Tomorrow - 112: Tracking Brianna Wu

Episode Date: April 13, 2018

Hello Tomorrow listener. Do you like Drake? Do you like gossip? Do you like amphetamines? Well, have we got a wave of hot content for you. There's also an impending apocalypse scenario that somehow involves the Neo Geo. Later we're visited by a tiny Topolsky, then Josh chats with Brianna Wu, a technologist and Congressional candidate in Massachusetts' 8th District. Whatever you do, don't listen to this in the secret hotel room you're keeping in your hometown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to tomorrow, I'm your host Josh Witts-Polski. Today on the podcast, we discuss speed, digrass-y, and the Neo Geo. I don't want to waste one minute. Let's get right into it. All right, we're back. Hello. With Ryan, Willa Hand Ryan. Great to see you again.

Hello. I just told him this Ryan. Great to see you again. Hello. I just told him this is one of my only joy in life. And then he was like your daughter is in the office. And I said, it's my second joy in life. It's my third joy in life. Wow. I enjoyed the podcast. Anyhow, I'm happy to be back.

It's been an insane week of news. So much has happened. I kept thinking it was a Friday. I mean, honestly, it's not a Friday, but honestly, it's Thursday. No, it's Thursday. Oh, I see you're making a 30 rock joke. Very good stuff. The, the, there are so many psychotic tragedies occurring right now all at once. There's so many like reality destroying moments that are collide? It is truly like this could be it. This could be the beginning of the end for all of us,

or the end of the beginning. Think about that, my man. Put that in your, put that in your, really irrocking towards with a thousand years of death war, and we're just starting it now. Put that in your brass and bamboo handcrafted bespoke jewel, we, but we ball, weed pipe, okay, and smoke it. No, there's a lot of shit going on in the world and we should talk about it, which is what

we do. So we're going to do some news. And then later on, I'm very excited because we've got Brianna Wheelback on the show, who is running for a congressional seat in the eighth district of Massachusetts. Is that right? Did I get that right? Yes, that's exactly right.

Against Steven Lynch. And anyhow, she's a future politician, advocate, nerd, all things I like. These are all game developers, all my wheelhouse. And you know, there's a lot to talk about right now in all of those spheres. Yeah. So we're going to try to be out a later. But first, we're going to get into some news

and Ryan, you have, I don't even know, there's so much happening, I don't even know what you have planned. So I'm just going to let it happen to me. Well, sit here and it's going to wash over me like a cool wave on a hot summer day. The news is not hot summer day to be clear. And it isn't a cool wave. It's a hot wave. It's a cool wave on a hot summer day. Which is not hot summer day to be clear. And it isn't a cool wave. It's a hot wave of lava watching over my body

and turning it to dust is what's happening. I mean, hopefully the lava is less humid than the air. Yeah, seriously. So the first story that I, so TJ Miller from Silicon Valley and the emoji movie, reviled comedian and like public enemy. I don't know much about TJ Miller. Here's what I know.

I don't watch Silicon Valley. Everybody's always like, do you watch Silicon Valley and I hit them, punch them in the face when they ask me. No, I don't watch it. I have seen it. You know, it's fine. It's funny. It's funny for what it is.

Here's what I don't like to do. I tend to not watch shows where every single character is unlikable and detestable and annoying. And Silicon Valley is a show where they're like, everybody here is horrible in some way, but then we're going to like kind of unveil, we're going to reveal their redeeming qualities. And I tend to be like, I want to know the redeeming quality kind of upfront. And then you can tell me the bad stuff about them as well. I find every character on that show,

so why aren't you a reality TV guy? In every situation to be detestable and horrendous and gross and also maybe it's just like, I'm like, yeah, of course, these are actual Silicon Valley people. So anyhow, I don't watch it, but I know TJ Miller is on it, he's in the dead. He was on it.

He was on it. He got killed or something. He was kicked off because he was accused, well, he was doing a lot of possibly drugs allegedly. Okay. Like weed or other things. Yeah. And, um, comedians love cocaine. I mean, that's a known fact. I think it should, I think we should have a rule. I gotta tell you, I gotta tell you, I'm a comedian. There's nothing like an out-of-all. Sure. Of course. Of course, that speed is the lifeblood of a comedian's work. My parents didn't hug me.

I like laughs and speed. But here's the thing. Okay. I think just make cocaine legal for comedians. If you're a comedian, you should get a license. You have to get a license to be a comedian. And if you get, it's like a medical marijuana card. It's called the Robin Williams Act.

You need to be, maybe not cocaine. Maybe Adderall is actually the right, it's like, if you're a comedian, it is legal for comedians. You get a card. You get a card. And they give you a riddle in or Adderall's actually the right, it's like, if you're in a legal for convenience. You get a card, you get a card, and they give you a riddle in or Adderall prescription and you're off the races. Next thing you know, you're... Tough thing though, because it used to be

everyone in New York's a comedian. Next thing you know, you're the next, you're, you're a dang cook. Well, TJ Miller was allegedly a gmailer who I like to think it was the new dang cook. He was allegedly accused of rape and sexual assault. Oh wow, okay. And so he's kind of reviled also his behavior

on talk shows and stuff is just always really awful. Yeah. He called in a bunch of fake bomb threats to a train because of someone he didn't like was on the train and then he was arrested and told like that's a real crime. Yeah, you can't do that. This isn't like, you're not getting your lulls. Well cocaine to hell of a drug.

I don't know if you're aware of it. It really does. I don't know if you're aware of the effects of cocaine, but it can make you feel that you're able to do things. Decated septum and people doing things that other chemicals would not do and would see as clearly wrong. You know, look, all I can say is,

you know, TJ Miller is clearly a guy who has a lot of problems. I don't, I'm not trying to be sympathetic towards him, but I will say there is like, we tend to turn and I think there's more to say about this and you want to talk about it, but it's in now in my head. We do tend to turn and I'm not trying to, again, I'm not defending this guy because he seems like a total fucking turd, but he also probably is a drug addict, or like an alcoholic, or something. Again, doesn't excuse his behavior, but there may be a root cause of his behavior that is actually like-

People bring up the fact that he had brain surgery at some point and like he had some kind of brain death stroke thing. Wow, okay. But the sexual assault was- No, you don't rape. As far as I know, you don't rape somebody because you had brain surgery. I mean, I don't, I don't.

It's that's a story, I'd be, I've fascinated you to understand why, but as far as I mean, I, I don't, if that's a story, it'd be, I've fascinating to understand why, but as far as I know that's not a medical situation, where you're like, oh yeah, the guy had brain surgery and then he became, nobody became a serial raper. I don't understand how. You could replace her frontal lobe

with just a hunk of cocaine. So just get it up there. They just put a permanent rock in there. No, but like, but the point is, like, you know, we tend to make jokes and we are kind of making jokes by T.J. Miller and how you know what he's fair game. But also if they root of this,

is like he's probably a guy who needs a lot of help and in Hollywood and the entertainment industry, certainly does not have a real interest in helping people who are in any kind of distress, psychological or otherwise. This guy might be a fucking criminal. I mean, he clearly is at least as far as bomb threats are concerned, he's an actual criminal.

Yeah. But like, you know, the other stuff, I don't know what all the allegations are, but let's just say that true or not, there's something wrong with this guy, and he probably needs help, but also, he's just fucking annoying more than anything. I think it's the point. Yeah, but I'm trying to make it. It's like, you get, look, you might need help, but you can still be annoying, okay? And I think that, um, well, listen, there's a balance. I don't know where I'm going with this, but I just want to make. It's like, you might need help, but you can still be annoying, okay? And I think that, well, listen, there's a balance.

I don't know where I'm going with this, but I just want to say that, I don't know, the celebrity world is weird. You know, I look at the guy with Michael Jackson, and here's an insanely controversial figure. Sex controversies, parenting controversies, business controversies, but also clearly a very damaged individual with a serious, very serious drug habit and problem

that where he was being just enabled by everybody around him and probably enabled in all sorts of ways, right? And I do think the environment has to be looked at. And I'm not saying in my Hollywood, what can we do about it? But I am saying that the environment that we put celebrities into this sphere of like, well, you're not really a human, you're like this avatar for our hopes and dreams

and your behavior is either excused or enabled or whatever. Like there is an issue that I think that we need to rethink like the humanity of also like the wall between celebrity and regular person has been come increasingly permeable. So it's like, what is the difference between 200,000 followers on Instagram and Instagram stories up like a reality show all day and you make money on those ads and a reality star and an actress. Like, I think we're learning, it's really blurry.

Well, I think we're learning that it's increasingly blurry and that blurry, those blurry lines are creating all kinds of fucked up situations for people. Again, I'm not going to go to the pathology of the YouTube shooter, which we talked about last week. But there certainly is an interplay there between celebrity and the internet and a desire for fame and fortune and a frustration without getting it and feeling,

all of this stuff is interconnected. By the way, this all goes to the speaks very, very deeply to like the Facebook stuff that's been going on this week and the kind of generation of people now that exist that feel like some part of their reality should be that they are on display and that they are a public figure and that they are a performer. And that is like, you know, not everybody needs that attention,

not everybody should be in that space. And it's a really hard and dangerous space to be and I think for a lot of people. So anyhow, this is all, I don't know how we're talking getting this deep on like TJ Miller, but. And Derek wrote a piece this week on the outline that about Mariah Carey came out as having been diagnosed

with bipolar disorder in 2001, around the time when we were all like, Mariah Carey's crazy. And ends up And she is. Well, I mean, it's like, look, yeah, and I think, look, it's like, it's hard to feel super sympathetic to people when they've been like a mass of celebrity

and become a millionaire. But I have more sympathy for someone who's just rich, rather than is like victimizing people with their mental. Do you know what I mean? Like with TJ Miller, I'm like, fuck him. He did a bunch of shitty things to a bunch of people. Certainly. Like, Carrie was like,

she was giving out ice creams and like taking weird baths on TV. She certainly, I don't remember that part, but certainly TJ Miller is a less sympathetic character because he seems like an asshole. Yeah. He seems like he can't control himself. I think Ryan Carrie seems like an asshole for the most part.

I'm sure she's definitely an asshole, but like, I'm just saying like, I'm like she's definitely an asshole, but I'm just saying, I'm like, the lot of people have bipolar disorder. Most of them aren't super fucking rich, super famous people. And so I'm like, that sucks, it does, but it would suck even worse if you were living on food stamps. So I'm kind of like, I do feel from Ryan Kerry, and I do think people are really rude and insensitive

and don't understand the realities of mental health, but I'm also like, you know, you can, you definitely have the resources to get the help that you need. So you should. But I feel like the conversation, I'm not trying to be, I'm not like, I know I just, I feel like the conversation around Britney Spears in 2007, 2008, 2009 to now. I actually think that the way that we learned to treat her better made a lot of us treat people with mental illness better in our own lives. Brandy Spears. Yes. And I feel like if we're kind to Mariah Carey at this turn, which I think people are being,

it might have a ripple effect. I don't want to say like trickle down culture, but I do think like if we have some compassion for Mariah Carey, it's easier to have compassion when someone in your life is like, I'm not stigmatized, someone in your life who's like, I have bipolar or depression. Right. No, I, listen, I do think the, again, the Britney thing is like the Michael Jackson thing in many ways, you know?

