Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

In short

Podcast Notes: All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

Episode Title

Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

Episode Overview In this episode, the hosts engage in a deep discussion revolving around the recent murder of Charlie Kirk, the broader implications of assassination culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel's indefinite suspension from ABC, and the Ellison Media Empire’s emerging influence.

Key Topics Discussed

Charlie Kirk's Death (0:00 - 15:27)
Impact and Legacy:
The hosts express their shock and grief over the murder of Charlie Kirk, a significant figure in conservative discourse.
They reflect on the tragedy of a young man, a father of two, being killed for his beliefs.
Discussed the chilling effect this event has on public discourse, noting the dangers of silencing differing viewpoints through violence.

Cultural Commentary:
The conversation highlights the emergence of a generation influenced by COVID-19, isolation, and online radicalization.
The concept of "salad bar extremism" is introduced, where individuals create unstable identities from fragments of various ideologies, leading to radical behavior.

Discourse and Violence:
The hosts articulate their horror at the idea that public debate could lead to violence. They emphasize the importance of maintaining open dialogue despite disagreements.
Sacks and Friedberg argue that Kirk’s success in changing minds made him a target, emphasizing the need for respectful debate.

Assassination Culture in America (15:27 - 30:37)
Radicalization and Ideology:
The hosts discuss the rise of a culture that rationalizes violence against ideological opponents.
They cite statistics indicating a troubling acceptance of political violence among young people, particularly on the left.

Mental Health and Social Isolation:
Discussion about the potential links between mental health issues, medication, and radicalization among youth, with a focus on the role of social media algorithms in reinforcing extreme viewpoints.

Jimmy Kimmel's Suspension (30:37 - 49:11)
Context and Reaction:
Following Kimmel’s controversial remarks about the Kirk murder, ABC suspended him indefinitely.
The hosts debate the implications of Kimmel’s comments and whether they constitute a form of censorship or accountability for statements perceived as inaccurate or offensive.

Free Speech Considerations:
A lively discussion ensues about the balance between free speech and accountability in media, highlighting the pressures media figures face.

The Ellison Media Empire (49:11 - 1:01:09)
Strategic Acquisitions:
The hosts discuss David Ellison’s ambitions in acquiring major media properties, positioning them to challenge existing media giants like CNN and Warner Bros.
The potential implications of these acquisitions on media narratives and the overall landscape of content distribution are considered.

Convergence of Media Models:
The discussion includes thoughts on how traditional media and social media platforms like TikTok may merge, creating new avenues for content consumption.

YouTube Video Flagging (1:01:09 - 1:06:23)
Algorithmic Content Moderation:
The hosts reveal that some of their recent YouTube videos were flagged as "Restricted," raising concerns about algorithmic bias and censorship.
They reflect on the challenges of navigating platform regulations and the implications for free expression.

All-In Summit Recap (1:06:23 - End)
Event Highlights:
The hosts share their experiences and key takeaways from the recent All-In Summit, emphasizing the importance of civil discourse and engaging in difficult conversations.
They celebrate the successful participation of diverse speakers and the vibrant discussions around pressing societal issues.

Key Takeaways

Importance of Discourse: The episode reinforces the idea that maintaining open dialogue is crucial for a healthy democracy, even in the face of violence against those with differing views.
Cultural Concerns: The rise of a culture that accepts violence as a means to silence ideological opponents is alarming and requires societal reflection and action.
Media Landscape Evolution: The potential consolidation of power within the media landscape by figures like David Ellison could reshape how narratives are constructed and disseminated.
Algorithmic Bias: There is growing concern about the role of algorithms in moderating content and how this affects free expression.

Conclusion The episode delves deeply into the implications of recent events surrounding Charlie Kirk and reflects on the current state of political discourse in America. The discussions highlight a critical examination of cultural shifts, the media’s role, and the importance of fostering a society where ideas can be debated without fear of violence.

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Transcript

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0:00Okay, everybody, there's no easy way to start today's show. Eight days ago, Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered while doing what Americans love to do, debate. And when someone is senselessly killed like this, especially at a young age and at the hands of another human, try to make sense of it. It's only natural. And it's hard to imagine anything worse than a young father of two. Just 31 years old and entering the best and most productive years of his life being killed by a 22 -year -old who's barely out of adolescence. Our hearts go out to the Kirk family, his friends, his fans, and every American who understands that no one should be killed for expressing their beliefs.

0:37That's the core of the great American experiment. So let's keep that experiment alive today and the memory of Charlie Kirk by continuing the great debate. Besties is a lot to process here. As a community, a country, a society, and I just want to check everybody's temperature at the top of the program. We're obviously not going to do a cold open here because that would be inappropriate. But how are you processing the last eight days? I actually wrote down something as well, which I normally don't do. I just like to kind of react. But let me just read that and then maybe we can just talk from there.

1:16So to me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID. I see years of isolation, a reliance on screens, and an immersion in online subcultures that have created a vacuum where some young men are drifting in without any grounding, no institutions, no friends, no communities, no family. And out of that void, I think what comes out can at best only be called ideological in coherence. Somebody used the word salad bar extremism. These individuals are not clearly aligned with any one ideology completely, but they seem to be assembling fragments of memes, of conspiracies, of cultural signals into an unstable identity.

2:22And in some cases now it's exploding into violence. I think the most troubling consequence isn't just the facts themselves, which is important. And I feel incredibly bad for all of Charlie's friends and his family and his children, obviously himself, but beyond the act itself, there's an enormously chilling effect, I think, on public discourse. When you express an idea, it cannot be that then you risk becoming a target. Because the ultimate outcome of that is fewer people will then enter the public debate. And then what happens is the range of acceptable dialogue really narrows. And it only leaves space then for the most benign voices in the public square.

3:14And if you have that kind of anodine discussion, I just think you have very bad outcomes for society. I've watched a lot of his content since he was murdered and I'm still trying to grapple with why people could not shout the man down if they disagreed with him and instead shot the man down. And I think that that is a completely unacceptable response for what he thought. That's what I was saying. Freeberg, you're... I think it wasn't his controversy. It was his effectiveness. He was too smart, too open, too honest, too willing to engage in discourse, too willing to debate. He was too effective in changing people's minds.

4:08And I think that's why he became such a cultural threat. And it wasn't necessarily the things he said, because there are people out there who say far more controversial things than Charlie.

4:22It's discourse. And as he changed people's minds, I think he became a real threat to the ideologies that he spoke up against. And I think that's why he was targeted. And it's obvious that if he wasn't as effective as he is, if he wasn't as smart as empathetic, as optimistic, as honest, as direct as he was, he wouldn't have been a target, perhaps. And it was very sad. One of the things that we've seen is the power of going direct, sort of like what we did with this podcast, he went direct, he went to college campuses, but he also recorded it and put it on the internet and millions of people saw it.

5:01And that new form of media, that new form of communication where someone can actually have a town square, the internet, that they can stand at and speak their mind and be heard. There's no longer these filters and these controlling powers of influence that decide what we get to know and not know and what our opinions need to be. the media and the traditional kind of systems are being degraded. I think it's important to continue that. And I think one of the things that I've been optimistic about, I was very sad and angry the day this happened. I called Chimap, I was actually tearful that day. But since that time, I think it's been amazing to see the optimism, not just from one side, but from a lot of different people, from different backgrounds, standing up and saying, discourse is so important and re -underwriting this American process.

5:49So I'm very sad, but I'm very hopeful that people take this as a sign of how important this discourse is. Sax, I don't know if you knew him, but obviously he was instrumental, I think, in the MAGA movement, the conservative movement, and moving so many young people over to it. Did you know him? Did you interact with him? What was he like? And how are you feeling? and he's into this. I know this is the second assassination attempt, third actually, in this recent political season, two on Trump, and now this one. So this feels pretty dark. How are you feeling? Yes, Jason. I knew him and I considered Charlie a friend.

6:33I started doing his show, his radio show. A few years ago, he invited me on and I came on his show. And he proceeded to have me back. I mean, I think I went on the show about half a dozen times. It was always on a wide range of issues, but usually when I was on his show, we talked about tech, we talked about things like censorship, we talked foreign policy. He was extremely versatile in the issues he could speak about. And you see that when he was speaking on campuses, he would really take on all comers and every possible issue would be thrown at him. And he'd always have a well thought out response.

