YouSaid · the spoken record

Ron Wyden

lines on the record: 91
first: 2025-02-10
most recent: 2025-02-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You are famously one of the authors of section 230, which protects service providers from liability for the content their users post. Elon is the service provider. He's also the user that is posting the content. Do you have any newer thoughts about Section 230 and all this mix? Do you think it's doing the job the way it's intended for it to be working?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are certainly questions with respect to how he runs his operations, and then there's certainly some questions involving China as well, and we'll have some more to say about that before long.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the weirder aspects of Elon Musk in all of this is that he owns a communications platform, the preferred communication platform of many members of government. Is that a problem that he can command attention, that he can run that algorithm any way he wishes? Do you think you have to go somewhere else?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Going to use every tool to excavate the information that the American people deserve. This is one of the most important issues I've tackled in my time in public service. It actually is one of the first rules of Hutzpah that I spell out in the book where it says if you want to make a difference, you got to make some noise. We're making plenty of noise right now. We just got to keep following through until we get the job done.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're continuing, for example, to follow up with individuals who used to work at the Treasury and tapped them for their knowledge. And that's been very helpful, and obviously I can't get into that.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. I know no one who's being briefed on this on the Democratic side consistently. At all, really, I guess that would be a better way to say it.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they're making a big deal out of saying they want to work around the clock. And, you know, look, you know, last weekend I told you that I have this book. It takes hotzpah. Part of the lessons, and it takes hotspot I've been using all week to try to tackle the Trump administration. And I was flying across the country and taking red eyes and made sure I didn't miss a minute in the effort to blow the whistle. That was what we were doing late on Friday night in terms of musket being given the keys to the treasury payments. And I know the Republicans are leaving town this weekend. So, you know, they managed to find ways to set an agenda that's favorable to them.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the specific question I had there is Elon is tweeting. I work on the weekends when the other team is not on the field. The other team that he's describing is the federal workforce. So that is already problematic. But Congress goes into recess. People leave town on the weekends. Are you and the Democrats ready to be here all weekend to see what he's up to at night?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is my worry. Saturday and Sunday tomorrow, we have a hearing on international trade. I described some of the bizarre practices that they've pursued in this space where they keep saying the foreigners are going to pay the tariffs and it's going to be your listeners instead. So you bet Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, there's no days off here on the days of the Trump whims, as I call them.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're back with Senator Ron Wyden discussing Elon Musk's doge and what's happening right now in the federal government. Before the break, we are talking about some of the panic and confusion within federal agencies. So I wanted to know, what can actually be done about any of this, and how is a senator or Congress planning to hold Elon and his associates accountable We're talking on a Wednesday. We usually publish decoders on Mondays. Usually that's fine, right? There's two business days between us talking, me talking to a politician and a publish. Usually not a lot happens in”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broken record, but I don't trust any of this stuff. You know, so often, you know, you go to these meetings and they all act like they're on the level and then they go and do everything they want. That was the, you know, the first administration. So I don't trust any of this. And when it sounds Appealing, and then you can't get any specific answers, that ought to be a wake up call to. Make sure that you check and the law limits his ability to make mass layoffs. So that's a big part of the debate too.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't trust any of this stuff. I don't want to end up sounding like the old-fashioned version of a broken.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they'd like some answers about it. I mean, you know, you can hear the headline, oh, you know, we'll buy you out, we'll give you all these opportunities to make a transition. But most of the experience that the federal workforce has had with Donald Trump, and it goes to the first administration and now has not been exactly confident building. So they'd like more details about how they and their families would be affected. This is not just their current and future income, but making sure that their benefits that they've accrued get treated fairly.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That set of whistleblowers largely the federal workforce, which is appalled, they're filing their own actions from their unions as private citizens, just worker protection lawsuits. They've also all been told to quit their jobs, right? They've received these letters that say you should resign Elon famously used a fork in the road, which is a letter he sent when he took over Twitter. That may or may not be legal. There's some big questions around that. Have you been hearing from that constituency?