Pod Save America - “How Mark Zucked America.”

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Facebook employees say Facebook is dangerous, a Rolling Stone report suggests that the January 6th insurrection was an inside job, and Andrew Yang stopped by Crooked HQ to chat with Jon Lovett about his new third party, Forward.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. What's so funny? You said a different inflection. I liked it. It's an evening. It's how I sound in the evening. Welcome to our... It's an evening recording, though you're getting this first thing Tuesday morning, hopefully. Hopefully you're listening right away. Monday night. Monday night. It's Pod Save America Raw. Oh, this is nice. Just me and my island boys. You guys up on your TikTok trends now? Okay, never mind. No, I am not. I'm not.

On today's pod, Facebook employees say Facebook is dangerous. A Rolling Stone report suggests that the January 6th insurrection was an inside job. You might say Facebook had a no-bones day.

Okay. That's a TikTok trend. That's good. There you go. That one's actually very funny. And Andrew Yang stopped by Crooked HQ to chat with Lovett

about his new third party, Forward. Speaking of a violent insurrection, how'd that conversation go? It was good. I asked him some hard questions. We had a good conversation. I, uh, you know. When I saw him in the lobby, I said, Lovett's going to gut you like a fish, and he didn't really laugh.

He didn't laugh, and it was like, I was, I did go pretty hard at him about, you should listen to the conversation because what I said to him is like, all right, you have goals for ranked choice voting. We think that's great, but we don't want you to do anything that makes electing Donald Trump an easier thing to do. Yeah. And he said, yes. He, I don't look, who knows what the future holds. Well, I'll listen to the interview. Listen to the interview.

I'll listen. You all listen to the interview too. All right. Two quick notes before we start. If you haven't already, check out the first episode of my series Offline, where I chat with New Yorker staff writer Gia Tolentino about how the Internet has turned life into an endless performance, why that makes politics hard and virtue signaling easy, and what being online during the pandemic has done to our collective psyche. Fantastic initial episode, John. Great. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks, John. Great episode. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks, John. I was joking that by episode 85,

what if the show just reverses on John and he goes down the dark rabbit hole and becomes a super crazy online person? Like somebody who starts listening to Steve Mena's podcast kind of as a lark and then realizes you can't listen to a podcast ironically? Turned around hard on you, Tommy. You see that?

You see that? You never know which way the wind's going to blow. Yeah, wow. I feel that's wonderful. Love it as Q. Yeah, I was going to say I'll be Q in a couple episodes. New episodes drop every Sunday right here on the Pod Save America feed. And in other exciting pod news, What A Day is celebrating its two-year anniversary all week long.

Two years for What A Day. That's amazing. How about that? Congratulations to host Gideon Resnick, Priyanka Arabindi, Travelle Anderson, Josie Duffy Rice, and the entire team at Whataday for reaching this incredible milestone. New episodes of Whataday drop every weekday at 5 a.m. Eastern. I think it's a hit. It's a hit.

You should listen wherever you get your podcasts. It's like secession for podcasts. Sure. Yeah. All right. Man, you guys aren't very giving today today i mean more of a yes and out of you all right we're just trying to get out of the promo i have to say tommy you keep pronouncing it secession and it's succession secession is like what happens in the union when like the south

wants to succeed it's about succeeding the elder roy i'm sorry it's about and then it's about i thought i would correct you here on the podcast lots of people i'm gonna take your recommendation just quietly tell i'm gonna put it in my draw nice which is something that i say because of an accent that i can't quite pinpoint so yeah you're right you got him anyway what a wind up let's get to the news all right uh if you woke up to a shitload of stories about facebook this week it's because whistleblblower Francis Haugen went beyond the Wall Street Journal to provide a consortium of more than a dozen news organizations, thousands of pages of internal conversations and research. I like that they created a Slack thread of all the journalists and even they were uncomfortable with the idea of being a consortium. And so they said, I guess we're a consortium now. Yeah. These are documents that also form the basis of a series of disclosures she filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission,

the testimony she gave Congress, and the testimony she delivered on Monday to the UK's Parliament. The headline from all of this, unsurprisingly, is that Facebook is bad. It's bad. The company's own research says that, and plenty of the company's own employees say it on internal message boards all the time, apparently. Beyond that, it can be tough to follow the details of all these stories. But the gist is that the algorithms designed by Facebook push people towards more radicalizing and polarizing content, that the problem is even worse in other countries, that Mark Zuckerberg both lies and lives in fear of being accused of liberal bias, and that the company didn't do nearly enough to stop the January 6th insurrection that was largely organized on its platform. I want to dive into all the

specifics, but what do you guys think about how this information was released? Did you find it difficult to process all these stories, Tommy? Yes. So credit first, I was initially quite impressed with the rollout. That series of Wall Street Journal stories were thorough. They were spaced out well. They were devastating. And then the really brilliant move was convincing 60 Minutes to do a big exclusive where the only carrot they really had dangled in front of them was naming the whistleblower who then repeated all the stuff from the Wall Street Journal stories

and they got a second bite of the apple. Today was too much, man. My understanding is that there were 68 stories. The consortium got out of control. 68 stories posted today, all embargoed for like 7 a.m. Eastern or whatever on like eight different topics. I was just awash with Facebook news.

I could not follow all of it. Yes, and I do think that a fair amount of it was overlapping both with Wall Street Journal reporting from the past couple of weeks and from other stories that came out today. It didn't feel like there was like the same division of labor that happened with some other kind of consortiums like what was formed around Snowden's leaks and some of the other ones we've seen in the past. Yeah, maybe this is just like the political staffer in me talking, but no one has been driving a message about Facebook here based on these documents. And so it definitely served the needs of and the way that many journalists want to do their jobs, which is great. And I'm glad that good for them for so many of

them for writing fantastic stories. And they did a great job. But if the goal of the Francis Hogan is to like deliver a single message or even a couple big messages about Facebook. I worry, I mean, we're going to try to do that here in this segment, but I do worry that it's going to be hard for your average reader to understand exactly what was going on there and what she was trying to say. Yeah. And I also think that there is enough in what we learned today that had it been spaced out over the next couple of days or weeks, it might have had a more lasting impact. We'll see. There's a very funny graph in Ben Smith's story about the sort of like media piece of it all and how it all came together, where the various journalists in this

Slack room, whatever, what the fuck do you call a Slack thing? Slack channel? Slack group. We're arguing over what to call it. And they didn't want to call it the facebook files because that was the wall street journal branding so the times started fighting with that and then casey newton who's a very funny very smart tech reporter uh said they should call it the leftovers that was awesome and self-aware and very funny that was really funny however i will say if you don't want the wall street journal to have a cool name all to themselves everyone should have just called it the facebook files right it would have taken the branding away from the wall street this is the not the most important piece of this just some some political uh and i also love too that of course the new york times which lives to pretend as though there are no other journalists in the world like we're

gonna go with our story first because some of it was based on reporting we had gathered oh they broke the embargo yeah no but mike mike isaac was the one arguing us using that branding he's like super fun he wrote super pumped that great uber book that everyone loved anyway but uh i loved the little i love the little chippy back and forth among journalists like that no way that's gonna work without them fighting before we get into some of the details any other big takeaways overall broad takeaways that you guys uh got from stories? I think two, which is actually, it's just complimentary to what we already learned from the Wall Street Journal. One, to a shocking degree, Facebook has basically total clarity into the problems that they're causing. And two, just how much internal debate and strife there is

within Facebook, acknowledging how bad it is in real time and desperate for the company to do more though. Um, we were talking about this before we recorded, but there is a little bit of like, there's a lot of complaining from people about what Facebook isn't doing and, and they all work at Facebook. And there's a little bit of like, if these guys don't clean up their acts before my stock vests, I swear to God, I'm out of here. If these guys don't clean up their acts before my stock vests, I swear to God, I'm out of here. Tommy? Three takeaways.

One, as bad as we think Facebook is here in the U.S., it's exponentially worse abroad. And we'll talk about that more later. Two, there's just like, there's so many instances of Mark Zuckerberg specifically prioritizing financial considerations over safety and the quality of discourse and the quality of the product too. It's just like, rarely do you have someone so nailed dead to rights on that. And then just three, and I think this is sort of the core of what we'll talk about for most of the conversation today is that politics in the fear of being called biased drives so much of what they do. And I think it's important to remember a little history here because I remember this happening in real time because I was living in San Francisco at the time. In 2016, Gizmodo wrote a story quoting a former Facebook staffer that alleged that the trending topics page was biased

against conservative outlets and stories. And that supercharged this coordinated effort by Republicans and people on the Hill to say that Facebook was biased. And it was incredibly successful. And remember when Zuckerberg invited Glenn Beck and a bunch of conservatives to Menlo Park, right? That meeting, you could tell Zuckerberg thought it worked because Glenn Beck walked out of it and said a bunch of really nice things about Facebook. He said that they were behaving appropriately, that they were humble, open, and they listened. And so Mark kept doing these dinners with Trump, Tucker Carlson, Brent Boesel, Ben Shapiro. And then like Joel Kaplan, this prominent Republican, rose to power. And so the result is all these political considerations that make no sense when you really dig into them.

