The Twitter Files Parts 1-2: shadow banning, story suppression, interference & more
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents5 chapters
§01Bestie gut health!§02Twitter Files Part 2: shadow banning and blacklisting entire accounts and topics; how content moderation was handled at other tech giants§03Twitter Files Part 1: Suppressing the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story§04China effectively ends Zero-Covid policies, Iran, China, and Japan demographics§05Kevin O'Leary defends FTX on CNBC, was paid $15M as a spokesperson; Sinema flips to Independent§01Bestie gut health!
You were bloated last night. What else is new?
It said not bloated. My god. You really are, though.
You look bloated.
Listen. That's coming from you? You started to look like Bert, and now you're back to Ernie. Your face is getting round again. All I have to say is hold on a second, guys.
I gotta get a drink. Is it okay you guys got a minute for me to drink?
Yeah. Yeah. I definitely do. I definitely do. Go ahead.
Hold on
a second. -- beer?
No. No. I'm actually you know, I've been working on my weight, so I'm just gonna pick here. I I think I have the mocha latte from forgotten. They also have the chocolate shake.
Do you have a recommendation here for me, Friedberg? because I'm gonna put it in my coffee. Is mocha on a mocha?
Is that a girl? You can't go wrong. Alright. Thank you. double mocha's a win.
Just on a completely unrelated topic, did you happen to invest in supergat checkout?
No. No. No. I haven't invested yet, but use the promo code
Oh, okay.
It's been a big part of my weight loss journey. It's also been a big part of me and Freightberg becoming besties and creating a unified block for all in summit 2023. So I've got 2 solid votes.
I'll be very honest with you. If you guys give me a credible plan, where we can maintain the integrity.
I was joking. I was joking.
I was joking.
I was joking. They change credibility to continue.
Listen to me. Listen to me. Listen to me. I'm listening to you.
If you 2 idiots -- I'm not involved. Yes.
You are. You clearly are involved with
the with the fucking grit.
You're an important vote. Hold on. No. Continue your mouth. I'm writing this in I'm writing it down.
If you 2 idiots, the 2 of you have to do this together because, otherwise, I'm with David, and there's absolute -- Got it. YouTube idiots need to come up with a plan.
Plans. Got it.
Anywhere where we can each make Make 4,000,000 bucks each net, then I'll do it. 4,000,000 net. Okay. Great.
Look at Jake how writing that down. As as if he a contract.
Okay. Got this, got this. I signed the fucking car. I signed the contract.
For Jay Kal, the negotiation begins at the point where there's a signed contract.
Yeah. Exactly.
It's like,
okay. Now I'm gonna go share with you. When
your winter's ride.
Rainman, David Sanders. And it
said -- We open so Alright, everybody.
The show has
§02Twitter Files Part 2: shadow banning and blacklisting entire accounts and topics; how content moderation was handled at other tech giants
started The four of us are still here by by some miracle. We're still going after a 107 episodes, and it's better than ever. Last week, we were at number 12. So mainstream media, We'll see you in the top
10.
It remains creepy.
Here we go. Twitter files, part 1, and what you drive.
Despite your oppressive conditions, Yes. Take out. We're allowed to strike.
Unpressible additions making you show up on time. Yeah. If I was getting 5 paid 5 bucks for this. I'd be on strike right now. Guys, not only
are you getting 5 bucks. You're getting a bill for the production. Okay. Here we go.
By the
way, how beautiful is it that the same reporters who couldn't stop writing about the oppressive working conditions that Elon Musk was supposedly creating. because he simply wanted the employees to go back to the office and work hard. And if they did it, he'd give them a generous 3 months severance package.
Yeah.
Those same reporters are now on strike. because the Soul's burgers are running a clickbait farm over there with oppressive working conditions.
The intellectual dishonesty has never been higher in the world. Yeah.
I like I
like that. intellectual honesty.
Yes. Will the publisher of The New York Times agree
that anybody who isn't happy there can have a
voluntary 3 month severance
package Yeah. Click this link. And do you want to work hard or do you want 3 month severance? If the New York Times publisher did that, you know what would happen? 800 of 1200 people would take the severance.
Of course. Alright. Here we go. Twitter files have dropped. Part 1 dropped with the legendary award winning, highly respected journalist, Matt Taibbi.
If you don't know who he is, he is a left leaning journalist who worked at rolling stone and did the best coverage hands down of the financial crisis and the shenanigans and he held truth to power to that group. This is important to note. The second drop was given to Barry Weiss, who is a a right leaning independent journalist. These are both independent journalists She previously worked at the New York Times itself now. I think we should work backwards.
From 2 to 1. Do you agree?
Yes. For sure. Let's start with a drop that just happened last night.
Yes. So last night, a drop happened. So Here's what happens in Twitter files part
2.
I'm gonna give a basic summary, and then I'm gonna give it to Zach's because he's chomping at the bit. We now have confirmation that what the right thought was happening all along, which is a secret silencing system built into the software, of blacklist was tagging right wing conservative voices in the system. And these included people like Dan Bongino. Is that how you pronounce it?
Yes.
He was tagged with being on a search blacklist. What that means is you're a fan of of Dan's, who is a former secret service agent who is now a right wing conservative let's just say conservative instead of wing. A conservative radio host, podcast host. He was not allowed to be found in search engines for some reason. Charlie Kirk, who is a conservative commentator, he was tagged with do not amplify.
I guess that means you can't trend into people's feeds even if they follow you. And then there were people who were banned from the trends blacklisted, including a Stanford professor, j Bhattacharya. Did I get it right, sir?
Yes. Jay Batacharya.
Batacharya. Okay. I got it right.
Doctor Stanford School of Medicine.
And he was not allowed on the trend's blacklist because he had a dissenting opinion, a Stanford professor had a
defending opinion. on COVID that's turned out to be true.
And this is where the danger comes in because all of these actions were taken without any transparency, and they were taken on one side of the aisle by people inside of Twitter, essentially covertly. No ownership of who did it. And they never told the people they gaslit them. They could see their own tweets. They could use the service, but they couldn't be seen even by their own fans in many cases here.
Sachs, when you look at that let's just start with that first piece. The shadow banning as it's called in our industry where you can participate in a community, but you can't be seen. Are any is there any circumstance under which this tool would make sense for you to deploy, and then what's your general take on what has been discovered last night.
Okay. Look. Two more questions. Yes. Let me start with Westman covered here.
Let me boil it down for you. This is an f t x level fraud except that what was stolen here was not customer funds. It was their free speech rights. Not just the rights of people like Jay Bonachoria and Dan Bongino to speak, but the right of the public to hear them in the way that they expected. Okay?
And you had statement after statement by Twitter executives like Jack Dorsey, like, Vijaya, godaddy, like, you know, Joel and others saying we do not shadow ban. And then they also said we certainly, this is their emphasis, do not shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint. And what the Twitter files show is that is exactly what they were doing. They in the same way that SPF was using. FTX and customer funds is as personal to eBay.
They were using Twitter as their personal ideological piggy bank, they were going in to the tools and using the content moderation system, these big brother like tools that that were designed. to basically put their thumb on the scale of American democracy and suppress viewpoints that they did not agree with and they did not like even when even when they could not justify removing content based on their own rules. So there are conversations in the Slack that Barry Weiss exposed, where, for example, Observe TikTok, they admit in the Slack that we can't suppress lives of TikTok based on our pay policy. Libs of TikTok hasn't violated it. We're gonna suppress that account anyway.
Now it's important to note what libs of TikTok does. This is a great talking point. lives of TikTok finds people who are trans, people who are, you know, maybe not LGBTQ, and they feature their TikToks and they mock them on Twitter. Now this certainly is free speech, And the argument from the safety team was by putting all of these together, you're inciting violence towards those people. And they said they haven't broken a rule, but collectively they could be in some way targeting those people.
