A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - The Tech Bro-ligarchy

00:00:00.000 It really feels like we let the lab rat who designed a hot or not website to rank his

00:00:05.600 female students based on attractiveness. I don't know, it feels like it got out of the meth lab. 0.64

00:00:14.980 Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity. I'm Matt Bernstein. I'm so happy that you're here.

00:00:22.100 And before we start this episode, I would like to let you know with full transparency that despite

00:00:28.740 Despite spending thousands of hours creating content and podcasts about how dangerous the right and their consolidation of power is, I, too, attended Donald Trump's inauguration on Monday.

00:00:42.140 And some of you might say that I'm a sellout.

00:00:44.700 Some of you might say that I'm a spineless hack who will do anything to stay in the good graces of power.

00:00:50.700 Were the snacks good?

00:00:52.020 That was...

00:00:53.020 donald trump has spent the better part of the last decade campaigning as a populist

00:01:01.580 he's for the common folk the farmer the small business owner the downtrodden among us but his

00:01:09.260 inauguration on monday was attended almost exclusively by billionaires seated physically

00:01:15.580 closer to him than many actual politicians were the following mark zuckerberg the ceo of meta

00:01:22.120 you know, Facebook and Instagram, Elon Musk of Twitter. I'm still calling it Twitter on this

00:01:28.380 podcast. It's a grudge that I hold. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Shao Chu of TikTok, Sundar Pichai of

00:01:36.200 Google, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the chat GBT guy, Tim Cook of Apple. So many people, myself included,

00:01:45.160 feel so overwhelmed right now by the rapid deterioration of federal institutions and

00:01:52.000 what feels like the rapid wedding of the government, specifically the Trump administration

00:01:57.180 and the tech industry. And I think most of us have questions like, what does this mean

00:02:01.840 for the communication platforms we all rely on every day? What can we do? I want this

00:02:07.380 episode to hopefully simplify the rise of the tech oligarchy for those of us who are

00:02:12.960 confused and feel like everything is getting a little fucking out of control to create at least

00:02:18.200 you know an hour of stillness and understanding and hopefully maybe a path forward at least for 0.59

00:02:25.600 now joining us today to help us accomplish that is someone who has i imagine spent hundreds if

00:02:32.420 not thousands of hours in the weeds of these billionaires their politics their influence on

00:02:38.180 all of our lives, whether we'd like to acknowledge it or not. Ed Angueso, a tech journalist is here

00:02:44.300 on a bit fruity. Ed, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me on. How are you feeling right now

00:02:50.920 about everything? Because I honestly, I think we can maybe start this episode by just acknowledging

00:02:57.000 like, it's not great lately. No, it's not. I think some parts of it are to be expected, right?

00:03:03.760 there has been a continual slide to the right in this country for a long time and we are seeing

00:03:10.260 some of the more enthusiastic elements come out but you know i didn't expect like a nazi salute

00:03:15.820 at the inauguration yeah i didn't expect all of this to come to a head so quickly speaking of the

00:03:22.100 nazi salute i saw are you familiar with uh brianna woo yes brianna woo is like a trans woman who was

00:03:30.960 really awfully victimized by gamer gate and who has in more recent years become sort of like a 1.00

00:03:36.320 right wing mouthpiece yeah i'm saying you know a warrior for justice well right that's what she

00:03:42.360 would say right right she is just every day wakes up and it's like i need to guarantee my float on

00:03:49.040 the bad take parade and yesterday she she tweeted regarding the elon musk nazi salute

00:03:57.620 actually i'm just gonna read it yeah i'm gonna read it i'm excited to hear what it is this is

00:04:03.440 my favorite brianna woo tweet of all time she wrote you know what other people can decide if

00:04:09.100 it's a nazi salute i'm not getting involved that was her take you know what maybe yeah why not you

00:04:19.420 know i've seen everything from you know who amongst us doesn't get awkward yeah and nervous

00:04:25.220 and a little shy and throw up a salute yeah yeah yes i saw lots of autistic people being like

00:04:33.340 hi i am autistic and my autism does not make me a nazi yeah like i think it's safe to say the guy

00:04:40.580 who's turned twitter into a safe space for nazis threw up the salute right it's just it's very

00:04:48.460 unambiguous looking at it one taker theory i saw in it that i really liked was that there's a lot

00:04:53.900 of right-wingers who do this but try to do it subtly and they try to do it in the midst of 0.92

00:05:00.260 there's like a clear intentional action and then they obscure it and that he's just too fucking

00:05:05.620 awkward to actually pull that off and so he got too excited at the prospect of controlling people

00:05:11.240 with like a subtle salute and just did it that makes sense to me one take that i saw about the

00:05:16.820 nazi salute that also made a lot of sense to me was that what people are so intensely pushing back

00:05:22.920 on is not necessarily what they saw which i think is like a very unambiguous nazi salute twice

00:05:30.000 but what it means for the movement that they have committed themselves to and people people not

00:05:36.220 wanting to acknowledge like what that means about what they're a part of and what they've been

00:05:40.700 fighting for and what they voted for yeah people not wanting to realize they're the bad guy i love

00:05:45.240 this brianna woo tweet other people can decide if it's a nazi salute i'm not getting involved

00:05:50.140 To be honest, I wish she would commit to this attitude on more issues.

00:05:55.000 Yeah.

00:05:55.800 Listen.

00:05:56.560 Brianna, if you're listening to this, continue to not get involved.

00:05:59.980 We love that.

00:06:02.420 It's great.

00:06:04.120 So I wanted to start this episode with sort of a historical anecdote and see how you feel about it.

00:06:12.460 Do you know about the Nazi radio?

00:06:14.080 Yes.

00:06:14.560 During World War II?

00:06:15.480 Yeah. In the Weimar Republic in Germany, which was the period in Germany before Hitler rose to power, Germans just didn't really have personal radios unless they were really rich. Germany was behind on the technology. And so personal radios were too expensive. And the only people who had them were rich people. 0.72

00:06:35.040 And then in the beginning of Hitler's rise to power, the German government collaborated with German radio manufacturers to develop a radio that was half the price of all the other radios available in Germany. And the Nazi propaganda ministry promoted the fuck out of these things. And within a year, it became the top selling radio in Germany. 0.57

00:06:57.360 Everyone had it. The farmers could afford it. People in rural areas could afford it. And they used this radio to push out Nazi propaganda. And it was a hugely successful tool for them. That just felt like a timely anecdote.

00:07:11.640 You know, I think a lot of scholars, at least of right wing movements, talk a bit about how like, yeah, the creation of mass media, mass culture has lent itself or contributed to the rise of some of these more jingoistic movements and tendencies.

00:07:27.380 And I feel that on some level, it makes sense that communication platforms and technologies that we have today lend themselves to amplification of right-wingers, in part because these platforms, right, they want to be as ubiquitous as possible so that they can maximize advertising revenue.

00:07:45.540 And one way to do that is to remove a lot of the limitations on what kind of content is on them. And the people who are going to do that are not necessarily liberals, you know, and Democrats, right? It's going to be the right wing nuts who also have funny ideas about people's skulls and, you know, who should be allowed to be in public and who should have power in the country or be able to vote or have political power, right?

00:08:09.540 So I talk a lot on this podcast in general.

00:08:13.340 It's probably the most common theme is grifters.

00:08:17.240 Grifting basically the idea of following the money wherever that takes you, even and especially

00:08:24.760 when that includes espousing beliefs that aren't authentic to your own.

00:08:29.420 As I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about people like Mark Zuckerberg and

00:08:34.800 elon musk and now xiao chu of tiktok i'm looking at all of their histories their relationships

00:08:41.600 with donald trump their relationships with politics in general their relationships with

00:08:45.540 the public and to me it just feels like one big grift circus and it feels like that they're just

00:08:53.000 grifting all the way to kind of like grift boss like head boss grifter which is donald trump

00:08:58.460 i mean donald trump is like the grifter of all time there's a reason why a lot of the villains

00:09:03.360 and movies in the 80s were modeled after Donald Trump. I think there's this quote that's floating

00:09:09.580 around, but it's like Donald Trump has connections to wrestling, to casinos and gambling and reality

00:09:15.440 TV shows, to real estate, to a lot of fields and sectors of American life that are all about

00:09:19.760 bluster, about fraud, about grift, about deception. And this says something about American culture,

00:09:27.160 right? The extent to which scammers and hustlers dominate everything.

00:09:31.300 He really is like the final boss of grifting. Like a type of grifter that I talk about a lot on this podcast and that I actually started the podcast to talk about is like gay conservative grifters. And I like to think that it's like if you start making your little TikToks that are like the pronoun people have gone too far. We as gays, we would find acceptance if you all just got a little more normal. 0.97

00:09:53.600 and then you take that to like a podcast on like prager you and then you take your prager you

00:09:59.740 podcast to get a guest news on fox news and then they make you a primetime fox news person i like

00:10:05.540 to think that if you grift your way all the way to the top you end up at trump's inauguration

00:10:09.020 yeah i mean you literally kind of do like riley gains who i've talked about on this podcast like

00:10:14.740 she was at these like inaugural parties logan paul logan paul who was like a lib yeah right

00:10:21.620 i mean you know we have a little bit of skepticism maybe around logan paul's uh liberalism but he

00:10:31.700 is something he made that great black lives matter video right which like for an influencer of his

00:10:37.500 size at the time was like and now he's at the inauguration with sam altman taylor and i yelled

00:10:43.740 about this on my podcast a couple months ago we were like if i just did a little right wing pivot 0.69

00:10:48.760 i wouldn't be fucking editing this by myself yeah i have an editor you know you would have 0.78

00:10:54.460 an editor probably bought with uh by one of these uh one of these donors dennis dennis prager would 0.88

00:11:00.620 be paying for my marketing yeah you know enthusiastically the life the life but so i

00:11:06.700 mean too late it's not you might see some crazy things if you see crazy things happening on this

00:11:14.180 podcast in the next four years mind your business some of these people a lot of these people don't

00:11:22.500 start out as right-wingers or at least not as fervently right-wing as they become i i was i

00:11:27.980 was like falling asleep last night and i was thinking about like riley gains was supportive

00:11:32.540 of leah thomas's transition at the beginning the first interview she ever gave she said i wish leah

00:11:39.160 good luck in her transition and three years later and lots of i would imagine multi-million dollar

00:11:45.760 contracts later she's on bill maher's podcast talking about leah thomas's genitals just like 0.97

00:11:52.420 so radicalized so horrible so cruel but i think also we can see that phenomenon taking place with

00:12:00.720 someone like mark zuckerberg yeah so can we talk about mark zuckerberg a little bit yeah you know

00:12:04.700 i think mark zuckerberg is in of himself a really interesting case but also a great example of how

00:12:09.920 the media criticism and capacity to analyze tech people has been bad for a long time and a lot of

00:12:17.600 people really genuinely believed that mark zuckerberg's mythology is about why he started

00:12:22.500 facebook he just wanted to connect people uh how he viewed it as a walled gardener the garden for

00:12:28.760 everyone in the planet to be connected to one another how they were going to bring the internet

00:12:33.080 to the developing world, how they were going to lift up the global South, how they were going to

00:12:39.300 build a much more harmonious world. When in reality, this is just like a guy who is interested

00:12:44.980 in generating as much profit as possible and transforming that into political power

00:12:50.820 and shoring up his own political power. And he's done this by shifting back and forth and back and

00:12:57.520 forth between liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, whoever he thinks will protect him.