Like Breitbart being called news, Politico, The Washington Post, Axios, Reuters being called liberal. It's a organization that is scared to death of being called politically biased. It's a organization that is scared to death of being called politically biased. And they're willing to have a platform that is full of misinformation and incitement and outright garbage if they're not called liberals. I think that tech executives are the easiest mark. Totally. Pun intended, John. There you go. Thank you. There you go. I think they are the I think they are the easiest mark for ref working because they all believe that technology is beyond politics and that Democrats and Republicans aren't always right.

And we can solve our political problems through technology. And so when you accuse them of being biased towards one side or the other, they take it very seriously. they take it very seriously. Also, it's who Mark brought in, right? Sheryl Sandberg, you know, was he brought in a bunch of like Republicans or at best centrist Democrats to help run run Facebook and at least on the political side. Well, what I I think you're right. I think it's not just that they think what they're doing is out is outside of politics. It's that it's more important than politics and politics in the sweep of history is a distraction from the great work they're doing to build this kind of utopia. The other piece of it. So I think you're right. They're terrified of being called liberal, especially because a lot of their they view their staff as being liberal. Right. Yes. But the other piece of this and they may have liberal, social and cultural values. Yeah. They're cosmopolitan

conservatives. A lot of these people is what they are. They are pro-gay. In some ways, they are pro-equality. But when push comes to shove, they have conservative leanings. But when I talked to Shira Frankel, who wrote that book about Facebook, my question to her was when Mark gave up on this idea of a libertarian paradise, which is where he was not that long ago. When he talked to kara swisher he was like i think holocaust denial is okay because people should see it and and i asked them like what replaces the larger ethic about how facebook governs speech if it's not going to be libertarian anymore and she couldn't say and in uh in one of the pieces i i thought this was important right this is what a facebook team member said they said multiple cases, the final judgment about whether a prominent post violates a certain written policy are made by senior executives, sometimes Mark Zuckerberg. If our decisions are

intended to be an application of a written policy, then it is unclear why executives would be consulted. And so what happens is there's a fear of being called liberal. There's no organizing value or principle. And so then everything becomes ad hoc. Everything becomes a debate. Everything becomes about appearances. And you end up with a situation where whitelisted propagandists are allowed to spread information. Sectarian strife spreads in India and around the world. And there's no governing principle to prevent it. You said a couple minutes ago that this story has proved that Facebook really does know exactly what the problems are. I thought that they also proved that Facebook knows how to solve them or at least make them better. but we'll never be able to solve all of them because these are problems that have to do with human nature and we're just a neutral platform and we can't restrict free speech so these are the same problems that you see in humanity anyway and we're just facebook but that's clearly not what's going on here facebook has plenty of tools to fight extremism and we know that because they have used some of them on certain occasions but they refuse to use them all the time or more. So I thought some of the most damning revelations were about, to that point, Facebook's algorithms pushing people towards extremism.

NBC ran a story about how the company created a fictitious user named Carol Smith who described herself as a politically conservative mom from North Carolina. Within two days, Facebook was recommending that she join QAnon groups. Here's the weirdest part. She was arrested at the Capitol. I was about to say, she's actually the she's on the shortlist for Trump's veep in 2024. Congrats, Carol.

Yours was better. Carol's gonna be on the shortlist. Yours was better. Yours was fun. What was that movie, Carol? What? What was that movie, Carol, about? A lesbian, kind of a lesbian story involving Cate Blanchett. They didn't attack the Capitol. I don't think so. I don't remember it then.

What did you guys think of that story? A Facebook spokesperson said, it's the perfect example of research that helped inform their decision to remove QAnon from its platform. Oh, thanks. Yeah. Which is so typical of so many of their responses. I really appreciated that in some internal conversation, Yeah, well, that's the it's so typical of so many of their responses. Well, one one. I really appreciated that in some internal conversation, someone at Facebook said, I'm sick of Mark answering a question that wasn't asked, which is what they do over and over and over again.

They were so slow on QAnon. And I was thinking about how they call that they move fast and break things. They are now a government bureaucracy. They move incredibly slowly, incredibly fecklessly around these problems because, yeah, I mean, by the time they removed QAnon, it had festered into this giant conspiracy theory, maybe one of the biggest ever. It has rended families like, yeah, we talk about it in political terms. I know people in my life who have had to have divorces and now they are co-parenting with QAnon people. It is a fucking nightmare. And they allowed it to fester for so long.

Yeah, and same with anti-vax content. I mean, this is why the problem with Facebook is not about freedom of speech because it's not about your right to say you like QAnon or your right to say, I don't want to get vaccinated. The issue is that Facebook's algorithm is recommending radical content to people who otherwise wouldn't have seen it.

That's a problem. That is core to the DNA of the product. It's radicalizing people. Why recommend anyone join any political group at all? Let people search for their own political groups. If they're interested and people with like-minded, like, go search for the political group. Because they're like, oh, well, this is how we got rid of QAnon. They're like, go search for the political group.

Because they're like, oh, well, this is how we got rid of QAnon. Okay, but I'm betting that the algorithm is going to continue to push people to join more extremist groups, other extremist groups that may not be QAnon. And then you're back to playing whack-a-mole all the time. There's a more fundamental design flaw here, which is that the algorithm continues to push people towards polarizing, radicalizing content or to join groups like that. Yeah, there's this Daniel Dennett is a philosopher and he talks about something called an intuition pump. And when an intuition pump is when you use an analogy in a way that hides the truth, that makes the truth less obvious. And I think all the time Facebook tries to use these intuition pumps, which is in some ways what they want us to think about Facebook is like kind of an inert bulletin

board for society, right? It's no different than a cork board hanging in a coffee shop somewhere where people put things up and other people see them, right? But it's, of course, become this sophisticated operation for delivering information to people. An incredibly sophisticated machine, an intelligent machine with agency for delivering information to people. And the one thing we learned from this is right after the election, they figure it out how they can just literally adjust the dial. And all of a sudden, far less misinformation and negative content being spread and far more accurate and reliable information is being shared. And the reason is nefarious, because the longer they keep you on

the site, the more money they make. And so you have people searching for like wellness or essential oils. Then all of a sudden they're pulled into like plandemic and anti-vaccine content and all this right wing sort of QAnon or QAnon adjacent content. It's a problem you see happening across the spectrum. And it is a problem of reach. You know, Jeff Horowitz of the Wall Street Journal, who love it. You talked to and wrote the initial round of stories. I talked to that guy. Tommy.

Oh, I'm sorry. I was. You guys both. So many Facebook people. Now I forget. I was with the headband guy before it was the thing that's right you were i'm sorry anyway so jeff was tweeting the other day that researchers including my leftovers chuck todd you know that's what i'm saying okay uh researchers how's that for a consortium sorry uh researchers you got your consortium right here, Chuck Todd. Person Tommy's addressing this at.

