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Hey everyone, hey everyone, welcome to the All Empire. You're asterius you're illustrious moderator Jason Calcanis has been purged. Cancel. He's been cancelled. We cancelled him for his constant interruptions and low IQ comments. We decided that the minimum IQ required to be on this pot of this, you know, 100 and 4000 and 50, he did not make the cut. And so now it is just me, chamath and freeberg. He is Jason is away. He is actively implementing our **** *** to win strategy to solve the pandemic and free speech. Let your winners ride. Man David. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy. Queen. Hey everybody. Hey everybody. It is an emergency podcast. Episode 16 hit #2 in the rankings on the Apple iTunes Podcasting store. Clearly we hit a nerve. It's been an insane week and the dictator dictated that he was not satisfied with doing our podcast once every two weeks. And so here we are on a Sunday. The Queen of Quinoa, Rain Man himself, David Sachs, and the dictator chopping it up for you. The loyal, confused, angry, infuriated audience of all in it's the craziest week of our lives. Jason, please, please don't ascribe to the audience the characteristics that describe yourself. OK, this has been a crazy. 72 hours. Can anybody remember us a week that has been more crazy in their life, with the exception, I guess, 911, the financial crisis. I'm trying to think of this level of crazy. And I think I think we should start with what happened after the last all in podcast between you and sacks over text, which should get it all out there. We should share it publicly. And I think no, no, I think I think we should. I think it's worth doing. We we talked about this before you joined us and chamath and I are having an intervention and you know, I'm going to say something real quick. I think it's worth highlighting that one of the things that I think we have the opportunity to do as a group is to kind of. Elevate the conversation a bit and not frame things as being black and white and not frame them as being one or zero or partisan or left or right. And everyone on this in this conversation has nuanced opinions about a lot of different topics. And when you sum up all those opinions, it doesn't define a left or a right person or Democrat or Republican. I think that's what makes us. You know, a compelling and interesting group to talk to sex has been characterized as the Trump guy. He took offense to that and in particular the heated conversation you guys had last time. And I do think it's worth kind of sharing that with everyone and letting you guys reconcile publicly have have a group hug and and and reframe kind of how we talk about each other and how so that we can kind of set a bit of an example on how to do this. Well, I can start. You can start, David. I'll start because I'm the one who. Infection. You're the aggrieved. Yeah. I mean, so look, I I think that that Jacob does an amazing job moderating the pod and it's a difficult job and you know the so. So I don't want to, you know, this is not something I'm trying to blame him for, but I do have an objection to being labeled in a certain way. I think anybody would, you know, we, we don't want to be misconstrued and and we want to be able to characterize our own views. We don't want to be labeled in a certain way. Now I think Jason has sort of branded me as a Trump. Because frankly, it's amusing to him. I think he's mainly trolling me and but the audience doesn't necessarily understand that. I mean, if you go back and look at my Twitter feed or my blogs, I haven't written about Trump for years. I mean, I haven't seen anything really about it. That's not my agenda. You know, and I think it's I, I don't have a pro Trump agenda, but I also don't have a pro resistance agenda. I've described my position as anti hysteria. Sometimes that means criticizing Trump like it did in the last pod. Sometimes it means criticizing the resistance. So I just don't like being labeled a certain way. And I think Jason and I sort of, you know, kind of resolve this, you know, if I were labeled my politics, just, you know, Jason calls me the conservative. I think that's more accurate. But the question is, you know, what am I conserving exactly. And I would describe myself more as like in 1960s style liberal. You know, I'm a believer in free speech, you know, ACLU style, believer in King's dream of a colorblind society. You know, if, you know, I'm against all these, you know, foreign wars and interventions, if I had been around the 1960s, I would have been protesting Vietnam. That's kind of more where I'm coming from. And I guess the reason I'm a conservative now is because the political debate has moved so far away from that. But if I'm trying to conserve anything, it's really the liberal. Victories of the 1960s. So in any event, I I don't think that qualifies me in any way as a, as a, as a Trumper per se. And I just don't want, you know, Jason making jokes to somehow have the audience get the wrong idea because I want to be heard. And I know Trump's extremely polarizing figure. And the second you tell somebody you're frankly pro or con Trump, the other half just doesn't even stop, doesn't want to listen to you. And so my, my views are more complicated than that. OK. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in to the all in. Amazing episode 17 emergency pod. Thanks to our sponsors. Listen, I think what makes this podcast great is the diversity of opinion and the respect that we show for each other. If my breaking chops, which is, as everybody knows here, my superpower in life and along with talking, has pigeonholed you into being something you're not. Or if you felt I've taken a cheap shot at you in any way. I apologize and it was not my intent. My intent is to keep the conversation flowing. To entertain the audience, certainly, but not at anybody's expense, David, and certainly not yours, because I do consider you one of the best friends I've had in my life and one of the most supportive people in my life. And I think we all feel that way about each other, that we go to bat, Frasier, and support each other. I do think that this highlights. And dovetails with what we, and I've given it a long thought, actually. I've really spent since the last podcast a lot of time thinking about your position, David, and where you're coming from, and then also where the people who maybe, you know, you maybe agreed with some of Trump's victories, and certainly you're a conservative. I don't know if you voted for him or not, or if you're willing to say if you did. I'll put that aside for a moment. But I do think that we're all seeing in our families, in our lives and now as a nation, what is the off ramp here to the people who supported Trump? Up until this coup attempt and this ugliness, and then how do we reconcile it? Right. That is the grand reconciliation. Here is the thing that has me very concerned because we're a microcosm, David. You and I are unbelievably close friends for a very long period of time and we struggle with, I think. Trump, Trump is. As I was saying in our group chat earlier, it's like the trolley car problem, like people will be pulling up. How do you deal with Trump? As the example of you know, what do you do if the trolley car, you know it's going to kill one person or five and do you, you know the brakes broke and kind of situation it it's. And I think Jack and the platforms also have a difficult task. Do you leave this person up after what we saw on Wednesday and a lot has changed since Wednesday and say something, I'll leave it at that and then I'll throw it to you. I don't wanna. No, Jason, here's the thing. I think that we all have views. And I think the thing that I respect the most about sax is that his views are independent of the candidate Dejour. And I think his views, quite honestly, are in many cases the most well reasoned and well thought out. Because he's frankly, you know, one of the smartest people in our friend group, if not probably the smartest OI think. What it speaks to is the fact that you can have these momentary. Sort of pauses where you have these people that are so polarizing that you forget that there are legitimate views on both sides. I mean, I would characterize my political views as in some cases like deeply conservative meaning get the government out of the way, they're a bunch of incompetent ******* buffoons. And on the other side, on some issues, I think that they should be extremely interventional, like in healthcare or in climate change, because it's just so dire and there needs to be a public mandate in order to drive change. I don't know where I fit anymore, especially because it's harder to be nuanced, as Freedberg said at the beginning, without sounding like a complete crazy person because one word triggers the other side against you. So I think the thing that I just want all the listeners to appreciate, not just amongst the four of us, but also amongst their own friends, is having a little patience and tolerance here is really important because we cannot become the worst of ourselves, especially because of a single person. Who will be rendered with an enormous* beside his name. And by him I mean Trump for the rest of our natural lives. And so let's just not allow what one person has been able to do to malign all of our, like, natural ability to just not be completely. Stupid. Quite honestly, OI just think it's important to realize that we all have completely, completely nuanced. Perspectives. They're all worth listening to and I would just tell people, don't fall for the simple easy out to assume that, you know, being a conservative means you're a Trump supporter or being a liberal means you're not a Trump supporter. Because I think that there's issues in which, you know, frankly, look, let's be honest, the the Wall Street Journal opinion by was it Lisa Lasser? Was her name Lisa Amy Lassell somebody. Skype posted into the group chat Nick, can you find it? I can't remember it sassel or lasso or last name anyways. So Kim strassel. Kim Strassel she she had a paragraph intro where and again I wasn't a Trump supporter. Have never been a Trump supporter. I do have those some sympathy to some of the things he did and the way that she described his four years although you know. She was selective. It was impressive, actually. You know, meaning getting the rhetoric right on China, getting the rhetoric on trade right. The deregulation that he's created in some ways, so there there is very much a reasonable narrative up until the capital storming where the glass was definitely half full and it could have legitimately been viewed half full, and it was just a matter of opinion because he was just such a crazy person and his style was so ******. I think the thing and David said this on the last part after storming the Capitol. It is very clear 100% categorically this guy is just a complete ***** ** **** and so now the people that stand with him are extremely isolated and so I just want us to remember that there is probably something to learn from everybody. He actually did some reasonable things intelligently well until he ******* self immolated himself and so let's just not. Given to our basic instincts here, and I think there's a lot to learn from, I think the frustration of a lot of people is some people saw this coming. And some people, you know, when Peter Thiel said things like, hey, you know, don't take Trump literally and all this kind of stuff, some of us were taking him literally and some of us were very concerned. And people were saying, you're being hyperbolic. He's not Hitler, he's not dangerous. You know what? ********. He is dangerous and you should take him literally. And I think a lot of the folks who enabled him and who thought it was funny, who weren't on the other side of his vindictiveness, his dog whistling and the anger and the violence he put out into the world, and he consistently did this. You know, he he he started by saying, you know, get that person the hell out of here like I would in the old days. The cops