7:05But then I always tried to say, yes, Tim, I always moved things around my schedule when he asked me to come on the show. I just felt that he was a very positive person, very upbeat about the future. I think that he engaged in a very respectful type of debate with people. You see this on college campuses. He saw every opponent and so on that he could potentially persuade and convinced to convert to his side. There are clips of him going around where he explains that we all have to engage in dialogue and in democracy because the alternative, what we stop talking is that we become enemies and eventually at least to violence.

7:42And he was very concerned about the rise of assassination culture he wrote about this months before his death. And so in a way, he almost, I don't think he saw his own death coming, but he definitely saw this disturbing rise of violence as the alternative to free speech and an open discourse. And he dropped out of college when he was 18 to start turning point. I mean, it was sort of a force of nature we put together this organization from scratch and he would go on these college campuses and kind of put down his soapbox or tent and chair under a banner that said, prove me wrong and he would engage people in conversation.

8:19Liberals like to use his term platforming. It's usually the prelude to justifying why someone needs to be denied the opportunity to speak on a tech platform but Charlie wasn't platformed by somebody else. He created his own platform. He created this organization from scratch. And he was platforming liberals or leftists or woke or whatever. He was giving them the opportunity to debate with him and his crowds got larger and larger people like to see him speak and engage in these debates and he was platforming the other side and giving them the opportunity. But like Fieber was saying The more he did it the more became clear that his use were very well thought out and oftentimes the other sides weren't and And if one side became hysterical, it was always the other side.

9:02It was never Charlie. He was always sort of cool, comic collected. And he was winning the debate. He was winning the debate very effectively. And I think he was revealing, in a lot of cases, that these woke students had these very strongly held views. But they couldn't really explain beyond the level of cliches why they believe what they believe. I mean, when he would just start to socratically ask them questions, it was rare that you'd get someone on the other side who could go multiple questions deep with him and debate him with the level of knowledge that he had. And so I think that that firmly is why he was winning the debate.

9:39And that's why I think that so many people of his generation and younger were really paying attention is because he was offering them something that they weren't getting elsewhere. They weren't getting it through the school system. The school systems were kind of drilling it their heads, the sort of woke catatism about what they're supposed to believe. and he was actually offering them critical thinking and dialogue and debate. And I think it's why young people were flocking to him in droves. And I do think that ultimately the reason why he was killed is because he was so effective at engaging in this kind of debate.

10:13And we have it in the killer's own words. I mean, the killer signed this very detailed confession. I should say text of it to his ledger roommate lover about why he did it. And he said that in his view, Charlie represented something hateful and then I think the key thing he said right after that was the killer said I had enough of his hatred Some hate can't be negotiated out So in other words, there's no imperative to engage in Dialogue or debate or discourse of people who disagree with you Counting their arguments with better ones. They just need to be silenced by any means necessary. That's basically The killer described his own motive is that he essentially just thought that there are views that just have to be silenced with extreme violence, with murder, and that that was justifiable.

11:07And I think this is what I think hit a nerve for the whole country. I mean, beyond those of us who are neutrally and concerned with a friend and how much sadness and grief that we have over losing him and for his wife and for his kids are going to grow up fatherless now. I think that we all felt that this was a huge invasion of the town square of the marketplace of ideas. This happened on the college campus, which is supposed to be the ultimate marketplace of ideas. It's supposed to be the place where people engage in reason discourse to work out our differences. And so it felt like an assault on the citadel of democracy.

11:43Freiberg, you set up this amazing panel. We just released, which I think we all agree was kind of a sleeper panel at the summit with two of the heads of colleges, and we talk deeply at the summit about dialogue and freedom of speech and nurturing that, your thoughts on sort of college campuses and the free expression of ideas. Whether it's the college campus or whether Charlie Kirk and that genre moves people via the internet, one of the things we talked about with the head of Berkeley and the head of Dartmouth is that college needs to be a place that teaches kids how to think, not what to think.

12:25And I think that was one of the things that Charlie exemplified better than anyone in this kind of modern media genre is showing people that you can have a discourse, you can have a debate, you can have a dialogue. In the same way that as a group, we've had fights, we've had disagreements, we've had different points of view that we challenge each other on. One of the things early on when we started doing this podcast was people telling me that they thought it was so cool to see friends argue like this and have discourse and have debate and we still do it. And I think Charlie exemplify that and that teaches people how to think and it allows them to form their own point of view.

13:05I do not believe in this notion that some system or some institution should be telling us what the truth is or what to believe or what reality needs to be. They can present us with the facts and the evidence that they've sourced and they can give us a recommendation. But ultimately we need to have agency as individuals to form our own belief systems, to form our own opinions, to make our own decisions. And I think what made Charlie so powerful was his ability to teach people how to do that, how to have a discourse and reason your way to an opinion. And I think that's one of the things that's changed so much in the last 20 years is just this idea that you know, there's truth and there's not truth and whatever one institution tells you is truth and the other institution tells you is not true As opposed to giving ourselves individual agency.

13:53I was in his target audience and so I was aware of Charlie Kirk But I had only seen you know flipping through social media once in a while some of the clips So I took the time to knowing we're gonna talk about it here watch at least 40 or 50 of these interactions listen to a couple of his podcasts and you know, my take away from it was to your point, Sacks, he was incredibly respectful to people. He disagrees with certainly more respectful than you at times, Sacks. Oh, we have debates. And he was actually playful. He was gregarious with these kids when they didn't understand something. And there's a lot of talk right now, people trying to, you know, point out where he was wrong, by the way, you don't get to murder somebody because you believe they're wrong.

14:39And I know this sounds like the most obvious statement in the world. But what I came away with was he reminded me of all the Catholics, my family members I grew up with. He was for family values. He was against abortion. He had specific feelings on affirmative action or DEI that we all might agree with. He might have said them at times in a spicy way or in a really full contact debate. But these were the same conversations I had with growing up. And you know, this is a situation where I'm just perplexed. And I guess it goes back to where you started, Chimoff, that there are some number of people who are sick right now in our society.

15:24And it seems to be young men. It seems to be the COVID generation. How does a person that is seemingly a 4 .0 student on the right track getting a scholarship. How do you so severely go off the rails? And then how do you end up in a place where you believe that something like this is even tolerated or justified? How can a person that's that seemingly intelligent? Get to that place. From a conservative family, it seemed like he had his whole life ahead of him and was on a right track at a certain age. And if he's capable of it, but how many other people are going to end up in that place? So what is happening that basically allows these young men to become so unward?

16:09I think a lack of socialization, and we don't know in this case, but I have very deep concerns about these SSRIs, Adderall. These kids have all kinds of mental health issues, and then they get put on a lot of different prescription drugs. We don't know if that's the case here. So I'm not speculating about that, but just talking about this generation in general. You know, if they are permanently online, they're part of these subcultures. If they are being, you know, having their brain scrambled with all these different drugs, many young people are on two or three different medications. And I'm not necessarily anti them, but I do have a concern of them being massively over subscribed.

16:49His entire justification for this beyond the fact that it's completely abhorrent and unacceptable. is also completely all over the place. I actually asked my team explain to me the things that this guy wrote down. Like where did they come from? One of it is from a video game called Hell Drivers 2. Another one is from the furry subculture. Another one is a fascist theme from a Netflix show. What is going on? Yeah. Well, look, I mean, we know some things about the killer's ideology from what his family said, from what other people who knew him said, and from what he put in his own text messages explaining why he perpetrated this murder.

17:31And I think a big part of it was that in his view, the basically mainstream conservative views that Charlie was discussing were in his view, they were hateful and they were they were fascist. I think I'm one of the bullet casings he etched, he catched this fascist. He had this view that, first of all, that violence is justified as a way to end a political debate and that relatively mainstream conservative thought was so hateful and beyond the pale that it needed to be stopped. And I'd like to say that those views are so unusual that nobody else has them, but the truth is if you look at the data.

