Part Two: Mark Zuckerberg Should Be On Trial For Crimes Against Humanity

that one can assemble into comedy. Um. Yeah, very nice. Yeah, I mean comedy. You know, it is just a series of things that you put in the correct order. It's like a deconstruction of comedy, like when people take up part of sandwich and then serve it on a plane in a fancy restaurant. I gotta be on it. Anytime someone says it's a deconstruction of comedy, it's the least funniest ship you'll ever hear in your entire life. Like he's deconstructing the medium, and it's usually just like some

some guy. It's yeah, some guy. Yeah, it's never any good, but you know it is good. Jamie, what Facebook's peanut butter? I was like, this can't be a transition to Mark Zuckerberg, No, because nothing about him. Just talked about this delicious lunch he had as I eat, I had a great lunch and I'm eating a peanut butter and you know what,

I'm content, Sophie is eating peanut butter. I ate a delicious lunch, love for you, had a couple of chips, and most important, most important, we're all going to get back to my favorite thing to do with my good friend Jamie Loftus, which is talk about the extensive crimes of Mark Zuckerberg. Oh yes, I changed shirts between episodes. Roberts and I have a little Marquis with me. Yeah you do, You've got your your your Marquez shirt. Yeah, my favorite, my favorite Mark quote that you can't you

can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life. Ha ha. It is amazing. And he really, I mean there's been a lot said about him, but the man sticks to his guns. He lives by this credo to this very day. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you know who else sticks to their guns? Jamie whom the death squads of the various dictatorial political candidates who use Facebook to crush opposition and insight race riots. That was a transition. That was a transition. So Jamie, all right,

I'm gonna start. It's time to start the episode, and gonna start with a little bit of a little bit, little well bit of an essay here. So once, once upon a decade or so ago, I had the fortune to to visit the ruins of a vast Mayan city in guatemality call Um. And the scale of the architecture there was astonishing. If you ever get the chance to visit one of these cities, you know, in Guatemala or

in mexicoever really worth the experience. Um, Just again, the size of everything you see, the the the precision of the stonework. Um, it's just amazing. And one of the things that was most kind of stirring about it was the fact that everything that surrounded it was just hundreds

and hundreds of miles of dense, howling jungle. UM. So I spent like an afternoon there and I got to sit on top of one of these giant temple pyramids, drinking a one lead bottle of guy O beer and staring out over the jungle canopy and just kind of marveling at the weight of human ingenuity and dedication necessary to build a place like that sounds metaphorical, and while I was there, Jamie, I thought about what had killed this great city and the empire that built it, Because

a couple of years earlier, really not all that long before I visited, theories had started to circulate within the academic community that the Mayans had, in the words of a NASA article in this subject in two thousand nine, killed themselves through a combination of massy forestation in human induced climate change. A year after my visit, the first study on the matter was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I'm gonna call to hear from

the Smithsonian magazine. Researchers from Arizona State University analyzed archaeological data from across the Yucatan to reach a better understanding of the environmental conditions when the area was abandoned around this time. They found severe reductions in rainfall were coupled within a rapid rate of deforestation as the Mayans burned and shopped down more and more forests to clear land

for agriculture. Interestingly, they also required massive amounts of wood to fuel the fires that cooked the lime plaster for their elaborate constructions, Experts estimated would have taken twenty trees to produce a single square meter of city escape. So, in other words, the Mayans grew themselves to death, turning the forests that fed them into deserts, all in the

pursuit of expansion. It's a story that brings to mind a quote from the great historian Tacitus writing about Augustus Caesar and men like him solitudinum faciunt pack him appellante. They make a desert and call it peace. That's what he's saying about Augustus Caesar and the Emperor's like him. They make a desert and call it peace. That's That's one of those Sun dial phrases. I think a more accurate summation of the two hundred years of peace that

Augustus Caesar created than than what Mark put out. They make a desert and call it peace. Now, I read that quote for the first time as a Latin student in high school, and I saw it referenced in relation to Mark Zuckerberg in a Guardian article covering that New Yorker piece. We quoted from last episode and the title of that New Yorker article was, can Mark Zuckerberg fixed

Facebook before it breaks democracy? So democracy a free and open society where numerous viewpoints are tolerated, cultural experimentation is possible, and evolution is encouraged. These are the things that have made Facebook success possible. It could not have come about without them, um, and outside of a culture that embodies those values. And now that Facebook's member count is closing in at three billion, the social network is doing what

all empires do. It's turning the fertile soil that birthed it into a desert. And as it was with the Mayans, all of this is being done in the name of growth. Katherine Lois was an early Facebook employee and Mark Zuckerberg speech writer for a time. In her memoire The Boy Kings, which is what you call it, sigured, I don't know that's a good title, um, she lays out what she saw as the engineering ideology of Facebook. Quote, scaling and

growth are everything. Individuals and their experiences are secondary to what is necessary to maximize the system. Mark Zuckerberg and thus Facebook have held a very consistent line since day one of the company operating as an actual business, and that Lion is that Facebook's goal is to connect people, but this was and always has been a lie. The goal is growth, growth at the cost. In two thousand seven,

Facebook's growth leveled off at around fifty million users. At the time, this was not unusual for social networks, and it seemed to be something of a built in natural growth limit, Like maybe fifty million is about as much as a social network can get unless you really start jinking the results um and fifty million users. That's a very successful business. You can be a very rich person operating a business. You can call it a day. That's a great thing to accomplish. My Space Tom was thrilled

with that. Yeah, my God, blessed Tom. Space Tom is now who hasn't done a goddamn problematic thing traveling the world now taking photographs of of of the world that Mark Zuckerberg is destroying. I mean, he might be the only person worth hundreds of millions of dollars that I'm fine with not taking the money back, right, Like, let Tom, You're fine, Like go keep doing your things, use the money to be boring. It feels like he is just

used his fortune to be boring. What is I remember it took like five months for me to get my my space to lead. So I don't remember anything about my space. That's my favorite thing about my space is I've forgotten everything about it but the name my space. Oh for sure my space was not good. But did I learn about a lot of goth music on it? Now I'm the middle school anchst from not being in

somebody's top aid. But oh my god, PC four PC, I did a lot of PC that I'm my friend, you are so pretty PC four PC, And you know what, you know what? No one used my space for Jetta's side that organizing militia's to show up at the side of protests and shoot Black Lives Matter activists was not done with with with my space, and I suspect Tom

would have had an issue if it had been. I think, so, I well, I don't well, I I don't know about Tom's but the fact that he's kept his fucking mouth shut since getting rich and going off to do whatever he does makes me suspect that he's a reasonable man. So Facebook hits this growth limit and it and it it kind of levels off a bit um And again, it's a very successful business in two thousand seven, but

