Be an alpha like why are you such a surrender monkey like why like be like you're one of the richest guys in the world and like you do the jiujitsu and the MMA like why are you getting pushed around like why are you acting like you are unable to resist the critiques of like the Atlantic you know and you are forced into making these policy changes because you know there were a handful of uh Tech reporters that were mean to you Well it's fair [Music] [Applause] beta hello and welcome to the bu podcast I'm your
host Tim Miller uh we've got the perfect guest for today's uh Facebook news uh Charlie warell he's staff writer at the Atlantic author of the newsletter Galaxy brain about technology media and Big Ideas he's also the co-author of out of office the big problem and bigger promise of working From home that's not on our that's not on our to-do list today we have too much to discuss to discuss my working from home thoughts but maybe another day how you doing Charlie I'm doing great thanks for having me you I initially had reached out uh because
you an awesome article about crypto and I was like I want to do a crypto episode with Charlie and uh you know the news Gods had other ideas we we'll get to crypto at the end for people dying to hear our hot takes About you know ethereum um but Mark Zuckerberg uh is out with some news this morning uh and I just want to read exactly what the announcement is from Facebook so we can make sure to get it right here um he is replacing not that that matters anymore but uh he is replacing fact
Checkers with Community notes in the model of Twitter that's number one uh number two simplifying content policies to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender That are out of touch with the mainstream discourse uh he's moving the Trust In safety content teams from California the California teams were too biased he's going to move them to Texas uh which is a beacon of just just right down the road right down the middle of the road political ideology in Texas no bias in Texas so we're moving the moderators who have the worst jobs in the world
I think the content moderators that those people there's the moderation Slums are moving from California to Texas to weed out bias um we've also I think has it's going to get less attention but I think potentially the most ious thing that is happening is They're bringing back more political content to the algorithm in the news feed they're not dranking that anymore crazy people post is going to be back in your Facebook Newsfeed if you are of the demographic that uses the Facebook news feed so um those are the Big updates Joel Kaplan went on Fox
to discuss I have some audio from that I want to get to um but I I want your big picture thoughts on the changes first sure uh I woke up to this like full cander like an hour ago um so my thoughts on this are basically I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very and I I felt this way for a while very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between let's say March 1st 2020 and January 10th 2021 right so beginning the Covid pandemic right into uh you know Post January 6th I mean the
fact that this announcement is coming I'd go back probably ashamed of what they did starting in 2016 trying to root out the uh right I mean yeah I would I would Age Antica stuff and all that I don't think he cares about actually I I would I would agree with that but I think too you know you can you can like they were they were up against a lot of pressure there and they were always sort of Trying to do the very least like they were being kind of dragged Along by people and but you
know what I I think back to uh my Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my my old boss who was at the times then uh Ben Smith about like covid misinformation and it was like the the first interview I'd really heard from Zuckerberg where he was basically like no it's it's good that we're like you know censoring quote unquote right like It's good that we're taking action against this this is a very clearcut situation in which there is actual harm you know connected to this type of content these type of
words and I think I bet you if you had to like read that to him in front of him he would just like cringe like full body right because I think there's this this real understanding in his mind in the mind of a lot of the people who's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and I In the world of like UFC or Jiu-Jitsu or whatever that that there is this you know this huge overreach during the co and the you know the leadup to the 2020 election and then of course the big one
right after January 6th you know uh getting rid of trump all of that stuff I mean the the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7th for years later is like it's a big like middle finger I feel like to this idea of like the hall monitors like you have lost is I think what he's trying to communicate here yeah I so I think that there are two elements to this one is the forward-looking Trump suck up part and one is the regrets looking back part we're going to get to the Trump suck
up part but let's continue down to the Looking Back part uh first bill crystal in our internal slack wrote this I told him I was gonna steal it from him but I'll credit it um he was like here's the thing this the fact checking ended up Ended up being mostly pointless there's not a lot of evidence of the fact checking part work I think D ranking things from feed mattered but like the fact checking end up not being that useful I'm open to the fact that there's counter research on this maybe you've seen but um
but Bill writes Zuck now denouncing Facebook's factchecking when he implemented it was in charge of it arranged it supervised it paid for it for years is like a stalinist show trial Type of self- denunciation for the new leader and I think it is part that putting on the hair shirt for Trump but I do think he also has some his own regrets about it but he hasn't he hasn't you know done the mature thing of like accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as of the richest people in the world and in this announcement it's
like the Legacy Media and these annoying Hall monitors forced me to do this you know and now it's like Now this is my big middle finger back at them but as you point out that's thought really he could have done whatever he wanted really it's not like the the US the Biden Regulators were coming for him um and he believed a lot of the stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith but that he hasn't kind of accepted responsibility for that doesn't feel like he's blaming this on you Charlie it's your fault that he well
yes and and you know what I I'll take the blame um No I I agree I agree with that completely I've been covering this company for more than a decade now there's this classic thing that that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of he rolls out something new and basically says like he speaks as if he has Amnesia or or or as if like you know a totally new paradigm has formed right it's like like there you know he we're getting into groups we're getting into community building we like everyone just Wants to gather with
