Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And Ron Desantas's biggest donor has pulled out due to the candidate's policies being too extreme. We're back from vacation with a fantastic show for you Today. Alex Winter stops by to talk about his excellent documentary The YouTube Effect. Then we'll talk to Celeste Hedley and Marie Brenner about their amazing podcast Big Sugar. But first
we have Pod Save America's Tommy Vitour. Welcome to Fast Politics.
Tommy, thank you for having me.
Very excited to have you.
And also, not much has happened in the week that I have quote unquote been on vacation. Another Trump indictment, a federal indictment, a superseding, basically one and a half more federal indictments.
Congratulations, Thank you, Yes, seventy eight counts. It's good to have your number of accounts to be just match your AIGs. That's all. We're all good. Thanks v here.
I mean again, like the thing I'm so struck by, and you have worked in politics, you know, like they had this off ramp yet again, and yet again they were like, no, this is our guy.
The Republicans, you mean, yeah, in terms of the primary, yeah, I mean, you know what is remarkable about this is
the timing. You know, they are going to be three of the majority of their primaries and caucuses when these trials start, potentially unless they get delayed, and so they're in this position where none of the Republicans are going to seem willing to run hard against Donald Trump, but they might be in a position where he's just appearing in the court room for the majority of the campaign and nobody seems to want to do anything about it. It's incredible.
I'm like so impressed because again, I feel like this just keeps happening. There's like a moment of silence where they're like, wait, we should get this guy the curb, and then they're like, no, too much warp. Let's just stick with our guy, even though he has, you know, a trial in New York coming up, a trial in the district, now, a trial in Florida.
Like no, no, this is our man.
Yeah.
I mean, to me, it's just sort of a story of compounding political cowardice. Because there was the moment right after January sixth, where they could have impeached him, Mitch McConnell decided to be a whimp and not go forward with that. I think he was worried that Trump would leave and start his own party and you know, hurt
the Republicans in the long run. But then, you know, you and Kevin McCarthy say some tough things about what Trump had done and blame him for the insurrection, and then fly down to mar Lago to kiss his ass. And fast forward to today. I mean, they have not laid the groundwork with Republican voters to know, convince them that January sixth was should rule him out as president.
I keep thinking it's funny because it's like yesterday I was in the UK doing this news show on Sky and like the anchor kept saying to me, well, we in the UK don't see any that he becomes president, And I was like, do you guys not understand.
How the electoral college works?
Like he doesn't have to win the popular vote, He just needs to win ten thousand voters in Wisconsin and twenty thousand voters in you know, Michigan. I mean, this is a sort of insane system.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, you're right that it's kind of a coin flip. You know, right now it's fifty to fifty, but the electoral college process is stacked in favor of Republicans. I think, you know, Joe Biden would probably have to win like fifty one, fifty two to fifty three percent of the popular vote to really feel comfortable that he was going to get it over the finish line with the electoral college. And also,
you know, there's polls. There's a poll out today the New York Times that has Trump with forty four percent of the vote in the Iowa COCCAS scores among Iowa COCCA scorers, and DeSantis is twenty. So he's doubling up his next primary opponent in the first state. And by the way, Iowa's a state that he has struggled in historically, so he's probably going to better numbers from there.
In twenty fifteen, he actually lost Iowa to Ted Cruz, which, yeah, imagine losing anything to Ted Cruz truly embarrassing.
You just, yeah, with the worst person in the world.
Anyway, We're just saying that because we're jealous of his enormous podcasting success.
Correct, He's a full time podcaster, part time senator, and I think that's a pretty good life hack if you want to.
Feel happy, I'm being Yeah, Ted cruz Is really makes Marco Rubio look like a charming guy.
Sure does.
I do want for one minute to make fun of the boys who work at the National Review. Yeah, I hate that Trump is the nominee, but I still delight in their incredible miscalculation when it comes to Ron DeSantis.
And then, yeah, Ron DeSantis, I think someone needed to perform kind of an early charisma check on him and just go down there and spend thirty minutes in a room with the guy. Like, I don't think it's over for Ron DeSantis. He is twenty percent in that Iowa poll. I think, yeh, there was some under the hood. There were some numbers on electability that were a little better for him than I would have expected among Iowa Coccus scores.
I think I think that's the path to defeating Trump in this primary, which is convincing a bunch of hardcore Republicans, even maybe a portion of Trump's base, that he will lose to Joe Biden because of all this baggage like, that's what I would be doing all day every day, kind of like Chris Christy is. But yeah, Ron DeSantis has just shown himself to be uncomfortable around human beings. I'm not sure how I else to say it.
Yeah, I remember that there was a Republican member of a big real estate family who went and met with him early on and left and was like, I'm never.
Giving him any money.
And I thought like, if you can do that with a donor one on one, then you you know, it's one thing to leave and say like I'm not sure this is the best pick.
But he was literally like this guy sucks.
And I was like, all right, you know, so I am very impressed by that.
Yeah, he propulses people.
I think.
The New York Times asked Republican primary voters in their most recent poll which candidates they thought were fun, and like, they think Trump is fun, you know, and listen, he like, we detest the guy. He repulses us. But for a lot of Republican like Maga people, they go to these events,
they have a great time. They see their friends, they like, they hear them play the greatest hits about the deep state and lock her up and blah blah blah, and like there's nothing about Ronda Sants campaign that seems enjoyable. He's at the state fair telling kids, are you consume it makes too much sugar? You know, like that's that's the place you go to eat too much sugar. Ron, that was an amazing moment. Yeah, that kid, he was like, isn't that a lot of sugar? I'm always looking she's nine.
