Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
Speaker 2: We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
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Speaker 2: Let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Crystal.
Speaker 2: I had an interesting conversation with Brianna and Joy Gray
Speaker 2: about third parties and Cornell West. So set it up
Speaker 2: to the people, what are we about to watch?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so some of the comments that I made about
Speaker 1: third parties and doctor West's third party bid attracted a
Speaker 1: lot of attention apparently online, and so Kyle and I
Speaker 1: wanted to have a longer conversation. He basically shares my
Speaker 1: view on third party so we wanted to have a
Speaker 1: longer conversation with someone who's a good friend Briann and
Speaker 1: Enjoy Gray, who has a very different opinion on this,
Speaker 1: so we could go through all the things back and forth,
Speaker 1: et cetera. It's going to be available on Crystal Confront
Speaker 1: substack if you guys want to subscribe there, you can
Speaker 1: get the whole thing on Friday this evening. Otherwise, we
Speaker 1: are going to post this clip now that you can
Speaker 1: watch and enjoy and take from it whatever you will.
Speaker 4: Here you go, Welcome everybody to a special edition, i'd say,
Speaker 4: of Crystal Kyl and Friends. Not only is a Crystal
Speaker 4: Kyl and Friends, it's also sort of like a dual
Speaker 4: thing going on. We got Brianna Joy Gray in the
Speaker 4: house and this will be on her channel as well
Speaker 4: the Bad Faith Podcast.
Speaker 5: We'll crossover episode.
Speaker 4: We'll crossover episode for us. Definitely definitely looking forward to it.
Speaker 4: So we're going to discuss Cornell West's campaign and everything
Speaker 4: around that. And I just want everybody in the audience
Speaker 4: and ocause I don't know if we've said this publicly
Speaker 4: before that like he's been invited on multiple times and
Speaker 4: he just hasn't come on yet. And you know, this
Speaker 4: goes all the way back to when he launched, so
Speaker 4: he invited him on, he hasn't come on yet. You know,
Speaker 4: will he eventually? I don't know, you know, it's up
Speaker 4: to him. Balls in his court.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and we had him on before, he had.
Speaker 4: Him on before, Yeah, before he announced his campaign. We're
Speaker 4: going back to when the People's Party thing launched. We
Speaker 4: invited him on all the way back then too, and
Speaker 4: just haven't heard back or anything. But I just don't
Speaker 4: want people to think we're debating Cornell West. But like
Speaker 4: Crystal and Kyle refusing to talk to cornw On West,
Speaker 4: we'd love to talk to Cornon on West. We want
Speaker 4: to have him, you know, we'd love to have him
Speaker 4: on at any point in time to discuss anything and everything.
Speaker 4: So we're going to discuss his campaign a little bit here,
Speaker 4: and so I want to lay out what my position
Speaker 4: is and then bringy. I'll turn it over to you
Speaker 4: and you can respond to it, and Crystally you can
Speaker 4: jump in at some point and tell say what you're feeling.
Speaker 6: We'll go through all the things.
Speaker 4: So here's my first of all in the Democratic primary,
Speaker 4: because I'm a registered Democrat in New York, I will
Speaker 4: be voting for Mary and Williamson. Very happy and proud
Speaker 4: to say that one of the I'm the chief Mary
Speaker 4: and Williamson bro out there.
Speaker 6: I'm leading the.
Speaker 4: Charge now in New York. I'm in a safe state.
Speaker 4: So what I vote for Cornell West in New York. Yes,
Speaker 4: because I have a ninety five percent agreement with him
Speaker 4: on policy, and I think it would be nice to
Speaker 4: get the Green Party in a position where if they
Speaker 4: become more viable because we get ranked choice voting or something,
Speaker 4: it'd be nice to grow their popularity a little bit.
Speaker 4: And when we get rain choice voting, I think they
Speaker 4: kind of automatically become a lot more viable. So I'd
Speaker 4: like to help out in that process. But if I'm
Speaker 4: in a swing state and it's Biden versus Trump, I'm
Speaker 4: at the point now where I don't even think.
Speaker 6: It's a tough call.
Speaker 4: I would definitely vote for Biden because either in that situation,
Speaker 4: even if other people are running, either the Democrat or
Speaker 4: the Republican is going to win. And in my estimation,
Speaker 4: Biden has definitely passed what I would describe as my
Speaker 4: bare minimum purity test. And I think if it's him
Speaker 4: or Trump, or even him or DeSantis or anybody, he
Speaker 4: just blows them out of the water. And so I
Speaker 4: think i'd happily vote for Biden that instance.
Speaker 7: Your response, So, I similarly was voting for Jill Stein
Speaker 7: in New York in twenty sixteen. I did the same,
Speaker 7: and I also happen to believe that strategically, it makes
Speaker 7: the most sense to apply pressure to the Democratic Party
Speaker 7: by voting for not Biden in a primary Marian Williamson
Speaker 7: is obviously the most progressive candidate in the primary, and
Speaker 7: then vote for Cornell Lesson in the general. And I
Speaker 7: know there are a lot of people in my audience
Speaker 7: who are frustrated by that plan because they think that
Speaker 7: it takes something away from Cornell West's run, or it
Speaker 7: affirms the Democratic Party in some way to vote for
Speaker 7: Mary and Williamson running as a Democrat. I don't feel
Speaker 7: that way. I feel it's a little hypocritical to have
Speaker 7: that position, given that we all just enthusiastically voted for
Speaker 7: Bernie twice in the primary the last two rounds. You
Speaker 7: can make a distinction saying that Bernie was an independent
Speaker 7: and he always identified as an independent, and Maryon Williamson
Speaker 7: doesn't have that kind of cloak of distance from the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party. You can say what you want. I don't
Speaker 7: see those things as mutually exclusive in the least, so
Speaker 7: that is also my plan. I differ from you only
Speaker 7: in so far as that I would say it's a
Speaker 7: more difficult choice in a swing state to decide what
Speaker 7: you're going to do. But I frankly respect people who
Speaker 7: feel comfortable. It has not been something that I have
Speaker 7: to contend with, but I respect people who feel comfortable
Speaker 7: voting third party, even in swing states. The reason is this,
Speaker 7: and it goes back to that early bad faith viral
Speaker 7: Noom Chomsky interview and which I asked him about a
Speaker 7: month before the twenty twenty race. Look, I said, I
Speaker 7: take your point. Let's say Trump is an existential threat.
Speaker 7: Let's say that he's a unique threat among all Republican candidates.
Speaker 7: My concern is that every year, because we all vote
Speaker 7: for blue no matter who, because most Democrats vote blue
Speaker 7: no matter who, are most left leaning people do, the
Speaker 7: message that gets sent out is that Democrats don't have
Speaker 7: a bar. You can go as low as you want,
Speaker 7: as close to the Democratic Party as you have Republican
Speaker 7: Party as you want, and there's a ratchet to the
Speaker 7: right effect. And Republicans know that they can keep being
Speaker 7: more and more extreme. And so I want you to
Speaker 7: explain to me what you predict to be the stopping point,
Speaker 7: which we're no longer to. We're no longer saying this
Speaker 7: new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. This
Speaker 7: new Republican is the worst that has ever happened. Tell
Speaker 7: me you're not going to be saying the same thing
Speaker 7: about Ron DeSantis or a big Ramaswami or whatever other
Speaker 7: person comes down the pike. And he was unable, in
Speaker 7: my subjective view, to respond credibly to that claim. So
Speaker 7: if somebody could could tell me strategically what the stopping
Speaker 7: point is going to be of making this argument of
Speaker 7: the lesser of two evils, I would be open to
Speaker 7: the idea that, Okay, this is the last one Donald Trump, Fine,
Speaker 7: he'd tried to steal the election. Fine, that is a
Speaker 7: new line that he has crossed. But absent and acknowledgement
Speaker 7: that we are creating our own destiny by lowering the
Speaker 7: bar in these ways, I'm not comfortable coming out and
Speaker 7: criticizing anybody who no longer wants to be complicit in
Speaker 7: that kind of a system that's enabled the Democratic Party
Speaker 7: to not have a primary, treat Mary and Williamson as
Speaker 7: bad as badly as they've treated her, treat Bernie Sanders
Speaker 7: as badly as they treated him, and openly come out
Speaker 7: and say and say they don't have to hold a free,
Speaker 7: fair election, the DNC argue that in court.
Speaker 1: You know, so let me explain a little bit of
Speaker 1: my position. I think that'll help respond to some of
Speaker 1: what you said there. And I'm also curious to dig
Speaker 1: in a little bit more to your analysis of how
Speaker 1: the Biden administration has actually been in reality. So, last
Speaker 1: election in twenty twenty, I did live in a swing state.
Speaker 1: I lived in Virginia, still live in Virginia, registered in Virginia,
Speaker 1: and it did not feel good to vote for Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: But I decided to vote for Joe Biden, which is
Speaker 1: something I said publicly at the time. But I said
Speaker 1: something very similar to you, which is like, listen, this
Speaker 1: was not easy for me. If you wherever you live,
Speaker 1: swing state, not swing state, et cetera, you do whatever
Speaker 1: you analyze is the right thing to do. And the
Speaker 1: reason that I voted for him, primarily at that time,
Speaker 1: even though I thought he had an atrocious record in
Speaker 1: the Senate, even though you know, complicit in the Iraq War,
Speaker 1: complicit and bad trade deals, complicit, like terrible things on crime,
Speaker 1: all that stuff, right, the primary reason I voted for
Speaker 1: him was because of the National Labor Relations Board and
Speaker 1: because labor politics and building out union power in this country,
Speaker 1: to me is one of the most important goals and
Speaker 1: something that I think we all share and leftists generally believe.
Speaker 1: Now in retrospect, not only do I feel good about
Speaker 1: that vote, he's actually surprised me. Now, I've got all
Speaker 1: kinds of issues right on the National Labor Relations Board
Speaker 1: though specifically, they just issued a ruling which could be
Speaker 1: a complete game changer for unions, And just to explain
Speaker 1: to people a little bit, basically, in the past, bosses
Speaker 1: could union bust with impunity, no accountability. Now the process
Speaker 1: going forward is completely changed. If bosses are caught union busting,
Speaker 1: then that's it. There's no more election, it's canceled. They
Speaker 1: have to recognize the union and start bargaining with them.
Speaker 1: That's the biggest shift in labor relations we've had in
Speaker 1: our lifetime. So that's why at this point I'm not
Speaker 1: only you know it's likely to I'm a Merryan supporter
Speaker 1: as well, but we can all see the most likely
Speaker 1: outcome is it's going to be Trump versus Biden. Not
Speaker 1: only would I say that protecting the Biden National Labor
Speaker 1: Relations Board isn't important enough for me to vote for
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, but it is important enough that I would
Speaker 1: actively encourage.
Speaker 5: But I'm not going to shame them for whatever they
Speaker 5: decide to do.
Speaker 1: But I would actively encourage people who are in a
Speaker 1: swing state to vote for Joe Biden, if for no
Speaker 1: other reason than to protect that board.