people around shared interests and then like qinon happens and he's like I don't know what people were were were doing you know trying to gather in these groups and we're just forcing people into these groups so what we really want to do is this like they were all about news and prioritizing the news feed I mean when I worked at BuzzFeed in 2013 one day literally just one day in October we had 300 times the amount of referral traffic That we like normally had to the entire site and was because someone at Facebook turned a
dial yeah and there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get you know in bed partner with these news organizations be a place where news you know reading where all this happened then they realized that like they cared about reading then they realized oh like your your your grandma is getting radicalized it's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app To be inundated with political news 24/7 and they were like this this political news it's it's bad it's like you did this you did this you control the website you are making the
editorial decisions and yet they sort of act like it's these like gravitational forces that are like pushing and pulling us into these behaviors Facebook is the one dictating you know how what we see what we do how we act on the platform yeah it's like JVL wrote about this in the Triad this today it's like be an alpha like why are you such a surrender monkey like why like being like you're one of the richest guys in the world and like you do the jiujitsu and the MMA like why are you getting pushed around like
why are you acting like you are unable to resist the critiques of like the Atlantic you know and you are forced into making these policy changes because you know there were a handful of uh Tech reporters that were mean to you you know Like why are you acting like you were forced in these changes by the Biden Administration which wasn't really that forth you know like that aggressive on these matters at all like you know and uh like the whole thing is very um well it's very beta it's like I'm not I'm not really in
control here and now now it's just like now I think the best thing to do is just become the clock maker God and let let a thousand flowers bloom in free speech and that will solve all the Problems and that's going to create new problems and he'll have a new announcement in four years that pretends like this was not his fault either this was Donald Trump's fault probably well and I think we also have to like talk about the Elon Musk of it all right I mean he is essentially adopting the Twitter practice like Community
notes right which which I mean like hand up Community notes is a is an interesting feature like of the the Musan you know features like it is the one that sort of makes some sense right yeah and and and it is like it Community notes fact checks all of Elon musk's all the time right like it it does a reasonably good job every once while it seems like he takes those down but uh free speeech absolutism has its limits you know it sure does uh on on x.com but I I mean going to that and
then also I I get this sense and I you know the reporter in me like I can't Really like prove it but I think that these guys like when I when I saw all the announcements I was you know the the glib part of me is like Zuckerberg just wants people to be able to say the word you know which like everyone uses on on X now it's like oh we're you know free speech is back we can say things you know that we used to say in the 90s that we would have gotten canceled
for I feel like those are the waters that you know these guys are Swimming in all the time right they're just having this like very weird Edge lordian discourse all the time and I think like he sees that on a place like X and sees that there is kind of like a charge to it right that there's all these people who are really excited about being able to speak a certain way and triggering a certain type of Li and you know whatever and I think it's like he's feeling left out by the sort of I
would never describe Elon Musk as cool But there's like a in that world a sort of you know like Renegade nature to the way that he's running his platform and I think that Zuckerberg is is frankly just like he he wants that it all goes back to being stuffed in the locker and into making a page about which girls are the hottest at Harvard you know it just it really it's true about he wanted to and all it's for all these guys all these guys were super nerds and and want to feel cool and it's
like great now we can Call gays fairies again or the other f word and the AI bot won't put up a little content note but one more thing about these content notes it's just worth bringing up you have to be so deep online and so aggressive about your political posting to even interact with the Facebook moderation regime like the right-wingers online and Zuckerberg now himself is pretending like he's he's accepted their fake narrative that like they were really cracking down and there Was a lot of censorship like in in most of the cases where it's
not like porn or you know Murder like it was just a little note at the bottom it was a little fact check note and in most of the cases content wasn't getting taken down and and like even in those cases like you had to be saying really extreme or weird stuff like if like I you know I post all the time like I'm I'm a super poster I'm like I've never encountered a moderation regime in Anyway like just think about what kinds of stuff you have to be posting to even know that this is happening
like most normal people don't even like this does doesn't even affect them it's like a small number of edge Lord super posters that that have now like taken intire control of the entire narrative about online censorship I I I agree with you on on that but I will the the one point of push back I will have is I think as always like Instagram is the thing That's going to get like forgotten in all of this and I and I do think the changes if if we feel them at all right like this could be
and this is the thing with all meta Facebook whatever changes is like they can be subtle and they can make a big deal out of them because they're subtle and no one your experience will barely change or they could be wild right and all of a sudden like every meta product is look like X or foran or whatever we don't know but I Do think especially like the inclusion of like you know not filtering out any politics stuff and by filtering what Facebook means is like Facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the
