Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny, infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 9 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 7 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 12 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 12 We've got the perfect guest for today's Facebook news, Charlie Warzell, He's staff writer at the Atlantic, author of the newsletter Galaxy Brain about technology, media, and big ideas.

Speaker 12 He's also the co-author of Out of Office, The Big Problem, and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. That's not on our to-do list today.

Speaker 12 We have too much to discuss to discuss my working from home thoughts, but maybe another day. How are you doing, Charlie?

Speaker 15 I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 12 You know, I initially had reached out because you had an awesome article about crypto. And I was like, I want to do a crypto episode with Charlie.
And, you know, the news gods had other ideas.

Speaker 12 We'll get to crypto at the end for people dying to hear our hot takes about, you know, Ethereum.

Speaker 12 But Mark Zuckerberg is out with some news this morning. And I just want to read exactly what the announcement is from Facebook so we can make sure to get it right here.

Speaker 12 He is replacing, not that that matters anymore, but he is replacing fact checkers with community notes in the model of Twitter. That's number one.

Speaker 12 Number two, simplifying content policies to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with the mainstream discourse.

Speaker 12 He's moving the trust and safety content teams from California. The California teams were too biased.
He's going to move them to Texas, which is a beacon of just

Speaker 12 right down the middle of the road, political ideology in Texas, no bias in Texas. So we're moving the moderators who have the worst jobs in the world, I think, the content moderators.

Speaker 12 Those people, there's the moderation slums are moving from California to Texas to weed out bias.

Speaker 12 We've also, I think, has it's going to get less attention, but I think potentially the most pernicious thing that is happening is they're bringing back more political content to the algorithm in the news feed.

Speaker 12 They're not deranking that anymore. Crazy shit people post is going to be back in your Facebook newsfeed if you are of the demographic that uses the Facebook news feed.
So those are the big updates.

Speaker 12 Joel Kaplan went on Fox to discuss. I have some audio from that I want to get to, but I want your big picture thoughts on the changes first.
Sure, I woke up to this like full candor like an hour ago.

Speaker 12 Yeah, same.

Speaker 15 My thoughts on this are basically: I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very, and I felt this way for a while, very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between, let's say, March 1st, 2020, and January 10th, 2021.

Speaker 15 Right? So, beginning the COVID pandemic right into,

Speaker 15 you know, post-January 6th. I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th.

Speaker 12 I'd go back. I think he's probably ashamed of what they did starting in 2016, trying to root out

Speaker 12 Cambridge Analytica stuff and all that. I don't think he cares about actually.

Speaker 15 I would agree with that. But I think, too,

Speaker 15 they were up against a lot of pressure there and they were always sort of trying to do the very least. Like they were being kind of dragged along by people.

Speaker 15 But Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my, my old boss, who was at the Times then, Ben Smith, about like COVID misinformation.

Speaker 15 And it was like the only first interview I'd really heard from Zuckerberg where he was basically like, no, it's good that we're like.

Speaker 12 censoring quote unquote, right?

Speaker 15 Like it's good that we're taking action against this. This is a very clear-cut situation in which there is actual harm, you know, connected to this type of content, these type of words.

Speaker 15 And I think, I bet you, if you had to like read that to him in front of him, he would just like cringe like full body, right?

Speaker 15 Because I think there's this, this real understanding in his mind, in the mind of a lot of the people who he's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and in the world of like UFC or jiu-jitsu or whatever, that there is this,

Speaker 15 you know, this huge overreach during the COVID and the, you know, the lead up to the 2020 election. And then, of course, the big one, right? After January 6th,

Speaker 15 getting rid of Trump. All of that stuff.

Speaker 15 I mean, the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7th, four years later, is like, it's a big middle finger, I feel like, to this idea of like the hall monitors.

Speaker 15 Like, you have lost is, I think, what he's trying to communicate here.

Speaker 12 Yeah, so I think that there are two elements to this. One is the forward-looking Trump suck-up part, and one is the regrets looking back part.

Speaker 12 We're going to get to the Trump suck-up part, but let's continue down the looking back part first.

Speaker 12 Bill Crystal in our internal Slack wrote this. I told him I was going to steal it from him, but I'll credit it.
He was like, here's the thing:

Speaker 12 the fact-checking ended up being mostly pointless.

Speaker 12 There's not a lot of evidence of the fact-checking part work. I think D-ranking things from feed mattered, but like the fact-checking ended up not being that useful.

Speaker 12 I'm open to the fact that there's counter-research of this. Maybe you've seen.

Speaker 12 But Bill writes, Zuck now denouncing Facebook's fact-checking when he implemented it, was in charge of it, arranged it, supervised it, paid for it for years, is like a Stalinist show trial type of self-denunciation for the new leader.

Speaker 12 And I think it is part putting on the hair shirt for Trump, but I do think he also has some of his own regrets about it.

Speaker 12 But he hasn't, he hasn't, you know, done the mature thing of like accepting responsibility for the decisions he made as one of the richest people in the world.

Speaker 12 And in this announcement, it's like the legacy media and these annoying hall monitors forced me to do do this.

Speaker 12 And now it's like, now this is my big middle finger back at them. But as you point out, that's not really true.
He could have done whatever he wanted, really.

Speaker 12 It's not like the Biden regulators were coming for him. And he believed a lot of this stuff based on that interview with Ben Smith.
But that he hasn't kind of accepted responsibility for that.

Speaker 12 It doesn't feel like he's blaming this on you, Charlie. It's your fault that he has had to do this.

Speaker 15 Well, yes. And you know what? I'll take the blame.
I agree with that completely.

Speaker 15 I've been covering this company for, you know, I don't know, more than a decade now.

Speaker 15 And there's this classic thing that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of rolls out something new and basically says, like he speaks as if he has amnesia from the past or as if like, you know, a totally new paradigm has formed, right?

Speaker 15 It's like, we're getting into groups. We're getting into community building.
We like everyone just wants to gather with people around shared interests. And then like QAnon happens.
And he's like,

Speaker 15 I don't know what people were doing, you know, trying to gather in these groups. We're just forcing people into these groups.
So what we really want to do is this.

Speaker 15 Like, they were all about news and prioritizing the news feed.

