Joe Rogan and David Pakman critique YouTube’s algorithm-driven polarization, citing the 2017 Adpocalypse and Pakman’s pivot to memberships after demonetization. They debate censorship—Rogan highlights Steven Crowder’s demonetization for targeting LGBTQ+ figures, while Pakman distinguishes between illegal content and terms-of-service violations tied to identity politics. Pakman warns of echo chambers radicalizing users, like anti-Semitic rhetoric online, but Rogan argues tech’s future (AR, thought-based communication) may outpace current conflicts. Both agree transparency in algorithms is critical, as processed food and social media harms reveal, while Rogan resists monetization pressures compromising honesty. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it is temporarily, well, sometimes it's good because it mocks people's positions and it makes people realize, yeah, that is a ridiculous position.
So if you're on the fence or if you're not really quite sure how you feel about things and you see someone get mocked for a ridiculous position that maybe you've even shared for a little bit, maybe you haven't explored it deeply and you see someone who has explored it deeply sort of expose all the flaws in this line of thinking.
It's good.
But my thing, what I'm, I interview a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left and I just hate all this conflict that I'd say the unnecessary conflict, I think is when you when you watch television today and you see Antifa fighting with Trump supporters and all this weird conflict,
I don't necessarily think that most of it is necessary.
Well, part of that, you could argue, is if one side just does not accept science, how can you really bring those people together?
It doesn't mean you need physical conflict to resolve it.
In fact, I completely agree with you.
The physical conflict is totally counterproductive.
But at a certain point on some issues, I understand why there's like an intractability to the debate where it seems completely impossible to move forward.
Because whichever side you're on, I would argue that I'm on the right side of these issues and others would disagree.
When you're far apart in a way that you can't even agree as to like what the starting point facts are about the conversation, how do you even, how do you start?
I have some ideas as to how I try to do it, but it's very tough.
Yeah, and I think it's important to distinguish between just straight up ad hominems where someone is wrong and bad because I think they're a bad person or they're an idiot or whatever, to recognizing when somebody is a participant in bad faith in a conversation, to when someone has maybe fallen prey to audience capture or whatever else might be kind of influencing what and how they're doing.
I think that those criticisms are legitimate, but you got to stay away from just ad hominem.
The YouTube algorithm, as far as comments go, I mean, it actually kind of encourages it.
And so does Facebook.
So does anytime there's a social media platform that is ad dependent, one of the best ways to get people to engage is to have something they disagree with so they can get angry.
Yes, until it becomes no longer brand safe according to whoever's running the platform.
Right.
I mean, you go back to April 2017 where I woke up and saw that my YouTube channel made 19 cents the previous day.
And I text Kyle Kalinsky and I say, I think there's like a glitch.
It says I made 19 cents and he says, it says I made 35 cents or something like that.
Something's going on.
And it was the beginning of like adpocalypse 1.0.
And that was a rough three-week period.
And so it's, you know, encourage the debate and the battle of ideas, so to speak, and all of this stuff until advertisers get worried and they say, oh, you know, our ads are showing up on stuff that's a little bit touch and go for us.
That's a weird one to me because YouTube has always been a secondary thought for me.
The first thought was the audio version of the podcast.
And in fact, when we were uploading it to YouTube at first, I was like, why are we even doing this?
I guess, why not?
Some people probably want to watch it.
And then somewhere along the line, it became at least close to as big as the audio version of it.
And then maybe even more significant because one of the things that the YouTube version has is the comment section, which is often a fucking dumpster fire.
But at least there is some sort of like a community engagement aspect of it that doesn't really exist in iTunes.
Like in iTunes, it's sort of, it's in a vacuum, right?
Sure.
But when the adpocalypse thing happened, I was like, hmm, what is going on here?
It wasn't my primary focus.
So it wasn't.
terrifying.
But people that only did YouTube and people that relied on that for their living, I mean, it's a huge blow.
The way I think about it is as long as, I mean, listen, yeah, there's marijuana companies that are having trouble even processing payments.
But assuming like Stripe and PayPal don't say you can't even accept payments anymore, David Pacman, I control the entire process on my website.
So when people pay their six bucks, all but 2.9% gets to me.
And when Adpocalypse happened, I saw it as a maybe blessing in disguise and that I could now explain to the audience, here's the problem with these algorithms.
Here's the problem when it goes from I am fighting white supremacist content to an algorithm can't distinguish between that and white supremacist content.
And I mean, so a lot of those people's channels do really well on YouTube.
So if you interview someone who has a channel themselves, there's a very good chance that the algorithm, if they're watching your interview with that person, will say, well, here's a lot of their stuff.
And then once you click there, the algorithm very quickly starts to build a picture of every individual user.
If you watch your interview with Ben Shapiro, and then it takes you to a Daily Wire video, then it takes you to the Daily Wire second stringer guy, and then you're off who knows where.
I think the criticism that could be levied if one wanted to make it into a criticism would be if you engage with right-wing ideas that you don't agree with, right?
Like I take you at your face value that you don't agree with a lot of the stuff that your right-wing guests say.
One could make the argument that by not challenging those ideas, it's implicitly lending them more credibility than maybe you think they should have.
That was, I mean, there's the Socratic method of questioning, which is why do you think that?
And how do you know that that's true, et cetera, et cetera, and sort of some other questions that come from it, which I do as well.
I mean, I think, I don't know, to tie it to the Richard Spencer interview that I did, some of the criticism I received after was from people on the left.
That it is inevitable that people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds simply will not be able to coexist together peacefully and we're better off trying to figure out how can we separate people based on their membership in ethnic or religious groups.
That's a sad thought that you just can't get along with people that do other things, that are interested in other things, that come from other places, that have different religions, that have different points of view.
Well, they have a series of decades of what they call scholarship supporting their view.
But for the context of my interview, I made it abundantly clear that I didn't agree with that stuff, right?
And my view is, and everybody can have a different view about how they do interviews, my view is if I just allow what I consider to be disgusting views to be spread out, right?
You know, like a spray bottle, just spray them everywhere, not do anything else, I can't say that I'm doing something that I think is valuable.
I don't feel like it's valuable.
So my approach is, are the ideas known enough to be worth refuting?
That's number one.
If it's some weird conspiracy theory that has not even any following whatsoever, I'm probably not going to choose to even entertain it because it's irrelevant in sort of all ways.
So my first question is, was Richard Spencer relevant at the time?
Alt-right was rising.
This guy was considered by many the sort of creator of the alt-right.