it's not an empire, and that's what Mark wanted. That's the only thing Mark has ever wanted um in his entire life. And so he ordered the creation of what he called a growth team, dedicated to putting Facebook back on the path to expansion, no matter what it took. So the Growth team quickly came to include the very best minds in the company, who started applying their intellect and ingenuity to this task. One solution they found was to expand Facebook to users who spoke other languages. And

this is what began. We talked about last episode, the company's heedless growth into foreign markets. Obviously, at no point did anyone care or even consider what impact Facebook might have on those places. Yeah, I'm gonna quote from The New Yorker again. Alex Schultz, a founding member of the growth team, said that he and his colleagues were fanatical in their pursuit of expansion. You will fight for that inch, Alex said, You will die for that inch. Facebook left

no opportunity untapped. In two thousand eleven, the company asked the Federal Election Commission for an exemption to rules requiring the source of funding for political ads to be disclosed and filings a Facebook lawyer argued that the agency should not stand in the way of innovation. Oh okay, it doesn't seem like an innovation to me, real loose interpretation of the word. You know, I get this to an extent.

So the other day I was drunk driving my Forerunner, UM and I was I was, I was shooting at some targets I'd set up in the trees and the people in the neighborhood. I was doing this and said, oh, for the love of God, you're you're please, you're endangering all of our lives. Um, And I said, you're standing in the way of innovation because I was innovating what you can do drunk in a Forerunner with a kalashnikov,

and they got in the way of that. I understand that I have to really heat up a pan and put it on someone's face just to innovate the art of what you you innovate their skins. Yeah, and and really, people standing in the way of that innovation. Am I supposed to make progress in hurting people's faces? Yeah? I'm a fan of how Polpod innovated the capital city of Cambodia by forcing everyone out of it and then killing

hundreds of thousands of just it's just it's innovative. The way all of this is just horrific and like, I don't know, like I'm talking about something else, but it's like the language of Silicon Valley applied to the two genocidal situations is just so it makes my fucking I mean, I'm just peeled all my skin off. You have to you have to agree that Hitler was an innovator. He innovated so many things. He really did change. He changed

the game. Yeah, he absolutely changed the narrative from there not being a war in Europe to there being a war in Europe. That's called disrupting, Honey. He didn't disrupt it. He disrupted the ship out of the Polish government. Oh my god, doing this dinner wrong. So Sandy Parakilis, who joined Facebook in two thousand and eleven as an operations manager, paraphrase the message of the orientation session he received as

we believe in the religion of growth. Um, the religion of growth is what he was told when he joined the company. That's what it was called him not only horrifying, but like, what could you sound like a more of a sniveling loser? Okay, he said quote the growth team was the Cure was the coolest. Other teams would even try to call subgroups within their teams the growth X

or the Growth Y to try and get people excited. Um. And in the end, Facebook's finest minds decided that the best way they could I know, I know, yeah, I'm excited. I'm a horny, I'm ready to go. I mean with with that kind of narrative. I love to hear it. I love you do love to hear it. So in the end, Facebook's finest minds decided the best way they could further the great god of growth was too for

Facebook to become a platform for outside developers. Um that this was the way to really really get things going again. And you will remember the start of this period when

Facebook made this change. This is when like what had once been a pretty straightforward service for keeping up with your friends from college was suddenly flooded with games like Farmville and a bunch of like personality tests and ship that period of time, the mom's fucking drone struck Facebook by coming down with Farmville, sending you five trillion invitations, leaving your like high school choir concert to go harvest strawberries. Yeah,

I'm making a bunch of fucking money for Facebook. Whatever rance these apps took. Their main purpose was the same, which was to hoover up all of your personal data and sell it for profit. Yeah. I've given her a social security number to the Farmville and that's just a fact. Yeah. And the only person you should give your social security number two is me. I do encourage all all of our listeners to find my email, um and just just email me your social uh yeah, just to just do

your tips line. Yeah. Yeah, it's like it's like that you like that thing from that that documentary about Keith Ranieri who also did episodes on the vow. It's your collaterals and me your social security number, so I'll know that you really care. Um. Yeah. So Facebook's employees kind of realized very quickly after this change was made and these developers start flooding the service with all of their ship um that the company's new partners were engaged in

some really shady behavior. One worker who was put in charge of a team order to make sure developers weren't using user data immediately found out that they were. And I'm gonna quote again from the new Yorker. Here, some games were siphoning off users messages and photographs. In one case, he said, a developer was harvesting user information, including that of children, to create unauthorized profiles on its own website. Facebook had given away data before I had a system

to check for abuse. Peraculis suggested that there be an audit to uncover the scale of the problem, but according to Paraculus, an executive rejected that idea, telling him, do you really want to see what you'll find? No, which look I can identify with that too. I recently had an issue where I left a bag of potatoes and the top counter of my of my kitchen for I don't know, somewhere between four and seven months, and when I took them I didn't want to. I knew something

was wrong. I knew something was wrong up there because of the flies and the strange smell, but I didn't want to look into it because I didn't want to see the extent of the problem. And when I finally did, I regretted learning what an issue I had made for myself and my home. You are really since the last BO you've become very prone to a metaphor. I am I am a living metaphor. You you are living out an innovative. I innovated those potatoes. You distruct those potatoes.

Works with a family magic. It's okay. We don't need to We don't need to talk about what a problem my life has become. Um Parakeelis told me the New Yorker reporter quote, it was very difficult to get the kind of resources that you needed to do a good job of ensuring real compliance. Meanwhile, you looked at the growth team and they had engineers coming out of their ears. All the smartest minds are focused on doing whatever they can do to get those growth numbers up. Now, Jamie