And by the way, I don't know the Britney Spears's current situation is necessarily, I mean, it's an improvement in some ways, but it sounds like another fucked up situation. But like, you know, there is, I just think there is an enormous amount of enabling that goes on around these people, that people either glossed over their problems

or they enabled them because it makes them easier to manipulate or they're like, as long as they're producing money for everybody around them, like it kinda doesn't matter how they personally feel. You know, and I think that's a really sad and dangerous place to be. But yeah, I mean, but I just think it's an industry.

It's like, I mean, it's an industry problem. And maybe a human problem, which is like, when somebody's a celebrity, they move into some kind of status. Maybe I just did it with Mariah. I was like, well, you're rich and famous. So why should I care about your bipolar disorder? I mean, I do care, but it's like, you should also be able to treat it. But also, you shouldn't be around people who are enabling your like disorder to not be treated.

Yeah. And it's a different issue than it is for regular people. All right, let's move on. It's topic straight up on me out. All right, well, on a topic or no. It's a happy news. So I know we have a bunch of things. I know you're bopping to the new Drake track.

All right, yeah. I don't have some things to say. It's happy or news. I'm not looking, bopping to it is not a word I would use to describe what I do to the Drake track. But nice for what is the title, I believe. And we can listen to a sample of it. We're going to put in, we're going to wrap in a little.

We're going to listen to my favorite part of Nice for What, which is like about two minutes into it. Yeah boy I'm a watch the breakdown Gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it up, gotta make it out of my- I don't make it out of my- I don't got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got. Okay, I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he's got some good songs. I like to grassy. I'm not like a, I have no opinion of DeGrasse but I'm not like, oh fucking, the new Drake, fucking holy shit, it's happening. This is honestly, maybe the first Drake song where I'm like,

this is just really fucking good and I wanna listen to it over and over again. And I think it's probably helped by the fact that it's got a Lauren Hill sample throughout it. I mean, what would it be? You've got, like, you're actually adding, like, several layers of great songwriting. And Big Freed is on there.

Into the, yeah, I mean, it's a, it is a collaborative effort. I actually looked at the list of songwriters on the track on Wikipedia tweeted about the other night, and it's like 20 total people who have like, have songwriting credit on it. I mean, it's because they use like a sample, there's like a sample in the, it's better to credit those people than it would be. Mar mean, it's because they use a sample. There's a sample in the...

It's better to credit those people than it really. Marvin Hamlish is credited. Yeah. Okay. But it's a good song. I don't have a lot to say about it. I just think it's really, to me, it's probably the first potential summer jam.

I can say that Drake songs are good, and when they're on, I like them. But I feel about him the way I feel about. A lot of things including everyone's going to flip out on me. Please don't ask me on Twitter Kanye West, which is like, I don't think this is made for me. So when I see it, I'm like, that's good. But like Breaking Bad, I enjoy it and I think it's of quality.

It's just not for me. It should breaking bad is not for you. No. What is for you? I don't think I'm the audience for me. You said breaking bad is not for you. No. What is for you? I don't think I'm the audience for it. So tell me what's for Ryan. I really enjoy, I like all of Bravo. I enjoy drag race.

I really enjoy the magicians. I like like V. You like the magicians. I love the magicians. I like like V. Do you like any longer dramas? Oh, I love longer dramas. Like I'm enjoying the looming tower Do you like any longer dramas? Oh, I love longer dramas. Like I'm enjoying the looming tower.

Have you liked that? I've heard good things about it. It's really good. And there are lots of longer thoughtful dramas. Like an enjoy. But I just think some stuff's made for me in some of the Game of Thrones. Is it?

I love Game of Thrones. Who's your favorite character on Game of Thrones? I mean, you don't want to say Cersei Lannister because I do think she's the most watchable. But I actually. Cersei, she's the bad guy, right? Yeah, she's like the most evil character on the show where she misunderstood I don't know. No, she's just straight people. She's bad. She's just a baddie. She killed her kid, right? So spoiler alert Oh, but Natalie Dormer. I just like her as an actor. Dormer. She's done. No, she's done, but she's uh She did I think she's dead. I don't know. There's so many deaths on that. But like I watch Westworld

But I just know some things aren't made, aren't, I'm not the audience for it. In the way that I would love it if you would watch season of Real Housewives that I could talk to you about it because I think you would have such weird insights. I can't handle. You're not the audience for it.

I can't handle reality TV. I really, I think you don't like it. It doesn't interest me. For like Vanderpump rules. Yeah, I guess it is truly the darkest fuck, most fucked up thing I've ever seen on television. I just think like reality is, I see enough reality. I'm living in reality.

I want something else. I want something better. What I like about it is that it's like a reflection on what we're talking about, which is like, I'm kind of a celebrity, but I'm pretending I'm not, but I want you to think of me as one and it's about like being seen and performance. I enjoy it. Anyway. Yeah, sure.

I mean, we can move on, but I just again, the new drag track, track it out. You've already heard, it's probably got a billion listens to you, too. Yeah, everybody's heard it. Anyway. Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, we can, we can move on, but I just again, the new drag track, check it out. You've already heard it. It's probably got a billion listens to YouTube or whatever. What else is in the news? What else is happening? Uh, we need a truck. We need a truck.

He has a love child and they read it, Michael Cohn's, uh, parking on a, uh, uh, corner, corner, corner. We'll get you a Michael Cohn in a second. I haven't heard anything about the love child. Okay. This is the whole new, this is brand new to me. When did this happen? Uh, earlier today. Today. Yeah. This is brand new to me. When did this happen? Earlier today.

Today. Yeah. Who's reporting this? So there's a really. I literally, I'm just, I'm coming to this, I'm coming to this totally fresh. Okay. I understand. I know nothing about it.

So the Trump, Trump's former door man gave an interview to the Washington Post saying that the National Enquirer paid him $30,000 to keep quiet about a tip that he had, that he had, like, an out of wedlock kid with, like, presumably not someone he was, like, in a long-term relationship with. When? I mean, he, they paid him off right before the election. Wow, he really is pro-life. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought that was the last week's show. I thought that was all a ruse. He didn't care. I thought he was the last week. I know. I thought that was all a ruse. He didn't care. I thought he was the king of abortions, but it turns out. Yeah. Wait. So you're telling me, is this seems flimsy? I mean, the story isn't necessarily the love child thing because we don't know that that's true, even though it's extremely possible. The story is that the national inquire has obviously been continuing to pay off anyone with negative stories about Donald Trump. The national inquires fake news literally here literally. Literally hilarious thing.

Yeah. Okay, wait a second. Trump is rejoining TPP. This is the word. He's the worst fucking president. I'm sorry, like I don't agree with his policies at all, but like, at least have a policy. I just at least be a person with a policy. Sorry, I just looked at the front page of the New York Times

to see what information might be out there about this Trump love child. I, first of all, who fucking cares? On the one hand, I'm like, he's so fucking corrupt. Him having a child out of wedlock is like the nicest thing he's done. It's the best thing that he's done in his entire life probably,

as he's like, didn't force a woman to have an abortion for him or whatever, you know like I you know He's a piece of shit the person who sits in the highest office in our country is a is a is a is a what he's a walking Mount of excrement, okay, and and nothing he does is good. He's not a nice guy. He's not a good guy He's a fucking bully and a and and, and, and, uh, he's a bully. And, um, and a dumbass. And he's corrupt as hell. And there's nothing you, there's no amount of arguing that will ever get me to change those opinions.

It's so obvious in all of his dealings, but like, you know, I actually would like to, I'm not saying don't we can't focus on all the stuff. And I'm not saying this is, I'm glad we're his dealings, but like, you know, I actually would like to, I'm not saying don't, we can't focus on all the stuff. And I'm not saying this is, I'm glad we're talking about it, but like, like, like, the Washington Post, I feel like it's not, it's, of course it's a story. Of course, and they have to, you have to, but it's fine.

Like, I just don't give a shit. I mean, Trump, fuck Trump and his fucking bullshit news all day long. What I want to hear about is something real is actually happening. He's put a policy into place that's affecting people. He has blown up some kind of relationship that we have with the country. Or real information about the multiple court cases, multiple legal battles that he's in and corruption, investigations, and collusion investigations.

Those are the things I wanna hear material information on. I'm so tired of Trump's like side show. You know, Trump's love child, Trump's tweets, Trump, he's mad, he's storming around the White House angry. It's like I get it. He's an unstable dipshit who is in a job that he shouldn't have and he's doing a really poor job and everybody's aware of it and he feels like a dope so he acts out. I know that story and I'm

tired of that story and I think everybody's fatigued and I think I said this last week. I'm not saying tune it out but I'm saying Trump can be thwarted by votes. Nothing will stop Trump but better politicians in offices where they have power to take him out and to stop his policies. But you don't think that this kind of like a constant chaos and screaming and bullshit is why Paul Ryan was like, all right, I got my tax shit done to do so. I think you just said it right there. I think Paul Ryan got the one thing that he's worked his entire career to do, which is give corporations, give corporations. Yeah, that's right.

To service the spirit of one of the fucking worst writers in history, to manually service, to give her fountain head. Yeah. It's like he got his, you know, he made his money, got out of the business. Like, when I had my bar mitzvah, I was like, I made my couple of grand and I'm getting out of my Catholic confirmation. I made my couple of grand and I'm getting out of the business. When I had my bar mitzvah, I was like, I made my couple of grand in, I'm getting out of it. I did that with my Catholic Confirmation. I made my couple of grand in, I'm getting out of the business.

That's what I literally said. I'm like, I wore a shirt to the thing that's at work for the money. Sorry, I don't want to be a dick, but you know, like that's the way you get paid. You do bar mitzvah and then you don't have to keep going. You don't have to keep going to synagogue. Yeah.

I mean, once I crossed the line from boy to man, I was all set, yeah, you know. And you got a nice fat check Got a big fat check which I spent on I spent on some really dumb shit, which my parents should not have let me do Like I don't know what I bought some like Batman figures and like comic book I mean they let me spend my barman's for money in ways that definitely I bought like some video games I think about a neo geo with the money neo geo were like $600 in the game for $200 a piece. That's about right.

I think they were like sure. I was like really, I'm buying a fucking Neo Geo console in the games for two. This was the Surface tablet of your year. Yeah, anyhow. Neo Geo is great. I still have it and it's fucking rips. Anyhow.

Oh. Oh. Look, do you know anybody else who can turn a conversation about Trump's corruption into a conversation about the Neo Geo? No, that's right. And that's why we're here. All right, so Trump is a lot of child, whatever.

Fuck his kid. I want to see him, I want to see Trump, I want to see him impeached. But what about the Michael Cohn of it all that? Oh, Michael Cohn, let's talk about this shit. No, look, you know how I know, you know how I know, you know how I know Trump is, is fucking corrupt. You know, and by the way, these people like Bannon's out there right now going like, they got a fire, Rod Rosenstein and fire, it's like, it's like, it'll be, Steve Bannon was a Roy

Moore supporter. Roy Moore is a fucking child rapist, okay? Roy Moore is a pedophile rapist. And like, and by the way, I don't think that's like a conspiracy. I think Roy Moore is a piece of shit, okay? You can, it's pretty clear when people are, what's more likely that they cooked up a fake pedophile conspiracy or that an old thing?

All of these conspiracies, it's like the fucking rosan shit. It's like what is more, yeah, Trump, the fucking Pimpslayer, you know, like all of these, it's like fantasy. I mean, we wrote a story about QAnon, which is the, which is the, you know, Fortun, lead, you know, four Chan lead, you know, ridiculous, pita gate on fucking crap. On the pita gate on shit.

