Ep 42 | Blake J. Harris | The Glenn Beck Podcast

On paper, today's guest and I are an odd couple for a podcast.

We come from different places politically, but our common ground is the search for truth.

When truth becomes subservient to our tribe, we're all doomed.

My guest on this podcast is a rare breed, a non-fiction writer who tries to report the truth rather than trying to score political points.

His work focuses on technology and entertainment, future kind of technology topics.

He's the best-selling author of Console Wars, Sega Nintendo, and The Battle That Defined a Generation.

That book is being developed for TV by producers Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg.

His latest book is called The History of the Future, Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution that Swept Virtual Reality.

It is a fantastic book that tells the dramatic story of a guy named Palmer Lucky.

He's the founder of the virtual reality company, Oculus, that eventually ran afoul of Mark Zuckerberg in Facebook for having the wrong political worldview.

This is fascinating no matter who Paul Merlucky was for in a presidential campaign.

But it is also a timely story that reveals the dark side of big tech politics that no one in mainstream media has bothered to dig into.

Until my guest today, he's not a guest that you will see really on any mainstream media.

He was an A-list guest for his last book.

They can't even find the alphabet for him now.

So what is the history of our future?

Will we be truth tellers or will we remain caged by our own tribalism?

Our guest for that answer is Blake J.

Harris.

So if I

would have told you that you would be sitting at this table with me in 2019, if I would have said that to you in 2016, what would you have said?

I would have said the evil Glenn Beck we're talking about?

Something like that.

Right, right.

But then again, and I'm sure we'll get into it, but if I've learned one thing over the past few years working on this book, it's to definitely be skeptical of what you read about people in the media.

So actually by 2019, I'd say I'd be very interested in meeting Glenn.

I don't think we'll get along on much.

But we did.

Yeah,

I don't have a problem.

In fact, I just have to start with complimenting you.

How rare you are to find somebody

that actually

will tell the truth when it personally hurts.

There's, you know, I, yeah, I know a lot of people are like, no, I'll tell the truth.

But when it comes down to it,

No, they won't.

No, they won't.

Because they have an agenda or because in your case,

you're going to be destroyed.

That's what was facing you.

We're going to destroy you.

How hard is that to tell the truth?

I still don't think it's my job.

I mean,

it seems hard for other people to do it, and I don't think I'm that special of a journalist.

I really appreciate the compliment.

But when I signed up to write this book or to be a storyteller and a journalist telling nonfiction stories.

That's just what

you do.

So it never really even occurred to me, you know, in terms of considering the consequences, thinking about that, you know, the media that had loved me for my first book would hate me for this one or that I would face pushback from Facebook or any of that stuff.

My response was just, all right, I need to line up my next book and make sure it's not based on getting access to a tech company.

Not, maybe I should massage the truth to make it.

There was never any time that you thought this is not worth it.

Not to lie, but just to not tell the truth.

No,

and

I think that's less about my integrity and more just about Palmer in two ways.

Seeing what happened to Palmer Lucky, seeing how much he became hated in Silicon Valley.

Yeah, so, you know, seeing how hated Palmer was and

the vitriol directed at him from the media, from the people.

As I told you in that email, it was never going to be that bad for me.

So I felt like I can't complain if he didn't complain.

And then the other is just his character.

I know him probably better than almost anyone in the world at this point, talking to him every day for the last few years,

except for maybe his girlfriend, now fiancé.

And I just, I couldn't, I needed to do right by him.

You know, I needed to get the story out.

Yes, he supports a politician that I find.

very objectionable, but but but the thing that did bond me and Palmer and the reason why I, in in retrospect, believe I was selected to tell the story and got this incredible access from Oculus and Facebook is because I really always bonded with Palmer over our mutual love of the First Amendment.

I thought that, you know, we had conversations about it in terms of a virtual reality, like, you know, in a virtual environment, what should the rules be?

You know, should it be, I remember one time we talked about like, should it be like a My House, My Rules thing?

So then if you want to use a lot of four-letter words, that's fine.

But, you know, everyone sets it up.

And these were things I didn't really think about because I also took them for granted.

Like I think a lot of people do and we can't anymore.

So

yeah, it was tough.

It was excruciating at times.

It was exhausting.

For me, the hardest part was less the reception or lack of reception or the impact on my career.

potentially or actually, but it was, it was seeing Facebook lie to my face systematically.

You were a fan of Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah.

And Facebook.

Yeah.

I mean,

I didn't have like a, you know, like a number of people.

I'm a fanboy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, but, but, but I thought,

like, like, also going back to your question of how would I have felt meeting you back before I knew you, and just from what I read, you know,

I do really admire entrepreneurs so much.

So, so, even, even like Alex Jones, who I find pretty vile, like, I'm like, you know, he's put together a pretty good business in the world.

I kind of admire that.

Yeah, I mean, it is like a little cartel in a way.

Right, right.

So, yeah, I don't know if I really admire him, but like, but like I really admired Mark for his

sticking with his mission of connecting people for setting up this company.

I will tell you that I met Mark and was at Facebook and I've got my problems with Facebook, but he's a genuine feeling kind of guy.

You don't see him when you meet him and you're talking to him.

He really seems like, look, we're just trying to do the right thing.

You know, and this is the company that we're doing and this is how we're trying it.

And I, you know, why would I want to edit anybody's speech?

Why would I want to do any of that?

I don't want to control all that.

And you believe him.

And I've stuck up for Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, I remember.

Yeah, until recently, I took a lot of heat.

I don't, that's not, no, that's not what's happening at Facebook.

So you had mentioned when I was on the show that you had stuck up for Mark and that you had the same feeling about him that I did.

And I would have went to bat for him.

And then you said you no longer believe him.

When did that start to change for you that you became skeptical of what he and Facebook were doing?

It was just the actions of what they were doing.

You know, it just doesn't, I'm sorry.

You can only say, oh, that was a mistake or that was just an oversight.

You can only say that so many times before you go, you know, I don't think so.

And I'm growing concerned.

And I want to talk about this later

with

his insistence on, I want regulation.

No entrepreneur ever says, I want the government regulation.

And I have a theory and I want to pass it by you.

All right, yeah, as we go.

But let's let's start with Palmer.

Sure.

Palmer is,

this is the greatest American.

This is, you don't think of Steve Jobs being able to start Apple again.

You don't, I mean,

what's his name from Microsoft?

Bill Gates said, you couldn't start Microsoft today.

So you don't think of somebody in a little trailer who's just got this crazy idea of being able to become a Titan overnight.

Right.

And it's so Palmer for anyone who's read the book or knows Palmer that it was a camper trailer parked in his parents' driveway in Long Beach and not a garage.

Because, you know, now there's this fabled idea that Apple was started by the Steves in a garage and everyone sort of copies it, homage.

But, you know, the whole thing with Apple was think different.

People are thinking similarly to Think Differently.

You know, Palmer really is an original.

Love him or hate him.

You're not going to, you're not going to find another Palmer lucky.

And

for me as a writer what better way to start the story than with this this kid um

he was 19 years old and and by the way this is tangent but I was pulling up um the novel that I wrote in college when I was 21 and reading it over the weekend just because I was going through all the stuff and I was like this is such garbage this guy thought he was smart and I was like wow and I was two years older than Palmer when he started this billion dollar company yeah yeah so I forget that at times you know because he's so precocious and he's just also so himself.

You know, we'll get into it later, but a lot of people,

the ones who still talk to me about Palmer, they usually say, they try to excuse his actions and say, oh, but he was very young donating to this Trump organization.

You know, like he'll learn or he'll mature.

And I was like.

We can agree whether it was a good decision to do that or not, but I'm pretty sure 40 years from now, it's going to be the same guy, especially now that he has money because he is himself.

And that as a writer, you know, those are the people that you...

They're interesting.

Yeah, they're very interesting.

So

when did he start tinkering with things?

I mean, how did he...

Oh, yeah, it's a good question.

So, you know, the book starts in April 2012 when he's discovered by John Carmack, this legendary programmer that viewers and listeners might know from creating games like Doom and Quake and first-person shooters, and he's a pioneer in that genre.

But I always kind of found it fascinating and almost a little unfair to him

that the book starts in 2012.

That's when he founds Oculus.

But there's also this whole other story story of the three years that led to this thing.

You know,

we talked about it being like this great American dream story,

the American dream in 2012 or 2019.

And it's, you know, you start with the product, the thing.

And to get to that thing, though, that he had to go through three years of working on this.

So he started in 2009.

But can I put that in perspective?

Tesla came to the United States.

He spent decades toiling and working.

I mean, things have changed so much

that somebody with a good idea is going to take it to market pretty much finished in three years.

