Big Technology Podcast - Crossover With The Realignment: Can Tech Survive Washington’s Onslaught?

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Marshall Kosloff and Saagar Enjeti host The Realignment, an excellent podcast about politics and tech in our fast-changing world. I joined the show his week to talk about the new set of bills in Congress aimed at Big Tech and asked them if we could air the show here on the Big Technology feed as well. Graciously, they agreed! So this week, we'll run this episode as a bonus on a Tuesday, and then we’ll be back on Thursday with our regularly scheduled show, with Adam Kovacevich, who runs a big-tech funded organization called the Chamber of Progress.

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast. Today, we're trying something new. Marshall Kozlov and Sager and Jetty are two friends of the show. They've been guests here before, and they host an excellent podcast called The Realignment, where they look at politics and tech with some terrific guests. I've been on the realignment a few times, and we're going to be. when Marshall and Sagar asked me to join this week to talk about the new set of bills in Congress aimed at big tech. I said yes right away. Then I asked if we could air the show here on the

big technology feed as a crossover episode. And they said yes right back. What you're about to hear is a discussion with myself, Marshall, and Sager on their realignment show. We get into the bills. We get into the FTC. And we get into whether social media companies are actually censoring conservatives. It's a fun discussion. So let's air this conversation today. And then, And we'll be back here this Thursday on the big technology podcast with a regularly scheduled show with Adam Kovacovic, who runs a big tech funded organization called the Chamber of Progress. We'll ask him what he gets for the money.

Okay, on to the show. Alex Cantorich, welcome back to the realignment. It's great to be back here with you guys. And a quick hello to big technology listeners. We're cross-posting this on the big technology podcast feed because I thought this was a conversation that you might want to hear as well. So this is what the podcasting environment's all about, right? Like, it's all about the crossposts, the guest posts, all of that.

So it's good to see Alex, long time friend of the show for new listeners. Alex has been with us for quite some time and is our resident Silicon Valley friend slash, I think he's one of our, one of our best friend out there. Should we say that, Marshall? What do you think? I think we'll go with that. We're not quite in with Ben Thompson yet, so we're going to have to do with Alex. Well, he lives in Taiwan.

So what is he? Sometimes I'm like, what does this guy even know? I think Ben moved to the U.S. but don't quote me on that. Oh, did he? Wow, that's big. Yeah. There's something in the works there.

Go ahead and call me a conspiracy theory. Somebody's hiring him. I'm going to call Spotify exclusive, but we'll see before any of that happens. Ben could make a lot of money working for one of those companies. He definitely could. But, I mean, anyway, he's actually invented the game that I'm in right now, which we can get to a little bit. In terms of what Wii and we've always discussed here on the show is kind of the intersection

between Silicon Valley and Washington right now, what's happening right now in terms of the political space, obviously, is people are looking at the recent confirmation of Lena Khan to the FTC, longtime foe, quote unquote, of big tech. Last time, I think you and I talked, we were on Clubhouse, and we were talking about, like, do these companies actually care? And you said that they didn't, that they weren't afraid. Is that where they're thinking is right now? What do you think? I think they're more afraid now. than they were before Lena Khan became the chair of the FTC.

So I think it's one thing if she's nominated as a commissioner. It's another thing if she's going to be the chair of this agency. Not only that, both the Senate, the Senate's passed and the House has just introduced bills that will fund the FTC to a level where it can actually be competent. So right now it's so vastly underfunded. They've paused expert witnesses in some senses. They've cut down on bonuses. They've done a hiring freeze.

and they've even cut down on IT spent, which has made the one federal entity responsible for checking these companies power, maybe that in the DOJ, totally incompetent and unable to do its job. And so if you have the combination of LenaCon coming in to be the chair and money coming in to give the agency the opportunity to do the work that it's supposed to do, that's more intense threat than you would have had in the past. Now, I don't think most Silicon Valley employees, you know, go about their daily lives and say, you know, Congress is going to pass the five bills that were just introduced and Lena Kahn's going to break us up, you know, better go into oil or something like that. I don't think that's happening here. But I think that the alarm is definitely one notch higher than it was previously.

And this would be good because let's take the chance just to set the stage of what's actually happening right now. So you had the release of five different bills. You wrote great posts on this that we're going to link out in the show notes. But what are the five bills? And then how did that randomly coincide with Lena Kahn's naming to the FCC chair? I mean, sorry, the FTC chair position. Okay. So five bills.

So what's happened is there's been this long process where largely the Democrats in Congress, but it is bipartisan, have led a. interrogation of the anti-competitive practices that the tech giants have engaged in. You know, it started out with like some weariness around Facebook's role in the 2016 election. And you started to see a set of hearings that were largely embarrassing to Congress where senators asked Mark Zuckerberg how they could email on WhatsApp, which is most ridiculous question I've ever heard and how Facebook makes money. And that's when Zuckerberg said, Senator, we sell ads, which is what the hearing was all about. Congress and some unexpected twist, though, ended up becoming way better at this job. And they went from being fairly uninformed to actually having Lena Kahn, who's now the FTC chair,

who we talked about, work behind the scenes with them on a package of antitrust investigations into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. That led to another set of hearings that were actually extremely well informed and well researched. And they came in with interviews with third parties that the tech companies have harmed and said, all right, let's have a discussion about this and actually find out, you know, if the excesses that the other people have claimed are true in reality. And they ended up making a number of these CEOs look extremely dumb, including Jeff Bezos, who all but admitted in the hearing that Amazon indeed was taking data from third party merchants and using that to enhance its first party business, which is a big no-no. obviously, you know, there was sort of like a gentleman's agreement where Amazon was against Amazon's internal rules, right? Yeah, exactly. And he was basically like, I don't know. Yeah, exactly. And but he's like, you know, it might be, might be the case that this happens, which, you know, when you have a CEO in front of Congress is, you know, I mean, maybe I'm reading

between the lines a little too much. But everybody watching that hearing saw Jeff Bezos admit that this was a practice. And it didn't help him that the Wall Street Journal had reported a pretty rock solid, uh, report that this was going on. So, Just that, so that's important background to bring us to the five bills that we saw released because they were essentially the product of these really well thought out investigations and hearings. So one, the first one deals with all the self-dealing. It basically prohibits the stuff that Bezos admitted to before it was a gentleman's agreement where like if you were a third-party merchant working with Amazon, Amazon would be like, oh, it would be against our rules to siphon your data and use it for our own purposes while doing that. This would make it against law, along with a slew of other things. The next one comes from Pramila Jayapal, who did the questioning of Bezos.