Jamie Loft, I happened to read this quote well. I was struggling to work in the midst of unprecedented wildfires that devastated a huge amount of the state of Oregon um and made our air quality the worst in the world for a while. On the very day I read that article, four of my friends and journalistic colleagues were held and threatened at gunpoint by militiamen who had taken to the streets of a town very near Portland in the middle of an evacuation. Because viral Facebook memes convinced

them that Antipho was starting the fires. Around the same time that this was happening, that my buddies were getting held at gunpoint because they were not white people. Uh, and a militia thought that was suspicious. Around that same time, a tweet went viral from a Portland resident and a former Facebook employee named bo Wrin. She posted a picture of the city blotted out by thick, acrid clouds of smoke and wrote, my dad sent me this view from

my childhood room in Portland. It hit me that we have been wasting our collective intelligence in tech, optimizing for profits and ad clicks. Huhmm, glad you got on the on that page. Bow well glad. We I mean sometimes it just takes something to put it all in perspective, wouldn't you say, like your home burning down? Yeah? Sometimes, and the militias minutes from your door. Yes, unfu believable militias that organized on Facebook. Yeah, I mean the story

went pretty viral about it. They weren't harmed, um yes, um yeah. The two people I knew best who were there were Sergio almost ingined almost In Justin Yao, who are both wonderful reporters, But yeah, it was. It was not lost on me that I think of the four people who were there, three of them were not white people. Um, and that some of the white reporters had a much easier time. Interesting things about militias you learn? Anyway, Do you think it makes you think? Now? I thought that

quote was interesting? Um. Anyway, opening interesting, disruptive, disruptive, like the fires, like malicious. The thing has made me think when I could think, Yeah, I threw up in my d n mask walking down the street, awesome. Yeah, I've been jogging and doing pull ups in a gas mask. Um, just half naked in a gas mask in my front lawn like a normal person. You're the only person I know who would have seen this as a as a possible outcome. And for that, Um, for that, I thank

you and I curse you. Yeah. So anyway, opening Facebook up to developers made a shipload of money and membership grew, and from Mark's point of view, everything was going great. But Catherine Katherine Loss, his speech writer, saw a lot of the same problems Parakeelis had seen, and in her memoir she writes the idea of providing developers with a massive platform for application promotion didn't exactly accord I thought with the site state admission of connecting people to me.

Connection with another a person required intention. They have to personally signal that they want to talk to me, and vice versa. Platform developers, though, went it human connection from a more automated angle. They churned out applications that promised to tell you who had a crush on you if you would just send an invitation to the application to

all of your friends. Idea was that after the application had a list of your contacts, it would begin the automated work of inquiring about people's interests in matching people who were interested in each other. Soon, developers didn't even ask you if you wanted to send invitations to your friends.

Simply adding the application would automatically notify all of your Facebook friends that you had added it and invite them to add it to using each user as a vessel through which invitations would flow viral e without the user's consent. In this way, users needs for friendship and connection became a powerful engine of spam, as it already was with email and on the Internet long before Facebook. The same will tell you you have a crush on who has a crush on you if you just send this email

to your address book. Ploys were familiar to me from Hopkins, when spammers would blank at the entire email server with emails in a matter of hours, spread violarly by students scullably entering the names of their crushes and their crushes email addresses. So this was the face. This was the start of Facebook making choices for its users, choices that were based on what would be best for the social network, which was keeping people on the site for as long

as possible. The growth teams saw that proactively connecting people to each other worked out really well for Facebook's bottom line, even though sometimes, for example, people who had been horribly abused and raped by their spouses were reconnected to those spouses who they were hiding from and had their personal data exposed to them, a thing that happened repeatedly. Um and still happens repeatedly, you know. But that's a small

price to pay for growth. For that inch, you gotta fight for that And sometimes fighting for that inch means connecting abused women to the men who horribly injured them. That's like Mark talking to Priscilla when they're trying to conceive a child. He's just like, you gotta fight for my inch, honey, you gotta fight for it. Oh. Mark Zuckerberg is incapable of talking during sex um. He lets out a high pitched hum that is only audible to crickets.

He doesn't. Yeah, he's sort of got a Kendall situation going on, whereas he just has a sex lump that gets really hot. Yeah. Yeah. She has to actually withdraw the semen from inside his sax using a needle. I think, actually put in a little a little hold on, hold on, hold on, okay, on the subject holding my vomit but in a syringe and then suck and then and then she just has it. And then she just has it.

And if you want to have the emotional equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg, seem no, that's not that's not fair to the products or services. It's not anyway. Here they are vomit. We're back, Okay. So in two thousand ten, Facebook launched Facebook Groups, which would allow just about anyone to create a private wald Off community to discuss just about anything, including fascism, white genocide, or the need to gather a militia together and use it to kill their political enemies.

If you're a regular listener of my show, you know the next part of this story. From about two thousand ten to two thousand and sixteen, the United States saw an astonishing leap in the number of active hate groups. For some perspective, just from two thousand fifteen to two thou twenty, the SPLC estimates there were at increase in the number of hate groups nationwide. Um All of this growth was mostly spurred on by social media, and Facebook was one of the main culprits. And they knew they

were at two. They didn't admit it openly, but internally they were talking about it from pretty early on. And I'm gonna quote now from a report in the All Street Journal. A two thousand sixteen presentation that names is author of Facebook. Researcher and sociologist monocha Ly found extremist content thriving and more than one third of large German political groups on the platform swamped with racist, conspiracy minded, and pro Russian content. The groups were disproportionately influenced by

a subset of hyperactive users. The presentation notes most of them were private or secret. The high number of extremist groups was concerning the presentation says worse was Facebook's realization that it's algorithms were responsible for their growth. The two thousand sixteen presentation says that sixty of all extremist group

joins are due to our recommendation tools. Yeah, and that most of the activity came from the platforms groups you should join and discover algorithms from the presentation, are recommendation systems grow the problem? Oh okay, Well, I mean as long the word grows in the sentence, I think that that's good enough. Growth is in there, You're good is in there? So really where we're growing and and what

the consequences are? Not really worried about it. Yeah, It's just like when I'm in my Forerunner drunk is shipped on mescal and firing a collash to CoV All that matters is forward movement. It doesn't matter if that forward movement is driving through the trailer that a family lives in. What matters is that I'm moving forward and shooting and drunk. You're right, thank you? Wow a judgmental statement. I'm innovating

homeownership there. I mean, this is another example of just you know, Facebook innovating people's interests, Like hey, do you do you enjoy this? I'm trying to think of the old Facebook groups that you used to be able to join, like ten years ago, where it would be like science is my boyfriend, and it's like enjoy the Smithsonian Institute. Like groups would be like Class of two thousand and twell,

stuff like that. With like early I mean, it's like, I mean, obviously very much in the same line of algorithmic thinking as YouTube, where it's like, oh, did you enjoy this, like collage of Gerard Butler images? How about a man sitting at his four runner whispering conspiracy theories for three hours on end? Yeah, that's just growth. I love growth. I love growth almost as much as I love everything that I do. With the Toyota four runner

um hammered in a trailer park. Yeah, that's that's the real is innovating the trailer parks near my house with a Toyota and a rifle, just changing the narrative around it,