Yeah.

Or actually, things have changed so much that you could sell it for billions of dollars before even finishing the product, which does feel like a very America in the 21st century sort of story.

But you're totally right, too.

And that's why I love the story, not just because I think Palmer is this incredible character and a great proxy for our times and just a great inspiration.

But because it is an ensemble story, you know, without Brendan Arib, his partner,

who becomes the CEO and makes the initial investment.

How old is he?

Brendan is a couple years older than me.

I'm 36.

So he must have been like 32 or so.

Did they know each other?

They didn't know each other, and that's like a credit to Brendan.

Brendan received a tip, you know, is described in the book as like

the scene from Back to the Future where

Marvin Berry calls up, says, you gotta listen to this new sound.

And like he got, he gets this call that, you know, you gotta check out this Palmer Lucky kid.

He dazzled at this video game trade show.

And Brendan, before even trying a demo, already invested like $200,000, which I think you could say he's either a true believer or he's a serial risk taker.

And I think it's a little bit of both.

But they really hit it off.

They had a dinner together that was chronicled in the book and really sort of foreshadowed a lot of what was to come.

And I remember the first time I met with Brendan after I was given this access, and he asked me back, this was February 2016, you know, what's your vision for the book?

I said, it's way too early.

Especially it was way too early.

I had no idea where it was going.

But I said, I kind of imagined it's the marriage between you and Palmer, between the entrepreneur and the inventor.

And, you know, I think it's interesting to think that it still would have been the same invention, but without people like Brendan, without an endorsement from John Carmack, without all these people coming together,

It wouldn't have been successful.

It wouldn't have been successful in this way.

And then, you know, but Palmer's the one who's on the cover of Wired, the cover of Time, the cover of Popular Mechanics.

So people think it's a one-man show.

That leads to some resentment amongst the group.

But at least that was positive media coverage compared to what was to come.

Yeah.

So

tell me about Oculus and

how big of a leap this was for the industry.

Sure.

So, you know, Oculus is a virtual reality company.

Palmer's, you know, one of the great things about this book that I didn't have this luxury with my last one, which was from the 90s, was that all the stuff was archived or a lot of the stuff was archived.

I ended up getting emails and other private exchanges, but, you know, he had an original website for Oculus and described this as his tilt to try to make virtual reality happen.

Virtual reality had failed so many times over the past several decades.

Why?

Because it was for a lot of reasons.

I mean, first of all, I would say that Oculus did sell the Facebook for $3 billion, but they're not even necessarily a success now, even with all those resources.

But largely,

technology, it was very expensive.

That was a huge barrier.

And then it's this chicken and egg problem.

You're selling a virtual headset or goggles or glasses or

whatever form factor it's going to be.

And that's the hardware.

But the hardware is worthless without the software.

That's why Magic Leap sold their...

products out to producers first.

Right, exactly.

And that was something I mentioned, Brendan Arib, the CEO.

That was one of his ideas with, you know, originally Palmer's plan was to start a do a Kickstarter and only sell this to people who were enthusiasts like him.

And there was, you know, less than 100 people in the world who cared about virtual reality.

And Brendan wasn't saying, oh, let's sell it to Blake and Glenn just yet.

Let's sell it to the producers.

Let's sell it to the developers.

So that way we'll create this ecosystem and try to solve this chicken egg problem.

And that was no easy proposition, but that in hindsight was one of the things that, you know, underratedly was a big part of the success, you know, knowing your customer.

And it's also a good thing to contrast to now, which I'm sure we'll get into with Mark and what his vision for VR.

But

the biggest problem I would say for Oculus right now is that they don't know their customer.

That the way that it's been phrased to me is that Mark would rather sell a million headsets to the right people, and by right means like a demographically representative group of people,

than he would to sell 10 million units today to the actual demand, which is.

This happens with other companies too now, where it's like, it's a weird, it's not really capitalism.

It's like activism capitalism, where you're not trying to supply demand.

You're trying to create assertive demand, not in the way of like where Steve Jobs would say.

Tell me the difference between that and

a fashion designer that just will not make size 12 dresses.

I mean, isn't that kind of the same thing?

They want their product on a certain look and they don't want it

on, you the average everyday person.

No,

it's a good comparison.

Especially because

if you look at the thinking with how Facebook has proceeded with VR and AR and AR's augmented reality,

when I talked to the executives back before I was blackballed,

they had a sample-size experience of one major success, starting Facebook.

And so they often thought about VR in terms of Facebook.

And one thing that they talked about was that Facebook, unlike MySpace or Friendster or these other social network companies,

Facebook had an almost equal mix of men and women.

And that was enticing.

You know, it was like basically a social media network is like a party and you're saying, come in, come on in.

So in that respect, you know, designing dresses for fashionable people is

There is a comparison to be made, though I feel like the motivation is different here.

I think that s so much of the rhetoric at Facebook and some of their decision and a lot of their decision making seems based on inclusivity and,

you know, it doesn't.

When you say inclusivity, what you really mean is exclusivity, making sure that only a certain group get it and not another group.

Right.

I mean, like, I spoke with a lot of, in addition to people at Oculus and Facebook, I spoke with a lot of developers, a lot of white male developers, and they were explicitly told that Facebook was not looking in that direction

for

that sort of creator, which is crazy because they're actually creating something.

You'll never even know what these people look like.

I guess it trickles down in some way, maybe, to their aesthetic, but really, I mean, this is obviously a much larger cultural question, but it's just so weird that you could watch a movie like The Godfather Now and say,

you know,

this is Francis Ford Coppola made this, and people people would have a different opinion than if you say Tina Fey made this.

I mean, like, it shouldn't really matter.

Look at Game of Thrones.

You watch Game of Thrones, and then you see the guy who wrote Game of Thrones, you're like, well, that doesn't match.

Right.

You know what I mean?

It doesn't, what difference does that make?

Right.

And this is an issue that I care about a lot.

And we are probably pretty aligned on because I come at it from the perspective as an artist, as a creator.

I want to write about people like Palmer.

I want to write about interesting people of all ethnicities, genders.

I don't care.

So

to feel, you know, it does seem more and more like if I were to write a book with a female protagonist, I would be concerned about some sort of appropriation or anything along those lines, which is really antithetical to why I got into storytelling.

Yeah.

And

antithetical to

what we've always been taught from Martin Luther King.

Right.

Judge me by the content of my character.

You know, just judge my work, not what, what are you looking at me for?

Right.

And that's, you know,

I will say that part, you know, part of, this is a great example of this story.

You asked me, you know, like it was,

I had to bite my tongue at times when I was writing it because

while conveying the subjective perspective, I conveyed why people like Trump and I don't like Trump.

But that is partly why I wanted to write.

I wanted to get inside other people's heads.

I wanted to understand that.

And it made me a better person for it, or at least

I'm a happier person for knowing that.

And it's just

been kind of saddening.

Like this experience really did open my eyes to

just always thinking about that Martin Luther King Jr.

quote

and talking to, I mean, I guess now there's,

at the time, I think that like a lot of liberals, I was kind of blind to the big divide between maybe a new left or a very progressive left and more of a classical liberal or people like me who had always voted Democrat and getting into the more of the cultural issues.

And

this really opened my eyes up to that.

And when I talk to some of my ultra-progressive friends and bring that quote up, it's always just there's this asterisk like, well, yeah, eventually that'll be the goal.

But we have to offset all these years of oppression.

And

I'm sympathetic to try and offset that, but like, do you have a formula?

Like, what is it?

And it's more just like, well, we'll know when we see it.

I mean, I don't know.

This is not pornography where we just know when we see that.

And you got, you know, hundreds of millions of people in this country.

I don't think people are going to be cool with a, well, no, you see it perspective.

And

it's not changing hearts.

It's hardening hearts.

It's hardening hearts.

You got to, it's,

you know, we, we, we,

we worked so hard to break down barriers between us.

And we were nowhere near finished by any stretch of the imagination, but we had made some really good progress to where I really believe

a majority of people, 80%,

really just didn't see color.

They just didn't.

I mean,

you're good at what you do.

I don't really care.

I don't really care.

And I think that a lot of that is reversing now.

But people are seeing white, they're seeing black, they're seeing handicapped.

We're just categorizing people into groups instead of saying, we're all human.

Now, what do you bring to the table?

right and that that's something that i'm sure you were aware of and had your pulse on much earlier than i did and and that has really become clear to me in the past few years and it's really disconcerting um

partly too because you know as as a as a journalist um

you know objectivity is

my north star and and then i hear people,

some of these terrible journalists, or just skeptics say, well, there's no such thing as objectivity.

And then it's like,

we can argue whether that's true or not.