She's a congresswoman from Washington State, so she's neighbors with Microsoft and Amazon. This one basically gives the Department of Justice fairly wide authority to break these companies apart. Next one is a data portability bill called the Access Act of 2021. I think data portability is kind of overrated when it comes to legislative action. So I wasn't very impressed with that one. It was very hot like two years ago. Now it's just like, now. Wait, let's, let's, let's get into it real quick, though.

Yeah. Hey, like, what is data portability and then give us your hot tape and why it's not. Oh, yeah. So data portability is like I'm on Facebook and so I should be able to, you know, leave Facebook and go to another social network and take all my data with me. So maybe press a button and like, and you're looking at it through an anti-competitive lens, right? So press a button and say, I want to go to Facebook's competitor and bring all of my data from Facebook.

So like your friends, so with this, just to put some, so I've got my Facebook friends. Right. Because this is, this is where I was friends, your photos, your likes, stuff like that. I can't leave because I've been on Facebook for 15 years. That's the argument, correct? Yeah, exactly. I think it sounds really nice in theory and in hearings and in academia, but it doesn't really work very well in practice because at the end of the day, what's not enabling competitors

to compete with these companies isn't the fact that individual, users can't port their data over. I mean, if I build a shell social network and say, you can bring your Facebook photos with you and your friends, but none of your friends are there and your likes, but none of the pages that you've liked are there. I've just built an extremely crappy piece of software. So I just think that in reality, you know, the way that we use technologies, we just build up new data profiles and the new products we use.

And the way that those products can win is be better. and so I think that this is this bill doesn't I think there was one more bill that you were I want to ask you about though on the data portability one because you hear this one so much how does how do how do different algorithms come into play with this topic so for example what is it that differentiates TikToks TikTok from real these aren't really social networks even the definitions are a little complicated but TikTok has a super unique algorithm so even if you pours your Instagram how does that play into it? Yeah, and that's again, this is exactly why I think this is kind of a ridiculous law because you as a TikTok user are one node in the TikTok network.

What makes TikTok differentiated is the algorithm. And there's no way any Congress can legislate anything that forces a company to give its proprietary algorithm to a competitor. I mean, once you do that, there's no point in doing business. You know, it's like you took my secret sauce. It would be like forcing, I don't know, shake shack to give its burger recipe, which would be a shame. Well, you're describing standard Chinese practice, though, to be four. It's about they run things in their country. But, I mean, there's a reason why, yeah, I mean, this, you know this.

This is, you know, your position, but there's a reason why we're America, right? We, uh, of course, we don't want to do that shit. So, yeah, I'll just quickly go through the last two. The second and last one, again, is the one that helps fund the FTC. gives them more than $400 million a year to operate with, which is still like two and a half days of or two days of Facebook's revenue. But it's better than what they're dealing with now. And the last one is a bill that I think is,

I will preface this by saying I think some of the ideas and the bills are very good. Some of the ideas in the bills are very bad. And the last one I think is a bad one. I just wrote about this on big technology. It's a bill that would essentially end acquisitions. So if you're a big tech company, he couldn't inquire. It's from Akeem Jeffries. Who, Hakeem, if you're out there and listening, write me back.

I've been trying to write you and your spokesman for like a week and a half here and I haven't gotten anything back. So please. Am I mistaken or is he not slated to be the next speaker of the house? So this one seems pretty important. Yeah. So as I understand, so, you know, for the politics angle here, ironically, the worst bill written probably, I'm going to assume, probably the next future most influential person. Nancy Pelosi has made it all but known that somebody like Hakeem Jeffries very much is on the bench in terms of who's next for

speaker. So I would pay particular attention to this one. Yeah. And so I think this one is I spent the week essentially calling people working in the tech industry, which okay, they have definitely have their biases, but they're the people creating the stuff and saying what would happen if big tech couldn't acquire startups anymore? So I think you would see. them immediately go to copying startups versus waiting a little bit and seeing if they could acquire them. And you're seeing that already, Facebook, you know, might have typically tried to acquire clubhouse. It has the money to do it. Now, instead of having those conversations, it has clubhouse working or about to roll out on two billion user platform. It just started doing that

this week. And then you'd also have companies taking the money that they would put aside for acquisitions of startups and actually using that to just hire their best people. So, So gutting the companies from inside, bringing them in to either build copycats or work on some critical products. And then crucially, you would lose a safety net for startups where like if you don't work to, every startup wants to work toward an IPO. Like that's what they want to do. They want to exit and go public and become the next Facebook or Google. Needless to say, not everyone is going to end up being there. So what you want to have is a safety net, which is to say if I build a good product and create value, I want to exit even though I can't.

IPO, and that's where the acquisition comes in. So if you cut off the five biggest companies in the U.S. economy for making acquisitions, you're going to end up having these companies settle for worse deals or just fall apart completely, and that changes the incentives to actually start a company in the first place. Now, I see why Congress would want to, you know, introduce an act to prohibit acquisitions because a lot of times big tech companies will kill the startups they bring on. A lot of times they will, you know, capture all their growth, like in the Instagram case. But that's why we have the FTC is to evaluate these acquisitions. And if you wholesale ban acquisitions, you're just going to do way more harm than good. So that's my perspective

on that one. Could you put some meat on the bones? Because I'm guessing, isn't there a, it's when a company reaches a certain size, correct? So what's scary? Because obviously, if we turn the realignment into a startup, we could require things. What level of company would you have to be to be subject to this rule? I think it's six hundred it's very it's written uh in a way that um particularly targets big tech. So I think one of the, uh, qualifications is you need 600 billion dollars in market cap. Well, which companies have 600 billion dollars in market cap? I can think of five. So, um, so there's only like how many actually do have six. I, I think that they let me take a look at Tesla right now. Uh, Tesla might be the only one close.

All right. So Tesla is right above 600. But it also there's also a user requirement there. So Tesla might have more than 600 billion in market cap, but not enough users. So it could still make acquisitions. Like this bill was written to target big tech. There's no, there's no, these set of bills. So there's no doubt about that. So what I don't understand here, and I like the way you put it, which is you could critique this and still say, hey, maybe in. Instagram shouldn't have been approved. Maybe you do something retroactive, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What is the harm and not just consumer harm? So forget the, because there's obviously the debate over the consumer harm standard. When Congress is talking about these acquisitions and saying they should be banned, like, what is the specific problem in the market that you're attempting to solve? So, for example, I think of, look, like, I'll be honest, clubhouse, you know, we were, you know, you were more bearish, soccer. We wanted Clubhouse very much to happen, but I don't think it's going to happen.

And I think a world where Facebook did acquire Clubhouse, yet Twitter did their own competitor version, which I think you've really enjoyed using so far. I don't really know what the problem is because then in that situation, Facebook overpaid for something that they could have done anyways. What is the problem in that scenario? Yeah, it's where the theoretical stuff sort of runs into reality. and it's a pretty tough collision. So in theory, what you want is companies not capitulating before they need to and getting bought out.

