July 21, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:15
3355 Twitter's Free Speech Controversy | Charles C. Johnson and Stefan Molyneux
What is Twitter’s relationship with free speech and expression? Stefan Molyneux is joined by Charles C. Johnson to discuss his recent confrontation with Jamie Weinstein and Michelle Fields, similarities to the situation involving former Donald Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Milo Yiannopoulos’s recent permanent ban from Twitter, government involvement in technology companies and investment strategies based around “virtue signaling” from major companies. Charles C. Johnson is an investigative journalist, author and the founder of both Got News and WeSearcher. For more of his work, check out: http://www.gotnews.com and http://www.wesearchr.comBreitbart: Milo Suspended Permanently by Twitterhttp://www.breitbart.com/milo/2016/07/19/breaking-milo-suspended-twitter-20-minutes-party/Charles C. Johnson Assaultedhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONujNKx0ScAhttp://gotnews.com/rncincle-jamie-weinstein-assaults-gotnews-editor-video/Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I am here with wounded warrior Charles C. Johnson.
This will make sense in just a moment.
He is an investigative journalist, author, and the founder both of Got News and WeSearcher.
You can go to gotnews.com and we, W-E-S-E-A-R-C-H-R.com.
Tell us a little bit about WeSearcher before we dive into the altercation that occurred recently.
Yeah, sure.
A few years ago, I came up with this idea that if I could crowdsource raising money for various investigative projects, that this would actually be a great way to induce leaks, be a great way to pay sources, and it would be a great way to make people feel like they had ownership over certain stories.
And I had always wanted to do it.
And recently we did it with the Barack Obama manuscript, which I bought from Malik Obama.
And of course we put up, we solved that bounty.
People can go to Got News where we published it, the full book.
They can read it for themselves and they can see that there are sections where it's clear that Barack Obama did not write the book.
And so you can see the early manuscript.
And of course this is something that was always suspected, but it's kind of cool to actually have proof of that.
And there are some other ones we're going to be doing soon.
But the basic idea was to induce leaks, to get people to crowdfund the truth, to crowdfund the journalism that they want to see, and always have some sort of video document, that sort of thing.
We have something on John McCain.
We found all the tapes of him betraying his country in the Hanoi Hilton, doing broadcasts for the enemy.
And given what he said recently about American servicemen in Iran, that's something else we're going to get out at some point.
He has a primary at the end of August, so obviously we're going to time it accordingly.
Now, Charles, I obviously don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but I just wanted to give you a hint.
You might want to tell the media that there's strong evidence, according to your site, that Barack Obama didn't write all of his own first autobiography because they really, really seem to be interested in plagiarism.
You should just probably pass that along because that could be considered more important than Melania's speech.
Just a thought, little bird in your ear.
It's funny to me, too, that she speaks five languages, you know, again.
I mean, I speak fluent French and I speak Spanish, but all my life I was always venerated for being smart, for speaking multiple languages.
And here's this model who's hot, who speaks five languages, and they're going after her for plagiarizing.
Michelle Obama's speech, which was, of course, written by a Jewish secular woman.
So it's just funny that Michelle Obama, for all of her talk of diversity, has a Jewish white woman writing speeches for her.
And now I feel bad for spending all my time learning Wookiee and Kobol.
I just feel like I've not spent a wise amount of time on that.
All right.
So let's talk about One of the things that happened recently, and when I read it, I really, really thought it was The Onion.
This is the kind of thing where it's got so many n-dimensional layers of irony that it's hard to even know where to start.
So let's talk about the street altercation that happened to you yesterday, was it?
Yes, yesterday.
It was really interesting.
So I... As your readers may know, we were some of the first people that got news.
Also, Mike Cernovich going after Michelle Fields on being a hoax artist and the whole Corey Lewandowski affair.
She has falsely accused me of hacking her computer, so that just gives you some sense of, like, she just makes stuff up.
And so I just really wanted to ask her, because I hadn't seen her in a while, like, why are you always making stuff up?
And so I went to go with a team of people.
