The Problem With Jon Stewart - Mark Cuban, Maria Ressa & Julia Ioffe Join Our 2022 WrapUpFestPalooza

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

The year is almost over and we’re going out with a bang! Entrepreneur Mark Cuban is here. Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa is here. Whip-smart journalist Julia Ioffe is here. Come on, you can’t beat that lineup. Join us as we break down some of 2022’s biggest moments: Elon’s Twitter tumult, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the coming AI apocalypse, and, of course, the collapse of crypto and Sam Bankman-Fried. Come for the copious amount of Yiddish, stay for a look back at the year that was, the year that wasn’t—and the year that, God willing, will never be. Season 2 is now streaming on Apple TV+.CREDITS
Hosted by: Jon Stewart Featuring, in order of appearance: Mark Cuban, Maria Ressa, Julia Ioffe Executive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard PleplerLead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Zach Goldbaum, Caity GrayAssoc. Producer: Andrea Betanzos, Daniella Philipson Editor: Zach SilberbergSound Engineer: Miguel CarrascalSenior Digital Producer: Freddie MorganDigital Producer: Cassie MurdochDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris AcimovicSenior Elements Producer: Kenneth HullClearances Producer: Daniella PhilipsonSenior Talent Producer: Brittany Mehmedovic Talent Manager: Marjorie McCurryTalent Coordinator: Lukas ThimmSenior Research Producer: Susan HelvenstonLead Research Producer: Andy Crystal Theme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast, produced by Busboy Productions. https://apple.co/-JonStewart

Welcome to the podcast everybody, the problem with me, John Stewart, the problem. Today's our special end of the year, extravaganza. A year in review, a wrap up fest, Palooza, I don't know what you're gonna call it. I'm sure we're gonna get into Russia and crypto and Elon and, oh, what a fucking year. All right, we're very delighted to have a panel of friends of the show.

You may recognize them from the Apple TV Plus show, the podcast or life and the news. We've got entrepreneur and co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, Mark Cuban. What's up, John? Cost Plus Drugs. Welcome, sir. Thank you, sir. That's a wonderful introduction.

Journalist, CEO of Rappler and 2021 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Maria Ressa is joining us. Hello. From the Philippines. Yes. So it's so delightful to see you again and founding partner in Washington Correspondent for Puck. Julia Yafi is also going to be joining us. I want to ask you guys, it's hard not to just start with the main news.

Have all of you been suspended from Twitter? And should we just pool our money and buy it? And when I say pool our money, I mean, Mark, will you buy it? Yeah, kind of fair. It's Elon's company. Elon gets to do what Elon wants to do. He paid price for admission. Win, lose or draw, we'll find out.

Yeah, it's kind of nice to see it in this arbitrary, pernicious state. You mean free speech absolutism? Is that what you mean, John? I believe that's what I meant. By the way, Higu controls the chalkboard, controls the absolutism. Now, the person that I think has the most at stake here, if we're being honest, is Maria Ressa, who faces censorship and the penalty of imprisonment in the Philippines. And so it's very easy for us to sit here and watch glibly.

But for Maria, I'm assuming this is a chilling bit of a turn of events. I think it's both chilling and instructional. It really shows you the basic question is, why does one rich man have that much power over the public sphere globally? And it has never happened this way in the past. And this platform in particular, because of its design, is global in scope. So that's... And I think this is part of what we've been trying to point out is that in the medium

term to just try to fix everything that is wrong, fix the information ecosystem, which means stop what social media has done, put guardrails on these. And what is happening on Twitter is a perfect example why you need this. Well, that's it. Mark, you know this cat, Mark. You know, you know, Elon, you're excited to see him take it over. But it's pretty clear that there's a fine line between being a disruptor and being a utterly narcissistic, anarchist, sanctimonious nutbag.

Dictator. What the fuck happened? It's Rupert Murdoch on a different platform. You know, it's always been this way. It's not it's not something new. It's always been this way. Walter Cronkite decided what went on his show. You know, Rupert Murdoch has been for corporate advocacy since Rupert Murdoch was born.

You know, there's just, it's just a different platform. And so we're starting to understand. And look, and even with the Twitter files with, you know, even though there was no there there, we got insight into how Twitter worked in their decision making process. And while they tried to stick to their terms of service, there's always going to be a gray area where decisions are made about information. And so we're just getting to, you know, in this particular case, the guy making the sausage is showing his recipe, even though he's saying he's making cupcakes.

He's making hot dogs. Right. And we're getting to see how they're made. Mark, have you had breakfast yet? Because it seems to me that a lot of these food analogies may be based on you. Right here. There you go. That's what I'm talking about.

My list of healthy cookies. That's, that's, that's delightful. Julia, as a journalist, you've also got to be thinking to yourself, well, if I don't know where the mines are buried, I don't know where not to step. And my entire job is based on not treading lightly, but, but walking into this. The problem is, you know, he made a big deal of Twitter files showing the corruption within the decision making process of moderating this free speech town square platform. I would bet you a Twitter files from the last 24 hours would be a tiny release because

it would just be Elon, what should we do? Answer, fuck these guys, get them all done. He just shut down Twitter spaces because one of those journalists confronted him on the fact that he didn't dox Elon. He was just reporting on it. So Julia, what, for a, forget about guardrails, where's the map? Where's the rule of the road here? Well, I do think it's interesting that these self declared free speech absolutists are absolute

in protecting their own speech, right? It's free speech for them, but for really nobody else, especially if it's speech criticizing them, then that's really, really out of bounds. Look, I think that it's always been a, Twitter has always been a fraud space for journalists. And I imagine that there are a lot of editors that are watching this with some relief. And then they're like, oh good, you know, just blow this thing up and let's just not have any journalists on Twitter because Twitter has given so many editors, so many of our bosses such, you know, Shpilkis and the Geneticozoic because, because,

Wow. Let me just, let me just stop you right there. What a beautiful tribute to Hanukkah was to have. I thought my grandparents just jumped on and said something. There is, there is a poem that is, that is, that is smiling. That is very shame. There you go. It's Linda Richmond.