channels if you showed interest in it it was just making sure not to show it if you hadn't showed interest right if you know Instagram's experience could could change drastically if people are like just want To see you know like Timothy shalam at the Golden Globes like I'm just into that and all of a sudden it's just like the worst people you've ever met in your life posting about yeah exactly like that could that could piss a lot of people off and I guarantee if that happens he will come back and be like they're pushing
Politics on us like it was the whole you know like postelection Trump won we're we're we're gonna stay away from that like as if he had no hand In it yeah yeah I don't I now that you mention it this maybe says something another type of content that I'm consuming the only experience I've had with any meta uh content moderation is occasionally I see gays complaining that they're that they have had you know their Speedo pictures C censored by Instagram so I don't I don't know if the rules are changing on that I think that
maybe some maybe lascivia Speedo pictures are still G to be come under The you know long arm of the of the content moderation law while posting the ARs slur is cool I don't know we'll see I don't know I mean the X the stuff with X is uh you know he's been very against any kind of like sexualized content or nudity on on all meta platforms it's like been a very prude platform since the beginning of its existence if you go on X like X is just feeding feeding you hardcore porn when you're not asking
for it all The time so I I don't know if he's ready for that part of the you know Free Speech wing of the Free Speech well this is just a whole this is like I've written so much about this the whole moderation discourse is always so stupid because it's like it's so hard you know I back in the day just as and I guess I should say this like I I I consulted for Facebook for like a year uh 10 years ago now 15 years ago and I had some overlap with the moderation team
where I had to Do PR and like when you talk to people that are in charge of actual moderation I mean what they see every day is so insane I I mean like the dregs of society like the T just with the scale that Facebook has or Twitter any of these things have even random message boards the scale a small message board has like the amount of like gross porn you know murders like stuff you would never want children to see on the platform Something adults don't want to see stuff from the the end of
you know stuff that they were showing at the end of the substance which I suffered through last night um like Teeth coming out of people's mouths and like racist stuff like like the like the it is so challenging to moderate all that even with AI even with technology and so like this the if you turn down the notch on like kind of the automatic vetting you know of certain word key words or key Terms or key images like then the amount of you don't want to see elevates spam I should have included spam in there
and it becomes Craigslist it's like like literally becomes Craig like remember Craigslist was a great place to like buy tickets or sell furniture and stuff now and now it's like all the only thing on Craigslist is like scammers like trying to steal your money and porn and weird stuff it's it's it's a really good point because so much people people Don't realize right it all gets caught up in the censorship conversation and so much of the job like you said everywhere on the internet from the smallest Message Board to whatever like moderation is just it's
like people should think of it as like okay here's a Starbucks right like we have to clean the bathrooms right we have to wipe down the counters every night at the end of the day it's like you can't let a naked person and walk through the store you Can't let somebody like blare with an iPad like showing like nc17 like porn you know uh you know cadaver porn like you can't like you can't walk into the Starbucks doing that right like or else people won't go to the Starbucks and that and that's what it is
and you know occasionally there's an edge case right there's a guy who comes in who's playing by most of the rules but he's listening to his iPad too loud and you have to say like hey man Sorry can you turn it down and that becomes the censorship like yeah the edge cases are frustrating it's sucks it sucks to be on the other end of that especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules but you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space it's just like like basic Humanity all right now
we got to get to the Trump part of it which is more in my my realm the nears Joel Kaplan for people who don't know it's a longtime Repu kind of uh you know pretty Normy Republican traditional Bush Republican um but it was good friends with Kavanaugh uh people say he was qu radicalized maybe is an overused term but you know quasi um you know moved towards the magga direction after the treatment what he felt like was unfair treatment of his friend BR Kavanaugh um and has been at Facebook for a long time he's just
elevated in his role has been a long time opponent of of the Factchecking regime that his own company was doing um he they made this announcement this morning and the roll out was not to discuss it with you know I don't know my friend savannnah goth three over on over on the Today's Show or something his first interview is with Fox and Friends well if Joel was here I'd ask him how Trump's ass tastes but since he's not and you're here I'm curious what what your thoughts are on that the Donald Trump Free Fighter of
Free expression wants to take away broadcast rights from people who criticized him sued Bill Maher for calling him the son of an orangutang he's got his new FBI director suing our friend Olivia Troy for being mean to him on cable news just a free expression absolutist lover of the First Amendment Donald Trump that's why they're doing this right char just because they just are right in line with these first principles with the new Administration Was that fox business or Fox News Fox News okay I thought it was Fox Business I was like that's really like
then you've really gone you know uh Down The Rabbit Hole uh man I mean that that says it all right like that really to me says it all right we're just how do we get an audience with the big man you know before without going to Mara Lago is clearly let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about um about that I I mean I I I don't know I it's it's just I I get the I get the whole pandering to to Trump thing but I I almost feel like there's something real
about it now like I I I wonder if the circles that he that Zuckerberg is you know hanging out in like I I the the you know the proximity to like the MMA crowd too like I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he you know is trying to Pander necessarily to Trump I think he likes to Hang out with Dana White both I I think it can be both and what I'm just it it feels a little bit to me there's a way to Pander to hit and I