Speaker 7: So I think that's a perfectly defensible position. And I
Speaker 7: had this conversation on my podcast in the last episode,
Speaker 7: and there are people who would characterize that position as
Speaker 7: I mean, you've heard the thing, you've been on the internet,
Speaker 7: you know, being too credulous about Biden, or you know,
Speaker 7: being too comfortable in one's own position in life and
Speaker 7: not needing enough change and being happy with the status
Speaker 7: called people say things like that, I think, I think,
Speaker 7: actually that if your priority, if you believe the path
Speaker 7: to meaningful change is going to primarily come through a
Speaker 7: kind of I don't say this dismissively, but a kind
Speaker 7: of labor incrementalism, meaning there are meaningful labor gains that happen,
Speaker 7: but are not the type of which would radically transform
Speaker 7: the system the way that some people want to happen
Speaker 7: in a shorter term, and the way that some people
Speaker 7: might argue Bernie Sanders represented his movements as the goal
Speaker 7: of being Then that's a defensible position. But I also
Speaker 7: I have to hold space for the reality that there
Speaker 7: are people for whom, even as significant as those labor
Speaker 7: gains are, it's simply insufficient. And what they see when
Speaker 7: they look at the trajectory of the last fifty sixty
Speaker 7: years of Democratic Party politics, when they look when they
Speaker 7: read Listen Liberal and see the longer game, the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party making a concerted choice to back away from labor
Speaker 7: in a way that has gone on for decades. It
Speaker 7: isn't necessarily turning around as a consequence of Joe Biden
Speaker 7: having some good NLRB appointments.
Speaker 6: And it's so let me actually and then I want
Speaker 6: to jump into it.
Speaker 1: So Number one, I don't think that in like massively
Speaker 1: increasing union density, I actually don't see that as incremental change.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look at the chart of the
Speaker 1: decline in the middle class and the decline of union density,
Speaker 1: it you'd be hard pressed to find a more significant factor.
Speaker 7: I've but I've made these arguments as well.
Speaker 1: But the other piece is I feel like those same
Speaker 1: pieceeople who are right about the Democratic Party, they were
Speaker 1: right about the analysis and listen liberal right about the
Speaker 1: fact that you had, you know, this free trade bipartisan
Speaker 1: consensus and in large part, a union busting bipartisan consensus. Also,
Speaker 1: don't acknowledge that there actually has been a notable shift
Speaker 1: in the Biden administration. Now, my big issue with the
Speaker 1: Biden ministry. I mean, there's a million of them right
Speaker 1: on foreign policy, I've got problems, But my biggest issue
Speaker 1: economically with the Biden administration is the way they've allowed
Speaker 1: the pandemic relief, the short term panic demic relief programs
Speaker 1: to fall away and leave a lot of ordinary Americans
Speaker 1: more in a more precarious financial position now than they
Speaker 1: were at the beginning of the administration.
Speaker 5: And that's not nothing.
Speaker 1: But when I look at the long term, when I
Speaker 1: look at the fact that listen, with the Inflation Reduction Act,
Speaker 1: with the Chips Act, with Infrastructure Investment, you're talking about
Speaker 1: industrial policy in a way that would have been completely
Speaker 1: unheard of in the Clinton Obama era. When you look
Speaker 1: at not just the NLRB, which I said is like
Speaker 1: the core for me, but also his anti trust appointments
Speaker 1: and the fact they're really trying to reverse decades of
Speaker 1: neoliberal attack on any sort of trust busting. I feel
Speaker 1: like none of those improvements that have made Biden on
Speaker 1: that front way better than Obama, way better than Clinton.
Speaker 1: I just feel like there's no willingness to acknowledge any
Speaker 1: of that whatsoever.
Speaker 7: I don't think the issue is acknowledging it. It's how
Speaker 7: much it matters to you, how weighty that is to you,
Speaker 7: and how much you see those kind of meaningful, find
Speaker 7: common meaningful improvements as really core to the nature of
Speaker 7: the project that you're on. And I think that what
Speaker 7: some people are frustrated by is that this went from
Speaker 7: feeling like, in both left media and left politics, a
Speaker 7: bigger revolutionary project that was going to the core of
Speaker 7: our capitalist system and wanting to radically change the way
Speaker 7: that human lives are valued, what we consider to be
Speaker 7: the nature of our social safety net, what we believe
Speaker 7: to be the nature of what we consider to be
Speaker 7: human rights. And they wanted to join a movement that
Speaker 7: validated what many of us felt intrinsically emotionally for most
Speaker 7: of our lives, that something in the milk very much
Speaker 7: wasn't clean. And Bernie came along and articulated that we
Speaker 7: were it was legitimate for us to be asking for
Speaker 7: something more, and so at this point it does feel
Speaker 7: as though there has been a kind of a bait
Speaker 7: and switch. It's not that what you're describing isn't true
Speaker 7: or legitimate. And I said this on my podcast. If
Speaker 7: your priorities are what you have kind of articulated your
Speaker 7: priorities as being I think it's a perfectly legitimate argument,
Speaker 7: but I have to hold space for the fact that
Speaker 7: for many people it simply is inadequate.
Speaker 6: Wait can I respond, h me, let me jump in here.
Speaker 4: So my issue is that many people on the left
Speaker 4: are i would say, dishonestly refusing to acknowledge any good
Speaker 4: things that were done.
Speaker 6: We could all on the left.
Speaker 4: List like, here's the fifty seven things we hate that
Speaker 4: Biden did, But when something good happens, I'm the only
Speaker 4: one talking about it, and then I get used to
Speaker 4: be in a DNC show.
Speaker 6: Now I'm not like, Look, I'm not blind.
Speaker 4: I think in order to be intellectually honest, you have
Speaker 4: to look at here's the good things that happen, here's
Speaker 4: the bad thing that happen. I'm gonna give them all
Speaker 4: to you, and then you could judge how much you
Speaker 4: value each and which one you way more and how
Speaker 4: that factors into your voting analysis. But I was like
Speaker 4: the poster boy back in the day, or people viewed
Speaker 4: me this way as like he's the purity tester. He's
Speaker 4: like the main purity tester guy. And I didn't vote
Speaker 4: for Biden in twenty twenty because I didn't think he
Speaker 4: would pass my purity test. Now at the time people
Speaker 4: could go back and watch the video. My purity test
Speaker 4: was super fucking lenient. It was like, if I'm convinced
Speaker 4: you're gonna do like two or three of the things
Speaker 4: that I value highly, then I would vote for you,
Speaker 4: because I know it's basically down to just the Democrat
Speaker 4: and the Republican no matter how much we want to
Speaker 4: wish the Green Party or libertarians want to wish the
Speaker 4: Libertarian Party into existence. And so when I look at
Speaker 4: the record again, I could list all the bad things.
Speaker 4: But you just mentioned the NLRB raising overtime pay, or
Speaker 4: you mentioned the thing where you know they automatically recognize
Speaker 4: the union if the bosses try to bust it up.
Speaker 4: There's also the overtime pay rule, where now it's not
Speaker 4: thirty three one thousand dollars, it's about fifty five thousand
Speaker 4: dollars a year where now you get overtime pay. That's
Speaker 4: a huge, huge change, student loan debt reduction. And even Biden,
Speaker 4: even coming back after the Supreme Court tried to slap
Speaker 4: it down and he said, no, I'm gonna try to
Speaker 4: do it through the Higher Education Act. Now there's little
Speaker 4: things we could go after. Oh the interest, right, yes,
Speaker 4: that's bad. I agree with you on that, but we
Speaker 4: got to recognize that that is all things considered a
Speaker 4: step in the right direction. Pulling out of Afghanistan. He
Speaker 4: actually had the balls to do it, even when the
Speaker 4: media was shitting on them relentlessly. And I didn't see
Speaker 4: anybody on the left coming into his defense.
Speaker 6: At that point. A lot of people have I was like,
Speaker 6: the only fucking one it was me.
Speaker 5: I definitely defended him.
Speaker 4: Okay, well then it's like three people I didn't and
Speaker 4: all these oh I'm so anti war, anti war. He
Speaker 4: pulls out of Afghanistan, and it gets it gets messy,
Speaker 4: because that's what happens when you pull out of bars
Speaker 4: and all of sudden, oh my god, you know.
Speaker 7: It's I thought the world good moment for the left.
Speaker 7: I saw a lot of consensus. Good good on you,
Speaker 7: because we were we almost resented and kind of were
Speaker 7: enjoying the extent to which he was getting, you know,
Speaker 7: dog pilot by the mainstream media, and we were the
Speaker 7: only ones defending him.
Speaker 4: So I would quible with that a little bit too
Speaker 4: much defending him. I really didn't what people.
Speaker 7: Are responding to. If I can offer this is not
Speaker 7: the idea that you are accurately describing advancements, good things
Speaker 7: that Joe Biden is doing. I think you could also
Speaker 7: say Obama did some good things.
Speaker 6: No, what Biden is way better than Obama. I your close.
Speaker 7: That's not the point I'm making. It's not that one
Speaker 7: is better than the other. You could also sit here
Speaker 7: and say Obama did good things. Now the way you
Speaker 7: bristled at me, say Matt, I could say, oh, why
Speaker 7: want you just acknowledge that Obama did good things? The
Speaker 7: same with that you're saying that leftist won't acknowledge. They
Speaker 7: bristle when you acknowledged that Biden did good things. And
Speaker 7: it's because we have different standards and we're making different
Speaker 7: kinds of comparisons.
Speaker 4: That's not my issue because they're not even acknowledging the
Speaker 4: good things is my point. I at least of forty
Speaker 4: seven things here, and I've heard nobody talk about any
Speaker 4: of them.
Speaker 7: But let me get to the core of this point.
Speaker 7: The reason that people are frustrated with that kind of
Speaker 7: analysis is because it's been used for so long by
Speaker 7: liberals to justify why people shouldn't be asking for more.
Speaker 7: I'm not saying that that's what you're doing. But if
Speaker 7: you bring up something like student debt, when the consensus
Speaker 7: of all the students experts that I've talked to on
Speaker 7: my podcast, people from the Debt Collective, the Astra tailors
Speaker 7: of the world, the legal experts I brought on, is
Speaker 7: that there was a path toward doing this, to canceling
Speaker 7: all student debt that would not have been steinied by
Speaker 7: the Supreme Court. The same authority that Donald Trump used
Speaker 7: to enact the student debt moratorium, which has been ongoing
Speaker 7: until the beginning of this month for the last three years,
Speaker 7: was the same authority that he could have canceled all
Speaker 7: student debt with the stroke of a pin. He chose
Speaker 7: not to do that because he decided to means test
Speaker 7: the program. He circulated those documents. I got one of
Speaker 7: my inbox last August I believe it was to see
Speaker 7: if you qualify for student debt. It was a very
Speaker 7: easy form. But when he did that, that sorted the
Speaker 7: clock for people to be able to challenge it in court,
Speaker 7: which what six states did. Two of them were successful,
Speaker 7: and now here we are today. Not only did he
Speaker 7: decline to do the unstoppable mechanism to actually cancel all
Speaker 7: student debt, he additionally chose to use a legal authority,
Speaker 7: which when many legal experts said, was the most vulnerable one.
Speaker 7: So you're now saying, no, no, no, he could have used
Speaker 7: the Higher Education Act.
Speaker 6: He did, he did, He could have.
Speaker 7: He could have done that in the first instance.
Speaker 4: But he didn't, and now he tried it again through
Speaker 4: the Higher Education Act. The idea that it's like it's
Speaker 4: a conspiracy. He doesn't want to actually cancel it.
Speaker 8: No.
Speaker 4: He he appealed the case like four or five times,
Speaker 4: and then at the end of it, when the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court said no, you can't do that, he said, fuck you,
Speaker 4: I can, and he did the Higher Education That's exactly
Speaker 4: what we wanted him to do. Then he does it
Speaker 4: and people go, oh, that's not good enough, and it's.
