The Tech Bro-ligarchy

It really feels like we let the lab rat who designed a hot or not website to rank his female students based on attractiveness.

I don't know, it feels like it got out of the meth lab.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein.

I'm so happy that you're here.

And before we start this episode, I would like to let you know with full transparency that despite spending thousands of hours creating content and podcasts about how dangerous the right and their consolidation of power is, I too attended Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday.

And some of you might say that I'm a sellout.

Some of you might say that I'm a spineless hack who will do anything to stay in the good graces of power.

Were the snacks good?

That was good.

Donald Trump has spent the better part of the last decade campaigning as a populist.

He's for the common folk, the farmer, the small business owner, the downtrodden among us.

But his inauguration on Monday was attended almost exclusively by billionaires.

Seated physically closer to him than many actual politicians were the following.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, you know, Facebook and Instagram, Elon Musk of Twitter.

I'm still calling it Twitter on this podcast.

It's a grudge that I hold.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Xiao Chu of TikTok, Sundar Pachai of Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the chat GBT guy, Tim Cook of Apple.

So many people, myself included, feel so overwhelmed right now by the rapid deterioration of federal institutions and what feels like the rapid wedding of the government, specifically the Trump administration and the tech industry.

And I think most of us have questions like, what does this mean for the communication platforms we all rely on every day?

What can we do?

I want this episode to hopefully simplify the rise of the tech oligarchy for those of us who are confused and feel like everything is getting a little fucking out of control to create at least, you know, an hour of stillness and understanding and hopefully maybe a path.

forward at least for now.

Joining us today to help us accomplish that is someone who has, I imagine, spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours in the weeds of these billionaires, their politics, their influence on all of our lives, whether we'd like to acknowledge it or not.

Ed Angueso, a tech journalist, is here on a BitFruity.

Ed, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on.

How are you feeling right now about everything?

Because

honestly, I think we can maybe start this episode by just acknowledging, like, it's not great lately.

No, it's it's not.

Um, I think some parts of it are to be expected, right?

There has been a continual slide to the right in this country for a long time, and we are seeing some of the more enthusiastic elements come out.

But, you know, I didn't expect like a Nazi salute at the inauguration.

Yeah, I didn't expect all of this to come to a head so quickly.

Speaking of the Nazi salute, I saw, are you familiar with Brianna Wu?

Yes.

Brianna Wu is like a trans woman who was really awfully victimized by Gamergate and who has in more recent years become sort of like a right-wing mouthpiece.

Yeah, I'm just saying, you know, a warrior for justice.

Well, right, that's what she would say, right?

She is just every day wakes up and is like, I need to guarantee my float on the bad take parade.

And

yesterday, she

tweeted regarding the Elon Musk Nazi salute.

Actually, I'm just going to read it.

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

I'm excited to hear what it is.

This is my favorite Brianna Wu tweet of all time.

She wrote, you know what?

Other people can decide if it's a Nazi salute.

I'm not getting involved.

That was her take.

You know what?

Maybe.

Yeah, why not?

You know, I've seen everything from, you know, who amongst us doesn't get awkward and nervous and a little shy and throw up a salute.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes, I saw lots of autistic people being like, hi, I am autistic, and my autism does not make me a Nazi.

Yeah.

I think it's safe to say the guy who's turned Twitter into a safe space for Nazis threw up the salute, right?

It's just very unambiguous looking at it.

One take or theory I saw on it that I really liked was that there's a lot of right-wingers who do this, but try to do it subtly.

And they try to do it in the midst of there's like a clear, intentional action, and then they obscure it.

And that he's just too fucking awkward to actually pull that off.

And so he got too excited at the prospect of controlling people with like a subtle salute and just didn't.

That makes sense to me.

One take that I saw about the Nazi salute that also made a lot of sense to me was that what people are so intensely pushing back on is not necessarily what they saw, which I think is like a very unambiguous Nazi salute twice,

but what it means for the movement that they have committed themselves to, and people not wanting to acknowledge

what that means about what they're a part of and what they've been fighting for and what they voted for.

Yeah, people not wanting to realize they're the bad guy.

I love this Brianna Wu tweet.

Other people can decide if it's a Nazi salute.

I'm not getting involved.

To be honest, I wish you would commit to this attitude on more issues.

Listen, Brianna, if you're listening to this, continue to not get involved.

We love the Nazi.

That's great.

So I wanted to start this episode with sort of a historical anecdote and see how you feel about it.

Do you know about the Nazi radio?

Yes, during World War II?

Yeah.

In the Weimar Republic in Germany, which was the period in Germany before Hitler rose to power, Germans just didn't really have personal radios unless they were really rich.

Germany was behind on the technology, and so personal radios were too expensive and the only people who had them were rich people.

And then in the beginning of Hitler's rise to power, the German government collaborated with German radio manufacturers to develop a radio that was half the price of all the other radios available in Germany.

And the Nazi propaganda ministry promoted the fuck out of these things.

And within a year, it became the top-selling radio in Germany.

Everyone had it.

The farmers could afford it.

People in rural areas could afford it.

And they used this radio to push out Nazi propaganda.

And it was a hugely successful tool for them.

That just felt like a timely anecdote.

You know, I think a lot of scholars, at least, of right-wing movements, talk a bit about how, like, yeah, the creation of mass media, of mass culture, has lent itself or contributed to the rise of some of these more jingoistic movements and tendencies.

And I feel that on some level, it makes sense that communication platforms and technologies that we have today lend themselves to amplification of right-wingers in part because these platforms, right, they want to be as ubiquitous as possible so that they can maximize advertising revenue.

And one way to do that is to remove a lot of the limitations on what kind of content is on them.

And the people who are going to do that are not necessarily liberals, you know, and Democrats, right?

It's going to be the right-wing nuts who also have funny ideas about people's skulls and, you know, who should be allowed to be in public and who should have power in the country or be able to vote or have political power, right?

So I talk a lot on this podcast in general.

It's probably the most common theme is grifters.

Grifting basically the idea of following the money wherever that takes you, even and especially when that includes espousing beliefs that aren't authentic to your own.

As I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and now Shao Chu of TikTok, I'm looking at all of their histories, their relationships with Donald Trump, their relationships with politics in general, their relationships with the public.

And to me, it just feels like one big

grift circus.

And it feels like that they're just grifting all the way to kind of like grift boss, like head boss grifter, which is Donald Trump.

I mean, Donald Trump is like the grifter of all time.

There's a reason why a lot of the villains in movies and like the 80s were modeled after Donald Trump.

You know, like, I think there's this, there's this quote that's floating around, but it's like, you know, Donald Trump has connections to, you know, wrestling, to casinos, and gambling, and reality TV shows, to real estate, to a lot of fields and sectors of American life that are all about bluster, about fraud, about grift, about deception.

And this says something about American culture, right?

The extent to which scammers and hustlers dominate everything.

He really is like the final boss of grifting.

Like a type of grifter that I talk about a lot on this podcast, and that I actually started the podcast to talk about is like gay conservative grifters.

And I like to think that it's like, if you start making your little TikToks that are like, the pronoun people have gone too far.

We as gays, we would find acceptance if you all just got a little more normal.

And then you take that to like a podcast on like Prager You.

And then you take your Prager U podcast to get a guest news on Fox News.

And then they make you a primetime Fox News person.

I like to think that if you grift your way all the way to the top, you end up at Trump's inauguration.

Yeah.

I mean, you literally kind of do.

Like Riley Gaines, who I've talked about on this podcast, like she was at these like inaugural parties.

Logan Paul.

Logan Paul, who was like a lib.

Yeah, right.

I mean, you know.

We have a little bit of skepticism maybe around Logan Paul's liberalism.

He is something.

He made that great Black Lives Matter video,

which, like, for an influencer of his size at the time, was like, and now he's at the inauguration with Sam Altman.

Taylor and I yelled about this on my podcast a couple months ago.

We were like, if I just did a little right-wing pivot, I wouldn't be fucking editing this by myself.

Yeah, I have an editor.

You know,

you would have an editor.

You would probably be bought by

one of these donors.

Dennis prager would be paying for my marketing yeah you know enthusiastically the life the life but so i mean too late

it's not too you might see some crazy things if you see crazy things happening on this podcast in the next four years mind your business

some of these people a lot of these people don't start out as right-wingers or at least not as fervently right-wing as they become i i was i was like falling asleep last night and i was thinking about like, Riley Gaines was supportive of Leah Thomas's transition at the beginning.

