Daryl Davis and Bill Ottman critique Big Tech’s opaque algorithms, citing Minds’ open-source transparency and end-to-end encryption via Matrix. Their Censorship Effect paper—co-authored with Jesse Morton and others—finds deplatforming fuels extremism by isolating users. Ottman proposes replacing censors with mental health experts to guide debates, while Davis shares how direct dialogue deradicalized KKK members, like the case of a racist who quit after learning about white serial killers. Rogan highlights suppressed but later validated discussions on COVID treatments and nutrition, arguing censorship stifles necessary discourse. Minds’ Change initiative uses Bitcoin to fund long-form conversations, proving financial control mirrors speech suppression. The trio concludes that echo chambers thrive when platforms prioritize ideological purity over open inquiry, undermining progress in education and conflict resolution. [Automatically generated summary]
So I absolutely respect any network that is putting forward a free speech policy.
But if you can't have free speech policy with sketchy algorithms and closed source code because then we don't know if you're soft censoring, shadow banning.
We don't know what's happening in the news feed behind the scenes.
And so, Daryl, to fill people in on you, you've been on the podcast before and you have an incredible history.
You're a brilliant musician and you have personally converted.
What is the number now?
It's more than 200. Ku Klux Klan members, neo-Nazis.
I mean, we talked about these guys giving you their Klan outfits and retiring because they met you.
And just because you had reasonable conversations with them made them realize how stupid these ideologies that they had somehow or another been captivated by.
I mean, at the end of the day, you know, a missed opportunity for dialogue is a missed opportunity for conflict resolution.
It's as simple as that.
But it's not just having a dialogue or a conversation or a debate.
It's the way that we have it, how we communicate, you know, that makes it effective.
For example, I've been to 61 countries on six continents.
I've played in all 50 states.
So all that is to say that I've been exposed to a multitude of skin colors, ethnicities, religions, cultures, ideologies, etc.
And all of that has shaped who I've become.
Now, all that travel does not make me a better human being than somebody else.
It just gives me a better perspective of mass humanity.
And what I've learned is that no matter how far I've gone from our own country, Right next door to Canada or Mexico or halfway around the globe, no matter how different the people I encounter may be, they don't look like me, they don't speak my language, they don't worship as I do or whatever, I always conclude at the end of the day that we all are human beings.
And as such, we all want these same five core values in our lives.
Everybody wants to be loved.
Everybody wants to be respected.
Everybody wants to be heard.
We all want to be treated fairly, and we all basically want the same things for our family as anybody else wants for their family.
And if we learn to apply those five core values when we find ourselves in an adversarial situation or a culture or society in which we're unfamiliar, I can guarantee that the navigation will be a lot more smoother.
And essentially, that's what's happening here at Mines.
We're allowing people to be heard.
We're showing them that kind of respect.
We don't have to respect what they're saying, but respect their right to say it.
And we provide that platform because, you know, when you don't do that, you're driving people to a platform that will embrace them.
And then it becomes an echo chamber.
And essentially, it could become a breeding ground for a cesspool of nefarious activities, whether it's extremism or violence or conspiracy theories or what have you.
So it seems like there's an issue with many social media companies where they want to censor bad ideas.
It seems to me that part of that is because the work involved in taking a person who's a neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan member and showing them the error of their ways, allowing them to spread their nonsense, and then slowly but surely introducing them to better ideas, it's Exhausting.
So what Twitter does is like, fuck you, get out of here.
What Instagram does, the same thing with all these people.
But the problem with that is then it goes further and further and further and further down where you're getting rid of people for just not agreeing with you.
So Daryl and I just wrote this paper called The Censorship Effect, along with Jesse Morton, Justin Lane, Leron Schultz, and my brother Jack, and the multiple PhDs, like serious research has gone into this.
Even the left out of outlets like Vox are now admitting that deplatforming causes more severe radicalization.
This is being admitted across the board.
So the fact that big tech apps are not looking at this data and applying it to their policy, it makes you almost have to speculate that they're intentionally causing it.
I mean, because these are very smart people that work at big tech sites.
And if you live in that world, if you live in that tech world, and I have many friends who have, you know, they're executives at these places.
That is just the fucking doctrine.
You have so many employees that they have these radical ideas about what you're supposed to do and not supposed to do, and what you're supposed to platform and not platform, and this idea of platforming people.
I have people on this podcast all the time that I don't agree with at all, or I agree with them very little, and I want to see what's going on in their head, and I'll get that.
You're platforming these people.
You're platforming a bad person.
I don't think they're bad people.
I just don't agree with them.
And they have a right-wing ideology that I don't think should be suppressed.
There's a lot of people with left-wing ideologies that I think are ridiculous, and I want to pick those apart, too.
I want to have conversations with people, and this idea that you're only supposed to have conversations with people that you absolutely agree with, and that what you're doing is just broadcasting these ideas to better humanity.
If you want a better humanity, have fucking conversations with people.
So even the Catholic Church endorsed that we are a geocentric model universe, meaning that the earth is the center of the universe and everything revolves around us, right?
Right.
And Copernicus said, no, we're just another planet.
The sun is the center of the universe and everything revolves around the sun, which makes it a heliocentric model.
And everybody scorned him, ridiculed him.
A hundred years later...
Galileo came along and built upon Copernicus' theory and developed it even further and said, yes, we are a heliocentric model.