What were you saying, Sean? Minding his own business, living his life. You guys good? Probably. I guess so. So Jeff was tweeting the other day that researchers, including Facebook researchers, their own researchers, have noted that Facebook can reduce the spread of misinformation, hate speech, radicalizing content by restricting the reshare button and reducing the spread of viral content. There's a VP of Facebook who's the 10th longest serving employee in the company said that they

could reduce most public integrity problems just by moderately reducing virality. Like that is what we're talking about here. It is the sharing, it is the reach of the information, it's where it's getting spread that is causing most of the problems here. And the reason that Mark will not dial back on that is because that is where you get the engagement. And it, you know, drug dealers rely on repeat customers. Adrian LaFrance wrote, I think, a really good piece that- I think one of the best pieces of all the ones today for sure yeah in the atlantic in the atlantic that kind of runs through i think the kind of overarching issues talks a lot about what people are saying internally and the point

she makes at the end of the piece is facebook knows that people who are isolated recently widowed or divorced say or geographically distanced from loved ones are disproportionately at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform it knows that that repeat offenders are disproportionately responsible for spreading information. And it knows that 3% of Facebook's users in the United States are super consumers of conspiracy theories, accounting for 37% of known consumption of misinformation on the platform. And I know there's been this analogy about the tobacco companies, but it really reminds me of that. You see domestically Facebook desperately trying to keep a hold of the kind of the aging population that is addicted to its product, especially the kind of chain smokers

of Facebook while looking for market share in the rest of the world because they know that we are starting to come down on them for the harm they are doing to people. And we are trying to keep our kids off of their fucking platform and they don't know what to do. Tommy, I know you guys have covered this on Pod Save the World, but why do Facebook's problems seem even worse in other countries than New York Times? Big story from the latest tranche of documents was all about India, which is the company's largest market. John, thanks for the nod to the more intellectual offering that Crooked Media has for listeners

out there. So the most important stat I saw was that only 13% of Facebook misinformation moderation staff hours are devoted to non-US countries. But 90% of Facebook users are outside of the United States. So what that tells you is they don't give a fuck about you

if you live outside the United States. Again, not a problem you can't solve. You're just not spending as much resources outside the United States as you're spending here. And it's better here, even though it still sucks here. I mean, I do think there's a question of like, at what point do they reach a scale where they actually can't have a handle on these things? Because India alone, 300 million Facebook users, 400 million people on WhatsApp. You have 22 languages spoken in a country and then systems that can't monitor all of them uh you don't have like either real people doing content moderation your ai isn't

working and so like again if you can't handle it if you can't have all those people doing it then you shut it down exactly it's on them it's on them well it's on governments to regulate right well that's asking a lot of some of these governments that are in like, you know. Well, only in the digital, only in digital space are you allowed to build something too big to be safe, right? You're not allowed to build a, you're not allowed to say like,

look, my hospital treats a lot of people. Unfortunately, it is too big and several of the wings will fall down on you. But that's the price of having a hospital this big. You're not allowed to do that

if you have a department store. You're not allowed to have some poisonous stuff inside of your supermarket because there's just too much food coming in, but only in digital space still do we allow that. But also like, there's also a piece of this just sort of lack of cultural understanding. So in a place like Burma, where Facebook was, has been, there's lots of research on how it was used to spread hate speech that led to, you know, a genocide against the Rohingya. A lot of people in Burma didn't have internet access until they got Facebook.

And then Facebook was basically their only access to the internet. So your digital literacy is obviously going to be pretty fresh. So if you see something on someone's Facebook page that says something like horribly violent or incitement or this Muslim group raped this person, people are more inclined to believe it because they just don't have that kind of bullshit antibody built up that we all have living in the U.S. But it sounds like Menlo Park has zero interest in understanding that context. Well, we talked about Carol's journey, right? Carol, the Christian conservative from North Carolina. They created an account in India that didn't even identify as a certain political persuasion,

just a random fake account. And within just a couple weeks, that account was inundated with hate speech, misinformation, and celebrations of violence. The user who was running the account said they saw more dead bodies in that couple weeks than they had in their entire life. And again, no one is blaming Facebook or saying that Facebook is the reason there are tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India, that that predates Facebook. But it is certainly the case that when there's sectarian tension, Facebook can be a dangerously powerful tool on the fire. It is. Well, like so often, I think Facebook's I think

core defense is something along the lines of we are the new public square for humanity. Humanity is flawed. Those flaws manifest on Facebook. We are not responsible for that. We are a place where everyone can gather. But that is. Yeah. But I mean, that's what I was just saying.

Use all the people and all the Facebook employees themselves and all these message boards are being like, we are not neutral. This platform is not neutral. Well, not only is it not neutral, the fact that you are well aware that people come to your platform as they're not macroeconomic nodes, but actual human beings with flaws and biases

should lead you to be cautious in the tools you give them to spread misinformation and hate on the internet. It's not an excuse for letting people be terrible to each other in a way that leads to violence. It's a responsibility you have. But again, it's not an excuse for letting people be terrible to each other in a way that leads to violence it's a responsibility you have but again it's not just the tools that they're giving them it the company itself and the algorithms themselves are actually pushing people towards more radicalizing content and knowingly so i mean like this guy boz who's

now the chief technology officer who's the deputy who's been there forever he wrote this memo that he's kind of walked away from or just said was sort of performative or meant to sort of create a conversation. But he literally wrote, maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools and we still connect people. They are like, it's a religious focus on connection and it's all like sort of embedded in this like naive tech utopia bullshit that we've been listening to for years and years and years. And like one of the reasons I'm now so cynical about Bitcoin and NFTs and all these things people talk about to be the same people who became millionaires and billionaires

off of those tools and technologies are now telling us it's going to save the world in this new context. And I'm like, I don't fucking believe you. Maybe it will, but I don't think you know what you're talking about. Boz or Sam altman or like all these people in silicon valley i well i'm more specifically worried about the fact that like facebook's about to do this rebrand maybe it's called meta.com with redirects to the chan zuckerberg initiative um but what i said that's some breaking news right here on this i didn't crack that twitter crack that but what i what i worry about is a company like you know i think of like a company like ibm that totally changed its entire business model but there were some like core

cultural values about how they did did what they did that like carried over when they stopped becoming a home computer brand for americans and like i think of what facebook's culture is and it makes me extremely nervous to imagine this group of people with this ethos in charge of more and more pieces of like the way in which we get information or interact with now the physical world. I don't think like, again, like we all know a lot of people work at Facebook. They're good people. They're well-meaning. They're like, you know, they've worked in democratic politics, Republican politics. I just think like now they're part of this massive thing that has created all these systems and this inertia and you get dug in and you get defensive. And it's like, I don't, I don't know who will pull the breaker here or, you know, like make everybody, I hope this series of reports

leads a lot of people to be like, oh shit, I just learned a lot of stuff I didn't know. Like that's how I felt when I, the Snowden disclosures came out, my reaction to most of them was like, holy shit, I didn't know the U.S. government was doing this. I'm hoping that Facebook internally has a similar reaction. It's like, oh, God, I did not realize there was this much harm happening. Or maybe if you work at Facebook right now and you just did find out about all this and you don't do anything differently, maybe you're not as good of a person as you thought you were. Well, there was this debate today about the earnings came out, the quarterly earnings, and it was great for Facebook. I don't even know all the numbers. I don't give a shit.

But anyway, great. And some reporters are like, oh, this proves that the company is not in crisis, stuff like that. I do think that I wonder if all of these stories will have the effect of both making current employees think twice about working there for the long haul. And I wonder if it will have an effect on Facebook's recruiting efforts in the future to try to like get the best engineers and the best employees to work for them. And I realized that that could be very naive because people like money and they want to work at a place where they make a lot of money. But I don't know. There's a lot of people who went to these companies because in their minds, they thought they were helping change the world or doing something good or blah, blah, blah, blah.

Or at the very least, they didn't think that they were actively kind of running society at its very core. Look, I think there are people that will take money to work for tobacco companies or people who take money to kind of sell OxyContin in West Virginia. But there's a tax these companies ultimately have to pay to get good people. One reporter tweeted that Facebook's stock price going up after hours, after their earnings report suggested that the company wasn't in crisis. I think that is undercut by the fact that they reported Q3 earnings, which end September 30th. So none of the current period of turmoil was reflected in those earnings. They also made 28.2 billion last quarter. Yeah, it's a money printing machine, but I agree.

I think the biggest problem is going to be recruiting. Because it's hard, like, people are now embarrassed to say they work there. Tommy, you mentioned this earlier, but the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how employees

fought with Zuckerberg and leadership over allegations that content rules aren't enforced for Breitbart and other right-wing publishers for fear of public blowback, which sort of gets to the point where the political, the concerns about bias at the top levels of Facebook, including Zuckerberg, are pretty crazy. There was a diamond in silk example, of course, a Facebook staffer said that there should be no punishment

for a false post from diamond in silk because they noted that the publisher, quote, has not hesitated going public about their concerns around alleged anti-conservative bias on Facebook. Imagine being scared of that. It's just it's pathetic. It's completely pathetic. These are bad faith attacks. They work. They coordinate them. You know, you have Congress, you know, putting out studies like John Kyle's office put a study in 2018 about

bias on Facebook. There's hearings. It's like lunatics like Louie Gohmert barking at your boss and some open hearings. Yeah, of course, you get risk averse. It works. I also say one other thing, too, which is my experience of, I think, a lot of wealthier tech people, wealthier L.A. people, too, to be honest. They fucking hate the left.