00:13:02.140 it's so crazy because we did like a month ago an episode a whole long form on elon musk

00:13:09.420 and everything you said describes elon musk yeah i mean elon musk was talking about how um

00:13:14.680 climate change was real and we should not pull out of the climate accord and then has become

00:13:20.660 the shadow president of the guy who's pulling out of the the paris climate accord i mean zuck

00:13:25.580 especially i think is a particularly insidious one because you know he'll do whatever he needs

00:13:30.180 And right now what he needs to do is placate Trump because there are a bunch of antitrust lawsuits up against him because they've been laying seeds for the past five to ten years about how there's going to be this Cold War with China and you can't break us up because they're not going to break up China's competitors to Facebook.

00:13:50.380 A lot of effort's been made to present a liberal and a conservative version of himself.

00:13:57.140 I'm going to be the defender of democracy, don't regulate me into oblivion, or I'm going

00:14:02.540 to free us with masculine energy. 0.99

00:14:06.340 Yeah, whatever the fuck he's talking about now. 0.98

00:14:09.580 I would like to talk about not only, Mark, we're going to talk about a few of these people 0.99

00:14:13.660 today.

00:14:14.020 And my goal in doing that is to kind of demystify these sort of larger than life figures that feel like they, I mean, it's not that we feel like they have so much control over our lives.

00:14:26.080 They do, especially now that they are getting in with government in a way that I don't think they ever have before.

00:14:32.640 And so I want to just demystify them, their decision making, and hopefully increase everyone's knowledge levels a little bit about the situation so that we all feel like we have more agency in the decisions that we make.

00:14:44.020 and the way we interact with these platforms and the way we understand what content is being fed

00:14:49.720 to us and so i feel like maybe we should start by so what i put on my outline is like what did

00:14:57.040 what did facebook actually start as because i watched the social network i know it was a hot

00:15:02.200 or not website yeah i mean and that's what it was right zuck at harvard figuring out a way to get

00:15:08.340 the entire directory of students so that he could make a hot or not yeah i have a screenshot of it

00:15:13.580 here i'm gonna put it on the screen but i'm gonna blur out these women's faces but it was called 0.99

00:15:17.380 face mash you went on this website and it just showed you two photos uh of of two different

00:15:25.320 classmates of his like female classmates at harvard blank white website with these two photos

00:15:30.160 and it says were we let in for our looks no will we be judged on them yes who's hotter click to

00:15:37.420 choose so evil yeah so like honestly traumatizing yeah i mean and and it is important to keep this

00:15:47.680 in mind with facebook it is all it has been something that's at the beginning been trying

00:15:53.920 to figure out how do we lie to the public about what we are actually right how do we lie about

00:15:58.160 the origin being face mash how do we lie about our desire to just maximize advertiser revenue

00:16:05.040 how do we lie about the negative effects that we have on our users and you know how can we

00:16:11.940 present ourselves in a new light so that we get more users more popular support more integration

00:16:17.240 i mean and this is also the model for tech in general right you know how do we get this product

00:16:22.860 that people don't want need and would probably reject if they knew why we're doing it but we

00:16:28.180 want it so that we'd be able to get the profit so that we'd be able to get the power that comes with

00:16:33.120 the wealth if we were to track every stage of all of these people's careers we'd be here for

00:16:38.160 eight hours but i just included this as the origin of facebook and the origin of mark zuckerberg's

00:16:43.280 career i'm curious how much of mark zuckerberg's like who he is now and the decisions that he's

00:16:48.860 making now can fit sort of neatly into the mark zuckerberg who created face mash yeah i mean i

00:16:56.540 think that someone who made a hot or not site at a young age that then quickly became a social

00:17:05.560 network that was desired in a lot of college campuses, a lot of workplaces, made a lot of

00:17:11.200 money off that and then realized they can make even more money off that is not going to be the

00:17:16.720 most well-formed individual when they become one of the most powerful people on the planet. It

00:17:20.540 becomes in their billions and billions of users for a variety of reasons, right? I think there's

00:17:25.060 a core element of him that slots in nicely which is that there's not really regard for the people

00:17:30.340 that are being used the site and that the people on the site the users are being used themselves by

00:17:35.900 him to attract more users or or to you know provide this or that service or to collect data

00:17:44.160 on them right i think the core disregard for the users there and you can see that even today and 0.99

00:17:49.540 how the platform is right yeah you can say faggot now yeah you know and you can you can say anything 0.97

00:17:55.440 you want it's protected speech right which can i just say sorry i don't mean to interrupt you 0.98

00:18:00.980 no no go for it we're gonna talk about the relaxed regulations on hate speech that he did to placate

00:18:05.700 trump but as whatever a femme gay guy who has had sort of a following on instagram for a number of 0.57

00:18:13.740 years now it's just so funny to me this idea that like everybody who wanted to spew hate has been 0.59

00:18:20.060 like wildly censored like i have reported so many death threats so many i'm outside of your house 0.99

00:18:28.320 faggot so many i know where you get coffee i'm coming with a baseball bat like i'm laughing at 0.96

00:18:34.300 these but it's crazy and i have reported all of them and they never get taken down no like this 1.00

00:18:39.900 this was not a particularly protected website for you know marginalized people ever i would argue

00:18:45.600 no like and and like too clear right facebook a lot of these social networks cesspools for hate

00:18:51.100 you report them they insist that they that you are applying some old censorious state of mind

00:18:57.760 and that you know if you're getting in the way of freedom of speech you're getting in the way

00:19:00.780 freedom of expression also the same site and you know social media ecosystem that has like you know

00:19:06.600 aided and abetted a genocide, destroyed the mental health of content moderators because

00:19:12.180 of how much vile shit is on the website, facilitated a slide to the right of the general 0.98

00:19:19.200 population, mental health crises of young adults and children who use the site. 0.99

00:19:23.800 This is a site that deals psychic damage to you if you use it, but that the company is

00:19:30.320 now pretending like, oh, this is actually going to help us.

00:19:34.240 This is actually going to help the community.

00:19:35.380 this is actually you know going to uh promote the values that we have the values that they've had

00:19:41.920 have always been like we don't really care about the marginalized groups right from the hot or not

00:19:46.240 to now yeah yeah i think so i think like it's always been like you are a product you don't

00:19:51.400 really matter and even the product that we're providing you doesn't matter you know facebook

00:19:55.600 is full of ai slop now you know yeah i know we're kind of reaching in a number of directions but i

00:20:00.920 feel like that's important because ai slop can you explain what ai slop is because i feel family

00:20:06.660 members have sent me ai oh yeah and i have to be like mom i love you and that's ai slop yeah like

00:20:13.660 a picture of like donald trump riding a tyrannosaurus rex you know hooked in like a

00:20:20.600 catholic garb and being like like if you believe in god reshare if you prayed to god today you know

00:20:27.040 something like, you know, this is everywhere. This is everywhere, right? Do you think that

00:20:32.700 would be everywhere if it was run by someone who cared about what was actually on the platform?

00:20:37.380 Of course not. I mean, the AI swap is also not just the content, the sort of nonsense where

00:20:42.640 AI generated images. But, you know, as we saw recently, they have been trying to force AI with

00:20:49.620 chatbots, with fake profiles, because they've been trying to normalize it so that they will

00:20:55.300 be able to push more policies, more products that affirm their investments into artificial

00:20:59.820 intelligence. I think the core thing to think about is that the platform itself is in disrepair

00:21:04.860 because Zuckerberg is not interested in anything other than how can we juice what we're extracting

00:21:10.860 from it. You can let the apps fall into disrepair and people still use it. As long as you still get

00:21:16.940 the money, that's what matters. And it's not the same thing as having a good community.

00:21:20.440 I want to follow Mark Zuckerberg's political trajectory a little bit. And this is basically

00:21:24.700 what i did in the episode that was about elon musk we just like went through like all the times

00:21:28.900 he signaled his politics and how that had changed over the years and and trying to analyze what

00:21:34.820 caused them to change i think elon really became a culture warrior for a number of like personal

00:21:41.560 crises related reasons so that by the time it was like donald trump's inauguration on monday

00:21:46.880 like i think elon musk is i personally think that he is like very much like an avowed nazi yeah

00:21:51.940 I don't think the same necessarily of Mark Zuckerberg.

00:21:56.160 I think Mark Zuckerberg is kind of a little bit more transparent of a grifter.

00:22:01.000 That's my two cents.

00:22:02.820 But let's look at the evidence and decide.

00:22:06.180 I mean, Mark Zuckerberg has never said a lot outright about his own, you know, for example, like voting record, not until recently.

00:22:13.920 My understanding is that he aligned himself with a number of socially liberal causes.

