What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of money in the process.
And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and
the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.
So Elon Musk is trying to acquire Twitter, and I think it's a uniquely controversial
matter because it sits at the sort of center of multiple unrelated controversies that we're
dealing with.
So for example, should social media platforms be centers for free speech, or should they
be responsible for cleaning up and clarifying misinformation and protecting people from
harm and harassment?
How do we deal with income inequality?
Should billionaires and people like Elon have as much singular power as they do?
Do we even have billionaires in the first place, et cetera, et cetera?
No matter who you are, I think it's hard not to have an opinion on Elon Musk and the issues
surrounding him.
And so to debate and discuss this issue, we have two very successful IndieHackers here.
None of them should be strangers to you if you're fans of the pod.
Justin Jackson, the founder of Transistor, which is my favorite podcast host and what
I use to host the IndieHackers podcast, is here.
And as far as I've been able to tell from Justin's tweets, you're fairly anti-Elon
and Justin, I'll let you speak for yourself in just a moment.
We also have Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, who is the opposite.
Gumroad is one of the best ways to sell your products online as a creator.
And Sahil, from your tweets, you're fairly pro Elon.
You do a lot of retweeting, a lot of sharing, a lot of supporting.
So I don't want to speak for the two of you.
We'll have you each give a couple of your thoughts on Elon before we jump into it.
But just a few notes on the format.
So I'm here with Channing.
Channing is my co-host.
We're going to be the moderators and we will, I suppose, just ask questions of both of you
and we'll probably slip in a few challenge questions directed at each one of you.
And you'll each just have a few minutes to talk.
You can talk back and forth between each other and we'll just try to keep things fair
and equal.
How does that sound?
Four dudes talking about Elon Musk on a podcast.
What could go wrong?
All right, Justin, why don't you go first?
What are your thoughts on Elon?
How do you feel about the guy?
So the author Adam Grant has this quote, professionalism is the standard of conduct you uphold.
Being a professional is about maintaining personal reliability and social respect.
You strive for excellence in your actions and grace in your interactions.
And so I really have two main problems with Elon.
First, as the CEO of multiple high stakes companies, jet propulsion and space exploration
and car manufacturing and tunnels underneath L.A., I think just as a CEO, he's needlessly
distracted and is also endangering his company, stakeholders, employees, customers.
And as a shareholder, I would be concerned about his public behavior, the accusations
against him and the Twitter bed.
And then second, I think as a figure who influences tech culture, indie hackers, founders, I think
his behavior, especially in the last few years, I just don't think it's a model worth following.
As indie hackers, I think we invoke him far too often anyway.
He's an entirely different space than most indie hackers.
But just as a leader, as a model to follow, I don't think he's worth following.
So those are probably the two main points for me.
All right.
Not a leader worth following.
Sahel, what are your thoughts on Elon?
What brings you here?
Yeah.
I mean, I think Elon is one of the most interesting, successful, smart people on planet Earth.
I think if you quantify his impact, it's absolutely massive.
And it's still very, very, very early.
And so when I think about who I want to be inspired by, if I care about climate change,
I would put him near the top of the list, maybe at the top of the list in terms of someone
who has made a real impact, both personally in the way that he has made an impact, but
then also as he has shown others how they can also make an impact.
I think one of the most compelling things to me about Elon is that he does things his
own way.
He does things the way that he thinks they should be done.
He's sort of high conscientiousness.
And I think that is very valuable in a society that seems to become more and more centralized
and authoritarian.
And so I think it's incredibly important that we have people who have a voice, who are famous,
who are independently and financially rich.
We can kind of talk about, is he too wealthy or not?
But having someone who has that amount of capital, financial, social, and knowledge
capital who can say, hey, establishment, this may not be the right approach.
Being able to push the Overton window in that way, I think, is really, really, really important.
I would say the other thing, sort of in the indie hacker context, is that Elon has had
a long story.
And I actually think his story can be incredibly valuable for an indie hacker or an inspiring
indie hacker.
His first company was called Zip2.
It was basically a SaaS product that they sold to newspapers, local newspapers.
And I think, I believe, in the US and Canada, he took sort of the proceeds from Zip2 and
made PayPal.
And then he took the proceeds from PayPal and made Invest in Tesla and founded SpaceX
and all these other things that he does.
And I think that's important.
He started with software.
He transitioned to hardware.
He sort of started with things that had almost a zero burn rate, something that him and his
a couple of friends could build in a basement or an attic or whatnot, get to profitability,
and then use the proceeds to kind of make bigger and bigger bets that I consider effectively
philanthropy.
If you define philanthropy as good for humans, which is what the word means, I can't imagine
someone who's sort of on a utilitarian basis done more as an entrepreneur for humanity
as a collective.
All right.
Perfect.
Let's jump into it with some questions for both of you.
Sahil, you can go first, then Justin, and the two of you can sort of talk it out before
we move to the next question.
So let's start broad here and talk about money and power.
Is it problematic that Elon Musk has so much power?
Do you think that we as a society should be doing anything to limit the ability of people
to accrue billions of dollars and sort of influence the world as they will?
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's a question of, can we?
Are we able to?
And so, for example, in the United States, you can't donate over a certain amount of
money on a personal basis to a politician, right?
However, you can donate effectively an unlimited amount of money to a super PAC, which can
sort of fund effectively ads that are pro that politician and anti ads that are for
people who are against that politician.
Why?
Because we have capitalism and so money is very, money is sort of information.
Information is very difficult to censor.
And so you will always have this dynamic.
And so my concern is, should anyone be a billionaire?
I think it's sort of an arbitrary question where it's an arbitrary number.
It has nine zeros.
It doesn't really mean much, right?
But I think the important question is, how do you build a system that when people succeed,
that success sort of spreads in a way that doesn't centralize power?
I think the core issue I have with people who say he has too much power is I just don't
have a good framework for how do you get that power away from him?
And who do you give it to?
I think the big question you always have to ask is the power is sort of a zero sum game.
And so if you're taking power away from him, who are you giving it to, right?
If you're taking away power from NASA, you might be giving it to SpaceX or you might
be giving it to Russia to sort of send astronauts to space.
Who do you who deserves that that power?
I personally think that the government probably has too much power on certain things and probably
it should have less.
And so I find it very difficult for me to see a world in which tech entrepreneurs who
have built their wealth by primarily providing products that people are voluntarily choosing
to buy to have less power.
I also believe that money is not really power.
I mean, I think one great thing about the Internet is that ideas can win, not only people
with money.
I think the best example of this was probably Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.
I think both sides were relatively against getting rid of Citizens United, the Supreme
Court case that allows for all this money to get into politics, but frankly, the result
of that election shows me that money has almost no power to impact elections because Hillary
and their side spent over $2 billion or something like that, like an insane amount of money
far more than Donald Trump.