Anyway. But you bring up a great point. Right. Because they were always freaking out that we were saying things that would compromise our objectivity or that would get us in trouble and I've gotten in trouble on there a fair amount of times. And there was, there was so much hand wringing in, on kind of in editorial that I think the public didn't see.

And I think there's a lot of, there are a lot of editors that are just hoping that this thing just blows up. And this way it'll look like it's not that the editors are kind of turning the screws on their journalists, which they've been doing for years by the way, including at publications like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, but that it'll look like Big Bad Elon Musk has come out and shut down Twitter for journalists and they were trying to protect free speech. Well, let's go, let's, let's flip it on its head.

You know, you could also say that journalists and editors and publications are just upset that they've lost the gatekeeping powers that had formerly been invested in them and that they had wielded that authority perniciously and in a partisan way. And so this is the revenge of, the revenge of the free speech libertarians. But on the flip side of that, couldn't you make a case that Twitter blowing up is a good thing for journalists because they're so wedded to its circadian rhythm as though it's news that journalists have turned this space into reality when in fact Twitter is not reality? Well, I think it emerged, I think it became a really important platform because of journalists

and because of people who acted like they were journalists. It was a kind of newsfeed and a bespoke newsfeed for a lot of people. A crowd sourced. For only for journalists, only for journalists, right? Because you know, John, I don't necessarily agree that this is good for journalists and one respect is good because everybody wants to hate the king and they get to do it in their own way, right? So everybody unifies in that perspective.

But the other side of the coin is everything is long tail. The beauty of Twitter is you're able to accumulate followers, right? It's not algorithmically driven. Yes. And build a brand on there. Yeah. And you're able to define your brand. It's not like TikTok where it's all algorithmic and followers don't really have an impact.

It's very much chronological and it's very much follower driven where everybody at the early days of Twitter, when it evolved from being a social medium, hey, what are you doing at South by Southwest tonight to, hey, let's get my news or let me promote something. Now it's very different and it's very brand driven. I think it actually created a lot of journalists and kind of leveled the playing field and allowed a lot of people into the profession, not just of journalism, but comedy, other kinds of storytelling that wouldn't have made it into these traditionally very elite spaces that are very hard to break into.

That's one. And then back to your original question to turn it back on its head again, Elon bought this platform in part because conservatives were saying us being shadow banned on Twitter, us being demoted on Twitter is a violation of our First Amendment rights. And liberals, ironically, were saying, well, this is a private company, they can do whatever they want. I think you're giving Elon too much credit. Yeah.

I think you're giving Elon too much credit. So hold on. But no, no, no, but whether that was his thought process or not, but now that he owns it, now conservatives are saying, well, now it's a private company, he can do whatever he wants and it's not a First Amendment right. So now it turns out, again, they're not free speech absolutes. Yeah. Well, like everything else, it becomes a tit for tat ownership over libs or conservatives.

But my point is more this, isn't it a problem if journalists view the ranking of trends on Twitter, if aren't you outsourcing your editorial authority by just, and I do think journalists have done this and newsrooms have done this, they scan Twitter and they look at the trend and they look at how it's ranked and they decide, oh, that's the top story. That's the most important thing going on in the world right now, that's the urgency. And you see how it influences coverage. I mean, it's more than that, right? So I would disagree with something Mark said, that it isn't just Elon kind of being the

owner and the gatekeeper of this, these are his rules, so he exercises the power media used to exercise. We never could exercise this kind of power because the power of technology is significantly different from traditional media, where we all saw the same thing, where we weren't cloned as, you know, where data privacy is thrown out the door and algorithms of amplification determine, actually, on Twitter in particular, lies spread at least six times faster than really boring facts. So from the very beginning.

That's been quantified at six times, Maria, six times faster. Yeah, this is an MIT study from 2018 lies spread at least six times faster than facts on social media. And then you add on top of that that, you know, it is the kind of weaknesses of it, the way it was set up to basically keep you scrolling, right? Because that's the end goal of this. Keep you scrolling. Sure.

It's monetized by engagement and the amount of time you spend on it. That's how they make the money. And it has, and it has actually gotten rid of, you know, it has atomized meaning and given flattened what engagement even means. But because it just wants to make money out of us, it has come in, used our biology against us, used insidiously manipulated our emotion and a system of advertising and marketing that was once advertising and marketing has now been used for political power and geopolitical power. So this is insidious manipulation.

And this is now a behavior modification system. And we're Pavlovs. Boom. And where is this? Okay. Sorry. This is what I wrote a book about, you know. I'm so down with this.

I'm going to go even further. Twitter is the opiate of the people. No, absolutely. It is up the masses. And haven't reporters been corrupted by it? Facebook, yes. Because I think that survey alluded to Facebook and not to Twitter, right? Because Twitter really didn't have as much weight in 2018.

It was Facebook. And yes, you know, we saw this before. No, it was Twitter. It was actually on Twitter. Yeah. It was an MIT study done by Sina Narallan, then the guy who was formerly a CTO of Twitter. But it happens on every social media. No, but Mark, you have the money, so tell us.

Yeah. I know what Elon's thinking, right? It's a toy. You buy different things. You know, you could afford different things. But at the same time, I think we saw this all before with Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, right? This is not new, right? This is something that's happened before.

And that's why I analogized it to Rupert Murdoch and different platforms. Rupert Murdoch bought what he needed in order to have an impact, right? He didn't just say, OK, we'll just let the audience take us where it goes. He was very specific in what he was trying to accomplish. And I don't- Why would say, isn't Elon, because he said, I want Ron DeSantis for president. He said- Yeah.