We saw her on the street, and we just I went and followed her down the street several blocks, and I just went to go walk up and then turned to go and ask them a question, at which point her fiancé, Jamie Weinstein, the guy who attacked Corey Lewandowski for being a thug, he was the first person to, of course, tweet about the Michelle Fields incident, lunged at me and swore at me, and then I said, dude, we got this on camera.
He then suddenly said, fuck you, sir.
And sort of changed some of his demeanor.
But he pushed my arm pretty hard.
I'm not quite as big of a pussy as some people think, but it did actually kind of hurt.
And I just couldn't believe it.
I mean, here's this guy who has spent all this time attacking Trump and Trump supporters for being thugs and violent and so forth.
And here I was, like, yeah, I'm a pretty paisley guy.
Like, I'm not very strong.
I'm sort of, you know, in the nerd, weak category side of things.
And...
And of course, I was just kind of shocked by it.
And of course, we put it up.
I think it's got like a thousand retweets at Mike Cernovich's thing.
And of course, we put up an article that got news about it.
So it was a little, it was interesting, to put it mildly.
Well, so this is, and this is the irony.
So I had a look for, and this was Jamie Weinstein's tweet that came out in the beginning of March.
He wrote, Trump always surrounds himself doubly with Tonight, thug Corey Lewandowski tried to pull my GF girlfriend, Michelle Fields, to ground when she asked tough Q. I guess, tough question, right?
So, as Vox Day says, social justice warriors always project.
And, of course, you were trying to ask her, I guess, what could be considered a tough question for her.
And this was the response.
And...
I must say I was surprised by the response because I've had a lot of people who are hostile to me here, activist types, and I always try to be gentlemanly and charming.
I've even taken pictures of some of them where they're giving the finger to the camera and to me.
It's all in good fun.
No one's going to really attack you or savagely beat you up in a crowd when there are all these police around.
I feel extremely safe in Cleveland.
I probably wouldn't go to Cleveland normally because of how dangerous it is.
But I feel very safe here.
And so the attitude of this sort of just elite, you know, this elite attitude of being attacked essentially by trustafarians was very surprising to me because, you know, Weinstein's Weinstein pays for a TV booker.
He has a history of using his late father's wealth to advance his career.
I have no beef with that.
He didn't choose who his father is.
But it is important to know that he is still at the Daily Caller, which is a publication I had a familiarity with as a contributor several years ago.
And he was very jealous of me there because I was always breaking stories and getting grudge links and always getting interviews to be on TV and I was always turning them down and he was going and taking them because I have no interest in being on TV. I'd much rather be on YouTube and I'm sure you can kind of relate to some of that.
And so it was just very interesting, the psychology of somebody who's always attacking people for being thugs actually behaving as if you were a thug.
And I said to him, look, I said to him privately and said to his editor, look, all I want is an apology.
And people think that I'm trolling on it, but I kind of do.
It was just very strange.
And of course, people were high-fiving me everywhere I went at the convention afterwards because there are lots of people who dislike the way Jamie Weinstein and Michelle Fields have gotten away with.
You know, falsely accusing, falsely and maliciously accusing, not just Corey Lewandowski, but me, Alan West, a number of other people over the years, Mark Dice.
It just goes to show you this tension between old media and new media.
I was very civil.
I was wearing a button-down shirt, which is rare for me.
I've done a bunch of interviews with people all across this area, all across the convention.
We got approved for press credentials, crazily.
It's interesting to see the people who see me and they just run, and then there are other people who come up to me and want to talk to me.
I was surprised.
This is the first time anyone has been violent with me.
And it's not like people come up to me and tell me to go fuck myself.
And Philando Castile was not a crip.
And I'm like, all right, why does he have all these gang signs on his Instagram?
And then we have a discussion about it.
But it's curious that the people who were actually violent were the only one who was violent.
And it was Jamie.
I wonder what would have happened had Michelle Fields not been there, because she, of course, in the video, as your listeners or viewers can see, she went and tried to step right in between us.
And, of course, he pushes her first, so he can't get at me, which I thought was also kind of funny in further review.
