Roger McNamee

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob left Fess Podcast.
My guest today is writer, musician, investor Roger macum. Roger,
it is so good to be here with you, Bob. Okay,
so Roger, how are you coping with the COVID nineteen era, So, Bob,
After a two weeks where I was really trying to
figure out which way was up, I decided to adopt

(00:30):
a full zen program, and I am now one with
the quarantine and it's really working for me. Okay, let's
go a little bit deeper. You're one with the quarantine.
Do you leave your domicile almost never. I'm lucky to
live in a semi rural area where I can go
for walks and get out without going near anyone else,

(00:53):
and that is pretty much where I am. I'm really
lucky because where we live, one of my bandmates chose
to shelter with us, and so we have been able
to play music every day, and we do a live
stream that's on our websites, on Facebook, on Twitter, and
YouTube every single day and that has made the whole experience.

(01:16):
It's given it a focus that's really been for me
at least wild change from three and a half years
of activism where I was on the road seven days
a week and you know, banging my head against a
wall trying to protect democracy from internet platforms. So let's

(01:36):
go back to the band. Why don't you uh tell
give us the U r L for those who are
unfamiliar to so they can live stream. So everybody should
understand that when I was in high school, I was
in a really really sorry When I was in college,
I was in a really cool band, but the lead
songwriter in the band didn't want to go for it,
and so I was one of these people who was

(01:58):
like completely left at the altar and felt crushed about it.
And I went and got a real job because I
had what was a ridiculous amount of student loans for
that period, and I felt like I couldn't afford to
take a risk starting from scratch, but I always wanted
to play, so I kept playing you know, happy hours
and small band things all the way through. And then
about twenty years ago, I decided that I had gotten

(02:21):
far enough in my day job career that I could
afford to try to get serious and convert the industry
group I was in from a garage band into something
real and then it evolved into a full time band
called Moon Else. Uh T Bone. Burnett put us together,
recorded the first album, and the notion was he'd just

(02:41):
done Oh Brother Ware Art Thou and it was a
huge hit, and so he was going to do a
series of albums of Americano music in different styles. So
the notion was reinterpreting them, and he did three at
the same time. We were supposed to take the sound
of the Hate Ashbury and reinterpret it, and then he
got h Elvis Costello to do kind of I think

(03:02):
a New York folk thing, but what he really got
was Alison Krauss and Robert Plant to do Raising Sand,
which of course became huge, and we and Elvis were
completely forgotten in the mix. I mean, we got the
album done in all, but you know, Raising Sand sucked
all the oxygen out of the room, and that forced

(03:22):
Moon Else, which at the time included Jack Cassidy from
the Jefferson Airplane, included Geez Smith, included people who have
been part of the Grateful Dead extended family. That band
essentially had to focus on finding another way to get attention,
and beginning in two thousand and eight, we focused on

(03:43):
Facebook and Twitter, So we did the first live shows
on on Twitter, and then we did we we figured
out how to use Facebook to build an audience, and
we got the hundreds of thousands of people with ridiculously
high levels of engagement as the band gradually figured out
what it's, what its thing was, and you know, we've

(04:06):
been at it now thirteen years and now we're called
Full Moon Eilis because last summer we added Lester Chambers
and his son Dylan from the Chambers Brothers and the
Tea Sisters, who are three sisters who sing tight harmony
to what was basically a hippie band. You know. So
we were really good instrumentally and our vocals were We're

(04:28):
good enough but not great. Now we've added these unbelievable
vocals and we've just recorded new album and we were
about to begin our first tour of theaters, right it
was supposed to start basically March one, and you know,
we had like I want to say, seventy shows set
up for this year, two thirds of the theaters, and
it was going to be really excited because Full Moon Elis,

(04:49):
you know, the notion of bringing back the Chambers Brothers
psychedelic gospel and the fantastic harmonies of the Tea Sisters
on top of what we were doing. People were really
groo it on him, and of course, just like everybody else,
you know, we got shut down and uh, we've missed
all but one show from our and but we have

(05:12):
this album ready to go, and so we're going to
just try to launch an album. And if you go
to moon Alis dot com you can get the first
two songs, which include a new version of Time Has
Come Today with Lester now at age eight, on the
lead vocal as he was on the original and h
T sister song called Wo Wo that it's just it's
really hot and you can check those out if you like,

(05:35):
but it's you know, we're just like everybody else. So
we've we've resorted to pushing the technology really hard and
seeing what you can do with live streaming with multiple
locations and you know, we haven't solved the latency problem,
so we can't all play at the same time, but
we've been able to have all of us on screen
at the same time using a thing that's better than zoom,

(05:57):
and uh, with people playing from all locations but not together. Okay,
you know, this brings us to the question if you know,
the music business at large, recording end of it is
sort of solved with streaming not deeply affected by COVID nineteen,
but the touring business has been brought down to zero.
Do you have any insights on how you would address

(06:18):
this problem that may be able to move it forward.
I mean, Bob, we have spent our time doing almost nothing,
but so you know, we, like a million other people,
had the idea of how about driving movie theaters? Right,
and so we studied the economics, we started talking to
people who own theaters. Now do we begin doing this
some other more ago? And uh, you know, the problem

(06:40):
is the experience for the fans, right, I mean, you know,
the audio would be really imperfect. You can't get that
many people into them. The production costs are pretty high,
and so is it doable? Absolutely? Uh? Is it gonna
be hard? Yes? And you know the question of when
comes back? I think it's really super difficult because, let's

(07:05):
face it, we've mostly been hearing wishful thinking out of Washington.
And you know, as somebody made a professional career in
the daytime studying technology and studying economics, and you know,
I pretty good at reading the news and The thing
that really concerns me is that, you know, one, we

(07:26):
have no leadership in the country, and so our response
to this literally couldn't have been worse. And yet there's
no solution on the horizon. I mean, it might take
multiple years to get a vaccine that works in enough
supply to actually protect the country. So we're stuck for
a while. And what does that mean for live music?

(07:48):
I mean, we're going to have to find new models
because until then, when people get close together, there's a
really high risk of getting sick. And in my mind,
folks who are older, and our audience includes a lot
of you know, older folks, they're going to be really
hesitant about what they do. And uh, we we haven't

(08:10):
got that figured out yet, but we're going to keep
trying until we do. Okay, let's segue to the COVID
nineteen And it's important because the wind ever, the facts
don't really change, but the spin does. That we're recording
this Thursday, May fourteenth, Starting today, we wave a magic
wand you're in charge. What should we be doing in

(08:31):
the US or maybe worldwide to fight COVID nineteen. Well,
in my mind, the United States as biggest failing right
now is that we don't cooperate with the rest of
the world about anything. So we dropped out of the
International Confederation to develop a vaccine that is insane. So
on day one, I would get back into that and
I would go to everyone around the world and I

(08:54):
both listened to what they've learned, and I would adopt it.
Our problem was we spend two months in a form
of quarantine which slowed the spread of the disease without
actually shrinking it. So every other country went to a
more harsh form of quarantine. Well, let's let's just go back.

(09:14):
We stopped the spread, but we didn't shrink that. Please
amplify that from my audience. So essentially, the way to
think about this is if you look at New Zealand,
or you look at Taiwan, or you look at South Korea,
they implemented measures immediately, they tested immediately, they went to
social distancing immediately before there was widespread infection, and the

(09:40):
result of that behavior was that they stopped the thing
from spreading and made it possible to resume economic activity
after a couple of months. In our case, we waited
for almost two months after the first case before we
did anything significant. And then when we implemented our quarantine,
we did it in such a way that it was

(10:00):
already too late in the Northeast, and we didn't think
about elements of our economy like meat packing facilities, like
retirement homes, prisons where people are tightly packed and where

(10:21):
the normal behavior did not have public health standards that
would be resistant to a communicable disease like COVID. And
so the result is we are still having outbreaks at
exactly the time we're trying to reopen the economy. So,
you know, they talked about this rate of infection called
are not and you want to get that thing significantly

(10:42):
below one in order to get the actual spread of
the disease. Now that's how many people one person infects
can In fact, right, we started out I think around three,
you know, now we're down to just slightly over one.
And the result is we're sort of stable with twenty
to of thousand people a day being diagnosed and between

(11:04):
fifteen hundred a day dying. Well I'm sorry, but you
can do the man. I mean, you know, if you're
going to have let's say an average of two thousand
people a day dying, that's sixty people a month, right,
So that's bigger than Vietnam every single month. And you

(11:24):
know that means that by this time next year, if
it persists, of this time next year, you literally have
more people dead in a year than died in the
Second World War. And so that's not a solution, right.
We have to find a way to get the numbers
so that you know they're like everybody else, which is
to say that there are some days you have next

(11:45):
to no new infections and nobody dying, and we haven't
done any of the things to do that are testing
is woefully inadequate. We started so late that we missed
the window when this level of testing would have made
a difference. Now we need the testing to be five
times is great to produce the same effect that this
part would have done if we've done it three months ago.

