Name: Adam Curry's Analysis on US TikTok Ban and Twitter's FBI Links
Uploaded: 2023-01-25T18:03:29.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Adam Curry's Analysis on US TikTok Ban and Twitter's FBI Links' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Adam Curry's Analysis on US TikTok Ban and Twitter's FBI Links' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-01-25. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- How long before TikTok's banned?
- Well, let me tell you what's going on with TikTok.
I have a very opinionated explanation
for what is going on with TikTok.
- Okay.
- 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 China and they're tracking everything
and that shit, it's Communist Party."
Dude, Facebook tracks you, Google tracks you,
everyone fucking tracks you all over the place,
but all of a sudden TikTok is a problem?
No, it's because they're eating their lunch
and instead of competing, 'cause they've tried,
no one can seem to create the TikTok algorithm
and the thing that they have going there.
It's what people want, the quick hits, the sing-alongs,
et cetera.
So, they decided to lobby politicians
and come up with 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.
- Interesting.
- Oh yeah.
- That's an interesting perspective.
- I know a lot about the advertising business,
'cause I ran companies that were in that.
There was so, everyone was buying TikTok.
And 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.
- Interesting.
- They are just taking them down to get rid of the competition.
It's very sad.
- Really?
- That's interesting, because they're not taking them down, right?
Still up.
- Oh, they will.
- You think so, eventually?
- Oh yeah, it's already, you know, it's banned at UT.
You can't have TikTok 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.
- It's no different from any other app that you have on your phone.
It's no different?
- I disagree.
No.
- So, you think that all of the other apps can track your keystrokes on other
computers?
- Fuck yeah.
- Computers that aren't even connected to that?
- Yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah.
- But, interesting.
- Yeah, oh yeah.
- Interesting.
So, they're lying.
- 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 going to kick it off.
Now, what Apple did, if you remember, they changed some things in what they
allow apps to do,
and that took about $10 billion off of Facebook's income.
- Yes.
- Because they couldn't sell the information that way anymore.
- Right, and they were mad.
- And TikTok is less interested in selling your information.
They're getting the ad dollars.
People, it's continuous ad money.
The whole thing is a big ad.
Everything's an ad.
- Yeah, if you're a guy like Zuckerberg, 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 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...
- This is a different one than you had before.
The one you had before, you had an old iPhone that had been converted?
- No, no, no.
- And then you went to...
- The Pixel.
So, we basically rip all the Google stuff off.
- Right.
- And this is the 6.
I had the 4.
It was just time to upgrade.
The screen was cracking.
It's falling apart.
And yet, if you're connected to a network, you're still...
- Yeah, you're fucked.
- They still know where you are.
- Yeah.
- But the apps cannot spy on me.
I know what the apps are doing.
They're running a sandbox, so nothing goes in or out unless I give it that
permission.
- That's Graphene OS.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
Noagendaphone.com.
The instructions are right there on how 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 are they...
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 I'm saying is that at least it says in TikTok's 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.
- Yeah, they all have it.
- They all have that.
- They all have it.
Why would they not do it?
- But it was also...
One 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.
- Mm-hmm.
Everything is tracked.
We're in...
There's only one telephone company.
It's the US government.
They have everything.
Everything is recorded.
Everything that you put on a network anywhere goes into...
In Utah, they've got the big data centers.
You know, they're all cooled under water.
There's all kinds of high-tech shit.
Whenever they need to find out what Joe Rogan's doing, let's pull up Rogan.
Did he text Curry on Signal?
What day was it?
It just comes up.
- Right.
- It comes up.
That Signal...
That was a problem, which is a problem for the government.
But again, how many companies just give up the goods?
Apple does maybe 30,000 a month or something.
I mean, "Oh, what do you need?
We'll give it to you."
They pay for it.
The FBI pays.
We know that from the Twitter files.
It's like, "Hey, we need information on this account."
"Okay, that's $5,000."
"Okay, no problem.
We'll just pay...
These numbers, I'm making them up."
- Right.
- But there were millions of dollars that they paid Twitter just for handing
over account information.
- I think Twitter never really collected, though.
Is that true?
I'm pretty sure that's true.
- 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...
- But I think that was a part of that narrative.
Because, you know, there was a giant bill that the FBI had owed Twitter.
It was like $3 million.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Apparently, they'd never paid.
Find out if that's true.
- Well, they're...
- Because I think...
- 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...
Okay.
- Well, let's see what we got.
- No, this is the right message.
You want to know what USA Today said.
- It says it's conflating two separate events.
- 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
information requests the FBI made through a stored communications act.
The $3.4 million is unrelated to the FBI flagging accounts.
- Yeah, that's unrelated.
- Right, but it's also like we're giving you a lot of money.