And he got arrested for heresy against the Catholic Church.
But guess what?
He was right.
He was right.
So, you know, sometimes we have to stand up to the masses, not just join in because everybody else thinks this way.
And it's also the problem of the walled garden, right?
There's a lot of people that get booted from these social media platforms, whether it's Twitter or Facebook, and then they look at that and they look at those people with further and further disdain and it separates them.
From whoever's there.
And we're not even just talking about radical people.
One of the things that really alerted me to how crazy the censorship shit was was Brett Weinstein had a group that he put together called Unity 2020. And the idea was to bring people that were from the left...
That were really reasonable, and from the right that were really reasonable, that weren't captured by corporate greed, and to have them as an alternative candidate.
Like, instead of saying, like, you have to be a Republican, or you have to be a Democrat, let's, like, get reasonable left-wing and right-wing people that can agree on a lot of stuff and have them work together, and maybe you have a candidate that's, like, a vice president and a president, one's right-wing, yeah, like, it would be a great way to sort of, like, come together in the middle.
Twitter banned the account.
Twitter banned an alternative account.
There was nothing unreasonable about what they were saying.
It was all just conversations with people that are brilliant that happen to be left-wing and brilliant that happen to be right-wing.
Let's get them together and see if we could lead this country in a better direction than having this polarization of right versus left where people get super tribal about it.
Like, this would be a great way to meet in the middle.
I think there was a real concern in the early days of Twitter and of social media where a lot of these people that were outrageous right-wing people We're starting to get a lot of attention, like Milo Yiannopoulos was a big one, Gavin McGinnis, and a lot of these guys, they were getting a lot of attention, and the response from the left was like, no, no, no, no, silence them!
Like, I heard this one woman talking about her kid is listening to Ben Shapiro, and I would love to get Ben Shapiro removed from all platforms.
Yeah, so if you have an idea, like especially with something as innocuous as Unity 2020 or beneficial, the idea of unity, I mean, come on, it's like literally in the title.
That's what we're all hoping for.
We're united as a community, the United States of America, all these different ideas.
Let's work together.
No.
Fuck you.
You're not a right wing.
You're not a left wing.
You can't be a part of the problem because you're going to draw votes away from the people that we think it's imperative that they win.
So it changes the whole idea of what democracy is because they're kind of admitting that they have an influence on the way our elections go.
You know, I mean, and speaking of unity, you got those people who are out protesting every day, you know, to help change and bring people together, but a lot of them are the very ones who will not sit down and talk with the person that they're protesting against, you know?
I started seeing it, I mean, I guess it was a couple of decades ago.
You started to see when someone was a controversial speaker, they would come to a university, and instead of someone debating that person or someone, you know, listening to that person's ideas and picking them apart, Instead, they were like pulling fire alarms and shouting people down and screaming at the top of their head in the middle of the auditorium.
They're silencing people's ideas because they feel that their ideas are better, which is exactly the opposite of what the Founding Fathers were trying to sort of manage when they came up with the First Amendment.
We're really trying to make this less of an emotional debate because I think the censorship and speech stuff is obviously very emotional.
We're talking about hate speech.
We're talking about a lot of horrible stuff that hurts people personally.
And so the big tech strategy is, oh, we care about people's feelings and we want to...
Hide this information because it's offensive, but we need to remove the emotion and look at this empirically in terms of what is actually making society more healthy and what is actually preventing radicalization and violent extremism.
There's a difference between radicalization and violent extremism.
So, if we can prove to big tech that deplatform—we want them to adopt a free speech policy.
I think that's the goal here.
We don't expect that Facebook and Google are going away.
It's not going to happen.
There's going to be no MySpace of Facebook and Google.
They are embedded in the infrastructure of the planet.
So they need to change their policy.
They need to start open sourcing more code.
And they need to start adopting more open policies because when they ban, it's all network topology and whack-a-mole.
You ban it from Facebook and then it pops up over here and it's just this whole little interconnected matrix.
Like for mines, like say if someone starts like a neo-Nazi group and they start posting on mines and they start talking about the master race and eliminating Jews and crazy Nazi type shit.
So it's like one of those Instagram videos, like if you see a car accident or something like that, there's Instagram videos you have to say that you're willing to see this offensive thing.
And Darrell, your take on this is like, how do you think that a social media company like Twitter, something that's really huge, can pivot from the model that they have now, where they just ban people?
Because, you know, that points to them assuming that the majority of people out here are stupid and that these companies need to tell you what to believe, which to me is offensive.
It is offensive, yeah.
I believe, you know, yes, there's a lot of bad information out there.
And, you know, the more liberal you make your platform, allowing anybody and everybody to come in, yeah, you're going to have some bad actors, sure.
But the way you address it is you combat bad information by providing more good information.
Yeah, I know Jack Dorsey had an idea of two versions of Twitter, a curated, moderated version of Twitter and then a Wild West version.
And he was trying to pitch that and I think they shot him down.
But his idea was like we should have some Twitter that's like got some sort of decentralized control where it's not up to the moderators to decide what's on it and people can just put on whatever they want.
And then he left, like, two days after he left, there was this huge censorship issue where they said, oh, you can, if it's a private image, it can get taken down on Twitter.
And it seems like, I mean, it's a hard position to be in because, you know, it's like your baby.
