Latest / Pod Save America / No Evidence, No Problem: GOP Votes To Impeach (Live from San Jose!)

Transcript

No Evidence, No Problem: GOP Votes To Impeach (Live from San Jose!) · Pod Save America

0:01
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Tommy Vitor.
0:28
Speaker 2: I'm Jon Favreau.
0:31
Speaker 1: I'm Adesu Demesi. I'm John Lovett. I'm Dan Pfeiffer.
0:40
Speaker 3: John Favreau can't be here tonight because he and his
0:42
Speaker 3: wife Emily are expecting a baby any day now, which
0:45
Speaker 3: is very exciting. We're excited for him. Of course, we'll
0:49
Speaker 3: miss him, but we have a great show for you guys.
0:51
Speaker 3: We are so excited to have Adesu joining us tonight.
0:53
Speaker 1: Adesu, he managed Cory Booker's campaign recently.
0:58
Speaker 3: Your governor, Gavin Newsom's campaign in 2018, worked for Obama, Clinton.
1:02
Speaker 1: Lots of folks. We're thrilled to have him.
1:06
Speaker 3: Our first guest is the youngest member of the California Assembly,
1:09
Speaker 3: Alex Lee.
1:10
Speaker 1: Give it up for Alex.
1:14
Speaker 3: And then for our second news section, we're gonna try
1:16
Speaker 3: something a little different. We're gonna focus on the intersection
1:18
Speaker 3: of tech and politics. And we'll be joined by Zoe Schiffer,
1:22
Speaker 3: a fantastic tech reporter from Platformer who's gonna help us
1:25
Speaker 3: make sense of this town you guys call home.
1:28
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:29
Speaker 1: So you guys can applaud while you try to pretend
1:31
Speaker 1: you don't have your fucking day jobs.
1:33
Speaker 2: Saturday!
1:39
Speaker 3: But first, after a year-long investigation into vague and unfounded claims,
1:43
Speaker 3: House Republicans voted today to formally launch an impeachment inquiry
1:47
Speaker 3: into President Biden.
1:49
Speaker 1: Boo for that. It was a party-line vote.
1:51
Speaker 3: All Republicans voted yes, all Democrats voted no.
1:54
Speaker 1: You get the concept.
1:55
Speaker 3: As a reminder, Republicans haven't stated the official charges they
1:59
Speaker 3: want to bring against Biden, and they haven't proven any allegations,
2:02
Speaker 3: but that didn't slow them down. Here's Republican Senator Chuck
2:05
Speaker 3: Grassley talking about this open and shut case.
2:09
Speaker 5: I have no evidence of it, and I'm going to
2:11
Speaker 5: just follow the facts where they are. And the facts
2:14
Speaker 5: haven't taken me to that point where I can say
2:17
Speaker 5: that the president's guilty of anything.
2:21
Speaker 1: They got him, guys.
2:23
Speaker 3: In related news, Hunter Biden was subpoenaed by Republicans who
2:26
Speaker 3: demanded he appear today in front of the House Oversight
2:28
Speaker 3: Committee hearing in a closed-door deposition. Instead, Hunter defied that
2:32
Speaker 3: subpoena and held his own press conference outside the Capitol
2:35
Speaker 3: where he said he would only testify publicly so Republicans
2:38
Speaker 3: can't cherry-pick and leak his testimony. So, Dan, it's tempting
2:43
Speaker 3: to treat this impeachment inquiry as a joke because the
2:45
Speaker 3: process is so clearly politicized. But let's talk about what
2:48
Speaker 3: happens next and the political risks here for Biden. How
2:51
Speaker 3: do you think Biden's team figures out how to respond
2:53
Speaker 3: to this impeachment inquiry? And what would you be worried
2:56
Speaker 3: about most if you had your old White House job?
2:59
Speaker 6: I would just note that everyone here just cheered the
3:02
Speaker 6: defiance of a subpoena. We were here in 2019, right
3:06
Speaker 6: about the time Mark Meadows was defying a subpoena and
3:08
Speaker 6: Trump's impeachment.
3:09
Speaker 1: No one applauded that. I'll tell you that right now. No,
3:11
Speaker 1: this was this. The show we did in San Jose
3:14
Speaker 1: in 2019 was the opening of Trump's first impeachment inquiry.
3:19
Speaker 4: Nice.
3:20
Speaker 1: And you guys had a much different take.
3:25
Speaker 6: So I think this impeachment inquiry, like so much Republican
3:28
Speaker 6: politics over the last decade or so, was just like
3:31
Speaker 6: one really unfunny joke. But if I was in the
3:36
Speaker 6: White House, I don't know that I would be worried
3:39
Speaker 6: about this. I might be excited about it. I think
3:42
Speaker 6: if I was sitting in my old office, what what
3:46
Speaker 6: I would try to convince the president to do, and
3:48
Speaker 6: I understand why he would not do this, because this
3:49
Speaker 6: is obviously very personal to him.
3:50
Speaker 1: This is about his son.
3:53
Speaker 6: But from a purely political perspective, I would spend every
3:57
Speaker 6: single day beating the Republicans up for this, right? There's
4:00
Speaker 6: nothing Joe Biden could use more right now than a
4:02
Speaker 6: fight with a bunch of extremist, unpopular Republicans, and that's
4:06
Speaker 6: exactly what this House is. And so, like what I would,
4:10
Speaker 6: I would go out every day. I would say, here
4:11
Speaker 6: are the things I'm working on. Here's what they're doing instead.
4:14
Speaker 6: I would do press conferences. I mean, if I really
4:15
Speaker 6: wanted to play a big card, I would do a joint,
4:17
Speaker 6: I would call for a joint session of Congress, go
4:19
Speaker 6: up there, say, here are the things, here's my agenda
4:21
Speaker 6: to lower your costs and raise your wages. And what
4:24
Speaker 6: are you doing instead of that? Take them on, make
4:26
Speaker 6: them pay for this. This is a huge political.
4:28
Speaker 1: Mistake on their part and be aggressive about it.
4:33
Speaker 6: Like the, there's, I think a big, huge fight with
4:37
Speaker 6: these people, with these Republicans, would do Joe Biden so
4:41
Speaker 6: much political good right now, and they've given him a gift,
4:43
Speaker 6: and he should take it.
4:46
Speaker 1: Well said.
4:46
Speaker 3: Speaking of gifts, let's watch a clip of CNN's Jake
4:50
Speaker 3: Tapper interviewing the Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer.
4:54
Speaker 1: And my concern is that Weiss may have indicted Hunter
5:00
Speaker 1: Biden to protect him from having to be deposed in the.
5:04
Speaker 2: House Oversight Committee on Wednesday.
5:06
Speaker 1: He indicted him to protect him.
5:08
Speaker 7: Yes, the classic rubric.
5:10
Speaker 1: He indicted him to protect him. I got it. Well, look,
5:13
Speaker 1: this whole, Jake, this whole thing's been about a cover-up.
5:17
Speaker 1: You know, you've got two serious concerns.
5:18
Speaker 2: That's why he.
5:19
Speaker 1: Indicted him to protect him, to cover it up. I
5:26
Speaker 1: love Jake, man. Wow. I love not having to deal
5:29
Speaker 1: with Jake as a flack. Love it.
5:30
Speaker 3: Obviously, no president wants to get impeached, but history suggests
5:34
Speaker 3: that the political impact of impeachment is not necessarily a given, right?
5:38
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, look, the crimes are supposed to lead
5:44
Speaker 1: to the impeachment. The impeachment isn't supposed to lead to
5:47
Speaker 1: the crimes. So they fucked that up. They got the
5:50
Speaker 1: order wrong. Huge blunder. You know, I do think that, like,
5:57
Speaker 1: the point Dan's making is, like, really important because I
5:59
Speaker 1: think people have a lot of assumptions or they've sort
6:02
Speaker 1: of taken a lot of conventional wisdom about what impeachment means,
6:05
Speaker 1: but impeachment means exactly what we fight to make it mean.
6:08
Speaker 1: I think there are people that say, oh, you know,
6:10
Speaker 1: Bill Clinton's approval ratings went up, but you could, you know,
6:13
Speaker 1: tell that to President Al Gore. You know, Donald Trump,
6:18
Speaker 1: you know, oh, all of these accusations, impeachment, it washed
6:21
Speaker 1: right off of him. Did it? Or did those weeks
6:23
Speaker 1: of attention hurt him politically in that moment? And we
6:25
Speaker 1: have the memories of fucking goldfish. My, I think that
6:30
Speaker 1: there's sort of, There's two ways to think about it,
6:34
Speaker 1: and I think one actually does have a pitfall that
6:36
Speaker 1: we should just be cognizant of, which is we should
6:40
Speaker 1: not be in the position as Democrats of defending kind
6:42
Speaker 1: of quotidian corruption in Washington. Like, I don't think there's
6:46
Speaker 1: anything to be bashful about when you just say, look,
6:49
Speaker 1: Hunter Biden seems like he's quite a sleaze, but they're
6:52
Speaker 1: trying to attack Joe Biden for committing the sin of
6:56
Speaker 1: loving his fuck-up son. And I think a lot of
6:58
Speaker 1: Americans have fuck-up kids, and they have fuck-up relatives, and
7:01
Speaker 1: we all know... That it's the act of a good
7:05
Speaker 1: person to try to find a way to love that person,
7:08
Speaker 1: even when they're fucking up and dragging your name through
7:10
Speaker 1: the mud. I'd rather be that than anyone going out
7:14
Speaker 1: of their way to pretend that some of the shit
7:16
Speaker 1: that goes on in D.C., including Republican members of Congress
7:19
Speaker 1: and what their spouses do and what their family members
7:21
Speaker 1: do to trade off the names of their own politicians,
7:23
Speaker 1: I think is worth keeping in mind. Beyond that, you know,
7:28
Speaker 1: Hunter Biden thinks he's going to have some kind of
7:31
Speaker 1: moment in a press conference where he's like, have you
7:33
Speaker 1: no decency, sir? I'm not sold on that. I'm not
7:36
Speaker 1: excited for his public hearing any more than I was
7:38
Speaker 1: excited about his private hearing. I want to say something.
7:45
Speaker 1: Is this the joke back there?
7:47
Speaker 2: We finally found the joke. He's not ready to tell.
7:50
Speaker 1: Coward. Here's what I would say. Look. I would say
7:54
Speaker 1: to Hunter Biden, the same thing I would say to
7:56
Speaker 1: George W. Bush or Hitler, which is stick to painting.
8:08
Speaker 1: Leaving space to cut that.
8:10
Speaker 3: Well, there's a piece of this that's like purely financial, right?
8:14
Speaker 3: And then there's the piece of this that's about Hunter
8:16
Speaker 3: Biden's addictions. And he's been very honest about his struggles
8:19
Speaker 3: with addiction. And I think if Republicans had the discipline
8:22
Speaker 3: to focus solely on the financial piece of this in
8:25
Speaker 3: the way he potentially used his father's position in office
8:28
Speaker 3: to make money. That would be one thing, but we
8:31
Speaker 3: know they don't have any discipline and they're attacking him
8:33
Speaker 3: for addiction problems. And I don't know anybody, there's nobody
8:36
Speaker 3: in this country who doesn't have a friend or a
8:37
Speaker 3: relative or someone they care about generally who hasn't struggled
8:40
Speaker 3: with addiction.
8:40
Speaker 1: So I do think that's a real risk for Republicans.
8:42
Speaker 3: But Adisu, so even if we concede that getting impeached
8:45
Speaker 3: during an election year is not ideal, Donald Trump has
8:48
Speaker 3: been charged in four criminal cases. He was impeached twice,
8:52
Speaker 3: by the way, Do you think voters will see the
8:56
Speaker 3: criminal cases as materially different?
8:59
Speaker 8: Well, first, I will concede that nobody wants to get impeached,
9:03
Speaker 8: but I'm not going to concede that this impeachment is
9:04
Speaker 8: actually going to happen. You know, we only need three
9:08
Speaker 8: or four Republicans to realize it's political suicide to vote
9:11
Speaker 8: for this, for them to... The article's never to actually
9:15
Speaker 8: come to fruition. So this inquiry is going to take place.
9:18
Speaker 8: I think, to your point, Dan, they're actually... There will
9:21
Speaker 8: be a moment for the president to stand up there
9:22
Speaker 8: in the State of the Union whenever it comes towards
9:25
Speaker 8: the beginning of the year, but I'm not sure it's
9:28
Speaker 8: actually gonna happen. With that said, there is something materially
9:32
Speaker 8: different between the Trump indictments and this Biden impeachment inquiry,
9:36
Speaker 8: and that is that one.
9:37
Speaker 2: Is bullshit and the other is actually based on facts.
9:42
Speaker 8: And the reality, I think, here is that the Republicans
9:47
Speaker 8: are trying to blur the line between reality and fantasy,
9:50
Speaker 8: and we can't allow them to do that.
9:52
Speaker 2: We can't allow them to do it because talking.
9:54
Speaker 8: About this and talking about indictments and impeachments together is
9:58
Speaker 8: actually going to serve their purposes, as it were. And
10:02
Speaker 8: they know that this is bullshit, right? You showed the
10:04
Speaker 8: clip from Chuck Grassley. I took a quote that I
10:08
Speaker 8: pulled up here from Chief Clown Matt Gaetz, who called
10:12
Speaker 8: Comer and Johnson's investigations failure theater. Fox News' Chief Clown
10:17
Speaker 8: Brian Kilmeade called the impeachment ridiculous and a waste of time.
