Oh my God.

I know.

The thing is, you know what the thing is? So I wrote a piece in 2019 for The Atlantic, uh, called Inbox Infinity, and I talked about effectively how, like, e- email is just this, like, flood.

It's like a feed that I check sometimes, but I get, like, thousands of emails a day, especially since I've gone independent.

I've only ever used my Gmail, even when I worked in mainstream media.

So, like, I just, my inbox is unusable.

I get...

[laughs]

[laughs]

Um, I sort of asked Hayes this question earlier, but in our AI-generated world, I guess, how do we feel about existing content or existing incumbents when it comes to social media? Do people who already have an audience, who already have a following, who maybe have proved authenticity in some way, or that they're willing to put effort into their own work, do they become more valuable in this environment? Or is it another case of, like, low entry costs, anyone can come in and make content for free, and so we see a sort of further trend of, I guess, what we used to call the democratization-

Well, that's a relief.

So [laughs] so we're probably gonna be fine.

I think, like, what, what I think is, is concerning or, or worth interrogating is the way that we anthropomorphize AI, and that's what I wrote about, is the way that people assign agency to these, um, products.

And I think in some ways it's really great to do that because we have to describe how, you know, you have to sort of describe how they work and they...

But they're not humans, and this, the-- we are talking about computer programs.

And I do think that when we go to these policy debates about liability and stuff, it's really important-

it, you know,

whatever.

These people share, I think worldview is fair, like a collective worldview that can be really positive.

You know, I love that a lot of them are vegan and want, but a lot of them have these really kind of weird beliefs on tech and they have millions and millions of dollars.

And if this anthropic, you know, when it happens, it's about to really boost, people with this ideology even more.

We have to talk about their political influence.

And I know it's kind of hard because the only people sort of talking about that are like the Trump administration and people don't, they're not really serious, but, but I encourage people to listen to really Natasha Tiku at the, at the Washington post, who's my former colleague.

I'm an old

Can you kind of explain what it is and how it's connected to the company Anthropic?

Yeah, well, effective altruism is I would call it a cult.

It is a belief system.

I think it operates a little bit differently in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I've been hearing from a lot of effective altruists in other places like DC and New York that are like, actually, we like the San Francisco Bay Area effective altruist rationalist community is sort of like its own bubble.

And a lot of these other people don't ascribe to it.

So, you know, not not all effective altruists, I guess.

How are companies like Anthropic influencing the media influencers and politicians right now?

Yep,

yep.

But I was like, Elon's never run a... social media product like this is gonna be what he banned me by the way let's not forget that first mistake first major misstep um he banned me that's a badge of honor immediately yeah it was um it was really funny because i was at a party that night with a bunch of other journalists including my former colleagues at the new york times and like it was like we were all like getting banned one by one and like ryan mack went down and like he was banned and then like an hour later like mine was banned and we were all drinking and i was like oh my god this is like a we're in like a A simulation.

Yes.

Yes.

Anyway, I was very skeptical.

I thought this would be the end of X, but I wasn't, I was never like a decamped to blue sky person.

I think that's a totally fair label actually.

Sorry, go ahead, Taylor.

I'm very concerned about where this is going because I think there's a lot of fear and to just bring it back to like what Reid was saying right when we started like getting a call from his mom, like this has really broken containment, no pun intended, to like normie audiences.

And I think...

In times of great technological change, which we're definitely in, you see a lot of fear from the public and that can often have very negative consequences.

I don't think we get thoughtful, useful policy when the public is scared.

I don't think that a lot of the public will take advantage of the upsides of this new technology when they're so scared of it.

And so I just, I think there's a lot of fear.

there anything that should be happening on the product side of AI development that's not happening or that changed this conversation? Or is what you're all saying, this is actually the product side has been kind of overemphasized?

Um, what's going on there?

Young women control consumer tech.

Whatever technology young women are adapting, specifically teen girls and young mothers, will become mainstream, and we saw that with every single consumer tech product that you can possibly think of, basically.

Until it breaks into those markets, it's not seen as cool, it's not seen as sort of, like part of culture.

Cell phones, uh, back in the day, were actually seen as this sort of, like, businessperson thing.

A lot of moms didn't realize why they'd have one.

You'd never give a young girl one.

So what have you found? Tell us about what these networks are and how they work.