You psychout. You do a couple of things at the Iowa Stay Fair. I've been many times. You eat like some sort of funnel cake, You go on some fun rides, you gorge on like a fried twinkie. You see the buttercow. You don't lecture people, especially like a little girl. I believe about being our sugar and like an icy pop.
Now Ron DeSantis.
Speaking of Ron DeSantis, he has taken a pivot and decided he's no longer going to a focus on the people he's running against. He's going to focus on Gavin Newsom because he is running for governor of California.
Discussed if that is interesting, I mean, I think the Desanta's campaign must be thinking to themselves. Donald Trump has blotted out the sun. He is consuming all day of every news cycle, even if it's bad news with indictments or whatever. It's so benefiting him because we just can't get covered except for when we're firing people. Therefore, what gimmicks can we use to get in the press? Gavin Newsom is like super pugilistic. He clearly hates Ron DeSantis,
understandably so, and wants to do this debate. Like I actually think Gavin Newsom would probably mop the floor with Rond de Santis in this event. But it's a weird choice to debate some random dude.
We'll see, right, I think it's really smart on the point on the part of Dessantas right, DeSantis is quietly waiting in the wings, God forbid something happens to Biden. You know, I think he's positioned himself as like the alt. I mean, don't you think that's what's happening and that's why there's some hostility towards him.
What are you saying DeSantis is the alt? Or are Gavin's the alt?
Gavin is the Alt?
Sorry, I think Gavin Newsome I spent a little time with him. He's super competitive. He wants Democrats to be tougher. He wants to win. He is unbelievably frustrated about sort of like information bubbles, which is why he went on Sean Handy's show in the first place, and.
He killed it on Sean Hannaday. I thought he was great.
If I had been in this comms person and they said, hey, I want to go on Sean Handedy, I said, a boss, absolutely not. This is a bring against you. Don't do it. Go on like a Joe Rogan or some other show where you have a chance. I was wrong, he was right. It was fantastic.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's definitely probably part of Gavin that wants to run for president. I don't know if he will, but he's certainly like creating this national profile for himself by you know, punching a lot of Republicans in the face, including on Fox News, which I think the Democrats probably like.
I have to say that Meg Gaffin before, and I was struck by how readily charismatic he was, like shocking like charismatic.
Yeah, I mean, he's like, if you look at the resume and the things they've gotten done in California, it's incredibly impressive. And then he is, you know, like super likable guy in a lot of ways, like he can, you know, deliver a compelling message to a crowd. And he's also dyslexic, so the way he retains information is just by memorizing everything. So he has all these facts and figures like right there on the on the tip of his tongue that can hurt you. I think, you
know why work for Barack Obama. There were times when he sounded way too wonky and was appealing to people with like, you know, spreadsheets, basically verbal spreadsheets, and I don't think that always works, but I think a few layer in, you know, some emotional appeals with a clear grasp with the acts, that can be pretty pretty effective.
Good thing that I think about with these candidates, as we're talking about we're in this strange primary season of weirdness, is that it does seem like Ted Cruz has an incredible amount of ambition, used largely to become a clown. But a lot of these candidates don't feel, especially on the Democratic side, don't feel that ambitious, whereas Newsom seems like a killer.
Yeah, that's a really good observation. I do think Gavin seems like there's a lot of like really strong Democratic governors in the various states, you know, Regretchen Witmer, Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Like the list can go on and on and on. You don't see a lot of them going on TV to pick fights with the entire Republican Party. Yeah, we're like picking a fight with Greg Abbott or some other Republican Right. So Gavin is definitely like feels.
The need to be out there, yeah, which I actually think ultimately is good. Now, one of the things I've been really struck by as we are watching this and looking at this all this polling, which again with all this pulling, you know, maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong.
Right, We've seen it be wrong before.
But the thing I've been struck by is like, and I was thinking about this yesterday when I was watching Alina Habba give a pess conference during Trump's arraignment where she was saying and really you know, she was saying and you can see that the day that Trump was, you know, was indicted by New York was the day after they found Hunter Biden's laptop, you know, making this kind of taste that this was all Democrats trying to obfuscate Hunter's laptop instead of what it really was, which
was the guy who did all the crimes. Maybe getting in a little bit of trouble for it, but it works with their people.
Yeah, yeah, it does. I caught a clip of Joe Rogan today who is basically like, you know, I think there's going to be some people who saying Trump economy before COVID was pretty good. I'd love to go back to that. And you know, when you look at all these efforts to indict Donald Trump, it does seem like they're targeting him. If you look at the history with the Steele dossier and the impeachments, et cetera, et cetera, does seem like there's a coordinate effort to go after
him and maybe he's the victim. And I think there is some real risk there of Republicans being able to, you know, reach that audience, like so of the Joe Rogan audience that is predisposed to think that there is some grand conspiracy driving these things, and also filter in little bits of news about the allegations against Hunter Biden and you know, make these baseless suggestions that Joe Biden was essentially part of it.
And it's funny because It's like people will be like, well, what would you think about Hunter Biden.
I'm like, send him to jail.
