I found something transcript

I think I'm going crazy. A few months back, I was researching a completely different video, the history of American culture, and I stumbled on this really, really small fact. It was that the language of this type of historical lens called transnational history had been adopted by certain writers at the Heritage Foundation. Now, the original conclusion of my video was the European Science Foundation and the EU more generally had funded a lot of papers with this lens, first to sort of develop the thought process to make Europe more accepting to the American culture, which was overriding the entire continent post-World War II.

I figured, well, that's a great end to the video. It's a nice little twist. It's a nice little, you know, button on things, and we'll end it there. And then, I had to look at just one more thing. It was such a small, tiny, tiny little thing. It was that the Heritage Foundation in raised a record-breaking $103 million. Now, if that doesn't sound that weird, you're right. If you look at the year before, they raised $93 million.

So, it's not exactly weird that they'd have a 10% bump during an election year, right? Except then, I looked back at 2020 and 2016. In both of those election cycles, donations had gone down about 15% from the previous year. And again, I I I realize this is such a small thing. There's a billion things that could explain this. Maybe they were raising money for a new wing. Maybe they got a fancy new donor on board. But, for some reason, it just kept gnawing at the back of my mind.

So, I dug a bit more. Now, donations to the Heritage Foundation can be anonymous. So, I didn't have a whole lot of luck there. So, instead, I tried to find some wealthy people who might have suddenly taken up a lot of these talking points. Some of these people who might be interested in the thoughts coming out of the Heritage Foundation. After all, it's ultimately just a think tank. And that turned me on to a whole other path.

Nowadays, you have all these tech billionaires suddenly taking these right-wing talking points straight out of the Heritage Foundation's playbook. And what's so strange is if you just go back a few years, they were all spouting fairly left-wing talking points. So, I just I started tugging. I started uncovering little bits and pieces here. I traced payments. I traced contracts. I listened to well over 10 hours of congressional testimony.

I watched over 40 hours of podcasts. I found about a hundred billion dollars of your and my tax money. And in the end, the story I found Well, it kind of makes me sound crazy. So, maybe it's better if you just see for yourself. >> [music] >> If the run time or my wall that actually took me like 2 days, I was not expecting that to take this long. I didn't give it away. There's a lot of stuff to go over. But, as with all my videos, I do have a companion doc in the video description with direct links to every single source that I'm talking about.

So, as much as I like looking crazy, as much as I like the aesthetic, everything I'm about to say is very much backed up and I encourage you to double-check for yourself. This has been a story that's been in the making basically since the '90s. But I really think the best place to start is before things changed most recently. And frankly, that happened with the election of Barack Obama. The day Barack Obama got into office, he made one thing very clear.

He wanted to get the American government and its citizens online. And in many ways, the internet was a large part of the reason Obama had been elected. His use of social media and memes allowed him to reach the youth to turn out their votes so that he could succeed in certain areas where Democrats traditionally struggled. By the time Obama took office, the economy was in shambles due [music] in no small part to his predecessor, George W.

Bush, letting the banks hold less cash. So, Obama used this tailwind to pass the American Recovery Act, which contained a lot of provisions including two programs specifically aimed at the tech sector. First was the National Broadband Plan, where the government subsidized broadband companies to expand access to rural areas. The second was tax breaks and incentives to build out America's power grid, especially using green energy.

And Obama and tech companies were largely on good terms. See this town hall where Obama makes Zuckerberg look halfway human. >> I I I will say and I hate to tell stories on Mark, but the first time we had dinner together and he wore this jacket and tie. I'd say halfway through dinner, you know, he's starting to sweat a little bit. It's really uncomfortable for him. So, I helped him out of his jacket. And in fact, if you'd like, Mark, we can take our jackets off. >> Yeah, that's good. >> And it wasn't as though that's all the government got out of this deal.

When the Affordable Care Act went live, the online portal was in shambles. Day one, it was plagued with bugs, if you could even reach it at all. But a bunch of engineers from Facebook, Google, and various other tech companies came on board in order to help fix the website. And beyond tax credits and contract work, the government was also offering loans to tech startups. Elon Musk's Tesla was saved by a $500 million loan from the Obama administration, which, to be fair, he paid back in full and even a little bit early.

And the majority of Americans both trusted and loved tech. One poll from Gallup had the approval rating for the tech sector at around 70%, although that's technically a combination of both the computer industry and internet industries. I'm kind of averaging the two. So, I'm going to say this here, and I'm going to be repeating this frequently throughout the video. Despite the aesthetic I've chosen, this really wasn't a smoky backroom deal or some kind of conspiracy.

The incentives of tech to make money and the incentives of the then Democratic administration to create websites, get people online, reach more people, this was aligned interests. And the reason that's important is because that makes the relationship way stronger than some sort of financial transaction. Now, as it ever goes in politics, if one party is reaping rewards, the other party kind of wants a taste. As much as the Democrats were pushing tech and the internet as much as they could, Republicans during this time period would frequently lampoon social media companies as >> [music] >> censoring conservative speech.

They claimed conservative views were being stifled, that terms of service were written in such a way to specifically favor more liberal points of view. Now, these claims were not baseless. The early demographic of people who had access to the internet was, unsurprisingly, on the wealthy side and, as a result, also skewed quite urban. This meant the early internet in many ways skewed left. As a result, the people who went to college to build those websites also skewed left.

So, as the internet arrived at more and more rural places, the social media sites they were met with were fairly urban and fairly liberal. And a lot of these people felt like they were coming into a community that they didn't belong to. And so, this quickly turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Republicans kept pushing to regulate these tech companies, so tech companies had no incentive to try and make nice with them.

It really seemed as if Big Tech and the Democrats were going to build their shining utopia together. But then, not for any explicitly clear reason, the relationship started to sour. In June of 2016, Peter Thiel's company Palantir would sue the US Army, claiming the Army had unfairly passed them over for a bid, that they hadn't allowed Palantir to integrate their systems with the Army's systems to truly demonstrate what their system was capable of.

Whether or not this had merit was beside the point. Musk had sued the Air Force just a few years prior for a similar reason, claiming they had unfairly excluded SpaceX from a contract. Musk, however, ended up settling that lawsuit, preferring to take the win on the Air Force opening up other bids in the future that SpaceX could bid on. Thiel, however, was not satisfied with that. Thiel was taking this one all the way.

It felt to a small extent like the honeymoon period was maybe ending, and this even extended to social media as well. Obama wanted to support net neutrality, or the idea that an internet service provider has to charge a general fee as opposed to having fast lanes that, you know, bigger companies can pay for access to. And then, before, during, and after the 2016 election, Obama, along with basically everyone else, was talking quite a lot about fake news, and specifically social media's role in spreading that fake [music] news.

In fact, in his final address to the nation as president, given in January of 2017, Obama made the following appeal to Americans. >> For too many of us, it's become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, especially our social media feeds. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it's true or not, that fits our opinions. Instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life. >> [cheering] >> And to make matters worse, just across the pond in tech's second biggest market, the European Union, they weren't just taking Obama's words to heart, they were doing something about it. Back in 2009, they'd opened an antitrust investigation into Google over how Google favored their own products in Google shopping search results.

Now, interestingly, this case was originally brought to the European Union's attention by none other than Microsoft. In 2016, the EU passed its first big piece of tech regulation, called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, it generally regulated how data could be used by large companies, as well as stating individual rights with respect to their data. Now, I'll note this law only applies in the EU, regardless of citizenship status.

So, if you're a French citizen in America, it doesn't apply. And if you're an American citizen in France, it does apply. Compliance with the GDPR is estimated to cost most American tech companies $50 billion on average. That's for both the staff and the infrastructure. Similar laws have been adopted all around the world, including in Brazil, Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa. The UK and the state of California even passed their own very similar pieces of legislation in 2017 and 2018 respectively.

The big takeaway is this, tech was feeling attacked on all sides, both at home and abroad, which brings us to 2016, which wouldn't you know it, just so happened to be an election year. And [music] after Bernie made the mistake of saying he was going to break up the banks, which you know, he's not going to win the election at that point, big tech was pretty excited to welcome the first female president into the White House.

But as literally every single person watching this knows, Hillary Clinton did not win the 2016 election. No, instead tech and the rest of us were stuck with Donald Trump. Donald Trump and Barack Obama ran surprisingly similar campaigns, at least in terms of their ground game. And in the end they won for a very similar reason, their outreach via the internet. And so naturally when Trump took office, he was at least happy with the social media side of big tech, although that wasn't universal.

