TRASHFUTURE - histroy sent from my iphone feat. Paolo Gerbaudo

Episode Date: February 3, 2026

We discuss the new Epstein revelations that show that jeevacation also had a day job as a kind of nefarious Forrest Gump, facilitating or gleefully observing a huge number of the events that made our world feel so irredeemable, connecting a world of post-Soviet and American oligarchs with European aristocrats, western financiers, and basically every intelligence agency. In the second half, we talk to sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo about Ellison and friends’ acquisition of TikTok USDS and what that means for politics and social media going forward. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here!   TF Merch is still available here!   *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

So this is once again a difficult week to kind of thread the comedic needle in that the news is Epsteinorama. And we got to we got to try and be like sensitive about the fact that this is about a sex trafficker and rapist and genuinely monstrous person who also was involved at every level. of seemingly almost every government and NGO in the world and also did not know how to work a phone keyboard. I got to say, I think Forrest Gump paints a picture of a much better world where a Forrest Gump is Forrest Gump. And I think Epstein being Forrest Gump globally has been very... Yeah, making Forrest Gump a pedophile was not the sort of creative choice I would have made.

No, no, I don't think I would have said, hey, let's take, Let's do Pito Gump. The sort of great pedophile of history theory. God damn. Well, yeah, the end of history in the last pedophile, which is apparently Jeffrey Epstein.

That's right. Which was Jeffrey Epstein. Jesus. Francis Fukuyama wasn't on the island, was he? Like, I don't know. I haven't like, you know, control seed his name. While you introduce the podcast,

I'll go and look and see if Francis Fukuyama's in the Appseed Files. Welcome to Trash Future, the podcast where we are going to be talking about the new Epstein revelations in the first half. And then we're going to be talking to Apollo Garbo from the Complutense University of Madrid about the new American TikTok entity

and what the political right gets from seizing the means of posting. Weirdly, I think these are kind of connected, different sides of the same coin in some ways. And before we talk about Fukuyama, I do want to say, one of the few people who shows up in the Epstein files and actually comes off better for it is Norman Finkelstein just

being like, yeah, fuck you. I want nothing to do with you. Stop emailing me. Yeah, sort of the reverse Elon Musk. Yeah, he's like, you're all disgusting and should be strangled. Fuck you. Apparently also kind of the opposite of Noam Chomsky, because like the running joke for a while was that Noam Chomsky will respond to any email that you send him. Yeah, turns out that cut both ways.

Turns out Nome Chomsky will also go to any island you invite him to. That just didn't come up as often. Whereas Norman Thinklstein is just like, no, leave me alone. I'm staying on Staten Island. Does he live on Staten Island? Just like, I'm staying in Saturn Island. I'm not going anywhere. The good news is,

Fukiama vindicated. He's only in the files in the extent that, and this is the main problem with the files, right, is although they're not everything and they're clearly still protecting, I mean, most of all Donald Trump, right? It's also just like the complete dump of like whatever was in the kind of like database, which means that if you were on like a reading list that went to Jeffrey Epstein's spam folder, as Francis Fukuyama is, or if you're in the references of a like scholarly paper that Jeffrey Epstein had, saved, as Francis Fukuyama is, then you're in the files. So, as we say, this new tranche of Epstein documents gets released as millions of pages.

And from what has been gleaned so far, so the day of recording February 2nd, it seems again, like everything we knew about everyone who's in there is largely reconfirmed. The lies have become more brazen in retrospect, you know, Peter Mandelson being like, oh, I deeply regret my friendship with this guy who gave me 75,000 pounds. My favorite kind of small side beef here is where we watched, I think now two film adaptations of the, like, Andrew Newsnight interview when his private secretary, Amanda Thursk was portrayed as this kind of, like, ditsy, mumsy woman who was completely blindsided.

She's in the files emailing Jeffrey Epstein, like, oh, come to Buckingham Palace and bring you a, like, you know, mysterious brand of entertainment or whatever. So I feel like maybe the legacy there has slightly changed. November, what we have to do is clear. we need a third Prince Andrew Newsnight movie. And we'll keep doing it until it's right. Exactly. No, we're like Steely Dan, and we're Donald Fagan and Walter Becker,

and we're getting Jeff Piccaro, which is like the BBC, to keep re-recording the same Prince Andrew Jeffrey Epstein movie until they get it perfect, hundreds of them. We're going to do it until morale improves. It could be like that play. What's that play? The fucking... Mr. Burns, a post-electric play, the one I keep referencing on Kill James Bond.

play the one that Lily Allen was in and made the, like, the 222, the ghost story one, whereas it's just like on and in perpetuity, but they have like different celebrities as like the leading role like every month or something like that. That could be, yeah. It'll be like one of two plays. But we say that the lies become more brazen. The connections more corrupting, embarrassing, deeply lucrative, political as well. This is much more politic.

Like, not just political like Bill Clinton, but political or Larry Summers, but political like, no, like operatives, intelligence agents. Yeah. You're seeing Epstein in more of a work mode thing. It's a lot more sinister, both in the sense that, like, you see him sort of making these connections, albeit still sort of like hammering at a keyboard. But like, he's also sort of keenly aware that he can't talk about a lot of the like sex trafficking on email only alludes to it.

And that makes it even more sinister when you see sort of like it slips out through people emailing him being like, hey, Jeffrey, what about the sex trafficking? What about the like, you know, child sexual abuse? abuse. And Jeffrey Epstein replies with sort of like three pound signs in the queue and then like can't talk about this on email and email was misspelled. Yeah. And that's what I mean, right? It's like we, when we see JEE vacation, ironically enough in work mode. Well, that was the greatest trick he ever pulled. He said he was on vacation. Is that it turns out like much more big and powerful and globally networks than anyone outside of committed left wingers with eyes and memories or people engaging in

exaggerated gallows humor really turned out to, like we turned out to be on the money, essentially. We did. I mean, some of the more, like, Utre conspiracy theorists also unfortunately vindicated. But you have to remember that that line, which mercifully we never held to of like, oh, Jeffrey Epstein was just a weird guy. And, you know, everyone was just kind of like, who's this weird guy? I hate that I have to hang out with him because he has so much money or whatever was

always a kind of like defensive, like, ditch, right? And everybody doing it who was in the files knew that more would come out at some point. And as you say, it makes it that much more brazen to be like, oh, I, I, you know, never met Virginia Jufrein. By the way, I don't sweat, knowing that, you know, either Gillen Maxwell or Jeffrey Epstein took a photo of you like the ones of Andrew that have just dropped. So it's real bad and it kind of seems like this guy was maybe the protagonist of history, which

I don't love. I just want to intervene for a second. I did do what is natural for me to do, which is I did type in Avatar into the Jeffrey Epstein search engine. Oh my God. Find out how many references there are. There are a lot of references and there is only one where I apparently a private plane was, I think

it was a private plane was set for him. And this was an email from Scott Dennett who said, Avatar Blu-ray, B-L-U-E, Ray is ready for you. Amazing. There's only one reference to kimchi in the final.

