Jessica Rosenworcel and Eddie Huang warn the FCC’s 3-2 vote to kill net neutrality risks turning the internet into a corporate-controlled platform, prioritizing pay-to-play access over free speech. With half of U.S. households lacking broadband choice, monopolies could throttle competitors like Huang’s early Blogspot ventures, stifling creativity and opportunity. They contrast the open internet’s potential for shared growth with traditional competition models, while debating voting reforms—Huang’s firsthand discrimination vs. Rosenworcel’s push for accessibility without undermining informed participation. Amid rising automation and shifting work norms, both stress public advocacy is key to preserving digital fairness, though Huang jokes about Pornhub as a last resort. The episode underscores how unchecked deregulation could reshape democracy itself. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, you are very concerned and a lot of people are about net neutrality and we all have some questions about it and we're excited to talk to you about it.
So maybe we could illuminate some of the issues and give us an understanding or try to help us understand what's at stake here and why are people so concerned?
Well, I think people are concerned, because the future of the Internet's the future of everything.
I mean, every aspect of our lives is now touched by that connectivity.
And it's a funny thing, but the agency where I work in Washington, the Federal Communications Commission, has enormous power and control over our Internet experience.
And for decades, we've had these policies that have been all about Internet openness.
And what that means is you can go where you want, Do what you want online and your broadband provider can't get in the way or prevent you from looking at some websites or looking at some videos or setting up some businesses.
But that changed last month in Washington when the FCC, over my objections, voted to end net neutrality.
And as a result, all of our broadband providers now have the legal right to block websites, to throttle content, and to set up Sweetheart paid for prioritization deals.
And over the long haul, that could really change The internet and the web as we know it.
Now, one of the arguments pro-net neutrality, one of the arguments for people that were excited about this being signed, they were saying that net neutrality was really only over the last couple of years.
And before the last couple of years, net neutrality as we know it.
The last couple years everything was fine and that it'll continue to be fine and that people are just panicked.
And there was that really bizarre video that one dude made where he was saying, these are all the things you're going to be able to do.
Yeah, you know, for me, the net neutrality thing is huge because when I was in law school, I read this one book called Fighting for Air and it documented like the Telecommunications Act of 97. It's like boring stuff, right?
Don't go read the Telecommunications Act of 97. But like radio mattered to me.
Remember like growing up with the radio, like I remember they would actually break records on the radio back in the day.
Like Funk Flex still does it on Hot 97. He'll break records.
He broke my boy Old Drew's record the other day but like recently it's like Clear Channel, iHeartRadio they own all the radio stations and it really sterilized content and they play the same songs every hour in every city almost around the world and I when I read that book and I went to law school I realized I was like yo it was because of the deregulation of radio that allowed for all these local independent Radio stations in every
city that were repping local culture and state culture that kind of eroded that means of communication.
And I was like, this happens to every single industry we have, whether it's radio, television, but now it's coming for the internet and by deregulating it, you're going to gut it again.
You know, like, when technology started popping and podcasts came around, I mean, that's what enabled JRE and that's why my first place to go was like, I'm gonna come see Joe.
Because you were one of the innovators with this new technology.
I think there's an argument that you want government out of the way.
Deregulation is going to lead to more competition and we'll have a flourishing of new ideas and content if we just move government out of the way.
And even if you're sympathetic to that argument, here's where I think it breaks down.
According to the FCC's own data, half of the households in this country don't have a choice of broadband provider.
I'm familiar with this.
I'm one of them.
I only have one provider that serves my house.
So the thing is, if your broadband provider started blocking your content or throttling your access to some video, in a competitive market, you'd pick up, you'd take your business somewhere else.
But about half of our households don't even have that opportunity.
So, to me, the idea that the competitive market will prevent this behavior just doesn't fly.
Well, it seems like that's where the real argument lies, that if there are monopolies, and there seem to be in certain areas in regards to what kind of internet access you can get, that if you don't have regulation then, then what is going to protect the consumer?
What is going to protect free speech?
