#171: Internet Beyond the Wall (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 171st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.This week we discuss why businesses aren’t acting like businesses. Why did Fox fire Tucker Carlson? Why did Anheuser-Busch hire Dylan Mulvaney? Why did Twitter of old throw people off for engaging in WrongThink? Why does YouTube continue to strike people for talking to the wrong people—people like democratic candidate for p...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream number 171, which I feel certain must be prime because what the hell are you gonna divide into it?
I forgot to look.
Yeah, but it just doesn't feel so very Prime.
I'm gonna take the risk.
I'm just gonna predict that it is.
And if anybody can figure out factors, I'd love to know what they are.
All right.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You remain Dr. Heather Hying.
We are here to discuss the important issues of the day, the future, should there be one, and we are going to head that direction very, very soon.
Yeah, we are.
We're coming to you early today.
It just occurred to me, you said, I remain Dr. Heather Hying, and I was thinking, well, I was a Hying, assigned before birth.
I was assigned Heather at birth.
I was assigned Doctor much later.
But there was never any assignment of my sex, because that's just who I am.
No, no, there was an obstetrician involved, I feel certain of it.
Just ask your mom.
That doesn't matter.
Oh.
Well, all right.
My mom matters.
It's my mom's birthday today.
Happy birthday, Mom.
Happy birthday, Jessie.
But the fact of the obstetrician being there and observing something verifiably true about the universe, why would we give the obstetrician more power than they actually have in pretending?
Why would we pretend that they are in charge of reality?
They're not.
So what you're saying is you had an old-school obstetrician, the kind that observes the universe, as if that's a thing.
I have no idea.
I really have no memory of the day.
Yes, that's probably true.
Yeah.
And for the best.
Oh, for sure.
Hi everyone!
This is Livestream 171, and yeah, we're gonna make it short and sweet today.
Apologies for coming to you earlier than we had said we would.
Next week we will be coming to you rather later than usual by about three days.
Three days and a few hours.
We'll be coming to you on, excuse me, Tuesday May, wow, Tuesday, May 9th.
Uh, and I can't remember what, when we decided 2 p.m, maybe Pacific, something like that.
Um, but here we are today.
No Q&A today.
Uh, but if you are looking for more, uh, for more Dark Horse content while we are away, The conversation that you had with Mary Harrington is up and that was released right before our previous live stream.
We've been getting a lot of great feedback on that.
People seem to love it.
And of course there are other guest episodes that you've done that we have generally failed to mention here.
Jeremy Riss, UFO specialist.
Yeah.
Yep.
And I, of course, always put things out on Natural Selections.
So, our producer, our now 19-year-old son, Zach, is freaking out because there's unexpected noise happening.
And I have news for him.
It's birds.
I figured that I'd want to take off my headphones.
It's birds because, after all, they are, in fact, real.
And they're singing because it's spring, which we're going to talk about just a little bit at the end of the hour today.
Are ornithologists real?
Yes.
Some of them are crappy.
Some birds are crappy, too.
Some people are crappy.
I don't know why ornithology should be an exception to the rule that people are crappy in every specialty.
Precisely that.
Yes.
I don't want to believe all ornithologists any more than I want to believe all anyone.
Wow.
Believe all ornithologists.
That would be a thing.
It's a niche.
Although, honestly, if we have to pick a demographic by either profession or immutable characteristic or whatever, I feel like a niche, a small niche, purportedly scientifically trained group like ornithologists, I'd go with them sooner than I'd go with, say, doctors at this point.
Ornithological confusions are unlikely to be immediately harmful.
Maybe to birds.
Possibly, right, right.
Or I guess you could get salmonella if you ate chicken rim.
Yeah, and when birds get, you know, misidentified or misgendered, God forbid, guess what the birds don't care?
Because birds are like, that's your language, doesn't pertain to us.
Okay.
Bird brains.
Very different from, you know, other kinds of brains.
Actually, like is more generally true between mammals and birds.
You know this already.
They are not each other's closest relatives.
The most recent common ancestor of birds and mammals was some stem reptile, because birds are descendants of dinosaurs, which are reptiles.
But birds and mammals have a tremendous amount of convergence between them, and some of that happens in the brains.
But the part of our brain that's so gigantic, our cortex, is a different part of the brain that's been enlarged, a part of the brain that was primitively associated with a smell, whereas the part of the brain that is enlarged for birds was primitively associated with vision.
Two points of order.
One, there are certain birds that have excellent senses of smell, but they are very much the exception, like vultures and things.
And there are certain mammals that have excellent senses of vision, like primates.
Like us, yes.
Second point of clarification, stem had not been invented in the age of reptiles.
It's not spelled differently so much as capitalized differently.
Got it.
All right, well... One's a word, one's an acronym.
Glad we took care of that.
Yeah, I'm not at all.
Okay.
Why should they be any different than the other day?
No, that's not how it is.
Okay, in Natural Selections this last week I actually posted some things from a long ago program that I taught at Evergreen and got some fun and interesting feedback because for the second of the two things I posted was a bunch of the questions that I posed as part of the curriculum to my first-year students and, you know, without of course providing
The lectures, the readings, you know, all of the material that went along with those questions.
But I really love to see the conversation on Natural Selections about those questions and what kinds of things it prompted people to think about.
So I encourage you to go take a look.
If you haven't, that's of course naturalselections.substack.com.
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Double hold, huh?
Double hold.
That's right.
Yeah.
That's what I said.
Can't argue with you.
Sorry about the interruption.
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That's right.
Yeah.
Near and dear to our heart.
I again I having you know we both ran a lot of domestic field trips and I ran a number of study abroad trips and the packing lists especially for study abroad are incredibly important Especially when you're going into places where there is no commerce and you won't be able to buy things that you're missing.
And the vast majority, if not all, of the people you are going with have never been into places like this before.
And so when I looked at their packing list, I felt again a kindred spirit.
I thought, okay, these people both know what they're doing.
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At some point, we should do a segment on cashews.
It's the craziest thing ever.
Like the biology of cashews.
The biology of cashews, the dual component fruit.
It's a very odd nut that poisons a lot of people in the process.
And am I right, they're closely related to mangoes?
Uh, anacards, yeah.
Yeah, it's like, okay, cashews and mangoes.
I mean, not super close, but... Yeah, very poisonous family.
Yeah, totally.
Um, they are... This is not about cashews.
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What are macadamia nuts closely related to?
Well, they are...
I wish I knew.
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I said it right.
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That's too many ands, but you can subtract one later.
The proteaceae.
Proteaceae.
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Oh yeah.
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I mean, that is what punctuation is for.
Admittedly, it's not perfect, but that is what punctuation is for.
Yeah, but when you say not perfect, like wildly screwed up and not... I mean, like, okay, in Spanish, at least they put a question mark at the beginning of the sentence so you know it's a question.