This fucking guy keeps wanting to like, I'm not letting him come into my island with his fucking bucket of kimchi. We talk about Epstein being the protagonist of history,

right? And we're going to talk a little bit about how to understand Epstein, not as a weird guy. Yeah. It's a little bit more

nuanced than than protagonist of history. I do think he may have been the kind of son of the 21st century, you know? So what did he do? Like,

he, he, some of this in the email, some of it's not. Yeah, stuff that we learned, right, in the last few days that Jeffrey Epstein is responsible for, number one, the recession, the global financial crisis. Or more specifically, the recession in as much as it was his withdrawal from a Bear Stearned CDO fund that was levered like 17 to 1 or whatever that caused the big drawdown that turned

into the recession. Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein's face photoshopped onto the end of a Jenga block that's about to collapsed at out. Like, he didn't, he didn't, like, create the, the mortgage bubble, right? But he turned out to weirdly be the thing that popped it, which is an insane historical coincidence. He's the reason why you can't buy a house anymore. Literally, yes.

Jeffrey Epstein is the reason why you can't do that. Number two, he, like, he arguably, like, he was pushing, he was through Mandelson, right? He was pushing Jamie Diamond to threaten Alistair Darling with J.P. Morgan, like, pulling all of its guilt and therefore sort of like nudged the UK government's response to the recession as well.

Yeah, and we also know he was friends with Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, and like all those like Obama people who like engineered the bailout for bankers fuck everyone else. Like we know he was deeply invented in all those networks. But like seeing him actually say

don't worry, I will tell Jamie Diamond to threaten Alistair Darling so the UK doesn't do too generous of a bailout package is quite galling to be like, oh, in the one sense of the conspiracy is real. Like, we know that these are actual people with names and they talk to each other and so on. They have interest that they advance. But it is also quite jarring to see it, I guess, written down.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. We're not even halfway. Number three. Number three. This is so fucked. This is fucked. Jeffrey Epstein did Gamergate.

Right. Like, Jeffrey Epstein arguably is responsible for the existence of Pol, the politics board on 4chan, which means they're currently right now as a recording is crashing out, wondering whether or not any of their thoughts are their own. And the thing is, they aren't, right? Jeffrey Epstein is the kind of

Dr. Yakub of Chuds. He invented them. And he did it on an island like you're... He also had a big head, much like Yacoub. Yeah. He invented a new kind of white person to serve his own twisted

ends, right? He made the Primaris white guy. But like if you told me that like Gamergate exists because of like an international billionaire pedophile, back when it was happening, I would have been like, no, this is too on the nose. It's just this is just some kind of bottom up chud phenomenon. Not so. Just like the most reductive kind of like single actor theory you can imagine.

Vindicated time and time and time again. Number four, he did Brexit. Or at least he seemed like peripherally involved with like Fras in the time. I'm willing to fly completely off the handle and attribute Brexit single-handed Lisa Jeffery. You've got to like bring back the Wofferandum guys but give them all, but you've got to give them all like Excel bullies.

Like he's in the emails being like, damn, Brexit, be good to make a lot of money off of that. And it's like, how... And you know that you start pulling on these threads of like, why is Jeffrey Epstein emailing Steve Bannon about Tommy Robinson? And you can just keep pulling and pulling and pulling. And it's just all of this stuff is tied together in a way that makes you feel insane to talk about. Before we move on though, I do want to hold on.

I do want to stay for a second on fucking the Epstein-Bannon clouting on Tommy Robinson thing. Sheep at any price is Bannon's verdict on him, which owned. I feel like I'm just trying to find it now because this was my favorite. I didn't get a channel to sort of read through all of them, but I did see this one, and I have found it so funny. And I just, I feel like, let me, let me find the picture because the actual, like, chat itself, I think is quite funny. So they've got this picture of Tommy Robinson.

And Steve Bannon replies in quotation marks, Blackbone of England, to which Epstein, yeah, backbone of England. So to which Epstein responds, that's why the pounds so low, to which Steve Bannon replies, cheaper any price. Yeah, I mean, I've said this, like, a couple of times people,

If I found out that people were clowning on me in the Epstein secret chat logs, I would definitely consider maybe redacted myself, yeah. You would, yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. Number five, Russia Gates, Jeffrey Epstein, again. The lips were right. They were kind of right. They were kind of right in the sense that...

The lips had half the puzzle. Yeah, because my feeling is that the lips were kind of, and I mean that not in a sort of, like demeaning way, but actually in a very admirable way now, like, I have said, and I sort of admit, I, I'm willing to eat humble pie in this, in lots of instances. But like, I feel like the reason why certain liberals were kind of made fun of like a few years ago was because like their analysis was seemed to be very simplified, right? Like, you know, Russia gate, like working on the basis of like there's a sort of like nefarious kind of like Russian plot to undermine the United

States and that like this is being conducted by various sort of like hidden forces, um, of which Putin is kind of like connected to them. You know, the sort of like notion of like the hidden forces behind like momentous moments like Brexit, again, were sort of like dismissed by many, including like those on the left, as being like, you know, oh, like they're just dismissing kind of like these wider social problems. And I'm not saying that's not true, but also like there seemingly, yeah, there was a secret cabal. And it was just this one guy that everyone couldn't stop emailing for some reason. There's what? There's more. There's more.

Number six, because Peter Mandelson was his guy, right? And I think that makes one of the interesting things retrospectively, much like Jimmy Saville. Now, going back and looking at what people said, you know, and the kind of like lobby journalist, I know more than you do because I'm cool, wink, wink kind of elusive way about Peter Mandelson as kind of like the Prince of Darkness, right, knowing where the bodies are buried. Because Peter Mandelson was his guy and because he had Jeffrey Epstein keeping him afloat financially, that gives us Morgan McSweeney and therefore Stama and therefore West Street. Once again, thank you, Jeffrey. Very cool. More than that as well, he also appeared to be involved in the innovation of micro-transactions.

That's the final insults is to be like, and he put micro-transactions in Call of Duty. Fucking shud Dr. Yakub has gotten the kids addicted to gambling. Fantastic. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you. So, no, this is true, by the way, because I saw this. I was like, I need to, I see a screenshot.

I checked it. And again, what he says is Epstein and Kodick. emailing one another about ideas for games and Epstein is like, what if people were like, and again, imagine this brutally misspelled, what if people were more like emotively interested in like the financial outcome, but it was small enough that it could like matter each time?

And it's like, yeah, let's do that. It's like, he is at the back to the future end of movie Concert of Evil and is just calling fucking everybody. Biff Epstein? My damn. I feel like the human basketball player's an air bud. Like, I'm just

So it's like, if we say history is written by the winners, it appears in this case to be replete with spelling mistakes because it was sent by the iPhone of a barely literate pedophile. Yeah, by the simple expedient of not being a pedophile, right? History has assigned us to the Washington generals, apparently. Yeah, if Napoleon is, quote, history and horseback, then Epstein is, history sent my iPhone. Can we include the,

No, we probably can't include that as a legal reason. I think we can include elements of it. Here's the thing. If you want, if you want to include elements of it in your voice, that's fine. I do. I, I'm just going to remain silent. So, okay. It appears as though some emails were exchanged by someone who signs off their emails

JX in the Epstein files. Yeah. They seem to, they identify as a, woman. Yeah, they do. Uh-huh. And at this point, I am dropping the 1,000 ton, quote, being named in the Epstein Fells as not an indicator of wrongdoing, end quote, anvil on the podcast.

