The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sacha Baron Cohen Speech at Anti-Defamation League on Social Media

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

Sacha Baron Cohen Speech at ADL on Social Media

TheChrisVossShow.com. TheChrisVossShow.com. Hey, come in here with another podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Go to TheCVPN.com or Chris Voss Podcast Network. You subscribe to the eight different podcasts we have there and check them all out and all that good stuff and subscribe. If you would, also refer the show to your friends

so that your friends can take and subscribe if you would also refer the show to your friends so that your friends can subscribe as well uh so normally we talk about like tech news what's going on technology world sort of good stuff but uh we kind of have one that's kind of on the same vein but maybe a little bigger on the picture of uh the big picture if you will there you go uh so anyway let's talk about what's going on uh you can also go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss, uh, and, uh, subscribe to the show and things there. We're multi-cast, uh, multi-casting this out on multiple platforms right now using restream.io. So this should be interesting to see how this comes out the other end, as it were. It's kind of like that time you, uh, eat burritos or tacos. You're just like, I don't know how this is going to end when it comes out the other end, as it were. It's kind of like that time you eat burritos or tacos. You're just like, I don't know how this is going to end when it comes out the other end, but there it is.

So there's that. So a few days ago, I watched a video of Sacha he was giving a speech, winning an award there. And that is the Defamation League that he was giving a speech to. And in giving the speech, he was taking and speaking about social media, Facebook. As you know, a lot of stuff has been coming out about Facebook recently, and some of it is kind of interesting on how it's going. So let's talk about what he talked about. I'm going to cover some of the different points he had in front of the group and also what he talked about and some of my thoughts. And hopefully at the end, maybe we can come to some ideas on how to either utilize or abandon this platform of Facebook, social media, what it's doing to us, and maybe how to take power back into ourselves. With the Anti-Defamation League that he spoke to, it was a powerful speech, and I highly recommend that anyone who is in my audience give it a listen. It's a good 20, 25 minutes, but it's a very powerful speech. It's a very thought-provoking

speech. And honestly, for my money, I think it's probably the best 25 minutes you can spend your time watching just about anything on social media, at least this week. If not, the impeachment hearings might hold a higher bearing given our democracy. But there might be people listening around the world that were wrapped. You know, I started in social media in 2008 when I joined Twitter. And then it was this, you know, blogging had become huge about that time. And it had become these platforms where suddenly everyone could have a voice. Everyone could spout their opinion, could become, um, an authoritarian, uh, authoritarian on their figure. They can become authority if you will, on their, on their, um, discussions,

what they thought, uh, they, you know, they could write books, they can give speeches. Um, it became a platform where people could start could start, you know, pushing their views, theirBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, all that sort of good stuff. It took away the power from them at having the only voice. And it created millions upon millions, if not billions of voices that can now be heard and listened to by anybody who wanted to listen to them and follow them. And suddenly, you know, instead of having, when I grew up, there was three king cooks in the kitchen. There was ABC, NBC, and CBS, and they dominated the news with their coverage. And if you wanted to learn anything, you, on television, you tuned into them. And if you wanted to read anything, you turned into some of the biggest newspapers in the country, the Washington Post, the New York Times, all that sort of good stuff

that you would use. Now, everyone has a platform. Everyone's delivering what their version of the news is. And certainly, the reporting standards and the standards of journalists, and usually most journalists go to school for this sort of thing. They learn. There's a whole, I think, handbook on journalism and everything that people learn. And the standards have just been thrown out the window. It's just anybody with a platform and a blog and now anybody with a social media account or YouTube channel

or now on Facebook you can do your videos has the ability to spout whatever they want. When I joined social media, it was this utopia of a dream where there was this democratization of opinion and voices and everyone could be heard and no longer were governments totally in control. And there was this utopia that would bring us all closer together, that we could create that environment that John Lennon talked about where all the world works together. And it was great because it did bring the world closer together. It brought us all close together where we started moving one as a humanity, as opposed to, you know, territories and countries and tribalism of going, well, my country is better than your country. And, uh, you know, for me, for the first time, it opened up the ability to sell around the world, to have international clients, um, and, and be able to get to know people. I mean, now I have more friends in other countries, probably just as much as I have friends in this country.

And, uh, and I can hear their perspectives and I can learn about things. Um, I've had, I have friends that are Muslims and I've learned a lot about, um, their perspective from,

from being Muslims and some of the, uh, misconstrued ways that they're, um, presented sometimes by people who want to take and use them as straw men or as evil, or, you know, point them out as that's the bad person over there. Um, which everyone seems to be at the end of that finger these days. So that was a utopia and the dream was alive and everybody was in it. And for several years, it was really beautiful.

And let me talk about this too. Back then, we kind of controlled social media. Back then, Twitter kind of followed whatever. Oh, you guys want to retweet? Okay. Well, I guess everyone's doing that. So I guess we'll do it. Same thing with hashtagging.

With YouTube, the big dream was you get on YouTube. Yeah, I remember the day when I could put up videos. And the quality of your video, the quality of your content, determined whether people liked it or not. And YouTube let people determine whether it liked it or not. If it got a lot of likes, if it got a lot of views, it would rise to the top of the trending charts. And you could go to the page, and you could see what everyone in the world had said,

this is a good video, you should watch it. Now over time, what's happened with social media is they've developed algorithms and all sorts of different ways to control the systems. And now it's become more of a part where they're in control. They've figured out what motivates us, what gets our hot buttons going, what gets us driving, what makes things go viral, especially negative items in the happenings of the world and stuff. So it kind of went from this utopia to this very dark sort of place. And we saw that in 2016 with the election where, uh, and, and this also

happened in England with the Brexit where Russia had come in and countries are now meddling in elections and using social media against us, using targeting, using ads, et cetera, et cetera, to manipulate us. Uh, and even, we even saw the worst case scenario was the genocide that happened using Facebook with posts from Miramar's military where literally it created a genocide in modern history where we thought we put this to bed with Hitler and Nazism and all that sort of good stuff. And, of course, now we've seen the rise of Nazism, white nationalism, which is Nazism when it comes down to it. Uh, they've just rebranded it. Uh, and, uh, now we have all these problems and all these issues with social media and everything that's going on. So let's, let's, let's, uh, it, it, it kind of started out as a place where everyone had a voice. Um, but the problem is with great power comes great responsibility.

