Keith Olbermann, Douglas Rushkoff & Matt Fuller

we have the host of Countdown with Keith Olberman. It's Keith Oberman. Welcome to Fast Politics. Keith Oberman. Nice to be back. So you cannot tweet, No, I can tweet. This is part of the deterioration of the mechanical systems around loan scums control of Twitter. I have wanted to make a big deal about this because I don't want anybody to notice. But previously, if you're suspended for any length of time on Twitter, they shut down anything can

acted with you. I have two other accounts. I've been tweeting from them, and in point of fact, because the right wingers were so busy, you know, laughing at the Libs. Because I got suspended, and the other reporters did that, they kept retweeting the promos from my podcast. So last what was it Friday, we got more downloads than usual because the right wingers kept retweeting it from my dog account that I can tweet. I just can't tweet under my main account with the blue check mark. And it's

just who knows when it will come back. I dropped my appeal. It's sometimes it says you'll be restored in three days and twelve hours, and sometimes it says your account has been locked. The whole infrastructure mechanically of Twitter has also, in addition to the editorial end gone to hell in a handbast. What do you think the end

game here is. I really do think it's what it looks like, which is that Elon Musk is another one of these megalomaniacs, and this is about him satisfying himself that there is a pleasure that somebody like this can derive only from being Gulliver in Lilliput, where you know, he's seven feet tall and everybody else's is three quarters of an inch tall and they're all praying to him. I mean, that's that's what it's about. I mean, that's obviously what Trump is about at his core, and I

think that's what this is. I mean, you know, it's clear from the public record that he's his perceptions of reality are a little bit different than the average person to begin with, and then you throw in everything else that's going on, and I think this is really about

him enjoying this role. And you know, you can you can look into the other things, which is the people who are helping and finance this would like to end democracy, and it would be a good thing to do, would be to get rid of Twitter, since it's been pretty much a free forum for democracy. There are other things to it, but at heart, this is about Elon Musk's ego. So he just wants to be the main character and have like these all right people suck up to him.

If there were some way for it to be the same kind of response from liberals, he would have gone there first probably, or he'd go there as well. Or it was just just women, or is just left handers or just sports people, whoever it was. You see it in miniature throughout Twitter and every other social media platform.

I remember there was once thirty years ago there was a leftover chat room about my first MSNBC show, which somebody pointed out to me once, and it was it was thirty or forty people, almost all women, and the star there was a woman who claimed to have been my former girlfriend, and she was like the guru to these other people, and it was everything that she she spoke as if it were a unique development or something only she knew was publicly available from newspaper interviews, but

the other ones didn't know that, and she was the giant in the field. And then she pointed out something in there about how I supposedly threw out a car door while I was driving home and I got on this board and I said, you guys, do know I don't drive right? And she disappeared. And the whole psychology of people who have to be the star and have to boast and and will lie about anything or say anything or take any position to have people around them

to have worshippers. I mean, we're seeing this with the congressman who never was. It's the same, you know, it's the same story. It's what where where it all ties back to something being wrong emotionally with the person you're talking about. So do you think ultimately that he ends up sort of disappearing. I don't know something rooted back to the stalker. I mean, the stalker story is is legit. It's just not that just didn't have anything to do

with the with the airplane account. He just conflated the two things and was looking for people to blame. So I don't know. I don't know what this tells us about what he's going to do long term. I do think that that pole was was designed the poll should I leave Twitter or should I resign as the chief of Twitter? I think that was designed. People are saying, well, that that was his way out. I think it's the

other way around. I think it was a way for him to tell himself he should keep doing it because everybody loves him, and he didn't get that vote, and that's why he hadn't said anything about it, because he doesn't know what to say. I don't know how this ends.

I do think clearly he has driven the value of this into the ground, as he's done with Tesla, and I suspect the Tesla board will at some point take the company away from him, and then who knows, maybe he has more time to deal with Twitter, or maybe has to spend all his time fighting at TESLA and he pays no attention to Twitter. I mean, I really don't know what's next. So yesterday was this big hearing for January six. They suggested criminal charges to the d

o J. The d J has been working. We saw just in use Hit today that the DJ has been working with the January six committee since at least December five, sending over overseas all their information. That gives me the sense that justice is slowly winding its way over to Donald Trump. Do you think that's true or now? Boy?