changing the narrative around it, um to screaming mainly. So yeah, throughout right, So throughout two thousand sixteen, uh, and particularly in the wake of the election, a lot of Facebook employees began to increasingly express their concerns that the social network they were pouring their lives into might be tearing the world a right, because again, most of these are very nice and intelligent people who don't want to live in a planet dominated by nightmarish dictatorships and a complete

collapse in the understanding of truth that allows, for example, viral pandemics to spread long after where they should have spread, because people don't have any sort of common conception about basic reality UM as a result of the influence of social media. They don't like that, they like the people who work at Facebook kind of bummed out about contributing

to that UM. One observer at the time reported to The Wall Street Journal, there was this soul searching period after these thousand sixteen that seemed to me, this period of really sincere, oh man, what if we really did

mess up the world? And two thousands sixteen? Yeah, yeah, I love that We're going from in the forties, like like the scientist who does this, who does the same thing, going now, I am become death, the destroyer of world an appropriate comment for the thing that he had done, and then something honestly equivalent in its destructive potential UM. But the response this time because everything is tacky. Now, oh, what if we messed up the world, we might have

sucked this up? God, like starting to think we've severely fucked up the planet never mind, Like, yeah, this is why Aaron Sorkin is still working is because people are saying shitty stuff in shitty ways. Yeah, I don't you should cut that out history. No, No, let's we connect. We should never cut out criticizing histories. Real villain Aaron Sorkin, who I call the poll pot of cable television. Yeah.

This soul searching did not extend to Mark Zuckerberg, who after the election gave the order to pour even more resources into Facebook groups. Marking that feature out is emblematic of what he saw is the future of his sight. He wrote a six thousand and word manifesto in two thousand seventeen which admitted to playing some role in the disinformation in bigotry flooding the body politics. So he's like, yeah,

we did, we had we had something to do with it. Um. He also claimed that Facebook was going to start fighting against this by fostering safe in meaningful communities. From CNBC quote, Zuckerberg noted that more than a hundred million users were members of very meaningful Facebook groups, but he said that most people don't seek out groups on their own. There is a real opportunity to connect more of us with groups that will be meaningful social infrastructure in our lives.

Zuckerberg wrote at the time, if we can improve our suggestions and help connect one billion people with meaningful communities, that can strengthen our social fabric. Since then, fascinating use of the word meaningful, meaningful, meaningful, meaningful. What happened next

was terrible and predictable and meaningful, Jamie, very meaningful. A flood of new users got introduced and even pushed into extremist groups on Facebook that changes are consisted upon have been critical to the growth of q and on, which was able to break containment from the weird parts of the Internet and start infecting the minds of our aunts and uncles, thanks mostly to Facebook, which took no action

against it until like a month or two ago. Within two years, Facebook hosted thousands of q and on pages with tens of millions of collective members. I'm gonna quote now from an NBC News investigation on the matter. Facebook has been key to q and On's growth, in large part due to the platform's groups feature, which is also seen a significant uptick in use since the social network

began emphasizing it in two thousands seventeen. There are tens of millions of active groups, a Facebook spokesperson told NBC News in two thousand nineteen, a number that has probably grown since the company began serving up group group posts in the user's main feeds. Well. Most groups are dedicated to innocuous content. Extremists from q and on conspiracy theorists to anti vaccination advocates have also used the group's feature

to grow their audiences and spread misinformation. Facebook aided that growth with it with its recommendations feature, powered by a c great algorithm that suggests groups to users seemingly based on interest and existing group membership and growth and growth. Yeah, it's funny. There's one of the things I like about this NBC report, which is partly authored by Brandy's at Rosne, who has done a lot of great work on this subject, um is uh, they kind of talk about how profitable

spreading dangerous fascist content is for Facebook. Quote. A small team working across several of Facebook's departments found a hundred and eighty five ads that the company had accepted praising, supporting, or representing q and on. According to an internal post shared among more than four employees, the ads generated about twelve dollars for Facebook and four million impressions in the

last thirty days. Well you have to imagine, like they have to if if they're doing the math of what I mean, it has to be financially profitable because it has to offset the cost of the pr hits that they know that they're going to take for ship. So there and again, it's just as signing yes, a signing of is to uh lives and and and brains. Yeah, which is a good thing to do. Seems reasonable, Yeah,

it seems fair to me. Yeah. Um so yeah. Outside Facebook, the only people who really noticed what was happening initially were a handful of researchers that studied extremist groups. Um and I wasn't really one of them until like two thousand nineteen that I realized Facebook groups specifically were a problem. Was obviously that Facebook was the issue, but the um I wasn't until Facebook group kept threatening to kill me for two years. Yeah that did happen to you? Huh?

That did happen to me? Yeah? If you have a listener her my year in menso podcast What are you doing there? Thankfully, the people threatening to kill you were just members of MENSA who I trust are not competent enough to pull off an assassination. I mean, don't challenge them, but let's hope. So no, this I'm throwing down the Gautensd're like, no, no, no, I don't think they could

do it. Yeah, sorry, so, um yeah. I didn't really grasp the scale of the problem with Facebook groups and specific until two thousand nineteen when I started really looking into the Boogaloo movement UM, and it was kind of camouflaged because there was just so much fascist content everywhere on Facebook. UM that the fact that groups in specific we're driving a lot of the expansion of fascism in

this country kind of got lost in the noise. But there were other researchers who started to realize this early on, and workers inside Facebook realized what was happening right away, and two eighteen they held a meeting for Mark and other senior leadership members to reveal their troubling findings. From the Wall Street Journal quote, a Facebook team had a blunt message for senior executives. The company's algorithms weren't bringing

people together, they were driving people apart. Quote. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness. Read a slide from a two thousand eighteen presentation. If left on checked, it warned Facebook would feed users more and more divisive content and an effort to gain user attention and increase time on platform. So that presentation went to the heart of a question dogging Facebook almost since its founding, does

its platform aggravate polarization and tribal behavior? The answer it found in some cases was yes. In some case, I mean, I guess that's technically accurate. In some cases yeah. So Facebook, in response to this meeting, starts like a massive internal effort to try to figure out like how its platform might be harming people, and Mark Zuckerberg in public and private around this time, started talking about his concern that

sensationalism and polarization we're being enabled by Facebook. Into Mark's credit, he made his employees do something about that phrase, yeah a little bit to his credit. It's okay, we'll take away the credit in just a second. Um so quote. Fixing the polarization problem would be difficult, requiring Facebook to

rethink some of its core products. Most notably, the projects forced Facebook to consider how it prioritized user engagement, a metric involving time spent like shares and comments that for years had been the loadstar of its system, championed by Chris Cox, Facebook's chief product officer at the time, in

a top debt beauty to Mr Zuckerberg. The work was carried out over much of two thousands, seventeen and eighteen by engineers and researchers assigned to a cross jurisdictional task force dubbed common Ground, and employees and a newly created newly created integrity teams embedded around the company. Integrity teams sounds good to me. It sounds reliable. It sounds like

they made sure that integrity was accomplished via teamwork. Yeah. Yeah, So the common Ground team proposed a number of solutions, and to my ears, some of them were actually pretty good. One proposal was basically to um uh like to to kind of try to take conversations that were derailing UH groups, like conversations over hot button political issues, and exercise them

from those groups. So basically, if if a couple of members of a Facebook group started fighting, about vaccinations, and like a group based around parenting, the moderators would be able to make a temporary subgroup for the argument to exist in so that other people, like the Zoom breakout room. Yeah, so that other people wouldn't be expect which I don't know if that's a great idea, but it was something.

