SPEAKER_05: You were bloated last night. What else is new? I said not
SPEAKER_01: bloated. My God, you really are though you look bloated. Listen, that's coming from you. You started to look like Bert. And now you're back to Ernie your face is getting round again. All I have to say is hold on a second, guys. I gotta get a drink. Is it okay? You guys got a minute for me to get a drink? Yeah, yeah, I definitely do. I definitely do. Go ahead. Hold
SPEAKER_00: on.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I'm actually you know, I've been working on my weight. So I'm just gonna pick here. I think I have the mocha latte from super got and I also have the chocolate shake. Do you have a recommendation here for me free bird because I'm going to put it in my coffees mocha on a mocha. You can't go wrong. You
SPEAKER_00: can't go wrong. Thank you. Double mochas a win. Just on a
SPEAKER_05: completely unrelated topic. Did you happen to invest in super gut? J. Cal? No, no, no, I haven't invested yet. But use
SPEAKER_01: the promo code. Oh, okay. It's been a big part of my weight loss journey. It's also been a big part of me and freeberg becoming besties and creating a unified block for all in summit 2023. So I've got two solid votes. I'll be very honest with
SPEAKER_02: you. You guys give me a credible plan where we can maintain the integrity. Hold on. Hold on.
SPEAKER_01: Continue. Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. If you two
SPEAKER_02: idiots, I'm not involved. Yes, you are. You clearly are involved with it with his fucking great important vote.
SPEAKER_01: Hold on. No, you're in your mouth. I'm writing this in. I'm writing it down. If you two idiots, the two of you have to
SPEAKER_02: do this together because otherwise I'm with David and there's got it. You idiots to come up with a plan. Where we can each make make 4 million bucks each net. Then I'll do it
SPEAKER_02: for million net. Okay, great.
SPEAKER_05: Look at J. Cal writing that down as if he respects a contract.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, got this guy. I signed the fucking car. I signed that contract for J. Cal. The negotiation begins at the point
SPEAKER_05: where there's a signed contract. Yeah, exactly. Okay, now
SPEAKER_05: negotiate with you.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, everybody, the show has started. The four of us are still here. By some miracle. We're still going after 107 episodes and it's better than ever. Last week, we're number 12. So mainstream media. We'll see you in the top 10. Here we go. Twitter files part one. Despite your oppressive
SPEAKER_05: conditions. Yes. We're not.
SPEAKER_00: If I was getting paid five bucks for this, I'd be on strike right now.
SPEAKER_01: Not only are you getting five bucks, you're getting a bill for the production. Okay, here we go. By the way, how beautiful is it that the same reporters who
SPEAKER_05: couldn't stop writing about the oppressive working conditions that Elon Musk was supposedly creating? Because he simply wanted the employees to go back to the office and work hard. And if they didn't, he'd give them a generous three months severance package. Yeah, those same reporters are now on strike. Because the souls burgers are running a clickbait farm over there with oppressive working conditions.
SPEAKER_01: The intellectual dishonesty has never been higher in the world. Yeah, I would like to honestly, yes, will the publisher of the
SPEAKER_05: New York Times agree that anybody who isn't happy there can have a voluntary three month severance package?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, click this link. And do you want to work hard? Or do you want three months severance? If the New York Times publisher did that, you know what would happen? 800 of 1200 people would take the severance. Of course. All right, here we go. Twitter files have dropped. Part one dropped with the legendary journalist, award winning, highly respected journalist Matt Taibbi. 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. This is important to note. The second drop was given to Bari Weiss, who is a right leaning independent journalist. These are both independent journalists. She previously worked at the New York Times itself. Now, I think we should work backwards from two to one.
SPEAKER_05: Do you agree? Yes, for sure. Let's start with the drop that just happened last night. So last night a drop happened. So
SPEAKER_01: here's what happens in Twitter files part two, I'm going to give a basic summary and then I'm going to give it to sacks because he's chomping at the bit we now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a search for a right wing silencing system built into the software of blacklists was tagging right wing conservative voices in the system. And these included people like Dan bongino. Is that how you pronounce it? Yes, he was tagged with being on a search blacklist. What that means is, you're a fan of Dan's who is a former Secret Service agent who is now a right wing conservative. I could just say that Dan was a conservative radio host podcast host. He was not allowed to be found in search engines for some reason.
SPEAKER_01: Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative commentator, he was tagged with do not amplify. I guess that means you can't trend into people's feeds even if they follow you. And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklist, including a professor, Jay Bhattacharya. Did I get it right? So Jay Bhattacharya, okay, I got it right doctor at Stanford School
SPEAKER_05: of Medicine. And he was not allowed on the trends blacklist
SPEAKER_01: because he had a dissenting opinion. A Stanford professor had a dissenting opinion on COVID. That's turned out to be
SPEAKER_01: true. And this is where the danger comes in because all of these things were taken without any transparency. And they were taken on one side of the aisle by people inside of Twitter, essentially covertly no ownership of who did it. And they never told the people they gaslit them. They could see their own tweets. They could use the service, but they couldn't get it even by their own fans in many cases here. Sachs, when you look at that, let's just start with that first piece. The shadow banning as it's called, in our industry, where you can participate in a community, but you can't be seen. Are any Is there any circumstance under which this tool would make sense for you to deploy? And then what's your general take on what has been discovered last night? Okay, look, two question.