Is there anything fair Friedberg to that statement. That they targeted them? By collecting their let's say views that are. I'm I'm asking this question for discussion purposes. I'm not giving my -- Jake
Alp.
Hold on. I want Friedberg -- Why
can't I finish?
I'm gonna go back to you. Spoke for 2 minutes. That's why.
Friedberg, you turned down moderating today, sex. You couldn't -- Everybody else
used to suffice people. --
as long
as they want, I get interrupted.
You got 2 minutes.
Let me
just finish the s b f let me just finish the s b f analogy. Okay? And then you
can -- I need the filibuster continues. Go ahead.
Then you could both sides of the situation.
Don't worry. while you're speaking the prompt 1 or 2 words on you, and then yeah.
Go ahead.
Why did people like Adi and Yoelle deny that they were engaged in shadow banning even though that's clearly what they were doing? because they knew that they had an obligation to be stewards of the public trust. They were custodians of public trust They knew they were violating that trust. The same way that SBF had a duty to be custodians of his customers' funds. They did not implement their own policy that they said they were implementing.
Why? Because they were suppressing accounts that personally offended them that personally they disagreed with, and they wanted to deprive the public of the right to hear.
Okay.
So I can tell you -- -- justifying this. Hold on. The way that the media is today justifying it is They're pointing to obscure provisions in the terms of use around spam accounts, things like that saying, oh, well, the terms of use show that they had the right to do this. This is like the margin account. Okay?
They do not have the right to use these tools in this way. Okay? The Jay Bottacharya was not posting spam.
Tell her professor. A standard professor. -- professor. It doesn't yes. Yeah.
Your radio if your COVID
has been proven correct. completely. He was opposed to lockdowns. That was the great Barrington declaration. And they suppressed it.
What is the justification
for that? You have to answer my question then. Sacks, since you wanna talk so much. Hold on. Mhmm.
Sachs, I want you to answer the question then since you are so interested in talking.
Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I want
him to answer one question. Then it's going to you, Friedberg. Sacks, should lives of TikTok be able to collect trans people living their life, making TikToks, put them into a group feed, mock them And if those people experience harassment because of it, is that something that Twitter should allow? I'm asking you this Without giving my opinion, I'm curious your opinion specifically for the lids of TikTok since you opened that door and you wanted to bring up that very thorny issue. Go.
Listen. So on on listen to TikTok, my understanding of that account is that they only take videos that have already been made public by another account. They're all public. They're all in the public domain and then they repost them. Sometimes they make a snarky comment, but usually they just let them stand on their own.
That is not a violation of free speech. Now --
Mhmm.
-- the way that I think these Twitter executives have interpreted it is that they live in such a bubble. And they live in it was such privilege and entitlement that they think that when their point of view gets criticized or challenged that that in and of itself is harassment. That's not. That is public debate. And they wanna make themselves and their points of view immune to public debate and the way that they do that.
is that they claim that any criticism is harassment. It's not.
If in aggregate, final final follow-up, if in aggregate, those people report being harassed and have evidence of being harassed, what should Twitter do?
Listen. If somebody is harassed, I'm I'm fine with taking that down. But being publicly criticized, or simply retweeted is not harassment. Okay? Harassment needs to be targeted and it needs to be more than just public criticism or even a snarky comment here or there.
And so you don't consider a not you know, a a a daily feed of trans people being mocked, you don't consider that target harassment?
Got it. Don't listen to me about it. Listen to Twitter's own Slack files about it. They knew that the account that lives of TikTok was not violating the rules, yet they suppressed that they've suspended it six times. They knew they were on shaky ground.
They wanted to do it anyway. Why?
Because they no. There are people who are experiencing harassment. That's why they did it. But it is a thorny Friedberg of speech
issue, I
agree with you. Go ahead. I think I think Saks has articulated a vision for the product he wanted Twitter to be, but I don't think that's necessarily the product that they wanted to create. It's not that Twitter set out at the time or stated clearly that they were gonna be the harbinger of truth and the free speech platform for all I think they were really clear. And they have been in their behavior and as, you know, demonstrated through this stuff that came out, which to me feels a lot like a We already knew all this stuff.
This is a bit of a Nothing burger that they were curating and they were editing and they were editorializing other people's content and the ranking of content in the same way that many other Internet platforms do to create what they believe to be their best user experience for the users that they wanna appeal to. And I'll say, like, there there's been this long debate And it goes back 20 years at this point on how Google does ranking. Right? I mean, you guys may remember Jeremy Stoppelman went to DC, and he complained about how Google was using his content, and he wasn't being ranked high enough as Google's own content that was being shoved in the wrong place. And there's a guy who ran kind of he was the spokesperson for the SEO, the search engine optimization rules at Google.
And it was always the secret at Google, how did the search results get ranked? And I can tell you it's not just a pure algorithm that there was a lot of manual intervention, a lot of manual work. In fact, the manual work gets to be the to the point that they said there's so much stuff that we know is a is the best content and the best form of content for the user experience that they ranked it all the way at the top, and they called it the one box. It's the stuff that sits above. the primary search results.
And that editorialization ultimately led to a product that they intended to make because they believed it was a better user experience for the users that they wanted to service. And I don't think that that that this is any different than what's happened at Twitter. Twitter is not a government agency. They're not a free speech. They're not the Internet.
They're a product. And the product managers and the people that run that that product team ultimately made some editorial decisions that said, this is the content we do wanna show, and this is the content we don't wanna show. And they certainly did wrap up you know, a bunch of rules that had a lot of leeway for what they could or couldn't do, or they gave themselves a lot of different excuses on how to do it. I don't agree with it. It's not the product I want.
It's not the product I think should exist. I think Elon also saw that, and clearly, he stepped in and said, I wanna make a product that is a different product than what is being created today. So none of this feels to me like these guys were the Guardians of the Internet, and they came along, and they were distrustful. they did exactly what are they what a lot of other companies have done on exactly what they set out to do, and they editorialize the product for a certain user And by the way, they never blocked they never edited people's tweets. They changed how people's results were showing up in rankings.
They showed how viral they would get in the trend box. Those were in app features and in app services. This was not about taking someone's tweet and changing it. And people may feel ashamed and they may feel you know, upset about the fact that they were deranked or they were kind of, quote, shadow band But, ultimately, that's the product they chose to make, and people have the choice and the option of going elsewhere. And I don't agree with it.
And it's not the product I want, and it's not a product I wanna use. And I certainly don't feel happy seeing it. But -- So you wanna see products
in you want Friedberg to to summarize that. You wanna see the free market do its job. Chamath, you worked at Facebook. Facebook seems to have done, I would say, an excellent job with content moderation. I think in large part, correct me if I'm wrong because of the real name's policy.
But you tell us what you think, you know, when you look at this and the 15 year history of social media and moderation.
I think moderation is incredibly difficult. And, typically, what happens is early on in a company's life cycle. And I I'm gonna guess that Twitter and YouTube were very similar to what we did at Facebook, and it's very similar to probably what TikTok had to do in the early days, which is you have this massive tidal wave of usage And so you're always on a little bit of a hamster wheel. And so you build these very basic tools and you uncover problems along the way. And so I I think it's important to humanize the people that are at Twitter because I'm not sure that they're these super nefarious actors per se.
I do think that they were conflicted. I do think that they made some very corrupting decisions, but I don't think that they were these evil actors. Okay? I think that they were folks who, against the tidal wave of usage, built some brittle tools, built on top of them, built on top of it some more, and tried to find a way of coping. And as scale increased, they didn't have an opportunity to take a step back and And I think that that's true for all of these companies.
