The Daily Beast Podcast - How Silicon Valley’s Sociopath CEOs Are Just Like Trump

Episode Date: July 10, 2020

Recode co-founder Kara Swisher has this thing she likes to call the “prick to productivity ratio”—how big of a jerk a particular executive is, verus how much he gets done. And these days, both in Silicon Valley and in Washington, that ratio has gone all wrong. “Taking advantage, just not caring about the consequences—that's being played out in Silicon Valley over and over again. So don't be surprised at what Trump is doing. Silicon Valley sets the tone,” Swisher tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson in the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Their lack of self reflection is so vast that I always say they can't see themselves in mirrors, like they're vampires.” Then! Separated author Jacob Soboroff talks about exposing the Trump administration’s child detention facilities. “But when you had the opportunity to see what these 5,400 families go through,” he tells Rick and Molly, “it's impossible to understand this for anything other than a government-sanctioned torture program.” Plus! Rick and Molly discover that the Donald used to kick his own children back in the day. And our dynamic duo wonder if anyone can stop the man in the White House from making this pandemic worse. “We need a federal government to control our president,” Molly says. Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, an editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So, hi, Rick Wilson.

Hello, Molly Jongfest. How are you this morning? I'm good. How are you? I'm prospering here in the Lower Florida-Stand province. What's the humidity there? 10 million? Three billion. It sounds amazing. So it turns out that Trump's Oklahoma event was, shall we say, a super spreader event? Well, I mean, there were super spreaders there, some of whom we've identified previously. By a deleted tweets. But Spreader Palooza clearly had a, if you were going to design an event where you would have people in close proximity to one another, and if you took up all the social distancing markers on the chairs, people from sitting too close together. And kept people from wearing masks. And if you discourage mask as a sign of your culture war supremacy, right.

Well, guess what happens? You get a cluster of people who suddenly have the Rona. So not just the 999 guy. What is his name? Herman Kane. Herman Kane, that's right. But long story short, they gather the Trump faithful in the great disease dome of Tulsa, and viruses do what they do, and it did what it does.

So it is now become a cluster that's notable for a sudden outbreak of coronavirus. And by the way, not that this would deter our fine president, he's going to New Hampshire this weekend. Well, he's got to spread it. You know, he does. Spread it around. It's always typically been the order he gave, but now it's, you know, just something he does. We need like a federal government to control our president.

Well, one thing I love about the Mary Trump book is she makes the case that he's essentially been institutionalized in the White House. I love that quotes. I use that quote of my beast piece today. I saw your beast piece today. It's excellent. I only sent it to you like six times. But that piece, it was interesting because reading that book, I think she's a very good

writer and it's a fun book. And also Trump is totally evil. my favorite part of the whole book is the stuff about Ivana. The Ivana stuff interested me. I thought the little anecdote in the Mary Trump book that really struck me was that Donald would sit with Ivanka on his lap while he made the boys wrestle and he would kick the one was on the bottom of the dog pile. And all I could think of was this is just a perfect encapsulation of every fucked up pathology

of the sky. It's the whole thing. It creeps me out on so many levels. And there's also a scene in the book where, The grandfather has a picture of a half-naked 18-year-old in his wallet, which he shows to... There's a lot of really sleazy male behavior in that book. Well, you can see that Fred Trump is the supervillain origin story of Donald Trump. I mean, he's just...

The guy was insanely, weirdly abusive and misogynistic and everything else. And, I mean, you could see that Mary Trump was so beaten down by this situation. And think about the time she was living in. The mother, Mary Trump. Yeah, the mother. Think about the time she was living in. I mean, just the degree of, like I said, this is the super villain origin story of Donald. The need for attention, the amorality, the cruelty, the bloviating, the ego aggrandizement. All of it just comes together in this one hideous package. I also think it's a case for not naming everyone in the family the same two names. Well, as one shouldn't. I mean, it's like five Mary Trump's in that family.

If only Fred had named Donald Trump Ludwig or something, it would have been a much different outcome, I think. Well, that would have been really on brand, frankly. Exactly. I mean, Adolf or, you know, Benito, which I feel like is a little bit closer. Though he did sign off on the Chinese death camps, he didn't actually build them himself. When it comes to your fascists, Trump does have the clownishness of Mussolini. Right. He just leaves the sort of Hitlerian stuff to the minions, more, more sense.

so than himself. Yeah, I think it's bizarre. But yeah, Mary Trump, come on the new abnormal. Thank you. Mary Trump, you should come on the new abnormal. We would like you a lot on the new abnormal. We will help you sell many books and infuriate the guy who is sitting in the dining room off the Oval Office with a yellow highlighter over every line of your book over and over again,

staring at himself muttering, I'll get her, I'll get her. We can help you with this. He's five Diet Coke's in. He's five Diet Coke's in there, hearing out in the Secretary's area, Bring the Adderall Trough. I need it all. I'm reading this fucker in one sitting. It's probably the most Trump has ever read.

Oh, probably. He never reads any of those books, so. Well, my favorite thing is when Donald Trump gives a book review to someone. Right. I'm like, yeah, you've read what, the title maybe, so you could have Skavino type it into the Twitter machine. That is hilarious. Hey, before we go too much further, folks, we want to bring in Kara Swisher.

You may know Kara from her amazing. amazing work at Recode Decode, her fabulous podcast pivot, and you'll be listening to her new podcast coming up very soon at the New York Times. Kara is a great conversationist, one of the great anthropologists of the American tech scene. You also know her from her biting and insightful New York Times columns. We're so happy to have you with us, Kara. So we're talking about two very big Supreme Court. Actually, I sort of think three very big Supreme Court decisions just came down. I think the biggest one is that Trump is going to have to show his taxes. Well, I think we all agree that Donald Trump has wanted to hide his taxes because it will prove several things.

One, he's not as rich as he says. Two, he's the skeezy criminal we all expected. Right. And sadly, this decision doesn't mean we're going to see them anytime soon. But I'm perfectly happy pursuing him in his retirement like a wild animal. So, Kara, what are your thoughts on the tax situation? You know, I'm not a tax expert. So I play one on television.

