Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Fess Podcast.
Speaker 1: My guest today is writer, musician, investor Roger macum. Roger,
Speaker 1: it is so good to be here with you, Bob. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Roger, how are you coping with the COVID nineteen era, So, Bob,
Speaker 1: After a two weeks where I was really trying to
Speaker 1: figure out which way was up, I decided to adopt
Speaker 1: a full zen program, and I am now one with
Speaker 1: the quarantine and it's really working for me. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: go a little bit deeper. You're one with the quarantine.
Speaker 1: Do you leave your domicile almost never. I'm lucky to
Speaker 1: live in a semi rural area where I can go
Speaker 1: for walks and get out without going near anyone else,
Speaker 1: and that is pretty much where I am. I'm really
Speaker 1: lucky because where we live, one of my bandmates chose
Speaker 1: to shelter with us, and so we have been able
Speaker 1: to play music every day, and we do a live
Speaker 1: stream that's on our websites, on Facebook, on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: YouTube every single day and that has made the whole experience.
Speaker 1: It's given it a focus that's really been for me
Speaker 1: at least wild change from three and a half years
Speaker 1: of activism where I was on the road seven days
Speaker 1: a week and you know, banging my head against a
Speaker 1: wall trying to protect democracy from internet platforms. So let's
Speaker 1: go back to the band. Why don't you uh tell
Speaker 1: give us the U r L for those who are
Speaker 1: unfamiliar to so they can live stream. So everybody should
Speaker 1: understand that when I was in high school, I was
Speaker 1: in a really really sorry When I was in college,
Speaker 1: I was in a really cool band, but the lead
Speaker 1: songwriter in the band didn't want to go for it,
Speaker 1: and so I was one of these people who was
Speaker 1: like completely left at the altar and felt crushed about it.
Speaker 1: And I went and got a real job because I
Speaker 1: had what was a ridiculous amount of student loans for
Speaker 1: that period, and I felt like I couldn't afford to
Speaker 1: take a risk starting from scratch, but I always wanted
Speaker 1: to play, so I kept playing you know, happy hours
Speaker 1: and small band things all the way through. And then
Speaker 1: about twenty years ago, I decided that I had gotten
Speaker 1: far enough in my day job career that I could
Speaker 1: afford to try to get serious and convert the industry
Speaker 1: group I was in from a garage band into something
Speaker 1: real and then it evolved into a full time band
Speaker 1: called Moon Else. Uh T Bone. Burnett put us together,
Speaker 1: recorded the first album, and the notion was he'd just
Speaker 1: done Oh Brother Ware Art Thou and it was a
Speaker 1: huge hit, and so he was going to do a
Speaker 1: series of albums of Americano music in different styles. So
Speaker 1: the notion was reinterpreting them, and he did three at
Speaker 1: the same time. We were supposed to take the sound
Speaker 1: of the Hate Ashbury and reinterpret it, and then he
Speaker 1: got h Elvis Costello to do kind of I think
Speaker 1: a New York folk thing, but what he really got
Speaker 1: was Alison Krauss and Robert Plant to do Raising Sand,
Speaker 1: which of course became huge, and we and Elvis were
Speaker 1: completely forgotten in the mix. I mean, we got the
Speaker 1: album done in all, but you know, Raising Sand sucked
Speaker 1: all the oxygen out of the room, and that forced
Speaker 1: Moon Else, which at the time included Jack Cassidy from
Speaker 1: the Jefferson Airplane, included Geez Smith, included people who have
Speaker 1: been part of the Grateful Dead extended family. That band
Speaker 1: essentially had to focus on finding another way to get attention,
Speaker 1: and beginning in two thousand and eight, we focused on
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter, So we did the first live shows
Speaker 1: on on Twitter, and then we did we we figured
Speaker 1: out how to use Facebook to build an audience, and
Speaker 1: we got the hundreds of thousands of people with ridiculously
Speaker 1: high levels of engagement as the band gradually figured out
Speaker 1: what it's, what its thing was, and you know, we've
Speaker 1: been at it now thirteen years and now we're called
Speaker 1: Full Moon Eilis because last summer we added Lester Chambers
Speaker 1: and his son Dylan from the Chambers Brothers and the
Speaker 1: Tea Sisters, who are three sisters who sing tight harmony
Speaker 1: to what was basically a hippie band. You know. So
Speaker 1: we were really good instrumentally and our vocals were We're
Speaker 1: good enough but not great. Now we've added these unbelievable
Speaker 1: vocals and we've just recorded new album and we were
Speaker 1: about to begin our first tour of theaters, right it
Speaker 1: was supposed to start basically March one, and you know,
Speaker 1: we had like I want to say, seventy shows set
Speaker 1: up for this year, two thirds of the theaters, and
Speaker 1: it was going to be really excited because Full Moon Elis,
Speaker 1: you know, the notion of bringing back the Chambers Brothers
Speaker 1: psychedelic gospel and the fantastic harmonies of the Tea Sisters
Speaker 1: on top of what we were doing. People were really
Speaker 1: groo it on him, and of course, just like everybody else,
Speaker 1: you know, we got shut down and uh, we've missed
Speaker 1: all but one show from our and but we have
Speaker 1: this album ready to go, and so we're going to
Speaker 1: just try to launch an album. And if you go
Speaker 1: to moon Alis dot com you can get the first
Speaker 1: two songs, which include a new version of Time Has
Speaker 1: Come Today with Lester now at age eight, on the
Speaker 1: lead vocal as he was on the original and h
Speaker 1: T sister song called Wo Wo that it's just it's
Speaker 1: really hot and you can check those out if you like,
Speaker 1: but it's you know, we're just like everybody else. So
Speaker 1: we've we've resorted to pushing the technology really hard and
Speaker 1: seeing what you can do with live streaming with multiple
Speaker 1: locations and you know, we haven't solved the latency problem,
Speaker 1: so we can't all play at the same time, but
Speaker 1: we've been able to have all of us on screen
Speaker 1: at the same time using a thing that's better than zoom,
Speaker 1: and uh, with people playing from all locations but not together. Okay,
Speaker 1: you know, this brings us to the question if you know,
Speaker 1: the music business at large, recording end of it is
Speaker 1: sort of solved with streaming not deeply affected by COVID nineteen,
Speaker 1: but the touring business has been brought down to zero.
Speaker 1: Do you have any insights on how you would address
Speaker 1: this problem that may be able to move it forward.
Speaker 1: I mean, Bob, we have spent our time doing almost nothing,
Speaker 1: but so you know, we, like a million other people,
Speaker 1: had the idea of how about driving movie theaters? Right,
Speaker 1: and so we studied the economics, we started talking to
Speaker 1: people who own theaters. Now do we begin doing this
Speaker 1: some other more ago? And uh, you know, the problem
Speaker 1: is the experience for the fans, right, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: the audio would be really imperfect. You can't get that
Speaker 1: many people into them. The production costs are pretty high,
Speaker 1: and so is it doable? Absolutely? Uh? Is it gonna
Speaker 1: be hard? Yes? And you know the question of when
Speaker 1: comes back? I think it's really super difficult because, let's
Speaker 1: face it, we've mostly been hearing wishful thinking out of Washington.
Speaker 1: And you know, as somebody made a professional career in
Speaker 1: the daytime studying technology and studying economics, and you know,
Speaker 1: I pretty good at reading the news and The thing
Speaker 1: that really concerns me is that, you know, one, we
Speaker 1: have no leadership in the country, and so our response
Speaker 1: to this literally couldn't have been worse. And yet there's
Speaker 1: no solution on the horizon. I mean, it might take
Speaker 1: multiple years to get a vaccine that works in enough
Speaker 1: supply to actually protect the country. So we're stuck for
Speaker 1: a while. And what does that mean for live music?
Speaker 1: I mean, we're going to have to find new models
Speaker 1: because until then, when people get close together, there's a
Speaker 1: really high risk of getting sick. And in my mind,
Speaker 1: folks who are older, and our audience includes a lot
Speaker 1: of you know, older folks, they're going to be really
Speaker 1: hesitant about what they do. And uh, we we haven't
Speaker 1: got that figured out yet, but we're going to keep
Speaker 1: trying until we do. Okay, let's segue to the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen And it's important because the wind ever, the facts
Speaker 1: don't really change, but the spin does. That we're recording
Speaker 1: this Thursday, May fourteenth, Starting today, we wave a magic
Speaker 1: wand you're in charge. What should we be doing in
Speaker 1: the US or maybe worldwide to fight COVID nineteen. Well,
Speaker 1: in my mind, the United States as biggest failing right
Speaker 1: now is that we don't cooperate with the rest of
Speaker 1: the world about anything. So we dropped out of the
Speaker 1: International Confederation to develop a vaccine that is insane. So
Speaker 1: on day one, I would get back into that and
Speaker 1: I would go to everyone around the world and I
Speaker 1: both listened to what they've learned, and I would adopt it.
Speaker 1: Our problem was we spend two months in a form
Speaker 1: of quarantine which slowed the spread of the disease without
Speaker 1: actually shrinking it. So every other country went to a
Speaker 1: more harsh form of quarantine. Well, let's let's just go back.
Speaker 1: We stopped the spread, but we didn't shrink that. Please
Speaker 1: amplify that from my audience. So essentially, the way to
Speaker 1: think about this is if you look at New Zealand,
Speaker 1: or you look at Taiwan, or you look at South Korea,
Speaker 1: they implemented measures immediately, they tested immediately, they went to
Speaker 1: social distancing immediately before there was widespread infection, and the
Speaker 1: result of that behavior was that they stopped the thing
Speaker 1: from spreading and made it possible to resume economic activity
Speaker 1: after a couple of months. In our case, we waited
Speaker 1: for almost two months after the first case before we
Speaker 1: did anything significant. And then when we implemented our quarantine,
Speaker 1: we did it in such a way that it was
Speaker 1: already too late in the Northeast, and we didn't think
Speaker 1: about elements of our economy like meat packing facilities, like
Speaker 1: retirement homes, prisons where people are tightly packed and where
Speaker 1: the normal behavior did not have public health standards that
Speaker 1: would be resistant to a communicable disease like COVID. And
Speaker 1: so the result is we are still having outbreaks at
Speaker 1: exactly the time we're trying to reopen the economy. So,
Speaker 1: you know, they talked about this rate of infection called
Speaker 1: are not and you want to get that thing significantly
Speaker 1: below one in order to get the actual spread of
Speaker 1: the disease. Now that's how many people one person infects
Speaker 1: can In fact, right, we started out I think around three,
Speaker 1: you know, now we're down to just slightly over one.
Speaker 1: And the result is we're sort of stable with twenty
Speaker 1: to of thousand people a day being diagnosed and between
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred a day dying. Well I'm sorry, but you
Speaker 1: can do the man. I mean, you know, if you're
Speaker 1: going to have let's say an average of two thousand
Speaker 1: people a day dying, that's sixty people a month, right,
Speaker 1: So that's bigger than Vietnam every single month. And you
Speaker 1: know that means that by this time next year, if
Speaker 1: it persists, of this time next year, you literally have
Speaker 1: more people dead in a year than died in the
Speaker 1: Second World War. And so that's not a solution, right.
Speaker 1: We have to find a way to get the numbers
Speaker 1: so that you know they're like everybody else, which is
Speaker 1: to say that there are some days you have next
Speaker 1: to no new infections and nobody dying, and we haven't
Speaker 1: done any of the things to do that are testing
Speaker 1: is woefully inadequate. We started so late that we missed
Speaker 1: the window when this level of testing would have made
Speaker 1: a difference. Now we need the testing to be five
Speaker 1: times is great to produce the same effect that this
Speaker 1: part would have done if we've done it three months ago.
