The Bulwark Podcast - Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks-Up to Trump

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg is doing all he can to get an audience with the big man at Mar-a-Lago, including praising Trump's (faux) free speech bona fides and restructuring Meta to eliminate fact-checking. Maybe it's because Zuck wants to show his middle finger to the mean tech reporters—or maybe it's because Trump threatened to imprison Zuck. Plus, the conspiracies around Jan 6 v 9/11, and the potential threat to our financial system from crypto.  Charlie Warzel joins Tim Miller. show notes: Charlie's piece on internet brain rot Charlie's piece on crypto and the potential nightmare in Trump 2.0

Hello and welcome to the Bulldog podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. We've got the perfect guest for today's Facebook news, Charlie Warzell. He's staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the newsletter, Galaxy Brain about technology, media and big ideas. He's also the co-author of Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home. That's not on our to-do list today. We have too much to discuss to discuss my working from home thoughts, but maybe another day. How are you doing, Charlie? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I initially had reached out because you had an awesome article about crypto and I was

like, I want to do a crypto episode with Charlie. And you know, the news gods had other ideas. We'll get to crypto at the end for people dying to hear our hot takes about, you know, Ethereum. But Mark Zuckerberg is out with some news this morning. And I just want to read exactly what the announcement is from Facebook so we can make sure to get it right here. He is replacing, not that that matters anymore, but he is replacing fact checkers with community notes in the model of Twitter. That's number one. Number two, simplifying content policies to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse. He's moving the trust and safety content teams from California. The California teams were mainstream discourse. He's moving the trust and safety content teams from California.

The California teams were too biased. He's going to move them to Texas, which is a beacon of just right down the middle of the road, political ideology in Texas, no bias in Texas, or moving the moderators to the worst jobs in the world, I think. The content moderators, those people, the moderation slums are moving from California to Texas to weed out bias. We've also, I think, has, it's going to get less attention, but I think potentially the most pernicious thing that

is happening is they're bringing back more political content to the algorithm in the newsfeed. They're not deranking that anymore. Crazy shit people post is going to be back in your Facebook newsfeed if you are of the demographic that uses the Facebook newsfeed. So those are the big updates Joel Kaplan went on Fox to discuss. I have some audio from that I want to get to but I want your big picture thoughts on the changes first. Sure. I woke up to this like full candor like an hour ago. Yeah, same. My thoughts on this are basically, I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very and I felt this way for a while, very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between, let's say, March 1 2020, and January 10 2021. Right. So beginning the COVID pandemic, right into,

Right. So beginning the covid pandemic right into, you know, post January 6th. I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th, I'd go back. I think he's probably ashamed of what they did starting in 2016, trying to root out. Yeah, I would agree. But I Cambridge analytic stuff and all that. And I don't think he cares about actually. I would agree with that. But I think too, you know, they were up against a lot of pressure there and they were always sort of trying to do the very least.

Like they were being kind of dragged along by people. But Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my old boss, who was at the Times then, Ben Smith, about like COVID misinformation. And it was like the first then, Ben Smith, about COVID misinformation. And it was the first interview I'd really heard from Zuckerberg where he was basically like, no, it's good that we're censoring, quote unquote, right? It's good that we're taking action against this.

This is a very clear cut situation in which there is actual harm connected to this type of content, these type of words. And I think I bet you if you had to like read that to him in front of him, he would just like cringe like a full body, right? Because I think there's this this real understanding in his mind in the mind of a lot of the people who's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and in the world of like UFC or Jiu Jitsu or whatever, that there's this, you know, this huge overreach during the COVID and the you know, the lead

up to the 2020 election. And then of course, the big one, right after January 6, you know, getting rid of Trump, all of that stuff. I mean, the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7th, four years later, is like, it's a big like middle finger, I feel like, to this idea of like the hall monitors, like you have lost is, I think, what he's trying to communicate here. Yeah, I said, I think that there are two elements to this. One is the forward looking Trump suckup part, and one is the regrets looking back part. We're going to get to the Trump suck-up part, but let's continue down the looking back part first. Bill Kristol in our internal Slack wrote this.

I told him I was going to steal it from him, but I'll credit it. He was like, here's the thing. The fact checking ended up being mostly pointless. There's not a lot of evidence of the fact checking part work. I think deranking things from feed mattered. I felt like the fact checking ended up not being that useful. I'm open to the fact that there's counter a lot of evidence of the fact checking part work. I think deranking things from feed matters. I feel like the fact checking ended up not being that useful. I'm open to the fact that there's counter research on this, maybe you've seen. But Bill writes, Zuck now denouncing Facebook's fact checking when he implemented it, was in charge of it,

arranged it, supervised it, paid for it for years, is like a Stalinist show trial type of self-denunciation for the new leader. And I think it is part putting on the hair shirt for Trump, but I do think he also has some of his own regrets about it. But he hasn't done the mature thing of like accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as one of the richest people in the world. And in this announcement, it's like like the legacy media and these annoying hall monitors

forced me to do this. And now it's like, now this is my big middle finger back at them. Did you point out? I thought really he could have done whatever he wanted. Really. It's not like the Biden regulators were coming for him. And he believed a lot of the stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith, but that he hasn't kind of accepted responsibility for that. It doesn't feel like he's blaming this on you, Charlie. It's your fault that he has had to do this. Charlie Bolling-Hill Well, yes. And you know what, I'll take the blame. I agree with that completely. I've been covering this company for, you know,