And by tech clash and the backlash against big tech, you're talking about the ways that people now feel, particularly I would say post-2016, that big tech is not good for us, that social media is inhibiting democracy.

Yes.

So that narrative took hold in 2016 after Brexit and Trump's election, and people started to say, hey, wait a minute.

Like, technology is not all rainbow and sunshine.

There are sort of, you know, there are challenges with it, too.

The far right, which has had this sort of festering authoritarian movement for decades back into the 90s, really even the 80s, they have always sought this system of identity verification and control over the internet.

It's the style of the internet that countries like China and Russia have, right? That has always been very incompatible with democracy.

But I also would like to start somewhere as opposed to just saying that's fixed this massive hierarchy that throughout all of humanity we have never been able to dislodge.

I just wanted to make sure I got Reid in

...

I, no, I, I was saying, I probably was about to say something very similar to Reid, which is I don't wanna downplay, uh, this previous employee's concerns and the current employee that followed up with him and backed him up and said he's, he's right here, the guy, Evan, who's a current employee.

I don't think that these guys are gonna come out and expose themselves to the world, um, if they're just, you know, on a hunch.

AI has proven to be not far enough along to be being, to be pushed out as much as it's been pushed out.

We've heard about the warning shots that's happened already, how it's broken out of the sandbox multiple times, how it's backdoor hacked.

Listen, in, in a couple of the recent warning shots, the hacks, the backdoor hacks by AI, uh, were so complex that we as humans didn't even understand the hack and had to spend weeks reverse engineering it to try to understand what the hell it did.

[laughs]

will they do that? Will it be like submitting a driving license? So what are the ways they're going to actually be doing it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So if they determine that you might be underage or that you're interacting with an underage person, you will be uploading your government identification.

A lot of people have their... information stored already.

So their payment information is another way to do it, harvesting biometric data.

But they are going to be doing ID verification for the internet.

It is a huge rollback.

And these bots were like literally hacking into Hugging Face and the investigation agents were kind of like, oh, that's not that's not a big deal because you know the other the other agents on these message boards sort of gave them permission to do it and so what my takeaway was is like like we have no idea how to even analyze like this vast of an output of an ai model even though it's an english language and that's where i think we need to focus legislation and research in my opinion

Do we have a new chapter yet?

I think that was the beginning of the end of the open internet is the thing.

And I think that influencers were defined by this like democratized media landscape.

And as you mentioned, in the past few years, like big tech has seized more power, right? Like we're not getting this more distributed, less profit-driven tech ecosystem.

And more importantly, like the gatekeepers have seized more power.

So governments and media institutions like sort of through those governments.

So, I mean, that is what all of these censorship laws are leading to.

then does that mean the influencers won by coming so far the establishment or actually the principle of democratizing media was a beautiful thing and that's failed and it's just like the top 0.001 percent that can just be very very gentle and sell you some very soft things like the real counterculture influencer i can't name you one that is really against the grain so much so it's sort of the the beigeification of the influencer that's actually won rather than the true counterculture revolution that we were promised

Does your audience feel in some ways like you've, uh, like, switched sides on them? And how much of your audience feels that way?

Yeah, you know, the question of how much my audience, like, how much of my audience feels that way is something I'm trying to get a handle of.

The thing that I've had a hard time navigating more recently, especially as I've, like, tried to de-radicalize my own audience and just be like, "Hey, let's learn about tech policy.

Let's learn about this stuff." 'Cause y- I, I think, like, a lot of my audience has good instincts, and we align on a lot of things in terms of, like, human rights, um, broadly a, a prog- a progressive worldview.

But I think when I went independent, the advice that I got from so many people was, like, "Just collaborate with as many other YouTubers as possible, go on other people's streams, like, talk about...

Like, in- put yourself fully in the influencer world and just, like, get out of mainstream media 'cause otherwise you're always gonna sort of be trapped in this mainstream media thing," whatever.

So I did do a lot of collaborations with a lot of progressive influencers, and some of them are my friends.

So where, where's the line for you?

What do you mean by that?

Yeah.

And I also think like the EFF gave a really great statement that I'd love to just read part of because I think they explained this really well.

But they said, you know, young users will now have less access to meta products and but less access, sorry, less ability to exercise their right to speak, access information and art and culture.