And I guarantee you that Hillary's team is far more competent, was able to deploy that
capital far better than Donald Trump's team was ever able to.
And it didn't matter.
Right.
Why?
Because Twitter, because the Internet and frankly, because of free speech.
And so I think, one, we have to define power, two, we have to define a system for how we
sort of take that power away from that person, then three, we have to decide who deserves
that, who would be better placed to make those decisions.
Maybe a focused example of this would be unions, right?
Should Tesla autoworkers be able to set up a union in a way to remove power, kind of
decentralized power away from one person in Elon or the executive team and into more people?
But inherently what you're doing there is you're creating a union, which is another
corporation which will have its own leaders and revenue.
And so it's always a balancing act.
I think that's really important.
One thing I love that Elon says is that, you know, effectively, the government is a corporation
at the limit.
It's just a really big corporation and it has a, you know, it has a unique ability to
kill people, basically.
Right.
It's kind of the unique power of the government that no other sort of...
It has other unique abilities, too.
It can print money.
It can be democratically elected.
It's not just its ability to...
I mean, all of those powers come from the core, you know, hard power of being able to
commit violence against people.
Sure.
I don't think the antidote for that is to centralize power in one individual, especially
someone who some people think is like a genius, all-knowing, Christ-like, Tony Stark figure
who can encompass all of the world's wisdom in one person and who pretty obviously does
not know everything.
I mean, this whole thing with Twitter and his understanding of how bots work and how
statistics work and some fairly fundamental things, it just seems like he has this ignorance
in all sorts of categories.
So he certainly has some intelligence, you know, in certain areas, but that doesn't mean
he has intelligence in all areas.
And that doesn't mean he's the best person to lead the world, for sure, or solve all
of the world's problems or even, you know, have as much influence and power as he does.
What does he have?
80 million Twitter followers?
He's been able to move crypto markets with tweets.
He's gotten into the trouble with the SEC because of tweets.
And he's also has tons of allegations against him for sexual harassment, racism at his factors.
One allegation for sexual assault and one allegation for racism.
Not time.
Well, in December 2021, six women sued Tesla for rampant sexual harassment.
There's been multiple cases.
That's not him, though.
Just one against him.
Just to be clear.
I'm just trying.
Sure.
He's the CEO.
So if he's going to rule society as the omnipotent, all-knowing tech savior that we're going to
put our our trust in, I don't think he's proven that he can even run Tesla.
He's got multiple problems and he's quite unfocused.
You know, if if I had any sexual harassment cases against me, I wouldn't tweet that I
want to start a new university called tits.
Yeah.
The amount of confidence you need to know that you're innocent to do that is absolutely
crazy.
Right.
Oh, no, no.
Come on.
He's got to be out.
He he has no like sober judgment.
He has no second thought.
He's he doesn't have for for a culture that admires stoicism so much.
Our infatuation with Elon is so puzzling.
You know, the four virtues of stoicism, wisdom, justice, courage and moderation.
I think Elon's tweeting is anything but moderated.
Elon is definitely not a stoic.
And I would say that anyone who is a stoic that, you know, does not provide a lot of
value to the world.
I think I think stoicism is a is a recipe to for stagnation and nihilism.
Okay.
I usually consider myself a stoic up until recently because I think a lot of what what
it says is incredibly valuable.
But I think in the context of providing role models for kids, I don't think I want to teach
my kids to be to be sort of, you know, stoic philosophers.
I think they should build companies first and then they can, you know, become stoic
philosophers after that if they wish.
So if I can what about what what about the value of moderation?
Are you okay with that?
You know, everything in moderation, right, including moderation.
I think I agree that Tesla is probably not perfectly run.
But you know, Tesla has 100,000 employees and I drive a Tesla.
I don't own any shares in Tesla currently, but I do drive a Tesla and it's phenomenal.
So I think just if I were to you know, if I were to do a blind taste test, right and
drive every car and I had to do this, you know, three degrees, you know, I guess now
a year ago, the Tesla was the best car if I had to make a judgment call on how well
Nissan is run compared to Tesla, my guess is that Tesla has run far better in terms
of their ability to ship a car, which is, you know, as a consumer and customer of Tesla.
And if I were a shareholder of Tesla, the primary thing I would be basing that decision
off of is the quality of the product.
And I think the quality of the product is probably a relatively good signal for how
well run the company is.
It's also I'm sure I also own a Tesla and I just got it.
I'm out of the shop.
So okay.
One thing that's really interesting is with respect to the role model question, you both
had like different scopes of how you even assessed whether he was a good role model.
So what is the role of a role model on the one hand, Sahil, your your standard was like
his output look at, you know, sort of the companies that he's building.
Look at like basically the end result of the system that begins with like Elon's personality
and Justin, you brought a professionalism and like the presentation.
And so both of those things are interesting challenges.
So on the one hand, Justin, do you think that there's a role of a role model to build things
that are sort of useful?
And then on the other hand, Sahil, in the context of Elon actually trying to build a
social media company, one of the things that he's presented is that he is going to vote
Republican and he believes that Democrats are the quote party of division and hate.
So like, you know, sort of the other half of the question of role models, do you think
that there's validity to having a sort of a more complete picture?
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, right, you know, the important thing to say is that like,
no one should base, you know, their decisions on a single human, right?
I think generally you want to want on, you know, on a single human, you want to look
at both sides.
I think it's incredibly important.
I can talk about lots of issues I have with Elon.
Of course, I do.
I, you know, every every human, especially at that scale, it has a lot of issues.
But I think ultimately, like, if I was a parent teaching a kid, which is primarily how I think
about a role model, I don't think I've had role models since I was a kid.
You know, I think the sort of idolatry is probably, you know, an evil more than a than
a virtue at this point.
And I think the beauty of a lot of what the Internet has been able to provide is you have
like, you know, thousands of people you can now look up to and piece together your own
perfect sort of thing that you want to be, right?
You don't have to just be a single rapper, you can kind of assemble a set of personality
traits and things.
I think the other thing also to be, you know, to be mindful of is that we can't choose to
be like Elon.
I think that's also really important is like most people are not, you know, don't have
his level of intelligence, don't have his level of work ethic and never will just like
physically impossible.
And so most people I would I would say you should not try to be like Elon, you might
be able to learn certain things from him and the way that he's acted and how he's found
success.
But certainly you should you should almost definitely not not copy him.
So what's interesting is that I started out like a lot of people admiring Elon, like,
because it's exciting, it's like the first here's someone who's finally pushing the electric
car and here's someone who's finally taking us to space.
And it was inspirational.
And even for my kids, especially my my now 14 year old who is interested in space and
engineering, Elon was like this figure like, oh, maybe I could be like him someday.
But as a father, it's now pretty hard to have that conversation, even just alone on the
public behavior.