were thrown him down the stairs kind of thing. He is like Tony Soprano or any other mob boss. Who knows how to incite people to do dangerous things without having the culpability himself? As you pointed out shamati, he might be the one who gets off Scott free while they're rounding up all these people and and you got the prediction, right. Like these people are going to jail this multiple felonies. He's not going to get off Scott free. He's not well, I mean do you think he's going to jail and do you think the people who broke into this you think you think Trump's going to jail? Yes. Oh my Lord, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm not I'm not sure about that. But I I I do think that, you know, like I said last time, Trump is now the 1st. Sitting president to cost his party the presidency, the House and the Senate since Herbert Hoover. Jason, if you're right about Trump, I mean, the voters have certainly been able to see that and they've punished him and his party at the polls. I do think that whatever you do to Trump individually at this point is sort of redundant with that. You know, he has now cost his party any share of power, everything, any share of the power in Washington. So. Can I ask you a question, David? When I made that point about Peter Thiel and the people who supported him early. Do you have any regrets in your own thinking about being supportive of Trump in his early years? You're you're coming at this from a place I've never even come at it from, which is I'm not like a partisan person. When Trump won the election in 2016, my first reaction was not, is this, you know, hard, right or wrong? I don't, you know, which side am I on? My, my first reaction was, why did this happen? You know, I tried to understand it. You know, I read, you know, the the Hillbilly Elegy author, you know, I was, you know, my, my surprise at, at that happening caused me to ask questions. And, you know, what I think became really clear is that Trump won despite his manifest, you know, flaws because of a, because of the failure of the elites. I mean, he he was, you know, he's this sort of outsider populist. And the country was trying to send the elites a bipartisan, I should say bipartisan elites wanted to change. And what was that message? That to shamas points, for the last 20 years, the bipartisan consensus in Washington has been to feed this Chinese tiger and agonist, now potentially on the cusp of of supplanting us as the sort of richest economy in the world. We have admired ourselves in these forever wars in the Middle East. I mean, again, these were things that. Both Democrats and Republicans got us into. So my reaction, you know, was first and foremost to try and understand it. And then once he was in the Presidency, you know, I didn't see my job as being to be part of some crazy resistance. I mean, there needed to be a rational opposition to Trump, and there was never a rational opposition. People would basically object to anything he said just because he said it. Which then made your side, and I'm going to say your side, the conservative side. I won't say your side, the conservative side dug in because they were like, well, the left being hysterical. We're gonna dig in. Not not really. I mean if you if you've been reading National Review for the last few years and especially the last two months there's been plenty of criticism of Trump. Well, I was thinking more Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham. All these people who said they would be never Trumpers became right in line Trump supporters. And and they're and they're partisan. They're they're they're politicians. They're part of the the party for people who care about ideas. What I would say is I didn't change my ideas one way or another because Trump might happen to agree with one of them. Freeberg, what's your take? I don't like talking about Trump. Well that is kind of I think we're we're where we're getting to this is the look what's the off ramp here Friedberg. What's the end game? You guys remember how the emperor came to power in Star Wars? He was. Palpatine turned the Republic against itself, and then he emergency powers. Emergency powers. Look what I to saxis point like I care more deeply. I care very little about Trump the person, and I care more deeply about the motivations of people that that want a person like that in power. And I care more deeply about the way the dialogue is happening to resolve ideas and to resolve to decisions in this country right now. That is why I think that, you know, my vote last year in our last two podcasts ago, which seems like 10 years ago. Was that the biggest political failure of 2020 is the Institute of American Democracy, and it's only gotten worse in the last two weeks. And I think that the mechanism by which we have debate is lost. It's from everyone from the Republican to the Democratic leadership. It is attacking and finger pointing and there is no resolve for forgiveness. There is no everything is all about justice and winning and there is no resolve for objectivity and discovering the truth and and doing the best thing for people, not the best thing for party and doing the best thing for country. And that's really easy to say and really, really hard to do as I think everyone is realizing because as soon as you say let's bring the country together. Half the country raises their hand and says, but I want justice and we can't come together until we have justice. And so at what point do you break the cycle? You know, revenge never ends until someone steps down 1st and says, you know what, I give up, I'm not going to, I'm going to end up in the losing position. But at that point, maybe reconciliation can begin and I'm more concerned about the heat, the temperature, and everyone says turn it down, but no one's actually turning it down. And so you know the the legacy of Trump, I, I I I honestly care less about. I care much more about going forward. How do we resolve to decisions that aren't all about the Democrats overrunning. And you know I was I was actually upset about Georgia because I do think it's a problem if you have a one party state and we don't have balance and we don't have a forum for conversation and we don't have a forum you know for for for coming to to kind of you know objective sentiment that that's best for the people. Umm. And so, you know, I'm much more interested in flipping the conversation away from Trump and trying to think about, you know, going forward, what are the things, what are the forms, what are the mechanisms that we can have to to create equity in the country, to create reconciliation, to create balance in decision making and to turn down the temperature so that Chancellor Palpatine doesn't become the evil Emperor and that we don't lose to China and, you know, all the things that are kind of emerging as as being the unfortunate outcomes? Yeah, we have three or four. Major wars. We need to solve the pandemic, China, wealth inequality, global warming, chamath. Do you think at this point in the podcast we should walk through what's happened since Wednesday, Visa V, you know, Trump being D platformed? Or do you think we should talk a little bit about and skip to reconciliation? I think we have a fork in the road here. As the moderator, I'll just ask Chamath maybe you could pick which direction we go? Well, I think it's important to talk about what happened. And I'll frame this in the in the context of Peter Thiel. He has a philosopher that he's talked a lot about, Renee Girard. And, you know, basically the the Guardian philosophy is essentially that, you know, people come into conflict because they're extremely similar and, you know, they effectively want the same things and they're competing for the same sort of essentially scarce resources. And the way that you resolve that is through some sort of. Athletic sacrifice, right? Meaning, like there needs to be a grand crime, a grand act. And I think that we're at this point to freedberg's sort of earlier statement where you got a choice, which is you either throw democracy under the bus or you actually throw DJT under the bus. And you don't have a choice. And that and that and and sort of like, it's not just even the United States. It's almost like sort of democracy as an institution's hand was forced. This past week and so it is probably important to look at what's happened in the last few days through that lens, which is, you know, it's almost like people first were shocked and then now we're in the midst of that reflexive reaction to what is a simple choice, which is you can basically forgive the guy or you can re affirm the institution, which means to sacrifice the guy. And I think that's the thing that's happening in real time. And it's going to be, I think, over the next few weeks, a super messy conversation because you're going to have a bunch of dumb decisions, you're going to have a bunch of overreaching. You know, you're going to have a bunch of dramatic sort of bellyaching on both sides. You know, there was this thing today where Devin Nunez was, like screaming about how he had lost his 3000 followers on Parler, 3,000,000 followers on Parler. But he was saying it on Fox News, which is distribution to millions of people. And so I ask a question about this reality now we're all facing do cause the event that occurred on Wednesday. We are all still trying to process and new information is coming in. As we, you know, as people get the videos and and as we let the dust settle, the dust is settling. I'm curious. Sacs do. How do you look at what happened on Wednesday? Do you view it as a coup? Do you? Because some of the information that's come out about they were trying to get to Pence and that they wanted to kidnap people. And then that dovetails with the kidnapping schemes that were going on. And there were pipe bombs and a police officer was beaten to death with a pipe and his skull. Has crashed or something. We don't have all the details yet. First publisher yeah, a fire extinguisher was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Some of the videos I've seen of police being dragged. You know that counteract the selfie, police. You know, so many different things occurred on Wednesday. I think we all have to just think about what happened on Wednesday. How do we each feel about what happened on Wednesday? I'll go to you first, sax. Well, not because I'm framing you as anything, just because you haven't talked already, said. I already gave my thoughts in the last pod that it was outrageous. It was a travesty. It was a rally that turned into a riot that turned into, you know, some sort of insurrection, I guess you could call it. It was it was a rebellion against authority. I think coup is is potentially a strong word because. It wasn't it. Nobody ever had their hands on the levers of power. I mean, the the fate of the Republic was never in question. I know there were even, you know, people tweeting about how the. That these rotters, what I'm going to call them, almost got their hands on the electors ballots. I mean, yeah, but we all know how they're voting. Even if they had gotten them, we would just have gotten new ones. I mean, that was sort of a ceremonial thing, but look, it was it was an absolute outrage. But I do think that there is a thing happening now called threat inflation where, you know, using language like, you know, going from Riot to. Insurrection to now coup it, there is a type of inflation happening that is then used to justify the reaction by the other side to it, which is now, you know, the basically the ending of freedom of speech, which is really I think the big thing has happened since the last pod is really that's the reason why we are having this emergency pod, I think is because of what's happened there. I think the emergency part was just to make sure that the pot wasn't ending because of you not getting in a big fight. I think that was people's concern. Yeah, The Beatles were breaking up. Yeah, well that's true. Look, just keeping the pot together, you know, with with four big egos on it. You're right. It's