10:22
Speaker 8: Ken Buck, a Republican congressman, wrote in the Washington Post
10:25
Speaker 8: in September that Republicans in the House who are itching
10:28
Speaker 8: for an impeachment are relying on an imagined history. They
10:32
Speaker 8: know this is bullshit. And I think voters, to answer
10:35
Speaker 8: your question, voters are smarter than we give them credit
10:38
Speaker 8: for it sometimes, particularly the voters that I think we
10:40
Speaker 8: need to stay on our side or come back to
10:42
Speaker 8: our side next year. Voters of color, college educated voters
10:46
Speaker 8: in the suburbs, And once indictments turn to trials, turn
10:49
Speaker 8: to potentially convictions, I think the difference is going to
10:52
Speaker 8: be clear. But these are not the same thing. One
10:54
Speaker 8: is based in evidence, and one is based in absolute fiction.
10:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's just no doubt that, like, if you're one
11:04
Speaker 1: of the dozen or so Republicans who won in Biden districts,
11:10
Speaker 1: that you are deeply unpleased.
11:12
Speaker 4: Yeah.
11:13
Speaker 1: You're deeply unhappy with this situation. This is not what
11:16
Speaker 1: you want to be talking about. This is not what
11:18
Speaker 1: you want to be answering questions about. This is not
11:19
Speaker 1: what you want to be dealing with.
11:20
Speaker 8: And yet, they all fucking voted for it today, right?
11:23
Speaker 1: Including Ken Buck who wrote that op-ed. You quoted.
11:26
Speaker 6: The ink was not dry on that op-ed when he
11:29
Speaker 6: turned around and voted for the thing that he said
11:31
Speaker 6: he was not.
11:31
Speaker 1: Going to vote for in the Washington Post.
11:33
Speaker 2: But maybe it is actually very believable.
11:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very believable.
11:35
Speaker 3: You forgot about my guy, Dusty Johnson from South Dakota
11:39
Speaker 3: who said, there's not evidence to impeach I don't like
11:41
Speaker 3: the stonewalling the administration has done, but listen, if we
11:44
Speaker 3: don't have the receipts, then that should constrain what the
11:46
Speaker 3: House does. You guys know I've been hard on Dusty
11:48
Speaker 3: Johnson in the past. But that's a pretty solid quote.
11:52
Speaker 1: I don't listen to you. I just wait for my
11:53
Speaker 1: turn to talk. I just think that's a funny name.
11:55
Speaker 1: All right. Love it.
11:59
Speaker 3: So Hunter Biden is refusing to sit for this private deposition.
12:02
Speaker 3: He's instead demanding that he be allowed to testify publicly
12:05
Speaker 3: during a press conference Wednesday. He said, quote, Republicans do
12:07
Speaker 3: not want an open process where Americans can see their tactics,
12:10
Speaker 3: expose their baseless inquiry or hear what I have to say.
12:13
Speaker 1: What are they afraid of? I'm here. I'm ready. What
12:15
Speaker 1: do you think of this high stakes game of political chicken?
12:18
Speaker 1: Here's what I think. I think he's making a lot
12:20
Speaker 1: of good points. I'd like someone else to make those points. Uh,
12:23
Speaker 1: like this, this idea that we're heading to a, like
12:25
Speaker 1: a big confrontation where Hunter Biden's going to clear his name.
12:28
Speaker 1: That's not how this goes. I just, I would like
12:30
Speaker 1: this to be, I would like him to answer questions
12:33
Speaker 1: from Republicans the way those college professors answered the questions
12:35
Speaker 1: from a Lisa Stefanik, like lawyerly cold and dead, just quiet,
12:40
Speaker 1: fucking shitty, boring answers. Uh, We have to make the
12:46
Speaker 1: argument that everyone's talking about, right? That like Republicans are
12:48
Speaker 1: in our, you know, Joe Biden is president as an
12:52
Speaker 1: antidote to Republican chaos, extremism, and corruption. This impeachment inquiry
12:57
Speaker 1: is a distraction from that fight. That Joe Biden's success
13:00
Speaker 1: as president is not something Republicans can run against. What
13:03
Speaker 1: they can run against is trumped up charges, efforts to
13:06
Speaker 1: do what Comer is doing, which is If you watch Comer,
13:08
Speaker 1: he has been doing these interviews with Jake Tapper for
13:11
Speaker 1: literally a year now. And he goes on and he
13:13
Speaker 1: talks in that fucking high-pitched Southern accent for 15 minutes,
13:17
Speaker 1: never saying a goddamn thing while Jake smirks and smiles
13:19
Speaker 1: and says, you don't have anything. But Comer doesn't care
13:21
Speaker 1: because they're doing what they did with Benghazi. They're doing
13:24
Speaker 1: what they've done over the years to try to make
13:27
Speaker 1: it to just, even if there's no fire, they're going
13:30
Speaker 1: to do everything they can to create the illusion of smoke.
13:34
Speaker 1: So our job is to fight that. What Hunter Biden does,
13:36
Speaker 1: I don't really care. I would like it to be
13:39
Speaker 1: quiet and in his own home. That's how I feel
13:42
Speaker 1: about it.
13:43
Speaker 6: I think it's worth talking for a second about why
13:45
Speaker 6: they're doing this. There are, as Tommy and Lovett just mentioned,
13:50
Speaker 6: 18 Republicans who are in districts that Joe Biden won.
13:52
Speaker 6: And that number is actually probably going to go up
13:55
Speaker 6: because there's a court case in New York and New
13:56
Speaker 6: York is going to redraw its districts.
13:58
Speaker 1: So a bunch of these....
14:01
Speaker 6: We have cheered subpoena defiance and gerrymandering.
14:11
Speaker 1: When we do it, it's good.
14:17
Speaker 6: The short-term political imperative for why they're doing this is
14:22
Speaker 6: the law of Republican physics is if you do one
14:25
Speaker 6: sane thing, which is what the Republicans did when they
14:27
Speaker 6: voted to prevent the government from shutting down, You have
14:30
Speaker 6: to do one much bigger, much more insane thing, and
14:34
Speaker 6: that is this impeachment.
14:36
Speaker 1: Now, there's not, like, Adesanya was right.
14:38
Speaker 6: There may be a chance they will never vote to
14:42
Speaker 6: actually impeach Joe Biden, but they want to keep the
14:47
Speaker 6: investigation going the entire time so that there can be
14:50
Speaker 6: some level of suspicion, and suspicion in a political environment
14:55
Speaker 6: where the overwhelming majority of Americans think most politicians are corrupt.
14:59
Speaker 6: And You know, one thing that we, you know, in
15:03
Speaker 6: the impeachment of Donald Trump, there were all these subpoenas
15:06
Speaker 6: that were never actually enforced because the Democrats were on
15:08
Speaker 6: a clock. They were trying to get it done quickly,
15:11
Speaker 6: so they never pushed it to the envelope or they
15:13
Speaker 6: would force there to be, go all the way up
15:15
Speaker 6: to the Supreme Court, some of these subpoenas. Republicans would
15:17
Speaker 6: now have a year or 11 months to try to
15:20
Speaker 6: do that. And that's what they're hoping for, is to
15:21
Speaker 6: just keep this out there. Maybe they find something that
15:24
Speaker 6: is totally... unrelated to Hunter Biden that can be some.
15:28
Speaker 1: Moment in the campaign.
15:29
Speaker 6: Hillary Clinton's emails did not come from an investigation into
15:33
Speaker 6: her email protocol. It came from an investigation into a
15:36
Speaker 6: totally bullshit special committee investigation into Benghazi.
15:40
Speaker 4: Yeah.
15:40
Speaker 1: And the Bill Clinton impeachment grew out of a decade
15:43
Speaker 1: older investigation out of Whitewater. The other thing too, just
15:46
Speaker 1: part of the reason they've pursued this specific investigation is
15:51
Speaker 1: Donald Trump ran an incredibly corrupt White House where his
15:54
Speaker 1: family members profited off the administration, where people who were
15:58
Speaker 1: working for him were doing shady fucking shit to position
16:02
Speaker 1: themselves to get, say, $ 2 billion from the Saudis after
16:05
Speaker 1: they left office. This is also about neutralizing a critique
16:09
Speaker 1: of Donald Trump to try to stir up something that
16:12
Speaker 1: seems to have the contours of the kind of corruption
16:15
Speaker 1: that actually took place when Donald Trump was president. That
16:19
Speaker 1: is what they're trying to do with Hunter Biden. That
16:20
Speaker 1: is what they were trying to do when Donald Trump
16:22
Speaker 1: says Joe Biden is a threat to democracy. It is
16:24
Speaker 1: the I'm rubber, you're glue 2024 campaign.
16:30
Speaker 8: The only thing I would add is, obviously, we're talking
16:33
Speaker 8: about this because this happened today on Capitol Hill.
16:36
Speaker 1: It's news.
16:37
Speaker 8: But one of the things for the listeners, for the
16:38
Speaker 8: folks in the audience, like, They want us to keep
16:41
Speaker 8: talking about this because it takes up space from all
16:44
Speaker 8: the other things we could be talking about, not just
16:46
Speaker 8: about things that President Biden and Democrats have done in
16:48
Speaker 8: Washington or elsewhere, but the things that Trump did in
16:51
Speaker 8: the past and will potentially do if he becomes president again.
16:54
Speaker 8: And so some of this is just about taking up
16:56
Speaker 8: oxygen and making sure that, you know, they did it
17:01
Speaker 8: to Trump, so they're going to do it to Biden.
17:02
Speaker 1: Impeachment, impeachment.
17:03
Speaker 8: And try to get voters out there who are paying
17:05
Speaker 8: less attention than the listeners of the people in the
17:08
Speaker 8: audience to just say, throw up their hand and say
17:11
Speaker 8: they're all the same. And so I think it's incumbent
17:13
Speaker 8: a little bit upon us to, sure, talk about it.
17:15
Speaker 8: It's important news of the day, but also not to
17:19
Speaker 8: let this become the defining issue of the next six
17:22
Speaker 8: months because it's probably not a good place for us
17:25
Speaker 8: to be fighting this election, especially when Trump becomes the
17:28
Speaker 8: nominee in a couple of weeks.
17:29
Speaker 1: I don't know.
17:30
Speaker 6: I mean, yes, I don't think we want to spend
17:31
Speaker 6: the next six months on this, but I think they
17:33
Speaker 6: are going to want to have this vote.
17:35
Speaker 1: They did very little press on the vote. They're not
17:37
Speaker 1: going to talk.
17:37
Speaker 5: They did it.
17:38
Speaker 6: There's a reason they did it right before they went
17:40
Speaker 6: home for the holidays, right, just to get it done with. Now,
17:42
Speaker 6: none of them have to get cornered by Jake Sherman
17:45
Speaker 6: in the hallway of the Capitol in an answer for this.
17:47
Speaker 6: They're not going to see voters for weeks. They want
17:49
Speaker 6: to keep this kind of a little bit under the radar,
17:52
Speaker 6: like they're going to go on Fox News and talk
17:53
Speaker 6: about it. They'll be on Newsmax and want anyone else
17:55
Speaker 6: to know about it. This is why I think that
17:57
Speaker 6: it's worth having a fight over this. And there are
17:59
Speaker 6: political merits to having the fight. Like, there's going to
18:02
Speaker 6: be a moment where Donald Trump's the nominee, and we're
18:03
Speaker 6: going to pivot hard, and that is going to be
18:05
Speaker 6: the thing. The next few months, there's nothing that would
18:07
Speaker 6: be better, in my view, for Joe Biden's political standing
18:10
Speaker 6: than to get Democrats angry at Republicans. And this worked
18:14
Speaker 6: for Donald Trump because Donald Trump's poll numbers, we all
18:18
Speaker 6: cheered that day in December of 2019 when that impeachment
18:21
Speaker 6: was filed. Donald Trump's poll numbers went up over the
18:24
Speaker 6: course of that for two reasons. One is his approval
18:28
Speaker 6: rating among Republicans went from 80% to 90%. So that
18:31
Speaker 6: jumped his approval rating up significantly. And one of the
18:35
Speaker 6: only times Donald Trump has ever been above 50% with
18:37
Speaker 6: independents in the entire time of his presidency was when
18:40
Speaker 6: the Democrats were impeaching him.
18:41
Speaker 1: Because the voters thought that that was not what Congress
18:44
Speaker 1: should be spending their time on.
18:46
Speaker 6: And so to your point, they want to make it
18:48
Speaker 6: about something, we should make it about something else, and
18:49
Speaker 6: we should have that argument, we should have it loudly.
18:51
Speaker 8: Yeah, maybe it's about not debating the facts. Oh, yes.
18:55
Speaker 1: Exactly.
18:55
Speaker 8: The facts of the matter are not we shouldn't be
18:58
Speaker 8: debating it. If we're talking details, if you're explaining you're
19:00
Speaker 8: losing is like super extra true when it comes to
19:04
Speaker 8: Biden impeachment.
19:05
Speaker 4: Yeah.
19:05
Speaker 3: Now what the voters, if you ask an open-ended question
19:08
Speaker 3: to voters, what are the most important issues facing the
19:10
Speaker 3: U S it's inflation, immigration, democracy.
19:14
Speaker 1: Like those are the things they want us to focus on.
19:16
Speaker 3: Biden has to make the case that this impeachment inquiry
19:19
Speaker 3: is politicized and it's happening because Donald Trump, their MC said,
19:25
Speaker 3: Democrats did this to me. So now you have to
19:27
Speaker 3: do it to them. But Adisu, for a while, I mean,
19:31
Speaker 3: the reason we know the politics of this are a
19:34
Speaker 3: little unsteady for Republicans is because for a while, they
19:37
Speaker 3: were hesitant about impeachment. It was the Marjorie Taylor Greene's
19:40
Speaker 3: of the world pushing for it, while the kind of
19:43
Speaker 3: normal elements of the caucus were saying, I don't know
19:45
Speaker 3: that we have the evidence yet. Now the support is unanimous.
19:49
Speaker 3: What do you think changed to get us here?
19:52
Speaker 8: I think Republican congressmen are more afraid of Donald Trump
19:56
Speaker 8: and the MAGA base than they are of anything else.
