The David Pakman Show - 5/25/23: DeSantis launch event collapses, global humiliation

Episode Date: May 25, 2023

-- On the Show: -- David Auerbach, writer, technologist, and author of the book "Meganets: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities," joins David to discuss the problematic structure of online networks. Get the book: https://amzn.to/3IGcTeZ -- Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launches his 2024 Republican presidential campaign on Twitter alongside Elon Musk, and it goes so horribly wrong from a technical standpoint that it immediately becomes a meme-worthy global humiliation -- Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' campaign launch event was so bad, Donald Trump was able to brutally troll him -- Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enters a talking point coma during a Fox News interview with Trey Gowdy in the immediate aftermath of his presidential campaign announcement -- Donald Trump is wildly triggered by Ron DeSantis' campaign launch and publishes a wacky attack ad against DeSantis -- Fox & Friends hosts make fun of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announcing his presidential campaign on Twitter Spaces -- Radical Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene becomes the latest attack dog for Donald Trump against Ron DeSantis -- A desperate Nikki Haley, ignored by everyone, decides to go fully anti-transgender to try to get attention -- Fox News propagandist Maria Bartiromo becomes the latest anchor to casually and quickly admit that their entire story about undocumented immigrants and hotel rooms was fake news -- On the Bonus Show: Life-threatening heat could impact 2 billion people buy 2100, unlicensed religious chaplains may counsel students in Texas public schools, US colleges consider an end to race-conscious student admissions, much more... ♨️ Bon Charge Sauna Blanket: Use code PAKMAN for 15% OFF at https://boncharge.com/pakman 🌱 Ounce of Hope: Get 25% OFF with code PAKMAN at https://www.ounceofhope.com/ 💰 Public.com: Start getting a 5% yield on your cash at https://public.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman -- 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)-2DAVIDP

Speaker 1 We start today with the humiliatingly abortive presidential campaign announcement of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This event was a global humiliation. And if DeSantis is presidential campaign is going to follow the theme and tone and competence of yesterday's Twitter space announcement, it is going to be a very, very short lived campaign. Now, let's not judge it all by the first 24 hours, but it was really bad. For those of you who don't know, there was an announcement made two days ago that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, after much speculation, would indeed announce that he is running for

president in the Republican Party against Donald Trump and Tim Scott and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy. And he would be making this announcement alongside Elon Musk on Twitter spaces. Twitter spaces is a very rudimentary. I mean, we're talking about audio over the Internet. This isn't the most advanced, you know, 4K live streaming video you could imagine. So low energy, nearly a dozen technical disasters. I'm starting to think prayer may work because I was willing technical disasters into existence all day yesterday and they happened. So I have to reconsider. Maybe thoughts and prayers actually do have an impact. I'm kidding. Of course, this was the worst and most embarrassing presidential campaign launch that I can remember in the modern political era. Minutes of silence,

random throat clearing, muffled commentary from Elon Musk about how the servers are melting down. DeSantis himself getting booted off of the event. Let's just listen to a little bit of and again, there are going to be extended silences here. I'm trying to get everybody back in the mode of understanding the environment yesterday, which we live streamed and just everything going wrong. Let's jump into it. It is now live. OK, so it's starting about eight minutes late.

And this is the sort of thing that we experienced. Well, there's certainly 2000 people. All right, great. So let's see. So you're crashing. Yeah, I think we've got just a massive number of people online. So it's service restraining somewhat. It's not clear they know they're live right now. That's Elon Musk, by the way, speaking. It's shocking to me they didn't bring in Mike Pillow's cyber guys to help. Take it all in, my friends. Take it all in. Normally, this this the David Pakman show doesn't include such extended silences, but the the content is the silence in this particular case.

They seem to have no idea that this is all live. OK, it got even worse, if you can believe it, when they sort of like got closer to actually starting. Let's see. So, you know, yeah, like so. Just to simplify that. So then they cut out. When they seemed to realize they were going to be starting, they cut out again. This went on for about half hour.

As you can see, it's just not good. OK, and then there were like audio feedback loops and all sorts of things. Now there are, we're going to get to the DeSantis speech in a moment. There are people like Ben Shapiro, right wing columnist, a commentator, Ben Shapiro saying things like what he tweeted quote, tonight was a perfect encapsulation of the campaign. If you're obsessed with the optics of the Twitter spaces glitch, then you're probably not going to vote DeSantis. If you're interested in political substance, DeSantis is likely your candidate. There were also people on the right saying this isn't a disaster. This event was so popular that it

crashed Twitter servers. So many people so popular that it crashed Twitter servers. So many people were interested that it crashed Twitter servers. It is a big success. All of these narratives are idiotically wrong. First and foremost, once DeSantis started speaking, it got even worse. He read a prepared speech with absolutely no charisma or engaging inflection or delivery, which just talked about woke and he whined. So once DeSantis started speaking, there was no substance. It was just grievances in an even whinier voice than the one Donald Trump speaks in. And for this entire like it wasn in a disaster. So many people were interested that it crashed the servers. This is a success. Number one, not even a million

people. This was promoted for 30 hours everywhere nationally. Every play Fox was talking about it. CNN, MSNBC, every newspaper, everybody was talking about this and they scrounged together at its peak nine hundred000 people. That's not exactly arousing success. And the whole story about Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter is he's the tech guy. He's going to rebuild the stack. Remember that we're going to rebuild the stack completely from the ground up. We've we've gotten rid of all of the superfluous engineers. Now Twitter is operating beautifully.

