Glenn Greenwald on Substack, Content Moderation, and Joe Rogan

In January, I wrote a story for OneZero about the content moderation war in store for smaller social platforms like Clubhouse, Spotify, and Substack. As part of my reporting, I reached out to Glenn Greenwald, a strident voice against moderation who left The Intercept for Substack last year. While I'm not in lockstep with Greenwald ideologically, I wanted to hear his thoughts at length. This week’s Big Technology Podcast features my full conversation with Greenwald, where we discuss his move to Substack, the line between content moderation and censorship, and Joe Rogan. Story: https://onezero.medium.com/the-moderation-war-is-coming-to-spotify-substack-and-clubhouse-9fe00672091b Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Glenn Greenwald, our guest today, caused quite a stir when he left The Intercept for Substack late last year, leaving behind a publication he founded to build a one-person media operation funded by subscription revenue. In the time since he's left, Greenwald's had many harsh things to say about those advocating for more content moderation on social platforms. And while I'm not in lockstep with him ideologically, I wanted to hear his thoughts at length, not in tweets, and so I asked him for a conversation. I asked for the interview as I was working on a story for 1.0 about how the content moderation discussion that once focused on Facebook, Twitter, and Google was migrating towards

• 1:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  smaller platforms like Substack, which we both inhabit, along with Spotify and Clubhouse. I wanted to get Greenwald's take on what was happening, and I wanted to hear at length about why he's largely opposed to moderation. On this week's podcast, I'm going to play the full audio from my conversation with Greenwald. Before we get into the intro, a quick word from our sponsor.

• 2:08Alex Kantrowitz?

  The Big Technology Podcast is sponsored by MediaOcean. Looking for a job in big tech? You might want to take a look at MediaOcean. They were just named the number one place to work in advertising technology by Ad Age. Go to mediaocean.com/bigtech to learn more about the company and check out their careers hub. MediaOcean is building the mission critical platform for omnichannel advertising. If that sounds cool, hit up mediaocean.com/bigtech and browse their job listings. And big thanks to MediaOcean for supporting the Big Technology Podcast. All right, let's get into it.

• 3:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  So first of all, I'd love to know how Substack is treating you.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  It's great. I, you know, when I, before, I didn't have much time to investigate how it worked or what it was prior to leaving because I had decided I was going to leave The Intercept. I don't know, maybe 24 hours or so prior to actually posting my first article on Substack about why I left. So I had a series of very frenetic calls. And one of the things I wanted to figure out is what is it that Substack actually provides you that you can't provide on your own? Like, why can't you just go and start your own site and charge the same amounts for subscriptions? And then instead of giving Substack their percentage, keeping it yourself?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  And everybody with whom I spoke emphasized that the services that they provide, not just customer service if things go wrong with the billing or with people signing in, but also just the entire platform itself, how user-friendly it is, how well it works.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  That that alone makes it worthwhile and not having to deal with all that. And in addition to the fact that something we I didn't really discuss, but I've come to appreciate a lot, which is, I think Substack is becoming an important symbol of certain values in journalism and political discourse that I value a lot and I'm happy to be a part of. I think that's also helping to give legitimacy to the platform and to those people who are writing on it. So I've been there about a month and overall I'm extremely happy.

• 4:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, the user friendly part of Substack is definitely, you know, part of what drew me to it also. I just figured I was working on a terrible newsletter, a content management system. And this one was just better and made sending emails out easy. So that was nice.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I've worked, obviously, with a lot of different systems, including various iterations of The Intercept, with Salons, with The Guardians. And I have to say, the one at Substack is not just easy to use, but also the most advanced and most sophisticated in terms of layout and the options that it gives you.

• 5:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, now I want to just speak to you for a moment about like the set of values that you mentioned that Substack sort of puts forth or now represents, given the writers that have gone to it. I've always been of the opinion that, you know, it's just a platform and we shouldn't read too much into the fact that like there are, you know, certain writers that have left their publications and sort of made ideological breaks from them. And there's a whole variety of different writers there. You have like people writing about climate change, people writing about women's sports. You have me. I mean, I, you know, I didn't do an ideological break from BuzzFeed. I just wanted to be independent. So, you know, am I looking at it wrong?