Another idea that I do think was better was to tweak recommendation algorithms um to give people a wider range of Facebook group suggestions. Um. Yeah. But it was kind of determined that doing these things uh would probably help with polarization, but would come at the cost of lower user engagement and less time spent on site, which the common Ground team warned about in a two thou eighteen document that described some of their own proposals as anti

growth and requiring Facebook to take a moral stance. Guess how that all went. Yeah, marks Uckerberg almost immediately lost interest. Um. Some of this. A lot of this is probably due to the fact that it would harm Facebook's growth, But another culprit that, like employees who talked to the Wall Street Journal and other publications repeatedly mentioned is the fact that he was all but heard about how journalists were reporting on Facebook because after the Cambridge analytic A scandal,

they kept writing mean things about him. Mr Well, Mr Marc always has to ask himself, what would what would bad haircut Emperor do? And that the haircut Emperor wouldn't you know, wouldn't slow down? And this ship absolutely not. One person was familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal, the internal pendulum swung really hard to the media hates us no matter what we do, So let's

just batten down the hatches. But January of Mark's feelings had hardened enough that he announced he would stand up quote against those who say that new types of communities forming on social media are dividing us. According to the Wall Street Journal, people who have heard him speak, I've at least say he argues social media bears little responsibility for polarization. Now there may be an additional explanation from marks shifting opinions on the matter that go beyond being

just greedy and angry about bad press. And that explanation is a fella named Joel Kaplan. Do you know Joel Kaplan? You ever heard of this? Dude? I don't know this Joel Kaplan character. Well, in short, he's the goddamn devil. Um long, he's the guy that Facebook hired to head up US Public Policy in two thousand eleven, and he became the VP of Global Public Policy in two thousand fourteen.

And Joel was picked for these jobs because, unlike most Facebook employees, he is a registered Republican with decades of experience and government. This made him the perfect person to help the social network deal with allegations of anti conservative

bias as little empathy as possible. I'm sure. Yeah. In two thousand and sixteen, there's all these rumors that Facebook is like censoring conservative content that are proven to be untrue, but the rumors go viral on the right, and so everyone on the right forever assumes that they were true.

Um And basically, Joel becomes increasingly influential after this point because he's Mark Zuckerberg's best way out of angering the right wing, which you actually can't not do because they're they're always angry, and we'll just yell about everything until they get to kill everyone who wasn't them, because that's

what life finds a way for that. So Joel was a policy advisor for George W. Bush's two thousand campaign and a participant in the Brooks Brothers riot, which is the thing that was orchestrated by Roger Stone to help hide a bunch of ballots in Florida that he was a part of that. That's the guy who's basically running Facebook's response to partisanship right now. I have a physical

reaction to that. It's awesome, so upset. He worked in the White House for basically the whole Bush administration, and in two thousand and six he took over Carl Rob's job. So if you visualized Joe Kaplan, he's the guy you get when you can't get car Old Rove anymore. He's Mr Carl Rove wasn't when the worst person in the world is like, I can't do this job anymore. Joe Kaplan's like, I got you. I got you famous monsters, Like I'm trying to srub some ship over here, infamous

piece of ship, Carl Rove, don't worry. I will continue your good work. I am Joe Kaplan and now I basically run Facebook. And if you google him, Google has enlisted as American Advocate. Yeah, he is an advocate of things. I was like, I was like, again, I guess more specific don't enjoy his face, just put it out there. Joe is one of the most influential voices in Mark Zuckerberg's world, and he was one of the most influential voices in the entire company when the common Ground team

came back with their suggestions for reducing partisanship. As policy chief, you had a lot of power to approve these new changes, and he argued against all of them. His main point was that the proposed changes were, in his words, paternalistic um. He also said that basically babying people. He also said that these changes story, yeah, be a daddy story. I

can't there daddy stories that end in a genocide. Robert, Well, God, if it makes you feel any better, all the genocides that this is going to lead to, heaven happened yet? Oh okay, well there you go. He yeah. So. Joel also said that these changes would disproportionately impact conservative content because it tends to be bigotted, a divisive. Since the Trump administration was at this point regularly tossing threats at Facebook,

this had some weight. Quote from Wall Street Journal, Mr Kaplan said in a recent interview that he and other executives had approved certain changes meant to improve civic discussion.

In other cases where proposals were blocked, he said he was trying to instill some discipline, rigor, and responsibility into the progress as he vetted the effectiveness in potential unintended consequences of changes to how the platform operated internally, The vetting process earned a nickname eat your Veggies No, which sounds paternalistic to me. Actually sounds like the beginning of a daddy story that ends in a genocide. Wow. Okay, we'll get back to Joe Caplan in a little bit.

For now, we need to talk some more about the problem of violent of how we want to talk about how the problem of violent extremism on Facebook groups got completely out of control. So this summer, which was marked by constant militia rallies, the explosive growth of the Boogaloo movement, numerous deaths as a result of violent far right actors showing up at protests with guns, Facebook finally took action in late September to ban militias from using their service

because they have to be balanced. They also banned anarchists from Facebook at the same time, even though anarchists have not been tied to any acts of fatal terrorism in recent memory. Um, because you know, you gotta placate the right wing, because they're the only ones who matters. So

let's play. Let's let's ban the anarchists who have been spending the last four years trying to lay out the individual actors and groups who are members of these militias that are doing stuff like taking over checkpoints and holding my friends at gunpoint. We wouldn't one of the folks who were keeping track of them to be able to use Facebook. That's the wrong kind of disruptive, you see.