He was growing a following in the context of the Trump candidacy at the time or maybe administration.
But so, you know, first thing was I did want to interview him, but if I had felt that I wouldn't be prepared to make it abundantly clear that I don't agree with the guy and I think his ideas are terrible, I wouldn't have done the interview.
So the problem I had with the critiques from the left of me doing that, some who said, the last thing we need to be doing is giving this guy a voice, that's often how they say it, or a platform.
My response was, this guy's getting interviewed in lots of other places that aren't even challenging him.
I'm at least making an attempt here to get something in the record that there are arguments against these ideas.
These are bad ideas.
And I don't want to be part of the diffusion of just the ideas themselves.
I don't know if there were unique or new arguments that I was making, but there was no argument to be made that I was letting him just parrot white nationalist talking points unopposed, which I just wouldn't feel good about that.
Well, I don't actually agree that it exists on a significant portion of the left.
Like, I think a bigger issue, for example, like if you said, what is like a serious issue that the left needs to contend with right now, I would say a more serious issue is if you look at the progressive accomplishments of the early 20th century, for example, like 1905 to 1925, and the New Deal accomplishments that the left had in the time of FDR.
What was different, I think, then than the left now is that you didn't have to be completely in line with a specific set of policies or ideas.
And I worry that now there's a little bit of the left maybe having this idea that if you're not in line on all of these issues, whatever the checklist is, so to speak, you're not really worthy of being a participant in what is clearly a leftward move in sort of the average American's political orientation.
With healthcare, I don't think that you can make any serious case from the left that healthcare is fine and the for-profit employer-connected system that we have is working.
Like, I don't think there's any progressive case to be made for that.
Where people will differ is what about Medicare for all versus some other system, system that looks more like Canada's or the UK or Germany or whatever.
And I've already started to see, like, when I say on my show, I'm kind of agnostic on this.
Like, the system we have is a disaster.
We need a system that will get coverage to everybody.
The numbers can be made to work any number of different ways.
We've looked at it.
But 80% of people on Medicare, I believe it is, have some additional coverage.
They either are still working part-time or full-time and get coverage that way, or they're poor enough to be on Medicaid.
The point is, Medicare for All doesn't solve every issue.
It's way better than what we have.
But here's like a dozen other possibilities looking at other countries.
There is a portion of the left that doesn't like that because I'm saying I'm against Medicare for all.
I'm not saying that.
What I'm saying is there are a number of different ways to improve upon the system we have, all of which sever this relationship between usually your employer and these for-profit insurance companies.
And then that's not even paying for housing and food and transportation and books and everything else that you're going to need too.
And to make it more difficult for young people to succeed is one of the worst ways to make a stronger country.
If you want a strong country, you want educated people that get to pursue their dreams.
And the idea that we are so willing to spend so much money on these costly regime change wars and flying troops overseas to these places that they don't want to go.
No one wants it to happen.
And it's trillions of dollars.
And people are fine with that.
But you talk to them about some sort of socialized education system and people freak out and think you want to turn us into communists.
So if you say to a fiscal conservative, you know, if you consider the amount that the employee pays for premiums plus the employer plus your co-pays plus co-insurance, you put it all together into some amount.
And you explain to them, there's lots of great analyses that have been done, which tell us that with roughly the same amount of money, maybe a small payroll tax in addition, with roughly that same amount, it all could be done with a single payer system that covers everybody.
It's the same.
You're taking all of these individual risk pools where you have different for-profit insurers and then you have systems for people that don't have enough money, Medicaid.
You have systems for people that are over 65, Medicare.
You put it all together.
You spread the risk far wider.
The employer no longer has to pay their part of the premium.
The employee no longer pays part of their premium to the for-profit insurance company.
The numbers work.
They're still not going to say, you know what, that sounds great.
It's actually pretty fiscally conservative.
Let's do it.
Because at some point, there is a portion of the right that just doesn't think people have earned health care.
And it's very hard to change people's minds when that's their view.
I think it might be George Lakoff who I believe calls it strict father morality, which is like, how would a really strict father treat a child who comes to them and says, hey, you know what?
I figured out a way that we can all have health care.
The strict father, even if the numbers make sense, would say, I'm going to teach you a lesson.
You haven't earned that health care, either because you don't work or you don't make enough money or you're on disability, whatever the case may be.
How do you convince someone to change their mind when that's their worldview?
You talk to people that get health care over in the UK, it sucks.
But at least they have a system.
It's just not the same quality health care that you get in America.
Same with my friends in Canada.
I have friends in Canada that have come down here to get surgery because they find better doctors over here because of the- Rand Paul was going to Canada to get his operation at that point.
I mean, the Canadian system is administered at the province level.
So the province is sort of like the market.
Instead of having all these sub-markets attached to individual for-profit insurers, at the provincial level, that's how it's organized.
The UK has the National Health Service where they're actually they don't actually run the healthcare facilities, but they are the ones who are contracting them.
So it's sort of like the healthcare facility still is its own entity.
It's not that you're going and the government is the employer of the doctor, so to speak, but they're contracting with the healthcare facilities.
But the point I want to make is that there are criticisms of all of these systems, but they're different ones.
So when we say, the British and Canadian systems aren't that good, let's figure out in what ways each is not that good, because there are different ways.
Whether you're talking about health outcomes, early detection, cost per treatment, whatever, you really have to drill down and figure out in what way are we saying it's not as good.
I mean, number one, to be clear, we're now starting to get into a little bit of broader economic philosophy.
Like, I'm a capitalist.
I'm for social democracy, which is a mixed system that's a capitalist system that says we're going to invest tax revenue in a particular way to make sure that no one falls below a certain level.
So just to contextualize that my point of view is not from one of becoming a socialist country.
A lot of doctors will say that even though on sort of on paper in a socialized medicine system they might make less for a particular procedure, for example, or something like that.
A lot of them are still in favor of those systems because it would drastically reduce their overhead.
So there's all of this apparatus that includes medical billing and coding, both on the insurer end and at the healthcare provider end.
The hospital and the insurance company both are battling over what is it that was done.
What are the codes that apply here and how what are reimbursement rates?
There's fraud when it comes to that and that requires an apparatus for investigating and adjudicating that.
That adds more and more cost.
So I don't think it's as easy, I don't think it's as obvious that under those systems, at the end of the day, a doctor that owns a PCP group, for example, or an orthopedic clinic or whatever the case may be, I don't know that it's that clear that they end up taking home less money.
