Elie Mystal, The Good Liars & Nilay Patel

and chat GPT. But first we have nation writer and author of allowing me to retort, Ellie missed all. Welcome to you Fast Politics. Ellie missed all. Molly, how are you? I am just always so excited to have you because you are so smart and interesting but also hilarious. No pressure, no pressure, Yeah, exactly. Be hilarious. Nope, let's not be hilarious. Let's talk about the Supreme Court, which is I feel like the opposite of hilarious. It's terrifying, is what it is.

It's hilarious like a clown, right, It's a thing that should be funny and should be dismissable. But actually is just very creepy and scary. There are a bunch of cases. I think we should talk about Yesterday's case where they are toying with democracy. Yeah, so yesterday's case is the case to legalize the coup. Essentially right, it was the oral argument, and the case is called mor v. Harper.

It arises out of the North Carolina State legislative Republican control North Carolina State legislature making a map that was so partisan, so favorable Republicans basically rigged the election um in favor of Republican corressional candidates and Republican state legislative candidates. That the North Carolina State Supreme Court throughout the map as a violation of the North Carolina Constitution and ordered

it to be redrawn. North Carolina Republicans appealed that decision in that case when all is what, it went all the way to the Supreme Court. But the theory under

which they appealed it is what's really troubling. Um. They didn't do the normal thing of just saying, hey, the North Carolina Supreme Court is wrong, please help us, Mr John Like that would have been the normal Republican thing to do, right, No, no, no, no. They propagated what's called independent state legislature theory or doctrine, depending on which

cuckoo for cocopus person you talked to. And this doctrine or theory says that the state legislature and the state legislature alone, through the process of an up or down vote, is the final arbit on every time, place, and manner on every aspect of an election held in the state, subject only to the Federal Constitution's supremacy clause. So while that might not jump off the page as a huge thing, it does not above the page. But yes, continue, it

changes everything, right. It basically means that the state legislature, which will often be controlled by partisans, are allowed to, for instance, draw maps that violate the state constitution, and the state Supreme Court cannot tell them that the state constitution has been violated because only the state legislature can

do that. It means that potentially a state board of elections could say like, Okay, we're gonna have voting from this day to that day and it's gonna be early voting from here to there, and the state legislators to say no, because only the state legislature gets determined when the time place again in manner of elections, so we

get to decide. It could mean that when the state's certification bureau says we have now certified our slate of presidential electors the state legislature and only the state legislature, it gets to say, no, no, no, we would like to have a different slate of presidential electors. So the entire kind of structure, the kind of nitty gritty nuts and bolts of how democracy works, these North Carolina Republicans say, can only be controlled, can only be be adjudicated by

the partisan upper down vote of a state legislature. It should come as no surprise to your listeners that the first place where this cockamamie ferry voice was in two thousand in Bush Vigor. This theory was adopted by former Chief Justice William Renquest in Bush Vigor. Now, if you guys remember what and I'm gonna date myself here by like being alive during Bush Vigor. Right, I was a

one out during Bush Vigor. So like it's stuck in my mind a bit, right, and that when and uh, the issue in Bush for your younger viewers listeners, is that the Florida State Supreme Court had ordered a recount of the general election between Gore and Bush in Florida. That was a court ordered recount following the state courts

interpretation of Florida statutory law. It was the Republicans, who usually are all four state rights, suddenly when the presidency was online, didn't want to listen to states rights, didn't want to listen to Florida wants to have a different standard of review to find a way to stop the recount. Intellectually,

this was hard. So Renquist invented this independent state legislature theory that said that it was actually the then Republican controlled Florida State legislature that had the final authority on whether or not there should be a recount, not the Florida State Supreme Court. Now, it's important to understand that renquests idea here was rejected by the court. That's not the grounds on which the Republicans made George W. Bush president.

They found a different way to stop the court mandated recount. But that's the first time this theory was put into play. But here's the coda to that story, Molly. As I said, it was a concurring opinion by Justice William Renquist. It was signed only by two other justices, Antonin Scalia who is now dead and Clarence Thomas, who was very much not. In addition, if y'all remember one of the lawyers on George W. Bush's team who was pushing this independent state

legislator theory was current Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There's actually a clip of Kavanaugh from two thousand. Mark Joseph Stern actually founded I saw. I saw him posted on Twitter the other day a clip of Brett Kavanaugh in two thousand talking to Wolf Blitzer pushing independent state legislature theory. Interesting, that's how this cockamamie theory got started. It was Republicans casting about for a way to make George W. Bush president, and now it's coming back to us as a book.

Ins cast about for a way to legalize not the previous coup, but to legalize the next coup that they're planning. You know who else is a proponent of independent state legislature theory. Jenny Thomas. This was one of the theories that she was pushing in her emails to Kevin McCarthy and all the other people that she was trying to

get to legalize the coup. So there's an entire kind of you know, white wing, right wing ecosystem here around the concept of pushing this theory forward so that red state legislatures are able to decide the results of elections as opposed to Board of Elections, nonpartisan commissions, or even the state Supreme Court. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to get back to the second. There was some pushback here,

though it didn't go as badly as I thought. Random, Yeah, y, that's congratulate ourselves for it not going as badly as we thought. I I was reading some piece about this, and I was super eyes that it didn't go as badly as we thought. Yeah, Democrats not as bad as possible. Well, this Supreme Court, they really suck so whenever they are slightly and I thought it was interesting. It seems like Gorcitch was the one who was the most into the idea,