think that that is like signaling in like in I mean I think he kind of did it pre-election right like the the Tim Cook style of pandering right the the donate to the transition the uh you know send a nice tweet that's like we look forward to working with President Trump blah blah blah I I think this is slightly Different I mean this really feels like we're actually tailoring the platform we're actually restructuring our our corporate governance to you know to to do this um I don't know I mean and then on the flip side
right it Trump said he wanted to he potentially put Mark Zuckerberg in jail so I guess the stakes are pretty high for him um yeah this is the point I mean Ste Brian ster writes this this morning met is facing antitrust trial in April they've got Business before the government Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison as you just mentioned um so I I I think that Zuckerberg can both be redpilled and want to say you know like on his platform I think he can have both like that can be true he can be like
a you know trying to relive like boy State you kind of like hang out with his new MMA Bros and like you know want to say non PC things and like he thinks that's cool um I think he can both feel that And also be like this is some e this is easy pickings Trump suck up stuff right like this is just like we can go on Fox we can butter him up I can go down to Mara Lago I can do the I can go from censoring uh you know an Insurrection material to putting
my hand over my heart as they sing the January 6th choirs rendition of the national anthem you know like I I I just think that the that like this can be both of those things at the same time you're you're Probably right about that I I think what is always true about the the you know the the right these days in the past you know whatever 10 years Trump will always turn on you obviously we we've seen that Trump like you know Trump will will knife you in the back if it's convenient but I do
think that there is a an acceptance like an eagerness to have somebody turn right like there's always been a a joke that Like I would you know here when I was talking to other people who covered the far right which is that like tomorrow I could you know be a right-wing social media like influencer if I just you know sold my soul and just said like you know I worked at the New York Times and like let me tell you like I'm the Whistleblower right like oh God like it's such an easy path because they're
so accepting of those yeah where do you want to work do you want to work at the Free Press do you want to go to Fox like I mean we could just I can get you a promo promotion I don't know what they're paying you over at the Atlantic we could get you a we could get you a raise I think and and and that's always been this like you know this this kind of joke like how you know that because they're so accepting of that type of person right as long as you're willing to
sort of sell the entirety of your soul to that and I think that that's Always kind of a difference especially that like in in the big Tech space right between Republicans and Democrats yeah like there's there's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg being one of the richest people on Earth who has presided over Facebook for two decades now there's really nothing he can do to like ingratiate himself like even if he changes all of the policies of whatever there's always going to be the balls and Strikes of you know content moderation Stuff he's always going to
be be an annoying agressive complaining about him I know I know yeah it's tough it's tough like you're gonna always get complained about you know there's no and there's nothing and if that bothers you well that's what the money's for right um but I think you know that it is like when you do break Maga or whatever you want to call it right there is obviously Trump turns on everyone but there is this kind of like you know okay like you Want to play that's great like we we will actually give you like sort of
the blanket pardon as long as you you know Walk the Line and I think that that's really like is must feel pretty nice for someone like Zuckerberg to just be like okay all I got to do is sell my soul have Joel go on Fox once a week talk about you know Trump being a crusader for free speech and finally I can just get some people who are just G to be Like hey he's a good guy yeah oh he's nice does he does a good job yeah there's something to that I've always said that
there one thing Democrats could learn from Trump is being a little bit a little bit more generous to converts maybe not this not not the whole cult thing where if you where if you put on the blue hat then all sins are forgiven and whatever but like a little bit being a little bit more generous uh to people would probably Help uh the Democrats political Progressive political project in the long term but um this for another [Music] day y'all there is obviously much uncertainty in the world uh with Donald Trump coming back into the white
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policy for your life and your budget Select Quote they shop you save get the right life insurance for you for Less at selectquote.com go to selectquote.com workkk today to get started that's selectquote.com [Music] bwork all right I want to get into your internet brain Rod article around misinformation but it kind of it relates To this story in one way right which is we don't exactly know how but or or what to what degree but one of the planks that Zuckerberg laid out today is that they want to bring politics back to the news feed on
Facebook on Instagram on threads as you as you rightly point out the Instagram part of it is potentially more interesting since Facebook is like an elderly message board right now and threads threads has become very Niche to say the least um so the Instagram part Of this maybe the most interesting but that to me like that was the effective change effective in air quotes but like that the change that made some difference after 2016 2020 for Facebook more than the factchecking stuff was let's kind of drank some of this political stuff um and you know
get that out of the newsfeed and try to reemphasize Facebook's original Mission of whatever people posting pictures of their friends at keg parties and like And emphasize those a little bit more um and and to change back I think has some potentially dangerous consequences particularly as it relates to um have your article about uh about conspiracy theories um you know around around various hot button issues what do you think about that I I think that again we might not be able to these the changes could be small right and it could be sort of on
the margin stuff that is going to sound really good to People like Donald Trump and you're not going to see that much of a difference right that that's totally possible it's also possible that this is a classic maneuver by Facebook to push so far into the direction and that they I mean they historically don't seem to think through the externalities of what they're doing right like for me yeah the the um the idea of of you know dranking some of this quality news you know whatever stuff um that's that's a big One but for me