What's going to protect Say if you are on Verizon and your system is on Verizon, what if you decide to make a podcast that criticizes Verizon?
And everybody says, you know, hey, Eddie Wong's got a podcast criticizing us.
And what happens is you as a consumer, you just get online and you might not even notice, right?
You might not even notice they're taking you to the video content that they have a special pay-for relationship with.
I think, though, the biggest harm is to entrepreneurship.
Because right now, look, you have a good idea.
You got a business, a service.
You can go online and you can almost instantly have global reach.
That's amazing.
But now you're going to have to figure out, is your broadband provider instead going to shuffle off all your traffic to someone else who's paying them on the side?
Are you going to have a fair shot to show your wares and your ideas to the world?
Because I start thinking, like, A bad one percenter dude and I'm like alright if there's no net neutrality and I'm the only person that can service Calabasas, California, Woodland Hills, California well I'm gonna charge all the other streaming providers more money to use this and I'm gonna create a competitor in every single one of these sectors so you can have an advantage if you have your show with me and if you're on the other one I'm gonna disadvantage you I'm gonna tax you basically So,
Yes, there's loads because I'm not giving up in the fight for net neutrality and I don't want you to either.
We got a few different pathways ahead.
First, in Congress right now.
They are trying to get rid of what just happened at the FCC. They're trying to use this law called the Congressional Review Act that in effect just undone everything that the FCC just did.
So it's a way to wipe out what just happened.
And while the odds are long, there's more than 40 United States senators who have sponsored that law.
And in the House side, there's more than 80 members of the House of Representatives.
So there's momentum growing in Congress to take a look at this issue and maybe fix what the FCC did.
And if you're sitting out there and thinking they're not listening to you, what you should do is something totally old-fashioned.
You should pick up the phone, call your members of Congress and your representatives, and let them know you care about this issue.
Because that, still today, is one of the most powerful ways of conveying your opinion to those who represent you.
I think it's going to happen first in the United States Senate and later in the House.
I also think we are going to have litigation.
We've already got a few states attorneys general who want to sue to overturn this.
We've got some big companies, some public interest groups.
So I think it's fair to say we're going to court.
And then we're also seeing activity in state houses.
And that we've seen net neutrality legislation introduced in Nebraska, Nevada, Washington State, Massachusetts, California.
Lots of places.
And I'm not sure how that all comes together legally, but what you see is this momentum growing that people are not happy with what Washington just did.
Well, I think everyone understands the insane power of the Internet and what a cultural shift that we've experienced over the last 20 years.
I mean, it's unprecedented in human history.
There's never been anything like it in terms of access to information, in terms of the rate of change, the way people look at things, the way the issues get discussed, the cycle of news, which is like, what, 10 hours now?
Stories come in and out.
I mean, Hawaii just had a fake missile attack and everybody already forgot.
You mean somebody pressed a button and sent out a text that said that there's an incoming ballistic missile, a possibility, a threat of an incoming ballistic missile and this is not a drill?
And then I have friends in Hawaii and everyone went crazy.
People were crying in the streets.
No one knew what to do.
And of course, this is a state that was attacked, you know, less than 100 years ago during World War II. So this is, it's not an unusual thing for them.
Yeah, but then once I figured out it was a mistake, I was like, whoa, maybe I should ask Jessica if we could send like a national message on my birthday, 12 a.m.
But what Joe was saying about the internet and how it opened things up, like personally for me, like today's Martin Luther King Jr. Day, right?
And I remember reading a letter from Birmingham jail as a kid.
Jonathan Swift, Modest Proposal as a kid, and Tupac, Me Against the World.
Those were like the three works that made me want to write.
And I started writing since I was 15 years old, never gave up, but no one would buy my writing, right?
The only place I would buy my writing was Roto-Wire, and I would write fantasy sports updates for them.
I covered the Magic and I covered the Knicks.
But all the way until I was like 28 years old, no one wanted to buy my writing.
It was Blogspot.
That allowed me to write in my own voice and find my own audience.
And then people started to see, whoa, there are like weird children on the internet that like Eddie's writing, like he's creating a lane.