Yeah, I mean, that's the art in writing, but I also wonder if you shouldn't do this in the middle of the sound, but okay, I'll hold the thought.
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You won't be sorry.
I feel pretty good about that.
I think I got at least a B plus on the reading.
Oh, you totally did.
So before we get into the main topic of the show, you asked during that read, how do non-dyslexics inflect sentences appropriately when reading, given that you haven't gotten to the end of a sentence yet?
You don't know what's coming.
And my answer was, well, that's what punctuation is for.
That's also what good writing is for.
But I also wonder if I think that when I read, certainly when I read to myself, reading out loud is different, and then of course maybe you're not, you still have to understand meaning, but you don't have to inflect it vocally if you're reading to yourself, of course.
But I think that I scan ahead.
You do?
I think that I read simultaneous, I'm seeing a lot of words at once.
And this is part of what people who are sort of like really immersed in writing, reading, you know, written language do, and it's part of what dyslexics kind of find baffling about the rest of us.
Yeah, no, this is exactly going to be my hypothesis, is that you must be, part of you is reading ahead, and then your conscious mind is wherever it is in the sense that Well, I mean, I think this also fits with our observation.
So, you know, a couple months ago or so, you put a number on our, we only have one camera, we used to have three, that was good.
And so as sort of a joke, you put 17 on the one camera we've got, as if we had, you know, anything more than A single camera, which obviously does not need to be numbered in any way.
You could just be like, the camera.
But you put it up there, and I found it incredibly distracting, because you put text, even numerals, anywhere in my visual sphere, and I will go to it.
That's where I will orient, and I'll be constantly trying to figure out, what does that mean?
Why is it there?
And I, in turn, find it baffling that you can ignore the text in your visual environment.
Right.
And I, having put it there, putting a prime number in a prime location, wondered why nobody had noticed that confluence of primes.
I mean, it seemed so clear, and yet nobody... Now, have you noticed that I reversed the 17?
I told you to.
Yeah.
No, you told me to take it off.
Oh, I did.
And I reversed it.
Yes.
No, you reversed it right away.
It's like, I can't, I can't live like this.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, so... It's backwards now.
There's a backwards 7 and a backwards 1.
The camera came with, like, I don't know, some huge number of numbers, and you could pick one and slide it in there, and I just chose the 17.
But whatever.
All right, shall we move on to the topic of the day?
Let's do it.
And then we're going to finish.
We're going to spend most of the time here on what you're about to introduce here, and then we're going to talk a little bit about Spring, because it's Spring here in the Northern Hemisphere.
Right.
Ah, it does feel good.
It really does.
All right.
Now, confession up front.
I don't know exactly how to do this.
What I want to do is explore a A force that appears to be operating towards some sort of objective, where the force isn't clear what it might be, and the objective isn't clear what it might be.
But it's throwing paradoxes left and right, and it is worth unpacking what this may be.
So, loosely speaking, the topic is, what the hell happened to Tucker Carlson?
There's a paradox in that, at the very least.
And what does it imply about where we are in history?
What can we infer is taking place on the basis of this strange turn of events?
Now, let's just recap for people who may have been living under a rock and don't know.
What happened is... You know, whenever I use that phrase now, I think, I should consider living under a rock.
Maybe one with a nice skylight, but a rock nonetheless.
Living under a rock where these things don't hit quite so hard.
Yeah, I agree.
All right, so what happened is Tucker Carlson appeared to be fired from his Fox News programs.
There are more than one.
Tucker Carlson Tonight being the biggest, but Tucker Carlson Today is also a daytime show.
And what happened was Tucker was over the weekend Forbidden to return to his post.
So he did a show on Friday that gave no indication of it being his last show.
Certainly there was no indication that he knew it was his last show.
And then he did not arrive in his chair on Monday, the news having circulated that he was fired.
Now, fired may turn out to be the wrong term.
Megyn Kelly reported yesterday that he was not fired.
But I think it's a distinction without a difference.
It's a contractual question.
So his exit involves a contract that we have not seen, so we don't know what kind of constraints Fox is operating under.
It's a distinction without the difference if he didn't initiate the move.
I think it is very clear he did not initiate the move.
But that's what I'm saying.
Like, obviously, fired not fired makes a big difference, unless if he didn't initiate the move, which if that's clear, then okay, distinction without a difference, that's fine.
Yeah, he was effectively fired, in the sense that he would certainly have come on to say what he was doing and was not allowed to do that, and they had someone fill in for him.
Sure.
Okay, so that appears to be a paradox of sorts, and you and I have said in various places, I believe it's in our book, that paradoxes are a way that one finds value, right?
When there are no real paradoxes, everything has an underlying explanation in the universe, and if you look for a place that looks like a paradox and you dig there, often you find you learned something you didn't know.
It's right there.
It's like the X on the treasure map.
It's the X on the treasure map.
And so there's an X on the treasure map at the firing or de facto firing of Tucker Carlson last week.
Why?
Well, because the man is, whether you like him or hate him, so ferociously popular as such an incredibly large audience compared to competing properties elsewhere in the mainstream.
Media that the idea that a conglomerate like Fox would throw him off the air not only Cutting their connection to the source of revenue that he was for them But that they would also enrage his audience at them And I don't know but I would guess that the
The audience of Fox generally has huge overlap with Tucker's audience.
He was the biggest star on... I've heard from more than one person this week.
Classical liberals who had subscriptions to Fox, who are cutting him now.
And not to punish Fox, although that is a collateral benefit, but because that's why they were there.
Yep, that's why they were there.
And I know a tremendous number of people, I wouldn't even just say classical liberals, lots and lots of people pay attention to Tucker because, in fact, he says a lot of stuff, including my personal take on it, is that he is frustrated at liberals who are failing to make the case for their values.
And although he is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, he understands that you don't want conservatism to win, that you want conservatism to play its role.
You need liberalism to play its role.
And that tension requires both parties to do their job.
And liberals are falling down on that job in favor of other nonsense.
And so he has been effectively making the case for liberalism, even though it's not his home turf, which I think is fascinating.
But it does mean that there are a lot of people.
It reveals a kind of honor.
It does, which is another paradox.
So paradox one, why would something that is apparently a for-profit business like Fox fire its biggest star with the largest audience and enrage his audience, which has a huge overlap with the rest of their audience?
And the largest audience with maybe the only audience at Fox that has crossover appeal.
Yeah, right, or major crossover appeal.
The second paradox has to do with Have you ever run across the claim that Tucker Carlson is, for example, a white supremacist?
Sure.
Yeah.
You ever click through on the evidence that finally reveals he's finally said the quiet part out loud?
I've never bothered.
No, you should.