Education and healthcare, those are the two things that I think we can both agree we need to invest money on, and we need to figure out some way to make that more accessible to people.
And I don't understand people that don't think that.
And if that's what that is, the strict father mentality, the only thing that makes sense to me is that you don't want people who are kind of half-assing college that can just get in.
I think that that comes up a lot when you hear about so-called free college, which isn't free.
We're saying we're paying for it through taxation.
Really important to point that out.
It's just not for everybody.
And that's okay.
I mean, I think that that sometimes gets lost.
And yes, there are more and more jobs that require college degrees, even though you could make the case maybe the college degree is not actually necessary, but it's a way to sort of thin the herd of applicants in order to just make hiring more practical.
But I do think that it's okay to say that college isn't for everybody.
But the same ideas that apply to so-called free college, meaning college paid for through education, could apply to trade school.
They could apply to retraining programs.
There's a whole bunch of other ways that it could be done.
When I went there, it wasn't available for that, but since then, they have made that available, and that's also in the time that YouTube has made basically education-free for a lot of people.
I mean, I think with that, the issue is, in my mind, that when you consider the cost relative to the earnings potential, as you pointed out when you talk about $68,000 a year, or, you know, I guest taught at Boston College, and I think it was like $64,000, something like that.
Depending on what field you're going into, it's almost impossible to pay that off ever.
So at some point, something needs to change.
And this kind of gets us into the technological automation and unemployment stuff of what happens as computers and technology start to replace jobs.
And that's where I think there's a pretty clear line between a free market capitalist, a social democrat like myself, and actual socialism, like what should happen with the gains that come from those technological advancements.
But as far as the education piece is concerned, it's completely unsustainable the way it is now.
I knew about you before this happened, but then I really kind of got on board with you when someone was trying to get you fired from Boston University.
So we may be able to even find the tweet, but she tweeted something, the gist being that she would not be supporting any candidate in 2020 who's white or male.
I think that that was the gist of it.
And I responded, I'm going from memory here.
The gist was something like, isn't that the definition of racism?
You're sort of preemptively excluding someone from consideration on the basis of race and in that case, gender, if it was white and male.
And then it became, I mean, you know this way more than I do because I think on all platforms you have roughly 10 times the following that I do.
No matter what you do post or whatever, if you look at what the feedback is, it's extraordinarily toxic and horrible negative stuff that is only a distraction to what I'm trying to do.
And one of the things that he brought up that's so huge, it's so true, is that you can have 10 positive things, but that one negative will outweigh the 10 positives.
I mean, I think one of the biggest realizations is that people don't really miss you that much.
They don't hear from you for a couple of days.
That's one of the things where the idea of needing constant engagement comes from sort of like a slightly narcissistic point of view where people are going to notice if I don't tweet from Thursday night until Monday morning or do anything like that.
But my approach is, I just, I really do assume most people are pretty good people.
And even when we have disagreements, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt that if we could only talk the way we were doing, we could figure out 95% of the disagreement.
The reason I'm thinking back, actually, to a conversation I had at the time where someone said to me, if you do get fired, it's the best possible thing that'll happen.
Well, this is the thing, the falling in line, the no room for deviation from the ideology.
Sure.
This is a giant issue that I have with both parties.
And I think it's one of the reasons why people are in these parties to begin with.
I don't necessarily think that people have clearly thought out every single aspect of whatever party they align with.
I think they fall in line and they adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior that seems to be attractive at the time, and then they fall in line with whatever that party is saying.
I think that is a giant percentage of people.
When someone deviates from that, like you did, someone who is also clearly a progressive and clearly a left-wing person, and you're criticizing something very politely, and she just goes haywire over that.
That's the thing, right?
It's like, are you responsible for the people who also comment on your post?
And this is where we're getting to this like Vox thing that's happening with Steven Crowder right now.
Are you responsible for the reaction to what you post?
Because if you look at what Stephen Crowder said to that, for people who don't know the story, Steven Crowder got into it with this guy who is a writer for Vox, who is gay.
But first, if you look at the policy, the terms of service of YouTube, there's a Verge article from yesterday before, a few days ago, earlier this week, before YouTube had made the decision to demonetize Steven Crowder.
So in the article where they made the decision not to act, they actually put what YouTube's terms of service are with regard to bullying and harassment.
My reading of it, and we could go through them if we could pull them up, we could go through it line by line if we wanted.
My reading was that that definitely did break the terms and conditions.
That was my view as I looked at what it was that was done by Steven Crowder and what the terms of service are.
Just matching it up, not looking at the comments for the viewers.
But if you look at Crowder's video, and I can't believe I spent so much time doing this, but I spent like a whole hour on this two days ago.
He was talking about how Carlos just dismisses Antifa as being not that big a deal and that there's bias in the media whenever there's anything negative that happens.
But if you look at the overall picture, and then Crowder goes on to talk about all the assaults, all the murders, that there were sexual assaults, there were rapes, there was all these things that happened with Antifa.
He was talking about all these different people that got maced in the face, all these people that got hurt.
And he's highlighting all, like, this is not something to easily dismiss.
I think the principle, though, is you're suggesting that because a certain word is sometimes used self-referentially by members of a group, that any use of it from the outside is by definition not problematic.
And I'm just saying it's more complicated and you've got to do it.
I made it so listen I think that I do appreciate what you're saying and I agree with you to a certain extent I believe that when YouTube yesterday said we looked at the content in total and we don't think it violates our terms and conditions, I disagreed with them.
I thought it very clearly violated their terms and conditions.
Where I am thinking about it now is the application of those terms and conditions violations.
Because a similar thing happened with Alex Jones as well, which was there's lots of way smaller players that are violating these same terms and conditions, but nobody knows about them.
YouTube doesn't know about them.
They don't get any attention because they have no audience.
So I think there's the question of the application of these terms and conditions in a way that's sort of fair and is not ultimately going by the public blowback or reaction to situations because that's how Adpocalypse 1.0 happened.
I think it was a Coke ad appeared on an obviously racist video on a channel with like 800 or 1,000 subscribers.
The Wall Street Journal, I think it was, did an article saying, look at these screenshots.
of these advertisers on these crazy racist videos.
That led to blowback because YouTube didn't want to lose money.
And ultimately, that's what this is about.
I know that there are people who say YouTube has an inherently left-wing bias.
Well, in the sense that the woman who's the CEO of YouTube has talked about it pretty openly.
Like the fact that she doesn't...
What was it that she had gotten into?