This is a company he's been working on forever and he doesn't want to badmouth it.
But I would not be at all surprised if there were some internal wars happening about, I mean, there's a huge wired piece about internal free speech wars in Twitter management.
So it's a fact that it's not, you know, one single ideology in these companies.
There's definitely an overwhelming ideology, but I think that there is starting to be pushback.
Well, Bill had contacted me after seeing me on some interview or reading about me or something to participate in an event he was originally going to have in New Jersey, then it got moved to Philadelphia.
I'm sure you guys know about Majid, who's one of the best examples of that.
Someone who was radicalized.
Even the name of his podcast is Radical.
His book's Radical.
He was a guy who was deeply embedded in this sort of Islamic group.
And then went to jail and realized why he was in jail, started reading, sort of examining this thought process, and came out of it this sort of brilliant mind to analyze what's the process where people get radicalized?
How does this happen?
And he could say it from—first of all, he's incredibly articulate, so he could say it from this way.
He's coming from this place of, I was this guy.
Instead of, I know what's wrong with these people, I was these people.
And that's what, you know, and that's what Mines has in terms of doing the research.
You know, we've done like a polymath, a 360, digging from all different genres, psychologists, former extremists, trolls, all kinds of people, people like myself with boots on the ground dealing with current extremists and things like that.
So all of that comes, you know, into the conclusion of this paper.
Unlike a lot of other papers, they talk about why people do this.
Others talk about the effect of what they've done.
Some talk about the cause and the effect.
But we have the cause, the effect, and the solution.
I was looking in my Google data history like a couple weeks ago And I had, you know, I have a bunch of different phones, actually, which I want to show you later, some, like, new open source stuff.
Yeah, because a lot of it has to do with the chain of custody of these products because proprietary surveillance chips will get added to the phone in its life cycle throughout the factories globally.
So they're saying, look, we need to make sure to be able to commit to our customers that there's no sketchy chips on this thing that's feeding data to some...
One of the things about banning Huawei in the United States was they had proven that some of their routers were allowing access from third parties to access the information as it's distributed between the two parties.
So a third party could come in, scoop up all the intellectual property and just use it.
And you know, sometimes some of these companies, they work both sides.
So the ones that create the device to prevent something is the same company that creates the device to take something.
Like in the Washington, D.C. area, for example, a few years back, D.C. was being sued for the cameras, the red light cameras.
You run the red light, you get a ticket.
Well, Lockheed Martin had created those cameras, and they were shortening the length of the yellow light So you got a bigger chance of running the red light, all right?
So for every ticket that was written, Lockheed Martin was getting a dollar, and the rest of it would go to the D.C. Police Department, right?
He is literally the man who created the original podcast.
Under your leg, you're wrapped up, though.
You're wrapped up.
I'm wrapped up.
See it under the table?
Yes, it's actually connected to the table.
Adam has this No Agenda podcast, and they have a No Agenda phone, and it's essentially a de-Googled Android phone that removes all of the tracing stuff, all the stuff where, you know, but you can't use navigation on it.
The iOS and Android operating systems that run on nearly every smartphone conceal uncountable numbers of programming flaws, known as security vulnerabilities.
That means common apps like iMessage or web browsers become dangerous.
You can be hacked.
So he uses the Graphene network as his base operating system.
Yeah, I mean, Apple is, they try to have this privacy argument, and it's so shocking to me that they try to push that, like, oh, you know, we're not going to let the FBI in, like, trust us.
And look, Apple makes beautiful products.
Everybody knows that they're the best designers in the world.
And I'm going to explore all the different options and hopefully transition.
So, like, I have gotten rid of most...
I don't use big tech...
Nearly as much as I used to probably like 10% of what I used to I deleted most of my accounts I'll check in sometimes because I like to see what's going on and to understand the market but you know I it's I'm not gonna I need to get around to with maps and so I'm gonna as soon as we have an alternative I will do it I'll be the first one in line when someone can put something I'm trying to get all these options in front of me,
but it seems like Operating systems and applications, the trend is for them to get more intrusive, right?
Like TikTok is supposedly, they back-engineered it and said it's the absolute worst software that they've ever examined in terms of, like, violating your privacy.
But doesn't Apple at least give you the option to block advertisers from being accessed your information, block cross-platform or cross-application sharing of data?
They've been locking down their app store, which has taken billions of dollars away from Google and Facebook advertising because they don't allow apps to do what they used to be able to do.
Well, I remember the days of clones, where you could buy a fake Apple machine that runs Mac OS, and they shut them all down.
Because you could buy, like, a...
Bomber machine that has crazy power and gigantic hard drives and multiple hard drives, way more potent than anything that Apple was selling in the 90s.
Yeah, for gaming and just for people who do video editing and just people that wanted some crazy, ultra-hyped-up machine, and it would still run the iOS.
And this was the early iOS.
This was before OS X 10, which was the Unix-based operating system.
That was back when Apple's operating system was a little janky.
It was kind of sketchy.
Crash a lot.
No preemptive multitasking.
It was like no memory protection.
It would crash.
People were really devoted to it, but that shit would crash a lot until OS X came along.
We did a show once at Stubbs, and my friend C.K. brought a bunch of burgers from a bunch of different places, and some of them were plant-based, so I took a bite.
There's this guy, Ed, Earthling Ed, who's very honest and not preachy and has good information.