explained to us what happened. So Thomas, with his priors, Aldo and Gorci, we're all in independence legislator theory. Gorsig was actually particularly odious and I don't even want to waste a lot of time on this on this guy, because he's he He was literally just trolling. I think all black Americans with his questioning. But that only gets you to three. Right now, again, because of what I said about Kavanaugh, I expected Kavanaugh to be a solid four, but at oral arguments he was a bit weak. I

mean Kavanaugh is like constitutionally like a weak person. I mean that's kind of his brand. But yes, continue right, he was. He was a little bit intellectually washy. He was trying to distinguish Bush v. Gore. And actually, just by the way, mentioned that at the time of Bush Vigor he was any lawyers I'm saying he was. He was one of Bush's lawyers. Yeah, is so sketchy, and now he runs the highest court in the land. Continue right. The Kavanaugh tried to distinguish Bush Vigor from the case

in front of him from North Carolina. He was trying to make a very it's a thin slice of the legal pie. He was trying to make a distinction between statutory interpretation, which is what was at issue when Bush Vigor versus state constitutional interpretation, which is what is that issue in North and Morvy Harbor. And he was trying to say that like, those two things are different and independent state legislature theory works for one but not for

the other. So that was a little bit surprising. I don't know they'll have the strength of character to fall through through with that. But the swing vote was always gonna be Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, he doesn't like this theory, like it's it's funny because part of the reason why we're here is because of an earlier Robert's decision, like this is a bit of chickens coming home to

roost to him. But but Roberts is not down for this, because Roberts, this whole thing is to give more power to judges, not take power away from judges, even at the state court level, um and put it in the hands of partisan legislatures. That's that's not Robert's m l. So Roberts doesn't like independence legislature theory. But Amy Coney Barrett, like, she has no priors on this right, She hasn't written

about this before, she hasn't ruled on this before. She isn't married to a person who tried to support a violent insurrection against the American government. And yet and as far as I know, Molly, and I'm not a schooled in theology, as I am on law, but I do not believe Jesus has taken a strong position on independence date legislat This is why I love you because anyway, yes,

I don't think Jesus has a right. So if so, if she can't tie this to anything in her prior law and to anything in Leviticus, to anything in her background, she's in play, is what I'm saying. And based on her questions, she seemed quite skeptical that independence legislature theory was a thing now, and I have written about this from the Nation and an article that's coming out a

little bit later today. You always have to be careful with reading the tea leaves on Barrett, because in her brief history she has actually shown herself to be a very good, thoughtful, smart questioner, where at oral arguments she seems to really be intellectually getting in to the meat of the issue in front of her. But then when it comes times to vote, all she's done is vote for the most extreme, brain dead version of the conservative

case like she like. Whatever she does at oral arguments has thus far not linked up to what she does behind closed doors when it comes time kind to vote. So I don't want to put too much faith in there, but based on aur arguments at least, she seemed extremely skeptical that independent state legislature theory was a thing. Right, that's so interesting. So she is actually smarter than she votes. I think she gets a bad rap because, you know her her background coming into the court was so light,

and people dislike her for entirely legitimate reasons. But please don't come at her as if she's dumb. She's not dumb. She's not a man, basically, right, like all of the women are the Supreme Court are smarter than all of them. Yeah, you're laughing, but that sounds right to me. It's much harder to succeed in these businesses as a woman, just like it is much harder to succeed at these than when you're black. I mean exactly. This is why the people who get there tend to be much, much, much

smarter than the white guys. You can't be Amy Coney Barrett but have a background like Brett Kavanaugh, Right, you can't. You can't just fail up and be a woman, even in kind of conservative Republican circles. You know, there are exceptions, Carrie Lake Springs find for no reason, But she didn't win. Right, when you're a woman and you get to the level of Amy Coney Barrett, even within conservative circles, that there's probably some intellectual heft there, and she has it. She's

an intelligent person. Her problem is not that she's dumb. Her problem is that she's at least she votes like one. Her problem is that she's a religious wing nut, or at least she votes like like. If you're gonna come at her, come at her for what she does. Don't come at her for her background. Because when you listen to her at court, she is an intelligent person who asks and again I can't emphasize this enough. Her questions are consistently now over the past two years, the best

version of the conservative case possible. Right, she asked the questions correctly from the perspective of her view of you that I obviously disagree with. Really, the only stinker was during the dobbs Or argument where she kind of went off on a Jesus tangent about firehouse babies and in two years that the thing she said. I do not go through two years and have one thing to be the dump right, the most things you said in two years, but other than that kind of obvious problem. She's really

intelligent and she asks really good questions. Again, when it comes time to vote, she votes like she's a brain dead problem right, talks like Kagan votes like Havana. That's her problem. Right. But you, as someone who has covered this court for a long time and who is quite smart, I think what you're trying to tell me is that there is that the Court is a power that changes people. It sounds like, and again I'm maybe reading between the lines here, but it seems like what you're saying is

that people grow into the court. I'm not quite willing to go that far in her yet, right, but it could you feel like it's theoretically possible. What I think is true is that Amy Coney Barrett knows what she's doing, right. I think what is still unknown is what she wants to do. Right. She's got this power, she understands how it works, she understands how this game is played. The question is what she wants to do with that power.