Speaker 1: And so I find all of that obviously alarming, because Bob,
Speaker 1: you and I are not spring chickens, right, we are
Speaker 1: in the portion of the population that needs to be
Speaker 1: super careful, and many of our favorite people in the
Speaker 1: music business are also, and obviously to the extent that
Speaker 1: anybody has had any past health history, you know, if
Speaker 1: you've ever had hypertension or heart disease or lung disease,
Speaker 1: or you're a smoker or overweight or whatever. I mean,
Speaker 1: those things just make it a lot more dangerous if
Speaker 1: you've and god forbid, you've ever had cancer. And so
Speaker 1: you know, to me, we've had a massive failure of
Speaker 1: you know, public health administration in this country and there's
Speaker 1: no sign of fixing that until best case, January of
Speaker 1: next year, right, which is like, wow, you know that's
Speaker 1: just okay, Just so I know what would happen theoretically
Speaker 1: on January one next year. It wouldn't be January. Fe
Speaker 1: be January right when you change presidents. Okay, but let's
Speaker 1: I don't I don't want to make this false equivalences.
Speaker 1: But since we the pass is locked in stone, if
Speaker 1: hypothetically you were in charge today, what would you do?
Speaker 1: So the first thing that I would do is that
Speaker 1: I would I would simply there there too two paths.
Speaker 1: I would take, one relative the economy and one relative
Speaker 1: to the to the the coronavirus. And keep in mind,
Speaker 1: I'm just a citizen. I have a professional analyst, so
Speaker 1: I have Oh yeah, but the reason you have a
Speaker 1: long history in tech, and just like with many people
Speaker 1: saying about climate crisis, climate control in there there depending
Speaker 1: on tech solutions. So your viewpoint is important. So to
Speaker 1: be clear, I do not I think the tech industry
Speaker 1: is grossly overstated what it can do on this. Relative
Speaker 1: to the pandemic. We have got to find a way
Speaker 1: to increase the testing by a factor of five, like immediately.
Speaker 1: And we need to culturally and this notion that the
Speaker 1: pandemic is part of the culture wars, this notion that
Speaker 1: somehow people's liberty is being infringed upon because we're asking
Speaker 1: them not to kill grandmother, grandfather or someone else in
Speaker 1: their household. That I mean, we have you know, the
Speaker 1: first thing I do is try to bridge that gap
Speaker 1: politically and because we have to work together on this.
Speaker 1: This is this is a situation where the country is
Speaker 1: threatened in a way it has potentially never been threatened
Speaker 1: in its homeland, certainly not since the Civil War. And
Speaker 1: you know, we have to start doing the right thing.
Speaker 1: But on the economy, I think it's really simple. Trump
Speaker 1: has focused all of his energy on protecting his friends,
Speaker 1: basically billionaires, large corporations, and that is insane. We have
Speaker 1: got to have focused the energy on the people who
Speaker 1: work in our economy and on the small businesses on
Speaker 1: which it depends. And you know the thing that I
Speaker 1: would do is I would I would sit there relative
Speaker 1: to Congress and go here is the deal. Okay, we
Speaker 1: need to have something that guarantees an income to every
Speaker 1: single American for the duration of this crisis, and it
Speaker 1: should be uncontestable, and we need to have billionaires paying
Speaker 1: their share. From a taxpoint of view. You need to
Speaker 1: have corporations recognizing that they're not going to be allowed
Speaker 1: to use the pandemic as an excuse to harm employees
Speaker 1: or to harm customers. And you know, the reality is
Speaker 1: we're paying a price here because for forty years we
Speaker 1: deregulated our economy in a way that shifted all the
Speaker 1: power and most of the wealth to a tiny fraction
Speaker 1: of the population. And you know, ideas that worked pretty
Speaker 1: well in the eighties became a disaster by two thousand
Speaker 1: and a train wreck. Recently, and my very strong opinion,
Speaker 1: having spent a career looking at this stuff, is that
Speaker 1: our economy right now looks like an authoritarian regime. You
Speaker 1: have a small number of monopolies that dominate every industry,
Speaker 1: and that contributed to magnifying the damage to the pandemic.
Speaker 1: If you look at it, we had been firing employees
Speaker 1: and shifting production of low cost things outside the US
Speaker 1: for forty years, to the point where today you cannot
Speaker 1: make cotton swaps in order to do a test. Right.
Speaker 1: We've lost the ability to things that are absolutely essential
Speaker 1: to the economy because we were so focused on optimizing
Speaker 1: shareholder value in the short run, and our supply chains
Speaker 1: are really fragile. Our health care system is a train wreck.
Speaker 1: It is not designed for any kind of public health disaster.
Speaker 1: In fact, the entire economy has no margin for everything
Speaker 1: is so efficient that any disruption at all breaks. And
Speaker 1: that is what's going on. That is why they are
Speaker 1: thirty three million people that are explicitly unemployed. But the
Speaker 1: reality is it's probably much much bigger than that. And
Speaker 1: you know, you look at this and you just go.
Speaker 1: The thing that I would be all over on day
Speaker 1: one is a new new deal that we've got to
Speaker 1: get out there and recognize that all of the people
Speaker 1: that live in this country deserve to be treated better.
Speaker 1: And so I would follow that up. For example, is
Speaker 1: I mean I would reverse everything Trump has ever done
Speaker 1: on immigration, and I would absolutely recognize that the people
Speaker 1: whose jobs are on the front line. So these are
Speaker 1: the people who work in healthcare, the people who work
Speaker 1: in retail point of sale, particularly like grocery stores and pharmacies,
Speaker 1: the people who work in u meat packing and other
Speaker 1: food supply things. Those are essential abs, we say, but
Speaker 1: we treat them like they're not, and that's insane. These
Speaker 1: jobs need to be paid better. In fact, we need
Speaker 1: to look at the whole ecounty. We need to recognize
Speaker 1: that part of the reason we're here is that we
Speaker 1: cripple public education, right, and so are are too many
Speaker 1: people in our population have lost critical thinking and they
Speaker 1: can't see facts as facts. They can't appreciate why expertise
Speaker 1: really matters. And so I would love, you know, to
Speaker 1: use the current environment to reset the whole economy and
Speaker 1: to sit there and say, look, our goal should be
Speaker 1: to get back to you know, we hold these truths
Speaker 1: to be self evident. You know, everybody's created equal, right,
Speaker 1: I want to form a more perfect union, and you
Speaker 1: really want people to be able to pursue their lives
Speaker 1: without fear. And you sit there and you look at
Speaker 1: that poor situation where a jogger in Georgia is hunted
Speaker 1: down and killed in broad daylight. And you said, you
Speaker 1: see these guys in Michigan, armed to the teeth with
Speaker 1: heavy weaponry, who are claiming that somehow their rights are
Speaker 1: being infringed. I'm going the whole world is upside down.
Speaker 1: It is backwards. And if you know, if you made
Speaker 1: me president for a day, my goal would be to
Speaker 1: try to remind people that we actually have shared interests,
Speaker 1: that we you know, this notion that each one of
Speaker 1: us is an independent like Marlborough man and not depend
Speaker 1: on anybody else. I mean, that's ridiculous, and you can
Speaker 1: see that in this pandemic. Okay, let's before we let's
Speaker 1: just step focused on the other half for a second
Speaker 1: before we leave it behind. How should we be fighting
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen irrelevant of the economic effects. So here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I'm no doctor, but I can tell you about the
Speaker 1: tech part. Everything that you've heard it about contact tracing
Speaker 1: using smartphones is nonsense. Everything you've heard about using surveillance
Speaker 1: is nonsense. And here are the problems. So this notion
Speaker 1: that a smartphone can be used to create automatic automated
Speaker 1: contact tracing fails. For the following reasons. The core technology
Speaker 1: and the smartphone that you would use to figure out
Speaker 1: whether you got close to people who had symptoms or
Speaker 1: people who actually were infected with COVID is bluetooth. And
Speaker 1: the problem for this application with bluetooth is that while
Speaker 1: it can get you within roughly six ft, it doesn't
Speaker 1: recognize walls, So you can be within six ft of
Speaker 1: somebody but nowhere near them relative to the disease. Because
Speaker 1: there's a wall between you and the way the systems
Speaker 1: are set up, it's very hard for them to keep
Speaker 1: track of how long you are close to somebody. Right,
Speaker 1: That's what Apple and Google are trying to create. They're
Speaker 1: trying to create something that would would fix that. But
Speaker 1: the fundamental problem is you're going to get massive numbers
Speaker 1: of false positives, and that's going to require a ridiculous
Speaker 1: level of processing. Because with a country of three and
Speaker 1: thirty million people, if you get you know, if half
Speaker 1: the things you get are false positives or two thirds
Speaker 1: of the ones you get are false positives, that number
Speaker 1: would be staggering. But it's going to be more like,
Speaker 1: are gonna be false positives? And so let's assue for
Speaker 1: by some miracle, just say to be inherently in the
Speaker 1: way the phones are designed. This is an unsolvable problem,
Speaker 1: or could Google and Apple come up with a solution
Speaker 1: to this issue. Even enough time, you can come up
Speaker 1: with a problem. But with the time constraints were under,
Speaker 1: you're not going to get there fast enough, which is
Speaker 1: a big reason why Google and Apple are radically narrowing
Speaker 1: the scope of what they're trying to do. So the
Speaker 1: second piece of the problem is artificial intelligence, which is
Speaker 1: certainly artificial but not intelligence. The current state of artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence is so grossly oversold that it will not help
Speaker 1: you to solve the false positives problem. In fact, if
Speaker 1: you look at it, all these people claiming that they
Speaker 1: can create these uh heat based cameras to identify people
Speaker 1: are sick. That is all utter nonsense, okay. And all
Speaker 1: these people who say, well, I can look at a
Speaker 1: picture of you and identify whether you have COVID or not.
Speaker 1: I mean that is I don't know what language we
Speaker 1: can use here, but that you can use any language
Speaker 1: you choose. Bullshit. Okay, it is just not So doesn't
Speaker 1: mean you can't get there eventually, but the current state
Speaker 1: of the technology, it was not designed for that, and
Speaker 1: so it's not going to get you there quickly. So
Speaker 1: here's the thing that I believe really matters. When I
Speaker 1: look at the tech industry my big problem and I've
Speaker 1: spent you know, I've been there since night teen two, right,
Speaker 1: so from when the Space program was the most important thing,
Speaker 1: before PCs were the dominant stuff. So I've watched the
Speaker 1: whole thing and I've had a front row seat. And
Speaker 1: technology has so much promise, but the industry is out
Speaker 1: of control and it fundamentally it it's driven by this
Speaker 1: passion to take advantage of the weakest elements of human
Speaker 1: psychology because the technology allot should do that. That's what's
Speaker 1: wrong with YouTube and Facebook and is just just before
Speaker 1: we go because now we're going down a very deep avenue.
Speaker 1: But let me let me just fine. Fine, So they've
Speaker 1: got that thing, but the other part, the enterprise products
Speaker 1: all they're eliminating jobs. And I say, COVID is a
Speaker 1: perfect opportunity to fix that problem. Because contact tracing is
Speaker 1: actually best done by human beings enabled and empowered by
Speaker 1: a small amount of automation. So the thing that Apple
Speaker 1: and Google can do is, you know, empower a huge number,
Speaker 1: you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people
Speaker 1: who are physically going and meeting people who have symptoms
Speaker 1: and doing that contact tracing. It would have been so
Speaker 1: much easier to do this when you're dealing with hundreds
Speaker 1: or low thousands of infected patients. But here we are
Speaker 1: in a million and a half. And so you know
Speaker 1: you've got this problem that the contract tracing thing, the
Speaker 1: scale of it is simply staggering. But here's the good news.