Speaker 15 I mean, when I worked at BuzzFeed in 2013, one day, literally just one day in October, we had 300 times the amount of referral traffic that we normally had to the entire site.

Speaker 15 And it was because someone, Facebook turned a dial.

Speaker 15 And there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get, you know, in bed, partner with these news organizations, be a place where news, you know, reading, where all this happened.

Speaker 12 Then they realized that like, oh, that's quaint when they cared about reading.

Speaker 15 Then they realized, oh, like

Speaker 15 your grandma is getting radicalized. It's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app to be inundated with political news 24-7.
And they were like,

Speaker 15 this political news, it's bad. It's like, you did this.
You did this. You control the website.
You are making the editorial decisions.

Speaker 15 And yet they sort of act like it's these like gravitational forces that are like pushing and pulling us into these behaviors.

Speaker 15 Facebook is the one dictating what we see, what we do, how we act on the platform.

Speaker 12 JVL wrote about this in the triad today. It's like, be an alpha.
Like, why are you such a surrender monkey?

Speaker 12 Like, why, like, you're one of the richest guys in the world, and like, you do the jiu-jitsu and the MMA. Like, why are you acting like you are unable to resist the critiques of like the Atlantic?

Speaker 12 you know, and you are forced into making these policy changes because, you know, there were a handful of tech reporters that were mean to you.

Speaker 12 You know, like, why are you acting like you were forced into these changes by the Biden administration, which wasn't really like that aggressive on these matters at all? Like the whole thing is very,

Speaker 12 it's very beta. It's like, I'm not, I'm not really in control here.

Speaker 12 And now, now it's just like, now I think the best thing to do is just become the clock maker God and let a thousand flowers bloom in free speech. And that will solve all the problems.

Speaker 12 And that's going to create new problems. And he'll have a new announcement in four years that pretends like this was not his fault either.
This was Donald Trump's fault, probably.

Speaker 15 Well, and I think we also have to like talk about the Elon Musk of it all, right? I mean, he is essentially adopting the Twitter practice, like community notes, right?

Speaker 15 Which, which, I mean, like, hand up, community notes is a, is an interesting feature. Like, of the, the Muskian, you know, features, like, it is the one that sort sort of makes some sense.

Speaker 12 That's the first thing he's done.

Speaker 15 Yeah. And, and, and it is like a community notes fact checks all of Elon Musk's bullshit all the time, right? Like, it, it does a reasonably good job.

Speaker 12 Every once in a while, it seems like he takes those down. Yes, it does.
It does.

Speaker 12 Freeze-free jobs has its limits.

Speaker 15 It sure does

Speaker 15 on X.com. But, I mean, going to that, and then also

Speaker 15 I get this sense, and I, you know, the reporter in me, like, I can't really prove it, but I think that these guys, like, when I, when I saw all the announcements, you know, the glib part of me is like,

Speaker 15 Zuckerberg just wants people to be able to say the word retarded, you know, which like everyone uses on X now. And it's like, oh, we're, you know, free speech is back.

Speaker 15 We can say things, you know, that we used to say in the 90s that we would have gotten canceled for. I feel like those are the waters that, you know, these guys are swimming in all the time, right?

Speaker 15 They're just having this like very weird edgelordian discourse all the time and i think like he sees that on a place like x and sees that there is kind of like a charge to it right that there's all these people who are really excited about being able to speak a certain way and triggering a certain type of lib and you know whatever and i think it's like he's feeling left out by this sort of i would never describe elon musk as cool but there's like a in that world a sort of you know like renegade nature to the way that he's running his platform.

Speaker 15 And I think that Zuckerberg is frankly just like, he wants that.

Speaker 12 It all goes back to being stuffed in the locker and to making a page about which girls are the hottest at Harvard. You know, it just, it really, it's true about Elon 2 and all it's for all these guys.

Speaker 12 All these guys were super nerds and

Speaker 12 want to feel cool. And it's like, great, now we can call gays fairies again or the other F word.
And the AI bot won't put up a little content note. One more thing about these content notes.

Speaker 12 It's just worth bringing up because

Speaker 12 I sometimes am like, you have to be so deep online and so aggressive about your political posting to even interact with the Facebook moderation regime.

Speaker 12 Like the right-wingers online, and Jacqueline Brugdown himself is pretending

Speaker 12 he's accepted their fake narrative that like they were really cracking down and there was a lot of censorship.

Speaker 12 Like in most of the cases where it's not like porn or, you know, murder, like it was just a little note at the bottom. It was a little fact-check note.

Speaker 12 And in most of the cases, content wasn't getting taken down. And like, even in those cases, you had to be saying really extreme or weird stuff.
I post all the time. Like, I'm a super poster.

Speaker 12 I'm like, I've never encountered a moderation regime in any way. Like, just think about what kinds of stuff you have to be posting to even know that this is happening.

Speaker 12 Like, most normal people, this doesn't even affect them.

Speaker 15 It's like a small number of edgelord super posters that have now like taken control of the entire narrative about online censorship i agree with you on on that the one point of pushback i will have is i think as always like instagram is the thing that's going to get like forgotten in all of this and i and i do think yeah the changes if we feel them at all right like and this is the thing with all meta facebook whatever changes is like they can be subtle and they can make a big deal out of them because they're subtle and no one your experience will barely change or they could be wild right and all of a sudden sudden like every meta product is gonna look like x or 4chan or whatever we don't know but i do think it

Speaker 15 especially like the inclusion of like you know not filtering out any politics stuff and by filtering what facebook means is like facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the channels if you showed interest in it.

Speaker 15 It was just making sure not to show it if you hadn't showed interest.

Speaker 15 Instagram's experience could change drastically if people are like, I just want to see, you know, like Timothy Chalamet at the Golden Globes. Like, I'm just into that.

Speaker 15 And all of a sudden, it's just like the worst people you've ever met in your life posting about, yeah, exactly. Like that could, that could piss a lot of people off.

Speaker 15 And I guarantee if that happens, he will come back and be like, they were pushing politics on us. Like it was the whole, you know, like post-election Trump won.

Speaker 15 We're going to stay away from that, like as if he had no hand in it.

