Hey everybody, hey everybody, welcome besties are back. Besties are back. It’s another all-in

podcast dropping it to you unexpectedly because there’s just so much news.

It’s too much surprise bestie pods but dropping a bestie. It’s not a code 13. We’re not dropping

any Snickers bars today. Just dropping a bestie. Oh no, he’s got a megaphone.

It’s a special censorship edition. Warning, warning.

We hit a new low in terms of people needing to be heard. Oh my god. By the way, Tramont Sacks

his agent and his chief of staff called me. He felt like he only got 62 percent of the minutes

in the last podcast versus the rest of us. And so I’m dealing with his agent a little bit. It’s

like the debates where they count the number of minutes. Who, Daniel? Is Daniel grinding you for

more minutes? Daniel’s grinding. No, I go for quality over quantity. Absolutely, okay. Well,

this week’s going to be, I mean, what a complete disaster of a week.

Is there no other way to explain what is happening? Every day is a dumpster fire.

It’s a huge dumpster fire. So here we are, we’re three weeks out from the election

and somebody’s emails have, a Democrat’s emails have been leaked again, potentially. But last time

we had an investigation by the FBI and then that might have impacted the election. This time

we have a whole different brouhaha, apparently Hunter Biden, who loves to smoke crack and has

a serious drug problem. This is, you know, he’s a seriously, obviously troubled individual,

um, but he brought three laptops to get them fixed and never picked them up according to this story

in the New York post. So the New York post runs a story with an author who is kind of unknown.

And this, these laptops were somehow the hard drives may, he never picked them up.

That’s a little suspicious. The hard drives wind up with Rudy Giuliani and the FBI.

Uh, and anyway, what they say is that Hunter Biden, which we kind of know is a grifter

who traded on his last name to get big consulting deals. I don’t know what board anybody here has

been on that pays 50,000 a month. Uh, but it’s obviously gnarly stuff, but the, the fallout from

it was the big story. I went to tweet the story and it wouldn’t let me tweet the story. Uh, so

the literal New York post was banned by Twitter at the same time, Facebook put a warning on it.

So let’s just put it out there. Um, you know, sacks your guys losing pretty badly in this

election. And so we’ll go to our token GOP or what do you think is this let’s, let’s take this

in two parts. One, what do you, what did they think the chances that this is fake news or real

news or something in between? And then let’s get into Twitter’s insane decision to block the URL.

Yeah. I mean, so, so first of all, so I, I think this whole thing is a tragedy

of errors on the part of, um, sort of everyone involved. I think the New York post story

stinks. I don’t think it, uh, it, it, it meets sort of standards of journalistic

integrity. We can talk about that. Uh, but then I think, you know, Twitter and Facebook overreacted.

And I think that the story was well in the process of being debunked by the internet.

And it was like Twitter and Facebook didn’t trust that process to happen. And so they intervened.

And now I think there’s going to be a third mistake, which is that conservatives are looking

to repeal section two 30. We should talk about that. And so each one, there’s been a cascade of,

of disasters that have led to this, this dumpster fire. But starting with the story, it is, it is,

um, very suspicious. First of all, these disclosures about Hunter Biden’s personal

life, they didn’t have to go there. It was completely gratuitous to the article. It was

sleazy. And then of course, the story about how the hard drive ends up with the reporters makes

no sense. Even today, uh, Giuliani was, was making up new explanations for how it got there.

Um, it’s now being widely speculated that this was the, that the content came from the result

of a hack, um, maybe involving foreign actors, that this whole idea that it came from

this sort of hard drive that he left at a repair shop and forgot to pick up.

Um, I mean, so that, that’s now, you know, I think that would have been the story today

if it weren’t for, um, Facebook and Twitter making censorship the story.

And then the final thing is, you know, this story wasn’t a smoking gun to begin with. I mean,

the worst thing it showed was that there was a single email between a Burisma exec and Joe Biden.

And, um, the, the buying campaign is denied that, that Joe Biden never met with this guy.

And so it wasn’t ever the smoking gun. And, um, and, and that makes it all the more, um, apparent

why Facebook and Twitter sort of overreacted. It was almost like they were trying to overprotect

their candidate. Um, but that’s the thing that obviously looks crazy. Like they now have given

the GOP, the right, the extreme right, the belief that the, the technology companies are now on the

side of the left. Whereas last time they were on the side of the right, I think, right. Facebook

was supposed to be on the side of the right last time. So Chamath, you worked at Facebook famously

for many years. What are your thoughts? Well, Jack came out last night and basically said that

the reason that they, that they shut down distribution was that it came from hacking

and doxing or some, I think that was basically a combination. Yes. A combination. Um, and then

Facebook today came out and said, you know, before we could take it down, it had been

distributed or read 300,000 times. Um, I mean, look, if we just take a step back and think about

what’s happening here, there are more and more and more examples that are telling,

I think all of us, well, we kind of already knew, which is that this fig leaf that

the online internet companies have used to shield themselves from any responsibility,

those days are probably numbered because now exactly as David said, what you have is the left

and the right looking to repeal section two 30. And so, and by the way, two days ago,

I think it was Clarence Thomas basically put out the entire roadmap of how to repeal it.

And if you assume that Amy Coney Barrett gets put into the high court in a matter of days or

whatever, um, it’s only a matter of time until the right case is thoughtfully prepared along those

guardrails that, that Clarence Thomas defined, and it’ll get, you know, fast tracked through to

the Supreme court. But if I was a betting man, which I am, I think that section two 30 is their

days are numbered and Facebook, Twitter, Google, all these companies are going to have to look

more like newspapers and television stations. Okay. So before we go to your Friedberg,

I’m just going to read what section two 30 is. Uh, this is part of, um, a law basically designed

to protect common carriers, web hosters of legal claims that come from hosting third party

information. Uh, here’s what it reads. No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall

be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information

content provider. Uh, so what this basically means is if you put a blog post up

and people comment on it, you’re not responsible for their comments. Or if you’re a medium and

you host the blog, you’re not responsible for the comments of that person is that person’s,

it makes complete logical sense. The entire internet was based off of this, that platforms

are not responsible for what people contribute to those platforms. That’s how publishing works.