SPEAKER_05: Yes. Let me start with what's been discovered here. Let me bring it down for you. This is an FTX level fraud, except that what was stolen here was not customer funds. It was their free speech rights, not just the rights of people like Jay Bonacioria and Dan Bongino to speak, but the right of the public to hear them in the way that they expected. Okay. And you had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like Vijay Gadi, 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. And what the Twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing. They, in the same way that SPF was using FTX and customer funds as his personal piggy bank, they were using Twitter as their personal piggy bank. 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, even when, even when they could not justify removing content based on their own rules. So there are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed, where, for example, Libz of TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress Libz of TikTok based on our hate policy. Libz of TikTok hasn't violated it, we're going to suppress that account anyway. Now it's important to note what Libz of TikTok does, this is a
SPEAKER_01: great talking point. Libz of TikTok finds people who are trans, people who are, you know, maybe not LGBTQ, and they feature their TikToks. And they mock them on Twitter. 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. And they said they haven't broken a rule, but collectively, they could be in some way, targeting those people. Is there anything fair, freeburg to that statement? That they targeted them? By collecting their, let's say views that are I'm asking this question for discussion purposes. I'm not giving my take out. Hold on. I want free bird. I'm going to go back to you spoke for two minutes. That's why freedberg you turned down moderating
SPEAKER_00: today, sex, you could have everybody else as long as they want. I get interrupted. You got two minutes. Let me just finish
SPEAKER_05: the SPF analogy. Okay, then you can filibuster continue. Then you can both sides this is why you're speaking one or two words
SPEAKER_00: on you. And then yeah, why did people like God and yo, well,
SPEAKER_05: deny that they were engaged in shadow banning, even though that's clearly what they were doing. Because they knew that they had an obligation to be stewards of the public trust. They were custodians of public trust. They knew they were violating that trust. The same way that SPF had a duty to be custodians of his customers funds. They did not implement their own policy that they said they were implementing. Why? 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. Okay, so now 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 in 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. This is like the margin account. Okay. They do not have the right to use these tools in this way. Okay, the Jay Bala, Charlie was not posting spam. A Stanford professor. A Stanford professor. Yes, and his view on COVID has been proven correct completely. He was opposed to lockdowns. That was the great Barrington Declaration, and they suppressed it. What is the justification for that? So now you have to answer my question then, Sax,
SPEAKER_01: since you want to talk so much. Hold on, Sax. I want you to answer the question then since you are so interested in talking. Hold on. Hold on. I want him to answer one question. Then it's going to you, Freeburg. Sax, should lives of TikTok be able to collect trans people living their life making TikToks, put them into a group feed, mock them. And if those
SPEAKER_01: people experience harassment because of it, is that something that Twitter should allow? I'm asking you this without giving my opinion. I'm curious your opinion specifically for the lives of TikTok since you opened that door and you wanted to bring up that very thorny issue go. Listen, so on the lives of TikTok, my understanding of
SPEAKER_05: that account is that they only take videos that have already been made public by another account. They're all public. They're all in the public domain and then they repost them. Sometimes they make a snarky comment, but usually they just let them stand on their own. That is not a violation of free speech. Now, the way that I think these Twitter executives have interpreted it is that they live in such a bubble and they live in it with such privilege and entitlement that they live in it 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 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
SPEAKER_01: not. If in aggregate final final follow up if an aggregate those people report being harassed and they have evidence of being harassed. What should Twitter do? Listen, if somebody
SPEAKER_05: is being harassed, you're fine with taking that down but being publicly criticized or simply retweeted is not harassment. Okay, harassment needs to be targeted and it needs to be more than just public criticism or even a snarky comment here or
SPEAKER_01: there. And so you don't consider a not, you know, a daily feed of trans people being mocked. You don't consider that target
SPEAKER_05: harassment. Got it. Don't listen to me about it. Listen to Rick files about it. They knew that the account that lives if tik tok was not violating the rules, yet they suppressed that they suspended at six times. They knew they were on shaky ground. They wanted to do it anyway. Why? People are
SPEAKER_01: experiencing harassment. That's why they did it. But it is a thorny freedom of speech. I think, I think i think sacks has
SPEAKER_00: articulated a vision for the product he wanted Twitter to be. don't think that's necessarily the product that they wanted to create. 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. 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 this is a bit of a nothing burger that they were curating and they were 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. And I'll say like there's been this long debate and it goes back 20 years at this point on how Google does ranking right. 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 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 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. In fact the manual work gets to be to the point that they said there's so much stuff that we know 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. It's the stuff that sits above the primary search results 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 and I don't think that this is any different than what's happened at Twitter. Twitter is not a government agency. They're not a free speech. They're not the internet. They're a product 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 and they certainly did wrap up 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. It's not the product I want. It's not the product I think should exist. I think Elon also saw that and clearly he stepped in and said I want to make a product that is a different product than what is being created today. So none of this feels to me like these guys were the guardians of the internet and they came along and they were distrustful. They did exactly what a lot of other companies have done and exactly what they set out to do and they editorialized a product for a certain user group and by the way they never block they never edited people's tweets. They changed how people's results were showing up in rankings. They showed how viral they would get in the trend box. Those were in-app features and in-app services. This was not about taking someone's tweet and changing it and people may feel shamed and they may feel you know upset about the fact that they were de-ranked or they were kind of quote shadow banned but ultimately that's the product they chose to make and people have the choice and the option of going elsewhere and I don't agree with it and it's not the product I want and it's not a product I want to use and I certainly don't feel happy seeing it. So you want to see products in you want Freeberg to summarize it you want to see the free market do its job.