See this tweet of his about Facebook a year into his first term. And to be fair, that certainly did not extend to the rest of the tech sector. Trump renewed a push for fracking, shale and offshore oil, and removed many tax breaks and advantages that had been granted to renewable energy we might call them today green energy sources. Then just as a kicker, he also stripped several broadband companies of subsidies meant to increase competition in the marketplace in rural areas where the internet was still relatively new.

Although this [music] was 2017, so not exactly brand new by any stretch of the imagination. But social media at least was safe. They did get a lot of good press from him. He would constantly talk about this new tool that allowed him to speak directly to the people and bypass the crooked media. And he was right about this, and this opinion has certainly spread. I mean, even today, if you really want to be informed about something, you don't go to CNN, you don't go to the New York Times, you don't go to these mainstream outlets.

No, you go to Twitter or something, and you listen to other people talk about the mainstream outlets. It's a completely different world. I know. I know. Let let Let me have a little fun with this, okay? The story is quite depressing overall. And Trump would keep up this positive dialogue about social media until 2019. Sometime around May, Facebook banned several high-profile accounts it considered to be spreading hate on its platform.

The notable ones were Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan, and James Woods. Trump used the opportunity to take up the Republican battle cry. Social media was censoring conservative voices. Now, I'll note what's often lost here is why these people were banned. Just that December, there had been a shooting in Christchurch, a city in New Zealand, where 52 people who were praying at a mosque had been gunned down by a lone gunman.

Facebook came under a lot of criticism for this because the whole thing was live-streamed on their platform from start to not quite finished, but pretty darn close. Naturally, Facebook felt like they at least had to look like they were taking some actions. After all, they didn't want to end up with another EU regulation costing them money. Now, as we went over, Trump wasn't a fan of Facebook even before this, but that also wasn't one-sided.

Less than a month after he had taken office, Mark Zuckerberg put out a long post kind of attacking Trump, although in a rather indirect, [music] dare I say, "Zucked" manner. The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we should be proud of that. Like many of you, I'm concerned about the impact [music] of the recent executive orders signed by President Trump. We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat.

We should also keep our doors open to refugees and those who need help. That's who we are. >> I'm not I'm not good at Zuckerberg either. I'm not good at any impressions. How about that? >> If you recall from some of the reporting we went over from the Obama years, the mood at those companies was that they were building a better future, that they were actually improving the lives of people around them. Now, was that genuinely a work culture shared by the execs or was that just sort of a work culture that was encouraged to get people to work for these billion-dollar companies for not that much pay?

Hey, I'll let you decide. But, with the internet helping to elect Orange Batman and with the spread of fake news, misinformation, and now violent killings because of social media, it was harder and harder to think about that in a positive light. And it wasn't just workers at these companies that were becoming disillusioned. Americans as a whole were becoming rather disillusioned with social media. Gallup shows that during Trump's first term, trust in internet-based companies declined roughly 10 points.

They were still slightly above water when you combine them with tech as a whole, but barely. Now, Trump was still using social media. Obviously, he was tweeting [music] like crazy. It truly was a love-hate relationship. And I think nothing exemplifies that better than Trump's July 2019 summit on social media. At the event, Trump naturally gets up to speak and says many nice things about the social media companies and influencers who attended.

Trump then invited freshman Senator Josh Hawley up to speak. Unlike Trump, he wasn't there to give everyone their laurels. No, he was there to declare war. >> Google, Facebook, Twitter, they've gotten these special deals from government. They've gotten a special giveaway from government. They're treated unlike anybody else. If they want to keep their special deal, here's the bargain. They have to quit discriminating against conservatives.

You agree with that? No more. >> Much like with everything Trump does, this was not only clearly planned, but an example of his rather showmanship mentality. This was a warning, and Trump had made sure that Hawley himself was there to speak to promote Hawley's proposed legislation. >> Josh is doing right now. He's doing some very important legislation. Uh because we have to do something about what's happening. >> From the bill's summary, it removes the statutory immunity unless the social media company obtains certification from the Federal Trade Commission that it does not moderate information on its platform in a manner that is biased against a political party, candidate, or viewpoint.

As a brief explanation, social media companies typically have the benefit of something known as Section 230 of the Federal Communications Act. This shields them from any liability of posts made on their platform by posters. As much as Hawley's proposed legislation is often framed as just a necessary tool to restore freedom of speech, the reality is it was anything but. Recall, the way those companies would get that protection back was getting a certificate from the FTC.

And framing the problem as output-oriented versus input-oriented is a very common political maneuver, because it's much easier to claim something needs control if the output [music] is unfair, even if the input that arrives at that might be perfectly fair. As an easy example, assume a website is 80% left-wing. If I have a perfectly equal algorithm, one would assume that 80% of those posts would be left-wing. Therefore, the conservatives might feel as though they're being suppressed [music] when the reality is it's just a natural consequence of the culture in the area.

Big Tech was clearly in trouble. [music] Even if the worst didn't come to pass, things were not looking good for them long-term. But, they still had one hope left. You see, luckily Trump didn't start moving on a lot of this stuff in earnest until 2019. And 2020 was an election year. And that year, the Democrats just so happened to nominate the vice president of the guy who'd brought about tech's golden age. Oh, yeah.

Big Tech was riding with Biden. Biden's messaging on the campaign trail mostly focused on two things: a return to normalcy and a revitalization of America's infrastructure. But, if you recall, Americans were souring on social media. And as any politician in a democracy should, Biden at the very least talked the talk. In stump speeches and interviews, Biden would often sprinkle in bits about how we needed to regulate these big tech companies, notably on the internet and social media side.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even TikTok. In fact, in an interview with the New York Times, Biden proposed the single most radical regulation that had been proposed by anyone up to this point in time: the complete repeal of Section 230 protections. But, Biden at the end of the day is a politician. He'd been in the Senate for decades. So, I mean, [music] he was just saying what he needed to to get elected. After all, this was Obama's VP.

There was no way he'd actually regulate these tech companies. Right? Well, in the immediate aftermath of the election, I imagine many of these tech companies breathed a small sigh of relief. Because Biden's transition team included a lot of figures from the tech sector. His transition team included one former advisor to Palantir, a lobbyist for Apple, and one lobbyist who technically never directly worked for Google, but worked with a lot of companies that worked with Google and worked on lobbying for some issues that Google wanted, even though Google didn't technically pay her and you you you get the picture.

Early on, Biden also faced a lot of criticism from his own party over his decision to keep a lot of these tech and defense contracts Trump had signed, notably including Palantir. But once Biden settled into office, things started to go a little differently. By November of 2021, less than a year into Biden's first term, he'd already created the agency of cybersecurity, both standardizing and regulating all technology companies that worked with, quote, critical infrastructure.

He also signed an executive order aimed to promote net neutrality. Now, to be fair, regulation is not, strictly speaking, always hated by companies. And early on, it can even be welcomed to a certain degree. When you don't know where the line might be drawn, you have to fight for every square inch, which means you have to cover all your possible bases. But once you have some baseline generic regulation to work with, well, now you can focus more on moving that line in a favorable direction, which is a much more concentrated and efficient use of your [music] resources.

But that relief didn't last long, because that same year, 2021, a whistleblower came forward with documents [music] showing social media was a lot more harmful than even people might have suspected. This was the release of the Facebook files. Yeah, I know I I know, weird, isn't it? I swear this is a story about Big Tech in general. Facebook just keeps being at the center of a lot of it for some reason. I mean, for all I know, it's just the way I did my research led me to that.

And to be fair, I mean, if you check the companion doc, there was stuff going on with like Google and Apple and Twitter and stuff at this time. Just nothing quite as flashy as what was going on with Facebook, so. Hmm. The Facebook files was a set of leaked documents that included internal emails, [music] meeting minutes, and even documents like internally commissioned studies that showed that Facebook had a long, long history of choosing profits over safety.

I I know, shocker, but but just listen, okay? It gets good, I promise. As an easy example, Facebook knew they were showing ads featuring nicotine, alcohol, and even adult content to underage children. Facebook was aware of this and even considered creating a separate category for these ads, but decided against it when they realized that, in order to make sure that actually happened, they'd have to spend money. It would ultimately cut into their bottom line.

