wanted to pass three and a half trillion of build-back better spending, she along with Manchin opposed it. And I think save the administration from this gigantic boondoggle that would have

Starting point is 01:08:28 inflation much much worse now manchigal the credit but she was equally responsible for putting a hold on that and then as a result they only did the seven hundred fifty billion inflation reduction act so she's willing to buck her own party now as a result of that i think they were planning on she she was going to get primaries, that the progressive wing of the party was planning on primering her. And by moving to an independent, in a sense, she preamps that. Because what she's now saying is, she's now sort of like, you know, Bernie Sanders is an independent or this guy, Angus King from Maine, they still caucus with the Democrats, but their independence

Starting point is 01:09:07 and the Democrats don't run candidates against them because they know that if they do, you'll have a Republican or Democrat and independent, and the Democrats and the independence will split the vote and their Republican will win. So basically, she's now daring the Democrats, hey, if you want to run a candidate against me, I'm not going to sit around and get primaryed by them. You go ahead and run somebody, but then we're both going to lose to the Republican. That's what's smart about it is. I think she's daring Schumer to run somebody against her. It's also interesting. She's, she's the only member of Congress I've read that's not this, which is kind of like

Starting point is 01:09:46 eighth, she doesn't talk about God or doesn't believe in God. And I think she's the first openly bisexual member of Congress. She's a maverick. Certainly. Sex, do you think she held up on making this decision until after that Georgia Senate runoff election finished and do you think that it influenced the decision? I don't know, but I think that the definition of what for her is. Well, imagine if she doesn't make this move now, okay? And then in two years, well, I guess really next year, she gets primary, okay? And then what if she loses the primary?

Starting point is 01:10:18 It's going to be very hard for her to run as a independent, at that point, it'll look like Sour Grape, Sour loser, right? But if she goes independent now, she's saying, listen, I'm running as an independent amount of what? The question you have to make is what the Democratic Party is whether to support me or basically tank this election through a couple of other parties. Will we see more of this purple approach? I was just going to ask you, what does this mean for Joe mention well i don't think you mentioned houses problem i'll tell you why because

Starting point is 01:10:49 west virginia and like a razonis like a plus twenty two red state joe mansion is the only politician in that state who could win that seat for the democrats when joe mansion retires that seat is going to republican and shumer knows is the democrats notice they think they're lucky stars every day that they got joe mansion because otherwise that would be a republican seat and so look all this stuff about how the progressors were upset with mansion and all

Starting point is 01:11:14 that papal city got that may be you know that sort of progressive wing is going to say that publicly but the smart democrats know that they're very lucky to have a politician like joechin on their side of the aisle. I could ask a question to you, Tremoth. Why do Democrats... Why are they... It seems to be so anti-moderate Democrats. Why are they so resistant to the concept of a moderate Democrat when obviously moderate Democrats seem to have an advantage in these elections.

Starting point is 01:11:46 Well, no, I think David described it well, which is that in many of the seats, this is both true for Republicans and for Democrats. You're not really competing in a general election. You're competing in a primary and if you win a primary, you're probably going to win. So like, you know, if you're in Mississippi, for example, you just have to win the Republican primary. Nothing else matters. And then you're just going to skate to victory.

Starting point is 01:12:05 And so the real question is, who votes in those are different oftentimes in who votes in the general. And this is why you get this dispersion that's happening where folks seem to be getting more and more extreme. It's reflecting the sound bites that those primary voters want to hear. And this is the big problem that we have. And that's why, why like if you have

Starting point is 01:12:26 A bunch of this you know ranked choice voting or you know These other kinds of methods it starts to clean that up so that you move people more into the moderate middle But that's why that's why you have this crazy stuff happening. All right everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the all-impock asked for the dictator the Sultan of science and David Sacks. Hi, I am Take out. We'll see you next time. Bye bye We'll let your winners ride Brain man David Sack We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with her. I'm the US, I'm the Queen of kilowatt.

Starting point is 01:13:06 I'm going on a leash. What, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, the cashier, we meet the athletes We should all just get a room and just have one big hug or two because they're all It's just like this like sexual tension that we just need to release that out What your, the beef, what your, your beer, beef Beef, what? It's good for you We need to get买 cheese, aren't we? I'm going all in I'm going all in

Starting point is 01:13:44 I'm doing all it.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E107: The Twitter Files Parts 1-2: shadow banning, story suppression, interference & more

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