SPEAKER_01: Chamath you worked at Facebook. Facebook seems to have done I would say an excellent job with content moderation. I think in large part correct me if I'm wrong because of the real names policy but you tell us what you think you know when you look at this and the 15-year history of social media and moderation. I think moderation is incredibly difficult and typically what happens is
SPEAKER_02: early on in a company's life cycle and 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 TikTok 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 and so 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. I do think that they were conflicted. I do think that they made some very corrupting decisions but I don't think that they were these evil actors okay. 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 and I think that that's true for all of these companies 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. Google, Facebook, Twitter, ByteDance and TikTok they're all the same 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 so what do we do from here is the question okay. The reason somebody needs to do something about this is summarized really elegantly in this Jay Bhattacharya tweet so please Nick just throw it up here so that we can just talk about this. This is why I think that this issue is important. Critically this is a perfect tweet. Still trying to process my emotions on learning that Twitter blacklisted me okay who cares about that. Here's what I'm going to do. Here's what matters. The thought that will keep me up tonight. Censorship of scientific discussion, permitted policies like school closures and a generation of children were hurt. Now just think about that in a nutshell. What was Jay Bhattacharya to do? Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and
SPEAKER_02: try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok. Maybe he was supposed to go on YouTube and create a video. Maybe he was supposed to go on Facebook and you know post into a Facebook group or or do a newsfeed post. The problem is that and the odds are reasonably likely that a lot of these companies had very similar policies. 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. So we're just seeing an insight into Twitter but the point is it happened everywhere. The implication of suppressing information like this is that a credible individual like that can't spark a public debate and in not being able to spark the debate you have this building up of errors in the system and then who gets hurt in this example which is true it's like you couldn't even talk about school closures and masking up front and early in the system. 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 because those are all factual things we can measure today. 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 and the implications are pretty broad reaching
SPEAKER_02: and now I do think governments have to step in and create better guardrails so this kind of stuff doesn't happen. I don't buy the whole it's a you know private company they can do what they want 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
SPEAKER_01: said. Sax your reaction to your besties. I largely agree with what Jamal said but let's go back to
SPEAKER_05: what Freeberg said. I think what Freeberg's point of view is is really what you're hearing now from the mainstream media today which is oh nothing to see here you know that they told us all along what was happening this was just content moderation they had the right to do this you're making a big deal over nothing. No that's not true. Go back and look at the media coverage starting in 2018. Article after article said that this idea of shadow banning was a right-wing conspiracy theory that's what they said. Furthermore Jack Dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening including at a congressional hearing I believe under oath so either he lied or he was lied to by his subordinates. I actually believe that the latter is possible I think I don't think it's true with SBF it might be true with Jack because he's so checked out. Furthermore you had people again like Vijaya Gadi again tweeting and repeatedly stating we do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint. So these people were denying exactly what their critics were saying they were accusing their critics of being conspiracy theorists. Now that the thing is proven the mountain of evidence has dropped they're saying oh well this is old news this was known a long time ago. No it was not known a long time ago it was disputed by you and now finally it's proven and you're trying to say it's not a big deal. It is a big deal it's a violation of the public trust and if you are so proud of your content moderation policies why didn't you admit what you were doing in the first place? Don't you feel good that Elon's running
SPEAKER_00: this business now? I mean like the things that you're concerned about as a user as someone who cares about the public's access to knowledge, to opinions, to free speech this has got to be a good change right like this has come to light it's clearly going to get resolved everyone's going to move forward. I mean do you think that there's penalties needed for the people that work there or like what what what's the anger because because no one like I think look I think we got I think
SPEAKER_05: we basically got extremely lucky yeah 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. He's just about the only billionaire who has that level of means who actually cared enough to take on this battle. But are you saying that this is a hard preserve for other platforms? I think he deserves praise for that but
SPEAKER_05: I mean unless Elon can buy every single tech company which he clearly can't I think you guys are right this is happening a lot of other tech companies. We're about to rewrite the government
SPEAKER_02: the United States government is going to make an attempt to rewrite section 230. I think that what this does is put a very fine point on a comment that Elon actually tweeted out and Nick if you could find that please that's a very good tweet where he said going forward you will be able to see if you were shadow banned you were able to see if you were deboosted why and be able to appeal and I think that that concept to be very honest with you should be enshrined in law and I think that should be part of the section 230 rewrite and all of these media companies and all of these social media companies should be subject to it and the reason is because it ties a lot of these concepts together and says look you can build a service you're a private company make as much money as you want 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 and we're going to transparently allow you to understand it and I think that's really reasonable make that a legal expectation of all these organizations and by the way 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 this is a there's really four problems that