Speaker 12 Now that you mention it, and this maybe says something about the type of content that I'm consuming, the only experience I've had with any meta content moderation is occasionally I see gays complaining that they have had, you know, their speedo pictures censored by Instagram.

Speaker 12 So I don't know what the rules are changing on that. I think that maybe some, maybe lascivious speedo pictures are still going to come under the

Speaker 12 long arm of the content moderation law while posting the R slur is cool. I don't know.
We'll see.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I mean, the stuff with X is, you know, he's been very against any kind of like sexualized content or nudity on all meta platforms.

Speaker 15 It's like been a very prude platform since the beginning of its existence. True.
If you go on X, like X is just

Speaker 15 feeding you hardcore porn when you're not asking for it all the time. So I don't know if he's ready for that part of the free speech wing of the free speech party.

Speaker 12 Well, this is just the whole, this is like, I've written so much about this. This whole moderation discourse is always so stupid because it's like, it's so hard.

Speaker 12 I guess I should say this. Like, I consulted for Facebook for like a year, 15 years ago, and I had some overlap with the moderation team when I had to do PR.

Speaker 12 And, like, when you talk to people that are in charge of actual moderation, I mean, what they see every day is so insane.

Speaker 12 I mean, like, the dregs of society, like the just with the scale that Facebook has or Twitter, any of these things have, even random message boards, the scale a small message board has, the amount of like gross porn, you know, murders, like stuff you would never want children to see on the platform, something adults don't want to see, stuff that they were showing at the end of the substance, which I suffered through last night, like teeth coming out of people's mouths and like racist stuff.

Speaker 12 Like, it is so challenging to moderate all that, even with AI, even with technology.

Speaker 12 And so, like, this, if you turn down the notch on like kind of the automatic vetting, you know, of certain work keywords or key terms or key images, like then the amount of shit you don't want to see elevates.

Speaker 12 Spam. I just should include spam in there.
And it becomes Craigslist. It's like, like, literally becomes crazy.

Speaker 12 Like, remember, Craigslist was a great place to buy tickets or sell furniture and stuff now.

Speaker 12 And now it's like the only thing on Craigslist is like scammers like trying to steal your money and porn and weird stuff.

Speaker 15 It's a really good point because people don't realize, right, it all gets caught up in the censorship conversation.

Speaker 15 And so much of the job, like you said, everywhere on the internet from the smallest message board to whatever, like moderation is just it's like people should think of it as like okay here's a starbucks right like we have to clean the bathrooms right we have to wipe down the counters every night at the end of the day it's like that's what you can't let a naked person walk through the store you can't let somebody like blare it with an ipad like showing nc 17 cadaver porn like you can't like you can't walk into the starbucks doing that right like or else people won't go to the starbucks and that and that's what it is and you know occasionally there's an edge case right there's a guy who comes in who's playing by most of the rules, but he's listening to his iPad too loud.

Speaker 15 And you have to say, like, hey, man, sorry, can you turn it down? And that becomes the censorship. Like, yeah, the edge cases are frustrating.
It sucks.

Speaker 15 It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules. But you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space.

Speaker 15 It's just like, like, basic humanity.

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Speaker 16 and the gifts they need, like underpants.

Speaker 12 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 9 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 7 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 Now we got to get to the Trump part of it, which is more in my realm than yours. But I need to play this for you.
Have you had a chance to see Joel Kaplan on Fox and Friends this morning?

Speaker 12 This is great. We're going to do it live.
Joel Kaplan, for people who don't know, is a longtime Republican, kind of,

Speaker 12 you know, pretty normie Republican, traditional Bush Republican, but was good friends with Kavanaugh.

Speaker 12 People say he was radicalized, maybe, is an overused term, but quasi you know moved towards the maga direction after the treatment what he felt like was unfair treatment of his friend britt kavanaugh and has been at facebook for a long time he was just elevated in his role has been a long time opponent of of the fact-checking regime that his own company was doing they made this announcement this morning and the rollout was not to discuss it with you know i don't know my friend savannah gothri over on it over on the today show or something his first interview is with fox and friends and i want to play a clip from it There's no question that the things that happen at Meta are coming from Mark,

Speaker 18 but there's also no question that there has been a change.

Speaker 19 Over the last four years,

Speaker 19 we saw a lot of societal and political pressure all in the direction of more content moderation, more censorship.

Speaker 18 And we've got a real opportunity now.

Speaker 19 We've got a new administration and a new president coming in who are big defenders of free expression.

Speaker 18 And that makes a difference. One of the things we've experienced is that when you have a U.S.

Speaker 19 president administration that's pushing for censorship, it just makes it open season for other governments around the world that don't even have the protections of the First Amendment to really put pressure on U.S.

Speaker 18 companies.

Speaker 12 We're going to work with President Trump to push back on that kind of thing around the world.

Speaker 12 Well, if Joel was here, I'd ask him how Trump's ass tastes. But since he's not and you're here, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that.

Speaker 12 Donald Trump, free expider of free expression, wants to take away broadcast rights from people who criticized him, sued Bill Maher for calling him the son of an orangutan.

Speaker 12 He's got his new FBI director suing our friend Olivia Troy for being mean to him on cable news. Just a free expression absolutist, lover of the First Amendment, Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 That's why they're doing this, right? Charlie, just because they just are right in line with these first principles with the new administration.

Speaker 15 Was that Fox Business or Fox News? Fox News. Okay, I thought it was Fox Business.
I was like, that's really like, then you've really gone, you know, down the rabbit hole.

Speaker 15 Man, I mean, that says it all, right? Like, that really, to me,

Speaker 15 says it all, right? We're just, just, how do we get an audience with the big man, you know, before, without going to Mar-a-Lago is clearly,

Speaker 15 let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about

Speaker 15 that. I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 15 I get the whole pandering to Trump thing, but I almost feel like there's something

Speaker 15 real about it now. I wonder if the circles that

Speaker 15 he that Zuckerberg is, you know, hanging out in, like the proximity to like the MMA crowd. I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he

Speaker 15 is trying to pander necessarily to Trump. I think he likes to hang out with Dana White.

Speaker 15 I think it can be, I think it can be both and what I'm just, there's a way to pander to him. And I think that that is like signaling.
And I mean, I think he kind of did it pre-election, right?

