Taken from JRE #1930 w/Adam Curry:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/489chEayb8doxqCYbrgjRs?si=649d0f14c57d47d5

Well, let me tell you what's going on with TikTok.

I have a very opinionated explanation for what is going on with TikTok.

TikTok was eating Silicon Valley's lunch.

They were taking all the ad money from Instagram from Twitter from Google I'd say Google and Instagram and Facebook just killing it knocking it out of the fucking park so look at who is Saying oh, it's a China and they're tracking everything and that's just Communist Party, dude Facebook tracks you Google tracks you everyone fucking tracks you All over the place, but all of a sudden tick-tock is a problem No It's because they're eating their lunch And instead of competing because you know, they've tried no 1 can seem to create the tick-tock algorithm and the the thing that they have going there It's what people want the the quick hits or sing-alongs, etc.

So they decided to Lobby politicians And and come up with this this scam.

Oh, no, this is China Fuck no, it's because Silicon Valley couldn't compete with them.

Oh, yeah Just look at I know a lot about the advertising business because I ran companies that were in that.

When you have a big company like Facebook or Google who are tied into government, how many times have they been to DC to explain what they're doing.

That's the only avenue they have to compete is that you got to get these guys out of here.

And luckily, even though it's American companies that run it, it's China.

So now I'm not a China fan, but this is a fucking scam They are they are just taking them down to get rid of the competition.

That's interesting because they're not taking them down right still up.

Oh, yeah It's already, you know, it's banned at UT you can't you can't have tick-tock on your phone, but

at the same time There is a real problem with the terms of service at the same time I see what you're saying and I see why they would want to do that, but they have an extraordinarily invasive software

How It's no different from any other app that you have on your phone.

other apps can track your keystrokes on other computers?

Computers that aren't even connected to that?

If Apple doesn't have TikTok, people will actually give up their iPhones.

Now what Apple did, if you remember, they changed some things in the way, in what they allow apps to do.

And that took about $10 billion off of Facebook's income.

Because they couldn't sell the information that way anymore.

And TikTok is less interested in selling your information.

you're a guy like Zuckerberg, like you can't use an iPhone, huh?

I mean, if Apple did that to his company and then, you know, made it so that they lost that much money in advertising revenue by changing some

Well not advertising, they were basically selling your information and creating profiles and they all do it.

I mean, that's why I have the Graphene OS.

You know, I've had this phone for a while.

This is a different 1 than you had before.

So we basically rip all the Google stuff off and this is the the 6 I had the 4 it was just time to upgrade And what you know screen was cracking is falling apart And yet, as you if you're connected to a network, you're still yeah, you still know where you are Yeah, but the apps cannot spy on me.

I know what the apps are doing I can they're running a sandbox.

So Nothing goes in or out unless I give it that permission.

Yeah, no agenda phone.com Instructions are right there on how

So you think that most of the applications, are they just not telling you the truth about what they're allowed to do with the terms and the permissions?

But is it written in there and no one's paying attention to it or is it just they're not putting that stuff in there because what what I'm saying is that at least it says in tick tocks terms like what it's outrageous but some of it is like monitoring your keystrokes and having access to your microphones and stuff like that.

But it was also, 1 of the points of concern for some people was that it was linked to computers that aren't even loaded up with TikTok.

There's only 1 telephone company is the US government.

Everything that you put on a network anywhere goes into it.

In Utah, they've got the big data centers.

And whenever they need to find out what Joe Rogan's doing Let's pull up Rogan.

It just comes up right comes up that signal they mean encryption is a problem, which you know is a problem for the government But again, you know how many companies just give up the goods?

Apple does maybe 30,000 a month or something.

You know, it's like, hey, we need information on this account.

There were millions of dollars that they paid Twitter just for handing over account information.

I think Twitter never really collected though.

Well, Facebook certainly did and Google certainly does and they publish those numbers.

They publish the numbers that they, I don't know where.

think that was a part of that narrative because you know There's there was a giant bill that that The FBI had owed Twitter was like 3000000 dollars.

Yeah, apparently they never paid find out if that's true.

According to the USA Today, it says- Oh, there we go, USA Today.

Okay, first, the documents released by new Twitter owner Elon Musk show that the FBI flagged Twitter accounts the agency believed violated Twitter's terms of service.

Second, another document shows the FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million for Twitter's processing of information requests the FBI made through a stored communications act the 3.4 million is Unrelated to the FBI flagging accounts.