Now look at the internet as paper, but again, let’s build on this. When that law was originally

written, we had no conception of social distribution and algorithmic feeds that basically

pumped content and, and increase the volume on those things. So what you have now is really

no different than if, you know, you created a show, um, on Netflix or HBO or CBS and put it

out there. If that stuff contained, you know, something that was really offensive, those

companies are on the hook. Did they make it? No. Did they distribute it? Yes. And it’s the,

but here’s the difference, but it’s the active act of distributing it. You cannot look at these

companies and say they are basically holding their hands back. They have written active code

and there is technical procedures that they are in control of that are both

the amplifier and the kill switch. But isn’t this a bad analogy, Netflix, shouldn’t it,

the analogy be the person who makes film stock, where the person who makes the camera,

where the person who develops the film, not the person who distributes? No, because that

a limited amount of shows on Netflix, you can police all of them. You can’t police everything

written. Netflix is making editorial decisions about which shows to publish, just like,

you know, a magazine makes editorial decisions about which articles to publish. They are clearly

publishers. But the communications DCX section 230, the original distinction, I mean, if you

want to think about like an offline terms for a second, you’ve got this idea of publishers and

distributors, right? That’s a fundamental dichotomy. A magazine would be a publisher.

The newsstand on which it appears is a distributor. It shouldn’t be liable. If there’s a libelous

article contained in that magazine, you shouldn’t be able to sue every single newsstand in the

country that made that magazine available for sale. That was that was the original offline

law that was then kind of ported over into section 230. It made a lot of sense without this. I mean,

I think it was a really visionary provision that was passed in 1996. Without that every time that

somebody sends an email that, you know, potentially created a legal issue, you know, Gmail could have

been liable. Friedberg, is it? What’s the right analogy? When people post to the internet? Is that

the is the analogy of paper or film stock? Is it the newsstand? Or is it the publisher? So remember,

like what sacks is pointing out is this was passed in 1996. So think back to 1996, when you would

create some content, right? And the term around that time was user generated content, right? You

guys remember this, like the early days, it was like the big sweet UGC, UGC. And it was like the

big sweeping trend was like, oh, my God, all this content is being created by the users,

we don’t have to go find content creators to create, you know, a reason for other consumers

to want to come to our websites. So users could create content, you know, blogger was an early

kind of user generated content service, you could create a blog post, you could post it,

and people would show up. The problem with blogger, or the challenge was distribution

or syndication, right? How do I now I’ve posted my content? How do I as that content creator,

get people to read my content. And you’d have to send people like a link to a website or link to

a web page, and you click on that link, and then you could read it. What Chamath is pointing out

is that today, Twitter and Facebook make a choice about and YouTube make a choice about what content

to show. And so you know, I think the analogy in the offline sense, via the algorithm is what

you’re saying to be clear, the algorithm and, you know, YouTube realized that if they showed

you videos that they think that you’ll click on, they’ll keep you on YouTube longer and make more

money from ads. So it keeps the cycle going. And so they optimize content, and it turns out that

the content that you need to optimize for to get people to keep clicking is content that is somewhat

activating to the amygdala in your brain. It’s like stuff that makes you angry, or makes you

super pleasured, and not just boring, ordinary stuff. And so this sort of content, which the

New York Post sells a lot of, is the sort of stuff that rises to the top of those algorithms naturally

because of the way they operate. Now, if a magazine stand were to put those newspapers using

the offline analogy on the front of their magazine stand and told people walking down the street,

hey, you guys should check these out, you know, top of the news is Hunter Biden smoking crack with

a hooker, people would, you know, probably stop. But I think the question is, should they be liable?

Now, in I think 2000, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was passed. And that act basically

created a process by which folks who felt like, and it was related to copyright,

but I think the analogy is similar. If you thought that your content was copyrighted,

and was being put up falsely, or put up without your permission, you could make a claim to one

of those platforms to get your content pulled down. And I think the question is, is there some

sort of analogy around liable content or false or misleading content, that maybe this evolves

into law, where there’s a process by which platforms can kind of be challenged on what

they’re showing, much like they are with the DMCA takedown notices. So I think the problem,

the problem comes back to the code. If you explicitly write code, that fundamentally

makes it murky, whether you are the publisher or the distributor, I think that you have to

basically take the approach that you are both. And then you should be subject to the laws of both.

If, for example, Twitter did not have any algorithmic redistribution amplification,

there were the only way you could get content was in a real time feed. That was everything that your

friends posted, and they stayed silent. You could make a very credible claim that they are a

publisher and not a distributor. Which, by the way, is the way it originally worked. And it was

why they were falling behind Facebook, as you well know, because you worked on the algorithm.

You cannot, you cannot claim that you’re not a distributor, when you literally have a bunch

of people that sit beside you writing code that decides what is important and what is not,

you can say, but you can debate which signals they decide to use, but it is their choice.

Well, but if the signals are the user’s own clicks, then I would argue that’s still just

user generated content. No, no, it is a it is a signal, David. But that’s not the only

signal. For example, I can tell you very clearly that we would choose a priori stuff that we knew

you would click on. It wasn’t necessarily the most heavily clicked. We could make things that

were lightly clicked, more clicked. We could make things that were more clicked, less clicked.

But my point is, there are people inside the bowels of these companies that are deciding what you and

your children see. And to the extent that that’s okay, that’s okay. Maybe we’ve actually solved

this problem. sacks in that, if we said if you deploy an algorithm, that is not disclosing how

this is going, then you are ergo a publisher. And if you are just showing it reverse chronological,

our crown, as we used to call back in the day, with the newest thing up top, that would be

just so maybe we should be not getting rid of 230. We should be talking to these politicians about

algorithms equal publisher. So the publisher at the New York Post

is the same as the algorithm. I like this as a better framework.

Well, yeah. So Senator Tom Cotton, who’s a Republican, he tweeted in response to the

New York Post censorship. Look, if you guys are going to act like publishers,

we’re going to treat you like publishers. So that’s not modifying Section 230. That’s just

saying you’re not going to qualify for Section 230 protection anymore, if you’re going to make

all these editorial decisions. I would argue that these decisions are making about censoring

specific articles. And by the way, it’s a total double standard. Because, you know, when when

Trump’s tax returns came out a week or two ago, where was the censorship of that that was wasn’t

that hack material. I mean, that was material that found its way to the New York Times without

Trump’s consent, by the way, so where the Pentagon Papers, I mean, you cannot apply this standard,

this this idea that we’re going to prohibit links to articles,

but you’re proving the point these people are.

No, I don’t. Well, well, hold on. I’m saying I’m saying if they make editorial decisions,

they’re publishers, I think there’s a way for them to employ speech neutral rules,

and remain distributors. So I would be I would have a little bit of an issue with you. I would

say the reason why they’re going to fall into this trap of becoming publishers is because of their

own desire to censor their own biases. They can’t I don’t think that’s what it is. I think it’s

purely market cap driven. If you go from an algorithmic feed to a reverse chronological

feed only, I can tell you what will happen in my opinion, which is that the revenue monetization

on a per page per impression basis will go off by 90% 90% for sure people wouldn’t.