And I talked to my publisher at Random House and they're like, yeah, you created a lane selling books to people who don't buy books, non-traditional readers.
And so without the internet, without Blogspot, Without that ability to just project my voice and hope someone connects, I never would have happened.
But it is totally radical as a matter of human history that you can reach out, reach around the world and build community with total disregard for geography and find people who like fantasy sports or something like that and build community around it.
Think about what that does for commerce or diplomacy or your ability to talk to me across the table without having a translator in some clunky way try to describe what I just said.
These things are amazing.
And you want all of our collective genius to drive them and not have big gatekeepers like our broadband providers in the way.
Yeah, it seems to be a real issue, and I think that we should look at the internet as something different than almost all other services, because it directly affects our ability to evolve as a culture.
Our ability to exchange information.
It's so critical and it's so unprecedented.
And this is a very powerful thing.
And, you know, people would love to have it go back the old way and have you get your news on ABC and NBC and CBS and that's it.
A Democrat or a Republican, you benefit from net neutrality and internet openness.
If you're conservative or liberal, if you're a big business or a small business, you benefit from internet openness.
And the history of net neutrality is something that doesn't get discussed enough, which is that it began the first time the FCC put net neutrality policy on paper.
It was 2005. And I'm old enough to remember that that was when President George W. Bush was in the White House.
In other words, this country's first net neutrality policies were put on paper when a Republican was running the FCC. It is only in recent days we have characterized this as a left-right issue, and I think that's fundamentally a mistake.
I think that he was supported by people in Washington, including some broadband providers, and was led to believe that with deregulation, we would all be better off.
And then what I find interesting is Google, Amazon, Facebook, these big power players used to be very vocal, net neutrality, keep the internet free, things like that.
Well, first, I want to point out that those big companies through their association are going to be intervening in the lawsuits in favor of net neutrality.
So that's true.
But to me, net neutrality has never really been about big companies.
It's about who's going to be the next...
Who's going to be the next startup and the next player?
The big companies can always find ways to build relationships and manage this kind of lack of neutrality online with their leverage that come from size.
It's the question of who's going to start something up that you and I may not see because they didn't pay off their broadband provider.
It's the entrepreneurship that has me most concerned.
So when I was saying that there seems like an ideological rift, there's certain people that are not very well versed in this issue that automatically side one way or another.
This is a thing that we do in this country culturally, a right-left thing.
You see it a lot with global warming.
When you have a conversation with people, they say that global warming is a natural process, natural cycle, the earth goes through it.
And then you actually talk to them about how much research they've really done on it.
They fall into these ideological groups, and those pull yourself up by your bootstraps, right-wing, you know, there's this sort of conservative way of thinking that, let the market decide, and this is that conversation.
I don't think that's an honest conversation if you're dealing with monopolies in regards to Internet access, which I think a lot of, and I am, and you are, a lot of people are.
But that's what's scary about this country now is that even when so many of us agree about something, when one very powerful group, a lobby, the broadband companies, get behind somebody with some control, they can push the needle.
My email inbox, which was an explosive thing leading up to this vote, was full of people writing and telling me their stories.
But a whole bunch of them were like...
You know, I'm a registered Republican, but I want you to know, or I supported the president, but I believe net neutrality is really important.
It was striking to me, like, once you get out of the talking head types, what you found is that there was really broad-based support for net neutrality.
Yeah, it's like all the money goes to the fence and Department of Education is gutted, Department of Energy is gutted, Department of Environment, all these things are gutted.
Everything that has to do with our even present and future, it's gutted.
The only thing that's going is business and defense.
The argument for that is that as business booms, as the economy booms, there'll be more opportunities for businesses to clean up the environment and profit off of it.
I think, at the very least, the Trump administration, and I'm trying to look at it through rose-colored glasses, is a fascinating experiment in so many different ways.
So three people changed it for 320 million people.
That's crazy.
That doesn't seem like...
And three people, by the way, who were not voted in.
So they're unelected.
Which, it's just bananas.
