0:00
You were bloated last night. What else is new? I said not bloated.
Search this video
0:03
My God, you really are though. You look bloated.
0:07
Listen, that's coming from you.
0:07
You started to look like Bert and now you're back to Ernie.
0:10
Your face is getting round again.
0:12
All I have to say is hold on a second, guys. I got to get a drink. Is it okay?
0:16
You guys got a minute for me to get a drink? Yeah, yeah. I definitely do. I definitely do. Go ahead. You need to get a beer? No, no.
0:21
Um, I'm actually, you know, I've been working on my weight.
0:23
So, I'm just going to pick here.
0:24
I think I have the mocha latte from Supergut.
0:26
They also have the chocolate shake.
0:29
Do you have a recommendation here for me, Freeberg?
0:31
Cuz I'm going to put it in my coffee. Is mocha on a mocha? Is You can't go wrong. You can't go wrong. Thank you. Double mocha is a win.
0:38
Just on a completely unrelated topic, did you happen to invest in Supergut, J. Cal? No, no, no. I haven't invested yet.
0:43
But use the promo code Oh, okay.
0:48
It's been a big part of my weight loss journey.
0:49
It's also been a big part of me and Freeberg uh becoming besties and creating a unified block for All-In Summit 2023.
0:57
So, I've got two solid votes.
1:00
I'll be very honest with you.
1:00
If you guys give me a credible plan where we can maintain the integrity Hold on. Hold on. Keep going. HEY, HOLD ON. MAINTAIN CREDIBILITY. CONTINUE. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me.
1:14
If you If you two idiots I'm not involved. Yes, you are.
1:17
You clearly are involved with with this [ __ ] grip. important vote. Hold on. Continue, Chamath. I'm writing this in it. I'm writing it down.
1:24
If you two idiots, the two of you have to do this together because otherwise I'm with David and there's absolutely Got it.
1:29
You two idiots need to come up with a plan Plan, got it. Idiot's plan.
1:35
where we can each make make 4 million bucks each net. Then I'll do it. 4 million net. Okay, great. Look at J.
1:44
Cal writing that down as as if he respects a contract. Okay, got this. Got this.
1:48
I signed the [ __ ] con- I signed the contract.
1:52
Cal, the negotiation begins at the point where there's a signed contract. Yeah, exactly.
1:58
It's they okay, now I'm going to negotiate with you.
2:17
All right, everybody, the show has started.
2:18
The four of us are still here.
2:21
By by some miracle, we're still going after 107 episodes, and it's better than ever.
2:25
Last week we were number 12, so mainstream media we'll see you in the top 10. Here we go.
2:32
Twitter files part one and part two dropped.
2:35
despite your oppressive conditions. Yes.
2:38
J Cal, we're not on strike.
2:39
My oppressive conditions are making you show up on time. Yeah.
2:43
If I was getting paid five bucks paid five bucks for this, I'd be on strike right now.
2:48
Guys, not only are you getting five bucks, you're getting a bill for the production. Okay, here we go.
2:50
Twitter files is it that the same reporters who couldn't stop writing about the oppressive working conditions that Elon Musk was supposedly creating cuz he simply wanted the employees to go back to the office and work hard.
3:03
And if they didn't, he'd give them a generous three months severance package.
3:06
Those same reporters are now on strike because the Sulzbergers are running a clickbait farm over there with oppressive working conditions.
3:15
The intellectual dishonesty has never been higher in the world.
3:17
I'm looking for intellectual honesty.
3:21
Yes, will the publisher of the New York Times agree that anybody who isn't happy there can have a voluntary three months severance package? Yeah, I click this link.
3:29
And do you want to work hard or do you want three months severance?
3:33
If the New York Times publisher did that, you know what would happen?
3:37
800 of 1200 people would take the severance. Of course. All right, here we go.
3:41
Twitter files have dropped.
3:42
Part one dropped with the legendary award-winning, highly respected journalist Matt Taibbi.
3:48
If you don't know who he is, he is a left-leaning journalist who worked at Rolling Stone and did the best coverage hands down of the financial crisis and the shenanigans and he held truth to power to that group.
4:01
This is important to note.
4:03
The second drop was given to Bari Weiss, who is a a right-leaning independent journalist.
4:10
These are both independent journalists.
4:12
She previously worked at The New York Times itself.
4:14
Now, I think we should work backwards from two to one. Do you agree? Yes, for sure.
4:21
Let's start with the drop that just happened last night.
4:25
Yes, so last night a drop happened.
4:25
So, here's what happens in Twitter Files part two.
4:30
I'm going to give a basic summary and then I'm going to give it to Sachs because he's chomping at the bit.
4:33
We now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a secret silencing system built into the software of blacklists was tagging right-wing conservative voices in the system.
4:51
And these included people like Dan uh Bongino, is that how you pronounce it? Yes.
4:57
He was tagged with being on a search blacklist.
4:59
What that means is you're a fan of of Dan's, who is a former Secret Service agent who is now a right-wing conservative I could just say conservative instead of wing.
5:08
A conservative radio host, podcast host.
5:13
He was not allowed to be found in search engines for some reason.
5:17
Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative commentator, he was tagged with do not amplify.
5:21
I guess that means you can't trend into people's feeds even if they follow you.
5:27
And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a Stanford professor Jay Bhattacha rya.
5:35
Did I get it right, uh Yes, Jay Bhattacharya.
5:40
Bhatta Okay, I got it right.
5:41
Doctor Stanford School of Medicine.
5:43
And he was not allowed on the trends blacklist because he had a dissenting opinion.
5:48
A Stanford professor had a dissenting opinion.
5:54
on COVID that's turned out to be true.
5:56
And this is where the danger comes in because all of these actions were taken without any transparency.
6:04
And they were taken on one side of the aisle by people inside of Twitter essentially covertly.
6:12
No ownership of who did it and they never told the people. They gaslit them.
6:19
They could see their own tweets.
6:22
They could use the service, but they couldn't be seen even by their own fans in many cases here.
6:29
Sacks, when you look at that let's just start with that first piece.
6:33
The shadow banning as it's called in our industry where you can participate in a community, but you can't be seen.
6:41
Are any is there any circumstance under which this tool would make sense for you to deploy?
6:46
And then what's your general take on what has been discovered last night? Okay, look. Two part question.
6:52
Yes, let me start with what's been discovered here.
6:54
Let me boil it down for you.
6:56
This is an FTX level fraud.
6:56
Except that what was stolen here was not customer funds.
7:02
It was their free speech rights.
7:04
Not just the rights of people like Jay Bhattacharya and Dan Bongino to speak, but the right of the public to hear them in the way that they expected. Okay?
7:14
And you had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like the G I got it, like you know, Yoel and others saying we do not shadow ban and then they also said we certainly, this is their emphasis, do not shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint.
7:32
And what the Twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing.
7:36
They, in the same way that SBF was using FTX and customer funds as his personal piggy bank.
7:43
They were using Twitter as their personal ideological piggy bank.
7:48
They were going in to the tools and using the content moderation system, these big brother-like tools that were designed to basically put their thumb on the scale of American democracy and suppress viewpoints that they did not agree with and they did not like.
8:00
Even when even when they could not justify removing content based on their own rules.
8:08
So, there are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed where, for example, Libs of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libs of TikTok based on our hate policy.
8:20
Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it.
8:22
We're going to suppress that account anyway.
8:25
important to note what Libs of TikTok does.
8:27
This is a great talking point.
8:29
Libs of TikTok finds uh people who are trans, people who are, you know, maybe not uh LGBTQ, and they feature their TikToks, and they mock them on Twitter.
8:42
Now, this certainly is free speech, and the argument from the safety team was, by putting all of these together, you're inciting violence towards those people.
8:54
And they said they haven't broken a rule, but collectively they could be, in some way, targeting those people.
9:01
Is there anything fair, Friedberg, to that statement? That they targeted them?
9:09
By collecting their, let's say, views that are I'm I'm asking this question for discussion purposes.
9:13
I'm not giving my opinion. Jake Hal Hold on.
9:16
I want Friedberg to answer. I finish?
9:18
I I'm going to go back to you. You spoke for 2 minutes. That's why. Friedberg.
9:22
You turned down moderating today, Sachs.
9:24
You could have had the opportunity to decide who speaks.
9:25
as long as they want and I get interrupted. You got 2 minutes.
9:28
Let me just finish the SBF.
9:28
Let me just finish the SBF analogy, okay?
9:30
And then you can The filibuster continues. Go ahead.
9:33
Then you can both sides this issue. Sachs.