And then they just basically respond like, well, all the rules are out.

So we can be as

subjective as we want to be.

And I agree that maybe there's no such thing as true.

There's probably no such thing as true objectivity, but

it's a goal.

Yeah, it's a goal.

I've met with journalists, and this is the norm.

I've met with people who come in knowing what they're going to write.

And then all they're doing is just writing.

Yes, it is.

That's not a journalist.

A journalist could come in and say, I think I know what's going on.

Are you willing to see it from a different perspective?

If you walk up to something and you're like,

that's not what I thought.

Are you willing to say it?

Many are not.

Right.

And I'm sure we'll get really into the journalism aspect of it because that is one of my big takeaways from this.

But I just think about that objectivity being my North Star.

And

the more experience I have, the more I feel this way.

It's not like, oh, I become more jaded.

There's no such thing as objectivity.

In terms of colorblindness, because you said 80% of people are colorblind.

I don't know.

I know, no, I know.

I know.

You were just throwing.

But like, I mean,

we're not.

Whatever the number is,

I'm sure, or I'm not sure, but I'm open to the idea that on some subconscious level, these things do impact us.

But that doesn't mean that the rules are thrown out.

That's still the goal.

I thought the goal was still colorblindness.

no it's amazing to me we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights among them life liberty and pursuit of happiness people say the opposite about that that martin luther king did martin luther king said live up to that standard that's our mission statement this is This is, hey, King, we got to part ways because you don't even know who we are.

Okay.

You think we're like you.

We're not like you.

We have this whole different idea.

We think this.

And so we're going to create a government that tries to do that.

Right.

Okay.

If we could accomplish that, it's time for a new mission statement.

You know what I mean?

It's time for a reach of a goal.

This is such a reach for a goal.

We're throwing this out and saying, well, that won't work.

Of course, it's never worked, but are we getting closer or farther away?

Right.

No, you're totally right.

And

it's that.

There's something aspirational about it.

It is a mission statement.

And I'm definitely not ready to burn down the house and try to start a new mission statement.

I think it's a good challenge.

I think it's a good comfort

that that's the goal, that that's what hopefully society is trying to provide you with.

But

there's a lot of people who just seem to have this mentality

seems foreign to me where it's like, well, if not everyone, you know, not everyone has life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness or doesn't have it equally.

So we need to go back to the drawing board.

And then you have to get the opportunity cost also of, okay, well, okay, maybe this isn't the best way, but what's the better way?

Oh, well, we'll get to make sure that happens.

And Churchill said this is

the worst system except everything else that's ever been done.

And it's true.

It's true.

I agree.

Yeah.

All right.

So I want people to read the book because it's a fantastic book,

but it changes halfway through because you're telling this great story of this entrepreneur and tech and how it's all working.

And then

Donald Trump appears.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean,

of course, I could never have.

prognosticated Trump would be part of the story just because I didn't think he was going to be running for president.

Though to Palmer's credit, you know, we talk about visionaries, just people seeing the world differently and sort of being a little ahead of the curve.

I still think it's amazing that in March 2011, Palmer posted online that Donald Trump was thinking about running for president in the 2012 election, that he was very supportive of that and thought it'd be a great idea.

And I was, I remember he said that to me the first time, I was like, wait, this is from you, this is from 2015.

And he's like, no, no, no, it's in 2011.

I was like, what?

I remember seeing him come down the escalator going, this is crazy.

Yeah.

This is crazy.

But he saw it way in advance.

Him and I think Peter Thiel, not as soon, but Peter Thiel is one of the other people that I

spoke with to some degree because he's on the Facebook board, but

talked about his Trump support.

And

these are the kinds of people who you...

There's, of course, a luck aspect to the success of entrepreneurship.

But then you see, all right, these people see things differently in a way where they can feel something becoming a part of the zeitgeist before other people do.

So, when we saw Trump come down the escalator, and we're like, oh my God, this guy's going to be a joke.

Good fodder for the daily show.

Nope, they see actually how it can resonate.

And I always, and

speaking of PRTL, the other thing I've been thinking, I was thinking about the other day that I thought was interesting was

Mark Andreessen, another famous venture capitalist from Andreessen Hurwitz.

He had given an interview, not with me,

but it was a podcast, I think it was a podcast.

Something I listened to in 2017.

this was shortly after Palmer was fired from Facebook and he talked about how the that this is a guy who knows everyone in Silicon Valley and he said there's only two people I know in Silicon Valley who are publicly Trump supporters or who are willing to say that they're Trump supporters Palmer Lucky and Peter Thiel and that's obviously a problem for a lot of reasons because I think that there's more than two that are just were unwilling to say it but it's interesting to me that now here we are in 2019 less than two years after he said that and both Peter and Palmer are out of Silicon Valley and and it's not because they don't like the geography there it's because there's other stuff going on

so

he he posts uh his support for donald trump and it's not crazy is it when he first comes out and says i'm for donald trump it's not he's not like well it was crazy back in 2011 because who would have said yeah yeah i know but i mean when this story really starts to take, he sold his business to Oculus, and he's not like, you know, in the Trump gear and, you know, walking down Facebook

with flags and going, you know,

he's actually,

he is much more like how I remembered politics when I was growing up, where I remembered I once asked

my home economics teacher, which I...

I would suspect is not really a class anymore, even though I thought it was very useful to learn those skills.

And I remember asking her who she voted for in the election.

I guess I was in eighth grade.

It must have been 96.

And she got mad at me.

Like, that's a very personal thing to ask.

You don't ask people about politics.

And that's sort of Palmer's mentality,

which once he was, you know, it was determined that he was a villain, everyone thought, oh, that's him being sneaky.

He doesn't want to talk about his politics.

No, that's just, he doesn't think that matters.

He was there to do virtual reality stuff and do cool tech stuff.

That was irrelevant.

But...

But yeah, he had no qualms with publicly being a Trump supporter not long after the escalator introduction of Trump.

You know, one of the things I find fascinating that it's not in this edition of the book, but I will put it in a later edition because I'm still getting

more information.

Fortunately, no contradictory information, but I'm still getting other cool details that I want to include is that in April of 2016, Palmer went to a Trump rally in Costa Mesa.

And the reason I know that is not just because he told me, but because there was an NBC video talking about protesters outside of the rally, and Palmer was one of the people interviewed as like, you were at this Trump rally.

What was it like?

Or what was the protesters like?

So he had no problem being

hiding.

Yeah, he wasn't hiding.

Exactly.

He wasn't hiding it.

He knew this was going to be on the news.

Potentially millions of people would see it, potentially no one.

But like he had no problem hiding it.

And then we flash forward to five months later when he makes this $10,000 donation to an organization and he does it anonymously, which people then say he did it because he was sneaky about it or he was trying to cover it up or whatever they say.

And you have to ask yourself, well, then what changed over the five months?

And the answer is Peter Thiel.

The answer is that in, you know, in between that was the Republican National Convention in 2016.

Peter spoke there and came out as a Trump supporter, as a gay man Trump supporter.

And

people on Facebook want, so many people on Facebook wanted to get him fired from the

board of Facebook for the only reason was just that he was a Trump supporter.

I mean, I was not a Trump supporter at that time.

And

I saw that.

And I thought, I don't understand what Peter is seeing here, but what a cool moment.

What a cool moment for a gay man,

successful, to stand up in front of a whole bunch of people that supposedly hate gay people.

And he's got this warm reception.

And

he speaks openly about it.

This is a great thing.

May not like his candidate, but this is a good moment.

I totally agree.

Because some of my reluctance over the years to embrace Republican candidates or

why I wouldn't be tempted to the dark side was because so many of my close friends are homosexual and there was always felt like for various reasons that they were unwelcome.

I think it's still a work in progress,

but it's changing.

And one thing I want to mention that...

Speaking of Peter is, you know, I feel like someone might say, oh, Glenn Blake, you guys are being hypocrites.

You say that identity politics is all the stuff, and then you're giving Peter extra credit because he's a gay man.

Or that, you know.

Well, I think there's something to recognize when somebody breaks a wall.

And Donald Trump and Peter Thiel broke a pretty big wall.

Pretty big wall.

Totally agree.

But it just reminded me of something that Peter.

once said to me where we were talking about diversity and he said he's like don't get me wrong i think diversity

um i'm i'm not gonna be verbatim quoting him here but he but he you know the gist was that he said diversity is is important it's just on the list of like 40 thing on the list of things to make a company successful it's like the 40th most important so it's not that we should pretend like diversity is irrelevant we just need to get our priorities straight and I think that

there's a lot of merit to thinking about things that way where and diversity Diversity really only counts when it affects your thinking.