Speaker 15 Like the Tim Cook style of pandering, right? The donate to the transition,

Speaker 15 send a nice tweet that's like, we look forward to working with President Trump, blah, blah, blah. I think this is slightly different.

Speaker 15 I mean, this really feels like we're actually tailoring the platform. We're actually restructuring our corporate governance to, you know, to do this.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I mean, and then on the flip side, right? Trump said he wanted to potentially put Mark Zuckerberg in jail.
So I guess the stakes are pretty high for him.

Speaker 12 Yeah, this is the point. I mean,

Speaker 12 Brian Stelzer writes this this morning. Met is is facing an antitrust trial in April.
They've got business before the government. Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison, as you just mentioned.

Speaker 12 I think that Zuckerberg can both be red-pilled and want to say retarded, you know, like on his platform. I think that can be true.
He can be like,

Speaker 12 you know, trying to relive like boy state, you know, kind of like hang out with his new MMA bros and like, you know, want to say non-PC things and like he thinks that's cool.

Speaker 12 Um, I think he can both feel that and also

Speaker 12 be like, these, this is easy Pickens Trump suck up stuff, right? Like, this is just like, we can go on Funks,

Speaker 12 we can butter him up, I can go down to Mar-a-Lago, I can do the, I can go from censoring insurrection material to putting my hand over my heart as they sing the January 6th choir's rendition of the national anthem, you know, like I just think that

Speaker 12 this can be both of those things at the same time.

Speaker 15 You're, you're probably right about that. I think what is always true about the

Speaker 15 right these days in the past, you know, whatever, 10 years, Trump will always turn on you, obviously. We, we've seen that.
Trump will knife you in the back if it's convenient.

Speaker 15 But I do think that there is a an acceptance, like an eagerness to have somebody turn, right?

Speaker 15 Like, there's always been a joke that like I would, you know, hear when I was talking to other people who covered the far right, which is that like, tomorrow I could, you know, be a right-wing social media like influencer if I just, you know, sold my soul and just said, like, you know, I worked at the New York Times and like, let me tell you, like, I'm the whistleblower, right?

Speaker 15 Like, like, it's such an easy path because they're so accepting of those people, right?

Speaker 12 Yeah. Where do you want to work? Do you want to work at the free press? Do you want to go to Fox? Yeah.
Like, I mean, we could just, I get you a promotion.

Speaker 12 I I don't know what they're paying you over at the Atlantic.

Speaker 12 We could get you a raise.

Speaker 15 And that's always been this like, you know, this, this kind of joke that because they're so accepting of that type of person, right?

Speaker 15 As long as you're willing to sort of sell the entirety of your soul to that. And I think that that's always kind of a difference, especially that like...
in the big tech space, right?

Speaker 15 Between Republicans and Democrats.

Speaker 15 Like there is, there's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg, being one of the richest people on earth who has presided over Facebook for two decades now, there's really nothing he can do to like ingratiate himself.

Speaker 15 Like, even if he changes all of the policies of whatever, there's always going to be the balls and strikes of content moderation stuff. He's always going to be, you know, a capitalist billionaire.

Speaker 12 He's always going to be an annoying progressive complaining about him. I know.
I know. Yeah, it's tough.
It's tough.

Speaker 12 You're going to always get complained about. You know, there's nothing, and there's nothing.
And if that bothers you.

Speaker 15 Well, that's what the money's for, right?

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 15 I think, you know, that it is like when you do break MAGA or whatever you want to call it, right? There is, obviously, Trump turns on everyone, but there is this kind of like,

Speaker 15 you know, okay, like you want to play? That's great. Like we, we will actually give you like sort of the blanket pardon as long as you, you know, walk the line.
And I think that that's really like,

Speaker 15 it must feel pretty nice for someone like Zuckerberg to just be like, okay, all I got to do is sell my soul, have Joel go on Fox once a week, talk about, you know, Trump being a crusader for free speech.

Speaker 15 And finally, I can just get some people who are just going to be like, hey, he's a good guy. Yeah.
Oh, he's nice.

Speaker 15 He does a good job.

Speaker 12 Yeah, there's something to that. I've always said that it's one thing Democrats could learn from Trump.
It's being

Speaker 12 a little bit more generous to converts. Maybe not this one, not the whole cult thing where

Speaker 12 if you put on the blue hat, then all sins are forgiven and whatever.

Speaker 12 But being a little bit more more generous to people would probably help the Democrats political, the progressive political project in the long term. But that's for another day.

Speaker 16 Amazon has everything for everyone on your list. Like your Uncle Ricky, who ruined every single one of your wedding photos because his fly was open.
Get him a three-pack of new underpants.

Speaker 16 And with Amazon Black Friday week starting November 20th, you can save up to 40% on the gifts everyone wants, like the latest toys and housewares,

Speaker 16 and the gifts they need, like underpants.

Speaker 12 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 11 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming Manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 9 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 7 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 2 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 12 I want to get into your internet brain rot article around misinformation, but it kind of relates to this story in one way, right?

Speaker 12 Which is we don't exactly know how or what to what degree, but one of the planks that Zuckerberg laid out today is that they want to bring politics back to the news feed on Facebook, on Instagram, on threads.

Speaker 12 As you rightly point out, the Instagram part of it is potentially more interesting since Facebook is like an elderly message board right now and threads.

Speaker 12 Threads has become very niche, to say the least.

Speaker 12 So the Instagram part of this may be the most interesting.

Speaker 12 To me, like that was the effective change,

Speaker 12 effective in air quotes, but like the change that made some difference after 2016, 2020 for Facebook more than the fact-checking stuff was let's kind of derank some of this political stuff and get that out of the news feed and try to re-emphasize Facebook's original mission of whatever, people posting pictures of their friends at keg parties and like and emphasize those a little bit more.

Speaker 12 And to change back, I think has some potentially dangerous consequences, particularly as it relates to your article about conspiracy theories around various hot button issues.

Speaker 12 What do you think about that?

Speaker 15 I think that the changes could be small, right?

Speaker 15 And it could be sort of on-the-margin stuff that is going to sound really good to people like Donald Trump, and you're not going to see that much of a difference, right? That's totally possible.

Speaker 15 It's also possible that this is a classic maneuver by Facebook to push so far in a direction. They historically don't seem to think through the externalities of what they're doing, right?