They hate the left. They hate the left. They hate the left just as much as they hate the right. These are not liberals. These are not Democrats. As you said, at best, they're centrists. Some of them are Republicans. And so they share the right wing's antagonism towards the left wing of the Democratic Party. They agree with it. Last thing worth mentioning before we move on is that several stories pointed out how Facebook didn't do enough to stop the January 6th insurrection that was mostly organized on its platform. The company rolled back measures it had taken before the election to stop the January 6th insurrection that was mostly organized on its platform. The company rolled back measures it had taken before the election to stop the spread of content that promoted violence and misinformation. Facebook's response, of course, is that they

banned the Stop the Steal groups from the platform and that the responsibility for violence lies with Trump and others who incited it. What do you guys think of that response? There's nothing Facebook likes doing more than shutting a barn door after the horses are gone. Do they have any horses left at Facebook? I mean, we are going to find out that, I am sure that the kind of protests that turned into a riot about masks and vaccine in New York will have been fomented on Facebook. There was a story in the Washington Post today about a Montana town ripped apart because of pro-insurrection and anti-COVID safety measures

protests taking place there. Those, of course, were organized on Facebook. Like, it is a platform for misinformation. They allow it to get big enough and to turn into such a strong community

and they're like, now it's a problem. And let people find each other. Encourage people to find each other. Crowd building. Yeah. It's a pretty important part of G6 find each other. Encourage people to find each other. Crowd building. Yeah. It's a pretty important part of January 6th. Group polarization.

That's what they try to do. Speaking of January 6th, two Stop the Steal organizers who were being interviewed by House Select Committee investigators spoke anonymously to journalist Hunter Walker for a Rolling Stone piece that published Sunday night, where they revealed that rally organizers participated in dozens of planning meetings with members of Congress and the White House. This included Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Representatives Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Madison Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, and Paul Gosar.

Cawthorn, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert, and Paul Gosar. Paul Gosar, who they said, quote, dangled the possibility of a blanket pardon in an unrelated ongoing investigation to encourage them to plan the protests. One organizer actually told Walker, quote, our impression was that it was a done deal, that he'd spoken to the president about the blanket pardon in the Oval. The Select Committee is also looking into the January 6th money trail to determine whether any election law violations or financial crimes took place. In the entire House, all Democrats and nine Republicans just voted to refer Tommy's favorite podcast host Steve Bannon for prosecution after he defied a subpoena to testify. What do you think of that Rolling Stone story? It set Twitter ablaze, as they say, on Sunday evening. Was it blazing?

Oh, Twitter was hot. Believe us. If you didn't see it, it was hopping. Too hot for TV. The pardon piece was new to me. That was interesting. I'd like to hear that under oath-y. Also, I want to know what the unrelated investigation is. That was an interesting twist to that. We knew that members of Congress were

involved in the January 6th planning because one of the main organizers, this guy, Ali Alexander, said he formulated a strategy with Gosar, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs on a live stream that has since been stricken from the record. There was also a sort of a article in the Washington Post about this outside war room at the Willard Hotel that kind of folded into this. And that's where my friend, my mentor, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Bernie Kerik and that crew was doing the kind of outside game where they're trying to pressure Pence into overturning the election. The interesting thing to me in that story is we now know that the Trump campaign reimbursed Bernie Carrick fifty five thousand dollars for renting those rooms. So these things were directly tied. And we also know that Trump was like pressuring Pence one minute alone in the Oval Office and then calling into the little Willard war room the next to get the outside game going. So it was directly coordinated with the White House.

So there was this debate as to whether or not what this does constitute like coordinating of like it's stochastic fascism. It's the equivalent of the Al Qaeda inspire magazine telling people that they should launch random attacks without ever explicitly saying in any of these things, commit an act of violence, break into the Capitol throughout Trump's words. And we saw it actually in some of the Facebook stories and then in some of these stories, this idea of wild as a word to describe the protests. I don't know what that means other than frightening, scary, not simply speech, but no one ever explicitly comes out and says it. And I was really what I was struck by in seeing those many of those members of Congress, both inciting those people to violence and then kind of kind of have like a smug look on their face when they're kind of holed up in the capitol is

this was the wrong amount of violence for them like no violence or far more violence would have served their purposes but unfortunately uh it was just it was just a few people dead and not enough to overturn the election that didn't goldilocks it for you it well it's the i'm gonna this is gonna be the most pretentious thing I say. Well, we'll be the judge of that. So there's this James Thurber quote. Oh my God. Which is that, I told you.

You quoted a philosopher earlier. I told you, this is worse. Something pump. It's an intuition pump, Daniel Dennett. It's an Eric Smith album about a bulletin board or something. It's that two martinis is too many many but three martinis is not enough and like a small insurrection is too much violence but a grand insurrection that takes place at capitals across the country that was to the level they would have loved is uh is not enough i just john your thoughts yeah anyway i said what the fuck you know what put it in the comments put it in the

comments let john know heteronormative i love james thurber why are you guys it's not about You know what? Put it in the comments. Put it in the comments. Heteronormative bullying. I love James Thurber. Why are you guys making me want to love him? It's not about James Thurber. Gordon Wood. Sorry. That was a fab wrong impression. I just think you alluded to the debate that's going on here,

which I think is important. I think we have to separate two different things here. Let's pretend that not a single person entered the Capitol, not a single rioter. What you would have had then was a series of organized rallies Let's pretend that not a single person entered the Capitol, not a single rioter. What you would have had then was a series of organized rallies organized with the White House and members of Congress to pressure members of Congress to vote to overturn the election. Right. So even if you never had any violence or anyone breaking into the Capitol, that enough is a bunch of members of Congress and the president of the United States and his staff trying to overturn a free and fair election. It's bad enough.

Yeah. And like you're saying, it's not illegal. I mean, is that I don't know. Is it true? No, I'm just what are we talking? Oh, I'm just saying, like, whatever it's I mean, we are at the point now where it is something that it should be taken to the voters of this country to make sure that we never elect these people or Donald Trump again, is what I'm saying.

Now we have to find out, in all of that planning, was there also explicit planning about a violent insurrection, about people coming into the Capitol, causing violence, all the things that we saw actually happen on January 6th. On that, we don't know yet, but that's part of what the investigation should uncover. I saw a lot of people saying, oh, all these members of Congress should be expelled. Like, yeah, of course they should. But it takes two thirds majorities to expel members of Congress. So that's never going to happen. The one thing I'm a little worried about is everyone getting all Mueller investigation here.

Like, let's not set the standards of success for this investigation at like expelling every Republican we don't like for come from Congress because it's not going to happen. I think success looks like transparency and understanding and hopefully an associated political impact. Yes. That's a lot to ask for these days. I do think, look, if you could prove that someone said, hey, if someone texted, like, let's go fuck up the Capitol and break in and maybe hurt some people or steal those election certificates. Yeah, sure. That's a crime. I also say, by the way, and if a member of Congress was involved with that and has proven to be involved in that, then right. It's even fucking worse. And I would say, like, we don't we haven't seen that evidence yet.

It's not as far fetched as you want it to be. I mean, there was that those protesters that were allowed to enter a state house and they found the footage that showed a fucking member of the Assembly or the state Senate opening the door and letting them in. So Oregon,regon or yeah oregon or washington yeah i think it was oregon but the um and we do know that like there has been rumors and sort of questions about the coordination with from people like gosar from people like bobber from people like marjorie taylor green uh with some of the insurrectionists and we we haven't gotten to the bottom of yet and we don't know the answer yet no you guys want to know the bannon response to all this not really i do oh sure yeah

so bannon is going like full special correspondent special bannon correspondent tommy vitor full-on wild conspiracy so on the show yesterday or today or whenever it was he had a guy on from an outlet called revolver news on his podcast and this guy wrote an article that's so insanely long that i actually read it but i will just briefly summarize it for you but the gist is is that they have these videos of this one guy going up to people and being like, hey, let's go. Let's get into the Capitol. Let's break in. And what they are suggesting is that this guy was actually one of several FBI informants.