19:59
Speaker 8: And when the rubber meets the road, that's where they go.
20:03
Speaker 8: And Luckily, next November we're gonna have a chance in
20:07
Speaker 8: those 17 districts, or 18 or however many there'll.
20:10
Speaker 2: Be, to show them the opposite.
20:13
Speaker 8: But I also think that the idea that the Republican
20:16
Speaker 8: Party hasn't been wholly taken over by the MAGA extreme
20:19
Speaker 8: right is just not true.
20:22
Speaker 2: There are a couple, sure, that hopefully those.
20:24
Speaker 8: Couple that end up voting or intending to vote against
20:27
Speaker 8: articles of impeachment, thus it never moves forward, but the
20:31
Speaker 8: super majority of Republican Congress is now MAGA Republicans, and
20:37
Speaker 8: we just have to acknowledge that, and I know all
20:38
Speaker 8: of us, myself included, for the good of the country,
20:40
Speaker 8: for the good of the world, wish that there was
20:43
Speaker 8: a sane opposition on the other side, but it does
20:48
Speaker 8: not exist, and I don't think it will exist as
20:49
Speaker 8: long as Donald Trump is still in politics. It's why
20:51
Speaker 8: I still am in politics, because I said the day
20:54
Speaker 8: after Hillary Clinton lost in 2016, until that fucker is gone,
20:56
Speaker 8: I'm not going anywhere. And it's because he's a threat
20:59
Speaker 8: to democracy. But anyway, that's where I think ultimately the
21:05
Speaker 8: Republican Party has been taken over by Donald Trump. That
21:08
Speaker 8: starts at the top, but it's the members of the
21:10
Speaker 8: House in particular and even, honestly, the rest of Congress,
21:13
Speaker 8: I think, because they're MAGA now and we just have
21:16
Speaker 8: to acknowledge it.
21:17
Speaker 1: And the rest of them have resigned.
21:19
Speaker 3: Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when
21:20
Speaker 3: we come back, you'll hear from California State Rep Alex Leak.
21:34
Speaker 7: Have you ever asked yourself, do I have enough Dan
21:37
Speaker 7: Pfeiffer content in my life?
21:38
Speaker 1: Every day. Well, now you do.
21:41
Speaker 7: Today, Dan's brand new series, Polar Coaster, drops its first
21:45
Speaker 7: ever episode. Plus, Dan and Alyssa team up in the
21:48
Speaker 7: second monthly installment of Inside 2024, dropping next Wednesday, the 20th.
21:53
Speaker 7: In light of the Trump versus Biden campaigns, the two
21:54
Speaker 7: will be exploring the strategy behind running an incumbent campaign.
21:58
Speaker 7: To listen to both of these Dan-infused episodes, head to crooked.com
22:04
Speaker 7: slash friends to sign up now.
22:11
Speaker 1: Please welcome to the stage your own state representative, Alex Lee.
22:25
Speaker 9: Hello, San Jose.
22:26
Speaker 1: Hello, San Jose. These are your people. I know.
22:30
Speaker 9: This is my home city, too.
22:31
Speaker 1: So it's really awesome.
22:32
Speaker 9: You're ending the tour in San Jose.
22:34
Speaker 1: It's awesome. All right. You were 25 when you ran
22:38
Speaker 1: for the seat and won.
22:39
Speaker 9: I was 23 when I ran. Oh, there you go.
22:41
Speaker 9: I was sworn in at 25.
22:42
Speaker 1: Okay, there you go. I was sworn in at 25.
22:44
Speaker 1: So you were 23 when you started to run. I
22:46
Speaker 1: know what I was doing when I was 23. Running
22:47
Speaker 1: for office, too? No, no, absolutely not. Talk to me
22:55
Speaker 1: about how you.
22:56
Speaker 6: like how did you come to decision to think that
22:58
Speaker 6: this is how you should spend your early twenties and
23:02
Speaker 6: what gave you confidence that you could win?
23:05
Speaker 5: Yeah.
23:05
Speaker 9: So I'm 28 now. So that's three years.
23:08
Speaker 1: Into basically old now. Yes.
23:10
Speaker 9: I'm very old. If you ask my very young staff,
23:14
Speaker 9: they'll say I'm a death's door. Now I'm basically a 30, uh,
23:17
Speaker 9: but three years in, it feels like I've been in
23:19
Speaker 9: office for three decades. Frankly, I started during the pandemic.
23:22
Speaker 9: I won my primary two weeks before this County, shut
23:26
Speaker 9: down because of the COVID pandemic and was the first
23:28
Speaker 9: ever in an entire country to do so.
23:30
Speaker 1: So you're like Joe Biden in that way.
23:33
Speaker 9: I think so too. I think we were both leaders
23:35
Speaker 9: in our own time like that too. I mean, hey,
23:37
Speaker 9: Joe Biden started very early too. I don't know if
23:39
Speaker 9: I could be president at his age too, but frankly.
23:43
Speaker 1: We'll get to that. We'll see. We'll see, right?
23:45
Speaker 9: But you know, one thing that really motivated me to
23:48
Speaker 9: run for office, and I was a legislative staffer before
23:50
Speaker 9: I ran for office, is that I was frankly tired
23:53
Speaker 9: that we had a Democratic supermajority in California with democratic
23:56
Speaker 9: control of all the executive office, and yet we were
23:59
Speaker 9: surrendering to fucking incrementalism. We have some of the worst
24:03
Speaker 9: problems in the entire country, and people rightfully sometimes lampoon
24:09
Speaker 9: us for it, but we have to be really innovative
24:12
Speaker 9: in how we tackle these problems. And maybe it's because
24:14
Speaker 9: I'm from, I grew up here in Silicon Valley, but
24:16
Speaker 9: I went there, I disrupted things, I said we should
24:19
Speaker 9: think about things differently, we should tax billionaires, we should
24:21
Speaker 9: actually get people housing. and frankly, annoyed a lot of
24:24
Speaker 9: people with status quo. But I wasn't gonna surrender to incrementalism,
24:29
Speaker 9: and that's why I ran.
24:31
Speaker 6: And how have your new, older colleagues taken to your
24:36
Speaker 6: non-incrementalism message?
24:38
Speaker 9: I think at first, a lot of people were taken
24:40
Speaker 9: aback by my approach. You know, frankly, I've been in
24:42
Speaker 9: legislative staff. I understood that a lot of things were
24:45
Speaker 9: true compromise, right? But it was really nibbling away at
24:47
Speaker 9: the edges of so many things. But I am excited,
24:50
Speaker 9: as we constantly have a refresh of new members, we
24:54
Speaker 9: are more and more bracing of new ideas. And frankly,
24:56
Speaker 9: it's also because how dire the consequences are, or dire
24:58
Speaker 9: the issues are now. I mean, we, even though the
25:01
Speaker 9: wealthiest state in the entire country, have the largest population
25:04
Speaker 9: of unhoused people on the streets. And that is a
25:06
Speaker 9: symptom directly of our inequality. So as more and more
25:08
Speaker 9: people understand how dire the issues are, I think more
25:11
Speaker 9: people are turning to issues. And frankly, I even got
25:13
Speaker 9: the governor to say it once, that I was right
25:15
Speaker 9: on something. And he doesn't usually say I was right
25:17
Speaker 9: on something.
25:17
Speaker 1: What was the thing you said you were right on?
25:19
Speaker 9: It was this year, we actually... investigated the gouging prices
25:26
Speaker 9: by gasoline companies, and I proposed last year a windfall
25:30
Speaker 9: profits tax, and then we had a special session to
25:33
Speaker 9: do just that. So we adopted that proposal. It changed
25:36
Speaker 9: along the way, but I was really happy to work
25:37
Speaker 9: with Governor Gavin Newsom on this issue too.
25:39
Speaker 1: All right.
25:40
Speaker 6: As you mentioned, and I think this is probably your
25:42
Speaker 6: signature legislative effort, has been introducing legislation to increase taxes
25:45
Speaker 6: on the wealthiest Californians, people with a net worth of
25:49
Speaker 6: $ 50 million or more.
25:50
Speaker 1: Apologies if any of those people are in this audience tonight.
25:52
Speaker 6: Can you walk us a little bit through that legislation
25:54
Speaker 6: and why you introduced it?
25:56
Speaker 9: Yeah, so very much like Senator Elizabeth Warren's proposal to
25:59
Speaker 9: tax mega millionaires and billionaires, just 1% of every dollar
26:04
Speaker 9: of their mega fortune. That proposal at the time when
26:08
Speaker 9: we created it, and we worked with a lot of
26:10
Speaker 9: smart academics and people worked in policy, worked on Senator
26:13
Speaker 9: Warren's proposal too. would have generated $ 22 billion a year,
26:17
Speaker 9: $ 22 billion a year. And you know the funny thing
26:20
Speaker 9: about that is it unequally skewed towards the billionaires, even
26:23
Speaker 9: amongst super rich people, the very, very rich people we pay.
26:27
Speaker 9: And we're talking about the Jeff Bezoses, the Mark Zuckerbergs,
26:30
Speaker 9: the Elon Musk of the world, which I know you're
26:31
Speaker 9: gonna talk about later. But those are the people that
26:33
Speaker 9: will be paying an enormous amount of money. And I
26:35
Speaker 9: wanna highlight to you why a wealth tax, an asset tax,
26:38
Speaker 9: is so important. Because our taxation system, even in California
26:42
Speaker 9: and in the country, is very good at taxing you
26:44
Speaker 9: if you make a paycheck. But once you no longer
26:47
Speaker 9: make a paycheck, especially the very rich people we know
26:49
Speaker 9: as household names today, when you own everything, and which
26:52
Speaker 9: is the most classical and ancient form of power, is ownership.
26:55
Speaker 9: You own everything you need, you can leverage more stuff
26:57
Speaker 9: because you own more stuff, And that's where the rich
27:00
Speaker 9: can forego paychecks and salaries and stuff like that because
27:02
Speaker 9: you don't need anything. You own everything. That is true power.
27:05
Speaker 9: And that system goes unchecked. And that's why wealth is
27:08
Speaker 9: so imbalanced. And especially now, as you've probably seen the headlines,
27:11
Speaker 9: California is facing a budget crisis. We can continue to
27:14
Speaker 9: support our social services, our schools, our educators, all the
27:18
Speaker 9: great things that we want if we just said, let's
27:21
Speaker 9: tax the people that are already evading a taxation system.
27:26
Speaker 5: Now.
27:27
Speaker 6: California has a lot of very politically active rich people.
27:33
Speaker 1: How, and we're going to talk about some of them later,
27:36
Speaker 1: some of them are quite conservative, but.
27:40
Speaker 6: Many of them are huge supporters of democratic politics in
27:43
Speaker 6: the state. What has been the response to your proposal
27:46
Speaker 6: in Sacramento?
27:48
Speaker 9: I think You know, you have a lot of people
27:51
Speaker 9: who are very scared of the T word, and I
27:53
Speaker 9: encourage my fellow party members of Democrats to obviously always
27:56
Speaker 9: talk about taxes. Because we, and you talked about this
27:59
Speaker 9: in the previous segment, we have to be the responsible
28:02
Speaker 9: adults in the room. We have to have a true
28:04
Speaker 9: fiscal responsible conversation. If we want the best schools in
28:07
Speaker 9: the world, actual healthcare system that serves people, we have
28:10
Speaker 9: to talk about how we're gonna pay for it. Republicans
28:12
Speaker 9: always say there's no such thing as free lunch.
28:14
Speaker 10: I agree.
28:15
Speaker 9: So how do we together figure out what's the most
28:17
Speaker 9: equitable way to pay for lunch? And yet we're so
28:19
Speaker 9: afraid to say, how do we pay for things we enjoy?
28:22
Speaker 9: And one other thing of why a wealth tax is
28:24
Speaker 9: so important is that for more than half of Californians,
28:28
Speaker 9: they already pay wealth tax on their most important source
28:31
Speaker 9: of wealth. It's called property tax. You already pay that.
28:34
Speaker 9: But with rich people, you own more than just one house. Well,
28:36
Speaker 9: they own a lot more than one house. They own
28:38
Speaker 9: a lot of things.
28:39
Speaker 1: And that's what a wealth tax gets at.
28:42
Speaker 6: One of the critiques that people have had to your
28:45
Speaker 6: proposal is that it would trigger an exodus of wealthy
28:47
Speaker 6: people from California and that that would diminish the tax
28:51
Speaker 6: base during a time of, as you say, a budget crunch.
28:54
Speaker 1: What's your response to that?
28:56
Speaker 9: The reality is two things, is that the outbound migration
29:01
Speaker 9: of Californians tends to be upon working class Californians. People
29:05
Speaker 9: that can pay the premiums being California, whether or not
29:07
Speaker 9: they bitch and moan about California, they pay the premium.
29:10
Speaker 9: They stay here, frankly, because you can pay the premium.
29:14
Speaker 9: It's people who are squeezed in the middle and squeezed
29:16
Speaker 9: at the bottom who have no other options but to
29:18
Speaker 9: leave the state. Those are the people that leave the state.
29:20
Speaker 9: And we also know from history, under Governor Jerry Brown,
29:23
Speaker 9: who was a fiscal conservative, we raise income taxes on people.
29:27
Speaker 9: And yet the migration of high-income people was not this
29:31
Speaker 9: exodus that people complained about all the time. So frankly,
29:34
Speaker 9: all the times I see people complain about, well, if
29:36
Speaker 9: we do this, the rich will do this, so the
29:38
Speaker 9: rich will do that. I thought we live in a
29:39
Speaker 9: democracy folks. I didn't know we lived in an aristocracy
29:42
Speaker 9: where we did what the nobility wanted us to do.