the the biggest one was this focus on groups and communities right and just throwing people together based on some of these shared interests and you know every time that Facebook chooses to priori I something really heavily it its algorithms are pushing people in this way that they don't really notice right they don't really totally understand it's all of a sudden unintended consequences this is my classical Oak shadian Small C Conservatism coming out you know you make a big change like this you don't exactly know what's going to come out at the back end and and
and I think you know you saw the sort of end logical end point of all of that right was like Facebook architecture was perfectly suited in 2020 late 2020 uh November December 2020 to allow tens of thousands of people to gather around the stop the steel Movement Like if you remember on November whatever 6th or something 2020 like I was watching the stop to steal Facebook group somebody like in early in the morning was like hey you should check this out this like election denying group has like 15 th000 members and then I went by
the time I looked at it six minutes later it had 50,000 members and it's like that doesn't happen if you don't make a series of changes from 2018 all the way through to Try to get you know like Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally into knitting groups and you know Rotary Club meetings and whatever it's and and so it's just like I think that we met book clubs we met book clubs not Insurrection and so it's it's like this this kind of stuff has the potential for these really large kind of gnarly changes because there are
billions of people on this platform and like if there's one thing covering Facebook for As long as I have or meta or whatever we're calling it is is this idea that like they are so naive or act at least so naive as to how people like actually use the internet like there's every time they talk about these changes in the way it works it is always around the knitting club or just two people getting together shaking hands and breaking bread and you know talking kitchen table connecting cultures you know like the From from Malaysia to
America you know people are going to be sharing recipes it's like no actually there's going to be a guy living in Malaysia that is sharing election fraud conspiracies that has a ton of interests or or a bunch of guys in a room in Malaysia with 186 smartphones hooked up to a thing like basically reposting each other's generative AI shrimp Jesus Facebook spam to trick Grandma and Grandpa into thinking that you know I Don't even know what but it's like that people go on the internet I have this like Theory which is called like the toilet
theory of the internet which is that like most things that you see that either Delight you enrage you whatever that are just post by a human being are were probably like typed out with two thumbs on the toilet by somebody else like like people do like the internet is is very like it's wonderful it's horrible but it's also just like really Quotidian it's used by people all the time to Stave off boredom in random moments and like Facebook never sees that right it's always just the you know the the breaking bread over the over the
table even though they know better and I just think when you make these changes especially when you make these sort of radical changes very quickly the unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads 18 months down the line in like a totally Unforeseen way uh one of your other theories uh I want to talk about a recent article was that the internet is not functioning so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine that it like people people find information to justify any pre-existing crazy view that they have and and I thought it was
interesting your comparison between like the January 6 conspiracies how people you know initially were like oh it was Antifa and that's like like oh the FBI did it like what whatever they needed to find to justify the fact that they weren't the baddies but comparing that to the 9911 conspiracies and how I it took a lot longer for them to Bubble Up they bubbled up in more heterodox kind of ways U because it happened in like not pre- internet but like the early in the early internet before the Social Web anyway talk about that I
WR this piece that came out um on January 6th with This researcher Mike Coffield who studies information environments and all the all the bad stuff uh and the and the idea is basically that we are always we're always thinking about misinformation as like you know again Uncle Tim gets on his computer sees a piece of misinformation and all of a sudden like you know oh yeah like H Hillary Clinton has babies trapped in the B basement of a pizza parlor like I'm convinced now the moon's made of Cheese yeah and and really what's actually happening
is is that it is it is keeping you locked in your beliefs like the misinformation pedaling that's going on everywhere is to keep people from having you know like from having to experience cognitive dissonance for having a piece of information come in and make them rethink their entire worldview and January 6 is this great example of this right because I mean you we can't forget like I saw them you know On the on the fouryear anniversary like dredging up tweets from you know Eric Ericson being like you know shoot the protesters right like all these
people on the right saying this is unconscionable this is horrible right so there was this moment where the like a crack lets the light in right and it's like oh are we you know are we are we the bad guys here and this entire system spins up with these justifications right offering this parade of evidence so that People do not have to experience that cognitive dissonance they get oh oh actually yes see it was antifa yes there were you know FBI agents leading people in all that stuff um and as we were trying to like
think through this you know this idea this Theory it's like so so what does that do to people right and it creates this stuckness this this like inability to look backward or to hold people accountable so you know with January 6 It's like oh no we realized that you know it's it it was just like a big false flag situation or it was a peaceful protest or it was whatever right we Mind Is Made Up we're not going to go back and so the January 6th you know committee commission was then framed it was either
completely ignored by you know right-wing media institutions or it was framed as a bunch of democratic scolds who are obsessed with the past who are Hall monitors who Have Trump derangement syndrome you know blah blah blah and there's this inability to look back because all we're doing is looking forward towards the new barrage of evidence that makes us feel you know like comfortable in our beliefs and I mean the reason why we compared it to the 9911 stuff is the 911 Commission obviously it wasn't like you know January 6 and 911 aren't completely analogous events