Oh, well, first of all, it was the James DeMoore thing.
She was talking about the Google memo, and she was talking about how it was incredibly damaging, damaging stereotypes against women, which it just wasn't.
So I think we have to distinguish between the personal political biases of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the broader place that Google has in the sort of corporate sphere.
Google is part of the group of huge multinational corporations that lobbies for particular tax policy to avoid paying taxes legally.
That is not a particularly left-wing thing to do.
Google is part of the large tech companies that, in order to avoid serious regulation of their businesses, have come up with this idea of regulating themselves, which I know is a topic, self-regulation that's come up before on your program in a variety of ways.
So those are not left-wing things.
And if you want to make the case that as a company, it has a left-wing politic in the outward-facing world, you have to have something more than just a lot of their engineers live in Palo Alto and are hipsters who go to coffee shops.
I think that in terms of the place that it occupies within the economic system we have, they are not very different from all of the large corporations that are pushing against regulation, pushing for ways to avoid taxes, period.
Yeah, I mean, listen, if we want to talk about how the personal politics of the employees translate to policy, we can do that, but we need to be able to make some specific claims about how it does.
What I'm saying is we know the way in which the structure that Google is a part of leads to it advocating for things that are center-right, corporatist capitalist.
The status quo of tax shelters, havens, and not paying taxes, regulating ourselves, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, that's what's interesting about this crowder thing is ultimately the decision was to allow him to have his freedom to post videos on there, but the punitive aspect of it is they're going to reduce his ability or eliminate his ability to make money from it.
Well, I should say reduce, right?
Because he couldn't he put videos, put ads up in his video?
So like we, one thing that I do is we kind of split off the ad sales from my show into an ad agency, and we're doing ad sales not just for my show, but for other shows as well.
And those include ad placements that are not like the pre-roll ads on YouTube.
It's the host is actually talking about a product or whatever.
I happen to think their initial decision was the wrong one, but I have a sort of broader concern here, which is about the fairness of the application and also the distinguishing between content that is promoting whatever falls under any of our definitions of hateful or whatever content and those who are fighting against it.
Tulsi Gabbert believes that it's a First Amendment issue, and she believes that everyone should have the freedom of expression.
And that as long as you're not doing anything illegal, you're not putting anyone in danger by giving up their address or doxing them or something along those lines or making overt physical threats, that you should be allowed to do that because that's what the freedom of speech is all about.
And freedom of speech, when you eliminate social media in this country, your freedom is basically just yelling out in public.
We leave them alone, even though we get accused of it.
But the question is, YouTube at one point in time had thrown out there that they were going to make people responsible for the things that were in their comments.
I think they backed out of it very quickly when they realized that places like yours, which like your average video gets how many thousands of comments?
And how would you, yeah, and how would you even be able to look at all those?
I mean, you would have to be 24-7 monitoring them because you've also got people that are watching your videos from overseas at all times of the night.
So I think that the principle of only illegal content will be removed is great.
That's my personal principle.
However, I think that there is no serious case to be made that a private company can't say, these are our terms of service.
And if you want to, I mean, it's sort of almost a conservative principle, right?
The idea that unless illegal things are going on, we are not going to tell a business how it is that it should be run.
And that's where I think a lot of right-wingers start to stumble on this issue because they're calling for a very invasive form of government regulation.
Yeah, well, I think there's a difference, though, between Elizabeth Warren saying we should separate the social platform, Facebook, from the ad sales revenue generating piece of it.
That's one thing that falls under antitrust.
That's different than saying the government should come in and it should tell anybody who runs a social network that you can't even, you can't do anything unless the content is illegal.
Because there are financial considerations, right?
I mean, there's lots of content that would not be illegal, but it would make a platform, a video platform like YouTube, not financially viable because advertisers would see it and they'd say, oh, we're not going near that.
So I have a very hard time taking what is a very authoritarian perspective that the government should come in and say, this is how social networks should be run.
Now, if you want to change the law, here's the way it could be done.
If you want to change the law and argue that these platforms have gotten so big that they represent more of a town square, so to speak, then, okay, maybe you could pass a law that changes how they would be regulated.
But that's typically the type of stuff the right is against because it is more regulation.
It is more regulation, but it's regulation to keep a private company from regulating against free speech.
You see what I'm saying?
It's a sneaky kind of regulation.
It's a regulation that's enforcing the First Amendment and the people's ability to freely express themselves.
If we're admitting or if we're agreeing that we are entering into this new world, where this is, that's my position is it is a town square.
And I feel like everybody should be able to communicate.
The really unfortunate, unsavory aspect of it is when someone gets harassed, like Carlos Mesa was because of this, where people are sending him all these homophobic tweets and he's getting text messages and all this shit.
So are there other types of businesses through which communication happens that you think should be regulated in the same way?
That's not really clear, so I'll give an example.
If you start regularly sending people via UPS similar things to some of the content that exists on YouTube, and UPS says, we're getting reports that you're sending people harassing stuff.
Isn't there a difference between someone sending something to a physical address and someone sending something, let's say, to you when your social media apps are on the third page of your phone and you have to swipe all the way over to get them and open it up and you have to read them if you want to find them.
There's a difference in a practical sense, but I guess the question is, would we want the government, would you similarly want the government to enforce for telephone companies if you are getting harassing texts and you report it and report it.
I guess where I hesitate, and again, speaking as someone from the left who believes regulation of businesses is an important thing, I would want to be really sure about how exactly it is that the government would step in and mandate essentially that their view has to be listened to over the terms of service that a private company would wish to have.
I feel like when you give people a gun, they start looking for targets.
And that is a very common thing.
And if you give people the ability to censor, and if you give people the ability to censor based on their political ideology or based on what they feel is offensive where other people don't, it's a slippery slope.
And I'm worried about people that are really strictly trying to promote their ideologies and what they think is okay and not okay.
And it's very slippery because there's a lot of weird people out there that believe a lot of weird things and want other people to conform to those weird things.
And we sort of have to decide.
That's why I'm bringing up this crowder thing.
Like, do I think that what he said was good?
No, it's not nice to call someone a little lispy queer.
It's not nice.
It's kind of mean, you know, and especially when that guy wasn't even engaging with him, but he's making fun of them.
He's a comedy show.
He's mocking them.
So the question becomes like when is that mocking considered homophobic and when is it just ribbing, right?
This is the problem with a discussion that is only about the principles.
So like a lot of our conversation for the last 15 minutes has been, what is our principle about what types of business regulation is okay for the government to do and is not okay?