Basically, they are enshrining Meta's harmful surveillance into law, and all of these changes compromise users' data privacy.

And because we're not getting any data privacy, this data that is collected can be used for law enforcement purposes.

It can be used to hunt down people having abortions, which Meta has already helped do in other states.

What do you say to that? You

And that's not so true.

I mean, I think of this great report that I send to people a lot of the times where some of the top experts studying social media and mental health and children, including Alice Marwick, Jacob Smith, Robin Kaplan, Mayor Wadahan.

I'm going to mispronounce her name, I'm sure.

But these are people at Duke and UNC and elsewhere.

They got together and they put together this huge, it's like an 80-page report on child online safety legislation it's sort of a explanation of basically how the science doesn't support any of this and these are academics being like hey here's an 80-page report with all the citations you could ever look for explaining that this is they actually use the word moral panic which if you know scientists is very rare but they call it out in this report and you know duke promoted the report and everything and but it doesn't seem to have broken through.

And that's why I want to kind of mention the money aspect again, because figures like Jonathan Haidt, I mean, these are figures that have obscene amounts of money backing them.

You also see groups like the Tech Oversight Project, which is funded by Pierre Omidyar, a billionaire who has put an inordinate amount of money towards pushing these initiatives.

So you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to take that as a win from somebody who once built a TV stand upside down.

But what's happened in the last couple of weeks where kind of everybody seems to be talking about it?

Yeah.

So if you listen to Flock, they'll say they're the victims of a terrible smear campaign.

Basically, I would disagree with them on that.

But so Axon actually tried to buy Flock.

Flock said no.

And that's where this like bad blood seems to have started.

I don't know if he's a fake influencer or a real influencer, but he'd been following this kind of vigilante anti-flock content.

So as you are someone who translates internet culture to us, so why, why isn't that a part of it? Why not, you know, fight against Anthropic if that's, if that's your cause? What's going on?

on?I, I guess like, yes.

And my point to point out some of this is like, I, as somebody that reports a lot on sort of like these backlash cycles, they're not based in real- They're, they're...

It's all, as you said, it's emotion.

There's no moral consistency.

Because if you are morally outraged about a content creator going on one single press weekend with OpenAI, where is that energy for Alix Earle when she did her huge Microsoft partnership? Microsoft, which is a key player in the military industrial complex and is, like, heavily embedded with the Department of War, right? Or, um, a- and as you mentioned, Anthropic as well is very eager to d- to work with the Department of War.

They obviously have a sort of disagreement with the government now, but it's not even that they're saying, "We don't wanna work with you." We're-- They're saying, "Hey, yes, we're totally down to, to make these autonomous weapons.

Mm-hmm

[laughs]

The only time that I used them, I remember I was actually covering a Trump rally, and I had a Snapchat show at the time 'cause that's the era that we were in, covering the election.

And I remember being actually, I think it was at the Trump building, whatever, but it was this rally, this press conference he was doing, and I was trying to type on my phone and file notes, but I also had to get video footage.

And I was like, "Oh, I have these Spectacle things." So I would just, like, tap...

I think you had to click them or something as well, but I would just continually tap it and then while I was doing that, type, yeah, file my story.

And I guess it was kind of useful but just pretty clunky.

Nobody really wanted them.

Who really knows? But I would guess it's, it's the mass appeal and her ability to straddle a very, very mass audience, you know, spanning the entire country, but also appealing to people on the coasts.

And from that day forward, I was like, I need to really understand exactly what this is.

Yeah, I feel like crypto, in a lot of ways, it's so, as Rabble said before, decentralization is not synonymous with the cryptocurrency world.

But I think the word decentralization and this idea of a different kind of structure for our technology did really become pervasive, as you mentioned, with the rise of crypto.

So, Rabble, can you talk a little bit about kind of, I guess, building technology products and this idea of decentralization and can you first describe kind of how the web 1.0 works and like, why weren't those products decentralized? Like why do we have this internet that we have now?

I mean, Taylor, your user mag is partially supported by paid subscribers who subscribe to the newsletter.

Yes, which Substack takes a huge cut out of.

So yeah, which is I think, yeah, it's hard.

I want to talk about incentive, incentive structure on these different platforms, because this sort of centralized social media has gotten a really bad rap.