• 6:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, is, you know, should we look at Substack as having an ideology?

• 6:08Speaker 01

  You know, it depends. I think you're correct that viewing it through the prism of a few high-profile writers who have gone there after breaking with their news outlets over relatively similar disputes is a mistake in the sense that it's too limiting and narrowing for what Substack represents. But I think the way you described it in your question, in terms of what it represents for you, is an ideology. The idea of independence as a writer and as a journalist, to be able to produce content free of corporate structures

• 6:47Speaker 01

  and the dogma that ends up being embedded in it. Whether or not there's a repressive atmosphere that emerges at a particular media outlet, writing within a corporate structure is a different way of writing and doing journalism than being on your own and doing it independently, speaking in your own voice, for better or for worse. So I think there is an ideology inherent to Substack, which isn't necessarily the narrowly-defined one that often is attributed to it, of a place that, you know, refugees from corporate outlets go when woke ideology prevents them from speaking freely. That's obviously true

• 7:27Speaker 01

  for a few people, but probably not the majority. I think more so, it's a place that's designed to enable people to write freely and independently, and that I do see increasingly as an ideology in a journalistic climate where control and structure and homogeneity are becoming more predominant.

• 7:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And for me, I would say it was more of a determination to write outside of, you know, the core news cycle and tackle things with a little bit, you know, deeper. Analysis, but I mean, I, I, I do see some of what you're saying in that, you know, with, with my publication, at least like I came out saying, I want to write nuanced stories about tech. And yeah, I think part of it is I'm trying to demonstrate the type of coverage that I'd like to see more of. So it's

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to interject there, like, I think that's important that what you just said. Um, so, you know, it, a lot of times if you're at a news outlet that does try not to censor writers and journalists or impose on them some specific partisan or ideological set of orthodoxies. But nonetheless, has a certain financial model that necessarily fosters imperatives about how you work and the kind of writing you can do, right? So if you're a BuzzFeed, which depends upon a advertiser-based model and deriving revenue from it, it means that journalists have to write

• 8:59Speaker 01

  about things that are going to generate a lot of clicks. It means that in general, you, depending on where you are in the organization, you're going to have to produce a lot of content to satisfy that model, which isn't nefarious. It just can mean that you're not entirely free to choose the things that you want to write about, or the pace at which you're writing them, or the time that you're taking to dig deep. I mean, I know BuzzFeed has investigative journalists who it gives the luxury of digging deep into a story and not requiring to produce multiple items a week. But in general, depending on what job you have in an organization, it can impose on you conditions for how you can write that you can liberate yourself from by being a Substack.

• 9:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And, and look, I don't think that we ever wrote for clicks. Um, but I do think there was definitely, uh, you know, a determination to be relevant in the conversation that was going on at the time. So.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, just I got what by writing for clicks, I mean, I, I don't mean you that in the most, you know, kind of derogatory sense. I know, you know, as a journalist, I've written for clicks in the sense that you just described it, which is when you write something, you want a lot of people to read it. It's one of the metrics by which you judge of the success of your journalism. But a lot of times that can translate into a pressure to write about something, not because you're most interested in it, but because it's kind of the easiest path to obtaining that outcome, whereas taking your time, writing deeply, may not give you that immediate sugar high of tons of people going because it's the hot news item of the day. But you can build a big audience over time. It's just that not every news outlet has the luxury of allowing you to do that.