Speaker 7: Like that's that's ridicule Kyle. What we wanted him to
Speaker 7: do was first and foremost, just cancel the student No.
Speaker 6: No, I expected him to do nothing on student debt.
Speaker 4: This is the point I'm trying to get across to you,
Speaker 4: is that I expected nothing from Biden and he did
Speaker 4: way more than I expected.
Speaker 6: Let me be honest about that.
Speaker 5: Conversations, we have different expects.
Speaker 6: Talk about it through my expectations. I'm me.
Speaker 9: Let me.
Speaker 1: I want to pivot this conversation a little bit, because
Speaker 1: what we really have is a tactical does agree. We
Speaker 1: could quibble about student loan debt, he could quibble about
Speaker 1: all kinds of aspects of biden administration. All of us
Speaker 1: would like him to do more. There's no doubt about that.
Speaker 1: Our political but hold on a second, our political our
Speaker 1: political aims are ultimately very similar. But I do think
Speaker 1: the student loan debt example is instructive because it shows
Speaker 1: what has been effective in terms of securing real gains
Speaker 1: versus what has been ineffective. Jill Stein running in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: I don't think she was a spoiler, but the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party thinks she was a spoiler. They put that out
Speaker 1: to the public.
Speaker 5: So in the.
Speaker 1: Theory of change where a third party would force all
Speaker 1: of this revolutionary change on the Democratic Party. That should
Speaker 1: have worked, but instead it served to allow the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party to basically demonize and dismiss third party efforts, and
Speaker 1: then they prop up Joe Biden, so that definitely didn't work. However,
Speaker 1: the fact that Joe Biden had to be on a
Speaker 1: primary debate stage versus Bernie and Marianne and a whole
Speaker 1: lot of Elizabeth Warren, a whole lot of other people
Speaker 1: who were pushing him on student loan debt cancelation forced
Speaker 1: him into a position of doing something when he one
Speaker 1: hundred percent would have done nothing otherwise. And we can
Speaker 1: see that now because you know the fact that they've
Speaker 1: basically like blocked any sort of real democratic price process
Speaker 1: within the democratic price, Mary has made it possible for
Speaker 1: him to literally promise nothing for this next term thus far.
Speaker 1: So you can see how the third party effort was
Speaker 1: not successful in bringing about whatever revolutionary change people want
Speaker 1: to see, and the process that Bernie engaged in and
Speaker 1: that Mary and Williamson is engaging and now was far
Speaker 1: more effective in actually delivering results. And that's what I'm
Speaker 1: focused on.
Speaker 7: So, first of all, you, I think are both fundamentally
Speaker 7: dramatically overestimating and overstating and giving way too much credit
Speaker 7: in the second that you can make your labor point
Speaker 7: the student debt point, absolutely not. Joe Biden promised and
Speaker 7: coerced people to the polls by saying he was going
Speaker 7: to cancel at least ten thousand dollars of everybody's student
Speaker 7: loan debt and moreover, cancel all student loan debt for
Speaker 7: graduates of HBC used. And he went down to Georgia,
Speaker 7: I state that he not only needed to win for
Speaker 7: the presidency, but needed to win for the Senate, and
Speaker 7: where there are three of the major hbc us in
Speaker 7: the United States of America, made that promise, and people
Speaker 7: knocked doors and turned people out to the polls. The
Speaker 7: basis of that promise, which he immediately stopped talking about
Speaker 7: the second he got elected and renegged upon. He also knew,
Speaker 7: he knew the authority that he had to cancel law
Speaker 7: student debt. And I know because all of these student
Speaker 7: debt advocates have been talking about how they were directly
Speaker 7: liaising with his office and communicating these points, and they
Speaker 7: chose to ignore them and do a plan that he
Speaker 7: knew could be abstracted. You can say it's it's not
Speaker 7: a conspiracy theory, that's conspiracytorial thinking. But it's either a
Speaker 7: conspiracy or as an idiot. Those are the options, and
Speaker 7: I'm not especially comfortable and validating either of those things. Now,
Speaker 7: you you were saying that you are looking through the
Speaker 7: prism of your own perspective.
Speaker 4: I was saying I expected nothing from him, like we
Speaker 4: all expected nothing from him.
Speaker 7: Absolutely not the people that he expect from him.
Speaker 4: I expected nothing of Joe Biden. He was the guy
Speaker 4: who brought us NAFTA. He's the guy who brought us
Speaker 4: the Iraq War. He's the guy who wrote the Patriot,
Speaker 4: actor wrote the Wail of him.
Speaker 7: When a presidential candidate makes a promise to people and
Speaker 7: lies to them in order to get them to go
Speaker 7: to the polls, I believe it. It's my job as
Speaker 7: a member of independent media to make it clear so
Speaker 7: that people don't fall for those kinds of mistakes going forward. People,
Speaker 7: if Biden wants to run, is I'm a milk toast
Speaker 7: incrementalist who's just better than Trump. He can feel free
Speaker 7: to do that all day and night, and then he
Speaker 7: would have lived up to the expectations that he set
Speaker 7: for himself.
Speaker 6: In the context of run campaign Milk Toast, he.
Speaker 7: Promised to cancel all student debt for every graduate of
Speaker 7: an HBCU and ten thousand dollars to twenty thousand dollars
Speaker 7: of student debt for people who earn less than one
Speaker 7: hundred and twenty five thousand dollars a year. Now, that
Speaker 7: might not matter to you, and and I've defended, I defend,
Speaker 7: I've offend you guys against claims that you know you
Speaker 7: don't care about this stuff because you know you're out
Speaker 7: of touch and it doesn't affect you in material. I
Speaker 7: think that some of those claims get really silly and
Speaker 7: overly personalized. But Biden made a choice to tell forty
Speaker 7: four million Americans who have student debt that he was
Speaker 7: not only going to not fulfill his promise to them,
Speaker 7: but that in the middle of the debt ceiling argument
Speaker 7: of a couple of months ago, the one thing that
Speaker 7: he was going to bargain away to get the debt
Speaker 7: ceiling pass was ending the student loan moratorium. So now
Speaker 7: it's not me, I'm not I'm not the one in
Speaker 7: control of whoever votes he has to make the case
Speaker 7: of those forty four million Americans, who's who's he's starting
Speaker 7: their student debta?
Speaker 4: Right stronger or weaker than what you expected, because it's
Speaker 4: way stronger what I expect nothing from amongst the real.
Speaker 1: Question though, is we all want all of the debt
Speaker 1: to be canceled?
Speaker 10: Duh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course what is going to most What is
Speaker 1: the most likely path to get us there? And honest,
Speaker 1: hold on, but I don't see how Cornell us getting
Speaker 1: five percent of the vote and unintentionally helping to re
Speaker 1: elect Trump that doesn't get us.
Speaker 7: There at all? Get into that.
Speaker 1: So whereas if you have a primary contender actually able
Speaker 1: face to face to pressure him, we have feed in
Speaker 1: the way that can potentially.
Speaker 7: Work armast Cornell.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have to be exclusive.
Speaker 1: But do you think that the project defeating Trump is
Speaker 1: worthwhile at all? Because I would turn back on you
Speaker 1: ask the question like where's the bottom of the lesser evil?
Speaker 6: Question?
Speaker 5: Like where where does that end?
Speaker 1: I would turn it back on you and say, where
Speaker 1: does it become not just a lesser evil, but like, actually, this.
Speaker 5: Person is significantly better?
Speaker 1: And I would say that Biden for my disappointments with him,
Speaker 1: for all of the things that I talk about plenty,
Speaker 1: including disappointments on student loan debt, including on the pandemic
Speaker 1: relief that I talked about, including on the real waste,
Speaker 1: all these things, right, Ukraine, At what point, though, do
Speaker 1: you acknowledge that this person is a lot better than
Speaker 1: Donald Trump? And so when you're in this binary choice
Speaker 1: where let's not pretend like Cornell West is going to
Speaker 1: be president of the United States, it is worth making
Speaker 1: the choice in that situation to reelect Joe Biden and
Speaker 1: get the NLRB, and get the antitrust stuff and get
Speaker 1: what is at hand to be gotten in this moment
Speaker 1: and live to fight another day.
Speaker 7: So everyone, Crystal, somebody might say, and people did make
Speaker 7: this exact argument against Bernie Sanders. Fine, he's on the stage,
Speaker 7: but I'm not going to vote for him. I'm not
Speaker 7: going to weaken the person who's ultimately obviously going to
Speaker 7: be the present United States. I'm gonna why not vote
Speaker 7: for Biden in the primaries? Why And it's you're wrinkling
Speaker 7: your ball because it's a ridiculous argument. This I completely agree.
Speaker 7: I don't see the argument for Marianne and against Cornell West.
Speaker 7: They have nothing to do with each other. You can
Speaker 7: you can vote for Marianna in a primary. You can
Speaker 7: be happy that she's on the debate stage, which obviously
Speaker 7: aren't allowing, which is material to this argument. I've got
Speaker 7: to say, some people are You're saying, what is the Green.
Speaker 9: Party going to do?
Speaker 7: The Democratic Party has demonstrated that it won't host a
Speaker 7: free and fair and open part.
Speaker 1: I get that, But how does Cornell West getting five
Speaker 1: percent of the vote and helping unintentionally to re elect Trump?
Speaker 5: So how does that move us towards our So two things.
Speaker 7: One, you said this in the now viral clip that
Speaker 7: just framing Cornell West as the spoiler. Looking at those
Speaker 7: poles in those polls that you referenced, Biden is losing
Speaker 7: in both of them, with or without Cornell West in
Speaker 7: the race.
Speaker 1: Now Cornell West makes it worse. I just want to
Speaker 1: clarify one thing. I'm not blaming. People are saying like
Speaker 1: it's their fault for Trump getting reelect or whatever. But
Speaker 1: I am saying, we would like it if the way
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party responded to Cornell West would be to
Speaker 1: cancel all the student But we know that's not reality.
Speaker 1: So we know that what ought to happen and the
Speaker 1: reality of what will happen are two very different things.
Speaker 7: Let's get to the second point. Yeah, you framed the
Speaker 7: twenty sixteen votes for Jill Stein and the reaction of
Speaker 7: the Democratic Party subsequently as evidence that a concerted movement
Speaker 7: effort to withhold one's votes has been proven ineffective. It
Speaker 7: is obviously the case, Crystal, that there was not a
Speaker 7: concerted effort in twenty sixteen, or any kind of structural
Speaker 7: movement to withhold one vote for Hillary Clinton in favor
Speaker 7: of Jill Stein. It was just a bunch of us
Speaker 7: angry Bernie bros. A very small number, by the way,
Speaker 7: because we all know sitting here that more Bernie Sanders
Speaker 7: voters in twenty sixteen benthony and vote for Hillary Clinton
Speaker 7: than Hillary Clinton voters in two thousand and eight benthony
Speaker 7: and voted for Brock Obama. We all know these statistics.
Speaker 7: We've been saying them back at neo liberals for the
Speaker 7: last five six whatever years. That being said, there was
Speaker 7: no argument to control the media narrative and present an
Speaker 7: opportunity for actual leverage and change. So there wasn't like
Speaker 7: a group. There was no spokesperson, there was no politician.
Speaker 7: There was no left media that was saying here, I
Speaker 7: have an organized movement, an organized group of people who
Speaker 7: are willing to actually change their mind and vote for
Speaker 7: the Democratic nominee and exchange of various concessions that didn't exist.
