Charlie Warzel
Appearances
Radio Atlantic
Elon Musk's Luck Runs Out
I'm Hannah Rosen. This is Radio Atlantic. My colleague Charlie Worzel interviewed Patrick George recently about the tumultuous journey Tesla's been on, from darling of the environmentally conscious to target of tire slashing. And the two of them land on Musk's blind spot, which caused him to miss this coming crash.
Radio Atlantic
Elon Musk's Luck Runs Out
Their conversation explains so well how we got to this moment.
Radio Atlantic
Elon Musk's Luck Runs Out
The moment of reckoning for Tesla's founder has arrived. The company's earnings report showed that profits dropped 71% since this time last year. On a call with investors this week, Musk announced that he would spend a day or two per week on his Washington business, but that he would mostly turn his attention back to the struggling company.
Radio Atlantic
Elon Musk's Luck Runs Out
As Patrick George, the editor-in-chief of Inside EVs, wrote in The Atlantic this week, luck runs out.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And that's what it is. And, you know, occasionally there's an edge case, right? There's a guy who comes in who's, playing by most of the rules, but he's listening to his iPad too loud. And you have to say like, Hey man, sorry, can you turn it down? And that becomes the censorship. Like, yeah, the edge cases are frustrating. It sucks.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It sucks to be on the other end of that, especially when you didn't think you were violating the rules, but you have to have some kind of standard in a communal space. It's just like, like basic humanity.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Okay, I thought it was Fox Business. I was like, that's really like, then you've really gone, you know, down the rabbit hole. Man, I mean, that says it all, right? Like that really, to me... says it all, right? We're just... How do we get an audience with the big man, you know, before, without going to Mar-a-Lago is clearly... Let's get on Fox News and say some nice things about that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I mean, I don't know. I get the whole pandering to Trump thing, but I almost feel like there's something real about it now. I wonder if the circles that... He that Zuckerberg is, you know, hanging out in like the proximity to like the MMA crowd. I don't think he put Dana White on the board of Facebook yesterday because he is trying to pander necessarily to Trump.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I think he likes to hang out with Dana White. I think it can be. I think it can be both. And what I'm just. there's a way to pander to him. And I think that that is like signaling. And I mean, I think he kind of did it pre election, right? Like the, the Tim Cook style of pandering, right? The, the donate to the transition, send a nice tweet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
That's like, we look forward to working with president Trump, blah, blah, blah. I think this is,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
slightly different i mean this really feels like we're actually tailoring the platform we're actually restructuring our corporate governance to you know to do this i don't know i mean and then on the flip side right trump said he wanted to he potentially put mark zuckerberg in jail so i guess the stakes are pretty high for him yeah this is the point i mean steltz brian stelzer writes this this morning met is facing antitrust trial in april
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Sure. I woke up to this like full candor like an hour ago. Yeah, same. My thoughts on this are basically, I think that Mark Zuckerberg is very, and I felt this way for a while, very ashamed of everything that he and Facebook did between, let's say, March 1st, 2020 and January 10th, 2021, right? So... beginning of the COVID pandemic, right into, you know, post-January 6th.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
You're probably right about that. I think what is always true about the right these days in the past, you know, whatever, 10 years, Trump will always turn on you, obviously. We've seen that. Trump will knife you in the back if it's convenient. But I do think that there is an acceptance, like an eagerness to have somebody turn, right? Like there's always been a joke that like I would, you know,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
here when i was talking to other people who covered the far right which is that like tomorrow i could you know be a right-wing social media like influencer if i just you know sold my soul and just said like you know i worked at the new york times and like let me tell you like i'm the whistleblower right like like it's such an easy path because they're so accepting of those people right
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And that's always been this like, you know, this this kind of joke that because they're so accepting of that type of person. Right. As long as you're willing to sort of sell the entirety of your soul to that. And I think that that's always kind of a difference between. especially in the big tech space between Republicans and Democrats.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
There's really nothing that Mark Zuckerberg, being one of the richest people on earth who has presided over Facebook for two decades now, there's really nothing he can do to ingratiate himself. Even if he changes all of the policies of whatever, there's always going to be the balls and strikes of content moderation stuff. He's always going to be a capitalist billionaire-
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