• 10:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, there have definitely been times where I've seen stories that I've written now perform. You know, what by any measure would be poorly, right? But the open rate keeps going up. Uh, more people open the newsletter, which means that a bit of a relationship that's building with the reader, which is interesting. I have a couple more questions about your move to Substack. Um, so first of all, I know it wasn't financially motivated, but how's it going on the money side? Have you exceeded your internet intercept salary yet?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've exceeded my intercept salary. Um, the concern for me was that in addition to my salary, which I was pretty certain I'd be able to at least equal, the intercept had been paying a substantial amount of expenses for me connected to the work I do in Brazil, including lots of lawyers fees and uh, fighting off the attempt by the Bolsonaro government to imprison me or to criminally prosecute me, as well as physical security, around the clock, physical security that I need because of threats. Um, the intercept, to its credit, has agreed to continue to assume the cost of my legal representation in connection with anything that has to do with reporting I did for it.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  But the security cost and things like my assistant and other people who work with me in my journalism is something for which they're obviously no longer paying. Um, and so I was more concerned about that. But the launch of the Substack page has gone very well and, and I've at least equaled those amounts as well. So I'm satisfied on that end.

• 12:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  So yeah, so you've hinted that you might want to start your own publication, a new publication. So I'm. I gotta ask, do you want to break some news about that? Or is it still in the works?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I may be breaking some news. I'm unfortunately not prepared to do it on, on your podcast or on your Substack page. But I've been open about the fact that it is something I'm working on. Because I think in order to have a real impact on the news cycle, you need to be able to work with the team. But I'm also thinking about how to integrate it with the Substack page and with the Substack model, where people pay for the content that they're interested in, that they want, and where I assure myself that I have the same level of freedom. So there's a lot of moving pieces to figure out.

• 13:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. So are you gonna, I mean, you can decline to answer, but are you gonna just bundle with a handful of different Substack writers? Uh, maybe some that we've, we've kind of touched on or hinted at?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's definitely, it's, I mean, it's possible, though that's not the idea. The idea isn't to, to bundle Substack writers. The idea is more to, um, build a newsroom that is designed to, you know, kind of institutionalize the values that we had been discussing, some of which I thought I had been implementing when I co-founded The Intercept and didn't quite work out in the way I had envisioned. But the idea is, you know, you can have an impact as a Substack writer, a Substack columnist for sure. Um, you know, I think a lot of my articles already are finding bigger audiences than they found at, at The Intercept. But to really present a new model of writing and doing journalism,

• 13:56Speaker 01

  I think you need to be able to commit to constructing a newsroom based on those values. So that's really, that would be the idea if we're able to do it.

• 14:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Interesting. All right, I'll keep a lookout for it. Um, so I also want to talk to you about content moderation.

• 14:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  Online and specifically on Substack, I'm working on a story about this for 1-0. And it seems like it's been a subject close to your heart. So I mean, why don't we start with this CJR article, Columbia Journalism Review. They wrote about Substack writers and they put you in a category of writers who I think they said condemn cancel culture and the left. And you had quite a reaction to it. You said, "It's only a matter of time before people started demanding Substack be censored. Hate nothing more than free expression." So what did you mean by that?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I had several objections to that article. The part that was about me, I think, just wildly mischaracterized what I do as a journalist. I write very rarely about cancel culture in the sense that it means, you know, firing people or canceling book contracts. And I very, very rarely critique the left on that basis either. I do write a lot about free speech and censorship, which to me is something quite different than cancel culture, but I've always written a lot about that. But I think the other two examples that the author of that article cited, which are Andrew Sullivan and Matt Taibbi, write about it much more than I do.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  And I don't really, and she kind of implied strongly that we were all like-minded. A characterization I can accept when it comes to Matt, but something that both Andrew and I, who have been fighting for 15 years, both in public and private, quite vociferously, were very surprised by. And, you know, so the, the thing that I objected to most was the idea that while they're just succeeding because they're white men, for so many reasons, you know, this is very flattening of my work in, of, of just my life and my identity and lots of other things.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  But I think it was really a way of trying to say that Substack itself is intrinsically unfair and did start, not with me, but with Andrew Sullivan, to start implying that content that he's producing is the kind of content with which a platform like Substack ought not to be associated or not ought not be platforming because it's white nationalist or racist. Or anti-immigrant or designed to incite violence against marginalized people, all the standard phrases that are invoked when it comes time to censoring. And I think one of the things you're seeing is that as Substack becomes more successful and more big names migrate there and start earning as much money as they were making when they had to kind