This is just audio over the Internet. It's not even video and they couldn't hold it together. So the it was such a success that it crashed is not a viable line. Now, DeSantis eventually did start speaking and he somehow figured out a way to be even more whiny than Trump during his campaign launch, which is really bonkers stuff. He used the word woke, I think, more than 20 times. I lost count. Our live audience lost count. Here's sort of what the speech sounded like. Biden's allowed woke ideology to drive his agenda. We will never surrender to the woke mob

and we will leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history. There you go. So woke, woke, woke. You know, remember when Rudy Giuliani was 9-11 noun verb? Ron DeSantis is woke noun verb. That's what that's what it is. A humiliation for Elon Musk that cannot be understated. Nothing worked. And once DeSantis actually got to speak, it was the lowest energy campaign announcement I could imagine. The political alliance also shouldn't be ignored. Elon Musk, who says his number one priority in buying Twitter and making the changes to Twitter that he made is free speech. And he's making a big show of celebrating Ron DeSantis, who is quite literally banning

books in school libraries and suppressing the speech of teachers and corporations in Florida. That's the alliance that we have here. This event was so bad, even Donald Trump looked clever and funny in trolling DeSantis. And I want to talk about that next. You all know my feelings about Donald Trump looked clever and funny in trolling DeSantis. And I want to talk about that next. You all know my feelings about Donald Trump. I think he's a complete and total doofus, dangerous wannabe, authoritarian dictator, liar, con man, grifter.

You all know that. The DeSantis campaign launch was so bad that it made Donald Trump's memes and posts to Truth Social Central actually make Trump seem like a funny and clever guy. And a couple of people wrote to me and said, wow, your brain is so broken, David, that now you think Trump looks good. You know, the same people who are saying you're too critical of Trump, you have Trump derangement syndrome, are now telling me I'm deranged because I think that the DeSantis event made Trump look better. Trump's campaign now looks like it is functioning properly. That's how bad the DeSantis launch was. Trump posted this video to Troth Central, and it's a contrasting video of Trump's launch and

the DeSantis launch. It's genuinely funny. Take a look at this. Take a listen to this and you'll see when you hear the country song, it's Trump's campaign launch. And then when you hear audio feedback loops, it's the DeSantis Twitter spaces launch. This is genuinely funny. Here we go. To be an American. And I won't forget the men who died. We are kind of melting the surface. And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. It's a freedom.

It is when you put his money where his mouth is. Upset the narrative. Upset the narrative. Speaker 2 Okay. So what is amazing about this is there are levels of things. There are levels of disasters. When we many of us, a couple, a few 20,000 of us or so watch the Trump campaign announcement together, we did a live stream, beautiful live stream. Some say the best. And when Trump comes out and he's all stiff and he's standing there hinging back and forth and leaning forward.

And God bless the USA is playing. And a crowd of Mar-a-Lago sycophants is almost, you know, peeing their pants and in titillated pleasure over the presence of Donald Trump. We look at it and we say, this is a humiliation. How after all these years dating back to 2015, this disastrous Trump campaign, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. How are these people? This is this is humiliating. And Trump looks like a what could possibly be worse than this.

And then what's worse is DeSantis tries to announce his candidacy on Twitter spaces and it goes horribly wrong. By the time it starts, 25 minutes late due to a technical disaster. DeSantis just talks about woke, woke, woke, reading a prepared speech on Twitter. And you realize, wow, the Trump event was the previous bottom of the barrel. But DeSantis is far, far, far worse. And now we go, well, the Trump event, I guess, wasn't that bad. Now, meanwhile, over on Truth Social, Trump really getting a lot of mileage out of this.

And it'll be interesting to see where the polling goes as a result of this fiasco. Trump posting to Troth, quote, Rob, my red button. So he calls Ron DeSantis Rob. Now, I don't even know where that comes from. Rob, my red button is bigger, better, stronger and is working. Truth. Yours does not. Per my conversation with Kim Jong Un of North Korea soon to become my friend. Then continuing. Wow. The disanctest Twitter launch is a disaster. His whole campaign will be a disaster. Watch Trump continuing. This genuinely is funny. Tim Scott's presidential

launch, even with the broken microphone, don't pay the contractor. Tim was by far the best presidential lot launch of the week. Rob's was a catastrophe. And then lastly, Trump trothing is the DeSantis launch fatal? Yes. So a self inflicted error for sure. Later on in the evening, DeSantis appeared on Fox News to talk policy. And that was a disaster. We'll talk later. But but but but before we assume too much, DeSantis continues to gain in the polls against Trump since news of the announcement broke.