Oh, come on. And that this was a government job. They called it a failed intelligence operation. And one of the guests on Bannon's show even suggested the FBI planted the pipe bomb. So I know this is crazy, but Bannon's like, this is what he's spinning. And he told all his listeners to say, you need to push this story to everyone you know, you need to share it on social media, go to their website, blah, blah, blah. So like, this is what's coming on Tucker, like that this was an FBI setup of Trump. There's also another thing to separate, which is the planning and what happened before the insurrection and then what happened during the insurrection and here's something that we know for

sure is that while it was happening while there was a violent insurrection at the capitol while people were breaking and trying to find members of congress to cause them harm donald trump saw it unfold and was like fuck yeah great he loved it and again he didn't do anything to stop it mark meadows didn't do anything to stop it And again, he didn't do anything to stop it. Mark Meadows didn't do anything to stop it. The White House staff didn't do anything to stop it. But like Republican members of Congress, some of them now they pretend that didn't happen, but they were pleading with Donald Trump like Kevin McCarthy to stop it from happening. And they didn't stop it from happening. So like whatever, again, whatever the planning was beforehand during the insurrection president did not try to stop it and

i'll go it is he loved it his only problem with it to this day is that it didn't work which tells me for donald trump the right amount of insurrection is either none or a fucking ton more i do i will think about the martinis because you're right once you get to three martinis it's not enough thank you how many do you want like six well once you get to three you might as well have six yeah exactly you're gonna feel bad either way now you're getting it i'm getting it once you're like 30s you sniff a martini well you should have started the way as soon as you hit the martini that for me i was like oh yeah now i'm also like now now we're talking about now talking about drinks can somebody please by the way source this to me because i'm really afraid it's going to

turn out that it's like uh actually it was al was Albert Einstein from brainy quote who said two martinis is too many. Um, all right, before we leave this topic, I think Tommy, you wanted, uh, you had something fun for us. Yeah. Well, you, again, the listeners will be the judge of that. Um, so one interesting, one important source for the recent details about the Trump coup attempt is Bob Woodward's most recent book. And that got me thinking about how every Bob Woodward book has three core elements. One, juicy insider details. Two, sort of an omniscient voice

that makes it impossible to verify said details. Three, a histrionic title. You bet. The most recent of which was peril. Did he also do Fury or was that Michael Wolff? According to my extensive research of bob woodward's uh wikipedia page summary not the full thing uh he has written 21 books on u.s politics or current events holy shit so today i don't i can't even get through

21 tweets i'm gonna ask you guys to play a little game i'm going with all the president's melodrama sure all the president's verbs okay one of those okay would you tell us the game first okay cool i'm gonna tell you three book titles two are real woodward books one is not okay are you okay let's do it love it i saw google get no no i was looking i wasn't googling i didn't know what the quiz was gonna be i was looking up the name i was looking up the name of the quiz show i was looking up the name is this quiz show i was looking up the name. Is this quiz show? I was looking up the name because you're antagonizing a Jewish contestant. I was looking up the name of his Belushi book because a lot of people view the Belushi book as an example of him kind of having these sort of like unverifiable narratives. Anyway, go on.

Two true, one false. Is that what it is? Two true, one false. I'll give you a pass for that. Great. Here we go. Ready? Shadow.

Maestro. Undaunted. Undaunted. Oh, Maestro is definitely real. I don't know if it's Shadow. I think Shadow's fake. Undaunted is the title of a memoir by John Brennan. That's what I knew that. That's why. The War Within, The Choice, In Trump Time Time In Trump Time? I know that I think that's the fake one The War Within The Choice In Trump Time

I've never heard In Trump Time In Trump Time? Yeah that can't be right It's not even grammatical In Trump Time A Journal of America's Plague Fear Is a book by Peter Navarro

There you go Ready? Yes Bush at War That's real Worthy Fights Not sure The Secret Man

Ooh Worthy fights. Not sure. The secret man. Ooh. Worthy fights sounds not, I don't think that's a good enough title. He's good at titles. He's a marketing man first and foremost, that Bob Woodward. What was the set?

What was it? It was the last two? Bush at war. That's right. That's right. Worthy fights. The secret man. I think worthy fights is fake. I'm going to go with

worthy fights too. Worthy fightsights is fake. I'm going to go with Worthy Fights too. Worthy Fights by Leon Panetta, Memoir of Leadership and War and Peace. That's generic for our man Bob. The Brethren. Oof.

Known and Unknown. The Final Days. Oh, those are good. Oh man, they all sound like, those are all good. They sound like. Known and Unknown

is his book about the Rumsfeld years and I think that, I know the last one was the Woodward, so I think it's the first one. So which one do you think is it? Brethren. Yeah, I'll do that too.

You think Brethren is fake? Yeah, same, same, same. Sorry, The Brethren is his book about the Supreme Court. Known and Unknown is Donald Rumsfeld's memoir. Oh, it's his own memoir. Last one. Fear, duty, rage.

Duty. Duty. Duty's fake. Duty, Memoirs of a Secretary of War by Bob Gates. You see what I did here? I did. I made the case. Other people in the blob.

As I was doing the game, I was going to mock Woodward's title, and then I realized all political book titles are kind of douchey. So here we are. That was great. That was fun. Now stay tuned for an interview on Forward. With Andrew Yang. With Andrew Yang, when we come back.

Perfect. All right. He is a former Democratic candidate for president and mayor of New York. He just announced he is leaving the Democratic Party to form a new third party called the Forward Party. Andrew Yang, thanks for being here. John, thanks for having me. I think the last time I saw you, there was an in-person podcast in Boston, Mass. I think.

Yes, on stage. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was great. And you had a great conversation with Tommy during the primaries as well. So I want you to know that over the past few days, I have consumed an enormous amount of Yang content, the book, the interviews, the podcasts, and I went in extremely skeptical. And I came out extremely skeptical. But I was really reminded of why I like you so much, which is, I think you talk about issues like a human being. I think you talk about issues like a human being. You make hard problems accessible to people and you help people think about broader solutions to structural problems in interesting ways. And two, I think you have a natural optimism and curiosity and joy in how you campaigned that was really exciting to a lot of people, especially people that weren't paying attention to politics before. That is what excites me about you as a figure. You talk about watching the insurrection unfold with horror.

You say democracy is hanging by a thread across the country right now. Trump is leading an effort to put in place people and rules to try to overturn the next election. At the same time, studies show that Democrats and independents get their news from a wide variety of sources, some liberal, some mainstream, while Republicans have become concentrated in this bubble around Fox News and some of its satellites. I view this as an existential crisis. How does the forward party help stem the impact of this authoritarian drift specifically in the Republican Party? Well, thank you for digging into Yang content. There's part of me is like, it's like, I feel bad for you, you know? So first, let me say that I share people's concern about what is coming.

I saw, for example, the recent Bill Maher video saying, look, we should take the demise of democracy in 24 as a real possibility. I think that is where we are, truly. And the question in my mind is, what do we do about it? And the answer that I've been suggesting to people is before our eyes in the great state of Alaska, where if you look at the Republican senators who voted to impeach Donald Trump, there aren't many of them, the Republican senators who voted to impeach Donald Trump. There aren't many of them,

but there was only one who was also up for reelection in 2022. Now, it turns out if you're a Republican senator and you decide to go against Trump, you're like, oh, maybe voters will forget about it over the next several years. But that's not the case for Senator Murkowski. She's up for reelection essentially immediately. And the reason why she voted to impeach Trump, I'm sure, was because she thought it was the right thing to do. But I'm going to suggest it was also largely because Alaska has changed its process as of just last year, where instead of going through a partisan primary where she'd answer to only the 10 to 20% most extreme Republican voters in Alaska, it goes straight to the general public. And so she can go to 50.1% of the voters and say, look, I did what I thought was right. I'm an independent voice. I represented you for

years to the best of my ability. And now she has a fighting chance. So if you're concerned about the potential disintegration of our democracy, which I believe we should be, I'm going to suggest that if you had a critical mass of, let's call them moderate Republican senators who are able to vote on principle and what they all thought was the right thing as opposed to what their party is dictating, then that could be the difference. And so that's what we should be racing to accomplish as quickly as possible. We should be trying to liberate, let's call it six or eight or 10 senators to have freedom to vote on principle like Senator Murkowski does by virtue of the process change they just implemented in Alaska. So you talk a lot about ranked choice voting. I think that's great. You talk about open primaries.