That's the wrong kind of disrruptive and advocating. You know, that's very similar to what the dude and that trailer said when I was driving my Forerunner through his trailer and shooting towards his children. Not at um. And I'll tell I'll tell you what I told him. What did What did you say? I'm an innovator, Mark, I don't know. That didn't really tie into it worked for me. I could see it. I could see it in kind of an ozarchy kind of way. I could see Yeah. Yeah,

so Uh. Mark. By the way, Uh is on record declaring that Facebook is a guardian of free speech which is one of the things he did when he refused noted that he was refusing to fact check political ads. In so, anarchists who want to talk about operating a communal garden or you know, share details about dangerous militias are the same as militiamen baying for the blood of protesters. But political candidates spreading malicious lies about protesters who are

being assaulted and killed based on those lies. That is fine. Back to Facebook growth or anything like that. Let's get back to Facebook's integrity teams, and they're doomed quests to stop their boss from destroying democracy. So the engineers and data scientists on these teams in chief like mainly like the guys who are working on the news feed. Uh they yeah, they accorded to the Wall Street Journal arrived at the polarization problem indirectly. Um asked to combat fake news, spam, clickbait,

and in authentic users. The employees looked for ways to diminish the reach of such ills. One early discovery bad behavior came disproportionately from a small of hyperpartisan users um now. Another finding was that the US saw a larger infrastructure of accounts and publishers that met this definition on the far right than the far left, UM and outside observers

documented the same phenomenon. The gap meant that seemingly a political action, such as reducing the spread of clickbait headlines along the title of you won't believe what happened next, uh, it meant that, like, doing this stuff affected conservative speech more than liberal speech. Now, yeah, and obviously this piste off conservatives. The way that Facebook works means that users who posted an engage with the site more have more influence.

The algorithm sees if you're posting a thousand times a week instead of fifty, it likes that engagement because engagement means money, and so it prioritizes your content over the

content of someone who posts less often. This means that a bunch of networks of Russian bots and hyperactive or like Ian Miles Chong who's a fascist troll who lives in fucking Malaysia and tweets about how like everybody needs to have a that they can use to shoot democrats even though guns are legal in his country, and like makes like did very recently miss anyway, total piece of ship that that that these pieces of ship um who are actively attempting to urge violence, and who have urged

violence and cause death mobs in other countries. It means that these people, because they're just shotgunning out hundreds of posts per day, will always be more influential than local journalists and reporters who are trying to bring out factually based information, because it's better for Facebook for a stream of lies to spread on their platform than a smaller

amount of truth. Yeah. And it also lends itself to just never like to be releasing contents so quickly that you couldn't possibly disprove or fact check things fast enough, because there's just it's just a bullshit machine. Yeah uh. And you know, Facebook's teams found that most of these hyperactive accounts were way more partisan the normal Facebook users, and we're more likely to appear suspicious, like to engage in suspicious behavior that suggested either a bunch of people

working in shifts or there were bots. So these these teams, these integrity teams did like the thing that has integrity, which was they suggested their company fixed the algorithm to not reward this kind of behavior. Now, this would lose the company a significant amount of money. And since most of these hyperactive accounts were right wing and nature it would piss off conservatives. So you can imagine how this

idea went over with Joel Kaplan. Uh. Since Mark was terrified of right wing anger, he tended to listen to Joel about these sort of things. Joel's daddy and the eat your veggies policy review process stymied and killed any movement on halting this problem. So, well, how do we feel about that? We feel we feel great, We feel good. Glad that's in charge, Glad everyone's eating their veggies. I mean, even just the dystopian nature of like mobilizing these teams

to be like, hey, I've ruined the world. Do you think you could stop it before it blows up? Because this is going to be a real pr issue. Why would you do that? Just of luck to the team. There was another case where because basically the only way to combat this stuff is to have another person Mark Zuckerberg respects or is at least scared of yelling at him um or you know, talking politely to him. The daddies of the world opposite of whatever John Kaplan is saying.

And there, thankfully was someone like that in Facebook. They hired in two thousands seventeen, Carlos Gomez Uribe, who was the former head of Netflix's recommendation system, which is obviously made a lot of money for Netflix. So this guy, Carlos Uribe is a big important get for Facebook. UM. So he gets on staff and he immediately is like, Oh, this looks like we might be destroying the world, and so he starts pushing to reduce the impact that hyperactive

users had on Facebook. Um and one of the proposals that his team championed was called sparing sharing, which would have reduced the spread of content that was favored by these hyperactive users. UM and this would obviously have had the most impact on content favored by far right and far left users. Um And number one, there's more far right users on Facebook than far left, so that was going to disproportionately impact them. But the people who mainly

would have gained influence were political moderates. UM. Mr Uribe

called it the the happy Face. That's what he called this plan, and Facebook's data scientists thought that it might actually like it might actually help fight the kind of spam efforts that Russia was doing in two thousand sixteen, But Joe Kaplan and other Facebook executives pushed back because yeah, and they didn't want to say because you know, Max UiB, you couldn't like you had to be careful arguing with some instead of saying this will be bad for money

or it'll make the right angry at us. Joe Kaplan invented a hypothetical girl Scout troupe, and he asked, what would happen if the girls became Facebook super sharers as part of a cookie selling program. That sounds like a metaphor you would do at the big of an episode. Yeah, he was like, basically like, what if these girl scouts made a super successful account to so their cookies? Like, we would be unfairly hurting them if we stopped these people who are baying for the deaths of their fellow

citizens and gathering militias to their banner. Okay, I hear you, but what about fictional girls girl scouts? Yeah, it's awesome. So the debate between Mr aib and Um and Joel Kaplan eventually did make it to Mark Zuckerberg. He had to make a call on this one because both of them were kind of big names in the company. Uh. Mark listened to both sides and he took the coward's way out. He approved Ureb's plan, but he also said they had to cut the weighing by eight percent, which

mitigated most of the positive benefits of the plan. Um. Yeah. After this, Mark, according to the Wall Street Journal quote, signaled he was losing interest in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good, asking that they not bring him something like that again. Neat two years apiece, Mark, do that that has big two hundred years of pieces, big two d years of piece energy. Yeah.