On the pita gate on tj, whatever tj Miller is doing conspiracy about child sex rings. And it's like, I don't know guys. I don't know. What is, what is the most likely scenario here that, that, that, that several senior Democrats, just Democrats or love the fuck kids, or you're a dipshit who will believe anything. And it makes you feel good to hear that people you hate are as bad as you think they are.

It's like the reality is, most people's politicians aren't fucking kids, okay? Roy Moore is the one that is. There's a couple of others. But honestly, most of them are seem to be Republicans. People's politicians aren't fucking kids, okay? Roy Moore is one is the one that there's a couple of others. Looked honestly, most of them are seem to be Republicans. I'm sorry, but like it just seems to seems to net out that when you're tapping under the airline, you know, I mean, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like a defend out Frank and but now Frank and like, you know, doing a fake group and a, you know, but poorly, a poorly executed

photo bomb, you know, which is offensive. It's bad, but it's not comparable. It's not like I had sex with a 16 year old girl and I prayed on them at a mall so much that I got kicked out of the mall and banned from it. I hung out at a high school and I'm not defending now, Frank. Although, look, we're in a precarious moment for men and you know, it's listen, you got to fucking keep it clean. Keep a clean keep yourself together. Keep your shit together, but Anyhow the point is it's not difficult. I do it every day. I don't I don't rape people every day

I didn't rape anybody today. I just didn't do it. It really wasn't hard super here's a super simple Here's a tool kit for guys if you're out in the world and you're trying to figure out how to navigate. If you're like, I should rape someone, just don't do it. And then see a doctor about that thought and you'll be used to good start. Tony Robbins was caught or like caught. He was saying in a giant conference, he was like, you know, it's unfair to have an extremely attractive woman around your office and then penalize men for falling into that trap. It's like, I don't know if you know so. If you know so. A trap of woman is a trap. I like that.

It's crazy. It's only a matter of time until you rape someone. Go to a doctor. You are seriously fucked up. It's insane because I was, I was, Lauren, I were talking about this other day. And oh, I was talking about the purge. Could you talk about the purge for a second?

I'm sorry, we're gonna say way into the purge. Wait, I had a point that I was making about. What was they talking about? Oh, and by the way, I was groped earlier this week, so I get to talk about this topic by the way. I wanna hear, I wanna hear this. I don't want to talk about that. So, so, so, and he had the QAnon conspiracy,

which is like, yeah, all the Democrats are in a child's tax ring. He's like, listen guys, whatever you want to be true, just simply isn't, like, it feels good to, to imagine a world where there's like, this horrendous evil and it happens to be all the Democrats, but the reality is like, the Republicans have proven really time and time again to be the party of corruption, the party of a lack of appreciation for women

and children, for people of color, for the LGBTQ community and And like poor people. And look, I'm not saying Democrats are perfect. They're not. Bill Clinton definitely had an extremely fucking inappropriate sexual relationship with a woman who worked for him in a very, you know, not a child, but like still not a great situation. Well, I mean, if he was single and she was single,

they didn't work together and they started dating. Anyone that's dating a 22 year old intern. I'm not, no, you're intern. He was married, he's the president. There's a million reasons why it's bad. Not, so I'm not trying to wash away, there's plenty of bad Democrats, there are. But the reality is like,

taking as a whole, just looking at the whole spectrum of activity and behavior. You know, it's not, Trump is not a fucking defender of human rights and freedom. He is a violator. He's a violator. The man has a list on his Wikipedia page. It's like 20 fucking deep of women who have accused him of sexual assault or harassment.

He has a history of, he has recorded history. You can hear the fucking tapes of him talking about. Which is probably like he's been saying in private company aren't real lately. I mean, he's got fucking dementia. But he's a scumbag and the people he's around himself are scumbags. And so the fact is, these conspiracy theories are so insane and so out there.

And it's like, it truly is, the world is, it seems to have gone mad in some way. And I do think it is, it is, you know, it is the internet. We should not be exposed to every possible idea. I think we should have access to ideas, but we shouldn't be necessarily assaulted by the ideas. And I think that the internet has,

we've created a way of speaking on the internet, which lets people be essentially assaulted by ideas. Like Twitter is a place, or Facebook is a place where ideas, like takes. Where ideas, not even ideas. They're like half thought through takes. But takes or propaganda or whatever they are, but you're not like you come to, not even ideas. They're like half thought through takes. But they're, but takes or propaganda or whatever they are, but they don't, you're not like you come to them

out of discovery. Yeah. They come to you algorithmically as a, as a, as a dominating presence in a feed built by very feeble people. Somebody's like, and somebody's like, somebody's like, this is your news feed. They call it the news feed.

Mm-hmm. And they're like, here's the important story of the day. Child sex ring led by Hillary Clinton and whoever the fuck else it is, I don't know. You know, it's like, we have ruined the way people get information because it's a good ad product for fucking Facebook and for Twitter and for, and for, and for, it is wild. Like, and it's like, I was like, say Google's culpable but not in the same way. Not even close. Google's idea for the most part is you need something and we're going to try to help you

get it. And they fucked that up all the time. But you know what? They just put out that YouTube kids app where they're like, we have editors. It's like, well, that's just start they have in for a long time. But that's what I'm saying. And that they've seen. I heard you say, but I'm saying that at least is like a, yeah, this is a start.

Like oops. Not here. Oh, I have to talk about the Zuck Tech. I'm saying that's at least is like a yeah, this is a start like oops Not here. Oh, I'm not gonna talk about the Zuck Tech. I'm not testimony. Yeah, we're hearing him talk about the kids messenger product Was the most fucking disgusting thing I've ever heard where he's like, well, we'll get a new account when you grow up What's like here's the thing? What's here's the thing? Here's the thing Facebook isn't Facebook is not it's not like a In the Bible. Oh, yeah, and it's not like a, in the Bible, oh yeah, in the fourth part of the Bible, they talk about how we'll have a global communication system

where we connect everybody, and they're connected and expose. It's inevitable. It's like I'm not saying that it's being exposed to people. Look, I like the being in a city. I love being in like around people in New York city, different people, people with different opinions, people with different ways of living,

people with different backgrounds. Like, that's wonderful. That's good. But it's also like, I have to viscerally be in a space with other humans. Like, you know, there are just like, there are rules of etiquette and behavior that people accept, don't accept in society. Like, you can't just fucking start screaming at somebody in public. You will get arrested. Like, you will be, somebody start screaming at somebody in public, you'll get arrested.

Like, you will be somebody who will call the police and that police will put you in a car, you know? Like, you can't just do whatever you want. Yeah. The internet is like basically when it comes to ideas, images, video, audio, how you get them, where you get them, you basically, that's wonderful, you can do whatever you want.

But the systems that have been crafted to deliver information in spark conversation are systems that assault you with an algorithmic assumption about who you are and what you want for the purpose of advertising. And like that system is fucking broken. And the idea that we are living in a society where we're like, well, Facebook now exists and it just must.

No, it mustn't exist. It doesn't have to exist. Like Targeted advertising is not something we have to accept as. That's right. That's right. By the way, I like ads. I like good ads.

But ads worked fine 20 years ago. But you didn't need to know what I ate for lunch, but that's right. But that's right. And you know, Paris Martinot wrote something about this where she was being served all these ads on Instagram for like depression. And you know, it's like, listen,

based on her browsing habits, right? It's like, we don't, I don't think people want that. And I don't think people need it. Actually, I don't think it helps at all. The only fucking people who need it are marketers in Facebook. People who want to sell weird Etsy shop shit to like a t-shirt that says I'm a Gemini.

I mean, to be probably honest, like to be probably honest, like Google does a thing that I think is actually makes some sense. I mean, Facebook does this too, but like if I'm shopping on a target, and then they give me a target ad, like I understand what happened. I'm like, oh, I was on target

and they're like, hey, you were shoppers was on a target, do you want? Amazon does this shit to me all the time. They're like, we noticed you were looking at some items, do you wanna buy those items? That makes that's pretty, that's kind of like why that's what a store attendant would do if you're standing in the diapers and they say, sir, do you need some help? Are you looking for diapers today? Here's what I think this is what I think most people would say they don't want. You

are talking to a friend. You are looking for, you've got a rash and you're looking for some creams, you're talking to a friend about your rash, you go into some group, some, you know, hypokondriac groups on Facebook to see if you're being a hyperchondriac or not about your rash. And then you get an ad for like a mental health service for people who are dealing with hypokondriac. I don't think that's what most people want. I don't think they want to have a fucking algorithmic assumption about who they are and what they want. And then try to make a suggestion to them so they can store

that data so they can spend money. Yeah. You know, I think it's like, if you, there is a line, there is a line. It's like, you, there's got to be a way to establish the line. And I think Facebook is going to learn really hard and fast. And frankly, like, I think Google there are places, like, I'm not defending Google. I think that they have done this in a more trustworthy way and in a way that feels less like you're being taken advantage of every turn and exploited. I'm gonna say they don't exploit you, they do. But look, look, I get ads in my Gmail,

and then I don't look at the ads and I move on with my life. It's not like in the middle of a message to me about my daughter's school, somebody's like, try a different school in your area. You know, it's like, that's basically Facebook somebody's like, try a different school in your area. You know, it's like, that's basically Facebook, you know? And anyhow, so we should talk about, and then speaking of my daughter,

I wanna get Zelda in here to talk to her a little bit. Yeah. Cause she's at the office and it's a rare opportunity. What was the thing you said you went to, oh, the Trump stuff. Well, sorry, the Mark Zuckerberg stuff. Yeah, before we do that, like you were saying like that exists in the real world.

Like I was on the subway two days ago and a guy who was homeless and obviously mentally ill, like grove to me and started yelling at me for, I think it was for attention or for like a reaction to like be seen. And people like didn't stand for it. They were freaking out and made him get off the train and ask me if I was okay and rode with me home.

And I've gotten death threats on Twitter and no friend has ever stepped in or like been like, that I'm really sorry that happened. It's just accepted that we're gonna get violent on the internet. And what's really troubling is and you see, you mainly see people on the right doing this where they're like, you know, the rich dispensers of the world and people are like, well, you mainly see people on the right doing this where they're like,

you know, the rich dispensers of the world and people are like, well, they should be able to speak their mind. And even if you disagree and this is, it's like, it's like, no, no, I mean, if you're a Nazi and you believe that black people should be wiped out or sent away and Jewish people should be in fucking concentration camps.

I don't, I'm not gonna, I don't have to fucking listen to what you have to say. What you're saying is violent and hateful and useless. Well, that's the reddit to you. And you know, the sweet just said like he's against violence but not racism as if that's not violent. Yeah, I mean, look, look, discrimination. I mean, there's like, look, you can be, like you get personally, if you're like, I'm like, black people, I don't want to be around them. It's like, well, okay.

Like, listen, I disagree with that. You're a racist. But like, live your life. But if you go in public screaming, I hate black people all the time. You're inciting violence. But it's like, it's like, I don't, this is not a useful opinion.

No. To anybody who is in need. To anybody who's in need. No, to anyone that says that. Frankly, to most rational human beings, fearing or not liking someone because of the tone of their skin, which is truly like what we're actually talking about.

You and I are like have different skin tones, we're like literally talking about difference in skin tones. Like I understand there's all this other cultural stuff, but when it comes down to it, you don't know somebody's background when you see them, you don't know where they're from, what they do, how they are. They're like, tell us you nothing. So anyhow, so it really is about you having a treat.