So if you're like publicly comparing the Canadian Prime Minister to Hitler, or calling a rescuer
in Thailand a pedophile, or calling the SEC bastards, it's like already just the public
behavior and the lack of restraint is hard for me to say to my kids, well, this is a
model of who you should be like you want to be a leader like Elon.
And then you have, you know, the you have the actions of also like that seemingly are
endangering people, like sweeping the self driving accidents under the rug, instead of
taking it seriously, like this is a serious allegation.
And you can't just say, well, you know, the computers aren't active when these things
happen.
You've got to have a different disposition at the very least.
But what worries me is that it it shows what his underlying values are.
It doesn't seem like he actually cares about his customers.
His attitude seems like he's just incredibly arrogant and self obsessed, like he cares
about what he wants.
He wants Twitter.
So he's going to buy Twitter.
He wants, you know, to do this, or he's going to do it.
His actions and his words aren't reflecting the values of caring about humanity, even
though that's what he says he wants, you know, he wants to do.
I think humanity on a macro basis, I don't think he cares about any one human on a micro
basis.
Right.
And so I think if you sort of think of his ideal future, you know, post climate change,
post, you know, sustainable energy based on on Mars, that's self sustaining.
That's how he defines a love of humanity.
And that sort of is so valuable that I think getting into fights with people and doing
things on a micro basis, you know, in order to let off steam or do whatever he's doing
so that he can kind of achieve these end goals, I think it just ends up becoming do the ends
justify the means.
You know, one role model I did have as a kid was Bill Gates, right?
And I think, you know, now you could look at him and say, hey, is this person who he
said he was, he was on like Jeffrey Epstein's plane and this and that.
He also, you know, is responsible for like literally saving the lives of like something
like tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of children, primarily in Africa
from malaria, polio, etc., right?
Like absolutely amazing achievement.
And he might have had sex with a child, right?
And so how do you weigh that?
I think the only way you can weigh that is to have a conversation about the complexity
of that.
Right.
And and I don't know what went through Bill Gates head.
I don't know if it happened.
I don't know any of these things.
But I do think there is a pattern that we probably should analyze as society is this
ends justify the means I see this, the Democratic Party, I see this, I'm sure I on the Republican
Party, though I'm less connected to that.
But there is this idea that it's okay to do things that are unprofessional, that are unacceptable.
You know, we talked a little bit about Elon Musk saying he's going to vote Republican
because the Democrats are sort of the party of hate.
I mean, truthfully, the reason he's voting Republican is because the Democratic Party
is treating him and Tesla terribly, right?
And the Cal, the state of California is treating him terribly.
So he's making a very pragmatic self sort of rational self interest decision to vote
for the party that might support him, right?
I think that that is not a love of humanity sort of thing.
I think that is purely a self interested sort of CEO of Tesla sort of thing, right?
And I think that's far into admit.
But I do think that, you know, ultimately, like, these people are imperfect, they get
to such scale and they are they are broken humans.
I think they every human is broken, no one gets to this state without having an insane
amount of trauma, family trauma, daddy issues, who knows what, I hope that everyone kind
of sees the tweets as just exhaust, right?
Just things that aren't that serious, they're 140 characters or less.
I don't think anyone should should sort of form a an image or a vision of somebody and
certainly not treat someone like a role model, just based off what they tweet.
And I think that goes for Elon, Bill, Trump, anybody, right, me, you, like, I'm sure if
you judge me purely based on my tweets, like, I'm sure there are people out there that are
like, this guy is not great, I would not like it if I met him in person, right?
And I'll share, but but there are better models.
And these people do have a lot of influence.
In some ways, you've just shown that with Bill Gates, like he he did have a tremendous
amount of influence.
And when the people we admire do horrible things that should change the narrative.
That should be the point where we go, we we hit pause on the admiration and we go, maybe
we should find better models and certainly not.
Who is it?
I think, I think Yvonne Schoonard, founder of Patagonia, I think Ray Anderson, founder
of Interface, I think on the indie hacker scale, Natalie and Chris from Wildbit, Michelle
and Matthias from Geocodeo, Marie Poulin, there's like all sorts of creators and and
many of them are smaller, they have less influence and less wealth.
And in some ways, I think that's what makes them healthier.
And we should be seeking out these kinds of models.
Plus, there are tons of engineers in the world doing very good things for space exploration,
for solar powered roofs and for all for battery technology who aren't making fun of people
on Twitter who don't have tons of accusations against them, who who are concerned when the
their self driving technology causes a bunch of accidents.
Because there are better models, and it's a spectrum, obviously, you know, lots of people
lots of comedians admired Bill Cosby for a long time.
But when the when the Bill Cosby was shown to be a rapist, that changed the narrative.
And for me, Elon's public behavior is already there, you can already see it in the way he's
acting publicly, and I think there's something concerning about that.
What, what role does the media play in all of this?
Because there is, in a sense, maybe this is a challenge question for you, Justin, I understand
your point that, you know, we can choose better role models, but like, but can we, can we
decide this person's values are good, they should be on the front page of the New York
Times every day, and to some degree, there's a physics of attention grabbing, where if
you don't stand out, and you aren't willing to be this sort of larger than life unique
person, you won't necessarily get the platform to influence people.
And so you might be a wholesome, upstanding individual.
And I'm sure there are many dozens who lead companies, and yet they don't actually end
up influencing nearly as many people because they aren't able really to get that platform
and to get that attention.
So I guess what role does the media play?
And like, how do you factor in the fact that like, perhaps you have to be a little bit
different and a little bit edgy in order to influence lots of people?
I don't really know.
But it feels the question worth exploring there is how much amplification and magnification
of influence is healthy.
Like perhaps the New York Times has too much influence and amplification of their message.
That's possible.
It feels worth exploring.
And this might not be the answer, but maybe, and I don't know if you can put the cat back
in the bag, but maybe there's just too many individuals and too many institutions that
have an outsized influence in our culture.
Because it's a lot easier to make these, to make good choices, it feels, on a smaller
scale, like a local role model.
It seems like you, you at least have a chance of associating with better people.
You know, Sam Harris says, like, Sam Harris doesn't believe in free will, but he's like,
we do have this opportunity to fill our minds with better books, better people, better influences.
And if that's true, then the things that influence us do matter.
The people on Twitter, the people we idolize, the things we read, and my thought is maybe,
I don't really know, but maybe the scale, we are at an inhumane scale.
Like humans have not evolved for this much influence.
A single person shouldn't have 80 million followers, and maybe that's where the danger
comes in.
Does that make us complicit, maybe because we've chosen, even though we're a much smaller
scale show, to talk about Elon, to debate Elon.
We could be talking about anything.
I suppose it depends on how meta you want to get.