And the ability to abuse that voice is now highly prevalent and probably a leading voice in social media. There's so much disinformation. There's so much conspiracy thinking. No one knows. It's become a real dissolution of what the truth is. And now it's more opinion and more what people think or want to subscribe to as opposed to what truth is.

And that's one of the things we've lost, the democratization of this medium. So let's talk about a few different things and some of the stuff that and and some of the stuff that uh sausage baron cohen talked about in his speech uh but let's establish something that's really clear that i i just want to get through to people i get anytime i see somebody post this it just makes me want to go but there you go um free speech is not free reach was something that one of the points that sasha made in his thing. It's really important people to note, especially those of you who post on social media, they're regulating our free speech. We have the free speech to say whatever we want.

Now, in America, you are given the First Amendment rights. I can't speak for all the countries around the world, but you're given the first amendment rights to say what you want and assemble in the public square. That's the public square. Um, if you're on social media, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, uh, anywhere really on the internet, you are on private property. Now the internet's kind of open to everybody, but you know, I mean, there, there are different providers. If I do something on go daddy, that's extremely whatever and they're hosting my website and they decide they don't want to host me anymore, they can dump me. Same thing we've seen that with Cloudflare has done that to Gab AI. What's the other website that they took down that was part of the Jewish Philadelphia killings?

8chan, 4chan? I can't remember. They've been trying to reiterate that thing to revive that platform. I believe it was 8chan or 4chan. It was 4chan and then they made 8chan and that's where all the racists went. So I think it was 8chan. So you can do stuff to get disabled. And, you know, for the most part, these large companies, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, are in fact private companies.

The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, does not apply First Amendment rules to private properties. If I come on your property or you come on my property and start spouting a bunch of hate, anger, and whatever against me, I can have the police come and remove you from my property. If I want to evict you from my property, I can do that as well. So can Twitter, so can Facebook, so can YouTube and other different platforms that are out there that are private property. Now you have the right to go rant in the street. You can stand in the street in front of my house and round it, round to me, but you cannot do it on my property. And this is the thing that I think a lot of people don't get, or they think that they're entitled to and they're completely wrong. So, uh, if you're a person who

believes that or is constantly posting that they're trying to limit free speech and this is a free speech issue or what we're going to discuss here on the show um it is not a free speech issue stop it knock it off you're just you're just exhibiting how stupid you are from the get-go so don't don't be that guy um so how did how did this go from becoming this beautiful thing like Facebook where, you know, we have this, uh, uh, platform that was pretty much built for cutesy kids picks for grandma to tune in, get the whole family together and see how Johnny's growing up or how my dog's going. How has it now turned into a platform that, uh, people seek to, seek to stoke genocide, white nationalism, racism, xenophobia.

Pedophilia is like huge on the internet. It is crazy out of control. If you've read some of the news reports on it, they can't stop pedophilia fast enough. And it is scary. It is scary what's going on out there. And so let's talk about what this is. So the algorithms of these platforms, instead of being built like they were originally in the dream sort of state that we were in, this utopia that we were in, like it's all going to become one world.

You know, we were seeing the Arab Spring where countries were going, hey, we're tired of our leaders. Let's overthrow them and use social media to overthrow them. Now it's turned into something very ugly and very different. And I would pose to you that now social media is being used against us. Let me repeat that. It used to be that we had the ability to control social media, that we influenced it, that we were kind of largely in control of it. Now it's being used against us.

Their algorithms feed on our emotions. They feed on our hot buttons. They give us whatever they can give us to trigger it. Everything is designed to create content on the platform. You see something, it makes you angry, it stimulates your emotion. Then you type something, and then someone types something, and you argue with them. And then all the while, the six billionaires that Sasha Baron Cohen talks about in his ADL speech are sitting back collecting money because they're watching you give all the

data about yourself, what you think, what you feel, and then they go sell it to advertisers who target you based upon all that stuff that you're talking about on social media. They're sitting back. And I know this for a fact because on my YouTube back in the day before Google Plus killed everyone and all the commenters and everything and wiped the commenters from the database mostly for a while there, they forced everyone to join google plus um and uh before that we would have these huge wars in my comment sections where i would do videos of which is better you know iphone uh version this and google android version that or lg uh you know

all the different comparisons of phones and they would have phone wars on my YouTube channel. Like it was going on a style and my views would go through the roof. My comments go through the roof, likes and dislikes. But, um, I would have people write me and go, do you know, there's like a nuclear world war three going on in your comment stream of YouTube on your video, which is better Samsung Samsung Galaxy this or iPhone that, and people are just going head to head. And I'd sit back, just like Mark Zuckerberg does, just like the heads of Google do, just like the people that run YouTube, just like the people who are on Twitter.

And I would sit back and go, yeah, I know they're all fighting, and it's bloody. And every time they do that, I make money. I make pennies every time they show up. And, you know, I used to have people on YouTube that would write me and go, you have fat fingers. You're a fat guy. You're going to die. You're horribly unhealthy, you know, and whatever they're saying at me from their mom's basement. You know, you're fat, you know, and people would write me and be like, do you, you know, those people are calling you ugly names and stuff.

I don't care. Every time they show up to write something hateful about me, they're actually paying me to say it to me because they're watching ads, they're playing the video, and of course that gives it more distribution, and I'm laughing all the way to the video. And of course that gives it more distribution and I'm laughing all the way to the bank. So I know this for a fact, because this is the way I make money. In fact, maybe if you're commenting on this video on the platform right now, you're helping me make money. So good for you. Um, and, and maybe you're disagreeing with me, but, uh, if you're playing this video, I'm making money doing it. And that's how Zuckerberg and all these big platforms operate.