But this wasn't limited to just being reckless with ads. See, [music] in order to get money off those ads, Facebook wanted to maximize the amount of time you spent on the platform. And one of the easiest ways to keep you on the platform was to attach some value or meaning to being on [music] the platform. The algorithm would take you from pages about how to eat healthy, maybe how to exercise a little better, to eventually pages about crash diets and maybe about crazy workouts until eventually it would get you to pages that were basically devoted to saying if you didn't have less than 3% body fat, you weren't a real man.

If you ever wondered why eating disorders and body dysmorphia in general are on the rise, a big part of it is social media. And as much as I think we all know this on some level, it's very different when you realize that it's very much by design. Hating how you look is a great way to keep people on the platform, especially if those pages are saying you'll look better if you just do X or Y or Z. And this is to say nothing of the rise of pedophiles on the platform and the specific sex trafficking of children that often occurred, where people would either get in Instagram posts or talk to some of these kids and say, "Hey, why don't you chat with me off the platform?

Why don't you come over to this other chat service and we can chat there in order to lure them to meet up in real life. And Facebook wanted to go even farther than this. By law in the US, you're not allowed to have a Facebook account unless you're at least 13 years old. But many of these internal documents showed that Facebook was actively trying to recruit younger users. One email from 2018 said, "If we want to get big with teens, we need to bring them in as tweens." Yet another from 2020 stated, "Why do we care so much about tweens?

[music] Because they are a valuable but untapped market." Now, obviously this is what most of the news media focused on. After all, "Won't someone think of the children?" is a time-tested way to get people's attention. But what I want to take a brief detour to focus on was how much foreign political parties were feeling the effects of Facebook. Though the documents themselves are not publicly available, both the Wall Street Journal and the whistleblower Frances Haugen herself both talked about how political parties in Europe were often reaching out to Facebook over concerns of the effects their algorithm was having on their reach.

Now, at the time these parties wanted to focus on the classic issues, you know, the economy, civil liberties, health care, you know, the the real meat and potatoes of politics. But what they found was when they put out those messages, their ads and posts didn't reach as far. It was the niche politics, the far more extreme things that were getting amplified. >> Politicians are being forced to take positions they know their own constituents don't like or approve of because those are the ones that get distributed on Facebook.

That's a huge huge negative impact. They all Facebook also knows that they have admitted in public that engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems, but then not rolled out those integrity and security systems to most of the languages in the world. And that's what's causing things like ethnic violence in Ethiopia. >> And documents show Facebook knew they were contributing to the spread of these ideas.

And they actively took steps to stop some of these ideas from spreading. You can very easily find a bunch of news articles of Facebook talking about how they would specifically suppress political movements they did not agree with. Now, maybe you support those positions, maybe you don't, but I would imagine that you don't like Facebook being the deciding factor in whether or not those positions reach more people. And I think one of the best ways that demonstrates again, Facebook's desire to crack down on some of this stuff, but also their sheer cocked inability to, can be found in their handling of the COVID vaccine.

Before you leave your comments, just just chill, okay? We're we're not even going to be talking about the efficacy or the side effects or anything else specifically. Or do, actually, now that I think about it, that's kind of the whole point, right? That's what the algorithm selects for. I say something that makes you angry, and then you leave a comment, which YouTube then takes as engagement, and so it boosts my video in the rankings.

Yes, I am vaccinated, okay? You want to attack me for that, go right ahead. That's basically what Facebook is hoping you will feel like. Anyway, Zuckerberg wanted people to get the COVID vaccine, and he saw this as an opportunity to prove to people that Facebook could be a force for good in the world. And so they implemented a policy by which vaccine misinformation would be fact-checked in real time, and strikes would be given out to both accounts and pages that repeatedly posted misinformation, with eventually those accounts and pages just getting banned.

But when they implemented this policy, they were horrified to find that there was an unintended consequence. Users were spending less time on the site. No, really. Yeah, that's that was it. People People didn't spend as much time on the site, so revenue went down. So [music] they went back to allowing that content, and not just allowing it, but again, letting their algorithm do exactly what their algorithm was designed to do with it.

People always talk about, especially when it comes to the vaccine, follow the money. The people who are making the vaccines already had the money by the time the vaccines rolled out. No, the only people who made money when it came time to take the vaccines were social media companies like Facebook. You really want to follow the money? Follow that money. I do really want to drive home that again, I don't think Facebook was like, "Oh, we really want to make kids' lives worse.

We really want to do X or Y or Z thing." It really is just the lack of regulations and the incentive of profit that pushed them to this place. Again, not to take their culpability. At the end of the day, they still ultimately made this decision. I'm sure if you're familiar with the story at all, you're also aware that the Biden administration specifically reached out to Facebook about [music] them not cracking down on misinformation around the vaccine.

But if you read the actual documents, the story you find is way darker. I'm going to link the whole thing in the campaign document cuz frankly, I I actually think it's a really, really interesting read, although it's hundreds and hundreds of pages. I'm going to go into this a little bit more in the second video in this series, which by the way, subscribe if you want to see that one, but uh uh just know for right now, uh not good.

But hey, that's that's just what I found from reading the documents. If you want to trust big business and politicians, you go right ahead there, champ. I'm also completely skipping over Facebook having [music] an active genocide occur under their watch in Myanmar where they knew that their platform was leading towards that. But uh hey, we only have so much time. Can't go over everything. Like there's a ton in the story I don't have time to cram in this video.

Some of it will make it into that second video I keep talking about, but not all of it. So, if you have questions, check the campaign doc. Feel free to ask me in the comments. I don't know, whatever. But uh it's just It's very depressing, though, trust me. Let me tell you, this is not nearly as fun as researching Roman pagan religious history. This led to a number of congressional hearings, Facebook rebranding as Meta to avoid the bad press, and eventually the introduction of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act.

If you're curious about the specifics, companion document, but for the purposes of this video, all you really need to know is it introduced a duty of care, which essentially would remove legal protections from social media companies if children were exposed to things like self-harm, eating disorders, illegal drugs, alcohol, things like this. It also very specifically aimed to curb child sexual exploitation that occurred on these platforms.

The bill had overwhelming bipartisan support. Though, in terms of support from the tech sector, only Snap of Snapchat and Twitter, which at this point was X, I'm like 99% sure, actively supported the legislation. There were also critics, of course, who worried that giving the government too much control over things like this could lead to rather negative outcomes. Rand Paul, by far the most consistent senator, to say the least, had a really interesting argument on this.

That if children were watching a sports game on the television, they could just as easily see ads for many of those same products, and it wouldn't be considered inappropriate. Was it really right for the government to then restrict [music] the online companies from showing the same types of ads to children? It's not a bad argument, and frankly, the reason I'm giving you both sides is because I'm not here to litigate whether or not the bill was good or bad.

The point really is that social media companies and Big Tech more generally didn't like this bill for the very specific reason that it would cost them a lot of money to ensure compliance. [music] Also, also, I know there's now a new similar law, the Kids Act. Check the companion doc for a fuller explanation, but they are different laws. Big Tech lobbied for the Kids Act, and it removes the duty of care or ability to sue these companies.

It instead adds mandatory age verification, which doesn't really help the problem. But again, see companion doc for more. Now, we should briefly talk about how a bill becomes a law because it's going to be important later. Most people know that it needs to pass through the house, [music] the Senate, and then get to the president's desk where the president signs it. However, what is lesser known is that in order for a bill to reach the floor of the house or the Senate, it must first go through what's known as a committee, sometimes even a subcommittee.

Once the bill is approved by a majority of the committee or subcommittee, it goes to either the speaker of the house or the majority leader of the Senate, who then have the responsibility of bringing it to the full floor for a vote. Now, those who followed the release of the Epstein files might remember that that floor vote was actually forced by getting majority of signatures from the House of Representatives. That is [music] incredibly rare, however.

I want to make that very clear. That almost never happens. So, KOSA is proposed in the Senate and goes to committee where it sits for 10 months, but is eventually advanced. It is given a date on the calendar, but it is when the Senate is not in session. Then 2022 comes to a close. It's time to the midterms. The 117th Congress is over, and the whole thing was reset. During that period, by the way, Facebook was lobbying like crazy.

They spent almost $20 million on lobbying that year. But that cost seems to have been well worth it. With KOSA finally dead, Big Tech, or perhaps just Facebook, breathed a sigh of relief. They had weathered the storm, made it through the worst, and they'd earned at least a few more years of rampant profit. But that relief, once again, was rather short-lived. Because the environment that these algorithms had created also gave rise to anytime a new story broke, immediately it was the most catastrophic ways of thinking about that news that became so popular.

