And the previous program was Economic Update with Richard Wolff heard Wednesdays at 6.30pm
here on WBAI New York 99.5 FM and WBAI.org online it is 7pm.
Stay tuned for Off The Hook coming up right now.
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We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would, from Billy Bumper, the best expect the worst.
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I hope that's understood, from Billy Bumper.
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Kyle.
Hello.
And over in Skype land we have Alex.
Good evening.
And over in the other Skype land we have Gila.
Good evening.
And it looks like, yeah that's Rob T. Firefly over there, isn't it? How you doing?
It is, good evening.
A little hazy picture today. Great, okay. And I think we're coming in a little hot, but I think we're alright now. Good?
Yeah, that Skype signal's extra crispy.
We got the Skype extra this week.
Cool, well you know, if there was a theme to this week, I would say it would be the phrase, and maybe you've never heard this phrase before,
but it would be something along the lines of,
Oh how the mighty have fallen. Has anyone ever heard that before?
No? I guess maybe I just made it up.
Oh how the mighty have fallen.
So let's talk about how this ties into news events of this week.
We have the whole Twitter Elon Musk debacle that's going on.
We talked about this last week on Overtime.
We did not talk about it on the air, so I'd like to remedy that this week.
We also have a failed candidate who has announced his comeback, so to say.
I don't know if we want to talk about that at all, but it is a little bit funny.
And then of course we have FTX.
Yeah, the FTX cryptocurrency disaster.
I don't know if there's enough time to talk about this. We'll certainly try to get to that.
But boy, to see a fortune of tens of billions of dollars just evaporate in a matter of days, or maybe even hours, I don't know.
It gives you pause, and it makes you think maybe, just maybe, cryptocurrency isn't as rock solid as we all thought it was.
Or ready.
Or anything.
To be pouring all your investments into.
All these things we believe so strongly in.
NFTs, and now people are doubting those.
Faith in gods and things like that.
All being questioned.
Our lives are being turned upside down.
I don't know if we can handle it.
But we have this place.
We have WBAI, and before we get started with the discussion, I want to implore people to support WBAI so we can continue to work through these chaotic and sometimes traumatic news events that are going on in the world of technology.
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They've changed formats, they've all been bought and sold.
We've stuck around because of you, the listener.
And that is a very, very strong currency, I guess is a good thing to describe it as.
As opposed to what we're seeing in the world of cryptocurrency.
No, listeners.
That's rock solid.
That's something that's not theoretical.
That's something that's easy to understand.
It's something that no other radio station relies on as we do.
Other radio stations, they can go to their sponsors, they can go to all kinds of corporate grants and favors and things like that.
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Yeah, everyone's moved on.
Nobody's listening to the radio anymore.
If that's the case, then just give us all the frequencies.
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If you're not using them.
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Radio is very much alive.
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That's what the people want.
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I think WBAI is very different, in fact.
We're in the middle of the FM dial.
Unlike most non-commercial stations.
We broadcast at full power.
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And we're part of a network.
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And that is decided by you, the listener.
Without that, we're nothing.
All right.
212-209-2950.
Website give to WBAI.org.
And with that said, let us move into what we're discussing this evening.
All right.
212-209-2950.
Website give to WBAI.org.
And with that said, let us move into what we're discussing this evening.
And with that said, let us move into what we're discussing this evening.
And with that said, let us move into what we're discussing this evening.
Okay.
So we talked about what's happening with Twitter.
A little bit last week on Overtime.
And more has happened since then.
Gosh.
Anybody have the latest?
Because I walked out of our office about 10 minutes ago.
Because I walked out of our office about 10 minutes ago.
But I see the headlines.
Elon Musk is putting Twitter at risk of billions in fines.
Warren's company lawyer.
Company lawyer is warning of that.
And something that happened
And something that happened
a few days ago
where Elon Musk decided to end
Twitter's SMS two-factor authentication.
Twitter's SMS two-factor authentication.
And what that
raised was a very real possibility
that if you had two-factor authentication
as I did, because I was
which I was basically advised to, by Twitter.
That means that when you log into your Twitter account,
you get a little code on your phone, sent to you by SMS.
Except, they turned it off, or Elon Musk decided,
hey, for some reason, I don't like this,
I'm gonna turn it off, and save something,
don't know exactly what he's saving,
and if you still have that feature,
you won't be able to get into your account,
because you won't ever get the text message
that has the code that you need
to complete the two-factor authentication.
It's been disabled, so.
There was a bit of panic over the weekend.
People realizing, oh my God, if I log out,
I will never be able to get back in.