hard. It is like The Beatles. You know one day is going to break up but, but not but not yet. Not yet, but but but I want to, I want to tie in this issue with you set up what you said about the off ramp, OK? Which is you know, what is the off ramp from this. Look, everybody understands I think regardless of what side political spectrum you're on that we are caught in a cycle of insane hyper partisan. Warfare and *** for tat retaliation. And that is the thing that we need to that. That is the ledge we need to walk back from. OK, but the problem that everybody has is that they can only see the other side doing it. You know? They can't see themselves doing it. This is a two way St both sides are doing it, and that's how Deescalation works as both sides have to concede something. Yes, and unless you can see when your side is doing it, we're never gonna break the cycle. Now, the thing that is happening right now, now what Trump did was absolutely outrageous, and I think it it brought him to an ignominious end in American politics. He will pay for it in the history books, if not in a court of law. OK, but now what has happened is the next step in the *** for tat retaliation. What the the storming of the Capitol has now been used to implement a sweeping attack on free speech. You know, the the Twitter employees who sent that letter to Jack. Who've been demanding this for years, have finally gotten their way. And there is a widespread purge going on it. Not just of Trump, not just a permanent ban on Trump and then a whole bunch of other people, you know, conservatives. There are now liberal accounts. There's an account that I wasn't even aware of called Red Scare. They're basically, you know, pretty, pretty much on the left. No one could say exactly what it was that got them banned. I guess they had Steve Bannon on their podcast. They are suddenly banned from Twitter. Nobody knows why. I subscribe to the Red Scare podcast. It's actually it's called the dirtbag left. They're kind of like socialists into trying to be public intellectuals, and it's oddly compelling. I'll leave it at that. That they are now banned from from Twitter they somehow got let's pause for a second on DJT getting banned from Twitter. This is close to 100 million followers. It's a billion dollars in value. He just had the PGA say they'll never do a Trump golf course again. So the Rams, the real world ramifications for Trump are he's his businesses are going to be devastated, his platform is gone. But. And and I was very pro Trump staying on Twitter. I thought it was insane to think that the President of the United States would have their Twitter handle removed. That seemed crazy to me, however. Crazy. It's a crazy concept. That being said, Trump knows how to dance right up to the line on the terms of service. And I think here's the thing, here's the thing. I think there's imminent danger, and I think what we don't know is what. Is concerning to me. The fact that all of these services have turned him off I believe is indicative of Wednesday was under hyped. And that they really did intend to kidnap folks and blow off bombs. And the Proud Boys founder was arrested days before with, you know, selling large magazine weapons. I think that they wanted to kill and kidnap people and perhaps even like hang the vice president sounds crazy, but that's honestly Jason. That's what I think is going on with Twitter. I think they told. I think they showed them the receipts. Jason, stop. I honestly like let's not ******* fear monger like. There were no better than anybody else with that ********. We don't know any of that crap. And the reality is that if they were doing that they they are not stupid enough to do it on a platform where you basically follow anybody you want. OK? Like I mean if that were the case then ******* ISIS would be using Twitter. They don't use Twitter, they use telegram. But he's known live streamed storming of the capital. These people are not smart. We've established that I I anyways I can we just let's just like let's not do the left version of Q Anon. OK, let's not have now the lefts version of the crazy conspiracy theories. Here's here's I think what is worth talking about we really reflexively all of a sudden. Started to push back on free speech in a way that doesn't make any sense. Meaning, I really was surprised. Like, why are these Silicon Valley companies reacting now? Like if you had. A reason to do it. It had been building for years and years and years, and in many ways it was kind of like this random moment. And I and I and I mean random because I just don't think that, you know, everything up until that point was not equally sort of vile and disgusting under the same lens that that moment was. And so had you had a reason to ban him, you would have banned him already. But then doing it in the way you did and then having this cascading effect on folks on the left and the right, just getting basically pushed out the door. To me was just completely reactive and not rooted in anything. It didn't to me it didn't make any sense. It it's it's, I don't know, I was, I was very frustrated and and a little taken aback. Well, can I, can I, can I jump in on that? Because yeah. And then the last thing is like they let Donald Trump hit a 1 outer, like he was painted in 1/4 to be a complete demagogue, and instead now it has been wrapped in a free speech issue where now more people are talking about free speech than what a scumbag he is. How did we let that happen? Big Tech blundered into it again. I mean, we had a unanimity across the political spectrum that what happened with the capital was wrong and Donald Trump was responsible for it. And chamath exactly like you said, the topic has now changed to censorship by big tech, which is a real issue. I mean, look, our freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution, in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. It's the first ******* one, OK? It's the one the framers of the Constitution cared about the most, because. Free speech is not just necessary and important for democracy. It's the reason why we have our freedom is so that we can think and speak and worship as we please, and that is legitimately under threat. You know what? What big to and and by the way, it's not just the permanent ban on Trump. You had simultaneous to that. It was a it wasn't just the banning of all these accounts. You also had the deep platforming of parlor, which is sort of the Twitter alternative. By Google and Apple at the same time, and in Amazon. And so you're talking about really deep platforming. Not just Trump, but millions of people. And so the the amazing thing is that we've had this sweeping appropriation of power by, you know, half a dozen oligarchs who now have the right to determine what we see and read. And people are cheering because they hate Trump so much they can't see that the biggest power grab in history has happened, has happened. OK, something on this, because I'm not sure I really fully agree. I I think that the point that Sachs is making about freedom of speech applies to what you're legally allowed to say. Sax, we're talking about private services that, you know, a user chooses to use and the service provider chooses to make available to that user in a market space. And in that context, it feels to me like everyone has a choice. Of where to go and what services to use. And frankly, if there aren't good services to use and there's a lot of people that want to use one, the free market will resolve to create one. And we're already seeing that with signal being the number one app on the App Store today that emerging new platforms will win in a marketplace where old service providers are no longer catering to the market demands for a service. I'll also say that we can correspond to that one. Yeah. And I'll make one more point, but go ahead. Yeah. So I understand the 1st amendment only applies to government. OK, it doesn't apply to private companies, but, but here's, here's the The thing is that when the the framers of the Constitution wrote that freedom of speech was something that took place in the in the town square, right, you would go to the courthouse steps and put down your soapbox. You could speak to people, gather, crowd. That is why the right to assemble is part of the 1st amendment is because assembling is tantamount to free speech. Where do people assemble today? Online on these monopoly network services? Like a Facebook, like Twitter? And again, it's not and and and to your point, couldn't they go to some other site? Well, they did. They went to parlor. Guess what happened? The operating systems just banned parlor. And so, you know, I hear this, this there's an open, there's an open web sax. You know, you don't need to go to Apple's App Store or Google's Google Play. You can put an app on Android. You just don't need to do it through Google Play. And if you don't want to use Apple's OS, you can use another phone. And by the way, and everyone can access the Internet. The Internet is free and open, and anyone can create a new network. Load on the Internet and anyone can put any information they want on that node, provided it's within the boundaries and constraints of the law, and they can make it available to anyone else. Maybe for for now, but you can't use a WS and Google might not make you show up in search results. You could turn your iMac, you could turn your iMac at home into a into a web server, and you could make it available on the Internet. If Google and Amazon and Apple have censored you at the operating system level and remove you from Google search results, how in the world is anybody supposed to find you? Yeah. You're getting people have been removed from Google search results. Let me just I I think it's important. Yeah. So, so I do think that there's still an open market and there's an open Internet that people can access information freely and use the Internet freely without being dependent on a handful of your right high highly scaled services and highly scaled platforms. But there's certainly a marketplace and an opportunity for for innovation there. I'll also say that the the platforms that made these decisions to ban these accounts and and kick. People off are not doing so. Under the demand of law. And I think that that is a really. And so I think to some extent, you know, I'm probably on your side in this context, but the standard is not a legal standard. The standard is a judgment. It is a, it is a, it is a moral or some principled standard that is sitting above and beyond the legal standard that they're required to comply with. This is the point. And this is really scary, right? Because at that point it becomes a subjective decision about who you kick off based on your interpretation of what. They said and what they intended when they said it and that leads to the infinite slippery slope. And you, yeah, you nailed it. 1 ******* 1000%. That is the exact issue. It's not necessarily about free speech. It is that when you have accumulated power and you effectively have a quasi governmental organization that gets to operate in the free market when it wants to, but then operate like a quasi governmental monopoly when it wants to, all of a sudden the power becomes in the shadows, right? There is a random. ESP. Someplace. Who actually controls this decision? And the problem is, today, if a politician does something, or a political body or a government body does something, you have redress, right? You can sue that entity. You know who it is. There's a pathway through the courts, through the law, through the Constitution. The problem with this is all of a sudden it becomes murky. And look, you flip a coin, 50% of the time, guys, you're going to get your way. The other 50% of the time, who the **** knows what will happen? And you may be completely on the wrong side of it. This is, I think, the problem. Let me I just want to read you guys something. There was a there was this manifesto or memo, this woman who was a former Facebook data scientist, Sophie Zang, she wrote. I'm just, I'm just going to