Which meant at the end of 2022, when Big Tech found their new golden goose, the new thing that would bring them more profit than anything [music] had before this, people weren't quite as happy about it. And they were more than willing to vote in politicians who were going to regulate AI. When talking about AI, most people think of the public-facing apps, whether it be a chatbot like ChatGPT, some kind of a genetic AI like Claude Code, or even your favorite image generator.

However, what most Americans don't realize is AI is actually far older than that. The public-facing aspects by which we know the technology today, in the very early stages of development, really wasn't the goal. And in fact, for many companies in the space, still isn't. The value proposition of AI was actually rather straightforward. Everyone had too much data. Whether you're trying to run a healthcare company that covers several hundred million people, or if you run, for a completely unrelated example, an intelligence agency that is monitoring hundreds of millions of phone calls a year, well, there's really just no way to go through all those phone calls with humans >> [music] >> and parse them into some sort of usable format, especially not before the data becomes outdated.

AI was the solution. Give all this data you don't have time to analyze to a computer that's really good at analyzing a lot of data quickly. So, AI was and remains first and foremost about parsing incredibly [music] large data sets. Even LLMs, large language models, the models behind most of the popular chatbots, are simply token predictors using incredibly sophisticated algorithms trained on a huge data set, a large data set, if you will.

To that end, though the models were different, the government was aware of AI and had been integrating it into their systems for years, arguably all the way back during Bush, although that really depends on how you want to define AI. Certainly under Obama, though, at the absolute latest. Biden, much like Trump and Obama before him, was not opposed to AI and was integrating it right into the government. But as these chatbots spurred a lot of conversation and people started talking about the dangers AI pose, well, Biden wanted to make sure that we at least had some guardrails on this bold new frontier we were entering.

So in September of 2023, Biden signed an executive order attempting to establish a framework for AI regulation. Obviously, without the approval of Congress, Biden couldn't enshrine these in law or make it akin to OSHA regulations, but at the very least it was the first step on a path in the right direction. It's mostly pretty standard stuff you'd expect. [music] They want to encourage competition, so they'll crack down on antitrust violations.

They want to make sure people know if what they're looking at is AI or not, so they want to ensure standards for labeling when AI was [music] used to create something. They also want to make sure that AI is integrated into the government responsibly, especially in such a way that it doesn't create a bunch of cybersecurity flaws. So they're going to establish guidelines and training, etc. etc. You get the picture, fairly average stuff.

But when you get to section four of the executive order, ensuring security, that's where I imagine some of these companies started to get a little antsy. In section 4.2, mandatory reporting is required for anyone developing dual-use AIs. [music] These are AIs which can be used both for commercial purposes, but also for military purposes, and that AI companies could not conduct business either in the US or abroad in such a way that US intel or classified AI training might leak to people who did not have America's best interests at heart.

This was essentially a warning to all AI companies. Regulation was coming and it was coming soon. Not wanting to be beaten to the punch, the EU passed its own AI regulation the following year. This included both a restriction on deployment, rigorous safety and permitting systems, and an outright ban on facial recognition databases from publicly available CCTV footage. Although, there was an exception carved into that for immigration.

So, go figure. And what's far worse, AI wasn't a search engine or or social media or an e-commerce platform. It wouldn't scale with users. No, it required an intense amount of power consumption. This meant these tech companies, [music] in order to feed the beast they were creating, would require a ton of space, a lot more power, and a ton of construction. All of which would require permitting and a ton of time. Yet, in 2024, leaks would come out of the White House that Biden was actively considering regulations to make it harder.

This led to, on January 14th, just 6 [music] days before Trump took office, issuing executive order 14141. I know, fun, right? Advancing United States leadership in artificial intelligence. This executive order first and foremost attempted to expedite permitting for AI data centers with some caveats. Notably, permits could be accelerated, but only if the centers were built to use renewables like solar, nuclear, or geothermal.

To avoid a spike in electricity prices, the companies building the data centers would also be responsible for building the energy infrastructure that was needed to support the data centers. It also set standards for security that wasn't just for the AI models, but for the data centers housing those models as well. There's more, but you get the picture. Biden wanted to make sure that these companies weren't just skirting regulations in order to get these data centers up as quickly as humanly possible.

He wanted to make sure that things were being done the right way and that things were being done in such a way that it wouldn't be too much of an impact on American citizens living nearby. Now, environmental and labor groups loved these regulations, especially union heads of various construction, electric, and HVAC organizations. These regulations meant more jobs, more money, but importantly, also safety and dignity for the workers building these data centers.

AI companies, on the other hand, absolutely hated this executive order. Nvidia spent months lobbying against these regulations, as did Microsoft, who at this time owned just north of a quarter of OpenAI. And just when Big Tech felt like they had weathered the worst of the storm, they had kind of gotten Europe to quiet down a little bit, they had made sure that, you know, the the COSA bill didn't pass in the US, all of a sudden they were being hit with a brand new storm, where their golden goose was now getting its wings clipped before it even got off the ground.

I mean, how is this fair? Uh keep in mind, the internet, social media, green energy, and big data, as I guess you could call them now, these were all industries that had gotten a kickstart from the government, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Big Tech was used to a world where they got funded by the government to varying degrees, especially in the early stages of developing a new technology. It was clear to everyone Big Tech was in big trouble.

And when your opponent is not just the federal government, but the sole superpower in the world, the richest country in terms of raw GDP on Earth, and all your companies combined equal barely 2% of GDP, well, then what exactly can you do? Who can you turn to? It's not like there's some deus ex machina, some god from the machine that's going to come and save you. But sometimes, you don't need a god. Sometimes, all you need is Peter Thiel.

Now, to properly tell the story of Thiel, we have to go back all the way back to the beginning of this story, and we have to start with Palantir. Palantir had a long history of contracts with the US government. Between 2009 and 2013, they had contracts with the FBI, the NSA, and everyone's favorite, the CIA. Much of this data comes from a leaked client list shown to Gizmodo, though, and as we'll get into, Palantir is not exactly the most trustworthy company.

But, whether or not the list is completely accurate, there is at least some truth to those claims. And we know that because Palantir apparently wasn't that well-liked by the intelligence community. Leaked internal communications show CEO Alexander Karp, who co-founded the company with Peter Thiel, saying the following, "I think France may be the country where they just like us, as opposed to the US government, where they tolerate us because nothing else works." You'll notice that the two leaks I've discussed both [music] paint Palantir in a somewhat positive light, or at least show that they were very well integrated with these prestigious US intelligence organizations.

And that was a big part of the problem because Palantir was suspiciously leaky, and always in ways that seemed to make them look good, even when that maybe wasn't quite the truth. A 2012 book called The Finish, The Killing of Osama bin Laden, claimed that Palantir had been instrumental in that operation. It had elegantly accomplished what no one else could, turning America's special forces into deadly effective hunters.

Holly Finn, a later reporter writing for the Wall Street Journal, would back this up, however, when she would also claim that Palantir was instrumental in the capture of Osama bin Laden and that further Palantir's information gathering technology was making torture and advanced interrogation techniques obsolete. According to later reporting, the CIA was actually quite upset about this. One anonymous source said, "Of course Palantir was involved, but so are hundreds of thousands of other companies.

Due to how information works in infosec, it's entirely possible a contractor could have contributed to the mission without even realizing it." And while you're welcome to take the most charitable interpretation of this, Palantir has been caught fudging stuff before in order to make their company look better. A good example of this would come from a leaked memo that circulated in the wake of one of their pitch meetings with Molina Healthcare, at the time one of the single biggest Medicaid and Medicare providers in the country.

[music] According to this memo, Mario Molina, the CEO of the company, said in the meeting that their capture of Osama bin Laden was seen by him as proof of Palantir's efficacy, specifically stating, "Quote, find Osama bin Laden. Palantir didn't do that by going out to the Middle East and surveying people asking, 'Where's Osama?'" When asked later about these comments by BuzzFeed News, yes, BuzzFeed, Mario Molina wouldn't decline to comment.

He would actually just [music] outright deny these claims, saying, "First of all, we didn't go to Palantir because they found Osama bin Laden. Number two, no one at Palantir has ever told me they found Osama bin Laden." As much as government contracts are nice for the money they get you, they're also really nice cuz you get to say one of my clients is the CIA, >> [music] >> which is kind of impressive when you're talking to prospective clients.