18:12If you look at polling, you see that there's been a huge rise on the part of young people, and particularly on the left, although there's some on the right, but it's mostly on the left. They believe now that political violence can be justified. And so you look, I mean, there's been many different ways of getting at this. There's a study, I guess, Rutgers University, the social perception lab. They asked about whether the murder of of Donald Trump or Elon Musk could be justified. And 50 % of leftist center said yes. 14 % of rightist center said yes, even that number is shocking to me. How could it be one percent?

18:56That obviously it's three times greater on the left. Then they asked about destroying Tesla dealerships and protests, whether that could be justified. And roughly 60 % of leftist center said yes. and 23 % of right of center said yes. So there is, I think, an increasing view on the part of young people. And this also coincides with similar declines in respect for the value of free speech. They've been pulling people of all different age groups and different political parties for many, many years on whether they believe in free speech. And those numbers have been on the decline again, particularly among young people and particularly on the left.

19:37And so you see it now in the data that there is a Generation of young liberals. I mean obviously not all to be sure but a sizable contingent Who believe that the other side is so hateful that it's okay to use violence against them and then and you yeah That is a huge societal problem Because democracy ends when we can't debate ideas. What's at the root of it? I have two things I think are out the root of this. I talked a little bit earlier about the medication that they're putting all these kids on, and I'm going to keep talking about it because we're talking about, you know, upwards of 20 % of kids have been on SSRIs or on Adderall or some stimulant right now.

20:25And it's not possible that all these kids need this. And there is many other solutions to it. And then I'll add the algorithms, not that an algorithm is responsible for the murder, but we are taking people down rabbit holes online. And in fact, Jorolley's content was exceptional at engaging people, right? Short form, you know, really interesting debates and all that kind of stuff. And that combination of being online too much, being over -medicated, being isolated. You put all that together, Jamaf. I think that's what leads to these kind of extreme theories and disconnects from reality. But we could also be dealing with somebody who's severely mentally ill.

21:04And we're trying to understand a severely mentally ill. Hold on a second. Hold on. You're starting to sound a little bit like Paul Graham there, but that this is just some sort of random nut. Here's why it's not just some random nut. First of all, we have an extraordinarily detailed statement and confession from the killer, giving us a lens into his motives. But I would say the even bigger thing is the reaction of hundreds of thousands of people online super celebrated this murder. Exactly. beliefful who expressed some degree of happiness about it or try to downplay what the killer had done by saying on some level that Charlie Kirk deserved it.

21:42Where does that come from? And I think this has to do again with the ideology of the left, not the traditional old left because I think the sort of old left really believes in speech maybe anybody else, folks like Nadah and Toph and so And by the way, I think guys who I would consider kind of more old left like Bernie Sanders and Ezra Klein put out excellent statements denouncing this murder agreeing with this core idea that political violence is never acceptable. And then they were shattered down, which is insane to Ezra. He got crushed for that. That tells you something too. So look, I think that the psychotic break, if you will, that is now occurring in a bunch of different cases, may be exacerbated by who knows.

22:27medication by isolation experience during COVID or what have you, but there is clearly a huge ideological component to this that there are huge numbers of people, even if they don't commit the crime themselves, who celebrate it. Because they have had drums and ther head for decades now, the idea that the other side are fascists, their leader is like Hitler. What do you do to Hitler? You have to stop them at all costs, right? And I think that is a significant part of the problem here. Now, you ask not where, where does this ideology come from? I think it's going from the school system. I mean, we've had, now for the last couple of decades, this sort of woken ideology, this cultural Marxism, be taught through the school system, where they drum into the kids that there are two kinds of people, oppressors or oppressed, and they divide people into these groups and say that the oppressors have to be stopped.

23:19And that's really as deep as the discussion gets. And if you want to get a sense for this exaggerated, just destructive rhetoric, just look at the new book that has come out by Randy Weingarden who is... Head of the teacher. ...basically the head of our school system because she runs the teachers' unions and they're the ones who have all the political power. She wrote, Why Fascist Hate, Critical Thinking. And by the way, this is not just an article, I guess Rolling Stone did an excerpt. This is an entire book. And the book is called Why Fascist Fear of Teachers. So she's basically saying that Trump and all of his supporters are fascists.

23:58They have to be stopped. You've had this hyperbolic rhetoric. For a decade, you've had the press describe Trump as some sort of new Hitler. To use Scott Adams term, they basically Hitlerized him. And so you ask, we don't know exactly where Tyler Robinson and Biveau, all of these ideas, but you have to also take into account that probably since he was 12 years old, And the mainstream media has been beating into his head that the leader of the United States is a new Hitler and the worst thing that could ever happen is his return and his supporters are fascists. And I'm sure this has to play into, if not his thinking, the thinking of the people who are celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk.

24:42Because they have bought into this idea that the other side are fascists who have to stop at all costs. Yeah, I think it's important to point out as you did, Mandami, Nancy Pelosi, gosh, AOC, Ezra Klein, they all came out just very strongly that this is horrible, unacceptable, and they couldn't, you know, obviously, I think it's apporant. So I think that leadership is strong, and I think that's what we need to see more of, is people trying to tone this down and yeah, not exacerbate it. Look, I think you're right. I think that what we need to see from all of our political leaders is a condemnation of this murder in particular and political violence in general without any caveats whatsoever, without intimations that somehow Charlie Kirk deserved it without this exaggerated rhetoric that the other side are fascists that Trump has hit learned so on.

25:42there just needs to be an unequivocal denunciation of this crime and political violence and the idea that we can settle our differences in this manner. And I give credit to any liberal Democratic politicians who say that, but unfortunately, that has not been the discussion. I think that's been one of the most disturbing things about this is that if it had just I think that we wouldn't have had the same national conversation. So it would have been awful. But I think the reason why this became such a national conversation is that we can all see that living among us, you have huge numbers of people who've been indoctrinated into what Scott Adams called this Hitler bubble.

26:30And I think it's a real question what we're going to do to get out of this bubble. Because in order to have civil society, we have to have the ability to engage in conversations to have for the base without fear of violence or murder. And when you have this sizable contingent of people in our society who've deviated from that, it makes you really worry for the future of our society. Absolutely. And it makes you wonder, what are we gonna do about this? There's a whole trans angle to this that is being talked about, but maybe people are withholding a little bit, but he was answering a trans question when he was shot by somebody who's, I guess girlfriend, would be the right way to say it was in the middle of transitioning.

27:15So there's many different angles here that we're gonna try to understand over time. Right, and then in response to that, you saw an ABC news reporter describe the text chain, which was a murder confession as touching. And so now I think that is the reporter has published an apology. So I'm not gonna dwell on that part of it, but I think what you see here is an upside down morality. What Tyler Robinson did was an act of hate. The ultimate act of hate. He committed murder, he left a wife without a husband, he left two children without a father. It was the ultimate act of hate. But in his twisted mindset, it was somehow an act of love.

27:57And the question is, how do we get to this place? And again, if it was just Tyler Robinson, then we could just chalk it up to the random nut theory. But well, and we don't know the random not who shot Trump like we don't have any information on that person either So I'm right, but what bothers me more again are all these people in Redic groups or online and blue sky, which is just a cesspool of hate now Who are Celebrating celebrating to some degree. No, there there are Definitively people celebrating. Yeah, this is why I really think one of the most constructive things that we can do coming out of this is we have to find out how to course correct these people.

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28:39Yeah, actually, Jake had a rolling head a really good tweet on this. So she says that if you believe free speeches for you, but not your political opponents, your illiberal. I mean, I think we've known that for a while, and I don't know if the woke left cares about that anymore, but any event, she's then goes on say, if no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you're a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you're a totalitarian, and then I think the most important one is if you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you're a terrorist.

29:10And I think actually this was an active terrorism in the sense that it was designed to discourage other people from speaking out. Again, it was done in the most public place in this town square. But I think what Rallie is getting at here is that in order for civil society to survive, we're going to need some sort of minimum standard of Decentcy, you know, I remember when we were in college we used to have these like thought experiment type questions Which is how much if tolerance can a tolerant society tolerate things like that and I think we have our answer which is Listen you can say whatever you want, but our minimum standard of decency in a society is That you cannot use violence to settle political disagreements and And if you cannot accept that, I mean, really, that should be the pledge.