I'm a little bit more skeptical about the value of open primaries in part because there are some form of open primaries right now in Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Alabama, Michigan, Montana, Vermont, Arkansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Missouri, Texas. You also have top two primaries in Washington and California. A lot of states have gone for open primaries, but it turns out that some of these underlying structural and cultural issues around polarization are not solved by open primaries. There's something deeper going on. And when you talk about making these kinds of changes, I'm all for them. But I worry it's a little bit like walking through a house

that's on fire and saying, here's where we should have had smoke detectors. Here's where we needed a better egress. Here's where these stairs should have had better lighting. That's great. But we're in an emergency right now. And what I see is a authoritarian Republican party on the rise and a democratic party that needs to be infused, not just with the current bevy of part of partisans of septuagenarian senators, but the new and engaged young people that you can help bring into that movement right now to save this country so that we have the opportunity to put in place some of these changes. Well, I wish too that we were talking about making these reforms before the house was on fire. But one of the dynamics that you just pointed out, which I also completely agree with,

is that polarization is as high as it's ever been and it's rising. In large part because different Americans are getting their information from very different places and in large part because of the collapse of institutional trust in certain communities. So, and I talk about this in the book, which you clearly have read through, but the trust and relationship in media varies widely between parties, where 69% of Democrats trust the media, only 15% of Republicans do. So the question is, how do you try to break up this polarization, us versus them dynamic in as fast a time period as you can? And if you're concerned about the rise of authoritarianism, because let's say one major party has succumbed to bad leadership. One of the things you should be trying to do is make the system more multipolar as quickly

as possible so that there are actually more institutional safeguards in place because those safeguards don't exist as much in a two-party system. It's one reason why, for example, John Adams and our founding fathers would see our two-party system as uniquely fragile and vulnerable. So I, again, I wish I was running around trying to help immunize a system that didn't have a disease that was this advanced. But I'm going to suggest that this is still the best approach in conjunction with what you're describing. Like if someone says, look, best approach in conjunction with what you're describing. Like if someone says, look, Andrew, team Dem, like let's go defeat Republicans. I say, have at it. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Let's do it. It's different than have at it. Or have at it. Let's do it or have at it. Well, now as an independent, it's a bit more have at it than let's do it. That's the problem though. That's the problem. But I'm going to be endorsing candidates who are going to be running as Democrats, as Republicans, as independents. And I believe that the hinge group that our entire democratic project rests on is independents and moderate Republicans. And the problem right now is that a lot of this group is subject to the leadership of the party, which is likely to be Donald Trump. So what you have to do is try and create a dynamic where that group of people that's embodied by figures like Senator Lisa Murkowski have a fighting chance to be free of political

incentives that are making it so that they cannot actually vote independently on principle. Well, one way to make them be free of those incentives is by shifting the incentives by showing them that there's less value in the politics of Donald Trump. And the way you do that is by defeating Donald Trump's movements at the ballot box. I don't care what kind of changes you make. If being endorsed by Donald Trump is how you win primaries and win elections, it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how many ballot measures you put out there. It doesn't matter how many open primaries you have. I mean, I come back to this problem, which is I am all for these long-term solutions. I'm all for doing them as quickly as humanly possible. But I don't think any of that will matter if in the next two

years we have a Republican Congress and a potentially Donald Trump as a candidate who works with that Republican Congress to overturn the election. We will never have ranked choice voting. They're installing people in Michigan that don't believe that Democratic votes should really count at the end of the day. I mean, how do we... If you want to achieve some of these solutions, you should be getting behind Democrats to defeat as many Republicans as possible.

And inside of the Democratic tent, becoming a leader who helps make these solutions part of the Democratic agenda. Because by the way, people like Elizabeth Warren, a bunch of different Democrats, they're all for ranked choice voting. I'm for ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting, you just lost a primary with ranked choice voting.

And I'm still a fan, yeah. And still a fan. And still a fan. Well, again, I wanted to focus on Alaska because it's a red state. And let's say that Andrew Yang, Democrat, showed up in Alaska and was like, hey, let's change the process. We all know that would be a non-starter. But the people of Alaska independently adopted both open primaries

and ranked choice voting in an environment that will make all of the difference. So if you are able to do the same thing in, let's call it Utah, Missouri, like different places that would actually, again, unlock this critical mass of legislators, that could be the project. And if you try and undertake that project from a partisan stance from day one, it never gets off the ground. I mean, if you look at what we have to do right now, the action has to be in red states as much as any place else, particularly in a polarized environment like the one we're in. You know, like if you if you just chalk up to the fact that look at this point, you know, there's the blue camp, there's the red camp. The tensions are just going to go up and up and up. Like, how can we actually change that dynamic?

Uh, like how can we actually change that dynamic? And you cannot change that dynamic if you're just running around, in my opinion, to blue states and making a case for reforms in those environments. You have to take the reforms to red states and purple states, and you're much more likely to be able to actually accomplish that if you don't seem like you're an appendage to one party or another. So that's actually something you also talk about. You talk about what happens when people would find out you were running as a Democrat and that people kind of shut down. Right. That, you know, you talk basically, you know, people are interested in your ideas, but they've been kind of they've whether it's through talk radio because they're truck drivers and they've been listening to talk radio all day or they've been listening to Fox News or Facebook. When they hear somebody's a Democrat, they're just not interested anymore. somebody's a Democrat, they're just not interested anymore. And yet, over the last couple years, we've seen Medicaid expansion pass in Idaho and Utah. We've seen minimum wage increases passing in red states. We've seen weed legalization. Florida voted 60 to 40 in a year where they rejected two Democratic statewide candidates. They voted by 60-40 to re-enfranchise people

who had been convicted of crimes. How do you think about the delta between progressive policies? And I think a lot of policies you would support and progressive candidates. This is the point. And I'm so glad that you're hitting it. So all politics at this point is tribal. And if you go to a Republican conservative truck driver or diner employee in a part of the country and you just say, hey, what do you think about drug prices? Too high? They'd be like, oh, heck yes. It's like, hey, do you want to make these changes and make sure that drug companies can't be raking the American people of the coals? They say, heck yes. Then if you say, hey, how do you feel about socialized medicine? They'll say, heck no. It's just because they're coded for certain things.

And so if you present the same proposal around, let's say, weed legalization or whatever it happens to be, it turns out that a majority of Americans are for it. A majority of Americans are for trying to address the ravages of climate change. The problem right now is that we're being presented those things in these coded terms along tribalized lines. The correlation between my policy desires and my political self-identification is only 0.25. If you present the same policy in neutral language in a new way, you have a much better chance of having someone not shut down because there's a name, like, you know, a letter next to your name where they're like coded to say, oh, like, you know, I don't trust you. You look down on me, whatever the phenomenon is.

So that's the distinction we have to draw as quickly as possible is to try and get to goals and reduce the tribal lines that right now are false. Because it turns out that the majority of us agree on most things if you sit down with them individually. And that's one of the great learnings I took away. The problem now is that you have two tribes. And so if you say, hey, I'm a member of this tribe, you're going to shut down that conversation for, let's call it, you know, 40, 45% of the country. But this is why I'm frustrated with you. Okay.

You're the guy to help break that down. But instead of, so there is a- I hope to be the guy to break that down. There is, let's say, let's hope there's a Fox News. It is inuring tens of millions of people to policies they would otherwise like. There is a Democratic bubble that is far more porous that involves CNN and the New York Times and Fox and ABC and NBC and Pod Save America and Rachel Maddow. But there are these millions of people that right now are getting their news sources that tells them the Democratic

brand is toxic. And you saw that as a real problem. And instead of saying, I want to figure out how to bring my people that are less engaged into this tent and how to change this Democratic tent, I'm going to take my bonga home. I got to start a new thing. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Americans where they are watching Fox News and say, hey, here are some ideas and now you're not going to be immediately defensive and negative about them because I am no longer the enemy, essentially. And that's the way we can open it up. That's the way also we can send a message to people that it isn't just a win-lose, zero-sum dynamic, us versus them.

And that if you actually try and get someone to examine the substance of an idea, let's call it universal basic income, then you can open them up to it. But it's much more achievable if you're not trying to play again, this like blue team, red team dynamic in the same way. But, you know, you keep coming back to this tribal blue team, red team, but I think you also recognize because I think you're, you know, you've seen the numbers and I think you're intellectually honest about this. You recognize that these teams are not equally divided or equally tribal. There is far more intellectual curiosity and honesty in the kind of structures of the Democratic Party. It's far more fact based. It is far more ecumenical in the way it gets its information than this cordoned off 40% of the country inside of the Republican bubble, right? Oh, I'm not someone, and this is something that I feel bad about. I'm not someone who sees the issues as symmetrical. Let's put it that way. They're very asymmetrical issues. And when I talk about the vulnerability of one party succumbing to authoritarianism,

and then there being no safeguards, you know, I'm clearly referring to one side. So I see these issues as not being equivalent 100%. So one question that came up a lot when I asked people what to ask you was, Andrew Yang is a math guy. Doesn't he know the math of electoral systems versus parliamentary systems? Doesn't he understand the math that you can the math that you need to make changes to make a third party possible and that until you make those changes, a third party is ultimately just going to take away votes from one of the two parties that will win in some kind of a first-past-the-post system? What's your reaction to that? I say that what we need to do is first shift to a process that will allow different points of view to emerge.