And I always contrast her with Brett Kavanaugh, not just because they are the closest in terms of their appointments, but because Bret Kavanaugh is a drooling idiot When he asked questions. They are the dumbest, most reductive, most most most least, most bog standard version of the Republican argument. Like he said, like there there is a lack of intellectual left that you see with Brett Kavanaugh, and there's also a sweaty desperation. She's off the man to be

liked by the media. Now. I think that that John Roberts has gotten a completely um. He is entirely too respected by mainstream media. They love Roberts. Everybody wants that wants Roberts as their conservative friend. That is the wrong. Roberts is an enemy of black people voting. It has been for his entire career. But the way the media treats John Roberts is the way Brett Kavanaugh would like

to be treated. The problem, of course, is that John Roberts, you know, as far as we know, never tried to rape anybody, right, and so like he can't kind of

can't get around that, but he would like to. There's no world in which Kavanaugh will ever not be tainted by what he has done exactly, but he wants to be treated like Roberts, and so all of his all of his little machinations are, even in this case where he's trying he's trying to make this dissension right between bustery goor in this case, I don't know if he'll follow through on and I don't know if he just did that because he wants to be liked. He wants

to sound reasonable more so than he is. So you can really distinguish between what Kavanaugh does, which is always kind of dumb, but also media facing and whatever versus again what we've seen from Barrett so far, which is to be smart, to be thoughtful, to be probative, but then be hind closed doors, just do the Republican bidding. So people have to see about that. Obviously, the smartest justice on the court right now is is Katanji Brown Jackson. Whoo.

She just she comes out swinging hard, taking no prisoners. She has been and I've said this before, Molly, but like I'm I'm a grown as man, right, I'm a forty four year old man. I don't need I'm beyond the stage where I'm like, I hope that Disney character looks like me, because i feel like I'm beyond that right right, right, Katanji Brown Jackson is like me being a twelve year old and seeing a black princess and being like, maybe I could be a princess someday. Like

she's that level of affirming. It's not just what she says, but how she says it. The way she attacks an argument, it's exactly the way that I think. It's exactly what I think should be done. And to hear it for the first time in my life coming from a Supreme Court justice, it's just been so affirming and wonderful to to listen to her in these arguments. She gotta lose. I mean, she lose right because the votes. Yeah, it sucks that you have these three pretty incredible liberal justices

and then you have like the drunken beer guy. But like it's not I mean, can you imagine like that the women have killed themselves to get there. But lawmakers have added a provision in the National to the National Defense Authorization Acts. This is I'm reading a tweet from Jane Mayer protecting Supreme Court spouses from having to reveal any outside employer in the name of security. If it passes, Jenny Thomas's professional entanglements would effectively be state secrets. YEP,

that sounds on brand for Republicans and Republicans. But it also sounds like the kind of thing Joe Mansion would be for, right, because like when you go too far into there is a desire on the behalf of corrupt politicians for us to not know who's paying for them. Right, Like it's in Nascar, they at least have the dignity to emblazon who bought them on their cars and on their shirts, right, But in American politics, they don't even

have that level of dignity, right. They they don't want us to know who is funding them because they don't want us to know who actually controls their votes. And so hiding the spouses it's not security issue, nobody's nobody's threatening Jenny Thomas's right wing crazy conspiracy Q and on employers. It's not a real thing, right. They're doing it so

they can hide what these people do. I remember, these people are spouses, are you know, like Jenny Thomas, A lot of the Supreme Court justices have spouses who were public figures before their spouses ascended to the Supreme Court. Unlike Jenny Thomas, they pulled back from public life to

avoid the appearance of impropriety. But John Roberts's wife, for instance, Jane Sullivan was a fierce forced birth lawyer who ran forced birth organizations and pushed rel Leslie the legal theories that would eventually be used to overturn Roe v. Wade for her whole life until Roberts to send it to the Supreme Court. Right, super interesting, Thank you so much, Ellie, super interesting. I hope you will come back absolutely, Molly. You guys, you guys have a nice one. You're the best.

Thank you. Jason Selvig and dav Rom Stifler are a comedic duo known as The Good Liars. Welcome Too Fast Politics, The Good Liars, Thanks for having us, Thanks for having us here. Jason, Hey, how's it going make your voice sound distinctive? I can do it, am impression and yes, good do Advram oppression. Now I'm not gonna do that to da Vrom say hi to us so we can people can Hello everyone, This is Davrom here. Jason was a pretty good impression of me. A little it's on

the offensive side, but uh, pretty good. Good enough that my my Syria on my phone picks him up and thinks it's me O. Hey SERI, oh wow, my series not going off, So that was a mistake on my part. Uh, get what you deserve. So anyway, welcome to Fast Politics. I wanted to have you guys on the podcast to talk about all of the stuff that you guys do that is pretty hilarious. I mean, I don't know where we start here. I guess you should start by telling

people how you two found each other. Sure, yeah, de Vron and I were friends in the city through the comedy scene for years and years, and we didn't like do a lot of comedy together. We mostly were friends from playing basketball together. We would go play pick up

games in the city. And then around the time of Occupy Wall Street, we did one video together, a comedy video where we acted like we were investment bankers that were down there protesting the protesters, and we called ourselves Occupy Occupy Wall Street, and we thought we were kind of you know, we thought it was pretty obvious that we were joking, and we were saying ridiculous things like if you guys keep protesting, we're gonna have to give up our house in the Hampton's and uh, quit our

cocaine addiction. And we thought it was a pretty obvious joke. But people thought we were real, and the news reported on us like we were real, and real investment bankers came and joined us in the protests. Yeah. Eventually we

we had like we had a website. We were selling cuff links for like three hundred bucks, just like I said, one percent on them, be part of the one percent, and by these like everything was supposed to be a joke was taken seriously, and then real bankers joined us and we're saying all this that crazy stuff we were saying along with us. It was like this out of body experience where like we thought we were, you know, doing caricatures of people, and now here they are joining us.