Speaker 1: We have tens of millions of unemployed people and here's
Speaker 1: an opportunity to put them all to work and to
Speaker 1: use technology to enhance that. So the big piece I
Speaker 1: would give our listeners to think about relative to technology today,
Speaker 1: and COVID provides the perfect case in point, is that
Speaker 1: we should not trust the technology can solve all our problems.
Speaker 1: It's not a silver bol and we first certain should
Speaker 1: not believe the promises given by the people who run
Speaker 1: tech companies. There. They aren't all horrible people, but they
Speaker 1: are relentlessly optimistic and the culture of the industry is
Speaker 1: not what it needs to be. Tech is today where
Speaker 1: the chemicals industry was in nineteen sixty when they spewed
Speaker 1: toxic fumes into the air. When they poured mercury into
Speaker 1: fresh water, when they left mine residue on the side
Speaker 1: of the hill. They were profitable because they were destroying
Speaker 1: the economy and the sorry. They were destroying the environment
Speaker 1: and public health. The tech industry, the profits of Google
Speaker 1: and Facebook are grossly overstated because they're destroying democracy, public health,
Speaker 1: privacy in the economy. And so I look at this
Speaker 1: and I go, COVID is the moment. This is the
Speaker 1: pivot where we can sit there and go. Tech is
Speaker 1: so important that like chemicals in nineteen sixty, like pharmaceuticals
Speaker 1: in nineteen o six when we passed the Pure Food
Speaker 1: and Drug Act, and just like the building trades after
Speaker 1: the Chicago fire, when we realized we really needed to
Speaker 1: make the people who build houses responsible for what they built.
Speaker 1: That that you have to make tech accountable. And this
Speaker 1: is a great opportunity to do that because we all
Speaker 1: know how important it is in our lives. And the
Speaker 1: future of tech could be so bright and it can
Speaker 1: be so constructive. But if he keeps doing what it's
Speaker 1: doing now, I mean, I look at Amazon. I'm so
Speaker 1: frustrated because Jeff Bezos said he's going to take the
Speaker 1: four billion dollars of profits he would otherwise make in
Speaker 1: the Jeune quarter. He's going to push him all into
Speaker 1: COVID stuff. And my question what's he going to put
Speaker 1: it into. Is he going to proctect his employees. Is
Speaker 1: he going to change the work rules in the warehouses
Speaker 1: so that it's healthier to work in an Amazon warehouse?
Speaker 1: Is he going to pay his people more? Because if
Speaker 1: he was going to do all those things, that would
Speaker 1: be huge. What I fear is that he's going to
Speaker 1: spend a ton of money on computer solutions that he
Speaker 1: can then sell to governments, and he's going to still
Speaker 1: treat the employees really badly. And if that's true, that
Speaker 1: will be a missed opportunity, completely tragic. Okay, we're segueing
Speaker 1: into a whole thing in terms of if we know
Speaker 1: that tech is not going to solve the problem, and
Speaker 1: assuming there's no vaccine on the immediate horion horizon, you're saying,
Speaker 1: put the unemployed people to work to do contact tracing
Speaker 1: very slowly. How would you close down the spread of
Speaker 1: the virus? Or maybe you don't. I don't know, Bob,
Speaker 1: I wish I knew the answer to that. The one
Speaker 1: thing I do know is that there is a silver
Speaker 1: line with this whole thing. If you and I stay
Speaker 1: physically isolated, we can come through this thing. Right. We're
Speaker 1: in a position where you can do your job. I
Speaker 1: can do my job in an isolated way. And that's
Speaker 1: a lucky thing, right, because otherwise we're in h the
Speaker 1: peer group of those with the greatest risk. Anybody in
Speaker 1: that situation who has that opportunity is blessed. My core
Speaker 1: question is what do you do about the people who
Speaker 1: can't or to do that, whose jobs do not allow
Speaker 1: them to be isolated, who's lack of political power this
Speaker 1: means they have no protection, and so my focus is
Speaker 1: on those people. And I would simply note that Amazon
Speaker 1: employees have begun to push back, and not just the
Speaker 1: people in the warehouses, right, Even salaried people who work
Speaker 1: in headquarters have had some pushback, and I think that's
Speaker 1: really excited. Citing teachers, We've had more teacher strikes in
Speaker 1: the last two years that I think the prior twenty
Speaker 1: put together. It's you know, it's time to have work
Speaker 1: action everywhere in the economy. People in healthcare, people who
Speaker 1: work in meat packing plans, people who work in prisons.
Speaker 1: They have way more power than they realize, and it's
Speaker 1: incumbent on all of us to help them. You know,
Speaker 1: there were days when people didn't buy from Facebook, didn't
Speaker 1: buy from instat cart to protest against their labor practices.
Speaker 1: We need to have more of that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: We need to if if we always take the convenient path,
Speaker 1: the country's gonna just keep going right off the Cliffic's
Speaker 1: going off now, Okay, now, Naomi Klein wrote a whole
Speaker 1: book called The Shock Doctrine talking about these big moments
Speaker 1: in national history, and then they basically say, the powers
Speaker 1: that be, the government and the corporations ram through things
Speaker 1: to their advantage. You're delineating a lot of things that
Speaker 1: would benefit the public. How do we make sure that
Speaker 1: this crisis does benefit the public as opposed to the
Speaker 1: fat cats. So at the moment, we're doing a terrible
Speaker 1: job of that, right because Trump's whole stick is he
Speaker 1: has the people he supports, and he really doesn't care
Speaker 1: about anybody else. And the Democrats in Congress have moderated
Speaker 1: some of his worst instincts, but because of McConnell in
Speaker 1: the Senate, they have of not being able to do
Speaker 1: what needs doing, and that I find incredibly distressing. And
Speaker 1: if the pandemic gives Trump the ability two manipulate the
Speaker 1: presidential election or two implement voter suppression techniques that are
Speaker 1: as effective as the ones that we're employed in, you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to have to work really hard to get
Speaker 1: past this. I mean, job one has to be ending
Speaker 1: the Trump presidency, and that there is I mean, the
Speaker 1: fastest development of a vaccine in history, I believe was
Speaker 1: the for the months and I think it took four years.
Speaker 1: And my understanding is that it's not uncommon for a
Speaker 1: vaccine to take twenty so more. I mean, AIDS has
Speaker 1: been thirty years and we still don't have one. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so I'm looking at this and just saying we're
Speaker 1: going to be living with this for a while, and
Speaker 1: it is essential that we followed naomi clients brilliant observations
Speaker 1: about these moments and not waste this opportunity to get
Speaker 1: it right. So I would look at everybody and say,
Speaker 1: our job is not to go back to what the
Speaker 1: world was before, because the world before actually sucked for
Speaker 1: most people, right it massive income inequality, really unfair labor practices,
Speaker 1: incredibly predatory business practices by large companies and our goal
Speaker 1: should be to move forward to something much better. And
Speaker 1: you know, I say this as somebody who's I spent
Speaker 1: my whole life as a capitalist, But the truth is,
Speaker 1: we haven't had capitalism in this country for at least
Speaker 1: a decade because the world is dominated by monopolies. And
Speaker 1: if you think back history, monopoly is associated with monarchy,
Speaker 1: with authoritarianism because it creates balance it's easy to control
Speaker 1: for an authoritarian whereas capitalism and democracy are really tightly aligned.
Speaker 1: And I believe that the United States is a failed
Speaker 1: democracy in many dimensions. And you can argue about how
Speaker 1: far down the failure uh spectrum the country is, but
Speaker 1: it's in my mind. You know, you've had to presidential
Speaker 1: elections in the last twenty years where the loser of
Speaker 1: the popular vote became president and that is clearly not
Speaker 1: an outcome that is consistent with any normal view of democracy. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about politics for a second, because it
Speaker 1: leads into another topic. Uh In, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton a real run for her money in the primaries.
Speaker 1: We had Bernie Sanders on the left, we had Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Warren on the left. Needles to say the ultimate nominee
Speaker 1: at this point in time is Joe Biden. My personal
Speaker 1: analysis is that once it appeared that Bernie Sanders was
Speaker 1: going to be the nominee, the d n C and
Speaker 1: the media, ie the New York Times primarily conspired to
Speaker 1: make sure that didn't happen. So my questions are secondarily
Speaker 1: how important is the media too? Can a candidate of
Speaker 1: a what is seen as left today be successful? And see?
Speaker 1: Are though those the people we should be running and
Speaker 1: would they be embraced? So, Bob, I am so much
Speaker 1: more close to politics in this country than I would
Speaker 1: have been before I became an activist. You know, when
Speaker 1: I started my campaign in basically the end of to
Speaker 1: it really early to make the world aware of what
Speaker 1: happened in the election, how Facebook and Instagram in particular,
Speaker 1: and Twitter and YouTube were manipulated to distort the outcome
Speaker 1: of our presidential election. And I tried to warn people
Speaker 1: to prevent that from happening again. And what wound up
Speaker 1: happening is I spent a huge amount of time in Washington.
Speaker 1: I got to know a ton of people and learned
Speaker 1: a lot about how our process works when it's working well,
Speaker 1: and what its failure modes are, so my read of
Speaker 1: what happened this time is very different from yours, not
Speaker 1: that in the end it matters either way, but let
Speaker 1: me just suggest an alternative hypothesis which I think actually
Speaker 1: explains the facts slightly better. Uh. And So the first
Speaker 1: signal that I had there was something wrong with Facebook
Speaker 1: and democracy occurred in January when I saw a hate
Speaker 1: speech from Facebook groups that were notionally associated with Bernie Sanders,
Speaker 1: and they were hate speech against Clinton. And what struck
Speaker 1: me was how rapidly these memes were spreading, and how
Speaker 1: many of my friends were spreading them, and how you
Speaker 1: went from one person to a dozen people in a
Speaker 1: matter of days, which suggested somebody was spending money to
Speaker 1: get my friends into these groups. And I don't know that,
Speaker 1: I can't prove that that was true. But it turned
Speaker 1: out there was a a group of people outside the
Speaker 1: Sanders campaign but tightly affiliated with them, who were really
Speaker 1: clever in their use of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter,
Speaker 1: and who essentially supported that campaign really aggressively against Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: Now it turns out what really pushed me over the
Speaker 1: edge in was breggsit because that was the first time
Speaker 1: I realized, oh, my God, the ad tools at Facebook.
Speaker 1: The same thing that you know you can use to
Speaker 1: sell records or tickets to a concert could be used
Speaker 1: to destroy the outcome of the general election of major country.
Speaker 1: I mean, that was like, that scared the crap out
Speaker 1: of me. And so you know, when I went to
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg and Sandberg in October, it was because I was
Speaker 1: convinced that the business model, the algorithms, and the culture
Speaker 1: of Facebook, we're allowing bad guys too harm innocent people
Speaker 1: into harm democracy. So I set out to inform the
Speaker 1: world and prevent that from happening again. And what was
Speaker 1: tragic about was that the exact same forces that we
Speaker 1: saw in We're back in size and had a huge impact.
Speaker 1: And the the thing that really was so frustrating for
Speaker 1: me was that pull people in the press, they acknowledged
Speaker 1: there's a real primary, and they acknowledge there is what
Speaker 1: is called a donor primary, where you know, it's about
Speaker 1: whose money can you get? Right, And the thing that
Speaker 1: that Bernie and had Warren did so well is to
Speaker 1: convert fundraising from a batcat thing to a masses of
Speaker 1: people thing using social media. Now, that same Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: group that did the UH Facebook stuff in never went away,
Speaker 1: and they got really good and they built up their network.
Speaker 1: They had, I want to say, something like Facebook pages,
Speaker 1: and they were amplified by roughly four hundred Facebook groups
Speaker 1: which would have in many cases thousands of people in them.