That is the only reason why these guys won’t switch because they know that for every billion

dollars they make today, it would go to 100 million in a reverse chronological feed because

you would not be able to place ads in any coherent valuable way.

There will be zero click throughs and the ads will be just worthless.

Otherwise, they should do it now. If you could keep all the revenue,

and you could be reverse chronological, right and have the same market cap,

just do it and be under safe harbor so that you’re not attacked every day.

How fun is it to be sitting there and being attacked every single day by both sides?

And by all the libertarians in the middle, the reason they don’t do it is because of money.

Let’s just be honest. That’s the only reason they don’t do it. It’s all market cap driven.

Maybe they should go back to just kind of the straight reverse con feed. And maybe you’re

right that the I mean, I think you probably are right that the algorithms are make the

situation worse because they kind of trap people in these bubbles of like reinforcement and they

just keep being fed more ideological purity. And it definitely is fueling the polarization

of our society. So I’m not trying to defend. I mean, I think maybe you have a point that we

should get rid of these algorithms. But just to think about like the publisher aspect of it,

going back to the newsstand example, let’s say that the guy who works at the newsstand knows his

customers, and pulls aside every month the magazines that he knows that his clientele

wants. And in fact, sometimes he even makes recommendations, knowing that oh, okay,

you know, Chamath likes, you know, these three magazines, here’s a new one, maybe he’ll like

this, and he pulls it aside for you. That would not subject him to publisher liability, even though

he’s doing some curation, he’s not involved in the content curation. I would argue that if the

algorithms proceed in a speech neutral way, which is just to say, they’re going to look at your

clicks, and then based on your own revealed preferences, suggest other things for you to

look at. I don’t think that makes you a publisher necessarily. If you if you do, if you do put your

finger, if these engineers are putting their thumb on the scale, and pushing the algorithm

towards certain specific kinds of content that may cross over. No, no, no, you’re being you’re

being too specific. And it’s it’s not that extreme. And it’s not as simple as you’re saying.

The reality is there are incredibly intricate models on a per person basis that these companies

use to figure out what you’re likely going to click on, not what you should not what is exposed

to you, not what you shouldn’t, but what you likely will. And that’s part of a much broader

maximization function that includes revenue as a huge driver. So the reality is that these guys

are making publishing decisions. And right, you are right, David, that, you know, the law back

in the day, it didn’t scale to the newspaper owner. But you know what, in 1796, you know,

colored people were three fifths of a human, and we figured out a way to change the law.

So I’m pretty sure we can change the law here, too. And I think what’s going to happen is,

you should be allowed to be algorithmic, but then you should live and die by the

same rules as everybody else. Otherwise, that is what’s really anti competitive

is to essentially lie your way to a market advantage that isn’t true,

just because people don’t understand what an algorithm is. That’s not sufficient to

But they’re not actually in the content creation business, right? And so

what’s the what’s the definition of a term publisher in that context, because in all

other cases, publishers pay for and guide and direct the editorial creation of the content

versus being a kind of discriminatory function of that content. Here’s the problem. Let’s take,

for example, Instagram reels. Can you manipulate content through reels? Yes. Now, as the person

that provides that tool to create content that theoretically could be violating other people’s

copyright or, you know, offensive or wrong or whatever, and then you yourself distribute it

to other people knowingly. The reality is that the laws need to address in a mature way.

The reality of what is happening today versus trying to harken back to the 1860s and the 1930s,

because things are just different. And we’re smart enough as humans to figure out these nuances and

that sometimes we start with good intentions and the laws just need to change. Well, ironically,

Chamath, you’re making a point that Clarence Thomas made Justice Thomas made in his

filing recent filing where he said that, that if you are acting as both a publisher and a

distributor, you need to be subject to publish reliability, which means peeling back section 230.

And moreover, you may not even be the primary creator of the content. If you’re merely a

secondary creator, if you’re someone who has a hand in the content, then you are your creator,

you’re a publisher, and therefore you should lose section 230 protection. That is basically what he

said. If you if your argument is that the algorithms make you a content creator effectively,

and the tools, algorithms and tools, then the other thing is, you know, what you have the

algorithm, it’s monetization, guys, right, but there’s monetization involved in the YouTube

example. They are helping you having a serious conversation, Jason, let’s not let’s not go off

on that. No, but but Chamath, I mean, this goes back to the politics may make strange bedfellows

point. I mean, I think a lot of the conservatives are actually making the point you’re making,

which is that these social media sites are involved in publishing. I don’t want these guys

involved in any of this shit, because I don’t trust them to be neutral over long periods of

time. So do you trust their decision to pull down q anon groups and zero what just like, just like

it took it took years for us to figure out that Holocaust denial was wrong. anti vax was marginal

q anon was crazy, like wearing masks was a good idea, right? I mean, I don’t want these people

in charge of any of this stuff. And to the extent that they are, I want them to be liable and

culpable to defend their decisions. So Chamath, your ideal nonprofit social media service would

be a chronological feed of any content anyone wants to publish that anyone can browse.

That’s not what I’m saying, David, what I’m saying is that you have to be able to

live with the risk that comes with, you know, playing in the big league and wanting to be a

500 plus billion dollar company, there is liability that comes with that. And you need

to own it and live up to the responsibility of what it means. Otherwise, you don’t get the free

option. What if they didn’t take a hand in it, and they follow the dig, the Reddit model, and

it’s just upvoting that decides what content rises to the top. I suspect that I suspect that so Reddit

has a just a different problem, which is a sort of like, you know, a decency problem and a different

class of law, who are we to judge decency, right? I mean, like, in the vein of like editorialism,

like they’re taking no hand in what content rises to the top.

Well, they did ban certain topics. So they did recently, but like, like, assume they didn’t

write and it was just purely like upvoted consumer and not algorithmic.

That it’s very hard to pin up. I think it’s like a platform to me.

I think it’s very hard to pin a section 230 claim on Reddit, as easy as it is YouTube,

Facebook and Twitter. And so if YouTube reverted to just hey, what people are watching right now

rises to the top, and that was the only thing that drove the algorithm, you would feel more

comfortable with YouTube not being. It’s not comfortable. This is what I’m saying.