But, you know, I think it's a really interesting case because, of course, it's going to take too long, right? as usual. And it's actually not his tax. I think they're pursuing the banks, right? Correct and the accountants and things like that to get those returns and those information. But it's definitely a blow to him. I mean, what's interesting is that before it came out, he obviously had advanced knowledge of it. He was on Twitter saying prosecutorial misconduct. I don't know. He'll be really crazy on Twitter today, which is, I think, what happens when he loses something and we'll make a big deal of it. And defocused from coronavirus, which really remains the story. Putting him in jail is just a side light, but I think his issues

of not handling this, for the second time, the second outbreak, really, even though a lot of medical people consider it the first, his inability to handle it even now when he's got another bite at the apple is really quite astonishing. Like Uber, but for incompetence. That Native American decision is a really big deal,

isn't it? Yeah, sure. So much is, you go back, speaking of Trump's favorite president, to Andrew Jackson's time, so much has been done that's been such a criminal activity on the part of the government. And so I haven't looked at it very carefully, but it's definitely creates all kinds of implications, and it probably will have some impact on that election there, would be my guess. And from what I understand, it means that almost half of Oklahoma will become

Native American land. Yeah, that is true, something like that. It's a large part, I think, of the eastern part of the state. I have bent Oklahoma a couple times, actually, more than you'd imagine. It's a lot of empty land out there, but it's a really interesting case. And again, it's fascinating how this Supreme Court has gone back and forth. They seemingly very conservative and then yet not as conservative and conservative is not. It's a really interesting moment. And I think a lot of people have been surprised by obviously John Roberts. And Gorsuch.

And Gorsuch. Yeah. There was a period in the Republican world where the phrase, but Gorsuch, was the catch-all excuse for every sin of Trump. He says, it's terrible. We got Gorsuch. And he's voted against Trump in three big cases this year, three of the biggest of the cases this year. And it's kind of fascinating how quickly he's doing the jurisprudence and not just doing the bidding of the folks that thought he was going to go there and just automatically be a...

That happens. I mean, a lot of Supreme Court... I think you get there and you're like, oh, I'm here for life. I can do what I want. I want to be historical. I want to... I don't need to play these political games. And I have a larger charge. I mean, I don't... Listen, I'm cynical. I don't... I think all of them have their own issues personally. But they, you know, I think they have a bigger role. And I think they, I think you recognize it when you get into a role like that. Mary Trump, what's your thinking? I think there's not a ton of like revelations. So he's an asshole because his parents didn't hug him, right? Is that really pretty much what it's what I'm? I did a piece on it this morning. I thought the big reveal I was at the father's a sociopath. Well, yeah,

I kind of knew that. I was interesting. I interviewed Esther Perel, who's the relationship, guru person, and she made, she nailed it like this years ago. She was like, oh, he's a narcissist and his parents, a mother who was not present, who was weak, and a father who was a sociopath, and therefore he focused on the father. He didn't want to be the weak one, which she got, even without even trying. It was sort of like a, let me give you the 4-1-1 on this guy. It's an interesting book. I think unfortunately what happens in this media environment is everything moves on to the next thing, unless she had something like he has, he's actually a woman or whatever.

Is something really shocking? Because this guy really is shocking. Like everything he does. Like when the SAT thing happened, everyone's like, he's cheated on the SATs. I'm like, you're kidding. What a surprise. Like, of course he did. Of course he did.

He's cheated on everything with or without a pulse his entire life. Right. Like, it's come on. It's ridiculous. Like, that's what's sad here is that like we expect him just to be awful. His joke was shooting someone down Fifth Avenue and something. I don't know what he could do. He went after.

I wrote a big long column about that. The poor woman he went after, who he was insinuating, was having an affair with Joe Scarborough. He just has no bottom. There's no bottom. And so I think she's a very good writer. I think it seems like some of the parts I read seem really good, like that we're quoted in the press and that's not out yet.

I think she's probably a very good. I think she's a doctoral psychologist or whatever she is. She seems very good at her job. But it's sort of like looking at a narcissist and a sociopaths and going, oh, look at what they just did. You know, they just crapped on the floor again. Well, guess what? That's what they do. That one scene in the book where he's talking about holding Ivanka on his lap while the boys are

wrestling on the floor, and he would kick the one that was being pinned down at that moment. And all I could think it was, this is how monsters are made. It sounds like an asshole family. It feels like the Sopranos and with one nice person. I did like her. Yeah. Like, I did think she was likable and it was nice to know there was one Trump who wasn't just appalling.

Well, you know, like there's a lot of families like this. right? This is not an uncommon situation. Really, I was like the soprano. So we have this, you know, Mama's soprano. We got the wife. One of the things that struck me was the gift giving, which I like, I deal with a lot of rich people and they're the cheapest people on the planet. That was like, of course they took out the caviar. That was like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, that is right. And I deal with a lot of people, sometimes when I'm dealing with really wealthy people who just cannot care enough, like they don't care about the impact of their inventions. I sometimes say this to them when I'm not to say, in public, I say it privately, I said, you know, I'm so sorry your parents didn't hug you enough, but they're dead and you need to move on. Like, you need to stop. You need to get more empathy or whatever it takes to not be such a giant prick would be great. I'm pretty sure that both in the White House and Silicon Valley, the admonition don't be such a giant prick is often met with deaf ears. Well, you know, I have this thing I call it a prick to productivity ratio that I have. And like, how big a prick you are compared to how useful you are, like, you know, like a Steve Jobs would be

have a high productivity, a bit of a prick. So, you know, he's got a good ratio. Bill Gates back in the day, not as good, except for wealth, you know. So I think the issue is, like, I just recently wrote about Robin Hood, which is a app that they're making for investors. A kid killed himself. I wrote about the predatory nature of how Silicon Valley doesn't have it. They're letting kids do these kids new options.

And the Times just had a great piece today, just essentially proving the point I was making, which was these kids trade more, they prey on kids, they prey on addiction, they pray on gambling. And what are they going to do? Now, I don't think kids shouldn't learn how to invest either. And that's their sale. They're like, people should be investing. It should be not democratized. 100%.

