Government pressure can work without a formal ban

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:36:31

   I mean, it probably started soft, lightly, slowly, and then it escalates as the old will to power will instruct them to do. Because you get, I mean, yeah, that's why there's protection. because you can't put a check on power for government right there are so many ways that they can get you like there are so many ways they can come at you and get you and you know the thing here to think about is a lot of times we'll think about government action they think about legislation right because you so when i was a kid we got trained how does government work there was this famous animated short uh the thing we got shown was just a cartoon of how a bill becomes a law and it's like this you know that's little bill sneaked along and goes this i'm just the bill. Exactly. It's like, all right, number one, that's not how it works at all. That doesn't

2. 1:37:17

   actually happen. We could talk about that. But even beyond that, mostly what we're dealing with is not legislation. When we talk about government power these days, mostly it's not legislation. Mostly it's either regulation, which is basically the equivalent of legislation, but having not gone through the legislative process, which is a very big open legal issue and one of the things that the Doge is very focused on. Most government rules are not legislated, they're regulated. And there's tons and tons of regulations that these companies are So this is another cliche you'll hear a lot, which is, oh, private companies can do whatever they want. And it's like, oh, no, they can't. They're subject to tens of thousands of regulations that they have to comply with. And the hammer that comes down when you don't comply with

3. 1:37:53

   regulations is profound. Like they can completely wreck your company with no ability for you to do anything about it. So regulation is a big part of the way the power gets exercised. And then there's what's called just flat out administrative power, the term that you'll hear. And administrative power is just literally the government telling you, calling you and telling you what to do. Here's an example of how this works. So Facebook had this whole program a few years back to do a global cryptocurrency for payments called Libra. And they built the entire system and it was this high scale, you know, sort of new cryptocurrency and they were going to build in every product and there were going to be 3 billion people who could transact with Libra.

4. 1:38:23

   And they went to the government and they went to the, all these different, try to figure out how to make it. So it was like fully compliant with anti-money laundering and all these, you know, controls and everything. And they had the whole thing ready to go. Two senators wrote letters to the big banks saying, we're not telling you that you can't work with Facebook on this, but if you do, you should know that every aspect of your business is going to come under greatly increased level of regulatory scrutiny, which is of course the exact equivalent of it sure is a nice corner restaurant you have here. It would be a shame if, you know, somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail through the window and burned it down tonight. Right. And so that letter, like what is that letter? Like it's not a law. It's not even a regulation. It's just like straight direct state

5. 1:39:01

   power. And then it culminates in literally calls from the White House where they're just like flat out telling you what to do, which is of course what a king gets to do, but not what a president gets to do. And so anyway, so what these companies experienced was they experienced the full panoply of this, but the level of intensity was in that order. It was actually legislation was the least important part. Regulation was more important. Administrative power was more important. And then just like flat out demands and flat out threats were ultimately the most important. How do you fix it? Well, first of all, like you have to elect people who don't do it. So like, as with all these things, ultimately the fault lies with the voters. And so, you know, you have to decide you don't want to live in that regime. I have no idea what part of this recent election mapped to the

6. 1:39:44

   censorship regime. I do know a lot of people on the right got very angry about the censorship, but I, you know, I think it probably at least helped with enthusiasm on that side. You know, maybe some people on the left will now not want their, you know, democratic nominees to be so pro-censorship. Um, so the, the voters definitely, you know, get a vote. Um, number one, number two, I think you need transparency. You need to know what happened. We know some of what happened. Um, Peter Thiel has written in the FT just now saying we just need like brought after what we've been through in the last decade, we need to broad based truth and reconciliation, uh, you know, efforts to really get to the root of things. Um, so maybe that's part of it. We need to investigate.

7. 1:40:20

   For sure. Ultimately, we need prosecutions. Ultimately, we need people to go to jail, because we need to set object lessons that say that you don't get to do this. And on those last two, I would say that those are both up to the new administration, and I don't want to speak for them, and I don't want to predict what they're going to do, but they for sure have the ability to do both of those things, and we'll see where they take it.

8. 1:40:40

   yeah it's truly disturbing i don't think anybody wants this kind of overreach of power for government including perhaps people that were participating in it it's like this dark momentum