9:35
While you're speaking, he'll throw up one or two words on you, and then yeah, go ahead.
9:38
Why did people like Adi and Yoel deny that they were engaged in shadow banning, even though that's clearly what they were doing?
9:44
Because they knew that they had an obligation to be stewards of the public trust.
9:49
They were custodians of public trust.
9:51
They knew they were violating that trust, the same way that SBF had a duty to be custodians of his customers' funds.
10:01
They did not implement their own policy that they said they were implementing. Why?
10:05
Because they were suppressing accounts that personally offended them, that personally they disagreed with, and they wanted to deprive the public of the right to hear.
10:14
The way that they're justifying this, hold on, the way that the media is today justifying it is they're pointing to obscure provisions of the terms of use around spam accounts, things like that, saying, "Oh, well, the terms of use show that they had the right to do this."
10:27
This is like the margin account, okay?
10:30
They did not have the right to use these tools in this way, okay?
10:32
Jay Bhattacharya posting spam.
10:38
He's a Stanford professor.
10:38
A Stanford professor doesn't doesn't Yes, and a talk show radio host you disagree with has been proven correct completely.
10:44
He was opposed to lockdowns.
10:46
That was the Great Barrington Declaration, and they suppressed it.
10:50
What is the justification for that?
10:53
you have to answer my question then, Sachs, since you want to talk so much. Hold on.
10:56
Sachs, I want you to answer the question then, since you are so interested in talking.
11:02
I want him to answer one question.
11:04
Then it's going to you, Freeberg.
11:04
Sachs, should Libs of TikTok be able to collect uh trans people uh living their life, making TikToks, put them into a group feed, mock them, and if those people experience harassment because of it, is that something that Twitter should allow?
11:24
I'm asking you this without giving my opinion.
11:28
I'm curious your opinion, specifically for the Libs of TikTok since you open that door and you wanted to bring up that very thorny issue. Go.
11:36
Listen, so on on Libs of TikTok, my understanding of that account is that they only take videos that have already been made public by another account. They're all public.
11:44
So they're all in the public domain and then they repost them.
11:48
Sometimes they make a snarky comment, but usually they just let them stand on their own.
11:51
That is not a violation of free speech.
11:53
Now, the way that I think these Twitter executives have interpreted it is that they live in such a bubble and they live in with such privilege and entitlement that they think that when their point of view gets criticized or challenged, that that in and of itself is harassment. That's not.
12:13
That is public debate and they want to make themselves and their points of view immune to public debate and the way that they do that is that they claim that any criticism is harassment. It's not.
12:23
If in aggregate, final final follow-up, if in aggregate those people report being harassed and they have evidence of being harassed, what should Twitter do?
12:31
Listen, if somebody is harassed, I'm I'm fine with taking that down, but being publicly criticized or simply retweeted is not harassment, okay?
12:38
Harassment needs to be targeted and it needs to be more than just public criticism or even a snarky comment here or there.
12:47
And so you don't consider a not you know, a a daily feed of trans people being uh mocked, you don't consider that target harassment. Got it.
12:57
Don't listen to me about it.
12:57
Listen to Twitter's own Slack files about it.
12:59
They knew that the account that Libs of TikTok was not violating the rules. Yet they suppressed it.
13:06
They suspended it six times.
13:08
They knew they were on shaky ground.
13:10
They wanted to do it anyway. Why?
13:13
No, because people are experiencing harassment. That's why they did it.
13:14
But it is a thorny freedom of speech issue. I agree with you.
13:20
I think I think I think Sachs has articulated a vision for the product he wanted Twitter to be, but I don't think that's necessarily the product that they wanted to create.
13:33
It's not that Twitter set out at the time or stated clearly that they were going to be the harbinger of truth and the free speech platform for all.
13:40
I think they were really clear and they have been in their behavior and as, you know, demonstrated through this stuff that came out, which to me feels a lot like a we already knew all this stuff.
13:51
This is a bit of a nothingburger that they were curating and they were um editing and they were editorializing other people's content and the ranking of content in the same way that many other internet platforms do to create what they believe to be their best user experience for the users that they want to appeal to.
14:11
And I'll say like there there's been this long debate uh and it goes back 20 years at this point on how Google does ranking, right?
14:20
I mean, you guys may remember Jeremy Stoppelman went to DC and he complained about how Google was using his content and he wasn't being ranked high enough as Google's own content that was being shoved in the wrong place.
14:31
And there's a guy who ran kind of he was a spokesperson for the SEO, the search engine optimization rules at Google and it was always the secret at Google how did the search results get ranked?
14:43
And I can tell you it's not just a pure algorithm that there was a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual work.
14:49
In fact, the manual work gets to be the to the point that they said there's so much stuff that we know is a is the best content and the best form of content for the user experience that they ranked it all the way at the top and they called it the one box.
15:00
It's the stuff that sits above the primary search results.
15:04
And that editorialization ultimately led to a product that they intended to make because they believed it was a better user experience for the users that they wanted to service.
15:11
And I don't think that that that this is any different than what's happened at Twitter.
15:18
Twitter is not a government agency.
15:20
They're not a free speech, they're not the internet, they're a product.
15:21
And the product managers and the people that run that that product team ultimately made some editorial decisions that said, this is the content we do want to show and this is the content we don't want to show.
15:33
And they certainly did wrap up, um, you know, a bunch of rules that had a lot of leeway for what they could or couldn't do, or they gave themselves a lot of different excuses on how to do it. I don't agree with it.
15:42
It's not the product I want.
15:44
It's not the product I think, um, should exist.
15:46
I think Elon also saw that.
15:48
And clearly he stepped in and said, I want to make a product that is a different product than what is being created today.
15:54
So none of this feels to me like these guys were the guardians of the internet and they came along and they were distrustful.
16:00
They did exactly what they what a lot of other companies have done and exactly what they set out to do.
16:05
And they editorialized the product for a certain user group.
16:08
And by the way, they never blocked, they never edited people's tweets.
16:12
They changed how people's results were showing up in rankings.
16:14
They showed how viral they would get in the trend box.
16:18
Those were in-app features and in-app services.
16:20
This was not about taking someone's tweet and changing it.
16:23
And people may feel shamed and they may feel you know, uh, upset about the fact that they were deranked or they were kind of, quote, shadowbanned.
16:32
But ultimately, um, that's the product they chose to make and people have the choice and the option of going elsewhere.
16:38
And I don't agree with it.
16:40
And it's not the product I want and it's not a product I want to use.
16:43
And I certainly don't feel happy seeing it, but want to see products in you want free market to to summarize it, you want to see the free market do its job.
16:49
Chamath, you worked at Facebook.
16:52
Facebook seems to have done, I would say, an excellent job with content moderation.
16:56
I think in large part, correct me if I'm wrong, because of the real names policy.
17:02
Uh, but you tell us what you think, uh, you know, when you look at this and the 15-year history of social media and moderation.
17:10
I think moderation is incredibly difficult.
17:12
And typically what happens is early on in a company's life cycle, and I I'm going to guess that Twitter and YouTube were very similar to what we did at Facebook and it's very similar to probably what Tik Tok had to do in the early days, which is you have this massive tidal wave of usage and so you're always on a little bit of a hamster wheel and so you build these very basic tools and you uncover problems along the way.
17:40
And so I I think it's important to humanize the people that are at Twitter because I'm not sure that there are these super nefarious actors per se.
17:48
I do think that they were conflicted.
17:50
I do think that they made some very corrupting decisions, but I don't think that they were these evil actors, okay?
17:59
I think that they were folks who against the tidal wave of usage built some brittle tools, built on top of them, built on top of it some more and tried to find a way of coping and as scale increased they didn't have an opportunity to take a step back and reset.
18:15
And I think that that's true for all of these companies.
18:18
And so you're just seeing it out in the light what's happening at Twitter, but don't for a second think that any other company behaved any differently.
18:25
Google, Facebook, Twitter, ByteDance and Tik Tok, they're all the same.
18:29
They're all dealing with this problem and they're all probably trying to do a decent job of it as best as they know how.
18:36
So, what do we do from here is the question, okay?
18:40
The reason somebody needs to do something about this is summarized really elegantly in this Jay Bhattacharya tweet.
18:46
So, please Nick, just throw it up here so that we can just talk about this.
18:52
This is why I think that this issue is important. Critically. This is a perfect tweet.
18:58
Still trying to process my emotions on learning that Twitter blacklisted me.
19:02
Okay, who cares about that? Here's what matters.
19:03
The thought that will keep me up tonight censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures, and a generation of children were hurt.