I mean, I did occasionally, early after Evergreen, see what the evidence that you were, but I stopped doing that, too.
Right.
Well, I have made a point of doing it, always with some trepidation.
Well, I will say not any longer because I've recognized the pattern.
There's never any there.
But at first, like, oh God, what did I miss?
Right.
Who is this person?
Right.
So you look at the tweet, it swears that he's finally revealed himself to be the white supremacist that he is.
And then you click through and it turns out that he doesn't believe that our Doesn't think some educational policies are actually good for black people.
Right.
Not his bag.
Same thing.
That was the evidence of your white supremacy.
Right.
My white supremacy for which nobody in six years of there being a bounty on my head has found any evidence of it, of course.
So it's the same old, same old.
But here's the paradox.
And I will say, this is unpleasant to recount, because I now value Tucker and know him and like him.
I did not always like him, as you know.
In fact, I had a visceral distaste for the man that is not common for me.
I don't typically find people abhorrent, and there was something very troubling about him to me in the CNN crossfire days.
And so I have been stuck with a question since first interacting with him when he, in the week that Evergreen melted down, invited me to come on his program.
And as you'll I don't recall, but I will recount for the audience.
I was reluctant to go on his show.
I knew very little about what he had been up to in modern times.
A, I couldn't be certain that it wasn't a trap.
He and I were from opposite sides of the political spectrum.
His team was incredibly gracious when they reached out.
I decided, okay, he seems to want to know the story.
Maybe that makes sense because the story of Evergreen's meltdown reflects poorly on liberalism.
So, I remember, this is one of the conversations from that era that I actually remember explicitly and visually.
Like, I know where we had it.
Like, I know what room in our house in Olympia we had it in.
And how difficult it was.
Because, let's see, Evergreen melts down at 930 in the morning on a Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017.
And I believe it's a Friday.
Yeah, 2017.
And I believe it's a Friday and things have gotten crazier and worse and everything is happening and not a single major media outlet has reached out.
And we've gone to the state house and we've tried to get the governor to bring order to the campus and there's just no help coming.
It's getting worse and worse and worse and his people call and you've talked to them.
And you say, I think, I think I need to go on Vox and not just Vox, but Tucker.
And both of us like, Oh, God, no, like, why?
Why does it?
Why does it have to be?
Why isn't?
Right.
Why isn't the New York Times calling?
Why isn't CNN calling?
Why isn't NPR calling?
Why aren't all of the supposedly left-leaning bastions of journalism calling at this incredibly anti-liberal, anti-democratic insurrection at a public college?
Well, they weren't, and they never did.
And Tucker's people did.
And you went on.
I went on and it was kind of a strange thing.
They sent a vehicle.
It's a long drive up to Seattle from Olympia and we got stuck in traffic.
So I was literally like threading the microphone through my shirt in the elevator.
They sat me down in the chair.
My hair is crazy.
You know, I'm shiny because nobody had any time to do makeup because Anyway, so, and, you know, I couldn't see Tucker because the way the studio is set up, you're just looking at a pair of eyeballs that have been drawn on a piece of paper above a camera.
Anyway, very strange experience.
And he's on the other coast.
He's not in the same building with you.
But anyway, the experience was one, you know, so here's somebody I don't like who I think is probably using me to make the case against liberalism.
And I'm there because the story needs to break into a larger audience.
They are going to effectively snuff us out on the campus and this mutiny is going to take hold of the place if I can't get the word out and nobody else is calling.
So I go there because they've offered and there's no other place that will have me and I'm expecting him to be using me and that's not what I got.
What I got was a compassionate guy who actually, in spite of the fact that I'm some liberal professor from a radical college, And this person is supposed to be my archipolitical enemy.
Um, you know, I got nothing but decency from him.
And he was not, you know, telling me, ah, you see, we conservatives were right, right?
So anyway, the second paradox with Tucker is that many of us formulated an opinion of him.
And then in recent times, you'll find a whole host of liberals find safe harbor on Tucker's program.
You know, from Glenn Greenwald, who has long been participating across political divide with Tucker, Matt Taibbi, Tulsi Gabbard, the list goes on and on.
Can I just add a little more color to your appearance there and how then we lived downstream of that while still being in the crazy part of the Evergreen story, which was that within a day or two, one of the faculty at Evergreen declared in an email to all the faculty and staff, when Brett went on Tucker, the world shifted to the right.
And I looked at that and I thought about, you know, launching more things.
And I like, I did not publicly respond, but I said, but at the same time, I was then monitoring your email because you were getting hundreds, sometimes, sometimes over a thousand emails a day.
At that point, because it was public.
It was your evergreen email.
And it was mostly from your appearance on Tucker Carlson.
And I've spoken about this and we've written about this before, but the thing that I saw in the people who said, I saw you on Tucker and was amazing.
And they would always begin with, well, I'm on the right, you and I disagree politically.
Or, I'm on the left, but I listen to Tucker because.
Like, every demographic marker you could possibly expect.
Highly educated, self-declared not educated at all.
All of the possible demographics.
And yes, this is a selected group of people who chose to write to you after seeing you on Tucker Carlson, but they said, thank you, sir.
You and I surely disagree about many things, maybe we don't, maybe we do, but I know that if I were to meet you I could have a conversation with you and that is what is missing in American discourse now.
And as a result of those, which continue to come in for weeks, and you know still occasionally, but in just like droves and droves and droves for weeks, I thought in response to that Confused, ideologically captured faculty member at Evergreen who had said, when Brett went on Tucker, the world shifted to the right.
I thought, quite the opposite.
Quite the opposite.
When you went on Tucker, that opened up the world more to the left.
And in a good way, not the thing that is currently masquerading as the left, but in service of conversation.
And frankly, that is what you learned, and therefore I learned, Tucker Carlson was accomplishing.
With having all of these different guests on.
Right.
Which then points to the paradox.
Yes.
And I've been wondering about this since the day that I went on his program the first time.
I think I've been on Tucker Carlson tonight.
Four times, and I went on Tucker Carlson Today once.
So, you know, I've had a number of interactions with him.
Unfortunately, the gig on Fox is always a few minutes.
It's the hardest interview to do because there's just no time to say anything substantial.
But his hour-long Tucker Carlson Today thing is quite a different environment, and it offered the possibility for us to interact without the camera on.
You were actually there in the studio with him.
Actually physically present.
And, you know, I know we're not in the same place on a lot of issues, but I did find a genuinely decent person.
We shared lots of interests.
He's a kind of a hands-on, do-it-yourself kind of guy.
So anyway, the paradox is, how do we reconcile The person who, you know, has partnered with Glenn Greenwald over the span of many years, you know, who reached out to me with compassion at a moment that he might have taken a victory lap for conservatism.
How do we reconcile that person with the person that we thought was so awful?