I don't know, more than a decade now. And there's this classic thing that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of rolls out something new, and basically says, like, he speaks as if he has amnesia from the past, or as if like, you know, a totally new paradigm has formed, right? It's like, we're getting into groups, we're getting into community building, we like, everyone just wants to gather with people around shared interests. And then like QAnon happens, and he's like, I don't know what people were doing, you know, trying to gather in these groups that were just forcing people into these groups. So what we really want to do is this like they were all about news

and prioritizing the newsfeed. I mean, when I worked at BuzzFeed in 2013, one day, literally just one day in October, we had 300 times the amount of referral traffic that we normally had to the entire site. And it was because Facebook turned a dial. And there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get in bed, partner with these news organizations, be a place where news, reading, where all this happened. Then they realized that like, oh- That's quite when they cared about reading.

Then they realized, oh, like your grandma is getting radicalized. It's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app to be inundated with political news 24 seven. And they were like, this political news, it's bad. It's like, you did this, you did this. You control the website. You are making the editorial decisions.

And yet they sort of act like it's these like gravitational forces that are like pushing and pulling us into these behaviors. Facebook is the one dictating what we see, what we do, how we act on the platform. JV, I'll write about this in the triad this today. It's like, be an alpha. Like, why are you such a surrender monkey?

Like, why, like, you're one of the richest guys in the world and like you do the jujitsu and the MMA. Why are you acting like you are unable to resist the critiques of the Atlantic? And you are forced into making these policy changes because there were a handful of tech reporters that were mean to you. Why are you acting like you were forced into these changes by the Biden administration, which wasn't really that aggressive on these matters at all? The whole thing is very, it's very beta. It's like, I'm not really in control here.

And now, it's just like, now I think the best thing to do is just become the clockmaker God and let let a thousand flowers bloom If free speech and that will solve all the problems and that's gonna create new problems and they'll have a new announcement in four years That pretends like this was not his fault either. This was Donald Trump's fault Probably well, and I think we also have to like talk about the Elon Musk of it all right I mean he is essentially adopting the Twitter practice, like community notes, right? Which, which, I mean, like hand up community notes is a, is an interesting feature, like of the, the Muskeen, you know, features, like it is the one that

sort of makes some sense, right? The best thing he's done. Yeah. And, and, and it is like a community notes, fact checks, all of Elon Musk's bullshit all the time, right? Like it does a reasonably good job. Even though it seems like he takes those down. Yes, it does. It does. Pre-free jobs absolutism has its limits. It sure does on x.com. But I mean, going to that, and then also I get this sense and I, you know, the reporter in me, like I can't really like prove it.

But I think that these guys, like when I saw all the announcements, you know, the glib part of me is like, Zuckerberg just wants people to be able to say the word retarded, you know, which like everyone uses on X now. And it's like, oh, we're, you know, free speech is back. We can say things, you know, that we used to say in the 90s

that we would have gotten canceled for. I feel like those are the waters that these guys are swimming in all the time, right? They're just having this very weird edgelordian discourse all the time. And I think he sees that on a place like X and sees that there is kind of a charge to it, right? That there's all these people who are really excited about being able to speak a certain way and triggering a certain type of lib and you know, whatever. And I think it's like, he's feeling left out by the sort of, I would never describe Elon Musk is cool. But there's like a in that world, a sort of, you know, like renegade nature to the way that he's running his platform.

And I think that Zuckerberg is frankly just like he wants that. It all goes back to being stuffed in the locker and to making a page about which girls are the hottest at Harvard. You know, it's just really, it's true about you want to and all it's for all these guys, all these guys were super nerds and, and want to feel cool. And it's like, great, now we can call gays fairies again, or the other F word and the AI bot won't put up a little content note. One more thing about these content notes, it's just worth bringing up because I sometimes I'm like, you have to be so deep online and so aggressive about your political posting to even interact with the Facebook moderation regime. The right wingers online and Zuckerberg himself is pretending he's accepted their fake narrative.

They were really cracking down and there was a lot of censorship. In most of the cases where it's not like porn or murder, it was just a little note at the bottom, it was a little fact check note. In most of the cases, content wasn't going to take it down. Even in those cases, you had to be saying really extreme or weird stuff. I post all the time. I'm a super poster.

I've never encountered a moderation regime in any way. I just think about what kind of stuff you would be posting to even know that this is happening. Most normal people, counter to moderation regime in any way. I just think about what kinds of stuff you would be posting to even know that this is happening. Like most normal people, this doesn't even affect them. It's like a small number of edge lord super posters that have now like taken control of the entire narrative about online censorship.

I agree with you on that. The one point of pushback I will have is, I think, as always, Instagram is the thing that's going to get forgotten in all of this. And I do think the changes, if we feel them at all, and this is the thing with all meta, Facebook, whatever changes, is they can be subtle and they can make a big deal out of them because they're subtle and your experience

will barely change, or they could be wild right and all of a sudden like every meta product is gonna look like x or 4chan or whatever we don't know but i do think especially like the inclusion of like you know not filtering out any politics stuff and by filtering what facebook means is like facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the channels if you showed interest in it it was just making sure answering what Facebook means is, like, Facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the channels if you showed interest in it. It was just making sure not to show it if you hadn't showed interest. Instagram's experience could change drastically if people are like, I just want to see, you know, like, Timothy Chalamet at the Golden Globes.