They don't give a crap about necessarily what's on them until enough consumers say, hey, we don't want this on the platform. And here's the deal. And Sasha Baron Cohen talks about this in the speech. A private business has the right to throw people out. Now, if you come into my company or any given companies in the world, it's a private property. Even if it's Starbucks, even if it's your favorite McDonald's or whatever, they have a right to come to you and go, we don't want to serve you. In fact, you may see in their windows, we have the right to refuse service. By law, companies do have the right to refuse service. So if you come into their building,

they can say, hey, we don't want you here. Now, technically, the way this works is we as a society all decide, for the most part, what's right or what's wrong or what's socially acceptable or what we want to have around us. So we have the right as a society to boycott or strike against the business and say, we don't want to be, you know, we don't want you serving, you know, white nationalism people around us or Nazis around us. We don't want certain things around us. We don't want pedophiles in our environment of Starbucks because, you know, whatever. And so at that point,

a business has to make the decision. Do we ban this group of people because this larger group of people doesn't want it banned? Or do we try and serve everyone and make everyone happy, but that makes these people uncomfortable so they won't show up? And so businesses have to make this decision. It's a very big decision they do. But unfortunately for social media businesses, they don't have to care that much. There's very little law that regulates them and it's very hard to stand up to them when they have billions and billions of users. You know, we've seen groups that have stood up and called out Twitter, called out Facebook for allowing some of these things to do. But largely, the response has been, especially from Mark Zuckerberg, if you saw his recent Georgia speech, is like, well, we don't want to restrict anyone's voice

because all voices are important and all opinions are important. And it's important to, you know, see what's going on so that you can address it and understand it. Well, the thing that Sacha Baron Cohen brings up is these platforms give racism, hate, and bigotry, the largest propaganda machines in history. When you really think about it, they really do. You can go viral in a moment and you can spread a message of hate, racism, or bigotry incredibly quickly. We've seen people that have basic, and Sasha Baron Cohen references,

have basically put up snuff films where they are filming live on Facebook them killing people and murdering them in cold blood. And it's getting promoted millions and millions and probably sometimes billions of times across the network before it's finally shut down. Now, if I showed you a snuff video at home, you'd probably call the police. If you came over to my house,

if I showed you a snuff video in a movie theater, you'd probably call the police and I'd probably be arrested. But somehow it's okay to put it on Facebook and for that to be distributed as it were. So, uh, Sasha, let's go through some of the points that Sasha Baron Cohen made, and then we'll discuss it further. Um, just, he makes a comment. I think this comes from an article that someone wrote, just think what Joseph Goebbels could have done if he had had facebook we've seen the awesome power that russia can do to throw an election and have influence over people's

opinions and attitudes imagine what joseph goebbels and hitler could have done if they'd had facebook they could have literally instead of conquering the world country by country as they did in europe they literally could have just run ads on Facebook and then tagged into everyone's deep closeted prejudices, maybe their opinions of Jewish people. And in doing so, maybe they could have won over the world and dominated and gotten away with everything they're doing. Right now, the perfect example of that is right now, China is doing the same thing. China has one of the largest, uh, genocidal sort of repression prisons going on right now. Uh, they're harvesting their parts. Uh, there's a huge, uh, report that

leaked out today that is talking about, uh, uh, exposing all the different things that are going on in China. So this is happening today. The Miramar genocide happened. This isn't something that we need to close our eyes anymore and go, no, it can't happen anymore. That happened like 50 years ago or 60, 70 years ago. It can't happen again. No, it can. And what's given rise to it is social media is the vehicle that these new hate groups are driving.

If you look at the Southern Poverty Law Center's hate tracker, the hate groups are growing. They're becoming more powerful. They're getting larger followings. White nationalists, the KKK and Nazis are using social media. Even places where a lot of this sort of stuff is illegal to even talk about or raise the Heil Hitler symbol sign. In Germany, Germany of all places that has worked really hard to keep this from rising again is now having a surgence of this right-wing craziness, et cetera, et cetera. So, uh, one of the things Sasha points, let's go through some of the things that he pointed out. Uh, he pointed out the rantings of a lunatic are now weighted the same as a Nobel prize winner. You have people that can just go on Facebook and start claiming that

there's a certain chemicals in vaccinations that cause autism or that cause this or that cause that, and everyone should stop doing that. We recently saw the result of that where suddenly toddlers and everything were getting the measles. There were huge outbreaks that were shutting down schools. And somehow, you know, you've just got anybody who has an opinion is suddenly a scientist on social media, especially if they can get enough followers, if they can make a crazy enough conspiracy theory and crazy enough, you know, there's, there's always some weak mind that they can find that would be like, yeah, that's probably true. Yeah. I want to believe that.

So let's run with it. Um, how did we get this far from truth from people that are experienced and the Dunning Kruger effect? If you haven't got a chance to look that up, the power of people who know the least are usually the most confident in their ability to believe what they have as knowledge or what they think is knowledge is true. And the more an expert knows, the more he realizes he does not know as much as he should, and there is always more to learn. And in science, the same. Scientific theory is theory.

So therefore, it's always open to, uh, being developed or being challenged when it comes down to it. But we have these people that form these opinions, the form, these theories, these conspiracy theories, and they go, ah, this is, you know, reality, nine 11, blah, blah, blah. So here's, here's the biggest problem that we have with it. Um, it gives the most reprehensive reprep, reprehensive people. Let me see if I can get that right. Uh, access to about a third of the planet, according to Sasha Baron Cohen. He talks about how now we have a less educated society that is inherently more lazy. Um, and they're better at picking up, uh, parroting talking points. They're easily perverted by their ignorant bias. Most people are.

I mean, it's become a platform where people are just looking to make their beliefs, make their attitudes, make their bigotry or their racism more resolute by just finding other people who like them. And it's become this platform where people are binding together and giving hate to more ignorance, stupidity, racism, and all this hate. The other thing he talks about, he talks about how there are six unaccountable billionaires controlling these platforms. They manipulate us to increase their share price like what we talked about. And basically, in my opinion, what we're left around now is we're basically mice running around a maze.