And so you're just seeing it out in delight what's happening at Twitter. But don't for a second think that Any other company behaved any differently. Google, Facebook, Twitter, ByteDance, and TikTok. They're all the same. They're all dealing with this problem, and they're all probably trying to do A decent job of it as best as they know how.
So what do we do from here is the question. Okay? The reason somebody needs to do something about this is summarized really elegantly in this J. Bhattacharya tweet. So please, Nick, just throw it up here so that we can just talk about this.
This is why I think that this issue is important.
Critically. This is a perfect tweet.
Still trying to process my emotions on learning that Twitter black listed me. Okay. Who cares about that? Here's what matters. The thought that will keep me up tonight.
Sensorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures, and a generation of children were hurt. Now just think about that in a nutshell. What was Jay Batacharya to do? Maybe he was supposed to go on TikTok and try to sound the alarm bells through a TikTok. Maybe he was supposed to go on YouTube and create a video.
maybe he was supposed to go on Facebook and, you know, post into a Facebook group or or do a news feed post. The the the problem is that And the odds are reasonably likely that a lot of these companies had very similar policies. In this example, around COVID misinformation because it was the CDC and, you know, governmental organizations directing, you know, information and rules, reaching out to all of these Right? So we're just seeing an insight into Twitter, but the point is it happened everywhere. The implication of suppressing information like this is that a credible individual like that can't spark a public debate.
And in not being able to spark the debate, you have this building up of errors in the system. And then who gets hurt in this example, which is true, is like you couldn't even talk about school closures and masking upfront and early in the system. If you had scientists actually debate it, maybe what would have happened is we would have kept the schools open and you would have had less learning loss and you'd have less depression and less overprescription of you know, ritalin and Adderall? because those are all factual things we can measure today. So I think the important thing to take away from all of this is we've got confirmatory evidence that whether they're you know, these folks under a tidal wave of pressure made some really bad decisions.
And the implications are pretty broad reaching. And now I do think governments have to step in and create better guardrails so this kind of stuff doesn't happen. I don't buy the whole it's a, you know, private company. They can do what they want. I think that that is too naive of an expectation for how important these three companies literally are to how Americans consume and process information to make decisions.
Incredibly well said Saks your reaction to your besties.
I largely agree with what Jamas said, but let's go back to what Friedberg said. I think what Friedberg point of view is is really what you're hearing now from the mainstream media today, which is, oh, nothing to see here. you know, that they told us all along what was happening. This was just content moderation. They have the right to do this.
You're making a big deal over nothing. No. That's not true. go back and look at the media coverage starting in 2018. Article after article said that this idea of shadow banning was a right wing conspiracy theory.
That's what they said. Furthermore, Jack Dorsey denied that shadow banning was happening, including at a congressional hearing, I believe, under oath. So either Eli or he was lied to by his subordinates. I actually believe that the latter is possible. I think I don't think it's true with SBF.
It might be true with because he is so checked out. Furthermore, you had people again like Vijaya Gotti, again tweeting and repeatedly stating we do not shadow ban and we certainly don't shadow ban on the basis of political viewpoint. So these people were denying exactly what their critics were saying. They were accusing their critics of being conspiracy theorists Now that the thing is proven, the mountain of evidence has dropped, they're saying, oh, well, this is old news. This was known a long time ago.
No. It was not known a long time ago. It was disputed by you. And now finally, it's proven. And you're trying to say it's not a big deal.
It is a big deal. It's a violation of the public trust. And if you were so proud of your content moderation policies, why didn't you admit what you were doing in the first place?
It's like sad. You feel good that Elon's running this business now. I mean, like, the things that you're concerned about as a user as someone who cares about the public's access to knowledge, to opinions, to free speech. This has gotta be a a good change. Right?
Like, this has come to light. it's clearly gonna get resolved. Everyone's gonna move forward. I mean, do you think that there's penalties needed for the people that work there? Or, like, what what what's the -- No.
--
the anger? because because, no. You won't like like
-- I think look. I think we got I think we basically got extremely lucky --
Yep.
-- that Elon Musk happened to care about free speech and decided to do something about it and actually had the means to do something about it. He's just about the only billionaire who has that level of means, who actually cared enough to take on this battle.
But are
you saying that this is a hard business for
all the platforms? Praise for that. But, I mean, unless Elon can buy every single tech company, which he clearly can't, I think you guys are right happening a lot of other technologies.
We're about to rewrite the government the United States government is going to make an attempt to rewrite section
230.
I think that what this does is put a very fine point on a comment that Elon actually tweeted out. And, Nick, if you could find please. That's a very good tweet where he said, going forward, you will be able to see if you were shadow banned, you were able to see if you were deboosted. Why? and be able to appeal.
And I think that that concept, to be very honest with you, should be enshrined in law. And I think that should be part of the section 230 rewrite. And all of these media companies and all of these social media companies should be subject to it. And the reason is because it ties a lot of these concepts together and says, look, you can build a service. You're a private company.
Make as much money as you want. But we're going to have some connective tissue back to the fundamental underpinnings of the constitution, which is the framework under which we all live, and we're gonna transparently allow you to understand it. And I think that's really reasonable. Make that a legal expectation of all these organizations. And by the way, And by the way, sorry.
The companies the companies will love it because
I think it's super hard for
you to be in these companies, and they probably are, Take this responsibility off my plate.
It's just very simple. This is a there's there's really 4 problems that occurred here. Number 1, there was no transparency. the people who were shadow banned, taken out of search, etcetera, they did not know. If they were told and it was clear to users we could have a discussion about, was that a fair judgment or not?
In the cases we've seen so far from Barry Weiss' reporting in the Twitter files part, de, it's very clear that these were not justifiable. Number 2, these were not evenly enforced. It's very clear that one side We because we don't have one example of an a person on the left being censored. When we if we do, then we could put balls and strikes together, and we could say how many people on one side versus how many people on the other, it's pretty clear what happened here. Because these all occurred with a group of people working at Twitter which is 96 or 90 percent less leaning.
The statistics are clear. Number 3, the shadow banning and the search banning, and I think this is something we talked about previously, Chamath, it feels very underhanded. This was your point. If we're gonna block people, they should be blocked and they should know why. The 4th piece of this, which is absolutely infuriating, And this is a discussion that myself, Saxon and Elon have had many times about this moderation.
I'm not speaking out of school now because he's now very public with his position. And, you know, his position, he came to on his own. It's it's not like this is Saks and I, you know, coming up with these positions. This is why Elon bought the business. If you really want to intellectually test your thinking on this, and I am a moderate who's left leaning I can tell you there's a simple way for anybody who is debating the validity of the concerns here.
Imagine Rachel Maddow or Ezra Klein or whoever your favorite left leaning pendant is was Shadowband. By a group, of right wing moderators who are acting covertly and without any transparency. How would you feel if Mato reporting on you know, all the Russian coordination with Trump's campaign did this or as a recline with whatever topics he covers. and you will very quickly find yourself infuriated. And you should then intellectually, as we say on this program, Steel Manning, If you argue the other side, it's infuriating for either side to experience this.
And that is what the 230 change needs to be, Jamath. You're exactly correct. If you make an action, it should be listed on the person's profile page and on the tweet. And if you click on the question mark, you should see when the action was taken by who, you know, which department maybe, maybe not the person so they they get personally attacked. And then what the resolution to it is?
This has been banned because it's targeted harassment, this can be resolved in this way. Then everybody's behavior would steer towards whatever the stated purpose of that social network is. You can get better behavior by making the rules clear, by making the rules unclear, and making it unfair you create this insane situation. Go ahead Chamov. And that's why I'm infuriating about it.