19:17
Now, just think about that in a nutshell.
19:20
What was Jay Bhattacharya to do?
19:20
Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok.
19:25
Maybe he was supposed to go on YouTube and create a video.
19:27
Maybe he was supposed to go on Facebook and, you know, post into a Facebook group or or do a newsfeed post.
19:36
The the the problem is that and the odds are reasonably likely that a lot of these companies had very similar policies.
19:42
In this example, around COVID misinformation, because it was the CDC and, you know, governmental organizations directing, you know, information and rules reaching out to all of these companies, right?
19:55
So, we're just seeing an insight into Twitter, but the point is it happened everywhere.
20:00
The implication of suppressing information like this is that a credible individual like that can't spark a public debate.
20:09
And in not being able to spark the debate, you have this building up of errors in the system. And then who gets hurt?
20:17
In this example, which is true, is like you couldn't even talk about school closures and masking up front and early in the system.
20:24
If you had scientists actually debate it, maybe what would have happened is we would have kept the schools open and you would have had less learning loss and you'd have less depression and less over prescription of, you know, Ritalin and Adderall, cuz those are all factual things we can measure today.
20:40
So, I think the important thing to take away from all of this is we've got confirmatory evidence that whether they're, you know, these folks under a tidal wave of pressure made some really bad decisions.
20:55
And the implications are pretty broad-reaching.
20:58
And now I do think governments have to step in and create better guardrails so this kind of stuff doesn't happen.
21:03
I don't buy the whole, it's a, you know, private company, they can do what they want.
21:09
I think that that is too naive of an expectation for how important these three companies literally are to how Americans consume and process information to make decisions. Incredibly well said.
21:21
Sach, your reaction to your besties.
21:25
I largely agree with what Chamath said, but let's go back to what Friedberg said, because I think what Friedberg's point of view is is really what you're hearing now from the mainstream media today, which is, oh, nothing to see here.
21:35
You know, that they told us all along what was happening.
21:37
This was just content moderation.
21:39
They have the right to do this.
21:40
You're making a big deal over nothing. No, that's not true.
21:42
Go back and look at the media coverage starting in 2018.
21:45
Article after article said that this idea of shadow banning was a right-wing conspiracy theory. That's what they said.
21:53
Furthermore, Jack Dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening, including at a congressional hearing, I believe under oath.
21:59
So, either he lied or he was lied to by his subordinates.
22:04
I actually believe that the latter is possible.
22:06
I think I don't think it's true with SBF.
22:08
It might be true with Jack, cuz he's so checked out.
22:11
Furthermore, you had people again like Vijaya Gadde again tweeting and repeatedly stating, we do not shadow ban, we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint.
22:20
So, these people were denying exactly what their critics were saying.
22:25
They were accusing their critics of being conspiracy theorists.
22:28
Now that the thing is proven, the mountain of evidence has dropped, they're saying, oh, well, this is old news.
22:34
This was known a long time ago.
22:36
No, it was not known a long time ago. It was disputed by you.
22:38
And now finally it's proven.
22:41
And you're trying to say it's not a big deal. It is a big deal.
22:45
It's a violation of the public trust.
22:47
And if you were so proud of your content moderation policies, why didn't you admit what you were doing in the first place? That's well said.
22:56
good that Elon's running this business now?
22:58
I mean, like, the things that you're concerned about as a user, as someone who cares about the public's access to knowledge, uh to opinions, uh to free speech.
23:10
This has got to be a a good change, right?
23:11
Like this has come to light.
23:11
It's clearly going to get resolved.
23:14
Everyone's going to move forward.
23:14
I mean, do you think that there's penalties needed for the people that work there?
23:17
Or like, what what what's the the anger? Cuz cuz you won.
23:19
Like like look, I think we got I think we basically got extremely lucky Yeah.
23:26
that Elon Musk happened to care about free speech and decided to do something about it and actually had the means to do something about it.
23:32
He's just about the only billionaire who has that level of means, who actually cared enough to take on this battle.
23:39
I think you saying that this is a harbinger for other platforms? praise for that.
23:43
But I mean, unless Elon can buy every single tech company, which he clearly can't, I think you guys are right.
23:50
This is happening a lot of other tech companies.
23:53
about to rewrite the government The United States government is going to make an attempt to rewrite Section 230.
24:00
I think that what this does is put a very fine point on a comment that Elon actually tweeted out.
24:05
And Nick, if you could find that, please.
24:06
That's a very good tweet.
24:07
Where he said, "Going forward, you will be able to see if you were shadowbanned.
24:12
You were able to see if you were deboosted, why, and be able to appeal."
24:17
And I think that that concept, to be very honest with you, should be enshrined in law.
24:24
And I think that should be part of the Section 230 rewrite.
24:26
And all of these media companies and all of these social media companies should be subject to it.
24:34
And the reason is because it ties a lot of these concepts together and says, "Look, you can build a service.
24:39
You're a private company.
24:41
Make as much money as you want.
24:43
But we're going to have some connective tissue back to the fundamental underpinnings of the Constitution, which is the framework under which we all live.
24:51
And we're going to transparently allow you to understand it.
24:54
And I think that's really reasonable.
24:55
Make that a legal expectation of all these organizations.
24:59
And by the way, and by the way, sorry, the companies the companies will love it because I think it's super hard for you to be in these companies and they probably are like take this responsibility off my plate. It's just very simple.
25:09
This is a there's there's really four problems that occurred here.
25:13
Number one, there was no transparency.
25:17
The people who were shadow banned, taken out of search, etc. , they did not know.
25:23
If they were told and it was clear to users, we could have a discussion about was that a fair judgment or not.
25:28
In the cases we've seen so far from Bari Weiss's reporting in the Twitter files part duh, it's very clear that these were not justifiable.
25:37
Number two, these were not evenly enforced.
25:40
It's very clear that one side we cuz we don't have one example of a a person on the left being censored.
25:50
When we if we do, then we can put balls and strikes together and we can say how many people on one side versus how many people on the other.
25:57
It's pretty clear what happened here.
25:58
Because these all occurred with a group of people working at Twitter, which is 96 or 97% left-leaning.
26:06
The statistics are clear.
26:09
Number three, the shadow banning and the search banning, and I think this is something we talked about previously, Chamath, it feels very underhanded. This was your point.
26:18
If we're going to block people, they should be blocked and they should know why.
26:22
The fourth piece of this, which is absolutely infuriating, and this is a discussion that myself, Sachs, and and Elon have had many times about this moderation.
26:33
I'm not speaking out of school now because he's now very public with his position.
26:37
And you know, his position he came to on his own.
26:39
It's it's not like this is Sachs and I, you know, coming up with these positions.
26:43
This is why Elon bought the business.
26:47
If you really want to intellectually test your thinking on this, and I am a moderate who's left-leaning.
26:53
I can tell you there's a simple way for anybody who is debating the validity of the concerns here.
27:01
Imagine Rachel Maddow or Ezra Klein or whoever your favorite left-leaning pundit is was shadow banned by a group of right-wing moderators who were acting covertly and without any transparency.
27:14
How would you feel if Maddow reporting on you know, uh all the Russian coordination with Trump's campaign did this or Ezra Klein with whatever topics he covers.
27:26
And you will very quickly find yourself infuriated.
27:31
And you should then intellectually, as we say on this program, steel manning.
27:35
If you argue the other side, it's infuriating for either side to experience this.
27:38
And that is what the 230 change needs to be, Chamath. You're exactly correct.
27:44
If you make a an action, it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet.
27:48
And if you click on the question mark, you should see when the action was taken, by who, you know, which department maybe, maybe not the person so they they get personally attacked.
27:57
And then what the resolution to it is.
27:59
This has been banned because it's targeted harassment.
28:01
This can be resolved in this way.
28:03
Then everybody's behavior would steer towards whatever the stated purpose of that social network is.
28:10
You can get better behavior by making the rules clear.
28:13
By making the rules unclear and making it unfair, you create this insane situation. Go ahead, Chamath.
28:23
And that's why I'm infuriated about it.
28:24
I think you have to take it one step further to really do justice to why this should be important to everybody.
28:29
And I do think this school example, it really matters to me.
28:33
Like we have like I don't know now.
28:35
We know what the counterfactual is which which is that we have I mean, we've relegated our children to a bunch of years of really complicated relearning and learning that they never had to go through because of all the learning loss they gave them.
28:51
But what if Jay Bhattacharya, who's I mean like you can't be more, you know, have a higher sort of role in society in terms of, you know, population I mean, imagine if if, you know, there was a platform where he could have actually said this and then, you know, people would have clamored and said, "You know what?
