Offline with Jon Favreau - The Truth About TikTok’s Spin on Israel-Gaza

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

Jon and Max get into the numbers behind TikTok’s supposed pro-Palestinian tilt— is the bias real, what do “views” signify, and how many of these videos are spreading misinformation? With content creators surpassing legacy media as Americans’ primary source of news, the guys discuss the future of getting credible information on social media. And to round it out, Jon updates Max on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s higher power: a porn policing software called Covenant Eyes. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

If you are a TikTok influencer, your incentive is not to think about what can I do productively for the people of Israel, the people of Gaza, God forbid, the people of both. Your incentive is, what is the thing that is going to get people to watch my videos? And that is expressing the most fervent outrage at the other side, articulating the conflict, not even as one of Israelis and Palestinians, but one of the influencers who share my views, who are good, and the influencers who have other views, who are pieces of shit, and we're going to get them in the comments. Welcome to Offline. I'm Jon Favreau.

I'm Max Fisher. We got a couple stories to get into today, Max. We got the death of news on social media. R.I.P. But alive and well on podcasts. Sam Bankman Freed's guilty verdict. I'm shocked. I thought he was innocent.

Doesn't sound like a good guy. You think so? Yeah, I read up on this whole thing. I'm buying the dip. I'm sending him some cash now to invest. And just for fun, we're also going to cover why speaker Mikeson sends his internet search history to his son it's the answer is disgusting we cover this on pod save america i'm going to cover it here it's never enough we might do it in new orleans again on friday we're here for the top headlines i cannot get enough of mike

johnson's porn police app okay did you guys cover the fact that his name is Mike Johnson? A couple times. Many different threads I have on that. Okay, but first, we talked a few weeks ago about how social media has made it impossible to follow the war in Gaza. And Max, it seems like we may not have fixed the problem. People are not taking our advice and it shows. I thought that whatever we said would be final and then everything would be fixed that's not the case this has become an even nastier and bigger debate since we spoke just last week there was a twitter thread about the role of tiktok in gaza that was widely shared

by journalists and republican senator josh hawley so you know it was good yeah in it jeff morris a prominent silicon valley investor argues that tiktok has been overtly anti-Israel, delivering, quote, wrong information about Hamas and Israel. Many journalists at publications like Semaphore and The New York Times then reported about how, compared to other platforms, TikTok has seemed overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian. Max, what do the numbers show? Is TikTok actually showing more pro-Palestinian content? So TikTok is very opaque. It's hard to get a sense, harder than most platforms to get a sense for what it's showing in the aggregate. So we can only kind of make some indirect inferences with some of the numbers. There have been 1 billion videos, I think it's in the last month, tagged hashtag Israel, 2 billion tagged hashtag Palestine, although they have comparable views, about 20 billion views to each hashtag. So reminder, it's a big platform.

The big data point in this Twitter thread that you mentioned that has also gotten cited in news coverage, of which there's been a lot about TikTok's supposed pro-Palestine tilt. He said that the hashtag stand with Palestine had about 3 million views and the hashtag stand with Israel had 200 million. So that sounds very tilted, although Washington Post looked at those numbers and they found that if you just look at US numbers, it's actually three to two pro-Israel with 46 million views to the stand with Israel hashtag and about 29 on the stand with Palestine hashtag. Some of looked at other hashtags. They found about an even split within the US, but a much larger pro-Palestine tilt abroad, which is not surprising given that we're talking about Asia and the Middle East. But of course, these numbers tell you very little about the actual content on the platform. They tell you very little about the valence of it. So it's kind of become

this weird article of faith, especially on Fox News and from a lot of republicans that tiktok is using its algorithm to like radicalize our kids into joining um hamas which i think is not we don't think that's happening i don't think it's happening i think it's a platform works i don't think it's indicating the numbers but there's not nothing going on here like yeah to me it seems like there's because as as this is meta but but with everything else, it becomes like a binary debate, right? Which is either like TikTok is, you know, radicalizing kids to have them join Hamas or TikTok's fine. Everything's great. It's wonderful.

Everyone's blaming TikTok for everything and TikTok's fine. And there's something in the middle that is happening here. Yeah. So I ran a little experiment this week where I every night I would load up TikTok, which I put back on my phone months after deleting it because it is so incredibly addictive. And I would look at a bunch of the top hashtags for Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Hamas. And then I would, after watching a lot of those top videos, I would kind of scroll through my feed. And this is, of course, very anecdotal. So there's no way to draw firm conclusions from it. But I wanted to get... This is exact social science. That's right. We are publishing these results in nature at the end of the month. And you know what? And if you agree with it, it feels true.

That's right. That's what's important. Yeah. Yeah. We're publishing it in the journal. These are my feelings. I just wanted to get a sense for what are the videos look like? Like when you look at a video that has a lot of views that has the hashtag Palestine, what does it tend to show you? What's it, what is the experience of being pushed down the algorithm? And I really came away from this thinking that everyone is really focusing on the wrong issue here. I do not think that balance quote unquote is a problem on the platform. You see a ton of videos that are pro Israel, that are pro Palestine. I think the problem here is that the content on the platform is terrible. I mean, it's like, of course the balance thing isn't the issue here. It's not