In two thousand nineteen, uh Mark announced that Facebook would start taking down content that violated specific standards, but would take a hands off approach to policing material that didn't clearly violate as standards. In a speech to Georgetown that October, he said, you can't impost tolerance top down. It has to come from people opening up, sharing experiences and developing a shared story for society that we all feel we're

a part of. That's how we make progress together. So you know, it's like that is just such a wild way of saying, like, I don't feel I am accountable for this, and once again I'm going to delegate this to the users. Of the people brains. I'm actively ruining You know what makes progress harder in my opinion, Jamie

Products and services. No, no, when fascists are allowed to spread lies about disadvantaged in endangered groups to tens of millions of angry and armed people because your company decided sites like The Daily Caller and Breitbart are equivalent to the Washington Post. This is something Facebook did when, at Joel Kaplan's behest, it made both companies Facebook news partners. These are the folks that Facebook trust to help them determine what stories are true. Um, they get money from Facebook,

they get an elevated position in the news feed. Um. Yeah. On an unrelated note, earlier this year, Breitbart News shared a video that promoted bogus coronavirus treatments and told people that masks couldn't prevent the spread of the virus. This video was watched fourteen million times in six hours before it was removed from Breitbart's page. They removed it presumably because it violated Facebook policy, and Facebook has a two strike policy for its news partners sharing misinformation within a

ninety day period. When Mark was asked why Breitbart got to be a Facebook trusted partner while spreading misinformation about an active plague that was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. Mark held up the two strike policy as a shield. Quote. This was certainly one strike against them FIR misinformation, but they don't have others in the last ninety days. So by the policies we have, which by the way, I think are generally pretty reasonable on this, it doesn't make

sense to remove them. That's pretty great, Jamie, that's pretty awesome. But you know what's even better about physical and unethical but still legal, ha ha. What's even better about this is that Breitbart absolutely violated Facebook policies more than two times in ninety days, and it was covered up. That's what's even better. Yeah, you have to imagine Breitbart is violating Facebook policies multiple times a day like the happlin have some heide it. Yeah, that is such. I mean,

it's awesome, it's awesome. I'm going to read actually by citing an incredible report by BuzzFeed, who, by the way, all credit to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, and I think you know BuzzFeed, And I've cited a number of great articles, including that one from The Wall Street Journal, which is really important. BuzzFeed has probably been of all of the different media companies the most dedicated and like hounding Facebook like a fucking dog with a groin fetish. I don't know how to.

I'm very proud of Buzzfeeds reporting on Facebook. Thank you for keeping on this one, y'all. Good work from my head. But yeah, I'm gonna quote from this report on the fact that uh Facebook fraudulently hid the fact that one of their information partners was violating their own policies and spreading this information about an active plaque. And then and then you need to take an adbreak, just you know, I'll take an ad break now. Well, we'll get we'll

get we'll get to this afterwards. Because if there's one thing that prepares me to hear about how democracies, both in the nation I live and around the world are being actively murdered for the profit of a man who's already a billionaire, there's one thing that makes that easier to take. It's products and services. It's the sweet lullaby of a product or service. Ah, Nothing nothing keeps me going gets me intellectually hard like a product or a service.

I want to be surrounded. I want to die surrounded by my most beloved products and services. I have a feeling that you will, because there's a good chance that a horrible wildfire will sweep through the city you live in. And sorry, that's getting too dark mine too, maybe, yeah, yeah, as it to say, I'm like, hey, as long as we're on the same same page there, that's great, And it's okay if we make it out of that fire.

Facebook cool. And sure there's lots of armed and misinformed militias waving guns wildly in the areas we attempt to evacuate through. Well, as long as my death will have been completely in vain. Yes, that's what Facebook promises for all of us, and that's what products and services promise for all of us. Here we go, Oh, all right,

we're back. So we're talking about how Facebook covered up the fact that Briitbart was repeatedly spreading this information that should have gotten them removed as a trusted partner quote

from BuzzFeed. Some of Facebook's own employees gathered evidence they say shows Brightbart along with other right wing outlets and figures, including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University has received special treatment that helped it avoid running a foul

of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives. On July, Facebook employee posted a message to the company's internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook,

seemingly acting on the publication's behalf. A Brightbart escalation marked urgent end of day was resolved in the day, with all misinformation strikes against Breitbart's page and against their domain cleared without explanation, the employee wrote. The same employees set up partly false rating applied to an Instagram post from Charlie Kirk was flagged for priority escalation by Joel Kaplan,

the company's vice president of Global public Policy. Now, the whole article itself details just a ton of other instances in this, and it's all incredibly shady. I'm not going to go into all of it and tremendous detail because we are running out of time, But if you read the article, it's extremely clear that Joel Kaplan is directing Facebook to actively violate the company's own policies in order to keep right wing bullshit peddlers spreading lies on the

platform for profit. Kaplan has faced no punishment for this, although his behavior did provoke outrage from employees in in Facebook's internal chat system applied to Daddy, that's how it goes. Facebook employees are be getting angrier and angrier at this sort of thing throughout the year. Remember back in May when President Trump posted this message to Twitter and Facebook vote There is no way, zero that mail and ballots

will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mailboxes will be robbed, Ballots will be forged and even illegally printed out and fraudulently signed. The governor of California is sending ballots to millions of people. Anyone living in the state, no matter who they are, how they got there, will get one that will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how and for whom to vote. This will

be a rigged election no way. I do remember that Robert Twitter too. Again, it's unbeliod like like the mildest I could possibly give someone credit to that level of credit. Twitter fact checked the president's tweet, which was not nothing, and that's all I'll say about it. Marginally, that does not qualify as nothing. Again, that qualifies as the most

responsible action that's made. A social media ceo. Took Mark, on the other hand, refused to let his employees do anything similar, allowing the president's flagrant misinformation to circular aid on his network. This enraged employees, and they got angrier when his when the Looting Starts the Shooting Starts post was let up. They created a group in workplace, their internal chat app, called Let's Fix Facebook parentheses the company.

It now has about ten thousand members. One employee started a poll asking colleagues whether they agreed quote with our leadership's decisions this week regarding voting, misinformation and posts that may be considered to be inciting violence. A thousand respondents said the company had made the wrong decision on both posts, which is more than twenty times the number of responses

who said otherwise. So. Facebook employees after this staged a digital walk out uh and they like changed their workplace avatars to a black and white fist and called out sick uh in mass, hundreds of them and stuff. Um and you know, yeah, I'm gonna quote from BuzzFeed again here. As Facebook grappled with yet another public relations crisis, employee morale plunged. Worker satisfaction metrics measured by mic A Pols surveys that are taken by hundreds of employees every week

fell sharply after the ruling on Trump's looting post. According to data and obtained by BuzzFeed on June one, the day of the walkout, about forty five percent of employees said they agreed with the statement that Facebook was making the world better, down twenty five percentage points from the

week before. That same day, Facebook's internal survey has showed that around forty four percent of employees were confident in Facebook leadership leading the company in the right direction, a thirty percentage point dropped from responses to that question have stayed around the lower mark as of earlier this month, so pretty significant drop and faith in the company from