29:47
Speaker 6: Let's talk a little about housing, right? It is every
29:50
Speaker 6: conversation you have with people all across the country, frankly,
29:53
Speaker 6: it's about housing, but particularly as it relates to here
29:55
Speaker 6: in California and What have you been working on to
29:58
Speaker 6: try to address the lack of affordable housing in the state?
30:02
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
30:02
Speaker 9: So when I ran in 2020, and just a small
30:05
Speaker 9: plug is that no one thought I was going to
30:06
Speaker 9: win in 2020, including myself, okay? Because I had $ 32, 000
30:11
Speaker 9: in a half a million people district to just knock
30:14
Speaker 9: on doors. But the most pressing issue that I talked
30:17
Speaker 9: to other people is housing affordability. I've shared this often.
30:20
Speaker 9: I am one of the five renters in the entire
30:22
Speaker 9: state legislature, five out of 120 people. And I'm also
30:26
Speaker 9: probably the only person that lives with their parent because
30:28
Speaker 9: in my area, it costs one, well, it's actually now
30:31
Speaker 9: $ 2 million. $ 2 million to buy a house lasts you $ 1.
30:33
Speaker 1: 6 million.
30:34
Speaker 9: And housing affordability is so critical to the very fabric
30:38
Speaker 9: of California society. Because think about this. If I, as
30:40
Speaker 9: someone who works in government and gets pretty decent well-paid,
30:43
Speaker 9: cannot afford to be a homeowner in my own community,
30:45
Speaker 9: as many people do, then what's our long-term hope in
30:48
Speaker 9: this place? Are we going to be priced out? And
30:50
Speaker 9: so it's only people who pay the premium can be here.
30:53
Speaker 9: So in the legislature, we're focusing more and more on
30:55
Speaker 9: housing affordability, a really active step. And under the leadership
30:58
Speaker 9: of our new assembly housing chair, Chris Ward from San Diego,
31:00
Speaker 9: my favorite tree hugger, if he's listening, I'm really excited
31:03
Speaker 9: what we're going to do because we can thread so
31:05
Speaker 9: many different issues, climate justice, homelessness, social justice, through land use,
31:11
Speaker 9: through housing issues. It is very nerdy. Oftentimes you talk
31:14
Speaker 9: about zoning or exclusionaries, policies or stuff like that. But
31:17
Speaker 9: the heart of it, what I try to tell voters,
31:19
Speaker 9: is that the way your community looks and feels is
31:22
Speaker 9: because of land use, is because of housing. And I
31:24
Speaker 9: believe that housing is a human right, so we should
31:26
Speaker 9: be doing as much as possible as a government to
31:28
Speaker 9: make sure that everyone has a home.
31:36
Speaker 1: This is probably not fair. I don't mean to make
31:38
Speaker 1: you the spokesperson for your entire generation. But one of
31:42
Speaker 1: the biggest challenges... Well, often my colleagues do, but... That's right,
31:44
Speaker 1: that's right.
31:45
Speaker 6: But one of the biggest political challenges for President Biden
31:48
Speaker 6: and Democrats, frankly, across the country right now, is that
31:51
Speaker 6: the young voters who propelled our election victories in 2018
31:56
Speaker 6: and 2020 are becoming more disengaged, more disengaged from the
32:01
Speaker 6: Democratic Party, not necessarily disengaged from issues, frustrated with President Biden.
32:05
Speaker 6: That's probably the group within his coalition where his approval
32:07
Speaker 6: ratings have gone down the most.
32:10
Speaker 1: What.
32:11
Speaker 6: would your advice be to Democrats about how they win
32:14
Speaker 6: back and re-engage the younger voters who are so critical
32:17
Speaker 6: to any Democratic victory?
32:20
Speaker 9: Yeah, I don't... Look, speaking as also a strong progressive
32:24
Speaker 9: in our state legislature, and I'm also chair of the
32:25
Speaker 9: Progressive Caucus, I'm someone who's frustrated with the Biden administration too.
32:28
Speaker 9: But sometimes, as a young person, I'm puzzled why political
32:33
Speaker 9: analysts are so struggling with how to engage with young people.
32:36
Speaker 9: If you approach us just like every other demographic... it
32:39
Speaker 9: would make sense. Because what we're asking is, what are
32:41
Speaker 9: you going to do for us? We have asked for
32:43
Speaker 9: student loan relief. We've asked for a decisive climate change.
32:47
Speaker 9: We've been asking very plainly for decisive action material change.
32:51
Speaker 9: And yet we fall short, right? Especially in the student
32:54
Speaker 9: loan conversation where it's been paused and a little bit
32:57
Speaker 9: of cut off, a little bit.
32:57
Speaker 1: Of this, right?
32:58
Speaker 9: But people get very frustrated by that. So I think
33:00
Speaker 9: if there is decisive material benefit that's affecting us, I
33:05
Speaker 9: think that's what we want to see. And I think
33:06
Speaker 9: this president as being the most progressive president in our
33:10
Speaker 9: history and the most pro-union president in our history, can
33:13
Speaker 9: deliver on those things. And like in a time when
33:17
Speaker 9: the Republicans, all they want to do is impeach or
33:19
Speaker 9: besmirch his family, all these things, why not show him
33:22
Speaker 9: and say, hey, you know what? I'm just going to,
33:23
Speaker 9: like that. Your student loan debt is gone. I'm going
33:26
Speaker 9: to make health care for him.
33:26
Speaker 1: I'm going to do all these things. I'm just going
33:27
Speaker 1: to do it.
33:28
Speaker 9: Because it's also just as important as to brag about
33:30
Speaker 9: our victories and do press releases. And I know as
33:32
Speaker 9: a politician, we also have to deliver on these things
33:34
Speaker 9: and make people feel the change. Because If people feel
33:37
Speaker 9: that this government is working for them, they really will
33:40
Speaker 9: vote for it. They will turn out for that. But
33:41
Speaker 9: right now, I think a lot of people are disillusioned
33:43
Speaker 9: and they feel there isn't that moral clarity or that
33:46
Speaker 9: decisive action. And that's what Democrats want. We want decisive
33:49
Speaker 9: social change. And if we don't see that, it's hard
33:51
Speaker 9: to be inspired.
33:52
Speaker 6: Well, I think that's a great place to end it.
33:54
Speaker 6: Please give it up for Alex Lee.
33:56
Speaker 1: Thank you. All right.
34:04
Speaker 3: Since we're in San Jose, a city that is sometimes
34:07
Speaker 3: referred to as the city that's an hour south of
34:09
Speaker 3: the capital of Silicon Valley.
34:12
Speaker 1: Just kidding. I'm just... It's fine.
34:16
Speaker 3: We thought we spent the rest of the show talking
34:17
Speaker 3: about the intersection of tech and politics. And to help
34:20
Speaker 3: us sound smart for once, we are joined by Zoe Schiffer.
34:24
Speaker 3: She is the managing editor at Platformer. Excellent, excellent site.
34:30
Speaker 3: And the co-author of the forthcoming book, Extremely Hardcore... inside
34:34
Speaker 3: Elon Musk's Twitter. You can pre-order it today, I imagine, right?
34:39
Speaker 1: Zoe, welcome to the pod.
34:40
Speaker 10: Thank you so much for having me.
34:41
Speaker 1: It's wonderful to have you. Okay.
34:45
Speaker 10: Wait, before, can we just get a gauge of the
34:48
Speaker 10: audience so we know who we're dealing with here? How
34:51
Speaker 10: many of you are current Twitter users? Can you raise
34:53
Speaker 10: your hands? No shame. And how many of you pay
34:57
Speaker 10: for X premiums?
34:59
Speaker 1: Applaud if you do.
35:00
Speaker 10: Okay, we're among friends. We can go on.
35:02
Speaker 1: Does any one person in this room pay for X premium?
35:06
Speaker 2: If so, please leave.
35:10
Speaker 1: Zoe will scorch you out.
35:13
Speaker 3: Um, speaking of X, premium or regular, so this week, uh,
35:17
Speaker 3: I guess this is premium now, uh, Elon Musk continued
35:20
Speaker 3: the race to the bottom by reinstating none other than
35:22
Speaker 3: Alex Jones. Um, You remember Alex Jones, the guy who
35:27
Speaker 3: claimed that Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax
35:29
Speaker 3: and got his band of followers to harass the families
35:32
Speaker 3: of the victims. So not only did Elon reactivate Alex
35:36
Speaker 3: Jones' account, he invited him to appear in a live
35:38
Speaker 3: Twitter space, whatever you call that, space thing, with Republican
35:43
Speaker 3: presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
35:45
Speaker 1: Here's a clip. Gentlemen, I have to go.
35:47
Speaker 10: I just want to be sort of, exactly, I want
35:50
Speaker 10: to be clear about my position.
35:51
Speaker 11: I'm super pro-humans, and.
35:53
Speaker 9: I mean all humans.
35:55
Speaker 1: You know, humans in America, humans.
35:57
Speaker 8: In Africa, Asia, and everywhere else.
36:02
Speaker 9: That's your phone, Vivek.
36:05
Speaker 1: I'm not able to mute you. Vivek.
36:10
Speaker 7: Go ahead, Elon.
36:12
Speaker 1: Sorry about that.
36:17
Speaker 3: Yes, we did play that clip on Tuesday's show, but
36:20
Speaker 3: Democrats have been promising you guys a pee tape for
36:22
Speaker 3: six years. And it's time we finally delivered. Our producer
36:30
Speaker 3: wanted us to try this one. That Vivek's a real
36:33
Speaker 3: whiz kid, huh? Got some booze, Alona. So obviously reinstating
36:41
Speaker 3: Alex Jones is basically a way of signaling you don't
36:43
Speaker 3: actually care about trust and safety or content moderation or anything.
36:46
Speaker 3: But it's also part of a broader trend where tech
36:48
Speaker 3: companies like Meta and YouTube have changed their policies on
36:52
Speaker 3: political advertising, They've relaxed restrictions on disinformation, like claims that
36:56
Speaker 3: the 2020 election was stolen. Zoe, do you think these
36:59
Speaker 3: companies are basically giving up on content moderation as we
37:03
Speaker 3: roll into 2024?
37:04
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, none of this is an accident. I
37:07
Speaker 10: think that there is a legitimate attack on free speech happening,
37:11
Speaker 10: but it's not the attack that most people think. There's
37:13
Speaker 10: an effort from conservatives to make the work of content
37:17
Speaker 10: moderation seem dangerous and downright illegal. And this is the
37:22
Speaker 10: culmination of that plan.
37:25
Speaker 1: Have any tech companies done a good job with content
37:27
Speaker 1: moderation that you've seen?
37:28
Speaker 10: I mean, X has now set the bar pretty low.
37:31
Speaker 10: So I would say anything above having Alex Jones of
37:34
Speaker 10: the background, a saw me peeing on air is pretty
37:37
Speaker 10: good at this point.
37:38
Speaker 1: How's LinkedIn doing? Are they crushing it? Well, like the
37:43
Speaker 1: Republicans in Missouri, I believe, are now going after media matters, right?
37:46
Speaker 1: So like they claim to be for free speech, but
37:49
Speaker 1: then- Basically, they target people who just simply want accountability
37:54
Speaker 1: or to hold people accountable for their speech.
37:55
Speaker 10: Yeah, the thing about free speech on these platforms is
37:58
Speaker 10: it doesn't mean that all speech is allowed. Because what
38:01
Speaker 10: happens when you allow all speech is that most people
38:03
Speaker 10: actually cannot speak because they're brutally harassed. And so you
38:06
Speaker 10: need some level of content moderation. And there is a
38:09
Speaker 10: real effort right now to make that seem politicized when
38:13
Speaker 10: it's honestly not.
38:14
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, DC, I mean.
38:15
Speaker 3: Democrats in particular have gone back and forth on whether
38:18
Speaker 3: we should be on these platforms and fighting it out,
38:20
Speaker 3: whether we should starve them of users and revenue, I guess.
38:23
Speaker 3: Where do you land at this point?
38:25
Speaker 8: Yeah, maybe an unpopular position for the room, but I actually,
38:27
Speaker 8: I'm not paying for premium, that's for damn sure. But
38:31
Speaker 8: our job in campaigns to win elections at some level
38:36
Speaker 8: is to take the world as it is. And if
38:38
Speaker 8: people are using a medium, it's very hard to just
38:43
Speaker 8: take yourself out of the game of talking to the
38:45
Speaker 8: people who are either getting their information, political or otherwise,
38:48
Speaker 8: from that medium. And so I had a couple debates
38:51
Speaker 8: when I ran Senator Booker's campaign for president in 2020.
38:54
Speaker 8: Should we go on Fox News or should we not?
38:58
Speaker 8: I know there's been talk about the president getting off
39:01
Speaker 8: of some of these platforms.
39:03
Speaker 2: People are there, right?
39:04
Speaker 8: And um, when you, again, when you're in a campaign
39:07
Speaker 8: in particular, your job is to communicate your message to
39:10
Speaker 8: people where they are. So my general position is, should
39:14
Speaker 8: we be supporting with advertising dollars? Probably not to the
39:17
Speaker 8: extent that we, um, certainly not in the corporate sense,
39:21
Speaker 8: but on the campaign side, it's, it's really hard to say, no,
39:24
Speaker 8: don't spend any money talking to voters on meta when
39:27
Speaker 8: that's where they are, and you are basically ceding a
39:29
Speaker 8: battleground to Trump and the Republicans.
39:33
Speaker 1: It's interesting, though. I have no disagreements at all, but
39:39
Speaker 1: the debate that Elon Musk and these guys want to
39:42
Speaker 1: have is one about abstractions and ethics, which kind of
39:45
Speaker 1: makes sense because they're the worst people at college, right?
39:48
Speaker 1: Like that's what this group is, like the worst people
39:51
Speaker 1: you met in college, grown up. But like from a
39:55
Speaker 1: business perspective and just from a user perspective, yes, like
39:59
Speaker 1: what are the ethical bounds, what are the more, what
40:01
Speaker 1: are the like, the Kantian categorical imperatives around free speech.