But I think, you know, that it is like when you do break MAGA or whatever you want to call it, right? There is obviously Trump turns on everyone, but there is this kind of like, you know, okay, like you want to play, that's great. Like we, we will actually give you like sort of the blanket pardon as long as you, you know, walk the line.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I think that that's really like is must feel pretty nice for someone like Zuckerberg to just be like, okay, all I got to do is sell my soul, have Joel go on Fox once a week, talk about, you know, Trump being a crusader for free speech. And, um, finally, I can just get some people who are just going to be like, hey, he's a good guy. Yeah. Oh, he's nice. He does. He does a good job.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I mean, the fact that this announcement is coming on January 7th... I'd go back.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I think that the changes could be small, right? And it could be sort of on the margin stuff that is going to sound really good to people like Donald Trump, and you're not going to see that much of a difference, right? That's totally possible. It's also possible that this is a classic maneuver by Facebook to push so far in a direction. They historically,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
don't seem to think through the externalities of what they're doing, right? Like for me, the idea of, you know, deranking some of this quality news, you know, whatever stuff, that's a big one. But for me, the biggest one was this focus on groups and communities, right? And just throwing people together based on some of these shared interests.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I would agree with that. But I think, too, you know, they were... up against a lot of pressure there. And they were always trying to do the very least. They were being dragged along by people. But Zuckerberg did an interview in March or April of 2020 with my old boss, who was at The Times then, Ben Smith, about COVID misinformation.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And, you know, every time that Facebook chooses to prioritize something,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
really heavily its algorithms are pushing people in this way that they don't really notice right they don't really totally understand it's all of a sudden unintended consequences this is my classical oak shoddy and small c conservatism coming out you know you make a big change like this you don't exactly know what's going to come out the back end and and i think you know you saw the sort of logical endpoint of all of that right was like
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Facebook's architecture was perfectly suited in 2020, late 2020, November, December 2020, to allow tens of thousands of people to gather around the Stop the Steal movement. Like if you remember on November, whatever, 6th or something, 2020, like I was watching the stop the steal Facebook group. Somebody like in early in the morning was like, Hey, you should check this out.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
This like election denying group has like 15,000 members. And then I went by the time I looked at it, six minutes later, it had 50,000 members. And it's like, that shit doesn't happen. If you don't make a series of changes from 2018 all the way through to try to get, you know, uncle Jim and aunt Sally into knitting groups and, you know, rotary club meetings and whatever it's, Oops.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And so it's just like, I think that they make these... We met book clubs. We met book clubs, not insurrection. And so it's like this kind of stuff has the potential for these really large kind of gnarly changes because there are billions of people on this platform. And like if there's one thing covering Facebook for as long as I have or meta or whatever we're calling it,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
is this idea that like they are so naive or act at least so naive as to how people like actually use the internet. Like there's every time they talk about these changes in the way it works, it is always around the knitting club or just two people getting together, shaking hands and breaking bread and, you know, talking kitchen table issues and,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Or a bunch of guys in a room in Malaysia with 186 smartphones hooked up to a thing, like basically reposting each other's generative AI shrimp, Jesus, Facebook spam to trick grandma and grandpa into thinking that, you know, I don't even know what, but it's like people go on the internet.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I have this like theory, which is called like the toilet theory of the internet, which is that like most things that you see that either delight you and rage you, whatever that are just posts by a human being are, we're probably like typed out with two thumbs on the toilet by somebody else. Like, The internet is wonderful, it's horrible, but it's also just really quotidian.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It's used by people all the time to stave off boredom in random moments. Facebook never sees that. It's always just the breaking bread over the table, even though they know better. I just think when you make these changes, especially when you make these radical changes very quickly, The unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads 18 months down the line in like a totally unforeseen way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And it was like the first interview I'd really heard from Zuckerberg, where he was basically like, no, it's good that we're like censoring, quote unquote, right? Like, it's good that we're taking action against this. This is a very clear cut situation in which there is actual harm, you know, connected to this type of content, these type of words, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I wrote this piece that came out on January 6th with this researcher, Mike Caulfield, who studies information environments and all the bad stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And the idea is basically that we're always thinking about misinformation as like, you know, again, Uncle Tim gets on his computer, sees a piece of misinformation, and all of a sudden, like, you know, oh, yeah, like Hillary Clinton has babies trapped in the basement of a pizza parlor. Like, I believe it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Yeah, and really what's actually happening is that it is keeping you locked in your beliefs. Like the misinformation peddling that's going on everywhere is to keep people from having to experience cognitive dissonance, for having a piece of information come in and make them rethink their entire worldview. And January 6th is this great example of this, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Because we can't forget, like I saw them, you know, on the four-year anniversary, like dredging up tweets from, you know, Eric Erickson being like, you know, shoot the protesters, right? Like all these people on the right saying, this is unconscionable, this is horrible, right? So there's this moment where like a crack lets the light in, right? And it's like, oh, are we the bad guys here?