But anyway, I feel better.
I love eggs and meat and all that stuff.
but and I do feel like healthier but I think I was healthy vegan and you can be healthy vegan and I wouldn't be surprised if in a thousand years humans are not eating nearly as much meat well why did you decide to go back because I wanted to you know I didn't need that much of a reason you know doing it with my family And also...
It's just, you know, I'm not ideological about stuff.
I don't want to get stuck in ideology about food or whatever.
So imagine, so Facebook spends tens of billions on moderation.
Or they have.
And so our vision, imagine if rather than tens of thousands of censors who are just going like, down, down, down, take it down, hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theory.
What if you had tens of thousands of mental health professionals and positive intervention people and just like people engaging in dialogue who can...
Provide mental health resources to users who need it to share information.
I'm not saying you need no moderation.
You definitely do need a certain level.
But that's so much money and human energy.
I mean, you've seen the PTSD studies of these content moderators at Facebook.
Say, 25, 30 years ago, insurance companies were not paying for acupuncture.
Oh, that's nonsense.
It's, you know, what do you call it?
A placebo or something.
Right.
Now they do.
Now they see value in it.
Well, Chinese people have been using that for 2,000 years.
Would they still be using it 2,000 years later if it wasn't working?
So now we're accepting, you know, some Eastern culture.
Now we're, you know, when our doctor does not give us what we...
Hope will cure us for our cancer, our diabetes, or whatever.
We go the holistic route, and we've found some pretty amazing results.
And that's what, you know, Minds is doing, the holistic approach, by giving everybody a platform to share their information, like you just shared about the cabbage juice.
You know, somebody hears this podcast and goes out and tries cabbage juice, and it clears up their wife's ailment or something like that.
And this is a good subject to talk about now because we just got through the pandemic and that was one of the things that was suppressed was information about methods of treating COVID. I mean, it was a giant issue where if you talked about whether it's hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin or whatever you would talk about, even vitamins, we're talking about like the difference between the COVID results of people that were vitamin D insufficient versus people that had sufficient levels.
It's a giant difference.
But if you talked about that, you would get in trouble for disinformation or misinformation, and you would get either shadow banned or outrightly banned.
I mean, there were people that were banned from social networks for suggesting that people who are vaccinated can still spread COVID. That turns out to be an absolute fact now.
But if you said that eight months ago, nine months ago, instead of Having this conversation and having medical experts debate it and people that understand it and don't understand it, so ask questions and people who are following the standard narrative, they express themselves, and then people that have alternative ideas express themselves, and we find out what's right and what's wrong.
Well, we're building out a sort of citation tool to kind of show the citations on both sides of various arguments and, you know, have more crowdsourced This really gets into the realm of decentralized identity and where we're moving in terms of reputation and credibility on the internet.
And right now, you've got all these different logins, what we were talking about, where things are going with crypto and with the web standards.
Really, we're moving towards a place where you have these credentials associated with your core identity, which can be generated from like a crypto wallet or something like that.
And you'll have all these badges that you're earning everywhere you go.
And you can decide to disclose those or not disclose those, like NFTs.
There could be any infinite number of, you know, badges that you could potentially earn, but like you could be trusted by, say someone in martial arts trusts you and they give you a signal of trust, then that would add to your credibility in martial arts in your decentralized identity on the internet, which would be interoperable between social networks.
unidentified
So that there's sort of this web of- Oh look, I got a page.
And so, when Vox, who are very strongly left-leaning, when they have a piece that they write saying that There are harmful effects of censorship that actually pushes people towards more radical ideas.
What are they suggesting?
Are they suggesting that places like social media, sites like Twitter, back off of censorship and maybe choose an alternative?
I mean, I think that what Vox is saying is, it depends if, you know, Alex has a platform.
So he was going to grow huge kind of in either direction, I would imagine.
But small people, when they get banned, you know, that kind of gets buried.
You know, no one's complaining when some random person posting a COVID post gets banned from Twitter.
They're just lost.
There's millions of people who just get lost from that.
And so, you know, anyway, in the analysis we saw, the total views of Alex's content went up significantly.
But I think that it's, you know, it's called the Streisand effect.
But it's also, there's variation on that.
And I think it is definitely, CenturyStreet also works.
Like, in an isolated system.
So if you're on Google or Facebook or Twitter, like, yeah, you can silence certain words or topics.
But when you're thinking of the internet as a whole, then, you know, the total reach is not necessarily going down.
And we need to start thinking about the internet as a whole, not just isolated networks.
Like, you can't claim that censorship of COVID misinfo worked When you just banned it from Google and it just went up, like what about the global numbers?
You can actually get more reach on minds than Facebook or Twitter if you're a small creator.
Because small creators, like getting out of the void on social is so hard.
And we have this reward mechanism where you can earn tokens and boost your content.
And, you know, we also just wrote out this build your algorithm feature where you can actually opt in to see people who are different from you or similar for you.
Or you can opt in to increase the level of tolerance that you have to ideas that you disagree with.
Now, Darrell, I want to talk to you about your personal experience on Mines with what you do, what you're known for.
Have you had interactions with people on Mines that have been favorable, that you've kind of pushed people into a— Yeah, I've had a few, and I've had my share of detractors.