I hope So I still have this PTSD from Mueller that I don't think any of us who have this are going to get rid of that easily because you know the construction that you would you would make in your mind if you were Garland and you were more concerned about protecting the structure and UH and UH conventions of the United States of America rather than actually preserving the United States of America, you would appoint a special counsel. So essentially you would reset the clock back to zero

on this. And there's a special counsel. So I will maintain that suspicion until I see indictments. But yeah, I mean that what what what I thought has been encouraging about the Special Counsel and Smith was that he's widened what he's been investigating. I mean, he went in there with essentially two assignments and he's now up to at least four different categories of Trump crime. So that to

me suggests perhaps that the wheels are moving. I mean, I thought obviously that that summary of the January six committees findings, although the headline was the referral, that was just basically the headline, that the important part where it was that those little dribs and drabs of evidence that came out in particularly the Hope Hicks text, which turned this from what did Trump do on January six to what did Trump do on January four, fifth and sixth,

which is now you know, for knowledge of guilt and awareness of conspiracy and all the rest of that. So yeah, I think I think this week has been productive towards finally getting this done. But I do say that with the reservation that if there are people in this government and in every other government, Republican or democratic, dating back a hundred years, who see their jobs primarily as preserving their jobs, and you know, if you can indict a

former president. Well that means you can indict the former attorney general or the former special counsel. And these are institutions that are self preserving. And you know, my business agent told me many years ago in television, when I told her that this one manager would stand up for me in a dispute with this other manager. She said, no, he won't. They're all managers. They're just stand up for each other. And that's my one word. Yeah, well that's depressing.

So you think it's still largely unlike I mean, there are all these other cases. I mean, how much crime can one person do? Right? Trump is is good at two things, operating without a lot of sleep and criming every moment of the day that he's not asleep. And I'm presuming he has dreams in which crimes come to him the way writers have great sentences come to them that spothered sleep. It's so interesting because you know, both

Ellen and Trump do not sleep enough. I mean, we don't know because Trump isn't tweeting, but it certainly seems like there's a fair amount of like people not sleeping. His social media sites still puts time stamps on his whatever they're called there and they and truths and they still the truth TM, the irony, they still some of them show to fifteen am. I don't criticize somebody on social media to fifteen am because I'm one of those

when I'm not suspended. But you know, the idea that you're on two fifteen and then seven fifteen and then three fifteen in the afternoon suggests, yes, lack of sleep. Well, I mean, I don't know where you begin, and becomes decreasingly relevant to try to psychoanalyze or simply diagnose whatever is wrong with Donald Trump. Realon must but but clearly in both cases their brains do not work in traditional fashion.

And whatever that means, you know, it would be useful, But it's kind of like it's it's kind of like who is the rightful czar of all the Rushes? Oh, that's fascinating. It doesn't really mean anything. It's interesting when you think about there's been so many bad people in the Republican Party and also in the Democratic Party over the years. But like, I feel like we are in a unique position in American life, are sort of media landscape is being terrorized by a couple of people who

see them like more unhinged in a weird away than usual. Well, you know, I wonder what the cause of that is. Um it could be accelerated by changes in society, including the Internet itself, which accelerated everything. And there were people get to that state earlier than once in the past might have. I mean, compare like a new to Gangridge. Like I think of NEWD Gangridge as the villain of right. But NEWD Gangridge did not occupy American life quite the

same way that Anilon Moscow or Donald Trump did. Well, he took time off. This is the other I mean seriously that the only thing I look at and and sometimes it marveled that with Trump was Yeah, a lot of his day is have been spent playing this most ridiculous of all sports. And I say, this is a sometimes sportscaster, but he's indefatigable, and new Gingridge is not indefatigable. New Gangridge liked to take those three week vacations. And would you know, you want him on for a controversy

on a Saturday or Sunday. Call my office on Monday afternoon when I'm in And you know the other thing is just history has tended in the past to pick off the Trump's and the Musk types because they couldn't. You couldn't. I mean, we didn't take protection of these people, or they didn't take their own protection seriously enough. But I mean people say, oh, this is this is unique in American history, and always I point to Huey Long.

I mean, hue the only reason Hue Long did not attempt to take over the United States in some sort of dictatorial fashion and get the opportunity to be in that position was that somebody shot him. I mean, this is bluntly that that arrangement. Today, were Hughie Long alive, whoever shot him, and it's presumed to have been this son in law of a judge that he gerrymandered, but who knows. You know, it's like seventeen people with guns in the in the room or in the hallway when

he got shot. Huie Long today would would have an entourage that would protect him from things like that. So you don't, you know, you don't knock these people off. Trump was not erased by somebody else's husband at some point in the last fifty years. Uh, he wasn't you know, putting a home somewhere when he was a kid, and so he's the one of the who knows five thousand, ten thousand, one million Americans of that particular disorder, whatever it is, the one who survived and got away with it.