If

I can't relate to being a gay man, okay, diversity is important because they'll have a different viewpoint.

You know what I mean?

But we're looking for exactly the same viewpoint, just in a different body.

Right.

It doesn't make sense.

It's like, you know, it's like if GM makes every car exactly the same, just puts different bodies on it.

Right.

It's a Ferrari.

No, it's not.

It's a, it's a GMC truck.

No, that's really an analogy.

And one thing that's kind of sad, scary, no, more so sad, but you think like the idea of groupthink is not that crazy because we're all humans.

We all want to, you know, there's, you know, fear and shame that kind of push us in these directions.

We want to be accepted members of society.

So it makes sense why we'd have this instinct.

But it's so weird to me that in Silicon Valley, where you had Steve Jobs and this sort of this think different ethos, this rebellion mentality, and now it's like everyone's rebellion, but I just imagine like 50 Fonzis.

And it's like, yeah, we're all rebels, the exact same kind of rebels.

And so it's like, really?

And that's what I found really fascinating with this book,

among many aspects of why I

was happy in retrospect that it did swerve the way it did, because I thought of Silicon Valley as this renegade place of people who thought differently.

And it's like, no, no, no, think differently, but as long as it's the same way.

And then, you know, if you're thinking about just taking a step back of like, you know,

America has always been

such a great place for innovation.

And

it's not a shock that a lot of these tech companies have been homegrown and thrived here.

But what does that mean for the future

of technology and our leadership or

of the younger people out there that

they're probably not going to be as likely to go to Silicon Valley to disrupt if you have to disrupt it in a certain way and not really disrupt.

But it also is,

you know, it's why cloning eventually is really bad after a while because there's no diversity at all.

And then it just dies out because it's just, it's not capable to adapt to anything else.

If you're not including everybody in that,

it's ripe for

disease.

Right.

Does that make make sense?

Yeah.

And correct me if I'm wrong, because it was a few years ago when you met with Facebook and with Mark.

But I did, I feel like I remember you saying,

like, there was some talk about, oh, there should be a certain number of conservative people on

the news council.

And then you were like, no, then we're just doing the exact thing we stand against.

And so I actually remember really respecting you saying that because that was a great point.

I got into a lot of trouble for it.

But I sat there, and I'll never forget, I was sitting right here with Mark, big long table and all these people and they started in on well we need to have quotas for people and i i looked down there and i looked at mark and i look back down and i'm like

no we don't need quotas no

conservatives finally we're on the side of quotas let's just let's just talk to each other right let's just get to know each other how about you not

not hire conservatives if they happen to be the right person.

Right.

You know what I mean?

How about you just recruit for the best person?

Right.

And that's where the book really did just become about discrimination.

And, like, I think I said earlier in this conversation, I told you before, like, you know, it's not that I think Palmer is an incredible human and he's going to go on to do successful things.

But I've had people say, oh, why should I feel bad for him?

He's a multi, multi-multi-millionaire.

He's got, you know, he now has another company.

And my point is not to make you feel bad for him.

It's to see that he just represents something that's happening in so many other ways.

But he's a visible example.

And he's an example that after, you know, 500 pages, you'll at least understand where he's coming from.

And how many people have had this happen to them on a much smaller scale that don't have

billions of dollars, you know, millions of dollars?

There's a lot.

There's a lot.

And more and more all the time.

Right.

And the different, and one of the key distinctions to me, anecdotally, with the discrimination against conservatives in Silicon Valley is that at least before this sort of became more of an issue and people realized it was wrong to discriminate, or at least that they shouldn't publicly say it, is a lot of people had no problem saying it.

Like it was just like, oh, well, we know the conservatives are the wrong ones.

Right.

Whereas they would never say that about someone of a different gender or different religion because they at least had the tact to

say the right thing.

But this was like, it was so, it was so beyond the pale to be conservative that they don't even have to, you know, put on the airs of the formalities of that that's a valid way of looking at the world.

So

when did you

because when this started happening with Donald Trump, let's just tell a little bit of the story.

Palmer is told to write

something that he didn't believe by Mark Zuckerberg.

Why don't we go there and then tell me where you came in where you're like, wait, what was your first inkling that you're thinking,

hold it, am I,

nah, this can't be it, right?

Yeah.

Well, so, okay, so I'll tell it from, I'll give some very brief background that in

September 22nd, 2016,

or I'll even just tell it from my perspective.

I get a bunch of text messages on September 22nd, 2016.

It's 9 o'clock for me, 6 o'clock Pacific.

And it's all these...

2 p.m.

Oh, p.m.

Okay.

So it's the evening of the 22nd.

A few days after Palmer had just turned, I think, 23,

or 24.

And

I get all these messages being like, oh, your book's in trouble because there's a Daily Beast article with the headline about Palmer.

The headline is Facebook billionaire secretly funding Trump's meme machine.

And

between that article and then the 50 other articles that spewed up over the next 24 hours from premier outlets, these weren't just like random blogs.

It was Business Insider.

Wired, The Verge, all these places.

They were saying that Palmer had been funding this troll army that was making memes and that everything you'd seen that was misogynistic, anti-Semitic, hateful, that Palmer was like ground, you know, patient zero, that he was like funding this thing, which was and

let's go back because it's my understanding of reading the book that he was actually just responding to something that the left was doing, putting up these billboards that were,

if Trump were so rich, how come he didn't buy this billboard or something like that.

And so he was just like, that's funny, and I'm on the other side, and we should do that too, right?

So it wasn't,

it wasn't a machine, and it wasn't they these were not bad things that that they were putting out, were they?

Um, I mean, I guess it's the eye of the beholder, but but the only he donated to an organization called Nimble America.

In the entirety of Nimble America's existence, which had been started only five days before this happened, all they ever did was put up one billboard in Pennsylvania with the three words, uh, too big to jail and a character of Hillary Clinton's face.

You know, like, like it was dead, you know, if you have a problem with that, then I have a problem with you because that is like as tame as

I mean when

you get.

Adams said, if Jefferson is elected president, your children's heads will be on pikes and blood will run through the streets.

So, I mean, tipping to jail is.

Yeah, so we're definitely not even in that territory.

And one of the interesting things,

and so this organization, Nimble America, was founded by.

an individual who I interviewed several times throughout the course of the book because I was really curious about his perspective.

You know, He was the one who started this.

And I don't,

it's a man, but he uses a pseudonym.

I provide a pseudonym for him in the book because he didn't want any professional consequences.

But I will say that after years of speaking with him and interviewing him for the book, I finally met him in person

a week and a half ago.

And I met him and his wife and his two kids.

And his wife is Filipino.

He's described in every article as a white supremacist.

And I guess maybe some white supremacists can have Filipino wives.

And that seems

unlikely to me but like right like

he's not a white supremacist I will bet my life on that

I am always shocked even with Palmer I'd have journalists the ones that were still willing to speak with me say

I remember one conversation that after two hours I just thought was the biggest waste of time where they say

so is Palmer a white supremacist and I say

I say, I can't tell you what it's in his heart, but as someone who knows him better than all the other world, absolutely not.

And there's no evidence to support this.

And then I would explain how here's what Nimble America actually was.

Here's why that's ridiculous.

Here's, you know, the first few people that Palmer hired at Oculus were an Indian guy, an Asian guy, a bisexual guy.

Like,

if you're looking for hate, Palmer's not the source, not the guy.

And then after two hours of this one particular conversation, the guy says, yeah, but what's the smoking gun?

And I was like, The smoking gun to disprove something that's not true?

No such thing exists.

And then he walked away skeptical and i was like wow i just spent two hours talking to this guy why he clearly was there's nothing i could say that could change his mind because he's certain of something even though he hasn't done the research and and that's i guess just goes to yeah how do you

that had to have

boggled your mind because you knew a lot of these people you respected the journalists and They knew you.

They knew you're not a dope.

You've got a good reputation.

and you're saying no no guys you got it all wrong how i mean it really sucks because this happened to me too it sucks when you find out the guys you hold up and go like oh

come on we're all great guys right all of a sudden you're like okay no i'm not with them that sucks right yeah i i

felt a little bit prepared for that because i saw what happened to palmer and i could you know i like i said anything that happened to me i knew would never be as bad as him so having this

wasting two hours of my time realizing that this approach was not persuasive to someone like him,

not the worst thing in the world.

Maybe that helped sharpen my knives for

information in the book.

Another thing that I thought about a lot was George Orwell's book, Animal Farm.

He wrote an original forward for the book that was not included, and I don't think it's still included.

That the whole book is about

essentially the dangers of totalitarianism and

right-wing nationalistic thinking.

But he talked in this forward about the dangers of liberal totalitarianism and how it's much more subtle and how

he had wanted to say some critical things about the left.