I mean, we talked about Instagram. The real thing that they would say is the WhatsApp acquisition might have been the real bad one. I know the FTC's on trying to unwind both of them. But Facebook paid, what, $16 to $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp, which was clearly on its way to be an important independent social media company, would have gone to IPO, would have been worth more than $16 billion right now. but the founders chose an exit. And so that's what Congress wants to incentivize. In a perfect world, it would work that way. But you know, you're right.

This isn't a perfect world. And so it's not going to work the way that Congress wants. Yeah, I guess, you know, it's interesting every time we talk about this, which is that I see what people are saying. Well, actually, let's try this. The theory is that people are stifling innovation because they're only doing work like they're only funding companies so they can get bought by Google and Facebook

so that there's a market distortion as in let's say I want to make a lot of money I would create like some sort of search addition which would be clearly compatible with Google rather than trying to create my own brand new search engine.

What's the evidence behind that? Because I actually never even heard. I don't think there is a lot. I mean being here in Silicon Valley, you speak with startup founders and these people are ambitious and they want to make a lot of money. They want to leave their mark on the world and they want to do something important.

I don't think any of them wakes up and says, I'm going to get VC funding so I can build a Google add-on and then get acquired by Google. And the exit isn't guaranteed. You also have to work like kind of night and day and go through like emotional ups and downs like you wouldn't believe. I mean, I think that you're finding this out, you know, when it comes to starting a company, I've certainly had it starting my own company. So Saga, I want to ask me about LLC fil-Obee. So, Saga, I want to ask you about it because can you imagine going through all this pain and being like, yeah, I'm going to get acquired by Google before I hit exit velocity. Maybe make some money. That's a very good point.

That's cool. Yeah, this shit is hard. Yeah, it's hard. You put your whole being into it. Exactly. So the whole concept of like, now there's definitely, will it happen? Sure. But is it going to be the rule rather than the exception?

Not a chance in hell. Interesting. Here's a question. We had Keither boy of. founders fund on. We asked him the question about funding to get acquired by big company. He made the point that in most cases, those acquisitions are total failure for the venture capitalists. Because if you're venture capitalists, people give you money in order to get a 10x, 100x return. But if you look at the acquisitions, so separate from the Instagram, separate from the WhatsApp,

those are the exceptions. Right. But those are the exceptions that the FTCI, frankly, we think you should focus on. If we get funding for, I mean, this is fascinating to me when, for example, look at, look at Wondery, look at the ringer, like a bunch of these different media startups that did podcasting, they got acquired by Amazon. They got acquired by, you know, Spotify, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But in most of those cases, those were not great investments if you're a venture capitalist because you expected to get a billion dollars for something and not just 100 and not just,

you know, $50 to $100 million. So how do you think venture capitalists who are actually putting the money into these things think about the acquisition dynamics here? They view it as a safety net, I think. They are obviously going to every company thinking about how it can become the largest company possible, how it can become the next Facebook or Google. And so they fund, you know, based off of that. But they know that not everyone's going to hit.

In fact, if you, you know, get two or three hits in your career as a VC that go to you know, that 50, 100 X. If you get one out of 10 or, you know, some number that end up, you know, 10, 20 Xing, you're doing extremely well. And so I think that like the VCs understand that not every company is going to go to IPO. And the question is what happens to the rest of them. And, you know, you look at a VC's so funny, go to any VC like personal website and they'll list all their investments and then they'll list like all the exits there.

very proud when a company gets acquired because it means they've created something. And yeah, okay, maybe it wasn't the outcome that they wanted, but it's still, they can still have a good outcome. Maybe you get five or six times your money versus 20 times. And so you need some of those singles and doubles along with the home run in order to be, you know, happy with this job. And it's also the startup founders. So they couldn't do that.

They would, you know, they might not found companies in the first place. I was speaking to one startup founder this week, and he told me, I'm going to just quote him. He said, I don't think most people will realize that startups can implode at any second. And having a buyer always available is what makes the risk worth taking. So essentially, if this thing all blows up, well, we can get acquired. Spent four years, Vest, start again. So to make us not just sound like tech shows here, what would your advice be for legislators or people who in good faith are really looking back at the end?

Instagram and WhatsApp sales and want to use this blunt instrument to prevent that from happening. What would your advice be for a modified version of the bill? I mean, I think they have the right bill, which is to fund the FTC. These things should be looked at case by case. And they should be given the attention that they deserve and not glanced over by overworked and underpaid public servants. And so. Well, let's let's talk about this, though, because this is something I find really interesting, which is that, so I read that book on Instagram. I forget what it's called. No Filter. No filter. I think that's what it's called. Sarah Ferret. Anyway, great book. Highly recommended. I hope everybody goes out and buzz it. So I read this book.

In retrospect, the Instagram acquisition, crazy by Facebook, that we let it happen. At the time, though, you're like, yo, Zuckerberg just paid a billion dollars for this app with, okay, I don't want to get the users wrong, but I think it was like 10 million or something like that. Zero business plan, zero recommendation algorithm. At that point, I believe they did not even accept ads. And if you go and you look at how it was written up, everybody was like Zuckerberg has lost his goddamn mind, spending a billion dollars on this app.

And I kind of get it, right? Like, I kind of get why people at the FTC didn't do anything. Like, I think even I remember at the time being like, this is crazy, man. Like, how are they going to make? Now, obviously, I think Instagram alone makes $15 billion a year. there's actually a pretty good argument to be made. They never would have been as successful as they were without Facebook. So how are we supposed to assess these things in real time?

And I'm not above also the FTC being like, look, we screwed up, you're spun off. It's over because in real time conditions, I think it's pretty fair. I'd be like, look, this is kind of unfair. But, you know, this is like this is the problem about the principle. It's like pretty hard to apply in the moment at the time, especially in tech. Definitely. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's not as hard as we're thinking.

I mean, what about the Instagram acquisition is crazy that we let through? Just because of what it developed into? Yeah. No, I'm saying like, now we're like, okay, market power. Of course. But I mean, that was 2021. Nine years ago or eight years ago or whatever, I'm like, look, I mean, if you would ask me, the current me eight years ago, I would be like, I don't care about Instagram. Let's be, let's all be honest.

Nobody, nobody would. No one did. And that's why I actually think that it's somewhat ludicrous that they're trying to go out and separate it. and revisit this. I think the FTC made the right decision by approving it. And I think that, like, it was a tiny company. You know, if it was Instagram today and it wanted to merge with Facebook, then you say no. But you can't, you know, there's this question of whether Facebook had some role in Instagram's success.

I mean, come on. Like, we can't hide our head in the same. No, yeah, it did. You read the book and you're like, this is so obvious. WhatsApp is a different question. What's up different? What's up different. And so evaluating it case by case, I think, makes a lot of sense.