29:07
You and Fauci need to get to the bottom of this."
29:09
Or where legislators could have seen it and said, "You know what?
29:13
Before we make a decision like this, maybe hey Fauci, go talk to Jay because he's a Stanford prof.
29:18
He's probably not an idiot. Why does he think that?"
29:20
Or maybe let's convene, you know, an actual group of 20 or 30 scientists.
29:25
And the fact that this one version of thinking about things was deemed so heterodoxical, it is just such a good example because you an important conversation.
29:37
know that the decision was so wrong and the damage was so severe. Yeah.
29:42
So we know what happened by suppressing that speech. And that's one example.
29:47
Well, it's in in my in my estimation, it is the silver bullet example that cleans through all of this other stuff because, you know, I don't really care if Rachel Maddow, Ezra Klein, who the hell cares?
29:56
This is important stuff because it affects everybody irrespective of your political persuasion and what editorial you want to read.
30:01
Chamath, what if the investigation into the Catholic Church and the abuses that occurred there, somebody said, "Oh, this person it needs to be shut down."
30:10
And then children are molested for another decade.
30:12
By the way, we have an example of that.
30:13
Sinéad O'Connor came out on SNL, look it up for if you're under 40 years old, and said fight the real enemy.
30:19
She ripped up a picture of the Pope because of the scandals there. She was excommunicated.
30:22
She was canceled at that time.
30:25
One of the first people to be canceled cuz she spoke truth to power.
30:27
What if somebody, an investigative journalist at The New York Times, The Boston Globe's or in the movie Spotlight, those are the people who broke the story of the Catholic Church.
30:36
If somebody came in and the Catholic Church put pressure on a social network and said, "Hey, you You put this stuff up here.
30:40
You can't have this situation of a Here's Here's Here's another example. It's infuriating.
30:44
Why are we shutting down discussions in America?
30:46
Remember the Vietnam papers?
30:47
because J Cal, the media the media does not value transparency anymore.
30:50
If you go back and look at the way that the media portrays itself, like in the movie The Post, which is about the revelations about the Catholic Church, or you go back to All the President's Men.
30:59
What the media prized and what they congratulated themselves on was first of all transparency and exposing the lies of the powerful people.
31:10
Well, that is exactly what has happened here.
31:11
The lies of the powerful group of people who were running Twitter policy and suppressing one side of the debate has been exposed and the media is treating it with a yawn, like there's nothing to see here. Why?
31:24
Because they were complicit in this.
31:26
They were complicit in suppressing the views of people like Jay Bhattacharya.
31:30
They were complicit in choosing the views of Fauci and the elite on COVID.
31:35
And so they have no interest now in bringing and in making in making what's happened here at Twitter fully transparent. to own it.
31:43
And I think by the way, just a just a quick correction there.
31:45
I think Sachs, when you said The Post, Washington Post, Watergate. Spotlight, exactly.
31:50
Oh, I might have been thinking about Spotlight, sorry.
31:51
It was maybe it was Spotlight instead of The Post. Okay.
31:54
But like but The Post is another example.
31:55
That that movie was about another event like this which could have been easily suppressed in today's world, much harder there, which was the Pentagon Papers.
32:03
And in that world, you know, there was an immense amount of pressure that the government put on The Washington Post, but then they said, "You know what? We're going with it."
32:11
and they still published it.
32:11
And it created a groundswell of support to really re-examine the Vietnam War and it had a huge impact.
32:18
But could you imagine this time around, which is like, "Hey guys, there's going to be some kind of misinformation, you know, these Pentagon Papers are not real.
32:23
It's It's coming from the Russians. Suppress it."
32:27
And nobody could It's so much easier now to run this play.
32:29
What journalists need to realize is that today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer Prizes. On to you, Sach.
32:38
Not in the current media environment.
32:40
They work for these corporations and they don't get rewarded for telling the truth. Oh, no.
32:45
They They They're going for Pulitzers. Trust me, they are.
32:47
And what they need to do is stop thinking short-term and think long-term.
32:50
Anytime there's a conspiracy theory, you must give it some validity and say, "Is there any truth here?"
32:59
Because it could in fact be a scandal that's being covered up.
33:02
And you can take the approach of shutting down everyone.
33:05
They're involved in the cover-up right now. This is a cover-up. I agree.
33:08
I'm in agreement with you.
33:09
Let's bring the first batch of Twitter files into the conversation, the one that Matt Taibbi exposed.
33:13
What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of, you know, of of FBI agents and former security state officials.
33:30
So, this has now been exposed.
33:32
There was no legitimate basis for suppressing that story. It was true.
33:37
It was a respected publication. They did it anyway.
33:39
This is election interference.
33:42
You know, the same people who pride themselves on strengthening democracy are engaged in this wide-scale censorship of one side of the political debate, including of true stories before an election, and then they puff out their chest and say, "We're protecting democracy."
33:58
They're not protecting democracy.
33:59
They're interfering with democracy.
34:01
They're interfering with the public's right to know.
34:05
And then we look at a country like China and we say, "We're so much better than them because they've got this problem over there where the state and Big Tech are colluding to create a Big Brother-like system." Well, what is this?
34:16
What are these tools that have been exposed?
34:18
This is a Big Brother-like system.
34:21
Okay, yeah, but just you have to I I know you want to make it like an equivalency.
34:24
It's less than a 1% equivalency because in our society, we can have moments like this and we can have investigations.
34:30
So, just to to put it in perspective look Jacob, I don't think we're equivalent, but what I'm saying is that this is very much like a big brother social credit system.
34:41
Yes, it should be an alarm bell should be going off.
34:44
This should be an alarm bell going off.
34:46
didn't decide, just we had this one idiosyncratic billionaire who believes in free speech.
34:51
If Elon decided to take this on, we would never have known this stuff.
34:55
Okay, tell me what happened in between these two things.
34:57
There is an attorney at uh Twitter.
35:01
I I and I don't know the details of this.
35:03
Uh I do not work for I do not work for I do not work for the Twitter Corporation.
35:06
I do not speak for the Twitter Corporation.
35:07
Sachs does not work for the Twitter Corporation and does not speak for it.
35:09
But there was in between these two drops something that happened. Yes.
35:14
So, basically what was discovered, and this is all just publicly reported, is that a former FBI lawyer named Jim Baker had now become deputy general counsel um at Twitter.
35:27
And this guy Jim Baker is like the Zelig of the whole Russian collusion hoax.
35:29
He was involved in the um in the FISA warrants that were that the FBI applied to the FISA courts that had had all the errors and omissions.
35:38
He was involved in the Alpha Bank hoax.
35:41
He was the guy that that Perkins uh Coie lawyer Sussman was feeding this like uh phony uh phony scam to.
35:51
And he I don't think he was officially sanctioned, but basically he was asked to leave the FBI.
35:57
And then lo and behold, where does he land? At Twitter.
36:02
And he is involved in their content moderation policies.
36:03
I think what it shows is how deeply intertwined our big tech companies have become with the security state.
36:12
Now, how did this get exposed?
36:12
Well, Bari Weiss was basically uh putting forward document requests for this for the latest batch of Twitter files, and she wasn't getting anything back.
36:24
And she's like, "What's going on here?"
36:27
And the guy who's giving her the files is his name is Jim.
36:30
And she's like, "Well, wait. Like, wait. Jim Jim who?"
36:32
And she finds out, "Wait, Jim Baker? Wait, that Jim Baker?"
36:37
That you know, New York Post had a long story about this guy.
36:40
And so, it was discovered that the guy who was curating the Twitter files was this former operative of the FBI who was involved in the Russian collusion hoax and then was involved in their their blacklist decisions.
36:57
So, in any event, once this came out Twitter fired him.
37:02
And then, you know Bari apparently received all of these files that are now the the second batch of the Twitter files.
37:09
And just to be clear, that's not James Baker if you're, you know, thinking it's the former Reagan cabinet member. Not James Baker.
37:18
This is Jim Baker who's a different person. Right.
37:20
But a lot of people are wondering, "Well, how could this have been missed?"
37:22
Listen, He's an FBI ex-FBI These guys don't want to be found.
37:24
I mean, they they This is Some people call it you know, the permanent Washington establishment.
37:30
Some people call it the deep state.
37:32
The administrations come and go.
37:34
The people who work in Washington stay there forever.
37:36
And they can simply effectuate policy by outlasting everybody else and clandestinely implementing what they believe.
37:42
And they've become a constituency of their own that exercises power like a praetorian guard in Washington.
37:49
So, in any event, this guy is an expert at bull weeviling himself Great.