Right now, 62% of Americans do want there to be some more dynamism in our process. If you look at any other industry, it continues to evolve and advance, but our politics does not. So if there's someone listening to this who's concerned about the spoiler effect, let's adopt ranked choice voting as quickly and broadly as we can. It would allow people to actually vote their preferences. It would enable, in many cases, more consensus building coalition building candidates who I'm going to suggest are more likely to be women candidates who right now, in my view, get short shrift in the current plurality voting system. So if you're concerned about this dynamic, let's change it. Like, why are we insisting on an archaic process that is distorting our results? If the Republican Party had ranked choice voting

in 2016, Trump probably does not win. Well, why not be an advocate for ranked choice voting as a leader of the Democratic Party? You were until two weeks ago a leader of the Democratic Party. Because if I'm an advocate for ranked choice voting as a leader of the Democratic Party, then there's 40 to 50% of the country that will just say, oh, rank choice voting is a Democratic thing and it's a dud. Again, we have to get this done in red states to have any meaningful effect. And Alaska, I'm heartened to say, it was homegrown. If you actually look at the support for some of these reforms, it's actually quite high among Republicans because Republicans have a general anti-institutionalist bent. So if you say, look, stick it to the man, like, you know, have rank choice voting and open primary so that different parties can emerge, like, yeah.

And I want to be the champion of that. I think that this is one of the antidotes to a dynamic that otherwise threatens to destroy us. Like I take the threat as seriously as anybody else. I just think that there is another approach that we can undertake simultaneously that will give us a better chance at avoiding utter disaster in the next several years. And so as like a, you talk, talk a little bit about what makes it a party versus just kind of a political organization. Because my understanding based on what you've said about this is at first,

certainly you're going to be just endorsing Democrats and Republicans. It's almost like a kind of, um, you know, like when, like the, you know, the legal conservation voters endorses somebody like, are you going to, for the most part at first, you're going to be getting behind Democrats and Republicans. Yes. Um, and again, I do want to stress to people who are listening to this, I'm assuming you're a Democrat, that a lot of the action has to be trying to get reasonable Republicans and independents elected. And so if Andrew Yang and the forward party can help make that happen, that could be the difference, which by the way, you could not do as a Democrat, because if you're a Democrat and you endorse a Republican candidate,

then they just run the other direction. But if you're the forward party and people see you as an independent actor and there are some Republicans that want to work with us, then that could be the difference. I can't wait to get into some of these red states and activate voters for candidates that will help preserve democracy. But we're going to be endorsing Republicans, independents and Democrats. We're talking to multiple candidates. I'm really excited about some of the candidates that we're going to get behind. I do want to emphasize too that the forward party is an inclusive, popular movement where you can be a registered Democrat and before these reforms, you can be a registered Republican and before these reforms. I'm getting incoming support from people of every political background,

which makes me feel like we're doing the right thing and we're on the right track. Look, I'm glad you're out there advocating for these changes. My worry, my concern, and by the way, I knew going into this that I was going to sound basically like Nancy Pelosi's chief defender. I am sitting here as a defender of the Democratic Party, not because I give a fuck about the Democratic Party. I want to make sure we have the opportunity to make some real positive changes for people and stave off authoritarianism in the next couple years. And my worry is the second that what you're doing right now goes from an effort to make some changes that are really positive for our democracy to the potential of hurting our ability to make

sure Democrats keep the House and the Senate and win the presidency in 2024. I get it. I share the same concerns. I'm going to do everything I can to be productive. And that there are people, you know, it's like, I get it. People have been burnt in various ways. I'm focused on what we can do in different environments to move things in a better direction. And one thing I do want to suggest to folks folks too, and this is part of what I'm about, 75 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Are there people among that 75 million who hold very, very terrible, objectionable, racist beliefs? Yes. Is that true of 75 million Americans? I do not believe it is. I have family members who voted for Trump. There are a lot of people that are just responding to the tribal values-based appeal, you know, that's like just pulling out certain notes and strings. So what we have to do is try and give

some of those 75 million people like a place to channel their energies differently. There are a lot of Americans who are really pissed off and upset about how things are going, including on the left. I know. Yeah. And so you look up and like the anger is getting expressed in this very dark zero sum way because of the current dynamic. Like like we have to try and give some of the 75 million like a place to go. And it's not going to be Team D. You know, that's, that's not true, right? There are, there are people who switched from Donald Trump to Joe Biden, right? Oh yeah. I'm sure they, they voted. And I, I don't want to oversimplify that and say that that does not happen. But the, the zero sum game, we can all sense that the polarization is getting worse, not better. And all of our incentives are driving us in that direction, you know, from the political incentives to the media incentives to the, of course the social media incentives. us in that direction, you know, from the political incentives to the media incentives to, of course, the social media incentives. I mean, like, you know, the more up in arms you are, you know, the more power it generates.

So you wrote the book in 2020. When I was reading the list of the kind of pillars, maybe you should run through them. Can you run through a little bit the list of the kind of pillars of the Forward Party, the policy pillars you outline in the book? No, sure. list of the kind of pillars of the forward party, the policy pillars you outline in the book? No, sure. So the first is open primaries and ranked votes voting, which I see as the structural reform that can help both break us free of this polarization, but also get real goals across the finish line. And there was a Republican senator who said to me the other day, something that we really should take very, very seriously. She said, we get rewarded more for keeping an issue around than resolving it, which is like if we reach across the aisle and compromise, we're probably going to get a beating

and some of us are going to lose our jobs. Whereas if we just keep the issue around, then we can raise money around it, we can get votes around it. And so our political incentives are just to not do it. And the thing I thought of when she said this to me was Marco Rubio and immigration reform a few years ago, where he's like, let's do this bipartisan thing. And then he got shouted down. And then all of a sudden, it's like, let's not do that. I was just kidding. So that's something that we need to try and change. And I think open primaries and ranked choice voting is the way because again, right now, 83% of our legislators answer to the 10 to 20% most extreme voters in their district and not the general public.

And if you change that, that could be the game changer. And on reforming democracy, I mean, right now there's this Manchin-Klobuchar bill that was about, you know, stopping, you know, certain aspects of the way in which Trump is trying to overturn the election, expanding voting, getting rid of partisan gerrymandering. Something actually would do a lot about this polarization, right? Because gerrymandering leads to these kind of more extreme districts and even included voter ID, which is a compromise to kind of get Republicans on board, and they couldn't. Right now, the coalition in the Congress in favor of voting rights and democracy reform runs from Joe Manchin to AOC, but includes zero Republicans. I do believe that at least some of the Republican

senators would have an interest in it. But you're not surprised to know that I'm very much for those reforms and those protections, and they could be the difference. And I am also for getting rid of the filibuster, which is something they made up a number of years ago. Honestly, like I was around a Senator who was talking about the filibuster. Um, and I just had this sinking feeling. I was like, uh, you know, where she was making the case that, you know, it's an important part of institutional integrity. And I was like, Oh no. Um, so that was cinema, right? That was cinema. Cause you've talked about this. You've talked about this. You were, she was sort of defending it in private near you, right? Yes.

Cool. Very cool. And it gave me that sinking feeling it did. So, you know. Did you scream or anything? I would have been unable to contain myself. If I'm in a private room with Kirsten Sinema and she's defending the filibuster, I will just go, I will share with you that someone else had a reaction such that I did not need to.

So it was expressed. It was voiced. And then so the next pillar, right, is human-centered capitalism. Yes. We have the wrong measurements. We're 28th in the world in terms of infant mortality, access to clean drinking water, life expectancy, the basics, really. And the fact that we're disintegrating on that level, I think, is driving a lot of the frustration.

Our leaders aren't really held accountable for our way of life. They're being held accountable by scoring political points and getting on cable news and having a good hit. I mean, this stuff's a disaster. The only thing that should matter is just how we and our families are doing. Yeah. Well, look on human centered capitalism and UBI, which we already discussed, like right now there is this effort to do expand healthcare, make sure Medicare covers things like dentistry, family and medical leave. I think that's a big part of human centered capitalism, letting people take time off. Like

you're describing the democratic agenda to a large extent. Again, I'm, I'm sitting here like I'm, like Chuck Schumer, but I want to push you on this. I want to push you on this because I think sometimes it's fun to say, you know, we don't need the duopoly is the problem. But then when you outline some of these ideas, I think, well, they fit very I've seen in the reconciliation package. And I want very, very big changes to be possible in the United States of America. And I believe that this is a path to help get us there. But you've read my book, so you know I'm for universal health care, universal basic income, like improving these measurements that we're talking about right now. You know, the vision and goals are the same. I have a different sense of how to get there. And part of the insight I gained really is that, again,

we're not really having policy disagreements, it turns out. Like, we're just being tribalized and having these contests, you know, and these are contests that eventually are going to lead us nowhere, lead us to very nasty direction. Yeah, but we are but like we are having a policy debate. It just happens to have to take place inside the Republican Party, because right now we have one fact based governing institution, which is very flawed and run by a bunch of octogenarians who do not know how the Internet works. And we have a political party, a Republican party, a campaigning institution that has no interest in governing once it runs. But we do have, we're in the middle of a ferocious policy debate. Joe Manchin is trying to strip out climate change protections. Democrat. Absolutely. Kyrsten Sinema doesn't want to cut taxes for a

corporate once it cuts corporations. This is the problem in many ways. So you have the Democratic party that's very, very big tent because it's necessity. But, but part of this is that you have zero Republican senators willing to play ball on any of these things. And one approach to be like, Hey, you know, that, that party terrible, no interest in governing. And I understand those criticisms because, you know, they literally didn't even have a platform during their last convention. I mean, that's kind of bizarre. And so the question is, which of these problems do you want to try and solve for?