I think this is the kind of conversation we want to have, because indie hackers in the
grand scale of things is a small community.
And we on this call are all peers, even, I don't know who has the most Twitter followers
or influence, but the scale of influence is within the relative sphere.
But the scale of influence and wealth that Elon in particular has, and maybe this is
a comment on all billionaires, it's just way higher.
It's much, much higher.
I do also, I'm an optimist in the sense that, and I still believe in old institutions like
government and universities and the press, and I think there is an ability for individual
voters to make a difference, like the EU has already implemented privacy legislation that's
not perfect, but that big tech companies had to conform with GDPR.
So it's possible for democratically elected governments to change things.
And if I was Elon, I'd be scared actually, it's not going to come from the US, it's going
to come from the EU, they've already proven they can enact legislation.
And by the way, they've got new free speech legislation on the books right now that would
have a substantial influence on how Twitter is run.
They're the ones that are going to perhaps make a big difference.
And if I was Elon, for all sorts of reasons, that's who I would be most scared of is the
EU.
It's not necessarily the US politicians.
I mean, at the end of the day, you're effectively balancing the will of the people versus the
will of one person.
And there are many ways to do this.
I think capitalism and voting with your dollars is one way to do this.
And clearly that model is leading to these winners take all people worth 200 plus billion
dollars.
I think the way that people are choosing to vote absent democracy, just free markets,
is clearly going more and more towards this world, and this just isn't just for Elon,
this is also the New York Times, is not really the New York Times anymore.
It's the World Times.
It started out as a monopoly on a specific sort of place, and it has kind of grown and
become the winner of this market in a sense, and maybe the day of the Washington Post.
Let's talk about the free market stuff, because that one is funny to me, because it wasn't
just people voting with their dollars.
It was the government giving electric car manufacturers massive subsidies.
The California government, I think, has given billions of dollars specifically to Tesla
in the form of subsidies.
And then Elon's other work with SpaceX and other things also has government links.
So the government is actually a key part of this.
You don't have Tesla without those subsidies.
It's ironic to me that California has given Tesla so many subsidies, and he complains
about taxes, and he wants to move to Texas.
Who paid for the subsidies?
It was governments that paid for those subsidies.
We've already seen that demand for electric cars goes down when the subsidies go away.
The subsidies are an incredible motivator.
I got a subsidy here in British Columbia when I bought my Tesla, and it was a big motivator.
There was thousands and thousands of dollars off the purchase price of a car.
So it's not free market in the sense that it's my dollars that are making the difference.
It's also who the government is deciding to give subsidies to.
You're right, especially in the formation of these new technologies in which you need
effectively the governments to effectively front-load, effectively loan the money from
taxpayers, and the justification is this will be worth it eventually.
The federal loan to Tesla was paid back early with interest.
Currently, at least the federal EV program in the US is you get $7,500 tax credit if
you buy an electric vehicle.
However, this only applies if the electric vehicle manufacturer has sold under 200,000
cars.
Actually, the only electric vehicle company that this $7,500 tax credit does not apply
to is Tesla.
Actually, in today's world, if you took the electric vehicle market, at least in the United
States, and removed all subsidies from it completely, it would basically destroy all
the competition of Tesla.
It would be massively beneficial for Tesla.
Of course, today's a different picture than maybe 10, 15 years ago when the dynamics were
very different.
You're certainly right.
Tesla would not exist today without some government help.
I'm not anti-government.
I think governments play in a super, super, super essential role, and I don't think we
should get rid of governments, nor can we, but I do think I bias towards figuring out
how do we make the government a wealth distributor and a facilitator of, hey, you can go build
this.
Here's some money to go do that, and not the company that's actually hiring people and
doing the work themselves.
I think that's a lot of where the danger comes from is because then you allow for decentralization,
which allows for lobbying and all of these other things.
I am generally against most subsidies, though I do understand that if you want some new
technologies when solar, things like this to happen faster than they would otherwise,
because I do think free markets would eventually make them happen.
It would just not be nearly as pretty of a path.
I do think governments play a super essential role.
However, I do think, for example, the SEC saying, if you're a public company CEO, you
have to tweet like this might go a little bit too far.
The SEC is also unelected, which is also different.
Let's go back to the Twitter question.
One of the questions at the heart of the issue is that Elon's stated goal in this acquisition
is that he believes that Twitter should be a public platform that's a free speech zone
and that we should have minimal interference, minimal people at Twitter censoring and toggling
the weights on what rises and what sinks and who goes away.
Do you think that this is a good goal and do you think that Elon is the person that
should be in charge of it?
Well, free speech as defined by whom?
Right.
I think that his claim is that it's, hey, we already have free speech codes and we're
just going to be abiding by that.
To take his word for it, that's who, right?
Say the American government.
If you're going to take the legal definition, Twitter has already been within free speech
guidelines as set up by US legislation.
By the way, Canada free speech legislation, different than the US in some notable ways
and also in the EU and also in Africa and also everywhere else.
The idea about free speech is that people say it is both a cultural value and a legal
construct, but it's not a universal cultural value.
It is highly dependent on what region you're in and also highly dependent on who you are
as an individual.
I guess the question would be, do we want Elon, if he's saying I'm going to make Twitter
a better platform for free speech, what does that mean?
If all he's saying is I'm going to moderate Twitter the way I want it to be moderated,
maybe just lose the free speech label because what level are we talking about as defined
by whom, as defined by whose cultural values or whose legislation?
To me, it just felt like ridiculous rhetoric.
It's just a way to pump up his 80 million followers and it's like, yeah, Elon's going
to get them.
What exactly is he going to do?
So far, he seems completely oblivious as to how to run a social network, what's involved
in spam detection, how these incredibly basic principles work that you even at Indie Hackers
have said.
I think you guys were talking to Vince about this.
Have you ever dealt with spam and we could only judge him by the things he says and does?
That's a counterfactual.
We can't just imagine what we think his ultimate purpose is.
This is why that three-dimensional chess thing, like, oh, he's just playing three-dimensional
chess.
He's going in and out of different vectors, pulling on strings.
It's like, well, even if that were true, how would we evaluate that?
The free speech thing is just on his face ridiculous.
Yeah, I mean, I think one example of this would be, so the United States has codified
free speech.
There's a lot of court precedent around what this means.
For example, the Amber Heard Johnny Depp case is a good example of defamation not being
bound by free speech principles.
So I think that's great because it educates people broadly on free speech is not an absolute
sort of thing.
There's a lot of nuance here.
I think what Elon is saying, and I think the Peter Thiel quote, where he talks about Donald
Trump and he says, you shouldn't take him literally, but you should take him seriously,
I think is how you should take Elon, which is Elon is an incredibly smart person.
He's surrounded by incredibly smart people.
He has an unlimited amount of money so he can hire the best lawyers, the best engineers,
the best folks basically in the world.
