looking into it. It doesn't sound true. Doesn't sound true. Yeah so let me say that. I'll go look that up. I was going to do that before I get on but I want to comment before researching it. It doesn't sound true. It sounds like it's true-ish. It has the ring to it of something that sounds true but if you looked into it there'd be a little something there.

Well let me understand this. The WEF cannot require anybody to do anything or am I right? So they didn't require anybody to do anything and so Sri Lanka was under no more or less requirement than every other country. Is that true or false? Every country had the same set of standards that were being pushed on them but one of them made a horrible catastrophic decision to I don't know follow some specific part of it too far. Why did nobody else do it? Incentives. Did the WEF offer them incentives? All right heavily encouraged. Did they heavily encourage them to look for substitutes or did they heavily encourage them to farm in a way that would not possibly work? Because I have trouble believing that the WEF said get rid of your fertilizer and don't replace it with anything. I don't believe that happened. Do you believe that happened? I don't believe that happened. And only one country in all the countries, only little Sri Lanka actually took that advice. They're the only ones.

Am I acting too confident for someone who has no information on the topic whatsoever? Probably. But I want you to see. So this is like a little test. I believe that you could usually, let's say eighty percent of the time, identify without doing any research eighty percent of the time. Now the twenty percent of the time could be a real problem right? So I'm not saying 80 is good but I think about 80 of the time you can tell it's just from the story itself. So I'm gonna call on the story with a complete lack of knowledge about the context because I think I have an 80 chance of being right and then a 20 chance of embarrassing myself but I never care about that right? So it's just an experiment. I don't know what's true. I'll just make it an eighty percent bet then tomorrow if I remember we'll check and I'll tell you if there's any context that changes the situation. But I don't believe it's true. But I could be wrong.

Let's talk about Stephen Crowder versus The Daily Wire. I knew this story was going to get more interesting didn't you? Couldn't you kind of smell it? Like there was a little story. I'll give you the starting point but just from the very beginning I thought this is going to go deeper and then it did.

All right so the story is internet conservative superstar Stephen Crowder who has millions of followers on YouTube and other places and he was offered a very lucrative contract to work with Daily Wire. And what went wrong was the Daily Wire made a large offer of 50 million over four years with the option to extend. Now that 50 million would include his production costs but you know maybe that's 10 or 20 percent of it so it's a big deal. A connection problem there. And Stephen Crowder went public but he didn't name the entity. He didn't name Daily Wire initially. Daily Wire outed themselves because I think they assumed people would figure out who they were. There are not many entities on the right who could offer a big contract right? And he was leaving Blaze. The Blaze. So they basically were like two entities that could offer him a lot of money and the Daily Wire was one so people would have figured it out. I think that trying to imagine that nobody would figure it out was unrealistic in my opinion. Somebody would have figured it out from the ends.

But Crowder said that the real issue was that the Daily Wire's offer was, let's see if I can, I'll try to do my most honest attempt to accurately characterize his opinion which is always sketchy whenever you're trying to summarize someone else's opinion. You almost never get it right because I watch people do it with me and they never get it right. So I'm wary that I might be misrepresenting his opinion but you all, many of you have seen it so keep me honest okay? So call me out if I'm not representing his side as accurately as possible.

Part of the deal said that if Crowder got demonetized by YouTube for example or some other platforms that would have obviously have a big impact on their shared revenue. So the idea was Crowder would make content, Daily Wire would promote it and put it on their platforms etc. and then the two of them would share the combined money. But if Crowder did something that would get him demonetized or banned on platforms the amount of money the two of them could make could be substantially decreased. So the Daily Wire's first offer, and first offer is important, first offer is not a final offer, his first offer was that there would be a financial offset for that or penalties you might call it so that they wouldn't have to pay Crowder millions of dollars if he was making no money for them.

Now Crowder interpreted this as effectively a form of censorship because he would be penalized if some other platform that he can't control decided he said something they didn't like. So in effect his point, which is accurate, this is an accurate point, is that the Daily Wire's offer would make him still subsidiary to the social media censors. In other words he would now, the Daily Wire would be an extra force on the side of the censors. Does that capture it? That the Daily Wire's offer because it included a penalty for bad behavior, you know bad behavior in quotes, that that was the same as being on the side of the censors. How many would take that view?

Oh and furthermore he said very clearly it is not about the money. It is not about the money. Does that capture it? And then he backed up it's not about the money by saying I never said the 50 million wasn't enough. I never even discussed the dollar amount which apparently is true. So does that back his view that it's not about the money because he never discussed the 50 million? It's only about them being on the side of the censors. And that he was also concerned not so much for himself but he said directly on an audio we heard he said but what about the smaller person who comes up and can't negotiate with you? What about them? Are they going to get this deal too where basically everybody's just going to be under the heel of the censors which is exactly what we don't want. And then he suggested that they move away from being dependent on advertising now.

So would you characterize that as number one not about the money? How many would you agree the Crowder's complaint was not about the money? You're not quite sure are you? Well I'm gonna clear it up for you in a minute.