I mean, there's no question about it.
That's a terrible idea.
Like, if you gave people the option, you said, hey, do you think that five people should be able to decide whether or not 320 million plus, plus the rest of the world, really, because if your podcast gets cut off, you're not going to be able to reach Canada either.
Do you think that they should be able to stop access to information?
Yeah, I think you've got to make a choice, which is you've got to choose to be optimistic, because it's the only force multiplier we have, which is you're going to decide that if something's not right, you're going to call, you're going to write letters, you're going to write editorials, you're going to build campaigns around things, because in the end, that's the only way to change things.
And if all of us felt a little of that spirit, gosh, today, if not every day, I think that that would make extraordinary difference.
And we're already seeing its impact in Washington.
There are more people showing up in the capital city for votes, for marches.
There are more people reaching out to their members of Congress than ever before.
And I just think we're going to have to sustain that energy if we want to create some real change.
I'm not running, but my thing is that I think we all need to have a stake in the cats that are running and ask the questions that need to be asked because I've been one of the people that just shows up maybe two weeks before the election Two weeks before the deadline of the absentee ballot, and I go research for two weeks, and I go check out all the pros and cons of each candidate, and after two weeks, I decide.
But, you know, I should be involved more than that as citizens.
Find a way to participate in public life and give back.
And whether you run or support someone or encourage your friends, and they don't have to be the person who was the student council president in high school.
Yeah, because it's a benefit a lot of people have and then they do great work and you take that stress off their plate.
But I talked about the conversation because we had a good discussion about it and then it went on for weeks on Twitter.
We kept talking and then we both kind of came around on things and I was like, yo, this is great.
And when I think about candidates, I think about I would vote for somebody who...
They're going to stick to their guns and they're going to do what they said they would and their values aren't going to change once they go to D.C. That's all you can ask for from a person.
Be honest about who you are and be who you are when you go to D.C. Well, I'm looking at the future of civilization, right?
Like, where are we now and this insane change we've experienced over the last 20 years because of the internet, what is it going to be like in 20 years from now?
And what happens to the average person, the average human being?
We have this idea that you're supposed to show up 9 to 5 for a job, and that's what you do, and then you work until you're retired.
But that's all something that people invented.
I mean, all of this is a new thing in terms of human history.
This is not the only way human beings can live.
And The idea that this is the only way to use our tax money or our resources is the way we're doing it currently, that doesn't seem to be that logical.
And I would like people to have more opportunity to innovate and create and more freedom where they don't feel shackled down.
There's a lot of people out there that just feel shackled down by just the need to feed themselves and survive.
No, but I listened to this dude and he was talking about like, it's a scientific thing.
Some people are on a different body rhythm.
They just don't do well in the morning.
And he looked at schools and the school schedule.
And the school schedule is based on mom and dads.
They have a nine to five based on traffic.
Let's try to get these kids into school for high school the earliest, then middle school later, then elementary school after that.
And some people, because they're morning people, they're just at such a disadvantage.
And high school, college, this is like kind of an educational industrial complex.
If you don't fit in, if you're not cookie cutter in the way your body and your mind works, you're not going to be successful.
And speaking to what Joe's talking about is...
I genuinely believe, even with some of the silliest people I've met, everybody has some sort of genius.
We're just not fostering the unearthing of that.
Look, there's some hilarious stuff that happens at Bauhaus at the restaurant, but I tell myself every time, alright, this guy totally messed up making this Bau, this guy totally messed up butchering this chicken, but find a place where he can succeed.
Yeah, the problem is if you do have a nine-to-five job and you're trying to feed yourself and get along, you're going to have less chances to innovate.
You're going to have less chances to take risky decisions and just try things out.
Because this was a platform and a space for you to go experiment, build community, find communities, figure out what your genius might involve, which may not be what you're doing at work every day.
And I think the idea that Washington is mucking around with that is just crazy.
Well, I definitely don't think they like the fact that people have this ability.
I definitely think if the people who created the Internet knew what they were doing when they released this on the general public, they probably wouldn't have.