So, you have to go into your settings,
and disable that feature.
Being very careful not to log out in the process.
Supposedly, other forms of two-factor authentication
still work, but you know what?
I don't wanna take the chance.
The guy's so moody and temperamental
that he could just unplug it, and that's it.
It's fun, it's fun watching it all implode.
It really is, but it's also sad,
because this is one guy doing this.
So many people have poured their heart and soul
into Twitter, both employees, engineers, programmers,
but also people who contribute content every single day,
and help spread the word about various things.
Activists, and all kinds of creative people out there.
I'm not talking about influencers.
No, definitely not talking about influencers.
I'm talking about everyday, average people
that probably get about half a dozen likes
on something they post, which is pretty awesome.
Those people are feeling the effects
of a cranky billionaire.
Any other alternatives?
We're moving to alternatives, but they're fragmented,
like everything else these days,
where you can't just give an address,
and expect somebody to be able to reach you.
No, you have to have the agreed-upon way of communicating.
It's not like just picking up the phone.
It's not sending an email.
It's, no, you gotta contact me over here
at this particular social media outlet,
because I'm not gonna be reading
that particular social media outlet,
and we're all poorer for that.
Anyway, back to Elon.
Does anybody want to focus on something
that has happened?
Gila?
Early this morning at midnight Pacific time, roughly,
an email went out to all Twitter staff,
saying that if they don't decide to be in,
basically they have until five o'clock tomorrow
to decide if they want to stay at Twitter
or take three months severance.
If you stay, it's gonna be quote, extremely hardcore.
Long hours, only exceptional performance
will constitute a passing grade.
If it were me, I would take the severance and go.
I don't know.
I'd kind of want to test that system a little bit.
Yeah, are you familiar with the tactic of work slowdowns?
That can take very long to do a task.
I'll work long hours.
It'll take me three hours just to boot up my computer.
I want to do it right.
I want to do a good job.
And I feel if everybody at Twitter did something like this,
you gotta stand up to bullies.
He's a bully right now.
He really is.
I'm not saying he doesn't have good ideas occasionally
and might actually be able to do something beneficial,
but right now at Twitter, he's not doing that.
And I think employees there really have an opportunity
to tell him something about himself.
It's also an interesting piece
because some of the way that the hiring is being,
excuse me, not the hiring,
the end of hiring is being handled
for lack of a better term.
There may be questions about compliance
with law in the EU, GDPR stuff.
Things are becoming, and also, thank you, Rob,
because California is an at-will employment state,
but that doesn't exist everywhere.
There are lots of countries
where the labor laws are a lot stricter,
and this may not fly there.
So how this is all going to pan out
is, I think, an open question in a lot of ways.
Yeah, this isn't just the United States.
I read something recently about the Irish employees
and how they were all being told
that they had to report to work in Dublin,
even though most of them were working
from all over the country, from their homes, usually.
And what people were saying was
that he clearly had no understanding
of how the housing market worked over there.
There was no possible way all these people
could even find places to live anywhere near Dublin
on such short notice.
And it's this kind of cluelessness
that it's both amusing but also really sad
because people's lives are being very adversely affected.
I don't think he cares or is even aware of that.
And it's just, it's staggering to watch.
Alex, go ahead.
Yeah, I think there's a number of issues
that have been raised by the last few comments here.
I want to go back to one of your original statements though,
Emmanuel, which was that all these people
that have put so much into Twitter,
aside from the developers, aside from the programmers
and the owners and the executives,
but the people who made the platform what it was
by generating content and likes
and contributing to the discourse
and generating a follow-up,
essentially almost building your brand on Twitter,
which was one of the premier platforms on which to do so.
But I think this goes back to the very type of principle
that we have been discussing on this show
for many years now,
which is to not put all your eggs in one basket,
to not be beholden to any individual platform.
And in just the same way that you won't put all of your music
into iTunes and you still want to have a physical
or digital copy of your music,
just in the same way,
you don't want to entirely trust Twitter
with your social media,
whatever it is you do on social media,
talk, chat, brand yourself, et cetera.
If you put all your eggs into Twitter
and you see Twitter imploding on itself,
all of those years that went into developing that content
are going to go down the tubes.
And it is by no fault of your own.
It's entirely the choice of certain executives
who are willing to save a buck
or willing to charge $8 to any individual
who decides to pay for a blue check
in the face of losing massive amounts of advertising revenue
for that exact decision.
But I want to go back also to what Gila said too,
which was this issue of employees and the FTC.