It’s what I know. All I want to know is what am I getting when I go here? And if what I’m getting is

a subjective function where they are maximizing revenue, which means that I can’t necessarily

trust the content I get as long as I know that. And as long as there’s recourse for me,

I’m I’m very fine to use YouTube and Twitter and Facebook. What I think is unfair is to not know

that there’s a subjective function, confuse it with an objective function, go on with your life,

end up in the state that we’re in now where nobody is happy and everybody is throwing barbs.

But and you have no solution. Maybe I just want to be stimulated. Like I remember the day when I

would go to Facebook and Twitter and it was boring as hell. It’s like just fucking random shit that

people like here’s a picture of my show. You know, like like now I go to Facebook and I’m

like fucking addicted because it’s showing me this. And there’s like shit that I’ve been buying

online and the ads keep popping up. And I’m like, oh, this is awesome. And I keep buying more stuff.

I think all of that is good. But I it’s all it all should be done. Eyes wide open,

where in these corner cases, the people that feel like some sort of right or privilege

or has been violated or some overstepping has occurred, they should have some legal recourse

and they should be there should be on the record a mechanism to disambiguate.

Wait, hold on. Here’s one question, David. Would this be alleviated if the algorithm

was less of a black box? If we could just say, hey, no, we need these algorithms to be. So that’s

not a solution. And then what is this? And I want to hear about that and then also labeling

because Facebook labeled stuff. And if labeling stuff, hey, this is disputed from a third party,

that feels to me like that would have been a better solution in the first case.

All right, let me get in here. So I half agree with Chamath. Okay. So the half I agree with is

I don’t want any of these people, meaning the social media sites, making editorial decisions

about what I see, censoring what I can look at. I don’t trust them. I don’t want that kind of power

residing in really two people’s hands, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. I don’t trust them.

And I don’t want them to have that kind of power. But that where I disagree is if you

repeal section 230, you’re going to make the situation infinitely worse. Because section two,

what is the response to these companies going to be corporate risk aversion is going to cause them

to want to hire hundreds of low level employees, basically millennials to sit there making

judgments about what content might be defamatory might cause a lawsuit, they’re going to be

taking down content all over the place. And you know what will happen to be a worse world? No,

you know what will happen? Those companies will lose users lose engagement and new things will

spring up in its place around these laws that work. How will they how will they lose audience?

I mean, I think what will happen is you’ll have a torrent of lawsuits. Anytime somebody has a

potential lawsuit based on you know, like trying to police speech at a dinner party, like, our job

never existed at scale. This is never existed at the scale. I don’t think the goal is to work

backwards from how do we preserve a trillion dollars of market cap. So what if that’s what

happens? I don’t think that’s what we’re doing. So for me, I’m trying to work back from how do

we preserve the open internet. But I think this is exactly what it’s saying, which is,

here’s a clear delineation in 2020. Knowing what we know, you know, person entrepreneur who goes

to Y Combinator or to launch to build the next great company. Here are these rules, pick your

poison. And some will choose to be just a publisher. Some will probably create forms of distribution,

we can’t even think of, some will choose to straddle the line, they’ll have different risk

spectrums that they live on. And that’s exactly how the free markets work today. There’s nothing

wrong with that. Maybe the only like disagreement here is that I think that code can be written and

algorithms can be written in a speech neutral way, so that the distributors don’t cross over

the line to becoming publishers. I fully agree with you that these sites should not be publishers.

The reason why the New York Post story should be taken off, they should be platforms and they

cross the line. I would say that this this New York Post story is the reason why people are up

in arms about it is because what Twitter and Facebook have done is basically said they’re

going to sit in judgment of the media industry. And if a publisher like the New York Post puts

out a story that doesn’t meet the standards of Twitter and Facebook, they’re going to censor

them. That is a sweeping assertion of power. They’re picking and choosing who they don’t

want to give distribution to. Yeah, we all we all agree on that piece. They should not be

the arbiter of that. That is what is triggering but that is what is triggering the conservatives

in particular, but everybody but especially conservatives to say they want to repeal

section 230. Nobody, my point is nobody is safe. And it’s less about I actually think that there’s

a nuanced point to this, which is it’s less about what they think is legit or not as much as what

they think is important or not. They chose to make this an important article. They chose to

kind of intervene in this particular case when every day there are going to be hundreds of other

articles that are going to be actively shared on these platforms that are by those same standards,

false with some degree of equivalency, false and shouldn’t be on the platform. Absolutely.

And it is the simple choice that they chose an article to exclude, regardless of the reason in

the background, because there are many articles like it that aren’t being excluded. And that alone

speaks to the hole in the system as kind of satisfying. Well, it’s because it’s because

they they have too much power and they’re unaware of their own biases. They can’t see this action

for what it so clearly was. It was a knee jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and

Facebook to to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn’t like. I mean, because if

they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the

exact same reason, by the way, just so you know, about to block you so he can keep the Biden

campaign strong and not have your I would say I’ve been red pilled. Actually, the last 24 hours have

been red pilling for me. I got to say, David, I agree with you, because like I thought I thought

that both things were crossing the line, like meaning either you publish them both or you

censor them both. And there are very legitimate reasons where you could be on either side.

But to choose one and not do the other, it just again, it creates for me uncertainty. And I don’t

like uncertainty. And I really don’t like the idea that some nameless, faceless person in one of

these organizations is all of a sudden going to decide for me knowledge and information that to

just unacceptable journalistic standard becomes a slippery slope to nowhere, right? Like at that

point, you’re like, what is what is not true? What is opinion? What is not opinion? What is

what you know, how do I validate whether this fucking laptop came from this guy, or this guy,

or this guy? It’s a slippery, how are you ever going to resolve that across billions of articles

a day? Anders would be the answer. Yeah. And lower standards. Right. And so let’s look at

how slippery the slope has become just a week ago. I mean, literally a week ago, Mark Zuckerberg

put out a statement explaining why Facebook was gonna censor, censor Holocaust denial.

Why he went out on a limb, huh, David?

Well, it’s I think, wow.

My point, my point is, he actually put out a multi paragraph, well reasoned statement,

multi paragraph, three paragraphs about the Holocaust is bad. Wow, congrats.