It's interesting because we had New York Times pitch on this podcast and he said that he used to comment on this conservative blog as a way of trolling them, and they thought he was serious. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the same deal where it was like the more ridiculous we would get, the more people would be like nodding

and saying yes. And it was kind of at that point where we realized that like both of us, I feel comfortable, you know, for better or worse, doing these things in public and doing ridiculous things in public and from there, we kind of were like going. We ended up doing a movie on the election where we kind of got into the world of pranking politicians, and it's kind of evolved along the way. But it's all in

the real world. We're putting ourselves in, you know, kind of tricky situation sometimes, but all all for the sake of comedy. I mean, do you guys have anxiety about doing these things? I mean, I don't have any anxiety about public speaking, but I think this might freak me out a little bit. I think yes is the answer to some degree. But we have gotten used to it. Like there is as crazy as some of these situations are,

there's like a routine to it. Like we go somewhere, we stay in a shitty hotel, we write our little notes about what we want to say, we show up like it is kind of tense, but because we've done it enough, there's like a little bit of a routine to fall back on. In a weird way. But I think some of the craziness of the situations, you know, doesn't go away over time because there's like a certain amount of danger and and it will always be new when you're dealing with real people. So yes, yes and no.

I guess. You know what's funny because I'm thinking about we had this incredible activist on this podcast, crackhead Barney. Oh yeah, yeah yeah, oh yeah yeah yeah, it's great. I said, like, did you ever feel like actually scared? Was there any place where we've ever felt scared? She got arrested once, right, she could put in a mental institution once. That would be scared. I would be scary for me. Yeah, hard, yes, hard, yes, I guess would

be her answer. What is Belleview still? Does that still exist? No? I mean, guess where was the scariest place She said she'd ever been? Troup Rally, Staten Island. That is a scary place, you know, scary. So so what do you guys? I mean, where have you felt really like we're going to get murdered? January six was scary? That was That was That was like the thing that the event that we went to that where it definitely took a toll on at least my mental state. I tell us a

little bit about that experience. We got there like the day before and it was we were staying in this hotel and people were up all night playing like military pump up music, and so that was like all night the night before, so it just definitely felt like something,

something was coming. Jason interrupted a little, but I just felt like we should mention that the January that was almost as crazy, like Alex Jones and Roger Stone and Ali Alexander and all those people spoke to night before people went to that and we're just like partying and it was that was the night before was we got there on the fifth and we did some interviews and talked to some people, and then we went back to the hotel or checked in the hotel, and I remember,

and we then walked to the Alex Jones Roger Stone speaking thing and there were people like Proud Boys or I don't even know who, militia members in bull profess and military gear all around the city that like had a perimeter, that were on radios talking to other people. They like basically like owned the city at that point, owned d C. They like they they were the uh quote unquote police presence there or whatever you want to

call it, their their own military presence. And then we got to the Alex Jones event and he was speaking and it was like the closest thing I can imagine what it would be like to see Hitler speech speak at in Germany in the nineteen thirties. Just the way he was speaking. I think we have a video of it somewhere where he's speaking and just screaming and pounding the podium and talking about how it's a war. Yeah,

it's like indistinguishable. He's throwing his fist up and he's like yelling, and he's pounding the podium like in rhythm as he's speaking, and it's like it's not well lit. I don't think they were expecting, you know, as many people as they got there, it didn't feel like it was very organized, like the chaos was like brewing. For sure, it was a very unsettling night. Everything was closed, We

couldn't get dinner anywhere. Everything was boarded up. I think people were thinking something really bad was going to happen the next day, and then they were right to think that. But then the next morning we went out and we talked to people, and just everyone that we spoke to. You know, Davram has this amazing interview where he talks to a guy who's saying he's going to die in his boots for Donald Trump. Like everyone was speaking like this was an injustice and it was going to be

right that very day. This was seventeen seventy six, two point Oh, we're going to take this thing over. And that's exactly what they tried to do. And it when the we wanted to get out of town. Before we started, we started to feel like some some like as Trump was about to be finished speaking, We're like, this is probably the time to leave. And then um, we were driving along whatever whatever it is constitution is that right, trying to leave and we saw like this mob of people.

So in the time that we had gotten our car and started to head out of town, Trump had said we're going to the capital, and so we're like leaving town, checking Twitter, like no way. He actually told them to go there, and he did, and we pulled over and like, well, whatever is about to happen, let's at least just not miss it. And then within like five minutes they had broken through the you know, the barricades and yeah, there

were flashbanks. Yeah. That was the thing that stuck with me was you were seeing these cops like just like getting the hell beat out of them by by these people, and we were, you know, we were by the steps in the in the back where they broke through, and you're just seeing these just getting hit in the face with flags, flag balls, I should say. And it was I thought that the police, like, for the most part, I acted completely heroically and they were just like getting

beat up. But I thought at some point one of them was going to pull out a gun and like shoot, because I don't know what I would do in that situation if I was getting beat up and people were gonna were trying to get in there to potentially kill

members of Congress or the vice president. So whenever a flashband went off, my first instinct was, oh, bullets are gonna fly, and I like could get shot right now, and it's probably you know better that you know, people didn't get shot with it, you know, one obvious exception, but that really stuck with me where I would like go try to go to sleep at night, and then I would be like kind of had like PTSD for

a little bit. From that, I was I was standing next to the police officer trying to call he was trying to call for back up, and it was in tears because I think as far as anyone knew, it was like many many, many people were dying in there. At that moment, nobody, you know, we didn't have the benefit of any time having passed and watching on TV and getting any reporting. It was like, oh my god,