And Twitter's top lawyer apparently last week
sought to reassure a bunch of Twitter employees
that they wouldn't have any kind of personal responsibility
or liability if the company disregarded an FTC
or federal order to protect users' privacy
when it's developing and launching new features.
And I frankly, I don't think that that lawyer
should have made such a pronouncement.
I think it's a lot more complicated.
I think it's more difficult.
And I think if you look back
at what we saw throughout this year of 2022,
we're seeing a lot of not just corporate responsibility,
but personal liability and personal responsibility
for lax data security and cybersecurity practices.
I mean, this is something I was actually just talking about
two hours ago with some colleagues,
but you have just this year, think about it.
You've got a chilling message that was sent to CISOs,
to chief information security officers,
when we saw Joe Sullivan,
the chief security officer of Uber,
sentenced and criminally convicted.
Well, he hasn't been sentenced yet,
but he's been criminally convicted
for mishandling a data breach in 2016
and obstructing an FTC investigation.
And what had happened in that particular case
was as the CISO or the chief security officer,
he had, because he was handling a data breach
while Uber was already under some kind of FTC order
and investigation.
And he decided that he was going to reshape that data breach
and make it look like this was something
that related to a bug bounty and not a breach.
And so in reshaping that, he misled the FTC,
DOJ went after him and they got a conviction
for obstructing an FTC investigation.
And then you look at what's happened
in a federal court in Texas,
I think maybe about six months ago or so,
where a civil lawsuit was allowed to proceed
against the CISO of SolarWinds
for making pronouncements about their cybersecurity practices
and the technology that they had at issue.
And then bring it back right to the FTC.
Just a couple of weeks ago,
you had the CEO of a company called Drizzly.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Drizzly.
Have you heard of this?
Sounds fun.
Yeah, it sounds like it would be fun too
because it's an alcohol delivery service.
I had no idea this existed, to be honest.
Wow, okay.
I didn't know you had to have a company to deliver alcohol.
I thought pretty much anyone could do it.
I thought it was somewhat regulated
who could deliver alcohol, but in any event,
it's actually a subsidiary of Uber.
So Drizzly is owned by Uber and their CEO,
who was already under, I believe,
some kind of FTC order as well
for lax data security practices,
really got the hammer brought down hard on him personally.
And the FTC, just a couple of weeks ago,
essentially stated to him
that you now are personally responsible
for implementing certain data security practices at Drizzly.
And here's where it gets really interesting.
And any other company that you may go to after Drizzly.
So it doesn't even just apply to him
and the company that was under FTC order
because he screwed up so badly, according to the FTC,
this order is going to follow him wherever he goes.
Assuming he's running the company,
if he gets hired as a doorman somewhere,
he's not gonna be responsible for the company
that he's letting people into, right?
Who knows, I don't know.
That would be unfair.
That would be too much.
I don't know expansively if the FTC
views its authority or something,
but fair point, Emmanuel.
I think if you look at all of these individual trends
towards personal responsibility
for lax data security practices,
it's difficult for any lawyer to say
that you're not going to have personal responsibility
for not following clear FTC mandates.
So that's something for these Twitter employees
to think about when they're making their decision
about whether or not to stay by tomorrow.
Hey, Alex, I was kind of thinking
about something along similar lines,
and I'm wondering if you kind of hear where I'm going,
but to a degree, I think you're absolutely right,
but I think lawyers will have a lot of strength
as the types, the sophistication level escalates,
because I don't think the average company
is prepared for certain thresholds
and beyond of attacks and breaches and activity.
There's, of course, a long list of important activities
that all kinds of institutions can participate in
and test and prepare for the average everyday activity,
but I don't think it's a binary necessarily
in every scenario, but going back to this
kind of holiday layoff topic,
I find it, I know I heard Amazon,
they're laying off like 11,000 people.
Facebook.
Yeah, I think, how's Netflix doing?
Has anybody checked on Netflix?
Like all these big high-flying companies
that have a lot of really talented people
facing this kind of stuff, as Alex pointed out,
they're obviously gonna have to deal
with the immediate effects, litigation,
through severance and stuff and entanglements
with their current or now former employer,
and then they'll have to survive somehow,
but I'm really curious where they will take their talents.
I hope they all take their talents to the same place
and form a new company and do a better job.
Drive these guys out.
It's something worth playing around with
in your imagination, I think, because as you said,
there's a lot of ways things can go.
As they try to get this adrenaline
of accelerating churn and changing around management
and everything and try to make it
an obedient organization, so to speak,
and then more malleable, in a sense,
to whatever aims and goals they have going forward,
I think it's important to recognize
that if they want a dynamic, chaotic, changed environment,
they may soon get that.
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead, Rob.