read this because I think it's really interesting here. The 6600 word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zang, is filled with concrete examples of Heads of Government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them, she said. In the three years I've spent at Facebook. Found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry and Causeway international news on multiple occasions. Now let me just stop there. Replace your United States with all those countries and we care. But there are people in all of those countries where you know those countries mean more to them than what's happening in the United States, right? And that represents the problem. That's what we're dealing with. The social suasion that is influencing the leaders of the tech companies are largely. They're Democrat employees that live in the Bay Area and that's a big part of why the decisions are being made in the way that they're being made in. The priorities are being said is because, as you pointed out, I think it was. Saka put it on Twitter and and Jason, you've talked about this, but talent has everything in Silicon Valley. And if your employees tell you they're going to quit working for you or they're not going to do their jobs, you're going to take that to heart. And there's not a lot of influence or suasion that you know, citizens of Bolivia and you know. Uruguay can have with executives at Facebook and Twitter, but people in the Bay Area do have. A lot of us have a ******* clue about the politics in Azerbaijan or Bolivia. Does anyone of us have a point of view? And and I think that's that's that's the point is like is like as soon as you add judgment to the equation you know you're gonna be wrong with some people and you're gonna be right with some people versus using an absolute standard. And if the issue is that the law if the law doesn't define the absolute standard then you need to go and change the law. I think there's going to be a couple of free market solutions that come here because you even as difficult as this decision can be you layer it on to it. Somebody who is completely insincere and. Manipulating the system on purpose and to your point, David, in the last podcast is sitting in the President of the United States seat. You know, it carries different weight. And if you look at the words that Trump used or Rudy used, you know, we want to have combat trial by combat, you know, is that somebody's got to make a judgment call? Is that an incitement to violence or do you just look at what occurred after they said the words? It's a very difficult thing to do. There are free market solutions that will emerge. Bitcoin is something we've talked about is an incredible run. Nobody's controlling that. There is Mastodon and plenty of other peer-to-peer software that will be deployed, I predict and that will put up a competition now for these services and it will be impossible to ban those peer-to-peer platforms. And so we'll have some products emerge. Universal truth, that's information wants to be free. So if there is an opinion, if there is a voice, if there is information out there, there'll be a free market response to parlor being shut down. I I sincerely believe that a lot of these decisions are being made not just at the behest of the employees. I do. They agree they have tremendous power. And, and I've said that obviously many times. I think what's going on here is people believe that Trump and we, and you said it yourself, David, there's going to be a white knuckle 10 days and I don't know if you still believe that there's a chance on the 17th or 19th or whatever that there could be more unrest. I actually think a lot of people woke up and said, I don't know if I want to give this guy. The ability to say the next three or four crazy things that make people show up at a person's home. Or, you know, the dog whistling and you know if if if Trump's. Comments on Wednesday at that rally and Rudy Giuliani's and Donald Trump Junior's the people who really incited this and and they're going to face some amount of civil and and and criminal charges, I believe. If they did that on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or Periscope or whatever it happens to be and then this happened with those platforms have some liability especially after you know what's happened. I think that they're just in part of this is covering their *****. I think they should have just done a 30 day ban, not a permanent ban. So at least they would have the cover of saying, listen this is too heated, we're going to pause for the 30 days and then we'll reassess it February 1st or February 15th, right. Well, so, so part of the problem here. Is that there is no policy right? The policy is public outcry, and if there's enough public outcry and there's enough pressure or letter writing from the employees, or there's enough Saber rattling by the people who are going to run the Senate Judiciary Committee next year, or the language was so clear. It's there is so. So three months ago I wrote a blog post about the the policy that I thought the social media companies should take. I said for moderation. And what I said is there actually is a moderation policy consistent with the 1st amendment that could be implemented because the 1st amendment does not protect many categories of basically dangerous speech. There's like 9 major categories. It includes incitement of violence. It includes, you know, trying to. You know it. Trying to provoke a crime, it it includes fraud, it includes defamation. There are many categories of speeds that aren't protected by the 1st Amendment and social media companies could have said, listen, this is our policy is we are going to try and be broadly consistent with the 1st amendment, but if somebody goes outside of those lines then we will remove it. So there was a way to your, to your point, Jason, I think there was a way to remove some of Trump's treat tweets for incitement consistent with the 1st Amendment, but that's not what they did. You know that, and maybe that. Would it say what they did is, is a lifetime ban combined with rounding up, you know, twice the usual number of suspects combined with a deep platforming, not at the account level, but now at the application level by Google, Apple and Amazon. And none of this has been explained. There is no policy. What it is is a hold on. What it is is an appropriate use of power by oligarchs. No, no, there is a policy. The problem is. As we've just discussed, it's an interpretation that must occur. And the interpretation of Wednesday's comments on a tweet might be OK, yeah, they're borderline, but not enough to shut his account down. And these folks know how to do it. When Rudy Giuliani says I want a trial by combat, or if Trump says you're not going to have a country unless you fight and you have to fight and we're never going to accept these results, is that inciting or not so well? It did incite people. The policy that that that I want is. Something broadly consistent with the 1st amendment because, but in those, in those phrases I just told you is there are those inciting or are those on the borderline if you were making the decision. Right. So, you know, putting my lawyer hat on for a second, there's questions of law and questions of fact. OK. And we can debate what you're describing are questions of fact. What I'm trying to say is, well, what what is the law? What is the policy that the law would say those were not? Direct incitement, no, there is no policy. These social media companies have any policy. They're making it up as they go along based on what would you do, they get, what would you do with Trump's comments from Wednesday if they were in tweets? Yeah, I'll tell you. So first of all, I would have implemented a moderation policy broadly consistent with the 1st amendment and then certain tweets that were inciting violence while there was riding on the capital. I would have been OK taking those down. I would have taken those down where I think and and and I think even doing something until the inauguration. If you think that Trump poses a threat, because I think, I think that's OK, I think that's OK. So you would have been fine with the 30 day ban or something, well, like a 10 day ban or whatever, but a lifetime ban that like on what basis, on what constitutional grounds do you justify that? And look, I know it's a private company, but my point is this idea, our free speech rights got privatized, OK? The town square got digitized and centralized. We used to have. Thousands. We used to have town squares where people could convene all over this country. We had a multiplicity of newspapers. All that got replaced by a handful of tech monopolists. Our free speech rights got digitized. If they take away our ability to speak, we don't have free speech rights. Who do we appeal to when we get cancelled by a Google or Apple? What court can we go to? There is that you have to create a computing pride. By the way, I think this is the best argument for having an Internet court. And if you think about the. Standards that are being applied, they're being applied haphazardly, randomly by by by these companies in response to to to near term market forces. You know what are, what is everyone saying they have to do or what are their employees rallying to have to do securities law. Well there's, there's, there's there's privacy laws that say what you you know that companies that digital companies cannot take certain types of data and you know why not have laws which was out there as well and and why not be more specific and then you let an Internet court adjudicate. And make the decision about what to take down and what not to take down. They are as they are very responsive to warrants when there is a criminal act underway and so why not let an Internet court be responsive to takedown requests or to what do you think or some other sort of good idea? No, it's it's mandatory. And again, it centralizes the standards, right? So you don't have to have ad hoc random decisions and let if if what Sachs is saying is true, it creates a standard that everyone has to abide by and that every consumer can trust them to abide by. For first, first we need a Bill of Rights, right. First we need to say that we as citizens have rights that the Court can defend, can defend. That is the problem. We don't have any rights. These companies are. Acting Willy nilly, cancelling people, depriving them of their speech rights. And don't tell me that you can still speak. You know somewhere if you get, if you get cancelled. Here's the thought exercise and I want everybody listening. Who's on the left to think about this exact issue? Your favorite social media company is trying to get a really, really big deal closed, and they are trying to Curry favor with a bunch of brands and a bunch of governments and those governments and brands. Let's just say it's in India, right? Huge market 1.2 billion people, they say, you know what? We are a little tepid on abortion. And so the deal is you need to dial down any ad. From Planned Parenthood, you need to prevent Planned Parenthood groups from amplifying, from being able to fundraise. Think about that exact issue now and ask yourself is it OK? Because there's a lot of people that are, you know, pro-choice that listen to this and they and you. I'm sure right now your blood is ******* boiling. But there is no distinction between that decision and what happened over the last few days. There's none. It's arbitrary, it's random. It doesn't necessarily make any sense. There is no way to readdress it. And that's the biggest problem with all of this thing. It just there's a concept that newspapers should have in a buzzman, and the New York Times had what up until, I think 2017? And then they got rid of it because it was causing too much headaches. But it's a person who sits, who works for the organization but has complete independence and sits outside of it. To comment on these kind of situations and I think that's what these companies, but no these Jason, they have these things but those are fig leaves and those