The David Pakman Show - 10/3/23: Trump furious after court appearance, more electric car lies

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

-- On the Show: -- Taylor Lorenz, columnist for the Washington Post and author of the new book "Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet," joins David to discuss the world of influencing and modern social media. Get the book: https://amzn.to/45arpny -- Fox News host Charles Payne tells a stunning number of lies about electric vehicles in a very short amount of time -- A slurring, confused failed former President Donald Trump speaks in Iowa, tells one of his "tears in their eyes" stories, and raises major cognitive concerns -- A furious Donald Trump appears in New York court for his fraud lawsuit and it does not go well -- Failed former President Donald Trump melts down after his court appearance, attacking everyone in sight -- MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell says that he is now under tax fraud investigation from the IRS and facing five different audits -- Donald Trump complains that his trial doesn't have a jury, but this is because his lawyer, Alina Habba, did not request one -- Brain worms caller Troy York claims we "purchased bots" and that our subscribers are fake -- On the Bonus Show: Supreme Court to consider abortion pills, guns, and social media in new term, Nobel Price goes to scientists behind mRNA COVID vaccines, drug makers sign on to negotiate Medicare prices, much more... 🔊 Babbel: Get 55% off your subscription at https://babbel.com/pakman ☕ Beam melatonin hot cocoa: Get up to 40% OFF with code PAKMAN at https://shopbeam.com/pakman 💪 Athletic Greens is offering FREE year-supply of Vitamin D at https://athleticgreens.com/pakman 🤢 Reliefband: Use code PAKMAN for 20% OFF + free shipping at https://reliefband.com 💥 SainSmart: Get 10% OFF with code PAKMAN at https://davidpakman.com/engrave 😁 Zippix Toothpicks: Code PAKMAN10 saves you 10% at https://zippixtoothpicks.com -- Become a Supporter: http://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow -- Subscribe to Pakman Live: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanlive -- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidpakmanshow -- Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave us a message at The David Pakman Show Voicemail Line (219)-2DAVIDPSeptember 20, 2023

Speaker 1 The American right wing continues to wage a brave and courageous war against the scourge, as Trump used to say it, of electric vehicles. And, you know, I think part of what's going on here is that the electric vehicle is much more visible as a scapegoat than, you know, if you've replaced your gas stove with an induction oven the way I have, it's not really visible in the same way that out on the highways you see these electric vehicles and you can frame them and scapegoat them as evil wrongdoers or whatever. Here's Charles Payne on Fox News yesterday unleashing an anti electric vehicle tirade laced with I mean, count the lies that I struggle to keep up with the number of lies

that are told. Do facts matter anymore? It seems clear that the answer is no, but let's listen to what he had to say and then we'll discuss it. In fact, he hit on a lot of amazing, fantastic points. Anyone out there who feels great about themselves as a good global citizen because they're driving an electric car? No, you are absolutely strip mining the planet. You are putting little kids in a Congo out 14 years old into filthy, dirty water for 20 hours a day. You are a slave master. You're not a good citizen. Stop patting yourself on the back. By the way, they're not rare. They're hard to get. They're expensive to get and they're dangerous to get. That's why we stopped mining for them. But it's so crazy. By the way, the only thing you missed

was the billion dollars. How about hundreds of billions of dollars? Right. But one quick thing, because I'm getting a rap, I think is a huge mistake for Republicans to start dissing these you, you, you. OK, so now he gets off onto you, a W workers. So let's talk about a few of these things. The argument against electric vehicles in favor of gas powered vehicles is a bogus argument. Now, if you want to come to me, maybe drenched in tears and say, sir, I don't believe today's electric vehicles are the endpoint of transportation. I would say to you, that's a great conversation to have. We are going to see changes to battery technology. We are going to see hydrogen. I just saw an incredible demo of a hydrogen fueled vehicle. Maybe we're going to go in the direction of

hydrogen. I would grant you today's electric vehicles are not the end point, but at a fundamental basic level, basic level efficiency per mile is much higher with electric vehicles. And so however we back in how they are made, we have to remember at a core level to go a mile in an electric vehicle accounting for the carbon footprint of the batteries and all of these different things. It is way, way lower. Now, to address the specific things that Charles Payne is saying, you know, last week we had this dude. I don't even know what to call him. There was a male human. It was a homo sapiens male

who was interviewed at Trump's fake autoworker rally last week and said electric vehicles are bad because the engines are so simple that you need 30 to 40 percent fewer workers. And of course, the counterpoint is widespread electric vehicle adoption will blow up countless new industries and generate new jobs. Now, let's go through Charles Payne's arguments here. You are strip mining the planet if you drive an electric vehicle. It is true that the production of the batteries for electric vehicles requires extracting certain raw materials, lithium, cobalt, nickel, other minerals. Some of the mining practices are environmentally problematic if they aren't properly managed.

But he's not telling you the other side of the story, which is the extraction of oil to transport and refine into gasoline to then have cars driving around pumping poison into the atmosphere. That is not without its environmental impacts either. Drilling for oil, especially in some of the places where we do it through practices that are harmful to the environment, is a disaster. Oil spills are a disaster. The catastrophic environmental consequences of obtaining, refining and burning fossil fuels is a nightmare. So he's just not even going to mention that. Also, battery technology is going to improve over time and you are going to need comparatively less and less of each of those minerals over time if we continue to fund this research.

OK, then he says, if you drive an electric vehicle, you're putting kids in the Congo into filthy water 20 hours a day. Now, this seems to be a reference to the mining of cobalt in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is absolutely the case that a bunch of the world's cobalt comes from there. It's used in batteries, comes from DRC. There are documented cases of child labor and unsafe conditions in some of those mines. Absolutely true. Absolutely a concern. There are also major human rights concerns in the oil industry.

