Charlie Kirk Murder, Assassination Culture in America, Jimmy Kimmel Suspended, Ellison Media Empire

Okay, everybody. There’s no easy way to start today’s show. Eight days ago, Charlie Kirk was savagely murdered while doing what Americans love to do: debate. When someone is senselessly killed like this, especially at a young age and at the hands of another human, it’s only natural to try to make sense of it. It’s hard to imagine anything worse than a young father of 2, just 31 years old and entering the best and most productive years of his life, being killed by a 22-year-old who’s barely out of adolescence.

Our hearts go out to the Kirk family, his friends, fans, and every American who understands that no one should be killed for expressing their beliefs. That’s the core of the great American experiment. So let’s keep that experiment alive today, and keep alive the memory of Charlie Kirk, by continuing the great debate.

Besties, there’s a lot to process here as a community, a country, and a society, and I just want to check everybody’s temperature at the top of the program. We’re obviously not going to do a cold open here because that would be inappropriate. But Chamath, how are you processing the last 8 days? I actually wrote down something as well, which I normally don’t do. I just like to react.

Let me read that, and then maybe we can talk from there. To me, what Tyler Robinson illustrates is the emergence of a lost generation that was shaped by COVID years of isolation, a reliance on screens, and an immersion in online subcultures that have created a vacuum where some young men are drifting in without any grounding. No institutions, no friends, no communities, no family. Out of that void, I think what comes out can at best only be called ideological incoherence.

Somebody used the phrase “salad-bar extremism.” These individuals are not clearly aligned with any one ideology completely, but they seem to be assembling fragments of memes, conspiracies, and cultural signals into an unstable identity, and in some cases now it’s exploding into violence. I think the most troubling consequence isn’t just the act itself, which is abhorrent. I feel incredibly bad for all of Charlie’s friends, his family, his children, and obviously Charlie himself. But beyond the act itself, there’s an enormously chilling effect, I think, on public discourse.

When you express an idea, it cannot be that you then risk becoming a target, because the ultimate outcome of that is that fewer people will enter the public debate. Then what happens is the range of acceptable dialogue really narrows, and it only leaves space for the most benign voices in the public square. If you have that kind of anodyne discussion, I just think you have very bad outcomes for society. I’ve watched a lot of his content since he was murdered, and I’m still trying to grapple with why people could not shout the man down if they disagreed with him and instead shot the man down. I think that’s a completely unacceptable response to what he thought.

Well said. Friedberg, your thoughts?

I think it wasn’t his controversy; it was his effectiveness. He was too smart, too open, too honest, too willing to engage in discourse, too willing to debate. He was too effective at changing people’s minds. I think that’s why he became such a cultural threat. It wasn’t necessarily the things he said, because there are people out there who say far more controversial things than Charlie. It’s that he sounded sensible and changed people’s minds through his discourse.

As he changed people’s minds, I think he became a real threat to the ideologies that he spoke up against. I think that’s why he was targeted. It’s obvious that if he wasn’t as effective as he was, if he wasn’t as smart, empathetic, optimistic, honest, and direct as he was, he perhaps wouldn’t have been a target. It was very sad.

One of the things that we’ve seen is the power of going direct, sort of like what we did with this podcast. He went direct. He went to college campuses, but he also recorded it and put it on the internet, and millions of people saw it. That new form of media, that new form of communication, where someone can actually have a town square—the internet—that they can stand at and speak their mind and be heard, is important.

There are no longer these filters and controlling powers of influence that decide what we get to know and not know, and what our opinions need to be. The media and the traditional systems are being degraded. I think it’s important to continue that. One of the things that I’ve been optimistic about is that, although I was very sad and angry the day this happened—I called Chamath, and I was actually tearful that day—since that time, I think it’s been amazing to see the optimism not just from one side, but from a lot of different people from different backgrounds standing up and saying discourse is so important and re-underwriting this American process.

So I’m very sad, but I’m very hopeful that people take this as a sign of how important this discourse is.

Sacks, I don’t know if you knew him, but obviously he was instrumental, I think, in the MAGA movement and the conservative movement, and in moving so many young people over to it. Did you know him? Did you interact with him? What was he like, and how are you feeling 8 days into this? I know this is the second assassination attempt—third, actually—in this recent political season. Two on Trump, and now this one. This feels pretty dark. How are you feeling?

Yes, Jason. I knew him, and I considered Charlie a friend. I started doing his radio show a few years ago. He invited me on, and he proceeded to have me back. I think I went on the show about half a dozen times. It was always on a wide range of issues, but usually when I was on his show, we talked about tech, censorship, and foreign policy.

He was extremely versatile in the issues he could speak about. You saw that when he was speaking on campuses. He would really take on all comers, and every possible issue would be thrown at him, and he’d always have a well-thought-out response. In any event, I always tried to say yes to him. I always moved things around my schedule when he asked me to come on the show.

I just felt that he was a very positive person, very upbeat about the future. I think that he engaged in a very respectful type of debate with people. You see this on college campuses. He saw every opponent as someone that he could potentially persuade and convince to convert to his side.

There are clips of him going around where he explains that we all have to engage in dialogue in a democracy, because the alternative, when we stop talking, is that we become enemies, and eventually it leads to violence. He was very concerned about the rise of assassination culture. He wrote about this months before his death. I don’t think he saw his own death coming, but he definitely saw this disturbing rise of violence as the alternative to free speech and open discourse.

He dropped out of college when he was 18 to start Turning Point. He was a force of nature who put together this organization from scratch. He would go on these college campuses and put down his soapbox, or tent and chair, under a banner that said, “Prove me wrong,” and engage people in conversation.

Liberals like to use this term “platforming.” It’s usually the prelude to justifying why someone needs to be denied the opportunity to speak on a tech platform. But Charlie wasn’t platformed by somebody else. He created his own platform. He created this organization from scratch, and he was platforming liberals, leftists, woke people, or whoever. He was giving them the opportunity to debate with him, and his crowds got larger and larger.

People liked to see him speak and engage in these debates. He was platforming the other side and giving them the opportunity. But like Friedberg was saying, the more he did it, the more it became clear that his views were very well thought out and, oftentimes, the other side’s weren’t. If one side became hysterical, it was always the other side. It was never Charlie. He was always cool, calm, and collected.

He was winning the debate. He was winning the debate very effectively, and I think he was revealing, in a lot of cases, that these woke students had strongly held views, but they couldn’t really explain beyond the level of clichés why they believed what they believed. When he would start to ask them questions Socratically, it was rare that you would get someone on the other side who could go multiple questions deep with him and debate him with the level of knowledge that he had.

I think that, fundamentally, is why he was winning the debate. That’s why I think so many people of his generation and younger were really paying attention: He was offering them something that they weren’t getting elsewhere. They weren’t getting it through the school system. The school systems were drilling into their heads this sort of woke catechism about what they were supposed to believe, and he was actually offering them critical thinking, dialogue, and debate.

I think it’s why young people were flocking to him in droves. I do think that ultimately the reason why he was killed is because he was so effective at engaging in this kind of debate. We have it in the killer’s own words. The killer signed this very detailed confession—I should say, texted it to his alleged roommate and lover—about why he did it.

He said that, in his view, Charlie represented something hateful. I think the key thing he said right after that was, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

So, in other words, there’s no imperative to engage in dialogue, debate, or discourse with people who disagree with you, countering their arguments with better ones.

They just need to be silenced by any means necessary. That’s basically how the killer described his own motive: He essentially thought that there are views that have to be silenced with extreme violence, with murder, and that this was justifiable.