And so you have to kind of give him some, I think, some slack when he tweets something
like we can just call every 10th person.
If you talk to a lot of statisticians, they'll say like, that is actually how we do stuff.
That's actually not insane.
The way that I think about free speech, I'd be interested on your sources on that because
everything I've read from people who do this kind of spam detection says that the model
he suggested is, you can't do it at scale, but on a one off basis, you can take a list
of people, call them and figure out if they're human and then use that statistically to scale
how many people are not with the sample that not with the sample he was suggesting.
And I mean, I'm an idiot.
I don't know anything about this.
The goal, let me just finish with an example of how free speech may look a little bit different
on Twitter, or at least how Twitter will look, because you're right, free speech is sort
of outside of the scope, I think, of Twitter.
But for example, Twitter has a brand safety team.
So this brand safety team basically talks to advertisers and says, hey, what content
do you not want to be next to?
And Nike or Pepsi or whatever can say, hey, we don't really want to be next to these kinds
of ads.
And every television network has this.
This is why you don't see anyone drinking alcohol on TV, like try find it doesn't exist.
And what Elon is saying is, hey, this is an example of a rule that we have that is not
because the US government says that we need this rule, but because Pepsi or because Nike
is saying that we need this rule.
And in my world, we will effectively delete this team and effectively reference point
to whatever the US government wants us to do, or whatever the UK government wants us
to do if the user happens to be in this.
Of course, there's a lot of stuff to figure out.
It's a very complicated thing.
I don't think anyone thinks it's an easy thing.
I don't think Elon has any, you know, illusion around how difficult this problem is.
I think he purposely wants to make it controversial and seem like he wants to create the debate
because it keeps him in the zeitgeist, which I think is very important.
But why?
Why is it important for him to be in the zeitgeist?
If your primarily primary partners in SpaceX is the US government, NASA, if one of your
biggest subsidies historically has come from governments, why would you be shit-talking
in public like this?
And if you were the CEO of a publicly traded company with a duty to shareholders and everything
else, and they're concerned, this isn't just me.
There's masses of shareholders that are like, Elon, you're already in some of the most difficult
industries in the world, car manufacturing, space exploration.
Why on earth would you distract yourself with this?
Why?
Why do it?
It seems so unwise.
It seems so important to me.
I think Twitter being a place in which people can express ideas freely is incredibly important.
I grew up in Singapore, which does not have free speech, and Twitter was like my sacred
space.
It was like the thing that I checked every morning.
I think people who live in maybe the West, like, think that they can just go around and
say whatever they want on the internet, and it's not that bad.
But it is pretty bad in a lot of the world.
And I think one of the most amazing exports that the US has is basically free speech.
We force it on other places in other countries and other governments that may not want that.
And I think that's an amazing thing that we should do more of.
We should make it harder for places like China and Russia.
I think that is a great thing.
And I think that ultimately, when you have a brand safety team, it is going to be full
of bias, right?
Because brands are going to have people who work at these companies that are going to
be more generally living on the coasts, for example, right?
And so they're probably going to be less gun-friendly than the average American, for example, right?
And so there are clear rules that I think that would change under Elon.
So I think it's very easy to say this would be different.
For example, misgendering someone is a suspendable offense on Twitter.
I don't think it would be a suspendable offense under Elon Musk.
You can very much have an argument, like, is that a good or bad thing?
And I think many, many rational minded people would say, it's actually, we should ban people,
suspend people for harassing people on Twitter in this way.
I would like to tell there's ideally a way to get those people off Twitter so that no
one should ever see their tweets anyways.
They can talk to a wall if they want to.
But I think that is an example of an Elon Musk Twitter being very, very different.
The Babylon B is currently suspended from Twitter because they have an article that
I believe misgenders somebody that works for the federal government.
And so that's a very real example.
Do you want the person in charge of that moderation to be someone who has so little self-restraint,
he can't stop himself from calling somebody a pedophile publicly?
It's not that he has control.
What he's saying is I'm referring to the US government.
So if you want this, if you want, look, if you want misgendering to be a felony or whatever,
a misdemeanor, let's go make that change.
Like if we believe it, if we as a society believe this, we have a system in which we
can make this change, we can make it expensive to do this thing, which is how we control
behavior generally is we make it cost something to do that behavior.
And then cool.
I just don't think you want the person in charge of all that.
He just he can do whatever he wants.
He flies wherever he wants.
He can buy whatever he wants.
He can manipulate his finances however he wants.
He takes hundreds of millions of dollars of loans from finances.
He takes hundreds of millions of dollars of loans to pay for his lifestyle using Tesla
stock.
But I can't do well, you know, you know, I can't do that and you and I pay taxes hopefully
on our income.
Well, we could do it if we had public equities that were held with a bank that sure, sure,
sure.
But when you're when you're dealing with a public platform with people who are not in
the zero point zero zero zero one percent of humanity, but just normal people who have
a normal job in a normal house and everything else, I think you would want people who understand
real life.
I think you wouldn't want the most privileged man on earth to be to be the arbiter of what
is safe and what is not safe, which is elected by those people, right?
Real people get to choose like who those who those people ultimately.
Yeah.
And I and if Elon really cared about free speech, then he would be petitioning the government
to change its legislation using his influence, using his influence, his 80 million improvement
on his free speech basis.
I mean, let's make the change.
What change do you want?
Should we make it?
Well, I actually I actually think it's working pretty good overall, then we should use it
for Twitter's rules.
Why have the Twitter TOS?
Why not just point to US Gov dot TOS or whatever?
Sure.
I don't know why Twitter needs.
But I'm not the one motivated to buy it because I think free Twitter needs more free speech.
If he thinks that there's this fundamental problem in society, which he does, this isn't
just about Twitter.
He's saying, I want to I'm buying this right in the SEC filing.
I'm buying this because I think our society has a free speech problem.
We do.
I believe that.
Well, if your society has a free speech problem and you can move and you can get people to
buy Dogecoin just by sending out a tweet, then I'm I'm pretty sure you probably have
some influence on who people vote for, too, and I would use that influence in that way.
I mean, the thing is, like, it's it's similar with like Joe Rogan, where people like to
think that he has a lot of influence.
But the first time he says something stupid, everyone's like, he's an idiot.
I followed him on all these other points.
But I don't like, for example, Donald Trump can't change the mind of his base.
Like his well, except except he incited a riot on your capital.
Through the things he said, well, if you're saying publicly that you don't think he did,
I think I would disagree with you.
It seems pretty regardless of what he wanted or would have wanted.
I mean, I don't think he tweeted on that day.
Right.
So I don't know how you consider that incitement.
I think months of tweeting that the election was stolen when there is zero evidence was
is sufficient evidence.
I and maybe we do, but I think there's a related factor here.