What you see on the screen, the purple line is Trump and the green line is DeSantis. As you can see, starting in late March, when news of Trump's arrest went public, it was just up, up, up for Trump going from 44 four to fifty six in the Republican primary and DeSantis falling from a high of 30 all the way down to 19. But but since news broke that DeSantis would be announcing DeSantis climbing from 19 to 21 and Trump dropping from 56 to 54, is it a big change? No. But is it an inflection point? Is MAGA going to abandon Trump? Are we going to see this as the inevitable rise of Ron DeSantis? We have to wait and see. After the break, we will look at DeSantis's first major interview

as a 2024 presidential candidate. And I will warn you, it is tough to watch. Remember that Monday Memorial Day now just a few days away, we will be offering a one day membership special. This is our end of May launch 2024 discounted membership special one day only. If you'd like to be notified of how to sign up for a criminally inexpensive membership on Monday, simply get on my newsletter at David Pakman dot com. We'll take a quick break. It is a hell of a sponsors today is Bonn Charge. I have always enjoyed dry saunas. You get in there, your heart rate is up, dilates the blood vessels, can soothe achy joints and muscles. It's relaxing. It's just a great way to remove a little stress. Bonn Charge is the creator of the infrared sauna

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all. Let's take a look at this. And this is just if you thought the announcement was bad, when DeSantis actually gets a chance to speak, it gets even worse. So let's start there. Here is Ron DeSantis with a talking point coma. Can't stop saying woke. Well, first of all, the woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism. At the end of the day, it's an attack on the truth. And because it's a war on truth, I think we have no choice but to wage a war on woke. So how does that work for a president? Some of it may be the bully pulpit, being willing to tell the truth and not being deluded by ideology, which we see in many aspects of our society. There you go. So woke, woke, woke. Florida is where woke goes to die. We will end woke. So please understand that the term cultural Marxism is nothing but a far right wing conspiracy theory that is,

let me to put it lightly, often tinged with anti-Semitism. I get emails every time one of these right wingers starts talking about cultural Marxism. People write in, say, David, what the hell? I know Marxism, the economic theory. What on earth is cultural Marxism? When the right uses the term cultural Marxism, they are talking about a supposed leftist agenda that wants to undermine traditional values. It wants to erode societal norms. It wants to promote political correctness and police, police speech and this sort of thing. Often what they accuse George Soros of is tantamount to the very cultural Marxism they claim exists.

And they say that this so-called cultural Marxism is a conspiracy propagated by left wing intellectuals, left wing activists, Democrats, etc. They want to infiltrate and control institutions, including academia, media, entertainment, and they want to reshape culture to fit their ideology. Now, according to that perspective, cultural Marxists are accused of manipulating language, promoting and using identity politics, advocating for social justice issues and LGBT rights and so on and so forth at the expense of individual freedoms and liberty and so on and so forth. The most important thing to understand about so-called cultural Marxism is that it essentially does not exist. And what I mean by that is Marxism focuses on

economic structures and class struggle. That's the first thing to understand. It doesn't actually focus on cultural or social issues, although Marxism does acknowledge that culture and society will be shaped by the economic system. That's number one. So even the term doesn't really make sense. Secondly, the entire emergence of the term cultural Marxism came from a misinterpretation of actual Marxism. That's number two. And then number three, there's also no Marxists in the United States. Now, I know you might go to, you know, the local magic, the gathering tournament and meet an actual Marxist who understands Marxist ideology and says they subscribe to it. And I'm not insulting Magic the Gathering. I'm just saying you might be able

to find someone somewhere who's actually a Marxist. There is not a single Marxist in a position of power in federal government that I can think of in the United States. So when the right talks about cultural Marxism, they don't even really know what they're talking about. It's not Marxism. It doesn't exist. And it's thinly veiled anti-Semitism. So but that wasn't the worst moment of this entire thing. Then DeSantis is asked, what makes you different than Trump? When Nikki Haley was asked this question, she said, I'm a woman of color and I'm younger. When Tim Scott was asked, what makes you different from Trump? He didn't even really answer. And he said there will be

a stark contrast, by which I guess he means he's younger than Trump and he's black. Does Ron DeSantis actually answer the question? Let's see. Yeah. So why now? And what distinguishes you from from the other candidates? Are there policy differences or is it more about electability and how you would implement those policies, even if you agree on them? I don't know. Well, why now? I think it's because the country's going in the wrong direction. We have another four years of the Biden administration. I think some of the damage is going to be irreversible. I think we have an opportunity now, kind of like the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter was president,

to really move the country in a much stronger direction and really bring a lot of bold leadership to bear. Why me? Well, I think what we've been able to do in Florida is two things. One, we've had unprecedented policy success. All the things that we believe as Republicans or as conservatives for many, many years, we've been able to take those values and those principles and actually turn them into reality. Every single day we put up big wins on the board, but we're doing that while also enjoying major political success. You alluded to it. We were able to win reelection by a historic margin.

So as you can see, he doesn't actually say what distinguishes him from Trump when he was asked about the military and exactly what he would do with Ukraine. He talked about gender ideology. I'm not kidding, guys. I'm not kidding. Look at this. All right. You wore the uniform. If you are elected president, you may be the first one in a while to have worn the uniform. How would you address the ongoing war in Eastern Europe between Russia and Ukraine on day one of the Ron DeSantis president? Good question. Well, first, I think what we need to do as a veteran is recognize that our military has become politicized. You talk about gender ideology. You talk about things like global warming that they're somehow concerned.