are just meant to basically they just they don't have it in distract dumb politicians. It's not, it's not Jason, they have a ******* counsel. Facebook has a council with all these transparent, they don't say here's our decision making and talk to the public directly about it. I think that you can look to securities law, there's some examples and securities law which I think are really interesting, which is that. A CFO and CEO has to certify quarterly results, right? Meaning for people who have issues with the company and with the statement of their earnings, which is the sort of atomic unit of value creation and financial reporting, they have a mechanism to redress it because you're certifying that something is true, right? You're certifying a set of decisions have been made and audit has been done. You know the software works, you know the blah, blah, blah. What is the version of that for all of this other stuff, which is that? You know where, where are the people? Who are they actually that make the decisions? You can't point to Jack and Zuck and say those guys are the decision makers. I think in these examples what you have to point to is there was a petition of potentially several 100 or a few thousand engineers and depending on how important they were, they may have gotten their way. That's crazy guys. Well, and Trump served it up to him. I mean if you if you know, and then the worst part is no. But the worst part is these people who are probably very left of center, completely ****** the left. And then they basically let Donald Trump off the hook because now we're going to completely be talking about free speech. Whereas the odds that Donald Trump would have gone to jail and been prosecuted was basically, in my opinion, a ******* stone cold lock. And then now after this happened, there's a bunch of those people who are going to basically like him and Haw and now they're not going to necessarily go along with it. Exactly 100 hundred 100% and and and Jason. So good ******* job, guys. You got the exact opposite of what you wanted. Exactly. And here's the thing, Jason. You're right. Trump's outrage gave the censors the excuse to impose this. That's the way that censorship always works. If you are censoring somebody popular, it would never happen. Censorship always starts by censoring some outrage that everybody agrees should be censored, and no one even notices that what's happening is you're handing power to a group of people that they can now use against you in the future. Censorship always starts with something you like, and it ends as something you don't like when it finally gets turned against you. What is the policy of the people who are now cancelling Willy nilly? It's cancel culture, by the way. It's not the First Amendment. I I think you gotta not say Willy nilly after Trump incited riots. If there's enough public it might have been an overreaction, but I think it's the proper reaction. You agree? It's the proper, just so people understand the proper reaction to maybe do a 30 day suspension, but maybe not indefinitely on all platforms. Forget about Trump for a second. There are all these like random ******* useless accounts with 60,000 people that were basically suspended. Well, a lot of them were bots. 60,000 followers is like, I mean like it doesn't like what's going on. It makes no sense, Jason. I mean, you used to be a member of the press. No one believed in the First Amendment more than you. And you're letting you still outrage. You still didn't have full information. You're getting your outrage at Trump no cause you to pull your punches on these, on censorship. No, no, I'll be totally clear. I think they should have a buzzman. I think they should lean towards allowing speech. I was anti kicking Trump off the platform when the entire left was asking for it to be. And you can look at the receipts. I've been saying for four years, it's insane to take POTUS off. I actually in my heart of hearts believe that there is imminent risk in keeping him able to communicate with this group of people and there should have been a 30 day time out for him and I don't think it should have been indefinite. It should have been a 30 day timeout and I think we should do what folks said. I don't know who said it on the last pod or I heard it somewhere else. Like actually if we actually were to audit some of these claims and create an independent counsel to audit the election, that might be a way to heal things. And I think giving Trump except that. Is that freeburger? Yeah. So I think that's like a power move as well. But I'm still pro freedom of speech. I think there's imminent danger, and I don't think it's Willy nilly. This is where I think sometimes you get you. You miss and you misrepresent yourself, David. And we started this off with me misrepresenting you. But when you say it's Willy nilly, it's not Willy nilly. We just had this active treason and this violence at the Capitol. It isn't just Willy nilly. Jason. Jason, you have to overreaction. I agree, but it's not. Willy nilly, Jason. You have to admit, though, the entire world had Donald Trump in a corner, debt to rights, and he hit one out and he hit a one another. It's it's a bad strategy to deep platform to this level. I agree. And then then to include the reason they're going after parlor, by the way, is that this guy Lynnwood threatened. He said that they should take Vice President Pence out and shoot him and I think that actually. I'm saying but they literally didn't take it down and it was incitement to violence and and under the First Amendment you can clearly prohibit that. I would have taken Parler didn't take it down. They dragged their feet taking it down and he said it's a metaphor to go take pants out and shoot him. And this is Donald Trump's lawyer. Well, one of his lawyers, previous lawyers that in my view that doesn't just that doesn't justify what's happened. What I mean by Willy nilly is why is red scare been taken down so left wing site, I don't know why is why is Dan Bongino been taken? Down. He's like a fox commentator. I I've heard him. I mean he's sort of, you know, I I don't know he he's kind of a pretty middle of the road Fox type guy. I don't really know what he did. We have no transparency into why people are being taken down. I can't go evaluate for myself what they said to see if it, you know, if it warranted censorship. And the civic might say that this overreaction was playing into the hands of the. Jason Jason what happened? Controlled Senate Congress. Listen, what happens if like a big pharma company who wants to do a big ad buy on Facebook says hey guys, you got to really dial down anti VAX content. Now I'm not an antivaxxer, but do I at some level believe in their right to talk about being an anti vaxxer? Absolutely. I think it's insane. But should they have a right to do it? Absolutely, absolutely. I'm a fan of the labeling. I thought the labeling was the right direction to go in. Where if but but sacks you did talk about how for the last 60 days. Trump fermented this insane conspiracy theory. So I guess the question is do you think that in saying conspiracy theory or the question we have to ask all of ourselves. I'm not pinning it on you and you know I'm, I'm sensitive to you being pinned as the person who stands for all of Trump's bad behavior. But we you did say and you just say this is a two-month process of indoctrinating people into thinking this was all stolen and then they put labels on it and then the capital gets stormed. So I think these companies are being put in a very uncomfortable position, which is. At what point do you stop this maniac if he's, if he's lying constantly? We, we were talking about these challenges on the pilot for the last couple of months and we were laughing. I mean, we were laughing at how ridiculous they were and how ridiculous the the the things that, you know Rudy was doing and you know, it was crazy. So look, I'm not to his supporters. Well, but here, here's the thing, one of which is dead, or four of which are dead. I understand. And here's the thing. Democracy takes work. I mean, we have to, you know, we have to spend the time to actually dispel these views. And, you know, it would be nice to be able to wave a magic wand and just censor the things that we don't like. But here's the thing. None of us has a monopoly on the truth. And, you know, we knew what the truth was in this particular instance, but there are other cases where we don't. And and and the question is really. Who has the power to decide? So, you know, just, I'll tell you just a real quick story. You know, when I went to law school all those years ago, the very first class that, you know, that that that I had in law school, it's this very arcane class called Civil Procedure, which is about what court you take a case to. OK. And, you know, I was kind of wondering, well, why is this, like, the first thing we learned in law school? And I'll tell you the reason why is because the first question in the law is who? Besides, it's jurisdiction. Who has the power to decide an issue? And here's the thing. I would love for Lynnwood to to be cancelled and to not be able to spout these insane theories, but who are going to give the power to to make those decisions? And what we've done this week by we had this feel good moment, I, you know, at least in in the tech community of being able to say Donald Trump banned for life and all these other people we hate, but we have now handed this enormous power. To this big tech cartel and it's not going to end here. This is not the end. It's the beginning. Look, I. I don't think that the the leadership at Big Tech want to be in this position. You know, I I think it's easy to blame the individuals zock. Uh, Jack, Susan, Umm Sundar, whomever you know, I worked at Google when it was a small, when it was a private company, you know, Chamath knows, work with Zac. I think we've all had experience with these individuals, and I think one thing having spent time with all of them, I can tell you is that I believe that all of them want information to be freely available and accessible and that that's a really core principle and and the challenge that they're facing. Is that there is you know as we talked about this social pressure to move away from that core principle because there is always an argument to be made and there is no universal or unifying kind of court of law that says this is the way things should should be done by law. And as a result the the pressure is what changes the behavior and that pressure will change the tides will, will shift and and it's a, it's a, it's a very kind of ugly circumstance, but you know I think. Vectorizing the individuals as being in charge of this sex or you know, trying to to handcuff to to, to make them feel like they should be handcuffed in some way is, you know, is a is a bit of a mischaracterization and we saw that even in the congressional hearings last July. Just what an absolute joke it was to see Congress trying question these folks because the answers they have, I think were reasonable and rational. And as we all know as technologists like, Congress doesn't understand this stuff. The biggest observation to me is that the law hasn't kept up with the Internet. And Umm, you know, if you look at how the DMCA was written, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, shortly after it was written, YouTube, with all this user generated content, saw a lot of copyright content show up and they would get a takedown notice, which is the legal process by which you remove copyright content. And then as soon as they took it down, someone else would post the same content and then someone else post the same content. And then suddenly, you know, Viacom sued Google because they were like, look, our copyrighted content is being continuously displayed on your site, on your platform, and that's because the mechanism. Finding the DMCA did not keep up with the law. The biggest issue I think is, is is a legal one, which is, you know, how do we create laws and how do we create a private industry meets government