The first interview she ever gave, she said, I wish Leah good luck in her transition.

And three years later, and lots of, I would imagine, multi-million dollar contracts later, she's on Bill Maher's podcast talking about Leah Thomas's genitals.

Just like so radicalized, so horrible, so cruel.

But I think also we can see that phenomenon taking place with someone like Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah.

So can we talk about Mark Zuckerberg a little bit?

Yeah.

You know, I think Mark Zuckerberg is in of himself a really interesting case, but also a great example of how the media criticism and capacity to analyze tech people has been bad for a long time.

And a lot of people really genuinely believed that Mark Zuckerberg's mythologies about why he started Facebook.

He just wanted to connect people.

How he viewed it as a walled garden or the garden for everyone in the planet to to be connected to one another How they were gonna bring the internet to the developing world how they were going to Lift up the global south how they were going to you know build a much more harmonious world when in reality this is just like a guy who is interested in Generating much as much profit as possible and transforming that into political power and shoring up his own political power and he's done this by shifting back and forth and back and forth between liberals conservatives democrats Republicans, whoever he thinks will protect him.

It's so crazy because we did, like a month ago, an episode a whole long form on Elon Musk, and everything you said describes Elon Musk.

Yeah.

I mean, Elon Musk was talking about how climate change was real and we should not pull out of the climate accord and then has become the shadow president of the guy who's pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

I mean, Zuck, especially, I think, is a particularly insidious one because, you know, he'll do whatever he needs.

And right now, what he needs to do is placate Trump because there are a bunch of antitrust lawsuits up against him because they've been, you know, laying seeds for the past five to ten years about how there's going to be this Cold War with China and you can't break us up because they're not going to break up China's competitors to Facebook.

You know, a lot of efforts been made to present a liberal and a conservative version of himself.

I'm going to be the the defender of democracy.

Don't Don't regulate me into oblivion, or I'm going to free us with masculine energy and

the fuck he's talking about now.

I would like to talk about not only Mark, we're going to talk about a few of these people today.

And my goal in doing that is to kind of demystify these sort of larger than life figures that feel like they, I mean, it's not that they, we feel like they have so much control of our lives.

They do, especially now that they are getting in with government in a way that i don't think they ever have before and so i want to just demystify them their decision making and hopefully increase everyone's knowledge levels a little bit about the situation so that we all feel like we have more agency in the decisions that we make and the way we interact with these platforms and the way we understand what content is being fed to us and so i feel like maybe we should start by so what i put on my outline is like what did what did facebook actually start as because i watch the social network.

I know it was a hot or not website.

Yeah.

I mean, and that's what it was, right?

Zuck at Harvard figuring out a way to get the intact directory of students so that he could make a hot or not.

Yeah, I have a screenshot of it here.

I'm going to put it on the screen, but I'm going to blur out these women's faces.

But it was called Face Mash.

You went on this website and it just showed you two photos.

uh of of two different classmates of his like female classmates at harvard blank white website with these few photos, and it says, were we let in for our looks?

No.

Will we be judged on them?

Yes.

Who's hotter?

Click to choose.

So evil.

Yeah.

So

like honestly traumatizing.

Yeah.

I mean, and it is important to keep this in mind with Facebook.

It is all, it has been something that's at the beginning been trying to figure out how do we lie to the public about what we are actually, right?

How do we lie about the origin being face smash how do we lie about our desire to just maximize advertiser revenue how do we lie about the negative effects that we have on our users and you know how can we present ourselves in a new light so that we get more users more popular support more integration i mean and this is also the model for tech in general right you know how do we get this product that people don't want need and would probably reject if they knew why we're doing it but we want it so that we'd be able to get the profits, so that we'd be able to get the power that comes with the wealth.

If we were to track every stage of all of these people's careers, we'd be here for eight hours.

But I just included this as the origin of Facebook and the origin of Mark Zuckerberg's career.

I'm curious how much of Mark Zuckerberg's, like, who he is now and the decisions that he's making now can fit sort of neatly into the Mark Zuckerberg who created FaceMash.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that someone who made a hot or not site at a young age that then quickly became a social network that was desired in a lot of college campuses, a lot of workplaces, made a lot of money off that, and then realized they can make even more money off that is not gonna be the most well-formed individual when they become one of the most powerful people on the planet.

It becomes in their billions and billions of users for a variety of reasons, right?

I think there's a core element of him that slots in nicely, which is that there's not really regard for the people that are being used the site and that the people on the site the users are being used themselves by him

to attract more users or or to you know provide this or that service or to collect data on them right I think the core disregard for the user is there, and you can see that even today in how the platform is, right?

Yeah, you can say faggot now.

Yeah, you know, and you can

say anything you want.

It's protected speech, right?

Which, can I just say, sorry, I I don't mean to interrupt you.

No, no, go for it.

We're going to talk about the relaxed regulations on hate speech that he did to placate Trump.

But as whatever, a femme gay guy who has had sort of a following on Instagram for a number of years now, it's just so funny to me.

This idea that like everybody who wanted to spew hate has been like wildly censored.

Like,

I have reported so many death threats.

So many, I'm outside of your house, faggot.

So many, I know where you get coffee, I'm coming with a baseball bat.

Like, I'm laughing at these, but it's crazy.

And I have reported all of them, and they never get taken down.

No.

Like,

this was not a particularly protected website for, you know, marginalized people ever.

I would argue.

No, like, and like, to be clear, right?

Facebook, a lot of these social networks, assess pools for hate.

You report them.

They insist that they...

that you are applying some old censorious state of mind and that, you know, if you're getting in the way of freedom of of speech, you're getting in the way of freedom of expression.

Also, the same site and the social media ecosystem that has like you know aided and abetted a genocide, destroyed the mental health of content moderators because of how much vile shit is on the website, you know, facilitated a slide to the right of the general population, mental health crises of young adults or in children who use the site.

I mean, this is a site that deals psychic damage to you, you know, if you use it, but that the company is now, you know, pretending like, oh, we are, you know, this is actually going to help us.

This is actually going to help the community.

This is actually, you know, going to promote the values that we have.

The values that they've had have always been like, we don't really care about the marginalized groups, right?

From the hot or not to now.

Yeah, I think so.

I think it's always been like, you are a product.

You don't really matter.

And even the product that we're providing you doesn't matter.

You know, Facebook is full of AI slop now.

Yeah, I know we're kind of reaching in a number of directions, but I feel like that's important because AI slop.

Can you explain what AI slop is?

Because I feel family members have sent me AI slop.

Oh, yeah.

And I have to be like, mom, I love you.

And that's AI slop.

Yeah, like a picture of like Donald Trump riding a Tyrannosaurus Rex,

you know, hooked in like a Catholic garb.

And being like, like, if you believe in God, reshare if you prayed to God today.

You know, something like, you know, this is everywhere.

This is everywhere, right?

Do you think that would be everywhere if it was run by someone who cared about what was actually on the platform?

Of course not.

I mean, the AI slop is also not just the content, this sort of nonsense, where it's AI-generated images.

But, you know,

as we saw recently, they have been trying to force AI with chatbots, with fake profiles,

because they've been trying to normalize it so that they will be able to push more policies, more products that affirm their investments into artificial intelligence.

I think the core thing to think about is that the platform itself is in disrepair because Zuckerberg is not interested in anything other than how can we juice what we're extracting from it.

You can let the apps fall into disrepair and people still use it.

As long as you still get the money, that's what matters.

And it's not the same thing as having a good community.

I want to follow Mark Zuckerberg's political trajectory a little bit.

And this is basically what I did in the episode that was about Elon Musk.

We just like went through like all the times he signaled his politics politics and how that had changed over the years and trying to analyze what caused them to change.

I think Elon really became a culture warrior for a number of like personal crises-related reasons.

So that by the time it was like Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday, like I think Elon Musk is, I personally think that he is like very much like an avowed Nazi.

I don't think the same necessarily of Mark Zuckerberg.

I think Mark Zuckerberg is kind of a little bit more transparent of of a grifter.

That's my two cents, but let's look at the evidence and decide.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has never said a lot outright about his own, you know, for example, like voting record, not until recently.

My understanding is that he aligned himself with a number of socially liberal causes.

He attended San Francisco Pride in 2013, which was significant because it was after they defeated the Defensive Marriage Act.