And I feel like they might still be doing that even to this day because I went on their Wikipedia page and I found something that's either misleading at best or just an outright lie at worst. They claim Biden credited Palantir with supporting the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board's fraud detection efforts, >> [music] >> highlighting specific cases identified through the system. Now, since I always follow the footnotes, I actually went through the trouble of tracking this down.

I'm not sure if there's any video of the event, but there's certainly photos and a full audio recording. And I listened to the full 40-minute recording. Biden never once mentions Palantir. In fact, no one at that meeting mentions Palantir. Biden only refers to it as a tool and other times talks about this tool and others like it. Also, at that conference, and the guy actually demoing the tool is a guy named Peter Orszag, the OMB director at the time.

Now, he also just calls it a tool. So, nothing to directly tie it to Palantir, but to be fair, maybe Palantir is being used for this. Except, if you then follow Peter Orszag's blog posts, because I guess the OMB director was doing blog posts back in those days, >> [music] >> one of his last ones is talking about this specific tool. Again, he does not name the tool, doesn't say it's from Palantir or anything else, and specifically says that this tool was developed by the board.

And as far as I'm aware, Palantir wasn't on this board. Now, to be fair, Biden does mention some specific cases, and the Wikipedia article very carefully claims that Biden mentions specific cases that Palantir was responsible for. Again, problem is, I can't find anything that indicates Palantir was responsible for finding these cases. Only that a tool was, a tool that may have been developed by the board. Again, I'm not claiming the Wikipedia article is dead wrong or anything like that, but to claim Biden credited Palantir is just factually incorrect.

Biden never credited Palantir. He talked about a tool and others like it. That would be like if I said, "Oh, I really like Halo." and someone said, "Wow, Port really likes Microsoft." And the intelligence agencies separately all considered severing ties with [music] Palantir. Ultimately, the NSA decided not to pursue them. The CIA significantly scaled back the work they were giving Palantir, and only the FBI left things as they were.

Although, I'll note the FBI didn't give them any new jobs, either. That same leaked meeting from earlier shows Andrew Karp throwing a fit over this. The CIA was recalcitrant, and we've walked away, or they walked away from us. Either way, I'm happy about [music] that. With the intelligence community rapidly losing patience, and the healthcare community getting oversaturated, well, Palantir was kind of running out of places to grow.

But, luckily for them, there was a portion of the US government Palantir hadn't been able to access yet that was the single largest amount of discretionary spending in the [music] federal budget. I'm speaking, of course, of the Department of Defense. In 2009, Palantir approached the US Army with an offer. They wanted to help build the next Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS for short. This is, to oversimplify, the backbone system by which all intelligence is shared, stored, and distributed.

A multi-billion-dollar contract. Ultimately, the Army declined, preferring to continue to work on this system in-house. They didn't give any reason for this, but I can come up with several. I'm sure you can, as well. So, in 2011, Palantir hired retired Marine Corps Brigadier General Terry Paul to lobby for them in Congress. Paul had formerly served as the Marine Corps liaison to the Senate, so he was well credentialed, to say the least.

He was also very good friends with one Duncan Hunter, who was the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, the committee in charge of overseeing military spending and oversight. Fun fact, Paul was the master of ceremonies at Hunter's portrait unveiling and is even listed in the special thanks of the press release. But Duncan Hunter retired in 2009 after a failed bid for the presidency. His son took over his seat, who is also named Duncan Hunter.

The younger Hunter would apparently be introduced to Palantir executives by Paul and in just a few years he'd become the loudest advocate of the company on Capitol Hill. He argued Palantir should build the next DCGS as it would ultimately save the taxpayers money. I'll remind you that that ultimately did not carry the day. Palantir ended up having to sue to reopen that bid. Now, if you're still with me and haven't clicked off, it might seem like I just spent an awful lot of time on a very small story that ultimately shouldn't matter that much.

So, Palantir got one government contract, so what? But the reason I did was to show you how many ways Palantir tried to get this contract until they hit upon one that worked. First, he simply asked the army, by far the cheapest option. When that didn't work, he hired a lobbying firm. And when that didn't work, he donated to and sweet-talked to congressmen. And only when all of that didn't work, he sued. And this is very typical of Thiel's strategies.

It's not that Thiel's great at picking winners. Thiel has backed many, many losers in his time. But Thiel has also just backed a lot of people. He's diligent, he's persistent, and he tries every single avenue he can think of. And so, the other heads of these tech companies must have been like, "Wow, man, I wish we could get some of that government money." And if it worked for Thiel, well, why couldn't they do it, too?

Now, and stay with me here, in 2018 you have Oracle suing the Department of Defense over a cloud storage contract held by Amazon. Then, in 2019, you have Amazon suing the Department of Defense over a cloud storage contract held by Microsoft. Also, just as a kicker, in 2021, Microsoft sued the NSA over a cloud storage contract held by Amazon. Can't make this up, folks. Now, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that these lawsuits didn't always work.

Oracle's, as an example, didn't seem to do much. Amazon would just lose that contract to Microsoft a few years later. But, that's also kind of the point and why I keep hammering this home. It's not some smoky backroom deal. It's actually rather straightforward. Thiel tried a billion things, one eventually worked, and then a bunch of other companies just did the same thing. And sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

As boring as it may be, it is ultimately all about money. And I also don't want to paint the picture that Thiel only funds winners. Yes, he funded J.D. Vance very famously with a record-breaking donation to his Senate campaign back in the day. And he would introduce Vance to Trump. In many ways, Thiel is the reason J.D. Vance is vice president right now. But, in 2022, he also funded an Arizona senator by the name of Blake Masters.

[music] Well, I should say an Arizona Senate hopeful, because Blake Masters didn't win. He even got Trump's endorsement, but he didn't even make it out of the primary. Thiel spent about 30 million dollars on this guy, and in the end, got nothing. And before we move on from Thiel, I want to cover one more story about him that I think is fairly illustrative of what we're examining. Thiel was not just known for Palantir and PayPal.

He was also known as being the first outside investor in Facebook, a move which had netted him a board seat. But, later, reports came out from other board members that there'd been a rift growing between Thiel and the rest of the board for well over a decade at this point. That Thiel had been pushing them over and over again to not restrict speech on the platform, to specifically allow for this inflammatory and hateful conduct.

In 2022, Thiel stepped down from the board of Facebook and rather abruptly at that. Well, technically it wasn't Facebook at the time, it was Meta because they'd rebranded in the wake of the leak of the Facebook files, but hey, read into that what you will. Now, at the time Facebook and Thiel released a statement saying that Thiel was stepping down voluntarily so that he could better focus on his political ventures. But here's something that might color this whole thing in a slightly different way.

If you recall back to Trump's social media summit, you might recall one of the people Trump had speak was Senator Josh Hawley. And if you haven't guessed it by now, yes, one of his biggest donors in his campaign was Peter Thiel. Now, tell me, why would Thiel support a candidate who's advocating for regulations that would hurt one of his companies. If you ask Thiel this question, and many have, he'll be pretty straightforward with you.

He'll say, "I'm a free speech absolutist. I'm fighting for the type of internet that I want to see, an internet free from censorship." He'll say he's a libertarian or something close to it, and he's already a billionaire. Why does he care if he loses a few million here or there? It's not like he's going to spend all his money before he dies at this point anyway. Again, that's what he'd say. But I'm going to paint a slightly different picture for you.

And fair warning, this is speculation territory. I don't know Thiel, haven't talked to Thiel, he did not respond to my email at peterthiel@gmail.com, but I have looked into a lot. There's a lot of stuff I'm fairly convinced about with this theory I'm about to tell you, but I don't have a smoking gun. And I do think that's important to acknowledge right up front. Now, I'll admit I do find it odd that >> [music] >> Thiel would be the only one to care about the finances of the company.

And while the leaks from insiders don't reveal anything, the Facebook files do show the board cared about revenue. The board repeatedly would choose to not censor some of this inflammatory content because of the impact it had on their revenue. So, my end theory is basically this. What if Peter Thiel wanted to regulate Facebook? What if Peter Thiel actually did want this regulation to pass because it regulated Facebook in a way that he approved of.