Or when we talk about free speech, do we have a principle of anything short of illegal content versus something that is more strict?
So in a sense, they haven't violated his First Amendment rights because he's still able to express himself.
But then you go, as a company, they've made a punitive decision to eliminate his ability or radically reduce his ability to make an income off of their platform.
That seems like, and I'm not supporting that they did it, but that seems more reasonable as a decision, right?
I think it is because Carlos Maze is progressive and because the argument that he was making is a very left-wing progressive argument, and this is what Crowder was going after.
He was going after the argument.
In the process of going after the argument, he mocked his sexuality and his appearance.
But so that gets to the real crux of it, which is my real concern with this is YouTube only getting involved in even publicly saying what they're doing about a channel when it becomes very public and it starts to have the possibility of impacting their bottom line and brands saying, this is too hot.
I mean, the other side of this is, I mean, I don't know if we even want to go into identity politics, so to speak, but I've read some comments on some of the few articles that have been written about this that are saying that this is effectively YouTube enforcing a defense of identity politics, so to speak.
And I think that that's just, again, opening up the door to the incredibly broad application of that term, identity politics.
I don't even really fully understand that, but I don't know.
And I don't even know if that's a path we want to go down to talk about the identity politics component of what's going on with a lot of people.
So I guess in order to define it, it would be good to point out that I have been critical of, quote, identity politics on the left in a very limited way that I think it is actually damaging, while at the same time recognizing that identity is a really important thing to consider when we think about sort of how the world should be organized.
So for your audience who may not know, when identity politics is used, you know, like a knife to enforce that because of someone's identity, their opinion supersedes and is the opinion that is the valid one over everybody else because of membership in some kind of group.
I'm against that.
I think that's extremely destructive.
It would be very incorrect to believe, though, that identity doesn't play a role and that we shouldn't understand how one's identity might make us think differently about certain issues.
I mean, any example would make that pretty clear.
You know, I, as an immigrant to the United States, do I get some privileged position to decide what policy should be over all native-born Americans because I immigrated here?
No, that would be me using identity politics as like a mallet or a cudgel or whatever.
But as someone who did immigrate here, we should recognize that I may have things to say about it which would be valuable and worthy and important to sort of think about.
I'm not interested in the oppression Olympics, and I'm not interested in using identity to silence ideas that could be perfectly good coming from someone who is not a member or checking a certain box.
I think it's certainly a problem, but I think it's a vocal minority problem.
That's what I think.
I think if you just regular people that are on the left that are working jobs and having families and doing their hobbies and they just have left-wing ideas, I don't think the vast majority of them hold those positions.
I think those positions are things that people use as revenue.
I mean, not as revenue, but it's like they get points from it.
They get points from certain types of behavior that they support, certain types of thinking that they support.
And it lets you, you know, you got woke social justice points.
I mean, I do think that it's disproportionately a pro.
I think it's a small problem, like you're saying.
I think a lot of the problem exists in the college campus setting.
But I mean, even at Boston College, I had sort of maybe been incorrectly indoctrinated into the idea that this was really a problem everywhere on college campuses.
And I had an incident, the details of which wouldn't be appropriate to talk about, but with a student when I taught at Boston College, that because of the circumstances and the identities involved, I was ready for it to go into this is going to be resolved the wrong way on the basis of the toxic identity politics I'm hearing is existing on college campuses, and it was not.
It was the exact opposite.
So I think the same way that when you look at Yelp reviews, people who had a bad experience are way more likely to go and write about it, these individual stories get way more attention than the percentage of the problem that they represent.
But when you see videos like Nick Christakis getting just shouted down at Yale by a group of students and that they supported the students and that kind of shit, you say, well, it is real.
I think that sensible people on the left like me call it out.
But I want to be careful.
Imagine that you had someone from Cato on the show, which is sort of like a traditional conservative, or American Enterprise Institute maybe is like a better example.
And a lot of the conversation was about getting them to talk about or denounce the alt-right, for example.
I'm sure they would do it, but how much should AEI denounce the alt-right when that's like a different thing that is available?
And those are the people that are most invested in getting these ideas pushed through.
And it's also people that, for lack of a better term, they're probably mentally ill.
And I don't mean mentally ill in terms of like have like legitimate diseases, but in terms of their thought patterns.
They're probably obsessive.
I mean, I've had friends that were especially friends that were heavily involved in this kind of stuff before, and it was very damaging to their mental health.
Being woke left-wing, shout-out at people, attack people, politics.
Okay, but then they realize somewhere along the line.
And then one of them, my friend Jamie Kilstein, they turned on him and then devastated his life.
And he realized along the way, like, oh, Jesus Christ, like, what was I doing?
Like, I was checking my Twitter every five seconds and insulting people left and right and attacking people just to get everybody to say, yeah, go get them.
And, you know, showing everybody how woke I am and how progressive I am.
So there's people on the left and right who get pulled into political wokeness, whether it's I'm now Tea Party in 2010, people that got sucked into Tea Party on the right, Antifa, whatever.
These are all groups with different sort of followings.
They're not all the same, whatever.
I do think that there is a difference between getting extremely passionate about the idea that everybody should have access to just basic health care than getting extremely passionate about the idea that we need to go out of our way to shut down every abortion clinic in the country.
I think that there's just, there's a difference.
And so I don't want to participate in a false equivalency between, well, you got very far left and very far right people, and they're the same.
And you've got center left and center right, and they're the same.
It's just two sides of the same coin.
Like, obviously, I have a perspective that is based on my politics.
I'm glad to debate any of these issues with anybody who wants to on the merits, but I don't want to make the false equivalency.
I mean, listen, when you look at anti-defamation league numbers, for example, the vast majority of hate incidents in the United States are coming from the right.
We could talk about other ways that the left is active.
We could talk about what it means or how things should be categorized, but that's the reality.
And so I want to make sure I don't play a false equivalency game.
My audience would crush me if I did that, number one.
And I also think that these false equivalency kind of conversations are ridiculous because each individual conversation about each individual issue deserves its own discussion.
I don't know if this would be interesting to go into, but there's a few things that I've found have been somewhat successful in conversations with people who really disagree with me in at least like lowering the temperature a little bit and getting people to maybe engage in a good faith way.
One of them is, how do you think I came to my position?
So you might be for total free market for-profit health care.
I am for a system where the government is more involved.
And even if you can't pay, you get care.
Before we even start, if I say, how do you think I arrived at my position?