What I’m trying to, you’re not listening to my point. My point is that he took it seriously,

that he was going to censor something. And I think, you know, people can come down,

you could be like a skokie ACLU liberal and oppose it. Or, you know, you could say, look,

common sense dictates that you would you would censor this, but he felt the need to justify it

with, you know, like a long post. And then one week later, we’re already down the slippery slope

to the point where, you know, Facebook’s justification for censoring this article

was a tweet by Andy Stone. You know, like, that was it. It was a tweet. That was the only

explanation they gave. By the way, one of the reporters pointed out that if you were going to

announce a new policy, you probably wouldn’t want it done by a guy who’s been a lifelong Democratic

operative. You know, this was just so and so it just shows that once you start down the slope

of censoring things, it becomes so easy to keep doing it more and more. And, and this is why I

think these guys are really in hot water, whatever, whatever, you know, whatever controversy

there was about Section 230 before, and there was already a lot of rumblings in DC, about modifying

this, they have made things 10 times worse. I mean, as someone who’s actually a defender of

Section 230, I wish Dorsey and Zuckerberg weren’t making these blunders, because I think they’re

going to ruin the open internet for everyone. Super blundered. I’ll tell you what was an

even bigger blunder for an equal blunder for me last night. I don’t know if you guys had this

experience. But I was trying to figure out what the consensus view on the Biden Hunter Biden story

was. And I went to Rachel Maddow, and the last word and Anderson Cooper, and there was a media

blackout last night. I couldn’t find one left leaning or CNN if that is even in the center. I

don’t think they’re the center anymore than the left. I couldn’t find one person talking about

Biden. I was like, let me just see if I tune into Fox News. And Fox News was only discussing the

Biden story. And so this now felt like, wow, not only if you were one of these, you know,

folks on the left, who’s in their filter bubble on Twitter and Facebook, they’re not going to see

that story. And then if they tuned into Rachel Maddow, or to Anderson Cooper, or you go to the

New York Times, it’s not there either. And then drudge didn’t have it for a day. You’re bringing

up something so important. So think about what you’re really talking about, Jason,

there was a first order reaction that was misplaced, and not rooted in anything that

was really scalable or justifiable. Then everybody has to deal with the second and

third order reactions. The left leaning media outlets circle the wagons, the right leaning

media outlets are up in arms, nobody is happy, both look like they’re misleading. And then now

if you’re a person in the middle, for example, what was what was frustrating for me yesterday was

it took me five or six clicks and hunting and pecking to find out what the hell is actually

going on here. Why is everybody going crazy? But that bothered me, you know? And so I just think,

like, again, it used to be very simple to define what a publisher was and what a distributor was

in a world without code, without machine learning, without AI, without all of these things.

I think those lines are bird. We have to rewrite the laws. I think you should be able to choose.

And then I think if you’re trying to do both, by the way, the businesses that successfully do both

will have the best market caps. But if you’re trying to do both, you have to live and die by

the sword. Yeah. It would be interesting also if I don’t know if you guys have done this,

but I switched my Twitter to being reverse chronological, which you can do in the top

right hand corner of the app or on your desktop, because I just like to see the most recent stuff

first. But then sometimes I do miss something that’s trending, whatever. But I just prefer

that because I have a smaller follower list now. But to Friedberg, your point, you kind of like

the algorithm telling you what to watch. So a potential solution here might be…

I’m not saying I like it rationally, by the way. I’m just saying, like, as a human,

humans like it. I like it. Like, I like to be stimulated with titillating information and,

you know, interesting things that, for whatever reason, I’m going to, you know…

Click on again. You like that experience of jumping down the rabbit hole.

My point is, all humans are activated. And the algorithms, the way they’re written,

they’re designed to activate you and keep you engaged. And activation naturally leads to these

dynamic feedback loops where I’m going to get the same sort of stuff over and over again that

identifies, activates me because I clicked on it. And therefore, I’m going to, you know,

continue to firm up my opinions and my beliefs in that area. But I think showing me stuff that

I don’t believe, showing me stuff that’s anti… I mean, because I’m a science guy,

showing me stuff that’s anti-science, showing me stuff that’s bullshit that I consider bullshit,

I’m not going to read it anymore. So, if I’m reading just random blurtings by random people

in reverse chronological order, it is a completely uncompelling platform to me,

and I will stop using it. And that leads back to kind of the, you know, Chamath’s point,

which is that the ultimate incentive, the mechanism by which these platforms stay alive

is the capitalist incentive, which is, you know, how do you drive revenue, and therefore,

how do you drive engagement? And that’s to give consumers what they want. And that’s

what consumers want. All right. Let’s give Sax his victory lap. He predicted last time that

there was a possibility that Trump would come out of this like Superman and would do a huge

victory lap. And sure enough, he considered putting a Superman outfit on under his suit,

and he did a victory lap literally around the hospital, putting the Secret Service at risk,

I guess, and then did a Mussolini-like salute from everybody from the top of the White House.

I mean, you nailed it, Sax. He came out. It was very Il Duce.

Il Duce. He did Il Duce.

It was very Il Duce. Il Duce?

No, but it was very predictable. The media was making it sound like Trump was on his deathbed,

you know, because the presumption is always that the administration’s hiding something.

He must be much sicker than he’s letting on. If he says he’s not that sick, it must be really bad.

And so for days and days, they were talking about how Trump was, you know, potentially

had this fatal condition, and by the way, he deserved it. You know, it was a moral failing,

he was negligent. And so it’s not unlike really what the right was doing, constantly accusing

Biden of senility, you know, and then Biden went into that debate and then blew away expectations.

And so the same thing here, you know, the media set up Trump to kind of

exceed expectations. But I do think, you know, it is noteworthy that Trump was cured so quickly

with the use of these, you know, clonal antibodies that we talked about last time. I think we talked

about it on the show two weeks ago. And it was a combination, I guess, of Regeneron and Remdesivir,

and the guy was out of there in like, a couple of days. So, you know, it’s like the media doesn’t

want to admit anything that is potentially helpful to Trump. But you have to say that at this point,

we have very effective treatments for COVID. They may not be completely distributed. Yet.

Trump obviously had access to them that the rest of us don’t have. But it feels to me like we are

really winding down on the whole the whole COVID thing. And I ask a question is it has have they

published the blow by blow tick tock of exactly what he got when? No, they haven’t, right? I would

love I would love to have that because Americans deserve. Yeah, they know they know what his

dosage was. And they said what day he got it on the Remdesivir. He got several doses. It said what

days he got the antibody treatment. I just want to print that out and keep it as a folded in my

pocket just in case. We know what to take now. We know what to take if we get sick, right? Yeah.