30:00Instead of frankly, growing Norquist tax pledge or even the pledge about deficit spending, I think we need a minimum decency pledge. The political violence is unacceptable. And if you can't sign that pledge, you should not be participating in the discourse. I mean, the fact that you have to even suggest signing a pledge to not murder people you disagree with shows how far gone this all is, and how to serve bring it is. That just should be something that is inherent in every human being in their operating system You just don't murder people because you disagree with them All right, it's obviously yeah, we're this is an evolving story.

30:35We don't have all the answers here, but you see the Jimmy Kimmel Comments and should we play those and talk about yeah, I guess this is a pretty good segue here. So Political discourse adjacent related the fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk is gonna to stay with us for some time here. ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel from Jimmy Kimmel live indefinitely after he made the following remarks and pressure from the FCC and the affiliates of ABC. Here's the 15 second clip. We get some new lows over the weekend with the Magigang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and do everything they can to score political points from it.

31:20And in between the finger pointing, there was grieving. And he goes on to show a clip of Trump. Yeah, but I think you also left out that sentence right after that where he says, yeah, there was grieving, but it was like a four year old grieving the death of a goldfish. Yeah. So, yeah, pretty inappropriate comments, I think. And here's the timeline of it. So because it was some thinking this could have been a mega person because the parents were or conservatives and during that breaking news, you know, maybe that first sentence wouldn't be as off -putting or inaccurate as it seems to be. But he said it Monday night, and this was three days after we knew about the anti -fascist bullet casings that Chimalt was referencing, hey, fascist catch, et cetera.

32:07And this was one day after Utah's governor was very clear that this was a murderer who had leftist ideology. and one day after it was disclosed that Robinson had been living with a transpartant of which may or may not turn out to be relevant. You could totally have B .G .A. or have a transpartant or any of that and we may have nothing to do with this or it could have everything to do with this. So we'll have to wait and see. And Jake, how was it the what are the text messages out by that as well? Well, the text messages was part of this very good. Those were actually released on Tuesday after the show aired and they usually tap in the afternoons for those nightly shows just so people know that.

32:46So there was enough information here that, you know, he was inaccurate or spinning this or however you want to phrase it. It was clumsy. Meghan Kelly put out a very long description of everything that was known prior to Jimmy Kimmel's remarks. Yeah. And there was a huge amount of information to indicate that this was someone who was in the grips of a radical leftist ideology and no evidence to suggest that they were somehow part of MAGA. And what Jimmy Kimmel did there was viciously lie, I think, implying or stating outright that effectively Charlie Kirk was killed by one of his own, by a MAGA person, thereby, I think diminishing the crime somehow and by maybe they deserve it.

33:32And then he diminished the sincere grief and outrage that millions of people are feeling, Yeah, beyond those of us who were friends with Charlie and Charlie. But millions of people. But that is okay. In free speech sacks, that statement, that's his choice. He might lose audience over it, but free speech protects him doing that. The challenge was did he say something that he knew to be not true and declared as fact and did that kind of was the reaction that he got. Yeah. And so if he said something that he knew, well, just reading his sentence, you know, he He was saying, we hit some new lows over the weekend with the Maga gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlotte Kirk is anything other than one of them.

34:16So he's referencing the weekend. So you know, you could say he's being disingenuous here, but I think it's not a funny. He's supposed to be a late night comedian. It is. It is an accurate, it's highly inaccurate. It's a lie and it's a vicious lie. I'm not defending it, but it was not inaccurate that people were doing that speculation during a podcast on Tuesday, FCC chair, Brendan Carr, we all know said the FCC would look into revoking the broadcast license of ABC affiliates because Jimmy Kennell, Kimmel was engaging in, quote, news distortion by falsely claiming Tyler Robinson was magna on Wednesday.

34:54Next star, one of ABC's affiliates that has 28 local stations that it would be replacing Kimmel show with different programming. And there's now this backstory that next star is buying a rival for $6 billion So the speculation is like the CBS and paramount situation where they fired cold air on July 17 that they don't want to get caught up in Having the 47th administration coming up their M &A activity and Then ABC after all that pull Jimmy Kimmel in Definitely so I guess the question here I'll say I'll say pull up the ratings over time. We get to all that but I just let me just Yes. The question, do you have concerns about this act?

35:36Obviously, you've been very approached free speech here. Do you think that this is overreaching? If you hurt people's feelings, if you said something inaccurate, do you think you should be, the government should be taking him off the air or putting pressure on them to take him off the air? Well, no, the government shouldn't be ordering him to be taking off the air, but neither President Trump nor the FCC Chairman Brennan -Card did that. The reason why Kimmel lost his job is because the two largest affiliates, which is Next star in Sinclair told ABC Disney that they wouldn't air it anymore. And I think part of this is due to the genuine offense at what he said, which, okay, I guess you can put the best face you want on it.

36:16It was false and it was a flip way of describing something that was causing pain to millions of Americans. Next star called his remarks offensive and insensitive. That is true. And then Sinclair said that they're gonna air a Kirk Tribute in Kimmel's time slot on Friday. So look, I think this is about the affiliates. First of all, finding what he said completely offensive, but then, secondarily, the truth is that I think there's a lot of opportunism in this, and this is really about poor ratings. Kimmel has even worse ratings than Stephen Colbert, who recently got canceled, because his show was too expensive and none of people were watching it.

36:54And I think that what's happening here is the ABC affiliates are, frankly, they're seizing an opportunity to rid themselves of this money losing disaster. And they're getting back that hour of television for other things. The question is whether cars should have said we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take actions on Kimmel or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead. That's what I'm sort of referencing in terms of the government putting pressure on these folks to cancel him. Well, look, what car was asked whether by, I think he's on Penny Johnson's show, So, Benny asked whether there's anything that can be done about this.

37:32And then, Carr said that there is a public interest requirement with respect to the broadcast networks. So, if Jimmy Kimmel show was on a podcast or on cable, that public interest requirement wouldn't apply. But because those affiliates receive public spectrum for free, there is a requirement that the reporting being truthful to some degree and serve the public interest. And I think he was right to point that out. Now, look, did it ever get to the point where the government ordered him off there? No. It didn't need to get to that point because the guy show was a ratings disaster. Look, even John Stewart, who was a big late night host at one point said, let me just read you his quote on not this topic, but about late night.

38:20He said, being a late night host is like operating a blockbuster video, kiosk, inside a tower records. In other words, the business model is totally obsolete. And I think that's what's ultimately driving this. Look, we never got to the point where the FCC took an action. And I think if we got to that point, then maybe we debate this issue of what the government should do. But we never got to that point. And I think it's because the affiliates decided on their own that it was time for Kimmel to go. Pat, you're not doing that? It's mostly that. If you just look at the ratings, the reality is that these folks get a lot more intention than they actually deserve.

38:55I mean, it is an anemically sad audience approaching zero. 160 ,000 people watch Jimmy Kim alive. More people hate stream our show in one day on YouTube. You know what I mean? So it's like, I mean, so what are talking about you. This is like the pimple of the pimple of the pimple of the dogs ass. So I think that people needed air cover to make a decision to cancel it today. And the reason why they wanted to cancel it today was if they didn't take this opportunity, they would have had to wait another year or two for his renewal to come up. And so I think that there was a economic motivation that was lingering for a long time before this happened.

39:44His show sucks. It's not very good at a very basic social, cultural, economic reality as these numbers demonstrate. Many, many, many millions of Americans who had a choice every day to listen to this guy voted with their feet that this show sucked. Let's move on. I will, yeah, say I agree that they made a very simple decision that was economic because Because these same networks, ABC and CBS, were more than happy when these shows were pulling in serious ratings and serious money back in, you know, three, four or five years ago, they were doing much better. It shows you how cable has come apart over the last couple of years.

40:30In 2022, ABC signed Kimball to three seasons, 45 million, 2023, CBS signed Colbert to a three -year deal. That'll be ending. and as you showed in that chart, it's been plummeting since then. Quick note, that's just for the very important 18 to 49 demographic, obviously they have a bunch of old boomers watching it on their cable channels. That's the discrepancy in those numbers. Nobody watches this, but I do have grave concerns over myself personally in what branding cars doing. I don't think the FCC should. He didn't do anything. Well, I'll finish my sentence maybe. Okay. Or you can just interrupt me every time I start a sentence.