Right?
And what I've come to realize is that actually a lot of the sense about Tucker is a holdover from that prior era, whatever its meaning was.
The crossfire era.
The bowtie era.
I think the thing is people assume, in fact you will hear lots of people say, oh people don't change.
People don't change, right?
And of course what they really mean is that change is very difficult and therefore if you think somebody has changed radically you're more likely wrong than right.
But I think the evidence that Tucker has changed is actually readily apparent and especially in the aftermath of his de facto firing.
I've gone and looked at a number of things.
His most recent talk at the Heritage Foundation.
Utterly fascinating.
Absolutely recommend it.
smaller podcast talks that he's done, and he talks about, rather like Glenn Beck, he talks about the fact that he regrets his early behavior in his career, that he feels remorse about it, that he thought he was playing a destructive role, right?
Now that sounds like a person who has grown, and I think part of what I'm wondering is if The wrap on Tucker Carlson isn't largely based on the fact that people have not checked in on not only how he's grown as a person, but also how he has Developed his political understanding, right?
That his balanced sense that, you know, if nobody's providing safe harbor for real liberals, that somebody has to do it because conservatism actually depends on real liberals doing their job or it's not going to work.
Right?
That is a very different story, but you never get there because the political modality of the day basically paints somebody with a label and then persecutes you if you don't trust the label and go check for yourself, right?
So, you know, the rap on me, of course, was nonsense, but what it did successfully was prevented lots of people from checking for themselves.
Does this sound like a white supremacist, right?
Does this sound like a eugenicist or any of the other-- - Don't touch that, like the contagious. - Right, so anyway, that is gonna become an important piece of this story, which is that there is a technique that is being used to keep people from checking in with dangerous properties like Tucker Carlson, and the technique involves a stigma for which there is a penalty and the technique involves a stigma for which there is a penalty for checking And if people did check for themselves, and many have, right?
They go watch Tucker Carlson today, they see these monologues, you know, and they realize, oh actually he's alerting me to something I'm not seeing on other media that's important and our values aren't so far apart.
Right?
That's what you find if you actually go and check for yourself, but what fraction of the audience just doesn't?
Because they can't.
And so, anyway, the second paradox is, did he change?
Or did we have him wrong?
Or do we have him wrong now?
Right?
Those of us who have changed our position on who he is.
And I firmly come out in the belief that he has changed in a way that his reputation has not caught up to.
And I did once ask him about this.
And the answer was surprising to me.
Right?
I said, you know, you're just not a good match for what I see written about you.
And he sort of had a general sense that General sense of what's said about him, but he was not in any deep way paying attention to the daily back and forth and the scuttlebutt this week.
Right.
So anyway, that's probably very healthy.
Very like Joe Rogan, who says, don't read the comments.
OK, so you've got a corporation.
If you know who you are and you know what you're doing and you have some number of close advisors, Who, you are assured, will tell you if you appear to be changing, or off, or that was an error, or whatever needs to be said to you.
Why would you drag yourself through the other stuff?
Yeah, why would you do it?
And I think ultimately, in the model we're going to find here, there's a question of manipulation.
Right?
The audience is clearly manipulated.
We've talked about them being manipulated into not watching for themselves and formulating their own opinion.
But the personalities are also manipulated too.
And if you are tuned in, then the point is that is a conduit through which whatever is Operating can access you and modify what you do in a way that is useful to it and not to you and not to your audience.
So, there is definitely a strong piece of that flavor.
Now, what I want to do is basically throw a number of principles in together and see if they don't resolve the ultimate paradox that we're discussing, which is why would Fox News burn such an important property?
And I do just want to... Fox recently settled a major lawsuit over allegations that voting machines were insecure.
And the idea... I find the idea that they fired Tucker over this preposterous, given his importance to their business.
I also would point out that they settled.
They didn't lose a lawsuit.
So yeah, it's a large number, but they chose not to fight it.
And this wasn't primarily a Tucker thing anyway.
So none of that makes sense.
It kind of suffices.
If you're just looking for some explanation, you can resort to that.
But it doesn't, it's not the right order of magnitude.
And, you know, so Fox appears to have cut off its nose.
Nose.
Yes.
I was really trying to change something else.
For those of you just listening, Heather has suffered a Furniture Malfunction.
Someone had come in... I'm sorry, go on.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
A Furniture Malfunction, you can live with that now, right?
It's not a Wardrobe Malfunction.
You don't know.
I think I do know pretty well.
Okay, so a couple things.
I'm just gonna put them on the table and then we'll try to piece them together.
Yeah.
I have argued for using the term Goliath to refer to a force in the universe that one can detect.
What is Goliath?
Goliath is the force that opposes meaningful change.
Now, I say that because First of all, change is all around us.
There's obviously no force preventing change.
But those who have achieved disproportionate power, rent-seeking elites who have disproportionate control, disproportionate security in the future, I tend to use that power to prevent radical shifts, because radical shifts can only take them in the downward direction.
They're very unlikely.
If you're at the top, you can't go up.
So this force is troubled by anything that threatens to introduce some kind of change.
Any event horizon beyond which the future is unpredictable, Goliath opposes that.
So the prime directive for Goliath is no meaningful change.
And basically meaningful change refers to the basic flow of well-being, power, and wealth.
Is Goliath a conspiracy?
No.
Goliath is a hybrid between colluding entities, including things like corporations and political parties, departments of state, things like that, and emergent properties.
The social phenomena that emerge in the social environment that buttress the current power structure, etc.
et cetera, et cetera.
So, that is what I'm going to argue is underlying a strange move like this.
A business operating in a way that is not businesslike, that does not appear oriented towards maximizing shareholder value over the future.
And I'm going to make a weird connection.
We see that same odd phenomenon with the Dylan Mulvaney fiasco with Anheuser-Busch.
And the idea is, ordinarily, you would find a property like Anheuser-Busch very reluctant to say anything that suggested a strong political perspective at all, because why would you want to limit your beverage consumption to people of one ideology when there might be people of another ideology who are thirsty also?
Yeah, I guess I'm not as compelled that this is the same, that what's going on, that your model, you're asking a question about why Fox appears to be acting in a way that isn't good for Fox's business.
And is the answer the same as the answer to the question, why is Anheuser-Busch acting in a way that doesn't appear to be good for Anheuser-Busch's business?
Now the VP of whatever at Bush, at Anheuser-Busch, who made the decision to hire Dylan Levine is on some sort of extended leave of absence now.
Not clear.
I haven't kept up with the story.
I don't know that it really matters.
But so, you know, A, Anheuser-Busch did, you know, put some kind of a corrective in place.
But that's actually, I don't think, that's not so much the interesting part.