I think you have to take it one step further to really do justice to why this should be important to everybody. And I do think this school example, it really matters to me. Like, we have like, I don't know now. We know what the counterfactual is, which which is that we have I mean, we've relegated our children to a bunch of years of really complicated relearning and learning that they never had to go through because of all the learning loss they gave them. But like, what if Jay Bhattacharya, who's I mean, like, you can't be you know, have a higher sort of role in society in terms of you know, population Pretty
sure credentials. I mean, imagine if if,
you know, there was a platform where he could have actually said this and that, you know, people would have clamored and said, you know what? You and Fauci need to get to the bottom of this or where legislators could have seen it and said, you know what? Before we make a decision like this, Maybe, hey, Fauci. Go talk to Jay because he's a Stanford prop. He's probably not an idiot.
Why does he think that? Or maybe let's convene you know, an actual group of 20 or 30 scientists and the fact that this one version of thinking about things was deemed so heterodoxical, it is just such a good example because
you They shut down an important conversation.
You know that the decision was so wrong. and the damage was so severe. Yes. So we know what happened by suppressing that speech.
And that's one example. What it's in in my in my estimation.
It is the silver bullet example that cleans through all of this other stuff because, you know, I don't really care if Rachel Maddow as your client, who the hell cares. This is important stuff because it affects everybody irrespective of your political persuasion and what editorial you wanna read.
Chamath, what if the investigation into the Catholic church and the abuses that occurred there. Somebody said, well, this person needs to be shut down. And then children are molested for another decade. By the way, we have an example of that. Shaneda O'Connor came out on SNL.
You can look it up for if you're under forty years old and said fight the real enemy. She ripped up a picture of the pope because of the scandal's there. She was excommunicated. She was canceled at that time. One of the first people to be canceled because she spoke truth to power.
What if somebody, an investigative journalist, at The New York Times. The Boston Globes are in the movie spotlight. Those are the people who broke the story of the Catholic Church. If somebody came in and the Catholic church put pressure on a social network, hey. You can't put this stuff up here.
You can't have this discussion of -- Here's
a here's a here's another example.
It's infuriated. Why are we shutting down discussions in America? Remember the Vietnam papers?
Because because, Jake, how the media the media does not value transparency anymore. If you go back and look at the way this media portrays itself, like in the movie the post, which is about the revelations about the Catholic church where you go back to all the president's men. With the media app apprised and what they congratulate themselves on was, 1st of all, ex transparency and exposing the lives of powerful people. Well, that is exactly what has happened here. the lies of the powerful group of people who were running Twitter policy and suppressing one side of the debate.
has been exposed, and the media is treating it with a yawn. Like, there's nothing to see here. Why? Because they were complicit in this. They were complicit.
in suppressing the views of People like J. Bhattacharya. They were complicit in choosing the views of Fauci and the elite on COVID. And so they have no interest now. in bringing -- Just -- -- in making in making what's happened here at Twitter, fully transparent.
I have to own it. And I think, by the way, just a just a quick correction there. I think, Sax, when you said the post, Washington Post, Watergate, Spotlight Exact.
I'm not even thinking about Spotlight. Sorry. It was may have been Spotlight
since the first game. Okay.
But, like but the post is another example. That that movie was about another event like this, which could have been easily suppressed in today's world. Much harder there, which is a Pentagon papers.
Yeah.
And in that world, you know, there was an immense amount of pressure that the government put on the Washington Post, but then they said, you know what, we're going with it and they still published it. And it created a groundswell of support to really reexamine the Vietnam War and it had a huge impact But could you imagine this time around which is like, hey, guys. There's gonna be some kind of misinformation. You know, these Pentagon papers are not real. It's it's coming from the Russians.
Suppress it. and nobody could it's so much easier now -- Right.
--
to run this plane.
Well What journalists need to realize is that today's conspiracy theories are tomorrow's Pulitzer prizes onto you, Saks.
Not in the current media environment. They work for these corporations, and they don't get rewarded for telling the truth?
Oh, no. They they they're going for pulitzers. Trust me. They are. But what they need to do is stop thinking short term and think long term.
anytime there's a conspiracy theory, you must give it some validity and say, is there any truth here? Because it could in fact be a scandal that's being covered up.
Take other they're involved in the cover up right now. They're involved in the cover up right now.
This is a cover up. I agree. I'm in agreement with you.
§03Twitter Files Part 1: Suppressing the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop story
Let's bring the 1st batch of Twitter files into the conversation, the one that Matt Taibbi exposed. What he did was confirm that a completely true story by the New York Post about Hunter Biden that came out a month before the election was suppressed by Twitter executives, including at the behest of, you know, of of FBI agents and former security state officials. So this has now been exposed. There was no legitimate basis for suppressing that story. It was true.
It was a respected publication. They did it anyway. This is election interference. You know, the same people who pride themselves on strengthening democracy are engaged in this wide scale censorship of one side of the political debate, including a true story for an election, And then they puff out their chest and say, we're protecting democracy. They're not protecting democracy.
They're interfering with democracy. They're interfering with the public's right to know. And then we look at a country like China and we say we're so much better than them because they've got this problem over there where the state and Big Tex are colluding to create a Big Brother like system. Well, what is this? What are these tools that have been exposed?
1% of that. Big Brother like system.
Okay. Yeah. But just you have to I I know you wanna make it, like, an equivalency. It's less than a 1% equivalency because in our society, we can have moments like this, and we can have investigations. So just to to put it in
perspective -- Look. Jacob, I don't think we're equivalent, but what I'm saying is that this is very much like a Big Brother social credit system. Yes. So this should
be the alarm bell should be going off. This should be an alarm bell
going on. -- didn't decide just we had this one idiosyncratic billionaire who believes in free speech. If he didn't decide to take this on, we would never have known this stuff.
Okay. Tell me what happened in between these two things. There is an attorney at Twitter, and I don't know the details of this.
Right. Okay. So this is interesting. --
work for the Twitter corporation. I do not speak for the Twitter corporation. Saks does not work for the Twitter corporation and does not speak for it.
But
there was in between these two drop Something that happened.
Yes. So, basically, what was discovered, and this all just publicly reported, is
that the former
FBI lawyer named Jim Baker had now become deputy general counsel at Twitter. And this guy, Jim Baker, is like the Zelig of the whole Russian collusion hoax. He was involved in the in the FISA warrants that were that the FBI applied to the FISA courts that had had all the errors and omissions. He was involved in the Alpha Bank hoax. He was the guy that that Perkins Koi lawyer Sussman was feeding this, like, phony phony scam to.
And he I don't think he was officially sanctioned, but, basically, he was asked to leave the FBI. And then lo and behold, where does he land at Twitter? And he is involved in their content moderation policies. I think what it shows is how deeply intertwined our big tech companies have become with the security state. Now how did this get exposed?
Well, Barry Weiss was basically putting forward document requests for this for the latest batch of Twitter files, and she wasn't getting anything back. And she's like, what's going on here? And the guy who's giving her the files is, his name is Jim. And she's like, well, wait, like, wait, Jim Jim who? And she finds out, wait, Jim Baker, wait, that Jim Baker that, you know, New York Post had a long story about this guy.
And So it was discovered that the guy who was curating, the Twitter files was this former operative of the FBI who was involved in the Russian collusion hoax and then was involved in their their blacklist decisions. So in any event, once this came out, Twitter fired him. And then, you know, Barry apparently received all these files that are now the the 2nd batch of the Twitter files.
And
just to be clear, that's not James Baker if you're, you know, thinking it's the former rig and cabinet member. Not James Baker. This is Jim Baker, who's a different person.