Yes, named as, again, exchanged emails with him. Whoever this was, exchanged emails with him. It's not a crime to exchange an unwise email. It doesn't imply anything necessarily. But it does suggest that, number one, that in the 2013s, they were, uh, that someone who signs out their emails JX and someone who has the same amount of characters in their email

address as J.K. Rowling's email address. Again, that's just a complete like that could be any number of things. Yeah. Genuinely, I... Uh-huh. Does seem to be corresponding with this man. And, you know, maybe whoever this is, I

just, you know, I mean, look, women, women and girls, that's all I just say is women and girls. They're so important. Both of them are so important. Both women and girls are super important. be kept safe from anybody who might be even suspicious of maybe hurting them. And, you know, I just, that's a disconnected statement. I just think it's important. Yes. No, I agree. Can I, can I offer another completely disconnected statement? Uh-huh. Someone, and bear in mind, this is a huge production, could have been anyone, does appear to have invited Jeffrey Epstein to the premiere of

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in New York. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, November. Yeah. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, is that the first book that came out in in like 1999. No, no, that's one of the like recent ones. Oh, I don't know.

Like 2006, maybe, seven, eight? No, no, later than that. I would say subsequent to Jeffrey Epstein's 2009 arrest for like child sexual abuse

and then imprisonment, I would say. Oh, oof. Yeah. I hope someone got fired for that blunder. That would be very embarrassing, I would say.

Yeah. On the invitation, does it say you are invited by two of the producers of the show and then J.K. Rowling is named. That's just a form thing. That doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, she was in any way aware of that. That's just, that's a production decision. I don't think that we could draw any inferences from this or any of this whatsoever. No, no, no, not at all. I think what we can confirm is that it's more important than ever for women and girls to

be protected from, you know. I would say so. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So that is all we will say about that other random JX style individual who happens to critiques. He's the only person, by the way, who critiques Epstein's writing. He's like in the entire, in the drop. But you sent me a substack earlier. I was reading with some interest. It was by a University of Toronto IR academic called Seva Gnitsky. And it's one that I think is quite insightful about Epstein and says something more

about the day job orientation of this drop of five. Yeah, I like Seva. I would like to get Seva on at some point if we could. Seva, DM me on Blue Sky or DM November, wherever November wants to be DM'd. Yeah, sure. So, this is Seva's writing. This is from his piece that Russiagate and the Epstein files are the same thing.

It makes sense when you read it. So, it says, for years, the culture war has assigned these scandals to opposite teams, but the three and a half million pages released from the DOJ confirmed that these are in fact the same story. Both highlight the post-1991 emergence of a transnational kleptocratic class that links Western oligarchs to foreign state interests, whether Russian, Saudi, Israeli, or whoever. Treating Russiagate as isolated foreign interference

or Epstein as individual depravity are limiting and strange as it sounds comforting frames because they give each side a villain. Well, this is why it's interesting to me. I think the most impactful email personally in the files yet discovered is the one where he is emailing Larry Summers about Brexit, where he just quite casually says like, you know, he worked out that it's easier to sort of make money off of things on the way down, right?

where if you look at this kind of post-Cold War kleptocracy, right, that's something that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and which is, you know, therefore very adept at exploiting collapse. And it's, I would suggest, a big reason for why everything feels like it's collapsing now is because, you know, this is now a kind of established network of people across borders that is good at doing that, is good at causing and exploiting collapse. Yeah, and to go on from Gnitsky, he says, a real story here is more systemic. The documents suggest a reframing of Epstein's case from one

man's crimes to transnational geopolitics. The Russian collusion story was never about, sorry, this is a long quote, but I think it's quite insightful. The Russian collusion story was never about shadowy foreign forces assaulting an innocent democracy. This lets the U.S. off the hook too easily. Rather, it's about a sphere of elite impunity where American consultants, Russian oligarch, Saudi princes, European politicians, Israeli intelligence figures, and British ex-spies all swim in the same waters, and I'll add here, all with largely similar interests. And so the Russia gate that he talks, that Gnitsky talks about, isn't like, you know, Putin personally had some Serbian teams post-Defried Hillary memes, but rather that there were like politically

connected oligarchs who were paying huge over-the-odds prices for properties or paintings or whatever owned by like Donald Trump or Muhammad bin Salman. And in almost every case, it's Epstein who's making those introductions and allowing like, allowing these things to happen. That's his job, you know? And I think also I don't want us to lose track of the kind of central facts of this, which is what he was getting paid to do was both those introductions and whatever other kind of nefarious things, but chiefly like child sex trafficking, right, which is something that had a sort of like huge wave from post-Soviet countries, right? Like there are, you know, millions of girls from like Ukraine or Belarus or any number of

other post-Soviet states who were trafficked into sexual abuse all over the world. And so when you start looking at these patterns, then you see that it makes sense because these are sort of already things that exist. You don't need to have been Forrest Gump, right? Or rather, you don't need to have been sort of like Napoleon. You can just be Forrest Gump.

You can just kind of be in the right place at the right time. And I think that's how you square the thing of how Jeffrey Epstein is connected to all these people. And also, ostensibly not that smart, is because he just didn't have to be. He was in this perfect place where it was in everyone's interest to prop him up as much as possible.

Yeah. It's sort of like the guy who has the idea of the bank first, right? You have a kind of paradigmatic thing. You have one good idea, which is to be a kind of broker of access in which the sexual abuse of children and the trafficking of children

for that sexual abuse. to just kind of one currency, and you become very useful in that role until you're not. Yeah, he was like, he was the, the Jacob Fugger of his very specific world. Yeah,

kind of. And I mean, you can trace that back to, you know, any way you want, most notably, I think Robert Maxwell, which is your kind of,

like, your intelligence side of that's as well. So, so like I say, like Jeffrey Epstein didn't sort of necessarily invent any of these things, but I think he is a new synthesis

of some of some. And by the way, we want to talk about Another example of like profiting from collapse. You know, another email gets released, right? Which is, okay, it's July 2011. There is the various like uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Gaddafi has not yet been killed by Libyan rebels.

He will in a few months. Gaddafi in the emails, question? He's trying to get Jeffrey to read the green book. But there's this email set that between Jeffrey Epstein and associate, it's like speculating that, well, there's like $80 billion of Libyan funds frozen internationally, 32.4 billion in the U.S., but you could probably get even more. And it's saying, if we can identify slash recover 5 to 10% of these monies and receive 10 to 25% as compensation, we're talking about billions.

The sender, which is two, Jeffrey, says certain members of MI6 and Mossad have all expressed a willingness to assist in efforts to identify and recover stolen assets. So if you want to take billions from this, guess who you talk to? Guess who knows everyone in intelligence who can find all this stuff? Epstein. Yeah, absolutely. And like it's one of those things where any intelligence agency should like have a national interest in knowing Jeffrey Epstein and knowing these things and also to help cover them up until it doesn't. And so I think the kind of brazenness of a lot of this stuff comes from people acting under that kind of assurance, which now it turns out was not good after all.

Or it was good till it wasn't. Exactly. Yeah. The email, by the way, also says, we assume Libya will need to spend at least 100 billion in reconstruction and economic recovery, saying the real carrot is if we can become their go-to guys because they plan to spend at least $100 billion next year to rebuild their country and jumpstart the economy.

So it's like, you can see weird paths of history not taken in the Jeffrey Epstein emails because he's kind of one of the nodes of the network of transnational kleptocrats where all the stuff flows through. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. He's the one guy that rules the world. or the one guy that rules the one of the like 10 guys, one of the 20 guys, God knows how many other fucking Epstein's are out there. I mean, this, I wonder if this global, this again, this global network of kleptocrats, including like every intelligence agency, the vast majority of rich guys from Europe, North America and Russia and Israel.