That's probably It's probably nothing more significant than statistical chance amplified by changes in society. Now we are sort of about to enter this where we have a sort of a week off before the new Congress gets going, the Maga Congress. Is it going to just be Benghazi all the time? Yeah, And I wish the Democrats would play that game to ten percent of the levels that the Republicans do. In other words, here's this guy nobody's heard

of before. He's writing in the Hunter Biden Joe Biden laptop whatever, cell phone, whatever it is, that beeper Hunter Biden's beeper is being investigated. Comber of Kentucky, James Comer. In two thousand and fifteen, I think it was when

James Comber was running for the governor of Kentucky. His college girlfriend came forward with a series of pretty standard accusations of use when they were going out, and threats and violence, and Comber calling her mother and saying I'm going to kill your daughter and I'm the usual kind of stuff for people who wind up being Republican congressman. And because Comber lost in the primary in Kentucky, the

story just went away. I mean I spent a couple of weeks looking through newspaper archives for the resolution to this story, like I was disproved or he confessed, or he went to nothing. It just vanished from the newspapers in Kentucky. And every time I see James Comber's name mentioned, I put this story in the podcast, and I'm waiting for some Democrats somewhere to come and say, Okay, while you're doing that, we're going to reopen the investigation of

James Comber. If you're gonna play this game where the other team, the their team brings out baseball bats to hit your guys over the head, guess what, You're gonna need guys with baseball bats to hit them back. And it's brutal. But if you get enough of them and they realize that nothing that they do is going to occur without some metaphorical pain to their own personal lives, uh, they'll keep doing it. But if you if you convince

them of that, they will stop doing it. But until you know until until the Democrats stop rolling over for this and saying, well, we're not going to dirty our hands. When they go high, we go low stuff. When they go low, we get baseball bats. That should be the next you know, big Let's get Obama out there saying when they go low, we get baseball bats. I think that would solve this completely, because yes, that's entirely what

they want to do. They want to do Benghazi. The second chapter, that is, if they elect the Speaker of the House and if it turns out that only one of their new congressman is a complete fictitious character. Yeah, that guy is amazing, built in a lab somewhere. I mean, it's it's even for a Republican. That's pretty amazing to have have not one or two lives or amplifications or exaggerations,

but but quite literally a dozen. I mean is George Santos if that is your real name, you know who were It's marvelous And that one that's the one thing something the Republicans always trip themselves up with something like this, and there's all it's like, you know, who got we go back? You mentioned new Ingridge. That was the first political story I covered when I went to MSNBC in ninety seven. That was the first big thing, the impeachment of Clinton, who lost his job in that Gingrich did.

But the guy they brought in afterwards to be Speaker of the House was about to be voted in, and it turned out he'd had six extramarital affairs and he went out the window too. And stay to the term because the Republicans always leave the back door unlocked. Listen, man nud Gingridge ended up married to his seventeenth wife, and she became the ambassador to Holy See. So Mary, Mary, yes, you know that's hardly a happy ending. She won't even face tune him in their selfies, just her. Keith Olberman,

thank you so much for joining us. Matt Fuller is the Washington bureau chief at The Daily Beast. Welcome too fast Politics, Mad Fuller, Molly, thank you for having me. Congress. What the fund is happening over there? Go? That is the evergreen question you can You can ask that every day. That's what they ask you at NPR. Just tell us what the funk is going on? Yeah, exactly, a few issues.

You have a looming government shutdown. Now it seems like they will once again avert this right before Christmas, the plans to come up with a year long omnibus. In that omnibus, uh, it's sometimes known as a Christmas tree, in which people attach lots of ornaments right things bills like National Defense Aptation Act or Josh Holly wanted to ban TikTok from all government phones. All sorts of little ornaments can get hung up on this. By the way,

he got that right, that's exactly right. You know, I think that Democrats didn't feel strongly are strongly enough either way on this, and Josh Holly was able to force this through on the omnibus. It seems now the Omnibus has not passed and there's not bill text and all that, you know, those formalities. But this seems like it's going

to be a done deal. But you know, we should be careful because I've seen that plenty of times now too that you know, things fall apart pretty quickly when you're when you're dealing with trillions of dollars and the child tax credit, which is actually something that's useful and relevant,

that's out. Yeah, you know, this is a funny thing. Obviously, the child tax credit was immensely popular a big item helped a lot of people out of poverty, to write totally truly progressive pulse that actually helped people, that was extremely popular with parents, seems like a real winner, and when that disappeared, really, you know, Democrats would have obviously loved to have kept it around, but they didn't fight for it. And part of the reason they didn't fight

for it was all these inflation concerns. You could debate exactly how much inflationary effect a child tax credit has versus by the way, the you knows, as you noted the effects of lifting people out of poverty and making people's lives easier supportedly things that people who go to Congress they're trying to do every day right and make people's lives easier. Um, But yeah, it just was not the priority, I guess for Democrats. And you know, some of this is just this feeling of maybe the politics

of this aren't great for us. A lot of the feeling is just, hey, inflation really is out of control. We can't be just handing out money to people, and when voters are telling us that inflation is their number one concern. But yeah, that that that did go away without the fight. That probably a lot of Democrats wanted to have Yeah, it's sort of shocking to me, but