It's about you having this kind of like set of beliefs about a skin tone that you see. Like literally that, you know, or like a piece of clothing or something. It's like so fucking infantile and stupid. Honestly, it's just an animal. It's an animal thing that we haven't. Yeah, I get it. It's just part of our own. It's learned. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like, like we haven't. Yeah, I get it. It's just part of our own. I mean, it's learned. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like,

it's funny. I mean, we were talking about Zelda, but you know, she loves Annie, you know? And in Annie the movie, the original one from the 80s that she's seen, you know, to Addy Warboxes is played by, what is his name? Can't think of the actor's name,

but he's bald. Daddy Warbox is always bald. And, you know, like a few, like last year, I think like in the parking lot of her school, she saw like one of the dads came to pick up when her schoolmates and he's a person of color, the dark skin guy, who's bald. And she's like, oh, it's Daddy Warbuck's, you know?

And she's not like making a distinction between that, there's no like judgment or thought about this color of that person's skin. She's like, she's a Warbox, you know? And she's not like making a distinction between that, there's no like judgment or thought about this color of that person's skin. She's like, she's a bald guy, you know? And I think that it's like, you gotta learn, you know, anyhow, everybody knows racism is a learn. It's learned, you're not born being racist. But the point is it's a fucking useless,

like it's a bad opinion, it's a useless opinion. Like I don't need to, if I'm the Reddit CEO, you know, my reaction is, no, I'd like to ban as much racism on this platform as possible. I don't think it's, I don't think everybody should just say everything that we can. But this is what I'm saying about this information assaulting you. I don't think everybody should just be in every, on every platform, be able to say whatever they think.

Here's the way to think about the internet as far as I'm concerned. The internet is a free speech platform, the internet. You can put whatever website you want on the internet, you can build whatever you want on the internet. We built the outline on the internet. The outline, I get to say whatever I want on the outline because it's mine, okay? And the editors here, they get to say what they want

because they are at the outline and this is their job to do that, right? The outline could have been a pro neo-Nazi news site, and we'd be allowed to do that. Now, maybe some people wouldn't want to host us, and maybe if we put something on, if we try to put something on Twitter, we may get banned because it's racist or whatever,

but we have our platform on the, which is the outline.com. Which is the outline.com to say whatever we want, right? And that's the free speech part of the internet, yeah. Okay, that's the free speech part of the internet. Okay? That's the free speech part. Facebook's idea that they're in charge of free speech. We are the internet.

It's wrong. Yeah. Twitter's idea that they're in charge of free speech is wrong. But suddenly they're, suddenly they're, they're, suddenly Facebook is like, I'm super pro free speech except not nipples. Yeah. We'll give more judgment call.

So you're not making a judgment call on race. I mean, there's a hundred things. Listen, when you run a business, there's a hundred things. By the way, to my point about the island, the island is not a pro neo-Nazi website. Obviously, it is a violent anti neo-Nazi website amongst other things. And that's my fucking prerogative

because this is the business that I run. And so if you're Jack or you're Mark Zuckerberg or you're the fucking dickhead from Reddit, what is his name? Let's say his name is something like Steve Huffman. If you're Steve Huffman, what you should say is listen, I abhor racism. And if you come to Reddit to be racist,

I don't want your business. And if we see people who are using hate speech on the platform, then we'll ban them. And it's as simple as that. Done. And we'll make some rules about what we consider hate speech. And those will then we'll ban them. And it's as simple as that. Done. And we'll make some rules about what we consider hate speech. And those will probably be in line with like laws in many countries about hate speech

and laws in America about hate speech. And that's what we're gonna do. And guess what? You wanna start your own Reddit, hate speech, filled Reddit, start some servers. Fuckin' go for it. Yeah. That's why the internet exists.

Like you can do whatever you want. Just like you can write a book about how sucky Jewish people are. You can write mine comp, but book stores, fucking Barnes and Noble doesn't have to sell your fucking book. You know, it's super simple and I don't know why people don't get this. I've talked about this a million times. All right, anyhow, we should move on. We should just touch on Michael Cohen.

So we were actually to get back to the before we break his out of it on this very, the sea of fun stuff we've been talking about. We were talking about like, you brought up Michael Cohen. And I was saying like, oh well, you know, I know Trump has cropped. It's like, look, you know, they rated his lawyer's office,

his lawyer's hotel room where he lives. No judgements, but you know, I think we should investigate that a little bit, just think about that. And it's house. The only people I know who live in hotel rooms are reality stars who are going to rehab. A bad people, not bad people.

But those stars are going to rehab. People at rehab, yeah, and people who have something to hide. You go, you live in a hotel? That's like Don Draper lived in a hotel when after he was caught cheating on his wife and madman. I mean, what is Michael Cohen up to? Yeah, I don't wanna blow your mind, but nobody, you're. I mean, what is Michael Cohen up to? Yeah, I don't want to blow your mind, but nobody, you're not Eloise, you're Michael Cohen.

So here's the deal. Look, you know, several senior, like judges and law enforcement officials looked at traditionally conservative. These are all people Republicans. A bunch of these people are These are all people, Republicans. A bunch of these people are all, they're fucking Republicans. Mueller is a Republican.

Yeah. He's a Republican. He's on the right wing, okay, of the party. Anyhow, there's like up and down the line, you look at the list of people that are to sign off on this document saying, yeah, we think there's been some criminal activity and we need to get these documents

before they're destroyed. You know, that shit doesn't happen by accident. And you can have Devon Nunez talk about his deep state conspiracy theory, just like the QAnon people can have a their conspiracy theory all you want. But the real most likely scenario here is you're, these are people are corrupt, they're bad people, and they're doing bad things. And it is so transparent to me. I'm sorry, when you're an innocent man, if you're Donald Trump and you're just an innocent guy and guilty of no wrongdoing, you don't react in the way that

he's been reacting to these, to what people are saying about him. What you do is say, you know, if you have nothing to hide in your tax returns, you release them. If you're the presidential candidate, he has something to hide in his tax returns. Why would he never see them? Okay. He has something to hide or he would have shown them. And I don't care what I don't care what anybody says about that. If he really believes he's innocent of wrong doing, then he should be able to show us his tax returns. You don't say over and over again, this is a witch hunt. This is a witch hunt. This is a witch hunt. You don't say no collusion, no collusion, no collusion. You say, look, I'm an innocent man. I'm not going to waste time

responding to this. Yeah, let me totally open myself up to him. I'm not gonna spend time on Twitter yelling about this like a crazy person. I'm open and ready to meet Mueller and his team at any point. If Bob, Bob, I wanted to investigate me. Go right ahead. If anybody, if the FBI wanted to investigate me right now, of course I'd be nervous.

I'd be like, this is crazy. Yeah. I'd be like, I don't know what they want. But I'd be like, whatever you guys want. I'm happy be like, I don't know what they want. But I'd be like, whatever you guys want. I'm happy to help because I don't believe I've done anything wrong and I don't as far as I know everything I've done is on the up and up. And if there's anything there, we'll deal with it.

But like, you know, it's like, if you're an innocent person, you go, look, I didn't do this. Yeah. And I want to help you figure that out. And I'll give you access to what you need access to. My guess is, if not the specific thing that the FBI thinks he did is the thing there's probably a thousand other things that Donald Trump. It's like if there's smoke there's fire and I get the argument of like I'm walking fire. What if there's fire if I'm walking down the street and I just get a whiff of smoke it's like maybe someone was walking by with charcoal.

We're in a room where people are dying from smoking. When the nation we have to admit that there's a fire. What if, what if, what if it's not just their smoke, but they're literally, what if your unfires? There's a little like a house full of people and all of them are burning up right now. Oh, we're that little dog aren't we? Oh my God, it's just insane. We're that little, this is fine dog.

I just like we're living in this weird thing where it's like, you know, because the media exists the way it does and because like, you know, frankly, social media exists the way it does, it's like people can shout down reality. It's like, you're just shouting down like what is obviously true.

Like this to me is not like, this is why I love reality TV. I don't have to. I don't have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Like, like, like, I don't know all of what Donald Trump did. I don't even know exactly what he did, but he did something. I just know, okay.

He did something. Like I prefer stuff. By the way, I don't think you're a real estate person in New York. I would be, you could probably pull any, you know, billionaire real estate developer in New York. I'm sorry, pull a rich person off the street of New York and you're gonna find at least Coke. But yeah, I mean, but I'm just saying,

let's just, let's just broaden it out. Yeah, my guess is, any billionaire real estate developer in New York probably fucking broke the law. Okay, I bet if you look into it. I've broken the law, yeah, my name's Sart. And if I was a billionaire, I probably would have some maker ways that I've broken the law.

I don't know, I'm a law biting citizen and I love, I respect all law enforcement and all laws. So I don't know what to say about that. All right, we should bring Zalda in real quick. Yeah, let's lighten the news. So let me explain, Zalda has been wanting to come to our office for a while. We have a new beautiful office in New York.

And we're finally getting a kind of set up. I think Witton should took you over to see the conference room carpet. Is that what you guys really get? Oh, no. The chairs, the light. So you guys were looking at the conference room for some reason. Oh, I walked by and said that looks really important because it was all fancy and you

were having a very serious meeting. That's me all good. And I was like, I shouldn't interrupt this with my, with my TJ Miller, definitely. I have you heard about TJ. Yeah. Yeah. Anyhow, so I said, I come to the office today and so she's here and then I realized like, I don't, as far as I know, I mean, we have recordings of Zelda, but like, she's never been

on the podcast. She definitely has never been on the podcast. And I thought we should get her in here and talk about, I don't know what, just her experience maybe. What's going to happen? What's happening? So that's what we're going to do. So we're going to bring her in here.

Yeah. And Chad was Zelda. And then, and then we're going to be, we're going to do. So we're going to bring you in here. Yeah. And Chad was the elder. And then we're going to be, we're going to talk to Brianna Wu about probably more of the depressing state of politics and the world. So stick around. Can you sell, can you say your, can you say a phone? I'm going to do an interview. Okay. Do you know what an interview is?

Nope. Okay, an interview is when a person talks to another person and asks them a bunch of questions. Okay. Okay, I'm gonna ask you questions, all right. Okay. Okay, so where are you today? Where are you right now?

At the office. Yeah, what office? Your office? Yeah. What have you been doing here all day? I've been seeing people. Okay, like people who work in the office. Yeah. Okay, so who have you seen?

Give me give me give me some idea of people you've seen and talked to. Katie. Okay. What do you think about Katie? Good. Yeah, she's pretty good. Okay. And baby.

Yeah. Oh, baby is a baby is the dog, right? Yeah. And what do you think about baby? Good. So what does baby, what does baby look like? She's dog but she has whiskers like a cat. Okay.

Oh really? Uh-huh. Okay. Who else have you met in the office? Well, I don't know. Is it Elias? Yeah. Yeah.

Leah. Did you mean Leah? Yeah. What about Casey? Yeah. Okay. Are you getting close to the microphone? Uh-huh. Okay, good.

So what do you like best about being at the outline? Well, I love seeing baby. Yeah, you like the dogs the best. What do you think about baby compared to Penny? Do you think is- I like both. You like both, equally? All right, so what else have you done in the office?

Anything else? Well, I have done a lot of things. Tell me about them. Well, well, um. Did you do any drawing? No. Have you done, did you write any stories? No.