What if Thiel donated to specific politicians that wanted to regulate Facebook and social media as a whole in the specific way Thiel was okay with. Yeah, go ahead. Make sure we can't target kids with these ads. Who cares? >> [music] >> Make sure though that we can keep the type of speech that keeps people on the platform for as long as possible. We'll find other advertisers. We'll find people to fill those slots. What we won't necessarily find >> [music] >> is people spending more time on there.

But, I think we've spent enough time on just Thiel specifically. [music] I think it's time to get back to the story as a whole now that we understand how Thiel opened this door and how everyone else was walking through it. Because things get really interesting when we get back into what was going on with the reintroduction of KOSA. The 2023 State of the Union, Biden did something that Big Tech [music] wasn't expecting. >> There's time to pass bipartisan legislation to stop Big Tech from collecting personal data on our kids. >> As you can see, this got overwhelming applause from both sides of the aisle.

So, inspired by a vote of confidence from the president, two versions of KOSA were reintroduced. One in the Senate and one in the House. Both referred to committees and advanced. And in order to avoid having to redo a floor vote, the Senate, led by the shockingly spine-having Chuck Schumer, voted to adopt the House bill as it had been advanced. The result was 91-4, three against. [music] Overwhelming bipartisan support.

Now, all that was left was for the House to vote and it would be sent to the president's desk. Early polling showed that it was clearly favored to pass in the House. Not quite by the margin it had in the Senate, but by more than enough. But, if you recall from earlier, after going through committee, a House bill needed to be put on the floor by the speaker, who at the time was the Republican from Louisiana, Mike Johnson.

[music] Now, there are two points to the story that are interesting. First, according to a supporter of the bill, when she spoke to Johnson at a closed-door Republican fundraising event, he seemed to very enthusiastic about passing the bill. Second, Meta chose Louisiana, Johnson's home state, as the site of their new $10 billion data center. At the time it was announced, it was to be the largest data center in the United States.

Which gets a little suspicious when you find that Johnson never scheduled the bill for a floor vote. He said that there wasn't enough being done to protect people's privacy, although publicly, there were no specific changes to the bill he was calling for. And then, 2024 would end, the 118th Congress would be over, and the whole process would end up resetting. But, the fact remains, >> [music] >> Thiel stepped down, donated to politicians in favor of this legislation, but ultimately, the legislation failed to pass.

And it failed to pass because Mike Johnson didn't put it on the floor. And, for legal reasons, I'm just going to say, separate clause here, also Meta decided to open a $10 billion data center in Louisiana, Mike Johnson's home state. I think in general, especially after KOSA, many tech people slowly realized Democrats didn't quite have their backs anymore. And so, whether this was just the straw that broke the camel's back, or this had been brewing for quite some time.

Eventually, Big Tech decided the Democrats weren't worth their time anymore, and they shifted. They went to supporting the Republicans. Musk very famously supported Biden in 2020, but by 2022, he was already eyeing up Republican candidates. Jeff Bezos, similarly, also supported Biden until around 2022, when a lot of Biden's regulations started coming through, and he [music] suddenly started supporting Trump. And Zuckerberg held onto the Democrats basically until 2024, until Johnson killed COSA dead.

But here's the really annoying thing about America. We're a democracy, which means we have this pesky little idea that you can only hold office if the majority of people in your district say that you should be able to hold that office. If Republicans got elected on phone bad, and then switched and suddenly started saying, "Actually, phone good." Well, their jobs might be at risk. And luckily, Big Tech had a great reason that they'd been censoring, and why they were going to stop now.

You see, it was all Joe Biden's fault. Ex-Meta and even Amazon were quick to release tons of emails and documents showing the Biden administration had been reaching out to them asking them to take down certain types of posts. Largely, these were posts that were spreading misinformation about the COVID vaccine, but we went over all this earlier. Which is going to take us right up to Trump 2, and basically the entire reason I started researching this video.

This video is about America being for sale, and again, the thing I want you to understand is for sale is your tax dollars. Before Trump 2, tech companies were rather limited in the amount of money they could suck out of the US government. After all, the government needed a contract ready to go, they needed a project that these people could work on, and then they needed to bid for and win that contract, and then probably also fend off a lawsuit or two.

But with Trump 2, all that changed. Now, there was a much, much better and far more direct way to get money from the US government. Break it, and then sell them a fix. >> [music] >> When Trump returned to office in 2025, he was far friendlier to tech than he had been in the past, though renewable energy was still out in the cold. And nothing illustrates this quite like the new way tech has found to siphon our tax dollars, Doge.

Let's start with the third rail, social security. The Social Security Administration cut about half its staff in 2025 and replaced many of them with AI systems. This includes a transcription system called Heart, that's also coupled with an LLM for some reason I can't fathom, as well as a chatbot that you can call the Social Security office and talk to directly, although apparently it doesn't work very well and they're kind of in the process of phasing it out, as well as another chatbot for a reason I cannot possibly fathom that has to do with facilitating content creation.

And hidden away in an Excel spreadsheet is a chatbot for therapy for Social Security Administration employees. I mean, just give them health insurance and send them to a real therapist. The contracts awarded so far amount to at least 200 million, although it could be higher, and Doge claims they cut from the agency. So, if indeed they saved any money, it was about 32 million, and even that number is contested. Let's next turn to NOAA, one of the incredibly boring agencies that you only hear about when a really interesting hurricane is happening.

Yet also one of the most crucial when it comes to anticipating weather-related events. Doge cut, again according to their estimates, about 800 jobs and given other thousand early retirement packages. In total, this means they cut about 15% of the total workforce. Dodge also claims they terminated a number of contracts, leading to a whopping $42 million saved. Weirdly, however, they didn't mention Musk's SpaceX contract that they signed back in 2020, when it was still under Biden, by which they got about $100 million to help launch a new satellite.

Kind of I don't know. Maybe just an oversight. Now, if you haven't guessed it yet, this is essentially the thesis of this whole video. The goal of firing all these federal workers was to replace them with AI. And I'll remind you, AI was already being integrated into various government departments [music] under Obama, Trump, and Biden. And again, maybe Bush again, it kind of depends on you how you want to define AI. But what's happening now is not an integration, nor really is it a replacement of workforce.

What it is is privatization. I'm at heart some flavor of liberal, a very weird flavor that, frankly, stretches that definition to its breaking point, but ultimately, that's a label that I feel comfortable with people ascribing to me. And as a result, I'm okay with paying taxes for certain things. I'm fine funding National Park Services. A park ranger [music] getting their salary out of my dollars is something I wholeheartedly support.

However, if you lay those people off and you have AI do their job and now my tax dollars are going to OpenAI's bottom line suddenly, I kind of have some issues about what my taxes are being used for. But hey, just in case you were worried that that's the only way these tech companies are getting our tax dollars. Now, let's turn back to data centers. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump undid basically all of Biden's executive orders on AI.

Well, I guess by all, I mean both, but still, you get it. But luckily, Trump passed his own executive orders. However, these gave tech companies more than they ever could have dreamed of. This included some frankly wild concessions, such as ordering the creation of special permits and exemptions to existing permits, as well as ordering the head of the EPA to figure out if anything might run a foul of legislation like the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act.

And if so, he was ordered to modify those regulations. And of course, there's no mention whatsoever of making sure that the data centers power draw from the grid doesn't affect power pricing for other people living in the area. And hidden in the environmental review section 5C is this lovely little line. For purposes of this order, federal financial assistance representing less than 50% of total project costs shall be presumed not to constitute substantial federal control and responsibility.

This has to do with NEPA, which in turn has to do with permitting. And if the government funds a project majorly, either directly with cash or in terms of tax breaks or loans or what have you, then it is required that you conduct at least two environmental surveys. [music] One to assess impact and one to assess what the environment is currently. So far, the US has about 3 to 5,000 data centers constructed, with another 3,000 currently being built.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal had an article that predicted in 2026 the tax breaks, loans, and direct cash benefits to Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are going to total about 2% of GDP for the entire year. That's currently around $300 billion, dollars, that GDP projections hold for the year. And they've already gotten close to a hundred billion dollars just so far in 2026. Also, I love that to put that in context, the Wall Street Journal shows us the entire spending on the railroads between 1850 and 1859 was 2% of GDP.

Just as an FYI, by the way, in 1860, our nominal GDP was about four billion dollars. For 2026, the projection is 30 trillion. And it's not just the tech CEOs that are enriching themselves off this. Don't worry. Now is the time where you can start to imagine some of these shady backroom deals. Because [music] some of this kind of insider trading stuff is also enriching politicians. In fact, in May of 2026, yes, literally as I was writing the script, because why can't it ever be easy?