There's exploitation. There's environmental degradation. There's conflict and wars funded around obtaining and extracting oil. How many people have died? How many kids have died over wars fought for fossil fuels? It's absurd to only tell one side of the story. And then he says electric vehicle drivers are slave masters. Any ethical concern that exists over the sourcing of the batteries or whatever he's referring to, I share the concern. But it is such a silly oversimplification to simplify driving an electric vehicle in this manner. Obviously, the electric vehicle industry is aware of those concerns. There are companies working towards more ethical sourcing. That is all going to happen much more quickly if we stop

subsidizing gas powered vehicles and instead further subsidize electric vehicles. So they're obsessed with this and they're obsessed with it for a few different reasons. The primary reason is they love the optics and they are tricking maggots or magapatamians or whatever. They're they're tricking the the non thinking right wingers with the talking points and the right wingers go, see, it sounds pretty good. We should get away from these things. It's very bad. Charles Payne completely off the wall. Just about everything he said was untrue. A slurring and confused Trump raising new cognitive concerns in a Tomwa, Iowa. I a couple

weeks ago I was I was crushed for mispronouncing. I guess it's Makata is the way it's pronounced Iowa. And I thought it was Macaca or something like that. I believe a Tom what Iowa is correct. Trump slurring his words, ranting about how he would rather be electrocuted to death than eaten by a shark. It's another cognitive beauty, ladies and gentlemen. But if I'm sitting down and that boat's going down and I'm on top of a battery. I know water starts flooding in. I'm getting concerned. But then I look 10 yards to my left

and there's a shark over there. My left. So I have a choice of electrocution or a shark. You know what I'm going to take electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time. Do we agree? There you go. Three glitches and three nonsense statements in 21 seconds. It's really something else. Imagine if Joe Biden did this. Imagine if Joe Biden did this. It would be 25th Amendment right away. Trump then continuing to slur and glitch badly, looking particularly swollen more than usual, points out a state senator in the crowd and calls her a beautiful female. I got elected.

I say, wow, somebody is really doing well over there. Indict him. Indict him. Indict the senator right over there. That beautiful female. She says, no, please indict her. Completely normal stuff, completely typical and standard of any former president to deliver a speech like this. Right. Trump said that farmers and builders who previously in their

lives never cried, they just never cried as a matter of procedure, are coming up to him in tears, thanking him for everything he's done. It's another one of the tears in their eyes stories. Does anybody believe this story? And a lot of farmers come in from Iowa, a lot of builders come in from all over the country and they were crying. Many of them were crying. People that have never cried before. This was unprecedented crying from big, strong men.

Nobody's ever seen them shed a tear before Trump with another cognitive confusion saying that if you look up the Obama administration's statistics, I guess, whatever they are, if you look up the Obama statistics, the Obama administration has recorded the amount of border wall that Trump built, which is weird because any border wall Trump built, if any, happened after the Obama administration. It's a trip. Maybe time functions in a different way than we understand. It's a metaphysical statement. Listen to this. And then I build a 40 foot wall, a 50 foot wall or a 30 foot wall on top. They say that was a renovation. That doesn't count. These people, I'll tell you what they have. I'll tell you, they have a great line of bull. That's one thing I can tell. That was a renovation.

Like sloppy Chris Christie. Oh, he only built 56 miles of wall because there was some wood laying on the ground. So they call that a renovation. We built almost 500 miles of wall. Even the Obama administration says it in this. That's that's right. If you look up the record of the Obama administration, they somehow let you know that years later, Trump built part of a wall or something like that. This is not a man who is well, this is not a man who is well, and the people that are defending him are essentially endorsing this behavior. Trump weirdly says he's leading with whites, blacks, women, Hispanics, Asians and those in Gen Z. These are not true statements.

Poll just came out. We're leading with women, with suburban women, with men, with black, with white, with Asian, with Hispanic, with people that went to MIT, like my uncle, who has three degrees. We like leading with people like that. He passed away a long time ago, but he was a smart one. And we're leading with young kids that don't even have a high school education. We're leading with everybody among 12 year olds who have yet to complete high school. Trump is way, way ahead. And that will be very useful in the 2032 2032 presidential election. Trump continues his ranting against electric vehicles.

As we saw earlier, this is just extraordinarily popular now. And Trump making claims that certainly don't mirror my experience with electric vehicles. I'll tell you that the happiest people in the world are the people who just got their electric vehicle charged. That lasts for 10 minutes. After that, they become somewhat schizophrenic. There you go. Now, again, as I've said before, Brooklyn to Montreal with just a 15 minute charging and diaper change stop. Not my diaper, guys. The baby diaper can be a break. It was a very much not schizophrenic experience. I have to tell you, Trump continues to attack batteries and electricity. Now they want to go to all electric cars. That's great. You know, if you want to drive

for a half hour and start, let's where do I recharge? You want to take a nice, long, beautiful drive in the country. You have to make it a nice short drive in the country. And Trump knows more about driving than anybody, as I'm sure you can imagine. A legend in his own mind, Donald Trump describes how he saved Christmas. He saved Christmas from the Obama administration. Christmas tree, by the way. Remember Christmas, by the way, we brought back Christmas. We brought back Merry Christmas.

Nobody fights it anymore. Nobody fights it anymore. Nobody fights it. Heroic. Speaking of Christmas. Remember that? I said one of the first things I said in 2015, actually, when I was campaigning, I said, we will bring back Merry Christmas because these woke departments, as they didn't want to use the word Christmas and they use the word Christmas.