Speaker 1: And they were all in for Bernie and a big
Speaker 1: part of their effort, and I worked with researchers at
Speaker 1: George Washington University. Uh was the beginning in the summer
Speaker 1: of nineteen they decided to clear the field for Bernie,
Speaker 1: and they made very quick work of Senator Harris and
Speaker 1: then turned their sights on Warren and beginning in October,
Speaker 1: focused on the one issue where Warren's position was identical
Speaker 1: to Sanders and somehow made people think there was something
Speaker 1: wrong with Warren. Right issue was becoming the front runner,
Speaker 1: and they were amazingly effective at getting it. We're talking
Speaker 1: about healthcare, Yes, Medicare for all. So the point was
Speaker 1: where they were really affected was getting the breath to
Speaker 1: position Warren as somehow with a dangerous position without saying
Speaker 1: the same about about Burnie. The key thing is there's
Speaker 1: nothing in American law that makes this illegal. Okay, this
Speaker 1: is hardball politics. It's how the game is played. It
Speaker 1: was amazingly successful, and I was with the folks at
Speaker 1: George Wasshing University try to call attention to fact that hey,
Speaker 1: this is going on, we should at least be talking
Speaker 1: about is this the right way to conduct to Democratic primary?
Speaker 1: So they cleared the field because I think the Sanders
Speaker 1: people correctly thought that Warren was the biggest threat and
Speaker 1: Harris was the second biggest threat. I think they thought
Speaker 1: Biden would just peter out. Now, my perception of what
Speaker 1: happened is not that the d n C did anything.
Speaker 1: In fact, my impression of the DNC is honest to god,
Speaker 1: I'm amazed they can get dressed in the morning because
Speaker 1: I watched them. You know, we tried to get them
Speaker 1: to pay attention to disinformation a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: and they just had no interest. Their focus was making
Speaker 1: sure they were not embarrassed by a hack again. And
Speaker 1: uh so, I literally don't think they could possibly have
Speaker 1: tilted this divide. I think what happened was that the
Speaker 1: most important constituency in the Democratic Party, black people, particularly
Speaker 1: black women, decided that all that mattered was beating Trump.
Speaker 1: They would deal with a guy who was hopeless in
Speaker 1: every other respect as long as it could be Trump.
Speaker 1: And the guy who had consistently the best numbers against
Speaker 1: Trump was Biden, and they knew him well from the
Speaker 1: Obama administration, and they decided in South Carolina they're going
Speaker 1: to go there, and that just tipped the whole damn thing.
Speaker 1: I think the d n C was every bit as surprised.
Speaker 1: In fact, people I know around that thing express complete
Speaker 1: and utter shock by what happened. Because if you look
Speaker 1: at I mean remember the movie, the Peter Sellers movie
Speaker 1: being there. Sure, well, I look at Biden, I'm going
Speaker 1: that's Chauncey Gardner. I mean, you know, I look at Biden.
Speaker 1: I just go. You gotta be kidding. Now. The one
Speaker 1: good thing is the guy's a weather vane, right, So
Speaker 1: I'm really hopeful that Warren and Harris are going to
Speaker 1: play a really big role in his administration. Stacy Abrams, Right, Uh,
Speaker 1: But the first thing, you should gotta get him elected.
Speaker 1: And you know, as much as you know he's not
Speaker 1: my guy, you know what, I want to go forward,
Speaker 1: not backward, right, But it's really essentially getting elected. He's
Speaker 1: the guy we have, right, And to me, the great
Speaker 1: tragedy is that the d n C organized what was
Speaker 1: demonstrably a ridiculously bad primary process for picking a candidate,
Speaker 1: and in the end it was decided on cosmetic stuff
Speaker 1: as opposed to like who would be well prepared. I mean,
Speaker 1: can you imagine how different the thing might have been
Speaker 1: if the pandemic has started three months earlier, right, Because
Speaker 1: in that context, Warren probably would have emerged differently than
Speaker 1: she did, because I mean, she looks like the kind
Speaker 1: of people who have been successful around the world, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you look at it, whether it's Germany
Speaker 1: or New Zealand or any of those other countries in
Speaker 1: Europe that have women prime ministers, there is this incredible
Speaker 1: thing that the you know, I want to say, eight
Speaker 1: of the ten countries they are most successful in finding
Speaker 1: the pandemic have a minutes their chief executive. And that's
Speaker 1: I don't think that's a fluke, right, And you know,
Speaker 1: women technocrats in politics have a really good track record,
Speaker 1: and you know, but we're not going to get to
Speaker 1: run that experiment right where we are where we are,
Speaker 1: so we we got to play with the horse we've got. Okay,
Speaker 1: before we get back to the political thing, uh, talking
Speaker 1: about income, inequality, etcetera, globalization has gotten a bad name.
Speaker 1: My viewpoint would be that globalization is inevitable. It's just
Speaker 1: that they left out the people who would be screwed
Speaker 1: by globalization. What's your viewpoint on that? So I am
Speaker 1: totally with you, and if you don't mind, I'm going
Speaker 1: to go past where you are, okay. So I love
Speaker 1: globalization because it's a peacemaking phenomenon that when you have
Speaker 1: interlocking economies, it's really hard to go to war. And
Speaker 1: the flaws of globalization really can be reduced to the
Speaker 1: ancillary choices that were made with it. So if you
Speaker 1: think about the fact that we allowed the tax law
Speaker 1: to be used to encourage outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries,
Speaker 1: which caused whole communities to disappear in the United States
Speaker 1: economically whole basically whole states. And if you think about
Speaker 1: the choices we've made relative to optimizing our globalization strategy
Speaker 1: to ensure that there would be a hundred thousand different
Speaker 1: products at Walmart at the lowest possible price. There are
Speaker 1: lots of ways you could have optimized the strategy, but
Speaker 1: we basically say we're going to optimize in a way
Speaker 1: that you know goes to all this Huxley, We're gonna
Speaker 1: give people the soma of consumerism. People can take away
Speaker 1: their job. And it's like, if that is those things
Speaker 1: are not linked, those are choices. And we have a
Speaker 1: thing that started really well, went way off the tracks
Speaker 1: because we forgot something about capitalism that really matters, which is,
Speaker 1: for capitalism the work, someone has to set the rules
Speaker 1: and enforce them, and traditionally that's the federal government. And
Speaker 1: Reagan comes in says the government is the problem. And
Speaker 1: the Republicans set about making government ineffective. And it took
Speaker 1: them forty years, but they succeeded to the point where
Speaker 1: today government does not have the ability to meet the
Speaker 1: needs that people incidently expect from it. And exactly the moment,
Speaker 1: the technology is creating a new set of needs for
Speaker 1: which the government does not have the budget or the
Speaker 1: skills to provide support. And we have got to break
Speaker 1: the back of the libertarian philosophy that there is nothing
Speaker 1: useful the government does, because if you're looking at it
Speaker 1: right now, the absence of a thoughtful government response all
Speaker 1: by itself explains why the United States has the worst
Speaker 1: outcome from COVID in the entire world. Okay, you know,
Speaker 1: in the news right now. Moving into the social media
Speaker 1: sphere is the whole plandemic documentary okay, which doesn't seem
Speaker 1: to be able to be killed in terms of video,
Speaker 1: keeps popping up. Give us your viewpoint on that. So
Speaker 1: the first piece, let me just remind our audience how
Speaker 1: the business model of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and in a
Speaker 1: slightly different way Twitter work. These sites are all dependent
Speaker 1: on our attention. They sell ants. They're only twenty four
Speaker 1: hours in a day. They need keep as much of
Speaker 1: our attention as possible. For YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, they
Speaker 1: have used surveillance what Shoshana zoo Boff at Harvard calls
Speaker 1: surveillance capitalism. Two. Build a dossier on every single person
Speaker 1: that is, for all intents and purposes, a data voodoo
Speaker 1: doll that is a complete representation of our digital lives,
Speaker 1: every touch point, not just the things you have on
Speaker 1: Facebook and Google, but every time you use a credit card,
Speaker 1: every time you travel, every time you use your phone,
Speaker 1: every time you move with the phone in your position.
Speaker 1: They know everything. They know what you do minute by
Speaker 1: minute the whole day. They know where you are, who
Speaker 1: you're with. They use that in order to identify content.
Speaker 1: It will activate your emotions. Well, guess what. For most people,
Speaker 1: the surest way engage people emotional is to appeal to
Speaker 1: flight or fight. Right, it's you can't help, but survivally,
Speaker 1: you have to react. Even if you don't like the content,
Speaker 1: you still have to pay attention. It's the same reason
Speaker 1: why you have rubber necking when there's an accident. So
Speaker 1: what kind of content does that? Hate speech, disinformation, and
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories. So an algorithm that is designed to maximize
Speaker 1: attention will, over the course of time, wind up promoting
Speaker 1: hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories far more than other kinds
Speaker 1: of content. So conclusion number one, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Their
Speaker 1: business is hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. And so
Speaker 1: when something comes along and you look at their reaction,
Speaker 1: their basic reaction is first order responses, Oh, it's free speech,
Speaker 1: We're not going to interfere. If the pressure doesn't go away,
Speaker 1: they go, well, we have this tool so people can
Speaker 1: report it, and you know, if enough people report it
Speaker 1: will do something. Then the third level response is, uh, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but that doesn't violate our terms of service. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's objectional, what doesn't If it still won't go away,
Speaker 1: they will eventually remove either the piece of content or
Speaker 1: the person who put it up. So they got rid
Speaker 1: of Alex Jones. Why did they do that because the
Speaker 1: pressure was really huge, and even though Alex Jones was gigantic,
Speaker 1: he was a tiny fraction of all the hate speech, disinformation,
Speaker 1: conspiracy theories on those platforms and they were able to
Speaker 1: protect all the rest of it for a period of
Speaker 1: time by getting rid of him. So they take down plandemic,
Speaker 1: But what do they not do. They do not eliminate
Speaker 1: the ability of someone to advertise and share the link
Speaker 1: to plandemic in an ad, and they do nothing to
Speaker 1: prevent it from being spread inside groups on Facebook, so
Speaker 1: you wind up having people promoting it in places and
Speaker 1: other people just sharing it inside groups. So it's they
Speaker 1: don't actually want to get rid of it because that's
Speaker 1: the thing that drives their business. This is the same
Speaker 1: basis on which Google, Facebook as corporations, and Twitter have
Speaker 1: had two standards, one for real people and the other
Speaker 1: for people who are conservatives right. Twitter famously said they
Speaker 1: couldn't eliminate white supremacy hate speech because doing so would
Speaker 1: require them to shut down a bunch of Republicans. They
Speaker 1: obviously do not enforce their terms of service on Trump
Speaker 1: for anything. And Facebook has done the most amazing thing.
Speaker 1: A reporter named Judd Lego discovered that Trump was advertising
Speaker 1: with blatant falsehoods that violated the Facebook terms of service.
Speaker 1: He calls them on it, and so what did Facebook do?
Speaker 1: They change their terms of service last summer and now
Speaker 1: it's okay to lie in a political act. Now I
Speaker 1: look at all these things and I just go why.
Speaker 1: And here's the thing. There are three billion people who
Speaker 1: actively use Facebook products. Roughly similar number actively use Google products,
Speaker 1: so have almost half the worlds population. They're more than
Speaker 1: twice as big as any country. Neither Google nor Facebook
Speaker 1: acknowledges responsibility to any country. They're bigger than any country.
Speaker 1: They go, but you can't regulate us. And yet they
Speaker 1: do have a problem. They don't have armies and they
Speaker 1: don't control currencies, so they lack the two things that
Speaker 1: sovereign nations have. So they have to cooperate to sub degree.