I don't care, no, my kid, I mean whatever, Democrats are not a cult. I mean, if you want to lock up all the bidens, I mean, I just you know, if somebody did a crime, they should go to jail.
Yeah.
I mean there's really two pieces of the story. I mean there's the there's the plea agreement piece of this, and it was sort of like you know, you know, tax fraud or failure to pay taxes and then sort of you know, making a mistatement on a gun license, like Republicans want to put people in jail for that. Okay, I mean that's that's fair.
This is strange.
Yeah, And didn't Rogerstone have some tax issues too.
I mean I think a lot of the feeling comfy and that's some tax issues over the years, you know, And I think, look, I'm with you, like everyone should face the same standard of justice. But you know, Trump prosecutor is the one who's been looking at these Hunter Biden allegations and cut this plea deal. But there's the
other piece of this. I think we need to do a better job emphasizing, which is like Hunter Biden is someone who is dealing with a really horrific addiction problem, and Joe Biden was a dad in this case, like just you know, doing everything he could in his power to keep his kid alive. You know, I mean quite literally, Like I read Hunter's book, and you know, it's it's
a miracle he's still here, you know. And so I think emphasizing that part of the story, like Joe Biden the father dealing with the loved one with addiction, Like that's a story that I think a lot of people can understand and relate to.
Yeah, you know, I read that book and I interviewed Hunter, and I'm sober since I was nineteen and come from a family riddled with addiction and alcoholism. So I totally get it. Yeah, and also remember Hunter. I Mean the thing that I feel like is maybe a little bit of a messaging malpractice is like we forget that Joe Biden has had this incredible tragedy and has had all of these children. I mean, like you're pigging on one
of his two surviving children. And when you're not pigging, you know, like Trump, when Trump World isn't pigging on on Hunter. They're picking on Ashley, like of his two surviving children, Like, think about how catastrophic that kind of losses.
It's unimaginable. I mean, you know, I have been a month old daughter, Like what happened to Joe Biden, you know, with his wife, that accident, entering his first wife. I mean, it's unimaginable to me. I don't even want to think about it. And then losing Bo who clearly was Ina s or Joe Biden's other half, equally horrific and unfair and tragic and just you know, the crassness of deciding to go this hard after Hunter Biden politically just to harm his dad is kind of, I guess, part and
parcel of our politics. I do wonder if there will be some part of the electorate that's turned off by I do think, like there's reasonable criticisms to make about, you know, suppression of the laptop story by news outlets for the election, et cetera, et cetera. All the things
they're talking about are specific to Hunter Biden's conduct. There's no accusation, even from Hunter Biden's business partner, that Joe Biden was in on the deal, right, just like taking a call from his kid and got put on speakerphone. We're showing you out or saying hi to business associates like I don't know, what are you to tell your kid to give your kid the heisman and say no, I will take your phone call, of course, not or anything human being. So we'll see how this plays out.
And also I think, you know, if I were Jared and Evanka, I would be a little worried about a broader narrative about you know, kids benefiting from political connections. Given a Jared got two billion dollars from the Saudi government for his little investment fund.
It is amazing.
I mean, the Trump kids are such and I say this is a beneficiary of nepotism myself, and I always am really a book born on that.
It's just amazing to me.
The last thing I would do, or at least I would put in the caveat you know, this nepotism born on third base, you know.
Did not hit a home run.
So it is kind of amazing to me that those kids managed to me somehow. I mean, Don Junior, that is really an incredible bit of projection.
Oh yeah, I mean just so angry about it too. Just profiting off of everything they do, you know, like you'll see him doing spond con for like steaks and shit. You're like, dude, I thought you were the son of a billionaire. Couldn't you even Jared Kushner again, Like, yes, Hunter Biden did some things that I don't agree with. There were troubling then if he broke the laws, he
should be prosecuting. The difference in my book is like Trump made Jared Kushner his like shadow Secretary of State, a guy every reason, Like I was whatsapping with Mohammad b and Salman, this homicidal dictator or run in Saudi Arabia. He was cutting these Middle East piece deals they were not peace deals, about Abraham A Cord deals, and then clearly getting a huge kickback on the back end, like literally got two billion dollars from the Saudis despite having
no investing experience. That's something I think that's worth talking about.
Yeah, and I'm not laughing because it's funny. I'm laughing to keep from crying.
Now. I'm with you.
Yeah, Tommy, you think next week we're gonna see some Georgia indictments?
God, good question. I can't believe there's more of this to come. I do. I wonder you know that my colleague Max Fisher, who is a criok media now he's the New York Times. For a while, he looked at how prosecutions had gone internationally and he saw some evidence that in South Africa there was an instance where like the accumulation that charges against a leader there, you know, led people to over time think like, Okay, this guy's
got to go. I wonder if that cumulative effect will happen here with Trump or if at some point people will either think, okay, now he's being targeted unfairly, or maybe just tune it out. I don't know, but it is remarkable. They were going to be waiting for another set of indictments.
Yeah, it's funny because Trump world is saying that three indictments is better than one.
Maybe they're right.
There was a Raiders pullout today with ask respondents they would vote for Trump for president if you were convicted of a felony by a jury. In forty five percent said they would not vote for him. This is mong Republicans. Thirty five percent, yeah, said they would, so you know again, twenty eight percent they would vote for him if you were currently serving time in prison, so you know, dispiriting. That's the Laura Lumer crew. Thank you so much, Tommy.