But taking advantage, just not caring about the consequences. It's played out Silicon Valley over and over again. And so don't be surprised that Trump is doing. You know what I mean? He just happens to be that particular brand of it. But the Silicon Valley does set the tone of like they don't care about the consequences. They're so lack of self-reflection is so vast that I always say they can't see in mirrors. Like they're vampires.

Like they're just, what are they going to do? There's a lot more entrepreneurs that I talk to now that really do think hard about the impact of their inventions, what it means. They don't have to go for the quick box that there's a longer term game here for a lot of them. And I'm hoping, I have a lot of hope, especially on climate change tech, auto tech, things like that, that there's a bigger thinking about your impact and your accountability. One of the things I hope to do is sort of resonate that idea that just because you can invent something doesn't mean you should, just because you can take advantage of people, doesn't mean you should. Right. And it would be nice if I would. our country got that way.

And there's a push in Silicon Valley called Compassionate Capitalism. Mark Benioff is pushing it. My husband said he's a venture capitalist who does education and they do a lot of for-profit philanthropy. We'll see about that. Although the guy who was doing that for one firm was caught up in the varsity blues thing. College scandal. You used to lecture me all the time about doing good.

Kara, you really need to focus on doing good in the world. And I was so tiresome. And I remember going, oh, perfect. Exactly the guy who cheats. No, I mean, I think it'll be interesting to see, though, because there definitely is a way to do that, and you've seen it with, like, tobacco and certain things. Like, they can diversify the portfolio so that it doesn't invest in evil. Will they is the question. It's not all evil. You know, when I started covering the Internet at the very beginning, I, the reason I am so hard on them is because I think it has so many possibilities uniting the way. I have a thing, and I talked about this on the last show that I did for Rico Deacon. I'm moving my podcast over the New York Times.

I talked about you either have a Star Trek point of view. or a Star Wars point of view. Even at the end of Star Wars, it's not good. Like, these people, there's a lot of not good. Like, and you know that bad people are coming back. And, yeah, so you blew up the Emperor. Like, it's not good. It's never good. The Empire always strikes back. And so it's sort of a dark vision of what technology brings us. And then you have this Star Trek where they go to Boldly Worlds. And, you know, there's villains, but, you know, they're worthy villains. And they get to fight them. And then ultimately, the Benetton crew, the one that looks like every race on the planet, together as a team and technology beats them. I'm a Star Trek personality. I would like them to be more

like Star Trek and a little bit arrogant like Captain Kirk and you have Spock and stuff like that. That's who I want them to be. And I believe that you can't have that going forward with the right mentality and the right regulation and the right citizenry that demands more of these people and stands up and doesn't get sucked into their addictive the way they design these things, which is architect. It's architected. The The reason we're having these problems is because it's architect this way. They can change the architecture. They can absolutely. They know what the human cognitive tweak is to change it.

They could do it. Will you talk about Facebook and what happened today? What do you want to know? Well, we want to know everything. Why are they so evil? How deep should the hole we dig for Facebook be? Well, you know, it's interesting because we just did a podcast talking about my column this week again, trying to write about this wonderful company called Lemonade, which just went public,

which is an insurance industry disruptor. But Facebook. Like you talk about butt gorses. but Facebook. Every time I turn around, they're doing something just really worse than ever. But this is something, I think I've written 26 columns in The New York Times saying this is what it's like. And before that, I wrote another 100 at Recode and all things digital. You know, I've covered this company since its beginnings. And I have always called it the most compromised company in Silicon Valley.

And I think they're representative of a lot of what's wrong is the lack of responsibility, the lack of accountability, the oversized and overweening ideas that their ideas are the best. their lack of any intellectual heft in what they're talking about around free speech. And it really does boil down to the idea. The idea, I finally came upon it today, that what they're selling is they're trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of free speech and the First Amendment, neither of which applies here, by the way. And it just doesn't. I mean, just a reading of the First Amendment.

It says, government shall make no law, not, Congress shall make no law, not Facebook. They can do whatever they want. They've decided to have a platform that's a free-for-all because it's good for business. It just is it's good for their business. And so I think one of the issues is, I was trying to think of a comparison. and some people use Mark Benny often use cigarette companies. I've decided they're like a meat manufacturer, and they say to people,

you know what, everyone should have a right to tainted meat. If they want to have tainted meat, they should eat tainted meat. Let their gastrointestinal system deal with it because everyone should understand the meat that's tainted. They can eat the good meat, sure, but tainted meat should be available to all people. It's just like, no, it shouldn't.

It's hate speech. It is not free speech. It is hate speech they're doing it. It's violent speech. It's inaccurate speech. It's dangerous speech. And so this idea, Mark has put out, I'm the arbiter of the truth.

I don't want to be the arbiter of truth. And don't build a system which requires us to have an arbiter of the truth. Do a system that cleans it up and gets rid of the shitty stuff, which I think all journalists do all day long on their own platforms. It's just not as big. Do you think the game here is they're not going to take any of the suggestions from the audit? I think they just, that's what you do. You do an audit, right?

This audit was pretty eviscerating. And this is people they hired. They have meetings where they meet. They met just with the NAACP and Club Change and ADL. And I think it's the second or third meeting. had with them. And what they do is they put their hands together and say, we can do better. We should do better. We are so sorry. They do this all the time. They did it to the FTC. We're so sorry we violated the consent decree. We will not do it again and let us pay the small fee. So they have it down cold,

but they're being supported by our two things. One is that Mark Zuckerberg cannot be fired. The way the dual class structure works is he cannot be fired. Neither can Kim John L. So that's one. Actually, he could be killed, right? That's kind of a scary place to be running the show. The second thing is there's no ability to do anything because the stock is so high and it's the only game in town. There's the only social network in town. The others, Twitter and Snapchat are so small by comparison. And Facebook grabs their best ideas most of the time. And so there's no game in town. And so Wall Street rewards them both this enormous stock price, which they, by the way, deserve given the financials, right? But the financials are built on a house, not in large part,