I think this is what hit a nerve for the whole country. Beyond those of us who knew Charlie and considered him a friend, and how much sadness and grief we have over losing him—and for his wife and his kids, who are going to grow up fatherless now—I think we all felt that this was a huge invasion of the town square, of the marketplace of ideas.

This happened on a college campus, which is supposed to be the ultimate marketplace of ideas. It’s supposed to be the place where people engage in reasoned discourse to work out our differences. It felt like an assault on the citadel of democracy.

Friedberg, you set up this amazing panel we just released, which I think we all agree was kind of a sleeper panel at the summit, with two of the heads of colleges. We talked deeply at the summit about dialogue and freedom of speech and nurturing that. Your thoughts on college campuses and free expression?

Whether it’s the college campus or whether Charlie Kirk and that genre move people via the internet, one of the things we talked about with the head of Berkeley and the head of Dartmouth is that college needs to be a place that teaches kids how to think, not what to think.

I think that was one of the things that Charlie exemplified better than anyone in this modern media genre: showing people that you can have a discourse, a debate, and a dialogue. In the same way, as a group, we’ve had fights, disagreements, and different points of view that we challenge each other on.

One of the things early on, when we started doing this podcast, was people telling me that they thought it was so cool to see friends argue like this and have discourse and debate. We still do it, and I think Charlie exemplified that. It teaches people how to think and allows them to form their own point of view.

I don’t believe in this notion that some system or some institution should be telling us what the truth is, what to believe, or what reality needs to be. They can present us with the facts and the evidence that they’ve sourced, and they can give us a recommendation. But ultimately, we need to have agency as individuals to form our own belief systems, form our own opinions, and make our own decisions.

I think what made Charlie so powerful was his ability to teach people how to do that—how to have a discourse and reason your way to an opinion. One of the things that’s changed so much in the last 20 years is this idea that there’s truth and there’s not truth, and whatever one institution tells you is truth and the other institution tells you is not truth, as opposed to giving ourselves individual agency.

I wasn’t his target audience, and so I was aware of Charlie Kirk, but I had only seen some of the clips while flipping through social media once in a while. I took the time, knowing we were going to talk about it here, to watch at least 40 or 50 of these interactions and listen to a couple of his podcasts.

My takeaway from it was, to your point, Sacks, that he was incredibly respectful to people he disagreed with—certainly more respectful than you at times, Sacks, when we have debates. He was actually playful and gregarious with these kids when they didn’t understand something.

There’s a lot of talk right now about people trying to point out where he was wrong. By the way, you don’t get to murder somebody because you believe they’re wrong. I know this sounds like the most obvious statement in the world.

What I came away with was that he reminded me of all the Catholic family members I grew up with. He was for family values. He was against abortion. He had specific feelings on affirmative action or DEI that we all might agree with. He might have said them at times in a spicy way or in a full-contact debate, but these were the same conversations I had growing up.

This is a situation where I’m perplexed, and I guess it goes back to where you started, Chamath: There are some number of people who are sick right now in our society, and it seems to be young men. It seems to be the COVID generation.

How does a person who is seemingly a 4.0 student, on the right track, and getting a scholarship so severely go off the rails? How do you end up in a place where you believe that something like this is even tolerated or justified? How can a person who’s that seemingly intelligent get to that place?

He was from a conservative family. It seemed like he had his whole life ahead of him and was on the right track at a certain age. If he’s capable of it, how many other people are going to end up in that place?

I think it’s a lack of socialization. We don’t know in this case, but I have very deep concerns about these SSRIs and Adderall. These kids have all kinds of mental health issues, and then they get put on a lot of different prescription drugs. We don’t know if that’s the case here, so I’m not speculating about that.

Just talking about this generation in general, if they are permanently online, they’re part of these subcultures. If they’re having their brains scrambled with all these different drugs, many young people are on 2 or 3 different medications. I’m not necessarily against them, but I do have a concern about them being massively overprescribed.

His entire justification, beyond the fact that it’s completely abhorrent and unacceptable, is also completely all over the place. I actually asked my team to explain to me the things that this guy wrote down. Where did they come from?

One of them is from a video game called Helldivers 2. Another one is from the furry subculture. Another one is a fascist theme from a Netflix show. What is going on?

Yeah. Well, look, we know some things about the killer’s ideology from what his family said, from what other people who knew him said, and from what he put in his own text messages explaining why he perpetrated this murder.

A big part of it was that, in his view, the basically mainstream conservative views that Charlie was discussing were hateful and fascist. On one of the bullet casings, he etched, “Catch this fascist.” He had this view, first of all, that violence is justified as a way to end a political debate, and that relatively mainstream conservative thought was so hateful and beyond the pale that it needed to be stopped.

I’d like to say that those views are so unusual that nobody else has them. But the truth is, if you look at the data and polling, you see that there’s been a huge rise among young people—particularly on the left, although there are some on the right—in the belief that political violence can be justified.

Insane.

There have been many different ways of getting at this. There was a study—I guess it was Rutgers University’s Social Perception Lab—that asked whether the murder of Donald Trump or Elon Musk could be justified.

Insane.

50% of those on the left of center said yes, and 14% of those on the right of center said yes. Even that number is shocking to me.

How could it be 1%?

But obviously, it’s three times greater on the left. Then they asked about destroying Tesla dealerships in protests and whether that could be justified. Roughly 60% of those on the left of center said yes, and 23% of those on the right of center said yes.

There is an increasing view among young people—and this also coincides with similar declines in respect for the value of free speech. They’ve been polling people of all different age groups and different political parties for many years on whether they believe in free speech. Those numbers have been on the decline, again particularly among young people and particularly on the left.

You see it now in the data: There is a generation of young liberals—not all of them, to be sure, but a sizable contingent—who believe that the other side is so hateful that it’s okay to use violence against them.

That is a huge societal problem, because democracy ends when we can’t debate ideas.

What’s at the root of it? I have 2 things I think are at the root of this. I talked a little bit earlier about the medication they’re putting all these kids on, and I’m going to keep talking about it because we’re talking about upwards of 20% of kids who have been on SSRIs, Adderall, or some stimulant right now.

It’s not possible that all these kids need this, and there are many other solutions to it. Then I’ll add the algorithms. Not that an algorithm is responsible for the murder, but we are taking people down rabbit holes online.

In fact, Charlie’s content was exceptional at engaging people: short-form, really interesting debates, and all that kind of stuff. That combination of being online too much, being overmedicated, and being isolated—you put all that together, Chamath, and I think that’s what leads to these kinds of extreme theories and disconnects from reality.

But we could also be dealing with somebody who’s severely mentally ill. We’re trying to understand a severely mentally ill person.

Hold on a second. Hold on. You’re starting to sound a little bit like Paul Graham, that this is just some sort of random nut.

Here’s why it’s not just some random nut. First of all, we have an extraordinarily detailed statement and confession from the killer, giving us a lens into his motives. But I would say the even bigger thing is the reaction of hundreds of thousands of people online who celebrated this murder, who were gleeful, who expressed some degree of happiness about it, or tried to downplay what the killer had done by saying, on some level, that Charlie Kirk deserved it.

Yeah.

So you have to ask: Where does that come from? I think this has to do again with the ideology of the left—not the traditional old left, because I think the old left really believed in free speech. Folks like Noam Chomsky. And, by the way, I think guys whom I would consider more old left, like Bernie Sanders and Ezra Klein, put out excellent statements denouncing this murder and agreeing with this core idea that political violence is never acceptable.

Yes.