Now we brought that back. We did a lot of things. That's a major accomplishment, as I know many of you were just really pining for a president that would bring back Merry Christmas. And lastly, Donald Trump says that recently his wife, Melania, has been telling him he's not looking so good on TV, but it's because of the lighting, not because he's facing 91 felony counts and has been found to be a civilly liable rapist. The lights get much more powerful, but you look like crap on television. I got it. I was going to tell my people. I'm telling my people now I'm talking. This isn't for you. This one, these lights are so powerful. They probably cost a lot of money because we're doing so well.

Everyone's sending in lots of camp. But these lights are no good. Number one, the more you donate, the more lights they put on him, I guess. And you can hardly see the audience. Number two, when you go home to watch it with our great first lady, how did I look? She said you didn't look good. Too much light. You know what makes this very hard to believe that Trump claims he still talks to Melania, who, by all reports, is living a completely separate life and essentially has agreed to stay with Trump through this campaign, at least in part for a revised financial arrangement.

So that's that's how you know Trump is lying. He claims he still talks to Melania Trump. This is where we are right now. And is it the pressure of Trump's four criminal trials and multiple civil trials getting to him? Is it the fear of spending the rest of his natural life in prison if he's convicted on even some of the 91 charges that he's facing? Or does he simply think he's going to lose this election? I don't know what it is, but he is an unwell man. And the MAGA crowd wants to talk about Joe Biden tripped Biden's 80 and he tripped.

But they don't want to talk about these cognitive beauties. You tell me what you think is going on and please make sure you're subscribed on YouTube. Do you realize we are 80,000 subscribers away from 2 million? And we found out this is an incredible statistic. YouTube reps came up to me with tears in their eyes. These are people who never cry. OK, they came up to me and they said, David, you know, over 7 million people watched your clips last month and five and a half million of them are not even subscribed. If just those folks subscribed, we would be at two million overnight. So let's do it. And we'll take a very short break. People in my audience who sometimes struggle with sleep, you know, you've got those habit

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That's drink a G the number one slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. An absolutely furious Donald Trump showed up in New York court yesterday. These are not even his criminal trials yet. This is the civil suit against Trump and his sons for alleged fraud. It's a $250 million civil fraud trial. The arguments here are that all sorts of different fraud took place, including lies about the valuation of Trump's properties. This is one that is not going particularly well for Trump. But to be perfectly honest, the criminal risk to Trump

here is extremely minimal. It's essentially zero. We're talking about a lawsuit here. His criminal trials will start in several months. Video of Trump from the courthouse was taken. As you see Trump standing, sitting what I believe he believes is stoically sitting next to one of his lawyers, Alina Haba, to his left our right. The video, the subject of much parody, meme efficacious and criticism. Some right wingers furious that when the camera turned from Donald Trump over to the judge in the case, Judge Anger on that Anger on was grinning. And we don't have that part of the video here, but many people were extraordinarily angry about that.

This is a trial that continues today. Trump apparently is there. The trial is expected to last until December 22nd, occurred, according to Judge Arthur and Garon. And Trump wasted no time attacking everybody involved. But before we get to that, here's a statement from the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who said what is being sent here as a message is that it doesn't matter how powerful you are. If you do things that are wrong,

you're not going to be above the law. This is a good message. Take a listen to this. Oh, and we've got a glitchy video. Let's see if we can fix it. The occasional glitch. Here we go. Committed persistent and repeated fraud. Last week, we proved that in our motion for summary judgment. Today, we will prove our other claims. My message is simple. No matter how powerful you are, no matter how much money you think you may have, no one is above the law. And it is my responsibility and my duty and my job to enforce it. The law is both powerful and fragile. And today in court, we will prove our case. I thank you all for being here. And again, justice will prevail. And remember, the threat here is to Trump's business, which may indeed lose the right

to operate in New York. That is what it is at issue. This is a civil trial. But nevertheless, Trump wasted absolutely no time attacking everyone involved just after leaving the courthouse. And we're going to talk about that next. Donald Trump suffered an epic meltdown after the disastrous court appearance yesterday, during which I think he believes he looked tough, but he genuinely looked scared. Trump exiting the courthouse and making a number of different ridiculous statements, including immediately attacking both the judge and the attorney general.

Here is Trump saying that Judge Anger on should actually be disbarred and should be removed from the bench. I don't know that this is the way I would approach this, but this is Trump. This is a judge that should be disbarred. This is a judge that should be out of office. This is a judge that some people say could be charged criminally for what he's doing. He's interfering with an election. I think it's a disgrace. Thank you very much. So Trump apparently saying it's the judge who committed crimes. You know, I'm not a lawyer, but I know many lawyers, including criminal defense attorneys. They've never mentioned that it's a good idea for

their clients to attack the judges in their cases. That's something that typically you want to stay away from. And as Trump does this, you see Trump's lawyer, Alina Haba, in the background, just kind of standing there as if everything that's going on here is normal. Well, you know, I dare Trump to stand up in court and say these things to the judge's face. Trump continuing and arguing nobody was defrauded, that the properties he has are worth buku bucks, who even knows how much. And the numbers really just aren't adding up. This is a great trial.

The murders going all over the city, all over the state at a record level, it's an epidemic and they waste their time on this. It's banks that were very happy. They got all their money back. They weren't defrauded. I've been defrauded. To judge the rule that a building, that a property is worth $18 billion,

$18 million, when in fact it's worth over a billion, probably a billion and a half, it may be worth anything. But many properties which I sold are worth much more than were listed in the financial statement. Yeah, there is no tangible empirical evidence suggesting that Mar-a-Lago is worth one point five billion dollars.