But a lot of people, they don't see that because they would not tolerate the time to sit down and have somebody tell them some nonsense that Jews are the childs of the devil or some crazy things like that.
I will sit and listen to that and I will put up with it.
Because in order for me to speak my mind, I have to listen to somebody else's.
As you already know, one's perception is one's reality.
You cannot change anybody's reality.
If you try to change their reality, you're going to get pushback because they only know what they know.
Whether it's real or not, it's their reality.
So what you want to do is you want to offer them a better alternative perception.
And if they resonate with your perception, then they will change their own reality because their perception becomes their reality.
Just a quick example.
Let's say you got a seven or eight-year-old brother, right?
And he goes to a magic show with his buddies.
And he comes back and tells you, Joe, you know, this magician, he asked for a female volunteer and 50 women raised their hand.
He picked up this one, come up on stage.
He told her to climb into this long box and stick her feet out that hole and put her head out this hole.
Then he closed the lid, told her to wiggle her feet, and she kicked her legs, and he took a chainsaw and went and cut that box in half.
He cut that woman in half.
And you're like, it didn't really happen like that.
Yes, it did.
I was there.
You weren't even there.
I saw it with my own eyes.
You are challenging his reality.
He knows what he saw.
And that magician cut that woman in half.
And then to make it even more obvious to you, he tells you that the magician, after he cut the box in half, took the half with the legs sticking out and moved it over here to stage right and the half with the head over here to stage left.
And then he went over there and talked to the head of the woman and she talked back to him.
And then he brought the two halves back together, opened the box, and out popped the woman full He cut her in half and he put it back together.
And you're saying, eh, it was just an illusion.
No, it wasn't.
I saw it with my own eyes.
I was there.
You weren't even there.
So again, you're attacking his reality.
He's going to resist.
He's going to fight you.
All right?
So what you do is you offer him a better perception.
You say, hey, listen, I hear what you're saying.
But could it be possible that just maybe...
Out of those 50 women that raised their hands and he picked one, maybe she works for him.
Maybe he planted her in the audience.
She knows the trick.
She travels to every show around the country with him.
And when she gets in the box, there's a pair of mannequin legs laying on the floor of the box that are wearing the same stockings and same shoes that she has on.
She picks them up, shoves them out the hole.
When he says, move your feet, she shakes those things.
And then she brings her own legs up under her chest.
So her whole body is on that half of the box.
So the saw doesn't even touch her.
And obviously when he separates the two halves, the feet are over there.
Now she can't move them.
So he has to distract your attention by going over here.
So you're not looking at those feet.
And he's talking to the head and she's talking back.
Of course, when he brings them back together, she pulls the dummy legs, leaves them on the floor of the box.
She climbs out.
And then your brother says...
Hmm.
You know, I guess that would be the only way that would work.
You've offered him a better perception, and that perception then becomes his reality.
So don't attack somebody's reality, regardless of what it is, even if you know it to be false.
Give them a better perception and allow them to resonate with it, because it's always better when somebody comes to the conclusion, I've been wrong.
And, you know, so Daryl always talks about how much he listens when he starts a dialogue and doesn't even try to, you know, push ideas at the people that he's engaging with, different extremists or whatnot.
I'm interviewing a Klan leader, white supremacist, right?
And I ask, you know, how can you hate me?
You don't even know me.
You know, all you see is this.
You come in my room five minutes ago and you've already determined, you know, whatever you determine.
Well, Mr. Davis, you know, black people are prone to crime.
And that is evidenced by the fact that there are more blacks in prison than white people.
Now, I'm just sitting here listening to this guy.
He's calling me a criminal.
But he's right.
He's 100% right.
The data and the statistics show that there are more blacks in prison than white people.
So that feeds what he already thinks he knows, the data, right?
But he does not go to find out why does that data show that.
He doesn't realize there may be an imbalance in our judicial system that sends black people to prison for longer periods of time than white people who've committed the same crime.
So I just listen to him.
Because when he walks in that room and he sees me, I'm the enemy.
His wall goes up.
His ears are like this.
He's ready to defend whatever his stance is.
So I'm just listening.
And then he goes on to say, you know, black people are inherently lazy.
They always have their hand out for a freebie.
They're always trying to scam the government welfare programs and all that kind of stuff.
So now he's called me a criminal.
Now he's calling me lazy.
And I'm just sitting here listening.
I'm not pushing back.
And then he says, and black people are born with smaller brains.
And the larger the brain, the more capacity for intelligence.
The smaller the brain, the lower the IQ. So now I'm being called stupid.
Now, he says that this is evidenced by the fact that every year the data shows that black high school students consistently score lower on their SATs than on white kids do.
Again, he's 100% correct.
That does show that.
But he doesn't realize why.
Where do most black kids in this country go to school?
In the inner city.
Where do most white kids go to school?
In the suburbs.
It is a fact.
Suburban schools are better funded.
They have better facilities, better teachers, etc.
I will guarantee you, white kids who go to school in the inner city can score just as low as those black kids, if not some lower.
Black kids who go to school in the suburbs can score just as high as As the white kids, if not higher.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the color of the student's skin or the size of the student's brain.
But it has everything to do with the educational system in which that child is enrolled.
But of course, he won't go to research that because the data already supports what he already believes, that I'm inferior.
So now he's called me all these things.
I've already done my research on him.
I know this guy sitting across from me just barely made it out of high school.