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And this entire system spins up with these justifications, right? Offering this parade of evidence so that people do not have to experience that cognitive dissonance. They get, oh, actually, yes, see, it was Antifa. Yes, there were FBI agents leading people in, all that stuff, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
as we were trying to like think through this, you know, this idea, this theory, it's like, so, so what does that do to people? Right. And it creates this stuckness, this, this like inability to look backward or to hold people accountable.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
So, you know, with January 6th, it's like, Oh no, we realized that, you know, it's, it was just like a big false flag situation or it was a peaceful protest or it was whatever. Right. Our mind is made up. We're not going to go back. And so the January 6th, you know, committee commission was then framed.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It was either completely ignored by, you know, right wing media institutions, or it was framed as a bunch of democratic scolds who are obsessed with the past, who are hall monitors, who have Trump derangement syndrome, you know, blah, blah, blah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And there's this inability to look back because all we're doing is looking forward towards the new barrage of evidence that makes us feel, you know, like comfortable in our beliefs. And I mean, the reason why we compared it to the nine 11 stuff is the nine 11 commission.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Obviously it wasn't like January 6th and nine 11 aren't completely analogous events, but they are both really visually intense attacks on, on the country. Um, The 9-11 commission, the report comes out. It's long. It's dense. It is a national bestseller for like four months. Like over a million copies are sold. Like you can go back and take a look at it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I think – I bet you if you had to, like, read that to him in front of him, he would just, like, cringe, like, full body, right? Because I think there's this real understanding in his mind, in the mind of a lot of the people who he's running with in these circles in Silicon Valley and in the world of, like, UFC or jujitsu or whatever, that there's this –
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It was a cultural event of people saying, let's get to the bottom of this thing. Let's look back at the history. Let's look at the way that this institution, Congress, investigated it and try to understand it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Yeah, I'm not trying to say that any of these things are perfect on their own, but just the difference between a cultural desire to look back and investigate this versus what happened with January 6th. And you had a lot of people, I'm sure a lot of people who, you know, listen to this podcast, who watched the hearings, who are interested, who felt that accountability was right and necessary.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I think it was. But there was also this huge gulf of people who didn't fall in the MAGA category, who didn't fall in the watching it on MSNBC category, who were also just like, I'm just trying to live my life. I'm barraged with information all the time. And I, you know, didn't really pay attention to it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Like culturally, the two events are so different in the way that they were analyzed and received. And I think, you know, where I ultimately fall with it, and this is maybe where it could be a
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
In this world where we have this justification machine just constantly humming, where there's a barrage of evidence, it's really hard for the Democrats, say, to make the 2020 election a battle for the soul of the nation. It pins the hopes on something like January 6th being resonant four years later. And I think the way that information moves, the way these ecosystems move, it's not as resonant
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
as people might want it to be, right? History does not pull out as long as it used to. And I think that's just like a really brain scrambling thing to confront. It is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Yeah, there's certainly an asymmetry between the mega coalition and what's going on. But it happens everywhere. And I think that it's like, we can't think of it as just like... We have to understand that this is what the media ecosystem is doing, whether we want to be that type of media consumer or not, and have less judgment about it happening when it's happening in good faith.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