Well, the question is, can we get it? But even independent of that, right? Like,

I think people love anecdote. It’s very hard for people to find emotion and find belief in

statistics. And you know, if you look at the statistics on COVID, you know, you go into the

hospital 80% chance you’re coming out. And you know, the average stay for someone that goes in

a lot of people go into the ER, and they’re getting pushed back out because they’re not

severe enough. And I think the anecdote is, everyone that gets COVID dies, the statistics

show that that’s not true. And, you know, whether or not Trump got exceptional treatment, he

certainly did. It’s very hard to sexist point for the storytelling that has kind of been used to

keep people at home and manage kind of and create this this expectation of severity of this crisis,

etc. It’s very hard for people to kind of then say, hey, like, you know, he’s got a 97% chance

of making it through this, and he’ll be at 90% chance to be out of the hospital in three days.

When it happened, it was a shocking moment. And it really hit that narrative upside down,

right? Like it was just like, well, can we show that there was a tweet recently

providing the statistics on what the real infection fatality rate was for COVID?

Yeah, I saw it. It’s about half a percent point four. And that’s across,

you know, the whole spectrum. But like in anyone under 75 years old, you’ve got the number, right?

That’s right. But it’s here, let me pull it up. So on. We tweet, I think Bill Gurley first tweeted

it. And then I retweeted it. IFR was like, point one, if you’re young, and it goes all the way up

to like, point four, if you’re above 75, it’s way less than point one. Yeah, it’s it’s it was,

I thought the IFR was a lot less severe than that IFR is also distorted, you know,

based on the zero prevalence study that was just published, you can take that number that’s

published and divided by about three, three to five. Why get to get the true IFR because not

everyone that’s had COVID is registering as a positive infection because they had COVID and

got over it. So there was a paper published in in JAMA a few weeks ago, where they took dialysis

patients, and they measured and they get blood from these dialysis patients. And they measured

COVID antibodies in these patients. And they showed that in the Northeast 30% of people 27

point something percent of people have already had COVID. It’s an incredible fact. Wow. And in

the West, the number is close in Western states, they’ve kind of got it all written up in this

paper, and they did a great job with paper, it’s about 3%. But in aggregate across the United

States, it’s a, this was a few weeks ago. So nowadays, it’s it was a 10.5%, I think, so it’s

probably closer to 12% now people have already had COVID. And so then if you assume that number,

right, I mean, that’s 30 million people. And now you look at how many people have died,

we haven’t gotten the deaths wrong, right? Because everyone that’s died from COVID,

we’ve recorded that death. We know that number. It could be a little inflated, right? People who

died with COVID. Be conservative and assume that it’s right. Right? I mean, if I look in the United

States, 217,000 cases, but the real cases is 30 million, 30 million. And that’s where you that’s

where you end up with this, like, you know, adjusted ifr true ifr of one. Yeah, like very,

very point 1% point. Oh, 7%, or point 7%. Sorry.

By the way, my my tweets aren’t loading right now. So

I think Trump just took the tick tock decree, and he just crossed out tick tock and put

Twitter and he just shut Twitter down. What was what is the tick tock thing done?

Yeah, who knows? That was like three weeks ago. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Was there a second debate? There’s tonight, there’s going to be two town halls.

Trump refused to do a zoom with or, you know, a zoom debate. I’m talking about the power of zoom,

a virtual debate he wouldn’t do, ostensibly because he’s not good. When he’s not interrupting

somebody would be my take on it. So then he went to NBC, which he made 400 million dollars,

I guess, from The Apprentice. And NBC let him take a time slot directly opposite Biden tonight

to do his own town hall. So they didn’t even stagger it. Which NBC, which is responsible

for saving Trump, is getting absolutely demolished by their own actors and showrunners on Twitter.

So I think NBC is going to come out swinging tonight in this town hall to try to, you know,

take down Trump as maybe their penance. That’s my prediction for it. But how do you watch Biden

if Biden is up against Trump? Like that’s like watching paint dry versus watching like,

you know, some maniac running down Market Street with a samurai sword on meth.

I’ll be I won’t be watching either. I cannot wait for this election to be over. How many

days until November 3rd? We are like 18 and a wake up 18 days. My gosh, maybe 18.

Yeah, let us just get this over with. Yeah, I know we’re all sick of it.

I do feel like I mean, it’s the polls are now showing that Biden is up by as much as 17.

I mean, things are really continue to break his way. I think, to your point, Jason,

about Trump being more watchable. I think that’s sort of Trump’s problem is he just can’t

help making himself the center of the news cycle every single day. And to the extent the election

is a referendum on Trump, I think he’s going to get repudiated if the election were more of a

contest. And people would weigh Biden’s, you know, positions as well. I think Trump would have a

better shot because I think he does have some Biden does have some weaknesses. But the whole

reason why Biden’s basement strategy has been working so far is because Trump just eats up all

the oxygen and he’s making a referendum on him, which I think he’ll lose if he keeps doing it

that way. You know what they say, Saks, what got you here will not get you there. What got him into

his office was the ability to take up the entire media channel during the Republican runoff and

just be able to demolish everybody was entertaining. I want to that is exhausting.

It’s now exhausting. I want to change topics. I would like to ask David to explain his tweet

related to prop 13 or 15. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so I saw that that Mark Zuckerberg had contributed

$11 million to try and convince the people of California to vote for this prop 15, which is the

largest property tax increase in California history. What it does is it chips away at prop 13

by moving commercial property out of prop 13. And it would then tax it on what’s called fair

market value as opposed to the cost basis of the property. It would have a lot of unfair consequences

for property owners who’ve owned their commercial property for a long time.

You know, if you’re a small business and you’ve owned your store or whatever for 20, 30 years,

all of a sudden you’re going to get your taxes are going to get reassessed at the new fair market

value. But I just think there’s the larger prize though, is that the California unions,

the government workers unions want to chip away at prop 13. This is the first salvo. First,

we’re going to strip out commercial property. Eventually they want to basically repeal all of

prop 13. And I just think it’s like so misguided for billionaires to be using their wealth in this

way. Because prop 13 is really the shield of the middle class in California. And it’s kind of no

wonder that, frankly, like tech built wealth is so just increasingly despised in this country.

Because tech billionaires are funding such stupid causes.

To explain this to people who don’t know in California, if you bought your house in 1970

for $50,000, the 1% tax you pay on it is $500. That house might be worth 5 million today,

if it was an atherogen. And so you’re still paying what would have been a $50,000 tax bill

is a $500 tax bill. So they’re starting with commercial spaces. And Jason, sorry,

and you can pass it off to your kids at that cost basis. So this is why you have two old

people living in a five bedroom, right? It caps the rate increase of the tax increase every year.