To give people the kind of access to information and the ability to change things, what we've seen through Arab Spring, we've seen through so many different...
Cultures that are using this to change the way they interact with each other.
You know, it was interesting during our net neutrality proceeding, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, and Vint Cerf, who invented the internet, along with some real icons from early days, like Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, all wrote us and said, do not change these rules.
And it seems like when you've got that incredible genius of these people who created this connected world for you and told you that this agency in Washington is going to really mess around with it, it strikes me that we should have listened.
Yeah, going to what you just said, Joe, it's like even like let's say my role – just to explain for you, my role as the owner or manager at the restaurant, it's not necessarily – Always my job to create a role for somebody and find a way for them to be successful in my restaurant.
I'm hiring a cook.
I'm hiring a manager.
Like, this is the job description.
Hopefully, if you're coming for this job, you can do this, right?
And I think what you said really opened something in my mind, which is the government should not be...
Always prescriptive about like, alright, we're all going to go to school at 7 o'clock.
You're going to study hard and you're going to get these grades and you're going to go to college.
That's not a path to success for everybody.
But what it should do is enable people to be creative and find out what works for them.
We need to give people the freedom to contribute to society.
I think that this new world of the internet in terms of like the ability to explore these communities and like you said video like see the video of someone like this clock this Russell built made this clock for us that that grandfather clock I mean that dude made that all the metal he welded it all put it all together I mean this this kind of stuff to me is so fascinating and I don't just like it because I'm interested in the craft of it all I
like it because I see it as an opportunity for people to get out of the grind.
You can make things.
If you can make things and sell things, if you have an internet connection and you have an Instagram account which is free and you have an iPhone, you take your phone, you film something, next thing you know you're selling things.
It's an incredible time for opportunity to escape.
But then it's like when you become in control of your own shit and you go do what you're passionate about, it's like, well, then I became successful.
And I try to tell people all the time, like, if this doesn't work for you, the straight and narrow doesn't work for you, like, think of a way, think about what you think your strengths are and play to that.
Don't let anyone tell you you're a failure, you're unsuccessful, because you don't fit the stereotype.
The thing about sports is you're forcing your body to do things that are uncomfortable.
And in doing that, you're not just exercising your body.
You're also exercising your mind.
And that's one of the things that I always try to relay to people that are negative about physical exercise and exertion because they think that it's some sort of a frivolous venture that's just...
Vanity, you just want to look good or use your body.
There's a mental aspect to having the ability to push through discomfort that is extremely valuable.
And if you don't have that switch where you can be comfortable being uncomfortable because you've done it a million times, if you don't...
You're going to be panicky.
You're going to be weirded out by it.
And that is a mental weakness.
And that ability to push through discomfort helps you not just in physical exercise and exertion, but it also helps you in work.
If you have to push through certain work things, instead of getting up and getting another cup of coffee, figure out what the fuck you're doing.
I don't believe in trickle-down economics, but I believe in trickle-down mental strength.
Do you know what I mean?
I start in the gym every morning, and whatever happens in the gym, it humbles me, it gives me some kind of energy, and I bring that throughout the day.
Well, I've done martial arts since I was a little kid, but I think there's something that is inescapable, in my life at least, and that is that there is no disconnect between the mind and the body.
That they're all one thing, and that you can work them individually, but not really.
Because when you are working your body, you need the mind to do that.
The intensity of my workouts is one of the most important aspects of it, and that's fueled 100% by my mind.
Fighting that three-round fight, I was, like, my first three-round fight, I got so scared.
I was shaking the whole time, but I just told myself, dude, there's no backing out.
You're in the ring.
You have to go forward.
Keep going forward.
And just out of fear, I'm a pressure fighter.
Do you know what I mean?
Just out of fear, I have to be a pressure fighter.
In my first fight, I did not have the calm in me to counter or do what the game plan was.
I was like, I just have to pressure.
I have to move these hands and move these feet.
But then I got through it.
I got lumped up a few times.
I won the fight, but I was like, whoa.