And that's not the military that I served in. We need to return our military to focusing on commitment, focusing on the core values and the core mission. That would be something that I could take care of on day one. There'll be a new sheriff in town as commander in chief. And I think you'll see recruiting start to get back to where it needs to be because people don't want to join a war as if the military is not big enough military. And I think it's been really, really problematic. Look, in terms of what's going on over in Eastern Europe, you know, I'd like to see

a settlement of this. I do not want to see a wider war. OK, so what he would do, he would he wants the war to end is what he would do. But woke in the military is really the problem. Disastrous interview. Is that going to convince MAGA voters to switch to DeSantis from Trump? Let's give it a few days and see where the polling lands. A wildly triggered failed former President Donald Trump, even before Ron DeSantis announced that he was running for president, released an attack ad on Ron DeSantis, calling him a swamp creature. Let's take a look at this.

This might give us a little bit of a preview of the sorts of lines of attack that we may be seeing during what is certainly going to be an extremely ugly Republican primary campaign. Take a look. Trump defeats the 2016 President Trump defeats the liberals and heads to Washington to train the swamp. But swamp creature Ron DeSantis is about to start his third term in Congress, and he's already voted repeatedly to cut Social Security and Medicare. Twenty seventeen, Trump passes huge tax cuts for nearly everyone. And Ron DeSantis, he's pushing a bill that would swap those tax cuts for a new 23 percent national sales tax. So let's just pick pick this families paid more just to pick.

I can't fact check everything here, but Trump has been saying this a lot, that Ron DeSantis was going to put in a 23 percent sales tax and, you know, make everybody pay more. The reality is what DeSantis supported was part of the fair tax proposal. And what that would have done is put in a 23 percent national sales tax, but get rid of income taxes, payroll taxes, estate taxes and gift taxes. And the idea was simplify the tax code and make it more transparent by lowering taxes for rich people. So is it a lie to say DeSantis supported a 23 percent national sales tax? It's not a lie, but it was a right wing proposal to lower taxes on the rich. Imagine that you're in the 37 percent federal tax bracket and then you've

got your Social Security, Medicare and so on and so forth. If you replace all of that stuff, if you get rid of income tax, payroll tax, estate tax and gift tax and you just pay 23 percent, that's on what you spend. That's an insane decline in taxes on the rich. So like, is it a lie what Trump is saying in the ad? It's not a lie, but it's extraordinarily deceptive. Twenty eighteen. Trump is building the wall, securing the border, fighting the invasion while Ron DeSantis is

voting against funding for Trump's wall in Washington. One was a leader and one let us down. Even DeSantis admitted there are big differences between him and Trump. Obviously, there is because I voted contrary to him in the Trump. So this is going to be such an ugly primary that it's going to make your head spin. But also a factor will be that Trump is constantly lying about the Santas. And if the Santas decides to acknowledge that Trump is running right, because so far it's been like just don't even talk about Trump.

Is he going to tell the truth about Trump policy or is he going to have to lie to draw distinctions that don't really exist? We're going to watch it. Many different right wing media outlets and right wing elected officials slamming Ron DeSantis his decision to announce his presidential campaign on Twitter. One such critique or ridicule came from Fox and Friends. Fox and Friends with a what the heck is Twitter spaces moment ridiculing DeSantis for his choice here. Hey, Lucas, so he's going to make the big announcement with Elon Musk at six o'clock tonight on Twitter spaces. What the heck is Twitter spaces? I wish I knew more about it. I think he's trying to make it sounds like a video function.

Yeah, right. Yeah, we've heard that they wanted to do some streaming and some podcasts and that kind of thing. I think it's fascinating that they're using social media as a way to announce a presidency. Speaker 3 Yes, it's all very fascinating. So listen, there's people wrote to me and said, you know, David, it's weird because yesterday morning, Fox and Friends was just gushing about how great Tim Scott is. And now they're making fun of Ron DeSantis. What are the explanations?

There's two primary interpretations of this. One interpretation is that Fox sees DeSantis as the only guy that might defeat Trump. So they attack him and praise Tim Scott, who doesn't have a shot, all in reality in service to helping Trump. You attack the only guy that might beat Trump. You kind of pretend to prop up guys that have no shot like Tim Scott, and it just keeps Trump at the front. That's one interpretation of what Fox, Fox and Friends is doing. Second interpretation is they genuinely want someone other than Trump. But for whatever reason, the brass at Fox News has decided DeSantis is not the guy we want. So we're going to make fun of DeSantis and praise Tim Scott.

We absolutely have no idea at this point in time. Fox News is priority really is maintain access to those in power. And that is going to be their primary motivation. We will see in the next couple of weeks how Fox News is perspective on the primary solidifies. In the meantime, Marjorie Taylor Greene is becoming Donald Trump's latest attack dog against Ron DeSantis. Yesterday, I told you about Carrie Lake going after DeSantis in service of Trump. Now it is Marjorie Taylor Greene. What Carrie Lake and Marjorie Taylor Greene have in common is they both seem to be openly vying to

be Donald Trump's vice presidential choices. Here's Marjorie Taylor green also attacking DeSantis for where he is announcing his campaign, which he did last night on Twitter spaces. You don't announce that you're running for president of the United States in some kind of little Twitter world. It's not a real world. Twitter is not real. So I can't comprehend why that would be the place to do the announcement. It's not a real world. Twitter is not real. So I can't comprehend why that would

be the place to do the announcement. It makes no sense. And it's not serious. OK, so Marjorie Taylor Greene says DeSantis isn't serious. Remember that there are there is the belief that Trump will pick a woman to be his running mate this time around. The four women whose names are being floated are Marjorie Taylor Greene, Carrie Lake, Nikki Haley, who's running against Trump and Kristi Noem from South Dakota, who it's not even clear if she's interested and it's not even really clear if she's the top contender. So arguably, Marjorie Taylor Greene participating in this in service to supporting her own potential candidacy to be Donald Trump's vice president.