And then they were shouted down, which is insane. Ezra got crushed for that. That tells you something, too. I think that the psychotic break, if you will, that is now occurring in a bunch of different cases may be exacerbated by—who knows?—medication, isolation experienced during COVID, or what have you. But there is clearly a huge ideological component to this: There are huge numbers of people, even if they don’t commit the crime themselves, who celebrate it because they’ve had drummed into their heads for decades now the idea that the other side are fascists, that their leader is like Hitler. What do you do to Hitler? You have to stop him at all costs. And I think that is a significant part of the problem here.

Now you ask, where does this ideology come from? I think it’s coming from the school system. For the last couple of decades, we’ve had this sort of woke ideology, this cultural Marxism, being taught through the school system, where they drum into kids that there are 2 kinds of people: oppressors or oppressed. They divide people into these groups and say that the oppressors have to be stopped. That’s really as deep as the discussion gets.

If you want to get a sense of this exaggerated, destructive rhetoric, just look at the new book that has come out by Randi Weingarten, who is basically the head of our school system because she runs the teachers unions, and they’re the ones who have all the political power. She wrote, “Why Fascists Hate Critical Thinking.” And, by the way, this is not just an article. I guess Rolling Stone did an excerpt. This is an entire book, and the book is called Why Fascists Fear Teachers. So she’s basically saying that Trump and all of his supporters are fascists. They have to be stopped.

You’ve had this hyperbolic rhetoric for a decade. You’ve had the press describe Trump as some sort of new Hitler. To use Scott Adams’s term, they’ve basically Hitlerized him. We don’t know exactly where Tyler Robinson imbibed all of these ideas, but you also have to take into account that probably since he was 12 years old, the mainstream media has been beating into his head that the leader of the United States is a new Hitler, that the worst thing that could ever happen is his return, and that his supporters are fascists.

I’m sure this has to play into, if not his thinking, the thinking of the people who are celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, because they’ve bought into this idea that the other side are fascists who have to be stopped at all costs.

Yeah. I think it’s important to point out, as you did, that Mamdani, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Ezra Klein all came out very strongly that this is horrible and unacceptable, and obviously think it’s abhorrent. I think that leadership is strong, and I think that’s what we need to see more of: people trying to tone this down and not exacerbate it.

Look, I think you’re right. What we need to see from all of our political leaders is a condemnation of this murder in particular and political violence in general, without any caveats whatsoever, without intimations that somehow Charlie Kirk deserved it, without this exaggerated rhetoric that the other side is fascist, that Trump is Hitler, and so on. There just needs to be an unequivocal denunciation of this crime and political violence, and of the idea that we can settle our differences in this manner.

Yeah.

I give credit to any liberal or Democratic politicians who say that. But unfortunately, that has not been the discussion. I think that’s been one of the most disturbing things about this. If it had just been Tyler Robinson and everybody agreed that this was a heinous act—a heinous murder—I don’t think we would have had the same national conversation. It would have been awful, but I think the reason this became such a national conversation is that we can all see that, living among us, there are huge numbers of people who’ve been indoctrinated into what Scott Adams called this “Hitler bubble.”

I think it’s a real question what we’re going to do to get out of this bubble, because in order to have civil society, we have to be able to engage in conversations and have political debates without fear of violence or murder. When you have this sizable contingent of people in our society who’ve deviated from that, it makes you really worry for the future of our society.

Absolutely. And it makes you wonder, what are we going to do about this? There’s a whole trans angle to this that is being talked about, but maybe people are withholding a little bit. He was answering a trans question when he was shot by somebody whose—“girlfriend” would probably be the right way to say it—was in the middle of transitioning. So there are many different angles here that we’re going to try to understand over time.

Right. In response to that, you saw an ABC News reporter describe the text chain, which was a murder confession, as “touching.” That ABC reporter has now published an apology, so I’m not going to dwell on that part of it. But I think what you see here is an upside-down morality.

What Tyler Robinson did was an act of hate—the ultimate act of hate. He committed murder. He left a wife without a husband. He left 2 children without a father. It was the ultimate act of hate. But in his twisted mindset, it was somehow an act of love. And the question is, how do we get to this place?

Again, if it was just Tyler Robinson, then we could chalk it up to the random-nut theory. But—

Well, we don’t know the random nut who shot Trump. We don’t have any information on that person either.

Right. But what bothers me more, again, are all these people in Reddit groups, online, and on Bluesky, which is just a cesspool of hate now, who are celebrating—

Celebrating to some degree.

No, there are definitely people celebrating.

Yeah. This is why I really think one of the most constructive things we can do coming out of this is find out how to course-correct these people.

Actually, J.K. Rowling had a really good tweet on this. She says, “If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you’re illiberal.” I think we’ve known that for a while, and I don’t know if the woke left cares about that anymore. But she then goes on to say, “If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you’re a totalitarian.”

I think the most important one is, “If you believe political opponents should be punished with violence or death, you’re a terrorist.” I think this was actually an act of terrorism in the sense that it was designed to discourage other people from speaking out. It was done in the most public place, in the town square.

But I think what Rowling is getting at here is that in order for civil society to survive, we’re going to need some sort of minimum standard of decency. I remember when we were in college, we used to have these thought-experiment-type questions, like, “How much intolerance can a tolerant society tolerate?” Things like that.

I think we have our answer: You can say whatever you want, but our minimum standard of decency in a society is that you cannot use violence to settle political disagreements. If you cannot accept that, that really should be the pledge instead of, frankly, Grover Norquist’s tax pledge or even the pledge about deficit spending.

I think we need a minimum-decency pledge that political violence is unacceptable. If you can’t sign that pledge, you should not be participating in the discourse.

I mean, the fact that you have to even suggest signing a pledge not to murder people you disagree with shows how far gone all of this is and how disturbing it is. That should be inherent in every human being’s operating system. You just don’t murder people because you disagree with them.

All right. Obviously, this is an evolving story. We don’t have all the answers here, but you see the Jimmy Kimmel comments. Should we play those and talk about it?

Yeah, I guess it’s a pretty good segue here. Political-discourse-adjacent, related: The fallout from the murder of Charlie Kirk is going to stay with us for some time. ABC has suspended Jimmy Kimmel from Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely after he made the following remarks, amid pressure from the FCC and ABC affiliates. Here’s the 15-second clip.

Jimmy Kimmel

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”

And he goes on to show a clip of Trump.

Yeah, but I think you also left out that sentence right after that, where he says, “Yeah, there was grieving, but it was like a 4-year-old grieving the death of a goldfish.”

Yeah. Pretty inappropriate comments, I think. And here's the timeline of it. There was some thinking this could have been a MAGA person because the parents were conservatives, and during that breaking news, maybe that first sentence wouldn't be as off-putting or inaccurate as it seems to be. But he said it Monday night, and this was 3 days after we knew about the antifascist bullet casings that Chamath was referencing—“Hey, fascist, catch,” et cetera.

This was 1 day after Utah's governor was very clear that this was a murderer who had leftist ideology, and 1 day after it was disclosed that Robinson had been living with a trans partner, which may or may not turn out to be relevant. You could totally be gay or have a trans partner or any of that, and it may have nothing to do with this, or it could have everything to do with this. So we'll have to wait and see.

And Sacks, weren't the text messages out by then as well?

Well, the text messages with his partner—that's very good. Those were actually released on Tuesday after the show aired, and they usually tape in the afternoons for those nightly shows, just so people know that. So there was enough information here that he was inaccurate or spinning the story, however you want to phrase it. It was clumsy.

Megyn Kelly put out a very long description of everything that was known prior to Jimmy Kimmel's remarks, and there was a huge amount of information to indicate that this was someone who was in the grips of a radical leftist ideology, and no evidence to suggest that they were somehow part of MAGA. What Jimmy Kimmel did there was viciously lie.