like, it's like hey saw 300 israel videos today and only 200 palestinians think bb's got a point seeing more of the israel videos like that's not how fucking people's brains work you're right it's and it's a it's a it's something that people are fixating on because it's another thing to argue about and it's another way to say the only reason people don't agree with me on this conflict is because Silicon Valley is tricking them into believing the other side. But I really did come away. Obviously, TikTok was not going to be a font of great information, but the quality of the information and the degree of the push towards polarization on the platform was so much worse than I expected. And frankly, it was much worse than any major story I have ever seen

on a major platform. I found it interesting that there was a good Washington Post story on this, but it was the very last paragraph of the Washington Post story, the last paragraph that said this sentence. The broader understanding of TikTok is complicated by the fact that the platform is designed to show people what it expects they want to see. Yeah, no, that seems to be the story. That's the issue. Right, right. So I flagged a bunch of little clips just to give people a sense for what it's like to be on this platform. Because I think when you see it and hear it,

you really come away with like, wow, this is really bad. Misinformation is, I think, the smaller part of the problem, but is a big one in itself it's not just that so many of the facts you hear are wrong you hear almost no facts whatsoever on TikTok about this conflict you can watch hours of videos as I did and I never once heard the name Joe Biden or Benjamin Netanyahu or Mahmoud Abbas it's literally just people yelling into their phone about how their side is superior. But when you did hear facts, they tended to be like some of the wildest misinformation. Let's play a clip that I think you will enjoy that was an example of this. While mainstream media around the world is reporting this morning that Gaza's internet

access is severed, what they aren't telling you is that Elon Musk has activated his Starlink internet access to Gaza. So the reason mainstream media won't tell you that is it is not true and did not happen. So that's a funnier one. But like, I saw so many videos that said that all of these major companies are quote unquote funding israel which i don't even know what that means i saw one that said starbucks mcdonald's and kfc are all secretly israeli companies oh we yeah well um i think tommy got a message on instagram with that meme about starbucks disney mcdonald's and it was like what are you oh i know what Oh, I know what it was.

I know what it was. So we're on the road and Tommy filmed some fun social content of us at McDonald's because we stopped at McDonald's in Ohio somewhere on the way to Cleveland. And someone was like, why are you talking about McDonald's?

Why are you putting up content about McDonald's right now? Don't you know that they're directly funding the Israeli government? What? I know. This stuff is everywhere. Like, the first time I saw this video, I was like, this is so silly. And then right after that, I heard from a friend of mine that his kid, who's 11 years old,

had, like, accosted him for having a Disney Plus subscription and say, don't you know that you're funding the Israeli military? Which doesn't even make any sense. I just want to tell you how fucking stupid this is. It's just like, put the hamburger down and the bombs will stop. That is the best way to bring this conflict to a close.

Fewer hamburgers. Well, I think it speaks to what works on these platforms, which is saying that there's something you can do to stop this conflict. And also, you were the protagonist of this conflict. Another misinformation video I saw that had a huge number of views said that, quote, the Zionists were using the dark web to identify and endanger anyone who goes to a Gaza solidarity protest. Hopefully this video was selling ski masks to stop the Zionists from identifying you. What?

How are they using the dark web? It's all very technical, John. So there's no... Okay. There's no explanation. It's 90 seconds. There are millions of views. And the platform is full of this stuff. There's also a lot of

what I call garbage information where it's not exactly misinformation, but like here, I have an example of it. Most people have heard about the war happening in Israel and Palestine, but not many know how this war in the Middle East could lead to a greater World War III between some of the world's largest nations. What?

So again, that's not correct. And the video actually at no point even backs that claim up. I was going to say. It's just like a hooky thing to pull you in, to heighten the stakes. Some music, some graphics, makes it all seem very legit. Yeah, I was personally. Or seemed very Johnny Harris you. I was going to say, I was a little offended by that because they're ripping off our boy Johnny Harris.

Yeah. It's just like an absolute copy of his style. Minus all the facts and reported information. Minus the accuracy. Yeah, right, right. I think it's easy to get like... Sorry, I'm laughing. I'm watching the next clip, which is just...

Oh, yeah. Which is just a woman looking at a camera with, I am so disappointed along the top. Oh, yeah. Oh, we're going to get to her momentarily. So I think that like, it's easy to focus on misinformation because you open up a video, it's wrong. You can say like, this platform is promoting wrong information. But

I actually think the much bigger problem is how much of the content on this platform, like the overwhelming majority is just influencers who are just shouting about how they're outraged and disgusted with the other side. And that anyone who supports the other side is a stupid, immoral monster or just engaging in some influencer flame war. Yeah. This is back to, I mean, we've talked about this before, but the focus on whether it is a genocide or not, and it's like, why are people fighting over whether labeling this agenda,

like, why are people fighting over labeling this a genocide or not? And one of the reasons is, if it is a genocide, then you're being able to say that the other side is wrong. That's right. Like you have more moral credibility and saying that, well, like, you're not just wrong and I need to persuade you differently, but you're like a monster because you supported genocide. I cannot tell you how much more sophisticated the debate that you just described is than anything on TikTok. It's like, look, and I get like, I get it. But like, you know what?

There's also been arguments over centuries over what constitutes a genocide. Right. over centuries over what constitutes a genocide, right? And there's like, I remember being in the White House when there was a push every year to talk about whether Turkey, what Turkey to Armenia was a genocide, right? And there was like meetings held and high level about like just little statements. And now we're just sort of like throwing it out there. Yeah, and I mean, I think it is at an academic level,

I think it is an important thing to talk definitely is an important thing to talk about but i think you're right that it is a a word that people are increasingly using online just as a cudgel to talk about how their side is the superior one and the other side is a bunch of monsters and can you believe that anyone would ever sympathize with the other side right and again i don't mean to like make light of it or dismiss it, but it's like, I just wish people would think like, what can help end the conflict here? Like, what can I do that would actually help bring it about, bring about the end of a conflict, which for most people is very little, right?