but they are both really like you know visually intense Attacks on on the country the 911 Commission the report comes out it's long it's dense it is a national best seller for like 4 months like M over a million copies are sold like you can go back and take a look at it was a cultural event of people saying let's get to the bottom of this thing let's look back at the history let's look at the way that this institution Congress investigated it and try to understand Flash Forward you know I flaws right Like it's
not a perfect going back I mean like they did some you know uh masking over some of the Saudi involvement and like still other little conspiracies bubbled up and another true uh push back to that you know commission you know bubbled up but like that's like more of a natural course of you know of uh Socratic public discussion yeah I I'm not I'm not trying to say that any of these things are are perfect on their own but just the difference between a Cultural desire to look back and investigate this versus what happened with January
6th and you had a lot of people I'm sure a lot of people who you know listen to this podcast who watch the hearings who are interested who felt that accountability was right and necessary and I think it was but there was also this huge golf of people who didn't fall in the Maga category who didn't fall in the watching it on MSNBC category who are also just like I'm just Trying to live my life I'm barraged with information all the time and I you know didn't really pay attention to it like culturally the two
events are so different in the way that they were analyzed and received and I think you know where I ultimately fall with it and this is maybe where it could be a stretch for some people is in this world where we have this like justification machine just constantly humming where there's this barrage of evidence it's It's really hard for the Democrats say to make the 2020 election a battle for the soul of the nation you know like it pins the hopes on something like January 6th being resonant four years later and I think the way
that information moves the way these ecosystems move it's not as resonant as people would would might want it to be right history does not sort of H like like pull out as long as it used to and I think that's just like a really brain scrambling thing to Confront it is the other element that I wanted to bring up that you mentioned in the article that might be a little brain scrambling for some of our listeners to confront is like we're all susceptible to this right like so there's like this idea of one to find
information that justifies pre-existing beliefs and when you're in a you're in this Marketplace on social media where you have all these different outlets and all like all the people you can follow and you unfollow People who are unpleasant to unfollow right like it's very easy to find yourself in a in a hole and one example you guys gave um which is obviously not a conspiracy on the level of antifa did did January 6 but was this notion that that Trump's momentum is losing Trump is about to collapse like that found huge purchase on people on
the right and and I we to see this I'll put my hand up like if we posted on YouTube a poll that was like Trump's losing like and the views Skyrocket it right like that's a natural instinct right at some level right like I I use this comparison all the time I listen to the Nuggets podcasts after they win to hear the analysis more often than I do after they lose um so that's it's a natural human impulse but people got to really like believe this right and I've seen some people in our lives because
they were only clicking on things that Were showing Trump's weaknesses um and they they convinced themselves like oh yeah like Mega is dying like Mega is collapsing like even smart people really engaged people I know were saying this to me and going up into the election and and I think it's just because the same impulse to like look for something that justifies something that you want to be true so bad or that you believe to be true so bad yeah there's certainly an asymmetry Between the mega Coalition and and what's going on but but it
happens everywhere and I think that it's like we can't think of it as just like I we have to understand that this is what the media ecosystem is doing whether whether we want to be that type of media consumer or not and I think and have less judgment about it happening when it's happening you know kind of in good faith but I I like you know I I'll see this all the time a very small example Of this in my own life is I'll see a piece of news you know pop up on social media
in some way and it's not that I'm trying to like find a way to immediately discredit it but if it's like kind of shocking to me yeah I'll I'll be like does this person you know know what they're talking about are they like an actual political reporter is this analysis and sometimes you know the initial Instinct of me being skeptical of that is because it's a piece of Information that doesn't make sense to my worldview and sometimes it is right but sometimes it's actually just right but that instinct of me going you know and being
like okay so is this guy credible is it it's good but it's also because of this idea of like whoa like we're not used to we we've sort of lost our defenses for information that that makes us you know question our our our worldview a little B yeah like I'm the saying the other Side of the coin is the same for me more positive like in my nerdy you know politics and policy feeds that I follow if some somebody's posting like you know uh if your colleague Jerusalem dempus who I love is posting a she's
like o just read a new study you know showing that we need to build more housing in urban areas you know I'm like oh yeah I'm clicking on this like I want to get a couple sentences I can use from the podcast right if I see somebody else Like an anti-immigrant person I've got a new study out that's like the real problem is that we have too many immigrants here that are taking up too many houses I will either just not click on that at all or do it you're doing like click on that person
and be like this person's got to be bad right I got to find some reason why this person's bad right like that's just a that's natural that's human but we these are like Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo like Version of the of the problem that like there's some like other people doing the same thing that are like people that are just like you know winning the Poo naked eating honey right so like how do you how do you combat this I I mean that's that's the that's the big thing this has been the problem