And he's like on a float, like wearing a rainbow leg.

Like I was looking at these photos the other day and I was like, huh,

another one bites the dust.

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

In 2016 at then the Facebook office, because it wasn't Meta, someone had written like Black Lives Matter on a wall somewhere and then someone else had crossed it out.

Mark Zuckerberg sent out a company-wide memo and he admonished the person who crossed out Black Lives Matter and wrote All Lives Matter.

He wrote, quote, Black Lives Matter doesn't mean other lives don't.

It's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve, which like, first of all, is a very far cry from what Mark Zuckerberg is espousing now.

But also like, I mean, that shows like a pretty solid understanding of like the Black Lives Matter, all lives matter like debate that was happening at the time.

So you could tell that on some level, he was like personally invested.

Yeah, I think that, you know, in the early years, right, a lot of companies were making these really ridiculous and clanky ass statements in support of Black Lives Matter.

And so Facebook and some of the other tech companies being like concise and like straight to the point shows one, like there's an understanding of what's going on.

But also two, I think highlights even more just how like empty and cynical a lot of them are, right?

Because of how easily they'll walk that back when they sense any sort of change in the direction that the wind is going.

Right.

You know, it's, it's only a few years later that you see him basically walking this bank, starting to censor, you know, progressive and leftist political activity and comments on the platform.

You know, when it's not like he suddenly lost all the information or his team lost all the information.

I think it's, I think it's like you said, there's an understanding, but it's

understanding of a fact that they don't really care too much for.

You know, if it's useful, they'll demonstrate the knowledge.

If it's not, they'll pretend that, you know, they're retooling their company's woke culture or something like this.

Enter Trump in Mark Zuckerberg's life.

In the wake of January 6th, Meta, which is still Facebook, bans Trump, which that obviously wouldn't last.

But they ban him from posting and they take some of his content down.

Earlier this year, so now, you know, three years later, Trump releases yet another book where, in the book, he like he threatened Mark Zuckerberg with life in prison.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And yeah, you know,

it happens.

It's a little threat.

And in speeches, too,

if I recall correctly, he threatened this in speeches as well.

Trump wins the election November 5th.

November 27th, Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump have dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

December, now last month, Mark Zuckerberg donates a million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund,

which

when I posted about this, some people had a question that I also have, which is, what is an inaugural fund and why do you donate to it?

Well,

it is a little, you know, the American political system is beautiful.

Things that would be corrupt in almost every other country are encouraged here because you speak with your dollars.

And so the inaugural fund, think of it as like a little bit of a slush fund that you can use for other activities, ostensibly re-election campaign, because

presumably you're raising these funds for your first term.

But if you're a second-term president and you're doing an inaugural fund, big question mark.

Well, and he had already won.

Yeah.

I mean, that was the thing.

So Sam Altman, Open AI,

Mark Zuckerberg, all of these other people, they all donated millions of dollars to

showing how much they care.

But he'd already won.

Right.

So where does the money go?

So, you know, feel free to comment.

I genuinely don't know.

It's just going towards making sure that you can say faggot more.

Right.

You know, Instagram now.

And getting a little gold star when you go to the White House and having dinner.

That's it.

I think that also, you know, one thing that is interesting with the money that they threw this way in the meetings that they've been having, I think the speed with which they did the about face to support Trump was interesting.

But they also seem to have done it in a different way than 2016, where 2016 it felt like begrudging, or maybe, you know, it was telegraphed to seem like, oh, we're begrudgingly going to the tower and we're only talking with him because we forced him to have a clear vision for what tech is going to look like in this country or for uh issues that specifically affect us whereas this time around they're more so just allying themselves with with with trump with advance with the ascendant i think tech right movement and the desire to like you know allow for artificial intelligence to push through without any regulation crypto to push through without any regulation.

I think you're on to the right point, which is like, okay, they donated this money to an inaugural fund to a a president who just won for the second term.

So he's not running again, presumably, right?

So where's it going to go?

You know, probably going to be sucked up into the apparatus to like support other candidates who are part of this movement.

And so just investing in future connections, consolidation, and control and access.

I mean, it's also always important to remind people because it's like kind of a flashy headline of like, oh, each of these men donates a million dollars.

But like a million dollars to each of them is like less than pennies to us.

That's also the other thing, right?

That's how cheap it is to buy a politician in this country.

Which is, yeah, yeah.

God damn it.

So on January 7th, just a couple of weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg, via a video shot in his living room, it looked like, announced all of these new policies to Instagram and Facebook.

And the main ones were that we are no longer fact-checking.

Nice.

Nice.

Because misinformation was famously not already thriving on these platforms.

Right.

And

can, but you can spew more hate speech.

And notably, like, you can do that if it's couched in religion because it specifically highlighted, and this was so like Anita Bryant-era homophobic language.

And you all who listen to this podcast know that I cannot get through an episode without mentioning Anita Bryant.

Rest in peace.

But it was the specific policy that Meta put forth was like, you can now accuse queer people of being mentally ill due to ongoing religious discussions regarding homosexuality and transgenderism, which was so 1970s to me.

But these just seemed like a very transparent result of his kind of cuddling up with Donald Trump.

Yeah.

And it's also so funny, and a lot of people pointed this out, but it's like, theoretically, misinformation and truth versus fiction is not partisan,

but but it is.

Yeah, it is always important to remember how much of what comes out of Zuck's mouths and the mouths of his executives is just like PR

warified bullshit, right?

You know, from the interviews where you're talking, where he's talking about changing the culture and it being too woke and feminine at a company where it's like two-thirds men, to him

coming around and saying that we've been getting away from

we've let

woke values or a focus on them distract from just a freeballing attitude that will lead to innovation right i mean all these suggestions are bullshit they're the flip side of what he was saying just a few years ago and they're very clearly like you said calibrated to the president to be like hey look like we are we're not your enemy We would never censor you.

We won't censor your allies.

We're good for the American people.

We're good in the Cold War against China.

Please don't throw me in jail, break up my company, or investigate what we're doing, or block us from buying smaller companies again.

You know, we are a good old, we're your friends, we're your friends here.

The last thing I had on my little Zuck, I know, because we need to move on from Mark Zuckerberg, but the last thing that I had here was, if you look at my laptop over here,

I'll put it on the screen, don't you worry.

is a side-by-side of Mark Zuckerberg, you know, mid-2010s, looking kind of nerdy, receding hairline.

I don't know, he kind of just looks like

a thumb a little bit, which is fine.

Like Channing Tatum also looks like a thumb, and I've like Channing Tatum was one of my gay awakenings.

And now,

and I've been trying to raise hell about this on Twitter, and it never catches fire.

And I just want to talk about how ridiculous this style transformation has been.

He looks like he's in the hype house.

Yes.

He looks like he's like a 14-year-old TikToker in the body of a 40-year-old man.

Yeah.

Permed hair.

He's wearing these gold chains every day with the oversized like streetwear t-shirts.

What is the angle here?

He looks ridiculous.

I'm sorry.

I'm like...

I'm not one to play fashion police.

That's not the essence of this podcast.

This is an extra an eight mile, you know?

Like, this is

an extra in eight miles.

Like, I haven't seen this.

I haven't seen this in years.

I haven't seen this in years.

I mean, I feel like if I go back home, I can see people who are dressing like this.

But I think also, again, another signal of just like how there's really so much of that public persona, bullshit.

They're just like, oh, well, we need more young users.

So we need to make him look younger.

How do young people dress, you know, perfectly?

No, but he doesn't.

It's just,

it's not working for me.

Yeah, no.

Because

it's giving like aging Twink

who's hanging on to being a Twink.

You know?

But like, you,

at some point, it's like, just let it go.

No, I mean,

a guy who used to have a Julius Caesar haircut because of how much he loved Julius Caesar is someone who

his appearance has to be managed, right?

It's because if it doesn't, then he's going to do things like that.

But also, the fact that it's managed, like you said, even though it doesn't do anything for us, one of the many attempts to try to cultivate this image is someone who, like, I'm just like you.

You know, I'm like, I'm, I, you know, I do MMA, I rap, I got, you know, I have a gold chain.

Yeah.

It doesn't work for me and for people who are, you know, I think discerning about it, but they're also like a lot of people aren't.

And you'll see like some of the coverage of this, just like, wow, like, yeah, Zach's looking great.

Yeah.

To me, it just reads as someone who, like, I don't know, he like went to the barstool website and scrolled for 45 seconds.