The reason I'm not sure this is the same is That trans rights, and specifically trans rights activism, is being pushed on us, and somehow a tremendously large number of Americans, at least, and other people in the weird world have taken this on as truth.
That this is the next civil rights battle.
And if you really believe that trans rights is the civil rights battle of the day, and that you also, if you were sort of looking around going like, man, you know, the 60s must have been an amazing time to be alive, you know, really fighting for the thing that should have been the case all along.
You know, civil rights was finally happening, we were finally getting there.
That wasn't, especially in retrospect, right?
Civil rights wasn't a political position, it was a human position.
This is like, you know, this is what we all should have recognized and we understand to some degree why we didn't, but here we are finally catching up to our shared humanity and let's go.
But trans rights aren't like that, sorry.
No, for a number of reasons, and we've talked about it a lot.
But in part because this is a, you know, opt-in, you don't have to do anything but, you know, put on a woman face and you get to claim to be a woman.
And maybe more to the point, you just... Well... Boy, I feel like I'm trying to go in too many directions here.
I think what you're saying makes sense, but I think in some sense it's the cover story.
And this is the place where... Well, but it may be, but it may work because.
It may work because you've actually got people convinced that if, you know, pick your hero.
If Martin Luther King Jr.
or Malcolm X were the civil rights leaders that we all needed in the 60s, Maybe Dylan Mulvaney is the leader that we all need in the 2020s.
And that's, you know, reprehensible on its face, right?
But I think a number of people actually believe that.
And so maybe something underlying, you know, like, why is the trans rights agenda?
Cruising with such alacrity through all of our lives is, of course, a bigger and maybe more interesting question.
But people have compelled themselves because they really think that not only are they on the right side of history here, but that there is no possible explanation for being on the other side of it.
Right.
And that's why it is a beautiful bludgeon, right?
Because if you can successfully get people to make one leap, that this is the same as the fight against Jim Crow or the fight for the freedom of people to be openly gay, if you understand this is that fight, then you can look at the map and you can say, well, oh, I know who the people are who, you know, you know,
tried to block the schoolhouse from black kids attending, and I'm going to be on the other side of that fight.
I remember what their angry faces looked like.
Right, exactly.
And I don't want to be remembered by history.
So people are terrified of being on the wrong side of history, and they have falsely been led to believe that this is a story they already know.
It just has a new subject, right?
But I would point out, Dylan Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch, That's one example of something that we see again and again and again, right?
Twitter was another such example, right?
Twitter was throwing people off for saying perfectly mundane things, right?
Now there was a conservative bias in who it was Punishing, but of course it punished all sorts of people.
It punished Unity 2020 when we were really just trying to elect courageous, capable patriots to the White House, right?
You know, what may have been a quixotic attempt to do it, but the point was something about Twitter was behaving in exactly the opposite way that you would imagine that a social media site should, and all of them do.
Right?
A social media site is in competition for attention, eyeballs, people willing to spend time on Twitter.
Why is it throwing off users who, like Megan Murphy, are simply asserting that men aren't women?
Right?
Even if the people at Twitter disagree with that?
This is a perspective for which there is an audience who would come to Twitter and make Twitter wealthier because the overall Twitter audience is bigger.
Same thing, obviously, with YouTube.
We remain demonetized for closing in on two years now.
But I just saw today or yesterday that I guess Kim Iverson had an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is, yes, running for president.
And this interview was not even that recent.
Right.
But they took it down on the Stryker Channel.
Yep.
For daring to speak with someone who is running for president because he suffers from wrong think.
You know who else had Robert Kennedy Jr.
on?
Tucker.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So this is going to, so I did on the list of, you know, corporations behaving badly or weirdly, you know, Gillette, we've now forgotten.
Gillette did some gender weird thing several years ago and created a huge uproar and, you know, again.
How about Hershey's for Women's Month, National, whatever the month was.
And then I think it was Daily Wire who came out with Their own brand of chocolate.
She-her without nuts, and he-him with nuts.
If you need someone to tell you which one's which, it's the wrong chocolate for you.
Right, so, okay, we've got a phenomenon.
Corporations behaving paradoxically with respect to what they're supposed to be doing, which is making money, and more to the point, their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders is to put those shareholders in a good position.
So why are they politicizing their products when conservatives and liberals need to shave, drink beer, whatever it is, or discuss things online.
All of this is so paradoxical.
Did you say conservatives and liberals need to drink beer?
Yes.
They both drink beer.
And therefore, you might imagine that a beer producer wouldn't want to piss off part of that audience in advance.
You're not claiming it as a human right.
I mean, look, this used to know.
Well, I'm now in a predicament because I can't drink beer.
And so if it's a human right, maybe I'm being oppressed.
Because of the gluten.
Because of the gluten, yeah.
But I would point out, in the past, Let's take the Coors Corporation.
Shall we?
Now, in my family, it was well understood that Coors was a reactionary family, right?
The family that owned the brand was reactionary.
Right.
And so there was some, like, grumbling about people drinking Coors because it's like, why would you enrich those folks, right?
Coors wasn't being political in their ads.
They were doing the opposite.
They were obscuring the fact that, you know, or Knott's Berry Farm or any of these entities.
Which, for those who didn't grow up in Southern California, was like the third amusement park after Disneyland and Magic Mountain.
Yeah, it was the Circus Vargas of amusement parks.
But anyway, the point is brands used to go out of their way, not To connect their politics with their product because money is money, right?
So paradox is why in the current era are these corporations behaving so weirdly and firing their top star and you know all of these things and of course business people are currently shouting at their No, we're not on television.
They're screens, or they're speakers, because the answer in some sense is obvious, the proximate answer.
It is ESG, right?
Now, ESG stands for environment, no.
Environment, social, and governance.
Social and governance, right.
So ESG is... Are you going to show?
Yeah, I'm going to show a little video.
Maybe we should just do that.
It will explain itself.
Zach, cue the ESG.
Before you show this, so what's the source on this?
This is CFI, which is some sort of like a We're going to get back to what ESG is, but I believe it is like a ratings agency.
It's basically a facilitator of ESG in the market.
CFIs.
Yeah.
ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance.
You can think of it as an analysis framework to help measure and quantify the degree to which an organization is operating in a sustainable manner.
Environmental assessment criteria help stakeholders understand an organization's impact on the environment and the climate, like its greenhouse gas emissions, and its management team's stewardship over natural resources, like fresh water.
While understanding environmental risk and impact is a big part of the ESG framework, the concept of sustainability in this context extends well beyond just the environment.
The S pillar, social, examines an organization's social impact.
It seeks to understand how well leadership manages relationships with stakeholders.
Including fair wages for workers, generating positive outcomes in the communities where they operate, and taking accountability for the actions and inactions of supply chain partners in other parts of the world.
The G, as we know, is governance.