I just thought it was interesting.
Do you think that the presence of the video camera, as you pointed out, changed the course of the interaction, or do you think it was mostly done at that time?
I think it changed the course of it.
He looked extremely angry.
I've seen him probably 10-15 times, and I've never seen him angry like that.
In fact, I actually, in some measure, kind of respect him in a way, because he started defending his woman's honor.
I just frankly didn't think he had it in him.
It was very, very surprising, though.
You know, he spent all this time talking about reasoned discourse and how, you know, that's been his sort of presentation of himself.
And he very desperately, he wants to be famous, he wants to come off as charming, as this debonair kind of guy.
He's written kind of like, you know, sort of jokey articles.
I think at one point he won DC's Funniest Celebrity or something like that, which I think should honestly just always go to a politician.
Just a personal view on that.
But he, it was very surprising.
And it was clear that they were very stressed out because apparently they did not come back.
And Jamie has been seen and spotted throughout the convention drinking a lot, which was a behavior that I had never seen of his before.
And he got into a shouting match with several other reporters who were trying to ask him questions as well.
And it's been interesting seeing just the responses, too.
Lots of friends of his, or I guess acquaintances of his at the caller and others who are...
You know, applauding me.
And it's interesting.
So the day before, I went to the Daily Caller party.
And of course, Jamie Weinstein was not there for that.
He went to a more elite party.
And it's interesting, too.
Like, one of the things that nobody really pointed out during the Michelle Fields situation was both, you know, Michelle Fields' mother...
He has a relationship with the Honduran government, which involves taking care of illegal immigrants from Honduras in the United States, and actually in Los Angeles.
And Jamie's father, for many years, depended on sort of the cheap labor industry to build his empire, which Jamie has now inherited since the father passed away, I guess, two or three years ago now.
Right, so their relationship to Trump could have some economic drivers that have escaped most people's attention.
That's right.
So let's turn to Milo.
And you've had your own run-ins with...
Oh yeah, real quick.
It's Milo, by the way.
He always corrects me for calling him Milo.
I appreciate that.
As a Stefan or Stefan, I don't mind if people...
Which is it, by the way?
I go with Stefan.
Stefan, okay, good.
I don't like the...
It comes out of Stefan, but I mean, I don't.
So it's Milo?
Yep, Milo.
Thank you.
So...
You've had your own run-ins with Twitter in the past, and the thing that I find strange about this, I mean, there seems to be a lot of double standards at play, but this idea that, and this is kind of common across the internet, that somehow somebody who's on the internet bears some responsibility for the actions of his or her followers is something that I find very strange.
First of all, who knows if they're even real accounts, and secondly, you know, what was that book?
A Catcher in the Rye.
That a lot of people ended up getting obsessed with, and there were a couple of shooters and so on, but nobody would hold the writer responsible for all of that kind of stuff.
But there is this kind of odd idea, and it floats up from time to time, where it's like, ah, someone who watches your videos or listens to your show did something that most people would consider, and so therefore somehow that's on you.
That seems like a very, very bizarre notion, but that's I think one of the things that's going at play in this situation.
I think that's right.
I mean, people don't quite understand how to deal with this larger question of technology and human nature.
And so what they're discovering is that a lot of people are actually quite mean, that they're quite tribal, that they dislike a lot of the elites and celebrities out there.
And a lot of celebrities and elites were induced to be on Twitter because they saw it as a place to broadcast their platforms, broadcast their ideas.
And then, of course, people like me and Milo sort of became celebrities through Twitter.
Which is, of course, a very difficult and dangerous sort of thing.
I mean, beforehand, I was an obscure researcher.
I was, you know, happily well paid.
I was sort of, no one would have taken my vote or anything like that.
And frankly, some days I wish I could go back to that.
But it's this interesting problem of To what extent are artists responsible for their ideas?
I would say that we are somewhat responsible for the kind of things we put out into the universe.
I am responsible for changes that I've observed.
When we did the Kevin McCarthy story about his affair with Renee Elmers, he did not become Speaker of the House.