• 16:56Speaker 01

  of endure all the, you know, burdens of being within a new big news organization or even more, established media outlets and the journalists who work for them are going to start turning their guns on Substack, in part just out of professional jealousy, but more substantively based on the idea that they believe corporate media outlets are the only legitimate guardians of our discourse, that they're the ones who have the fact checking and the journalistic expertise, integrity to make certain they're not disseminating fake news or airing toxic opinions, and that any platform that's too free is a platform they're going to start trying to demonize with the aim of mandating that more controls

• 17:41Speaker 01

  be exerted over who can and can't write there, the way they've done to Facebook, the way they did Twitter, the way they've done to Patreon, and now the way that they're going to do to Substack. So I say it's inevitable because Substack is sort of new on people's radar, but it's inevitable that it's going to follow the same pattern as media behavior toward these other platforms that also were allowing free and independent dissemination of information that ended up competing with the hegemony and monopoly that these corporate media outlets want for themselves when it comes to overseeing discourse.

• 18:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. It also seems that Substack is going to be like super reticent to take anybody's newsletter down. I mean, I've been speaking with people about this and the notion that if Substack takes one person's newsletter down, then everyone's just going to move to a new platform because if you don't feel safe there, then can't really operate there. So do you have a real fear that, you know, some of the movement, you know, well, I wouldn't even call it a movement yet, but some like floating hints like in that CJR article to, you know, consider heavily or more heavily content moderating Substack. Do you think that that's an actual fear? Or do you think that like, did you just see

• 18:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  it important to push back on the idea in, you know, the earliest possible stage?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  No, it's an actual fear. I agree with you that Substack and the people who founded it and are running it are very committed to the idea that this should be a free content, content neutral platform, that they ought not to play the role of discourse police or speech regulators deciding which ideas are good and bad, which ideas are true and false. But that was the premise of Facebook as well and Twitter and Patreon. They didn't want that responsibility either, largely for self-interested reasons. But when the New York Times and CNN and NBC News starts turning their very loud and powerful megaphone

• 19:49Speaker 01

  on to you, saying, oh, look, Substack is hosting extremist content, they're allowing racism to flow freely and misogyny to go unchecked, there it's become a hotbed of misinformation and disinformation and fake news. Suddenly, the pressure from the public is very high for you to do something about it, for you to disassociate your, your platform from what is being decreed to be toxic or racist or anti-Semitic or misogynist or whatever content. And even if you start off very resolved not to do it, that pressure is very

• 20:30Speaker 01

  high, as evidenced by the fact that much bigger platforms thus far have succumbed to it. And I think that you're right, that once you start going down that path, which was, you know, how they induced Facebook and Twitter to do it, which is first you do the easy cases, you kick off Mylanopolis, you kick off Alex Jones, but now suddenly you've assumed the responsibility to exclude people who are toxic and then anyone that you're allowing is almost like an implicit judgment. From you that they're within the realm of decency and permissibility. And I think it's very important to for Substack not to go down that road, but to do that, they're going

• 21:14Speaker 01

  to have to prepare now about how to resist the onslaught that absolutely will be coming in their direction.

• 21:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And I wonder if there's a difference between like what Facebook and Twitter have done to, you know, what might happen on Substack. Like, for instance, you or Andrew Sullivan, you know, would never be kicked off. I mean, maybe never say never, but you know, you haven't been kicked off Facebook or Twitter. You're, you know, operating freely there. And, uh, you know, it seems like those platforms, I mean, I like to talk to you about this a little bit, but it seems like those platforms took action on like, you know, some of the most egregious stuff, people spreading misinformation about COVID that could lead people to get sick and, um, you know, take it, take it lightly or, um, you know, foreign election manipulation. I know you have some thoughts on that, uh, election integrity

• 22:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  stuff. Um, like should Facebook and Twitter, well, I guess it's two different questions, but one is like, should Facebook and Twitter have just let the whole thing, you know, run open and wild? And then two is, you know, do you see the distinction between sort of the stuff that they've taken down and, um, you know, the threat to writers like, you know, Andrew Sullivan, you know, quote unquote threat, you know, to writers like Andrew Sullivan on, on Substack?