And then, you know, you have this policy in, in China, and it-it's so hard to, you know, between the, between the, between those two paths figure out, like, how, how should societies, you know?

Well, I think what's really scary and concerning is that we're seeing America begin to regulate our information ecosystem increasingly like China.

So we continue to pass laws, and actually you'll see people that are ostensibly liberals praising China and extremely other authoritarian regimes.

And we have, like, Jonathan Haidt, sort of pseudoscience guy who's, uh, amassed a big audience here as a pundit, um, pr-praising countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

You know, these are countries that don't have f-free press, um, that arrest people for their online speech, um, and often they're working with them.

I mean, we had even, um, lawmakers praising the UAE, uh, and their restrictions on, on sort of speech online and access to information.

So I think this is really worrying.

Right.

Hmm

... that, you know, has, has... was lobbying anti-LGBTQ laws in Africa, has been responsible for horrible things, that constantly pushes out moral panic slop.

Like, you know, this is a very irresponsible group that I would argue does not care about the children.

The Heritage Foundation.

You know, The Heritage Foundation has been, um, you know, a huge proponent of these policies.

I would argue The Heritage Foundation does not care very much about children.

You know, a lot of states that are passing these laws, l- look, take a look at some of their child labor law.

... you know, that, that, uh, sur-

So, so would you say the things you posted don't encourage assa- assassinations?

No.

I think it's such a ridiculous framing.

I, I mean, explaining why, explaining the motivations of a killer does not mean that you promote assassinations.

I mean, we...

This is America.

True crime is a massive, massive industry.

They can also assist people who are immunocompromised in many cases, the vaccines

So is it your position that schools should not ban phones completely from schools?

No, I think it's up to the school to decide and it's up to the teachers to decide.

And I think parents should have a say in that as well.

And I think that what we need to do is ask questions about the government and what is the government's role in this.

And do we want the government coming in and taking this heavy-handed approach where we have cops you know, tackling students to the ground because they might have a cell phone or students getting certain students getting suspended and, you know, harassed again by police officers in schools.

Is that the is that, you know, the model that we want to follow? We now we had the beeper bands in the 90s, right? We saw how those beeper bands played out.

Beepers were blamed.

how so? Like, what would you like people to be doing today in 2026 that they're no longer doing? Because people are not going to socially distance or close businesses or anything like that into perpetuity.

Like I do not want to see Palmer Lucky pretend to be a goofy, silly guy playing a game that's like more suited to a school field trip in high school.

This is not the first time that VCs have tried to create shows.

Let's not forget Sri Ram, who we were just talking about, had a show for years on the Andreessen Horowitz YouTube channel that could not break 200 views, okay? They've constantly...

They had their clubhouse show, right, that Andreessen had.

Like, they have been trying to create content forever.

These, unfortunately, for some reason, even though they invent the technology...

I mean, I think for a lot of reasons, mainly that they're out-of-touch billionaires.

Playing the Clulee thing, Taylor.

Um, what did you learn from your conversation about Muskism, uh, about space and ambitions to go to space amongst Elon and Jeff Bezos?

Yeah, I think...

I mean, that book really talks about sort of, um, Elon Musk's political ideology and compares it kind of to Henry Ford.

I actually think this other new book out by Adam Becker, who's a phenomenal science journalist, he actually studied physics himself, is really good.

It's called More Everything Forever, and there's this great chapter at the end of the book that basically just decimates, uh, you know, Elon Musk's theories on Mars and explains why we absolutely will never live on Mars and why this is just, like, this sort of deluded fantasy, and I, I thought it was really illuminating.

That's not to say that these space projects aren't potentially worth it.

I mean, I think they could be valuable.

I, like-

Mm.

Um, that's where we, in the US, we originally had the Communications Decency Act, which was a lot, you know, sort of the earlier version of, of the Online Safety Act.

And, um, they've been pushing, you know, this movement for decades, and they really didn't get any traction until recently.

And the way that they've been able to amass traction is actually by framing their, you know, opposition to free expression online as cracking down on big tech.

So you see them pass these really crazy laws.

Like in the US, we have FOSTA-SESTA, a devastating law that led to the deplatforming of a lot of progressive content, but also, like, so- it was aimed at cracking down on sex, you know, content online.

Um, it ultimately deplatformed LGBTQ people.

Mm