And he was like, gold chain, check, permed hair, check, like extra large.

Frame is some Zin, you know, like

style at all.

I learned what Zin was on this podcast.

Taylor Lorenz was explaining to me Zinn because she was like, You don't know about Zinn, but I was like, I don't know straight men.

It's a, it has its own universe, and that's part of their audience.

That's Mark now.

I don't know,

our glorious leader, he'll be president in 25 years.

Do you think that's his goal?

I hope not

because you say that,

But each day.

I know.

I would like to take a quick break from the show to shout out Factor for making this episode possible.

Listen, if you are all about trad living, if you watch Nara Smith wake up in the morning and spend six hours cooking a bowl of cereal from scratch and are like, I'm going to do that, this one might not be for you.

But if like me, you find yourself on the opposite end of that spectrum, where you love good food but rarely have time to prepare it yourself, Factor might be for you.

Factor is a meal delivery service with chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy.

The best part is they are ready to heat and eat in two minutes.

There are a bunch of different Factor menus that you can try.

Personally, I go for Protein Plus.

I know, I know, not so dainty, but I admittedly do love going to the gym and I don't love eating unseasoned grilled chicken seven days a week.

Sorry.

Some of the Factor meals that I've personally loved are the mushroom chicken with wild rice, the cavatepe with meatballs, and the smoothies.

The smoothies are great.

If you'd like to try Factor, you can get started at factormeals.com/slash fruity50off and use the code fruity50off to get 50% off your first box and free shipping.

That's factormeals.com slash fruity50 off with the code fruity50 off.

Thank you so much to Factor Meals for making my dinner last night and for sponsoring this episode.

Now let's get back to the show.

I had Elon in here.

We have talked about Elon pretty extensively on this podcast, so I'm not going to like rehash his entire life, but I do specifically want to talk about what I haven't talked about on here before, which is his years-long tenuous relationship with Donald Trump.

Because I believe that even though, yes, I think that Elon is an incel culture warrior authentically, like I think he has brainworms authentically.

I also think that he has done some grifty maneuvers around specifically his relationship to Donald Trump.

Right.

I think they play each other a lot.

I'm very curious how this is going to go.

You know, I could see in the, I could see, you know, it was very funny when Trump got elected.

You could could see there was an attempt to be like, How do we break this up?

You know, like, or covering how annoying one of them might be to the other, or, you know, reporting on riffs in the camps, you know.

Yeah.

Didn't work.

There have been some reports, and you know, who knows about the merit of them, but that are like, report, Donald Trump annoyed by Elon Musk.

And I believe it.

I believe it.

I'm annoyed by

pitch me too.

But so this goes back.

I have a little timeline.

2016, Elon describes Trump in an interview as he doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the United States.

In 2017, Elon was part of one of Trump's business councils, like you mentioned.

And when Trump in his first term pulled out of the Paris climate agreement, Elon, whose whole thing with Tesla is like going green, or theoretically, that's his whole thing.

Elon quits the business council because he's like, this is bad for the environment.

Later on in January 2022, Trump describes Elon as a genius, but then later in that year, he pivots.

And this is while Elon is basically threatening to buy Twitter.

Trump is essentially calling his bluff.

He calls him a bullshit artist.

He calls him like a fake Republican.

And this was like kind of the height of their feud was mid-2022.

Elon replied, it's time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset.

They were fighting.

The girls were fighting.

And like, I wish they had continued to fight.

Me too.

I mean,

do you remember that?

Oh, yeah, no, yeah, get to that.

I was just about to, I was like, remember this?

His necklace.

You saw it come up on my laptop screen.

Okay, this is.

I hate that Donald Trump wrote this.

I know.

Because this is one of the, this is one of the posts of all time.

Yeah.

Donald Trump writes, amidst Amidst this feud, he posed on Truth Social a picture of him and Elon Musk in the Oval Office from Trump's first term.

And he wrote, this is like an Azealia Banks level round.

It's amazing.

It's amazing.

There's an alternate reality where he's just like the best shit poster.

He's just queening out in Queens or maybe in Manhattan.

No politics.

And we just get posts like this from him every day.

Oh, I know.

Okay, I'm leaving the listener hanging.

Let's read the, let's read.

It's not a tweet, it's a truth social post.

When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me to help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere, without which subsidies he'd be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and a Republican, I could have said, quote, drop to your knees and beg, and he would have done it.

And then posting a picture

a picture of the two.

Oh, my God.

It's so good.

It's so good.

And everything he wrote is true.

Yeah.

Without subsidies from the government, like Elon's businesses would not be what they are.

Yeah.

And that's also, I mean, that's also the recipe for success for so many of the tech oligarchs we have now.

I mean, they rely on

lifelines from the government, whether it's subsidies outright, whether it's protection from competitors, whether it's a leg up in in other markets, but Ilamas especially, like every single major venture has given him a lifeline that he then grows into success and then borrows against to get more money.

All of his many subsidized projects, whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere.

That's so, it's, it's, it's crisp.

It really is.

Oh.

Oh my god.

It's, it's really.

He should have let Azalea Banks post that.

Right.

No,

the note that I had next to this on my outline was, amazing post I wish anyone else had written.

Yeah, I mean, Musk is, in line with what you've been saying, like a grifter and a bullshit artist of the highest degree, right?

He has been able to bolster his way into public prominence as a genius, despite most of the things him promising and insisting on being revealed to be false and also turning out to run some of the most racist workplaces on earth, which is not a surprise given background in apartheid South Africa.

Fork found in kitchen.

Right.

Moving right along, November 22nd, 2023, Elon buys Twitter.

Well, is that right?

November 2020.

Oh, no, no, no.

Sorry, not November 22nd, November 2022.

I was like, why do I have the day that Elon bought Twitter?

That's kind of weird.

November 2022, Elon buys Twitter and Elon submits a poll to the general public of Twitter and asks if they want Trump to be reinstated on the platform, which he had been banned from by Jack, previous owner of Twitter, post-January 6th.

And the public votes yes.

And as you might recall, if you were on Twitter at the time, a ton of very, very far-right-wing, kind of Nazi-esque people who had been previously banned were let back on Twitter.

And if you were on Twitter at the time, like this was felt.

It's like these kind of prolific, really far right wing, Nazi, racist, homophobic, transphobic voices were suddenly back in your timelines.

We're going to return to that, but bottom line is he lets Trump back on the platform.

And as we talked about in the Elon episode, Elon from 2022 till now has kind of been really radicalized in his culture warrior-ness

and has become like an avowed transphobe, anti-immigrant, oftentimes anti-Semitic.

So it came as less of a shock come time for the the election that Elon really did ally himself with Donald Trump.

Immediately following Trump's assassination attempt, number one, Elon donated $45 million

to a pro-Trump super PAC, which is just so funny.

I mean, it's not like he did end up purchasing this election.

But just the idea that it's like, I felt really sorry for someone and I felt like they were wronged.

So I'm going to give them $45 million.

You know what?

I'm going to give them the presidency.

I think

that'll let them know.

And ultimately, Elon spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on this election, which is why you'll hear people say he bought the election.

Yeah, I would say so.

I mean, in this country, elections are bought.

You know, there's

multi-billion dollar spends when you throw in both sides, right?

There are a lot of ways.

to talk about it and lie to ourselves about it.

But at the end of the day, elections are being bought, right?

It's corporations and donors spending in some, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars to get their candidate across the finishing line.

And then a whole secondary grifting operation where a bunch of consultants and politicos, you know, fleece the campaigns for all this money.

No other way to describe it than just buying it.

Pretty dismal.

Yeah.

Pretty dismal.

Freest country in the world, you know?

Greatest fucking country in the world.

And so that's my little bit about Elon Musk that I had here.

He feels like an evil person I would run into like a warehouse party in Bushwick, you know?

He's just like,

you know, just like someone who does way too much fucking ketamine

and has way too much fucking money and doesn't really know what to do with it.

But anything they focus their vision on, they destroy.

They make worse and they ruin, which is, you know, we have to deal with him now.

Richest man on earth.

Anything he focuses on, he's going to make his own, which is, you know, going to be the lesson of the next four years, I guess.

Yeah.

No No shade on too much ketamine.

Like we live in we live in New York, but the thing is, you can't have that much money and do too much ketamine.

Yeah, you can't be evil, rich, and do too much ketamine.