It's the same sort of power that you saw in the early century with William Randolph Herbst controlling most of the major newspapers in the country. He eventually ran for president. And by doing so, he could take and control the medium. And politicians, everyone had to kind of bend his way and make him happy unless they wanted to be destroyed by his papers or king made by his papers. But now we have these billionaires that are running these huge, huge entities. One book that I recommend everyone get a chance to read, it's a book called The Elite Charade of Changing the World. It's by Anand, I can't pronounce his last name, Anand G. And if

you just search for The Elite Charade of Changing the World, it talks about how the elite have this attitude that they're going to make these huge systems, they're going to help change the world and make it better. And the incredible narcissistic way of that, the narcissism, actually ends up creating more problems than fixing them. And so that's kind of what we have. There are people that are denying the Holocaust, and the people who are denying different things like that are the people who are denying different things like that are the people who want another one because they have racial prejudices, religious prejudices, et cetera, et cetera, things for hate. So on top of that, you see the theory of white replacement.

And, you know, so it comes down to do we want to give these people a platform to push their views? So what do we do? How do we get down to it. Do we want to give these people a platform to push their views? So what do we do? How do we get down to this? How do we make social media so it's not a hate bully pulpit? Even recently, we just saw that a new article, I think it was yesterday, got published in The Guardian. White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook and they won't get it. So what you have, and you've seen this in discussions with Mark Zuckerberg, is he wants to give everyone a voice because it's money in the bank to him. It's power.

It's direct marketing that he can sell to advertisers to go, Chris Voss thinks this way about this, and here's how you can market to him. You can drill down to his core beliefs, his closet and attitudes about some sort of topic, whatever it is. And you can target him and exploit his emotions and whatever he has and sell him product. That's what all this is about. I mean, what do they always say about just about anything? Follow the money. That's what you see. One thing that's disturbing about Mark Zuckerberg is lately, and it came out recently in meetings at Facebook,

he was very disturbed by Elizabeth Warren calling for the breakup of Facebook. He's running into political pressure from, I believe, all, it's either 47 or all 50 attorney generals have signed on for a monopoly investigation into Facebook and how it operates and everything else. That's bipartisan because they're both Democrat and Republican attorney generals that are on board with that lawsuit. It's more of an investigation, I believe, right now. But he's having to deal with this. He's having to deal with calls for new laws like Sasha

Baron Cohen did, where we need to have laws that hold these guys responsible that may put people in jail that, uh, that say, Hey, you know what you, you, you can't do certain things. If certain hate is on your site, you've got to take and remove it, et cetera, et cetera. Now I'm going to have some people on the show over the next coming week. I've got two people coming on that are going to bring some debate, some of their perspectives, this sort of thing. And one of the issues that came up was how do we deal with this? I mean, what, what do we say is bad and what do we say is not, but let me get back to, if I can back step real quick to Mark Zuckerberg recently came out, he was meeting with Trump, uh, with, uh, Peter Thiel, uh, who, uh, is a big Trump fanatic.

Uh, recently Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook sponsored the, um, uh, uh, our attorney general bar, uh, speaking at the federal society. If you're not familiar with who they are, do your Googling. Um, but they're into all these right-wing conspiracies and right-wing control, et cetera, very right-wing, in fact. And, you know, you're starting to see where he's playing both sides. He's playing both sides against each other and trying to make sure that they both have a weighty voice.

And then just like any other politician, what he's doing is having us all fight amongst ourselves as to what he should do. And in the end, nothing gets done and he wins. And he just sits and smiles and goes ka-ching, ka-ching. Everything is cashing in my bank account. And that's really what these guys are doing. The algorithms that we used to take control, that we used to put up and go, this is the greatest video to watch are now controlled by them. They're now controlled by advertisers. A lot of YouTube trending videos are paid ads where they have paid to get those, uh, artists, music, uh, movies to the top of the trending charts.

And so really those aren't true sort of like well this is the most popular no this is the most popular because somebody paid to drive it there and um and so now these algorithms play with us they go hey your friend is talking about some high emotional stuff that everyone's getting angry about you should go over and look at it here you go boom there's that thing we know that'll trigger tree and you'll go over there and it'll create a whole different thing. I've always thought it was kind of interesting. Anytime I use the word unfriend, I'm unfriending a bunch of people on Facebook. Anytime I use that line, that post will go through the roof. It will get seen by everybody. But if I put up just about anything else, it usually gets buried. Try putting

YouTube, uh, the word YouTube, on your Facebook post. Yeah, no one will see that thing, especially if you post the video. So now social media is manipulating us. Now these services are manipulating us. We are the mice in the maze running for the cheese, the viral cheese. We're like, how can I go viral? How can I get people listening to me more? And we live in this world where we always want to be heard.

We want to be important. We want to have the power of our voice. We want to be recognized. And everybody wants to have that. But now we live in this world where we're like trying to get noticed. We're trying to say something edgy. We're trying to say something controversial. We're trying to say something controversial. We're trying to do something viral. And these algorithms have manipulated us into being these Pavlovian dogs that jump and go,

I want to be viral. I want to be this. I get this from companies all the time. We want to do something that goes viral. How much money do you have? We have $100 in our budget. Do you understand what's going on? And so sometimes they look for controversial things to go viral and do things.

Sometimes it doesn't have to be perfect. We kind of saw Elon Musk do that this week. He put up a real shitty prototype of a vehicle and knew everyone would be like, this is a shitty prototype vehicle, and now he's sold $8 billion worth of pre-sales. And everyone else who's putting a better product to market uh that's that's more prepared and not in prototype mode is sitting there going what the fuck so um i think we have to recognize that we are the mice in the maze now and that we are being manipulated that facebook no longer is a place for grandma to tune in and see, uh, your kids pictures

and stuff. And in fact, a lot of people moved the Instagram because that's probably a better place for it. Now, grandma is, or grandpa is ranting at the top of her lungs about how a white replacement is going on. And you know, her ex white daughter is marrying someone of a different race and blah, blah, blah. And posting all this hate it's turned from this beautiful utopia that we used to have to something that's very dark and negative. So what do we do about it?