You don't see so many like African or Chinese billionaires involved. No, for sure. And it is also arguably to some of these players' advantages if there are multiple Jeffrey Epstein's, if you follow me, right? If there are sort of competing networks that they can play off against each other. So it's not as this sort of, you know, Epstein had access to everything everywhere all the time. I love that movie. So much as that, like, he was, you know, useful to a lot of people and was, you know, deeply, deeply influential.

sure. But yeah, again, I come back to Robert Maxwell here of like, you certainly can be for a time, but there absolutely comes a time when you outlive your usefulness. And I think it's naive to assume that the reason why that's happened is because we're all living in a time of more kind of truth and justice and like fewer of these people being pedophiles, right? Like, so you have to imagine that a lot of the kind of like sort of day-to-day stuff that Epstein was doing is still going on somewhere with someone. Fucking Bill Clinton needs his adrenochrome supply, you know, Yeah. Bill Gates needs advice on how to trick his wife into taking antibiotics so he cannot tell her that he got an STI from someone who was sex traffic. I would say world's most vindicated divorce saying there. Oh, 100%. Absolutely. But again, it's like they're all there, right? And it's not just, and yeah, the billionaires are all there. The intelligence agents are all there. And then even like guys like fucking Dan Ariely are there as well, which is, again, very funny to see, who you remember is the guy who's, who you remember is the guy who's,

like the chief niceness officer or whatever at the spy insurance technology company Lemonade. And what he did was he can, I think it was lemonade, but he came up with the idea of if you record a video of yourself saying, I promise I'm not committing insurance fraud. You'll feel too guilty if you're more committing insurance fraud and you're less likely to do it. Like he's his behavioral economics is why there's like a video of you at the self-checkout machine. So you feel guilty if you're, if you're like, Jeffrey Epstein did the self-checkout machine. Where does it end?

Where does it end? I don't think it does. I mean, that fucking is an unexpected item in the bagging area. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So it's like he's at least connected to a lot of things that make your life shitty. Fuck. And just to just to round out before we sort of hand off to ourselves in the past to talk about the TikTok sale, which again is, I think a hugely important political development.

And if we want to talk about like, and we do get into this, if you want to talk about communication, secrecy, elite capture. Elite capture, then you could really do worse than thinking about the purchase of TikTok by, you know, Larry Ellison and friends. Boy, I hope we remember to ask some questions along that theme. Oh, I'm sure we will. But before we do that, I want to note just a couple other people who have appeared. I mean, again, you could, there's infinite things to talk about in these releases for people who are interested in this sort of thing. Oh, yeah. You know, we have, so I want to focus a little bit on, um, uh, Sarah Ferguson, uh, and,

and Prince Andrew where they have their code named, of course, in the files. But the code is like, oh, yes, this is from the Duke. And then the code name is just like, oh, my mother's not letting me go to Buckingham Palace again. It's like, I wonder my mom, the queen. Yeah, the more, the more pathetic one is that he signed off some of his emails as the invisible man. God. So, so Sarah Ferguson says, uh, and this is from 2011. I know you must feel

hellaciously let down by me from what you were either old or red. Fuck sake. They even write like this. I... And, and I most humbly apologize to you

and your heart for that. You've always been as steadfast, generous, and supreme friend to me and my family. As you know, I absolutely did not say the P word about you,

but understand it was reported that I did. I was advised in no uncertain terms to say I have nothing to do with you and not to speak or email with you. And if I did, I'd be causing more problems

for both you, the Duke, and myself. Also, can we, can we be 100% clear that the queen knew about all of this, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. Just now that she's dead, now that, now that we're sort of like, you know, letting kind of memories fade on like, oh, she's kind of like the nation's mom.

It's like, no, she was. She's the nation's mom that's colluding with another abusive relative. Yeah. Basically. So Sarah Ferguson goes on. So I shut down and ran away. I was broken and lost. So please understand as I do about you that I was broken and not the strong person you know.

And I got completely obliterated. And I saw all my children's work disappeared. I shut everyone out. I was frightened. The palace system is frightening. Yeah, this is, so Sarah Ferguson, I think, maybe he comes off the worst in any one, uh, in the files after Elon Musk in that, like, you know, you're in the Epstein files. Okay, that's pretty bad. How bad is it? Well, you're in the Epstein files proposing to him so that he would have, as like a kind of pedophile beard. So that people would stop thinking that he was a pedophile because he was married. married to you an adult woman.

I mean, we've barely even have the time to talk about Elon Musk, who is, I fucking Jesus Christ is like, when can I come to the island? Because he's like autistic enough to not know how to like code that. And also Jeffrey Epstein seems visibly annoyed by him. Before we go to Musk, I want to do a couple more things for Sarah Ferguson and, and Prince Andrew. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No sweat.

Which is Epstein appears to have just used. the palace for like, use Buckingham Palace more or less as like another of his homes. There's going to be a photo of him like on the throne that is going to drop at some point. Yeah, like, there has to be. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the 30th release of the Epstein documents that just show even more and deeper and more like perverse and pervasive connections. Oh yeah. Like, and where he uses Prince Andrew.

This is, again, I like to see Prince Andrew humiliated. I just wish it wasn't by this guy. where Andrew basically is his like houseboy for arranging dinners at Buckingham Palace for his friends that he might not even be invited to right? It's like, oh, what time and how many replies Andrew to Epstein again suggesting how much Epstein was calling the shots

in terms of like where they are. Yeah, just sort of like piloting the royal family like a quarter of seps. You know what? Again, that's not difficult. These are deeply inbred people. This is very true. Also, not just the British royal family. The fucking like Norwegians are.

matter as well. Yeah, everyone. No one comes off clean. But yeah, as you say Nova, Elon, and then we're going to throw to ourselves in the future past. In November 2012, Epstein sent Musk an email asking, how many people will you be for the helicopter to the island? Musk then says, probably just

Tallulah, his wife at the time, and me. What day slash night will be the wildest party on your island, Musk replied. Cool. Yeah. I can't wait to engage in some, like, sort of awful abuse and depravity. Yeah, he says later on, not to skip a ahead of you, but like, he says,

a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I'm looking for, which he may as well, he may as well have included the word wink there. Like, I just And also, by the, he's email, sorry, this is a reference to no gods, no mayors. We talk to a lot of people who are emailing each other crazy shit on Christmas, but

Musk follows up with an email on the 25th December in response to another Epstein message, encouraging to visit and offer the use of his helicopter. Do you have any parties planned? I've been working to the edge of sanity this year, and so once my kids head home after Christmas. No, you fucking have. I remember what Elon Musk was doing in 2012

and it was not working to the edge of sanity. Yeah, it was writing his like master plan on a notes app. Yeah. He says, I really want to hit the party seat in St. Bards or elsewhere and let loose. And then he says the invitation is much appreciated but as you say, Nova, a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I'm looking for.