He has a political goal. And I think tomorrow it could be somebody different. I think Elon is being Elon, because he wants to, you know, he bought a new toy. He's concerned about the economics. He's trying to figure out a way where he can have his impact and be the king. Well, at the same time, paying his bills. And as an entrepreneur, that's a process. So what we're doing, I've started a lot of companies and I'm a ready-fire aim entrepreneur,

right? It's like, OK, I've got to visualize where I want it to go. I don't know exactly how I'm going to get there. That's exactly what Elon is doing right now. He wants to be the king. He doesn't know exactly how he's going to get there. If Joe Biden said, Elon, you're exactly right. We're going to make you the de facto communications protocol

and a standard that'll make you the ultimate, the TCP IP of communications, right? Of news and information communications. He would love Joe Biden. Oh, that's interesting. But here's a couple of things, though, on that mark. One is you can be good at Twitter or you can own Twitter, but you can't be both. And I think you cannot be a participant in the system.

You have to maintain some sort of neutrality as it goes along, especially given the fact that this is a monopoly. There is no viable competitor to Twitter as we've seen. Go to post.news. Go to post.news. It's not yet. Listen, you can go to Mastodon and Parler and post.news and all these places. It's like saying, I don't want to.

There is until there is, right? There isn't until there is. But let me ask you then. If this is Shark Tank, are you in or out? Invest, is Twitter an investment right now for you? Depends on the valuation, right? Or post. Is post an investment?

You know what? I would do post. Yes, I would do post. Now they wanted $250 million valuation, so I would question that because I think that's way too high for where it's at. But yeah, I think post has got a shot because it's long. Well, think about that, though. $250 million.

$250 million to $44 billion. What about Mastodon? Mastodon was too hard to use. Mastodon with all the different servers and distribution. It wasn't intuitive. Whereas post.news is. Now the question for post.news and the competitors is how would they exercise their editorial strength, right?

At what point will they start to say, no, you can't post this and that'll define where it goes because. Well, are you 4chan or are you 8chan? Or are you Reddit or are you? I mean, moderation is always a complex issue. But Julia, I noticed that you shook your head a little bit when I was talking about how Twitter itself had corrupted, as Maria and I were sort of commiserating

on behavior modification, that I thought Twitter had corrupted journalists and a news model because it seduced them into likes and followers and that they allowed the trends to, and the circadian rhythm of the trends, to be real life when it's not. But I saw you shook your head a little bit in disapproval. So where do you disagree with that? Oh, that's just the Jewish way of agreeing.

No, I'm kidding. Oh my goodness. So no, actually, I mean, I think that's true. And I think that Donald Trump understood that, you know, in his bones and was able to manipulate the shit out of that. And that's why he was, it was like, you know, he turned the press into, you know, like a dog with a bone. Anytime he tweeted.

That's right. The news cycle was shift, was shipped, right? He understood the behavior modification. On the other hand, I'm, I have not been a journalist who covers that kind of stuff. And Twitter has been something else for me. So when, It does have value. There's no question.

There's, there's great value. Right. And so, for example, when Putin invaded Ukraine, and even now there's great value in Twitter abroad, right? And it does serve as a great resource tool and a great news feed. Julia, I just want to, I just, first of all, I want to thank you for throwing more Yiddish

into the podcast. Second of all, I just want to thank you for the most natural segue I think we could possibly imagine on any kind of a podcast. And that's, let's move into that, you know, because the other obviously huge story in the world right now is Putin and Ukraine. And, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to also put the grassroots revolution

and protests that we're seeing in Iran. And Twitter is invaluable for those who are powerless against a regime. Unfortunately, the regime can also kind of reverse engineering at some points. But Julia, I'll ask you, moving away from the Twitter aspect of it, are you heartened by Ukraine standing fast against Russia?

Do you feel that this will be an escalation? Has the West provoked this? As some critics have said, where do you stand right now on Ukraine Russia? Oh my God, that is so many questions. But before I get into that, I do want to say that, and I think Maria would probably feel similarly, is that a lot of our, and Lydia Pulgrin at the New York Times

has written about this really well. I think that when we talk about social media, we talk about it in a very insular way, just as it applies to the U.S. And social media abroad, especially in authoritarian or in semi-authoritarian regimes, plays a very different role. And so, for example, when overseas,

they have more guardrails on social media than here. There's a lot more in Europe and India. Yes, but it also, so for example, when we were debating in the U.S. whether we should allow political ads on Facebook, everybody here said, oh, obviously it's a no-brainer. We should not allow political ads on Facebook. The Russian opposition, when it existed, said,

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, that's our only way to get ads out to the public, because we have no access to television, the Kremlin controls all of that. We have no access to the airwaves at all. All we have is Facebook and social media. So when you make a blanket policy based on the U.S., it's too wide of a brush.

I mean, that's Elon's failing, too, because you can't dox Elon, but three-quarters of the world is being doxed at any particular point in time. There's no way for anybody else, other than Elon, to ban anybody or protect themselves. But he also, what was interesting is that he suspended an account that was Russian oligarchs jets

being, you know, being tracked, which was like, oh, really? You want to protect those guys? Okay. Right. Maria, you're someone, so you live in a country that obviously has a more authoritarian bent. Although what's, how is the new boss,

same as the old boss, how is Marcos in relation to Duterte? You know, Marcos is a little bit better than our last administration, just because the bar was so low. But this is a Marcos. This is President Marcos, 36 years before he was overwhelmingly elected.

His father and the family was thrown out by a people-power revolt. Part of the reason that he won now is because of information operations that began in 2014, not coincidentally, the same time as Russian information operations against Crimea, which was used in Ukraine.

So this is all like, well, picking up three things, I think. One, this technology has pushed journalism to be its worst, right? Because the incentive structure gives the widest distribution to the most salacious, the one that makes you angry, afraid.