So, how is the firm led and managed?
Stakeholders are increasingly taking note that a healthy corporate governance function can make or break progress in the E and the S realms, but can even create existential threats for business operations more broadly.
ESG as we know it evolved from a number of older sustainability-themed acts and frameworks, including EHS, Environmental Health and Safety, and CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility.
But these older frameworks took more of a philanthropic approach, implying that management teams should do good because it's the right thing to do.
What's somewhat unique about ESG is that it looks at these issues through the lens of business risk and opportunity, which tends to resonate more clearly with the investment community.
These rapidly changing market and non-market conditions have created the ESG landscape as we see it today.
This includes the emergence of ESG rating agencies, ESG scores, mandatory public reporting, often called ESG disclosure, and countless sustainability themed funds and investment strategies.
All right.
Let me just say that actually the visuals that go along with that in the absence of the sound are in some ways even more disturbing.
It has a kind of a mesmerizing, uh, we are the good people and these are the things that we will do.
The thing, so you literally showed this to me within minutes of us starting, and I was only listening, so that's the first time I saw the visuals, and I took some notes, and I thought that my overriding sense of this video was that there's no specifics, right?
That, you know, how is it that these scores, these, you know, the agencies, the scores, the monetary reporting, the funds, the investment strategies are being decided on?
Like, what are the values that lie just below the surface?
And we hear, for instance, leadership managing relationships with stakeholders are taking responsibility for the actions and inactions of supply chain partners in other parts of the world.
Taking responsibility for the inactions of supply chain partners in other parts of the world.
What thing that your supply chain partners in other parts of the world might they do or not do that would prompt you to be interested?
And, you know, so they they mentioned climate and freshwater, and that's about the only specific things that they even point to at all here.
Well, I want to steel man ESG before we reveal what it actually is.
Yeah.
Okay, because there are a couple... First of all, let me just say, as a lifelong progressive, I believe it is actually philosophically all but certain that our top priority ought to be sustainability properly defined.
That before we get to anything else, humanity should never deliver the next generation a lesser world than the one that we were handed, right?
Because if you start doing that, it's a very short ride.
And there are lots of competitive dynamics that will produce that.
So I understand the devil is in the details.
Defining what it means not to deliver the next generation a lesser world is not an easy thing to do.
So operationalizing that is not something I'm even claiming can be well done.
But philosophically speaking, our obligation to future generations is something we are falling down on, and sustainability, if we were reasonable and just to use common parlance, sustainability should be our top priority before we get to anything else.
And there is a game theory problem in sustainability, which I won't go deeply into, but it's a very well understood problem that goes by the name of collective action in academic circles.
And basically what it means is that if each party pursues the best course of action for its own well-being, that the global well-being is decreased by lots of phenomena.
In other words, The ability of any corporation to reduce pollution enough to make a difference is tiny and so there's no motivation to cut your own emissions because if your competitor doesn't then they come out ahead.
And so years ago I did a talk A TEDx talk called the Personal Responsibility Vortex, in which I basically said, if in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, if you live your principles, you will actually put your principles, you will set your principles back, and that the right way to advance your principles is to do whatever course of action makes the most sense, including
leaves you healthiest and all of those things, but not to, you know, buy products for the good of the planet, but to buy the right products that are priced correctly and use the surplus to move the world in the direction of the values that you hold, rather than try to do it by shopping in a particular way.
Because if you did try to leave a sustainable world, then you couldn't avail yourself of almost any of the products that, you know, this microphone is undoubtedly made of materials that I wouldn't like how they were sourced and produced in the conditions of the workers.
So am I not allowed to have a microphone?
And by not having a microphone, I can't reach the audience and tell them about the personal responsibility vortex.
So am I better off making a compromise at the microphone and being able to reach an audience?
Clearly.
So in any case, ESG is built around some correct logic and values.
The correct logic and values.
The values are we want a world that functions well, that's fair, that is inclusive, that is sustainable.
And the stated goals of ESG.
That's it.
And it is true that the market itself does not produce sustainable outcomes.
It does not produce fair outcomes, right?
It produces something below that level.
And so a coordinated effort is in principle not a crazy idea.
But in this case, what ESG is, is an excuse To marshal power in the direction of a political objective which is not stated.
And so, for example, let's take the question of, well, E. E and ESG, right?
Environment, okay?
Environment.
Well, we all want the environment protected.
Brett just said that the top value ought to be sustainability, so presumably he's on board with 15-minute cities.
No, I am not.
15-minute cities are an excuse for control over the population.
I am dead set against those things.
If some entity decides that, oh, well, sustainability is good, and therefore 15-minute cities are good, and therefore we want corporations who are advancing the cause of 15-minute cities, and they get a higher rating, which means that when I look at the box of whatever, it says that they're a better corporation, right?
Then the point is, the political agenda is using this thing as a weapon.
That's what I meant by the lack of specificity.
That they vaguely state some values that, in principle, in very vague terms, we all should be able to get behind.
And I guess this is the analogy to the dilemma of anything.
It's like, well, it's civil rights.
We can all get behind that, can't we?
And then they say, now, you don't worry your pretty little heads about any of the specifics.
We'll take care of the operationalization part of this process, because that's inside baseball.
You wouldn't want to know.
And as it turns out, we really do want to know.
We have to know, and you have to stop until you start telling us what it is that you're doing, because this is bad.
Right.
Now, here's the thing that I realized in thinking through this.
ESG is social credit for corporations.
It is a social credit system for corporations, and I'm sure others have noticed that.
Oh, they do?
Okay.
Well, they say scores, but the point is, those of us who know what the Chinese social credit system is, We fear such a thing being instituted in the West.
We fear it being instituted through central bank digital currencies, for example, all of which is very plausible and on the march.
The idea that this has a wing over in corporate space that is going to operate through ratings agencies that are, for example, going to decide that trans rights are a good.
Now, are trans rights a good?
Yes, up until they are in conflict with somebody else's rights.
But the idea that a ratings agency is going to notice that a trans person may have struggles in the world and not notice that children are being sterilized Under the banner of trans rights, right?
Which side is good, right?
I would say that the people who are protecting children are actually doing the more important job.
And so it's not obvious in which direction that score should go, but it is very obvious which direction it will go.
And so why does this exist?
Right.
Well, I'm going to argue, and you should probably be sitting down for this.
I know that chair can pull surprises on you.
That was all me.
You can't just go randomly flipping levers on chairs, right?
In any case, the reason that this ESG thing is happening, in my opinion, is that it is a facilitator of this new kind of fascism that we are seeing.
And I'm not exaggerating when I say fascism.
So fascism is, of course, an ideology that has reared its ugly head many times.
The sine qua non, the central feature of fascism, is the uniting of government and corporate power.