Epstein responds, I'll see you on St. Barth. The ratio on my island might make Tallila uncomfortable. Ration is not a problem for Tallulah replied now. I would say that ratio is a problem for Elon Musk. Oh, God. Jesus Christ. Anyway,

I've got to be these people. And the thing is, nothing's, nothing's going to happen. And Elon Musk is going to stay rich forever. And like, unless things take a really strange turn, in which case, I will be in New Zealand having survived the apocalypse, trying to pry open the air vents to his bunker. So we'll see. We'll see.

Yeah. And also, it's like, this will not change unless politics, changes it. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. And even then, like, this is, this would require a kind of like generational project of debathification, right? Like, when we, when we talk about, like, how the Labor Party is done, right? We're not just saying, like, oh, Andy Burnham is going to get sort of shut out by factional stuff. We mean, like, a lot of influence is still held by people who are put there by one of Jeffrey Epstein's close friends. Yeah. And I think we can, we can say, you know what,

that politics must be depedified. Yeah, absolutely. By f*** necessary. And I think necessary. Yeah. So I'm going to now hand over to us in the future past and we will see you in a second. Hello, everybody from the first half. Welcome to the...

And what's the first half it was. Oh, yeah. Hey, you know, why don't we recount our favorite... I know, so I do this every time. It never isn't funny to me. We count our favorite jokes in the first half. Hem. Anyway, hello, everybody from the first half, welcome to the second. November and I are going to be talking with Paolo Gerbado, who's a sociologist at the Complutense University of Madrid, who specializes in digital culture, platforms, and so on.

And an associate of friend of the show, Ben Fogles. Paolo, welcome to the show. Hi, Edwin. I'm very well, thanks, but it appears... It must be a quiet week. Not much going on with, like, social media, as far as I know. Hold on let me just post on my TikTok about how much I hate ice cream and we should abolish ice cream and hey, what the, hey, what the Dickens? It doesn't appear to be loading. Sorry,

that was, of course, the ice cream skit. So, Paolo, one of the things we're here to talk about is the recent handover of TikTok to its new coterie of reactionary billionaire American owners and the political fallout that's come from that as people are beginning to, I think, be quite rightly suspicious of how they're going to use and abuse capital T, capital A, the algorithm. So can you just give us a little bit of an overview of what exactly has happened and what people are saying? Yes, I mean, it really looks like, or you know, like the authoritarian phase of capitalism when the things you accuse China of doing, you're actually doing them yourself.

I think this is what is happening with the US TikTok. But to give you the facts first before the interpretation. Really, basically what happened, we remember that during the Biden administration already, there was this bipartisan bill that wanted to force Biden dance, the Chinese company, which created an own TikTok, to cede its American operations, its U.S. operations, on the basis of a number of acquisitions, fears that it would be able to use U.S. users' data, basically what all Silicon Bally companies are doing, but they were signaling out TikTok for doing that,

as well as possible political interference from a Chinese company, suspected of having ties with the Chinese Communist Party, whatever. And there were all these congressional hearings. You may remember this famous hearing when this congressman was asking the TikTok CEO, are you a member of the Chinese Communist Party? Have you served in the Chinese military?

And the guy was famously saying, I'm from Singapore. I'm from Singapore. I mean, I'm not supposed to. And actually, all of that ultimately ended up leading to this bill to this, I mean, this law that was approved. And which actually set a legal obligation for Biden to sell its American operations. Then enters Trump 2.0, Trump 47, and he uses, as he always good at doing, he has a sense of opportunity. and says, hey, I mean, why don't I use this opening that Democrats basically Biden kindly gave me to turn TikTok into even more of a propaganda machine for myself, for the MAGA movement, or what it has already been anyway, because Trump himself celebrated the fact that during the campaign TikTok was decisive, was what won it for him.

And basically what he did, he was basically installing this new job. joint venture, which comprises US tech company as well as financial companies that are invested in big tech, together with an assortment of other international allies, somehow similar to the investors of X-Twitter with the mask takeover like a pair of years ago. And many of them have very clear ties with Trump, with MAGA, with a global rights. And so it's really, I will say, it's a perfect sense of opportunity which Trump, to reinforce his control of their media and social media system, even more of what he already had.

So all of the stuff that we love about X.com, the Everything app, is now going to be sort of like transported to TikTok and turn it into a kind of like, I don't know, like a kind of hamburger red note. Completely. I mean, we already saw that. I mean, it's nothing new in a way, right?

I mean, it's precisely what happened with the nsitification of X to quote corey doctoral. I mean, basically taking, spoiling a social network, a platform of all the good things that we associate with it. In the case of Twitter, being able to have access

to a variety of qualified opinions from credentialed experts, academics, journalists, as well as, not like debate, but say sane debate and plural debate, democratic debate, and then turning it into a crypto and porn machine, which is what is X,

we are probably going to see something similar happening with TikTok, where TikTok we prize its creativity, video explainers, jokes, meme videos, trends. But it has also been, I would say in a way, considered unsirious because of its association with hilarity and with light-headed content and with jokes. and with jokes. But the reason why it is so politically sensitive

is because it is also being a channel through which in recent years, Generation X and Generation Z have been in form of many recent events like Gaza, affordability crisis, and so on and so forth. So this is something that people like Larry Ellison, which is basically the leader of these TikTok US

in many respects, the CEO of Oracle and the very right, in person and a very staunch pro-Israel person, what he wants to do, basically, what these people want to do is to normalize TikTok to take out all these democratic elements and critical elements out of TikTok and turn it into yet another vessel for the global right propaganda. And when we say the vessel for the global right propaganda, we're also not just simply talking about you will see RFK doing his new food pyramid or whatever, but also it will be things.

like relentlessly pushing, you know, like gambling, for example. That's been one of the hallmarks of the global right is an adoration of gambling and embedding in all of its forms. It's now everywhere on X. It's everywhere in the high end of the U.S. government. The labor right has been ahead of the key. More sort of like AI slop content as well. I look forward to, you know, a sort of like shrimp Jesus telling me to gamble.

Yeah. And one of the things I want to talk about as well, right, which is that, so we've got this, again, it is so typical that it is a, this big democratic push. And I remember, you know, you mentioned Gaza, Paolo, this democratic push to, raising, fomenting a moral panic over TikTok, partly because TikTok was the thing that through its terrifying algorithm was making Gen Z, people in their 20s and 19s, suspicious of Israel and sympathetic to Gaza. This must be the algorithm. It's the same thing you could, if you zoom into the New York mayor's election, a lot of people were saying, Oh, the algorithm is favoring Zoron.

You know, there is this paranoia among the political center and the right about what the algorithm is and how it's to be used. And, I mean, I wanted to talk about this as well. Like, what do they mean when they say the algorithm? Because they refer to it, I think, without understanding what it is. I mean, I think that there's an element of truth in that conspiracy theory or if you want to call it like that, in a sense that, of course, we know that these platforms use these algorithms. use these algorithmic curation, which basically means that you don't really decide

what you're watching, but you have recommend their systems as they're called. You have a computational system that are recommending contents to you in ways that are very effective because they know, I have so much information about you and they have very complex models to make sense

of what you're likely to like, what you're likely to be interested in based on your previous behavior and based on what People like you, your neighbors as they're called. Neighbors of taste, of course, are liking. And these algorithms, fundamentally what they do, they are coherent to the profit motive of these companies.