You can only do two of the three.

Exactly.

So the other person I had in here was Shao Chu, who is the, he's Singaporean.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chief executive of TikTok.

And this is something that's obviously really in the news right now with the TikTok ban.

But what can you tell us us about Shaoqu and Donald Trump?

Because he too was at the inauguration.

Right.

I think it's, you know, important to also step back and see, you know, TikTok, of course, Trump tried to ban in 2020, right?

Failed, but still seemed like he was interested in doing so until there was a meeting with Jeff Yass, who's this billionaire investor, mega donor for the Republicans in March 2024, who invested in Byte Dance, which is the parent company of TikTok.

No conflict of interest.

Yeah, none.

None whatsoever.

This is like the decisive factor that gets Trump to abandon the desire to ban TikTok.

Was Jeff Yass.

Yeah.

I have heard of Jeff Yass because I've consumed some media about this whole debacle that we're in.

And every time, I just imagine his last name being spelled Y-A-S-S-S.

Like Jeff Yass.

You know, it's almost there.

And I haven't looked it up because I don't want to learn that that's not how it's spelled.

It's really almost there.

But who is Jeff Yes and what's his significance in all of this?

He's just an investor who made it who he invested in the parent company and the technology that allowed TikTok to really ascend to commanding heights early on.

And it would have been a loss for him if it was allowed to be banned.

So he stepped in, intervened, and was able to save it.

And I think also there are a few other factors at play here, right?

The chief executive himself, he's tried to do a media tour to try to convince Congress to not unleash the ban.

But the grifting, I think, more so comes in

two elements, which is that I don't think Americans actually really understand what TikTok is.

And the TikTok kind of exploits that.

You know, I think there's this really great, the great series of pieces on TikTok in Garbage Day, which is this newsletter.

And one of them was talking about how TikTok is not a social media app per se the way that ours are, where they're focused on advertiser revenue and gleaning as much insight for you for that.

It's an e-commerce platform, and its competitors are not meta and

meta or Facebook.

Fuck, you know, they got to me.

Yeah, they got you, girl.

Facebook.

You know, Twitter, Google, they're more so Temu and Sheen and other apps that are trying to get people to spend as much money as possible and learn as much about them.

But because we don't really have infrastructure for these uh shopping apps the way that they do in china we don't read it as such but that algorithm is very powerful in recommendation for social media and tick tock has been able to exploit the ignorance that americans have about this as well as you know lawmakers their ignorance about this has led them to insist okay well you know we should divest we should we should force a sale and tick tock has been able to pretend or might be able to pretend that it's going to entertain a sale, but there's no reason to do a sale, right?

You know, in Garbage Theory, they were talking about how, one, America is not even one of the largest markets for TikTok, right?

There are multiple markets that are larger than it, and it wouldn't even be the largest one that they got banned from.

They got banned from India, 200 million users.

We have about the same size as Brazil, which is 100 million.

The market would, it would be a large, you know, it's a lot of users to lose, but it would not make or break.

the platform.

But, you know, that's enough for them to not want to sell, but they can entertain delusions of, hey, we'll do a joint venture, or maybe we'll look for a buyer, you know,

as part of their effort to stay open, cultivate closer ties with Trump, and then close the door on a sale.

Are you saying that you think it ultimately won't survive here?

I think ultimately

there's no reason for them to do a sale.

And what they're going to do, I would presume, is pretend that they would do a sale.

What's the reason in cozying up to Trump?

So if you just cozy up to Trump, you know,

you can buy time and you can pretend that you are going to do a sale or that you'll entertain a 50% joint owned venture, which is one of the things Trump floated.

But as you're growing closer to Trump, as you're cultivating more ties, whispering more in his ear, having your investors pressure him more in the back end,

you can get to the point, presumably, where he just chooses not to enforce the ban.

And do you think that's the ultimate goal of Shao Chu in the situation?

Yeah, I mean, I would say that's a good outcome for them.

I mean, even if it's like, if you just try to think about who they'd sell to, I mean, why would they sell to any of the companies that'd be able to take it off their hands?

If you're TikTok, if you're ByteDance, there's no reason why you would let an American firm buy off any segment of your business.

So, what they can then go into other markets and compete with you?

It would be a night missionary with them, especially when if you're beating them in the United States, which is their own domain, you know, you don't want to deal with the competition elsewhere.

And so, I think, like,

there's not really much of a reason to sell.

It'd be interesting to think about who they might sell to, but they have all the cards here, I think.

They should sell it to, um,

I don't know, who's someone someone that Azalea Banks.

Yeah, just

keeping her in the mix constantly.

Let's give it to Azealia Banks.

Maybe Grimes can come in as CTO.

I would support that.

So what I've tried to paint here is sort of a pattern of behavior from these CEOs who all want something.

They have all, you know, in the case of Shao Chu, Trump was extremely antagonistic towards him for years.

The same goes for Mark Zuckerberg.

The same goes for Elon Musk.

And they all find a way to sit down in the same room together and celebrate one another

because what?

Money and power?

Yeah, I think so.

I think it comes down to that.

I mean, I think they all stand to make a lot of money.

One, they stand to make a lot of money.

Two, they stand to be able to position themselves such that they can dominate the minds and hearts of generations that are reliant on these platforms.

Right.

And so there's a lot of interest in like figuring out something that works, that makes everybody a little bit more richer, enables them to have a little bit more political power without eating each other's lunch, which, you know, they're able to do.

I think they might be able to do and pull off.

I mean, even these other people, which we're not going to get into detail with all of them, but like Jeff Bezos and Trump have a history of antagonizing each other.

Bill Gates obviously was like never sort of aligned with with Trump's worldview.

And then although he wasn't at the inauguration, they did have apparently a three-hour dinner together shortly before the inauguration, which like I could say is disappointing.

But like, I think if you always expect billionaires to do the worst thing, no matter how good you think they are, then you won't be disappointed.

Yeah.

And I think also one thing that's important to think about too is we just had an administration that, you know, regardless of whether someone may think antitrust is the way to reign in these tech companies, we just had an administration that was seriously entertaining the idea that the major tech companies can be broken up banned spun off regulated in a real way and that's what they're afraid of yeah and that's what they're afraid of and you know that's a threat that Republican administrations didn't have in their toolkit before until Trump who started some of the antitrust trials that Facebook and Google are now facing so you know one thing I think that is always going to be present is trying to figure out how to flood the zone with enough love so that these threats go back in the box and no one ever thinks about them again.

That's why I'm going to the administration so they don't break up my podcast.

Right.

They're threatening to regulate a bit fruity.

We've mentioned Sam Altman.

He was another one at the inauguration.

He is the open AI guy, the ChatGPT guy.

He's gay.

He donated millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, but still found his way to donating a million dollars to the Trump inaugural fund.

I texted you before you came over that I had a funny story about Sam Altman.

And I would like to inject that here before we move on with our conversation.

I was

a couple of years ago in San Francisco and I attended a house party at Sam Altman's house.

And I would like to say right up front, I did not know who he was.

I did not know whose house I was at.

But a friend and I were just invited to a house party one night.

It was the weekend.

And, you know, it was just like a bunch of gay guys.

Was it fun?

No, no, no, no.

And this is the thing.

So Sam wasn't there.

The house was the most memorable part for me.

You can Google Sam Altman's house.

It's like, you know, like a $40 million like compound in San Francisco.

It really was beautiful.

Like sometimes these huge houses are very ugly, but it was beautiful.

It was so strange.

It was so strange.

He wasn't there.

It was like someone he knew at the time was throwing this party in his house with his permission while he was away.

And I just, I remember it was like a lot of like younger, you know, adult, but like, you know, gay men in their 20s sort of running around.

And it just felt,

how much do I want to divulge here?

It just felt like everyone was so, you know, these were all San Francisco people.

A lot of them worked in tech, were in like these junior roles at tech companies.

And it felt like everyone there was so enamored with the fact that they were at Sam Altman's house.

And I remember there was one person who I was talking to at one point.

And, you know, in fairness, everyone was like drunk and music was playing and whatnot.

But he was like taking me around and telling me how like the, he knew the price of different pieces of furniture.

And he was like, this table is $80,000.

Oh, no, I don't like that.

And And I was like,

what am I doing?

What am I doing here?

Yeah.

But then I went home and I read the Wikipedia page for Y Combinator, and I still don't know what it is.

But,

you know,

that's my story about the world.