An investigation by the group Floodlight found that Louisiana state senator John Morris >> [music] >> had perhaps unethically, though the ethics committee ruled that it was fine, bought and sold land around the area where Meta eventually placed its new data center. So, he used the information of the ongoing negotiations to enrich both himself and his business partners. And as if that's not bad enough, Morris also voted to grant Meta three billion dollars in tax breaks over the course of like 10 years, not in one year, but still.

Like this is just wild to me. We now even have the free market being trod upon by these Republicans. This is insane. Oh, and don't you worry, by the way, Trump hasn't forgotten about plain old government contracts, either. Palantir is currently contracted with the following government agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of the State, Department of Agriculture, the Department of Energy, the Department of Transportation, Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Commerce, the Department of the Interior, NASA, [music] the Department of Labor, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

And again, just to really put a button on it, as much as Thiel opened the door, the door itself very much is Trump. You only get access to this money, you only get access to America's books if Trump allows you to. Whatever motivated him to do so, he's still the one calling the shots. And nothing illustrates that better than some of the times tech bros didn't get their way. And nothing illustrates that better than what happened to Elon Musk.

Remember, Musk was rather late to the Trump train. Early on, he'd supported Ron DeSantis to the tune of $10 million. It was only when DeSantis dropped out that Musk turned to supporting Trump, supporting his campaign to the tune of $200 million. But despite all of Musk's money, his donations, he seemed to lack the very specific influence he was trying to gain. I can only speculate as to why exactly, but in order to talk about this, we need to turn to one of Trump's overseas tours, specifically when he visited the Middle East.

If you recall, about a year ago, OpenAI secured a contract with the United Arab Emirates >> [music] >> to launch their Stargate program there. To be fair, the Stargate program was mainly focused on the US. And indeed, when it launched prior to this deal being announced, it was targeted to build out data centers domestically. However, thanks to this deal, Stargate was able to partner with MGX, an investment firm owned by the Abu Dhabi Emirate, which, for those who are unaware, is the Emirate that's essentially in control of the UAE.

Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan Nahyan >> Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan >> has de facto run the country since 2012 and [music] has actually run the country since 2022. And the US government was a big part of this negotiation. Part of the deal with this investment was that the UAE would be allowed to purchase some of America's top-of-the-line artificial intelligence chips. Musk was reportedly furious about this. Supposedly, he joined the Middle [music] East trip in order to try and snake the contract from OpenAI and Sam Altman.

However, obviously, this didn't work. And the rivalry between OpenAI founder and CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk is no secret. Musk was originally part of OpenAI back when it was a non-profit focused on trying to come up with AI safety standards and regulations. However, he stepped down from that company in 2018 when he started his own AI for-profit [music] company. After OpenAI's breakout success with ChatGPT, Musk has been relentless in his attacks on Altman and OpenAI in general, including a lawsuit against the company for creating a for-profit branch, as well as a holding company to govern both.

This led to the very famous falling out between Musk and Trump, which I'm sure most people know from when Musk tweeted out that Trump himself was in the Epstein files. Again, not to continuously run defense for these people that I have nothing but contempt for, I don't think Trump is just opening the books up to the highest bidder. Ultimately, I wish I could sit here and tell you a a much more nefarious insidious story than the one I found, but ultimately, I am a slave to the truth.

I want to tell you what I found, not necessarily what I find more interesting or what I think might secretly be going on. Now, as much as Trump is the door, I really do want to reiterate that point, placing 100% of the blame at his feet is also wrong. And honestly, [music] that was probably the single weirdest discovery for me in my entire research of this story. And frankly, I think it's the piece that is the most important to understanding [music] this story.

And that piece is ultimately all of this regulation and fines is Big Tech's fault. And I don't even mean indirectly. I don't mean they were being so flagrant someone had to crack down on them. I mean they actively sought this out because Big Tech could not stop tattling. >> [music] >> This next section actually has one of the more straightforward origins. It comes from something Mark Zuckerberg said in his 2025 Joe Rogan appearance. >> Well, I mean the the EU I I pulled these numbers.

The EU has fined the tech companies more than 30 billion dollars over the last I think it was like 10 or 20 years. If the US tech industry is going to continue being really strong, um I I do think that the US government has a role in um in basically defending it abroad. >> Now that by itself wasn't that weird to me. I mean, if you own a business, yeah, probably you would like the entire might of your home government on your side to protect your interests abroad.

I don't know who wouldn't want that. Now what threw me off was a different quote he said just a little while later. >> Apple has a specific protocol that they've built into the iPhone that allows AirPods to basically connect to it and and it's just much more seamless because they've enabled that, but they don't let anyone else use the protocol. If they did, then there would probably be much better competitors to AirPods out there. >> Yeah, I mean the whole thing that they've done with iMessage where they basically they do this whole blue bubble green bubble thing and then they always wrap it in like security.

Finally, I think Apple was forced to implement it. >> RSS. Yeah, >> Yeah. I think like I think it was the Chinese government that basically ended up forcing them to do it or some other government. >> And when you put that together with everything else we've looked at so far, there's really only one conclusion you can come to. Big Tech doesn't hate regulation, the EU, or really any [music] governing body. They love those governing bodies, but only when they go against their competition.

Because the more I looked, the more I felt like I was being driven insane. If you remember back in 2009, it was Microsoft that filed the complaint that led to Google getting fined. >> [music] >> And then when SpaceX sued the Air Force, it was over them choosing to go with Blue Origin, a rival space company. These tech companies are all locked in constant combat, [music] and the number one thing they're using to fight each other with is government.

This is why Microsoft, who back in 2009 was horrified that Internet Explorer, the most popular browser, was now losing out to Google Chrome, filed that antitrust violation against them. For Google Shopping, admittedly, but still. Same with Musk and Blue Origin. I highly doubt the actual issue was that Elon Musk felt Blue Origin shouldn't get the money. In reality, it could have been anyone. He just thought he should be getting the money.

This was what was such a weird part of the story for me to find. Namely, that this regulatory environment that the tech companies all hate was caused in no small part by them. They were weaponizing governments against each other to try and make the competition suffer, give themselves a leg up, yada yada, what have you. >> As much as Big Tech tries to frame their problems as an issue of regulation, it's really an issue of not frankly tattling. >> Yeah, ultimately the EU was the one that levied those fines, but they were more than happy with that when it was against their competition.

It really only became a problem when it was levied against them. And I know, I know what you're going to say. Right, that makes sense. Everyone knows this already, right? Rules for thee, but not for me, that kind of stuff. But, I still think it paints this whole story in a different light when you realize the scary monster they're trying to get Trump to protect them from is a monster of their own creation, and a monster that frankly they love.

Literally, as I was writing this script, Anthropic now had their Fable 5 model >> [music] >> taken offline because it was deemed too dangerous by the US government. And the reason they said that is because Amazon tattled, allegedly. Originally, this last section actually had way more about Anthropic. I was actually a lot more positive about them. But, when I looked into them more for this specific new part of the story, I realized they were consistently cucking out on a lot of their safety values, which was very disappointing to me.

These companies are just running to the teacher to tattle about, "Oh, Johnny's not playing fair." While they themselves are also not playing fair. And then when someone tattles about them, suddenly they freak out, and this is a horrific injustice that must be stopped. Like, it's just I don't know, man. It's pathetic. Remember back at the top of this video when I said I think I'm going crazy? That wasn't just for dramatic effect.

Genuinely, researching all this has made me feel crazy. Because I kept saying while there clearly is a conspiracy here, and it took me so long to realize there isn't. It's not a conspiracy. It's not something they sat down and decided on. It's something that if I put any civilization in all of human history into these exact same circumstances, >> [music] >> the exact same thing would happen just by chance. It's natural human inclination.

That's all it is. I think a lot of people like looking at figures like Curtis Yarvin, Alain de Benoist, and even Thiel himself, and seeing some sort of codified movement, some sort of centralized, directed effort to arrive at this outcome. And again, that's a lot of what my next video is going to focus on. It's going to focus on how that's not really the case, but there is an enormous amount of effort meant to make it look like that's the case.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself. Again, I have a whole other video on the works about that. By the time you're watching this, I'm either researching it or it's done, in which case just go watch it. But sorry, I'm very much getting tired here. Sorry, hour 11 of filming. I'm kind of I'm kind of out of it here. I think this is important. It's easy to see these men as idealists trying to bring about their ideals.