There is just simply no evidence of that whatsoever. And it doesn't seem to me that it's in Trump's favor to make these sorts of arguments. Trump continuing the brutal attack on the judge, calling him a Democrat judge and operative, and then goes. Other than that, it went really well. Violent crime that's being committed in our city and our state is disgraceful. And we're going to be here for months with a judge that already made up his mind. It's ridiculous. He's a Democrat judge. He's an operative and it's ridiculous. Other than that, things went very well. I don't know why that's so. But, you know, it all went great.

Other than the fact that the judge has already prejudged the trial and is a terrible person and is a rat and is a Democrat operative or whatever. And then also during this completely unhinged, I don't even know that I'd call it a press conference. It's really just a statement. Trump appears to sort of threaten the attorney general here as well. Speaker 3 Great company. It's got tremendous value. It's got some of the greatest real estate assets in the world. And now I have to go before a rogue judge as a continuation of Russia, Russia, Russia,

as a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time. And I don't think the people of this country are going to stand for it. If I weren't leading in all the polls or if I weren't running, I wouldn't have any of these cases. I wouldn't be seeing you this morning. That's absolutely untrue. But I'll be seeing a lot of you because this is a horrible thing that's happening to our country and we've got to get it straightened away.

You know, this is one of the biggest grifts. If Trump can successfully do it, that you can do to the American people, or at least to the American people that are willing to hear it. The idea that Trump lying about the value of his properties, both for collateral benefit on loans and for tax purposes, Trump lying about the value of his properties is somehow an attack on the American people. Of course, it's ridiculous. Anybody who did what Trump is accused of doing would be getting prosecuted because it's fraud. But Trump wants you and me and certainly his followers to believe that this is somehow an attack on them, on their freedom, on their rights,

because Trump appears to have lied badly about financial characteristics of his properties. And now there may be a repercussion for that. If he can get away with this, then he's going to he may laugh all the way to back to the Oval Office. So we'll go in and see our rogue judge and we'll listen to this man. And I think most people get it. People are getting it. I can tell you the voters getting it because every time they give me a fake indictment, I go up in the polls and that's never happened before. Right. But this is a disgrace. And

you had to go after this attorney general because she's turning off everybody from coming in. You know, I don't know if you take a look at the outflow of business. Businesses are fleeing New York because. So listen, when he says they ought to go after the attorney general, I genuinely don't know if that's a threat with Trump. It's all it's so difficult to really know what's in his mind. One thought. Remember those bonkers COVID press conferences where Trump would talk about injecting bleach, almost like a cleaning for the lungs or whatever. I think that the post trial press conferences, particularly when the criminal trials get going, may be even more insane than the covid press conferences, which I never thought we would see anything like those again.

Those may end up just being a warm up compared to what we're now expecting. We'll have all of these clips on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, even on Snapchat. Some of these clips will appear. We'll take a quick break and be right back. One of our sponsors today is Relief Band. Relief Band is the number one FDA cleared anti-nausea wristband clinically proven to effectively prevent nausea and vomiting. Relief band is a type of therapy called transdermal neuromodulation, acustimulation. And in really simple terms, it's just a band you wear on your wrist that sends a gentle pulse to the part of your nervous system that regulates nausea. And there's been growing research showing that relief band can help with

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So what you know, when I think about being extremely online, I think about someone who is so connected to what's happening on social media, Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, that they sometimes lose the connection with what's happening in the, quote, real world. And in the political space, what I think about is if you just looked on Reddit and Twitter in 2020, you would have thought, for example, like Bernie Sanders will easily win the Democratic primary. It turned out a lot of the people that vote in the Democratic primary are just working and they're not spending time on these social platforms and that there was much more support among Democrats for Joe Biden than it seemed from the Internet. Talk about if that relates to what you mean by

extremely online and kind of the focus of the book. Yeah, it's definitely a phenomenon. I think social media can be a great sort of signal, but it's definitely not representative of everything, especially not one platform. My book, I named it Extremely Online because it's really about sort of how all of us have become increasingly online, not even necessarily extremely online in the way that a lot of people use it, as you just described, but also just like our lives are increasingly mediated by the internet, our economic system, our political system, like all of these things are shaped by the Internet. You know, I know Joe Biden's not a big Internet user, but actually his

entire digital team was just at VidCon last week talking about how he's the biggest content creator there is on, you know, in the political world right now. So, you know, online content is really key and we all live in this world shaped by the So, you know, online content is is really key. And we all live in this world shaped by the Internet. It seems as though like with any technology and, you know, Neil Postman and other technology theorists have written about this over time. There are things that we might say are, quote, good for society to the extent that we can come up with such a list. And then there are things that are maybe not so good that result from new technology. If we talk about some of the good, I guess, with the world that you describe in the book,

we would talk about rapid and more fluid communication, ability to learn about things that are taking place physically far from where we are, created all sorts of new industries and jobs, although any time that happens, maybe some are destroyed. You know, we can kind of come up with that. These is category of things that are good. And then you've got maybe on the other side of the ledger, the things that are not so good from your perspective. What is at the top of the not so good list, if that makes sense?