But like people are upset with very good reason. Yeah. And I don't know that arguing in the comments over that is the best way to do it. Well, I think this speaks to the perverse incentives of social media. If you are a TikTok influencer, your incentive is not to think about what can I do productively for the people of Israel, the people of Gaza, God forbid, the people of both. Your incentive is what is the thing that is going to get people to watch my videos? And that is expressing the most fervent outrage at the other side, articulating the conflict, not even as one of Israelis and

Palestinians, but one of the influencers who share my views, who are good and the influencers who have other views, who are pieces of shit and we're going to get them in the comments yeah because that generates a lot of engagement and that makes money and that's what so like this next clip i have is a just a lifestyle influencer who lives in la and i don't mean to pick on her specifically because i don't think that she knows anything about israel palestine but she is just following the incentives everyone has to amp this up, to make herself the protagonist and to express as much outrage as possible. So let me just... As an American Jewish person, it has been exceptionally difficult to watch the past

couple of weeks unfold. And that is mainly because I am so disappointed and enraged at my people. I am so mad at other American Jews for backing Israel, for supporting Israel. So, I mean, the message of these videos, and you see so many of these of people getting really upset and emotional into the camera, is that you, the person on your phone scrolling TikTok, you're the protagonist of this conflict. It's about you. It's about how it makes you feel. And it's about you dunking on and owning the other side and especially by showing solidarity by liking and sharing my videos right it does there is well and i talked about this with naomi klein last week it is there there's something about social media that incentivizes the most individualistic

behavior and self-centered behavior because since social media is so much about performance and it's about like your as naomi called it your digital avatar yeah and like what that digital avatar looks like stands for whatever you're constantly thinking about yourself and like the entire progressive project requires you to think about others like trying to end a horrible conflict requires you to think about others. It requires empathy. It requires putting yourself in other people's shoes. But all of the incentives for TikTok and social media is like, how can I put myself at the center of the story? How can I talk about my feelings in a way that center those feelings so that everyone has to pay attention to those feelings? And especially if they can then focus that energy

on activity on TikTok, which works for the platforms and works for the influencers. And it's amazing to me how brazen so many really big influencers are about really encouraging this like digital slacktivism that just says like, all you need to do is just like a video on,

like here, we have two queued up that I just really kind of called me if you are also in support of israel you are praying for them and you know that god is backing them i want you to like this video share this video and write in the comment section i support israel let's go i like that he just slipped in there and God is backing them. Oh, yeah. He's a big evangelical influencer. Everybody is getting in on this. Everybody, like any influencer. You know what it's like?

You remember the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial? And there was all this discussion about like the TikTok algorithm is rewarding anyone who posts on it. So everybody is posting on it. That's what's happening right now with this conflict. So every influence is like, how can i make my bullshit the center of this and this is why it's so horrifying because the johnny depp amber heard thing is like low stakes for most people sure if you're not johnny depp or amber heard right or the people involved in that right right and so it's like a it's like a kitschy celebrity thing that everyone's put and

and that is like seen by a lot of people on the same level as a fucking conflict that's claimed thousands and thousands of lives already yeah but it's all like leveled by social media well this is why i hear like you hear fox news it's like oh tiktok is causing all of this pro-gaza activism i think it's doing the opposite of that i think that it's encouraging so many people who would be doing something to instead just be on their phones because it's telling them that's that's the thing that matters. That's the only thing that's important. And I do think it spills out into real life too because just like the battles over the monstrous taking down

of the pictures of people who've been kidnapped by Hamas and then other people filming those people and then they're getting fired. It's all content. It's all for content. It's all content. And it's like- It's all for content. It's all for content, and it all plays out on social media, but it's also like it's having real effects and consequences in real life.

Yeah. So this is the last one I will play for you, and then our shared horrible nightmare journey on TikTok will be over. Okay, great. Honestly, it was a great journey. It was very illuminating for me at least. So this video for me really encapsulates the entire experience of learning about and experiencing this conflict through TikTok. It's a video game streamer who has been doing these extremely popular videos, like millions of views, tens of millions of views,

where all he does is he does video calls with Israeli children and their kids. Some of them are really young kids. And he dunks on them. He goads them into bringing up the October 7th Hamas attack. And then he mocks them for caring about it when the Israeli occupation has killed so many more Palestinians over the years. They're usually about a minute long, many millions of views, and it's just dunking on kids. So here's 10 seconds of one. I will answer your question if you calm down.

Why are you so aggressive? Why are you... Why are you... Oh, that seems productive. That seems like it's moving the ball. This is, I mean, TikTok is by time on platform, by far the most popular social network with people under 24. And this is what they're learning about the conflict.

Yeah. I think it's really distressing. We're going to talk about this after the break, sort of in the death of social media, death of news on social media story. But I think there was a study that Taylor runs sites in a Washington Post piece that kids in the UK are spending more time watching TikTok now than hours of television. I'm sure. Yeah, I definitely believe that. I know in the US for under 24s, I think it's well over an hour now. And it's like if that's where you're getting your information. You're right.

It's not just misinformation. over an hour now. And it's like, if that's where you're getting your information, this is what you're learning about the world. It's not just misinformation because I'm glad that we didn't, there wasn't too many of these that had just like blatant misinformation. Right.