Speaker 7: And I'm, by the way, not advocating for it. I
Speaker 7: know that some of my friends, like Nathan Robinson, have
Speaker 7: said that Cornell West should do exactly that, say that
Speaker 7: he'd be willing to drop out and exchange your various concessions.
Speaker 7: I think that's better than nothing, and that's more than Frankly,
Speaker 7: I love Marianne and I hope she's successful, but that's
Speaker 7: more than Marianne is likely to get out of this. However,
Speaker 7: that is not even my plant, that my perspective.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: What I am saying, though, is that, knowing that the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party is fundamentally not willing to be fair to
Speaker 7: rig the election, they're willing to change the order of
Speaker 7: the states, they are willing to completely block marian out
Speaker 7: of the media, it feels rich to say that running
Speaker 7: within the Democratic Party is manifestly and demonstrably more effective
Speaker 7: and actually changing the out.
Speaker 6: Because of the structural barrier.
Speaker 7: Then Cornells, who at very least. You're keeping very dismissive
Speaker 7: Kyle about this match.
Speaker 4: Well, I've said like two words in the past ten minutes. Okay,
Speaker 4: so I'm not being dismissive about anything. I haven't gotten
Speaker 4: a fucking worder.
Speaker 7: Okay, what's what is it that you're champing.
Speaker 4: The structural barriers against running as a third party is
Speaker 4: rigged as it is by the DNC against outsider Democrats,
Speaker 4: which it definitely is. It's even more rigged against third parties,
Speaker 4: which is why they always get like three percent of
Speaker 4: the vote.
Speaker 6: Literally, Bernie got forty three percent of the vote.
Speaker 7: Which is literally why people feel it is a structural
Speaker 7: advantage to get someone like Cornell Wes to five percent
Speaker 7: of the vote so they can get federal matching funds.
Speaker 6: To me as the voter thirty percent as a Democrat,
Speaker 6: for me.
Speaker 7: As a voter in New York, I'm not interested in
Speaker 7: shoring up the Democratic Party.
Speaker 6: No, that's him getting his ideas out of it's shoring
Speaker 6: up Cornell.
Speaker 7: I am not a Democrat.
Speaker 4: I understand that, that's very clear. But I'm saying that
Speaker 4: would shore up Cornell West.
Speaker 7: And the people who also don't want to vote for
Speaker 7: Joe Biden under any circumstances, are not Democrats, And fundamentally
Speaker 7: you can make her argument. I think it's the perfectly
Speaker 7: legitimate argument to make two democrats. I think that Democrats
Speaker 7: might think that Joe Biden is a manifestly better Democrat
Speaker 7: than other Democrats.
Speaker 1: It's not about whether you're a Democrat or a Republican.
Speaker 1: It's about what are your political goals? And I think
Speaker 1: that how you share a lot of the same political
Speaker 1: there's a big one that we do. But hold on
Speaker 1: so I still don't understand. Just lay out for me,
Speaker 1: like what in the ideal scenario happens, and how does
Speaker 1: that constitute any sort of revolutionary change or help to
Speaker 1: further the goals that we largely share.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think, for one, getting federal matching funds for
Speaker 7: third party candidates, since I believe third parties are going
Speaker 7: to be a much better vehicle to actual meaningful change
Speaker 7: in this country than the Democratic Party, is infinitely more
Speaker 7: significant a goal.
Speaker 5: But the parties having gotten a single electoral vote, and it's.
Speaker 1: True because I mean, look at Rossboro had all the
Speaker 1: money in the world, it didn't matter.
Speaker 4: Don't you agree that ran choice voting needs to come first?
Speaker 4: That's the important question. Do you agree that if we
Speaker 4: get rank choice voting, then yes, overnight third parties become
Speaker 4: more viable.
Speaker 6: Do we get them? It's they're not viable.
Speaker 7: I think that Cornell West, running in a in a
Speaker 7: general election where he can, he has been doing this.
Speaker 7: He's been talking about raine choice voting interviews, but continuing
Speaker 7: to talk about how the onus is on the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party to prevent the spoiler effect. He is in a
Speaker 7: position now running in a general election. Every time he
Speaker 7: goes on TV to say, if you're upset at meet
Speaker 7: at being a spoiler, you need to look at the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party, who across the country for the last decades,
Speaker 7: has been purposefully undermining any ballot measures that effectively put
Speaker 7: into effect rank choice voting in Maine, in North Carolina,
Speaker 7: the way they attacked Matthew Hoe. I am not the
Speaker 7: enemy they are. And that's the burden shifting, the narrative
Speaker 7: burden shifting. I think the left should be engaged in
Speaker 7: right now to the extent that you think that Cornell
Speaker 7: West can ruin Biden's chances. Isn't it Biden's responsibility to
Speaker 7: find those votes not among disaffected third partiers who he
Speaker 7: doesn't who don't owe him anything anyway, but the tens
Speaker 7: of thousands of millions of disaffected Democrats who aren't going
Speaker 7: to vote for him. We've all talked about this together.
Speaker 7: In Wisconsin in twenty and sixteen, there were eighty eight
Speaker 7: thousand registered black voters who voted in twenty twelve who
Speaker 7: declined to vote in twenty and sixteen. That's like two
Speaker 7: or three times the margin by which Hillary Clinton lost
Speaker 7: and Matt stayed alone. And you know, we're sitting here
Speaker 7: talking about whether or not Cornell West is going to
Speaker 7: pull some third party voters away, but I can the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: It's the difference between what I would love to happen
Speaker 1: and the reality that we have experienced now. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've we tried it before in twenty sixteen. It did
Speaker 1: not help what they.
Speaker 5: Tried in twenty sixteen, the third party effort.
Speaker 1: Jill Stein was not a spoiler. It is not those
Speaker 1: voters fault who voted for you, like you guys that
Speaker 1: voted for jill Stein, but.
Speaker 4: She got blamed and that was further marginalized as a
Speaker 4: result of it.
Speaker 1: So I just I don't see the connection. If I did,
Speaker 1: I would love to vote for Cornell West. It would
Speaker 1: feel way better to vote for Cornell West. I share
Speaker 1: his politics almost one hundred percent, but I don't see
Speaker 1: the connection between voting for Cornell West and achieving any
Speaker 1: of the aims. And I see a much more direct
Speaker 1: connection between protecting the Biden Natural Labor Relations Board and
Speaker 1: allowing this little budding, exciting, amazing, potentially transformational labor movement
Speaker 1: to actually grow. Whereas if Trump gets re elected, which
Speaker 1: is listen, it's the fact, based on how the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party is going to respond to Cornell West's election bid,
Speaker 1: it is more likely that Donald Trump gets elected with
Speaker 1: Cornell West in the race, And that to me is
Speaker 1: a massive lust because we know what his record is,
Speaker 1: we know what his National Labor Relations Board we was,
Speaker 1: we know who his labor secretaries were and how they
Speaker 1: were engaged in all this union busting, and so I
Speaker 1: see a much more direct connection between that moving the
Speaker 1: ball in our direction. Then you know, Cornell West getting
Speaker 1: five percent and either his candidacy not really mattering at
Speaker 1: all or being used once again to you know, smear
Speaker 1: the left and marginalize the left and say these are
Speaker 1: just the people that are interested in getting Trump elected, so.
Speaker 7: To that second point, I'm gonna be honest, not only
Speaker 7: do I not care about arguments of the left is
Speaker 7: going to be smeared. I think it's silly because no
Speaker 7: matter what we do, the left is going to get smeared.
Speaker 7: Burning one Nevada and it was, oh my god, we're
Speaker 7: going to decapitate people in Central Park.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 5: It is?
Speaker 7: It is, I think deeply unrealistic to expect that there's
Speaker 7: ever going to be a left movement that genuinely challenges
Speaker 7: power in this country that's not going to be smeared.
Speaker 7: And if you are choosing your political strategy on the
Speaker 7: basis of what's going to get you a pad on
Speaker 7: the head from MSNBC and I know this, I'm not
Speaker 7: That's not what I'm not. I don't mean to mischaracter
Speaker 7: raise you, but that is.
Speaker 1: But I'm not saying, listen, that's fine, and I agree
Speaker 1: with you. Left is going to be smeared, But the
Speaker 1: question is what is actually going to.
Speaker 7: Move a ball?
Speaker 5: And I just don't matter because I don't.
Speaker 6: See his policy is all the matters.
Speaker 1: See how Cornell West getting five percent and helping to
Speaker 1: reelect Trump owns up with things going like.
Speaker 7: That, Crystal, he doesn't. He gets five percent, and then
Speaker 7: the Green Party a third party effort, it gets stronger
Speaker 7: and more well funded and more able to compete in
Speaker 7: future election.
Speaker 4: So we have ranked choice voting, there is no even
Speaker 4: one percent viability for them?
Speaker 6: Can you admit that? Can you acknowledge that? I think
Speaker 6: that it's.
Speaker 4: Until we get ranked choice voting, no third party has
Speaker 4: any chance in hell?
Speaker 6: You agree with that?
Speaker 11: Right?
Speaker 7: Think has been doing most of the rank Who do
Speaker 7: you think.
Speaker 6: I can answer? It's a simple one.
Speaker 7: Can I answer it in my own time, in my
Speaker 7: own words, Kyle, respectfully?
Speaker 4: The simple one, the rank choice voting thing. If we
Speaker 4: get rank choice voting, may I go around.
Speaker 7: I do a lot of podcasts, and I don't know
Speaker 7: what's going on right now. It might be the phase
Speaker 7: of the moon. We had the double moon last month.
Speaker 7: But I'm getting a little frustrated with feeling shut it
Speaker 7: down and disrespect it in every single space that I
Speaker 7: go into. I gotta say, I promise I won't to
Speaker 7: answer your your question. K sit tight, I got it
Speaker 7: coming for you.
Speaker 6: I'll sit tight.
Speaker 7: I who do you think has been doing the bulk
Speaker 7: and the best funded ranchoice voting advocacy? In terms of
Speaker 7: getting it on ballots and getting a past the United
Speaker 7: States of.
Speaker 6: America third party voters.
Speaker 7: The Libertarian Party, Yeah, because unlike the Green Party, I'm
Speaker 7: no like fan of the Libertarian Party, but for obvious reasons,
Speaker 7: they were enormously better funded than the Green Party, and they,
Speaker 7: as a consequence, have been able to make much greater
Speaker 7: gains and actually getting ranked choice voting passed around the country.
Speaker 7: What I'm saying is that there's a tangible material benefit
Speaker 7: to getting more money for a Green Party, whatever third
Speaker 7: party happens to be. But right now all we have
Speaker 7: is the Green Party, for obvious reasons, getting them more
Speaker 7: money to do the work across the country to advance
Speaker 7: third parties ranchoice voting rather is exactly the goal that
Speaker 7: you're articulating. So yes, I do see a direct connection
Speaker 7: between your goal, your stated goal of getting rankedchoice voting
Speaker 7: and voting for the Green Party. You know who's not
Speaker 7: going to fight for rank choice voting, the Democratic Party.
Speaker 6: Here's my point.
Speaker 4: Here's my point there there's not even a one percent
Speaker 4: chance or a point one percent chance of Cornell West
Speaker 4: winning unless or until we get ranked choice voting.
Speaker 6: So I have to be honest.
Speaker 4: I feel like it's self disenfranchisement to really like put
Speaker 4: all your effort into third parties before we get Raan
Speaker 4: Chos putting the car before the horse. In my opinion,
Speaker 4: that's my point. And on the issue of Democrats versus Republicans,
Speaker 4: we know either the Democrat or the Republican is gonna win.