I've had friends like my friend, Mike Elgin, who recently, I think he took like six months announcing he was leaving Facebook, uh, telling her he was leaving and to go to his website or go to other platforms. What do we do with this? That's, I think, the thing that we, first we have to recognize what's happening to us, that we are being manipulated and sold for everything we believe in, everything we talk about, everything we're posting, and that we're being manipulated by these algorithms. So we have to decide, are we going to be the mice running around, scurrying around where Mark Zuckerberg is controlling us and everything,

or are we going to take the power in our own hands? And there are several different things we can do. We can leave the platform like Mike did. And like a lot of my friends did, there's a lot of my friends who have left the platform. There's a lot of my friends who, who left the Twitter platform because they claim it was too toxic. And certainly the interesting thing about Twitter, you know, I think the reason most people think Twitter is too toxic is because with Facebook, really the only people who can mostly interact with you, depend upon your privacy settings are set up, are your friends. You know, my group, my circle is going to see my posts on Facebook. It's very rarely going to get outside of that group. About the only time that very rarely going to get outside of that group.

About the only time that I've seen it get outside of that group is if I post a news item and it hits the top trending in news and I'm like in the top four of that list. And then all of a sudden I've got like, who are all these people coming in? But for the most part, it's us. But with Twitter, you're exposed to the whole world unless you set your privacy settings where no one else can see him but your friends uh but for the most part if you're posting on twitter you're exposed to the whole world and their replies their attitudes and everything else and their judgment so i think

that's why people like twitter as much so recognize that when you're hitting on twitter just realize what it is um and why it, and maybe that can empower you. So we could use these tools to evade them and say, we're not going to be on Facebook anymore. But then grandma's upset. She's like, why isn't Joey on Facebook? She's not part of the family anymore. Or what we can do is take control of this medium. We can take it back.

We can pass laws. We can elect officials that will pass laws to say, hey, there's certain things we don't want. Now, one of the things that came up when I was discussing this on Facebook was some of my friends started giving me the whataboutism. What about this? Well, we can't do this. And what about that? What about this? There are certain things in our society that I think we can decide are so toxic, that are so evil, that they have no place in our public forums when it comes to Facebook. And I shouldn't say public forum because it's a private property, but our forums that are largely public, like racism. Racism has no place in our society. Genocide, killing other people, harm to other people, etc., etc.

Pedophilia. You know, I think there's some different things that we can say, look, we've decided that for the most part, these things are bad and they should not be there. And to give you an example, maybe the way that we decide what is bad to be on these platforms and should be removed is those things which we have decided by law. We've decided that hate speech, that attacking someone, that encouraging violence against someone for hate is illegal. I mean, if you do different things like this in any given state in this country, you will be arrested and go to jail. If you're a pedophile, you'd be arrested and go to jail. If you encourage and threaten other people with physical harm, you can go to jail. These are things that we've already decided as a society are illegal, immoral, and wrong, and you can pay a penalty for them.

So let me ask you this. Why are they being allowed to be on our platforms? If we've decided that hate speech is illegal, that you can be arrested for it in public, if you encourage direct harm on others, if you threaten other people, you can go to jail. You can be arrested, jail, prosecution, et cetera, et cetera. We already have decided that as a society that those things are inappropriate. So why are those things on Facebook? Why are those things allowed on Twitter?

Now, we're starting to see different things where Facebook, Google, or I'm sorry, not Facebook. Let me take that out of the equation. Google, YouTube, and Twitter are starting to block these things, kick people off their platform. But we've been seeing some cases where sometimes Facebook will allow somebody to stay on their platform. Uh, usually if there's enough outcry, they remove them.

The same thing with Twitter. There's been a few people they won't remove. And then finally they end up having to remove them because they're not outcry. Now, we can cry out, we can petition Zuckerberg, and we can all go rant on Facebook, which I always find is ironic, where we're like, Facebook is stupid. Mark Zuckerberg's a horrible person, you know, blah, blah, blah. Well, guess what? That's stupid, Cause just like the case of me and my YouTube and just like the case of Mark Zuckerberg, he's just sitting around going, yeah, tell me how stupid I am. Yeah. Ka-ching. Yeah. Well, you guys are arguing about that stuff.

I'm going to go sell ads about, I don't know, whatever, you know, and you're just making money for him. Every time you're creating content for him, you're making a post, whether it's about your little kid Johnny and, I don't know, his first play date, or you're making a post about politics or making a post about what your opinion is or what your coffee looks like, you know, that beautiful picture of your breakfast and crap. You're making money for Mark Zuckerberg. You are the product. Just go ahead and put a barcode over your fucking forehead.

Just tattoo it and put like a Facebook barcode right there because you are the product. We are all the product. So it's up to us to decide what to do with these platforms and how to do it if we all want to collectively take the power back uh with anything all the way down to you know monkeys in original tribes there's a point where we say no you don't get to be among us there's a uh there's a there's a part of our society where we go you do not get to be a part of our group anymore.

Pedophiles, go to jail. Murderers, go to jail. People who steal from us and disrupt our societies, you go to jail. We have this decision-making that we do in a society to remove these people from our social presence and their ability to harm us. So why are we not doing this with Facebook when Facebook has white nationalism on it? I've written some stuff that I've had pulled down off of Facebook that really wasn't that bad. In fact, some of it was jokes. And the jokes weren't offensive. It was just that Facebook didn't get that it was a joke.

They thought I was really like, I'm going gonna harm somebody or whatever and and you know like i'm gonna choke that person and laugh out loud like some of you had lol on them to indicate that was a joke and they're like no that got suspended you're like really and it's like have you seen the deplorables, Facebook groups, I mean, they are riddled with just utter racism, debauchery, and just ugliness to humanity and everything else. And somehow those are allowed to stand. I don't know why. But like I said, this is how Mark Zuckerberg is making all his money. As far as I'm concerned, what we need to start doing is using the power of Facebook against Facebook. We need to start speaking out on these different things.

We need to recognize this platform is no longer grandma's cutesy kid platform. This is a platform we need to speak out. We need to speak loudly and say this place place has, this has no place here. And we need to get the voices together and do this. On top of that, we need to pass new laws to say, look, uh, the, uh, what was interesting was what Sasha Baron Cohen talked about, you know, uh, for his movies, there are MPAA standards. If you're under 13, you know, there was, 13, there's the, I forget what it's called, MP, whatever it is, the ratings that you go to the movies with. I don't know what they are.