40:07
Speaker 1: Put that aside. Who cares about any of that? Is
40:10
Speaker 1: this a place you want to spend your time? Is
40:12
Speaker 1: this a fun and exciting and cool and rewarding and
40:15
Speaker 1: enriching experience? The answer is no. And so you can
40:18
Speaker 1: have a debate about the limits of free speech on
40:22
Speaker 1: the internet. But from a business perspective and for us
40:24
Speaker 1: as users, I don't care what that ethical line is.
40:29
Speaker 1: I got off of Twitter and I'm a little bit happier.
40:32
Speaker 1: And And so when they go after Media Matters or
40:39
Speaker 1: they go after the left or they claim, like Elon
40:41
Speaker 1: Musk claims the Anti-Defamation League is silencing him. He's like,
40:44
Speaker 1: how dare these Jews claim I'm an anti-Semite? These fucking
40:48
Speaker 1: Jews won't stop saying I'm an anti-Semite. How many times
40:52
Speaker 1: do I have to tell these fucking Jews to get
40:54
Speaker 1: off my dick? I'm not an anti-Semite. It's just these
40:57
Speaker 1: Jews won't shut the fuck up. When will these sneaky
41:05
Speaker 1: fucking Jews stop telling me that I'm an anti-Semite? I'm
41:08
Speaker 1: going to sue these rich, sneaky, international cabal of fucking
41:13
Speaker 1: Jews for calling me an anti-Semite because everyone knows I
41:17
Speaker 1: love humans. That's what you could hear in the fucking
41:19
Speaker 1: background of that asshole peeing. And so the point is,
41:27
Speaker 1: this intellectual masturbation around free speech is not Elon Musk's problem.
41:31
Speaker 1: The problem is that People who treat other people like dicks,
41:36
Speaker 1: who treat other people like assholes, who make other people
41:38
Speaker 1: feel bad, that's a platform people don't want to be on,
41:41
Speaker 1: which means it's not a platform businesses want to advertise on.
41:43
Speaker 1: And that's not an ethical question. That's just a product question.
41:47
Speaker 6: I mean, you can have a platform that has Alex
41:50
Speaker 6: Jones or you can have a platform that makes money
41:53
Speaker 6: from advertising.
41:53
Speaker 1: You can't have both. Yeah.
41:55
Speaker 10: I mean, there's a reason that content moderation on these
41:57
Speaker 10: platforms generally always ends up at the same place. You
42:00
Speaker 10: start out saying you're a free speech absolutist and then
42:03
Speaker 10: a foreign government says that you're going to be booted
42:05
Speaker 10: out of the entire country unless you take down speech.
42:07
Speaker 10: And so if you're Elon Musk, you take that down real,
42:09
Speaker 10: real fast. And this keeps coming from every angle. Is
42:12
Speaker 10: child sexual exploitation allowed? Absolutely not. Is this other kind
42:15
Speaker 10: of speech allowed? Absolutely not. Oh, this person's getting harassed
42:17
Speaker 10: and doxxed and now their life is in danger. Is
42:18
Speaker 10: that allowed? And then you end up, well, like Meta
42:22
Speaker 10: or the other platforms, or you end up as you
42:24
Speaker 10: said with Alex Jones.
42:25
Speaker 6: And then one day, an impulsive man-child buys your company
42:29
Speaker 6: for $ 45 billion, and this is.
42:30
Speaker 1: Where you are.
42:31
Speaker 3: When you talk to people who work at other tech companies,
42:34
Speaker 3: the Metas, the YouTubes, are they like, thank God Elon
42:37
Speaker 3: bought Twitter.
42:38
Speaker 1: This is the best thing that's ever happened to us.
42:39
Speaker 1: No one talks about us anymore.
42:43
Speaker 10: They don't say that, but I would think that that
42:45
Speaker 10: is the general feeling, because the bar has been set
42:48
Speaker 10: at the absolute ground level at this point.
42:49
Speaker 1: If I worked at Facebook comms, I would buy that
42:52
Speaker 1: man a drink. I don't know.
42:53
Speaker 10: Mark Zuckerberg. Can we talk about his reputation? Like he
42:56
Speaker 10: looks incredible. He's had a summer of all summers. I mean,
43:00
Speaker 10: the PR team there.
43:00
Speaker 1: Is like Tybo and Taryn ACLs and no one cares.
43:03
Speaker 10: He's popular now.
43:05
Speaker 1: It's like, it's like, you know, he's like an ex
43:07
Speaker 1: boyfriend and it's not that he, it's not that he's better.
43:11
Speaker 1: He wasn't a better boyfriend in hindsight. It's just that
43:12
Speaker 1: the boyfriend after him was so awful. It's like, yeah.
43:19
Speaker 10: Um, You're like, he looked really good, actually.
43:23
Speaker 5: What?
43:25
Speaker 3: So Republicans and conservative media like to attack the Bay
43:30
Speaker 3: Area and the tech industry as this like lefty liberal paradise.
43:33
Speaker 3: And while it's certainly true that a lot of tech
43:37
Speaker 3: company employees are progressive, their bosses and their investors are
43:42
Speaker 3: often more right wing or assholes like Elon Musk or
43:46
Speaker 3: Peter Thiel or David Sachs.
43:47
Speaker 1: The list goes on and on.
43:49
Speaker 3: Even Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, in between yoga retreats, endorsed
43:54
Speaker 3: RFK Jr.
43:54
Speaker 1: For president. So, I mean, Zoe, do you have a
43:58
Speaker 1: sense of.
43:58
Speaker 6: Are you people surprised or disappointed or both?
44:04
Speaker 1: Both. Disgusted. Disgusted. That's the right response. I heard a disgusted.
44:07
Speaker 1: All right.
44:08
Speaker 3: Do you have a sense of which candidates, the kind
44:11
Speaker 3: of like big money players in Silicon Valley are supporting?
44:14
Speaker 3: I feel like they've been kind of dabbling in a
44:15
Speaker 3: few along the way.
44:16
Speaker 10: I mean, yeah, I think we can watch like the
44:19
Speaker 10: David Sachs's of the world and they seem to be
44:22
Speaker 10: trending towards Vivek and RFK Jr. I know, but I mean,
44:27
Speaker 10: that does seem to be like, if you follow where
44:29
Speaker 10: the money is and where the fundraising is happening, that
44:32
Speaker 10: seems to be it.
44:33
Speaker 3: I mean, Peter Thiel, I guess has decided to sit
44:37
Speaker 3: out this election and not donate to any more candidates
44:40
Speaker 3: in 2024. And to get himself there, he did this
44:44
Speaker 3: long interview with the New Yorker to announce his decision
44:47
Speaker 3: because he said it would force him to not change
44:50
Speaker 3: his mind. I guess the New Yorker is his accountability.
44:51
Speaker 1: Partner, as.
44:53
Speaker 3: Speaker Mike Johnson might say. Wouldn't it be easier to
44:56
Speaker 3: just tweet it out, dude, not spend 18 hours with
44:58
Speaker 3: Barton Gellman or whatever he did?
45:01
Speaker 1: That's a weird move.
45:02
Speaker 6: I mean, if you were to tell me that if
45:04
Speaker 6: I did an 18-hour interview with the New Yorker and
45:06
Speaker 6: I would never get another fundraising text.
45:08
Speaker 1: In my life, I would do that. That does sound
45:10
Speaker 1: pretty good. You know what? Dan, you raise a really
45:12
Speaker 1: important point. We're in San Jose right now. I'll do
45:15
Speaker 1: my pitch again. It's called Democrat Plus. You pay a
45:19
Speaker 1: monthly fee and then you never get a text again.
45:26
Speaker 1: Join Democrat Plus today and then you don't get another
45:28
Speaker 1: text from a House candidate you've never heard of with
45:30
Speaker 1: a picture that says, I'll kill myself if you don't
45:33
Speaker 1: donate right now.
45:35
Speaker 10: The sound of those cheers means you just raised $ 30 million.
45:37
Speaker 1: Hell yeah. It's happening. It's happening. It's already vaporware.
45:44
Speaker 3: I mean, this is a hard question, but is there
45:46
Speaker 3: a political ethos in Silicon Valley?
45:51
Speaker 1: No.
45:51
Speaker 4: Really?
45:52
Speaker 1: This guy says no. That drone said no.
45:54
Speaker 10: I feel like there's, I mean, I think there's a
45:57
Speaker 10: big difference between, like you said before, the people who
45:59
Speaker 10: have money who are supporting the Vivex, the Ron DeSantis
46:02
Speaker 10: of the world, and then the people who are like
46:04
Speaker 10: on the ground working at these companies and are pushing
46:06
Speaker 10: for more progressive policies. But I think Silicon Valley kind
46:10
Speaker 10: of has its own ideology and it's like industry first
46:13
Speaker 10: in a lot of ways. But I wouldn't say that's
46:16
Speaker 10: reflected in the rank and file employees.
46:19
Speaker 3: There's also a weird amount of paranoia. And I can't
46:22
Speaker 3: tell if the paranoia comes with the industry or the
46:25
Speaker 3: paranoia comes when you have lots of money and you're
46:28
Speaker 3: worried about losing it. For example, in that same New
46:30
Speaker 3: Yorker story about Peter Thiel, Sam Altman is quoted, the CEO,
46:34
Speaker 3: on again, off again, CEO of OpenAI. And he said
46:37
Speaker 3: that in a global catastrophe, he and Peter Thiel were
46:39
Speaker 3: going to wait it out together in Peter Thiel's sheep
46:41
Speaker 3: ranch in New Zealand.
46:43
Speaker 10: Yeah, the prepper community. Are you new to this?
46:45
Speaker 1: Why are there so many preppers here? Tell us more
46:47
Speaker 1: about the prepper community.
46:48
Speaker 10: I don't really know. Yeah, I think it's, from what
46:52
Speaker 10: I can tell, it's like an exciting ideology that men
46:56
Speaker 10: in this industry, this is a generalization, but it's what
46:59
Speaker 10: I've seen. seem to feel like if the end of
47:02
Speaker 10: the world is nigh, then that's a very energizing way
47:05
Speaker 10: to go through life. And it justifies a lot of
47:08
Speaker 10: decision-making along the way. I mean, you know, it's just
47:14
Speaker 10: my opinion.
47:15
Speaker 1: There's a little bit of something where I feel like
47:21
Speaker 1: some of these wealthy tech people feel as though they
47:25
Speaker 1: got away with a heist. You know, they feel like
47:28
Speaker 1: they feel like they got away with something. So it
47:30
Speaker 1: feels a little ill-gotten. And so psychologically, it's about to go...
47:34
Speaker 1: It's like they're like mobsters putting cash in their... It's
47:37
Speaker 1: like the money that's buried with Havana on the golf course.
47:41
Speaker 1: You know? You know Trump put valuables down there because
47:43
Speaker 1: on some level he knows it can all go away
47:45
Speaker 1: because it's ill-gotten. And if he got it the wrong way,
47:48
Speaker 1: it can go just as quickly. And I feel like
47:50
Speaker 1: there's that. There's some little broken part of that brain
47:52
Speaker 1: where it's just like, I got away with something and
47:54
Speaker 1: at some point the world is going to catch wise.
47:56
Speaker 1: Which is... Why part of the end of the world
47:58
Speaker 1: is trying to figure out how to get their super
48:00
Speaker 1: soldiers to wear the neck brace that'll explode if they
48:03
Speaker 1: don't follow orders if money doesn't work. You know what
48:05
Speaker 1: I mean?
48:06
Speaker 10: I mean, I hear you. I do.
48:11
Speaker 1: It's very polite of you to pretend you know what
48:12
Speaker 1: he means. You guys remember that story? That the billionaires
48:18
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do when their money stopped working,
48:19
Speaker 1: so they figured out they'll put little braces, they'll put
48:21
Speaker 1: things around the neck so that the guys keep listening?
48:24
Speaker 1: I think they gotta go outside.
48:32
Speaker 2: Bring us back, Tavi.
48:33
Speaker 1: Good luck. So, I'm here.
48:36
Speaker 3: The last few years haven't been the best for some
48:39
Speaker 3: parts of the tech community. You had higher interest rates
48:41
Speaker 3: making it harder for venture capitalists to raise money for
48:44
Speaker 3: the next round of whatever.
48:46
Speaker 1: That's what that parade is about. We're going to do
48:48
Speaker 1: that walk-a-thon for them.
48:49
Speaker 2: Yes.
48:51
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley Bank collapsed.
48:52
Speaker 3: You had these major crypto exchanges going bankrupt. You have
48:55
Speaker 3: leading figures like Sam Bankman-Fried potentially doing jail time.
48:59
Speaker 1: But now.
49:01
Speaker 3: All of a sudden, the price of Bitcoin is back up.
49:04
Speaker 3: The New York Times just wrote an article about a
49:06
Speaker 3: 27-year-old who raised nearly $ 20 million to build a crypto
49:09
Speaker 3: city in the Mediterranean. I'm sure that'll pan out.
49:15
Speaker 1: Is the tech bubble back?
49:17
Speaker 10: I mean, have you heard of artificial intelligence?
49:19
Speaker 1: Tell me more. Tell me everything.
49:22
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think we have a new bubble.
49:23
Speaker 1: You have a new bubble and it's AI?
49:25
Speaker 10: I mean, I think the tech, there's a lot of
49:27
Speaker 10: money in Silicon Valley still and we will find ways
49:30
Speaker 10: to funnel, and we, I'm not part of this, they
49:32
Speaker 10: will find ways to funnel it into various projects and
49:35
Speaker 10: I think artificial intelligence is you know, has more legitimacy,
49:39
Speaker 10: I would say, than crypto, but definitely it's where the
49:42
Speaker 10: money is at now.