its employees. Um and yeah. Zuckerberg, the ultimate decision maker, according to Facebook's head of communications, initially defended his decision to leave Trump's looting post up without even hiding it like with a warning like Twitter, Mark stated quote, Unlike Twitter, we do not have a policy of putting a warning in front of posts that may incite violence, because we believe that if a post insights of violence, it should be removed, regardless of whether or not it's newsmorthy, even

if it comes from a politician. So you have to wait for their to be violence and study and then be like, oh, it turns out that post was actually very bad and we should take it down. There I get the amount of bodies that he needs attached to do a single thing is staggering. Four days later, Mark backtracked from BuzzFeed quote. In comments at a company wine meeting on June two that were first reported by recode. Facebooks, founders said the company was considering adding labels to post

from world leaders that incite violence. He followed that up with the Facebook post three days later, in which he declared black lives matter and made promises that the company would review policies on content discussing excessive use of police or state force. What material effect does any of this have, one employee asked in workplace, openly challenging the CEO commitments to review offer nothing material has anything changed for you in a meaningful way? Are you at all willing to

be wrong here? Mark didn't respond to this, but on the sly a month of June. Nearly a month later, he posted a clarification to his remarks, noting that any post that is determined to be inciting violence will be taken down. Employee dissatisfaction has continued to swell over the course of the summer. One senior employee, Max Wang, even recorded a twenty four minute long video for his colleagues and BuzzFeed and another article has the all the audio

for this, It's worth listening to. In the video, Max outlines why he can't morally justify working for Facebook anymore, and he's a pretty early employee. I think his video quotes at length from books on totalitarianism by Hannah Arrent, who was one of like the great scholars of the Holocaust. Yeah. He shared the video on workplace with a note that started, I think Facebook is hurting people at scale? Yes, yes, yeah, yes,

it is absolutely yeah. Yeah. Like Emperor Augustus who had members of his own family killed for disobedience, Mark did not like being questioned and gasp dista proved of by his own employees. On Juno leventh, he hosted a life Q and A where he delivered a message to employees who were angry at his enabling of hideously violent fascist rhetoric. This is a lot of this isn't like I think

response to yeah, the killings and such. I've been very worried about the level of disrespect and in some cases of vitriol that a lot of people in our internal community are directing towards each other as part of these debates. If you're bullying your fellow colleagues into taking a position on something, then we will fire you. Mm hmm, well, uh good. You know. The the amount of consistency I mean,

you gotta appreciate it that. I'm really glad that employee I mean just spoke directly about because it's like, at what point, truly, what do you have to lose, Like I guess except for your life depending on how Mark Zacher wants to go about it. But I mean, it's I don't know, it's it is. It is so frustrating, even though it's like I don't know what else to do other than you know, whatever, some some ship and minecraft. But because people are continually waiting for this person and

this company to act in the best interest. It's like, it's not when has it ever happened? Name a time, even in the face of like the most brutal public disapproval. There's too much. It's amazing. As you're saying all this, and as I just finished the thing that I'm saying, a Bloomberg story just dropped. Like as we were recording this episode, I'm just gonna read you. I haven't read

the story. I'm just gonna read you the title. Facebook accused of watching Instagram users through cameras no fucking rules. Oh my god, it's so good. Have we talked about that before though, because I have. I've had that issue with Instagram before where I'll close out Instagram and then you'll see the uh, the little section of your iPhone in the top left where where it indicates that you're being recorded. Uh, it goes it turns like when I listeners.

Let me know if you've had a similar issue. Sometimes when I close Instagram, it looks like my phone just stopped recording, but it goes away really quickly. It's like I'm a mill a second that it's It happens all the time. So that is not shocking at all. It bury doo. I don't know what I'm going to actually title this Um, I don't know what I'm actually gonna title this episode. The working title that I started this under was Mark Zuckerberg needs to be tried in the

Hague and hung in public until dead. But I don't think legal is gonna let me go with that title. I think it's clickable. I think it's clickable as Yeah, I think you'd get great engagement on that. Um, I mean that's what he'd want. Yeah, we may have to go with a different time. I mean, I'm not urging

a legal behavior. I'm urging that he'd be tried in the International Criminal Court and then, once convicted, hung until the by the neck until dead for his crimes um, which is what you do when a world leader commits genocide, right right, Yeah, it's true, But I probably won't title the episode that. I don't know. I mean, I'm glad you put it out there, though, let's let's not take it out of the running. Yeah, there's a number of other options. I mean, Mark Suckerberg continues to disrupt two

hundred years of peace. There's so many options. I can't wait for the two hundred years of peace that only involved dozens of worse. Yeah, I mean it was if the two hundred years of piece began in two thousand and four, imagine how much peace we have to look forward to. I think it's similar to the amount of peace I brought that trailer park. There, this, this, this, you're you're you're a little sick. Oh, you're a little sick of I know it, I know it. Well, we're

all gone be fine, Fine, We're gonna be great. Yeah you want to plug some ship? Yeah yeah, thank you for disrupting my life and intersense of peace once. It's always be disrupted. It's always been a pr You've always been a huge disruptor. And uh yeah, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram, which is watching me right now. Uh. And then if you want to contribute to a candidate that I love, uh Fatima Ball Zubert. We're doing a live read of the Twilight Script this Friday evening, five

pm Pacific. That sounds very exciting. It is something to do to distract yourself from the void. See you there, see you there, and I am going to be uh um, you know he's lost doing the thing that I normally do, which is staring into the Abyss and going, hey, hey, quit being an abyss. You really bumming us all out, Abyss. And the Abyss is like you and the abyss have

great chemistry. We do, we do, And the Abyss has made me a lot of money, a lot of money, which is something that I feel very very conflicted about. The abysses is rich. That's the thing that Nietzsche missed is sometimes when you stare into the Abyss you get a six figure salary because it's incredibly profitable to talk about the Abyss on a podcast. Yeah, the Abyss has facial recognition software and it's pretending to be me elsewhere. Yeah, Jamie,

the abyss loftus, that's what I've been called. You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram, where you're probably being watched at Bastard Pod. You can follow Robert on Twitter and I right, okay. You can buy stuff from our te public store and also the best Dolkasti public store, uh, where Jamie designs all the artwork for that and it's amazing And yeah, I think I covered everything. Wher hands wear a mask. Yeah, Bert, did I show you my bedazzled bolt cutters. I'll send you a picture of them

by Bultcutters. No, I would love to see your bedazzle bowl cutter. Yeah I have. I have a pair of bolt cutters that are still usable but also mostly covered in red stones. I'll send it to you. Yeah, that's the episode. Hell yeah,