I think he was implying, or stating outright, that effectively Charlie Kirk was killed by one of his own, by a MAGA person, thereby diminishing the crime and somehow implying that maybe he deserved it. Then he diminished the sincere grief and outrage that millions of people are feeling—not just those of us who were friends with Charlie and knew Charlie, but millions of people.

That is okay. In free speech, Sacks, that statement is his choice. He might lose audience over it, but free speech protects him doing that. The challenge was: Did he say something that he knew to be untrue and declare it as fact? Was that the reaction that he got?

Yeah.

Yeah. And so if he said something that he knew—

Well, just reading his sentence, he was saying, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” So he's referencing the weekend. You could say he's being disingenuous here, but I think he's not even supposed to be a late-night comedian.

It is inaccurate. It's highly inaccurate.

It's a lie and it's a vicious lie. I'm not defending it, but it was not inaccurate that people were doing that speculation. During a podcast on Tuesday, FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who we all know, said the FCC would look into revoking the broadcast license of ABC affiliates because Jimmy Kimmel was engaging in, quote, “news distortion” by falsely claiming Tyler Robinson was MAGA.

On Wednesday, Nexstar, one of ABC's affiliates that has 28 local stations, said it would be replacing Kimmel's show with different programming. There's now this backstory that Nexstar is buying a rival for $6 billion. So the speculation is like the CBS and Paramount situation, where they fired Colbert on July 17, that they don't want to get caught up in having the 47th administration gumming up their M&A activity.

Then ABC, after all that, pulled Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely. So I guess the question here is—

Pull up the ratings. Pull up the ratings over time.

We'll get to all that, but I just—

Ask the question.

Do you have concerns about this, Sacks? Obviously, you've been very pro-free speech here. Do you think that this is overreaching? If he hurt people's feelings, if he said something inaccurate, do you think the government should be taking him off the air or putting pressure on them to take him off the air?

Well, no. The government shouldn't be ordering him to be taken off the air, but neither President Trump nor FCC Chairman Brendan Carr did that. The reason why Kimmel lost his job is because the 2 largest affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, told ABC/Disney that they wouldn't air it anymore.

I think part of this is due to the genuine offense at what he said, which, okay, I guess you can put the best face you want on it. It was false and it was a flip way of describing something that was causing pain to millions of Americans. Nexstar called his remarks offensive and insensitive. That is true. Sinclair said that they're going to air a Kirk tribute in Kimmel's time slot on Friday.

So look, I think this is about the affiliates, first of all, finding what he said completely offensive. But then, secondarily, the truth is that I think there's a lot of opportunism in this, and this is really about poor ratings. Kimmel has even worse ratings than Stephen Colbert, who recently got canceled because his show was too expensive and not enough people were watching it.

I think what's happening here is that the ABC affiliates are, frankly, seizing an opportunity to rid themselves of this money-losing disaster, and they're getting back that hour of television for other things.

The question is whether Carr should have said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” That's what I'm referencing in terms of the government putting pressure on these folks to cancel him.

Well, look, Carr was asked whether—by, I think, he was on Benny Johnson's show—and Benny asked whether there's anything that can be done about this. Then Carr said that there is a public-interest requirement with respect to the broadcast networks.

So if Jimmy Kimmel's show was on a podcast or on cable, that public-interest requirement wouldn't apply. But because those affiliates receive public spectrum for free, there is a requirement that the reporting be truthful to some degree and serve the public interest. I think he was right to point that out.

Now, look, did it ever get to the point where the government ordered him off the air? No. It didn't need to get to that point because the guy's show was a ratings disaster. Even Jon Stewart, who was a big late-night host at one point, said—let me just read you his quote, not on this topic, but about late night. He said, “Being a late-night host is like operating a Blockbuster Video kiosk inside a Tower Records.”

In other words, the business model is totally obsolete. I think that's what's ultimately driving this. We never got to the point where the FCC took an action, and I think if we got to that point, then maybe we debate this issue of what the government should do. But we never got to that point, and I think it's because the affiliates decided on their own that it was time for Kimmel to go.

Chamath, your thoughts?

It's mostly that if you just look at the ratings, the reality is that these folks get a lot more attention than they actually deserve. It's an anemically sad audience approaching zero. 160,000 people watch Jimmy Kimmel Live. More people hate-stream our show in 1 day on YouTube. So what are we talking about here? This is like the pimple of the pimple of the pimple of the dog's ass.

I think that people needed air cover to make a decision to cancel it today. The reason why they wanted to cancel it today was that if they didn't take this opportunity, they would have had to wait another year or 2 for his renewal to come up. So I think there was an economic motivation that was lingering for a long time before this happened.

His show sucks. It's not very good. That's a very basic social, cultural, economic reality, as these numbers demonstrate. Many, many, many millions of Americans who had a choice every day to listen to this guy voted with their feet that this show sucked.

Let's move on. I will say I agree that they made a very simple decision that was economic, because these same networks, ABC and CBS, were more than happy when these shows were pulling in serious ratings and serious money back 3, 4, 5 years ago. They were doing much better, which shows you how cable has come apart over the last couple of years.

In 2022, ABC signed Kimmel to 3 seasons for $45 million. In 2023, CBS signed Colbert to a 3-year deal that will be ending, and as you showed in that chart, it's been plummeting since then. Quick note: That's just for the very important 18–49 demographic. Obviously, they have a bunch of old boomers watching it on their cable channels. That's the discrepancy in those numbers.

Nobody watches this.

But I do have grave concerns, myself, about what Brendan Carr is doing. I don't think the FCC—

—can't do anything.

Well, I can finish my sentence, maybe.

Okay.

Or you can just interrupt me every time I start a sentence. We just talked about having civil discourse.

Do you want to have civil discourse, or do you just want to shoot me down?

I do have concerns over both how the administration is doing this. I think it's disgraceful. I didn't like the pressure they put CBS under to get Colbert canceled, and I don't like the pressure they're putting ABC News under. We should have a tradition of free speech, and comedians should be protected even if you don't like what they have to say.

This is the exact opposite of what many folks wanted and why they backed this administration: to have less censorship. We sat here on this program for many years talking about Biden censoring COVID talk and Biden censoring social media, with the Twitter Files showing a direct line in there to cancel this. I think that this can—hold on, let me finish. It's a dark moment for this administration to be so obsessed with trying to silence its critics, and it's not going to work. It's only going to drive them to start podcasts and do more of it. Yes, go ahead.

I'm civil in the first sentence.

Please go ahead.

I do have concerns over both how the administration is doing this. I think it's disgraceful. I didn't like the pressure they put CBS under to get Colbert canceled, and I don't like the pressure they're putting ABC News under. We should have a tradition of free speech, and comedians should be protected even if you don't like what they have to say.

This is the exact opposite of what many folks wanted and why they backed this administration: to have less censorship. We sat here on this program for many years talking about Biden censoring COVID talk and Biden censoring social media, with the Twitter Files showing a direct line in there to cancel this. I think that this can—hold on, let me finish. It's a dark moment for this administration to be so obsessed with trying to silence its critics, and it's not going to work. It's only going to drive them to start podcasts and do more of it. Yes, go ahead.

Can I ask you a question?

Yeah.

Well, first, I want to make a statement. I think your comments are insane. But here's my question.

I think you're also sycophantic to Trump.

What? What did I say? I said he didn't do anything.

No, I think you're trying to suck up to Trump by saying it's a terrible show and he's not funny. None of that matters in terms of freedom of speech.