Speaker 1: They will always aligned with power. There's a famous story
Speaker 1: about how Twitter in particular and Facebook also we're used
Speaker 1: during the Arab Spring to help get those people together.
Speaker 1: How they were used to help organize the Women's Arch,
Speaker 1: how they were used to help them organize the March
Speaker 1: for Our Lives, how they were used in Black Lives Matter.
Speaker 1: The part of the story that people don't focus on
Speaker 1: it closely is that these companies aligned with the powerful,
Speaker 1: such that when something like the Arab Spring or the
Speaker 1: March for Our Lives of the Women's March happens, the
Speaker 1: people on the other side, particularly authoritarians, can use the
Speaker 1: exact same technology to replect, to suppress any kind of resistance,
Speaker 1: and Facebook in particular has been a huge enabler of
Speaker 1: that in countries like Myan mar in countries like Cambodia
Speaker 1: and the Philippines, where you know, the authoritarians have inflicted
Speaker 1: great harm on innocent people. So what drives me insane, Bob,
Speaker 1: is this week's big stories. Facebook has something called the
Speaker 1: Oversight Board, and in theory, it's going to police. It's
Speaker 1: academics and journalists who are going to police hate speech,
Speaker 1: disinformation and conspiracy theories. And I'm pulling my hair up
Speaker 1: because people are trying to debate whether the people on
Speaker 1: this board are the right people. And I'm going to
Speaker 1: hang out people. This entire discussion is ridiculous. The oversight
Speaker 1: board requires human moderation. Humans look at the content. It
Speaker 1: fails for two reasons, and our audience will get one
Speaker 1: of them instantly. One of them is latency. There's a
Speaker 1: lag between when something gets put up and when a
Speaker 1: human can review it and agree and take it down.
Speaker 1: During that lag is when all the harm takes place, right,
Speaker 1: because when the thing gets put out, the damage is instantaneous.
Speaker 1: So what Facebook uses was what I call algorithmic amplification.
Speaker 1: It blows this thing out to literally three billion people,
Speaker 1: and there's nothing you can do with human moderation to
Speaker 1: keep pace with that. So the other problem is the
Speaker 1: problems scale right that you know you're gonna have forty
Speaker 1: moderators patrolling a thing with billions of posts a day.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's hopeless. And so what we need to
Speaker 1: do is to stop pretending like Facebook is seriously trying
Speaker 1: to solve any of these problems. If they want to
Speaker 1: do that, they wouldn't be treating Trump the way they
Speaker 1: are in the selection. They wouldn't be you know, they
Speaker 1: wouldn't be aligning themselves so tightly. They'd be sitting there saying,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, when this is done, we have to
Speaker 1: live somewhere. Employees have to live somewhere. Do they want
Speaker 1: to live in an authoritarian country? I mean that it's
Speaker 1: to my mind, that's what's wrong with all of this
Speaker 1: stuff right now. Because these companies are so big, they
Speaker 1: have to align with power, and they are inherently authoritarian
Speaker 1: in their own decision. Right because the founders of Google,
Speaker 1: the founder of Facebook have absolute control over those platforms, right,
Speaker 1: shareholders have no voice. And so in that situation, authoritarians
Speaker 1: are going to align with authoritarians and just make them comfortable.
Speaker 1: And I'm sitting I've spent three and a half years
Speaker 1: trying to go, hey, hello, we got a huge problem here.
Speaker 1: We gotta do something about it. And you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not some dude who just walked in off the street.
Speaker 1: I spent thirty eight years in Silicon Valley. I was
Speaker 1: at Kleiner Perkins when they made the first investment in Amazon,
Speaker 1: when they made the first investment in Google. You know,
Speaker 1: I was one of the early advisors from Mark zucker
Speaker 1: Bergen and Cheryl Sandberg. I mean, I saw all this stuff,
Speaker 1: and look, I'm not the perfect messenger, duh. You can
Speaker 1: tell because it didn't want But I did my because
Speaker 1: and I took three and a half years of my
Speaker 1: life to do nothing else because I thought it was
Speaker 1: that important. And here we are. Now. The good news
Speaker 1: is the cavalry sort of has arrived because a lot
Speaker 1: of people who really know way more about how this
Speaker 1: stuff works than I do have come into the game.
Speaker 1: You know, Shoshana Zooboff is an amazing person. Becca Lewis
Speaker 1: relative to white supremacy at Stanford. You know, the list goes.
Speaker 1: You know, there's Joe Donovan who does disinformation, and I
Speaker 1: mean there's just tons of people who have come in now,
Speaker 1: and so the real experts are in the game and
Speaker 1: that makes me feel like we got a shot. But man,
Speaker 1: we got a lot of work to do. But okay, well,
Speaker 1: we know, like any business, there's outside and inside, and
Speaker 1: you have had the privilege, unlike these researchers, to literally
Speaker 1: be on the inside. So let's start with Zuckerberg and
Speaker 1: Cheryl Sandberg. Since you were an early investor and an advisor,
Speaker 1: do they understand the problem you're obviously, especially someone like Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: A lot of these tech people, uh I will say,
Speaker 1: are not fully rounded people. Okay, where you're thirty years older, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Do they literally understand the issues. So I think the
Speaker 1: challenge here, Bob, is that the founders of Google and
Speaker 1: Facebook have a different philosophy. So I'll start with Mark
Speaker 1: at Facebook. Mark believes that bringing together the whole world
Speaker 1: onto one network that he controls is the single most
Speaker 1: important thing any human being can do, and that it's
Speaker 1: a much better idea than the United States of America,
Speaker 1: or France or Italy. And he believes that haven't gotten
Speaker 1: this far, we should let him finish the job. The
Speaker 1: founders of Google believe that if they can gather all
Speaker 1: the data in the world, they can make everything a
Speaker 1: million times more efficient. So one thing that both Mark
Speaker 1: and Larry and Surrogey share is the engineering philosophy that
Speaker 1: efficiency is the value that you want to optimize for, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you're making a motor, that's obviously true.
Speaker 1: If you're making a small piece of software, great, But
Speaker 1: when you're applying it to a country, then you have
Speaker 1: to ask the question, is efficiency consistent with the values
Speaker 1: of that country? And I would simply observe that Western
Speaker 1: democracies we're valued. We're sorry, We're established on the principles
Speaker 1: of the Enlightenment. Specifically, two things, free will, self determination,
Speaker 1: and another word for that, and the other one is democracy.
Speaker 1: Now think about it. Self determination is inherently inefficient. You
Speaker 1: decide what you're going to wear today, You decide what
Speaker 1: you're gonna eat today, You decide where you're gonna go.
Speaker 1: I make my own choices. If everybody does that, you know,
Speaker 1: that's immensely inefficient. Would be so much more efficient if
Speaker 1: everybody wore the same clothes, if everybody ate the same things, right,
Speaker 1: you just be able to optimize everything a lot better.
Speaker 1: And you think about democracy, You go, whoa democracy is
Speaker 1: all about forcing compromise, right, be so much better if
Speaker 1: you could just sit there and go, these are the rules.
Speaker 1: Everybody has to obey them. And the thing happened last week.
Speaker 1: It was an amazing step for our side in that battle.
Speaker 1: Google has been following the a path of developing products
Speaker 1: that's a little bit like the Apollo program to go
Speaker 1: to the Moon, where you know, you broke down each
Speaker 1: of the steps necessary to go to the moon, and
Speaker 1: Gemini and Apollo had to do each one, advancing to
Speaker 1: the next only after they've successfully accomplished going to Earth orbit.
Speaker 1: Rande of Alot Earth orbit spacewalk and Earth orbit, go
Speaker 1: to the Moon, go around it, do a rendezvous, and
Speaker 1: lunar orbit to a spacewalk in lunar orbit, then you
Speaker 1: go down to the Moon without landing, and then finally
Speaker 1: you go to the Moon. So they've been building up
Speaker 1: towards something they call smart cities. They have an alphabet
Speaker 1: division called Sidewalk Collapse. They just going to impose this
Speaker 1: notion of efficiency on the city and they have been
Speaker 1: for the last few years trying to do the very
Speaker 1: first moon landing, if you will, in Toronto and something
Speaker 1: called water Front Toronto. There was going to be a
Speaker 1: development where they were going to essentially take over control
Speaker 1: of all the city services and make everything really efficient
Speaker 1: through a combination of surveillance and them controlling the information streams.
Speaker 1: And they sold this thing to the city on the
Speaker 1: basis of, Hey, we're going to finance this massive development
Speaker 1: and we're going to give you some great data for
Speaker 1: running the city. And for a long time they didn't
Speaker 1: talk about what the gotchas were. And I played a
Speaker 1: very small role in the campaign to expose those gotches,
Speaker 1: and they were things like, oh, if there's a problem,
Speaker 1: you complained to the city government. But the city government
Speaker 1: can actually fix the problem because Google has total control.
Speaker 1: Google is going to own a lot of the land,
Speaker 1: so they're gonna make a lot of money on the
Speaker 1: real estate. Maybe that was a fair deal, but they're
Speaker 1: also going to own all the data, and they were
Speaker 1: going to be able to take any data they wanted
Speaker 1: and you could not push back on it. Well, I
Speaker 1: mean that's way past that's past the matrix, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's really creepy stuff. They were forced to withdraw their
Speaker 1: bid last week because of a tsunami of opposition, but
Speaker 1: the day before they started a new thing because Governor
Speaker 1: Cuomo New York appointed Eric Schmidt to help redesign public
Speaker 1: education in New York. And it's like, I just want
Speaker 1: to sit there and go, you have got be kidding.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is insane. And you know it's when
Speaker 1: you look at this thing. Technology could be used to
Speaker 1: empower people, to give them greater rights of self determination,
Speaker 1: to give a better form of democracy, and instead it's
Speaker 1: being used to exploit all the weak elements in our society,
Speaker 1: all the weak elements in our psychology. And it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be that way. That is a choice, that
Speaker 1: is a that is a sociopathy that has become endemic
Speaker 1: and silicon volley over the past decade, and you see
Speaker 1: it in things like Uber and Airbnb and we Work
Speaker 1: and Palenteer and now more recently with Banjo and clear
Speaker 1: View AI. The people who are basically using surveillance, stealing
Speaker 1: your right you know, your photos and all that, and
Speaker 1: using it in really creepy ways and going it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be this one. This is a choice. And
Speaker 1: our job is to use the pandemic to force change.
Speaker 1: And you know, we gotta take our little victories like Toronto,
Speaker 1: but we somebody needs to send out the governor of
Speaker 1: New York and go. Billionaires are not going to be
Speaker 1: our path out of this. They are the problem. Expecting
Speaker 1: Bloomberg and Gates and and Eric Schmidt to suddenly become
Speaker 1: committed two super high taxes on the rich and bringing
Speaker 1: up the rest. That does not seem like a good back. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's talk. And I'm really talking about the reality more.
Speaker 1: Most of the political debate to what degree was Russia
Speaker 1: and their disinformation employed on social media to affect the
Speaker 1: outcome them in Brexit and to affect election outcomes in
Speaker 1: the US. So the thing that we've focused a lot
Speaker 1: on Russia. We had a Muller report here, there was
Speaker 1: analysis in the United Kingdom. Their impact was huge and
Speaker 1: in the United States. My hypothesis, and I can't prove
Speaker 1: this because I'm not connected in that world well enough
Speaker 1: to have real data, but my hypothesis is that without
Speaker 1: the Russians, Trump could never get nominated. That essentially, they
Speaker 1: had spent from to the beginning of sixteen millions of
Speaker 1: dollars sewing discent in America over a set of issues
Speaker 1: like white supremacy, like guns, like anti vax where they
Speaker 1: were trying to divide Americans, and Trump just picked up
Speaker 1: all their themes and the other whatever was sixteen Republicans
Speaker 1: were running on conventional Republican things, and so he ignited
Speaker 1: a you know, a populist wave that got him nominated.
