Facebook Whistleblower Fears Zuckerberg More Than Musk | PBD Podcast #888

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen explains why Zuckerberg's immense power worries her more than Elon Musk's. She debates Trump's ban with Patrick Bet-David, details Instagram's risks to children, and argues that modern AI threats demand action now, long before any hypothetical future apocalypse.----.👞 Get the NEW Billionaire Suede Loafer: https://bit.ly/4ym5oRA.👔 BET-DAVID CONSULTING: https://bit.ly/4lzQph2.🇰 KALSHI: http://kalshi.com/pbd.👕 SHOP THE ICON COLLECTION: https://bit.ly/3TuUU3x.👞 GET THE FLB1's: https://bit.ly/4mC4uf6.Ⓜ️ CONNECT ON MINNECT: https://bit.ly/4kSVkso.Ⓜ️ PBD PODCAST CIRCLES: https://bit.ly/4mAWQAP.🥃 BOARDROOM CIGAR LOUNGE: https://bit.ly/4pzLEXj. SUBSCRIBE TO:@VALUETAINMENT@BetDavidConsulting@vtgenz@ValuetainmentComedy. ABOUT US:Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mark Zuckerberg is the only voice that matters when it comes to Facebook.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  ... CEO Mark Zuckerberg is making the case for putting super intelligent AI in the hands of everyone.

• 0:08Speaker 02

  It's just my mistake, and I'm sorry.

• 0:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think Zuck is evil?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I worry about Mark a lot more.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I worry he burns the candle at both ends. People around Mark are there because Mark wants them to be there. They make Mark feel good. They tell him whatever story they need to tell him that lets him be able to accept the way the world is. And that's not good for any human being.

• 0:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Zuck announced yesterday that he may be leaving California because of the wealth tax that Ro Khanna, Newsom, others may be pushing in the state of California, and it's already something that's on the ballot that may take place.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  The deal that the board cut with him this morning is shocking. He's made it so that over the next eight years, he can cash out tens of billions of dollars and still maintain complete control over the company.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  ... is to make the world more open and connected.

• 0:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Negative motives long term. Do you worry about this much power to Zuck or Elon?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  We don't need AI any smarter than the AI we have today for it to be incredibly disruptive. The only reason we are not seeing more chaos right now with the level of AI we have right now is just because people aren't trying.

• 1:06Patrick Bet-David?

  So, I appreciate you for coming down.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, my pleasure.

• 1:09Patrick Bet-David?

  We just watched your movie, the movie that's based on your story with The Social Reckoning. I think Mikey Madison plays you. The movie was very interesting on what happened with Facebook. And even the guy that played Zuck, who's a very well-known actor, he was in The Judge. He's been in a lot of different...

• 1:25Speaker 00

  Jeremy Frum.

• 1:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, he crushed it. And my favorite scene was the scene where they're challenging him to get ready for the hearing, and they're getting under his skin, and they brought Bill Burr, that was really getting under his skin. Very interesting movie. But before we get into the whole story, something just broke that I think is a good idea for us to start off with. So, yesterday, New Mexico, because of the Cambridge Analytica story that happened in 2018, which we had Brittany Kaiser on the podcast, I think like eight years ago, she talked about it. They're ordered to pay $25 billion penalty to New Mexico. Same time while that happens, the next day today, I think nine hours ago, story broke, WSGA, that Zuck announced yesterday that he may be leaving California because of the wealth tax that Ro Khanna, Newsom, others may be pushing in the state of California,

• 2:11Patrick Bet-David?

  and it's already something that's on the ballot that may take place. I think it's Proposition 40 that they're announcing. So then the board came out, and they tried to give him a new agreement, eight years, 20 billion, still keep the control. Maybe talk about the importance of those two happening at the same time.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  I think it's more than 20 billion. So, the thing that people should be aware of, so, one of the reasons why Facebook is so unique is you have one person, Mark Zuckerberg, who has 60% of the votes to control the company. So, in most big companies, like even Google, which is one of the most concentrated companies in the world, you have two people who have most of the votes. Three, if you tack on Eric Schmidt. I think for anyone who's ever been married or in a relationship, once you even have a second person who you have to negotiate with, it really, really pulls you back to reality, right? Mark Zuckerberg is the only voice that matters when it comes to Facebook because he has those voting shares. The deal that the board cut with him this morning is shocking in that they basically came in and said, okay, so right now we have these A-class shares, which most people have.

• 3:09Speaker 00

  We have B-class shares, where you get 10 times as many votes. And then we're going to do these C-class shares, where everyone who has an A or a B-class share is going to get one of these C-class shares that have no votes. And the reason why this matters is it means Mark can now progressively sell half of his fortune and not lose any control of the company. And he tried to get this deal all the way back in 2017, and the shareholders blocked him. They were like, no, no, no, you either get to be the king, or you get to be rich, you don't get to be both. But the fact that he is now basically taking the money off the table, because he didn't ask for just enough to pay his 5% wealth tax, he's made it so that over the next eight years, he can cash out tens of billions of dollars and still maintain complete control over the company.

• 3:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, and so this was, even though he only owns 13.6% of the shares, right? Is this the old Peter Thiel structure of the founder's shares, where you get four times the amount of votes per...

• 4:01Speaker 00

  10 times the amount.

• 4:02Patrick Bet-David?

  It used to be 10. I think they... Is it four times now, or still 10?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  I don't know what the current best practice is, but in his case, it's 10.

• 4:07Patrick Bet-David?

  At that time, it used to be 10.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Jake. Okay. So, Zuck still has those shares. So, they are also asking him to stay near the headquarters because of the AI...

• 4:20Speaker 00

  In California.

• 4:21Patrick Bet-David?

  In California. They don't want him to leave. Do you think it's going to go through? Because they're allowing him to take $20 billion off the table.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  They've already done it, you have to remember. So, because he controls the company, the Chan-Zuckerberg entities, you know, the things that hold these votes today, they already voted on it. Like, there's not going to be a big shareholder vote.

• 4:37Patrick Bet-David?

  So, this is done, done?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  This is done, done.

• 4:39Patrick Bet-David?

  So, this is not, it's gonna happen? This deal is broken?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  This morning, yeah.

• 4:44Patrick Bet-David?

  It's done, signed, he's staying in California, he's not leaving?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:47Patrick Bet-David?

  So, Zuck is not leaving California.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Eight years.

• 4:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Eight years. To be near the headquarters, yeah. Because, you know, I think it was yesterday where Sergey Brin announced that he saved $15 billion by leaving California to Miami, but lives in a $174 million house. So, the timing of all these stories that are going on. What do you think about the wealth tax? Do you think it's a good idea?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  It doesn't, as like an applied math person, it drives me a little crazy from the perspective of, like, it doesn't raise that much money, right? Like, think of how disruptive it has been to California. A 5% wealth tax does not cover, like, almost any of the gap on like a 10-year basis. So, I think it's been very harmful in terms of the level of disruption it's caused for how little benefit it got. And my understanding was they never expected it to get this far. They thought it was just like a negotiating ploy, and then...

• 5:35Patrick Bet-David?

  A fear tactic? Like, hey, if you guys don't do this, we're going to tax you.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  And yet, it all ran away from them.

• 5:40Patrick Bet-David?

  No shit.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  That's what I've read.

• 5:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So, even though it was, if you guys don't listen to us, we're going to tax them, and then, this was around December of 2025, I want to say, when I first heard about this, that, was it 25 or 24? It could have been 25, where they need to get this many votes, and they actually ended up getting the votes. And so, it ended up being on the ballot, and by June or something, they had hit a certain number. So, do you think for somebody who is there, with a lot of billionaires that are, you know, the All In Podcast talked about this a lot, Shamad was very vocal about this, which is not really a 5% tax. It's really closer to an 8% to 10% because if a lot of my money is tied to stocks, I have to sell my stocks.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  Appreciation.

• 6:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Appreciation, and I have to sell the assets, and then, you know, me leaving could hurt the job market. So, you're not fully supportive for it?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Well, I think the issue is, like, the gap it's meant to close is issues around health premiums, right? So, they have these health obligations for public employees. So, in California, there's very lucrative public pensions, public health obligations. This is for teachers, firefighters, nurses. These are people who do hard jobs, they're important for society. At the same time, because the budget of California has been mismanaged for decades, right? This is not a problem that happened in the last year or two, this is a decades-long problem. It's only giving a liability that is going to explode more in the next 20 years. A wealth tax may plug the hole for one or two years, but it is not a sustainable solution. And so, given the level of disruption, I think it is very attractive to go after billionaires. Like, it's easy to be like, oh, just take it from them.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  But it's not going to address the larger issue, which is that California's budget is in a really unhealthy place, especially when we look forward 10 years.

• 7:19Patrick Bet-David?

  How did it get to a place like that? You're a math person. How did they screw it up so bad? I used to live in California 24 years.

• 7:25Speaker 00

  I think a big part of it is, it's always easy to say, we'll catch up in the future, right? Because remember, states don't get to run deficits. They have to, they can only accumulate so much debt, they can't declare bankruptcy easily. They can't print more money, like, at the federal level, we can print more money. So, if you say, get cheaper salaries today because you promised someone a pension in the future, you can be like, oh, it's going to be fine, we're going to be able to catch up within the future. But those obligations come due eventually. And if you haven't planned for it over time, then you get stuck with, someone else gets stuck with the bill.

• 7:58Patrick Bet-David?

  So, let's go to the story. You're in Silicon Valley, you're doing your thing, you're career-oriented, you high school debate, you were known for that, you did great, and then you're at Facebook, and suddenly you get to this point where you're like, oh, this data with Instagram that's coming out and how it's harming young girls, and I think we need to tell the public about this. Maybe walk me through the story of what happened before you released the 20-something thousand dollar document.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  So, in the, like, January 2019, I get this email from Facebook saying, hey, have you ever considered working at Facebook?

• 8:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Where were you at that time?

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Where was I at the time? I think I was, I think I was on a break. So, like, I was looking at, like, I was thinking about doing a startup, like, you know, it's like one of these things in Silicon Valley. Like, sometimes you leave a thing, and you're like, oh, I'm going to take a few months and decide what I want to do next. And I get this email from Facebook, and they're like, have you considered working there? And I wrote back, I had to reread my old email when I wrote my memoir, and I maybe wrote a less polite email than I should have. But I was very curt about how I would never work at Facebook.

• 9:05Patrick Bet-David?

  In the email, you said that?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  In the email, yeah. It's like, the only thing I would ever work on at Facebook is misinformation. Because, like, in 2016, I had a friend go, like, way off the deep end.

• 9:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Politically?

• 9:16Speaker 00

  Politically. So, he had been like a Bernie Sanders supporter, and Bernie lost the primary, and...

• 9:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Which he shouldn't have.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  So, that's part of what happened.

• 9:25Patrick Bet-David?

  He should have beaten Hillary. It was very weird what happened there. He was dominating.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  The DNC, and, yeah. And so, he was sufficiently upset about what the DNC had done and all the other weird things that happened around Hillary, that he was looking for comfort online. And over the course of six months, like, he just disconnected from reality, right? Like, the last conversation I had with him was like after the 2016 election, and he was talking about things like George Soros running the world economy. Like, it was just like, and we couldn't even have a conversation about, was this a conspiracy theory? Because he was so disconnected from any kind of news source that had a connection to reality. And the, so, I say, like, the only thing I'd work on is misinformation. And they come back to me, like, we have a job for you. We have this thing called civic misinformation.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  And so, I assumed, being it's 2019, my, with like this very US-centered, you know, I'm a normal Silicon Valley tech person, I don't really think of the rest of the world, I'm just thinking about Silicon Valley. I show up expecting to work on the US 2020 election, you know, getting things locked down, maybe information operations, foreign interference, that kind of thing. Oh, no, no, no, no. I find out the thing I'm going to work on is all misinformation beyond third-party fact-checking. So, third-party fact-checking is like Hunter Biden laptop, right? It's like journalists get paid to go write fact-checks, and Facebook decides what can and cannot be said. So, imagine only 300 stories get fact-checked a month. Like, it's very, very few.

• 10:55Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you mean?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  So, Facebook talks this huge game about how these fact-checkers are the thing between you and chaos, and yet they're only fact-checking a few hundred stories globally every month.

• 11:04Patrick Bet-David?

  This is in 2019?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  This is in 2019.

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• 13:34Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. They're paying $3,000 to a journalist to go and research it and write a little thing and be like, no, the Pope did not endorse Donald Trump.

• 13:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. 300 only?

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:44Patrick Bet-David?

  A multi-trillionaire company.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  So, but there's a bigger problem, which is like billions of pieces of content are produced over the course of a month. And in places like Myanmar, places like Sri Lanka, places like Ethiopia, you know, African countries, Southeast Asian countries, Facebook isn't just like a thing we go and like look at pictures of cats on. It is the internet. And I had been completely oblivious to the role of like how Facebook had evolved in some of the most fragile places on earth. So here I am, never having really thought about the idea that algorithms could cause violence. Because remember, part of why I got this job was I used to run the recommendations, the algorithms for Pinterest. Like, what's the most dangerous thing that comes out of Pinterest? Right? Like, maybe you make a bad dinner? Like, maybe you make some fashion choices you shouldn't have made?

• 14:32Speaker 00

  Like, what's the most dangerous thing that comes from this algorithm? Right? The... So I get to Facebook and I'm sitting down every day with these researchers who are going into these places and watching civil wars happen because of misinformation. So, fast forward a year later, and they dissolve the whole part of the company I work in.

• 14:52Patrick Bet-David?

  The civic?

• 14:53Speaker 00

  The civic, no, civic integrity as a whole. So I'm on...

• 14:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Misinformation is under that?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Misinformation's under them. But by the time that happens, I've already been moved between three separate projects because inside of Facebook, things are so chaotic, people are regularly reassigned every six months.

• 15:07Patrick Bet-David?

  That's cultural.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  That's cultural. Yeah.

• 15:11Patrick Bet-David?

  So you know if I'm doing this, I only have six months here?

• 15:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:13Patrick Bet-David?

  And why do they do it that way?

• 15:15Speaker 00

  I think part of it is a lack of like conviction. I think it's like, I think it's a little bit like, so when you don't have, when you don't have market constraints, right? Like, when you have to make profit and you have a 10% profit margin or a 5% profit margin, you have to constantly work on execution. When you get 35% profit margins because you've locked in with a monopoly, you get sloppy. Inside of Facebook, they know the reason why their company succeeds is because your friends are there. Like, your friends aren't going anywhere. You're locked in. Anything can happen.

• 15:47Patrick Bet-David?

  That's what they think?

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  And...

• 15:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Is it, is it sometimes companies move positions within six months because they want to make in more all-around person so they can move you up in better executive positions?