but enough on a house of hate and it's architected on architecture of hate that it's really problematic. But Wall Street doesn't care. So the stock goes up. And if you were a stock picker, have to be buying that. But ultimately, it's dangerous for this country. I think that Facebook being sort of the secret sauce inside of American extremism is something that we just don't grapple with it as a country. We don't grapple with Facebook's near monopoly position in terms of enabling and empowering those people. There are still, it takes about three clicks on Facebook to find yourself in White Power USA Facebook groups. And they have a shockingly large footprint. They have hundreds and thousands of members, maybe hundreds of thousands of members, and Facebook doesn't police it, it doesn't go after

it. There's some notch they have on their radar, some clutter notch they have on their radar that when it's, you know, Roger Stone and the proud boys, they'll kill them off, and rightly so. Well, no, but they just did it. At this was 2015, like it was years, it doesn't matter now. Right. It takes until the noise level gets so high that they feel like it could impact shareholder value. It hardly mattered that they did that at this point. They didn't matter. It mattered then. It doesn't matter now. And one of the things that they tend not to do is we just did our last episode of Rico decode. I played an interview that I did with Mark that I think everybody should listen to so you understand his thinking. And in it, I forgot how badly he conceives of his charge.

You know what I mean? And we were arguing about Alex Jones. And he kept saying it's, and then he moved on to Holocaust deniers and they don't mean to lie. And I was like, yes, they do. They're gaming you. And so it just went on and one of the things is during that meeting, we argued about the Alex Jones issue, which he wasn't going to take him off. He wasn't going to take him off. And I afterwards, I turned to him, I said, you're taking him off. It's just a matter of how many weeks you're going to take him off again. And they did. Like, I didn't order him to do it.

I just was like, it's going to happen. Why are you resisting what you're going to be doing? It's a weird flex. It's a weird flex that they do there. And I think they get protected. You know, now advertisers are unhappy. I don't think it's going to matter much. What do you think about this advertiser boycott?

You think there's any juice there? Well, there's juice, but it doesn't matter. They have eight million advertisers or some number like that. Even though there's some large names in there, you know, lever and whatever. It's de minimis, right? Well, it's just how long will they do it? And by the way, why should these people are going to suffer? Because you have to be on Facebook to market. If you're doing online marketing, you have Google and Facebook. That's your choice. I think you and I both know that corporate advertising people have that little reflexive twitch

where they say, oh gosh, this is scandalous. But when someone says, hey, the ROI on putting ads on Facebook is X, they're going to be back. Not just big and small businesses really rely on Facebook. And so that's the question, the size of it. And what they can do is we'll go over here to Instagram where it's nice, but it's all the same company. That's the part. And I think the question is, what's to be done about it? I don't know what finds. You know, Europe is being super aggressive with all the companies. And I think the problem is our Congress sort of, there's a hearing in the end of July with Mark and Tim Cook, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pachai is coming. And then the Jeff Bezos, the biggest CEO of all in Amazon. They're coming. It's great. They're going to testify about

antitrust issues. But the fact the matter is, each of them have a different issue. And, you know, Apple's is less critical. It's difficult. The hap store dominance is a problem. At Amazon, it's very problematic that they control the marketplace and they sell things. That's really a clear problem. At Google, they dominate search and what do you do about that? And how do you separate their products from the search? And then you have Facebook. And so the issues are, we tend to have these big things, but we really do need to dig down deep and fund our justice department, our FTC, which has tried to do a very good job. But I think they have like 300 people and a $300 million budget. It's some enormously small amount of money. I think Facebook has 700 PR people or something like that. It's some number. And so they're not funded properly. And then they have other things to do besides Facebook and things like that. And so, I mean, people of the Justice Department are like the real ones, the real actual lawyers, not Bill Barr's people. Minister of the Interior Bill Barr? He's been protecting Facebook. It's very clear. Because Trump loves it. But when you watch those hearings and the senators are like, how do I delete a photo? Yeah, well, that was a bad one. There was some good ones. Katie, poor.

And AOC did a great job. They did a great job. But the question is, like, maybe you should have each of them on it. Some people are suggesting you have each of them on a different day and discuss those issues. How do you get the American people angry about this in any way, given all the other things like coronavirus and things like that? And it's almost not a thing of we have to get everybody angry. I don't think everyone was angry about seatbelts. I don't think everybody was angry about a lot of these things. And it's your job to regulate these things. There's no laws. There's no regulations. So people are like, we shouldn't regulate these companies for innovation. I'm like, there's no regulations. There's none. Well, there is an argument that I've heard some D.C. Facebook lobbyists make. Oh, we'd love to be regulated. We'd love that because our compliance ability is, it would close the market to everyone else. They would. And that is a very much D.C. corporate crony capitalist model that everyone's very comfortable with. For sure.

So I'm super cautious about any time anybody on Facebook's team says, we welcome a working relationship with the FTC and other federal bodies because that's how they're going to shut out everybody else from the market forever. Yep, 100%. And I think that's one of the issues. I think the question is, what should be done and who should regulate them? And I think it'll be different in the Biden administration, hopefully. I think one of the interesting things, I mean, one of the fascinating things I found was when Mark Zuckerer was talking about Elizabeth Warren, who was suggesting antitrust action and things like that, and quite intelligently, and she's got the goods in terms of being able to push it through. And Mark Zucker at a meeting said something like, Elizabeth Warren is our existential threat.

And I thought, oh, my God, like, not climate change. Not death, not. I was like there's so many things. And then I thought, you know what would just drive them crazy in Silicon Valley would be is Vice President Elizabeth Warren, Attorney General Elizabeth Warren, whatever you want to make. It would be a really interesting thing of certain people. Vice President Kamala Harris will be a problem for these tech companies for sure, even though she's from California. You may see that as a higher probability outcome than Good Warren?

Yep, for sure. I don't think Joe Biden is far outside the economic and regulatory mainstream by any stretch. No. I do think there are. is a growing understanding that the carve-out Facebook has had from any accountability from the government at all isn't pro-competitive, it isn't pro-market, it isn't pro-capitalism, it is becoming something that is a national security risk from the economic perspective and from the civil society perspective and everything else.

Yes, absolutely. I think one of the issues is that they've been so close to Trump administration through a guy named Joel Kaplan who is there. I know, yeah, I am. I'm sure you know Joe Kaplan, Kaplan, everybody is. Kavanaugh's best friend. So I think that's the issue, is that you have policy people making product decisions. That's one thing.