court body governing principles that you know allows these organizations to operate. Can I say something? Sentence. I mean apply First Amendment obligations to these monopolists. That's when my blog post was about ohh I'll tell you where this could go in a bad direction is if you look at, if you think about what social media has become, I would put it on the top of the list that includes other critical national resources that any country has. So for example, if you look at in Bolivia, you know, as it turns out, Bolivia has incredible access to lithium. Right. And lithium is like an incredible we all knew that we want to medicate Trump with lithium. Is that what you're saying? No. Lithium, the, the, the, the, the input into into lithium ion batteries. But it also turns out that at every step along the way, Bolivia is basically nationalized, every single private investment of a lithium mine in countries all around the world. There's, you know, numerous examples of this privatization turning into nationalization. When something becomes important enough and Norway, part of I think what we're struggling with here is, you know there's going to be this crazy push, pull in in in social media. What do you think happens if you know India actually says, hey, you know what? You're gonna have to nationalize the rails of WhatsApp or the rails of Facebook if you want to be in my country. Why? Why is that so inconceivable? I think you're right. That that's that that is a second order, that that is a second order consequence of censorship that nobody even thinks about. You have the leaders of many countries across the world using Twitter as a as a channel. Do you think they are now going to want to rely on that? Given that Twitter can censor them at any time, they're going to hand that lever of national power to Jack Dorsey. No way they're going to look at this. I mean, not even Jack Dorsey, David, somebody in like the bowels of the user. You know, user, user access group, something, some Brando, VP, some place is going to stop the president or the Prime Minister of a country in communicating to their people. It's not exactly, exactly and and this is exactly the kind of 2nd order consequence that the people who who I think engage in this feel good moment of censoring. Trump didn't even think through, didn't even think through. This is exactly why the best solution would have been a temporary pause on these accounts to let the dust settle, but any of these completely fundamental. Decisions that you can't go back from. What is the technical difference between saying it's banned forever and it's banned for 10 days today? Technically, it's the same decision. Yeah, but exactly what David said. You feed into this emotion just like the people that stormed the capital fed into their emotion. And then you wake up the next day with this hangover and you realize to yourself, what the **** did I just do? And I think that's that's what we're gonna have to sort out now is you cannot unscramble this ******* egg because irrespective of whatever happens in the United States, there are two to three billion monthly active users, daily active users on these products. They all report to different people. And none of those people that they report to are Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg. They are the presidents and prime ministers, duly elected individuals of these countries. And so you're not gonna allow these two private citizens to disrupt power. We we we have so much information we don't know about what occurred this past week. I think it's it's all going to get investigated. It's gonna be like a 911 Commission all over again or Ukraine, etcetera. And and I think that's why a pause would be really good to find out exactly. You know, Trump's been telling people to come to this rally. It's going to be a hell of a show, and it's gonna be incredible. And you gotta be there on the 6th. It's gonna be out of control. You know how how how much did they know? Right? Like, that's what I really want to know. How much did they know about what was going to go down? And why are these people carrying zip ties and pipe bombs? You know, like, this could have been a lot worse. I think that's why people are responding this way. And I saw something today that I thought was, I'll let you pick it up for me, freeberg. But I saw something today that I thought was. Particularly interesting, and in dovetails with reconciliation, which is what the country's got to do in 2021 and 22, we got to reconcile the ship because it's bigger fish to fry, like, you know, China and the pandemic and global warming. Uh, one of these people at the airport who was coming home from the rally is now on the do not fly list. They're taking this group of domestic terrorists, is how they're putting these American citizens who got whipped up into a frenzy by Trump and Giuliani. They're calling them domestic terrorists now. Some of them, maybe, maybe some of them are just, you know, got caught up in the wrong mob. They're on the do not fly list. This guy couldn't get home and he's freaking out. And then I don't know if you saw Lindsey Graham. With twenty of the people who are going home from the rallies chanting at him that this is never gonna end and and that seemed like a very volatile situation and and so the escalation continues. Good Freeburg, I'll tell you like it feels to me like this past week has been nothing but fuel for both sides because there isn't a black and white circumstance here and there isn't a black and white objective truth about, you know, what took place and what motivations were and what the connections were. When I was 16 years old, I went to a rave in downtown LA and for New Year's Eve you didn't. And right before were you 16 and and the rave got shut down half an hour before midnight because there was some illegal drug being widely circulated for free. So you guys can watch videos of this on YouTube. It's called circa 1996. And we and everyone the cops came in and they shut down the rave. It was outdoors in downtown LA and we rioted. And so everyone liked the rave and. Like I, I I participated. I think I've passed the the period where they can prosecute my God, 7000. Yeah, I participated in the. No, don't say that. Don't say that. On the show you you were you witnessed. I witnessed, participated in the sense that I was there and and I saw all this, all this activity. But when you're standing next to these people, there was absolutely no thought around what to do and when and what the next step was. And I think if you watch the videos, yeah, if you watch the videos of the capital, there's a lot of videos on YouTube that you can watch now and you can watch the interviews of people coming out of the Capitol building. It's like, what were you doing in there? We were fighting for, you know, to to. It's a revolution, right? I mean, we're taking back the country. And then some people were saying, well, we're trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden. And other people were saying we're taking over the capital. There was number uniform sense of what the objective of the mission was. And there was many interpretations. If you look at all the parlor messages that have been copied and published now online, there were many interpretations about Trump's words and Rudy Giuliani's words. Yeah, parlor and and so everyone has a different point of view. And I think that's the biggest challenge we're going to have is we're all going to try and, you know, get to the truth. And everyone's going to cast this as a different point. They're going to take what happened. They're going to take some set of events that happened, and they're going to highlight that this is what the connections were and this is the reason why it happened. And this just creates fuel it doesn't create. You know, there there is not gonna be some objective outcome here. We're all gonna feel better. No one's gonna feel better at the end of the day. And and we've basically just thrown a whole bunch of gas on on a fire that was already. What do you think that was my point was just like, it's all. It's all grace. No, my behavior, I mean. Yeah, it's crazy. Burn whatever photos you took. Sax what do you think of this VP you know Pence and Trump and their relationship visa vie pardons in this end game here because it does seem like Pence was upset obviously at what occurred and that Trump didn't even call to check on him and what was going on and that a number of these people because there are Q Anon people there. There are you know I'm sure Antifa people there, but it was mainly Trump folks they wanted to capture the VP that was. For some of them, the explicit purpose of this was to get the vice president and to hold him accountable. And you know, there are some speculations to do bodily harm to him. What are your thoughts on that? I think one of the most insane aspects of what Trump did was the way that he denounced Pence, who's been the model of a loyal VP. I mean, certainly the other side has criticized him for that, for being sort of almost a toady. No one could have been more loyal than Pence over to Trump the last four years, and Pence simply told him, look, I don't have the power to cancel this vote of the electors, you know, and for that fact, you know, just for speaking truth about that, Trump denounced him in front of this. This mob and and made him a target and that is one of the more insane aspects of what Trump did and you know I truck no sympathy for that. Again this was an act of of demagoguery and this is in Indominus and for for Trump's presidency. But but in terms of like you know I want to go back to to what Freeburg just said about how he got kind of caught up in this in in that mob. I think that. That was true, I think, for 90 something percent of the people who are there is that they went to this Trump rally and protest and it turned into a riot and they got caught up in it. And then in addition to that, there were, I think, hidden in that crowd, some serious agitators who were there to carry out violence and mayhem and had crazy plans, you know, hanging my pence, shooting Pelosi. I mean, there really were, you know, a small number of those people. I don't know what the percentage is. Probably 1 or 2%. What? It's nothing. It's not the majority. Exactly. What do you what do you think will happen if they actually did shoot Pelosi or they did hang pens? No. It is a possibility. But see, no. But see that's threat inflation. What you're doing right there, Jason, is exactly what you're. No, I think it's actually could have happened. Five other people have. One of the people who died was a senator. Yes, it it could have happened. But here's the problem. People are acting as if everything that could have happened but didn't actually happened or may still happen in a later. Eight, that that is what I call threat inflation, and it's the biggest tool the sensors have for seizing power. And because it it it confuses you yourself said these people had those plans. So we we do have to think about it. I mean, the first time we tried to blow up the World Trade Center, it didn't come down, David, but the second time it did come down. I I understand that by constantly beating the drum of we needed to inflate that threat, didn't we? But but by constantly beating the drum of these threats, it's no, wait a minute, give up. No, we we did not need to do anything. There was a national security apparatus who needed to do it. Their job isn't to inflate threats. Their job is to investigate Apolitically, get to the bottom of **** and fix it. They ******* failed on 9/11. OK, we know that conclusively. So talking about it, in amping people up, Jason doesn't do anything. Let's not do it. I'm saying we need to call it what it was. A better. A better example of threat inflation would be the Iraq war. Remember that? We gotta go. Absolutely, yeah. Bad data of WMD. That was threat inflation threat whipping people up, you know, and making the worst. I'm just talking to three of my besties and asking you what you think about what would have happened if a senator died. I think it's a valid. It came close to happening. It didn't, but it came close. It didn't. This, this is the thing that is is convincing people, helping convince people to give up liberties that they should want to hold on to. Just asking you. I'm not. I'm not saying everybody and I'm not saying we need to. Be on edge that this is going to happen every day of our lives. We can't live in fear like that, but that's almost what happened. There are people who went there with that intent. Well, actually, we don't. We don't. We don't. We don't know any of this. Now we're now we're no better than anybody else. Hmm. You had you had a maniac. Who was a vessel? He basically spilled over. There was a small fraction of the people that probably came to that thing with ill intent, and then there was a large number of people that got pulled into the undertow. All of their lives will be ruined because of 1 individual. OK. And at the end of the day, there was, in my opinion, one singular person to blame, Donald Trump, and then a handful of people who was accomplices. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Rudy Giuliani, we know who all of these characters are in this terrible play. And then there were all these people that were caught in the undertow, and I would rather just deal with it that way because it actually allows us to have some sympathy. Or felt sympathy person who's struggling, yeah. So all I'm saying is, let's just get back to the core issue at hand. Something bad happened, and then something really, really stupid that is actually even worse also happened. And by that you mean the banning of Trump on all platforms were all time? No, that that there is a there. There was an arbitrariness to the decision making around free speech. And I'm telling you guys, I know that you may think banning him from Twitter is so much lower than this attack on the capital. And I'm telling you, it's not because the slippery slope of event, event number one is so obvious. The prosecution of that is so obvious. The law. It's so completely clear, but we've shifted now. Into this realm where things are arbitrary, where things are Gray and it's a worldwide problem. There are 180 some odd countries in the world, right, that these sites operate in, with 180 different leaders multiplied by, you know, two or three political parties each. Like there are now hundreds and hundreds of people who are trying to figure out games. It's so I just think we've now made the problem. Yeah, I just think we've made the problem so much worse. Three and and you know earlier today our heated conversation extended to one of our friends in our chat group who was telling us that, you know there's a group of SAS companies that are talking about deep platforming parlor as well from just using ordinary software as a service and other sites like it. And you know and and and again it's a little bit like it's it's just like this censorship thing. It's like a red scare. It's like a red scare. It's like a Red Scare podcast. The actual red scare that are. Yeah like Joe McCarthy. Exactly. We're literally gonna go after anybody who writes the screenplay who we're communist or socialist meeting. But let me ask you guys, how much do you guys? So I think that there is severely there. There's there's a severe amount of pressure on the leaders of these companies to do well by their employees and that employees are all Bay Area based and Bay Area based is. A very heavy Democrat area, 90% plus and so so so this is the argument a lot of you know conservatives make which is that tech companies in general as a result act in the best interest of of of you know of the the liberal movements SAC and to math. I mean and and Jason do you guys think that it is an employee driven kind of set of actions that we're seeing and that the motivation is, is, is in part to kind of appease the employee. They said these companies in fact I think that more than 70% or 80% of the impetus for these last ditch efforts was internally driven. And this is where I think it's a complete crisis of leadership because if you had just gotten up in front of your employees and said, guys, if we do this we will shift focus away from what actually is the problem. So I think the right solution is temporary ban. While we evaluate, while we strengthen policy like some ******** ******* statement and allow the legal court system to do their job, instead they acted like vigilantes. In a way that basically appeased nobody and all of a sudden shifted the focus away from the person that all these hundreds of employees wanted to basically have, you know, have been found guilty and pointed to one individual. They all wanted one individual to be held culpable, and now he's not going to. 100% and and and and the proof of that is the fact that these employees have been calling for this policy for years, and now they finally got the excuse to do it. And so I agree. I mean, Jack is leading Twitter from behind the mob runs Twitter now. So you think and they have for some time and to free Brooks point, it's like Padma. Padme, I guess the great, the Great American Star Wars said is medulla. Who said I said this is how, this is how democracy dies with thunderous applause? Yes, and everybody's clapping over this. Censorship is not. I mean, the prequels are underrated, I have to say. I mean, if you watch revenge of the Sith, it's definitely, I don't know, the last three were the best, but the last one with the worst. But anyway, yeah, but hold on a second. I just want to go ahead. So 100% right. There's one thing I would add. That though, which is a just a few months ago, we had this Senate hearing on Section 230. Yes. And both Jack and suck were berated by the Senators, most notably Senator Blumenthal, who was basically arguing for censorship. He was telling him you got to crack down. And so I also think there's not this pressure from below. There's pressure from above. These guys know who's coming into power in January, and I think especially Zuck, who has to be terrified of being set up right now. He. Yes. Exactly. So he is thinking about how do I mollify and appease these politicians who now have the power and can break me up. And I got news for him, it's too little, too late, too late, too late, too late. You're going to get up anyway. And by the way, I now agree with it. I got to say, you know, on previous pods I've defended these tech companies, but I've come around, they are too powerful and they are using their powerful, their power in two indiscriminate away without power. And can I say it more broadly the better. But can I say that? Let me just, let me just point something out. Tax. You didn't say that before. It affected the conservative movement's ability to have a voice, right. They don't calacanis sacks. Yeah no, I mean no. But I want to point out like, I mean like and and and a lot of people are having this reaction which is once it affects and I just want to point this out once it affects you personally, that's when you take issue with the way that the system is operating right now. You know, a lot of people make make fun of this, but a few months ago or weeks ago there's a **** website. ******* and Visa, MasterCard and discover stop processing payments for them because the New York Times put out an opinion article about David. David, how do you spell that? POR? Yeah 30 URL. You just auto filled 30 URL's. Got your bookmark? Yeah. Go to your bookmark and go down another two and and so and and and I want to just point out like like the the Electronic Frontier Foundation was the only organization that really made a stink about this, this behavior from these monopoly payment processing network stepping in and blocking their ability to run as a business, not on any legal grounds and not on any grounds based on some court making a decision was what was it? It was what grounds and it was an opinion piece and suddenly everyone's waking up. Because now Trump is being silenced and this, and This is why. No, no, no, no. Unregulated stuff like Bitcoin. Yeah, let me respond to that. So, so first of all, **** has always been in a separate category. The Supreme Court has said that you can regulate it accordance Community standards. And so I support the ability of Facebook or Twitter or whatever to regulate it according to their standards. That's perfectly consistent with the 1st amendment. I personally am not that upset about Trump per se being censored. I'm upset about this new vast policy of censorship. Including deep platforming. Not just Trump, but parlor. I mean, you're talking about millions of people, and the fact that they're conservative is not the reason. If this was happening to a Liberal app, I promise you I'll be acting the exact same way. For me, free speech is the most cherished value that we have. It's the 1st amendment of the Constitution. It's the 1st right in the Bill of Rights. That's the thing that has me upset. This is not a partisan thing. To your point, freeberg, you asked us, what do we think is going on here at these companies. I think there's three things and we just heard two of them. And Sax stole my Thunder because I was gonna say I think that Zuck who I believe I'm very cynical about. I think he is thinking how do IP's the left now after having appease Trump for all these years now Trump's out of office now how do I appease the left? OK, I have to ban him for life. And remember Trump was Zuck was the first to give the lifetime ban, not Jack. So Zach, who has previously been in Trump's corner, is now not the third factor. So the first factor is obviously the employees. Second factor is getting broken up and appeasing all these senators. I think the third one is. I think that there could be information that we are not Privy to, that they are Privy to, that that is leading them to overreact here because I'm going to disagree, I'm going to disagree too. It would, it would not have come out in that way. It would have said we are, you know, pausing the account, we're suspending the account. It wouldn't have been this next step of saying your D platform forever think in Jax. It would have been necessary if it was a real security. Issue? No, it was not the the other thing I'll say can I just say one thing, which is that I've been in the bowels of these companies. I helped build one. My team was probably the most instrumental in getting one of these things to real megascale. I think that these companies are complicated enough that everybody needs to realize that it is beyond the capability of anyone person to manage in a reasonable way. And these businesses are they're too broad based. They exist in too many countries with too many different standards. That ultimately all comes back to one unified code base. If Facebook was actually 182 different products on a country by country basis and Twitter was the same, there was actually be a path here, right? And each one had a country level CEO. That actually had power. Maybe this could be different, but the problem is that if all roads go back to Menlo Park and San Francisco and you're putting the power in the hands of 15 or 20,000 people over a multi million line code base. It's an impossible task for even the smartest of the smart people. These companies need to get broken up. I think we're all going to agree on that. I'm not. I do think you guys are missing a piece of info. Another point you guys are missing a piece of information. I'm just gonna read to you what from the Washington Post Twitter specifically raised the possibility that Trump's recent tweets could mobilize his supporters to commit acts of violence around president-elect Joe Biden's inauguration and analysis that experts are as a major expansion in the company's approach. And so they specifically cited that they said they were and the and the tweet that they were concerned about was this one that got taken down very quickly. American Patriots will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way shape or form. And then he had announced right after that that he's not going to the inauguration. So what Twitter believes