• 16:00Speaker 00

  No. This is the wild thing. So because the company is so flat and so static, so remember, the one voice that matters inside of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. He has 60% of the votes. The next tier under him are people who are there because they make Mark feel good. The next tier under them are basically the same people who've been there for five years. Right? Like, the people who are running the company are the same people who've been there since day one with Mark, or came in five years after that. So there's very little movement above, like, maybe you'll get promoted once or twice, but the company's flat and static because there's nowhere to go.

• 16:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, would you say that the way the employees look at Mark, is he loved, respected, liked, feared, or trusted? How do the employees view him?

• 16:36Speaker 00

  So within the part of the company I worked within, I think there was kind of an acceptance that Mark was in charge, but it made things kind of chaotic. So I'll give you an example. Maybe three months before I joined, there was a situation in India. So Modi is the prime minister of India. He had started making comments about Muslims that referred to them as like insects or rodents, like language that is otherizing.

• 17:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Modi?

• 17:05Speaker 00

  Like Modi, yeah.

• 17:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. He's actually making these comments?

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, public comments on Facebook. And these are considered precursor comments to ethnic violence. Like, when you start talking about an ethnic group in your country as like vermin, this is like on the steps.

• 17:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Documented he said these things?

• 17:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Because it's their feud with Pakistan and what they have maybe?

• 17:22Speaker 00

  He's also like a Hindu nationalist. I mean, this is a big part of his political power. When people study how ethnic violence happens, you first start out with this kind of like delegitimizing language and you go from there. So this conversation came about, being like, oh, interesting, he has started doing these things. What does Facebook do if he starts posting, "You should kill the Muslims"? Like, what do we do? Like, this is a reasonable question. And so, a task force was formed. So 40 people spent six months trying to figure out, at what point can you not allow a national leader to post on Facebook? Like, what is, what's the, what's like the threshold where you're like, okay, we're not going to let him coordinate a genocide on our platform? Right? Like, what is that bar? Because I think everyone agreed, there's some bar. Who knows? Like, we can have a conversation about where's that bar, but probably like calling for the

• 18:07Speaker 00

  deaths of the Muslims in India is probably above that bar. And, so...

• 18:12Patrick Bet-David?

  They all agreed? All 40 agreed?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. So at the end of six months, you know, they've talked to people in ads and public policy and government relations, and there's literally a genocide group inside of Facebook. It's called social cohesion. All these different people, people with PhDs, they write a proposal. They come to one final thing. They present it to Mark on like a Friday. He says, "I don't like this. I can do better." He goes home, he writes a policy, he comes out and he announces it on Monday. How, how would that make you feel? Like, if you know that like 40 people have like hashed this out and argued about it and like consulted people inside the company, outside the company, figured out a thing that they all can agree to over six months, and your leader goes, "Oh, no, no, I can do better" over the weekend?

• 18:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Was his better?

• 18:55Speaker 00

  Well, the challenge with his was it wasn't implementable. So he said, "We will never censor the voice of a politician." And the only problem with this is in some jurisdictions, your local dog catcher is an elected position. Do they count as a politician? I mean, they're an elected official.

• 19:10Patrick Bet-David?

  And how did he qualify that? Did he say if it's a world leader, if it's tier one, tier two?

• 19:16Speaker 00

  No, elected official.

• 19:17Patrick Bet-David?

  That's it?

• 19:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so the problem, and part of the reason why this policy was not suggested originally, was like the advertising team doesn't know who the dog catchers are. Right? There's like, in the United States alone, there's hundreds of thousands of people who have elected jobs. Right?

• 19:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Now, what percentage of the 3.5 billion users on Facebook are from India?

• 19:34Speaker 00

  Are from India? Oh, great question.

• 19:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you pull it up on the period?

• 19:37Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 19:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Because I would say, hey, we have to be careful with the clients that we have and the users that we have in India. So I'm thinking selfishly now to see, maybe that's what it is. I don't know.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  So, well, I know only 11% of users spoke English when I left in 2021.

• 19:50Patrick Bet-David?

  In India? Only 11% of users on Facebook spoke English?

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Then that's, that's a big part of it. It has to be India if that's the case. Okay, so, so in your position, in the 40 people that were a part of that, you said the cohesion, social cohesion group?

• 20:05Speaker 00

  So that was one of the groups with social cohesion.

• 20:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And how did they react to Zuck saying, "I can write it better"?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  So my boss, so he's the head of civic integrity. I can't tell you exactly what social cohesion did, but I can tell you what my boss did. So my boss called together all 200, 300 of us into a big conference room, big like auditorium, and showed us pictures of an MRI of his spine.

• 20:28Patrick Bet-David?

  This was your boss?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  This is my boss. So imagine you're sitting there and like, everyone knew this policy was coming. They knew it was a big deal, like across the org. I didn't even work on this policy and I knew it was coming. So when the news came out that like, Mark had written his own thing and announced it, and he called us all together and my boss gets up there and he starts showing us MRIs of his spine. And we're all like, what is going on here? Like, is he gonna quit? Like, and he's talking about how he worked so hard that he hurt his own back. You know, like how much he's given for this company, how much he's sacrificed and like how dispiriting it is.

• 20:58Patrick Bet-David?

  He's shown this to you guys?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:00Patrick Bet-David?

  How many people are in the room?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  There's like 200 people in this room.

• 21:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, so this is a heavyweight?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  This is a heavyweight. This is, and he's, he reports directly to Mark. He's like one step down. And, you know, he's up there talking about how much he has personally sacrificed for this mission, right? Like, he's showing us his spine. And we're all like, God, he's gonna quit? Like, this is, there's only one way this talk ends. And at the last minute, he's like, but no, we must fight onwards. So like, people were really devastated by having it be like, like, we have just told you there is a risk of people dying at like a huge scale. And to be clear, within two years of that, you had the ethnic violence in Ethiopia that was fanned by social media and like half a million people died.

• 21:39Patrick Bet-David?

  So when was this with his position on, by the way, it's 12 to 13% of users are from India, around 300 to 400 million people are from India. So when was the date of Modi making the comments?

• 21:50Speaker 00

  It's like April 2019.

• 21:51Patrick Bet-David?

  April 2019. So if we go April 2019, Trump is president, right? And Modi and Trump are somewhat close. They did, they did an event together. I don't remember when the event was.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  They had a big, they had a big formal state dinner.

• 22:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Right, I remember there's something, and there was also a live event that they were together. I can't remember what it was, maybe it was after that. So that happens. Elected official, if they say anything, they can't be removed. How much longer after that did Facebook and Zuck agree to remove Trump off the platform?

• 22:21Speaker 00

  After January 6th.

• 22:22Patrick Bet-David?

  After January 6th. So were you, were you there to see what was behind the decision making of feeling comfortable to remove Trump?

• 22:29Speaker 00

  So by the time that decision came down the pipeline, I had already been moved, so I was telling you, like, I never thought I would work on ethnic violence. Within three months of getting that job, they moved us back into the United States to focus on misinformation sent to targeted groups. Because police officers, it had been found that Russian foreign interference, like Russian foreign, like, information operation kind of thing, was sending targeted misinformation to police officers. And within six months of that, I was on to a different sub-project. And three months after that, I was on to counter espionage. So by the time January 6th came up, I was working within threat intelligence on counter espionage, just because like I told you, like, Facebook is chaotic. Constantly moving you around different things.

• 23:13Patrick Bet-David?

  So now, were you, but I'm sure the entire company is talking to each other. When that decision was made, did you guys know that was gonna be the decision? Because you guys were the second to ban him, right? I don't think you were the first. Trying to see who was the first that banned him? I think it was Twitter that banned him first, and then it was Google, then you, YouTube, then you, one of those. I don't remember how it was, but.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Fascinating.

• 23:33Patrick Bet-David?

  What was the internal decision? Was it, oh shoot, Twitter just did that, let's follow the lead? Or was it, you know, this is what we're doing no matter what Twitter and others do?

• 23:42Speaker 00

  All I saw, so I only had visibility at the level of like, I was within the group of people that was getting updates. But I was not like in the war room itself. Like, remember this is a virtual thing, because it's, it's still during COVID, like, everything's still locked down. All I do know is I documented what protections were on at 10:00 AM on January 6th and what protections were on the next day. So we had a list of maybe 35 to 40 different little knobs you could turn on Facebook to make it like less viral, less heated. This is not like specific ideas, this is like how, how should the platform perform overall?

• 24:24Speaker 00

  In terms of those 35 to 40 knobs, where they were set on Election Day versus on January 6th, because all of the measures had been turned off, like it was back running at 11, 12, right? At 10:00 AM on January 6th, maybe 20% of those had been turned on. By January 7th, all of them had been turned back on. So people had just like been asleep at the wheel. Like, people had not been paying attention to it until there was actively rioting happening in DC.

• 24:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think it was a right move to remove the president off of Facebook?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  I think, given the circumstances in that moment, like, he had an opportunity, he had many opportunities to say, go home, like, de-escalate. And he chose not to. I think in, in at least that localized moment, that was an appropriate decision. I think, I'm, I'm very cautious on whether or not hard actions, like exclusionary policies are appropriate. Like, that has never been, like, a big part of what I brought out was on how content moderation doesn't work, right? Like, the concept that AI can save us in that way is just a lie. But I think in moments where you actively have leaders leading to like fanning the flames of violence is appropriate in the short term.

• 25:38Patrick Bet-David?

  So short term for you would be what? 24 hours, 48 hours?

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Probably, probably a week or two.

• 25:43Patrick Bet-David?

  A week or two, but let him back in after a week.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  I think, I think you, I think that in software engineering, we have a concept known as progressive backoff. So if you have a situation where like, let's say your server's not responding, so you're asking the server to send you something, you might first ask every minute, then you might ask every two minutes, then you might ask every four minutes, then you might ask every, you know, progressively go longer and longer. You could imagine waiting a couple of days and seeing what they do, because maybe they need a timeout for a day or two or a week. And then if they come back and they're like, hey, I was, I was really wound up. Like, it was clearly not the right thing to do to attack the Capitol. That is a very different thing than saying you can never come back again.

• 26:24Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so I think if you want to go back to the timeline, Twitter did it first on J6 account, they suspended it for 12 hours and then removed three tweets. And then Facebook and Instagram followed suit for 24 hours. And then Snapchat indefinitely suspended Trump's account. And then Facebook and Instagram extended the suspension, lasting at least through the presidential transition. And Twitter became the first of three of these major platforms to announce permanent ban of Trump's personal account. And then January 13, Snapchat made its ban and then everybody else followed suit. And how long did the ban last? Was it two or three years? I, I feel like it was a couple of years that he couldn't get back on.

• 27:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think that's appropriate.

• 27:05Patrick Bet-David?

  To, to not keep him on for that long?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Like, permanent bans are not appropriate. Because like.

• 27:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Period for people or for elected officials?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  I think for people. Like, I think this idea, like, I think right now we have this notion in our society that like there are good people and there are bad people, and that denies the chance for growth and change.

• 27:22Patrick Bet-David?

  So take the two extremists politically, let's just say, some would say Hassan Piker, America deserved 9/11. Or Nick Fuentes, you know, he says what he says. You're from the position that let them speak, let the audience decide for themselves.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  I'm of the position that, that you can give people timeouts. The idea that that person doesn't change, that they're not gonna be different in a year, they're not gonna be different in six months. Like, I think it's one of these things where we're saying like, hey, we have, you have to have rules in, in, in social spaces. Like, there's a saying, if you create a space that bans witch hunts, the problem is it becomes full of only witches, right? We need to have rules, but the idea that people don't change or they don't grow, that excludes a future. And in the United States, we have this idea that we can cancel people forever. Like, we need to have consequences, but we need to have the idea that like, someone can come back and say, I'm, I'm a different person. And so an indefinite ban doesn't give you an opportunity to grow and change.

• 28:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Would you consider yourself a freedom of speech absolutist?

• 28:21Speaker 00

  I, I, that is, that is a very inflammatory phrase, right? So there's this question of like, let's say you do see something like an ethnic violence incident, like Myanmar. Are you really telling me that the, so we, we know now that the Myanmar East government sent governmental officials, people in their military, to Russia to learn how to run information operations on their own people. They came back, they triggered an information operation, they built it for years, saying, let's kill the Muslims in our country. I think it is appropriate for Facebook to cut off that speech. Like, I don't think you're too, I think private entities have a right to say, I don't have to be part of killing someone else.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  At the same time, I don't think it's appropriate to, I think people need to be more uncomfortable than they are today, right? Like.

• 29:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Due to free speech. Hear what people are saying, make up your own mind.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  I think it's a question of, we don't get to grow and change if we are not challenged. And this idea that there are ideas that are too dangerous for us to talk about them, that is a great way to stop having ideas. Like, we need to be able to, um, like, like, um, my husband likes to say that we have a very traditional marriage in that it used to be people were married to people who didn't agree. Like, you'd have a Republican married to a Democrat, and that almost never happens anymore. And I would say both my husband and I are political orphans. Like, we are part of the large number of Americans who don't really associate with either party. But we definitely don't agree politically either. Like, we're both, like, very opinionated people in our own different ways, but we can have arguments and learn from each other. And I think that is one of the greatest gifts that the world has, the idea that you can

• 29:59Speaker 00

  be exposed to an idea that challenges you and makes you think, and you, you both grow and you both change.

• 30:03Patrick Bet-David?

  So maybe, let me restate what I'm thinking you're saying is, when it comes down to violence, that is...

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Calls for violence, yeah.

• 30:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Calls for violence.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  I think reasonable people can say, I don't have to participate, I don't, I don't have to platform you.

• 30:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, so reasonable people would say, I understand if Facebook or Twitter or somebody takes them down.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay? Now, the suspension for Trump, I think the only one that still has it is Snapchat, they still haven't lifted it. Twitter's lasted one year and 10 months, and he came back November 19, 2022, I think a month after Elon bought X. Facebook was two years and a month, 763 days. Instagram, same day. YouTube was two years and two months, a month after the other guys did it, and Snap still hasn't lifted it. So, so you would have only kept them off for one week. Now, let me ask the, the...

• 30:51Speaker 00

  I would come and see, and see what he does. Right? Because if he comes back after a week and he starts delegitimizing the election again and calling for violence, then you have to be like, okay, now we have to go for two weeks. Like, are you, are, are you actually acknowledging that you lost the election?

• 31:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Where was the part where we called for violence? Because I think, uh, a couple part of it was, I remember the, when they called the police.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:12Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, there's a clip of Nancy Pelosi talking to her daughter, I don't know if you've seen it in the car or not, where it's like, you know what? I called them off, you know? And she's like, whoa, why are you guys even documenting this? So Nancy Pelosi didn't want to send the security in, and, you know, BBC and some of these guys got sued because of the way they cut the clips to manipulate.

• 31:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:30Patrick Bet-David?