The incentivize for conflict and outrage. Right. Right. And more than that, for lies, right? So it's really, and remember, if we don't have integrity of facts, then we don't have integrity of elections. And it can be weaponized knowing that.

You can weaponize. And look at the business of news across the world. All the money is gone, right? There are no fact checkers anymore. And you talked about looking at trending news items as a way of determining what you're going to write about or produce. That's a way of saving money.

You know, you don't need as many producers. You don't need as many editors. You don't need as many reporters because a lot of the work is done for you. So what's the balance, Maria, when you talk about that freedom of expression versus guardrails that can be weaponized by authoritarian regimes,

what's the balance? Well, right now I could go to jail for the rest of my life because of the information operations that my government has done against me. China, Facebook took down information operations from China that was attacking me and journalists in the Philippines, right?

But let me pull up the global parts of Twitter because Twitter in the Philippines is actually significantly better than Facebook or YouTube, right? It is. I'm actually far more protected on Twitter even though now they're coming. And part of that was just a take up on Twitter

isn't as large as the take up on Facebook. 100% of Filipinos on the internet are on Facebook. Facebook is our internet. And a lot of the videos, of course, TikTok coming in, but a lot of the videos that were distributed on Facebook and subsequently Twitter came from YouTube. So this is an entire ecosystem. But I think that putting up what you had said,

which is, you know, this is very different outside the United States. Most of the time, these American tech companies care about what happens in America because they also make the most money from America and Europe. In our parts of the world, there aren't enough people who understand our language, who understand the nuances.

But it is also here's the flip side. It is also where activists, human rights activists, journalists actually can reach. It flattens. It allows you to reach lawmakers in the United States, in the EU. And when Elon first bought it and took over, there was actually an ongoing, you mentioned Iran.

Iran was an ongoing campaign on Twitter at that point in time. As was Egypt. You know, one of the main proponents of the Arab Spring had just started a hunger campaign. And this was heading towards the climate change. And all of this was churned upside down because Elon decided that he would randomly change things when he felt like it.

I think this is the difference between programming as in one program. This is your quirks and you can own it and you can do what you want. But this is an entire global system where people lose their lives. Boy, Maria, this is, it's enormous. What an underreported story

is that the sort of arbitrary machinations of Elon Musk have actually had huge ramifications for activists on the ground in Iran. But then, you know, he's providing, you know, internet for Ukrainians. Like, it's such a mixed bag. But he just hiked the prices by 25%. Did you see that?

They, he said that it was like a month ago. Starlink sent out a notice to Ukrainians. It was like, uh, thanks for using Starlink. We're now raising prices by 25%. Thanks for using it. Bye. Well, so the flip side of that is Russia, which controls all of the information.

And the Russian people, if they had access to the real on the ground information in Ukraine, I would imagine Putin would be in a more precarious position than he's even in right now. Julia, how are they getting any of the information as far as they're concerned? Russia is winning and the denazification continues. I don't know that it's that simple.

I think that there was actually a great episode about this of the daily, a couple, a few days ago, between Sabrina Tavernizzi, who's a former Russia correspondent and Valerie Hopkins, who's a current, a Russia correspondent for the New York Times and who's in Moscow now, which is incredibly dangerous. And she, and she went to a draft office,

a military draft office and spoke to people, men going in and their mothers and wives and girlfriends standing outside. And, um, and basically what she came away with, very, like a very vivid picture of what we've all been picking up on is that Russians are so bombarded with disinformation and misinformation

that inevitably they just shut off. And, which is I think what you see in some corners of the U.S. too, where it's like, I don't even know what to believe anymore. Everybody's lying. And so I'm just going to go back to my little life. Nothing depends on me anyway. The big people at the top decide.

They're not going to ask me. My life is too insignificant. My opinion doesn't matter. And, and I don't believe anyone anyway, because there's too much of it and they're all lying. So I'm just going to shut off. Like a fatalism takes over.

Yeah. But that's by design, right? And it's on purpose because then when you're called up, you don't want to go, you don't want to die. You don't really understand what the war is for. Most Russians don't really understand what the war is. Some really support it, but most don't really understand what it's for. But then they're like, I don't know.

Like they called me up. I don't want to go to jail for not, for draft dodging. And I guess the people at the top know better, but, and I don't know what to believe anymore. So I'll just go. Right. And hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people feel that way,

that's a good way to wage a war in the short term, right? And, but I think that's, and, and you see that, I think replicated another authoritarian regimes around the world and by leaders who lean authoritarian, hint hint, who, you know, bombard you with so much again, so many lies. Yeah. But at a certain point, Julia,

the facts, the facts on the ground are the facts on the ground. And if enough Russian families are losing their sons, you know, there, there is a certain reality to an extended war and a siege that the casualties begin to pile up and people begin to see the terrible price. But they're not Americans. I just want you to understand, they're not Americans. Like they don't expect their lives to get better.

They don't expect their lives to be good. I see what you're saying. I, I see what you're saying. And that's kind of the Russian zeitgeist, right? In Russia, it's just. They're still in the tall story. They're in the tall story. Yeah.

They don't, they, they expect like it's like, okay, can I. Life is to suffer. So yeah. And so, and just real quick, this is the, the joke that will explain the Russian mentality to you where, you know, a bunch of Russian peasants are standing in a giant sea of liquid sewage and it comes up to like right

under everybody's noses and everybody's standing there with their tops of their heads sticking out. And one guy sticks his head out up, looks around and is like, hey, we're all standing here in shit. Why are we doing this? Well, let, let us, let's go. Let's get organized. Let's improve our lot.

Why are we just standing here in shit? And somebody else looks up and goes, stop making waves. That's Russian. Yeah. Yeah. One of those people, that's why Karl Marx apparently was like, look, we should get out of here.