I hope you'll come back. Of course, it was a blast finger thanks for having me.
Alex Winter is an actor and director and his latest film is called The YouTube Effect and it's out now.
Welcome to Fast Politics, Alex.
Winter, so good to be here. Thanks, Molly.
I already delighted to have you. Really interested to talk to you about this movie.
I also like wonder. I just first want.
To quickly ask you about like I guess I very much understand, like moving from being an.
Actor to being a filmmaker. But just two seconds on that, well he started doing both.
I was a child actor. I was on Broadway for a lot of my childhood and saving up for film school them so I stopped acting. I've quit acting like five times. The first time was at like seventeen years old, after ten years of acting professionally as a child. Then I went to NYU Film School to study directing and writing. When I came out of that and I was broke and still had an agent, so I said, can you
get me some auditions? So I could avoid delivering pizza like my roommate, and I ended up booking like Lost Boys and Bill and Ted and all this stuff, which look I wasn't like looking down my nose on. It was super fun. But at that time I was already directing. I was directing music videos and TV commercials, and my partner Tompson, and I had a show on MTV, our movie Freak. So I'm kind of always done both. It's just one is less publicly visible than the other.
Yeah, pretty interesting. And also I was just am curious about how people get where they're going because I have like never had a normal career or known how to get one.
Yeah. I don't know either. I couldn't tell you anything about that. Yeah.
Yeah.
I literally was like I remember being like nineteen and being like, okay, so I'll just write a book because I have no idea how you do anything else?
Yep, not good. Yeah, that's it. I do what I do and I can't do anything else, So thankfully I'm doing this.
So let's talk about this movie. What sort of got you going on this? Why did you decide to make.
It getting through as quickly as possible. I've been around the internet from the beginning of the kind of public facing Internet, which was in the eighties. I first got online and probably eighty fivee.
What was that Prodigy.
It was a BBS era, so in bulletin board systems, you know, simples islet modem No, no way yet. But I was very captivated by the growth of online community right away and how robust it was, and how diverse, and how the barriers were being broken down all over the planet and within what would become much bigger subcultures and then primary cultures as the Internet grew. And that was just a really fascinating place to be and it's kind of the way things are now, just writ large.
It was a very small version of these giant communities we now have. So I started making my first doc was about the rise and fall of Napster, and I was around Sean Fanning and Parker for the back end of Napster's demise and spent a lot of time with Sean Fanning primarily, and Aldam San Matteo and the other primary players at Napster because Napster was really the first time you ever had a large scale online community ever, one hundred million people on the Internet at once, very seminal.
So that's been an area of fascination for me. And YouTube is by far, by an order of magnitude, the largest media platform on the globe. You know, it's the second most search website on the planet after Google. Both of those are owned by one company. And the implications are so vast and I never hear them really being discussed very much other than kind of somewhat cliche stuff about like being rabbit holed or black killed or things
that don't even really have much relevance anymore. And so I really wanted to dig in and figure out, like what the implications of this vast beast are.
Yeah, I always thinking about this regulation is like the most unsexy topic ever.
Right.
Trump was able to fuck up a lot of our country and our planet and our you know, environmentally and like with transit. I mean, he was able to deregulate a lot of things very quickly, and that was sort of what he ran on. And I don't think when he would say this stuff, I don't know that anyone.
I'm sure, I mean, some.
People, but mostly a lot of people didn't really kind of understand what the larger implications for deregulating things were, But this is not even a question of deregulation. This is more of a question of like, these things are not regulated.
No, they're not. And it's very, very difficult to successfully regulate companies that have such deep pockets because their lobbying power is so vast and impenetrable, and it's spread evenly across both sides of the aisles, so you know they own they've locked up most of the Democrats and most of the Republicans. And no one is coming at I mean my movie specifically about Google, but you can stay
similar for Meta and other platform big companies. But no one's coming at Google with any in my opinion, any
meaningful legislation or regulation at all. And I think that there are things being done on the state level, there are things being done by individual lawyers who are suing them, like Harry Goldberg who's in our film, but there is really nothing happening, and there's an enormous amount of talk and posturing, and I would say, honestly, literally, no meaningful anti trust, anti monopoly regulation that would that would actually help.
In fact, conversely, I would say that the a lot of what I don't mean to be a party pooper but a lot of what the government.
No, we never talk about the president stuff here. So it's just like.
Yeah, as much as I want the federal government to to because I do think that this is going to become a this is only can be solved by the federal government, at the end of the day, you have to sort of deal with these companies like we dealt with Standard Oil.
So we're in trouble.
Yeah, yeah, So I think that the A they don't understand the technology very much anyway, be there, they're they're paid up up to the hill with with cash and then see the ideas they do have about regular regulating the Internet are usually terrible and will make the Internet worse, like what's going on largely with the EU regulation with the Internet and which has caused a lot of censorship
and a lot of marginalized communities to be art. And I think that the US is gearing up, especially on AI and social media platform is gearing up for very similar I think they're borrowing some of the language from some of the same people who wrote the EEU language a very similar misguided approach to dealing with these issues, and I think it's going to hurt people more than it's going to help them. So I think we have kind of a bumpy road ahead.
So explain why a little more on that, because I don't know so much about the EU regulations except I know that they have more regulation than we do here.