  And showed that Trump said this, and yet, they didn't show the whole clip, so they lost the lawsuit.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Even to the point where the CEO, I think BBC had to step down, if I'm not mistaken, the lady, you remember, was, am I saying it correctly? Please fact-check me. Uh, it was either the editor-in-chief or the CEO of, uh, it was a lady that stepped down, and she quit, and she didn't want to say anything about it.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:49Patrick Bet-David?

  So now that we look at the story, that some of it was the media manipulating what Trump really said. Does your position change with that, or does it stay the same?

• 31:58Speaker 00

  So I, I want to be real clear. I have not looked in great depth at what Trump did on the day of January 6th. I can tell you in great depth what we knew inside of Facebook was going on, um, in terms of like, the, the much larger thing that drove January 6th was not Trump, it was that a, a group of people actively weaponized Facebook. So, for example, the most prolific inviter to stop the steal groups, one person, invited 300,000 people to stop the steal groups. Or, for example, we had groups of people, so in, in Facebook, you are not allowed to found two groups or three groups, where you have, say, the same eight mods, same eight admins who own the group, and they all have basically the same name. And the reason for that is, if I get you to join those three groups, I can send you three times as much content.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  You had a small number of people who founded 20, 30 groups, you know, each, and flooded people's feeds with content. And one of the things that I have a huge amount of empathy for the people who stormed the Capitol that day, is a lot of those people said the exact same thing. They said, my feed was full, was completely full of content, saying, I know, exactly. So I'm saying, I'm saying that, like, that I, I can't, I can't tell you the great details on exactly what Trump did, but I'm saying that, that for, if there are calls for that, um, and so I'm, I'm not going to be able to defend Facebook's policies on, uh, what were the exact words that they did.

• 33:12Patrick Bet-David?

  But you have to realize, I mean, that was a moment that divided America in a big way, so if, can you go back to the previous ChatGPT when you pulled it up? So, uh, this is the one. So the top two BBC executives resigned over the controversy surrounding the BBC's misleading editing of Trump's January 6th speech. They resigned before Trump formally filed his lawsuit on November 9th, so the BBC Director General, Tim Davie, the broadcaster's highest-ranking executive, and Deborah Turnus, the CEO of BBC News, because they manipulated the clip. And can you ask what they did? Because it was a, he put a, uh, this is it, so if you watch this, I'm so glad you're seeing this, if you, go for it.

• 33:49Speaker 06

  We're gonna walk down to the Capitol.

• 33:54Patrick Bet-David?

  That's BBC's clip.

• 33:55Speaker 06

  And I'll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell. We're gonna walk down to the Capitol. Yeah! And we're gonna cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. We're gonna walk down...

• 34:13Patrick Bet-David?

  That's a...

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Do you have the sentence after that?

• 34:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Can you pull up what, he's, there's a longer format of this clip.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  I also think, if you could ask ChatGPT, like, can you give context on, like, what, what were the, what were the public statements that, that Facebook said were why they did this? Because, like I told you, I, I, I'm, I'm an information operations person, I don't, I don't deal with individual pieces of content.

• 34:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but, but what's important is to go back in, it, look, they made a movie about your story and what you did with Facebook, and the person that starred, played you was an Academy Award-winning actress, and it was a, so this is a massive story.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 34:48Patrick Bet-David?

  It divided a lot of people that went through this, and it kind of takes me back to, and, and we're gonna do that, because I want you to see exactly, and I wanted to see exactly what the speech was afterwards.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  And, and I, but I, but I want to key, I want to do a key tiny, just, you know, just remind you, when I came forward, I came, I left Facebook in May of 2021. Right? Like, I started, most of my whistleblowing happened in April, May of that year. The reasons I came forward didn't involve January 6th, it involved systemic...

• 35:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Instagram.

• 35:16Speaker 00

  Well, no, it involved systemic weaponization of platforms. So I worked with them through intelligence, and like, every day, the thing that I worked on was China and Russia and Iran and North Korea actively weaponizing the platform.

• 35:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but, but the part, the part that's very important on what you're saying, I totally get that. But you started off, when I asked the question from you, you said you saw a friend of yours...

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:36Patrick Bet-David?

  After Hillary Clinton did what she did to Bernie, and they kind of bullied him out, I wanted to see a Bernie against Trump, that's what I wanted to see.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Because I think that's the message we all wanted, like...

• 35:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:47Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, so then your friend went from there...

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:50Patrick Bet-David?

  To, uh, Soros and all this stuff that happened, and which, by the way, some of the stuff with Soros makes sense, there's some real investigation that's done, that this is not the, uh, you know, he said in an interview with LA Times that I fancy myself as a god, I don't know a lot of people that say stuff like that.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  So, so my friend said he funds violent revolutionaries, and like, like, I, I was a civil, a Cold War Studies minor in, in college, like, the, the revolutions that he was referring to, like, people did things like hold flowers in public squares. The idea that, like, if you are, are having a revolution where you have people basically doing civil disobedience is a violent revolution, I, I, like, it's things like that where, like, we...

• 36:26Patrick Bet-David?

  The guy's not allowed in his own country, Francis. Soros is not allowed in his own country. Think, think about, I mean, he had some restrictions where his own country is like, we don't let this guy come back here because of how divisive and manipulative he was, so...

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Overly involved in the political process.

• 36:39Patrick Bet-David?

  Overly involved in funding some charities that are going and creating havoc in streets and protesting and riots that become chaotic, and he needs that noise to kind of do what he does. Yeah, what is this one here? Oh, is this, okay. Anyone you want, but I think right now, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong, we have come to demand that Congress do the right thing, and only the elected, uh, electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated, I know that everyone here will be soon marching over to the Capitol Building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

• 37:21Patrick Bet-David?

  This is very different than what the news played 24/7, and they brainwashed us, and because of the way they cut the clips, they silenced the president. He in his speech says peacefully and patriotically, so you can see how a lot of people could be, you know, confused with it.

• 37:38Speaker 00

  All right, can you scroll back up real quick? It's like, I'm just, uh, uh, today we see, let's answer out for integrity.

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• 39:55Patrick Bet-David?

  Are you reading in the bottom or the top?

• 39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I want to be clear. So it's one of these things where I, I, I think one of the things that is captured well in the movie is that Facebook, so one of the things we learned from Sarah Wynn Williams' book, so that she had a book called Careless People that came out maybe a year ago, year and a half ago. So Sarah Wynn Williams has been basically banned by Facebook. So she has, they've sued her for 200 or 300 million dollars, like completely silenced her. But she came into the company right when Arab Spring was going on, right? So similar period of time in terms of like, Facebook is right in the middle of violence. Whether or not we want to connect them or not, we can have a conversation on that. But I think one of the things the movie captured well was back in Arab Spring, back

• 40:41Speaker 00

  in, on January 6th, they didn't think they were going to have the ability to influence anything, right? Like their, Facebook, they're like, we're a place for connecting people. Like we, we're right.

• 40:51Patrick Bet-David?

  It's much bigger than.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  And so it's one of these things where I think on January 6th, because there wasn't the kind of thoughtful preparation. So the point of having a task force of 40 people go and talk to elected officials and talk to the advertisers and talk to all the different stakeholders is that you can have a plan for what to do if shit like this hits the fan. But if you say, oh, no, no, no, we don't need to do anything. Like, like we can just be, you know, for example, if we say we're going to be free speech absolutists, I hope you actually have the conviction to be a free speech absolutist because otherwise you're going to make an emotional last minute decision. And in the end, what happened on January 6th was there, nothing was done until he got scared enough that he did something.

• 41:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Who?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Mark, the only person whose decision.

• 41:32Patrick Bet-David?

  But even he was brainwashed.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:34Patrick Bet-David?

  Even he was brainwashed.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  And do you really want a single person making these decisions?

• 41:38Patrick Bet-David?

  Him, Zuck?

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because that's what happened. Like, like he, Trump got taken down because at some point Mark got scared enough.

• 41:46Patrick Bet-David?

  So instead of him, who would you have rather be making that decision? The government or how would you have set it up? In your ideal?

• 41:53Speaker 00

  I think, like in my ideal world, we have social media platforms that are less centralized, right? Because right now, this is a private company that has to do whatever they want to do with our public finances. They'd be less centralized. They would be more democratically governed, right? Because right now, there's lots of things about Facebook that the reason why it could even be weaponized is because it was optimized to grow and for virality and for maximizing the number of advertising impressions you look at. If you have smaller places that are more run by the people who actually use them, you have less systemic risk. And then it matters less whether or not a single person is saying something inflammatory on them.

• 42:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, but where I'm trying to go with this is maybe your friend was right. Maybe your friend in 26, by the way, is he still in the same position today?

• 42:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:39Patrick Bet-David?

  He is where now? He's more independent libertarian type?

• 42:42Speaker 00

  He, he moved to, he left the Bay Area for Indiana.

• 42:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 42:45Speaker 00

  With some people who, I, I like, I don't want to say he got like, some very, some very politically extreme people. He ended up meeting a lovely woman. He ended up going back to church. He has a farm now. They have ducks.

• 43:04Patrick Bet-David?

  So he lives a simple life now?

• 43:05Speaker 00

  He lives a simple life now.

• 43:06Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And I called him when I did 60 Minutes because I, I knew that I had talked about him on 60 Minutes and I was like, hey, I want you to know, I talked about you in the abstract.

• 43:14Patrick Bet-David?

  No name, just a story?

• 43:15Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. And he was like, I'm actually fine now. Like I, I met this girl and like many people who go off into the fringes, the thing that brought him back was people.

• 43:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, no question. Yeah. But, but where I'm trying to go with this is the following. So I'm still a registered independent until today. Okay, just so you know, I went from a Democrat to Republican to register independent myself. I think Bill Clinton was a good president. And I know, oh my God, I can't believe you say this. Take Monica Lewinsky and all the other stuff out. Not a fan of his wife.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:45Patrick Bet-David?

  But I think Bill was a good president. I've met him, you know, we've had our conversations. Say that again?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Economy did great.

• 43:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, him and Newt worked together and he was willing to go talk to the other side. I think I like that. I'm good with that.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  I wish we did more of that.

• 43:57Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, yeah, fully, fully. But, but a part of this, we have to ask how we got here.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:01Patrick Bet-David?

  I think the part that I saw a lot of people who were liberals, who left to become independent libertarian, and then they voted Republican, is what they thought happened with Russia collusion. And they're like, oh, shoot, Hillary was behind it, the 35 million auto dossier. I didn't know this thing here. She's, what a great woman. Then when you go and say, okay, maybe COVID, you know, COVID, you better get the shot and all this stuff. And then Bobby Kennedy, who's a guy that's, last time it's Kennedy, he's been a left, you know, he's criticized Trump, all these guys. He then goes there, so it's like, wait, am I forced to take the shot? And then the last one was, is when you saw guys like Elon. Elon was always on the left. Elon was always a liberal supporting a bunch of different things. Rogan.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 44:44Patrick Bet-David?

  How did these guys, all of a sudden, it's like, wait a minute, you're trying to brainwash me by, you know, keeping information and manipulating me through media? I'm not going to play this game. You lost me now.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:55Patrick Bet-David?

  It doesn't mean Rogan's a 100% Trump guy.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  And they canceled lots of people.

• 44:58Patrick Bet-David?

  So a lot of people were turned off by the amount of manipulation and brainwashing. And I also think even Zuck was in the middle of it and he's like, ah, I don't know if I'm part of this.

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:08Patrick Bet-David?

  So do you think there was a little bit of credence of all the manipulation that media did that some of the people on the left left?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  I think, I think for a number of those people on the, on the, on the left, it wasn't just this question of like, are there ideas that are okay or not okay? And to just repeat again, a big part of what I brought out was about how Facebook claimed that they could tell you what ideas were good or bad and they could take the bad ones off. And that was all a lie. AI cannot do that. And we can talk about why, but it just doesn't work. But the, the place that we were at as a country in 2020, like very much was like a very black and white lens. Like there were good people and there were bad people, right? And I, the, the, the, the channel that was left available that you had to walk to be a good person got smaller and smaller and smaller.

• 45:58Speaker 00

  And I think one of the, the good things that has happened over the last couple of years is that the space of range of what is acceptable behavior is wider than it was in 2020. And, you know, even, even, God, what's her name? AOC has said woke 1.0 was crazy. And I think that kind of intolerance, that level of moral purity that they expected from people or they would cancel you is a very, very exclusionary thing. Like it's very hard to constantly be in this prison of behavior and say like, if I do anything outside of it, I may be canceled forever. And one of the things I worry a lot about kids these days is kids are terrified of being canceled. Like they're terrified of doing the wrong thing and ending up on the internet and having everyone tell them they're horrible. And as a result, their lives get smaller and smaller and smaller because they're always

• 46:43Speaker 00

  on stage.

• 46:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Hmm. So maybe walk me through when you were having a meeting with Wall Street Journal and you're like, ah, should I do this? Should I not? I don't want to do it. I know what you're asking me. Maybe, you know, I should. And then all of a sudden you're like, I have all the documents. I took all the pictures. I'm coming out. I think the world needs to know. What was that process?

• 47:01Speaker 00

  Sure. So when I originally came to Jeff, my main issue was I, we, we had done internal research where we had talked to political parties in Europe and they had said, hey, we are intentionally running different political positions post you changing the algorithm. So the idea that a private company can make a decision about what information we get to see or not see and that public entities, public political, political parties are saying, we don't give voters the same options because of choices you made in, in Menlo Park. That seems like a thing that the public had a right to know. So initially that was my big focus was saying like, hey, they know what's going on. They're not telling people our elections are being influenced, even in the options they get to choose. I worked with Jeff, we always try to leave this part slightly ambiguous.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  I've been told by my lawyers not to give too many details, exactly on timeline on a variety of things. But the vast majority of what I brought forward came out in just the last few weeks. So it was one of these things where I cared a lot about these questions on platform design and algorithms and like how content censorship AIs work, that kind of thing. In the last couple of weeks, that's when we started grabbing things like the stuff around kids, you know, the stuff on teen mental health. I knew that I had no business case to touch that. Like I worked on foreign governments interfering in the United States and interfering around the world. I had lots of reasonable business cases to touch that information. I never worked on kids' mental health beyond like child predators.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  And only then, like, as in the larger threat intelligence framework. And so when we started grabbing that kind of information, I assumed Facebook would catch me.

• 48:38Patrick Bet-David?

  That's when it happened.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  That's when I assumed they would. Well, they never caught me. Like, we got all the way out the door before they ever realized I had taken.

• 48:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Ever get close, even the other girl that sat right across from you? She kind of had, was that scene where she comes and she tells you, here's the chip? Did that ever happen?

• 48:54Speaker 00

  That never happened.

• 48:54Patrick Bet-David?

  That never happened. So that's just movie.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  That's just movie.

• 48:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, got it. Were there other people involved internally trying to help and?

• 49:01Speaker 00

  No, just Jeff.