I wanna speak a little bit about,
Alex had mentioned, and I think you had mentioned,
too, Emmanuel, the people who have contributed
their material to Twitter over the years
to make it what it is, to make it as successful as it is,
and one thing I'm seeing a lot of
is people in the creative spheres,
in the writing, artistic, whatever spheres
where they've been building up this body of work on Twitter,
and Twitter's been around for 16, 18,
no, 16 years now.
They started in 2006, and people have really
made it work for them in the creative world.
People have gotten work off of what they've done.
I've gotten creative work off of things
I've done on Twitter, and a lot of people
sort of fell away from maintaining their own websites,
maintaining their own portfolios,
because, oh, all my stuff is on Twitter.
You wanna see what I've got?
It's on Twitter.
And they've got their audience on Twitter.
They've got their portfolios on Twitter,
and people are now being caught at a loss,
because Twitter being what it is,
people are leaving the platform.
The audience is leaving the platform,
and people are realizing, wait,
where's all my stuff gonna go?
And I think it's really important to reinforce
for anybody in any sphere where what you do
on social media is part of what pulls in
your audience and gets you work.
You need to have your own site, too.
You need to have stuff in a place that you control,
because anything you put on a service
that you don't maintain control of,
that could go away in a second.
And I think this is the first time for a lot of people,
for maybe a generation of social media users,
that they're coming up against this in such a scale.
Yeah, I mean, not only just have your own website,
but maybe just have another place, another outlet,
because I know not everybody can run their own websites.
Perhaps there's an opening here
for some other type of service
where people are helped in that regard,
where they maintain control of their website,
because Twitter or any other service
could shut down tomorrow and take everything with it.
And even Jason Scott won't be able to get everything
before they disappear.
So whenever you trust anything to the cloud,
that's what happens.
That's the risk you take.
And I don't think a lot of people
are really aware of that risk.
You put all your photos on Flickr, great,
but I hope you have your own copy locally as well
in case they disappear.
Same thing with Facebook and all your contacts.
And that's why I push email so much,
is because it's not dependent on one particular service.
Gmail could disappear, but email would still be there.
It would just go somewhere else, different address.
You'd have to set that up,
but people tend to want someone
to take care of everything for them,
and that often doesn't work out, sad to say.
Anything else from the world of Twitter
before we move on to other disasters?
Go ahead.
I do have one other thing.
In the, what is it, a day that the Twitter blue thing
existed and you could spend your eight dollars
for a check mark?
Yeah, that doesn't still work, right?
It doesn't, and part of the reason why
is because a couple of companies
were basically impersonated and their stock tanked.
Who could have seen that coming?
Right, so like Eli Lilly stock dropped, I think, 30%,
because someone created a Twitter called Eli Lilly Co.
and bought a blue check for it and announced,
hey everybody, insulin's free.
And there was a message after that saying,
we don't give a damn about these people.
We apologize to those who have been served
a misleading message from a fake Lilly account.
If anybody knows a diabetic, they were honestly not,
you were probably not mad to see that at all.
No, no, but.
It's like everybody became the yes men for a day.
Yeah, and no one thought about that.
I think I saw something go by that said
there was no mechanism in place to check
for the continuing blue checks.
So you could pay eight dollars once
and keep your blue check forever
and there was no way to make it recur.
I don't remember what it was,
but the rollout of verified blue
or whatever on earth it was actually called
could have been a bigger mess.
I'm just not entirely sure how.
There is a way.
If you wanna see the people that you follow
who paid for a blue check,
as opposed to people who have a blue check
because they're verified in the past.
Yeah, this is what you type
in the search string for Twitter.
And it's a little complex, so take notes.
The word filter followed immediately by a colon, no space.
Filter colon follows, F-O-L-L-O-W-S
space dash filter colon verified
space filter colon blue underscore verified.
All those words are spelled the way they sound.
I'm gonna read it one more time.
If I don't say space, that means there's not a space.
If I do say space, that's where you put the space.
Filter colon follows space dash filter colon verified
space filter colon blue underscore verified.
And obviously when I say underscore,
I don't mean the word underscore,
I mean the underscore character.
That will display tweets from the people that you follow
that have a blue check but paid for it.
If you wanna be able to separate
who did that and who didn't.
Of course, they have to be tweeting
for you to see who they are.
But it's, you know, we saw this coming
as soon as they announced this ridiculous scheme
where they're not gonna be able to differentiate between.
I mean, it could have been worse.
It could be, you know, you can click on that blue check
and see if they paid or if they didn't pay
and were verified from the start or, you know, in the past.