But it's like poison for your brain. It is. Yeah. Most of this was poison for your brain. And you're not, the thing is,

if you watch this, you're not learning anything. You're not learning anything about the conflict, about the occupation, about what's happening in Gaza. You're not being empowered to do anything to further whichever side it is that you care about helping. All you're learning is that you're supposed to pick sides in

this world, and then you're supposed to use your phone to dunk on the other side. And I think that's a really bad way to teach people about how to be in the world and i wonder also what it's doing to people's perception of public opinion of the conflict of where people are of where they should be because um and like not to get too meta about this but our vp of social media here crooked sort of like gives us an update every week of like what's going on on social media on our crooked channels and um she noted in last week's report that on our a lot of our posts the viewership was slightly down and the engagement rate was slightly down but the number of engagements were up and they were like mostly negative sentiment and it was it's it's not just clips about Gaza now. It's clips about anything.

Really? Yeah. And then the comments are all a fight about Gaza. And I was telling him, I'm like, well, the good thing to know is it's not just us. Matt Gertz from Media Matters posted these two screenshots of Elizabeth Warren's posts. And she had one post one day where she called out anti-Semitism. And then everyone in the comments was saying, you have not done enough to call out Islamophobia. And then she posted calling out Islamophobia.

And then all the comments were, you have not done enough to call out anti-Semitism. And I was like, if that doesn't just tell you everything you need to know right there. And again, it's like, and I think if you are coming to look at this content and you're reading the comments, how do you, like, it's a tough. This is this exact phenomenon where you get far fewer people engaging,

but it's a smaller number of people who are engaging much more frequently. I've experienced it. Every outlet I've ever worked at, they comment on this topic specifically. And I think it's really misleading for the other like 95% of people who aren't commenting because they come and look at the comments and they say, Something's bad. This is bad.

Yeah. Well, you, right. You think something's bad. And you also think that those comments represent the averaged or totality of people's sentiments. So you see, well, there's 20 comments here and they're all outraged at Tommy eating McDonald's because he's backing Israel by having a cheeseburger. So that must be what everybody thinks. And that makes it easier for you to internalize that and for you to think, well, everybody else thinks that there must be something to it. But that's not, it it's a tiny minority but they're just really loud and i would say if if you're listening and you're part of that minority it's not persuading anyone yeah it's not it's not i mean at least me it's not changing my mind right what it is doing is i think it's and just this is anecdotal from people i talked to it is sort of pushing people away altogether which is why it was part of the engagement rate is down. So there's like people who might usually engage or either say something about Gazza or say nothing at all,

say something totally unrelated about whatever the piece of content is. And they're just going to be like, well, I'm not getting into the comments. I'm not going to reply now because everyone's yelling at everyone. I don't want to get yelled at. That doesn't mean that their opinions are changing. That means that they're just having their opinions with people they feel comfortable talking with. Everybody I know who is, I don't want to say try to take a nuance to you because that sounds like I'm doing, you know, hashtag both sides, but everyone who is trying to be very thoughtful on this or has a lot of experience with the conflict, so knows how to speak knowledgeably about what's happening and knows how to speak with a lot of care and compassion about, you know, for example, the harms of the occupation is being much quieter now because they know that the

discussion is so toxic and so polarized that even if you are someone who feels that, you know, one side is really being victimized by the other here, there is no room for any sort of kind of depth of discussion that you would want to bring to it. And I think that's really harmful to the overall discourse and what people learn. No, the other irony here is when we interviewed Obama and Tommy asked him a question, but it was a very offline question, Max, by the way. It was basically like, how do you talk about this conflict with people? And Obama's answer, again, very offline answer, but it was very nuanced in the sense that he said, this is complicated and you have to hold multiple truths in your head at the same time and like we made i was like we're

gonna put out the clip oh no the whole clip right we're not gonna cut it we're not gonna do a quote tweet we're just gonna say watch the whole clip sure i'm like that will that will fix it i was naive i was like that will fix it it did not fix it it did not it never happens yeah obama says everyone's complicit no one's It was just a whole thing. Something I learned when I was writing a lot about this for various newspapers is if you can make the headline for your story absolute gibberish. Because if the headline says anything declarative at all, not even it's not taking a side. Anything declarative at all. People will look for a way to react against it and to say that you're doing propaganda for a side that they don't like.

So just make the, just word salad in the headline. Are you saying some people don't read beyond the headlines? What? I know. In this day and age? I was surprised too. Alright. Some quick housekeeping before the break. If you haven't yet heard,

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copy by John Tommy. What? Wow. That seems like a lot of work. Is that getting outsourced to the sweatshop in Cambodia, do you think? Wow, cool. Okay, well I guess I'll be signing some books. And 100% of profits will be going to Vote Save America and its partner organizations in 2024 and beyond. So head on over to bookshop.org to pre-order that today.