I'm trying to ask you a question. Do you think the government did nothing? Let's just be clear: they did nothing.

They threatened him.

After he was already canceled.

No.

And they shouldn't be applying any pressure. The government should be staying out of it.

Okay. Let me ask you a question.

Do you think the people who made the decision to dump Kimmel—what percentage of it do you think was the economic reality of a busted show, and what percentage of it do you think was the infringement of free speech, as you characterize it? What percentage?

Absolutely. I think they would have let both of their contracts run out, renegotiated them with smaller dollar amounts, and reset the economics of those shows if not for the pressure put on them by the 47th administration. I think they would have just ridden these shows out until their next contracts ran out, and then they would have renegotiated them at much lower amounts.

You think Trump is the reason why Colbert got canceled? What are you talking about?

I think that the pressure—

This is like a whole mythology now that's been created.

Not a pathology. I think they wanted to get the Paramount deal through.

No, no. I think getting the Paramount deal through—the sale of Paramount—

And I think they've settled a lot of these agreements because they don't want them going away.

Well, that can all be true. Two things can be true at the same time. Jon Stewart understands the medium, and he says it's a Blockbuster store. They can't wait to be rid of these guys. These guys are overpaid. They're entitled because they're grossly overpaid. They think they deserve this.

By the way, free speech does not mean you have a right to an ABC show. Sorry. You actually have to be able to get ratings. You have to be talented. You have to be funny, which none of these guys are anymore. That's the reason they're getting canceled.

Exactly.

You know what? They're talking about replacing Kimmel with—not another late-night performer, but Celebrity Family Feud. That's what they're talking about replacing it with, a game show.

Great show, by the way. It's a more affordable show. They would not have canceled either of these folks if it weren't for pressure from the administration. The FCC head—

Basically said, “We're going to do this one way or the other.”

So, I believe that this is the kind of thing we don't want to see out of the Trump administration. And by the way, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and I are all in sync on this. We all think that this is a bad look for Trump and the Trump administration. You guys can disagree, but that's what we do here. We have several disagreements.

Where were all the people who were complaining about this when Gina Carano got fired by Disney?

Oh, I absolutely felt that was inappropriate. I think cancellation is happening now on both sides, the left and the right, and I understand people are very hurt by what happened.

Are you cool with Roseanne Barr getting fired?

I am against anybody getting canceled for their political beliefs. I was against it when they did it to the right, and I'm against it when they're doing it now to the left. Is that clear?

Let's talk about cancel culture for a second. I actually think that Dave Portnoy had a great take on this. There is a legitimate question here about cancel culture: Should it ever be used, and when should it be used? I think Portnoy made a really good point. He says, “To me, cancel culture is when people go out of their way to dig up old tweets, videos, et cetera, looking for dirt on someone.”

In other words, they're going through 10- or 20-year-old tweets of yours. Maybe they find some joke that was either off-color or in poor taste, or maybe it's just something they can spin as being that thing, and it's done in an opposition-research type of way. They decide they're going to go after you, so they sort through everything you've ever written. That's cancel culture.

He contrasts that with somebody who is on live TV, basically saying something that a ton of people find offensive, rude, and dumb in real time. In other words, this was not opposition research. This was a spontaneous reaction to a deeply offensive, insulting, dishonest, and false thing that Jimmy Kimmel said.

He was already on thin ice because his ratings are terrible and his syndicators want to get rid of him. And, like Portnoy says, that is not cancel culture. That is consequences for your actions. I think he's right about that. And I am a free-speech absolutist. If Jimmy Kimmel wants to create a podcast and say all the types of things he said on ABC, I have no problem with that. That's his right. He will not be censored. He can do that.

My view on the whole public-interest requirement is that we should just auction off all the network spectrum. I think it's a can of worms to basically say to all these broadcast affiliates, “We're going to give you all this wonderful free spectrum, but then you have to uphold the public interest.” It's way too debatable what that means. I do think it basically invites challenges to what could be free speech. So, I think just get rid of the public spectrum. Just have an auction. We don't need free public spectrum for broadcasting.

I definitely agree with that. In the era of the internet, you don't need public spectrum anymore. I think that solution has a lot of positives beyond this issue. I think that—

The best use of that spectrum anyway.

And just to go back to this idea: If someone in real time is advocating for the murder of someone for their political views or for any reason, maybe that does justify a spontaneous outpouring where it should be reported to their employer: “Hey, this person is saying this thing.”

If they're dancing on the grave of someone, if they're praising that act of murder, I have to say that I have a minimum standard of decency for civil society. And that minimum standard of decency is an unwillingness to engage in political violence or to celebrate political violence when somebody engages in it, because otherwise we're down the path of civil war. I think we all understand that.

Yeah.

So, I have to say that if someone's going to advocate for these views, I'm okay with there being a spontaneous reaction of people complaining about it. And if that means that Jimmy Kimmel does a podcast instead of an ABC show in prime time, I'm okay with that.

I think the issue I have with any of these cancellations is when the president is asking the networks to cancel people during his 17-times-a-day press conference and working with a gaggle, he's literally telling them, “Fire the last 2,” and then the FCC chair is telling them to fire them and that they'll figure out a way to do it. That, to me, is the height of putting pressure on these companies, and I think it's abhorrent. That's just my personal belief. You guys don't have to agree with it in this civil debate we're having here.

Let's talk about Larry and David Ellison. They're making massive media moves, both in legacy and social media. Let's talk about the legacy stuff first. The Paramount Skydance merger is basically a month old, and already CEO David Ellison—that's Larry Ellison's son—is looking to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery.

As you probably know, it's run by David Zaslav. They own CNN, HBO, DC Comics, Discovery, and a bunch of other brands. That would put the Ellisons in charge of not just CBS News, which owns 60 Minutes, but also CNN.

As everybody knows, Larry Ellison has been a big GOP donor in the past. There are also reports, interestingly, that David Ellison wants to buy The Free Press from Bari Weiss for $200 million and put her in charge of CBS and 60 Minutes. That would be seismic in the news business.

If you put those assets together, that would be 200 million paid subscribers: HBO and Discovery have 120 million paid subscribers right now, and CBS reaches 80 million paid subscribers with Paramount+.

The Free Press is obviously niche and brand-new, but they're growing. They have 136,000 paid subscribers and almost 1 million followers across their social media.

The second piece to this puzzle that's super interesting is social media. Oracle is now the heavy favorite to acquire TikTok, and Trump said that was going to happen as part of the US-China negotiations that are ongoing for trade.

So, what are your thoughts here, Friedberg? You wanted to talk about this. This is an interesting collection of assets coming under the Ellison umbrella. Is this strategic? Is this vanity? Is it a nepo baby with a huge blank checkbook? What are we seeing here, and what do you think?

I mean, what do you do when you're worth a couple hundred billion dollars and you're 81 years old and you're thinking about what legacy you want to leave behind, except to perhaps empower your kid to build the largest, most influential media company in history?

I think that's the story that's unfolding in front of us. Not to mention, I think that the TikTok deal and Ellison's role in TikTok are going to be instrumental in realizing potential future distribution.

So, if you think about the way media has evolved, it used to be kind of centralized, studio-based production models: the old Paramount, the old Warner Bros., et cetera. Then there have been a lot of streamers that have come on and started to syndicate that content and contract for production of content, like Netflix. Obviously, Paramount Plus and HBO Max have their own streaming services to deliver their own content.

But at the end of the day, there are kind of 2 big behemoths that each come at it from a different place. One is YouTube, and the other one is Netflix. Netflix has historically been on the scripted production or contracted production side, and YouTube on the social-production side.