I guess they just felt too scared of inflation. Yeah, And and you know, again, a lot of this went away and was determined during the mid terms before the midterms ever happened. And the question was, you know, our Democrats really going to fight for the child tax credit, and half the country is saying inflation is might number one issue and you number one concern. That was the thing that really just had this real chilling effect I

think for democratic leadership. You know, there's obviously a lot of progressives who still feel very strongly about this, and and note you know, the very direct effects it has for families involved, and and also the idea that this is directly contributing to inflation may maybe flawed as well. That it's it's it certainly has some inflationary effect, but all economic policies have pluses and minuses, and you have to determine, based on your own values, what things you

you think matter the most. But given the political climate and the economic climate, it just wasn't a thing that Democrats really fought for. Now we should also we don't just blame democrats no Republican wanted to extend the Yeah, I'm shocked they didn't. Yeah, it really was a failure of both parties on this one. But um, if you are going to blame one party, you can definitely say Republicans absolutely did not want this. A lot of Democrats did, but they didn't want to fight for it enough. Talk

to me about this crazy RNC Committee chairmanship. What is happening over there? Well, you have basically two candidates, sort of a third. I'm going to force you to bring in the my pillow guy, Come on, yes, Mike Lindell, who is just gathering RNC delegates by the day. Ron McDaniel has run the RNC since I think seventeen. This would be her fourth term. It's really a race between

Ron McDaniel and Harmy Dylan. Obviously, yes, you have Mike Lindell and some other side characters here, but this doesn't neatly align because Trump has said I liked them Wolf right, Ron and McDaniels has definitely kept sort of close with Trump right and kept in line. She's not breaking from that so much. But har Meat, a former Trump lawyer,

trying to go after that really hardline vote. But also just trying to inflame uh this feeling of someone needs to be held accountable for the mid terms, right, and God, for a bit it be Trump. God forbid to be Trump, God forbid to be Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy. So who are they gonna blame? Well, it's the only women who's around the Republican So I think there's some legitimate concerns here from Republicans. Is they're saying, why didn't we

do enough on absentee voting? And where were we on trying to get people to do mail in voting? And why was our data operation wrong? And why do we think we were gonna have this huge red wave and we didn't? Those are I think legitimate questions. But then people also know, hey, fundraising was there, or get out the vote operation on on election Day was pretty good. I think it's more of a question of do you

want to move on from Trump? And neither of these you know, either Dylan or or mcdany really are are saying we should move on from Trump. In fact, I think her Meat's argument is quite the opposite. And obviously Mike Lindell is like, you know, the most all in pro Trump guy you could possibly find. So, um, I don't expect him really to siphon it. Maybe any votes from the hundred succeeding, although I think he told two of our reporters that he expected like a unanimous vote

or something. I don't want to report pick news, but um, that's not far off from the truth. But yeah, it's going to be an interesting race. There's it's the The other part of this is it's become very nasty. There's this long reply all thread where R and C members are are getting, you know, all the information about how much you know Ron McDaniels shipping off to this person, or how much Harmy Dylan took in from the RNC through Trump legal fees or whatever. So it's become very personal.

Some R and C members are being docked and you know this person is for this person, and they're putting names out. It's definitely a interesting race. I still expect Ron and McDaniel to survive, but it could go either way. And then there's another race we need to talk about. Tell me about Okay, only Kevin because Matt was taken. It is just like such a fitting, perfect acronym for for the only Kevin crew. Look, I don't think any of these only Kevin folks are really truly committed to

only Kevin McCarthy. And it's not you know, if you went up to any of them and the folks who are quote only Kevin, who are okay, are some of them the the most and I won't say water, but you know, the most center Republicans in the Republican Conference, right, Brian Fitzpatrick, David Joyce, John Cacko. These are the folks who definitely don't want to empower the hard right. Okay, So you have on one side you have the never Kevin folks, right, this is the Matt Gates and Matt

Rosendale and Andy Biggs and Bob Good Ralph Norman. So those there's at least five stated there, and they've said that they have some more in their pocket. Some have said it's up as much as twelve. If that's the case, then Kevin McCarthy is truly in trouble. If it's five, there's there's a path here. But basically, the only Kevin folks are saying, we're not gonna let five of the most conservative the House Freedom Caucus guys dictate who the speaker is or really who the speaker will not be.

So what we're going to do is say it's only Kevin. And this is kind of getting into this game theory side, because truly, like the never Kevin people, they can lay out a pretty convincing case why it should never be Kevin McCarthy. He's been tainted by the leadership. Um he's not going to oversee in an open process. And this is actually a big sticking point of the Freedom Caucuse, something that they actually were founded upon back when it

was a slightly different organization. But they wanted to open up the process, and there was only one open rule under the speakership of Paul Ryan. During the second speakership of Nancy Pelosi, there were no open rules. And open rule just means the ability of someone anyone, any member to offer an amendment on the floor get a vote on their amendment, and that that has gone by the wayside.