Speaker 15 Like for me, the idea of deranking some of this quality news,

Speaker 15 whatever stuff, that's a big one. But for me, the biggest one was this focus on groups and communities, right? And just throwing people together based on some of these shared interests.
And

Speaker 15 every time that Facebook chooses to prioritize something. really heavily, its algorithms are pushing people in this way that they don't really notice, right? They don't really totally understand.

Speaker 15 It's all of of a sudden.

Speaker 12 Unintended consequences. This is my classical oak shadi and small C conservatism coming out.

Speaker 12 You make a big change like this. You don't exactly know what's going to come out the back end.

Speaker 15 And I think, you know, you saw the sort of logical end point of all of that, right? Was like

Speaker 15 Facebook's architecture was perfectly suited in 2020, late 2020, November, December 2020, to allow tens of thousands of people to gather around the stop to steal movement.

Speaker 15 Like if you remember on November, whatever, 6th or something, 2020, like I was watching the Stop the Steal Facebook group.

Speaker 15 Somebody like in early in the morning was like, hey, you should check this out. This like election denying group has like 15,000 members.

Speaker 15 And then I went, by the time I looked at it, six minutes later, it had 50,000 members.

Speaker 15 And it's like that shit doesn't happen if you don't make a series of changes from 2018 all the way through to try to get, you know, Uncle Jim and Aunt Sally into knitting groups and, you know, Rotary Club meetings and whatever.

Speaker 15 Oops. And so it's just like, I think that they make these.

Speaker 12 We met book clubs. We met book clubs, not insurrection.

Speaker 15 And so it's like this, this kind of stuff has the potential for these really large, kind of gnarly changes because there are billions of people on this platform.

Speaker 15 And like, if there's one thing covering Facebook for as long as I have or meta or whatever we're calling it, is this idea that like they are so naive or act at least so naive

Speaker 15 as to how people like actually use the internet?

Speaker 15 Like there's every time they talk about these changes and the way it works, it is always around the knitting club or just two people getting together, shaking hands and breaking bread and, you know, talking kitchen table issues.

Speaker 12 Yeah, connecting cultures, you know, like the

Speaker 12 from Malaysia to America, you know, people are going to be sharing recipes.

Speaker 12 It's like, no, actually, there's going to be a guy living in Malaysia that is sharing election fraud conspiracies that has a ton of interest.

Speaker 15 A bunch of guys in a room in Malaysia with 186 smartphones hooked up to a thing, like basically reposting each other's generative AI shrimp Jesus Facebook spam to trick grandma and grandpa into thinking that, you know, I don't even know what, but it's like people go on the internet.

Speaker 15 I have this like theory, which is called like the toilet theory of the internet, which is that like most things that you see that either delight you, enrage you, whatever, that are just posts by a human being

Speaker 15 were probably like typed out with two thumbs on the toilet by somebody else. Like the internet is very, like, it's wonderful, it's horrible, but it's also just like really quotidian.

Speaker 15 It's used by people all the time to stave off boredom in random moments.

Speaker 15 like

Speaker 15 Facebook never sees that, right? It's always just the, you know, the breaking bread bread over the table, even though they know better.

Speaker 15 And I just think when you make these changes, especially when you make these sort of radical changes very quickly, the unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads 18 months down the line in like a totally unforeseen way.

Speaker 12 One of your other theories, I want to talk about a recent article, was that the internet is not functioning so much as a brainwashing engine, but as a justification machine that

Speaker 12 people find information to justify any pre-existing crazy view that they have. And I thought it was interesting your comparison between like the January 6th conspiracies, how people

Speaker 12 initially were like, oh, it was Antifa. And it's like, oh, the FBI did it.
Like whatever they needed to find to justify the fact that they weren't the baddies.

Speaker 12 But comparing that to the 9-11 conspiracies and how it took a lot longer for them to bubble up.

Speaker 12 They bubbled up in more heterodox kind of ways because it happened not the pre-internet, but like the early, in the early internet before the social web. Talk about that.

Speaker 15 I read this piece that came out on January 6th with this researcher, Mike Caulfield, who studies information environments and all the all the bad stuff.

Speaker 15 And the idea is basically that we're always thinking about misinformation as like, you know, again,

Speaker 15 Uncle Tim gets on his computer, sees a piece of misinformation, and all of a sudden, like, you know, oh yeah, like Hillary Clinton has babies trapped in the basement of a pizza parlor.

Speaker 12 I'm convinced now the moon's made of cheese.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And

Speaker 15 really, what's actually happening is that it is keeping you locked in your beliefs.

Speaker 15 Like the misinformation peddling that's going on everywhere is to keep people from having to experience cognitive dissonance, for having a piece of information come in and make them rethink their entire worldview.

Speaker 15 And January 6th is this great example of this, right?

Speaker 15 Because we can't forget, like, I saw them, you know, on the on the four-year anniversary, like dredging up tweets from, you know, Eric Erickson being like, you know, shoot the protesters, right?

Speaker 15 Like all these people on the right saying, this is unconscionable, this is horrible, right? So there's this moment where the like a crack lets the light in, right?

Speaker 12 And it's like, oh, are we the bad guys here?

Speaker 15 And this entire system spins up with these justifications, right? Offering this parade of evidence so that people do not have to experience that cognitive dissonance.

Speaker 15 They get, oh, oh, actually, yes, see, it was Antifa. Yes, there were, you know, FBI agents leading people in, all that stuff.

Speaker 15 As we were trying to like think through this, you know, this idea, this theory, it's like, so, so what does that do to people, right?

Speaker 15 And it creates this stuckness, this, this, like, inability to look backward or to hold people accountable.

Speaker 15 So, you know, with January 6th, it's like, oh, no, we realized that, you know, it's, it was just like a big false flag situation or it was a peaceful protest or it was whatever, right?

Speaker 15 Our mind is made up. We're not going to go back.
And so the January 6th, you know, committee commission was then framed.

Speaker 15 It was either completely ignored by, you know, right-wing media institutions, or it was framed as a bunch of Democratic scolds who are obsessed with the past, who are hall monitors, who have Trump derangement syndrome, you know, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 15 And there's this inability. to look back because all we're doing is looking forward towards the new barrage of evidence that makes us feel, you know, like comfortable in our beliefs.