SPEAKER_01: occurred here number one there was no transparency the people who were shadow banned taken out of search etc they did not know if they were told and it was clear to users we could have a discussion about was that a fair judgment or not in the cases we've seen so far from barry wice's reporting in the twitter files part it's very clear that these were not justifiable number two these were not evenly enforced it's very clear that one side we because we don't have one example of a person on the left being censored when we if we do then we could put balls and strikes together and we could say how many people on one side versus how many on the other it's pretty clear what happened here because these all occurred with a group of people working at twitter which is 96 or 97 percent left leaning the statistics are clear 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 if we're going to block people they should be blocked and they should know why the fourth piece of this which is absolutely infuriating and this is a discussion that myself sax and um elon have had many times about this moderation and i'm not speaking out of school now because he's now very public with his position and you know his position he came to on his own it's not like this is sax and i you know coming up with these positions this is why elon bought the business if you really want to intellectually uh test your thinking on this and i am a moderate who's left-leaning i can tell you there's a simple way for anybody who is debating the validity of the concerns here imagine rachel matto 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 how would you feel if matto reporting on you know uh all the russian coordination with trump's campaign did this or ezra klein with whatever topics he covers and you will very quickly find yourself infuriated and you should then intellectually as we say on this program steel manning if you argue the other side it's infuriating for either side to experience this and that is what the 230 change needs to be chamath you're exactly correct if you make a an action it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet 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 and then what the resolution to it is this has been banned because it's targeted harassment this can be resolved in this way then everybody's behavior would steer towards whatever the stated purpose of that social network is you can get better behavior by making the rules clear by making the rules unclear and making it unfair you create this insane situation go ahead chamath and that's why i'm infuriated about it i think you
SPEAKER_02: have to take it one step further to really do justice to why this should be important to everybody and i do think this school example it really matters to me like we have like i don't know now 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 laws they gave them but what if jay bhattacharya who's i mean like you can't be you know have a higher sort of role in society in terms of you know population credentials 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 you and fauci need to get to the bottom of this or where legislators could have seen it and said you know what before we make a decision like this maybe hey fauci go talk to jay because he's a stanford prof he's probably not an idiot why does he think that or maybe let's convene you know an actual group of 20 or 30 scientists and the fact that this one version of thinking about things was deemed so heterodoxical it is just such a good example they shut down an important conversation you know that the decision was so wrong and the damage was so severe so we know what happened by suppressing that speech and that's one example 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 matto as your client who the hell cares this is important stuff because it affects everybody irrespective of your political persuasion and what editorial you want to read shammoth what if
SPEAKER_01: the investigation into the catholic church and the abuses that occurred there somebody said oh this person it needs to be shut down and then children are molested for another decade by the way we have an example of that shanae o'connor came out on snl you can look it up for if you're under 40 years old and said fight the real enemy she ripped up a picture of the pope because of the scandals there she was excommunicated she was canceled at that time one of the first people to be canceled because she spoke truth to power what if somebody an investigative journalist at the new york times the boston globes are in the movie spotlight those are the people who broke the story of the catholic church if somebody came in and the catholic church put pressure on a social network said hey you can't put this stuff up here you can't have this discussion here's here's
SPEAKER_02: another example it's infuriated why are we shutting down discussions in america remember
SPEAKER_01: the vietnam papers because because jcal the media the media does not value transparency anymore if
SPEAKER_05: you go back and look at the way the media portrays itself like in the movie the post which is about the revelations about the catholic church where you go back to all the president's men what the media prized and what they congratulated themselves on was first of all ex transparency and exposing the lives of powerful people well that is exactly what has happened here 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 because they were complicit in this they were complicit in suppressing the views of people like jay bhattacharya they were complicit in choosing the views of fauci and the elite on kovit and so they have no interest now in bringing just own and making in making what's happened here at twitter fully transparent i have to own it i think by the way just so just a quick correction there i think
SPEAKER_01: sax when you said the post washington post watergate spotlight exactly i've been thinking
SPEAKER_05: about spotlight sorry it was may have been spotlight okay but like but the post is another
SPEAKER_02: example 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 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 and they still published it and it created a ground swell of support to really re-examine the vietnam war and it had a huge impact 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 it's it's coming from the russians suppress it and nobody could it's so much easier now to run this play what journalists need to realize is that today's
SPEAKER_01: conspiracy theories are tomorrow's pulitzer prizes onto you sax not in the current media environment
SPEAKER_05: they work for these uh corporations and they don't get rewarded for telling the truth oh no they
SPEAKER_01: they're going for pulitzers trust me they are but what they need to do is stop thinking short term and think long term anytime there's a conspiracy theory you must give it some validity and say is there any truth here because it could in fact be a scandal that's being covered up they're involved
SPEAKER_05: in the cover-up right now this is a cover-up i agree i'm in agreement with you let's bring the
SPEAKER_05: first batch of twitter files into the conversation the one that matt tayebi exposed 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 fbi agents and former security state officials so this has now been exposed there was no legitimate basis for suppressing that story it was true it was a respected publication they did it anyway this is election interference 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 they're not protecting democracy they're interfering with democracy they're interfering with the public's right to know 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 what are these tools that have been exposed one person's a big brother-like system okay yeah but just you have to i know you want to make it like an equivalency it's less than a one percent
SPEAKER_01: equivalency because in our society we can have moments like this and we can have investigations so just to put it in perspective i don't look i jacob i don't think we're equivalent but what i'm
SPEAKER_05: saying is that this is very much like a big brother social credit system yes alarm bells should be going off this should be an alarm going on didn't decide just we had this one
SPEAKER_05: idiosyncratic billionaire who believes in free speech if he didn't decide to take this on we would never have known this stuff okay tell me what happened in between these two things there
SPEAKER_01: is an attorney at uh twitter and i don't know the details of this right okay so this is interesting i work for the twitter corporation i do not speak for the twitter corporation sacks does not work sacks does not work for the twitter corporation and does not speak for it but there was in between these two drops something that happened yes so basically what was discovered and this is all just
SPEAKER_05: publicly reported is that a former fbi lawyer named jim baker had now become deputy general counsel um at twitter and this guy jim baker is like the zelig of the whole russian collusion hoax he was involved in the um in the fisa warrants that were that the fbi applied to the fisa courts that had all the errors and omissions he was involved in the alpha bank hoax he was the guy that that perkins uh co-e lawyer susman was feeding this like uh phony uh phony scam too and he i don't think he was officially sanctioned but basically he was asked to leave the fbi and then lo and behold where does he land at twitter and he is involved in their content