Like, I'm just into that. And all of a sudden, it's just like the worst people you've ever met in your life posting about. Yeah, exactly. Like that could piss a lot of people off. And I guarantee if that happens, he will come back and be like, they're pushing politics on us. Like it was the whole, you know, like post-election Trump won.

We're going to stay away from that. Like, as if he had no hand in it. Now that you mention it, this maybe says something of the type of content that I'm consuming. The only experience I've had with any meta content moderation is occasionally I see gays complaining that they have had their Speedo pictures censored by Instagram. So I don't know if the rules are changing on that. I think that maybe LaCivia Speedoo pictures are still gonna come under the, you know,

long arm of the content moderation law while posting the R slur is cool. I don't know, we'll see. I don't know. I mean, this stuff with X is, you know, he's been very against any kind of like sexualized content or nudity on all meta platforms. It's like been a very prude platform since the beginning of its existence.

Yeah, true. If you go on X, like X is just feeding you hardcore porn when you're not asking for it all the time. So I don't know if he's ready for that part of the, you know, free speech wing of the free speech party. Well, this is just a whole, this is like I've written so much about this. The whole moderation discourse is always so stupid because it's like, it's so hard. Yeah. I guess I should say this.

Like I, I consulted for Facebook for like a year, 15 years ago, and I had some overlap with the moderation team when I had to do PR and like, when you talk to people that are in charge of actual moderation, I mean, what they see every day is so insane. I mean, like the dregs of society, like just with the scale that Facebook has or Twitter, any of these things have, even random message boards, the scale a small message board has,

the amount of like gross porn, you know, murders, like stuff you would never want children to see on the platform, something the adults don't wanna see, stuff that they were showing at the end of the substance, which I suffered through last night, like teeth coming out of people's mouths and like racist stuff. Like it is so challenging to moderate all that, even with AI, even with technology. And so like this, if you turn down the notch on like kind of the automatic vetting, you know, of certain key words or key terms or key images. Like then the amount of shit you don't want to see elevates spam. I just shouldn't

include spam in there. And it becomes Craigslist. It's like, I literally becomes crazy. I remember Craigslist was a great place to like buy tickets or sell furniture and stuff now. And now it's like, the only thing on Craigslist is like scammers, like trying to steal your money and porn and weird stuff. It's a really good point because people don't realize, right, it all gets caught up in the censorship conversation and so much of the job. Like you said, everywhere on the internet from the smallest message board to whatever, like moderation is just, it's like people should think of it as like, okay, here's a

Starbucks, right? Like we have to clean the bathrooms, right? We have to wipe down the counters every night at the end of the day. It's like, that's what my- You can't let a naked person walk through the store. You can't let somebody like Blair with an iPad, like showing NC 17 cadaver porn. Like you can't walk into the Starbucks doing that, right? Like, or else people won't go to the Starbucks. And that's what it is. And, you know, occasionally there's an edge case, right? There's a guy who comes in who's playing by most of the rules,

but he's listening to his iPad too loud. And you have to say like, hey, man, sorry, can you turn down? And that becomes the censorship. Like, yeah, the edge cases are frustrating. It sucks. It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules. But you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space. It's just like,

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but I need to play this for you. Have you had a chance to see Joel Kaplan on Fox and Friends this morning? This is great. We're going to do it live. Joel Kaplan, for you who don't know, it's a long time Republican, kind of, you know, pretty normie Republican, traditional Bush Republican, but it was good friends with Kavanaugh. People say he was radicalized maybe as an overused term, but you know, quasi, you know, moved towards the MAGA direction after the treatment, what he felt like was unfair treatment of his friend Brett Kavanaugh, and that has been at Facebook for a long time. He's just elevated in his role, has been a long time opponent of the fact-checking regime

that his own company was doing. They made this announcement this morning, and the rollout was not to discuss it with, I don't know, my friend Savannah Guthrie over on the Today Show or something. His first interview is with Fox & Friends and I want to play a clip from it. There's no question that the things that happened at Metta are coming from Mark, but there's also no question that there has been a change over the last four years. We saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship, and we've got a real opportunity now. We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression. That makes a difference.

One of the things we've experienced is that when you have a U.S. president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world One of the things we've experienced is that when you have a US president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on US companies. We're going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world. Well, if Joel was here, I'd ask him how Trump's ass tastes, but since he's not and you're

here, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. Donald Trump, free fighter of free expression, wants to take away broadcast rights from people who criticized him, sued Bill Maher for calling him the son of an orangutan. He's got his new FBI director suing our friend, Olivia Troy for being mean to him on cable news. Just a free expression absolutist, lover of the first amendment, Donald Trump. That's why they're doing this, right? Charlie, just because they just are right in line with these first principles with the new administration.

Was that Fox Business or Fox News? Fox News. Okay. I thought it was Fox Business. I was like, that's really like, then you've really gone down the rabbit hole, man. I mean, that says it all, right? Like that really, to me, says it all, right? We're just, how do we get an audience with the big man, you know, before, without going to Mar-a-Lago, is clearly, let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about that.