Oh, my God. Yeah, that's hard to choose from. I mean, as a journalist, I have to say a lot of disinformation worries me. You know, I think the there's there's no media literacy in this country at all, but especially on the Internet. I know there was some study that came out recently that said teenagers on TikTok are actually more likely to fall for scams and misinformation than their boomer, you know, grandparents or whatever on Facebook. So I think that worries me the most. The second aspect, and I write a lot about this in the book, is the mental health toll that it has on people. Because I think, again, even just using it at a

young age, I think it can really affect you, but it affects all of us. It just it can be toxic. I don't think the Internet is inherently bad, but I think our current platform ecosystem is really exploitative and bad. Yeah. On a recent podcast, Cal Newport, who writes a lot about this stuff, said he there's a prediction. Right. So it could be wrong. But he expects that in 10 years, the idea of giving a 12 year old uncontrolled access to social media would be sort of like we would now say, oh, we give them cigarettes at like he believes the data is going to ultimately be so overwhelming on the side of this is very bad that it will seem that destructive to provide young people with the sort of access that that many have.

What do you think about that? Speaker 1 Well, I don't know if I totally agree with that because I think that the, you know, social media and the Internet can be a real lifeline, especially for like LGBTQ youth and other, you know, kids that grow up in environments that maybe aren't very supportive of their identity or gender, you know, things like that. It can be good. I think unfettered access to the internet at such a young age is not good, right? It's just the same way we wouldn't put our kid out on the streets of New York City and say, you know, go explore for a couple hours, right? Like you need to provide sort of guidelines and safe experiences. And I

think it's really good to teach kids to use the internet in positive ways, you know, YouTube tutorials, you know, teach yourself skills, right. But also teach them a very strong sense of identity early so that they don't sort of let their identity be defined by the Internet. This all kind of gets us into another major topic of your book, which relates to influencer culture, content creators, sort of like the space in which I and many of my colleagues exist, many different content areas, of course. Talk a little bit about how the platforms led to this even being possible in the sense that my space for all its successes and failures did not really foment the influencer content creation culture that we see today.

So in some sense it was different even though it was a precursor. What is it about the platforms that are prevalent now that have led to this influencer culture? Yeah, I actually talk about my space in the book that beginning and sort of I think it was just way too early, like they wanted people to add and discover. At that time, it wasn't even normal to add your real life friends on social media. So it was just it was it was kind of not much of a thing. I talk about actually the rise of blogs and blog culture, which I think is actually very similar to kind of like podcast culture today, where, you know, you have these people that are generating ideas or thoughts around

a specific topic and you have sort of people returning to learn or listen or, you know, just some of them are highly personal. Some of them are highly educational. I think that was the real beginning of influencer culture. It started with bloggers, actually. And then, of course, it's evolved into platforms like YouTube. YouTube was so early. They rolled out monetization in 2007. You know, Facebook still doesn't have a coherent monetization model for creators. So yeah, but I think as these platforms

grew, online attention became this valuable currency and people started to be able to monetize in more ways on the internet. You know, I talk in the book as well about this explosion to e-commerce sites that allow people to easily generate merch and, you know, websites and things like this. So we just have a lot more tools at our disposal now. Yeah, the the the platform monetization thing is interesting. There are platforms now. I don't know how it's going to shake out ultimately. But for example, Tick Tock launched. They've had their creator fund for a while, but they launched what's called the Creativity Fund Beta.

And I'm part of it. And the first month it sort of did OK. And it's essentially dead as of October 2023 in the sense that, like, the revenue we had is down like 98 percent. I don't know if it's because they actually have changed their mind or because it's a pool based revenue source. So now it's getting split up among more people. When these things happen, it very quickly changes the dynamics of the content that's

being created because creators adjust to create content that meets the guidelines. And then just as quickly when the funding dries up, creators change again. It seems that this is not an uncommon story. Adpocalypse on YouTube. We've had periods on Facebook where we lose all revenue for a month because I debunk some misinformation, but it's flagged as misinformation, et cetera. Yeah, I actually I have a whole almost a whole chapter on the adpocalypse in my book and the sort of the what that led to and why it happened.

I think that this is this inherent tension between content creators and platforms and platforms like tick tock and and instagram and it's an extent too with reels it's like they haven't really cracked short form monetization yet right um and i think that they're still struggling they don't have that sort of just a tried and true monetization model that YouTube has, honestly. And I think that that makes it really precarious for content creators. So you see a lot of people use TikTok for discovery and for audience growth. And then they immediately try and funnel people to their Patreon or YouTube or something more

sustainable because you just can't. It's like building a business on quicksand. If you try. This has been my experience. I mean, I have been on TikTok a fraction of as long as I've been on YouTube. I get recognized just as much by people who say I watch you on TikTok as YouTube, which might give one the impression that it's just as significant of a platform to our revenue. It's not. It makes almost zero. But the combination of I think it's addictiveness as well as the time spent on the platform

and just an insanely good recommendation algorithm, which we could say is a great thing and also a really dangerous thing. It just seems as though the growth and time on app has to be off the charts for TikTok. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's far surpassed Instagram, Facebook, everything else. I mean, they they talk about themselves about themselves as a Netflix competitor because they really want people to be on there binging basically TikTok for hours. And I think people are. I mean, it's a highly addictive app and I literally was on it until 1 a.m. last night. But it's also an app that you're not

pressured to follow. It's not a follow based social media app. It's all algorithmic content. The content is algorithmically delivered. So that, I think, is also kind of hard for creators to wrap their head around because it's you could have followers on there, but it's really about getting distribution in the feed. And that is just inherently so volatile. So in general, if we zoom out on the influencer and content creation thing,