Speaker 4: And clearly we have a disagreement in terms of how
Speaker 4: good of a job Joe Biden is doing, because, like
Speaker 4: I said, I expected nothing of him, Brianna, I expected
Speaker 4: this is the guy who brought the Iraq War and
Speaker 4: the Patriot Act in NAFTA, and he's like the poster
Speaker 4: child of the conservative, Democrat and the neoliberal. But then
Speaker 4: he gets in office and he does all these things
Speaker 4: which shock me. He massively reduced the drone war by
Speaker 4: over ninety percent. He like I said, pulled out of Afghanistan.
Speaker 4: The Supreme Court overturned the EPA's ability to regulate greenhouse
Speaker 4: gas emissions, and the Democrats slipped into the ira A
Speaker 4: provision that redefines carbon as a pollutant, which then allows
Speaker 4: the EPA to start protect in the environment again. If
Speaker 4: we didn't get that, and yes, that was brought to
Speaker 4: us by Democrats, we would be beyond fucked on the
Speaker 4: issue of climate change. We still are, but we'd be
Speaker 4: even more fucked if the EPA couldn't do basic EPA stuff.
Speaker 4: We have project labor agreements for hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 4: construction workers that came to us from Biden. Fifteen dollar
Speaker 4: minimum wage for federal contractors and employees that's from Biden.
Speaker 4: Gun and reform with red flag laws, and closing the
Speaker 4: Boyfriend LOOPOL those are definitely good things. Katanji Brown Jackson
Speaker 4: on the Court, a George Floyd executive order to create
Speaker 4: a Registry of abusive cops. We have the Pack Act,
Speaker 4: which is healthcare for veterans exposed to toxic burn pitch,
Speaker 4: which every single Republican voted against. He added eight hundred
Speaker 4: thousand manufacturing jobs. I didn't expect any of these things.
Speaker 4: So when I talk about Biden, the way I do
Speaker 4: is because none of these things were on the menu
Speaker 4: and we got them. So now when I look at
Speaker 4: the fact it's either going to be Trump or Biden,
Speaker 4: a standard generic Republican or standard generic Democrat, the way
Speaker 4: I feel now versus the way I felt in the
Speaker 4: past is like, oh, this is definitely way better. If
Speaker 4: you asked me in twenty nineteen or twenty twenty, I'd
Speaker 4: be like, I don't know, man, flip a coin fifty
Speaker 4: two percent. Maybe a Democrat's a little bit better than
Speaker 4: a Republican. Now I'm looking at it like it's not
Speaker 4: even close. One blows the other out of the water.
Speaker 4: And all I care about is the policy. And when
Speaker 4: we have all these policies, I mean, we have a
Speaker 4: fifteen percent corporate minimum tax rate. Now that is not
Speaker 4: something we had previously. You'd have corporations paying nothing in taxes,
Speaker 4: or they'd even get a negative tax rate, which is
Speaker 4: a subsidy effectively from the taxpayers. These things are not nothing.
Speaker 4: We have a one percent tax on stock buybacks. They're
Speaker 4: cracking down a wealthy tax cheese. Like, all these things
Speaker 4: are very good. They're objectively good. So do you agree
Speaker 4: that Biden is better than what we expected on the left?
Speaker 7: Maybe you've already said that your expectations on the ground,
Speaker 7: and it seems like he's surpassed your expectations. He has
Speaker 7: not surpassed mine. I don't know what you want.
Speaker 6: Me to say, but he's not better than what you thought.
Speaker 7: It's not better than what I thought he really let.
Speaker 6: Me know to be better than I did for sure, well.
Speaker 7: I expected him to. Well, I didn't really expect him
Speaker 7: to fulfill his pan campaign promises. But I'm not going
Speaker 7: to pat him on the back when he's so flagrantly
Speaker 7: light about them.
Speaker 2: Now, there's been a lot of talk by elon Mosk
Speaker 2: about free speech and about how and when to bow
Speaker 2: to the wishes of authoritarian governments, censorship and all of that.
Speaker 2: But one case that we definitely wanted to highlight is
Speaker 2: what's happening with Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 3: Let's ahead and put this up there on the screen
Speaker 3: for people who don't know.
Speaker 2: Saudi Arabia is a place where Twitter and or x
Speaker 2: I guess is now currently known, is extraordinarily popular, It's
Speaker 2: very important in Saudi society, and currently there is a
Speaker 2: lawsuit going on right now that says that Twitter and
Speaker 2: or x is helping Saudi Arabia actually commit grave human
Speaker 2: rights abusers against its users, including by disclosing confidential user
Speaker 2: data at the request of Saudi authorities quote at a
Speaker 2: much higher rate than it has for the US, UK
Speaker 2: and or Canada. The lawsuit was actually brought last May
Speaker 2: by arij Al Sadhan, the sister of a Saudi worker
Speaker 2: who has forcibly disappeared and sentenced to twenty years in prison.
Speaker 2: Surrounds the surrounding infiltration of a California company by three
Speaker 2: Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as employees in
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen twenty fifteen, and led to the erec of
Speaker 2: the brother and the exposure of the quote identity of
Speaker 2: thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later
Speaker 2: reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government's crackdown
Speaker 2: on dissent. They have now updated their claim last week
Speaker 2: to include new allegations how Twitter willfully ignored or had
Speaker 2: knowledge of the Saudi government's campaign to ferret out critics,
Speaker 2: but because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close
Speaker 2: ties to the Saudi government, which is a top investor
Speaker 2: in the company, provided assistance to the Kingdom. Now clearly
Speaker 2: what they actually said is that this was under the
Speaker 2: leadership of them chief executive Jack Dorsey. The question though,
Speaker 2: is how Twitter the company will be actually handling this
Speaker 2: as we go forward, and especially important in the light
Speaker 2: of what's currently happening right now. Let's put this place
Speaker 2: up there on the screen. A Saudi man has just
Speaker 2: been sentenced to death after his tweets were criticizing the
Speaker 2: country's leadership. Saudi activists say that his tweets and his
Speaker 2: retweets were presented as the evidence of his so called
Speaker 2: crime of insulting the case or the Crown Prince and
Speaker 2: then supporting a terrorist ideology. So what you can see here,
Speaker 2: Crystal is the analysis of the case is the guy
Speaker 2: had ten followers and he mostly retweeted posts critical of MBS,
Speaker 2: and now he is being literally sentenced to death. He
Speaker 2: is the father of seven and a retired teacher. There's
Speaker 2: also a question here about how they got his user
Speaker 2: information because he ran two anonymous accounts on the site.
Speaker 2: On x he was not a public account. So all
Speaker 2: of this is really important around how Elon is going
Speaker 2: to be handling not only such requests, but is he
Speaker 2: going to speak out against what's happening here, against this
Speaker 2: man getting sentenced to death for something he did on
Speaker 2: your platforms completely insane Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, and this is super relevant because put this
Speaker 1: last piece up on the screen. Saudi Prince all will
Speaker 1: Lead is Twitter's second largest shareholder. Saudi government officials have
Speaker 1: become incredibly significant in terms of funding Twitter overall, which
Speaker 1: is why you know, always when a government is pressuring
Speaker 1: a social media company to do whatever, that becomes a
Speaker 1: very complicated set of issues for whoever.
Speaker 5: Is running that company.
Speaker 1: But when you have a lot of cash involved as well,
Speaker 1: it makes it even more difficult. There's actually a lot
Speaker 1: of layers to this because, first of all, Jack Dorsey,
Speaker 1: one of the areas where he has been critical of
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, including on our show when we interviewed him,
Speaker 1: was about Musk's approach to government requests with regard to
Speaker 1: the platform, and Dorsey had to have tried to have
Speaker 1: more of a consistent at that level sort of free
Speaker 1: speech principle where it wasn't just about okay, what are
Speaker 1: what areever the laws of the land are, That's what
Speaker 1: I'm going to abide by. Elon has explicitly stated he
Speaker 1: has a different view, which is that whatever is legal
Speaker 1: in that country, whether they have a dictator or whatever
Speaker 1: the situation is, that's what they're going to abide by.
Speaker 1: That's what he used to justify, you know, censorship of
Speaker 1: I Believe, as a BBC documentary about India, about the
Speaker 1: Indian Prime minister. That's what he used to justify the
Speaker 1: censoring of an investigative journalist in Turkey. That's been his
Speaker 1: sort of like Okay, this is my guidelines, this is
Speaker 1: how I operate. So number one, since this happened under
Speaker 1: Jack Dorsey, you can see how even with his stated principles,
Speaker 1: clearly he wasn't always living up to what he was
Speaker 1: claiming he was doing. And number two, you see in
Speaker 1: the case of this man who's being put to death
Speaker 1: because of something he said at Twitter. I mean, this
Speaker 1: is a really dramatic case in point test of the
Speaker 1: Elon Musk principle of like, okay, well, if this is
Speaker 1: legal in Saudi, are you just cool with it? Like
Speaker 1: even when it's you know, people are being rounded up
Speaker 1: and sentenced to death for exercising, you know, the most
Speaker 1: basic understanding of free speech.
Speaker 5: Are you still.
Speaker 1: Okay with that if it is technically legal under that jury?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that that's a poor standard to hold.
Speaker 3: It's a terrible sting, but.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what he has articulated to be his guiding principle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredibly dumb.
Speaker 2: Look, this is the problem with owning Twitter, with owning
Speaker 2: or x with having a platform which engages in speech
Speaker 2: and then holding ideals here and trying to balance business
Speaker 2: and all of that. He willingly stepped forward into it
Speaker 2: with a free speech quote absolutist position. So I mean
Speaker 2: you're supposed to abide by that. Just saying you're going
Speaker 2: along with government regulations, I mean then, and you know,
Speaker 2: every dictatorial government on earth will just pass whatever, you know,
Speaker 2: thing that they want you to do, and you're just
Speaker 2: going to do it. That's not how we should American
Speaker 2: companies should operate, and if they are well, we should
Speaker 2: absolutely change the lot.
Speaker 3: In order to make sure that they don't do that.
Speaker 2: So anyways, lots of interesting stuff going on here, but
Speaker 2: first and foremost, just what a ridiculous and barbarous decision
Speaker 2: or to slaughter somebody, probably behead them publicly for the
Speaker 2: crime of.
Speaker 3: Posting posting anonymously your ten followers.
Speaker 5: Unbelievable, unreal.
Speaker 3: Okay, we'll see guys later. Hilarious moment.
Speaker 2: In a recent new interview with Trump, he wanted to debate,
Speaker 2: not do the GOP debates somebody else.
Speaker 3: I'm not even going to tease it.
Speaker 12: Let's take a lesson ninety million people and the only thing.
Speaker 12: I think that might draw an audience that even approaches
Speaker 12: that would be if you were to sit down with
Speaker 12: the Duchess of Sussex, Megan Markele and Prince Harry. They
Speaker 12: don't like you much, would you do that for the ratings?
Speaker 8: Well, I don't know that that. On nightbe I said
Speaker 8: that I don't think they're very appropriate what they're saying,
Speaker 8: what they're doing. And I didn't like the way she
Speaker 8: dealt with the Queen. I became very friendly with the Queen.