00:22:19.120 he attended san francisco pride in 2013 which was significant because it was after they defeated

00:22:25.700 the defensive marriage act and he's like on a float like wearing a rainbow lay like i was looking at

00:22:31.620 these photos the other day and i was like huh another one bites the dust with with with allies

00:22:38.580 like these who needs enemies in 2016 at uh then the facebook office because it wasn't meta someone

00:22:45.580 had written like black lives matter on a wall somewhere and then someone else had crossed it

00:22:50.620 out mark zuckerberg sent out a company-wide memo and he admonished the person who crossed out black

00:22:57.840 lives matter and wrote all lives matter uh he wrote quote black lives matter doesn't mean other

00:23:04.060 lives don't it's simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve

00:23:08.740 which like first of all is a very far cry from what mark zuckerberg is espousing now right

00:23:13.980 but also like i mean that shows like a pretty solid understanding of like the black lives matter

00:23:19.380 all lives matter like debate that was happening at the time so you could tell that on some level

00:23:24.300 he was like personally invested yeah i think that you know in the early years right a lot of 0.65

00:23:29.580 companies were making these really ridiculous and clanky as statements support of black lives

00:23:35.100 matter and so facebook and some of the other tech companies being like concise and like straight to

00:23:39.540 the point shows one like there's an understanding of what's going on but also two i think highlights

00:23:45.420 even more just how like empty and cynical a lot of them are right because of how easily they'll

00:23:50.240 walk that back when they sense any sort of change in the direction that the wind is going right

00:23:55.600 you know it's it's only a few years later that you see him basically walking this back starting

00:24:01.820 to censor you know progressive and leftist political activity and comments on the platform

00:24:08.040 you know when it's not like he suddenly lost all the information or his team lost all the

00:24:12.260 information i think it's i think it's like you said there's an understanding but it's it's

00:24:16.700 understanding of a fact that they don't really care too much for you know if it's useful they'll

00:24:21.160 demonstrate the knowledge if it's not they'll pretend that you know they're retooling their

00:24:26.700 company's woke culture or something like this you know enter trump in mark zuckerberg's life

00:24:32.880 in the wake of january 6th meta which is still facebook bans trump which that obviously wouldn't

00:24:40.480 last right but they ban him from posting and they take some of his content down earlier this year

00:24:46.960 so now you know three years later trump releases yet another book where in the book he like he

00:24:54.360 threatened mark zuckerberg with life in prison yeah you know it happens it's a little threat

00:25:01.220 and in speeches too if i'm if i recall correctly he threaded this in speeches as well

00:25:08.860 trump wins the election november 5th november 27th mark zuckerberg and donald trump have dinner

00:25:15.780 at mar-a-lago december now last month mark zuckerberg donates a million dollars to trump's

00:25:24.100 inaugural fund, which when I posted about this, some people have a question that I also have,

00:25:31.560 which is, what is an inaugural fund and why do you donate to it?

00:25:35.660 Well, it is, you know, the American political system is beautiful. Things that would be

00:25:41.640 corrupted in almost every other country are encouraged here because you speak with your

00:25:45.960 dollars. And so the inaugural fund, think of it as like a little bit of a slush fund that you can

00:25:51.180 use for other activities ostensibly re-election campaign because presumably you're raising these

00:25:59.660 funds for your first term but if you're a second term president and you do an inaugural fund

00:26:03.660 big question mark well and he had already won yeah i mean that was the thing so sam altman

00:26:09.300 open ai uh mark zuckerberg all of these other people they all donated millions of dollars

00:26:15.280 just showing how much they care but he'd already won right yeah so where does the money go so

00:26:21.020 you know feel free to comment i genuinely don't know 0.98

00:26:24.320 it's just going towards making sure that you can say faggot more right you know instagram now um 0.99

00:26:32.320 and getting a little gold star when you go to the white house and having dinner that's it 0.98

00:26:36.480 i think that also you know one thing that is interesting with the money that they threw this

00:26:42.080 way in the meetings that they've been having i think the speed with which they did the about

00:26:46.060 face to support trump was interesting but they also seem to have done it in a different way than

00:26:50.200 2016 where 2016 it felt like begrudging or maybe you know it was telegraphed to seem like oh we're

00:26:57.280 begrudgingly going to the tower and we're only talking with him because we forced him to have

00:27:02.220 a clear vision for what tech is going to look like in this country or for issues that specifically

00:27:07.460 affect us whereas this time around they're more so just aligning themselves with with with trump

00:27:12.500 in advance with the ascendant i think tech right movement and the desire to like you know allow for

00:27:19.140 artificial intelligence to push through without any regulation, crypto to push through without

00:27:23.180 any regulation. I think you're on to the right point, which is like, okay, they donated this

00:27:27.920 money to an inaugural fund to a president who just won for the second term. So he's not running

00:27:32.760 again, presumably, right? So where's it going to go? Probably going to be sucked up into the

00:27:38.380 apparatus to support other candidates who are part of this movement. And so just investing in

00:27:43.820 future connections, consolidation, and control and access.

00:27:47.120 i mean it's also always important to remind people because it's like kind of a flashy headline of

00:27:51.200 like oh each of these men donates a million dollars but like a million dollars to each of

00:27:55.600 them is like less than pennies to us that's also the other thing right that's how cheap it is to

00:28:00.660 buy a politician in this country which is yeah yeah god damn it so on january 7th uh just a

00:28:08.480 couple weeks ago mark zuckerberg via a video shot in his living room it looked like announced all 0.95

00:28:14.740 of these new policies to instagram and facebook and the main ones were that we are no longer fact

00:28:21.620 checking nice nice because misinformation was famously not already thriving on these platforms

00:28:28.000 right and you can but you can spew more hate speech and notably like you can do that if it's

00:28:34.640 couched in religion because it specifically highlighted and this was so like anita bryant

00:28:40.800 era homophobic language and you all who listen to this podcast know that i cannot get through an

00:28:46.640 episode without mentioning anita bryant rest in peace but it was the specific policy that meta

00:28:54.280 put forth was like you can now accuse queer people of being mentally ill due to ongoing

00:29:01.240 religious discussions regarding homosexuality and transgenderism which was so 1970s to me 0.59

00:29:09.720 right but these just seemed like a very transparent result of his kind of cuddling up with donald

00:29:19.740 trump yeah and it's also so funny and a lot of people pointed this out but it's like theoretically

00:29:24.360 misinformation and truth versus fiction is not partisan but it is yeah it is always important

00:29:32.400 to remember how much of what comes out of zuck's mouths and the mouths of his executives is just 0.99

00:29:37.840 like PR, warrior-fied bullshit, right? From the interviews where he's talking about 0.99

00:29:44.920 changing the culture and it being too woke and feminine at a company where it's like two-thirds

00:29:49.620 men, to him coming around and saying that we've been getting away from, we've let woke values

00:30:00.760 or a focus on them distract from just a free-balling attitude that will lead to innovation, 0.93

00:30:06.420 right i mean all these suggestions are bullshit they're the flip side of what he was saying just 0.92

00:30:11.140 a few years ago and they're very clearly like you said calibrated to the president to be like hey 0.97

00:30:16.420 look like we are we're not your enemy we would never censor you well you won't censor your allies 0.91

00:30:22.040 we're good for the american people we're good in the cold war against china please don't throw me

00:30:26.760 in jail break up my company or uh investigate what we're doing or block us from buying smaller

00:30:32.820 companies again you know we are a good we're your friends we're your friends here the last thing i

00:30:38.420 had on my little zuck i know because we need to move on from mark zuckerberg but the last thing

00:30:44.000 that i had here was if you look at my laptop over here yeah i'll put it on the screen don't you

00:30:52.220 worry is a side by side of mark zuckerberg you know mid 2010s looking kind of nerdy receding

00:31:01.820 hairline i don't know he kind of just looks like like a like a thumb a little bit yeah which is

00:31:06.760 fine right like i like channing tatum also looks like a thumb and i've like channing tatum was one

00:31:11.520 of my gay awakenings and now and i've been trying to raise hell about this on twitter and it never 0.66

00:31:17.940 catches fire and i just want to talk about how ridiculous yeah this style transformation has 0.94

00:31:22.900 been he looks like he's in the hype house yes he looks like he's like a 14 year old tiktoker 0.93

00:31:28.400 in the body of a 40 year old man yeah permed hair he's wearing these gold chains every day 0.88

00:31:34.200 with the oversized like streetwear t-shirts what is the angle here he looks ridiculous i'm sorry

00:31:42.040 i'm like i'm not one to play fashion police like that's not the essence of this podcast

00:31:46.940 this is an extra an eight mile you know like this is i've been an extra eight mile

00:31:52.480 it's like i haven't seen this i haven't seen this in years i haven't seen this in years i mean i

00:31:58.920 feel like if i go back home i can see people who are dressing like this but i think also again 0.69

00:32:03.720 you know another signal just like how there's really so much of that public persona bullshit

00:32:09.620 it will they're just like oh well we need more young users so we need to make him look younger

00:32:14.580 how do young people dress you know but he doesn't it's just it's it's not working for me yeah no

00:32:21.100 it's i agree because it's giving like aging twink yeah who's hanging on to being a twink 0.76

00:32:28.000 you know but like you you at some point it's like just let it go i mean the a guy who used to have

00:32:38.080 a julius caesar haircut because of how much he loved julius caesar is someone who we his appearance

00:32:46.920 has to be managed right it's because if it doesn't then he's going to do things like that

00:32:50.760 But also the fact that it's managed, like you said, even though it doesn't do anything

00:32:53.520 for us, one of the many attempts to try to cultivate this image of someone who like,

00:32:58.080 I'm just like you, you know, I'm like, you know, I do MMA, I rap, I got, you know, I

00:33:05.280 have a gold chain.

00:33:06.800 Yeah.

00:33:07.160 It doesn't work for me and for people who are, you know, I think discerning about it,

00:33:10.680 but they're also like a lot of people aren't. 0.93

00:33:12.780 And you'll see like some of the coverage of this just like, wow, like, yeah, Zox looking

00:33:17.440 great.

00:33:18.240 Yeah.