- It's unrelated, yeah.
- But did they actually pay the money?
That was the question.
- Well, I think you can look at this paying for account information, because
the Silicon
Valley companies are like, "Well, we're not going to do this work for free.
You've got to pay.
We've got to put people on it."
- Right.
- So it's normal.
- But if they didn't pay it off, that's...
- That's fucked up.
- That's fucked up.
- Are they going to give it to Elon?
Like, how does that work?
If they did...
- It's a drop in the bucket at this point.
- But I don't know if they didn't.
Maybe someone erroneously reported that, and I just read it.
- Well, I think what we're seeing with Twitter is...
It was not a very profitable company.
You know, it kind of ran a little bit...
- 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.
- Well, I think he's doing more.
I think...
- Yes.
- And I'm not sure.
I listened to the...
Someone sent me the clip of you and him about four years ago, talking about AI
and how that's
going to 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 ex.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 you use...
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 know,
you can have a lawyer sue you if you say something slanderous.
- Yeah.
- 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.
You know, 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.
You know, 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, like, 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?
I mean, now it's a military system, which I think was probably the plan all
along.
I mean, it's great to give consumers this for $110 a month.
But we 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, you know, 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, hey, you should just kind of hook
us up.
That was the U.S. government saying that.
The U.S. government was saying that.
This is what I've found about that.
Okay, here it goes.
A former Facebook security executive has called Elon Musk 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.
Alex Stamos.
But that's not what I said.
No, no, no.
I'm not saying you did.
Okay.
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.
That was just information requests.
Right.
It wasn't deplatforming requests.
I totally agree with that.
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, like, that's a
significant business transaction.
But it was because of, you know, tens of thousands of accounts that the
information had to be collected, given to the FBI, completely separate from
politicians saying, you need to look at these guys.
You know, they're against your own terms and service.
They're against what Fauci says.
Take them down.
Flag them.
You know, don't amplify them.
That's the egregious part.
That has nothing to do with the FBI as far as I'm concerned.
Okay.
But 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.
Don't let that.
I have 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.
You know, there's your location.
Yeah.
Here I am.
You know, it's beautiful.
Right.
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 of, 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 two years for some reason, because, you know, whatever.
When Obama came in, well, we need this guy.
And he was 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.
That is bizarre.
Thank you, Jamie.
Oh, dynamite, man.
Thank you so much.
This is great, Joe.
It's so fun to talk with you.
Yeah, it's great to see you, brother.
I'm good.
I'm good for now.
We should clarify what it actually said, though.
One of the things that's interesting, he said, so this is a Mastodon thread.
So this guy, 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 U.S.C. 273D.
This infamous D order has to be signed by a judge.
He said that he added that 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 2019, as shown by the email screenshot, the
company chose not to.
Yeah.
So they chose not to get reimbursement prior to 2019.
So for a while, they were doing it for free.
They were doing the government's work for free.
Yeah, but it becomes expensive.
Google has always charged them for it.
Yeah.
I think Apple has charged them for it.
And they publish those numbers.
It just is not-
It's so weird.
It's all part of the distraction to keep us guessing, and whatever you do, keep
posting selfies.
We need you to keep posting selfies.
Keep letting us know what you're doing.

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

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- How long before TikTok's banned?
- Well, let me tell you what's going on with TikTok.
I have a very opinionated explanation
for what is going on with TikTok.
- Okay.
- 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 China and they're tracking everything
and that shit, it's Communist Party."
Dude, Facebook tracks you, Google tracks you,
everyone fucking tracks you all over the place,
but all of a sudden TikTok is a problem?
No, it's because they're eating their lunch
and instead of competing, 'cause they've tried,
no one can seem to create the TikTok algorithm
and the thing that they have going there.
It's what people want, the quick hits, the sing-alongs,
et cetera.
So, they decided to lobby politicians
and come up with 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.
- Interesting.
- Oh yeah.
- That's an interesting perspective.
- I know a lot about the advertising business,
'cause I ran companies that were in that.
There was so, everyone was buying TikTok.
And 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.
- Interesting.
- They are just taking them down to get rid of the competition.
It's very sad.
- Really?
- That's interesting, because they're not taking them down, right?
Still up.
- Oh, they will.
- You think so, eventually?
- Oh yeah, it's already, you know, it's banned at UT.
You can't have TikTok 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.
- It's no different from any other app that you have on your phone.
It's no different?
- I disagree.
No.
- So, you think that all of the other apps can track your keystrokes on other
computers?
- Fuck yeah.
- Computers that aren't even connected to that?
- Yeah, yeah.
Oh yeah.
- But, interesting.
- Yeah, oh yeah.
- Interesting.
So, they're lying.