it seems to me that the most positive spin we can put on it is that it has democratized content creation. It has lowered barriers to entry where you now don't need to get hired by three different levels of bosses at CBS in order to be able to get your opinion out there. And because many of these platforms are algorithmically driven, if you just create pieces of content that people are interested in, you're going to build a large audience. And that all sounds great. On the other side of it, as you talked about, there's the misinformation, disinformation side of it. There's creators who quickly grow and aren't prepared for the mental health implications of starting to see horrifying comments of all different kinds and, you know,

kill yourself and anti-Semitic stuff and stuff like this. What are the kind of two sides to this democratization of content creation? Yeah. As you mentioned, it's been really liberatory in so many ways, especially for people. I mean, I started as a blogger. I have no background in traditional media. I would have never gotten a job in traditional media had i tried right and now i do solely because of my internet presence basically my work but um leveraging the internet

um i i think what what's really worrying is especially how right-wing creators have become very adept at manipulating this um this media ecosystem especially to generate outrage around sort of manufactured news stories. I mean, I obviously have covered the account lives of TikTok and others like Matt Walsh and the Daily Wire content creators. And they're just very good at covering the news in a sort of this hyper specific way that generates outrage, which generates revenue. And it's just this flywheel for them. And I think that's increasingly like large swaths of the content creator ecosystem where these people pushing misinformation for profit. And that's a huge problem. Right. So this to me seems analogous to, you know, one of the reasons local

news is what it is, which is you've got 30 minutes, you take away the commercials, you have 21 minutes left. Yeah. Seven minutes goes to weather, multiple weather reports. You've got 14 minutes left. The 14 is basically half stories that came from a network that are pre produced because they're really cheap. And then the other half is often like some kind of crime or something like that. Sort of like if it bleeds, it leaves. OK, so that's like how that format and the financial incentives lead to the way local news looks on online. It's logical to me that if I do a general story about the number of people that lack health care, it's not the type of story that's going to get a lot of attention. It doesn't

have a clear beginning, middle and end. It's generally upsetting, but it's not a particular person did a thing. If you talk about litter boxes in a bathroom, it's about which principal put that in there, which parents are OK with their kids saying, I'm a cat, so I'm going to use a litter box or whatever the case may be. It seems like a natural fit for the way these algorithms work. Yeah. Which, by the way, Tyler, Kinkade NBC did a great debunking about how there was absolutely no truth. And the litter boxes at that one school were because of school shootings in case kids had

to go to the bathroom during school shootings. So. Right. Oh, of course. Yeah. Completely dark and horrible thing. Yeah. But but anyway. So it seems we're only going to see more of that to the extent that this is the way the platforms work. A hundred percent. These platforms incentivize exactly that behavior and exactly that content. And I think that's a huge problem. And I think a huge issue that I wish that we had more sort that's a huge problem and i think a huge issue that i wish that we had more sort of attention and accountability on i think we often have a lot of accountability on the platforms of like oh you're sharing you know like fake news links and facebook or something people generally ignore this the content creator world if it ever gets covered

it's usually through like entertainment lens know, political reporters just fundamentally do not care about or understand our current media landscape, which is really terrifying because they're very unprepared. And we see political figures leverage these content creators, obviously Trump in a huge way, but also DeSantis, Matt Gaetz, you know, a lot of sort of far right political figures have just become sort of very tightly wound with that community online. Speaker 1 I want to zoom out a little bit from the content creation around politics because I'm familiar with it and my audiences. But you talk about other areas in the book as well. To pick something, mommy bloggers talk a little bit for people who may not follow mommy bloggers.

How did mommy bloggers sort of completely upend the online discussion about motherhood altogether? Cause it's been a major change with these platforms. Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, I think mommy bloggers were some of the OG influencer content creators. These were a Gen X mothers in the early twos who were really didn't feel like traditional women's media spoke to their version of motherhood at all. Basically, it was really misogynistic.

It was very patriarchal. And so they turned to the Internet. This was in the early aughts. And they started blogging, often extremely candidly about their life. And they attracted audiences of millions. They started monetizing. They built, in some cases, huge media brands. And they really changed women's media.

Like they really pushed the traditional media, which had always like sort of stigmatized things like postpartum depression or struggling to breastfeed or like hating your husband sometimes. Like these were all things that the mommy bloggers were discussing openly and candidly. And so the traditional media was forced to kind of react and be like, OK, moms are a little bit more complex. And I want to be clear, too. A lot of these mom bloggers, you know, I think moms get a lot of hatred online or they're accused of exploiting their kids or whatever. A lot of these blogs didn't even have photos.

This was the early aughts. Like a lot of them were pseudonymous. They used pseudonyms for their children. You didn't actually know very much about their lives. You just knew a lot about sort of their inner lives. So they were just really, it was a really incredible kind of time where it seemed like the internet would maybe be used for good. And then of course, things got very warped. But yeah, they really pioneered this whole ecosystem and the revenue pathways that they built and systems that they built for monetization, I mean, content creators still rely on today.

What are a couple other areas, sort of like mommy bloggers, that may be less known to my audience but that have been significant in the entire ecosystem? Yeah, I talk about this in my book, too, is the beauty blogger revolution in the early 2010s. You had these beauty bloggers on YouTube like Michelle Phan, Ingrid Nielsen, these women that also felt like the traditional makeup industry wasn't serving women of color and just like basically anyone without a very specific skin tone and kind of aesthetic. And so they started to build these huge audiences and launched huge product lines

and makeup lines and started to, yeah, build products. I mean, Kylie Lip Kit is sort of the most famous influencer makeup line, but Michelle Phan was doing it before Kylie. And it really transformed the beauty industry, transformed the beauty industry, like upended it. And I just think it's really interesting. I think a lot of this stuff people think of as more recent phenomenon or they think, oh, it started with Mr. Beast or David Dobrik, but it was really built by women. It was like fashion and beauty were areas that the content

creator ecosystem like sort of adopted very early. So, yeah, there were a lot of pioneers, but a lot of those same women were driven off the Internet. I mean, almost none of these women are still around on the Internet because they dealt with so much misogynistic hate. Right. That is I guess that kind of segues me into the last thing I wanted to ask you about, which is are you getting a lot less hate since Tucker was fired from Fox? Yes. I was actually thinking about that recently. His fans have been real quiet and he is tanking on Twitter like he's not getting the views. I mean, Elon Musk has just made up numbers for views now. But yeah, it seems that if you inadvertently scroll by the video, it's a view.