A wild 24 hours. All of these clips will be on our Instagram, which you can find by searching Instagram for David Pakman show. They'll be on our tick tock and they will be on our YouTube channel as well. Are you tired of getting crushed in the market or the volatility? There is some good news, which is that Treasury yields are surging. You can now get a whopping five percent yield on Treasury bills. That is higher than any high yield savings account that I have seen. But buying U.S. Treasuries can be a complicated process. At least it used to be.

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want to ask is why a new word. And the key aspect is that I wanted a term that not only includes these huge networks, by which I include everything from social networks to online games to cryptocurrencies, but to emphasize that the people and the data we put into these networks are now an intrinsic part of it. That we're accustomed to thinking of these networks as things that we program, that engineers program and come up with, and we're just subjected to them. But that's not really what's happening. What's happening is we have these systems that now are engaged in feedback loops, very high volume, high velocity, and high virality feedback loops that constantly cause their own algorithms and behavior to change so that you can't step into the same algorithm twice, so to speak.

And my argument that I make in the book is that these particular kinds of systems, which I call meganets, don't let us have control in the way that we think we use, in the way say, to, OK, let's just stamp out everything bad on the Internet is like saying, well, let's just stamp out all stock crashes. Yeah. When we when we think about some of those feedback loops and algorithms, I mean, just to take something simple, like much of the social media we interact with. I think in in passing casual layperson terms, many of us sort of understand that these algorithms are optimized for keeping us on

the platform as well as generating engagement and that engagement is more likely to be generated by content that triggers a bigger emotional reaction. And so that's where we get a lot of these echo chambers of extremist content and things that titillate and so on and so forth. We kind of think we have this passing understanding sort of of what's happening, but there's more to it. Right. And I think this is part of what you get to in the book, that there's a whole other layer

that goes beyond that understanding. Yeah, because what happens is that, you know, that focus on engagement, certainly there's a financial incentive there, you know, they're in no way infallible. What you get is are forces that do amplify popular content, but also forces that cause balkanization and mutual incomprehension simply because, yeah, there is that catering towards what's termed engagement. And the focus on engagement isn't, I mean, yes, profit is there, but it's also, well, what would you substitute for it? Because at that point, well, now the tech companies are telling you what you want. Engagement sort of became the default, the default rationale for what to show people because anything else is OK. The tech companies are now running our lives.

So if Facebook puts a warning on a piece of content saying this is misinformation. Well, OK, that's not optimizing for engagement. But you've caused a different problem at that point. There are many. Yeah, no, go ahead. Yeah. The issue is that even if you were to have to be able to make those sorts of decisions

in a way that wouldn't cause massive controversy, you still have the issue that there's more content that can be possibly be filtered certainly ahead of time you're constantly closing the barn door after the horse is bolted and that's why when misinformation by one stand or another gets out it's very hard to change people's minds because the nature of these mega nets is that you can now find reinforcing data for whatever viewpoint you have. And that's really what's changed is that you have these many to many networks. And it's not even a matter of killing brush fires so much as that it's creating, once you have a surplus of content and no evolutionary pressure to sort of select one narrative that

everybody then sort of falls into, then there's there's no force driving people to reconcile. And you can't do much to to to bring people together around an enforced narrative. So along those lines, you know, often the idea of we need more regulation is thrown around and whether folks even know what they really mean by that when they say it isn't totally clear. Sometimes there's a sort of these companies have gotten too big and they need to be broken up and that will improve the situation. But it's not exactly totally clear how Jonathan Haidt has mentioned, like one thing that would

be useful at the individual user level would be you can't be anonymous to the platform. You can use a handle that's not your real name, but you should genuinely have to sort of like register with the social media platform so they know who you are. But a lot of people are like, I don't know that I necessarily want every social media platform having my driver's license. I don't know. Some of the things you suggest are kind of counterintuitive. Can you talk a little bit about what you think would help? Yeah. Well, I think that, you know, one of the reasons why people are having such a hard time coming up with fixes is that we don't understand the problem that well and we don't understand the limits of our control that if if you're going to regulate the first impulse is to say, OK, just like get rid of everything I don't like and um and it's put the tech companies into a weird position because they are they do

is more or less safe now and again that they literally don't have the amount of control that they that we think they do and that they often claim to because you know there's a there was this facebook memo where they they're more concerned about being seen as not having control of their own systems than is being perceived as evil, like better that they be evil capitalists and that they literally be out of control. They're meant to try to sort of break up the tendencies of these mega nets by decoagulating the pockets that tend to amplify stuff. And what I have in mind here, you know, in the run up to the 2020 election, Facebook banned all political advertising. Right. That's not the action of a company that can like, you know, make a fine grain filtering of content. So I take that as admission there.