We're going to have a world where no one knows what it is.

And that's what I want.

Yeah.

That, yeah, no, I am.

We all have to, at one point in our lives, go to a party where someone's like, and this costs that and this costs that.

And you kind of reflect, like, what the, how did I get here?

It was kind of radicalizing for me because I was like, I don't care about this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, but they clearly do.

Right.

But, and I was like, I need to figure out what's important for me

because it's easy in a country where you are told constantly that the most important thing is money to make that your most important thing.

I'm not trying to shit on anyone.

Right.

But it's like you meet people who have definitively prioritized like luxury as the most important thing in their life and their and the aspiration to that as their primary goal in every situation.

And you realize like how kind of sad and empty that is.

Yeah.

And that's how I felt at Sam Altman's house party.

Quick break from the show to give a shout out to Incogni for making this episode possible.

Have you ever wondered why you get so many emails for shit you never signed up for, never bought?

Maybe you don't even know what it is?

That's because of a little thing called data brokers.

Data brokers are these devious little operations that scrape the internet for your personal data.

Information like your political leanings, where you live, your employment history, your interests.

And they sell that information.

Oftentimes to companies who want to sell you stuff or just annoy the shit out of you via email.

Incogni is a wonderful little service that will contact hundreds of different different data brokers on your behalf and demand that your data is removed from their inventories, which is something that you legally have the right to do, but that if you tried to do all by yourself would become a full-time job.

Incogni provides you with a whole interface, including a dashboard where you get kept up to date on their progress with taking your information down.

from all the different data brokers.

And Incogni continually stays in contact with data brokers to make sure that your public profile online remains as diminished as possible.

If you would like to try Incogni, listeners of a bit fruity can head to incogni.com slash fruity for a discount on an annual plan.

That's incogni.com/slash fruity.

Thanks so much to Incogni.

And now let's get back to the show.

So I want to pivot a little bit into what it means for all of these communication platform CEOs to be pivoting right.

I think a lot of people hear about this stuff and they're like, oh yeah, well, Mark Zuckerberg's a piece of shit.

True.

But also they don't understand or necessarily think about the impact that this has on their experience as a user of social media.

I think a lot of people are lulled into a sense of thinking that the platforms that we use are neutral and they're not.

And I think that an experience personally that I and millions of other people had where you're really woken up to the fact that these platforms are not neutral is that the experience of being on Twitter before and after Elon Musk's takeover

is extreme and noticeable.

And it's just a result of a series of policy changes where before you could go on Twitter without like constantly seeing like the N-word

and have all of this content by white supremacists be at the top of every thread.

And now that's not the case.

Now you go on Twitter and it's like going on 4chan.

And I was so distraught by the Mark Zuckerberg of it all when those policy changes came out.

Because again, I think people see, like, oh, Mark Zuckerberg is dining with Donald Trump.

Like, yeah, what a piece of shit.

But I'm like, no, the policy implementations on these platforms that we all rely on to communicate with each other, those experiences of those platforms can change.

Instagram can also become a Nazi playground.

If we think about what happened with Twitter, right?

It's not just that there were also, like you said, there were policy changes, but there's also like intentional amplification.

And I think we can expect, I mean, that has already been documented with Facebook and Instagram, right?

I think it was Kevin Roos who documented how like maybe three or four years ago, the most consistently amplified, visited, followed pages, engaged with pages were just like, you know, largely right-wing noise.

And Facebook has refused to really give any real insight into why it is.

I mean, it's very obvious why.

It's like, you know, amplification of this feeds into the political patterns that we were talking about before.

And I think now that as they're trying to orient more and be more useful to Donald Trump and to the right wing, we're going to see this sort of amplification that will also have a knockdown effect of radicalizing people and pushing them even further.

And that's been documented, you know?

Like, I think about how my younger brothers, how much time I had to spend in their early years when they were learning how to use the internet, constantly intervening and deprogramming, deprogramming them.

Because even if they weren't watching these sorts of videos, they'd be bombarded with videos from red pill minisphere spaces.

Totally.

And it's like, you know, leave them alone with them, with these devices and with these sites for a week or two or a month or two and come back and they are spouting some of the nonsense in these videos.

You know, they're children.

Why are they repeating right-wing talking points that this should not even be in their radar?

And it's because of how aggressively it is pushed, right?

And I think that in the coming years, you know, as we see amplification, relaxation, my concern is, you know, this is also going to feed into a pretty successful attempt to normalize and kind of beautify nasty, far-right-wing and reactionary viewpoints about how our society should be run.

That we should be more bigoted, we should be more violent, we should be more discriminatory.

That in of itself has so much momentum.

And then we also have to deal with all the other ideologues who have like aspirations for something more fascist or something more outrightly destructive and violent.

And again, it's just like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg announced these policy changes.

He's talking about how, like, you know, these apps that he runs were far too censored before and censorship had run amok.

And it was like, I have been in meetings with meta executives, with other creators belonging to, you know, various marginalized identity groups.

And I have begged these people to for example remove libs of tick tock yeah right

if tick tock i saw someone say if tiktok doesn't exist anymore it's going to become like libs of zhao hong shu

libs of red node

but but like i had to beg these people and be like look at this bomb threat look at this bomb threat i'll read you all the bomb threats i will read you the messages that their followers have sent me after i've been posted or whatever and they wouldn't do anything Yeah, they don't care.

They don't care.

And they didn't care before these two.

It's just like the idea that we were like heavily censored.

You couldn't even say anything before free speech.

It's just not true.

It's just not true.

And anyone who has any sort of following and is marginalized in any sort of way could have told you that.

Yeah.

Like we, again, like we had these meetings and like queer people, black people, like we would just go around the circle.

And basically, I had one meeting in person at the, it was then at the time, it was Facebook office.

It was like five years ago, where we were all like a room full of 20 creators, and Adam Missouri was sitting there and we were all just like basically reciting the worst things that have been said to us on their platform and where no reports ever went anywhere with the company.

They just kind of nodded and nothing came of those meetings.

And they'd be like, well, you know, sorry, but

feel free to come to like the Meta Pride event or whatever the fuck.

You know, it's like, okay.

You know, the platforms at best don't care because they're prioritizing profit and at worst believe that it doesn't really matter what kind of political order they're meshed in.

And that actually one that leans to the right or is even far right is better for them because it will prioritize their importance and profit making.

And now, and AOC just, you know, posted a great rant about this to her Instagram stories, but she was basically like, all of the major social apps are now in bed with the right.

Now, I want you all to put all the pieces together because what this effectively means is that every social media platform, mass social media platform in the United States has been taken over by the right wing with the exception of Blue Sky, but Blue Sky is still very small.

When I say put the pieces together, Elon Musk took over Twitter and there's open reporting.

It's pretty obvious as well that they have manipulated the algorithms.

They've artificially manipulated the algorithms to boost right wing content on X and to amplify harassment.

Then you have Meta.

So you have Mark Zuckerberg saying that they're basically also bending the knee to Trump with their changes to fact-checking, regardless of how effective that was in the first place.

It's an open signal.

And now TikTok

is

now saying we are agreeing, we will use

our push notification system for all 170 million American users to promote Donald Trump.

Just understand that government announcements like this with companies, they never name politicians.

They will usually name law or policy.

TikTok is making an explicit agreement to do this.

And if I were a betting person, they probably are making a deal with Donald Trump to not just use these push notifications.

They probably would consider algorithmic changes, which is ironic because the time when people voted for the TikTok ban, there was a lot, it was in the environment was because there was a lot of pro-Palestinian content.

And that argument was being used as being somehow anti-American.

Twitter, obviously, like Elon loves his little Nazi playground.

You have Facebook and Instagram, which clearly now at risk of becoming Nazi playgrounds.

You have TikTok.

And my hot take with TikTok is that if it survives in the U.S., somehow, we don't know right what that could look like yet.

I don't think it'll be the same TikTok that's existed.

I don't think, because TikTok, by and large, is where a lot of like young, marginalized, progressive voices have found a lot of success since 2020, right?

You have black trans creators on there accruing millions of followers talking about, you know, like things like socialism or Palestine.

When TikTok was having this whole like flippy floppy band situation where it went dark for 12 hours and then it came back, the pop-ups that they gave both were like, we applaud the efforts of President Donald Trump.

We all saw those pop-ups.

Donald Trump was not in office yet.