If they didn't have that, then it would be complete mayhem.
So it could be worse, but it's pretty bad right now.
Yes, Alex, you had something.
I think it is utter and complete mayhem
that this whole idea of charging $8 for a verified account
was just short-sighted and somewhat childish.
And it appears to be par for the course
because the whole system of management
since Elon Musk has taken over
appears to be childish and short-sighted
in the sense of every single idea is put out for the public.
It is tested without some kind of Q&A protocol
being put into place.
At the same time, they're cutting staff, cutting salaries,
have this ridiculous stay
or be severed deadline for tomorrow.
I thought that it was going to be bad
when Elon Musk took over Twitter,
but I thought it was gonna be bad for the wrong reason.
I thought it was gonna be bad
because content moderation was gonna go to the dogs,
so to speak.
But this is much, much worse
than I think anything that we had expected
because just the management from on high
and these policy changes without any notice
or really without any thinking
is much, much worse than I had anticipated.
Go ahead, Pat.
Yeah, I have a theory.
I think it's mostly to keep it in the news cycle
and it is serving as a huge distraction
from other really critical stuff.
And we're all bearing witness to it.
Just with the constant change in business models,
very much like venture capital coming in
and hyping something to keep the attention on this.
We are gonna continue to hear crazy stuff that goes on
and it'll be self-important.
But Elon Musk wants us to focus on this
as opposed to some other disaster?
Well, I just think like the last political cycle,
the way this platform has been used and exploited
is to serve as a constant drama.
And I think in this case to keep interest and investment
or keep people looking at it,
it's going to use its own tumult, its own craziness
to keep people even there at all.
I don't know if anyone is gonna wanna invest in this
after seeing what's going on.
I don't understand what else you'd do.
Go ahead, Gail.
Thank you, Kyle,
because there's one reason you would do it.
And I've been saying this,
I said this on the show a couple of months ago.
If Elon Musk were a normal guy,
had just gone through a breakup,
he would go buy himself a Porsche.
But he's finding himself at the intersection
of bad breakup, too much time on his hands
and way, way, way too much money.
He cannot, he's got the venture capital
in all of the thises and the thatses.
And he can't go dye his hair blue.
He has to splash out big.
Instead of buying a Porsche,
why didn't he just buy Porsche?
That would have saved us all a lot of, what?
He's competing with them.
Is he?
Oh, that's right, he is with his death machines.
Yeah.
But and now it's so bad, Gail,
like he's buying ads on Twitter,
like one company's supporting other companies,
taking out a selling stock to put together the investment,
to buy this sucking Vortex that he runs now.
The whole thing is a mess.
But I think also we can't take our eye off the fact
that the content moderation stuff
is also really, really, really bad.
Yeah, there was like an anti-discrimination or anti,
one of the committees just a couple of days ago
was disbanded.
Yeah, it's not priority.
It's not priority.
And I have to say as the person in this group
who identifies as not male,
it is not a fun time to be a not male person.
It is not a fun time to be in any kind of minority
on Twitter right now.
It's really scary.
And there's no place to go.
And that is terrifying in and of itself.
And I wonder if the big noise is about firing people
and breaking everything
or to keep everybody's eye off that particular ball too.
Interesting.
Go ahead, Rob.
Just going back to the string of characters
you gave out before
to see who among the people you're following
bought their check mark
rather than earned it under the old system.
If you want that string of text,
we just tweeted it on our Twitter account
at Hacker Radio Show.
Okay, awesome.
We're gonna move on.
We have some mail from listeners.
We get mail all the time.
We love getting mail.
And you can continue that tradition
by writing to us, oth at 2600.com,
oth at numbers 2600.com.
This is actually a response to an article
that came out in the most recent 2600,
which just came out about a week or two ago,
has to do with cars that drive themselves.
And we just talked about Elon Musk's death machines
because they've been in the news too.
And here's a quote from the article
entitled, Will You Let Your Car Drive Itself?
After explaining my previous experiences
with the cruise control,
my companions agreed to try it
and to watch closely should anything happen.
After engaging, we drove for 20 or 30 minutes
without incident until my car suddenly slammed on its brakes.
Driver behind us swerved,
no obstacles or vehicles ahead of us.
Apparently, this kind of thing happens fairly frequently.
Now, this writer says,
this one resonated with me personally.
This feature has saved me or someone,
my life or someone else's life at least once
in my Pacifica, ironically enough, 2020 Pacifica.
But I always pose this very question,
what happens when the software thinks there is danger
when there isn't and creates danger?
I'm following up with the writer and the NHTSA,
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
to find out if this next part is accurate
from the article that their office has received
758 reports of this exact same thing.