is this happening right now? And then of course someone saw our microphone and said we were part of the fake news and kind of like chased us out of there a little bit, and I think at that point we were happy to leave. Yeah, there was. It was like a group of like twelve guys that like circled around us and said that we were part of the

fake news media. And then a flashband went off and everybody turned around and we were like, all right, that's our que let's let's let's make our way to the exit of Washington, d C. Now we do not want to be here for this. And oddly enough, like it was like some people were unaware anything was going on to like a block away. Someone's just like on a run with their dog, the same thing they do every day. Like at that time, it was like if you weren't in that like block or two radius, like life was

just happening ordinarily, it was really eerie. That is really quite interesting, So tell me what else have you done? That's been weird and strange and interesting. Well every Trump rally we go to is is weird and strange and interesting. I think you could you could say all those words. Not the actual rallies, not go in any We don't go in. If you see there, goes on forever and ever. I mean just endless. We usually get out of there before he even speaks. And yeah, because it's just it's

just not worth it. He really is boring, and it's just if you've seen one, you've you've seen them all. In the last couple years, we were filming in Georgia with herschel Walker and that was interesting. We were in Kentucky and we just saw a bunch of people wearing shirts matching shirts, and we thought, is this some sort

of like Pyramids game or something. And we walked into this this big auditorium and it was it was like ten am, and they were all chanting along and singing along about some sort of like ionized water or something. We never put a video out about to Ketones, so I apologize that somebody a listener is a member, but you can end up in the weirdest places on these trips. It was like like it felt like a rave and it was ten am and we were the only ones

not in these T shirts. The thing I'm always amazed by, like when you are sort of going around places, is

that there's really strange stuff you can wander into. You know, it's it's really just putting ourselves in this situation and going out there, and the strangest place you can wander into our Some of these people's minds though, probably like seven out of ten people we stopped and talked to, granted it's a self selecting group of Republicans at a Trump rally, it's you know, it's going to be some of the people that are more out there, but it's like seven out of ten people are going to say

something like that is wild, like really wild stuff. It's an actor wearing a mask. We've each heard that like enough times at oh yeah yeah. One woman we talked to said it was it was Jim Carey actually playing him, and we were like, Jim Carreck and we were like, because Biden tripped going up the stairs and it was so funny that only a genius comedic actor like Jim Carey could have been doing that. So wait, so if Biden is Jim Carrey. Are they happy with that or Now?

That's the thing I can never really understand. One interview stands out to me. It was somebody at Sea Pack, I guess outside Sea Pack, they weren't inside the convention. I was talking to him and he was saying that Joe Biden isn't Joe Biden, it's an actor. Trump is actually still the president. And then I said, well, are you mad at Trump because of the high gas prices? And he said no, I'm not. And I'm like, well, whose fault is that? And he said Joe Biden. And

I was like, wait a second. You just said Joe Biden is not the president and it's it made sense to him. It doesn't. It still doesn't make sense to me. But he was still blaming Joe Biden even though he doesn't think he's president. I think the thing they think makes sense to enough sense to them is that there is a bigger plan. They're not concerned with the details, but it's just important to let everyone know that, like

nothing is as it seems. And once you believe that, then you're you just need to trust and follow the plan and the details become like not important. I mean, you've interviewed the guy who thinks he's jfk Jr. Vincent Fusca. That guy doesn't look anything like jfk j even a little. He's way too tall and handsome, exactly for those extremely online. The guy who the Q and On people think is jfk Jr. Is not, is like it looks like he's

a bad twenty years older and five inches shorter. Yes, yeah, And and he's actually like some sort of financial consultant that has like lived in Pittsburgh for thirty years. Like there's no public records that tell you this is who he is. That he's got kids. I think I think I forget someone we're in into said there, you know, some sibling went to school with his kids. Like this guy is just not jfk Jr. Not even a little No. But I think he's like happy to go along with it,

Like he's got this the weirdest kind of fame. People stop him to take pictures. He's now like, you know, he's got a special spot, you know, somewhere behind Trump at a lot of these things. So I think he's just rolls with it and doesn't really answer any questions. But just like one more piece of weird shrapnel in all of this stuff that is going on. Is that now there's a little famous h JFK Jr. Walking around? What about the guy who wears the brick wall suit? Jason, Oh, yeah,

I just interviewed him. Yeah, I just you know, I don't know. It was interesting because he was saying, by the way, for those who are not incredibly online, this is the guy who goes to all of Trump's rallies and wears a suit that looks like a brick wall. Hey, so he's the build the Wall guy. He's the build the wall guy. But he was the guy I talked to. He was very clear. He's like, I just want to

be clear. There's two of us, two of us, and I might not be the guy you're thinking I'm at all the rallies, but I don't know if I might might be thinking of the other build the Wall guy. But I do want to disagree with what you guys were saying, because I actually do believe that Vincent Fusca is JFK Jr. You want that on the record, Yes, I want that on the record. This Vincent Fusco looks like he's significantly older than JFK would be junior if

he were still alive. It's almost like that's not him, but you could, Jason, that's what they want you to believe. He doesn't hive at all. No, it's very it's very, very weird. Back to the wall guy, Jason talked to him for kind of a long time and got him on a kind of you know, our biggest problem is China thing, and they went on that for a while.