And everybody was like, I don't know how well that's going to work out. Yeah. Mark, I want to talk to you. So you've got, you've got media and you've got the political system, but the truth is capitalism is really the thing that interconnects all of these cultures. And ultimately, you know, when Julia is talking about a group of people who decide we're just going to go provincial,

we're going to go local, we're going to give up, or then there's another group that's only connecting through kind of social media and information and disinformation and weaponization of said information. But business people have a ground, you know, level reality that they have to stick to that is interconnected and globalized. And what is the power that they can influence? They just leave. They just leave.

It's just not worth it. Right. You know, to Maria's point, most of the money is in the United States. And so it's not worth jeopardizing your brand because whatever is written is not going to be kind to you if you sustain your business operations in any type of authoritative country. It's just not, it's not worth it. So they leave.

Even the places that are more oligarch oriented or state run like China, you know, clearly, you know, they're able to maintain a globalized economy while still exercising a real authoritarian control. Well, it's changing now too. It depends on what industry, right? So you see what's happening with semiconductors. You know, there's a lot of money to be made in China selling any type of high end technology related to semiconductors.

First, you know, our government is saying, no, you can't do it. And second, they're not doing it because at some point you realize you don't want to kill the golden goose, right? If China Inc. is stronger than America Inc. across the board with new AI technologies and semiconductor technologies, you know, we all have bigger problems. And so there is some rationality and pragmatism from corporate America in how they view international operations. It's just not worth being in an environment unless you're some subversive organization,

the Wagner group or whatever, right? But, you know, it's typically not worth it. But don't we always, the United States in particular does this. We punish the citizens of these authoritarian regimes through sanctions. So we create, we've done it in a run, we've done it all around the world. And we create these economic bars and economic deprivations. And the people that suffer, as Mark I think alluded to, aren't the oligarchs and they aren't the business people and they aren't the corrupt government officials.

It's the individuals on the ground, the people of Iran. Without question. Suffer terribly under the kinds of sanctions. And Maria, living in a country that has a more authoritarian bent, what is your opinion of the efficacy of those kinds of things and what we can do? What is the leverage that democratic societies have other than punishing the citizens of countries already suffering under a lack of freedom? Well, so first, before I answer that one, let me just twist this just a little bit, you know,

social media, the tech, when they became gatekeepers because lies spread faster than facts, because now modern authoritarians basically lie all the time, then they say it's the other guy who's lying and it's those journalists who are lying and then everyone goes, you know, so who is telling, there is no truth, right? That's the goal of Russian disinformation. I don't think it's a coincidence that the number of democracies globally has rolled back to 1989 levels. Because if you don't have integrity to facts, you don't have integrity of elections,

we are democratically electing illiberal leaders, the United States also having done some of this, but so as we roll it back, right? So 60% of the world today is under authoritarian rule, 60%. Is that the highest since 1989? That's the highest since the USSR fell, because that's 89 is when the Berlin Wall, all that, yeah. Correct, correct. So really, if you look at the next two years, if nothing significant is done and the United States must take a role in this because it was first started by American tech companies,

if nothing significant is done, we will have enough elections, we will elect more illiberal leaders democratically and they don't just crumble the institutions of democracy in their countries, they do it, they ally globally. Like would Belarus, would this be a democratic country today if Russia didn't come in to help? And then to pull up what Mark said, which is in the end, it is power and money, but it cannot be like climate change where you take power and money right now and then you kill the world for anyone else. This is where we are headed with democracy.

And so what do we do in the immediate term is, yeah, well- But don't you think, Maria, and I'll ask all you guys, but isn't the rolling back of liberal democracies and the increase in illiberal democracies a product of instability? And when you look at instability, who are the actors of instability within the world? And I would say the United States has unleashed a large part of the momentum for these illiberal governments by our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, who sent all those migrants across the seas into Europe that caused the voters in those areas to then turn to the right and LaPen and Maloney and Sweden.

We've played a really large role in, oh boy, Julia. All right, for those of you who are just listening on the podcast, as I was getting up ahead of steam about the United States policies leading to illiberal democracies, let the record show Julia Yaffe has raised her hand and the chair recognizes the gentle woman from what appears to be her library. Yes. I think that is partially true. I think the migrants coming from across the sea to Europe are the result, actually, of people

rising up and asking for democracy and countries like Russia coming in and trying to put that down. And countries like Putin specifically weaponizing- But you're talking about in Syria pretty much solely. Well, that's what happened. That's where they were mostly coming from. That is what gave us Brexit. That is what gave us mostly the right turn in European politics. Putin helped create that flow of refugees in 2015 by coming in with tremendous airpower that the

Syrian regime no longer had and bombing Aleppo, bombing aid convoys, bombing hospitals, bombing schools, and creating a refugee flow, weaponizing that refugee flow against Europe because the EU had sanctioned him for taking over Crimea and trying to break up the unity inside the EU and hoping to weaken sanctions on him. But that doesn't excuse our actions in Iraq. Yeah, but I understand. But I think where the argument falters a little bit is the presumption that, again, it's very- I find that argument to be a little bit

solipsistic and provincial, which is that- That's my trademark, Julia. That's what I do. That's my jam. It assumes that the U.S. is the only actor in the world and it takes away agency from all other countries. 00:37:37,000 --> 00:37:40,840 There are plenty of other actors in the world who create instability.

Instability is kind of the default for the world. I was not suggesting the United States is the sole purveyor of instability, but we are an incredibly powerful force that unleashed a good deal of destabilization. Absolutely. But I don't think that that's what is the only thing driving the world toward- That is what's driving the world toward autocracy. Give me a percentage. Give me your-

Oh, Maria. Now Maria's got her hand up. Oh, Maria. All right, come on. Talk to me about- Tag team. Back again. Talk to me about what's driving this move towards autocracy.

Because if World War III is coming, I want to know who's the allied powers and who are the Axis powers and who are we joining up with. So, Maria. I go back and I wrote a whole book about this, right? What is the fundamental game changer? What you taught brought up, like Julia said, in many ways that still happens at the speed of human comprehension. And human beings in society shift to these things, right?