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with super comfortable sneakers crafted with consciously sourced materials. Plus, Cariuma plants two trees in the Brazilian rainforest for each pair purchased. Head to kruger.com slash store to grab a pair. Wow, that sounds really great. I'm really, I'm just, I'm bowled over by everything that you just said and the way that

you said it exactly i think i conveyed what i wanted to convey there after the break sam bankman freed heads to jail mike johnson sends his internet history to his son and online news may officially be dead. All right, let's get to it. This week, Taylor Lorenz published a piece in the Washington Post that argues that news on the internet has hit a tipping point with content creators surging past legacy media as Americans' primary source of news. She notes that as news outlets have seen a decline in the amount of traffic from social media sites, independent journalists and creators posting directly to platforms have seen their audiences explode, and that as young audiences age, it's unlikely that their news consumption habits will evolve to drive traffic

back to these traditional legacy media outlets. What do you think about this? Are we at a tipping point where most Americans are getting their news from? And has TikTok killed the New York Times? I think that the changes that she identifies are absolutely accurate and they are worth worrying about given that so many people now are being diverted to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, which we know are terrible sources of information and are worse than what people would have been consuming otherwise. I'm not totally defeatist on this. A ton of people are still reading traditional news sources. And it's also always been true that younger people tend not to read newspapers or other traditional news sources and then tend to go on to read them when they get older. It is possible that this generation will be different. But I think what's changing here is not so much that people are flocking from the New

York Times to TikTok in huge numbers that would never come back. But I think rather what's happening here is that the share of younger news readers who get their news from bad sources basically is static. But the things that they are reading are getting worse because TikTok and YouTube is worse than what they're replacing. Yeah, I have a lot of worries about the trend and like where it's going yeah because so like look i think i love that social media has given a platform and a voice to people with like a much more diverse set of experiences and opinions than traditional legacy news outlets were hiring right that was like a problem and i also think that that taylor in this piece identifies a bunch of independent journalists and creators including johnny harris and some others who really do as they do their work and they do their journalism like consider it or treat it as

journalism sure and they're doing fact checking and it's like it's well reported and deeply reported to a lot of people it's i don't want to like dismiss independent tiktok creators or whatever as people who like don't care about this and are just like some of the clips that we saw earlier. Right. But I think somewhere along the line, social media has blurred the distinction between takes and news. Yeah. And or even uninformed takes and thoughtful analysis. We're very open about our political biases here at Crooked,

but we spend a lot of time trying to get it right. Like make sure that we're giving people facts, that we're fact checking, that we're trying to be objective in analysis. And then we're separating that from when we do advocacy. Like we really pay attention to that.

And again, a lot of the people that Taylor profile do too, but a lot of people aren't. And it's tough if you're a consumer to know the difference between people who are and people who aren't. It's true. And I think a lot of this does come down to the structural incentives that are created by the platforms. If you were trying to run a newspaper or for that matter, you know, a podcast company where you're trying to get a dedicated listenership or come back to you. Your incentive is to build trust.

Your incentives. I mean, obviously, we care about it on the merits because it's something that we all care about. But it aligns with our financial and commercial interests, too, at this company to create things that are going to be durable for people that they know they can trust, that they know they can come back to and feel good about and will have a high level accuracy. And that's not what TikTok and Instagram and two different ways YouTube incentivize. What they incentivize is the things that we talked about being shown here, where it's like influencers who are pushing you to be mad, people who are,

you know, polarizing you, who are provoking outrage. And so I think it's not shocking that those are the influencers or those are the voices that are increasingly dominating the platform. I'm also mindful that there are different ways to create trust with an audience. It's true. And one way is to make sure that all the information you're providing is factual, well-reported, like objective. And the other is to tell people what they want to hear yeah right you know and then they'll feel pretty good if it aligns with their opinions and their political beliefs and like there's a place for that right especially because it's a place around advocacy and activism

but i was like thinking about this the other day when we analyzed the fucking new york times poll about biden and trump on pods of america and i was like i look i get that a lot of people probably don't want to hear this and it's like more comfortable to think like the polls don't matter and everything's bullshit and new york times blah blah blah like i get that instinct but i don't know i want people to know the real information yeah and i'll give you all the caveats and why it's like, you know, nothing to panic over and it's a year out, all that kind of stuff. But like, let's do some honest analysis. And if you're annoyed, then like, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to give you some honest analysis.

Well, and I think your point about the fact that there are different ways to build trust is also an important way to understand where a lot of these influencers, how they build their audiences in ways that I think are not always so great. Like Taylor Enzinger piece quotes a lot of these influencers, how they build their audiences in ways that I think are not always so great. Like Taylor Enzinger piece quotes a lot of influencers saying what they always tend to say, which is that people like my content because I will tell them things that the mainstream media won't.

And I will give them a perspective that the mainstream media won't. And I think that there's sometimes truth to the latter. As you said, there are like a lot of voices and perspectives that have traditionally not been reflected in the mainstream media won't. And I think that there's sometimes truth to the latter. As you said, there are like a lot of voices and perspectives that have traditionally not been reflected in the mainstream media, but that social media is elevated. But I think that often the claims

that like I'm bringing you the perspective that newspapers won't, it's just not true. Like one of the people who she quoted is someone who's saying that like the Muslim perspective, the Palestinian perspective is not reflected in the mainstream media. And this is not true. Like I read that and I immediately pulled up the New York Times and also the Washington Post or paper, and they had a ton of stories about the Palestinian American perspectives on the conflict historically and what's happening now.

They also have reporters who are in Gaza right now risking their lives to give us the Gazan perspective, which, you know, always makes me great a little bit at influencers sitting in their basements in suburban New Jersey, saying they're like, I'm going to bring you the truth from Gaza. And then what they're doing is they're just reading off of like, AP and Reuters wire reports at the end of it saying like, well, they mainstream media will never tell you this. Well, that and and and Bill Gruskin makes a point in Taylor Lenz's piece. And he was like, I'm not trying to say that giving opinions about something isn't important, but ultimately it relies on the quality of the underlying information, which is done through actual journalism. Like, I'll be very honest. All my takes on Pod Save America on here, like they don't happen if I don't have like real actual journalism to depend on.