And meanwhile, the the tag of the guy's suit is just sticking out on, you know, out of the back of his neck, and you know, Jason asks to see the tag and the suits made in China case anybody wanted to know out there to build the walls, but suit when you ask them about that, what do they say? He was like, oh, yeah, yeah, it's hard to get anything else from another place, so I had to get it from China. It's just like, you know, you could

spout out for a million years. And we've had that a couple of times where people would talk about China how much they hate it, and then do you like be like, can I see your hat and it's made in China. You know, it's just like it's a I don't want to say the jokes right themselves sometimes, but it's and I think one guy, he had all these flyers. He was like COVID as China's fault. You know, it's terrible. He thought it was the worst and came from China

and we needed to be holding China accountable. That was his whole stick. He had like a table with fires. He was handing him out. He was talking to people and made in China hat. Oh yeah, it's amazing. Thank you guys so much. I hope you'll come back. Oh yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, anytime. Nilai Patau is the editor and cheat of The Verge and host of the podcast Decoder. Welcome, Too Fast Politics. We're so excited to

have you. We are in this weird where it's the it's the Twitter files, right, we got to talk about the Twitter files. You are the editor of a tech publication. You have spent a long time in tech journalism. What the funk is happening? Yeah? I have sent a lot of time in tech Journalist and the versions published a lot of stories content moderation. Over the years. We've been nominated like major journalism awards for big expos as content mode ration really works. These companies. I have a lot

of sympathy for a good content moderation story. It is a very complicated thing that big companies do. And every time you peel back the layers of the onion, you're like at the center of it. There's just like a couple of people who are like, I don't know, take it down right, like and like you build up all of these processes to try and make it fair to like let everybody sleep at night, and then kind of at the end of the day it's we don't have

a rule, but it sucks. Take it down right, And you just see this over and over again and kind of the furthest version of this, the most like built up version. This is like Facebook literally set up a supreme court. They have an oversight ward that is composed of famous lawyers and politicians that is a supreme court for them because they don't want the responsibility. So that's just the stage. I just want to put that out there, like, this is a very hard thing that social media companies

has to do. There are lots and lots of pressures placed on them to take all kinds of things down. For some reasons are really good, right, Like some content is illegal. Some content is like really damaging the teenage girls. Some content is just like openly racist. Some content they're advertisers would pay all their bills, don't like like some content government just don't want to have existed. So they face all these pressures and the goal in these systems.

What's hilarious about the Twitter files, Like what they are exposing is a bunch of like diligent nerds doing bording stuff right. Right, It's like they haven't exposed like the Twitter would happily have told you all of the things right and they did, right. I mean, it's in the terms of service. It's well, it's not even in the terms of service, like Twitter has been very open. Jack Dorsey isn't very open. We made the wrong decision with

the Hunter Biden New York Post story. They changed their mind, like you know, they like started allowing the list of up. I think you have to recall that in the moment that story was published, no one knew the providence of that information, no one knew where it had come from, and there had been in the past. Yeah, like these hacken week operations beyond wiki leaks like I Cloud mccrowen leaks mccrollan leaks, if you will, recall a bunch of famous women had their eye cloud accounts act and their

nudes leaked. Like that's the real thing that has happened in the past. Sony had its email systems breached, and the president's emy, Pascal Head her emails leaked all over the place, including like a very intimate shopping list on Amazon. Right. Yeah, but that's because they got North Koreans really really mad.

It's true. But so all of these platforms like developed these policies that are like, you know what, like we're complicit in this thing, and like we're complicit in someone hacks your system and says pay us the ransom and bitcoin, or like leak all your emails. We don't want to be complicit. It's like they developed all these sort of like hair trigger shut it down systems. I got in that context, overheated, overdone, and then they changed your mind,

and it's like, yeah, okay, that sucks. You made their own decision, But they weren't. None of those executives are running around saying this was the right decision. They all admit it was wrong decision. And so I think what you're seeing with the Twitter files, particularly a second set where it's like some people on Twitter had their reach suppressed. It's like, yeah, dude, like they they say it out loud like they were they were not unclear about what

they were trying to do. They're trying to make the platform or pleasant. It's just it is being presented as though it is this ongoing scandal. Is things are revealed, and I think what everyone is going to come to learn, what we have come to learn doing hundreds of content moderation stories over the years, is once you fall all the way down the rabbit hole of talking on content moderation, but people just tune out, it's just boring. Yeah, I mean,

I think that's right. What I think is pretty interesting about Elon's Twitter purchase is that we've seen him he's like literally living out loud, like he's doing everything that Twitter has done. Right. He went back and you know, he said, we're going to just let everyone get verified. Okay, no, we're not going to do that. We're gonna do no content moderation. Oh well, we're not going to do that. I mean, it does seem like he gets to the

same place that Twitter is anyway. Yeah, so I just talked to Matt mollen White, who's the CEO of Coming called Automatic. They're the holding company that owns WordPress. They also owned Tumbler. He's the CEO of Tumbler as well. And you know, they bought Tumbler from Verizon for like nothing, for like three million dollars. And it was like, he said to me, this has been the most humbling experience

of my career owning a social network. Like we bought it for nothing, Like we bought it for the smallest amount of money that anybody would feel good about. It was losing money and has all these users Tumblings famous content moderation problems kicked off the app store already. And he's like, our roadmap is basically Twitter short map. We want to reduce our reliance on advertising income. We want to build some subscriptions when you created all the stuff

that he wants is he wants to do. And he's like, Ellen is quickly going to get to the place where he already was, because once you start going down the road, you could be as libertarian about speech as you want, but there is all this stuff that is horrible that drives away your users, that drives away your advertisers, that limits your ability to grow, that makes you feel bad about being the CEO of a social network that you're gonna want to just not have the example he gave,