00:33:18.600 to me it just reads as someone who like i don't know he like went to the barstool website yeah

00:33:24.200 and scrolled for 45 seconds and he was like gold chain check permed hair yeah check like extra

00:33:31.200 large frame is some zin you know i learned what zin was on this podcast taylor lorenz was explaining

00:33:39.940 to me zin because she was like you don't know about zin but i was like i don't know straight

00:33:43.800 men it's uh it has its own universe and that's part of their audience that's mark now i don't

00:33:50.500 know our glorious leader he'll be president in 25 years do you think that's his goal i hope not

00:33:56.800 because you say that but each day i know i would like to take a quick break from the show

00:34:06.240 to shout out Factor for making this episode possible. Listen, if you are all about trad

00:34:13.900 living, if you watch Nara Smith wake up in the morning and spend six hours cooking a bowl of

00:34:19.540 cereal from scratch and are like, I'm going to do that, this one might not be for you. But if like

00:34:26.080 me, you find yourself on the opposite end of that spectrum where you love good food, but rarely have

00:34:32.060 time to prepare it yourself, Factor might be for you. Factor is a meal delivery service with

00:34:38.720 chef-made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. The best part is they are ready to heat

00:34:44.980 and eat in two minutes. There are a bunch of different Factor menus that you can try.

00:34:51.300 Personally, I go for Protein Plus. I know, I know, not so dainty, but I admittedly do love going to

00:35:00.500 the gym and I don't love eating unseasoned grilled chicken seven days a week. Sorry. Some of the

00:35:07.160 Factor meals that I've personally loved are the mushroom chicken with wild rice, the Kava Tepe

00:35:12.700 with meatballs, and the smoothies. The smoothies are great. If you'd like to try Factor, you can

00:35:19.380 get started at factormeals.com slash fruity50off and use the code fruity50off to get 50% off your

00:35:28.680 first box and free shipping that's factormeals.com slash fruity50 off with the code fruity50 off

00:35:37.620 thank you so much to factor meals for making my dinner last night and for sponsoring this episode

00:35:43.960 now let's get back to the show i had elon in here we have talked about elon pretty extensively on

00:35:53.100 this podcast so i'm not going to like rehash his entire life but i do specifically want to talk

00:35:58.340 about what i haven't talked about on here before which is his years-long tenuous relationship with

00:36:03.920 donald trump because i believe that even though yes i think that elon is an incel culture warrior

00:36:10.040 authentically like i think he has brain worms authentically i also think that he has done some

00:36:16.820 grifty maneuvers around specifically his relationship to donald trump right i think they play each other

00:36:21.880 a lot i'm very curious how this is gonna go you know i could see and i could you know it was very

00:36:27.960 funny when um trump got elected you could see there was an attempt to be like how do we break

00:36:32.700 this up you know like or covering how annoying one of them might be to the other or uh you know

00:36:39.200 reporting on riffs in the camps you know yeah didn't work there have been some reports and you

00:36:46.820 know who knows about the merit of them but that are like report donald trump annoyed by elon musk

00:36:52.700 and i believe it i believe it i'm annoyed by

00:36:55.300 but so this goes back i have a little timeline 2016 elon describes trump in an interview as

00:37:08.720 he doesn't seem to have the sort of character that reflects well on the united states

00:37:12.780 in 2017 elon was part of one of trump's business councils like you mentioned and when trump in his

00:37:19.500 first term pulled out of the paris climate agreement elon who's you know whole thing with

00:37:24.380 tesla is like going green or you know theoretically that's his whole thing elon quits the business

00:37:30.440 council because he's like this is bad for the environment later on in january 2022 trump

00:37:35.580 describes elon as a genius but then later in that year he pivots uh and this is while elon is

00:37:43.280 basically threatening to buy twitter trump is essentially calling his bluff he calls him a 0.95

00:37:49.200 bullshit artist he calls him like a fake republican and this was like kind of the height of their feud 0.96

00:37:56.040 was mid-2022 elon replied it's time for trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset 0.95

00:38:03.320 they were fighting you know the girls the girls were fighting and like i wish they had continued

00:38:11.100 to fight me too i mean what do you remember that uh oh yeah no yeah get to that i was just about

00:38:16.700 i was like you saw it come up on my laptop screen okay this is i hate that donald trump wrote this

00:38:24.640 i know because this is one of the this is one of the posts of all time yeah donald trump writes

00:38:29.640 amidst this feud he posts on truth social a picture of him and elon musk in the oval office

00:38:35.660 from trump's first term and he wrote this is like an azalia banks level right it's amazing 0.99

00:38:41.980 it's amazing there's an alternate reality where he's just like the best shit poster 0.98

00:38:48.180 he's just queening out in queens or maybe in manhattan no politics and we just get posts 0.97

00:38:55.400 like this from him every day okay i'm leaving the listener hanging let's read let's read it's

00:39:01.000 not a tweet it's a truth social post when elon musk came to the white house asking me to help

00:39:06.100 on all of his many subsidized projects whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough

00:39:11.540 driverless cars that crash or rocket ships to nowhere without which subsidies he'd be worthless

00:39:17.680 and telling me how he was a big trump fan and a republican i could have said quote drop to your

00:39:23.940 knees and beg and he would have done it and then posting a picture and then posting a picture of

00:39:30.500 standing there oh my god it's so good it's so good and everything he wrote is true yeah without

00:39:38.060 subsidies from the government like elon's businesses would not be what they are yeah

00:39:42.580 and that's also i mean this that's also the recipe for success for so many of the tech oligarchs we

00:39:47.940 have now i mean they rely on uh lifelines from the government whether it's subsidies outright

00:39:56.240 whether it's protection from competitors, whether it's a leg up in other markets.

00:40:01.220 But Elon Musk especially, like every single major venture,

00:40:04.580 has given him a lifeline that he then grows into success

00:40:08.440 and then borrows against to get more money.

00:40:11.040 All of his many subsidized projects,

00:40:12.920 whether it's electric cars that don't drive long enough,

00:40:15.780 driverless cars that crash, or rocket ships to nowhere.

00:40:19.420 It's crisp.

00:40:21.620 It really is.

00:40:22.760 Oh my God.

00:40:23.980 It's really...

00:40:24.980 he should have let azalea banks post that right no the note that i had next to this on my outline

00:40:31.240 was amazing post i wish anyone else had written yeah i mean musk is in line with what you've been 0.95

00:40:37.520 saying like a grifter and a bullshit artist of the highest degree right he has been able to 0.85

00:40:42.680 bolster his way into public prominence as a genius despite most of the things him promising and 0.99

00:40:49.260 insisting on being revealed to be false and also turning out to run some of the most racist

00:40:56.240 workplaces on earth which is not a surprise given background in apartheid south africa

00:41:01.320 fork found in kitchen right moving right along november 22nd 2023 elon buys twitter well is

00:41:11.280 that right oh no no sorry not november 22nd november 2022

00:41:15.420 i was like why do i have the day that elon bought twitter that's kind of weird

00:41:20.600 november 2022 elon buys twitter and elon submits a poll to the general public of twitter and asks

00:41:31.860 if they want trump to be reinstated on the platform which he had been banned from by jack

00:41:37.720 previous owner of twitter post january 6th and the public votes yes and as you might recall if you

00:41:44.120 were on twitter at the time a ton of very very far right wing kind of nazi-esque people who had

00:41:51.220 been previously banned were let back on twitter and if you were on twitter at the time like this 0.94

00:41:56.480 was felt it's like these kind of prolific really far right wing nazi racist homophobic transphobic

00:42:03.260 voices were suddenly back in your timelines we're gonna return to that but bottom line is he lets

00:42:09.240 Trump back on the platform. And as we talked about in the Elon episode, Elon from 2022 till now has

00:42:16.440 kind of been really radicalized in his culture warrior-ness and has become like an avowed

00:42:22.900 transphobe, anti-immigrant, oftentimes anti-Semitic. So it came as less of a shock come time for the

00:42:29.940 election that Elon really did ally himself with Donald Trump. Immediately following Trump's

00:42:35.920 assassination attempt number one elon donated 45 million dollars to a pro-trump super PAC which

00:42:44.300 is just so funny i mean it's not like he did end up purchasing this election but just the idea that

00:42:49.880 it's like i felt really sorry for someone and i felt like they were wronged so i'm gonna give them

00:42:55.480 45 million dollars you know what i'm gonna give them the presidency i think that's a that'll let

00:43:02.480 them know. And ultimately, Elon spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars on this election,

00:43:08.740 which is why you'll hear people say he bought the election. Yeah, I would say so. I mean,

00:43:13.980 in this country, elections are bought. There's multi-billion dollar spends when you throw in

00:43:20.220 both sides, right? There are a lot of ways to talk about it and lie to ourselves about it. But

00:43:26.200 at the end of the day, elections are being bought, right? It's corporations and donors spending in

00:43:31.600 some you know hundreds of millions billions of dollars to get their candidate across the

00:43:35.900 finishing line and then a whole secondary grifting operation where a bunch of consultants and

00:43:41.180 politicos you know fleece the campaigns for all this money no other way to describe it than just

00:43:47.800 buying it pretty dismal yeah pretty dismal greatest country in the world you know greatest

00:43:52.740 and so that's my little bit about elon musk that i had here he feels like like an evil person i

00:44:00.740 would run into like a warehouse party in bushwick you know like he's just like you know just like 0.96

00:44:07.680 someone who does way too much fucking ketamine and has way too much fucking money and doesn't 0.97

00:44:13.780 really know what to do with it but anything they focus their vision on they destroy they make worse 0.99

00:44:19.460 and they ruin which is you know we have to deal with him now richest man on earth anything he

00:44:24.260 focuses on he's gonna make his own which is you know gonna be the lesson of the next four years

00:44:28.940 i guess yeah no shade on too much ketamine like we live in yeah we live in new york but the thing

00:44:33.640 is you can't have that much money and do too much yeah yeah you can't be evil rich and do too much

00:44:39.300 ketamine you can only do two of the three yeah exactly so the other person i had in here was

00:44:48.680 who is the he's singaporean yes yeah chief executive of tiktok and this is something

00:44:55.240 that's obviously really in the news right now with the TikTok ban. But what can you tell us

00:45:00.140 about Xiao Chu and Donald Trump? Because he too was at the inauguration.