The alternative to that might be this consolidated merger, and TikTok—and now Larry Ellison is going to have a hand in both. There may be, and I do think that there's going to be, this convergence between a socially generated content platform like YouTube or TikTok and the high-value produced content that the studios, like Netflix, have been doing.

The reason is that Netflix has had to compress margins on the content creators. We talked about this at our summit last week, where a lot of the creators that went to Netflix to get good deals or went to Amazon are all finding that the budgets are getting cut, and that the only way these folks are going to get paid is cost of production plus 10%.

With the cost of production and budgets getting squeezed by Netflix, as a creator, you may actually make more money by taking your content to a bigger audience with sponsors or advertisers on YouTube. A lot of big-time creators, by the way—the audience on YouTube is over 10 times bigger than it is on Netflix.

Netflix is only paying to retain subscribers. Subscriber growth has slowed down a bit. At the end of the day, Netflix is just spending money on content to keep people on the platform.

So, if you take the incredibly rich content and production capabilities of HBO and all the Warner Bros. Discovery media properties and production houses underneath this combined company, and you combine that with the direct-to-consumer distribution of TikTok, there may, in the future, be a merger between this media company and TikTok, or a deep commercial relationship.

Imagine going on TikTok and now being able to get premium content for $10 a month or $2 an episode, and watch all of your HBO shows in the TikTok app. Or watch all of the Discovery content or all of the other content that's available.

I do think that the distribution delivered by this kind of social media model, like YouTube and TikTok, combined with the premium model, may end up creating a real category killer that can challenge both YouTube and Netflix. I would look at this story as the beginning of something that may rewrite the entire media landscape.

I mean, when you look back on it, Katzenberg was maybe ahead of his time with Quibi. He wanted to try to make this bridge between the two, and he just might have been too early or just didn't execute.

Well, think about the network effects. What made TikTok so big and what made YouTube so big is the long tail of user-generated content. That's what drove the audience, built the platform, and made it mainstream, right?

Yeah. Then you can do the premium stuff on top of it. But when you try to create premium content in a small way, like Katzenberg tried to do, it's very hard to build the audience to make the economics make sense.

The economics are really challenging already with premium content in the big players, as you can see with Netflix. They're compressing budgets. So, I would argue that you really need to have them both to make the model work now, because the audience is so attuned to user-generated content.

Polymarket gives Larry Ellison or Oracle—kind of the same thing here—an 84% chance to acquire TikTok. That's up over 20 percentage points in the last couple of days.

What do you think all this means? The divestiture of TikTok, Larry Ellison getting it as opposed to Google, Apple, or Microsoft—I mean, there were so many people, maybe even Elon, who might have wanted TikTok. What do you think of this divestiture? And our government gets the golden vote now. I understand that the US government will have a seat on the board of TikTok.

So, the Chinese have given it up except for the algorithm. What are your thoughts?

Remember, it's TikTok—it's TikTok US. It's only 5% to 8% of the overall TikTok business. So, TikTok US is what's being spun out.

Yes. Correct.

Chamath, what do you think here?

I think there are 2 things that are important. The first is that in the future—and this may sound very dystopian—he who controls the algorithm will control what people think.

If you think about it in that context, you need, as you've said before, a marketplace of very different approaches and algorithms that are essentially fighting for mind share. If you don't have that, you'll have a massive zombie groupthink culture.

From that perspective, you have to put TikTok into the hands of a completely different owner than any of these other social media sites, so that they are motivated to compete against each other. That's 1.

The second thing is that there's been a lot said about the TikTok algorithm called Monolith, and a bunch of it has already been put out openly. TikTok was very transparent, and they published a paper. You can find it on arXiv. You can show the link to it, Nick, maybe in the show notes, but it's an incredible paper that describes a very simplistic approach to essentially moving people in different directions of thought.

If you put all of these ideas together, I think where we may be coming all the way back to where we started this discussion about Charlie Kirk, it is increasingly important to make sure that the overwhelming majority of how people get ideas is understood by the rest of the people.

Because if you start to go down these rabbit holes in ways that are algorithmically programmed in models that you don't understand, and that then push you into extremism, you will end up in a very, very, very bad place, as will society. The outcomes of that are completely avoidable, as we're seeing.

Yes.

So, I think that the TikTok thing is going to be one of these important moments where we shine a light on the importance of these algorithms. It's poorly understood. It's not well talked about, but I think what the Trump administration is doing is important to keep it away from everybody else so that there's more competition.

Yeah, I'm going to strongly agree. I think the Trump administration did a great job on this one, just calling balls and strikes and making sure Meta didn't get it, or somebody who already has a lot of algorithmic control over what society is seeing.

Just on this, I give a lot of credit to Elon, too, because his algorithm is open source. We know what's happening there.

He just did it 2 weeks ago. Yeah.

If that's open source and Monolith is open source, then I think the next big question we have to ask is: What is going on in Reddit? What is going on in Meta?

How are we guiding and shaping people? Why does YouTube sometimes, for example, apparently deem our Tulsi Gabbard video too risqué—adult content? Who decided that? How did that happen?

An algorithm. Not any human.

The thing I think is important to start thinking about here is that, as an industry, we're going to either need to regulate this ourselves or be regulated.

I think that there should be regulation, and I'm not a super big fan of regulation, but algorithms must be disclosed, and you must have the option given to you upfront to switch your algorithm. There should be a BYOA—bring your own algorithm. There should be an algorithm store.

I talked to Elon about this publicly on X many times. If you could say, “I want one that just gives me a chronological feed. I want one that is from the highest-quality sources,” then you should be required to show what the default algorithm is doing.

If you don't do that, I think you should lose your Section 230, because an algorithm is more powerful than an editor at The New York Times or an editor at HBO or Netflix deciding what we see and deciding what goes on the homepage.

The algorithm is a black box, and who knows who's controlling it? What happens in society when young men are pushed toward more and more fringe content, more and more dark content? Why not just have all this be transparent? Why not let people see?

Unfortunately, they don't need to be pushed to fringe content. All they need to do is go to a school where the woke curriculum has been mainstreamed. And bingo. Randi Weingarten's foot soldiers are saying that conservatives are fascists.

So, you're acting like you've got to go through some weird rabbit hole to imbibe these ideologies, when all you have to do is attend a public school—and probably a lot of private ones, too.

I think Dalton's probably the worst. So, again, you're acting like the radicalization's coming from the fringes. I think what's so concerning about where we are as a society is that the radicalization's coming from our institutions, or a lot of these institutions.

You're not going to get an argument with me. I think these schools should be teaching basic skills, and they should not be involved in the culture wars in any way. I don't think any parent is setting their kids there. If you are a parent and you're in California, I would encourage you to figure out what they're teaching your kids.

It's quite different here, by the way. It's quite different here in the great state of Texas, I can tell you, having lived in both places with 3 kids.

Yeah, I get it. And that's why a lot of people move to red states, because they care about that. But did someone mention that our Tulsi video from the All-In Summit has been—

Partially censored on YouTube.

So, what happened is I was at my office yesterday, and I opened up our YouTube channel because Nick had sent out a link that something new had posted. I went to see what had posted that day, and I pulled it up. I saw the Summit videos, and I saw that Tulsi wasn't there. I thought, “Wait, didn't we post Tulsi?” Then I looked for it, and I couldn't find it. I texted Nick, and he said it was there. I clicked on it, and it said, “Restricted Mode is on.”

What does that mean? Apparently, if your network administrator has set your enterprise network to Restricted Mode—as ours was at my office—it prevents people from looking at adult content on the network and that kind of stuff. When you have Restricted Mode on, YouTube turns off anything that would fall under mature audiences. It says, “Activate Restricted Mode,” so it prevents a huge number of people from seeing it.