I mean, I don't know. I get the whole pandering to Trump thing, but I almost feel like there's something real about it now. I wonder if the circles that Zuckerberg is, you know, hanging out in, like the proximity to like the MMA crowd. I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he is trying to pander necessarily to Trump. I think he likes to hang out with Dana White.

Can't be both hands? I think it can be both hands. There's a way to pander to him. And I think that that is signaling. I mean, I think he kind of did it pre-election, right? The Tim Cook style of pandering, right? The donate to the transition, send a nice tweet that's like, we look forward to working with President Trump, blah, blah, blah. I think this is slightly different. I mean, this really feels like we're actually tailoring the platform, we're actually restructuring our corporate governance to, you know, to do this. I don't know.

I mean, and then on the flip side, right? Trump said he wanted to, he potentially put Mark Zuckerberg in jail. So I guess the stakes are pretty high for him. Yeah, this is the point. I mean, Brian Stelzer writes this this morning, Matt is facing an antitrust trial in April. They've got business before the government.

Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison, as you just mentioned. I think that Zuckerberg can both be red-pilled and want to say, retarded, you know, like on his platform. I think that can be true. He can be like, uh, you know, trying to relive like boys state, you know, kind of like hang out with his new MMA bros and like you know want to say non-bc things and like he thinks that's cool. I think he can both feel that and also be like these this is easy pickings Trump

suck up stuff right like this is just like we can go on Fox, we can butter him up, I can go down to Mar-a-Lago, I can do the I can go from censoring insurrection material to put my hand over my heart as they sing the January 6th choir's rendition of the national anthem. You know, like I just think that like this can be both of those things at the same time. You're probably right about that. I think what is always true about the right these days in the past, you know, whatever 10 years, Trump will always turn on you. Obviously, we've seen that Trump will knife you in the back if it's convenient.

But I do think that there is a an acceptance like an eagerness to have somebody turn right like there's always been a joke that like I would, you know, hear when I was talking to other people who covered the far right, which is that like, tomorrow, I could, you know, be a right wing social media like influencer if I just, you know, sold my soul and just said like, you know, I worked at the New York Times and like, let me tell you, like, I'm the whistleblower, right? Like, like, it's such an easy path because they're so accepting of those people, right? Yeah. Where do you want to work?

You want to work at the free press? Do you want to go to Fox? Yeah. I mean, we could just I get you a promotion. I don't know what they're paying you over at the Atlantic. We could get you a we could get you a raise. And that's always been this like, you know, this this kind of joke that because they're so accepting of that type of person, right, as long as you're willing to sort of sell the entirety of your soul to that. And I think that that's always kind of a difference, especially that like, in the big tech space, right between Republicans and Democrats, like there is there's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg being one of the richest people on earth who has presided over Facebook for two decades now, there's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg, being one of the richest people on Earth

who has presided over Facebook for two decades now, there's really nothing he can do to, like, ingratiate himself. Like, even if he changes all of the policies of whatever, there's always going to be the balls and strikes of, you know, content moderation stuff. He's always going to be, you know, a capitalist billionaire. It's always going to be an annoying progressive complaining about him. I know, I know. Yeah, it's tough. It's tough. You're like, you're gonna always get complained

about, you know, there's nothing and there's nothing and if that bothers you, that's what the money's for. Right. But yeah, I think, you know, that it is like when you do break MAGA or whatever you want to call it, right, There is obviously Trump turns on everyone, but there is this kind of like, you know, OK, like you want to play. That's great. Like we will actually give you like sort of the blanket pardon as long as you, you know, walk the line. And I think that that's really like is must feel pretty nice for someone like Zuckerberg to just be like,

okay, all I gotta do is sell my soul, have Joel go on Fox once a week, talk about, you know, Trump being a crusader for free speech. And finally, I can just get some people who are just going to be like, hey, he's a good guy. Yeah, he's nice. He does he does a good job. Yeah, there's something to that. I've always said that it's one thing Democrats could learn from Trump is being a little bit, a little there's something to that. I've always said that it's one thing Democrats could learn from Trump is being a little bit a little bit more generous to converts. Maybe not this one, not the whole cult thing where if you put on the blue hat, then all

sins are forgiven and whatever. But like a little bit being a little bit more generous to people would probably help the Democrats political, the progressive political project in the long term. But that's for another day. Y'all there is obviously much uncertainty in the world with Donald Trump coming back into the White House. These big oligarchs are figuring out how to deal with it by sucking up to them. But regular people need to be thinking about this as well. And there's one thing that you can do that will bring certainty or at least

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kind of, it relates to this story in one way, right? Which is we don't exactly know how or what, to what degree, but one of the planks that Zuckerberg laid out today is that they wanna bring politics back to the newsfeed on Facebook, on Instagram, on threads. As you rightly pointed out, the Instagram part of it is potentially more interesting since Facebook is like an elderly message board right now

and threads has become very niche to say the least. So the Instagram part of this made those interesting. But to me, like that was the effective change. effective in air quotes, but like the change that made some difference after 2016, 2020 for Facebook more than the fact checking stuff was, let's kind of D rank some of this political stuff and, you know, get that out of the news feed and try to reemphasize Facebook's original mission of whatever people posting pictures of their friends at keg parties and like and emphasize those a little bit more and to change back, I think has some potentially dangerous consequences, particularly as it relates to your article about conspiracy theories around various hot button issues.