What's up happened in a regulatory environment where everything was going through? Instagram, I think, should have gone through. And, yeah, I don't know. I mean, yeah, Facebook helped build that value. And I don't think Facebook is a monopoly in social media. Like, to begin with this, to begin with this, the conversation has to be Facebook is a monopoly in social media. Therefore, we should break this up. I mean, we talked about TikTok.

I mean, look at TikTok. Holy shit. Like that app is. is just blowing up. I think it's the most downloaded app in the last, what, 12 months or something like that? And I believe they just surpassed Instagram on time on app, which is the most important thing that exists.

It's the best social experience, I think, out of all the social apps. I personally had to delete it. I installed it because I was bored during the pandemic and became addicted and said there's no reason why I should be spending two hours a day on this thing and kind of like, you know, made those app icons rumble. a bunch of times and then finally hit the X because I just couldn't deal with it in my life. And honestly, it's been nice.

I don't miss TikTok at all. But I think that the stats that we just quoted show that Facebook isn't a monopoly in social media. And in fact, like, it's to me the company that is the least monopolistic out of all the big tech companies. There's no operating system that it owns unlike the rest of them. And so it's the most vulnerable because a company like TikTok could come away and just siphon the time that people spend on it.

So yeah, so I think just to circle back to the question, I wouldn't have blocked the Instagram acquisition. I think it's tough to unwind it now. And I think that an FTC that wasn't asleep at the wheel might have had some second thoughts at the WhatsApp acquisition. Certainly WhatsApp wouldn't go through today. I think what's interesting about this is we're talking about one specific part of the monopoly discussion, but obviously there's Amazon, there's Google. So can you just fill out how

people are thinking about that? Because I guess here's the way that I'll put this. I had a friend who saga knows text me the left and the writer coming together to break up Google, whether or not that's true. I just find myself honestly not caring that much because in the sense that, Okay, so YouTube gets split off from Google, and they're still super huge. This person was conservative. So obviously he is not happy if YouTube for censorship-related issues. But I'm like, dude, like, even if it was split off, there would still be the same, like, in your view, censorship issues.

So just what are the stakes when it comes to breaking the companies up themselves? Because it gets to a question I want to get to in a bit, which is what exactly are the left and the right coming together to critique these companies on? I think you're spot on. Honestly, I don't think that it's appreciated how if you do break up these companies, you're still going to have a lot of economic value created. It's not that you're not going to destroy them. You're just going to break off their component parts. And they'd be able to operate largely in the same way. I mean, of course, like if you break off an Amazon web services from the rest of Amazon, there would be part of that cash printing element that wouldn't be able to fund some of the other. experiments. So Amazon would have to work its way around that. Sorry, quick interruption, just because we just talked to Brad. And you, we both talk to Bradstone

about this. Yeah. Wasn't the scoop, though, that Bezos doesn't have AWS just print money for everything in the sense that people are expected to be independent? I'm trying to remember what the thing there was. I want to make sure the nuances hit. Yeah. I mean, I think that like it's, it all gets kind of squishy, you know, it's like maybe that doesn't come out of the AWS column of the balance sheet, but can you afford having one business line lose money for a while? Like, can the Echo lose money for a while while it figures it out because you have that AWS cushion? Probably. So even if it's not like Andy Jassy showing up to the Alexa building with wheelbarrows of cash at the end of the day, like it does end up supporting it in some way. Yeah, it's interesting

whenever we're talking about this. Like in terms of, I don't know, in terms of like the cross subsidy agreement in terms of like what we see with the antitrust discussion. And in terms of the whole like bipartisan thing, I wanted to pull this up because I just think it's crazy. YouTube, if you spun it off, is made more money or made as much money as Netflix in 2018. And by the way, they didn't have to spend a dime on original content. That same year, Netflix spent $8 billion on original. content. YouTube, they rely on idiots like me in order to spend a lot of my own money,

and we can go to that into creating content for them so that I can serve as the person in between their ads. So this is the thing I want to underscore, which is that like, you could, you could break it up. But at this point, it's being, you think Susan, what's her name? Was, was Nicky? Wajiki. You think Susan Wajicki is not going to take down Brett Weinstein's Yvermectin video? Like, it's going to happen. Yeah. I mean, people that are looking at this as anti-censorship move, like, oh, now they're humble and will not take down videos. No, that's not going to happen. I didn't say it's not still a good idea. But like, you should be talking a lot more about market power and different things. Exactly. But this is, but this is, oh, but this is, okay,

this is my favorite topic ever. So Kara Swisher on her Sway podcast had David Cicillane, who's the Democratic chair, focused on the antitrust bills. And he was making the argument that what I tell everyone on the right who's interested in this topic is the following. We're not going to hit censorship directly under these bills, but this is a market power question. Therefore, if they were broken up, they wouldn't have the same power. I'm just to Saugger's point, I'm just not sure that that's true. I mean, we had Senator Hawley on a whole other topic in May when his book came out, and he made the point that if you had serious antitrust action, you would have a, let's say, more child-friendly competitor to YouTube exist. That was an example of what

he gave. And I'm just sort of like, but dude, don't we have it? I did not say this, obviously. There was no dude. But aren't there like 10 to 12 different streaming services? Like, I don't get the sense that YouTube's market power is what's preventing like a conservative-friendly children's cartoon streaming service. So I'm just curious what you think about that argument because I just, I get the principle here. So I get the idea of people saying, Oh, hey, like, YouTube is big, but there's 12 streaming services. That's the whole joke. So I just don't understand.

I mean, maybe you guys can help me figure this one out. I mean, I hear so much about how Google and Facebook censor conservatives, but they seem to be doing pretty well on those sites. Like, you've got this canned. I actually hate this talking point from Kevin Ruse, who's been on the podcast. Look, when this is, this is why. Yeah. Because you can get liberal content anywhere else.

Right, right, right. It's actually very intuitive, which is that people are like, oh, Facebook prioritized conservatives. Okay, but hold on then. Like, all right, you can get liberal content anywhere else. You can get conservative content on these platforms. So they've essentially built this alternative media ecosystem. 100%.

But that's my point. So it's not, though, that it's an equal playing field. Right. This is where I want to emphasize. I don't think it's equal playing field. Right. Yeah. Because I'm like, listen, the entire mainstream culture is liberal.