Basically the process and Congresses you either get it approved in committee, your amendment, or you go to the rules committee and leadership says, yeah, we can have a vote on that on the floor, And sometimes it's the case we can't vote on this amendment because it will pass right, they won't won't actually let it get a vote because they know it would it would get a majority of people. Uh. And sometimes that's smart because you know you have a

what's called a poison pill amendment. Basically there's a majority for the amendment, but then the remaining majority would vote on the bill don't want to vote on the bill

because now that they have this amendment in there. Right, So, constructing legislation is very difficult, and basically speakers over the last hundred years, but really specifically in like the last fifteen years have noted that if you close was down the process and you don't allow these amendments, um, it gets a lot easier to control the actual legislative product.

And you know the end the end result. Right. So you have a very few people who are actually making the policy, actually making the legislation, like two or three people, and it's not an actual body. So then never Kevin people actually have a point they say, hey, it's not going to get better if you elect Kevin McCarthy. In fact, it might just get worse. We know what Kevin McCarthy stands for in this way, and you know what we'd

actually vote for. Kevin McCarthy if he'd, if he'd give us these you know, say, three or four rule changes, the actually the whole list of them. But one of the big rule changes that they wanted was the ability to say, oh, if we get ten percent of the Republican Conference to say we want to vote on this amendment, we would get an amendment vote on the floor. That has been you know, it's a total non starter for

Kevin McCarthy. That amendment will make it impossible to speaker, and that amendment wouldn't I would say, it would make it really difficult for the House to pass bills, which is already already gonna be very difficult, and particularly in a narrow majority. So McCarthy is looking at this and saying, you're gonna just gonna make my job harder. The other rule change they want is to bring back the motion of a k which is just the ability to ditch the speaker right any member to get a vote on

emotion of a kate. You know, that's the case than Kevin McCarthy's position is even more precarious. So McCarthy saying, I'm not going to do that. If you want to vote me down, vote me down, you'll have to take the heat. So these five members are stepping up and saying, great, we'll take the heat. We don't care, We'll we'll do that. We're happy, We're happy to take the heat. And then you have these only Kevin folks who are saying, I'm not prepared to just hand over the House majority to

Andy Biggs. Okay, I'm going to say I will only vote for Kevin McCarthy. He's the only person who I will vote for. Otherwise you're gonna end up with some like Democrat. Right. I don't exactly believe this, and I you know, I think the Freedom Caucus folks don't exactly believe this. But the interesting thing is, no one's really making the affirmative case for Kevin McCarthy. No one like David Joyce isn't going up there and going Kevin McCarthy will just be the best speaker. He'd just be so

good at it. You know. It's more, well, I don't want to empower these folks, right, So it's become this very involved game theory issue. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. Typically, the folks who are the hardline conservatives, they don't bend right. It's usually the monitor to do give in. But the funny thing is you're right on the cusp. But the Republicans have

two two votes, Democrats have two hundred and twelve. They did have two hundred thirteen and then Congressman Don mckitchen died. So if they lose five votes, it's tied at to seventeen to seventeen. If one of those people on the on the five that I will not vote for Kevin McCarthy vote present, and they've you know, four of them have been pretty emphatic that they're not going to do that, but one of them has been a little shaky on it.

If one of them votes present, that would lower the threshold to to seventeen, and at that point McCarthy actually would be able to get it with a two event teen I think to seventeen to sixteen in that scenario. Anyway, the math here is very tight. And if it's five people, there's a path forward. One person, could you know, negotiate a great committee assignment or something. If it's twelve people, very difficult for Kevin McCarthy, and we're certainly looking at

difficult territory for him come January three. Well, that's kind of fun. That was extremely long, no no, I listen, hilarious and also fascinating. So but you don't think there's a unity ticket, huh. I think that's pretty far fetched. It would be difficult to imagine one coming together quickly.

Now that there's a scenario when you know they truly are deadlocked and we're in this sort of no man's land of the houses recessing and Republicans can't even take the majority yet because they don't have the speaker, and you don't have you don't have the ability to enact rules or anything. And that scenario, yeah, there's probably someone that Democrats would least a few Democrats would vote for, and at least they say the majority Republicans would vote for.

There's a path to that sort of person, But that's really difficult for me to imagine. I still think Kevin

McCarthy is the the odds on favorite here. The Freedom Caucus guys are sort of figuring that, all right, we'll just block Kevin McCarthy and then chaos will ensue and Steve's gleez will start running for a speaker and Patrick McHenry will start running for speaker, and maybe Andy Biggs is somehow in the mix, like they don't exactly have a plan on who is going to be the person They just right now are saying it's not gonna be Kevin McCarthy. He hasn't negotiated with us on the rule

changes we want. We have this power and we're not going to see it until he gives in in some way, and McCarthy is saying right now, I'm not gonna do that, And both sides are gonna sort of see what happens on January three and go from there. Great, it's Christmas miracle. Thank you so much, Matt Fooler. I hope you'll come back all right, thank you. I know you, our dear listeners are very busy and you don't have time to sort through the hundreds of pieces of pundentry each week.