00:45:05.200 Right. I think it's important to also step back and see TikTok, of course, Trump tried to ban

00:45:11.180 in 2020, right? Failed, but still seemed like he was interested in doing so until

00:45:18.300 there was a meeting with Jeff Yass, who's this billionaire investor, mega donor for the

00:45:24.740 republicans in march 2024 invested in by dance which is the parent company of tiktok i think no

00:45:29.880 conflict of interest yeah none none whatsoever this is like the decisive factor that gets trump

00:45:35.520 to abandon the desire to ban tiktok was was jeff yes yeah i have heard of jeff yeah because i've

00:45:44.240 consumed some media about this whole debacle that we're in and every time i just imagine his last

00:45:50.580 name being spelled y-a-s-s-s like jeff yeah yeah yeah you know it's almost there and i haven't

00:45:57.800 looked it up because i don't want to learn that that's not how it's spelled it's it's really

00:46:01.740 almost there but who is jeff yes and what's his significance in all of this he's just an investor

00:46:07.320 who made out who he invested in the the parent company and the technology that allowed tiktok

00:46:12.820 to really ascend to commanding heights early on and it would have been a loss for him if

00:46:18.420 It was allowed to be banned. So he stepped in, intervened, and was able to save it. And I think

00:46:24.300 also there are a few other factors at play here, right? The chief executive himself, he's tried to

00:46:30.280 do a media tour to try to convince Congress to not unleash the ban. But the grifting, I think,

00:46:36.560 more so comes in two elements, which is that I don't think Americans actually really understand

00:46:42.840 with TikTok is. And TikTok kind of exploits that. I think there's this really great series of pieces

00:46:50.180 on TikTok in Garbage Day, which is this newsletter. And one of them was talking about how TikTok is

00:46:56.140 not a social media app per se, the way that ours are, where they're focused on advertiser revenue

00:47:02.500 and gleaning as much insight for you for that. It's an e-commerce platform and its competitors

00:47:07.520 are not meta and face meta or facebook fuck you know they got to me yeah they got you girl 0.91

00:47:14.120 facebook you know twitter google they're more so uh temu and uh sheen and you know other apps that 0.96

00:47:21.900 are trying to get people to spend as much money as possible and learn as much about them but because

00:47:27.500 we don't really have infrastructure for these for shopping apps the way that they do in china we

00:47:33.400 don't read it as such but that algorithm is very powerful and recommendation for social media and

00:47:38.900 tiktok has been able to exploit the ignorance that americans have about this as well as you know

00:47:44.700 lawmakers their ignorance about this has led them to insist okay well you know we should divest we

00:47:50.260 should we should force a sale and tiktok has been able to pretend or might be able to pretend that 0.96

00:47:54.880 it's going to entertain a sale but there's no reason to do a sale right you know in garbage

00:47:58.260 they were talking about how one america is not even the lot one of the largest markets for tech

00:48:03.540 talk right there are multiple markets that are larger than it and it wouldn't even be the largest

00:48:07.140 one that they got banned from they got banned from india 200 million users we have about the

00:48:11.460 same size as brazil which is 100 million the market would it would be a large you know it's

00:48:16.980 a lot of users to lose but it would not make or break the platform but you know that's enough

00:48:22.940 for them to not want to sell but they can entertain delusions of hey we'll do a joint

00:48:27.540 venture. Maybe we'll look for a buyer as part of their effort to stay open, cultivate closer ties

00:48:33.480 with Trump, and then close the door on a sale. Are you saying that you think it ultimately

00:48:38.100 won't survive here? I think ultimately there's no reason for them to do a sale. And what they're

00:48:44.300 going to do, I would presume, is pretend that they would do a sale. What's the reason in cozying up

00:48:50.480 to Trump? So if you just cozy up to Trump, you can buy time and you can pretend that you are

00:48:56.300 going to do a sale, or that you'll entertain a 50% joint-owned venture, which is one of the

00:49:00.900 things Trump floated. But as you're growing closer to Trump, as you're cultivating more ties,

00:49:06.020 whispering more in his ear, having your investors pressure him more in the back end,

00:49:10.560 you can get to the point, presumably, where he just chooses not to enforce the ban.

00:49:17.620 And do you think that's the ultimate goal of Xiaochu in this situation?

00:49:21.860 Yeah. I mean, I would say that's a good outcome for them. I mean, even if it's like,

00:49:25.680 if you just try to think about who they sell to there i mean why would they sell to any of the

00:49:29.860 companies that be able to take it off their hand if you're tick tock if you're bite dance there's

00:49:34.140 no reason why you would let an american firm buy off any segment of your business so what they can

00:49:39.940 then go into other markets and compete with you be a nightmare scenario with them especially when

00:49:44.060 if you're beating them in the united states which is their own domain you know you don't want you

00:49:47.940 don't want to deal with the competition elsewhere and so i think like there's not there's not really

00:49:51.200 much of a reason to sell it'd be it's interesting to think about who they might sell to but they

00:49:55.420 have all the cards here i think they should sell it to um i don't know who's someone that 0.60

00:50:00.280 azalea banks yeah actually just keeping her in the mix constantly here let's give it to azalea

00:50:08.580 banks maybe grimes can come in as a cto i would support that so what i've tried to paint here is

00:50:16.540 sort of a pattern of behavior from these ceos who all want something they have all you know

00:50:24.900 In the case of Shao Chu, Trump was extremely antagonistic towards him for years.

00:50:30.780 The same goes for Mark Zuckerberg.

00:50:32.500 The same goes for Elon Musk.

00:50:35.280 And they all find a way to sit down in the same room together and celebrate one another.

00:50:40.600 Because what?

00:50:42.320 Money and power?

00:50:43.700 Yeah, I think so.

00:50:45.000 I think it comes down to that.

00:50:46.140 I mean, I think they all stand to make a lot of money.

00:50:48.900 One, they stand to make a lot of money.

00:50:50.220 too they stand to be able to position themselves such that they can dominate the minds and hearts

00:50:58.400 of generations that are reliant on these platforms right and so there's a lot of interest in like

00:51:03.840 figuring out something that works that makes everybody a little bit more richer enables them

00:51:08.580 to have a little bit more political power uh without eating each other's lunch which you know

00:51:13.280 they're able to do i think they might be able to do and pull off i mean even these other people

00:51:18.400 which we're not going to get into detail with all of them but like jeff bezos and trump have a

00:51:23.460 history of antagonizing each other bill gates obviously was like never sort of aligned with

00:51:30.060 trump's worldview and then although he wasn't at the inauguration they did have apparently a three

00:51:36.520 hour dinner together shortly before the inauguration which like i could say is disappointing but like

00:51:42.220 i think if you always expect billionaires to do the worst thing no matter how good you think they

00:51:46.960 are, then you won't be disappointed. Yeah. And I think also one thing that's important to think

00:51:51.920 about too is we just had an administration that, you know, regardless of whether someone may think

00:51:57.280 antitrust is the way to rein in these tech companies, we just had an administration that

00:52:01.260 was seriously entertaining the idea that the major tech companies can be broken up, banned,

00:52:07.760 spun off, regulated in a real way. And that's what they're afraid of. Yeah. And that's what

00:52:12.520 they're afraid of. And, you know, that's a threat that Republican administrations didn't have in

00:52:17.640 their toolkit before until Trump, who started some of the antitrust trials that Facebook and

00:52:22.560 Google are now facing. So, you know, one thing I think that is always going to be present is

00:52:28.760 trying to figure out how to flood the zone with enough love so that these threats go back in the

00:52:34.940 box and no one ever thinks about them again. That's why I'm going to the administration so

00:52:39.240 they don't break up my podcast right they're threatening to regulate a bit fruity

00:52:46.640 we've mentioned sam altman he was another one at the inauguration he is the open ai guy the

00:52:54.280 chat gpt guy he's gay he donated millions of dollars to democratic campaigns but still found

00:53:01.300 his way to donating a million dollars to the trump inaugural fund i texted you before you

00:53:05.800 came over that i had a funny story about sam altman and i would like to inject that here

00:53:10.120 before we move on with our conversation i was a couple years ago in san francisco and i attended

00:53:19.600 a house party at sam altman's house and i would like to say right up front i did not know who he

00:53:26.260 was i did not know whose house i was at but a friend and i were just invited to a house party

00:53:33.020 one night it was the weekend and uh you know it's just like a bunch of gay guys was it fun

00:53:39.080 no no no no and this is the thing so sam wasn't there the house was the most memorable part for 0.75

00:53:46.620 me you can google sam altman's house it's like you know like a 40 million dollar like compound

00:53:52.560 in san francisco it really was beautiful like sometimes these huge houses are very ugly but

00:53:56.660 it was beautiful it was so strange it was so strange he wasn't there it was like someone he

00:54:03.680 knew at the time was throwing this party in his house with his permission while he was away

00:54:08.400 and i just i remember it was like a lot of like younger you know adult but like you know gay men

00:54:15.780 in their 20s sort of running around and it just felt how much do i want to divulge here

00:54:23.200 it just felt like everyone was so you know these were all san francisco people a lot of them worked

00:54:31.600 in tech were in like these junior roles at tech companies and it felt like everyone there was so

00:54:36.680 enamored with the fact that they were at sam altman's house and i remember there was one person

00:54:41.680 who i was talking to at one point and you know in fairness everyone was like drunk and music was

00:54:46.660 playing and whatnot but he was like taking me around and telling me how like the he knew the

00:54:53.380 price of different pieces of furniture and he was like this table is eighty thousand dollars

00:54:58.700 and i was like i what am i doing what am i doing here yeah but then i went home and i

00:55:09.560 read the wikipedia page for y combinator and i still don't know what it is but

00:55:13.640 you know that's that's my story about we're gonna have a world where no one knows what it is and

00:55:19.320 that's what i want yeah uh that yeah no i um we all have to at one point in our lives go to a party

00:55:25.820 where someone's like and this cost that and this cost that and you kind of reflect like what the

00:55:30.040 how did i get here it was kind of radicalizing for me because i was like i i don't care about

00:55:35.440 this yeah yeah like but they clearly do right but and i was like i need to figure out what's