Yeah, that's not related, but it's also Like we're giving you a lot of money.

Yeah, but did they actually pay the money?

think you can look at this paying for account information Because the Silicon Valley companies like what we're not gonna do this work for free You got to pay we got to put people on

That's that's Are they gonna give it to Elon like how does that work if they did

the bucket Maybe someone erroneously reported that and I just read it.

Well, I think what we're seeing with Twitter What we're seeing with Twitter is it was not a very profitable company.

Yeah, it takes a lunatic to spend $44 billion to get a not very profitable company so that he can let people just talk shit.

I listened to the, someone sent me the clip of you and him about 4 years ago, talking about AI and how that's gonna take over the world and how he tried to stop it and now he seems to be all in on it.

But I think that's his x.com, which is what he wanted PayPal to be and that didn't turn out the way he wanted.

And he's literally said, I want it to be like WeChat.

I mean, he has said that, I want it to be your bank, I want it to be your social, that app, super app.

He calls it a super app That's what he's doing.

And of course with that once you have authenticated everybody with a real name, you don't need trust and safety You know if someone does something bad It's that person right And we can send the feds on them or the feds can go themselves or you can have a lawyer sue you if you say something slanderous.

But it will be the thing that you use, like in China, for everything.

And so it behooves him to keep as many people on the platform by just letting it open.

I don't know if he's overextended himself a little bit on the cost of it.

It's costing him a lot, it's costing him in value, in Tesla stock value, and he seems to be okay with that, which is great.

I mean, it's a big nut to crack to do that, to create the WeChat of America or the rest of the world.

But then I see like Starlink which to me was, I mean, Starlink was what an amazing fucking invention.

I put this fucking dish on the ground and I got internet and it's fast and it's groovy But of course, where does the real money come in now?

It's a it's a military system Which I think was probably the plan all along.

I mean, it's great to give consumers this for a hundred 10 dollars a month But me had the military and that came out of Ukraine, you know, how he said, hey, you should pay me for this.

And they went, no, fuck you, you should do this just because you're a good guy.

And after a while, he's like, you know, I'm moving satellites around, you should probably pay me to do this as a service and I forget what it's called, but it is now an actual government military service that is used in the field.

It is kind of bizarre that a country can say, you should just kind of hook us up.

A former Facebook security executive has called Elon Musk's claim that the FBI paid Twitter to moderate content false.

Alex Stamos, and this is what we were talking about earlier, that it was, that you can't like say that this is exactly why they did it.

Comment comes after journalist Michael Schellenberger shared a redacted screenshot of a 2021 email showing that Twitter had collected over 3.4 million from a reimbursement program for time spent processing FBI requests.

I agree with that too, but you also could recognize that if there is a deal where compensation is being paid to your company to the tune of $3.4 million, that's a significant business transaction.

But it was because of tens of thousands of accounts that had the information had to be collected given to the FBI, completely separate from politicians saying, you need to look at this guys, they're against your own terms and service, they're against what Fauci says, take them down, flag them, don't amplify them.

That has nothing to do with the FBI as far as I'm concerned.

If you look at, I think we talked about this, In 2000, maybe 2010 or 12, Mark Zuckerberg was man of the year.

And he was on the cover of Time Magazine.

Okay, if you read that article, in the middle of this interview, Robert Mueller, FBI director, pops his head in, hey, I just happened to be in the building.

And even the reporter who wrote this Time Magazine article says, it was the most bizarre fucking thing I've ever seen.

The FBI was already in these companies from inception.

People post pictures, there's your location, here I am, it's beautiful.

Why wouldn't you want that as an intelligence organization?

And Robert Mueller, who it must have been 2012 because they extended him for a couple, against the constitution, which is really funny because he's only supposed to be there for 10 years After the, you know, the FBI has a sordid history.

And there was a very solid law put in place.

No FBI director can be FBI director more than 10 years.

Except Robert Mueller was in for an extra 2 years for some reason because, you know, whatever.

When Obama came in, well, we need this guy.

And he was in, literally in the Facebook building.

Oh, it just happened to be in the building the director of the FBI come on that was you know so they've been there for a long long time

It's so fun to talk with you brother We should I'm good.

We should clarify what that actually said though.

He said So this is a mastodon thread So this guy's Stamos who left Facebook in 2018 to lecture at Stanford, explained that law enforcement has the ability to get stored communications from companies like Twitter under 18 USC 273D.