you know, this huge overreach during the COVID and the, you know, the lead up to the 2020 election. And then of course the big one, right after January 6th, you know, getting rid of Trump, all of that stuff. I mean, the fact that this announcement is taking place on January 7th, four years later is like, it's a big, like middle finger.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I'll see this all the time. A very small example of this in my own life is... I'll see a piece of news pop up on social media in some way. And it's not that I'm trying to like find a way to immediately discredit it. But if it's like kind of shocking to me, I'll be like, does this person, you know, know what they're talking about? Are they like an actual political reporter? Is this analysis?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And sometimes the initial instinct of me being skeptical of that is because it's a piece of information that doesn't make sense to my worldview. And sometimes it is bullshit. But sometimes it's actually just right. But that instinct of me going, you know, and being like, okay, so is this guy credible?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It's good, but it's also because of this idea of like, whoa, like we're not used to, we've sort of lost our defenses for information that makes us, you know, question our worldview a little bit.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
right yeah hurricanes aren't real this has been the problem my entire career right it's like i feel like i write things you identify a problem and then you're like sorry guys here's the problem but i do think like the person who has the you know the foolproof solution to that problem will probably win like a nobel prize because it'll like save humanity to some degree i mean there's all kinds of things right there's the
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
fixing different issues of media literacy, which is the boring and sort of, you know, eye-rolling answer to that. Clearly, we're not going to get any platform regulations, but also platform regulations are their own minefields. The way that I like to look at this issue, and I think... I've said this in different places before, is the internet and the democratization of speech in this way.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Think about multiple billions of people on Facebook at a given time. That is historic in the sense of humanity. We have not connected people in this way ever before. It is a media revolution on par with something like the invention of the printing press. And if you go back to that, that's... centuries of tumult and disruption.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I think that like everything in the internet age, we will speed run that. But I think like we are all trying to figure out what the hell is going on, how to process it. Like it is rewiring our relationships to each other and to ourselves. And I think that it's this long process, process, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I feel like to this idea of like the hall monitors, like you have lost is I think what he's trying to communicate here.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Where we develop new norms around how to communicate, how to share, how to do all these different things. It's a very unsatisfying answer. But I think when people are like, what button can I push to make life more sane? It's like, there is no button. There's no net underneath. Like, this is a new experiment for civilization to be doing this.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don't know, we're all sort of born and living in this time period of like massive, massive societal, technological, cultural disruption. And it's bonkers.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Yeah. I mean, the very nature of, like, if you go back and you read the Bitcoin white paper, which I don't really suggest anyone does, it's only like 11 pages, but it's pretty dry.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Depending. If you read it, like, obviously, it's not overtly political, but it is a political notion to want to build a technology that, you know, circumvents the need for middlemen or middle institutions or it's basically, you know, trying to come up with a decentralized form of global finance, right? Yeah. that in itself is just, it's an anti-institutional idea.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And that technology, when it first, you know, came out and no one was really caring about it except for like engineers and super nerds. And I mean that, you know, in a, in a, in a loving way, like those types of people are like techno cyber libertarians, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
They are people who want that sort of democratization, who have a healthy skepticism of institutions and authorities and power and would like a technological tool to circumvent all that. So those are a lot of the people, right? who had an early investment in Bitcoin, who got in on the ground floor.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And by the ground floor, I mean the real ground floor and the people who have 100,000x returns on their investment at the moment and who have been made incredibly rich. Then you have a lot of the other like speculator class and people like that. But so many of the people who have been on this bandwagon for a long time got in not necessarily just because it was like a really good speculative asset.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
They got in because of this sort of ideological rooted connection. Those people being made really rich, like they are now a meaningful political constituency because of their money. And that influence in this moment is another like really big cultural factor in our like anti-institutional moment.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
swing demo not like a decisive one but for for trump this time oh definitely and it has so much overlap right with the not not even the manosphere but sort of like the you know the bro podcast sphere that you know that he was going on and and trying to court like there's an overlap there so
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