• 49:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Just you?

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:03Patrick Bet-David?

  And nobody, did anybody, like, you know, nowadays with HR software, so you can, everybody wants to know sentiment. They want to know, you know, like, almost a Minority Report to find out, we're about to lose Francis. And based on email communication, you know, she's probably 90 days away from quitting, and she's hit tier one crisis mode for the company? Let's have a conversation with her. Did anybody approach and say, you seem very unhappy?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  So I, I, I think I had that moment in my first six months at Facebook. So when, when I was working on ethnic violence, like, like, more hands-on, when I was working on people targeting Americans with these targeted misinformation campaigns, the level of seriousness that the company brought to it, I was very concerned that not enough was being done. Because remember, I am watching things like, I have friends who work on the ethnic violence team, and they're getting depression and having to talk about going on medical leave. Like, it's that bad, right? People are feeling suicidal because, like, the company is, is, like, the reality you learn inside the company versus, like, what you can do, the gap is so big. Right? During that period of time, that's when I kind of clued in that you, it was unacceptable to be unhappy inside the company.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Right? Like, they made it very clear that, like, you were not allowed to be negative. And so after about six months in, I realized, oh, if I want to continue working at Facebook, and that's like around when COVID hit, and I was like, oh, I don't want to lose my job.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  You cannot visibly ever be unhappy with the company. And so at that point, I kind of, like, strained, strained up and flew right. Like, I, I was just.

• 50:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Like, you were acting and you were being fake?

• 50:34Speaker 00

  I, I would say I chose what to focus on, right? And, and the, the good thing was that I had gone shifted at that point, because remember, you, they move you around constantly, so you never get very deep in any one thing. At that point, they had moved me on to modeling how much influence anyone on the platform had. So like, at that point, we were trying to identify who, not just elected officials. Like, let's say you are a labor organizer. Can we identify that you have effectively power on Facebook?

• 51:01Patrick Bet-David?

  Would you guys give a score to that person?

• 51:03Speaker 00

  We would give a score to everyone.

• 51:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Almost like that, back in the days, there was a website called Klout. I don't know if you remember Klout with a K.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  We kind of were calculating Klout scores for everyone.

• 51:10Patrick Bet-David?

  And you have that on the back?

• 51:11Speaker 00

  We, we, we, we made a prototype of it. I got moved off on to threat intelligence towards the end of that summer. So we made a prototype that, like, was actually quite interesting.

• 51:21Patrick Bet-David?

  And it's private. It's yours, not public. It's only for Facebook.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  So it was, we put it in place because Facebook treats influential people differently than it does average people.

• 51:30Patrick Bet-David?

  In what way?

• 51:31Speaker 00

  So one of the big revelations I brought out was about a program called Crosscheck. So Facebook had been public about the idea that this thing called Crosscheck existed. They had never disclosed the details of, like, how you got on Crosscheck. So you, you probably are on Crosscheck, given the amount of influence you have on, on, on the internet. So if you're on Crosscheck, you're a celebrity, you're a big elected politician, Facebook will not apply any of the content moderation tools to your content. You will end up in a human queue that will take days. So by the time, by the time someone actually looks at your content, you have already gotten all the views you're going to get, probably. Eighty, ninety percent of the views you were going to get anyhow. But no AI.

• 52:09Patrick Bet-David?

  It takes 24 hours plus.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  No, yeah, yeah, yeah. Back then, it was taking seventy, you know, three days. Yeah. And this was a huge problem. Like, I'll give you an example. There was a Brazilian soccer player who sexually assaulted a woman, and she came out and accused him. And he turned his fans on her, like, basically actively called for them to go after her. And because he was in this special queue, it took days for them to get to his content. And like, she, she got death threats, she got people show up at her home, like, all kinds of stuff happened because he, he could call for violence against her, and no, no, by the time a human looked at the content, it'd been days and days down the road. Right? So, so there's this question, which is, Facebook has these different programs in place to protect, say, a local politician, a state-level politician.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  If we don't have data sources that can tell us this is who needs protection, we have to figure out on our own who needs protection. Because some of the other things are things like making sure you have an extra recovery phone number, or like, we make sure you turn on two-factor authentication, because you're more likely to get hacked. You know, the, the intention of that project was to make sure that you, the people who needed protection got protection.

• 53:17Patrick Bet-David?

  So on the backend, did you have the highest Crosscheck score on influence for people? Was Trump number one? Was Elon ranked?

• 53:24Speaker 00

  So, so I, my focus was not on people we already had data on. So we, Trump would already have been under, like, one of our major federal politicians. There were like 35 different lists that might be how you'd get on Crosscheck protection.

• 53:37Patrick Bet-David?

  If I'm in a room, I could see the ranking of who's the most influential to the least?

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:41Patrick Bet-David?

  That kind of how it was?

• 53:42Speaker 00

  For the prototype that we built.

• 53:43Patrick Bet-David?

  And you probably see it moving like this, right?

• 53:45Speaker 00

  But we, we only focused, everyone who already had protection, we filtered them out, because we're like, oh, you're already protected. So we focused on everyone beyond that. And so, for example, I remember one of the people in our top 10 was a National Medal of Freedom winner. Right? Like, she's, she's, she's gone and returned more than like a million acres of Native American land. She's very, very influential, but she is not an elected official.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Those are the kinds of people who we didn't know about until we mined them for influence.

• 54:18Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you reach out to them, or you just watched them? They didn't know you're doing this. You're just watching them?

• 54:22Speaker 00

  So my specific job was just to find them, because there are other parts of the company that provide them with protection. Because I'm just a data scientist, figuring out, like, can we find the people with influence so that then the parts of the company that give them special treatment can give them special treatment?

• 54:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, because I remember something happened with Facebook, where guys who were making 30, 40, 50, $100,000 a month with Facebook revenue that was coming, and all of a sudden it split. And, you know, to a fifth. And a lot of people that were relying on that income, they lost it. I don't know what the event was.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  So that, that's a, that's a huge deal. Like, most online news sources had this happen to them.

• 54:55Patrick Bet-David?

  You remember this one, this happens?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  This happened, maybe 20, 21, 2022.

• 54:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Right.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Basically, Facebook came and said, we are no longer going to prioritize the news. And so all these online news sites suddenly lost all their traffic.

• 55:07Patrick Bet-David?

  And revenue?

• 55:08Speaker 00

  And revenue. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, traffic is revenue.

• 55:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Was that intentional?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  I think Facebook, one, they knew that they were facing in some countries, like Canada, for example. Canada has put in place laws that say, hey, Facebook, like, your business is built on distributing the content of, of people who, who, who you didn't pay. Like, if you want there to be a news ecosystem, you have to give at least a little bit of funding to the news sector. I think Facebook looked at them, looked at the Australians, and basically said, we're just going to distribute less news, because we don't want to risk having governmental interference in the future.

• 55:41Patrick Bet-David?

  So when you were going through, blowing the whistle on Facebook, and you're dealing with Jeff, Jeff's, you know, he's a known guy in this space. I hope I'm saying his name correctly.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  He's much more competent than with the movie.

• 55:55Patrick Bet-David?

  It was, they made it seem like he's a dummy.

• 55:56Speaker 00

  I got to defend him. Got to defend him.

• 55:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay, that's good to know, because I was not convinced you were going to be that guy and be as dumb as they made him out to be. Not dumb, but it's like oblivious. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So he knows what he's doing. So while you're going, was it, did he at all tilt you? Did he at all influence you to go, like, did he say something like, hey, you're about to change the world, you're, you're going to be on everything, do you want to take this? Or was he kind of like encouraging, discouraging, you sure you want to do this? What role did he play?

• 56:24Speaker 00

  So, um.

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• 59:07Speaker 00

  I never intended to come forward publicly. So like that decision was made like six weeks before the first Wall Street Journal article. Maybe six weeks, maybe four weeks before the first Wall Street Journal article came out. So he definitely, he definitely counseled me against coming forward publicly. But like when we were in the thick of it, I like, I never really wavered on that I was going to provide him with materials. The question was like, were we, like when we started out, like I think I probably never expected to work with him for more than a month or two. And like, I never thought we would bring out 20,000 pages of documents. Like, I never thought we would end up being the reason why 47 states sued and won against Facebook.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  You know, like I never saw this future in front of us. But he was real, one of the things he told me that I was very, very grateful for, and I've always carried with me, is he's always said, "You can stop anytime you want to. Like, you owe no one anything." Like, this is not, you're like, at some point, it's not fun anymore. Don't, like, you don't have to be a public whistleblower.

• 1:00:13Patrick Bet-David?

  So that happened?

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Patrick Bet-David?

  That happened?

• 1:00:16Speaker 00

  That, that, that.

• 1:00:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Was there ever a flirtatious moment between the two of you, or no?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  No, he's, he's married.

• 1:00:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, he's married? I didn't know that.

• 1:00:22Speaker 00

  And, and the thing that I think is so sad about the movie is so that the place we actually met, so we didn't, he did not live in a hotel. He lives in Oakland. His wife is a garden designer. And we, the place we actually met most often in San Francisco was, his wife has built this glorious garden. Like, they rescue cactuses. Like, they go down to like, like Joshua Tree and like, like people will say, like, "I'm gonna cut this cactus down for my front yard, just anyone wanted." They will go and rescue cactuses. They have like these giant cacti and like trellises with flowers and it would never look realistic on camera. But like, that's where we met.

• 1:00:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Rescue cactuses?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Yes, you can rescue a cactus.

• 1:00:58Patrick Bet-David?

  How do you, because it's not going away. How do you rescue?

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  So like, if a, if a cactus like lays on the ground, it can like put down roots. So you can like take an arm off a cactus and replant it.

• 1:01:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, God.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  It's wild.

• 1:01:09Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, that's pretty wild.

• 1:01:10Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so imagine like the place that, so I'm, it's like cold in San Francisco, it's like dreary, foggy, and you get to go to a nice sunny Oakland. Because remember, the, the rich used to have their summer homes in Oakland, because it's sunny and more pleasant.

• 1:01:21Patrick Bet-David?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, you know, and so that's where we met.

• 1:01:25Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:27Patrick Bet-David?

  And so, the, when, when you're at a point where you're like, "I'm going public with this."

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:32Patrick Bet-David?

  And you know, "I'm gonna go and I'm gonna be on camera and they're gonna see my face. They're gonna know, "Who, Francis Haugen, I'm gonna be doing that."

• 1:01:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Did you get any weird calls? Did you get any weird visits? Did you get any weird texts? Did you get any weird people wanting to talk to you, or no?

• 1:01:47Speaker 00

  So, no one knew who I was until the day of 60 Minutes. Right, so we, the only people who knew who I was, was, was like the Wall Street Journal, so they knew my name. And that, that scene where they, like the Francis Houghton character comes in and like meets all the Wall Street Journal people, like that actually happened.

• 1:02:04Patrick Bet-David?

  That did happen.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  And the, my, my, my moniker.

• 1:02:08Patrick Bet-David?

  Was the lady as mean as she was?

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  So, so his actual editor is a dude. And, and I actually feel.

• 1:02:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Was he a jerk?

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

  No, he's wonderful.

• 1:02:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. Are you just being diplomatic?

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  No, I'm, I'm like, like, I was, I was telling Jeff, like, I thought it was the, a little sad because like, his editor was like, as much like a part of the team almost, right? Because like, we'd have to call him and defend what we were doing. Right? Because like, we'd call him up and be like, "We found this thing." And it's like, you know, and, and the job of an editor is to be skeptical. Right? And the job of the editor is to be like, "Do you really, is that really true? Like, how can you prove that? Is that, and, and so, having someone who is skeptical is like the wall you bounce things off of, is how you have better ideas. And so I, I feel like the, that role is missing from the movie.

• 1:02:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 1:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Patrick Bet-David?

  And, and your experience now with Wall Street Journal, leaving them, what's your level of respect and credibility you have for their approach and how they do things?

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  I thought they did a really good job. The, the one thing where I think they, I don't know what happened on the inside, but I think they got a bunch of pressure because there were like 11 stories all done, ready to go. And after the first, say, week came out, they were like, "Oh, we can't publish anything more for a while." Like, one of the big places of conflict was Jeff had, he had a team of like four journalists who worked with him, and they had fleshed out these giant stories that were out of the files. And by the time we had to open things up to the rest of the press consortium, he was, he was like chomping at the bit. Like, he wanted to be able to publish these stories.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  And I don't know what was happening inside the journal, that they held him back. Because he could have been the one who broke more big stories than he did, but they didn't let him actually push out the door until sometimes weeks or months later, some of those stories.

• 1:03:50Patrick Bet-David?

  Was there anything that was left out?

• 1:03:52Speaker 00

  That was left out? I mean, the fact that the press consortium published lots more stories, there is always question of scale. Right, so the Wall Street Journal has a certain level of staffing, and they have a certain focus. And so there's going to be stories that are relevant, say, only in Poland. So, for example, there was a couple of stories around politically influential people that came out of some of these, these cross-check documents, that those stories are not going to get published by the Wall Street Journal, because they don't care about Polish politicians. But the paper out of, you know, Warsaw is going to publish them.

• 1:04:26Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. So now, they did come out, I think when that was going out, Facebook came out and says, "You weren't a senior executive, you worked there for less than two years, you never attended decision-making meeting with C-suite executives, you acknowledged it during your congressional hearing. Zuck said your allegations were false." I think he responded publicly on October 5th, 2021. "He rejected the allegation that Facebook knowingly prioritized profits over user safety." Then Facebook said she wasn't an expert on Instagram's effects on children. Andy Stone emphasized that Haugen hadn't personally worked on Instagram child safety research. Zuck said, "Most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted." His response was that Francis's interpretation failed to acknowledge the company's extensive investment in safety and research.

• 1:05:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Zuck says, "Your accusations unfairly characterize thousands of employees who genuinely care about protecting users." These are some of the things that he took. Do you agree with him on what he said?

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  But what I find so funny about the, the, like, we don't agree with this characterization thing, is one of the things that came out from the lawsuits against the company about Instagram, was an email from Adam Mosseri to Mark Zuckerberg and a couple of other C-suite folks about Instagram and child safety. They came out, the email happened like one or two weeks before the first story was published in the Wall Street Journal. And the reason why this timing is so interesting, is we gave them three weeks to do comment. Right, like, the Wall Street Journal was, was cautious enough, impaired enough, that they didn't give them three days to do comment. They gave them three weeks. So, sometime between when they were tipped off that these stories about kids and Instagram were coming, a week or two later, Adam Mosseri writes to Mark and says, "In order for us

• 1:06:03Speaker 00

  to actually do what we claim we're doing publicly, to protect kids, we need another 45 people working on kids." And the CFO writes back, "There's no money to do that."

• 1:06:15Patrick Bet-David?

  This is documented?