49:43
Speaker 6: I mean, I just feel like there's this real urgency
49:45
Speaker 6: because there hasn't been a new thing since a smartphone
49:48
Speaker 6: was invented.
49:49
Speaker 1: So we're at 15 years from now.
49:50
Speaker 6: So it's like, we're waiting for the thing that's going
49:52
Speaker 6: to create all this new wealth and crypto was supposed
49:53
Speaker 6: to be that thing.
49:54
Speaker 1: And then it wasn't. And so now it's AI.
49:57
Speaker 6: And so if you just put, like, there are all these,
49:59
Speaker 6: I mean, you've written many of these stories with these
50:01
Speaker 6: people who just basically put AI in a deck and
50:03
Speaker 6: people are throwing millions of dollars at them.
50:05
Speaker 7: Yeah.
50:06
Speaker 6: It's like it's AI for dog food.
50:08
Speaker 1: And you're like, AI powered dog food. Take my money. Yeah. Well,
50:11
Speaker 1: the alternative is that Apple's like, now the phone has
50:13
Speaker 1: four cameras. Why?
50:15
Speaker 6: It's like, hey, people, I don't know how much time
50:17
Speaker 6: you spent with your Alexa recently, but I think I'm
50:19
Speaker 6: going to be smarter in 15 years.
50:20
Speaker 1: I want to read you an email I received from
50:22
Speaker 1: my friend Samir on May 30th, 2011. This is real.
50:27
Speaker 1: Speaking of crackpot financial schemes, anyone want to buy some bitcoins?
50:31
Speaker 4: Yes.
50:32
Speaker 1: I want you to know that we decided not to
50:34
Speaker 1: buy Bitcoins that day because we had a different stock
50:37
Speaker 1: we were interested in. It was TiVo. Adisu, you're still...
50:49
Speaker 1: in politics. That's real. Working on campaigns. You're cutting ass.
50:53
Speaker 1: Or you were before tonight.
50:55
Speaker 3: The like hope and the anxiety and the democratic party
50:58
Speaker 3: is all about the impact of AI potentially on campaigns.
51:02
Speaker 3: Are you seeing any of this play out in this cycle?
51:04
Speaker 8: Yeah. I, if I'm not mistaken yesterday in a Pennsylvania
51:08
Speaker 8: house race, um, I don't ask me why I know this.
51:12
Speaker 8: AI was used to phone bank for the first time.
51:14
Speaker 1: Really?
51:15
Speaker 8: Literally like a, like a, conversation with a voter via
51:18
Speaker 8: a robot, basically. I'm going to go out on a
51:20
Speaker 8: limb and say it probably wasn't that effective. But I
51:24
Speaker 8: think we're, yes, the short answer is we're at the
51:25
Speaker 8: beginning of what I think is going to be potentially
51:28
Speaker 8: a scary, potentially exciting revolution of every industry when it
51:33
Speaker 8: comes to AI, but politics as well.
51:36
Speaker 2: And so it's.
51:37
Speaker 8: Not, I think back to 08, was it Facebook in
51:41
Speaker 8: 08 or Twitter?
51:41
Speaker 2: Maybe it was Facebook in 04. It was Facebook. Facebook
51:44
Speaker 2: in 08 and Twitter in 12 and.
51:47
Speaker 8: You know, there's always something in a cycle that becomes
51:50
Speaker 8: the next big thing.
51:50
Speaker 2: Until it's not.
51:51
Speaker 1: In 2020, it was COVID.
51:55
Speaker 2: That stuck around for a while.
51:57
Speaker 8: But I'm not sure if this is going to be
51:59
Speaker 8: the AI cycle or another one, but I do think
52:02
Speaker 8: it's coming because I actually think it can be potentially
52:04
Speaker 8: very helpful to our industry. I also think it's very
52:08
Speaker 8: dangerous because, you know, when it comes to jobs and,
52:12
Speaker 8: you know, we usually have human beings making phone calls,
52:14
Speaker 8: for example, and If AI gets really good at phone calls,
52:19
Speaker 8: goodbye field organizing, right?
52:21
Speaker 2: It becomes a lot cheaper to do that, et cetera.
52:23
Speaker 2: So we're not there yet.
52:25
Speaker 8: I don't think this is the cycle probably where it
52:27
Speaker 8: takes over, but we're all going to have to figure
52:29
Speaker 8: this out just like we figured out every other tech
52:31
Speaker 8: thing for the last 20 years I've been doing this.
52:33
Speaker 1: I do worry, though. We see with artificial images that
52:41
Speaker 1: the threat isn't people thinking fake things are real, well,
52:45
Speaker 1: that is a threat, but just as big as the
52:47
Speaker 1: threat that people start seeing real things as fake, that
52:51
Speaker 1: you start to doubt whatever you see and whatever you hear. Already,
52:53
Speaker 1: I think, I know that I am deluged with text
52:56
Speaker 1: messages and phone calls that I don't answer. And even
53:00
Speaker 1: if you have an AI phone call that can just
53:04
Speaker 1: as effectively reach people, really what you're doing is creating
53:07
Speaker 1: a device to make phone calls more ubiquitous and then
53:11
Speaker 1: less useful as a result, which... like we've been talking
53:17
Speaker 1: about this in a bunch of different ways, but like
53:19
Speaker 1: so much of what politics is now is figuring out
53:22
Speaker 1: how to break through the noise and break through the clutter.
53:24
Speaker 1: And for years and years, like we basically built a
53:27
Speaker 1: kind of information system that values almost true, kind of dull,
53:34
Speaker 1: kind of semi-emotional things that like, that feel true, but
53:42
Speaker 1: aren't necessarily true. And that's a perfect thing for artificial
53:45
Speaker 1: intelligence to generate vast amounts of. And so like we
53:48
Speaker 1: kind of devalued information and then built a system that
53:51
Speaker 1: can make it even cheaper. And like, I don't know
53:53
Speaker 1: what happens on the other side of it, but maybe
53:56
Speaker 1: we have to, maybe the only way out is through.
53:59
Speaker 6: The intersection of politics in AI is incredibly fascinating, right?
54:04
Speaker 6: There's all the dangers of deep fake videos and all
54:07
Speaker 6: of that. And I think Lovett raised a really important point,
54:09
Speaker 6: which is I'm sure you've seen this, but people are
54:12
Speaker 6: so skeptical right now of politicians and political ads that
54:16
Speaker 6: the only ads that really work are the ones that
54:19
Speaker 6: use a politician in their own unedited voice, where it's
54:23
Speaker 6: just like footage of Donald Trump saying something, or a
54:25
Speaker 6: voter making a regular person who's not a politician explaining
54:29
Speaker 6: why it would be bad to take the Affordable Care
54:31
Speaker 6: Act away.
54:31
Speaker 1: The Biden campaign has an ad up like that right now.
54:34
Speaker 6: And AI actually has the potential to render the first one,
54:38
Speaker 6: not actual AI, but the prospect of AI. Donald Trump
54:42
Speaker 6: has already said that a very legitimate video of his
54:45
Speaker 6: was a deep fake. And he's going to do that
54:47
Speaker 6: throughout this campaign. And so that's a big thing. But
54:50
Speaker 6: then there's some other really bad ways in which AI
54:52
Speaker 6: or annoying ways that AI has affected us, which is
54:55
Speaker 6: the only thing that's preventing us from getting more fundraising
54:57
Speaker 6: emails and texts is the time it takes to write those.
55:01
Speaker 6: And then when you take that friction out of you're
55:03
Speaker 6: just asking chat GPT to send you an insane text about,
55:08
Speaker 6: you know, how, why the entire world's going to come
55:10
Speaker 6: to an end. If you don't give money to a pack,
55:12
Speaker 6: you've never heard of five minutes ago like that. And
55:14
Speaker 6: it's going to reward the worst, like most grifty players.
55:17
Speaker 6: But there are other ways in which I think it's incredibly,
55:19
Speaker 6: it could be incredibly useful because ultimately politics is the,
55:23
Speaker 6: is the marriage of art and science and words and data.
55:26
Speaker 6: And there are ways to think much more to understand
55:30
Speaker 6: what politicians are saying and at every level, right? Whether it's,
55:34
Speaker 6: There's all this scrutiny on what comes out of President
55:36
Speaker 6: Biden's mouth in the campaign. Is that the right message?
55:39
Speaker 1: What's between the speech? What's between the ads?
55:41
Speaker 6: But you could then take the data you're using to
55:43
Speaker 6: inform that and apply it across every conversation that every
55:46
Speaker 6: voter is having. This is not saying we're going to
55:48
Speaker 6: create a fake chatbot to add that conversation, but by
55:52
Speaker 6: sort of smoothing out the process by which you're using
55:56
Speaker 6: the most optimized messages in every single interaction. And that
56:00
Speaker 6: is like a very, very interesting thing. And my DMs
56:03
Speaker 6: are open on LinkedIn if anyone wants to talk about it.
56:06
Speaker 3: Zoe, interestingly, for all the anxiety about AI and deepfakes
56:11
Speaker 3: and things ahead of us, it does seem like a
56:14
Speaker 3: lot of people have been driven off Twitter recently, not
56:17
Speaker 3: because of deepfakes, but because of people surfacing old videos
56:21
Speaker 3: and saying that they were from Gaza when really they
56:23
Speaker 3: were Syria in 2015.
56:25
Speaker 1: Is that a Twitter-specific problem, or what do you think
56:27
Speaker 1: is happening there?
56:28
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean.
56:30
Speaker 10: Elon Musk has promoted a crowdsourced fact-checking tool as the
56:33
Speaker 10: first line of defense between telling fact from fiction on
56:36
Speaker 10: his platform. And I think we've seen more recently that
56:40
Speaker 10: that's woefully inadequate in times of crisis. We need a
56:43
Speaker 10: multi-pronged approach, especially during an election. And that's going to
56:47
Speaker 10: take human content moderators, and it's going to take AI,
56:51
Speaker 10: and it's going to take sophisticated tools. And the trust
56:54
Speaker 10: and safety team at X is a shadow of its
56:56
Speaker 10: former self. They've really devalued and under-invested in all of
57:00
Speaker 10: these things, and I think that's going to be an
57:01
Speaker 10: enormous problem in the coming election.
57:04
Speaker 1: I hate the community notes thing. It's obviously a ridiculous thing.
57:06
Speaker 6: But I will say that someone attacked Taylor Swift when
57:11
Speaker 6: she was named the Time Woman of the Year, saying,
57:14
Speaker 6: how could this billionaire person who could end the war
57:18
Speaker 6: in Gaza with one Instagram post get this award? And
57:22
Speaker 6: the community notes thing was, Traditionally, Instagram posts have not
57:25
Speaker 6: ended century-old conflicts.
57:29
Speaker 1: That was truly a great one. What a ridiculous thing
57:33
Speaker 1: to think Taylor Swift could do. That's not what she
57:35
Speaker 1: could do. What she could do is solve a lot
57:37
Speaker 1: of unsolved murders.
57:43
Speaker 3: On Tuesday, a jury in San Francisco ruled in favor
57:46
Speaker 3: of Fortnite maker Epic Games in their lawsuit against Google.
57:50
Speaker 3: Epic Games claimed that Google had an illegal monopoly in
57:52
Speaker 3: the Google Play Store. After the win, Epic Games CEO
57:55
Speaker 3: Tim Sweeney told The Verge, quote, it's a great day
57:58
Speaker 3: for all developers to see that the Sherman Antitrust Act
58:01
Speaker 3: works in the new era of tech monopolies. How big
58:04
Speaker 3: a deal do you think this decision is? And do
58:06
Speaker 3: you think it's going to impact other antitrust cases going forward?
58:10
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, it's a really big deal, although I
58:12
Speaker 10: will say we're a few years out from knowing exactly
58:15
Speaker 10: what the final answer to this is. Google has already
58:17
Speaker 10: said that it's going to appeal to If the ruling stands,
58:21
Speaker 10: then I think we can expect to see a more
58:23
Speaker 10: robust app ecosystem where smaller developers are able to circumvent
58:27
Speaker 10: Google's in-app fees, which are 30% right now. And we
58:32
Speaker 10: might see multiple app stores and all of that is
58:35
Speaker 10: very good for consumers. But I do think it's a
58:38
Speaker 10: little early to know what this could mean for Apple
58:41
Speaker 10: and other big tech companies.
58:42
Speaker 6: Because Epic lost the same suit against Apple, right? Because
58:45
Speaker 6: Apple makes the phones. So they had a different set
58:48
Speaker 6: of rules.
58:48
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah.
58:49
Speaker 10: And also Google won a similar case that was decided
58:53
Speaker 10: by a judge last year. And so I think it's
58:56
Speaker 10: still a total question mark. This was a jury trial,
58:58
Speaker 10: which ended up being quite important.
59:00
Speaker 3: This is also a case where I think President Biden
59:02
Speaker 3: has gotten a lot of credit for putting in place
59:04
Speaker 3: regulators who have a track record of writing and thinking
59:08
Speaker 3: and saying things that I think are a lot tougher
59:09
Speaker 3: on tech monetization. Do you think the toughness of those
59:12
Speaker 3: appointees has played out in practice in terms of, I
59:16
Speaker 3: don't know, even changing behavior in Silicon Valley?
59:19
Speaker 10: I don't know. I mean, when we think of the FTC,
59:21
Speaker 10: we certainly have a much stronger FTC and more aggressive
59:25
Speaker 10: FTC than we have in the past. At the same time,
59:28
Speaker 10: Lena Kahn, like there've been a lot of losses. And
59:31
Speaker 10: I think that was part of the strategy. You all
59:33
Speaker 10: might know better than me, but my understanding of her
59:35
Speaker 10: approach was we're going to take really big swings and
59:38
Speaker 10: there will be a lot of losses along the way,
59:40
Speaker 10: but we have to take a stand for consumers and
59:43
Speaker 10: change the definition of what the FTC is really here
59:46
Speaker 10: to do. So I think it's actually, it's kind of
59:51
Speaker 10: yet to be determined what all of that looks like,
59:52
Speaker 10: but people are definitely paying attention.