They do. But the thing that people get very excited when there's language around turning off and we're deplatforming or
shutting down chunks of the Internet. But these this is a fragile landscape, and you know, there's a lot of great articles written about this, so it's not a difficult thing to seek out, but a lot of the discourse in the US around reforming Section two thirty, for example, there's a reason why the far right is so eager and why Trump was so eager to dismantle two thirty because it creates more censorship, It prevents safeguards for primarily
smaller websites and language to be accessible online. And it really won't hurt the large companies because they're so deep pocketed they'll find ways around this stuff. So we have to be incredibly careful. It's very nuanced how you deal with content moderation and with deplatforming. Giant chunks of human
beings that are online without causing major damage. And I think that's the problem is a lot of this regulation, like some of the legislation regulation in the U, is coming in with a hammer as opposed to a scalpel, and they're just there is just whack the mole. They're just bashing this stuff back and saying, hey, well we are we are preventing a lot of this discourse from happening online. So now childer nursing. But that's actually not the case. It can actually make children less safe. They
can make LGBTQ lessie. Some just point to one thing that he use doing that America is looking at doing is requiring age verification, and that's a huge privacy breach and it's very dangerous for children and for people in marginalized communities to have to give up their identity online in that way, and it will cause it will cause people to get hurt.
That seems not good.
Explain to us a little bit about this, the connection between Google and YouTube.
Well, one of the things I learned a lot making the film, though I had done a lot of research going in and you know, look, this is I guess kind of a wimpy caveat that this is a giant company.
We love a wimpy caveat.
I'm the king of the whimpy caveat.
It's yeah, yeah, you know, be happy to have it.
Google is a huge company. They do a lot of good. There's a lot of great people there. I know a lot of engineers there. I know a lot of people pretty high up the food chain there that are amazing people doing great work. So just saying and saying with YouTube, and you know, we use it all the time in a way when you're dealing with a platform as vast as YouTube that is so much more than a social media platform, so much more than news media, TV, influencers,
culture search, it's all of that stuff. It's going to do a lot of good, but because it has so much influences, doing a lot of a lot of harm. And what I didn't realize going into the cell that became evident pretty quickly is that it's not a ruse because it sounds I think I'm unfairly nefarious, but YouTube is really not a separate company from Google in any meaningful way. YouTube is really I would argue that Google YouTube is really Google Media front at. It is really
the platform. It's the reason it's the second most search and viewed website after Google. Is that they are in a sense of package. You know, Google performs it's functions online and YouTube performs is functions online, but they are part and parcel of the same function, which is that they are holding the eyeballs and the attention of more people on this planet than any other source for all of recorded human history, all of our information, all of
our media. And I think the implications of Google's direct relationship and ownership of YouTube is important and important to underscore and understand why and what it means. And I think they've gone to great pains to try to to present a kind of superficial optical idea of two separate entities.
But other than the people that work within the YouTube you know, the engineers and the basic folks working on the UI, et cetera, they really are just a part of Google's media front end and they are run under the ethos of Google an alphabet.
So what does that translate to.
It means that as Google grows, which is it is growing exponentially, and as it creates more data farms and more of a collection of the world's data and our identity and our content, it gives them a leg up. I would say against any other platform, any other media company, any other information source, any other search source in a vast way. So I think it just requires more scrutiny than they're getting. I think they've been. I think that people are so overawed by the size of YouTube that
they tend to just forget it exists. Like people will say to me, well, what about TikTok. The kids, aren't the kids all on TikTok. I'm like, yeah, but there's like, there's billions of billions for people to quote Carl Sagan on on YouTube than there are on TikTok. It's just
not a comparable they're not comparable platforms. And right, so I think it tends to get overlooked, and you know, circling back to your regulation point at the top, I think that also prevents us from putting proper safeguards in place, because we just sort of throw up our hands and say, well, it's just another social media platform, and it isn't. It's really the media front end for the largest tech company on the planet.
Right right, right, So, so talk to us about you know, this movie, talk about how YouTube is radicalizing people.
How does this happen.
What's interesting is, I would argue, and to be fair to people who were talking about rabbit hole and you know, a couple of years ago, there was a point when the recommender algorithm had first been introduced that it was causing havoc, and to be fair to YouTube and Google,
they did primarily fix that. It's very difficult to go on YouTube now the way one used to a few years ago, and you know, search for fuzzy slippers and then suddenly be down a rabbit hole with Alex Jones and you know, Jordan Peterson and Shapiro, you know, with flat earthers and people talking about the moon landing being fake. Those videos are all there. And if that's your your deal, and that's the kind of stuff you dig, well, sure
you can have a field day. But I would argue that the that the radicalization on YouTube today and what what made YouTube the number one platform for sending people to the January sixth insurrection more than any other platform
is the parasocial component. Is the fact that you were dealing with the very powerful and visceral and ad money amplified system of looking into a webcam and feeling that you are having an intimate connection with the person on the other end of that webcam, who, meanwhile, you don't know,
that person ends up feeling like your best buddy. And because YouTube is not TikTok and you have you know, videos that are hours and hours long, that creates an incredibly strong bond between the influencer or you know, the person or the people that are talking into that webcam and the people on the other end. It also has because of its scale, it has enormous ability for communication
and interconnection. So through the comment section and in other ways, you can suddenly build an army, which is what happened
on January sixth. So if you take that to you know, cruising into the twenty twenty four election, what we were pounding the table and trying to get YouTube to do for years after the christ Church shooting was deplatform some of these people and moderate their content better, because while content moderation is hard, it is absolutely doable, so that, you know, in fairness to then they booted Stephan Mulinu, who was causing enormous problem in real world violence.