But they're not. They're just businessmen. Businessmen like everyone else. Businessmen like Rockefeller who fell by the wayside. Businessmen like Big Tobacco. Businessmen like literally every other business cabal the US government has taken down in time. But there's a reason I wanted this video to focus so much on the history, the business, and the money. It's because ultimately the conclusion I came to after all my research was that this whole thing was super childish.

Big Tech literally cannot help but tattle. You know, Microsoft knows that Google's favoring their stuff in search results, so they they tattle to the EU. And they say, "Oh, Google's not playing fair." But Google also knows Microsoft is favoring Edge in its own browser performances, so they go tattle to the EU. And they're just all tattling to the EU about it. And then you both go crying to Trump that the EU isn't being fair, and so he's like, "Well, how about we just do some random tariffs until they decide to play fair." And then they do that, and you frame yourselves as these champions of justice trying to spread free speech and idealism around the world.

Like it's just pathetic, man. You're just a stupid tattletale. It's it's just pathetic, honestly. And yet they sit there and claim that they're underdog heroes. It's disgusting, man. I hate this. And I hate that I'm burying this at the end of a 2-hour video. Why do I always do this? Like, I don't know, man. I Maybe I just need to figure out how to make stuff shorter cuz how the heck am I ever going to get a message out if I make my videos 2 hours?

Like, no one's going to sit through all this. But, like, god. The The more I look into this story, the more I just get disgusted that this is the best our entrepreneurial visionaries can do, you know? The richest man in all of human history has to lie about being good at a video game because he's just like that insecure about himself. Like, god. I I I I I think people always wonder what the history books are going to say about us.

I know. I know exactly what they're going to say about us. And honestly, this was like the worst part for me as I kept researching this stuff. Like, unironically, I I cannot wait to go back to history because at least that I feel like is more straightforward. And at least, you know, I can fall into the great man fallacy and live like that. But, like, this is just pathetic, man. These are just people who, like, I don't know.

They don't have the self-confidence. And so, they just feel the need to like flex and put out these weird stories about themselves and then run around and lie and realize they can just get away with lying, so they just keep lying. It Like, it's so stupid. Look, I'm even sympathetic to that. I, to this day, have an enormous problem with self-confidence. Like, even like today, me putting out a video for a channel that currently has 50,000 subscribers that on average my views be, you know, little under like 60, 70k, somewhere around that on average.

Like, I keep thinking there's no way I deserve this. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up tomorrow, my channel's going to be gone, and everyone's going to say, "Hey, you had one good video, but, you know, we don't actually want to listen to you. It's time to stop doing this and and go back and start working on your real career more." I understand feeling like inadequate, incompetent, whatever. And I understand needing to make that up somehow.

But not at the cost of like just sacrificing a country, man. Like do you genuinely have no morals beyond just making money? Like I I don't know. Maybe they do. Or maybe they realize the way the winds are blow- I don't know, man. This is why I hate I'm sorry. See, now you just have to listen to a whole ramble. This is why I normally write stuff out because I can't I I'm shockingly very bad at communicating my ideas just by talking.

Like if I don't write them out, my ideas just are rambly, they go all over the place, they don't have like a good conclusion. Like it's just it's it's it's bad when I don't write out a script. But like I I don't know. Nothing I just said was written out and it's like I just Mhm. I I I I wish I could express this better. Maybe there's someone out there who can express this more eloquently than I can. But it is it is so pathetic to me that the people who are tearing our norms, our culture, our institutions apart are just doing it cuz they're insecure.

They're not even doing it cuz they genuinely believe, "Oh, we need to bring about the New World Order." It's not even that, dude. They're just doing it cuz they're like, "Oh my god, someone else has more money than me. That's scary." Like god. There's a clip I saw in my research that had nothing to do with this, so I couldn't use the clip at all. But there was a clip I saw where Peter Thiel's being interviewed by someone.

I think it's for the New York Times. And he says he I was having a dinner with Elon. And one guy at the dinner was like, "I'm doing the most important thing. I'm building an AI." And then Elon Musk, apparently according to Thiel, replied, "Well, I'm actually doing the most important thing. I'm turning us into an interplanetary species." Which is like, bro, why are you at a dinner party interrupting someone who's making a stupid comment, admittedly, and then being like, "No, actually I'm the most important person in the world." Like Jesus Christ, dude.

How pathetic are you? Holy Like seriously, put me in a room with Elon Musk for for 2 minutes. 2 goddamn minutes. I guarantee you I will having that man well I don't know. I I I Sorry, I don't know. The algorithms are supposed to keep us angry in a way [music] and that's That's what they do. They lead me to doing like this. Sorry. I'll get back to it. Sorry. But I I I'm getting ahead of myself. See, I I already like part of this is doing the research for this next video and it just anyway I don't know.

Like, share, subscribe, all that stuff. I don't care, man. Like, well, you know what? Do share it. I want this message to get out. I don't think it's going to cuz I just I'm small and no one cares what I have to say and they shouldn't, frankly, cuz I'm just a random dude and I make myself look stupid and I do stuff like this. This took me, I'm not even kidding you, 2 days to put that wall together. I ran out of ink halfway through and I had to go to the store to buy more ink cuz I couldn't wait for it to come on Amazon.

Like, it's just I don't know, man. I I am not the person who should be like talking about this right now. But no one else is doing it. So, I I don't know, man. Like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Sorry. I'm freaking out a bit. This is personal to me if you can't tell cuz I keep looking at it and I kept going like Well, I have to be wrong. I I remember my my code name for this video was mania. All my scripts are like mania V1, mania V6, stuff like that.

I kept thinking to myself, I have to be incorrect because more people would be talking about this if, you know, there's no way me, some random dude on the internet, has figured out something that people who would make millions if they could bring this story to light weren't able to figure out. But then I realized everyone has figured out this story. But for some reason they're only figuring out like bits and pieces of it.

I don't know why, but no one seems to be able to put the full picture together. But I realized a lot of it has to do with the political stuff that I don't think most of these people can see through. Cuz as someone who was very far right, let me tell you something. It's pretty easy to look at like Musk or Zuckerberg or anyone else and be like, "Yeah, these guys aren't actually anti-immigration. These guys aren't actually for any of the far right policies they claim to be for.

They're just not." But they're using that as a cloak so that they can claim the system is broken. Idealism only gets you so far. There are ideas I want to spread in the world. There are things I want to use this channel for. But but I'd also be lying to you if I tried to tell you that that's all this channel is. It's pure idealism and I'm I'm a perfectly idealistic person and I would never lie to you or or or exaggerate or embellish or anything.

Like, no, I I do play to the algorithm a bit. And frankly, that's sort of what scares me and what we're going to be focusing on a lot more in the next video. I don't think it's an accident that three of my top four videos on this channel are like debunk style videos. They're They're videos which are necessarily attacking a position that I believe is popular. Anyway, don't worry cuz all of this was really just laying the groundwork for the actual crazy story, which is what is coming next time.

This video just answered what happened and that's important because if you don't know that, when we get to the second video on how it happened, you're going to see nothing but conspiracies everywhere. And there are conspiracies in that video. Very real, very serious ones that people should be talking about more. But ultimately, this is very very important, not the ones people are telling you about. And in like one of the weirdest twists and what actually made this so difficult to research cuz a part of me was like, "Wow, I don't have to dig through ancient sources.

I don't have to like learn a whole second language to figure this out. This is cool. I'll probably be able to research this in a week." I have spent more time researching this than anything probably aside from my very first video. I probably did spend more on that. Maybe also history of uh paganism. I don't know. It's up there though. This This video is definitely up there. In a weird twist, I've seen so many people talking about parts of this story, but I haven't really seen anyone put the pieces together yet.

I haven't seen anyone zoom out and talk about the totality of what's occurring. But after digging more, I think I know why. Uh I weirdly think someone like me is needed to see this story. Because you need someone who understands what the far right is like, what their concerns are, what they think about because it lets you spot how all of these tech bros aren't far right at all. But you also need someone who's not currently far right.

And that is very, very important [music] because once you see what I've seen, you realize there is a very, very big problem barreling towards us right now. And the worst [music] part is you, me, and everyone else actually doesn't want to solve this problem. If anything, weirdly, we seem to want it to get worse. But anyway, I mean, that's all I got. Get out of here. Love you. Take care.