My actions led to other actions, which led to his career going in a different direction.
There's always a responsibility question, which is why libel law and why all that's so very important.
But it's very, very hard to know How to deal with that in the modern age.
And it's very hard because Milo doesn't tell anyone to do anything.
I mean, I've been friends with him now for, I guess, a few years.
And he's the last person to go and, like, have an executive judgment and tell somebody to go do things.
People just go and, you know, they see Milo's effects and they want to join in and they want to participate.
And it's also unclear to me why you should care.
I mean, I routinely got, you know, people talk about the death threats thing all the time.
But, I mean, I've had...
I've had people send me menacing letters.
I've had all kinds of crazy things, particularly in the Black Lives Matter situation, some of which I'm probably not good to talk about at all because the police has told me not to.
But this idea that somehow people are sending you mean tweets, or mean images, or racist images, or sexist images, is just a very strange idea.
And that's sort of what happened here with Leslie Jones.
I believe she's on Ghostbusters, this new movie.
I haven't seen it.
I thought two Ghostbusters were sufficient.
Don't need to go and reinvent the wheel.
But apparently she quit Twitter.
And this is a serious problem for Twitter, that Twitter's having, where people get whipped up into a mob, and then the celebrities who they first induce to come onto the platform, they exit the platform.
And so they blame the trolls, people like me, people like Milo.
They blame us with affecting the climate of civility, when they should really look at their business model.
I mean, you have an inherent tension here.
Between basically the user base, which wants free speech, which is promised free speech.
I mean, Jack Dorsey has called it a utility.
He was with DeRay McKesson at Recode Conference.
They said every voice is allowed to be on Twitter.
And I was like, excuse me.
And of course, the company, which has an interest in getting in the way of both the advertisers on the one hand and the users on the other.
And I just don't think that that works.
I don't think you can actually monetize Twitter through advertisements because The amount of content is being created at such a fast clip that your attention to actually see those ads is actually quite low, unlike, say, the Super Bowl, for instance, but probably talking too much, so feel free to jump in.
No, no.
I think the business model question is interesting, and there is attention.
I mean, if you invite celebrities on to help build the platform, then people have sometimes, let's just say, complicated relationships with celebrities, and particularly, I would say, Since the Gamergate pushback against some of the leftist narrative, there's a new tension in social media that did not really exist before, and it has become a bit of a battleground, if not a lot of a battleground, in my opinion.
And that's not something that, of course, the leaders of these social media sites could really have anticipated a couple of years ago, that there's been such a pushback against the leftist narrative.
And that there is, you could say a race to the bottom in terms of pushback, although I don't particularly see it that way.
But it's not elevated or civil discourse at times, or it seems like the majority of times.
And I think being the battleground for this culture war, which is a relatively new phenomenon since the left has dominated the media for so long, it's not really used to much pushback.
But again, since the Gamergate thing, I think there are people who are very energized when it comes to the culture wars and it is playing out on social media.
And I can imagine it would be a challenging thing to manage.
No, that's right.
And it's interesting to me just how many people I meet in my research group who are ex-gamers.
And it's sort of like the real world has become a video game of sorts.
And we were just talking about Pokemon Go before this, and it's a great example of reality meshing with the video game culture.
And what I think is actually going on is that there's a decline in real economic growth in the overall economy, so people are becoming much more tribal.
And so the technologies are just reflections of that.
Twitter is a great example of this because people break into their own little Twitter ghettos.
Conservatives on Twitter, liberals on Twitter, blacks on Twitter.
Black Twitter is a big part of Twitter.
I think Twitter is actually the blackest social network, which is a big reason why I was kicked off.
Not only that, but the relationship that DeRay McKesson, he's rumored pretty credibly actually to be the boyfriend of Jack Dorsey, who is the part-time CEO of Twitter.
And so there's always this view, there's this problem within Twitter, which is they need basically a safe space to sell things to advertisers.
And everybody else wants to go in there to see who's fighting who.
And so it's a different kind of model that I think we're prepared for.