This is why every week I put together a newsletter of my five favorite articles on politics. If you enjoy the podcast, you will love having this in your inbox every Friday. So sign up at Fast politics pod dot com and click the tab to join our mailing list. That's fast politics pod dot com. Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Survival of the richest. A fund read and

excellent gift for the holidays. Welcome Doug Rushcoff to Fast Politics. Yea, yeah, we're talking about the end of this particular weird, big tech news cycle. Is that fair or the beginning of a new one? Yeah? I think it's certainly the end of a cycle. Let's say, uh, the cycle that they again after the dot com boom and bust, the cycle that began maybe in two thousand one, because like a twenty year cycle has come to its close, that all the the startup mania hype, you know, VC driven internet

may be done. I feel like, and I say this as someone who was married to a VC, we learned this year the most vcs are not not so great. They're not I mean, and it's it's weird. It's like, I feel like what happened was in some ways it was great that the crypto thing, the crypto thing kind of went meta on tech investing. It was like, we were investing in tech companies and now it's like, well, just invest in the idea of a tech company. Let's

go meta on this meta thing. And it was as if it cycled the same thing, the whole kind of Internet boom and bust. It cycled it in just like two or three years, and we got to witness it so firsthand that it was like, oh, I get it. This stuff is fake and all that stuff is fake too, you know, so the whole thing is crumbling. I'm gonna be Devil's advocate to you here, which is to say, crypto has many times gone to nearly zero and come back. What makes this time different. It's that it exposed the

rest of the system. I mean, blockchain is still a totally cool thing, right, it's a totally cool thing. It's it's as cool as a map. It's just not the territory. So blockchain and decentralized technologies and all that they are really cool. To use this stuff to simulate a power grid or a weather system or an economy and to play. It's just its promise is not to make people rich by simulating money, right some point. So, but it's great, just like the net was sort of this great way

to simulate social interactions. Right, it's play. It's like a l chat room. Who's there? I don't know? It could be a man, could be a woman, could be a monkey, could be anything, right, But it's not like, oh, now I'm going to invest in this a l chat room or what the what the character in there is saying or in a jpeg or something. So you think crypto doesn't come back, I say, this is someone who recently

bought some crypto. No, I'm just kidding. Well, I'm not totally kidding, but I mean you think crypto is you think it's done now. I mean the thing that struck me as it being done was that I was told crypto was hedge against inflation, and then crypto crashed on inflation, among other things. Yeah, where do you even start? Yes, the idea would be that that crypto was like, because it's in theory, it's limited, right, you know that only

so much bitcoin can be produced. It works kind of like match sticks in a prison or in the can't It's like, there's only so many of these, so we can bet with them. But the problem is, because it's so digital and the way in which is digital, we won't even have to go there. But what people end up doing is any one of these match sticks can be staked against other matchsticks, so it's almost like the

fractional reservative bank. So this one matchstick of bitcoin or of lunar coin or of whatever coin is going to now be staked for three thousand of them across all of these other networks. So it's it's it becomes inflationary anyway until everybody then wants their money back, and then all of a sudden there's a run on crypto and it's not even there right right right now. A good point, But it doesn't mean it goes away, right, because the

promise of the technology is still so cool. I mean, it's just the difference between what you can do with blockchains and crypto is as different as like fireworks and gunpowder, right, and there's just very different applications for a decentralized ledger like crypto can provide. Right. I think that's a good point, and that's the appeal of blocks to write. Yeah, blockchain

was really came up during occupy. It was that moment that we're looking at, how can we do this differently, How can we create a way for people to transact and verify their transactions and stuff without involving these big, awful, you know, extractive banks that that just they make money cost way too much, right, there's just too much a drag on that. So let me ask you. It seems like we're in this weird period in Tach where Zuckerberg

is in Hawaii surrounded by sycophans. Yeah, having lost seventy percent of his company's worth on fake worlds that nobody wants right right on a dream and it's not even to think if even if it was virtual reality, it couldn't be worth that much. It's like a virtual reality replacement of everything we know and we'll have yet to know. It's like that big a bet we will place God, It's like, no, right, So that world is over right, I mean, that's done. Tell us where Ellen is? Ellen?

You know, it's so funny because I write these pieces and then some people still write in the comments, Oh, he's still gonna pull it up, He's still gonna make it Ellen. Oddly enough, he doesn't get what he has. He's blown it by doing what he's done the way he's done it in public. You know, he's kind of almost taken down Trump with himself because he's like a kind of a bad, less embarrassed version of Donald Trump.