So they were calling him President Trump and they were congratulating him on his efforts to save TikTok, but that was two days and one day before he was even inaugurated.

So he was a private citizen.

He had no federal lawmaking power when what a lot of people are calling a stunt was happening, which means that they were working together privately.

And so my thing is like, if TikTok does make it into the Trump era, which we still don't know, one of the things that Trump and his allies were so outspokenly opposed to was this idea that TikTok can be used as a propaganda tool by the CCP.

In what world would they not just make it a propaganda tool for themselves?

Yeah.

In the way that Elon has with Twitter.

No, there's no reason why they shouldn't.

And I think that this is an avenue of thought that has been discouraged, partly because some of the commentary wants to focus on and drum up the idea that, you know, hey, look, Chinese-owned app, we're in a Cold War with China.

They are going to use this to destabilize the United States or to undermine the United States or introduce irritants to the United States.

But the reality is, like, if the terms of engagement for it to continue access and dominance of the U.S.

market are maybe it lends itself to boosting and amplifying right-wing content and right-wing politics in this country, that's something that it would almost certainly do, right?

That's not a tall ask, and that's something that all the other tech firms are going to line up to do to try to curry favor with Donald Trump, insulate themselves from regulatory pressure, and to gain more power as they go about pursuing new modes of profit generation.

My goal with this episode was to sort of start very specific with some of these men and their relationships with Donald Trump and then like get broader and broader into like, what is the philosophy of these people's worldview?

What do they want?

What is this new sort of like oligarchy of like people who run apps and also now are government?

One thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tech CEOs, which who have become unbelievably wealthy, is that they're kind of, they're not just like inventors or heads of companies, but they really position themselves as like philosophers.

When you read what people, you know, like Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman or Peter Thiel, like when you, they're not just talking about their product when you read, you know, their tweets or their interviews.

They're talking about about like the meaning of life.

Why?

Why?

Why?

Like, what is the worldview of these people and why do they all speak like gods?

Part of it is the PR side of when you are trying to convince people to let you upend a core part of their life, when you're trying to convince people to commit a lot more resources towards you, to integrate you into their daily lives, to onboard this product that you've been pushing out, and to organize things around you.

You do have to talk about all these other things to kind of weave together some bullshit narrative, you know?

You have to, you know, as Zuck has done, you know, talk about community and the future and saving the planet and values.

And you have to come up with some story that's going to be believable to rationalize it to people who might otherwise be opposed to it.

And sometimes that makes a difference in adoption.

But also a good chunk of it is because these people have so much money and so much wealth and so much influence that they get a big head about their ideas and believe that these,

in one way or another, is how the world should or must work, right?

And also, because some of them are influenced by people who actually do think of themselves as influence, as philosophers, as an aspect of the people, as influencers, yeah, as influencers.

Some of them really are, at the end of the day, influenced by Bryce Hall.

And they're, you know, they're doing get ready with me in the morning.

I love to think about like the influence of Jacqueline Hill on Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah.

Get ready with me as

I do my perm in the morning and put on the gold chain.

No, but what you're saying rings so true, though, because I think we can all, right?

Like most people are aware.

Maybe it's a celebrity, maybe it's someone that they knew in real life who becomes really rich.

where you stop thinking about the things that affect normal people, like the price of groceries or like, I don't know, the weather or interests that normal people have and like whatever, music or art.

And they start taking up these like really big, like, I don't know, I feel like that's when people start stop taking vaccines.

Yeah.

Sometimes

I don't need to take a vaccine.

You know, I got all this money.

I'll probably have some alternative treatment to help me out with it.

Having all this money, the scale, this reach, really does something to people's brains.

And especially in the Silicon Valley, I mean, a lot of these guys are reading the most racist people you've ever heard who believe that we're at the precipice of a moment where we can save human civilization by, you know, getting rid of democracy, you know, or getting rid of the right to vote or getting rid of, you know, all these sorts of reforms that liberals have dragged us towards.

And they get in the way of good old capitalism.

And so I think also we're starting to see an encroaching influence.

I mean, but this is also a key part of Silicon Valley over the past few centuries.

These are people who have always thought that they know what's best for the future of the society.

And it's also a function of like how things have been decaying and collapsing.

There's this writer really like John Gans who wrote about how one way to think about the United States is as this like Vichy regime, right?

This Nazi collaborator state where it's like, yeah, it's a little, it's a little fascist, but there's also a group of people who like to think of themselves as modernizers, as technocratic reformers.

These oligarchs, I think, to a great extent are like, you know, hey, look, there are some reactionaries around.

Maybe I'm a reactionary.

But the ideas that we have about how the state should be run, about how resources should be allocated, about the types of products we should prioritize, these are not just because we want to make money.

Of course we do, but because we have a vision about what life should look like.

And you guys don't understand it.

You're getting in the way of it in one way or another.

I would say not every single tech executive has some like political theory,

but the ones who do are the most dangerous because these theories are usually ones that are like everyone is in the way of the future, whether it's giving birth to some AI god, whether it's prioritizing innovation, whether it's destroying China's capacity to do technological innovation.

These are the people who are the most motivated to bring about the worst possible world.

It really feels like we let the lab rat who designed a hot or not website to rank his female students based on attractiveness.

I don't know, it feels like it got out of the meth lab.

Yeah, I mean, it did.

Yeah, it really did.

And it ran out.

It got, you know, and just imagine, like, I don't even know what is it, what would be an extension to that?

Like, Stuart Little, you know, become

imagine if just Stuart Little.

Leave Stuart alone.

He became

obsessed with Julius Caesar and billions of dollars.

Stuart Little in 2024 made an app.

Right.

And now Stuart Little is in government.

Yeah.

I mean, just, you know,

Stuart Little, Clifford the Big Red Dog, SpongeBob SquarePants, just like

all of these.

Imagine their brains rotted

on Facebook, given billions of dollars, some drugs to help them out.

And you get what we have today.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I feel like this is all sort of epitomized in the Apocalypse Bunkers, which a lot of people don't know about.

I did not know about the Apocalypse Bunkers

until...

So could you explain the apocalypse bunkers you know i first learned about this i think this writer uh douglas ruskoff he did this article and in a book about it where he was invited to some talk where they were like hey look you know let's say you have a bunker how do you prevent the workers in the bunker in an apocalypse from taking control of the bunker and the food and the weapons and have and revolting against you.

Here's one way.

You put collars around them that, you know, are prevent them from acting up or else they might die, or you enforce some biometric RFID system so that only certain people related to you or certain people in the system already can get into certain areas, right?

So, just like that was the intro to the bunker where it's people imagining, okay, I'm gonna be in a future where a lot of people have guns around me to protect me and I'll have a lot of resources, a lot of food, a lot of stuff to write out, the end days.

How do I prevent them from turning against me?

I started this podcast to talk about gay culture.

What are we talking about?

Yeah, yeah, no, I know.

Isn't it a wonderful world?

But so a lot of these billionaires have over the last 10 years been building doomsday bunkers overseas.

I mean, Altman has a bunch of land in California, and

he brags about having like a plane, land, biotics, and weapons.

You know, not a good thing to hear if the guy trying to say I'm pushing the most important invention in human history, I also have a bunker and and an escape plan in case it goes wrong.

Well, these,

there's a long history, I think, in societies, especially societies that are decaying, of people trying to escape.

And I think this is like a symptom of that.

People realizing they've squeezed everything they can out of it and it might be too much.

Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg has invested over $100 million into like this compound in Hawaii.

Peter Thiel has like a 500-acre thing going on in New Zealand where he also got citizenship.

A lot of them are building these like doomsday apocalypse bunkers.

And I want to be a little earnest for a second.

And I, I, I got emotional.

I hate to admit it.

Credibility points docked.

Gay guy got emotional.

But I was in LA during the wildfires and I was like watching smoke roll in past my window.

And I was in Hollywood.

So one night there was a fire four blocks from the the house that I was staying in.

And there's been so much debate about, you know, the immediate cause of the wildfires.

And was it an arsonist?

And was it, but the bottom line is the conditions, the environmental conditions in California, the dryness, made it possible for the fires to get as big as they did, as quickly as they did.

And while I was sitting there watching the smoke roll in and watching the air become unbreathable, I was reading about Peter Peter Thiel's apocalypse bunker in New Zealand.

And I got so angry because

these

people,

these people who are, you know, building AI data centers that are just sucking up water from communities, you know,

these people who are just building their empires with reckless abandon.