What I'm frustrated with on the Twitter question is, you know, I had somebody build software to stop all these crazy people from, you know, buying me bots and trying to shut down my account.
An Australian programmer, thank you for helping me on that, by the way, because he loves your show.
But, you know, I've had a lot of people who, you know, sent me tips.
You can still do that at Editor at Got News, but there were lots of people who had helped me out all the time.
And in real time, when we were breaking stories where we were debunking frauds.
And so, in a sense, I just got too powerful for the platform.
I mean, I also figured out how Twitter's algorithm worked early on, which is, if you get into fights and arguments with blue checkmarks, it actually makes, or your page is viewed by blue checkmarks, it actually makes your tweets go higher.
And so there's an incentive to go and report on journalists because all of them have blue check marks.
And so, you know, when we were doing things like pointing out Wesley Lowry, who claimed that he was pulled over because he was black, when we went and pulled up the police report and showed that he was, it said he was Arab, you know, they thought he was Arab on the form.
You know, those types of things made the Washington Post reporters very uncomfortable because for the first time in their life, they were actually being debunked in real time and their credibility was being eroded.
And so there was a consistent campaign to get me kicked off.
Now, Milo, I had a conversation with Milo four days before he was kicked off.
We actually had lunch in LA. You know, we're, I wouldn't say, are we close?
I don't know.
I mean, we text, we chat.
We're not, we were at one point frenemies.
In fact, at one point he was attacking me for going after Sean King.
And then later he wrote a post about Sean King.
And I wonder how he could have gotten that research, you know?
Yeah.
But I like him.
I mean, Milo's a good guy, and he didn't really deserve this.
And I warned him, I said, you know, you're going to be next.
And I've said this to Cernovich, and I've said this to a number of people, because what's happening is as the companies are collapsing, and the options, the value of the options are less and less, the talented people are fleeing these companies, and they're going and starting their own companies.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but just, you know, for the less sort of financially literate...
I mean, I was a software entrepreneur and was involved in going public and all of that.
So you attract people with your stock options, and it's a great way to keep your costs low because you don't have fixed payroll.
That's the demon of entrepreneurship is no matter what your receivables, cash flow is king.
You have to make that payroll.
And the degree to which you can incent people to come and work with you financially.
With stock options is the degree to which you can keep your payroll loan and keep your – but as stock price declines and you can go and look at the couple of year plummet off the cliff that Twitter represents, then what happens is people say, well, listen, my stock options are going down.
I need you to pay me more.
And if you don't have the cash in the barrel to do that, then people will go to other companies that can pay them more or give them more upwardly mobile stock options.
And it does become a bit of a vicious circle because then you have to give people more stock – Yes, that reflects actually most of Silicon Valley.
And Twitter, of course, is the best, worst example of this trend.
Or the best example of this trend, rather.
This is true of LinkedIn, where they have to give a huge chunk of their stock to employees to basically compete with Facebook and Google, which is the big...
They're sort of the Borg of Silicon Valley.
And so...
What ends up happening is that a lot of these companies have to be acquired at some point, some of the smaller ones, but Twitter has sort of gotten too big in a way, and it's sort of stuck because a lot of the engineers in Silicon Valley don't respect Twitter.
I mean, they're famous for smoking pot in the office during work hours, throwing parties with Snoop Dogg.
All this is in this book, Hatching Twitter, which I highly recommend by Nick Bilton, who's formerly the New York Times.
He's now at Vanity Fair.
And a big reason, so whenever there's a new platform that comes up, I, you know, somewhat of a technical background, so I'll go and I'll read every book I can, every journal, every article, whatever, trying to figure out how to master that platform.
And in the case of Twitter, I was like, oh, wow, they're for free speech.
I'm for free speech.
Great.
Like, what a good thing.
Yeah.
And they were very serious about this.
Now, Twitter has also cut deals with the government, and they push certain policies.
So they claim their utility on the one hand, whenever it suits them, and they're also a private enterprise on the other hand.
And by utility, you mean sort of value agnostic?