And the profit motives of these companies is based on advertising, right? And it's based on the time you spend on the platform, which translates into a number of opportunities to expose you to advertising content. So they, in order to maximize the time you spend on the platform, what they give you is content that is as addictive as possible. So the bias there, before the political bias, will tend to be a bias towards sensationalistic content. Content that is very attractive, very satisfying, content that grabs your attention, content that wants you to come back, and interactions that in a way are also hitting at your weak spot. So that is already a bias that is more cultural or experiential,

but then also translates into political opportunities. It's a bias that that's to do with surprise, that it's to do with activating emotions, with extreme emotions, not necessarily negative ones, but often negative ones. But say, in a way, it favors more intense or sometimes extreme positions, but it is not automatically something

that is just an opening for the right or for the left if you see what I mean. I mean, we've seen Zora and Mamm Dali make good use of some of those techniques, some of those sort of like styles of filmmaking. I remember seeing a recent deadline somewhere on Instagram or TikTok. I don't remember from which media,

which is perhaps testament to the attention span reducing or all of us becoming Bidenized in some way or other. But he was saying like the left finally has understood the algorithm. The left discovers the algorithm. And there was a photo of Mamdani with very strange pair of

spectacles with some celebrities showbies figure that I don't know because I'm too old to be that much into showbies. But basically already the headline and the photo already were self-explanatory really. I mean this was a content that was

completely apolitical, to start with, completely affective or fatic, basically Mamdani playing cool and showing off relatability, but which is, to a great extent, the matter of politics these days, and perhaps has always been, in a sense of projecting an aura.

You know, remember that aura farming was Oxford dictionary a word of the year, alongside with vibe something. I mean, is this effective politics that is really prominent now and is pushed by algorithms? Is there a danger to that too, though, of a sort of like a left politics that becomes hype moments and aura?

Completely. Completely does a lot of danger there. I mean, on the one hand, I mean, tactically, one can exploit that space. I think that the point of the left discovering the algorithm is realizing, hey, I mean, these are the rules of the game, like them or not. If you want to play in corporate communication space, in a way, you need to latch on to some of these affordses. If you want to be able to be relevant, of course. Then it carries a number of liabilities in terms of personality culture. I mean, of course, it's a politics of extreme personalization.

It's a politics of neo-charisma. By charisma, he is a plebiscatory personalist politics, as we know from Max Weber, right? So perhaps it's quite, how you say, not very easy to reconcile with organizational politics or with party politics. And so there are all these number of liabilities that are associated with it. but I would say that it really tactically one needs to play this game

and you can win with this as Zeraman I mean indeed as you were suggested as Roman Dhani thus far is the most clear case of how the opportunity can be used and if you look at that from the sort of other end the more participatory end of people

say like filming ice or filming the police more generally do you think that sort of TikTok US's new efforts to try and like sort of put that back in the bottle a reflective of a kind of potential there. Completely. It's precisely that.

I mean, my sense, also because if you look at the operation itself, it makes very little business sense. I mean, it is clearly, by and large, politically motivated. I mean, it's something also really weird. I mean, it's a company,

a joint venture that acquires the national operation of a global social network with a very unsexy name, TikTok USDS. It looks like the name of an agency, of a quango,

right? With these group of investors that are alf shady, Alf also shady, and I mean, who are licensing, pay the license for the use of the algorithm.

I mean, it's an operation that as such, I mean, you would normally kind of create an alternative platform or whatever or acquire a platform. But in that way, it's really strange. And what they want to do is really quite clearly,

I mean, fiddle with the algorithm and fiddily with the algorithm. So the point that I made in a recent Guardian article is that this is how censorship operates these days in this invisible indirect way. Namely, we are used to think about censorship as people that are not allowing you to speak, right, are shutting your mouth, are not allowing you to speak out. Yet, to a great extent, these days, censorship is about more stopping your voice from going too far. I mean, as long as I'm speaking and just my 12 friends and 20 affectionate listeners listen to me, I mean, the system can cope with that.

Any system, any alternative system can perfectly cope with that. The problem is that people listening to me or seeing my tweets, my Instagrams and TikToks become 10,000, 100,000 million. And with algorithms, there are a number of ways of fire stops or how you call the metaphor we use where you can basically strangle, you can block the transmission from the small circle of people to the general public. And by fiddling with parameters, which is basically the nuts and balls of algorithms, by changing the weight you attribute to different variables in the algorithm. you can pretty much,

you can not completely shut down as you wear certain voices, but more effectively, more sensibly and more sophisticated manner, more invisible manner, really control the general climate, as you were, of the conversation.

Maybe you're not too left. Maybe you're just not posting enough. But that's also important because if you note that you are being stopped from speaking at all, then you're likely to react to that. You're likely to just, well,

I'm going to stop posting on TikTok. I'm going to find somewhere else. But if you're encouraged to keep interacting with the service, if you're encouraged to keep doing it, but you realize you're just, you're not getting much distance, then you just keep on going and all of that energy, that energy that is, you know, let's say, communicating against the interests, let's say, represented by Ellison Trump and their immediate group of friends, then you'll just sort of keep doing it, but you'll be sort of just sidelined. You just won't really feel it. It's that you'll be part of this, the censorship is from an overwhelming

amount of information and that you can just be pushed to the side of it, if you will. Because it's worth saying, like, what people have said, right, that the, so ownership of, as we said, ownership has switched over to the new American consortium. And what people have said is, hey, when I send a DM containing the word Epstein, it's marked as suspicious, when I'm posting about the killing of Alex Preddy by a federal agent, that, oh, it just, it's controversial, remains under review. It's basically suspicious malfunctions like this. And the thing is, I'm always now, naturally suspicious of anyone who sort of makes a political statement that is essentially my posts aren't posting because, you know, we, we make fun of... I remember us deriding like Greg Stuby a few years back and being like, I was shadow banned.

Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm always suspicious of people who claim to be shadow banned. And I guess I want to know, Palo, your view on what the significance is of like, of people making these claims, especially given that TikTok, TikTok USDS, which I actually think sounds like a dairy farm. came out with the explanation for a couple days later, like, oh, yeah, a winter storm knocked out

like all of Oracle's data centers, which I find hard to believe, but I also, I guess, I'm naturally suspicious of anyone talking about shadow banning. Yes, I mean, I'd say that you're right to be suspicious. I mean, in a sense that, you know, shadow banning, I mean, is a practically that exists, and basically it involves inflicting,

throttling the visibility of a certain account. It has been shown that, I mean, social social networks have done it. But in a way, this would be more targeted, in a sense, whatever. This user has repeatedly breached community guidelines,

so I will inflict less visibility. So usually it would be kind of manually curated, right? It would involve an individual decision. Well, here is a sort of generalization of Shadobani, as you were, right? In a sense that I would reduce the weight that is attributed to a parameter.

For example, I mean, this is what Facebook already did in 2018, right? On the back of all the Cambridge Analytica, you know, scandal and wave of attention around the power of social networks, so on and so forth, and breaches to privacy, what they did was reducing the weight of the algorithm attributed to political public political content and news. So you would see less of that on your timeline. And that heavily affected any account that was covering politics on Facebook. The idea behind that the justification was that it was important to go back to authentic, real connection with your relatives and with your friends and so on and so forth.