Right. But I'll of people are wondering, well, how could this have been missed? Listen.
He's an FBI 8. X FBI
-- These guys don't wanna be found. I mean, they they this is some people call it you know, the permanent washing establishments. Some people call it the deep state. The administrations come and go. The people who work in Washington stay there forever.
and they can simply effectuate policy by outlasting everybody else and clandestinely implementing what they believe. And they've become a constituency of their own that exercises power like a praetorian guard in Washington. So in any event, this guy is an expert at bowweaveling himself into the bureaucracy.
Great. Pretorian guard, bully you're a fire. I got second.
So hold on. So when they finally hold on
a second. When they finally rooted when they finally rooted this this mole, out of the FBI, he bullwafels himself into another powerful bureaucracy.
What is that word? Weatherwaffle bullwhip. evil.
But we like borrows. Like, burrows. Like, burrows. Like that.
So Oh, maybe.
He digs his way into the Twitter bureaucracy to the point where he isn't even found. And then somehow, he has put himself in the position to be intermediating the Twitter files. Can you believe this? So once this once it was discovered --
A unit of the imperial Roman army that served us personal bodyguards and intelligence agents, the praetorian guard. Okay.
Got it.
Well, you you understand what happened is is that the praetorian guard originated because they were to defend the life of the emperor. And then what happened that then they became so powerful that that whoever bribed the praetorians would become emperor. And then finally, the last step is that the praetorians themselves would pick the emperor. And whoever basically led the praetorian guard would be the next emperor. Any event.
I mean, we're not we're not at that point yet. But the point it look, look, the point is that these security state officials have power that they should not have. Okay? That's the bottom line. They should not be involved in our elections in this way.
They should be completely non partisan and non political. They should just do their jobs as law enforcement officials. But we know from the Hunter Biden story, that a very important piece of this was the pre debunking that the FBI went to Facebook and Twitter and social networks and said, be on the lookout. for a story about Hunter Biden. It is Russian disinformation.
And they prime these social networks to suppress that story when it came out. That was something they never should have done. And they knew they knew the story was not fake. They knew it was not Russian disinformation because they had the laptop in their possession. since 2019.
Well, okay. That has not the the Providence of the laptop is still being reviewed in fairness, and there's still hold on.
You're wrong.
And there is an investigation going on at Hunter Biden. You also have to put the context in here and please let me finish. There is a context here of there was massive interference going on, both sides of the aisle, Republicans Democrats all wanted to see the Russian interference and the Ukrainian interference, and Trump's encouraging the Ukraine and the Republican the the Russians to interfere in elections everybody was on high alert, and that happened to drop. Like, it was announced 30 days before, and it dropped 10 days before the election. So everybody was on high alert.
And I agree it was not done properly.
Hold on
a second. It should have been done it should have been done properly. They should have said should have come out public and say, we don't know the providence of this. We could be hacked. It might not be hacked.
Jason, they knew.
Let's wait and see. We have to reserve judgment here.
Listen. Let me tell you what Let me just tell you what happened. Okay? So they use -- And make sure
you source this.
I will. So look. It's all in the New York Post. Okay? They've done how
great -- Great.
No. It nobody has refuted it. Nobody has refuted it.
It's a supercharged paper.
Go ahead. No.
Let me just get let me just get this on the record here.
So -- From the post.
The FBI was given the laptop in 2019 by the lab store store owner. Those guys have forensics. They have cyber experts. They knew the laptop was real. We know it's real now.
Nobody questions that. In fact, the FBI has admitted that the laptop was real. and that the the 100 Biden files are real. Nobody disputes that. Okay?
But what they did before the election is they used this excuse of Russian disinformation to discredit the story before it even came out. But they had no business getting involved in the story that way. They simply didn't. They just stayed out of it completely. I don't I don't understand how you can possibly justify that.
Yeah. I mean, I think we do have to look at the context of that time period when Hillary's emails were hacked, and we had a press -- That's
why it's
a perfect excuse.
Well, I
didn't finish the sentence. And we had a president, which you will agree, our presidents and presidential candidates should not be encouraging foreign powers to hack their their adversaries. You agree with that. Do you agree with that? Answer my question.
Do you agree with that? President just president? Answer the question. Why do you have
to divert?
I know
what you're doing. Listen. -- attack me.
No. I'm not.
Personally attack me. Just answer the question.
Should presidential candidates -- -- denial for 2016. You're still up on this. You can't let
it go. You personally attack me. You don't answer the question. That's fine. We'll move on.
You can't be intellectually honest with you. The audience knows you're not being intellectually honest.
You're not even all you're talking about.
If you could answer the simple question, should presidents encourage foreign powers to hack their adversaries, then you would be being intellectually dishonest. I am absolutely disappointed that you will not answer that simple question. It's an obvious yes. It's an obvious yes. Yeah.
Of course.
But of course, but I don't really believe that end.
I don't really believe that happened. Because you know Trump's gonna win the primary. Let's keep going. China has
said -- I don't wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
Listen. I I don't I've said so many times in the show that he's not my candidate. I don't know what you're talking about. You're going all the way back. He won't be going all the way on Wednesday.
What you're doing right now is like delusional. You're going back to some throwaway comment. He made it a rally in 2016. It's got nothing. Absolutely nothing to do with the story.
And the fact you're even bringing it up is, like, pure TDS. And I don't know why waste
any time talking about it now. Instead of answering a question, That's your technique. Your technique is to call me names instead of
answering the questions. I wanna on muddy the waters, I
wanna make one more time. -- another technique. I'm muddying the worst. So I'm not muddying
the worst. You are.
I don't know. -- answering the question.
Let's move
on. No. Let's move on.
I wanna make one final point.
Okay. I'll make a final point.
There was a letter. Listen. there was a letter with this Hunter Biden thing. Mhmm. This is 2020 election, Jason.
We're not going back 2 elections ago. I want to talk about the most
recent Okay. Fine.
You had Clapper. You had Comey at 50 of these security state officials. They write a letter saying that the Hunter Biden story has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. They claim that it was Russian disinformation when it wasn't. They knew it wasn't.
And it was the same story that the FBI was telling Twitter, and it was the same story that these Twitter executives were indulging it even though they all knew or had reasons to know, it wasn't true. And they suppressed the New York Post story anyway. I don't know why you're bringing up this Trump stuff It has nothing to do with the real issue here. The re hold on a second. The real issue is this.
Does social media have the right to suppress true stories put out by our media before the month before an election? Yes or no?
I'll I'll How do you defend that? I will answer your question yes or no, and you will not answer mine because you're being intellectually dishonest. Yes. We should no. We should not suppress news stories.
If it was, and I will argue both sides. If it was snowed in, if it was the Pentagon papers, if it's Hunter Biden's laptop, taking out the sex stuff, which we both agree on, Or if it is Russia and Ukraine, where your presidential candidate at the time Trump asked Zelensky to find dirt on Biden before the election, and he asked the Russians to hack Hilli's email, and they did that, and they least at 10 days before the election. That is facts that happened, and that is -- No.
Wait a second. That that's not what
this was. That's not what this was. You said you would let me speak. And you will let me see.
Your money in the waters.
No. Stop interrupting me and stop insulting me. I will say my part, you said yours, and then we will move on. The fact is, Trump encouraged hacking of other candidates, and he did it twice in a 4 year period back to back elections. We need to be on high alert when you have a Republican candidate Trump doing something so absolutely treasiness.
This
was a perfect cover story. This is why it was a perfect cover story is because But you will address
the treasonous behavior.
Let's move on. I I don't think it was a perfect phone call. I think it was there were lots of shenanigans. There were lots of shenanigans, so callbacks and on. I'm not defending anything Trump did.