59:54
Speaker 6: It's interesting because Donald Trump you know, likes to pretend
59:57
Speaker 6: he's like this big populist, but there are a lot
59:59
Speaker 6: of these tech companies who are basically putting on pause
1:00:03
Speaker 6: the idea of merging or acquiring someone to see what
1:00:07
Speaker 6: happens in the election. Because if Donald Trump gets in,
1:00:09
Speaker 6: that'd be much better in their view for big tech monopolies, right?
1:00:13
Speaker 6: And that's actually going to, I think, that's not the
1:00:17
Speaker 6: exact argument, but it's part of the overall populist case
1:00:20
Speaker 6: that Biden can make is that Donald Trump is going to,
1:00:23
Speaker 6: that they're rooting for him because it is better for
1:00:27
Speaker 6: monopolies and big, huge companies under Trump because they're scared
1:00:29
Speaker 6: that Joe Biden is going to enforce antitrust laws.
1:00:32
Speaker 3: Yeah.
1:00:32
Speaker 1: I also do think sometimes this debate, like the risks
1:00:35
Speaker 1: posed by these companies being so big and having monopolies,
1:00:37
Speaker 1: like that creates one set of very big challenges. And
1:00:40
Speaker 1: I think it's really important that we have aggressive antitrust
1:00:43
Speaker 1: laws and regulations. But I also think it sometimes is
1:00:47
Speaker 1: a quick thing for, I think, politicians to say to
1:00:49
Speaker 1: like kind of wave off some of the issues that
1:00:52
Speaker 1: actually don't have as much to do with the size
1:00:54
Speaker 1: of these companies. Like uh, issues of, of, of, of, uh, misinformation,
1:01:00
Speaker 1: privacy issues. Like I think the fact that these companies
1:01:02
Speaker 1: are so enormous and have so much power impacts the
1:01:05
Speaker 1: ways in which they don't have to respect consumer privacy,
1:01:07
Speaker 1: consumer rights. They don't have to worry about, about regulation
1:01:10
Speaker 1: in part because of their influence and their lobbying. But
1:01:13
Speaker 1: regardless of whether they break Amazon in half or spin
1:01:17
Speaker 1: off the, you know, spin off, uh, um, make, you know,
1:01:20
Speaker 1: give the, allowing WhatsApp to be under, under, uh, um,
1:01:25
Speaker 1: Who bought that, Meta? Meta. Regardless, we need a privacy law. Regardless,
1:01:31
Speaker 1: we need regulation of these companies.
1:01:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, 100%.
1:01:35
Speaker 1: Okay, we're going to take a quick break. When we
1:01:37
Speaker 1: come back, we're going to play a game.
1:01:53
Speaker 2: And we're back.
1:01:58
Speaker 1: Thank you all for joining us this evening. The most
1:02:03
Speaker 1: American questions are the questions the people of San Jose
1:02:06
Speaker 1: ask every day. Can we squeeze any money out of meditation?
1:02:12
Speaker 1: Would people pay a monthly fee to access extra features
1:02:14
Speaker 1: on their smart blender? How can we brand our toilet
1:02:18
Speaker 1: camera in a way that assuages privacy concerns? What if
1:02:22
Speaker 1: we could make life a little better and worse while
1:02:25
Speaker 1: getting filthy fucking rich? So it's time for a game
1:02:30
Speaker 1: we're calling, cue the slide, Tech Tech Boom. Zoe and
1:02:40
Speaker 1: Dan will be one team. Disu and Tommy will be
1:02:44
Speaker 1: the other. I will alternate asking each team a weird
1:02:47
Speaker 1: tech industry question. If they can't answer the question, the
1:02:49
Speaker 1: other team has the chance to steal. Are you ready? Yes.
1:02:51
Speaker 2: Born ready.
1:02:53
Speaker 1: Question first will start.
1:02:54
Speaker 2: Do we have to buzz or something?
1:02:56
Speaker 1: No, we'll alternate. Don't worry, I got this.
1:02:58
Speaker 2: Okay, I believe you.
1:03:01
Speaker 1: Ish. You question, if it was Ken Jennings, you would
1:03:04
Speaker 1: just trust him. Because I happen to be a drunk idiot.
1:03:13
Speaker 1: Just yesterday, the New York Times profiled a 27-year-old NYU
1:03:15
Speaker 1: dropout who is raising money to build a crypto city
1:03:18
Speaker 1: for tech bros and tastemakers in the Mediterranean. What is
1:03:21
Speaker 1: that guy's name? And what is the name of the
1:03:23
Speaker 1: tech utopia he reportedly tried to build in Ghana before pivoting?
1:03:27
Speaker 1: Praxis is this.
1:03:28
Speaker 10: Yeah, that's the current one. His name is Dryden Brown.
1:03:32
Speaker 1: That is correct. I was going to give you multiple choice. No, no, no.
1:03:35
Speaker 10: Shout out to Santa Barbara. He's from my hometown.
1:03:38
Speaker 1: We are screwed. Tommy and Adisu. We're so fucked. Bill
1:03:42
Speaker 1: in the blank. One of the internal slides revealed by
1:03:45
Speaker 1: the Wall Street Journal's Facebook files is a slide titled,
1:03:48
Speaker 1: user experience of blank is exacerbated by our platform, complete
1:03:53
Speaker 1: with a graph outlining how teen girls experience severe negative
1:03:56
Speaker 1: mental health outcomes by using Instagram. What is that user experience?
1:04:01
Speaker 1: Is this multiple choice? No. I think... Their experience of blank.
1:04:09
Speaker 2: I'd like to phone a friend.
1:04:09
Speaker 1: Do you want to steal? Is it filters?
1:04:13
Speaker 9: No.
1:04:13
Speaker 1: No, no. It's an emotional experience. Wait, wait.
1:04:17
Speaker 10: Sorry. Can you read that just one more time?
1:04:19
Speaker 1: The user's experience of blank is exacerbated by our platform.
1:04:23
Speaker 1: And it's about teen girls experiencing negative mental health outcomes.
1:04:26
Speaker 10: Something to do with B?
1:04:30
Speaker 1: I heard body dysmorphia. You're in the ballpark.
1:04:32
Speaker 10: Oh, okay.
1:04:33
Speaker 1: Body image? It was just downward spiral. Their experience of
1:04:39
Speaker 1: downward spiral.
1:04:40
Speaker 10: I feel like I need to work on the Mad Libs.
1:04:42
Speaker 2: Yikes.
1:04:44
Speaker 1: That's sad but hard to guess. Yeah. Exactly. Okay. And
1:04:51
Speaker 1: so is hard. Who cares? Who tweeted, Tommy and Adisu,
1:04:55
Speaker 1: the coronavirus panic is dumb on March 6, 2020? Elon Musk.
1:04:58
Speaker 1: Elon Musk. Correct. starting a nearly uninterrupted four-year string of
1:05:05
Speaker 1: being awesome. Dan and Zoe.
1:05:09
Speaker 10: I'll read my book to find out more.
1:05:10
Speaker 1: Which startup launched by Jeffrey Katzenberg is considered one of
1:05:13
Speaker 1: the biggest failed startups in history?
1:05:14
Speaker 4: Quibi.
1:05:14
Speaker 1: Yep, you got it. They were in our building. They
1:05:19
Speaker 1: were in our building. Tommy and Adisu Juicero, a famous flop,
1:05:24
Speaker 1: sold a $ 400 Wi-Fi-connected juice press that used proprietary packets
1:05:27
Speaker 1: of pre-mangled fruits. Bottomed out. Because Y, A, you could
1:05:33
Speaker 1: buy juice at the store. B, there were more affordable juicers. C,
1:05:37
Speaker 1: you could squeeze juice with your hands. Or D, you
1:05:40
Speaker 1: could eat a piece of fucking fruit.
1:05:44
Speaker 3: I remember this story well because I was a little
1:05:47
Speaker 3: drift in my career at the time and I had
1:05:49
Speaker 3: a meeting with a really smart, really nice person.
1:05:52
Speaker 1: I actually think Dan connected me with.
1:05:55
Speaker 3: We talked about a bunch of different interesting things happening
1:05:58
Speaker 3: in Silicon Valley. I lived in San Francisco at the
1:05:59
Speaker 3: time and Juicero came up And I was like, oh,
1:06:02
Speaker 3: that sounds cool, but I'm not like a juice guy.
1:06:04
Speaker 3: But it turned out you could just squeeze the pack.
1:06:06
Speaker 1: That's correct. You could just squeeze the juice out of them.
1:06:09
Speaker 3: You didn't need the $ 400, like, timed release system that
1:06:13
Speaker 3: sat in your kitchen to.
1:06:14
Speaker 1: Squeeze the pack. Insane. And remember it was also, it
1:06:18
Speaker 1: was like, it was end user license agreement, like, fucked
1:06:22
Speaker 1: with so that, like, if your juice packet was past
1:06:24
Speaker 1: a certain date, the machine wouldn't squeeze it for you.
1:06:27
Speaker 10: But your hands still cook.
1:06:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, like a machine would be like, no, no, this
1:06:31
Speaker 1: juice is not for you. Get other juice.
1:06:33
Speaker 8: Are the other answers incorrect or is that one just
1:06:35
Speaker 8: super correct? Because I think you can just eat some
1:06:38
Speaker 8: fucking fruit.
1:06:39
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point.
1:06:41
Speaker 1: You got the right answer. I don't know why you're arguing.
1:06:44
Speaker 1: Take the points.
1:06:47
Speaker 2: I'll take the points.
1:06:47
Speaker 1: I didn't think of that. Which disgraced tech mogul's lawyer
1:06:53
Speaker 1: told the media this week that his client may be
1:06:55
Speaker 1: at the very top of the list as the worst
1:06:58
Speaker 1: person I've ever seen do a cross-examination? Sam Bankman-Fried. That
1:07:03
Speaker 1: is correct. His lawyer said that to Bloomberg.
1:07:08
Speaker 3: Is he in jail currently or is he on home arrest?
1:07:11
Speaker 10: Wait, I thought he was in jail, but I'm hearing
1:07:13
Speaker 10: home arrest. But I'm not a crypto gal.
1:07:15
Speaker 1: I think he got sent to jail for doing too
1:07:17
Speaker 1: much internet.
1:07:18
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah.
1:07:19
Speaker 1: It's like talking to Michael Lewis like 500 times.
1:07:21
Speaker 10: That is accurate.
1:07:23
Speaker 1: It's a good Democrat you're talking about. All right. Tech
1:07:29
Speaker 1: weirdo Brian Johnson made a splash this fall by insisting
1:07:32
Speaker 1: he had actually lowered the biological age of his penis
1:07:36
Speaker 1: by 15 years. How did he claim to do this? Hint,
1:07:40
Speaker 1: it's your second thought. I have no idea. How did
1:07:48
Speaker 1: he claim he lowered the age of his penis by
1:07:50
Speaker 1: 15 years? Like the weights that kind of pull on it?
1:07:55
Speaker 1: So that's your first thought. What's your second thought? You
1:08:02
Speaker 1: guys want to steal it?
1:08:03
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:08:04
Speaker 1: Nope. Giggles.
1:08:04
Speaker 10: I feel like it's all them.
1:08:07
Speaker 1: Anybody out there want to guess? That's right. By electrocuting
1:08:13
Speaker 1: his penis. According to Johnson, there's this technology. You have
1:08:17
Speaker 1: a wand and you sit in a chair and the
1:08:19
Speaker 1: technician uses the wand and basically shocks your penis. Hey,
1:08:24
Speaker 1: remember when smart people used to invent airplanes and antibiotics?
1:08:30
Speaker 1: No one got that one. I also just like, why
1:08:40
Speaker 1: did he think it worked? During her trial, jurors heard,
1:08:45
Speaker 1: who's up? Let's go this way. Tommy, pay attention. This
1:08:48
Speaker 1: is our last show of the year, guys. During her trial,
1:08:51
Speaker 1: the thing is, thing they used to shock me, John
1:09:03
Speaker 1: has it. During her trial, jurors heard Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes
1:09:07
Speaker 1: make a number of false claims to journalist Roger Parloff,
1:09:10
Speaker 1: who recorded their interviews for Peace and Fortune. Which of
1:09:12
Speaker 1: these was not a lie? Which was not a lie
1:09:15
Speaker 1: that Holmes told us during those interviews? A, that Theranos
1:09:19
Speaker 1: had worked with the US military in Afghanistan, B, that
1:09:21
Speaker 1: Theranos had worked for foreign governments, that C, Theranos had
1:09:24
Speaker 1: worked with border security, D, that Theranos had worked correctly
1:09:28
Speaker 1: when performing over 600 tests, making it competitive with Quest Diagnostics.
1:09:32
Speaker 1: That one's a lie, right? Yeah, it's got to be. Well,
1:09:34
Speaker 1: they're all, which is the lie she didn't tell? Oh, okay.
1:09:36
Speaker 1: It's such a confusing question.
1:09:38
Speaker 2: She told?
1:09:39
Speaker 1: It's like jazz.
1:09:40
Speaker 2: Afghanistan? No, because she would do.
1:09:42
Speaker 3: No, the Afghanistan one I think is real because that
1:09:44
Speaker 3: was part of their, they had Jim Mattis on the board.
1:09:47
Speaker 4: Yeah.
1:09:47
Speaker 2: Oh, there you go.
1:09:48
Speaker 1: Okay, so Afghanistan. Defense secretary. I think it's the.
1:09:53
Speaker 1: They worked with people overseas.