I feel like I can do anything now and so now I keep sparring and I keep fighting because if I can be composed in the ring with someone trying to kill me then I can be composed on a podcast or in a meeting or in some negotiation.
I really believe in Joe as the guy that's like, alright, the crazies trust him and then he can get them to think about things from a different perspective.
Well, I don't identify as left either, but I do when it comes to so many issues.
When it comes to gay rights, when it comes to civil rights, when it comes to, just across the board, things that you would automatically consider liberal.
But also...
The freedom to express yourself.
That, to me, is the marketplace of free ideas is one of the most important aspects of developing a civilization.
It's one of the most important ways that we understand about each other.
And you've got to have an open mind.
It's like I was saying, you bringing up that universal basic income.
And I was like, get the fuck out of here with that.
And then I thought about it afterwards.
And I was like, maybe there's something...
I always like to explore my reactions to things.
And if I have a reaction to something and I automatically dismiss it, I go, okay, was that valid?
Or did I just dismiss it because it's easier than to have a nuanced perspective that's formed over time and a lot of critical thinking?
And so I stopped and thought about it all.
And I think at the very least, it's something that merits consideration and maybe could be a...
Competition is so powerful over here, and I think that's good, and I also think that's bad, because ultimately it's like...
If you could grab Trump and get him on mushrooms and let it explain, just somehow or another let the universe explain to him, this is a temporary experience.
You're trying to gather up all this money and gather up all these resources and gather up all this influence when this is all fleeting.
It's sand that slips between your fingers.
There's no way you can grasp it for real.
The real experience is the shared moments that we have with each other.
And the more we can enhance that for the people around us, the more you can use your power to enhance people's perspective, change people's way of interfacing with this world that we live in, and I recognize that we're all just living together.
We're all just a part of this community.
This competition thing, most of the competition is with yourself.
Most of it.
The vast majority of it.
And those other people that you're competing with?
You should cherish them because they're fuel.
All those people, instead of looking at them as the enemy, those people are your friends.
All your most bitter rivals are the greatest motivators you're ever going to experience.
I mean, the fuel that you get, the information that you get from the internet, that is fuel for your mind.
And whether you get it in the form of actual food or whether you get it in the form of information, these are both very critical things that you need a wide variety of different sources for.
But you're bringing up a good point, even just let's say food delivery, right?
It started off, you would call the restaurants and it was difficult.
You had to save the menu from every restaurant.
Then Seamless comes around and they're like, all right, we're putting all the menus on here and we're just helping facilitate you get things from the restaurant.
But it wasn't like for restaurants, we didn't necessarily like Seamless because then you had to have your own delivery workforce.
They took a big cut of what you were making and a lot of restaurants, they didn't even break even using Seamless.
So then like places like Caviar came around and Postmates came around and they supply the service, the delivery people, the consumer pays more for the delivery and the restaurant makes their money.
And it's like, whoa, now that actually created competition between delivery services.
Because that's the first place most people experience mobile.
That online activity.
And the only concern that I have about that, though, is that, you know, ultimately we want people to not just be digital consumers, but to be digital creators.
Some people.
Some people stay offline.
No, I think more of us should be.
I don't think the only people building things should be, you know, a bunch of guys in hoodies in their 20s, I think.
And I hope on a going-forward basis, we're going to fix this internet situation with net neutrality, and we are also going to diversify the universe of people who build things for our online world.
Food is actually, you know, when I was working on this net neutrality issue, I worked with the Today Show, and they wanted to find someone who built a business online.
And they spent time with this woman, I think it was Laura's Kitchen, you know, and she had basically started just putting videos on YouTube, showing herself and how she was cooking.
And then, you know, that morphed over time into a book and a big empire, and she built something from it.
And it's amazing if you look at how much cooking has evolved from just hobby online to actual business.
Like, I mean, for younger people listening, they're probably just like, guys, we know, like the internet, like everything, it's undoubted everything happens on the internet.
And recognize it as the important resource that it is.
The ability to distribute information is critical to changing the culture.
