I recently realized I had to delete my YouTube app. I was on the usual journey one goes through, some call it a rabbit hole; Luxury Watches, Gold Mining (sluicing washing crushing refining smelting), gold extraction from discarded items, professional mining (so fun to watch shotcrete being applied), professional tournament poker, board game reviews, board game let’s play, poker drama, chess and chess drama, Lego and other brick toys, sports cards collecting, and finally the end of the road: courtroom YouTube.
Something about real courtroom footage is mesmerizing to me. It has to have something to do with the combination of human tragedy (eviction, custody battles, attempted murder) and the cool procedural formal emotional application of complicated rules that are strictly followed and have to ignore all emotion (for the most part) for it to work. And everybody involved thinks they are helping somebody.
My favorite “episodes” of courtroom YouTube ended up, after a while, being the ones where misconduct by lawyers is sanctioned or threatened to be sanctioned. A unique taste, I know.
The justice system is so fascinating: you are supposed to act ethically as an officer of the court, and have to maintain the integrity of judicial proceedings. And if you don’t and get called out or found out you get sanctioned. You could lose your job temporarily or permanently. You could have to pay a fine. The set of rules can be quite narrow and stepping over the line can be consequential.
With 2026 politics being a circus of spinning facts, omission, motivated ignorance, and lying without consequences it is pleasing to dive into a subculture where trying to win somebody over cannot be done at any cost.
I wonder what it would be like if we could apply the rules of the justice system to today’s politics. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make a case against an elected official, proving that they wilfully lied, that they maliciously obstructed the process, and have them sanctioned? I hear you rolling your eyes, I am not asking for a “Ministry of Truth” because it would be abused and would lead to fascism quickly. But it is a thought experiment. Consequences for bad faith actions. And I’m not dreaming of struggle-sessions either, but a mechanism that makes it obvious if and how somebody is acting in bad faith.
Large parts of the Fourth Estate are not well equipped to deal with this problem, they are poor judges, they deal with “he said this”, “she said this” reporting instead of surfacing patterns, rhetorical trickery, and opportunistic adjustment of positions.
The recently completed Knowledge Fight podcast was a cathartic digestion of hundreds upon hundreds of hours of what one particularly egregious public persona said and did. The foundation of this podcast was friendship and chemistry, comedic excellence and a vast cache of recordings of the person they were covering. It had many beautiful moments and arcs but one throughline was the rigorous analysis of what was said based on saved recordings of the person’s show.
And I wish we had this analysis for every public person.
Not to find a bad joke from fifteen years ago and pretend that is the whole person. I mean something less narrow: a way to see trends, contradictions, bad faith reasoning, and opportunistic shifts in position.
And of course as a technologist my solution space is narrowly focused on technology. We have a lot of the source material available, TV, YouTube, Podcasts, and other platforms. We can transcribe content quickly and with low error rates. Assertions can be extracted, clustered, compared, and flagged for human review. One example of this for the Knowledge Fight persons of interest is Fudgie Search; it hosts machine generated transcripts collected from several sources (RSS feeds, Wayback Machine, other archives).
What if I could ask: did politician X always believe Y, or did that belief appear only when it suited them? Have they been captured? Have they said A but done Z? Not only would we remember what they said, we would be able to quickly look at it, compare, and form an opinion. We would have a record, just like in a courtroom.
It might not help with anything. It might become another tool to divide us further. Maybe it would harden the fronts.
But maybe it would add just a sliver of friction to public lying. Maybe we would see the occasional public figure pause and consider their answer, just like I have seen lawyers in those YouTube videos pause and carefully consider their answer, because they know the record matters.
Maybe.