This infamous D order has to be signed by a judge.

He said that out of the companies can demand reimbursement for the request, which is what Twitter did.

He said companies can demand reimbursement for the request, which is what Twitter did, though prior to

as shown by the email screenshot, the company chose not to.

So they chose not to get reimbursement prior to

So for a while, they were doing it for free.

It's all part of the distraction to keep us guessing.

We need you to keep posting selfies, keep letting us know what you're doing.


Speaker 0: The Jerogen Experience.

Speaker 1: How long before TikTok's banned?

Speaker 0: Well, let me tell you what's going on with TikTok. I have a very opinionated explanation for what is going on with TikTok. TikTok was eating Silicon Valley's lunch. They were taking all the ad money from Instagram from Twitter from Google I'd say Google and Instagram and Facebook just killing it knocking it out of the fucking park so look at who is Saying oh, it's a China and they're tracking everything and that's just Communist Party, dude Facebook tracks you Google tracks you everyone fucking tracks you All over the place, but all of a sudden tick-tock is a problem No It's because they're eating their lunch And instead of competing because you know, they've tried no 1 can seem to create the tick-tock algorithm and the the thing that they have going there It's what people want the the quick hits or sing-alongs, etc. So they decided to Lobby politicians And and come up with this this scam.

So it's Hawley. It's Marco Rubio. Oh, no, this is China Fuck no, it's because Silicon Valley couldn't compete with them. That's what's going on. Oh, yeah Just look at I know a lot about the advertising business because I ran companies that were in that.

Everyone was buying TikTok. When you have a big company like Facebook or Google who are tied into government, how many times have they been to DC to explain what they're doing. And so that's all controlled. That's the only avenue they have to compete is that you got to get these guys out of here. And luckily, even though it's American companies that run it, it's China.

So now I'm not a China fan, but this is a fucking scam They are they are just taking them down to get rid of the competition. It's really it's very sad

Speaker 1: That's interesting because they're not taking them down right still up.

Speaker 0: Oh, they will

Speaker 1: you think so?

Speaker 0: Oh, yeah It's already, you know, it's banned at UT you can't you can't have tick-tock on your phone, but

Speaker 1: at the same time There is a real problem with the terms of service at the same time I see what you're saying and I see why they would want to do that, but they have an extraordinarily invasive software

Speaker 0: How It's no different from any other app that you have on your phone.

Speaker 1: It's no different? I disagree. No. So you

Speaker 0: think that all of the

Speaker 1: other apps can track your keystrokes on other computers?

Speaker 0: Fuck yeah.

Speaker 1: Computers that aren't even connected to that? Yeah.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Oh

Speaker 1: yeah. But interesting. Interesting. So they're lying?

Speaker 0: Why doesn't Apple kick it off? Because people use it. If Apple doesn't have TikTok, people will actually give up their iPhones. They're not gonna kick it off. Now what Apple did, if you remember, they changed some things in the way, in what they allow apps to do.

And that took about $10 billion off of Facebook's income. Because they couldn't sell the information that way anymore. And TikTok is less interested in selling your information. They're getting the ad dollars. It's continuous ad money.

The whole thing is a big ad. Everything's an ad. Yeah, if

Speaker 1: you're a guy like Zuckerberg, like you can't use an iPhone, huh? What do you mean? I mean, if Apple did that to his company and then, you know, made it so that they lost that much money in advertising revenue by changing some

Speaker 0: features. Well not advertising, they were basically selling your information and creating profiles and they all do it. I mean, that's why I have the Graphene OS. You know, I've had this phone for a while. I just don't, I don't.

Speaker 1: This is a different 1 than you had before. The 1 you had, you had an old iPhone

Speaker 0: that had

Speaker 1: been converted and then you went to.

Speaker 0: A Pixel. So we basically rip all the Google stuff off and this is the the 6 I had the 4 it was just time to upgrade And what you know screen was cracking is falling apart And yet, as you if you're connected to a network, you're still yeah, you still know where you are Yeah, but the apps cannot spy on me. I know what the apps are doing I can they're running a sandbox. So Nothing goes in or out unless I give it that permission.

Speaker 1: That's graphene OS.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah, no agenda phone.com Instructions are right there on how

Speaker 1: to do it. So you think that most of the applications, are they just not telling you the truth about what they're allowed to do with the terms and the permissions? People don't care. But is it written in there and no one's paying attention to it or is it just they're not putting that stuff in there because what what I'm saying is that at least it says in tick tocks terms like what it's outrageous but some of it is like monitoring your keystrokes and having access to your microphones and stuff like that.