There, there’s there. If you didn’t have prop 13, not hold on. If you didn’t have prop me just

explain to people if you didn’t have prop 13. Anybody who owned his own their house for say

20 years would have a massive tax bill all of a sudden, and probably would have to sell their

house. Just about anybody who’s middle class, who’s been in California for more than a decade

or two, probably could no longer afford to live in their house. But the reality is people are

mortgaging that asset sex to access capital that they’re using and investing in different things,

whether it’s fueling the economy, right? So I mean, the libertarian point of view might be

less taxes is good, because in this particular case, that building can still be used by that

resident to buy stuff, they can take a mortgage out and they can go spend that money versus having

that money eaten up by property taxes, which just goes well. Yeah, so so so I understand that if you

were to design the like perfect tax policy, it wouldn’t look like prop 13 or, you know, or, you

know, maybe prop 15 in a vacuum, if you’re just like a policy wonk trying to design the ideal tax

policy, it might look more like that. But the real problem in California, we’re not an undertaxed

state, it’s a massively taxed state. And, and there’s never enough, you know, the beast always

wants more. And so what I would say is, look, if you want to reform prop 13, do it as part of a

grand bargain, that creates real structural reform in the state of California. What I mean by

structural reform, we got to look at, well, who controls the system, and it’s really the government

employee unions, who block all structural reform, and who keep eating up a bigger and bigger portion

of the state budget. So we’ve talked about this on previous pods that the police unions block any

kind of police reform. You know, the prison unions block prison reform, you’ve got the teachers

unions blocking education reform and school choice. If you want to talk about systemic

problems in California, look at who runs the system. It’s these these gigantic unions,

and a bigger and bigger portion of the budget keeps going to them every year, they’re breaking

the bank. And by the way, it doesn’t get us more cops on the beat, it doesn’t get us more teachers

in the classroom, what it’s buying is lots and lots more of administration, along with a bunch

of pension fraud. And so what I would do is I would say, look, we need some structural reforms

here, we need some caps on the rate of growth in spending, we need some pension reforms. In

exchange for that, as part of a grand bargain, you might get some reforms to prop 13. But just to

give away one of the only cards we have in negotiating with these powerful special interests

for no reason. I just think it’s dumb, you know, do you think that Zuck was tricked? Or what do

you think? I think he’s probably got, look, I don’t really know. But I don’t know how many

Zuck and I’ve defended him on this podcast a lot, basically on, on the speech issue. But

I think what it is, he’s got some foundation, and he’s got some pointy headed policy walks sitting

there trying to analyze what the perfect tax policy is. And it probably looks more like fair

market value than like cost basis. And they’re not thinking about the larger political sort of

ramifications, which is, we the private sector is being squeezed more and more by these public

employee unions. And we do need structural reform. And we can’t just give up one of the

only cards we have, which would be, you know, trading reform on prop 13.

And Zuck doesn’t already commercial real estate.

Well, even if so, I would venture to guess that maybe sex does. I don’t know. I mean,

hold on, let me I do. But let me explain that this doesn’t affect me because my cost basis

is fresh. Yeah, all the all the commercial real estate that I’ve bought in California has been

the last few years is probably underwater. I mean, it’s certainly not about my cost basis.

So it doesn’t affect me, it affects the little guy, it affects the small business who’s owned

their property for 10 or 20 years. And again, I’m not arguing that we can come with a better

tax system. But what I’m saying is the bigger, more pressing need is structural reform.

Totally. No, I mean, I totally agree. The bloated monster of socialism is coming for us. And it

starts with the unions and it evolves. And it’s just average salary. I don’t know if you saw this

go viral in the last couple weeks on Twitter. Average average salary in San Francisco. $170,000

out of tech workers, city employees, employees. I saw that like 170,000 was the average salary.

I was like, Oh, wow, tech people are doing good. Like, no, no, no, that’s the city employees.

19,000 administrative employees in the city of San Francisco city of 800,000 people.

800,000 people with a $14 billion budget.

The state of California is converting the entire middle class into government workers,

because if you’re a small business owner, you’re getting squeezed by more and more taxes.

You’re getting driven out of the state. People leaving the state now exceeds people

immigrating into the state. So the private sector middle class is leaving and this public

sector middle class of government workers is being created. And like I mentioned,

it’s not getting us more cops on the beat. It’s not getting us more teachers in the classroom.

What it’s getting is a giant number of overpaid administrators and bureaucrats.

That is a big structural problem. The private sector unions are very different. You see,

when a private sector union goes to negotiate, they go negotiate against ownership or management,

there’s someone to oppose their unreasonable demands, not all the demands are reasonable,

just the most unreasonable demands. But with the public sector unions are negotiating against the

politicians. And they are the largest contributors to those politicians. And so there’s no one

and the politicians need them for their votes, right? They’re like, they’re going to deliver

whatever number of teachers, police officers. Exactly. The unions feed the politicians,

the politicians feed the unions, that is a structural. That is a structural problem.

And these unions will, the unions will never be a piece, you can never buy them off.

It’s why democracy always ends in the state. Like it’s just an inevitable outcome.

I am. I had no idea about any of this until I’m glad I asked you about that tweet. That’s really

I actually learned a lot just in that last little bit. I have one other thing I want to ask you guys

about, which is the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation hearings, whether you guys have watched them,

and what you guys think. And I don’t know whether these are just cherry picked clips, or

whether she’s playing dumb, or I really don’t want to judge because I want to know more. But

I just want to know what you guys think up going into this. You know, I’ll say something about

climate change, because, look, I spend a lot of time looking at data and research on climate

change, and certainly feel strongly that there’s a human caused function of global warming that

we’re actively kind of experiencing. But I think everyone kind of assumes you have to take that as

truth. I think one of the key points of science is you have to recognize your ignorance, and you

have to recognize that science is, you know, kind of an evolving process of discovery and

understanding. I don’t, and she’s getting a lot of heat for what she said about, I’m not a scientist,

I don’t know how to opine on climate change. And I heard that and actually gave me a bit of pause

that like, this, this is exactly, you know, what I would expect someone who’s thoughtful to say,

not someone that’s trying to act ignorant and play to the right. She didn’t say I don’t think

climate change is being caused by humans. And I think like, everyone kind of wants to jump on her

and every, it’s like become religion. I just want to point out that climate change has become as

politicized and as dogmatic as all these other topics we talked about. And we all kind of assume

that if you do or don’t believe in climate change, you’re left or right, you’re evil, you’re good.

And I think like, it’s very easy to kind of just go into those hearings and assume that.