41:08We just talked about having civil discourse. Do you want to have civil discourse? I'm a shiver. I'm civilly telling you civil. You can do any in the first sentence. Please go ahead. I do have concerns over both how the administration is doing this. I think it's disgraceful. I didn't like the pressure they put CBS under to get co -bearer cancelled. And I don't like the pressure they're putting ABC news under. we should have a tradition of free speech and comedians should be protected even if you don't like what they have to say. This is the exact opposite of what many folks and why they backed this administration was to have less censorship.

41:45And we sat here on this program for many years talking about Biden censoring COVID talk and Biden censoring social media having the Twitter files, a direct line in there to cancel this. I think that this is a dark question. Hold on, let me finish. It's a dark moment for this administration to be so obsessed with trying to silence their critics. And it's not going to work. It's only going to drive them to start podcasting. Can I ask him to do more of it? Yes. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Well, first I make a statement. I think your comments are insane. But okay, there's no question. I think you are so sick of fantic to Trump.

42:23What about that? I said he didn't do anything. No, I think you're trying to suck it up to Trump by saying it's a terrible show. He's not funny. None of the matters in terms of freedom of speech. I'm trying to ask you a question. Do you think because the government did nothing, let's just speak with it, they did nothing. They threatened them. After he was already canned. No, not after. And they shouldn't be doing any pressure. Okay, the government should be staying out of it. Okay, but let me ask you a question. Do you think the people that made the decision to dump Kimmel. What percentage of it do you think was the economic reality of a busted show?

42:59And what percentage of it do you think was the impingement of free speech as you characterize it? What percent? How did you weigh these two things? Absolutely. I think they would have let both of their contracts run out, renegotiate them with smaller dollar amounts and reset the economics of those shows if not for the pressure put on them by the 47th administration. I think they would to just row these shows out till their next contracts went out and then they would have renegotiated them at much lower amounts. You think Trump is the reason why Colbert got canceled. What are you talking about?

43:31I think that the president of the whole mythology now that's going to create it. Not a pathology. I think they wanted to get the power of the deal through. No, no, I think getting the power amount deal through the sale of the power amount and I think they've settled a lot of these agreements because they don't want to get caught out The business model is going away. That can all be true. Two things can be true at the same time. John Stewart understands the medium and he says, the blockbuster store, they can't wait to rid of these guys. These guys are overpaid. They're entitled because they're grossly overpaid.

44:02They think they deserve this. Oh, wait, free speech does not mean you have a right to Navy C show. Sorry. You actually have to be able to get ratings. You have to be talented. You have to be funny, which none of these guys are anymore. That's the reason they're getting canceled. Exactly. You know what they're talking about replacing, Kimmel with, not another late night performer, celebrity family feud. Like that's, they're going to replace it with a game show. That's what they're talking about replacing with. Great show by the way. Yeah. Great show. It's a more affordable show. They would not have canceled either of these folks if it wasn't from pressure from the administration.

44:37The FCC had basically said, we're going to do this one way or the other. So I believe that this is the kind of thing we don't want to see at the Trump administration. and by the way, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and I are all in sync on this. We all think that this is a bad look for Trump and the Trump administration. You guys can disagree, but that's what we do here. We have several disagreements. Where were all the people who were complaining at this when Gina Karano got fired by Disney? Oh, I absolutely felt that was inappropriate. I think that cancel, I think there's cancellation now on both sides.

45:07The, and I understand people are very hurt by what happens. Were you told, where is Amba getting fired? I am against anybody getting canceled for their political beliefs. I was against it when they did it to the right And I'm against it when they're doing it now to the left. Is that clear though? Let's talk about cancel culture for a second I actually think that Dave Portanoi had a great take on this there is a legitimate question here about cancel culture like should it ever be used? When should it be used and I think Portanoi made a really good point he says here to me cancel cultures when people go out of the way to dig up old tweets videos etc.

45:39Looking for dirt on someone. So in other words, they're going through 10 -year, 20 -year -old tweets of yours. Maybe they find some joke that was either off -color or import taste or maybe it's just something they can spin as being that thing. And it's done in an opposition research type of way, right? They decide they're going to go after you and say sort through everything you've ever written. That's cancel culture, okay? He can trust that with somebody who is on live TV basically saying something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, and dumb in real time. So in other words, this was not like opposism research.

46:19This was a spontaneous reaction to a deeply offensive and insulting and dishonest and false thing that Jimmy Kimmel said and he already was on thin ice because his ratings are terrible and his syndicates want to get rid of him. And like Port -Nois says, that is not cancel culture, that is consequences for your actions. And I think he's right about that. And I am a free speech absolutist. If Jimmy Kimmel wants to create a podcast and say all the types of things he said on ABC, I got no problem, that's his right. He will not be censored, he can do that. Okay, and my view on the whole public interest requirement is What we should do is just auction off all the network spectrum I think it is a can of worms to basically say to all these broadcast affiliates that we're gonna give you all this Wonderful free spectrum, but then you got to uphold the public interest It's way too debatable what that means.

47:13I do think it basically invites challenges to what could be free speech so I think just get rid of the public spectrum just have an auction and And we don't need free public spectrum for broadcast. I definitely agree with that. In the era of the internet, you do not need public spectrum anymore. I think that that solution has a lot of positives beyond this issue. I think that that's the issue of that spectrum anyway. And just to go back to this idea of, look, if someone in real time is advocating for the murder of someone for their political views or for any reason, maybe that does justify a spontaneous outpouring where it should be reported that an employer, hey, this person is saying this thing, if they're dancing on the grave of someone if they're praising that act of murder, you know, I have to say that, again, I have a minimum standard of decency for civil society and that minimum standard of decency is an unwillingness to engage in political violence or to celebrate political violence when somebody engages in it because otherwise we're down the path of civil war.

48:20I think we all understand that. So I have to say that if someone's going to advocate for these views, I'm okay with there being a spontaneous reaction of people complaining about it. Yeah. And if that means that you make animals does a podcast instead of an ABC show in prime time, I'm okay with that. I think, you know, the issue I have with any of these cancellations is when the president is asking the networks to cancel people During his 17 time a day press conference and working with the gaggle, he's literally telling them fire the last two. And then the FCC chair is telling them to fire them and that they'll figure out a way to do it.

48:58That to me is the height of putting pressure on these companies. And I think it's that poor. Okay. That's just my personal belief. You guys don't have to agree with it in this civil debate we're having here. Let's talk about Larry and David Ellison. They're making massive media moves both in legacy and social media. Let's talk about the legacy stuff first. Paramount Skydance merger is basically a month old and already CEO David Ellison, that's Larry Ellison's son, is looking to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery. As you probably know, they run by David Zazlaw. They own CNN, HBO, DC Comics Discovery, a bunch of other brands.

49:35and that would put the Ellison's in charge of not just CBS news, which on 60 minutes, they would also own CNN. As everybody knows, Larry Ellison, big GOP donor in the past, and there also are reports, interestingly, that David Ellison wants to buy the free press from Bart Weiss for 200 million and put her in charge of CBS in 60 minutes. That would be seismic in news business. If you put those assets together, 200 million paid subs, HBO Discovery, 120 million paid subs right now, CBS reaches 80 million paid with Paramount Plus, and the free press is obviously niche and brand new, but they're growing.

50:14You got 136 ,000 paid subscribers, and almost a million followers across their social media. The second piece to this puzzle that's super interesting is social media. Oracle is now the heavy favorite to acquire TikTok and Trump said that was going to happen as part of the US and China negotiations that are ongoing for trade. So what are your thoughts here, Freiberg? You wanted to talk about this. It's an interesting collection of assets coming under the Ellison umbrella. Is this strategic? Is this vanity? Is it a nepot baby with a huge, you know, blind checkbook? What are we seeing here? And what do you think?

50:54I mean, what do you do when you're worth a couple hundred billion dollars and you're 81 years old and you're thinking about what legacy you want to leave behind, except to perhaps empower your kid to build the largest, most influential media company in history. And I think that's the story that's unfolding in front of us. Not to mention, I think that the TikTok deal and Ellison's role in TikTok is going to be instrumental in realizing potential future distribution. So if you think about the way media has evolved, that used to be kind of centralized studio -based production models, the old paramounts, the old Warner Brothers, etc.