Speaker 15 And I mean, the reason why we compared it to the 9-11 stuff is the 9-11 Commission, obviously it wasn't like January 6th and 9-11 aren't completely analogous events, but they are both really visually intense attacks on the country.

Speaker 15 The 9-11 Commission, the report comes out, it's long, it's dense, it is a national bestseller for like four months. Like over a million copies are sold.

Speaker 15 Like you can go back and take a look at, it was a cultural event of people saying, Let's get to the bottom of this thing. Let's look back at the history.

Speaker 15 Let's look at the way that this institution, Congress, investigated it and try to understand.

Speaker 12 And I mean, that had its own flaws, right? Like, it's not perfect going back.

Speaker 12 I mean, like, they did some masking over some of the Saudi involvement and like still other little conspiracies bubbled up.

Speaker 12 And another true pushback to that, you know, commission, you know, bubbled up. But like, that's like more of a natural course of Socratic public discussion.

Speaker 15 Yeah,

Speaker 15 I'm not trying to say that any of these things are perfect on their own, but just the difference between a cultural desire to look back and investigate this versus what happened with January 6th.

Speaker 15 And you had a lot of people, I'm sure a lot of people who listen to this podcast, who watch the hearings, who are interested, who felt that accountability was right and necessary, and I think it was.

Speaker 15 There was also this huge gulf of people who didn't fall in the MAGA category, who didn't fall in the watching it on MSNBC category, who are also just like, I'm just trying to live my life.

Speaker 15 I'm barraged with information all the time. And I, you know, didn't really pay attention to it.
Like, culturally, the two events are so different in the way that they were analyzed and received.

Speaker 15 And I think, you know, where I ultimately fall with it, and this is maybe where it could be a stretch for some people, is

Speaker 15 in this world where we have this like justification machine just constantly humming, where there's this barrage of evidence,

Speaker 15 it's really hard for the Democrats, say, to make the 2020 election a battle for the soul of the nation. You know, like it pins the hopes on something like January 6th being resonant four years later.

Speaker 15 And I think the way that information moves, the way that these ecosystems move, it's not as resonant as people might want it to be, right? History does not pull out as long as it used to.

Speaker 15 And I think that's just like a really brain-scrambling thing to confront.

Speaker 12 It is.

Speaker 12 The other element that I wanted to bring up that you mentioned in the article that might be a little brain-scrambling for some of our listeners to confront is like we're all susceptible to this, right?

Speaker 12 Like, so there's like this idea of wanting to find information that justifies preexisting beliefs. And when you're in a

Speaker 12 marketplace on social media where you have all these different outlets and all the people you can follow, and you unfollow people who are unpleasant to unfollow, right?

Speaker 12 Like it's very easy to find yourself in a hole.

Speaker 12 And one example you guys gave, which is obviously not a conspiracy on the level of antifa didn't did january 6th but was this notion that that trump's momentum is losing trump is about to collapse like that found huge purchase among people on the left right and we just see this i'll put my hand up like if we posted on youtube a poll that was like trump's losing Like and the views skyrocketed, right?

Speaker 12 Like that's a natural instinct, right? At some level, right? Like I use this comparison all the time.

Speaker 12 I listen to the Nuggets podcasts after they win to hear the analysis more often than I do after they lose. So that's a natural human impulse.
But

Speaker 12 people got to really like believe this, right?

Speaker 12 And I've seen some people in our lives because they were only clicking on things that were showing Trump's weaknesses and they convinced themselves, like, oh, yeah, like MAGA is dying.

Speaker 12 Like MAGA is collapsing. Like even smart people really engage people I know were saying this to me and going up into the election.

Speaker 12 And I think it's just because of the same impulse to like look for something that justifies something that you want to be true so bad or that you believe to be true so bad.

Speaker 15 Yeah, there's certainly an asymmetry between the mega coalition and what's going on, but it happens everywhere. And I think that it's like, we can't think of it as just like,

Speaker 15 we have to understand that this is what. the media ecosystem is doing,

Speaker 15 whether we want to be that type of media consumer or not. And I think, and have less judgment about it happening when it's happening, you know, kind of in good faith.
I'll see this all the time.

Speaker 15 A very small example of this in my own life is I'll see a piece of news pop up on social media in some way.

Speaker 15 And it's not that I'm trying to like find a way to immediately discredit it, but if it's like kind of shocking to me,

Speaker 15 I'll be like, does this person, you know, know what they're talking about? Are they like an actual political reporter? Is this analysis?

Speaker 15 And sometimes the initial instinct of me being skeptical of that is is because it's a piece of information that doesn't make sense to my worldview and sometimes it is bullshit but sometimes it's actually just right but that instinct of me going you know and being like okay so is this guy credible it's good but it's also because of this idea of like whoa like we're not used to we've sort of lost our defenses for information that that makes us you know question our worldview a little bit.

Speaker 12 Yeah, like I'm the same. The other side of the coin is the same for me, more positive.
Like in my nerdy, nerdy, you know, politics and policy feeds that I follow.

Speaker 12 If somebody's posting, like, you know, if your colleague Jerusalem Dempses, who I love, is posting a, she's like, ooh, just read a new study, you know, showing that we need to build more housing in urban areas.

Speaker 12 You know, I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm clicking on this. I want to get a couple of sentences I can use from the podcast.
Right.

Speaker 12 If I see somebody else, like an anti-immigrant person, it's like, I've got a new study out. That's like, the real problem is that we have too many immigrants here that are taking up too many houses.

Speaker 12 I will either just not click on that at all or do what you're doing, like click on that person and be like, this person's got to be bad, right? I got to find some reason why this person's bad, right?

Speaker 12 Like, that's just a natural. That's human.

Speaker 12 These are like the Winnie the Pooh and the tuxedo like version of the problem.

Speaker 12 There's some like other people doing the same thing that are like people that are just like, you know, Winnie the Pooh naked eating honey. Right.
So like, how do you even, how do you combat this?

Speaker 12 Right. Yeah.
Hurricanes aren't real.