Yeah, so the way they would describe themselves is a bit like the cell phone companies.
That's how they described themselves in the past.
Or they even talked about it as like electricity for the internet.
Jack Dorsey has described, page 47 of Hatching Twitter, he described Twitter as a utility for the internet.
So the relationship between the Obama administration and a lot of these companies is very, very intense and very, very close.
And they're sort of hiding some of the decline, which is happening right now as...
Essentially what happened from 2008 to 2016 is the Fed was printing lots and lots and lots of money.
And what was happening is that money was going into funds.
Those funds wanted returns.
So they invested in all these private companies and they invested in companies like Twitter and so forth.
And their hope was that they could get paid back in the public markets, which to some extent they did.
But the actual regular investor has been sort of screwed by Twitter.
And there's all sorts of questions on the shareholder activism side about whether or not they've been selling people a bill of goods.
And there's going to be an earnings call July 26th.
I haven't decided yet if I'm going to institute a short on the company yet.
I'm probably going to decide in the next day or so.
I'm sorry, and a short being that you make when the stock price goes down.
Go ahead.
No, that's fine.
I remember when I first learned about this many, many years ago as a cobalt programmer at a trading company.
You can make money if the stock price goes down.
We don't have to go into the mechanics, but a short is betting that the stock price is going to go down and you can make some good cash.
You, of course, do have this investment approach, which I wanted to touch on briefly.
It's looking for social justice warrior markers within a company and then finding it of interest to you to possibly short the stock.
Yeah, so what's interesting, I open up files on the companies when I look at how much they signal diversity.
And this tends to happen more with tech companies, and tech companies tend to be more volatile because sometimes they're promising a future that can't be delivered.
Certainly we saw that with Theranos and some of these other sort of a tech company, more biotech company.
But what we essentially do a lot of the time What my team does is we look at examples of social signaling on the part of the CEO or the management.
And then what we do is, whenever they're bragging about things like the number of black engineers that they hire, I call this part the Oompa Loompa test.
I don't really care who makes my cell phone or the chocolate I eat or whatever.
I just care that it works or it tastes good.
It could be Martians, it could be robots, it could be Oompa Loompa, it doesn't really matter.
And so whenever a company is saying, oh, we hired all these black engineers, first of all, it's statistically unlikely that the number of black engineers who are competent are actually, there's all that many.
It's possible that a really rich company could spend lots of money, but in any event, it's usually a tell that they're trying to sell you on something else.
They're trying to advertise to you.
And typically, you see a lot of social signaling around charity.
So this is where I first sort of discovered this, where I looked at I looked at all of these CEO types in the 2007-2008 crash in the financial services, and they were all running around giving lots and lots of money to various gay marriage causes, various trendy lefty causes.
And I was like, well, that's weird.
That seems kind of strange.
And this was right before the crash.
So clearly people anticipated a crash of some sort.
And so I see this behavior again by a number of mega-gifts.
We see this with Reed Hastings, $100 million, CEO of Netflix, giving it to basically try and teach blacks and Hispanics more, which is a noble goal.
I just don't think it will be as effective as a lot of people think.
See this in the form of the large gifts that Mark Zuckerberg has promised.
So you see this across kind of the board.
And so what tends to signal to me is that there's a bubble and that they're trying to book the value of the tax deduction of their stock sale at its aperture.
And a lot of these guys have similar financial planners who oftentimes advise them to give gifts right before the downturn.
And so this is something I've learned.
So in any event, I look at this and so I open up files on companies, the more social, the more they signal.
And if anyone has good examples of this, email me at editor at gotnews.com.
If it's very good and I make money off of it, I'm sure to cut you in on the profits and maybe even give you a job.
But I very much like this approach to investing because when I was younger, I used to pay a lot of attention to what people say.
But my basic tell now is pay attention to what people do.
And, you know, we've seen a lot of behavior on the part of Sheryl Sandberg, who's sort of the second-in-command at Facebook, and we've seen a lot of behavior of people that sort of shows them not necessarily as As free speech arbiters.