Speaker 0: Yeah, they all have it. They all have that. Why would they not do it?

Speaker 1: But it was also, 1 of the points of concern for some people was that it was linked to computers that aren't even loaded up with TikTok. Like they're not even connected.

Speaker 0: Everything is tracked. There's only 1 telephone company is the US government. They have everything. Everything is recorded. Everything that you put on a network anywhere goes into it.

In Utah, they've got the big data centers. You know, they're all cooled underwater. There's all kinds of high-tech shit. And whenever they need to find out what Joe Rogan's doing Let's pull up Rogan. Did he did he text curry on signal?

What day was it? It just comes up right comes up that signal they mean encryption is a problem, which you know is a problem for the government But again, you know how many companies just give up the goods? Apple does maybe 30,000 a month or something. What do you need? We'll give it to you.

They pay for it. The FBI pays. We know that from the Twitter files. You know, it's like, hey, we need information on this account. OK, that's a 5000 dollars.

And OK, no problem. We'll just pay. These numbers are making them up. Right. There were millions of dollars that they paid Twitter just for handing over account information.

I think Twitter never really collected though.

Speaker 1: Is that true? I'm pretty sure that's true.

Speaker 0: Well, Facebook certainly did and Google certainly does and they publish those numbers. They publish the numbers that they, I don't know where. But I

Speaker 1: think that was a part of that narrative because you know There's there was a giant bill that that The FBI had owed Twitter was like 3000000 dollars. Yeah. Yeah, apparently they never paid find out if that's true.

Speaker 0: Well, they're Welch's. What the hell? Yeah. FBI? You bastards.

According to the USA Today, it says- Oh, there we go, USA Today. Well, I can't find it. Okay.

Speaker 1: Well, let's see what

Speaker 0: we got. No, this is the right message. You want to know what USA Today said. This is conflating 2 separate events.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Okay, first, the documents released by new Twitter owner Elon Musk show that the FBI flagged Twitter accounts the agency believed violated Twitter's terms of service. Second, another document shows the FBI paid Twitter $3.4 million for Twitter's processing of information requests the FBI made through a stored communications act the 3.4 million is Unrelated to the FBI flagging accounts. Yeah, that's not related, but it's also Like we're giving you a lot of money.

Speaker 0: It's unrelated.

Speaker 1: Yeah, but did they actually pay the money? That was the question I

Speaker 0: think you can look at this paying for account information Because the Silicon Valley companies like what we're not gonna do this work for free You got to pay we got to put people on

Speaker 1: it, right? So this

Speaker 0: is normal,

Speaker 1: but if they didn't pay it off. That's that's Are they gonna give it to Elon like how does that work if they did

Speaker 0: but I don't know in

Speaker 1: the bucket Maybe someone erroneously reported that and I just read it.

Speaker 0: Well, I think what we're seeing with Twitter What we're seeing with Twitter is it was not a very profitable company. It kind of ran a little bit...

Speaker 1: Yeah, it takes a lunatic to spend $44 billion to get a not very profitable company so that he can let people just talk shit.

Speaker 0: Well, I think he's doing more. I think, and I'm not sure. I listened to the, someone sent me the clip of you and him about 4 years ago, talking about AI and how that's gonna take over the world and how he tried to stop it and now he seems to be all in on it. But I think that's his x.com, which is what he wanted PayPal to be and that didn't turn out the way he wanted. And he's literally said, I want it to be like WeChat.

I mean, he has said that, I want it to be your bank, I want it to be your social, that app, super app. He calls it a super app That's what he's doing. And of course with that once you have authenticated everybody with a real name, you don't need trust and safety You know if someone does something bad It's that person right And we can send the feds on them or the feds can go themselves or you can have a lawyer sue you if you say something slanderous. But it will be the thing that you use, like in China, for everything. And he said that, so it's his words.

And so it behooves him to keep as many people on the platform by just letting it open. It's beautiful to watch. I don't know if he's overextended himself a little bit on the cost of it. It's costing him a lot, it's costing him in value, in Tesla stock value, and he seems to be okay with that, which is great. We'll see.