SPEAKER_05: moderation policies i think what it shows is how deeply intertwined our big tech companies have become with the security state now how did this get exposed well barry wyse was basically uh putting forward document requests for this for the latest batch of twitter files and she wasn't getting anything back and she's like what's going on here and the guy who's giving her the files is his name is jim and she's like well wait like wait jim jim who and she finds out wait jim baker wait that jim baker that you know new york post had a long story about this guy 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 so in any event once this came out twitter fired him and then you know barry apparently received all these files that are now the the second batch of the twitter files 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
SPEAKER_01: this is jim baker who's a different person right but a lot of people are wondering well how could
SPEAKER_05: this have been missed listen he's an fbi ex-fbi these guys don't want to be found i mean they're
SPEAKER_05: they this is some people call it you know the permanent washing establishments some people call it the deep state the administrations come and go the people who work in washington stay there forever and they can simply effectuate policy by outlasting everybody else and clandestinely implementing what they believe and they've become a constituency of their own that exercises power like a praetorian guard in washington so in any event this guy is an expert at bowl weave laying himself into the bureaucracy a great praetorian guard bully you're on fire i know
SPEAKER_02: hold on so when they finally hold on a second when they finally rooted when they finally rooted
SPEAKER_05: this this mole out of the fbi he bowles himself into another powerful bureaucracy what is that word twitter evil bull weevil like burrows like burrows like that so so 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 so once it was discovered a unit of the imperial roman army that served as personal
SPEAKER_01: bodyguards and intelligence agents the praetorian guard okay got it well you understand what happened is is that the praetorian guard originated because they were to defend the life of the
SPEAKER_05: emperor and then what happened that then they became so powerful that uh that whoever bribed
SPEAKER_05: 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 in 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 that's the bottom line they should not be involved in our elections in this way they should be completely nonpartisan and non-political 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-bunk king 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 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 well okay that has not the providence
SPEAKER_01: of the um laptop is still being reviewed in fairness and there's still hold on you're wrong and there is an investigation going on of hunter biden you also have to put the context in here and please let me finish there is a context here of there was massive election 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 russians to interfere in elections 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 so everybody was on high alert and i agree it was not done properly hold on that's why it was the perfect it should have been done it should have been done properly they should have said they should have come out public and say we
SPEAKER_01: don't know the providence of this it could be hacked it might not be hacked jason they knew
SPEAKER_01: let's wait and see we have to reserve judgment no listen let me tell you what happened let me just
SPEAKER_05: tell you what happened okay so they make sure you source this i will so look it's all in the new york post okay they've done great no it nobody has refuted it nobody has refuted it it's a super partisan paper no let me just get let me just get this on the record here so from the post the fbi
SPEAKER_01:
SPEAKER_05: was given the laptop in 2019 by the lap store store owner those guys have forensics they have cyber experts they knew the laptop was real we know it's real now nobody questions that in fact the fbi has admitted that the laptop was real and that the the hunter bind files are real nobody disputes that okay but what they did before the election is they used this excuse of russian disinformation to discredit the story before it even came out but they had no business getting involved in the story that way they simply didn't they should have stayed out of it completely i don't i don't understand how you can possibly justify that yeah i mean i think we do have to
SPEAKER_01: look at the context of that time period when hillary's emails were hacked and we had a perfect
SPEAKER_05: excuse uh well i didn't finish the sentence and we had a president which you will agree our
SPEAKER_01: presidents and presidential candidates should not be encouraging foreign powers to hack their uh their adversaries you agree with that this is do you agree with that answer my question do you agree that presidential you're still wrapped up answer the question why do you have to personally attack
SPEAKER_01: me no i'm not personally attack me just answer the question this is your election denial for
SPEAKER_05: 2016 you're still wrapped up on this you can't let it again you personally attack me you don't
SPEAKER_01: answer the question that's fine we'll move on you can't be intellectually honest that's fine the audience knows you're not being intellectually honest you don't even know what you're talking about if you could answer the simple question should presidents encourage foreign powers to hack their adversaries then you would be being intellectually dishonest i am absolutely disappointed that you will not answer that simple question it's an obvious yes it's an obvious yes of course but of course but i don't really believe that happened i don't really believe that because you know trump's gonna win the primary let's keep going uh china honestly i don't know wait wait
SPEAKER_05: listen i i don't i've said so many times in the show that he's not my candidate i don't know what you're talking about you're going all the way back what you're doing right now is like delusional you're going back to some throwaway comment he made it a rally in 2016 it's got nothing absolutely nothing to do with the story and the fact you're even bringing it up is like pure tds and i don't want to waste any time talking about it instead of answering a question that's your
SPEAKER_01: technique your technique is to call me names instead of answering the question i want to unmuddy the waters i want to make one more point another technique that i'm muddying the water so
SPEAKER_05:
SPEAKER_01: i'm not muddying the water you are i'm not answering the question let's move on let's move on i want to make one final point okay i'll make a final point there was a letter listen there was a
SPEAKER_05: letter with this hunter biden thing this is 2020 election adjacent we're not going back two elections ago i want to talk about the most recent one okay fine you had clapper you had combi at 50 of these security state officials they write a letter saying that the hunter biden story has all the uh hallmarks of russian disinformation they claimed that it was russian disinformation when it wasn't they knew it wasn't and it was the same story that the fbi was telling twitter and it was the same story that these twitter executives were indulging in even though they all knew or had reason to know it wasn't true and they suppressed the new york post story anyway i don't know why you're bringing up this trump stuff it has nothing to do with the real issue here the real hold on a second the real issue is this does social media have the right to suppress true stories put out by our media before the month before an election yes or no i'll how do you defend that i will