51:30And then there's been a lot of streamers that have come on that started to syndicate that content and contract for production of content like Netflix. And obviously Paramount Plus and HBO Max have their own streaming services to deliver their own content. But at the end of the day, there's kind of two big behemoths that each come at it from a different place. One is YouTube and the other one is Netflix. Netflix has historically been in the kind of scripted production or contracted production side and YouTube and the social production side. The alternative to that might be this consolidated merger and TikTok.

52:03And now Larry Ellison is going to have a hand in both. And so there may be, and I do think that there's going to be this convergence between this kind of socially generated content platform like a YouTube, like a TikTok and the high value produced content like the studios, like Netflix has been doing. And the reason is Netflix has had to compress margins on the content creators. And we talked about this at our summit last week, where a lot of the creators now that went to Netflix to get good deals or went to Amazon, they're all finding that the budgets are getting cut and that the only way these folks are going to get paid is like cost of production plus 10%.

52:42With cost of production getting squeezed and budgets getting squeezed by Netflix. So as a creator, you may actually make more money by taking your content to a bigger audience with sponsors or advertisers on YouTube. And so a lot of big time creators, by the way, the audience at YouTube is over 10x bigger than it is on Netflix. So Netflix is only paying to retain subscribers now. You know, subscriber growth is kind of slowed down a bit. At the end of the day, Netflix is just spending money on content to keep people on the platform. So if you take the incredibly rich content and production capabilities of HBO and all the Warner Brother discovering media properties and production houses underneath this combined company, and you combine that with the direct to consumer distribution of TikTok, there may in the future be a merger between this media company and TikTok or a deep commercial relationship where imagine going on TikTok and you can now get premium content for 10 bucks a or two bucks an episode and watch all of your HBO shows in the TikTok app or watch all of the Discovery shows, or all of the other content that's available.

53:47So I do think that the distribution that has been delivered by this kind of social media model like YouTube and TikTok, combined with the premium model, may end up creating a real category killer that can challenge both YouTube and Netflix. And so I would kind of look at this story as like a beginning of an unfolding of something that may rewrite the entire media landscape. I mean, when you look back on it, freeberg, Katzenberg was maybe ahead of his time with Quibi. He wanted to try to make this bridge between the two and he just might have been too early or just in execute. Well, think about the network effects.

54:21What made TikTok so big, what made YouTube so big is the long tail of user generated content. And that's what drove the audience. And that's what built the platform. And then it's from mainstream, right? And yeah, well, then you can do the premium stuff on top of it. But when you try and create premium content in a small way like Katzenberg tried to do, it's very hard to build the audience to make the economics make sense. Yes. And the economics are really challenging already with premium content in the big players as you can see with Netflix. They're compressing budgets. So I would argue that you really need to have them both to make the model work now because the audience is so attuned to user -generated content.

54:57Here's what our partner, Polly, market, shout out to my guy Shane. 84 % LaRy Ellison are Oracle, kind of the same thing here. They put a slash acquire TikTok. That's up over 20 percentage points in the last couple of days. What do you think all this means? The divestiture of TikTok, LaRy Ellison getting it as opposed to Google, Apple, Microsoft, and there were so many people, maybe even Elon, who might have wanted TikTok. What do you think of this divestiture? And then our government gets the golden vote. Now I understand that the US government will have a seat on the board of TikTok. So the Chinese have given it up except for the algorithm.

55:37Remember TikTok, it's TikTok US. It's only 5 % of the overall TikTok business. So TikTok US is what's being spun out. Yes, correct. Tremont, what do you think here? I think there's two things that are important. The first is that in the future, and this may sound very dystopian, but he who controls the algorithm will control what people think. And if you think about it in that context, you need, as you've said before, a marketplace of very different approaches and algorithms that are essentially fighting for mindshare. If you don't have that, that you'll have a massive zombie group think culture.

56:19So from that perspective, you have to put TikTok into the hands of a completely different owner than any of these other social media sites so that they are motivated to compete against each other. That's one. The second thing is there's been a lot that has been said about the TikTok algorithm called Monolith. And a bunch of it has been already put out openly and TikTok was very transparent and they publish a paper you can find it on archive, you can show the link to it, Nick. Maybe in the show notes, but it's an incredible paper that describes a very simplistic approach to essentially moving people into different directions of thought.

56:57So if you put all of these ideas together, I think where we are, maybe all the way coming back to where we started this discussion about Charlie Kirk, it is increasingly important to make sure that the overwhelming majority of how people get ideas is understood by the rest of the people. Because if you start to go down these rabbit holes in ways that are algorithmically programmed, in models that you don't understand that then push you into extremism, you will end up in a very, very, very bad place as will society. And then the outcomes of that are completely avoidable as we're seeing. Yes. So I think that the TikTok thing is going to be one of these important moments where we shine a light on the importance of these algorithms.

57:45It's poorly understood. It's not well talked about, but I think what the Trump administration doing is important to keep it away from everybody else so that there's more competition. Yeah, I'm going to strongly agree. I think the Trump administration did a great job on this one. Just calling balls and strikes of not making sure metagon it or somebody who has already a lot of algorithmic control over what society is seeing. And back to the algorithm. Just on this, you know, I give a lot of credit to Elon too because his algorithm is open source. We know what's happening there. He just did it two weeks ago.

58:19If that's open source and monolith is open source, then I think the next big question we have to ask is what is going on in Reddit? What is going on in meta? How are we guiding and shaping people? Why does YouTube sometimes, for example, like our Tulsi Gabbard video, is apparently deemed to risque and add all content? Who decided that? How did that happen? An algorithm, not any human. And the thing I think is important to start thinking about here is, as an industry, we're going to either need to regulate this ourselves or be regulated. I think that there should be regulation, and I'm not like super fan of regulation, that algorithms must be disclosed, And you must have the option given to you up front to switch your algorithm.

59:06There should be a BYOA, bring your own algorithm. There should be an algorithm store. And I talked to Elon about this publicly on X many times. If you could say, I want one that just gives me a chronological feed. I want one that is from the highest quality sources. And then you should be required to show what the default algorithm is doing. And if you don't do that, I think you should lose your section 230. because an algorithm is more powerful than an editor at the New York Times or an editor at HBO or Netflix deciding what we see, deciding what goes on the homepage. The algorithm is a black box and who knows who's controlling it.

59:42And then what happens in society when young men are pushed towards more and more fringe content, more and more dark content, why not just have all the speech transparent? Why not let people see? Unfortunately, they don't need to be pushed to fringe content. All they need to do is go to a school where the woke curriculum has been mainstreamed. And Randy Wyingard and his foot soldiers are saying that conservatives are fashists. So you're acting like you got to go through some weird rabbit hole to imbibe these ideologies when all you have to do is attend a public school and probably a lot of private ones too.

1:00:20I think Dalton's by the worst. So again, you're acting like the radicalizations coming from the fringes. I think what's so concerning about where we are as a society Is the radicalizations coming from our institutions or a lot of these institutions? You're not going to get an argument me. I think these schools should be teaching, you know a basic skills and They should not be involved in the culture wars in any way I don't think any parent is setting their kids there and if you are a parent and you're in California I would encourage you to figure out what they're teaching your kids and here in the great state of Texas.

1:00:53It's totally great. But hey, can I? Can I just ask someone for a sec? By the way, and it's quite different here in the great state of Texas. I can tell you having lived in both places with three kids. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. And look, that's why a lot of people move to red states because they care about that. So, but hey, let me just did someone mentioned that our Tulsi video from all in summit has been Yeah, I conferred on YouTube. So what happened is I was I was at my office yesterday. And I opened up our YouTube channel because Nick had sent out a link that something you had posted. So I went to go see what had posted that day.

1:01:25So I pull it up and I saw the summit videos and I saw the Tulsi was there. I'm like, wait, didn't we post Tulsi? And I look for it. I couldn't find it. So I text Nick and he says, it is there. And then I clicked on the thing and it said, safe search is on. What does that mean? I searched and apparently if you were network administrator on your enterprise because I was at my office We had like our network set restricted mode. It's called in restricted mode people can't like look at adult content on the network And that kind of stuff and when you have restricted mode on YouTube turns off anything that would fall under mature audiences So here it is activate restricted mode So it prevents you from number of people Huge number of people.