But then paradoxically, by doing that, at the same time, Facebook attributed more importance to more weight to angry reactions, which in fact, according to some analysts, help. create the ground for the nationalist right to rise. So you see what I mean? I mean, it's a matter of I mean, there can be a matter of creation. For example, you can decide a certain words on topics

that are controversial are disfavored. They are put at a algorithmic disadvantage. This is part of also what TikTok has always done with controversial topics, with aggressive topics because with corporate ethos that focuses on

think positive, but you can weaponize that much more deliberately in order ultimately to silence voices that are critical of your favorite political part. I think that's the thing that interests me here. And I'm sort of being haunted by some kind of a specter as I ask this question, right? Is that like whether it's TikTok or Facebook or Twitter, for some mysterious reason, almost as if there's some kind of like motive underpinning these things. things, whether there's like shadow banning or no shadow banning, whether you're sort of like waiting the algorithm or not, somehow these things always tend to work in the right's favor. And I wonder if you could kind of, if that sort of jives with your experience as well.

And if you could elucidate maybe why that might happen. I mean, I would say that there is a certain complicity. And I've argued also in an article where I said that kind of social media and populism kind of an elective affinity between the two. I think that the main complicity between the two has to do with the fact that social media sensationalism, which is the main product of algorithm, therefore the emphasis on content

that is astonishing, high pitch, high arousal, works very well in the right's favor as it tries to pander fear, fear of immigrants, fear of foreign interference, fears or collapse of Western civilization, because that kind of content is very much high arousal and high intensity and appealing to visceral emotions,

while the left also culturally is very reluctant to engage with these more visceral emotions. I mean, that doesn't mean that there's no game for the left. I mean, it has been shown that also messages of hope. If they are high stake, I mean, they need to be high-stake messages. They need to be challenging. They need to engage people in a civilizational battle for the future. And I feel like things like now, Zach Polanski is doing

or what Jeremy Corbyn in his past period was doing and some of the material that political environe was producing. And now, of course, Mamdani are managing to do that, but indeed is playing with an environment that is very sensationalist and where you need to know that you are in a way riding the beast, that can lead you place you don't want to go. The fact that it is sensationalist

sort of, I think, ties well into the old observation that fascism is the application of the aesthetics to politics, the Walter Benjamin one, right? Which is politics, because fascist politics is about feeling good all the time

if you're a favored group, right? And it's in that those high emotions, the same emotions that make you want to keep engaging in social media that get you more and more angry and tuned in are the same ones that sort of create that desire to, you know, to demand that sort of the government, you know, machine guns, anyone who comes over in the channel because it's,

it's creating that desire to feel good. And that's partly sated by scrolling and scrolling and scrolling or posting and posting and posting. But that because it's so, it's so fear-based and so empty and so, you know, news-related, yet that demand eventually has to be filled by someone like Trump or someone like Nigel Farage. And in my view, that's the, I think that's actually one of the main reasons why I think it does these platforms just benefit the right so much. And why the right seems to be so able to and keen to, aside from the fact that the right has most of the billionaires. Of course.

As taking every opportunity to seize control of the methods of communication, you know? Indeed, I think that it's kind of compulsive, obsessive kind of user experience that they give us, place us in a spot where we are more vulnerable. to those kind of appeals. I don't know how much that is completely new, because ultimately, if you think going a bit back in time, I mean, what the sun and the tabloid press was doing is partly similar, right? They tended to favor a certain kind of ethos that was very much in line with what the right wanted to be, right?

Pandering fears about migrants, pandering fear about whatever, food welfare queens and so on support. be creating that kind of moral panic. So, at a view, it is completely new in certain respects. What is new is just the pervasiveness of the algorithmic environment. I mean, the hours and hours and hours we spend in these. I mean, paradoxically, we have never been more exposed to politics and political content than we are now. So all this idea of the politicization of society, I think, is only partly true.

And probably we've never discussed so much politics. and I'm saying the average of the population in the sense that we are constantly exposed to discussion. They may not be very deep. They tend to be very superficial. But yet there is a sort of submerged politicization of the population which also opens opportunities, I think.

And people are more interested in politics precisely because of the situational crisis, the escalating and converging, poorly crises. So indeed, it's a landscape that favors the right, but I also would not underestimate the openings that there are for socialist politics there. I think on both sides there is this kind of feeling of like being overwhelmed, of being sort of demoralized out of action sometimes by sort of being suffused by politics to that extent.

Do you think that the sort of the Polansky sort of like hope schema, if you like, is sort of like something that's helpful for that? Or is there a risk inherent in that of just sort of people, feeling just more of the same sort of like overwhelm. How will you say, I think that there's an opportunity for that. And in a way, it's the only thing that we can do really realistically in a sense to cast that message. We should not underestimate the importance of the environment in the sense that the right,

what has done, the right, has created an ecosystem. It's not just the campaign. It's not just farage or reform or the top candidates of reform. It's tens and tens of accounts on YouTube, podcasts, Telegram channels, Facebook pages, meme accounts that are fundamentally hammering the same message in thousand variations and are creating a climate. So my proposal in my recent work is really that we should go beyond looking at propaganda

as message response individually, but understand that the persuasive effect is made possible by the creation of a certain climate within which this single messages swim and become effective. So what the writers managed to do very effectively through this ecosystem, through this investment,

through this infrastructure propaganda, is to create a climate of inevitability and to create a climate of millionaire and fear about civilizational collapse where they also managed to permeate our own psyche. I mean, the things we are saying, saying now, but are the things that you almost always repeat in conversation with leftists at any latitude, basically, these days, which is, ah, yet again, another victory of the right. Yet again, look what has happened. You know, a mixture of shock and awe and despair and farther confirmation that we are bound to go down the new 1930s and whatever that we let us. end up in jail and whatever.

You know what I mean? I mean, this kind of climate. And this is precisely the spell that they manage to conjure up and that they want to keep going. But I think there's also a spell. Perhaps we can try to puncture, to start puncturing. And part of that means also in a way puncturing the algorithm and the way in which it manages to reproduce this climate. And I mean, I think when we talk about the climate,

And we talk about the people who want to create it, the sort of reactionary billionaire class. Just putting this back in the context of Oracle's major participation in the consortium of investors who are largely associated with the right, with the party political right, with also obsessions, with culture wars, with sort of support for Israel, stuff like this. You know, you could see why they would do it. But also it's strange because although that algorithmic content, most of the time is pretty rigged in their favor, like already. Right? Just because it naturally is, yeah, that's the sensationalism that makes for good business also makes for good right-wing propaganda generally.

It's almost just like, again, they're playing a rigged game in their favor. And they're like, no, this is not rigged enough in my favor. I would like to buy the game now. And let's remember that Lary L isn't also controls media, right? He's creating a media empire, an old media or news media empire. And is acquiring CBS and once acquired CNN. So they want to control all of it. in ways that are really concerning for anybody who has studied the political economy of the mass media. I mean, it's worse than Mardock. You know, like the Marduk Empire was bad, bad, but this is worse. It's more pervasive, is more totalizing, is more comprehensive.