37:57
Praetorian guard bull weevil You're on fire right So, hold on a second. Wait. So, hold on a second.
38:02
So, when they finally Hold on a second.
38:04
When they finally rooted When they finally rooted this this mole out of the FBI, he bull weevils himself into another powerful bureaucracy. What is that word? Bull weevil? Bull weevil. Bull weevil? Bull weevil. Like burrows. Like burrows. Yeah. that.
38:22
So What are we even He he he digs his way into the Twitter bureaucracy to the point where he isn't even found and then somehow he has put himself in the position to be intermediating the Twitter files. Can you believe this?
38:39
So once this once it was discovered A unit of the Imperial Roman Army that served as personal bodyguards and intelligence agents.
38:44
The Praetorian Guard, okay. Got it.
38:47
Well, you you understand what happened is is that the Praetorian Guard originated because they were to defend the life of the emperor and that what happened.
38:54
That then they became so powerful that that whoever bribed the Praetorians would become emperor and then finally the last step is that the Praetorians themselves would pick the emperor and whoever basically led the Praetorian Guard would be the next emperor.
39:09
Any event, I mean, we're not we're not at that point yet, but the point is look the point is that these security state officials have power that they should not have, okay? That's the bottom line.
39:21
They should not be involved in our elections in this way.
39:24
They should be completely non-partisan and non-political.
39:28
They should just do their jobs as law enforcement officials, but we know from the Hunter Biden story that a very important piece of this was the pre-bunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said be on the lookout for a story about Hunter Biden, it is Russian disinformation and they primed these social networks to suppress that story when it came out.
39:50
That was something they never should have done and they knew they knew the story was not fake, they knew it was not Russian disinformation because they had the laptop in their possession since 2019.
39:59
well, okay, that has not the providence of the laptop is still being reviewed in fairness and there's still an Hold on. You're wrong.
40:06
And there is an investigation going on of Hunter Biden.
40:08
You also have to put the context in here and please let me finish.
40:12
There is a context here of there was massive election uh interference going on both sides of the aisle, Republicans, Democrats, all wanted to see the Russian interference and the Ukrainian interference and Trump's encouraging the Ukraine and the Republican the the Russians to interfere in elections.
40:28
Everybody was on high alert and that happened to drop uh like it was announced 30 days before and it dropped 10 days before the election.
40:35
So, everybody was on high alert and I agree it was not done properly. Hold on. Let me finish.
40:38
It should have been done It should have been done properly.
40:44
They should have said They should have come out public and say, "We don't know the providence of this. It could be hacked. It might not be hacked." Jason and you. Let's wait and see.
40:52
We have to reserve judgment. No, listen.
40:54
Let me tell you what happened.
40:55
Let me just tell you what happened, okay?
40:56
So, they used you source this. I will.
40:59
So, look, it's all in the New York Post, okay?
41:02
They've done a No, it Nobody has refuted it. Nobody has refuted it.
41:06
Let me just tell you what happened.
41:07
No, let me just get Let me just get this on the record here. So, from the post.
41:12
The FBI was given the laptop in 2019 by the laptop store owner.
41:17
Those guys have forensics. They have cyber experts.
41:20
They knew the laptop was real. We know it's real now. Nobody questions that.
41:23
In fact, the FBI has admitted that the laptop was real and that the the Hunter Biden files are real.
41:29
Nobody disputes that, okay?
41:29
But what they did before the election is they used this excuse of Russian disinformation to discredit the story before it even came out.
41:38
They had no business getting involved in the story that way. They simply didn't.
41:41
They should have stayed out of it completely.
41:45
I don't I don't I don't understand how you can possibly justify that.
41:48
Yeah, I mean, I think we do have to look at the context of that time period when Hillary's emails were hacked and we had a president That's why it's a perfect excuse.
41:55
Uh well, let me finish the sentence.
41:55
And we had a president, which you will agree, our presidents and presidential candidates should not be encouraging foreign powers to hack their uh their adversaries. Do you agree with that? Do you agree with that? Answer my question.
42:08
Do you agree that presidential president it. Answer the question.
42:11
Why do you have to divert?
42:12
I know what you're doing.
42:12
You're going to personally attack me. No, I'm not. Personally attack me.
42:15
Just answer the question.
42:16
Should This is your election denial of for 2016.
42:18
You're still wrapped up on this. You can't let it go.
42:21
Again, you personally attack me.
42:21
You don't answer the question. That's fine. We'll move on.
42:24
You can't be intellectually honest. That's fine.
42:25
The audience knows you're not being intellectually honest.
42:28
You don't even know what you're talking about.
42:29
If you could answer the simple question, should presidents encourage foreign powers to hack their adversaries, then you would be being intellectually dishonest.
42:36
I am absolutely disappointed that you will not answer that simple question. It's an obvious yes. It's an obvious yes.
42:43
We don't want people doing that.
42:45
Of course, but of course but I don't really believe that happened.
42:45
I don't really believe that happened.
42:48
You know Trump's going to win the primary. Let's keep going.
42:51
Uh China has Honestly, I don't know Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Listen.
42:53
I I don't I've said so many times in this show that he's not my candidate.
42:57
I don't know what you're talking about.
42:58
You're going all the way back.
42:59
Listen, you're going all the way back.
43:02
What you're doing right now is like delusional.
43:03
You're going back to some throwaway comment he made at a rally in 2016.
43:06
It's got nothing, absolutely nothing to do with this story.
43:09
And the fact you even bringing it up is like pure TDS.
43:12
And I don't want to waste any time talking about it.
43:15
You're name-calling instead of answering a question. That's your technique.
43:17
Your technique is to call me names instead of answering the question. un-muddy the waters.
43:22
I want to make one more point about this Hunter Biden thing.
43:25
That's that I'm muddying the waters.
43:25
I'm not muddying the waters.
43:26
You're not answering the question. Let's move on. Let's move on.
43:30
I want to make one final point.
43:32
Okay, I'll make a final point if you want. a letter.
43:33
Listen, there was a letter with this Hunter Biden thing. Mhm.
43:37
This is 2020 election adjacent.
43:37
We're not going back two elections ago.
43:39
I want to talk about the most recent one. Okay, fine. You had Clapper. You had Comey.
43:42
You had 50 of these security state officials.
43:46
They write a letter saying that the Hunter Biden story has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
43:51
They claimed that it was Russian disinformation when it wasn't. They knew it wasn't.
43:55
And it was the same story that the FBI was telling Twitter.
44:00
And it was the same story that these Twitter executives were indulging in.
44:03
Even though they all knew or had reason to know it wasn't true.
44:08
And they suppressed the New York Post story anyway.
44:10
I don't know why you're bringing up this Trump stuff.
44:11
It has nothing to do with the real issue here.
44:16
The real Hold on a second. The real issue is this.
44:17
Does social media have the right to suppress true stories put out by our media before the month before an election? Yes or no?
44:28
I I I'll answer your question. that?
44:29
I I will answer your question yes or no and you will not answer mine because you're being intellectually dishonest.
44:33
Yes, we should No, we should not suppress new stories.
44:36
If it was and I will argue both sides.
44:38
If it was Snowden, if it was the Pentagon Papers, if it's Hunter Biden's laptop taking out the sex stuff which we both agree on, or if it is uh Russia and uh Ukraine where your presidential candidate at the time, Trump, asked Zelensky to find dirt on Biden before the election and he asked the Russians to hack Hillary's email and they did that and they released it 10 days before the election.
45:04
That is facts that happened and that is the context. not what this was. you would let me speak.
45:08
You said you would let me speak.
45:11
And you will let me speak.
45:12
You're muddying the waters.
45:13
No, stop interrupting me and stop insulting me.
45:15
I will say my part, you said yours, and then we will move on.
45:20
The fact is Trump encouraged hacking of other candidates and he did it twice in a four-year period back-to-back elections.
45:30
We need to be on high alert when you have a Republican candidate, Trump, doing something so absolutely treasonous.
45:41
This is why it was a perfect cover story.
45:42
This is why it was a perfect cover story is because But you won't address the treasonous behavior. Let's move on.
45:48
I I don't think it was a perfect phone call.
45:50
I think it was There were a lot of shenanigans.
45:52
There were a lot of shenanigans, okay?
45:53
I'm not going to be Hold on.
45:55
I'm not defending anything Trump did, okay?
45:56
I don't feel the need, okay? I never defended it.
45:58
But here But the deal is that you're letting your TDS justify, come on, you're letting you're you're allowing this Russian disinformation to be a cover story for what they all did.
46:13
You're you're you're misconstruing are you even bringing this up?