There's a whole culture that, you know, I mean, really during the pandemic is when it kind of took its form that it has now. And through, you know, the whole like GameStop and SBF and FTX, all that stuff that happened in the last couple of years, you know, the laser eyes, meme kind of stuff, like sort of edgelordy culture that formed around it has a lot of overlap, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Because it is anti-authority, anti-institution. It is sort of like... people on X who, you know, want to use words they feel like, you know, would get them canceled in, you know, polite liberal spheres. There is an overlap with that audience. So I think it was actually very smart for the Trump campaign to court that, to adopt that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I also think that when I would like to have been in the room the first time, That someone actually explained like crypto and not like the blockchain, but I mean, like, you know, the world of speculative asset trading and money laundering and stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And yeah, Trump coin and all that to him, because I'm sure his eyes got like really wide because it's like basically like if Donald like finance Donald Trump's way, right? Like, oh, I can, you know, I can get people to give me sort of like in kind political advice.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
contributions by you know by investing in my coin and i can have my son be like the head of research for this you know dubious startup based in you know a garage in palm beach like sweet i can plant my logo on something but it's just online now i don't even have to put it on a building i can put it on like an internet thing and then people will pay me to put my to put my you know face on it
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I'm sure he was like, this is like made for me. Right. But I agree with part of what you said with the, you know, it, it shouldn't be treated in, in like a, in a changed world. It shouldn't be treated by Democrats with this like gross sort of sustained, like turn off the people for whom crypto is like the, the one, you know, thing that they're voting. They're the single issue crypto voter.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Like it, yeah, it's probably not a great idea. But I think where we might be going with this conversation, there is a really large concern when it comes to... I'm not a defender of big investment banks by any stretch, but I also think co-mingling our financial system with the most volatile speculative assets ever really to exist is a freaking nightmare.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And that is where we might be headed under a Trump administration. Yeah.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
For that piece, I talked to this researcher named Molly White, studies reports on like is deep in the, in the crypto world and the regulation stuff and all this. And this was her like red flag concern, which is basically like, think about when FTX crashed, right? It was a, you know, an exchange that was insolvent. The bottom fell out. A lot of people lost everything.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Most of the people who do lose everything are the people who have the least, right? Like the whales usually don't lose at all. They're diversified, whatever. it was a terrible thing for a lot of people. It was totally contained, though, from the global financial system.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It was not like, you know, when the bottom drops out of a bunch of people defaulting on their mortgages that all of a sudden, you know, we end up with, you know, bankers in the street, you know, lighting their little boxes of their desk stuff on fire. That is what, like, protects us right now. Like, you can be for all of this you know, I want a decentralized currency.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It's easier to send money to people in different countries. I like the culture around it. I like to essentially gamble on the price of Bitcoin, like all that stuff. Hey, like if I get it. Free country. Right, sure, exactly. But the idea that like a bunch of people are going to like,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
hump and dump into this into this currency that you know it's going to be there's you know no guardrails between city banks holdings in you know this realm and in the crypto realm and the fact that like if we do have another ftx style collapse of some kind and this realm of like of crypto finance too is just it's the wild west like you just have i mean you have
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
so much money laundering going on, so many people using it for crimes.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It's not to say that the traditional world of finance is great, but like to have those things together in that sense, and then to have, you know, a potential global financial crisis because all these banks have FOMO and don't want to miss out on, you know, you know, giving their clients access to something like this because, you know, their son likes to trade it on Coinbase. Like,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
all of that is just, it's maddening. It's like freaky. And so I think like that is the place where I think you could find reasonable democratic opposition, which is to say like, Hey, it's a free country, but like, we don't want people losing their shirts and, and not even investing in it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Well, yes. And you know what? I'll take the blame. I agree with that completely. I've been covering this company for, you know, I don't know, more than a decade now.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And there's this classic thing that Zuckerberg especially does where he sort of rolls out something new and basically says, like, he speaks as if he has amnesia from the past or as if like, you know, a totally new paradigm has formed, right? It's like, we're getting into groups, we're getting into community building. Everyone just wants to gather with people around shared interests.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And then like QAnon happens and he's like, I don't know what people were, were, were doing, you know, trying to gather in these groups that were just forcing people into these groups. So what we really want to do is this, like they were all about news and prioritizing the newsfeed. I mean, when I worked at Buzzfeed in 2013, one day, literally just one day in October, uh,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