1:09:54
Speaker 5: Is my guess.
1:09:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go with that one. Incorrect. It was the border.
1:09:57
Speaker 1: I thought we had to steal it. Did you know
1:09:59
Speaker 1: the answer? Border patrol, obviously. You got it. I believe you.
1:10:03
Speaker 1: You're trusting. You have a trustworthy face. Dan and Zoe.
1:10:09
Speaker 1: Which of these unfortunately named failed apps is a real
1:10:12
Speaker 1: unfortunately named failed app? In other words, one of these
1:10:15
Speaker 1: is real. A... Hitler, no vowels. A music app designed
1:10:24
Speaker 1: for users to upload their hits and have them reviewed
1:10:26
Speaker 1: by other musicians. B, blow me, a balloon delivery startup. C, fascism,
1:10:41
Speaker 1: a fashion app designed for users to upload their looks
1:10:43
Speaker 1: and have them critiqued by other fashionistas. Or D, F
1:10:47
Speaker 1: My Dog, a pet finder app that seems to have
1:10:50
Speaker 1: been pretty normal except for that rank name. One of
1:10:56
Speaker 1: those is real. Which one? Is it Hitler? Blow me. Fascism.
1:11:05
Speaker 1: Or F My Dog. What do you think?
1:11:11
Speaker 10: I'm between fascism and blow me, which I don't like
1:11:14
Speaker 10: to be, but.
1:11:18
Speaker 1: That's what it's like to be on Twitter right now.
1:11:22
Speaker 1: You're always stuck between fascism and blow me. Let's go
1:11:26
Speaker 1: with fascism?
1:11:27
Speaker 10: Yeah.
1:11:28
Speaker 1: You got it.
1:11:28
Speaker 6: What?
1:11:31
Speaker 1: And Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis invested in it in 2011.
1:11:35
Speaker 1: Of course they did. And finally, and anybody can take it,
1:11:40
Speaker 1: who wrote this tweet? I just gave a squirrel a
1:11:43
Speaker 1: piece of bread and it straight smashed.
1:11:45
Speaker 10: Travis Kelsey.
1:11:46
Speaker 1: We got it. So we got it. It was Travis Kelsey.
1:11:49
Speaker 1: I just gave a squirrel a piece of bread. Every
1:11:51
Speaker 1: word spelled wrong. Squirrel spelled in, I guess, the British way.
1:11:57
Speaker 10: That's actually how we spell squirrel now, though. He decided
1:11:59
Speaker 10: it then and that's the correct. I.
1:12:01
Speaker 1: Not before E, a piece of bread and it straight
1:12:04
Speaker 1: smashed all of it. I had no idea they ate
1:12:06
Speaker 1: bread like that. Ha ha, hashtag crazy. That was Travis Kelsey.
1:12:13
Speaker 1: Zoe and Dan, you've won the game.
1:12:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so.
1:12:15
Speaker 6: Yeah, they did.
1:12:15
Speaker 1: Congratulations. You've won two tickets to Praxis. We found it on,
1:12:22
Speaker 1: I quote, traditional European Western beauty standards in which the
1:12:24
Speaker 1: civilized world at its best points has always found success in. Cool.
1:12:30
Speaker 5: Cool.
1:12:30
Speaker 1: It's like I always say, inside every techno-libertarian millionaire is
1:12:34
Speaker 1: a tiny little fascist waiting to pop out like an
1:12:35
Speaker 1: alien through John Hurt's abdomen. Give it up for Zoe, everybody.
1:12:47
Speaker 3: Before we go, we thought it would be fun to
1:12:49
Speaker 3: take a couple questions or maybe hear a couple tech
1:12:51
Speaker 3: horror stories.
1:12:53
Speaker 1: We're just going to open up. Did you work at Hitler?
1:12:55
Speaker 1: That was a fake one. Did you work at fascism?
1:12:59
Speaker 1: We want to know. Did you work at Juicero? You
1:13:01
Speaker 1: pronounce the E. Do we have a mic out there
1:13:05
Speaker 1: by any chance? I think Austin's out there. We can
1:13:07
Speaker 1: bring the lights up. Oh, Ben's going out there. Sorry.
1:13:12
Speaker 1: We open to questions or.
1:13:18
Speaker 1: What's that website, Demois, the one where you get gossip?
1:13:21
Speaker 1: Anonymous gossip about tech freaks also welcome. Or questions. I
1:13:29
Speaker 1: have none of that.
1:13:30
Speaker 2: Isn't this your fifth anniversary?
1:13:32
Speaker 1: Is it what?
1:13:33
Speaker 10: Your fifth anniversary.
1:13:34
Speaker 1: Fifth anniversary of what?
1:13:35
Speaker 5: Your company.
1:13:36
Speaker 1: Is it? I don't think so. No? I think we
1:13:39
Speaker 1: started at seven. Early 2017. I don't remember before this.
1:13:44
Speaker 1: I've always been here. I'll always be here. Here's my question.
1:13:49
Speaker 7: When you look back on the founding of Crooked Media,
1:13:54
Speaker 7: is where you are now where you thought you would be?
1:13:58
Speaker 10: Did it grow the way you thought?
1:14:01
Speaker 6: I remember that first meeting when Tommy just wrote on
1:14:04
Speaker 6: a cocktail napkin, San Jose.
1:14:07
Speaker 1: Here's what I'd say. We, like, when we were doing
1:14:17
Speaker 1: the podcast that was on The Ringer, and we decided
1:14:20
Speaker 1: to do Pod Save America and try to launch a
1:14:24
Speaker 1: company around it, we were protected by just how little
1:14:27
Speaker 1: we knew. We had the confidence of ignorance. True, true ignorance.
1:14:35
Speaker 1: And that gave us, I think, the freedom to believe
1:14:38
Speaker 1: that this could work, and I think We thought there
1:14:40
Speaker 1: were a lot of other people that felt like we
1:14:42
Speaker 1: did that would we want to be part of a
1:14:43
Speaker 1: community like this, but I don't think, A, we understood
1:14:46
Speaker 1: just how hard it would be to build a company
1:14:48
Speaker 1: and how much smarter the people would have to be
1:14:50
Speaker 1: who would ultimately need to do it. And then, B,
1:14:53
Speaker 1: I think, like, no, we could have never anticipated that
1:14:57
Speaker 1: we would be here all these years later. You know, look,
1:15:00
Speaker 1: we thought we'd give it a year and then I'd
1:15:01
Speaker 1: be on some kind of failed Roseanne reboot writing jokes for...
1:15:04
Speaker 1: Didn't that almost happen? It did almost happen. That's my
1:15:07
Speaker 1: other fucking path. She got canceled, right? Yeah.
1:15:11
Speaker 3: We sat in Jon Favreau's kitchen for months, which Emily
1:15:14
Speaker 3: did not like, and we created a Medium website, which
1:15:18
Speaker 3: we barely knew how to do, announced it, and called
1:15:20
Speaker 3: it a company.
1:15:21
Speaker 1: You bet. We had to use the website getcrookedmedia.com because
1:15:25
Speaker 1: Crooked Media and Crooked.com, there was a guy in Prescott, Arizona.
1:15:30
Speaker 1: His career was in porn, but his passion was taking
1:15:34
Speaker 1: on the liberal media. So eventually we had to, remember that?
1:15:37
Speaker 1: The porn king of Prescott, Arizona? What happened to that guy? Anyway,
1:15:41
Speaker 1: we got it, the website, eventually. Oh, man. What else
1:15:47
Speaker 1: we got?
1:15:49
Speaker 4: My question is actually for Dan. I'm sorry, it's not
1:15:52
Speaker 4: a tech question either. I was just reading some of
1:15:56
Speaker 4: the bios, and in yours, it stated that you are
1:16:03
Speaker 4: banned from going to Russia.
1:16:04
Speaker 2: Because of Putin.
1:16:07
Speaker 4: I sat back and I'm like, is that really true?
1:16:09
Speaker 4: And if it's really true, what the hell did you
1:16:12
Speaker 4: do to Dan?
1:16:13
Speaker 1: Dan dated his daughter. In the early aughts.
1:16:17
Speaker 2: Ugly breakup.
1:16:18
Speaker 1: Messy. It is true.
1:16:21
Speaker 6: And the reason I am banned to this day from
1:16:24
Speaker 6: traveling to Russia is when Russia invaded Ukraine the first
1:16:30
Speaker 6: time in 2014, I was previously scheduled to go on
1:16:35
Speaker 6: Meet the Press. to do an interview about something else
1:16:37
Speaker 6: because no one sends me on TV to talk about
1:16:40
Speaker 6: major foreign policy, but it happened basically while I was,
1:16:44
Speaker 6: after I was already scheduled. So our friend Ben Rhodes, uh,
1:16:47
Speaker 6: whose time is a lot of rule those here. He
1:16:51
Speaker 6: gave me some very aggressive talking points about why Putin's
1:16:55
Speaker 6: decision to invade Russia was really a sign of weakness,
1:16:58
Speaker 6: not strength. And so when the Russians banned a whole
1:17:01
Speaker 6: bunch of people, a bunch of Americans, uh, in retribution.
1:17:07
Speaker 1: For the U.S.
1:17:08
Speaker 6: Sanctioning a bunch of Russian officials, I got added to
1:17:10
Speaker 6: that list, which answered the mystery of which people in
1:17:14
Speaker 6: the world still watch the Sunday shows.
1:17:19
Speaker 1: Wow. Great, very observant reading of the bio. Well done.
1:17:24
Speaker 1: What else we got out there?
1:17:26
Speaker 11: Okay, I have a question about relational organizing versus AI.
1:17:31
Speaker 1: Okay. Let's hear it. Do you want applause for the topic?
1:17:35
Speaker 11: Okay, so the question is, do you think that relational
1:17:38
Speaker 11: organizing is going to become more important, like walking out
1:17:43
Speaker 11: and canvassing in person versus the phone calls and texts?
1:17:48
Speaker 2: Wow, that might be a question for me.
1:17:49
Speaker 1: It's a great question.
1:17:50
Speaker 2: It is a really good question.
1:17:51
Speaker 8: I actually haven't really thought about the implications of AI
1:17:54
Speaker 8: with it, but that's really interesting. For those of you
1:17:57
Speaker 8: who don't know, relational organizing is really just, you know,
1:18:00
Speaker 8: in the old days, like five years ago, you would
1:18:03
Speaker 8: get a list of your neighbors or what have you,
1:18:06
Speaker 8: or you'd walk into a campaign office and they'd give
1:18:08
Speaker 8: you a list of voters and you'd go knock the
1:18:09
Speaker 8: doors and you'd talk to them about your candidate. Now,
1:18:12
Speaker 8: sort of in the last two or three cycles, the
1:18:15
Speaker 8: organizing hot thing du jour, which I actually think, to
1:18:18
Speaker 8: answer your question, is the right way to do organizing,
1:18:21
Speaker 8: is basically tapping the contacts in your phone and allowing
1:18:25
Speaker 8: you to sort of define who within your own iPhone
1:18:29
Speaker 8: or Android or whatever it might be contact list is
1:18:32
Speaker 8: a target voter and communicating with them. Presuming you are,
1:18:35
Speaker 8: if they're in their phone, you already know them. I
1:18:37
Speaker 8: think it is a more effective way to organize because
1:18:39
Speaker 8: organizing is all about relationships. And if somebody is in
1:18:42
Speaker 8: your phone that presumes that you already know them and
1:18:43
Speaker 8: you already have.
1:18:44
Speaker 2: A relationship with them.
1:18:44
Speaker 8: And so your communication with them will be more effective
1:18:48
Speaker 8: than a stranger coming to their door. I don't really
1:18:51
Speaker 8: know how AI, I mean, I feel like AI could
1:18:52
Speaker 8: help sort of accelerate it ultimately, but it still comes
1:18:57
Speaker 8: down to the core power of relational organizing is that
1:19:00
Speaker 8: you know the person you're talking to before you show
1:19:02
Speaker 8: up and talk to them about politics, and thus they
1:19:05
Speaker 8: are more likely to accept what you have to say,
1:19:08
Speaker 8: pick up the phone, whatever it may be, and maybe
1:19:10
Speaker 8: AI can just help make it basically a little more efficient.
1:19:13
Speaker 5: All right.
1:19:14
Speaker 1: Well, listen, thank you, San Jose. Thank you, Adisu. Thank you, Zoe. Thanks,
1:19:20
Speaker 1: Alex Lee, for being here. Great to see you. Have
1:19:23
Speaker 1: a great night.
1:19:24
Speaker 2: Good night, everybody.
1:19:35
Speaker 7: If you want to get ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and more,
1:19:38
Speaker 7: consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription community at crooked.com
1:19:42
Speaker 7: slash friends. And if you're already doom-scrolling, don't forget to
1:19:45
Speaker 7: follow us at Pod Save America on Instagram, Twitter, and
1:19:48
Speaker 7: YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content, and more.
1:19:51
Speaker 1: Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping
1:19:55
Speaker 1: us a review. Give us your own takes. Hey, give
1:19:57
Speaker 1: us a review.
1:19:57
Speaker 7: Give us your takes on our takes. Pod Save America
1:20:02
Speaker 7: is a Crooked Media production. Our producers are Olivia Martinez
1:20:05
Speaker 7: and David Toledo. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari, writing
1:20:09
Speaker 7: support from Hallie Kiefer. Reid Cherlin is our executive producer.
1:20:13
Speaker 7: The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan
1:20:16
Speaker 7: Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle
1:20:19
Speaker 7: Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madeline Herringer is our head of
1:20:22
Speaker 7: news and programming. Matt DeGroat is our head of production.
1:20:25
Speaker 7: Andy Taft is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team,
1:20:29
Speaker 7: Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Mia Kelman, David Tolles, Kirill Pelleviv,
1:20:33
Speaker 7: and Molly Lobel.