Okay? I don't feel the need. Okay? I never defended it. But here but the deal is that you're letting your TDS
I don't have to do this. He's treasonous.
You're letting you're you're allowing this Russian disinformation to be a cover story --
No. I said I don't think posts should have been blocked. You're you're you're miscommunication
with it. -- even bringing this up? It was no rush
to this information. -- under which the con the reason I'm bringing it, I agree that the posting is a lot of great cover story. that's your interpretation. The the context also is everybody was on high alert waiting for a hack to drop and, in fact, a hack dropped 10 days before. You have to -- Those are not a hack.
Okay. We found out subsequently it was hacked.
That's why they're here to retire. -- point. They knew at the point.
Twitter and Facebook did not know. Twitter and Facebook didn't know. That's the point. They don't help her.
No. No. No.
No. Tyib in the you you you go back to the Twitter files. The first drop. Jim Baker. Hold on a second.
Jim Baker and Vijaya Gotti said, okay, that there were in a lot of internal questions about whether that that Hunter Biden story can be justified under the hacked -- Yeah. -- policy. Okay? And there were many legitimate questions raised internally about whether they could maintain that party line. And the emerging view was that they could no longer maintain that line.
And still, Gotti and Jim Baker said, no. We will maintain the idea that this was hacked information until proven otherwise. Even though it was not hacked, it was a New York post story.
Okay. Let's revise. We're gonna I'll I'll agree to just you, Rabe. Let's move on.
Why are you bringing up all this, like, irrelevant stuff?
The audience and the other besties wanna smooth on. So let's move on. China ends most zero COVID rules, and Iran might be abolishing its morality. Police news broke in the past week. On Wednesday, China's health authorities overhauled at 0 COVID policy.
§04China effectively ends Zero-Covid policies, Iran, China, and Japan demographics
and announced a 10 point national plan that scrapped most health code tracking and also they're rolling back their mass testing And this allowed many positive cases too, just simply quarantine at home like we were doing, I guess, a year ago now. and they're limiting some of these lockdowns. This all comes from a Foxconn letter which we don't know the cause causation here.
Does does it does
does it?
Well, we
don't know.
That's why
I just said. We don't know cause and correlation here. Give give us some perspective here, Trima.
Well, I just think it's kind of ridiculous to assume that the 2nd largest economy in the world pivots based on one letter from one CEO. So I know that that's how the Western -- Describe your
letter, please. Yep.
Well, apparently, what happened was Terry Guo, who's colloquially known as uncle Terry, who's the CEO of Foxconn, wrote a letter that essentially said, you know, if we don't figure out a way to get out of these this lockdown process, we're going to lose, you know, our leadership in the global supply chain. And apparently, that jolted the central planning commission to realize that they needed to you know, get out of these locked up. I think it's something different, which is I think this has been part and parcel of a very focused and dedicated plan By Xi, phase 1 was to consolidate power. phase 2 was to get through November. and to basically get reappointed for life and dispel any other rivals that he actually had.
And now phase 3 is just to reopen the economy again so this guy can basically sit on top of the 2nd largest economy in the world. So I think this is sort of a natural flow of things. The other part of it, which I think is being underreported, is I think that the way in which they did it was less responsive in my opinion to a letter from Uncle Terry, but was more responsive to the fact that there are people on the ground. And I think that these guys are getting very sophisticated and understanding how to give the Chinese people some part of what they want so that they're roughly happy enough to keep moving forward. And I'm not gonna morally judge whether it's right or wrong, but it's just a comment on what the game play and the game theory seems to be coming from the leadership of China.
So it's just I think this is it's it's it's good. for the Chinese people? And the real question is what will it mean for the US economy if these guys get their get their economy going again.
We talked about this previously, but this is a good example of the autocrat not necessarily being absolute in in their authority. And the sense that I think we get, at this point, coming out of China, is that there was enough descent from the populace on the lockdown and the experience of the lockdowns, and we can all go online and see the videos of steel bars being put on doors to keep people in their apartment buildings and people screaming and buildings being on fire. People can't escape the buildings. how much of that was true or not. And and riots in the screen and people fighting with the COVID testers, how much of it is true or not?
We don't really know. but it certainly seems to indicate that there was enough descent and enough unrest that in order to stay in power, the CCP had to take action and they had to shift their position and shift their tone. And I think it's a really important moment to observe that sometimes the CCP And, you know, perhaps even we can extend this into other autocratic regimes that we think are absolute in their authority and their own power and their power, perhaps are necessarily influenced by the people that they are there to govern and that they are you know, ruling over and that while we don't think about these places as democracies, perhaps they're not entirely the traditionally defined autocracy, that there is an influence that the people can have. And maybe we see the same change happening in Iran with young people and a population that's more modern, that's growing, and swelling, and size. that doesn't want to accept some of the traditional norms and the traditional laws.
And, you know, maybe that will kind of start to resonate around the world that the Internet is starting to do what everyone hoped and wanted it to do, which is the democratization of information, the democratization, of seeing other people's conditions and seeing what the rest of the world is and is like, gives the populace the ability to rise up and to say this is what we want because we know that there are better things out there. And these autocratic regimes have to start to shift slightly. And over time, maybe that has a real impact.
Here's a specific statistic and chart for everybody. The demographics of Iran are incredibly notable. If you look at this chart, for those of you listening, it just shows people by age and how many what percentage of the population they are or actually the raw numbers of the population. As you can see, it's basically like a pair. You have very few old people, and you've have a lot of people in their twenties and younger.
And so young people No.
No. No. Jason, it's fully. forties thirties is really
great. So forties thirties. You you don't have the geriatric population that you see in other countries like Japan, And so the demographics of Iran are extremely weighted towards younger people, millennials, gen xers, and younger. And they have VPNs, virtual private networks. They can see everything happening in the free world versus, let's say, closed societies.
And so I think that's what gives me a lot of hope is that these countries are going to have to evolve because young people are seeing how the rest of the world lives. And I and I think that's a big part of the change. Timoth, what are your thoughts?
About Iran specifically?
I think the demographic change and then China and demographic change slash protests.
I've said this before, and I've been tweeting about this for years. But people so poorly understand demographics, everybody thinks that we have a surplus of people and we don't. And we need to have a positive birth rate in order to kind of continue to support the expansion of the world in GDP. And we need that. And right now, we're not in that situation.
If you look at a country by country basis, a lot of these countries are facing that in a pretty cataclysmic way. The most sensitive country to this is China. I mean, their population get current course and speed. I think the last number is it's going to have by 21100. There'll be about 600,000,000 people in China.
which is unbelievably disruptive in a very negative way for them. Right? Because you will have a lot of people who are entering the workforce having to support an entire cohort of people above them in terms of age, right, who are retired, etcetera. So the state's gonna have to get much, much more actively involved over the next 50 years in China. And then you look at other countries like Nigeria or India who are in you know, at the beginning of what could be a multi decade boom.
Because you have twenty year olds that will be entering the workforce, you know, they'll effectively work for less than their older counterparts. Right? So then there'll be an incentive then to bring work onshore into those countries. And so it's gonna have huge impacts because Then you have rising GDP. You'll have rising expectations of living quality.
You'll have rising expectations of how governments treat those people. So it's all kind of positive in general, but the world needs more people. Let's just be clear, especially in Western Countries. We are going to be Not we're not as badly off as China, but we're not far behind.
Yeah. Here's a quick view of China and Japan for just really same kinda I don't know what they exactly call these charts are kinda, like, vertical histograms. But you start and, again, you know, data's hard to come by in some countries, but you know, China is starting to get top heavy when compared to Iran. And then if you look at Japan, quite stunning. There's just no young people left.