SPEAKER_01: answer your question yes or no and you will not answer mine because you're being intellectually dishonest yes we should no we should not suppress news stories if it was and i will argue both sides 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 zalensky 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 that is facts that happened and that is that's not what this was you said you would let me speak and you will let me see your money in the waters no stop interrupting me and stop insulting me i will say my part you said yours and then we will move on the fact is trump encouraged hacking of other candidates and he did it twice in a four-year period back-to-back elections we need to be on high alert when you have a republican candidate trump doing something so absolutely
SPEAKER_01: treasonous this is why it's the perfect cover story this is why it was the perfect cover story
SPEAKER_05: is because but you would address the treasonous behavior let's move on i i don't think it was
SPEAKER_05: a perfect phone call i think it was there were lots of shenanigans there are lots of shenanigans okay i'm not defending hold on i'm not defending anything trump did okay i don't feel the need okay i never defended it but here but the deal is that you're letting your tds i don't justify he's treason you're letting you're you're allowing this russian disinformation to be a cover story no i said i don't think posts should have been blocked your your your misperception
SPEAKER_01: why are you even bringing this up it was not rushing the context under which the con the reason i'm bringing i agree that the post made it a great cover story that's your interpretation
SPEAKER_01: the context also is everybody was on high alert waiting for a hack to drop and in fact a hack dropped 10 days before you have okay we found out subsequently was a hack that's why they're here to be time point they knew at the point twitter and facebook did not know twitter and
SPEAKER_01: facebook didn't know that's the point they don't hold on no no no no no no tayibi in that you you
SPEAKER_05: go back to the twitter files the first drop jim baker hold on a second jim baker and vijayagati said okay that there were a lot of internal questions about whether that that hunter by and story could be justified under the hacked policy okay and there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maintain that party line and the emerging view is that they could no longer maintain that line and still gotti and jim baker said no we will maintain the idea that this was hacked information until proven otherwise even though it was not hacked it was a new york post story okay agree to disagree let's move on why are you bringing up all
SPEAKER_05: this like irrelevant stuff the audience and the other besties want us to move on so let's move on
SPEAKER_01: china ends most zero covid rules and iran might be abolishing its morality police news broke in the past week 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 uh 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 this all comes from a foxconn letter which we don't know the cause causation here does does it does it we don't know that's why i just said we don't know causing correlation here give give us some perspective here chima well i just think it's kind of ridiculous to assume that the second largest
SPEAKER_02: economy in the world pivots based on one letter from one ceo so i know that that's how the western describe the letter please yeah well apparently what happened was terry guo 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 pandas this this lockdown process we're going to lose um you know our leadership in the global supply chain and apparently that jolted the central planning commission to realize that they needed to you know get out of these lockdowns i think it's something different which is i think this has been part and parcel of a very focused and dedicated plan by g phase one was to consolidate power 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 and now phase three is just to reopen the economy again so this guy can basically
SPEAKER_02: sit on top of the second largest economy in the world so i think this is sort of a natural uh flow of things 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 and i think that these guys are getting very sophisticated and understanding how to give the chinese people some part of what they want so that they're roughly happy enough to keep moving forward 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 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 u.s economy if these guys get their um get their economy going again we talked about this previously but this is a good example of the
SPEAKER_00: autocrat not necessarily being absolute uh in in their um authority 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 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 people can't escape the buildings how much of that was true or not and riots in the screen people fighting with the covet testers how much of it is true or not we don't really know 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 had to shift their position and shift their tone 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 they're in power and their power perhaps are necessarily influenced by the people that they are there to govern and that they are you know uh ruling over and that while we don't think about these places as democracies perhaps they're not entirely the traditionally defined autocracy that there is an influence that the people can have 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 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 demarcation of seeing other people's conditions and seeing what the rest of the world is and is like 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 and these autocratic regimes have to start to shift slightly and over time maybe that has a real impact here's a specific statistic and chart for everybody the demographics of iran are incredibly notable if
SPEAKER_01: you look at this chart for those of you listening it just shows people by age and how many what percentage of the population they are or actually the world numbers the population as you can see it's basically like a pair you have very few old people and you have a lot of people in their 20s and younger and so young people no no jason it's really 40s and 30s it's really okay so 40s
SPEAKER_02: 30s you don't have the geriatric population that you see in other countries like japan
SPEAKER_01: and so the demographics of iran are extremely weighted towards younger people millennials gen xers and younger and they have vpns virtual private networks they can see everything happening in the free world versus let's say closed societies 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 and i think that's a big part of the change tom off what are your thoughts about iran specifically i think demographic change and then china and demographic
SPEAKER_01: change slash protests i've said this before and i've been tweeting about this for a long time
SPEAKER_02: i've said this before and i've been tweeting about this for years but people so poorly understand demographics everybody thinks that we have a surplus of people and we don't 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 and right now we're not in that situation if you look at a country by country basis a lot of these countries are facing that in a pretty cataclysmic way the most sensitive country to this is china i mean their population get current course and speed i think the last number is it's going to have by 2100 there'll be about 600 million people in china which is unbelievably disruptive in a very negative way for them right 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 so the state's going to have to get much much more actively involved over the next 50 years in china 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 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 so then there'll be an incentive then to bring work on shore into those countries 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 so it's all kind of positive in general but the world needs more people let's just be clear especially in western countries we are going to be not we're not as badly off as china but we're not far behind yeah here's a quick view of china and japan