(12:07):
And so I find all of that obviously alarming, because Bob,
you and I are not spring chickens, right, we are
in the portion of the population that needs to be
super careful, and many of our favorite people in the
music business are also, and obviously to the extent that
anybody has had any past health history, you know, if

(12:29):
you've ever had hypertension or heart disease or lung disease,
or you're a smoker or overweight or whatever. I mean,
those things just make it a lot more dangerous if
you've and god forbid, you've ever had cancer. And so
you know, to me, we've had a massive failure of

(12:50):
you know, public health administration in this country and there's
no sign of fixing that until best case, January of
next year, right, which is like, wow, you know that's
just okay, Just so I know what would happen theoretically
on January one next year. It wouldn't be January. Fe
be January right when you change presidents. Okay, but let's

(13:11):
I don't I don't want to make this false equivalences.
But since we the pass is locked in stone, if
hypothetically you were in charge today, what would you do?
So the first thing that I would do is that
I would I would simply there there too two paths.
I would take, one relative the economy and one relative
to the to the the coronavirus. And keep in mind,

(13:34):
I'm just a citizen. I have a professional analyst, so
I have Oh yeah, but the reason you have a
long history in tech, and just like with many people
saying about climate crisis, climate control in there there depending
on tech solutions. So your viewpoint is important. So to
be clear, I do not I think the tech industry
is grossly overstated what it can do on this. Relative

(13:58):
to the pandemic. We have got to find a way
to increase the testing by a factor of five, like immediately.
And we need to culturally and this notion that the
pandemic is part of the culture wars, this notion that
somehow people's liberty is being infringed upon because we're asking

(14:21):
them not to kill grandmother, grandfather or someone else in
their household. That I mean, we have you know, the
first thing I do is try to bridge that gap
politically and because we have to work together on this.
This is this is a situation where the country is
threatened in a way it has potentially never been threatened

(14:42):
in its homeland, certainly not since the Civil War. And
you know, we have to start doing the right thing.
But on the economy, I think it's really simple. Trump
has focused all of his energy on protecting his friends,
basically billionaires, large corporations, and that is insane. We have
got to have focused the energy on the people who
work in our economy and on the small businesses on

(15:04):
which it depends. And you know the thing that I
would do is I would I would sit there relative
to Congress and go here is the deal. Okay, we
need to have something that guarantees an income to every
single American for the duration of this crisis, and it
should be uncontestable, and we need to have billionaires paying

(15:28):
their share. From a taxpoint of view. You need to
have corporations recognizing that they're not going to be allowed
to use the pandemic as an excuse to harm employees
or to harm customers. And you know, the reality is
we're paying a price here because for forty years we
deregulated our economy in a way that shifted all the

(15:51):
power and most of the wealth to a tiny fraction
of the population. And you know, ideas that worked pretty
well in the eighties became a disaster by two thousand
and a train wreck. Recently, and my very strong opinion,
having spent a career looking at this stuff, is that

(16:12):
our economy right now looks like an authoritarian regime. You
have a small number of monopolies that dominate every industry,
and that contributed to magnifying the damage to the pandemic.
If you look at it, we had been firing employees
and shifting production of low cost things outside the US

(16:32):
for forty years, to the point where today you cannot
make cotton swaps in order to do a test. Right.
We've lost the ability to things that are absolutely essential
to the economy because we were so focused on optimizing
shareholder value in the short run, and our supply chains
are really fragile. Our health care system is a train wreck.
It is not designed for any kind of public health disaster.

(16:56):
In fact, the entire economy has no margin for everything
is so efficient that any disruption at all breaks. And
that is what's going on. That is why they are
thirty three million people that are explicitly unemployed. But the
reality is it's probably much much bigger than that. And
you know, you look at this and you just go.

(17:18):
The thing that I would be all over on day
one is a new new deal that we've got to
get out there and recognize that all of the people
that live in this country deserve to be treated better.
And so I would follow that up. For example, is
I mean I would reverse everything Trump has ever done
on immigration, and I would absolutely recognize that the people

(17:42):
whose jobs are on the front line. So these are
the people who work in healthcare, the people who work
in retail point of sale, particularly like grocery stores and pharmacies,
the people who work in u meat packing and other
food supply things. Those are essential abs, we say, but
we treat them like they're not, and that's insane. These

(18:04):
jobs need to be paid better. In fact, we need
to look at the whole ecounty. We need to recognize
that part of the reason we're here is that we
cripple public education, right, and so are are too many
people in our population have lost critical thinking and they
can't see facts as facts. They can't appreciate why expertise

(18:25):
really matters. And so I would love, you know, to
use the current environment to reset the whole economy and
to sit there and say, look, our goal should be
to get back to you know, we hold these truths
to be self evident. You know, everybody's created equal, right,

(18:46):
I want to form a more perfect union, and you
really want people to be able to pursue their lives
without fear. And you sit there and you look at
that poor situation where a jogger in Georgia is hunted
down and killed in broad daylight. And you said, you
see these guys in Michigan, armed to the teeth with

(19:08):
heavy weaponry, who are claiming that somehow their rights are
being infringed. I'm going the whole world is upside down.
It is backwards. And if you know, if you made
me president for a day, my goal would be to
try to remind people that we actually have shared interests,

(19:31):
that we you know, this notion that each one of
us is an independent like Marlborough man and not depend
on anybody else. I mean, that's ridiculous, and you can
see that in this pandemic. Okay, let's before we let's
just step focused on the other half for a second
before we leave it behind. How should we be fighting

(19:51):
COVID nineteen irrelevant of the economic effects. So here's the thing.
I'm no doctor, but I can tell you about the
tech part. Everything that you've heard it about contact tracing
using smartphones is nonsense. Everything you've heard about using surveillance
is nonsense. And here are the problems. So this notion

(20:13):
that a smartphone can be used to create automatic automated
contact tracing fails. For the following reasons. The core technology
and the smartphone that you would use to figure out
whether you got close to people who had symptoms or
people who actually were infected with COVID is bluetooth. And
the problem for this application with bluetooth is that while

(20:37):
it can get you within roughly six ft, it doesn't
recognize walls, So you can be within six ft of
somebody but nowhere near them relative to the disease. Because
there's a wall between you and the way the systems
are set up, it's very hard for them to keep

(20:57):
track of how long you are close to somebody. Right,
That's what Apple and Google are trying to create. They're
trying to create something that would would fix that. But
the fundamental problem is you're going to get massive numbers
of false positives, and that's going to require a ridiculous
level of processing. Because with a country of three and

(21:19):
thirty million people, if you get you know, if half
the things you get are false positives or two thirds
of the ones you get are false positives, that number
would be staggering. But it's going to be more like,
are gonna be false positives? And so let's assue for
by some miracle, just say to be inherently in the
way the phones are designed. This is an unsolvable problem,

(21:42):
or could Google and Apple come up with a solution
to this issue. Even enough time, you can come up
with a problem. But with the time constraints were under,
you're not going to get there fast enough, which is
a big reason why Google and Apple are radically narrowing
the scope of what they're trying to do. So the
second piece of the problem is artificial intelligence, which is

(22:05):
certainly artificial but not intelligence. The current state of artificial
intelligence is so grossly oversold that it will not help
you to solve the false positives problem. In fact, if
you look at it, all these people claiming that they
can create these uh heat based cameras to identify people
are sick. That is all utter nonsense, okay. And all

(22:28):
these people who say, well, I can look at a
picture of you and identify whether you have COVID or not.
I mean that is I don't know what language we
can use here, but that you can use any language
you choose. Bullshit. Okay, it is just not So doesn't
mean you can't get there eventually, but the current state
of the technology, it was not designed for that, and

(22:49):
so it's not going to get you there quickly. So
here's the thing that I believe really matters. When I
look at the tech industry my big problem and I've
spent you know, I've been there since night teen two, right,
so from when the Space program was the most important thing,
before PCs were the dominant stuff. So I've watched the
whole thing and I've had a front row seat. And
technology has so much promise, but the industry is out

(23:11):
of control and it fundamentally it it's driven by this
passion to take advantage of the weakest elements of human
psychology because the technology allot should do that. That's what's
wrong with YouTube and Facebook and is just just before
we go because now we're going down a very deep avenue.