And they live very too much older ages in Japan. Its longevity is one of their great strengths as a population as a country. And so these demographics can't be fought. You're gonna have a constricting economy in Japan, and their place in the world is gonna be very, very different. Okay.
Where do we wanna go to next, please?
You never asked my opinion on on what's when these protests
are trying. You just talk. So go ahead. I just wanna didn't know if I
approached you.
No. I usually have to fight to give my opinion.
Oh, here we go. Listen. Have your agent call my agent. We'll talk about it. Okay.
We'll talk about it.
I have a slightly different view of of what's happening in China, Jason, which is, you know, I think that the people there need to stop harassing the CCP. You see, the Chinese Communist Party, they're the elites. They've set things up for the benefit of the people. They're not engaged in shadow banning. They're just you know, they have a system there.
to, you know, to engage in censorship, to prevent abuse and harm. Yeah. Right? That's the system. Continue.
They've set up. Right? Yeah. And the people just need to understand that that when they say things like, you know, when they oppose things like COVID lockdowns like Jay Bhattacharya did, They need to understand that that is engaging in abuse and harm. Exactly.
Yes. And you know what? They they -- And
they and we -- --
with reeducation camps for citizens who need, you know, to maybe rethink their positions on Friedberg and their wages, the hours they work, and their and their social conditions. You're you're absolutely correct. China really has built a perfect model for a society. Well well said, Sax. Great.
Now we can move forward. Let's go. Now we
can move forward. We are finally, we're in agreement.
By the way, you know that's gonna get clipped out and go viral.
Well, you you in.
Right? Like, according to according to
our elites according to our elites, like -- Yeah. -- EOL, Roth, or Taylor Lorenz, to criticize them is a form of harassment. You understand that. Right? So therefore, what the people in China are doing specifically by opposing lockdowns.
Mhmm.
You know, they're taking the Jay Pottery at point of view. They're engaging in harm and abuse and harassment of their betters,
of their elites. -- disagreement?
Why won't they just submit to the social credit system that has been set up for them for their benefit.
It's for their benefit. Why question? Yeah. Just accept. Accept your fate and work hard.
for the good of the people.
Great great points. Let's move forward. Should we talk about sales force?
I think it's actually a pretty it's a it's pretty good satire. I agree. Alright. I I think we have to talk about FTX. I I don't know if you saw and I the the people covering for SPF It continues to be an absolute joke.
§05Kevin O'Leary defends FTX on CNBC, was paid $15M as a spokesperson; Sinema flips to Independent
The number of interviews that SPF is doing is absurd, but the people carrying water for him is is is even more offensive. I mean, if you're a criminal trying to cover up your crime, okay. We get it. You're trying to cover up and stay out of jail. But Kevin O'Leary, who calls himself Mister Wonderful, was on CNBC trying to defend the fact that he was given this is stunning, by the way, 15 fucking
$1,000,000
to be a spokesperson for FTX. So the grift not only went to the press politicians, but now commentators on CNBC
$15,000,000.
To put that in context, I mean, you're talking what an elite NBA player gets from Nike. this does not exist in the world. You know, Kevin O'Leary might get, you know, 50 to 200 k for speaking gigs. but nobody gets $15,000,000 to show. Here's a seventy 5 second clip that I don't know if you all have seen, but is unbelievably stunning.
See you on
the other side of 75 seconds.
If you're a defense attorney that represents someone that you know is guilty, you gotta say, yeah, well, they're innocent.
But you
may know they're guilty. You may know they're guilty. If you find someone if you watch someone kill someone, yeah, They're innocent. I don't
think I'm joking. There's only the murder of my money in this case. Okay?
It's it's murder of of FTX's money
in my view. Everybody's -- Right.
Look, Joe. If you if you -- Yes. -- money that you got. I don't I don't think I don't think you should be singing the blues right now at all.
Oh, yes. I'm singing the
Why?
Because your 15,000,000 didn't pay an out that you that's a lot of money. a paid spokesperson.
It's a
lot of money. You didn't have to do much for that. That's per that's found money.
That's a different decision.
That's a different discussion. I the I you know, you can make that decision on your own, but I'm going to this point that if you want to stay up on the street before he's tried, I just don't understand it.
But it may end up costing you 15 for for reputation on everything else. That's the problem.
That's why I stay on this pursuit. I'm very transparent about it. I've just everything I know about it. I will find out more information. If I make the credit committee, I will act as a fiduciary for everybody involved.
I will testify I am an advocate for this industry and this changes nothing. Just look at the numbers that came out of circle today. I'm an investor there too. You've got the I lost it all in FTX, and we have a fantastic print on circle. The promise of crypto remains.
This will not change it.
Pretty crazy. 15,000,000 bucks. Any thoughts on the continuing SBF saga, Zach?
Well, I don't know why we should care so much about him. I mean, Kevin Lira, but but look.
It's indicative. Right? It's indicative of all these guys that got money from this guy.
--
he? Who is he?
And he's on Shark Tank.
He's a what? He's on Shark
Tank, and he's a contributor to CNBC who's on multiple times a week. The point is like you've got the the grift I'm I'm just trying to point out, $15,000,000 to a CNBC commentator is just an extraordinary payoff. I've never heard of anything like that.
I don't think it's fair to pick on Kevin O'Leary per se because there is a bunch of those guys that took money from you know, a bunch of athletes did, probably a bunch of movie stars,
you know, Republicans, Democrats. Yeah. Like, Everybody got paid -- Democrats.
--
by this guy. Democrats.
Okay. So,
Dan, just just like in the just like in the Twitter example, I think it's important in this case to generalize because the generalized thing is the real problem. Look, if you wanna focus on the crux of this, you have a concept in law that Saks knows better than the rest of us called fraudulent conveyance. And we have example after example where it does not matter whether it was in the Bernie Madoff example or, for example, Jason, we talked about it, the guy in LA that lost all the money client funds playing poker.
Yep. You have
to give the money back, especially if it was fraudulently conveyed to you.
Explain you explain this in detail for a second so the audience understands?
Well, on my understanding, which is very basic, and I think David can probably do a much better job is the following, which is If you get money some way, but it comes from somebody who fraudulently acquired that money, you have to give the money back. So in this example, what it would mean is if that they can show that that $15,000,000 that this guy got came from SBF basically rating the piggy bank of user accounts He's gonna have to pay the money back. Just like for example in the made of fraud, the the the the folks that went to find the money were able to go back to folks that actually redeemed even the beginning early ones and said, I understand that you didn't know any better, but This was fraudulently conveyed to you, so we need the money back, and they got the money back.
And in that case, if they had put a 1,000,000 in and it grew to 3,000,000, got their 1,000,000 principal back, but the 2,000,000 in gains, which were ill gotten, had to be returned. Return. Return. Exactly.
As I as I understand it based just what I've read that there's a 90 day rule around contributions, meaning that if I think this has to do with the bankruptcy, that that if he donated money within 90 days, then that can be unwound. So 90 days. Yeah. But I do think it creates potentially a powerful incentive here by politicians and various political groups for him not to be convicted of fraud for him to be able to plead this out into some sort of negligence. because they don't have to give it the money back.
They keep the bag. What an incredible insight. Well, this is what I think
is so interesting about the Kevin O'Leary thing. It's not about Kevin O'Leary. But it's about the fact that the money was spread around so widely and into such, like, deep trenches of the regulatory society. Society, lying to the blog influencers. Yeah.