Elections happen at the speed of human comprehension. What does not happen at the speed of human comprehension is information warfare, information operation. So, what you're talking about of Russian capture of media is very, very different from Russian disinformation that targeted Americans and continues to target with disinformation, right? Russian military doctrine says that disinformation, information warfare is part of its military doctrine.

And this is the best part that I love. Yuri Andropov, former KGB chair, says that disinformation is like cocaine. You take it once or twice and you're going to be okay. But if you take it all the time, you are a changed person. We have taken it all the time since 2014, right? And it is going to get worse. Hold on, Cuban, you can't just chime in. It's going to get worse.

It's going to get worse. Have you played with chat GPT at all? Yes. The next battle is not as much about, yeah. The next battle isn't so much about Twitter, control of Twitter. It's who controls AI models and the information that goes in them. Because if you play with any of these chat GPT, DaVinci version 3.5, not to get too much in the weeds, right?

We're just in the first inning of what's going to happen with AI interactive models. And so if you go to chat GPI and openai.com and play with it, it's stunning. It's stunning how far it is. But imagine this is version 3.5. How it can be weaponized, yeah. Yeah. In version 10, what goes into those models is going to be more impactful than Twitter. Like, my 13-year-old is already scheming how to write his papers, right?

Because you can tell me, you can go in there and say, write me a paper about Russian disinformation approaches written for an eighth grader. And it'll do it at an eighth grade level. It's insane. Okay, so let me try and put an optimistic spin on it then. So the world has always been destabilized not just by America. Thank you, Julia. But by the introduction of new forms of media.

I mean, from the Gutenberg press to radio to television. Don't forget the clay tablet. Oh, my God. The clay tablet was a fucking game changer. Game changer, Julia. I still have my old clay tablet. It starts with 10 lines, right? But the point being that whenever these new forms of communication are entered into the system,

human comprehension is not able to digest them in a way that is not destabilizing. But there is a little bit, or have we reached a point where this technology is so agile and so virulent that human comprehension can't catch up, or will mark your 13-year-old, are they more immune to its negative deprivations because it's not new to them? Their brains are more evolved. Our generation, right? Gen X and older doesn't get it, right? Gen Z and younger, they're not only native to it.

They know how to block things out, right? Just like we would tell our parents, I don't want to deal with it. I'm not doing whatever, but they're better able to deal with it. They're also going to define what comes next, not our generation, their generation, and they're more in tune to all these issues we're discussing. It's new to us because we're stuck in a legacy. But it is destabilizing. These new technologies in and of themselves are far worse than what we've seen so far.

Twitter or Facebook, to a certain extent, they're democratic within the filters that an Elon or Zuckerberg or whoever else puts. Once these things start taking on a life of their own, and that's the foundation of a chat GBT and DaVinci 3.5, taking on a life of its own. So the machine itself will have an influence, and it'll be difficult for us to define why and how the machine makes the decisions that it makes and who controls the machine. Julia, you've seen this from the Russian side, the American side. In your mind, what's the best way to deal then with these new weaponized misinformation and

disinformation technologies that absolutely do draw people together, but also can clearly be weaponized to create conflict and destabilization? Do you have a sense of solution? I think Europe has done a pretty good job. Laws and regulations are always going to lag behind technology by the time a lawmaker or a state body figures out what a technology really is and figures out what threat or risk it poses to society, how to regulate it, what guardrails to put on it, then figures out how to get it through the legislative process, blah, blah, blah.

It will have already evolved 15 times, at least. But I think Europe has done a pretty good job of regulating that space. But unfortunately, I think it's always going to be at the margins, because so much of it is not just the technology, but there's a reason I made a joke about the clay tablet, and you mentioned the printing press. So much of it is that it's just a tool in the hands of human nature. It is what people do with it and what people decide to do with it. You can only put so many guardrails in it.

I've always said that you can split an atom and you can create energy for an entire continent, or you can blow it up, and which one did obviously humans decide to do first. Maybe what I'm wondering is, if democracies are analog, if people are analog, and these technologies are digital, then we'll never be agile enough, because a system of checks and balances is never going to be agile enough to catch up. Maybe these new crowdsourced decentralizing technologies also hold the answer. Are we talking crypto now? Well, we're going to get it, but maybe the idea is crypto information guardrails.

Maybe the idea is crowdsourced, blockchained moderation of these systems, because it's going to be more agile. I mean, as funny as we may make Wikipedia out to be, it's a pretty good system for moderating information. That can be weaponized, too. I mean, we'll get to a point in Not Too Distant Future where it'll be, I didn't write it, my reporter didn't write it, the CEO didn't write it, the dictator didn't write it. It was the AI that wrote it. It's not my fault, it's the AI's fault, and we'll have to extend sources. We're going into a whole new world, and I don't even think people realize how much things are going to change. AI is more impactful than anything I've seen in my career.

It's not going to be the term, it's not like Terminator AI, it's like we just don't know what's real and what's not AI. Right, we all have limited time, so we have to make our own editorial decisions on who we trust and who we don't trust, and that's one of the values of Twitter. I follow this person because I trust them, I don't follow that person because I don't trust what they say. With AI, it's not an individual, it's an accumulation and an ingestion and spidering of everything, and it's going to be really difficult to reverse engineer, and there's going to be people who trust it, and it's going to be insane. So, Maria, how do these sources earn their editorial trust? How do they earn their

authority in a world where it's changing so quickly, and will that become more valuable? The way that they said Cronkite earned his editorial authority. We have to move out of the old world. In the Nobel lecture last year, I said, this is like there's an atom bomb that exploded in the information ecosystem, and we have to do what happened when the atom bomb exploded, and it still is. What did they do? The world came together in a completely different way. They created the United Nations, they created NATO, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. What are the standards and ethics? What are the values that will govern this?