I think this is like impossible to argue with. There is a community of people out there who are pro anorexia, and they run around telling people to be interacting, specifically young women, and like, you should just not surface that content, You should not give that content reach. You should not feel good about running a service where that content is

allowed to proliferate. And at some point, no matter who you are, what your beliefs, you're just going to run into the reality of millions of people are using my service. They're chaotic, they cannot be controlled, and I have to make some decisions about what will happen here or or

what I won't allow. And it is not for nothing that every major social network in this country more or less arrives at the exact same position around content moderation, because that's just the reality of the constraints if you want to grow your business. So now, this very white thing I thought was interesting. They were so breathless, like you know, they're like and then every reveal I mean and you saw it with that to do that, every reveal was like and then they said, I mean like

there was no smoking gun yet, right. Yeah. My favorite part of the very tweet storm, I'm pretty sure it was hers, was she was like a secret committee composed of Jack Dorsey, the CEO, the head of trust and safety, the company's lewner And it's like, yeah, that's the top of the company. That's the that's the company, like the C suite, right, Yeah, that's the c suite of the company.

Like you're saying that problems with like tricky problems in content moderation were escalated to a committee at the top of the company that then made a decision and they were somewhat unaccountable. Like have you ever worked at a company? Didn't you work at The New York Times, like one of the most famously hierarchical and political media companies. Okay,

I don't. Like, there's just an element of people reacting to the world as it is as though it's a scandal, which is built into all of this, and I think that's fine. You know, like I was once a teenager who reacted to the state of the world as though it was an ongoing scandal, right, I just don't think you're going to get a lot of traction with you know, the sort of mainstream consumer of Twitter. By saying did you know that the CEO of Twitter often makes capricious decisions?

It's like, yeah, that's been that is the experience of these Your Twitter has been for a decade. Did you know Mark Zuckerberg is very powerful? Yeah? Great? Do you think that Ellen will just keep going and keep doing these? I mean, they get attention from a certain group, They don't necessarily move the needle. They do seem to be

getting more and more boring. The endgame here? Again, I have heard from people, and again I don't believe this, but I've heard that Ellen's goal is to drive down the value of the company so he doesn't have to service the debt. I don't know how he could do that, because I think the distressed investors, the investors who are good at getting money for people who buy stuff that they can't afford. In this case, he can't afford it, but he doesn't want to pay for it. I don't

think they're going to let him do that. But do you does that look like the end game to you here? Or do you think he's just like having fun. I think mostly he's having fun. I don't think the endgame is the failure. And Ellen is a risk taker. I think he enjoys the gamble. And you know that people who surrounds himself with their metaphors for everything or like high stakes poker. Fine. I actually applaud the idea that you should take immense risks with the products that you make.

I think that's cool. I think there's like an element that it's fun. I don't think his goal is failures. You can get out of financial obligation, and certainly there are reports this week that some of the banks are willing to accept testless stock and revalue the loans, and

we'll see there's just some financial engineering here. I do think there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley, a lot of investors who are like, all of these companies are too bloated, and this is like the first time we're ever going to run an experiment like this where we just destroy a company's culture and rip out all of the fluff indiscriminately and see what happens. Like what if Meta could be fifty of its size and still operate like that company would just produce profits like massive

profits would have. Google could be half the size of itself and still be Google. That company would just print money because it wouldn't be paying for all this stuff that you know a lot of people in the valley think or is meaningless or useless. And Twitter is much smaller than those companies. I remind everybody all the time when you talk about big tech, it is in error a category air to say Twitter is part of big tech.

Twitter is teeny tiny. He fired fifty percent of the people and he still on me has two thousands some people. It's like nothing. Twitter in a year makes less money

than Facebook. Facebook makes a right. So this is a tiny company, but it is the first and only time and experiment like this has been run where you just gut the company, you reset the culture, you get rid of all the institutional knowledge that most smart business experts would tell you it was important to sustain a company, and you see what happens, and thus far the experiment has been working out right, at least on one level. I experience all kinds of weird errors and Twitter left

and right. I feel personally less motivated to tweet, to make content for free, for the service but but it's still up, it's still working, it's it's surviving the World Cup. So I think there's just an element of just experimentation. Like I think everyone's curious, and I think because of the people involved, they want to go and they wanted to succeed, so they can go out to the other companies are invested in, or the other companies they were on and say, you know what, what if we just

delete it? That's just sort of fascinating and a little bit dystopian. I always thought of Twitter are as the people worked at Twitter were always sort of the most kind of upstanding, in the least evil, you know, they were earnest in a way. So I see what you're saying, but it's very depressing, and that earnest this is probably

why Twitter was like a bad company. Criticizing Elon's administration, Twitter is in no way praise for the previous administration or the administration before that, Like this has not been a well run company. Often the earnestness that you describe, or the sincerity, and I certainly have experienced that sincerity fully got in Twitter's way when it came to being a well run company with a path forward to be

successful and actually ellen buying the company. One person showing up and being like, yeah, I'll just buy the whole thing, like doesn't usually happen, right, And a board of directors does not usually look at an offer like this and be like, you know what, we have no fucking plan

to get to evaluation of forty four billion dollars. There's nothing we can do, and this guy sucks and there's no one else screw it, Like, let's take the cash and walk, which is the decision the board of Rector's Twitter made, And that to me is as damning as anything. They had no ideas for how to get to this valuation.