Speaker 8: She was an incredible woman, ninety five. She was so shocked,
Speaker 8: she was one hundred percent. When you watch Biden, you said,
Speaker 8: this is a different planet. But they treated her with
Speaker 8: great disrespect and I didn't like it. And I didn't
Speaker 8: like the idea that they were getting us security when
Speaker 8: they came over here. Now I think it's it's not
Speaker 8: a good situation going on with the two of them,
Speaker 8: But I didn't know that they don't like. Somebody mention
Speaker 8: it might be possible they wouldn't be the only ones.
Speaker 12: But I mean that would get ratings, wouldn't it.
Speaker 8: Oh, if you want to set it up, let's set
Speaker 8: it up. Let's let's go do something. I'd love to
Speaker 8: debate here. I would love it, all right.
Speaker 2: I need this to happen obviously, First I need Trump
Speaker 2: to do the actual GP debates too. I think it's
Speaker 2: good democracy, et cetera. But I need to see this debate.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just it would be such great content.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I just there's so much to say. I mean,
Speaker 2: for me, everyone knows. Look, yes, it's it's true. I
Speaker 2: can't stand Megan Markle or Prince Harry. I think they're
Speaker 2: complete narcissists. Of course, the South Park episode on them
Speaker 2: nailed it the whole we want privacy thing. They are
Speaker 2: so lazy as well. After the revelations about their Spotify deal,
Speaker 2: where I mean, I just can't imagine that, Crystal, you
Speaker 2: having somebody else sit in for you and do an
Speaker 2: interview and then come in and record your voice on
Speaker 2: top of that. That's so crazy when you're getting paid
Speaker 2: millions of dollars and they were doing this like one
Speaker 2: a week or something like that for their pod. So anyway,
Speaker 2: I just thought it was hilarious. It was one of
Speaker 2: those where it will never happen. I kind of wish
Speaker 2: it would happen. It would be like a throwback to
Speaker 2: the old days. But Hugh Hewett is not wrong that
Speaker 2: a lot of people would watch it. So they watched
Speaker 2: the interview.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was such a like random question but up
Speaker 5: getting response.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know what made him think of that, but
Speaker 1: it ended up getting an incredible response. I mean, listen,
Speaker 1: I don't even know what to point to make I
Speaker 1: kind of disagree with you. I don't know that I
Speaker 1: could handle this thing, like there's just no one to
Speaker 1: cheer for. It would be facing content, but I just
Speaker 1: don't know if I could take it. So I'm hoping
Speaker 1: this remains in the land of fantasy.
Speaker 3: Really, oh no, this would just be incredible.
Speaker 2: I mean, it'd be one of those She's so she's
Speaker 2: got the same thing that Commas got going on that
Speaker 2: like Aaron sorkinesque, like wants to be a world historical figure.
Speaker 2: My favorite story about Magan Markle was apparently it was
Speaker 2: during the Child Task Credit or something like that, not
Speaker 2: Child There was some legislation where she was and she
Speaker 2: somehow got the individual cell phone numbers for US senators
Speaker 2: and would cold called them and they'd be like hello,
Speaker 2: and they're like, this is Megan Markle. I'd like to
Speaker 2: and they were like, who, like, what makes you think
Speaker 2: I care what you think about this legislation literally at all.
Speaker 1: I just like I don't really care, Like I generally.
Speaker 5: Find them annoying, but like that's as deep as it goes.
Speaker 1: But there seems to be this deep vein on the
Speaker 1: right of just absolute hatred, obsessive hatred of these two
Speaker 1: people who have no real power. There's sort of like
Speaker 1: cultural media dilettants, and don't I don't really understand it,
Speaker 1: Like I don't really understand why there's such a thing around.
Speaker 2: I think that there was the attempt the media creation
Speaker 2: of like the nart to embrace and to like to
Speaker 2: embrace and to respect the narcissism fundamentally of Megan Markle
Speaker 2: and Prince Harry who were trying to destroy a one
Speaker 2: thousand year old institution just because they.
Speaker 3: Thought they were better than them.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I find that just like you know, as
Speaker 2: a semi traditionalists, like with respect for norms and all that,
Speaker 2: I find that just like deeply offensive. I think that
Speaker 2: there's a lot of stuff that you can say about
Speaker 2: the Royal family of legitimate critiques, and I don't think
Speaker 2: any of theirs was real or it was real really
Speaker 2: at all, and like.
Speaker 1: The Trump people are not really known for their like
Speaker 1: respect for norms.
Speaker 2: Yes and no, I mean I think that there is
Speaker 2: like a reverence so to speak for I don't know.
Speaker 2: I can't explain. I can only tell you why I
Speaker 2: can't stand her. And I think a lot of it
Speaker 2: is media as well.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, I mean, the car.
Speaker 2: Crash is the most famous thing where I mean people
Speaker 2: credulously you know, looked at it and basically people credulously
Speaker 2: took them at their word that they were like in
Speaker 2: some harrowing car case or any of these when they're
Speaker 2: clearly just looking for attention. And I don't know, for me,
Speaker 2: it's like there are certain figures her, Jesse Smollett and
Speaker 2: others where, you know, just even that temporary willingness to
Speaker 2: take them seriously just is one of those where I
Speaker 2: cannot stand them. They repel me in such a repugnant
Speaker 2: way that I just, I don't know, I a cheat,
Speaker 2: and I'm totally willing to admit this.
Speaker 3: I have Megan derangement syndrome. Yeah, absolute drives me crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can't really, I don't really get it. I
Speaker 5: have to be off. I don't really get it.
Speaker 1: Which is part of why, like you know, wouldn't be
Speaker 1: eager to actually see this thing come to fruition because
Speaker 1: it just would feed into this What I see is
Speaker 1: like complete sort of obsessive, unhinged relationship with this one
Speaker 1: random woman.
Speaker 2: So fair enough, and you know, it would be healthier
Speaker 2: if we could all just forget that she existed, although
Speaker 2: for her that would be the worst thing.
Speaker 5: That's not what she's looking for.
Speaker 3: We'll see you guys later.
Speaker 8: Hi.
Speaker 10: I'm Matt Stoler, author of monopoly focused Substack newsletter Big
Speaker 10: and an anti trust policy analyst. Have a great segment
Speaker 10: for you today on this Big Breakdown. It's about the
Speaker 10: first big anti trust trial of the twenty first century,
Speaker 10: which starts next Tuesday, against the search giant Google. I
Speaker 10: want to start with the picture of an octopus. Since
Speaker 10: eighteen ninety there have been a few big Monopoli trials
Speaker 10: that have shaped the biggest corporations in America, So starting
Speaker 10: with Standard Oil around the twentieth the turn of the
Speaker 10: twentieth century. So this is a cartoon of that corporate behemoth.
Speaker 10: You couldee standard Oil written on the top of the
Speaker 10: octopus's head and America. And there's a reason for that,
Speaker 10: Americans have traditionally symbolized with monopoly power as an entity
Speaker 10: with tentacles reaching out everywhere, hence an octopus. It's actually
Speaker 10: still a good metaphor today. So Google, which had which
Speaker 10: is worth almost two trillion dollars in terms of its
Speaker 10: total value, has a lot of tentacles. It knows more
Speaker 10: about most of us than our families because it answers
Speaker 10: intimate questions from billions of people every day. It controls
Speaker 10: much of our communications. To boot, it has ninety five
Speaker 10: percent market share and search annual revenue of a little
Speaker 10: less than three hundred billion dollars a year in fifteen
Speaker 10: products with more than five hundred million users apiece. We've
Speaker 10: perhaps never seen any corporate asset as power full as Google.
Speaker 10: Search marketing professor Scott Galloway in twenty seventeen he went
Speaker 10: so far as to say that quote Google is God. Okay,
Speaker 10: So why is Google on trial and what does this
Speaker 10: trial signify? Well, Google is on trial for violating antitrust law,
Speaker 10: which means, in short, that it has an illegal monopoly.
Speaker 10: The government argues that Google controls roughly ninety to ninety
Speaker 10: five percent of general search and search advertising, and that
Speaker 10: it has used this remarkable market share monopoly share, using
Speaker 10: illegal tactics to keep rivals out of the market unfairly. Now, Google,
Speaker 10: of course disagrees, but we'll get to the details of
Speaker 10: the case in a bit. But let's ask a different question.
Speaker 10: So does this case really matter? Let's put it in context.
Speaker 10: Don't powerful corporations always win? Doesn't big money always carry
Speaker 10: the day in America? In fact, no. Historically, anti monopoly
Speaker 10: has been the pro business tradition in America, ensuring equality
Speaker 10: in the marketplace. And to understand what that means, it
Speaker 10: helps to look at previous antitrust cases involving the biggest
Speaker 10: corporations in the world at the time that they were held.
Speaker 10: So there have been a few big ones that are
Speaker 10: as historically important as the Google case. So there was
Speaker 10: Standard Oil in the eighteen nineties, Alco in the nineteen forties,
Speaker 10: IBM in the nineteen seventies, EIGHTE and T in the
Speaker 10: nineteen eighties, Microsoft in the nineteen nineties. And these cases
Speaker 10: are almost always against high tech firms that control a
Speaker 10: key sector in the economy, so Oil in the eighteen nineties,
Speaker 10: telecommunications in the nineteen eighties, operating systems in office productivity
Speaker 10: software in the nineteen nineties, win or lose, they determine
Speaker 10: what our society looks like going forward. Now, most people
Speaker 10: think technological progress is due to scientists and engineers figuring
Speaker 10: stuff out and innovating, and it's sort of true, but
Speaker 10: it's also due to law. Want to know why we
Speaker 10: even have the Internet? Well, one reason, and an important one,
Speaker 10: is that in nineteen eighty two, a judge named Harold
Speaker 10: Green ruled to break up AT and T, which had
Speaker 10: historically tried to control its network tightly and probably would
Speaker 10: have tried to block things like dial up modems from
Speaker 10: being attached to its network, and certainly did block a
Speaker 10: lot of stuff prior to the nineteen sixties. So you
Speaker 10: could see a memorial to the AT and T case
Speaker 10: when you walk into the DC Court building, which is
Speaker 10: the same one where a judge named am Meta is
Speaker 10: hearing the Google trial, so you can see it. There's
Speaker 10: a cartoon on display as a man in a robe
Speaker 10: tangled up in phone courts. That's a cartoon of Harold Green.
Speaker 10: He was an extraordinary man. So he was born in Germany.
Speaker 10: In nineteen twenty three, fled the Nazis, enlisted in the
Speaker 10: US Army during War two and then went to night school.
Speaker 10: After the war, he ended up at the Justice Department,
Speaker 10: where he helped draft the Civil Rights Act and the
Speaker 10: Voting Rights Act, And in nineteen seventy eight Jimmy Carter
Speaker 10: put him on the court as a district judge. That's
Speaker 10: where he heard the AT and T case. Now, so
Speaker 10: Green was no fool, and he was no fan of
Speaker 10: corporate power. He ruled against AT and T and sought
Speaker 10: the goal. Sought to fulfill the goal of quote deconcentrating
Speaker 10: AT and T's vast economic power. The guy had been
Speaker 10: up close with the Nazis. He was not intimidated by
Speaker 10: a large corporation. And the thing about it is, at
Speaker 10: the time there a lot of people said, Oh, this
Speaker 10: is terrible for the country. It's going to hurt this
Speaker 10: great corporation that everybody loves, very innovative Bell Labs. But
Speaker 10: in truth, the breakup really delivered. Telephone rates came down
Speaker 10: for consumers, but far more importantly, there was a massive
Speaker 10: explosion of innovation, including in all likelihood the development of
Speaker 10: the Internet and mobile telephony. The judge in the Google
Speaker 10: in the Google case is named Judge Meta. He's pictured
Speaker 10: here let's take a look. No Meta is now in
Speaker 10: this same position as Judge Green, able to shape a
Speaker 10: future to all of us or just to Google. But
Speaker 10: in contrast to Green, Meta's career tracks very much like
Speaker 10: most of our technocratic elites. Now. He's an immigrant, but
Speaker 10: he grew up in his suburb of Maryland, worked at
Speaker 10: the big lfew firm Lathan and Watkins for a few
Speaker 10: years of training, he was and then he was a
Speaker 10: public defender in DC, and then he served as a
Speaker 10: white collar defense attorney. Metta doesn't, as far as I
Speaker 10: can tell, how a strong record of recognizing the threat
Speaker 10: of concentrated corporate power or an instinctive skepticism of the powerful.