Why is this what manipulates our emotions and our minds? Why is that not governed the same way that genetic technology, CRISPR technology, is governed from the very beginning. Laws were put in place. We can now customize babies, but we can't because government stepped in. Democratic government stepped in and said, we can be gods, but we don't have the wisdom of gods. This is where I do say the same thing Julia said, which is the EU is ahead of the game, but it is because the United States and other democratic nations have let power and money lose without guarding the people, the users. We need to move from being users to citizens and demanding. Julia's not even Jewish agreeing now. She's just flat out agree. She's just actually

now. She's not shaking her head. No, she's nodding up and down vigorously, seconding Maria, Ressa. Julia, is that your mindset as well? Yeah. I think that that's kind of the problem in the US and getting back to the Elon problem. Is that money can pretty much buy you anything in the US and getting back to the other big story of the last month or so, which is Sam Bankman freed. I'm not familiar with this. Could you fill me in? Because I haven't heard anything. It's funny because I'm going to the Bahamas this winter and I just want to make sure that everything is... There's probably cheap real estate for you down there. No, I would imagine so. But go ahead, Julia. Yeah. We just came out of the midterms and there was the whole thing of

Peter Thiel had two of his candidates. Actually, my colleague, Teddy Schleifer, did an amazing job covering this, the way that Mitch McConnell was constantly... His team was constantly in touch with Peter Thiel and trying to get more money out of him and that there's this whole shadow election happening behind the... Before anybody even gets to cast a vote, there's... It's actually called a shadow primary where before anybody even gets to cast a vote, the person who raises the most money is the one who gets to advance to even start campaigning. And it's a problem that was made worse by Citizens United, but I think the whole... I'm here in Washington, DC, where it's quite swampy. The lobbying apparatus is insane. The fact that you can stop any bill, that you can

add all kinds of things that gum up the works, that prevent the kinds of regulations that you need to control this kind of technology from getting out of there. Julia, are you about to make an announcement that America needs a superhero and you have a big major announcement to make concerning that, maybe perhaps with trading cards and stuff. NFT trading cards, right? NFT trading cards is some kind of superhero. I'm not... I'm even worse at Photoshop than Donald Trump is. All right. But getting to that, Mark, you know, Julia brings up, Sam Bankman Freed became a player, not just because of his whatever crypto and hedge fund and Alameda and FTT tokens, he became a player because he had millions of dollars to give to the political system.

That's how he insinuated himself. And he did it as much as he's doing his Chauncey Gardner routine now in all of his interviews, like, I don't know how this happened. I just woke up. You know, the intention was, I think, to corrupt the parts of the system that he knew needed to be corrupted for him to carry on his scheme unfettered. Yeah. All this comes down to transparency, right? Where there is no transparency, there is extraordinary risk. And we all try to shortcut things through trust, through brands, et cetera. And whether it's, you know, authoritative regimes, whether it's United States, whether it's dealing with digital, whether it's dealing with AI, whether it's dealing with pharmaceuticals, where you find opacity and lack of transparency,

you're going to find fraud at one level or another. And so when it comes to legislating, any of this, it comes down to who's willing to keep the Kimona open. And like Maria was talking about CRISPR and everything, that's relatively transparent because people have to experiment and those things get published. We don't see that in politics and business in other areas. And so where we can legislate for transparency, where you have to disclose all these things, because it's digital, it's easier to disclose, it's easier to review, it's easier to analyze, but we have no transparency. And as long as that's the case, SBF can do what he did. Just like Donald Trump used to say, yeah, I know these politicians because I gave him all this money and then do what I said.

You know, the game has changed. But isn't it a matter of degree though? Because when you think about, okay, there's no transparency on, we knew that this guy was giving people money, but I think when the Supreme Court redefined corruption as it must be explicit quid pro quo, we lost a really great tool at rooting out this kind of insinuation. And I'll go even further, you know, when I look at the intricate workings of Wall Street, it doesn't look that much different from the shit that Sam Bankman Fried pulled. And that the legalized corruption that we have in this country looks very similar to everybody wants to go, well, that was a clearly a Ponzi scheme. Well, how the fuck is it different from a lot of the stuff that I see at the heart of congressional

stock trades and conflict of interest on Wall Street and payment for order flows and all that other shit that goes on there? It's not different. I mean, money buys power period into story. And once you get it, there's different ways of confirming it. You know, in the case of Elon, he buys the platform. In the case of Sam Bankman Freese, he bought politicians. And particularly in an area that people don't fully understand like crypto. I heard this lie the other day. It takes a couple of frauds to pop a bubble, right? A financial bubble. It took Enron and WorldCom MCI. Now it's going to take what we saw with Sam and who was with Terra and Luna and all the others there and three arrows capital. So now crypto will get its act together, but

we don't have the equivalent in government. We don't have the equivalent in politics yet. Everybody's still corrupted. And you talk about domination. It's a two-party system. It's the easiest system in the world to dominate because if you can rise to power and one of the two, you have half the power. But to Maria's point, that's just America. And the system is now globalized. And when you look at the largest... But they call the president the leader of the free world for a reason. And that's within a two-party structure. So there's the duopoly and you have a 50% chance, if you can get the top of either one of them, to be the most powerful person in the world. Sounds like a commercial. But that's an inherent... It's an inherent problem

that we have. That's why I'm a fan of ranked choice voting, not to get too far afield. Maria, when I look at that SPF story and the crypto and all that, I also look at the media's utter irresponsibility in... When this cat first showed up, I mean, they licked him up and down and treated him like a rock star. The very same people that are now saying, oh, this was clearly a Ponzi scheme, Bernie Madoff type guy. How do you... When I look at CNBC or Fox Business or those, these are 24-hour news organizations that have basically become cheerleaders for a lot of these incredibly risky and newfangled types of financial instruments that most people don't understand. And ultimately, retail is the group that gets screwed. So how do you put the screws to a media