David, I made a private. Sorry, I made a private account with no followers and I tweeted a tweet with no followers on a locked account. It said it had 700 views. That's very strange. That's suspicious to me. Made up. It's just nonsense. Somebody said it's like every time there's an API call on the page or something like weird. It's nonsense. And yeah, I think it's also like very made very clear how much Tucker was relying on producers because that show is it's rough. It's a shaky show. I

think is the way I would put it. Listen, the book is extremely online. The untold story of fame, influence and power on the Internet. We've been speaking with the book's author, Taylor Lorenz. Taylor, really appreciate your time and insights today. Thank you so much for having me. This is fun. People in my audience trying to quit smoking or vaping, this is for you.

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CEO and founder Mike Lindell. As some of you might recall, he recently announced that his lines of credit have been canceled by his banks. There was a fire sale on all sorts of different equipment, including, I guess, like sprinter type vans and elements of manufacturing from his factory. It just it all seems to be going really poorly. And the latest declaration from Pillow is that the IRS now, I guess, is targeting him with audits or audits, as they became known widely in the post 2020 election era. He says, let's actually see if we can. I don't even really know what he says. It's always hard to figure out what he's asserting.

But let's take a listen here to what's going on. It really couldn't happen to a nicer guy silencing our voices and and and and shaking down our country and this economy. And they went away to do it, then attack where my money comes from. You know, they attack that platform. But they made it personal to me now. These are moms working from home, all these employees working from home. We don't have a call center, Steve, that answers overseas you can't understand the language.

They've been with me from the start. We have our own call center. We have our own technology. I've done every part of my pillow. We do ourselves. We don't hire it out to, you know, overseas and you don't understand the operator or whatever. center. We have our own technology. I've done every part of my pillow. We do ourselves. We don't hire it out to, you know, overseas and you don't understand the operator or whatever. For them to it, he's really obsessed with that. The you know, the tech support where you don't

understand people. And listen, by the way, I've been very frustrated with that at different points. That's an absolutely fair gripe. But I don't know why he keeps bringing it up in this context. Them and say, you know, you can't be contract labor anymore. That's what these audits are all about. It's disgusting. They work off commission, everybody. And you can help them by, by calling that 1-800-873-1062. And you help yourself get all these right now while we're putting them all on sale, because I'll tell you what, an exclusive to war room, get the best gifts you can ever get. Get your Christmas presents early. It helps everything we're doing right now to help save us our country. Speaker 1

Mike, thank you so much. Tell the folks there, particularly the the call center folks, we got their back. Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly. So the claim is that my pillow, Mike Lindell, is facing multiple IRS audits. He made the claim in his typical confused way. Business Insider Report. Mike Lindell says my pillow facing multiple IRS audits. Lindell claimed on the war room that the pod that the audits concerned call center staff. Now they're going after our employees and they have made it personal. He says this audit is related to commissions earned by employees who worked remotely during the pandemic.

It started in California. Now there's three other states that are coming at my pillow. And Steve, it's disgusting. They keep attacking. They're going after our employees. They've made it personal. And his belief, his claim is that they are doing this to him because he supported President Donald Trump. There is no evidence for any of this.

What there is evidence for is that it might have been a mistake for Mike Pillow to take attention away from running his business and to put attention into showing up at political venues making wild claims about the 2020 election, claiming that Trump was chosen by God to be president of the United States. He said he spent about he told me on this show he spent about thirty five million dollars. That was months ago already trying to prosecute these claims about the election. And it just seems the business isn't going so well. Also alienating half the country through your harebrained activism probably is not helping the bottom line for my pillow. So that's where we are.

You know, we have to deal with where we are rather than where we would like to be. And as far as pillow is concerned, this is where he now is. And he, I guess, will now try to beat off these audits. I don't know. We don't know the nature in reality of the audits. To be perfectly frank, we don't even know that there actually are five audits. We're taking his word for it. He's said things in the past that, of course, aren't true or aren't going on. Like, for example, that is cyber symposium or symposium, as he calls it, is going to finally prove. I think it was that China stole the election for Joe Biden or something along those lines. So lessons we've learned getting involved in election lies often isn't a great business decision.