is that that was some sort of a dog whistle to go do violence at the inauguration. And that's what they said in their lifetime ban is they felt Trump was doing that. So that might be just to point out you, you could interpret it that way and you could also interpret it the other way and that that's. Which is the problem of Trump, right? Like he knows how to problem, it's the problem of using judgment, right and and not fiber. Can I ask you a question, would you be supportive of platform level open architecture. So for example that you know the messaging infrastructure that supports Facebook and Twitter have to be unified in a way so that there is that was originally called like there was Rs. I mean there's a lot of open communication protocols that exist out there. I mean signal has made an attempt at doing this as well with with their approach. Open sourcing everything. I'm just thinking, I'm just asking what is the technical solution if not to break them up to make them more predictable. Portability of your profile. I I think you could pass a law. I mean you know look we do have a government. We can pass the law. So you can pass a law that says if you're gonna operate a communication platform, here are the rules you have to abide by and here's how you have to and now you're a regulated entity and you could regulate them and you could even create a regulatory body to oversee them and make sure that standards of free speech are applied universally and and in an absolute way, you know, and give him a chance to correct. Right. You could give points him out given that it may be so technically difficult to break. Up that may be one of the points that one of the paths of resolution and we're going to find out the next two to three years because I don't think that anyone on the left or the right likes big tech as they call it and the way it's operating today. But I think technically having been in these organizations, it is impossible to break them up and I will say something controversial. I also think consumers benefit from the scale that they operate at and I don't think that they should be broken up. And I think that there's economic value to having Google be at the scale of 10, Amazon being at the scale attack and Facebook being scale at and it doesn't harm. Consumers, I think it helps in aggregate in terms of pricing and service availability, but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be regulated in a way that everyone can kind of feel like there's some absolute universal standard applied. But I know I'm in the minority on that. Yeah, I would say. My view about antitrust used to be that it was all about consumer harm. And I've actually come around to more of the the liberal point of view on this, which is it can't just be about consumer harm. It's also got to be about power and not just market power, but democratic power. And the fact of the matter is these companies have just gotten too large and too powerful and they have too much influence in our democracy and it's incompatible with, you know, a country democracy. So what if they got regulated? What if they got regulated like a utility sacks? So like we have regulatory bodies for utilities, for both telecommunications. And for power and energy, what if we had a regulatory body for Internet services? Well, yeah, I mean first and foremost I wanted an online Bill of Rights. You know, I wanna know what my rights are online that these techno, this cartel of Technopolis cannot take away from me because something is a right if it only if it if it can't be taken away and right now it can all be taken away. You know your online identity, you're right to participate in the public conversation, can be taken away with no explanation by these companies. We have no rights. And like, what would you do if your online presence is taken away? Like that is a huge part of the modern world. What is going on in Trump's mind, do you think right now, having lost? His ability to communicate with a billion people, you know, like he had this ability to control the conversation and now he's. I mean, I don't even know if people will put him on air. That's why I think something is brewing with him. You know, he he is not gonna sit tight and and wind out the last 10 days here. You know, whether it's some ad hoc press conference he calls tomorrow and just rants on TV or he tries to declare some, you know, pass some law without Congress's approval or does something. I mean, this guy is never proven himself to be able to sit quietly and to not be in the spotlight or to be told that he's wrong. And all three of those things are being imposed upon him right now. So he is squirming like a like a cat being put in the bath. Also, it seems like they're doing some last ditch stuff. Pompeo lifted restrictions for US Taiwan contracts. I know you saw that. That was a little bit of an interesting thing that was slid in the last couple of days. Little, little jab to the Chinese on the way out. Where do you think sacks last 10 days? Hey, guys, to go? The zip tie guy apparently got arrested. Yeah. I want to know what's going on with him. I mean, these guys having zip ties with them is just no, but this is incredible that how systematically they've been able to basically get, you know, a lot of these folks. I mean, Jason, I will tell you. I will tell you the one thing we got going for us is the deep state. I mean, thank God for, you know, folks who are loyal to the Constitution and to the rule of law in this country. And the FBI is incredible and are, you know, are the, the, the, the, the, the civil servants who have been career civil servants in government. As much as we make fun of the bureaucracy and the ******** that goes on, it's great to be an American and to know that there's, you know, that there's these, these folks out there looking out for, for this is like being in the final stages of a stress test. It's like the final weldments, by the way, as I predicted on the last part, I said there would be major, major arrests. You know, everyone was saying that that that these protests are being treated with kid gloves. Appear to be all. And I was like just wait. There's gonna be arrests and sure enough they're rounding up these people quick. A lot of charges are. I think the most genius thing was I don't know who said it was a honey pot but the the parlor post that said, you know, it was incredible sax but like Sax pointed this out so I'll give him full credit for this. But there was a parlor post where it was like the the title of the person was like you know office of the the president's pardon attorney. And you know, send me send me your name and phone number and e-mail if you want to be pardoned for what happened in the capital. It's like it's like Andy and named the crime you committed, so we don't. Yes. I just saw the video website called Capital riotsamnesty.org. So please go to capitalrightsamnesty.org. Yeah. And tell us what you did. And if you outline each of the crimes you outline that you did, you will get amnesty for those crimes. You have to outline in detail what you did and give us any photographic and video proof you have of your crimes. The reason I suspected that was a honeypot is because Jimmy Carter. Pardoned. You know, after the Vietnam War, he pardoned everyone who had dodged the draft as part of the Vietnam War. He did that as a blanket part without naming any names. So it seemed very suspect to me that Trump would need individual names and and crimes to be able to pardon them. I do. With ceremonial. Right. That was like a healing a wound move by Jimmy Carter. It wasn't. No one was going after that because we weren't prosecuting those sure Vietnam vets, sure. And so that it was never litigated. So it became a precedent. I think. I I do think that Trump probably. I mean, this would be a very interesting court case, but I do think he could issue a blanket pardon everyone on the mall that day. It's possible. I'm not saying he should. I think it's a terrible. And that would be really a point of escalation as opposed to deescalation. Sax being our our lawyer and our historian, you know, what is the the origin of the presidential pardon? How is that even legal? And how did we end up in a place in this country where any law could be superseded by the President telling you it's OK for you to break this law and pardon you after the fact or even before the fact? It's it's it's it exists because it's in the Constitution and the framers of the Constitution put it in there. I I don't know what they're thinking. I've never really studied that. It is a almost a residue of or a a vestigial monarchical power that somehow was included in the incredible, right? I mean, like the intention of it, my understanding was to correct injustices that occurred so that it would be a backstop against somebody who was by the judgment of the one guy, by the judgment of the one by the courts. It's like crazy that, like, you know, we relies on tradition, it relies on. You know people buying into America, right? And I and I think that's the Trump stress test, and I can't wait till we don't talk about this guy anymore. Love to see an amendment getting rid of the the pardon powers. I I don't know. I never feel good about it. Well, they are thinking about courts. The courts should be there, should adjudicate the, you know, appeals and such. But alright well listen, we've beaten this to can I can I end on something? Let's end on something I uplifting I took. Uh. A bunch of sparks public at the end of last year and on Friday, one of the vehicles that I'm the CEO of merged with Sofi. And I want to tell you something about the CEO of Sofi, Anthony Noto. And I think he'll be OK because he shared the story a couple of times, but. His parents got divorced when he was three years old. He grew up on welfare, food stamps, sort of free lunch, kids until middle school. Went to the. The West Point was it All Star stock analyst was the CFO of the NFL, was the CFO of Twitter, then the CEO of Twitter. And you guys know my story, but, you know, ended up in the United States after growing up in Canada after escaping a civil war. I grew up on welfare. And I said to Anthony, what are the odds that two kids who grew up that way could have ended up in a moment where we were part of doing something really amazing that, you know, for each of us was a meaningful accomplishment? And he said only in America. And only in America this is. Let's keep that single best ******* country in the *** **** world 100%. And it's worth fighting for. And it's worth having these debates. And I think it's worth doing the pod. And so I'd like to suggest second constitution, the pod going. Tojson, the American Constitution, is the most incredible ******* document because that is the foundation on which all of these things are built. It's just the most amazing thing. So I am really glad that we're all having this conversation. And I would just say, guys, keep the faith. Let's put the light. Back on Donald Trump. I would have as much sympathy as possible for as many of those folks in the capital. Maybe not the folks that were intending to do harm, maybe not zip tie guy, but there's a lot of other people that are that just got caught in the undertow. I would try to have sympathy for them and I would really don't lose focus now, people. Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, stay ******* vigilant. I would also love you guys think about doing something for someone else this week. Yeah. Yeah. And that's all. Let's all do something nice. Exactly. Yeah. I love you guys. I love you. Love you, sax. Love you sexy. Love you sexy poop. Come on, saxy. Say it. *** **** it. This is the time. Say it back. Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sassoon. We open sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Besties? My dog taking your driveway. Oh man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge order because they're always useless. It's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release stuff out there. Beat, beat. What? Where did you get merch? I'm going.