What do you think about that? I think that the changes could be small, right? And it could be sort of on the margin stuff that is going to sound really good to people like Donald Trump, and you're not gonna see that much of a difference, right? That's totally possible. It's also possible that this is a classic maneuver

by Facebook to push so far in the direction they historically don't seem to think through the externalities of what they're doing right like for me, the idea of you know, deranking some of this quality news, you know, whatever stuff, that's a big one. But for me, the biggest one was this focus on groups and communities, right and just throwing people together based on some of these shared interests. And, you know, every time that Facebook chooses to prioritize something really heavily, its algorithms are pushing people in this way that they don't really notice, right? They don't really totally

understand it's all of a sudden, unintended consequences is my classical Oakeshottian small C conservatism coming out. You know, you make a big change like that. You don't exactly know what's going to come out the back end. And I think, you know, you saw the sort of logical endpoint of all of that, right, was like Facebook's architecture was perfectly suited in 2020, late 2020, November, December 2020, to allow 10s of 1000s of people to gather around the Stop the Steal movement. Like if you remember, on

November, whatever sixth or something 2020, like I was watching the Stop the Steal Facebook group, somebody like in early in the morning was like, hey, you should check this out. This like election denying group has like 15,000 members. And then I went by the time I looked at it six minutes later, it had 50,000 members. And it's like that shit doesn't happen if you don't make a series of changes from 2018 all the way through to try to get, you know,

Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally into knitting groups and, you know, Rotary Club meetings and whatever. And so it's just like, I think that they make these. We met book clubs. We met book clubs, not insurrection. And so it's like this this kind of stuff has the potential for these really large kind of gnarly changes, because there are billions of people on this platform. And like if there's

one thing covering Facebook for as long as I have or meta or whatever we're calling it, is this idea that like they are so naive, or act at least so naive, as to how people like actually use the internet, like there's every time they talk about these changes and the way it works, it is always around the knitting club or just two people getting together, shaking hands and breaking bread and talking kitchen table issues.

Connecting cultures. From Malaysia to America, people are gonna be sharing recipes. It's like, no, actually, there's going to be a guy living in Malaysia that is sharing election fraud conspiracies. Again, that has a ton of interest. Or a bunch of guys in a room in Malaysia with 186 smartphones hooked up to a thing, like basically reposting each other's generative AI shrimp Jesus Facebook spam to trick grandma

and grandpa into thinking that, you know, I don't even know what but it's like people go on the internet. I have this like theory which is called like the toilet theory of the internet, which is that like most things that you see that either delight you and rage you whatever that are just posts by a human being are were probably like typed out with two thumbs on the toilet by somebody else like like the internet is very like it's wonderful. It's horrible. But it's also just like really quotidian. It's used by people all the time to stave off boredom in random moments. And like Facebook never sees that right.

It's always just the you know, the the breaking bread over the over the table, even though they know better. And I just think when you make these changes, especially when you make these sort of radical changes very quickly, the unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads 18 months down the line in like a totally unforeseen way. What are your other theories? I want to talk about a recent article was that the internet is not functioning so much as a brainwashing engine, but as a

justification machine that people find information to justify any pre-existing crazy view that they have. And I thought it was interesting your comparison between the January 6th conspiracies, how people initially were like, oh, it was Antifa. That's like, oh, the FBI did it, whatever they needed to find to justify the fact that they weren't the baddies. But comparing that to the 9-11 conspiracies and how it took a lot longer for them to bubble up, they bubbled up in more heterodox kind of ways because it happened, I mean, not pre-internet, but like the early, in the early internet before the social web. Talk about that.

I read this piece that came out on January 6th with this researcher, Mike Caulfield, who studies information environments and all the all the bad stuff. And the idea is basically that we're always thinking about misinformation as like, you know, again, Uncle Tim gets on his computer, sees a piece of misinformation, and all of a sudden, like, you know, oh yeah, like Hillary Clinton has babies trapped in the basement of a pizza parlor. Like, I believe it. I'm convinced now, the moon's made of cheese.

Yeah, and really what's actually happening is that it is keeping you locked in your beliefs. Like the misinformation peddling that's going on everywhere is to keep people from having to experience cognitive dissonance for having a piece of information come in and make them rethink their entire worldview. And January 6th is this great example of this, right?

Because we can't forget, like I saw them, on the four year anniversary, like dredging up tweets from Eric Erickson being like, shoot the protesters, right? Like all these people on the right saying, this is unconscionable, this is horrible, right? So there's this moment where like a crack lets the light in, right? And it's like, oh, are we the bad guys here? And this entire system spins up with these justifications, right?