And just because Pillow says something doesn't make it so we have to go back to the greatest failing that was exposed yesterday in civil court in New York. Donald Trump bemoaning that he doesn't get to have a jury trial. This was investigated. It turns out that Trump's lawyer, Alina Haba, checked the box saying we don't want a jury trial. She made apparently a mistake. They could have had a jury trial. Trump saying, how can the judge just decide they're not giving us a jury? And it turns out that it was his own lawyer that checked the box saying we don't want a jury trial. Listen to Trump after the appearance saying they're not giving us a trial. And the person

responsible for this, Alina Haba, is standing right over Trump's left shoulder. I think that was very good. That last five minutes was outstanding because the judge essentially conceded that the statute of contradictions that we won at the court of appeals is in effect. Therefore, about 80 percent of the case is over. I was going to come out and say that, as you know, we're not entitled to a jury, which is pretty unusual in the United States of America. So I think it's very unfair that I don't So interpret that and the way everyone else in the room seems to interpret that is that the statute of limitations is a very real thing. So this is not exactly the best legal team that Donald Trump has working for him. Many lawyers no longer are interested in representing Trump because he often doesn't pay. Some lawyers now say money up front, please, because they know Trump's stiff lawyers regularly, stiff lawyers regularly. And so now we have a situation where

Trump's legal team is not what we might call world class or a plus. And so it's not about the judge denying Trump anything. It's not about everybody else gets a jury and Trump doesn't get a jury. Trump's lawyer, Alina Haba, declined a jury in the paperwork that was filed with the court. That's what's going on here. That's the bottom line. There really is nothing else to it. And this is the sort of thing that I anticipate happening a lot. This is a civil trial. But even in Trump's criminal trials where his representation is legal representation, maybe marginally, but not that much better. And I'm hoping just because it would be extraordinarily entertaining. I'm hoping that Trump is able to convince his lawyers in his criminal cases to make some of the legal arguments that they and Trump have made publicly, which

are not valid legal arguments. Such examples include, of course, that the entire documents case against Trump is invalid because it's all subject to the jurisdiction of the National Archives rather than criminal law. That's a lie. It's not true. Legal experts have explained that is absolutely not the case when it comes to Trump's trials over his attempts to steal the state of Georgia. Trump has argued that they're

prosecuting him for free speech and that they're taking away his First Amendment right. I would love for Trump's lawyers to make that argument in court. Of course, it's in the indictments that Trump is not being prosecuted for his opinion about the election. Trump has every right to give his opinion about the election. He even has a right to lie and say, I won even knowing he didn't win. If that's the case, none of that is criminal. The reason he's being prosecuted criminally is because he actually engaged in a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters. Even though there was no actual proof that Joe Biden did not really win Georgia, Trump attempted to strong arm elected officials in Georgia into finding votes such that he would

defeat Joe Biden. He attempted to send a slate of fake electors to say, hey, in Georgia, we cast our electoral votes for for Donald Trump rather than Joe Biden. That's the criminal conspiracy. It's not because Trump said, I believe I won. He's not being prosecuted because he said, I believe I won. So my hope for entertainment's sake, and I think it would just be really great, is that Trump's lawyers try to make those arguments in court from everything I've read from legal

experts. They will be laughed out of court. We will know within a few months whether they're going to go for it. We have a voicemail number. That number is two one nine two. David P. As many of you know, we now get so many voicemails. There are currently thirty two hundred unlisted to voicemails. It is beyond my ability to triage the voicemails. So we now have a team that does it. And the team told me, David, this guy, Troy York, who's been calling into the show for like five, six years, he's calling in anywhere from five to 10 times a day. This guy is obsessed, which is really funny. I don't know what the subject matter of most of the voicemails is, but the team

forward forwarded me this one, which I want to address head on as we approach two million subscribers. Any time we get close to a big milestone, people come out of the woodwork and they say you're using bots and your subscribers are fake. And the really funny thing about it is I don't even think they know what they're talking about. Like conceptually, I don't even think they know what they mean. Take a listen to this. Hi, David Pakman. This is Troy York. Not only do you purchase bots and there is a system to set up in mass purchase followers, Jake Paul, all these people do it, such as Mr. Beast. In no way does Mr. Beast have the following that he does with his boring videos. And likewise, I don't believe you have that many subscribers. I definitely don't think Sam Cesar has a million subscribers, given that you're boring content and you guys produce Kyle Koensky. OK, so he's attacking everybody.

So listen, what does it mean to buy a bot? What does a bot do if you buy? You can only have one subscription to a YouTube channel per Google account. So like literally what would it mean to buy a bot? Do you buy a bot and the bot creates a Google account and then subscribes to you on YouTube and then you get one more subscriber? What I think people don't understand is that it's actually easier to get to two million subscribers by just making content people are interested in and saying, hey, if you like what

I'm doing, please subscribe, at least for me, because I don't even really know what it means to buy a bot. Or maybe Troy means comment bots, bots that leave comments. But again, that doesn't I don't understand how that even really helps me in any way. So to Troy York and these right wingers who are anxiously awaiting for our demise. Yeah. The next step might be we're exposed that all our subscribers are fake and we go to zero subscribers and it's the end of the show. I believe it's far more likely that we will get the 80 or so thousand subscribers we need to get to two million and that we will celebrate an incredible milestone with our audience. That's my prediction. OK, and if anybody can explain to me what it means to buy bots like do do they live

in my computer? Where do you put the bots? What do they do? I'm interested in knowing what it means. I just don't get how it helps me get any subscribers. I mean, listen, maybe if I knew what it was and it was useful, maybe I would buy some bots. It sounds kind of interesting. But needless to say, I don't even really get it. I would like to understand it. So somebody please explain it to me. We have a fantastic bonus show for you today. The Supreme Court in its next term will be considering abortion pills, guns and social media. What are the cases? What decisions might be made?

Secondly, Nobel Prizes have been awarded to the scientists behind the mRNA COVID vaccines and the MAGA right wingers are massively furious and triggered. And we also have learned that drug makers are signing on reluctantly to negotiate Medicare prices. Is this yet another one of Joe Biden's many accomplishments in this area that have quietly accumulated over the last couple of years? We will discuss that and more and more on today's bonus show. Sign up at join Pacman dot com. are.