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  This is documented. This is an email that came out through the court cases. And they have since claimed, "Oh, no, no, no, we actually did fund that later on." But like, the email thread that we have, like, we don't, allegedly how all this got funded is via verbal commands. There's no paper trail saying this ever did get funded. But Adam Mosseri said, "In order just to do what we say we're doing publicly, it would take 45 more people."

• 1:06:36Patrick Bet-David?

  What is, for the people that don't know, Adam's role, how much power did Adam?

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  Oh, so he's, he's the head of Instagram.

• 1:06:41Patrick Bet-David?

  He's the head of Instagram?

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  Head of Instagram, yeah.

• 1:06:43Patrick Bet-David?

  Okay. And so, on the findings for Instagram with specifically young teenage girls, what patterns did they notice?

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  So, there's, I would say there's a range of things that I brought out, and there's a range of things that we know now from the court cases. So, what initially kicked off a lot of the storm around Instagram and kids was a series of focus groups that Facebook ran with teenage girls, where they asked them questions like, "When you feel bad about your body? Does Instagram make you feel worse?" And that's like where the famous stat of like 65% said it made them feel worse, or 35% or whatever.

• 1:07:20Patrick Bet-David?

  I remember that.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  And what has happened since then is much, much larger scale studies have been leaked. So, this man named Arturo Behar, who is, was the first engineer on safety at Facebook way, way, way back in the day, like 2009, 2010. He left the company when he had kids, like basically retired, came back when his daughter was 14. So he, she and him like to fix up cars together. And she made an Instagram account about fixing up cars. And when he looked.

• 1:07:47Patrick Bet-David?

  This guy?

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, Arturo Behar. He's wonderful. When he.

• 1:07:51Patrick Bet-David?

  He came back to work for Facebook?

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Yep. So he, she, she started posting on Instagram about the cars. He looked at the comments, and it was a bunch of middle-aged men talking about his 14-year-old girl's body. And he's like, "How is this possible? Like, she's talking about this car she's fixing up. How is she getting sexually harassed? Like, why is she getting sent lewd photos that she didn't ask for? They must not know." Like, that was his immediate response. Like, you know, when I was at Facebook, they cared about safety. They must just not know this is a problem. So he returned to Instagram around the time that I was coming forward as a whistleblower. So he joined me a year before I came forward as a whistleblower. And at the same time that Facebook was making these public statements, saying, "This is not what's happening to kids on the platform," he was running surveys of 100,000 children on the platform. So this is 13 to 15 year.

• 1:08:37Patrick Bet-David?

  As an insider.

• 1:08:38Speaker 00

  As an insider. Yeah, he's running the study, he's right at the same time. And the results that are coming back are things like, 1 in 8 girls between the ages of 13 and 15, let's be honest, kids lie about their age on Instagram, so this is like 10-year-olds. 1 in 8 girls between 13 and 15 said they received an unwanted sexual message in the last seven days.

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  So he's sitting there being like, wait, they're saying publicly that nothing's wrong. And I'm asking 100,000 children, so I'm getting real responses on like, are you getting bullied? Are you seeing violence? Has violence been committed against you? Like, like what, like he's seeing the raw data and then the company is saying publicly, nothing is wrong. And that's why he came forward as a whistleblower.

• 1:09:14Patrick Bet-David?

  How, how much of that investigation did you guys on the inside, like the workers, the executives, how did they handle Instagram with their own daughters? Did they just say, you can't, you, my daughter doesn't, my daughter's not on Instagram. What did they do with their personal lives?

• 1:09:29Speaker 00

  So at the time that I came forward, which was like 2021, uh, so this is, this is, I think, part of the systemic problem of Instagram and Facebook, which is in Silicon Valley, people have kids a little bit older. Facebook was founded by a bunch of 19 and 20 year olds. When you add those two facts together, it means that even at the time that I left the company, which is 2021, Mark's eldest child was nine. Adam Serry, head of Instagram's oldest child was nine. So they could say publicly, like, seriously, my children are not on these products because they're not old enough, ignoring the fact that like 30% of seven to nine year olds are on social media. Today, Adam Serry says, my kid is on social media because she's like, I don't know, 14 now, right? I don't know how they use the products with their own kids though. Do they put time caps? Do they look at their kids' phones?

• 1:10:13Speaker 00

  Do they, um, use other kinds of, of software to supervise their kids on, on, on their devices? I don't know.

• 1:10:21Patrick Bet-David?

  How much of the onus do you put, curious for you as an insider, how much of the onus do you put on parents versus Facebook, the platform?

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  So one of the really big challenges with these, these apps is I think you can safely have kids on social media, but it requires a level of oversight from parents that not all parents have the time or, or energy to execute or, or technical sophistication. Right? Um, it's things like, you know, you have to sit down with your kid at least once a week and look at their feed with them and talk to them about it. Right? And, and that's an awkward conversation. Like, how many 14 year olds want to show their mom their Instagram feed? None of them, none of them. Right? Um, or you have to do things like you can't let your kid charge their phone in their bedroom at night because they're not going to go to bed.

• 1:11:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Jonathan Hyde talks about this in Action.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Huge, huge, huge, huge, huge lever you have. But that means you have to fight with your kid every night to make sure their phone stays in your room to charge.

• 1:11:12Patrick Bet-David?

  So you have a two year old daughter. When she's 14, are you going to let her be on Instagram?

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Uh, and I'm, I'm assuming Instagram will not be Instagram in 12 years, given the rate of how things are changing. Um, will she be on some, on the internet? She'll almost certainly be on the internet. Um, I'm assuming even in the next five years, we are probably going to have like AIs that ride along with kids in a much more active way. Um, and I think that, um, is going to really change how we view children on the internet.

• 1:11:40Patrick Bet-David?

  If she was 14 today, would you let her be on Instagram?

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  No, I would not let her be on Instagram.

• 1:11:44Patrick Bet-David?

  When would you let her be on Instagram?

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  Somewhere between 14 and 16. Like, I'd have to know the kid.

• 1:11:49Patrick Bet-David?

  I don't know if I'm, if I'm even doing it. My oldest son is 14, about to be 15, he's still not on Instagram.

• 1:11:54Speaker 00

  I, to give you, give you context on like, why it's so important for parents to have really awkward conversations with their kids about these technologies is the things that kids do online, they, they, they, they don't stay online. And one of the things that is happening at higher and higher rates is, um, sex extortion. So 14 year old boys get messaged by supposedly very gorgeous women, um, and, uh, lured into situations that, uh,

• 1:12:21Patrick Bet-David?

  Sure, you're dangling and then boom, next thing in school. There was a movie that did this, disconnected. I don't know if you,

• 1:12:26Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it, no.

• 1:12:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, can you type in disconnect or disconnected? You know who's in it? The guy from, uh, uh, that's the one, Disconnect. Disconnect movie is the, the sister walks into the room, the brothers is about to commit suicide because a girl he's in love with in school, the three bullies that were bullying him, send a picture of her as if it's her profile.

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Patrick Bet-David?

  And they send a private part picture of just any girl naked without the face on her and says, if I send you mine, will you send me yours? He sent his with him in the picture. The boys released it in school the next day.

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:01Patrick Bet-David?

  And then he came in committing su, wanted to commit suicide and the sister found him.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  It's terrifying.

• 1:13:05Patrick Bet-David?

  It, but that depiction in that movie, I think every parent needs to watch this movie. So to me, my challenge becomes,

• 1:13:12Speaker 00

  And then it went step worse. Now they're doing it with AI so that your kid might not even expose himself and they'll generate a photo and say, hey, see this photo with your face on it where like you're doing something that seems,

• 1:13:21Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you do, what do you do about that though? I mean, that's like,

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  Well, this is, I think one of the questions is who should have access to your children? Right? Like, one of the things that has been a big change that's happened as a result of, um, the kids lawsuit is one of the things that came out from, um, and this is, this is really sad. One of the things that came out as a result of the kids lawsuits was when we talk about the algorithm on Instagram, there's not one algorithm, there's a bunch of algorithms. So yes, there's one that picks out your posts, but there's also one that suggests hashtags to you and there's one that suggests people to you amongst other things that it suggests. The one that suggests people to you, one of the ways it prioritizes who, um, who is suggests to you is based on what friends you've accepted from that list before. So if you are a 55 year old guy who likes 13 year old girls, the algorithm will continue

• 1:14:08Speaker 00

  to show you more 13 year old girls. And it will show you not just 13 year old girls, it will show you 13 year old girls who actually accept friend requests from 55 year old guys.

• 1:14:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Stop it.

• 1:14:15Speaker 00

  Yes, because those are the highest probability,

• 1:14:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Till today?

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Uh, so now it doesn't because of the lawsuit. So now kids are opted into private accounts by default.

• 1:14:23Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh my God.

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Because should your kid get shown to some random stranger?

• 1:14:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Till, till when was it doing that?

• 1:14:28Speaker 00

  Um, it depends where in the world you were. Um, like it's one of these questions of Facebook complies with local laws. So if you have a country that says kids get private accounts, um, you have more private situations. Um, I think we can thank the Australians because the, the first beginning to close down those holes didn't happen until Australia threatened to ban social media for under 16s. And that's only like two years ago.

• 1:14:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Is, is, what did Florida do? Florida made a decision. DeSantis said something about under 16, you can't be on social media. Can, can you find out?

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  I think they appealed it.

• 1:14:59Patrick Bet-David?

  Who appealed it?

• 1:15:00Speaker 00

  Uh, Meta did.

• 1:15:01Patrick Bet-David?

  And they won?

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  I don't know. I don't know where it is in the current state law.

• 1:15:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Florida say,

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 1:15:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Uh, under 14 are banned from creating, holding social media. 14 to 15 teens are allowed to have accounts only with parental consent and targeted platform law applies to social media says they use, yeah, Florida, DeSantis drove this. So you support this?

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  I, so I believe we can design social media that is good for kids. We do not have a system of incentives in place right now that encourages companies like Instagram to actually comply.

• 1:15:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Can I ask you a weird question? Who do you, who do you think, uh, who do you think politically protects young teenage girls more? Conservatives or liberals?

• 1:15:41Speaker 00

  Ooh, great question. Um,

• 1:15:44Patrick Bet-David?

  Because even Jonathan Hyde was asked this question. I wonder what you say about this.

• 1:15:48Speaker 00

  Um, well, right now it's, it's kind of wild. So like, for example, the Kids Online Safety Act is the main piece of legislation at the federal level that is, um, in, in the Senate. You know, it has over 75 cosigners. So it's like both Republicans and Democrats are, are supporting it and yet it gets stuck in the House. Right? Um, and I think so far we have seen more right leaning states be willing to step up and take action. So I think Utah, Florida and Texas have all done things. Um, so when it looks, when you look at just the legislative history, definitely the right has done more to protect kids online than the left. I think they understand better that kids, that the internet is not an unadulterated, like a pure good, where there are lots of dark corners to the internet.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  And one thing that's really complicated is, like I said before, I don't believe we should just exclude children from the internet. At the same time, we have not seen these tech companies being willing to do the changes they need to do to make these places safe for kids. So when you have a conflict like that, are you more biased towards action or are you more biased towards, um, continuing to negotiate with these companies? And I think the, I think states like Florida have said, we're not going to negotiate anymore. We're just going to put our foot down.

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• 1:19:13Patrick Bet-David?

  Would you support?

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think until we see these companies being willing to make changes, I think one of the only ways to protect kids is banning them.

• 1:19:20Patrick Bet-David?

  So let me ask a different question to see how you. So let's just say you get hired by Disney.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:19:25Patrick Bet-David?

  And you're working with Bob Iger or Chapek, or even the newest guy that they have, Josh Diamara, or Kathleen Kennedy. Let's take any of those executives you're working with. And you see a pattern with Disney, all of a sudden, coming up with all these LGBTQ characters in cartoons. They've never done this before. First time ever a character in a Disney cartoon or movie said I am gay was 2019, I think. I just had Bob Chapek on here a month ago and we talked about this.

• 1:19:51Patrick Bet-David?

  If you, if a Frances Haugen is working at Disney, and you're noticing the pattern of the more LGBTQ characters you put in cartoons to meet your ESGDI score is increasing the influence of kids identifying as gay or part of LGBTQ, not as an adult, but as an eight-year-old, nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 12-year-old. Do you find that inappropriate?

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  Do I find it inappropriate?

• 1:20:20Speaker 00

  So the question is, are they depicting adults that are LGBTQ?

• 1:20:24Patrick Bet-David?

  No, they're targeting kids to tell them you may be.

• 1:20:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Maybe I am LGBTQ.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Sorry, sorry. Like, who are the characters they're putting in? Are they putting in, like, one of the parents in the Disney movie is gay?

• 1:20:36Patrick Bet-David?

  No, one of the young kids are gay.

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Not adults at all. And girls kissing girls, young girls kissing girls. I think I like girls. I think I like boys.

• 1:20:47Speaker 00

  I think for children's media, like, it's all a question on, like, what age range are you targeting? Like, I don't think in movies targeting four-year-olds, you should have eight-year-olds kissing, like, that kind of thing. But that's just, you know, my personal bias. Like, I don't think you should. I think we sexualize children too much in our culture. That's one of the major unfortunate things that has come out of Instagram, is we no longer have tween spaces. Like, it used to be we treated, in depictions of media, kids who were 12 to 14 differently than we did 16-year-olds. And now all the 10-year-olds want to be 25 years old. Right? So I think, I don't have enough context on the Disney thing of, like, who this queer character is. I'd want to see, like, what's their rationale? Why are they included?

• 1:21:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Let's just say they're doing that. Let's just say you're doing that. You're, so, let's, politically, I try to see where you're at politically. I think you're, you've got a libertarian side to you.

• 1:21:40Speaker 00

  I'm an anti-statist, yeah. I fear the government, yeah.

• 1:21:42Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I think you have a libertarian side to you. You're a crypto person. You live in Puerto Rico, so you probably don't like high taxes. COVID got you to leave California. You probably want the freedom. Too much control you don't like. Again, I'm speculating, but at the same time.

• 1:21:57Speaker 00

  We love our kids.

• 1:21:59Patrick Bet-David?

  You love your kids. I do as well. And you're all about education. That's great. You have supported AOC in the past.

• 1:22:05Speaker 00

  Hmm, I've, I gave, I have given money to Rand Paul. Oh, not Rand Paul, um, the original Paul.

• 1:22:10Patrick Bet-David?

  Ron Paul.

• 1:22:11Speaker 00

  Ron Paul.

• 1:22:11Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, really?

• 1:22:12Speaker 00

  Came to Google way back in the day.

• 1:22:14Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, you know, he raised like $6 million on MySpace in 24 hours in '04. He holds the record. It was crazy. So I have you there, right? Which means, uh...

• 1:22:25Speaker 00

  I think if we had Mitt Romney today, we'd all be really happy with Mitt Romney.