I too have almost experienced this.
My car thought there was danger
and alerted me and started to slam brakes.
I was driving normally, no cruise control,
yet my car almost caused a serious incident
because the road curved
and there was a breakaway to the left
to allow people to turn.
I still believe in this tech,
but I thought it was important to note.
And yes, I think that's the theme.
We believe in the tech,
but you have to pay strict attention
to the hazards and the flaws and the problems
because there's always gonna be problems.
And if you try to cover them up, they get worse.
So thanks for writing and for sharing that with us.
And we invite anybody else playing
with that kind of technology to share their thoughts.
Yeah, and I think there's a little bit of variation.
The types of imaging and vision that are used as inputs,
whether it's laser or some kind of radar.
I don't know the technology.
There's probably quite a big market, a big range.
And the standardizing of all of that,
I think is important along with safety.
If it's glare or heat from some other source
that the computer vision software
or the stuff running it interprets as some kind of object,
what are the implications and where is the discussion?
What does the conversation look like?
Where is it at now?
We have another letter.
This one's kind of a nasty letter and Alex, it targets you.
So I'm gonna give you some fair warning here.
And we're all gonna stand up for you, so don't worry.
This has to do with, remember we were talking last week
about how your kid was watching YouTube
and saw a YouTube ad warning him
that John Fetterman was too radical for Pennsylvania.
He came outside to ask you if in fact Fetterman
was too radical for that state
at that particular point in history.
Nine years old, yeah.
A reminder to Alex that YouTube
has a very reasonably priced ad-free option.
I haven't seen an ad on YouTube in over five years.
It's my main source of media consumption.
Insert sarcastic Emmanuel comment here.
No, no, I'm not gonna be sarcastic there.
I'll be sarcastic somewhere else.
But you know what, if you wanna make YouTube
your main source of media consumption,
I guess I'm getting sarcastic, aren't I?
That's your right, I suppose.
I mean, what can you say?
It's no worse than mass media.
You get to choose what it is.
But boy, be careful what you choose.
Not only is it ad-free, you can listen to videos
with the screen off and download videos to your device.
Kind of like what we do at eight o'clock
where we're not even on video.
In case people think they're gonna see us on YouTube
at eight o'clock, no, you're not gonna see us.
We're gonna hear us.
Yeah, that's how it works.
We thought about it, it's a lot of work.
We were advised not to.
Maybe he can take, maybe Alex,
you can take a more active role in parenting his child.
Now, that's nasty.
That's just, how dare you?
That's nasty to say that he doesn't take an active role
in parenting his child.
He's very active in parenting his child.
You have no idea.
Instead of subjecting him to evil YouTube ads
so that he can trot him out as the victim
of an agreement he willingly entered into.
And there was no trotting.
I don't think his kids even aware
that we talked about him on the radio.
I think I heard this in 2600.
If something is free online, then you are the product.
You know, that's true to some degree.
I mean, you're not our product, right?
We're free, but I wouldn't call our listeners our products.
I know Alex knows this.
The negative byproduct of so much law training
is you get really good arguing points
you don't actually believe to try
and get your message across.
And it's really easy to say that about a lawyer, isn't it?
It's really easy to say, yeah, you're a lawyer
so you don't really believe what you're saying, ever.
You have a choice in the situation, Alex.
He chose to sell out his child to save 10 bucks a month.
Not really YouTube's fault there.
Oh my God, really?
You expect every parent in the country
to pay YouTube 10 bucks
not to have their kids exposed to commercials?
I don't think that's the point.
Look, Alex, you're fuming, so go ahead.
I'm gonna let you have the floor.
No, I would say, you know, I welcome criticism like that,
especially unbridled and unrelenting criticism like that.
So, you know, if anybody wants to write
anything negative about me or anyone else,
you can reach us at oth2600.com
and feel free to foment vitriol at will.
We have enough stuff for a website.
Now we could put up a whole website
of all kinds of the negative, yeah,
but we'll talk about that later.
Let's address some of the, I think, valid points.
And I will concede almost every one of the points
that the listener addressed is valid.
I had thought about this notion of paying for YouTube
because it is an ad-free version,
but that was only after I realized
that my son was being subjected to so many political ads.
When I engaged in, or rather I had held
the erroneous assumption that a platform like YouTube
would direct age-appropriate ads at viewers,
namely that if you're watching something
that relates to childlike video games
or cartoons or Spider-Man that you would receive ads
that relate to childlike video games, cartoons, et cetera,
not necessarily wholesale political ads
attacking John Fetterman as being too radical
for Pennsylvania and getting into the minds
and brains of a child.