All right so let me give you three different takes on this. The first take will be people who don't have experience in business. Second take will be from a lawyer. The third take will be from somebody who's very experienced at negotiating contracts very much of this type. Do you think those three views are going to be the same? Not even close. Not even close.

All right so for our first stand in for the opinion of someone who I believe and if by the way if I'm mischaracterizing this individual please correct me but do you know Carolyn Borysenko on Twitter? Dr. Carolyn Borysenko. Now she's a popular tweeter. You've seen a lot of her tweets probably. And her take was, oh first of all you need to know that Stephen Crowder recorded his phone call with the Daily Wire and then he played it on the air. Okay we'll talk about that. But Dr. Borysenko says Stephen Crowder recorded phone call with the Daily Wire CEO that absolutely destroys the narrative that they, meaning the Daily Wire, have been trying to sell you. And so I listened to the audio and I didn't hear that. I didn't hear anything like that. I didn't hear any narrative get destroyed. Do you know what I heard? I'll tell you in a minute.

So somebody who, and again if I'm mischaracterizing this you know somebody should correct me because I'll apologize but I don't think that Dr. Borysenko would characterize herself as an expert in business or negotiating. I don't think so. Now if you're not really experienced in negotiating would it be reasonable that your take on this is incomplete? That there's maybe some blind spots because just a lack of experience in this. It's a very unique domain right? It's a domain that if you're not quite experienced with there'd be huge things that are not obvious to you. It would just be obvious to somebody who does it for a living. So that's one take.

So I'll say more about that but initially I would say it looks like she's agreeing that it wasn't about the money and it looks like she's agreeing that it was about the censorship. Is that a reasonable take for somebody who's not an expert at negotiating contracts? Is that reasonable from that perspective? Let's say I think so. I mean it sounds like a smart person because she is smart. She's above average, way above average I think, way above average in IQ and accomplishment. And it's reasonable if that was your frame of reference.

Now let's take another frame of reference. There's an attorney, maybe you've heard of him, Robert Barnes. Has anybody ever heard of attorney Robert Barnes? Well he's got a take in which he said on Twitter Crowder called the gilded cage of censored speech slavery to Big Tech not the dollar offer. And he says Crowder was right. So from a lawyer's take he's sort of more of like a technical take on what he said and his technical take is that it was about censored speech, you know slavery to Big Tech. It was not about the dollar amount of the offer. So that's the lawyer's take. By the way Robert Barnes is who I call the dumbest attorney in the world but that doesn't mean he's wrong on this. Just he's wrong about me. But so I just have a problem with him personally but yeah is that a reasonable opinion? Do you think that the attorney view because it very much agrees with Dr. Borysenko? Pretty reasonable. Yeah I'm going to say that's reasonable based on what he heard.

All right now I'm going to give you the third view which is someone with extensive business experience in this exact domain and that would be me. Because not only am I a content provider who has done lots of content providing contracts of all kinds but I also used to be a contract negotiator for a living and I've got a degree in economics and an MBA and so I have exactly the qualifications for exactly this topic.

All right so would somebody who has lots of experience in it have the same view as the attorney and as Dr. Borysenko? Well here's my take. It's always about the money. It's always about the money. Here's why. Now in order to understand that you would have to have some experience. So the idea was that Crowder would lose money if he got demonetized on the platform but the Daily Wire quite reasonably, quite reasonably the Daily Wire said well if you make less money shouldn't we pay you less money? Is that unreasonable? He says that if you pay me less money it's censorship. No it isn't. It's less money. If he didn't care about the money he wouldn't be complaining about the contract because the contract allows him to say anything he wants wherever he wants. What would be the penalty? Just money. The reason he feels he's trapped in the gilded cage is that he'll lose money if he says what he wants to say and is judged unfit for the platforms. So he doesn't want to be under the yoke of advertisers. We agree with that. He should not be under the yoke of advertisers. But what should he have done? How should he have handled it if he were an experienced business person operating with full ethics?

Number one you never record somebody's phone call in a negotiation and play it in public. If you do no one should ever work with you again. No there's no forgiveness. There's no second strike. There's no second chance for that one right? That is game over from an ethics perspective. Unless you know if we find out later let me soften this a little because there might be something I don't know. So you know if in 48 hours we find out that the Daily Wire knew they were recorded and agreed to it and agreed to have it public that'd be fine but that's not in evidence at the moment. It looks like he recorded them without their knowledge and played it without their knowledge. If that's true the Daily Wire should not be working with him. That would be evidence that he's not a person you could trust. That would be one of the worst things I've ever seen in a business context right? No he didn't steal any money but it's as bad as a you know Gary as a Madoff, FTX Sam Bankman-Fried I mean except for the money amount because it wasn't no money was lost but in terms of ethical breaches it's as big as it gets. I mean it's literally illegal depending where you are right? I think it depends on the state or something but it's literally illegal to record s