00:55:40.300 important for me because it's easy in a country where you are told constantly that the most

00:55:47.120 important thing is money to make that your most important thing i'm not trying to shit on anyone

00:55:52.780 right but it's like you meet people who have definitively prioritized like luxury as the

00:55:59.480 most important thing in their life and their and the aspiration to that is their primary goal in

00:56:03.600 every situation and you realize like how kind of sad and empty that is yeah and that's how i felt

00:56:11.040 at sam altman's house party quick break from the show to give a shout out to incogni for making 0.96

00:56:18.780 this episode possible have you ever wondered why you get so many emails for shit you never signed 0.96

00:56:24.440 up for never bought maybe you don't even know what it is that's because of a little thing called 0.97

00:56:31.660 data brokers. Data brokers are these devious little operations that scrape the internet for

00:56:38.440 your personal data. Information like your political leanings, where you live, your employment history,

00:56:45.200 your interests. And they sell that information, oftentimes to companies who want to sell you

00:56:51.200 stuff or just annoy the shit out of you via email. Incogni is a wonderful little service that will

00:56:58.360 contact hundreds of different data brokers on your behalf and demand that your data is removed

00:57:04.720 from their inventories, which is something that you legally have the right to do, but that if you

00:57:10.320 tried to do all by yourself would become a full-time job. Incogni provides you with a whole

00:57:15.720 interface, including a dashboard where you get kept up to date on their progress with taking

00:57:20.820 your information down from all the different data brokers. And Incogni continually stays in contact

00:57:26.460 with data brokers to make sure that your public profile online remains as diminished as possible.

00:57:32.220 If you would like to try Incogni, listeners of A Bit Fruity can head to incogni.com

00:57:38.460 slash fruity for a discount on an annual plan. That's incogni.com slash fruity.

00:57:46.180 Thanks so much to Incogni. And now let's get back to the show.

00:57:50.120 so i want to pivot a little bit into what it means for all of these communication platform

00:57:57.440 ceos to be pivoting right i think a lot of people hear about this stuff and they're like oh yeah 0.97

00:58:03.220 well mark zuckerberg's a piece of shit true but also they don't understand or necessarily think 0.93

00:58:08.920 about the impact that this has on their experience as a user of social media i think a lot of people 0.99

00:58:15.860 are lulled into a sense of thinking that the platforms that we use are neutral

00:58:20.020 and they're not. And I think that an experience personally that I and millions of other people had

00:58:25.780 where you're really woken up to the fact that these platforms are not neutral is that the

00:58:30.380 experience of being on Twitter before and after Elon Musk's takeover is extreme and noticeable.

00:58:38.220 And it's just a result of a series of policy changes where before you could go on Twitter

00:58:43.520 without like constantly seeing like the n-word and have all of this content by white supremacists

00:58:51.300 be at the top of every thread and now that's not the case now you go on twitter and it's like going

00:58:57.280 on 4chan yeah and i was so distraught by the mark zuckerberg of it all when those policy changes

00:59:04.880 came out because again i think people see like oh mark zuckerberg is dining with donald trump like 0.85

00:59:09.400 yeah what a piece of shit but i'm like no the policy implementations on these platforms that 0.96

00:59:13.960 we all rely on to communicate with each other those the experiences of those platforms can 0.99

00:59:18.600 change instagram can also become a nazi playground if we think about what happened with twitter right

00:59:24.160 it's not just that they were also like you said there were policy changes but there's also like

00:59:27.720 intentional amplification and i think we can expect i mean that has already been documented

00:59:32.760 with facebook and instagram right i think it was um kevin roose who uh documented how like maybe

00:59:38.840 three or four years ago, the most consistently amplified, visited, followed pages, engaged with

00:59:47.480 pages were just like, you know, largely right-wing noise. And Facebook has refused to really give

00:59:54.080 any real insight into why it is. I mean, it's very obvious why it's like, you know, amplification of

00:59:58.580 this feeds into the political patterns that we were talking about before. And I think now that

01:00:02.580 as they're trying to orient more and be more useful to Donald Trump and to the right-wing,

01:00:08.300 we're going to see this sort of amplification that will also have a knockdown effect of

01:00:12.580 radicalizing people and pushing them even further. And that's been documented. I think about how my

01:00:17.920 younger brothers, how much time I had to spend in their early years when they were learning how to

01:00:21.680 use the internet, constantly intervening and deprogramming them. Because even if they weren't

01:00:28.340 watching these sorts of videos, they'd be bombarded with videos from red pill, manosphere spaces.

01:00:34.900 totally and it's like you know leave them alone with them with these devices and with these

01:00:39.860 these sites for a week or two or a month or two and come back and they are spouting some of the

01:00:46.240 nonsense in these videos you know they're children why are they repeating a right-wing talking points

01:00:51.340 this should not even be in their radar and it's because of how aggressively it is pushed right and

01:00:56.840 i think that in the coming years you know as we see amplification relaxation my concern is you

01:01:04.120 Now, this is also going to feed into a pretty successful attempt to normalize and kind of

01:01:09.780 beautify nasty far right wing and reactionary viewpoints about how our society should be

01:01:16.860 run, that we should be more bigoted, we should be more violent, we should be more discriminatory.

01:01:20.860 That in of itself has so much momentum.

01:01:22.860 And then we also have to deal with all the other ideologues who have aspirations for

01:01:27.220 something more fascist or something more outrightly destructive and violent.

01:01:31.140 And again, it's just like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg announced these policy changes. He's talking about how like, you know, these apps that he runs were far too censored before and censorship had run amok.

01:01:45.260 and it was like i have been in meetings with meta executives with other creators belonging to you

01:01:55.020 know various marginalized identity groups and i have begged these people to for example remove

01:02:02.280 libs of tiktok yeah right if tiktok i saw someone say if tiktok doesn't exist anymore it's going to

01:02:09.220 become like libs of zhao hong shu libs of red note but but like i had to beg these people and

01:02:19.760 be like look at this bomb threat look at this bomb threat i'll read you all the bomb threats

01:02:23.460 i will read you the messages that their followers have sent me after i've been posted or whatever

01:02:27.300 and they wouldn't do anything yeah they don't care they don't care and they didn't care before

01:02:32.700 these two is which it's just like the idea that we were like heavily censored you couldn't even

01:02:37.840 say anything before free speech it's just not true yeah it's just not true and anyone who has

01:02:43.740 any sort of following and is marginalized in any sort of way could have told you that yeah like

01:02:48.040 again like we had these meetings and like queer people black people like we would just go around

01:02:52.900 the circle and basically i had one meeting in person at the it was then at the time it was

01:02:57.240 facebook office it was like five years ago where we were all like a room full of 20 creators and

01:03:02.200 adam missouri was sitting there and we were all just like basically reciting the worst things that

01:03:07.400 that have been said to us on their platform

01:03:09.560 and where no reports ever went anywhere with the company,

01:03:13.640 they just kind of nodded, and nothing came of those meetings.

01:03:17.100 And they'd be like, well, you know, sorry, but feel free to come 0.98

01:03:22.040 to the MetaPride event or whatever the fuck. 0.95

01:03:24.420 You know, it's like, okay. 0.99

01:03:26.080 You know, the platforms, at best, don't care

01:03:28.880 because they're prioritizing profit,

01:03:31.160 and at worst believe that it doesn't really matter

01:03:35.140 what kind of political order they're meshed in and that actually one that leans to the right or

01:03:40.800 is even far right is better for them because it will prioritize their importance and profit making

01:03:45.900 and now an aoc just you know posted a great rant about this to her instagram stories but she was

01:03:51.220 basically like all of the major social apps are now in bed with the right now i want you all to

01:03:59.400 put all the pieces together because what this effectively means is that every social media

01:04:04.480 platform mass social media platform in the united states has been taken over by the right wing

01:04:09.940 with the exception of blue sky but blue sky is still very small when i say put the pieces together

01:04:14.140 elon musk took over twitter and there's open reporting it's pretty obvious as well that they

01:04:23.340 have manipulated the algorithms they've artificially manipulated the algorithms to boost

01:04:28.300 right-wing content on x and to amplify harassment then you have meta so you have mark zuckerberg

01:04:37.400 saying that they're basically also bending the knee to trump with their changes to fact checking

01:04:43.940 regardless on how effective that was in the first place it's an open signal and now tiktok

01:04:49.320 is now saying we are agreeing we will use our push notification system for all 170 million

01:05:00.780 american users to promote donald trump just understand that government announcements like

01:05:06.600 this with companies they never name politicians they will usually name law or policy tiktok is

01:05:14.560 make an explicit agreement to do this. And if I were a betting person, they probably are making

01:05:19.560 a deal with Donald Trump to not just use these push push notifications. They probably would

01:05:25.220 consider algorithmic changes, which is ironic because the time when people voted for the TikTok 0.62

01:05:30.920 ban, there was a lot it was in the environment was because there was a lot of pro-Palestinian

01:05:36.600 content. And that argument was being used as being somehow anti-American. Twitter, obviously,

01:05:42.840 like elon loves his little nazi playground you have facebook and instagram which clearly now 0.62

01:05:48.420 at risk of becoming nazi playgrounds you have tiktok and my hot take with tiktok is that if

01:05:52.860 it survives in the u.s somehow we don't know right what that could look like yet i don't think it'll 0.65

01:05:57.960 be the same tiktok that's existed i don't think because because tiktok by and large is where a

01:06:04.740 lot of like young marginalized progressive voices have found a lot of success since 2020 right you

01:06:10.500 have black trans creators on there accruing millions of followers talking about you know

01:06:15.400 like things like socialism or palestine when tiktok was having this whole like flippy floppy

01:06:21.380 ban situation where it went dark for 12 hours and then it came back the pop-ups that they gave both

01:06:27.860 were like we applaud the efforts of president donald trump right we all saw those those pop-ups

01:06:33.440 donald trump was not in office yet so they were calling him president trump and they were

01:06:38.120 congratulating him on his efforts to save TikTok, but that was two days and one day before he was

01:06:43.060 even inaugurated. So he was a private citizen. He had no federal lawmaking power when what a

01:06:49.060 lot of people are calling a stunt was happening, which means that they were working together

01:06:52.260 privately. And so my thing is like, if TikTok does make it into the Trump era, which we still

01:06:57.880 don't know, one of the things that Trump and his allies were so outspokenly opposed to was this 0.95

01:07:06.200 idea that tiktok can be used as a propaganda tool by the ccp in what world would they not just make

01:07:13.540 it a propaganda tool for themselves yeah right in the way that elon has with twitter no there's no

01:07:19.100 reason uh why they shouldn't and i think that this is an avenue of thought that has been discouraged

01:07:25.700 partly because some of the commentary wants to focus on and drum up the idea that you know hey

01:07:30.460 look, Chinese owned app, we're in the Cold War with China, they are going to use this to

01:07:35.620 destabilize the United States or to undermine the United States or introduce irritants to 0.97

01:07:39.420 the United States. But the reality is like, if the terms of engagement for it to continue access

01:07:44.380 and dominance of the US market are maybe it lends itself to boosting and amplifying right wing

01:07:50.780 content and right wing politics in this country, that's something that it would almost certainly

01:07:55.740 do, right? That's not a tall ask. And that's something that all the other tech firms are

01:07:59.620 going to line up to do, to try to curry favor with Donald Trump, insulate themselves from

01:08:04.240 regulatory pressure, and to gain more power as they go about pursuing new modes of profit generation.