• 1:22:29Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:22:30Speaker 00

  Because think about it, like, if you had to choose between any of the politicians that are currently on the national scale and Mitt Romney.

• 1:22:34Patrick Bet-David?

  I never thought you would say that.

• 1:22:35Speaker 00

  Everyone would pick Mitt Romney.

• 1:22:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Mitt Romney?

• 1:22:38Speaker 00

  Think back. Think about, like, how, like, think of how much chaos there is today. If you had to choose between the chaos of today and Mitt Romney, how many Americans would choose Mitt Romney?

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  I think a lot of Americans would choose Mitt Romney.

• 1:22:48Patrick Bet-David?

  Over Trump?

• 1:22:49Speaker 00

  And I would, I never was Mitt Romney. In the last two years, I'm like, God, what if we had Mitt Romney?

• 1:22:54Patrick Bet-David?

  Your husband's doing something to you. Let me tell you, I don't know what conversations you guys are having with the debate.

• 1:22:59Speaker 00

  Maybe it's my, maybe it's my, like, so I went to Harvard Business School, so I'm like, I'm a practical person, like, like...

• 1:23:04Patrick Bet-David?

  I get that vibe from you. I get that vibe from you. So to me, like, I try to be, I have, you know, I run multiple businesses and we have employees that come from many different backgrounds. The part to me was, don't manipulate, like, the BBC stuff. When the CEO had to step down, he never said what you claimed he said. And you got sued and you had to pay money to Trump, which is embarrassing. Don't contact Facebook and Google and Twitter and say, hey, don't release the New York Post story about Hunter Biden laptop. That would have made a difference in the election, or else they wouldn't have gotten involved. That never happened. Elon buys Twitter. They do the Twitter files by Matt Taibbi and, you know, Barry Weiss and all these other. We realize, yeah, the Biden administration. And then Zuck comes out and Zuck says, they would call me and say this stuff.

• 1:23:48Patrick Bet-David?

  He said that on the, I think it was the Rogan podcast and all this stuff. And then to me, then it was the LGBTQ stuff. Why are you so concerned whether my kids are going to be gay or not? If a person's gay, they know they're gay. Leave them alone. They'll become gay later on in life. You don't need to try to impose. And then stats came out recently that the number of teenage girls identifying as lesbian has the highest drop-off in the last 12 months. Why do you think that is? Well, because finally Trump came in and was like, hey, stop with all this stupidity. Disney lost $200 billion in valuation. Nike just went from $261 billion to $50 billion valuation. You know, Netflix has flatlined a little bit with all the different things that they try to do. And maybe common sense is like, leave the kids alone.

• 1:24:31Patrick Bet-David?

  No, my kids don't need to be targeted by 55-year-olds that are liking 13-year-old videos. And I think that part, a lot of people on the left that were common sense and the ones on the right, maybe someone's on the left that's pro-choice. And I'm pro-life. Okay, great, but we can agree on these certain areas. I think that's the part that I had, and maybe a lot of Americans had problems with. Why are you trying to make cartoons and movies towards kids? Leave them alone.

• 1:24:56Speaker 00

  So I'll give you an example of, like, you know, where the things in terms of interventions on social media that, like, I think have interesting opportunities that, like, they're not in the discussion. So one of the documents that I brought forward out of Facebook was an experiment where they said, hey, there are some people who, even though they disagree politically, they're really good at talking to people who are different than themselves. Right? Like, we can look at it. Like, so this is one of the things that I think most people are not aware about Facebook. Facebook had a score for every person.

• 1:25:22Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that the cross-check program?

• 1:25:24Speaker 00

  No, this is a different program.

• 1:25:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So is this who's the most reasonable and willing to talk?

• 1:25:28Speaker 00

  So imagine for every one in the United States, we have a score of where we think you fall, on the left or the right. So everyone has that.

• 1:25:35Patrick Bet-David?

  I would assume Facebook has that for everybody.

• 1:25:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they have, they have that at least for the United States. I don't know if they have it globally. The, imagine we look at it and we say, interesting, you are on the left, you are on the right, but you're really good at getting positive comments from people different than you.

• 1:25:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Huh.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  So during COVID, there was like an epidemiologist.

• 1:25:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Important data to have.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  Isn't that interesting? So there was an epidemiologist, for example, during COVID. They got famous for being able to talk to people on the right. So she was on the left, but she was an epidemiologist. I don't remember her name. But she got famous on YouTube because she was willing to take people seriously and meet them where they were and, like, have open conversations. Right? So let's say, in general, we can look at the data and say, hey, there are some people who are able to get people who are different than them to put likes on their posts or get them to put comments on their posts. And they comment back and, like, very clearly, they are connecting with people different than themselves. If you say, you know what? That's a really hard skill. And it might not show up in likes and shares.

• 1:26:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Maybe the hardest skill.

• 1:26:29Speaker 00

  What if we, when we see this pattern taking place, we just presume your content is a little better on average and we give you a little tiny boost? What happens to the ecosystem as a whole? It turns out when you make just that one change, you say, hey, people who are good at talking to people different than them, let's give them a little tiny boost. You get less violence, you get less hate speech, you get less misinformation. Right? So there's a lot of these things where we don't have to go in there and pick individuals, topics, and say, you can't talk about that, you can't talk about that. But we can come in there and say, hey, like, maybe we should not prioritize things that have super long chains of shares. And maybe we should reward people who can talk to people different than themselves. There's a bunch of these things where these are systemic interventions. And the question is, who has the right to know they exist?

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  And who has the right to chime in on, of all the different ways we have to solve these problems, which should be the tools in our tool chest that we go to?

• 1:27:23Patrick Bet-David?

  That may be the most important data that I would want.

• 1:27:32Patrick Bet-David?

  I mean, that's a, for any marketer, for anybody running for office,

• 1:27:38Patrick Bet-David?

  different demos, who to target, for Facebook to have that kind of a data.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

  It's scary.

• 1:27:45Patrick Bet-David?

  It's powerful.

• 1:27:46Speaker 00

  It's super powerful.

• 1:27:47Patrick Bet-David?

  And, and is it fair to assume that both Google and YouTube and Twitter has access to that as well? How different would they be than Facebook?

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  Yes. So, so it requires you to have enough staff to actually go and check. Right? And one of the challenges right now is where you look at where the money is within the industry. Seventy-five cents of every dollar that's spent on advertising for social media goes to Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. Ninety, ninety cents of every dollar of profit goes to Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube. So, anyone who is outside those three platforms is working with much, much less money to do anything. So, Twitter, because they run so thinly, I bet they don't have that data, just because they don't have someone who's gone and computed it. The question is, does Facebook still do that today? Because it's possible as-

• 1:28:37Patrick Bet-David?

  How much does it cost to do this, by the way? Is it a big cost?

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  No, it's just you need to staff someone on it and develop the model, like a person.

• 1:28:43Patrick Bet-David?

  A person?

• 1:28:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, a person. Someone has to go and like spend a month or two and-

• 1:28:47Patrick Bet-David?

  You don't think Elon would do that? I mean, Elon's got the engineers from Tesla to transfer over there to-

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  So, the question is, is it a priority for him?

• 1:28:53Patrick Bet-David?

  Oh, if he's involved in elections, massive priority for him, don't you think? Like, if he just, didn't he just give like a hundred and eighty-five million dollars or something to, I don't know who, it was Tellerico or, massive amount? If you're given that kind of money, you better have the data on the back end to believe that maybe Tellerico has a chance of losing, that Paxton can beat him, or else why would I put my money there?

• 1:29:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:13Patrick Bet-David?

  So, I would assume he probably does.

• 1:29:15Speaker 00

  You just don't know.

• 1:29:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think Elon buying X was good for society, that at least somebody from the other side owned one of the big social media platforms?

• 1:29:26Speaker 00

  I think Twitter was slowly falling apart. Like, like, one of the things that is good about Elon buying Twitter is like, he is just better at technology than most other people are. And I think Twitter was going to be in a situation where they were gonna, there's a chance they would have gone bankrupt, or they could have gotten bought by someone even worse, right? Like, think of, think of Yahoo, like Yahoo buying-

• 1:29:48Patrick Bet-David?

  I remember that.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  Right? Like, what did Yahoo do to Tumblr? They kind of ran into the-

• 1:29:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I think Yahoo was one of the people that they were saying could potentially buy Twitter.

• 1:29:55Speaker 00

  I see those kinds of things, like, like, people who are even worse at technology than Twitter. So, I think the fact that Elon bought it and it is still alive today, like, that is an asset to the world. Like, because we do need, we do need discourse. And Twitter plays a, and this is gonna make a lot of people angry, Twitter plays a role for conversation that it is not filled in any other space today. And so, the fact that it is still a going concern, and I think will be a going concern going in the future, I think that is a positive thing. I think the fact that he fired, like, all of his safety people on the pathway to getting there, that caused, like, Mark has been very open that he fired his safety people because Elon was able to and nothing bad happened to him.

• 1:30:31Patrick Bet-David?

  He, he brought a few of them back because he realized he needed them. I don't know, you know, the stories, like, ah, I messed up, hey, can you come back?

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  But in the case of, of Mark, like, you know, after I came forward and said, hey, like, you're not investing in non-English safety. Like, only eleven percent of users speak English yet, like, you spend half the security, half the safety budget on English speakers. Like, you're clearly only doing this, like, to look kind of okay in the United States so you don't get regulated. Like, you have to care about people who Facebook is the internet for.

• 1:30:58Patrick Bet-David?

  What percent, is the, when you say eleven percent is only English-speaking?

• 1:31:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What percentage of the revenue Facebook gets is from English-speaking customers?

• 1:31:06Speaker 00

  I'm sure.

• 1:31:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Because then you have to target the English-speaking customers. If the other guys are not buying, why would I target them?

• 1:31:11Speaker 00

  Well, I think the issue is like, and this is one of the things I raised in, in the filings, was, Facebook went into places like African countries, Southeast Asia, when the internet was just being born, and said, if you use Facebook, we will pay for your data. If you want to use anything else, you're gonna have to go pay for your data yourself. And understandably, alternatives to Facebook did not emerge. Right? So, so Facebook is a much, much larger share of the internet in those places than anywhere else, because Facebook came in and made sure that competition did not take place. So, the question is, if you have a situation where people, it's harder for them to leave than on the English-speaking world, and you're treating them worse, like, what are your responsibilities, especially when you have something like Myanmar take place?

• 1:31:54Speaker 00

  Right? So, that, that's the question. The question is, you intentionally took on this extra responsibility by, like, killing your competitors, or like, making sure they weren't born, like, should you have to deal with the mess you created? And so, the situation was, you know, there's three thousand languages in the world. Facebook was choosing to use content, like, they didn't even have people who could get messages. Like, when, when the Myanmar genocide happened, one of the big things the UN flagged was that there was only one person in the entire company who even spoke Burmese. So, as people were getting shot, or like, as these messages were going-

• 1:32:25Patrick Bet-David?

  What a heavy job. This is a heavy job.

• 1:32:27Speaker 00

  I know. Yeah, it's wild.

• 1:32:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think Zuck is evil? You think he's an evil person?

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  No, I don't think he's evil.

• 1:32:31Patrick Bet-David?

  So, same with Elon. You don't think neither one, it's just, what do you think Zuck is?

• 1:32:35Speaker 00

  And I, I think Elon, the difference between Elon and Mark is actually really, really important. Like, I've watched videos of, like, Elon hanging out at SpaceX. You know, like, like, when they recovered, when the missile touched down and didn't blow up, right? Like, you could just see him interacting with his employees. Elon is a much more fully-formed adult than Mark is.

• 1:32:54Patrick Bet-David?

  What does that mean?

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Mark became CEO when he was nineteen years old. Right? He has been surrounded only by people that he chose to be around.

• 1:33:02Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:03Speaker 00

  Since he was nineteen years old.

• 1:33:04Patrick Bet-David?

  Interesting.

• 1:33:05Speaker 00

  And I-

• 1:33:06Patrick Bet-David?

  It's a heavy burden, by the way.

• 1:33:07Speaker 00

  It's a heavy burden, right? And they, they say, you know, power is the ultimate drug. In the addiction community, they say, the age at which you start using is the age at which you stop emotionally maturing. So, if you dry out when you're thirty-five, you still make, you still solve problems like a nineteen-year-old. Right? And, you know, when we look at the emails that came out through the court cases, or just his testimony, I'll give you an example. And the, when Snapchat started doing augmented reality filters, this is like, I'm a cat, that kind of thing. Instagram rolled out augmented reality filters. And one of the filters that rolled out was one that let you simulate plastic surgery. So, let you mark up your face as if you're about to get plastic surgery.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  And understandably, people wrote in and said, do we really want thirteen-year-old girls imagining themselves being marked up for plastic surgery? Like, do we want to normalize the idea that you should get plastic surgery for small children? And the, they went and were like, okay, we're gonna go talk to experts, so we'll bring a bunch of child psychologists, we'll consult outside people, inside people. They paid like twenty, twenty-five experts to like, give their opinions on like, what is the impact of making this accessible to kids? Across the board, on the inside and the outside, they said, even, even if this wasn't bad, and it is bad, it's a really bad look for us to be promoting this. And it goes up to Mark, and Mark says, I think it's patronizing to restrict access to this, to kids.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  And like, when he got confronted at the court case, so he had to give testimony, they asked him, do you still think, now that you know, all the more that you know, because this happened in like twenty nineteen or something, do you still think it's inappropriate to like, not have this be available for thirteen-year-old girls? And he goes, I still think it's patronizing.

• 1:34:51Patrick Bet-David?

  His position didn't change.

• 1:34:52Speaker 00

  He, he doesn't, he, he, he's not in circumstances where he grows.

• 1:34:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Does that tell you he's a true believer? Or does that tell you it's just money? Because that doesn't tell me it's money. That tells me he really believes in that position.

• 1:35:03Speaker 00

  Or, I mean, like, or, so like, there's other-

• 1:35:05Patrick Bet-David?

  It could be a blind spot.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a blind spot thing. So, so I'll give you an example. They came out with new augmented reality glasses recently, right? And the day after, the day of, there's this interview with them where this journalist is like, hey, I noticed, you now have augmented reality glasses that don't have a camera. So, for context for your listeners, there's a lot of people who have been calling these things creeper glasses. Right? Because like, people have been taking pictures in locker rooms and-

• 1:35:28Patrick Bet-David?