1:02:07Yeah, basically this would be this would be when you would most viewed video I'll guarantee you after the Elon video and maybe and maybe the most viewed. And I was shocked. I said, how is it possible that this video is struggling to be in the top half? And this is why you can't even see it. So when you shut up, when you shut up, well, it's unclear. So certain videos then get tagged as being for mature audiences and they don't show up in restricted mode by the algorithm on YouTube. Oh, so it's the algorithm did it again. It wasn't. And so I'll give you guys my theory. My theory is because the term Russia gate comes up and those sorts of terms.

1:02:44And I think those terms are triggers, if they're in the transcript, they're triggers to be under kind of treatment. So it's a bunking Russia gate. But do you think, if it was a video espousing and promoting the Russia gate hoax that it would have gone censored this way? It's a good question. I don't know. I mean, we can't I don't know. Test that by looking for other people discussing it. I mean, you mentioned Scott Adams early. He talks about it 17 times in episode. By the way, this is a government official in the White House who is the director of national intelligence who is providing an interview on national intelligence and is being filtered out as being for adults only.

1:03:21Very weird. This is insane. It's insane. This is like when Trump is the sitting president, God banned from social media. I mean, you're right. This is a public official describing intelligence and investigation. What is she is doing? No, an investigation. reading out an investigation. They're investing. Yeah, I'm putting aside the topic. It's a discussion. Who on earth would think that this is something that people shouldn't consume? Why is this being flagged adult? What's adult about it in any way? Makes no sense. For mature audience, yeah, some definition around it. But I think that there's some keywords that triggered it.

1:03:56Without acknowledging or recognizing the algorithm, this is one of the points Tom was making, we don't know how the algorithms work because the algorithms cannot determine that this is a clearly cannot determine that this is an actual government official and therefore should not be restricting access to the content. I don't know, man. AI's gotten a lot better in the last year. It seems like this would be an easy problem. There can be some obstruction of the algorithm. Yeah. Here's what YouTube says about their filter. This helps hide potentially mature videos. No filter is 100 % accurate. No sh**.

1:04:28I wonder if it's also people. Here's the question is, with respect to the error rate, what percent of those videos are conservative versus liberal in their ideological banks? Yes, Bernie Sanders and Mondami getting the same treatment. If conservative content and liberal content are both subject to the same error rate, then they have it like to stand on maybe. I still don't think they should be doing this by the way. I mean, look, potentially mature videos should be about... I just want to have one technical thing here, and then I'll go to you, Shmup. This could also be cause I know in the past by people reporting stuff they don't like.

1:05:03So people would do this report bombing, you know, get 20 different people in a, you know, signal group or in a discord group to go report this from different IP addresses and file the reports to then silence each. That's true. That's true. So Tucker and Cuban also get censored? That's a debate. I don't know soon. Wait, what happened with that? Anyway, Neil, can you check this out and report back? So this is the customer support here. Glad you had some. No, the Tucker Cuban debate was a perfect example of civil discourse. Yeah, there was a hug. I think this is an example. There was a famous media theorist, his name is Marshall McCluen, and he had this quote, which is, the medium is the message, right?

1:05:45And what did he mean by that? He meant that the characteristics of the medium itself, meaning the way information is delivered, has a greater impact on society and individuals than the actual content of the message. What he's foreshadowing is the importance of these algorithms and these decisions that happen in the shadows because the weight of those decisions have all of these downstream impacts. This is why they should be... Why can't I see my YouTube algorithm? I can confirm that Tucker and Mark Cuban also get filtered. This is insane. Well, it bases because Tucker and Tulsa are getting... filtered.

1:06:23All right, listen great. A segue here because we didn't get to recap the summit and we had quite paradoxically we had a real discussion about the importance of debate, friendship and you know the the process we try to do here and at the summit which has led a lot of people speak and debate important issues of which the Tulsi and the college university heads discussion. so many of these were important discussions, but people didn't see our recap. But just going around the horn here, great moments you felt were important or enlightening to you. Chimalt, did you have a moment at the summit that, you know, one of your amazing insights that you felt were particularly insightful that you want to share with the audience?

1:07:14I think the most Supporting sites. I think the most important conversation there was the one with Tulsi. I really do I mean, I think at a very basic level Why does America go to war? Why do we fight wars? Why are men and women being killed? why and It's just it's the same thing with Charlie Kirk I just get so agitated with this idea that a human being Believes that they have the judgment To take somebody else's life to me is incomprehensible It's just so wrong. It's so immoral. It's just so wrong. And what she talked about and what she's exposing is the cascade of lies that causes an entire generation to lose tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters, to lose your son and your diet.

1:08:04So yeah, it's, that was the most important conversation we had by a country mile. Freeber? You have a moment for you that was either entertaining, enlightening or important. I'll let you take any Angon. I would recount our wrap up that we did at the end of day two. When we first started planning the content for the summit this year, I was actually thinking about trying to get a bunch of American speakers for day one and then a bunch of international national speakers for day two, where we could kind of contrast the American perspective from the global perspective. And here, how does the rest of the world view the world and view America and how does America view America and view the world?

1:08:48And it was hard to kind of get the scheduling right. So the way things kind of ended up getting scheduled out, we tried to cluster the conversations into different themes, but I didn't feel like we were going to get the orientation I was hoping for. And so we ended up having just a bunch of conversations. But what was really powerful for me was that similarity we saw with Elon, with Tucker and Mark Cuban, with Alex Carp, we brought it up, I think also with Eric Schmidt, is this idea that much of what we see in terms of the evolution of society in the West can be viewed through a lens of suicide, that the West may be committing suicide financially in our deficit spending in terms of birth rate decline.

1:09:35So we're kind of destroying our dollar. We're destroying our head count because of the birth rate decline. And then this immigration policy issue, where we're potentially destroying cultures, which was a topic that came up a few times. And perhaps even thinking about the Tulsi comments, destroying ourselves by thrusting ourselves into war and chopping our heads up. And then we heard a lot of optimism. And we heard a lot of technologists. We heard a lot of folks talk about the options and the choice we have and that we have a choice to kind of reverse these trends and kind of change how we're behaving as a society.

1:10:09And so it all keep together as one long string. And we ended it with this idea that there's choice and you have a choice to kind of go forward or you have a choice to commit suicide. And then what really hit me was then we walk out and then the Charlie Kirkmutter happened. And so it created this emotional wrapper for me on the conversations we had that there are a lot of people that are going to make different choices. And so I just wish we could do a summary of what it was like at the summit, instead of each one of these talks standing on their own, they work well on their own. But I think that that whole kind of set of conversations leading to that point of view was really important to employing it from it.

1:10:44Did we end up publishing our final wrap of conversation? No, I want to. We have not done it. What I want to do is I want to do that with the summary video at the end of the summary video. So I want to be like, here's a couple of key points from the talks. Once we get all the talks out and then I'll wrap up conversation, which I think we should do. Sacks, you were incredibly engaged in this summit. You showed up. You were engaged where there are moments that you found particularly enlightening, inspiring, fun for you. Oh my gosh. We just found out that the carpe interviews also been censored on safe mode on YouTube.

1:11:21So wait. Basically, the three talks were Tucker, Tulsi, and Carp, which by the way, I think if you had the audience vote, what the most engaging in interesting works. Those are the three best. Those are up. Yeah. And by the way, there are a lot of other really good ones, but those ones, I think, were the most captivating. I think the audience you could see was like really engrossed. Animated. It could be because of Jason's point, which is that if enough people click report an issue, it gets put into that part of the algorithm. We got to have to give a little grace to Neil here. Oh, so who's the one who's doing all the reporting here?

1:11:55Who's weaponizing the YouTube reporting system? So a bunch of tall liberals. It could be Putin. You never know. Sax, you have a moment. We don't need the Russians doing this to us. We don't need to ourselves. There could be a cobble that is we could be reflecting this on. I agree. I grew in three works of rap. I thought it was remarkable how the whole thing kind of came together at the end. and there seemed to be a really stark choice. And I agree that the next day, Charlie was assassinated. And I mean, I stopped thinking about the summit, but I agree that it really did play into this idea of the suicide of the West.