(23:31):
But let me let me just fine. Fine, So they've
got that thing, but the other part, the enterprise products
all they're eliminating jobs. And I say, COVID is a
perfect opportunity to fix that problem. Because contact tracing is
actually best done by human beings enabled and empowered by
a small amount of automation. So the thing that Apple

(23:53):
and Google can do is, you know, empower a huge number,
you know, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people
who are physically going and meeting people who have symptoms
and doing that contact tracing. It would have been so
much easier to do this when you're dealing with hundreds

(24:15):
or low thousands of infected patients. But here we are
in a million and a half. And so you know
you've got this problem that the contract tracing thing, the
scale of it is simply staggering. But here's the good news.
We have tens of millions of unemployed people and here's
an opportunity to put them all to work and to
use technology to enhance that. So the big piece I

(24:37):
would give our listeners to think about relative to technology today,
and COVID provides the perfect case in point, is that
we should not trust the technology can solve all our problems.
It's not a silver bol and we first certain should
not believe the promises given by the people who run
tech companies. There. They aren't all horrible people, but they

(25:00):
are relentlessly optimistic and the culture of the industry is
not what it needs to be. Tech is today where
the chemicals industry was in nineteen sixty when they spewed
toxic fumes into the air. When they poured mercury into
fresh water, when they left mine residue on the side
of the hill. They were profitable because they were destroying

(25:24):
the economy and the sorry. They were destroying the environment
and public health. The tech industry, the profits of Google
and Facebook are grossly overstated because they're destroying democracy, public health,
privacy in the economy. And so I look at this
and I go, COVID is the moment. This is the
pivot where we can sit there and go. Tech is
so important that like chemicals in nineteen sixty, like pharmaceuticals

(25:50):
in nineteen o six when we passed the Pure Food
and Drug Act, and just like the building trades after
the Chicago fire, when we realized we really needed to
make the people who build houses responsible for what they built.
That that you have to make tech accountable. And this
is a great opportunity to do that because we all
know how important it is in our lives. And the

(26:11):
future of tech could be so bright and it can
be so constructive. But if he keeps doing what it's
doing now, I mean, I look at Amazon. I'm so
frustrated because Jeff Bezos said he's going to take the
four billion dollars of profits he would otherwise make in
the Jeune quarter. He's going to push him all into
COVID stuff. And my question what's he going to put

(26:32):
it into. Is he going to proctect his employees. Is
he going to change the work rules in the warehouses
so that it's healthier to work in an Amazon warehouse?
Is he going to pay his people more? Because if
he was going to do all those things, that would
be huge. What I fear is that he's going to
spend a ton of money on computer solutions that he

(26:52):
can then sell to governments, and he's going to still
treat the employees really badly. And if that's true, that
will be a missed opportunity, completely tragic. Okay, we're segueing
into a whole thing in terms of if we know
that tech is not going to solve the problem, and
assuming there's no vaccine on the immediate horion horizon, you're saying,

(27:13):
put the unemployed people to work to do contact tracing
very slowly. How would you close down the spread of
the virus? Or maybe you don't. I don't know, Bob,
I wish I knew the answer to that. The one
thing I do know is that there is a silver
line with this whole thing. If you and I stay

(27:33):
physically isolated, we can come through this thing. Right. We're
in a position where you can do your job. I
can do my job in an isolated way. And that's
a lucky thing, right, because otherwise we're in h the
peer group of those with the greatest risk. Anybody in
that situation who has that opportunity is blessed. My core

(27:57):
question is what do you do about the people who
can't or to do that, whose jobs do not allow
them to be isolated, who's lack of political power this
means they have no protection, and so my focus is
on those people. And I would simply note that Amazon
employees have begun to push back, and not just the

(28:18):
people in the warehouses, right, Even salaried people who work
in headquarters have had some pushback, and I think that's
really excited. Citing teachers, We've had more teacher strikes in
the last two years that I think the prior twenty
put together. It's you know, it's time to have work
action everywhere in the economy. People in healthcare, people who

(28:41):
work in meat packing plans, people who work in prisons.
They have way more power than they realize, and it's
incumbent on all of us to help them. You know,
there were days when people didn't buy from Facebook, didn't
buy from instat cart to protest against their labor practices.
We need to have more of that kind of stuff.
We need to if if we always take the convenient path,

(29:06):
the country's gonna just keep going right off the Cliffic's
going off now, Okay, now, Naomi Klein wrote a whole
book called The Shock Doctrine talking about these big moments
in national history, and then they basically say, the powers
that be, the government and the corporations ram through things
to their advantage. You're delineating a lot of things that
would benefit the public. How do we make sure that

(29:30):
this crisis does benefit the public as opposed to the
fat cats. So at the moment, we're doing a terrible
job of that, right because Trump's whole stick is he
has the people he supports, and he really doesn't care
about anybody else. And the Democrats in Congress have moderated

(29:53):
some of his worst instincts, but because of McConnell in
the Senate, they have of not being able to do
what needs doing, and that I find incredibly distressing. And
if the pandemic gives Trump the ability two manipulate the

(30:20):
presidential election or two implement voter suppression techniques that are
as effective as the ones that we're employed in, you know,
we're going to have to work really hard to get
past this. I mean, job one has to be ending

(30:41):
the Trump presidency, and that there is I mean, the
fastest development of a vaccine in history, I believe was
the for the months and I think it took four years.
And my understanding is that it's not uncommon for a
vaccine to take twenty so more. I mean, AIDS has

(31:01):
been thirty years and we still don't have one. Uh.
And so I'm looking at this and just saying we're
going to be living with this for a while, and
it is essential that we followed naomi clients brilliant observations
about these moments and not waste this opportunity to get
it right. So I would look at everybody and say,

(31:23):
our job is not to go back to what the
world was before, because the world before actually sucked for
most people, right it massive income inequality, really unfair labor practices,
incredibly predatory business practices by large companies and our goal

(31:44):
should be to move forward to something much better. And
you know, I say this as somebody who's I spent
my whole life as a capitalist, But the truth is,
we haven't had capitalism in this country for at least
a decade because the world is dominated by monopolies. And
if you think back history, monopoly is associated with monarchy,

(32:04):
with authoritarianism because it creates balance it's easy to control
for an authoritarian whereas capitalism and democracy are really tightly aligned.
And I believe that the United States is a failed
democracy in many dimensions. And you can argue about how
far down the failure uh spectrum the country is, but

(32:29):
it's in my mind. You know, you've had to presidential
elections in the last twenty years where the loser of
the popular vote became president and that is clearly not
an outcome that is consistent with any normal view of democracy. Okay,

(32:53):
so let's talk about politics for a second, because it
leads into another topic. Uh In, Bernie Sanders gave Hillary
Clinton a real run for her money in the primaries.
We had Bernie Sanders on the left, we had Elizabeth
Warren on the left. Needles to say the ultimate nominee

(33:14):
at this point in time is Joe Biden. My personal
analysis is that once it appeared that Bernie Sanders was
going to be the nominee, the d n C and
the media, ie the New York Times primarily conspired to
make sure that didn't happen. So my questions are secondarily

(33:37):
how important is the media too? Can a candidate of
a what is seen as left today be successful? And see?
Are though those the people we should be running and
would they be embraced? So, Bob, I am so much
more close to politics in this country than I would

(33:59):
have been before I became an activist. You know, when
I started my campaign in basically the end of to
it really early to make the world aware of what
happened in the election, how Facebook and Instagram in particular,
and Twitter and YouTube were manipulated to distort the outcome

(34:22):
of our presidential election. And I tried to warn people
to prevent that from happening again. And what wound up
happening is I spent a huge amount of time in Washington.
I got to know a ton of people and learned
a lot about how our process works when it's working well,
and what its failure modes are, so my read of
what happened this time is very different from yours, not

(34:45):
that in the end it matters either way, but let
me just suggest an alternative hypothesis which I think actually
explains the facts slightly better. Uh. And So the first
signal that I had there was something wrong with Facebook
and democracy occurred in January when I saw a hate
speech from Facebook groups that were notionally associated with Bernie Sanders,

(35:11):
and they were hate speech against Clinton. And what struck
me was how rapidly these memes were spreading, and how
many of my friends were spreading them, and how you
went from one person to a dozen people in a
matter of days, which suggested somebody was spending money to
get my friends into these groups. And I don't know that,

(35:32):
I can't prove that that was true. But it turned
out there was a a group of people outside the
Sanders campaign but tightly affiliated with them, who were really
clever in their use of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter,
and who essentially supported that campaign really aggressively against Hillary Clinton.

(35:59):
Now it turns out what really pushed me over the
edge in was breggsit because that was the first time
I realized, oh, my God, the ad tools at Facebook.
The same thing that you know you can use to
sell records or tickets to a concert could be used
to destroy the outcome of the general election of major country.
I mean, that was like, that scared the crap out
of me. And so you know, when I went to

(36:20):
Zuckerberg and Sandberg in October, it was because I was
convinced that the business model, the algorithms, and the culture
of Facebook, we're allowing bad guys too harm innocent people
into harm democracy. So I set out to inform the
world and prevent that from happening again. And what was
tragic about was that the exact same forces that we

(36:46):
saw in We're back in size and had a huge impact.
And the the thing that really was so frustrating for
me was that pull people in the press, they acknowledged
there's a real primary, and they acknowledge there is what
is called a donor primary, where you know, it's about

(37:07):
whose money can you get? Right, And the thing that
that Bernie and had Warren did so well is to
convert fundraising from a batcat thing to a masses of
people thing using social media. Now, that same Bernie Sanders
group that did the UH Facebook stuff in never went away,

(37:30):
and they got really good and they built up their network.
They had, I want to say, something like Facebook pages,
and they were amplified by roughly four hundred Facebook groups
which would have in many cases thousands of people in them.
And they were all in for Bernie and a big

(37:51):
part of their effort, and I worked with researchers at
George Washington University. Uh was the beginning in the summer
of nineteen they decided to clear the field for Bernie,
and they made very quick work of Senator Harris and
then turned their sights on Warren and beginning in October,
focused on the one issue where Warren's position was identical