And it comprises both news media, namely information sources and spaces of discussion. I think this is a great novelty, I mean, the real novelty of the, digital public sphere. Namely, once upon a time, capitalists could control our sources of information, but we were discussing in places that were physical, they were workplaces, they were clubs, they were sports venues, they were family circles, public squares, cafes, pubs. While now our discussion, political discussion goes on, and political talk is central. Many political sociologists really said this is the mediating factor between information

and individual opinion and ultimately motivation to vote. So what is really concerning now is that the places where we are discussing are privates, they are corporate, they are captive spaces, and they are owned

not only by evil capitalists or evil because they're capitalists, but because they are also allied politically and ideologically with the tech right, with the new extreme right. So that is what is really what is really concerning,

I think about this new moment. And as we say, Right? Like the, usually the Murdoch Empire, right? Its, its game was to look at social media and then create news content from its talk shows, for example. Yeah, that weird kind of air of desperation to be chasing trends almost. Exactly. Is that the Murdox, the Murdoch media empire writes articles and does news shows to be clipped and shared on social media platforms they don't own but want to influence. You know, whereas Larry Ellison has seen the bigger picture, right? We're going to, we, yeah, we can. create all we want by owning these TV networks, but that's not enough. Because we don't want

to share a TikTok algorithm that, for example, says, yes, if you pander to horror about migrants, that's going to go up. But also, if you're talking about horrors being committed in Gaza, for example, that an algorithm that just looks at highly emotive content that demands engagement doesn't really distinguish between the two of them. But I'm using, I'm using Israel as an example just because Gaza is one of these things that breaks through. Completely. No, Gaza is, he's central to this. It's central to these.

I think it was very, and Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed delight at his new arrangements. So, I mean, it's not just about Gaza, but I think Gaza for them was the last drop, as you were. They got, they got really afraid that there was these generations that was becoming politically out of, was going politically out of control from the perspective. Yeah. And I mean, this is not just, you know, again, another conspiracy.

This is, so this said quite literally, not just from Netanyahu, but as well as Oracle's CEO, Safra Katz, she said, you know, we've all been horrified by the growth to the BDS movement in college campuses and concluded that we have to fight this battle before the kids even get to college. We believe that we have to embed the love and respect for Israel in American culture. That means getting the message to the American people in a way that they can consume it. Yeah, this game isn't rigged enough. And it's interesting as well how the sort of heavy-hand and, of a lot of this seems to be

in some ways provoking a backlash. I'm struck by sort of like a lot of these people on the right was sort of like deeply, deeply emotionally wounded by Charlie Kirk getting assassinated. And the sort of like teenagers, they sort of like then tried

to enforce that feeling on made him into a meme almost immediately to the point that he's a sort of like punchline now. So I sort of wonder whether or not they'll be able to sort of dial that in, or whether it will say like this, where it becomes a sort of like an objective as much derision

as like the old forms of censorship used to. The amount of moral gaslighting around freedom of expression that has come from the right, particularly from Elon Musk, JD Vance, and all the council culture saga. Let's remember, he was initiated by people of the Tony Blair Institute,

then like fascist, curious liberals. would say, kind of like Barry Weiss and all these supposedly moderates, but actually very, very conservative. Now I put themselves at a complete service of the new right. It was all pretending that the left was censorious, that it was bent on cancer culture. And, I mean, personally, there were aspects of a certain kind of witch hunting instinct in certain left circles that I didn't completely share as, I mean, but what the right is doing now, is, I mean, is exponentially greater,

is both controlling everything in the media system, is demonizing any adversary calling them terrorists, is trying to get people to shut up through self-censorship, and that if you, I mean, what is happening to people going to the US is just ridiculous people like their phones being checked, and if they expressed an opinion or a criticism, getting in trouble, being kicked out. I mean, the amount of censorship that this right is producing just completely out of proportion. I don't think it is popular with anyone, especially with young people,

no, that you cannot express yourself besides being in evident contradiction with what they pretend to be, namely freedom-loving people who love freedom of speech, Charlie Kirk, free debate, debate me, blah, blah. It's interesting. It's sort of like in the course of trying to turn social media into an echo chamber, I wonder to what extent the right has just sort of trapped themselves in one where they can only sort of get more and more extreme with each other. And anyone with any sort of like semblance of normality left is just like, what are you talking about, you know? Yes. I mean, I was proposing this idea back then the intellectual year and I was a bit proven wrong on that in the sense that, I mean, sometimes you

wonder how much them becoming so streaming online. can lead them to lose touch from the real world. But these days, the real world is the online world to that extent. I mean, the separation between the two doesn't exist anymore. A few more is the separation from any sense of long-term reality that is troubling for them.

In a sense, they do living in confirmation bias. And I mean, Trump, first and foremost, lives in a world of confirmation biases. And you're already seeing the limits of that political strategy. I mean, like, no, he has basically alienated many of his allies. He has put himself in a very dangerous position with the economy when these enormous AI bubble, which was already there, but he just pumped it up beyond proportion. So indeed, I mean, partly it is a product of algorithms, right? Partly is this is a product of these algorithm in Publix and the boost and

de-boast mechanisms they build into the system. And yeah, we're looking forward to see these bubbles crashing down. And I guess just to wrap it up, taking it background, I think, to why you'd want to own this, I think it's pretty obvious. And also, I think it's something that you don't necessarily, you don't necessarily buy it to say, okay, if they send Epstein, flag it as suspicious. But rather, you buy it because you understand the power of these heightened emotive forms of communication. And you understand that you need them to work for you 100% of the time. because you won't settle for anything less.

But also because you do know that if your belief, for example, is well, obviously, you know, everyone in Minneapolis is a Soros-funded plant, whatever, whatever, you can say, well, we think that's, we think this kind of content, for example, is inauthentic, and we're going to be boosting authentic content. It's not that they're going to be imposing hard stop on this, never talk about this. If you upload this, it won't get, it won't work. But rather, we're just going to make relatively subtle changes. we're going to, we're going to couch them in line with something like a business strategy.

And also we're going to collect, by the way, a huge amount more information. Like they're now doing precise location tracking and they weren't doing that before. And we're going to use all of that, just like Elon did as well. I mean, he did it in a different way with Twitter. He did it by like favoring blue check people and blue check people are self-selecting to be morons, broadly speaking. But we're just going to make these subtle changes to what gets boosted, to what doesn't get boosted. And it's less less about individuals, generally speaking,

and it's more just about what kinds of things are people going to see. Are you going to be, if you're interested in a certain kind of topic, if you're posting for a certain kind of area or whatever, are you going to be seen as someone who is just going to get largely sideline? Totally. It's nudging to some extent, right? Yeah. I mean, it's this behavioral economic stripe of manipulation,

which is mostly subtle, is invisible, and small insidious. Because also it leads people to practice of censorship. Because perhaps you don't see your post-traudian and you wonder, perhaps is my audience that doesn't, I warn me anymore. So perhaps I should change that. The Nudge unit vindicated at long last. Completely. You see, it's a quango, I told you. All right.

Well, look, that's all the time we have. So we're going to throw back to ourselves in the future past. Always love doing that. I'm never going to get tired of it. That's my promise to you. Paolo, thank you so much for coming and talking to us today. This was very interesting and informative. Cheers.

You wake up. All right. Well, I think that just about does it for another episode of TF. A free episode of TF. Might have been some beeps in this one. A couple of beeps. A couple, a few. Yeah.

But it's fine. It wouldn't be a fitting episode on the finals if there weren't a couple of redactions of our own in that, you know? Yeah, that's right. So I just want to, of course, once again, thank our guest, Paolo. We're going to have a link to some of his recent work in the description. Thank my lovely co-os for being here as ever. And finally, to thank you, the listener. Remind you, of course, there's a Patreon, yada, yada, yada.

You can subscribe to it for more of this. So we will see you on the bonus episode in a couple short days. Bye. Bye.