Speaker 1: A similar thing happened in the United Kingdom and the
Speaker 1: run up to Brexit. But the piece that people have
Speaker 1: not focused on enough here is the role that the
Speaker 1: campaigns themselves played. Thanks to something called Cambridge Analytic, we
Speaker 1: know that that the Leave EU campaign for Brexit used
Speaker 1: Facebook data two essentially distort people's understanding of what Brexit
Speaker 1: was about. And to tilt the skills in their favor.
Speaker 1: The thing people have not focused on enough is how
Speaker 1: that same data was used by the Trump campaign, with
Speaker 1: Facebook employees as the active agents of doing it two
Speaker 1: suppress the votes of suburban white women, p people of color,
Speaker 1: and idealistic young people in a set of states, ten
Speaker 1: states in particular, as well as to essentially activate emotionally
Speaker 1: and increased turnout of people already like Trump. It didn't
Speaker 1: move one vote from Clinton to Trump, but that wasn't
Speaker 1: the goal. The goal was to suppress people who might
Speaker 1: vote for clone and engage everybody else. And it clearly
Speaker 1: worked because if you look at this, particularly, people of
Speaker 1: color and young people did not turn out in the
Speaker 1: way the models suggested they should, and the numbers are
Speaker 1: particularly telling of the states that Trump needed to win. Now,
Speaker 1: the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and the
Speaker 1: Russian hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee may also
Speaker 1: have figured. No one has ever actually told us how
Speaker 1: that data was used, but it meant they had the
Speaker 1: complete Clinton campaign playbook and the Democratic playbook and every
Speaker 1: congressional district, and they focused in particular intense states and
Speaker 1: a set of congressional districts where the data said that
Speaker 1: they could win, and they turned a ridiculous percentage of
Speaker 1: them and won the election thanks to seventy votes distributed
Speaker 1: over three states. So I look at this and go
Speaker 1: The Russian thing was absolutely essential, But so was Wiki leaks.
Speaker 1: So was the New York Times, which both promoted her
Speaker 1: emails as a giant story and didn't report on Trump
Speaker 1: being investigated by the FBI a few weeks before the election.
Speaker 1: So was Coomey. But I think in the file analysis,
Speaker 1: the voter suppression done by the Trump campaign, the highly
Speaker 1: targeted voter suppression, was decisive because you know, Jill Stein,
Speaker 1: her votes alone were enough to determine the outcome in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: And you know, they're like ten things that had to
Speaker 1: happen for Trump to win it. He got all ten. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's talk about today, um, in terms of media.
Speaker 1: One thing we know about the Internet, it was it
Speaker 1: allowed other stories to come out now. But we have
Speaker 1: these giant, powerful media operations, and if we were to
Speaker 1: go on right now, and I do it multiple times
Speaker 1: a day, the stories featured on the Fox News website
Speaker 1: are completely different from the stories featured in the WAPO.
Speaker 1: In the New York Times. Do we throw our hands
Speaker 1: up in the air. Is there any way to get
Speaker 1: the populace to agree on facts, especially in a world
Speaker 1: where facts are fungible. So, Bob, one of the things
Speaker 1: that's driving crazy is that we didn't learn from so
Speaker 1: major media. And here I would put all of the networks,
Speaker 1: plus the New York Times, Politico, ax eos uh and
Speaker 1: some parts of the Watch Shi Post have all essentially
Speaker 1: behaved as though Trump is normal and as though we're
Speaker 1: having a normal political process. Now, if you ask stuff,
Speaker 1: why would they do that? Well, it's really obvious. I mean,
Speaker 1: the guy who runs CNN talked about Trump and said, look,
Speaker 1: he may not be good for America, but he's great
Speaker 1: for CNN. And that's the problem. The incentives of journalism today, Look,
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just there. They drive them to normalize Trump.
Speaker 1: And the New York Times had what more new subscriptions
Speaker 1: this past quarter, more digital subscriptions rather up to four million,
Speaker 1: but they had like half a million in one quarter exactly,
Speaker 1: which is like greater than the sum of like all
Speaker 1: subscriptions to like local newspapers side of New York and
Speaker 1: d c uh. I mean, it's insane. Right, and the
Speaker 1: journalism is now dominated by Twitter, so everything, you know,
Speaker 1: the way they find their stories, the way that they
Speaker 1: decide what's important is all about what trends on Twitter,
Speaker 1: and that's really easily gained. And the right has been
Speaker 1: brilliant a gameing and clearly the willingness of Fox two
Speaker 1: act as an amplifier of the far right, irrespective of
Speaker 1: the danger to public health and society, is magnified this
Speaker 1: and made it intractable. But we have to also note
Speaker 1: that the hollowing out of newspapers by Google and Facebook,
Speaker 1: by essentially taking away whatever economics they still had, has
Speaker 1: been horrific. It's been you know, the the role that
Speaker 1: Facebook and Google and Twitter have had and in undermining
Speaker 1: the economics of these things is something we have to
Speaker 1: pay attention to. Now. I've spent the last couple of
Speaker 1: years quietly trying to build an idea for redesigning the
Speaker 1: economics of local news, really all news, but starting with
Speaker 1: local news. And technology plays a really huge role in that.
Speaker 1: But it requires a different philosophy than one of the
Speaker 1: people have had. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: when you hear somebody say, I just want to teach
Speaker 1: everybody news literacy. I'm going to hang on. We've got
Speaker 1: to be realistic. This is going to take a generation,
Speaker 1: and it's going to have to start in kindergarten. We
Speaker 1: have to go back and make public education about teaching
Speaker 1: people how to think. And we have to have you know,
Speaker 1: we have to say this stuff matters to us. I
Speaker 1: just don't see a silver bullet pop. That's the pro problem. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's just go back. Do you think there's a trend
Speaker 1: now in Australian and other countries of making Google and
Speaker 1: other outlets pay for the news. Do you think that
Speaker 1: is gaining power? I do believe it's gaining power. But
Speaker 1: the problem is that it doesn't fix the problem. If
Speaker 1: the incentives of these guys are to promote Trump as
Speaker 1: normal because he sells lots of subscriptions, then just having
Speaker 1: a little bit more subscription money isn't going to help.
Speaker 1: You know, we have that. We have to change the
Speaker 1: demand side. People have to want facts. I think you're
Speaker 1: running a really interesting experiment on COVID because every major periodical,
Speaker 1: all the ones with paywalls, have put their COVID stuff
Speaker 1: out for free. Their most valuable stuff has been out
Speaker 1: there for free, and two things have come from that.
Speaker 1: One is that the people have done that have seen
Speaker 1: a massive explosion in their subscriptions. So there is a
Speaker 1: portion of the market willing to pay for it, but
Speaker 1: that is a very small portion of the market. A
Speaker 1: far larger number of people have decided that COVID is
Speaker 1: a part of the culture wars and have therefore resisted fact,
Speaker 1: they've resisted expertise. They have said, you know, I'm going
Speaker 1: to bring my gun to the state House in Michigan
Speaker 1: because I want to get a haircutter. I want to
Speaker 1: get my nails done. And I'm sitting there going you
Speaker 1: have got to be kidding me. I mean, that is
Speaker 1: not a problem solvable by news media in the current model.
Speaker 1: That's a problem that you have to make a new
Speaker 1: generation people. And by the way, the way we're handling COVID,
Speaker 1: there's a really good chance that Darwinian processes are gonna,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially raise the cost of ignorance to a
Speaker 1: degree that makes people Okay, well, you know, let's talk
Speaker 1: about this education. We've been privileged, you and myself uh
Speaker 1: to have education that focused on analysis. I remember being
Speaker 1: in my first college course and the guy said, we're
Speaker 1: never going to discuss the reading in class. If you
Speaker 1: don't under in the reading, you shouldn't be here. So
Speaker 1: what is the environment we live in? Certainly with Betsy
Speaker 1: devas head of education, we have a great number of
Speaker 1: people moving towards parochial and home schooling. We have money
Speaker 1: taken from public schools. We have public schools where essentially
Speaker 1: books and certain thoughts are banned. Then we have what
Speaker 1: remains of the upper middle class and those above them
Speaker 1: rigging the system such that they get the best education,
Speaker 1: whether it be in private school, then allowing them to
Speaker 1: get in good universities. You know, there are a lot
Speaker 1: of tentacles here. How do we address this? And the
Speaker 1: other thing I must say, which goes back to education,
Speaker 1: to what you were saying earlier about Reagan, etcetera. With
Speaker 1: the money and the government. As soon as you say
Speaker 1: because the right is defined debate, we have to spend
Speaker 1: more money, they immediately tune out. So I think that this,
Speaker 1: you know, we can date that client in public education
Speaker 1: probably to the sixties. Right that things like the Civil
Speaker 1: Rights Act where and the things that followed from it,
Speaker 1: like bussing, caused a backlash against what I think had
Speaker 1: been the central premise of publication public education America, which
Speaker 1: is bringing up you know it basically teaching everyone to
Speaker 1: be a good citizen. And the opposition two civil rights
Speaker 1: laws started a pushback, and you know, simultaneously you saw
Speaker 1: the rise of egypt evangelical Christianity, which is really about
Speaker 1: you know, creating a version of Christianity that could keep
Speaker 1: black people prob And you know, I think sadly a
Speaker 1: lot of these things are basically about white supremacy trying
Speaker 1: to impose its view on policy and everything that follows it.
Speaker 1: Whether it's you know, imposing on a woman's right to choose,
Speaker 1: whether it is about how much money we invest in
Speaker 1: in public education and what is taught there. Those are
Speaker 1: all battles that I think stem from this, this underlying
Speaker 1: desire of a certain group of white people to retain
Speaker 1: privileges over everyone else, and that you know, after a
Speaker 1: long period of progress, you know, into the sixties and
Speaker 1: maybe even into the early seventies, you know, we've been backsliding,
Speaker 1: and initially very slowly and then much more rapidly. And
Speaker 1: I mean it's hard to know what the driver of
Speaker 1: it is, but it's possible that the fact that the
Speaker 1: country has not faced an existential crisis since the Second
Speaker 1: World War and depression immediately before it. That you know,
Speaker 1: those things receding into the background caused people not to
Speaker 1: appreciate the value of cooperation and promoting fairness for everyone.
Speaker 1: You know that essentially forgetting that causes to prioritize our
Speaker 1: individual rights and our infant individual autonomy and our convenience.
Speaker 1: And you know, this happened at a time when the
Speaker 1: economy was getting more and more driven by the needs
Speaker 1: of consumers, and so you went from you know, mass
Speaker 1: market products to mass customization to everybody needs to have
Speaker 1: their you know, bespoke items. That whole trend has put
Speaker 1: us where we are today. And with COVID, it seems
Speaker 1: to me that you have exactly the kind of issue
Speaker 1: and you layer climate change on top of that, and
Speaker 1: you have exactly the kind of issue that threatens everyone
Speaker 1: and where there's no place to hide. You know, your
Speaker 1: gated community is not going to protect you against climate change.