01:08:12.440 My goal with this episode was to sort of start very specific with some of these men and their

01:08:18.520 relationships with Donald Trump, and then get broader and broader into what is the philosophy

01:08:23.800 of these people's worldview? What do they want? What is this new sort of oligarchy,

01:08:29.620 of people who run apps and also now are a government.

01:08:33.300 One thing that comes up a lot when you talk about tech CEOs

01:08:37.320 who have become unbelievably wealthy

01:08:39.740 is that they're not just inventors or heads of companies,

01:08:44.240 but they really position themselves as philosophers.

01:08:48.320 When you read what people like Mark Zuckerberg

01:08:51.900 or Sam Altman or Peter Thiel,

01:08:54.560 they're not just talking about their product

01:08:56.500 when you read their tweets or their interviews.

01:08:58.980 they're talking about like the meaning of life why why why like what is the worldview of these

01:09:06.740 people and why are do they all speak like gods part of it is the pr side of when you are trying

01:09:15.660 to convince people to let you upend a core part of their life when you're trying to convince people

01:09:20.800 to commit a lot more resources towards you to integrate you into their daily lives to onboard

01:09:27.480 this product that you've been pushing out and to organize things around you you do have to talk 0.98

01:09:33.000 about all these other things to kind of weave together some bullshit narrative you know uh you 0.80

01:09:38.620 have to you know zuck has done you know talk about community and the future and saving the planet 0.87

01:09:43.600 and values um and you have to come up with some story that's going to be believable to rationalize

01:09:50.660 it to people who might otherwise be opposed to it and sometimes that makes the difference in

01:09:53.960 adoption but also a good chunk of it is because these people have so much money and so much wealth

01:09:59.200 and so much influence that they get a big head about about their ideas and believe that these

01:10:03.120 these in one way or another is how the world should or must work right and also because some

01:10:09.020 of them are influenced by people who actually do think of themselves as influence as philosophers

01:10:14.000 as a nice as influencers yes some of them really are at the end of the day influenced by bryce hall

01:10:20.340 um and they're you know they're doing get ready with me in the morning

01:10:27.920 i love to think about like the influence of jacqueline hill on mark zuckerberg yeah

01:10:34.920 get ready with me as i as i you know do my perm in the morning yeah put on the gold chain

01:10:42.620 no but what you're saying rings so true though because i think we can all right like most people

01:10:47.640 are aware maybe it's a celebrity maybe it's someone that they knew in real life who becomes

01:10:52.840 really rich where you stop thinking about the things that affect normal people like like the

01:10:58.420 price of groceries or like i don't know the weather or interests that normal people have

01:11:04.620 and like whatever music or art and they start taking up these like really big like i don't know

01:11:10.320 i feel like that's when people start stop taking vaccines yeah sometimes i don't need to take a

01:11:15.020 vaccine you know i got all this money i'll probably have some alternative uh treatment to help me out

01:11:19.560 with it having all this money this the scale this reach really does something to people's brains and

01:11:25.460 especially in the silicon valley i mean a lot of these guys are reading the most racist people

01:11:30.580 you've ever heard who believe that we're at the precipice of a moment where we can save human

01:11:36.320 civilization by you know getting rid of democracy you know or getting rid of the right to vote or

01:11:41.720 getting rid of you know all these sorts of reforms that liberals have dragged us towards

01:11:48.360 and again in the way of good old capitalism and so i think also we're starting to see an encroaching

01:11:53.200 influence i mean but this is also a key part of silicon valley over the past few centuries

01:11:57.100 these are people who have always thought that they know it's best for the future of the society

01:12:02.820 and it's also a function of like how things have been decaying and collapsing there's this writer

01:12:08.980 really like john gans who wrote about how one way to think about the united states is as just like

01:12:13.940 beachy regime right this nazi collaborator state where it's like yeah it's a little

01:12:18.720 it's a little fascist but there's also a group of people who like to think of themselves as

01:12:23.960 modernizers as technocratic reformers these oligarchs i think to a great extent are like

01:12:30.320 you know hey look there's some reactionaries around maybe i'm a reactionary but the ideas

01:12:35.780 that we have about how the state should be run about how resources should be allocated about the

01:12:41.940 types of products we should prioritize these are not just because we want to make money of course

01:12:47.220 we do but because we have a vision about what life should look like and you guys don't understand it

01:12:53.800 you're getting in the way of it in one way or another i would say not every single tech executive

01:12:58.160 has some like political theory but the ones who do are the most dangerous because these theories

01:13:04.220 are usually ones that are like everyone is in the way of the future, whether it's giving birth to

01:13:10.140 some AI god, whether it's prioritizing innovation, whether it's destroying China's capacity to do

01:13:16.120 technological innovation. These are the people who are the most motivated to bring about the

01:13:20.100 worst possible world. It really feels like we let the lab rat who designed a hot or not website to

01:13:26.780 rank his female students based on attractiveness. I don't know. It feels like it got out of the

01:13:30.500 meth lab yeah i mean it did yeah it really did and it ran out it got you know and just imagine

01:13:37.180 like uh i don't even know what is it what would be an extension to that like steward little you

01:13:41.880 know become imagine if just steward leave steward alone um steward obsessed with julius caesar

01:13:52.240 billions of dollars steward steward little in 2024 made an app right and now steward little is in

01:14:01.680 government yeah i mean just you know steward little clifford the big red dog spongebob square

01:14:07.940 pants just like the all of these imagine their brains rotted yeah on facebook given billions

01:14:13.700 of dollars you know some drugs to help them out and uh and you get you get what we have today

01:14:18.540 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I feel like this is all sort of epitomized in the apocalypse bunkers, which a lot of people don't know about. I did not know about the apocalypse bunkers until, so could you explain the apocalypse bunkers?

01:14:30.600 You know, I first learned about this. I think this writer, Douglas Ruskoff, he did this article and then a book about it where he was invited to some talk where they were like, hey, look, you know, let's say you have a bunker. How do you prevent the workers in the bunker in an apocalypse from taking control of the bunker and the food and the weapons and revolting against you?

01:14:53.460 here's one way you put a call collars around them that you know or prevent them from acting up or

01:15:00.940 they might die or you enforce some biometric rfid system so that only certain people related to you

01:15:07.660 or certain people in the system already can get into certain areas right so just like that was

01:15:12.000 the intro to the bunker where it's people imagining okay i'm gonna be in a future where

01:15:17.900 a lot of people have guns around me to protect me and i'll have a lot of resources a lot of food a

01:15:23.000 a lot of stuff to write out, but end days.

01:15:25.180 How do I prevent them from turning against me?

01:15:28.200 I started this podcast to talk about gay culture.

01:15:32.140 What are we talking about?

01:15:34.060 Yeah, yeah, no, I know.

01:15:36.840 Isn't it a wonderful world?

01:15:38.440 But so a lot of these billionaires have, over the last 10 years,

01:15:41.900 been building doomsday bunkers overseas.

01:15:44.920 I mean, Altman has a bunch of land in California,

01:15:46.940 and he brags about having a plane, land, biotics, and weapons.

01:15:52.300 you know not a good thing to hear if the guy trying to say i'm pushing the most important

01:15:56.940 invention in human history i also have a bunker and uh an escape plan in case it goes wrong

01:16:02.360 these uh there's a long history i think in societies especially societies that are decaying

01:16:09.720 of people trying to escape i think this is like a symptom of that people realizing they've squeezed

01:16:14.160 everything they can out of it and it might be too much yeah mark zuckerberg has invested over

01:16:19.300 a hundred million dollars into like this compound in hawaii peter teal has like a 500 acre thing

01:16:27.040 going on in new zealand where he also got citizenship a lot of them are building these

01:16:31.800 like doomsday apocalypse bunkers and i want to be a little earnest for a second and i i i got

01:16:39.140 emotional i hate to admit it credibility points docked gay guy got emotional but i was in la

01:16:47.480 during the wildfires. And I was like watching smoke roll in past my window. And I was in

01:16:56.200 Hollywood. So one night there was a fire four blocks from the house that I was staying in.