And ESG, as a social credit system for corporations, is basically aligning corporations with a handed down from above set of values.
Now, handed down from above set of values, if the government functioned in a truly democratic way so that those values were really a reflection of what voters believed and wanted, that would be one thing.
It would still be fallible, but it would at least be defensible.
But when it's being handed down by something that is not functioning in a democratic way in the slightest, it is absolutely terrifying.
Right?
I would also point out, is it just the corporate government fusion that appears fascist?
No.
Fascists also take a militaristic view of the world.
In other words, I've argued that the distinction between nationalism And patriotism is that nationalism is basically what your country can do for you, using your country as a bludgeon.
And patriotism is the willingness to sacrifice for your country.
They're essentially opposites.
They have a shared connotation in the mind, but it's wrong.
So this corporate-government partnership or fusion, this fascist fusion, has taken a decidedly militaristic view of the world.
It is Effectively coercing other nations and, you know, you can see the coercion in COVID policy, for example.
Why did the whole world take the same approach to COVID?
Why did, you know, why are we struggling to find exceptions where we can go to measure a different policy?
It wasn't obvious what we should do from the beginning.
There should be a huge diversity of policies, but it's all centralized through You know, The Who, for example, which is about to gain more power in this milieu.
Well, I mean, obviously, there's a tension.
And I am surprised to find myself about to be arguing that, you know, As we said throughout COVID, you know, not this product with this disease with this government.
Like, no mandates, no how under these three conditions.
But can you imagine A pathogen so horrifying and so rapidly spreading that a global response was actually the thing that needed to happen.
I can.
I can.
That we don't have that infrastructure in place and now, having lived through COVID, I am, you know, bereft of solutions, I guess.
Like, I feel like, oh, I would have thought that we should have had something in place in case of such a situation, and now I see that no such situation, no such entity could possibly be trustworthy.
It remains to be seen whether a conceivable entity could be trustworthy.
What we know is that no entity that is on the map is trustworthy, and therefore it puts... But all future entities will also be made up of people.
Right, but there, you know, I don't think the game theory is insurmountable.
I don't think good governance is impossible, but... I don't think good governance is impossible.
I am not compelled that good global governance is possible anymore.
Let's put it this way, we are depending on the fact that somebody can come up with a scheme, but the solutions of the 18th century are not up to the challenge.
That is true.
And what we have is a landscape full of malignant entities.
And so I agree, I'd love to have a global public health authority that actually was interested in public health, had enough humility to figure out when it was making an error and stopped making it.
was inclined to recommend the obvious in order to improve public health, and we have none of those things.
Right.
The WHO continues to recommend, as it was doing before COVID, through COVID, and now, that if you go outside while the sun is high, you absolutely must cover yourself in sunscreen or clothing because the sun is poison.
Yeah.
And I don't know that they use that language, but you know, it's not them, but then who is it?
Which is insane.
Yeah.
But all right, so let's begin to tighten this model up a little bit.
Yeah.
You've got ESG, which is being used to align corporations that are not naturally aligned.
It could be used, something like it could be used to align them in the direction of things, you know, solving game theory problems, but this is really functioning as an excuse to align them around a particular set of signals that they are on board with the crypto-fascist move that we are now collectively being dragged into.
And so along the lines of, you know, why would Gillette or Anheuser-Busch thumb its nose at some huge fraction of its market?
burn Tucker Carlson and his audience in a way that is infuriating, right?
People who would ordinarily, you know, if Tucker had quit, would still be Fox News viewers, are enraged at this, as they should be.
So why would they do that?
And I was talking to Zach about this in the car this morning, and he reminded me of a concept.
It actually The first time I said it was the last... I think it was the last time I met my... the last class I taught at Evergreen.
We met in a park.
Maybe it wasn't the very last.
It was the second to last time I met them.
Met in a park because it wasn't safe to be on campus.
And I had been invited to go on Joe Rogan's program.
And I barely knew who Joe Rogan was.
These people, of course, knew who Joe Rogan was because they were a good bit younger, and so he was an important person in their lives.
And anyway, I gave them a little talk about the oddness that their professor was going on this apparently important program, and why that would be happening based on what was going on at their school, and all of this.
And I said to them, I said, Take very careful notes on what's going on.
We will not be back this way again, right?
I knew that this was a one-way trip, that this was not something that was going to be put back together.
It couldn't be.
And so anyway, Why would Fox News burn Tucker Carlson in this audience?
Because they're playing a new dynamic in which they know they won't be back this way again.
They don't need Tucker.
They need to have Tucker Carlson gone more than they need him for some nebulous future in which they're playing their traditional role.
That's the thing that I want to surface here, is that they are actually, um, and I, you know, There's some good news in this.
I know I'm not the good news guy, but there is some good news in this because in order for them to have taken the step of getting rid of Tucker, Two things are true.
One, they've revealed themselves, right?
They have alerted us that there is something on the march that is behaving very strangely and does not appear to be just a simple corporation trying to, you know, get an audience.
Right.
It's something else.
So be aware.
There's something on the march.
That's one thing.
But here's the other thing.
Why did they reveal themselves in this, uh, in this way?
They did it because they are insecure.
And that is good news.
The fact is they are concerned about something enough that they had to make that move.
And I think I know what it is.
Maybe.
I don't see why a move that is a paradox is inherently a reveal of insecurity.
It could just be the next step.
No, it could be the next step.
But the thing is, if if you want to claim that people are, you know, paranoid, then not making moves that they can spot and say, that's a very odd thing for a media company to do, to go after its biggest you know, chunk of audience and enrage them.
Right.
That's a weird thing to do.
So why would they do that rather than continue to hide?
If they were feeling secure, it wouldn't be worth making that aggressive move.
Well, no, I mean, again, I would say it could be about feeling secure, feeling insecure, but it also could be about being on the move.
They could feel secure, but also be on the move in pursuit of something.
I believe they are, but I believe they have been forced out of hiding in some sense.
That the point is they can't just simply march where they're going.
That there's actually something.
They know that they're in danger.
And I think in part they know that they're in danger because Trump revealed that their control, the duopoly's ability to shut out anything meaningful, is not complete.
Which then raises this odd paradox.
You had RFK Jr.
going on Tucker Carlson's program, right?
This is supposed to be matter and antimatter.
Right?
This is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal from a famously liberal, important family going on the program of arch-conservative Tucker Carlson to announce his bid for the Democratic nomination for the president.
And that is a remarkable fact in and of itself.
And the fact that Tucker Carlson is, of course, hospitable is very troubling.
Why?
Because this... Troubling?
What do you mean troubling?
It's troubling to the forces that... to Goliath.
It's troubling because effectively why would people who are politically so far apart be finding common cause?