That guy is terrible. I shouldn't laugh, but he really just the worst.
The Deep platformed Alex Jones who was just you know, a parodic example of propaganda. But you know, Stephen Crowder is still there with millions and millions and millions of followers. And after after the FBI went down to Marl Largo and you know, knocked on Trump's bathroom door to try to get some of the classified documents back, Crowder went on YouTube and said to his millions of followers that
they should take up arms and civil war. And that's you know, that's a heavily funded, probably dark money funded channel with enormous ad value to YouTube that's not going
to get deep platform. That's causing real world violence. So that's how people get radicalized, it's not I would really would love for the narrative to jump off this algorithm speak, which is which just sounds like magic box stuff and turns everybody's brains to jello, and just look at this as as a business issue, you know, with then they're
just human business decisions. If YouTube is going to get add money off of platforming people that are radicalizing you know, their followers, then they're not going to be platform them. Then people are going to get hurt. And that's got nothing to do with algorithms or technology, that's just business.
So Alex, you tell so many great stories in this documentary. I couldn't help but wonder what was on the cutting room for if any thing really broke your heart to cut.
We had more of the real world violence, first person shooters that were live streaming killings on YouTube, things like that. To be honest with you, it didn't break my heart because I mean, you know, I wanted to jump out in the edit room a window, right, So it's like, it's like, I get it. I was like, if I can't deal with this, like, how's an audience going to
want to see? So there was that aspect, and there was really wanted to tell a very specific narrative story around a core group of characters, Caleb, Kine, Natalie, when Ryan, Ryan's Toylet like, who are these human beings? What are their relationships to each other? And so we focused more on the really critical, game changing watershed moments that made history in those ways in gamer Gate, the christ Church shooting, things like that, and so a lot of the incidental
stuff didn't happen. You could make eighty movies out of YouTube, which is so vast. You can make an influencer movie. You could make a Kids on the Internet movie. You could make a just a Beltway What's going on in DC with these guys movie, But we were at the end of the day very much focused on these on these core characters in their story.
Yeah, I mean, just incredible stuff. We really appreciate you coming on. I hope you'll come back.
Oh, I'd love to you. Yeah, I love you, and it's great to be here.
Hi, it's Mollie and I am wildly excited that for the first time, Fast Politics, the show you're listening to right now, is going to have merch for sale over at shop dot Fast Politicspod dot com.
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Marie Brenner is an author, investigative journalist and writer at large from Fanny Fair. Celeste Hedley is a journalist and author and the host of Big Sugar. Welcome to Fastpolitics, Celeste and also Marie Brenner.
Thanks for having us.
Thank you for having us, Mollie.
So tell me about how big Sugar came to be. Whoever wants to start is fine.
Well, the extraordinary story begins with a lunch where I was talking to a head of a great public interest foundation and I said, tell me about your most riveting case.
This was nineteen ninety nine, and she said, there are two lawyers fighting the most powerful sugar interests in the country right now in South Florida, and you have got to get down to West Palm Beach, take a forty five minute drive out to the sugarcane country and meet these extraordinary public interest lawyers who are trying to stop slave labor essentially in the fields that belonged to two powerful brothers called Alfie and Peppie von hul And that was the beginning of the beginning.
So, Celeste, how'd you get involved in this?
I got involved because I was asked, do you want to investigate the story and bring this up to date. We're working with Marie and we want to update this in time for the reconsideration of the Farm Bill and make people aware that all of these things that Marie reported on all those years ago are still happening now, if they're not worse at this point. It took about ten minutes for me to realize that they were correct.
The things that Marie was writing about, in terms of the treatment of labor, the relationship of capitalism to inequality, the relationship of corporations to our environment, all of those things are perhaps worse than they were when Marie's article appeared in Vanity Fair. So yeah, I immediately jumped on it.
So, Marie, when you wrote this article in Vanny Fair, what were the sort of top lines that you were so shocked by?
For me, personality is always the key to history, and I was so shocked by the absolute, massive extent of sugar what it has been in American politics. Remember this was the year nineteen ninety nine, two thousand, when Gore was running for president. You had the Bush by Gore fight. And here you had in South Florida, in Miami and Palm Beach, and in this tiny little town called Belglade where this alleged slave almost slave labor shorting of the Jamaican workers that had come in to farm the fun
Houl sugar plantations for years. You know, we're all based and it was you know when in retrospect, what was going on in nineteen ninety nine was an absolute canary in the coal mine for where we are now in South Florida politics. Because these two brothers that you always see in the magazines, Peppi and Alfi fun Houl, one gave millions to the Republican Party, the other gave millions to the Democratic Party. And for that, you know, it was believed by many that they were getting all kinds
of favors in terms of sugar subsidies. And Celesti you did so much great research on this and really brought it up to date.
But this company controls.
Forty percent of sugar in America?
Is that the number?
Yeah?
I think so it tages all the time depending on sales, et cetera.
But yes, but their.
Influence extended right down to the final Supreme Court you know Bush v.
Gore fight.