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me put it this way. There's no way it's going to be something they can just continue to stonewall. And let me give you an example. I announced five days ago that the Secretary of Treasury had given the keys to the kingdom, so to speak. Yesterday, outside the Treasury Department were thousands and thousands of Americans speaking out against these practices, something like 30 members of Congress addressed this, making it clear that we were going to stay at it until we secured the protections that our citizens deserve. That happened all within five days, and I will tell you, I give great credit to the whistleblowers because, again, the people who told us specifically, because we heard a rumor that there was some activity going on with the treasury payments, the whistleblowers were the ones who specifically told me”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're saying very little in the consideration of the Robert Kennedy nomination yesterday. I brought up, for example, that our committee, the Senate Finance Committee, had passed a bipartisan measure to rein in these PBMs, the pharmaceutical benefit managers who are ripping off seniors and taxpayers and people of all ages in the purchase of medicine. And I pointed out that those programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are under the jurisdiction of our committee and are subject to the kind of abuses that could happen with Musk and the federal payments. And they looked up, it was clear that when I said was registering them, and I said this is important, this is something that all of you have voted for, but they're not speaking out. In fact, yesterday, apparently on the Republican side, there was some kind of Republican sort of show trial.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a weird gap in every Trump administration here in Trump 2.0. I think it's even weirder where Republican officials will not criticize the president in public. Are they understanding or aware of the scale of the problem in private when you talk to them?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not completely clear to me that you asked me about, does Trump just sit in office and issue executive orders? I think that's largely what's going on. I'm sure they have some conversations, but I don't get the feeling that there are any checks and balances on Elon, that's for sure.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Oh, there is no question that this description is designed to lull people into thinking what Elon Musk is not what he tells people he's doing. I mean, he tells people that he is out doing all these things and then they put out these cover-up stories about, you know, how he's not really doing it.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe that this is data that's being abused now. Part of this is also semantics, and I'm not taking anything off the table in terms of what they're doing.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a big question right now over whether Musk and his team's access to that system is read only, or if they have the ability to write code. They have said it's read-only. There's some reporting that says they have the ability to write code. Do you know if it's read only?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pedaled hither and yawn in the whole payment system. And I can tell you that from a privacy standpoint, giving out people's home addresses and the like, this will be a privacy horror show.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We believe it has ever increasing. We believe that it's ever increasing because to a great extent Mr. Musk tells us that increasing. There was a big story that there really wasn't much being done, just general information kind of thing. And I got asked by the press about it late last night and I said, you got to be kidding me. Just look at all the stuff that he claims he's doing. The first thing we went after was a charity. He didn't have anything to do with waste and fraud and abuse. So I believe that we will move quickly in the days ahead to build more tools for a legal strike approach. And we're talking about that it's members of the Democratic Caucus. And I've been tasked particularly with promoting privacy for those who would be concerned that their data would be”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about that for a second. Do you know how much access Elon Musk has to the overall federal government right now? Has that been quantified for you? Or is it just ever increasing because it's chaos?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're going to use every possible tool, court actions, legislative actions, whistleblowers, the bully pulpit. We're going to use it all. We are still trying to find our way through the array of remedies that you have. My wife agreed to marry me. She said, you aren't a real lawyer. You worked with the Grave Panthers, and so I'll marry you because you're not a real But we're now looking through all of the legal tools to make sure that we can protect our rights, but it is not going to be any walk in the park. This is in some of these areas like the federal payments, nobody ever even thought of doing what Trump is doing, which is why it's so important that we stop him.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That mechanism of I need to blow the whistle, then there's a flood of outrage, and maybe that'll fix it, or maybe we'll file a lawsuit, and our courts will fix it. Can that keep up with the pace and the scale of just the chaos that's happening right now?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I will tell you on this point we check every day to make sure that the seniors can get their Medicaid and their medicine and access to nursing home information, but your general point is correct. Is there still a flood of abuses in a whole variety of programs across the government?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the mechanism that you just laid out, right, you heard about something that was happening that was bad because of a policy that was hastily rolled out, you mobilized some attention. There was a swarm of feedback, negative feedback for the policy, and then eventually the administration backed down. Maybe it's fixed, maybe it's not, right? This is an open question. I know in your state, like head start programs are still being unfunded, right?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To embrace it in a sentence apropos of what the hell is going on here is Trump and Musk are ignoring the checks and balances that are the foundation of our republic and for all practical purposes I'd call that a coup.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Officials and their community groups and their organizations and talk about why this was so unfair. Nobody voted to cause harm and discomfort to seniors and the disabled. And there was this outpouring of calls and letters and the like. And within about three hours, the Trump people were backpedaling and by late at night they said it'll all be fixed the next day. Now, this is just a small snapshot of what went on one day, but people mobilized, the whistleblowers that I work with, particularly on senior citizens' issues, came through, and this was something where Trump and Musk were stopped cold as they tried to abuse the federal budget. Small snapshot, but it's the kind of thing that I try to do.