  By the way, just, I don't like it when I see some guys that are, you, you know, you're wondering, hey, what, what are you, what are you doing? What are you recording? What are you-

• 1:35:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And people are covering up the light on them, right? So, the journalist was like, hey, I noticed you now have ones that don't have a camera. Is this because like, you heard the feedback? That like, people are really freaked out by these? Because like, people will attack other people in public for wearing these glasses. Because like, they're so, they, they don't, they, they feel their privacy is violated so much. And he goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no, they're just so much cheaper. Like, you save like a hundred and forty bucks if you don't put a camera in them, and like, people, there's always going to be people who want the cheapest option. And like, they're so much lighter if you don't have a camera in them, and like, they look just like normal glasses. So, either no one told him how upset people are, or he doesn't care, and we just don't know. And that's part of what's like so scary about him dabbling in like frontier AI stuff, is, you know, I think the public's been pretty clear about how big an impact the creeper glasses have had.

• 1:36:20Patrick Bet-David?

  What do you think the long-term, if you, if we were to analyze, and I mean, we're not psycho, you know, psychoanalyzing these folks, but negative motives long-term, do you worry about this much power to Zuck or Elon? Do you worry, or do you think it's all positive?

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  I worry much less, so I, I worry about Elon's well-being. Like, I, I genuinely think Elon really tries, like, I, again, this is probably a controversial opinion for some quarters. Like, Elon has invested so much in trying to advance things, like, he did electric cars because he cares about the environment. Like, it's very clear, right? Or like, he has done more for internet access than anyone in the world, right? There are more people through Starlink. Like, I think Elon genuinely believes, and he has a history of executing. And yes, he is a showman, and he oversells things, and it takes him a lot longer to do things than maybe he initially promises. Lots of businessmen have that problem, right?

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  I worry he burns the candle at both ends. I worry he's also probably surrounded by people who don't give him enough bad news. But I worry about Mark a lot more, right? And part of that is Elon has to deliver. Like, he doesn't own sixty percent of the voting shares. He doesn't get full control. He has to negotiate with other people. And that means Elon stays grounded in reality much more than Mark does. The people around Mark are there because Mark wants them to be there. They make Mark feel good, they tell him whatever story they need to tell him that lets him be able to accept the way the world is. And that's not good for any human being. Like, that keeps you from getting to grow and be a fully-fleshed adult.

• 1:37:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Who, who are the top three heavyweights at Facebook, at Meta? If something were to happen to Zuck, who would be the three heavyweights that could replace him?

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  Could replace him.

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  I don't know now, because like the shift to AI, like what is Facebook now? Like, is the future of Facebook AI, or is the future of Facebook social media?

• 1:38:13Patrick Bet-David?

  They don't have a choice but to go to AI.

• 1:38:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think they don't. I think there's a very good chance that the lawsuits are going to be so lucrative that they're going to have to split the company at some point.

• 1:38:22Patrick Bet-David?

  You think that'll happen?

• 1:38:23Speaker 00

  I think they will probably happen.

• 1:38:23Patrick Bet-David?

  They were trying to do that a few years ago, right? Who was it? Elizabeth Warren was that was presenting that? I don't know who it was, but it was.

• 1:38:29Speaker 00

  That was breaking it up. That was like.

• 1:38:31Patrick Bet-David?

  WhatsApp and Instagram and all this stuff. Yeah, but you're saying even bigger than that.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  Because if the AI part of the company is like the part that has a future, right? Like, you could imagine a situation where they say, okay, we will sell off the social media side of the company, and Mark will continue to have full control over his AI side of his company. And like with the new stock deal that he got just today, like, he can take out tens of billions of dollars each year and not lose any control over the company.

• 1:38:57Patrick Bet-David?

  He would still pay the 5% tax. He would still have to pay all that money.

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  That's a one-time thing. It's not every year.

• 1:39:02Patrick Bet-David?

  But that's still a lot of money for the guy.

• 1:39:03Speaker 00

  I get it. But right now, he can only sell shares if he loses control.

• 1:39:07Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think this wealth tax is going to pass? You think that's probably most, I mean, if they're having these types of talks, probably high likelihood that it's going to pass in California.

• 1:39:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I try not to follow California politics anymore. It's, they're very intense. I live thousands of miles away. I don't.

• 1:39:22Patrick Bet-David?

  It really is intense. Talking about AI. So we had Jacob Paxton on here. He's the guy, the fellow from Anthropic, that he was there for a few weeks. He was three years at OpenAI. He says, I think I'm resigning today because I'm worried about what's going to happen to safety. Do you have a similar position with AI?

• 1:39:37Speaker 00

  So I think the focus on the danger of AI five years from now is really misguided because we don't need AI any smarter than the AI we have today for it to be incredibly disruptive, right? Like, we don't need AI smarter than today to run information operations at a scale beyond anything we ever saw in 2016. Like, we don't need AI smarter than today to hack computers in really devastating ways. Like, I think there was a bunch of websites that were out over the last few days because of a huge hacking.

• 1:40:04Patrick Bet-David?

  The code in massive, this happened last 24 hours.

• 1:40:06Speaker 00

  The only reason we are not seeing more chaos right now with the level of AI we have right now is just because people aren't trying. Like, the reason the lights are on right now is because no one's trying to turn the lights off, right? The reason the water's flowing is because no one's trying to turn the water off. But like, we invade Iran, will the water stay on? Like, really invading Iran, like, not the current dabbling thing we're doing right now. That is the thing we should be talking about, is what are we doing to harden cybersecurity? What are we doing to get early access, like, early detection on bioweapons? Are we investing in broad-spectrum antivirals? Definitely not enough conversation on that. The idea that the AI is going to wake up and kill us all, I feel like there's a lot of things in that space where it's like, I haven't heard plausible war games.

• 1:40:50Speaker 00

  It's like, is this a suicidal AI? Like, you know, at least as of our level of automation today, they kill us, all the lights go off for them too, right? And so I think it's good that we are talking about technology having a downside, but we need to be like doubling down right now on the things we can control, because the danger is right now. It's not from the AI waking up five years from now.

• 1:41:12Patrick Bet-David?

  So you don't give that much credence to the fear porn?

• 1:41:15Speaker 00

  I think the focusing on the apocalyptic five years from now distracts us from doing things we need to be doing right now.

• 1:41:22Patrick Bet-David?

  But doesn't that create urgencies? Like, hey, let's go, because shit could happen in five years? You don't.

• 1:41:27Speaker 00

  I think we should be saying, hey, like, I think the much more pressing thing is like, so a week or two ago, Axios leaked a story about the big AI companies war gaming, like, red teaming situations around like the lights going out and like the banks getting hacked and that kind of thing. That is the thing that people should be asking lots and lots of questions about right now. Like, what is the federal government doing to make sure that the federal government is safe right now? I don't think enough, like, that's the thing we should be terrified by right now. Not like, will the AI wake up and decide like to snuff us out in five years? Because that is a problem that's going to happen two months from now, not the hypothetical five years from now. And when we talk about things that are like apocalyptic, it makes us freeze.

• 1:42:11Speaker 00

  You know, when we get too scared, we stop acting, like, it takes away agency. Like, there's a lot of people who like, when you get apocalyptic, like, so like, all the talk on the pause, for example, right? Like, talking about the pause at length versus talking about what are we doing to harden cybersecurity right now? Those are two very different conversations.

• 1:42:30Patrick Bet-David?

  Tell me more.

• 1:42:31Speaker 00

  Right? So I am a Cold War Studies minor. I'm sorry, I have an engineering degree as my primary. I have a Cold War Studies minor. I focused on civil disobedience against civil defense. So back in the early 1960s, late 1950s, we used to role-play nuclear war, right? So we'd, like, New York State, for example, passed law saying, once a year, we are going to simulate having a nuclear war. If you do not go into the shelters with everyone else, we can ticket you. Like, that level of like, we're going to role-game.

• 1:43:00Patrick Bet-David?

  This is actually a thing New York did?

• 1:43:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that's a real thing New York did.

• 1:43:03Patrick Bet-David?

  What year was that?

• 1:43:04Speaker 00

  Wild. 1954-ish to like 1962-ish. So 1959, this woman is having like a crisis of conscience. She's like, oh my God, I just had a baby. Like, she's 21, because back then, people had lots of babies at 21. I don't want to raise my child to live underground. I cannot do this. And she gave, put a roast in the oven for her husband, because she assumed she was going to get arrested, because that's what they did to people who did civil disobedience back then. She left her baby with the husband, they went in the shelter, she went out and sat on like a park bench, and nothing happened. It was like very anticlimactic. But the next day, she opens up the newspaper, and this woman named Janice Smith is sitting

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  on this, like, a park bench in front of City Hall, and there's like big police officers looming over her. She's holding her infant, she's got a towel on the bench next to her. Like, that, the idea that that was a news story, like, a single person saying, I'm not willing to go underground, was a news story in the New York Times. Shows you how different the circumstances. Right now, the talk on the pause says, hey, those people, the people who started those protests right then, within three years, they got a partial test ban treaty, right? Like, they organized, and like, they started out with like four people, and the next year they had like 100 people, and the next year they had a couple thousand people. By the early 1960s, we had a partial test ban treaty. We did not have a full test ban treaty.

• 1:44:30Speaker 00

  The reason we had a partial treaty and not a full treaty was we banned tests in space, tests in the air, tests on land, tests in the water. We never banned them underground. We didn't ban them underground for another, I don't know, like, five years, six years, because we invented a technology called Fourier Fast Transforms. You might have heard of FFTs.

• 1:44:51Patrick Bet-David?

  Fourier?

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Fourier.

• 1:44:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Fourier. Fast transform.

• 1:44:53Speaker 00

  FFT, yeah. You use them every day. So your video right now uses Fourier Fast Transforms in its codex, right? Like, it's a way of basically extracting out waveforms and things like that. We didn't ban nuclear tests underground because we couldn't tell if it was an earthquake or if it was a nuclear bomb. We don't ban things unless we can confirm that the thing is actually not happening. So when all the nuclear activists are like, these people cared, they knew the world was going to end, like, that's why we have to ban, that's why we need a pause right now. We did it before for nuclear weapons. No, we didn't. We didn't ban it until we had the ability to confirm that cheating was not taking place. And right now, tons and tons and tons of mental bandwidth is going into, we need to pause, and not into, we need to be investing way more in cybersecurity.

• 1:45:37Speaker 00

  We need to be investing way more in broad-spectrum antivirals. You know, these are the things that we have to be doing the work on right now. We are not having those conversations because we're talking about the pause. And the pause isn't even what we did with nuclear weapons.

• 1:45:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Wow.

• 1:45:52Speaker 00

  Drives me crazy, every time I hear about it.

• 1:45:56Patrick Bet-David?

  Cybersecurity.

• 1:45:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because it's one of these things where, like, I'll give you an example. We roll back in time to 1999. Like, I'm old enough to remember Y2K, right? We realized we were running the world on software from the 70s. And we didn't, we had literally said, well, it's going to take so long for us to need four digits to have time, that we can just do two digits for the year, right? So like 95 instead of 1995, right? You know, we invested huge amounts of effort, like tremendous amount of efforts across society to rewrite tons and tons and tons of software to make it so we can do Y2K. We should be having that level of crisis about AI and cybersecurity right now, and instead, we're talking about the pause.

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• 1:48:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Who is actually, who is actually spearheading that conversation? Is there somebody out there that's saying we should be paying attention to this instead of the pause?

• 1:48:58Speaker 00

  So I think the situation, like if you were going to go talk to people who are doing activism in this AI space, I think what they would say is, sure, getting hacked sucks, right? Like, yes, how much websites going on is bad. But like, if the thing that we're talking about is the extinction of humanity, it's more important to talk about the extinction of humanity. And I think the main issue right now is, like, the plausibility of what is that scenario? And so I think part of why we're getting distracted and not talking about those kind of like brass tacks, like, we have work we need to do right now to deal with AI. That stuff is less sexy. It will cost money. And if you are a nonprofit who has to go raise money from donors, it's a lot easier

• 1:49:43Speaker 00

  to raise money on, I want to save humanity from the apocalypse. And so there, I don't think there's enough voices right now that are talking about the, you know, not sexy, like, let's make sure all the systems are hardened.

• 1:49:53Patrick Bet-David?

  But if you're the enemy, is that how you would attack? Would you go, like, even warfare change, right? We didn't know Russia's going to destroy Ukraine. Now, we got these drones that we make, we got a half a million, I'm going to hit your, you know, warhead, I'm going to hit your ships, I'm going to hit, and you can't move. So what do you want to do? I'm the smaller guy. And then Iran had their drones, so you kind of realize warfare's changed. It's not what we thought it was going to be, right? So are we not paranoid about the right things? Where the way the enemy or in Iran, or China, or Russia, or somebody would attack us would be the power grid? Are we, you know, how would they do it? You know, if it's drones that threw us off, and now you got Palmer Lucky that's building what he's building?

• 1:50:34Speaker 00

  Have you had him on your podcast?

• 1:50:35Patrick Bet-David?

  No, we're having a conversation about going and seeing how he mixed the drones. He's fascinating.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  He's fascinating.

• 1:50:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Speaker 00

  I think it's fairly public knowledge that people assume that if we were to say attack, if there was a conflict between Taiwan and China, like, China probably would attack American infrastructure, right? Like, I think one way to think about it is, historically, strategists have talked about the world as being land powers or sea powers. So a sea power is like England, you know, they're completely defended by the ocean all around them. Or a land power is like Russia, like, Russia has no clean boundaries. So sea powers don't have to invest a ton in their military, or in their armies, they invest in their navies, right? Like, they're able to focus on things like trade, because they can reach anywhere. As long as they keep that maritime defense, they can have security within their society, they can have stability.

• 1:51:23Speaker 00

  A country like Russia, because they have porous borders, they are constantly having to fund the military, they have to have very different kinds of social structures. The United States has historically governed itself as if it is a maritime power, right? We were protected by the oceans on the sides. Mexico and Canada have not invaded us since like the 1800s, right? We need to understand that we are no longer a maritime power, right? In a world where China can attack the homeland through cyber things, we are vulnerable in a very different way. Or where they can run an information operation and sound like they're a person from Iowa. Or like, back in 2016, I kind of roll my eyes at the Russian foreign interference stuff, because like, they weren't nearly as effective as like, the Macedonia teenagers who were

• 1:52:07Speaker 00

  running like, for-profit AdSense fake news sites, right? Like, they had way more, way, way, they were way, way more warm bodies that were working on that than the Russians were. And the Russians all sounded like Russians. Today, you can run the same influence operation and run it through Claude, and you sound just like you're from Wisconsin. You sound just like you're from Minnesota, right? We are now vulnerable in a way that we haven't been vulnerable in 200, 300 years.

• 1:52:32Patrick Bet-David?

  Do you think a country like China has been thinking about this for decades, way longer than us, because the way they control power is different than ours? Where they have so many Chinese nationals or spies within different parts of our ecosystem that they know exactly what's going on in America?