Over-indexing on not unfending conservative people. And if you look at Kevin Ruse at the Times says a really great showing of who every week he tweets the top 10 stories on Facebook. They're always like you don't get to an actual news organization until the very like 10 or 12. It's Ben Shapiro. I mean, half of them are daily wire. Yeah, exactly. It's an interesting thing. And so you're not going to see anything from the Trump administration.

whatsoever. And that's why they've sort of kissed up to it. I think the question is, Biden doesn't really know much about tech. Let's be honest. But he certainly can have people in place that do. And I think he says things like we have to get rid of Section 230. I think that's Trump, of course, did the executive order. I always say that's like throwing a hammer at a piano and making music. That's not what needs to be done. It's very complex what needs to happen. And so when these people say things like that, you're like, you're like, you know what? We actually need to sit down because it's a very good law in some ways. It's not a good law. In other ways, we need to be nuanced about it. And that's what's lacking in Washington is this idea. And I don't think they're all stupid. But I think Amy Klobuchar is very smart on the issue. She was Mark Warner, Jared Paulus in Colorado, Gavin Newsom. There's all kinds of really smart people on these topics. I mentioned Katie Porter. I think AOC is quite sharp on this stuff. There's a real room. And the people at the FTC, I have a lot of admiration on both sides, the Republicans and Democrats there.

If Donald Trump and Joe Biden were hit by a meteor tomorrow and President Rick Wilson named Karras Swisher as my tech czar, Facebook czar. I feel like you're not going to be president here, Rick. Just a ride with me, Molly. It's a beautiful journey. What would you recommend? What would your steps be? What's the TikTok on how you deal with some of the things we're facing right now? I think one, you fund the FDC properly.

Two, you get the Justice Department funded properly because things move so quickly in the tech space. Three, you start to like move into some legislation around privacy, just basic privacy. It doesn't favor these companies. It really does protect consumers. You work with Europeans on some of this stuff and other governments like Justinda Ardaren is doing some stuff. Australia is doing some interesting stuff. You bring in industry people that are relevant

and at the same time reasonable, like Brad Smith from Microsoft, who has written a great book called Tools and Weapons. You start to really have dialogue, and you conclude consumers in this whole thing, like consumers that are affected and also these groups. It's a very long and difficult process, but we have done it with so many other industries. We've done it, whether it was a cigarette industry, Wall Street,

and none of them are ideal. Let's be honest. None of them are ideal. But it needs to start with some understanding the base consumers are the ones that matter and the impact on elections and society and civility. And the weaponization and amplification of these models is unlike anything else in history. And it's not like regulating newspapers.

It's not like regulating radio. It's not even like regulating television, which is very powerful. It's a whole other class of what's happening here. And so we really do need to understand that and help small companies. That's the other thing, is really start to back small companies that will compete. Because that's really where you get the real change. You can't fund a social media company. You cannot fund a search search.

There was just a recent one by an ex-Google executive who was quite high up called Neva. It's going to be a subscription service. You have to start getting competition going. And then lastly, you can't just fall back on the competition from China. By the way, I'm concerned about Chinese apps too, but I certainly don't want to wander into it like a ham-handed idiot like the bar. But why is that so innovative? Why do kids love it? It's because it is actually a great product.

How do we regulate those things? How do we think about the Chinese influence without having to have giant companies fight them? That tech companies always sort of point to China. I call it the she or me defense. Like, oh, it's either the Chinese or us. And I'm like, you're all awful. And you live here. Him, he lives somewhere else.

So I'm not really as concerned with him as you. I think there was also a belief for a while that Silicon Valley innovation would always push along. And eventually Facebook would become what Yahoo was. A once dominant thing that had gotten upended. But it seems to me that we've reached a point now where with the catch and kill and with the sort of regulatory and long-tail problem, that it's hard for anybody to imagine scaling to be competitive now with Google or Facebook

or Amazon. Right, exactly, in those particular areas. And then they'll need to reach out to other areas because they have to. You know, the Borg has to grow, essentially. And so what should they be allowed to buy? Should Google buy Pinterest? Should Facebook buy Pindor? Should Amazon buy Dordash?

Well, no. And then who does that? But can Doordash compete if they get into it? Now, Amazon does have something called Deliveroo or something like that hasn't worked out as well. but eventually they'll get to it. So that's another issue. And I think probably competition, Rick, is always the best way to solve these problems, always.

I agree. And it's never, like, I don't want excessive regulation. You know, we don't want to, but some regulation, one piece of regulation would be nice, one privacy bill to protect consumers. Because right now we're completely unprotected. These are the richest people on the planet with the most power. And lack of accountability, I mean, come on.

You know where this story ends, always. Same place. Hey, in case you missed it, the Daily Beast recently launched a crossword puzzle. It's made to let news junkies like us flex our mental muscles with clues based on what's happening in politics and pop culture. Head on over to the DailyBeast.com slash crossword-dash puzzles to play now. It's a great way to pass the time during the coronavirus, and it's free. Jacob Soberoff is a correspondent for NBC and MSNBC, and his new book is called Separated, which details the horror of the Trump administration's child separation.

policies. You know, Jacob, I think that if there is one catalyzing moment in the mind of most Americans about the Trump administration's border policies, it really was some of your reporting and some of the scenes, when you saw the scope of it, beyond just being a reporter, I mean, there must have been a humanitarian level of it, too, where you just, it was hard to imagine the degree to which this was such a deliberate program. I didn't know what to say, Rick, when I first saw it myself. And I only had, I think I had like around an hour to come out and get ready to go on Chris Hayes' show between the time I walked out of that Casapadre, former Walmart, and had to go on the air. And I really struggled with, how do I talk about this? Because there is no way to having not seen it.