Yeah.
That has been pretty useful.
Another example is, I think this came from Peter Bogozian, who I think you've had on.
Yes.
The defeasibility question, which is, what evidence, if I presented it to you, would bring you over to my side?
I'm not saying I have that evidence or that it exists, but give me a framework as to what is keeping you from seeing this my way.
Because sometimes that exists, the person just doesn't know about it.
Those are two tools that I have found super useful in trying to make some headway with people who are hyper-partisan and very escalated with a lot of these issues.
The descent into insults and dunking on people is one of the reasons why at the beginning of the conversation I was saying that one of the things I enjoy about your YouTube videos is you're a very reasonable, rational person, and you don't get crazy and animated and insulting.
And I think we need more of that.
Because I think even though you're not going to convert some people, there's just a certain section of the population that disagrees with you that's just going to.
But there's a significant number that are going to go, hey, this David Pacman guy is, he's reasonable.
You could be conflicted and neutral, but I try to at least be objective and transparent in how I arrived at what I believe.
So you can disagree with my conclusion.
You can even come to me and tell me the facts I've used to reach the conclusion are incomplete or wrong.
But I'm completely genuine in how I arrived there.
And I think that that is why we have some, I mean, yeah, there's obviously if you look at YouTube comments, there are right-wingers that watch my show.
But choosing to support it financially is a different thing.
And I get emails from conservatives who say, I don't agree with your conclusions, but I do find that you're at least reasoning through the issues in a way that resonates with me.
And I want to support the fact that you're doing that.
I think this is the most polarized time I can remember as a 51-year-old man looking back at my history of paying attention to social issues and the way we communicate with each other and just the partisan attitudes that people seem to have.
I mean, I think it's probably because of Trump.
That's a giant part of it.
But it's also just a sign of the times of social media.
I think it's in part engineered by the algorithms that Facebook and Twitter and all these other social media companies utilize.
And it's also been engineered by bad faith participants and people that are actually manipulating it.
I don't know if you've paid any attention to Sam Harris had a fantastic podcast with, and we had one with her as well, Renee DeResta.
Renee DeResta analyzed all of the various accounts that the IRA had created, which is the internet research agency that was responsible for all of these fake accounts that people thought were Black Lives Matter accounts or pro-Southern secession accounts or all these different accounts that were very polarizing and arguing with other people that these were just Russians that were working for this organization that was specifically
trying to start chaos.
They were specifically trying to start arguments.
And when you see that, and then, I mean, that's a factor.
That's a giant factor.
That kind of shit is a factor.
And that is sort of become part of the sport of social media has been arguing.
Absolutely.
I don't do it.
I don't engage.
But I do go on Facebook sometimes and someone makes an abortion post and I just watch the chaos like, oh my God.
Yeah.
Or anything having anything to do with Trump or anything having anything to do with the Second Amendment or anything that has anything to do with the wall or immigration.
So I don't know that people are actually in larger disagreements than they were previously.
I think that, yes, Trump has coarsened the language and the way in which it's now acceptable to talk about a lot of these things.
That's number one.
I think the social media algorithms, like you're pointing out, reward the most extreme and polarizing comments and reactions in a never-ending feedback loop where the most polarizing initial tweet generates more responses than less polarizing tweets.
And then the sub-responses that are most polarizing and aggressive do the exact same thing in this never-ending feedback loop.
I think it's all those things.
But I don't know that people are having bigger disagreements than in times past.
I just think that they're public in a different way.
I think that there's more opportunity, as we're saying, to disagree with people, more opportunity to argue.
And in those more opportunities, you're seeing more conflict, and I think more polarization.
And I think, again, the social media algorithms and all the other nonsense that gets, I think there's, I really do believe that the feeling that I get, but it also might be because a big part of my job is being on the internet.
Our view excuse it a little bit, but I think so in practice, let's imagine that the disagreements are equal to what they've always been, but there's more opportunities to disagree.
And the algorithm favors more escalated disagreement than rational conversation.
The effect is that you might meet someone with whom you have 80% in common in terms of your political views.
But the circumstances in which you engage with that person are going to be on the 20% that you don't.
So it makes it seem as though you just have very little common ground with anybody.
Because the 80% agreement becomes background.
And the social media platforms, the debates happening on YouTube, elsewhere, are focused only on the most divisive fraction of one's entire political views.
And that's, I think, what the problem is.
But it makes sense because most people agree that, I don't know, gas stations, I mean, just to pick something innocuous, most people agree that it's good to have a regulatory system that makes sure that when you think you've pumped five gallons of gas, you've gotten five gallons of gas.
It's so uncontroversial that nobody's going to talk about it.
Like it makes sense that the focus is going to be on the disagreements.
Where it's damaging is then when you meet people in real life and it's hard to relate or even be in the same room because only those differences are sort of like played up or relevant.
That's one of the more interesting things about, particularly with social media and like things when you come to this crowder situation.
I don't know where this is going because I didn't know this was ever going to be a thing.
I had never really considered that there was going to be some digital town square that we were all going to be enjoying, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or whatever it is.
But getting back to the crowder thing, the issue that you so you agree with it in the sense that he was mocking this person's sexual orientation and appearance.
I agree with the assertion that YouTube's terms of service as written were violated on the basis that he was singling out an individual and the characteristics that that individual was being targeted with or spoken about were sexual orientation in terms that the terms of service say is not allowed.
Mocking their ability to think, mocking their intelligence, mocking their decisions, mocking the way they talk, and then encouraging other people to do the same thing.
And then that person gets harassed based on their intelligence, based on their performance on particular YouTube videos and conversations.
And there's active harassers.
There's people that do that.
Is there a difference between, say, what Sam Seder does to Dave Rubin?
That's my view is that my videos about Dave Rubin are substantive.
I don't really watch any left-wing stuff because I want to try to isolate myself enough to make sure that what I'm saying are my ideas and that I'm not taking them.
I don't know, but if there's some specific examples, we could comment about them.
But I think that to your first question, there is a difference between going after someone for sexual orientation, then going after them for the fact that they say things that are wrong or don't know stuff, until you're making fun of someone who has an actual handicap of some kind, some kind of cognitive limitation that would be a disability of some kind.
See, this is what I was getting at before with Crowder.
Like, what Crowder said was one thing, but one of the things that Carlos Mesa was discussing was what the people that had watched Crowder, what they were doing, how they were going after him.
See, and that is a real discussion.