A huge number of people.

That's a huge number of people. This would have been the 2nd-most-viewed video, I guarantee you, after the Elon video—maybe the most viewed. I was shocked. I said, “How is it possible that this video is struggling to be in the top half?” This is why: You can't even see it.

Well, it's unclear. Certain videos then get tagged as being for mature audiences, and they don't show up in Restricted Mode by the algorithm on YouTube.

Oh, so the algorithm did it again. It wasn't user reporting it?

I'll give you guys my theory. My theory is that the term “Russiagate” comes up, along with those sorts of terms, and I think those terms are triggers if they're in the transcript. They're triggers for the video to be under some kind of safe—

Debunking Russiagate, right?

But I don't think—do you think if it was a video espousing and promoting the Russiagate hoax that it would have gotten censored this way?

It's a good question. I don't know. We can test that by looking for other people discussing it. You mentioned Scott Adams earlier. He talks about it 17 times in 1 episode.

By the way, this is a government official in the White House—the director of national intelligence—providing an interview on national intelligence and being filtered out as being for adults only. Very weird.

This is insane. It's like when Trump, as the sitting president, got banned from social media. This is a public official describing—

An intelligence investigation.

She is doing an investigation and reading out an investigation. Putting aside the topic, it's a discussion. Who on earth would think that this is something people shouldn't consume? Why is this being flagged as adult? What's adult about it in any way? It makes no sense.

Or it's for a mature audience. There's some definition around it. I think there are some keywords that triggered it, without acknowledging or recognizing the algorithm. This is one of the points Chamath was making: We don't know how the algorithms work, because the algorithms clearly cannot determine that this is an actual government official and therefore should not be restricting access to the content.

I don't know, man. AI has gotten a lot better in the last year. It seems like this would be an easy algorithm. Here's what YouTube says about its filter: “This helps hide potentially mature videos. No filter is 100% accurate.”

I wonder if it's also people reporting stuff they don't like. People would do this report bombing: Get 20 different people in a Signal group or a Discord group to report the video from different IP addresses and file reports to silence it. That happens.

Here's the question with respect to the error rate: What percentage of those videos are conservative versus liberal in their ideological content?

Are Bernie Sanders and Mamdani getting the same treatment? If conservative content and liberal content are both subject to the same error rate, then they have a leg to stand on, maybe. I still don't think they should be doing this, by the way.

Wait a second. Did Tucker and Mark Cuban also get censored?

That's a debate. I don't understand. Wait, what happened with that?

Anyway, Neil, can you check this out and report back to customer support here? Go ahead, Cham.

The Tucker-Cuban debate was a perfect example of civil discourse.

Yeah, there was a hug.

I think this is an example. There was a famous media theorist named Marshall McLuhan, and he had this quote: “The medium is the message.” What did he mean by that? He meant that the characteristics of the medium itself—the way information is delivered—have a greater impact on society and individuals than the actual content of the message.

What he's foreshadowing is the importance of these algorithms and these decisions that happen in the shadows, because the weight of those decisions has all of these downstream impacts. This is why they should be transparent. Why can't I see my YouTube algorithm?

I can confirm that Tucker and Mark Cuban also get filtered.

This is insane. Basically, Tucker and Tulsi are getting filtered.

All right, listen. Great segue here, because we didn't get to recap the Summit. Paradoxically, we had a real discussion about the importance of debate, friendship, and the process we try to follow here and at the Summit, which is to let a lot of people speak and debate important issues. The Tulsi discussion and the college and university heads discussions were important, but people didn't see our recap.

Just going around the horn here, what great moments did you feel were important or enlightening to you? Chamath, did you have a moment at the Summit—one of your amazing insights—that you felt was particularly insightful and that you want to share with the audience?

I think the most important conversation there was the one with Tulsi. I really do. At a very basic level, why does America go to war? Why do we fight wars? Why are men and women being killed?

It's the same thing with Charlie Kirk. I get so agitated with this idea that a human being believes they have the judgment to take somebody else's life. To me, it's incomprehensible. It's so wrong. It's so immoral. It's just so wrong.

What she talked about and what she's exposing is the cascade of lies that causes an entire generation to lose tens of thousands of their brothers and sisters—to lose your son and your daughter. That was the most important conversation we had by a country mile.

Friedberg, do you have a moment that was either entertaining, enlightening, or important? I'll let you take any angle on it.

I would recount the wrap-up that we did at the end of Day 2. When we first started planning the content for the Summit this year, I was thinking about trying to get a bunch of American speakers for Day 1 and then a bunch of international speakers for Day 2, where we could contrast the American perspective with the global perspective and hear how the rest of the world views the world and views America, and how America views America and views the world.

It was hard to get the scheduling right. The way things ended up getting scheduled, we tried to cluster the conversations into different themes, but I didn't feel like we were going to get the orientation I was hoping for. We ended up having just a bunch of conversations.

What was really powerful for me was the similarity we saw with Elon, with Tucker and Mark Cuban, with Alex Karp, and, I think, also with Eric Schmidt. It's this idea that much of what we see in terms of the evolution of society in the West can be viewed through a lens of suicide.

The West may be committing suicide financially through our deficit spending, in terms of birth-rate decline. We're destroying our dollar, and we're destroying our headcount because of the birth-rate decline. Then there's this immigration-policy issue, where we're potentially destroying cultures, which was a topic that came up a few times. Perhaps, thinking about the Tulsi comments, we're destroying ourselves by thrusting ourselves into war and chopping our heads off.

And then we heard a lot of optimism. We heard a lot of technologists and a lot of folks talk about the options and the choice we have, and that we have a choice to reverse these trends and change how we’re behaving as a society. So it all came together as one long string. We ended it with this idea that there’s choice: You have a choice to go forward, or you have a choice to commit suicide.

What really hit me was that then we walked out, and the Charlie Kirk murder happened. It created an emotional wrapper for me around the conversations we had—that there were a lot of people who were going to make different choices.

I just wish we could do a summary of what it was like at the summit instead of each one of these talks standing on their own. They work well on their own, but I think that whole set of conversations leading to that point of view was really important and poignant for me. Did we end up publishing our final wrap-up conversation?

Not yet.

We have not done it. What I want to do is include it with the summary video, at the end of the summary video. I want to say, “Here are a couple of key points from the talks,” once we get all the talks out, and then have our wrap-up conversation, which I think we should do.

Sacks, you were incredibly engaged in this summit. You showed up and you were engaged. Were there moments that you found particularly enlightening, inspiring, or fun?

Oh, my gosh. We just found out that the Karp interview has also been censored on Restricted Mode on YouTube. So, basically, the 3 talks were Tucker, Tulsi, and Karp, which, by the way, I think, if you had the audience vote on what was most engaging and interesting—

Those were the 3 best.

Those are up.

Yeah, and there are a lot of other really good ones, but those ones—

I think those were the most captivating. You could see that the audience was really engrossed,

Animated.

It could be because of Jason’s point, which is that if enough people click “Report an issue,” it gets put into that part of the algorithm.

Yeah, we’ve got to give a little grace to YouTube here. So, who’s the one doing all the reporting here? Who’s weaponizing the YouTube reporting system?

It’s a bunch of tolerant liberals.

It could be Putin. You never know.

Sacks, you have moments.

We don’t need the Russians doing this to us. There could be a cabal, and we could be inflicting this on ourselves.