And he was a democratic socialist, I think we were a socialist, but he wanted to say some critical things in the same spirit that I sometimes do to help the cause.

people that publishers didn't want stuff published they basically were like that's just not done like we don't don't do those things.

And so there's this like, this chilling effect of, of, of, of, of people know

not to, um, like, they know to ignore me because I'm not towing the party line.

Um, and, and, and to your question about what, what it was like, you know, I mean, it's not fun.

You've been through it, I'm sure, much worse than I have.

But, um, but it also is sort of like affirming, like, like, okay, I am spending, you know, 80 hours a week week working on this book i'm doing something important here because i'm not gonna maybe change that guy's mind hopefully i will but i'm gonna change other people's minds or at least i'm gonna get the truth out there and and i think that some people will actually go through the metamorphosis that i did that actually saw

you know what it was yeah what it was saw through the lies in the media and and that it really is just a matter of like it's all so much people talk so much about empathy for others and empathy at least to me as a storyteller is like just understanding the perspective of someone else and so um

as long as they're not acting in bad faith i i'm generally you should i think you should be respectful of different opinions and and um and i and i do think that the book um which you've helped get into so many more people's hands um i the reviews are much better than my first book my first book had very good reviews but like you know

very successful yeah but but but but people seem to be loving it and and seem to be um the message is getting through.

And I think that's important.

How did you get so much access to emails that

should never have been seen?

Well,

I guess the good thing about startups is that there's usually multiple founders and they usually end up not on the...

not not end up being the best of friends and they all want to make sure that they get their stake of the credit

and you can

work amongst them to try to get what you need.

That, I guess, is not necessarily true of the stuff at the end of the book.

Like Mark,

I guess we didn't even get to it, but at the end, after these articles, inaccurate articles came out, Palmer wanted to write a statement saying that he supported Trump and these articles were wrong.

He was not allowed to post that statement.

Instead, he had to post a statement that was written by Mark saying that Palmer supported Gary Johnson, which was not true.

And

that was a whole other,

getting, finding finding out the truth on that was a whole other thing.

And I guess I failed to really answer your question, but what it was like for me, so I knew that Palmer at that point was a Trump supporter.

I found it hard to believe that he had given money to something hateful that seemed out of context.

Um, but you know, I got to be open to the possibility.

Um, so I, so I did my research, um, I talked to him about whatever he was allowed to talk to me about because there was, you know, I do have a good relationship with him, but for legal purposes and for at that point, keeping Zuckerberg secret purposes, there was a lot that he that he couldn't say.

But I do remember being very surprised that he would say he's a Gary Johnson supporter when he wasn't, because, because honesty is so important to Palmer.

Like, he, he really is like a principled person who'd rather, you know, go down fighting, you know, but standing on a principle than sort of like sell out a little bit and get his objective.

And then the other thing I noticed was that,

you know, because like you mentioned, I got so many emails in the course of writing this book.

And sometimes people would

give me, you know, to avoid a paper trail, they would take photos of the emails and send them to me.

And then I would transcribe them.

And so I had a lot of practice transcribing email chains that often Palmer was on.

And I hated the fact that he does such an annoying thing.

He uses two spaces after a period, which is an old school typewriter thing.

I had so much respect for you because I wrote you an email.

And you wrote back and you said, this is how I knew Palmer didn't write the email because you do the same thing.

I put two spaces between the paragraphs.

I think you use like three spaces sometimes.

But yeah, and I noticed that Palm, that the, that every Facebook post Palmer had ever done prior to that had two spaces after a period.

But this one that said things that didn't sound like they were coming for him was, had one space, which was a mistake that Zuckerberry and the Facebook team made.

That said, at that point, I didn't think like, aha, this is a whodunit, and it probably goes to the top.

I just assumed that Palmer like worked with the PR, you know, the PR team there and sort of gave them more of the autonomy.

I assumed that he was on board with this.

I didn't realize it was against his will and that it went all the way up to mark.

And then what ended up happening was

like flash forward a year or so later, and I'm working towards the end of the, you know, the latter half of the book, and I had these great relationships and contacts at Facebook and Oculus.

And I said to them that i need you know

palmer is no longer the company uh i i believe he's fired but you guys say he exited and won't say anything but either way i need to provide some explanation for what happened i i can't just say you know this guy who's been the main character for 400 pages oh now he's not here so uh i really impressed on them how important it was that i got um more more information and and that they seemed to, I would assume they went back and huddled and were like, okay, we got to give this guy a story.

And I got a story of how Palmer chose to leave.

And it was given to me, not just by one person, but by several people in a systematic way that was meant to definitely provide me with a false conclusion of what happened and give me confirmation.

You know, I'm a journalist, so I have one, two, three, four people saying the same thing.

And as I think I mentioned during the show, and Palmer couldn't talk to me about this.

So they had nowhere to go.

So even if if I thought stuff was fishy, I couldn't say, Palmer, this is fishy.

Is this wrong?

He's like, I'm sorry, I'm not allowed to talk to you about that.

So I was,

you know, my spidey sense was like, something's wrong here, but I didn't know how to

get to the truth.

So

as you know from reading the book, I have a

narrative nonfiction writing style in which I don't attribute the quotes to the person that provided it to me, but to the actual speaker.

You know, I want you to feel like you're in the room and in the minds of these people.

And so I had a feeling that they were taking advantage of my writing style and that it would never trace back to them and that they were essentially laundering this misinformation through me, these executives at Oculus and Facebook that were telling me the same story that I believed was not complete or at least or might be false.

And so

I wrote,

I guess you could call it like a fake chapter,

a chapter that was just a straight up Q ⁇ A with one of these executives.

And I told them, look, it was after Ted Cruz had asked Zuckerberg

during the hearings about Cambridge Analytica stuff.

He asked about Palmer and if Palmer was fired for political reasons.

And Mark said, no, that had nothing to do with it.

And I said to these people that, you know, now there's like widespread speculation that politics has something to do with it.

You guys have all told me that it had nothing to do with it.

And I believe you, of course, but I don't, and I, and I don't want,

this is a really important important topic, so I don't want what's in the book to be Blake Harris' author's opinion.

I want it to be straight from the horse's mouth.

So, I'm going to do six chapters that are just QAs with executives.

Oh, my gosh.

And I really,

and, and so, thank you.

I was pretty proud of that.

And, and so I sent that to them.

And then immediately they got a call like, uh, or, you know, an email, like, can you, can you jump on the phone?

We need to talk.

And that led to

within a matter of days, they told everyone at Facebook and Oculus to stop speaking with with me.

So that alone, of course, didn't confirm that my hunch was correct, but it did give me

a strong sense that I might be.

And it gave me the ammunition to go to a lot of people that were at Oculus and Facebook who felt that Palmer had been wronged, but hadn't been willing to speak with me or hadn't been willing to get me documents because they were fearful of losing their job.

But once I said, like, look, here's the lie, or here's the information I'm being told that I think is a lie.

This is what's going to be in the book unless you guys help me.

And they really did step up to the plate.

And I always appreciated that it was people,

Trump supporters, and Hillary supporters.

Like, people were volunteering this information to me, not because they were trying to help the team, but because they felt that what had happened to Palmer was wrong.

And after seeing what they got me, I completely agreed.

And I had trouble believing that it really, that Mark personally wrote the statement.

I mean,

like,

how'd you verify that?

Trying to make sure I protect people.

Anyway, I can say that there was an email that came from, there was an email that came from

the general counsel at Facebook that went to Palmer's attorneys that said, here's the statement.

Mark personally wrote this.

Wow.

Or it was, I guess, to be specific, it said it was drafted by Mark himself.

So

in case that might mean something different, but like, and I was just like, oh, my God,

I couldn't believe that.

I couldn't, one, couldn't believe that Mark would really do that, that he would micromanage this and force an employee to lie.

I also couldn't believe that he really had such a problem with the truth.

And then I also just couldn't believe that he was so stupid or his lawyer was so stupid to put it in writing.

Like, if you guys are going to be, uh, you know, your digital mafiosas, at least at least be

good, yeah, at least be good.

So

he loses his job,

He loses his baby, Oculus.

What's the future of Oculus?

Let's start there.

What's

not really?

It's hard to even

agree or not with the Facebook is, you know, like we see all these scandals with Facebook come out, but at the same time, they've had pretty good earnings reports and their stock has rebounded.

So

I can,

this is speculation, like not coming from sources, but I can also just see Mark and Cheryl and the leadership team there being like, who cares?

Yeah, we get some bad ink, but like, it's not affecting our bottom line.

Let's just keep doing the stuff we've been doing.

What's to stop them?