Okay. Did you work on any reporting with any of the people here? Well, it's hard to compare, but I was doing a mermaid. Oh, you did your mermaid impersonation? Who'd you do it for? Uh, like earlier. Yeah. And you were there after the last

parents. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so what's on what's on what is your plan for the rest of the day? Well, um, I don't know, but really, it's something came. Yeah. Do you like the office? Yeah. Would you like to stay here? No. You don't want to stay here permanently? Okay. You do forever? No, I not mean forever. A little more. A little bit more than you, Mommy.

You're going to go home. And you! Well, yeah, but I'm going to go home a little bit later because I have to stay and do meetings. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's talk really quickly about you a little bit, okay. What would you say your favorite hobby is?

Do you know the hobby is? No. A hobby is like a thing that you like to do for fun. Well, go to your work. You, that's your favorite thing to do. Yeah. Really? What about ballet?

I do love to go to ballet and see baby. What about performances? Buff performances too. You like to do a performance? Yeah. What's the song that you've. You like to perform it? Yeah. What's the song that you've been dancing to recently that you really like? That's not my name. Do you know who that's by? What's the band that does that's not my name?

Uh, nope. The Ting Tings. Yeah. The Ting Tings. What's that other song that you like? The Diet Sigs song? That's not... I just want to dance. Yeah, that's not. I just want to dance. Yeah, that's not what I like. No, that's the Ting Ting song, right? You also like the diet's big song.

All right, let's quickly talk about PJ Mask, okay? Okay. Tell me about PJ Mask for a second. Like, what is that all about? Well, for this chance, I know. Well, that PJ Mask toys and PJ Max costumes. Yeah, it's a cartoon you watch. That's I know, it's really more.

Right, I'm listening. Apples. App, what about apples? You see apples on these computers? No. Okay, all right, so let's see, do you think you'd like to come back to the office at some point?

Yes. Do you know what we do here at the office? No. Do you know who he's working on? No. Do you know what we, do you know what we, do you know what we're working on? No. You don't have any idea at all? I don't know. You don't know what they're working on. Uh-oh.

Well, take a guess. What do you think that everybody's doing? They're working. Yeah, we'll kind of work though. Um, podcasting. They're podcasting. We're podcasting right now. Do you know what, do you know what I do every day?

Like do you know why I'm, what? Yeah, do you know what kind of work what I do every day? Like do you know why I'm what? Yeah, if you know what kind of work that I do, I tell stories. I make stories that we put on to onto like eye computers and phone. Like about the news. Do you know what the news is? Nope. The news is like what's going on in the world? Like, you know, when the president does something, Yeah. Do you know the president is right now?

Nope. Okay. You? I wish. Anyhow, so we tell stories about the news. Okay. Yeah. Does that seem interesting to you?

Yeah. It does. Okay. All right, we can finish up. Anything else that you'd like to say to the listeners? Well, I love you. Okay. I love you too. I love mommy. Yeah. The whole family. Yeah. Penny. I love baby. Yeah. You really like baby, huh?

Is baby playing with you nicely? Well, I kind of know that when earlier she had then I knew that she wanted water, so I just you gave her water No, but her own gave her water, but I told her and I see me do water so I you did her owner her owner is Leah What do you think about Leah shanne good good? Yeah, you like her Okay, when I was watching not come I could be took a photo. You and Leah? Yeah. And baby. Really? She was not looking at it. She's like,

look, looking everywhere at the rear. Baby was? Yeah, I'm Leah. Did you, did you, is there anybody at the office that you don't like? Nope. You like everybody here? Yeah.

Okay, good. All right, you ready to go back and see mommy? Sure. Are you done with this interview? Yeah. Okay, well, you did a really good job Zelda. Thank you for being here and telling me about your experience at the office. I really appreciate it.

Okay. Do you have any message to the people who are listening to this anything you'd like to tell them before you go? No. Okay, great. Thank you so much, Zelda. You can go. Okay, bye.

You get to take your headphones off. Hmm. My guest today is a really incredible thinker and a super sharp commentator on what is happening right now in the world. And as of very recently, a candidate for Congress in Massachusetts, I'm talking about Brianna Wu. Brianna, thank you for being here. It's always such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm listening. This is such a good time because we've got, we're in the midst of a week where politics and technology have never been more in the spotlight, I feel like, with the Zuckerberg hearing that's been happening in DC. And a lot of your platform is concerned with this intersection of the way we think about, the way we regulate, the way we talk about technology

as it relates to the political landscape. And I'm curious, what is your, you know, obviously there's a lot to unpack in what Zuckerberg has been saying, but do you have a takeaway as you listen to these senators, I'd say grill, but I don't know, the grill is necessarily the right term, but as you listen to this conversation and you listen to Zuckerberg's responses, what

are you thinking about this, especially as a person who's been, when you talk about privacy and you talk about online harassment, things like that, a person who's been in the crosshairs of that? What are you thinking as you're hearing Zuckerberg's sort of defend Facebook's position? Well, I mean, outline is written about these issues like day in, day out. And I mean, I have to say a lot of us feel vindicated like a lot of technologists and people concerned with privacy.

We've been telling people this was gonna happen from the top of our lungs for years now. And here it finally is. So on one hand, I feel very happy that the rest of the world is finally paying attention after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it's sad that it got us to this point. And I think this, what has really bothered me about Congress is there's no shortage of politicians pontificating about this. But at the end of the day, it's like, they're still missing the core issue,

which is when you mix microtargeting with no regulation whatsoever, it is like hitting the constitution with a Molotov cocktail. Like democracy just cannot survive in that environment. And you're, on that topic, you feel that way because using microtargeting, using all of this kind of like ambient data, directing and ambient data, is it just that you're able to manipulate

an audience with such specificity? Is that where you feel like the danger is? Let me give you an example. I feel like micro-targeting itself, like most things the tech industry does, is not inherently evil. For us, we are currently raising about $2,500 a day right now, and a lot of that is by finding people that care about net neutrality, and we micro-target them with ads on Twitter and Facebook, and we're like, hey, we are a Ranga campaign, and we want to make this better. I don't think anyone would argue that that's

not a net positive to get that kind of very segmented market out there. You identify somebody who clearly is behind a cause and you say, hey, we understand you're behind this cause, would you like to support a candidate who's fighting for this issue? Exactly. This issue. Right, that is very positive. But I think if you look at the, you know, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, they were like getting very specific voters and they were targeting them and saying, we have to win this county, but this many votes.

And they're just delusioning them with misinformation and the most racist thing she could possibly imagine. And, you know, it's, we've been here before in this country, like with the passing of the alien in sedition acts, it was because, you know, they were basically writing anything about people running for office. It wasn't true. And you've got the, you know, the era of yellow journalism between Pulitzer and Hertz. So, you know, this isn't the first time we've found a technology. And then we've gone, oh, wow, this has some consequences for our democracy.

We haven't really thought about what is new is the fact that all three branches of our government seem to be mostly broken right now. And without a lot of action on our part, it's not going to get better. Yeah, I mean, I think this is something that I keep coming back to and thinking about with this situation. And with so much of what's happening in regulation with technology, I mean, net neutrality is the obvious one, right? Where you know, I keep saying this.

I mean, I literally was on a rant about it earlier in the show where I was saying, you know, voting is the tool that we have to change the policies and the politicians that we feel are wrecking our country and wrecking, in some ways wrecking the future for us, right? And I really feel like, you know, it's interesting, but there is such a gulf in, in, and obviously this is like, you know, I'm saying this because there is no gulf for you,

but there's such a gulf with, with politicians and they're understanding of what technology is and does. And you hear some of these questions, you know, I kind of feel bad, like the jokes on Twitter or the last couple of days. Everybody's like, you know, it's like a senator, oh, it's, you know, it's the 85 year old senator and he's like, everybody's like, the joke is, uh, um, Mr. Zuckerberg, how do I set my VCR? Right.

But like the truth is, like you are kind of listening to these people and you're like, wait a second. Like, it's not just that you don't know what Facebook is and does, like you kind of don't understand how the internet works at all, you know? Yeah, and but I think this is where I think the public has a little bit of a golf and understanding here, and it's how bills actually get passed. If you ask me right now to tell you

what double derivative swap was, I could kind of do it, but not super well. Because what we found in is in passing legislation, it's a good idea to get people with specialized backgrounds onto certain subcommittees. Here in Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, who is an expert in banking corruption, serves on that committee in the Senate.

That's a good thing. She has political expertise there. So for me, I'm less worried about the fact that, you know, XYZ Senator doesn't understand that Facebook sells ads to make money. What I'm concerned about is the Technology Subcommittee in the House and the Technology Subcommittee in the Senate. So I'm running for the House. There are 15 people there. We need eight votes, just eight people that understand these issues enough to regulate it responsibly.

And then that gets rolled into larger bills that Congress is passing. So I think it's less useful to like blast all of Congress. That's fine. I don't expect them to get it off. I think they deserve it really. Well, I do to a point, but I would say this. I think if you are serving on the Technology Subcommittee, I don't think you should be taking money from AT&T Verizon and Comcast. I think it's a conflict of interest. And I think you can go there and look at who is donating that money right now and getting those votes. I think that's a conflict of interest. And I think you can go there and look at who is donating not money right now and getting those votes.

I think that's a very clear conflict of interest. So what I would really urge people to do is we need better people serving on those subcommittees. I don't know at the answer, like I've had conversations with women VCs from Silicon Valley this week. They're going, you know, I'm thinking about starting a political action committee to support candidates that believe in net neutrality and privacy and encryption and run this in Silicon Valley

and support candidates like you. I think that's the answer. Like we've got to fund candidates they're going to have better policy. Because without that AT&T and Verizon and Concaster going to win. Well, I mean, it's obvious that we have a there is a need for a new way of thinking when it comes to our kind of the political landscape. I mean, I think that we've what we've established pretty clearly is that certainly, you know, let's say fresh blood is good right now because new blood is good because we got, you know,

a extremely broken right wing of the political party that used to be known as the Republican party. I don't know what it is now. I'm not saying it was ever good because I don't think it was, but the state that they're in is is is corrupt and and ugly and and I mean, I don't like to call things good or evil, but seems pretty fucking evil right now. And on the flip side, you've got the Democrats, which, you know, the core of the Democrats' message, I've never disagreed with the kind of most of the core Democrat, democratic sort of message, which I think is, you know, lean towards progressivism, lean towards liberalism. You know, like there are all these things that are good about it, but it does feel like we have atrophied a little bit.

That party is atrophied and it's understanding and read of like the needs of its electorate, right? And the electorate. I couldn't agree more. I see it every single day on the campaign trail. I think people correctly don't feel like the Democratic Party serves them. I think they feel like it's a machine that serves their reelection to a large degree.

Yeah, and I think that, and I think that so, so that, so back, you know, sort of talking about the jokes of these, of, of the, you know, Senator's during this hearing, it's like, the reality is that all of them looks in some, in some way or many of them look in some way very out of touch. I think it's interesting, the subcommittee is sort of thinking, I mean, from you, it's interesting because I don't tend to consider subcommittees when I'm making my vote, right? Like, I'm not like, well, they get served on a subcommittee.

You know, you just go, well, I like this candidate, I like to stand for, I agree with their policies. And so they seem like the right person for the job. But that's interesting perspective because it actually, you're saying, it's not just about like, hey, I got elected, now I can pass laws. You're saying, hey, I got elected. Now I can go and retool some of these pockets of influence that actually don't the law, necessarily the law makers, right?