Like, what happens when you say something about someone and then your fans agree and then they take action?
Stochastic terrorism is the idea that if you have a big enough audience and you go and every day you're talking about someone should really do something about a particular politician.
You're doing it every day.
You're doing it every day.
At a certain point, given a large enough audience and enough repetition of that and the fact that there's like a distribution of people's emotional states, cognitive capacity, et cetera, it is statistically probable that someone from that audience is going to go and try to do something about whoever it is that you're targeting.
That individual who has the show and is hammering on this person day after day after day, they're not going to be legally responsible for that person from their audience who went and did something.
There's no way that you're going to hold them legally responsible under the current legal system that we have.
But you could argue that it is irresponsible in some way not to understand that your consequences have actions.
Of course, the person who goes and does the violent act is the primary person who is responsible.
But as long as you're not calling out for that act, how do we make this distinction that someone is encouraging that act or someone is at least inspiring that act?
I mean, listen, I can go on my show and I can speak in vague terminology or specific terminology.
You know, imagine that there's a local business that I don't like.
I could go on my show and I could say, this business did this, and I need everybody in my audience to show up there and to make it impossible to get in and patronize that business.
That's very clearly on one side of the gray area.
I could instead say, you know, there's a business, and I could say the type of business, but I not name it.
If it's a small enough town, people would know exactly what business I'm talking about.
And I really don't like the way I was treated there.
And if only there was some way that someone could do something about it, the effect could be the exact same thing.
YouTube tweeted an hour ago or 1230 that to clarify, this is responding to Carlos Maza, to clarify, in order to restate monetization on this channel, he will need to remove the link to his t-shirts.
I don't agree with him constantly going on and on about this guy being queer or calling him a lispy little queer, but he's doing it to try to be funny.
So the question is, when can you do that to be funny?
And apparently with YouTube, you can do that and be funny.
I think so much of this, again, these disagreements on issues, it comes down to what you and I were talking about before, that if two people are in a room together, 95% of what they're talking about, you're going to agree on.
When someone's making a video on someone, if they just say, like, fucking David Pac-Man, man, here's my deal with that guy, and then you just ranting thing, and I hate his fucking neck, and I don't like his shirt, and his face is stupid when people do stuff like that.
It's just, it's a terrible way to communicate.
Because it's, first of all, you'd have to be a real asshole to say most of the things that people say about things when they're dunking on them in person.
You have to be a bad person.
So you know the person's going to see it.
So you're just deciding, I'm going to be a bad person, but I'm going to pretend I'm not a bad person because I'm going to do it in a way where they're not in the room.
So I'm just going to shit all over them and give them my real opinion.
But even comedy aside, I agree with the principle: communicate, battle of ideas, marketplace of ideas.
Very, very big ideas we all want to hear about and what are the best ideas and let's rank the ideas.
There are people whose views are so extreme that you can't really bring them to the table as reasonable negotiating partners for figuring something out.
Or even, I mean, okay, imagine Louis Farrakhan, who I've spoken out about many times.
Imagine that we want to figure out what the tax rate should be.
Something that politicians have to do all the time.
If you have a group of people who believe that we need a 25% flat tax and a group of people who want, you know, like an escalating progressive tax that gets as high as 70% on income over 10 million, whatever, right?
Like fill it all in.
All those people are going to be able to have a conversation.
If someone comes in who says any taxes that the government collects are a form of slavery, how do you integrate that into the conversation about how to set tax rates?
So all of this stuff, you know, there's this new movement now, which I think is great about long-form conversations, going in depth, figuring out what our disagreements are.
But where I do think that there's like a lack of pragmatic reality to it is some people's ideas are so extreme that they can't in any sensible way be incorporated into an actual good faith discussion of how society should be organized.
And at a certain point, a decision has to be made about who actually gets to participate in the decision-making conversations.
It's great for everybody to have a voice on taxation on Twitter, but imagine if there was a significant portion of our elected officials who straight up think taxes are slavery.
I just don't know how that becomes integrated into a decision about tax policy.
I think the argument would be that bad ideas should be combated with good ideas, not with silencing someone.
And that when you do silence someone, you just sort of create this blockade where the idea builds up behind it, and then the opposition to your perspective builds up, and then people start picking teams and picking sides.
And I honestly think that that's something that's going to be going on right now with this whole Crowder, Crowder, Vox thing.
I think people are going to pick sides, and they fucking love it.
People love a good conflict to get into.
There's a lot of people in the cubicles right now that are weighing in and firing up, and there's people that want to dox him again, and there's people who want to infiltrate his Facebook and his Twitter.
My point is, I don't know, you know, any sensible person who lives in the West and has access to media, like Stephen Crowder or whoever, knows that the use of that language has a very specific path and set of reactions that it's going to trigger.
If I'm in a family thing and it's a bunch of Jews or whatever, that's a word that can be used in a way that if someone shows up, if Richard Spencer shows up or one of his followers and goes to a bar mitzvah and talks about this room full of Jews, the word is the same word.
But I think that Richard Spencer told me we know that Trump is not literally a white nationalist who is going to talk about let's take control back from the Jews.
But we see him as the closest thing to what we would like.
No, well, anti-Semitism and Israel also are two totally separate things.
I mean, you could be against the current Israeli administration, as I am, like Benjamin Netanyahu, and still call out anti-Semitism against Jews in the United States, for example, or whatever.
I see what you're saying.
One is not directly linked to the other.
But if you're a group that already has these views, and then you see a guy who opens his campaign talking about they're sending rapists and criminals, but some I'm sure are good people.
And I don't want people coming here from shithole countries.
What about Norwegians?
Whatever.
It's a signal.
It's a signal.
And I've spoken to former KKK people, some of whom are really interesting people to talk to, and they know exactly why it's appealing, because they see the signals and the vocabulary and the dog whistling.
So I think it's just brought it out into the forefront.
I don't know that new anti-Semitism has necessarily been generated, although it being in the forefront probably does start to get some people kind of curious.
Like, oh, maybe all the problems are because of the Jews.
Yeah, I mean, that's an important thing to talk about.
I mean, people call me that all the time.
And, you know, I feel like that is an issue where I try to speak.
I mean, shill to me suggests that you're saying one thing, but with some kind of other agenda that you're trying to push in some way.
In other words, you are being in some way deceptive about your actual intentions in what you say.
So I think when people call me a Zionist shill, what they mean is I'm talking about one thing with the secret goal or below the surface goal of actually promoting some action by the state of Israel.