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't really see the threat to myself, um, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I, as I said earlier, I don't write off that often about cultural issues, which is, you know, about race and gender and trans, uh, trans issues, which is a lot of times where these, these doors open first into demanding people be deplatformed. And when I do write about them, I tend more or less to share the liberal consensus, not entirely, but enough to kind of insulate me. I've never really been the target of those kinds of deplatforming calls, notwithstanding how polarizing my journalism might be. But someone like Andrew, I think is in real danger of that. I mean, he did get essentially fired

• 23:13Speaker 01

  from New York Magazine for exactly that reason, that even though he was one of the biggest names at the magazine, producing among the most traffic there. Making the most impact with a lot of his essays. There was a two-year campaign on the part of younger journalists to demand that he be fired on the grounds that what he was writing was so toxic that it was creating an unsafe workplace. They actually went to human resources and the like. But, you know, I think that Andrew was enough of a mainstream name that he certainly wouldn't be the first one for that to happen, but you can see how easy it kind of creeps. So maybe someone just a little bit more extreme than Andrew on questions of race or immigration

• 23:54Speaker 01

  or nationalism and the like could be the first test case. And then suddenly you move to Andrew next, once it's done. So I, I think the question, the other question, the part of your question that you're raising is an important one, which is, well, what about like truth and falsity? What about, as you said, the vaccine doesn't work, COVID is a hoax, masks don't work, Trump won the election, there was actual fraud? Do we think that the founders and managers of Substack are competent to judge the truth and falsity of, you know, various opinions sufficient to say what can and can't be heard?

• 24:36Speaker 01

  When, I remember Mark Zuckerberg was asked about that by Kara Swisher, and he said, well, I'm not a historian who expects me to decide what is historical truth and not. And she said, even when it comes to things like Holocaust denialism. And he said, yeah, even when it comes to that, like, how, I'm not a Holocaust scholar. And there was all this indignation. But I thought he was right. I don't want Mark Zuckerberg acting as, you know, historical expert over the kinds of things that can and can't be said. I think if people are saying bad things on Facebook, the solution is to refute them, rebut them, and debunk them. I think the other point is, is that

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Oftentimes, these debates assume that you have the power to banish bad ideas. But if Substack starts, you know, removing people's pages for posting stuff about COVID or misinformation about the election, it doesn't mean that stuff goes away. It just means, as you suggested earlier, it goes to a different place. And I just generally find it better for bad ideas to be out in the light rather than hiding in the dark, because then you can discredit them more easily.

• 25:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, the other side of that argument, I'm curious what you think about this one, is that, you know, less so Substack, but Facebook and Twitter for sure, editors, you know, and they're choosing what to amplify via their algorithms. So it's sort of like they're handing someone a megaphone, and then is it censorship if they take that megaphone away?

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Right, and that's an important point. So what happens, for example, on Substack if they start doing that? If they start, not necessarily using algorithms, but what if they just start promoting different sites using various metrics? Like already, they're showing the public what articles are the most read, which pages are the most subscribed to, which ones are producing the most revenue. What if they go even a little bit further and start creating categories, saying, here's our most popular pages for health policy, and here's our most popular pages for culture? And in those lists, one finds racist, or misogynistic, or transphobic content, one

• 26:55Speaker 01

  finds information that is clearly false by a consensus of experts in the field.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Then aren't they going to fall prey to exactly the critique you just articulated, which is, you may say that you're not editing or choosing which content to be heard enough, but by promoting certain content at the expense of other, like YouTube does, like Facebook does, like Twitter's starting to do more of? You essentially are assuming that role and once you do, you then have the responsibilities that go with it. And I think that's a good reason why Substack ought to be very, very careful not to start doing that because I think in order to resist these, what will be these growing calls for them to police content, they need to be able to say with credibility,

• 27:48Speaker 01

  we're a content neutral platform and don't make judgments about which content deserves to be heard and doesn't.