I mean, it's a big nut to crack to do that, to create the WeChat of America or the rest of the world. But then I see like Starlink which to me was, I mean, Starlink was what an amazing fucking invention. I have it at home. I put this fucking dish on the ground and I got internet and it's fast and it's groovy But of course, where does the real money come in now? It's a it's a military system Which I think was probably the plan all along.

I mean, it's great to give consumers this for a hundred 10 dollars a month But me had the military and that came out of Ukraine, you know, how he said, hey, you should pay me for this. And they went, no, fuck you, you should do this just because you're a good guy. And after a while, he's like, you know, I'm moving satellites around, you should probably pay me to do this as a service and I forget what it's called, but it is now an actual government military service that is used in the field.

Speaker 1: It is kind of bizarre that a country can say, you should just kind of hook us up.

Speaker 0: That was the US government saying that. The US government was saying that. This is what I've found about that.

Speaker 1: Okay, here it goes. A former Facebook security executive has called Elon Musk's claim that the FBI paid Twitter to moderate content false. Alex Stamos, and this is what we were talking about earlier, that it was, that you can't like say that this is exactly why they did it.

Speaker 0: Alex Stamos- But that's not what I said.

Speaker 1: No, no, no. I'm not saying you did. Comment comes after journalist Michael Schellenberger shared a redacted screenshot of a 2021 email showing that Twitter had collected over 3.4 million from a reimbursement program for time spent processing FBI requests.

Speaker 0: That was just information requests. It wasn't deplatforming requests. I totally agree with that.

Speaker 1: I agree with that too, but you also could recognize that if there is a deal where compensation is being paid to your company to the tune of $3.4 million, that's a significant business transaction.

Speaker 0: But it was because of tens of thousands of accounts that had the information had to be collected given to the FBI, completely separate from politicians saying, you need to look at this guys, they're against your own terms and service, they're against what Fauci says, take them down, flag them, don't amplify them. That's the egregious part. That has nothing to do with the FBI as far as I'm concerned. If you look at, I think we talked about this, In 2000, maybe 2010 or 12, Mark Zuckerberg was man of the year. And he was on the cover of Time Magazine.

And if you read that article.

Speaker 1: Don't let that. I have

Speaker 0: it, I have it. Okay, if you read that article, in the middle of this interview, Robert Mueller, FBI director, pops his head in, hey, I just happened to be in the building. I just wanted to say hi, everybody. And even the reporter who wrote this Time Magazine article says, it was the most bizarre fucking thing I've ever seen. The FBI was already in these companies from inception.

They were already for the collection. It's a beautiful system. People post pictures, there's your location, here I am, it's beautiful. Why wouldn't you want that as an intelligence organization? But they were in then.

And Robert Mueller, who it must have been 2012 because they extended him for a couple, against the constitution, which is really funny because he's only supposed to be there for 10 years After the, you know, the FBI has a sordid history. And there was a very solid law put in place. No FBI director can be FBI director more than 10 years. Except Robert Mueller was in for an extra 2 years for some reason because, you know, whatever. When Obama came in, well, we need this guy.

And he was in, literally in the Facebook building. Oh, it just happened to be in the building the director of the FBI come on that was you know so they've been there for a long long time

Speaker 1: that is bizarre Thank You Jamie

Speaker 0: Oh Dynamite fresh coffee so much. This is great Joe. It's so fun to talk with you brother We should I'm good.

Speaker 1: We should clarify what that actually said though. 1 of the things that's interesting. He said So this is a mastodon thread So this guy's Stamos who left Facebook in 2018 to lecture at Stanford, explained that law enforcement has the ability to get stored communications from companies like Twitter under 18 USC 273D. This infamous D order has to be signed by a judge. He said that out of the companies can demand reimbursement for the request, which is what Twitter did.

Oh no. Oh no. They almost got us. He said companies can demand reimbursement for the request, which is what Twitter did, though prior to

Speaker 0: 2019,

Speaker 1: as shown by the email screenshot, the company chose not to. So they chose not to get reimbursement prior to

Speaker 0: 2019.

Speaker 1: So for a while, they were doing it for free. They were doing the

Speaker 0: work for free. It becomes expensive. Google is always charging for it. I think Apple is charging for it. And they publish those numbers.

It's just not.

Speaker 1: So weird.

Speaker 0: It's all part of the distraction to keep us guessing. Whatever you do, keep posting selfies. We need you to keep posting selfies, keep letting us know what you're doing.

See all PowerfulJRE transcripts on Youtube

Adam Curry's Analysis on US TikTok Ban and Twitter's FBI Links