to be more responsible, not just the companies? So it's not even just that financial instrument. It's technology again, right? Because the crypto part was the beginning of it. And then... So how did everything shift? Because we all believed in the power of technology. Again, I was the truest of true believers in social media until it became unfettered and the harms were very, very clear and it became very personal. In crypto, all of the things that they used to say, so what did I do? I worked with civil. I was on the board and I looked at it and I was like, this is not quite anything that it's built up to be. So I think definitely I'm recording crypto ends on almost all fronts of what I think at the beginning, and this would be from 2014,

moving forward, right? It's the hockey stick of growth. And there was always the unicorn. Everyone wanted to be the unicorn. I did a startup. I did a series A, right? That's what everyone wants. People thought there was a shortcut that easy money is easy money and tech was the way to do it. It isn't true. There are harms that come with that and we are now feeling it. There's a difference between the underpinning technology and crypto. There's a signal on the noise. In crypto, 99% of it was noise, but there's real value and signal there. But look, I was sat on the phone with Sam for an hour talking crypto, and he's smart. He understands it, but I didn't know he was a crook. Any more than any other Ponzi schemeer you don't know until

you know. In his particular case, something is screwed. But the question is we can't just dismiss him as a crook because he's following a playbook that has actually been made. Well, that's what psychopaths do, right? They see the obvious. He's like, I'm a crook to a psychopath. Sometimes they're one in the same, right? Right, right, right, right. So maybe the lesson is this, guys, and I'm cognizant of your time and we'll wrap up. And I've so appreciated the conversation. It's this, with technology and all these things that are associated with technology moving so quickly, there's no question that people, given our true nature, will pervert almost anything you put in front of us. And now that the velocity of the perversions have come so far and so fast,

we need robust protections from ourselves and most base instincts. And we don't know we don't know where that's going to come from. But we're hoping that it comes from the collective efforts of well-intentioned, smart people who will be earning their authority. Yes? Yes. I hope so. We're done here. So no World War III? I mean, you can argue that World War III is happening already. It just has lousy brandy. Right? I mean, you can argue it is happening and it is not just a conventional war in Russia and Ukraine. You know, it's individual. Sorry, I'll shut up on that because I do think we are in a war,

each of us, on these platforms. But I'm on, it comes with the inability to tell fact from fiction all across the board. And is it any surprise when the companies, the platforms that connect us, prioritize the spread of lies? It's almost like telling your kid, lie all the time and I'll keep rewarding you. That's the world we live in. Boy, that's such an incredible point. And I think, you know, I think about my kids because they're they're now getting to the age where they're about to go off to college. But so much of their education when they're younger is, you know, don't cut people in line. It's nice to be important, but it's important to be nice. You know, all these sort of really basic rules of the road without acknowledging that the road

has changed so drastically. And maybe some of the antidote to this is to get into the schools and start revealing the matrix to them early. Here's what they're doing to you. Here's how you need to combat it. Julia, what do you think? I was going to say that one of the harshest revelations of adulthood for me was learning that all of those rules were actually not true when that I was the one sucker who thought they were. There's at least two of us. Do you know what I mean? I was like, are we not actually doing this? Am I the one idiot who thought this was that I was taking this all literally? Shit. And I think the people and that that was one of the things that so I think disillusioned me about adulthood that was that all the things

that I was taught as a kid by my very idealistic anti-Soviet parents, like dissident parents, was that actually the people who get the furthest in America are the people who say those things, but do the exact opposite. All right. That's dark. We can't end on that. I'm sorry, and I refuse to believe it. And here's what I think. The overwhelming majority of people truthfully just live in Washington alone. Yeah, that's true. That's bad. They want to be left to fuck alone. And it doesn't take many to destroy the value of the whole. It's a, you know, you have to try and distinguish between ignorance and malevolence. And the better we are at doing it, there's always going to be people who want to reverse engineer the information we give them

with malevolence. But generally ignorance is epidemic and curable. And malevolence is just, we just have to limit the damage in my mind. We just have to cure cancer. You know, it's like like what you just said. That's coming. That's coming. That's coming. We just have to get world's peace, you know? No, that's no. It's not pie in the sky. I'm telling you, isn't that the whole pursuit though? Isn't that why you do what you do? Isn't that why we do this? It's asymptotic. You know, it's like you'll never reach the limit. I don't know. It doesn't matter, man. Sure. Pursue it. Yeah. It's like in the pursuit. Everybody's gotta be sycophous because at some point, if we're all fucking sycophous, the rock goes over the mountain. It has to. Or at least moves. Fine.

Fine. Or moves. Wrap it up for us, Mark. Wrap it up for us. Thanks a lot. You know, the most valuable asset any of us have is our time. And digital information gives us a shortcut so we can retain as much time as possible. So we take advantage of that shortcut. And people who are malevolent understand that and they understand how to take advantage of our quest to retain our time. And so again, I'll go back to transparency. You know, social media on is 10 years old, 11 years old. And so in the time frame of life and generations, it's just a smidgen. And when we look back in 20 years, we'll realize we screwed it up a lot, but I think we'll figure it out. And I think, you know, social media won't have the impact that it once had. You know,

AI is our risk factor right now. And we need to really be concerned about ethics, because it'll be the information source that we go to above and beyond social media that can be influenced. And we don't even understand how that works yet. And we better learn those lessons quickly. Guys, I can't thank you enough for spending your valuable asset of time with us. Maria Ressa, Mark Cuban, Julia Yafi. It's our year in review wrap up podcast extravaganza. Thank you so much, guys. Thanks, everybody. Thank you. Thank you. It's the problem with John Stewart. Check us out on Apple TV plus as well. And we'll see you guys in the new year. Thanks so much.