But I wouldn’t say that her answer necessarily made me think that she is ignoring facts and

ignoring the truth. I think, you know, she’s kind of pointing out that this is a process of

science. And there’s a lot of discovery underway. So I don’t know, I mean, that was one point that

controversial point that I thought I should make. Because I am a believer, I do think that climate

change is real. I do think the data and science supports it. But I do appreciate that someone

recognizes that they may not have the skill, the few rather than just assume what the media tells

them to believe. Yeah, the few the few clips that I saw the confirmation hearing, my takeaway was

basically, you know, any candidate on the left or the right comes in extremely well coached.

And they’re taught basically how to evade meaning there’s a go to answer Amy Coney Barrett’s go to

answer was, listen, as a judge, I’d have to, you know, hear that case on the record, I can’t opine

on something hypothetically, you know, she had this very well rehearsed answer. And a lot of

the answers to the questions from the left were that. And, you know, the questions on the right

were more softball ish. So I couldn’t really get a sense of it. Now, the thing that I take

kind of a lot of comfort in is that, you know, when we saw john roberts get confirmed to the court,

it was supposed to be five for conservative with john roberts. And basically, what we learned was

now john robertson, you know, some critical decisions, he is willing to basically, you know,

make sure that things don’t change that much. Including Obamacare. Yeah, exactly. You know,

you don’t know exactly how they’re going to vote on these issues. You really don’t Roberts was the

deciding vote and upholding Obamacare. Gorsuch extended gay rights well beyond anything Anthony

Kennedy ever did. That was a big surprise. And so we don’t really know exactly how she’s going to

vote. The reason why Amy Coney Barrett rockets to the top of Trump’s list, quite frankly,

is because of how Dianne Feinstein treated her three years ago in the last confirmation hearings,

which she is she where Feinstein attacked her Catholicism. It was it was so ham handed,

it was so poorly done that it made Barrett a hero instantly on the right and it rocketed her to the

top of this list. But we don’t know how she’s gonna vote based on her Catholicism, you know,

which is a feature, isn’t it, David, because the lifetime appointment means they like tenure,

they can go with what they think is right. So that is kind of a good feature of the Supreme

Court. Do you think there should be like a term? Well, I think it’s a little crazy that decisions

as important as you know, the right to choice or something like that hangs on whether an 89 year

old cancer victim can hold on for three more months, you know, it seems very arbitrary to

me. And therefore, these Supreme Court battles become very heated and toxic. And there’s been a

recent proposal by Democrats that I would support, which basically says, listen, we should have an

18 year term for Supreme Court justice, that’s long enough. And each president should get two

nominees, like one in the first year, and then one in the third year. And so you basically have

one justice rolling off every two years, and one coming on. And so you have nine justices. And so

every two years, as up to 18 years, that proposal makes a ton of sense to me. And, and so you know,

you know, that when you vote for a president, they’re going to get to Supreme Court picks,

that feels less chaotic than this, that would be, that’d be a much better.

That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea. Yeah, that’s a great idea. I think it’s a fabulous

idea. I took solace in the fact that when they asked her the what’s protected in the First

Amendment, she couldn’t name all five things that I could. I was like, what about protest? Did you

miss that? What? And I thought that was like, I mean, it’s a gotcha moment, obviously. And it’s

not easy to be under that kind of scrutiny. And obviously, she just as Jayco. Well, I just thought

that was like, it’s also like, pretty interesting. I think they I think they I think they

I think they invented the word unconfirmable for Jayco.

You got a right to have your own pistola, but you shouldn’t have a shotgun.

Boys, free free burgers has a hard stop at three.

The the the fact that you left out protesters, I do think let’s let’s just end on the election

and our little handicapping of what’s going to happen and getting out of this mess. I do think

one of the stories coming out of this is going to be female voters. I have the sense,

and I know it’s anecdotal, that Trump has just alienated and pissed off so many women,

and that the threat of the Supreme Court thing and with RGB dying, this has made women feel so

underappreciated and attacked, especially with Trump,

you know, in terms of how he treats women and things he says about women.

And then you had the constant interruption by Pence of the moderator and Kamala. I think all

of this is going to add up and we do the postmortem on this. Losing all these women as

voters is going to be and as well as the black vote and people of color. This is going to be

a big part of it. So I think that Trump’s going to lose and it’s going to be a landslide.

What a roundabout way to say the same thing you’ve been saying for four months.

Oh, my God. Disrespected women. I don’t know. Listen, I don’t know. I think Biden is on the

path to an enormous victory. Well, that’s what the polls that’s what the polls say,

certainly, is that it looks like a buy in landslide. I and I guess that makes sense.

I think Trump’s running out of time to change the polls every day that goes by. He’s basically got

like 19 outs or 18 days. He’s got 18 outs every day that goes by where he isn’t able to move the

poll number. He loses an out. Right. And so we’re going to get closer to Election Day. He’s only

going to have like a three out or something. So, yeah, I mean, look, obviously, I understand the

polls. I still somehow think I know it sounds kind of weird, but I’m just not sure Americans

are ready for this reality show to end. I mean, we know it’s jumped the shark. OK,

but the Kardashians, the Kardashians lasted for 19 seasons. I just don’t know

if America is ready for the Trump reality show. I think part of the appeal of Trump

last time around was the the message of change. And he’s not delivering a message of change

anymore. And I think that’s where he’s kind of lost the narrative and the excitement of building

a wall and changing everything and draining the swamp like he’s just like keep draining the swamp

or keep building the wall. And people don’t love that. He’s also he also I think is coming across

as not being he’s looking weak by not being willing to be challenged. And that came across

clearly in that debate last time around. He got on stage and he just knocked everyone down.

But by not letting Biden talk, by not kind of engaging on any of the topics, he looks just

he looks like he just doesn’t want to have a shot at it. And it just comes across as bad.

So I don’t know. These are all contributing factors, I think, to what’s going on.

Chances of a pardon by Pence. He resigns. He pardons himself.

Pence pardons him. Zero. Zero. Zero. Ego tax. He won’t resign.

Well, we wouldn’t see that unless he lost the election.

If he loses. During the lame duck. During the lame duck period.

If he lost maybe 20 percent. 20 percent. Yeah.

Because at that point, he’s got nothing to lose. Right.

Right. That I think it’s I think it’s like

I think it’s 50 50. He just goes for the full family pardon.

All right. All right. Love you guys. I got to go.

All right, guys. Love you guys. And hopefully we’ll have a bestie poker soon.

Yeah. Talk to you guys later. Bye.