E108: Doxing debate, Nuclear fusion breakthrough, state of the markets & more

Wait, is that Spirit Airlines cap?

Absolutely. Spirit Airlines. I just wanted to say, all in podcast now sponsored by Montclair and Spirit.

Airlines, or now sponsored by the Village People YMCA.

Now, are you a pilot or a flight attendant?

J Cal, he's a flight attendant.

I don't think he's thin enough to be a flight attendant.

Are you fat shaming me? Are you body shaming?

Can't do that nowadays. That'll get you canceled.

Getting sacks canceled at this point, like fat shaming, would be number 72 on the list.

He can't get canceled because all the libs have left. Twitter. There's nobody to.

There's no hall monitors left. They all pretend, no, they quit every week.

Yeah, it's like all the libs that said they moved to Canada when Trump got elected.

Yeah, Canada. Immigration. Go ahead, flat.

Let your winners ride, rain man.

David satisfact.

And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you, queen of Kinwa. A hacker figured out a way to take all this data and know people's yachts, people's planes. Obviously, one of those people was Elon. Elon had a security issue. This is all public information. So the larger issue at stake here is the fact that the law allows for people to do this persistent tracking of planes, which then becomes persistent tracking of a person. And what really is at stake here is how we define the term doxxing. For people who don't know the term doxing, it means giving a person's location. That could be your home, that could also be you're at a location for some period of time. You're at a hotel for a basketball game. And it's pretty clear you can take a picture of a celebrity and say, there's a celebrity here. Oh, Lady Gaga's at the farmers market. What I object to here, we all understand doxxing is dangerous, and it, in fact, is against the law to just give people's addresses and stuff like that. The issue here is a new type of doxing, which I'll call persistent, coordinated doxxing, where dozens of times a month, you're giving a person's location. It may not be against the First Amendment, Sachs, I think you would agree. But we have to ask ourselves, do we want to live in a world where whether a person's on an electric bicycle or an airplane or any device in between, somebody should be releasing, dozens of times a month, a specific dedicated feed of their location? It is terrorizing as a parent, when this happens, I've had doxxing. People on the call here have had various security concerns. We don't want to live in a world with de facto doxing. What these sites were doing was de facto doxxing.

I think it was a bad decision, and I think that it represented. The least generous statement would be that it represents deep hypocrisy in that not just a few weeks ago did he say he would never delete that account. But he also said he was buying Twitter to enable freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and that he wouldn't come in and do the same sort of content moderation that was done by the old regime. And then he came in and did exactly what the old regime did, which is that he took the rules and he took the, quote, moderation policies, and he found a way to use them to make some editorialized decisions that he thought was appropriate. Now, the more generous thing is what you guys are saying, which I don't think is necessarily wrong, which is that he's trying to protect people where there's some loophole or some law that doesn't seem right morally, but it is the.

Law, and it is what it is.

In those cases, I think you run into the exact same issue that the old guard at Twitter had, that the moderators and the executives at YouTube have dealt with and that the executives at Google have dealt with, and that we sit here and we criticize until you're on that side of the table and you're forced to make these moderation decisions. You're forced to make these policy decisions, and you're forced to implement these policy decisions because of some moral framework that you now think is appropriate. And guess what? Some people will say that's not freedom of expression. That's not freedom of speech. You're taking that away from some people. You're taking this particular case away from a 15 or 16 year old kid who's built a Twitter feed. And so I think what it shows is just how hard it is to moderate these sites, these platforms, and that there is no simple, easy, idealistic ideologue of, hey, all these things are open. All these things can be used by anyone all the time, because as soon as one of these edge cases start to happen, you want to come in and do something about it.

Shamath, what do you think? What should happen going forward?