Oh, and a million people are going to jump into the comments and be like, well, AI is not the only thing that's bad for the planet.

I know.

I know.

But the private jets, the everything, I mean, the environmental impact of billionaires is not a new revelation.

And they know it.

And they're building these sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars price-tagged apocalypse bunkers

to leave the world that they're leaving us rotting in that they caused the rot.

I know that this has not been the most uplifting episode of A Bit Fruity.

If you want something lighter, if you want something lighter, we did an episode about Hawk Tua a few months ago.

You can listen to that one.

But like, when I said I wanted to start specific and then get out to like the bigger picture, like to me, that's the bigger picture.

This is a handful of men who are destroying the planet.

And while they're destroying the planet, they're destroying the ability for people belonging to all sorts of marginalized groups to live free and happy lives.

And they know it.

And they have an escape plan that we cannot afford.

I mean, I think you're absolutely, you are absolutely right.

I mean, the world is run by these arsonists, right?

These guys are the ones who are destroying the planet, like you said.

They're accelerating conditions of its collapse.

You know, people can quibble and yell and scream about AI data centers.

What do you think the environmental impact of having Microsoft do $70 billion deals with fossil fuel companies to maximize their production is going to be?

You know, it's going to be the continual degradation and collapse of our ecology.

What do you think the predictable consequences consequences of having these sprawling data centers, right, not only pop up in places, but successfully pop up in places and negotiate deals so that they can steal the energy, steal the water, steal as many resources as they can to run their thing?

You know, you may say it's not one-to-one, but it lends itself to building the conditions for the

faster decline.

of our ecological niche, right?

Because there's the success of this business model or success of these negotiation tactics where you come in, you get a prime piece of land,

you overbear on the power grid, you force the reallocation of resources to the data center, to the tech firms, take a good chunk of water that's in the area so that you can continue to run this thing.

And this proliferates over and over and over and over again.

For what?

So that they can offer services to other firms that are collapsing the ecology so that they can be powered by coal-fire or natural gas run plants.

You know, like this is all feeding into itself over and over and over again.

I think a lot of people freak out about it because they're personally implicated in it to a variety of degrees.

You know, like it's, it's, it's both the fact that artificial intelligence is being forced upon us as much as people are not pushing against it that contributes to it.

But it's also the fact that, again, the society is just run by arsonists who have no interest in preserving the environment.

if that gets in the way of them making money.

And that's why they have these apocalypse bunkers.

Yeah.

And, you know,

personally, I think those bunkers are not going to save them, you know.

When the time comes, if things get really bad, I don't think the bunkers are going to be, they're not, I don't think they'll be able to retreat.

At least most of them, I don't think, will be able to successfully retreat.

You know, is that the redeeming message here is that, like, if we all die, like Kelsey Ballerini,

if you go down, I'm going down too.

Right, yeah.

The redeeming message here is that we are all together in this.

We found bipartisan unity.

Yay!

On the Abby Pretty podcast.

To conclude, this has been dark because I think that we are just experiencing a dark reality right now.

And some people, after coming away from these conversations, they're like, well, I want to withdraw from any of social media that's controlled by this, by these men.

And I understand that impulse.

I am wary of like giving that as a directive to people for a few reasons.

One of which is that I'm still going to be on those apps.

And so I'd be a hypocrite if I told people to leave.

Two is that these platforms bring people joy and do connect people in ways that I think have, you know, net positive effects.

That's been my experience, not just because like my job revolves around being online, but because I've witnessed the way that it's connected people.

I mean, some of my earliest memories with social media were watching coming out videos on YouTube that made me feel like I wasn't alone in my community.

And also because in general, I'm wary of placing responsibility on individuals, on like normal everyday people, on like how to on fixing these huge structural issues.

And so part of this has just been to like, I hope give anyone who's listened to this a bigger picture of everything that's going on so that they have agency to make their own decisions.

But as someone who spends so much time in this and reading and writing about all these figures and their futures and our futures, which are so intertwined, what do you see as the way forward for the everyday person?

I mean, besides the fact that we're all going to die together.

Yeah, you you know, I've been thinking about this a lot, and it's kind of shifted, and my mind shifts on this a lot because, you know, really, of course, you want to say organize protest, but these companies, as they grow more powerful, they grow more insulated from traditional means of opposition.

So I don't know.

You know, if you work at one of these companies, get a bunch of your friends, leave your phone at home and walk into the woods and talk about things you can do at the company.

If you are someone who's, you know, doesn't work at one of these companies, maybe work at the company, figuring out a way that you can get in there and gum up the works.

Like, I feel like part of the thing that needs to happen, there's an emphasis on nonviolent resistance, of course, right?

And there needs to be a continuity of that.

But

part of the core plank of it in the civil rights movement was you would occupy a space to disrupt its ability to do commerce or for people to patronize it, right?

So that you could bring a little economic pain to business as usual.

There's not really an equivalent for that in the modern day, unless it's like, you know, maybe figuring out ways you can undermine the

block construction of some data center go to some or you know go to some workplace and gum up the works internally so that they're not able to do this or that product that advances the cause of perpetual AI integration into everything.

There has to be a way to figure out how to make it more expensive to do business as usual.

And property damage, economic disruption, boycott, like you have to figure out ways to expand these tactics because otherwise, you know, they have been pretty successful in taking control of the state, been pretty successful in seizing a great deal of public imagination pretty successful in insulating themselves from consequences think of it in those sorts of terms as they might have in the 60s where it's like if you're going up against something that is it's in everyone's interest except ours for things to continue as usual you know what are the vulnerable places where you can block business as usual, convince people to join you and move on from there.

But I don't know.

I mean, there's a lot of work that's being done to try to do this.

There are people in all these tech companies that are trying to organize and disrupt and occupy and walk out.

I think, you know, as these companies become more and more central to daily life, figuring out how to constantly escalate that and make the pain of it unbearable so that you can stop it is important because I don't have little faith that they're not going to be in control of the driving seat when it comes to policy for a long time.

We're looking at the beginning of a political order that's going to be dominated increasingly by tech and by the elements that align with tech, whether they're financial, whether they're energy.

The only language in which these guys really care about is the money and the dollars and the capital and the cost of investment.

So figuring out a way to raise the cost of investment, I think, is one of the only paths that's going to be available to us in the coming years.

And if you don't work at any of these companies, get a job at them.

Or maybe not.

I was just going to say there's always blue sky.

Oh, yeah.

Blue sky.

Posting is great.

It's a good release in Catharsis.

It's all I got.

Yeah.

Just keep on posting through it.

Yeah.

I don't know.

How do I end this in a lighthearted way in the a bit fruity fashion?

Hey, you know, the next four years, we're going to get new Trump quotes.

You know, we already got one in the inauguration when he was like, when he was giving a speech, he was like, you know, a lot of people.

A lot of our richest Americans, they lost their homes in the fires, and they're here right now.

And then he stopped and he looked around.

He's like, that's interesting.

Or more recently, Los Angeles, where we're watching fires still tragically burn.

They're raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now.

They don't have a home any longer.

That's interesting.

We're going to get, yeah, we'll get more of that.

Maybe we'll get a, I don't know, Hawk Tua just did a rug pull crypto scam.

I loved it.

She should be in the White House pretty soon.

So dark.

It's so dark.

Ed, thank you for being here today.

Thanks for having me.

I live in kind of an information ecosystem that's dark in its own way, but I feel like you really are up against a lot trying to do critical reporting against the powers that be in the tech world, and I really commend you for it.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

It's not fun.

And my contempt of how things are is what helps me stay,

you know, but it's important.

It's important.

It's important.

Where can people find you?

I got a newsletter, The Tech Bubble on Substack.

I got a podcast, This Machine Kills.

We talk about technology and the political economy of it.

I'm on Twitter, Big Black Jack and Ben.

I'm on Blue Sky with my name, Edward Donguesto Jr.

Thank you so much.

I know this was a long one.

Well, they're all long ones.

I appreciate you being here.

I know there is a lot to digest right now, and I just hope that you are doing whatever you need to do to take care of yourself.

And you don't need to read every single little thing.

You don't even need to listen to this podcast in one sitting.

I don't care.

You don't even need to listen to this podcast at all.

But I'm realizing I'm giving this advice at the end of a two-hour long recording, which means that you have.

In which case, I'm sorry.

Go take a nap.

I love you, and until next time, stay fruity.