I think the things that people say matter.
There's a related attribute here, which is I think the way the world is changing is that
the Internet has made everything more personal in some sense, like that's what this show
is about.
So you see it at a large scale where people like Trump and Elon obviously can sort of
circumvent the media and go straight to their audiences and whether they can change people's
minds or not as a matter of debate.
But you also see it at a small scale, right, where any hackers and founder and personality
driven companies are able to upend bigger, more faceless corporations who are in some
sense just and so more traditionally beholden to this idea of professionalism and sort of
ascribing to what society thinks you should look like.
Do you think this is a force for good?
Because I think some of what we're seeing is inevitably going to result from the interconnectedness
of people in the Internet.
Like, is this is this worth the cost?
Because I'm not sure we can put the lid on somebody like Elon or some future Elons or
Trump's popping up.
So what do we do about this as a society in some ways?
This is why I want to talk about it because I like all of you on this call.
I like you.
I respect you.
And ethics matter.
Values matter.
Now while we're determining what those are going to be, there might be some discussion.
But the things we influence people to do matter.
So there are people who with a tweet can raise a whole crowdfunding round.
That is influence.
And we should take that influence seriously.
There are people with a single tweet who can get people to buy a coin that may be an outsized
risk for their audience.
And I think you can teach and encourage people to have sober second thought, to write out
a tweet and say, ah, should I tweet this?
Should I clarify any of this when I'm telling people to buy this coin or do this thing?
Should I put any disclaimers on that?
Should I sharpen this in any way?
And what I'm seeing from Elon is none of that filter.
And I think that's disturbing because we know that he does have influence.
And in the same way that each of us, we do have influence as well.
That's marketing.
Marketing is influencing people to buy your product.
That responsibility we need to take seriously, which is why I think better models would be
Yvon Chouinard and Ray Anderson from Interface who took their responsibility as CEO and said,
my influence matters.
And I mean, Ray Anderson made carpets.
And he's saying, in my carpet manufacturing, my influence with suppliers, with customers,
et cetera, matters.
And I'm going to take it seriously.
I think we need more of that in the tech culture, less bravado, more sober second thought, and
more sensitivity, honestly.
I think a lot of people like Elon because he just says what he, you know, he's like
this loose cannon.
But I don't think that's what we necessarily want to model.
Part of this is, you know, I've seen how influencers in tech, leaders and idols that I had influenced
me.
You know, when I was reading 37signals all day, a lot of my blog posts and tweets started
to sound like 37signals.
And some of this is also my experience with kind of cult-like religion and how it influenced
me to behave and think.
And I think I just have this visceral reaction when a figure like Elon comes around because
it just feels like I've seen this before.
And it feels there's something about that kind of influence that's not right.
Yeah.
No, I think those are really good points.
And I think any time that you believe something or, you know, do something, it's important
to say, well, why do I believe this?
You know, why did I say it?
Why did I start this company?
You know, where are they coming from?
Because they're coming, if they're not coming from Elon, they're coming from your parents,
they're coming from your teachers, they're coming from the government, they're coming
from the media that you consume, they're coming from creators that you follow.
This is happening across all the time, we're getting signals.
So I think the first thing is, yeah, we should constantly be doing this.
And anytime someone is saying something to you, you have to understand that they are
benefiting from that, right?
Elon, anytime he tweets is benefiting from that.
You may, you know, you may say that's fine and good because that means Tesla has a higher
chance of success, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But I do think that's true.
Elon is true for the opposite, right, whoever would be on the other side.
Like I could say that, you know, it's impossible to sell carpets unless you virtue signal about
all this other crap that you do for your employees.
Otherwise, no one's going to give a shit.
I don't believe that.
But I'm saying that I can kind of make a claim like that.
Elon might say, hey, we actually don't need to do any of that.
So I can actually be who I am, which is how we all are, which are we're all assholes.
It's just I can now be this because I don't, I don't know if that's true, though.
I don't think everybody's an asshole.
I'm just sort of, I'm just positing that like, there are ways to somebody, I mean, there
are probably like religious people, Justin, who would take enormous issue with like your
characterizations of some of your past experiences, etc. So it really depends on like whose point
of view.
For example, Joel Epstein, right, or Joel Osteen, or the guy who does like the big,
you know, churches and in Houston, oh, it's like, he's manipulating all these people.
But if you actually, and I have actually like talked to someone who follows him, and it's
like, I chose to buy his book.
That's it.
So it's like, what does Obama do?
What does Hillary do?
What does every politician do?
They use their influence to sell a product, and then they sell that product.
And the other side says, hey, they're scamming all their followers, the blah, blah, blah,
this and that.
And then you actually talk to their followers.
And they're like, yeah, no, yeah, I just bought the book and it's a good book.
I don't know.
Like, you know, like, you haven't, you haven't, you haven't talked to all of the followers
yet, but you have a set the size of one right now.
And I do worry that there is this issue of high IQ people manipulating low IQ people.
I think that is an issue in society that we need to deal with.
Well, and there's a there's a tension here and it is it is tricky, but this is life of
being in between two tensions of on the one hand, I want more people to use transistor
and I want to influence them to become customers.
On the other hand, I've got to I've got to balance that the best I can, hopefully, according
to a set of values to say, well, I want to influence them, but I'm going to try to do
it in a way that's ethical, in a way that doesn't manipulate people need needlessly
in a way that has hard conversations.
I mean, I can give you a real example of like, like putting me in this place where I manipulated,
you know, hundreds of thousands of people on on Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted about, you
know, population collapse being a real big issue to post climate change.
And I replied saying, you know, and he says, why basically why aren't more people having
kids?
Right.
What is going on?
There's a bunch of reasons for that.
I don't think it's one simple thing, but I replied saying, you know, we need to make
having kids easier, cheaper, you know, faster, safer, all these sorts of things.
And then I give an example, synthetic wombs, etc., right.
And that caused this massive storm on Twitter for like a day, at least within our sort of
sphere, you know, crypto, Elon, whatever that sphere is, Twitter and, you know, people are
like, well, childcare and this and there's all these issues and this and like you can't
like synthetic wombs not gonna happen for a bunch of years if it happens, it's ethical
this and that.
I'm like, look, I'm not I'm just giving an example when I could have picked a different
technology.
I probably picked the craziest, most dystopian sort of technology you could ever think of.
And I literally I didn't think about it that much.
But I thought about it enough when I tweeted it to say, how do I say something that gets
people to pay attention, because I really believe this is an important issue.
I believe this is the most important issue that we face as humanity.
And I will take the heat of 2000 dunks in order to make this thing.
I didn't expect the 2000 dunks like maybe I would, you know, I again, you can't always
choose.
Sometimes I think I'm tweeting something incendiary and no one cares.
Right.
Yeah.
And so it goes both ways.