I agree with Friedberg’s wrap. I thought it was remarkable how the whole thing came together at the end, and there seemed to be a really stark choice. I agree that the next day Charlie was assassinated. I stopped thinking about the summit, but I agree that it really did play into this idea of the suicide of the West, in the sense that we talked about how there apparently are a large contingent—

—of people who don’t believe in what I would consider to be the central virtue or tenet of Western civilization, which was expressed—or at least attributed to Voltaire. What Voltaire said is, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

I think that is the central tenet behind Western civilization, because out of that came the right to free expression and freedom of religion. Out of that core principle came all the other principles, all the other key freedoms: the right to think and believe and worship as you please, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. It all comes out of that.

What you have here is people like Tyler Robinson, or the people who celebrated what he did. It’s the exact opposite: “I disapprove of what you say, and I will murder you to prevent your right to say it.”

The antithesis.

It’s the antithesis, and it’s not Western civilization. It’s something different and destructive. Where it will lead is to a civil war that none of us should want, on either side of the political spectrum.

One thing I would just like to say—and then, Jason, I’d love to hear what you think about this—is that one of the most powerful things Charlie got absolutely and precisely right was the plight of young people: the malaise and the anxiety, and what was at the root cause of it. The root cause, in the way people think and now in the way people act, is economic instability. That was something that also came out at the summit.

Charlie does a really good job of putting into a box what they’re going through: the lack of home ownership, the overwhelming and crushing debt, the failure of the school system, the inability to find a great job, and the hookup culture that takes people away from having a committed relationship, getting married, and having children. There’s a totality of issues that are really cultural.

I would just encourage people to go and find this out, because I think that at the root cause of all of this is that we need to find a way to give folks a chance to believe in something. If you don’t, I think the algorithm will take you to a very bad place.

It’s well said. I was absolutely delighted. Great job, Friedberg, and great job to the team—John, Kimber, Nick, and so many people who put so much work into that. It was amazing to see us double the size of it while increasing the quality, from the speakers to the experience.

The food was excellent. I heard the food was excellent.

No lines. All that logistical stuff was just so dialed in in year 4, so I give a lot of credit to our amazing team.

I have to thank our sponsors. They did an amazing job of making this summit available to so many people. We could do the scholarships and have so many people involved. There were 3 very special partners who did insane build-outs at the show.

Solana, our friends over there, went crazy. They did the entire upstairs. I don’t know if you hung out there, but I was at their coffee bar, and they had a juice bar and an IPO-themed bar. It was just awesome.

It was awesome. It was awesome.

They hosted 2 of the dinners, too—the public-market and geopolitical dinners. Our friends at OKX showed up big for us at the summit. They built out an awesome lounge modeled after a saloon. I went in there and had a little bourbon myself on Sunday. They screened their first film, Mild Mild West. They gave away $250 in Bitcoin to all attendees, and somebody won a hot lap with an F1 driver because they sponsored the McLaren team. That was super nice of them, huh, Friedberg?

Yeah, that was awesome. We’re going to be at that Formula 1 event in Vegas in November, which—

We’re going to Vegas. Yummy.

Oh, we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

IREN is a new partner this year, and they operate all these next-gen data centers. Big shout-out to them for doing the casino night, which was a huge hit at the Clift.

David Calacanis

I went to that. Did you go to that?

I didn’t. I was at the other event, and it was insane. I thought it was like the pictures. Look at the pictures.

I actually went to all 4 parties on Monday night. I was completely wiped out, but the casino night was awesome. It was so fun.

You’re like Phil Collins. You were at Live Aid, you went to everything, you were on your Concorde, and you went everywhere.

That’s right. And they had a great engraving station in the expo hall that packed the event.

We just couldn’t do it without you guys and gals. Again, without the sponsors, JCal, we would not be able to put this event on.

We spent way more than the ticket revenue, and we would not be able to have the scholarship tickets, which I think are really important. I remember in my early career, I couldn’t afford to go to a fancy event. You guys debated me about the scholarships for the first couple of years, and now you realize it’s great to have that young energy, right? Sometimes you get something right.

I really enjoyed having Joe Tsai there and talking about the China-America relationship—not as one in which we have to go down a prescribed route, but one where there could be off-ramps and collaboration. I thought Neal from YouTube, despite what we’re talking about here today, was great. I appreciate him coming and engaging with us on the censorship issue he got into with us, and I thought that was very productive.

I love the fact that people from this administration, Tulsi and Chris Wright, were willing to engage in a vibrant debate. The Dartmouth and Berkeley discussion on civil discourse is just so important, and they have such an impact on kids’ lives when their brains are developing, as we talked about on this show.

Rick Caruso on the management of our cities was amazing. Tucker and Karp went right to some really hard discussions around anti-Semitism and the situation in Gaza. These are very difficult things to discuss.

This event was a celebration of debating hard topics, and for that I am very thankful—for my friendship with each of you, for this amazing experience of the All-In podcast, and most of all for the community meeting all of our—I won’t call them fans. I think “friends” or “besties” in the audience is better.

What a great job, Friedberg, accommodating the scholarships. I know some people get bent out of shape: “Oh, you gave somebody a scholarship,” whatever. We got a lot of young people in there to experience it, as well as the people who could afford the tickets.

And I’ll say, what a crazy, joyful moment at the end when Diplo played and 3 of us were onstage dancing and celebrating with our kids.

I was having another seizure, but thanks.

Yeah.

Thanks for letting me up there for a few minutes.

Yeah, you came up for a couple of minutes and enjoyed yourself. But congratulations to the team. It was an amazing effort, and what a great dialogue. I think that spirit of dialogue, and making a choice to engage the hard topics in a respectful manner, is at the end of every program.

Chamath says, “Love you, besties,” and Sacks gives a “back at you.” But the truth is, even in a contentious debate, you can still remain friends and love each other despite those debates. It’s the most important American ideal, the most human ideal, and, dare I say, one of the most Christian ideas. I’m not a Catholic anymore, but I’ve remained a Christian.

I know that faith was a major part of Charlie’s life and his legacy, and that hit me personally as well. His Christianity—even if I disagree with him about issues and debates—was at his core. He cared about other people deeply, and he cared about humanity. So, rest in peace.

Let me just say, JCal, I’ll thank you most of all for taking the time to watch all of those Charlie videos. How much time did you say it was? It was like 40 hours?

I watched dozens of hours and 50 videos just to make sure I got, from first principles, my understanding of who he was. I disagree with him about gay rights. I disagree with him about how he said certain things. But there was nothing I saw in there that could even come close to justifying anything—

—that would be anywhere near violence.

Well, in any event, I appreciate that you took the time to watch Charlie for yourself, as opposed to listening to the mainstream media’s mischaracterizations of him, which are attempts to either downplay or minimize, or even to some degree justify, what happened. By doing that, JCal, I think you really honored our friend Charlie. So, thank you for that.

All right. Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk. Love to his family and his friends.

By the way, there was an incredible video that he did where somebody said something along the lines of, “Define what it means to be a conservative.” He said sometimes people think that what that means is limiting rights or whatever, and he said that’s not what it means. It’s just that he believed he would like to conserve and honor a specific way of life that had existed in the past.

He talked about how you could go get a job, do better than your parents, get married, have kids, and everybody’s safe. It kind of shocked me because I thought, “Wow, that definition is actually what many, many, many people believe,” even if they don’t believe that they are conservative. A lot of people believe that, and this isn’t taking away from other people, but that’s what we’d want for a lot of us—for our kids.

Let’s all set an example here: have vibrant debate and love your besties. Okay, and we’ll see you all next time. Love you, boys. Love you, besties. Bye-bye. There’s a “back at you.” No “back at you.” We missed the “back at you.”