Like you can watch the mainstream, New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, all. this. You can actually only get Ben Shapiro either on one channel or on Facebook. So, like, yeah, that is why it's more concentrated among Facebook? So then why do conservatives hate these platforms if they've created the ideal? No, no, no, what's, what's, what's put on our, our liberal hats and look at structure? No, I, because, because I, because I get frustrated by this one, too, because what the point is, is that, yes, as Sagar is saying, by its nature, conservative content will do better on YouTube because this is why air like once again air America in the 2000s was liberals trying to do talk radio it failed conservative talk radio did better i was rush limbaugh that

was all these different things because conservative audiences wanted to listen to the radio liberals had um the mainstream media this was like a dichotomy there so by definition conservatives who are not sated by the status quo operation we center to center left media go to youtube they go to Facebook. So obviously that's that. I'm sorry, but there are just apologies to anyone who listens to the Young Turks here. But there's just not that much demand for young Turks, democracy now, any of that type of content on a platform like Facebook. If I am that type of center-left or liberal person, I will go watch MSNBC. I will go listen. I will go to Crooked media, go to New York Times, listen to the ringer, all these places. And this isn't a dunk.

This isn't attacking them for the views. But these places are operationally center-left. So if you're a conservative, what you would say is, no, look, I get, and by the way, we've talked to a lot of conservatives in high places who hate this argument, so we're channeling them. They would say, look, Alex, no shit, Ben Shapiro does well on Facebook. That's not the point. The point is, A, not all of conservatism is Ben Shapiro. So there are a lot of people who would say, like, okay, so the fact that this, like, daily wire click farm does really well on Facebook doesn't really address the question of who exactly is doing the moderating on the Facebook platform. Is there structural bias.

Yeah. So there's two components to it. So I guess that's an interesting perspective. It's, it's yes, this is an alternative media for folks who aren't satisfied with the mainstream. But as they've built that, the quote unquote liberals in Silicon Valley are now moderating it to make sure that the conservative ideas don't get out there. I guess that's the argument.

Well, I don't not get out there. It's that they are, it's like they took our audience, our users and all that. Yeah. And now they're screwing with us. And look, like some of that is true. I came from this background. Like, I can literally see how Facebook will tweak their algorithm or change stuff. And it just nukes the bottom line of a more conservative outlet than it would do ever to a more liberal out.

I don't know about that. I mean, I've definitely like, I don't know, I've seen this happen to liberal outlets, too. They've complained just as much. Actually, I'll bring. Digital. Digital liberal. Maybe not the mainstream. I'll switch sides here.

This actually, okay, this is where this gets really complicated. in why my apologies are idioticocratic. There were some incidents during the Trump years where I think Mother Jones was the there were a couple publications on Facebook who had their reach limited in comparison to conservative outlets. So we'll put this in the show and let's go on and make sure this is accurate. But as I understand it, it has actually gone both ways. A better way of putting it out is this way.

What conservatives will tell you is that if you look at, and funnily enough, this is like a kind of like structural Marxist argument, don't look at the views on videos. Look at the actual structure of the companies itself. Like, do you think that the content moderation teams at Facebook, Google, et cetera, are 50-50 liberal conservative? No. I mean, they're not. So certainly, they're certainly not going to be, you know, representative of the American body politic in the exact form that it exists. Or even their user base. Right. Yeah. And that's the issue. And once again, I am not, I'm not calling for affirmative actions for conservatives or heterodox people. All I am just saying is, I wish liberals who make this point could just

acknowledge, oh yeah, like there is definitely, as of many parts of our society, a structural bias due to demographics, education, the fact that like conservatives don't we go into the tech industry the same way. But even heterodox views, which takes us, I think, to the lab leak discussion. Right. Well, I don't want to say one thing before the lab week. We're not just throw a step at you. The moderators, you know, are there to enforce the rules. It's the policymakers. that are actually the ones that are going to determine what stuff comes down and what comes up. And it's just the moderators that are going to decide whether or not to... Well, no, no, no. That's not true. Like, they take off like child porn and stuff. But like whenever

it comes to doxing someone, that's not law. That's just her Facebook's terms of service or Twitter. Look, it's tough. Yeah, but they, so I'm talking about the policy makers inside the companies that are the ones that make these rules. Lawmakers. Not lawmakers. Sorry. Yeah. Sometimes I get it confused.

But yeah, the policy makers inside the companies. Which is why, by the way, I think that the Facebook oversight board is fairly interesting. You know, I know people have called it a like PR effort for Facebook to offload responsibility. But I think ultimately turning this stuff over to the public and having them make these decisions in a transparent way is pretty good. And now they're starting to weigh in on policy. So you just hit something. Alex, like you're hitting a lot of things on Friday that I was. want to hit. Another annoying talking point that comes out of this discussion, because it means

nothing, but everyone makes it seem like it means nothing is, isn't it incredible that, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and these powerful people get to make these decisions that affect everyone's lives. David Cicely made this point. He was like, hey, like, it's, what I tell my conservative friends is it's crazy if it, like, Mark Zuckerberg could decide to, like, deportly platform Trump or not. Yeah. That has nothing to do with, I think, think a monopoly issue. Right. And it's not great, but both of you push back a few, if you, I'm just like viscerally feeling

this. Even if you broke off Facebook from Instagram, YouTube, from Google, there would still be people at these companies deciding what the rules are and how they're actually enforced. I think that the, the topic of who and what is ruining power in these institutions is just like a largely meaningless one. And I just yet to see a substantive point being made. People just say it's so crazy that Mark.

Mark Zuckerberg has this much power. Because when you look at what people are actually proposing, I don't actually really see what's different here. Like, Jack Dorsey, Jack Dorsey, this is not being touched by any of this stuff. Jack, this has nothing to do with Jack Dorsey. So here's a better way to put what I'm saying. I am frustrated by people having these critiques that they then try to shoehorn into other topics, aka Monopoly and Intertrust, that have nothing to do with them. Yeah. Look, I think that my view on this is Monopoly and Antitrust is one issue. Context. moderation is another issue. You're not going to solve one with the other.

And at the end of the content moderation stuff is tough. It is really difficult to handle this. You can't have a platform that's not moderated. You can't. Even the founder of Aitchan, I guess I call it Ait Kun now. What's his name Fred? We're not keeping track. He wants Aitchan to be moderated.

After creating it because he was pissed that 4chan was moderated and 4chan was created because they were pissed that Reddit was moderated or something along that line. Every platform eventually realizes that you can't have just this free for all and you to make rules. And I do think it's interesting that sometimes, yeah, the more, the more activity or the more prominent folks are going to end up getting moderated at some point. So I don't know what the solution is, honestly. You're never going to have a content moderation policy that's going to end up, you know, treating all political sides equally. And, you know, if you have content moderation on a platform and the platform is largely

inhabited or provides life to like one side of the political spectrum, they might run into the content rules more often. So it's tough. I don't know. I'm curious what you guys think the answer is on this one. Because this is one of the things where I've always said, you know, I, it's, this is like the last job that I'd want in the world is trying to fit. figure out how to moderate a platform.