So to be fair, the listener is right
that that was an erroneous assumption on my part
that these platforms would take their responsible route
and direct ads towards age-appropriate viewers.
I think your point, however, Emmanuel,
is also valid that every parent in this world
that has a child should not have to pay YouTube $10
to simply not subject him
to this type of political misinformation.
That's certainly valid as well.
But the other thing that I think is not valid
that the listener brought up and it was ambiguous
because of his use of a pronoun, namely he,
was that the listener wrote that this was a deal
or rather that a bargain that he entered into
that he struck.
And if he was my nine-year-old child,
he is incapable of striking any kind of agreement
because he's a minor.
He didn't choose this.
He just wanted to watch some videos.
Perhaps I should have been a better parent
and assumed that YouTube would do the wrong thing
rather than the right thing.
But I'm not gonna cave in and buy a $10 subscription
to YouTube.
I think the better choice is to just turn YouTube off.
That's the choice that we have as parents.
And just to clarify, Alex, you are a great parent.
So anyone who says otherwise is certainly mistaken.
But-
We all have our days.
But to basically turn it off
or to subscribe to the $10 feature, your kid's smart.
He'll get around that if he wants to.
Any kid will.
You can't just cut off YouTube.
I know because governments try this, it doesn't work.
People find ways around it, especially kids.
Go ahead, Rob.
But then we have to get into the FTX story.
We only have a few minutes left.
Go ahead.
Absolutely.
The funny thing is YouTube does present itself
as a safe place for children
if you're in the children section of it.
Basically, any video that's flagged as being for children,
the comments are disabled.
YouTube knows that their comment sections are garbage,
so they're not gonna subject kids to that.
But on that same video, apparently, if there are ads,
it'll subject you to comments about John Fetterman.
I'm amused.
Okay, so I'm gonna read a headline here.
It just kind of sums up how bad things got this week.
FTX, you might have seen FTX logos everywhere.
If you watched the World Series,
every umpire was wearing FTX.
I thought it was a broadcast network.
I thought it was like FXX or something or FX
or God knows what, but no, FTX.
Basically, their cryptocurrency exchange,
this is the headline,
FTX suffers $400 million hack after declaring bankruptcy.
Remaining funds moved to cold storage.
Yeah, it was a bad week, a very bad week.
First, they had to declare bankruptcy.
There was a run on all the money that the people had,
and a lot of people have lost a lot of money.
And then on top of that, they were hacked.
And the timing is just as bad as it could possibly be.
And basically, it seems likely that whoever did this
has some kind of insider knowledge
because they had access to all kinds of root passwords
and various other things that somebody
who had knowledge of the company would have.
Many believe if this is a hack, it had to be an insider job.
The hacker had access to the private key,
root level on the website,
publisher key access to the apps.
A user highlighted that the breach
included an Apple publisher key breach.
This allowed the quote-unquote hacker
to sideload malware into the FTX app.
Many users are reporting that their FTX balance
is now showing zero.
God, so terrible.
Many in the crypto community point to the fact
that FTX has never been hacked
since it started its operation.
Therefore, the idea of the exchange being hacked
immediately after filing for bankruptcy is shady.
So, yeah, there's that.
And then, of course, there's the fact
that people who used FTX may very well have lost everything
because filing for bankruptcy means
that they are a dead last in the list of people
that get money back from them if they ever pay anything.
All kinds of other creditors are ahead of them in line.
It's basically been very sobering
for people in the cryptocurrency world.
Bitcoin has tanked.
I think they're down to 16 grand now.
It's the risk I think most of us knew was always there,
but maybe we didn't see it coming this dramatically,
this disastrously.
Go ahead, Alex.
This FTX hack is incredibly interesting
and very curiously timed, of course,
the same day that the exchange declares bankruptcy.
Over 330 million, I think it's around 339 million
in digital assets goes missing
by way of a quote-unquote hack.
Yeah, this is all money that would have been paid
to its creditors, that would have been paid to its users,
to anybody that held money on the platform,
and somehow it just goes entirely missing.
And whoever is holding this 339 million
is now apparently one of the largest holders of ETH,
so that's-
35th largest holder of Ethereum, 35th in the world.
It's pretty incredible.
What about this, Alex?
Just humor me for a second.
If this person is sort of like a Robin Hood
that came in, grabbed all this money,
and intends to distribute it to the people who lost money,
the actual people who lost money,
do you think that's a possibility?
Sure, they could do that.