Why would Mark Kuzuckerberg

be repeatedly asking now for regulation?

I think it's because, I mean, he's a smart guy.

He sees the writing on the wall.

There has to be some

form of

inter,

or doesn't have to be.

I think that he sees that it's very likely that there's going to be some form of

intervention or regulations.

Somebody's going to step in on a governmental level.

And

one, it's good for him to be out front in that.

And more importantly, all those things that he asked,

you know, like

all the things that he asked are going to help Facebook and Google and hurt small competitors because it's the small competitors that aren't going to be able to comply with this stuff or that aren't going to be able to keep it.

It's exactly what FDR did with the big three automakers that put everybody out of business because he went to the big three and said, what do we need?

What do we need?

What do you need?

Let's come up with some regulations.

And they did, and they came up with everything that they could do that the small guy couldn't and put them all out of business.

Didn't know that.

I'm going to look more into that because it sounds exactly like like that.

It is.

It is.

Look at the number of cars, you know, Auburn's.

Look at the cars that were made up until the big three automakers got together.

Same thing with BF Goodrich and Goodyear Tires.

They put great tire companies, a great tire company, I think, in New Jersey out of business that had a cheaper tire and a better tire,

but because of the new regulations, they were out.

Which brings me to kind of a

frightening scenario that I want to run by you.

Google, Facebook, Apple,

Amazon, they have more information on us than

we would have ever dreamt that we would just hand over.

I remember saying, you know,

government asked for my fingerprint.

I'm not giving my fingerprint.

They're not fingerprinting people, but I'll give it to Apple.

I'll stand there and give my face, you know, my facial recognition.

What were we thinking?

Well, it's crazy.

Okay.

So

now when regulation comes in, they can come in and they can, they're going to be the experts that Washington calls.

Washington knows they need them because it's just such a powerful tool.

Right.

Amazon and everybody else knows they need Washington.

So they start to partner.

You're looking at a very different America.

When you have,

it is every,

it's everything I always made fun of of liberals.

I used to be like, can you stop with the corporation?

You know, the dystopian, you know, 2045, everyone works for the corporation.

You're like, oh, shut up.

It's what's happening.

It's what's happening.

And

Facebook.

Doesn't have to worry about the Bill of Rights.

Amazon doesn't have to worry about it.

Google doesn't have to worry about it because the bill of rights apply to the government right and if they decide to ban you and you can't buy products you can't speak you can't do all the things that china is currently doing but it's just being done by a corporation right

no it's it's a good point it's a good concern uh

one of my favorite television shows of all time is it's not a super popular one but it's called psych and it's about a psychic detective who's on the usa network and and there were police consultants who were allegedly psychic and I always just thought it was interesting because you know the police has certain rules and protocols they have to follow but consultants it's a you know

oh they decided to walk into that apartment and right obtain some stuff and that's like exactly the scenario you're describing where the US government hopefully they're following the the rules and guidelines but you know there's a mutually beneficial relationship to be had between them and the big tech companies so you know maybe backs are getting scratched maybe maybe they're they're getting what they what they need um and so i think mark is aware aware of that.

That's part of the reason also

that he wrote that op-ed in the Washington Post asking for regulation.

And then the other reason, too, is it's just asking other people to do your job.

They're banning people.

Facebook has

not shown themselves to be.

you know, caring that much about principles.

They're more reactive.

I mean, even the people they ban, it's not like those are the people saying the worst things.

They're just easy targets.

And so

know, people on Twitter always say, Oh, Jack, how are you letting this happen?

or oh Mark, why are you letting this happen?

How great would it be for Mark and Jack?

If they're like, Look, it's not us, it's the government.

Those are the bad guys.

We're the good guys here.

And that gets also to the accountability issue, which is a huge part of this and a huge part of my concern about the future of Silicon Valley.

And the other thing I think is interesting is like, you're, you know, like you said, like, oh, the year is 2045, and everyone works for the corporation.

Why would they hire us?

They'll have robots.

Like, I think about, about, you're talking about the big three automakers.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I imagine that their workforce was in the hundreds of thousands

at the heyday, and they were some of the biggest companies in the United States.

And now you have Google and Facebook, some of the biggest companies in the United States, their workforce is so small.

That's part of the answer of where the jobs are going.

It's that there's not as many jobs.

That makes it, to me, that has made it, I've talked about this for years, that that makes the collusion between tech and government so huge because at one point, I mean, tech has a goal, and I think it's a great goal, 100% unemployment.

Nobody has to work, you know?

Okay.

But that's not the goal of politicians.

Their goal is 3.6 or, you know, 0%

unemployed.

So they're going the opposite direction.

At some point, somebody's going to realize those jobs aren't coming back.

Right.

Okay.

When that happens, the politician is always the weakest in the chain, and he's going to need a bad guy.

And he'll say, well, it's those people in Silicon Valley and their evil AI or AGI and they're building these robots.

They're putting you out of work.

They're not going to be waiting for pitchforks.

These people know what they're doing.

They know what these guys will do.

They'll come together.

They have to to protect each other.

And

it leaves a lot of people out.

You know,

it's corporate socialism.

They get wealthy and they do everything else while we get

scraps.

I'm not an avid reader of dystopian fiction, but I do feel like the sense I get from stuff nowadays is that there is this vision of corporate socialism where

people associate more with being a citizen of Google than they do of being a citizen of New York or the United States.

Or the human race.

Right, or the human race.

And, and, and, you know, like that,

like, that's where stuff the fact, like, the fact that Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency, which of, you know, cryptocurrency alone is a fine thing.

It's a tool, like all technology.

But, like,

what are they, what is it, what's their plan here?

What?

And, and it does feel like they are

thinking of themselves as, as, as, as a government.

And maybe, and that might be good or bad, but it bears repeating your point that they're not bound by the same rules as action by the officials.

Right.

They can silence anyone they want.

And they have, you know, like just, they did a recent wave of bans a week or so ago.

And,

you know, like Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones, again, I guess.

Like, Laura Levin.

What was really frightening is they went a step further.

They said, if you support them,

if you're a supporter and you are actively defending them, you also could lose your status on Facebook.

Right.

And that gets closer to my fear.

I mean,

it would take a lot for me to be persuaded that deplatforming is a good strategy.

It's a horrible strategy.

Alex Jones,

maniac, but he is entitled to speak his truth.

Let me use this.

Because Alex Jones, Alex Jones actually claimed in 2000, I don't know, four or five, that I was a CIA operative

that was put into the media to cover up 9-11.

Okay.

So, and don't ask me any questions on that or I'll have to kill you.

So, I have no love for Alex Jones.

The same thing with Louis Farrakhan.

But Louis Farrakhan has been around my entire life, and he's been saying crazy things.

Right.

And I'd like to hear those crazy things because he's saying them to a lot of people.

Right.

You know, I want to know what he's saying.

Same thing with Alex Jones.

I don't agree with it.

I think it's dangerous, but I want to know what he's saying to people and know that he's got an audience.

You just make these people disappear.

We have no idea.

And by the way, it's my responsibility to check it out or to not listen to those things i don't like isn't it right yeah i mean it i would be more sympathetic to facebook taking actions if it was like you know you cultivated the glenn beck page on facebook and you're being bombarded with people who you don't want in there who are like making it your problem you know like it's not like they can there's you know like you have to confront an alex jones if he's posting on your page i still don't know what the solution is but But what I find interesting is that they are doing this,

you know, removing these hateful citizens, you know, in the name of like trying to

reduce extremism.

That's, you know, like reduce hate, reduce extremism.

And

reading,

you know, like the manifestos of the New Zealand shooter and some of these recent attacks, like at the synagogue in San Diego, I know we're not supposed to read the manifesto because it's supposed to pretend like it doesn't exist, but like, I find that I'm curious

where do they think they're coming from?

And

paraphrasing here, but they think that

they have mentalities somewhat similar to Alex Jones, where they feel like the mainstream media is hiding things from them and that there's a conspiracy against people like them.

And so

is removing Alex Jones or Milo going to make them...

Yeah, isn't that going to radicalize them even more?

It's like, you know, there's this

great movie out, and I don't know how close it is because I don't follow England enough.

But Benedict Cumberbunch, Cumberbatch, Cumberbun, whatever his name is.

They're all acceptable.

They're all acceptable.

The handsome Sherlock Holmes guy.

I actually really love him as an actor.

But he's in it.

And it's called Brexit.

And I saw him and I was like,

they're going to make the Brexit people all look like racists.

And I watched it.

And they did, for me, at least as an American overseas watching it, I think they did a really good job.

They showed that pocket of people that were racist.

And that was one group.

And then there was this other group that just felt like, hey, nobody's listening to me.