And again, admittedly, I had sort of missed the lead up, despite the fact I had been reporting a lot about the border to the separations. I didn't see it coming. There were other reporters like Lomi Creel from the Houston Chronicle or Caitlin Dickerson from the New York Times or Julia Ainsley, who's now my colleague at NBC. the time was at Reuters who had been covering this, um, intensively and aggressively. And the only reason I was invited was because I was working on a dateline hour-long documentary for which I had interviewed Kirstenielsen. And so I go inside and I see this thing and the kids are doing Tai Chi and watching Moana in the loading dock of the Walmart. And they're telling me things like they're allowed outside two or three hours a day, a maximum. This place is overcrowded. They have a variance

from the state and have five beds instead of four in every room. And they're basically overwhelmed. and it was almost impossible for me to articulate it clearly. And that's why I'm really grateful to Chris Hayes, because he spent with me on the air that night, June 13, 2018, seven or eight minutes, just talking. There was not a pre-planned segment. He just said, come outside and tell us what you saw inside. And I just sort of spill my guts about this is what I saw,

this is what it was like to see. I talked about being a father and seeing it. Chris talked about being a father. And I was just trying to do the best I could to represent what I had seen inside. and then sort of process it later. And I mean, that's why I want to write the book, too, because I had those experiences in real time, but I didn't understand how this could happen

in the United States of America, even though I probably should have. And there are many people that do and did understand it. One of the things that often puzzles people about this is why weren't there more whistleblowers? Yeah, I think it's a good question. And the answer is that there were. And at the time, I really just didn't know about it.

You know, my experience in covering family separations was largely based on my, the facts on the ground. What I saw when I went into that former Walmart that was 250,000 square feet that held 1,500 boys, hundreds of them who had been separated. And also when I went into the Ursula Border Patrol processing station, which at the time, Katie Miller, then Katie Waldman, told me what was the epicenter. And it's where I saw the kids under the mylar blankets and the concrete floors and the security contractor watching over them in a watchtower. And it's still never easy actually to describe that. But that was my point of reference. And when I would cover it,

In retrospect, you know, I was mistaken to say there was never a plan to reunite the children. There were plans. And there were people like Commander Jonathan White in HHS, Jalen Seulog at Office of Refugee Resettlement, Jim de la Cruz, who kept an informal list of separations, Claire, trickler, McNulty, inside of ICE. All people I learned about later who had attempted to stop this policy at multiple inflection points and were unable to do so because of political appointees in the Trump administration. They didn't necessarily come out. And like you said, Molly blew the whistle in a formal process. But they tried very hard. And it's very clear to me now, although it wasn't then, to stop this all from happening.

Will you talk to us about Katie Miller? The passage in the book about Katie Miller is pretty horrific. And she has the sort of most horrible moment of sociopathie in this administration, which is pretty impressive. When you ask her if she's a white supremacist, what's your read on her demeanor? Well, she had said similar things to me. We should say what she said. she basically said, so just to make sure I get it right, let me read from the book. What had happened was Katie Miller and I, Katie Waldman at the time, had a close professional working relationship

because she had invited me into these border detention centers, the HHS shelter Casapadre and the Ursula Border Patrol Processing Station, in order to, in her own characterization, have the media get the word out before Democrats on a CODEL could go in and say, this is what we saw. And I was just horrified. And she was a relentless, defender of the administration and the policy. So I constantly questioned her about, look, I saw this. You haven't even gone in there to see what I saw. How can you morally defend this policy? And on several occasions, she told me, you know, different versions of she was sent to the border in order to become more compassionate. And again, in this scene that I recounted in the epilogue of the book, and we had a similar conversation. So let me just read it to you. And by the way,

Kaylee McEnany, the press secretary was asked about this yesterday. Katie Miller denies, before I read this, She denies that she said this or essentially implied that I made it up. And... Sounds very Trumpy. After I read this, I'll tell you how that's impossible. So Katie said, my family and colleagues told me that when I have kids, I'll think about the separations differently, but I don't think so. DHS sent me to the border to see the separations myself to try to make me more compassionate,

but it didn't work. I asked, it didn't work? I'll never forget what I saw. Seriously. Or are you a white nationalist? She replies, no. But I believe if you come to America, you should assimilate. Why do we need to have Little Havana?

And so yesterday, when this comes up in the press briefing, and Kaylee McEnany says, I just talked to Katie Miller before coming out here, and she denies that she said that as was described or as written, it's just not true. And I wasn't the only person sitting at the table with Katie Miller. I was in Washington, D.C. with Katie Turr. And we were shooting our documentary series, American Swamp, for MSNBC. And Katie Turr was sitting at the table with me. And go ask Katie Turr, if you don't believe me.

go ask the multiple people who have come forward to me, both before this book was published and subsequent to the publication of the book and the statement that have said, Katie Miller said similar things to me independent of knowing about this in the book. The idea that the person who relentlessly defended and denied that there was a family separation policy is now telling the truth about what she said insofar as alleging that I'm not telling the truth. It's just absurd and on no level is it believable. Knowing her reputation and certainly having married Santa Monica Goebbels now, This is the least shocking thing I could have been told that she would have said.

That circle that they run in in D.C. right now that is very outright adjacent. Yeah, maybe I was naive, but I was in a weird way. And when you read the book, you'll see grateful to her, because if it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have ever seen any of this stuff. She was the one who invited me inside. And we had an amicable professional relationship. So I felt comfortable saying to her, look, this is how I feel about this. You know, this is what I saw.

I just don't see how anyone can process it for anything other than what it is. Maybe it isn't surprising, Rick, you know, but like I was constantly surprised. I guess that's my bad that I was. But when you had the opportunity to see or go through, like the 5,400 families that were systematically tortured, you know, which is the word used by physicians for human rights, it's impossible to understand this for anything other than what it was, a government sanctioned tortured program by the Trump administration. Did she really think that what she was showing you wouldn't horrify you? No, actually.

I think she and the administration, I don't think I know, she said this to me, that the administration, wanted to have these images get out because they felt like it would force the Congress to reverse laws, the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the Flores Settlement Agreement, to allow them to deport Central American kids immediately and detain children with their parents indefinitely. And they felt like the cruelty of this would force Congress to act. And I do want to say, those are two policy goals that the Obama administration also had. But the Obama administration, and immigrants rights groups and activists and lawyers will all say those were reprehensible goals that the Obama administration had. But they never used the systematic torture and trauma of children as a means to get there.