So there was one of their lawyers just sitting in seat number two. And you know when when Bush v. Gore was argued, So catch an extraordinary example of corporate bigfooting. And for me, you know, it was just so tragic to see these incredibly educated Harvard law Yale law lawyers who had just set their caps on this, you know, trying to get fairness for these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Jamaican workers who were really paid about half
what they should have been paid. And you know, they're at the fond goals with their massive yachts and their massive houses in the society pages, you know, just allowing this to go on. It's really how they made their money in America.
Yeah, I mean, that is such a crazy story. So how has it stayed the same or gotten worse a thing?
It's gotten worse in the same way that we see throughout corporate America. Inequality has gotten worse. Right, A few things have changed that since the case ended, most if not all, of US sugar production has been mechanized. They aren't harvesting sugar using machetes in the US anymore. It is being harvested by hand in many places throughout the world. However, sugar is still rife, fetaled, rife with wage slavery throughout
the world. The industry itself. It is still environmentally detrimental, you know. And we drove down to Florida, went to one of the fields that they had set on fighter which is what they do after the sugar is harvested.
Jesus why it's the most effective way.
You don't have to All you have to do is shut the cane on fire and then you're ready to replant it the next season. Right, And we parked in the parking lot of an elementary school, which is right next door to this cane field, and you saw all the critters, the frogs and the little the bunnies and creators trying running away from the flames. And I step out of the car and I was covered in ash, this greasy, thick ash. And I looked to my right and the playground, all of the slides and the playground
equipment is also covered in this ash. All of the things that Marie was talking about in terms of the effect of the impact on the environment, the impact on neighborhoods, you know, but you go to this town where generations of workers have been employed by the sugar industry, and we're talking about generations of poverty, and you can see what that does to a community when they're relying on these jobs in order to survive.
It's devastating.
And then you drive just down the road to mar A Lago and up the road from there is where Alfi von hul lives, and behind his multi multi million dollar house is his enormous yacht bobbing in the waters. And despite our best efforts, we were never able to speak to either of the fund rules. And we tried. There's a long montage in the podcast of our producers calling and calling I hung out outside their building. We even tried to just get to the receptionist to hand
them the letter. We couldn't even get to the front desk of the company. Like, if you are rich enough in this country, you don't have to answer questions.
You don't have to.
Answer for the decisions that you make, because you can completely shelter yourself behind enough layers of other people that you can stay far away from anybody who wants to make you accountable for the decisions you make, the things that you do, the wealth you accrue.
Right, tell us a little bit about this farm bell, either of you, and what it could do to Big Sugar.
Well, so the farm bell only comes up every five years, So phone me. Just go back a little bit in history, the farm bill, of course began. The sugar program part of it, of course, began after in World War two, and there was a real concern that the United States didn't want to have.
To rely on other countries for its sugar, right.
We wanted to make sure that we always had enough sugar here in the United States growing, and so they incentivized it. They may guarantees that the cost of sugar would never fall blow out a certain amount price, which basically is just subsidizing the growth of sugar. Obviously, we don't actually need that. It's not like sugar is not a profitable commodity. We don't have to incentivize people to grow sugar. We're not talking about kale, but it's worth
billions and billions of dollars. The Cato Institute calls it a candy coated cartel at this point. And these are a very small number of companies. We're not talking about a really diverse group of companies. We're talking about it very small number who get billions of dollars of corporate welfare. Now, the thing is is that not only they're getting billions of dollars subsidies, but also sugar in through the farm bill. The sugar United States is more expensive here than it
is in almost any other industrialization. So they're getting billions and taxpayer dollars from the farm bill. Then they're getting a lot more because we pay more when we could go to the grocery store. Then there's not a lot of environmental regulations forcing them to comply expensively with environmental regulations. The US taxpayer is having to comply with those in order, you know, the Everglades in other areas, those are other place of which the US taxpayer is having to pay
for the sugar industry. And in terms of labor, you know, we have to pay for the people who are not perhaps making enough to come up to a certain living standard. So the US taxpayer is really really paying a lot
for the sugar habits. And that doesn't even that doesn't even include healthcare costs, because for a very very long time, the sugar industry got itself involved in the science behind what caused obesity, what caused cardiovascular problems, what caused heart disease, to sort of mask or downplay the relationship between sugar and all of those various related health problems, which probably has a very high cost when it comes to our hospitals and life expectancy and various problems in that place
as well.
So it's super expensive. So on the human levels, I mean, what Celeste says is so riveting. But dial this back now to nineteen ninety nine and imagine a twenty two four year old just out of Yale Law School named Sarah Cleveland going to Belglade, Florida for the first time to work on this fellowship at this rural public interest law a migrant legal project, and meeting her future husband, Edward Tuttenham, a romantic, idealistic, optimistic, Harvard Law School educated lawyer.
And those two along with several other lawyers who are you know, They've given their life to fighting the sugar industry, all of them, Celeste interviewed for the podcast Imagine this drama.