(38:14):
to Sanders and somehow made people think there was something
wrong with Warren. Right issue was becoming the front runner,
and they were amazingly effective at getting it. We're talking
about healthcare, Yes, Medicare for all. So the point was
where they were really affected was getting the breath to
position Warren as somehow with a dangerous position without saying

(38:36):
the same about about Burnie. The key thing is there's
nothing in American law that makes this illegal. Okay, this
is hardball politics. It's how the game is played. It
was amazingly successful, and I was with the folks at
George Wasshing University try to call attention to fact that hey,
this is going on, we should at least be talking

(38:57):
about is this the right way to conduct to Democratic primary?
So they cleared the field because I think the Sanders
people correctly thought that Warren was the biggest threat and
Harris was the second biggest threat. I think they thought
Biden would just peter out. Now, my perception of what
happened is not that the d n C did anything.
In fact, my impression of the DNC is honest to god,

(39:20):
I'm amazed they can get dressed in the morning because
I watched them. You know, we tried to get them
to pay attention to disinformation a couple of years ago,
and they just had no interest. Their focus was making
sure they were not embarrassed by a hack again. And
uh so, I literally don't think they could possibly have
tilted this divide. I think what happened was that the

(39:41):
most important constituency in the Democratic Party, black people, particularly
black women, decided that all that mattered was beating Trump.
They would deal with a guy who was hopeless in
every other respect as long as it could be Trump.
And the guy who had consistently the best numbers against
Trump was Biden, and they knew him well from the

(40:02):
Obama administration, and they decided in South Carolina they're going
to go there, and that just tipped the whole damn thing.
I think the d n C was every bit as surprised.
In fact, people I know around that thing express complete
and utter shock by what happened. Because if you look
at I mean remember the movie, the Peter Sellers movie
being there. Sure, well, I look at Biden, I'm going

(40:25):
that's Chauncey Gardner. I mean, you know, I look at Biden.
I just go. You gotta be kidding. Now. The one
good thing is the guy's a weather vane, right, So
I'm really hopeful that Warren and Harris are going to
play a really big role in his administration. Stacy Abrams, Right, Uh,
But the first thing, you should gotta get him elected.

(40:47):
And you know, as much as you know he's not
my guy, you know what, I want to go forward,
not backward, right, But it's really essentially getting elected. He's
the guy we have, right, And to me, the great
tragedy is that the d n C organized what was

(41:09):
demonstrably a ridiculously bad primary process for picking a candidate,
and in the end it was decided on cosmetic stuff
as opposed to like who would be well prepared. I mean,
can you imagine how different the thing might have been
if the pandemic has started three months earlier, right, Because

(41:30):
in that context, Warren probably would have emerged differently than
she did, because I mean, she looks like the kind
of people who have been successful around the world, right.
I mean, if you look at it, whether it's Germany
or New Zealand or any of those other countries in
Europe that have women prime ministers, there is this incredible

(41:53):
thing that the you know, I want to say, eight
of the ten countries they are most successful in finding
the pandemic have a minutes their chief executive. And that's
I don't think that's a fluke, right, And you know,
women technocrats in politics have a really good track record,
and you know, but we're not going to get to

(42:14):
run that experiment right where we are where we are,
so we we got to play with the horse we've got. Okay,
before we get back to the political thing, uh, talking
about income, inequality, etcetera, globalization has gotten a bad name.
My viewpoint would be that globalization is inevitable. It's just
that they left out the people who would be screwed

(42:34):
by globalization. What's your viewpoint on that? So I am
totally with you, and if you don't mind, I'm going
to go past where you are, okay. So I love
globalization because it's a peacemaking phenomenon that when you have
interlocking economies, it's really hard to go to war. And

(42:57):
the flaws of globalization really can be reduced to the
ancillary choices that were made with it. So if you
think about the fact that we allowed the tax law
to be used to encourage outsourcing of manufacturing to other countries,

(43:21):
which caused whole communities to disappear in the United States
economically whole basically whole states. And if you think about
the choices we've made relative to optimizing our globalization strategy
to ensure that there would be a hundred thousand different

(43:42):
products at Walmart at the lowest possible price. There are
lots of ways you could have optimized the strategy, but
we basically say we're going to optimize in a way
that you know goes to all this Huxley, We're gonna
give people the soma of consumerism. People can take away
their job. And it's like, if that is those things

(44:02):
are not linked, those are choices. And we have a
thing that started really well, went way off the tracks
because we forgot something about capitalism that really matters, which is,
for capitalism the work, someone has to set the rules
and enforce them, and traditionally that's the federal government. And

(44:25):
Reagan comes in says the government is the problem. And
the Republicans set about making government ineffective. And it took
them forty years, but they succeeded to the point where
today government does not have the ability to meet the
needs that people incidently expect from it. And exactly the moment,
the technology is creating a new set of needs for

(44:46):
which the government does not have the budget or the
skills to provide support. And we have got to break
the back of the libertarian philosophy that there is nothing
useful the government does, because if you're looking at it
right now, the absence of a thoughtful government response all

(45:10):
by itself explains why the United States has the worst
outcome from COVID in the entire world. Okay, you know,
in the news right now. Moving into the social media
sphere is the whole plandemic documentary okay, which doesn't seem

(45:31):
to be able to be killed in terms of video,
keeps popping up. Give us your viewpoint on that. So
the first piece, let me just remind our audience how
the business model of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and in a
slightly different way Twitter work. These sites are all dependent

(45:52):
on our attention. They sell ants. They're only twenty four
hours in a day. They need keep as much of
our attention as possible. For YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, they
have used surveillance what Shoshana zoo Boff at Harvard calls
surveillance capitalism. Two. Build a dossier on every single person

(46:17):
that is, for all intents and purposes, a data voodoo
doll that is a complete representation of our digital lives,
every touch point, not just the things you have on
Facebook and Google, but every time you use a credit card,
every time you travel, every time you use your phone,
every time you move with the phone in your position.
They know everything. They know what you do minute by

(46:39):
minute the whole day. They know where you are, who
you're with. They use that in order to identify content.
It will activate your emotions. Well, guess what. For most people,
the surest way engage people emotional is to appeal to
flight or fight. Right, it's you can't help, but survivally,

(47:03):
you have to react. Even if you don't like the content,
you still have to pay attention. It's the same reason
why you have rubber necking when there's an accident. So
what kind of content does that? Hate speech, disinformation, and
conspiracy theories. So an algorithm that is designed to maximize
attention will, over the course of time, wind up promoting

(47:27):
hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories far more than other kinds
of content. So conclusion number one, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Their
business is hate speech, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. And so
when something comes along and you look at their reaction,
their basic reaction is first order responses, Oh, it's free speech,

(47:52):
We're not going to interfere. If the pressure doesn't go away,
they go, well, we have this tool so people can
report it, and you know, if enough people report it
will do something. Then the third level response is, uh, oh,
I'm sorry, but that doesn't violate our terms of service. Yes,
it's objectional, what doesn't If it still won't go away,

(48:13):
they will eventually remove either the piece of content or
the person who put it up. So they got rid
of Alex Jones. Why did they do that because the
pressure was really huge, and even though Alex Jones was gigantic,
he was a tiny fraction of all the hate speech, disinformation,
conspiracy theories on those platforms and they were able to

(48:34):
protect all the rest of it for a period of
time by getting rid of him. So they take down plandemic,
But what do they not do. They do not eliminate
the ability of someone to advertise and share the link
to plandemic in an ad, and they do nothing to
prevent it from being spread inside groups on Facebook, so

(48:56):
you wind up having people promoting it in places and
other people just sharing it inside groups. So it's they
don't actually want to get rid of it because that's
the thing that drives their business. This is the same
basis on which Google, Facebook as corporations, and Twitter have
had two standards, one for real people and the other

(49:20):
for people who are conservatives right. Twitter famously said they
couldn't eliminate white supremacy hate speech because doing so would
require them to shut down a bunch of Republicans. They
obviously do not enforce their terms of service on Trump
for anything. And Facebook has done the most amazing thing.

(49:45):
A reporter named Judd Lego discovered that Trump was advertising
with blatant falsehoods that violated the Facebook terms of service.
He calls them on it, and so what did Facebook do?
They change their terms of service last summer and now

(50:07):
it's okay to lie in a political act. Now I
look at all these things and I just go why.
And here's the thing. There are three billion people who
actively use Facebook products. Roughly similar number actively use Google products,

(50:27):
so have almost half the worlds population. They're more than
twice as big as any country. Neither Google nor Facebook
acknowledges responsibility to any country. They're bigger than any country.
They go, but you can't regulate us. And yet they
do have a problem. They don't have armies and they

(50:48):
don't control currencies, so they lack the two things that
sovereign nations have. So they have to cooperate to sub degree.
They will always aligned with power. There's a famous story
about how Twitter in particular and Facebook also we're used
during the Arab Spring to help get those people together.