SPEAKER_01: just yeah these same kind of i don't know what they exactly call these charts are kind of like vertical histograms but 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 when compared to iran and then if you look at japan quite stunning there's just no young people left and they live very uh to much older ages in japan it says longevity is one of their great strengths as a population as a country and so these demographics can't be fought you're going to have a constriction constricting economy in japan and their place in the world is going to be very very different okay where do we want to go to next you never asked my opinion on on uh was
SPEAKER_05: usually you just talk so go ahead i didn't want to i didn't know i just talked no i usually have
SPEAKER_01: to fight to give my opinion oh here we go listen have your agent call my agent we'll talk about it
SPEAKER_01: okay uh we'll talk about it i have a slightly different view of what's happening in china
SPEAKER_05: uh jason which is you know i think that the people there need to stop harassing the ccp you see the chinese communist party they're the elites they've set things up for the benefit of the people they're not engaged in shadow banning they're just you know they have a system there to you know to engage in censorship to prevent abuse and harm yeah right that's the system they've set up right 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 they they've re-education camps for citizens who need you know to maybe rethink their positions on freedom and
SPEAKER_01: their wages the hours they work and their and their social conditions you're you're absolutely correct china really has built a perfect model for our society well well said sax right now we can move forward let's go now we can move forward we are finally we're in agreement by the way you know
SPEAKER_00: that's going to get clipped out and go viral well you understand right according to according to our elites according to our elites like yo al roth or taylor lorenz to criticize them is a form of
SPEAKER_05: harassment you understand that right so therefore what the people in china are doing specifically
SPEAKER_05: by opposing lockdowns you know they're taking the jay bhattacharya point of view they're engaging
SPEAKER_05: in harm and abuse and harassment of their betters of their elites disagreement 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 yeah just accept accept your fate and work hard for the good of the people great
SPEAKER_01: great points let's move forward should we talk about sales no i think it's actually a pretty
SPEAKER_00: it's a it's pretty good satire i agree all right i i think we have to talk about ftx i i don't know
SPEAKER_01: if you saw and i the the people covering for sbf it continues to be an absolute joke the number of interviews that sbf is doing is absurd but the people carrying water for him is is even more offensive i mean if you're a criminal trying to cover up your crime okay we get it you're trying to cover up and stay out of jail but kevin o'leary who um calls himself mr wonderful was on cnbc trying to defend the fact that he was given this is stunning by the way 50% of the people who are on cnbc are winning by the way 15 fucking million dollars to be a spokesperson for ftx so the grift not only went to the press politicians uh but now commentators on cnbc 15 million dollars to put that in context i mean you're talking what an elite nba player gets from nike this does not have uh you know kevin o'leary might get you know 50 to 200k for speaking gigs but nobody gets 15 million dollars to show here's a 75 second clip that i don't know if you've all have seen but is unbelievably stunning see on the other side of 75 seconds if you're a defense attorney that
SPEAKER_03: represents someone that you know is guilty you gotta say yeah well they're innocent but you may know they're guilty you may know they're guilty if you find someone if you watch someone kill someone they're innocent there's only the murder of my money in this case okay it's it's murder of
SPEAKER_03: ftx's money everybody's everybody's look joe if you because it was money that you got i don't i
SPEAKER_04: don't think you should be singing the blues right now at all oh yes i'm singing the blues why because
SPEAKER_03: you're 15 million didn't pan out that you that's a lot of money listen a paid spokesperson it's a lot of money you didn't have to do much for that that's that's found money different decision that's
SPEAKER_04: a different discussion okay you know you can make that decision on your own but i'm going to this point if you want to say he's guilty before he's tried i just don't understand but it may end up costing you 15 for reputation on everything else that's the problem that's why i stay on this
SPEAKER_04: pursuit i'm very transparent about it i've disclosed everything i know about it i will find out more information if i make the credit committee i will act as a fiduciary for everybody involved i will testify i am an advocate for this industry and this changes nothing just look at the numbers that came out of circle today i'm an investor there too you've got the i lost it all in ftx and we have a fantastic print on circle the promise of crypto remains this will not change it
SPEAKER_01: pretty crazy 15 million bucks any thoughts on the continuing sbf saga sack well i don't know
SPEAKER_05: why we should care so much about him i mean kevin leary but um but look it's indicative right it's
SPEAKER_00: indicative of all these guys that got money from this guy who is he who is he he's on shark tank
SPEAKER_02: he's one of the what he's on shark tank and he's a contributor to cnbc who's on multiple
SPEAKER_01: times a week the point is like you've got the grift i'm just trying to point out 15 million dollars to a cnbc commentator is just an extraordinary payoff i've never heard of anything like that i don't i don't think it's fair to pick on kevin o'leary per se because there's a
SPEAKER_02: bunch of those guys that took money from him you know a bunch of athletes did probably a bunch of movie stars pax you know republicans democrats yeah like everybody got paid by this guy so okay 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 look if you want to focus on the crux of this you have a concept in law that saxx knows better than the rest of us called fraudulent conveyance 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 the money client funds playing poker yep you have to give the money back especially if it was fraudulently conveyed to you explain can you explain this in detail for a second so the audience understands
SPEAKER_00:
SPEAKER_01: well on my understanding which is very basic and i think david can probably do a much better job is
SPEAKER_02: the following which is if you get money some way but it comes from somebody who fraudulently acquired that money you have to give the money back so in this example what it would mean is if that they can show that that 15 million dollars 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 just like for example in the madoff fraud 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 and they got the money back in that case if they had put a million in and it grew to three million they got their
SPEAKER_01: million principal back but the two million in gains which were ill-gotten had to be returned returned returned exactly as i as i understand that based on just what i've read that there's
SPEAKER_05: 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 yeah yeah but i do think it creates potentially a powerful incentive here by politicians and various political groups 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 what an incredible