It is a you know, what I walked into was this extraordinary case that had dragged on for over several years even at that period, and was in its kind of final stages, and this love story that was going on at the same time, and the impossibility of these lawyers, with their backpacks and their ideals going against the fan Houle Enterprise. ALFI Fonhull was able to get then President Bill Clinton on the telephone to badger a tugger policy at a moment of intimacy he was having with Monaco
No Yes, and this was famously talked about. Now this again, it's all on the podcast. This was famously when he went and mispronounced Alfi Fought Bull's name as mister Fon Jewel was you know, hello, miss Jewel on the time. But the power of these guys, that's so insane. This all came out later and so this is what I walked into in nineteen ninety nine. It was one of the most riveting stories of corporate America. There was one moment in the courtroom, and we talk about this in
the podcast too. There was one moment in the court where they were in their final stages. It was the closing arguments, and I walk in and I see, you know, these incredibly educated lawyers who just, you know, like they're just trying to get these workers the money that they deserve.
And they all are literally carrying their backpacks and they're in their chinos, and they're on one side and there's only about four or five, maybe six of them, and then on the other side, the rows are packed with these incredibly elegant du Bean American stiletto'keel wearing you know, beautifully dressed wommen. Then they're you know, these incredibly attractive
and high power lawyers. And then in the midst of all of this, you know, they bring in an African American lawyer named Willie Gary who flies in, who's been brought in to help represent them, and he flies in
on his own plane. What's it called, Celeste, The Wings of Glory or the Going Off that it was one of the most American of epics of the you know, of you know, the Right against Might, you know, David against Goliath and there you go, you know, like they lost and the farm workers who had somehow managed to
stay in America, these Jamaicans. Celeste interviewed several of them for the podcast, and I had interviewed them, you know, twenty years ago, and they were so compelling about you know, literally how they were treated, how they were like they couldn't get into America without having their hands checked, you know, almost like it was like slave trade and that work is so backbreaking. I mean, Celeste, you were so good talking about that in the podcast.
Well, these men had such stories that sell Tella. It's about some of those stories.
What surprised me with some of them, was they They would talk about these things happening with absolutely just monotone inflection, you know, they would say and then you know, and then even he took the sheddy and I would look over and he had cut off his finger, and so we then you know, he shouted out and he screamed in the mantel, and I would be like, I'm sorry, go back, sorry what happened. But you know that, oh, those years, those months of that was how it was treated.
That those kinds of injuries were part of the job, and so that's how they had to cope. That's the kind of sort of disengagement from suffering they had to learn in order to survive those jobs. And they would write these letters home to their families, and many of them didn't include any of those details in those letters because the people at home in Jamaica were counting on even the small amount of money they were sending home, and they didn't want them to know what they were
suffering in order to get send that money back. You know, their stories were just you know, you just can't hear their stories without you know, feeling moved. And then the fact that especially the von RULs, who had so much these Cuban princes who lost everything, but they lost palaces when Pastro took over. Right, these are not in any case. Yes, Alfi was kidnapped at one point by Castro's man and
held at gunpoint. His father had gotten out before, and he Alphie at age eighteen or seventeen or ninety something is in college, was left to run the sugar companies before he led. But you know what was interesting, I too chased the fond Buls for a long time that they finally did agree to be interviewed because they wanted to get their side of the story out. And at one point I asked, Alfi, fund whichever, consider setting up an education fund for the children of these Jamaican workers.
Oh yeah, that's a good idea.
You set up any kind of a restitution fund, even though you're going to win this case. You know, meanwhile, you know they're sitting on this hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. He couldn't even imagine the question. He said, why would.
I do that?
And I said, because it's.
Probably the right thing to do, and he said, no, we've given them an opportunity to work in America and again as soles said, it was a kind of preview of the astonishing disparity that we are living now in this country.
Yeah, I mean incredible stuff.
Tell me one last thing that why you should listen to this podcast.
And okay, so I'll tell you one last thing. Look, we're all journalists.
We know that there's a lot of really important things that people don't have time to think about, or learn about or be educated about.
Right.
We know that everybody can't know stuff about everything they probably should know about.
But every once in a while, things bubble.
Up that you have to pay attention to, and as journalists we try to point those things out and say, Okay, it's time. It's time to think time to think about climate change, it's time to think about racism.
Now's time.
This is the time the farm bills up. It only comes up once every five years, so it's time.
This is that moment.
When you really do have to listen in and learn about what this does. Learn about the sugar industry, learn about how that sugar gets to your table and into your coffee or your tea, and understand how this works so that you could call you your representatives and your senator and take some action.
The legal drama, rivals, anything out of a John Grisham novel, I would say, is that not quite a celibate clent. It's a riproaring yarn of American power and politics and so dramatic. And again, Celeste, you know you have done such great reporting on the lawyers themselves and the battles between them that you know went on that just for the sake of sheer summer entertainment.
It is a great, great story.
It is. It's this started out as a great story with Murray. It's still a great story now.
So I think the top line is listen to the podcast Big Sugar during your vac and then call your rep and your Senator and talk to.
Them about the farm bill and subsidies for billionaires. It's time to end that. Yeah, thanks to both of you. Thanks in a moment perfectly Jesse Cannon Milli Jong Fast.
Trump is trucing it up, which is always ironic because he's not usually saying anything that's true when he does that.
We've been on vacation for a week, and during that time, Trump is at another set of indictments. He's taken to the social media site that he is stuck on because he made a deal with them, and he has continually been truthing, and he's threatened the judge, he has threatened the witnesses, and he has asked for a change of venue, as one does with all caps.
That's not how any of this is supposed to work.
And for that, our former president number forty five in all caps, trucing away is our moment of fuck Ray. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear 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.