The subcommittee doesn't say this is what the law is going to be. They say this is what it should be and then it has to be agreed upon, right? Right. Then it gets rolled into larger bills. Let me give you a good example. If you go read the page on the House Technology subcommittee and everything they have jurisdiction of, it will blow your mind because it is everything Geek's care about from patents to communication standards. And you look at this and you're like,

oh, so the house has a complete control. This subcommittee has complete control over technology communication standards. Ha, I wonder if we could write a bill and try to get it out there that would mandate like encryption standards as part of how social media has to create that data format. It's definitely getting into what the Commerce subcommittee does, but I think if you get there, people that are pushing these issues, I do think we can move the ball forward. So when it comes to technology regulation, you're basically saying you can, if you've got people who know what they're talking about, you can actually build, I mean, of this makes sense,

but you can build laws that regulate companies like Facebook that kind of put like intelligent, modern technology demands into the product itself, like you're basically saying. Like, hey, it's strong encryption is good. And here's the, here's the 10 reasons why. And so we bake it into this bill and we go and regulate. If, if and when the time comes, that people are are like, hey wait, let's actually regulate Facebook. Let's make encryption a part of, you know, a particularly strong type of encryption a part of their

their, uh, uh, must-haves. That's not going to happen if we don't have people who actually understand what encryption is on that subcommittee, right? That's dead on. They're going to get their marching orders from Verizon. I think the last time I was on I was a critiquing Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, who was on the TechSoup committee last year. You know, she was talking about the Mariah Botnet, which crashed a lot of the internet on our coast two years ago. It was blaming it on basically internet piracy. So she was blaming about that on internet piracy. And, you know, we're basically making fun of her. If you look at the amount of money she got from Comcast and Verizon, it was a joke. It was like $40,000 to get those marching orders.

And yeah, I'm sorry to say this a woman with a home economics degree from Mississippi, state and a background in business. She just, you know, you can self-teacher thing yourself these things, but listen to her comment. She clearly did not belong on that committee. So, you know, the average congressional race is $1.7 million. I don't know what the average Senate race is, but it's probably a bit more. Think about all that we could fund if technology people could run the table on the House subcommittee and the Senate subcommittee.

Does that, yeah. And does that, so do you see something like that? Like, you know, the Cesta Fosta bill that was just passed. And I'm sure you've got some thoughts on that. Is that a place where a tech subcommittee would touch? I mean, because it obviously is very directly related to regulation of technology in some degree.

Yeah, no, I definitely think it could. And definitely think it could. I mean, is it your opinion? I think it's the opinion of a lot of pretty smart people that this is a pretty bungled law. I agree. Yeah. And I mean, is there a way to go walk that back?

I mean, it feels like this is having immediate. Something like that is having immediate impact on, on sex workers, on people's like literal safety. You know, what do you, what do you do in a situation like that? Let's say it's, it's September, you know, I don't know when the primary is, I guess it would be after the primary, but it's, it's, I guess it would be this November is when the actual elections, right? So you're in, you get into that tech subcommittee. Are you are you taking aim at something like the SESTA FOSTA bill? Like are you, are you, is that something that's on the on the docket for you? So something I think is really good that

Donald Trump is unleashed is a kind of authenticity that people can have with the with the people you're asking to vote for you. I think 10 years ago, someone coming on your podcast and saying, you know what, the safety of sex workers is my primary concern here, and I'm not gonna put women in danger even if they are sex workers. I think that is such a bold statement that a decade ago you couldn't have said it.

But I think nowadays people want authentic people standing up and doing that. So are there ways the tech subcommittee can regulate that? Absofreak and lootly. We just need smarter people doing that. So let me flip this around for a second. Go ahead. No, we're talking about Facebook here.

And obviously, the politicians can do a lot. Subcommittees can do a lot. But at the end of the day, I mean, we do have this divide here where where you've got engineers making these kind of business decisions, arbitrary sort of like scale decisions, and they're not really checking, they're not checking like the ethics of it, right, before they throw the switch.

And I'm curious, like, you're an engineer. You've been on the, you're now running for a seat in Congress, but you've been on the other side of a lot of these debates that we're talking about right now where you've got to make decisions. Obviously, it's not like you're saying, hey, here's how Facebook is going to do targeted advertising. But tell me, what is the responsibility of a technology company and of developers to work with ethicists or is that the way to get to, you can do all kinds of regulation, but there

has to be a point somewhere where people are actually understanding the decisions they make and the impact they have on people. How do you implement that within technology companies? Do you have thoughts on that? Of course. So, did you got on the crap for journalism or did you just find yourself in this space? I'm a high school dropout. Okay. Well, at least a equipped person ever to be doing any type of journalism.

Well, when I studied journalism in college, I would say probably one-fourth of the things we talked about were ethics and ethical studies. Communication law, that's been one of the most helpful classes I've ever taken in my life. We clearly need to be having bigger discussions about ethics and the things that we build. It's almost like we've created this nuclear weapon and we're like, here I am the destroyer of worlds. It's that, but with large aggregate data. So, um, the nuclear weapon blows up cities and it's just, this just blows up our brains.

Well, it makes it impossible for us to have a fact-based conversation. Yeah, I thought about putting an ad. My staff talked me out of this. I wanted to put together a micro-targeted ad. It would be like, Brianna Wu is the monster, is the worst, and we'll destroy Tokyo, and we'll hit the earth with moon rocks.

And like this ad brought to you by you have no idea because there's no regulation whatsoever. It's a really good idea. It was sending this to you, or it was disagree with your team. I gotta say, I think you're your basic concept for that ad. And I don't wanna be the get to you in trouble. You're like, I lost and it's like that fucking ad.

But I will say that ad is a really great idea because it is completely accurate. It is the perfect depiction of the problem with our systems. We can't have a conversation if we can't like agree on a basic set of facts. It's a wider discussion here. I honestly, we were talking about this in DM the other day. I was like, how on earth do we fix this?

Bright Bart is having a completely different conversation than people that read the New York Times. These are really alternative universes. Oh my God, I'm insane. I have no idea. It's literally, it like Fox News is like broadcasting from another planet. Like an alternate version of the Earth.

Yeah, you know, but you can't like, you can't make a bright, bright, illegal. That's not constitutional. So I, it's, I think America weirdly, weirdly, if Trump had his way, it would be legal to, to ban a bright part. I mean, wouldn't be bright part that was getting banned, but you know, I think one of the things we could do, and you know, I have no idea how

you break up Facebook at this point because of the monopoly of the newsfeed and how just destructive it is to any kind of meeting start up. But, you know, I was talking about that before, the name itself is deceptive. Yeah. I mean, newsfeed has hardly a representation of news. I mean, it's like, here's some opinion, here's a hot take, here's some crazy thing, your uncle thinks, here's some ad paid for by a Russian, you know, botnet or whatever the hell it is. Like, it is not a news feed. I mean, they should, just on the name alone,

they could make some changes, you know? Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things, I would very much stand for this. The central problem is Facebook is so powerful at this point. If any new social media company comes along, they will acquire them. And they will take them over. For example, it has been crazy monopolistic. I mean, buying Instagram, buying, you know. The second something makes a, you know, WhatsApp, buying, what was the thing they just bought?

It was, it's like the teen quiz app. It's called, oh, I missed this. It's called like, for the record, FTR, I want to say, it's called, I mean, it, Ryan's looking at that right now. But they just bought it and it was like, he be, oh, TB I want to say is what it's called. I mean, Ryan's looking at that right now, but they just bought it and it was like, oh, TBH, to be honest, right? Right, TBH, and I should start now to put it for the record, now that I should fit.

It's all factual stuff. But you know, yeah, it's, no, but they're doing like, it feels like Instagram could have become a competitor and by the way, you see now, Instagram is an independent company, might have become a competitor. And by the way, you see now Instagram is an independent company. Might have been a competitor to Facebook, a real competitor. Absolutely. How many people have you met lately that are like,

oh yeah, I quit Facebook, I'm just using Instagram. Yes, I know. And you're like, I got some bad news for you. Yeah, I know. I'm friends of my college about that. Playboy announced. This is so hilarious. They're like, we're leaving Facebook.

They made the announcement on Instagram. It's like, guys, you might want to check out the about page on Instagram real quick. Oh, no. Well, I think we would all agree. I would like to, well, see, this is where it gets complicated again, because how are VCs going to fund the next generation of startups when their exit plan is for Facebook or a Google

to acquire them. If you bar that, it's like how do you even then you're gonna see less innovation in the space? This is just, oh. It's funny you bring it up because I think it kind of root problem of the VC industry in general is this idea that you fund a company and you're like,

your only exit is basically sell to a bigger company, company and you're like, your only exit is basically sell to a bigger company, right? You're like, oh yeah. And then you'll sell to Oracle. And it's like, but wait, what we used to make businesses and you're like, I'm going to be the new X or I'm going to topple this, you know, it's like, okay, Coke exists.

And you're like, hey, I'm gonna make Pepsi. And like maybe I'll be a competitor to Coke, not maybe Coke will buy me. It's like innovation gambling in the place where you cash in the chips. Oh wow. It's two companies. Ryan, various dude. And if you don't, if you get rid of the house,

how are you gonna play cards? Wow. House and analogy that actually works weirdly well. I mean, I do think it's, I mean, Brianna to your point. I mean, I think it is like you and to Ryan's point, we've, I mean, we build it is like you and to Ryan's point, we've built an entire industry on this, right? Like, I think about this all the time, the industry is the scale

problem, you know, where it's, everything's got to be the biggest and for everybody, which allows us to mine data so effectively at these companies, you know, the commerce aspect of it, the way you buy and sell things in these environments, the way they're funded, the expectation of exits, you built the advertising industry, by the way, ads didn't used to be like this, right? Like, there used to be ads that people would go, like, well, we have some idea of who our audience is,

but we can't go down to like the specific IP and tell you who this person is, where they are, whether they're wearing shorts or long pants right now. You know, it used to be like, okay, it has exists, but we only have a general sense of who we're getting at, right? And they still work on it. Well, I mean, if I go on your site, like, I assume that the story is I get, because you love this story, maybe you'll love reading this, it's actually pretty accurate. I would imagine you're doing that as well. I mean, in it's yeah to a degree

But I mean, I think there's like not not by IP, you know, not by yeah, not by we've collected all of your browsing happens And now we're serving you, you know, we know you like our advice column. Here's another advice column or whatever Like I think that I think that there is a degree to which it works By the way when we talk to advertisers at the outline We're like look here's the demographic of our audience, you know, we talk about, you know, where they live generally and what kind of incomes they have generally. And you know, if they're a college educator, they're not. And all these different things, but we're never like, oh, and by the way, we're going

to micro target to just people who like fancy cars in New Jersey or whatever. You know, it's like, that's just not how we work. It's like, there's a type of person who reads the outline and it's kind of like a larger group of people and that's how we sell our, our, our, and I actually think that's better. It's like, I don't want, but by the way, you know, you look at a, something with a,

just talking about media, you look same with a Buzzfeed scale. And now Buzzfeed does not serve a specific audience. It serves all the audiences, right? So the idea of targeting advertisements to specific pockets there makes a lot of sense. And of course, it's the same thing that makes sense for Facebook, right?