Rated R, there's rated PG-13, there's rated PG, et cetera, et cetera. Why don't we have ratings for certain parts of these different social media platforms where we say, you know, kids can't have access to this? I mean, do you want your kid getting into a white nationalist sort of area group? There's all sorts of interviews and different studies that have gone on. There's people who have talked about how they were lost in their world, and they found a group of people that accepted them, and it turns out those people were white nationalist, KKK Nazis,

and they ran with them and became a part of their hate and culture until one day they woke up and go, this isn't fun anymore. Or, uh, I found a conscience or it just became painfully, um, it became painfully a penalty for,

um, the repercussions of the choices that I made and things I said. And, uh, so, uh, I think we have to pass new laws where we have to say, look, there, there, you know, if I buy a game for my, you know, one of my nephews, his parents wouldn't let him play games that had a certain rating on the video game. So all these video games and music have ratings now. Why doesn't Facebook have ratings? Holy crap. Why don't we have ratings set up for them?

All the different networks have FCC standards and practices. There are certain things they can say. There are certain things they can't say. There are certain things they can do on air. Why don't we have these standards for these social media platforms where they have to meet a legal sort of bar in setting standards and saying these things are not appropriate to have on your systems? And like I say, we don't have to go crazy with this. Like some of the folks suggested in my Facebook stream, we don't have to go crazy with this. I mean, look,

there are certain things that you can do that do harm to people. I think we can say genocide, murder, threatening others, et cetera, et cetera, do incredible harm. I think conspiracy theories do incredible harm, but we can put those aside. If you believe that, you know, whatever the 9-11 conspiracies or you're an anti-vaxxer or whatever the hell that is great. We can kind of make a place for you to kind of go off to the side, a little Island where you can go do that special time. But I don't think you're really going to, I don't anti-vaxxers harm people. So we may need to put that in a different pot. But like, if you believe in the nine 11 thing, you're usually not going out and killing people.

I don't think we've had any of that yet. Knock on wood. Give it time. What can go wrong? But for the most part, I think there are certain things we can agree that you can believe. You can believe in aliens. If you believe in aliens, there's not only people going out and murdering people en masse because they believe in aliens.

And I think what we do as a society is we have to say, look, the things that we've already agreed on in tenancy of law that are harmful, that are destructive, that can hurt other people physically, that can destroy lives, that can murder people. Those are the things that we should put into standards for these platforms to say say these are not allowed. And I think our voices need to be heard. We need to realize that we are going to have an effect on these things, or we're just going to be the mice in the maze. There's a lot of people who like the mice in the maze thing. There's a lot of people who, you know, they like to be, they like to just, you know, Chris, I don't want to hear about politics on here. I just want to see baby Q videos and puppies and little cats and shit and stuff.

Well, guess what? The world's changed, baby. Wake up. You're living in it. And if you're turning a blind eye to it, you're the mouse running in the maze. And so, you know, it comes down to these things. We either have to leave Facebook or we've got to enact new laws and standards. And instead of being victims of the, uh, maze of the manipulation, we need to speak out. We need

to stand up and say, we're not going to take the shit anymore. Go to the window, throw it open and say, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this shit anymore. Go to the window, throw it open and say, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and ask these people to be taken off the platform. And maybe, maybe it doesn't have to be a boycott. Maybe we need to have a boycott where everyone says, we're not going to post on Facebook for a day, but somehow we need to come together as the largest group of sanity, as it were, and say, we're not going to allow this other stuff to be in our platform. If you're going to allow, you know, I mean, what would you think if, if Starbucks said, this is the pedophile section over here. Okay. Same thing out with the smoking

section. Enough people came in and said, we don't want to be in your restaurant with the smokers anymore. We don't want to be here. So we're not going to come here. And so restaurants went, well, shit, we're going to have to get rid of the smoking section. What if you went into a Starbucks and there was like a white nationalist Nazi section and then there was like a pedophile section? Would you go in there? No. You'd say, fuck that. I'm not going in that place anymore.

Screw that. And if anything, you'd register a complaint with Starbucks and be like, hey, man, I'm not coming to your place anymore, and I'm not buying your shit anymore because you've got these fucking assholes in here. billionaires that are pretty much unaccountable and they can do whatever they want they can create whatever algorithms they want to manipulate us into the mouse mice mouse maze for cheese and we have to say we're not going to take it anymore and we're going to stand up and say we want that removed off our platform and we want it gone and you know i remember hearing a long time ago there was always a there was always a saying as to what is the definition of sanity. And we're all basically insane, but sanity is whatever the largest group of people determine is the most sane than other people who are more insane. And we're the people who, you know, there's the largest group of us that determines who gets to be called insane. But technically, we're all insane. So technically we're all probably not perfect human beings, but we need to decide to make

some decisions based upon laws we've already enacted to say certain things aren't allowed into sections of Facebook, social media, et cetera. They should not be giving a voice to these people because that's where we really lose the, um, the power is these people are given this platform where they can very quickly. I mean, you look at, uh, in some of the cases where people broadcast on Facebook,

the, the snuff videos they made where they're killing people in real time. And those are being shared millions and millions and millions of times across these social media platform. Sasha Baron Cohen brings up something that's very important. Uh, he says, you know, why, why can't some of these posts, uh, be time be going through a filter? Why can't Facebook hire more people to evaluate stuff, to check up on stuff? They could easily do that. They have some of the best engineers engineers they have all the money in the world when it comes down to it to pay for it but the reason they don't is because it makes some money it makes some money for you and i to fight over

which canada is better which party is better or uh i don't know whether the red jumper on baby joe is better than the blue jumper that Grandma sent you at Baby Joe. You know, whatever the hell it is, man, this is what they make their money off of. And there needs to be standards for these people. They should fall into the FCC more so with rules and regulations that we give upon them that say, hey, we're not going to allow this anymore, that we've determined that these certain things shouldn't be on the platform, and we don't want them around us, and we don't want them making this a larger platform to it. I mean, really, when it comes down to it, if we're all just turning a blind eye to Facebook

and not saying anything when they're allowing genocide, when they're allowing white nationalism to be on their platform, when they're allowing some of these abuses to take place, we're condoning it in a way. We're just kind of like, yeah, I know Facebook is doing this, but, you know, I'm just going to go look at my puppy pictures right now and go, la, la, la, see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Yeah, I'm sure the world's a utopia. It's a wonderful place. I just want to hug people. And it's not going on. It's not ugly. Hey, the world's a utopia. It's a wonderful place. I just want to hug people. It's not going on. It's not ugly.