I think even Paul Graham, who founded Y Combinator and also said, he also, which also runs like Hacker News, the forum site said founding Y Combinator was way easier than trying to manage the forum site. Actually, once you get into doing content moderation, that's when your life starts to suck. So I'm curious that what you guys think the right solution is here. The best thing I've heard so far was from Ajit Pai's On the Way Out, which was a proposal that the FCC require transparency of moderation. And so what that means is that FCC would require,

not telling companies what they can and cannot take off or must take off or whatever, that they must release the guidelines through which they conduct moderation specifically. That, so right now there's broad language, but I'm saying much more specifically than it currently is. I think that's it. Because what pisses people off?

lack of consistency and lack of standards. And so, for example, during the Black Lives Matter protests and riots, right? Like, there was obviously mass organized violence happening on Twitter and Facebook. And none of it got taken off and we all know it. You can point me to like maybe one or two examples, Antifa in Portland or whatever was 100% Facebook organized and nothing happened. And then January 6 happens, stopped this deal. and obviously all those groups got nuked, QAnon gets nuked from Twitter, all of that. Now, I'm not saying that I'm necessarily against that, but if you're somebody who is in the

middle, and maybe you're more right-leaning and you see that, you're like, hey, this is bullshit. And I'm like, listen, what are you supposed to say? I think it is bullshit. And so it's, what else? You'll see reporting, right, the Hunter Biden story getting locked on Twitter, which I do think was actually a pretty seminal moment in terms of what they did. and especially in terms of radicalizing a lot of people

within the conservative movement but if you look at what happened there it is obvious that they panicked and they just banned it whereas if they actually looked at their standards around hacked policy and all of that then what are they gonna do? They're gonna back, they're gonna block

Edward Snowden like the WikiLeaks files and that's crazy like it and this is what I mean like we have to have consistent standards when we're talking about this and if we have that I guarantee you people wouldn't There. Nobody wants white supremacist on the platform who are like, you know, spouting the N word or whatever, but they also don't want to see blatant hypocrisy whenever it's an ideology, which let's be honest, is the majority ideology at Twitter or HQ or whatever. I think that's what drives people really crazy. Yeah. Look, I think that if you're transparent on the decisions that you make, then you're better off. And I'll say that I'm with you on this stuff because for a long time when I started reporting on Twitter, they had a policy that they don't comment on individual accounts, which was a cop-out of them saying,

we're not going to explain any of our decisions. And actually myself and Charlie Warzel, who was my colleague at that time, we wrote a story saying it's time for Twitter to stop hiding behind this cop-out excuse and actually tell us why people are getting banned. And they reversed themselves on the policy. So I do think that like, and now they'll actually explain. in great detail, you know, when they will ban. At least that's what happened with Trump.

So more transparency, the better. I agree because, A, you want to know where the line is. And I think the counter argument to that has been, oh, if people know where the line is, then they're going to start to go all the way up to it. So that's ridiculous. Let people know what the laws are versus trying to hide behind them. And transparency, because, look, I think that some of the, you know,

Twitter's against us thinking there might be some truth to it. other parts of it maybe not and so the best part is the place we should get to is instead of speculating of how this actually works let's know and let's put it out there in public so I'm with you on that what do you think about and this isn't something that yeah I think people who are right or left who are deeply informed proposed but I've just increasingly seen them saga you've seen this too why do people say okay rest of street Facebook Twitter like public utilities what do you think like the telephone company like what do you think about that argument people say that part basically requiring them to be neutral yeah that's nuts i think these are these are

not telephone companies you know they're yeah but what about google see that's where that's where i think what's the start of content moderation though for yeah i i don't think they're you know these platforms can not be neutral they'll never be neutral like once you write an algorithm you're not neutral A telephone company connects one person to another person and they get to talk on the phone. There's no sorting or reordering. So I do think that these companies are definitely, they're more, they do serve the function of editors in a way that I don't think is fully appreciated. So I don't, how could you, I don't think you could ever, you know, call them a public utility without forcing them to end their feet. And I just don't ever see that happening.

yeah well what do you guys think well on social i agree with you it's not true but on search i i don't know man yeah honestly i do think that there's a pretty good argument around the utility i'm not saying necessarily that it should be treated as one but and again i always give credit to andrew yang he's the one who put it this way to me which was nobody wants to use the third worst search engine he's right which is that the internet does naturally select for monopolies in certain cases for example, Amazon. The everything store actually does make sense. Having to input your credit cards into a million different stores is fucking annoying. And so having one place where you could buy literally everything and that also can optimize delivery to you in a short amount of time actually

makes a lot of sense. That's why a shitload of people use Amazon. And it's like one of the most popular companies in the U.S. I think there's a lot of dangers to come with that in terms of market power, sociability, labor market, et cetera. But this is part of the problem with having the internet. Now, Facebook, Twitter, and here's how I would define it. Facebook and Twitter and TikTok, these are all more inherently disruptable industries, as we just saw with TikTok. TikTok, if you create an app which actually can beat Facebook or Twitter in terms of time on app spent,

then you did kind of win, quote unquote. You did win. I don't. Yeah, right. I mean, they literally are beating Instagram. It's a literal zero-sum game. On search, I don't think that's the case. Same thing whenever it comes to Amazon.

Apple is like weird because it's also a hardware company. It's like it's got all kinds of stuff going on there. I kind of leave that one out of the conversation. But I think Google is problem. Google and Amazon, to me, are the two best cases of no, there actually can only be one winner. And they'll never admit this because that would admit them monopoly. But like, this is the whole thing behind Peter Thiel's like,

zero to one. Like, no, actually, you want to be the only one that can compete in your business. And it's just true. So like, so from that perspective, yeah, anyway, I'm curious. Yeah. Well, I want to hear your thought. Okay. So let's say, let's say we established that. What does treating a company like Google or company like Amazon as a utility look like? I have no idea. So I'm more just saying, I think we better off starting off from this, for example, FTC and DOJ sued Google for antitrust. And it sparked a lot of conversation, which is like, does that even make sense? Ben Thompson wrote that up.

And so obviously, what we're trying to deal with with Google is market power. So is, but antitrust is the only lever that we know how to pull. And I'm saying maybe we should be looking at another lever. I don't know if public utility is right framework. I'm just saying, let's start out from the policy acknowledgement. Google is a natural monopoly. Amazon is a natural monopoly. Now let's make some rules.

Oh, this is where it gets interesting, though, because so several things. I think we'll just say editorially is what we're running into. And what I think everyone could agree on is that we shouldn't take 20th century language and apply it to 21st century problems. So like the whole idea of like Saga, the reason why you're struggling is that public utility refers to power and water. And these like very literal things in the ground. So people shouldn't, right, we need to find new language and realign the way we think about

stuff. Wink, wink, but no, so here's the problem. What is Amazon a monopoly in? So for example. While Walmart, despite having a smaller presence when it comes to online stuff, still has a huge online business. They have far more physical storefront business, obviously. And Benedict Evans made a lot of really interesting points.