SPEAKER_01: insight well this is what i think so interesting about the kevin o'leary thing it's not about
SPEAKER_00: 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 society society like to the block influencers um yeah and basically i think the guy like cemented this 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 fester the belief then there is a business if you cannot fester the belief there is no business that there isn't a fundamental productivity driver it's about building a belief system and you can buy a belief system if you can take money that people have given you you can embed it in influencers and celebrities and politicians and regulators 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 which is a classic riff technique by the way in the grifters oh tell us all about it jake yeah yeah what you do is you
SPEAKER_01: have this uh the master no no it's the patina and it's this uh you know you look like you're incredibly rich you know 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 scone with the money 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 everybody starts to feel well might is right you got the wealth there might be how would you guys like how would you guys feel about honestly honestly no backing the ceo of a growth stage
SPEAKER_00: company that you put your firm's money into who lives in a 130 million dollar house and has not yet exited the business yeah absolute alarm bells everywhere and this is why i'm not a fan of
SPEAKER_01: never would do it let me let me ask you guys a question or secondary sales yeah let me ask you
SPEAKER_05: guys a question do you think that a billion dollars of dark money could stop a red wave just asking for a friend a billion dollars do you think it was overweighted to democrats
SPEAKER_00: no honestly do you think it's overweighted the money yes his mother was a huge democratic bundler
SPEAKER_05: yeah and moreover the the specific politicians he needed to influence there yes there were some republicans but by and large it was the sec are you the first person to make this claim i want to
SPEAKER_00: say did you hear it here first on the all-in-pod must credit all the bags david sachs making the declaration that i think the ron was stopped because of let me ask you let me ask a follow
SPEAKER_05: question what do you think would have more impact on our election enormous amounts of dark money going to democrats or extensive shadow banning of conservative influencers yeah which one do you think would have a bigger impact we could hold on in the 50 50 country where i mean the scales are like balance where these elections are just a few thousand votes yeah what do 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 yeah that's an interesting question um let me let me add a thing to that um what would have a bigger
SPEAKER_01: impact this uh subgroup cover voices i think this is great except for when you guys and your fight
SPEAKER_00: like or taking away a woman's right to choose after 50 years of giving it to them which would
SPEAKER_01: have a bigger impact on the red wave that did have a big impact but i think we're gonna move past
SPEAKER_05: that i think we're gonna move past that yeah all right great yeah great great great strategic
SPEAKER_01: socks what do you what do you think about the cinema christine cinema kiersten cinema flipping
SPEAKER_02: to independent do you think that's a big deal or i think i think it's really interesting i think
SPEAKER_05: it's actually a very shrewd move on her part well she's got first of all i think she's great you know yeah just tell us tell us about her sex no he well she she's she is the senator from arizona
SPEAKER_05: a formerly democrat now independent who is in the mold of you know john mccain who is a former senator from arizona sort of this maverick independent and she does not kowtow to her party orthodoxy and when biden wanted to pass three and a half trillion of build back better spending she along with mansion opposed it and i think saved the administration from this gigantic boondoggle that would have been inflation much much worse now mansion 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 so she's willing to buck her own party now as a result of that i think they were planning on she was going to get primaried that the progressive wing of the
SPEAKER_05: party was planning on primarying her and by moving to an independent in a sense she preempts that because what she's now saying is she's now sort of like you know bernie sanders is an independent or this guy uh angus king from from maine they still caucus with the democrats but their independence and the end and the democrats don't run uh candidates against them and they're 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 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 primaried by them you go ahead and run somebody but then we're both going to lose to the republican that's what's smart about it is i think she's daring schumer to run somebody against her it's also interesting she's she's the only member of congress i've read
SPEAKER_01: that's non-theist uh which is kind of like a 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 maverick certainly
SPEAKER_00: sachs do you think she held up on making this decision till after that georgia senate runoff election finished and do you think that it influenced the decision i don't know but i i
SPEAKER_05: think that the the democrats have a lot of her is yeah well imagine if she doesn't make this move now okay and then in two years well i guess really next year she gets primaried okay and then what if she loses the primary it's going to be very hard for her to run as a independent at that point it'll look like sour grapes sore loser right but if she goes independent now she's saying
SPEAKER_05: listen i'm running as an independent no matter what the question you have to make is what the democratic party is whether to support me or basically tank this election and throw it will we see more of this purple approach i was just going to ask you what does this mean for joe manchin
SPEAKER_05: well i don't think joe manchin has this problem and i'll tell you why because um west virginia unlike arizona is like a plus 22 red state joe manchin is the only politician in that state who could win that seat for the democrats when joe manchin retires that seat is going republican and schumer knows this the democrats know this they think they're lucky stars every day that they got joe manchin because otherwise that would be a republican seat and so look all this stuff about how the progressives were upset with mansion and all that 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 i could ask a question to you chamath why do democrats
SPEAKER_01: why why are they it seems to be so anti-moderate democrats why are they so resistant to the concept of a moderate democrat when obviously moderate democrats seem to have an advantage in these elections well no i think david described it well which is that in many of the seats this is both
SPEAKER_02: true for republicans and for democrats you're not really competing in a general election you're competing in a prime primary and if you win a primary you're probably going to win so like you know if you're in mississippi for example you just have to win the republican primary nothing else matters and then you're just going to skate to victory and so the real question is who votes in those are different oftentimes and who votes in the general and this is why you get this dispersion that's happening where folks seem to be getting more and more extreme it's reflecting the sound bites that those primary voters want to hear and this is the big problem that we have and that's why like if you have a bunch of this you know ranked 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 but that's why that's why you have this crazy stuff happening all right everybody this has been another amazing episode of the all-in podcast for the dictator the sultan of science and
SPEAKER_01: david sachs i am jcal we'll see you next time bye bye
SPEAKER_02: my uh dog it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release