46:15
It was not Russian disinformation.
46:21
The context made it a great cover story.
46:23
That's your interpretation.
46:23
The The context also is everybody was on high alert waiting for a hack to drop and in fact a hack dropped 10 days before.
46:30
You have to acknowledge it.
46:33
Okay, we found out subsequently it was a hack.
46:35
That's why they're using it to be down.
46:38
They knew it at the point.
46:39
Twitter and Facebook did not know.
46:40
Twitter and Facebook didn't know. That's the point.
46:43
They did not hold on a second.
46:43
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Taibbi in the go back to the Twitter files, the first drop.
46:49
Jim Baker, hold on a second.
46:49
Jim Baker and Vijaya Gadde said, okay, that there were in a lot of internal questions about whether that that Hunter Biden story could be justified under the hacked Yes. policy, okay?
47:01
And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maintain that party line.
47:08
And the emerging view is that they could no longer maintain that line.
47:12
And still Gadde and Jim Baker said, "No, we will maintain the idea that this was hacked information until proven otherwise."
47:20
Even though it was not hacked, it was a New York Post story. Okay, let's move on.
47:23
We're going to agree to disagree. Let's move on.
47:25
Why are you bringing up all this like irrelevant stuff?
47:28
The audience and the other besties want us to move on. So, let's move on.
47:29
China ends most zero COVID rules and Iran might be abolishing its morality police news broke in the past week.
47:36
On Wednesday, China's health authorities overhauled its zero COVID policy and announced a 10-point national plan that scrapped most health code tracking and also they're rolling back their mass testing and this allowed many positive cases to just simply quarantine at home like we were doing I guess a year ago now and uh they're limiting some of these uh lockdowns.
48:01
This all comes from a Foxconn letter, which we don't know the cause causation here.
48:07
Does Does it Does it Well, we don't know.
48:08
That's why I just said we don't know cause and correlation here.
48:11
Give give us some perspective here, Chamath.
48:14
Well, I just think it's kind of ridiculous to assume that the second largest economy in the world pivots based on one letter from one CEO.
48:23
So, I know that that's how the Western Describe the letter, please. Yeah.
48:29
Well, apparently what happened was Terry Gou, who's colloquially known as Uncle Terry, who's the CEO of Foxconn, wrote a letter that essentially said, you know, if we don't figure out a way to get out of these pande- this this lockdown process, we're going to lose um you know, our leadership in the global supply chain.
48:47
And apparently that jolted the Central Planning Commission to realize that they needed to, you know, get out of these lockdown.
48:53
I think it's something different, which is I think this has been part and parcel of a very focused and dedicated plan by Xi.
49:02
Phase one was to consolidate power.
49:06
Phase two was to get through November, and to basically get reappointed for life, and dispel any other, you know, rivals that he actually had.
49:17
And now phase three is just to reopen the economy again, so this guy can basically sit on top of the second largest economy in the world.
49:25
So, I think this is sort of a natural uh flow of things.
49:30
The other part of it, which I think is being underreported, is I think that the way in which they did it was less responsive, in my opinion, to a letter from Uncle Terry, but was more responsive to the fact that there are people on the ground.
49:41
And I think that these guys are getting very sophisticated in understanding how to give the Chinese people some part of what they want, so that they're roughly happy enough to keep moving forward.
49:53
And I'm not going to morally judge whether it's right or wrong, but it's just a comment on what the game play and the game theory seems to be coming from the leadership of China.
50:03
So, it's just I think this is it's it's it's good for the Chinese people, and the real question is what will it mean for the US economy if these guys get their get their economy going again.
50:13
We talked about this previously, but this is a good example of the autocrat not necessarily being absolute in in their authority.
50:28
And the sense that I think we get at this point coming out of China is that there was enough dissent from the populace on the lockdown and the experience of the lockdowns.
50:38
And we can all go online and see the videos of steel bars being put on doors to keep people in their apartment buildings and people screaming and buildings being on fire.
50:47
People can't escape the buildings.
50:49
How much of that was true or not and and riots in the street and people fighting with the COVID testers.
50:52
How much of it is true or not, we don't really know.
50:58
But it certainly seems to indicate that there was enough dissent and enough unrest that in order to stay in power, the CCP had to take action and they have to shift their position and shift their tone.
51:08
And I think it's a really important moment to observe that sometimes the CCP and you know, perhaps even we can extend this into other autocratic regimes that we think are absolute in their authority and their in power and their power perhaps are necessarily influenced by the people that they are there to govern and that they are you know, ruling over.
51:32
And that while we don't think about these places as democracies perhaps they're not entirely the traditionally defined autocracy.
51:44
That there is the an influence that the people can have.
51:46
And maybe we see the same change happening in Iran with young people and a population that's more modern, that's growing and swelling in size, that doesn't want to accept some of the traditional norms and the traditional laws.
52:00
And, you know, maybe that will kind of start to resonate around the world that the internet is starting to do what everyone hoped and wanted it to do, which is the democratization of information, the democratization of seeing other people's conditions, and seeing what the rest of the world is and is like.
52:15
Gives the populace the ability to rise up and to say, "This is what we want, because we know that there are better things out there."
52:24
And these autocratic regimes have to start to shift slightly.
52:26
And over time, maybe that has a real impact.
52:28
Here's a specific statistic and chart for everybody.
52:32
The demographics of uh Iran are incredibly um notable.
52:37
If you look at this uh chart, uh for those of you listening, it just shows uh people by age and how many what percentage of the population they are, uh or actually the raw numbers of the population.
52:47
As you can see, it's basically like a pear.
52:49
Uh you have very few old people, and you have a lot of people in their 20s and younger.
52:53
And so, young people Jason. It's really 40s and 30s.
52:57
It's really where the So, 40s, 30s.
53:01
Uh you you don't have the geriatric population that you see in other countries like Japan.
53:06
Um and so, the demographics of Iran are extremely uh weighted towards younger people, millennials, Gen Xers, and younger.
53:18
And uh they have VPNs, virtual private networks.
53:20
They can see everything happening uh in the free world, uh versus uh let's say closed societies.
53:27
And so, I think that's what gives me a lot of hope, is that these countries are going to have to evolve, because young people are seeing how the rest of the world lives.
53:36
And I I I think that's a big part of the change.
53:37
Tim O'Malley, what are your thoughts? About Iran specifically?
53:42
I think the demographic change and then China and demographic change / I've said this I've said this before and I've been tweeting about this for years, but people so poorly understand demographics.
53:52
Everybody thinks that we have a surplus of people and we don't.
53:57
And we need to have a positive birth rate in order to kind of continue to support the expansion of the world and GDP and we need that.
54:02
And right now we're not in that situation.
54:06
If you look at a country by country basis, a lot of these countries um are facing that in a pretty cataclysmic way.
54:12
The most sensitive country to this is China.
54:16
I mean, their population get current course and speed.
54:20
I think the last number is it's going to have by 2100.
54:24
There'll be about 600 million people in China.
54:27
Which is unbelievably disruptive in a very negative way for them. Right?
54:31
Because you will have a lot of people who are entering the workforce having to support an entire cohort of people above them in terms of age, right? Who are retired, etc.
54:41
So, the state's going to have to get much, much more actively involved over the next 50 years in China.
54:47
And then you look at other countries like Nigeria or India who are in uh you know, at the beginning of what could be a multi-decade boom.
54:54
Because you have 20-year-olds that will be entering the workforce, you know, they'll effectively work for less than their older counterparts, right?
55:01
So, then they'll be an incentive then to bring work on shore into those countries.
55:09
And so, it's going to have huge impacts because then you have rising GDP, you'll have rising expectations of living quality, you'll have rising expectations of how governments treat those people.
55:18
So, it's all kind of positive in general, but the world needs more people.
55:23
Let's just be clear, especially in Western countries.
55:25
We are in going to be Not we're not as badly off as China, but we're not far behind.
55:31
Yeah, here's a quick view of China and Japan.
55:32
If you just Yeah, these same kind of I don't know what they exactly call these charts are kind of like vertical histograms, but you know, you start and again, you know, data's hard to come by in some countries, but you know, China's starting to get top-heavy uh when compared to Iran.
55:45
And then if you look at Japan, quite stunning.
55:49
There's just no young people left.
55:49
And uh they live very uh to much older ages in Japan.
55:54
This is longevity is uh one of their great strengths as a population, as a country.
55:59
And so these demographics can't be fought.
56:01
Uh you're going to have a constriction constricting economy in Japan.
56:06
And their place in the world is going to be very very different.
56:11
Okay, where do we want to go to next?