Speaker 1: I mean, I live in California. A wildfire could burn
Speaker 1: my place down. Probably not today because it's overcast, but
Speaker 1: you know, at some point this summer, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter where you live in California, wildfires are a huge
Speaker 1: threat and they are a function of climate change. And
Speaker 1: it turns out that infectious diseases like COVID are also
Speaker 1: a function of climate change. And we haven't had an
Speaker 1: honest conversation by climate change in this country. Well, well, well,
Speaker 1: how is COVID related to climate change? So as the
Speaker 1: temperature rises, infectious diseases, uh, just seemed to prosper. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, I mean, climate change is also
Speaker 1: contributed to the you know, the play of locusts and
Speaker 1: you know the h crack atla. I mean, it's just
Speaker 1: like we have gotten ourselves into the psycho where we're
Speaker 1: so focused on our consumption that we've forgotten to leave
Speaker 1: something for the next generation. We've forgotten to leave something
Speaker 1: for our leader years. And you know, again the connections
Speaker 1: to all these things. They are better people to make
Speaker 1: those cases than I but those people are out there
Speaker 1: making them constantly. Well, this brings a connection. You were
Speaker 1: talking about dedicating three and a half years your life
Speaker 1: to raising the alarm of the abuse of social media,
Speaker 1: both by those using the systems and those running the systems.
Speaker 1: We've been talking about climate change essentially for fifty years.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, we have this woman on the spectrum,
Speaker 1: a girl on the spectrum, Greta Thunberg, and she literally
Speaker 1: pushes the message much further, showing the power of the individual.
Speaker 1: Uh are you do you? Are you still optimistic or
Speaker 1: you worn out with your work? Or have you achieved
Speaker 1: or is it somebody else who needs to do that? Yes, so, Bob,
Speaker 1: I look at Greta Tunberg with ah. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: she is in many ways for her movement what Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King was for his And what if if I
Speaker 1: had a chance to meet Greta, I would say, Greta
Speaker 1: the biggest barrier to climate change action in Western democracies
Speaker 1: is the power of the power that internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
Speaker 1: and Twitter give to the most angry, dissonant voices in society.
Speaker 1: That they give disproportionate political power to those people, and
Speaker 1: they basically prevent action on essential issues like climate change,
Speaker 1: like vaccination, like COVID. And we need to force changes
Speaker 1: in the business model. We need to end algorithm amplification,
Speaker 1: We need to provide better privacy rights, not because those
Speaker 1: things will uh you know, not to punish Facebook and Google,
Speaker 1: but simply because we cannot operate as a society under
Speaker 1: the terms that these guys have created force. And you
Speaker 1: asked me how I'm doing, and I will tell you.
Speaker 1: I started this conversation by saying that I am one
Speaker 1: with the quarantine. I the quarantine for me came along
Speaker 1: in a moment in time when without realizing it, I
Speaker 1: really needed to take a rest, and in my head
Speaker 1: I was already there that you know, I could see
Speaker 1: that my voice was not as effective as it was
Speaker 1: your wire going, and then other voices were doing a
Speaker 1: better job of my work than I was, and so
Speaker 1: I was thinking, Okay, this is great, But I was
Speaker 1: also in this routine of just doing it and the
Speaker 1: where people would call and I would always respond. Now
Speaker 1: with the quarantine, all that has stopped because other issues
Speaker 1: are more paramount and people's attention, and I don't know
Speaker 1: what I'm going to do after quarantine. It's possible focus
Speaker 1: on the local news thing, because in my career I
Speaker 1: also was very deeply involved in a lot of news
Speaker 1: organizations and so and I would involved with things like
Speaker 1: Wikipedia and AH just a lot of things that that
Speaker 1: could contribute to making this uh to creating a new
Speaker 1: ecosystem for for local news and it may be that
Speaker 1: I wind up just getting stuck back into the same
Speaker 1: thing I was doing. But I'm going to look around
Speaker 1: and see what the highest value thing is. Because when
Speaker 1: Tristan Harris and I first joined forces in early you
Speaker 1: can count on one hand the number of people were
Speaker 1: speaking publicly about the issues we were talking about. There
Speaker 1: are a ton of researchers who were working on the issues,
Speaker 1: doing great work, but they were buried inside organizations that
Speaker 1: did not amplify them, and so their voices were not
Speaker 1: being heard in the right place. And because Tristan and
Speaker 1: I were coming out of the valley, we had an
Speaker 1: ability to get access and amplify early on UM. But
Speaker 1: now those those really great researchers and the people who
Speaker 1: are the domain experts, they have access to the amplifiers
Speaker 1: and so UM, it's not as important for me to
Speaker 1: do that. And thank God, because you know, I need to.
Speaker 1: I need a break. I need to. I mean, this
Speaker 1: was gonna be the year Bob. I was already there,
Speaker 1: because this was the year we had this amazing album, right,
Speaker 1: and we were gonna be playing theaters, right, and I
Speaker 1: was going to be, you know, playing guitar behind Lester
Speaker 1: Chambers playing guitar behind Dylan Chambers playing guitar and the
Speaker 1: Tea Sisters to audiences that were just totally grooving on it.
Speaker 1: And you know, we had this review, this thing that
Speaker 1: took you through this this microcosm of you know, what
Speaker 1: the psychedelic music experience delivered back in the day, uh,
Speaker 1: in a way that was freshened up. And you know,
Speaker 1: I really want to do that. Now I can't do
Speaker 1: that at all, right, and so you know it's like,
Speaker 1: what are we gonna do? I mean, we're gonna put
Speaker 1: out this album, right, and we put two songs. You
Speaker 1: go to mons dot com. You can check out two
Speaker 1: of the songs, and we're gonna put out one every
Speaker 1: two weeks and then hopefully about a month from now,
Speaker 1: we'll put out the whole album. But I mean, how
Speaker 1: are you people even gonna find it? I have no idea.
Speaker 1: We're probably gonna give all the money to charity. We're
Speaker 1: trying to pick which one because it's like the country
Speaker 1: is broken, and the numbers and music for an album
Speaker 1: for a band like ours are not great enough to
Speaker 1: justify us keeping the money. But to Second Harvest or
Speaker 1: you know, Sweet Relief for two. You know, artists Rescue
Speaker 1: or one of those organizations helping people in our world,
Speaker 1: it might really matter. And you famously got together with
Speaker 1: Bono formed Elevation and Partners. But in our previous discussions
Speaker 1: you said your first aligned with Bono because you wanted
Speaker 1: to change some of the infrastructure of the music business. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: people were not receptive. Since you're still in the music
Speaker 1: business and it's now twenty years past the initial turmoil,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about the status today? The other
Speaker 1: thing of being, of course, people who are younger than
Speaker 1: us don't understand. They say, yeah, classic rock. But in
Speaker 1: the sixties and seventies, if you wanted to know what
Speaker 1: was going on, you listen to a record, and because
Speaker 1: there wasn't this in committee quality, if you were a
Speaker 1: musician who was very successful, you as rich as anybody
Speaker 1: in America and people knew your name. The only person
Speaker 1: with that kind of mind here today is Trump. Even
Speaker 1: though the media is saying everybody knows Drake, everybody knows
Speaker 1: Taylors with that is not true. So what's your general
Speaker 1: assessment of the music business today. Well, to me, the
Speaker 1: most profound thing is that the industry has acclimated itself
Speaker 1: to streaming. You know, everything has renormalized. You know, nobody
Speaker 1: spends the well. Very few people are still having the
Speaker 1: argument about the fairness of the economics of streaming. I mean, honestly,
Speaker 1: I look at it and I just go, you have
Speaker 1: got to be kidding me. But again, nobody's listening to me.
Speaker 1: They weren't listening to us eighteen years ago when we
Speaker 1: came in with another idea. Um. You know what's really
Speaker 1: weird is the industry is still dominated by the same
Speaker 1: executives were there then, and the same artists who are
Speaker 1: the biggest grossing live acts are still the biggest grossing
Speaker 1: live acts. So it's like the generation that you and
Speaker 1: I grew up and still dominates the economics of the
Speaker 1: live business and the industry in some ways is just
Speaker 1: gonna sunset out with the people that they grew up with, right,
Speaker 1: And there's still a new artist thing that's on streaming, right,
Speaker 1: which is where the hip hop guys are happening, and
Speaker 1: where uh, you know, all of the pop things are happening,
Speaker 1: And there you've hit a new equilibrium. I don't happen
Speaker 1: to think it's fair to the artist, and uh, I
Speaker 1: would like to believe that one of these days I'm
Speaker 1: going to figure out a way to break that. But
Speaker 1: the contracts are very ah, very well crafted from the
Speaker 1: point of view of of labels, and and the truth
Speaker 1: is that the labels do provide real value for breaking artists.
Speaker 1: You know, there are people who can do it on
Speaker 1: their own on YouTube, and but that's still a very
Speaker 1: very small number. And so when I look at this,
Speaker 1: the thing that was beautiful about the world I inhabit,
Speaker 1: which is where people live in the live world, is
Speaker 1: that the club and small theater environment was really vibrant.
Speaker 1: There was a lot going on, a lot of venues,
Speaker 1: a lot of people turning out. Ticket prices weren't high,
Speaker 1: but they were good enough to keep bands going and
Speaker 1: to keep people in the business. You know, here in
Speaker 1: the Bay Area, what Phil Lesh did at Tear Up
Speaker 1: a Crossroads and Bob Weir did at Sweetwater created an
Speaker 1: ecosystem for developing new bands that would then make all
Speaker 1: their money on the road. And I hadn't seen anything
Speaker 1: like that since you and I were kids. And here
Speaker 1: in San Francisco, where from basically the early seventies when
Speaker 1: Journey came up, until these guys started those two clubs,
Speaker 1: the industry. It was about national acts coming and playing
Speaker 1: the big vegant venues. The local papers didn't care about
Speaker 1: local stuff. And it was different than l A in
Speaker 1: that respect. And you know, you had Bobs s gags
Speaker 1: doing slims, but that was all by itself. And then
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, now you have this, this, this
Speaker 1: whole thing. It was really beautiful. But all of that,
Speaker 1: all that may be killed off by the pandemic and
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to do a restart. I mean, the
Speaker 1: buildings will still be there, but who's going to run?
Speaker 1: You know, how long is it going to be before
Speaker 1: people want to be jammed into a tight space. I
Speaker 1: don't know the answer to those questions. And you know,
Speaker 1: we were very early on streaming on Moonalysis streamed every
Speaker 1: show for more than ten years, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: but streaming is not the same experience. It's way better
Speaker 1: than nothing, way way better than nothing, but it's it's
Speaker 1: nothing like being in a live show. And you know,
Speaker 1: it may be the best we got for now, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been watching a ton of you. I
Speaker 1: watched Richard Thompson the other day. He was doing something
Speaker 1: for the Royal Albert Hall from his home and it
Speaker 1: was like it was beautiful. I love Richie Thompson and
Speaker 1: he's like three songs in it. He plays a song
Speaker 1: and he comes to maybe I don't know, four or
Speaker 1: five measures, and he stops, and I'm going, this is
Speaker 1: what I love about streaming. You're watching people in the
Speaker 1: home and it's okay to stop. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be perfect, and it's completely authentic. And Bob, you have
Speaker 1: been the voice of authenticity from the beginning, right, you
Speaker 1: are my guru on authenticity. Well, you know, it's your
Speaker 1: mistakes and your imperfections that make you beautiful, that draw
Speaker 1: people to you. And my point is you have always
Speaker 1: been on that and I've always appreciated I think everybody
Speaker 1: who reached your newsletter and all of us who listened
Speaker 1: to you. You know, whether we were there before, we're
Speaker 1: there now, right, And streaming is all about that, right.
Speaker 1: You know, there's no way to cover the mistakes, there's
Speaker 1: no you know, you're not able to have a click track,
Speaker 1: or you probably don't have a click track. You probably
Speaker 1: don't have all the support. You know. You go and
Speaker 1: see these great big bands and there's four guys on
Speaker 1: stage and you just count up a number of instruments
Speaker 1: that are being played. It's like nine, right, and you go,
Speaker 1: huh gosh, that's interesting, you know, and you see these things.