OK, now there's no question that did. I'm sure that did have an effect. Was it over the top? Maybe. But it's that sort of level that we actually can operate on. The question is, how do you do those sorts of interventions without it interfering in people's freedoms and without it coming off as biased. So that's why I advocate for non-targeted mechanisms where you aren't really trying

to target a particular type of content because unless it's something really extreme like child pornography, that's okay to target. I think we all agree that that stuff can be removed from the net. But when it comes to, you know, sort of stuff that's in the quote unquote mainstream of political discourse, well, the mainstream now includes pretty much each side thinking that the other side is evil. So you're not going to win on that one. What you can do instead, though, is try to amplify diversity and the quieter voices. In other words, enforce something like turn-taking, where basically the louder you get, the less privilege you have to be heard in the algorithm. Or say, intentionally randomized recommendation algorithms so that you can get things that are not what's being recommended to you. TikTok apparently did this with pro-anorexia videos because they were recommending too many pro-anorexia videos to that crowd. So they actually broke down the recommendation algorithm and said, okay, start giving them

other stuff. It doesn't matter what it is. Just stop giving them the reiterations of what they already have. And targeting something specific, like a particular type of content, means you're always going to be chasing after the next one. But if you were to do this more generally speaking and not say, look, we're not banning this. We're just going to say that there's going to be a more, you know, egalitarian float of what you see and who gets to speak. I think you could move in a better direction. Now, that isn't to say that you would have to not you have to do experiments here. You have to make sure that it is fair and not corrupt and all of that. But I do think that

those sorts of solutions are more feasible than the ones we look to now, where effectively we're saying, oh, just go in and audit the algorithms and eliminate bias and, you know, do what we want. That's to me is a nonstarter. It seems that to some degree, a lot of these discussions that have to be had about how to fix this problem that we don't yet 100 percent understand, but we're hopefully building a picture of what the problem is. It seems a lot of this would be mitigated by greater media literacy and critical thinking skills, which generally speaking, seem to be lacking. Now, I don't want to pretend like that's just the solution, that if people were smarter because you're sort of saying, like, all these stupid people are making us have to figure

out this sort of thing. I don't want to say that. But at the same time, when I see in my space some of the narratives that end up having to be fought and that then you have to figure out policy on or they lead to what some then say is censorship or whatever. If we had on average greater critical thinking and media literacy skills, it seems as though that would be useful, even though I don't want to just say the problem is stupid people. It's interesting.

I mean, from my perspective, I mean, maybe I was one of the stupid people because a lot of the stuff wasn't on obvious to me. And one of the things I talk about in the book is, you know, I worked at Google. I was a software engineer in the early days. And I don't think any of us anticipated the degree of impact that people would have, that the users would have. It was just not an obvious thing. We were so used to saying, okay, well, here's the data, and we do stuff with it. Not, oh, users are coming in in and they're shaping the algorithms. So I think part of the

problem is that even very smart people, it's not an obvious system. And I don't claim to understand it at all. And it took quite a bit of thinking for me to sort of get my head around what i thought was actually going on because even the really smart people i knew seem to be falling into various cul-de-sacs uh partly i think as an effect of being reinforced in this or that thought by being by getting placed into these little balkanized uh uh they're not they're not just bubbles they're like narrative bunkers where the assumptions become so taken for granted that you can never get past them so i actually i'm not i think that the level of thinking required is actually beyond that which individuals can easily get a hold of because i mean i had i had a lot of time to do it and i still i still am not certain about it that and one of the points i make is that there's just too much

that this explosion of data and information i think is moving the unit of agency higher so that individual rationality doesn't work and doesn't have the same efficacy that it used to. A gang is going to, a gang of people, a group of people is going to be able to out, out shout in these networks, any individual, no matter what their, no matter how, how great their, their, their critical thinking may be. There are exceptions. You know, if you're Donald Trump, obviously you have more pull. If you're Jeffrey Hinton, you know, one of the founders of deep learning

as it exists today, you know, that will count for something. But in the main, I think, the application of critical thinking, I think it leads to a sense of powerlessness and of uncertainty, of flip-flopping between, well, there's those groups of people over there that literally don't even have the same language or foundations for their thought that I do. How on earth do I even resolve that? That it's sort of, it's super rational in that it's too big for one person or even a company

to get its head around. And I don't mean to be fatalistic about that, but, you know, it echoes the current concerns with AI, that, you know, AI is not intelligent per se, but it does have a capacity to incorporate these huge amounts of data in the way that we don't. And that's one of the reasons why we can't exactly tell what's going on with it. And I mean, even again, very look at, they're very smart people who I think are completely wrong about what AI is capable of or what it does. You know, to me, these new chatbots, they do not think they do not understand

what they're saying. To me, I think that is absolutely indisputable. But, you know, there are people with more expertise in it than I do that insist that that's not the case. And I don't think any amount of critical thinking is going to resolve that. You need something that sort of like structurally just prevents chaos from forming. Last thing I want to ask you about, do you have an opinion about and if you don't, that's fine. What's been going on with Twitter recently? DeSantis launch failure aside in terms of, you know, I have found that even though I didn't I at no point have decided I'm sick of Twitter and I'm getting off of it. But slowly since Elon Musk took over, you know,

they took away my and many other people's verification. And we're now looking at my verified feed does nothing for me. It shows me people with 30 followers who are paying eight bucks a month for some reason and power all power to them. But that's not the way I was using that before. That was a useful tool for me. The for you feed is even though I'm a person on the left, it's feeding me right wing stuff from Brigitte Gabriel and other right wing bomb throwers. So that's not interesting to me. My following feed where I see the people I'm actually following is quite dead because many of those people also have reduced their usage of Twitter.