Offering this parade of evidence so that people do not have to experience that cognitive dissonance. They get, oh, actually, yes, see, it was Antifa. Yes, there were, you know, FBI agents leading people in all that stuff. As we were trying to like think through this, you know, this idea, this theory, it's like, so, so what does that do to people, right? And it creates this stuckness, this, this like, inability to look backward or to hold people accountable. So, you know, with January 6, it's like, oh, no, we realized that, you know, it's, it was just like a big false flag situation or it was a peaceful protest or it was whatever, right? Our mind is made up. We're not going to go back. And so the January 6th, you know, committee commission was then framed, it was either completely ignored by you know,

right wing media institutions, or it was framed as a bunch of democratic scolds who are obsessed with the past who are hall monitors, who have Trump derangement syndrome, you know, blah, blah, blah. And there's this inability to look back because all we're doing is looking forward towards the new barrage of evidence that makes us feel, you know, like comfortable in our beliefs. And I mean, the reason why we compared it to the 9-11 stuff is the 9-11 commission, obviously, it wasn't like January 6, the 9-11 aren't completely analogous events, but they are both really visually intense attacks on the country. The 9-11 commission,

the report comes out, it's long, it's dense, it is a national bestseller for like four months, like over a million copies are sold. Like you can go back and take a look at it was a cultural event of people saying, let's get to the bottom of this thing. Let's look back at the history. Let's look at the way that this institution, Congress, investigated it and try to understand. And I mean, that had its own flaws, right? Like, it's not perfect going back. I mean, like they did some masking over some of the Saudi involvement and like still other little conspiracies bubbled up and another true pushback to that, you know, commission, you know, bubbled up. Like, that's like more of a natural course of Socratic public discussion. Jared Yeah, I'm not trying to say that any of these things are perfect on their own,

but just the difference between a cultural desire to look back and investigate this versus what happened with January 6th. And you had a lot of people, I'm sure a lot of people who, you know, listen to this podcast, who watched the hearings, who are interested, who felt that accountability was right and necessary. And I think it was. But there was also this huge golf of people who didn't fall in the MAGA category, who didn't fall in the watching it on MSNBC category, who are also just like, I'm just trying to live my life. I'm barraged with information all the time. And I, you know, didn't really pay attention to it. Like, culturally, the two events are so different in the way that they were analyzed and received. And I think, you know, where I ultimately fall with it, and this is maybe where it could be a stretch for some people, is in this world where we have this like justification machine just constantly humming, where there's barrage of evidence, it's really hard for the Democrats, say, to make the 2020 election a

battle for the soul of the nation, you know, like, it pins the hopes on something like January 6 being resonant four years later. And I think the way that information moves the way these ecosystems move, it's not as resonant as people would might want it to be right. History does not pull out as long as it used to. And I think that's just like a really brain scrambling thing to confront. It is the other element that I wanted to bring up that you mentioned the article that might like a really brain scrambling thing to confront. It is. The other element that I wanted to bring up that you mentioned in the article that might be a little brain scrambling for some of our listeners to confront is,

like, we're all susceptible to this, right? Like, so there's like this idea of wanting to find information that justifies pre-existing beliefs. And when you're in a, you're in this marketplace on social media where you have all these different outlets and all the people you can follow and unfollow people who are unpleasant to unfollow, right? Like it's very easy to find yourself in a hole. And one example you guys gave, which is obviously not a conspiracy on the level of Antifa did January 6th, but was this notion that Trump's momentum is losing. Trump is about to collapse.

Like that found huge purchase among people on the left, right? And we have to see this. I'll put my hand up. Like if we posted on YouTube, a poll that was like Trump's losing, like, and the views skyrocketed, right? Like that's a natural instinct, right? At some level, right? Like I use this comparison all the time. I listen to the nuggets podcasts after they win to hear the analysis more often than I do after they lose. So that's a natural human impulse. But people got to really believe this, right? And I've seen some people in our lives because they were only clicking on things that were showing Trump's weaknesses. And they convinced themselves like, oh, yeah, like, mega is dying. Like, mega is collapsing. even smart people really engage people I know

were saying this to me and going up into the election. And I think it's just because the same impulse to like look for something that justifies something that you want to be true so bad or that you believe to be true so bad. Yeah, there's certainly an asymmetry between the mega coalition and what's going on, but it happens everywhere.

And I think that it's like, we can't think of it as just like, we have to understand that this is what the media ecosystem is doing, whether we want to be that type of media consumer or not, and I think, and have less judgment about it happening when it's happening, you know, kind of in good faith. I'll see this all the time. A very small example of this in my own life is I'll see a piece of news pop up on social media in some way. And it's not that I'm trying to like find

a way to immediately discredit it. But if it's like kind of shocking to me, I'll be like, does this person, you know, know what they're talking about? Are they like an actual political reporter? Is this analysis? And sometimes, the initial instinct of me being skeptical of that is because it's a piece of information that doesn't make sense to my worldview. And sometimes it is bullshit. But sometimes it's actually just right. But that instinct of me going, you know, and being like, okay, so is this guy credible? It's good, but it's also

because of this idea of like, whoa, like we're not used to, we've sort of lost our defenses for information that makes us, you know, question our worldview a little bit. Pete Yeah, I'll, like, I'm the same, the other side of the coin is the same for me, more positive. Like in my nerdy, you know, politics and policy feeds that I follow, somebody is posting like, you know, if your colleague, Jerusalem Demses, who I love, is posting a, she's like, ooh, just read a new study, you know, showing that we need to build more housing in urban areas. You know, I'm like, oh yeah, I'm clicking on this. I want to get a couple of sentences I can use from the podcast, right? If I see somebody else, like an anti-immigrant person, it's like, I've got a new study out.

