 When it comes to John Hickenlooper, there's two things that everyone should know. The first is that he watched porn with his mom I'm not kidding about this. So I took my mother to see deep throat Told you and the second thing you should know is that he is for some reason Conspicuously concerned with the profits of Facebook. So during the Facebook whistleblower's testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee he inquired about Facebook's profits and you know at first this isn't necessarily too weird, but I'll show you his question followed by her answer Obviously Facebook can manipulate its algorithms to attract users And I guess my question would be do you feel in your humble opinion that you know simply maximizing profits No matter the societal impact that that is justified And I think the question then would be that that's the short question, which I think I know the answer What impact a Facebook's bottom line would it have if the algorithm was changed to promote safety and to instead of to change to to To save the lives of young women rather than putting them at risk Facebook today Has a prophet is Makes approximately 40 billion dollars a year in profit a lot of the changes that I'm talking about are are not going to make Facebook an unprofitable company. It just won't be a ludicrously profitable company like it is today Engagement-based ranking which causes those amplification problems that leads young women from you know innocuous topics like healthy recipes to anorexia content If it were removed face people would consume less content on Facebook But Facebook would still be profitable and so I'm I I encourage Oversight and public scrutiny into how these algorithms work and the consequences of them. Okay, so in short Yes, Facebook would indeed lose profits if they changed the algorithm now This isn't the most bizarre question for a lawmaker to ask Knowing that these private companies have a fiduciary responsibility to increase shareholder value Of course, they're not going to willingly do something that hurts their bottom line So you need to know whether or not this is the case So you can figure out the right course of action to take and in this instance, of course You should do regulations because knowing that Facebook is a greedy company with one goal to make money They're not going to willingly change Something that you know makes them so much money. So that means you have to force them to make this change via regulation So at that point in time you get your answer, of course, you move on to the next topic Except john hickory loopers stays on the topic of Facebook's bottom line A little bit longer with another question. I'm a former small business owner. I don't Started to brew pub back in 1988 Uh and really was always we worked very hard to to look Again, we weren't doing investigations, but we were very sensitive to whether someone had had too much to drink Whether we had a frequent customer who was frequently Putting himself at risk and and others um Obviously, I think the the facebook business model puts Well poses risk to to youth and to teens You cared compared it to cigarette companies, which I thought was rightfully so If this I guess the question is is this level of risk appropriate Or is there a level of risk that would be appropriate Okay, so that's kind of a weird question This is the former facebook product manager not an expert in sociology john So I guess I just don't really follow what your point is. Are you implying that Overall, it's worse for society if facebook loses their profits I What are you getting at right and she made a pretty solid point about the fact that you know, it might Hurt them in the short term But in the long term if they change this algorithm and they don't willingly promote hate for purposes of profit It could help them With future revenue because if less people are leaving the platform because it's so toxic Maybe that helps them in the long term So you'd think all right, we've got two questions About facebook's profitability. It's time to either yield back your time or move on. Well, no, he brings up profits again I also thought that the um The question of Of how do we assess the impact to their bottom line Uh, we had a representative facebook in here recently who talked about that eight out of ten Facebook users feel their life is better and that their job is to get to 10 out of 10 Maybe this is the two the 20 percent that they're missing. I don't know how large that the demographic is of of people that are caught back up into this Circulus, uh, circuitous, uh, you know Sense of really taking them down into a the wrong direction. How many people that is do you have any idea? Okay, this is strange You no longer sound like a politician who's inquiring about a company's policy You sound like a businessman who's weighing the pros and cons About the short and long term profits of a company It's almost like he has stock in the company like that's what it sounds like to me except that's exactly the case He's asking these questions He's so concerned about facebook's profits because he literally has stock in the company As donald schov sludge reports while inquiring on facebook's bottom line Hickenlooper is invested in the company the senator's facebook shares are worth as much as 500 thousand dollars So he was presumably concerned about facebook's profits because it also impacts his wallet as well This is an obvious obvious conflict of interest and lawmakers shouldn't be allowed to have stocks. Why are they allowed to own stocks in Companies that they're supposed to be regulating doesn't this seem kind of fucked up Doesn't this seem like a system that is designed to fail and skew towards the business class of the united states That's exactly the case And it gets worse than that because it's not just that he's overly curious about facebook's profits It also influenced him As a lawmaker it influences what he chooses to support and not support So shaw adds the senator is not a cosponsor of the major democratic antitrust bill the competition and antitrust law enforcement reform act Introduced in february by senator Amy klobuchar The only bill hickenlooper is cosponsoring in the science technology communications policy area according to congress.gov Is a bill from republican senator roger wicker that according to a summary from senator hickenlooper and wicker Would require the national telecommunications and information administration To establish a test bed to develop and demonstrate innovative supply chain technologies and applications and establish a grant program To promote the participation of us companies and international standard setting bodies The bill is intended to help us companies develop new products to compete with chinese competitors Hickenlooper who is worth at least 7.8 million dollars on stock in several other tech companies Including microsoft automatic data processing alphabet amazon apple intel and invidia So there you have it. That's why he's so concerned with facebook's profits That's why presumably he's not signing on to legislation that would hurt facebook because it would hurt their bottom line So this is why these sorts of conflicts of interest Shouldn't exist This is why lawmakers shouldn't be allowed to own stocks in companies that they're supposed to be regulating But it's sort of a difficult situation to get out of because how do you convince lawmakers? Who all own stocks in different companies and industries to pass legislation that bans them from owning stocks in industries? I mean it's it's like them cutting off their own noses To appease everyone else and They're not gonna do that. They're not gonna do something that would impact them and their bottom line and John Hickenlooper is a multi-millionaire. He doesn't need to be concerned with facebook bringing in additional profits But this is the game. This is the way that it's played and it's sickening, but it's not surprising