And that's the difference. You know, one thing that the book I really hope makes clear is that American border policy for 30 years, at least, has been based around deterrence and making things hard, difficult, and dangerous, deadly for migrants who are coming to this country. But nobody had ever done and has ever done what the Trump administration has. it. I think it was Adam Surwer who said it first, but the cruelty is the point. That's right. And the spectacle of it is the point. I still think it's rippling out there into the country in a lot of ways. And I think that it is an issue that faded back in importance in the face of every other damn thing that's been exploding in our faces for two and a half, three years since it first started to come into public view. But I think it anecdotally, and from some research I've seen, it was a sort of permanent divorce with a lot of suburban voters for Trump. They, they looked at that as something that was so beyond the pale and so excessive. My question is, do they defend it inside the administration still today with the same sort of vigor that they seem to implement it with? Not only did they defend it, but literally today, there are articles out there about how the government has filed this week plans to essentially leave open the option to separate children

again, who are in ICE family detention with their parents ordered released by a federal judge due to the COVID outbreak in detention, and the government won't release the parents and children together, although they have the discretion to do so. There's 130 or so kids right now, as we're talking, who could be released by the government with their parents. And instead, the Trump administration is reserving the right to separate them. And not only that, there's another story in the book that I recount that I learned on March 3rd, 2019, well after the policy had been ended by executive order by the president. He was flying to Alabama on a tornado recovery trip to console the victims of a tornado in a place where many people had died. And instead of thinking about

the victims and talking with Kirstenielsen, who was a board Air Force One, alongside Ben Carson and Melania Trump about that. He says to her, we have to re-institute family separations. And Nielsen essentially said something to the effect of, I can't do that myself, sir. And before this conversation went any further, Melania Trump interjected and said, no, we can't do that. We can't do that. And the president said, we'll see. This is not something that they're ashamed of. This is something that they felt was effective. And if you listen to while he has a political break with Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions said we should have never stopped that. And I think that that's the way a lot of it, the hardliners in the administration still feel to this day.

There are so many children that are missing in different places, and do you have any sense of how many kids they've lost? We don't know the exact number, and that's according to the ACLU, who I just checked in with earlier this week before I started talking about this again. And the total number of kids, according to the ACLU, that have been separated is around 5,400. And 2,800 were separated during that critical zero tolerance period that everybody remembers. There was another thousand or so separated before that time during what was called a pilot program in the El Paso Border Patrol sector.

And then after that, another thousand, according to the ACLU, since the policy has ended. And the ACLU has tracked down and reunited the majority of the original 2,800 kids, but they simply can't find parents for the first 1,000 plus children because of the shoddy record keeping. Where are those kids? Many of them are with sponsors here in the United States, which might be fan. family members, what they can't find is the parents. Many parents, during zero tolerance over 400, were deported without their kids. The father and son, I write about Juan and Jose in the book, were almost faced with that situation. And if it wasn't for a lawyer, Lindsay Tislovsky,

from Immigrant Defender's Law Center out here in L.A., he wouldn't have been able to reverse a waiver he signed, giving up the right to his child. He was coerced to sign and wouldn't have ever been reunited. And it took five months for them to be reunited. In a sick way, he was one of the lucky ones, which seems like a horrible way to describe it, but he did get to get back together with his son and wanted to share his story very explicitly so that this never happens again. And there are so many parents who didn't, who still haven't had that opportunity. Let me just say about that, the ACLU was on the ground in Central America and until the coronavirus, they were with regularity looking for separated parents of children who had been deported to places like the Western Highlands or the dry corridor where many

people flee due to starvation and malnutrition, a place I visited over the course of the last couple years to see for myself why people were leaving. And it's literally a search, detective work, to find where these parents are to see if they want the children deported back to them in their home country in order to be reunited. I've wondered a lot about this the last couple years. The wall as this sort of Trumpian culture war artifact or signifier is what seems to distract people from all this sort of institutionalized horror. And when you talk to folks in the DHS world in that, did they treat the wall as something serious or do they understand that it's just a sort of Trump campaign prank? No. Any operator you talk to, while they say, hey, we want to replace this six or

eight-foot-tall landing mat strip that was a Vietnam War era relic with a more substantive wall, nobody says, virtually nobody who's a frontline operator says, we need a wall from coast to coast. And admittedly, I was really, it's a very, it's a shiny object to be distracted by. And that's what I was focused on in my reporting, the fact that most drugs don't come through places in between ports of entry, but legal ports of entry, you know, that MS-13 members are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the people who ultimately come. I think it was like 187 of 187,000 in the Rio Grande Valley sector at the time of separations when I was there covering this. I mean, there are all these things that are thrown as justification for the wall when the reality is most people who are in this country illegally, so to speak, are here because they've overstayed their visas after flying here from countries, not because they crossed the southern border.

Most people who cross the southern border are coming here to seek asylum. And so long story short, the wall itself, nobody has ever said that it's necessary all the way across other than President Trump and those. and his sort of ideological corner of this administration. And in fact, just go down there and look yourself. The technology, the Border Patrol and CBP and DHS has always said, technology, infrastructure, and manpower is how you, quote, unquote, secure a border. It's not infrastructure solely. It's a multi-part, three-pronged law enforcement strategy.

And to this day, that's the strategy. But the president certainly doesn't read his own DEA reports that say violence isn't spilling over from Mexico into the border communities, some of the safest communities in the country. Okay, we have a number of fuck that guys this week. That's like a busload of fuck that guys. It's a virtual pornocopia of fuck that guys because there's been a lot of fuckery. The fuckery level this week is really hitting.

It's the type of fuckery what goes to 11. So let's start with your home state of Florida. With Governor DeVirus? Governor DeVirus. Do you remember when the National Review, I can't remember who it was in the National Review, wrote a piece? It was Rich Lowry. Where does Ron DeSantis go for his apology? Well, you know where he goes?

You know where he goes right now? The morgue? Where? He goes to the maxed out fucking emergency rooms in Broward, Palm Beach, Dade, Hillsborough, and Leon counties. I don't think he's going to those emergency rooms. He goes for his apologies in the fact that Florida is racing to be number three in the country. And by population proportion, we're already number two in the country. He's following the Trump top-down orders, and he's ordered his education commissioner guy named Richard Corcoran to reopen all the schools, and he's insisting on it.