Speaker 10: And we can already see some problematic choices from Meta,
Speaker 10: and I'm going to focus on Mata. I'm going to
Speaker 10: do a few segments on the Google case. I'm going
Speaker 10: to focus on Meta because judges really go unexamined in
Speaker 10: our culture and it's important to change that. They are
Speaker 10: political actors. So Google executives, including its CEO Sundar Pichai,
Speaker 10: have been found in multiple cases, including this one, of
Speaker 10: destroying evidence related to potential anti trust violations, essentially deleting chatlock.
Speaker 10: So chatlog's involving discussion over antitrust show that quote. Pachai
Speaker 10: personally asked whether a chat group's history could be turned
Speaker 10: off and then attempted to delete that message end quote.
Speaker 10: Now that is that is a big no no. Okay,
Speaker 10: you are not supposed to destroy chat logs and anti
Speaker 10: trust late related or monopoly related evidence. You just don't
Speaker 10: do that. That's illegal. And in California a judge actually
Speaker 10: sanctioned Google for this behavior. They levied penalties on Google
Speaker 10: and its lawyers. But so far, Judge Meta has not. Now,
Speaker 10: I don't want to overstate the problem. The judge has
Speaker 10: ruled reasonably well in an earlier merger case. He might
Speaker 10: do something about the document destruction, but that's who he is.
Speaker 10: So that's the judge. Let's go a little more into
Speaker 10: the case, which is all about something called defaults. Right,
Speaker 10: That's how Google controls its market power. At least that's
Speaker 10: what the government argument. The government says that Google's monopoly
Speaker 10: in search is illegal, and it has maintained this monopoly
Speaker 10: not by making a better product if you notice there's
Speaker 10: a lot more ads in Google Search today, but by
Speaker 10: locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find
Speaker 10: a different search engine option and making sure that they
Speaker 10: only see Google instead. So here's a slide that the
Speaker 10: Department of Justice include in its complaint in twenty twenty.
Speaker 10: So it is the default search engine Google whenever you
Speaker 10: open your phone or whenever you open most browsers. As
Speaker 10: a result, when you use Google, you are giving Google
Speaker 10: some data which it can use to improve its search
Speaker 10: engines and which it's more importantly, its competitors cannot. Now
Speaker 10: the basic claim is that Google has essentially bought up
Speaker 10: all the shelf space where people might find a different
Speaker 10: search engine. It pays forty five billion dollars a year
Speaker 10: to have distributors refuse to carry its competitors products, signing
Speaker 10: deals with Apple, Motorola, Samsung, major US wireless carriers like
Speaker 10: ATTT Mobile, Verizon, browser developers like Mozilla, Opera uce Web
Speaker 10: to secure default status for its general search engine, and
Speaker 10: in many cases to specifically prohibit Google's counterparties from dealing
Speaker 10: with Google's competitors. So that's the case, and the big
Speaker 10: partner here for Google is Apple, which receives something like
Speaker 10: ten to fifteen billion dollars a year for placing Google
Speaker 10: as the default search engine on the iPhone and the Mac.
Speaker 10: And this revenue is really important to Apple. It's basically
Speaker 10: Apple and Google sharing monopoly profits. Apple is fantastically profitable,
Speaker 10: but still fifteen billion dollars is a lot of money.
Speaker 10: And that's just in the US. Now, here's a story
Speaker 10: that came out in the Financial Times in twenty twenty
Speaker 10: when the Apple case was filed. Apple is in fact
Speaker 10: preparing its own search engine in case it's deal with
Speaker 10: Google falls apart due to this case. In other words,
Speaker 10: if the government succeeds, will have more search engines and
Speaker 10: competition in this market, because at least Apple won't enter.
Speaker 10: Now it should be a slam dunk case, and not
Speaker 10: just because Google search has become much worse over the
Speaker 10: last five to ten years, packed increasingly with ads and
Speaker 10: poor results. To understand why this case makes sense, look
Speaker 10: no further than the experience of Niva, a search engine
Speaker 10: whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google,
Speaker 10: but died a few months ago because it just couldn't
Speaker 10: get access to customers. Niva, according to David Pierce in
Speaker 10: The Verge, was running an aproduct. So that's the most
Speaker 10: innovative that artificial intelligence a full stack search engine and
Speaker 10: a privacy first browser. If people went through all the
Speaker 10: bother of switching, they became converts. Pierce wrote. The problem
Speaker 10: was that very few of them managed to make it
Speaker 10: past the thicket of default settings and redirections. Now, I
Speaker 10: actually used Niva and it was a good search engine.
Speaker 10: But as all defaults are set to Google, they're an
Speaker 10: endless number of screens encouraging people to set their search
Speaker 10: engine to that of the search giant. So Neiva, despite
Speaker 10: its quality, despite its differentiated lack of ads, could not
Speaker 10: get in front of potential customers, and it died. These
Speaker 10: default settings and redirections are what's on trial, because that's
Speaker 10: what killed Niva, and that's what prevents anyone else from
Speaker 10: investing in the search next search competitor. If Google is
Speaker 10: found guilty and disciplined reasonably by being broken apart or
Speaker 10: having a choice screen imposed, or some other set of remedies,
Speaker 10: then the new technologies of machine learning AI you will
Speaker 10: actually be deployed in a competitive marketplace. That's new. Rival
Speaker 10: search engines can try different things, and we'll see immense
Speaker 10: possibilities open up, similar to those after the AT and
Speaker 10: T breakup. The future of telecommunications was not obvious in
Speaker 10: nineteen eighty two when that breakup happened. It only happened
Speaker 10: because of the breakup. There's actually a good amount of
Speaker 10: evidence on that as well. And that's true historically with
Speaker 10: all of these old antitrust cases. Okay, so far, I've
Speaker 10: laid out the arguments in the case in the historical context.
Speaker 13: But what about Google?
Speaker 10: What do they say about the allegations? Google has a case.
Speaker 10: Google's essential argument is that search is about economies of
Speaker 10: scale and that it owns the whole market, not because
Speaker 10: it's a predator, but because consumers simply prefer its search
Speaker 10: engines to rivals. Let's go back to the Department of
Speaker 10: Justice slide on defaults, because this argument works both ways. Now,
Speaker 10: Google would say that it might engage in behavior to
Speaker 10: exclude competitors, but it needs to do so to get
Speaker 10: the day to improve its search engine. Fundamentally, Google argues
Speaker 10: its ability to exclude others is a good deal for America.
Speaker 10: The exclusion is the price of this great search engine.
Speaker 10: In other words, consumers love Google. They love the search
Speaker 10: just so much that its monopoly is legal. That's Google's argument. Now,
Speaker 10: my view is that Google is Google Search is not
Speaker 10: as good as it used to be. It's not as
Speaker 10: good as it would be if it were disciplined by competition.
Speaker 10: Google is coasting. Essentially, it produces an increasingly shoddy product.
Speaker 10: There's an economist in the sixties. He said a great line.
Speaker 10: She said, the best reward for a monopolist is a
Speaker 10: quiet life. That's what Google is at this point. So
Speaker 10: as one Googler who left the company recently put it, quote,
Speaker 10: Google has one hundred and seventy five thousand plus capable
Speaker 10: and well compensated employees who get very little done end quote.
Speaker 10: Google used to be magic, but that was ten years ago.
Speaker 10: Today's search is full of too many ads, crap results
Speaker 10: peddled with Google's because of Google's own self interest. So
Speaker 10: here is what the Washing Post noted in twenty twenty.
Speaker 10: The Internet Archives wayback Machine stored some Google search results
Speaker 10: over the years. When we look back, a picture emerges
Speaker 10: of how Google increasingly fails us. There's more space dedicated
Speaker 10: to ads that look like search results. More results start
Speaker 10: with with answer snippets, sometimes incorrect, ripped from other sites,
Speaker 10: and increasingly results point you back to Google's own properties,
Speaker 10: such as maps in YouTube, where it can show more
Speaker 10: ads and gather more of your data. Many judges believe
Speaker 10: what executives say, and so judge Meta is likely to
Speaker 10: hear from Google CEO that economies of scale are all
Speaker 10: that drives product quality, and he may buy that. The
Speaker 10: judge may believe that, and I actually think Google executives
Speaker 10: believe it as well. Still, such an argument isn't really
Speaker 10: any different from what every monopolist has always argued. Standard
Speaker 10: Oil discussed how it brought cheap kerosene to the masses
Speaker 10: at and T stressed its awesome quality and universal service.
Speaker 10: Alcoa said that its control over aluminum was a result
Speaker 10: of its focus and dedication to America. IBM talked about
Speaker 10: how much it innovated and developed the computing industry. Monopolists
Speaker 10: always believe they are serving humanity, but Congress made it
Speaker 10: clear by passing antitrust laws that monopolies, whatever they may
Speaker 10: say or think, are not actually doing that. And the
Speaker 10: evidence from Standard Oil's breakup leading to the development of
Speaker 10: gasoline to the lawsuit anti trust lawsuit in the sixties
Speaker 10: against IBM creating the modern software industry suggests that Congress
Speaker 10: was right. Depending on what happens, there may be additional
Speaker 10: time spent on a remedy, or the case may go
Speaker 10: on appeal. Indeed, Judge Meta is not the only person
Speaker 10: who matters here. He does decide the whether Google is
Speaker 10: guilty initially. He decides the remedy initially, but the case
Speaker 10: is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to
Speaker 10: the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court judge Meta
Speaker 10: the DC Circuit, the Supreme Court erodes into trust case
Speaker 10: law against Google so much that this giant search monopoly
Speaker 10: that's obviously a monopoly. Everyone knows it's a monopoly. If
Speaker 10: they say, well, this is not the monopolization laws don't
Speaker 10: apply to this monopoly, even though it's giant controls all
Speaker 10: this information, controls society in many ways, then Congress will
Speaker 10: be confronted with the reality that it is hard to
Speaker 10: use the existing antitrust laws to address dominant corporate power,
Speaker 10: which is what they were written originally to address. As
Speaker 10: witnesses testify from Google executives to rivals, we're about to
Speaker 10: learn an enormous amount about how the Internet developed, how
Speaker 10: advertising is sold, and why decisions about what we search
Speaker 10: for happen the way that they do. It's pretty disconcerting.