But I look at I'm like, I could have tweeted something better.
And if there was a Twitter edit button, I might go back and add some context.
But it never would have been viral if I said something much more demean.
And I know this because you can go through the thousands of replies and there are all
these people suggesting this and that and this and no one cares.
So you also have to say, how do I make this the current thing?
How do I if I really believe in this, like, can I make it a thing?
And sometimes that requires this sort of I wouldn't call it self sacrifice or anything
like that.
Clearly, I benefit in many other ways.
But sometimes you have to get to the New York Times front page.
And the only way you can do that is by saying somebody is a pedophile.
Right.
Well, well, I don't think I don't think but that's but that's clearly a bad example.
Let's just call that out.
I don't want to be too cynical here, though.
But what I'm getting out with this question is is aren't we inevitably moving toward a
world where Justin even if we want people to be better role models, the way the system
works, the way social media works, the way our incentives are set up is such that there's
a lot of reason for people not to be that, you know, essentially, you know, 50, 60 years
ago, okay, the media was controlled by a very small number of people.
And they could act as sort of a filter and impose their morals and their advertisers
more advertisers more beliefs on the world.
And whether you agree with that or not, there was some sort of standard for professionalism.
Whereas today, it's a little bit more like mob rule.
And if the people find somebody entertaining, whether or not they ascribe to a system of
values means less.
How do we deal with that?
I mean, it's one thing to wish well and so I'm curious about your opinions, too.
It's one thing to wish well for the world and wish for people to set good examples.
But like, if the ecology of the internet doesn't necessarily allow for that, what do we do?
This would be a great, interesting customer interview case study, to go out and ask people
how did they change their mind about things?
And for me, one of the foundational experiences of my life was taking this business ethics
class at University of Lethbridge in my, you know, my business management degree.
And the things that he brought up and the challenges that he gave us as a class, he
didn't tell us how to think sorry, he didn't tell us what to think.
But he he said, here's how you should engage with these types of issues.
And I think part of the reason we're seeing this right now is because we do actually need
human beings at this scale, we do need strong institutions.
And so at one point in my life, I was like, ah, college is a waste of time.
I don't know if my kids should go.
And now I'm in my 40s and I've changed my mind because I keep coming back to that business
ethics class and how many things he challenged me on that come back over and over again and
have taught me, I think, to think about things in a certain way.
So I think institutions is one of them.
The benefit of the indie kind of movement is that what I'm hoping is that wealth and
influence and everything else becomes more distributed, that it's not just a few white
guys with billions of dollars, but that it's, you know, many, many millions of people who
are making a good living and now have time.
The reason I'm even here is because I've made enough money that I can afford to be here.
I've got the time to engage with these issues and to think about them and to read all of
the newspapers and to read the blog posts and to listen and, you know, that privilege
distributed amongst more people can lead to some better outcomes.
So the more people who have that freedom and that flexibility and that margin in their
life has the potential to change the culture.
And I don't think we're going to do it if we continue to erode institutions.
I don't think we're going to get it through anarchy.
Yeah.
I mean, one idea I would add is just a level of transparency.
And so when people do things or when power does get centralized, that you can at least
see it and have a conversation about it.
For example, one issue I have is that I don't think people in Congress should be able to
trade stocks.
I think that's kind of weird.
If you look at the returns, it's not statistically possible that they are they're not corrupted.
It's just they are.
But you can't really solve the problem in a very simple way because you can make it
illegal for them to trade stocks.
But then, by the way, all of their friends and family do it.
Right.
So you're not really solving the problem.
Again, this is why I think it's so hard sometimes to really solve it.
My answer is transparency.
Obviously, there's a lot of heat around Web3 right now and crypto.
But I do think one thing we can take from crypto is figure out how do we put more of
this stuff on chain.
Right.
We ask this of people when they run for president, ideally, they they kind of publish their tax
returns.
I know Trump didn't.
Biden did.
But generally, I'm a fan of putting that stuff in a place where people can see it.
This is why I'm also a fan of of Elon's sort of supposed attempt to potentially open source
Twitter as a code base.
I wanted to do this for Gumroad.
And certainly we can say, hey, anytime there's an action taken by a human on any moderation
or whatever, you can at least have an audit trail that's viewable.
Pinterest, for example, publishes a report every year.
GitHub does the same thing.
There's ways to kind of do more and more of this.
But I think when you can't agree or when you can't say, oh, we need more or less power
or more or less interrelation, I hope that at least one agreement is like, well, in any
case, there should be transparency so we can at least know, for example, like we don't
know like what household wealth looks like in America.
We like to guess.
We like to say 40 percent of people can't make their next check or rent or whatever.
We have no clue.
We're all just kind of guessing, calling people, like putting together statistical samples
because there is no SQL query you can run for this stuff.
My guess is one day there may be, and that will make it easier to have some of these
conversations, right?
Even the fact that Elon is worth X, but that's all Tesla stock and he can't really take it
out of the system.
It's all like how many people put money into Tesla, right?
For example, 37 Signals has an article where they raised a dollar at a hundred billion
dollar valuation or something like that, right?
They're all of these sorts of questions that I think we just don't have enough insight
and we don't have that data.
I do agree with you, Corlan, that this is inevitable.
Like, you know, if Elon gets out of the Twitter deal, Twitter stock price is going to crash.
And there are many, many, many humans on planet Earth that can afford to buy Twitter, right?
He is not the only one.
Certainly he is currently the only one that was interested in that price.
But who knows?
And so I think it's kind of an inevitability that something happens to Twitter and we just
have to sort of build a system that allows for that.
And of all has a great quote where he says, you know, you should build a system that you
can kind of give the keys to your worst enemy, right?
I think that's a relatively good way of thinking about our institutions, at least, like there
should be they should be resilient to bad actors.
But they should exist, right?
I don't think we should get rid of our institutions.
I don't want to live in an anarchist society.
But in any society in which we live, I do think that transparency seems like a good
idea.
If you run for office, if you're in the government, if you're lobbying, you know, if you're hiring
people over a certain amount, whatever the rules happen to be, I do think that we could
at least benefit from quite a lot of transparency in this.
I think if Elon doesn't buy Twitter, I think Twitter should still do a lot of these things.
I think Twitter is a unique platform.
It is the only place in which like a politician by default, you know, it becomes their their
sort of public square.
It could be like functionally, it could be many other places, but Twitter seems to have
become that.
And I think, you know, currently, Twitter is kind of, you know, controlled in part by
the US government and part by the SEC because it's a publicly traded company.
And I do think it's good to somehow figure out if Twitter should be a world utility,
then the EU should be excited about the fact that maybe the SEC doesn't get to control
it anymore.
Maybe there's a way to kind of move beyond that.
I don't know what that actually looks like.