The way we interface with each other, the way we talk, the experiences that we share, the way we have access to all these new ideas and information, it's just shifting things at this radical rate.
But with this administration, it's not stunning because it seems like net neutrality being dissolved favors these big businesses that would like to maximize their profits.
How'd you get to the FCC? So before I was appointed, I served as counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee.
And I worked there for Senator Rockefeller for a long time and for Senator Inouye before that.
And so I got like a front row seat at a whole bunch of digital issues with how we deal with our wireless spectrum, how we change our television technology.
So, you know, a real kind of nerdy Washington thing, but also a new way to see how everything is changing in our economy because of digitization.
I'm less interested in cryptocurrencies than I am in blockchain, which is the ledger that they use to record exchanges in cryptocurrency.
It's anonymous, and it can be used by anyone.
It's extremely low cost, and I think there are open questions about how you can make government and a lot of business services more efficient using blockchain that I think are really interesting and have yet to be explored.
Someone puts a bag of that fruit on the table and they say, well, we know that there are certain fields that fruit comes from.
You know, there might be a disease in it.
How can you figure out how that fruit got here from the field?
You know, you can go back through your supply chain and call everyone, get them to tell you how long it sat over here and who held it and put it in the truck.
The question is, if you can come up with a digital way where everyone as a collective just contributes to that along the way, can that be low cost, more efficient, and more effective?
I think it will change supply chain economics in a really big way.
And we don't fully understand the consequences for our economy yet, but I think it's coming.
I know people also in journalism have been talking about keeping articles on blockchain so they, like, internet articles don't go anywhere, you know, because people can just erase a website, like a website goes out of business, then all the articles on that website are gone.
So some people are putting websites on blockchain.
But then the thought is, well, if they're so stupid, lazy, they can't make their way to a voting booth, do we really want their opinion to be expressed?
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I think the busiest people need voting on the internet.
Yeah, I mean, like, if you live in Florida, I remember when I was trying to vote in Florida, like, the polling stations were in churches, and I'd go, and it was an uncomfortable thing to go to a church where I'm pretty much the only Chinese guy voting.
You know, a lot of people say really wild things to you online, like, when you're waiting to vote, and I'm like, I would have loved to vote online.
If you could answer what you're voting, if you understand it.
Maybe there's some sort of an amendment that's being passed or something that's being passed where you don't understand exactly what you're getting into.
And maybe there should be a way that we find out if you understand it.
I know that you have the good intentions for it, but I read these cases that once you have a test for people to vote, I mean, the powers that be, I mean, look at gerrymandering, you know, like, it's anytime you introduce that, it, it always sets like the populace back.
But I do, I do really connect with Joe's sentiment, which is like, a lot of people voting aren't aren't actually participating consciously in the process.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I think being a citizen is a job.
You actually have to spend some time and, you know, think about what you're authorizing for the world, what the future is going to look like and how you're going to participate in shaping it merely by voting.
I think it's a real job and I think more people are aware of that now than they used to be.
When the elections come around and you just realize all the different things that are up, and you just go over all the different issues and all the different possibilities, and you're like, oh, God.
I mean, it used to be that there was an employer with many employees.
I think, increasingly, we're all going to be the employee with many employers, and that we're going to have a web of contracts and activities that we use to sustain ourselves economically over time.
I think you saw that developing, the internet and the new platforms that are coming aboard.
There's consequences of that for healthcare and other issues that I don't think we've fully tackled.
But I think that there is change coming.
That lifetime employment and preparing for it with a single degree out of high school is, I think, something that is going to look like a historical moment more than the future.
And they don't have to be because we were all scared.
Everybody was scared.
It seemed like comfort.
And having some sort of security.
It's a real need that a lot of people have.
That comfort and security and knowing that your bills are going to be paid and everything's going to be taken care of, that's hard for people to shake off.
And I just tell everyone at the tables, I'm like, professional gambling, that's what we're here for.
Like, if you hit on 17, then always hit on 17. If you hit on 16, then, or if you stay on 16, stay on 16. But I'm like, let's practice professional gambling.