It's like that's how to make money in an environment where you can micro target down to an IP. But the whole system is kind of built on this. I mean, to the point we were talking about is kind of built on this, I mean, to the point we were deciding about, it's kind of built on a bunch of assumptions that are are lasso to the past in many ways. I mean, in the sense that the expectation that you should be able to micro target is built on a concept that Google started 25 years ago, and it has not at all really evolved. It has only gotten more detailed, but the concept of why you would do it,

or if it's right to do it, has not really evolved since Google introduced it in their searches. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, you know, again, I don't think it's necessarily wrong for a company like yours to say, here's who we have, like we can sell you these kinds of ads. What I do have an issue with, I'm not gonna name

the media company, but for some of these, if you install Ghostery in your browser and you look at all the tracking that they put on you, it is truly mind-boggling. It's not one tracker, it's like 26 trackers. We actually have done, we've tried to greatly diminish any tracking that we do. Like, we obviously have some first party stuff that we do.

We have pushed back a lot on advertisers who've come to us and said, we want to do third party tracking. There may have been a couple of things we've done where we're like, okay, we'll try a single third party tracking, but we actually are very kind of like, okay, well, why do you want it? Like, what is the reason you're doing this? What's the purpose?

I think in nine out of 10 things that we've done, it wasn't even a conversation. And I think that it is like the amount that you can track and the way that you can track is kind of crazy. Not only is it bad for consumer, like ultimately, bad and sort of intrusive for consumers, but it also slows the fucking experience in a like, if you go through, it's really, like Ghostre is great,

you look at like the amount of data that is being sent back and forth and the amount of things that actually have to load and trigger, you know, it's like, it's also making the internet worse. It's really creepy. And there's gotta be better ways. Like I actually think,

I think if you're doing something good and people like it and you appreciate the audience and you actually care about their well-being, you can have kind of an open conversation and say, hey, we'd like some more information from you so we can understand what you guys want without having to say we'd like to siphon all of your data out of your every activity. You know, I do think like, if I do think like right now, if we put a survey on the outline, we don't have this, but we're like, hey, we'd like to hear from you about your interests,

you know. I think a lot of the people who read the outline would probably take the survey, not like a shitty one, but like a cool one. Like because I think people like who read us are here for a very specific reason, and they know what we're about. If we're honest with them, I think that's a way to actually have a conversation. But I do. Yeah.

But you know, for a skit for huge scale audiences, as I mean, if for what Facebook is dealing with, I mean, the easiest way is obviously to just track and track and track and not easily to really think about the consequences. So, so I would, I would love to know your opinion on this. And I'm sorry, I'm sure there are Facebook out engineers out there, they're listening to this. I hope this doesn't feel personal.

But when you talk to people that work at Facebook, do you find a kind of idealism that goes beyond reality because I do. I've had some really hard conversations in the last few weeks and I've really, it's really bothered me like an inability to go, you know, to have like that conversation like, you know, we should have seen this problem coming. We made some bad decisions. Like that's the whole looking for it.

Yeah. I think I think, um, I look absolutely. I think that there is, um, I mean, you even hear it when you hear Zuckerberg talk. I mean, you hear doctrine. You know, this, by the way, and I have way, and I have such a strong feeling about this, this evangelism of connection and openness and community, and it's like, listen, I actually don't think the world has to be arranged so that every possible person

who is in it can reach every other possible person in real time. You know, like, I'm not sure. That's how gamer gate happened. Exactly. so that every possible person who is in it can reach every other possible person in real time. You know, like, I'm not sure. That's how game arcade happened. Exactly. I'm not sure that the correct arrangement of the world is that you're a person in another place

with a whole different life and set of ideas and we have no connection whatsoever and you're able to like blast your opinion into my direct, like dominate my feed, my information feed with your opinion or your perspective or your ideas, right? Like that is not a normal way that information is transferred. Now I think, I was talking about this earlier on the podcast, but I think that information

should be free and accessible. I love the idea of the internet. I love the fact that it's an open platform for communication. But the idea that Facebook is the answer to that communication strikes me as, strikes me as this, I mean, a perverse and extremely oversimplified idea about what communication is between people and what information is and how valuable that information actually is. And so I think that, and it puts a whole different value proposition against the information that is really broken. And so to that point,

I do think people at Facebook, and in fact, Buzzfeed did some great reporting right after the Cambridge Analytica stuff started breaking. I want to say, Charlie Wiesel, who's one of the writers there, wrote a piece where he said, you know, from,

and I quoted it in an editorial that I wrote, but it was like about Zuckerberg and sort of the news, the changes in news. But I think the sentiment was, you know, the changes in the news feed, which diminishes, you know, sort of publishers from the eye of users was like, really didn't make waves at all in the internal message boards of Facebook. People there were talking about like, when are we going to implement Bitcoin or when are crypto currencies going to become a part of the platform? And so I do think there is this like, look, it's funny.

What's strange is like when I was a kid, when I was 12 and 13, I was probably like, I read like Mondo 2000 and the early issues of wired and I was one of these like techno Optimists and I was like oh my god like technology is gonna be everything technology is gonna change the world like It's all about taking technology and letting it you know dictate and decide where we go as as human beings right Just enamored with the universes of like William Gibson and I would say now looking back It's like if you kept that perspective into adulthood, into like your real world, if you kept that perspective in politics

and in personal relationships. It's like trickle down economics. Yeah, and in privacy, like you're fucking crazy because those ideas were not right. Like they're cool and interesting and exciting, but they weren't all like, oh, let's follow these through to their logical conclusion. And I think that, like, honestly, first off, Zuckerberg did not start Facebook to connect

the world, okay? He started Facebook to rate women. Like we should just be really clear. And the original incarnations of Facebook was like a clicky way to, like, hook up with people on college campuses, okay? Like, it was not some open, you know, cum by, let's all like be friends, communication platform. It was like very specific.

I was one of the 14 colleges that was the first to get Facebook. And we were there and those are even gang past face mash. Like you're sitting on college campuses and you're looking up everyone that's hot around you in your, it's like tender. It's so tender. He was a huck up there. That's exactly it. Yeah, I mean, and by the way, so was Friendster

and so was my favorite. I went, so I met so many people on Friendster. I mean, nobody remembers it now, but it literally was exactly like Facebook. I had like, I like had girlfriends that I had met on Friend, or we ended up dating, you know, and like, look, unless in that's bad, that's good, that's great, I want people to like me people,

that's wonderful. But like, there is not a natural progression from like, let me find some people to date, or let me find some, let me see who my friends are and see their interests to, we are now the free speech platform for the universe, you know, it's like, if you actually, if you're engineering is based on these for the universe. You know, it's like, if you actually, if your engineering is based on these kind of like initial,

the initial premise that it's all about, like exposing who you are, who you want to be known as on the internet, and then you can like look and explore that part of you. Like that to me is a flawed premise to begin with because that doesn't actually sum up what people are or who they are or how they like need to communicate. Sorry, I'm rambling here, but you're not. No, no, you're not. I mean, I do think that within, I think in a lot of tech companies, but certainly Facebook, there is a

kind of like, it's one part kind of techno optimism, which I respect and understand and totally appreciate and I think does drive a lot of the great innovation that we've seen. But it's also one part like blind allegiance, you know, and I think that it is, you got a guy who's been coached, look, he built the thing when he was a teenager. He's been coached by a team of PR experts since he was 23 years old or 24 years old on how to talk to people. And that's the way it sounds when he talks. And when you hear about Facebook, by the way, I think the same thing is true.

When I hear Jack Dorsey talk about Twitter, it's like, listen, dude, you're an ad-supported service on the internet. You can either be really fucking good at it or you can be really bad at it. But you are not the ultimate test of the Constitution in America, you know? And so I do think that we need to rescale

what these things are and the people within them need to think about what they are actually building and what the ramifications are and not just thinking, you saw this, they brought up the letter in the hearings, what is the guy at Boz? Is that the name of the dude?

Who wrote the letter? Who wrote the letter? He's like, yeah, he's like, even if this gets people killed, it's still good. And he's like, and he's like, and he's like, he's excuses, even if this gets people killed, it's still good. And he's like, and you know, the, his excuses, oh, I wrote this to test our limits. And it's like, you know, dude, I think you just wrote it because you probably believe,

some part you actually believe it. And you're like, you're like, you're like, connection uber, Alice, you know, and it's like, that's actually not the answer. Like, you got to think about how these products function. That's like, I do have to say, I don't think there's a universe where Facebook magically wakes up and their engineers go study philosophy of moralism until they start making better. I think that's what we call boiled ocean

strategy engineering. I think the reality is, I think that, well, we should talk about possible solutions. I do think one big solution is, and I've said this for a long time and I'll only keep kind of like banging my drum on it. I do think that human beings, just we need to recognize like, we need literacy on these things like the dangers of the potential for abuse and to say, you know, there's media literacy, there's information literacy, there's also like technology literacy, which I think is like knowing like how something works and how it can be abused is really powerful. I don't think there's any future where people are so

educated on technology, they make better decisions. I just don't, I don't, I think. I think optimism coming through. I'm like, no, this is. Well, this is psychologically people, humans always seek a deep need for control. And I've always thought that this like informed consent with collecting data, it's a way for geeks like you and I to kind of feel control. Like, okay, well, I opted in, I understand the system, I am choosing to give this to them. And the reality is, if I wanted to quit social media today

and try to get off the grid, I could not continue my career. And that's a fact. So I kind of have always felt education is kind of a false flag here. I don't need to understand everything that brought down Lehman brothers to have a bank account in this country. And I think in that same way,

I think we need smarter people doing some common sense things to fix the system. And I think we've got a roadmap of where to go forward from here. I mean, listen, that sounds really good to me. I want to believe so badly that it came. You know, you do get into this look, I mean, we're in such a dystopic sort of like dystopian

reality right now that you're like, wait, is anything, I mean, I was just saying to Ryan earlier, it feels like we're like, hey, this week it might be the end times. Like, you know, it's like the Zuckerberg thing, and then this Trump is like, he's going to war with Syria or something, or, you know, he's lawyers getting raided, and just feels like everything is kind of crashing. You do want to believe that there's solutions. And you, as a candidate for a seat in politics in this country, you've got solutions. Let me actually, I'm going to quickly pivot because we don't have, I don't want to take

all of your day up here. But I do have a couple of questions about your, some of this as it relates to what we're talking about and how, some of the solutions that you've got for, on both a kind of local level for you at a national level. One of the things is, I mean, obviously we've been talking a lot about targeted advertising. You know, what would you do, what would you actually do when it comes to targeted advertising? Like what is your policy for the way the targeted advertising is used. Well, I can give you a sound bite and then I can give you a larger engineering answer, but I think my sound bite, the quick answer here would be, we need to apply the same rules we have for radio, television, and newspapers and apply that to ads online.

There, it would be more inconvenient for me as a candidate. I imagine there'll be FAC 4s to follow. By the way, the FAC, the software for this is literally from the 90s and it is the worst. If you imagine your worst experience from Windows 95, it's worse than that. That's a whole different. It's horrible. It's horrible. But it exists.

But it exists. Someone has to file. You want to put an ad somewhere you have to fight. You have to actually talk about what you're doing. Can we not fund someone to like create logical modern FEC software? That's a whole nother thing, but as far as with Facebook, I would say like one of the first places to start is we need to label ads. Now, that doesn't completely get dark money out of politics. You know, Jay Mayer,

their New York has written some brilliant books about dark money, and that's still going to mean that the mercers and the billionaires can still, you know, buy all this influence on Facebook and win whatever election they want. You know, that's not going to stop that, but it's certainly a place to stop. I think that we need to pass an omnibus privacy bill in this country. I do. I think that most of our laws around our rights as consumers were literally written in the 90s.