He's doing a stompy foot. His little Trump imitation. Oh, well, if you don't do it, we'll cut your funding. We may end up with empty classrooms in Florida, not because people resisted the order to go back to school, but because they obeyed it. This is a calamitous decision. It is well worthy of a fuck that guy.

Rhonda Sanis has been on our fuck that guy list a lot, I feel. Yeah, well, because he really deserves it. But I will say that probably he won't be able to have the schools back because if these municipalities are still in stage one, you can't have school in stage one. So good luck, Ron. I want to know, and everyone's asked this question, this is not an original question. If it is safe enough to force kids to ride crowded buses and go into crowded classrooms all across this country,

why the fuck is Paul Manafort walking out of prison because of the threat of COVID? Why does Roger Stone claim that his poor delicate physique can't handle the COVID in the prison? With kids have to go back into schools that are just as crowded. And as you know, kids are not notoriously clean and they don't notoriously wear the mask or use the hand sanitizer. That argument that COVID is so dangerous that Manafort needs to be freed from prison, but kids need to go to schools, that's a fuck that guy in and of itself. You know what's interesting, though, is actually there is a reasonable argument for kids to go back to school, and the way this is carried a lot. There's a lot of evidence from China that kids actually have not spread it to their parents, that it generally is the parent that spreads it to the kids. But what's interesting is all of that has been obscured by Trump's decision that everyone is going back to school and he doesn't care.

and that's it and we're done. And so in some ways, he's politicized something, a battle that he could actually win. But we just think he's so wrong about everything that we've hit that, which is interesting, I think. I think there's an enormous risk factor for this. And I think the CDC folks are right now in hostage territory. Right, certainly. Or they're having to follow the White House's bullshit lead on this. I think there is a strong understanding that they're doing this.

They know what's going to happen. But he wants to try to bump up the economic numbers. for election day. That's the bottom line. That's it. That's the whole thing. So fuck that guy. The only way he can win he has calculated, which is probably true, is if the economy comes back and he just doesn't understand that you can't bring the economy back until you mitigate the virus. Well, that is the fundamental reality check here. And if they don't choose to believe it, they don't choose to believe it. But I think there will be a terrible political price to pay when people say, motherfucker, we have to close again because these idiots move too fast. I also think

there's going to be a long-running fuck that guy because Mitch McConnell is telling Trump right now, he's Dr. Knowing Trump and saying, no, no more assistance, no more economic assistance. Right. Yeah, that's going to be just so grim. The school reopening thing has now become one more stupid fucking signifier in the Trump's stupid fucking culture war. Because, look, he's got nothing left. He can't run on the economy. He can't run on competence. He can't run on anything except the culture war. So he's going to defend Confederate statues. He's going to defend reopening schools as a signifier in that battle. You know, don't wear a mask is a cultural war signifier.

Yeah. Now it's, I got in trouble on CNN once one time long ago. Ukraine? For the making the Ukraine joke. But these are people who have this oppositional defiant disorder politics now as the center of their lives. And so it's even if, you know, those doctors and experts, they're not going to tell me to wear a mask or socially distance. I'm not going to do that because they're lying Liptard cucks who hate our president. And Kevin McCarthy was the latest guy to sing the songbook with his new Muslim Fear Factor thing that he's doing.

Did you see that? Right. They're just attacked Ilhan Omar. for no reason. And they said she's an ungrateful immigrant. And the joke is her father was literally killed by COVID. Oh, wait, Donald Trump. And this idea of the ungrateful immigrant. Right. And why don't they just go straight to the fucking blood and soil argument? Well, they're on their way. It's blood and soil adjacent. Let's put it that way. We're well on our way to that. And so it is interesting to see Kevin McCarthy go down this road.

You know, you and I saw this movie that's going to come out in August about Congress. I thought it was fascinating. It's called The Swamp. coming out from HBO, and we pre-screened it. And I think for you, Molly, because you haven't, like, grown up around that whole sort of scuzzy DC fundraising conveyor belt. I've been around a little too long. For me, it was just like, oh, God, this fucking grind that these guys go through all the time, this constant begging for money.

And people don't understand that the money party in D.C. Is a unitary party. Both sides are constantly slaving away, grinding to raise money, and grinding along to try to achieve something to get their committee chairmanships. But I think you came at it with fresh eyes. It was a lot more shocking. I mean, I'm so cynical on it. It's just ridiculous.

There's a lot more shocking. I think people are going to find it appalling. Yeah. How desperate the crawl for money is. And the guy who did it is the guy who did Get Me Roger Stone. Right. So hopefully we'll have... Do you know who's doing Get Me Roger Stone now?

The U.S. Marshal Service, who will remand him to custody in one week from today. Oh, Jesus. Oh, well, that wasn't so bad. That could have gone any number of ways. Trust me, once he's in prison, the jokes are going to flow. Well, let's see if they get him, right? The problem for Trump commuting his sentence is if he commutes his sentence, Roger's still a felon. Oh, wait, why is he still a felon? Because commuting the sentence does not a pardon.

Right. And he can't have a pardon? Well, Bill Barr has told Donald Trump that if he does a pardon of Roger Stone, there will be a rebellion that even he can't stop in the Justice Department. Do you think that's true? Well, I mean, Interior Minister Barr may have a lot of powers, but at some point, the favoring the president's political cronies for pardons and preferential treatment, there will be line attorneys who say, Fuck it, I'm done. Really? I mean, I was surprised, can we go back to the Supreme Court for one second here? Your boyfriend, Gorsuch?

Oh, yeah, my favorite. I was sort of surprised that they really did, they were not having it. No, they really weren't. And the revelation that as bad as Vance is that the grand jury can so proceed to get Trump's taxes and business records, it has led to exactly what you would expect it to lead to with Trump today, which is the Twitter hissy fit. Yeah, the complete and utter meltdown, which included the misspelling of the word caught. Of course, and one one hundredth. What was that? One one hundredth of what?

Donald Trump is a, what's the word I'm looking for? Moron. He doesn't understand the use of language or numbers. Tell me more. I think it's fairly self-evident. I think we got it there. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond

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