So I have had these issues happen to me multiple times. I'm not nearly as important as Elon is, but it feels the same when you're in the middle of it. It feels pretty terrorizing. That being said, I think the real decision for somebody like me is that if it's too much, is frankly just to get rid of it and to find a different mode of transportation that's a little bit more anonymous. You're pragmatic about it. And the reason I say that is that I just think that you would have to go and get the government to basically change the law, which they're not going to do. And so then, as a Result, your reaction will seem somewhat contrived and deeply personal. And in that, I think you lose credibility. Let me just summarize this and be the first one to just state this. I think that if there's any person in the world that can figure out Twitter, it's probably Elon. But man, has he taken on just a Gargantuan battle. And increasingly, I am not a fan of this battle, and I'll tell you why. This is a Man who has essentially proven that he can bend the Laws of Physics on behalf of Humanity. He's done it twice, once in electric cars and once in rocketry. The problem is that the realm of decision making at Twitter has nothing to do with the laws of physics and is governed by emotions and psychology in which there is no canonically right answer. And so he's quickly finding out that half the population will always find Fault with him, no matter what he does. And now the implication of that becomes very important. We saw yesterday that he had to sell another $3.8 billion of Tesla stock. Why is that? It's because this transaction, which was very tight to get done, probably required lots of margin. Look, I have a margin loan at Credit Suisse, so I know how these things work. And you can very quickly get margin called. You have to sell down things that you own in order to maintain your collateral limits. We've talked about this before. He's had to do this twice now in the last few weeks. And that's because, again, not because of the demand at Tesla, as far as we can tell, but because people believe he's distracted. And so people are anticipating weakness at Tesla. People are now shorting the stock anyways. It's causing this downward spiral. And can he fix it? I think so. Can he pull it all out? Sure. Is it just putting himself under an enormous amount of pressure that he could have avoided? Somewhat, yes. And I think that this is sort of where we're at.

Six weeks in.

My gosh, I mean, I was saying.

This guy learned in six weeks what it took YouTube seven years to learn how hard it is to moderate content. And I think the thing is, this.

Is where I disagree, is you're attributing so much good faith to these content moderators at YouTube and Twitter when the Twitter files reveal that they made no effort to suppress their bias. In fact, they were, like, pretty much dancing in the streets every time they booted off someone they didn't like.

Fair enough. Before you react to what Friedberg just said at the end that coda, can you respond to what I just said? Isn't it true?

Well, look, I mean, if you define what, you know, doing there as acting as a judge, arbitrating on every little content moderation decision, is that a great use of his time relative to what he could be building at Tesla and SpaceX and doing on behalf of humanity, then? No, clearly not. But if you define what he's doing in the larger sense as restoring free speech to the most important town square social network, hopefully thereby inspiring other tech companies to move in the direction of opening things up, then I actually think it's a pretty good use of his time. So, look, I think we can quibble about this or that decision that he makes or this or that tweet, but I think the overall thrust of what he's doing is very important for the country and for humanity. So I get where you're coming from. Hopefully, he'll find some people at Twitter who he can empower and trust to make these content moderation decisions. So he's not drawn into every single little battle. Right. We do want him focused on the highest priority problems.

My point is just that I get that. I just think that what he's learning and what we're living and seeing in real time is that there is no canonically right decision ever in this space. There's only a decision where some percentage will support and some percentage will always be against.

Correct?

That's my point.

Correct.

He did say when he took over, he knew that would be the case. He said, you will know I'm doing the good job when both sides are equally upset, just to put a pin in it. I think it's important for people to understand what the new policy is. So I'm just going to quickly read it just to.

Sorry, hang on one sec before you get to. Because I think the philosophical point, rather than the specific one, is an important one. And I just want to respond to what Chamath said and have Sachs respond to this. In the case of the points you make around the Twitter files, and by the way, I don't agree with any of the moderation decisions personally. So I don't think that someone should be suspended for posting public information. I don't think someone should be suspended for saying controversial things. That's my personal opinion. Just so I'm clear on that, because I know that.

Describe yourself as strong free speech libertarian. Okay,