What do you have an opinion about what's happening on Twitter? I mean, not an informed one, since I don't have a huge I don't have much in the way of sources on the inside, but I think it's a combination of intent and incompetence. I mean, you know, even if they supposedly fired their worst performing 50%, there was still a brain drain there, you know, that Musk's track record is of going in, shaking things up, just blowing things up, and then sort of forcing people to reassemble it. The problem is, is that it's okay if you do that, you know, if you do that to a private company, no one's going to notice except the employees and maybe, you know, the stock market or whatever. If you do it on Twitter, you're going to see the seams showing.

So for any of these phenomena that you're talking about, some of them may be partly or wholly intentional, but I have no doubt that a lot of it is just sheer chaos that they're struggling. He brought in that assistant who slept on the floor, she was gone a month later. And it sounds like his new CEO appointment seems like a scapegoat to me. So if you have a more specific question, I can say, but I do think that in some ways, Twitter was always a very anomalous entity in that it didn't make it didn't especially make money. It was run worse because it didn't make money. It was run worse than a lot of the other big networks. It was a massive target because of it being a public square as a target for everybody.

And so it was never I don't think it was ever going to end well. It didn't have to end with, in this particular way, with Musk buying it. But, you know, there was a reason why there weren't any competing bids. It is very much a poison chalice. And in some ways, I do suspect that the very idea of a central public square is on the way out because it was becoming basically impossible for it to keep people happy, enough people happy. Now, Musk sort of is the accelerationist option yes very much so happy we could make people um you know my my twitter experience is i mean it's a i've run into some of the same problems but um i think because of the way i curate my feed it's probably hit me a little less, but I can, I can see the decline. Um, uh, and, uh, and again, I mean, some of these are definitely bugs and there's definitely a

chance that the thing, I mean, I've seen weird, bizarre things popping up and it's like, okay, that's gotta be a bug. I don't get what that is. The fact that we can't totally tell, I guess, is an interesting part of the, uh, part of the whole thing. Well, the weird thing is, is that I mean, that I think that's always been the case. It's just become much more noticeable. Yeah. You know, you know, Facebook thought I was black for many years. It might still. And if I knew that I could see why some of the ads I was getting like, oh, OK, that's that's fine. But, you know, and I'm pretty sure that wasn't intentional. But, you know, the job of the company is just to keep it from becoming too obvious. Yeah. Twitter's problem right now is that it's become pretty obvious.

Very much so. Very much so. The book is Meganettes, how digital forces beyond our control commandeer our daily lives and inner realities. We've been speaking with the book's author, David Auerbach. David, really appreciate your time and insights today. David Auerbach Great. OK, thank you for having me. Speaker 1 One of the best ways to support this show is by supporting our sponsors today. One of those sponsors is sheath underwear. It is spring. Temperatures are rising. Many of us know all too well about the sweating and the sticking and the chafing. But that's only when you use traditional underwear. When you use sheath underwear, it's no longer a problem.

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to see for yourself. And my audience gets 20 percent off with code Pacman. Go to sheath underwear dot com slash Pacman. That's S.H.E.A.T.H. Underwear dot com slash Pacman. Use the code Pacman for 20 percent off. The link is in the podcast notes in the midst of all of the hubbub around Ron DeSantis announcing he's running for president. Tim Scott announcing that he's running Donald Trump spending twenty four to forty eight hours simply going after Ron DeSantis. Everybody forgot about Nikki Haley.

Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, is also running for the Republican nomination. She is getting absolutely no attention. She's desperate for relevance. So what does she do yesterday? She goes out and now let me go completely anti-transgender. Why not? This seems to be playing well among some. Now, she's not wrong. The biggest applause lines for the last couple of years at right wing events, including CPAC and others, have been when speakers make fun of or go after LGBT people. It's a resurgence of that in the Republican Party. So here is Nikki Haley figuring out, I guess, how to get some attention. Maybe people will

choose her because she's going to come out against trans people in a disgusting way. Here's what she had to say at politics and eggs in New Hampshire. We've got biological boys playing in girls sports. It is the women's issue of our time. Where is everyone? Right. My daughter ran track in high school. Did she? I wouldn't even know how to have that conversation with her. How do we get our girls comfortable with biological boys in their locker room? It's not okay. Everybody know about Dylan Mulvaney? Bud Light, right? Right.

Make no mistake. Right. That is a guy dressed up like a girl making fun of women. Women don't act like that. Yet everybody's wondering why a third of our teenage girls seriously contemplated suicide last year. What are we doing to them? We're supposed to be growing strong girls, confident girls, not ones being made fun of.

Right. So one of the reasons that's actually evidence based for the increase in suicidal ideation among particularly teen girls, but teens in general, is unrestricted access to social media seems to be extremely damaging in many different ways. Cal Newport has a recent podcast episode on this issue that I highly recommend people listen to. But the idea among the anti trans activists that, quote, keeping men out of women's sports, that's how they call it. We've got to keep men out of women's sports. They pretend that it's a feminist issue, a women's issue. The claim that banning trans women from sports is a feminist issue, number one, ignores the history and diversity of actual feminism.