Speaker 15 This has been the problem of my entire career right is like i feel like i write things you identify a problem and then you're like sorry guys

Speaker 15 here's the problem but i do think like the person who has the you know the foolproof solution to that problem will probably win like a nobel prize because it will like save humanity to some degree i mean there's all kinds of things right there's the fixing different issues of media literacy, which is the boring and sort of, you know, eye-rolling answer to that.

Speaker 15 Clearly, we're not going to get any platform regulations, but also platform regulations are their own minefields.

Speaker 15 The way that I like to look at this issue, and I think I've said this in different places before, is the internet and the

Speaker 15 democratization of speech in this way. Like, think about multiple billions of people on Facebook at a given time.
Like, that is historic, right? In the sense of humanity.

Speaker 15 Like, we have not connected people in this way ever before. It is a media revolution on par with something like the invention of the printing press.

Speaker 15 And if you go back to that, that's centuries of tumult and disruption. And I think that like everything in the internet age, we will speedrun that.

Speaker 15 But I think like we are all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, how to process it.

Speaker 15 It is rewiring our relationships to each other and to ourselves. And I think that it's this long

Speaker 15 process, right? Where we develop new norms around how to communicate, how to share, how to do all these different things. It's a very unsatisfying answer.

Speaker 15 But I think when people are like, what button can I push to make life more sane? It's like, there is no button. There's no net underneath.

Speaker 15 Like, this is a new experiment for civilization to be doing this.

Speaker 12 And unfortunately, for, or maybe fortunately, I don't know.

Speaker 15 We're all sort of born and living in this time period of like massive, massive societal, technological, cultural disruption. And it's, it's bunkers.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And actually, we're going to spend the next four years not trying to fix it.
So there you go. There's that.
All right. We got to do crypto.

Speaker 12 There were two topics in your article that I want to cover really quick. One was you lead the article saying for years crypto skeptics have asked, what is this for?

Speaker 12 Me among those skeptics. And for years, boosters have struggled to offer up a satisfactory answer.
You know, they argue that the blockchain is itself a genius technological invention.

Speaker 12 I agree with that. But once you get beyond that, the question is: what value do these coins provide for people that don't want to use them to commit crimes? Your answer to this is that

Speaker 12 maybe the purpose that crypto has found for itself is that it is a cultural one where it's serving a need that certain people have to oppose incumbent interests. Talk about that a little bit.
Yeah.

Speaker 15 I mean, the very nature of, like, if you go back and you read the Bitcoin white white paper, which I don't really suggest anyone does, it's only like 11 pages, but it's pretty dry.

Speaker 12 It's a hard 11 pages. Yes.

Speaker 12 Depending on two and a half in.

Speaker 15 If you read it, like, obviously, it's not overtly political, but it is a political notion to want to build a technology that, you know, circumvents the need for middlemen or middle institutions, or it's basically, you know, trying to come up with a decentralized form of global finance, right?

Speaker 15 That in itself is just, it's an anti-institutional idea. And that technology, when it first, you know,

Speaker 15 came out and no one was really caring about it, except for like engineers and super nerds. And I mean that, you know, in a, in a, in a loving way, like those types of people.

Speaker 15 are like techno cyber libertarians, right?

Speaker 15 They are people who want that sort of democratization, who have a healthy skepticism of institutions and authorities and power and would like a technological tool to circumvent all that.

Speaker 15 So, those are a lot of the people who had an early investment in Bitcoin, who got in, you know, on the ground floor. And by the ground floor, I mean the real ground floor.

Speaker 15 And the people who have, you know, 100,000 X returns on their investment at the moment and who have been made incredibly rich. Then you have a lot of the other speculator class and people like that.

Speaker 15 But so many of the people who have been on this bandwagon for a long time got in

Speaker 15 not necessarily just because it was like a really good speculative asset. They got in because of this sort of ideological rooted connection.

Speaker 15 Those people being made really rich, like they are now a meaningful political constituency because of their money.

Speaker 15 And that influence in this moment is another like really big cultural factor in our like anti-institutional moment.

Speaker 12 And I think that the Democrats had a miss here. I mean, I'm for crypto regulation for the reason that I want to close the top of the pod with, but

Speaker 12 the

Speaker 12 kind of like disdain of it or like this desire to attack it from an instant from being the institution, like taking on the guard of like the Democrats are the protectors of the big institutions.

Speaker 12 That is just a bad place to be in politics in a changed world. Like putting, just setting the merits of this aside, because Trump didn't give a fuck about this, right?

Speaker 12 Like Trump would have been happy to regulate crypto, to get rid of crypto, to whatever.

Speaker 12 It's not like any of him or the core people, well, now the new core of Andrew Eason and them care, but like the original MAGA crowd doesn't have strong crypto things.

Speaker 12 Trump saw he could make money on it, and so did.

Speaker 12 And there is then just like a general laissez-faire.

Speaker 12 It's like, oh, all these libertarian, anti-establishment crypto bros who are probably culturally kind of liberal, but like like their crypto asset, they're for me because I say I'm not going to F with them like Gary Gensler has.

Speaker 12 And like, I think that that was a meaningful swing demo, not like a decisive one, but for Trump this time.

Speaker 15 Oh, definitely. And it has so much overlap, right? With the

Speaker 15 not even the manosphere, but sort of like the, you know, the

Speaker 15 bro podcast sphere that, you know, that he was going on and trying to court. Like there's an overlap there.

Speaker 12 So

Speaker 15 there's a whole culture that, you know, I mean, really during the pandemic is when it kind of took its form that it has now.

Speaker 15 And through, you know, the whole like GameStop and SBF and all FTX, all that stuff that happened in the last couple of years, you know, the laser eyes meme kind of stuff, like sort of edge lordy culture that formed around it has a lot of overlap, right?

Speaker 15 Because it is anti-authority, anti-institution. It is sort of like people on X who, you know, want to use words they feel like, you know, would get them canceled in polite liberal spheres.

Speaker 15 There is an overlap with that audience. So I think it was actually very smart for the Trump campaign to court that, to adopt that.
I also think that when

Speaker 15 I would like to have been in the room the first time that someone actually explained like crypto and not like the blockchain, but I mean like, you know, the world of speculative asset trading and money laundering and stuff.