Speaker 10: That so much key evidence was destroyed by Google, and
Speaker 10: the judge hasn't done anything yet, but this case will
Speaker 10: still be a massively educational experience for the public, for
Speaker 10: the industry, and for Congress. Indeed, a tidbit that came
Speaker 10: out on a hearing last Friday is that Google is
Speaker 10: actually a posing having a public feed in the courtroom,
Speaker 10: whereas the government actually does want a public feed. Apparently
Speaker 10: the search giant doesn't want the public to be able
Speaker 10: to hear the arguments and evidence at hand. I guess
Speaker 10: that sometimes Google is concerned about privacy. Well, the thing
Speaker 10: is is that if I were Google, if I were
Speaker 10: Google executive, and I wanted to maintain Google's monopoly, I
Speaker 10: wouldn't want this information to come out either. I mean,
Speaker 10: I wouldn't want I would want the public to know
Speaker 10: as little as possible about my business. But that is
Speaker 10: in many ways what these anti trust cases are for.
Speaker 10: To learn about how our markets work, to learn about
Speaker 10: whether firms are using coercive market power or whether they
Speaker 10: are competing on the merits whatever happens. Reviving laws to
Speaker 10: constrain corporate power does take time, as people within many
Speaker 10: institutions have to change their mind and come to grips
Speaker 10: with the choice of living in a free society or
Speaker 10: one that is dominated by monopolies and is much more
Speaker 10: authoritarian in its commercial structure. Sure, unfortunately that change is
Speaker 10: happening in September October, so that is this month, starting
Speaker 10: on Tuesday, we're going to start to see some of
Speaker 10: the fruits of that change, and hopefully Judgemta will live
Speaker 10: up to the legacy of the DG District Court set
Speaker 10: forty one years ago by the courage of one Judge
Speaker 10: Harold Greed. Thanks for watching this big breakdown on the
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Speaker 14: Axios is out with a new survey if we can
Speaker 14: put this element up saying they polled what's two hundred
Speaker 14: and thirteen computer science experts from sixty five different universities
Speaker 14: and ask them who would be the ask them number
Speaker 14: of questions, but number one, who would be the best
Speaker 14: to regulate artificial intelligence going forward. Also asked questions around
Speaker 14: whether or not or when AI might escape human control
Speaker 14: and what the best way we can fore close or
Speaker 14: stall that that event is. So, as you can see here,
Speaker 14: the number one recommendation from these computer science experts emily
Speaker 14: is a basically a Department of AI or some type
Speaker 14: of agency underneath a Department.
Speaker 13: Of AI, like the AI.
Speaker 14: Protection Board, something along those lines that doesn't require Congress
Speaker 14: coming in whenever there needs to be some kind of
Speaker 14: nimble movement. Rather, the agency would be able to respond
Speaker 14: and also would be able to say regulate companies that
Speaker 14: are engaged in AI would be able to kind of
Speaker 14: examine what they're up to, why, what its potential implications
Speaker 14: are for human civilization?
Speaker 13: What do you make of this?
Speaker 14: This idea from size that we need the regulation we
Speaker 14: need is a new federal agency.
Speaker 9: You know, there's so much disagreement in AI world.
Speaker 11: There are experts who say this is only going to
Speaker 11: be for the benefit of humanity. There will be some
Speaker 11: downstream costs, but in the net it's going to be
Speaker 11: to the benefit. All of the fears are overblown. And
Speaker 11: then you have experts, I mean people who have worked
Speaker 11: intimately on this technology who say it terrifies me, and
Speaker 11: it is already kind of out of the box. There's
Speaker 11: really nothing even in regulation at this point. Basically like
Speaker 11: game is already lost. It's a matter of time. We
Speaker 11: can try our best to do what we can do,
Speaker 11: but like the game has already lost. And I think
Speaker 11: this also reflects that level of disagreement. I think we're
Speaker 11: going to see that level of disagreement come out in
Speaker 11: really important sort of forums that Chuck Schumer, who by
Speaker 11: the way, is himself like very deep into tech world
Speaker 11: just based on his own connections. He's very much sort
Speaker 11: of connected by family. I think his daughters are both
Speaker 11: in the tech sector. So what his you know, motivations are,
Speaker 11: whether he has incentives to do the right thing on
Speaker 11: tech I think is an open question. But he at
Speaker 11: least has been having people who are sort of familiar
Speaker 11: with the technology chirping in his ears, saying that you
Speaker 11: need to take this seriously. I feel like we're going
Speaker 11: to see those disagreements come out just next week when
Speaker 11: he has all of these tech experts here in Washington,
Speaker 11: d C.
Speaker 9: To give their own sort of takes on AI.
Speaker 11: One of the things that really stood out to me
Speaker 11: with the survey is that respondents from axios, they say,
Speaker 11: express greater worry about discrimination and bias resulting from AI,
Speaker 11: so forty two percent. Then about the risk of mass
Speaker 11: unemployment that only bothered twenty two percent of people. I think,
Speaker 11: you know, there's serious concerns about both of those issues,
Speaker 11: But I mean, come on, that you have that level
Speaker 11: of disparity twenty two percent only worried about employment versus
Speaker 11: discrimination and bias up at forty two percent.
Speaker 9: I don't even know what to like.
Speaker 11: I don't even have trust in the AI experts to
Speaker 11: be worried about the right things and the level of
Speaker 11: disagreement I think, in this survey and in others about
Speaker 11: how serious the problem is.
Speaker 9: It fuels that.
Speaker 14: Right, right, it's it's these guys are useful, and they're
Speaker 14: mostly guys in the sense that they have some understanding
Speaker 14: of the way that it works. But when it comes
Speaker 14: to their ideas about how it ought to be handled
Speaker 14: and what its implications are and where where it fits
Speaker 14: into the kind of human and civilizational experience, those those
Speaker 14: those contributions aren't particularly I think useful. That that's that's
Speaker 14: more in the realm of you know, the democratic control
Speaker 14: that you know that currently operates through our politicians, right,
Speaker 14: but you know, ultimately is supposed to come from you know,
Speaker 14: the people who are then able to then you know,
Speaker 14: enforce their will over these over these machines. The one
Speaker 14: area that I feel like the alarmists are missing is
Speaker 14: that there's more to.
Speaker 13: AI than just lines of code. Like behind those lines.
Speaker 14: Of code, are you need energy like you need like
Speaker 14: they have to run on something and that requires material
Speaker 14: resources from around the world to create the energy, the batteries,
Speaker 14: the other the other things that you need to make
Speaker 14: the cloud run, make make the technology run.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 14: I think uh, some of these a lot of these
Speaker 14: computer scientists, they show up for work, they flick the
Speaker 14: lights on the Internet's working, like they're they're not thinking
Speaker 14: about the way that you there's there are actual massive
Speaker 14: servers relying on enormous amounts of energy and and just
Speaker 14: human production that is not necessarily infinite and how the
Speaker 14: which which then means that there are limits to what
Speaker 14: the machines are capable of outside of a relationship with
Speaker 14: humanity and also with you know, resource allocation and resources
Speaker 14: that exist in the world.
Speaker 13: So I think there.
Speaker 14: Is they are getting a little ahead of themselves in
Speaker 14: the sense that they can't I don't quite see how
Speaker 14: machines can do all of that if there isn't the
Speaker 14: raw materials out there to make it hum Yeah.
Speaker 11: Well, and so another thing that stands out to me
Speaker 11: from this is three percent of respondents responded that the
Speaker 11: private sector should it is the best entity to regulate
Speaker 11: three percent, And that I think is a big thing
Speaker 11: carrying into and especially for conservatives libertarians who have very
Speaker 11: good arguments by the way, about hampering development when China
Speaker 11: is currently working really hard to develop all of these
Speaker 11: different advanced llms. Whether or not they're capable of those
Speaker 11: a different question, but like it is, that's a legitimate concern,
Speaker 11: especially if they start exporting it to the developing world
Speaker 11: and other places like that.
Speaker 9: I get it, I understand it.
Speaker 11: At the same time, however, when you have only three
Speaker 11: percent of these experts saying the private sector is the
Speaker 11: best entity to regulate AI, that tells me when this
Speaker 11: comes to the desk of Capitol Hill next week.
Speaker 9: It should.
Speaker 11: It should be a pretty glaring signal that so regulation
Speaker 11: which we have essentially none of. Now, there are some
Speaker 11: laws on the books that can be applied you know,
Speaker 11: through the legal system through challenges, couldcept precedent for how
Speaker 11: we deal with AI that's true. You know, there's there's patents,
Speaker 11: there's all kinds of different things that could be applied
Speaker 11: to this.
Speaker 9: I get it.
Speaker 11: But at the same time, we have virtually no regulation
Speaker 11: of AI right now. It's it's a consortium of people
Speaker 11: who have been coming in and out of the White
Speaker 11: House industry that has a close relationship with the government
Speaker 11: saying we're working on this right now. Of course, big
Speaker 11: industry loves to be regulated because it hurts their competitors sometimes,
Speaker 11: so we'll see some of that coming into play. The
Speaker 11: good old bootleggers and what's the phrase bootleggers and you
Speaker 11: know talking about it, Yeah, which is a legitimate thing.
Speaker 9: Like some of that's gonna happen.
Speaker 11: But when this comes to Congress, like they should know
Speaker 11: they have to do something.
Speaker 9: Something needs to happen.
Speaker 11: There has to be some basic framework that isn't you know,
Speaker 11: that isn't going to kill us in comparison to China,
Speaker 11: but isn't also going to literally.
Speaker 14: Kill us, right, which then hopefully can lead the rest
Speaker 14: of the world. Yeah, so all right, the US is
Speaker 14: doing this, like, let's let's do this too, because they
Speaker 14: don't know, they don't want to blow themselves up either.
Speaker 11: Well, it's the other thing where it's like we actually
Speaker 11: have to all it's the thing where you have you know,
Speaker 11: Winston Churchill talking about the framework for the United Nations
Speaker 11: after nuclear technology atomic weaponry is developed and saying there
Speaker 11: has to be something something, some level of international cooperation
Speaker 11: on these questions because like the climate, for instance, what
Speaker 11: happens in China affects what happens in the US in
Speaker 11: a way that is inextricably intertwined. There's no way we
Speaker 11: can take those two things out. It's the same thing
Speaker 11: with atomic weapons. So yeah, with nuclear weapons. So when
Speaker 11: you're looking at AI, there has to be some level
Speaker 11: of global cooperation too, because if people in China can
Speaker 11: use AI to hack American websites, we can do everything
Speaker 11: we can in the United States and only prevent that
Speaker 11: to an extent.
Speaker 14: Right, and especially with the way that kind of voice
Speaker 14: mimicry is expanding exponentially. You used to think, well, my
Speaker 14: bank account's safe because you can't I got two factor
Speaker 14: and you can't change you know, my password that way,
Speaker 14: Now you know, if people can call and fake your voice, like,
Speaker 14: then all bets are off, right, So and if and
Speaker 14: if on if there's artificial intelligence answering the phone on
Speaker 14: the other side as well. Then it's just robots against robots.
Speaker 9: That is the future.
Speaker 11: Basically, that is the future, and that will just be
Speaker 11: in our matrix pods the rest of us, Like, we'll just.
Speaker 13: That's where the resources come from.
Speaker 14: At least the matrix felt with that question, like where
Speaker 14: do the actual resources come from?
Speaker 13: Right, And their answer was from the people.
Speaker 9: This is a problem with bitcoin mining too.
Speaker 11: I mean these like bitcoin minds were like using a
Speaker 11: crazy amount of energy to mine the crypto. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 11: there's always a Once you think you've solved a problem,
Speaker 11: you've only created more problems.
Speaker 9: There you go, Russian nesting dolls all the way down.
Speaker 13: Indeed, pus An
Speaker 6: Injected the sy