Everyone tries to say they're...
They always try and wrap themselves in the flag before they do something really bad.
And that seems to be even more true of Silicon Valley, which is, you know, with the exception of Peter Thiel and a few others, you know, closet shitlords, you know, with the exception of Peter Thiel and Menchus Mulbug and a few others, there are...
It's sort of uniformly liberal.
So they're sort of inventing the future as dissidents in this larger operation.
And what I suspect is happening right now, I'm not sure if this is going to happen before or after Trump is elected.
I suspect that there's going to be a major crash in the next 6 to 12 months.
And so what I've been doing is I've been buying puts against the market, puts against various sectors.
And this is sort of how I've been, you know, how I've done well financially.
It's interesting, too.
You get to meet a lot of weird people in the finance world because a lot of people are very interested in how they get their returns.
And so I've gotten to meet a few billionaire hedge fund guys and they're like, what's your quant background?
How do you know all this stuff?
And it's like, well, I did study economics in college, and I did pretty well in corporate finance, but read a lot of books, read some missing to lab, had a bunch of money, started making some bets, started paying off.
And so it's just kind of funny.
But yeah, in any event, it's an interesting hypothesis.
I've called it the Johnson dollar diversity dilemma hypothesis.
Because you have a choice between dollars and diversity on the one hand, right?
And diversity...
You know, we've talked about this before, but diversity is, you know, one of the things that's never really talked about in Silicon Valley's history is the sheer numbers of WASPs or sort of like Midwestern people who went to Silicon Valley.
And there's this idea that all of the tech could be built by anyone, right?
It could be built by somebody who's in the ghetto in the Bronx, or it could be built by Puerto Ricans or whatever.
It doesn't matter.
And yet, when you go to Silicon Valley, you notice just how white everyone is in management, and you notice just it's basically whites, Jews, and Asians overwhelmingly.
And this was most...
It struck to me most when I was at Google's cafeteria, how you've got the line for all the Chinese food, got the line for all the Indian food, and then you had Mexican food, which all the white people were in the line for.
And so this kind of...
This idea that anyone can invent the future, I think, is just not empirically true.
And it's sad in a way, but it also shows us just how valuable, when people create real value creation, just how valuable and rare those people are.
And it's always this question of scarce resources.
So if you have a dollar...
Are you going to go and spend that dollar betting that somebody in the Bronx or in Compton or whatever is likely to bet the next Facebook?
It's a possibility.
It's unlikely.
Or are you going to bet on somebody like a Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin?
And a lot of this is just a function of IQ bets.
I think that basically the combination you see with the best entrepreneurs are courage and genius.
And so those are the kind of things that I look for when I'm investing along.
And of course, the other thing I do on the negative side of things is I study the history of collapses of regimes.
I look at South Africa.
A lot of the policies that I see in the US today are very similar in many respects to South Africa.
All my South African white friends own lots and lots of guns.
That's happening in the States right now.
Everyone's arming up.
And so typically what I do is I look at other countries, particularly ones that are white countries, and I look at how they're behaving to trends that I think are likely to exacerbate in the United States.
And so I told my wife right before the financial crash, right before the summer, to buy as much gun stocks as possible because I was convinced that there would be another series of shootings.
I didn't think it would be this bad, but I did think that there would be something.
And so those have gone up like 10%.
Ruger and I think Smith& Wesson are the ones we bought.
And we even bought others as well.
I'm just not sure.
So that's kind of my longer investment thesis.
Sorry if it was too much.
No, no.
Listen, I find this stuff.
I love econ and I love investing.
So it's all very interesting stuff.
So thanks so much, Charles.
A fascinating discussion.
I just really want to remind people, go to gotnews.com.
You are like a cutting-edge icebreaker of news stories.
And as you mentioned, you can email...
Charles with tips and ideas at editor at gotnews.com.
And WeSearcher, missing the last E, just, you know, because that extra E, way too much typing.
WeSearcher, S-E-A-R-C-H-R.com for crowdfunding research projects, which is, again, a great idea.