56:13
You never ask my opinion on on uh what's on these protests in China.
56:16
you just talk, so go ahead.
56:16
I didn't want to I didn't know if I could approach you.
56:20
No, I usually have to fight to give my opinion. Oh, here we go.
56:23
Listen, have your agent call my agent, we'll talk about it. Okay.
56:25
Uh we'll talk about it at the Well, I have a slightly I have a slightly I have a slightly different view of of what's happening in China, uh Jason, which is, you know, I think that the people there need to stop harassing the CCP.
56:36
You see, the Chinese Communist Party, they're the elites.
56:39
They've set things up for the benefit of the people.
56:43
They're not engaged in shadow banning.
56:45
They're just you know, they have a system there to you know, to engage in censorship to prevent abuse and harm. Yeah. Right?
56:52
That's the system they've set up, right? Yeah.
56:56
And the people just need to understand that that when they say things like, you know, when they oppose things like COVID lockdowns, like Jay Bhattacharya did, they need to understand that that is engaging in abuse and harm. Exactly. Yes. And you know what?
57:09
They they've provided reeducation camps for citizens who need, you know, to um maybe rethink their positions on freedom and their wages, the hours they work, uh and their and their social conditions.
57:22
You're you're absolutely correct.
57:23
China really has built a perfect model for a society.
57:25
Uh well well said, Sachs. Great. Now we can move forward. Let's go. Now we can move forward.
57:31
We are finally in agreement.
57:33
the way, you Well, you you understand, right?
57:38
According to according to our elites, according to our elites, Joel Roth or Taylor Lorenz, to criticize them is a form of harassment.
57:50
You understand that, right?
57:50
So, therefore, what the people in China are doing, specifically by opposing lockdowns, Mhm.
57:56
you know, they're taking the Jayaprakash point of view.
57:58
They're engaging in harm and abuse and harassment of their betters, of their elites.
58:06
Why won't they just submit to the social credit system that has been set up for them for their benefit. It's for their benefit. Why question it? Yeah, just accept.
58:15
Accept your fate and work hard for the good of the people. Great great points. Let's move forward.
58:21
Should we talk about sales tax?
58:22
I think it's actually a pretty it's a it's pretty good satire. I agree. All right.
58:26
I I think we have to talk about FTX.
58:27
I I don't know if you saw and I the people covering for SBF it continues to be an absolute joke.
58:36
The number of interviews that SBF is doing is absurd, but the people carrying water for him is is is even more offensive.
58:44
I mean, if you're a criminal trying to cover up your crime, okay, we get it.
58:50
You're trying to cover up and stay out of jail.
58:53
But Kevin O'Leary, who calls himself Mr.
58:57
Wonderful, was on CNBC trying to defend the fact that he was given this is stunning, by the way, 15 [ __ ] million dollars to be a spokesperson for FTX.
59:10
So, the grift not only went to the press, politicians, but now commentators on CNBC. 15 million dollars.
59:20
To put that in context, I mean, you're talking what an elite NBA player gets from Nike.
59:27
This not exist in the world.
59:27
Uh you know, Kevin O'Leary might get, you know, 50 to 200k for speaking gigs, but nobody gets $15 million to show.
59:36
Here's a 75-second clip that I don't know if you've all have seen, but is unbelievably stunning.
59:43
See on the other side of 75 seconds.
59:47
If you're a defense attorney that represents someone that you know is guilty, you got to say, "Yeah, well, they're innocent."
59:52
But you may know they're guilty.
59:54
You may know they're guilty.
59:54
If you find someone If you watch someone kill someone, yeah, they're innocent. Don't ruin their life.
1:00:00
There's only the murder of my money in this case, okay?
1:00:02
It's It's murder of of FTX's money, in my view.
1:00:06
Everybody's Look, Joe, if you Cuz it was FTX's money that you got.
1:00:08
I don't I don't even I don't think you should be singing the blues right now at all.
1:00:13
Oh, yes, I'm singing the blues. Why?
1:00:15
Because your $15 million didn't pay an out that you That's a lot of money to Hey, listen, I'm a paid spokesperson. It's a lot of money.
1:00:19
You didn't have to do much for that.
1:00:21
That's pretty That's found money, okay? discussion.
1:00:23
That's a different discussion.
1:00:24
I you know, you can make that decision on your own, but I'm going to this point that if you want to say he's guilty before he's tried, I just don't understand it.
1:00:33
But it may end up costing you 15 for for reputation and everything else. That's the problem.
1:00:37
why I stay on this pursuit.
1:00:37
I'm very transparent about it.
1:00:39
I've disclosed everything I know about it.
1:00:41
I will find out more information.
1:00:42
If I make the credit committee, I will act as a fiduciary for everybody involved. I will testify.
1:00:47
I am an advocate for this industry, and this changes nothing.
1:00:50
Just look at the numbers that came out of Circle today.
1:00:53
I'm an investor there, too.
1:00:55
You've got the I lost it all on FTX, and we have a fantastic print on Circle.
1:00:59
The promise of crypto remains. This will not change it. Pretty crazy. 15 million bucks.
1:01:04
Any thoughts on the continuing SBF saga, Sachs?
1:01:11
Well, I don't know why we should care so much about him.
1:01:12
I mean, Kevin O'Leary, but um But look, I think right?
1:01:16
It's indicative of all these guys that got money from this guy. Who is he? Who is he? He's on Shark Tank. He's on what?
1:01:23
He's on Shark Tank and he's a contributor to CNBC who's on multiple times a week.
1:01:26
The point is like you've got the grift I'm just trying to point out $15 million to a CNBC commentator is just an extraordinary payoff.
1:01:38
I've never heard of anything like that.
1:01:40
I don't think it's fair to pick on Kevin O'Leary per se because there is a bunch of those guys that took money from him, you know, a bunch of athletes did.
1:01:47
Probably bunch of movie stars.
1:01:51
Hacks, Republicans, Democrats. Yeah. Like everybody got paid. Democrats like this guy. Democrats.
1:01:57
Okay, just just like in the just like in the Twitter example, I think it's important in this case to generalize because the generalized thing is the real problem.
1:02:06
Look, if you want to focus on the crux of this you have a concept in law that Sachs knows better than the rest of us called fraudulent conveyance.
1:02:12
And we have example after example where it does not matter whether it was in the Bernie Madoff example or for example, Jason, we talked about it, the guy in LA that lost all that money client funds playing poker. Yep.
1:02:27
You have to give the money back.
1:02:28
Especially if it was fraudulently conveyed to you.
1:02:31
Explain Can you explain this in detail for a second so the audience understands?
1:02:35
Well, my understanding, which is very basic and I think David can probably do a much better job, is the following, which is if you get money some way but it comes from somebody who fraud fraudulently acquired that money you have to give the money back.
1:02:50
So, in this example, what it would mean is if that they can show that that $15 million that this guy got came from SBF basically raiding the piggy bank of user accounts he's going to have to pay the money back.
1:03:07
Just like for example in the Madoff fraud the the the the folks that went to find the money were able to go back to folks that actually redeemed, even the beginning early ones, and said, "I understand that you didn't know any better, but this was fraudulently conveyed to you, so we need the money back."
1:03:24
And they got the money back.
1:03:26
And that case, if they had put a million in and it grew to 3 million, they got their million principal back, but the 2 million in gains, which were ill-gotten, had to be returned. Returned. Returned. Exactly.
1:03:36
So, as I as I understand it, based on just what I've read, that there's a 90-day rule around contributions, meaning that if I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound. So, um 90 days, yeah.
1:03:53
Yeah, but I do think it creates potentially a powerful incentive here by politicians and various political groups Ooh.
1:04:01
for him not to be convicted of fraud, for him to be able to plead this out into some sort of negligence, because they don't have to give the money back. They keep the bag.
1:04:08
What an incredible insight.
1:04:09
Well, this is what I think so interesting about the Kevin O'Leary thing.
1:04:13
It's not about Kevin O'Leary, but it's about the fact that the money was spread around so widely and into such like deep trenches of the regulatory world.
1:04:24
Society, like Into the black influencers, Yeah.
1:04:28
And basically, I think the guy like cemented this the he he thought that like which which I think, by the way, is a really interesting product of the crypto ecosystem and the model that so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is if you can foster the belief, then there is a business.
1:04:45
If you cannot foster the belief, there is no business.
1:04:47
That there isn't a fundamental productivity driver.
1:04:51
It's about building a belief system.
1:04:51
And you can buy a belief system.
1:04:53
If you can take money that people have given you, you can embed it in influencers and celebrities and politicians and regulators.