(51:11):
How they were used to help organize the Women's Arch,
how they were used to help them organize the March
for Our Lives, how they were used in Black Lives Matter.
The part of the story that people don't focus on
it closely is that these companies aligned with the powerful,
such that when something like the Arab Spring or the
March for Our Lives of the Women's March happens, the

(51:33):
people on the other side, particularly authoritarians, can use the
exact same technology to replect, to suppress any kind of resistance,
and Facebook in particular has been a huge enabler of
that in countries like Myan mar in countries like Cambodia
and the Philippines, where you know, the authoritarians have inflicted

(51:59):
great harm on innocent people. So what drives me insane, Bob,
is this week's big stories. Facebook has something called the
Oversight Board, and in theory, it's going to police. It's
academics and journalists who are going to police hate speech,
disinformation and conspiracy theories. And I'm pulling my hair up

(52:22):
because people are trying to debate whether the people on
this board are the right people. And I'm going to
hang out people. This entire discussion is ridiculous. The oversight
board requires human moderation. Humans look at the content. It
fails for two reasons, and our audience will get one

(52:42):
of them instantly. One of them is latency. There's a
lag between when something gets put up and when a
human can review it and agree and take it down.
During that lag is when all the harm takes place, right,
because when the thing gets put out, the damage is instantaneous.
So what Facebook uses was what I call algorithmic amplification.

(53:04):
It blows this thing out to literally three billion people,
and there's nothing you can do with human moderation to
keep pace with that. So the other problem is the
problems scale right that you know you're gonna have forty
moderators patrolling a thing with billions of posts a day.
I mean, that's hopeless. And so what we need to

(53:27):
do is to stop pretending like Facebook is seriously trying
to solve any of these problems. If they want to
do that, they wouldn't be treating Trump the way they
are in the selection. They wouldn't be you know, they
wouldn't be aligning themselves so tightly. They'd be sitting there saying,
wait a minute, when this is done, we have to

(53:47):
live somewhere. Employees have to live somewhere. Do they want
to live in an authoritarian country? I mean that it's
to my mind, that's what's wrong with all of this
stuff right now. Because these companies are so big, they
have to align with power, and they are inherently authoritarian
in their own decision. Right because the founders of Google,

(54:10):
the founder of Facebook have absolute control over those platforms, right,
shareholders have no voice. And so in that situation, authoritarians
are going to align with authoritarians and just make them comfortable.
And I'm sitting I've spent three and a half years
trying to go, hey, hello, we got a huge problem here.

(54:33):
We gotta do something about it. And you know, I'm
not some dude who just walked in off the street.
I spent thirty eight years in Silicon Valley. I was
at Kleiner Perkins when they made the first investment in Amazon,
when they made the first investment in Google. You know,
I was one of the early advisors from Mark zucker
Bergen and Cheryl Sandberg. I mean, I saw all this stuff,

(54:53):
and look, I'm not the perfect messenger, duh. You can
tell because it didn't want But I did my because
and I took three and a half years of my
life to do nothing else because I thought it was
that important. And here we are. Now. The good news
is the cavalry sort of has arrived because a lot
of people who really know way more about how this

(55:14):
stuff works than I do have come into the game.
You know, Shoshana Zooboff is an amazing person. Becca Lewis
relative to white supremacy at Stanford. You know, the list goes.
You know, there's Joe Donovan who does disinformation, and I
mean there's just tons of people who have come in now,
and so the real experts are in the game and
that makes me feel like we got a shot. But man,

(55:37):
we got a lot of work to do. But okay, well,
we know, like any business, there's outside and inside, and
you have had the privilege, unlike these researchers, to literally
be on the inside. So let's start with Zuckerberg and
Cheryl Sandberg. Since you were an early investor and an advisor,
do they understand the problem you're obviously, especially someone like Zuckerberg.

(55:59):
A lot of these tech people, uh I will say,
are not fully rounded people. Okay, where you're thirty years older, etcetera.
Do they literally understand the issues. So I think the
challenge here, Bob, is that the founders of Google and
Facebook have a different philosophy. So I'll start with Mark

(56:24):
at Facebook. Mark believes that bringing together the whole world
onto one network that he controls is the single most
important thing any human being can do, and that it's
a much better idea than the United States of America,
or France or Italy. And he believes that haven't gotten

(56:46):
this far, we should let him finish the job. The
founders of Google believe that if they can gather all
the data in the world, they can make everything a
million times more efficient. So one thing that both Mark
and Larry and Surrogey share is the engineering philosophy that

(57:11):
efficiency is the value that you want to optimize for, which,
by the way, if you're making a motor, that's obviously true.
If you're making a small piece of software, great, But
when you're applying it to a country, then you have
to ask the question, is efficiency consistent with the values

(57:32):
of that country? And I would simply observe that Western
democracies we're valued. We're sorry, We're established on the principles
of the Enlightenment. Specifically, two things, free will, self determination,
and another word for that, and the other one is democracy.

(57:52):
Now think about it. Self determination is inherently inefficient. You
decide what you're going to wear today, You decide what
you're gonna eat today, You decide where you're gonna go.
I make my own choices. If everybody does that, you know,
that's immensely inefficient. Would be so much more efficient if
everybody wore the same clothes, if everybody ate the same things, right,
you just be able to optimize everything a lot better.

(58:17):
And you think about democracy, You go, whoa democracy is
all about forcing compromise, right, be so much better if
you could just sit there and go, these are the rules.
Everybody has to obey them. And the thing happened last week.
It was an amazing step for our side in that battle.

(58:37):
Google has been following the a path of developing products
that's a little bit like the Apollo program to go
to the Moon, where you know, you broke down each
of the steps necessary to go to the moon, and
Gemini and Apollo had to do each one, advancing to
the next only after they've successfully accomplished going to Earth orbit.

(58:59):
Rande of Alot Earth orbit spacewalk and Earth orbit, go
to the Moon, go around it, do a rendezvous, and
lunar orbit to a spacewalk in lunar orbit, then you
go down to the Moon without landing, and then finally
you go to the Moon. So they've been building up
towards something they call smart cities. They have an alphabet
division called Sidewalk Collapse. They just going to impose this

(59:20):
notion of efficiency on the city and they have been
for the last few years trying to do the very
first moon landing, if you will, in Toronto and something
called water Front Toronto. There was going to be a
development where they were going to essentially take over control
of all the city services and make everything really efficient

(59:41):
through a combination of surveillance and them controlling the information streams.
And they sold this thing to the city on the
basis of, Hey, we're going to finance this massive development
and we're going to give you some great data for
running the city. And for a long time they didn't
talk about what the gotchas were. And I played a

(01:00:02):
very small role in the campaign to expose those gotches,
and they were things like, oh, if there's a problem,
you complained to the city government. But the city government
can actually fix the problem because Google has total control.
Google is going to own a lot of the land,
so they're gonna make a lot of money on the
real estate. Maybe that was a fair deal, but they're
also going to own all the data, and they were

(01:00:24):
going to be able to take any data they wanted
and you could not push back on it. Well, I
mean that's way past that's past the matrix, right, I mean,
that's really creepy stuff. They were forced to withdraw their
bid last week because of a tsunami of opposition, but

(01:00:46):
the day before they started a new thing because Governor
Cuomo New York appointed Eric Schmidt to help redesign public
education in New York. And it's like, I just want
to sit there and go, you have got be kidding.
I mean, this is insane. And you know it's when
you look at this thing. Technology could be used to

(01:01:09):
empower people, to give them greater rights of self determination,
to give a better form of democracy, and instead it's
being used to exploit all the weak elements in our society,
all the weak elements in our psychology. And it doesn't
have to be that way. That is a choice, that

(01:01:29):
is a that is a sociopathy that has become endemic
and silicon volley over the past decade, and you see
it in things like Uber and Airbnb and we Work
and Palenteer and now more recently with Banjo and clear
View AI. The people who are basically using surveillance, stealing

(01:01:54):
your right you know, your photos and all that, and
using it in really creepy ways and going it doesn't
have to be this one. This is a choice. And
our job is to use the pandemic to force change.
And you know, we gotta take our little victories like Toronto,

(01:02:14):
but we somebody needs to send out the governor of
New York and go. Billionaires are not going to be
our path out of this. They are the problem. Expecting
Bloomberg and Gates and and Eric Schmidt to suddenly become
committed two super high taxes on the rich and bringing

(01:02:36):
up the rest. That does not seem like a good back. Okay,
let's talk. And I'm really talking about the reality more.
Most of the political debate to what degree was Russia
and their disinformation employed on social media to affect the

(01:02:59):
outcome them in Brexit and to affect election outcomes in
the US. So the thing that we've focused a lot
on Russia. We had a Muller report here, there was
analysis in the United Kingdom. Their impact was huge and
in the United States. My hypothesis, and I can't prove

(01:03:19):
this because I'm not connected in that world well enough
to have real data, but my hypothesis is that without
the Russians, Trump could never get nominated. That essentially, they
had spent from to the beginning of sixteen millions of
dollars sewing discent in America over a set of issues

(01:03:39):
like white supremacy, like guns, like anti vax where they
were trying to divide Americans, and Trump just picked up
all their themes and the other whatever was sixteen Republicans
were running on conventional Republican things, and so he ignited
a you know, a populist wave that got him nominated.