Speaker 15 And yeah, Trump coin and all that to him. Cause I'm sure his eyes got like really wide.
Cause it's like basically like. if Donald, like finance Donald Trump's way, right?

Speaker 15 Like, oh, I can, you know, I can get people to give me sort of like in-kind political contributions by, you know, by investing in my coin and I can have my son be like the head of research for this, you know, dubious startup based in, you you know, a garage in Palm Beach.

Speaker 15 Like sweet.

Speaker 12 I can plant my logo on something, but it's just online now. I don't even have to put it on a building.

Speaker 12 I can put it on like an internet thing and then people will pay me to put my, to put my, you know, face on it.

Speaker 15 Amazing. I'm sure he was like, this is like made for me, right?

Speaker 15 But I agree with part of what you said with the, you know, it, it shouldn't be treated in like a, in a changed world. It shouldn't be treated by Democrats with this like

Speaker 15 gross sort of sustained, sustained, like turn off the people for whom crypto is like the one, you know, thing that they're voting on. They're the single-issue crypto voter.

Speaker 15 Like, yeah, it's probably not a great idea.

Speaker 15 But I think where we might be going with this conversation, like there is a really large concern when it comes to, like, I'm not like a defender of like big investment banks by any stretch, but I also think like in commingling our financial system with the most volatile speculative assets ever really to exist is like a freaking nightmare.

Speaker 15 And that is where we might be headed under a Trump administration.

Speaker 12 It is. That's our final topic.
People should read the whole article. There's also Trump corruption stuff that we could spend a ton of time on.

Speaker 12 A Chinese national cryptocurrency entrepreneur recently bought $30 million worth of tokens and Trump's shit coin for one example. So there's much more that came from.

Speaker 12 We'll have the link in the show notes. But here's my last note on my Google Doc for this podcast.
I wrote in all caps because I just hadn't really thought about this that much.

Speaker 12 I just, you know, I read about crypto stuff, but like, once you get deep into the crypto, like, regulatory elements, it hadn't set in for me until I read your article.

Speaker 12 Letting big banks co-mingle with crypto would be insane. Did nobody read the big short?

Speaker 12 Like, like, what, like, really? Like,

Speaker 12 it is wild that there is not going to be just some basic regulations and guardrails. Like, forget, I honestly forget like even regulating crypto, but just

Speaker 12 preventing like the banks that are too big to fail that cause the great recession from being, you know, exposed to like this type of risk asset.

Speaker 15 For that piece, I talked to this researcher named Molly White, who studies

Speaker 15 reports on, like, is deep in the crypto world and the regulation stuff and all this. And this was her like red flag concern, which is basically like, think about when FTX crashed, right?

Speaker 15 It was a, you know, an exchange that was insolvent. The bottom fell out.
A lot of people lost everything. Most of the people who do lose everything are the people who have the least, right?

Speaker 15 Like the whales usually don't lose at all. They're diversified, whatever.

Speaker 15 It was a terrible thing for a lot of people. It was totally contained, though, from the global financial system.

Speaker 15 It was not like, you know, when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages, that all of a sudden, you know, we end up with, you know, bankers in the street, you know, lighting their little boxes of their desk stuff on fire.

Speaker 15 That is what like protects us right now. Like you can be for all of this, you know, I want a decentralized currency.
It's easier to send money to people in different countries.

Speaker 15 I like the culture around it. I like to essentially gamble on the price of Bitcoin, like all that stuff.
Hey, like if I free country.

Speaker 12 Right, sure, exactly.

Speaker 15 But the idea that like a bunch of people are going to like

Speaker 15 pump and dump into this, into this currency, that it's going to be,

Speaker 15 there's, you know, no guardrails between

Speaker 15 citibanks holdings in this realm and in the crypto realm.

Speaker 15 And the fact that like, if we do have another FTX style collapse of some kind, and this realm of like, of crypto finance too, is just, it's the Wild West.

Speaker 15 Like you just have, I mean, you have so much money laundering going on, so many people using it for crimes.

Speaker 15 It's not to say that the traditional world of finance is great, but like to have those things together in that sense, and then to have, you know, a potential global financial crisis because all these banks have FOMO and don't want to miss out on, you know, you know, giving their clients access to something like this because, you know, their son likes to trade it on Coinbase.

Speaker 15 Like, all of that is just, it's maddening. It's like freaky.
And so I think

Speaker 15 that is the place where I think you could find reasonable democratic opposition, which is to say, like, hey, it's a free country, but like, we don't want people losing their shirts and not even investing in it.

Speaker 12 We need basic protections for retail investors, retail, and that includes retail Hawktua coin investors.

Speaker 12 That's a fine place to be, you know, as long as you're not just kind of throwing away a growing demographic, despite one that is a little confusing to me.

Speaker 12 I was about to let you go, but I have one breaking news item. Trump says we're changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Speaker 12 Is that real? Is that real? That's something for people to think. That's something for everybody to think about overnight, and they can Google for themselves whether or not that's real.

Speaker 12 Could be real, could be fake. Who knows in the world of the new Facebook algorithms? And why would it matter?

Speaker 12 Why would we need to correct it if it were untrue? No value in that. Charlie Warzell at the Atlantic.
Check out his work. It's so good.
Come back soon.

Speaker 15 Thank you.

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But why not Eric, our dream in color, not black and white.

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Speaker 12 Blowing up and says all our rainbow.

Speaker 12 The Bullworth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 15 This is Matt Rogers from Lost Culture Eastos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

Speaker 13 This is Bowen Yang from Lost Culture East with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.

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Speaker 20 Cheers, my dears.

Speaker 21 Must be 21 or older to purchase. Drink responsibly.
Kahlua Caramel Swirl Cream Liqueur, 16% Alcohol by Volume, 32 Proof. Copyright 2025, Imported by the Kahlua Company, New York, New York.

Speaker 21 Dunkin' trademarks owned by DDIP Holder LLC, used under license. Copyright 2025, DDIP Holder LLC.

Speaker 22 What does Zinn really give you? Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but also real freedom to do more of what you love, when and where you want to do it. Why bring Zinn along for the ride?

Speaker 22 Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up all the possibilities of right now.

Speaker 22 With Zinn, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it. Find your Zen.
Learn more at zinn.com.

Speaker 22 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.