And I certainly don't think Elon, one human being, should have control of Twitter over
a long period of time.
But if that, you know, if he ends up becoming the choke point, the bottleneck that it needs
to be for for it to blossom, just like Tolkien was, you know, the bottleneck for fantasy to
blossom and that's just what it takes.
I would like to think that that's an acceptable sort of risk and hopefully the process is
incredibly transparent and there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands of people
who work at Twitter that will whistle blow and should if they think anything is going
wrong, just like Coinbase had an incident earlier this week.
And I think that's another nice thing is that a lot of these people can go to the New York
Times and can go leak these stories.
And so there are sort of other balancing forces here, I think, that we don't want to talk about.
Certainly in terms of transparency, I'd love to see the richest man in the world who has
contracts with NASA and the US government reveal how does he pay for things?
How many loans has he taken out?
How much crypto does he hold?
How much crypto has he sold?
What is the relationship between him tweeting and his buying and selling activity on crypto?
There's lots of opportunity for transparency from him, especially if he wants to earn Justin
Jackson's trust, but he might not care.
You mentioned the crowdfunding, you know, being able to raise a crowdfunding round off
a tweet.
And like to do that, I had to go through a very laborious multi-month process with a
third party audit.
I have this like 90 page document, it goes through all our financials, like this is what
you have to do if you're going to go to the public and say, hey, I'm raising money for
my company.
Why?
Because if I didn't have to do that, it would be much easier for me to just make up numbers,
right?
Which is what a lot of people in crypto do, did because they don't have to follow any
of these regulations or they think they don't or whatnot, right?
And I totally agree with you that I think, you know, the new bipartisan bill needs to
happen because I do think we need a lot more of a framework of a way to think.
I mean, just like we can say, hey, there is some jurisprudence around free speech because
there's been a couple hundred years worth of these back and forth conversations.
I wish we had that ability around these other things.
We just don't right now.
Right.
Currently, I can go on Twitter and I can say some crazy thing and then some stock price
can go up or someone can get killed and like there is no, there's just no system for what
happens in this case.
Yeah, there should be way more accountability for people with influence for sure.
There should be a lot more accountability.
There should be a real framework and you should kind of know what you're getting into.
I think that's kind of the other thing is like you should know the risks that you're
taking.
Currently you don't.
Right.
Like I don't like wearing a suit, so I don't want to go all the way back into like, you
know, mandating that public company CEOs should wear suits.
Like obviously no one thinks we should do that.
Should there be some rules probably and certainly around corruption and like so, you know, but
but I do think there should be standards.
Those standards should be public and generally standards that, you know, require or mandate
more transparency.
I would find it hard to be to be against, you know, for example, I think Sweden or Switzerland,
one of these European countries, I think you can literally look up anyone in anyone salary,
any citizen salary, not just people who work like anybody just say how much do they make
and you just know I, you know, Gumroad, everyone knows everyone else's salaries.
It's great.
If I was, you know, could wave on and say, hey, can we run an experiment in which everybody
in the city of California is, you know, tax returns are going to be public.
Would that ever happen?
No.
But like, would that be good?
I guarantee you behavior would improve.
Sure.
And let's start with billionaires.
Let's start with the pointy edge of that sword.
For sure.
I mean, start with public company CEOs.
You know, I think there's an easy they've chosen to be public company CEOs.
And so they've made that decision.
And I think that's totally reasonable to say that directors of public companies have to,
you know, submit their tax returns or public.
I think that's a great, great path forward, but only happens when you have outlandish
behavior that triggers these moments because the government is so slow that they only really
get up off their seats when there is, you know, when there are these kind of crazy,
crazy things that balloon to a level in which is like, oh, fine, we have to actually deal
with this.
Let's wrap up here.
We'll try a quick experiment.
We have sort of your one sentence takeaway you would like the audience to have from this
conversation.
Some of the broader topics around it.
I know it's hard to stick to one sentence, but let's do that.
And then we will wrap up.
So Justin, you want to start?
I think I said it before, I still I'd like us to look more into institutions like investing
in our institutions, like universities, like business ethics classes, et cetera.
I like the idea of transparency.
I'd say start with billionaires, including all their crypto assets.
And for all of this opportunity to be more distributed, I think that's a great way for
us to have a better society.
Sahel?
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately my takeaway is that people are incredibly complicated
people and we have to give them that credit that they're all humans.
Yeah, it's just important to acknowledge that, you know, these are all people with problems
that have massive megaphones and no one really knows how to use them yet.
Ultimately, what makes a lot of these conversations so difficult is that we're debating things
that have not happened yet.
Right.
Like Elon buying Twitter and doing so we're all speculating based on our priors.
And I think just acknowledging that we're all kind of playing a guessing game, you know,
it's more of like a hanging out with your friend at a bar and not being under oath.
Channy, what are your thoughts?
Before we did this, I read about this neuroscientist, this really controversial neuroscientist in
like the 1970s who did early human experimentation when the ethics around that weren't really
set up.
And one of the things that he did was he allowed like a hundred people to hook up electrodes
to their brain and stimulate the emotions that they just enjoyed the most.
And you would expect that to have been pleasure or something like that.
And instead it was anger.
It was like low grade anger.
That's what people liked when they got their own decision to stimulate the most.
That's what I think about Twitter.
And so when I think about Elon Musk taking over, like I think it's sort of broken in
a way that's systemic, like Justin, you were saying, you know, like we want to sort of
bridge the gap between the ethics of what we want it to go, where we want it to go versus
like the way that media encourages it.
But I think that in a way it's sort of built into just who we are as humans.
So creative destruction, who knows what direction Elon is going to go in, but that's the substrate
that he has to work with.
That's the sample that he has to work with is people that like to make themselves angry.
Okay.
I'll wrap up.
I would encourage people to, I think pay attention to something Justin said, which is the sort
of idea of this religious figures in society, these movements where we sort of turn off
our brains and we jump on a bandwagon one way or the other.
I mean, uh, Sahl said, we're all complicated people.
Uh, there's many ways to scan a cat.
And if you really jump into an issue, you dissect who someone is and the sort of forces
around that.
It's impossible to have a conversation and look at the good and look at the bad and look
at how we can do better and where we can improve and get away from some of these more religious
conversations where it's all one way or all the other.
So I would encourage people to just, uh, not try to oversimplify a complicated world and
to be willing to discuss issues like this and death.
Justin Seil, thanks a ton for coming on and doing this.
I'll have you back sometime soon for another debate.
Uh, can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about, you know, what you're
doing online, transistor gum road, your tweets and your writings?
Uh, I read at justinjaxson.ca and I'm on Twitter, the letter M, the letter I, Justin.
And I'm on Twitter at, uh, SHL, um, where you can find all my writing linked from my
personal website.
All right.
Thanks a lot, guys.