- 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 going to kick it off.
Now, what Apple did, if you remember, they changed some things in what they
allow apps to do,
and that took about $10 billion off of Facebook's income.
- Yes.
- Because they couldn't sell the information that way anymore.
- Right, and they were mad.
- And TikTok is less interested in selling your information.
They're getting the ad dollars.
People, it's continuous ad money.
The whole thing is a big ad.
Everything's an ad.
- Yeah, if you're a guy like Zuckerberg, 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 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...
- This is a different one than you had before.
The one you had before, you had an old iPhone that had been converted?
- No, no, no.
- And then you went to...
- The Pixel.
So, we basically rip all the Google stuff off.
- Right.
- And this is the 6.
I had the 4.
It was just time to upgrade.
The screen was cracking.
It's falling apart.
And yet, if you're connected to a network, you're still...
- Yeah, you're fucked.
- They still know where you are.
- Yeah.
- But the apps cannot spy on me.
I know what the apps are doing.
They're running a sandbox, so nothing goes in or out unless I give it that
permission.
- That's Graphene OS.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
Noagendaphone.com.
The instructions are right there on how 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 are they...
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 I'm saying is that at least it says in TikTok's 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.
- Yeah, they all have it.
- They all have that.
- They all have it.
Why would they not do it?
- But it was also...
One 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.
- Mm-hmm.
Everything is tracked.
We're in...
There's only one telephone company.
It's the US government.
They have everything.
Everything is recorded.
Everything that you put on a network anywhere goes into...
In Utah, they've got the big data centers.
You know, they're all cooled under water.
There's all kinds of high-tech shit.
Whenever they need to find out what Joe Rogan's doing, let's pull up Rogan.
Did he text Curry on Signal?
What day was it?
It just comes up.
- Right.
- It comes up.
That Signal...
That was a problem, which is a problem for the government.
But again, how many companies just give up the goods?
Apple does maybe 30,000 a month or something.
I mean, "Oh, what do you need?
We'll give it to you."
They pay for it.
The FBI pays.
We know that from the Twitter files.
It's like, "Hey, we need information on this account."
"Okay, that's $5,000."
"Okay, no problem.
We'll just pay...
These numbers, I'm making them up."
- Right.
- But there were millions of dollars that they paid Twitter just for handing
over account information.
- I think Twitter never really collected, though.
Is that true?
I'm pretty sure that's true.
- 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...
- But I think that was a part of that narrative.
Because, you know, there was a giant bill that the FBI had owed Twitter.
It was like $3 million.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Apparently, they'd never paid.
Find out if that's true.
- Well, they're...
- Because I think...
- 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...
Okay.
- Well, let's see what we got.
- No, this is the right message.
You want to know what USA Today said.
- It says it's conflating two separate events.
- 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
information requests the FBI made through a stored communications act.
The $3.4 million is unrelated to the FBI flagging accounts.
- Yeah, that's unrelated.
- Right, but it's also like we're giving you a lot of money.
- It's unrelated, yeah.
- But did they actually pay the money?
That was the question.
- Well, I think you can look at this paying for account information, because
the Silicon
Valley companies are like, "Well, we're not going to do this work for free.
You've got to pay.
We've got to put people on it."
- Right.
- So it's normal.
- But if they didn't pay it off, that's...
- That's fucked up.
- That's fucked up.
- Are they going to give it to Elon?
Like, how does that work?
If they did...
- It's a drop in the bucket at this point.
- But I don't know if they didn't.
Maybe someone erroneously reported that, and I just read it.
- Well, I think what we're seeing with Twitter is...
It was not a very profitable company.
You know, it kind of ran a little bit...
- 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.
- Well, I think he's doing more.
I think...
- Yes.
- And I'm not sure.
I listened to the...
Someone sent me the clip of you and him about four years ago, talking about AI
and how that's
going to 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 ex.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 you use...
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 know,
you can have a lawyer sue you if you say something slanderous.
- Yeah.
- 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.
You know, 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.
You know, 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, like, 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?
I mean, now it's a military system, which I think was probably the plan all
along.
I mean, it's great to give consumers this for $110 a month.
But we 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, you know, 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, hey, you should just kind of hook
us up.
That was the U.S. government saying that.
The U.S. government was saying that.
This is what I've found about that.
Okay, here it goes.
A former Facebook security executive has called Elon Musk 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.
Alex Stamos.
But that's not what I said.
No, no, no.
I'm not saying you did.
Okay.
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.
That was just information requests.
Right.
It wasn't deplatforming requests.
I totally agree with that.
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, like, that's a
significant business transaction.
But it was because of, you know, tens of thousands of accounts that the
information had to be collected, given to the FBI, completely separate from
politicians sa