So yes, it's true as a company, as a culture, as individuals, very earnest, very sincere right, but not earnest enough not to cash out, right, They weren't, like, my principles are worth more than that this moron who's overpaying. I mean he's not a moron, obviously, but you know what I mean, he's overpaying for the privilege of taking over. Yeah, and maybe he'll crash the car off the cliff and

maybe he won't. But like Twitter was successful despite itself, it was successful because it attracted so many users, but it was not successful as a business. I say, you will let Meta and metas like the comparison here, because it's the other large social networking company. Mark Zuckerberg has conviction, right, and like he's the god emperor of that company. You can't get rid of him, and it's going to do

whatever he wants. And He's key is clear that like what he wants is for all of us to like put our brains in vats and live in the metaverse. I'm like, fine, he's gonna try to do it. Twitter had no conviction, right, It had no center. It was just it continued to exist to spite itself. And I think that to me is it is is damning of the administration of Twitter, the previous administration, as it is damning of Musk, Who's like, screw it. I'm gonna throw

it all off the cliff, including the good parts. I'm not even to evaluate the parts of this that we're working. I'm just saying, screw it. Now. It's a payment set that's delightfully dystopian. We need to talk about the c g I chatbot that's going to destroy all of our careers and replace us. Are we going to be replaced by c g I, chat bots, GPTs. What you're talking about, yes, gbs whatever many initials put together. Our cameras are off what I could personally use some c g I. So

maybe that's pretty good. Yeah, I think is really fascinating. Will you explain to my dad what it is? Sure if you took a robot and you said, I want you to read the entire Internet, and then you said, now, what you are is the world's fanciest Microsoft word autocomplete system, and I'm gonna ask you a question, and You're just gonna guess what the next word of the sentence should be in response to that question. And that's really what

it's doing. It's not alive, it's not thinking. It just has a map of all of the language on the Internet and the probability that some words come after another in response to prompts, and so it's just it's just a really really fancy auto complete and obviously very impressive autocomplete and in some cases deeply hilarious autocomplete. But it's autocomplete, and so there's limits to it, right, and there's limits that are imposed by the people who make it. Open

eye it won't it won't answer some questions. It will happily tell you it's not a search engine all the time. But then there are things, uh. And this is like a great phrase that our reporter James Vincent, who covers AI for the Vergi, told me that there's amazing phrase. It's called the capability overhang, which is you invent a system like this. The AI researchers and developers they can't.

They're not as creative as the whole internet. So then you give it to the whole internet and you start discovering all the stuff that you had no idea could do. And then you were like off on the cliff being like, well, we didn't think about that. Should we slow it down? And I think that's the that's the thing we're all experiencing right now. These models have existed for years. In fact, the core technology of chat GPT is what they made was a user interface for it. That's really fun, right,

They made it a chat bot. But Google has demoed this kind of technology for a long time. Microsoft has demoed it. I don't know if you recalled this, but a couple of months ago there's a Google engineer named Blake Lemoyne who was like Google's chat bot is alive. Be fired because Google is like, this thing is definitely

not alive, right, it's super not alive. There was. Actually Google had another controversy with a woman named timnet Gibreu was one of their ethics researchers, and she published a paper was about a concept called stochastic parents, which is fundamentally like, if you train about like this on the on the text of the Internet, it will just be

it will re flect the biases of the Internet at large. Right, It can only reflect to you what is on the Internet, and that means it will be sexist, it will be racist. But then people who talk to the robot will assume that the robot is more accurate than the Internet at large, right, so that you will ask it some question, it will deliver you from like racist or wrong answer, and it would be so confident that people will like assume that that is correct. And she got run out of Google

for this paper. So Google has like put this technology that they haven't in a box right there. Their version is called Lambda, and they kind of like kind of afraid to use it. And then this other company is like here you go, like, let's burned money like running GPS to do AI for people, And I think that's really fascinating, right, And I think we're just a moment where it's like very fabish and very fun. There are

some of these that are like hilarious. Like I saw one that's like, tell me why I shouldn't put a banana and a VCR, or it was peanut butter sandwich. It was like, tell me how to get a peanut butter sandow which out of the VCR in the style of the King James Bible. And that's actually, on its face like a hilarious improv prompt, right, And then the robot is like just spits out a Bible verse about

peanut butter sandwiches and VCRs Like that's great. I think like, who's going to really use it as a bunch of like mid level content marketers to be like, here's a blog about health insurance, right, and my fine, that's fine. But what it cannot do is come up with new ideas, right, because it is just an autocomplete. It's only guessing the next word in a sentence based on the words that already exist on the Internet, which means you can do

like meet things like pretend to write code. But if you are the sort of person who like makes new sentences, I think you're safe for now. Oh good, well, I'm glad to hear my job is safe. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope you will come back and talk to us as the world ends slowly. It's super fun. Thank you for having me on, Molly John Fast, Jesse Cannon. These republic in the night out in New York, they always lead to so much for our first there's

the proud Boys. Now that it's the I would have done the insurrection right speech. I did not see it coming. I'm sorry that was really bad. But Marjorie Taylor Green is of course going to be our moment of fucory today. New York Young Republican Club had their annual gala on Saturday night, where the group's president declared total war on perceived enemies. He said, we want to cross the rubicon. We want total war. Let me just tell you what's

not happening total war. Marjorie Taylor Green, the intellectual, the head of the intellectual dark Web of the GOP Congressional Caucus UM told the group, I will tell you something if Steve Bannon and I organized that she's talking about January six. We would have won, she said as an attend as the attendees erupted in cheers and a pause, not to mention it would have been armed. This was right after they gave her the Richard M. Nixon Award,

which is really really something. Yeah, you'd think Richard Nixon would want better, but we know that he would not. It's very on brand for the Richard Nixon Award, and for that they are our moment of glory. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to your the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.