I have a college degree.
So do I throw that in his face?
No.
But because I sat there and listened to him, that wall is coming down.
Because you cannot impart information to somebody when the wall is up.
It's like hitting a brick wall.
You want that wall to come down and then the ears open up.
So now he's exhausted all his vitriol.
And now he's wondering, like, how come this black person isn't pushing up against me like most of them do?
And he's curious as to what I think about what he just said.
So now the wall is down and he feels compelled to reciprocate because I sat there and listened to him insult me.
So now it's my turn.
I could go on the offense and say, no, you are the one who's a criminal.
You're the one hanging black men from trees and dragging them behind pickup trucks and bombing their churches.
And I would be 100 percent correct because the Klan has over a hundred year history of doing that.
But if I did that, that wall would go right back up.
So I don't want that to happen.
I want to keep the wall down and let him hear what I'm saying.
So rather than go on the offense, I go on the defense.
And I say, listen, I hear what you're saying.
However, I don't have a criminal record.
And I'm as black as anybody you've ever seen.
So I don't have a criminal record.
I've never been on welfare.
As far as my brain size goes, I've never measured the size of my brain, but I'm sure it's the same size as anybody else's.
And as far as my SAT scores go, they got me into college.
Now, I already know that he doesn't have a college degree.
I do.
Does it make me a better person than him?
No.
But it gives me a better experience, right?
So I let him know this.
He goes home.
And he thinks, just like we all do at the end of the day, we reflect on what we did during the day.
He thinks, man, I just had a three-hour conversation with a black guy, you know, and we didn't come to blows.
And what that Daryl guy said, it makes sense.
Oh, but he's black.
But what he said was true.
But he's black.
So they're having a cognitive dissonance, right?
And they struggle with that for a while.
And then they have that dilemma.
I've got to make up my mind, what am I going to do?
So the dilemma is, do I disregard whatever color he is and believe the truth because I know it to be true and change my ideological direction?
Or do I consider the color of his skin and continue living a lie?
In most cases, people will follow the truth.
But then there will be those who don't want to give up the power or the notoriety or whatever, and they will follow the lie.
Well, the way you're doing it is brilliant because you're doing it so patiently and contrary to the way most people handle arguments.
Most people handle arguments by trying to shut down the other person's argument and shit all over them instead of trying to, what you're saying, offer an alternative perspective, which is really probably the only way to get people to think about things in a different light.
And that's why I want to share that with them vicariously, to let them know.
Every white person in the world is not like every white person in this country.
Every black person in the world is not like every black person in this country.
You know, there are white people over in France, like in the 1940s and 50s, a lot of black Americans moved to France to live.
Some even gave up their U.S. citizenship because the French people were treating them as equals.
They didn't see color, you know?
And those French people were a lot more white than the white people here in this country who might be mixed with something else.
So, you know, people need to see.
In fact, my favorite quote of all time is by Mark Twain, or otherwise known as Samuel Clemens.
It's called the travel quote.
And Mark Twain said, quote-unquote, travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetimes.
And so Sam Harris actually did a study that we talk about in the paper.
He did a neuroimaging study of people being exposed to political beliefs different from their own and actually looked at people's brains when they were going through this experience.
And they actually talked about this thing called the backfire effect, which is sort of what you're talking about when the wall's up.
And so they sort of detected that, interestingly.
And I forget the exact name of the study, but it's in the footnotes.
So I think the patience is it.
That it's long-term.
You're not changing someone's mind, like, in five minutes of, you know...
Chattering in comment sections or, you know, yelling at someone at the dinner table that you barely know.
Like, Daryl knows how to create long-term relationships and not be, like, thirsty for them to change their mind.
Like, it's just by, like, look, we're here.
We're hanging out.
Whether it's a network or, you know, offline or online network, it doesn't really matter.
And so I think the backfire effect that Sam found and that we're sort of talking about with walls going up is very real.
You know, Darrell, I'm just thinking while I'm listening here, like these conversations that you've had with these white supremacists and neo-Nazis, how amazing would it be if that was a podcast?
It is.
No, but I'm saying, if you sat down with those people from the beginning, from first meeting them, and see that conversation play out, that would be very relatable.
I think those videos would be a great tool for someone that's maybe trapped, but at least partially open-minded, where they have this view of things, like, maybe I'm incorrect about this.
Maybe I need to re-evaluate.
But as a podcast, that would be brilliant.
That's a great idea to have someone from the jump walk in a KKK member and have this conversation where they sit down with you over hours and hours and present all these articles about crime, brain size, all this shit, and have you just tell them your perspective and see the wheels start turning.
Because I think sometimes A lot of these people they're only interacting with people that think like them.
And he was talking about, you know, black-on-black crime and how violent we were and all that kind of stuff.
And he said, you know, black people have a gene within them that makes them violent.
Now, I'm driving.
He's over here.
And I said, you know, what are you talking about?
And he says, well, look at all the carjackings and drive-bys in the southeast.
He was referring to southeast Washington, D.C., which is predominantly black.
There's some whites that live there, but it's predominantly black, very high crime-ridden.
I said, okay.
I said, but, you know, you're not considering the demographics.
That's what lives there.
I said, what about all the crime in Bangor, Maine?
White people, that's what lives there, right?
I said, you know, he goes, no, no, no, that has nothing to do with it.