And I think it's time we took a fresh look at that and said, you know what, we have social media and cloud computing today. We need to take a logical look at this. I don't know how you feel, but if Facebook had existed when I was a teenager, I'm not sure I could be running for office today. So I feel very strongly we need to let data sunset

or let users request their data and basically have it purged. Something I feel is very, very important is we've got to get past this false idea that a social security number and a birthday is a good encryption standard for facing your identity on. I want to upgrade that to a public and private key. So at the very least when you're entering into new loans that someone can't get, you know,

find out your birthday and go take out $50 60,000 dollars of debt in your name. That's interesting, I love the idea of a kind of regulation around sunsetting data and, you know, ownership. I mean, one I'd like to see is ownership of data. It's like, you know, like, it should be, like, just law. Like, if I produce data anywhere, like, if I am, if anything I do generate a piece of data for you, there has to be some right to that data that I've created. I'm not saying it's like you don't get to do anything with it, but there should be some basic kind of human... I like to be paid for it, even just cents. I think that's a great idea.

I do. I think it's yours. I bet people get a lot more comfortable with hyper-targeted advertising if they were getting paid a few pennies. Even if I got a 25 cents a week or whatever, I would feel like, well, you went through the steps to show that I am a value.

Yeah. You're like, well, pay you one cent to look at this ad. It's a tweet, that's a nice. Okay, so let me ask you something that's a little bit closer to home. One of your initiatives that you've talked about is wanting to bring tech to Massachusetts in a way to create an industry there around technology

that looks, maybe not looks like, but is more like something like what's happened in Silicon Valley and that ends around San Francisco. So, Massachusetts, we have dreary weather, but we do have legal marijuana and we have we have some pretty good laws around women in the workplace. Our attorney general Martha Haley has actually done some good work. So when I'm thinking about states where we could kind of start building industry that would treat women and people of color and LGBT people better, I think

Massachusetts would be a great place to start. You know, for me, it's something like, you know, I grew up in Mississippi. This is the poor state in America. I like you. I didn't finish college. And the reason I didn't finish college is because my only computer science class at the University of Mississippi was teaching me 1959's cobalt. This was when, you know, we were starting object oriented programming,

and I knew I could not create a career if I stayed that. So I went away and decided to self-teach my self-engineering skills. I think there are a lot of poor people out there that they've had to do that. So when I tour schools in Massachusetts, and I see classrooms with very, very outdated, useless, technical skills that they're trying to teach children that personally hurts me.

Do you know what I mean? That personally hurts me. And maybe everyone in America doesn't need to know how to code. By what every girl, boy, non-binary, any person out there that wants to learn these skills, I think that should be taught in these skills, I think that should be taught in the classroom. I think that's really vital. I also think we are really facing a climate change crisis in this country. We've got to trouble quadruple down on renewable energy. I think that there are jobs to be found out in my district. I think we just don't

have leadership that cares about it. So one of my thoughts by brain kind of immediately goes to this, when I think about like turning a city that maybe isn't there into trying to find a model, maybe it's not exactly Silicon Valley, but to bring that technology as an industry into a place. How do you, and maybe you thought about this, and I'd love to hear it, how do you

stop the bad stuff from coming in with the good? What I mean by that is you look at San Francisco and look at the divide between the tech, these people come in for tech jobs and the companies who've put their foot down there, put their mark on the city, and you see people being displaced of put their foot down there, you know, put their mark on the city, and you see people being displaced, communities being kind of like totally upended, you know, you see rent going through the roof, housing prices going through the roof,

and a lot of, you know, a lot of, you see, you know, in terms of the people who are actually getting these jobs, you're not seeing a kind of, you see, in terms of the people who are actually getting these jobs, you're not seeing a kind of growth in an amazing diversity, you're actually seeing a tightening of and lack of diversity. And so how do you combat that gentrification? How do you combat the mode of technology companies to often not hire diversely or not look at a broader range of candidates.

And how do you not blow up massive? How do you not destroy your district in trying to bring that there? We're seeing that right now with the sweepstakes to see who gets Amazon second. Right. Like coast here, right? I would say this. I do think our attorney general here in Massachusetts is uniquely good. She is one of the key people out there that's been suing Trump when he's crossed the line on issue,

after issue, after issue like the Muslim ban. And I would say this, you know, I think you and I are very similar in the sense that we've entered industries and they're imperfect industries, engineering, and tech is, God knows it has this problem, media has this problems, but I look at the work you've done throughout your career and I think you're trying to do the best work you can within a flawed system. And that's kind of how I feel too.

Like I don't pretend to be, like I'm a deeply flawed person, but I think people can look at what I've done throughout my career and they agree, well, Brianna was doing what she felt was right, you know, even when it wasn't convenient for her personally. So, you know, I think my hope is if we get new people in there that are younger and just have a different set of values, I don't know if this is because I'm a Gen XR. I don't know if it's, I don't know what it is. But I think that I'm really hoping that when my generation steps up to the plate

and we are the ones serving in there, step baby boomers, I can just hope we're making less self-absorbed decisions, but we will have to see how that comes. Would you, would you, would you, do you think you'll find policies, you know, let's say you're able, you know, you get the seat, you get in there, you start making changes. Do you think you'd be able to find policies that can obviously in working with other folks in the political landscape. But can you regulate fairness? I believe you can.

I mean, I can feel like I'm asking a rhetorical question, but do you feel like you can regulate some of that fairness into the growth of an industry? I do. I think it's worth remembering, like nine out of the ten, most valuable companies in the United States, nine out of ten, are tech companies. And I think to a certain extent, that's come because of very light regulation. So I do think it's important, like for me as a politician, I don't necessarily think I understand how to teach more than a teacher does. And I think it's not always necessarily true. Government has a better understand how to teach more than a teacher does. And I think it's not always

necessarily true. Government has a better idea how to run an industry than an industry does. But clearly, if you look at technology right now, that light touch has led to a part where it's literally threatening our democracy. I don't know how we can have an election in 2020 that would feel legitimate to me if we don't fix these fundamental problems with Facebook. So I think a lot is on the line right now, but I think you have to accept imperfectness as part of the process. It's sort of like cybersecurity. Cybersecurity isn't a destination where you do it and you're done.

It's a process that you got through to make things safer. I think it's the same thing with regulation. Right. Interesting. I think that's like, well, that's a pretty good place to leave it. I feel like I have a sense of your view on this. And I'm hopeful that it can be done because I think that we've got a lot of huge kind of boulders to push up a hill. And if we can do it, we can actually get to maybe

not the techno utopia that I imagined in my teenage years. But we can get to a place that is better where technology is like a positive part of people's lives instead of a negative one. And that there are like, you know, I think about when I think about American innovation, you know, in the shift that we've seen, like what a great opportunity for this country that is where heavy industry is changing, has changed and is frankly dying

and will die thanks to automation in a hundred or a thousand different ways. You know, but we are also like the incredible innovators when it comes to technology, right? And that is like a place where there is room to explore, but you can't do it if it's the same 10 white guys in Silicon Valley. And I say this is a white guy. The same 10 white guys in Silicon Valley do the same shit all the time without any checking of their privilege or their ideas.

And this is to me like the Zuckerberg thing just boiled way, way down to this. It's like, if Zuckerberg was, I mean frankly, I don't wanna be rude, but if Zuckerberg was a better, smarter person, I do think there would be fewer. If he had read more books and had understood like his place in building this thing. Take in a liberal arts course.

Yeah, you know, it's just like, but it is like your experience informs what you make. And I think that, you know, we are in a place right now where people with a really narrow experience have been making the decisions. I mean, you look at Trump, perfect poster boy for this. You know, here's a white kid born to privilege who never thought for a second that the world

wasn't his to master. and he's taken every advantage He could take and is made every mess he could make and nobody ever really checked him for he became a fucking billionaire in the president And that's what we have re-awarded in this country And I hope we start rewarding other stuff because we really are in on a broken very broken path right now Wow, I just went to a very dark place Well, I would say that yeah I don't know many people that have run for Congress have been homeless, but I happen. When I came out to my parents, you know, they're religious right people in Mississippi. They disowned me immediately. It was a very,

very, very challenging time for me to get back on my feet. But, you know, I can look back at that now at 40 and go, that taught me some empathy that you just can't get any other way. And it makes it very personal. So I think the last thing I would say to your audience is, it's so easy to be cynical. You know, being cynical, it feels brave. And my generation, like we grew up on Doria and Gen X cynicism, it seemed really cool back in 1990,

but I realized today, like that kind of cynicism, like the system sucks and I'm not gonna participate. I think it's cowardice. Because when you're cynical, it's like you're armor and it stops you from being vulnerable. What is hardest is saying,

I'm going to try to fix this. I'm going to ask people for support. I'm going to do what I can instead of just watching the world burn and making fun of it. The last time I came on this podcast, I was just blown away by the people that reached out to me afterwards. I I just, I would encourage everyone there to do one of three things. Either run for office yourself,

local, state, you know, federal, either volunteer for someone who's running for office or donate money to someone running for office. Pick one of those three things. But don't leave like this billionaire class making all of our decisions because it's not working for any of us. Well listen, I gotta say, I like that sentiment. I do. I mean, I do, I, I, I, I, I, I, vacillate between like total doomsday and, and optimism and I do, I do think, but I do think it's, nothing's going to change if we're all sitting around and frankly sitting on our ass is going like, well, whatever, there's nothing we can do about it. I do think that nothing's gonna change if we're all sitting around and frankly sitting on our ass is going like, well, whatever, there's nothing we can do about it. I do think that they're, look, I know this was an argument early

and I don't like to think about it, talking about people are like, well, maybe Donald Trump will be good for America and good for democracy because he'll get people fired up. And it's like, you know what, actually, if we can find some, like some, maybe let's not call it a silver lining, but like a bronze lining.

So this is like, maybe that is true. Maybe more people like you are running for office and more people with new ideas and more people who aren't the establishment and we actually end up with a more progressive, smarter, better, more functional government because where we're at right now is, I'm definitely, there's definitely the Doomsday scenario

that looks really really clear. Let's get out and vote before the world melts literally. And the optimism is is, I'm definitely, there's definitely the Doomsday scenario looks really, really clear. Let's get out and vote before the world melts, literally. And the optimism is like, I get it, but you gotta make it, you actually, you actually have to make the, the optimistic view has to be turned into reality by action. And I think that's what you're saying.

Which I love. Listen, Brianna, thank you so much for doing this. This conversation was fascinating as I expected. And I really appreciate you taking the time. And you've got, as you so much for doing this. This conversation was fascinating as I expected, and I really appreciate you taking the time. And as you go through your campaign, and as you start to hit some milestones, love to have you come back and talk about the kind of fight that you're in and hear how that is, how that's panning out.

And you know, your localized experience, I think, will speak to a lot of stuff that's happening in much of the country in this next election cycle. I can't wait to actually win my race and to invite people like you to my office to figure out how we create a healthier media environment where we can have a more important electorate. Let me be your fan. I can be your fan. Let me be your fan.

Anyhow, Brianna, thank you so much for this and we will definitely talk to you soon. Amazing. Thank you. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week with more tomorrow. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best. Though I just been told that your family is staying at a hotel, even though your family has a house, so I can't be good.