So he's doing this kind of capricious real time decision making and pivoting and lying, and so what the latest I guess what he did was said he put up a poll, Yeah, said, figuring everybody loves me, and he's gonna put up a you know, self congratulatory Paul on Twitter saying should I stay as ahead of Twitter? And then he puts in the comment I will abide by this, Like what of people said no, actually, dude, step down, and he's like uh and then all of a sudden,

you've got you know. Jason kalakanis another saying oh, I'll do it, I'll do it, pick me, pick me, But he's just he's just silent. Right. Do you think he actually does step down? A lot of people were saying he was getting pressure to step down. He set this pole up because he wanted to pretend that investors were pressuring him to step down from Twitter. Do you think that's really true? Or now? I would think yeah, I

mean I think everybody's pressuring him too. On some level, I think he must say to himself this, this is not fun anymore, so he wants to go. I would think on sub level, I think it's gonna the whole thing is gonna fail, and I think if it is, then he will certainly step down before it does so he can blame someone else for what happened. You know, the way Jack Welch jumped ship from ge when he realized that his whole plan to turn a great company

into a bank was going to fail. It's like he takes the golden parachute and blames what's his name, Jeff mml Oh, that guy didn't right me. Do you think that ultimately what happens is Twitter dies. I don't think it dies. There's such a critical mass of people on there. I mean, I do believe it would be easy to fix Twitter. It would just you. You would change its central it's it's character back to what it was when it was super successful. I think it could die and

then get bought by someone and remade. It's funny that we used to say this, like back when my Space was dying and Murdoch bought it, and then like justin timber Lake bought it and it's like they could never quite revive it again. But if you took away the algorithm right completely? Yeah, explain taking away the algorithm. The big problem with Twitter for for most of us is this big algorithm that decides kind of what you see, what gets boosted, what gets suppressed, and the whole thing

is unnecessary, The whole thing is stupid. It makes Twitter into the thing we never liked about Facebook and all these other places. What Twitter kind of started out as, which was really fun, was gosh, it was started back in the day when even our SMS texting wasn't compatible from one carrier to the other, right, and A and T, A T and T and Verizon and timoil, well they

didn't even quite talk to each other. Well. So Twitter was started really as a way for you to send a text message to lots of different people at the same time, across all the different phone systems. And the idea was you would see the tweets of the people that you're following, and they and people who followed you would see your tweets. It makes the most sense, right. It was super simple, so then there was no decisions

to make. It was nothing. It's like, if you don't like what you're seeing, you just you just stop looking at it. So the first really smart thing to do with Twitter, again it makes it a little bit less profitable in a certain way, but more profitable in a long term way, is you get rid of the algorithm or if you want to get advanced and you really like algorithms, you let users train their own algorithms through

like a simple interface. And then what I would do if if you have a user and the users using an algorithm to sort of tune their experience, I would make them like check in once a month or quarterly, like do a reality check just so you know, Okay, here's what's actually going on. We just want you to check it out. Then you can go back to your to your algorithm, so you see for a minute what

what they're tuning and what they're not. You know. Then I think you've got to accept that Twitter is a publishing platform, and then that has consequences for two thirt exactly. But so what you know at a certain point, yes, you're a company. You are you are distributing this stuff and making money off it. So you just take your budget and you pay for it. You take like fifty of your budget and you give it to editors and they do this thing we used to call remember journalist

stick standards and practices. I think there a couple of times or times of London or somebody, I don't know, somebody stills Guardian. It's this thing you could revive it go to Columbia. There's people who know there's there's books. But I just want to get back to this idea for a second, because I was talking to someone who used to work at Twitter. So one of the things he was saying is the structure of Twitter is fundamentally limited.

One of the problems with Twitter was that Twitter loses eighty percent of its new users in the first month because it can't personalize fast enough. Ye. Well, she said, it shouldn't be. It's not that hard. What you do is is I guess what he's talking about is on boarding. So you come onto a new social network. What do you do? Who do you follow? What happens? You know? What you do is you find someone you like. Like Let's say I went on Twitter for the first time

and I like William Gibson. I go to his profile and I see who's William Gibson following Bruce Sterling. Oh, there's Neil Stevenson. Oh, the Science Fics Club of America. And then that's it. You know, and you can follow some there's some accounts you could follow that are aggregating other people's stuff. So it's really not that hard. The problem is if you're trying to extract money out of people.

If you're trying to get their engagement up from you know, three minutes to thirty hours, you know, in two weeks, then sure, you know, if you're trying to grow your subscribers. The issue here is not really that any of these metrics are a problem. It's that it wasn't enough for Twitter to earn two billion dollars a year. You know.