You know, you all are born with that gene.
And I said, look at me.
I said, I have never...
I'm as black as anybody you know.
I have never committed a drive-by or a carjacking.
How do you explain that?
This man didn't even think about it.
He didn't hesitate one second.
He goes, your gene is latent.
It hasn't come out yet.
It almost came out then, but, you know...
But, I mean, he had an answer for everything.
And I was, you know, stupefied.
Like, he's over here all smug.
You know, you got nothing to say.
And so I thought about it.
Well, if I gave him some, you know...
Ph.D. knowledge or whatever.
It wouldn't faze him.
So I had to go to where he was.
I said, well, you know, we all know that every white person has a gene in them that can make them a serial killer.
And he says, how do you figure?
I said, well, name me three black serial killers.
He couldn't do it.
I said, I'm going to name you one.
I named one for him.
I said, here's one, just give me two.
He couldn't do it.
I said, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler, David Berkowitz, Son of Sam, on and on.
I said, they're all white.
I said, son, you are a serial killer.
He goes, He goes, Daryl, I never killed anybody.
I said, your gene is waiting.
Has it come out yet?
He goes, well, that's stupid.
And I said, well, duh.
I said, yeah, it is stupid for me to say that about you.
But it's no more stupid for me to say that about you than what you said about me.
And he said it, and I didn't know the guy before I had him on, and while I was having him on, I was realizing a lot of the shit that this guy's saying...
Yeah, but back in those days, I would have people on, I would just read something, they'd say, well, this is probably a conversation that's controversial, I'll talk to this guy.
But some of the things he was saying, that was one of them, was that black people had this gene for violence.
And I go, well, how the fuck do you explain war?
My take was like most wars started by white people.
Like if you looked at the amount of war that goes on in the world, worldwide, like how much of it is instigated and initiated by white people and is there a thing more violent than war?
Nothing.
It's like literally you're telling people that don't even know people that it's their obligation to kill someone based on what land they're from or what part of the world.
That's the most violent shit we know, and it's all by white people.
All sorts of parts of the world where there are these military actions that we're ignoring.
There's actually a chart that someone put up.
It's like a graphic that shows the bombings and the people that died in Ukraine versus the people that are dying right now simultaneously due to US drone strikes and all sorts of other shit that's happening all over the world at the same time.
We're concentrating on this one thing, and it's in the news, and that's part of the reason why people are concentrating on it so much.
I know, I know, but I'm just, I'm saying that I think that, because I'm sure that was a, I don't know who you're talking about, but I'm sure that was a productive conversation in certain ways, and I feel like there's this chilling effect that is happening.
Where we're afraid to have a conversation with a murderer.
Or maybe not a murderer, but that's kind of the funny thing.
You could interview probably a serial killer on this show, and that would be fascinating.
And no one would be like...
Oh, dude, Joe's, like, gonna become a serial killer.
He just had a serial killer on his show.
And, like, people are obsessed with true crime and, you know, obsessed with interviews with some of the worst humans that have ever existed.
And those are considered to be extremely valuable interviews.
And I think that you should...
I hope that you, you know...
Own your ability to do that in a way where people aren't assuming that you think or you endorse the views of people that you're talking to.
It's such a dumb argument, especially in your case.
Look at the results.
What other human being has a documented result of literally hundreds of KKK and neo-Nazi people abandoning their ideology because they've had a conversation with you and literally had a change of heart, an actual change of heart?
And, you know, I'm just hoping that, honestly, no offense to them.
I feel like they're...
They're in their world.
Hopefully we can all get on the same page somehow about what's actually going on here.
I'm not trying to have a combative tone with any of these media outlets or with big tech even.
I don't want to polarize it between alternative tech and big tech.
It's like we need tech.
To adopt certain principles that have to do with digital rights and freedom.
That's just a reality.
It has to happen.
And the ones that do, what would be smarter than whether it's Google, Facebook, Twitter, whoever, to actually start doing some of this stuff and start to be more transparent?
In the confines of the campus, but the objective of higher education is to teach people how to navigate society beyond the campus and be a productive citizen, right?
So you got to let people learn that, hey, you're a woman.
Here, you're treated equally.
But when you graduate and you go out there and work in the real world, you might be sexually harassed by your boss.
You might not get paid as much as your male counterpart who knows less than you or whatever.
Or you might not get the job because you're black or because you're whatever.
This is, you know, in addition to the academic education, they need this empirical education.
And those institutions that are shutting me down are not providing it.
But what I was going to say also was today you got – and speaking of cancel culture, you got people banning books and banning history classes under the guise of CRT, critical race theory, things like that.
You've seen the pictures of a black girl walking towards a white school building for the first time, people behind her yelling at her and all that kind of stuff, or the four black guys sitting at the Woolworths counter in Greensboro and people pouring stuff over their heads.
There's nothing neutral about it, but I think that there's definitely some ideology that is attached to critical race theory that is rooted in critical theory, which is a left-leaning...
There are multiple definitions of critical race theory, and nobody has really explained it.
You're trying to victimize white people as the oppressors and victimize black people as the oppressed, and that's how you are, and you will never change.
That's how the people who are opposed to it define it.
But, you know, but that's not necessarily how some of the people who participated in the creation of it, like Kimberly Crenshaw, I can speak to all of them, define it, you know?