And same with everyone else. Sure. Right. And so if it goes solely to these independent creators who are not doing original reporting and journalism, but are just offering takes, if it's all takes, then like where's the journalism coming from? And it always, I think it should always be, I'm not saying that it's never correct to criticize the mainstream media. I know I can come across that way. I'm definitely not saying that.

I think it is often a red flag when you hear an influencer say, listen to me because the mainstream media won't tell you the truth. Like there's this conversation I had that I think about all the time with a woman who I was in a relationship back in 2019 when I was living in London. She was first generation Sudanese. Her family moved from Sudan when she was a kid. She was very plugged into the Sudanese diaspora, which is very big in London. It was something she cared a lot about. And there was, I don't know if you remember, but at that point, there were these huge protests in Sudan against this horrible dictator who had been ruling the country for 30, 40 years.

And, you know, they were getting gunned down in the streets. And it was this huge, huge story. And they eventually did help to pull down this dictator. And I remember one night she went to go see an Instagram influencer who she followed because she got her news mostly from Instagram. There was this influencer who she really loved, and he was doing some big speaking event somewhere. And she came back from it. We're having dinner and she was, she was kind of quiet. Like she seemed like

she was a little put off by something. And then finally she said, she was like, look, I know you care about what's happening in Sudan because we talk about it, but it really bothers me that the newspaper you work for and that all of Western media is hiding it because they don't want the protesters to succeed. And I was like, what are you talking about? And she showed me some of these guys' videos because I was like, I don't know what you're talking about because it was on the front page today. It was on the front page of all the newspapers. And she was like, well, she was really taken aback by that.

I was really surprised. She was like, well, let me show you these videos so you understand what I'm talking about. She showed me these videos from this influencer, tens of millions of views saying the mainstream media is deliberately covering up the protests because they've been told to do so by Western oil companies because the protests are bad for oil interests somehow. And the upshot of that is so therefore only listen to me, the influencer, buy my merch and come to my event. And I just like... And I will say, some of the motivations

don't have to be that nefarious either. Sure. Because it's just, look, it's pushing against an open door to be like, there is a conspiracy and it is powerful elites and they're doing this stuff and the right has done that very effectively

right but it can happen on the left as well and also sometimes it's true right there are powerful it's getting away with a lot of shit yeah and corrupt right like that that's a true thing but it's also an easy explanation for a lot of things that aren't isn't necessarily always true. Alright, let's talk about Sam Bankman Freed. He's on last Thursday a New York jury convicted Freed on charges of fraud and conspiracy

in the historic collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which is accused of stealing more than $10 billion from customers. Max, I hate talking about crypto. This seems important, right? I know. I, like you, I didn't talk about crypto for years because there was this mania about it and so many

people i knew who i think people i think are like really smart yeah we're writing all these articles about like you don't get it it's on the blockchain you don't understand what the blockchain is going to do so much crypto is going to do things and i kept thinking like boy it really seems like this is a ponzi scheme like it really seems like cryptocurrency has no innate value and its only value is to buy it and then sell it to someone else for a greater sum until it eventually loses money and everyone loses out but i was like this conversation is clearly beyond me somehow i must be missing something and on like a bigger level is how it was like when I Way back when I talked to Kevin Roos about this for the show and I came away from that interview And I was like wait so the whole thing is that people are like you don't want to trust

central banks and financial and financial institutions, you know, you need to trust the blockchain If I don't trust like central banks and financial institutions because of the blockchain you can't cheat the blockchain well and it's also the blockchain doesn't you know I don't even know it doesn't even matter it doesn't even matter I think that is one of the takeaways

from this is that we have all come around to you know what none of this matter it really was all just a Ponzi scheme have you ever heard the expression greater fool yeah but it's a financial term so it's an idea that an asset has if it's a if it's a greater fool scheme that an asset only has value in the sense that you buy it and then there is a quote greater fool who you can sell it to for a larger sum like imagine like a painting that is just a stick figure drawing that is really shitty but if i'm like that painting's worth 10 million dollars and then i buy it and then sell it to for a larger sum. Like imagine like a painting that is just a stick figure drawing that is really shitty. But if I'm like, that painting is worth $10 million and then I buy it

and then sell it to you for 20 million, then you have to find someone to buy it from you for 30 million. And eventually someone is going to be left holding the bag. And that's all crypto ever was. Well, in reading about this, yeah, someone made the good point that all the value from crypto, all the profit came from the fact that it's not regulated like the regular financial system right and so if you regulated crypto like you regulated the regular financial system yeah you would have a lot less fraud but you would also have a lot less profit for people and because the reason it was so profitable is because people are just like i don't know just do whatever i want right because it all well and the irony which I think is – it's easy to make fun of this.

We should make fun of this stuff because there's a lot of crooks involved like Sam Banker-Fried. There's also a lot of regular people who got left holding the bag for this because they believed because so many people, including the major financial institutions of Silicon Valley, told them the value of crypto will always go up. So they put – I think a lot about like a dental hygienist I had who was always putting her money into crypto and she had like two or 3000 in it and she lost all of it because it turns out it wasn't worth anything because she was being scammed by these people. Again, including a lot of very prominent famous people who told her that it had value and it never did. Yeah. I did. One of the stories I was reading for this. So they're talking about Caroline Ellison who was running Alameda, which was the hedge fund that was attached to FTX or connected to FTX. And they're talking about the engineer was talking with her in a group chat, in a signal group chat. Dated November 6th.