We had 300 times the amount of referral traffic that we normally had to the entire site. And it was because someone at Facebook turned a dial and there was all this stuff because Facebook wanted to get in bed, partner with these news organizations, be a place where news, you know, reading where all this happened.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Then they realized, oh, your grandma is getting radicalized. It's a terrible experience for absolutely every person on the app to be inundated with political news 24-7. And they were like, this political news, it's bad. It's like, you did this. You did this. You control the website. You are making the editorial decisions.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And yet they sort of act like it's these gravitational forces that are pushing and pulling us into these behaviors. Facebook is the one... dictating what we see, what we do, how we act on the platform.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Well, and I think we also have to talk about the Elon Musk of it all, right? I mean, he is essentially adopting the Twitter practice, like community notes, right? Which, I mean, like hand up, Community Notes is an interesting feature. Of the Muskian features, it is the one that sort of makes some sense, right? Probably the best thing he's done. Yeah, and it is.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Community Notes backchecks all of Elon Musk's bullshit all the time, right? It does a reasonably good job.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It sure does on X.com. But, I mean, going to that, and then also, I get this sense, and I, you know, the reporter in me, like, I can't really, like, prove it. But I think that these guys, like, when I saw all the announcements, you know, the glib part of me is like, Zuckerberg just wants people to be able to say the word retarded, which everyone uses on X now. It's like, oh, free speech is back.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
We can say things that we used to say in the 90s that we would have gotten canceled for. I feel like those are the waters that these guys are swimming in all the time. They're just having this very weird edgelordian discourse all the time. And I think he sees that. on a place like X and sees that there is kind of like a charge to it, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
That there's all these people who are really excited about being able to speak a certain way and triggering a certain type of lib and, you know, whatever. And I think it's like, he's feeling left out by the sort of I would never describe Elon Musk as cool, but there's like a, in that world, a sort of, you know, like renegade nature to the way that he's running his platform.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I think that Zuckerberg is frankly just like, he wants that.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
taken control of the entire narrative about online censorship i agree with you on on that the one point of pushback i will have is i think as always like instagram is the thing that's going to get like forgotten in all of this and i and i do think yeah the changes if we feel them at all right like and this is the thing with all meta facebook whatever changes is like
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
They can be subtle and they can make a big deal out of them because they're subtle and your experience will barely change. Or they could be wild, right? And all of a sudden, every meta product is going to look like X or 4chan or whatever. We don't know, but I do think... especially like the inclusion of like, you know, not filtering out any politics stuff.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And by filtering, what Facebook means is like Facebook was still showing people politics stuff across all the channels. If you showed interest in it, it was just making sure not to show it. If you hadn't showed interest.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
Instagram's experience could, could change drastically. If people are like, I just want to see, you know, like Timothy Chalamet at the golden globes. Like I'm just into that. And all of a sudden it's just like the worst people you've ever met in your life posting about. Yeah, exactly. Like that could, that could piss a lot of people off.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
And I guarantee if that happens, he will come back and be like, they were pushing politics on us. Like it was the whole, you know, like post election Trump one, we're going to stay away from that. Like as if he had no hand in it.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
I don't know. I mean, the stuff with X is, you know, he's been very against any kind of like sexualized content or nudity on all meta platforms. It's like been a very prude platform since the beginning of its existence. If you go on X, like X is just feeding you hardcore porn when you're not asking for it all the time. So I don't know if he's ready for that part of the,
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
you know, free speech wing of the free speech party.
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
It's a really good point because people don't realize, right? It all gets caught up in the censorship conversation. And so much of the job, like you said, everywhere on the internet, from the smallest message board to whatever, moderation is just... People should think of it as like... okay, here's a Starbucks, right? Like we have to clean the bathrooms, right?
The Bulwark Podcast
Charlie Warzel: Zuck Sucks Up to Trump
We have to wipe down the counters every night at the end of the day.