01:17:01.640 And there's been so much debate about, you know, the immediate cause of the wildfires. And was it

01:17:07.100 an arsonist? And was it but the bottom line is the conditions, the environmental conditions in

01:17:13.080 California, the dryness made it possible for the fires to get as big as they did as quickly as they

01:17:19.880 did. And while I was sitting there watching the smoke roll in and watching the air become

01:17:26.700 unbreathable, I was reading about Peter Thiel's apocalypse bunker in New Zealand. And I got so

01:17:34.420 angry because these people, these people who are, you know, building AI data centers that are just

01:17:41.940 sucking up water from communities you know these these people who are just building their empires

01:17:48.800 with reckless abandon oh and and a million people are going to jump into the comments and be like

01:17:53.860 well ai is not the only thing that's bad for the planet i know i know but the private jets yeah

01:18:00.820 the everything i mean the environmental impact of billionaires is not a new revelation and they know

01:18:07.180 it and they're they're building these sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars price tagged

01:18:13.500 apocalypse bunkers to leave the world that they're leaving us rotting in that they caused the rot

01:18:20.440 i know that's this has not been the most uplifting episode of a bit fruity if you want something

01:18:27.520 lighter if you want something lighter we did an episode about hawk tua a few months ago you can

01:18:31.740 you can listen to that one but like when i said i wanted to start specific and then get out to like

01:18:37.600 the bigger picture like to me that's the bigger picture is like this is a handful of men who are

01:18:42.800 destroying the planet and while they're destroying the planet they're destroying the ability for

01:18:48.020 people belonging to all sorts of marginalized groups to live free and happy lives and they 0.99

01:18:52.880 know it and they have an escape plan that we cannot afford i mean i think i think you're

01:18:57.640 You are absolutely right. I mean, the world is run by these arsonists, right? These guys are

01:19:03.360 the ones who are destroying the planet, like you said. They're accelerating conditions of its

01:19:07.200 collapse. People can quibble and yell and scream about AI data centers. What do you think the

01:19:12.680 environmental impact of having Microsoft do $70 billion deals with fossil fuel companies to

01:19:20.820 maximize their production is going to be? It's going to be the continual degradation and collapse

01:19:26.420 of our ecology what do you think the predictable consequences of having these sprawling data

01:19:33.080 centers right not only pop up in places but successfully pop up in places and negotiate

01:19:38.900 deals so that they can steal the energy steal the water steal all you know as many resources as they

01:19:44.540 can to run their thing you know you may say it's not one-to-one but it lends itself to building

01:19:49.280 the conditions for the faster decline of our ecological niche, right? Because there's the

01:19:56.780 success of this business model or success of these negotiation tactics where you come in,

01:20:01.620 you get a prime piece of land, you overbear on the power grid, you force the reallocation of

01:20:08.020 resources to the data center, to the tech firms, take a good chunk of water that's in the area so

01:20:14.180 that you can continue to run this thing. And this proliferates over and over and over and over again.

01:20:18.400 for what so that they can offer services to other firms that are collapsing the ecology so that they

01:20:25.060 can be powered by coal fire or natural gas run plants you know like this is all feeding into

01:20:32.220 itself over and over and over again i think a lot of people freak out about it because they're

01:20:36.460 personally implicated in it to a variety of degrees you know like it's it's it's both the

01:20:40.860 fact that artificial intelligence is being forced upon us as much as people are not pushing against

01:20:45.980 it that contributes to it but it's also the fact that again the society is just run by arsonists

01:20:50.580 who have no interest in preserving the environment if that gets in the way of them making money

01:20:55.720 you know and that's why they have these apocalypse bunkers yeah and you know i personally i think

01:21:00.800 those bunkers are not going to save them you know when the time comes if things get really bad i

01:21:05.660 don't think the bunkers are going to be they're not i don't think they'll be able to retreat at

01:21:09.240 least most of them i don't think we'll be able to successfully retreat you know is that the

01:21:12.700 redeeming message here is that like if we all die like kelsey ballerini if you go down i'm going

01:21:20.740 down too right yeah the redeeming message here is that we are all together in this we found

01:21:27.700 bipartisan unity yay on the pretty podcast to conclude this has been dark because i think that

01:21:37.280 we are just experiencing a dark reality right now yeah and some people after coming away from

01:21:43.140 these conversations they're like well i want to withdraw from from any of you know social media

01:21:49.280 that's controlled by this by these men and i understand that impulse i am wary of like giving

01:21:57.000 that as a directive to people for a few reasons one of which is that i'm still going to be on

01:22:00.760 those apps and so i'd be a hypocrite if i told people to leave two is that these platforms bring

01:22:05.100 people joy and do connect people in ways that i think have you know net positive effects that's

01:22:10.660 been my experience not just because like my job revolves around being online but because

01:22:15.480 i've witnessed the way that it's connected people i mean some of my earliest memories

01:22:19.580 with social media were watching coming out videos on youtube that made me feel like i wasn't

01:22:24.040 alone in my community and also because in general i'm wary of placing responsibility on individuals

01:22:30.460 on like normal everyday people on like how to on fixing these huge structural issues and so part

01:22:36.260 of this has just been to like i hope give anyone who's listened to this a bigger picture of

01:22:41.400 everything that's going on so that they have agency to make their own decisions but as someone

01:22:45.460 who spends so much time in this and reading and writing about all these figures and their futures

01:22:50.680 and our futures which are so intertwined what do you see as the way forward for the everyday person

01:22:56.560 i mean besides the fact that we're all going to die together yeah you know i've been thinking

01:23:00.760 about this a lot and it's kind of shifted and my mind shifts on this a lot because you know

01:23:03.940 i really of course you want to say organized protest but these companies as they grow more

01:23:08.720 powerful they grow more insulated from traditional means of opposition so i don't know i you know if

01:23:15.120 you work at one of these companies get a bunch of your friends leave your phone at home and walk

01:23:19.080 into the woods and talk about you know things you can do at the company if you are someone who's uh

01:23:24.260 you know, it doesn't work in one of these companies, maybe work at the company, figuring

01:23:26.540 out a way that you can like get in there and gum up the works. Like I feel like part of the thing

01:23:31.040 that needs to happen, there's an emphasis on nonviolent resistance, of course, right? And

01:23:34.860 there needs to be a continued of that. But part of the core plank of it in the civil rights

01:23:39.200 movement was you would occupy a space to disrupt its ability to do commerce for people to patronize

01:23:46.520 it, right? So that you could bring a little economic pain to business as usual. There's

01:23:51.860 not really an equivalent for that in the modern day, unless it's like, you know, maybe figuring

01:23:55.420 out ways you can undermine the, you know, block the construction of, you know, some data center

01:24:00.700 and go to some, you know, go to some workplace and gum up the works internally so that they're

01:24:06.020 not able to do this or that product that advances the cause of perpetual AI integration into

01:24:11.680 everything. There has to be a way to figure out how to make it more expensive to do business as

01:24:15.840 usual and, you know, property damage, economic disruption, boycott, like you have to figure

01:24:21.620 out ways to expand these tactics. Because otherwise, they have been pretty successful

01:24:27.520 in taking control of the state, been pretty successful in seizing a great deal of public

01:24:32.660 imagination, pretty successful in insulating themselves from consequences. Think of it in

01:24:37.980 those sorts of terms as they might have in the 60s, where it's like, if you're going up against

01:24:42.260 something that is in everyone's interest except ours for things to continue as usual, what are

01:24:48.380 the vulnerable places where you can block business as usual, convince people to join you and move on

01:24:54.800 from there. But I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of work that's being done to try to do this.

01:24:57.820 There are people in all these tech companies that are trying to organize and disrupt and occupy and

01:25:02.640 walk out. I think as these companies become more and more central to daily life, figuring out how

01:25:07.660 to constantly escalate that and make the pain of it unbearable so that you can stop it is important

01:25:13.780 because I have little faith that they're not going to be in control of the driving seat when

01:25:19.380 it comes to policy for a long time. We're looking at the beginning of a political order that's going

01:25:23.420 to be dominated increasingly by tech and by the elements that align with tech, whether they're

01:25:28.700 financial, whether they're energy. The only language in which these guys really care about

01:25:32.580 is the money and the dollars and the capital and the cost of investment. So figuring out a way to

01:25:36.640 raise the cost of investment, I think, is one of the only paths that's going to be available to us

01:25:40.500 in the coming years you know and if you don't work at any of these companies get a job at them

01:25:46.840 or maybe not i was just gonna say there's always blue sky oh yeah you know posting is great you

01:25:54.140 know it's a good it's a good release and catharsis it's all i got yeah i just keep on posting through

01:26:00.700 it yeah i don't know how do i end this in a light-hearted way in the a bit fruity fashion

01:26:04.920 you know the next four years we're gonna get new trump quotes you know we already got one in the

01:26:09.300 inauguration when he was like uh when he was giving a speech he was like you know a lot of

01:26:13.220 people a lot of our richest americans they lost their homes in the fires and they're here right

01:26:18.320 now and then he stopped and he looked around he's like that's interesting or more recently

01:26:23.280 los angeles where we're watching fires still tragically burn they're raging through the

01:26:29.160 houses and communities even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our

01:26:34.700 countries some of whom are sitting here right now they don't have a home any longer that's

01:26:41.180 interesting we're gonna get yeah we'll get more of that maybe we'll get a i don't know hawk tua 0.99

01:26:46.520 just did a rug pull crypto scale i loved it she should be in the white house pretty soon

01:26:51.980 so dark it's so dark ed thank you for being here today thanks for having me i live in a kind of an

01:27:02.360 information ecosystem that's dark in its own way but i feel like you really are up against a lot

01:27:07.160 trying to do critical reporting against the powers that be in the tech world and i really commend you

01:27:11.680 for it thanks i appreciate it it's not it's not um it's not fun and my contempt of how things are

01:27:16.920 is what helps me stale you know but it's important right it's important it's important where can

01:27:23.560 people find you i got a newsletter uh the tech bubble on sub stack i got a podcast this machine

01:27:29.380 kills we talk about technology and the political economy of it i'm on twitter big black jack and

01:27:34.340 ben i'm on blue sky with my name edward angueso jr thank you so much i know this was a long well

01:27:41.980 they're all long ones i appreciate you being here i know there is a lot to digest right now

01:27:48.720 and i just hope that you are doing whatever you need to do to take care of yourself and you don't

01:27:53.780 need to read every single little thing you don't even need to listen to this podcast in one sitting

01:27:57.540 I don't care you don't even need to listen to this podcast at all but I'm realizing I'm giving

01:28:00.980 this advice at the end of a two hour long recording which means that you have in which

01:28:04.460 case I'm sorry go take a nap I love you and until next time stay fruity

A Bit Fruity with Matt Bernstein - January 24, 2025

The Tech Bro-ligarchy

Episode Stats

Transcript