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And let me give you a little small snapshot of the kind of work I do. My background is working with senior citizens. I was the director of the Grey Panthers for about seven years before I got elected to Congress. So during the freeze, I found out that the Medicaid portals, which they have in all of the states were essentially off they weren't available for the senior citizens and the disabled to get information about their medicine and nursing homes and the like. And so I put it up online immediately. I said whistleblowers, which was all truthful, had told me about the tremendous problems that were being caused for the vulnerable and seniors and the like, and that it was important for citizens to get in touch with their elected”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very troubled by the type of policies that they are pursuing that when you add them up, looks and feels like a coup. And the reality is we are working very hard to derail them at various steps. And let me give you a couple of examples. Last week, Donald Trump basically undertook a kind of freeze of the budget. And he wanted to do it unilaterally. And there was a lot of back and forth about what the authority might possibly be. We knew there wasn't any, but we heard him out. And then we went to court and we won. And he had to drop it.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Start there. I again just hearing from our audience, our listeners and our readers of the Verge, there is a sense that what is happening right now is Donald Trump is sitting in the White House signing executive orders that may or may not be legal, may or may not have impact, may or may not mean anything at all talking about building hotels in Gaza. And that is all a distraction from Elon Musk and Doge taking over the government, right? We're all the way, it is this a coup? I really want to start there. Is that where you're at? Do you think that there's a coup going on?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Access to the federal payments program, which has enormous implications for hacking and abuse and violations of privacy, and the list could go on and on. So that's just a little bit of the last few days.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tariffs, he has lied about nonstop to the American people for well over a year. He always tells them that foreigners will pay the tariff. That's factually wrong. All of the people who are listening to your program, the fans of the good work you all do, they pay the tariffs. And so this weekend was just perpetual bedlum. And foreign leaders were basically laughing at us. They were making fake promises. They knew that Trump just wanted to be able to get some kind of headline. And I'm sure we'll talk about other aspects of the bizarre nature of the times, but you probably know that last Friday I blew the whistle as a result of getting input from whistleblowers that the Secretary of Treasury had signed off on giving Elon Musk.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is the question of the hour, and it is almost impossible to divine an answer because it moves from minute to minute. Donald Trump essentially governs by whim and he gets up and out of nowhere he will suddenly put our whole economy in play with a really colossally stupid approach on tariffs.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you for being on. There's an awful lot to talk about, Senator. You have a new book The Government is having an escalating series of catastrophes. There's TikTok to talk about. It's still banned, but unbanned in a liminal state. I want to ask you about that. I was listening to our audience. I was talking to our staff. Can I ask you the first question in just the bluntest way that I can think of? Can I have your permission for that?”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dove into it. Not for Doge and its associated chaos, the big tech policy story right now would be TikTok, which was legally banned by an act of Congress upheld by the Supreme Court, but enforcement of that ban was paused for 75 days by Donald Trump so the company could figure out how to sell itself. Right now, it's just an illegal gray area and that clock is ticking. So I ask Senarwiden, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, what's going on with that ban? And if President Trump can really just keep delaying enforcement of the law, which is also not a great legal situation, the senator seems to think a deal can get done, and I did my best to get any hints about who might buy it. There's a lot more in this one, including some discussion of our communication networks. But I think it's probably best to just get into it. If you pay attention, you'll notice that Senator Wyben manages to seamlessly plug his book throughout this episode.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doge has some level of access to the Treasury Department, and now it has its site set on the Labor and Education Departments as well. Some agencies have been completely closed, and others have had their funding frozen, with workers locked out and told to resign or put on leave. All while lawsuits are being filed and courts are telling the administration to hold on. It is utter chaos, and it is not slowing down. So I ask Senator Wyden as bluntly as I could what the fuck is going on, and can Congress and the courts even keep up with it? And the senator did not mince words here. He said it looks like a coup. You'll hear us get into the mechanisms that Elon Musk has used to seize power in the government and why it feels like attempts to slow it down feels so flat-footed. We also talked about whether you can trust anything these people say. Wyden basically called bullshit on virtually every promise and declaration coming out of Doge, especially everything they're saying about how much access its staffers have to sensitive data and systems. It's the story of the moment.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I Patel, editor in chief of the Virge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat and the senior senator from Oregon. He's been in the Senate for almost 30 years, which makes him one of the longest-serving members of the institution. He's also deeply involved in tech policy. In fact, Senator Wyden co-authored Section 230 in 1996. That's the law that says tech platforms like YouTube and TikTok and Facebook aren't generally liable for what their users post on them. The law that basically allows the modern social media landscape we have today to even exist. Now, we actually scheduled this interview with Senator Wyden a while ago. He's got a new book out called It Takes Hootspah, How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change, and he was going to come on and talk about that book. But recent events made it vastly more important to talk about the state of our federal government, specifically what Elon Musk and Doge are doing as they seize power in various federal agencies.”
2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
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2025-02-10 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Sen. Ron Wyden is here to stop Elon Musk · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT