The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 120 | Who Is More Evil: Government or Facebook? | Robby Soave | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

The Left and Right agree: Social media companies like Facebook are abusing their power — whether through censorship or harmful, groupthink-creating algorithms. But is the solution really more censorship and regulation, like government fearmongers and leftist “whistleblowers” have insisted? Glenn sits down with the senior editor at Reason, Robby Soave, who has a much more refreshing solution laid out in his latest book, “Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future.” Politicians have weaponized the fear we have about social media. So, maybe we should be looking at the positives. Glenn and Robby take a look at the (very familiar) history of tech panic and censorship, balance the consequences of changing Section 230, and expose the real threat to the future of free speech: Progressive tyranny entrenched in the old school media. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1997, a man on a giant stage ripped an article from a magazine, shoved it into a blender, put some clear liquid in it, hit blend, and then drank the cloudy, pulpy substance. The occasion was the sixth international worldwide web conference. The man was that year's keynote speaker, Robert Medcaf. In the 1970s, Medcaf invented Ethernet, founded Threecom. He helped create the Internet. So why was he chugging mulch in front of an audience? Because two years earlier, he wrote a column in which included the sentence,

I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse. He ate his words. He was so certain that he was right that he was willing to eat his words and he did. History is full of horrible predictions about technology and not for, from idiots either, from experts. In 1876, an inventor offered to sell the patent for one of his inventions to William Orton, president of Western Union. Orton was outraged.

In a memo, he wrote that the invention had too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as any means of communication. The inventor was Alexander Graham Bell, and the invention was the telephone. In 1927, H.M. Warner, co-founder of Warner Brothers, said, Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? Actually, that one I still agree with. In 1966, Time Magazine predicted that online shopping would flop because women like to get out of the house. They like to handle the merchandise.

They like to be able to change their minds. In 1936, the New York Times predicted, a rocket will never be able to leave the Earth's atmosphere. 95, an article in Newsweek predicted that no online database will replace your daily newspaper. You can find that article on Newsweek's online database if they haven't gone out of business yet. Predicting the future is a tough game. Even the most accurate guesses have giant errors and blind spots. It's why fortune tellers keep things air.

and vague, you know. But if we had to guess, most of us would say that social media is a technological behemoth. There is no way to know how it's going to play out or what turn we should make. Will it become an obsolete relic, a ridiculous old trend, or will it fuse us and fuse into our society until we're inseparable from it? We don't know and not knowing really bothers us. So what do we do? We panic.

Today's guest is one of the brave souls willing to make a prediction. His latest book, Tech Panic, why we shouldn't fear Facebook and the future. It's an honest and generally refreshing take on the question. When he isn't predicting the future, he's the senior editor of reason. Please welcome, Robbie Suave. Great to have you. Great to be here.

I think the first time we spoke was when you exposed the rape hoax. Ed Rolling Stone. Yeah. Right, University of Virginia. Yeah. Many years ago now. Yeah. So now you're living in Washington, D.C.

And how much you like that? I used to love D.C. Now I feel like it's the most miserable place on earth between the, I mean, people wear masks outside by themselves on the street under circumstances that even are notoriously risk-averse CDC doesn't think you have to wear a mask anymore. People still do it. They flip out if you express any disdain at this. In fact, they express disdain at you for not doing it. What's happening to us? I think the mask is becoming a symbol for the, what I call the blue tribe, the way, the MAGA hat.

It was a symbol for the red tribe, for Trump's tribe. the mask is their version of that because it's not really about health or safety anymore. It's just about. Not at all. Yeah. Not at all. It's about letting people know who you voted for. You know, University of Chicago I just read this morning is not only making you get the mandated vaccination, but you have to sign your name in agreement with several statements.

I don't necessarily agree with any of those statements. They're now, it's not enough. we saw it with the SPN. It's not enough to get the vaccine. You now have to like it. With the college campuses, elite liberal arts campuses, the Ivy League, Columbia, Harvard, Brown, other places, they are implementing the most authoritarian campus, COVID policies of all. And they are places where they could have less rigorous mandates because students,

young people are generally fairly protected from COVID. And they're all vaccinated. 90% plus are vaccinated. And they're telling people, you know, don't take sips of water in class because you'd have to take your mask down for long enough. We want you to go outside to do that. They're telling students, the cafeterias are being shut down, eat by yourself in your dorm room. If you must interact with another human being, please do it outside. And please don't make any new friends because we don't want you to expand your social circle.

These are dictates from the universities. And we've already seen how campus kind of culture can infect the rest of society with the sort of woke takeover. I'm very worried that this crop of students who will become the elites of our society will be accustomed to policies that are frankly insane. I read something, I'm going to butcher this, I'm sure, but I read something the other day from an author, he said, weak men make hard times. Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men.

weak men. Yep, I've heard this. And we're there. I mean, we just, we're weak. We're pathetic. We're pathetic. And we're just making things really bad. Yeah.

But I guess the good news is at some point, it'll be so bad. That will be strong men again. I hope we get to that point. So it must feel weird for you to be, you know, at this. time saying why we shouldn't fear Facebook and the future. Yeah. Tech panic. You, I'm not sure how much we're going to agree on, and I think that's really good.

We have a healthy debate. We might end up agreeing on more than I think. Tell me why we shouldn't fear Facebook. So I think most of the revelations that have come out in the last few weeks with this quote-unquote whistleblower, although I'm not. I'm not sure she told us anything we didn't already know. And her solution seems to be more government control and more of the sort of limit what we see on these platforms. You know, it's weird is her solution.

She's selling out the man. Right. But her solution seems to be exactly the solution Zuckerberg, the man, likes and wants. And I don't want to hear, I don't want to hear it from another senator that Instagram's addiction problem is akin to like cigarettes and big tobacco. Big tobacco is killed like millions of people. Instagram, there are some issues, and I think parents would be well advised to limit the amount of time their teenagers spend on social media. Now, that doesn't require a government solution, which is parents, please do that. But there are a lot of kids who benefit also from social media.

We force them to stay home and to avoid all social contact for the last two years. I think probably on net, I would bet their mental health is better because they had some access to socialization. It can be unhealthy, and, you know, we got to, again, we can talk about how we should limit their time using it. But high school is tough. I bet the majority of teenage girls would tell you that just going to high school makes them feel sad or depressed or bully. Because being a kid is hard. Oh. These problems are not new.

I have three girls, one boy. A boy's going to high school. That's rough, too. He has a rough time. But not, girls are vicious. They're vicious. They wound with words. Yeah.

Yeah. Vicious stuff. Yeah. You know. And Facebook only, I think, or social media only amplifies. It can make it worse. Yeah. But these problems existed long before social media.

I mean, we were talking about the body image problems of like glossy magazines and other things. Yeah, yeah. That's probably the main thrust of my book is that everything you're saying is wrong with social media. I think there are some legitimate issues there too. But a lot of this is also just present in the traditional media, the media that predates social media. media, which is, and if you, you know, if you want to get into the sort of treatment of conservative speech on social media, this is a major issue for a lot of people on the right, and I've agreed most of the time when they take down a piece of, you know, right-wing

content or conservative content, and it's a bad call, and I've said it's a bad call, the Hunter Biden thing, disaster, et cetera. Still, I think on net, social media is probably really good for conservatives. Better than the three networks? Yeah, better than, so the New York Times will never run an op-ed by a Republican senator again. That was their lesson from the Tom Cotton thing. From him expressing an opinion, probably a majority of the country agrees with, that these riots are out of control and the federal government ought to do something about it.

That opinion was considered unsayable in the mainstream media. That's the level of hostility to conservatives, to non-liberal thought, even to probably far-left thought, anything contrarian or that doesn't fit in the liberal bubble. On social media, yeah, they do sometimes take down stuff. They should leave up. But I see the numbers. I see, you know, Tucker. Ben Shapiro, other, or the Blaze, other conservative news sites, actually doing really well on Facebook,

which is why the liberals want to destroy Facebook even more. Yeah. So I think we agree on, you know, capitalism is, and the Internet and Facebook and everything. It is what it is. What you put into it is what makes it either really good. or really dangerous. It's just a tool. The problem, and I don't, I, I am libertarian-minded,

and I don't like regulation, and I'm firm on no regulation, no, no more laws, because it will not work out well for liberty. But I'm stuck in this place, because I've always said private companies can do whatever they want. But this is the one place where I'm beginning to feel the founders couldn't imagine a corporation being far more powerful than a country. You know what I mean? And that's fine, but now they're merging the two of them.

So I'm not sure that the solution lies with regulating Facebook as much as it does regulating the government. and say go back into your box. Well, that we, yeah, that I agree with completely. Government is the one, you know, the big tech, the marriage of big tech and big government is scary. But the one we can have some control over, or at least theoretically, because of our constitutional structure, is the government. When, you know, Facebook takes down, you know, so-called coronavirus misinformation, the

lab leak theory, you're not allowed to discuss it on Facebook. Terrible call. But the White House is pushing them to do that. Correct. They're lightly threatening them. Everyone in the mainstream media is telling them to do that. They rely on cues from what the New York Times tells them. They shouldn't do that.

But they feel scared to do anything else because right now there's an axe hanging over their head, something hanging over their head. Everybody on Capitol Hill wants to regulate them. Even Republicans want to regulate them. Some of them do. I think it's a mistake, too, because in the end of the day, the regulators will be progressives. The people who actually investigate these companies. Has that ever worked? When has more government ever worked out for liberty?

Yeah. Never. Yep. Never. You think the, you know, the bureaucrats who are investigating these companies will care that they took down too much conservative speech? No, it will be these companies are, make too much money. That's what it'll be.

They're too big and powerful and we have to break them up because they're a threat to our democracy. That's the view of progressives and that's what it will be at the end of the day. So do you believe that, um, that a corporation can ever, you know, because I've always mocked and hated, you know, those dystopian future movies where they're like, I work for the corporation, and it was like, I know, they're like, you know what I mean? I've always hated that.

Yeah. But I kind of feel that way now because it is becoming one. Everybody is working together. And, you know, if social media is not taking it down, then it'll be the FBI. And the FBI is really kind of guided by the White House, but so is social media. And it really is becoming that. Yeah. Well, these companies are making a lot of bad calls at the behest of their woke employees, to be frank.

I don't think, I don't think Mark Zuckerberg is actually inclined towards sort of liberal censorship overreach. I think there are people who work at his company who graduated from places like Oberlin and Yale and et cetera, and they hold hostile views toward kind of basic principles of a culture of free speech. And it's really bad that our education system has produced that. And we need to, you know, down the line, right, when we're not going to see some change for many years. But we're talking about big, what kind of big substantive changes do we need to make to not have people? who feel this way running all of our society, being all the elites, that's the kind of thing we need to do. Just, you know, regulations aimed at the companies are at the, like, the last link in the chain, and they're just going to backfire. So how do you deal with a company that just

swallows, has swallowed every competitor? Right. And, you know, hey, I got it something. They want to buy it. God bless them. Yeah. But they've swallowed almost everybody. And it compete against them because of regulations that they've helped put into place, they can afford things that other companies can't afford. So startups. So it's not a level playing ground, you know, playing field. There is a market for the opposite of a Facebook. There is that market.

But they kill you. I mean, look at what happened on January 6th. Yeah. Yeah. So what happened to Parlor, for instance, I think it was very suspicious. I don't like it at all. I've criticized it. Now, the reason that they take Parlor out of the App Store, but they said there are some violence is being organized on the platform. But of course, violence was being organized on Facebook and still is every day. And they didn't do anything about that. So it does seem unfair. Now you get into just a technical issue where, you know, I hear a lot, Republicans are more interested in antitrust law now. but existing antitrust law is about harm to the consumer not so the problem posed by Facebook isn't really essentially you would need new laws to kind of address this problem right the traditional monopoly is they own all of the resource or whatever the people need and then they can raise the price of it but they're not Facebook doesn't charge the user for the service so there's not it's a different kind of company I would I will listen to whatever proposal is on the table to address this

But I still think that even though they've crushed some competition, there's still more ways to speak online than ever before. Like Twitter is a competitor. They have Instagram, but kids now like Snapchat and TikTok, I think Facebook is kind of a dying star. They can't get new young users. It's boomer book. That's what they call it. And I remember when I was younger, MySpace was the social media site I liked in AOL Instant Messenger, and those things are gone. Those things are dead.

So what happened to, what happened to Myspace? Why did that fail and Facebook secede? It's a, it was market competition. Facebook was a better product. MySpace was glitchy. It had a bad user interface. It actually allowed too much customization. Like you could change the layout the way it looked to have like your favorite band in the

background. And they really wanted to focus on music. That was their value ad. Whereas Facebook was initially just a site for college students and they quickly decided, let's open this up to everyone. It was just better. It was a better, it was a cooler, sleeker product, and they beat MySpace. That's it.

That's really what happened. And someone else, it's hard to imagine how anyone else could do it. But it is possible that someone could do that to Facebook. In fact, and in the history of web online companies, that has happened a lot. Google? Google is very dominant. No question there. They're mostly dominant because the search engine they offer, everybody really likes.

I mean, they have the best product. They, you know, they beat, they just beat the search engines that were on the market previously. I think they're closer to a traditional monopoly than other companies. And again, I don't like, I know they've made mistakes where the conservative websites disappear. Why are your mistakes always running that way? Yeah. But again, the sort of investigation into them, the feds were doing was aimed at, yeah, their monopoly power and was saying they really didn't like that it's the default search engine on Apple products.

But I think they pay Apple to be the default search engine. So if somehow the government broke up that arrangement, you know, what would happen is all of the Apple customers would just be like, well, how do I put Google back on my phone? Right. It's what the customers want. So at some level, what we're saying is we need to bring the government in between two companies who's willingly, who like this. This is the thing they like.

And you're saying, why are we involving the government again? Do you know what I mean? So let me ask you this. because this is a place where I think the government maybe should get involved, and that is what I am, my thoughts, you know, my output is me, it's mine, my data, what I do, that's mine. Things would dramatically change if you could just opt into that or say, no, you don't get any of that unless you want to pay me, wouldn't that flip the power back around to, because really, when it's free,

you're the product. Yeah. You know, and I don't think people, I don't know if people really still get that. But. Hard to put Pandora back in this box. Or she doesn't go in the box. She opens the box. Anyway, hard to shut this box.

I think it's just her box. She doesn't live in the box. Sorry. So you don't think there's. is a way to get information back. Europe has a different approach to a lot of these things. They, in the speech versus privacy tradeoff, they're way more interested in privacy. And we are way more interested in speech, in being able to speak even if it makes people

uncomfortable or if it's revealing private information about people. That's the way our First Amendment kind of understanding has gone. And there are a lot of benefits to that. You know, you can't, I mean, you have hate speech laws in England, in France, it's et cetera, in ways that I think are cruel and abusive to people. But they also can have right to be forgotten, where you can petition Google to have your search results taken out. And there's a process to do that.

And Google grants a lot of those in accordance with the law. I like privacy, too. I think it's, unfortunately, some of those things are a non-starter because of how our courts interpret the First Amendment. There's only so much you can do at the end of the day. So when you say don't fear Facebook, I fear the collusion, but the part that I do fear, and it's not a Facebook problem, it's an AI problem. When you can predict and you know someone much better than they know themselves, you can move and sway, for instance, just the search engine and the, the, the, search results for politicians, you know, you can just by ordering them differently,

you can sway people. That kind of stuff, how do you deal with these companies being able to, it's kind of the trap of what's free choice worth? You getting really philosophical here. Yeah, well, I mean, these are the conversations I think we should be having where the world is dramatically changing and that you know it was called propaganda and then because propaganda got a bad name they changed the name to advertising right now we're being marketed to without even knowing we're being marketed to and it can be very dangerous

in the wrong hand it can be dangerous but I think the left is very concerned about this because they just hate capitalism whereas I like uh I I see advertisements when I watch TV, and most of them are irrelevant to my interest. I live in D.C. I'm not going to buy a car anytime soon, and I see tons of car commercials. Whereas on Facebook, I get ads for things I might actually buy. So there's a manner in which this is not nefarious. Now, sometimes it's nefarious, but in terms of the propaganda and political, that kind of stuff. But I still have to compare it to everything else.

Like, cable news is a 24-hour infomercial for one political view or the other, depending on which channel you're watching. There's so much open, you know, encouraging. of here's what you should think that I have no problem with. Everyone should make use of their first men right to advocate for whatever they want. I don't really know that social media is doing that in any more a direct or nefarious way than any of the traditional media comes. The New York Times endorses people for president. They tell you who to vote for directly. So it's weird for them to complain that Facebook is, you know, Facebook convinced everyone to vote for Donald Trump and that's why he's president.

When you told people to vote for him. Right. But I think there's a difference on being open and being nefariously in the shadows. You know what I mean? I have no problem. You want to tell me what your opinion is and this is what we do here. Okay. That's cool.

I know who you are and I can choose in or out. But when you are, no, we're completely, all we are is a search engine. Right. You want to find an answer. We're stacking the deck so you believe the answer. They have a Black Lives Matter, you know, banner in there. They're neutral. No.

Completely neutral. They're absolutely not completely neutral. We should dispense with that farce. Not that would be not making that claim whatsoever. So yeah, I think there are problems. I just think on balance, they've been good for heretical views because we used to have decades ago. We had just a small number of media companies and you could only say something that was in their narrow range. Now the conversation, those people have no control of the conversation and they hate it.

They want control. Right. They want to shut down Facebook and everything else so that they can again be the people who decide what we're talking about. It's really, it's the weirdest thing for. They hate speech. They hate free speech. They really do. They do.

They do. And it's so weird that companies that were built on UBU. Yeah. UBU. Now don't want you to be you. UBU if, as long as you fit into this category. Right. It's so bizarre.

I mean, they're collapsing the idea of, this is very philosophical, but with the new kind of woke left, the idea of the individual is kind of anathema. You have to be part of some group identity. And I don't have any, I'm a libertarian, I'm not really a social conservative, I don't have hostility to these kinds of group identities they're talking about. I just think, but at some level, that's just your characteristics. That's just who you are. And that's great. But you're just you. You don't have to subsume you to whatever group identity you're choosing.

I think that's one of the biggest problems. If you were a conservative, but you didn't say that Donald Trump was the greatest person to ever live and all of the claims he made about the most luxurious hotels that ever stayed in. If you didn't buy into that,

and you were like, no, I don't really, for a while there, you were dead. Right. That was weird. It was really weird. because that's what I expect from the left. Yeah. And their light years ahead, but still the conservative side is to the line.

Where is, have I just misread America for so long that I really thought that we could disagree on things and get along? Or is that America just not reflected? I have such a bias against, I hate the idea. things were better in the past and they're bad now because that's it's sort of a cognitive bias there are a lot of ways in which the past was bad but it does it does feel like this has gotten worse or the ability to be the polarization has gotten worse i think because i think it has i think we are you know we we used to be able to get along because we all at least thought we all believe in the bill of rights you know what i mean yeah we're a merit

That's what makes this American. Hey, you do what you do and I'll do what I do and we believe in these Bill of Rights. When we would violate those rights for blacks or Native Americans or whoever, it would start to grind. And eventually people would be out in the streets protesting and we would return back to the actual meaning. We're not even talking about rights anymore as things that are, are emotional. movable and, you know, given by a higher power than government, so government can't reach into them and change them. I think that's what we've lost, is we don't have an unum anymore. We don't have, I mean, what is it we agree on?

Well, I also think the stakes feel higher because they are higher because the federal government is more powerful and does more things. So it used to be easier for us, we could disagree. agree and go our separate ways. It would be friends. And because your rules are not going to be forced on me and my rules are not going to be forced on you. Correct. But now whoever wins will be forcing their rules on literally every person who lives in this

country. Wait, do you believe that there is, because I don't believe in the Republican Party, but do you believe that a reset of this system? Because when your computer starts acting like this, you turn it off and turn it back on again. Have you turned it on and turned it on and turned it. it back off again. Yeah. And it reboots back to the original programming. Factory settings. Yes. We need factory settings for the federal government. We do. We do. Turn it on and turn it off and turn it on again. Do you believe that we are so far from those factory settings that

whoever is in charge is just going to write the new code? Yeah. I mean, I hear this unfortunately a lot, even from people on the right, they say, no, when we take power, we have to use it. We have to wield it in a very like their boramere talking about you know the ring at the at the gathering it's a gift we have to like you cannot you this tool is hostile to our views to our limited government views we can't use it to accomplish limited government you can use it to to get you know repeal bad laws to reduce regulations to get rid of pointless bureaucracies but don't don't try to force don't create these new institutions to enforce your worldview that in four years will not be enforcing your worldview and probably won't even be enforcing them in the meantime because

they'll be staffed by progressives. So don't like don't fall. And I see a lot of people on the right falling into this trap. I mean the fact that Trump was not, he did some things I agree with and some things I disagree with, but I don't think anyone would say fairly that he accomplished a massive decrease in the size of the federal government, right? No. So we just tried it. It's not going to work. So you have to don't use the tools. Break the tools. That would be my advice. I've blown your mind. No, I'm just trying to think how you hold things together. I mean, my, our culture, the culture war is terrible.

Terrible. You know, I go back, we were talking earlier about the invisible hand of the market, the market, it is just a tool. And if, you know, moral sentiments, if you're not a moral society, the market's going to give you immoral things because that's what you want. So how do we change this? How do we change, how do we use the tools that we're not supposed to fear? Right.

To hold us together in a reset. We have to cling to things that are not political and try to zealously guard against them becoming political. we need to, you know, think about community in a healthy way, not in a, not in a, we have to force everyone to think one way or the other. We have to look outside the structures of government for your, for your kind of social cohesion. And this pandemic has probably been the worst thing for that of all time, because the rule of this pandemic was don't socialize. Don't keep those social ties. Those should fray. Because we have to do that for our health.

There are many unhealthy things about the restrictions we have decided we'll be fine that the government can snap its fingers at any time. If anyone anywhere is in danger of contracting COVID-19, we're going to shut down all the schools and all the community services and you'll have to wear masks and don't see anyone. Really bad. Really, really, really, really bad. People should stop, like, following those. I mean, and of course, the only people following those are the people. The elites don't follow those. the mayor of every, you know, blue city is not there still having birthday parties and weddings, et cetera.

That has been, the pandemic has been toxic in that way, in that, I mean, it's right for like a French Revolution type thing. Honestly, I mean, I feel this, and I'm not really a resentful or populist type person whatsoever. And even I am like off with their heads, these people who will order you to wear a mask, but they're, they're, they're, they're, they're, not going there's you know get me gala emmys etc it it really infuriates me it's it's absolute craziness yeah so why is i i keep i keep wondering what is the hold on people because i i mean we don't have anything because of social media everything's been destroyed we don't have trust in anything anymore and i don't know if it is because of social media although i think think the left played a big part of this. But we also destroyed ourselves. There wasn't anybody

who said, no, I'm staying true to these principles. I mean, name the media organization that deserves any credibility right now. There is no specific media organization that deserves credibility. People need to, but you know what? I still think this is a benefit of social media, Because now I'll see, on social media, I see content from all sorts of media organizations, and I get to read many perspectives and then decide which one I think is right. I think the media environment of the pre-social media era produced a lot of really bad policy, really bad foreign policy, I think. A lot of reckless intervention that was cheerleaded on the front page of the New York Times

and other places that was unthinkingly celebrated. Now you have a lot of the non-interventionist, even on the first. right there's a lot of healthy anti-interventionist sentiment in dissident non-liberal media comment and i even on it far weird weird far left stuff too is sometimes has a lot of value people like glen greenwald matt taby etc um who have been able to thrive in a non-traditional media environment that's part that's part of the breakup that social media provided that is in some ways we're we're more informed we're capable of being less informed because there's a lot more bad information out there. But sometimes the bad information is actually good information. How do we know?

We don't want one person in charge of deciding it. No, we don't. I don't want Mark Zuckerberg to be that one person in charge of deciding it. Ted Koppel thought he should. I mean, Ted Koppel actually said to me, there should be license. Everyone should have a license. And we in the in the mainstream media should vote on who gets those license. And I was like, no, Ted. No, that's a bad idea. And he was specifically directing it, I think, somewhat to me, like, you shouldn't have one. Yeah. It's like, who made you God? But, like, newspapers caused the Spanish-American War, right?

The coverage of the main. Yeah. Every innovation in the communication space, I actually have a lot of anecdotes about this in my book. They're really funny. Every innovation in the communication space had the, whatever the previous communication thing was, saying this will be the end of the world. The New York Times coverage of, like, radio when it emerges.

There were psychologists who talked about how radio, well, we're just all dead now. You'll never have a conversation with a human being. You'll be this mindless listening ape now. The phonograph. The New York Times wrote an editorial calling for Alexander Graham Bell to be killed for inventing the phonograph. Oh my gosh. Isn't that funny? Every kind of thing prompts this sort of panic.

And because all of these things have had some downsides, but I don't want to succumb to, I mean, I remember video games where there was a whole freak out violent video games are going to make all your kids into crazy, you know, killers school shooters. Turns out that now the research shows that not only is that not true, probably the tiny, small, small, small minority of kids who are inclined to violence probably are made less violent by violent video games because they have an outlet for their violence other than actually going out and committing real violence. So that whole idea was not true. And Scalia wrote what is the greatest Supreme Court opinion, in my opinion, of all time, in the Schwarzenegger California video game ban,

where he says these are expressive ideas just like, well, Grimm's fairy tales are violent, and obviously we can't ban those. It's a great decision that I would encourage everyone on the right who's in a kind of panic about social media to read this. And he said, cooler heads should prevail. On the opposite side, I have a story you probably don't know, when the motion picture was put together by Edithson,

I have an original copy of the investment portfolio. And in it, he says, the last couple of lines are, we will now forever know the truth because it will be recorded. And one reporter says this, one person says this, we'll know because we'll have it on film. Like, that didn't work out. Nope. That did not work out.

Smart people can be very stupid in some ways. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about Donald Trump and his being banned. Yeah. The Ayatollah is not ban. Right. Which is embarrassing and humiliating and ridiculous that these companies have these different practices. No disagreement.

Yeah. Trump was on social media for almost the entirety of his presidency. They kicked him off at the very end. I think they probably showed him honestly. If people are going to disagree with this, probably more leniency than they would have someone not in his position. I think there are multiple times he tweeted something that if he were anyone else, they would have banned him. Sure. They've also, I've seen the court cases.

There are people who sued Twitter saying that Donald Trump's tweets, lefty people, represent violence or harassment or something. And we're suing you telling you have to take Trump off Twitter. And Twitter, and it's said we're not going to do that, and here is the relevant law, Section 230, that we, because of this law, we don't have to do that. Which is funny because Donald Trump has tweeted about getting rid of this law. But this law actually empowered them to keep him on the platform. So that's an example of another way that, you know, changing these kinds of regulatory things I think would be bad. And also... But wait, isn't that still just bowing to the pressure from...

little groups. Right. And they bow. He's the president of the United States, former president. He is no president. There's no one who has used social media more effectively than him. Good or bad. He got his ideas out. He did. He used it very effectively. Now, he could, but I think it's, he could talk to the people in any format he won't, like he could be on TV all day. could, you know, every, everyone will point a camera at him if he starts talking, but he loves Twitter. He wants to be on Twitter. That's his favorite one. And he, they, they finally said, look, I think they should let him back on the platform. I've openly said that. I don't, I don't think their decision to take him down in that, in the moment when they did it was

necessarily wrong. I attended the Capitol, I covered it, the Capitol riots on January 6th. You were there. I was there. Part of the Klan? I was not there. I was there as a covering it. That's what you say. Right, yes, yes. No, that was me in the... Yeah, right. And the horns.

I did get, I got tear gassed in the face because there was a cloud of tear gas and I couldn't get away from it. And I thought to myself, well, how bad could this be? It's time for, you know, time to have a real journalist, you know, experience. I'm tough. I can take this. Several seconds later, I'm like crying. I'm on show. This is horrible.

This is so horrible. So it was, look, it was a bad day. It wasn't an insurrection. They weren't in danger of overthrowing the government. I agree with that, but it was still a pretty bad, embarrassing thing that they did. And Trump, he should have calmed. I think he had a moral responsibility to lower the temperature, and he didn't do that. Yeah, I think that was his real error, I thought.

That was a turning point for a lot of Americans that supported him when he didn't immediately come out with the same reaction that I think 99% of Americans had. stop. Stop this. This has got to stop. And you had, you know, the left came to town. They smashed every window in sight for the summer of protest right before that. It was horrible. It was condemned. It should have been condemned more strongly, obviously, by people who weren't doing that. But then Trump supporters came to town and they wrecked the place a little. Not every street, but they did not, you know, respect the buildings at all. and there's been a little bit of excuse making for that that doesn't sit right with me because you should not you shouldn't smash the windows of places no and i think people are just getting so frustrated and they see the left doing it and it seems to be working for them so i'm going to do it too and that's you can't it doesn't work for anyone no it doesn't work um let's talk a little bit about section 230 sure um because it's not you say it's not what everybody thinks it is and what i think what everybody

thinks it is is government protection from litigation. So Facebook is a publisher, which I can be sued. If we put something on the air that's not right, I can be sued. They said we can't have this if we're going to get sued every time, which makes sense. But that would make you, that would you'd just be a publisher and not a editor, right? Is that right? Yeah. Once you start to edit, you have the right to be sued because you're editing. But the issues they have to do some, everyone, I don't care who it is.

Anyone who says, no, these platforms shouldn't do any kind of moderation. They should just, you know, they're not publishers. They should just allow anything. I will show you things and you'll say, well, of course, I want that taken down. Right. Everybody wants craziness. Right. agree with that. But the rules don't equally apply. I mean, it's clear there's an editorial

opinion. It's not just editing. It's editing for a certain opinion. Why should that be protected by the government? New York Times isn't. I'm not. Right. You know, honestly, if I wanted to square this, I would probably say, well, maybe other media companies should have that. I don't like suing everyone willy-nilly. It's a gift. to I support tort reform. It's a gift to trial lawyers who are the most reliable Democratic party people anyway. So you're right. Section 23, it's not like the First Amendment. It's not something sacred. They could change it if they want to. I just think the immediate consequence of changing it in any way would be less conservative speech online. Because if you subject them

to greater liability, they're just going to take down more stuff. They're going to, or they're going to have a system where only people they trust can post at will. And who's that going to be? This not going to be you. It's not going to be the mainstream media. It's going to be blue checkmark people. There could be some system where only if you have a blue checkmark next to your name can you post. Everything else has to be reviewed by our attorneys to make sure we're not going to be sued for it. This does not benefit the right at all. Like it's so obviously bad that I can't believe anyone has seriously considered doing it that they have. So let me let me go to the places where It's quite obvious to some that it's bad, but you don't want to squash it.

I would imagine you don't. I don't. I've always believed more speech, not less. Let ideas stand on their own, you know. I'm glad we didn't ban Hitler's writings. I know when I first read Mienkopf, I'm like, what part of this did, were the Germans surprised? when he started killing all the Jews.

Right. He said it right here. And so I think, you know, you want to expose people to everything. When I was at CNN in 2006, the people who believed we went to the moon was, I think, 6%. And I had seen the problem with credibility already with people. And I said, that number is going to grow. and if we don't start being true to who we are, once people don't believe anything,

they'll believe anything. They'll believe anything. That number now on we didn't go to the moon, I think is 14%, 13 or 14%. And QAnon. QAnon is, I mean, I hear stuff from QAnon, and I'm like, are you kidding? You don't believe that, do you?

how do you what do you deal with that how do you deal with that i i struggle with this because i think there's a certain level of involvement in it that is not quite so scary and is in some ways though it seems weird is like um is like people who believe in astrology or or it's almost it's almost like a video game or something or or a it's like an online game where you're oh you're finding clues you're doing some kind of like detective story where it's not do you really really really believe it or is it just kind of something you're involved in? And people have believed, people believe, um, people believe kooky things for like forever. People used to believe, I was talking to a Stephen Pinker who's a Harvard, uh, Luke was a lot of great books. Um, yeah, you know,

he points out that, you know, people used to kill animals and then look for signs like in their blood, right? They're, they're, they're, we used to torture animals for fun. We used to, people used to believe that that you know the if birds landed on the trees in a certain way that meant the comets coming and we're going like people have believed kooky things now there's a political flavor to everything and Q&on has this political flavor that that feels like weird and new but I don't know how many of these people actually believe maybe the the most committed people are the ones like being tricked by the FBI into doing something the kidnapping plot the my former I'm from Michigan Michigan originally. The more you read about that, the kidnapping plot of the governor, the more you see it was just, you know, people sitting around complaining and then kind of got talked into it by these, by federal officials where they're, and they used to do that. They did this, by the way, to a lot of Islamic people, every time there's a bust of a so-called, you know, ISIS affiliated person, or this person never met anyone from ISIS. They're a radical teen

saying radical bad stuff online. And then they meet with a law enforcement officer who's like, You could purchase explosives for me. And now you're going, now you're going to jail forever. No, there's no actual threat that was averted here. And, you know, they get to throw a clap, clap for the feds. There's no threat was averted. It's all, there's a lot of, and actually this is one thing I admire about Trump especially and that has been good.

He's brought, he's made the right more suspicious of what he calls the deep state for absolutely valid reasons. There is, there are. And the more he said, I remember the first time he said things like, the press is an enemy of the people. I'm like, oh, God, what are you? Right. And then the more you watch their reaction, the more you're like, well, you know, kind of

yeah. Yeah. You know? And the deep state, when I first heard that, I thought, so conspiratorial. But if you understand it as, no, just a group of career people that are politicians and, you know, salaried people that just think, I don't care what the president says, we'd be here a lot longer than he is. Right.

That's the deep state. It's not a star chamber. Right. It's just people who think they know better. The state department. Right. The generals who are, you know, just feeding totally wrong information about the state of Afghanistan to president after president after president, knowing they'll outlast this guy,

knowing they can't make themselves look bad. I mean, Millie has just totally embarrassed himself. But it is a deep state. What can you say? It is. So on that, we've had the Hunter Biden story and the media and everybody has turned that around and made you look like, not you, but well, me, look like a conspiracy theorist for believing it and going, you know, I think we should at least look into this. I mean, there's, how do we, how do we navigate the world we're in? You're right about it's always bad.

I mean, I, in some ways, pine for the days when, you know, we had to sit down together as a family or whatever and watch a show at 8 o'clock on Thursday night because it kind of brought all of us together. You know what I mean? I never thought of it that way. I always thought, this sucks. I can't wait until you can get it when you want to get it and watch it how you're. you want to watch it, but there was some good things about that. And television was going to destroy us. You know, it was destroying the fabric of America.

This is the same thing, I agree. But it's on steroids. Yeah. And it's so much faster. People do need to turn it off more. When I say don't panic. I also don't mean make this your entire life and submit yourself to it. Turn your phone off sometimes.

Log out. Stop using social media sites that aren't contributing. to your own well-being. You don't have to be on them. Some of the people advocating the most for restrictions or breaking up these companies, what I think they are is that they're addicts, and they think everyone's an addict. Like the social dilemma, that Netflix documentary about how terrible. It's all these ex-Google people, ex-Facebook people.

Well, they're the most online people of all. They're talking like they invented their Manhattan Project scientists. We invented the greatest, most powerful, destructive thing ever, and now we're warning you, and it's so great, and we're so great for inventing it. But it's really bad for you. Maybe it's bad for you. maybe if you're you know most people can walk into a casino not bet away their life savings some people they would bet every they can't do it because they're addicts yeah I have and they should they should not do it I think we're I think we're at a point where we don't agree on something

now maybe we don't try to darn I mean no but I mean try to uh try to tell people yeah put your phone down for the day just they will all tell tell you. Oh, no, no, I can't. Wait, wait a minute. Ten years ago, you could. Everything was, I say this to my wife all the time. She's like, no, I have to be able to, why? Why? I don't have a phone. I don't carry a phone. I'm fine. Why does everybody have to have that? You tell them to turn it off and most people are like, uh-uh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Have to, have to have this. Yeah. It's not healthy. It's very bad. Yeah. We need to, I hope these companies will seriously consider implementing things that make it easier to turn them off some of the time. Maybe they

won't, but they're right now going to face regulation. They are going to be regulated, one way or the other, unless they can fix themselves. They don't want to fix themselves. They don't want to fix themselves, but they don't want to regulate. be the one. They're going to be the ones who write it. Well, that won't be good. I know Facebook supports Section 230 reform because they know it's going to put Twitter out of business. Right. And you know also that the government, they don't, we're talking about people who are a thousand years old. The gerontocracy. Yeah. I mean, they talking to these people about AI or anything on the horizon. they don't have any clue is what they're,

so they're just going to go to their friends in Silicon Valley and say, why don't you write some stuff up and how would you regulate it? That's what FDR did with GM and the big three automakers. Every hearing where you have these senators yelling at Zuckerberg and Dorsey and everyone else, I mean, they're embarrassing. They have no idea what they're talking about. Recent Blumenthal was yelling at someone from Facebook about Finsta. You say, get rid of Finsta, take down Finsta.

You have to eliminate Finsta. Finsta is not a feature. It's just having a fake Instagram account. It's just something users came up with. It's not a service they offer. They can't. And she's trying to explain this. And you can't.

He's so old. He doesn't know. That should disabuse anyone of the notion that these people are competently. I think it was Johnson, Congressman Johnson, I think, that was talking to a general. And he said, they were talking about. the bases on, I think the Philippines. And he said to the general, are you concerned at all if we have too many people on that side of the island

that the island will capsize? And the general without missing a beat, went, no, sir, that's not anything we've considered at all. Oh, yeah. The people running our government are not good. A lot of the people running and I think to a greater extent working at these companies are not good. They're hostile to our values. They're hostile to classically liberal values, free speech values, and it's very bad.

But what can we realistically do about it? I don't know that it's a lot from a policy standpoint and I don't want to make things worse. and I just don't want to give power back to the media environment we had before this, because for every bad thing we have now, honestly, I think it was worse when I was a young person before that. The dominance of the people who really hate you, who really disagree with your values, who won't let you hear a single different perspective

and just want you to listen to them, those are the people that would come to power again if we broke up these companies. Let me ask you one last question, and I don't know if you're, I'm sure you, I'm sure you're involved in cryptocurrency. Yeah. That's another place where the powers that be are actually talking about making the post office a bank.

Yep. I mean, if that's not a thousand-year-old thinking, I don't know what is. They've got to stop cryptocurrency because they lose all control. Once you don't control currency, you lose oh vast amounts of power crypto could very well

be the solution to some of the problems we're talking about I am not an expert I'm very interested in it I'm just frankly not an expert but a lot of my colleagues at Reason magazine write about

a Zach Weissmuller is someone people should look up if they're interested in this and he writes very persuasively about how this could be the future a future where there is less central control where there is privacy where a lot of the things we're talking,

we're worried about concentration, can be addressed by this, the decentralized internet, it is possible. And so there are, and that's all going to be innovation. That's not going to be the government doing anything. No,

at best that will be the government not doing anything. Right. So there, that could be the solution to a lot of what we're talking about. Generally speaking, I can't get a feel from you whether you are hopeful for the future

or you're just like, we're doomed. I think I'm hopeful for the future. I think things tend to get better. Our political conversations have gotten worse and the government always gets bigger. But there's a lot more to life and we should we should enjoy that. And it's been a bad, it has been a bad two years. I don't think, I don't think things can be as bad as they were last two years. I've been wrong before. Probably will be again. Everybody that said last year,

that's what they said, 2021 can't be as bad as 2020. My personal 14 days to slow the curve are over. Let me tell you, I am going to enjoy my life. I don't care. what Dr. Fauci or any other health official says ever again. So it will be better. We will make it better if it has to be. God bless. Thank you. Thank you so much.

You bet. Name of the book is Tech Panic, Why We Shouldn't Fear Facebook and the Future. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.