That's like, the real problem is that we have too many immigrants here that are taking up too many houses. I will either just not click on that at all or do what you're doing. Like click on that person and be like, this person's gotta be bad, right? I got to find some reason why this person's bad, right? Like that's just a natural, that's human. But these are like the Winnie the Pooh in the tuxedo version of the problem. There's some other people doing the same thing that are like people that are just like Winnie

the Pooh naked eating honey, right? So how do you even, how do you combat this? Right, yeah. Hurricanes aren't real. This has been the problem my entire career, right? I feel like I write things- You identify a problem and then you're like, sorry guys, here's the problem my entire career, right? Is like, I feel like I write things. You identify a problem and then you're like, sorry guys, here's the problem. But I do think like the person who has the, you know, the foolproof solution to that problem will probably win like a Nobel Prize because it will like save humanity to some degree. I mean, there's all kinds of things, right? There's the fixing different issues of media literacy, which is the boring and sort of, you know, eye rolling answer to that.

Clearly, we're not going to get any platform regulations, but also platform regulations are their own minefields. The way that I like to look at this issue, and I think I've said this in different places before, is the internet and the, you know, democratization of speech in this way, like think about multiple billions of people on Facebook at a given time. Like that is historic, right? In the sense of humanity, like we have not connected people in this way ever before. It is a media revolution on par with something like the invention of the printing press. And if you go back to that, that's centuries of tumult and disruption. And I think that like everything in the internet age, we will speed run that.

But I think like we are all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, how to process it. Like it is rewiring our relationships to each other and to ourselves. And I think that it's this long process, right? Where we develop new norms around how to communicate, how to share, how to do all these different things. It's a very unsatisfying answer, but I think when people

are like, what button can I push to make life more sane? It's like, there is no button. There's no net underneath. Like this is a new experiment for civilization to be doing this. And unfortunately for or maybe fortunately, I don't know. We're all sort of born and living in this time period of like massive, massive societal technological cultural disruption. And it's bunkers.

Yeah. And actually, we're going to spend the next four years not trying to fix it. So there's that. All right, we got to do crypto. There were two topics in your article that I want to cover really quick. One was you lead the article saying for years, crypto skeptics have asked, what is this for? Me among those skeptics. And for years, boosters have struggled to offer up

a satisfactory answer. They argue that the blockchain is itself a genius technological invention. I agree with that. But once you get beyond that, the question is what value do these coins provide for people that don't want to use them to commit crimes? Your answer to this is that maybe the purpose that crypto has found for itself is that

it is a cultural one where it's serving a need that certain people have to oppose incumbent interests. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I mean the very nature of like if you go back and you read the bitcoin white paper, which I don't really suggest anyone does, it's only like 11 pages, but it's pretty dry. It's a hard 11 pages. If you read it, like, obviously it's not overtly political, but it is a political notion to want to build a technology that, you know, circumvents the need for middle men or middle institutions, or it's basically, you know, trying to come up with a decentralized form of global finance, right? That in itself is just it's an anti institutional idea. And that

technology when it first, you know, came out and no one was really caring about it, except for like, engineers and super nerds. And I mean that, you know, in a loving way, like those types of people are like techno cyber libertarians, right? They are people who want that sort of democratization, who have a healthy skepticism of institutions and authorities and power and would like a technological tool to circumvent all that. So those are a lot of the people who had an early investment in Bitcoin, who got in, you know, on the ground floor. And by the ground floor, I mean the real ground floor, and the people who have, you know, 100,000 X returns on their investment at the moment, and who have been made incredibly rich, then you have a lot of the other like speculator class and

people like that. But so many of the people who have been on this bandwagon for a long time, got in, not necessarily just because it was like a really good speculative asset. They got in because of this sort of ideological rooted connection. Those people being made really rich, like they are now a meaningful political constituency because of their money. And that influence in this moment is another like really big cultural factor in our like-institutional moment. And I think that the Democrats had a miss here. I mean, I'm for crypto regulation

for the reason that I wanna close the top of the pod with, but the kind of like disdain of it or like this desire to attack it from being the institution, like taking on the guard of the Democrats or the protectors of the big institutions. That is just a bad place to be in politics, in a changed world. Couldn't just put setting the merits of this aside, because Trump didn't give a fuck about

this. Trump would have been happy to regulate crypto, to get rid of crypto, to whatever. It's not like any of the him or the core people, well, now the new core of Andreessen and them care, but like the original MAGA crowd doesn't have strong crypto things. Trump like, saw he could make money on it and so did. And there is then just like a general laissez faire. It's like, oh, all these libertarian anti-establishment crypto bros

who are probably culturally kind of liberal But like like their crypto asset they're for me because I say i'm not gonna f with them like gary guensler has And like I think that that was a meaningful Swing demo not like a decisive one but for for trump this time Oh, definitely and it has so much overlap, right with the Not not even the manosphere but sort of like the, you know, the bro podcast sphere that, you know, that he was going on and trying to court.