(01:04:06):
A similar thing happened in the United Kingdom and the
run up to Brexit. But the piece that people have
not focused on enough here is the role that the
campaigns themselves played. Thanks to something called Cambridge Analytic, we
know that that the Leave EU campaign for Brexit used

(01:04:27):
Facebook data two essentially distort people's understanding of what Brexit
was about. And to tilt the skills in their favor.
The thing people have not focused on enough is how
that same data was used by the Trump campaign, with
Facebook employees as the active agents of doing it two

(01:04:55):
suppress the votes of suburban white women, p people of color,
and idealistic young people in a set of states, ten
states in particular, as well as to essentially activate emotionally
and increased turnout of people already like Trump. It didn't
move one vote from Clinton to Trump, but that wasn't

(01:05:19):
the goal. The goal was to suppress people who might
vote for clone and engage everybody else. And it clearly
worked because if you look at this, particularly, people of
color and young people did not turn out in the
way the models suggested they should, and the numbers are
particularly telling of the states that Trump needed to win. Now,

(01:05:41):
the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee and the
Russian hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee may also
have figured. No one has ever actually told us how
that data was used, but it meant they had the
complete Clinton campaign playbook and the Democratic playbook and every
congressional district, and they focused in particular intense states and

(01:06:02):
a set of congressional districts where the data said that
they could win, and they turned a ridiculous percentage of
them and won the election thanks to seventy votes distributed
over three states. So I look at this and go
The Russian thing was absolutely essential, But so was Wiki leaks.

(01:06:23):
So was the New York Times, which both promoted her
emails as a giant story and didn't report on Trump
being investigated by the FBI a few weeks before the election.
So was Coomey. But I think in the file analysis,
the voter suppression done by the Trump campaign, the highly
targeted voter suppression, was decisive because you know, Jill Stein,

(01:06:47):
her votes alone were enough to determine the outcome in Wisconsin.
And you know, they're like ten things that had to
happen for Trump to win it. He got all ten. Okay,
So let's talk about today, um, in terms of media.
One thing we know about the Internet, it was it
allowed other stories to come out now. But we have

(01:07:12):
these giant, powerful media operations, and if we were to
go on right now, and I do it multiple times
a day, the stories featured on the Fox News website
are completely different from the stories featured in the WAPO.
In the New York Times. Do we throw our hands
up in the air. Is there any way to get

(01:07:33):
the populace to agree on facts, especially in a world
where facts are fungible. So, Bob, one of the things
that's driving crazy is that we didn't learn from so
major media. And here I would put all of the networks,
plus the New York Times, Politico, ax eos uh and

(01:07:59):
some parts of the Watch Shi Post have all essentially
behaved as though Trump is normal and as though we're
having a normal political process. Now, if you ask stuff,
why would they do that? Well, it's really obvious. I mean,
the guy who runs CNN talked about Trump and said, look,

(01:08:23):
he may not be good for America, but he's great
for CNN. And that's the problem. The incentives of journalism today, Look,
I mean, they're just there. They drive them to normalize Trump.
And the New York Times had what more new subscriptions
this past quarter, more digital subscriptions rather up to four million,

(01:08:47):
but they had like half a million in one quarter exactly,
which is like greater than the sum of like all
subscriptions to like local newspapers side of New York and
d c uh. I mean, it's insane. Right, and the
journalism is now dominated by Twitter, so everything, you know,
the way they find their stories, the way that they

(01:09:09):
decide what's important is all about what trends on Twitter,
and that's really easily gained. And the right has been
brilliant a gameing and clearly the willingness of Fox two
act as an amplifier of the far right, irrespective of

(01:09:30):
the danger to public health and society, is magnified this
and made it intractable. But we have to also note
that the hollowing out of newspapers by Google and Facebook,
by essentially taking away whatever economics they still had, has

(01:09:52):
been horrific. It's been you know, the the role that
Facebook and Google and Twitter have had and in undermining
the economics of these things is something we have to
pay attention to. Now. I've spent the last couple of
years quietly trying to build an idea for redesigning the

(01:10:13):
economics of local news, really all news, but starting with
local news. And technology plays a really huge role in that.
But it requires a different philosophy than one of the
people have had. But at the end of the day,
when you hear somebody say, I just want to teach
everybody news literacy. I'm going to hang on. We've got

(01:10:34):
to be realistic. This is going to take a generation,
and it's going to have to start in kindergarten. We
have to go back and make public education about teaching
people how to think. And we have to have you know,
we have to say this stuff matters to us. I
just don't see a silver bullet pop. That's the pro problem. Okay,

(01:10:55):
let's just go back. Do you think there's a trend
now in Australian and other countries of making Google and
other outlets pay for the news. Do you think that
is gaining power? I do believe it's gaining power. But
the problem is that it doesn't fix the problem. If
the incentives of these guys are to promote Trump as
normal because he sells lots of subscriptions, then just having

(01:11:17):
a little bit more subscription money isn't going to help.
You know, we have that. We have to change the
demand side. People have to want facts. I think you're
running a really interesting experiment on COVID because every major periodical,
all the ones with paywalls, have put their COVID stuff
out for free. Their most valuable stuff has been out

(01:11:38):
there for free, and two things have come from that.
One is that the people have done that have seen
a massive explosion in their subscriptions. So there is a
portion of the market willing to pay for it, but
that is a very small portion of the market. A
far larger number of people have decided that COVID is
a part of the culture wars and have therefore resisted fact,

(01:12:02):
they've resisted expertise. They have said, you know, I'm going
to bring my gun to the state House in Michigan
because I want to get a haircutter. I want to
get my nails done. And I'm sitting there going you
have got to be kidding me. I mean, that is
not a problem solvable by news media in the current model.

(01:12:25):
That's a problem that you have to make a new
generation people. And by the way, the way we're handling COVID,
there's a really good chance that Darwinian processes are gonna,
you know, essentially raise the cost of ignorance to a
degree that makes people Okay, well, you know, let's talk

(01:12:47):
about this education. We've been privileged, you and myself uh
to have education that focused on analysis. I remember being
in my first college course and the guy said, we're
never going to discuss the reading in class. If you
don't under in the reading, you shouldn't be here. So
what is the environment we live in? Certainly with Betsy
devas head of education, we have a great number of

(01:13:09):
people moving towards parochial and home schooling. We have money
taken from public schools. We have public schools where essentially
books and certain thoughts are banned. Then we have what
remains of the upper middle class and those above them
rigging the system such that they get the best education,

(01:13:30):
whether it be in private school, then allowing them to
get in good universities. You know, there are a lot
of tentacles here. How do we address this? And the
other thing I must say, which goes back to education,
to what you were saying earlier about Reagan, etcetera. With
the money and the government. As soon as you say

(01:13:50):
because the right is defined debate, we have to spend
more money, they immediately tune out. So I think that this,
you know, we can date that client in public education
probably to the sixties. Right that things like the Civil
Rights Act where and the things that followed from it,

(01:14:14):
like bussing, caused a backlash against what I think had
been the central premise of publication public education America, which
is bringing up you know it basically teaching everyone to
be a good citizen. And the opposition two civil rights

(01:14:43):
laws started a pushback, and you know, simultaneously you saw
the rise of egypt evangelical Christianity, which is really about
you know, creating a version of Christianity that could keep
black people prob And you know, I think sadly a

(01:15:03):
lot of these things are basically about white supremacy trying
to impose its view on policy and everything that follows it.
Whether it's you know, imposing on a woman's right to choose,
whether it is about how much money we invest in
in public education and what is taught there. Those are

(01:15:26):
all battles that I think stem from this, this underlying
desire of a certain group of white people to retain
privileges over everyone else, and that you know, after a
long period of progress, you know, into the sixties and
maybe even into the early seventies, you know, we've been backsliding,

(01:15:49):
and initially very slowly and then much more rapidly. And
I mean it's hard to know what the driver of
it is, but it's possible that the fact that the
country has not faced an existential crisis since the Second
World War and depression immediately before it. That you know,

(01:16:11):
those things receding into the background caused people not to
appreciate the value of cooperation and promoting fairness for everyone.
You know that essentially forgetting that causes to prioritize our
individual rights and our infant individual autonomy and our convenience.

(01:16:36):
And you know, this happened at a time when the
economy was getting more and more driven by the needs
of consumers, and so you went from you know, mass
market products to mass customization to everybody needs to have
their you know, bespoke items. That whole trend has put

(01:16:56):
us where we are today. And with COVID, it seems
to me that you have exactly the kind of issue
and you layer climate change on top of that, and
you have exactly the kind of issue that threatens everyone
and where there's no place to hide. You know, your
gated community is not going to protect you against climate change.
I mean, I live in California. A wildfire could burn

(01:17:20):
my place down. Probably not today because it's overcast, but
you know, at some point this summer, and it doesn't
matter where you live in California, wildfires are a huge
threat and they are a function of climate change. And
it turns out that infectious diseases like COVID are also
a function of climate change. And we haven't had an

(01:17:40):
honest conversation by climate change in this country. Well, well, well,
how is COVID related to climate change? So as the
temperature rises, infectious diseases, uh, just seemed to prosper. And
you know, it's like, I mean, climate change is also
contributed to the you know, the play of locusts and

(01:18:01):
you know the h crack atla. I mean, it's just
like we have gotten ourselves into the psycho where we're
so focused on our consumption that we've forgotten to leave
something for the next generation. We've forgotten to leave something
for our leader years. And you know, again the connections

(01:18:22):
to all these things. They are better people to make
those cases than I but those people are out there
making them constantly. Well, this brings a connection. You were
talking about dedicating three and a half years your life
to raising the alarm of the abuse of social media,
both by those using the systems and those running the systems.
We've been talking about climate change essentially for fifty years.