Singh noted that customers had withdrawn their funds at the rate of $120 million in the past hour. Ellison replied with a sad face emoticon. You know what? I think she's right. Which seemed to have understated her emotional volatility.

I think sad face. So do we think people know the Sam Bankman-Fried story? I can do like a one paragraph. Give us a tight five on Sam Bankman-Fried. Okay. So Sam Bankman-ed story? I can do like a one paragraph. Give us a tight five on Sam Bankman Freed. Okay. So Sam Bankman Freed ran FTX. FTX was a digital marketplace where you could buy and sell crypto. And this is actually pretty smart, especially if you think that like the value of crypto is dubious because he was taking a little percentage of every transaction. So if

lots of people are buying and selling crypto, he gets a little piece of that, then that adds up to an incredible amount of money. He also ran, like you mentioned, Alameda, which is a hedge fund. So basically what happened is that SPF was pilfering funds from FTX. Like people had, like normal people had investor accounts. By the way, part of the reason this is so complicated is because there's two abbreviations at the heart of this. F-B-S and S-B-F. F-T-X. Thank you. And S-B-F. S-B-F is Sam Bankman Freed. F-T-X is the crypto exchange.

You're right. I'll refer to him as Sam Bankman Freed to make it a little bit less confusing. Oh, no, it got me for a while. I was like, what are we talking about? I have bad news. There's a third acronym incoming. Anyway, so a lot of people had investor accounts. You have $1,000 in FTX to buy and trade. It turns out that Sam Bankman Freed was pilfering that money because he was making bad investments with Alameda and he had to cover the losses with investor funds. He was also pulling the money out for his own expenses. He made very infamously incredible amounts of political donations across the spectrum. He was also funding a lot of journalistic endeavors.

So all that money, a lot of that money was coming from Pelford accounts and then crashed. And FTX collapsed when people realized, and I'll tell you the story about how this happened because I think it's pretty fun. People realized, unless you have money in FTX, sorry. Or you're Sam Bankman. That's right. It didn't, people started to realize that FTX did not have deposit, like a bank, like did not have deposits to cover people's money. So it was just like a run.

People made a run on it and then that exposed that also Alameda didn't have money. And then that exposed that the whole thing was just, so it's ironically, it was like for all the crypto stuff here, this is kind of traditional white collar crime it's very like kind of traditional white collar embezzlement that just happened to be making its money off of crypto trades but there is a crypto angle here which is where our third acronym comes in um so something that sam bankman Sam Bankman-Fried did to inflate the balance sheets of FTX and Alameda was, and this is so stupid, he put a ton of their liquidity into a cryptocurrency that he invented for this purpose

called FTT. So he said, look, our balance sheets aren't $10 billion in cash. It's a hundred trillion dollars in ftc coin which is worth whatever i say it is no way yes oh right austin am i correct austin is nodding austin is nodding that is so crazy so okay it gets crazier it gets crazier so there is a rival crypto firm called binance. Oh, yeah, this part I've heard. Okay. So there are allegations that so the FTT, this cryptocurrency, they did also sell some small amounts of it, but mostly it's on the Alameda and FTX balance sheets. Binance, this rival cryptocurrency firm, maybe when they start to get a hint that FTX's balance sheets are not actually on the level, announces very splashily that they are selling their $500 million stake in FTT and everybody else should sell it off too. And this mass sell-off calls is the value of FTT to collapse because it's a cryptocurrency that's not regulated. It's not worth anything. And that means that the

FTX and Alameda balance sheets go from worth a hundred bajillion dollars to merely a few billion. And that's what precipitated the whole downfall. And that's what led people to understand that it's actually worth nothing. Yes. I have two questions before we move on from there. Okay. One is I saw some people say this verdict doesn't show crypto is a scam. It shows that Sam Bankman Freed is a scam scam artist this is all about his behavior his illegality but like if crypto there's a world where this could have worked out well i disagree it's it's correct that they are separate scams but i mean we have seen the value i mean this is the collapse of ftt is just an example of the value of all of these cryptocurrencies collapsing.

And also the fact that people had to pull all the deposits out was because Bitcoin and all these other cryptocurrencies were never worth anything. Right. So he was. Yes, it's true that his scam was making money off of people trading in a different Ponzi scheme. But they're all it's all it all, it's all speculative is the, is the nicest thing you could say about it. It's all speculative. And it's not even like speculative in like stocks where there's an underlying company that exists. There's no underlying anything.

That's right. Yeah. The blockchain. It's, that's it. It's the blockchain. That's right. Yeah.

Effective altruism. This was like Sam Bankman Freed's thing. I didn't, I, I'm not an expert in effective altruism. What's the deal there? Oh my God. So, okay.

So I, this has been actually kind of funny for me to follow because, so right now, effective altruism is a like philosophy slash cult that is enormously popular in Silicon Valley. And that Sam Bankman Freed is very closely associated with because he really ascribed to it and he used it as kind of a justification because he said under the tenets of effective altruism, which means what is the most effective way to use money to drive greater good in the world? It's kind of an idea like it's about kind of about philanthropy. He said, the more money I make, the better for the world, no matter how I make it, because I will give that money to charity and important causes.