Speaker 1: I mean, you were at the Grammys were Pink did
Speaker 1: that thing with the act and dropped in the lad
Speaker 1: and all that, and afterwards she goes, well, that pretty
Speaker 1: much puts the light to why you need a lip sync?
Speaker 1: And I'm going, you go, girl, I mean that was
Speaker 1: that was maybe the single most impressive live thing I've
Speaker 1: ever seen. Right, We're watching uh Lady Gaga when she learned,
Speaker 1: you know, she what was the Jazz standards. She'd spent
Speaker 1: like a year learning how to play before she did
Speaker 1: I think at a Grammy. I mean, you know, it's like,
Speaker 1: you see the people for whom this craft really matters, okay,
Speaker 1: and they have flourished in recent times not because the
Speaker 1: big dollars in the business supported, but rather because the
Speaker 1: big dollars in the business create an environment where authenticity
Speaker 1: and where craft could flourish around the edges. And I
Speaker 1: mean every once in a while in the mainstream, but
Speaker 1: always around the edges. And that makes me really happy.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going to happen with that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm involved with a lot of local music production. I
Speaker 1: play a minor role in the Hartley Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
Speaker 1: I do. I help the city put on a Summer
Speaker 1: Souls to show every year. Um, you know, I've been
Speaker 1: involved with a bunch of the local clubs and none
Speaker 1: of that's happening, right, none of it. And so I
Speaker 1: don't know how long this lasts. I don't know how
Speaker 1: long it takes us just to get the opportunity to
Speaker 1: start again. And who's going to be around and how
Speaker 1: are the fans going to feel if this goes on
Speaker 1: two or three years? Right, I don't know. Now, Sarah
Speaker 1: Ken's your do you know who that is? Everybody needs
Speaker 1: to get her books. She is brilliant, Okay, right, she
Speaker 1: just had a presentation and she said two very interesting things.
Speaker 1: First thing she said is we're all sitting at home
Speaker 1: thinking that there's some power somewhere that's gonna take care
Speaker 1: of this, take care of us, and really it doesn't exist.
Speaker 1: And she also said she doesn't have hope and we
Speaker 1: shouldn't have hope. We you know, you do your best
Speaker 1: to help for your children, You and me don't have children.
Speaker 1: But my question is do you have hope and how
Speaker 1: do you view the future for society at larger as
Speaker 1: opposed to you the individual. So here's the thing. I
Speaker 1: had massive hope after that it would be possible to
Speaker 1: educate people the Trump's behavior would be so obviously detrimental
Speaker 1: to society that that would bring people out of the
Speaker 1: stupor the soma, if you will, of consumer them and
Speaker 1: and convenience. When Trump got away with suppressing the Malla report,
Speaker 1: my hope was reduced. When he got away with the impeachment.
Speaker 1: My hope was further reduced. When he was successful at
Speaker 1: making a pandemic into a culture war issue, my hope
Speaker 1: was reduced even further. I strongly agree with Sarah that
Speaker 1: hope is the wrong thing to be focused on here.
Speaker 1: I think it makes more sense to be piste off
Speaker 1: and to go you know, this is not my America.
Speaker 1: I'm not putting up with this bullshit one minute longer,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to do something. Now here's the thing.
Speaker 1: I can't tell your listeners to do that. I can
Speaker 1: only tell them what I chose to do. And you know,
Speaker 1: in the summer of I realized that something I had
Speaker 1: been involved in was playing a really awful role in
Speaker 1: undermining democracy. And I didn't really understand it because I've
Speaker 1: been out of Facebook at that point for h seven years,
Speaker 1: and so I had to do a lot of studying
Speaker 1: to get up to speed to figure it out. But
Speaker 1: by early seventeen it was really obvious to me that,
Speaker 1: you know, I had to do one or two things,
Speaker 1: either to say this is somebody else's problem, which is
Speaker 1: the American way, or I went nope, I played a
Speaker 1: role in this thing. I'm going to drop everything. I'm
Speaker 1: going to focus on this because my value system, in
Speaker 1: the way I was brought up, requires it. And I
Speaker 1: think each of us reaches that point at a different
Speaker 1: you know, under different circumstances. I reached mine. You Know,
Speaker 1: what I am hopeful is that the pandemic will get
Speaker 1: a majority of America to do that. I took tremendous
Speaker 1: hope from the mid terms when the very groups most
Speaker 1: suppressed in turned out in record numbers and delivered the
Speaker 1: House of Representatives for the Democrats. And my point is,
Speaker 1: I am hopeful, but I don't prioritize that. I think
Speaker 1: each of us must do our part. I think this
Speaker 1: is like a war effort, and we need to suspend
Speaker 1: our dreams for the duration, right, because whatever path we
Speaker 1: were on, I mean, if Trump didn't kill it, the
Speaker 1: pandemic is killing it. So stop focusing on that. Let's
Speaker 1: focus on things that will, over time make our lives better.
Speaker 1: Let's look for inspiration to those people who did that
Speaker 1: in the past. And I get mine from the Civil
Speaker 1: rights movement. My my mentor in my activism, man named
Speaker 1: Clarence Clarence Jones. Clarence was Dr King's attorney and speech writer.
Speaker 1: And Clarence is ninety years old, but he takes a
Speaker 1: lot of time to teach me how to be an activist.
Speaker 1: And my parents were bit players and civil rights me
Speaker 1: when I was a kid, so I already had a
Speaker 1: great deal of comfort with a lot of the methodology.
Speaker 1: But you know, I was suddenly I was gonna be
Speaker 1: out front, right, and I had to learn to where
Speaker 1: to dress up for every meeting, bring my toothbrush right,
Speaker 1: do all the things, you know, treat everybody with respect,
Speaker 1: don't make it personal, right, all the things that they did,
Speaker 1: you know, to deal with people like Bull Connor. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing, I'm just one dude, okay, And I'm
Speaker 1: flawed and I've got limitations, and i haven't been that successful.
Speaker 1: But what I can tell you is that there you
Speaker 1: feel better if you're involved. Even when it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: it's worth doing. It's worth fighting the good fights. And
Speaker 1: those of us who grew up, you know, with Neil
Speaker 1: Young singing for Dead in Ohio, right, those of us
Speaker 1: who grew up with Buffalo Springfield, doesn't there's something happening here.
Speaker 1: And you know, listening to Paul McCarney to Blackbird right, um,
Speaker 1: listening to the Chambers brothers tell us time has come today.
Speaker 1: And I mean everybody's got their list of people who
Speaker 1: had a call to action. And if not now when
Speaker 1: I mean seriously, if this doesn't motivate you to get
Speaker 1: off your ass and and like push back, what will
Speaker 1: I mean you and I, I mean my wife and I.
Speaker 1: We like going to demonstrations, right, We like marching. There's
Speaker 1: something very therapeutic about joining with other people to express
Speaker 1: political views. Where are the margins now? Right now? Social
Speaker 1: distancing makes that difficult, But what are the analogs? What
Speaker 1: are the things that we can do to express our discomfort?
Speaker 1: Because if we're always going to optimize everything for convenience. Hell,
Speaker 1: Trump's not our biggest problem. Climate change is going to
Speaker 1: kill us because convenience is just destroying the account of
Speaker 1: destroying the environment. And you know, we're going to have
Speaker 1: to decide that something matters more than our joy in
Speaker 1: the moment. And you know, here's the thing that was
Speaker 1: my choice. Everybody gets to make their own. And the
Speaker 1: thought experiment I asked you to engage in is I'm
Speaker 1: not asking anybody who's listeners to believe that I know
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about, but I am asking you to
Speaker 1: do a thought experiment. Imagine what if what Magna says
Speaker 1: it's correct, how would I behave differently? Would I do
Speaker 1: anything different? And if you would, then do that. If
Speaker 1: you wouldn't, then that's the answer. But you know, I
Speaker 1: I mean, Bob, one of the things I love about
Speaker 1: you is that you're you're You're unafraid to put ideas
Speaker 1: on the table, and when you're wrong, you have a
Speaker 1: whole newsletter of the feedback, right And you and I
Speaker 1: had a huge conversation at one point about why your
Speaker 1: perception than Apple post Steve Jobs was somehow inferior and
Speaker 1: my view that no, the world was different. You needed
Speaker 1: a different set of skills, and you know, Apple was different,
Speaker 1: and there were things you didn't have that you didn't
Speaker 1: have before, but they weren't it wasn't relevant the way
Speaker 1: it would have been before. And that oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: this definition of what counts as innovation or using the
Speaker 1: wrong metrics that we're looking there. That what Apple has
Speaker 1: been doing around privacy, what Apple has been doing around
Speaker 1: payment systems, what Apple has been doing around uh, you know,
Speaker 1: things like that. Those are forms of innovation that are really,
Speaker 1: really profound and really important. And so you know, I
Speaker 1: love you like a brother because there are times when
Speaker 1: I want to throttle you. And the best part is
Speaker 1: we can have that conversation and by the way, you
Speaker 1: straighten me out half the time you're right, and so
Speaker 1: that's what's cool. Well, the great thing is we can
Speaker 1: have on an analytical conversation as a result of the
Speaker 1: era we grew up and in the educations we experienced
Speaker 1: and achieved and the people we hung with. So you
Speaker 1: and me, I could go on till the end of
Speaker 1: time to really addressing the issues, but I think we've
Speaker 1: come to the end of the feeling we've known. Will
Speaker 1: certainly check in with you again, you're a great uh
Speaker 1: temperature taker of what's going on. But Roger, always great
Speaker 1: to talk you. Thanks so much for your ins and
Speaker 1: about the one thing that we should also do is
Speaker 1: we should you should establish a list through your newsletter
Speaker 1: of artists who need our help, okay, because there are
Speaker 1: a ton of artists out there who have no financial
Speaker 1: support right now. There are a ton of people in
Speaker 1: band crews who are currently unemployed, their stage hands who
Speaker 1: are unemployed. And we've got to find a way to
Speaker 1: get way past where music cares goes and you know
Speaker 1: where a sweet relief well you know, yeah, somebody emailed
Speaker 1: me they had a benefit in Philadelphia and they raised
Speaker 1: a hundred grant and they gave out grants of just
Speaker 1: a couple of grant all these people. This analogizes to
Speaker 1: the country at large. There's no organization in terms of
Speaker 1: giving people. It's one thing if you know, someone had
Speaker 1: a heart attack, they lost their house, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people they just need to buy food. It's and
Speaker 1: as I say we're talking earlier, everyone's saying, well, when
Speaker 1: are we opening? When we opening? And you and me
Speaker 1: both no, we're not opening soon. No, And we've got
Speaker 1: to support people and so you know, I've got to
Speaker 1: deal with my band, my crew, the post artists. It's
Speaker 1: going to keep them and pay money. This is my
Speaker 1: opportunity to give back. But there are a lot of
Speaker 1: other people who need our help and we've got to
Speaker 1: find a way. And one of the things is, for
Speaker 1: better worse, your newsletter is one of the has the
Speaker 1: greatest reach in the music business for the demographic that
Speaker 1: you and I inhabit, and a lot of folks there
Speaker 1: and who And I'm just saying, if we keep a list,
Speaker 1: then people can select the ones that they want to
Speaker 1: support and help out right. And you know, it's a
Speaker 1: it's an affinity thing. The great thing about music is
Speaker 1: you know you can like one artist and not like another.
Speaker 1: And I think we can use that to help people out. Okay,
Speaker 1: well that's certainly food for thought. Anyway, Thanks again for
Speaker 1: doing this, Roger. I love your brother. Take care and
Speaker 1: stay well, and everybody out there, please stay well. Our
Speaker 1: first job is to survive this there, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: Until next time. This is Bob left th