• 27:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I don't know, I feel like leaderboard or not, they should probably not have the racist stuff in there, but it does also look like they're, they are moving towards that

• 28:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  featuring of, of stories and newsletters in a way that you described. So we'll see what happens with the next feature release, but it'll be an interesting discussion on the horizon for sure.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 28:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Um, a couple more questions for you if we can, and I'll just ask, ask them quickly. Why do you think this discussion has moved from, uh, it seems like we're talking a lot more about content moderation on platforms like Substack and Spotify and Clubhouse where we were talking about it on Facebook and Twitter predominantly for the last bunch of years. So why has the discussion moved to these platforms?

• 28:40Speaker 01

  I think there's still a lot of conversation about the need for more or different content moderation on Facebook and, and Twitter, but I think that liberal censors have largely won the war over Facebook and, and Twitter. Probably the most, you know, kind of the D-Day event was when they both acted to, in different ways, block access to the New York Post story that could have been damaging to the Biden candidacy in the days before the election, Twitter by just simply saying, we're not going to allow any posting of links to this story, Facebook by using algorithms to suppress the story. Pretty extraordinary act for social media companies that have long said, we don't do

• 29:23Speaker 01

  that to take in the weeks leading up to the election. But I think it demonstrates that media outlets calling for greater censorship, liberals calling for more content regulation have largely succeeded. Most of the most inflammatory right wing provocateurs have been removed from Twitter and Facebook, not all, but most, much more so than say, two or three years ago they were doing. So I think they feel as though they've kind of implanted the framework of censorship that they advocated on those social media outlets and are now on the hunt for outlets that are still too permissive from their

• 30:00Speaker 01

  perspective. And that includes Spotify and Substack, still Patreon. And I think that as a platform increases in importance in terms of the names who go there, the viewership or the readership they're attracting, the more interest there will be in trying to assert this power of content control. And that's certainly true of Substack, certainly true of Spotify with Joe Rogan's very high profile move there. So I think that's why you're seeing increased attention.

• 30:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I'm sure we'll disagree on this one. But for me, the move to censor the or to block the New York Post article just seemed to be sort of a trigger happy move from these platforms who like really didn't want to repeat what happened in 2016 and had been on the alert for on the alert for like a foreign disinformation campaign. Obviously, no, the evidence for that materialized. But yeah, I just think that they were just acting on a hair trigger just to sort of try to avoid a repeat of the Russia thing. But

• 31:07Speaker 01

  No, I agree with that. I agree with that. But I just may I agree with that totally. Everything you said, I agree with. But I think maybe we just differ on the significance. I think that The fact that they were so sensitive to that is indicative of the success that liberals, by which I just mean establishment or liberals, not, you know, like the left wing of the Democratic Party, have had in pressuring these companies and in causing them to internalize, both literally internally inside their own companies, but also just the consciousness of these companies about what their responsibilities are.

• 31:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, but they were also the victim of a real foreign disinformation campaign that happened during the 2016 campaign.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Right, but nobody thought that's, nobody, there's, there's, there's two, there's two categories, right? One is like fake Facebook profiles purporting to be something other than what it is, or Twitter bots, which nobody thought this was. This clearly was a story from the New York Post, and oldest newspaper in the country and the fourth largest, versus, you know, reporting that is the byproduct of foreign intervention, or hackers, or whatever. As you say, that story, by all accounts, doesn't really have any Russian involvement.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  It was, we don't know the real origins of it, we know the story, but, you know, even if you're interested in protecting your site from being abused by deceit, bots, and fake pages, that doesn't quite justify to me preventing links to the New York Post, a very well-established newspaper.