Nobody's talking to me.

Nobody's, they're calling me this and I'm not that.

You know what I mean?

This is happening.

There are identitarians out there who are very dangerous, but there are also people who are like, you know what?

I'm Swedish and I'm okay with that.

I'm not saying

Sweden is the greatest of all time.

It's just my country and I'm not a racist for flying my Swedish flag.

You know what I mean?

There are tons of people on both sides of the aisle that feel that.

And the example now with Brexit is, oh, maybe we should have another referendum.

Maybe we should have another vote.

What?

Because you didn't like the first one?

That's not the way it works.

And we're doing the same kind of thing.

We're creating

a much bigger problem.

I was against Donald Trump and I couldn't understand.

I could not understand my audience.

I was so angry with my audience.

And I've always said I loved my audience because I do.

They're some of the best.

I love them a lot too.

Yeah, I know.

Thank you, audience.

Yeah, they're great people.

They're great people.

I couldn't understand when they went for Donald Trump because I was so blind on what I saw in Donald Trump.

And I was so angry with him.

And it took me about six months after the election before I realized

You don't actually love your audience.

You say you do, but you don't.

Because if you loved your audience, you would have said to them,

this isn't like you.

What the hell is happening in your life?

Something big must be happening in your life.

And when I got on the air and I said that to them, I found out they're scared to death about what's happening to their country.

They're terrified about what's happening in their country.

And a lot of the stuff they're worried about are the same things that many Democrats.

I'm not talking about politicians.

I'm talking about Democrats who live in our communities.

They're afraid of the same kinds of things and they don't know what to do and no one's listening to them.

So when somebody steps up and says, I'm just like you,

even if he's not,

and he's very much not, or if you're that way.

No, you're totally right.

And I'm glad I'll check out the Brexit movie, not just because I like Benedict Cummerbatch, but I'm glad that they didn't just paint it in broad strokes of, oh, if you're too Brexit, you're a racist.

Because to your point, there are people like that

fringe small percentage.

But like,

I did the same thing.

I was devastated the night that Trump won the election,

but I also took it as I had hoped everyone would and said, okay, like my team didn't win.

What happened here?

Because I don't think that half the country are idiots.

Like,

what are they seeing that I'm not seeing?

What are they caring about that I'm not caring about?

And I remember like I reached out to some people on Twitter who were like,

you know, all you Democrats, you think I'm a racist because I care about this.

And I was like, hey, I don't think you're racist.

You know, I'm sorry if I felt you're like,

if I come across that way.

And, and, and I remember telling my friend John, and I said, you know, I showed him some of these conversations I had.

And I was like, there's a lot here that we're not getting in the media that actually is very reasonable and certainly not

with malice.

Like, we, what is happening here?

And he said, Oh, wow, you're doing the thing that we all said we were going to do, which is reach across to the other side and actually talk to them.

Whereas everyone else said that maybe for a brief while, and then they just doubled down on collusion, on we're smarter than them, they shouldn't have a vote anyway, or what do they know?

And and

that's that's probably been one of the sadder things these past few years.

I can't, I can't,

I've asked this of both sides.

Imagine a world where the next election, your side, whichever side it is, wins everything.

You've got the House, you have the Senate,

you have the White House, you pack the court with 40 new judges that rule exactly the way you want.

50% of the country is not going to want to live that way.

What's your plan?

That's a great, great question.

Great point.

Does both sides diametrically opposed?

Well,

you're going to have to become a totalitarian and you're going to have to, you're going to have to teach those people.

Or you're going to have to say, you know what, let's go back to the Constitution because we hold these things to be self-evident over here and you guys work it out.

I kind of feel like my initial answer, which is kind of like a joke answer, is like a reverse civil war.

I feel like so many of my fellow liberals are like, well, then we don't don't want you.

Like start your own country where it's like, no, you know, we fought a war hundreds,

75 years ago to unite the country, to stay united, you know, united we stand, divide, we fall.

But now it's like, no, if you're not on board with this idea, we don't want you.

It doesn't.

It's antithetical to everything the United States is supposed to be.

I mean, we are supposed to be united states.

I don't really care what California does.

I really don't.

I don't want to live there.

I've wanted to live in California my whole life.

But as a business person, I'm not living in California.

Okay.

It'll bankrupt me to live in California.

I don't want anything to do with it.

So I don't care.

San Francisco, poop in the streets all you want.

I think you're wrecking a good city, but go ahead.

Somebody else wants to carry, you know, open carry firearms down the street.

If that's what you want to do, go ahead.

I may or may not want to live there either.

But that's for each person to decide.

It's fascinating to me that Vermont,

very little news.

2011, you know what they did?

They started their own state universal health care.

Okay.

A state-run universal health care.

Did everything that they wanted the government to do.

They did it.

You know what happened?

2014?

Out of money.

Doesn't work.

Had to increase taxes, I think, by 20 or 30%.

The governor's like, that's crazy.

We can't do it.

So they stopped.

Okay.

The reason why we're asking the federal government to do things is for one reason.

Why these states, California has a right to do it, do it.

These states don't have the right to do one thing the federal government does, and that's guns.

No.

Print money.

Oh,

I thought it was the Second Amendment stuff because, you know, like they, I'm sure California would like to ban

guns, but that's at least right.

But what I'm saying is,

you can do any program you want.

We should have 50 different laboratories.

And it's in Texas.

If I saw something that was working, if Vermont could have made a go of that and it actually worked and it gave good health care and it was cheaper and it wasn't degrading the health care, I'd be in.

I'd be in.

Yeah, I actually wanted to,

you're you're so knowledgeable about the history of the country, and this is a very broad question.

So, but just a curse understanding of, like, I remember growing up and seeing that movie, The Warriors, like, the Warriors come out and play, and you got all these different gangs in the New York, like the baseball furies.

And I remember thinking like, oh, that's kind of like the United States.

You got, like, everyone's doing their own thing, and it works for them.

When did people start so aggressively looking for a federal solution to saying, like, let that state do it?

And if it works, it works.

If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Also, it's not my problem.

Like, I don't need to get involved in this.

It started with Theodore Roosevelt.

It got really bad with Woodrow Wilson, the worst president ever.

He was massively racist, horrible, horrible individual.

And then it kind of reversed itself for a little period of time with Calvin Coolidge, who I think is one of the best presidents of the 20th century.

And I think it was,

I think it was Coolidge, no,

it was Hoover that came in and there was

a big

storm that had happened and wiped out some part of some southern state.

I don't remember what it was.

And so the federal government, for the first time, sent in aid.

And the trucks came and the people in the town actually stood at the town road with shotguns and said, turn your federal trucks away.

We don't want your help.

Wow.

Theodore Roosevelt, I have up in the vault in the library,

I have a promotional piece from Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, and it's about this big, and it's a teddy bear, okay?

And it has bullseyes all over it, and it was made for kids.

And the reason why it was made for kids is he was trying to start a campaign to put a shooting range in every elementary school.

Do you know why America rejected it?

This is how much we've changed.

Cost too much?

What?

They said,

don't you dare tell us what we're supposed to do in our schools.

So we've fundamentally changed.

That's why we had the Bill of Rights and

FDR, Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama even talked about it.

Changing the Bill of Rights to

a document of positive liberties instead of negative liberties.

The Bill of Rights in the Constitution is meant to be the state's best friend, the locals' best friend.

The government cannot ever do these things.

You want to do them?

Great.

The federal government can never do these things.

Okay.

We've tried with FDR and his

New Deal, he tried to flip this and say, here's what the government must do.

That changes us fundamentally.

Right.

And that is what is forcing us to live a certain way.

It's like, I hate, do you travel much?

No, I'm sort of a reckless writer.

I traveled a lot in the 80s overseas, and then I did again here in the last 10 years.

The difference is crazy.

I don't like it.

I mean, you go to Rome, you might as well go to Epcot.

Because

it's the Ann Taylor.

And oh, look, there's the gap.

It's no longer Rome.

You go to our towns now, all across America, same mall, same shop, same everything.

We're all alike.

We've erased the uniqueness of

each individual state and everything

is just the same.

Right.

We weren't meant to be that way.

I mean, that's like a whole other bag of worms.

It's tough because that's...

That's like

the, like you see with Facebook and Google and Amazon.

It's like the monop

end up being monopolies.

Like, you know, I feel like 10 years from now, you'll go to Rome and say, like, oh, like, there was no Ed Taylor.

There was just like little kiosks who buy stuff on Amazon.

Right.

Like, that's like where it's headed.

But you know what?

Amazon has given us a bigger, Etsy has given us a bigger

market to look at.

I want to buy real cricket bats.