Feminism, feminism isn't this monolithic movement to compilation or combination of different perspectives and goals that aim to achieve what different people see as gender equality and justice. And there are many feminists who support trans rights and inclusion and they see trans women as allies in a struggle against whatever it is that they believe is the most important thing to struggle against. And so part of the feminist movement argues that when you exclude trans women from women's spaces and activities, you're actually reinforcing the very harmful stereotypes that feminism has sought to undo. But it's OK to acknowledge that the so-called let's not let's

call it trans women in women's sports to try to put a less offensive way to describe it. That is a difficult issue for some sports in which physical advantage comes from muscle mass. Weightlifting would be one example. And I am the first to tell you that although trans women in women's sports is an issue that is a slice of a slice of a slice. Right. You've got like all political issues, issues related to gender within issues related to

gender issues that are under the trans category. Under trans, you have all sorts of different issues, bathrooms and all the within that you've got, OK, sports. And then a subsection of that would be sports in which muscle mass confers a definitive advantage. So we're understanding the scope, right? This is not the biggest issue.

There are different opinions about how it should be handled. Some say so, you know, 31 states have gone the way of banning biological male individuals from women's sports in some capacity. That's one approach some are taking. It's been done in 31 states as of about a year and a half ago. The number may be slightly different now. That's one view. Another approach is you let trans women, biological males, different people use different terms for this. You allow those individuals to compete in women's sports if they meet certain criteria, such as undergoing hormone suppression therapy for a certain period of time, as signed off on by a medical professional, the NCAA has gone in that direction for some sports.

In some cases, another idea is for the sports in which muscle mass confers a definitive advantage. You create a separate category for trans athletes who don't fit into the other binary categories. There are many who say that actually is going to further stigma. That's the last thing we need. The point is there is a conversation to be had about trans women specifically in the sports where muscle mass is really important. Nikki Haley talking about a guy named Dylan Mulvaney, who's with Bud Light sponsorship, is just disgusting pandering to the anti-trans crowd.

But nobody's paying attention to Nikki Haley and her campaign was dead on arrival. So she's struggling for relevance. I want to give you another one of these examples of Fox News casually mentioning, oh, that story we covered for a week and told you that we verified independently. Turns out it was complete and total fake news. The latest is from Maria Bartiromo. This is the story Fox News ran with for a week last week about supposed homeless veterans being kicked out of hotels in order to make room for undocumented immigrants because of something Biden did. The story was totally made up. Maria Bartiromo waited an extra week before casually updating us that the story was completely made up. We want to update you on a report last week claiming that upstate hotels in Orange and Rockland counties, including the Crossroads Hotel, Crossroads Hotel,

evicted a group of homeless veterans. We've since learned that veterans advocates misled local officials. And it now turns out those eviction claims were false. We want to update you on the story, make sure the record was set straight and we'll get more to you as we get it. Yeah, there you go. What she means is it's fake news. We reported fake news and angered people and fired people up based on a story that's completely imaginary. And remember that Fox News said they verified the story. It's not. Well, listen, someone reported this and we were misled. They claimed to have verified the story. And what it sounds like is going on is Fox News lawyers have said you might want to make some kind of

retraction about this. We did talk earlier this week of Laura Ingraham also casually mentioning, by the way, that story was fake. All right. Before we go, a little update on a story we brought you this week about homeless being displaced from hotels so that illegals could move in. Turns out the group behind the claim made it up. We have no clue as to why anyone would do such a thing. No, we'll bring you any updates should they come. Why would any as I said on Monday, why would anybody lie in order to try to support their preexisting political narratives that Biden is treating undocumented immigrants, quote, better than Americans and

better? Why would why would anyone make that up? And this was one other retraction that was issued. Quick update on a story from earlier this week about homeless veterans being displaced from a hotel in Newburgh, New York, right, to make room for migrants. We're now looking into new reports that a veterans advocate misled lawmakers about or and media outlets about a story that some homeless men may have been hired to pose as veterans. We don't know. Reached out to the organization for a statement, but so far have not heard back.

It's also hazy. We just don't know what happened. So there is Maria Bartiromo shamelessly joining those who say, listen, I don't know. We were misled. Wait, you said you verified the story that they don't mention anymore. Completely and totally pathetic. We'll see if any more retractions are coming. We have such a great bonus show for you today that I hope that you're already a member of the bonus show where you want to make money. Yeah, everybody else that makes money to fund themselves is bad. Speaker 1 We will discuss on today's bonus show the new study that finds two billion people

could be impacted by life threatening heat by the end of the century. We've talked about heat before, and I don't mean Trump talking about applying light and heat to cure. I'm talking about heat and climate change and the issues that it will bring forward. This new study is very specific about where these dangerous heat levels will be. Secondly, in Texas, they are allowing unlicensed religious latest placating of the religious. I don't even what to call, you know what to call them, the sort of Christian Sharia type folks in Texas. We will discuss it. And U.S. colleges are now exploring what would admissions look like if they were no longer race conscious, which

is we're talking about affirmative action here. This would be a major change in American college admissions. What would it mean? What would it do? What would the implications be? All of those stories and more on today's bonus show. Can't wait for you to join us by simply signing up at joinpacman.com.