Like there's an overlap there. So there's a whole culture that, you know, I mean, really during the pandemic is when it kind of took its form that it has now and through, you know, the whole like GameStop and SBF and all FTX, all that stuff that happened in the last couple of years, you know, the laser eyes meme kind of stuff, like sort of edgelordy culture that formed around it has a lot of overlap, right? Because it is anti-authority, anti-institution. It is sort of like people on X who, you know,

want to use words they feel like, you know, would get them canceled in, you know, polite liberal spheres. There is an overlap with that audience. So I think it was actually very smart for the Trump campaign to court that, to adopt that. I also think that when I would like to have been in the room the first time that someone actually explained like crypto and not like the blockchain, but I mean, like, you know, the world of speculative asset trading

and money laundering and stuff and yet Trump coin and all that to him, because I'm sure his eyes got like really wide because it's like basically like, if Donald like finance Donald Trump's way, right? Like, oh, I can, you know, I can get people to give me sort of like in kind political contributions by, you know, by investing in my coin and I can have my son be like the head of research for this, you know, dubious startup based in, you know, a garage in Palm beach. Like sweet. I can plant my logo on something, but it's just online now. I don't even have to put it on a building.

I can put it on like an internet thing and then people will pay me to put my, to put my, you know, face on it. Amazing. I'm sure he was like, this is like made for me, right? But I agree with part of what you said with the, you know, it shouldn't be treated in like a in a change world. It shouldn't be treated by Democrats with this like gross sort of sustain, like turn off the people for whom crypto is like the one, you know, thing that they're voting.

They're the single issue crypto voter. Like it's probably not a great idea. But I think we're we might be going with this conversation, like there is a really large concern when it comes to like, I'm not like a defender of like big investment banks by any stretch, but I also think like in commingling our financial system with the most volatile speculative assets ever really to exist is like a freaking nightmare.

And that is where we might be headed under a Trump administration. It is. That's our final topic. People should read the article. There's also Trump corruption stuff that we could spend a ton of time on. A Chinese national cryptocurrency entrepreneur recently bought $30 million worth of tokens in Trump's shit coin, for one example. So there's much more that came from the link in the show notes.

Um, but here's my last note on my Google doc for this podcast. I wrote in all caps because I just hadn't really thought about this that much. I just, you know, I read about crypto stuff, but like, once you get deep into the crypto, like regulatory elements, it hadn't set in for me until I read your article. Letting big banks commingle with crypto would be insane. Did nobody read the big short? Really? It is wild that there is not going to be just some basic regulations and guardrails. I honestly forget like you in regulating crypto, but just

preventing the banks that are too big to fail, that cause the great recession from being exposed to this type of risk asset. For that piece, I talked to this researcher named Molly White who studies, reports on, is deep in the crypto world and the regulation stuff and all this. And this was her like red flag concern, which is basically like, think about when FTX crashed, right? It was a, you know, an exchange that was insolvent, the bottom fell out, a lot of people lost everything. Most of the people who

do lose everything are the people who have the least right like the whales usually don't lose at all. They're diversified, whatever. It was a terrible thing for a lot of people. It was totally contained, though, from the global financial system. It was not like, you know, when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages that all of a like, you know, when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages that all of a sudden, you know, we end up with, you know, bankers in the street, you know, lighting their little boxes of their desk stuff on fire. That is what, like, protects us right now. Like, you can be for all of this, you know, I want a decentralized currency, it's easier to send money to people in different countries. I like the culture around it. I be for all of this, you know, I want a decentralized currency.

It's easier to send money to people in different countries. I like the culture around it. I like to essentially gamble on the price of Bitcoin, like all that stuff. Hey, like if I get it right. Sure. Exactly. But the idea that like a bunch of people are going to like pump and dump into this into this currency that, you know, it's going to like pump and dump into this into this currency that you know, it's going to be there's no guardrails between Citibank's holdings in you know, this realm and in the crypto realm and the fact that like if we do have another FTX style collapse of some kind and this realm of like of crypto finance too, is

just it's the Wild West, like you just have I mean, you have so much money laundering going on so many people using it for crimes. It's not to say that the traditional world of finance is great. But like to have those things together in that sense, and then to have you know, a potential global financial crisis, because all these banks have FOMO and don't want to miss out on, you know, you know, giving their clients access to something like this because, you know, their son likes to trade it on Coinbase.

Like all of that is just it's maddening. It's like freaky. And so I think like that is the place where I think you could find reasonable democratic opposition, which is to say like, hey, it's a free country, but like, we don't want people losing their shirts and not even investing in it. We need basic protections for retail investors, retail, and that includes retail hawk to a coin investors. Like everybody. And they're a legion. Like that's a fine place to be, you know, as long as you're not just kind of throwing

away a growing demographic, despite one that is a little confusing to me. I was about to let you go, but I have one breaking news item. Trump says we're changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Is that real? Is that real? That's something for people to think about overnight and they can Google for themselves whether or not that's real. Could be real, could be fake. Who knows in the world of the new Facebook algorithms? And why would it matter? Why would we need to correct it if it were untrue? No value in that.

Charlie Warzel at The Atlantic. Check out his work. It's so good. Come back soon. Thank you. Later, man. Made it way too efficient Made us a giddy pig It did it with no commission Told her to call a friend Didn't tell her to listen So very scary So buy an eric 201 Like all the slang On my generic I dream in color Not black and white You sell your daughter on that day This dream don't funny make it hit

No, humans don't understand Humans will sell a lie Humans gotta survive We know we gon' die Nothing can live forever You know we gon' drive Life isn't really worth it The algorithm is perfect Everybody, everybody Now do we know here's something That's gonna make you move? In movements, don't you step too low Our rival, moving heart, this ain't so

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