Hey, the world's an ugly place, man. Sorry to tell you, you can hide behind whatever you want, but it's a lot better if you wake up and we all work together to make it there's a whole mess of people in a genocide prison having their rights taken away, etc., etc. You got to be awake, man. You got to pay attention to what's going on in the world. There's a good saying that I'll get to at the end. But let me wrap some of this. You know, I posted this yesterday. And I think I'm going to make this a quote of mine because I think I said it pretty good.

I don't know. I'll keep toying with it to see what I think. But I posted a quote of mine. Welcome to the Internet. Viralness sells no matter the scope of absurdity, a measure by which you can find those who will buy into any product or idea, and a platform where madness has no check.

That's really where we are with our social media. It's crazy some of the stuff that is going on out there. And the fact that it's growing so rapidly, I mean, I think we're all pretty much large against pedophilia. Google how much pedophilia is all over the Internet. It's like a huge amount of the Internet, and it's growing and getting worse. And our, our, um, our public authorities who, who, who put the stuff down and shut down sites and arrest people and stuff, they can't even keep up with it. It's so far out of control. Why are we allowing these sort of things to be on the internet? Why are we allowing some of this stuff to propagate on stuff like

Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera. And like I say, we don't have to go crazy. We don't have to have the whataboutisms of the people go, well, if we start shutting down white nationalism on Facebook, then what happens if you believe that in unicorns? Is that going to become illegal? Am I going to get kicked off of Facebook? Stop it with the stupid shit. Stop it with the whataboutisms.

You know, the people who with the whataboutisms. The people who do this whataboutism shit really make me fucking mental. Because they're the people, if they would have heard about, hey, we heard there's some Jews and they're being genocidally killed in Germany. And these are the whataboutism people. Yeah, well, what if they had a coming? Maybe they did something that caused Germany to do that. We probably shouldn't stop that because, you know, there's probably good reason,

you know, and we probably shouldn't, you know, when you really think about it, it's Mark Zuckerberg's attitude. Well, we shouldn't stop genocide and we shouldn't stop those Jews from being wiped out because, you know, we want to give a voice to Hitler. We want to give a voice to everybody. I mean, Joseph Goebbels kind of might have a point. Plus, if what he's doing is bad, we want everyone to see it so that, you know, whatever. Bullshit, buddy.

Follow the money. You just want to make money off this fucking shit. And this whataboutism that Mark Zuckerberg and everyone does just makes me mental because just about any horrific thing, you know, if somebody comes along and goes, hey, there's a video of a guy being, you know, committing pedophilia on a thing. And you're like, well, you know, what if, you know, we need to respect everyone's opinion? What the fuck, dude? Get the fuck out, man. Stop it with the whataboutism. Not everyone has an opinion that everyone needs to hear,

let alone be put on a platform that needs to be shared with a third of the world. It doesn't need to be given that amplification. And I think that's the thing we need to realize, that these platforms are amplifying those ideas. They're giving them the grounds and seeds and ability to recruit, to expand. Do you want that? Do you want pedophilia to expand? Do you want Nazis to expand again?

Because guess what? They are, and they're using these platforms to do it. So I think we need to collectively, or at least as the body of a moral majority, decide that there are certain things, especially in law, that we've already decided and that we've already put into codified regulations where the police can arrest you or put you in jail for them, that these things have no place on these platforms. They are private property and we need to decide collectively to say, hey, we're not going to take this anymore. Sorry, you need to get the pedophilia section out of our Starbucks. You need to get the Nazis out of our Starbucks section. We don't want to be

with those people anymore. And we don't want to be supporting a business that utilizes that, which is what we're doing right now. We're supporting a business on Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, et cetera, that's giving reach to these people, that's giving recruitment to these people, that's giving them the power to assemble and become more influential and also deceptive where they're using deception against us as well. We all need to get smarter about what's going on, and we need to make the decision to leave these platforms and go to platforms that hold a higher moral sort of, what's the word I'm looking for?

Basically say, hey, there's certain things that aren't here. You know, it's kind of interesting to me. We always see these people who get kicked off these platforms, and they go start platforms like Gab AI and 8chan and different other places because they're trying to find their voice where they can go spend all this hate and ugliness and and uh and stuff um you know maybe it's time we looked at facebook and said hey we need a platform where it's kosher for uh you know all the good decent people in the world the people who don't hate on other people and maybe that maybe you know we need to build that platform but then again here's the conversely, the other side of that.

Maybe the problem is we can't because one of the problems we have in American society, places around the world, we do have closeted seeds of racism from largely different varying degrees. Maybe some people might be slightly racist. You know, they use comments like culture and I don't like how that culture does things or that group of people does things or, you know, so-and-so group of people does this. You know how they are. You know, those sort of prejudices that we have about certain cultures, people, religions, et cetera. We all have this. And so the problem is I think moving to a new platform isn't going to help us in any way, shape or form because, uh, what was it? Emerson has said, uh, no matter where you travel, there still you are. And I think that's the problem we're going to have.

And I don't think we're going to solve our internal issues with racism, uh, our internal prejudices, our closeted sort of attitudes anytime soon. And there are a lot of people still dealing with those sort of issues or still coming into reconciliation or still living in denial about them. And so I don't think that's going to get solved anytime soon. We've been working on solving issues of prejudice and racism for long before the civil rights in the 50s. But but we still have resolved that. What is it like 70 years later? We're still, we're still a mess. In fact, if anything, we've

kind of realized after the recent election that we are a huge mess and we still have a lot of work and stuff that we have got to resolve. So maybe leaving the platform is the best thing to do. Maybe, you know, holding strikes or boycotts would be a good way to let them know. But maybe we should also be demanding that since we are the product, we're going to be used in the way that we want, that we strike, that we unionize, that we say, hey, you know what? If we're going to be on here, you're going to adhere by the rules of the majority, the people who largely decide what we believe is the moral majority,

and for the most part, follows along the laws of our country that we've already established are universally, at least in nation per nation, these are the laws that we want upheld, and they should not be on our social media platforms. And I think that's what we have to do. And I think we all just start speaking out. We have to put pressure on these companies. We have to call out Mark Zuckerberg and what he's doing and everything else. And we have to put out that we're not going to be played anymore.