I don't know where I would have bought those before, but I can, you know?

So it's given us that wide diversity,

which is really good.

But when you fold it into the government and we all have to have the same things,

what's right in Amarillo, you know, New Mexico is not necessarily what's right for Seattle, Washington.

I feel like it's like people who didn't have siblings or something.

Like, like, you know, I have a younger brother and when I was a kid, you know, anytime he got something, I wanted it.

Or, you know, like, I judged myself about him.

And then I grew up, and I assumed most people were just like, I just hope he has what's best for him.

It's not going to be the same as me.

I don't really care.

Like, as long as it's good for him, I don't, it's not my business.

That's not,

I guess, like,

I guess probably is more very tribal, like the white people.

It's a victory to impose that will

to feel like you're taking action.

I don't, because I don't actually know why people would care so much.

I don't think they do.

I think we've been pushed into tribes so hard that we feel under attack.

And so anything outside of our tribe is an enemy when that's not true.

I don't, I don't care what you do.

I mean, I was, I was painted as a

anti-gay marriage guy for I don't know how long.

Pendillette came onto my show with Fox, tried to trap me, and he was like, so, but why do you have a problem with gay marriage and I'm like I don't know

what I don't I haven't had a problem with ever with gay marriage I'm I'm a libertarian I believe

nobody has a right to tell me who I can marry and I don't need a license or a blood test thank you very much you know uh Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson for giving us those kinds of things thank you to reconstruction for giving us the marriage license so we don't marry the wrong race abraham lincoln didn't have a marriage license license from the state.

George Washington didn't have one.

Why do I need one?

I don't need one.

Now I can live side by side with everybody.

I'm fine.

Just be cool, do your thing, and I'll do my thing.

And can we just all get along?

Yeah.

I suggested to a friend the other day that he should start the Rodney King Alliance just to try to get more people to get along.

That was also my big takeaway too from

going from feeling dispirited by the election results to trying to feel inspired and bettering myself and just thinking like we are all in this together i like

i i want the best for this president that i didn't believe in i i definitely not rooting against him i want you guys to be happy we all win if if he wins it and same with barack obama on the big issues on the big issues

and and and i also

do believe that more

that we're just really hearing from the more vocal minorities not

ethnically minorities but just like we're hearing from the loud vocal minorities and and i think that there is like 60 to 80 percent of people more so in the middle that are like yeah let's actually get along i i don't want to fight with you but when the journalists on both sides especially on the left are in that 10 fringe extremist

we need to control everything it needs to be this if it's wrong if it's not way like that is really

slanting the way that that people are perceiving reality are you hopeful for the future of that this will this a phase we're going through

um

i think i'm a hopeful person in general so that's sort of a bias that i have and then i'm hopeful because

i've yet to encounter a situation and maybe i just haven't had many where i actually talk to someone who should be my enemy whether it's you or whether it's the guy who founded Nimble America.

And when I actually talk to you or him or any of these people, there's so much common ground.

And we want 95% of the same thing.

And that, and importantly, they are not or you are not what I had in my head believing that you were.

And then the other thing that has me hopeful is whether it's people reading this book or just me talking to them about what happened and explaining it.

Whenever someone actually is willing to give their attention span to have the conversation,

they are persuaded.

It is like a tribal instinct to hate this person or to like this person.

But if you actually say, hey, why do you hate that person or why do you like that person?

One-on-one, most people want to say, yeah, I guess you're right.

If the other side did that, I'd be mad too.

I think that people, I still believe in humans, I guess.

So we just need to figure out, easier said than done, way to get our better angels and to actually want to have that solidarity.

Because there are people out there that want to blow up the system, that want, that think that

fighting and arguing is

emotionally arguing, not debating, is the solution because the other side just needs to be defeated.

Last topic.

When I first had you on the air, your book was at 33,000.

And I don't think I knew this until you were on the air, that you just

couldn't get anybody in the mainstream media to talk to you about this book.

And you are an accomplished author.

I mean, you have one of

the best books of the last decade out, and it's being made into a TV show or movie.

Well, that's understandable.

Yeah, so I wrote this book about Sega Nintendo called Console Wars that is the all-time best-selling video game book.

And it's a small field, which is part of why I wrote the book and part of why people really liked it.

And it's being made into originally a movie, now a TV show with Seth Rogan and Jordan Voight Roberts is directing.

So like, you know, on paper, I was everything that a gaming journalist should like.

Like, you know, someone who actually got this to a mainstream audience, someone who's spent years doing the work.

Like, I actually did the work.

And I was very well liked.

I was, you know, named

one of the 50 most admirable gaming people from one of the

big magazines in 2014 when my book came out.

Yeah.

It didn't happen.

Yeah, 33,000.

The book was selling okay at first few weeks and then oblivion until you changed my career.

So went to bathroom.

So has it changed

from them now that it came back up?

Did you find anybody else that

were willing to take a look at it?

And that's an excellent question because the book, you know,

we went from 33,000 to number two on Amazon of every book.

I would send this to my friends, and they'd be like, oh, number two in what category?

I'm like, the category of every book in the U.S., like Catcher of the Rye, head of the fountainhead, head of, you know, Michelle Obama's book for a short while.

And it was a, you know, a national bestseller, USA Today bestseller.

And And

the week after it was named a bestseller, I put together an email

working with the publicist at HarperCollins who published the book.

And

I gave her the names of like 150 journalists in tech in the gaming world who were

my friends or who, you know, these were like personal emails, like people who I...

had had conversations with and said,

you know, let's let's make another effort to reach out to them.

Can you send them an email

basically saying that this book is a bestseller now?

It's the highest ranked a video game book has ever been.

And

say, you know, and I think she wrote something like, you know, what it's been getting headlines, you know, it's been getting attention because of the political discrimination aspect.

But in addition to that, there's also topics like,

you know,

the game company Epic just launched a store and there was some internal documents from him talking to Zuckerberg.

And so there's like, there was like five other topics that are super timely related to gaming and tech.

And I was like, oh, I have an even better idea.

Since Facebook is obviously the most interesting topic, I said, you know, a source had given me a cell phone recorded video of the day that Mark came to Oculus when they were being acquired for $3 billion.

And he gives a speech, which is the prologue to the book, but the actual video.

And I said, I've never shared this with anyone.

Why don't I put that up on Vimeo and we'll include a link.

And if reporters are not going to report this, then we have no hope because this is like a video no one's ever seen.

Of Zuckerberg.

Of Zuckerberg.

And Palmer even joked to me after I told him I sent this email because he we were curious, are the journalists going to finally acknowledge my book?

And Palmer made the point that a couple of weeks earlier, all these same outlets had been reporting on what was in Mark Zuckerberg's garbage.

And so Palmer said, if they don't report on this video, let alone the book, then they would literally rather report on what's in Mark's garbage than any of

the stuff that

I spent years researching.

And still,

not a single person

reported on it.

And I should say, that is the mainstream tech and gaming press.

Coming on your show and the success of the book

reached, you know,

you have such a devoted group of listeners and so many of them wrote nice letters to me.

So many of them bought this book and supported the book and liked the the book.

And it also led to other conservative pundits, hosts having me on their show.

So they've been really accommodating.

And there's been people here and there

that have had me on.

I had a good conversation with the guy, David Kurt.

No.

Hopefully David Rubin.

James O'Keefe mentioned the book on his show the other day.

And I'm hoping to speak with Dave because Dave actually.

I'll call Dave for you.

Dave's a good friend.

Thank you.

Dave's, you know, for me, I definitely still consider myself a liberal.

And I always think it's weird where when you question that, people, you know, like Dave's called right or alt-right, even though he, no, he's a gay guy.

Like,

and

then, you know, same thing with Joe Rogan and Sam Harris and all these people.

But I remember, like, you know, this has been sort of a journey for me of becoming more tolerant and sort of understanding what it means to be liberal, conservative.

And Dave's video, Why I Left the Left, was really eye-opening for me.

It did talk about the Martin Luther King Jr.

quote that I think about a lot.

And that was a very persuasive video.

And there's a lot of people on the left now who feel like Dave or like myself.

And

I think we can do better than that.

But anyway, yeah.

Oh, I was going to say that I was on this Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, which

we had a good conversation.

And I thought it was funny that

the podcast is actually produced by Wired, though, like they have no involvement.

But so they ended up putting it up on their webpage.

And I was like, oh, finally, I got on Wired after they refused to have me on.

Anyway, I kind of snuck on there.

And during the conversation, we talked about how Wired wouldn't have me on.

But yeah, and I just wanted to take another moment to thank your listeners.

They're the best.

They are the best.

They are the best.

Blake, thank you.

Thank you so much, Glenn.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.