When he pointed out that if you look at the whole debate around private label sales, so this is a huge part of the answer of the Amazon conversation, a.k. when Amazon creates Amazon basics, Amazon basics is still a smaller percentage. of their business, then your average grocery store. So when I go to Fred Meyer back in Oregon or Safeway in New York, they have private label too. So how does, I mean, Alex, just instruct us. Like, how does all of this work? Because as you delve deeper into the legal definitions of what non-monopies actually are and not just the colloquial way we refer to them, it gets really interesting. Yeah. So I think that these obviously aren't like the natural monopolies that we've been used to in the past, which is why you have a set of legislation that's going to try to now, you know,

frame them as monopolies and try to restrain some of their excesses. I do think that the way we need to think about this is just the impact that a company like Amazon or Google can have on competitors in a way that a Walmart cannot. So, yeah, you can sell on the shelves at Walmart. But as Walmart tracking every step that every person in the store takes, every time they pick up an item, every time they put it down, you know, and find more things that Amazon can track that Walmart could never dream of. Amazon is just tracking like the click paths that we have through the,

through the website and has this vast amount of data where they can, you know, very quickly put somebody out of business if they want to by copying their best-selling products. Now, are the private label Amazon products like Amazon basics, you know, are they monster companies yet? No, but do we want to have an economy where, you know, small businesses are, you know, either disincentivized from starting or actually go under because they participate in like this

one channel to sell through people online and then end up, you know, getting iced by Amazon. I don't think you want that. You want to have the most business creation possible. And that's where the government, the government should only step in if it thinks it can actually unlock more value as opposed to destroying it. It's the only place the government should step in. And in some of these cases, there is a good argument for the government to think about ways to use its power to end up creating more value, you know, versus the value that could potentially be destroyed by these companies' actions. Well, you are, though, voicing kind of a Berkian standard around when you're saying value.

I think it depends because there's a lot of argument about societal value or consumer value. Just to give you guys an example, because what Bezos likes to do is he likes to talk about Amazon and Marshall kind of used what you were talking about in the context of overall retail sales in the United States. But, and this frankly, I think bolsters my point. Last year in 2000, or sorry, 2019, Amazon took 51.2% of total all U.S. digital retail sales, 10 times more of an online share held by any of its rival. And from 2017 to 2019, market share increased by 14%.

So like not only, it's a recent phenomenon, which has become so exponential in the last couple of years, that that's where I think it becomes more interesting. They like to be like, well, we're only like 4% of overall sales or whatever in the world. I'm like, okay, come on, that's bullshit. No, wait, but wait, but wait, why is that? Because I'm talking about the monopoly. Once again, and again, goes to what Alex is talking about. Well, but this is where it gets interesting, though.

And I don't know how I actually feel about this, but I'm just reacting. There are laws. And the law doesn't say online sales. I agree with you. That's why we have to read. It's why we have to update our thinking here, which is that as what, for example, you were talking about private grocery stores, okay? I mean, like you're saying, when you have physical footprints, there are just restrictions

on your ability to compete, quote unquote, with Amazon that don't exist on the online world in terms of what you can track, recommendation. Also, in terms of, so Walmart cannot physically actually preference its own product over a third part over private label or sorry your product like a third party seller over it you may be able to shelf space but it's still there like you can see it with your eyes amazon actually can stop you from being able to see this stuff this is again where i think it gets all very tricky and why digital is just totally different and look in a way like respect man like 51% of online retail that's a lot like i get it like i use amazon everybody uses amazon amazon is incredibly efficient

Amazon is incredibly awesome from a consumer perspective. But this is where I think it gets complicated and why, again, I just think thinking of it from a natural monopoly perspective from the jump is more important to be like, okay, how do we deal with this? Private labels, does it matter? Should private label retail businesses be able to spit off into like Hollywood, right? Like, does that make any sense? Maybe.

I mean, again, like I'm totally open to it. I mean, does Kroger's and Walmart, like, Walmart doesn't, own a major studio, right? Like Walmart pictures or whatever. Would it be okay if they did? I don't know. I mean, truly. So this is where I think things solve, things become a lot more complicated.

One of the amazing things I like to think about in this discussion is just how early we are in all this. I mean, Amazon is only founded in 94. It's crazy. And so we are, I, and I say it's social media too, social media, not even two decades old. We're going to have online commerce and social media in our lives for. a long, long time to come. I mean, it's not going to go away by the time

we die. You know, it's going to only become even more prominent. And so, this stuff is going to take more and more brick and mortar sales. And I think that this year in particular changed behavior for a lot of people who previously would want to go into a store. And now they're like, oh, actually, it's pretty convenient

and cheap to buy on Amazon. You're starting to see, you know, stores and strip malls now be converted into Amazon fresh distribution centers. There's a store in my neighborhood opening up right over here, which is going to be like an Amazon grocery store, which is really like a delivery port. But you can also shop in there if you want. So this is the direction that the world is moving. And it is interesting that the monopoly conversation is happening now. And I do wonder

like a little bit down the road how much more powerful company like Amazon is going to get. And this is the point, which is that taking a step back and just thinking early days. And I think the one thing that I hope everyone takes away from this conversation because it went a bunch of different directions and also I switched sides ideologically. Sauger switched side. Alex is pretty consistent. So good for him being an actual person who has expertise in the space. You guys got me thinking today for sure. Think hard about what principles you're trying to bring here because I think the stronger critique I have of folks who engage with this is that they come with 20th century language, 21st century problems, like I said. Okay. So we've done a lot of

of huge sworegers, but there's something I really wanted to get to, which is the lab leaks conversation as relates to social media content moderation. Because the conversation with the platforming, publisher platform, I think that gets pretty circular very quickly. It doesn't really go anywhere. But the one, which I don't think there's been enough of a reckoning on, has been the pivot on lab leak theory. So this isn't weird person is doing this crazy cure that could go viral and it turns out it kills you. So the platforms in order to keep a safe platform for the spreading, this was the lab leak theory, which I mean, Sager, you should jump in here because you've covered this deeply.