They could establish essentially their own fund,
their own kind of interpleader
where you show what you had in your account,
and then they'd give it back to you
instead of to the creditors
that had a higher secured interest.
But yeah, I think that's unlikely.
I think it's a great idea,
but not necessarily reflective of reality here.
Unfortunately, this is another rude awakening
for a lot of holders of digital assets
who might have assumed erroneously,
just like I did with regard to the YouTube ads,
that there was some kind of protection
or some kind of insurance related
to what they had on deposit,
like a bank has FDIC types of insurance.
Well, that doesn't exist
because the only reason there's FDIC coverage
or insurance for your bank account
and what you hold in that particular bank account
is because banks are highly regulated entities.
They agree to do certain things.
They agree to keep certain amounts of capital in reserve
to have certain security practices in place.
That goes against everything
that a lot of cryptocurrency exchanges stand for.
They want to be outside regulation.
They want to be decentralized
and outside of any of the holds of national governments.
And so something akin to FDIC insurance
coming from a national government is just not there.
It's not present.
But on the other hand, to look at this
from this tragic situation
that affected so many people in a lot of ways,
I think there is some optimistic way of looking at this.
Oh, I want to hear this.
I want to hear this.
Go ahead.
Make it quick.
We only have two minutes left.
I know.
I'll make this in 30 seconds.
I think that what we're seeing here,
the fall of a lot of these exchanges
and a lot of these coins
and a lot of these places that were essentially
paper facades or houses of cards,
whatever you want to call them,
is necessary for the digital asset ecosystem
to begin to evolve.
There are going to be things
that are standing on stronger footing,
that have better practices,
that take care of their customers,
that are going to be propelled forward
when all of this nonsense has fallen to the wayside.
So I think we're going to hopefully see
once all the dust has settled, quite literally,
a renaissance when it comes to digital assets
and cryptocurrencies.
I think you also made an excellent point
regarding regulation.
This is why regulation, folks.
This is when people complain about government oversight
and you just want to be left alone.
This is what happens when you are left alone.
This is the risk that you take every time.
So ask yourself now,
will a little regulation have been such a bad thing?
Obviously, over-regulation is a bad thing,
but you can't just rely on the market to govern itself.
Doesn't work.
Doesn't work.
You have catastrophes like this.
Yeah, I mean, there's so much precedent in history
for the many different scenarios
where the important oversight, the public interest,
it has to be a priority.
And yeah, I'm with some of the other
optimistic stuff out of this.
I think I'm with that spirit because it's emerging.
It's something that, you know,
it's bittersweet in that there was a lot of acceptance,
a lot of enthusiasm around it.
And these are part of the fits and spurts, I think, of it.
These are the growing pains,
the growing pains of all growing pains.
And as Alex said,
it will lead to something better in the future.
It doesn't help people who lost a lot now,
but our advice to people investing in cryptocurrency,
only invest as much as you can lose,
as you can afford to lose.
And then it won't be so bad.
It will be bad,
but it won't be as bad as it is for some people right now.
And we'll learn, we'll learn from this.
We're gonna continue this conversation on overtime
in a couple of minutes.
Go to youtube.com slash channel 2600,
or just click on the link on the 2600.com webpage.
And please remember to support WBAI.
Give to WBAI.org.
Rich or poor, we're all in this together.
We'll see you next week.
Have a good night.
♪ Where you're rich and I'm poor ♪
♪ My life's a bitch, but I ain't sold ♪
♪ And I used some cash, but that's okay ♪
♪ I've learned to live this way ♪
♪ You're rich and I'm poor, I take my time ♪
♪ You rush and race and live your life at a terrible pace ♪
♪ Go count your money, yeah, go make more ♪
♪ I'll spend my time to love you're rich and I'm poor ♪
♪ Well, that's rich, I'm poor, I ain't got much ♪
♪ Don't need much more, you're riding high ♪
♪ And I'm lying low, who cares in the end? ♪
♪ Who's rich and who's poor? ♪
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♪
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♪
♪ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♪
♪ Well, I see you but you ain't never see me ♪
♪ And maybe you're rich, but God knows I am free ♪
And the finest cars, and the finest clothes
Won't give you no soul, you're rich and I'm poor
When we're outside the pearly gates
Side by side, in a way or fate
Well, I ain't worried about what's in store
But you've been mighty pale, you're rich and I'm poor
Well, that's rich, and I'm poor
And I ain't got much, don't need much more
Well, you're riding high, and I'm lying low
Who cares in the end, who's rich and who's poor
Who cares in the end, who's rich and who's poor
I use the word women because it's impossible to fight for the rights of the female half of humanity if we can't name ourselves