Ryan Mac

You know, you need content moderation, you need rules of the road and how to behave on a platform.

They grappled with that constantly, whether that was with Gamergate or COVID or, you know, the- Or Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, the January 6th.

Yeah, like these issues would constantly come up and there'd be people always yelling at them online, you know,

I was banned for this reason, or, you know, you should ban these people because they're abusive, or, you know, I just got a death threat.

And that weighed heavily on the company and its founders.

Yeah, he would do customer service for Tesla over it.

And, you know, he just started to cultivate this like brand online of being very real.

At one point he announced his divorce, one of his divorces on Twitter, you know, really messy kind of stuff.

And people were like, hell yeah, like that's a real person.

I want to like follow that guy and like be like him.

And I think that he was like one of the first like business executives to realize being real online can engender a lot of goodwill.

So also during COVID, he becomes very anti-trans.

Even though he has a trans child.

Even though he has a trans child.

Maybe because of it, yeah.

He starts to talk about wokeism and the woke mind virus, which is a kind of catch-all phrase for the influence of progressive politics.

On sites like Twitter.

And he sees this woke mind virus infecting employees and decision making leading to decisions like the banning of Donald Trump from the platform because of January 6th.

And he sees this as all kind of mashed together and this kind of great influence over culture and society and politics.