Yeah, look, I mean, people were removed from Twitter. Zero Hedge, which has an account, I think, of like 700K followers taken off for months for floating the lab leak theory. You got tagged as disinformation on Instagram and on Twitter as well as on Facebook, YouTube, actually took down some accounts whenever it came to this. Luckily, actually, I guess never came for me. We were talking about it far before it was in vote. Got that blue check. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Blue Check. But whenever you think about, whenever you think about this, it's probably the greatest failure of recent content moderation. On the one hand, I get where it comes from. Like,

I get, they're like, Trump, it's all crazy, blah, blah, blah. And I guess I more blame the media for this one, because I think they set the tone for which making people at Facebook and Twitter think it was so thoroughly debunked that they said, I have to take this down. I look at it, frankly, as more of a media failure, which overlays everything on the top and everything else being reactive, kind of the way same things works in politics, culture, society. But I'm curious what you think. And if there's been any reckoning inside, inside any of the buildings, because this is like WMD level failure of how bad. it actually turned out. And there's going to be a lot of egg on people's faces in the next six months, I think. Yeah.

So I think that the intention around the coronavirus policies were good, which is that they didn't want people to spread medical misinformation. Right. This was never medical misinformation. I mean, even if the lab leak theory was debunked, which it never was. Yeah. Yeah. No one would have been like, oh, well, now I'm not going to social distance because it came

from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That's crazy. So I think the platforms, this is, I mean, I wrote about this in the beginning of the pandemic. This was the most aggressive the platforms have ever been in terms of banning information. Then QAnon happened and that was another aggressive moment when they started to ban QAnon. But this was the broadest, you know, most aggressive content moderation move they had made. After saying they didn't want to be the arbiters of truth. You had this, like, once in a lifetime pandemic, hopefully once, you know, fingers crossed.

And then they said, we'll be the arbiters of truth to make sure people don't die. And so I think that, again, taking medical misinformation off in the middle of the coronavirus, you know, telling people, you know, you can take these pills and, you know, you'll be immune and all that stuff, probably a good idea. They never should have taken off anything about the origin of the virus. And I don't know. Personally, like, I mean, it was, I never thought that this was a far-fell. thing. And we still don't know where the virus came from, but there's a virology institute in Wuhan. That's where the thing started. As John Stewart said, the Wuhan bat coronavirus lab, look at the business card. Look at the business card. The thing that's, this is,

this is what I'm truly frustrated on because both of you have done a great job of articulating in good faith. Hey, we get why this is tough. It was COVID. Everything was crazy. The thing that's crazy for me is just the shamelessness of the pivot. So what's crazy is, hey, so we straight up spent a year saying one thing, not just saying one thing, being aggressive, as you said, unprecedentedly aggressive about one thing. And then we're just going to randomly switch. And once again, like, I'm pretty centrist on these things. I'm not a burn everything down guy. But look, like, we all know what happened here. What happened here is that Biden is president and things are vibe here and chiller. And now they're like, okay.

we could like be a little more relaxed and everyone can see that happen when you do that i actually think that that lack of consistency which goes back to your earlier point saga about people aren't actually pissed off about the existence of rules they're pissed off about the misapplication or lack of application of rules i think it's actually harder to enforce the rules we should have aka covid literal misinformation disinformation when you make it clear at the process is arbitrary as you have it so i mean Alex i'll throw it to you again you've talked to people in these companies in these roles, like, what would, what is your piece of advice for them for moving forward? Because, look, we all know if Jack Dorsey or Mark or whoever said, we're not the

arbiters of truth, they would go back and take back. They would never make that statement ever again. They would never say move past and back break things. They would never do any of those things. Moving forward, what should they actually change and think about? I mean, I think Sager nailed it. Like you, you know, you have to ask yourself whether you're being taken. And this story is really tough because I do think the whole time there was like a handful of people who were saying this is a possibility. We should be examining it. Sager, you're definitely one of them. I think Eric Weinstein had been talking about it for a while. There was an article in New York magazine. And there was like a lot of people who were, you know, talking about it.

about it and kind of hushed tones, but it became somewhat unacceptable to bring it up in public conversation. And so the platforms just rolled with it. And I think they got taken a little bit. And so I would just say that like there, there, there's something to be said about their initial hesitance to not want to be the arbiters of truth. It doesn't seem like a really good place for them to be. And so, you know, maybe it's a good lesson where, you know, they've been pushed for a long time to take more aggressive action. They did it. Some of it they got right. Some of it they got extremely wrong. And inevitably, I mean, again, we talked about how they're only 20 years old. Inevitably, they'll be in this situation again. And it should be a good lesson to

them. Honestly. The danger to me is conventional wisdom. You cannot go along with conventional wisdom. And this is the problem. I've said this so many different times. Whenever they were labeling Trump and all this, I said, look, I'll say, you want the Washington Post fact checker to be determine what's true and false because there are a lot of things that I've talked about on my show everybody the progressives have a beef with this guy people on the right have a beef with this guy he's like debunked Medicare for all or whatever which you know but you know listen it's not up to me and it's not up to him it's up to you like you guys can figure it out totally there's a lot of things that he's written and I'm like this is total bullshit for X Y and Z reason or New York Times

fact checks which are just totally overall the fact check industrial complex is a yeah well This has been an amazing movement to the fact check movement definitely has a lot of egg on its face. And, you know, we do, we do end up in a situation where it becomes a little concerning, like, you know, are, our facts completely meaningless? But I think it's kind of now apparent that every fact checking organization had an agenda to begin with. And so there's not a real way to, real good way to handle this stuff. I mean, interesting. What do you mean by had an agenda? Because you know, they're experiencing guys.

So what do you mean by that? Maybe a better way to put it is they had perspective. They come in with a perspective on life. They have a point of view. And, you know, it's so frustrating because we have definitely seen this dissolution of what truth means and what facts are, which has allowed misinformation to run wild. But, yeah, I think that, like, with a lot of these fact-checking organizations has become apparent to me over the course of this whole coronavirus situation. that they come in with priors, you know, and that's concerning. And I don't really know what the solution is, but it's a clear problem.

And, you know, they might have been given a little bit too much authority. I think it really comes down to the knowledge that you could look at what happened in Myanmar or Sush Burma with misinformation and literal ethnic cleansing and understand that from a pure common sense perspective, that is different than Wuhan Lab. And I think if there was something that, happened in the past four years, it was that everything just collapsed in on itself. Well, I think that is, there's so much there. And Alex, I know you're going to be back soon. So hope everyone we enjoy this. We're going to post this on the Breaking Points channel as well, too.

So we'd love for you to shout out your newsletter, your podcast, anything you want to share with folks. Yeah. So if you like YouTube, I just started putting the podcast on YouTube. You can find It's at my page, Alex Cantorwitz. We could use more followers there. I'll admit it. So please be one of the first. And then, yeah, Big Technology podcast is on podcast apps, your podcast app of choice. Big Technology newsletter.

Just type it into Google or Bing if you like the second best search engine. There you go. Or duck, duck go, the third. And then you can find it there. So thanks guys for having me. And thanks for letting me put this on my feet. I appreciate it. It's always one to talk about this stuff.

Thanks, man. Thanks, Alex. Thank you.