So I can do terrible things because it's I know. So you see why this is popular in Silicon Valley. And then it got tied up in all of these philosophical movements that took the basic idea. It's just like do math to figure out what is going to promote the most good with your money. That took this to this crazy extremes about like we need to start start freezing people because there'll be better healthcare in the future. And we need to like, it got very, very weird. And it got mixed up in like a lot of other weird groups. But the reason that I know it and the reason that I a little bit want to stand up for the

integrity of effective altruism is because I initially encountered it like 10, 15 years ago when it was the big idea in international development. And all that they were saying when this idea first started, we've ever heard of give well or give directly? Yeah, yeah. Effective altruism. Right. They just, it was starting from this idea that there's a ton of waste in philanthropy. There's things like Tom's Shoes where we're shipping 10,000 shoes to Kenya for people who don't need

them and they end up in the trash. There are better ways to spend this money. Let's do some rigorous studies. And, you know, I just associate them with like bed nets or like direct cash transfers. If you give your money to GiveWell, which is a charity that just does direct cash transfers to poor people. Just like figuring out how every dollar can go the furthest and do the most good with some kind of like metrics. Right. And it seems like that's good. kind of like metrics. Right. With some like, and it has, like,

that's good. Pretty straightforward. Yeah. And it's been like, but it's not, it's the, so effective altruism is not, I can do whatever I want to make as much money.

If I say someday I'll give it away because I know the best way to, to give out my money and not the government. Well, I mean, there's this now this this is getting very niche so you're very kind to humor me on it there's this big argument about what is the real effect of altruism because all of the money and energy right now is in the weirdest silicon valley cult sam bankman freed version of it right but there is also there's a lot of like

development economists who are kind of like meekly raising their hands and being like, we can still give people bed nets. They're going to have to. Rebrand. We're going to rebrand. I think there's. We're going to need a rebrand for effective altruism. That's right. Yeah.

Okay. Well, you know what? A big, a branding firm is going to get rich. Selling the new effective altruism to everyone. And then they can say that it was just effective altruism and that they're going to just give it away. They are going to be paid in bed nuts, unfortunately. There's another idea here

which is that everyone pays just a percentage of their income to us all together. They put it into some kind of organization. I see.

Organization. Maybe we elect people to then figure out how to... Like we write down a name on a piece of paper and who's in charge of the fund of money.

Yeah. Interesting. And then, you know, use it to build roads, schools, things that people need. I don't know. I don't know about this. It's crazy, but I see where you're coming from. A little nuts. A little nuts.

All right. Finally, before we go, speaking of politics and government, a recently surfaced clip from 2022 shows now Speaker of the house mike johnson admitting that he and his teenage son monitor each other's porn intakes in the clip the louisiana rep talks about his use of covenant eyes a christian themed accountability software that sends reports of computer activity to an accountability partner in johnson's case his teenage son wow i know i know so you're gonna need an accountability partner um we we had we decided on pod safe america first first me and love it are now

accountability partners i know i got love it that's fun and tommy has dan so maybe i don't know what are you guys holding each other accountable for well what happens is okay again if you get download covenant eyes every week sends a report to your accountability partner of everything you've all your activity on your phone i'm sorry did you actually download this app no no okay okay good okay because we were gonna smash your phone right now on the we're gonna set it on fire the idea that i own that's like yeah i'm gonna download i'm gonna voluntarily do my worst nightmare. It's also very hard to find out who owns these apps.

So it's like Mike Johnson and his son's information is definitely getting routed to the Serbian intelligence services. It's so weird. So it's very weird. I have to tell you, I think I am even more appalled on like, seriously, like digital personal security grounds. There was a great Wired story where they downloaded Covenant Eyes, this app, and then a couple other apps in this category. And they like looked at what it was actually doing on their phones. And you will be shocked to hear it is gathering way more data That it indicates to its users, including almost continuously taking screenshots of all activity on the phone and tracking any website that anybody visits through any app and then sending that data to who? To who? Where?

That's a great question. Mike Johnson is going to find out. More than just porn. More than just porn is happening on the covenant eyes it also turns out that it's used a lot by like kind of religious culty churches to control their members where they everyone in the church has to download it and then their partner is the pastor so they have to send all the information to him and they're using it to like police what their members do so it seems like a little bit of a like security risk that the speaker of the house is on the yeah i would just

i would definitely have some eyes on the continuing resolution any of the government funding bills that there's not a covenant eyes rider on there i think i think we're going to start seeing whatever again whatever intelligence i'm just going to say serbia i think we're going to start seeing some like wild handouts to serbia and mike john Johnson's legislation because the data they have on him. Are you kidding? They call him up tomorrow or show him some screenshots and say, are you sure you don't want to give us a hundred billion dollars in aid? And look, we don't know.

We're just like, maybe his phone is just extremely boring. Maybe he's just like going to Fox News, reading the articles. He's just, he's on his phone just for the articles. I mean, we're, we're going to find out how boring this phone is or is not. From the Serbian intelligence. That's right. Yeah, when there's a change of government in Serbia. All right.

Well, that's our show for today. As always, if you have comments, questions, or guest ideas, please email us at offlineatcricket.com. Don't forget to follow us at Cricket Media on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers, and other community events. To watch full episodes of Offline, subscribe to the Pod Save America YouTube channel, and please take the time to rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher.

Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vasilis Fotopoulos provide audio support to the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Madeline Herringer, Reed Cherlin, and Andy Taft for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn and Dilan Villanueva, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.

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