of my entire career right is like I feel like I write things and you identify a problem and then you're like sorry guys here's the problem well and and I but I do think Like the person who has the you know the foolproof solution to that problem will probably win like a Nobel Prize uh because it will like save Humanity to some degree I mean there's there's all kinds of things right there's the just me like fixing different issues of of media literacy which is the boring and uh and sort of you know eye rolling
answer to that there's I I don't think clearly we're not going to get any uh platform regulations but also platform Regulations are are their own mind Fields I the way that I like to look at this issue and I I I think I've said this in in different places before is that this is a like the internet and the you know democratization of speech in this way like think about multiple billions of people on Facebook at a given time like that is historic right in in the sense of of humanity like we have not connected
people in this way ever before It is a media Revolution on par with something like the invention of the printing press and if you go back to that that's centuries of tumult and disruption and I think that like everything in the internet age we will speedrun that but I think like we are all trying to figure out what the hell is going on how to process it like it is rewiring our relationships to each other and to ourselves and I think that it's this Long process right where we develop new Norms around how to communicate
how to share how to do all these different things it's a very unsatisfying answer but I think when people are like what button can I push to make life more sane it's like there there is no button like we are we are like you know we are there's no net underneath like this is a new experiment for civilization to be doing this and unfortunately for or or maybe Fortunately I don't know we're all sort of born and living in this time period of like massive massive societal technological cultural disruption and actually we're going to spend
we're going to spend the next four years not trying to fix it so there's that there go was kicking around with some of the parents at a child's birthday party over the weekend deciding how how we're going to manage January you know we just had the January 6th anniversary inauguration Coming up you want to stay in touch with the news but also take the edge off a little bit and one thing that came up Soul's out of office gummies and I got good news this podcast is sponsored by Soul Soul's new outof office gummies are
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join bull workk plus today you can click the link in This description you'll get the best politics newsletters in the business and you can become a bullwark plus member right now we'd appreciate it we got to do crypto really fast I mean I could have done this whole hour on crypto so we we'll try to speedrun there were two topics in your article that I want to cover really quick one was um uh you you lead the article saying for years cryptos Skeptics have asked what is this for me among those Skeptics and for years
boosters have struggled to offer up a satisfactory answer you know they argue that the blockchain is itself a genius technological invention I agree with that but once you get beyond that the question is what what value do these coins provide for people that don't want to use them to commit crimes and um your answer to this is that um maybe the the purpose that crypto has found for itself is that it is a cultural one where it's Serving a need that certain people have to oppose incumbent interests talk about that a little bit yeah uh
I mean the very nature of like if you go back and you read the Bitcoin white paper which I don't really suggest anyone does it's only like 11 pages but it's pretty dry it's a hard 11 pages two and a half in if you if you read it like obviously the it's not overtly political but it is a political notion to want to build a technology That you know circumvents the need for middle men or middle institutions or it's basically you know trying to come up with a decentralized form of global Finance right um that
in itself is just it's an anti-institutional idea and that technology when it first you know came out and no one was really caring about it except for like engineers and super nerds and I mean that you know uh in a in a in a loving way like those types of People are like techno cyber Libertarians right they are people who do who who who want that sort of democratization who who have a healthy skepticism of Institutions and authorities and power and would like it you know a a a technological tool to circumvent all that and
so those are a lot of the people who had an early investment in Bitcoin who who got in you know on the ground floor and by the ground floor I mean the real ground Floor and the people who have you know 100,000x Returns on on their investment at at the moment and who have been made incredibly Rich then you have a lot of the other like Speculator class and people like that but so many of the people who have been on this bandwagon for a long time got in not necessarily just because it's was like
a really good speculative asset they got in because of this sort of ideological rooted connection yeah those people being made Really rich like they are now a meaningful political constituency because of their money and they like that influence in this moment is is another like really big cultural factor in our like anti-institutional moment yeah and I think that the Democrats had a miss here I I mean I'm for crypto regulation um for the reason that I want to close the top the uh the Pod with but um uh the kind of like disdain of it
or like right Like this notion of this this desire to attack it from an in from being the institution like like taking on the guard of like the Democrats are the Protectors of the big institutions like that is just a bad place to be in politics in a change world like putting just put setting the merits of this aside and I think that um because Trump didn't give a about this right like Trump would have been happy to to regulate crypto to get rid Of crypto to whatever he like it's not like any of the
him or the core people you know well now the new core of andrees and them care but but like the original magga crowd doesn't have strong CTO things Trump like saw he could make money on it and so did and there's then just like a general L Fair it's like oh all these libertarian anti-establishment crypto Bros who are probably culturally kind of liberal but like like their crypto asset um they're for me because I Say I'm not going to f with them like Gary gendler has and like I think that that was a meaningful swing
demo not like a decisive one but for for Trump this time oh definitely and it has so much overlap right with the you know sort of not not even the Mana sphere but sort of like the you know the Bro podcast sphere that you know that he was going on and and and trying to court like there's an overlap there so There's a whole culture that you know I mean really during the pandemic is when it it kind of took its its form that it has now and and and through you know the whole like