1:05:01
And if you give it to enough of these people and you give enough of it to them, maybe that belief system solidifies and your thing becomes real.
1:05:10
And that's a classic grift technique, by the way, in The Grifters.
1:05:13
Oh, tell us all about it, J Cal. Yeah.
1:05:14
Yeah, what you do is you have this He's a master grifter. the patina.
1:05:18
It's this, uh, you know, you look like you're incredibly rich.
1:05:21
You know, you're you're going to fancy restaurants, you're wearing expensive suit, you're getting in a sports car, and then you own some palazzo, whatever, and then some other rich person comes and you get them to invest in something, and then you have absconded with the money.
1:05:33
But, they see all the accoutrements, you check all the boxes, your parents were Stanford, you went to MIT, and you are donating large sums of money, and you got this big table at the club, and you got a penthouse.
1:05:45
Everybody starts to feel, well, might is right.
1:05:47
You got the wealth, there might be you guys feel?
1:05:49
I mean, like how would you guys feel about honestly, honestly, no backing a CEO of a growth stage company that you put your firm's money into, who lives in a $130 million house and has not yet exited the business?
1:06:03
Yeah, absolute alarm bells everywhere.
1:06:03
I mean, this is why I'm not a fan of like secondary sales. ask you guys a question. Huge secondary sales.
1:06:11
Yeah, let me ask you guys a question.
1:06:11
Do you think that a billion dollars of dark money could stop a red wave?
1:06:15
Just asking for a friend.
1:06:20
Billion dollars in dark money could stop Democrats, Sachs?
1:06:22
No, honestly, do you think it's overweighted, the money he gave Yes, yes, his mother was a huge Democratic bundler. Yeah.
1:06:28
And and moreover, the the specific politicians he needed to influence, there were Yes, there were some Republicans, but by and large, it was the SEC Wait, so are you the first person to make this claim?
1:06:37
I I want to say Did you hear it here first on the All-In pod?
1:06:41
David Sachs, David Sachs making the declaration that the the red wave was stopped because of Well, let me ask you Let me ask you a follow-up question.
1:06:48
What do you think would have more impact on our election?
1:06:54
Enormous amounts of dark money going to Democrats or extensive shadow banning of conservative influencers?
1:07:02
Yeah, which one do you think would have a bigger impact?
1:07:04
And and and hold on a second.
1:07:04
In in a 50/50 country, where I mean the scales are like balanced where these elections are just a few thousand votes. Yeah, 52/48.
1:07:13
you think the result is going to be if we actually have a level playing field we get rid of this swindler's dark money?
1:07:19
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
1:07:19
Um let me add let me add a um I think to that.
1:07:22
Um what would have a bigger impact?
1:07:22
This uh suburban voter voices I think this is great except for when you guys end your fight like yeah.
1:07:30
Or taking away a woman's right to choose after 50 years of giving it to the Which would have a bigger impact on the red wave?
1:07:35
That did have a big impact but I think we're going to move past that.
1:07:37
I think we're going to move past that. Yeah, all right, great. Yeah.
1:07:40
Great great great strategic move.
1:07:42
What do you think What do you think about the Cinema Kyrsten Sinema Kyrsten Sinema flipping to independent?
1:07:45
Do you think that's a big deal or I think I think it's really interesting.
1:07:49
I think it's actually a very shrewd move on her part.
1:07:53
She's gone first of all I think she's great, you know.
1:07:55
Yeah, just tell us tell us about her, Sachs. No, he she's great.
1:08:00
she is the senator from Arizona, a formerly Democrat now independent, who is in the mold of, you know, John McCain who was a former senator from Arizona, served as maverick independent.
1:08:10
And she does not kowtow to her party orthodoxy.
1:08:15
And when Biden wanted to pass three and a half trillion of Build Back Better spending, she along with Manchin opposed it.
1:08:23
And I think saved the administration from this gigantic boondoggle that would have made inflation much much worse.
1:08:29
Now, Manchin got all the credit but she was equally responsible for putting a hold on that and then as a result they only did the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act.
1:08:37
So, she's willing to buck her own party.
1:08:39
Now, as a result of that I think they were planning on she was going to get primaried.
1:08:44
That the progressive wing of the party was planning on primarying her.
1:08:49
And by moving to an independent in a sense she pre-empts that.
1:08:52
Because what she's now saying is she's now sort of like, you know, uh Bernie Sanders is an independent or this guy uh Angus King from from Maine, they still caucus with the Democrats, but they're independents and the and the Democrats don't run candidates against them because they know that if they do, you'll have a Republican, a Democrat, an independent, and the Democrats and the independents will split the vote and the Republican will win.
1:09:19
So basically, she's now daring the Democrats, "Hey, if you want to run a candidate against me, I'm not going to sit around and get primary by them.
1:09:26
You go ahead and run somebody, but then we're both going to lose to the Republican."
1:09:32
That's what's smart about it is I think she's daring Schumer to run somebody against her. It's also interesting.
1:09:39
She's She's the only member of Congress I've read that's non-theist, which is kind of like atheist.
1:09:46
She doesn't talk about God or doesn't believe in God, and I think she's the first openly bisexual member of Congress. She's a a maverick. Certainly.
1:09:55
Zach, do you think she held up on making this decision till after that Georgia Senate runoff election finished in?
1:10:01
Do you think that it influenced the decision? I don't know.
1:10:03
But I I think that the the key consideration here for her is Well, imagine if she doesn't make this move now, okay?
1:10:11
And then in 2 years, or I guess really next year, she gets primary, okay?
1:10:13
And then what if she loses the primary?
1:10:16
It's going to be very hard for her to run as a independent at that point.
1:10:19
It'll look like sour grapes, sore loser, right?
1:10:22
But if she goes independent now, she's saying, "Listen, I'm running as an independent no matter what.
1:10:30
The question you have to make is what the Democratic Party is whether to support me or basically tank this election and throw it to the Republican." of this purple approach?
1:10:41
I was just going to ask you, what does this mean for Joe Manchin?
1:10:45
Well, I don't think Joe Manchin has this problem, and I'll tell you why.
1:10:46
Because um West Virginia, unlike Arizona, is like a plus 22 red state.
1:10:50
Joe Manchin is the only politician in that state who could win that seat for the Democrats.
1:10:57
When Joe Manchin retires, that seat is gone Republican.
1:11:01
And Schumer knows this, the Democrats know this.
1:11:03
They thank their lucky stars every day that they got Joe Manchin because otherwise that would be a Republican seat.
1:11:09
And so, look, all this stuff about how the progressives were upset with Manchin and all that bad publicity he got, that may be, you know, the sort of progressive wing is going to say that publicly, but the smart Democrats know that they're very lucky to have a politician like Joe Manchin on their side of the aisle.
1:11:26
I got to ask a question to you, Chamath.
1:11:27
Why do Democrats Why Why are they it it seems to be so anti-moderate Democrats.
1:11:36
Why are they so resistant to the concept of a moderate Democrat when obviously moderate Democrats seem to have an advantage in these elections?
1:11:46
Well, no, I think David described it well, which is that in many of the seats, this is both true for Republicans and for Democrats, you're not really competing in a general election, you're competing in a primary.
1:11:55
If you win a primary, you're probably going to win.
1:11:58
So, like, you know, if you're in Mississippi, for example, you just have to win the Republican primary. Nothing else matters.
1:12:03
And then you're just going to skate to victory.
1:12:04
And so, the real question is who votes in those are different often times in who votes in the general.
1:12:10
And this is why you get this dispersion that's happening where folks seem to be getting more and more extreme.
1:12:18
It's reflecting the sound bites that those primary voters want to hear.
1:12:23
And this is the big problem that we have.
1:12:25
And that's why, like, if you have a bunch of this, you know, rank choice voting or, you know, these other kinds of methods, it starts to clean that up so that you move people more into the moderate middle.
1:12:37
But that's why That's why you have this crazy stuff happening. All right, everybody.
1:12:40
This has been another amazing episode of the All-In podcast for the dictator, the sultan of science, and David Sacks. I am. J Cal. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.
1:12:51
You let your winners ride. Rainman David Sack.
1:12:59
And I said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you S. I queen of quinoa. Besties are back.
1:13:14
That is why dog taking a dump in his driveway. Man.
1:13:20
Actually we need to meet at the office.
1:13:22
We should all just get a room and just have a one big huge orgy because they're all just useless.
1:13:25
It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet your Beat beat. Wet your Wet your feet. Beat beat.
1:13:34
Wet We need to get merch. I'm going all in. I'm going all in.