• 32:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that I agree with. Okay, last question, I know you gotta go. On the Joe Rogan issue, I know you were on the show, I listened. This isn't about your decision to go on, but I'm just curious, like, do you think that guy should have had Alex Jones on the show after what he did with, with that shooting, the Newton shooting with the kids? And like, do you think that Spotify should leave interviews up with Jones?

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I would not interview Alex Jones, I would not put Alex Jones on my platform. That would not be a choice I would make. I think- One of the things I talked about, as you know, with Joe was what he said was his sense of growing responsibility not to provide the use of his platform to people who are reckless or irresponsible. There are a lot of alt-right people he used to routinely interview that he's decided he no longer will in the spirit of that. I think the Alex Jones case was very special or kind of an aberration for Rogan, in part because he's been friends with Alex

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Jones for 20 years. I mean, they're like personal friends. And I think he feels a sense of personal loyalty to Alex Jones not to participate in the deplatforming of or the ostracization of Alex Jones, given their friendship. So I think it's kind of a special case. I don't know that that would happen if they weren't friends. And then beyond that, I think that it's very important for Rogan to demonstrate to the people within Spotify who are trying to control his content. And clearly, there is a movement inside Spotify to do that, to brush back against that and to say, not only are you going to succeed

• 34:43Speaker 01

  in limiting my freedom to talk to whoever I want, to demonstrate that to you and to make it clear, I'm going to put on the person who's probably most horrifying to you, just to show you that you have no power to control me. So again, if you were to say to me, would you interview Alex Jones? Would you put Alex Jones on your? No, I wouldn't. But I think in Rogan's case, those more than a belief that Alex Jones is a voice that ought to be heard were his reasons.

• 35:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know about the personal friendship. Even still, I probably wouldn't have him on either. But it's interesting to see where Rogan's coming from. Awesome, Glenn. Any final thoughts?

• 35:20Speaker 01

  No, um, you know, I do think it's interesting when you emailed me and said, hey, I'm now writing at Substack 2. I want to talk to you for something I want to write at Substack. I kind of felt this allegiance, you know, like this loyalty. I hadn't thought about myself as a Substack writer before, but I do think that is indicative of how Substack is becoming a little bit of a brand and a little bit of an identity and a little bit of a cause. Just that it surprised myself that I reacted that way, but I did. So, um, yeah, it was good to talk to you.

• 35:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, you too. It's, yeah, it is interesting to see all the people coming over. Um, I've only been on six months, you know, seven months now. And obviously we come from, uh, different places. I think, uh, you know, from not ideology standpoint, but, um, I, I just think that more of these conversations are good. And if we shy away from them, we're gonna, you know, end up having this world where people just sit in their corners and they don't talk to each other. So I really appreciate your willingness to chat with me and, uh, looking forward to writing the story up.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Excellent. Yeah. Couldn't agree more with that last statement. And, um, in that spirit, very happy to talk to you too. And I look forward to what you're writing.

• 36:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  And that will do it for us here on the Big Technology Podcast. I want to thank Glenn Greenwald for his time, Red Circle for hosting the show and selling the ads, and Nate Guatini for the edits. If this is your first time listening, would be great if you could subscribe. We come up with a new interview every week on Wednesday with either an insider from the tech world or an outside agitator. And whether you're new or with us for a long time, I'd love a rating, uh, which go a long way in helping people be able to discover the podcast. And so in order to encourage you to do that, of course, I'd love you to do it out of the kindness of your own heart. Uh, but here's a little incentive. I'm going to give a few signed copies away this quarter for those who do. So if you would like, uh, to be eligible for that, just give us a rating and let us know by

• 37:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  sending an email to [email protected]. That's [email protected]. And of course you can use the same address. If you have any feedback for the show, I'd love to hear from you there. All right. It's been a great week. Uh, we look forward to coming back to you next week with another new show. Until then, take care. We will see you next time.

• 37:43Speaker 02

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