That's what they were earning when I considered them kind of at their sweet spot before their I p O, you know, and it was like, oh, two billion dollars a year, And as soon as they went public, everyone said, oh, now what they're gonna do? They peaked at two billion dollars a year. Two billion for a hundred forty character

messaging app. Yea, we won. And then you figure out, let's see if there's a way that we can keep this forty character messaging app going with just two billion dollars a year, with just the revenue of The New York Times, Can we do it? And I bet I bet they could have if they didn't want to make a thousand ext returns for all these these idiots, the same idiots are like, well, if you don't give me a thousand ext return. I'm gonna go to crypto al right,

right right now. So you feel like capitalism really crushed Twitter. A form of capitalism corporate right, corporate greed on digital steroids is really the difference there used to be capitalists used to understand you invest in a company and you make the money through the returns, like as a as a landlord. That was the original evil. Now they're not even landlords right now. They make their money by buying the property and then selling it with you in it,

you know, And that's very different. Yeah, yeah, it's more like a mobster thing. Yeah, it's always good. Who doesn't like a mobster. I want you to predict the future on how this goes, and you have to be right or else we will make fun of you. The short term future is people are going to feel very victimized by what happened. Oh this bad people like Sam Bankman Freed and they took our money and they're fraudulent and

all this stuff. But Sam Bankman Freed is really going to jail and soon and for a long time, I mean faster than anything I've seen. Right, Yeah, But don't let the fact that he was a bad person fool you into thinking that. But for bad actors like that, investing in crypto would have been a great thing. Right, It's like, no, so throw the industry out with the bathwater. No. But except that, it's this is second life, right, these are video games. I have way less sympathy for the

supposed victims of Sam bankmun Freed than most, right. I mean, it's it's one thing to an vest with who is the horrible pyramid scheme guy, the one who ruined the New York Mets, Yeah, made off. It's one thing to do that because at least there's sort of like SEC regulations. You think it's stocks. It's a little too good to be true. But I don't want to think about that, and you're still investing, all right, you know there's a little problem. But the people who invest in crypto, really

they've wanted to get rich for doing nothing. Right. They know it's nothing. They're investing in, nothing except maybe polluting the world more rapidly with the worser coins. Right. They didn't even understand what what Sam bankmun Freed was supposed to be doing, much less what he actually did. So yeah, I mean, what was at one point five trillion dollars was vaporized as these coins have gone, and it's because all the coins that you're investing in are just are

not really stable. They're just leveraged on other things. It's called staking everybody, staking everybody else in all of these complex ways that you can never trace back anymore. What's really going on once these things crashed. The ledger is ultimately infinite. It so, no, I don't have sympathy for people who wanted to make money for actually doing nothing.

It's like the only reason I have any sympathy for them is because their TV and movie stars were on the Super Bowl telling them it was okay, right yeah, And there's no culpability for any of those people, right. But ultimately the good of this is the opportunity here is the same opportunity we had after the dot com crash. It's like, oh my gosh. The Internet is not for spying. The Internet is not for data extraction. The Internet is

not a get rich quick scheme. It's a terrific decentralized network through which we can actually model things and communicate differently. If we lose that, it's like thinking that the only thing horses are good for is horse racing. That's right, they're beautiful, they'll love you. You know. There's all these other things and it's like, that's we We've turned the whole thing, of course, into a betting parlor. And crypto is in some ways the most honest expression of that Internet.

It was like, let's just go pure, just bet on the digital symbols themselves. It's like, okay, you don't even need a Google, you don't even need the company, It's just the symbol. Right, So it was pure and I think our ability to see that unwinds all of these other things. It's almost in a kind of a biblical idle smashing iconoclastic way, right, these are the plagues, These are the These are the desecration of the of the gods. And uh, now we can move on. Does Post do it?

Do you think Post replaces Twitter? I mean, if anything replaces Twitter, it would be uh kind of mastered on. I think it's sort of the is the fun place. But I don't think Twitter has to go away. I think it just is gonna It's gonna change. I think there will be a post Musk Twitter. Ideally it will be a Twitter that is purchased by its users and moderators that we actually do use the block chain, I

mean Twitter plus the blockchain almost works. It's they marry the two and get rid of the musk and you end up with really what's called a dow you know, a company or organization where the ownership stakes is determined by people's activity on the platform. And that would be an interesting experiment, so interesting. Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us. Thank you, and happy New Year. It's all good. Everything's going to be fine from here on.

So good. I'm excited. I can't wait. Yeah, Molly John Fast, Chessie Gannon. You know, like in those like mean Girls Heather's type movies, you know, they can never have the top dog be the top dog of someone always wants to fight. And Warren Bober she's coming from TG, the top dog of the Crazy Caucus. Well, MTG is coming for Lauren Baubert, coming back at her after the aggression, right because Lauren Boubert won't bend the knee to Trump's

Mike Kevin. So, Lauren Boubert was interviewed at the Turning Point event this weekend, and she decided to take a little dig about how she won't support Kevin McCarthy, and she made a dig about Marjorie Taylor Green and her Jewish space laser beliefs. I think it's well worth the explain what the dig was. She said, I don't believe in Kevin McCarthy or Jewish space lasers. I mean not bad, you know, not wrong, I mean neither do I right. Marjorie Taylor Green shot back that Lauren Boubert barely won

her election, which she barely did. We actually had the candidate who ran against her and almost one on this very podcast, and he may again. But the two of them, two of the worst people, are our moment of February. 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.