1:12:31And in the sense that like we talked about, there apparently are a large contingent of people who don't believe in what I would consider to be the central virtue or tenet of Western civilization, which was expressed, or at least it's attributed to Voltaire. What Voltaire said is, I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death you're right to say it. I think that is the central tenant behind Western civilization. Because out of that came the right to free expression to freedom of religion. Out of that core principle came all the other principles, all the other key freedoms. The right to think and believe and worship as you please, free of religion, free of the speech, free of the press, it all comes out of that.

1:13:17And what you have here is people like Tyler Robinson or the people who were celebrated, what he did, as the exact opposite. It's, I disapprove of what you say and I will murder you to prevent your right to say it. That is the antithesis. It's the antithesis and it's not Western civilization is something different and destructive. and where it will lead to is a civil war that none of us should want on either side of the political spectrum. One thing I would just like to say, and then Jason, I'd love to hear what you think about this, but one of the most powerful things that I think Charlie got absolutely and precisely right, was the plight of young people, meaning the malaise and the anxiety and what was at the root cause of it, at the root cause in the way people think, and now in the way people act, is economic instability.

1:14:09And that was a thing that I think also came out at the summit. And Charlie does a really good job of very precisely putting it into a box, what they're going through, the lack of home ownership, the overwhelming and just crushing debt, the failure of the school system, the inability to find a great job, the hook up culture that takes people away from having a committed relationship, getting married, having children. There's a totality of issues that are really cultural and I would just encourage people to go and find this out because I think at the root cause of all of this is that. I think that we need to sort of find a way to give folks a chance to believe in something.

1:14:50And if you don't, I think the algorithm will take you to a very bad place. So I'll send. I was absolutely delighted. Great job, freeberg, into the team, John and Kimber and Nick and just so many people put so much work into that it was amazing to see as double the size of it while increasing the quality of it from the Speaker's to the experience. I heard the food was excellent. No lines. Oh, I mean all that logistical stuff was just so dialed in in year four. So I give a lot of credit to our amazing team. I have to thank our sponsors. They did an amazing job of making this summit available to so many people can do the scholarships and have so many people involved and there are three very special partners who did insane build outs at the show.

1:15:30Salon, our friends over there went crazy. They did the entire upstairs. I don't know if you hung out there, but I was at their coffee bar and that it Jews bar IPO themed bar or it was just awesome. It was awesome. It was awesome. They hosted two of the dinners too, the public market and geopolitical dinners. Friends at OKX, they showed up big for us at the summit. They built out an awesome lounge modeled after a saloon. I went in there and had a little bourbon myself South on Sunday, they screened their first film, mild, mild West. They gave away 250 Bitcoin to all attendees. And somebody want to hot lap with an F1 driver, because they sponsored the McLaren team.

1:16:07That was super nice of them, huh? Fripper. Yeah, that was awesome. And we're going to be at that Formula One event in Vegas, in November, which is also Vegas. Yeah, me too. Yeah, yeah. Iran is a new partner this year. And they operate all these next gen data centers, or so big shout out to them for doing the casino night, which was a huge hit at Clifton's. I went to that. Did you go to that? I didn't. I was at the other event. It was in, it was insane. I thought it was like the coolest of that. Yeah. I actually went to all four parties on the Monday night. I was completely wiped out. But man, the casino night was awesome.

1:16:42It was so fun. You're like Phil Collins. You at Live Aid, you went to everything. I went around on your concord and you went everywhere. That's right. And that a great engraving station in the Expo Hall, that packed the event. So just couldn't do it without you guys and Gail. Yeah. And again, without the sponsors, J .C .L., we would not be able to put this event on because we spent way more than the ticket revenue. And we would not be able to have the scholarship tickets, which I think are really important. I remember in my early career, like I couldn't afford to go to a fancy event. And I think the scholarship just opens itself up.

1:17:16And you guys debated me about the scholarships for the first couple of years, and now you realize it's great. It's great to have that young energy, right? Sometimes she gets a problem. I really enjoyed having Joe Sye there and talking about the China and America relationship, not being one in which we have to go down a prescribed route that there could be off -ramps and there could be collaboration there. I thought Neil from YouTube, despite what we're talking about here today, I appreciate him coming and engaging us with the censorship issue. He was got into it with the USACs. I know that that was very productive.

1:17:47I love the fact that people from this administration, Kelsey and Chris Wright, they were willing to engage in a vibrant debate, the Dartmouth and the Berkeley discussion on several discourses, just so important and they have such an impact on kids' lives when their brains are developing, as we talked about on this show, Rick Caruso on the management of our cities, I think was amazing. And then Tucker and Carp, they went right to some really hard discussions around anti -Semitism and the situation in Gaza. You know, also, these are very difficult things to discuss. This event was a celebration of debating hard topics.

1:18:25And for that, I am very thankful for my friendship with each of you and to have this amazing experience of the online podcast. And most of all the community, meeting all of our, I won't call them fans. I think our friends are besties in the audience. And what a great job. Freeberg in accommodating the scholarships. I know some people get bent that shape. Oh, you gave somebody a scholarship, whatever. We got a lot of young people in there to experience it as well as the people who could afford the tickets, etc. And I'll say what an amazing joyful moment at the end when Diplo played. And I was, we were, it's three of us were on stage dancing and just celebrating with our kids and friends.

1:19:05I was having another seizure, but thanks. Yeah. Thanks for letting me up there for a few minutes. Well, I'm in, yeah, you came up for a couple of minutes and enjoyed yourself, free bird. But yeah, just congratulations to the team. It was an amazing effort. And what a great dialogue. And I think that spirit of dialogue and making a choice to engage the hard topics in a respectful manner. At the end of every program, Chimance says, love you besties. And Saks gives a back atcha. But the truth is, even in a contentious debate, you can still remain friends and love each other despite those debates.

1:19:36It's the most important American ideal. It's the most human ideal. And it's a dare I say, you know, I'm not a Catholic anymore, but I remain a Christian is one of the most Christian ideas And I know that was a major part of his faith was a major part of Charlie's life and his legacy and You know that may personally as well his Christianity Even if I disagree with him about you know issues and debates He was a Christian at his core. He cared about other people deeply Any cared about humanity? So, rest in peace. Let me just say, Jake, I'll thank you most for taking the time to watch all those Charlie videos.

1:20:17How much time do you say it was like 40 hours? I watched dozens of hours and 50 videos. Just to make sure I got from first principles, my understanding of who he was, I disagree with him about he rides. I disagree with him about how he said certain things. But there was nothing I saw in there that that could even suggest justifying anything that would be anywhere near violence. Well, in any event, I appreciate that you took the time to watch Charlie for yourself as opposed to listening to the mainstream media's mischaracterizations of him, which are attempts to either downplay or minimize or even to some degree justify what happened.

1:21:02And by doing that, Jake, I think you really honored our friend Charlie. So thank you for that. All right, rest in peace, Charlie. Kirk and love to his family and his friends. By the way, there is an incredible video that he did where somebody said something along the lines of define what it means to be a conservative. And he said, you know, sometimes people think that what that means is to like limit rights or whatever. And he said, that's not what it means. It's just that I believe that I would like to conserve an honor, a specific way of life that has existed in the past. And he talked about it, you know, where you could go get a job, you could do better than your parents, you get married, you have kids, everybody's safe.

1:21:43I mean, and it kind of shocked me because I thought, wow, that definition is actually what many, many, many people believe, even if they don't believe that they are a conservative, because a lot of people believe that, you know, and this is not taking away from other people, but that's what we'd want for a lot of us for our kids. Let's all set an example here. Have vibrant debate. I love your besties. Okay. And we'll see you all next time. Love you boys. Love you besties. Bye bye. It's a back atcha. No back atcha. We missed the back atcha. Back atcha.

From the publisher

(0:00) Reacting to Charlie Kirk's death: impact, legacy, and what's wrong in America

(15:27) Assassination culture in America, online radicalization

(30:37) Jimmy Kimmel suspended indefinitely by ABC

(49:11) The Ellison Media Empire: Paramount, Warner Bros Discovery, TikTok

(1:01:09) Besties discover their recent YouTube videos have been flagged as "Restricted"

(1:06:23) All-In Summit recap

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