GameStop and SPF and all FTX the all that stuff that happened in the last couple of years this you know the laser eyes meme kind of stuff like sort of edgel Lordi um culture that formed around it is has a lot of overlap right because it is anti anti Authority anti- institution it is sort of like people on X who you know want to use words they feel like you know would get them cancelled in in you know polite liberal spheres there is an overlap with that audience so I I think it was actually very
smart for the Trump campaign to court that to you know to to adopt that I also think that when I would like to have been in the room the first time that someone actually explained like crypto and not like the blockchain but I mean like the you know the world of Speculative asset trading and money laundering and stuff and yeah Trump coin and all that to him because I'm sure his eyes got like really wide because it's like basically like if Donald like Finance Donald Trump's way right like oh I can you know I can
get people to give me sort of like in-kind political contributions by you know by investing in my coin and I can have my son be like the head of research for this you know dubious startup based in you know a Garage in Palm Beach like sweet I can plant my logo on something but it's just online now I don't even have to put it on a building I can put it on like an internet thing and then people will pay me to put my to put my you know face on it and so I think
like I I think like I'm sure he was like this is like made for me right um but I I agree with part of what you said with the you know it it shouldn't be treated in in like a in a change World it shouldn't be treated by Democrats with the like gross sort of sustain like turn off the the people for whom crypto is like the the one you know thing that they're voting they're the single issue crypto voter like yeah it's probably not a great idea but I think where we might be going
with this conversation like there is a really large concern when it comes to like I'm not like a defender of like big investment banks by any stretch but I also think Like in comingling our fincial system with the most volatile speculative asset ever really to exist is like a freaking nightmare and that is where we might be headed under is that's our final topic our um I do people should read the whole article there's also Trump corruption stuff uh that we could spend a ton of time on a Chinese National cryptocurrency entrepreneur recently bought $30
million worth of tokens and Trump's shitcoin for one example so Anyway there's much more that came from we'll the link in the show notes um but here's my last note for the um uh for on my on my Google doc for this podcast I wrote in all caps because I just hadn't really thought about this that much I just I I I I you know I read about crypto stuff but like once you get deep into the crypto like regulatory um elements uh I just I hadn't really it hadn't set in for me until I
read your article letting Big banks co-mingle with crypto would be insane did nobody read The Big Short like like what like really like like it is it is wild that that there is not going to be just some basic regulations and guard rails like forget I honestly forget like you regulating crypto but just preventing preventing like the banks that are too big to fail that cause the Great Recession from from being you know exposed to like this type of risk asset for for that piece I Talked to this researcher named Molly white who studies you
know reports on does like is deep in the in the crypto world and the regulation stuff and all this and this was her like red flag concern which is basically like think about when FTX crashed right it was a you know an exchange that was insolvent like the the bottom fell out a lot of people lost everything most of the people who do lose everything are the people who have The least right like the whales usually don't lose at all they're Diversified whatever it was a terrible thing for for a lot of people it was
totally contained though from the Global Financial system it was not like you know when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages that all of a sudden you know we end up with you know Bankers in the street you know lighting their little boxes of their desk stuff on fire it it that is What like protects us right now like you can be for all of this you know I want to I want a decentralized currency it's easier to send money to people in different countries I like the culture around
it I like to essentially gamble on the price of Bitcoin like all that stuff hey like if you know I get I get it right sure exactly but the idea that like a bunch of people are going to like pump into dump into this into this currency that you know it's going to be There's you know no guard rails between City Banks Holdings in you know this realm and in the crypto realm and the fact that like if we do have another FTX style collapse of some kind and you know in an th this realm
of like of crypto Finance too is just it's the wild west like you just have I mean you have so much money laundering going on so many people using it for crimes it's not to say that the traditional world of Finance is great but like to have those things together in in that sense and then to have you know a a potential Global financial crisis because all these banks have fomo and don't want to miss out on you know like having you know giving their clients access to something like this because you know their son
likes to trade it on coinbase like all of that is just it's maddening and it's really it's like freaky and so I think like that is the place where I Think you could find reasonable Democratic opposition which is to say like hey it's a free country but like we don't want people losing their shirts you know and and basically basic protections for retail investors retail and that includes retail Hawk Tua coin investors like everybody okay like that's a Fine Place to be um you know as long as as um you're not just kind of throwing
away a growing a growing demographic uh despite one that Is a little confusing to me um Charlie oh wait I was about to let you go but I one breaking news item Trump says we're changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America I don't know if you have any thoughts on that is that is that is that real Is that real that's something for people to that's something for everybody to think about overnight and they can Google themselves whether or not that's real um could be real could be fake who
knows in the world of The new Facebook algorithms and why would it matter why would why would we need to correct it if it were untrue no value in that Charlie warzel at the Atlantic check out his work it's so good come back soon thank you later [Music] man for