I think that's the idea of a shill.
but you know i mean i i'm opposed to the current prime minister in israel uh i've made clear that isn't he in trouble right now uh Yeah, I mean, he's been in tentative trouble for a long time.
His wife is in trouble as well, I believe.
But that, I mean, the problem is, and I know that there are people on the left and right that when I say this will, I mean, I'm going to get crushed from what I'm about to say.
Sometimes when someone says Zionist shill, it's related to your view on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sometimes when someone says Zionist shill, it's cover for just wanting to insult someone for being Jewish or for anti-Semitism.
Do you find this is sort of an abstract question, but overall, like doing this show and having this increased, ever-increased exposure, do you enjoy it?
Are you weirded out by the interactions with all the people?
Do you feel pressure by all the comments?
Do you feel like a little bit of anxiety from all the social media aspects of it?
So I enjoy the idea that people are listening to my ideas and either agreeing or disagreeing, but they're considering them and then integrating it into how they figure out what they think about the world around them.
That's awesome.
I do get weirded out by sort of like safety security stuff that sometimes comes up, which I try not to even like put too much attention on because I feel like it just feeds and gives people ideas.
And people who come up to me and I mean, I'm more curious to actually hear your thoughts about this, come up to me and they may not necessarily see the world the way I see it and I'm unsure, sort of like what are their intentions type of thing.
I mean, it gives me anxiety and it gives people that are close to me anxiety for sure.
I mean, I do worry that no matter what happens in the next few elections, I don't know how we reverse the radicalization, polarization effects of the social media echo chambers that we've been talking about.
And I only see that as further, I mean, we could still accomplish good things while that's going on.
Like, I think if we elect the right people, maybe we can get good things done.
But in parallel, there is this like hyper-radicalized, polarized narrative that's going on.
And I don't see any way that that's going to turn around.
And I'm very, very confused by it because I don't see any long-term solution for this other than some radical change in the way human beings communicate with each other.
And I've contemplated that and hypothesized and theorized.
And I really think that what has changed the way we communicate is technology and this immersive aspect of social media technology, the fact that we carry these devices with us all the time that allow us to communicate and allow us to read other people's communications or watch other people's communications.
And I have a concern that this is going to escalate with each expansion and each innovation in terms of like what, and I don't know what it would be because no one saw the internet coming.
If you go back 30 years ago, no one ever thought anything was going to be anything like it is now.
And I think it's going to be, if you look at the trend, the trend is not towards calming people down and giving people space and allowing people to meditate more.
No, the trend is to get more and more immersed.
The trend is for us to get closer and closer to each other, to remove boundaries, remove boundaries for information and ideas.
And even in long-term contemplations of this, I've often thought that everything, right?
All of our communication is basically ones and zeros.
It's all information.
It's all words and thoughts and videos.
And now you're getting into cryptocurrency.
Now, cryptocurrency is essentially ones and zeros.
It's all digital.
Everything's digital.
And the bottlenecks, if any bottlenecks are there at all, the bottlenecks are slowly but surely getting removed.
The blockades and the walls.
I think we're going to probably experience some sort of a level of immersive technology in our lifetimes that's going to change the way human beings communicate, period.
And that we're going to look back at this time like, ha, remember when we thought that like social media arguments were like the big deal?
And I really like Joel Kinneman, and Richard K. Morgan I interviewed, who wrote the book years ago.
But that genre started to move me away from techno-utopianism.
And technology is just going to solve so many problems because it also is going to create new problems that we don't even yet know about.
So as an example, I went all the way back to the beginning when humans went from hunter-gatherers and figured out we can domesticate some crops, we can start agriculture and settle and be in one place.
That was the acceleration of what we know of as wealth, ownership.
It was like the start, right?
So much of what we had.
I mean, agriculture allowed people to be able to live and do stuff other than find food, which developed specialists who created technology, which created our, right?
It all came from agriculture in that way.
But tons of bad stuff came from it as well, right?
The beginning of the concept of a sedentary lifestyle came from agriculture.
Diseases that we got from animals and then that we brought other places and they killed tons of people.
So I've kind of adopted that view to technology now, which is, yeah, all the cool stuff we can imagine and improvements, I'm sure will be there.
But problems we aren't even aware of yet are also going to be there.
Jamie, whatever happened with that Microsoft thing that we were looking at, remember when they had like the little mouse that was dancing in your hand or the elephant that was dancing in your hand?
Microsoft has HoloLens and they're on HoloLens too, but they've moved more towards like a commercial applications for it as opposed to like consumer availability.
There are consumer availability AR things coming out right now.
What Apple just showed at their WWDC event this month, or actually on Monday, is really cool.
It's still just like watching through that phone, though.
I don't think anyone's made the device like a glasses type AR thing yet because the field of view isn't right.
They haven't mastered that.
Either projecting light into your eye, which is what Magic Leap does, or projecting onto the glass that you're then looking at, which is what I think HoloLens and the other thing does.
Well, there's no, I mean, I think the problems people have in practice often are different than the ones.
I mean, there's no transparency with a lot of the companies that are developing these technologies and setting up the algorithms and whatever.
There's really no transparency about what it is that's going on, what the end goals are, what the broader effects on society are going to be.
I know you've had Jonathan Haidt on, who has talked a lot about the disproportionate effect of social media on suicidality, particularly in young girls relative to boys.
It's been years now that this stuff has been around and we're now kind of figuring that out.
So it's inevitably we're behind always in figuring out what the effects are because you need time to measure it.
And that as things advance more and more quickly, whatever damage is potentially going to be done will happen even faster.
I mean, this happened with the food, the canned and processed food revolution of the 50s and 60s.
It was slower, but it was the same type of thing where all of these advancements and being able to make food last longer via how it was processed and stored, it all sounded awesome in a time when food would just go bad.
Then we started learning about all the bad things that came with it.
One, when I announced that I was going to be on the show, companies started contacting me saying, we will give you money if you work our name, our product, into the conversation.
I mean, there's this moral hazard sort of situation that exists with insurance where the people who don't really need the insurance are the ones that the insurance companies want to insure.
And the people that are more likely to use the insurance, the insurance companies are like, we're going to have to charge you six times as much type of thing.
It's easier to get the sponsorship money from stuff that's less interesting or less aligned or whatever.
And I don't know.
I mean, it's an ongoing battle.
I don't talk to any of our advertisers.
Like, we have a team that handles all of that, and that is great.
But there are still calls to make about what is on this side of the line, what's on that side of the line.