(01:18:45):
All of a sudden, we have this woman on the spectrum,
a girl on the spectrum, Greta Thunberg, and she literally
pushes the message much further, showing the power of the individual.
Uh are you do you? Are you still optimistic or
you worn out with your work? Or have you achieved
or is it somebody else who needs to do that? Yes, so, Bob,

(01:19:08):
I look at Greta Tunberg with ah. I mean, you know,
she is in many ways for her movement what Martin
Luther King was for his And what if if I
had a chance to meet Greta, I would say, Greta

(01:19:29):
the biggest barrier to climate change action in Western democracies
is the power of the power that internet platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram,
and Twitter give to the most angry, dissonant voices in society.

(01:19:50):
That they give disproportionate political power to those people, and
they basically prevent action on essential issues like climate change,
like vaccination, like COVID. And we need to force changes
in the business model. We need to end algorithm amplification,
We need to provide better privacy rights, not because those

(01:20:15):
things will uh you know, not to punish Facebook and Google,
but simply because we cannot operate as a society under
the terms that these guys have created force. And you
asked me how I'm doing, and I will tell you.
I started this conversation by saying that I am one

(01:20:36):
with the quarantine. I the quarantine for me came along
in a moment in time when without realizing it, I
really needed to take a rest, and in my head
I was already there that you know, I could see
that my voice was not as effective as it was

(01:20:59):
your wire going, and then other voices were doing a
better job of my work than I was, and so
I was thinking, Okay, this is great, But I was
also in this routine of just doing it and the
where people would call and I would always respond. Now
with the quarantine, all that has stopped because other issues
are more paramount and people's attention, and I don't know

(01:21:24):
what I'm going to do after quarantine. It's possible focus
on the local news thing, because in my career I
also was very deeply involved in a lot of news
organizations and so and I would involved with things like
Wikipedia and AH just a lot of things that that

(01:21:45):
could contribute to making this uh to creating a new
ecosystem for for local news and it may be that
I wind up just getting stuck back into the same
thing I was doing. But I'm going to look around
and see what the highest value thing is. Because when
Tristan Harris and I first joined forces in early you

(01:22:10):
can count on one hand the number of people were
speaking publicly about the issues we were talking about. There
are a ton of researchers who were working on the issues,
doing great work, but they were buried inside organizations that
did not amplify them, and so their voices were not
being heard in the right place. And because Tristan and
I were coming out of the valley, we had an

(01:22:31):
ability to get access and amplify early on UM. But
now those those really great researchers and the people who
are the domain experts, they have access to the amplifiers
and so UM, it's not as important for me to
do that. And thank God, because you know, I need to.
I need a break. I need to. I mean, this

(01:22:52):
was gonna be the year Bob. I was already there,
because this was the year we had this amazing album, right,
and we were gonna be playing theaters, right, and I
was going to be, you know, playing guitar behind Lester
Chambers playing guitar behind Dylan Chambers playing guitar and the
Tea Sisters to audiences that were just totally grooving on it.
And you know, we had this review, this thing that

(01:23:14):
took you through this this microcosm of you know, what
the psychedelic music experience delivered back in the day, uh,
in a way that was freshened up. And you know,
I really want to do that. Now I can't do

(01:23:36):
that at all, right, and so you know it's like,
what are we gonna do? I mean, we're gonna put
out this album, right, and we put two songs. You
go to mons dot com. You can check out two
of the songs, and we're gonna put out one every
two weeks and then hopefully about a month from now,
we'll put out the whole album. But I mean, how
are you people even gonna find it? I have no idea.
We're probably gonna give all the money to charity. We're
trying to pick which one because it's like the country

(01:23:58):
is broken, and the numbers and music for an album
for a band like ours are not great enough to
justify us keeping the money. But to Second Harvest or
you know, Sweet Relief for two. You know, artists Rescue
or one of those organizations helping people in our world,

(01:24:21):
it might really matter. And you famously got together with
Bono formed Elevation and Partners. But in our previous discussions
you said your first aligned with Bono because you wanted
to change some of the infrastructure of the music business. Ultimately,
people were not receptive. Since you're still in the music
business and it's now twenty years past the initial turmoil,

(01:24:45):
how do you feel about the status today? The other
thing of being, of course, people who are younger than
us don't understand. They say, yeah, classic rock. But in
the sixties and seventies, if you wanted to know what
was going on, you listen to a record, and because
there wasn't this in committee quality, if you were a
musician who was very successful, you as rich as anybody
in America and people knew your name. The only person

(01:25:08):
with that kind of mind here today is Trump. Even
though the media is saying everybody knows Drake, everybody knows
Taylors with that is not true. So what's your general
assessment of the music business today. Well, to me, the
most profound thing is that the industry has acclimated itself
to streaming. You know, everything has renormalized. You know, nobody

(01:25:31):
spends the well. Very few people are still having the
argument about the fairness of the economics of streaming. I mean, honestly,
I look at it and I just go, you have
got to be kidding me. But again, nobody's listening to me.
They weren't listening to us eighteen years ago when we
came in with another idea. Um. You know what's really

(01:25:54):
weird is the industry is still dominated by the same
executives were there then, and the same artists who are
the biggest grossing live acts are still the biggest grossing
live acts. So it's like the generation that you and
I grew up and still dominates the economics of the
live business and the industry in some ways is just

(01:26:15):
gonna sunset out with the people that they grew up with, right,
And there's still a new artist thing that's on streaming, right,
which is where the hip hop guys are happening, and
where uh, you know, all of the pop things are happening,
And there you've hit a new equilibrium. I don't happen

(01:26:36):
to think it's fair to the artist, and uh, I
would like to believe that one of these days I'm
going to figure out a way to break that. But
the contracts are very ah, very well crafted from the
point of view of of labels, and and the truth
is that the labels do provide real value for breaking artists.

(01:26:58):
You know, there are people who can do it on
their own on YouTube, and but that's still a very
very small number. And so when I look at this,
the thing that was beautiful about the world I inhabit,
which is where people live in the live world, is
that the club and small theater environment was really vibrant.

(01:27:24):
There was a lot going on, a lot of venues,
a lot of people turning out. Ticket prices weren't high,
but they were good enough to keep bands going and
to keep people in the business. You know, here in
the Bay Area, what Phil Lesh did at Tear Up
a Crossroads and Bob Weir did at Sweetwater created an
ecosystem for developing new bands that would then make all

(01:27:45):
their money on the road. And I hadn't seen anything
like that since you and I were kids. And here
in San Francisco, where from basically the early seventies when
Journey came up, until these guys started those two clubs,
the industry. It was about national acts coming and playing
the big vegant venues. The local papers didn't care about
local stuff. And it was different than l A in

(01:28:07):
that respect. And you know, you had Bobs s gags
doing slims, but that was all by itself. And then
all of a sudden, now you have this, this, this
whole thing. It was really beautiful. But all of that,
all that may be killed off by the pandemic and
we're gonna have to do a restart. I mean, the
buildings will still be there, but who's going to run?

(01:28:30):
You know, how long is it going to be before
people want to be jammed into a tight space. I
don't know the answer to those questions. And you know,
we were very early on streaming on Moonalysis streamed every
show for more than ten years, and uh, you know,
but streaming is not the same experience. It's way better
than nothing, way way better than nothing, but it's it's

(01:28:53):
nothing like being in a live show. And you know,
it may be the best we got for now, you know.
I mean, I've been watching a ton of you. I
watched Richard Thompson the other day. He was doing something
for the Royal Albert Hall from his home and it
was like it was beautiful. I love Richie Thompson and
he's like three songs in it. He plays a song

(01:29:16):
and he comes to maybe I don't know, four or
five measures, and he stops, and I'm going, this is
what I love about streaming. You're watching people in the
home and it's okay to stop. It doesn't have to
be perfect, and it's completely authentic. And Bob, you have
been the voice of authenticity from the beginning, right, you
are my guru on authenticity. Well, you know, it's your

(01:29:38):
mistakes and your imperfections that make you beautiful, that draw
people to you. And my point is you have always
been on that and I've always appreciated I think everybody
who reached your newsletter and all of us who listened
to you. You know, whether we were there before, we're
there now, right, And streaming is all about that, right.
You know, there's no way to cover the mistakes, there's

(01:29:59):
no you know, you're not able to have a click track,
or you probably don't have a click track. You probably
don't have all the support. You know. You go and
see these great big bands and there's four guys on
stage and you just count up a number of instruments
that are being played. It's like nine, right, and you go,
huh gosh, that's interesting, you know, and you see these things.
I mean, you were at the Grammys were Pink did