So it needs to be, all history needs to be taught, you know, and through the lens of what happened.
And then move forward.
But you can't create history and say, you know, we don't want to talk about it until 50 years later.
Like when I was in high school, I'll be 64 this month.
When I was in high school, we did not learn.
And I went to high school in Montgomery County, Maryland, which has one of the top school districts in the whole country.
Montgomery County, Maryland and Fairfax County, Virginia.
We tie neck and neck each year.
Anyway, we were not taught that we had Japanese internment camps in this country.
I did not learn that until I was in college.
I'm like, what?
Are you kidding me?
No way.
I asked my parents.
They said, yeah.
I could not believe I didn't learn that in high school.
Now, I knew about the Tulsa race riots 30 years ago.
Well, what we need to do is your take on the way you've had these conversations with these KKK people and these neo-Nazi people.
That has to be across the board with everything.
Let a person explain their position and then you come up with either a better argument or you agree with part of what they're saying or...
The only way is to not silence them, to let them talk.
So if people are against critical race theory for any particular reason, they should listen to the entire argument of what critical race theory entails from at least that person's perspective, and then this is what I agree with, this is what I don't agree with, and have a conversation that's Rational.
They're not having ad hominems.
They're not attacking the human.
They're not attacking the person with insults.
They're just talking about what is correct and incorrect about everything from economics to health care to everything.
These kinds of conversations are how people find out what's right and what's wrong and how people find out what resonates with them.
And as soon as you shut people down, those conversations stop.
And then these people go off into their own corner of the world where they are accepted, and they get in an echo chamber, and they just reinforce whatever stupid idea they had in the first place.
Yeah, what you were saying about watching people change their minds, like their interviews, that is so powerful.
And we're actually watching this Change Minds.
Sort of challenge where we're going to be trying to, as a campaign on the site, to have people make videos and tell stories of a meaningful time that they changed their mind.
Because everybody doing that more, what's a recent time you've changed your mind about something sort of meaningful?
I learned that a tiger does not change its stripes.
A leopard does not change its spots.
And so when I first went in to interview white supremacists and KKK people or whatever, I was not going there to convert them.
Never.
Okay?
All I wanted to know was, how can you hate me when you don't even know me?
That's all I want to know.
And then I'm out of here.
I'll never see you again.
Okay?
Because if a leopard cannot change his spots and a tiger cannot change his stripes, why would I think that a Klansman could change his robe and hood?
It's who he is.
Right?
But I changed my mind because those conversations did change that person.
And you're right, a leopard cannot change its spots and a tiger cannot change its stripes because those two animals were born with those spots and stripes.
That Klansman or Klanswoman was not born with that robe and hood.
That was a learned thing.
And what can be learned can be unlearned.
So that's why I changed my mind and why I continue to do this today to sit down with those people.
Your ideas should be something that's independent of you that you either think this is a good one or this is a bad one.
But if someone comes along and says that's a bad one, you shouldn't be defensive.
You shouldn't like hold on to it and cling to it.
Maybe like try to defend it because you think it's correct.
Like, oh, I thought that was right.
But then once it isn't, there's some people that for whatever reason never want to admit they're wrong because they think that being wrong makes them less.
Yeah, to play devil's advocate with ourselves, I mean, I'm not even ideological about our model.
I actually think that I'm open to seeing, you know, over the course of 10 years, like, let's actually come back in a few years and look at the data that...
The information that we've gathered about the rate of deradicalization and whatnot.
Like, what really works?
What is the most balanced moderation policy for a social network?
Like, you know, First Amendment, I think, is a great starting point.
And obviously there's edge cases, spam, weird, like, there's this...
So we have the distinction between misinformation and disinformation.
The difference is that disinformation is intentional manipulation.
I think that it really depends on the context of the specific post that we're talking about.
So I don't want to make a generalization about There's troll farms in the US that are doing all kinds of inauthentic content engineering for different political purposes.
Well, I think that's where the decentralized reputation is starting to come into play.
And there's this project, Verite, that's coming out.
There's the DID spec.
Which is starting to build this interoperable identity that you carry between social networks.
So basically you're bringing your credibility, your identity, whatever you want to share, whether it's Art, you know, content, it's all tied to you and you're sort of moving around freely in a sovereign situation.
I think that's where we want to go long term so that you're not locked in.
And the thing, when people don't want that, and they want people censored, what you're saying is your ideas won't hold up.
Because you don't want to, if we could all have debates in real time with good ideas versus bad ideas, and everyone gets a chance to watch, it's gonna be messy.
But at the end, you're gonna at least know where you stand.
Because you've had both arguments played out in front of you, whether it's left versus right or whatever it is when you're talking about ideologies.
You've got to watch these people have these conversations.
And if you can do that, you can kind of agree with one or disagree with the other and find out where you fit in this.
But there are, like, distributed systems, like IPFS that I mentioned, and Arweave, and some of these, like...
Systems where it's decentralized and, you know, you don't have to pay for all of the storage, but the bandwidth is still an issue and, you know, it's a spectrum with the decentralized stuff.
So I just wanted to bring this up because we're going to be doing more events.
We believe in offline events too.
It's not only an online social network.
And so if the address, if anyone is interested in supporting the conversations, the long-form conversations we're having with Daryl, Please, you know, send Bitcoin to this address, and we're going to put it towards that.