And if you were to have, let's say, just like a few Republican senators who are willing to play ball on certain issues, then maybe Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema's point of view isn't quite as elevated. Completely agree. And so you can look at that and say,

like, what approach are we going to take? And my, my approach is going to be, look, the Republican party should not be this monolith the way it is. Like we need to try and make it so that there are some subset of reasonable people and people listening to this could think that subset is very, very low and I get it. But, but if you have even that very, very low subset, stand up and say, you know what? I'm on board with some democracy protections and reform. I'm on board with this or that. That's actually in many ways, the key variable, the missing piece right now. I think that's totally right. And you talked about the filibuster. One thing that's very

frustrating is if Sinema and Manchin just said, we're open to get rid of the filibuster, suddenly a bunch of Republicans might play ball because something would pass anyway. And so might as well try to make it better. You know, you quote Arboy as recline extensively in the book, to the point where I hope you maybe like sent him something. I said, I said, thank you. Thank you. Like, you know, the manuscript. But one of the takeaways from that book is actually sometimes bipartisanship has been at its best in this country's history when there was actually one majority party and a minority. Because they knew something was going to pass. Because they knew something was going to go past, which brings me back to thinking, wow, if you really want to see some bipartisanship, either get rid of the filibuster so they know we can pass things with 50 votes or help build this democratic majority.

What I what I come down to at the end of this when I read this list of pillars is, my God, I think Joe Biden is the perfect candidate for the forward party. I mean, this is a guy whose whole entire life is built around grace. He almost lost the primary because he was being too nice about Republicans. All he does is talk about how they're friends. He wished they would have an epiphany. His career is built on loss and trying again is polarization is more fun to talk about than, you know, saying that being on the outside, saying we need to take on these two parties and leading a movement, that's more fun than the kind of the work of being inside of a movement.

And I think, and I'm getting to the but, this is the big but. Someone who runs for, and I'm going to ask this because I'm being honest, this is seriously my concern here. Someone who runs for, and I'm going to ask this because I'm being honest. This is seriously my concern here. Someone who runs for president as a long shot, then turns around and runs for mayor of New York, then drops out of the Democratic Party to start a political party. What I worry about is that as someone that is more interested in leading a failed movement than being a mere participant in a successful movement. What is your reaction to that? When I was running for president, one of the most popular questions I would get from journalists was, are you serious? And I was a very marginal candidate when I was getting this question.

So if you say no, then clearly you're ridiculous. And you know, like that's bad. If you say yes, then you seem like you're not lucid and that's not good. So I would say things like there are multiple versions of victory, which was accurate in my mind. If you say like, hey, how did Andrew Yang's presidential campaign go? Trust me when I say that I was not sitting at home brokenhearted that I was not president of the United States. You know, that wasn't like, I felt- Well, you were up late writing. I felt I was up late writing, it's true.

But I felt very, because I was trying to unpack what had just happened to me because I had done zero reflection on the trail because I was too busy trying to, you know, like stay alive. And so my goal was to try and advance our understanding of what was happening to us economically, advance universal basic income, which now two thirds of Americans are for in some version. And I found that to be very, very successful. I ran for mayor of New York City simply because I wanted to help.

And you understand the chronology is that I wrote this book in 2020 prior to deciding to run. I probably would have done some things differently if I knew I was going to run. to deciding to run. I probably would have done some things differently if I knew I was going to run. And now my goal is to try and strengthen and modernize and upgrade the mechanics of our democracy as quickly as possible in a way that will create better incentives for a critical mass of legislators to represent the public interest and not the partisan interest. Now, when you say that it's like more fun, I mean, trust me when I say that, you know, like I'm not sure that doing something in this direction is what someone would consider, you know, like the most carefree, like, you know, like think that what could do with what's time. I mean, I'm driven by a mission to help my country as best

I can. I understand if some people may have concerns about my approach, what I'd ask of them is to extend me a little bit of the benefit of the doubt and maybe some grace and tolerance and say, okay, like listening to Yang, he doesn't seem malignant. This is a great slogan too. Yang, he doesn't seem malignant. This is a great slogan too. Not malignant. Yeah. You know, like that, that I have a point of view that I think is based upon my coming to grips with this tough reality when I was researching my book and reading Ezra and you know, Lawrence Lessig and Catherine Gale and other people. And then I was synthesizing and I had to come to grips with, do I think this is working? Do I think this is going

to work? What would make it work? And I felt like I owed myself like an honest answer. And when I was writing this book, I had no idea what I was going to find necessarily. Like it wasn't like, I didn't go into this book thinking like, you know we're gonna need but like after I went through it and I said wait a minute we're being set up to turn on each other to fail to become more and more angry and frustrated and despondent we're heading towards political violence like what's a genuine solution or approach that could work and I believe that shifting to open primaries and ranked choice voting in a critical mass of red, purple, and blue states is a solution. And then the question is, okay, how can you advance that in the time we have in states that aren't in one camp or another? And the forward party is my honest, best approach to trying to solve the problem that we can see is growing more serious

by the day. Well, I will say I genuinely respect the way you approach these problems. I actually support a lot of the goals you have here. And my hope, and I will beseech you, that ultimately you recognize that there is value in being part of the coalition that has the best chance of achieving these things together rather than leading the one that I think is a far longer shot. But I genuinely do appreciate the goals you're trying to achieve. I just hope it does not come at the expense of the effort to defeat authoritarianism, to defeat this right-wing movement by electing Democrats across the country. Well, thank you, John. And I share the goal of making sure our democracy stands the test of time. And the goal I have is trying to make our system more genuinely resistant

to authoritarianism. And this didn't come up in our interview. And I know some people are going to say like, well, this is too much too soon. But if you look around the world, UK, five political parties, Germany, seven political parties, Sweden, eight political parties, Netherlands, 18 political parties. And that type of system is much more resistant to authoritarianism because if you have one party succumb to terrible leadership, then you have six other parties, whatever it is. It's also a parliamentary system. It is a parliamentary system, but we can accomplish some of the same goals just by having open primaries and ranked choice voting that, again, just improve the incentives of even the same leader. Like right now, our incentives are to reward unreasonableness.

And then we look up aghast when people are unreasonable. and then we look up aghast when people are unreasonable. Like if you change the incentives so that it rewards people for trying to do the right thing as opposed to punishing them, then more people will do the right thing. And we need people to do the right thing from right now, I'm going to say both camps or both sides, but we need people to do the right thing in part because they don't have this stance where this other side is my mortal enemy,

and I will take even very, very flawed leadership as superior to the other guys or gals. That's actually a recipe for authoritarianism over time, and I would love to prevent that. Andrew Yang, thanks for being here. The book is Forward. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's good to see you. Good to see you too.

Thanks to Andrew Yang for joining us today. Thanks for Tommy for letting us play that game called Deep Something. Can we do a deep throat thing? All the president's melodrama. Just tweet at us. No, or don't. Oh, no. For good titles.

John, you're hosting a whole series about getting offline. How's that going? No, that's not Tommy. That's not what the series is about. The series is about how to live online better than we already are, knowing that we all can. But Gia did it by getting offline. But then did you hear her? She said she got stuck back on.

She's now a Twitter looker. She reads 150 books a year. She goes online and she sort of looks at the tweets 150 books a year i read her on saying that on twitter once that's so many books is there music there should be music now there should be music it's fear duty it's duty i hope the music is island boys dude are you still laughing at duty i'm laughing at duty duty that's very bob woodward is this funny is this something something bob tbd john it's coming out on tuesday that's all i know about this bye guys pod save america is a crooked media production the executive producer is michael martinez our producer is hayley muse and olivia martinez is

our associate producer it's mixed and edited by andrew chadwick kyle seglin is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Brian Semmel, Caroline Reston, Madison Hallman, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos at youtube.com slash crooked media.