And, basically, I think the guy, like, cemented this the he he thought that, like, which which I think, by the way, is a really interesting product of the crypto ecosystem and the model that's so many kind of crypto businesses have engaged in over the years, which is if you can fester the belief, then there is a business. If you cannot fester the belief, there is no business, that there isn't a fundamental productivity driver. It's about building a belief system. And you can buy a belief system if you can take money that people have given you You can embed it in influencers and celebrities and politicians and regulators. And if you give it to enough of these people, and you give enough of it to them, maybe that belief system solidifies, and your thing becomes real.
Which is a classic GIF technique, by the way. In the grifters,
tell us all about it, Jake House. Yeah.
Yeah. That you do it.
You have this
--
It's a master. No.
No. It's
the patina. It it's this you know, you look like you're incredibly rich. know, you're you're going to fancy restaurants, you're wearing expensive suit, you're getting in a sports car, and then you own some palazzo, whatever, and then some other rich person comes and you get them to invest in something, and then you have scone with the money. But they see all the accruent remarks. You check all the boxes.
Your parents were Stanford. You went to MIT. and you are donating large sums of money and you got this big table at the club and you got a penthouse, everybody starts to feel, well, Might is right. You got the wealth. There might be
--
How would you guys -- Like, how would you guys feel about honestly honestly, no. Backing the CEO, of a growth stage company that you put your firm's money into who lives in a $130,000,000 house and has not yet exited the business.
Yeah. Absolute alarm bells everywhere. And this is why I'm not a fan
of a secondary cell.
Let me ask you guys a question.
Oh, huge secondary cells.
Yeah.
Let me ask you guys a question. Do you think that a $1,000,000,000 of dark money could stop a red wave? Just ask you for a friend. $1,000,000,000.
The jury was over weighted to Democratic Sachs. No. Honestly, do you think it's over weighted? The money
he has?
His mother was a huge Democratic bundler.
Yeah. Yeah.
And and moreover, the the specific politicians you needed to influence, there yes. There were some Republicans, but by and large. It was the SEC.
What are you saying? Are you
the first person to make this claim? I I wanna say, did you hear it here first on the Always pod?
Much credit
on the back. David Sacks. David Sacks making the declaration. I think Elon Elon said it was stopped because of
-- Well, let me ask you. Let me ask you a follow-up question. What do you think would have more impact on our election. Enormous amounts of dark money going to Democrats or extensive shadow banning of conservative influencers.
Yeah. Which one do you think
would have a bigger impact?
We
could open it. And and
and all I'll say in the 5050 country, where I mean, the scales are, like, balanced where these elections are just a few 1000 votes.
Yeah. What do you think
the result is gonna be? if we actually have a level playing field, we get rid of this swindler's dark money.
Yeah. That's an interesting question. Let me add a I'm I'm into that. What would have a bigger impact this suburban person's license. I I
think this is a great example of when you guys end your fight. Like -- Yeah.
--
taking away a woman's right to choose after 50 years of giving it to them. Which would have a bigger impact on the red wave?
That did have a big impact, but I think we're gonna move past that. I bet. I think we're gonna move past that.
Yeah. Alright. Great. Yeah. Great great, great strategic facts.
What do you what do you
think about the cinema Kristen cinema, Kirsten cinema flipping to independent? Do you think that's a big deal?
Or -- I
think I think it's really interesting. I think a very shrewd move on her part.
She's gonna prep
-- So first of all, I think she's great. You know?
Yeah. Just tell us tell us about her sex. No. He he
she's great.
She's she is the center from Arizona, formerly Democrat, now independent, who is in the mold of, you know, John McCain, who was a former center from Arizona, served as Maverick Independent, and she does not cout out to her party orthodoxy. And when Biden wanted to pass 3 and a half trillion of build back better spending, she, along with mansion, opposed it. And I think saved the administration from this gigantic boondoggle that would have been inflation much, much worse. Now, management got all the credit, but she was equally responsible for putting a hold on that. And then as a result, they only did the 750,000,000,000 inflation reduction act.
So she's willing to buck her own party. Now as a result of that, I think they were planning on she was gonna get primary that the progressive wing of the party was planning on primary ing her. And by moving to an independent, in a sense, she preempts that. Because what she's now saying is she's now sort of like, you know, Bernie Sanders as an independent or this guy, Angus King from from Maine. they still caucus with the Democrats, but they're independents.
And the and the Democrats don't run candidates against them because they know that if they do, you'll have a Republican and Democrat and independent, and the Democrats and the independents will split the vote, and the Republican will win. So, basically, she's now daring the democrats. Hey. If you wanna run a candidate against me, I'm not gonna sit around and get primary by them. You go ahead and run somebody, but then we're both gonna lose -- I
like it.
-- to the Republican. That's what smart about it is. I think she's daring Schumer to run somebody against her.
It's also interesting. She's she's the only member of congress I've read that's non Theist, which is kinda like atheist. She has talk about God or doesn't believe in God. And I think she's the 1st openly bisexual member of Congress. She's a a Maverick.
Certainly. Sachs, do you think she held up on making this decision till after that Georgia senate runoff election finished? And do you think that it influenced the decision?
I don't know. But I I think that the the key --
because the deceleration I'm aware of her for
is. Yeah. Well, imagine if she doesn't make this move now. Okay? And then in 2 years, well, I guess, really next year, she gets primary.
Okay? And then what if she loses the primary? It's gonna be very hard for her to run it as a independent At that point, it'll look like sour grapes or loser. Right? But if she goes independent now, she's saying, listen.
I'm running as an independent matter what. The question you have to make is what the Democratic Party is whether to support me or basically tank this election in the throat.
Will we see more of this purple approach?
I was just gonna ask you, what does this mean for Joe Medge?
Well, I don't think Joe Mansion has this problem, and I'll tell you why. Because West Virginia unlike Arizona is like a plus 22 red state. Joe Mancin is the only politician in that state who could win that seat for the Democrats. When Joe Mancin retires, that seat is going Republican. And Schumer knows this.
The Democrats know this. They think they're lucky stars every day that they got Joe Manchen because otherwise that would be a Republican seat. And so look, all this stuff about how the progressives were upset with mansion and all that papa pussy he got, that may be, you know, the sort of progressive wing is gonna say that publicly. but the smart Democrats know that they're very lucky to have a politician like Joe Manchen on their side of the aisle.
I could ask a question to you, Jamal. Why do Democrats? Why why are they it it seems to be so anti moderate Democrats. Why are they so resistant to the concept of a moderate democrat when obviously moderate Democrats seem to have an advantage in these elections.
Well, no. I think David described it well, which is that in many of the seats, this is both true for Republicans and for Democrats. you're not really competing in a general election. You're competing in a prime primary. And if you win a primary, you're probably gonna win.
So, like, you know, if you're in Mississippi, for example, you just have to win the Republican primary. Nothing else matters. And then you're just gonna skate to victory. And so the real question is, who votes in those are different oftentimes than who votes in the general. And this is why you get this dispersion that's happening where folks seem to be getting more and more extreme.
It's reflecting the sound bites that those primary voters wanna hear. And this is the big problem that we have. And that's why, like, if you have a bunch of this, you know, ranked choice voting or, you know, these other kinds of methods, it starts to clean that up so that you move people more into the moderate middle. But that's why that's why you have this crazy stuff happening.
Alright, everybody. This has been another amazing episode of the All in podcast for The Dictator. the sultan of Science, and -- David Sacks.
--
I am.
15 --
Jake, I
will see you next time. Bye bye.
Well, your winter's ride.
Rainman, David Sachs. I'm going home.
And it says open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy like that.
like, white hair winter's wearing.
Besties are back. I know the 13 step. That is my dog thinking, and I wish you
your driveway setbacks. We're gonna
We should all just get a room and just have a one big queue, George, because they're all It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release him out. What?
You're the thief. What? You're
the thief.
Speaking. would.
Where did
you get Murphy's artifact? going
all in.