And enough people speak out. That's the beautiful part of social media. This is the beautiful part of that utopia that we originally had. Enough people spoke out, had control, made the agenda, made the topic of conversation. Enough people spoke out where governments changed, where social media has changed over time because so many people speak out. That's what we have to do. We have to take this power back into and of ourselves, put it forth as a collective body, uh, as a moral majority and say, we're not going to take these certain things anymore being on our platforms. We want them off. If we decide as a moral majority that maybe we don't like conspiracy theories of aliens, well then enough of us decide that I can see a

venue for it. But I, I, you know, I think we can all decide that there are certain things that are more horrific and destruction of other people than other things. And certainly hate speech, hate, bigotry, racism is a very destructive thing and should not be on these platforms in any way, shape or form. And people that people that promote that should be removed and they can go to wherever they want in the darkest corners of the internet, but they don't need Facebook's platform to promote their thing and reach a third of the world because this is destroying the world and what they're doing.

So I think it's very important that we start making decisions about this, that we take the power back from being the maize and the mice. I have a lot of friends sometimes who complain about how many political posts I put up and they're like, oh, you know, Chris talking about politics. I'm like, hey, I'm trying to share and speak up and make a collective unified message with a group of us that go, this is wrong.

We think this is wrong and we don't want to do it anymore. And I'm not signaling. I once had a friend who accused, he goes, you're just signaling. I'm like, you don't really believe that I believe in this. You just think I'm signaling that because I want to go viral. Cause I'm like, I want to take this and go viral with it. No, I'm not signaling. I'm not doing this for the purpose of signaling. I'm doing this to rally the wagons so that we all get around and don't get killed by the Indians. And I'm using that just as a metaphor, if you would. I don't know why.

That's kind of a horrible thing to say. Indians are nice people too. But you get the message. You know, rally the wagons. Get everyone around. And say, hey, you know what? There's danger out there. And we don't want to, and we don't want

to all get killed by some of the ugliness in the world. And we want to have a better place. And I think that's what we have to decide. Um, I'll kind of wrap this up with something Edward R Murrow, the famed broadcaster said, uh, that was kind of interesting. And it was interesting cause he said this, uh, I don't have a date on this. said this in the 50s um but it's interesting that it's still now and it's still pertinent now and he was talking about it in the in the vein of the mccarthyism era and radio and tv at the time and he was calling out his to his own studios uh for promoting uh that sort of mccarthyism sort sort of speech and what he was doing, et cetera, et cetera. And he was calling out truth to power and saying, hey, this is bullshit and we need to knock it off and stop doing it. But it's interesting how this saying still applies today.

So I'll read it to you here and I'll just start partway through his thing that's pertinent to what we're doing now. Edward R. Murrow, he said, any historians about 50 or 100 years from now, which kind of make it ironic when you think about it when I finish, and there should be more preserved, the kinescopes of one week of all three networks, there we'll find recorded in black and white and in color, and in our case, the internet,

evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflects this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television, and in this case the Internet, in the main is being used to distract, elude, amuse, and insulate us,

then television and those who finance it, or in this case the Internet, I should add, those who look at it and those who work at it may someday see a totally different picture too late. I think it's time we wake up and you're starting to see a lot of books about social media now going to the dark side. And I think that's where we're headed. And I think it's not going to get better until we stand up and make it better. And so those are the choices we collectively need to make as the better part of a goodness of people who want to see a better world made, who want to see social media utilized in a better way, who want control, who want influence in and of themselves in what they see in the world around them as opposed to being manipulated by Mark Zuckerberg and some of these other platforms

who are like, well, you know, we've got this whataboutism because we make money. If you guys, if everyone speaks and everyone has something to argue about, because seriously, when you think about it, they don't make as much money when we're all arguing about like, here's a picture of someone hugging someone. Let's argue about how horrible that is or how good that is. Well, that won't happen. Well, that doesn't make these platforms very much money. So I think in the end, we've got to decide how we want to have our spaces utilized and who we want to have around us in those spaces when it comes to Facebook, when it comes to YouTube, when it comes to Twitter, et cetera.

And we need to speak out more and we demand better. And I hope that most all of us would think that way, that we do want a better world, that we want something that maybe John Lennon spoke about in the world of Imagine, where everyone gets along, and there's largely peace in the world. And maybe that's not possible. Maybe that perfection isn't attainable, but getting as close to it as we possibly could, I think, is worth the effort. Anyway, thanks for tuning in, folks. Give some thought as to how social media is around you. Give some thought as to whether or not you're using social media or social media is using you.

And give some thought to your voice and how it's being used, what it's being used for, and also how your content is being used and what it's being used for. Is it being used to make the world a better place or is it being used to make the world more destructive? I look at my content and go, I hope I'm educating people and I'm hoping to make people more aware of some of the abuses that are going on in the world. And do we need to stand up and say, hey, let's call out Mark Zuckerberg. Let's call out these things. I think that's the decisions we all need to make within our own spheres of what's happening

and how we can maybe get Facebook back to being a beautiful place where you just hang out with your grandma and grandpa and send them cutesy pictures of little Joey and Katie. Maybe we can get back there. I don't know. I don't know if we can put the genie back in the bottle and yeah, close that pen into his box that we've opened, but maybe we can at least get to a better form or version of it. Uh, I always like what, uh, Obama said at the end, he goes, this is an American society and I'm going to speak this to the whole of humanity across the world. We yang and we yang. We zig and we zag.

We make mistakes. We fall down. We learn from them. And hopefully we can learn from this and hopefully we can zag back and make the world a better place. Peace be with you all. And let's all work to make the world a better place

for all of us and the future and our children that are in it. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. I certainly appreciate you. Go to thecPN.com. You can subscribe to the podcast there, but I'm going to leave you with that. Thanks for tuning in.

I'll see you next time.