Why would Why would this be anything other than a very contentious interview in which Tucker Carlson is trying to get to the bottom of RFK's liberalism and show it to be false?
Why would it be, you know, a meeting of unity and alignment?
Well, because they're both patriots.
And the point is, Goliath is not patriotic at all.
Goliath wants to maintain control and the illusion of democracy, but cannot afford democracy.
And so, here's my contention, just to sum it up.
Bobby Kennedy is terrifying to the DNC, because in office, he would do the job that Democrats are supposed to do.
And that is in direct conflict with the DNC's business model.
And the DNC is not supposed to have a business model, but it very clearly does.
And so it panders to its voters, but its real constituents are not voters.
It's powerful, rent-seeking elites.
Bobby Kennedy would have the bully pulpit in the role of president and considerable power.
And it is much more terrifying to the DNC than something like Trump.
In fact, Trump is good for the DNC because the DNC does not have a valid argument in favor of electing its candidates other than Trump.
Right?
So they fear R.F.K.
Jr.
And so here's the point.
R.F.K.
Jr.
goes on Tucker Carlson's program and reveals in showing up there and having a cordial conversation about a political, about a bid for the presidency, The danger to Goliath.
And here's what I think is afoot.
Tucker Carlson's position has been very similar to what happened in podcast world over the course of the last four or five years.
Although he sat in a mainstream media chair, His position was quite heterodox.
And the point is, if you were going to make a move in which you were going to somehow learn the lesson that Goliath should learn from COVID, and realize that although it owned all of the big media properties,
That it could not maintain control over the narrative and that truth emerged, not fully, but in, you know, across LabLeak, across repurposed drugs, vaccine safety and effectiveness, the proliferation of variants, all of these things, the actual narrative broke through the media control because Goliath did not understand what podcast world was or why anybody would listen to somebody in a man cave or any of those things.
Or a sauna.
Or a sauna, for example.
The point is, let's say that that's going to happen over the course of the next electoral cycle, through the presidential election.
What's going to happen?
That we are going to have a battle in which the mainstream media is all going to sing from the same hymnal, and podcast world is going to reveal the insanity of that hymnal.
And worse, Twitter being a free property because Musk has freed it, is going to be a place where we can discuss the paradox of why the mainstream media is focused on a narrative that's obviously not true.
Right?
And you might have a like an actual presidential figure running for office.
Right?
Not a, you know, a wrecking ball like Trump, but somebody who actually aspires to right the ship of state.
So, My contention is, Tucker couldn't remain in a mainstream seat because what he is doing crosses over into the mainstream.
And if it is shunted over into podcast world, then whatever this force is can, I don't know if it's going to use ISPs or credit card processors or whatever it's going to use against podcast world or some industrial strength propaganda campaign that learned the lesson of COVID and, you know, proceeds to do a better job.
But the point is, Tucker had to be shoved out because his mainstreamness was out.
It did not fit whatever is coming.
And I would just say the, a prediction of this model is that the other person on the other side of the aisle who fits that same description, Don Lemon.
No, I don't, it's Don Lemon is a very different property.
That's what I thought.
So who are you thinking of?
Bill Maher.
Oh.
Bill Maher is also a heterodox person with a large audience sitting in a mainstream seat.
And, you know, it's funny.
I had that thought and then I happened on Twitter.
I didn't know Elon Musk had been interviewed by Bill Maher, but I think this must have happened yesterday.
And anyway, they allude to this jokingly, that Elon is the Grim Reaper or the Typhoid Mary of talk shows, that Tucker interviewed him and now Tucker is out of a job.
Is there just one previous example?
I don't know, that's the one I know, but they joke maybe Bill Maher is next, but I wonder if Bill Maher either, something works to chasten Bill Maher, which I hope is impossible, I hope he's just a free man and can evade whatever controls there are, but if not...
You might wonder if his mainstream seat might be in jeopardy in the upcoming year because of the election.
If all of this is true, and I don't see anything to object to in your analysis except for your contention that this necessarily reveals a lack of security on the part of Fox.
I think it's even more important that, for lack of a better descriptor, podcast world, non-mainstream media world, stop the infighting already.
So you mentioned podcasters and Twitter, and obviously in written word, Substack is the main contender there, and the shenanigans that Elon Musk continues to pull with Substack
That is, you know, breaching unwritten, unspoken agreements, sort of gentlemen's agreements, that I think we assumed that we had and that really should go back into place because, you know, we're in it.
We're in it for society here.
This is big.
Goliath is super powerful, and as much as a single billionaire like Musk is going to be very, very powerful himself, if Podcast World and Bobby Kennedy Jr.
and Twitter and Rumble and Locals and Substack can stop the infighting, Then we have a better chance.
So at the moment, just as a reminder, briefly, Twitter had stopped allowing any substack links to be clicked through on at all.
You got an error message.
This might be dangerous stuff.
And that actually stopped happening while we were talking about it on air a couple weeks ago.
But quietly, and I've heard no one talk about this, what has replaced that insane policy is now you can link to a substack, but it just shows up as a line of indecipherable, hotlinkable text.
And the social media assets don't come along with it.
So you don't get the image that comes along with the thing.
And it's not interesting to share.
And so stuff is not being shared.
So, you know, come on.
Stop that.
There is no reason beyond the really petty competitive stuff between a future Twitter property and what is established as substack and the future substack property, you know, notes on Twitter, yeah, going after each other competitively.
But this is not helpful.
So I'm going to propose something.
The unholy alliance built around ESG has to have a countervailing force.
And the countervailing force is those properties that are actually built to protect the values around the West, around which the West is founded.
Most importantly, a free exchange of ideas.
And so what I would propose is that the countervailing force, the honorable alignment, and I'm not suggesting these businesses aren't in competition, but the honorable force should be the internet beyond the wall.
The internet beyond the wall.
The free people of the internet need to look out for each other.
We may have our differences but we need to look out for each other because the real enemy is Goliath And that is enough of a hazard to the West that all of the other stuff is secondary.
So yes, Elon, I would ask you, maybe there's stuff we can't see, but please be mindful of the fact that the public square cannot be a monopoly.
That's not how it's going to work.
That's right.
So we have to go.
I hope that spring is still happening the next time we see you guys, because we have been seeing some amazing springy things with foxes and swallows and ladybugs and eagles, and I'd like to talk about that perhaps next time.
I don't think we have time now.
Excellent.
We will be back on Tuesday, May My calendar, I think it's March, May 9th at 2 p.m.
Pacific, and then the following Saturday, May 13th at the usual time.
It's going to be a little while before you see us again, but there's lots of other things to do.
Again, it's spring, and if you're in the Southern Hemisphere, it's fall.
Get outside while you still can with short sleeves on, right?
So yeah, thank you, as always, for joining us, and until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, Eat good food and get outside.