(01:30:21):
that thing with the act and dropped in the lad
and all that, and afterwards she goes, well, that pretty
much puts the light to why you need a lip sync?
And I'm going, you go, girl, I mean that was
that was maybe the single most impressive live thing I've
ever seen. Right, We're watching uh Lady Gaga when she learned,
you know, she what was the Jazz standards. She'd spent

(01:30:42):
like a year learning how to play before she did
I think at a Grammy. I mean, you know, it's like,
you see the people for whom this craft really matters, okay,
and they have flourished in recent times not because the
big dollars in the business supported, but rather because the
big dollars in the business create an environment where authenticity

(01:31:07):
and where craft could flourish around the edges. And I
mean every once in a while in the mainstream, but
always around the edges. And that makes me really happy.
I don't know what's going to happen with that. I mean,
I'm involved with a lot of local music production. I
play a minor role in the Hartley Strictly Bluegrass Festival.
I do. I help the city put on a Summer

(01:31:29):
Souls to show every year. Um, you know, I've been
involved with a bunch of the local clubs and none
of that's happening, right, none of it. And so I
don't know how long this lasts. I don't know how
long it takes us just to get the opportunity to
start again. And who's going to be around and how

(01:31:52):
are the fans going to feel if this goes on
two or three years? Right, I don't know. Now, Sarah
Ken's your do you know who that is? Everybody needs
to get her books. She is brilliant, Okay, right, she
just had a presentation and she said two very interesting things.
First thing she said is we're all sitting at home
thinking that there's some power somewhere that's gonna take care

(01:32:14):
of this, take care of us, and really it doesn't exist.
And she also said she doesn't have hope and we
shouldn't have hope. We you know, you do your best
to help for your children, You and me don't have children.
But my question is do you have hope and how
do you view the future for society at larger as

(01:32:35):
opposed to you the individual. So here's the thing. I
had massive hope after that it would be possible to
educate people the Trump's behavior would be so obviously detrimental
to society that that would bring people out of the

(01:32:56):
stupor the soma, if you will, of consumer them and
and convenience. When Trump got away with suppressing the Malla report,
my hope was reduced. When he got away with the impeachment.

(01:33:20):
My hope was further reduced. When he was successful at
making a pandemic into a culture war issue, my hope
was reduced even further. I strongly agree with Sarah that
hope is the wrong thing to be focused on here.

(01:33:41):
I think it makes more sense to be piste off
and to go you know, this is not my America.
I'm not putting up with this bullshit one minute longer,
and I'm going to do something. Now here's the thing.
I can't tell your listeners to do that. I can
only tell them what I chose to do. And you know,
in the summer of I realized that something I had

(01:34:03):
been involved in was playing a really awful role in
undermining democracy. And I didn't really understand it because I've
been out of Facebook at that point for h seven years,
and so I had to do a lot of studying
to get up to speed to figure it out. But
by early seventeen it was really obvious to me that,

(01:34:26):
you know, I had to do one or two things,
either to say this is somebody else's problem, which is
the American way, or I went nope, I played a
role in this thing. I'm going to drop everything. I'm
going to focus on this because my value system, in
the way I was brought up, requires it. And I
think each of us reaches that point at a different

(01:34:49):
you know, under different circumstances. I reached mine. You Know,
what I am hopeful is that the pandemic will get
a majority of America to do that. I took tremendous
hope from the mid terms when the very groups most
suppressed in turned out in record numbers and delivered the

(01:35:13):
House of Representatives for the Democrats. And my point is,
I am hopeful, but I don't prioritize that. I think
each of us must do our part. I think this
is like a war effort, and we need to suspend
our dreams for the duration, right, because whatever path we

(01:35:35):
were on, I mean, if Trump didn't kill it, the
pandemic is killing it. So stop focusing on that. Let's
focus on things that will, over time make our lives better.
Let's look for inspiration to those people who did that
in the past. And I get mine from the Civil

(01:35:56):
rights movement. My my mentor in my activism, man named
Clarence Clarence Jones. Clarence was Dr King's attorney and speech writer.
And Clarence is ninety years old, but he takes a
lot of time to teach me how to be an activist.
And my parents were bit players and civil rights me

(01:36:16):
when I was a kid, so I already had a
great deal of comfort with a lot of the methodology.
But you know, I was suddenly I was gonna be
out front, right, and I had to learn to where
to dress up for every meeting, bring my toothbrush right,
do all the things, you know, treat everybody with respect,
don't make it personal, right, all the things that they did,

(01:36:36):
you know, to deal with people like Bull Connor. And
here's the thing, I'm just one dude, okay, And I'm
flawed and I've got limitations, and i haven't been that successful.
But what I can tell you is that there you
feel better if you're involved. Even when it doesn't work,

(01:36:58):
it's worth doing. It's worth fighting the good fights. And
those of us who grew up, you know, with Neil
Young singing for Dead in Ohio, right, those of us
who grew up with Buffalo Springfield, doesn't there's something happening here.
And you know, listening to Paul McCarney to Blackbird right, um,

(01:37:24):
listening to the Chambers brothers tell us time has come today.
And I mean everybody's got their list of people who
had a call to action. And if not now when
I mean seriously, if this doesn't motivate you to get

(01:37:45):
off your ass and and like push back, what will
I mean you and I, I mean my wife and I.
We like going to demonstrations, right, We like marching. There's
something very therapeutic about joining with other people to express
political views. Where are the margins now? Right now? Social

(01:38:07):
distancing makes that difficult, But what are the analogs? What
are the things that we can do to express our discomfort?
Because if we're always going to optimize everything for convenience. Hell,
Trump's not our biggest problem. Climate change is going to
kill us because convenience is just destroying the account of
destroying the environment. And you know, we're going to have

(01:38:30):
to decide that something matters more than our joy in
the moment. And you know, here's the thing that was
my choice. Everybody gets to make their own. And the
thought experiment I asked you to engage in is I'm
not asking anybody who's listeners to believe that I know
what I'm talking about, but I am asking you to
do a thought experiment. Imagine what if what Magna says

(01:38:54):
it's correct, how would I behave differently? Would I do
anything different? And if you would, then do that. If
you wouldn't, then that's the answer. But you know, I
I mean, Bob, one of the things I love about
you is that you're you're You're unafraid to put ideas

(01:39:19):
on the table, and when you're wrong, you have a
whole newsletter of the feedback, right And you and I
had a huge conversation at one point about why your
perception than Apple post Steve Jobs was somehow inferior and
my view that no, the world was different. You needed

(01:39:41):
a different set of skills, and you know, Apple was different,
and there were things you didn't have that you didn't
have before, but they weren't it wasn't relevant the way
it would have been before. And that oh, by the way,
this definition of what counts as innovation or using the
wrong metrics that we're looking there. That what Apple has
been doing around privacy, what Apple has been doing around

(01:40:03):
payment systems, what Apple has been doing around uh, you know,
things like that. Those are forms of innovation that are really,
really profound and really important. And so you know, I
love you like a brother because there are times when
I want to throttle you. And the best part is

(01:40:23):
we can have that conversation and by the way, you
straighten me out half the time you're right, and so
that's what's cool. Well, the great thing is we can
have on an analytical conversation as a result of the
era we grew up and in the educations we experienced
and achieved and the people we hung with. So you
and me, I could go on till the end of

(01:40:45):
time to really addressing the issues, but I think we've
come to the end of the feeling we've known. Will
certainly check in with you again, you're a great uh
temperature taker of what's going on. But Roger, always great
to talk you. Thanks so much for your ins and
about the one thing that we should also do is
we should you should establish a list through your newsletter

(01:41:06):
of artists who need our help, okay, because there are
a ton of artists out there who have no financial
support right now. There are a ton of people in
band crews who are currently unemployed, their stage hands who
are unemployed. And we've got to find a way to
get way past where music cares goes and you know
where a sweet relief well you know, yeah, somebody emailed

(01:41:28):
me they had a benefit in Philadelphia and they raised
a hundred grant and they gave out grants of just
a couple of grant all these people. This analogizes to
the country at large. There's no organization in terms of
giving people. It's one thing if you know, someone had
a heart attack, they lost their house, but a lot

(01:41:49):
of people they just need to buy food. It's and
as I say we're talking earlier, everyone's saying, well, when
are we opening? When we opening? And you and me
both no, we're not opening soon. No, And we've got
to support people and so you know, I've got to
deal with my band, my crew, the post artists. It's
going to keep them and pay money. This is my
opportunity to give back. But there are a lot of
other people who need our help and we've got to

(01:42:10):
find a way. And one of the things is, for
better worse, your newsletter is one of the has the
greatest reach in the music business for the demographic that
you and I inhabit, and a lot of folks there
and who And I'm just saying, if we keep a list,
then people can select the ones that they want to
support and help out right. And you know, it's a
it's an affinity thing. The great thing about music is

(01:42:31):
you know you can like one artist and not like another.
And I think we can use that to help people out. Okay,
well that's certainly food for thought. Anyway, Thanks again for
doing this, Roger. I love your brother. Take care and
stay well, and everybody out there, please stay well. Our
first job is to survive this there, that's for sure.
Until next time. This is Bob left th

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Roger McNamee

1. The Podium