• 1:52:46Speaker 00

  When I was at Google, this wild thing took place, which was China hacked, I don't know if it was like 50 of the top 100, it was like 50 of the biggest companies in the United States, and only two of them realized they were hacked. So Google realized they were hacked, and one other company that I don't know the name of realized they were hacked. And the level of intrusion that China did to get into Google was, they clearly had spies inside the company that got the employee directory, they figured out who was in charge of the single sign-on team, so this is like the team that basically controls access to things. They figured out who the guy's wife was, they had her send him a link with like a photo

• 1:53:30Speaker 00

  album, so that he clicked on it. And this is the classic, like, don't click on links you don't know.

• 1:53:35Patrick Bet-David?

  Phishing, all this stuff, password.

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  So even, even this Googler clicked on the link from his wife, because why, who's that of hypervigilant, right? Installed some kind of malware on his computer, it stole his credentials, which shouldn't matter, because they're encrypted. They must have run basically a whole data center for a month to crack his credentials. And they used his credentials to log back into Google and plan all the stuff that happened. Right? Like, that was the level of intrusion that they could do, and this is like in 2011.

• 1:54:03Patrick Bet-David?

  What damage did they do? Did they extract information or actual damage?

• 1:54:07Speaker 00

  They, I know that we had a fire drill where we changed all the passwords that were in the codebase in like, less than a week. So like, imagine hundreds of Googlers all responsible for like, basically changing how access controls are done throughout the codebase, because I think the whole codebase was stolen. And this is like back in 2011, so imagine what they're doing today.

• 1:54:27Patrick Bet-David?

  Was Sheryl Sandberg there? Was she, was she there?

• 1:54:29Speaker 00

  Sheryl was in, was in sales, so she was not like a technical, yeah. But I think she had already left for Facebook by 2011.

• 1:54:36Patrick Bet-David?

  Got it. Interesting.

• 1:54:40Speaker 00

  But this is the kind of thing where we should assume that China has people embedded in every major institution.

• 1:54:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Did they identify who were the internal people working at the?

• 1:54:48Speaker 00

  I'm sure, I'm sure they weren't able to figure out who was the one who gave it over.

• 1:54:52Patrick Bet-David?

  Even with that fingerprints weren't left behind?

• 1:54:54Speaker 00

  Well, because, because if you have an employee directory, there's a lot, you remember how I talked about how when I was at Facebook and I was getting documents? There are documents where I felt confident, this will never raise a red flag, because I work on issues around societal violence, right? But the second I looked at a document about kids, or made a search about kids, I was like, oh, I must be on the list now. Right, they must be watching me now. There's so many people who have a legitimate business reason to contact that person, that just because he looked up his name in the employee directory doesn't mean, like, it would be almost impossible to figure out which Chinese national in the company is the spy.

• 1:55:30Patrick Bet-David?

  If that was the case back in the days, how much worse do you think it is today with Anthropic, OpenAI, all these other companies?

• 1:55:34Speaker 00

  I think, I think, given the geopolitical significance of AI and the conflict between China and the United States, I'm sure there are people inside those companies. I don't know if, I don't have evidence, but given the level of severity of these situations, like, I don't know how you would prevent it.

• 1:55:50Patrick Bet-David?

  So let's just say if somebody works over there, and they know that there's Chinese nationals that are working and releasing information back, as a whistleblower yourself, what would you tell them? Let's just say they're watching this right now. They know.

• 1:56:02Speaker 00

  Like, they know, they know that their specific coworker is an Asian spy. The, well, I would, I would encourage them in that situation, like, they should go talk to the security inside of Anthropic, because like, Anthropic, I guarantee you, would love to find the Chinese spies inside of Anthropic.

• 1:56:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Tell me why.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  Why? Because it's, they're, they're engaged with competition with the AI companies in China, right? Like, the number one thing that's threatening the valuation of Anthropic, right, is, is the AI models out of China.

• 1:56:26Patrick Bet-David?

  So they wouldn't want to know more than anything else? Got it. Last couple things before we wrap up. Tell me about, you know, we heard about Nicole Shanahan, you know, she's like, oh, I was partying at this, you know, the Burning Man and all the, what is this, what billionaires partying at this Burning Man? What is that all about? Yeah.

• 1:56:43Speaker 00

  So Burning Man is, how would you describe Burning Man?

• 1:56:46Patrick Bet-David?

  I've seen the videos of it, it's kind of.

• 1:56:48Speaker 00

  It's funny, so I was a ranger at Burning Man. So Burning Man is an arts festival, it's a self, a self-created city that is built in the Nevada desert every year. And there's a great documentary called The Man Will Burn, that's on HBO now. I highly recommend it. It's about the years of COVID, when they shut down Burning Man. Because even when the org did not go run Burning Man, the community of Burning Man went and recreated Burning Man, yeah, in 2021.

• 1:57:17Patrick Bet-David?

  Did they get arrested? Did they do anything?

• 1:57:19Speaker 00

  They did a rogue burn. They did not stop the, they were warned, they were warned, like, you might get arrested on the way in, but no one stopped them. Like, 20,000 people showed up, and like.

• 1:57:27Patrick Bet-David?

  How many people typically show up? If it was a non-COVID?

• 1:57:29Speaker 00

  It's like 75 to 85,000.

• 1:57:31Patrick Bet-David?

  So they still had 20,000 people show up?

• 1:57:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, very impressive.

• 1:57:34Patrick Bet-David?

  And what is it? It's art, it's?

• 1:57:36Speaker 00

  So people build a city, so it's like a crescent city, and people bring large art installations, and there's lots of interactive art. So for example, you might have a camp that serves bacon to everyone every morning. So after you've been out dancing all night, and you're hungry, and something salty would be delicious, imagine walking down the street and someone just gives you some bacon, right? But, so both my husband and I, so even before I met my husband.

• 1:57:58Patrick Bet-David?

  Like this, this is what it looks like?

• 1:57:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it looks like that.

• 1:58:00Patrick Bet-David?

  And that's 75,000 people?

• 1:58:02Speaker 00

  75,000 people.

• 1:58:03Patrick Bet-David?

  Are they partying, are they hanging out, are they talking?

• 1:58:05Speaker 00

  It's a huge range of things. So it's everything from, like, my dad really wants to go and volunteer for their airport. So they run the third largest airport in the state of Nevada for a week, because so many planes come in and out. And my, my dad wants to go and like, he used to fly small planes, so he like, really.

• 1:58:21Patrick Bet-David?

  A lot of PJs, but these are money people that are going to this, this is not.

• 1:58:24Speaker 00

  There's, there's everyday people that go to this, too.

• 1:58:25Patrick Bet-David?

  So this is like a Woodstock. How different is it from the Woodstock?

• 1:58:29Speaker 00

  Woodstock was, was chaos. There's a lot, there's, for how decentralized and disorderly this is, there's a lot of order. So like, you know, you have individual camps that might be 50 people who self-govern their community. There's, if you notice, there's like very clean streets, right? Someone goes out there and lays out all those streets and puts street signs up, and there's porta-potties that get cleaned every day, multiple times a day. So it's going to be dusty, it's like chaotic, it's not, it's not going to, you know, Hawaii and going on vacation on the beach. The dust is very alkaline, so it reacts with your skin, so like, you have to like, rinse your feet with like vinegar at the end of the day, because it'll hurt your skin otherwise. So it's, it's not easy, but it's like really, really fun and interactive.

• 1:59:09Patrick Bet-David?

  What, is it businesses being done, deals are being done, relationships?

• 1:59:12Speaker 00

  A lot of deals, a lot of deals get done. There's a lot of marriages that happen.

• 1:59:15Patrick Bet-David?

  After destruction, Burning Man's orgy dome is back in 20, what is the orgy dome?

• 1:59:19Speaker 00

  The.

• 1:59:20Patrick Bet-David?

  Is that a naked lady in the middle?

• 1:59:22Speaker 00

  That is definitely a woman with less clothes, actually, there's a lot of people in there with not very many clothes on. Is this a family-friendly?

• 1:59:28Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, I know, it's fine, it's, so.

• 1:59:30Speaker 00

  And.

• 1:59:31Patrick Bet-David?

  Go a little bit lower in the story?

• 1:59:35Speaker 00

  What happened? Oh, windstorm. How funny. So the orgy dome blew down?

• 1:59:40Patrick Bet-David?

  Orgy dome serves anywhere to eight to ten thousand, seven, eight, seven, ten thousand. It could explode sexuality, but after 50 miles per hour, the orgy dome then seven-person board of directors went to work after Burning Man ended trying to find a replacement for damaged 4,000 square foot structure.

• 1:59:55Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. 10% of attendees make their way through the orgy dome over the course of a week. Can you imagine 7,000 people through it?

• 2:00:02Patrick Bet-David?

  What did it say? 10% of what?

• 2:00:03Speaker 00

  Down at the bottom it says over 10% of attendees.

• 2:00:04Patrick Bet-David?

  10% of all Burning Man attendees make their way through the orgy dome. Holy shit. Okay, so.

• 2:00:09Speaker 00

  So that's like 7,000 people.

• 2:00:10Patrick Bet-David?

  So it's kind of like, what is the other thing that happens in Palm Springs? There's another one that they do.

• 2:00:14Speaker 00

  Coachella?

• 2:00:15Patrick Bet-David?

  Coachella.

• 2:00:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:16Patrick Bet-David?

  Right?

• 2:00:16Speaker 00

  So Coachella has way less infrastructure. So like, like people, there's, I know people who go just because they like building like domes. Like every year they go and they put up a three-story dome.

• 2:00:26Patrick Bet-David?

  It's not a concert like Coachella.

• 2:00:28Speaker 00

  So some people go just for the music. They like to go and they like to dance. There's people who are artists and they bring their art and present their art. There's some people like my husband's father, he used to run a camp that just fed artists. So his contribution to the Playa was it takes a lot of energy to put up art. They'd show up and they'd drive around in a little golf cart and they'd hand out free food to the artists as they set up their art. Right? That was his art.

• 2:00:51Patrick Bet-David?

  And then what's the thing that they do that they burn something at the end?

• 2:00:53Speaker 00

  So if you, if you pull up The Man, so every year they build this, this effigy called The Man, and they, they light it on fire as like the last, the second to last event of the thing.

• 2:01:05Patrick Bet-David?

  This guy?

• 2:01:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, they, every year, lighting on fire. They have fireworks, they have explosives, full, full, full pyrotechnics.

• 2:01:16Speaker 00

  But you should watch the documentary, it'll do a much better job.

• 2:01:17Patrick Bet-David?

  I have to go watch it. I have to go watch it. Very interesting.

• 2:01:22Speaker 00

  But my, my, it turned out, so I didn't know my husband until I met him in Puerto Rico. So we had both lived in San Francisco, two blocks apart. We had both been Burning Man Rangers, so like the Boy Scouts of Burning Man. So like, let's say you go to Burning Man and you have, you've been watching YouTube videos for 10 years, you're very excited about this. You show up, you set up your camp, you walk out into the Playa and you see all these fantastical things all day, and you come back at 10:00 PM and you realize you have no idea where your tent is. This is like a real thing that happens.

• 2:01:49Patrick Bet-David?

  Because of how messed up you are?

• 2:01:50Speaker 00

  No, just because, because like a bunch of other people. A bunch of other people set their tents up while you were gone. You got distracted. You're actually one street over. Who knows? There's a lot of reasons you might not be able to find your tent. It's like 75,000 people's worth of tents, right?

• 2:02:03Patrick Bet-David?

  So it's, is it drugs, sex?

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  Exhaustion. Maybe you didn't eat enough, maybe you're dehydrated. There's a lot of reasons that you cannot find your way back to camp. But like, the job of the Rangers is like, when you've been looking for your tent for two hours and now it's like midnight and you still can't find it.

• 2:02:17Patrick Bet-David?

  My job is to find your camp.

• 2:02:18Speaker 00

  My job is to walk around with you and at least make sure you have like a safe place to sleep that night.

• 2:02:23Patrick Bet-David?

  And is there a fraternity? Is it like a fraternity, oh my God, I go to the Burning, I'll see you next year. Is it that kind of a fraternity?

• 2:02:27Speaker 00

  So, so people do have like camps that they belong to year after year after year that are like, like they're like their fraternal order. Like they say, I've camped with this camp for a decade. The Rangers are in some ways like that. It's a public service organization. Our way of giving back to the Playa is by taking care of other people, you know?

• 2:02:45Patrick Bet-David?

  Very cool.

• 2:02:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:45Patrick Bet-David?

  You know, they brought it up. I'd never heard of Burning Man. This is the first, I know about Coachella, I know about, you know, back in the days when I was younger, we would go.

• 2:02:53Speaker 00

  But the thing that the billionaires that go, they, the thing that they're famous for, these things called pay to play. So Burning Man is supposed to be self-sufficient. Like the whole point is you bring in your own water, you bring in your own food. Coachella, you can buy your food, right? You can take an Uber into Coachella.

• 2:03:06Patrick Bet-David?

  So this is truly a BYO whatever.

• 2:03:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're going to haul your ass all the way out there.

• 2:03:12Speaker 00

  Often billionaires fly in, they don't drive in. They often have other people who come in earlier and set up like, set up all their stuff. And so there's this question of, is that level of, of accommodation, is it, is it aligned with like the campy spirit of Burning Man?

• 2:03:28Patrick Bet-David?

  I guess it doesn't, right? Because you don't really do anything. You didn't really, you weren't involved in that dirty part.

• 2:03:33Speaker 00

  What was your contribution?

• 2:03:33Patrick Bet-David?

  Yeah, yeah. What, how did you contribute to it?

• 2:03:36Patrick Bet-David?

  I really enjoyed this.

• 2:03:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:37Patrick Bet-David?

  Talking to you and I truly appreciate you making time. Is there anything you want folks to go? Is there an article, site? Is there somewhere they can follow you?

• 2:03:46Speaker 00

  So I'm, I have a Substack, so there's Francis Augen on Substack. I need to do, I need to do some form of social media. I, understandably, I'm not a big social media person.

• 2:03:57Speaker 00

  The, I think one thing I would leave, leave folks with is if you have kids, the number one thing I can leave you with is, even if you're skeptical that social media is in some way harmful for your kid, the thing I most hope you take from today is at least go and do a little bit more reading on the dangers of social media for kids. Because I think there's a lot of parents out there who feel like, I have no option but to give my kids a phone. You can still give your kids a phone and be able to provide them with other supports. And so, you know, Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation, I think is a really important read for parents. And just if I can leave folks with a little ray of hope of being like, please look into how your kids use technology. Don't assume it's neutral.

• 2:04:40Speaker 00

  Because we are actively waking up to the consequences of this over the last 10 years.

• 2:04:46Patrick Bet-David?

  Well, I fully support reading that book. We read it last year and it changed a lot of different patterns in the way of, we're already very involved with the kids, but it gave you systems. I really like the way he teaches. And I think he's got another book coming out here soon as well, but Francis, thank you so much for your time.

• 2:05:02Speaker 00

  Happy to be here.

• 2:05:02Patrick Bet-David?

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